Sound governance is not some abstract ideal or utopian pipe dream. Nor does it occur by accident or through sudden outbreaks of altruism. It happens when leaders lead with integrity, when directors actually direct and when stakeholders demand the highest level of ethics and accountability. ~ J. Richard Finlay in testimony before the Standing Committee on Banking, Commerce and the Economy, Senate of Canada.
Author. Thinker. Journalist. In the highest traditions of those professions. A civilized man for who whom baseball was a metaphor for life that taught about the place of rules, ethics and integrity in the governance and leadership of the public’s business.
For those who seek the truth, and occasionally wonder how it is discovered, his would be one of the brighter stars to lead the way.
A life well lived, indeed.
When NBC News decided to publish self-taken videos, audio and photos of a deranged mass murderer earlier this week, it abandoned its own proud history, and that of its corporate owner GE, and descended into the gutter of the worst form of tabloid exploitation. The scale of the crime at Virginia Tech was horrific beyond comprehension. It confirmed that for all the billions put into homeland security, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the intrusiveness of the Patriot Act and the constant preoccupation of its government with terrorism, America could not defend itself against the folly of its own gun laws that would permit a non-citizen with a history of mental illness to buy powerful automatic weapons with large magazines that shoot hollow point bullets. The purchase of the hand guns, magazines and ammunition by Cho Seung-Hui was apparently lawful under both U.S. laws and those of the state of Virginia. And with those two weapons, the deadliest shooting spree in U.S. history took place.
I am generally a vocal defender of the media and the rights of a free press. Too often, of late, they have been under siege, especially by the Bush Administration. Some actions, however, are not defensible. NBC crossed the line and with its actions. It unleashed a second assault by the madman of Virginia Tech when it placed the face of evil forever throughout the internet and on You Tube, where it is downloaded tens of thousands of times each hour by impressionable young people, and permitted the most vile videos and photos of a hateful and twisted individual to be splashed across newspapers, magazines and televisions around the world. It was done at the urging of a killer seeking some sickened form of immortality in place of a normal life. NBC gave him the heightened world platform he craved. In doing so, it sunk to a new low in its profession. A few media outlets, notably the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, chose not to air these images out of concern for the damage they might cause and the lack of taste such display would bespeak. They deserve high marks for their decision.
The high calling of journalism brought to an art by the likes of Edward R. Murrow, Fred Friendly, Walter Cronkite and Peter Jennings knows that it cannot detach its news gathering function from its obligations to respect decency, to exercise sound judgment or to act with a sense of proportion. Those qualities were absent in the high councils of NBC News this week. Only the voice of high ratings and bigger profits was heard. There was not even the slightest indication that anyone at NBC considered that it might be appropriate to at least hold off airing these images until after the memorial services at the campus and a suitable interval for recovery of the still injured students and the families of the victims had elapsed. No, NBC had to make sure these images were put right in the face of the public and the grief-stricken families even before the killer’s victims had been buried.
From time to time, capitalism shows its ugly side. It did so this week with the NBC logo on it. It is a long fall for a respected news institution —an icon with three tones that has shaped the news and entertainment habits of generations and where one of America’s most valued and historic enterprises —General Electric— is the corporate owner. Yet in a week where directors of another network —CBS— were making loud noises of disapproval over the racial slurs of Don Imus, not a peep of disgust is heard from the directors of NBC or GE over this act of grotesque indecency. This would not have occurred, I suspect, under the leadership of Owen Young or Reginald Jones, two admirable leading figures from GE’s past.
But under the current generation of senior managers and directors, there is but one cardinal rule: maximize ratings and profits —apparently without thought to the larger costs. As a society, we expect our premier journalistic institutions to act in a manner that is consistent with the enormous trust we place in them. As investors and consumers, we expect the boards of such institutions to be the ultimate guardians of the professional integrity and good reputation that is necessary to their functioning. That trust was ill-served this week, which is why the actions of NBC news, along with the network’s board and that of its corporate parent,GE, which permitted this disturbing act of journalistic misjudgment, is the Outrage of the Week.
He’s back at it again. After calling corporate governance advocates “birdbrains” a few months ago, as we noted at the time here, billionaire television and internet mogul Barry Diller is accusing the press of conduct that is almost illicit in its reporting on CEO pay. “I think it’s close to criminal,” he said of recent media coverage regarding executive compensation. Mr. Diller, one of the highest paid executives in the United States, also fears for the health of directors, whom he portrays as being nervous old aunts in light of the push to make companies more transparent and accountable. “You have boards now that are skittish in every area. They’ve made chief executives very skittish,” he is reported as saying to the Financial Times.
Apparently, it’s just not as easy as it used to be for a CEO to roll over boards and shareholders and grab as much as he can. (more…)
The Wall Street Journal’s Alan Murray posed the question in his column last week:
What lessons do you draw from the story of Lord Black of Crossharbour?
Like many, I have been following Conrad Black’s career with great interest —probably longer than most. (more…)
The shameful condition of U.S. medical facilities for treating wounded veterans was highlighted this week in what will surely be Pulitzer Prize winning stories for the Washington Post. It symbolizes a culture of betrayal on the part of official Washington that has rightly seen Americans everywhere register their indignation.
But the outrage goes beyond the squalor in certain buildings or even the red tape and run around facing returning military personnel. It is that this was allowed to happen for years without anything being done. During this time, veterans and their families were writing to their members of Congress and senators pleading for action. Yet with all their staff, these political representatives of the people apparently couldn’t be bothered to pull together the same story that virtually fell into the laps of Post reporters Anne Hull and Dana Priest. There was no investigative reporting here. The deploring situation was out in the open for anyone to see.
It is bad enough for the military chain of command to have permitted this situation. But one likes to think that at least elected officials –and there are enough of them in Washington– are there to serve as a check on executive power especially when it drops the ball. America’s federal lawmakers are busy folks. But they have no higher duty than to ensure that the best treatment and care is provided to those who are sent off into battle and return the worse for it. What happened to the staffs of the armed services committees of Congress or to the committees that oversee veterans affairs? Much is made on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue about the need to support the troops. But no senator or congressman —Democratic or Republican— it seems cared enough to respond affirmatively to the hundreds of letters they received or to walk over to Building 18 of the Walter Reed medical campus to see what the reporters saw. They, like the officials in charge, let the troops down.
This would be a disgrace anytime. During a time of war, it is an intolerable outrage.
Computer Associates offers a case study worth remembering about CEO pay abuse, ineffectual boards and press cheerleading.
A chapter has closed in the history of giant computer software company Computer Associates (now called CA), and in the life of its one-time high flying CEO, Sanjay Kumar, who was sentenced recently to 12 years in federal prison for securities fraud and obstruction of justice. The story is rather symptomatic of the ills that brought business to its Enron era state of disgrace and somewhat illustrative of the shortsightedness of the press, for that matter. (more…)