Is hero pilot Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger a normal man, or a superhuman paragon of ethics sent to earth to shame us into being better people? His treatment of an overdue library book points to "superhuman":
Three months ago, while Barack Obama was running for president and his rival John McCain kept kinda-sorta threatening to bring up corrupt Chicago politics, Obama called up his good friend in the Illinois State Senate, Emil Jones, Jr, and convinced him to change his mind on an important upcoming vote. The formerly doomed bill suddenly passed! Man, that Chicago machine. So dirty! Of course, it was the ethics bill. The one that forced Governor Blagojevich to get all his corruption in before it went into effect in January, leading to his convenient pre-inauguration downfall.
NBC's on-the-record response to the New York Times' David Barstow regarding his front-page story on their war-profiteering hack retired general Barry McCaffrey is pretty choice, as it's both filled with obvious factual inaccuracies and obtuse point-missing diversions. This is a letter from one major news outlet to another, remember, though it doesn't read like one. The whole thing, obtained by Salon's Glenn Greenwald, is below.
Former MSNBC guy Dan Abrams seems to have noticed that his plan to start a PR firm made up of actively employed members of the media who will sell their consulting services to corporate clients is causing some uproar among people who believe that it would be a blatant conflict of interest for any journalist to be part of it. Which should include you, and anyone else who doesn't think members of the media should take outside pay for PR work. Abrams and his cohort in the project, former HuffPo media critic Rachel Sklar, offered long defenses of the idea to Daily Intel. Let's do some critical analysis, shall we?
Harvey Levin, the schlocky managing editor of thieving celebrity news conglomerate TMZ, will have you know he's just a naturally honest man playing this dirty game. "We don't want to be a red carpet," he said, strangely, during a July interview at the EconCeleb conference. Harvey has drawn a very clear line for himself about what he will and won't cover; a line that goes back and forth and around in pinwheels until we really don't know if he's just messing with all of us:
If you ever selected a plastic surgeon or LASIK doctor based on a random YouTube video, it's probably apt that that video only happened as a result of an under-the-table payment and the doctor was really incompetent and now you walk around blind and ugly. But what about the victims of the future? Plenty of doctors have gone right ahead and offered patients rebates or huge discounts in exchange for posting glowing videos about their procedures online, although something like that would be patently unethical in the "regular" media. Docs are like, "Huh, rules, really? I just thought it would be nice!" Patients are like, "Sweet, cheap surgery!" The loser is you, the affluent, narcissistic consumer. A couple of typical videos are after the jump; just because "a famous celebrity (name undisclosed for privacy)" gets LASIK from Dr. Feinerman doesn't mean you have to, too:
Bill Clinton has become an embarrassment to his party, friends, and family, with his tone-deaf angry tirades and bizarre rhetorical missteps and also his habit of globe-trotting with scummy over-sexed billionaires. But if you tell him this, he becomes quite angry! Todd Purdum, who, despite being married to a former Clinton staffer, has written a number of negative things about Clinton over the years, is now the target of a raging tirade by the former president. All because he insinuated some untoward things using dozens of unnamed anonymous sources in Vanity Fair! Now Purdum has responded (clip attached). So. What did the article do wrong? And what did Clinton get wrong? And, uh, what the hell happened to the guy?
Earlier this month we told you about Jake Adelstein, the American reporter who spent 15 years covering organized crime in Japan and who now, unfortunately, finds himself and his family marked for death by an angry gangster. Adelstein's tormentor, Yakuza boss Tadamasa Goto, has been very sick lately; Adelstein's hope was that Goto would pass away, so he could return to America to be with his family without fear of assassination. Well, bad news: it's been revealed that Goto and three of his henchmen got precious, lifesaving liver transplants in Los Angeles (while many others died waiting). Thanks, science!
Popular Page Six gossip hack Paula Froelich had a party thrown in her honor last night, complete with her own signature cocktail: the IZZE FROLIC. Awww! She sent an email to all of her contacts saying, "It seems someone has decided to name a drink after me. I think we can use it as a good excuse to go play." But when the party happened, one boldface name was conspicuously absent: New York Post reporter Paula Froelich! So what happened? Bothersome ethics, of course.
Journalism students in Reno, Nevada (they have schools there?) are all going to sign a symbolic ethics pledge tomorrow, thus guaranteeing forever the survival and viability of journalism in America. The story is kind of too sad to even make fun of. Except not really! They're having a reception in the atrium of the Reynolds School of Journalism at the University of Nevada and all the seniors will solemnly promise to not make stuff up. If they ever get jobs. That's what's been wrong this whole time! We forgot to make all the reporters put their hands on bibles before filing stories!
