Ethics Newsline®

Seasons wait for no one. War, taxes, the economy — nothing stops the irresistible coming of summer. With the public transfixed on Iraq, that’s been easy to overlook. But in a scant few weeks, teenagers will again step into summer jobs. College students will again take up internships. In a struggling economy, there will be fewer openings, so employers can choose more selectively. Whom should they pick?

In a short spurt of summer work, there’s little time for training or acculturation. So the qualities that come through the door are pretty much the qualities that will be there for the summer. Employers will of course look for intelligence, ability, and a willingness to work hard. They’ll want teachable workers with good people skills. But what if, with all of those attributes, comes a determination to cheat, steal, and defraud? The results will be worse than useless. There’s nothing like a smart, hard-working cheater to make a miserable summer for everyone else.

What’s crucial in the mix, then, is a moral compass. If you’re an employer, where should you go to find young people who won’t rip you off? Short answer: suburban communities or small towns in the Northeast. When you get there, find kids who eat right. Avoid those who smoke or drink. And look for males aged 13 to 15. Why? Because, according to surveys from the Gallup Organization, that’s the profile of the young person least likely to cheat.

And that’s a significant profile: To refuse to cheat in an age of cheating is to take a significant stand against peer pressure. The extent of that pressure is clear in the just-published Gallup Youth Survey, which finds that two-thirds (67 percent) of today’s students (ages 13 to 17) report that “a great deal” or “a fair amount” of cheating goes on in their schools. Nearly half (48 percent) say they themselves have cheated on a test or exam. Girls are slightly more likely than boys to say they’ve cheated (52 percent versus 44 percent). So are older teenagers (ages 16 to 17).

Smoking and drinking also figure here: Nearly three-fourths of those who have smoked a cigarette in the past week say they’ve cheated, compared to less than half of the nonsmokers. And 60 percent of those who drink alcohol say they’ve cheated, versus 41 percent among nondrinkers. These ratios are perhaps not surprising: Since smoking, drinking, and cheating are all illicit behaviors among teenagers, it may be that a propensity for bending the rules in one area predicts similar behavior in other areas.

That logic doesn’t extend to poor eating habits, however. There’s nothing illegal about gorging on chips, cupcakes, and sodas. Still, three-fifths of kids who admit that their diet is “not good” say they’ve cheated, compared to 37 percent who say they’ve got a “healthy” diet. Does a willingness to practice self-discipline and restraint keep kids from cheating? Or is it foresight — a sense of building today what matters for tomorrow? Or, more simply, is it obedience to what’s thought to be right — a purely moral impulse that says, I won’t cheat others and I won’t cheat my future. Whatever the reason, kids who eat right cheat less.

And as for location? Fifty-four percent of teenagers in the South say they’ve cheated, with the numbers declining in the Midwest (47 percent), the West (46 percent), and the Northeast (38 percent). In addition, a 2001 Gallup Survey asked teenagers whether they would feel guilty about stealing, lying to a friend, not paying a debt, or cheating on a test. In all four areas, those feeling most guilty lived in suburbs or small towns.

So there you have it: A “Who’s the Most Likely Who” among teenage cheaters. Lest you use that as foolproof template for determining character, however, three caveats:

1. These are just averages. They won’t help you predict what this particular teenager will do. That 17-year-old junk-food junkie from rural Georgia may well turn out to be the most honest, scrupulous, and upright girl you’re ever hired.

2. Be suspicious of numbers. They reflect quick answers to probing questions, and there are lots of reasons why young people may not answer accurately. Are girls, in fact, more honest than boys — more willing to admit that they’ve cheated, where boys’ egos lead them to insist that they got those high grades all by themselves with no chicanery? And given that two-thirds of students are thought to be engaged in cheating, can we believe only a third of the answers on a survey about cheating — and if so, which third?

3. Kids aren’t cast in stone. They’re malleable, impressionable, trainable. But they need good examples, especially in an age of such distrust. Got a good company with high standards and an honest workforce? What a terrific context for any teenager to learn why truthfulness matters.

Bottom line: Be alert to what America’s teenagers are saying about themselves. But remember you’re hiring a person, not a statistic. And recognize that even a summer job can change a teenage life forever. If that change includes an adjustment of the moral compass, then you’ve just changed a social liability into an asset. Not bad for a summer’s work.

