Too Easy

I’ve made a few snarky comments in this space about Gwyenth Paltrow’s “lifestyle” brand company “GOOP” – it’s hard not to, actually. When you can find online ads for stickers that are purported to enhance some aspect of your health despite having the exact medicinal properties of postage stamps, it’s really hard not to wax sarcastic about any company that would attempt to sell such a product, or about consumers who would shell out money for that product. It gets even sillier when you can find other electronic snake-oil salespersons selling almost exactly the same products but offering entirely different explanations about how they supposedly work. But despite the commonly-held belief that the people behind the “GOOP” brand are delusional, it appears there may be an even simpler explanation…

An article this week on the AV Club site reports that not only does the company make no particular effort to check or support any of the health or wellness claims made about its products, it has actively avoided any efforts to let anyone else check them. The Goop magazine was originally going to be a collaboration with Conde Nast, but the kind of unsubstantiated question and answer babbling they wanted to print did not meet the Conde Nast print standards. Goop wound up producing their own “magazine” and forgoing the boost that they could have realized by working with an established publisher just because they didn’t want anyone else to fact-check their claims either…

Now, if the Goop enterprise was just an extended, online version of the Gwyenth Paltrow Fan Club, I don’t suppose anyone would have noticed, or cared if they did. There’s a tradition going back nearly a century at this point of celebrities of various types offering their fans “lifestyle” information about lives that they (the celebrities) may or may not actually live, along with pictures, newsletters, or whatever helps to increase their popularity. If Paltrow wanted to tell her fans that she wears bits of paper with adhesive backing stuck to her skin for the health benefits they supposedly offer, that wouldn’t have any more impact on anyone else’s health than, say, bizarre and otherworldly claims about living on absurdly tiny amounts of food money each month. Unfortunately, that isn’t the case…

I could go on for hundreds of additional words here – and in the past I have – about the ethics or morals of selling worthless, high-priced crap to people who should know better, or about how if making money off of the gullible, credulous, or stupid became illegal our economy would probably collapse. The problem is, at this point in American history, it’s just too easy to do that. Like it or not, we are living in a society where the President of the United States is going on national television and telling you that the things you are seeing and hearing aren’t real, and the nasty anti-intellectual streak in our society is getting out of hand…

The real take-away from this story, and the dozens of others like it that we’ve been seeing lately, is that just as A-list celebrities can afford personal trainers, wardrobe consultants, nutritionists, publicists, and agents, they can also afford to stick their heads in the sand and just ignore fact-checking activities that might mean actually having to think about the truth (or lack thereof) in what they are saying – but the rest of us can’t. We’ve reached the point where you can either do your own due diligence, check all of the things people tell you are facts, or accept the risks involved with spending hundreds of dollars on “health stickers” and looking like an idiot…

You Don't Say

It was the kind of story that statisticians and business analysts hate. The Metro (UK) website carried it with a banner headline that proclaimed “Couples who spend more on their weddings are more likely to get divorced” in bold letters above a picture of a wedding cake. The story went on to claim that the more cash spent on wedding rings, engagement rings, or the ceremony itself, the more likely the marriage would eventually crash and burn, as illustrated by pictures of celebrity couples who had managed to do just that. It’s the kind of thing that would make anyone who couldn’t afford an elaborate wedding, anyone who thinks ostentatious displays of wealth are crass, or anybody who particularly dislike weddings feel better about themselves…

Unfortunately, the original article does not give the title of the study they are citing, the name of the journal in which it appears, or where the researchers got their information. To be fair, most people who are casually reading online news stories wouldn’t care about the statistical methods employed or the degree of empirical rigor employed by the research team; most Internet readers don’t appear to consider the source at all. The Metro (UK) site isn’t exactly the BBC, but they aren’t the Daily Mail, either, so I decided to run down the original research article…

As it turns out, the paper the Metro (UK) people were talking about is called “A DIAMOND IS FOREVER” AND OTHER FAIRY TALES: THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN WEDDING EXPENSES AND MARRIAGE DURATION, and it appeared in the October 2015 issue of a journal called Economic Inquiry, which is published by the Western Economic Association International. It’s the work of two economics professors from Emory University, Andrew Francis-Tan and Hugo M Mialon, and as you’d probably expect, it’s not quite as sensationalist as the Metro (UK) headline, or even its own title, would have you believe…

