Ethics Newsline®

Question: “[Which of these opposite phrases] do you feel better describe news organizations generally?”

It could have been a made-for-television script. Here’s how it begins:

A Big Ten basketball team rolls into its first March Madness tournament game with five of its top players sidelined. Its opponent roars to a 45-26 halftime lead. Then a walk-on player erupts like a volcano, bringing the underdogs to within two points. It’s now a 65-63 game. There’s 1:42 to go. Hands up if you know how Hollywood would end it.

But, alas, this isn’t tinsel-town. This is real. The Big Ten team is the University of Minnesota Gophers. The occasion is last Thursday’s NCAA Tournament opener in Seattle against Gonzaga University. The walk-on is Minnesota’s Dusty Rychart, brandishing 23 points and 17 rebounds by game’s end.

And the reason that four of Minnesota’s five top players were benched? That’s what this story is about — a chilling reminder of why ethics matters, and of the blistering speed with which past deceptions can become present disasters.

The ethics story broke on Wednesday, March 10, the day before the game. Detailing an investigation that started last December, the St. Paul Pioneer Press front-paged allegations from an academic counselor who had been employed by the athletic program. Her job, it seems, was to help student-athletes cheat in their coursework. The employee, Jan Gangelhoff, estimates she wrote more than 400 classroom assignments, including term papers, for at least 20 players between 1993 to 1998. Proof? She had 225 of those papers on her computer, some of which matched printed copies that had been graded by faculty members and returned to the students.

Four of those 20 students were to have played in Thursday’s game. The fact that they didn’t bears testament to University of Minnesota president Mark Yudof’s courage. Hours before Thursday’s game, he declared the four ineligible. His position stands in crisp contrast to that of Minnesota’s new governor, former professional wrestler Jesse Ventura. Gov. Ventura used the word "despicable" — but applied it not to the athletic program’s organized cheating, but to the newspaper that ran the story and spoiled people’s "fun."

A long-running scam. High-level complicity. Payments by coaches. Down-to-the-wire decisions. Nationwide humiliation. A governor who doesn’t get it. A university president who does. This story has more layers than a Milanese lasagna. What’s to be learned here?

Three things. First, when you start by cutting corners in large, complex organizations, you can end up tearing out whole corner-posts. It’s bad enough to treat young athletes like chattel, caring only for their bodies and deliberately refusing to help them improve their minds. It’s worse to try to weasel around NCAA standards — especially with athletics already taking such a bludgeoning from the Olympics scandals. And it’s unconscionable to degrade the value of university degrees for the thousands of hard-working students who still believe there’s a connection between honest effort and academic success. Lesson 1: Ethics escalates.

Second, in an organization that depends on customer satisfaction, people are watching, and they really do care. You can’t write this one off as "no big deal." This is not a story of victimless crime or consenting adults. It’s a story that proves that cheating is frighteningly important, and that it can have enormous, tournament-class ramifications. Lesson 2: Ethics has consequences.

Third, in an organization moving into the 21st century, technology sometimes finds you before you find technology. A generation ago, Jan Gangelhoff couldn’t have produced such voluminous work — sometimes submitting the same paper to three different classes for three different students, churning them out like a well-oiled cheating machine. Nor would she have had them still intact in her computer and ready to turn over to the Pioneer Press, which put some of them up on its Web site (http://www.pioneerplanet.com). Lesson 3: Ethics will out.

Heroes? So far, President Yudof is shaping up as one. That’s as it should be. In a large organization, ethics has to start at the top. And Ms. Gangelhoff? If Hollywood scripted this story, she’d land in the heroes column, too. Should she? Probably not. Yes, she came forth — but only now. For five years she was complicit in the deception. Surely, had she spoken up earlier, this whole messy spectacle might never have happened.

