Free Speech and the Requirements of Democracy

Media Ethics Workshop
Workshop Aims
How we understand, protect, and discharge our rights and responsibilities as citizens is intimately connected to the standards and behaviour of our media in general, and our news media in particular. However, the media do not just stand between the citizenry and their leaders, or indeed between citizens and each other. The media is often the site where individuals attempt to realise some of the most fundamental democratic liberties, such as the right to free speech. Philosophers have been slow to recognise the unique institutional significance of the media in liberal democratic societies and to address the question of what duties should be assigned to individual citizens who engage, for a variety of reasons, in this kind of mass public communication.
In our workshop we will explore the conflict between the rights that people attempt to exercise in, and through, the media and the responsibilities that fall out of the awesome power of the modern media and the special role that it performs in a society committed to the principle of political equality.
This workshop is generously supported by the Society for Applied Philosophy.