Media and Corporate Responsibility - Essay Example

A corporation is more or less like a monster with several heads, where one head can be saying something that sounds very good and the other head can be doing something else that purely contradicts what was said earlier. Any corporation's main motive is to make profits. The only problem with profit making motive is that there is no such thing as "enough". Every act of the corporation undertaken in pursuit of maximizing profits is termed as "logical" or "rational". For instance, prosperous corporate giants taking advantage of cheap labor of starving people from under developed countries is considered pragmatic.

The capitalistic world even manages to justify these acts as legitimate, a kind of boon granted to the down trodden. But how many of these corporations actually consider the legitimacy involved in the severe working conditions provided to those workers or the fairness involved in the proportion of the worker's pay to the profit earned by the corporation from such activities In the name of maximizing profits, corporations have become extremely deceitful without having any concern for the safety of others.

For instance, many commercial dairies treat their cows with certain hormone in order to increase milk production. Though this method has been claimed to be harmless, it has neither been safe for the humans consuming this milk nor has it been easy for the cows. The cows, termed as "production units" by such dairies, experience painful effects such as broken limbs due to calcium deficiency and even early death as a result of these artificial methods. There are many corporations that use synthetic chemicals in their products which cause cancer, birth defects and other toxic effects.

Most corporations are mendacious to such an extent that they do not even reveal the true test results of these products. The saddest part of this tragic situation is that these untruthful corporations, over the years, have totally lost the capacity to experience any guilt for their insensitive activities. Well-known companies and brands such as McDonald's, Nike, Adidas, Shell, and Barclays top the list of unethical companies. Such companies have no respect for any legal or social norms. They continue to break such norms and consider the compensation paid later on as an act of justification.

But no compensation, irrespective of the amount involved, can actually compensate for the disaster caused by most of these unethical acts. There is no doubt about the fact that the corporations, though functioning with a self-centered motive, are producing other social benefits. But the self-centered motive has converted these corporations into Einstein's monster that has become so big that it has overpowered the people who initially created it. A corporation may be considered as a person in the eyes of law, but the fact still holds well that it is a person without a soul.

Media Responsibility The media occupies a privileged position in modern society. But more than simply seeking out truth and reporting it to an otherwise ignorant populace, the Media themselves have an active role in influencing and shaping public opinion. That is why it is so very disturbing that any media might