Censorship by Any Other Name

  Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.  - Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Cyberbullying , digital plagiarism and online cheating are among the most talked-about ethical issues in media today. Sadly, much of this discussion unfairly blames new technologies, conflates morality with ethics and proposes tired old collectivist “solutions,” ignoring the real drivers of ethical blind spots and disconnects. It's easy to pin all this on the internet, with so many recent accounts of unacceptable behavior on social media. War, bigotry and human rights abuses, however, are nothing new. If anything, the internet has enhanced awareness of these problems, especially for those of us fortunate enough to live in a relatively free society. The internet has only exacerbated our more animalistic tendencies going back to the dawn o...

  In 2006, Vladimir Putin hired Atlanta-based Ketchum, Inc. to bolster his image in Western nations… Yes, that Vladimir Putin . Ketchum would go on to earn tens of millions in revenues until just this past week, when Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov announced Putin had fired them . Ketchum, meanwhile, told PR Week that they fired Putin . Regardless of whom you believe, this raises the question of why an American PR firm would choose to represent one of the world’s most flagrant human rights abusers, or for that matter, how it managed, just a year later, to get Time magazine to name him their “Man of the Year. The “Man of the Year,” as Time explains, "is not and never has been an honor... It is a clear-eyed recognition of the world as it is and of the most powerful individuals and forces shaping that world--for better or for worse." Time, after all, named Adolph Hitler in 1938. Despite this, Putin didn’t pay Ketchum to represent him “for better or worse.” That’s not wha...

  The survival of democracy depends on an informed electorate. For this reason, the founders of this country sought to guarantee freedom of the press in the First Amendment. Journalists, for their part, established professional standards of objectivity in which news reporting stuck to the facts and opinions showed up in editorials. Over the years, these standards have encountered several issues. For one, they’ve created the false assumption that objective reporting is free of bias . Reporters and editors insert their biases every time they decide what to report, what photos to include and where to place a story. As human beings we all have biases. Professional journalism demands that we acknowledge our biases, rather than pretending they don’t exist. A second issue lies in the assumption that there is an objective reality , made up of ascertainable facts and that such facts are the basis for truth. This notion fails on many fronts. Our only access to reality lies in our senses,...