Ethics Newsline®

The Institute for Global Ethics is relocating a few miles down the coast from Camden. Our new office in Rockland, Maine, will be open for business beginning April 22. While our home on the Internet remains the same, our updated physical address and contact numbers follow:

Institute for Global Ethics
91 Camden Street, Suite 403
Rockland, ME 04841
Phone: 207-594-6658
Fax: 207-594-6648
Toll-free: 800-729-2615 (U.S. Only)

For more information, see this week’s Research Report.

by Rushworth M. Kidder

You may think this column is about the environment. In fact, it’s about the moral responsibility of the news media. First, some facts:

• In the first four months of 2007, clothesline sales rose 150 percent and sales of clothespins by more than 1,000 percent, according to one British retailer.
• Also last year, a leading maker of clothes-drying racks in Australia saw revenues rise by 15 percent.
• “Right to dry” activists in Colorado, Connecticut, Vermont, and Ontario, Canada, presently are seeking to overturn laws that ban backyard clotheslines in some communities.

Why? Because energy-hungry tumble driers are fast becoming the major-appliance equivalent of gas-guzzling SUVs. If, as some experts suggest, environmental action depends on behavioral change, a shift from clothes driers to clotheslines could be a leading indicator of a change in public attitudes toward global warming.

Now I’m pretty sure you never said to yourself, “I need to know more about clothespin trends.” Yet I bet that, like me, you find the “right to dry” movement intriguing. But I also suspect you’d never heard of it until now. Nor had I, until I saw the story in last week’s New York Times.

And that’s the point: I never planned to read that story, yet I did. Why?

It’s not because I have a laser-like focus on environmental issues. I don’t approach each day’s paper like a heat-seeking missile, ignoring every target but the one I’m programmed for. I want to know about lots of things. What’s more, I know I haven’t got time to read everything. So, like most of us, I tend to read about what I already know I want to know.

But there it was, on an inside page, illustrated by a large photo of a woman hanging out clothes in a snowy backyard in Aurora, Ontario. It was well constructed, broadly sourced, and engagingly written. It got me thinking about the ways in which some of our laws actually prevent us from conserving energy.

Would I have read that story on a Web page? I doubt it. I find I go to the Web to learn about what happened yesterday to Hillary, Zimbabwe, the markets, gas prices, or other things I’ve already defined as “the news.” This wasn’t news. It was something we in the trade call a feature story, which, unlike a news stories, can be read tomorrow as well as today and still remain relevant. But even as a feature, I wouldn’t have defined this topic as relevant to me. It wasn’t by-lined to a well-known correspondent or columnist. I didn’t see it as a must-read piece that everyone would be talking about. Neither, apparently, did most readers of the Times’s website. It didn’t even show up on that day’s list of the most downloaded stories.

Yet there I was reading it — all because my eye happened to catch it on the page.

As the economics of print drive newspapers toward a Web environment, one of the casualties may be what New York Times editor Bill Keller has called “serendipitous encounters” of this sort. The Web, after all, lives and breathes a sense of quickness, purpose, and drive. We go there to get what we need. Unlike the broad visual expanse of a well-designed newspaper, the Web doesn’t naturally draw us into corners of thought we never meant to visit. That’s partly because, on most news-related websites, the blurb for each story looks pretty much like every other blurb, making no story seem more important than any other except by virtue of the sequence.

Now, I admit to some bias. I spent several years as feature editor for a major international daily newspaper, so I love good feature stories. I like encountering examples, comparisons, and insights I wasn’t looking for. I relish the way a good newspaper, without warning, ambushes my single-mindedness and leads me to acquire a multitude of engaging but unrelated ideas. I look forward to the way it invites me to rise from fact to metaphor — so that, looking at one thing (a mere clothespin), I’m encouraged see another (an environmental trend).

Yet each week, I find I’m spending a little more time getting news on the Web and a little less time reading newspapers. I’m at risk, then, of the inevitable narrowing that comes with deep immersion in the Web.

I know, I know — I can already hear the outrage of Web addicts who insist that surfing the Web is hugely expansive. Agreed. But this isn’t about addicts. It’s about ordinary people with serious schedules who can’t spend time surfing, have no appetite for traipsing through chat-room threads hoping for the odd tidbit, and yet need to be informed about things they didn’t know mattered.

