Becca Hamilton

Dr. Chase

Senior Seminar

23 Nov 2015

Communication Ethics Credo

As a senior in college, I have arrived at the point where I must finally put into practice all

the knowledge I have accumulated over my 16 years of schooling. With the real world staring

me in the face, I need to be ready to navigate it in a way that is true to who I am and what I

believe. I want to be a successful, well liked, and respected member of the community and in

order to do so I have to know how to communicate. With those goals in mind, I also want to

strive towards them in an ethical and upstanding way. By creating a communication ethics credo

I can establish a fixed foundation of ethics while remaining true to who I am and who I want to

become. Taking all this into consideration, I lay out these four ethical credo statements to direct

and inform me as in my communication.

I commit to consciously demonstrating a witness to God and to bringing Him glory in

everything I do through my communication.

I commit to respecting the value of each person’s dignity and personal truth in both my

verbal and nonverbal communication.

I promote vulnerability, understanding, and connection through honest articulations of

personal beliefs and opinions.

I commit to the truthful and respectful representation of every person, including myself,

on any media platform I am involved with.

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Looking closer at each commitment, the first point of the credo, which emphasizes

communication that demonstrates a witness to God and brings Him glory, is the most important.

By consciously shaping my communication around the framework of God’s witness and

teachings, the other commitments to communication fall much easier into place. The practicality

of applying Jesus’ teaching to everyday communication manifests itself in ways that touch every

aspect of life. As Miller describes in his book Searching For God Knows What, “Jesus would

indicate the greatest thing you and I can do to display we know Him is to love our brothers and

sisters unconditionally, to love our neighbors as ourselves, and to love our enemies” (Miller

113). If I want to commit to being a witness to Christ in my communication, then Miller’s

suggestion of loving ‘our brothers and sisters unconditionally’ is a great place to start. To love as

Jesus loved is to communicate outside of the worldly standards of judgment and self-promotion.

We demonstrate a witness to Christ by lovingly communicating to our enemies and neighbors,

even when they do not deserve it. Then as we imitate Christ in the way He communicated, we

also bring glory to Him through these actions. We do as Christ did in order to reveal who He is

and to display His glory. Another way to apply the commitment to communicate in a way that

demonstrates witness to God is by using relatable language. Lesslie Newbigin writes in The

Gospel in a Pluralist Society, “If the gospel is to be understood, if it is to be received as

something which communicates truth about the real human situation, if it is, as we say, to ‘make

sense,’ it has to be communicated in the language of those to whom it is addressed and has to be

clothed in symbols which are meaningful to them” (Newbigin 141). Communication of the

gospel must not be shadowed in flowery language or pompous tone, but that of common

language in personal story as a witness to Christ. Language that is difficult to understand

separates the listener from the content. If a person wants to be a witness to Christ and bring Him

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glory, they must remove the prideful tone and haughty language in order to bring others closer to

Him. To uphold this commitment to communicating in a way that bring glory to Christ and

witnesses to Him, I must correspond in love in addition to using relatable language when sharing

stories of witness.

The next commitment involves respecting the value of each person’s dignity and personal

truth through both verbal and nonverbal communication. When talking about a person’s dignity

and personal truth, I refer to the value of a person’s opinion and story. Every person has a story

that is worth sharing, respecting, and receiving. Miller speaks to this issue by stating, “It seemed

while no logical evidence existed for one group of people being of more importance than

another, feelings, no thought governed the hierarchy” (Miller 100). He goes on to say, “I feel like

I am in a lifeboat trying to get other people to say I am important and valued, and even when

they do, it feels as though their opinion isn’t strong enough to give me the feeling I need, the

feeling that quit at the Fall” (Miller 109). Miller wrestles with the tension of knowing that each

person’s opinion is not worth more than another or should be ‘governed by hierarchy’ while also

feeling like he is constantly fighting for the validity of his personal opinions. By acknowledging

this tension, a person can grow closer to fulfilling the commitment to communicate in a way that

respects every person’s value. I will both verbally communicate respect to another’s opinion and

story while also nonverbally opening myself up to others. This could be as simple as responding

with encouraging words to another person, while giving polite eye contact and pleasant facial

expressions. In Preaching: Communicating Faith in an Age of Skepticism, Tim Keller expands

on how to verbally communicate the value of another’s opinion even when correcting them. He

writes, “John was saying of their cultural hopes, ‘yes, but not, but yes.’ […] John did no merely

confront the culture, nor did he simply adapt to it. He adapted to it in order to confront it in the

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most compelling and loving way possible” (Keller 98-99). By first acknowledging the value of

another person’s opinion before correcting them in line with Christ’s teachings, a person

confirms the other’s dignity and significance. This brings back the influence of the first

commitment point, revealing how communication through the lens of Christ touches every

aspect of life. Braithwaite and Braithwaite also expands on the issue of human dignity and value

with a discussion of communication with people who live with disability. They write, “The most

common theme expressed by people with disabilities in all of the interviews is that they want to

be treated as a person first. One man explained what he thought was important to remember: ‘A

lot of people think that handicapped people are ‘less than’ and I find that it’s not true at all…

Abling people, giving them their power back, empowering them’ “(Braithwaite and Braithwaite

479). As a person with an able-body, I can aid in empowering people with disability in both my

verbal and nonverbal communication by continuing to value as much I as I would a person

without disability. I can listen to their requests without assumption; I can talk with them the same

way I would with a person with an able-body. Whether the person has a disability, they are not

Christian, or are a mortal enemy, I still commit to communicating with them as a human who

deserves dignity and respect to their personal truth.

