Hello, and welcome to the third edition of Controversies in Media Ethics!

My name is Dr. Mike Dorsher. I’m one of the co-authors of this third edition of Controversies in Media Ethics, and I’m the principal author of this accompanying website for CME3, as we like to call it.

CME3 is completely rewritten, updated—and nearly twice the size of the second edition of this text, published in 1999. That was a century ago, especially given the pace of change in new media technologies and mass media economies over the dozen years between editions of this text.

We hope you’ll find this new edition worth the wait. We’ve put a lot of thought and effort into it, so that, even as further new media controversies arise, you, the instructors and students who use this text, will have the background and principles you need to discuss them intelligently—if not immediately resolve them.

The principal authors of the second edition of Controversies in Media Ethics—Drs. David Gordon, John Michael Kittross, and John Merrill—are still here.  They have put aside their retirements and marshaled their decades of unparalleled wisdom and experience in media ethics to update, rewrite, and expand the core of this third edition of Controversies in Media Ethics.

Then, for further expansions and experience with new media technologies and effects, the principal authors have brought on board a new generation of contributors and authors, such as Dr. Bill Babcock and myself. I was a journalist for 20 years, and one of the founding editors of washingtonpost.com, before I became a new media researcher and earned a doctorate and post-doctorate Fulbright Fellowship.

I’ve been teaching Mass Media Ethics for the past eight years, and I’ve produced this website full of complementary material for CME3 in order to make this a living text. I’ll be updating this website each summer and winter break, so that the timeless principles of the text can always be applied to the contemporary cases on the site. We hope you’ll enjoy and use these materials for years to come—no matter how long it takes us to write and publish the fourth edition of Controversies in Media Ethics.