Category: Media Ethics

By Posted on Posted in Ethics-International, Media Ethics

This would be funny if it weren’t so stupid. The Federal Emergency Management Agency, better known as FEMA, apparently didn’t want to take the chance of facing hard questions about the California fires as they did when they completely messed up the response to Katrina two years ago.

So, the Washington Post reports, the agency set up a press conference with just 15 minutes notice, and invited reporters to listen in by phone (but NOT to ask questions).

Turns out the people asking questions were on staff at FEMA–no wonder they were such soft questions! Did they actually think no one would notice?

Democracy Now reports that even White House Press Secretary Dana Perino, who shills without apparent shame for the Iraq war, for various repressions of domestic civil liberties, and for the Bush Administrations continued defense of megacorporate interests against ordinary folks, couldn’t stomach this one:

REPORTER: On Tuesday, FEMA’s deputy administrator held what was called a news briefing to talk about the California wildfires. And from what we understand, the questions were posed not by reporters, but by staffers, and that distinction was not made known. Is that appropriate?

DANA PERINO: It is not. It is not a practice that we would employ here at the White House or that we — we certainly don’t condone it. We didn’t know about it beforehand. FEMA has issued an apology, saying that they had an error in judgment when they were attempting to try to get out a lot of information to reporters, who were asking for answers to a variety of questions in regards to the wildfires in California. It’s not something I would have condoned, and they, I’m sure, will not do it again.

Oh yes, and DN also notes that these people can’t claim ignorance. They’re a very media-savvy bunch:

DIANE FARSETTA: Right. Well, there were four staff people with FEMA who all had roles in dealing with the media. So I think it’s important to point out that these are not people who are not used to these type of situations. These are people who work at a federal agency that deals with emergency situations, and they work specifically with press. One of them, John Philbin, who’s — or who was, until last week, FEMA’s director of external affairs, he had a quarter-century career so far working in government with media, specifically working on crisis communication — marketing communications, brand management are his areas of expertise, and I think that’s what we really saw was brand management. They couldn’t have known — or they couldn’t not have known that this would reflect very poorly on FEMA if the word got out. And they basically seem to have been assuming that the word would not get out about what they were doing.

And to top it off, Philbin actually got a promotion. I couldn’t make this stuff up.

You’ve just got to wonder what on earth these people were thinking!

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Ethics-International, Marketing Trends/News, Media Ethics, Publishing

One day after Xing’s

And this is exactly what I was hoping for. Now I can post away, knowing that I have a paper trail showing the integrity of my rights ownership.

Bravo! And hmmm, maybe they’ll reword it to cover what they really need without appearing to make a rights grab.

Those links to the two previous posts again:

My original letter (and the overall context)

Xing’s first response

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

I got an invitation to join a social network called Xing. It’s a business-oriented group based in Germany.

It looked promising, so I started the sign up process. Got all the way down to agreeing to the terms of service. I do give these a quick scan, because sometimes there are unfriendly clauses. This was one of those times.

First, a thank-you to Xing for making the type nice and big and legible. I have no patience with TOS agreements in 8-point type and have bailed on some, or if I was really in a position to need the service, taken the extra step to copy into Word and blow it up big enough to read.

The first thing I saw that made me say “huh” was one of the grounds for termination:

If the User is a member of a religious sect or a denomination that is controversial in Germany.

I’m assuming this is to keep hate groups out, but it’s very strangely worded. What isn’t controversial, after all? But I’m not a member of any terrorist orgs so OK, I’ll let it go.

But then, I found this:

When the User posts his or her contribution to a forum, the User grants XING an unlimited, irrevocable and assignable right of use for the respective contribution, which XING is entitled to utilize for any purpose. In particular, XING is entitled to keep said contribution on the forum, and on its Web sites and the Web sites of its partners, or use it for marketing the forum in any other way.

