Llewellyn King: Riots and the end of industrial prosperity

I was in Baltimore the last time it burned. That was back in April 1968, after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Washington also burned at that time. There was something surreal about the mood of the riots in both cities. The anger from African-American rioters seemed to be directed wholly against property.

I walked among the rioters, up 14^th Street to the U Street Corridor, the commercial hub of the Shaw area of Washington. Later that day, I drove around Baltimore. They seemed to me to be an uncommonly respectful pair of riots.

In Washington, young African-American men directed me where to go safely; one looter, coming out of a shop on 14^th and F Street, asked me if I needed anything, as though he were the proprietor.

Over the decades, I have wondered about those riots. I think they were indeed riots of anger as well as sorrow. King, the great civil-rights leader, had been murdered, and already people knew that there would not be another like him.

For days I drove around Baltimore, where I lived at the time, and Washington, where troops were patrolling and curfews were in place. With a large “PRESS” sign taped on my car’s windshield, I was allowed to drive around both cities, and I watched them come to grips with reality. A Washington Post writer described how a white motorist and a black motorist had waved each other through an intersection, both feeling they were doing something significant.

But Washington is not Baltimore. And, at that time, Baltimore was as segregated as any Southern city.

The proprietor of a bar near The Baltimore News-American, the Hearst newspaper where I worked, would shoo away blacks with this lie, “This is a private club and I can’t serve you, but I can sell you a bottle to go.”

I wanted to challenge this, and urged a black friend on the newspaper, Lee Lassiter, to come with me and make a stand. He averred, not because he was lacking in courage, but because he was fighting another battle over bars. Lassiter and other activists were trying to restrict the spread of cheap bars in the ghetto, where licenses were indiscriminately issued by a white board to white businessmen.

Unlike Washington, which, in some ways, was a more secure community and where there was certain amount of integration, the whites in Baltimore took little interest in the blacks. There was no sense that they shared a city.

Baltimore’s politics were white; its sensibilities were white; and it was comfortably assumed that in the profusion of row houses, there were happy blacks, living a happy parallel life -- although that term was not used. Not true then, and not true now.

This is a subjective comment, but I have always felt there is a kind of special dejection in the Baltimore ghetto.

While there was manufacturing, steel and shipbuilding and a car plant in Baltimore, guaranteeing good union jobs, there were pockets of prosperity. As these jobs faded in Baltimore, and other American cities, so did the hope for a route to the middle class for those in the ghetto.

As crime increased everywhere, it surged in Baltimore. Gun ownership shot up, mostly among ghetto youth.

Baltimore’s police – who probably felt the effect in their families, if not in their own aspirations, of the end of industrial prosperity -- took out their frustrations on those who had even minor malefactions.

Men in uniform easily degenerate into bullies. I saw this in London. When a policeman and a suspect face off, after the policeman is sure that he is not facing an ambush, he has absolute power over the suspect. It is an intrinsically ugly moment: When the handcuffs click, justice and liberty are at bay. Later in court, or through a civilian review, those things may be re-established. But when the suspect is under lock and key, the police power is absolute -- and it is absolutely corrupting.

Police officers go over the line often, and I have seen this all over the world. Race worsens things, but it is not a necessary ingredient.

It is sad for me that, 47 years later, Baltimore should have been torched by a mob. It is sad, too, that things in the row houses of Baltimore are as bad as ever, and that the mob is still the only voice black Baltimoreans think they have.

Llewellyn King (king@kingpublishing.com) is executive producer and host of “White House Chronicle” on PBS. 

'Afrofuturist aesthetic'

 

"Coast Cosmos'' (archival pigment prints, wood frames), by TODD GRAY, in his show "Caliban in the Mirror: Exquisite Terribleness,'' at the Samson Gallery, Boston, May 1-June 13.

The gallery says: "Gray’s transcontinental studio practice is informed by cultural hybridity, body politics, and global pop culture. Pulling from his archive of documentary images taken in Ghana, and photographs taken as personal photographer to Michael Jackson in the 80’s, Gray produces temporal and spatial schisms by juxtaposing decontextualized images in overlapping, found frames in low relief compositions. In afrofuturist aesthetic, he combines sculpture and photography to create ambiguous 'third' objects that provide the viewers with a multiplicity of perspectives of layered space and time that aid in problematizing singularity.'' Whew!

