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#MeToo and Journalism Leadership
Ethical Leadership in Newsrooms in the #MeToo Era:
A Panel Discussion
October 29, 2019 (Tuesday) ¦ 2:00PM-3:00PM ¦ BMC 5.208
How did sexual harassment persist for so long in journalism, and what difference has the #MeToo movement made for those that run the media? What does ethical and effective leadership look like in newsrooms during the #MeToo era? This panel discussion features scholars from various fields in communication and media reflecting on the extent of the #MeToo movement in journalism, as well as its intersections with leadership in the modern media environment. Confirmed participants include:
Kathleen McElroy (Journalism, UT Austin)
Meme Drumwright (Advertising, UT Austin)
Kate West (Journalism, UT Austin)
Scott R. Stroud (Communication Studies, UT Austin)
The Media Ethics Initiative is part of the Center for Media Engagement at the University of Texas at Austin. Follow Media Ethics Initiative and Center for Media Engagement on Facebook for more information. Media Ethics Initiative events are open and free to the public.
Co-Sponsored by the School of Journalism, University of Texas at Austin, and the UT Ethics Project
Debating Civil Rights
The Center for Media Engagement and Media Ethics Initiative Present:
Debating Civil Rights: James Baldwin, William F. Buckley Jr., and the Battle for the American Soul
Dr. Nicholas Buccola
Elizabeth and Morris Glicksman Chair in Political Science
Linfield College
November 21, 2019 (Thursday) ¦ 3:30PM-5:00PM ¦ BMC 5.208
In February 1965, James Baldwin – the poet of the civil rights revolution – and William F. Buckley Jr. – the Saint Paul of the conservative movement – met for an epic debate in Cambridge, England. Baldwin took the opportunity to deliver a jeremiad against white supremacy and Buckley did his best to warn an international audience of Baldwin’s radical agenda. For the two decades prior to their clash at Cambridge, Baldwin and Buckley rose to fame as prolific authors and public intellectuals. Both men were – among other things – journalists. In the years prior to the debate, Baldwin and Buckley provide us with two very different visions of the vocation of the journalist as a witness and a storyteller. In this lecture, Professor Buccola will describe these visions and explore the implications they might have for our own time.
Dr. Nicholas Buccola is the Elizabeth and Morris Glicksman Chair in Political Science at Linfield College. He is the author of The Fire Is upon Us: James Baldwin, William F. Buckley Jr., and the Debate over Race in America (Princeton University Press), The Political Thought of Frederick Douglass (NYU Press), and the editor of The Essential Douglass and Abraham Lincoln and Liberal Democracy. His essays have appeared in numerous scholarly journals and popular outlets including The New York Times, Salon, Dissent, and the Claremont Review of Books.
The Media Ethics Initiative is part of the Center for Media Engagement at the University of Texas at Austin. Follow Media Ethics Initiative and Center for Media Engagement on Facebook for more information. Media Ethics Initiative events are open and free to the public.
Designing Ethical AI Technologies
The Center for Media Engagement and Media Ethics Initiative Present:
Good Systems: Designing Values-Driven AI Technologies Is Our Grand Challenge
Dr. Kenneth R. Fleischmann
Professor in the School of Information
University of Texas at Austin
September 24, 2019 (Tuesday) ¦ 3:30PM-4:30PM ¦ CMA 5.136 (LBJ Room)
Photo by Franki Chamaki on Unsplash
Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.” This is the first law of technology, outlined by historian Melvin Kranzberg in 1985. It means that technology is only good or bad if we perceive it to be that way based on our own value system. At the same time, because the people who design technology value some things more or less than others, their values influence their designs. Michael Crichton’s “Jurassic Park” chaos theorist, Ian Malcolm, notes: “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think about if they should.” That’s the question we have to ask now: Should we increasingly automate various aspects of society? How can we ensure that advances in AI are beneficial to humanity, not detrimental? How can we develop technology that makes life better for all of us, not just some? What unintended consequences are we overlooking or ignoring by developing technology that has the power to be manipulated and misused, from undermining elections to exacerbating racial inequality?
