Why is communication such a big deal for CSR?

Corporate social responsibility often provokes a lot of debate. But one thing that most people seem to be agreed on is the necessity of good communications. Of course, what makes for "good" communications is not so clear cut. Should companies engage in dialogue and debate with their stakeholders? How do you communicate "authentically" with consumers around social issues? And what do employees expects or want in terms of internal communication around CSR? These are some of the questions occupying minds rights now, so it has been interesting to spend the last couple of weeks exploring some of the challenges around the intersection of CSR and communication, both from a research and practice perspective. Not that this has necessarily brought me any closer to the right answers, but I think it has helped a lot in clarifying what the right questions might be.

Last week I keynoted the 1st International CSR Communication conference in Amsterdam, NL, a primarily research conference that also featured a lot of practitioner participants. This was preceded by a doctoral workshop on CSR and communication research where budding PhD students sought to test out their ideas, theories, and methods with experienced researchers like myself and Mette Morsing from Copenhagen Business School. Then, this week I keynoted another pretty unique conference - a mixed practitioner/research conference in Copenhagen on CSR and social media titled "Social media for social purposes".

Suddenly it seems that the communications challenges in CSR are getting a lot of attention. Certainly they are beginning to attract a lot of research activity, whether from management researchers, communications scientists, or media analysts. There is some really interesting stuff happening out there, much of it making use of the new online data that is all around us. I've been impressed by some of the datasets that are being put together using Tweets, blogs, YouTube videos, media articles, and a variety of online texts and reports. The possibilities of analyzing "big data" around online CSR communication are growing all the time. But also, it is clear that we need more than just huge amounts of data - we also need to be asking the right questions.

Consider this. McDonald's, which has been a pioneer in blogging about its CSR practices through its Values in Practice blog, has recorded the following stats from January - November 2011:

Number of posts: 16.
Average number of comments per post: 0.5
Average number of tweets per post: 1.2
Average number of Facebook likes per post: 3.1
Average number of shares per post: 3.8

Now consider this. McDonald's has more than 11m people who have "liked" the company's main Facebook page. That's a lot of people who don't seem to be much interested in what is happening over at their CSR blog. Clearly something is up. CSR experts are saying that companies need to engage in dialogue with their stakeholders. So are McDonald's stakeholders actually not interested in dialogue? Is the way the company is communicating not relevant for them? Is the company blocking interacting on some way or is one way communication actually effective here?

As I say, we don't really have the answers to these sorts of questions yet, but the field is moving fast and through network, discourse, and sentiment analysis, for example, researchers are getting a better understanding of how and why people respond to CSR communications in particular ways.... and what this all means for the society we live in today. There is a long way to go, but it looks like its going to be an exciting and informative journey.

AC

Photo by joshfassbind. Reproduced under Creative Commons licence

Sex, privacy and media ethics

Sex sells. And sex really sells in the media business. With their profitability in free-fall, newspaper businesses especially are always on the look out for a salacious front page story to help them grab some precious market share. Unfaithful soccer stars "playing away from home", celebrity match-ups and break-ups, trysts with prostitutes, or accusations of sexual assault are all highly newsworthy, especially at the tabloid end of the market. But recent events in the UK and elsewhere have led many to question whether the sex lives of celebrities can be afforded some degree of privacy protection from an intrusive media, or whether in the interests of press freedom, and the growing uncontrollability on online social media "reporting", they are simply fair game.

In the last few weeks the Ryan Giggs super-injunction affair in the UK has brought these issues to a head. Why all the excitement? Well until a few days ago, Giggs, one of the UK's best known soccer players, was the mysterious unnamed figure who had successfully been granted a so-called super-injunction by the English courts. The injunction had been given to protect Giggs' privacy in the wake of an attempted kiss-and-tell story by Imogen Thomas, a former reality TV star, who claimed to have had an affair with the married, and previously squeaky-clean, soccer star. It not only prevented newspapers from reporting the story but also from even referring to the injunction or the claimant.

