ABSTRACT
Media ethics asks what the standards are by which we should judge the satisfactoriness of media institutions’ own codes of “ethics”. The task of interrupting what media do every day is difficult, but as the 2011–2012 scandal over the News of the World‘s phone-hacking practices illustrates dramatically, it is essential, not just for the quality of democracy but for the quality of public and social life, whether aspiring to democracy or not. A neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics, applied to media, would ask what virtuous dispositions can be expected to contribute to our living well together with and through media. Alisdair MacIntyre’s notion of practice gives bite in the media case to what might otherwise seem highly generalized virtues of accuracy and sincerity. Roger Silverstone’s argument places too much weight on the uncertain link between media and their audiences, displacing our attention from the process of producing media.
