Global Media Ethics and Justice

This chapter discusses the importance of justice in global media ethics. While Christians and Nordenstreng have given a blueprint in the form of protonorms for global media ethics with their emphasis on sacredness of life, human dignity, truth-telling, and nonviolence, implicit to all such discussions has been a call for justice. This chapter discusses how global media ethics should recognize justice as a fundamental principle to fully understand – and offer solutions to – practices for the global media. Using nyaya, a school of Hindu philosophy, this chapter proposes a normative application of justice. The chapter argues that nyaya can have a place in the way global media organizes ethically and can provide foundational principles to adhere by. The chapter also discusses the use of nyaya as an ethical principle by discussing the spread of WhatsApp as a micro-messaging app, disinformation, and lynchings in India.