Source: Harper’s Magazine Index for December 2006, citing statistics from a September 2006 study by Mark Chancey, assistant professor in the Department of Religious Studies, Southern Methodist University (Dallas)

As I recall, our secretive meetings were held usually in the early darkness of London’s winter afternoons. They weren’t announced, but like the handful of other Americans in the London press corps, I knew where to find them: in a nondescript upper room at the Foreign Office, just across Downing Street from then-prime minister Margaret Thatcher’s residence at Number Ten.

We all knew what to expect. A sharp, witty, and well-informed member of the Foreign Office staff would start by offering us tea. Then he would explain that this meeting was not happening, that it never had happened, and that if any of us wrote that it had happened, he would deny it to the hilt and never speak to us again. With that understood, he then would ask us what we wanted to discuss and would share the government’s position candidly and in depth.

Was he playing us? Like a harp. He knew the notes his government wanted us to sing, and he plucked them firmly. Were we using him? Unashamedly. We knew what he wanted us to write, and we were mining his revelations to develop alternative views and find on-the-record sources. He offered us accuracy and a window deep into the government’s views. We offered him confidentiality and exposure for those views. It was a trade-off as old as journalism itself and central to its success.

The just-concluded Washington trial of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Jr., vice president Dick Cheney’s former top aide, delivered a body blow to that trade-off. Not because of its outcome, which found Libby guilty of obstruction of justice, giving false statements to the FBI, and perjuring himself. And not because of any probability that he may be pardoned by President Bush. No, the real damage from this trial is the precedent it creates for attacking the secrecy that journalists offer to their sources.

The ability of journalists to promise confidentiality is crucial to helping move democracy forward in several ways:

• Leveling the playing field. Governments enjoy tremendous powers of obfuscation if they choose to use them. But democracy depends on an informed public. Journalists, by promising to keep private conversations off the record, can use inside sources to create transparency and help maintain the balance of power.
• Identifying fissures. Governments usually arrive at their positions through internal competition among rival views. They then roll out those views through the impression of a single unified front. Cracks and fissures in that front help citizens understand where a position comes from, gauge the depth and significance of its backing within government, and better prepare them to support or critique it.
• Providing context. Those London briefings didn’t always produce stories, nor even lead us toward future commentary, but they thickened the mix of our understanding of the general political and diplomatic landscape. Such off-the-record conversations are vital in educating journalists to better assess a government in its entirety. Their readers then are better able to distinguish important stories from those that are only secondary — a central task in an age of bloggers who, for every ounce of useful fact they reveal, release pounds of indifferent, unedited, or biased material into the atmosphere.

So when lead prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald compelled journalists to reveal their sources during the Libby trial, was he acting unethically? No. Fitzgerald probably thought he was taking the moral high ground, supporting democracy by exposing an obfuscator. And the trial in fact produced enormous transparency in the functioning of the domain — the office of the vice president — that was its focus. But in doing what was right in the short term for this individual case, he profoundly damaged the long-term health of the community of those seeking transparency in every other domain. By putting so many journalists on the witness stand and by compelling them to reveal their confidential sources through tactics that included imprisonment, Fitzgerald may have deeply compromised, for years to come, the ability of citizens to uncover truth in government.

Faced with two rights, in other words, Fitzgerald chose the one he thought was higher ¡- which, by definition, was an ethical outcome. But was it a judicious outcome? Perhaps not. Among the toughest calls facing any judiciary is the necessity to let a heinous criminal go free rather than pervert the justice system or compromise the standards of evidence. To many, that often looks like a case where someone got off on “a technicality.” More accurately, it’s a case where the preservation of a salient principle took precedence over the punishment of a single perpetrator. By putting punishment above principle, the Libby trial emphasized results over process.

Should Libby have gone free? Probably not, since democracy needs to be protected from perjurers. But was the cost to democracy worth this conviction? Probably not, since editors around the country say they already are beginning to pull stories that would have let more light into dark governmental corners. To be sure, the pendulum may swing back, and future trials may help restore the right of journalistic confidentiality. For now, however, the damage has been done.