Basically, what the professors did was ask people to fill out a Qualtrics survey that provided basic demographic information, an approximate range of what they spent on the wedding, the rings, and such, and how long they had been/were married. They then cleaned and adjusted the data to account for as many inaccuracies as possible, and ran a number of regressions and other analyses to see if any patterns appeared. If you’ve spent any time on statistical research, you already know that there are problems with self-reported data (people lie) and correlational data (correlation does not equal causation, no matter how good your math is), but the researchers in this case weren’t looking for a causal relationship in this case…

According to the report, the researchers were attempting to determine if there was any relationship between elaborate weddings and/or rings and the length or success of the marriages, specifically because the companies that supply wedding services and supplies have claimed for most of the last seventy years or so that such expenditures are critical if you want to have a successful marriage. They specifically note in their literature review that these marketing claims are a recent development, and prior to World War II advertising of this type was highly unusual, and there does not appear to have been any corresponding popular belief…

Even more to the point, what the study found was that there was no such relationship. According to the data they collected, the researchers were unable to find any support for more expensive weddings or accessories leading to longer or more successful marriages. Although they did notice a number of other interesting results, as far as this study can determine, there is no reason to believe that spending a lot of money on your wedding will help you stay married, and no reason to believe that failing to do so will doom your relationship to divorce. If you dig down into the information, this turns out to be a moderately interesting study of changing consumer economics over the last two or three generations that debunks claims made by a specific industry about the vital importance of their products and services…

Although we should probably concede that just coming out and saying that would make it much less likely that anyone would read a news article about the findings…

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…

Missing the Point

I was reading an article online this weekend and reflecting that whoever wrote the article – or, at the very least, whoever wrote the headline – appear to have missed the entire point of the interview and the issue it was set up to cover. However, the gentleman being interviewed appears to have caught it on the first go, proving that he has a better grasp of the realities of business than the Fox News business department has ever had…

You can pick up the original story here, if you’d like, but the interview was with the Chairman Emeritus of the Marker’s Mark organization, who had been the CEO for the previous 35 years before handing the job over to his son. If you’re not familiar with the company, the Samuels family has been making bourbon (and related products) in Kentucky since 1780 or so, but the business has only been producing a premium product for the last couple of generations, and has only started offering new variations on the flagship product over the last decade or so. You might reasonably expect, as the Fox News people clearly did, that a multi-generational family company that make distinctly American alcoholic beverages would be upset by news stories claiming that the finest whiskey in the world is actually made in Taiwan…

According to the interview, however, Bill Samuels Jr., the Chairman Emeritus, is delighted by the international spotlight that has been turned on his industry, and is predicting that the attention from around the world will increase sales for all of the company’s products, including the new high-end beverages they have recently introduced. Leaving aside just for the moment how much additional business that such international acceptance will generate for the brand domestically, the fact remains that three quarters of the world’s economy and 94% of its population do not live in the United States. It is highly probable, in fact, that if the company’s product takes on the image of an internationally sought-after luxury product that domestic sales will increase, but even if they do not, it’s a big world filled with a lot of people who seem to like bourbon…

Now, to be fair, we should probably acknowledge that Bill Samuels Jr. has spent almost his entire life – from the day his father convinced him to abandon a career in aerospace and come to work for the family business – thinking about distilled spirits and ways in which to sell more of them. By contrast, the Fox News staffer who wrote the story has probably only considered the industry as a consumer, and may not actually have any business credentials to speak of. And by the same token, I don’t believe that it is a coincidence that the company decided to bring out its new Maker’s 46 and Cask Strength products just as international attention is starting to develop for this product category…

So why am I telling you about this, I hear some of you asking? You don’t necessarily run a premium distilling company, and you’d never believe that Fox News knows more about any industry than a guy who has managed a company in it for 35 years. The point I’m going for here is that anything that moves our company or its products from being a specialty product purchased by a limited subset of consumers in one corner of our industry to being part of an international competition for the best product in the industry, even if we did not win that competition, is a good thing. And assuming (as somebody at Fox apparently did) that news reporters for a major media outlet must somehow know more about an industry than someone whose family has been in that business for over two centuries, and who has devoted his life to the family business, is just another good way to get yourself mocked by scruffy bloggers from all over the Internet…

