Category: Media Ethics

By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Media Ethics, media-general, Shel's Personal Life

Just stumbled across a fascinating article by Malcolm Gladwell, the brilliant and bestselling author of The Tipping Point and Blink, on the ethical issues he faces as a journalist who also writes books and also gives speeches. Among other things, he notes the latitude he has as a staff writer for the New Yorker compared to the extremely narrow ability to express any opinion he faced at his former employer, the Washington Post.

As a PR writer/consultant, speaker, journalist, book author, and webzine editor with a specialty in the intersection of marketing and ethics, I grapple with these issues every day. and I found myself not only agreeing with almost everything Gladwell says here (amazing considering the piece is four years old), but wishing I had written it.

Gladwell turns out to be quite good at defining his bo8undaries. An example:

On behalf of the business side of the New Yorker, I have repeatedly given talks or presentations to representatives of companies that advertise with the magazine. For some of those presentations, I have been paid. And on a number of occasions, those groups have included people from the U.S. automobile industry. Has that biased me in favor of the Big Three? Well, no. As I’ve stated, last January I wrote an article bitterly attacking the SUV, which has been the cornerstone of the financial success of Ford, General Motors and Chrysler over the past ten years. Giving a speech does not buy my allegiance to the interests of my audience. Why? Because giving a paid speech to a group for an hour is simply not enough to create a bias in that group’s favor. It’s a very different sort of transaction. I’m not invited to speak to those medical groups because I promise to agree with their position on health care, and I’m not invited to speak to groups from Detroit because I promise to agree with their position on SUVs. In fact, my position on health insurance or SUVs never comes up. I’m invited because those audiences want to hear about my work.

I say Bravo, and I recommend the piece highly–with the caveat that (like many great articles in the New Yorker) the piece is quite long and you’d be better off hitting the print button.

Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, Ethics-International, Media Ethics, Peace and War, Social and Economic Justice, Uncategorized

Here’s a website that shows falsely captioned photos as well as photos cropped in such a way as to completely change their meaning. The topic is the violence in Tibet–but according to this site, many of the pictures are actually from India or Nepal, or show things other than the Chinese anti-Tibet violence that they purport to.

Let me state my biases upfront:

  • I am a supporter of the Free Tibet movement, and have been so since 1978 when I learned about Chinese repression there
  • I have been increasingly aware of what appears to be a disinformation campaign by the Chinese government to discredit the Free Tibet movement–and I recognize the possibility that this website could be part of that disinformation campaign
  • I attended a speech by the Dalai Lama in 1982, and in 1993 my wife and I hosted a young Tibetan woman for over a year, as part of the Tibetan Refugee Resettlement Project

    • Still, even as a supporter of Tibetan freedom, I am appalled to see this apparent media distortion, even though it helps “my side.”

    I’m no photo expert, and it’s possible that this site is offering Photoshopped doctoring of its own, or is mislabeling the pictures. But my gut tells me the captions on this website are accurate, and that the mainstream media in the US, Germany, France, Asia, and UK have run photos that claim to show one thing and actually show something completely different. It’s not the first time this has happened; one prominent example in the relatively recent past is the toppling of Saddam’s statue in Baghdad–made to look like a huge an enthusiastic, locally originated event that was actually staged by US Marines in front of a small crowd that may have been comprised primarily of supporters of the discredited Ahmed Chalabi.

    Which does make me wonder whether the CIA or similar organizations have their fingers in this apparent distortion of the Tibet reportage, and wonder who has been feeding the media these islabeled or cropped-to-distortion images.

    Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

    By Posted on Posted in Media Ethics, Publishing

    Those who travel frequently know that different guidebook brands cater to different tastes. If you want American-style hotels and restaurants and don’t mind paying well for them, pick up Fodor. If you don’t mind sweeping off the bugs before you roll out your sleeping bag on a hard youth hostel bench, grab Let’s Go. If you’re on a low but not rock-bottom budget and you want some degree of comfort but nothing fancy, that’s Frommer.

    And then there are three major guidebook series for adventure travelers, focusing the experience on offbeat experiences most tourists will never see: Moon, Rough Guides, and Lonely Planet.

    Now comes a report of a major scandal at Lonely Planet: Australia’s Daily Telegraph newspaper reports that one of its most published writers, Thomas Kohnstamm, not only violated the company’s firm (and understandable) policy of not accepting comps (freebies from hospitality and tourism organizations seeking good coverage)–but worse, he did his Colombia guidebook from the comfort of San Francisco:

    “They didn’t pay me enough to go Colombia,” he said.

