The Ethical Barometer

The sordid tale makes you want to avert your eyes.  There is a terminally ill wife grappling with her husband’s public confession of an affair.  How that tugs at your heart strings!  But, you find you cannot avert your eyes because there are the journalism ethics questions, “How come The National Enquirer beat the major news sources to the story by almost nine months?  And why was it ignored until photos forced a confession?” 

The John Edwards saga has, at once, so much sadness and so much enlightenment. There are lessons to be learned from this tale of woe.  Some of the basic principles and lessons learned here could have been drawn from similar sagas that have run from Eliot Spitzer back to Grover Cleveland:  1.  Truth percolates.  It just wants out there. Behave accordingly.  And, if you slip, admit it, make amends and disclosures (particularly when in the public eye), and then move forward.  2.  Benjamin Franklin and the Hell’s Angels had it right:  “Three people can keep a secret if two are dead.” Continue reading →

Leave it to Sports Illustrated to not understand the Barry Bonds issue. Ben Reiter wrote, “If teams are rejecting Bonds on moral grounds, WHO ARE THEY KIDDING?” and “Still, in a sport where teams happily take late-career chances on outcasts like John Rocker and men of advanced age like Julio Franco, there should be a locker for Bonds somewhere.” [Emphasis in original article, “Will Work for What He Made in ’86,” Sports Illustrated, July 28, 2008, p. 18.

Well, there is a difference between hiring a guy who mouthed off about subway riders (Rocker) or another who is long in the tooth (Franco) and a guy who is under indictment by the feds for perjury charges related to the steroids mess (Bonds). We don’t yet indict folks for being less than PC, which Rocker was. And thanks to aging baby boomers, we love to see the old duffers out there giving it the old pre-rest-home try. Think Greg Norman at 53 giving the Scots great delight in the recent British Open. Continue reading →

Scrabulous, the online knockoff of Scrabble, was shut down on July 29, 2008 because Hasbro, and rightfully so, pointed out that Scrabble, the basis for Scrabulous, was its copyrighted game.  Scrabble launched its own online game, but hackers made the authorized version inaccessible. 

Bloggers are howling about Hasbro.  Dear bloggers, proceed with caution.  Intellectual property rights exist to ensure that those who have good ideas are rewarded.  Scrabulous was nifty, but it was not original.  Hasbro may be late-to-the-electronic party, but circumvent intellectual property rights and you’ll find innovation suffers.  As I tell my students who continue their free downloads of copyrighted music, there are costs to freebies.  Don’t come running to me when all you have are merry jingles for music.  If you want angst, you must reward sweat of the brow.  If you want good games, you reward those who develop the game, not those who stand electronically on the shoulders of creators.  If it were your game, how would you feel if someone ripped it?   

Rumors about health, surgery, and cancer recurrence aside, Steve Jobs looks to be ailing.  Even the analysts, whose acute powers of observation found them missing most of the dot-com bust as well as the subprime air, raised the question during a recent conference call.  Apple’s position is that health is a private matter.  Analysts’ position is that if Jobs leaves then Apple’s stock drops 25%.  The SEC’s position is that companies must disclose material information.  And so we swirl.  “None of your business,” is not the stuff that puts rumors to rest.  Maybe a firm, “You can’t handle the truth,” would be less controversial.  Or maybe Apple needs to escape the either/or conundrum.  Continue reading →