Ethics Newsline®

For the past few weeks, I’ve been waking earlier than normal. Restless by 5:30, I’ve been throwing back the covers, throwing on my shoes, and throwing the ball for the dogs — all of this an hour before I can normally pry open my eyes. After a few days of failing to finger the cause, the reason hit me square in the eyes: Daylight was arriving earlier.

Up here in Maine, this lengthening of days is cause for great celebration. In the depths of winter, the locals often joke about having only two seasons: winter and the Fourth of July. But as Maine tips back towards the sun and daylight begins to do overtime, we thaw out a bit, laughing at our own hyperbole and warming up to the truth: Spring is coming.

Driving home from work last week, I was thinking about this human habit — the ease, during dark days, of slipping into hyperbole. On that day, a Tuesday, I passed two groups of people decked out in picket signs and parkas — one group protesting the war on Iraq, the other supporting military action. Though both groups waved placards urging me to honk, my horn stayed silent — my hands at “10″ and “2,” my mind deep in thought.

The thing is: I wanted to honk — for both groups. It’s not that I’m indecisive or honk-happy or a hawkish dove or a dovish hawk. Rather, it’s that my feelings about this war — its beginnings, its procession, its uncertain conclusion — fall somewhere between the peacenik’s plea and the warrior’s cry. That’s something that a honk — a two-second bleat at 50 miles per hour — can’t convey.

Too often these days, though, that’s what we’re hearing: bleats and sound bites. Opinion polls and politicos are being trotted out by all sides to reduce complex feelings to simple statistics. It’s a binary game: You’re either for the war or against it, either old Europe or new, either a patriot or an enemy. In this game, hyperbole’s the rule and you spin to win.

In the process, though, something vital — our understanding of one another and the ethical complexities that knit us together — is being lost. Tongues are turning sharp, ears turning deaf, and minds turning off. And that’s a dangerous state for a nation built on democracy and diversity.

From abortion to Arctic drilling, civil rights to Iraq, Americans are often asked to polarize their opinions in a push to get things done. With our eyes on the prize, we forget about the process — that frustrating, confounding, painful, and astounding exchange in which we learn that maybe there’s more than one right answer … and that maybe we don’t know it yet.

What we also often fail to notice is this: Being forced to choose between polar opposites is usually a bogus choice, dumbing down the discussion and ratcheting up the rhetoric. In the process, we isolate ourselves and make false foes of friends. The current conflict with Iraq is proving to be no exception. From TV’s talking heads to Capitol Hill heavyweights, rhetoric is replacing what is really needed: a reasoned dialogue that admits both nuance and difference without disparaging either.

Last Tuesday, driving silently by the protestors, I hoped for this — more dialogue, fewer horns. That evening, I imagined both groups gathering at the local pub, unexpectedly sharing stools side by side, shedding their parkas and their preconceptions. I imagined their conversations turning from the war to the winter, this one especially cold and tough.

It was a good wish — and one I went to bed with, waking early again to play fetch with the dogs. Early light at this latitude means many good things — warm nights, evening sails, fresh tomatoes — as well as one bad: Mud season.

As winter slips its grip up here, the ground — frozen solid for months — goes to sludge. It’s a messy season, especially at our house, where happy dogs track in mud, blurring the line for a time between indoors and out. This year, I don’t think I’m going to mind so much: Mud season’s a good reminder that life gets messy, especially when once-stolid things — frozen earth, fixed opinions, false opposites — begin to unlock.

(c)2003 Institute for Global Ethics

“I would have expected that with so much international pressure, the government would have quickly released more information — they are sensitive to this — but this time they’ve still been tardy. The government’s general attitude about public disclosure is that when there’s a problem, unless there’s a rule that requires disclosure, you don’t speak out.”

– Prof. Mao Shoulong, a public administration expert at People’s University in Beijing, talking to the New York Times about China’s reluctance to provide details about the initial emergence of severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS. The disease appeared last November in China — a fact officials waited four months to acknowledge. In early March, “they insisted that the situation was fully under control, shared none of their data, and declined to join international investigations,” according to the Times. (“China Yields Data on Mystery Illness Reluctantly,” New York Times, Apr. 3.)

* * * * *

“What we have done is to give timely notice about the pneumonia, in accordance with our national conditions and law.”