Flying in the Face of History

At first glance, it looked like one of those stories that turn up from time to time railing about the fact that the US does not buy the things it needs and spends too much on things it doesn’t need. At second glance, it looked more like one of those defense industry stories about how some contractor or other is going to improve the nation’s defense against attack by weaving safety nets made out of actual dollars and then running their operations from a building made entirely out of gold and gullibility. And at third glance it looked like yet another story about how an aircraft that is older than I am is showing no signs of retiring anytime soon, provided we keep pouring money into it – which is actually a subset of the first two stories…

For those not familiar with it, the Boeing B-52 “Stratofortress” strategic bomber was originally designed and built over sixty years ago (first flight in 1952), primarily as a carrier for nuclear weapons during the Cold War. A lineal descendent of the famous “Flying Fortress” and “Superfortress” types of World War II, the B-52 combined a number of new design elements and new technologies to produce the largest, most powerful and most effective strategic weapons platform of its time. Since then, the aircraft have seen action in every major conflict the United States has fought in, slowly evolving from carrying giant thermonuclear gravity bombs to stand-off weapons, smart bombs, missiles, and anything else you could ask for. It even stepped in as a cruise missile launch platform when the B-1A was cancelled during the Carter Administration. Meanwhile, regular updates of its avionics and control systems have kept these airplanes flying decades after the intended end of their service life…

What usually gets lost in all of the shouting is that while the mission for which these aircraft was designed (e.g. dropping massive hydrogen bombs on the Soviets) has long since vanished, the utility of a large flying truck that can carry forty tons or more of assorted weapons to pretty much anywhere you might want them to be launched from has not. It’s debatable as to whether or not the B-52 could ever have accomplished its primary mission as designed (rather than simply being hacked out of the sky in droves), but as long as its systems are kept compatible with the rest of the military, and as long as you can still find things for it to carry, there’s no real need to build another huge, radar-friendly, gas-guzzling, smoke-spewing, noisy, ugly and incredibly adaptable flying machine…

The new story is really just another case of finding new things for the B-52 to carry. According to the press information on Boeing’sMedia Room page, the company has signed a small contract to develop modifications to existing launcher systems that will allow these venerable airplanes to carry the latest generation of “smart” weapons in their internal weapons bays, instead of having to carry all of them on external mounts. This will enable the aircraft to carry larger loads, or to avoid external mounts (and their attendant drag) and operate more efficiently. It won’t enable them to fly through contested airspace, ignore active threats, or do anything else they don’t already do, in fact. But if you just went off the original story headline (“Boeing to extend B-52 life span by increasing smart weapon capacity by half”) you could easily get the idea that this is a massive deal that will drive the company’s bottom line for decades to come…

Instead, we’re just looking at a $26 million upgrade to the airplane’s weapons stations – a nice project, and potentially very useful, but not particularly significant compared to the $33 billion in business that Boeing’s Defense, Space & Security division does in a year. I don’t know what the next big thing in manned strategic weapons platforms is going to be, if in fact there is every going to be one, but I can tell you with a fair amount of confidence that this isn’t it…

The Ethics of Wikipedia

Anyone who works in Education at any level has probably got a few stories to tell you about students using Wikipedia as the primary source – or occasionally the only source – of information on a report or writing assignment, even though the site’s occasional issues with the truth are widely known. The editorial board does its best, but given the number of volunteers contributing to Wikipedia there will inevitably be cases where personal bias of a political, philosophical, religious, scientific or spiteful nature results in errors being accepted or retained as correct. This has resulted in some embarrassing – and potentially actionable – mistakes, and has come close to knocking the site off the Internet more than once…

Probably the most outrageous of these errors are the cases where an artist or scientist is denied permission to edit the entry about his or her own work, on the grounds that they are not a credible source on things they have created. This came up again this past week, when American author Phillip Roth was told that Wikipedia did not consider him a credible source regarding the origins of a book he had actually written. Roth responded with an open letter about this fiasco in the New Yorker, and somebody was apparently willing to accept that article as a second confirmation of story – possibly because the magazine would have hesitated to run the open letter if the allegations it contained were not verified – because the Wikipedia entry has been corrected…