May 1 - June 13

Artist Reception: May 1st from 6 to 8pm

Chris Powell: Conn. would hide murder by police

  MANCHESTER, Conn.

While Connecticut is inching toward equipping police officers with body cameras and cruisers with dashboard cameras, they won't bring much accountability to police work unless the state's freedom-of-information law is strengthened. For if police video in Connecticut ever captured a murder committed by an officer -- like the killings recently committed by officers in South Carolina and Oklahoma and captured on video that was quickly made public -- the video almost certainly would be suppressed.

In part that's because of the exemption inserted in Connecticut's FOI law last year by the General Assembly and Gov. Dannel Malloy in response to fears that someone might publish photographs of the mass murder at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in Newtown in December 2012. The exemption lets government agencies to withhold images of murder victims if the "personal privacy of the victim or the victim's surviving family members" might be invaded.

If that exemption wasn't enough pretext for the police to withhold the video, they surely would withhold it under a second and longstanding exemption in the law, allowing the suppression of "information to be used in a prospective law-enforcement action if prejudicial to such action."

Never mind that murder, assault, and brutality committed by police officers can never be matters of "personal privacy," nor that the only prejudice to a law-enforcement action in such circumstances would be in withholding evidence of a crime, not in making it public.

No, the chief state's attorney, the local state's attorney, and the chief of the department whose officer had been caught in misconduct all probably would insist on preventing the public from getting a quick look at any incriminating video, lest the ability of the police to conceal or minimize a crime by an officer be impaired.

Indeed, Connecticut's prosecutors are notorious for their refusal to prosecute official corruption, almost always defaulting to federal prosecutors, who can handle only the biggest offenses. State prosecutors claim that they are handicapped in pursuing official misconduct by their lack of the power to issue investigative subpoenas. But even when serious misconduct by police was documented for them by civilian video in East Haven in 2009 and Bridgeport in 2011, state prosecutors failed to act and left prosecution to the feds, who won convictions.

In light of the explosion of videos documenting police misconduct around the country, Connecticut's FOI law should be amended to require immediate disclosure of any images involving death, injury, or property damage captured by police or other government agencies.

While Governor Malloy and the General Assembly seem content to leave police body cameras to a small experimental program, at least two Connecticut towns are hurrying toward greater accountability in police work as well as toward greater protection for officers against the many false accusations made against police -- South Windsor and Norwalk. If only other police departments had as much integrity.

xxx

State government in Connecticut can't take proper care of the mentally disabled and ill and addicted. Its finances are deteriorating despite -- or maybe because of -- a record tax increase. The state's transportation system needs tens of billions of dollars in renovations and improvements for which money can't be found. Government policies undertaken to remediate poverty only produce more poverty requiring remediation. Most of the state's high school graduates have failed to master high school work and many are duly sent off to take remedial courses in public colleges.

But last week Governor Malloy announced that he will appoint a committee to address climate change. He seems to think state government is a spectacular success and doesn't have enough to do.

Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.  

Organic and structural

"Reintegration'' by Leslie Zelamsky, in the "Common Thread'' show, through May 10, at Fountain Street Fine Art, Framingham.

In her sculptures, she  uses common building materials to create forms that are both organic and structural.

Devoting their lives to leaving the E.U.

Here's some of Michael Goldfarb's fine British election campaign commentary:http://www.politico.eu/author/michael-goldfarb/

David Warsh: Jeb Bush likely to be the next president

  The early stages of the presidential campaign are unfolding as expected.  Jeb Bush is irritating his party’s right wing by periodically praising President Obama. Otherwise he remains as elusive as possible, in view of the gantlet of Red State primaries he must run  to receive the Republican nomination. Then he can run to the center in the general election.

To make this point last week, Washington Post campaign correspondent Ed O’Keefe reached back to an interview that Bush gave Charlie Rose in 2012:

“I don’t have to play the game of being 100,000 percent against President Obama,” he said at the time. “I’ve got a long list of things that I think he’s done wrong and with civility and respect I will point those out if I’m asked. But on the things I think he’s done a good job on, I’m not just going to say no.”