(c)2003 Institute for Global Ethics

“Journalistically, we’ll probably take some heat for it, but we have a responsibility to the community and that weighed heavily in our decision. The targets identified in the investigation were the children of a prosecutor, his own son, and the mother of the wife he killed. Right there, you have a pretty exceptional situation. We thought it was important, we thought it was for a good purpose.”

– King County Journal editor Tom Wolfe, discussing the Washington paper’s decision to print a bogus story in order to help police catch a man allegedly planning several murders. The paper’s gambit worked, snaring Steven Sherer, already in prison for murdering his wife 13 years ago. According to police, Sherer hired his former cell mate to kill Sherer’s son and mother-in-law, as well as the four children of the prosecutor who put him in prison, and then light their homes on fire. Last week, following the cooperation of the cell mate and the Journal, Sherer was charged with soliciting the crimes.

* * * * *

“While there are times when things might appear to be (for) a greater good, [when a newspaper deliberately prints lies], you eat away at any integrity you may have. I can see them wrestling with the issue, but they should have wrestled it to the ground and pinned this thing. To intentionally mislead cripples credibility.”

– Aly Colón, an ethics faculty member at the Poynter Institute, a nationally recognized journalism school and research center in Florida, discussing the ramifications of printing false reports.

(“Ethics of Paper’s Fake Arson Story Debated,” Seattle Times, Apr. 18.)

NEW YORK
News network CNN came under fire last week after its chief news executive, Eason Jordan, said CNN kept silent for many years about Iraqi atrocities in order to protect reporters and sources in Iraq from torture and reprisals by Saddam Hussein’s government.

According to Jordan, an Iraqi CNN cameraman was tortured for weeks by government officials hoping to make the man say that Jordan was a CIA operative, a charge Jordan calls “ludicrous.”

Jordan said he also was told of assassination plots by Saddam’s son, Uday, against two brothers-in-law who had defected to the nation of Jordan, as well as Jordan’s King Hussein. While the CNN executive told King Hussein about the plot, the network never made the threats public. The brothers-in-law were later killed.

Jordan’s revelations, published earlier this month in a New York Times op-ed piece, were criticized by many analysts and commentators, who said CNN had walked a questionable line between journalism ethics and business interests.

While many agreed with CNN’s decision to conceal news in order to keep its staff safe, others questioned the network’s move as an unethical compromise made in order to maintain a bureau in Baghdad under a repressive regime.

“It really took the wind out of me,” said Bill Kovach, head of the Committee of Concerned Journalists. ”There were probably strategic business decisions about CNN’s relationship with the government, but this seems to me to be allowing the ethics of other endeavors to trump the ethics of journalism — to seek the truth and make it available.”

Jordan responded to such criticisms by saying the network’s decision-making process had been winnowed down to a simple rule: Protect your people. ”I am at peace with myself knowing that I did the right thing and not put the lives of innocent people at risk,” Jordan said, according to USA Today.

Jordan also told the New York Times that the dilemma as ” very simple. Do you report things that get people killed? The answer is no.”

CNN spokeswoman Christa Robinson added, “The decision not to report these particular events had nothing to do with access, and everything to do with keeping people from being killed as a result of our reporting.”

CNN insists it did not compromise its honesty or objectivity in the process, noting that its reporters were expelled often from Iraq for their tough reporting.

The network took another step into controversy last week after hiring an armed guard to protect a CNN reporter. After coming under fire in Tikrit, the bodyguard opened fire on the reporter’s attackers — an action that jeopardizes journalists’ protected status as noncombatants, watchers warned.

CNN’s decision to hire armed guards sets a “dangerous precedent,” the group Reporters Sans Frontieres warned last week.

CNN spokesman Matthew Furman said Iraq’s unusually high tensions made the network’s decision a special case. ”You do what you have to do to protect your people,” he said, according to USA Today.

WASHINGTON
Denver, Colorado, last week agreed to rein in a controversial police program that compiled data on peaceful protestors, saying it would destroy its so-called spy files on more than 3,400 individuals and groups.

