Never take financial tips from a Kardashian or other celebrities, especially when they don’t tell you it’s an ad
By Chris Roberts Never take financial tips from advertising. And never, ever take financial tips when it’s advertising and they don’t tell you it’s advertising. Kim Kardashian peddled EthereumMax’s crypto asset in Instagram posts in June 2021. What she didn’t do was tell her audience that she was paid $250,000 for the sales pitch. That’s […]
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 […]
Figures lie and liars figure: Journalists should be wary of bias behind numbers
By Serena Bailey In the immediate wake of the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High in Parkland, Florida, Everytown for Gun Safety, an advocacy group that works to reduce gun violence, tweeted that the Parkland shooting had been the 18th school shooting of the year. This statistic was shared by Bernie Sanders and New York […]
Ram ad was bad, but Bell Pottinger story shows worse persuasion ethics
Discussions of the fundamental flaws of a Super Bowl truck ad are soaring higher today than any missed field goal during the game played Sunday, Feb. 4, 2018. But that’s not the bigger story in persuasion ethics today. You’ll read much righteous indignation of the ad that peddled Ram trucks using Dr. Martin Luther King’s […]
Cartoonist fired for biting the hand that feeds his publication
A herd of media are writing about Rick Friday, who was fired from Farm News, a weekly publication of The Fort Dodge (Iowa) Messenger, after it published this cartoon pointing out that the CEOs of three men who run major farming-focused corporations earned a combined $53 million in 2015, as much as 2,129 Iowa farmers. […]
U.S. newsrooms mirror larger hierarchies of power
By Kendall Worman Newsrooms in the U.S. are not exactly the most diverse places when it comes to race. Is it possible for journalists to report objectively and holistically on race and minority issues when the journalists telling those stories don’t represent even a significant fraction of that demographic? According to The Atlantic a 2012 […]
What a class exercise taught me about my moral foundations
By Cara Walker Loyal. Fair. Caring. These are words most people would want to use to identify themselves. While the way we strive towards these attributes may seem almost subconscious at times, these characteristics are what many of us base our moral foundations upon, since we as a society have dubbed them all generally “good.” […]