Not an April Fool’s joke in March when Volkswagen lied.
You’re an automaker who lied again and again about your emissions testing. You’ve paid more than $33 billion in fines and to buy back many of the 11 million cars you lied about. Your chief executive officer was forced out, saying he was “deeply sorry that we have broken the trust of our customers and […]
No, Sen. Hawley, the First Amendment does not limit ethical choices
By Chris Roberts Somehow, a U.S. senator with a law degree thinks that the First Amendment means a private speaker does not have the right to make an ethics choice. The background: U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., had a contract with Simon & Schuster to publish The Tyranny of Big Tech. That was before […]
Privacy and the dead man from S-Town
By Hannah Saad Brian Reed, a producer with NPR’s This American Life, was looking for new story ideas when John B. McLemore, a resident of Woodstock, Alabama, contacted him to investigate a possible cover-up of a murder in Bibb County. Reed and McLemore corresponded through phone calls and emails and eventually, Reed traveled to Woodstock […]
A Universal action: When PR’s goal is to hide the truth
By Chris Roberts Very few people knew just how devastating was the June 2008 fire at the Universal Music Group’s archives that destroyed the master recordings of thousands of musical artists – from Count Basie to Snoop Dog, Chuck Berry to Nirvana. The company made sure. In fact, it took 11 years before the public […]
How should news organizations respond to non-responsive responses for comment?
Ethical news organizations follow the tenet in the Society of Professional Journalist’s code of ethics that says good journalists “[d]iligently seek subjects of news coverage to allow them to respond to criticism or allegations of wrongdoing.” More and more of those subjects don’t actually answer the questions, however. Companies, politicians, and others often respond to […]
On the ethics of introducing anti-First Amendment bills that won’t go anywhere
A Georgia lawmaker who won’t be coming back to the House filed a bill in April 2019 that is obviously oppositional to the First Amendment. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution says Rep. Andy Welch’s “Ethics in Journalism” act would write a canon of media ethics, and create a board led by the chancellor of the University of […]
Why we need journalism: Because PR-focused governments like to hide uncomfortable truth.
Two cities remind us why we need journalism to tell truths that PR-infatuated governments don’t want to tell: * The former mayor of Birmingham, Larry Langford, died Jan. 8. The city’s official web site posted this stirring obituary of Langford.What it neglected to mention was the uncomfortable truth that Langford was a felon, arrested and […]
It’s hard to ethically justify publishing photos of celebrity deaths
By Alley Paquin Media outlets use sensationalist headlines regularly to grab the attention of readers, encourage them to click on their website and read their stories. However, clickbait and sensationalist titles about celebrity suicides can have a disastrous effect. According to The Guardian, there was a 17 percent increase in suicides in the UK following […]
Facebook’s public relations efforts raise ethical questions
The New York Times took a penetrating look at how Facebook has handled the continuing questions about how it deals with its own shenanigans, and its difficulties in stopping the shenanigans of those who would use Facebook for its own propaganda and misinformation purposes. The Times‘ “Deny, Delay and Deflect” story makes the world’s biggest […]