In a world of exponential increases in information, we have a moral responsibility to remain broadly informed. So, too, our editors and Web designers have a moral obligation to keep us from funneling down into the narrowness of our own repetitive preconceptions. They need to invent ways to recreate the spatial expanse of a newspaper, where the eye falls on the unexpected and the mind turns distraction into education. They need to do whatever they can to compel these “serendipitous encounters.”

Sure, I can get by without reading about the right to dry. But can the world survive without our collective capacity to contemplate big-picture trends by looking at things as small as clothespins? The poet William Blake referred to it as seeing “a world in a grain of sand.” If all I learn is what I tell myself I need to know, am I seeing Blake’s world? Or am I just staring into the mirror of my own certainties? Without a broad, unintentional, serendipitous engagement with the world, where does creativity come from?

©2008 Institute for Global Ethics

Questions or comments? Write to newsline@globalethics.org.

“It was them saying, ‘We need to stick our hands up your back and move your mouth for you.’”

– Former Fox News analyst Robert Bevelacqua, a retired Green Beret, speaking to the New York Times about Pentagon efforts to assemble a team of retired military officials who would promote the administration’s views as military analysts in broadcast news on ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, and CNN. The Pentagon used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance,” reports David Barstow of the Times. “Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air. Those business relationships are hardly ever disclosed to the viewers, and sometimes not even to the networks themselves.”

* * *

“The intent and purpose of this is nothing other than an earnest attempt to inform the American people.”

– Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman, rejecting the substance of the Times’s piece, and insisting that the Pentagon program was not psyops that converted ex-military officials into “puppets of the Defense Department.”

Source: New York Times, Apr. 20.

For more information, see: Related Newsline story, Mar. 17 — Related Newsline story, Dec. 5, 2005 — Related Newsline story, Mar. 21, 2005 — Related Newsline story, Jan. 31, 2005 — Related Newsline story, Dec. 20, 2004 — Q&A with Times reporter David Barstow, Apr. 21.

We’ve given away our profession,” says JAMA editor

NEW YORK
Drug companies sometimes pay academic scientists to take public credit for research articles authored by medical writers employed by drug companies, alleges the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).

According to Investor’s Business Daily, the latest edition of JAMA says the ghostwritten articles are then published in peer-reviewed journals, a practice the JAMA article warns can lead to dissemination of biased research resulting improper treatment.

“We’ve got to stop this,” JAMA editor Dr. Catherine DeAngelis told the Baltimore Sun. “People are being hurt. We’ve given away our profession.”

Merck, one of the drug companies singled out by the Journal, denied any impropriety and said it was committed to high standards of scientific integrity and ethics, according to the Canadian Press news service.

In addition, according to an editorial in the Newark, New Jersey, Star-Ledger, Merck charges that the JAMA article authors are actually in a conflict of interest themselves because they previously worked for some of the plaintiffs suing the company over side effects from the drug Vioxx, which was pulled from the market in 2004.

Sources: Investor’s Business Daily, Apr. 18 — Baltimore Sun, Apr. 18 — Newark Star-Ledger, Apr. 18 — Canadian Press, Apr. 16 — Washington Post, Apr. 16.

For more information, see: Related Newsline story, Mar. 31 — Related Newsline story, Mar. 17 — Related Newsline story, Mar. 10 — Related Newsline story, Mar. 3 — Related Newsline story, Feb. 4 — Abstract of JAMA article, Apr. 14.

Authorities propose food-quality law with harsh penalties; U.S. lawmakers propose stepped-up inspection; “goons and thugs” remark by CNN commentator sparks street protest

VARIOUS DATELINES
China, attempting to restore faith in its consumer products, last week unveiled the draft of a law that provides penalties ranging from fines to life in prison for production of substandard, contaminated, or adulterated food products.

Reuters notes that China has been buffeted by a series of food safety problems in recent years, including contaminated toothpaste, fish, and pet food exported to other countries.

In response to safety issues, Democratic lawmakers in the United States last week proposed that all produce labels be required to show the country of origin, that food manufacturers of all kinds identify the origins of all food ingredients on their companies’ websites, and that medical devices label where components were manufactured, the Associated Press reports.

Another portion of the draft legislation would require U.S. regulators to inspect food and drug products more frequently, according to USA Today. The increased scrutiny would be paid for with added fees for food importers and exporters.

