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

by Rushworth M. Kidder

Sometimes, to invite reader feedback, I end columns with a “whaddya think?” This time I’m starting with it. We really need your help figuring out what to do about a Google Web Alert we received September 13.

Google’s little-search-engine-that-could, chugging through the dark that weekend, dutifully reported to my colleague Amber Kruk that it had found a website mentioning my 1995 book, How Good People Make Tough Choices. That’s nice, thought Amber. Then she read the alert in full.

Turns out Google was flagging up a site called AcaDemon, an e-supermarket of term papers for students determined to plagiarize. Among the papers for sale are several about my book. There’s your basic three-page model for $26.95, a deluxe seven-pager for $53.95, and the Cadillac edition (eight pages, citing four sources) for $63.95. “Buy and instantly download this paper now!” the site screams, promising “complete privacy.”

Along with the stupendous irony of helping students cheat their way through ethics classes, the site reveals that its writers still have some homework to do. “By understanding these ethical devices in Rushworth’s book,” one summary gushes, “we can see how she successfully creates a strong foundation within her book for ethical decision-making in this spectrum.” Perhaps that’s a laudable gender neutrality. After all, a fourth paper (nine pages, $69.95) titled “The Differing Moralities of Men and Women,” claims to identify “the three main differences between men and women, as described in How Good People Make Tough Choices” — useful information, no doubt, for students who can’t otherwise make that distinction.

Who writes these things? Experts? Hardly. AcaDemon solicits new products from its own customers. Got a paper that received a good grade? Post it here, agree to a 50 percent commission on sales, and then “sit back and watch the $$ roll in.” But it gets worse. Astonishingly, the site advertises its wares as “plagiarism free,” promising would-be customers that “we scan every term paper with our plagiarism-detection software to ensure that all text is original.” After all, we at AcaDemon can’t take a chance that papers written by the industrial-strength cheaters who visit our site might actually be cribbed from someone else’s site! No, our honor is intact: We promise never to sell a plagiarism to a would-be plagiarist.

It all sounds like an over-the-top skit on Saturday Night Live. But this is no April Fools’ column. This thing is real. With biting cynicism, the site’s name suggests just how real: Plagiarism is, in fact, the academic demon that haunts our nation’s educational systems. In a survey released in June by Common Sense Media, more than half of the U.S. teens surveyed admitted to “some form of cheating involving the Internet.” Thirty-eight percent have “copied text from websites and turned it in as their own work.” Nor do they seem to care: 36 percent said that downloading a paper to turn in as their own was “not a serious cheating offense,” while 19 percent said that “it isn’t cheating at all.” The problem isn’t exclusively American: A column last May by Marcel Berlins in London’s Guardian newspaper, citing a 2007 survey from Oxford University, reported that when applicants for medical school were asked to explain how they became interested in medicine, 234 of them told exactly the same anecdote.

What’s gone wrong? The standard complaint points to sloppy, inattentive teaching. Even with access to websites like turnitin.com, which helps faculty members detect plagiarism, students cheat with a brazen assurance that teachers don’t care. Commentators also note a lack of moral sophistication among students, who see no inconsistency between their vehement moral outrage at social injustice and their bland acceptance of their own duplicity. Observers also single out the self-delusion of graduates who, imagining they’ve been taught to analyze, reason, and create, find they’ve only learned to pillage, mimic, and regurgitate.

But back to AcaDemon — and to an analogy. If a site were selling illegal drugs, we’d find ways to nail it shut in a moment. If it sold identity theft — teaching customers how to invade privacy, steal account numbers, and rip people off — we wouldn’t tolerate it for an instant.

So why tolerate plagiarism sites? Plagiarism is its own kind of drug, lulling academic anxiety with a quick fix, reducing the pain of schoolwork without addressing the root cause, and quickly becoming habit forming when it brings success. Plagiarism is also a form of identity theft, turning out manikins cleverly disguised as graduates who know how to think, write, and take responsibility for their work.

As for AcaDemon, what should we do? Do we sue? Probably not: If they’re smart, they’ll make their writers use only paraphrase, not exact quotations, so they won’t need any permissions from our publisher. We can’t exactly treat all this with pride — “Jolly sad you’ve only got one paper listed on AcaDemon, old chap, while I’ve got four!” — even though that might help book sales. Nor can we climb on board by demanding our share of the royalties as hush money. So can we do no more than name them and shame them in columns like this — even though we can hear them chuckling all the way to the bank?

Whatever we do, we can’t do it alone. How should we — our institute, our schools, our world — respond to this demon? Your thoughts?

