The State of Connecticut has a list of criminal convictions since 2000 on the web for easy searching. Unlike other states, this one includes minor infractions like traffic violations. Nosy person that I am, I checked on some of my fellow faculty. Was hoping to find some dark secrets that would reveal something of their psychology: convictions for mayhem with suspended sentences, for example. No such luck: just some speeding tickets and the like.
I haven’t blogged about the ongoing saga of the Quinnipiac Chronicle, our student paper, which is facing administrative censorship. An editorial printed in the paper lays out the problems: efforts to constrain the way the paper represents the university and its policies. The president doesn’t like how his position has been portrayed in the paper, and the editor has been told it is not appropriate for him to criticize Quinnipiac policy, even when such policy hinders the way in which the newspaper operates. There are other issues, and like any sort of conflict, it’s a lot more gray than black-and-white. What is clear is that the university administration has taken a position that is regressive, and that hurts our reputation as a School of Communication, and, of course, our reputation as a university.
Tin Foil Hat
I have a pet theory. The president of the university, John Lahey, is nothing if not public relations-savvy. What is the guaranteed way of getting publicity for your campus newspaper? Threaten to shut it down, let things stew for a while, then make a firm statement that clearly endorses the autonomy of the newspaper. Think of this as a kind of “Pentagon Papers” for our own little newspaper. In a year the Chronicle may be seen as a beacon of student activist journalism, simultaneously propelling our journalism program to national prominence and dispelling the idea that the Quinnipiac campus is particularly apathetic.
It’s almost a given. If you want publicity, threaten the editor of the university paper when he criticizes an administrative policy. Even better, make sure that the president is directly involved. This is like sending an email to journalists saying “free hooks.” And at least a few of those journalists have bitten. An article appeared last Sunday in the New York Times detailing the conflict, and another article appeared earlier this week in Inside Higher Ed.
On the Other Hand?
On first blush, it looks like there is little to prop up the administration’s position. They offer two issues. The first is that they claim that things have been misquoted or taken out of context in Chronicle articles. This is almost certainly the case: after all, newspapers always fail at incorporating what everyone would like to see in the paper. Newspapers cannot please all of the people all of the time.
However, I am particularly cognizant of this criticism because of an exchange that occurred on this blog. I noted a quote in the Chronicle that seemed odd, and the person quoted argued that she never said what the paper said she said, or that if she did it was taken out of context. She complained to the paper, and the automatic response in these cases—the ethical response—is at the very least to make clear to the readership that the quoted individual disputed the article’s quotation. When I read a response on this blog that suggested that the paper was unwilling to do this, it raised serious flags for me: journalistic ethics require that reporters and editors are sensitive and responsive to their audiences and their sources. I think this is something that the paper should take seriously, and review their procedures for handling complaints about quotes and either publishing retractions or letters from sources contesting the quotation.
The second issue, which comes in a letter from the administration to faculty that I will not quote, suggests that there is an issue of legal liability: if the newspaper publishes content that is libelous, or that reveals protected information about the student (presumably issues protected by FERPA), the university could be held liable. I won’t hold them to this argument, since it seems not only misguided, but potentially damaging. If they are suggesting that by publishing the paper they are editorially responsible for it, I think they are setting them up for a fall down the road. It is almost inevitable that a media outlet will at least be threatened with lawsuit at some point. Even this lowly blog has received such threats from more than one corner. Does the administration really want it on record that they think they have an oversight role in determining content in the paper? If they assert such a role now, it will lead to a lot of back-peddling if and when the paper is sued and the administration tries to wash its hands of culpability.
In the end, what needs to happen is a clear statement from the administration that they have no interest or desire in acting as a censor for the newspaper. That is a vital first step. The second issue—whether university officials are allowed to speak to student journalists directly—is important to the quality of the education QU students receive, but if the administration chooses not to speak to the press, internal or external, there isn’t much that can be done about it. In some ways, the worst possible public relations is limiting your relations with the public. As the university seeks to become better known nationally and internationally, it needs to abandon parochial views and embrace a role that is very much in the public eye.
All of this comes back to an instigating issue. A number of racial epithets were scrawled on the doors of black students’ dorm rooms and elsewhere on campus. In some sick way, this makes Quinnipiac quite a bit like some other major campuses, where racial insensitivity is rising. Unfortunately, it represented yet another black eye for Quinnipiac, in part because of a (correct) impression that it is not particularly diverse. Quinnipiac ranks among the “top” ten whitest law schools in the US, and despite some interesting efforts, many of the students are strikingly unaware of the world outside of this little slice of the eastern seaboard, or outside of their own neighborhoods. It is important that the president not sweep racism under the carpet; like many social ills, it racism breeds best when kept under wraps, quiet, and unchecked. Many students on campus reacted against the racial incidents that occurred, and it is important to reflect the tolerance of our community proudly. We need to demonstrate our beliefs publicly, and conversations with our president should be equally open and public.
