The Readiness of Radio Journalism Ethical Self-Regulation in the European Union andSlovakia for the Online Media Era

Abstract

The study examines whether and how current self-regulatory ethical codes governing radio and onlineaudio production in the Slovak Republic and the European Union address key ethical issues in thedigital information environment. These issues were identified through expert consensus in the Delphistudy on information ethics conducted from 2021 to 2022 at Comenius University in Bratislava,Slovakia. The experts identified nine aspects across three areas of information ethics: primary ethicalconcerns (privacy and personal data, information technologies and artificial intelligence,disinformation), priority ethical dilemmas (human impact, transparency, human supervision, oversight),and core information values (usefulness, truthfulness, trustworthiness). These categories served as thebasis for the content and comparative analyses in this study. The results show that the codes of ethicsissued in Slovakia tend to be instrumental, normative, methodical, and reactive, while European codesare more philosophical, value-based, systemic, and proactive. The study contributes to the discussion onmedia and journalistic ethics in Slovakia, suggesting that although current regulations offer methodicalguidance for ethical conduct in both traditional and digital media environments and alignterminologically with the areas monitored and addressed by European codes of ethics, the Slovak codestill largely reflects conceptual approaches rooted in 20th-century thinking compared to the broader,more visionary European codes.