Revising Communication Law and Ethics for Platform Media

Panelists: Andrew Ventimiglia, John Harrison, and Jane Johnston

Moderator: Tom O’Regan

“Communication Law and Ethics” is a foundational Communications course that is traditionally designed to inform future media professionals about the legal issues and ethical norms relating to the communication and media industries. The core components of this class – issues like truth and objectivity, free speech, copyright law, and media regulation – feature because they have historically been central to the traditional modern media industries (print, television, film). Yet, the emergence of digital media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube have radically changed every dimension of the contemporary media ecosystem from production to distribution and consumption and, by extension, have changed the legal and ethical issues that new media professionals will face. How are we to revise ‘Communication Law and Ethics’ in order to adequately address these changes and prepare students for a very different media world than that imagined in the textbooks? In this roundtable, we discuss whether or not an enhanced focus on the complex life of media after production (as it circulates through myriad platforms, produces valuable audience data, becomes subject to alterations and distortions, and then is archived in various, often unstable, ways) might be essential for future media curriculum design and highlights the enhanced and often unresolved legal and ethical complexities of our current media moment.