    “I wrote the book in San Francisco. I got the information from a chick I was dating – an intern in the Colombian Consulate.

    This same writer is quoted in a New York Times article on the lives of guidebook writers that one of his highlights last year was going “out partying in Bogotá and met a lot of cool people. It can be kind of addictive.”

    Which Thomas Kohnstamm should we believe?

    UPDATE
    The International Herald Tribune issued a strong denial by Lonely Planet, which turns out to be majority-owned by the BBC.

    And it turns out Kohnstamm was not assigned to the part of the Colombia guidebook that requires in-person visits. Lonely Plant Publisher Piers Picard…

    called that claim “disingenuous” because he was hired to write about the country’s history, not to travel there to review accommodation and restaurants. That work was done by two other authors.

    As a journalist, I can tell you that it is thoroughly possible to do a very good story of that sort without setting foot in a place. Phone or e-mail interviews and some research with validated sources can be plenty.

    So why did Kohnstamm claim in the NY Times article that he was partying in Colombia’s capital? What are his real reasons for dragging his own name through the mud in order to apparently discredit Lonely Planet?

    Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

    By Posted on Posted in Media Ethics, Politics

    A lot of people have been dumping on Obama’s former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, for his remarks about 9-11, his endorsement of Louis Farrakhan, and various other things.

    Obama has consistently publicly and thoroughly distanced himself from Wright’s positions–a clear repudiation even of a close personal friend. Obama also immediately got rid of the key staffer who called Hillary Clinton a “monster.”

    Meanwhile, it looks like a lot of those shaking their fists in the air about this have some reluctance to criticize others who surround themselves with extremists and questionable characters–or, in some cases, are guilty of this behavior themselves.

    You want examples?

  • First of all, Fox (big surprise) took Wright’s remarks wildly out of context, according to Alternet. Wright was quoting someone else, Edward Peck–the white former Ambassador to Iraq (under Jimmy Carter) who might be expected to actually know about such things. And Fox’s camp-followers and parrots in the mainstream media (I don’t consider Fox to be mainstream in spite of its large viewership–it’s politics are extremist, its columnists act as attack dogs who use hate and intimidation, and its journalistic style seeks not the truth but the discrediting of those who disagree) didn’t question this, and repeated the accusation.
  • Clinton herself seemed remarkably unwilling to part company with Geraldine Ferraro, despite Ferraro’s crude racist remarks about Obama.
  • The ever-loathsome Sean Hannity, says Huffington Post, has ties to a neo-Nazi, Hal Turner.
  • And last but certainly not least, John McCain actively went after his endorsement by pastor John Hagee, an open homophobe and right-wing demagogue who is at least as extremist as Wright, and to my mind quite a bit farther out–and why isn’t the mainstream media, or Fox, jumping on McCain for this?
    • Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

    By Posted on Posted in Ethics-International, Media Ethics

    This is a doozy, from China.

    The photographer of an award-winning photo that advanced the Chinese government’s aims and allayed fears of environmentalists who had protested a high-speed China-Tibet rail link has admitted faking his widely published photo of a herd of rare-species chiru antelope placidly grazing underneath the train tracks, while a train zooms by.

    It is two photos spliced together. Liu Weiqing, a man who claimed on his blog, “One man, one car, one year…and a campaign to protect Tibetan antelope,” has now resigned in disgrace along with his editor, his reward revoked.

    But…as the Wall Street Journal notes,

    Other photographs that took home awards that night included “Facing a harmonious future,” a picture of Chinese President Hu posing with world leaders, and a “A trip to apologize,” a picture of a Japanese monk apologizing to China for Japanese atrocities in World War II. CCTV didn’t reply to inquiries about its criteria for photo awards.

    In other words, this award seems to follow a trail that dovetail’s nicely with Chinese government policies and propaganda.

    Which makes me–and the Journal’s writers Jane Spencer and Juliet Ye–wonder if Liu was merely the fall guy, if he was asked or ordered to come up with a photo like this:

    His friends say he was dedicated to his job and determined to raise the profile of the embattled antelope. “He was a good guy,” says Zhou Zhuogang, an environmental activist from Shenzhen in southern China who met Mr. Liu in the summer of 2006 when the two men were at a volunteer station on the Tibetan plateau. “He loved photography, and he loved the antelope. I don’t know what pushed him to do this.”

