Lying & Omission

Is deception by the media every justified? First of all, what exactly is deceitful? Is withholding the truth deceitful? To withhold the truth is a little different than outright lying. The media is never justified in outright and flat out lying. However, withholding truths of facts may, from time to time, be. For example, I believe that in the film "Absence of Malice" that we watched in class Megan would have been justified in withholding the information about Teresa.

Another example would be the Government's response to any hostile action by China. I'm sure that the plans in place should not be revealed to public. If somehow related information were to be leaked to a reporter or someone in the media, it would probably be best if the media recognized the importance of omission and did not report the information.

Yes, omission may be justified. But that does not mean under any circumstances. And when omission is performed, then the media needs to take care not to omit part of a story and tell the other part. Sometimes it might be better to omit the whole thing instead of part and give a false perception. To give such a false perception would be against the media’s purpose and ethics, even if what they reported was completely truth. Purposeful deception in the form of lies or other fictionalized claims or stories are not justified.

As for China, that's actually developing into an interesting story, one which my roommates and I sit around and talk about on a regular basis. Apparently the Pentagon Called Beijing a Potential Threat and there's the (Today actually) article on China Threatening Taiwan. And yes, the U.S. has actually discussed possible reactions to various situations.

How the Blogosphere Is Disrupting the Old Media

Blogs, Wikis, and other community sites like Slashdot and Digg are beginning to change the landscape of traditional journalism...

Can you Digg what is happening to journalism?

Jeff Jarvis
Monday February 27, 2006
The Guardian

When I do my scary blogboy dance for old-media companies, I warn them that their real successor - the true media mogul of the age - is not someone they know, not someone named Murdoch, Hearst, or Newhouse. He is Kevin Rose, the scruffy geek behind Digg.com, a site where users edit the news. In him, we see the media industry of the future.

More at the link to the Guardian story.

New blog on ethics from Poynter Online

Kelly McBride, a wise journalist, has started a new blog on ethical decision-making in newsrooms. Poynter is publishing it. I've linked it from our permanent links column (right beneath all your names, on the right). Here's the scoop:

We'd like to alert you to a new blog -- Everyday Ethics
(http://www.poynter.org/everydayethics) -- by Poynter's Kelly McBride and colleagues. The column includes
reports on ethical decision-making in newsrooms big and small, and will provide shorter, more frequently updated posts than we offered with Ethics Journal.

You'll find the new column here: www.poynter.org/everydayethics, and you can sign up to receive it as an e-mail newsletter (whenever new items are posted) here:
www.poynter.org/subscribetoeverydayethics. Soon, we'll also offer Everyday Ethics by RSS as well.

Why ethics matters so much

Couple of days ago I posted this, asking for your thoughts, and have noted a profound silence. In the meantime, Arthur Silber has thundered forth with a fine and pithy opinion on the subject:

Getting Our Hate On: Now We Are (Almost) All Michelle Malkin

"[A]s has been the case with every major controversy in the post-9/11 cultural atmosphere, the legitimate questions about the port deal are not the meat of the matter. They are not where this game is being played. The Newsweek story of last year was not about "press irresponsibility," although that was the excuse used to justify completely illegitimate attempts to intimidate the media into reporting nothing but "good news." And the entirely phony Mohammed cartoon controversy is not about freedom of the press -- but that is the cover used to stoke the fires of racial hatred and to make the very dangerous notion of a "clash of civilizations" appear to be genuine. See this follow-up post for more on the propaganda purposes served by the cartoon controversy.

So. What do you think? (Note: There's a COMMENT link at the bottom of this post.)

Protecting Sources in the Internet Age

Earlier this month, the Washington Post ran an interview with a shadowy young hacker who breaks into insecure computers and harnesses them to run a variety of money-making projects like distributing E-Mail spam for his clients.

The story in the Washington Post was carefully written to avoid giving away the identity of the hacker. There were sketchy descriptions of the otherwise unnamed small town where he lived.

