Posts tagged ethics
British Panel: Murdoch Not Fit to Run News Corp
Via the New York Times:
In a damning report after months of investigation into the hacking scandal at Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers, a British parliamentary panel concluded on Tuesday that Mr. Murdoch was “not a fit person” to run a huge international company.
The startling conclusion about the world’s most influential media tycoon went much further in criticizing Mr. Murdoch than had been expected from Parliament’s select committee on culture, media and sport, which has conducted several inquiries into press standards, the most recent starting last year.
Via the BBC:
After initially claiming that malpractice was limited to one “rogue” reporter at the News of the World, News International has now settled dozens of civil cases admitting liability for hacking between 2001 and 2006.
More than 6,000 possible victims have been identified and the police have so far made a number of arrests in connection with an investigation reopened in January 2011 - although no charges have yet been brought.
Via the Guardian:
Rupert Murdoch, the document said, “did not take steps to become fully informed about phone hacking” and “turned a blind eye and exhibited wilful blindness to what was going on in his companies and publications”.
The committee concluded that the culture of the company’s newspapers “permeated from the top” and “speaks volumes about the lack of effective corporate governance at News Corporation and News International”.
That prompted the MPs’ report to say: “We conclude, therefore, that Rupert Murdoch is not a fit person to exercise the stewardship of major international company.”
Years later, when I put together a book about those events in Liberia, I included a photograph of one of the people who had been killed outside of the beer factory. I thought it was an important picture but didn’t dwell on what it might mean for the mother of that boy to come across it printed in a book. My thoughts about this resurfaced recently as I put together a new book about a group of American soldiers I spent a lot of time with in Afghanistan. They reminded me a lot of the young Liberian rebel fighters, and yet, when I came to selecting a picture of one of their dead in the battlefield, I hesitated and wondered if printing a graphic image was appropriate. It was an image I had made of a young man shot in the head after the American lines had been overrun—not dissimilar from the one in Liberia. My hesitation troubled me. Was I sensitive this time because the soldier wasn’t a nameless African? Perhaps I had changed and realized that there should be limits on what is released into the public? I certainly wouldn’t have been in that questioning position if I’d never taken the photograph in the first place… but I did, and perhaps these things are worth thinking about and confronting after all.
Tim Hetherington, from a chapter in Photographs Not Taken, a new book of essays by more than 60 photographers about times when they couldn’t, or wouldn’t, take a picture. Hetherington died from wounds suffered while covering the Libyan civil war in 2011. Via Time Lightbox.
If you’re in New York City there’s a panel discussion with the book’s editor and a few of its contributors at PS1 Sunday April 22 from 2-4pm.
Massoud Hossaini won the Pulitzer Prize in Breaking News Photography for this photograph that appeared in newspapers around the world last December.
The image is from the aftermath of a suicide attack at shrine in Kabul attended by Shiites taking part in a religious ceremony.
Via the New York Times Lens Blog, which spoke to Hossaini in December after publishing the photo:
“Women were asking me, ‘Help, help, help,’” Mr. Hossaini said. “I couldn’t. I was recording and I was taking pictures.” One of the women who was holding a baby, called out for help — her other child had died. Another man lifted the child from the ground. But blood was pouring from its head. The man placed the child back on the ground and walked away.
As Mr. Hossaini photographed, he realized he was weeping. When he looked down, he realized how badly his own hand was bleeding. He wrapped it with the cleanest piece of material he could find.
Hossaini works for Agence France-Presse. It is the organization’s first Pulitzer.
![Over at the Columbia Journalism Review, Ryan Chittum writes about the ethics of social news apps.
In particular, he notes that while there’s much we may want to share, most people don’t understand the extent of what we share. For example, one partner in a relationship reading an article about breaking up that then appears in his or her Facebook timeline.
Facebook calls this frictionless sharing.
