Nazis on trial in the Nuremberg, Germany courtroom, 1946.
During the 2oth century, a new appreciation for the social and ethical responsibilities of the mass media emerged with an understanding of its power. In the 21st century, ethical codes for journalists would be sorely tested, and a reminder of these principles would often be needed.
Information and Communication Technology Ethics – also known as information ethics — relates both to the social responsibility of traditional media and the ethics of new media technologies.
Although new media technologies have enabled all kinds of positive collaborations, they have also liberated some of the darker sides of human nature in the form of hate speech between rival ethnic and social groups.
Words can kill. When harsh words become hate speech, they can lead to discrimination, repression, or genocide. That’s what happened in 1930s Germany, 1970s Cambodia, 1990s Bosnia and Rwanda, and Myanmar, South Sudan, and Congo in the 2010s. Hate speech built up through the mass media, and a deep stain on human history was the result. National and international organizations have urged the creation of new ethical and social responsibility codes for the mass media.
The Nuremberg Principles– A set of guidelines for determining what constitutes a war crime, the Nuremberg Principles emerged from the post-WWII trials of Nazi government officials and their accomplices in the mass media. Especially important from the media standpoint is Principle VII which states, “Complicity in the commission of a crime against peace, a war crime, or a crime against humanity … is a crime under international law.”
In one important case, Julius Streicher, editor of Dur Sturmer, was executed in 1946 for his 25-year advocacy of genocide against Jewish people that led to the Holocaust. Streicher was not a member of the military and took no active part in the events of the 1930s and 40s. It was exclusively his role in influencing public opinion through his newspaper that he was included in the indictment of major war criminals of World War II and executed.
Others who made films for the Nazis were imprisoned. Leni Rheifenstahl, whose 1936 Triumph of the Will was a celebration of a Nazi rally, spent three years in detention. Fritz Hipper, who made The Eternal Jew in 1939 for the Nazis, spent two years in prison as a war criminal. (For more information see the Nuremberg Trials documentary.).
The Hutchins Commission — During and after World War II, questions about press responsibility led to a commission financed by Time Magazine publisher Henry Luce. Leading the commission was Robert Maynard Hutchins, then chancellor at the University of Chicago, whose ideas about education had focused on communication as central to a lifetime of learning. The Hutchins Commission found that freedom of expression had been imperiled by accelerating technology and by arrogant and irresponsible publishers. The commission urged publishers to “regard themselves as common carriers of information and discussion” and recommended five major points that it said society was entitled to demand of its press:
- a truthful, comprehensive, and intelligent account of the day’s events in a context which gives them meaning;
- a forum for the exchange of comment and criticism;
- the projection of a representative picture of the constituent groups in the society;
- the presentation and clarification of the goals and values of the society; and
- full access to the day’s intelligence.
“Where freedom of expression exists, the beginnings of a free society and a means for every extension of liberty are already present. Free expression is therefore unique among liberties: it promotes and protects all the rest,” the commission said.
While the Hutchins Commission noted the importance of projecting a representative image of all social groups in the United States, a very non-representative set of images of people from the rest of the world are often presented in the U.S. Americans, more than people in most other countries, are highly insulated from global events.
Part of the problem is that international news coverage in the US usually emphasizes simple events such as coups and earthquakes. Very little real depth or analysis comes through most of the mainstream media. Another problem is that there has been a steep decline in overall global news in US television and newspaper reporting. This problem has been getting much worse in recent years with the financial collapse of the news business.
Another issue has to do with what is called media “hegemony” — that is, the indirect dominance of one culture over another. The major event in the discussion of the issue was the UNESCO report of 1980:
The UNESCO MacBride Commission report Many Voices, One World, by a Commission on International Communication for United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), was chaired by Nobel Laureate Seán MacBride. The commission said that the communications revolution had created dangers as well as opportunities.
The unequal flow of communication was making developing nations dependent on the cultural products of the industrial West. Centuries-old customs, time-honored cultural practices and simple life styles were being threatened. The one-way flow of information from industrial nations to developing nations was also a problem, the report said. News about the developing world in North American and Europe was dominated by spot reports on disasters and military coups, but the underlying realities and developments were ignored.
The MacBride recommendations included:
- More professional international training for journalists on both sides of the divide between industrial and developing nations.
- Protection of journalists and freedom of the press.
- Small nations should foster internal media development, have more control over the cultural processes of modernization and find ways to reduce the commercialization of communication.
The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda is a more recent instance of media being held accountable. Three media leaders from Rwanda were arrested, brought to a United Nations criminal tribunal, and convicted of genocide, incitement to genocide, conspiracy, and crimes against humanity, extermination, and persecution. The arrests and trials followed the 1994 genocide of a million Tutsi people in Rwanda, a country in central Africa. The editor of Kangura newspaper and two executives with Rwandan radio had forcefully advocated the atrocities. Two were sentenced to life imprisonment, and one was sentenced to 35 years in jail. The judge told one defendant: “You were fully aware of the power of words, and you used the radio – the medium of communication with the widest public reach – to disseminate hatred and violence….Without a firearm, machete or any physical weapon, you caused the death of thousands of innocent civilians.” The court also affirmed: “The power of the media to create and destroy fundamental human values comes with great responsibility. Those who control such media are accountable for its consequences” (UN ICTR, 2003).
Media complicity in crimes against humanity also took place during the Balkans war of the 1990s. “As Yugoslavia disintegrated, the media of the various republics served not to inform their respective publics but to bolster support for the stances taken by their leaderships,” said Christopher Bennett. “Years before the first shots were fired, the media were already at war and the journalists who deliberately fanned the flames of national hatred must bear a heavy responsibility for the carnage.” The genocide was not the product of centuries of hatred, he said. It was deliberately manufactured and cultivated by the Serbian media. (Bennett, 1995).
Direct “information intervention” to stop the hate speech was bungled. In 1999, a NATO bombing raid on radio and television stations that were encouraging genocide ended up killing sixteen civilian employees. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch condemned the bombings as war crimes, but it later emerged that the television station director refused to heed advance warnings of the bombing and was himself jailed by the International Court of Justice for ten years. (Reuters, 2022).
And in November of 2023, the nations of Gambia, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom filed declarations of intervention against the government of Myanmar for alleged crimes of genocide at the international court of Justice at the Hague, Netherlands.
“Over the past 75 years, hate speech has been a precursor to atrocity crimes, including genocide, from Rwanda to Bosnia to Cambodia,” said United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres. (UN, 2019).
A United Nations Open Ended Working Group is working on security in the use of information and communications technologies; threats in the sphere of information security, and how international law applies to the use of information and communications technologies.