In the same interview, Bush alleged that Obama was repeatedly blaming his brother for his own missteps and suggested it would be nice to hear Obama give “just a small acknowledgment that the guy you replaced isn’t the source of every problem and the excuse of why you’re not being successful.”

Meanwhile, Hillary Rodham Clinton is bogged down amidst increasing scrutiny of the philanthropic foundation her husband founded after leaving office.

Are the stories fair?  In New York Times columnist Paul Krugman’s view, there is reason to be skeptical. He wrote last week on his blog, “If you are old enough to remember the 1990s, you remember the endless parade of alleged scandals, Whitewater above all — all of them fomented by right-wing operatives, all eagerly hyped by mainstream news outlets, none of which actually turned out to involve wrongdoing.”

In fact  the Clintons manifested a fair amount of slippery behavior once they got to in Washington,  most of it involving a series of appointments of cronies to sensitive positions in the Treasury and Justice Departments, including that of his wife and of his old friend Ira Magaziner to head a Task Force on National Health Care Reform. Little of the initial concern was fomented by “right-wing operators.”

But instead of simply monitoring the president’s behavior in office, the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, under editor Robert Bartley, launched a campaign to, in effect, overturn the result of the election, by conducting an extensive investigation of the couple’s Arkansas years.

The result was the Whitewater craze —the name stems from a vacation development in the Ozark Mountains in which the Clintons had an interest.  Bartley’s inquisition found relatively little smoke and much less fire. Typical was the discovery of a futures trade, arranged by a favor-seeker, from which Hillary had benefitted in 1978, having put very little money at risk – at a moment in which her marriage hung in in the balance. Afterwards she backed away from the broker.

Mrs. Clinton’s healthcare reform initiative collapsed in 1994, amid heavy criticism of its approach (employers required to provide coverage to all employees) and its lack of transparency. Later that year Rep. Newt Gingrich (R.-Ga.) led the Republicans to control of the House of Representatives.  The struggle for power became more intense.

It reached a crescendo when impeachment proceedings failed to convict the president of “high crimes and misdemeanors” for having lied about his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. The Democrats gained seats in the House after that.

Clinton served out his time in the White House with only one more memorable scandal – his pardon of Glencore commodities founder Marc Rich on charges of trading with Iran and tax evasion.

The case against Bill Clinton was sunk by the consistently unfair and ultimately deplorable way in which it was brought. But Hillary Clinton’s problems with the Clinton Foundation – possible conflicts of interest while serving as secretary of state, her husband’s lavish speaking fees – are there for all to see, 18  months before the election.  Politico’s Jack Shafer compares the scheme to the concept of “honest graft,” as enunciated long ago by George Washington Plunkitt of Tammany Hall: “I seen my opportunities and I took ‘em.”

Shafer writes, “The Times story contains no smoking gun. As far as I can tell, the pistol isn’t even loaded. Hell, I’m not sure I even see a firearm.” But then Plunkitt never ran for president.

So it seems likely the next president will be Jeb Bush. He would be the third member of the family to serve. Is that a bad thing?

Not in my reading of it. Jeb Bush more nearly resembles his realist father than his idealistic brother.  The net effect of a Bush victory would be the marginalization of the populist wing of the GOP – and their fellow travelers at the WSJ ed page.  Remember, the editorialists there played a significant role in bringing about the defeat of the first Bush. Furious at him for having raised taxes slightly to finance the first Gulf War, they systematically forced Bush to the right.  Pat Buchanan gave the keynote address to the Republican convention in Houston, H. Ross Perot split the GOP vote and Clinton was elected with 43 percent of the popular vote. .

Rupert Murdoch bought the WSJ in 2007.  Since then I have detected a gradual slight moderation of its editorial views (if not those of its more fiery columnists (Bret Stephens, Daniel Henninger, Kimberly Strassel). In 2014, Club of Growth founder Stephen Moore left the editorial board for the Tea Party’s Heritage Foundation, taking with him the portfolio of crackpot economics.  Due next for an overhaul is the page’s stubborn denial of climate change.

