Category: Media Ethics

By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, Media Ethics

The real scandal of the Newsweek incident isn’t that the magazine issued a retraction. It’s the incredible pressure brought to bear by the White House and the Pentagon to stifle dissent and cover up problems. Big problems. And it’s the cowardice of American mainstream journalism in he face of that pressure.

Earlier this week, a query from a journalist crossed my desk:

“I’m looking for experts to comment on the issues surrounding this story, including, but not limited to: 1) The White House says the apology is not enough and Newsweek needs to do more to repair the damage. What is the magazine’s obligation? 2) Is it any surprise, given recent reporting errors, that Americans don’t trust journalists? 3) Newsweek is a highly respected news magazine. How could this happen? 4) What is happening in the journalism profession? Why are journalists and the field in general losing regard among the public?”

Here’s what I wrote back:

” I think there’s a deeper story, and a different set of questions. Newsweek’s retraction was made under enormous pressure form the federal government. Is there actually truth to the allegations? Why does this government take such a consistent role as squelcher-of-the-press? (Two examples: the refusal to let TV cover returning coffins; the 1999 pressure brought to bear on St Martin’s Press to recall and destroy a critical biography of Bush, later re-published by the courageous independent house Soft Skull) And why is the media so complicit in its own strangulation? Why was the Dan Rather scandal allowed to divert attention from the far greater scandal–well known long before the forged memos came to light–of Bush’s AWOL problem?”… That the government was able to force the retraction of an apparently true story is cause for deep concern–and as someone who focuses on ethics, something I’m particularly alarmed about.

Since writing my response (which actually has resulted in two interviews so far), I did a little digging on the story. And I found some very interesting information.

1. Koran abuse is an old story. It was broken nine months ago by Britain’s The Independent, and unlike Newsweek, that paper attributed its sources. Why did it take American journalists nine months to dig it out? The Independent’s site only has the very beginning of the article:
https://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=548033

but the whole thing is posted in several places, including
https://www.sfimc.net/news/2004/08/1700888.php

2. According to a story in Democracy Now today, not only was abuse of the Koran rampant at Guantanamo, as part of a general culture of trashing and profaning all things Muslim (forced shaving, defiling male prisoners with what they thought was menstrual blood, and other psychological abuse), but several Kuwaiti prisoners filed a lawsuit about this.

The whole sordid tale can be found at https://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/05/18/1434259&mode=thread&tid=25

It does not make me proud of the American government. Desecration of religion has been considered bad karma at least as far back as the Maccabees of ancient Palestine, 165 years before the birth of Christ, whose defeat of the defilers–who ordered pigs, considered unclean by religious Jews, slaughtered n the holy temple–created the Jewish holiday of Chanukah.

Is it any wonder Americans are hated when they do everything in their power to desecrate the entire culture of the lands they occupy?

And isn’t it deeply ironic that White House spokesperson Scott McClellan said, “The report has had serious consequences. People have lost their lives. The image of the United States abroad has been damaged.”

I decry the loss of life. It is a human tragedy on the mound of vast human tragedies this war has sprung on us. But Scott–didn’t it ever occur to you that far more lives were lost, and our country’s reputation was far more damaged, by the “you’re with us or against us” rhetoric, the refusal to wait for the United Nations, the blatantly false justifications for the war (anyone remember that this was supposedly about WMDs? Or remember President Bush joking about looking for them behind the White House furniture?) Engage in unethical and illegal behavior for years, and then blame the messenger?

Something is very wrong with this picture.

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By Posted on Posted in Media Ethics

https://www.investors.com/breakingnews.asp?journalid=27296372&brk=1

A fascinating and wide-ranging article from Investors Business Daily that looks at…

* Journalism’s own ethics skeletons: made-up stories, fabricated quotes, bad judgment, inflated circulation figures, and a general credibility gap
* The lack of training for business journalists as most small local papers slash their business coverage
* Journalism’s failure to pay attention to the signals before Enron and others collapsed–accepting company claims in the same spirit of “press release journalism” that mars–this is my opinion now, not article writer Jon Friedman’s–its failure to ask hard questions of the government