In related news, a CNN commentator’s remarks about the quality of Chinese goods sparked a demonstration in front of the network’s Hollywood offices last week, according to reports from the Los Angeles Times and the Hollywood Reporter. About 1,500 protestors took to the streets after the network’s Jack Cafferty said: “We continue to import their junk with the lead paint on them and the poisoned pet food and export … jobs to places where you can pay workers a dollar a month to turn out the stuff that we’re buying from Wal-Mart. So I think our relationship with China has certainly changed. I think they’re basically the same bunch of goons and thugs they’ve been for the last 50 years.” CNN said the “thugs and goons” remark was aimed at the Chinese government, not its people. The statement came at a particularly sensitive time, as anti-Chinese sentiment over Tibet policies has upset many Westerners and Chinese, disrupting China’s PR offensive in the run-up to the summer Olympics in Beijing.

Sources: Reuters, Apr. 19 — Hollywood Reporter, Apr. 19 — USA Today, Apr. 18 — AP, Apr. 18 — Los Angeles Times, Apr. 20.

For more information, see: Related Newsline story, Apr. 14 — Related Newsline story, Apr. 14 — Related Newsline story, Apr. 14 — Related Newsline story, Apr. 7 — Related Newsline story, Apr. 7.

Ethical investments turn sour in Britain, but some say it’s only temporary; finance ministers say it is immoral to use crops to produce biofuels when millions are hungry; and Congress continues to debate “moral hazard” of mortgage bailout

LONDON and WASHINGTON
Economic controversies centering on ethics disputes made news last week. Among the stories:

• Recent disappointing performances by ethical investment funds are leading some U.K. analysts to wonder if they are particularly productive financial vehicles, according to ThisIsMoney.com, a Web-based publication of the London Evening Standard. In the past 12 months ending April 1, ethical funds lost 9.5 percent on average, compared to an average downturn of 4.7 percent for traditionally managed funds, according to the site. But some analysts maintain that the sharp downturn is related to transitory market factors, and many predict that the sector will rebound.
• Finance ministers from around the globe gathered recently to consider a serious problem with a major ethical component: food shortages. The Wall Street Journal reports that riots related to soaring food costs have broken out in parts of Africa, while in Asia, troops have been deployed to protect food supplies from theft. The problem is compounded by the moral dilemma spawned by policies pushing the use of food products for biofuels. India’s finance minister, Palaniappan Chidambaram, told the Journal he considers it a “crime against humanity that food should be diverted to biofuels” when “millions of people are going hungry.”
• Massachusetts congressman Barney Frank is proposing a refinance bill to allow strapped homeowners to receive federally insured new mortgages even if they are way behind on their payments and have poor credit, according to CNN. The debate continues to focus on a variety of moral arguments, notes the report: Critics say it is unfair to burden taxpayers with the risk of foreclosures, and also argue it is wrong to bail out homeowners who knowingly overreached when they made their purchases — a move they say will exacerbate the “moral hazard” involved in the government rewarding risky behavior.

Sources: London Evening Standard, Apr. 17 — CNN, Apr. 17 — Wall Street Journal, Apr. 14.

For more information, see: Related Newsline story, Apr. 7 — Related Newsline story, Apr. 7 — Related Newsline story, Mar. 31 — Related Newsline story, Mar. 17 — Related Newsline story, Oct. 10, 2007.

Personal information remains at high risk; a new research technique could lead to remote-control lie detection; problems associated with the controversial practice of “monetizing” errant Web searches

VARIOUS DATELINES
Advancing technology continues to erode individual privacy, according to several reports last week. Among the pieces:

• Privacy is becoming an increasingly scarce commodity, according to the Christian Science Monitor. Staff writer Alexandra Marks reports: “Despite all of the rules, regulations, and software innovations in place to ensure that information doesn’t fall into the wrong hands, it does, and regularly. In just the past month, State Department employees were disciplined for snooping through presidential candidates’ passport files, and hospital workers have been charged with selling the personal information of tens of thousands of patients as well as rifling through the patient records of top stars. And in Hollywood a private detective to the stars is accused of bribing police and telephone company officials so he could scour their confidential databases. Then there’s the Internal Revenue Service. A week before tax day, its inspector general warned that the computer systems that contain the private tax returns of every taxpayer in America are vulnerable to disgruntled employees and hackers.” Marks notes that while no one has a complete answer to the problem, some experts interviewed for the article maintain that the only real protection is limitation on the amount of information the government is allowed to collect and the extent to which it can be collated.
• A new system that could monitor blood pressure, pulse rate, and perspiration remotely could be valuable in screening for health problems, but also could pose privacy concerns because it might be useful for surreptitious lie detector tests, according to a report from Discovery News. The theory is this: Human sweat glands in the skin change the frequency of an electromagnetic wave that can be harmlessly bounced off of a human and read when it returns to the antenna. Patterns of how a person sweats can indicate blood pressure and pulse rate — basically, the same measures monitored by a polygraph. Researchers working on the remote technology, which is still in experimental stages, tell Discovery that they fully understand the concerns over privacy — not only from the lie-detector angle but also relating to use of remote scanners for large-scale scanning to collect data for scientific and medical research.
• Some major Internet service providers may be exposing customers to a greater risk of online virus or phishing attacks because of a controversial technique they use to increase hits for online advertising, the Washington Post reports. Many ISPs routinely direct surfers to an advertising page when the user tries to view a Web address that does not exist. The technique, often referred to as “monetizing” wayward Web searches, could be used to trick surfers into believing they are on a safe page. Surfer then might offer up sensitive information, according to security researchers, who claim that one firm specializing in monetizing bad addresses only recently fixed vulnerabilities in its system.