It’s a kind of damage that Thomas Jefferson understood. “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government,” he wrote, “I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” It’s also a kind of damage any citizen can understand by reflecting for a moment on the common idiom, “You don’t know what you don’t know.” From this point forward, we won’t even know what journalism didn’t dare uncover about the workings of government. If the Libby standard means that the fog of obfuscation will roll in ever stronger, that the fissures will disappear from view, and that we’ll miss the deep context needed to grasp the relative importance of things, then this trial may prove to have been a proudly won battle that helped democracy lose the war.

©2007 Institute for Global Ethics

Last week, Rushworth Kidder’s column asked whether it is ever justified for a coach to touch a player in a confrontational or violent way. The question elicited as much — or perhaps more — mail than we’ve ever had in response to an opinion piece.

Most of you (about two-thirds) said no.

Many of your no responses were absolute in tone. “Other than the case of jumping in to stop a fight among players, I can’t see a time when it would be ethical,” writes one reader.

Another, a coach from Maine, rules out rough language as well as physical contact. “In my opinion, it is never acceptable to use any level of profanity in the environment of a team sport. It is also never acceptable to use physical touch as a method of coaching a team.” She writes that Maine state regulations prohibit contact and argues that such regulation should be imposed everywhere.

“No touching,” asserts a subscriber from Houston. “It may have been fine at one time, but that was then and this is now. If we weren’t evolving and leaving behind traditional ways of doing things that are now deemed unacceptable, all schools would still allow teachers to paddle students. That practice has been outlawed almost everywhere now because we have learned that violence only breeds more violence and teaches nothing about self-restraint and self-control.”

A reader who coaches youth baseball notes that a coach is also, figuratively and sometimes literally, a parent, teacher, and boss, and needs to realize that “there are better ways” to stop inappropriate behavior.

Another, who endured abusive behavior from a coach as a youth — for which the coach eventually apologized — offers this opinion: “I sometimes think that coaches have little understanding of the places that they hold in the lives of some of the young people for whom they are responsible. In other words, the branch you bend in a certain way in its youth may carry that bend for the rest of their lives.”

Several readers say they believe problems similar to those described in last week’s opinion piece are inescapable byproducts of a sport that conditions young people to, in the words of the column, “smash each other.” A former rugby player from Britain writes that cultural norms in U.S. football precipitate such incidents. “In the form of rugby, the emphasis is on self-restraint (the stiff upper lip of legend). To be injured or hurt or insulted is not an excuse for retaliation. It is an opportunity for an exercise of manliness. The form of American football that ‘teaches smashing’ must, by definition, teach violence.”

While not necessarily endorsing all physical action by coaches, some readers note that the dilemma of whether to manhandle a player carries considerable moral nuance.

One reader, a former professional athlete, admits that touching a player is not always the best solution but notes that we accept — and often endorse — both the seemingly ruthless behavior from lawyers acting as their clients’ advocates as well as the apparent insensitivity to suffering by doctors who must sometimes inure themselves to the situation in order to function. The problem, he maintains, comes when such attributes are applied inappropriately in different contexts.

Physical contact in a sport involving physical contact is “a part of nature,” writes another reader, who maintains that governing bodies of individual sports should establish reasonable guidelines.

A reader from Australia argues that physical contact can be appropriate and necessary, drawing on the parallel between sports and physical discipline of children. “It is clearly better to use rational argument to discipline children. But when your three-year-old is about to put a screwdriver in the power outlet, it is not time for a lecture on the dangers of electricity. Physical intervention is called for. The lecture must follow when everyone has calmed down. Physical contact for both positive and negative reinforcement is hugely powerful. It should be used sparingly, but it has its place.”

Congress may “impose statutory requirements and perhaps take away some of the authority which we’ve already given to the FBI, since they appear not to be able to know how to use it.”

– Sen. Arlen Specter (Pa.), the highest-ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, warning of consequences last week following the release of a report that found widespread abuses of the Patriot Act by the FBI.

The report by the Justice Department’s inspector general found widespread “improper or illegal … serious misuses” of so-called national security letters, which the FBI has used to seize “personal details about tens of thousands of people without court oversight,” reports the Washington Post.

WASHINGTON
Last week’s conviction of former White House aide Lewis “Scooter” Libby on perjury and obstruction charges related to a leak investigation promises to usher in an era of changed ethics relationships between the news media and their sources, according to press reports.

As New York Times reporter Adam Liptak writes, “Ten out of 19 of the witnesses in Mr. Libby’s trial were journalists, a spectacle that would have been unthinkable only a few years ago.

“Even more unusual,” Liptak notes in his analysis, “three of them played a central role in securing the conviction of Mr. Libby, their former source, by testifying about conversations they had once fought to keep secret by invoking the majesty of the First Amendment and the crucial role that confidential informers play in informing citizens in a free society.”

According to a report from the Associated Press, the collateral damage from the Libby verdict already is reverberating through the nation’s newsrooms. Eve Barton, the general counsel of Hearst Corp., which owns the San Francisco Chronicle and eleven other papers, told the AP that editors at Hearst papers have abandoned at least three recent stories involving government activity because of fears that government pressure could force editors to expose sources.

Barton noted that in the past two years Hearst has been served with 84 subpoenas for details of reporters’ notes and sources. Previously, she says, the chain might have seen only five or so subpoenas in a two-year period.

In an editorial, Kenneth Bunting, the associate publisher of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, also a Hearst newspaper, argues that the threat that a source’s name will be extracted by prosecutors will stifle whistle-blowers who seek to shed light on dark corners of government.

The successful tactics of federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, Bunting writes, “will embolden other prosecutors who want to compel journalists to reveal confidential sources.”

In a larger sense, the Libby trial painted an unseemly portrait of ethics on both sides of the story, which centered on an FBI probe into the leak of the name of CIA operative Valerie Plame, allegedly in retaliation for her husband’s public criticism of the Bush administration’s Iraq war policy, and Libby’s subsequent cover-up of the leak.

During cross-examination, reporters admitted that they lost notebooks, could not decipher their own notes, and withheld information from their editors.

But the spotlight did not flatter their government sources, either, writes Washington Post media analyst Howard Kurtz: “In their dealings with journalists, top administration officials were shielded by a curtain of anonymity so opaque that Libby asked Judith Miller, then a New York Times reporter, to identify him only as a ‘former Hill staffer,’ then was disappointed when she failed to write a story. Such pledges of anonymity helped mask efforts, orchestrated by Cheney, to neutralize Wilson’s criticism of the administration’s claims that Saddam Hussein was pursuing illicit weapons.”

WASHINGTON
New permutations of old ethics controversies continued to be the focus of news from Washington last week. Among the stories:

• The Senate Judiciary Committee is preparing to subpoena at least five high-ranking Justice Department officials in a probe of whether the abrupt firings of eight U.S. attorneys were politically motivated, according to a report from McClatchy Newspapers. The Department of Justice says subpoenas and hearings are unnecessary because it is prepared to cooperate and answer any questions lawmakers may pose. Several of the fired attorneys claim they were moved aside for up-and-coming candidates more closely allied with the Bush administration, and others have charged that they were let go after refusing to file charges against Democratic officials. The Justice Department has denied retaliating against the attorneys, with attorney general Alberto Gonzales writing an op-ed characterizing the controversy as nothing more that an “overblown personnel matter.” Gonzales’ dismissal of the firings, coupled with last week’s news that the FBI violated the Patriot Act in obtaining the personal records of U.S. citizens, prompted Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) to call for his resignation over the weekend, accusing Gonzales of politicizing the Justice Department at the expense of the Constitution, reports the New York Times. The scandal over the attorneys’ firing already has claimed one casualty: the quietly inserted provision of the Patriot Act that allowed the Justice Department to appoint “interim” U.S. attorneys without term limits and without Senate confirmation. Facing sharp bipartisan criticism last week, the Bush administration said it would not block a Democratic-sponsored bill that would repeal that measure. “Gonzales’ Justice Department had previously dismissed the legislation as unreasonable,” notes the AP.
• A loophole in new lobbying legislation has sparked a dispute between House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and minority leader John Boehner (R-Ohio). According to a report from the Hill, a paper covering Congress, Pelosi wants to fix an oversight in the wording of a prohibition against flying on corporate jets — a mistake that has grounded about a dozen members of Congress who fly their own private planes. The House rules prohibit lawmakers from boarding a “non-governmental airplane that is not licensed by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to operate for compensation or hire,” provisions that unintentionally have barred travel on most, if not all, private aircraft. While Pelosi wants to amend the rules by a process known as unanimous consent, a mechanism that does not require every member of Congress to record their vote, sources tell the Hill that Boehner will not agree to a unanimous consent vote unless other changes are made in the ethics code. Boehner reportedly has not revealed the specifics to the source who spoke with the Hill.
• The same set of House ethics rules also restrict lobbyist-funded travel, and also contain a loophole in that category, according to a report from USA Today. Colleges, universities, and other higher-education groups, constituting a powerful and well-funded lobby, are exempt. According to the report, higher-ed groups routinely seek help on issues such as federal student aid, immigration restrictions for international students, and federal grants. House members argued that they needed the exemption to be able to give commencement addresses, but as presently worded, the special rules would apply to all travel funded by higher education.