Chittum believes that publishers need to be more transparent about what their Facebook apps are going to do and share. Using the highly successful Washington Post app as an example, he writes:
The tagline [to the app] is “share what you read with your friends!”, which sounds innocent and useful enough. I like to share links to stories I think other people should read. Up high it says, “Okay, Read Article,” and when you push that button, it installs the app. There’s nothing telling you directly that you’re installing an app. A box in the bottom corner says “This app may post on your behalf, including articles you read, people you liked and more,” but how many people actually read that?…
…Not only does this stuff show up in my news feed several times a day (Yahoo’s app is also a frequent offender), but you can also go in there and click on your friends who have the app to see what they’ve read. The history goes back months. Jeff Bercovici reported back in the fall that even if you set the Post’s Social Reader to not let anyone see what you’ve read, friends can still go in and see what you’ve read. That’s egregious.
The solution, of course, comes back to the reader. First, monitor your app settings. Although, the Bercovici article gives pause as to whether that would even work. Second, contact publications about their apps and the concerns you have with them.
Ryan Chittum, Columbia Journalism Review. The Ethics of Social News Apps.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m2bs0mNfjS1qedj2ho1_r1_400.png)
Over at the Columbia Journalism Review, Ryan Chittum writes about the ethics of social news apps.
In particular, he notes that while there’s much we may want to share, most people don’t understand the extent of what we share. For example, one partner in a relationship reading an article about breaking up that then appears in his or her Facebook timeline.
Facebook calls this frictionless sharing.
Chittum believes that publishers need to be more transparent about what their Facebook apps are going to do and share. Using the highly successful Washington Post app as an example, he writes:
The tagline [to the app] is “share what you read with your friends!”, which sounds innocent and useful enough. I like to share links to stories I think other people should read. Up high it says, “Okay, Read Article,” and when you push that button, it installs the app. There’s nothing telling you directly that you’re installing an app. A box in the bottom corner says “This app may post on your behalf, including articles you read, people you liked and more,” but how many people actually read that?…
…Not only does this stuff show up in my news feed several times a day (Yahoo’s app is also a frequent offender), but you can also go in there and click on your friends who have the app to see what they’ve read. The history goes back months. Jeff Bercovici reported back in the fall that even if you set the Post’s Social Reader to not let anyone see what you’ve read, friends can still go in and see what you’ve read. That’s egregious.
The solution, of course, comes back to the reader. First, monitor your app settings. Although, the Bercovici article gives pause as to whether that would even work. Second, contact publications about their apps and the concerns you have with them.
Ryan Chittum, Columbia Journalism Review. The Ethics of Social News Apps.
When it comes to customers, Apple is a bold innovator that leads the industry into new directions and forces others to follow. However, when it comes to the management of its supply chain and treatment of workers in the Chinese factories that make its products, it hides behind the constraints of prevailing industry practices. What is even more disconcerting is the fact that these practices are in violation of not only local and national laws, but also of Apple’s own voluntary self-imposed code of conduct. It is important to note that this voluntary code of conduct breaks no new ground. It is at best a modest attempt to ensure that workers will be treated fairly and provided with a safe work environment.
S. Prakash Sethi, Professor, Baruch College, and President, International Center for Corporate Accountability. Carnagie Council, Two Faces of Apple
Sethi writes that the Apple brand is divided with its hyperfocus on the finished product but lazy glance factory conditions.
iPhones, iPads, iMacs and Powerbooks are innovative works of wonder. Operations at suppliers like Foxconn? Lowest common denominator.
Sethi challenges Apple CEO Tim Cook to change the company’s split culture.
“This would call for Apple to play a leadership role and thereby solidify its reputation not only as a leading corporate innovator, but also as a leading socially responsible corporate citizen,” he writes.
“One hopes that Apple will once again astonish the world by showing a new approach to building better bridges between private profit and public good.”
An important read as the business press hypes a potential trillion dollar valuation for Apple.
It could change my job, I guess. I could end up as greeter at Walmart next week.