Superstar MarketWatch media columnist Jon Friedman remembered recently that there was this young fellow who worked for the Times once who got in trouble for making things up and lying. It was a bit of a scandal! It happened five years ago this... season, so Friedman asks a couple folk what they think of the current state of media ethics. Salon's Joan Walsh says the Jayson Blair (for that was the fabricator's name) scandal forced writers and editors to remind themselves not to lie, or to maybe fact-check once in a while. Editor & Publisher's Greg Mitchell says the scandal encouraged more papers to issue corrections more often and not plagiarize so much. But a couple critics note that Jayson Blair is really the least of the newsmedia's woes in 2008.
There was a ton of debate about the death of Paul Tilley, the ad agency exec who committed suicide last month. Some people charged mean bloggers with helping to push him over the edge—charges that seemed increasingly ridiculous, as people took time to consider the full situation. But Liberty Mutual, the huge insurance company, had another thought about Tilley's death: what a great way to promote our company! And that's exactly what they did, the sickos.
Stanley Fish, the author, law professor, columnist, and one of the Times' innumerable bloggers, thinks it would be helpful if readers know exactly what his motivation is with all this highbrow writing he does. "Given a choice between being trivial and being ethical in any direction whatsoever, I'll take trivial (although I might want to debate the judgment), because ethics is not something I'm doing in these columns," he explains in his latest entry. How about superfluous, then? Would you consider being pompous and superfluous, Mr. Fish? Sure you would!
The formal final word on the Northwestern University J-school scandal that rocked the world has arrived. As you'll recall, the scandal arose after Medill Dean John Lavine couldn't snappily produce hard evidence of the origins of some anonymous student quotes he used in the alumni magazine. This led to an uproar, which was inane. Now, the formal investigation of this serious matter has concluded. The letter from the Provost has a satisfying undertone of prickliness: the investigative committee said Lavine "could not reasonably be expected to have retained for a year the notes or e-mails documenting the sources of quotations used in the letter; nonetheless, the committee advised that in the future such meticulous archiving might be desirable given the heightened awareness of the problems that can result." FINE, we'll save all the paper scraps for you annoying students! Lavine has also promised not to use any more unattributed quotes in "Medill publications," thereby obliterating the small chance that some newsworthy investigation would ever be printed therein. Truly a step forward for journalism. The Provost's entire note is below.
New York Times ombudsman Clark Hoyt's column this weekend took on Times magazine Q&A'er Deborah Solomon in response to a recent New York Press cover story on Solomon's editing antics. (Solomon's penchant for refashioning the responses of her interview subjects for her 700-word weekly column earned her the serious ire of NPR host Ira Glass, columnist Amy Dickinson and the LA Times critic Christopher Knight.) Solomon doesn't make much of an effort to come off clean in Hoyt's column, calling Dickinson "boastful," (mean!) and misplacing the tape of her Ira Glass interview (whoops!). Solomon also told the Times' internal watchdog that she was just joking when she told a Columbia Journalism Review reporter in 2005 to "Feel free to mix the pieces of this interview around, which is what I do. There's no Q. and A. protocol... you can write the manual." Hold your horses, Deb, Hoyt writes. "In fact, there is a protocol, and 'Questions For' isn't living up to it," he says. Oh snap. The take-away point here may be, however, that Christ, the New York Press had a story with legs! One with tormented prose that could easily have been cut in half, but nevertheless! You don't have a story until the New York Times says you do, so by all means, congratulations.
The New York Press is carrying a breathless 3,000-word piece today alleging that Deborah Solomon, the awesomely tactless New York Times Magazine Q&A queen, redistributed and flat-out invented questions she hadn't actually asked in final versions of interviews that she conducted with "This American Life" host Ira Glass and advice columnist Amy Dickinson. The subjects cried foul to Press reporter Matt Elzweig, who was until about a year and a half ago a security guard at the Met. The Times was not particularly responsive to his inquiries. Elzweig's piece reads as though he's just discovered White House plumbers in Times executive editor Bill Keller's basement. Instead, the Press has, for the most part, stumbled upon a fairly common editing practice.
Most of the free content online is supported by advertising. But most advertising is designed to interrupt the content. Even Google's supposedly helpful text ads are, in the end, a distraction; otherwise people would just search for ads instead of real results. Most ads are worse, a moving distraction while I'm trying to read text. So since the dancing cowboy will never make me buy , is it wrong if I just block them?
We're not going to get on our high horse to condemn plagiarism. (That'd be just so predictable.) But may we get on our high horse for a moment to condemn stupid plagiarism? The News gleefully notes today that the Post suspended reporter Andy Geller for a month "after the newspaper discovered he copied massive sections of an article." And where did he find the article from which he plagiarized? In the Times. On the same fucking day.
Here's a good one: Tyler Green at Modern Art Notes reports that Times art critic Grace Glueck sits on the Board of Trustees at the Clark Art Institute in the Berkshires. Which makes writing about art so much easier for her, really. Except:
From the front page of today's Times Business section:
