Ethics: November 2005 Archive Page

In a matter of minutes Thursday morning, while they were in Herald Square hosting NBC's coverage of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, a balloon crashed in Times Square, injuring an 11-year-old girl and her disabled older sister.

Lauer and Couric didn't mention the mishap.

[...]

Couric and Lauer spent the last 10 minutes of the coverage reading from the sappy script, although they did note viewers at home were seeing last year's footage of the M&M's balloon, which depicts the candies in distress.

"Now, because of today's windy conditions, these characters are on video, and if we told you they were not in a panic, we'd be full of hot air," Couric joked.

Sure, you can make an argument why they shouldn't have mentioned the crash. But the fact that someone was injured in a similar incident in 1997 was enough to make the crash worthy of mention on-air.

If it was possible for NBC's cable network, MSNBC, to report the accident - before NBC's own parade coverage ended - then someone should have gotten a word to Lauer and Couric. --Richard Huff --NBC leaves Matt & Katie to twist in wind (NY Daily News)

How does it taste when your credibility melts in your mouth, not in your hands?

The most subtle and cogent analysis by a rhetorician of how The Times or CNN frames its stories has all the pertinence to a reporter or editor that a spectrographic analysis of jalapeno powder would to someone cooking chili.

This is not a function of journalistic anti-intellectualism, though there?s certainly enough of that to go around. No, it comes down to a knowledge gap ?- one in which academic media critics are often at a serious disadvantage. I mean tacit knowledge. There are, for example, things one learns from the experience of interviewing people who are clearly lying to you (or otherwise trying to make you a pawn in whatever game they are playing) that cannot be reduced to either formal propositions or methodological rules.--Scott McLemee

--Meet the Press (Inside Higher Ed)

But in another sense, academic blogging represents the fruition, not a betrayal, of the university's ideals. One might argue that blogging is in fact the very embodiment of what the political philosopher Michael Oakshott once called "The Conversation of Mankind"?an endless, thoroughly democratic dialogue about the best ideas and artifacts of our culture. --Robert S. Boynton --Attack of the Career-Killing Blogs (Slate)

Here’s where it gets fun: after students’ small groups put some thoughts up on the board, we read through the Writing Program’s Statement on Plagiarism out loud, and discuss it, making sure everything’s clear about the policy.

And then I hold a plagiarism contest. --Mike Vitia --Let’s Plagiarize! (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I'm home in Greensburg, still coming down from my Serious Games Summit high. This post is a useful reminder that simulation and role-playing doesn't require a computer. Even the fanciest teaching tools may be useless unless they are contextualized effectively (and designed with sound pedagogical principles). I doubt that corporate or military trainers would go for a training exercise that asks learners to perform undesirable actions. The simulators are, of course, designed with the understanding that learners will fail, and the design includes feedback to get the trainee to reach the expected performance level. But the trainee isn't expected to understand all the material. In fact, teaching full comprehension is inefficient, since in many cases the decisions are made elsewhere, and the point of training is to get compliance (and thus save lives or protect valuable assets).

On the other hand, if the point of a simulation is to teach comprehension, situational awareness, or leadership, rather than to teach a particular skill to be performed by those with their boots in the sand, then we're back to Admiral Kirk's Kobayashi Maru -- a training simulation designed to test how a commander performs in a no-win situation.

Not sure where I'm going with this... it's way too late, and the caffeine-and-sugar high that fueled my drive home is starting to fade.