Call me naive, but I think it is un-contentious to suggest that the popular media helps to shape social attitudes and beliefs. The broadcast and print media may be the sole source of information for many people.
Is there, then, a moral responsibility for journalists to offer well researched, truthful information? This isn't to deny the opportunity of political or personal bias; only that mixed in with the spin there should be nuggets of actual fact.
The Daily Mail in particular is notorious for abandoning any connection with reality, allowing their writers to ascend in flights of bilious rhetoric that barely contain the merest whiff of an actual fact. Rather than inform the public debate, they deform and debase it. Peter Hitchens comes to mind as a chief culprit of this 'journalism', a perpetual wordsmith who soothes the middle classes with a patina of authority on things penal. If people are willing to pay them, and if others are willing to buy their views, why should I care? I care, as should you, because so many people assume that such luminaries have a genuine knowledge of what they speak, and this helps to broadly shape opinions. That is very dangerous, leading to an inflamed populace demanding policy changes based upon lies and distortions.
The best illustration of media stupidity flowed from a certain tabloid’s campaign to 'out' sex offenders, leading to marches and attacks on innocent people. To pretend that newspaper managers are so stupid as to not foresee this is an insult. No social good was achieved, only social harm.
To return to the beginning, then: Should journalists have a moral responsibility for the social effects of what they write?
