Exploring Communication Ethics

Exploring Communication Ethics is a comprehensive textbook on the ethical issues facing communication professionals in today’s rapidly changing media environment. Empowering students to respond to real-world ethical dilemmas by drawing upon philosophical principles, historical background, and the ethical guidelines of major professional organizations, this book is designed to stimulate class discussion through real-world examples, case studies, and discussion problems. Students will learn how to mediate between the best interests of their employers and their responsibilities toward other parties, and to consider how economic, technological, and legal changes in their industries affect these ethical considerations. It can be used as a core textbook for undergraduate or graduate courses in communication or media ethics, and provides an ideal supplement for specialist classes in public relations, professional communication, advertising, political communication, or journalism and broadcast media.

Innovative in its approach and content, Exploring Communication Ethics: Interviews with Influential Scholars in the Field enlivens the study of human communication ethics by presenting interviews conducted with nine communication ethics scholars along with an advanced literature review. The interviews provide accessible and insightful discussions of the philosophical and theoretical issues central to communication ethics, revealing insights about the scholars' experiences and thought processes unavailable elsewhere. This book is written for upper-level undergraduate students, graduate students, and faculty members interested in communication ethics from the perspective of human communication and rhetorical studies, philosophy, and sociology.

The authors argue against ethical myopia limited to spectacular scandals or comprehensive professional codes. Instead, they propose a master reframe of ethics based on a new take on virtue ethics, including Aristotle's practical ideal of eudaimonia or flourishing, which tells new stories about the ordinary as well as extraordinary aspects of professional integrity and success. By reframing ethics as not special, they elevate it to its rightful position in work and personal life.

This Handbook bridges explicit treatments of ethical issues in communication and implicit considerations of ethics, presenting in one volume analyses and applications that draw upon recognized ethical theories and those which engage important questions of power, equality, and justice. It is intended for scholars in communication, and will serve as a reference text in advanced courses addressing communication and ethics.

Practicing Communication Ethics: Development, Discernment, and Decision Making presents a theoretical framework for developing a personal standard of ethics that can be applied in everyday communication situations. This second edition focuses on how the reader’s communication matters ethically in cocreating their relationships, family, workgroups, and communities. Through an examination of ethical values including truth, justice, freedom, care, integrity, and honor, the reader can determine which values they are ethically committed to upholding. Blending communication theory, ethics as practical philosophy, and moral psychology, the text presents the practice of communication ethics as part of the lifelong process of personal development and fosters the ability in its readers to approach communication decision making through an ethical lens.

Broad in scope, yet precise in exposition, the Sixth Edition of this highly acclaimed ethics text has been infused with new insights and updated material. Richard Johannesen and new coauthors Kathleen Valde and Karen Whedbee provide a thorough, comprehensive overview of philosophical perspectives and communication contexts, pinpointing and explicating ethical issues unique to human communication. Chief among the authors objectives are to: provide classic and contemporary perspectives for making ethical judgments about human communication; sensitize communication participants to essential ethical issues in the human communication process; illuminate complexities and challenges involved in making evaluations of communication ethics; and offer ideas for becoming more discerning evaluators of others communication. Provocative questions and illustrative case studies stimulate reflexive thinking and aid readers in developing their own approach to communication ethics. A comprehensive list of resources spotlights books, scholarly articles, videos, and Web sites useful for further research or personal exploration.

Popular culture provides a daily catalog of cultural attitudes, values, and practices. From television sitcoms to the daily news, from the theater to the sports stadium, we observe embodiments and enactments of character, virtue, honesty, and integrity (or lack thereof) in situations we find understandable, if not familiar. The essays in this volume address popular mediated constructions of ethical and unethical communication in news, sports, advertising, film, television, and the internet. Emphasis is on the consumption of popular culture messages, as well as how auditors make moral sense out of what they read, hear, and observe.

Focusing on one historic episode per chapter, Ethics for Public Communication is divided into three parts, each dedicated to one of the three major functions of the media within democratic societies: news, persuasion, and entertainment. Authors Clifford Christians, Mark Fackler, and John Ferré, three trusted scholars in the field, discuss media ethics from a communicative perspective, setting the book apart from other texts in the market that simply combine journalism with libertarian theory. Classic media ethics cases, like the publication of Rachel Carson's 1962 book Silent Spring, are covered in tandem with such contemporary cases as the creation of Al-Jazeera English and the controversy surrounding Ice-T's protest song, "Cop Killer." FEATURES - A new "communitarian" approach to ethics that breaks from other texts in the discipline - A focus on classic and current cases that are culturally relevant today - A thorough and comprehensive grounding in the theory of media ethics - Longer and more universal case studies than those included in other texts, in order to provide more real-life, ethical dilemmas

Ethics in communication and media has arguably reached a pivotal stage of maturity in the last decade, moving from disparate lines of inquiry to a theory-driven, interdisciplinary field presenting normative frameworks and philosophical explications for communicative practices. The intent of this volume is to present this maturation, to reflect the vibrant state of ethics theorizing and to illuminate promising pathways for future research.