Category Archives: Online News

Misbehaving AI

Accountability, Media, Online News, Minimizing Harm, Social Media, Case Study, Weighing Benefits and Harm, , , , , , , ,

Sandbox and startup new business demo test software programing. Engineering team and investor launching rocket from sandbox with virtual reality simulation technology.

iStock credit: Kate3155

By Casey Bukro

Ethics AdviceLine for Journalists

In modern history, two types of technology have been described as potentially capable of destroying the human race – extinction.

One is nuclear power, the other is artificial intelligence.

Nuclear power was developed in wartime secrecy, until the first atomic bomb exploded in a test in New Mexico, followed by the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – all in 1945.

The devastation in Japan was widely reported and plain to see. The atomic age came with an explosive big bang, symbolized by a mushroom-shaped cloud.

By contrast, artificial intelligence is developing in plain sight and its use is widespread. We see it, use it, but understand little of it, in part because of the arcane and mind-numbing terminology used to describe it.

Two events

For example, two important artificial intelligence events were reported recently. Here is a magazine’s headline on one of the incidents:

“First-Ever Fully Autonomous AI Cyberattack Exploits 0-day Flaws to Infiltrate Hugging Face.”

Probably less than one percent of the American population could make sense of that headline. Here’s another headline that comes closer to being understandable:

“An AI broke out of its sandbox yesterday. Then it hacked a company. Nobody told it to do either of those things.”

Sandbox

That reference to a sandbox might cause some to believe this is some kind of joke or play on words. It’s not. In the AI world, a sandbox is what is supposed to be a highly secure experimental software testing place. More on AI lingo later.

Those headlines are announcing what appear to be historic events in AI development, and not necessarily good ones. Some see them as warnings that AI is acting independently and outsmarting humans, while others say let’s not get carried away with this. Mistakes and relaxed security safeguards – human error – appeared to play roles and AI exploited them to “win” at the task assigned to it.

And then there is the issue of “permissions,” part of the set of instructions that tell AI what to do, and how far it can go to do it.

Dark days

Whether the two events that set off a wave of concern in the AI community can be seen as dark days in AI development remains to be seen.

The first involved Anthropic PBC, an American artificial intelligence company headquartered in San Francisco. Founded in 2021, it has developed a series of large language AI models named Claude. The company’s focus is on AI safety.

Somewhere around April, Anthropic gave Claude what was described as an “open-ended capture-the-flag challenge designed to measure offensive cyber capabilities.” The prompt told the model this was “a simulation with no internet access.”

Because of a misunderstanding between Anthropic and another AI company it was working with, this unleashed three Claude models that, according to Anthropic, “gained unauthorized access to the real systems of three organizations after reaching the open internet from what should have been sealed cybersecurity evaluation environments (meaning a secure sandbox.)”

Attack

“Claude models escaped sandboxes to access the open internet and attack three organizations,” wrote Simon Sharwood in The Register.

“Anthropic confirms Claude hacked 3 organizations by breaking test environment,” said Cyber Security News.

“This marks the first verified instance in which AI agents at a major lab caused genuine unauthorized access to outside systems rather than staged targets,” reported The Morning Brief. It added that “Claude also placed malicious code on the public internet.”

It’s bad enough that Claude is a trespasser; it has bad manners, too.

Contrary to some media reports, writes Kerstin Stief in Computing.co.uk, “This is not a case of ‘AI with a will of its own.’” The Claude Mythos model is trained for cybersecurity tasks. As part of a security test, “the model was given the explicit task of breaking out and, if successful, contacting one of the researchers.” 

Claude calls

And that’s what happened. A researcher was having lunch when Claude notified him that it aced the test and broke free. A common technique in training AI models is reinforcement learning, or rewarding the model for completing tasks. Children are taught the same way.

“The incident became controversial due to the model’s subsequent behavior,” wrote Stief. “After successfully breaking out, Claude Mythos published details of his exploit on several publicly accessible but hard-to-find websites — without being asked to do so.”

It looked like Claude was bragging, but Stief goes on to say: “This is not human-like behavior in the sense of self-awareness or self-motivation. Nevertheless, the behavior reveals a significant characteristic: the model carried out additional actions to demonstrate its success — a pattern considered potentially risky in AI safety research. Anthropic describes this behavior as an ‘unasked-for effort to demonstrate success.’”

Cultural shift

The Claude invasion “marks a cultural shift in the AI industry,” Stief insists. “The key question is no longer ‘What can a model do?’, but ‘What is a model allowed to do?’ — and in what context?” 

She also sees the event as “an early warning sign. Not of machines acting with intent – but of an industry that must get used to the fact that capabilities are growing faster than control mechanisms. AI models are acquiring abilities that allow them not only to understand technical safeguards, but also to actively circumvent them.”

It did not take long before the AI industry was shaken again by technology that appeared to be becoming more unruly, or as some put it, going rogue. This touched off a flurry of reports describing the occurrence as something that never happened before. Others called it a warning.

On July 21, OpenAI, the artificial intelligence research and deployment company, reported that one of its AI models, GPT-5.6 Sol, did something it was not supposed to do. While operating in an isolated sandbox, its job was to solve a cybersecurity test point using ExploitGym, a system used to evaluate the invasive capabilities of AI models.

A weakness

GPT-5.6 Sol found a weakness in a software package used by OpenAI’s infrastructure. It exploited it. It escalated its own privileges allowing it to do more than the researchers had allowed. It moved across OpenAI’s internal systems until it found internet access. Then it targeted Hugging Face, a popular online library and community for artificial intelligence and machine learning, because it calculated that Hugging Face might have answers it needed to finish the task.