Super-injunctions like the one granted to Giggs have become the legal instruments of choice for individuals and companies in the UK looking to prevent their activities from being reported in the press. They are granted by the courts to protect privacy under the Human Rights Act. The newspaper industry is predictably waging a war of words against them because they shackle some of the traditional freedoms that they are used to and which they rely on to act as the fourth estate. Super injunctions also raise the hackles of the public because with a price tag that starts at something like US $100,000 they appear to allow special legal treatment for the rich and famous. Moreover, as the Giggs affair and the 2009 pollution case of the oil company Trafigura have shown, the rise of social media platforms such as Twitter through which stories can be circulated outside the remit of the formal TV and newspaper industries, the limits of existing legal protections for privacy are being severely tested. Giggs' name was connected to the injunction through Twitter long before the press could report on it, raising legal questions about the culpability of Twitter and it's tweeters for being in breech of the injunction.

There are all sorts of ethical questions arising out of this, but from our point of view, it largely boils down to the question of when our sex lives should be private and when could or should they also be public knowledge? Let's sort out some of the considerations here:

1. Consent
Obviously the starting point here is consensual sex between adults. Coerced sex or sex crimes fall into an entirely different realm of privacy. The media has a legitimate right to publish in these cases provided legal protections for victims and the accused (which differ between jurisdictions) are respected. But clearly Dominic Strauss Kahn's alleged assault on a hotel chambermaid should be held to a different standard of privacy than his consensual affairs. Affairs with subordinate employees, even when supposedly consensual, might fall somewhere in the middle given the power dynamics involved.

2. Public interest
Where there is a potential public interest at stake the media also has a stronger case for investigating and publishing, such as where politicians campaigning on "family values" are accused of marital infidelities, anti-gay advocates are caught with rent boys, or legal enforcers break the law by paying for sex. A weaker but sometimes defensible case can also be made for leaders in a position of authority and trust whose trustworthiness might be questioned when extra-marital affairs come to light. The sex lives of celebrities rarely have a public interest component .... however much the public may be interested in hearing about them!

3. Privacy vs free speech
In the absence of coercion or public interest, there is much less chance of the press claiming a prima facie right to publish. Privacy (and after all sex is pretty private) will usually trump rights to speech unless free speech can lead to other public benefits. It's a matter of avoiding harm being prioritized over some fairly minimal free speech benefits.  The media may claim that the right to privacy is critically weakened in the case of marital infidelities and other ethical infractions. But even the unjust should be able to expect justice.

4. Harms and benefits
Without public interest, for the equation to fall on the side of publishing, there will often have to be some meaningful moral benefits for one or more of the parties to the "private" act. A spurned lover with an illegitimate love child for instance might be looking to tell their side of the story in the media and thereby gain some kind of apology or recompense from a celebrity. Here the ethical equation between speech and privacy should shift more convincingly towards publishing.

5. Reasonable expectation
Where the waters really get muddied is in the question of reasonable expectation. Privacy is typically attributed when there is a reasonable expectation that something will remain so. A telephone call or a conversation in a private residence should reasonably be expected to remain private, for example. That is why the UK newspaper, the News of the World, is in such hot water for it's illegal phone hacking of celebrities. These conversations took place in a reasonable expectation of privacy and should remain that way unless one of the participants chooses otherwise. But phone hacking is a case of the ethics of media tactics. A newspaper offered a story by a willing kiss-and-tell informant is very different. Here it is one of the participants looking to rewrite the "contract " of privacy established between themselves and their sexual partner. And in this case we have to ask ourselves whether soccer stars and other celebrities really have a reasonable expectation that their affairs with glamour models and reality TV stars will remain private. However much they wish it to be the case, there appears to be a lot of evidence to the contrary. Sure, this may be a case of a highly pragmatic interpretation of rights to privacy, but it's in the real world, a world of privacy for sale that we increasingly find ourselves in. Celebrities should be protected from direct intrusions into their privacy by the media. But maybe they should not be protected from their own decisions about who to be "private" with in the first place.

