COMM 317: The President, privacy, Palin, Levi, Levi's Levis and the first Internet message

Today's Howard Kurtz column in The Washington Post has a good seque to our assignment for next week -- the chapter in "Media Ethics" on the right to privacy ... which reminds me, our reading assignment is the next chapter in Patterson and Wilkins, "Media Ethics." Kurtz' subjects: The Obamas' marriage, and Sarah Palin's daughter's ex-boyfriend's most recent, uh, shall we say, exposure in the media.

Kurtz also has this timely quote from USA Today, under the subhead "Happy Anniversary":

"Internet messages started with a crash 40 years ago today," USA Today reports, "and life hasn't been the same since. "We transmitted the 'L'. . . . and the 'O' -- and then the other computer crashed," says UCLA's Leonard Kleinrock, who helped send that first message on the university's campus on Oct. 29, 1969. He was trying to type the word 'login.' "

Just think: four decades of technological progress later, and Windows is still crashing.

This story about the first message ever sent on what we now call the Internet, in case you haven't heard it before, is absolutely true.

COMM 317: On board in class Friday

Marketplace of ideas

Freedom of expression

One’s opinion -- uncensored opinion

Opinion should be backed up by facts

PRSA -- responsible advocate -- provide a voice in the marketplace of facts, ideas and viewpoints to aid and inform public debate -- PR companies investigate clients for truthfulness, accuracy of info

central point of opinions and facts

taking a thought or opinion giving it credit, credibility by publishing

something that has value and can be backed up by

COMM 317: Advertising, the law and the 'marketplace of ideas'

Apart from ethical considerations, there are few legal limitations on advertising per se. According to JLCom Publishing Co., a law firm, the Central Hudson rule applies. Named for the court case in which it appears, JLCom says it holds:

Under the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision, Central Hudson Gas & Electric Corp. v. Public Service Commission of New York, No. 79-565, Supreme Court of the United States, 447 U.S. 557; 100 S. Ct. 2343; 1980 U.S. LEXIS 48; 65 L. Ed. 2d 341; 6 Media L. Rep. 1497; 34 P.U.R.4th 178, June 20, 1980, a state must justify restrictions on truthful, nonmisleading commercial speech by demonstrating that its actions "directly advance" a substantial state interest and are no more extensive than necessary to serve that interest.

It's part of a brief discussion on Advertising and the First Amendment. We'd better read it.

COMM 207, 317, HUM 223: No class Mon., Tue.

I'll be at a conference on student learning outcomes assessment. Classes resume Wednesday, Oct. 28.

COMM 207: For today ...

No class Tuesday ...

Washington Post Redesign A guide

COMM 317: For Friday's class [no class Monday]

Read about Marketplace of Ideas analogy in Wikipedia. Especially U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes' 1919 dissent in Abrams v. United States [250 U.S. 616]:

... when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas...that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out. That at any rate is the theory of our Constitution.

Also: In Patterson and Wilkins, "Media Ethics," read Case 5-D "The New York Times Sudan 'Advertorial': Blood Money or Marketplace of Ideas?" (138-43).

Notes from class Wednesday:

Advocacy --

When you work with people and businesses to get everybody on the same page regarding an issue -- Lobbying works with government, advocacy works w/ society, public

Persuade, influence and raise public awareness and action about organizations, issues -

Marketplace of ideas

Please notice this assignment hasn't gone away: We're still going to do something with media critic Neil Postman's 1969 speech titled "Bullshit and the Art of Crap-Detection" to the National Council of Teachers of English. Postman, who died in 2003, was a pretty insightful media critic.

COMM 317: Link for Wednesday's class

In class I want us to take up media critic Neil Postman's 1969 speech titled "Bullshit and the Art of Crap-Detection" to the National Council of Teachers of English. Postman, who died in 2003, was a pretty insightful media critic.

Now this ... "The News is Broken" by Dana Milbank of The Washington Post.

Is Illinois a 'failed state' yet?

Ever since the Guardian.co.uk website ran an article headed "Will California become America's first failed state?" I've been thinking Illinois is next in line right after Somalia and California.

Now comes Dick Locher, cartoonist for The Trib, with pretty much the same idea. Link here to see what the world's trouble spots look like from a CTA train.

COMM 207, 297, 317, 393: Is 'hyperlocal' the future of the news business? 'Time for the kids to take over'

Could be. Howard Kurtz' media column today in The Washington Post cites a report that says "hyper-local startups" may be taking up some of the slack left as general-interest, a-little-bit-of-something-for-everybody newspapers downsize or go out of business altogether. Here's the money graf(s):

Despite the "immediate disaster" striking newspapers, says Michael Schudson, a professor at Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism, he was struck by "the really stunning enthusiasm and excitement of people engaged in many of these startups, who were just bubbling over with what they were doing." Schudson wrote the report with Leonard Downie Jr., The Washington Post's former executive editor who is now a professor at Arizona State University.

