Category Archives: ethics

They Won’t Sign

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The lede has it.

Major media outlets including the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and CNN have said they won’t agree to a new Defense Department policy restricting journalists’ communication with military sources.
Those who don’t sign on to the new policy must forfeit their Pentagon press badges and won’t be issued new ones.

Among the restrictions being applied by DoD internally is

military personnel need approval before sharing information with the media, even if it isn’t classified. It says members of the media should be aware that agency “personnel may face adverse consequences for unauthorized disclosures.”

That should always have been the case. For far too long, there has been inconsistent, even contradictory, messaging coming out of DoD as a result of leaks, to say nothing of security failures in too many of those leaks. The journalism guild, of course, is spilling its collective ink pots over this.

The policy drew rebukes from press-rights organizations, which have highlighted the role journalists have played in revealing wasteful spending, conflicts of interest and misconduct.

This is self-serving and disingenuous. Pressmen should go back to doing original reporting instead of repeating each other’s rumors and printing leaked “information.” Pressmen surely understand—as the rest of us do—that leaks and their leakers are unreliable sources, and pressmen should rely instead on whistleblowers and other sources with the integrity of speaking on the record.

Their disingenuousness extends: the news outlets aren’t even being required to signify their agreement with the policy limiting DoD personnel’s interactions with the press; their signatures would merely indicate their understanding of the policy and the implications for DoD personnel.

News outlets don’t have an intrinsic right to wander the halls and poke into rooms in the Pentagon, nor do they have any need to do so, accosting any DoD personnel they happen on. Not even their self-proclaimed specialness gives them that.

It’s entirely appropriate, since the outlets won’t sign, to confine their writers to the various services’ public affairs offices, and it’s entirely appropriate to require all DoD personnel, military and civilian, who are encountered by a news writer, to refer those pressmen to the PAO and to refuse further interaction with the pressmen.

There are far too many leaks from government agencies, and those from DoD can have particularly dangerous national security implications. There are, also, far too many pressmen who don’t care a fig about national security, only about their personal bylines and notoriety.

The Boss Wants to Know

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Bari Weiss, newly hired CBS News editor-in-chief, wants to know what her employees in her news division do while they’re on the company clock.

On Friday [10 October], she sent a note to CBS News staffers asking each member of the organization to detail what they do, and what they believe is working or not working, by Tuesday [14 October].

Weiss, in so many words:

I want to understand how you spend your working hours—and, ideally, what you’ve made (or are making) that you’re most proud of. I’m also interested in hearing your views on what’s working; what’s broken or substandard; and how we can be better. Please be blunt—it will help me greatly[.]

You’d think two things would obtain here in an honest industry. One is the widely understood concept that bosses get to know what their employees are doing on the clock to earn their paycheck. The other is that such reporting would be simple and straightforward to carry out. In those industries where employees are required to keep time sheets, it would be a simple matter for employees to submit theirs or for bosses to get them from HR. In those industries where time sheets are not kept, those employees still know what they’re doing, and it would be simple to write down a few bullets and submit those.

In the present case, Weiss is also asking her employees what they think works and does not work. This is the employees’ opportunity to provide serious input and to simply bellyache about how hard their work life is.

However.

The Writers Guild of America East, which is a union representing many of those news room employees, is advising its membership to refuse to supply the data.

That’s a highly instructive tell.

Either these unionized employees spend their time on the clock largely goofing off and want to cover that up, or this is all-too-typical union obstructionism solely for the sake of obstructing. Or both.

Wess needs to instruct her HR to prepare termination notices for those employees not meeting the deadline (who did not meet the deadline as this is posted a couple of days after it) and to instruct her legal department to prepare to defend in court (no settlement) those terminations.

Note: Since I wrote this, Weiss has acquiesced and advised the union that writers who ignore her deadline will be acting with impunity–she will not punish them for their disobedience.

What He Said

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I don’t often agree with Vivek Ramaswamy, and I don’t always disagree with him. This is one of those times when I agree. This, from The Wall Street Journal‘s excerpt of Ramaswamy’s speech at a recent Turning Point USA gathering:

Do we play the left’s game—silencing, canceling, punishing, authorizing the government to pick winners and losers in the private sector? Or do we stick to the principles of the American founding—freedom, merit, the rule of law, the pursuit of excellence? … I believe the answer is crystal clear. We don’t care about owning the libs, not anymore. We care about owning responsibility for saving our country…
…
So how do we respond? Do we turn around and fight the Pharaoh on the shores of the Red Sea, or do we cross? The answer, my friends, is that we keep going. Their brutal tactics should never cause us to change who we are. But when we lower ourselves to play according to their rules, when we concede the idea that might makes right, that we settle our disagreements with force rather than debate, then we lose the very thing we were fighting for, and that is our identity as Americans.