Photo by AtilaTheHun. Reproduced under creative commons licence

Five things we've learned about social responsibility in the media this month

If the WikiLeaks embassy cables saga that kicked off at the end of last year wasn't enough, the first month of 2011 has seen media organizations facing a whole slew of social responsibility issues. The Guardian newspaper has been breaking a major phone hacking scandal at News Corporation; a sexism case at Sky Sports in the UK has been championed by those bastions of political correctness, the UK tabloids; and the Qatar-based broadcaster Al Jazeera was identified this week by the New York Times as a major force behind the spread of riots in the Arab world. Not only this, but earlier in the month, Al Jazeera was involved in publishing the leaked 'Palestine papers' about the Middle East peace process, which immediately inflamed tensions in the region and, according to the Middle East peace envoy Tony Blair had destabilised the peace process.

Meanwhile, back at WikiLeaks, Rudolf Elmer was convicted of breaching Swiss banking secrecy laws when he handed over client information to Julian Assange, pledging to make public the confidential tax details of 2,000 individuals and companies,which he claimed revealed instances of money-laundering and large-scale illegal tax evasion. Oh, and some of the WikiLeaks supporters that attacked the websites of Mastercard, Visa and other companies last December after the firms withdrew their services from WikiLeaks were arrested. Phew! These are just some of the headline grabbers in what has been a month to remember for corporate responsibility watchers in the media sector.

Talking of which, we are also expecting to see any day now, the release of the Global Reporting Initiative's final draft Media Sector Supplement ready for a last round of public consultation. This supplement is intended to offer specialist guidance for media organizations 'measuring and reporting on the economic, environmental, social, and governance dimensions of their activities, products, and services'. Judging by the events of the last month, they'll have their work cut out.

So what then have we learnt about social responsibility in the media this past month? And how prepared will the GRI guidelines make media organizations who want to report on all this stuff?

1. The media sector might have to start thinking harder about product responsibility
There has been a gradual acceptance that media organizations have to take some regard for the impact of their content, as well as for the actual physical media they use. From protections for minors from adult content, to recycling of newspapers, there are a whole host of product responsibility issues for the media to consider. The GRI guidelines are generally suitable to cover these. But recent events suggest a shift in the conversation about the impacts of publishing controversial political content. When news organizations become complicit in political unrest and pose threats to peace, the standard response of "publish and be damned" comes under increasing scrutiny. By the same token, stories that help forge greater democracy in repressive states should be held up for praise. Organizations such as The Guardian and the New York Times have been leading the way in accounting for the positions they take on such issues with their commentary around the Embassy Cables and the Palestine Papers. The Guardian editor, Alan Rusbridger, also recently published an interesting commentary on this (and points 2 and 3 below) in an extract from his forthcoming book about WikiLeaks. But a serious question mark remains about whether and how media organizations should consider the social impact of their version of the news - or like tobacco companies before them, lay the responsibility squarely in the hands of the consumer.

2. News organizations are being held to higher standards for how they gather information than they hold their own sources to.
The phone hacking scandal at the UK Sunday tabloid the News of the World demonstrates the importance of news organizations subscribing to legal and ethical standards in how they generate ‘news’. Illegally accessing the private voicemails of royals, film stars and other celebrities is simply unacceptable by normal standards of journalistic ethics. The Guardian newspaper has rightly been pursuing this story over the last few years. The resignation of Andy Coulson, the Government’s Director of Communications (and former editor of the News of the World) and Ian Edmonson, the paper’s Assistant Editor, show just how significant a story this is turning out be. On the other hand, the Guardian (and other news organizations) have decided to run stories based on illegally hacked emails, and no doubt will also do so using stolen financial information and other data gleaned by dubious means by intermediaries. Although there is a difference in the public interest component of these stories, the main distinguishing factor is that in one case the news organization is doing the dirty work, and in the other a third party is and the news organization simply takes advantage of it.

This has been a common ethical position adopted by news organizations, but as organizations in other sectors have learnt to their cost, the claim that the actions of those further back in the supply chain is not their responsibility doesn’t always convince – nor does it pacify their critics. News organizations will probably need to take a closer look at their policies and practices regarding the news supply chain. And the GRI should ensure that reporting on these policies and practices is part of their guidelines.

3. The fight between transparency and privacy is only going to get nastier.
Privacy and transparency are two fundamental principles frequently at odds with one another. The events around WikiLeaks have shown that much of the momentum is towards the latter, but the arrests of Elmer and the Anonymous hackers who supported WikiLeaks, not to mention mounting pressure on Assange and the travails of the original source of the Embassy Cables leak, Bradley Manning, are a warning that the proponents of privacy (or secrecy as their rivals put it) are not going to let the balance change without a fight. Media organizations need to articulate clearly where they stand on these critical issues for their business.