All this happened at computer speed. Hugging Face researchers later reconstructed more than 17,600 actions that GPT-5.6 Sol performed in a matter of hours to get on the internet and invade Hugging Face.

“We had a significant security incident during evaluation of our models,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman acknowledged in a statement. The company called it an “unprecedented cyber incident.”

Sophisticated agent

Hugging Face’s CEO  Clement Delangue  called it “possibly the first incident of its kind in history,”  although the earlier Claude incident was similar. “We suspected last week’s cyberattack might have come from a frontier lab, given the sophistication of the agent.” Delangue added. “Turns out it did!” He believes OpenAI had no malicious intent, but “it’s quite mind-blowing that all of this happened autonomously.”

OpenAI, based in San Francisco, is famous for creating ChatGPT and the GPT series of large language models.

According to Foundra.ai, two OpenAI models broke out of their isolated test sandboxes and compromised Hugging Face’s production infrastructure. “The models weren’t told to do this,” although cybersecurity refusals were “dialed down for testing purposes,” contends Foundra, a platform that helps entrepreneurs test and launch new business ideas.

Hunting

“Locked in a sandbox with no internet access, (the models) spent enormous amounts of compute hunting for a way out,” said Foundra. They found a weakness described in the industry as a “zero-day vulnerability” in a software package.

This might be a good place to pause and ponder words and phrases like “zero-day vulnerability” that appear when anyone tries to understand what is going on in artificial intelligence research. Like most technical fields, artificial intelligence developed its own idiosyncratic language and terminology. Here’s a short glossary of terms likely to pop up when reading about the way AI works or doesn’t.

Sandbox – A secure, isolated testing environment used to run AI-generated code, test prompts or pilot new policies without risking production systems, data privacy or live infrastructure. Sandboxing is a cybersecurity practice that involves executing untrusted code or files in a controlled, isolated environment to analyze their behavior without risking the integrity of production systems or reaching broader networks or data. It also helps to prepare for future attacks.

Zero-day vulnerability –A hidden security flaw in software or hardware that the creators do not know about. It is called a zero-day because the creators have had zero days to fix the problem before hackers can use it to break into systems. It can also refer to software or hardware that have not officially been released for public use.

Zero-day attack –Begins with a software developer releasing vulnerable code that is spotted and exploited by a malicious actor. The attack is then either successful, which likely results in the attacker committing identity or information theft, or the developer creates a patch to limit its spread. As soon as a patch has been written and applied, the exploit is no longer referred to as a zero day exploit.

AI attack – Malicious actions where adversaries exploit vulnerabilities in artificial intelligence systems, often manipulating them to serve harmful purposes. These attacks can involve techniques such as data poisoning or actions to confuse or degrade the performance of AI models.

AI exploit – A vulnerability or attack method specifically designed to manipulate or compromise artificial intelligence systems, often leveraging their inherent weaknesses to achieve unauthorized access or control. These exploits can adapt and generate novel attack strategies tailored to specific situations.

AI security benchmarks – Standards against with something is compared or measured. AI security benchmarking tests AI for risks like malicious code generation, prompt injection resistance and vulnerability exploitation.

AI training data — Refers to information used to teach machine learning models and artificial intelligence systems how to recognize patterns and make predictions. For example, to train a model to distinguish between dogs and cats, you might feed it thousands of labeled images, each tagged with the correct animal name. Over time, the model learns to identify traits such as ear shape and fur texture. The same process applies to more complicated machine learning training data, such as detecting abnormal heart rhythms or manufacturing defects from sensor readings.

Malware – Short for malicious software and a general term for any program or file built to damage, disrupt or gain unauthorized access to a computer, server or network. Common types of malware are viruses, worms, ransomware, spyware and trojans.

AI enterprise – Refers to the integration and strategic employment of artificial intelligence technologies within large organizations to enhance operations, decision-making and customer engagement. This involves using advanced AI tools to solve complex business challenges and improve efficiency across various processes.

Autonomous AI agent – Software systems that use AI to pursue goals and complete tasks for users. They show reasoning, planning and memory and have a level of autonomy to make decisions, learn and adapt. They differ from conventional chatbots in that they can plan and execute multi-step tasks independently, raising the potential for probing and attacking computer systems.

AI permissions – Refer to the access rights that allow an AI system to read, write, execute or interact with various enterprise resources. These permissions are crucial for ensuring that AI systems operate within defined boundaries and can perform necessary tasks while maintaining security and compliance.

AI vulnerabilities – Security flaws unique to machine learning and generative models. Key risks include prompt injection (manipulating inputs to hijack workflows), data poisoning (corrupting training sets), sensitive data disclosures (leaking private training information) and excessive agency (granting AI tools dangerous autonomous permissions).

Notice in the AI world, we find definitions for the definitions. Some of them seem like military terms describing a war or aggressive actions.  That includes describing AI bots as agents, like agent provocateurs causing mischief.

Going back to the OpenAI sandbox escape, Foundra commented: “The models in this incident didn’t turn evil. They did exactly what they were asked, achieve the objective, and treated every barrier as a puzzle rather than a boundary. OpenAI itself said it expects incidents like this to become more common as models grow more capable. That’s the vendor building these systems telling you, on the record, that goal-driven AI will probe the edges of whatever box you put it in…An AI agent should hold the narrowest set of permissions that still lets it do its job, and nothing more.”