    Some suspect pressure to create the photo came from above. “When everybody points a finger to the photographer, we actually missed the real core problem here,” says Wang Yangbo, editor of Wen Wei Pao, a Hong Kong Daily. The photographers “are nobodies in the scheme of things here,” she adds.

    Remember:

  • China invaded Tibet in the 1950s, has behaved with the worst kind of imperialistic colonialism since then, and continues to repress Tibetans and their independence movement
  • China has been roundly criticized on a number of environmental grounds, from flooding a huge and magnificent area with the Three Gorges Dam to contributing to rapid climate change through its unbridled (and largely un-pollution controlled) consumption of fossil fuels
  • Environmentalists tried to block this train’s construction precisely because of worries about this antelope species

    • Hmmmm.

    Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

    By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, Media Ethics, Politics

    To me, the biggest news of the highly critical New York Times story on John McCain is that a man whose entire campaign for the presidency is based on being “Mr. Straight Shooter” is caught in an obvious, blatant, easy-to-check, and dare-I-say spectacular lie. And it’s not about whether or not he slept with this lobbyist (he and she both deny it, and from what I’ve read it appears that staff were getting nervous that the affair might happen not that it was happening.

    Anyway, the New York Times ran a long profile about a number of instances of questionable judgment on John McCain’s part–and McCain’s office issued this rebuttal:

    It is a shame that The New York Times has lowered its standards to engage in a hit-and-run smear campaign. John McCain has a 24-year record of serving our country with honor and integrity. He has never violated the public trust, never done favors for special interests or lobbyists, and he will not allow a smear campaign to distract from the issues at stake in this election.

    (emphasis added).

    And that is the lie. McCain was one of the infamous Keating Five. Here’s the Keating Five section of his hometown newspaper the Arizona Republic’s bio of McCain.

    In fact it was his brush with ethics censure over Keating that led McCain into campaign finance reform, a place where he’s had a bipartisan leadership role. Yet it seems like

    Meanwhile, Kelly McBride and others at the journalism/ethics think tank Poynter Institute took the Times to task both for the timing of the article, and for leading with the allegations about the inappropriately close relationship with this lobbyist, Vicki Iseman (an attractive blonde over 30 years his junior).

    Says the Times,

    Mr. McCain promised, for example, never to fly directly from Washington to Phoenix, his hometown, to avoid the impression of self-interest because he sponsored a law that opened the route nearly a decade ago. But like other lawmakers, he often flew on the corporate jets of business executives seeking his support, including the media moguls Rupert Murdoch, Michael R. Bloomberg and Lowell W. Paxson, Ms. Iseman’s client. (Last year he voted to end the practice.)

    Says Bob Steele of Poynter:

    The New York Times had the obligation to apply rigorous, exacting, substantive standards of reporting, editing and ethics on the McCain story. Times’ editors clearly believed this story was important, given its strong play and length. The Times could have and should have given readers more information about why and how they developed, reported, vetted and edited this story. They should have revealed proactively the story behind the story. They should have better explained the decision to use some unnamed sources, better explained the timing of the publication.

    Says I, however,

    Actually, to me the timing makes a lot of sense. It’s part of a series by the Times profiling the major presidential candidates still left standing. And it’s early enough that if McCain becomes an untouchable from the fallout, there’s plenty of time for someone else to ride in on a white horse. Though it would be ironic indeed if it turned out to be the smarmy flip-flopper Mitt Romney, who seems to focus on the politics of expedience.

    Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

    By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, Media Ethics, Politics

    Well, it looks like McCain will be carrying the banner for the Republicans this fall, after so many previous tries, and after being essentially written off by the pundits just a few short months ago. That was when Giuliani was considered the front-runner.

    This is one among many reasons why we shouldn’t rely on pundits. Once the voters started speaking, it was clear that Giuliani was a non-starter. I heard one commentator say this week that he had the worst dollars-to-delegates ratio in the history of politics: $50 million to get one lone delegate. Ouch!

    McCain is much, much better than his competitors on some issues, notably torture and campaign finance reform. But on war (for me, the dealbreaker issue), he’s the worst of the lot–even more hawkish than GWB. Yikes! And his own shady past on ethics issues–he was one of the infamous Keating 5, after all–makes me wonder how sincere the reform really is.

    Still, he’s certainly less of a flip-flopper than Romney, who would have made a great used car salesman. And far less scary than our American Ayatollah Huckabee, whose election would make me seriously consider leaving the country; as a non-Christian with progressive politics, I’m not sure there would be room for me in a country governed by someone who equates homosexuality with necrophilia.