4.  Diversity issues affect media organizations in quite unique ways
The GRI guidance is quite clear on the need for media organizations (like all other organizations) to respond to and report on diversity issues. But the media actually has particularly acute responsibilities here because of its critical role in influencing public attitudes. So it's good to see the guidelines also cover diversity issues in media content. The Sky Sports case, which has seen one leading presenter fired and another resigning over sexist comments delivered off-air (but with the microphones still on), demonstrates just what a lightening rod the media sector can be for diversity issues. After all the presenters were off-air and would normally have expected their comments to go unreported and unheard by the public. Still, public they became and because this was a media organization and not say a bank or a real estate office, a couple of dodgy comments led to a firestorm of publicity. For Sky, sacking some star presenters isn't a bad way of advertising their commitment to diversity in such a context. But there's also a case for seeing the developments as an attempt by Sky to find a couple of scapegoats for what would appear to be something of a culture of institutionalized sexism at the organization - and not just a couple of off-message old dinosaurs.

5. Media organizations need other media organizations to make them act more responsibly.
Finally, for all the concerns about social responsibility in media organizations, the past month has also made it clearer than ever that the media plays a critical role in ensuring the accountability of powerful interests, whether those are governments, corporations .... or even media organizations. For this policing of the media by the media, we of course need plenty of plurality in the sector. Unfortunately, as far as powerful media players go, this is actually on something of a decline. And social media, for all its worth, simply doesn't have the research and reporting depth to do the core of that 'fourth estate' job as well. But that's a debate for another month.  

Photo by Caro Spark. Reproduced under Creative Commons Licence 

Is too much transparency a bad thing?

It’s been quite a week or so for transparency. The incendiary WikiLeaks release of almost a quarter of a million classified cables from the US diplomatic service has set news media across the world alight with daily revelations that have acutely embarrassed politicians everywhere. Last week also saw the FIFA bribery scandal reach new heights with the screening of the BBC Panorama program alleging corruption, followed by last Thursday’s selection of Russia and Qatar as the hosts of the 2018 and 2022 World Cups respectively. Yes, that’s Russia, the country labeled a “virtual mafia state” in one of the WikiLeaks cables. Both cases involve a whole host of ethical issues, but perhaps more than anything they pose critical questions about the appropriate limits of transparency. How much should we know about what goes on behind the scenes in organizations such as the US diplomatic service or a global sporting body such as FIFA? And can too much transparency really be a bad thing?

WikiLeaks is clearly the most significant case of the two, and it looks set to be something of a landmark on the ethics of transparency in the digital age. On the one side, high profile rightwingers in the US, including Presidential hopeful Mike Huckerbee, have responded by suggesting the source of the leaks should be tried for treason. “Anything less than execution is too kind a penalty,” he commented. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is under investigation in the US and Australia, wanted for questioning in Sweden (for an unrelated charge), and on Interpol’s red list – not to mention being cast by Sarah Palin as an “anti-American operative” who should be pursued with “the same urgency [as] al Qaeda and Taliban leaders”. Bradley Manning the army private who is supposedly the original source of the material is sitting in a military jail awaiting court marshal and a possible 52 years in jail. US internet companies Amazon, Paypal and EveryDNS, meanwhile, have responded to pressure by US authorities and ceased supporting WikiLeaks by allow it to use their servers, domains, and payment services respectively. As a result, the organization has been forced offline several times in the last week.

On the other side of the debate, five respected news organizations – the New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, El País, and Der Spiegel – received prior access to the cables and have shown little hesitation in splashing front page stories over the past 10 days. Various commentators, hackers, and net activists have heralded the leaks as a new phase in the radical transparency of digital information. Columbia, meanwhile, has offered Assange immunity, whilst Amazon has been touted as a boycott target for caving to “censorship” and political restrictions on “free speech”. Clearly, things are complicated, to say the least.

