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Given the capacity for public opinion to be swayed by media organizations, it is highly important that such organizations are ethical in their decisions as to which aspects of public life to expose, the context in which they situate them within, and the source of data being presented as fact. Hence, this study examines the relationship between a nation’s level of democracy, and the emphasis of democratic values expressed in such country’s most prominent media ethics codes. In specific, this paper will address three preeminent and interrelated questions: (1) Does the breadth and depth of democratic values in media ethics codes of the world’s leading democratic countries correlate to any marginal difference in its level of democracy? (2) Which values do media ethics codes, overall, adequately emphasize and on which values can they improve? (3) Is there great variance in the democratic values expressed in media ethics codes’ between those created by third sector associations and private sector publications in democracies with significant English speaking media? This study finds that (i) marginal democracy is correlated to the strongest private sector publication within its jurisdication and thus ethics codes remain important, (ii) that values relating to opinion poll citations, digital ethics and understanding media's role on society are widely excluded from codes and (iii) that ethics codes created by publications themselves are much more comprehensive than their third sector counterparts.