Which suggests still another lesson. Organizations need to establish an ethical culture in which the Jan Gangelhoffs of the world find their moral compass earlier rather than later. Was any ethics training available to her? Did anyone think that, given her role, she might benefit from some greater moral clarity? Evidently not. Yet that’s just the kind of intervention that could have helped avoid this maelstrom. In the end, ethics doesn’t need to be so seismic. Done well, done steadily, it’s preventative, not just curative.

Oh, and the game against Gonzaga? Minnesota lost, 75-63. That, too, could have been prevented. Under the circumstances, however, it’s probably part of the cure.

(c)1999 by Rushworth M. Kidder

We frequently take our expectations of privacy for granted in situations where that expectation is actually not a given. Two cases in this week’s edition of Business Ethics Newsline illustrate what may be one of the most unsettling issues of the coming century: the battle for privacy in cyberspace.

Our lead story concerns a lawsuit by Raytheon against the users and operator of an Internet chat room. Raytheon claims that the anonymous chatters broke company policy by discussing proprietary topics online — and the firm wants the chat room’s operator to turn over the real identities behind the Internet nicknames.

In other stories from our weekly wrap of the top news in ethics, we examine a related item with equally significant consequences: a Massachusetts computer programmer’s discovery that Windows 98 inserts an embedded identifier code that could be used to track down the authors of documents created within the Windows operating system.

This busy news week produced several stories relating to the intersection of international affairs and ethics:

• Charges that the Chinese stole nuclear secrets, and that the Clinton administration was slow to react
• Allegations that U.S. oil companies sanction violence by the Nigerian government
• A complaint that a multinational firm in Mexico is polluting the waters of a major ecological reserve
• A controversy over a Canada-based religious group that buys Sudanese slaves in order to free them
• A report in a medical journal claiming that use of placebos in developing countries is ethically justified

Three stories making ethics-related headlines conclude our domestic coverage: a government suit against Wal-Mart over disability-related questions on employment applications; a report about allegations of irregularities in college sports programs; and hearings into the way sweepstakes firms conduct their business. And we conclude our wrap of the news with a story about the troubling intersection of science and its subjects: marine life harmed by the scientists who are studying it.

We have two stories this week from our Canada-based correspondent. The first is a look at the unintended consequences caused by the shadow of the media spotlight — a case that fits in well with this week’s research report about the public’s increasingly dismal view of the press. The other story centers on allegations that a Canadian firm is improperly subsidizing exports.

And we conclude our report with our “Whatever Happened To…” feature, bringing you up to date on the U.S. Justice Department’s antitrust action against computer chip maker Intel.

Have a productive, ethical week.

–Carl Hausman

CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts
Defense contractor Raytheon Corp. announced last week that it is suing 21 disgruntled employees who chatted online about their grievances with the 100,000-employee firm.

Raytheon has asked a federal judge to order Internet portal operator Yahoo, Inc., which hosts the Raytheon chat room, to turn over the names of the code-named chatters.

Yahoo says it will turn over the names if the court issues such an order, according to a report in the Boston Herald.

Raytheon contends that members of the online group broke their Raytheon contracts by disclosing confidential information, primarily proprietary data on manpower projections and financial issues, the Associated Press reported.

Raytheon’s lawsuit seeks the identities of the chatters, as well as a gag order on further online proprietary disclosures, compensatory damages, attorney fees, and expenses.

WASHINGTON
Microsoft Corp. announced last week that it would change a programming function in its Windows 98 operating system that could allow the company to identify an individual Windows user by reading a unique code embedded in many Windows-produced documents.

Microsoft said it had been alerted to the embedded code by a Massachusetts software programmer, who discovered that Windows was stamping documents, including those generated by Microsoft Word and Excel, with unique user-specific identifiers, according to the New York Times.

Those electronic “fingerprints,” together with information gathered by Microsoft during users’ registration of Windows 98, could enable the company to track down the creators of electronic documents, the Times reported.