The publishing of the embassy cables by WikiLeaks is in many ways a more ethically ambiguous act than many of their previous leaks, most notably the well known Iraq and Afghanistan war logs which detailed the hidden impacts of US military action. Other WikiLeaks though have also won acclaim focusing on documents alleging political and corporate corruption, public interest media reports suppressed by injunction, and secret Congressional research reports. The embassy cables, just by their sheer volume, represent a less focused campaign.

Yes, there are clearly some important public interest revelations in the material that has come to light. These include: the exposure of a US spying campaign targeted at UN leaders; the naming by US diplomats of China’s propaganda chief Li Changchun as the orchestrator of the Google hacking late last year; and disclosures that the Brazilian government deliberately covered up the existence of terrorist suspects within its borders to protect the country’s image, to name just a few. Oh and of course claims that the media organization al-Jazeera is heavily influenced by state foreign policy in Quatar, where the 2022 World Cup is going to be held. But it has to be said that many of the big news stories are no more than allegations by diplomats in what they thought were confidential dispatches rather than necessarily well-founded or verified facts. There is also a whole lot more material that is just plain gossip and rumor-mongering rather than what you might genuinely call ‘intelligence’.

All this makes the WikiLeaks cables less clear cut in terms of making the hidden “truth” public. They provide us with a unique insight into how international diplomacy works, and what emerges is hardly pretty or a paragon of honesty and integrity. But it is hardly the case of a whistleblower bringing a miscarriage of justice to light or an exposé of corporate malfeasance or political corruption, except in the very broadest of terms. Sure the material in the leaks is incredibly interesting, but how we have to ask how much of it is genuinely in the public interest. If it doesn’t pass this test, then why should supposedly classified information become public?

On the other hand, the arguments emanating from the US that the release of the cables has injured the national interest and put lives at risk is also rather flimsy. Yes it has embarrassed the government, but then who hasn’t it embarrassed? Putin, Burlosconi, and others have been just as much the target as those in the US. And no one yet has managed to unearth anything that has genuinely put lives at risk even if it has probably hampered US diplomatic efforts in general. This of course begs the question of why so much information should be classified in the first place if it’s not actually protecting anything.

It is this – the transparency versus confidentiality issue – that is at stake here. Some would clearly like to see all but the most critical security information made public so that the state can be held to account. Others believe that a communication made under the presumption of confidentiality should remain that way unless there is a clear public interest reason for disclosing it. In the FIFA case, there seems little doubt that the BBC was right to go public with its allegations of corruption, even if some commentators were unhappy that it potentially hampered England’s bid to host the 2018 tournament. And even if FIFA President Sepp Blatter complained of “the evils of the media"

The WikiLeaks cables though are so indiscriminate as to fail the public interest test, at least when considered as a whole. However, with appropriate sorting and contextualizing (which the newspapers appear to be doing a pretty good job of), this changes the complexion somewhat. Newspapers like the New York Times and The Guardian have given a good account of their motives and methods. As the New York Times editor says:

"The more important reason to publish these articles is that the cables tell the unvarnished story of how the government makes its biggest decisions, the decisions that cost the country most heavily in lives and money. They shed light on the motivations — and, in some cases, duplicity — of allies on the receiving end of American courtship and foreign aid. They illuminate the diplomacy surrounding two current wars and several countries, like Pakistan and Yemen, where American military involvement is growing. As daunting as it is to publish such material over official objections, it would be presumptuous to conclude that Americans have no right to know what is being done in their name."

With appropriate journalistic selecting and framing, there is little doubt that there is an important if rather delicate media task at work here. This doesn’t condone the release of the cables en masse, though, which in our opinion is harder to defend from an ethical point of view, unless one’s view is that all government should be 100% transparent.

Regardless of the rights and wrongs of WikiLeaks in this particular case, though, the broader lesson seems to be fairly clear. In business ethics, one of the standard rules of thumb is the New York Times test – if you wouldn’t want your actions to be reported on the front page of the newspaper then maybe you shouldn’t be doing it. No doubt US diplomats didn’t expect this to so literally come true, but in a digital world, the prospects for doing so are increasing exponentially. And if you don’t want to be a news star, then you’ll need to work a lot harder than the US government in making sure what is said in confidence stays that way.



