Do Media Producers Have Obligations to the Greater Society?

I wrote an article a few years ago that generated some positive responses and ended up being cited as a source in another random article that I had come across on the web, in which I laid out an argument for professional media producers to take responsibility for the products they create in terms of their affect on society at large. While that article is still valid, it does not address the growing issues of spontaneous mobile media creation in light of the rise of smartphone and tablet use.

While I do not see this as a censorship issue, it is hard to get around the fact that we are in an era when it is increasingly more difficult to protect

Wayback Machine

Just for fun, here is a look back at August of 2000:

http://web.archive.org/web/20000816061446/http://www.3rdparty.org/bbs/

A lot of the issues were the same 12 years ago. Some topics are perhaps even hotter now, and not surprisingly so.

With tonight kicking off the debate season, it will be interesting to see how Romney and Obama address these old issues (or skirt around them).