| Abstract [eng] |
Ethical Media in Lithuania: in the Search of the Achilles' Heel Authors whose main research object is etchical media, mention only the reason why it is ethical or not ethical. The aim of this research is to identify the conditions under which the operation of the media may be unethical in Lithuania. This research rests on a key assumption that if media is financially weak and easily affected by external interests, it can’t be ethical. This assumption originates from the academic literature, which has served as theoretical bases for this Master’s theses. In the theoretical framework it has been claimed that financial weakness and external interests can have a negative effect on media: as a result it becomes unethical, especially in post-communist countries. This study aims at finding out whether financial weakness and external interests influence are necessary and sufficient conditions for media’s unethical behavior. The paper suggests two hypotheses that are tested using qualitative comparative analysis of fuzzy sets method. The first hypothesis is that the media is unethical because of financial weakness. The secondly hypothesis is that the media can behave unethically because there is a high risk that the media organization can be affected by external interests (those of politicians and / or businessmen). The data collected during this research leads us to the conclusion that financial weakness and external interests are necessary but not sufficient conditions for unethical media in Lithuania. The collected data are consistent and a coating of indicator that can be utilized/used as a measure of the significance is 0,(72). It means that there are more factors, which determine that media is unethical in Lithuania. The results from qualitative interviews lied to yet another conclusion. These interviews indicate that the Head of media organization who has acquired high leadership skills and is faithful to high moral standards (under the conditions of friendly relations with shareholders, which does not prevent the designated lead manager of the media organization) that could lead to (un)ethical media conduct. In addition, these conditions are more likely to occur when media organization in not so big. In this research were examined the factors which influence media in Lithuania. However, because in other post-communist countries the media is characterized by similar features, it is possible that they have the same influence in the rest of the region. |
