Patrick Lee Plaisance
Biographic Data
| ID | 4900332 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Patrick Lee Plaisance |
| GIVEN NAMES | Patrick Lee |
| FAMILY NAME | Plaisance |
| SIGNATURE | PLAISANCE P L |
| AFFILIATIONS | Pennsylvania State University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7218-4107 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 515 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 25 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Humility: A Foundational Virtue for Digital Life
Social media platforms often prioritize engagement metrics that amplify outrage and self-promotion, fostering environments of toxicity and hubris rather than humility. Despite the critical role humility plays in ethical formation and intellectual flourishing, its integration into digital media ethics remains underexplored. This project explores humility’s role in digital media ethics, integrating insights from psychology, virtue epistemology, and…
Transparency, disclosure and autonomy: Moral judgment and attitudes toward branded content among media workers
This study extends the media sociology literature on moral judgment by comparing moral orientations among journalists and non-journalistic media professionals as well as attitudinal differences regarding branded content and related perceptions of transparency, disclosure standards, and perceived job autonomy. Based on a survey sample of the Online News Association membership ( n = 226), journalists placed greater emphasis on organizational disclo…
Ethical Challenges and Moral Conation Capacities in Emerging Adults Moving into Media Industries
This study explores the development of moral identity and value systems among entry-level media workers during the formative period of emerging adulthood. Thematic analysis of extensive “life story” structured interviews with newly minted graduates of five journalism and communications programs in the United States (N = 65) focused on responses to specific interview queries regarding ethical challenges. Key themes of challenges involved autonomou…
Textual and Comparative Analyses on AI Policies: How Big Tech and Their Global Watchdogs Frame Virtues and Responsibility
The rapid advancement of AI has raised pressing moral considerations, prompting many stakeholders to publish guidelines for responsible development. However, the specific virtues organizations prioritize in their AI policies, and the extent to which they acknowledge AI’s potential role as a moral agent, remain underexplored. We conducted a textual and comparative analysis of AI principles issued by Big Tech corporations (OpenAI, Google, Microsoft…
Moral Identity Development Among Emerging Adults in Media: A Longitudinal Analysis
This longitudinal study examines changes in the moral identity of 48 emerging-adult U.S. college graduates in media-related fields from their first year after college to three years later as they progressed into early work life. Results from four moral psychology survey instruments reflect significant shifts in moral reasoning, relativistic thinking and idealism, coupled with stability in personality traits and character strengths. A fifth instru…
Special Call from the Journal of Media Ethics: Moral Psychology and Media
Scholarship on moral judgment continues to illuminate how we internalize value systems, how we form moral identities, and how both motivate and shape our decisions. Having developed within the fiel
Special Call from the Journal of Media Ethics: Media Ethics Symposium - ‘Challenges to Digital Media Flourishing’ October 2022, Pennsylvania State University
The Don W. Davis Program in Ethical Leadership is seeking manuscripts for the “Challenges to Digital Media Flourishing” symposium. Submission deadline is 15 April 2024.[Exact Symposium dates to be
Digital detox tourism: An Ellulian critique
Moving Into the Media World: The Moral Psychology of Emerging Adults in Journalism and Communication
A growing body of psychology-based scholarship identifies emerging adulthood as a distinct, transitional stage of life and work characterized by several features, wherein relatively little is known regarding moral development. This study is part of a 3-year, longitudinal project involving recent graduates across six U.S. universities who studied journalism and media-related fields. Guided by emerging adulthood, moral psychology, and media exempla…
The Moral Psychology and Exemplarism of Leaders in Advertising
Moral exemplars, individuals admired for their moral goodness, are invaluable resources for education and in practice, especially for practices fraught with ethical challenges such as advertising. The current study is the first to examine the moral psychology profile of advertising executives with a range of strategic communication experience as chief executive officers at regional, national, and international agencies and chief marketing officer…
Introduction for 35: 2
The articles in this issue scrutinize the ethical justifications for media claims, practices and structures. Regarding the topic of sponsored content, the predominant ethics question tends to be on
Special call from the Journal of Media Ethics: Media Ethics and Impermanence/Permanence
Alvin Toffler wrote more than 50 years ago that modern civilizations, as they acquired more knowledge and technology, were exhibiting increased impermanence. The rates of change throughout modern s