Their recommendations -- particularly for a federally financed fund to subsidize local reporting -- might not fly. But amid all the hand-wringing over newspaper deaths and bankruptcies, "The Reconstruction of American Journalism" makes clear that a thousand media flowers are, if not blooming, at least popping up.

These new ventures "are actually re-creating the kind of competition that used to exist in local news reporting a long time ago," says Downie, now a Post Co. vice president at large. He's not worried about their quality because "most of them have been started by seasoned professionals who used to work for newspapers. My greater concern is the fragility of their economic base."

And so on. Must reading, I'd say, for journalism students. So I'll let you read Kurtz' blog for details on exactly how the startups work and exactly where the jobs might be (besides, that part of it's speculative anyway). Kurtz concludes, and I agree:

These journalistic sprouts may never grow into towering institutions, and it's hard to imagine that the coverage of city hall, Capitol Hill and Kabul won't suffer. But they may produce a more diverse and energized form of reporting than the top-down monopolies of the past. They may be better suited to cover neighborhoods, recruit amateurs, engage in real dialogue and have some fun in the process.


"The days of a kind of news media paternalism . . . are largely gone," the report says. If that's true, not everyone will mourn the old way of doing things. Time for the kids to take over.

Amen.

COMM 317, take note. Kurtz, by the way, has a useful take on the "Hot Air Journalism" displayed in coverage of the balloon hoax in Fort Collins, Colo. It makes a good segue to something I want to take up in COMM 317 (media ethics) today:

I don't blame television for carrying the two-hour balloon extravaganza that turned out to be an utter sham. The anchors should have been more cautious in asserting there was a boy inside, but the authorities were taking it seriously. Plus, television isn't all that hard to fool. Remember the runaway bride, who claimed she'd been kidnapped? In 24-hour cable, you put the live pictures on the air first and seek explanations later. Any producer who cut away from the balloon, saying his news team wanted to gather more information first, would have been fired on the spot.

It's after we discovered that the kid never left the home that we saw the usual media excess. The yakkers, the experts, the child psychologists, all carrying on about people they've never met. Yes, Richard Heene seemed like a truly strange figure on "Wife Swap," and now seems to have been angling for a reality-show encore. But you begin to suspect that journalists are secretly pleased by this latest turn of events, by the way the story morphed from life-and-death drama to sick soap opera.

I'm not sure about that. I'm a journalist, and I'm not pleased. But I don't have to worry about ratings. And Kurtz' story does make a good segue to something I want to take up ... which is, conveniently enough, in the blog post below.

COMM 317: Before we let the balloon story drop ... a Hemingway quote, values and a segue to public relations

The novelist Ernest Hemingway famously said the one thing a good writer needs a "built-in, shock-proof, crap detector," and media critic Neil Postman of New York University elaborated on it in a 1969 speech titled "Bullshit and the Art of Crap-Detection" to the National Council of Teachers of English.

We'll come back to Postman in a minute. He had something to say I think is important.

But first, this. At least one journalist had her crap-detector turned on with batteries fully charged when the balloon went up. Reported Brain Stelter and Dan Frosch in The New York Times:

Before the fame-seeking backyard scientist Richard Heene phoned the police to report that his 6-year-old son, Falcon, had floated away on a homemade flying saucer Thursday morning, he called a local TV station and asked them to send a news helicopter.

Taken aback by the request, the news director at the station, KUSA-TV, Patti Dennis, said she called back and told Mr. Heene flatly, “I don’t believe you.” Still skeptical when Mr. Heene put a police officer on the phone to verify the story, Ms. Dennis added, “I told the deputy that I didn’t believe he was real, either.”

But her moment of clarity didn't last very long, and the helicopter was dispatched.

Don't blame news director Dennis for what happened next, though. The national cable networks didn't even have that momentary flicker of clarity. The Times' account continues:

Eventually satisfied by the local police’s report of a missing child, she dispatched the helicopter to the skies over Fort Collins, Colo., where the helium-filled balloon had taken flight, jump-starting an extraordinary afternoon of television coverage. Cable news anchors suspended skepticism in favor of spectacular images of the balloon as it glided across northern Colorado and landed in a dusty field about 60 miles away, and the ratings for CNN and the Fox News Channel doubled for the duration of the spectacle.

But even before Falcon was found hours later hiding inside a box in the Heene family home, incredulous observers were asking: Is it all a hoax?