    Much less clarity on the Democrat side. For me, the real question now becomes who could beat McCain. For reasons I stated here, I believe that in a McCain-Clinton contest, McCain would win, although I think she might beat Romney. But some of my friends believe that Obama hasn’t yet shown he can attract enough white voters to prevail against any opponent in November.

    I know that I personally would not vote for Hilary Clinton–but I have the luxury of living in a state where my vote doesn’t count anyway: no matter what I do no matter who the candidate, Massachusetts will go for the Democrat.

    The real shame for me, yesterday, was standing with my ballot and looking at Dennis Kucinich’s name right next to Barack Obama’s, thinking about what might have been. Kucinich has withdrawn, of course, and I’m not going to waste my vote on a candidate who’s no longer interested. But I think it’s a crime that the media–the same media that annointed Giuliani–decided for itself that it would not let us hear the voices of any of the candidates whose positions actually represented progressive change, and gave us a media blackout on the candidates who should matter most. They refused to cover Kucinich, Gravel, Dodd, and Ron Paul, among others–all of those bringing forward substantive reforms on a host of issues. This, to me, is a serious ethical breach and somehow we need a mechanism to address this that doesn’t interfere with the First Amendment.

    For broadcast media, at least, the solution may lie with their licenses to use the public’s own airwaves for profit. For print media, the solution is probably intense public pressure in the form of letter-to-the-editor campaigns, pickets in front of their stockholder meetings, and so forth.

    Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

    By Posted on Posted in Media Ethics, Politics

    Warning: I’m about to share a link to something filthy, vile, and disgusting. We all knew that if Obama turned into a serious candidate, as he most certainly has, that the racists would get down and dirty. I already heard William Bennett on the radio talking repeatedly about “Barack Hussein Obama”–and yes, the emphasis was in the original.

    But Alec Baldwin shared a clipping on Huffington Post from his small-town Long Island (NOT Mississippi) newspaper that is incredibly audacious in its hatred–thank you, Alex, for pointing out the barbarism we’re up against. It was written by the publisher of the paper, so don’t expect any firings. But a nice boycott might be in order. And wouldn’t it be nice if the publisher saw fit to enroll in a course on civil rights, ethics, or both?

    I personally find nothing funny in this “satire.”

    For whatever it’s worth, I had planned to endorse Obama in this space anyway, now that Kucinich is out of the race. I hereby endorse him–not because of this racist screed, but because I’d already made the decision (and actually last night authorized my name on a signature ad in our local paper). And I hope when people start to confront the racism of their own neighbors, that he will receive many, many more endorsements.

    Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

    By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, Media Ethics, Peace and War, Politics

    Facing a tough race for his own seat in Congress, Dennis Kucinich is ending his presidential campaign.

    This is very unfortunate. I heard Kucinich speak during the 2004 campaign, happily voted for him in the primary, and was appalled to see the way mainstream media refused to acknowledge his candidacy.

    In fact, Kucinich and the similarly ignored Ron Paul are the only ones to raise any truly visionary ideas in this campaign (unless you count Huckabee’s idea to rewrite the Constitution as a Christian fundamentalist document–ugh!). Kucinich’s platform included single-payer health care, a dramatic shift toward renewable energy, and many other things we progressives have advocated for years–and which the mainstream media cloaks in invisibility, so candidates with something fresh to bring to the table get no coverage, and people have to hear about them through their own personal networks and brave media outlets like Democracy Now.

    I question the ethics of a media empire that decides which candidates we should listen to, sanitizes those remaining, and ducks out on intelligent coverage of real issues. The whole system is deeply broken.

    To me, Kucinich was the first person since George McGovern and Shirley Chisolm that I could vote for with a smile and a light heart, as someone who actually represents my views, and I wasn’t old enough to vote for McGovern.

    He and Ron Paul have been the only ones willing to speak truth to power. Gravel has good politics but he’s been reaaaaly quiet!

    The country is poorer for him being forced out.

    Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

    By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, Media Ethics

    Seems to be a day for absurdist stories. First the FBI phone tapping gets shut off for nonpayment, and now this: some print journalists in Colorado want to keep “political activists posing as journalists” out of the legislature. and they’ve actually gotten a really dumb policy enacted.

    Translation, as I see it: keep the bloggers and other riff-raff in the indy media out. Just as Kucinich and Paul were kept out of the New Hampshire debates, becuse neither of them follow the party line.

    Let’s hope this gets reversed quickly, before it makes a lot of people look stupid.

    Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail