Ethics and Media Culture: Practices and Representations

6 The manufacture of news – fast moving consumer goods production, or public service?

Michael Bromley

 

 

 

 

We do not have a duty to inform: we have a duty to supply information to our customers – information they are willing to pay for, Mark Wood, editor-in-chief, Reuters Ltd, Reporting Africa: Return to the Agenda, Cardiff (23 November 1998).

The 1980s were characterised by the ascendancy of what C.P. Scott (1921; 1997, p. 108) called the ‘material’ existence of the press.The dominant libertarian view was that all other freedoms, including those of speech and expression, were dependent on the prior establishment of the freedom of the market (see Schudson 1978, pp. 57–60). The media were progressively deregulated, and sections were themselves ...