Shaky Platforms, Big Data, And Hyper-Individualism: An Assessment Of The Communitarian Turn In The Digital World
The Concept of Moral Ecology in Media Sociology Research
This project provides an explication of moral ecology, tracing its roots from 19th-century scientific approaches to its 20th-century critical-cultural focus, and introducing its latest moral-psychology incarnation for future media research. While the rich media ecology scholarship has focused primarily on the realm of effects, emerging applications of the moral ecology concept are shifting that focus onto the sociological processes and organizati…
Media Ethics Theorizing, Reoriented: A Shift in Focus for Individual-Level Analyses
This project argues that multidisciplinary methods and work to reconsider key concepts are critical if media ethics scholarship is to continue to mature. It identifies 3 dimensions of a reoriented framework for media ethics theory: one that conceptualizes moral motivation as the focus of inquiry at the individual level; another that focuses on promising assessments of autonomy and organizational influences for a transformed media landscape; and a…
Virtue in Media: The Moral Psychology of Excellence in News and Public Relations
This work establishes a contemporary profile of virtue in professional media practice. Author Patrick Lee Plaisance examines the experiences, perspectives, moral stances, and demographic data of two dozen professional exemplars in journalism and public relations. Plaisance conducted extensive personal "life story" interviews and collected survey data to assess the exemplars’ personality traits, ethical ideologies, moral reasoning skills and perce…
Media Ethics: Key Principles for Responsible Practice
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, marketing, and digital media. Unlike application-oriented case books, this text sets forth the philosophical underpinnings of key principles and explains how each should guide responsible media behavior. Author Patric…
Ethical Orientations of Journalists Around the Globe: Implications From a Cross-National Survey
Journalism ethics theorizing is increasingly preoccupied with identifying and articulating universal norms and standards for media systems across various cultures. This study offers an empirical contribution to this topic by examining the ethical orientations of journalists in 18 countries. Country-level, or ideological, factors, rather than individual-level variables, appear to have the greatest impact on journalists’ degrees of idealism and rel…
Mapping Journalism Cultures Across Nations: A comparative study of 18 countries
This article reports key findings from a comparative survey of the role perceptions, epistemological orientations and ethical views of 1800 journalists from 18 countries. The results show that detachment, non-involvement, providing political information and monitoring the government are considered essential journalistic functions around the globe. Impartiality, the reliability and factualness of information, as well as adherence to universal ethi…
Modeling Perceived Influences on Journalism: Evidence from a Cross-National Survey of Journalists
Surveying 1,700 journalists from seventeen countries, this study investigates perceived influences on news work. Analysis reveals a dimensional structure of six distinct domains—political, economic, organizational, professional, and procedural influences, as well as reference groups. Across countries, these six dimensions build up a hierarchical structure where organizational, professional, and procedural influences are perceived as more powerful…
A Gang of Pecksniffs Grows Up: The evolution of journalism ethics discourse in The Journalist and Editor and Publisher
This content analysis explores how American journalism's first trade publications reflected discussion of ethical issues before and during the Progressive Era. While issues of normative behavior for reporters and editors were thought to have developed from earlier efforts to professionalize the field, this study suggests that the two areas, while intertwined, developed along different trajectories. The analysis, based on content from a random wee…
The Mass Media as Discursive Network: Building on the Implications of Libertarian and Communitarian Claims for News Media Ethics Theory
Media theorists have created competing normative ethical frameworks based on libertarian and communitarian philosophies, but because each approach essentially promotes different moral principles, they do not merely offer competing alternatives that essentially serve the same purpose, as some scholars have presumed. This analysis suggests that the two dominant theoretical approaches of libertarianism and communitarianism require further clarificat…
The Mass Media as Discursive Network: Building on the Implications of Libertarian and Communitarian Claims for News Media Ethics Theory
Personal and Professional Dimensions of News Work: Exploring the Link between Journalists' Values and Roles