Some lingering questions: How can a professional media guy's individual values function as a crap detector? Should they? How can handed-down-through-the-ages ethical principles like Aristotle's, Kant's or John Stuart Mills' function as crap detectors? Should they? What sort of reading do you get on your own individual built-in, shock-proof crap detector when you hear the cable networks' rating went up along with the Heene family's balloon?

When Postman spoke to the English teachers, he talked about this slippery issue of individual values:

Each person's crap-detector is embedded in their value system; if you want to teach the art of crap-detecting, you must help students become aware of their values. ...

Now, I realize that what I just said sounds fairly pompous in itself, if not arrogant, but there is no escaping from saying what attitudes you value if you want to talk about crap-detecting.

In other words, bullshit is what you call language that treats people in ways you do not approve of.

So any teacher who is interested in crap-detecting must acknowledge that one man's bullshit is another man's catechism. Students should be taught to learn how to recognize bullshit, including their own.

So what values are Postman expressing here? One sounds a lot like the golden rule. Kant? And then there's this: One person's bullshit is another person's catechism. Hey, I like that. How could that attitude help news writers keep their crap detectors turned on?

More questions: On Monday, when we take this up in class, we'll be starting the chapter in Patterson and Wilkins, "Media Ethics" on public relations. How could Postman's attitude help public relations professionals keep their crap detectors fully charged? News people and flacks have an adversarial relationship. How does that help them keep each other's crap detectors operational?

COMM 317: Catching up on back stories ... ethics, combat photos, hidden cameras

First, an editorial cartoon on the political stunt that showed low-income advocates advising a "pimp" and a "hooker" on how to evade the law in what turned out to be a hidden-camera sting. K Street in Washington, by the way, is where a lot of the high-powered lobbyists have their offices.

A story on the Politico.com website today details a change in combat photo rules for embedded reporters with U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Here's the gist of the story:

U.S. military commanders in Afghanistan are retreating somewhat from an effort to ban embedded journalists from publishing photos or video of American soldiers killed in action there, according to ground rules issued Thursday.

But the new limitations on embeds – put in place after a flap between the Pentagon and the Associated Press over a photo of a wounded soldier - have elicited deep concerns from military journalists and press advocates.

The new rule, announced at U.S. headquarters at Bagram Air Base, and its rationale:

"Media will not be prohibited from viewing or filming casualties; however, casualty photographs showing recognizable face, nametag or other identifying feature or item will not be published," the new rules declare.

"This change better synchronizes [our] ground rules with those of our higher headquarters," a statement issued by the military public affairs office at Bagram said.

We visited this issue before, when the first rule was announced in response to an Associated Press story. Let's visit it again.

COMM 317: Potter Box

In addition to the discussion of the Potter Box in Patterson and Wilkins, "Media Ethics," we'll take a look at the Wikipedia page on this common schematic for making ethical decisions in the field of journalism.

To recap the model, developed by Ralph B. Potter, Jr. of Harvard Divinity School, in making an ethical decision you consider: (1) the facts; (2) your values or beliefs; (3) the ethical principles, e.g. Aristotle's golden mean or Kant's categorical imperative, you apply to the facts; and (4) your loyalties, e.g. to the paper, your sources, yourself.

A bonus: The Wikipedia page has a very brief and equally clear list of ethical principles:

• Aristotle's Golden Mean. Aristotle's Golden Mean defines moral virtue as a middle state determined practical wisdom that emphasizes moderation and temperance.
  
• Confucius' Golden Mean. Confucius' Golden Mean is more commonly known as the compromise principle and says moral virtue is the appropriate location between two extremes.
  
• Kant's Categorical Imperative. Kant's Categorical Imperative dictates what we must never do, and those actions that have become universal law.
  
• Mill's Principle of Utility. John Stuart Mill's Principle of Utility dictates that we must seek the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people.
  
• Rawl's Veil of Ignorance. John Rawls' Veil of Ignorance asks us to place ourselves in the position of the people our decisions may influence.
  
• Agape Principle [pron. ah-GAH-pay]. This principle, also known as the Judeo-Christian, 'Persons as Ends' principle, emphasizes love for our fellow humans and the golden rule.

COMM 317: Ethics in advertising? ASSIGNMENT FOR MONDAY

Q. If news and advertising are part of the same process, what is that process?

A. Duh!

ALSO: Read Chapter 4, with the above question in the back of your mind.

Here are a couple links ...

One is to a Vatican statement on Ethics in Communication

* * *

We say again: The media do nothing by themselves; they are instruments, tools, used as people choose to use them. In reflecting upon the means of social communication, we must face honestly the "most essential" question raised by technological progress: whether, as a result of it, the human person "is becoming truly better, that is to say more mature spiritually, more aware of the dignity of his humanity, more responsible, more open to others, especially the neediest and the weakest, and readier to give and to aid all" (Pope John Paul II, Redemptor Hominis, 15).