Some privacy rights groups claimed the fingerprinting was intentional, noting that the hidden code allowed Microsoft to collect valuable information about users registering Windows 98 — even if those users explicitly indicated that they did not want to transmit their information to Microsoft, the Chicago Tribune reported.

Microsoft officials told the Times and the Reuters news agency that Microsoft would delete information collected so far via the digital fingerprints, would offer affected users an electronic patch to fix the problem by summer, and would take the identifier out of future releases of Windows.

WASHINGTON
U.S. Department of Energy secretary Bill Richardson last week fired a Chinese-American scientist who allegedly stole nuclear secrets for the Chinese, heightening tensions between China and the United States over the trade in sensitive high technology.

Wen Ho Lee, a native of Taiwan, was fired from his twelve-year post at the Los Alamos nuclear research facility after a three-year FBI probe found evidence of security violations and “improper contact with foreign officials,” Richardson told NBC news.

Lee has not been charged with any criminal wrongdoing.

The U.S. government began its investigation after a sudden increase in Chinese nuclear know-how alerted U.S. officials to a possible leak from Los Alamos in the mid-1980s, the Associated Press reported.

The incident has fueled fiery condemnation from some U.S. lawmakers, who say the Clinton administration slowed its investigation to avoid upsetting China, and from Chinese authorities, who deny the espionage charges.

NEW YORK
The Congressional Black Caucus last week urged quick approval of a federal investigation into the alleged bankrolling of violence by U.S. oil companies doing business in Nigeria.

Most of the allegations focus on Chevron Corp., which has been accused of using the Nigerian military to violently suppress two demonstrations at its Nigerian oil fields in May 1998 and January 1999. Four people were killed and 67 people are missing and presumed dead after the 1999 protest.

Chevron officials deny any wrongdoing, insisting that company helicopters and hardware were used to attack demonstrators only after being commandeered by Nigeria’s military forces.

U.S.-based Human Rights Watch claims that Chevron and other foreign oil companies are funding the suppression of local protestors and exploiting Nigeria’s vast oil supply at the expense of local communities, Reuters reported.

MEXICO CITY
Mexican and U.S. environmental groups last week filed a criminal complaint against a Mexican-Japanese salt company that they say is polluting a protected marine sanctuary in Baja California, killing hundreds of protected sea turtles, gray whales, and fish.

Greenpeace and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) joined Mexican groups in calling for criminal charges against the salt giant ESSA, co-owned by Japan’s Mitsubishi Corp. and the Mexican government.

The groups fault the Mexican government for conflict of interest and inaction, saying that government studies have shown illegal levels of ESSA pollution for years, the Reuters news agency reported.

Government investigators have blamed ESSA’s brine discharges — which they say contain heavy metals and salt in concentrations between 100 and 300 times sea levels — for causing wildlife kill-offs in the Vizcaino Biosphere Reserve, the largest such sanctuary in Latin America and a U.N. World Heritage Site since 1993.

ESSA has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing, and is preparing to request government approval for an expansion of its salt-making facilities in the Reserve.

OTTAWA
A Canadian religious leader last week defended his Christian organization’s purchase of the freedom of 325 Sudanese slaves, insisting that the political objections to purchasing human life take second place to the rights of the freed captives.

Rev. Cal Bombay’s Crossroads Christian Communications is one of several groups that have paid slave traders to release more than 6,600 Sudanese slaves in the late 1990s, the Reuters news agency reported.

Sudanese officials and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) have criticized the practice of buying slaves’ freedom, saying that such purchases fuel further abductions and demean the humanity of captives.

But Bombay told Reuters that the $100-per-head fee paid by his organization to free the slaves is justified when you “see their joy . . . when you tell them they’re free to come to their families.”

NEW YORK
The use of placebos in medical tests on HIV-infected pregnant women in developing countries is ethically justified, a panel of doctors, bioethicists, and health policy professionals announced last week.