The program came to light in March 2002 when the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a lawsuit accusing the police of targeting, monitoring, and falsely labeling groups — from Quaker pacifists to Franciscan nuns to Amnesty International activists — as “criminal extremists.”

The police halted their surveillance last October. Last week’s deal puts a permanent freeze on the program, requiring the police to destroy the files, which include photographs, license plate numbers, and intercepted emails, reported the Reuters news agency.

The deal between the ACLU and Denver police codifies “a national standard that most probably will be adopted by other big-city departments,” Denver City Attorney J. Wallace Wortham said last week.

Mark Silverstein, the ACLU’s state legal director, welcomed last week’s deal, which also puts in place quarterly audits of Denver police activities for one year, with subsequent annual audits overseen by the ACLU and the mayor’s office, noted the Associated Press.

“The end of this political spying enhances the professionalism of the police department and is a victory for the First Amendment and for the civil liberties of all people in Denver,” Silverstein said. “As this agreement demonstrates, effective law enforcement does not require giving up our constitutional rights.”

WASHINGTON
The U.S. Defense Department last week defended its decision to invite the Rev. Franklin Graham, an evangelical Christian who has condemned Islam, to lead prayers for the Christian holiday Good Friday at the Pentagon.

Critics, including many of the Pentagon’s Muslim workers, say the government’s decision to welcome Graham sends a confusing message in light of the war on Iraq, which the administration has said is aimed at Saddam Hussein, not the Islam religion.

Graham has called Islam a “very evil and wicked religion” and promoted the conversion of Muslims to Christianity, making his invitation a politically charged decision, reported the Reuters news agency.

Graham is a long-standing friend of the Republican Party and Bush White House, delivering benedictions at the 1996 and 2000 Republican National Conventions and the invocation at President Bush’s 2001 inauguration, according to the Washington Post.

Last week, the Pentagon declined to disinvite Graham after some Pentagon workers protested, insisting that the Defense Department welcomes “leaders from all sorts of different places,” according to spokeswoman Victoria Clarke.

“We are in a balancing act between accommodating the interests and requests of many faiths and we will do our utmost to keep that balance in mind in providing religious support to workers in the Pentagon,” added Army spokesman Lt. Col. Ryan Yantis.

That may not be good enough, Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations, told the Post, saying Graham’s welcome at this time “sends entirely the wrong message to the Muslim and Arab world.”

“This kind of incident can undo any kind of bridges built by a hundred public affairs officers at the Pentagon. They need to think how their actions are perceived not only in this country but worldwide,” Hooper lamented.

Graham and his Samaritan’s Purse evangelical outreach program also have come under fire recently for their efforts to send emissaries to Iraq with the dual aims of offering humanitarian assistance and converting struggling Iraqis to Christianity.

“In Iraq, as is the case wherever we work, Samaritan’s Purse will offer physical assistance to those who need it, with no strings attached,” Graham responded in an opinion column published by the Los Angeles Times, reported Reuters.

JOHANNESBURG
Thousands of people victimized by decades of South African apartheid will be given slightly more than $3,800 each in a one-time reparations payment funded by the government, President Thabo Mbeki announced last week.

The payment — one-quarter the amount recommended by the nation’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) — will be given to roughly 22,000 victims or their surviving family members who testified at TRC hearings over the past seven years.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, convened to help the country cope with its violent past and its future free of apartheid, offered reparations to victims and amnesty to perpetrators who came forward to testify, reported the BBC. Individuals who did not cooperate with the commission will now be subject to investigation and indictment.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu delivered the commission’s final report last month, urging the government to provide swift compensation for victims, recommending a compensation total of $384 million. The government rejected that figure, offering $84.5 million instead.

“We hope that these disbursements will help acknowledge the suffering that these individuals experienced, and offer some relief,” Mbeki said in a speech before Parliament.

“For someone who lost a breadwinner or their eyesight or limbs this is extremely disappointing,” Hugo van der Merwe of Johannesburg’s Center for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation, told the Associated Press, saying more money was warranted.

In another blow to the TRC’s recommendations, Mbeki last week said the government will not support lawsuits seeking damages from South African firms that profited from apartheid. “The South African government is not and will not be party to such litigation,” Mbeki told Parliament.