Paul Nussbaum, reporter, The Philadelphia Inquirer, responding to news that the subject of his recent investigative reports is now part of a team that is buying the company that owns the newspaper. New York Times, Philadelphia Newspapers Set to Be Sold to Local Leaders.
Background: The Philadelphia Media Network, publisher of The Inquirer, The Daily News and Philly.com, has been on sale with a primary purchasing group lead by business and political leaders from Pennsylvania and southern New Jersey.
Another way to put it: The exact centers of power that Philadelphia’s news organizations are expected to cover are buying the company that owns the newspapers and the region’s primary Web site.
During the sales process, some reporters claimed that stories about the potential new owners have gone unpublished. And the worry, of course, is that there will be editorial meddling if the sale does go through, which, the New York Times reports, is likely.
The New York Times reports that 300 newsroom employees “signed a public statement insisting that the new owners agree not to alter the news coverage to reflect their ‘private or political interests.’”
Reason for Pennsylvanians to worry? Ed Rendell, former Philadelphia mayor, Pennsylvania governor and former leader of the purchasing group dismisses the idea in comments to the Inquirer, “You’d think this was the first time some political people owned a newspaper.”
In February, NPR’s morning edition ran a short piece exploring the issues and people surrounding the purchase.
Daily Mail made 1,728 potentially illegal requests to private detective
Just when the Daily Mail gets some longread love from the New Yorker, the Guardian reports that Daily Mail journalists paid private investigators about $227,000 to “unearth phone numbers and addresses of public figures over a three-year period, including personal details of the Duchess of Cambridge and her sister Pippa Middleton.”
Via the Guardian:
The tabloid demanded the private information between 2000 and 2003 from Steve Whittamore – whose targets for a range of newspapers included the union leader Bob Crow, the family of the murder victim Holly Wells, members of the England football team and the singer Charlotte Church. The Daily Mail made the most requests, with its sister title the Mail on Sunday spending an estimated £62,000 on 578 requests for information. The Sunday title’s figure was also roughly double the number of requests counted by the information commissioner in a report in 2006…
…Obtaining such personal information is a breach of section 55 of the Data Protection Act, although there is a public interest defence. If anybody working in the public sector was paid money to supply information illegally, it could amount to an offence under the more serious 1906 Prevention of Corruption Act, for which there is no public interest defence. Whittamore himself pleaded guilty to breaches of the Data Protection Act in 2005 and received a two-year conditional discharge.
Al Jazeera Will Not Air French Murder Video
Good case study for a journalism ethics class.
Via Al Jazeera:
Al Jazeera has said it will not air a video that it received showing three shooting attacks in Toulouse and Montauban in southern France this month.
The network on Tuesday said the video did not add any information that was not already in public domain. It also did not meet the television station’s code of ethics for broadcast.
The video shows the attacks in chronological order, with audible gunshots and voices of the killer and the victims. But it does not show the face of the confessed murderer, Mohammed Merah, and it does not contain a statement from him…
…Merah boasted of filming his killings and witnesses told police that he appeared to be wearing a video camera in a chest harness.
…Zied Tarrouche, Al Jazeera’s Paris bureau chief, said the images were a bit shaky but of a high technical quality. He also said the video had clearly been manipulated after the fact, with religious songs and recitations of Quranic verses laid over the footage.
This American Life Retraction Transcript for Daisey Foxconn Episode
Via Ira Glass, This American Life:
I should say, I am not happy to have to come to you and tell you that something that we presented on the radio as factual is not factual. All of us in public radio stand together and I have friends and colleagues on lots of other shows who – like us here at This American Life – work hard to do accurate, independent reporting week in, week out. I and my coworkers on This American Life are not happy to have done anything to hurt the reputation of the journalism that happens on this radio station every day. So we want to be completely transparent about what we got wrong, and what we now believe is the truth.
And let’s just get to it.
The transcript walks us through Mike Daisey’s trip to China to investigate labor conditions at Foxconn, and leads to an interview between Marketplace’s Rob Schmitz, Ira Glass and Daisey himself.