The WSJ editorial page and the Clintons have shaped each other to an astonishing extent over the past 25 years. What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.

Disclosure:  I worked on the famously fair-minded news side of the WSJ for a short sweet time many years ago. In the name of fairness, I have to say that an awful lot of wise opinion and shrewd editorial writing appears on its editorial pages. .

WSJ reporters are still remarkably straight. I have the feeling that the disdain among them for the wilder enthusiasms of their editorial colleagues hasn’t changed any more than mine in all that time.

David Warsh is a Somerville, Mass.-based based economic historian, long-time financial journalist and proprietor of economicprincipals.com, where this essay first appeared.

Fossilized interest groups

Dripping with the past

"Silent Serenade'' (charcoal and chalk pastel), by LESLEY COHEN, in her "Presence and Absence'' show, April 29-May 31, at the Bromfield Galllery, Boston. She explores memories of childhood in her work.

It's  curious how some of those memories, especially the bad ones, get stronger as one goes deeper into old age. I think of this as I look across from the patio here in Los Angeles to a yellow, parched, steep hillside with $2 million houses teetering at the top and flocks of gray parrots swooping in on palms with excessive force.

My memories of New England are usually of wet and cold, as it was  here in LA  of all places yesterday. So the line from the "The Lady Is Tramp,'' by Rodgers and Hart, can be accurate briefly:

Hates California, it's cold and it's damp.

That's why the lady is a tramp.

-- Robert Whitcomb

Exhibition against anxiety

 

 "C.L.U.E.  (color location ultimate experience), Part  1 (video), by A.L. Steiner & Robbinschild, in the show "It's gonna take a lotta love,'' at Franklin Street Works, Stamford, Conn, through May 24.

The gallery says that in the video  "two women perform dance-infused movements in backdrops of natural and built environments, connecting color, action, attitude and environment in a way that includes the audience in their choreographed antics. In an age of anxiety, isolated individualism and virtually-lived experience, this exhibition is a refreshing exploration of inclusivity, authenticity and commonality.''

Ira Sharkansky: The wandering Jews of Portugal and Fall River

JERUSALEM A number of individuals from my home town of Fall River, Mass., have traveled to Ponta Delgada, in the Azores , to commemorate the refurbishing of a synagogue that they had financed. They also met with the one Jew still living in the islands.

The story is long and interesting, and ironic from both sides.

Jews had once been a major element in Portugal, but no more.

They also were a major element in Fall River, but no more.

Jewish history in Portugal resembled Jewish history in Spain. A sizable population developed in the early Middle Ages, by some reports a larger percentage of the total population than in Spain. In both countries the Jews were mostly eliminated by forced expulsion or conversion. Some remained, passing themselves off as Christians, and some returned when the anti-Jewish policy was relaxed.

The Portuguese first came to southeastern Massachusetts as crew members on whaling ships. The work was hard and risky enough to dissuade Americans, so the ships would sail from New Bedford and Nantucket with skeleton crews to the Azores, pick up men willing to serve, at least partly for the opportunity to remain in the  U.S. when the ships reached home port with the results of several years' hunting.  When the cotton industry began to develop in Fall River, mill owners sent labor recruiters to the Azores.

Jews came to the city from the latter part of the 19th Century, and served a growing industrial population as peddlers and small merchants. Their children, more than others, stayed in school and moved up the economic ladder to larger businesses and the professions. As the cotton mills closed in the face of competition from the South, another wave of Jews came, mostly from New York, to produce clothing, taking advantage of empty buildings and unemployed workers.

Then competition from China, India, Indonesia, Vietnam and elsewhere did to their small factories what Southern cotton mills had done earlier.

At its height, the Jewish community amounted to several thousand individuals, with a number of small Orthodox synagogues and one grand Conservative temple.

If there is more than one Jew remaining in Fall River, there is not not enough for a daily minyan. For some years now, the Conservative temple has rented space that once served as classrooms to municipal social service agencies.

My first assignment as a student of political science led me to the city's problems. According to official statistics, 30 percent of Fall River teenagers did not finish high school, and the average adult had not gone beyond ninth grade.