©2009 Institute for Global Ethics

Find this and previous weeks’ commentaries online as a podcast titled Ethicast™ now available on iTunes. Subscribe today!

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

“The department is adopting these policies and procedures to strengthen public confidence that the U.S. government will invoke the privilege in court only when genuine and significant harm to national defense or foreign relations is at stake and only to the extent necessary to safeguard those interests.”

– Text from a drafted memorandum from U.S. Justice Department head Eric Holder, explaining the Obama administration’s decision to “impose new limits on the government assertion of the state secrets privilege used to block lawsuits for national security reasons. The practice was a major flashpoint in the debate over the escalation of executive power and secrecy during the Bush administration,” notes the New York Times. The new policy is expected to be announced soon.

Sources: Washington Post, Sep. 23 — CNN, Sep. 23 — New York Times, Sep. 22.

In other health-related news, Canadian poll shows health workers are most trusted professionals; in United States, officials tighten restrictions on tobacco

VARIOUS DATELINES
At the top of last week’s news in health and ethics:

• A new poll shows that 90 percent of Canadians are willing to give the government permission to restrict personal freedoms in the event of a flu pandemic, according to a report from the CanWest News Service. About half of those surveyed say that violation of a quarantine order could be considered equivalent to manslaughter. In other results, 90 percent of surveyed Canadians say doctors and nurses have an ethical obligation to report to work during a pandemic as long as safety precautions are put in place. The ethics of intervention in a flu pandemic has assumed international importance in recent months, and was addressed last week in a ProPublica investigative piece that claims federal and state officials in the United States are preparing to deny use of scarce ventilators to some patients in order to furnish them to patients most likely to benefit from them. The regulations were drawn up with “scant” public input, claims ProPublica, a nonprofit investigative news agency.
• A poll in Canada finds that physicians and pharmacists are regarded as the most trustworthy professionals, reports the Calgary Sun. Among respondents, 77 percent rated doctors as having high or very high ethics, with 73 percent of pharmacists receiving high or very high grades on their ethics. Also near the top of Canadian professions were high school teachers, police officers, and members of the clergy, reports the Sun.
• A law banning flavored cigarettes went into effect last week, part of an effort to keep young people from taking up the habit, according to U.S. News & World Report. Health officials contend that such products, sometimes flavored to resemble candy or fruit, are designed to hook the young. Also banned under the recently enacted law is use of the words “light,” “low,” and “mild” on tobacco products.

Sources: CanWest News Service, Sep. 24 — ProPublica.org, Sep. 23 — Calgary Sun, Sep. 23 — U.S. News & World Report, Sep. 22.

For more information, see: Related Newsline story, Aug. 24 — Related Newsline story, Aug. 10 — Related Newsline story, July 27 — Related Newsline story, July 6.

Ethics course is a surprise video hit; there’s controversy over schoolchildren taped singing a song praising Obama; publicist for the National Endowment for the Arts gets in hot water after apparently urging artists to support government program

WASHINGTON
Among the top stories involving education and ethics:

• New Jersey officials want the superintendent of the Burlington County school district to get to the bottom of a video circulated on the Internet that shows elementary school children singing a song that praises President Obama, as their teacher, not shown on camera, apparently encourages them, reports the Philadelphia all-news radio station KYW. Critics argue that the song represents an inappropriate politicization of the classroom.
• There’s a surprise video hit on television and the Internet: a course in ethics taught by a Harvard professor. The New York Times reports that Michael J. Sandel’s course is unusual in that it is a complete and fully produced course taught on TV. The class, according to the Times’s Patricia Cohen, takes familiar scenes and settings and turns them into nettling ethical scenarios: “Would you switch a runaway trolley from one track to another if it meant killing one person instead of five?” Cohen writes. “Would it be just as moral to push a person in front of the speeding trolley to stop it and save the five? What about a surgeon killing one healthy person and using his organs so that five people who needed organ transplants could live? Is that moral? Why not?”
• The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) became a stage for political passions last week after rumors began circulating that the agency’s communications director had asked artists to advocate for legislative causes during a teleconference. NEA officer Yosi Sergant reportedly urged “representatives from the arts world to get involved in President Obama’s United We Serve volunteerism initiative,” reports the Los Angeles Times. Sergant has been demoted, but not before conservative pundit Glenn Beck took aim, as did Republican Sen. John Cornyn, who claimed the “episode appears to merit congressional hearings and sustained oversight.” Rocco Landesman, who became NEA chairman a day after Sergant’s teleconference call, said the phone call was designed to encourage artists to take part in volunteerism programs, and “not a means to promote any legislative agenda,” notes the Times.

