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

by Rushworth M. Kidder

These are tough times for nonprofit institutions. So on Saturday I go to the art museum, and what do I find? Every fourth painting on the wall has been replaced by a large poster advertising cosmetics.

Worried, I go to the symphony. After each movement, a giant screen rolls down above the orchestra, showing a two-minute video for a car dealership.

Then I hear that the soup kitchen makes clients listen to cigarette promos before dishing up their meals — and that hospital rooms are adorned with pictures of smiling staff from the nearby pharmacy.

But the kicker comes at church, where the sermon is interrupted by a beer distributor and a casino operator, both invited to the pulpit to push their products.

What’s up? Well, hey, these nonprofit institutions have audiences but no funds. Advertisers have funds but no audiences. Fair trade, right?

This little vignette, of course, is pure fiction, straight from the theater of the absurd. But the absurdity has a point: When institutions are vital to society, we support them through the generosity of donors. We could fund them through in-your-face commercial advertising, but we don’t.

Which brings us to newspapers. They appear to be evaporating before our very eyes. Why? Not for lack of excellent journalists, a need for news, or public interest in serious reporting. No, what plagues newspapers is simply their financial model. They’ve always been supported by advertising. Those dollars now have migrated to other media, much of it Web-based.

So we have a choice: We can abandon newspapers, or we can understand that — like art museums, symphonies, soup kitchens, hospitals, and churches — newspapers are so central to the public interest that they deserve to be recreated as nonprofits and operated for the public good.

In recent months, this idea has gained currency in the New York Times, the New Yorker, National Public Radio, and other places. Several nonprofit ventures already are in place, like ProPublica, an investigative reporting service, and MinnPost.com, a Web-based newspaper out of Minneapolis. The concept has been floated even in the Senate by Maryland Democrat Benjamin Cardin, whose Newspaper Revitalization Act would let newspapers operate as nonprofits for educational purposes.

Beneath this conversation lie three essentially moral questions:

• Are newspapers truly a public benefit? Thomas Jefferson thought so. “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.” His point: Democracy is inconceivable without an informed citizenry, and government needs the probing edge of in-depth reporting to keep it honest. But investigative journalism requires the capacity to run extended stories — not only to provide the detail of the case, but to ensure the balance of views. Nothing yet has replaced newspapers in that capacity.
• If Jefferson lived today, wouldn’t he praise broadcast, cable, and Web-based news? Don’t be too certain. There’s a spatial serendipity to a newspaper that catches your eye with stories you never intended to read, educating you into interests you didn’t know you had. That may seem a frivolous point, but much of modern entrepreneurial success is based on a creativity that looks at one thing and sees another, and that puts A together with B in wholly new ways. Web readers, it appears, don’t engage in much serendipity. Too often they say, “I’m interested in A,” and then link directly to it. TV and radio audiences may be interested in B — though, in those sequential media, they sometimes have to plow helplessly through more coverage of A than they need. That leaves newspapers, surprisingly, as perhaps the most interactive news media of all. Unlike radio and TV, they let readers, second by second, decide whether to turn the page and move on. And unlike the Web, they remind us that the simple act of turning a page can be an act of delicious randomness, with no idea what will turn up. Never mind that a Web browser, commanded to turn the page, typically grinds on for several attention-sapping seconds before giving you the sequel. The real problem is that it also eliminates surprise: If you don’t tell it exactly what to look for, no page gets turned.
• Could you run a news operation without depending on ads? Evidently you can: Both the BBC and National Public Radio are highly respected and essentially commercial free. And would newspapers be better as nonprofits? Perhaps. While the best papers maintain firewalls between the news and advertising functions, there always lurks the suspicion that editors might spike an exposé of a top advertiser while running a similar story about a competing company. Newspapers funded by broad-based contributions from a community of donors might face less suspicion.