– Zhang Wenkang, China’s minister of health, speaking at a news conference, as reported by the New York Times last week. As of Monday, 100 people had died from SARS; another 2,800 people are believed to be infected. (“China Defends Actions in Battling Contagious Illness,” New York Times, Apr. 4.)

NEW YORK
Veteran war reporter Peter Arnett was fired last week by NBC, MSNBC, and National Geographic following the journalist’s impromptu interview with Iraqi TV, which included remarks criticized as unpatriotic and unwise.

Arnett, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting during the Vietnam War, covered the first Gulf War in 1991 and returned for the current attack on Iraq as a correspondent for National Geographic.

Following a news conference last week, the state-controlled Iraqi TV requested a 15-minute interview with Arnett, who said he acquiesced as a professional courtesy.

In the interview, Arnett praised the Iraqi government’s treatment of journalists, noted strong antiwar protests in the United States and elsewhere, and said the U.S. military’s first war plan had failed because of Iraqi resistance, reported the Los Angeles Times.

MSNBC, which had been airing Arnett’s reports from Baghdad, initially backed the interview, saying, “His remarks were analytical in nature and were not intended to be anything more. His outstanding reporting on the war speaks for itself.”

Less than 12 hours later, facing a barrage of outraged criticism, the network reversed course, saying Arnett was “wrong to grant the interview” and it was “wrong for him to discuss his personal observations and opinions.”

The network, as well as parent firm NBC and National Geographic, all fired Arnett. He has since been hired to report for Britain’s Daily Mirror tabloid and an independent Belgian network, reported the Associated Press.

Arnett has called his interview a “stupid misjudgment” and apologized for creating “a firestorm in the United States,” but denied saying anything that warranted his dismissal.

“I said in that interview essentially what we all know about the war, that there have been delays in implementing policy, there have been surprises,” Arnett told NBC’s “Today” show.

Last week’s controversy is not the first time Arnett has been in the hot seat. CNN fired Arnett in 1998 for reporting a story dubbed “Operation Tailwind,” which accused the U.S. government of using sarin gas on U.S. soldiers in Vietnam. CNN later retracted the documentary, citing “serious faults.” Arnett said he had simply been reading a script, reported the New York Times.

In a separate incident, the Pentagon removed Fox News reporter Geraldo Rivera from Baghdad last week after he drew a diagram in the sand to show U.S. troop movements and strategy, a violation of Pentagon rules.

Fox News defended Rivera’s departure as voluntary and his mistake as innocent, saying he had not attended the Pentagon’s special training for journalists, reported the Los Angeles Times.

LOS ANGELES
The Los Angeles Times last week fired an award-winning photographer after discovering that he had electronically doctored one of the paper’s front-page photos from the Iraqi war.

Brian Walski, who had been with the Times since 1998, was fired while on assignment in Iraq after admitting that he had used photo-editing software to make one of this photographs more dramatic.

The photograph composited two shots taken moments apart, utilizing elements from each to heighten tension. The shot, which showed a British soldier urging Iraqi civilians to take cover, appeared with the headline, “In Basra, Panic as a Tactic of War.”

The Times fired Walski after readers wrote the paper, noting that some of the photograph’s subjects appeared twice in the same image.

Walski’s actions violated both journalism ethics for news photography as well as Times policy, reported the Associated Press.

SACRAMENTO
In a major battle over free-speech rights in cyberspace, the California Supreme Court heard oral arguments last week in a case pitting the powerful Intel Corp. against a disgruntled ex-employee who sent thousands of emails to company workers, criticizing Intel for firing him.

The chipmaker’s suit targets Ken Hamidi, a former Intel engineer who was fired in 1995 after a protracted dispute over disability leave.

Hamidi, angry at Intel, used the company’s email system to send as many as 100,000 messages between 1996 and 1998 to current workers complaining about his treatment.

Using a novel interpretation of the law, Intel sued Hamidi for a type of trespassing, saying the emails had damaged the company’s property by decreasing worker productivity, reported the Reuters news agency.

The company also claims that its email system and computers are private property to which Hamidi has no legal right of access. Hamidi disagreed, saying the company is using a ruse to censor protected speech it does not like.

Intel won the first two rounds in lower courts. Last week, the state’s highest court took up the case, which has earned national prominence as a bellwether of how courts will treat emailed speech in the workplace.