When Mike Daisey lied to national radio audiences on This American Life, lied to the 888,000 people who downloaded the podcast (the most in the show’s history), and lied to who-knows-how-many theater audiences over two years of performing his one-man show The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, he wasn’t wrong about the Chinese labor abuses that go into making iPads and other beloved American gadgets. He wasn’t wrong that Chinese workers are often subjected to horrific conditions, wasn’t wrong that Apple’s supervision of its contractor’s factories has been problematic, and wasn’t wrong that we American consumers bear an indirect but troubling moral responsibility for these abuses.
Most importantly, Mike Daisey wasn’t wrong that it is possible for Chinese authorities and Apple to substantially improve labor conditions — without making their products any more expensive or less competitive — and that American consumers can help make this happen. But he was wrong that embellishing his story would help, that bad behavior in service of a good cause ever does.
Max Fisher, The Atlantic. The Tragedy of Mike Daisey’s Lies About China.
Are NPR's new ethics guidelines the way for journalism organizations to handle themselves? NYU journalism deep-thinker Jay Rosen thinks so.
With these words, NPR commits itself as an organization to avoid the worst excesses of “he said, she said” journalism. It says to itself that a report characterized by false balance is a false report. It introduces a new and potentially powerful concept of fairness: being “fair to the truth,” which as we know is not always evenly distributed among the sides in a public dispute.
Maintaining the “appearance of balance” isn’t good enough, NPR says. “If the balance of evidence in a matter of controversy weighs heavily on one side…” we have to say so. When we are spun, we don’t just report it. “We tell our audience…” This is spin!
shortformblog: Rosen took a particular liking to lines like these: “Our goal is not to please those whom we report on or to produce stories that create the appearance of balance, but to seek the truth.” Read NPR’s ethics guidelines and consider it for yourself.
Is HDR Acceptable in Photojournalism?
Interesting post by PetaPixel questioning the use of HDR photos in journalism. Do you think it’s ethical? Leave a comment and let us know.
AP does not identify Casey Anthony jurors, while local orgs split on revealing names by Julie Moos
The judge released the names the jurors on the Casey Anthony case. Bay News 9 released a table of their full names, occupations, marital status and how many children each person had. AP decided not to release their names but you can find a link to the Bay News 9 article in the Poynter article. In this day and age, once it’s published online, anyone can Google it instead of plowing through court documents. Should news organizations publish them online? ~Chao @cli6cli6
See the Poynter article here.
The depressing tale of Johann Hari
The key passage from the apology runs:
I did two wrong and stupid things. The first concerns some people I interviewed over the years. When I recorded and typed up any conversation, I found something odd: points that sounded perfectly clear when you heard them being spoken often don’t translate to the page. They can be quite confusing and unclear. When this happened, if the interviewee had made a similar point in their writing (or, much more rarely, when they were speaking to somebody else), I would use those words instead. At the time, I justified this to myself by saying I was giving the clearest possible representation of what the interviewee thought, in their most considered and clear words.
But I was wrong. An interview isn’t an X-ray of a person’s finest thoughts. It’s a report of an encounter. If you want to add material from elsewhere, there are conventions that let you do that. You write “she has said,” instead of “she says”. You write “as she told the New York Times” or “as she says in her book”, instead of just replacing the garbled chunk she said with the clear chunk she wrote or said elsewhere. If I had asked the many experienced colleagues I have here at The Independent – who have always been very generous with their time – they would have told me that, and they would have explained just how wrong I was. It was arrogant and stupid of me not to ask
Read it quickly, and it sounds terrifically contrite. Read it carefully, and Mr Hari is actually blaming his interviewees for their lack of verbal polish. It is a nifty defence: there he was, travelling the world to meet all these famous and brilliant people, conducting all these excellent interviews, only to find, on returning to his hotel room to transcribes his tapes, that time and again his subjects had garbled their lines.
Read the entire article at The Economist
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