That move was welcomed by the nation’s businesses, but lamented by advocates for apartheid victims and others who have filed suit to seize the firms’ ill-gotten gains.

Mining giant Anglo American and diamond firm De Beers have both been named in multibillion-dollar apartheid suits filed in the United States on behalf of apartheid victims. Trade and Industry minister Alec Erwin has said the government will not enforce foreign rulings against the firms, noted the New York Times.

In related news, the government of Switzerland last week said it will not cooperate with prosecutors seeking to link Swiss firms to apartheid-era abuses, reported the Reuters news agency. Swiss banks Credit Suisse and USB have been named in such suits.

The government said its efforts to collect and organize data detailing Swiss profits from apartheid were so much more extensive and accessible than those being offered by other nations, that Swiss firms faced an unfair disadvantage during trial.

“In view of the lawsuits … the free access to files which has hitherto been practiced runs the risk of damaging the position of Swiss companies named in the suit in comparison to other foreign firms,” the government said in a statement last week.

WASHINGTON
The U.S. Treasury Department last week revealed the names of nearly 60 U.S. firms fined a collective $1.1 million for doing business with nations under trade sanctions — a move that comes after watchdog groups filed suit for access to the information.

The announced fines range from a relative slap on the wrist — $9,000 for Chevron Texaco — to a stiffer $244,250 against GRE Insurance Group and Albany Insurance Co., which insured seven cargo shipments from Iraq to Libya between 1991 and 1995, reported the Reuters news agency.

Both Iraq and Libya are on the government’s trade-embargo list, which is enforced by the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). Burma, Cuba, Iraq, North Korea, and four other nations are also on the list, according to the BBC.

Other fined firms include Amazon.com, Bank of New York, Caterpillar, Citibank, ExxonMobil, the New York Yankees baseball team, and Wal-Mart.

OFAC, which has been slow to release information about the fines, has been sued by watchdog group Public Citizen under the Freedom of Information Act.

That suit prodded OFAC to release information about more than 300 cases last year, though critics say the information is sparse and inadequate, reported the Associated Press.

“The public has a right to know the reasoning behind this agency’s decisions in these cases so it can evaluate whether the program is being properly administered,” Public Citizen attorney Michael Tankersley said last week, urging OFAC to make more detailed records available.

A Treasury spokesman said the agency is taking steps to make the information more “open and transparent.”

COLORADO SPRINGS
The U.S. Olympic Committee (USOC) came under renewed criticism last week after a former executive released documents allegedly detailing USOC efforts to overlook positive drug tests that should have sidelined Olympic athletes who instead took home gold medals.

Dr. Wade Exum, former USOC director for drug control from 1991 to 2001, turned over more than 30,000 pages of documents to Sports Illustrated and the Orange County Register newspaper.

According to the documents, there were more than 100 positive tests for U.S. athletes who went on to win 19 Olympic gold medals between 1988 and 2000, reported Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald.

Among the athletes named in the documents is Carl Lewis, who won nine gold medals during his Olympic career, taking home the 100m gold medal in the 1988 Seoul Games after Canadian Ben Johnson was stripped of his victory on the basis of a positive drug test.

According to the documents, Lewis tested positive for three banned substances two months before the Seoul competition, but was determined to have ingested the drugs accidentally by the USOC, reported the Associated Press.

Press reports also say the documents indicated that Lewis’s training partner, Joe De Loach, tested positive for the same three stimulants, but was also allowed to compete in Seoul, winning the 200m race. Teammate Andre Phillips also tested positive before the 1988 Games, but was given the green light to compete, taking home the 400m hurdles.

Last week’s revelations sent the USOC into another reputational tailspin, with critics saying the documents confirmed what many had suspected all along: that the USOC was crying foul of others’ drug use while hiding the misdeeds of its own athletes.

In October 2000, drug-testing duties were moved from the USOC to the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, an independent body designed to eliminate the conflicts of interest many viewed as inherent at the USOC. The World Anti-Doping Agency was also created at that time to crack down on doping by other nations, reported the Reuters news agency.

Last week’s allegations of drug cover-ups by the USOC prompted widespread calls for an independent and open investigation from observers, coaches, and athletes, including U.S. sprinter Evelyn Ashford, who won gold in the 100m in 1984 and silver in 1988.