Scholars studying news work have long focused on either journalistic roles or journalistic values, rather than trying to integrate the two as a way to better understand internal forces that drive reporters and editors. This study questions assumptions regarding values by applying social psychology research on values to better understand how journalists operate. The resulting “profile” of journalistic values produced by a nationwide probability-sa…
The journalist as moral witness: Michael Ignatieff's pluralistic philosophy for a global media culture
Prototypical philosopher–journalist Michael Ignatieff argues that the globalization that has helped spawn modern ethnic conflict demands that mass media assume new roles as sentinels of ‘moral engagement’. Underlying Ignatieff's call are the claims that history has debunked the concept of absolute human values and that global communication must, above all, mediate among opposing moral worlds. His pluralistic philosophy represents the culmination …
Mapping Journalism Cultures Across Nations: A comparative study of 18 countries
This article reports key findings from a comparative survey of the role perceptions, epistemological orientations and ethical views of 1800 journalists from 18 countries. The results show that detachment, non-involvement, providing political information and monitoring the government are considered essential journalistic functions around the globe. Impartiality, the reliability and factualness of information, as well as adherence to universal ethi…
Modeling Perceived Influences on Journalism: Evidence from a Cross-National Survey of Journalists
Surveying 1,700 journalists from seventeen countries, this study investigates perceived influences on news work. Analysis reveals a dimensional structure of six distinct domains—political, economic, organizational, professional, and procedural influences, as well as reference groups. Across countries, these six dimensions build up a hierarchical structure where organizational, professional, and procedural influences are perceived as more powerful…
Personal and Professional Dimensions of News Work: Exploring the Link between Journalists' Values and Roles
Scholars studying news work have long focused on either journalistic roles or journalistic values, rather than trying to integrate the two as a way to better understand internal forces that drive reporters and editors. This study questions assumptions regarding values by applying social psychology research on values to better understand how journalists operate. The resulting “profile” of journalistic values produced by a nationwide probability-sa…
Ethical Orientations of Journalists Around the Globe: Implications From a Cross-National Survey
Journalism ethics theorizing is increasingly preoccupied with identifying and articulating universal norms and standards for media systems across various cultures. This study offers an empirical contribution to this topic by examining the ethical orientations of journalists in 18 countries. Country-level, or ideological, factors, rather than individual-level variables, appear to have the greatest impact on journalists’ degrees of idealism and rel…
The journalist as moral witness: Michael Ignatieff's pluralistic philosophy for a global media culture
Prototypical philosopher–journalist Michael Ignatieff argues that the globalization that has helped spawn modern ethnic conflict demands that mass media assume new roles as sentinels of ‘moral engagement’. Underlying Ignatieff's call are the claims that history has debunked the concept of absolute human values and that global communication must, above all, mediate among opposing moral worlds. His pluralistic philosophy represents the culmination …
The Mass Media as Discursive Network: Building on the Implications of Libertarian and Communitarian Claims for News Media Ethics Theory
Media theorists have created competing normative ethical frameworks based on libertarian and communitarian philosophies, but because each approach essentially promotes different moral principles, they do not merely offer competing alternatives that essentially serve the same purpose, as some scholars have presumed. This analysis suggests that the two dominant theoretical approaches of libertarianism and communitarianism require further clarificat…
The Mass Media as Discursive Network: Building on the Implications of Libertarian and Communitarian Claims for News Media Ethics Theory
A Gang of Pecksniffs Grows Up: The evolution of journalism ethics discourse in The Journalist and Editor and Publisher
This content analysis explores how American journalism's first trade publications reflected discussion of ethical issues before and during the Progressive Era. While issues of normative behavior for reporters and editors were thought to have developed from earlier efforts to professionalize the field, this study suggests that the two areas, while intertwined, developed along different trajectories. The analysis, based on content from a random wee…
The journalist as moral witness: Michael Ignatieff's pluralistic philosophy for a global media culture
Prototypical philosopher–journalist Michael Ignatieff argues that the globalization that has helped spawn modern ethnic conflict demands that mass media assume new roles as sentinels of ‘moral engagement’. Underlying Ignatieff's call are the claims that history has debunked the concept of absolute human values and that global communication must, above all, mediate among opposing moral worlds. His pluralistic philosophy represents the culmination …
