Media Law Matrix - Assignment Example

New technologies push the boundaries of ethical discussions on ownership of creative work First Amendment The media’s right to free expression is protected, with the amendment prohibiting the enactment of laws that abridge or curtail press freedom and free speech What are the bounds of press freedom? Can private individuals slighted wrongly by the press and by individuals seek redress under the law? This relates to libel as a legal recourse. Prior restraint prohibition An extension of the First Amendment, prohibiting government from prohibiting speech prior to the utterance of the speech.

The effect is the broadening of the power of mass media, and the press in particular Ethical issues are again tied to limits of free speech as they pertain to the rights of private individuals Abridgements to First Amendment Rights Non-interference of government on free speech rights is not absolute, but may be justified by public safety considerations. The effect on media is the setting of bounds on free expression, in cases where the public safety or the national safety are compromised There is the ethical issue of where the bounds of government power and the public and media lie.

There is a tug of war in legal discourse/precedents relating to this Libel law The freedom of the press is not absolute, but is predicated on such freedom not trampling the rights of others. This is a curtailment and a bound on press freedom, because those slighted by media has recourse to libel law Libel law interpretations in courts determine the bounds of press freedom and free speech. Ethical issues are tied to making sure that judgments are just and fair to media and to private individuals Table inputs source: Vivian, 2011, pp.

424-445 B. Two Issues A. Local Media Issue The issue at hand in an article discussing the extension of the treatment of media organizations to private individuals posting online, in blogs and in social media, and the standards that ought to govern both forms of media, the traditional and the emergent, when it comes to considering the evidence and the arguments relating to possible defamation and libel charges. The issue at hand is tied to the emergence of social media and blogs in particular, and how those emergent media forms have empowered ordinary individuals to speak freely and to publish their thoughts with the same reach and power, and print permanence, as the newspapers and related media forms of old.

There are established precedents for governing free speech issues for traditional media, but the precedent for emergent media is not always well laid out. On the other hand, recent court decisions seem to apply a different set of standards for blog-published and social media-published content on the one hand and traditional media on the other. The legal implications of the double standard are evident in the way there seems to be an unequal application of First Amendment rights as they apply to ordinary people in social media and to media practitioners, creating potential future problems in the interpretation of First Amendment and related laws.

The ethical implications are profound, because the double standard may mean that the rights of private individuals, for instance, against defamation may be compromised by such unequal treatment of bloggers and ordinary social media users on the one hand a