Consequently, XING has a right of use over all contributions to discussion forums it operates. Duplication or the use of these contributions or their contents in other electronic or printed publications is prohibited without the express written consent of XING. Copying, downloading, dissemination, distribution and storing of the contents of XING and/or third parties, with the exception of the cache memory when searching for forum pages, is prohibited without its express consent.

Um, excuse me, but no. I make my living as a writer. I want the ability to repurpose my own posts without crawling to Xing for permission. I certainly recognize Xing’s need to display and desire to have the option of parading my stuff around–but not if they don’t let me do the same. So this is what I submitted on the contact form:

Question About Terms of Service

I have a question about Clause 12, and I can’t really complete the signup until this is answered. As currently written, this transfers all rights to you from the poster. Wouldn’t it make more sense to take the nonexclusive rights you claim i the second paragraph, and then in the second paragraph after the words, “Duplication or the use of these contributions or their contents in other electronic or printed publications” INSERT “by anyone other than the original author of the forum post”

As a professional writer, I am quite concerned about my intellectual property rights. If I were to join under the current language, I would not contribute any forum posts (and I’m someone who posts extensively to Internet discussions)–because I wouldn’t want to ask permission to use my own words in a blog post, article, or book at some point.

I’ll let you know their response.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Ethics: General, Media Ethics

The always-fascinating Grok.com has an article on the ethics of altering old news to reflect current realities, and how the New York Times search engine strategy is bringing up a rash of complaints from people profiled unfavorably in old stories.

Interestingly enough, I was recently listening to part of Orwell’s “1984” on tape–the part, as it happens, that profiles Winston Smith’s typical day at work–altering old news stories to fit the current politics of the dictatorship.

I’d forgotten that’s what he did for a living. Yet this is one of the most chilling parts of that whole very chilling story. I have to re-read it–it’s been decades!

the Grok story generated quite a few comments (16 so far). The most cogent, in my opinion, was from David Meerman Scott, a well-known PR writer–here’s an excerpt:

My opinion is that the news should always be maintained as originally written. However I do see wide applications of social media tools to amend news, much like a comment or trackback does to a blog post.

News happens and then things change. It is inevitable. Imagine a story about, say, “Czechoslovakia.” But then the country disappears into the “Czech Republic” and “Slovakia”. That does not change the opinion of the reporter or what was said when it was first published. A comment–style addition saying that Prague is now the capital of the Czech Republic would be helpful to a story about Czechoslovakia but I would not advocate a search and replace strategy to make wholesale changes to pre-existing news.

I agree with David. It’s fine to annotate old news stories to reflect current realities/correct errors–but it’s definitely not OK to alter stories and claim they were in the original. I also agree with Brad Waller’s comment that the Times could benefit greatly by adding updated links and corrections, making the story fresh and relevant again.

Shel Horowitz, author, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First and founder of the Business Ethics Pledge, https://www.business-ethics-pledge.org

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Ethics in Government, Ethics-International, Ethics: General, Marketing Trends/News, Media Ethics, Politics

Knowing that any entry in a Wiki can be changed by any reader, I’ve always been a bit suspicious of what I read on Wikipedia. Still, I find that Google often points me to Wikipedia articles, and most of the time, they seem pretty authoritative and accurate (if I’m at all suspicious, I verify with other sources, and it usually checks out).

Now it turns out I was right to be suspicious. Virgil Griffith, a grad student at CalTech, invented a system to track the IP addresses of people who change Wikipedia entries–and the results are scary. While the majority of changes are innocuous–correcting typos and that sort of thing, a number of well-known entities have deliberately distorted facts. A few among many examples:

According to the Wired article (one of several from mainstream news sources, including BBC and ABC),

Griffith thus downloaded the entire encyclopedia, isolating the XML-based records of anonymous changes and IP addresses. He then correlated those IP addresses with public net-address lookup services such as ARIN, as well as private domain-name data provided by IP2Location.com.