Personal and Professional Dimensions of News Work: Exploring the Link between Journalists' Values and Roles
Scholars studying news work have long focused on either journalistic roles or journalistic values, rather than trying to integrate the two as a way to better understand internal forces that drive reporters and editors. This study questions assumptions regarding values by applying social psychology research on values to better understand how journalists operate. The resulting “profile” of journalistic values produced by a nationwide probability-sa…
A Gang of Pecksniffs Grows Up: The evolution of journalism ethics discourse in The Journalist and Editor and Publisher
This content analysis explores how American journalism's first trade publications reflected discussion of ethical issues before and during the Progressive Era. While issues of normative behavior for reporters and editors were thought to have developed from earlier efforts to professionalize the field, this study suggests that the two areas, while intertwined, developed along different trajectories. The analysis, based on content from a random wee…
The Mass Media as Discursive Network: Building on the Implications of Libertarian and Communitarian Claims for News Media Ethics Theory
Media theorists have created competing normative ethical frameworks based on libertarian and communitarian philosophies, but because each approach essentially promotes different moral principles, they do not merely offer competing alternatives that essentially serve the same purpose, as some scholars have presumed. This analysis suggests that the two dominant theoretical approaches of libertarianism and communitarianism require further clarificat…
The Mass Media as Discursive Network: Building on the Implications of Libertarian and Communitarian Claims for News Media Ethics Theory
Mapping Journalism Cultures Across Nations: A comparative study of 18 countries
This article reports key findings from a comparative survey of the role perceptions, epistemological orientations and ethical views of 1800 journalists from 18 countries. The results show that detachment, non-involvement, providing political information and monitoring the government are considered essential journalistic functions around the globe. Impartiality, the reliability and factualness of information, as well as adherence to universal ethi…
Modeling Perceived Influences on Journalism: Evidence from a Cross-National Survey of Journalists
Surveying 1,700 journalists from seventeen countries, this study investigates perceived influences on news work. Analysis reveals a dimensional structure of six distinct domains—political, economic, organizational, professional, and procedural influences, as well as reference groups. Across countries, these six dimensions build up a hierarchical structure where organizational, professional, and procedural influences are perceived as more powerful…
Ethical Orientations of Journalists Around the Globe: Implications From a Cross-National Survey
Journalism ethics theorizing is increasingly preoccupied with identifying and articulating universal norms and standards for media systems across various cultures. This study offers an empirical contribution to this topic by examining the ethical orientations of journalists in 18 countries. Country-level, or ideological, factors, rather than individual-level variables, appear to have the greatest impact on journalists’ degrees of idealism and rel…
Virtue in Media: The Moral Psychology of Excellence in News and Public Relations
This work establishes a contemporary profile of virtue in professional media practice. Author Patrick Lee Plaisance examines the experiences, perspectives, moral stances, and demographic data of two dozen professional exemplars in journalism and public relations. Plaisance conducted extensive personal "life story" interviews and collected survey data to assess the exemplars’ personality traits, ethical ideologies, moral reasoning skills and perce…
Media Ethics: Key Principles for Responsible Practice
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, marketing, and digital media. Unlike application-oriented case books, this text sets forth the philosophical underpinnings of key principles and explains how each should guide responsible media behavior. Author Patric…
Media Ethics Theorizing, Reoriented: A Shift in Focus for Individual-Level Analyses
This project argues that multidisciplinary methods and work to reconsider key concepts are critical if media ethics scholarship is to continue to mature. It identifies 3 dimensions of a reoriented framework for media ethics theory: one that conceptualizes moral motivation as the focus of inquiry at the individual level; another that focuses on promising assessments of autonomy and organizational influences for a transformed media landscape; and a…
The Concept of Moral Ecology in Media Sociology Research
This project provides an explication of moral ecology, tracing its roots from 19th-century scientific approaches to its 20th-century critical-cultural focus, and introducing its latest moral-psychology incarnation for future media research. While the rich media ecology scholarship has focused primarily on the realm of effects, emerging applications of the moral ecology concept are shifting that focus onto the sociological processes and organizati…