What Doesn’t Kill Us
As I said, I am hopeful that good can come out of this incident. As one commentator has noted, this act has energized otherwise placid students at Quinnipiac. She notes this rather ominous YouTube posting, suggesting that there is an undercurrent of activism on campus:
If there is such an undercurrent, it is well hidden. Many of the differences between this campus newspaper and that at the The Daily at the University of Washington are night and day, in part because the latter has successfully navigated efforts at censorship. It’s about page proudly trumpets its independence:
The Daily is the independent student newspaper for the University of Washington. The Daily is produced exclusively by students, with the exception of four non-student UW staff members who provide fiscal and administrative assistance. Any UW student may work for The Daily and will be paid for their work.
All content and advertising is approved by student staff members with no interference by UW staff or administration for an uncensored press. No non-student staff members review editorial content before publication.
A nine-member Board of Student Publications oversees the newspaper, reviews finances, resolves disputes and selects the editor and advertising manager. The board is comprised of representatives from UW administration, the Faculty Senate, the Department of Communication, ASUW, GPSS, a professional publication and The Daily newsroom.
The Daily began as the Pacific Wave in 1891. It became The Daily in 1909 when the paper began publishing five days a week. The Monday edition of the paper was dropped in 1933 during The Great Depression. The Monday publication resumed in 1985 and has run on schedule ever since.
The uncensored approach to student journalism has been controversial at times, but the First Amendment and Supreme Court decisions guarantee this right for students at the University of Washington.
Former UW Communications professor, Don Pember, stated “While freedom of expression has been considered a basic right for the press in this country for nearly 200 years, this right was not articulated for college and high school newspapers until quite recently. Until the 1960s, college and high school journalists enjoyed about as much freedom of expression as the newspaper’s advisor, the high school principal or the college dean was willing to allow.”
In the 1967 Supreme Court decision Dickey vs. Alabama, it was ruled “censorship of school papers is allowed only when the exercise of freedom of speech interferes materially and substantially with the requirement of appropriate discipline and order in the school.”
It remains as the law today.
UW faculty, staff and students can be proud that this university was a pioneer in clarifying the freedom of student press and that University presidents have defended that Constitutional freedom ever since.
The Daily won the Apple Award at the 2006 College Media Adviser Spring Convention in New York City for the best overall four-year college tabloid-sized newspaper in the nation.
Obviously, The Daily has about a century of a head start on the Quinnipiac Chronicle, but I hope that the current efforts to curtail its freedom act as a kind of annealing process, giving student media on campus a more common set of values and objectives.
I’ve been saying “no thank you” to the increasingly ubiquitous receipt checkers at the doors of (mostly) big-box stores. It’s insulting and an inconvenience. Generally, the guards are pretty nice about it. At Bed, Bath, & Beyond, they kind of shrug, and smile. At CompUSA, they actually shout after you like you are the criminal they assume you to be. I’ve even successfully said no thank you to the TSA at JFK, when they wanted to see my ticket for the third time (once before security, once going through the metal detector, and then again leaving security). Actually, in that case I would have complied if the person had been even minutely polite.
An incident at the Naperville outlet of TigerDirect somehow doesn’t surprise me. A customer said “no thank you” to guards who wanted to see her receipt, and was detained and verbally harangued. She called 911, but the police officer refused to charge the guard and manager with false imprisonment. I have to say, under the same conditions I would have walked out of the store and I doubt that a guard would be able to physically restrain me, but I’m kind of a jerk that way. Anyway, I’ve been in that store, and it feels a bit like a prison. I’ve gotten some pretty good bargains from TigerDirect in the past, it’s too bad I can’t in good conscience order from them any more.
I’m not sure that “no thank you” is enough any more, so I’ve printed up two versions of slips of paper to keep in my pocket, and to hand to guards who have this thankless job. The first one reads:
To the General Manager:
I have handed this paper to your security employee who has requested to see my receipt following a purchase, a request I politely refused. I recognize that this employee is doing the job you have assigned, and this should not be seen as an indication that this person has done anything but a fine job.