Now, I admit there are caveats: Web-based news is in enormous and creative flux, nobody’s figured out how to charge for it, and new formats may resolve issues of spatial serendipity. But the advent of nonprofit newspapers neatly addresses these three ethical concerns. They would encourage a citizenry to accept its moral responsibility to stay informed and demand integrity — and to pay a modest price for that privilege. Such papers would mitigate the unwitting bigotry that occurs when readers seek only the news they want rather than the news they need — while promoting entrepreneurial creativity along the way. And such papers would enhance objectivity and lessen conflicts of interest in newsrooms.

What’s so absurd about that?

©2009 Institute for Global Ethics

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

“Public interest in Guantánamo Bay generally and these proceedings specifically has been unwavering. Publicly disclosing the factual returns would enlighten the citizenry and improve perceptions of the proceedings’ fairness.”

– U.S. district judge Thomas Hogan, ruling last week that the federal government cannot keep secret unclassified documents “that it says justifies the continued imprisonment of more than 100 Guantánamo Bay prisoners,” reports the Reuters news agency. Judge Hogan ordered the U.S. Justice Department to release the documents, known as factual returns, or “show the court what specific information it wants to keep secret by the end of next month,” according to Reuters.

Source: Reuters, June 1.

But police say there probably will not be a raft of prosecutions resulting from lavish expense claims by MPs

LONDON
A scandal over expense account claims by members of Parliament continued to resound last week as prime minister Gordon Brown reshuffled his cabinet.

Brown’s popularity has plummeted in the aftermath of the scandal and his Labour party was drubbed in recent local elections. As this issue of Newsline went to press, CNN predicted that Labour would perform poorly in European Parliament elections.

Various political leaders in Britain speculate that despite Brown’s cabinet moves, his days as prime minister may be numbered, according to the BBC.

The crisis erupted after it was disclosed that members of Parliament had billed extravagant living and other expenses to the taxpayer. While many of the expenses were legal, if lavish, questions remain about several MPs who apparently collected money for mortgages that already had been paid off or received allowances for properties they did not use, according to the Times of London.

The London Daily Mail reports, however, that police apparently have ruled out charges against the vast majority of MPs involved in the expenses scandal. In a statement, the Metropolitan Police and the Crown Prosecution Service said that even those who had made some outrageous claims had based them on “accurate information.”

A “small number of allegations,” though, are being pursued still.

Sources: CNN, June 8 — BBC, June 5 — Times of London, June 5 — London Daily Mail, June 5.

For more information, see: Related Newsline story, June 1 — Related Newsline Commentary, May 25 — Related Newsline story, May 18 — Related Newsline story, Feb. 2 — Related Newsline story, Apr. 14, 2008.

Pledge was drawn up by students

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.
About half of Harvard Business School’s graduates last week took a voluntary oath to behave ethically.

According to the Harvard Crimson, the idea for the oath originated with students who had researched methods of reforming business education.

Some students who signed the pledge said they were drawn to it after witnessing the economic damage caused by reckless financial behavior, reports the Crimson, though others who did not sign on said the measure simply reflected empty rhetoric.

The oath includes a promise to “serve the greater good,” “act with the utmost integrity,” and “guard against decisions and behavior that advance my own narrow ambitions but harm the enterprise and the societies it serves,” reports the Economist.

Max Anderson, one of the students who organized the pledge, told the Boston Herald that he hopes that “at our 25th reunion our class will not be known for how much money we made or how much money we gave back to the school, but for how the world was a better place as a result of our leadership.”

The Financial Times notes that Harvard is not the first business school to come up with the idea of an MBA pledge that mirrors the Hippocratic Oath given to doctors or similar pledges made by other students graduating from professional programs. Thunderbird in Arizona has a similar pledge, and at the Ivey School at the University of Western Ontario, graduates not only take a pledge but wear a ring that signifies their commitment to “act honourably and ethically in all dealings, in the belief and knowledge that doing so will lead to a greater good and, above all, aspire to make a positive contribution to my society.”

