Suppose you are a reporter in London, England. You are covering a hotly contested general election for parliament. Someone tells you at a social event that there are allegations that John Jones, the Conservative Party leader, has sexually harassed women on his office staff. That “someone” is Jason, a senior election worker for the Labour Party. Jason mentions that a woman in Jones’s office, Martha, has told fellow staffers about his actions. You contact Martha by telephone. She confirms she was sexually harassed by Jones. She hints there may be other victims but refuses to go into detail. Martha says she is considering laying a complaint with the police. “Please don’t use my name,” she asks.

Media ethics, the study and application of the norms of journalism, should confront the most important questions that swirl around contemporary practice.

Today, these normative questions arise from a revolutionary change in journalism and information media in general: the evolution of a digital media that is global in reach, use, and impact. Journalism is now distributed along global, digital networks. Moreover, journalism is created by individuals who are not professional, mainstream journalists. The capacity to publish to a public is now in the hands of anyone with access to the Internet. Professional journalists, who once dominated the media sphere, now share the space with tweeters, bloggers, citizen journalists, and social media users around the world.

Global media ethics is the study and application of the norms that should guide the responsible use of informational, public media that is now global in content, reach, and impact. Global media ethics is not the empirical study of globalization as a complex phenomenon affecting culture, economics, and communication. It is the analysis of the ethical impact of globalization on news media, whose original codes of ethics were codified about a century ago when journalism was non-digital and non-global.