The Inaugural Chair of the Good Systems Grand Challenge, Ken Fleischmann, will present the eight-year research mission of Good Systems, as well as our educational and outreach activities. Specifically, he will discuss the upcoming Good Systems launch events and ways that faculty, researchers, staff, and students can become involved in the Good Systems Grand Challenge.
The Media Ethics Initiative is part of the Center for Media Engagement at the University of Texas at Austin. Follow Media Ethics Initiative and Center for Media Engagement on Facebook for more information. Media Ethics Initiative events are open and free to the public.
Weather Media in the Public Sphere
The Center for Media Engagement and Media Ethics Initiative Present:
Weather Media in the Public Sphere
Dr. John Durham Peters
María Rosa Menocal Professor of English &
Professor of Film and Media Studies
Yale University
May 2, 2019
On its face, weather sounds like the most banal and mundane thing possible. Ordinary people look down on talking about it and journalists often regard it as the lowest kind of news. This talk aims to show that the accusation that talking about the weather is intellectually empty is hardly the case in the age of climate change, and even dangerous. The rise of weather as a topic of conversation coincides with the rise of the bourgeois public sphere. More broadly, weather is a key part of media history. The history of human interaction with weather is also a history of cultural techniques and media technologies. Dramatists and divines have sought meaning from atmospheric events. Reading the skies is one paradigm case of human-nature interaction, and studying weather can stand in as part for whole as an inquiry into the environments humans have made or unmade. The history of modern weather forecasting is also a history of the militarization of the sky and oceans, and is co-extensive with the history of modern telecommunications, computation, and reporting. Weather raises two questions of profound interest to recent media theory: how mundane infrastructures are full of meaning and how vaporous or evanescent entities can be tracked, recorded, and programmed. Talking about the weather is not dumb; it may be essential.
Dr. John Durham Peters is a leading scholar in the area of media history, communication theory, and philosophy. He is the María Rosa Menocal Professor of English and of Film & Media Studies at Yale University. Previously, Peters taught at the University of Iowa between 1986-2016. He is the author a range of books, including Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication, Courting the Abyss: Free Speech and the Liberal Tradition, and most recently, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media. He has held fellowships with the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright Foundation, and the Leverhulme Trust.
The Media Ethics Initiative is part of the Center for Media Engagement at the University of Texas at Austin. Follow Media Ethics Initiative and Center for Media Engagement on Facebook for more information.
Matters of Facebook Live or Death
CASE STUDY: The Ethical Challenges of Live Internet Broadcasting
Case Study PDF| Additional Case Studies
Yatko / CC-BY-SA 4.0 / Modified
On March 15, 2019, a mass shooter entered two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, killing 51 people and injuring 49 others. The shooter publicized his murderous actions by streaming parts of the mass shooting on Facebook Live, a feature on the social media app that records and posts live video. The feature allows the user’s Facebook friends to observe and interact with them in real time, as well as like and comment on the live video. As with all content on Facebook, a viewer can report the video if it violates community standards, but this process often takes time. In the case of the Christchurch mosque massacre, the video was up long enough to go viral, coming across possibly thousands of users’ feeds. Facebook has since removed the original video, but because users have screen recorded or downloaded the video, parts of it are still floating around the internet today. Facebook Newsroom, the official Twitter account for Facebook Communications, confirmed in a tweet that within 24 hours of the video ending, over 1.5 million uploaded videos containing parts of the violent livestream were removed from the site, with 1.2 million being stopped at the uploading stage.
Within three weeks of the mass shooting, the Australian Parliament passed legislation penalizing Facebook if it does not remove violent content in a timely manner. Failure to do so could see executives facing up to three years in jail, or fines of up to 10% of the platform’s annual turnover (Griffiths, 2019). Some have proposed time delays, effectively limiting the “live” nature of immediate broadcasting promised by Facebook Live. In an op-ed for The Conversation, Jennifer Grygiel argues that installing a time delay can help decrease the spread of violent content or content that does not abide by Facebook’s standards. Time delays are normal in televised news content now, but there are important differences between cable and broadcast content and internet content. On Facebook, there are many live videos being posted, and too few moderators to scan all of them before they are viewed and shared by others. Facebook has challenges controlling regularly posted content, so some might wonder what difference a slight delay in Live broadcasts would make.