This is not too far afield from Sun Tzu’s injunction to leave the enemy a path off the battlefield. Just let the Left go, and the rest of us will move on, prosper, and those Leftist violence favorers will be left behind.

A Misconception

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The headline and subheadline say it all.

Funding Freeze Threatens an Economic Lifeline in Chicago
Washington’s move halts plan to extend a train line into a depressed pocket of the city

Except that Washington’s move needn’t halt anything. Chicago could reallocate its spending priorities and fund the extension itself.

There’s no political will to do so, though; too many politicians in the city are addicted to Federal dollars, and apart from that, they benefit personally politically from bringing in the pork rather than spending city money.

Too, relying on Federal dollars—the taxes paid in by citizens from elsewhere in the State and especially by citizens of other States—lets city politicians avoid the drudgery of worrying about, and doing something about, the costs of such a project. And that benefits the politicians’ union employers donors.

A major factor in those costs is labor, which is driven by Federal construction dollar strings mandating union wage rates whether the builders are union shops or not. Allowing non-union wages would greatly reduce the cost of any construction project, including this train line extension.

One small example of the city officials’ shortsightedness on the revenue side is this from Wendy Jones, who runs a nonprofit that mentors young men:

The Red Line would have been a huge improvement, and it probably would have increased the property value here[.]

That increase in property value would have increased property tax revenues for the city. There would be sequelae, too, were the city managers ever to get serious about solving its crime problem: an influx of businesses, with attendant jobs, into the area fed by the train line extension, with an associated increase in income and business tax revenue to the city.

All of that would be in addition to all the construction jobs that building the extension would entail, and would still be available were the city to spend its own money on the construction.

As a bonus, the city spending its own money on the project would reduce the city’s dependency on the Federal government and reduce the latter’s leverage over the former.

That it’s a widespread and longstanding misconception that halting Federal construction funds transfers must perforce halt construction projects only demonstrates the knee-jerk response to and dependency on Federal funding that too many on both sides—politicians and citizens—have settled into.

The Federal government isn’t the only level of governing where spending discipline and reallocations are necessary.

Free Speech vs “Free Speech”

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California’s Progressive-Democrat Governor Gavin Newsom pretends to favor free speech even as he attacks it and seeks to limit it. Under Newsom,

California law requires companies with more than $500 million in annual revenue that “do business” in the state—which can mean having a single employee or contractor in the state—to detail how speculative climate-related risks could affect their businesses.
Companies with more than $1 billion in annual revenue will also have to report their CO2 emissions, including those from suppliers, customers, and contractors. Some 10,000 companies will have to comply with the first rule, and more than 5,000 with the second.

This is nothing but government-mandated speech, which is antithetical to speech freedom

Activist Federal judges are playing their role in this limitation [emphasis added].

A lawsuit by the US Chamber of Commerce and other business groups argues that the mandated climate disclosures violate the First Amendment by compelling business to speak on an intensely controversial subject. The state claimed in response that it is regulating business conduct, not speech—ergo, the First Amendment doesn’t apply.
Federal Judge Otis Wright in August rejected this defense, but he agreed with the state that the climate disclosures are constitutionally kosher because they implicate commercial speech, which merits a lower level of scrutiny under the First Amendment. This blurs a crucial distinction between commercial and non-commercial business speech.

This is even worse. Wright demonstrated his activist judicial bent by directly tying in our 1st Amendment and then saying it doesn’t apply to some (government disfavored) speech. Wright has directly attacked, with this position, the freedom Americans are explicitly allowed under that Amendment’s speech clause.

Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech….

There’s nothing in that clause that segregates speech into categories of speakers or of types of speech. No law abridging, means exactly that, neither more nor less.

At bottom, free speech is like the longstanding saw about pregnancy: either we have free speech, or we do not. There is no such thing as “a little free speech” or speech that is “somewhat free.” Most Americans understand that. It’s instructive that Progressive-Democratic Party politicians and activist judges do not. We can fix the one promptly through our elections. Fixing the other will take longer, but we can fix it, too, through our elections as we choose Congressmen and Presidents who will nominate and then confirm judges who adhere to the text of our Constitution and our statutes rather than to their personal views of “social needs.”