The Ethics of Freedom of the Press

On the face of it, this is a non-issue in the way that only an aspect of Constitutional Law can be. The Right to Freedom of the Press cannot be abridged in any fashion anywhere in the United States, and probably shouldn’t be. Certainly, there don’t appear to be any historical examples of government-sponsored censorship, or government controlled media, that turned out to be a good thing. But in a world where almost any information that is released in any fashion can be made accessible to anyone with a computer in a matter of seconds, the question becomes more one of ethics than law anyway. I thought we should take a closer look…

To begin with, despite the things that some people like to claim on the Internet, you can’t really say or print anything you want. The First Amendment protections were never intended to shield anyone from the consequences of actual crimes or of tortious acts. Claiming that an object you are selling is valuable when it isn’t is still fraud, and claiming that someone has defrauded you when they haven’t is still slander, or libel if you publish it. Similarly, the use or distribution of material somebody else wrote, drew, photographed, filmed or otherwise created without their permission is a copyright violation, and generally regarded as theft. But what about a case where there is no law preventing the use of some material, and no practical chance of a civil suit, but the possibility still exists of causing harm – physical, monetary or emotional – to another party?

Consider, if you will, any of the cases where crime scene photos, or pictures taken after an automobile accident, have been leaked or sold and then posted online. There was another one of these in Montana this past week, but you can find similar examples in California and several other states. Depending on the jurisdiction and the appropriate state law, there may or may not be any legal prohibition against releasing these images to the public, or distributing them on the air or over the Internet. One could argue that the people who run television stations and news websites have a fiduciary responsibility to generate revenue for their owners, and that if displaying legally-obtained images increases viewership or site traffic they have a duty to display those images. One could also argue that as journalists they have a duty to inform the public of newsworthy events occurring in their community, even if those events are tragic. But I personally would not want to be the one assigned to explain those principles to a grieving family who had first learned of the loss of a loved one when they saw the footage on the 6:00 news…

I’m quite sure I don’t need to tell anyone reading this post (assuming I have readers) how problematic it would be to have officials at any level of government – or worse, private citizens with “influence” over those officials – decide what information should be available to the public. The potential for abuse in product liability cases alone would be monumental. But at the same time, relying on the conscience, discretion or human decency of those managers in charge of the news media does not appear to be working. All of which brings me to the question:

At what point does the right of the public to know about the conditions, hazards, risks, or misfortunes befalling their community outweigh the right of family, friends, or victims of a tragedy to privacy? Does our answer change depending on how much time has passed since the tragic events, or on how much of a threat the underlying cause of that tragedy poses to the public at large? And even assuming that it was possible to identify such a point, can we trust anyone outside of the media companies themselves to make such a judgement? Or are should we just leave those laws as they stand and hope for the best?

It’s worth thinking about…

Beyond Our Means

I read with great interest a story that appeared on the Reuters home page this past week, where the authors noted that auto loan delinquencies had reached their highest level in eight years during the last quarter of 2016. Given the number of crises, financial and otherwise, that appear to be rampaging around our nation these days the threat of people not making their car payments on time may seem relatively trivial, but it has a number of disturbing implications, beyond the fact that Americans appear to be spending more than they can afford on motor vehicles yet again…

Regular readers of this blog (assuming I have readers) may recall a story I brought you at the beginning of the 2008 financial crisis about people falling prey to predatory loans, not just on their mortgages or their credit cards, but also on their car loans. It didn’t draw that much attention at the time, and maybe it shouldn’t have – this was a period when people with mortgages they couldn’t afford were choosing to abandon their properties and taking the hit to their credit when the banks foreclosed. But the impact of borrowers using the same tactic to purchase new cars – taking out new loans to purchase new vehicles and leaving the old ones to be repossessed – did not help the ensuing consumer credit situation…