Sources: KYW Radio, Sep. 25 — New York Times, Sep. 25 — Los Angeles Times, Sep. 22.

For more information, see: Related Newsline story, Sep. 21 — Related Newsline story, Sep. 14 — Related Newsline story, Sep. 8 — Related Newsline story, Aug. 24 — Related Newsline story, Aug. 17.

Also, there’s an ethics issue over disclosure of the owner of an email account that received confidential information from a bank — by mistake

VARIOUS DATELINES
The balance between the benefits of technology and the erosion of privacy continued to be elusive in last week’s news. Among the stories:

• The latest wrinkle in home monitoring for minor criminal offenders has caught the attention of privacy advocates: an ankle sensor that can detect the faintest amount of alcohol in the perspiration of the wearer. At a cost of $12 a day, reports the Washington Post, the ankle monitor is a bargain compared to the $150 per day it would cost to jail the offender profiled in the piece, a woman who is under court order to avoid alcoholic beverages. While GPS location-detection devices are now routine, the march of innovation in monitoring systems raises new questions, according to the Post’s Fredrick Kunkle and Derek Kravitz: “The idea that governments could monitor its [sic] citizens’ every move with technology has been the stuff of fiction for decades, and the technology that allows people to create invisible fences for other people has been around for almost 20 years. But in a world with E-ZPass, spyware, and surveillance cameras, the notion that law enforcement is increasing its ability to monitor people’s physiological states unsettles privacy advocates.”
• Privacy advocates are hailing Facebook’s decision to shut down its controversial “Beacon” feature, according to a report from ComputerWorld. Social networking giant Facebook late last week said it would disable Beacon as part of the resolution of a lawsuit. Beacon is an advertising feature that reported purchases made by a user to his or her “friends” on the network. In addition to the unsettling invasion of privacy and slew of spoiled birthday surprises, the service appeared to violate federal privacy protections, according to plaintiffs in the case.
• A federal judge in California has ordered Google to temporarily deactivate an email account after a bank sent sensitive data to the account by mistake, reports technology publication Wired. The Rocky Mountain Bank of Wyoming sued Google to obtain the identity of the account holder who mistakenly was sent information containing sensitive data about more than a thousand customers, and did not respond to a second email asking that the information be destroyed. Google said it could not provide that information without a court order, reports Wired, so the bank sued, even though it made the mistake.

Sources: Wired, Sept 25 — Washington Post, Sep. 25 — ComputerWorld, Sep. 22.

For more information, see: Related Newsline story, Sep. 21 — Related Newsline story, Sep. 14 — Related Newsline story, Sep. 14 — Related Newsline story, Sep. 8 — Related Newsline Commentary, Aug. 24.

The team manager receives a lifetime ban

LONDON
European automaker Renault lost two of its major sponsors last week in the aftermath of a scandal involving a deliberate crash in a Formula One race last year in Singapore.

A bank and an insurance company backed out after it was disclosed that a Renault driver was ordered to crash so that another Renault driver would have a better chance of winning the race, the Financial Times reports.

The moves came after the Formula One tour’s governing body, the World Sport Motor Council, gave the company a suspended ban, reports Reuters.

But while the company can continue its racing operations, two employees of the firm were banned — one for life and one for five years — according to Sky News.

Former team chief Flavio Briatore, who received the life ban, also may face an uncertain future in his other main pursuit: part ownership of a West London soccer team, the Queens Park Rangers. ESPN reports that soccer league rules appear to disqualify anyone from ownership who has been banned from another sport by a governing body.

Sources: Sky News, Sep. 25 — ESPN, Sep. 23 — Reuters, Sep. 21.

For more information, see: Related Newsline story, Aug. 17 — Related Newsline story, Aug. 3 — Related Newsline story, June 15 — Related Newsline story, June 8 — Related Newsline story, May 11.

Former Israeli PM declares innocence in corruption trial; former New Jersey political candidate becomes the fifth person to enter guilty plea after New Jersey sting; British firm pleads guilty to bribery and violating U.N. sanctions

VARIOUS DATELINES
The world press focused on several stories dealing with corruption last week. They included:

• Former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert declared his innocence at the start of his corruption trial last week. “I come here as an innocent man and I believe I will leave here as an innocent man,” he told reporters, according to ABC News. Olmert, the first current or former Israeli prime minister to stand trial, is accused of receiving illegal donations and double-billing Israeli charities for trips abroad.
• James King, a former under-sheriff in Hudson County, New Jersey, became the fifth defendant to plead guilty to charges related to July’s massive undercover corruption sting, the Newark Star-Ledger reports. King admitted that he accepted bribes from an undercover informant posing as a developer seeking zoning changes from King, who was running city council in Jersey City at the time.
• A British construction firm has been ordered to pay almost $8 million in penalties after pleading guilty to bribing officials for overseas contracts. The BBC reports that the firm Mabey and Johnson also pleaded guilty to breaching United Nations sanctions by paying money to Saddam Hussein’s regime.