The story also included a photograph of him in shadows, so that his face could not be seen.

But there was something else about the photo that the editors of the Washington Post neglected to reckon.

Photographic images stored in digital format contain embedded text annotations (called metadata) that are used to help organize and classify libraries of digital images. Some of the metadata is inserted automatically by the digital camera. Some of the metadata is inserted manually when images are run through PhotoShop. Photo journalists routinely add such annotations to help them keep their image libraries sorted out. In this case, the metadata included the name of the small town in Oklahoma where the photographer had taken the original picture.

Someone who knew about metadata in digital images opened up the photo from the Washington Post's story (as posted on the newspaper's website) and examined the metadata. That was enough to complete the missing parts of the picture. The Post hasn't confirmed whether the sleuthing is accurate. They are remaining mum.

A failure of the press?

William J. Bennett is the Washington fellow of the Claremont Institute and a former secretary of education. Alan M. Dershowitz is a law professor at Harvard. Their jointly written essay, published Thursday in the Washington Post, says American's free press has surrendered after the latest volley. Here's an excerpt:


What has happened? To put it simply, radical Islamists have won a war of intimidation. They have cowed the major news media from showing these cartoons. The mainstream press has capitulated to the Islamists -- their threats more than their sensibilities. One did not see Catholics claiming the right to mayhem in the wake of the republished depiction of the Virgin Mary covered in cow dung, any more than one saw a rejuvenated Jewish Defense League take to the street or blow up an office when Ariel Sharon was depicted as Hitler or when the Israeli army was depicted as murdering the baby Jesus.

So far as we can tell, a new, twin policy from the mainstream media has been promulgated: (a) If a group is strong enough in its reaction to a story or caricature, the press will refrain from printing that story or caricature, and (b) if the group is pandered to by the mainstream media, the media then will go through elaborate contortions and defenses to justify its abdication of duty. At bottom, this is an unacceptable form of not-so-benign bigotry, representing a higher expectation from Christians and Jews than from Muslims.

While we may disagree among ourselves about whether and when the public interest justifies the disclosure of classified wartime information, our general agreement and understanding of the First Amendment and a free press is informed by the fact -- not opinion but fact -- that without broad freedom, without responsibility for the right to know carried out by courageous writers, editors, political cartoonists and publishers, our democracy would be weaker, if not nonexistent. There should be no group or mob veto of a story that is in the public interest.

When we were attacked on Sept. 11, we knew the main reason for the attack was that Islamists hated our way of life, our virtues, our freedoms. What we never imagined was that the free press -- an institution at the heart of those virtues and freedoms -- would be among the first to surrender.

Are they right? What do you think? Please use the comment button beneath this post to post your opinion.

Shattered Glass

I also thought that Shattered Glass was a good movie, not one that I would choose to own, but one that is worth watching, especially in the setting presented to us. There were many ethical issues that can be discussed, especially with Glass and his fictional articals. Now, fictional articles are not in and of themselves bad, but to present them as true does bring up some difficulties. Maybe he thought that he wasn't really hurting anybody, but the whole story about the political convention and the mini bars really could have damaging effects, not on individuals who were of course fictionalized, but on the parties involved and their associates. It is also important to take into account the magazine, and those whose jobs might be compromised by such lies. Innocent as it may have seemed to him and to some others, it was wrong and very potentially damaging.

Another point that I found interesting was the "political" problem with disciplining Glass becaus he was so well liked. He had done wrong, but was that to be overlooked because of the good rapport he had with his fellow employees in order to keep them happy. I would have to disagree with that line of thought and say that what he did was indeed wrong and merited punishment even before finding out about all the other stories. I would hope that such dishonesty in the media would be returned with just punishment.

Is it something we said, boss?

Thanks to Prof. Ted Pease's Word of the Day for this quote:

"America loathes the White House press corps.
This is especially true when the journalists
preen for the television cameras, yell at the
press secretary to achieve a dramatic effect, act
bratty and petulant, appear openly disrespectful
to the president and the vice president and
generally behave like unruly five-year-old
children playing in a sandbox."