Friedman doesn’t comment on the scandal of VNRs: video news releases presented as actual TV news, without attribution to the government agency or corporation that prepared it with a particular agenda. and while he hints at it, I think he gives short shrift to some of the reasons behind these trends:

1] News decisions made by bottom line-focused executives with no understanding of the role news plays in a free society, and therefore no recognition of the value honest and thorough news brings to the table, beyond dollars

2] The tragic tendency to replace discourse with “infotainment.” If you watch many newscasts, or read many prominent publications, you’d come away with the impression that celebrities’ love lives are more important than a solid discussion of, say, the reasons for foreign policy decisions or the impact of corporate outsourcing on a local economy.

This second factor has left an ill-informed populace with poor thinking skills. Sure, it’s easy to find much more thorough treatment in the alternative voices; the problem is that these wonderful resources make very little impact on the mainstream, whereas the infotainment specialists have taken over the TV sets and daily newspapers that reach a majority of people. And this is dumbing down our whole culture.

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By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, Marketing Trends/News, Media Ethics

As a copywriter, I’m always looking to better my skill set—so I read a whole lot of copywriting newsletters and books. One of them is Ivan Levison’s “Levison Letter.”

Ivan’s latest issue expressed surprise at the results of an A/B split—a test that changes one variable in a copywriting piece. He had advised the client to format the letter in an old-fashioned typewriter-style font, like Courier–because, in the old days, letters that looked hand-typed usually pulled better. (Direct marketers measure absolutely everything–the number, kind, and quality of the results; it’s as much science as art.) But the client was adamant about doing it in Times Roman. So they did an A/B test: 25,000 letters in each font, no other variables changed.

It was a dead heat, and this shocked Ivan. But it doesn’t shock me. In fact, I wouldn’t have been surprised if the typeset-looking version had outpulled the classic Courier.

Why? Because to the current generation, Times New Roman represents hand-typed. It’s the default font in Microsoft Word, the word processor that completely dominates the market. Many people never even touch their font settings. There are probably a lot of people under 30 who’ve never seen a letter typed on a real typewriter. What Ivan forgot to adjust for is that the principle behind his original conclusions is sound: people respond better to a letter that looks like it was created just for them–but the parameters of what makes that true have changed.

I’m betting that in the last ten years, the only letters you’ve seen that were typed in Courier were marketing documents, done by direct marketers who didn’t realize the territory has shifted. Unless, maybe, you have an elderly aunt who never got a computer and doesn’t hand-write her letters.

Now, this got me thinking about a famous situation where several careers were dramatically altered because of the difference between Courier and Times Roman: Rathergate.

You’ll remember that in the run-up to the election, a memo was leaked that seemed to prove the longstanding allegations that President Bush had not only used his family privilege to get a precious–and safe–spot in the Texas National Guard, but then skipped out on his responsibilities, didn’t show up for a required physical, and lost his pilot status.

Some alert bloggers in the Republican camp noticed that the memo had been done in Times Roman, and appeared to be produced on a modern word processor, and not a 70s-era typewriter. Yes, proportional-font technology existed back then–I even used a funky IBM compositor in 1975–but no sane person would use it to produce a casual memo. It was hard to wrestle with and expensive to purchase and operate, and it was designed to create finished typeset documents for publication. I saw a PDF of the memo at the time, and recognized instantly that it was a forgery. This caused the firing of several people at CBS, and advanced Dan Rather’s retirement to several months earlier than planned.

The interesting side result was to deflect all the piled-up criticism about Bush’s highly questionable service record. Mary Mapes got fired; Bush held on to the presidency.

The question I asked then, and continue to ask, is who really benefited from Rathergate, and who was really behind it? No one has ever really tied this scandal to either the Democrats or the Republicans–but actually, the Republicans had far more to gain. In fact, this story completed deflated the various investigations into the actual military service record–a record which, in a time of war, and a war whose purpose and justification were tangled in a web of deceit (does anyone remember that we were supposed to be preventing Saddam from using his non-existent weapons of mass destruction?), was a valid and crucial election issue. The various trails running through this sordid story are starkly relevant to the election and its outcome. For starters, it would be worth looking at how quickly people were able to trace these memos back to the same source. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if we found out Karl Rove had a hand in this.

