by VICENTE ROMANO
Whenever we talk about ethics, we are referring to customs, the way human beings behave, their moral conscience. Like any professional group, professional communicators, journalists, also have their mores, their customs, derived from useful practices. These change as production techniques do. That is why it is convenient to check from time to time if the premises of professional ethics are still present in reality.
This is not as simple as it seems. Each professional ethic has its peculiarities, which do not necessarily agree with general customs. Human beings have the capacity to alternate, to do something or stop doing it, and it is their subjective culture, their system of values, that tells them what they should do.
Despite the symbiosis between journalists and their media, the decision is always subjective. Ethics appeals to the individual to address an issue according to their conscience, their conviction and their faith. Saying "no" is always more difficult, because negation contradicts the desire for appropriation and domination. That is why there are hardly any journalists who refuse to reject the invitation to a trip or an official reception. That is why there are so many gourmets and so few ascetics among journalists. But the consumer society runs the risk of devouring itself. Its voracity can reach the extreme that in some pharmacies in Hollywood and Los Angeles they sell tapeworms for 30,000 dollars (I quote from memory) that the rich put in their bodies to continue devouring without being forced to go on slimming diets. There are few journalists and professors who, like W. Abendroth and Harry Pross, have drawn attention to the consequences of this type of society.
In communication, the great business has been done by the gossip press and entertainment programs, that is, the contents that exclude one's own responsibility, ethical behavior. What has been imposed as a criterion of journalistic quality is speculation about a diffuse and leveled taste of the public.
Complaints about the dependence of journalists on capital are nothing new. Karl Bücher already defined the newspaper at the beginning of the century as a text that is written to sell advertising space. Lord Nordcliffe, the English press magnate of that time, expressed himself thus: "God taught men to read so that I can tell them who they should love, who they should hate and what they should think." The old German liberal Paul Sethe defined freedom of expression in 1965, in a letter addressed to Spiegel, in these terms: "Freedom of expression is the freedom of 200 rich people to spread their opinion."
During the Vietnam War, the North American TV, governed by commercial criteria and fed with entertainment programs, left a tiny space of news and political commentary to a small opposing sector of left-wing intellectuals, religious leaders and academics. And it was the effect of these, and not that of the media, that prevailed. The government learned the lesson well and in the Gulf War of 1990 only allowed politically "clean" correspondents to report on the "clean" war in "desert storm". In the current one, started in March 2003, the Pentagon and the fundamentalist Government of the USA still maintain the prohibition that foreign journalists access the actions of the military, the much-touted free elections, the data on victims, prisons, tortures, murders and looting, etc., committed by their troops, and if necessary, journalists who contravene their policy of concealment are liquidated. Foreign reporters also have difficulties accessing the places devastated by Hurricane Katrina and developing their work.
Let these examples serve to illustrate the complexity of the situation according to the point of view from which it is judged, whether economic, political or communicational. Over time, the different participating groups develop specific moral behaviors according to their own laws, which serve them for belonging or exclusion.
Faced with this, ethics is presented as an invariable relationship of the individual with something absolute and metaphysical.
As a doctrine of correct action, it always appeals to the freedom of the human being to say yes or no.
As, professionally, they have to deal with different moral practices, due to the fluctuation of social groups, journalists are constantly confronted with the inaccuracies of these customs. And the journalist never has time for precision, to investigate further. The economy of signals and the coercion of deadlines are, as is known, moral instances of the journalistic profession. Journalists lack a present, they always live from the past or from the future. Their biotiempo is occupied by how their work will appear tomorrow in the corresponding medium. Professional morality is oriented by the communicative effects of yesterday. What place remains for the ethics of personal responsibility for present communication?
The coercion of deadlines and the economy of signals force us to put aside ethical decisions, even in the era of electronic media. If revolution means that a group takes power and finds docile followers for a certain time, then it turns out that the electronic revolution has been enjoying its victory for years: never before has the same audiovisual message reached so many people in so little time simultaneously. It reduces its field of elementary, direct perception to the small rectangular box of the television, which is presented framed, up-down, right-left, light-dark, fast-slow, saving viewers perceptive effort and preventing them from thinking.
In this context it is important that the electronic network limits the field of subjective action with images. As the primary, personal relationship is missing, there is no need to act. All that is done is sitting. Ethics, as a doctrine of correct action, is unnecessary, finds no demand. The electronic network reduces the market value of what is closest, by limiting the direct actions that can be had with it. Instead of talking to people, you talk to the computer or the screen. In the era of viewers, authority emanates from contemplation, and this from the foreground. And, as is known, the foreground benefits whoever occupies the official position, the president, minister or presenter on duty.
The media interfere with the ends of politics and economics because they are very suitable for occupying the biotiempo of subjects. That is why they are an instrument of power. Formally, the State is presented, according to the old sociology, as a legal institution that a victorious minority imposes on the majority in order to administer it, that is, to manage its exploitation. Administering means appropriating in the long run the fruit of the work of the majority with the least possible expense of one's own. For this, means of communication are required that constantly renew the imago.
The model of a "free market society" has tried to increase the portion of the administered in the product of their work. But it has not been able to prevent the minority that exploits resources from evading state control. When it deems it convenient for its interests, that minority, that is, those transnational corporations, seeks cheaper objects of exploitation in other States.
