Posts under ‘Ethics’

Jason Calacanis has written a very tough piece about an operation called PayPerPost, a company that has gotten serious venture-capital backing for a “service” in which bloggers are paid to write about products — but are not required to disclose their financial interest. We should generally abhor this kind of marketing. It encourages us to […]

Business Week Online: Unrepentant PayPerPost Gets Funding. The Orlando-based startup, which matches advertisers with bloggers willing to write about their products for $2 and up per post, will announce on Tuesday that it has netted $3 million in venture capital. The Series A round was led by Inflexion Partners, with Village Ventures and Draper Fisher […]

NY Times: False Accusation Sharpens Canadian Press Debate. A Canadian government commission faulted Canada, the United States and Syria for their treatment of the engineer, Maher Arar, whom it found to be completely innocent. The commission also found that several leading news organizations had been used by anonymous sources in a smear campaign against Mr. […]

The Poynter Institute’s Bob Steele, in an essay entitled “HP’s Glass-Housed Critics,” writes: Journalists are not above using some forms of deception to get stories. We’ve long used our own form of sting operations. We’ve played private detective in ways that aren’t always so kosher. Sometimes we pretend to be someone other than a journalist. […]

(The following column first appeared in PR Week (subscription required).) My friend David Weinberger, an author and deep thinker, once updated the famous Andy Warhol line for the era of the blog. Weinberger said, “In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 people.” Fame is double-edged, of course. So an addendum: In the future, […]

The New York Times discusses “The Lonelygirl That Really Wasn’t” but skirts the ethical questions — including the fact that the site in question was deceiving people, and that the creators plainly hope to make money on the people they’ve deceived. Isn’t that — at least as much the smart forensic work that exposed the […]

It’s no surprise that some bloggers on the political right have been enthusiastic supporters of the fake history that ABC and Disney are passing off as “almost fact” this weekend — the so-called “docudrama” about 9/11. What is dismaying in the extreme is that some people for whom I’ve had a great deal of respect […]

The Wall Street Journal asks, “Where Did That Video Spoofing Gore’s Film Come From? The answer, it appears, is a PR firm that also represents Exxon Mobil: In an email exchange with The Wall Street Journal, Toutsmith didn’t answer when asked who he was or why he made the video, which has just over 59,000 […]

After its ridiculous cover headline claiming that Digg.com’s founder has “made $60 million” — based on valuations, not cashed in for real money, by unnamed people “in the know” — Business Week is still refusing to acknowledge its goof, as Scott Rosenberg’s notes in a trenchant post: Now the magazine can either publish a correction, […]

The postings in TPMmuckraker’s Ann Coulter Archives lead to various articles and other evidence that her rancid writings aren’t always her own words, and the site is looking for more examples that it plans to publish soon. I have many objections to her work — such as her too-frequently lack of accuracy and fairness — […]