ABSTRACT
By locating the journalist off-stage, the myth of neutrality obscures the increasingly powerful role of the news media in society. The role that the news media play in shaping not only political discourse but also political institutions, in defining public agendas, and in setting the terms of moral discourse are rendered invisible. The emphasis on information is explicit in all of the media's major codes of professional ethics. Journalism's ethics focus so intensely on the role of the news media in the transmission of information that other very important—and ethically significant—social roles played by the news media are completely overlooked. To the degree to which any social entity is able to command the attention of the media, it is able to define the representation of reality in ways that reflect its interests. The decline of the community and public sphere is widely attributed to the collapse of traditional social forms in the face of modernity.