“It should all be done in the open,” Ashford told the Orange County Register. “For so many years, I lived it. I knew this was going on, but there’s absolutely nothing you can do as an athlete. You have to believe the governing bodies are (doing) what they are supposed to do, and it is obvious that they did not.”

WASHINGTON
Drug firms Bayer and GlaxoSmithKline last week agreed to pay nearly $340 million to settle charges that the firms bilked the U.S. government by deliberately overcharging Medicaid, the government’s insurance program for the poor.

Under the companies’ contract with Medicaid, they are required to bill the government for their drugs at the lowest price paid by any customer. When the companies make deals that dip below that established price, they are required to give the government a rebate.

The firms were charged with defrauding the government by selling popular drugs to Kaiser Permanente, the nation’s largest HMO, on the condition that Kaiser hide the deals by stripping off the prescription labels and pasting on labels bearing a different name for the drug, reported the Associated Press.

That alleged “lick and stick” scheme will cost the companies $338 million in penalties, the bulk of which will be borne by Bayer for allegedly overcharging the government for two drugs, including Cipro, the antibiotic also used to fight anthrax last year.

Under the settlements, Bayer will pay a criminal fine of $5.6 million and civil penalties of $251.6 million. GlaxoSmithKline will pay only civil penalties of almost $88 million, according to the AP.

GlaxoSmithKline spokeswoman Mary Anne Rhyne said her firm decided to settle the case only because of the expense of fighting it. “GSK believes its interpretation of the [law] was reasonable and was in good faith,” Rhyne said.

Last week’s fines come as part of a growing government crackdown on prescription-drug price schemes that cheat Medicaid and other government programs of guaranteed price breaks even as insurance costs rise and state budgets get squeezed, according to the Reuters news agency.

SAN FRANCISCO
A U.S. judge last week agreed with environmental groups and blocked the Bush administration from relaxing rules governing the nation’s “dolphin safe” labels for tuna fish, saying the government may have let politics play a role in what should be a scientific decision.

The injunction puts a legal hold on a December 2002 decision by the Department of Commerce allowing the “dolphin safe” label to be pasted on cans of tuna caught by speedboats that chase, encircle, and net dolphins at the same time.

As long as the dolphin are separated from the tuna and released without apparent injury, the label should apply, Commerce Secretary Donald Evans argued, saying science was on his side.

U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson rejected Evans’s position, saying the government had failed to satisfy the needed scientific hurdles set by Congress for relaxing the “dolphin safe” label, which was adopted in 1990, reported the San Francisco Chronicle.

In addition, Henderson said other evidence — declarations by former government scientists who say their work was stopped because of their findings, and apparent pressure from Secretary of State Colin Powell to relax the rules because of Mexican irritation — pointed to potential irregularities that warrant scrutiny.

Despite government denials, the evidence is sufficient “to raise a serious question as to the integrity of the decision-making process,” Henderson concluded.

Saying the environmental groups are “likely to succeed on their claim that the [Commerce Department's move] is contrary to the best available scientific evidence,” Henderson issued an injunction blocking the new rule from taking effect.

While the number of dolphins killed each year by tuna fishers has dropped dramatically — from hundreds of thousands to roughly 5,000 a year, dolphin populations have failed to recover, a fact the government says it cannot explain, noted the Associated Press.

Environmental groups argue that the practice of chasing, netting, and releasing dolphins is doing unseen damage by stressing the animals and separating mothers from their calves, crippling the population after the fishing boats leave the area.

Led by the Earth Island Institute, critics of the Commerce Department’s efforts have filed suit to block the relaxed rules. That suit is scheduled to make its way into the courtroom later this year, according to coverage from the Reuters news agency.

SYDNEY
Australia’s biggest businesses were asked last week to cooperate with a new effort designed to gauge the firms’ corporate and social responsibility, with grades handed out by RepuTex, a new group backed by former federal Liberal leader John Hewson.

The planned RepuTex rating service aims to give private investors common-sense guidance on how companies behave — from executive pay packages to diversity and environmental policies, reported the Australian Associated Press.