I can’t speculate on the political or legal ramifications of the crisis, but it is possible that too many people failed to grasp the size of the problem. According to the Reuters story, auto debt in America went up by around $93 billion over 2016, which brings the total people in this country owe on their vehicles to just over $1.16 trillion. Yes, I said trillion; we have just caught up to and passed the amount owed on this class of loan at the time the Great Recession started. Of that amount, Reuters is reporting that around $23.27 billion are 30 days delinquent, and another $8.24 billion are 90 days delinquent or more. For comparison, the ruinous student loan debt in this country is at around $1.31 trillion, and total debt is around 12.6 trillion…

Now, you might quite reasonably ask why I am wasting your time with this story, particularly if you are not currently behind on any of your loan payments. Why should you care if the kind of people who spend $80,000 on a car when they make $10 an hour are at it again? I could point out that this type of borrowing behavior is a long-standing predictor of trouble for the auto industry, remind you about the havoc that resulted the last time the Big Three automakers were facing bankruptcy, or even point out that if one or more of these companies does go underwater again, it’s your tax dollars that will be used to bail them out. But what really concerns me about this is the part we’re not seeing – the parts that don’t hit the radar at Ford Credit or its counterparts…

The impact of predatory lending at a local level – the “Buy Here – Pay Here” operations are only one of the more egregious examples – may not have the same impact as GM going into bankruptcy, but the effects on a whole range of people who can’t ask the Federal government to bail them out were hideous. And while our current leadership – financial as well as political – does not like to admit it, if consumer spending drops off because none of our consumers have money to spend on anything except loan payments, none of us are going to like the results…

Unexpected Consequences Ride Again

I found the story about decreasing gun sales this week on the CNN Money page to be somewhat ironic and more than a little amusing. If you don’t follow such things, you may not have been aware that the last eight years have been a bull market for all things gun-related in the United States. Gun sales have been so strong that several manufacturers have expanded production and even some foreign firms have begun setting up U.S. divisions. Meanwhile, ammunition sales have been even more explosive, prompting some manufacturers to move into ammo production for the first time. Several explanations have been given for the increased sales, but the most common cause cited has been the persistent rumor that the Obama Administration was secretly planning to introduce legislation to confiscate all privately owned guns in the United States…

Why, exactly, such a rumor would have proven so difficult to dispense with has never been conclusively proven, and I think we can safely assume that if anyone could produce evidence of a deliberate smear campaign we would have heard about it by now. What we can establish is that these rumors let to panicked buying trends after the 2008 and 20012 elections, and rash of similar rumors about Secretary Clinton (and a widely-held belief that she would be elected last year) resulted in an even more intense buying frenzy last fall. But when a Democratic victory failed to appear, sales of guns and ammunition began drying up, and apparently several of the major weapons manufacturers are having to deal with significant surplus inventory which is showing no sign of ever being sold…

The irony, of course, is that many of the same people and organizations who are most opposed to gun control legislation were significant contributors to the Republican candidates in the last election – and in every previous election over the past fifty years. But while hunters, NRA members and people who participate in target shooting may make up the rank and file of the “gun lobby”, a significant amount of the money that supports the cause – and that goes into getting Republican candidates elected – comes from those same arms companies. And while they have undoubtedly succeeded in getting a candidate more sympathetic to their cause elected, they have also helped to undermine their own sales tactic: scaring people with the specter of gun confiscation…

Now, one could reasonably argue that a better-educated electorate would have known that the outgoing Administration had never made gun control (let alone gun confiscation) a priority issue. There was an attempt to renew the Assault Weapons ban passed twenty years earlier, but this was defeated by the Republican-controlled Congress and never had much of a chance. And while gun control is traditionally seen as a Democratic issue, any attempt to undercut, much less repeal, the Second Amendment would be political suicide for almost any politician seeking national office – and our last Administration certainly knew that. That the gun lobby was able to perpetuate this myth is a strong indication of just how ignorant large numbers of our citizens really are, but it also demonstrates that the companies in question did not follow up their strategy to its logical conclusion…

