ABSTRACT
The conditions of news production for journalists are debated over David Harvey’s concept of accumulation by dispossession in the neoliberal period. The flexibilization of journalistic labor, which includes journalists and communications students in the growing precariat throughout the world, has accelerated the facilitation of capital exploitation through media and social mediations and commodifying the circulation of global information. Journalistic ethics is faced with many questions, old and new, linked together in the new age of media. The code of ethics that addresses reporters who produce the news within the rational organizing of the news industry help make invisible the conditions of production and workings of a system that alienate journalists’ news through its form of debate in the liberal/pluralist paradigm. The mystification that is created by ethical codes hides the conditions of news production from sight while drawing attention to the news and journalists. In this study, we extend the discussion of the conditions of industrial news production and code of ethics to the effects of social media on the news industry over the concepts of the precarity of journalistic labor and accumulation by dispossession, expanding it to new alternatives for the public sphere. Social media networks largely commodify the use of Internet and social media while transforming users’ free labor to surplus value. The results that will emerge in the short and long term from this commodification in terms of journalists are discussed in the context of the democratization of news production. This study aims to enrich the discussion of ethics, pivoting on the journalistic labor that becomes flexible through the landscape and conditions of the new media.