ABSTRACT
Media are an inescapable part of daily life. Yet media consumption has until recently been an act performed by audiences at a distance from processes of media production. Perhaps this is why journalistic codes of ‘media ethics’ are formulated exclusively from the point of view of media professionals, not media audiences, and why issues of media ethics are not generally thought of as the subject of legitimate intervention by members of the public, even, as Onora O’Neill noted in her 2002 BBC Reith Lectures (O‘Neill, 2003), in societies that claim to be democracies. This needs to change in an era when via the internet at least some aspects of information and image production/circulation are being decentred. If the old “division of labour in democratic discourse” (Bohman, 2000) between media producers and media consumers is now open to challenge, then our understanding of media ethics also needs to change, with considerable implications for the broader ethics of consumption in today’s media-saturated societies.