The city stimulated my interest in ethnicity, and the topic for my Senior Thesis was "The Portuguese of Fall River." Demographic and political research was made easier by the few family names among the Portuguese. One of them was Franco.

There are Francos in our family. The grandparents of the Franco who married a niece came from Turkey, and earlier ones most likely went there from Spain or Portugal..

There are Portuguese in Fall River who say they are Jews, or that their family had been Jewish.

Gentile friends lament the absence of Jews. They say that the public high school has become an "inner-city school," and that few graduates apply to prestigious colleges.

The ambitious Jews of my generation had to apply to several places, insofar as the most desirable limited the number of Jews they would accept. Virtually none of us returned to the city after college.

Fall River's total population has dropped from more than 115,000 to less than 90,000. Tenements are empty and cheap. Boston relocated some of its homeless to the city.

The city's education profile hasn't changed in 60 years. Still close to 30 percent of teenagers fail to finish high school. Now the average adult has reached 10 grade, but has not finished it.

There are Jews who live outside of Fall River, while continuing to practice their professions in the city.

It's not only the Azores and Fall River where there are empty synagogues. There are about as many Jews in each of Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Libya, Iraq, Algeria, and Afghanistan, all of which had been home to thousands..

Jews remain a significant population in the area of the former Soviet Union, despite about half of them--more than a million--having left since the late 1980s.

Estimates of Jews in Iran have declined from 100,000-150,000 in 1948 to about 80,000 prior to the revolution, and 17,000-25,000 currently.

Assessments of Jews' lives in Iran vary as widely as the population estimates.

Jews not only move. They also look for Jews in what for them are exotic places. The support of what had been Fall River's community for the Azorean synagogue is part of a wider tradition. Israelis do "roots" trips to their own, their parents', or their grandparents' former homes in Europe.

My wife, Varda, and I have seen where her parents grew up in Dusseldorf and Berlin, and visited the graves of her grandfather and a young cousin who died before the Holocaust. We have passed by the synagogues in a number of other European cities, walked the streets of Judeiria in Spain, and saw indentations in the stone alongside doorways in Gerona that most likely remain from when there was a mezuzah. .

After a professional conference in Moscow during 1979 I visited Jews in Samarkand, Bukhara and Tashkent. When I told one old man that I came from Jerusalem, he began to weep.

Neither of us has a desire to visit the ashes in Eastern Europe where family members perished.

Jewish movement has something to do with Jews' historic association with commerce. There are Biblical mandates about charging interest, and extensive Talmudic disputes about what constitutes interest, fair dealing, and the financial relations appropriate with Jews and others. Communities have invited Jews on account of their economic skills, and then turned against Jews for the same reason. Concerns for bookkeeping and commercial agreements may have contributed to the early development of literacy throughout the community, or at least among most of its males, and subsequent contributions in every field of science and culture..

Commerce is part of what we are, for the good and the bad associated with it. Including our capacity to move elsewhere when things turn sour.

While the Azores, Fall River, and many other places have empty synagogues, there are four within 100 meters of these fingers. All have daily minyans, even without my attendance.

Ira Sharkansky  is  an emeritus professor of political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Robert Whitcomb: Boondoggle baseball stadium or jobs?

“The political condition of Rhode Island is notorious, acknowledged and it is shameful. Rhode Island is a state for sale, and cheap.” -- Lincoln Steffens, in 1904

Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo is right to focus a lot on job training. You repeatedly hear from business executives that there aren’t enough people in the state with adequate literacy and numeracy. That’s a major reason why Massachusetts is so much richer than the Ocean State.

What’s needed are not just college graduates but high-school graduates with some post-secondary-school vocational training who can prosper in work environments using high technology, such as assembly-line robotics, and who can understand, and explain to each other and the outside world, an enterprise’s needs.

Greater Boston has many thousands of such people. We can lure more of them, but the Ocean State desperately needs to start producing more of its own.

The governor’s $1.3 million grant program via the state Workforce Board will help. It will provide grants of up to $25,000 to help partnerships convene, determine employers’ needs and create plans to meet those needs. The remaining money would fund the approved training partnerships.

Ms. Raimondo announced the program at the Cranston facility of Yushin America Inc., a global robotics maker. Yushin wants to expand and has 14 open positions but is having trouble finding trained workers in Rhode Island to fill even that small number of jobs.

