The Dilemma of Media Professionalism and Maintenance of Social Order: Media Authority and Legal Authority

The death of Dr. Kelly and the serious confrontation between the British government and BBC have led to a crisis of survival for the BBC, both as an institution and as an idea. The taken-for-granted principles of media professionalism have shown to be weak and self-contradictory under extreme circumstances. This paper will contextualize the meta-narratives of “impartiality, objectivity and independence" from the vantage points of history, discourse and power, and try to demystify their claimed universalism. The principles set up by media professionalism are ideological consensus maintained among dominant social institutions under specific historical conditions. Thus, their ontological legitimacy is easily in crisis when the media are forced to stress these principles by extreme events. The intervention of law temporarily settled the crisis and restored social order, but it did not, and could not, resolve the deeper crisis of the loss of general consensus over the present constitution of order. It only used the authority and broader consensus of law to suspend the crisis.