Why should anyone want Facebook Live to retain the immediacy of its current broadcast model? For some Facebook users, it’s a way to broadcast messages that are liable to be unreasonably censored by others. In a June 2016 sit-in on the floor of Congress focused on the lack of gun-control reform after the Pulse nightclub shooting, Democrats used Facebook Live and Periscope as ways around the C-SPAN cameras being turned off by Republicans during the protest (Newton, 2019). For others, it’s a way to immediately connect to a mass audience watching from afar. For almost two years, Congressman Beto O’Rourke used Facebook Live almost daily to talk about issues to fellow constituents in Texas who could not make it out to his rallies in every county in Texas (Guynn, 2018). Aside from politics, Facebook Live has been used by educators to help ensure success for their students. Principal Belinda George at Homer Drive Elementary uses Facebook Live for “Tucked in Tuesdays,” where she reads bedtime stories to her students. In a school that is 94% economically disadvantaged, she stated the goal of going on Facebook Live and reading to her students was “to bridge the gap between home and school… to form relationships with my scholars and their families” (Brown, 2019). While George can just record her reading a book and upload later, she couldn’t interact with them the way she can in the Facebook Live connection.
While the exposure to violence on one of the biggest social media platforms has its negative effects, some say it also has the power to bring justice to its victims. Danny Cevallo, CNN’s legal analyst, discussed how because of the sharing nature that Facebook has, it is often the first place detectives look for evidence of criminal behavior: “Sometimes, these cases would be completely unwinnable for the state if not for the defendant providing all the incriminating evidence against himself on social media” (Cevallo, 2017). This op-ed was released in response to the four Chicago teens brutally beating a disabled student while broadcasting this atrocity on Facebook Live. Because they broadcast the event on Facebook Live, they were quickly identified, arrested, and convicted for this crime. While justice was served, however, the disabled student victim was still humiliated in front of the many Facebook users who watched this video before it was removed by Facebook.
Facebook Live’s immediacy and speed, both in broadcasting a message and in others sharing it, has brought people together and has incited or reveled in violence against others. Its availability to everyone—from ordinary citizens to politicians to mass murderers—shows a democratizing force inherent in the technology. But what is the price paid for putting this ability to quickly “go live” in the hands of so many communicators? What ethical problems arise when content can be shared and used in ways that the original poster did not imagine?
Discussion Questions:
- What values are in conflict in the controversy over Facebook Live?
- How do the worries over Facebook Live relate to debates over free speech? Would eliminating one’s ability to immediately “go live” with content curtail their freedom of expression?
- What are the best arguments for eliminating Facebook Live? What compelling reasons are there to keep this technology?
- How might you navigate the ethical conflicts brought about by Facebook Live? How would you mitigate or reduce any side-effects to your proposed solutions or changes?
Further Information:
Cevallo, Danny. “Facebook Live is the new key witness to crime.” CNN. January 7, 2017. Available at: https://www.cnn.com/2017/01/06/opinions/facebook-is-key-witness-for-police-cevallos/index.html
Guynn, Jessica et al. “The Facebook candidate: Beto O’Rourke’s social media savvy fuels long-shot Ted Cruz challenge.” USA Today. October 26, 2018. Available at: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2018/10/26/facebook-puts-beto-orourke-voters-faces-bid-unseat-ted-cruz/1754371002/
Brown, Genevieve Shaw. “Principal reads bedtime stories to kids over Facebook Live because she loves ‘honoring children’.” ABC News. March 5, 2019. Available at: https://abcnews.go.com/family/story/principal-reads-bedtime-stories-kids-facebook-live-loves-61454447
Griffiths, James. “Australia passes law to stop spread of violent content online after Christchurch massacre”. CNN. April 4, 2019. Available at: https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/04/australia/australia-violent-video-social-media-law-intl/index.html
Grygiel, Jennifer. “Livestreamed massacre means it’s time to shut down Facebook Live.” The Conversation. March 21, 2019. Available at: https://theconversation.com/livestreamed-massacre-means-its-time-to-shut-down-facebook-live-113830
Newton, Casey. “The world is turning against live streaming.” The Verge. April 4, 2019. Available at: https://www.theverge.com/interface/2019/4/4/18294951/australia-live-streaming-law-facebook-twitter-periscope
Authors:
Irie Crenshaw & Justin Pehoski
Media Ethics Initiative
Center for Media Engagement
University of Texas at Austin
May 4, 2019
Cases produced by the Media Ethics Initiative remain the intellectual property of the Media Ethics Initiative and the University of Texas at Austin. They can be used in unmodified PDF form without permission for classroom or educational uses. Please email us and let us know if you found them useful! For use in publications such as textbooks, readers, and other works, please contact the Media Ethics Initiative.
