Media Ethics: Key Principles for Responsible Practice

Patrick Lee Plaisance (Ph.D. Syracuse University) is an associate professor in the Department of Journalism and Technical Communication at Colorado State University, where he teaches media ethics, reporting, and mass communication theory at the undergraduate and graduate levels. His primary research areas include media ethics, moral psychology, virtue ethics, journalistic values, and newsroom socialization. His work has focused on analyzing how ethics theory can be more effectively brought to bear on media practice, and he has conducted qualitative and quantitative social-science research on journalistic decision making. He worked for nearly 15 years as a journalist at newspapers around the country, including papers in Los Angeles, south Florida, New Jersey, and Virginia. He has contributed chapters and case studies to numerous journalism and media ethics books and has published more than a dozen peer-reviewed articles in journals including Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, Communication Research, Journal of Mass Media Ethics, Communication Theory, and many others. He is also the author of the book Virtue in Media: The Moral Psychology of Excellence in News & PR.