Sources: ABC News, Sep. 25 — BBC, Sep. 25 — Newark Star-Ledger, Sep. 25.

For more information, see: Related Newsline story, Aug. 10 — Related Newsline Commentary, Aug. 4 — Related Newsline story, Aug. 4 — Related Newsline Commentary, July 27 — Related Newsline story, July 21.

Education, public service, seem to be beneficiaries of new talent stream, according to the Wall Street Journal

NEW YORK
The world of finance, rocked by the ethics scandals of recent years and the resulting economic implosion, has seen a decline not only in the job outlook for college finance grads but a shift in interest to other fields, including education and public service, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal.

Writes the Journal’s Lisa Bannon: “Over the past 20 years, finance grew faster than almost any other sector of the U.S. economy, offering rich pay and luring a growing share of bright minds to trade securities, make loans, manage portfolios, engineer mergers, and turn mortgages into complex derivatives. Now the finance bubble has deflated, forcing hundreds of thousands of employees to search for other work and sending new graduates looking elsewhere for careers.”

Bannon reports that the change in the employment landscape sometimes serves as an occasion for people to re-examine their lives and careers. Many have filtered into education, and there appears to be an increased interest in public service.

The Journal piece quotes Yewande Fapohunda, who dropped her plans to pursue an MBA and instead enrolled in a pubic policy and economic development program at Harvard, anticipating working in the developing world.

“I realized the type of work I did mattered more to me than the compensation,” she told the Journal.

Source: Wall Street Journal, Sep. 18.

For more information, see:  Related Newsline story, Sep. 21 –  Related Newsline story, Aug. 3 –  Related Newsline story, July 13 –  Related Newsline story, June 22 –  Related Newsline Commentary, June 22.

“Immigration and Income — Not Race — Are Seen as Primary Sources of Social Conflict,” Pew poll finds

From the Pew Research Center:

“It may surprise anyone following the charges of racism that have flared up during the debate over President Obama’s health care proposals, but a survey taken this summer found that fewer people perceived there are strong conflicts between blacks and whites than saw strong conflicts between immigrants and the native born, or between rich people and poor people.

“A majority (55%) of adults said there are ‘very strong’ or ’strong’ conflicts between immigrants and people born in the United States. Nearly as many — 47% — said the same about conflicts between rich people and poor people….

“The survey found that about four-in-ten (39%) believe there are serious conflicts between blacks and whites, and only a quarter (26%) see major generational divisions between the young and old.

“The findings come at a time when discussions about the role of racism in American society has featured heavily in media coverage of Obama’s presidency — triggered first by the arrest in July of a prominent African-American Harvard professor in his own home, and more recently by the assertion by former President Jimmy Carter that much of the opposition to Obama’s policies is racially motivated….

“The survey found some notable demographic patterns in the public’s perceptions of social conflicts. For example, blacks, Hispanics and women are significantly more likely than whites and men to say major conflicts exist between groups in at least three of the four areas tested in the survey. Blacks, in particular, consistently see more social conflict than do other demographic groups. But not even blacks believe that racial conflict is the most prevalent kind of conflict in the country today….

“Similarly, half of all Democrats (46%) but a only third of Republicans (33%) say there are serious conflicts between blacks and whites. The partisan perceptions gap is even bigger on perceptions of conflicts between the rich and poor: a 55% majority of Democrats see very serious or serious conflicts between haves- and have-nots, compared with 38% of Republicans….

“Disagreements between immigrants and native-born Americans emerge as the most prevalent and serious type of social conflict among those tested in the survey….

“Hispanics in particular see serious clashes between these groups: nearly seven-in-ten (68%) say there are major conflicts between immigrants and the native born, a view shared by half of whites (53%) and six-in-ten blacks (61%)….”

For the full release from the Pew Research Center, Sep. 24, click here.

“All humanity is one undivided and indivisible family, and each one of us is responsible for the misdeeds of all the others.”

– Mahatma Gandhi (Indian political and spiritual leader and civil rights pioneer, 1869-1948)

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

by Rushworth M. Kidder

FLINT, Michigan
In Julie & Julia, the camera lingers lovingly over leafy greens in an open-air Paris market as Julia Child (played brilliantly by Meryl Streep) picks out produce on her way to becoming America’s iconic French chef. Since it opened last month, the film has captivated foodies, prompted Child-inspired restaurant menus, and rocketed her 1961 book, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, up the bestseller lists.