Sources: Financial Times, June 5 — Boston Herald, June 5 — Economist, June 4 — Harvard Crimson, June 1.

For more information, see: Related Newsline story, June 1 — Related Newsline story, May 25 — Related Newsline Commentary, May 4 — Related Newsline story, Apr. 20 — Related Newsline story, Apr. 6 — Related Newsline story, Mar. 30.

New survey says “values voters” are losing clout because of tanking economy; the AP gives mixed grades to Illinois political reform; House majority leader says allegations of earmark abuse should be investigated

WASHINGTON and SPRINGFIELD, Ill.

Politics intermingled with ethics last week in several stories. Among them:

• So-called values voters appear to be losing political clout, according to a recent survey cited by the Washington Post. A poll by the Pew Research Center says the number or respondents saying “moral values” would matter most in a presidential election has fallen by half — apparently, the Post says, because concern has shifted to the nation’s economic problems. Post columnist E. J. Dionne says the most immediate evidence of the cultural shift is the diminished interest in moral issues, such as abortion, in the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court.
• An Associated Press analysis of political reform measures in Illinois — measures enacted after the mortifying Blagojevich scandal — has some mixed findings. While limits on campaign contributions will be imposed for the first time in the state’s history, the AP notes that the restrictions contain plenty of loopholes and won’t kick in until after the 2010 elections. And while lawmakers tightened up oversight of state contracts and strengthened the law on releasing state records, they ignored measures to limit legislative leaders’ power, dropped plans to come up with better ways to draw up legislative districts, and blocked proposals to strengthen law enforcement’s ability to prosecute government corruption, according to the AP.
• Steny Hoyer, majority leader of the U.S. House of Representatives, said that fellow Democrats should be investigated over claims that several members of the House Appropriations Committee traded millions in congressional earmarks for campaign contributions from the now-defunct PMA lobbying group, the Christian Science Monitor reports. While the House has referred the matter to its ethics panel, it only directed the panel to report back on any actions it had taken — a resolution that Republicans claim is deliberately convoluted and symptomatic of a cover-up. Hoyer told the Monitor that even though the House did not require the ethics panel to investigate, it clearly “expressed its desire” to have it done.

Sources: Christian Science Monitor, June 4 — AP, June 3 — Washington Post, June 1.

For more information, see: Related Newsline Commentary, June 1 — Related Newsline story, June 1 — Related Newsline story, June 1 — Related Newsline Research Report, May 25 — Pew Research Center, May 21.

Online data collection, Twitter impersonation, and rape simulating video games pose moral dilemmas

VARIOUS DATELINES

Last week saw a raft of stories dealing with evolving technology and ethics. Among the coverage:

• Sears agreed to settle allegations that it improperly collected personal data from online customers. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) said Sears paid customers $10 for the privilege of monitoring their online browsing, but did not adequately inform them that the company would be gathering data from non-Sears sites, such as online bank statements, emails, and drug prescription information, reports Reuters. The FTC’s complaint charges that while Sears did disclose the full scope of its monitoring, the details were buried in fine print. Sears agreed to destroy all personal data, but said it never compromised customers’ security.
• An online privacy group last week launched a new website that keeps track of the policy changes at popular websites, technology network CNET reports. The Electronic Frontier Foundation says the site will protect against erosions of privacy and other consumer rights by “terms of service” agreements, which the foundation says are often complex, constantly being rewritten, and sometimes contain language that seriously can affect customer privacy.
• Web surfers are tracked more than they realize, according to a study from the University of California at Berkeley. The San Jose Mercury-News quotes Ashkan Soltani, one of three Berkeley gradueate students who compiled the data as part of a master’s project, as warning that third parties frequently track detailed information on user actions, meaning that “some third party will know that a computer from your location visited a Web page, and they’ll know the content of the page you viewed.” Google was found to be one of the most energetic and invasive trackers, according to the report.
• Tony La Russa, manager of the St. Louis Cardinals baseball team is doing legal battle with micro-blogging site Twitter for allegedly allowing a counterfeit page to be set up under his name, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. La Russa sued Twitter in May after an imposter made distasteful references to two Cardinal pitchers who died recently. Twitter has a policy against impersonators, but allows parodies, creating a difficult gray zone. While the Post-Dispatch says the lawsuit has been settled, Twitter’s own blog denies any resolution to the case, calling La Russa’s charges nearly frivolous and saying they will be dismissed in court. Over the weekend, Twitter announced a new upcoming service that will verify the identity and posts of some celebrity Twitterers.
• A Japanese software industry regulator has decided to ban games that depict sexual violence, the Agence France-Presse reports. The action comes in response to protests of a game called “RapeLay,” which sets up simulations of stalking and raping young girls. The industry group, called the Ethics Organization of Computer Software, said it now will ban all “sexual torture software,” according to the AFP report.