Hewson, dean of the Macquarie Graduate School of Management, is teaming up with Graeme Lee, the managing director of international ratings agency Standard & Poor’s, to rate the country’s top 100 companies.

Experts from 21 organizations, including Greenpeace and the Australian Shareholders’ Association, will aid the effort.

“We will rank the top 100 anyway, even if they don’t cooperate,” Hewson told the AP last week. “We hope companies will recognize that social responsibility has become a real issue, particularly with the number of corporate failures [in recent years].”

Hewson himself came under a bit of criticism last week from executives at Telstra and Caltex Australia, both of which have declined to complete forms required for their RepuTex evaluation. The firms say Hewson is trying to bully them into cooperating with the ratings plan using the threat of adverse publicity.

“I think it’s somewhat ironic that an organization that is supposed to be rating people on their corporate responsibility would take such an approach,” Bill Scales of Telstra told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. “They suggest because we won’t become involved with a private commercial firm that want [sic] to rate us, that somehow we’re not prepared to be rated for our corporate responsibility and that is simply not right.”

RepuTex said the first of its evaluations should appear in public ads slated for October.

Special to Newsline from Canadian correspondent Errol P. Mendes

MONTREAL
The unique Canadian approach to dealing with the separatist movement in Quebec was vindicated in the general election for the provincial National Assembly on April 14, 2003, when the federalist Liberal Party handily beat the separatist Parti Quebecois, who had been in office for nine years.

Canada is one of very few democracies in the world that allows separatist parties with the avowed aim of breaking up the country to stand for election to the national assemblies.

The Parti Quebecois held a referendum on sovereignty in October 1995 and lost by approximately 50,000 votes.

In the general election held yesterday, the Liberal Party won 74 seats to the Parti Quebecois’ 47 seats, with the upstart Action Democratique du Quebec winning only four seats.

The leader of the Liberal Party, Jean Charest, was credited as the main cause for victory due to his strong performance in a leaders’ debate and his ability to win over francophone voters. However, another cause of the defeat of the Parti Quebecois was attributed to the former separatist, Premier Jaques Parizeau, who repeated his controversial statement during the election campaign that the 1995 referendum was lost due to the votes of “money and ethnics.”

From the Committee to Protect Journalists:

“The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) today released its annual survey, ‘Attacks on the Press in 2002.’…

“According to CPJ, the number of journalists behind bars rose sharply in 2002, while heightened awareness of journalist safety and a decline in the number of global conflicts last year contributed to a decrease in the number of journalists killed for their work.

“‘Attacks on the Press in 2002′ documents some 500 cases of media repression in 120 countries, including assassination, assault, imprisonment, censorship, and legal harassment. In documenting these attacks, CPJ’s report notes several trends:

“For the second year in a row, the number of journalists in prison rose sharply. There were 136 journalists in jail at the end of 2002, a 15 percent increase from 2001 and a shocking 68 percent increase since the end of 2000, when only 81 journalists were imprisoned. China, already the world’s leading jailer of journalists for the fourth year in a row, arrested five more, ending the year with a total of 39 journalists behind bars. In Eritrea, 18 journalists languish behind bars, and 16 journalists were incarcerated in Nepal.

“A total of 20 journalists were killed worldwide as a direct result of their work in 2002, a sharp decrease from 2001 when 37 were killed…. It is the lowest number of journalists killed in the line of duty since CPJ began tracking the deaths in 1985. Most of the journalists killed in 2002 were not covering conflicts but were instead murdered in direct reprisal for their reporting on sensitive topics, including official crime and corruption in countries such as Colombia, the Philippines, Russia, and Pakistan.

“Government officials invoked ‘national security’ concerns to impose new restrictions on the press and limit access to certain conflicts….

“Although the number of journalists behind bars rose in 2002, there were some positive trends in press freedom worldwide…. Three Palestinian journalists detained without charge during the Israeli military’s April 2002 offensive in the West Bank were released after intensive lobbying by CPJ staff and board members. After CPJ traveled to Vladivostok, Russia, to pressure authorities to free imprisoned journalist Grigory Pasko, he was released early this year before completing his full term….”

“Honesty pays, but it don’t seem to pay enough to suit a lot of people.”

– Kin Hubbard (U.S. journalist, writer, and humorist, 1868-1930)