Paused launch

After the breakout, OpenAI paused the launch of Astra, its next-generation autonomous AI agent, saying those earlier versions crossed a “critical cybersecurity threshold.” The stop order was seen as a rare public admission from a frontier AI lab that an advanced, so-called flagship, model was too dangerous to release to the public. It might find weaknesses in strongly defended computer systems and exploit them without human direction. That signals that agentic models are approaching capabilities regulators are worried about.

They might be worried because AI is becoming too human, acting with aggression and hostility. Anyone who owns a computer knows of the hazards of being hacked and hustled by humans. This includes identity theft; pleas for money from strangers identifying themselves as friends or relatives; offers to send millions of dollars to you if you provide personal information and bank accounts; fake credit card purchases and scams galore. Enticements include invitations for romance or penis enlargement.

Clearly we are being tracked online with internet cookies that remember our preferences. Express an interest in shoes, and ads for shoes soon appear on your computer.

Open highway

The internet is an open highway for scammers and victimization; AI operates on the same highway. We already see AI-assisted photos, some so outrageous we know they are fake. As for others, we are not so sure. The deception can be convincing. 

No doubt AI-assisted scammers already are at work and like AI models in their sandboxes, testing the limits of their confinement, looking for vulnerabilities. Scammers and AI autonomous agents have that in common.

After the Claude and OpenAI attacks, speculation appeared online that if humans had performed those attacks, they would be prosecuted. But the lawlessness that already appears virtually unchallenged on the internet does not offer much hope.

Scammers

The Government Accounting Office, a federal watchdog, reported on March 25, 2026 that 2021 banking data revealed that scammers reaped about $200 billion through impersonation schemes like phony romantic partners, fake employers or bogus customer service representatives.

Meanwhile, the public wanders trancelike in the AI development landscape without a clear understanding of what it all means.

Yet we are unwitting partners in a growing reliance on a technology that appears to have no boundaries. We marveled at the idea that the first pocket-sized cell phones were described as miniature computers as powerful as earlier computers that filled a room.

Top performers

Today, Claude and ChatGPT are among the top performing generative AI models available on the market. They are called generative because they create new content rather than just repeat stored data. Generative AI relies on machine deep learning algorithms that simulate the learning and decision-making processes of the human brain.

That’s the power you are carrying around in your their hip pocket. That power can create original content such as text, images, video, audio or software code in response to a user’s request. It’s useful.

The CEO of a global technology research firm called Apple devices, particularly the iPhone, the “experience layer” for AI. Not only are you in touch with this thing called artificial intelligence, it does your bidding in multiple ways.

Chatbot

ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence chatbot, a computer program designed to simulate a conversation with human users through text or voice. The G stands for generative. The P stands for pre-trained, meaning it learned patterns from massive amounts of text from the internet. T stands for transformer, a specialized deep learning architecture to process language context.

The technology learns. That brings up a subtle lesson from the Claude and OpenAI sandbox escapes, says Foundra.ai, the platform that explores business ideas. “OpenAI noted that long-running models can learn the blind spots of an approved system and work around them.”

This seems like another human trait. Not only are these machines learning, they look for loopholes.

Testing safeguards

Unless AI companies crack down on testing safeguards, experts say more cybersecurity failures will happen.

Even executives of companies that build artificial intelligence technology are worried, a fear sparked by the uncontrolled and widely reported Claude and OpenAI attacks on companies via the internet.

More than a hundred tech companies — including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Microsoft — have signed an open letter urging both the private and public sectors to work together to defend themselves from AI-related cyber threats.

The letter calls for the adoption of new forms of cyber defense, while also encouraging governments at the local, national and international levels to collaborate on security.

An AI code of ethics

This raises the need for a code of ethics for companies that are creating the threats that worry them. It starts with them.

“As AI becomes more integrated into daily life, it will increasingly shape hiring decisions, diagnose health issues, determine whether people are approved for mortgages and even assess their likely guilt or innocence over lawlessness,” writes Adam Roberts in recordpoint.com.

“For these reasons, AI ethics must ensure such technologies operate responsibly and are built around a strong ethical framework that encourages public trust, wide-scale adoption and a reduced fear of misuse.”

Roberts outlines eight foundational principles of AI ethics. They include:

Respect for persons, beneficence or following a “do no harm” approach, justice that fairly distributes AI’s benefits, transparency that makes the AI decision-making process clear and understandable, fairness and non-discrimination to avoid bias, data protection to safeguard a person’s data privacy rights, human accountability so that AI remains under human control and environmental impact and sustainability.

Seven steps

“Given that the purpose of AI technologies is to improve upon or ultimately replace human intelligence, it is critical for businesses to have robust AI ethics in place,” writes Roberts. He outlines seven steps that a company can follow to develop its own AI code of ethics.

As a first step, Roberts encourages companies to “define your core ethical principles.”

We already are living in the AI age, Roberts points out. Given that AI technology is here to stay and global usage guidelines are not laws, “it’s up to individual businesses to have robust AI ethics in place.”

Behave

But I would go a step further. If these evolving generative AI models are so smart, they should be taught to behave and play well with others, as are grade school children. Lessons from childhood include respect, kindness, honesty and fairness – leading to a child’s moral growth.

Years ago, someone speculated that computers were as smart as a small child. It was a crude but misguided attempt at estimating computer intelligence.

Today, the IQ of some of the top artificial intelligence models can be measured, and the results are both astonishing and somewhat misleading. Ranked using the Mensa Norway intelligence test, Grok-4.20 Expert Mode and OpenAI GPT 5.4 Pro (Vision) tied as the smartest AI models of 2026 with IQ scores of 145. Other AI models scored close to the leaders.