Sources: Telegraph, June 8 — St. Louis Post-Dispatch, June 5 — Reuters, June 4 — CNET, June 4 — San Jose Mercury-News, June 3 — St. Louis Post-Dispatch, June 3 — AFP, June 3.

For more information, see: Related Newsline story, May 25 — Related Newsline story, May 18 — Related Newsline story, Apr. 27 — Related Newsline story, Apr. 20 — Related Newsline story, Apr. 13 — Twitter blog entry, June 6.

But new technique, based on use of pig tissue, still burdened by ethical and scientific baggage

BEIJING and NEW YORK
An advance in stem-cell technology is purported to offer a method to circumvent ethical speed bumps posed by the use of human embryonic cells.

Science magazine Discover reports that Chinese scientists say they now are able to reprogram cells from pigs to become stem cells that function in the same manner as human embryonic cells.

According to the official Chinese news agency Xinhua and a report from the New Scientist, the breakthrough could mean that scientists will be able to genetically engineer animals for human organ transplants.

The use of embryonic tissue has been hotly contested over the past decade, notes USA Today, with limits on research funding imposed by President Bush in 2001 only to be repealed by President Obama in March.

While use of animals is not problem free — protests have come from animal-rights groups who say the practice is cruel and from religious leaders who say mixing animal and human genes is immoral — the most recent development appears to circumvent some of the hot-button political issues.

And as USA Today points out, many techniques that sidestep the use of embryonic tissue introduce the risk of cancers — a problem that currently is the focus of several international research projects.

Sources: Xinhua, June 3 — Discover, June 3 — New Scientist, June 2 — USA Today, June 1.

For more information, see: Related Newsline story, June 1 — Related Newsline story, Mar. 30 — Related Newsline story, Mar. 16 — Related Newsline story, Mar. 16 — Related Newsline story, Mar. 9.

Citigroup claws back promised executive bonuses; electronic cigarettes are popular, but not with the FDA; a novel ethics training program mimics a popular TV show

VARIOUS DATELINES
Some unusual items topped business-ethics news last week. Among them:

• Citigroup, which has received about $50 billion in taxpayer rescue funds, has told about five former top executives that it will not pay them tens of millions of dollars in promised controversial severance payments, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal. The paper reports that while Citigroup is legally bound to make the payments, the company hopes that the executives who lost their severance will be too embarrassed to file lawsuits against the struggling, taxpayer-financed company.
• Electronic cigarettes — battery-powered devices that include replaceable cartridges usually containing nicotine — are becoming popular, but they are unapproved and largely unstudied by health researchers, according to UPI. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has halted shipments of some of the “e-cigarettes,” but manufacturers claim that because the devices are not sold as smoking cessation tools, the FDA has no authority to do so. In related news, the U.S. Senate last week took an administrative step toward giving the FDA limited authority to monitor smoking products, according to Dow Jones.
• The trade journal Human Resource Executive last week profiled an unusual ethics and compliance training program at computer giant Cisco Systems — a method designed specifically for engineers, who, as one training officer notes, “like to walk through things and figure it out on their own.” The result: “Ethics Idol,” an Internet-based interactive program that allows users to view four animated “contestants” telling the tale of a difficult ethical situation, followed by the decisions of three judges, an engaging parody of the “American Idol” television show. The engineers, according to the article, loved it.