RALEIGH
A judge delayed an execution of a North Carolina inmate last week because of an ethical dispute between doctors and the state.

The Charlotte Observer reports that it was the fifth execution put on hold after the state medical association threatened to pull the licenses of physicians who assist at a lethal injection.

According to the Wilmington (N.C.) Morning Star, the state medical board says it is unethical for doctors to participate in the taking of life, leading to a procedural impasse since state law requires that a physician be on hand to assure that the condemned does not suffer pain during the process.

The state of North Carolina is suing the medical board, attempting to strip the board of its power to punish physicians, reports the Los Angeles Times.

WASHINGTON
A powerful southern Republican lawmaker last week said that excessive executive pay reflects an ethical decline in the United States and warned that Americans are getting fed up.

Alabama Rep. Spencer Bachus said the public is disturbed by pay that is not justified by performance.

“If nothing else, it shows we’ve had some decline in ethics or our moral behavior. How we address that I’m not sure. It’s a situation most Americans will not tolerate for long,” he said, according to a report from the Reuters news agency.

Bachus is the senior Republican on the House Financial Services Committee, which is debating a measure that would allow corporate shareholders to vote on executive compensation packages.

BusinessWeek notes that while some business groups vehemently oppose the bill, which is sponsored primarily by Democrats, members of both parties have expressed concern with executive pay packages.

Bachus, who is seen as having a strong pro-business stance, spoke in what for him was unusual language when he said that “lavish executive compensation packages for CEOs have contributed to the growing public perception — justified or not — that the rules in corporate America are rigged in favor of well-insulated insiders.”

“In fact, some recent examples seem to show outrageous rewards for rank incompetence,” he said, according to a report from BusinessWeek.

Under the bill pending in the House committee, shareholders would have an advisory vote on compensation packages, similar to current practice in Australia, Britain, and Sweden, the Cox News Service reports.

LONDON
Admissions officers at universities throughout the United Kingdom, including prestigious institutions such as Oxford and Cambridge, are discovering that applicants routinely are cutting and pasting stock phrases copied from the Internet into their application essays.

The London-based Independent reports that about 5 percent of the 50,000 applications tested with a plagiarism-detection software contained wording copied from websites that offer advice on the application process, including examples of personal essays.

According to a report from IT Week, about 234 applicants to medical schools identically professed that their interest in science began accidentally after an accident with a chemistry set that involved “burning a hole in my pajamas at age eight.”

The London Evening Standard reports that the recent wave of plagiarism is part of a larger trend noted throughout the U.K. academic community and is being fueled by stiff competition and record numbers of applicants.

The Evening Standard reports that there has been a wave of plagiarized applications from abroad as well, sometimes as part of a scam by immigrants who have no intention of enrolling in classes and disappear once they are admitted on a student visa.

Scotsman education correspondent Kevin Schofield poked around some of the admissions-help websites and found that in addition to offering collections of personal essays for perusal, one provides guidance on how to not get caught, including the advice, “Don’t copy the sentences you find outright, change them or write your own sentence in a similar style.”

The study found that the number of plagiarized applications rises sharply as the deadlines grow closer.

NEW YORK
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) last week suspended trading in the stocks of 35 companies it claims are linked to spam email campaigns.

According to the New York Times, the SEC says the enforcement effort will protect investors from potentially fraudulent stocks pumped up by emails promising they are “ready to explode” or will produce “fast money.”