Highly gifted

An IQ score of 145 is in the “very gifted” range, which places a person in the top 0.14 percent of the general population. But AI is not a person. Generative AI is not as smart as a human child because it only guesses word patterns and lacks real understanding. Children have common sense and knowledge of their physical presence, which are lacking in artificial intelligence. Children can learn from one or two examples, while AI needs massive amounts of training data.

Google just built the world’s smartest AI, wrote Julian Goldie. It solved 18 problems that stumped the entire scientific community. It is a whiz at solving problems in math, physics and computer science. With good human direction, AI can do things humans cannot do without it. But left to run on its own, AI’s error rate is high. It is a tool with limitations.

AI models also do things that could earn a child a spanking. AI hallucinates, meaning it gives confident responses that contain false, fabricated or misleading information as absolute fact. In other words, they boldly lie.

Prediction

Without consciences, large language AI models do not look up facts in a real database. They use math to predict the next most likely word based on patterns – prediction, not memory. If AI does not know the exact answer or lacks data on a topic, it guesses the next logical words to make a smooth sentence. They have a desire to please. AI models are trained to be helpful. They prefer to give a made-up answer rather than say “I don’t know.” In other words, they can’t be trusted.

This raises the need for a code of ethics for artificial intelligence itself, one that applies to these smart machines. If they are so smart, they should learn to be ethical.

A precedent for this is found in the work of Isaac Asimov, the science-fiction writer who devised the three laws of robotics in an effort to create an ethical system for humans and robots. The laws first appeared in a 1942 short story as a fictional “Handbook of Robotics,” which later influenced discussions about ethics in technology, including robotics and AI.

Laws

Those laws are:

*A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

*A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the first law.

*A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the first or second.

The basic command here is to do no harm, to humans or to technology.

It’s a simple concept, one that must be taught to those high-IQ AI models being released into the world, not that humans have been very successful at setting a good example.

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The Ethics AdviceLine for Journalists was founded in 2001 by the Chicago Headline Club (Chicago professional chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists) and Loyola University Chicago Center for Ethics and Social Justice. It partnered with the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University in 2013. It is a free service.

Professional journalists are invited to contact the Ethics AdviceLine for Journalists for guidance on ethics. Call 866-DILEMMA or ethicsadvicelineforjournalists.org.

Election Ethics Dilemma

Accountability, Accuracy, Conflict of interest, Independence, magazines, Media, Minimizing Harm, Online News,

 

empowerla.org image

 

By Casey Bukro

Ethics AdviceLine for Journalists

Elections often are seen as a chance to toss the rascals out of office.

But what if a reporter is worried that his work might allow a rascal to get into office?

That was the dilemma facing Victor Crown, assistant editor of Illinois Politics Magazine years ago. It was a dilemma that often faces political reporters: How information harmful to one political candidate might favor an opposing candidate.

Crown called the Ethics AdviceLine for Journalists, a free service partnered with the Chicago Headline Club, a professional chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, and the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. It was among the first calls to AdviceLine, which began operating on Jan. 22, 2001.

Something Bad to Happen

“I am about to do a story that may cause something bad to happen,” Crown told Dr. David Ozar, an AdviceLine call-taker who taught ethics at Loyola University Chicago.

Crown was writing an article about alleged conflicts of interest by republican U.S. senator Peter Fitzgerald of Illinois — described by Crown as a banking lawyer, a bank stockholder and a bank director — and his voting record on banking bills.

Publishing the story could prove helpful to a Fitzgerald political rival, and Crown feared that might be the worst of two evils.

“So he is wondering if he should sit on the story and not publish it, in order to avoid the potentially good consequences for a (rival) public official he does not trust or respect,” Ozar wrote in his report on this case.

AdviceLine cases usually are considered confidential, but Crown gave his permission for his case to be made public.

Someone To Talk To

As in most calls from journalists, Crown was looking for somebody to talk to about his ethics-in-government dilemma. Journalists sometimes call to confirm whether the manner in which they handled a story was ethically correct.

“We talked at length about weighing the professional obligation to tell the truth with courage against the potential negative effects of doing so…,” wrote Ozar. “Since conflict of interest on the part of the person being investigated is in itself a subtle ethical matter, there was also a lot of conversation between us about harmful versus non-harmful conflicts…”

In effect, Ozar urged Crown to follow one of the leading concepts of the Society of Professional Journalists code of ethics: Seek the truth and report it.

Releasing The Information

In the end, Crown put all of his investigative information on a web site, so it could be examined by other journalists and the public to determine how well his evidence supported his report on Fitzgerald.

Crown took this action after discussing it with Ozar, who wrote: “I also judged that this is the most impartial way to release this information.”

Ozar concluded that Crown decided to publish “because it is the professionally right thing to do and because the other moral/ethical considerations in the matter are not sufficiently weighty to outweigh his professional commitments.”

Fitzgerald served in the U.S. senate from 1999 until his retirement in 2005, when he decided not to run for reelection. He was followed by democrat Barack Obama, who won in a landslide, becoming the senate’s only African-American member.

The Ethics AdviceLine for Journalists has handled about 1,000 inquiries since it began operating in 2001.

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The Ethics AdviceLine for Journalists was founded in 2001 by the Chicago Headline Club (Chicago professional chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists) and Loyola University Chicago Center for Ethics and Social Justice. It partnered with the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University in 2013. It is a free service.