So here’s the question: Will all of that fresh produce be available in our future?

You wouldn’t think that a dilapidated inner-city neighborhood would hold the answer. But if Michael Hamm is right, the gap-toothed, jack-o-lantern look of Flint, Michigan — where block after block features dark, abandoned houses standing cheek by jowl with lit-up and occupied ones — could one day, as he says, “lead the nation” in a pioneering effort to build gardens in cities.

Dr. Hamm should know. As the C. S. Mott Professor of Sustainable Agriculture at Michigan State University, he focuses on ways to provide access to healthy, locally grown food. (Full disclosure: I serve on the board of the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, which years ago endowed the chair he holds.) A nutritionist by training, Hamm is worried that, as individuals, “we eat only about half of what we should eat in fruits and vegetables.” But he’s also concerned about big-picture issues, which he sets forth with chilling lucidity:

• By 2050, the U.S. population is estimated to grow from 302 million to 420 million, so we’ll need about 40 percent more food than we now consume.
• Much of our food is imported now from fast-growing, water-stressed countries. Yet global population is set to grow from 6.6 billion to 9.1 billion in 2050. Of the 3.5 trillion pounds of food needed to feed the world by then, a lot of it won’t be available for export to the United States — or won’t even be grown, as water constraints and urban development cut into farming.
• Can the United States expand its food production? Not if we continue to turn farmland into residential and commercial infrastructure. Already, Dr. Hamm says, 86 percent of our fruits and vegetables are grown on “threatened land” under pressure from developers.
• Result? If we decide to eat as much fresh produce as we should, by 2050 we’ll be 13 million acres short of our needs — equal, he says, to “two or three Californias.”

So why is this guy smiling? Because his students are beginning to work with Daniel Kildee. The treasurer of Genesee County (where Flint sits), Mr. Kildee chairs the Genesee County Land Bank Authority. He’s also a force behind the new thinking about vacant property, much of which began in Flint. His land bank takes derelict houses, repossessed by the city through tax foreclosures, and rebuilds them for resale or tears them down and plants lawns. He too has some crisply disturbing facts:

• Flint, once a hub of high-paying car-making jobs, hit its population peak of 197,000 in 1960 — on its way to 250,000, according to that year’s master plan. Since then, with the auto industry’s decline, the population has plunged to 113,000. Along the way, some 33,000 housing units have been abandoned, largely in the poorest precincts.
• Since Kildee’s initiative began, 1,100 houses have been removed in the “clean and green” campaign. But the city still owns 4,800 more parcels, with an additional 2,000 perhaps joining the rolls in the next six months.
• The city now owns about 800 acres of lots — some 14 percent of Flint’s footprint. Despite the urban-living trend now benefiting Flint’s business district, he sees no prospect for growth in these neighborhoods. Needed, instead, is a plan that will “re-pattern” the city for a more realistic future.

Which is what makes Prof. Hamm smile. With 700 of those acres in production, he says, “we’d grow half of the fruits and vegetables that Flint needs” — employing local workers, eliminating transportation costs, and assuring freshness. In the coming months, his students will be using a few inner-city plots to grow crops, develop farmers’ markets, and work to sell produce to local school-lunch programs. They’d also like to put up “hoop houses” — inexpensive greenhouses that, through an innovative insulating design, already are growing vegetables year-round in Michigan, using only the sun’s heat even in midwinter.

But there’s a hitch: City ordinances prevent such activities. There’s also resistance to the sale of residential parcels to farmers — lest, at some point, the city begins to repopulate. And that raises a core moral dilemma. What is the objective — to hold open the possibility for growth, or to feed and care for those already here? When is it clear that a city needs redesigning? And who gets to redesign?

If the numbers cited by Hamm and Kildee are right, this short-term versus long-term dilemma will be played out in cities all across the United States. Inner-city residents have vacant land but need fresh, affordable food. Food growers can supply that need but lack land. If policymakers can wrap themselves around the necessary changes, this could be an urban marriage made in heaven — where the sun shines just as brightly, and the rain falls just as frequently, as it does on America’s endangered rural farms.

©2009 Institute for Global Ethics

Find this and previous weeks’ commentaries online as a podcast titled Ethicast™ now available on iTunes. Subscribe today!

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

“Public officials using their public office for personal enrichment is a serious breach of the public trust.”