Now, the point has been made several times that this policy isn’t as farcical as it sounds. Without some kind of independent fact-checking there would be nothing to keep a discredited scientist from changing the facts of a Wikipedia entry to indicate that his theory had been right all along, for example. We’ve already seen cases of political parties and candidates altering both their own entries and ones about their opponents in order to improve their chances of election, and there’d certainly be no reason to suppose that authors, filmmakers or commercial firms wouldn’t alter information about themselves in order to increase sales, regardless of the truth or falsehood involved. Unfortunately, there have also been cases where one or more Wikipedia editors have allowed their own personal biases to cloud their judgment, resulting in citations of scientific research being deleted in order to uphold a personal or political point…

Clearly, Wikipedia has a responsibility (legal and ethical) to try to present the most accurate information available, especially because despite all evidence to the contrary, people at all levels of age and education are going to take what they read on the site as absolutely correct. In cases where scientific fact is in question, or the details of an event (public or private) are in dispute, it’s hard to argue that a second (or third) source of confirmation is a bad thing. But when an artist presents his or her actual thoughts about a work, or a scientist provides his or her actual data and calculations, it’s even more difficult to say that an editor who can’t possibly have an understanding of that work that approaches that of the person who created it should have the authority to override (or delete) the opinions of the creator. This leads me to an ethical question that is not as simple as it initially appears:

Does Wikipedia (or any other online source) have an ethical responsibility to allow the creator of a specific work of art or research to have the final say on the meaning and interpretation of his or her own work? If so, how are they to prevent edits made for self-serving purposes, and particularly ones that intentionally distort the facts? If not, how are they to prevent edits that directly contradict not only the original work but also the creator’s efforts to correct the entry? In the case of any disputed fact the editors could certainly request third-party confirmation of basic facts, but this will almost certainly result in cases where the editors and their subject matter are at odds with yet another set of bias and belief. Or should the site allow all information that isn’t directly contradicted by other available sources to be entered, possibly with notations where the disputes occur, and allow visitors to the site to make their own decisions?

It’s worth thinking about…

Apples and Corn Chips

I was reading some of the news stories about the success of the new “Doritos Locos Tacos” product from Taco Bell and reflecting that there were at least two things worth considering about this report – depending on how one happens to feel about fast-food operations, product development, and possibly business reporting or history. There may even be a few points here about expert knowledge, really bad logical fallacies and demographic research, which struck me as being quite a lot to say about a food product so preposterous on the face of it that it could be (and occasionally was) mistaken for a Saturday Night Live skit when it first appeared…

First of all, there’s the performance of the product. The “Doritos Locos Tacos” are actually just Taco Bell’s standard crunchy taco product served in a flavored shell – in this case, the flavoring used on Frito-Lay’s popular “Nacho Cheese Doritos” corn chip product. It’s one of those concepts that is so simple it probably took a genius to think of it in the first place, and it has resulted in the company’s most successful product in its 50-year history: Taco Bell is claiming to have sold over 100 million of the things in the first ten weeks they were on the market – or roughly as many hamburgers as McDonald’s sold in the first 18 years they were in operation, according to the OrangeCounty (California) Register. Surprisingly, this isn’t quite as impressive as it sounds…

Consider the difference between the two firms during the periods indicated: Taco Bell has been in operation for fifty years, and has been a franchised fast-food operation for most of them; at the time of product launch three months ago it had more than 6,000 locations world-wide, serving more than 2 billion customers a year and bringing in somewhere on the order of $1.9 billion in revenue annually. By contrast, in 1958 there were only 34 McDonald’s locations extant, all of them in the United States; Ray Kroc had started the franchise/expansion program that would build it into the dominant brand we know today, but comparing the two organizations is silly, and so is the fact that the Register is just printing that claim without fact-checking anything. Whether the fact that Taco Bell is headquartered in the same community as the Register (and purchases a lot of advertising space in the paper) had anything to do with this report is something you’ll have to judge for yourself, of course…