WikiLeaks graphic by Anna Lena Schiller reproduced under Creative Commons Licence
America Shhh image reproduced from Boycott Amazon for Dumping Wikileaks  

CSRwire Talkback - Can We Really Afford Free News?

Check out our post on the ethics of free news on CSR Wire....

CSRwire Talkback - Can We Really Afford Free News?

A step forward for technology companies and internet freedoms

If you've been following, as we have, the story of internet companies being implicated in human rights abuses around privacy and freedom of expression - see one of our earlier blogs here - then you'll be interested to see that Yahoo, Microsoft and Google, three of the companies most in the firing line on these issues, have launched a new multi-stakeholder program, the 'Global Network Initiative' aimed at tackling the problem.

This has come in a little under the radar, as there has not been much news of these developments in the business press leading up to the launch, but it appears to have arrived as a pretty well worked out program. With a tagline of "Protecting and Advancing Freedom of Expression and Privacy in Information and Communications Technologies", the initiative is a partnership between tech companies, human rights groups, academic institutions, and other institutions involved in media and communications freedoms. It has a set of principles, guidelines on implementation, including a commitment to human rights impact assessments, and a built-in review process. Most importantly, there is also a commitment to institute independent monitoring of companies' compliance with their commitments (though not, as far as we can tell, a commitment to report publicly).

It is, it has to be said, a difficult area to navigate for technology companies. Dealing with overseas governments can raise a host of problems that they are ill prepared to deal with, especially when they are operating overseas through a subsidiary or joint venture. So the initiative is certainly welcome. It establishes a clear framework for action that should make a meaningful difference to decision makers inside the organizations concerned. Of course, the devil will be in the detail of how such principles will be realized in practice. Especially interesting in this respect for us are the commitments to actively lobby governments to shift their expectations and demands:

"Participating companies will encourage governments to be specific, transparent and consistent in the demands, laws and regulations (“government restrictions”) that are issued to restrict freedom of expression online.

Participants will also encourage government demands that are consistent with international laws and standards on freedom of expression. This includes engaging proactively with governments to reach a shared understanding of how government restrictions can be applied in a manner consistent with the Principles.

When required to restrict communications or remove content, participating companies will:

• Require that governments follow established domestic legal processes when they are seeking to restrict freedom of expression.
• Interpret government restrictions and demands so as to minimize the negative effect on freedom of expression.
• Interpret the governmental authority’s jurisdiction so as to minimize the negative effect on to freedom of expression."

There are so many tricky details in that one passage alone, but it is heartening to see that the participants seem to be fully aware of the complications. As the Wall Street Journal blog, China Journal, put it:

For the most part, however, members decided not to include specific rules on issues such as where to host servers — outside servers can keep data out of problematic territories — because they felt that fast-changing technology might make them quickly irrelevant.

“The idea is that we believe the guidelines will need to be reviewed, and we will have to revise them as we take into account the actual experience,” says Sharon Hom, the executive director of Human Rights in China, which also helped develop the framework over two years. “It envisions an ongoing process of learning and sharing best practices,” she says.

So, there is still a lot to work out as the initiative unfolds. Let's just hope that Microsoft, Yahoo and Google can stay friends long enough to do all that mutual learning and sharing before they fall out with one another again...

Getting an ethics fix

This week’s blog is a bit late. Sorry, but there is an excuse: Crane and Matten have recently been introduced to the TV series ‘The Wire’ and, though we are somewhat behind the rest of the civilized world in this, have been avidly watching the third season on DVD. This stuff is so addictive that one of us even managed to watch all 12 episodes in 2 ½ days. Well, sometimes you need to stop writing, and just starting watching…

The Wire is set in Baltimore and introduces us to the world of drugs, smuggling, crime, dodgy police and sleazy backroom local politics. As far as we’re concerned it’s probably one of the best TV serials ever made. The storylines are gripping, the plot credible and the acting is just superb. Each series operates between two ‘camps’. ‘The Law’ is basically the police, prosecutors, lawyers and local politicians. On the other side, there is the ‘The Street’: the local drug trade, constituted by various rivaling gangs.

