The Responsibilities of the Media

[MEDIACSRFORUM]

Hi this the MediaCSRForum here, were are a group of around twenty of the UK's largest media co's. We exist to collectively look at, discuss, and sometimes jointly act on the Corporate Responsibilities of the media.

The question we would like to ask this group is:

What do you think are our most important responsibilities? For example:

Should they be to promote CSR issues impacting on other sectors?

Should they be to provide high quality entertaining content?

Or should they be simply about managing our operational impacts and treating our suppliers and staff fairly?

It would be great to hear the views of sustainability professionals, however if you would like to do this in a more structured way you can via a survey. Hurry up though because the survey closes next Friday.

You can find it by clicking on the following link: Corporate Responsibility and the Media Survey 2008

Many thanks

All at the MediaCSRForum

[MEDIACSRFORUM]

Hi there, here is a response we recieved via another route which may help to start some debate:

Imagine a train hurtling down a track and heading off a cliff. The driver has gone a bit mad and demands a popular vote of all passengers on whether or not to apply the brakes. In the time remaining only one person has the power and reach to make that vote happen. Thats the conductor with the tannoy. But the conductor says ‘people don’t want to hear bad news like that from me – it would make me very unpopular’.

The train is our civilisation which is already probably beyond the tipping point of climate change but can maybe halt some of the worst effects if it acts radically and fast. The driver of the train is our heads-in-the-sand ‘leaders’. The conductor – the man with the tannoy – thats the media sector.

Who is madder and badder the driver or the conductor?

[biker]

Haven't been here for a while but the forum seems to come along nicely.

Here is my take on it.


I think both the are responsible for it.

Nice analogy by the way.

In my opinion the media has a huge responsonsibility to help us make change our mind on what the role of business in society is.

And at the moment they could od a much better job at it. I also think that big business and the infleunce of business is the biggest infleuncing factor for why the media is so inactive.



biker

[Karl]

Originally Posted by biker

...
In my opinion the media has a huge responsonsibility to help us make change our mind on what the role of business in society is.

And at the moment they could od a much better job at it. I also think that big business and the infleunce of business is the biggest infleuncing factor for why the media is so inactive.



biker

In general the media business seems to operate under the principle that - "sensationalism sells - objectivity is boring". They often portray themselves as a symbol of freedom and democracy and such, and while they undoubtedly have an important role in highlighting important issues, especially where potential threats to health or the environment are discovered - they too often return to that origin point, i.e., the media itself is an industry / business guided primarily by the bottom line (as opposed to the quality of the information they disseminate). Often enough, even where the author of an article tries to present a fair or balanced account, the headlines are carefully "selected" by editors, whether or not they reflect the actual intent (or content) of the story. Further to that, when it becomes evident that they blow an issue out of proportion, when real hazards are discovered somewhere many people reading about it would be skeptical having been "taken for a ride" by the media from some previous alarmist reports. As such the idea of "Media Social Responsibility" is a more than welcome addition to the overall field of CSR.

[natureguy]

Media doesn't do anything mediocre. Either they create very rosy picture or else they scare you like anything.

None of these seems to be solution to create mass awareness.

[Karl]

An article related to the topic of “media responsibility”: Drive by Media « The Air Vent

Well we might as well jump right in. Whether you like him or hate him Rush Limbaugh’s catch phrase for todays media is pretty accurate. What it is doing to the general discourse in our culture is without a doubt disastrous.
…

If you have ever done a news search on a subject in Google news you know what I’m talking about. Hundreds to thousands of articles by different publications with the same information and opinions and often times the same exact wording. There is nothing explicitly wrong or immoral to this type of news, it lowers the cost for getting a story and adds a lot of content to small news organizations, but it certainly lowers the quality of the information on a subject while giving the appearance of consensus.
Everything we do has consequences though, except maybe blogging to no one. There is a significant problem with this mode of mass information dissemination. When someone becomes interested enough in a subject to look for information, they often will run into dozens of articles with slightly different wording and different author’s names at the top all regurgitating the same three facts as the original article they were copied from…