– Mary Boyle of Common Cause, a Washington-based government watchdog, discussing last week’s news that former Interior Department secretary Gale Norton is being investigated by the Justice Department for alleged criminal violations. Justice is looking into whether Norton violated the law by currying favor with oil giant Royal Dutch Shell. Under Norton’s leadership, Interior awarded Shell a series of favorable contracts shortly before she quit her federal job and went to work for the company in 2006. Shell stands to make an estimated $1 trillion in profits from those contracts, notes the Los Angeles Times.

Sources: Wall Street Journal Sep. 18 — Denver Post, Sep. 18 — Los Angeles Times, Sep. 17 — New York Times, Sep. 17.

Regulators won’t set salaries, but will have power to veto pay and bonus packages that reward excessive risk

NEW YORK and LONDON
The Federal Reserve, reacting to what the Reuters news agency characterizes as the culture of excessive risk taking that led to the current global financial crisis, plans to introduce new rules on compensation for bankers.

Under the terms of the proposed regulations, the Fed could reject any compensation package it believes would encourage a bank employee at any level to take excessive risks, according to the Wall Street Journal.

While the government would not set pay levels, it would review and if necessary amend salary and bonus policies, the Journal notes.

The guidelines will be formally proposed within the next few weeks, a Fed source tells Reuters.

While the regulations would apply to more than 5,000 banks registered with the central bank, regulators are expected to focus most of their attention on the largest 25 banks, MarketWatch reports.

The Times of London reports that news of the Fed’s plan comes in advance of the G-20 meeting in Pittsburgh, where world leaders are expected to discuss how to mount a global crackdown on banks in order to prevent another economic meltdown.

The proposal requires approval by the Fed’s board, but does not need to be passed by Congress, according to press reports.

Sources: MarketWatch, Sep. 18 — Times of London, Sep. 18 — Wall Street Journal, Sep. 18 — Reuters, Sep. 18.

For more information, see: Related Newsline Commentary, Aug. 31 — Related Newsline Commentary, Aug. 10 — Related Newsline story, Aug. 3 — Related Newsline Commentary, July 13 — Related Newsline story, July 13.

Embattled South Carolina governor says he won’t resign; Los Angeles Times reports that Maxine Waters is under ethics committee scrutiny; watchdog names Charles Rangel as one of the “most corrupt” politicians

VARIOUS DATELINES
Ethics probes and corruption allegations continued to be a major factor in news about U.S. politics last week. Among the stories:

• South Carolina governor Mark Sanford last week rejected a call from fellow Republican and State House speaker Bobby Harrell to resign as the investigation continues into his use of state money to support his extramarital affair. “Let’s let the process work its way through,” Sanford said, according to a report from Bloomberg. Sanford, noting that he may face impeachment, said in an interview that his offense would not merit such drastic action: “Eight governors have been impeached and that’s been for heinous things, like stealing thousands of dollars,” Sanford told a radio interviewer, according to the Bloomberg report. “It’s a lot different than what happened here.”
• The Los Angeles Times reports that the House Ethics Committee is investigating Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) for an undisclosed reason. While Waters has come under scrutiny for her husband’s ties to a bank that received federal bailout funds, the Ethics Committee did not say why Waters was being investigated and Waters declined comment, the Times reports.
• Watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington has put Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) on its list of “most corrupt” lawmakers for the second year in a row, the New York Daily News reports. Rangel currently is under Ethics Committee investigation for allegedly failing to disclose income and using his office to improperly raise money. Rangel’s office did not respond to the Daily News’s request for comments.

Sources: Bloomberg, Sep. 18 — Los Angeles Times, Sep. 18 — New York Daily News, Sep. 16.

For more information, see: Related Newsline story, Aug. 31 — Related Newsline story, Aug. 17 — Related Newsline story, July 6 — Related Newsline Commentary, June 29 — Related Newsline story, Feb. 16.

Opinion writers variously condemn and praise the actions of pair who staged undercover sting

VARIOUS DATELINES
Footage of ACORN workers allegedly offering advice to undercover filmmaker-activists posing as a prostitute and a pimp has ignited controversies over both the conduct of the controversial fundraising group as well as the ethical principles that apply to sting journalism.

The Christian Science Monitor reports that the videos purport to show staffers at an ACORN office advising the filmmakers on how to set up a brothel using underage prostitutes.

ACORN has been at the center of controversy and the target of political animosity from some conservatives, particularly after a 2008 incident when some ACORN workers were found to have filed phony registration forms, reports the Monitor.