The result: A database of 34.4 million edits, performed by 2.6 million organizations or individuals ranging from the CIA to Microsoft to Congressional offices, now linked to the edits they or someone at their organization’s net address has made.

So who’s been playing fast and loose with the truth?

  • The CIA edited entries about Iranian President Ahmadinejad
  • Diebold, the voting machine company, removed incriminating material about its machines and faulty election results
  • Someone at a Democratic Party computer edited the entry about Rush Limbaugh to call him Limbaugh “idiotic,” “racist”, and a “bigot”–and about his audience, “Most of them are legally retarded.”
  • Microsoft listed its MSN as a “major competitor” to Google, whle adding deprecating material to Apple’s entry
  • Wal-Mart toned down criticism of its labor policies
  • Even the Vatican removed passages about Sinn Fein’s Gerry Addams that linked him to a 1971 murder.

    • Needless to say, this raises a lot of ethical questions. As a start, it would seem logical that Wikipedia should keep a running, public list of any IP addresses that altered a particular entry–right on that page. And also, perhaps, each page could display its history, so that previous versions would be visible and readers could draw their own conclusions.

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    By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Media Ethics

    Apparently the phenomenon of a corporate executive posting anonymously in ways that he/she thinks will help his/her company/hurt the competition is called “sock puppeting.”

    I hadn’t heard this term until I stumbled on a New York Times article this morning, published Monday.

    The article cites not only John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods, whose disgraceful and illegal behavior I covered here, but also…

    Conrad Black, CEO of Hollinger International–found guilty last week of mail fraud and obstruction of justice, and facing up to 35 years in the slammer.

    Says the Times:

    At the criminal fraud trial of Hollinger International’s chief executive, Conrad M. Black, prosecutors introduced evidence that the former press baron had once proposed joining a Yahoo Finance chat room to blame short sellers for his company’s stock performance.

    Patrick Byrne of Overstock.com (who claims that his real name was attached to his anonymous handle on every post–which, if true, makes it a very different situation, in my opinion).

    And it’s not just the business world, but also politics and media.

    Tad Furtado, at the time, policy director for New Hampshire Congressman Charles Bass (who lost his re-election bid in a perhaps-related development).

    Journalists are not immune either:

    In April 2006, The Los Angeles Times pulled Michael A. Hiltzik, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, off of his blog because he had posted comments on blogs under an assumed name while feuding with readers. In November, New Republic magazine suspended its culture critic Lee Siegel after it determined that he had been energetically defending himself in the discussion forums of his New Republic blog, under the name “sprezzatura” (Italian for “making the difficult look easy”).

    Of course, there’s the related phenomenon of journalists writing under their own identity, but not disclosing that they are also acting as paid PR flacks, such as Armstrong Williams shilling for the Bush administration. I’ve written about that one, too.

    Meanwhile, there are those of us still out there fighting the good fight. If you haven’t signed the Business Ethics Pledge yet, I urge you to do so.

    I plan to write an essay, “When Even Whole Foods Cheats.” Rest assured, it will be published under my own name, and whatever plugs it may make for my book Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First, it will make them honestly.

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    By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Marketing Trends/News, Media Ethics, People Helping People, Social and Economic Justice, Uncategorized

    FreePress.net sent out this alert yesterday

    Imagine having a fast connection to an open Internet wherever you go, without needing a telephone wire or cable modem.

    The FCC could make this happen. Instead they’re on the verge of turning over our public Internet airwaves to the same giant phone and cable companies that control high-speed access for more than 96 percent of American users.

    Don’t let the FCC give away our wireless Internet to these price-gouging giants. We need to use these public airwaves to connect more Americans to an open, neutral and affordable Internet.

    And this is what I appended at the beginning of the comment field:

    The idea of using the existing TV spectrum for widely available broadband is tremendously exciting. As a business owner, I could see that this might spark a wave of creative entrepreneurship like the original dotcom boom a decade ago, and create useful technologies we can only dream of currently. Open access is the way to do this, not tight control by a handful of companies.