The statement, published in the medical journal Lancet, was in response to growing concerns over the use of placebos by doctors searching for effective ways to fight transmission of HIV from pregnant mothers to their newborn children, the Reuters news agency reported.

The panel said that while administering inactive medication to some of the test subjects is regrettable, it is a vital and justifiable method of investigating the effectiveness of treatment programs and fighting the spread of HIV in countries that lack adequate financing and health care services.

SACRAMENTO
The U.S. government sued retail giant Wal-Mart last week, charging the company with violating the Americans with Disabilities Act by using a pre-employment questionnaire to screen out disabled applicants.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) claimed Wal-Mart’s job application asks applicants about disabilities before making a job offer, a question deemed illegal under terms of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Wal-Mart officials told the Associated Press that the question had been removed from most applications after legal challenges in 1997, and was intended to make sure Wal-Mart could accommodate applicants with special needs, not disqualify those applicants.

ST. PAUL, Minnesota
Corruption scandals dominated college sports news last week, as the University of Minnesota’s men’s basketball squad was accused of tolerating academic fraud, while UCLA’s football team was cleared of point-shaving accusations.

• The University of Minnesota benched four members of its starting basketball team after two former academic tutors told the St. Paul Pioneer Press that they had written papers, taken tests, and prepared homework for the men and at least 16 other players from 1993 to 1998.

• In Los Angeles, the FBI announced it was dropping its investigation into alleged point shaving by members of UCLA’s 1998 football team, which lost two key games after a season of championship-level wins.

WASHINGTON
Sweepstakes companies defended their practices before a Senate committee last week, but their claims that the contests are on the up-and-up met with skepticism and some hostility from some senators who claimed the contest advertisements are misleading, manipulative, and blatantly fraudulent.

Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), co-sponsor of proposed legislation to regulate the sweepstakes industry, blasted contest organizers for the “purposely misleading, purposely deceptive” fine print and for the deceptively personal tone of their mailings, the Associated Press reported.

Proposed legislation would require sweepstakes mailings to clearly state the odds of winning, and to explicitly say that purchasing products advertised in the sweepstakes would not increase the entrant’s odds of winning.

Spokespeople for sweepstakes companies, including Publishers Clearing House, Reader’s Digest, Time Inc., and American Family Publishers, told the Senate panel that their mailings are fair and clear to any “reasonable person.”

LONDON
Researchers studying marine life in the deep sea are unintentionally blinding the animals that they are trying to examine, the scientific journal Nature reported last week.

Scientists exploring the volcanically active sea floor found that spotlights on the researchers’ submarines had destroyed the retinas of a large percentage of shrimp, which have become specially adapted to feed at the murky ocean bottom.

Dr. Edward Gaten, who co-authored the study at the request of the Southampton Oceanography Centre, told the BBC that the accidental blinding is an “unfortunate” collision of scientists and their subjects.

Blinding the shrimp may be invalidating the deep-sea research, Gaten admitted to the BBC, but said “you can’t do anything else. It’s a very dangerous place . . .and pilots must have strong lights to see.”

The shrimp may still be able to feed by using their sense of smell to locate food, the BBC reported.

Special to Newsline from Canadian correspondent Errol P. Mendes

VICTORIA, British Columbia
TV pictures of a raid on the house of a prominent politician are at the center of an ethics controversy here.

On March 1, 1999, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) raided the house of the premier of British Columbia, Glen Clark. A television crew was waiting for the raid to take place and taped the premier pacing in his house while the RCMP performed a search of the house.

The pictures led to rampant media speculation that the premier was under a criminal investigation and that he was about to step down.

The reality was that the RCMP raid was in connection with an investigation centering on a charity casino license that had been granted to a partnership that included a friend and neighbor of the premier’s, Dimitrios Pilarinos.

Pilarinos had been charged with running an illegal gambling operation. The premier, according to reliable news sources, had not been involved in the granting of the license, but had $11,000 worth of renovations carried out on his home by Pilarinos. Clark and his family had also gone on holiday with the Pilarinos family.

