Media Ethics: Key Principles for Responsible Practice

• Provides students with a much-needed foundation in ethical theory, offering solid coverage of the ethical principles important to the decisions of media professionals and the judgments of media consumers
• Devotes chapter-length coverage to central philosophical principles widely referred to in the media ethics literature and in professional codes of ethics― transparency, autonomy, privacy, harm, community, and justice―and places them in the context of media practice
• Includes more than three dozen relevant, up-to-date media cases and examples (such as the use of sex in advertising and policies for journalists covering suicide stories) that illustrate the relevance of key principles to the work of journalism, public relations, and advertising
• Presents the innovative MERITS (Multidimensional Ethical Reasoning and Inquiry Task Sheet) model to help students apply the book′s six key principles to ethical issues
• Synthesizes theories from a wide range of disciplines, including mass communication research on media sociology and audience effects, as well as philosophy and sociology
• Applies ethics theory to the online world to illustrate that ethical values don′t change with the medium, nor should they be driven by technology

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.