Sources: Dow Jones, June 3 — Wall Street Journal, June 2 — UPI, June 2 — Human Resource Executive, May 16.

For more information, see: Related Newsline story, June 1 — Related Newsline story, June 1 — Related Newsline story, May 25 — Related Newsline story, May 25 — Related Newsline story, May 18.

Widely reprinted story asserts that colleges and universities used widely differing interpretations of law; the measure’s author says that’s not what he intended when he wrote the law in 1974

NEW YORK and COLUMBUS, Ohio
A report from Ohio’s Columbus Dispatch claims that colleges and universities use the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) to obscure information about athletic programs.

In an article that was reprinted and cited nationwide, the Dispatch contends that institutions hid behind interpretations of the 1974 act to keep the public in the dark about violations of NCAA rules.

Trade journals Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed note that the author of the original privacy measure, former Sen. James L. Buckley, was quoted as saying the law was never intended to be used in that manner and needs to be revised so that colleges cannot impose their own interpretations on it.

Editor & Publisher reports that interest in the story was so widespread that the Columbus Dispatch offered newspapers free use of the article in packages that examine the issue locally. The Dispatch also offers a free searchable database of the Division I schools it surveyed.

Sources: Editor & Publisher, June 3 — Inside Higher Ed, June 1 — Columbus Dispatch, May 31 — Chronicle of Higher Education, May 31.

For more information, see: Related Newsline story, May 18 — Related Newsline story, May 11 — Related Newsline story, Mar. 2 — Related Newsline story, Mar. 24, 2008 — Related Newsline story, June 14, 2004.

“Weekly churchgoers also show double-digit increase in support from 2004″

From Gallup:

“Americans are six percentage points more likely than they were four years ago to favor allowing openly gay men and lesbian women to serve in the military, 69% to 63%. While liberals and Democrats remain the most supportive, the biggest increase in support has been among conservatives and weekly churchgoers — up 12 and 11 percentage points, respectively.

“The finding that majorities of weekly churchgoers (60%), conservatives (58%), and Republicans (58%) now favor what essentially equates to repealing the ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ policy implemented under President Clinton in 1993 is noteworthy for several reasons. First, the data show that these traditionally conservative groups are shifting on this issue, supporting it to a far greater extent than they support legalized gay marriage. Second, it suggests the political playing field may be softer on this issue, and President Barack Obama will be well-positioned to forge ahead with his campaign promise to end the military ban on openly gay service members with some support from more conservative segments of the population. To date, it is estimated that more than 12,500 servicemen and servicewomen have been discharged under the policy, including more than 200 since Obama took office.

“Overall, the groups most in favor of allowing openly gay service members to serve in the military continue to be liberals (86%) and Democrats (82%), followed by Americans 18 to 29 (78%) — whose support registered a nine-point jump in support from 2004.

“While men (64%) and Americans 65 and older (60%) have levels of support more in line with right-leaning groups than with left-leaning groups on this issue, they join virtually all other demographic segments of the population in registering an increase in support since 2004.

“The only exception to the trend in favor of openly gay service members is seen among those with a high school education or less, who showed 57% support in both surveys….

“As the Obama administration weighs the political and military consequences of a policy change on this issue, it can do so knowing Americans are for the most part strongly in favor of change toward allowing gay men and lesbian women to serve openly alongside their fellow service members.”

For the full press release from Gallup, June 5, click here.

“Not failure, but low aim is crime.”

– James Russell Lowell (U.S. Romantic poet, critic, editor, and diplomat, 1819-1891)