The governor’s plan is too modest.

Contrast it with the plan to help some rich guys build a baseball stadium in downtown Providence to host a successor to the Pawtucket Red Sox with the aid of state and city government subsidies of $4 million a year. The stadium would employ a few people mostly paid near minimum wage – in season. Off-season, I suppose they’d go on state-funded unemployment insurance. And what happens to the stadium when the team decamps to another venue offering more public money? Then it might be empty 12 months a year instead of 5.

Note that Terry Murray, one of the rich guys in the stadium plan, moved Fleet Financial Group from Providence to Boston, taking many hundreds of jobs with him.

The stadium  would be on land where otherwise facilities could be built with hundreds of well-paying jobs, many connected with the medical, design and academic complexes in the very same neighborhood. Of course, that might require importing trained people from outside Rhode Island. (See above.)

But the stadium will probably get built because of the powers behind it and such short-term allures as short-term construction jobs, for which organized labor pines. While only a minority of the population cares a lot about baseball teams, those who do include powerful people in business and government who see themselves hyper-validated by association with the government-protected, heavily tax-subsidized macho monopolies known as professional sports teams.

A few consultants will say how wonderful (at least psychologically) stadiums can be for their localities. Then you discover that they have earned buckets of money as consultants for teams.

These teams are welfare for the rich and opium for them and the dwindling percentage of the masses who can afford $11 hot dogs. Still, the teams aren’t boring, unlike job training and fixing roads.

xxx

A line (probably erroneously) attributed to Harry Truman goes: “If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.’’

Recent research shows us more about how humans and dogs evolved together. As spinoffs of wolves or wolf-like canids, dogs developed over millennia as pack animals whose packs came to include people. We selected them to help us hunt and generally favored those who were the least aggressive. They hung around for free meals from carnivores even better at killing than they were (us).

In doing so, they developed social skills for dealing with humans – e.g., reading our gazes – that no other animals have. Indeed, they read us better than do such close human relatives as chimpanzees.

And, no, dogs don’t just pretend to like us to get free room and board. Scientific studies of such factors as the hormone oxytocin show true affection on both sides of the human-dog duet.

Even their diets are changing, with more dogs (like us) mostly eating vegetable-based food. Now on what might be my last dog, I wish I had known all this with my first, in the Truman administration. I would have been nicer to him.

Robert Whitcomb (rwhitcomb51@gmail.com), overseer of New England Diary, is a former Providence Journal editorial-page editor,  a partner in a healthcare-sector consultancy and a Fellow of the Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy.

Plan B for the stadium

The economic Bird of Paradise;

That giant Construction Crane,

Seeks tragi-comic sacrifice

With compliant taxpayer drain.

Skeffington wants a deal sunny,

An investor’s modest desire.

By using other people’s money,

A financial homerun is sure-fire!

Best yet from our “Partner” to be:

Pay no taxes and get the land free!

And those drains; public funded the price.

Should public funds pay for them twice?

The best government money can buy;

Withhold campaign funds as leverage.

It’s pie-a-la-mode-in-the-sky,

The public’s not up for your beverage.

The boon of your plan’s a charade!

Prove us wrong; drink your own Kool-Aid!

Here’s Plan “B” for you to deploy,

In case one has to save face.

Buy the land surrounding McCoy,

And “Kraft” your own “PAWSOX PLACE.”

                -- Allan Klepper

Fred Brown: News folks shouldn't be the news

A gyrocopter lands on the Capitol lawn, and it turns out the Tampa Bay Times knew about the stunt well in advance but waited until the last minute to tell authorities. Rolling Stone retracts a long article about a gang rape on the University of Virginia campus after its primary source is shown to be unreliable.

Trusted newscasters Brian Williams and Bill O’Reilly are called out for exaggerating, though the consequences for each differ markedly.

And that’s just the most notorious of the recent journalistic misbehavior. There is no shortage of bad examples.

Journalists should be reporting news, not making news. But all too often, journalists have been the focus of news stories that raise serious ethical questions.

