Morals, Money, and Power: The Limits and Obligations of an Ethic of Care in the U.S. Documentary Film Industry

This article empirically examines a common moral framework in media ethics: an ethic of care. While normative scholarship has lauded an ethics of care approach for its groundedness and flexibility – especially in contrast to deontological (rules-based) approaches – less is known about how media producers navigate situational nuance when applying an ethic of care to the participants in their stories. How do they determine their obligations to care for participants, and what are the limits of those obligations? Informed by 46 interviews with U.S.-based documentary filmmakers, I find that variations along two dimensions – media producer capital contexts (money) and media producer–participant power dynamics (power) – strongly affect how producers apply an ethic of care to participants in specific contexts. Drawing from literature on precarity within media production fields and field theory, this study illustrates how money and power can both limit and motivate the ways media producers care for participants in practice.