The fourth power- the media

THE FOURTH POWER

1. DEFINITION
The well-known Media have grown so much in this past 20 to 30 years that its evolution came into people as a dependence of theirs. The technological advances as well as their globalization allowed the creation of new ways to spread information, in the electronic field mostly (radio, and television, internet), which were added to the already existent, known as traditional (such as newspapers and magazines). That created such a vast, diffused way to pass along information that, for some, it was then created a new power that integrated the three other, which constitute the Portuguese State- Executive, Legislative and Judiciary.

2. STRUCTURE

• TRADITIONAL Print media: newspapers, magazines, etc ( periodic: daily, weekly, monthly, every two weeks)
• EVOLUTIONAL Audio visual media: TV, radio, Internet, etc

3. RESPONSABILITIES, ETHICS

An individual who’s placed into a certain situation which causes him a moral or ethical issue has to present himself which three questions which will help him to determinate how to proceed. Those questions are the following: do I want to..? Should I…? Can I… ? Ethics represent the arrow which will direct you to the most right answer for yourself.
Considering the massive difference between the individual as a worker and as a person, the ethic norms have to be reviewed when applied to different situations.
With the change of the century, the media’s professional’s responsabilities increased considerably because of the now so varied ways to pass along information and messages and it’s inspection and selection weren’t being as careful as it should, with the preoccupation of imposed boundaries to control, in order to avoid another kind of censureship (conflict between the all freedom approvers and the privacy approvers)
The only choice we had left was to create a Code of Ethics, which can be applied to each concrete situation. In the communication means there is a code called of Journalists