However, I am insulted by your practice of treating every customer as a potential thief. Note that this lack of goodwill results not only in my future choice of other, more customer-oriented stores over your own, it also results in significant negative word-of-mouth advertising regarding my shopping experience. Consider that you will have to spend substantial amounts of revenue in advertising for new customers with each customer you lose to this charade.
I sincerely hope you will reconsider your policy of checking receipts at the door. I recognize that shoplifting and other forms of loss are a challenge to retail establishments, and I encourage you to take measures—including increasing the number and training of sales associates—to reduce loss. Insulting your customers is the wrong approach.
I figure you can add your signature and contact information or not, as you like. Here it is in a convenient pdf, along with a less subtle version. (via Boing)
When I was growing up, I dreamed of visiting “red” China, the USSR, or the DDR. I’ve always paid attention to defending against the worst case. During the 1980s, like lots of kids in America, I worried about the potential for global nuclear war, and our seeming lack of preparation for it. I worried about other worst-case scenarios as well—Herbert’s White Plague felt less like fiction and more like a possibility worth guarding against, and in California, a major earthquake was always a certainty—but, as a child of the times, I worried most about what to do when the first ICBMs hit.
It might seem strange, then, that I would want to visit the other side of the iron curtain, but my greatest flaw has always been an insatiable curiosity. The stories of people visiting Moscow, Peking, or East Berlin at the time were much like those of visiting North Korea now. You should expect your hotel room to be bugged, your movements monitored. They would likely ply you with drugs and women, hoping for something you could be blackmailed with. (I suppose the potential of being plied with drugs and women might have been part of the attraction…) And should you try to go off the beaten track or photograph things you were not permitted to, you would find yourself in the gulag. Of course, much of this was romanticism, propaganda, or some combination. And like all myths, there was probably some kernel of truth.
It’s been a while since I’ve been in DC, and I don’t want to overplay this point, but as I took a handful of shots of facades, I always glanced around to make sure uniformed guards were nowhere nearby. Now, there were no signs that suggested that photography was not allowed, and these were public buildings shot from public sidewalks in the public’s capitol. I had no real fear of being dragged in for questioning (although perhaps I should have), I just wanted to avoid the uncomfortable situation of guards telling me I was not allowed to do what I was doing. It was a subtle unease, and I realized that it reminded me a lot of the way I felt it would be to visit a communist state when I was a child. The problem is that there is a new set of understandings of what should be allowed to be photographed. I would never have felt that kind of unease at a museum, because it seems it has long been the case that photography is restricted in most museums. (The Met is a refreshing exception.) But this idea of not being able to photograph public buildings in some cases, seemingly determined at the whim of the guard, is galling to me.
I think the thing that really bugs me is this idea that there is no clear rule—no sign indicating that what you are doing may get you into trouble with someone with a gun and a state license to take physical action against you. This shows up when boarding a plane as well. The fact that I can’t bring a bottle of water with me on the plane is a nuisance, not least because it seems to serve only the slimmest security function. But these regulations that are arbitrary, but clearly spelled out, are far less onerous than the seemingly capricious ways in which some of the rules are applied.
This story about someone getting stopped for his homemade MintyBoost that TSA thought looked like an IED (well, it had the I and the D parts, at least) reminded me of a run-in with airport security in Buffalo. I had a long conversation with a woman who thought it was strange that I was bringing a large electric gear-motor on a plane from Buffalo to NYC. “What’s it for?” she wanted to know. I answered honestly (aka, stupidly), “I don’t know.” I had originally picked up the motor on eBay to activate a cover over our front steps in Buffalo, which tended to get impossibly slick with snow and ice. We improvised a frame with a tarp to cover the steps, but that meant lifting up the cover whenever we arrived or departed. I wanted to automate this, using the motor to drive a winch mechanism, but never got around to it. Now, I was dragging random items from my office at UB back to Manhattan when I made the commute, and so I dropped the motor into my bag. Rather than this rather unbelievable and difficult to articulate story, I said I was a roboticist (white lie; I dabble) and it was for my work, and after running it through the ETD system and a bit of deliberation they let me on. But it was the same sort of feeling: the TSA had the ability to either seize this piece of junk or keep me from boarding the plane, and there was no exacting rule that would determine whether they would exercise that authority. This becomes especially annoying when they are clearly wrong, as when someone from the TSA in Los Angeles held me up for a twenty minutes insisting that I was flying alone, on a one-way ticket, and had open-jawed a previous flight, and found it very suspicious when I disagreed with his assessment.