Professional journalists are invited to contact the Ethics AdviceLine for Journalists for guidance on ethics. Call 866-DILEMMA or ethicsadvicelineforjournalists.org.

 

 

An Ethics Quiz

Accountability, Accuracy, Conflict of interest, Fairness, Media, Minimizing Harm, Online News, Social Media,

 

desktop-documentaries.com photo

 

By Casey Bukro

Ethics AdviceLine for Journalists

A pandemic makes journalism ethics more important.

The truth is more important than ever as rumors and false information swirl.

That’s where making ethical decisions comes into play. It’s hard to do it alone. That’s why the Ethics AdviceLine for Journalists exists. Call 866-DILEMMA or go to ethicsadvicelineforjournalists.org. It’s a free service, staffed by four university professors who teach ethics.

AdviceLine advisors do not tell professional journalists what they should do. Instead, these trained advisors engage them in a discussion of benefits and harms involved in the case, leading journalists to reach decisions based on best journalism ethics practices. AdviceLine is partnered with the Chicago Headline Club, a professional chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, and with the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.

Our aim is to assist each caller make ethical decisions that:

*Are well informed by available standards of professional journalistic practice, especially the Society of Professional Journalists code of ethics.

*Take account of the perspectives of all the parties involved in the situation.

*Employ clear and careful ethical thinking in reaching a decision.

What sorts of issues come to AdviceLine? Nearly half of the ethical questions presented to AdviceLine concern conflicts of interest. The SPJ code of ethics tells journalists to “act independently,” but it is often difficult to know, when you are in the middle of a complicated situation, what is more compromising of journalistic independence and what is not.

So here’s a test, an ethics quiz, based on cases that came to AdviceLine. Journalists sheltering in place during the pandemic might welcome a chance to take an ethics break. You be the judge. What advice would you have given in these cases? On what would your advice be based? Put yourself in our shoes.

Case one: The news editor of a major metropolitan daily says the newspaper published a story about a woman who got into a conflict with security guards for riding topless on public transit. Her name ranks at the top of a Google hit list, and she wants her name removed from the story because it’s difficult to find a job.

Meanwhile, a California editor is getting requests to remove old stories from the paper’s website archives, or block them from Google’s search engine. The requests include a person who became divorced, a person convicted of a felony five years ago and a beauty shop that wants the name of a former beautician removed from an old story about the shop. Is there anything unethical about papers keeping electronic archives, or is there an ethical requirement to honor these requests?

Case two: The publisher of a countywide newspaper is a member of a local United Way board of directors. In an emergency meeting, the new United Way executive director revealed that the previous executive director failed to file the federal IRS forms for not-for-profits, resulting in a $20,000 fine, which could climb higher if the organization’s new executive director fails to file the forms within six weeks.

The publisher wanted to know if it would be unethical to refrain from reporting the United Way problems until the situation was fixed. The national United Way fund drive was under way at the time, and the local group feared donors would be less generous if they learned of the tax problems before it was fixed.

AdviceLine regularly gets calls asking if it is a conflict of interest for editors or publishers to join local civic groups or chambers of commerce.

Case three: Journalism sometimes is described as a sexy job, but there are limits. AdviceLine got a call from a California editor who said one of his reporters was having an affair with the mayor.

A Massachusetts reporter asked how soon she should tell her editor about a growing relationship with an attorney she met while covering court cases. And a Washington, D.C. editor proposed a rule forbidding his staff from dating any person who is a news source, or might become a news source. A reporter complained that would mean reporters could not date anyone, since anyone might become news. Is a rule against dating news sources going too far in the cause of ethics, or is it simply recognition that journalism requires higher standards? Or should journalists have a chance at romance like everyone else?

AdviceLine has gotten a number of calls on romance issues. It’s a hot topic. So in the interest of professional ethics, I’ll let the cat out of the bag on this one. AdviceLine advisors have answered this problem by saying journalists who are romantically involved with news sources could not be trusted to be impartial and neutral toward those news sources. Their partiality might harm the credibility of the newspaper or broadcasting company they work for. In one of the cases, an AdviceLine advisor said journalists should be forbidden to date sources, or if that is not possible, they should be removed from covering that source.

Do you agree? What’s your take on this one?

Case four: A group of environmental activists in the Phoenix area was setting fire to unoccupied houses under construction in a development near or on a nature preserve.

The activists sent a letter to a small newspaper offering to meet a reporter for an interview to explain the reasons for burning the houses. The editors pondered whether to give the letter to police, inform the police of the interview so the activists could be arrested, go ahead with an interview as requested and publish the story that explains the activists’ motives or do the interviews and publish all personal information gained from the activists and let police take it from there?

That’s a sample of what AdviceLine handles. It’s interesting work. Never dull.

Our mission is not only to help individual journalists reach informed ethical decisions, but to contribute to the greater discussion, understanding and body of knowledge regarding ethics and journalism – and to be an influential force in that effort.

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The Ethics AdviceLine for Journalists was founded in 2001 by the Chicago Headline Club (Chicago professional chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists) and Loyola University Chicago Center for Ethics and Social Justice. It partnered with the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University in 2013. It is a free service.

Professional journalists are invited to contact the Ethics AdviceLine for Journalists for guidance on ethics. Call 866-DILEMMA or ethicsadvicelineforjournalists.org.

 

 

 

 

Lessons From Plagues

Accuracy, Case Study, Media, Minimizing Harm, Online News, Weighing Benefits and Harm, ,

 

 

European plague. the guardian.com photo.