If the various companies that manufacture and sell firearms had really wanted to maximize their profits, they should have thrown all of their support behind a Democratic candidate that many of their customers (rightly or wrongly) believed was going to take all of their guns away. They could have counted on support from the people who make those air-tight containers that some folks have been using to bury cashes of weapons (you can’t confiscate what you can’t find, right?), and any number of publishers, filmmakers and lawyers who make money feeding the same scare stories to people too gullible to know better. But with a politician in office who will cheerfully sign off on new laws allowing personal ownership of whatever guns people want to buy, the demand for all of these products is already starting to dry up, and the entire industry may be in for a crisis in the new year…

Whether this means the companies and their allies are simply getting their comeuppance for foisting their politics off on the rest of the country depends on your point of view, but it does appear to have had consequences they did not anticipate…

Words Fail Me, Again

There are some stories you encounter on the Internet that will make you wonder if somebody is trolling you, or possibly whoever wrote the article. There are others that will make you want to trace back the source of the information and verify that the article isn’t just made-up misinformation. Earlier today I was trying to authenticate the claim that former Vice President Dick Cheney had joined filmmaker Michael Moore and the Pope in opposing the Muslim immigration ban (which turned out to be true, by the way) when I stumbled onto a notice about a California-based homeopathic company that was being investigated by the FDA for including an unsafe (possibly toxic) level of deadly nightshade in a teething tablet product. Unable to believe my eyes, I went looking for the origin of the story…

Unfortunately, it would appear that this one is a true story. You can find the press release on the FDA website if you don’t believe me, and I can’t say I would blame you if you didn’t. The idea that a company could willfully endanger the lives of teething infants by using an ingredient whose effects the Food and Drug Administration calls “unpredictable” in children under two years old, and has denounced as an unacceptable risk is almost literally unbelievable – unless you are already familiar with homeopathic remedies. Most of these products involve trace amounts (they’re sometimes called “memories”) of various substances, which are supposed to work by triggering the body’s defenses without actually containing enough of the toxin to be dangerous. At least, that’s the idea…

As I’m sure I’ve mentioned before, I have no training in either biology or chemistry, but the people who do research these subjects, including the top people at the Food and Drug Administration, have been almost unanimous in debunking homeopathic products as “pseudoscience” – later-day descendants of the “snake oil” products of the Wild West era. An MD of my acquaintance once described a homeopathic iron supplement as containing roughly the same amount of iron you would ingest if you drank tap water in a building with iron pipes – which is to say, less than you would get from food that was cooked in an iron skillet. Fortunately, these miniscule concentrations usually keep homeopathic remedies from having any harmful effects on the user, since even if you are taking a product made with belladonna (deadly nightshade) there won’t be enough of it in an entire package to actually harm you. Unless, of course, you are under the age of two, with organs and systems that are still developing…

Now, we should probably acknowledge that, for the most part, homeopathic products aren’t illegal. As long as everything in the package is clearly labeled, and the appropriate disclaimers about the contents not being approved for treatment of anything by the FDA are in place, there’s generally no law against ingesting a “mineral supplement” that has less of that specific mineral in it than is normally found in the air you breathe. The problem in this case is that the amounts of belladonna found in the product are not consistent, and neither is effect of this ingredient on young children. The FDA is announcing that at this time they are not aware of any proven health benefit offered by these products, but there have been cases of serious negative reactions, possibly including death, among users in the affected age groups…

I’m not sure how this story will eventually shake out. At the moment, the FDA doesn’t even have enough evidence of wrongdoing to force the manufacturing company to recall the product, and so far the company has not agreed to a voluntary recall. Given the current administration in Washington, it does not seem likely that we will be seeing any more restrictions on highly lucrative products that may possibly have extremely bad side effects, either. For the moment, the best solution I can suggest is to research all unsupported product claims, consult with actual biomedical scientists, and don’t believe everything you read about the magical curative properties of very tiny amounts of deadly poison…