Beyond clickbait and commerce

creating a commercial climate in which competition, so far from
driving quality up, drove it down. These shortcomings were
evidence of a corporate culture in which, as Richards (2005) said:
At any given moment in most major corporations one can find
a vast array of vocabularies of motive and accounts to explain or
excuse or justify expedient action.
In tension with these material pressures, the media also have, as C.
P. Scott said, a moral existence. As Muller (1946) recounts, his way
of describing this was to refer to the media as an institution that
reflected and influenced the life of a whole community, and might
affect ‘even wider destinies’. ‘It is, in its way, an instrument of
government.’ By this, Scott did not mean that the media were tied
into the processes of government but that they were part of the
way in which free societies governed themselves. Tiffen (1994: 53-
67) captured this idea with his statement that the mass media were
the central political arena of contemporary liberal democracies, the
link between the governors and the governed.
RESEARCH
PAPER
It was the recognition of this institutional function, combined with
a self-interested response to political and community dissatisfaction
at the way in which the press had allowed commercial considerations
to influence the conduct of editorial operations, that gave rise to
the development of the ‘church and state’ separation.
The effect of the digital revolution
The digital revolution, which began to have measurable effects
on newspaper advertising revenues, at least in Australia, in about
2005 (Finkelstein et al. 2012: 301-314), has challenged those four
assumptions on which the related ethical concepts of editorial
independence, conflict of interest and deception have rested.
Evidence for this phenomenon is abundant. Simons (2013) reports
on a range of news-like start-ups characterised by a mixture of
idealism, altruism and financial insecurity. Williams et al. (2014),
describing the state of hyperlocal news in the United Kingdom,
reveal that while 56.7 per cent of hyperlocal publishers described
their activity a journalism, among the sub-sample (43 per cent)
who generated income from their activity, 31.1 per cent nominated
‘sponsored features’ as among their sources of revenue. The three
brief case studies that follow illustrate the breadth and variety of
these practices.
Case 1: The Atlantic and Scientology
In January 2013, The Atlantic published online an item headed
‘David Miscavige leads Scientology to milestone year’. The item
began: ‘Under ecclesiastical leader David Miscavige, the Scientology
religion expanded more in 2012 than in any 12 months of its 60-
Copyright 2016-2/3. Ethical Space: The International Journal of Communication Ethics. All rights reserved. Vol 13, No 2/3 2016 101