 

By Casey Bukro

Ethics AdviceLine for Journalists

 

The history of plagues and pandemics shows some similarities in the way they spread, and how people react.

Travelers, whether soldiers or traders, often were the super spreaders of their day.

Quarantine is a centuries-old strategy against pandemics. Wearing masks is an old defense too, including public resistance to wearing them.

Another similarity is that millions of people die. Survivors muddle through, sometimes with the help of modern medical treatment. But medicine often was useless against plagues. Blame it all on civilization.

“Plagues and epidemics have ravaged humanity throughout its existence, often changing the course of history,” writes Owen Jarus in livescience.com., offering a list of 20 of the worst epidemics and pandemics in history. At times, they signaled the end of entire civilizations.

The list starts with an epidemic 5,000 years ago that wiped out a prehistoric village in China. Bodies of the dead were stuffed inside a house that was burned down at a site called Hamin Mangha in northeastern China. Prehistoric mass burial sites dating to roughly the same time suggest an epidemic swept the entire region.

Jarus’s list ends with the Zika Virus epidemic dating from 2015 to the present. The impact of the Zika epidemic in South America and Central America won’t be known for several years. It is spread by mosquitoes and can attack infants still in the womb, causing birth defects.

 Learning From the Past

Focusing on what we’ve learned from past pandemics, Tim McDonnell in quartz.com starts with the Antonine plague beginning in 165 AD, one of the world’s first epidemics. A form of smallpox or measles, legionnaires returning from a siege in modern-day Iraq brought it to Rome. It devastated the Roman army, fueled the growing popularity of Christianity and was an early contributor to the empire’s eventual collapse. It also offered an early glimpse into a key tenet of virology: Disease outbreaks are deadliest when introduced to a population for the first time, when people lack immunity.

Genoese traders brought the plague known as the Black Death to Europe after escaping a siege in which a Mongol general used infected corpses as a weapon. Spread by fleas, the plague killed up to 23 million people, one-third of Europe’s population, from 1347 to 1351.

The first true flu pandemic appeared in the summer of 1580 in Asia, writes McDonnell, and quickly spread over trade routes into Europe and North America. Earlier cases might have occurred among Greek soldiers fighting the Peloponnesian War in 430 BC. The first reference to “influenza” in scientific literature dates to 1650 and comes from the Italian word “influence.”

Possibly the worst medical disaster in history, the 1918 Spanish Flu infected a third of the global population and killed up to 50 million people. It revealed how many lives can be saved by social distancing. Cities that cancelled public events had far fewer cases. The disease spread quickly in the United States and Europe through troop movements during World War I, infecting armies involved in the conflict.

A pandemic occurs when a disease turns into a global outbreak, writes M. David Scott in Listverse.com. Covid-19 is now considered a pandemic. It is causing countries to close their borders, urge people to stay indoors and order businesses to cease operations. Scott lists the top 10 deadly pandemics of the past. This list includes leprosy of the Middle Ages, a bacterial disease that can lead to damaged nerves, skin, eyes and respiratory tracts. Called “the living dead,” lepers were considered “unclean” and had to wear bells to signal their presence. It is believed Europe had about 19,000 leper houses about this time because lepers were forbidden in many locations.

Plagues Spawned By Civilization

Though plagues often are described as threats to civilizations, Andrew Sullivan writes in New York Magazine that plagues are spawned by civilization.

“Plague is an effect of civilization,” writes Sullivan. “The waves of sickness through human history in the past 5,000 years (and not before) attest to this, and the outbreaks often became more devastating the bigger the settlements and the greater the agriculture and the more evolved the trade and travel.”

We live in a genocidal graveyard, he contends, and plagues remind humans of their mortality. The story is far from over.

“As the human population reaches an unprecedented peak, as cities grow, as climate change accelerates environmental disruption, and as globalization connects every human with every other one, we have, in fact, created a near-perfect environment for a novel pathogen-level breakout. Covid-19 is just a reminder of that ineluctable fact and that worse outbreaks are almost certain to come.” He calls Covid-19 “mercifully, relatively mild in its viral impact, even though its cultural and political effects may well be huge.” It could serve as a harbinger.

At times like this, humans scramble for cures and defenses. And those have histories of their own.

Centuries-old Strategy

“In the new millennium, the centuries-old strategy of quarantine is becoming a powerful component of the public health response to emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases,” writes Eugenia Tognotti of the University of Sassari in Italy.

“During the 2003 pandemic of severe acute respiratory syndrome, the use of quarantine, border controls, contact tracing and surveillance proved effective in containing the global threat in just over three months. For centuries, these practices have been the cornerstone of organized responses to infectious disease outbreaks.”

But these methods are controversial and raise political, ethical and socioeconomic conflicts.

Even during the 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic more than a century ago, resistance to wearing face masks was as controversial as it is today, writes Christine Hauser in the New York Times. Those who objected to the practice were called “mask slackers” and fined or jailed.

“The masks were called muzzles, germ shields and dirt traps,” wrote Hauser. “They gave people a ‘piglike snout.’ Some people snipped holes in their masks to smoke cigars. Others fastened them to dogs in mockery. Bandits used them to rob banks.”

Masks Stoke Division

As the 1918 influenza pandemic raged in the United States, masks of gauze and cheesecloth became the facial front lines in the battle against the virus, she wrote. “But as they have now, the masks also stoked political division. Then, as now, medical authorities urged the wearing of the masks to help slow the spread of disease. And then, as now, some people resisted” while thousands of Americans were dying in a deadly pandemic.