In the aftermath of the new scandal, commentators weighed in on the implications:

• In Harper’s, Washington editor Ken Silverstein wrote that while he admires the work of ACORN and thought previous right-wing attacks on the group were “hysterical,” the undercover operation was “a terrific undercover sting mounted by two young conservatives. Sorry, but it’s a serious matter when at least three different ACORN offices, in Washington, Baltimore, and New York, offer to help a 25-year-old ‘pimp’ wearing a derby hat and chinchilla shoulder throw and his ‘prostitute’ lie about their business in order to buy a home. And even more so when the preposterously dressed duo suggested that they’d be bringing in underage girls from Central America to work at their brothel.” Silverstein dismisses arguments that this is a story that the mainstream media should have done, asserting: “Of course no one in the mainstream media would have done the story.”
• Noted journalist Mark Bowden, writing in the October edition of the Atlantic, characterizes the activist sting as an outgrowth of the collapse of journalism — meaning that the quest for information has become a quest for ammunition. He cites the way that troubling video clips of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor surfaced on all networks just minutes after her nomination. “The reporting we saw on TV and on the Internet that day was the work not of journalists,” he writes, “but of political hit men. The snippets about Sotomayor had been circulating on conservative Web sites and shown on some TV channels for weeks. They were new only to the vast majority of us who have better things to do than vet the record of every person on Obama’s list.”
• San Francisco Chronicle columnist Debra Saunders said she would not join those who are hailing the activists who, in her words, did “the sort of work that ‘60 Minutes’ should have done.” She writes that there was little fact-checking in the media firestorm that followed the video’s release, and warned conservatives that “any activist can grab a camera, head for a church or a campaign, and record some stupid quotes. When they do — and they will — the right will complain that it is wrong to brand a cause by the careless comments of a handful of disciples.”

Sources: Atlantic, October 2009 — Christian Science Monitor, Sep. 19 — Harper’s, Sep. 18 — San Francisco Chronicle, Sep. 17.

For more information, see: Related Newsline story, Sep. 14 — Related Newsline story, Sep. 8 — Related Newsline story, Oct. 20, 2008 — Related Newsline story, Aug. 27, 2007 — Related Newsline story, Oct. 9, 2000.

Two ethical issues are raised by the piece: the dangers of reckless behavior and whether it’s proper to use shock tactics to stop it

LONDON
A public service announcement depicting — in graphic and violent detail — the consequences of texting while driving has had only limited airplay on regular TV but has worked its way around the world on the Web, being viewed an estimated six million times.

The video has raised ethical issues on two fronts: awareness of the recklessness of texting behind the wheel and whether it is appropriate to use highly disturbing images to get that message across.

In the video, reports National Public Radio, three teenage girls are laughing while the driver is texting. The car swerves into another lane and crashes into an oncoming vehicle.

Heads are seen smashing through windshields and necks heard to crack.

While it is left unclear in the four-minute clip, the texting driver’s friends and two people in the car that is struck appear to die.

The public service announcement was made in Wales and is part of a longer film that will debut on the BBC Wales in October, reports the London Daily Mail.

Police in Gwent, Wales, produced the piece, using largely amateurs and volunteers. They intend to show the film in schools.

The U.K. Guardian reports that media worldwide have questioned the value of shock tactics to affect behavior — whether it is appropriate and whether the tactic really works.

But others adopt the consequentialist view that it will save lives in the long run.

The director of the film, Peter Watkin-Hughes, told the London Telegraph, “If we can get one person to change their behavior then it is worthwhile.”

Police say they originally were going to do a film about the dangers of joyriding, but changed the film’s subject on the advice of their teenage volunteer actors, who persuaded them that texting was more dangerous, reports the Telegraph.

Sources: Telegraph, Sep. 4 — Guardian, Sep. 3 — Daily Mail, Sep. 3 — NPR, Sep. 1.

For more information, see: Related Newsline story, Sep. 14 — Related Newsline Commentary, Aug. 17 — Related Newsline story, Aug. 10 — Related Newsline story, Aug. 3 — Related Newsline story, Sep. 22, 2008.