Monday, April 27, marks the start of what the Society of Professional Journalists has designated Ethics Week, when SPJ puts particular emphasis on the importance of responsible reporting. Ethics Week began in 2003, and today it's as important as ever – maybe more important, given recent events – especially in a media environment where there are an unfortunate number of unreliable sources.

This year’s Ethics Week comes a few months after SPJ completed more than a year of effort revising its Code of Ethics. It's a voluntary code, advisory and not enforceable, but for decades, it has been the go-to standard for news organizations.

Many news media outlets have their own codes of ethics; a lot of them use the SPJ code as the starting point. Employers’ codes are more detailed, and there’s a price to pay if they aren’t followed. Journalists can lose their jobs for violating the company standards, and some have.

Those employers’ codes tend to go into great detail about what constitutes a conflict of interest. For many people, in journalism and out, that’s the major part of ethical behavior – avoiding conflicts of interest. But for responsible journalists, ethics goes well beyond that.

Ethical journalism is rooted in accurate reporting and responsible behavior.

Those have been guiding principles throughout the 88-year history of the SPJ code, and remained the touchstones when the code was updated. It had been 16 years since the code was last revised. Some of the language was outdated, especially provisions that mentioned specific technologies and processes.

Some critics wanted the code to be more specific and instructive; some felt transparency should be stressed over independence.

Ultimately, the revision committee decided that basic principles don’t change when the technology changes. The four major principles remain the same: Seek truth, minimize harm, act independently and be accountable.

The committee made the final provision “Be Accountable and Transparent.” Transparency is good, we felt, but not a substitute for being aware of one’s biases and wary of outside influences.

The committee is in the process of adding explanations and examples as links to the online code (accessible at spj.org) – elements that can change as journalistic practices evolve.

In the end, the revisions committee made the code itself as broad as possible, to focus on abiding principles and avoid ever-changing technologies, in the hope that such a “constitutional” approach would survive for decades.

The importance of those abiding principles is illustrated by recent media misbehavior.

The Tampa Bay Times stressed storytelling and didn't pay enough attention to minimizing the possible harm that could come from a stunt played out on the Capitol grounds.

Rolling Stone worried too much about minimizing harm and let protecting its source get in the way of truthful, accurate reporting.

Brian Williams and Bill O'Reilly represent opposite approaches to the principle of accountability. NBC suspended Williams for his off-camera embellishments; Fox instead criticized the media that were criticizing O’Reilly.

All this might lead one to accept the tired old joke that journalism ethics is an oxymoron. It isn’t. But it is a constant challenge.

One week a year isn’t enough, but at least it’s an opportunity to focus on the axiom that serious media need to be reliable and responsible, 52 weeks a year. Journalists need to be constantly aware that their job is to report the news – accurately, compassionately, independently and responsibly – and to stay out of the headlines.

Fred Brown is a former president of the Society of Professional Journalists (1997-98) and co-vice chair on its ethics committee. He writes a column on ethics for Quill magazine and served on the committee that wrote the society’s 1996 code of ethics.

Mr. Brown officially retired from The Denver Post in early 2002, but continues to write a Sunday editorial page column for the newspaper. He also does analysis for Denver’s NBC television station, teaches communication ethics at the University of Denver, and is a principal in Hartman & Brown, LLP, a media training and consulting firm. He has won several awards for writing and community service, including a Sigma Delta Chi Award for editorial writing in 1988. He is an Honor Alumnus of Colorado State University, a member of the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame, and serves on the boards of directors of Colorado Public Radio, the Colorado Freedom of Information Council and the Sigma Delta Chi Foundation.

Maurits van Rooijen: A way out for struggling small colleges

Times are tough for institutions that do not have access to substantial endowment funds or benefit from a top-ranking position. Whether with a rural or metropolitan setting, a large number of colleges are discovering that there is a limit to raising tuition prices. Prospective students no longer automatically queue up. And once the “at risk” notice is up, the perceived deficiency becomes self-fulfilling.

The popular strategy of spending one's way out of a crisis by major investments in the campus or star professors has proven not to be the answer. It looks like the fate of many small colleges is closure, “merger” (meaning effectively being swallowed up by a stronger institution) or even—subject to regulatory complexities—acquisition. And that is not good news for the colleges, their staff, students, alumni, surrounding communities—nor for the higher education sector as a whole.