If that turns out to be true, will the mass media, cowed into submission by this and other instances, raise its collective head, remove the tail from between it legs, and call strongly for impeachment?

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By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, Media Ethics

https://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-ethics12mar12,1,4171595.story?ctrack=1&cset=true

“If you aren’t going to create an ethics committee right, don’t create it at all,” says Rep. Alan B. Mollohan of West Virginia. “Otherwise, it is a great farce on the body, not to mention the American people.”

Mollohan’s concern is that the US House of Representatives has eviscerated its own ethics rules. While I usually write about ethics in the business sphere, and it seems to me that business has been cleaning up its act, the political dirty tricks seem to get worse and worse with time. We thought Nixon’s people were the masters of political dirty tricks–but we hadn’t met the late Lee Atwater or Karl Rove, who have “elevated it to a high art”–which is to say, debased themselves to the point where one wonders how they can sleep at night. And the Democrats are not so clean-handed either, as witness some of the dirty pool regarding Nader’s presence on the ballot or their lack of willingness to face protestors at the convention (that particular spinelessness extended to both major parties).

This particular chorus of “I didn’t do it, or at least you didn’t catch me” seems largely to benefit House honcho Tom DeLay, who was up to his ears in ethics problems last year. So now the Committee wants to procedurally sandbag any investigation just by stalling for 45 days. Yuck! DeLay’s ethics problems are so widespread that a search for [ethics rules “tom delay” “house of representatives”] (without the square brackets) brings up 12,400 hits on Google, many from within the last few days that the House has been discussing this.

Well, some of us are watching, and we are not pleased.

2. https://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-050604ruhllecture_lat.story

Lecture by John S. Carroll, Editor of the Los Angeles Times: A remarkably candid, if somewhat rambly, look at journalistic ethics, the importance of disclosing a financial relationship, and the monster Orson Welles created by inventing pseudojournalism with his famous War of the
Worlds broadcast.

I happened to notice this as I was clicking on the above story, and went back to have a look afterwards. I liked it enough that I’m going to ask for permission to put it up on my Ethics Articles page at https://www.principledprofits.com — but whether or not I get permission, you can follow the link. (You may have to be registered.)

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By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, Media Ethics

https://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/03/02/media/index_np.html

Is it a coincidence that so much of the real discourse in the last election took place not in magazines, not in newspapers, but in books? Michael Moore on the Left and the Swift Boaters on the Right were the most visible, though far from the only. There were dozens of books from all over the spectrum on the charts, and they were selling.

This article gives some insight into why so many newspapers and magazines were conspicuously irrelevant. Oh, for the glory days of the 70s when newspapers actually took the idea of news seriously!

Among the most disturbing parts of the article:

[quote begins here] Suskind quotes a senior Bush advisor who dismissed reporters for living in the “the reality-based community.” The advisor said, “That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”

Separately, discussing the role of journalists, White House chief of staff Andy Card famously told the New Yorker in a Jan. 20, 2004, article, “They don’t represent the public any more than other people do. In our democracy, the people who represent the public stood for election. I don’t believe you have a check-and-balance function.” At the time, Card’s blunt assessment was seen as a justification of the Bush administration’s policy of keeping the press at arm’s length. (Bush held the fewest first-term press conferences in modern presidential history.) It’s now clear that while most mainstream reporters were getting stiffed, members of the administration were simultaneously setting up propaganda projects by lavishing the Ketchum public relations firm with nearly $100 million in contracts to “communicate” White House initiatives — by hiring Williams, shipping out bogus video news releases, and other sleazy schemes — and waving into the White House an amateur journalist using an alias and working for a fake news outlet. (The bogus video news releases were subsequently slapped down as an illegal use of public funds by the General Accounting Office.) end of quote]

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By Posted on Posted in Media Ethics

https://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=53&aid=79271

Fascinating–a look at what a reporter knew that her public didn’t know, and whether withholding the story was appropriate. Of course, every journalist makes choices about what to include and what to leave out in a story–legitimate journalistic choices. A major purpose of journalism is to filter a large quantity of raw information into a coherent and digestible story. When I work as a journalist, I usually have far more information than I can include in (for instance) a 500-word story. But when the choice is not to do the story in the first place, or to do it and leave key information out of the discourse, many ethics questions come into play. Especially if a government or corporate source wants the material held or permanently suppressed.

