Ethics: June 2007 Archive Page

Traditionally, many news organizations have applied the rules to only political reporters and editors. The ethic was summed up by Abe Rosenthal, the former New York Times editor, who is reported to have said, "I don't care if you sleep with elephants as long as you don't cover the circus."

But with polls showing the public losing faith in the ability of journalists to give the news straight up, some major newspapers and TV networks are clamping down. They now prohibit all political activity -- aside from voting -- no matter whether the journalist covers baseball or proofreads the obituaries. The Times in 2003 banned all donations, with editors scouring the FEC records regularly to watch for in-house donors. In 2005, The Chicago Tribune made its policy absolute. CBS did the same last fall. And The Atlantic Monthly, where a senior editor gave $500 to the Democratic Party in 2004, says it is considering banning all donations. After MSNBC.com contacted Salon.com about donations by a reporter and a former executive editor, this week Salon banned donations for all its staff.

What changed? --Bill Dedman --Journalists dole out cash to politicians (quietly) (MSNBC)

Also of interest is a long list of excuses/apologies/evasions offered by reporters and editors who made partisan donations. Several of the donors were up front about their attitude, saying that as reporters they don't give up their right to participate in the political process. But in many cases, their employees have a policy in place that stipulates exactly what a news employee must do in order to prevent the appearance of bias from affecting the public's faith in the publication's ability to present the news honestly, without bias.

This response from the copyeditor of The New Yorker is illuminating: "I've never thought of myself as working for a news organization."

Solar scientists predict that, by 2020, the sun will be starting into its weakest Schwabe solar cycle of the past two centuries, likely leading to unusually cool conditions on Earth. Beginning to plan for adaptation to such a cool period, one which may continue well beyond one 11-year cycle, as did the Little Ice Age, should be a priority for governments. It is global cooling, not warming, that is the major climate threat to the world, especially Canada. As a country at the northern limit to agriculture in the world, it would take very little cooling to destroy much of our food crops, while a warming would only require that we adopt farming techniques practiced to the south of us.

Meantime, we need to continue research into this, the most complex field of science ever tackled, and immediately halt wasted expenditures on the King Canute-like task of "stopping climate change." --R. Timothy Patterson --Read the sunspots (Financial Post)

Because Hollywood and the mainstream press in America have pretty much decided that human activity have caused global warming, I am always interested when I come across reports of an alternative way of thinking .

Environmental reporting is an area in which journalists who are sympathetic to the agenda of environmentalists (after all, who doesn't want clean water and air?) are too quick to pass along scary statistics and predictions that have little or no basis in scientific fact.

Of course he would expect I was in the pay of those whose interests I advanced. Why else would I advance them? Both he and I were in a business in which such shilling was the norm. It was totally reasonable to thus expect that money explained my desire to argue with him about public policy.

I don't want to be a part of that business. And more importantly, I don't want this kind of business to be a part of public policy making. We've all been whining about the "corruption" of government forever. We all should be whining about the corruption of professions too. But rather than whining, I want to work on this problem that I've come to believe is the most important problem in making government work.

And so as I said at the top (in my "bottom line"), I have decided to shift my academic work, and soon, my activism, away from the issues that have consumed me for the last 10 years, towards a new set of issues: Namely, these. "Corruption" as I've defined it elsewhere will be the focus of my work. For at least the next 10 years, it is the problem I will try to help solve. --Larry Lessig --Required Reading: the next 10 years (lessig blog)

Lessig is an excellent communicator and an inspiring leader. It will be interesting to see what he accomplishes when he turns from copyright reform to the broader concept of corruption.

All touching -- not only fighting or inappropriate touching -- is against the rules at Kilmer Middle School in Vienna. Hand-holding, handshakes and high-fives? Banned. The rule has been conveyed to students this way: "NO PHYSICAL CONTACT!!!!!"

[...]

It isn't as if hug police patrol the Kilmer hallways, Hernandez said. Usually an askance look from a teacher or a reminder to move along is enough to stop girls who are holding hands and giggling in a huddle or a boy who pats a buddy on the back. Students won't get busted if they high-five in class after answering a difficult math problem.

Typically, she said, only repeat offenders or those breaking other rules are reprimanded. "You have to have an absolute rule with students, and wiggle room and good judgment on behalf of the staff," Hernandez said. --Maria Glod --Va. School's No-Contact Rule Is a Touchy Subject (Washington Post (will expire))

The article features the plight of a boy who got into trouble for giving his girlfriend a hug -- but it also notes that the hug was one of two infractions: the boy also got up from his assigned seat and went over to his girlfriend without permission.

I'm not sure that I'm comfortable with the principal's statement that students need to comply with an absolute rule, but that enforcers need wiggle room. If you call the rule absolute, doesn't that just teach students to think of rules -- even so-called absolute ones -- as a means of dishing out arbitrary punishment at the whim of an authority figure? If there is wiggle room, then the rule is not absolute. It might be appropriate to say that touching itself is not a problem, but to enforce rules against such things as bullying, loitering in the halls, distracting other students, and dress code, and noting that monitors will naturally be drawn to the activities of two students who are touching one another, and that any violation of the rules that really are disruptive can lead to a harsher penalty if touching is involved. But my solution may not work for a building housing 1100 tweenagers in a space designed for 850.

The article also refers to different cultural notions of what counts as acceptable personal space.

Still, the fact that these kids even have assigned spaces in the cafeteria suggests that maintaining crowd control is more important to the administrators than teaching socialization. I understand that there are only so many hours in the day and there are probably only a small number of kids who are causing the problems, but "what about socialization" is typically the first question that homeschooling families hear from people with kids in public or private schools.

I grew up in Vienna, and I was bussed right past Joyce Kilmer to a different school. The school's namesake is best known for his poem "Trees."

I haven't the energy to write much more than "I think that I shall never see / A rule so laughably PC."

See also "Fisher v. Lowe 1999."

WATCH out YouTube lovers - the online video service are trialling new technology to prevent people posting unauthorised material they don't have the copyright for.

YouTube will trial the new technology with two of the world's largest media companies, Time Warner Inc. and Walt Disney Co. --YouTube no longer yours (Sunday Telegraph)

The New York premiere of the film, on Wednesday, was held to support the organisation Reporters Without Borders, which defends journalists against persecution and combats censorship and laws that undermine press freedom.

But several journalists covering the premiere objected when Jolie's lawyer demanded they sign pre-interview contracts limiting exactly what they could and could not ask her. --Catherine Elsworth --Jolie accused of hypocrisy over press 'gag' (Telegraph)

Bravo to the reporters who refused to sign the contract and declined the opportunity to promote the movie.

Negotiators: Ages Nine and Five (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I have a nine-year-old and a five-year-old who love each other to death, but do occasionally bicker. I tend to be far more impatient with the older child, since he is much more capable of finding something else to entertain himself. I generally remind him that, if he wants something that his sister has, he has to offer to trade something else.

If he really, really wants it, he will work fairly hard to get her to agree to a trade. When the argument is more philosophical (such as, he wants to play Harry Potter or Spider Man, and she wants to play her own made-up game "Babies in the Woods") I will pull him aside and tell him to play the game HER way for 20 minutes, after which I will relieve him and he can go do whatever he wants. Sometimes when the 20 minutes has passed, they have found a middle ground that keeps them both happy.

Of course, now that my daughter has heard this conversation too many times, before I actually intervene, I will hear her say things like, "Daddy says you have to do it my way, because I have not yet reached the age of reason."

(See Bickering about LEGOS.)

News emerged over the weekend that Church authorities have complained to Sony about the depiction of Manchester Cathedral in the game. Some reports have stated that the Church may pursue legal action against the company.

But according to Alex Chapman of Campbell Hooper solicitors,"The Church will have an uphill battle in a legal claim against Sony, and indeed it is likely that there is no basis for a claim." --Church will face ''uphill battle'' if suing Sony, says legal expert (Games Industry Biz)

I've been following this story about Resistance: The Fall of Man.

I'm reminded of when sculptor Frederick Hart was surprised to discover that that a copy of a sculpture he had created for the National Cathedral in Washington D.C. was featured for about 20 minutes in the movie Devil's Advocate, and that the filmmakers had actually animated the sculpture to turn it into what the Anglican church leaders called a distortion of a religious sculpture.

Sony was forced to re-edit the film before they could release it on DVD and video (after agreeing to put disclaimer stickers on the copies of the movie that had already been produced).

The National Cathedral case involved a living artist, who still owned the copyright to a work that was commissioned for a religious purpose. The Manchester Cathedral case probably doesn't involve much recently-produced art, and the leaders object to the fact that the digital re-creation of the church is the setting for a gunfight.

It will be interesting to see how the mainstream media represent the Manchester case, since it involves a video game. (We've already seen that even the very edgy indie Slamdance Film Festival is not a safe place for envelope-pushing videogames.)

A Courier-Journal sports reporter had his media credential revoked and was ordered to leave the press box during the NCAA baseball super-regional yesterday because of what the NCAA alleged was a violation of its policies prohibiting live Internet updates from its championship events. --Rick Bozich --Courier-Journal reporter ejected from U of L game: Bennett removed for blogging super-regional (Courier-Journal)

I'm posting this version because I find it interesting that, when the Courier-Journal reported on the incident, it emphasized the involvement of the paper, while when this story attracts the blogosphere, it will be the identity of the reporter as a staff blogger that gives the story legs.