UPI reports that the suspensions are part of a move dubbed “Operation Spamalot,” launched after shareholders lost millions of dollars in recent years after being fooled by the Internet pitches.

Bloomberg reports that investigators are concerned primarily with whether the emails are part of what is called a pump-and-dump scheme, which uses deceptive marketing to hype a stock, usually a low-value “penny stock,” that the spammers sell once the spike in interest pushes the prices to the top of the bubble.

Forbes reporter Lisa Lerer notes that while such schemes have been around since the development of email and the Web, the situation has grown much worse in the past year. Lerer reports that “stock-related messages make up about 20 percent of all spam landing in in-boxes. The SEC estimates that 100 million stock spam messages are sent each week.”

IRVINE, Calif.
A federal jury last week ruled in a civil case that two former Gateway executives manipulated earnings numbers in order to please Wall Street analysts.

The jury found former chief financial officer John Todd and former controller Robert Manza liable for violating accounting laws and for making false statements, the Associated Press reports.

According to the Financial Times, the jury concluded that the pair intentionally misled investors by inflating revenue figures in 2000, attempting to “close the gap” between Wall Street expectations and actual performance.

In one violation, the SEC charged, a manipulated transaction added only a penny per share to the stock price, but it was the crucial penny that put the stock at the expected level, according to the Financial Times report.

IDG News Service reports that “company executives now have the challenge of regaining trust investors may lose in the face of sharp criticism of the company’s business ethics.”

SEOUL
Scientists are beginning to plan for ethical dilemmas instigated by human abuse of increasingly “intelligent” robots.

The BBC reports that rapid advances in robotics are prompting serious debate over the issue, with a panel in South Korea drawing up an ethical code to prevent humans from abusing robots and vice-versa.

A report from the CBC notes that South Korean robot scientist Park Hye-Young envisions scenarios that require some ethical forethought. “Imagine if some people treat androids as if the machines were their wives,” she said. “Others may get addicted to interacting with them just as many Internet users get hooked to the cyberworld.”

As the London Daily Telegraph reports, the code of ethics is likely to be modeled after the principles stated in science fiction writer Isaac Asimov’s work, I Robot. Telegraph Asia correspondent Richard Spencer writes that Asimov’s guidelines were a “sort of Hippocratic oath for androids: they were not allowed to harm humans, or allow them to come to harm through inaction; they had to obey orders; and they had to protect themselves if that did not compromise the first two instructions.”

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation reports that many scientists feel the ethics code is not that far-fetched. Futurist Damian Conway told the ABC, “It’s quite likely that robots will develop some form of intelligence. It may even be to the level of some kind of self-awareness. Now at that point they become creatures with which we have to have an ethical kind of relationship.”

“Now, you can leave that until that happens,” Conway warned, “but then the history of legislation is that it always follows very far behind the actual technologies that it’s trying to legislate. And in the gap between what is considered to be right or lawful or appropriate, and what is possible, you have the room for all kinds of abuses.”

From the Wall Street Journal Online/Harris Interactive:

“Eight in 10 (80%) U.S. adults are in favor of requiring some or all employers to provide paid sick time to their employees, and similar numbers (78%) say employers who don’t give their employees paid sick time pay for it in other ways, according to the latest Wall Street Journal Online/Harris Interactive Healthcare Poll. However, just over half (52%) of adults agree that requiring smaller employers to provide paid sick time would have a negative impact on their business and less than a quarter (23%) agree that their employer does not offer enough sick time for its employees….

“There are no federal requirements that require employers to provide paid sick time to employees, but legislators have been seeking to change that. San Francisco recently passed a law requiring employers to provide paid sick time based on the number of hours employees work. Democrats in Congress have proposed a measure to require minimum paid sick time for all employees.

“Compared to part-time employees, full-time employees are three times as likely to have paid sick time (24% vs. 77%, respectively). A majority (58%) of employees who lack paid sick time say they cannot afford to take time off work when they are sick, and more than a third (36%) of these workers worry that taking time off when they are sick will jeopardize their jobs….”

“Conceit may puff a man up, but can never prop him up.”

– John Ruskin (English writer, critic, and reformer, 1819-1900)