There are many reasons for the popularity of the show, one of which is the apparent amorality with which the two camps are displayed. Unlike in many standard cop shows, the ‘good guys’ are actually not quite that good. And the ‘bad guys’ are even at times fairly decent: despite the drug dealing and murdering, there are strict rules, very clear notions of fairness and an honor code among the gangsters. Most of all, nearly all characters are so likeable. If bad things happen, they are mostly the result of ‘the system’ – be it the police bureaucracy, politics or the power relations within and between gangs.

Now – some of you might be wondering by now what all this has to do with business ethics – or if it does, why Crane and Matten can’t even have the least bit of fun without bringing their ethics perspective into everything. Fair enough, so let us just say this much: ‘The Wire’ is absolutely superb if you want a lively laboratory of what we call ‘context related factors’ in ethical decision making (Chapter 4 of our business ethics book). The show gives a pretty vivid account of why it is that normal people end up doing some pretty bad things. This is what the Stanford University psychology professor Philip Zimbardo (of the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment) calls the ‘Lucifer Effect’ in his latest book: how personal morality is fundamentally shaped by social context.

And, besides, the link to business here is by no means artificial either. Stringer Bell, one of the gang leaders in the Wire, is actually doing a business degree part-time in the show, and he brings to bear some of the lessons from the classroom to his business on the street. Mind you, we doubt that he’ll have spent much time in any ethics classes. But that’s a shame. Not only could he have learnt more about why ‘The Street’ and ‘The Law’ behave the way they do, but he could also have provided us with some knowledge in the other direction. As some of our European colleagues have discussed recently, we can learn a thing or two about CSR from the way that organized crime outfits like the Sicilian mafia offer very instrumentalized forms of philanthropy to survive and flourish in governance vacuums. Oh, yes, but that was another show…

"Unjustly incarcerated": Conrad Black, ethics, and the media

So with Conrad Black spending his first day behind bars as federal prisoner 18330-424, the issue of the ethics of senior executives is once more back in the headlines. Well, OK, in this case, its more than just about ethics - clearly we have a case that is as much about breaking the law as it is getting entangled in ethical gray areas. For all the complexities of this case, fraud of $6 million is, well ... just plain illegal. But with Black himself continuing to claim to be the slighted one, making all kinds of accusations about the integrity of, among others, dissident shareholders, a special committee set up at Hollinger to investigate the case, the media, US prosecutors, and even the trial jury for "compromising" in reaching its verdict, ethics have never been far from the surface of this one.

Not that we are going to enter the fray arguing about who did what and who was to blame for the whole Hollinger fiasco. Clearly a whole lot of value got leached out of the company one way or another. Some of it through poor management, some bad luck, and, as the courts have made clear, some through fraud. Whichever way you look at it, the situation doesn't look good for anyone much.

For us though, especially being relatively new to Canada, one of the most interesting aspects of the case has been the media reaction to it here in the former press baron's country of birth. Black is certainly a larger than life character, and the media here in Canada, as in the UK and the US, eagerly covered every detail of the case, and especially reports of his supposedly lavish lifestyle. Now that Black's six and a half year sentence has started, his fall from grace is back in the news. Prominent among the broadsheets covering Blacks last moments of freedom was his former title, The National Post, where he made front page headlines again yesterday.

As it goes, actually, he got more than just front page news. In addition to the interview with him on the front page, the whole of page 6 was turned over to a Conrad Black penned comment section headlined 'Unjustly incarcerated' where he laid out in detail why he was innocent, who was to blame, and what "really" happened at Hollinger. And all without further commentary from the Post's fine reporters.

Now we are all for freedom of the press, freedom of speech to the invidual, and freedom to do a whole lot of other things. But why exactly is a national newspaper giving such unembumbered press space to a convicted felon, and not an inch to any of those that have proven in a court of law why he should be behind bars? Surely the media, even a paper once owned by Black, has some kind of duty to present a more fair and balanced account of such events. Or at least to provide some analysis of the "news", if yet more bombastic denials of his wrongdoing really count as news.

We should be thankful at least though that one item managed to break the Black monopoly. Nestled at the top of the page above Black's trenchant commentary was a sidebar reporting on news that Canadians will at last be able to rate their favourite public washrooms. We're not sure how we all coped before, but even so we're guessing that Black's new home in the Coleman Federal Correction Complex in Florida won't be featuring too high on any national bathroom ratings.