One of the things I found especially useful in this article is author Kelly McBride’s list of six criteria for when to hold and when to divulge, at the very end of the piece.

Criterion #1:
“First figure out where the information came from. Anything that can be found in a public record, anything that is voluntarily revealed by witnesses or is observed first-hand by a journalist should be considered fair game.”

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By Posted on Posted in Marketing Trends/News, Media Ethics

https://online.wsj.com/public/article/0,,SB110626272888531958,00.html?mod=todays%5Ffree%5Ffeature

Yup–blogging’s getting mainstream. This fascinating Wall Street Journal article looks at the role of blogging in getting stories on the radar, and bloggers’ shifting self-perceptions into the world of journalism. Blogging has played a role in discovering–and covering such stories as the Dan Rather Bush memo escapade, and what WSJ writer Jessica Mintz calls “widely disseminated premature exit poll results that led many to believe John Kerry was winning the presidential election for much of Election Day.”

In my own mind (and in the minds of many others), there’s a huge question about whether, in fact, Kerry actually did win key states that would have given him the election. Irregularities that went far beyond the issues in the Ukraine, where in fact the election was done over. I am convinced that Bush did not win honestly in 200, and I am not convinced either way about who won Ohio (and thus, the presidency) in 2004. I find it particularly weird that in the US, partisan Republican Bush campaign officers (Katherine Harris, Florida, 2000; Kenneth blackwell, Ohio, 2004) get to oversee the election and count the votes. If you are Secretary of State with oversight responsibility for elections, you shouldn’t be chairing the state campaign of *any* candidate, IMHO.

Meanwhile, blogs are so legit now that Harvard University’s having a conference,”Blogging, Journalism & Credibility.” Mintz mentions this in her article, and Poynter.org’s Romsensko (in whose emailed blog I found the Mintz piece) gives a URL to listen in:
https://cyber.law.harvard.edu/webcred/index.php?p=12

Unlike most of the WSJ archive, this particular article is available to non-subscribers.

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By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, Media Ethics

In an op-ed by Andrew Rotherham called “No Pundit Left Behind,” The New York Times called it “a stunningly inefficient use of public dollars – every bit as redundant as paying football fans to watch the Super Bowl.” The nation’s newspaper of record is referring to the news that conservative commentator Armstrong Williams was paid $240,000 to promote the No Child Left Behind Act–and promote it he did, but without revealing it was earning him a paycheck.

And because I write about business ethics, I find this story–which combines the public and private spheres in yet another act of blatant corruption–particularly instructive. First, Williams should clearly have reveled he was a paid lobbyist. Organizations such as Public Relations Society of America are very clear that failure to disclose a financial interest is a definite no-no for PR folks. If Williams hadn’t stumbled across the PRSA Code of Ethics, surely his own common sense would tell him that when you shill for a special interest, the relationship ought to be disclosed.

Of course, those of us who have followed the various scandals and mismanagement accusations connected with the Bush administration shouldn’t be surprised. The more they play the values card in public pronouncements, the more dirt shows up with a little scraping. I can’t remember an administration as obsessed with having everyone follow the party line, regardless of the consequences, and so quick to apply double standards on matters of truth, special interest relationships, and their own accountability.

I’m not being partisan, here. The current group is amplifying a trend that can certainly be traced at least as far back as the LBJ administration–but Johnson and Nixon and Clinton were amateurs. As a populace, we need to demand accountability, and not spin–not only from any presidential administration, but from the media that supposedly have the job of keeping them honest.

This story is breaking all over the mainstream press–but so many others are either buried on page 46 or left to the likes of the highly partisan Internet news organizations of the left and the right.

personally, I think America would have just as much appetite for substantive news as it does for the latest celebrity trial or “reality” TV show (sure doesn’t look like *my* reality!)

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