* * *

19. In short, the media can be used for good or for evil—it is a matter of choice. "It can never be forgotten that communication through the media is not a utilitarian exercise intended simply to motivate, persuade or sell. Still less is it a vehicle for ideology. The media can at times reduce human beings to units of consumption or competing interest groups, or manipulate viewers and readers and listeners as mere ciphers from whom some advantage is sought, whether product sales or political support; and these things destroy community. It is the task of communication to bring people together and enrich their lives, not isolate and exploit them. The means of social communication, properly used, can help to create and sustain a human community based on justice and charity; and, in so far as they do that, they will be signs of hope" (Pope John Paul II, Message for the 32nd World Communications Day, 1998).

* * *


The other is to a canned speech on ethics on the Advertising Educational Foundation website.

Tangent: What's the ethics of canned speeches? Or is it a tangent? Maybe not.

Note: The following speech was written by Chris Moore of Ogilvy & Mather to help liven up what can be a bland topic. While it has been edited by the [Advertising Educational Foundation] and contains basic information about topics we have found to be of interest to students, you will want to use your own words and examples where possible.

COMM 317: For Wednesday, Oct. 6

• Does the use of mass communication processes in news and advertising industries imply a need for the same ethical standards?
  
  Getting info to viewers (news - what’s happening - ad product info)
  
  To relay information to the person you want to read your … whatever
  
  I think it’s bullshit. … but they’re right, both make some assumptions about medium, message and receiver
  
  You want to catch viewer’s attention , you don’t want to be writing about a bunch of nonsense that doesn’t matter
  
  News is latebreaking, advertising is prolonged --
  
  You learn about product, facts about product is news, news is facts …
  
  News doesn’t satisfy our needs and wants
  
  News is educational, conveys messages … than it is more sales potentials
  
  News what’s happening … can be segmented for a target audience … ads about a product or service … persuasive
  
  Processes are the same, you’re both increasing awareness of something, whether a news story or a product …
  
  News is more honest, ad targets audience and is not always honest.

COMM 337: 'Sound economic values,' ethics, Aristotle, Bentham and Kant

An interesting take on America's "economic values" by New York Times op-ed columnist David Brooks. A former senior editor of the neo-conservative opinion magazine The Weekly Standard, Brooks' column is unpredictable, and it has managed to infuriate virtually all of his readers at one time or another.

Which is not necessarily a bad thing.

In Tuesday's Times, he discusses America's economic situation in terms that are decidedly moralistic - or ethical.

He sees the beginning of cultural "indulgence and decline" in developments from our low rate of savings wasteful executive compensation packages to "supersize" meals in fast food restaurants "offering gigantic portions that would have been considered socially unacceptable to an earlier generation."

Other sound bites: "[D]espite the country’s notorious materialism, there has always been a countervailing stream of sound economic values ... [but] Over the past few years, however, there clearly has been an erosion in the country’s financial values. ... [We are] oblivious to the large erosion of economic values happening under their feet."

Brooks mentions high levels of personal, corporate and government debt, and adds, "These may seem like dry numbers, mostly of concern to budget wonks. But these numbers are the outward sign of a values shift. If there is to be a correction, it will require a moral and cultural movement. [a] crusade for economic self-restraint ... moral revival."

In a nutshell, Brooks says:

The United States needs a revival of economic self-restraint to restore its financial values and make it a producer economy again, not a consumer economy.

And this:

If there is to be a movement to restore economic values, it will have to cut across the current taxonomies. Its goal will be to make the U.S. again a producer economy, not a consumer economy. It will champion a return to financial self-restraint, large and small.

It will have to take on what you might call the lobbyist ethos — the righteous conviction held by everybody from AARP to the agribusinesses that their groups are entitled to every possible appropriation, regardless of the larger public cost. It will have to take on the self-indulgent popular demand for low taxes and high spending.

A crusade for economic self-restraint would have to rearrange the current alliances and embrace policies like energy taxes and spending cuts that are now deemed politically impossible. But this sort of moral revival is what the country actually needs.

Linked to Brooks' column are 387 reader comments. How do these comments compare to those in other reader forums, say for example those in the State Journal-Register? Are they civil? Do they argue with each other's comments? Do they go in for personal attack, or do they focus on the issues? Do they repeat ideological talking points? How does the tone of this comments board reconcile with President Obama's claim of a "coarsening of our political dialog?"

Other questions: Can economic issues even be discussed in terms of right and wrong? What standards ought to apply? Are there benchmarks that ought to be applied? If so, what are they? Do classic thinkers like Aristotle, Bentham or John Stuart Mill have anything to say to us in the 21st century? If so, what?