A ruling from the court, which appeared evenly split with the one remaining justice undecided, is expected within 90 days, reported the online legal publication Law.com.

BIRMINGHAM, Alabama
HealthSouth Corp., accused of deliberately overstating $1.4 billion in earnings, last week fired chief executive and chairman Richard Scrushy as well as its accounting firm, Ernst & Young LLP.

Scrushy, founder of the corporation that became the nation’s leading operator of rehabilitation hospitals, is accused of masterminding the accounting fraud, which investigators now claim dates back to at least 1989.

Noting that the company needs formal shareholder approval to remove Scrushy, the HealthSouth board of directors urged him to resign, warning that the firm may try to reclaim some of his compensation. Scrushy pulled in more than $11 million in salary, bonuses, and stock options in 2001, reported the Reuters news agency.

In addition to Scrushy, eight HealthSouth workers have now been charged with abetting the fraud. Most are likely to cooperate with prosecutors in the hopes of receiving reduced sentences, according to press reports.

Chief among the government’s new allies is Emery Harris, HealthSouth’s 33-year-old vice president for finance and assistant controller. Harris and two former CFOs have been charged with criminal fraud.

“Mr. Harris’s detailed knowledge of the mechanics of the various fraud schemes has sustained the pace of this investigation and helped identify other individuals who have knowledge of the fraud,” said U.S. attorney Alice Martin.

Last week, five HealthSouth executives were charged with joining in the conspiracy to inflate earnings and overstate assets by $800 million. They include the firm’s chief information officer and four finance vice presidents, reported Reuters.

PricewaterhouseCoopers’ forensic division has been hired by HealthSouth to trace the fraud and find the company’s real value. HealthSouth stock, which was trading at $15.90 less than a year ago, closed last week at 8.5 cents, according to the New York Times.

The Washington Post notes that Scrushy will likely face a tough time as the first high-ranking executive to be tried under provisions of last year’s Sarbanes-Oxley corporate reform act, which requires chief executives to validate their firm’s accounting records.

Scrushy “is not in a position to say, ‘I never even looked at it,’” securities lawyer Joel Greenberg told the Post. “His defense is going to [have to] be either they were accurate or ‘I was misled.’”

WASHINGTON
In a blow to the HMO industry, the U.S. Supreme Court last week unanimously ruled that states can force insurance providers to open their networks to physicians who are not part of the firms’ official plans.

The court’s decision effectively expands consumers’ right to be treated by the doctor of their choice, so long as the doctor agrees to abide by the patient’s HMO payment plan, reported the Washington Post.

The case before the court centered on Kentucky, one of 21 states that have enacted so-called any willing provider laws, most of which were designed during the early days of HMOs when the plans severely limited choice of providers.

Kentucky’s law, passed in 1994, was designed to help patients who were increasingly being forced to drive long distances or drop their doctors when workplace health plans came under the control of HMOs.

Seven HMOs and a state HMO trade group challenged the Kentucky provision, complaining that it violated a federal law forbidding states from regulating workplace benefits.

Two lower courts sided against the industry, ruling that the Kentucky law regulated not workplace benefits, but rather the insurance industry providing those benefits, exempting it from the federal restrictions.

Last week, the Supreme Court unanimously agreed, upholding the right of states to force open HMO networks without opining whether such moves are necessary or actually benefit patients.

The HMO industry last week warned that the decision could prove a Pyrrhic victory for consumers, who may be forced to pay increasingly steep premiums to cover the expanded choice in care providers.

Other analysts contended that the “any willing provider” laws are mostly relics of past days when HMOs wielded potentially abusive power. But as the industry has expanded, so has its need for network doctors, resulting in wider networks and more choice, according to the Post.

“If we had had this 10 years ago when I was opening up my practice, this would have been a godsend for me because I couldn’t get into any of these plans,” John Lawson, president of the Medical Society of the District of Columbia, told the Post. “But now all of these plans are clamoring for me to join them.”

Ron Pollack, executive director of consumer health care advocacy group Families USA, agreed, characterizing the Kentucky suit as a dispute between two powerful industries. “I think this is a tempest in a teapot from a consumer’s perspective,” he told the Post.