I think the most important point to this story, though, is the reaction I noted in a lot of people when the product was first tested last year. People in either of the primary demographics (Doritos or Taco Bell) went for it like the proverbial pack of rats, while everyone outside the primary demographics (most people over 30, in fact) thought it was the stupidest (and most nauseating) idea they had heard in years. Fortunately for their profitability, the senior management team at Taco Bell decided to try the concept out on customers in the appropriate demographic groups and probably realized that they had a winner on their hands before the first focus-group study was half-finished. If the product development team has just dismissed the thing as “something I’d never want to eat” they’d have missed out on selling 100 million products at $1.29, which by my count is $129 million in sales on one product alone, in just ten weeks…

That sort of failure of imagination – making decisions about a product based on what you want, rather than what your customers actually want – is sometimes called the “I Am The World” fallacy, and it remains one of the easiest ways to destroy a good company that doesn’t involve hiring your brother in law to run your operations. So the next time somebody brings you an idea that sounds like a stoner made it up late at night after a trip to the fast-food stand, you might want to hear them out before you make any decisions…

Or at least run the thing past a panel of probable customers…

The Whole Story

I was reading a story off of the Seattle Times website the other day and reflecting that sometimes even a really well-written article doesn’t actually tell you everything – or even the most important thing – about the event being covered. Sometimes it’s a matter of the reporter, the editor, or whoever runs the website not getting the facts straight; sometimes it’s rushed reporting or technical problems, and sometimes the people involved don’t really know what they’re doing; and sometimes it’s just that the people behind the story reported the facts accurately, completely and correctly – and missed the one key point that changes the entire nature of the article. It’s another reason to question everything you read, and look at every situation from as many different perspectives as you can…

The story itself seems simple enough, and relatively upbeat for a change. Last Thursday Boeing announced that they had received what will be the largest order in the company’s history; a request from Indonesia’s Lion Air for 230 of their 737 aircraft, including 29 of the new, extended-range version expected for delivery in 2017. This announcement comes on the heels of an order from Emirates Airlines for 50 of the new 777 aircraft, which was the largest order to date in terms of dollars ($18.1 billion USD). Lion Air also has options to order 150 additional aircraft, and over the summer American Airlines announced plans to purchase 200 additional Boeing aircraft of various types (potentially even bigger than either of these deals). One would expect a euphoric reaction from Boeing’s stockholders on this sort of news; however, this might not be the case…

Hidden at the bottom of the page is the notice that Boeing’s stock closed down 25 cents on Thursday, despite the glad tidings these huge orders represent. This could be of no consequence, of course; you’d have to check on the recent trends on the stock price to tell for sure. If you did, you might note that the current price is right about average for the past year (that is, about midway between the lowest and highest prices in the previous 12 months), or that the stock price has improved a bit since October but has not changed significantly over the past week. The actual value of a stock depends on a broad range of historical and accounting factors, and you will need some fairly complex equations to work out what it should be, but the key point here is that none of the people who make their money by speculating on how a company will perform (and whether its stock will increase in value) are reacting in the way you would expect them to react to the news that the company has just received its largest order ever and is now expecting an even larger one…

Now, I don’t pretend to have any expertise in the analysis of stock prices or probable future values; that’s a specialist function, and on my best days I’m just a generalist with a talent for spotting trouble. But then that’s the point – I don’t know what is going on here, I just know that something is missing from this picture. It might be nothing, or it might be the key to figuring out what an entire manufacturing sector is going to do for years or decades to come. But you’re not going to find out what it means without a great deal of additional research and analysis – and you won’t even realize that something else might be going on if you just take the original story at face value…

With the rise of computerized intelligence gathering and analysis software, and expert systems that can extract the one key piece of information you want from a database containing millions (or billions) of entries, it’s easy to forget that the machines are only as good as the people running them. I’m not saying that there is any hidden meaning in this simple story about large product orders being placed with Boeing, let alone that there might be some sinister warning concealed within the text. But just as you should never believe everything you read, you should also never assume that a given article is giving you the complete truth or the whole story…