    If you’d like to comment on this, this link brings you to the webform.

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    By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, General Commentary, Media Ethics, Uncategorized

    You might have missed this story in the mainstream news; on the first two pages of Google results for Wal-Mart spy, AOL, MSN, and CNN were the only U.S. mainstream sources listed; they picked up the story from the Reuters wire, which means it was accessible to every news outlet in the world.

    You can read the original WSJ piece, as reproduced on MSN, here.

    But most of the returns were from places like Huffington Post, Consumerist.com, and wakeupwalmart.com–the “usual suspects” on the Left.

    Nothing wrong with those news sources; after all, I found the story by listening to Democracy Now yesterday. And DN’s interviewee was one of two Wall Street Journal reporters who broke the story, so this one actually started in the mainstream media.

    Personally, I think that when the world’s largest retailer, a force considerably larger and more powerful than many national governments, illegally wiretaps phone calls with a New York Times reporter, intercepts employee e-mail sent over networks other than its own corporate system and records their correspondents’ addresses (e.g., Hotmail and Yahoo), infiltrates opposition grassroots groups, digs up a private unlinked archive of an activist’s vacation photos in order to identify him if he tries to go to a shareholder meeting–the list of shockingly inappropriate activities goes on and on–it should be a huge story in every print and electronic medium that calls itself a news organization–and government agencies should be investigating NOW.

    I even searched the New York Times site to see if that august paper had deemed that such a story–its own reporter’s telephone was tapped when he called the company–was worth a line or two in print. But a search for wal-mart spy and another for wal-mart spying brought up nothing relevant or recent (this story began to reveal itself within the last few weeks, with the most important revelations coming just this week).

    Oh yes, and Wal-Mart’s wimpy statement about future behavior:

    This group [the spy unit] is no longer operating in the same manner that it did prior to the discovery of the unauthorized recording of telephone conversations.

    Not “we have disbanded this group.” Not “we shouldn’t have spied on people.” Just a statement that the group is reorganized (the whole letter is included in the DN article). For shame!

    But don’t you think when a story like this breaks across a major newswire and originates from one of the most respected media in the world, that other media would sit up and take notice? Papers in Taiwan and Belfast thought so, but not most of the US press.

    Shame on Wal-Mart, yes–but shame as well on the major media outlets who ignored this story.

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

    Alelujah! A journalism organization that understands that it is NOT the role of a free press to disseminate government propaganda without questioning it or evaluating the sources:

    It is the policy of KSFR’s news department to ignore and not repeat any wire service or nationally published story about Iran, China, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia or any other foreign power that quotes an ‘unnamed’ U.S. official.

    This was reported in Editor & Publisher, a well-respected trade journal for the media, and mentioned in the always interesting Weekly Spin e-newsletter.

    I find this very refreshing–especially as the administration continues to ever-more-loudly beat the drum for war against Iran (apparently they have learned nothing from the Iraq debacle).

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    By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Media Ethics, Uncategorized

    I knew there was a company called jigsaw.com. I assumed it was for puzzle lovers. Then I stumbled on my colleague David Batstone’s blog entry about it. (Author of the WAG newsletter and the Right reality blog, David is another blogger on corporate ethics; I’ve been on his newsletter list for a couple of years.)

    To say I was horrified is an understatement. This company actually pays people to gather business cards and punch the information into a for-sale database!

    I don’t know about you, but I find that extremely creepy. I give a business card to someone because I’m interested in facilitating that person’s ability to stay in touch with me. As public as I am, and I’m pretty public, I don’t really want people exploiting me by selling my contact info. As it is, I am cursed, as an early adopter on the Internet, with the dubious honor of being included on every blankety-blank list of contacts that spammers buy and sell already.

    Let me say categorically that if I ever find out that someone has mined my information in that way, I would *never* do business with that person again. It is an invasion of privacy and a very bad business model.

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