Under the sociological conception of the State, the professional ethics of social communication is predetermined by a double dependence. On the one hand, journalists depend on the administering-exploiting minority, since it finances the technology. On the other, they depend on the State, since they are subject to its laws.
State representatives and the exploiting minority share the common interest of preventing anything that could disturb their collaboration. Such disturbances can occur in press releases that speak of differences, reciprocal favors, etc. In the end, they are sailing in the same boat. Journalists must deal with these issues since they are part of the symbolic staff of society. Together with the religious, literary, artistic and academic hierarchies, this symbolic staff guarantees the cohesion and temporal process of the whole. The different codes in which this is done jointly constitute the culture.
The fundamental rights of freedom of creed, expression, press and assembly are its legal postulates. But this does not mean, far from it, that they are put into practice. Peoples that have not been free for a long time take time to shed their uniforms and medals. Education for freedom, including freedom to communicate, is something that never ends.
The relativization of one's neighbor through electronic media, the ease and speed with which one can connect electronically with him, has not fostered freedom, but has fostered adaptation to the uses of exploitation. What 30 years ago any editor would reject, because his professional ethics prevented him from presenting advertising claims as news, today occupies a considerable part of the editorial space and broadcasting time.
As an example, the irresponsible proportion occupied by the news of lucrative professional sports can serve. They lack informative value, in the sense of directing behavior, but they serve to create an image. The message is always the same: "One has to win." Reporting on the exchange value of soccer players and coaches has nothing to do with social communication, with the social exchange of knowledge and feelings in order to dominate the environment. It is nothing more than incitement to the magic of acquiring the superiority of the labeled winners through personified logos. It is no longer team A competing against team B, but milk X against soda Y. TV programs are decided. and even made, by the sponsors, with which journalists and presenters spend their time presenting and publicizing their products.
As an advertising audience, the public pays for its own indoctrination. The journalistic profession is undone. It can be objected that people want it that way. But the truth is that they lack a real option. How are you going to want what is not offered? If it were true that people have what they ask for, one would have to ask then why people applaud their own spiritual impoverishment, how tastes are formed, who determines them, etc. How are people going to want something else if consciousness is nourished by experience?
It is still too early to glimpse the long-term damage that the leveling offers of entertainment and programs that distract from the political can produce. It is likely that they are no less than the reduction of one's own responsibility, induced by the constant pressure to immediately satisfy some needs and create new ones in order to maintain social status.
Judging by the propaganda that is made of them, by the space they occupy in the media and the books that are dedicated and awarded to them, it seems that the world networks of computers (the Internet is a good example) are the ones that dictate the new rules of the game for companies, the economy and the state, that the lords of cyberspace, like Bill Gates, determine the program. 50 years after the first computer, the Californian company "Sun" had sales of six billion dollars in 1994 with the move to networks.
True, these networks allow their users to halve the time of the activities studied. But what good is this to the 40,000 children who die of hunger every day in the world? ICTs (Information and Communication Technologies) have not yet changed the gap between the rich and poor of the world. Here is the picture offered by the July-August 2005 issue of the Monthly Review of New York:
Of the 6.4 billion inhabitants of the planet: Almost half of humanity (3 billion) suffer from malnutrition. This half of humanity lives with what can be acquired for 2 dollars in the USA.
Of the 3 billion who live in cities, 1 billion live in shacks. One billion do not have access to clean water. Two billion lack electricity. Two and a half billion do not have running water in their homes. One billion children, half of the world's children, suffer extreme deprivation due to poverty, war and disease, including AIDS. Without forgetting the 25-30 million children who live abandoned in the large Latin American cities and who are killed because they disturb the urban aesthetics.
Even in rich countries, as Hurricane Katrine has shown, large masses of the population lack sufficient food. Four million families deprive themselves of one meal a day so that other family members can eat.
However, "the worst waste", respond the lords of cyberspace, "are people who do not work profitably and who perform meaningless jobs. That is why we have to rationalize and invest the money saved." (Words of Scott McNealy, of Sun Corporation.) Technically, the connection to the network is a matter of the capacity of the computer and the bandwidth. Sociologically it is a matter of cultural revolution. From the point of view of economic exploitation, it is about which minority anonymously faces the majority in order to make it work "profitably" for it. What good is the State then?, we can ask ourselves. Indeed, its dignity as a legal institution disappears. When the State can no longer protect its citizens from foreign exploitation, nor guarantee the basic rights of its citizens, its right is eroded.
By depending on the advances in communication technology, journalists belong to the middle strata. As is known, these are the first to lose purchasing power. The fact that they are not considered totally superfluous is due to their role as mediators and as consumers. Also people who do not perform a profitable job and who, therefore, are a "waste", need purchasing power to consume.
The group ethics of the lords of cyberspace is unacceptable because it is inhuman. It denies the relationship of each individual with the superior principle of solidarity, to which every human being and humanity itself owes its existence. And, in the long run, this has not been allowed by human beings. It is said that cyberspace turns the world into a village, and the village into a jungle. But the world does not become a village, of course. For the village is a space full of elementary, direct contacts, united by a collective memory.
What the current mode of communication production can do is contribute to widening this electronic desert, loneliness, that is, lack of communication. Let each journalist ask himself, as if his own life depended on it, to what extent his texts and his images enrich the biotiempo of the many to whom they are addressed.