There but For the Grace of God…

There was a story that popped up on “Nightline” last week that caught my attention as a true indication of just how bad our present economic crisis really is – and how diverse this country’s beliefs are, as well. According to the story (which you can pick up off the ABC News site) there’s a young couple who are filming themselves having sex and selling the A/V files to an amateur porn website in order to make enough money to pay their bills and provide for their 20-month-old daughter. From what I can make out, ABC was expecting this to be a mildly sensational story; the kind of things that will pick up a few extra views for a news show that airs after most people have gone to bed. What they got was a genuine hot potato, and an apparently huge influx of email commentaries…

The first thought that came to my mind on reading this story is that the editor at ABC who approved it for broadcast is having one on us – or else is so naïve that he or she should be institutionalized somewhere safe until they learn a little bit more about human beings. American society remains deeply divided on most issues of morality, which is hardly surprising given the vast diversity of our population and their ethnic and national heritages. Americans as a whole like to pretend that we are all the spiritual descendants of the Puritan movement by way of the Plymouth Colony, and that none of us would ever have a dirty thought, much less look at a dirty picture. But even a cursory examination of our commercial history will establish that this is nonsense; contemporary American culture is derived from literally hundreds of different cultural traditions, none of which could ever have agreed on one code of morality…

Thus, it is disingenuous (and facile) of the ABC News people to claim that they did not expect any strong reaction to the story. A much more interesting question is what this says about us – and the time in which we are living. At first glance, the idea of two young adults (who have a child of their own) filming amateur pornography for money might seem shocking, but when we consider that this activity is completely legal, as is the use to which their content is being put, it certainly doesn’t compare to some of the extremes we have witnessed people going to in order to support their families. It is highly probable that this material will complicate their efforts to raise their child (especially if they intend to maintain a particularly straight-laced family), but given that they have voluntarily chosen to take this action, and that all of the things they are doing are completely legal, I don’t think we can criticize it on ethical or moral grounds…

At some future point, perhaps, I will have to address the ethical side of this question in one of our regular Sunday ethics posts. My point in bringing you this story today is to point up that no matter how degrading your job might be, and no matter what you feel you have sacrificed in order to keep your family fed, somebody somewhere has probably had to do something worse – and that no matter how advanced, sophisticated, jaded, apathetic or uncaring you think our society has become, there will always be stories about people doing completely legal things in the privacy of their own home that will move vast numbers of our citizens into a howling frenzy…

It’s probably worth remembering that the next time you plan a business venture, and innocently ask, “What could possibly go wrong?”

The Phony War

I wandered out onto the Internet the other day, and there was the story on one of the news aggregation sites: “American Cancer Society Rejects Half-Million Dollar Donation from Atheists!” Right away, I was skeptical; the ACS is about as non-political as it gets, and I can’t imagine them refusing a donation that size from anyone, regardless of ideology. A little digging around the Web turned up the facts of the case, which are a little off from what the headlines are screaming:

First, it wasn’t a donation; it was a pledge to match the funds raised by a team of Atheists participating in the annual Relay for Life event, up to $250,000. This could end up increasing the donations made to the ACS, but it’s hardly the same thing as a check for $500,000 being turned down because the people offering it are a controversial group that could offend many other donor organizations…

Second, the American Cancer Society didn’t reject the offer; they rejected one of the conditions of the offer, which was that the atheist group (from the Foundation Beyond Belief) be allowed to participate as one of the National teams in the Relay. These positions are limited, and tend to draw the most attention. For the most part, the ACS tries to get corporate sponsors for the National teams, and very large (or influential) non-profit organizations to round out any remaining spots on the roster. Both the Foundation Beyond Belief and the Stiefel Foundation (which was offering the matching donations) were told they could participate on any local level they wanted…

Third, the outrage that has resulted seems a bit fishy. The only advantage that being a National team provides over participating in a local event is a larger stage (e.g. more exposure, more media attention, more opportunities to forward and publicize your own agenda). If, as they keep protesting, all the atheists wanted was the chance to contribute to the fight against cancer, they could easily do so; what they are actually saying is that if everyone doesn’t give them the spotlight to advance their agenda they won’t contribute anything at all and will just go home…

