ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the notion of social responsibility in Western journalism criticism. Polarisation of public debate has been intensified by the hybrid media system, where journalists and other content providers fight for the audiences’ attention with a mixture of journalistic and algorithmic logics. Social responsibility has historically manifested in journalism first as self-regulation. This dates to the press criticism against powerful publishers in the US in the 1940s. Peace, public, constructive, solutions, slow and conciliatory journalisms have all been connected to the social responsibility ethos but most often in terms of their historical positioning. In the literature, peace journalism’s key criticism of conflict coverage is that war and violence are regarded as standard news frames, but non-violent responses to conflicts are disregarded. Slow journalism, in turn, emerged as a reaction to the increased emphasis on instantaneity in online journalism in 2010.