It's unusual for a newspaper to interview its own staff members, but the paper's executive editor, Bernie L. Ivory, gets a few good zingers about First Amendment rights, and a lawyer-friendly response to a claim that the NCAA threatened to punish the University of Louisville if officials did not revoke the reporter's press pass: "If that's true, that's nothing short of extortion and thuggery."

The Courier-Journal carefully included the "If that's true" part of Ivory's quote, which is a good hedge against future accusations of libel. (See this current story about how selective quoting made Edwards sound like he was talking about the Paris Hilton saga, when in fact he twice said he wasn't talking about her.)

The reporter was warned before the game that if he blogged during the game, it was in violation of NCAA policies. He consulted his editors, and went ahead and blogged anyway.

According to the Courier-Journal, staff blogger Brian Bennett was approached by NCAA officials in the fifth inning of a game between the University of Lousville and Oklahoma State, told that blogging "from an NCAA championship event 'is against NCAA policies (and) we're revoking the (press) credential and need to ask you to leave the stadium.'"

In its article, the Courier-Journal quoted its executive editor, Bennie Ivory, as saying, "It's clearly a First Amendment issue. This is part of the evolution of how we present the news to our readers. It's what we did during the Orange Bowl. It's what we did during the NCAA basketball tournament. It's what we do." --Blogger removed from NCAA baseball game for blogging (C|Net)

We are aware that the decision to place Google at the bottom of the ranking is likely to be controversial, but throughout our research we have found numerous deficiencies and hostilities in Google's approach to privacy that go well beyond those of other organizations. While a number of companies share some of these negative elements, none comes close to achieving status as an endemic threat to privacy. This is in part due to the diversity and specificity of Google's product range and the ability of the company to share extracted data between these tools, and in part it is due to Google's market dominance and the sheer size of its user base. Google's status in the ranking is also due to its aggressive use of invasive or potentially invasive technologies and techniques.

The view that Google "opens up" information through a range of attractive and advanced tools does not exempt the company from demonstrating responsible leadership in privacy. Google's increasing ability to deep-drill into the minutiae of a user's life and lifestyle choices must in our view be coupled with well defined and mature user controls and an equally mature privacy outlook. Neither of these elements has been demonstrated. Rather, we have witnessed an attitude to privacy within Google that at its most blatant is hostile, and at its most benign is ambivalent. These dynamics do not pervade other major players such as Microsoft or eBay, both of which have made notable improvements to the corporate ethos on privacy issues. --A Race to the Bottom: Privacy Ranking of Internet Service Companies (Privacy International)

Cutler has spent much of her time fending off a lawsuit by ex- boyfriend and fellow DeWine staffer Robert Steinbuch, who claims Cutler's blog publicly humiliated him. He is seeking more than $20 million in damages.

[...]

The lawsuit is being closely watched by online privacy groups and bloggers because the case could help establish whether people who keep online diaries are obligated to protect the privacy of the people they interact with offline. --Sex Blogger Files for Bankruptcy (Breitbart | AP)

This is a great find. I'm a student (with a full time job), who uses the web a lot in my research. I've found that there are many insightful comments out there, but failed to use them due to 1) fear of not properly citing them 2) fear that they will be rejected as credible sources. It wasn't until yesterday that I realized that my current paper really needs to cite a few comments in order to make some points. Thanks again![Submitted Comment] (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

The above is the text of a comment that someone submitted to an old blog entry about how to cite weblog comments in MLA style.

I didn't publish it, because the URL supplied by the poster was the home page of a company that offers search-engine optimization services. In the space where the name was supposed to be, the poster added some Google-friendly keywords.

A hand-made personalized commercial message may not fit the strict definition of spam, but it's still an unwelcome submission.

You may or may not be familiar with V-Tech Rampage, a flash game created by Ryan Lambourn. True to its title, the game allows the player to take on the role of Cho Seung-Hui and re-enact the fateful school shooting of April 16th. The game drew hatred from the mainstream media and gamers alike; many feel the game to have no ultimate purpose other than allowing players to kill simply for the sake of killing.

Similar complaints have been lodged against Super Columbine Massacre RPG!, created by Danny Ledonne. Like V-Tech Rampage, SCMRPG allows the player to take the roles of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold on the day they massacred twelve of their peers.

In an effort to get Lambourn's side of the story and answer some nagging questions I had for Ledonne, I interviewed these two frequently despised, often applauded game creators about the possible importance of their games. --Virtual school shooings: interviewing two of the most hated game creators alive (Destructoid)

Ryan Lambourn, the creator of V-Tech Rampage, sounds defensive and juvenile. I haven't played his game yet, so I'm just filing this for later.

Same with I'm O.K. - A Murder Simulator