Ethics in entertainment

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what are the ethical issues in the entertainment industry?
I am trying to critically review the concepts of ethics, morality, accountability and social responsibility as they apply to entertainment industry?

Oscar Wilde wrote, in
The Picture of Dorian Gray:

"No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style."

The only ethics I can see in entertainment is for the entertainer to deliver the best performance he/she knows how to deliver in exchange for the pay and the admiration of the audience.

A good entertainer is an ethical trader. As is a good shoemaker or a good engineer.

ruveyn



But if we look at ethics in entertainment today...

page 3 girls? alcohol adverts in television, products that promise you to make you better, more attractive but never do...
a range of products, events are advertised by half naked girls etc.

That is not ethical in my opinion....children have access to all of it nowadays... and young girls feel the pressure to look like the girls in magazines(most of the pictures are retouched and look nothing like the real women)

Of course the delight in the audience in people motivated to eat excrement and cockroaches by big money rewards is not exactly uplifting.

Without public demand, there would be no suppliers


so who`s responsible?

There are no ethics in entertainment (year 2010)(simplified answer). Technically, in parts of the movie industry today (Hollywood), there are film rating categories for audiences based on age. The lack of ethics is due to a long series of US Supreme Court decisions over the last sixty years or so which have watered down ethics to something pretty close to: If you have the money to pay for something and it doesn't appear to hurt anyone too much, it's ethical. When the Internet/www was invented, the content of the Internet/www was not addressed legally much at all so almost anything could be put on the Internet/www (aka zero ethics). The Internet/www bypassed all the laws on the books (including any sort of ethics) which applied to traditional media. That's the state of the art today although there is a growing number of restrictions on the Internet/www due to the writing of new laws. There are some countries such as (extremist) China which have adopted a different approach toward ethics in entertainment and actively censors the Internet/www/the Chinese entertainment industry. Pandora's box (old story) has been opened and there's no going back to traditional ethics anytime soon (my view). Once the feathers have been released from a pillow in a strong wind, the feathers are gone for good.

I'd have to say that I don't think that there are heavy ethical obligations with art. I think that perhaps we can argue that more ethical art is better in some sense, but even then, I am not certain. The diversity of art has intellectual value, one that would be precluded by a lot of self-limiting behaviors. As such, while it may be optimal for some artists to have ethical agendas, in the same bit, it is optimal(and thus arguably ethical) for many to not seek that at all, and to seek mere expression.

Didn't entertainers in Shakespeare's time use real heads, real blood in pig bladders, etc. (Not sure about the real blood, but I do know they used a few real heads). So morality has gone downhill in some ways and uphill in others.