The Center for International Media Ethics (CIME) is a global community for professional media and digital media ethics. The goal of CIME is to improve the overall ethics standards of media and the internet.
Contents
History and mission
CIME began in July 2007, after thirty-two young journalists and professionals from five continents gathered in Prague for a week-long seminar. CIME emerged afterwards as a formal international framework with the intent of helping journalists take on a proactive role in shaping their societies.
CIME encourages each media professional to take on a proactive role in defining ethical practices through the choices and decisions made at work on a daily basis. CIME urges media professionals to work together to make their own judgments and identify their own strategies. The driving emphasis is that media professionals together have the power to formulate and enforce a tacit code of ethics as a status quo of their profession.
In 2013 CIME's founder Melisande Middleton was selected as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum in relation to her work building the CIME media ethics network globally.
Work
CIME collaborates with local media organisations in a range of countries to organise workshops for media professionals around the topic of ethics.
Approach
CIME focuses on the role of responsible reporting in societal and economic development processes. The related the role of media in society to the role of information in economic growth, as illustrated in Paul Romer's work on New (or endogenous) Growth Theory. This theory articulates how knowledge input (e.g. creativity through innovation and ideas) is a key factor in sustaining growth. In other words, new ideas that are constantly created, for example via Research & Development as well as via other less formal initiatives, are what allow a society to improve its socioeconomic and technological levels. CIME emphasises that journalism participates actively in this growth model by circulating these ideas, communicating knowledge all the time and providing the medium for many information flows.