The RCMP were looking for bills associated with the renovations and took away the house plans which indicated the scope of the renovations.

An interim report by the province’s conflict of interest commissioner exonerated the premier.

Clark has confirmed that he has no intention of stepping down, although he said he considered it in the middle of the media frenzy, which he described as a nightmare for him and his family.

The ethics spotlight is now turning on the question of who tipped off the media that an RCMP raid was imminent on the house of one of Canada’s leading politicians.

Special to Newsline from Canadian correspondent Errol P. Mendes

GENEVA
The World Trade Organization is questioning whether Canada has violated trade rules in a case involving the aerospace industry.

The Financial Post revealed that Canada’s refusal to give detailed information about its highly sensitive export financing programs may lead to a WTO panel declaring that some of the financing schemes violate international trade rules, deeming them a prohibited export subsidy.

The controversy centers on a Canadian airplane manufacturer, Bombardier Inc.

This latest flap follows on the heels of a WTO panel ruling that another federal program, the Technology Partnerships Canada, was an illegal subsidy because Canada had failed to prove that the repayable grants scheme was not a method to directly subsidize exports.

Observers note that in a country that relies on exports for over a third of its GDP, such issues can have a serious economic impact.

WASHINGTON
Intel Corp. last week agreed to a ninth inning settlement with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) over charges that it abused its market power, heading off an antitrust trial scheduled to begin last week.

The FTC had charged Intel with withholding vital technical information from three computer companies — Intergraph, Compaq, and Digital — because the companies refused to license key patents to Intel for free, the Associated Press reported.

Intel admitted taking retaliatory measures against the companies, but denied that it had used coercion or exploited its market strength in doing so.

Under terms of the settlement, Intel promised to stop withholding technical information in intellectual property disputes, with special exceptions, according to the Associated Press.

Intel avoided admitting that its 80-percent worldwide market share gives the company a monopoly on computer chips — an admission that would result in strict government regulation and a more difficult defense in a private antitrust trial still pending against Intel, the BBC reported.

The settlement is scheduled for full FTC review and approval within two weeks.

From the Pew Research Center for People and the Press:

“The public’s evaluation of press values has plummeted over the past 15 years, with increasing numbers of Americans saying the news media is immoral, unprofessional, and disrespectful. Consistent with this, public assessment of the news media’s job performance remains anemic, and the grades given to the press for its coverage of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal are poor.

“The decline in the Americans’ ratings of press values is startling. The number of Americans who describe the news media as immoral jumped three-fold to 38 percent from 13 percent in 1985. The increase in those who say the news media lack professionalism is comparable, climbing to 32 percent from 11 percent. And today, two-thirds of Americans say the press displays a disregard for the people it covers (67 percent from 48 percent). Two-thirds of the public also says the press tries to cover up its mistakes — a jump since 1985, when just over half of the public said so.

“The press’ role in protecting democracy has also tumbled in the public mind. Americans are divided 45 percent-to-38 percent over whether the news media protect or hurt democracy. In 1985, the public saw the press as a democratic caretaker by a two-to-one margin (54 percent-to-23 percent). In addition Americans now split evenly (41 percent-to-42 percent) over whether the press is too critical of the United States, a significant change from the mid-1980s when the public described the news media as standing up for America by a 52 percent-to-30 percent margin.

“While a majority of Americans continue to see the news media’s influence on the rise, the number who say it is in decline has nearly doubled since 1985. Today, 32 percent say the press is declining in influence, up from 17 percent. In another remarkable decline in esteem for the news media, a 56 percent majority of the public describes the press as politically biased, an 11 percentage point increase over this same period.”

“Every man takes care that his neighbor shall not cheat him. But a day comes when he begins to care that he does not cheat his neighbor. Then all goes well.”

–Ralph Waldo Emerson (U.S. essayist and poet, 1803-1882)