Today is Thursday, May 17, 2012

Ethics

Whom do you trust for advice?

Anell over at Total Trust comments on how important spouses have become as advisers to business owners, executives and, I’d add, investors.

One of the joys of being in business with your spouse is the ability to get good, honest advice on both business and personal issues. Do I take her advice? I’d say usually. Does she take mine? Usually. And this may be because we’ve been together almost 40 years, and we’re usually on the same page and have similar reactions to our environment.

Ethics: Wal-Mart bounces top marketing executives, ad agency

Wal-Mart bans employees from accepting even a cup of coffee from suppliers, according to today’s Wall Street Journal, and the company apparently bounced two of its top marketing executives and its new ad agency because they allegedly and reportedly violated those rules, according to MediaPost.com. (Link has expired.)

Wining and dining have always been part of the sales, marketing and public relations stratetgies used by all kinds of organizations that sell products and services and raise funds for not-for-profit causes, but the ethics of wining and dining are being questioned in both the corporate and political worlds.

Executives want their managers to select vendors based on merit, not colleagiality and the number of NFL tickets or plane rides they’ll receive from the vendor. And political watch dog groups want politicians to pass laws based on their needs rather than in response to campaign contributions and gifts.

Such rules are needed in large bureaucracies, where abuses often get out of hand. The Securities and Exchange Commission is cracking down on brokers and mutual funds that wine and dine as well as exchange gifts, and voters in Colorado last month approved Referendum 41 that puts severe gifting restrictions on the state’s employees and their immediate families.

The question is how strict should the rules be, and are they enforceable over the long term? At what point will people just ignore them because they’re unenforceable and there is little risk in breaking the rules, and at what point will somebody violate the rules and get in big trouble?

At Wal-Mart, marketing executives apparently hired from outside the company allegedly didn’t buy into its corporate culture, and they’re gone, along with the ad agency they hired.

Manipulating the media and consumers never pays for long; consumers informed by multimedia

Steven Silvers over at Scatterbox.com warns big organizations against trying to manipulate consumers with under the table paid content columns and broadcasts. And in response, I note that the mistake that unethical marketers who spike news stories and broadcasts with paid content can’t win. This is because consumers obtain news and advice from many more sources than any consumer manipulator can control.

Marketers and publicists who play straight with the public don’t have to worry that slime balls have an advantage. The conumer gets it right every time.

Media bias: Wall Street Journal news pages most liberal

A study funded and conducted by UCLA-led political scientists found that The Wall Street Journal’s news pages are the most liberal and that all but two major main stream media favor the left. A UCLA news release says:

“I suspected that many media outlets would tilt to the left because surveys have shown that reporters tend to vote more Democrat than Republican,” said Tim Groseclose, a UCLA political scientist and the study’s lead author. “But I was surprised at just how pronounced the distinctions are.”

“Overall, the major media outlets are quite moderate compared to members of Congress, but even so, there is a quantifiable and significant bias in that nearly all of them lean to the left,” said co‚Äëauthor Jeffrey Milyo, University of Missouri economist and public policy scholar.

The results appear in the latest issue of the Quarterly Journal of Economics, which will become available in mid-December.

Groseclose and Milyo based their research on a standard gauge of a lawmaker’s support for liberal causes. Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) tracks the percentage of times that each lawmaker votes on the liberal side of an issue. Based on these votes, the ADA assigns a numerical score to each lawmaker, where “100” is the most liberal and “0” is the most conservative. After adjustments to compensate for disproportionate representation that the Senate gives to low‚Äëpopulation states and the lack of representation for the District of Columbia, the average ADA score in Congress (50.1) was assumed to represent the political position of the average U.S. voter.

Groseclose and Milyo then directed 21 research assistants — most of them college students — to scour U.S. media coverage of the past 10 years. They tallied the number of times each media outlet referred to think tanks and policy groups, such as the left-leaning NAACP or the right-leaning Heritage Foundation.

Next, they did the same exercise with speeches of U.S. lawmakers. If a media outlet displayed a citation pattern similar to that of a lawmaker, then Groseclose and Milyo’s method assigned both a similar ADA score.

“A media person would have never done this study,” said Groseclose, a UCLA political science professor, whose research and teaching focuses on the U.S. Congress. “It takes a Congress scholar even to think of using ADA scores as a measure. And I don’t think many media scholars would have considered comparing news stories to congressional speeches.”

Of the 20 major media outlets studied, 18 scored left of center, with CBS’ “Evening News,” The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times ranking second, third and fourth most liberal behind the news pages of The Wall Street Journal.

Only Fox News’ “Special Report With Brit Hume” and The Washington Times scored right of the average U.S. voter.

The most centrist outlet proved to be the “NewsHour With Jim Lehrer.” CNN’s “NewsNight With Aaron Brown” and ABC’s “Good Morning America” were a close second and third.

Why big corporate media is losing its grip

A discussion about the role of journalists and fairness in the media prompted me to write this comment over at the blog “Rhetorica:”

 

Letter challenges media critic

One of the biggest problems in American journalism is that on most newspapers I’ve seen (and I’ve hardly seen them all) reporters and columnists are poorly suspervised and are allowed to advocate, attack people, publish their opinions and distort stories and facts.