--Jon Friedman, columnist, MarketWatch,
reviewing journalists' confrontations with White
House Press Secretary Scott McClellan over the
Cheney hunting accident, 2006

Let's have good role models in the media!

Calvin & Hobbes do journalism ethics too, did you know that? Here's Calvin expounding on the subject of cartoons.

Trick or Truth!

Okay, this may seem like a little bit of a trivial thing, or it may just make me seem like an idiot, but I figure that any news article that leaves me searching the internet like this one deserves some attention.

Before reading the rest of my post, take 45 seconds to read this article related to the U.S. Outsourcing.

Finished reading it? No? Oh, well, here’s the link again.

Okay, now you've actually read it? Good. So maybe you're not like me, but at the end of the article I was left wondering "Is this for real, or is this just some spoof article that's meant to make fun?" I thought it was just a spoof, but there was no obvious disclaimer, such as "Andy is a Humorist writing spoof news Articles for Newsweek" at the very bottom of the page. I mean, sure, it's classified as "Humor" on MSNBC and "Satire" by Newsweek, but sometimes there's a lot of truth to what's meant to be humor.

So I thought "Maybe on the guy's webpage, The Borowitz Report, there might be a biography or something." Nope, nothing.

After some searching, I found this page on Amazon, which describes his book. Using your browser, search for "fake journalist" (which appears just above "Product Details"). That's the type of conclusive disclaimer that I was looking for.

So my ethics issue here is this - some of the more serious sounding and legit looking humor pages should have a better disclaimer. I could easily see some gullible fool being completely taken by that article, even though it was not meant to be taken as such. Do we really want people like that running around talking about the "horrible article about U.S. outsourcing" that they read from a very reliable source, such as MSNBC? These things need to be better marked. After all, we do live in a world in which firewood is marked as "Warning: Flammable!"

The satire article above is making fun of President Bush outsourcing Port Secutiy, which is a real story.... or at least, I've been fooled! This article mentions Dubai, which has some interesting things going on in it. Check out a Google Image Seach, or look at the World's Fanciest Hotel (Burj al-Ara), read about Dubai on Wikipedia, look at The Palm Islands or The World Islands websites.

Troubled journalists...

I was thinking about Glass as well. How can a person have so little self respect to attach their name to items they made up? If he were a fiction writer he would have been wonderful. He had an amazing imagination. But he was not. He was a journalist assigned to report the facts. He knew that but still he lied. I consider it lying because he was told to tell the truth and he didn't. If he were writing fiction he could do that.

It angered me that when he was interviewed he was so smug. It was like he didn't care he had gotten caught. He only wanted publicity. It was sad when he said he was apologizing on national television to the people he deceived. And only after five years. I agreed with the older gentleman that called him a worm. I would want to never see him again either.

I am so angered that he can now write about his experience and make money. I was pleased to hear that not many people bought his book. It serves him right.

Just one thing that bothered me. If he was so messed up about his lying then how can he pin point when he started. If he consciously did it he could. Therefore I think he did it on purpose and now is trying to cover his tracks. He thought he was so smart that he could get away with it and he wasn't. Now he has to find a way to make himself look like a victim when he isn't.

ATTENTION PLEASE!

Just a reminder to those of you who attended class last week, and a heads-up for you who did not:

Because we have two February/Monday holidays (Presidents' Day and MLK Day), the university requires we teach Monday classes on Tuesday this week. This means that tomorrow night is really not Tuesday in the eyes of USU, it's Monday -- which means we don't have class tomorrow, since some actual Monday class most likely has dibs on our classroom.

This also means that your second film commentary (Shattered Glass) won't be due until we meet next week. So, you have a week of grace on that assignment.

For those of you who weren't in class last week when we discussed this, your commentary should expand on the message of the movie and connect it with events from your own experience as well as philosophies of ethics. Recapitulations or reviews of the movie's plot will not be accepted as commentary.