Introduction for 35: 2
The articles in this issue scrutinize the ethical justifications for media claims, practices and structures. Regarding the topic of sponsored content, the predominant ethics question tends to be on
Special call from the Journal of Media Ethics: Media Ethics and Impermanence/Permanence
Alvin Toffler wrote more than 50 years ago that modern civilizations, as they acquired more knowledge and technology, were exhibiting increased impermanence. The rates of change throughout modern s
Shaky Platforms, Big Data, And Hyper-Individualism: An Assessment Of The Communitarian Turn In The Digital World
Moving Into the Media World: The Moral Psychology of Emerging Adults in Journalism and Communication
A growing body of psychology-based scholarship identifies emerging adulthood as a distinct, transitional stage of life and work characterized by several features, wherein relatively little is known regarding moral development. This study is part of a 3-year, longitudinal project involving recent graduates across six U.S. universities who studied journalism and media-related fields. Guided by emerging adulthood, moral psychology, and media exempla…
The Moral Psychology and Exemplarism of Leaders in Advertising
Moral exemplars, individuals admired for their moral goodness, are invaluable resources for education and in practice, especially for practices fraught with ethical challenges such as advertising. The current study is the first to examine the moral psychology profile of advertising executives with a range of strategic communication experience as chief executive officers at regional, national, and international agencies and chief marketing officer…
Special Call from the Journal of Media Ethics: Moral Psychology and Media
Scholarship on moral judgment continues to illuminate how we internalize value systems, how we form moral identities, and how both motivate and shape our decisions. Having developed within the fiel
Special Call from the Journal of Media Ethics: Media Ethics Symposium - ‘Challenges to Digital Media Flourishing’ October 2022, Pennsylvania State University
The Don W. Davis Program in Ethical Leadership is seeking manuscripts for the “Challenges to Digital Media Flourishing” symposium. Submission deadline is 15 April 2024.[Exact Symposium dates to be
Digital detox tourism: An Ellulian critique
Moral Identity Development Among Emerging Adults in Media: A Longitudinal Analysis
This longitudinal study examines changes in the moral identity of 48 emerging-adult U.S. college graduates in media-related fields from their first year after college to three years later as they progressed into early work life. Results from four moral psychology survey instruments reflect significant shifts in moral reasoning, relativistic thinking and idealism, coupled with stability in personality traits and character strengths. A fifth instru…
Textual and Comparative Analyses on AI Policies: How Big Tech and Their Global Watchdogs Frame Virtues and Responsibility
The rapid advancement of AI has raised pressing moral considerations, prompting many stakeholders to publish guidelines for responsible development. However, the specific virtues organizations prioritize in their AI policies, and the extent to which they acknowledge AI’s potential role as a moral agent, remain underexplored. We conducted a textual and comparative analysis of AI principles issued by Big Tech corporations (OpenAI, Google, Microsoft…
Humility: A Foundational Virtue for Digital Life
Social media platforms often prioritize engagement metrics that amplify outrage and self-promotion, fostering environments of toxicity and hubris rather than humility. Despite the critical role humility plays in ethical formation and intellectual flourishing, its integration into digital media ethics remains underexplored. This project explores humility’s role in digital media ethics, integrating insights from psychology, virtue epistemology, and…
Transparency, disclosure and autonomy: Moral judgment and attitudes toward branded content among media workers
This study extends the media sociology literature on moral judgment by comparing moral orientations among journalists and non-journalistic media professionals as well as attitudinal differences regarding branded content and related perceptions of transparency, disclosure standards, and perceived job autonomy. Based on a survey sample of the Online News Association membership ( n = 226), journalists placed greater emphasis on organizational disclo…
Ethical Challenges and Moral Conation Capacities in Emerging Adults Moving into Media Industries
This study explores the development of moral identity and value systems among entry-level media workers during the formative period of emerging adulthood. Thematic analysis of extensive “life story” structured interviews with newly minted graduates of five journalism and communications programs in the United States (N = 65) focused on responses to specific interview queries regarding ethical challenges. Key themes of challenges involved autonomou…
Sociology (19 works) · Political science (17 works) · Psychology (12 works) · Journalism (11 works) · Media studies (11 works) · Law (10 works) · Epistemology (8 works) · Law (8 works) · Media Studies and Communication (8 works) · Social science (8 works)