Regulation, Law and ethics. - Mechanism for Media Regulation

 

Media has become an integral part of the human life in the present era. Be it dissemination of very crucial information to source of entertainment, media plays a very vital role in everyone’s lives. Regulation in literal terms is the set of governing actions. Media Regulation in a general context are the acts or laws that are implemented in order to abide by the objective to achieve a certain goal.

Media regulation has always been a debatable issue and has been in continuous discussion. To simplify this the arguments are based on two school of thoughts commonly- one stands for the thought of media freedom where the media should get complete freedom and the other school of thought says that media freedom should not be absolute.

Firstly, as we talk of the first school of thought about complete media freedom this will also lead to an extension in the right of free speech. The open space of the internet and the media platforms will also provide opportunities for everyone to express their views and opinions and will also highlight neglected issues which are important to the society. Limiting media freedom will lead to hindrance in the freedom of speech and content distribution amongst media persons and institutions.

The second school of thought talks about how no matter to what extent a society is liberal media cannot be absolutely free and cannot be given absolute freedom. Provided media is not kept under any restriction or follows regulations will lead to a lot of chaos on the media platforms. Everyone has different opinions and variation in ideology can lead to a lot of conflict. The regulation would not be made to adhere complete media freedom but to arrange information dissemination in a way that would not lead to havoc among people.

Though many arguments have been made on media regulation, it can be contextual and can differ from place to place to social construction and beliefs of people of the society. Most common methods of media regulation can be self-regulation, statutory regulation and co-regulation. As the name suggests, self-regulation is the idea of maintaining action to stay within the law and produce or distribute content on media. Statutory regulation come from legislative aspect for the media organizations and personals on how to  be on and off the screen while co-regulation is simply a hybrid form of both of these ideas for best attainability of the required meeting of objective on media platforms.

Law and ethics are the two major considerations professionals should take in order to maintain unchaotic and peaceful environment in the media world. law are the codified set of rules which have to be followed or else can lead to a punishable state whereas ethics are self regulatory beliefs that drive our action towards right deeds that do not harm social harmony. Ethics and law can be related but cannot be misunderstood as the same.

Law defines the right and wrong while ethics gives a space for subjective interpretation of the context and then enact. While one thing can be ultimate wrong according to the law, the ethics might keep it under consideration of the social context including other factors as well.