Per un sistema general de la deontologia periodística

Abstract

Towards a general deontological code for the media profession
Media deontology is generally held to be a repertoire of errors and offenses that are associated with the communication media and its professionals. This passive, restrictive and reductionist deontology needs to be overhauled and replaced by a new set of active, mobilising and motivating ethical values. This ethical objective is one of the proposals aimed at renewing the very concept of journalism, its functions and duties of social responsibility and solidarity within the frame of the challenges brought about by the new digital era. The article proposes building on well-established theoretical foundations to formulate an interconnected system of media ethics. Moreover, it suggests a general and systematic structuring of media ethics, inspired by methodologies that have been tried and tested in the extended theoretical and conceptual tradition of other humanistic disciplines, notably law, a field of knowledge with which deontology has many doctrinal and practical affinities, analogies and associations. This article makes new contributions to a coordinated perspective of the diverse typologies of the discipline, both in terms of doctrinal deontology and of positive deontology, its diverse taxonomic divisions and the specific regulation of the order of priority in the application of rules in matters of procedural deontology.