The story isn’t exactly a hoax; the matching donation offer was made, and the American Cancer Society did refuse to let the atheist groups have what they wanted. But the screaming headlines about the ACS discriminating against atheist groups (and being bigoted against atheists in general) are complete nonsense. The worst aspect of this, though, is that I don’t believe the Foundation Beyond Belief or Stiefel himself had any real expectation of getting the sort of attention normally given to a sponsor like the Ford Motor Company or the Ford Foundation through a grass-roots fundraising program and the promise of a matching donation. This was a convenient way of drawing a much larger amount of attention than the case could possibly deserve and advancing their own agenda at the expense of the American Cancer Society – and all of the people who actually have cancer and might benefit from ACS support…

I call this to your attention because if you don’t think the same tactics could be used against your business – especially if you are ever involved in an event that will draw national media attention – then you’re fooling yourself. The truth is, this sort of publicity stunt has been around for decades; it’s just that until recently you couldn’t use Twitter, Facebook, and various websites to turn this simple grab for attention into a national event. There are any number of ways the ACS could have fought back against this garbage, and hopefully they will at some point in the near future, but in the long run the only way to stop chicanery like this is to refuse to play those games. If you’re going to support the FBB or any other atheist group, do so because you share their beliefs, not because they’ve made up some absurd accusations about a national charity group discriminating against them. And if you’re going to withhold support from the American Cancer Society, do it for some reason other than because some special-interest group says the ACS was mean to them…

And in the meanwhile, let’s all try to avoid this sort of stunt in our own business dealings – and slap it down hard when it does appear…

The Ethics of Muckraking

Back at the beginning of the last century, most of the news available in the world was transmitted through the use of newspapers, which in turn meant that most of the information available to people about current events in the world were controlled by a handful of powerful men who owned the papers. I’ll leave the obvious comments about political and social control based on informational control to people who actually know about such things, and just focus on the business aspect of the situation – which was that, in order to sell newspapers, you had to have news to put in them. In extreme cases this led to things like William Randolph Hurst instigating the Spanish-American War (“You furnish the pictures, I’ll furnish the war!”), but for newspapers with fewer resources, this often meant going out into your local community and finding something about which you could write inflammatory stories. This process (commonly known as yellow journalism or muckraking) sold a lot of newspapers, and in later decades, a lot of television advertising and Internet pop-ups, which may be good for the economy, but remains questionable in ethical terms…

A recent example popped up in Utah, where a local news website started running a story about a billboard promoting an adult products retailer, and how “some” of the local residents were outraged about the risqué (possibly pornographic) photo featured on the sign. Now, everyone knows that Utah is a politically conservative state, and that people there (especially in smaller communities like Ogden) are not going to accept this kind of advertising the way people in Los Angeles (where such ads are common) or Las Vegas (where this would actually be on the tame side) would. On the other hand, the same article points out that the billboard does not meet any of the Federal standards for pornography, and is therefore considered protected speech under the First Amendment, no matter how much people in the area might not like it. The real point, I think, is that there doesn’t seem to have been much of a story here until the local news station started splashing it across the airwaves – and over the Internet…

Now, obviously, the rights of the station to drum up news on a slow news day are also protected by the Constitution, and no one is suggesting that they shouldn’t go out and ask people about the issues of the day – or even that they shouldn’t make up a few issues when there aren’t any worth asking people about. But the move from trying to rile up a few people about something that might be offensive to local sensitivities to advocating censorship of things the people running the station (or buying its advertising time) don’t like is a very short step indeed, and at the end of that road lies madness. The people running the station may only have intended to spice up a slow news day with a billboard featuring a scantily-clad female model (which we should note they didn’t have any problem with showing on television repeatedly), but the potential for things to spiral out of control as a result is disturbing on several levels – especially in a time when fanatical belief systems can and do give rise to actual violence…

Or, to put it bluntly, is it ethically acceptable for a television news program to increase its viewership and enhance its price for advertising time by artificially creating public controversy where none previously existed? Or should broadcasters (and other news channels) limited themselves to simply reporting the events that happen, and risk losing money, bankrupting their owners, ruining their investors (in the case of publicly-held companies), and destroying dozens or hundreds of jobs because there was nothing worthwhile to report on a specific day, and their viewers instead tuned in to the Playboy Channel or the Lingerie Football League?

It’s worth thinking about…