Seattle Times' conflict of interest

The Daily Kos on the Seattle Times' apparent financial conflict of interest in its editorial endorsing a right-wing congressman.

Mark Cuban's Sharesleuth: Teetering on ethical edge?

Mark Glaser's latest piece just went up on PBS MediaShift, this time a look at Mark Cuban's latest maverick project, Sharesleuth.com. The site's editor Chris Carey (formerly of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch) investigates sketchy business practices at companies and digs up dirt on them mainly from public sources. The business model for Sharesleuth is unusual in that Cuban will
take positions in the companies covered. He shorted the stock for Xethanol before Carey's expose came out, hoping to eventually fund Sharesleuth through these stock positions.

But journalists and financial bloggers have cried foul, saying while Sharesleuth's business model might be legal, there are conflicts of interest with betting on the subjects of your investigative journalism. Cuban denies there are ethical problems, and says he's not out to manipulate the market, and defends his new way of doing journalism:

"We aren't writing reports to move stocks. We are writing reports to report the facts. Chris [Carey] hears that from me all the time. If I traded on price movements, then there might be an issue. I don't. I don't pump and dump [tout the stock, then sell it], and we don't skunk and dump. I put on a position and stay with it till there is a material change in operations of the company. I don't cover or sell my position based on reaction to this or any article in the media."

Absolutely fascinating, and there are still models for citizen journalism yet to be uncovered. But I'm with Jeff Jarvis on this one. Says Jarvis:

"By turning this into a personal and shady profit center, by trying to play the bad boy in this arena as [Cuban] does in the basketball arena, he harmed his endeavor, his reputation, and even the nascent movement in independent journalism. Just so he could make a few bucks. Now that's what I call dumb money."

Survey measures attitudes toward maniuplated images in the news

Researcher, blogger, and professor Dennis Dunleavy, Ph.D., is conducting an online survey about attitudes toward manipulated images in the news and the impact of these pictures on foreign policy. Writes Dennis:

The survey is written for the general public and seeks to evaluate levels of understanding and distrust of news imagery following last week's discovery of digital manipulation out of Lebanon. The survey asks a range of questions from types of manipulation to the influence of photo manipulated images on foreign policy decisions.

Participation is voluntary and you can quit whenever you want without any
worries. All results are confidential. The survey will take about 5 minutes
of your time. After collecting sufficient results we will post the results
online.

Dennis is asking if bloggers could help circulate the online survey to others.

CNN on 'the al Qaeda candidate'

An email message today from Tom McMahon, Executive Director, Democratic National Committee. He's absolutely right — members of the news media have an obligation to call bullshit when they see it.

Here's what a CNN Headline News anchor asked a Washington journalist on Friday during an interview about the British terror arrests:

"How does this factor into the Lieberman-Lamont contest in Connecticut? Might some argue, as some have, that Lamont is the al Qaeda candidate?"

You would expect this kind of disgusting and inappropriate suggestion from someone more like Dick Cheney. In fact, it was Dick Cheney who said last week that electing people who question the Republican war in Iraq encourages "the al Qaeda types".

The anchor later apologized to Lamont for misquoting Cheney -- but then went on to question Lamont about the same ridiculous accusation. He's not alone -- commentators and journalists have mindlessly repeated Cheney's remarks over and over again, reporting on it or inquiring about it over the past week as if it's a real question for debate.

Journalists have a responsibility to do more than regurgitate the most desperate and most extreme talking points. When journalists allow these defamatory and un-American suggestions to infect their coverage of the news, we have to act swiftly to call on them to stop it.

Democrats offer a new direction. We'll do a better job of fighting the war on terror by taking the target off the backs of American troops in Iraq; we'll get serious about capturing or killing Osama bin Laden; and we'll be ready for threats to our safety and security here at home, whether it's terrorism or hurricanes. We'll sit down with journalists and answer the tough questions about our nation's security any time -- but there's no excuse for resorting to repeating desperate Republican talking points.

Write to your local newspaper and let them know where Democrats stand, and that we're not going to allow our party and our candidates to be smeared.

http://www.democrats.org/speakout

Blogging about it will help, too.

Later: Correspondent Chuck Roberts apologizes.

Bloggers uncover manipulated news photos

NY Times: Bloggers Drive Inquiry on How Altered Images Saw Print.

[Adnan] Hajj, a Lebanese photographer based in the Middle East, may not be familiar to many newspaper readers. But thanks to the swift justice of the Internet, he has been charged, tried and convicted of improperly altering photographs he took for Reuters. The pictures ran on the Reuters news service on Saturday, and were discovered almost instantly by bloggers to have been manipulated. Reuters then announced on Sunday that it had fired the freelancer. Executives said yesterday that they were still investigating why they had not discovered the manipulation before the pictures were disseminated to newspapers.

The matter has created an uproar on the Internet, where many bloggers see an anti-Israel bias in Mr. Hajj’s manipulations, which made the damage from Israeli strikes into Beirut appear worse than the original pictures had. One intensified and replicated plumes of smoke from smoldering debris. In another, he changed an image of an Israeli plane to make it look as if it had dropped three flares instead of one. ...

Al Gore spoof on YouTube not so amateurish

ABC News: Al Gore YouTube Spoof Not So Amateurish. Republican PR firm said to be behind 'Inconvenient Truth' spoof.

A tiny little movie making fun of Al Gore, supposedly made by an amateur filmmaker, recently appeared on the popular Web site YouTube.com.

At first blush, the spoof seemed like a scrappy little homemade film poking fun at Gore and his anti-global warming crusade.

In the movie, Gore is seen boring an army of penguins with his lecture and blaming global warming for everything, including Lindsay Lohan's thinness.

