Ethics is one of the crucial and vital subjects through which we can weigh the issue at hand and determine how well it aligns with its requirements and intended goals. Indeed, communicative practices in the media cannot be sound unless they rest upon an ethical framework that fosters and monitors them, ensuring the legitimacy of their actions in the public arena toward citizens. The fusion of communicative practices with ethics allows them to address strategic issues concerning the nation and its citizens, as well as everything related to the societal space, in a clear and lucid language far removed from populist discourses—discourses that lack communicative ethics whose sole goal and concern is sharing the truth about what occurs within the societal realm.

In this way, the subject of ethics has begun to emerge and impose itself upon everyone following the proliferation and diversification of media channels, alongside the expansion of the liberal system resulting from the massive and growing development of financial capital led by global institutions, which has led to a global commercial market. All these mentioned determinants suffer from selfishness and a lack of transparent participation for other individuals to make their voices and opinions heard regarding ongoing events, so that it may truly function as a participatory democracy obligating everyone to respect order and ensuring that bodies take responsibility for what happens in this world. Instead, they have reduced the media's mission to a mere tool for achieving their ends through advertising to display their goods at the expense of the overwhelming majority of society, in addition to distorting reality far from realistic and accurate language.

In our era, media and communication play more than a "communicative" function; rather, they perform a function of influence, direction, and the creation, shifting, charging, or steering of public opinion as intended. This is not limited to countries that have begun taking steps toward media "communication" with the masses after their first and last concern was merely "informing" and notifying them with whatever the sender deemed appropriate. Rather, this problem is raised today on an international scale: capitalism, which birthed liberalism—whose core pillars include pluralism, individual liberty, rationality, and the separation of the private from the public—no longer treats media communication (nor has it ever) as a means of connection and interaction so much as an instrument of delivery, dominance, and direction controlled by major profit-driven corporations that manufacture and manipulate public opinion. This signifies the presence of a liberal project seeking to generalize its selfishness onto others, making assimilation the order of the day by refusing to recognize existing boundaries, identities, and differences present in reality. Consequently, media outlets are harnessed to embody and reinforce this stance by feeding individuals information and claims that lack the barest standards of accuracy and credibility.

Prof. Dr. Ben Omar Yezli