In the end, it’s a small thing. I doubt most people have enough of a problem with authority to have this even bother them. The solution is easy enough—someone needs to make a cell phone with a camera in it that rivals the point-and-shoots now available. Also need to be able to redirect the lens to be able to take a shot without holding the phone up. Do this, and the enforcement issue is pretty much moot. Of course, it is not the actual rule that bothers me so much as the impulse, and the fact that it is not a problem for so many people. It also troubles me that I have the same slight prickling at the back of my neck in DC as I have had in cities that do not make the claims of freedom and liberty that the US does.
Kevin is playing with using his new helmet-cam to record his everyday experience. I did this a few years ago, trying to record an entire day, using a webcam and my laptop. Mine was, by necessity, shoulder-mounted, rather than head-mounted, which has its own advantages and disadvantages.
The idea runs back to Mann’s sousveillance or Brin’s reciprocal transparency, though I have to say that the term only gets at a slice of what I think this starts to get at. Really, it remains surveillance, and but with you as the “surveillor” and gateway to other people looking in. That is, the camera is naturally a panoptic device, a one-way mirror, and as such you have to wonder who is or will be observing you. When I did this, I wore a label next to the camera saying “You are being recorded,” and this resulted in a lot of discussions like the one Kevin has in this clip.
The emergence, however, of YouTube and similar services changes the nature of the video camera. In the past, there was always the possibility that something captured on a camcorder could be shown to others, and—if interesting enough—sold to the evening news. Now, however, at least in certain circles, there is the assumption that some form of the video is likely to find its way out onto the web. This makes the camera a different kind of device, and our cultural assumptions and public policy will change as this shift becomes complete.
On the one hand, someone taking pictures of a birthday party at a restaurant has become a common thing to see. But when those photos are likely to be published publicly, and facial recognition (either computer-driven or human-driven, as on FaceBook) becomes the norm, that camera takes on a new intrusiveness. One could even see restaurants outlawing cameras; which, of course, also means outlawing camera phones. Already, this is an issue for those going to courts where camera phones are not allowed. Imagine what happens when camera phones are not allowed in a quarter of the restaurants you visit.
I’m glad Kevin has done this. I’ve been planning on retrying my shoulder-mounted cam (in much lower resolution than Kevin’s new camera!) and do a “day in the life” or “week in the life.” While these kinds of experiments have been going on for a long time now within relatively limited groups (mostly wearables researchers), it will be interesting to see the degree to which amateur panveillance becomes more common in the coming months and years.
I’m in the midst of designing my graduate media law class for next semester. Even though it isn’t directly part of the interactive communication major (it’s required of all graduate students in the School of Communications, I think), I’m taking a heavily “interactive” leaning to it. That means that instead of spending 80% of the time on freedom of the press and libel, which is the standard sort of thing, I’m going to be spending a lot more time on things like telecommunications regulation, privacy, intellectual property (with a good look at virtual environments and the rise of DiY fabrication), digital rights management, jurisdictional issues related to the internet and that sort of thing. Oh, and so we’ll be talking about mash-ups, like this one (via chutry):
Add this to the AOL leak: Someone ran across a collection of MySpace passwords, badly hidden on a phishing server. Again, a really interesting dataset (and no, he isn’t making the data available!), but tinged by the absolutely unethical and illegal method of collection. Of course, you could reasonably ask whether the passwords collected by a phishing attempt represent the average MySpace password. I seriously doubt that is the case.
If this becomes common, the difficulty is manifest. Researchers who follow even a small degree of ethical behavior will be left in the dust by “amateurs” (in the kindest sense of the word) and professionals (in the least kind sense) who do not recognize the ethical problems of making use of data that has been taken against the wishes of its owners. We’ve already seen this: I’ve posted about issues of scraping social network sites and the AOL data. But is this the future of online research: a sea of questionable datasets, traded on the black market, and unavailable to researchers who would most benefit from them?
Most difficult is that it is clear that the blogger posting above has arguably brought no harm to the individual users. He has analyzed the work in the aggregate and not revealed anything that directly impacts most users. Moreover, I don’t think he did much to violate their trust: the phishers did that, and then just left the data lying around. Nonetheless, I think this represents another case in which the researcher has to close her eyes to it and just say no. It’s not an easy thing to do, though.
It raises another issue. While professionally, we clearly would be bound from using the data in—say—a publishable paper, what about blogging it? On the AOL data, I decried its invasion of privacy, and then turned around and blogged about it. I think it’s also clear that distributing via blog is no less damaging than in a research journal. Does that make my earlier post ethically questionable? What a mess.