Green is the New Color of Money
CASE STUDY: Greenwashing and Advertising Ethics
Case Study PDF| Additional Case Studies
Present consumers are caring more and more about the environment. Among 25-34-year-old Americans, 75% rank the environment among their top concerns. Not only are consumers more prone to purchase from brands making a “positive social and environmental impact,” but 72% of Generation Z (ages 15-20) respondents to a Nielsen study are willing to pay a premium price on those products.
The corporate response to this cultural shift has been to churn out product lines or change company values to be more “green.” In order to educate consumers about green initiatives, companies started to heavily market their efforts and actions toward being more environmentally sustainable and friendly. Some companies have gone as far as overstating the positive environmental impact of their products or business practices. This practice misleads consumers into believing that a product is more environmentally friendly than it actually is and is called greenwashing.
The practice of greenwashing often involves companies using buzz words such as “biodegradable,” “natural,” and “organic” to convey the message of greenness, even if that wasn’t the case. When a company exaggerates these claims, it can even run into legal trouble as showing an intent to deceive/mislead consumers. In the 2012 California case of Ayana Hill v. Roll International Corporation and Fiji Water Company LLC, the water bottle company was taken to task for claims that their bottled water was “environmentally friendly and superior.” While the “greenness” of the bottle was not disputed, many felt that this gain was overshadowed by the unemphasized fact that the manufacturing, production, packing, and distribution of the product causes “as much, if not more, of an adverse environmental impact when compared to similar bottled waters,” rendering it less than “green.”
Proponents of the greening—or “greenwashing”—of products would point to the relative gains that controversial marketing strategies might encourage. Many would argue that harsh criticism against companies working toward greener initiatives and products will discourage strides being made in the corporate world toward more eco-sustainable business practices. Slight exaggeration in advertising may be needed to convey the notion of potential impact to the consumer. Supporters could point to the use of green words such as “natural,” “organic,” “eco-friendly,” as encouraging consumers to look for more environmentally friendly products, even if their product is only slightly greener than the non-green alternative. Audrey Holmes of Earth911 goes as far to say “the best way greenwashing is helping our society change over time is by making sustainability a normality” (Holmes, 2017). By arguably over-emphasizing the green-ness of a specific product, companies are at least bringing the environmental dimension of purchases to the foreground of a consumer’s purchasing decisions, and even altering the status-quo. Proponents argue that the shifting ethos to greener living is worth the cost of some hypocrisy. While some of these green products over-sell their environmental benefits, not all do—and such marketing will result in some of these better products being clearly identified and purchased by consumers.
Critics of greenwashing point to this intention of “going green” as a deceptive way to increase business profits rather than as a way of fulfilling any duty to the environment. When the intention behind the product’s “green-ness” is to increase sales, businesses may be sacrificing the environmentally positive aspects of a product for the marketability or cost-efficiency of producing it. The more money businesses put into marketing their “green-ness,” the less money they put toward environmentally sustainable efforts. In practice, this leads to businesses putting on a front of being eco-friendly while still practicing environmentally unsustainable practices such as polluting or lobbying against environmentally forward laws. This, in end, places the burden on the consumer to distinguish between authentic environmentally friendly companies and those just putting on a facade. David Mallen, associate director of the National Advertising Division of the Council of Better Business Bureaus, notes that “because green advertising is so ubiquitous now, there’s so much greater potential for confusion, misunderstanding, and uncertainty about what messages mean and how to substantiate them” (Dahl, 2010). The confounding messaging has left a vacuum in the consumer trust in the information they receive from companies. Greenpeace, one of the most prominent groups leading the charge against greenwashing, argues that “the average citizen is finding it more and more difficult to tell the difference between those companies genuinely dedicated to making a difference and those that are using a green curtain to conceal dark motives” (Moss & Scheer).