NEW YORK
Despite corporate denials of wrongdoing, juries in Illinois and New York last week awarded nearly $300 million to two men suffering from a painful cancer linked to asbestos exposure

In Illinois, U.S. Steel worker Roby Whittington was awarded $250 million after being exposed to workplace asbestos and contracting mesothelioma, an extremely painful and usually fatal type of cancer.

U.S. Steel, which denied liability, afterwards agreed to settle the case for less than $50 million rather than appeal the verdict, reported the New York Times.

In New York, a jury ordered companies including utility firm Consolidated Edison to pay $47 million to Robert Croteau, a 53-year-old utility worker with mesothelioma who is expected to die within a year.

Con Edison called the verdict “grossly excessive and not supported by facts or law,” saying it would file an appeal, according to the Times.

Last week’s verdicts come shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that in certain cases firms can be forced to pay “pain and suffering” damages to workers afraid of contracting mesothelioma, even if the disease has not yet manifested.

NEW YORK
A U.S. businessman renowned for brokering oil deals with the Kazakhstan government was arrested last week for allegedly funneling more than $78 million in bribes to Kazakh officials on behalf of the world’s leading oil companies.

James Giffen, head of merchant bank Mercator Corp., was indicted on 60 counts related to his efforts to win contracts for Amoco, Mobil, Phillips Petroleum, and Texaco, reported the Agence France-Presse.

In the 1990s, Giffen was the go-to man for arranging deals between the Kazakh government and Western oil firms, according to former CIA officer Robert Baer.

“James Giffen was ‘Mr. Kazakhstan.’ If you wanted an oil concession in Kazakhstan, you went to Giffen,” Baer wrote in his recent memoir, according to a report in the Financial Times.

Prosecutors allege that Giffen’s payment for services often slipped under the table, passing into his Swiss bank accounts and the hands of Kazakh officials.

Giffen, who was released last week on $10 million bail, faces more than 20 years in prison and fines of more than $84 million if convicted, according to the Agence France-Presse.

Federal prosecutors also indicted a former Mobil Oil executive last week on related charges. J. Bryan Williams, Mobil’s former manager of government crude acquisitions and sales, is accused of evading taxes on a $2 million kickback from a Kazakh deal brokered by Giffen.

Williams “believed he had acted properly as an employee of Mobil,” his lawyer, David Schertler, said last week. If convicted, Williams faces at least five years in prison and millions of dollars in fines, according to the Associated Press.

CHARLOTTE, North Carolina
Wachovia Corp., the nation’s fifth-largest bank, last week revealed that federal regulators are probing stock purchases surrounding the announcement of the firm’s merger with First Union in 2001.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) inquiry apparently is focusing on the two firms’ efforts to buy $619 million in First Union stock after the merger was announced.

SunTrust Banks, whose hostile bid for Wachovia failed, had complained about the stock purchases, alleging that the purchases inflated First Union’s share price, giving the firm an unfair advantage during merger negotiations.

Current law forbids firms from buying each other’s stock after merger announcements for exactly that reason. Wachovia and First Union, however, found a loophole through which they slipped their trades, independent analyst Richard Bove told the Times.

The banks’ scheme may have violated the spirit of the law, but not its letter, Bove said. “It’s hard to see how they can penalize Wachovia and First Union for taking advantage of a loophole,” he added.

Revealing the SEC investigation last week, Wachovia chief executive Ken Thompson told investors that the matter had “nothing to do with the integrity of Wachovia’s financial reporting or financial statements, nor anything to do with insider trading.”

“All during our merger, we were very open about everything we were doing,” Thompson insisted, noting that the stock purchases had been vetted by the firm’s lawyers and accountants.

The SEC has declined to comment on the investigation.

MIAMI
Coca-Cola’s leading Latin American bottler can face a civil suit on charges of hiring right-wing paramilitaries to kill union leaders at the firm’s Colombian plants, a U.S. federal judge ruled last week.

The decision by U.S. District Judge Jose Martinez marks the first time a U.S. court has allowed a case to proceed based on allegations of human-rights abuses committed abroad, reported the BBC.

Panamerican Beverages (Panamco), a Colombia-based bottler 25-percent-owned by Coca-Cola, is accused of hiring military commandos to kill, pressure, and intimidate pro-unionists in the firm’s employ.

Rival firm Bebidas y Alimentos was also named in the suit, filed in July 2001 over the murder of four union members killed between 1995 and 1996, according to the BBC.