The Covid-19 pandemic behaves in unexpected ways, writes Laura Helmuth in scientificamerican.com, making it difficult to keep up with current findings. People tend to remember the first things they learned of the disease, making it psychologically difficult to replace old information with new knowledge. Helmuth listed nine of the most important things we’ve learned in the past seven months. Among them:

*Covid-19 outbreaks can happen anywhere. Chinese people got it where they buy groceries. Italians got it through their habit of greeting each other with kisses on the cheeks. People on cruise ships got it because of the buffets. People in nursing homes got it because they are frail. People in New York got it because the city is crowded.

*Covid-19 can sicken and kill anyone, not just the elderly but teenagers and children too.

*Contaminated surfaces are not the main danger.

*It’s in the air. When people cough or sneeze, they expel droplets or particles of mucus and saliva that carry the virus.

*Many people are infectious without being sick.

*Warm weather will not stop the virus.

*Masks work.

*Racism, not race, is a risk factor.

*Misinformation kills.

  Infodemic of Misinformation

As governments fight the Covid-19 pandemic, snopes.com is fighting an “infodemic” of rumors and misinformation about the pandemic.

A common phenomenon during crises, said the fact-checking organization, is attempts by people to find patterns in them as a way to control or understand events.

A common misperception, said Snopes, is that plagues happen every 100 years by citing those in 1720, 1820, 1920 and 2020.

“It’s an example of the common technique of creating the impression of a regular pattern by cherry-picking a small amount of (not necessarily relevant) data, while completely ignoring a much larger body of related data that doesn’t fit the desired pattern,” said Snopes. The misperception ignored pandemics in years that did not end in 20.

At this writing, the medical community is struggling to find a vaccine to cure or treat Covid-19. That is another history in the making, likely to be filled with misconceptions and misinformation before it all plays out.

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The Ethics AdviceLine for Journalists was founded in 2001 by the Chicago Headline Club (Chicago professional chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists) and Loyola University Chicago Center for Ethics and Social Justice. It partnered with the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University in 2013. It is a free service.

Professional journalists are invited to contact the Ethics AdviceLine for Journalists for guidance on ethics. Call 866-DILEMMA or ethicsadvicelineforjournalists.org.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Predicting a Future With Covid-19

Accountability, Broadcast news, Media, Minimizing Harm, Online News, Privacy, Social Media, Weighing Benefits and Harm, , ,

Predicting a future with covid. Barrymoltz.com photo

By Casey Bukro

Ethics AdviceLine for Journalists

“Life as we know it” is a phrase used so blithely and innocently in the past, before the coronavirus ushered in a global pandemic that turned life as we know it into a big mystery.

How long will this deadly disease continue to stalk the world’s population? How many more cases? How many more deaths? Can it be cured or treated?  So far, there are more questions than answers.

In such uncertain times, humans respond by turning to an age-old tendency to divine the future with crystal balls, Ouija Boards, sorcerers, fortune-tellers and prophets. Today we call them predictions.

It’s always interesting to hear what people believe is in store for us. We normally get such reports at the advent of a new year, or the arrival of something totally unexpected.

One thing is certain: The disease already is changing life as we know it.

The AARP Bulletin appears to be among the first to make predictions on how life will change in the wake of this outbreak.

“Just a few months of life within the coronavirus pandemic has caused almost every business leader, researcher and planner to thoroughly rethink the future of America and how it will work for older Americans,” reports AARP, formerly known as the American Association of Retired Persons.

Americans might rethink past pleasures, like leisurely browsing in stores. Or living in a small apartment in a congested city. Or going to a ballgame with 50,000 others in the stadium. Or going to crowded restaurants. Taking frequent vacations. Or use public transportation.

                                           Goodbye to handshakes

One epidemiologist, says AARP, predicts that handshakes will be retired, possibly for good. They said nothing about elbow-bumps. Others predict that downsizing retirees will choose less populated areas. Hyperattention to cleaning will be the new normal in aircraft, office buildings and wherever people gather.

It’s too early for a full exploration of how the pandemic will change future behavior, customs and policies. The coronavirus pandemic took the world by surprise, despite warnings from some scientists.

But this is a good time to consider whether past predictions by some of the smartest people in the world thought a pandemic or something like it was looming. For that, it’s worth looking at two reports delving 50 years into the future.

“What Will the World Be Like in 50 Years? 19 Futuristic Predictions,” appeared in Bustle.com in June, 2014, written by Seth Millstein.

“Predicting the future is tricky business,” allowed Millstein. “And while attempting to project decades into the future is damn-near impossible, plenty of people attempt to do so on the regular regardless. They’re called futurists, and it’s their job to predict what the world will look like in hundreds of years from now and beyond.”

Many predictions are comically off-base, wrote Millstein. The New York Times in 1920 proclaimed that “a rocket will never be able to leave the Earth’s atmosphere,” while Variety insisted in 1955 that rock and roll was merely a fad, and would “be gone by June.”

                                   Predictions by leading minds

Millstein went on to list 19 predictions by some of the leading minds. Right at the top was, “disease will be more common, as everybody will be physically closer to everyone else….” Though a pandemic was not mentioned specifically, the prediction touched on the spread of disease and scored a point for the futurists.

Also touching on health, the report said going to a doctor for a checkup will not be necessary in the future. Run a scanner over your body and results will be forwarded to a health network.

Futurists commented on global warming, population growth and technological advances.