Science Reporting and Religion

On the subject of loyalty, how would you report a story in which scientific results conflict with religious beliefs?

This is far from a hypothetical exercise.

Consider, for example, this current story from the Los Angeles Times...

Bedrock of a Faith Is Jolted

DNA tests contradict Mormon scripture. The church says the studies are being twisted to attack its beliefs.

By William Lobdell
Los Angleles Times Staff Writer

February 16, 2006

From the time he was a child in Peru, the Mormon Church instilled in Jose A. Loayza the conviction that he and millions of other Native Americans were descended from a lost tribe of Israel that reached the New World more than 2,000 years ago.

"We were taught all the blessings of that Hebrew lineage belonged to us and that we were special people," said Loayza, now a Salt Lake City attorney. "It not only made me feel special, but it gave me a sense of transcendental identity, an identity with God."

A few years ago, Loayza said, his faith was shaken and his identity stripped away by DNA evidence showing that the ancestors of American natives came from Asia, not the Middle East.

"I've gone through stages," he said. "Absolutely denial. Utter amazement and surprise. Anger and bitterness."

For Mormons, the lack of discernible Hebrew blood in Native Americans is no minor collision between faith and science. It burrows into the historical foundations of the Book of Mormon, a 175-year-old transcription that the church regards as literal and without error.

...

More at the link.

Playing it safe?

Media Run or Report?

Jen raises the issue of how much journalists should risk to do their jobs, in her "Run or Report" post.

The Committee to Protect Journalists tracks these statistics. You may be surprised at the number of journalists who've died in the line of duty.

RE: Ethics and political cartoons

Media Ethics and political cartoons

Good point to consider, from the Toronto Star:

The atheist and the moderate Muslim:
When it comes to taking offence, we all need to do some growing up

"If being offended is such a necessity to your enjoyment of life or your sense of self, think about the censorship you implicitly advocate. Consider that you may not be the one who gets to decide what is offensive and should be banned. Maybe it will be me. I guarantee you wouldn't like it."

Commentary on Cheney Story

The Christian Science Monitor has a good analysis by Linda Feldmann on the media feeding frenzy over the Cheney story...

Right or wrong, the White House press corps has behaved like a dog with a bone over the story of Vice President Cheney's hunting accident.

How many people get hurt when journalists lie?

What can you say about a trusted professional who makes stuff up and publishes it as fact? Salon's Jack Shafer has something to say about that.

The Jayson Blair Project: How did he bamboozle the New York Times?

Loyalties?

Journalists:
I think it is a tie between their publishers or editors and the public. It should truly be the public but how can a journalist keep their job if they go against the superiors? It is most likely they would get fired. However they should have their first priority to inform the public. Again if they do not inform the public well enough they could lose their jobs.
They have to balance very carefully on a teeter-tater. They are in the middle and the public is on one side with the publishers and editors on the other. If one side is catered to more then the journalist crashes off.

PR Practioners:
Their loyalty is completely with the company or organization that hired them. Their goal is to inform people about the good sides of the company and not the bad. They must tell the truth about the company but maybe not all of the truth. They only have to tell the good truth and not the bad. They are on a merry-go-round of the company. It starts slow for them to get on but their information helps keep the company going and succeeding. If they do not keep total loyalty to their company and step a foot off the merry-go-round, they will fall off and probably lose their jobs.

It is different for journalists and PR practitioners. They have different loyalty dilemmas. I believe professional loyalty is important but not more than personal loyalty. For example, if a reporter writes something about a local political group that gets published. However, her editor took out some facts and quotes that would have made the politicians look good, what should she do? She has to be loyal to her editor or get fired but she believes more in the loyalty to inform the public of the truth to the best of her ability. She quit and will not work for her again. Luckily she had that option but journalists don't always.

Loyalties & The Media

I am in agreeance with just about everybody in that the media's loyalties should lie with the public. But the question is, what public? To a nation's public? To the world public? Speaking of which, here's the latest scoop on the Danish Cartoon of the Muslim Prophet.