But when the Wall Street Journal tried to find the guy who posted the film "Al Gore's Penguin Army" — listed on YouTube as a 29-year-old — they found the movie didn't come from an amateur working out of his basement.

The film actually came from a slick Republican public relations firm called DCI, which just happens to have oil giant Exxon as a client. ...

In-text ads: Pure evil

(Click to enlarge)

Kontera Technologies — motto: Creating In-Text Relevance! — contacted me the other day about advertising possibilities on the New Media Musings blog. Which is fine. Except that what they're offering isn't the usual text or banner or pop-up ads. They want to embed text ads right in the middle of the editorial copy.

I know that Weblogs Inc.'s Jason Calacanis calls these practices pure evil (I'm paraphrasing, but only slightly) because of the duplicity involved in mixing editorial and advertising content. I wholeheartedly agree.

Decide for yourself whether the Web is cluttered enough with unwanted and confusing ad messages. See the screenshot of the proposed in-text ads on my site above.

Here's what the Kontera rep had to say via email:

As I'm sure you get dozens of requests to place advertising on your site each week, I want to make it clear that our ContentLinks work in conjunction and are non-competing with the ads that are already running within your site. Utilizing our technology is as simple as placing one piece of JavaScript into the HTML of your page and our technology does the rest.

ContentLinks are an ad unit that matches advertiser's keywords to the text of your pages and provides your users with the easiest way possible to get more information about what it is they are reading about. We ... are working with some of the biggest advertisers online. Due to the effectiveness of our technology and the ads, Advertisers are paying north of $.40 CPC and the ads are seeing around a 1%-3% CTR. Essentially for every 1,000,000 page views our publishers are providing, they are seeing thousands of dollars in incremental ad revenue that was once not available to them. ...

I've created a mock up of how the ads look within a site and show you the dynamic ability to match advertisers to any page of content. Keep in mind that everything is controlled by you- the number of links per page, the color, the type of ads- we want to bring your site new ad revenue but we also want to make sure that you dictate what ads get shown and how they appear to your users. To get set up is simple, there is no contract to sign and no minimum amount of page views to provide. We're simply looking to find strategic partners that meet the ever expanding need of our advertisers goals. ...

Kontera, I should point out, isn't the only company doing this.

And, oh, I turned them down.

Gawker's horrid new Stalker program

Tonight's "Showbiz Tonight" (you get what you can here on the road) had a segment about the new Gawker Stalker, the aptly named yellow journalism cyber-sheet that lets you know the exact location of dozens of celebrities in near-real time. It's a hand grenade just waiting to go off.

Sorry, Gawker. I'm with the 82 percent of respondents in the "Showbiz" poll who said that celebrities do deserve a zone of privacy away from prying eyes. Just because you're an actor doesn't mean you forfeit basic human rights. Sheez, this just may give the mainstream media a good name again by comparison. If we're really this obsessed with celebrities, let's just shoot ourselves now.

Prostituting the press

Jon Carroll in today's San Francisco Chronicle on the Doug Bandow scandal.

A senior fellow at the Cato Institute, Doug Bandow, wrote at least 24 columns for the Copley News Service at the request of lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who paid generously for the thoughtful thoughts thoughtfully expressed. Business Week broke the story; when it came out, Bandow resigned from Cato and acknowledged a "lapse in judgment."

Lapse? One column is a lapse, maybe; 24 columns is a lifestyle choice. Maybe he believed everything he wrote; I dunno. Seems like a darn slippery slope. And I guarantee you that he chose his subject matter with an eye toward Abramoff's pet issues. That looks bad. It suggests that the press is for sale. ...

News payola

Josh Marshall looks at news payola -- an unethical practice that receives too little attention.

In Business Week this morning, Eamon Javers reports that two noted conservative columnists -- Doug Bandow of Cato and noted Social Security privatization advocate Peter Ferrara -- both accepted cash payments from Jack Abramoff to write columns favorable to his clients.

The revelation has caused Bandow to resign from Cato. But Ferrara, who is now at the Institute for Policy Innovation, says "I do that all the time," Ferrara says. "I've done that in the past, and I'll do it in the future."

Now, I used to follow the OpEd payola story pretty closely. (Here are a few examples of posts on the topic from previous years.) And I have to say that when Ferrara implies that this is a common practice, boy is he right, particularly on the right. There are even shops in DC that specialize in ginning up bogus 'man on the street' opeds which they then get placed on major oped pages. Another area where my reporting showed this to be very common was among foreign lobbyists, a number of whom had ex-foreign service officers and various other foreign policy bigwigs on retainer to write opeds advocating on behalf of their clients. Actually, 'write' overstates the matter. The lobbying firm writes the OpEd and the expert signs it.

It hadn't occurred to me that Abramoff dabbled in this racket. But now that I think about it, I can't imagine why it hadn't. If he had these two on the payroll, there must be many, many more.

Now, before I end this post, let me make one important distinction. Everybody knows that most major politicians have speechwriters. And we don't see anything untoward about that. When a major pol writes an OpEd most people understand that either a speechwriter or policy staffer either helped craft the words or got the ideas from the pol and wrote the piece which the pol then signed. Again, I don't think that shocks anyone. When I said there are shops in DC which specialize in this sort of thing, this 'speech writing' sort of OpEding is not what I'm talking about.

What I'm talking about is when, say, the American Federation of Hot Dog Manufacturers wants to beat some new regulation. So they hire a shop in DC which then goes out and finds some sidewalk hot dog vendor and offers to pay him a couple grand if he'll pretend to be the author of an OpEd saying how the new regs will drive his hot dog stand out of business. They then shop it to one of the conservative OpEd pages which are known to be an easy mark for this sort of scam.

Like I said, there are shops in DC who specialize in that sort of thing.