Moving to the next point in the credo, I commit to promoting vulnerability,

understanding, and connection through honest articulations of personal convictions. Though this

relates to respecting the dignity and value of other’s opinions, this point focuses more on the

commitment to staying true to myself and my truth in relation with others. By fostering an

environment that stimulates vulnerability, connection between people can be more easily

established. Baxter and Akkor in their article “Aesthetic Love and Romantic Love in Close

Relationships” discuss this point in the context of love. They write, “First, love is positioned as a

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joint action between partners, not an individualized internal state of each person. Thus, love is

not psychologized but constituted through partner actions.” (Baxter and Akkor 37). Baxter and

Akkor reveal that communication in the context of any love relationship is based on a mutual

vulnerability, not just the other. I need to be just as willing to be vulnerable as the other in order

to create a healthy communication environment. This vulnerability also relates to the truth in

what is shared during these times of openness. I need to share the entire truth of my feelings and

opinions with another person as much as the other person must share the same truth with me.

Miroslav Volf writes in his article “Truth and Community” about how God sees the truth in our

situations. He states, “Ideally, of course, we should see things from everywhere. ‘From

everywhere’ is how God sees human beings, I would argue. God sees not simply from outside

but also from within, not abstracting from peculiarities of individual histories but concretely”

(Volf 251). God understands a situation ‘from everywhere’ or by knowing the whole truth. As

communicators, we should make every effort to strive towards revealing and respecting the

whole truth as well by sharing the whole truth in times of vulnerability. We do not have the

ability to see inside someone as God does, so we must make more effort to communicate our

inner thoughts and feelings in an appropriate manner. Staying true to ourselves is difficult, but as

an ethical communicator is it something I must strive towards. By encouraging environments of

vulnerability, connection and understanding are more easily generated and a fuller truth is

revealed.

The final point of the credo involves communication through mass media. In it, I commit

to the truthful and respectful representation of every person, including myself, on any media

platform I am involved with. Whether this be producing music, television, movies, social media

posts, radio, or any other form of media, I commit to making every effort to resist

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misrepresentation of any type of person. Lilie Chouliaraki illuminates the complexity and

prevalence of this issue in "The Media As Moral Education: Mediation And Action”. He

explains, “Media representations are, in this sense, conditions of possibility for public action and

it is these conditions that we need to analyze so as to understand just how media texts may

contribute to promoting an ethics of care and responsibility, or indifference and apathy towards

distant others” (Chouliarki 832). Media representations shape a lot of the ways in which specific

types of people are viewed, whether they are accurate or not. With such power, it is imperative

that media contributors make every effort to profile those representations accurately. There are

numerous instances where media representations have severely hurt those involved with little

consequence for those who instigate the issue. Patterson and Wilkins in "An Introduction to

Ethical Decision Making” describe how important and complex media ethics can be. They write,

“All around you are cases of meritorious media behavior and cases of questionable media

behavior. And quite frankly, there are cases where good people will disagree over which

category the behavior falls into” (Patterson and Wilkins 20). By committing to the accurate

representation of all people in media production, I am able to lay a foundation for the inevitable

situations I will find myself in that require tricky media ethics decisions. Even when posting on

my own personal social media platforms, I commit to an accurate depiction of my life, though

sometimes it is tempting to misrepresent circumstances. Situations of misrepresentation will no

doubt present themselves during my media production experiences, and so by making the

commitment of ethical media representation now, a foundation is laid for a future of ethical

media interaction.

Overall, these four credo statements define my commitment to ethical communication.

As an active and influential member of society, my communication must be shaped by my

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witness to Christ. With this Christ lens, I then know to respect each person’s dignity and to

accurately represent every type of person on each media platform. I can even facilitate mutual

vulnerability in settings of connection and relationship in a better way. In a culture that has so

many conflicting messages, laying the groundwork of communication ethics makes navigating

these conflicts a little easier. The difficult situations are inevitable, but freedom can found in

following an ethics credo that is persistent and unchanging.

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Work Cited

Baxter, Lesslie, and Chitra Akkor. "Aesthetic Love and Romantic Love In Close Relationships."

Communication Ethics: Between Cosmopolitanism and Provinciality. By Kathleen

Glenister Roberts and Ronald C. Arnett. New York: P. Lang, 2008. 23-40. Web.

Braithwaite, Dawn, and Charles Braithwaite. ""Which Is My Good Leg?: Cultural

Communication Of Persons With Disabilites." Bridges, Not Walls: A Book About

Interpersonal Communication. By John Stewart. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Pub.,

1977. 470-81. Web.

Chouliaraki, Lilie. "The Media As Moral Education: Mediation And Action." Media,

Culture & Society 30.6 (2008): 831-852. Communication & Mass Media

Complete. Web. 15 Nov. 2015.

Keller, Timothy. "Preaching Christ To the Culture." Preaching: Communicating Faith in an Age

of Skepticism. N.p.: Viking, 2015. 93-120. Web.

Miller, Donald. "Adam, Eve, and the Alien." Searching For God Knows What. Nashville:

Nelson, 2004. 91-109. Web.

Newbigin, Lesslie. The Gospel in a Pluralist Society. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989. Print.

Patterson, Philip, and Lee Wilkins. "An Introduction to Ethical Decision Making." Media Ethics:

Issues and Cases. 7th ed. Dubuque, IA: Wm. C. Brown, 1991. 1-21. Web.

Volf, Miroslav. Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and

Reconciliation. Nashville: Abingdon, 1996. Web.

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