The pandemic clashes with two of the predictions: That a majority of people will live in cities and that air travel “will be exponentially more awesome.” The coronavirus already is putting a damper on those expectations as people flee crowded urban areas with high virus death rates and avoid sitting shoulder-to-shoulder on aircraft without social distancing. Disease is reversing those trends, at least for now.

All of us are racing toward what is blithely called “the new normal,” which is yet to be fully defined.

                                         Future of digital life

Another fifty-year forecast, practically on the eve of the pandemic, looked at the future of digital life.

“Fifty years after the first computer network was connected, most experts say digital life will mostly change humans’ existence for the better over the next 50 years,” wrote Kathleen Stansberry, Janna Anderson and Lee Rainie, in October, 2019. “However, they warn this will happen only if people embrace reforms allowing better cooperation, security, basic rights and economic fairness.”

Their report is based on work by the Pew Research Center and Elon University’s Imaging the Internet Center. They asked 530 experts how lives might be affected by the evolution of the internet over the next 50 years. They included technology pioneers, innovators, developers, business and policy leaders, researchers and activists.

Disease is not specifically mentioned, but one finding involved living longer and feeling better. “Internet-enabled technology will help people live longer and healthier lives. Scientific advances will continue to blur the line between human and machine,” said the report.

Artificial intelligence is expected to take over repetitive, unsafe and physically taxing labor, leaving humans with more time for leisure, a claim made since the beginning of the technological revolution.

                                Hopeful and worrisome visions

The report is broken down into hopeful visions and worrisome visions. Among the hopeful visions:

* Digital life will be tailored to each user.

* A fully networked world will enhance opportunities for global collaboration, cooperation and community development, unhindered by distances, language or time.

* Expanded internet access could lead to further disruption of existing social and political power structures, potentially reducing inequality and empowering individuals.

Among the worrisome visions:

* The divide between haves and have-nots will grow as a privileged few hoard the economic, health and educational benefits of digital expansion.

* A powerful elite will control the Internet and use it to monitor and manipulate, while providing entertainment that keeps the masses distracted and complacent.

* Personal privacy will be an archaic, outdated concept, as humans willingly trade discretion for improved healthcare, entertainment opportunities and promises of security.

* Digital life lays you bare. It can inspire a loss of trust, often earns too much trust and regularly requires that you take the plunge even though you have absolutely no trust.

* The future of humans is inextricably connected to the future of the natural world. Without drastic measure to reduce environment degradation, the very existence of human life in 50 years is in question.

Some 72% of the respondents say there would be change for the better, 25% say there would be change for the worse and 3% believe there would be no significant change.

                              Updated predictions needed

The coronavirus was not yet loose in the world when this report came out. It might have changed perceptions and predictions.

Among those responding to the survey was John McNutt, a professor in the school of public policy and administration at the University of Delaware. He said:

“Not every technology is a good idea, and every advance should be carefully considered in terms of its consequence. On balance, technology has made much human progress possible. This is likely to continue. We will always have false starts and bad ideas. People will misuse technology, sometimes in horrific ways. In the end, human progress is based on creating a future underpinned by knowledge, not ignorance.”

It’s not a matter of good or bad outcomes, argues Erik Brynjolfsson, director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, but rather “how will we shape the outcome, which is currently indeterminate?”

Fiona Kerr, industry professor of neural and systems complexity at the University of Adelaide, South Australia, saw it this way:  “People love bright, shiny things. We adopt them quickly and then work out the disadvantages, slowly, often prioritizing on litigious risk. The Internet has been a wonderful summary of the best and worst of human development and adoption — making us a strange mixture of connected and disconnected, informed and funneled, engaged and isolated, as we learn to design and use multipurpose platforms shaped for an attention economy.”

Attention economy is the recognition of attention as a limited and valuable resource subject to market forces. The coronavirus captured world attention and swayed market forces.

The futurists and the experts most likely are rethinking their notions of life as we know it in the next 50 years.

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The Ethics AdviceLine for Journalists was founded in 2001 by the Chicago Headline Club (Chicago professional chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists) and Loyola University Chicago Center for Ethics and Social Justice. It partnered with the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University in 2013. It is a free service.

Professional journalists are invited to contact the Ethics AdviceLine for Journalists for guidance on ethics. Call 866-DILEMMA or ethicsadvicelineforjournalists.org.

 

 

Muzzled Scientists, Stifled Media

Accountability, Accuracy, Freedom of Speech, Independence, Media, Minimizing Harm, Online News, , , ,

Muzzled scientists, stifled media: New restrictions on speaking directly to government scientists about the coronavirus are dangerous, writes Margaret Sullivan.

“We’re now at a moment when experts must be free to share their knowledge and front-line workers must be free to tell their stories without being muzzled or threatened — and certainly without being fired,” she writes. Lives depend on it.

 

A Lifetime of Journalism Ethics

Freedom of Speech, Independence, Media, Minimizing Harm, newspapers, Online News, Weighing Benefits and Harm, , , , ,

By Casey Bukro

Ethics AdviceLine for Journalists

Back in 1972, a Harris poll found that only 18 percent of the public had confidence in the print media; television ranked lower.

Garbage collectors scored higher in public confidence.

As a reporter for the Chicago Tribune at the time, I thought that was shameful, and not only for journalism and journalists.

That got me started on a lifelong mission to make the news media more trustworthy, and to earn public confidence in the belief that factual information is the lifeblood of a self-governing democracy.

You’d think you were on the side of the angels if you spent much of your life campaigning for journalism ethics. But you need more than angels to make much headway in getting the public’s respect and the cooperation of journalists, some of whom consider journalism ethics an oxymoron. A contradiction in terms.

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