Sources: Washington Post, Apr. 14 — Discovery News, Apr. 9 — Christian Science Monitor, Apr. 19.

For more information, see: Related Newsline story, Apr. 14 — Related Newsline story, Mar. 31 — Related Newsline story, Mar. 31 — Related Newsline story, Mar. 24 — Related Newsline story, Mar. 17.

Sex abuse scandal, human rights, and role of science figure in world-press reports

WASHINGTON and NEW YORK
Ethical concerns dominated coverage of last week’s visit to the United States by Pope Benedict XVI. Among the stories:

• In a surprise move, the pope last week met with five people from Boston who said they had been sexually abused by priests. The Boston Globe reports that the meeting, held in Washington, was brokered by Boston cardinal Sean O’Malley, who told the Globe he had given the pope a list of nearly 1,500 people who alleged they were abused by clergy in the Boston archdiocese. The series of sex-abuse revelations, along with allegations that clergy were sheltered by the church, rocked the U.S. Catholic community during the past decade and triggered hundreds of lawsuits. According to UPI, Boston was at the epicenter of the scandal, paying out more than $150 million. Bernard Law, Boston’s former archbishop, was forced to resign after it was revealed that he shuffled alleged abusers from parish to parish and covered up apparent molestation of children by priests. Law relocated to Rome and was given several prominent appointments in the Roman Catholic church, which he retains, by pope John Paul II.
• The pope, during his first visit to the United Nations, stressed another ethics issue: human rights. Canadian National Post religion columnist father Raymond De Souza reports that the pope emphasized the obligation of the international community to intervene to protect individual rights, saying that threats to human rights often appear in the guise of cultural differences or religious schisms. According to a report from the U.K. Guardian, the pope used the sixtieth anniversary of the U.N.’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights to argue that the organization should occupy the “moral center” of world affairs.
• The pope’s views on the moral underpinnings of science are still largely undefined, according to a report by National Geographic reporter Anne Minard. Minard writes that even before he assumed leadership of the Catholic Church, Pope Benedict XVI had come under fire for “what some say are his anti-science views. He has been criticized for comments about the 17th-century astronomer Galileo, stem cell research, and evolution.” TIME magazine reports that the issue of the ethics of science did surface briefly during the pope’s address to the United Nations, in which he maintained that regulations on research “never require a choice to be made between science and ethics: rather, it is a question of adopting a scientific method that is truly respectful of human imperatives.”

Sources: Boston Globe, Apr. 20 — TIME, Apr. 20 — National Post, Apr. 19 — Guardian, Apr. 19 — National Geographic, Apr. 18 — UPI, Apr. 17.

For more information, see: Related Newsline story, Feb. 4 — Related Newsline story, Jan. 28 — Related Newsline story, Jan. 14 — Related Newsline story, Oct. 15, 2007 — Related Newsline story, Oct. 15, 2007.

Fashion industry is not sure how measure will affect it, but adopts voluntary compact to promote healthy body images

PARIS

A bill adopted by France’s National Assembly last week would make it a crime to promote extreme thinness through the media.

The Agence France-Presse reports that the measure is mainly targeted at websites that offer tips for girls to starve themselves into resembling stick-thin models.

But many say there are limits on how far laws can go in regulating health issues.

The measure, which will progress to the French Senate next month, would impose fines of up to $47,000 for publishing prohibited material, with prison sentences of up to three years if a victim dies, reports the U.K. Guardian.

