Category: Media Ethics

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

    An article in today’s SpeakerNet News (scroll down to “Do book testimonials work? — Ian Percy”) posits that many, if not most, book blurbs are signed by people who’ve never examined the book.

    I surely hope Mr. Percy is wrong! Certainly, when I’m asked for a book blurb I spend some serious time with the book and read at last several sections as well as the Table of Contents, index, etc. I will confess–I don’t generally read the whole thing–but I read enough of it that I can comment accurately. I find it scandalous that some people apparently consent to blurb a book without looking at it at all.

    Perhaps it hasn’t occurred to them that ultimately, it’s *their* reputation at stake as well as the author’s. To endorse a book you don’t actually believe in is asking for trouble on both moral and practical grounds.

    And when I request a blurb from someone else, I want that person to give me something based in honesty and a true appreciation of the content of the book. The blurbs I get, as a result, have enough substance that they actually do sway a sale. Yes, I believe readers can tell the difference between an honest enthusiastic blurb and a fake. (In fact, I spend some time explaining what makes a good blurb and how to get them, in my newest book Grassroots Marketing for Authors and Publishers).

    Blurbs are a crucial tool in creating a marketing buzz, and one that helps equalize the playing field between those books published by big houses and those published by small independents. Let’s not cheapen them, please!

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    By Posted on Posted in Events, Media Ethics, Uncategorized

    I’m just back from the National Conference on media Reform in Memphis, where much honor was deservedly poured on Martin Luther King, Jr., assassinated in that city just a few blocks from the conference (now the site of the National Civil Rights Museum).

    My reports on the 2005 conference in Saint Louis are posted on my Frugal Marketing site; I’ll try to get at least some of my ’07 coverage up this week.

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

    One of the things investigative journalists learn very quickly is “follow the money.” And that can mean both a direct trail of funding as well as who stands to benefit from policy changes a particular group is recommending.

    Given the naked self-interest of certain large corporations in the watering down of the Sarbanes-Oxley–or at least what they perceive to be their self-interest–it’s not a big surprise that the group advocating to weaken that bill turns out to be funded by the very people who see themselves as benefiting by pulling back the watchdogs.

    The Committee on Capital Markets Regulation, which argues that U.S. markets are suffering under overzealous enforcement and unwieldy rules, said it received $500,000 in financial support from the C.V. Starr Foundation. The charity has longstanding ties to Maurice R. “Hank” Greenberg, the former American International Group chief who was ousted from his post last year and is contesting civil charges filed by the New York attorney general.

    Two committee members, Wilbur L. Ross Jr., a private investor, and Citadel Investment Group manager Kenneth C. Griffin, contributed “a few hundred thousand dollars” more, Ross said in an interview. The panel was formed this year with support from Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr., a former chairman of the Wall Street firm Goldman Sachs.

    The email version (thanks, Nancy Smith, for sending it) connects a few more dots:

    The
    report was funded by the Starr Foundation, which is controlled by Former AIG
    Insurance chief Maurice Greenberg. Greenberg was forced to resign last year
    after then-NY Attorney General Elliot Spitzer revealed major accounting
    manipulations and misrepresentations at his insurance company.

    The irony is, as I point out repeatedly in my award-winning sixth book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First, that high standards of ethics are actually good for the business bottom line.

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    By Posted on Posted in Media Ethics, Uncategorized

    Apparently some students got the wording of their two essay questions some days before they were supposed to. However, it was an open exam, with 90 minutes to compelte the test an time during a 36-hour period.

    I am both amused and saddened by some of the comments made on Jeff Bercovici’s blog about it.

    This unfortunately is the future of journalism, the creme de la creme.

    Meanwhile, William Powers takes the media to task for its endless reporting on itself, at the expense perhaps of more urgent news. And also wonders if the ability to comment publicly is such a good thing.

    Well, there, I disagree with him. I think the much larger voice of public comment than the few letters that see print is a very positive thing.

    Both of these stories courtesy of my occasional look at Romesnko, the journalism blog.

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