Making ethics accessible and applicable to media practice, "Media Ethics: Key Principles for Responsible Practice" explains key ethical principles and their application in print and broadcast journalism, public relations, advertising, and media-based marketing. Unlike application-oriented case books, this text sets forth the philosophical underpinnings of key principles and explains how each should guide responsible media behavior. It avoids moralizing and instead emphasizes the deliberative nature of ethics, inviting students to grapple with ethical dilemmas on their own and presenting ethical theory in a way designed to enrich classroom discussion. Author Patrick Lee Plaisance synthesizes classical and contemporary ethics in an accessible way to help students ask the right questions and develop their critical reasoning skills, both as media consumers and media professionals of the future. This book 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. It 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. It 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. It 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. It synthesizes theories from a wide range of disciplines, including mass communication research on media sociology and audience effects, as well as philosophy and sociology. It 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. "Media Ethics: Key Principles for Responsible Practice" is ideal for use as a core text in courses such as media ethics, critical perspectives on media, media studies, journalism ethics, and communication ethics in departments of journalism, mass communication, media studies, communication studies, and public communication.