Media, Mission and Morality: A Scholarly Milestone Essay in Mass Communication, Volume 1

For more than 50 years, media ethics professor John C. Merrill has been championing and criticizing the libertarian model of the press. In Media, Mission and Morality, he addresses a number of moral and theoretical issues, including the increasingly popular anti-libertarian views of postmodernists, communitarians and critical theorists. Their relativist, collectivist and subjectivist criticisms have many strengths, Merrill notes, but they also harbor the threat of censorship as well as centralized control of mass media. To stave off such threats, Merrill says journalists need to do more than embrace ethics — they need to formalize their profession. "Numerous problems, of course, face such action. ... But making journalism a profession would, I think, result in higher and more consistent quality ... ." One need not embrace Merrill’s ideas to appreciate the contribution this essay makes to the literature.