As more and more companies find that green sells, more products will be touted as helping the environment—or at least as not harming it as much as competing products. But how far can companies go in creatively selling their products without trashing their consumer’s autonomy?
Discussion Questions:
- What values are in conflict over the use of greenwashing in this case study?
- To what extent should companies be allowed to tout their green marketing efforts?
- What does it mean to deceive a company’s consumers? Are companies expected to forgo their exaggerated claims to guarantee transparency for the consumer?
- What sort of ethical principles could you create that would guide advertisers in balancing creativity, persuasive messaging, and respect for the consumer’s autonomy? Would these work in subtle cases of spin or exaggeration?
Further Information:
Capital Flows. “Greenwashing”: Deceptive Business Claims of “Eco-Friendliness.” Forbes. March 20, 2012. Available at https://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2012/03/20/greenwashing-deceptive-business-claims-of-eco-friendliness/
Clarke, Richard A., Stavins, Robert N., Greeno, J. Ladd, and Schot, Johan. “The Challenge of Going Green.” Harvard Business Review. July 1994. Available at https://hbr.org/1994/07/the-challenge-of-going-green
Dahl, R. “Green Washing.” Environmental Health Perspectives. June 1, 2010. Available at https://doi.org/10.1289/ehp.118-a246
Holmes, A. “Can Greenwashing Ever Be Good?” Earth911. August 9, 2017. Available at https://earth911.com/business-policy/greenwashing-good/
Mintel. “Green Marketing.” Mintel, April 2011. Available at http://academic.mintel.com/display/574850/
Moss, Doug and Scheer, Roddy. “How Can Consumers Find Out If a Corporation Is “Greenwashing” Environmentally Unsavory Practices?” Scientific American, Earth Talk. (n.d.) Available at https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/greenwashing/
Nielson. “Green Generation: Millennials Say Sustainability is a Shopping Priority.” Nielsen, November 5, 2015. Available at https://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/news/2015/green-generation-millennials-say-sustainability-is-a-shopping-priority.html
Authors:
Sharmeen Somani & Scott R. Stroud, Ph.D.
Media Ethics Initiative
Center for Media Engagement
University of Texas at Austin
April 30, 2019
Cases produced by the Media Ethics Initiative remain the intellectual property of the Media Ethics Initiative and the University of Texas at Austin. They can be used in unmodified PDF form without permission for classroom or educational uses. Please email us and let us know if you found them useful! For use in publications such as textbooks, readers, and other works, please contact the Media Ethics Initiative.
Race, Democracy, and Media
The Center for Media Engagement and Media Ethics Initiative Present:
The Spectacle of Lynching Redeployed:
On the Performance of Democratic Regard
Dr. Melvin Rogers
Associate Professor of Political Science
Brown University
April 9, 2019
America’s history is marked by a striking image—“black bodies swinging in the southern breeze.” Abel Meeropol—a Jewish American—first articulated this line in his 1937 published poem, “Bitter Fruit,” after viewing Lawrence Beitler’s horrific lynching photograph. Although Meeropol eventually put the words to music, it was jazz singer Billie Holiday’s haunting rendition of the song, now titled “Strange Fruit,” first recorded in 1939 that made it a classic. How does one practically and conceptually engage the simultaneous existence of a professed commitment to equality and liberty alongside the fact that white Americans visually digested those with whom they otherwise shared the polity? I engage this vexing issue by reflecting on the normative possibilities latent in Holiday’s performative rendition of Meeropol’s song.
Dr. Melvin Rogers is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Brown University. He is the author of The Undiscovered Dewey: Religion, Morality, and the Ethos of Democracy (Columbia University Press, 2008) and co-editor of African American Political Thought: A Collected History (University of Chicago Press, forthcoming). His articles have appeared in major academic journals as well as popular venues such as Dissent, The Atlantic, Public Seminar, and Boston Review. Rogers serves as the co-editor of the New Histories of Philosophy series at Oxford University Press. Presently, he is at work on his second book, The Darkened Light of Faith: Race, Democracy, and Freedom in African American Political Thought.
The Media Ethics Initiative is part of the Center for Media Engagement at the University of Texas at Austin. Follow Media Ethics Initiative and Center for Media Engagement on Facebook for more information.