I think that the recent fiasco with the Danish cartoons is a great example that the media sometimes has to think on a very large scale. I believe that they owe their loyalties to the public of the world. But does the truth vary from country to country?

For example, was the propaganda in WWII in the US justified? Most people would agree that the Nazi's weren't exactly the nicest people in the world. But our view of them at the time I'm sure was very different than their view of themselves. Wikipedia has an excellent page on The History of Propaganda

So there must be a line between loyalties to your nation's public and the public of the world. Is the truth really the truth in this case? I believe that there is a difference between the nation and the world, and that there is a line. Though I'm not really one to tell you where that line is.

And I'm sure that there are loyalties on different levels than just national and global. As I said, I'm not really sure where that line is, but.... I think Denmark might!

Ethics and political cartoons

A good discussion on NPR about political cartoons and violence —

Do Editorial Cartoonists Draw the Line?

Talk of the Nation, February 9, 2006 · The visceral — and in some cases violent — reaction in the Muslim world to Danish cartoons of the prophet Muhammad have raised all sort of questions about the freedom of speech and cultural sensitivity in a globalized world. It also reminds us of the power of the political cartoon.

Neal Conan talks to cartoonists Mike Luckovich of the Atlanta Journal Constitution and Ann Telnaes, whose work has appeared in many newspapers, including The New York Times and The Washington Post, about their craft. Joining the discussion is Stephen Hess, co-author of the book Drawn & Quartered: The History of American Political Cartoons.

Here's a link to the NPR site (and more cartoons), from which you can click to listen to the interview.

Thinking about loyalties

For Josiah Royce, an American philosopher-theologian in the early 20th Century, who taught at Harvard, loyalty was an integral part of moral development. He believed loyalty was the most important ethical principle and that if we practiced being loyal, we would automatically make good ethical decisions.

Here are some questions to think about: Using "Absence of Malice" or current news events, can you see specific problems that result from making loyalty a guiding principle? To whom do you believe journalists owe loyalty? What about public relations practitioners? Where does loyalty rank on your own scale of professional values?

Cinnamon Danish

Cinnamon Stillwell, writing in the San Francisco Chronicle, has a good analysis of the Danish Cartoon Kerfuffle.

Ethics & A Movie

Anchor Name movie1

After watching the film Absence by Malice, quite a few media-ethics issues have surfaced. For all those readers like me who have a short attention span, I'll just put this into a list instead of paragraph form.

1. Okay, looking at the file which was (purposely) left on the investigators desk is pretty obviously an issue to question.

2. Some of the information published in the newspapers was detrimental to the lives of innocent (until proven guilty) individuals. I'm not just talking about "Boo hoo, that article hurt my feelings" or that somebody was offended, but take as an example the point where Gallagher’s workers went on strike. When Megan published the article about the abortion, Teresa committed suicide. Granted, suicide is a choice, but not one that comes lightly.

3. Megan tried to record her lunch with Gallagher without his knowledge. That’s pretty sly and deceitful.

4. At one point in the movie, Gallagher says to Megan, "Tell you or the world?" and Megan says "What does it matter? The truth is the truth." This was after the point in the movie where Teresa asks Megan is she can share something with her and have her not publish it in the paper. Megan says that she can't promise anything. So, my question is this - is Megan obligated to report everything she learns? Does Megan ethically reserve the right to withhold information from the media/public? Does it really matter as long as it's the truth? My take on that is that the media's job is to serve the public, and the public is comprised of individuals, so individuals must be taken into the equation There's no real definitive line that can be drawn, but at some point, yes, I believe that it is ethical to withhold certain information from the public to help individuals.

5. Going hand-in-hand with the previous bullet is the quote by Megan's publisher "I know how to print what's true, and I know how to not hurt people; But I don't know how to do both at the same time." I just thought that was an interesting quote to ponder. It ties in with the previous point in that there is often a very blurred line between what needs to be published for the public and what needs to be withheld for individuals.