While District Judge Martinez cleared Coca-Cola, he gave a green light to pursuing claims against Panamco and Bebidas y Alimentos under the U.S. Alien Tort Claims Act.

Lawyers for the United Steelworkers of America and the International Labor Rights Fund, which filed the $500 million suit on behalf of Colombia’s union groups, say they will appeal Coca-Cola’s exclusion from the suit.

No trial date has been set.

NAIROBI
The Kenyan government last week warned the nation’s elite to return land ceded to them by corrupt officials or risk exposure and legal action, saying the public had been cheated by a greedy “land grab.”

At least 752 parcels of public land — from forests to fire stations, public parks to hospitals — have been given to members of the government and their friends by corrupt officials since 1990, according to a recently completed government audit.

The BBC estimates that the amount of so-called stolen land is much higher.

Kenya’s new president, Mwai Kibaki, who took office in December, has pledged to crack down on corruption and return the land to the public domain.

Kibaki’s administration is offering anonymity to beneficiaries of the land grab if they return the deeds. Those who refuse will be taken to court, Amos Kimunya, Minister for Lands and Settlement, warned last week.

From the Project for Excellence in Journalism:

“U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has suggested we are getting only ’slices’ of the war. Other observers have likened the media coverage to seeing the battlefield through ‘a soda straw.’ The battle for Iraq is war as we’ve never it seen before. It is the first full-scale American military engagement in the age of the Internet, multiple cable channels, and a mixed media culture that has stretched the definition of journalism.

“The most noted characteristic of the media coverage so far, however, is the new system of ‘embedding’ some 600 journalists with American and British troops. What are Americans getting on television from this ‘embedded’ reporting? How close to the action are the ‘embeds’ getting? Who are they talking to? What are they talking about?

“To provide some framework for the discussion, the Project for Excellence in Journalism conducted a content analysis of the embedded reports on television during three of the first six days of the war. The Project is affiliated with Columbia University and funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts.

“The embedded coverage, the research found, is largely anecdotal. It’s both exciting and dull, combat focused, and mostly live and unedited. Much of it lacks context but it is usually rich in detail. It has all the virtues and vices of reporting only what you can see.

“In particular:

• “In an age when the press is often criticized for being too interpretive, the overwhelming majority of the embedded stories studied, 94 percent, were primarily factual in nature.
• “Most of the embedded reports studied — 6 out of 10 — were live and unedited accounts.
• “Viewers were hearing mostly from reporters, not directly from soldiers or other sources. In eight out of 10 stories we heard from reporters only….
• “While dramatic, the coverage is not graphic. Not a single story examined showed pictures of people being hit by fired weapons.

“Over the course of reviewing the coverage, Project analysts also developed a series of more subjective impressions of embedding. Often the best reports were those that were carefully written and edited. Some were essentially radio reporting on TV. Technology made some reports stand out but got in the way when it was used for its own sake. Too often the rush to get information on air live created confusion, errors, and even led journalists to play the game of ‘Telephone,’ in which partial accounts become distorted and exaggerated in the retelling.

“On balance, however, Americans seem far better served by having the embedding system than they were from more limited press pools during the Gulf War of 1991 or only halting access to events in Afghanistan. Moreover, the first week of the war hints that fears that the embedding system would mostly just co-opt the press or would fatally risk military security in time may wane.

“The study examined stories from embedded reporters in three of the first six days of the coverage…. These encompass days in which ground troops began their push into Iraq, when they first encountered serious resistance, and the first day that some began to suggest that U.S. troop momentum had slowed.

“The study examined the traditional key viewing hours for news … on the three major broadcast networks and two cable channels (ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN and Fox News) as well as the evening news programs for the broadcast networks and the analogous hour-long evening news programs on cable….

“Americans themselves seem to be conflicted about embedding. A survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that overall, 58 percent of Americans said embedded reporters ‘are a good thing.’ Of the 34 percent who said it was ‘a bad thing,’ most are worried that it is providing too much information that could help the enemy.

“But the tracking survey also found as time went on, people were more likely to say they felt depressed, frightened, tired out, and saddened by watching the coverage.”

“When you come to a fork in the road — take it.”

– Yogi Berra (U.S. baseball player and coach, 1925- )