Social Responsibility In The Media

Responsibility has to do with defining proper conduct; accountability with compelling it. The former concerns identification; the latter concerns power. The issue of responsibility is a practical one and the answer to this can come from an examination of the society’s needs to know and the media’s abilities to inform. The issue of accountability is a political one the answer to which can come from an analysis of centres of power-government, media organizations and public influence.

Ground of Responsibility
It is a fact of life that human beings are inescapably and simultaneously both individual and social. We are free agents living together, whose actions affect each other, and who are radically dependent upon each other. Those facts dictate

By informing the citizenry of what its government and other centres of power are doing, the media becomes itself an integral part of the political process. By monitoring the centres of power-political, economic, and social—the media functions to keep them in check. The second role of the media involves an educational function. It includes reporting on and promoting discussion of ideas, opinions, and truths toward the end of social refinement of those ideas, opinions and truths. In this role the media follows the tradition of the town meeting. Third, the media functions as a utility, a conduit of information about what is happening. It operates as the society’s “bulletin board.” The fourth function is social or cultural. The media holds up a mirror to society and reflects the kind of people we are, shows us our heroes and villains, recalls our shared values. We must now examine each of these in more

Mill offers four reasons why liberty of thought and discussion is essential. The first is that only through discussion can we rectify mistakes in judgement. It is owing to a quality of the human mind, that errors are corrigible. He is capable of rectifying his mistakes, by discussion and experience. Not by experience alone. There must be discussion to show how experience is to be interpreted. Wrong opinions and practices gradually yield to fact and argument; hut facts and arguments, to produce any effect on the mind, must be brought before it. Very few facts are able to tell their own story, without comments to bring out their