At issue are cases involving the privacy of web users, cloud computing, omnipresent cameras, and the Twitter factor

VARIOUS DATELINES
Technology continued to race at least one step ahead of law and ethics last week, as agencies, journalists, and commentators grappled with dilemmas that would have been imponderable just a few years ago. Among the stories:

• Press reports indicate that the Federal Communications Commission will back the concept of “net neutrality,” prohibiting Internet service providers from blocking or slowing certain web traffic, reports USA Today. ISPs want to put file sharers and other bandwidth hogs on a slow track. The ethical issue: Backers of net neutrality argue that elevating certain traffic to the fast lane will lead to inequities based on finances and create privacy invasions because ISPs must inspect a user’s web traffic in order to determine whether or not to slow it.
• A Wisconsin newspaper has apologized for revealing the identity of a person who posted inflammatory comments on its website. The Wausau Daily Herald named a local politician “Person of the Year,” but one reader who didn’t share that sentiment posted comments attacking the politician’s performance, personal characteristics, and family, according to Wausau television station WSAW. The politician requested and received confirmation of the poster’s previously anonymous email address and sent the poster a letter challenging the assertions. The paper says it regrets turning over the information and the paper’s parent, news giant Gannett, says it will clarify its policies on anonymous speech, reports WSAW.
• ABC News columnist Leslie Harris opines that the new trend of cloud computing — creating an omnipresent workspace for connected computers to operate, store, and access software — threatens privacy. “The payoff for users is massive data storage capacity available at very low — or zero — cost and freedom from having to deal with upgrades and security issues,” Harris writes. “The downside, however, may be loss of privacy when a government agent or a lawyer with a subpoena shows up at the office of the cloud computing service provider.” Harris contends that privacy law is years behind the accelerating pace of technology, and must quickly be updated to protect medical records, email, photos, and other information that may live forever in the so-called cloud.
• The New York Times reports that new technology has eroded privacy for many college athletes as omnipresent cell phones are used to snap and distribute pictures of star players, often with the intent of capturing them doing something embarrassing or provoking them into a faux pas. Compromising photos of athletes often turn up on the web, according to the Times report, sometimes working their way into the mainstream media.
• A Swiss data protection agency is threatening to sue Google over its “Street View” function, which photographs streets and allows users to take a virtual tour. The agency’s commissioners say the service is too intrusive, sometimes offering views not available to passersby, according to a report from the Agence France-Presse. Google says it will vigorously defend its service.
• The standards of journalism in the Twitter age are being debated after an off-the-record remark by President Obama went global via Twitter’s micro-blogging service. Obama’s off-the-record remark, calling rap singer Kanye West “a jackass” for his treatment of another singer during an awards show, was overhead by ABC employees sharing a fiber-optic line with CNBC, where the interview was actually conducted, reports the Associated Press. After three ABC employees took to Twitter to publicize Obama’s remark, ABC apologized. CNBC said that while there was no explicit agreement, pre-interview chatter is normally off the record.
• Britain’s Conservative Party has promised to limit government databases and protect citizens’ privacy, reports technology network ZDNetUK. The party is calling for fewer massive databases, stronger data-protection rules, and stricter limits on access. Britain has extensive surveillance networks and a large DNA database. While both have proved useful in solving crimes, critics worry that the measures intrude too far on personal privacy.

Sources: Washington Post, Sep. 21 — USA Today, Sep. 18 — WSAW, Sep. 17 — New York Times, Sep. 16 — ZDNetUK, Sep. 16 — AP, Sep. 15 — AFP, Sep. 15 — ABC News, Sep. 15.

For more information, see: Related Newsline story, Sep. 14 — Related Newsline story, Sep. 8 — Related Newsline story, Aug. 24 — Related Newsline story, Aug. 3 — Related Newsline story, Aug. 4, 2008.

Todd Henshaw, writing in the Washington Post, argues that failed leadership begins in the classroom, not the boardroom

WASHINGTON
Columbia University professor Todd Henshaw, who previously directed the leadership program at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, looked at the consequences of “Education Without Ethics” in an opinion piece last week for the Washington Post.

Henshaw argues that the problem of failed leadership begins not when a CEO takes the helm, but when future leaders are educated.

Business schools, Henshaw writes, need to take more responsibility for the ethical orientation of their graduates and should produce strategic, ethical leaders rather than technicians.

“Business schools have an opportunity to impart values along with technical skills,” Henshaw argues, “and many have either chosen to offer up a meaningless elective or worse, a non-credit lecture or workshop on ethical leadership or leadership skills. This signals to students the peripheral nature of leadership and ethics within their education.”

No class is value free, Henshaw writes, and in any classroom the professor’s lecture always carries “an underlying message or philosophy.”

“When business schools choose to avoid or neglect their responsibility for the development of ethical leaders,” Henshaw concludes, “this equates to sending a different message: that these things don’t deserve a place in the classroom alongside functional skills.”

Source: Washington Post, Sep. 17.

For more information, see: Related Newsline story, Sep. 14 — Related Newsline story, Sep. 8 — Related Newsline story, Aug. 17 — Related Newsline story, Aug. 10 — Related Newsline story, June 8.