Chapter 1
Protected: Instructor’s Portal
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
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 […]
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 […]
Tom Brady, and why it’s best to leave 5-year-old children out of it
By Chris Roberts Kindergarten teachers [note]My wife taught them for most of her 26 years in the classroom.[/note] will tell you that their real job isn’t to teach math and the alphabet. The real job is teaching 5-year-olds that the world does not revolve around them. This is an important lesson for all of us, […]
How some news organizations track you online
By Aaron Bonner In 2017, information is available in a matter of milliseconds, from cake recipes to a politician’s tax forms, but the availability of certain information has created privacy concerns for both journalists and readers. With more news organizations shifting to an online readership, readers have begun to question the information gathered by each […]