If market value comes to dominate the media's ethical thinking, then the foundations of liberal democracy could be undermined, said Father Eoin Cassidy at a media and ethics conference in the Mater Dei Institute.
Codes of media ethics "testify to an alternative vision of the media than that reflected in the maxim of neo-classicism, that the business of the media is profit," the head of the philosophy department at the institute said.
"Anyone who is even marginally aware of current major news stories in the Irish media would quickly recognise that ethics is the stock in trade of investigative journalism," he said. "In this respect at least, the media stand apart from any other business."
The media provided an essential service in ensuring the existence of the checks and balances necessary for a healthy society, he said, and few could deny it its privileged role in combating all forms of prejudice, promoting universal human rights, and in fostering a sense of universal solidarity.
Father Michael Breen, of the communications department at Mary Immaculate College, Limerick, said despite its promotion as the latest mass medium, the Internet was nothing of the sort.
Of its 153.25 million subscribers worldwide, most were north Americans and Europeans, predominantly white, male, middle-class "haves", while "one third of its sites are pornography-related". For "the money needed to enter the Internet world, you could feed a family in Bangladesh for a year" and he thought the Internet "will be a weapon of economic power and knowledge".