6. Finally, I was intrigued by the ending where someone asks Megan what they should print about Megan's relationship with Gallagher. Megan replies "Just Say that we were involved." Then Megan is asked "Is that the truth?" and replies "No, but it's accurate." That seemed to be a little different than the Megan whom we had seen throughout the film up until the end. Could it be that Megan's outlook on ethics had been changed during the course of the film, or could it be that Megan simply had the tables turned on her?

Instructions for your film commentaries

Recapping what I told you last week in class:

Pick your favorite philosopher (choose from those covered in the text and my lectures). Then choose the one ethical problem, from your own "laundry list" or someone else's, that nags at you the hardest. Write 2 to 3 pages, typed and doublespaced, on the problem and what you think your philosopher would have to say about it, as well as the resolution he/she would offer.

It's not enough to be indignant or to scold the unprincipled principals in this story; what's important is coming up with a solution. Avoid the simplistic black-and-white prescriptions such as "well, if Megan hadn't peeked at the file on Rosen's desk in the first place none of this would have happened and Teresa Perone would still be alive. It's a slippery slope, blah blah blah..."

Ideally, this paper should lead you to formation of an ethic or "best practice" you would want yourself and all journalists to follow.

Questions? Ask them in the comments below this post.

Absence of Malice...a laundry list

This movie definitely had problems. A few I noticed were...

1. Elliot leaving the file about the investigation of Gallagher on his desk so a reporter could read it.
2. Megan reading Gallagher's file and then printing a story with no real attempt to contact Gallagher.
3. Megan trying to secretly record Gallagher talking to her but only getting caught.
4. Megan becomes romantically involved with Gallagher, a source in a continuing story.
5. Printing Gallagher's alleby of going with Teresa to get her abortion. Even if Teresa asked Megan not to name her or tell about her abortion. It results in Teresa's suicide.
6. Megan telling Gallagher that she got her information from Elliot Rosen.
7. Printing a story about Gallagher paying off the District Attorney, Quinn, when it could cost her source his job and he specifically told her as a friend and not a reporter.

I really believe the biggest issues were started with Megan snooping in the investigation file and printing the story with no attempt to contact Gallagher. She then would have had no contact with Gallagher and not possibly become romantically involved with him. She would not have become interested in Gallagher and therefore print Teresa's abortion and then her suicide would not have resulted. Then she would have not found out about the possible bribary of Quinn by Gallagher. It was just one series of events that could have been stopped with Megan not snooping. But that is just one opinion. Who knows if Megan still could have become romantically involved with Gallagher even if she just looked in the file and not print the story.

Just a side note... the biggest problem for me about this movie was when Megan's editor said that a journalist can print the truth or not hurt people but they can't do both. That just got me thinking.

Political Cartoonery

The media is abuzz with stories and commentaries about the furor in Europe over the publication of Danish political cartoons lampooning Islamic terrorism. The stories about the stories change the intent from the expression of political opinion to the consequences of expressing political opinion.

Meanwhile, back in the States, the media is abuzz about yet another consequence of expressing political opinion, after two women — Cindy Sheehan and the wife of Congressman — were both ejected from the audience of the State of the Union address because they were wearing T-shirts expressing opinions about the war. The two women's opinions canceled each other out, as one had an anti-war message, and the other had a pro-administration message.

But the Capitol Police were left with egg on their face for engaging in a practice that deflated the President's lofty call for spreading democracy around the world.

This item just in from NPR's Day to Day...

The online encyclopedia Wikipedia, which allows users to edit entries on a wide range of subjects, has banned Capitol Hill computers from the editing process. The reason? Hill staffers tend to write glowing entries about their bosses. Alex Chadwick talks with Andrea Seabrook about some of the worst offenders, and just how far-ranging the problem is getting.

The story on the NPR web site includes links to lists of such self-serving edits by House and Senate staffers.