Ultra-thinness has been a major issue in France. Last week, fashion industry leaders and advertisers there signed a separate voluntary agreement to promote healthier body images, according to the Guardian.

The issue has resonated throughout Europe in recent years following anorexia-related deaths of fashion models and the banning of ultra-thin models from Spain’s catwalks.

New York Magazine notes that it still is unclear how the proposed French law would apply to ads, fashion spreads, and runway shows, and the measure does not define “excessive thinness.”

In related fashion-industry news, the BBC last week launched an “ethical fashion” magazine called Thread, which looks at issues facing people who care about the origin of their clothes.

The London Daily Telegraph quotes noted European fashion designer Katherine Hamnett as saying, “Thread is great because ethical fashion promises to be the next big thing and not just a passing fad. Young people are really interested in these issues.”

Thread will cover such topics as the environmental impact of clothing manufacturing, animal rights, and how clothing choices affect the environment.

Sources: AFP, Apr. 19 — Daily Telegraph, Apr. 17 — New York Magazine, Apr. 17 — Guardian, Apr. 16.

For more information, see: Related Newsline story, Feb. 20, 2007 — Related Newsline story, Nov. 20, 2006 — Related Newsline story, Sep. 25, 2005 — Current issue of Thread from the BBC.

New York Times and Times of London note that some musicians say enforcement of laws designed to protect factory workers will doom some types of music

LONDON
New European Union laws designed to protect workers from unhealthy noise levels have produced an unintended consequence: symphony orchestras are having to drop some loud pieces from their repertoire, or at least tone down the loud parts.

Reporting from London, New York Times reporter Sarah Lyall writes: “Across Europe, musicians are being asked to wear decibel-measuring devices and to sit behind see-through anti-noise screens. Companies are altering their repertories. And conductors are reconsidering the definition of fortissimo.”

“Alan Garner, an oboist and English horn player who is the chairman of the players’ committee at the Royal Opera House, said that he and his colleagues had been told that they would have to wear earplugs during entire three-hour rehearsals and performances,” Lyall reports. “‘It’s like saying to a racing-car driver that they have to wear a blindfold,’ he said.”

Some critics argue that enforcement of the regulations is an example of government overreaching and overreacting.

Some musicians go so far as to say that certain types of music are now doomed, according to the Times of London. A bagpipe band director argued, for example, that requirements that bagpipers wear earplugs make it impossible for them to hear and play properly in an ensemble, warning that if the regulations are enforced, “pipe bands won’t exist.”

Sources: New York Times, Apr. 16 –London Times, Apr. 4.

For more information, see: Related Newsline story, Sep. 15, 2003 — Related Newsline story, Apr. 5, 1999.

Looking to the future, “Democratic candidates are perceived to be better than Senator McCain,” poll finds

From Harris Interactive:

“With the arrival of Earth Day 2008 and the ongoing presidential election, it is interesting to compare how the current president is perceived as handling the environment and how his possible replacements are perceived as handling it if they were president. Just over one-quarter of Americans (28%) give President Bush positive ratings on his handling of the environment over his term while almost two-thirds (64%) give him negative ratings.

“Not surprisingly, Republicans are more likely to give him positive ratings (58% positive versus 35% negative) and Democrats negative ratings (83% negative and 10% positive). Independents, however, are more closely aligned with Democrats on this issue. Seven in ten Independents (71%) give the president negative marks on his handling of the environment while one in five (22%) give him positive ones….

“Looking at the three Senators vying to replace President Bush, the two Democrats are perceived as doing a better job on the environment if they were elected president. Just under half say Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton (47% each) would do a positive job on the environment while one-third (33%) say John McCain would do a positive job. One-third (32%) give a possible Obama presidency negative ratings on the environment, while a possible Clinton presidency and the environment is perceived negatively by 35 percent of Americans. Just under half (45%) give a possible McCain presidency negative ratings on the environment….

“The environment and global warming are issues that concern many people but, at this time, they are not nearly as important as the economy, Iraq or health care. In so far as they become significant issues in the election, these findings suggest they will be somewhat helpful to the Democratic candidate. This poll does not tell us whether Senator McCain’s lower scores reflect perceptions of Republicans in general or of McCain personally or if he is hurt by President Bush’s negative ratings on the environment….”

For the full press release, Apr. 21, click here.

“Getting along with others is the essence of getting ahead, success being linked with cooperation.”

– William Feather (U.S. publisher and author, 1889-1981)