Small-sized colleges—many enrolling just a few-hundred up to a few-thousand students—really enrich the overall education ecosystem. They offer a perfect option for a certain category of student, have an important social-economic function locally, and mostly represent a high-quality provision with an outstanding student experience and often a valuable focus on personal development to match.

A mere survival of the fittest will result in a seriously impoverished sector. But one does not need to be a defeatist; there is an alternative.

The Pavlovian reaction to external pressures—such as ruthlessly cutting costs, increasing steeply marketing and fundraising budgets and/or bringing in new senior management—is unlikely to resolve the underlying issues.

My alternative option: Create what I call “co-operatives.”

I have argued the case for setting up "systems" of boutique universities, whereby institutions start sharing—and hence substantially reducing—costs for administrative and academic operations, while sharing the bigger investments such as in promotion, international marketing and online delivery. Such cooperatives are not only more cost-effective; they also gain strength by size when it comes to contract negotiations with third parties. Moreover, these consortia can make themselves much more visible in the crowded market, nationally and even internationally.

The idea of various colleges working in a cooperative manner also underpins my own organization Global University Systems, which brings together, at a global level, more than 10 institutions (from vocational colleges to leading business schools), each with a different target group of students or specific portfolio of activities or different physical locations. The group shares marketing, recruitment channels, academic expertise and real estate in major cities globally. This enables us to deliver courses internationally, help our university partners to tap into new markets and meet the demand of students globally via online and on campus courses. This cooperative structure can, in principle, be created anywhere. In fact, institutions united in a co-operative system would in many ways become more cost-effective and hence more attractive to invest in than a lone college struggling to survive.

There is a risk associated with creating co-operatives  that  needs to be carefully mitigated: the issue of organizational complexity. My suggestion is that it would be worth designing a cooperative structure for boutique universities, creating a system that could work for everyone, while explicitly making sure one avoids ineffective decision-making processes. When designing a cooperative, it is essential to create governance and management systems that focus on the need for efficient operations rather than safeguarding vested interests.

Some institutions, whether at governance or managerial level, will have problems understanding the difference between narrow and broad interests, but of course those colleges will not join, nor should they. They will continue their own battle and one can only wish them luck, though I am not necessarily optimistic about their chances. For the interest of the sector as a whole, I hope many institutions will prosper, possibly within the alternative of a co-operative framework.

One way of dealing with the governance and management issue is to create a separate legal entity for defined shared services and operations, possibly together with a third (investment) partner. This will help to keep some of the politics away from the business side of shared activities. But of course with some level of creativity one could develop some further options; I am not pretending this is the only way forward. In any case, as always, one should adjust a basic model to local circumstances.

Maurits van Rooijen is chief academic officer of Global University Systems, CEO and rector of the London School of Business and Finance, and acting rector of Hannover-based GISMA Business School. This originated  on the Web site of the New England Board of Higher Education.

Inside and out

"Mother in Her Apartment at Night'' and "Wind and Waves'' by Suzanne Hodes, in the Hess Gallery, at Pine Minor College, Chestnut Hill, Mass.

Llewellyn King: God save our Queen

  She is the best-known woman in the world, and she has been since 1952, when Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor, at age 25, became Queen Elizabeth II. Although she has a huge list of titles, she is to most people simply the Queen. And she has been the only British monarch in most people’s lives: She has always seemingly been there.

Once Queen Elizabeth was young and quite pretty; now she is old and quite beloved. She works very hard, whether it is presiding over meetings with prime ministers – she has dealt with 12 of them, starting with Winston Churchill -- or applying herself to an endless schedule of charity events. She has visited 116 countries. I have always wondered at her incredible tolerance -- no, call it endurance -- at watching cultural events in faraway lands: How many children’s choirs, folk dancers or synchronized gymnasts can a human being watch? In the case of the queen, the number seems to have been infinite.

When she came to the throne, she set off a surge of hope in Britain and the Commonwealth. Popular mythology, as I remember, held that a new Queen Elizabeth would bring a revival of fortune for Britain -- the second Elizabethan period would be as great as the first Queen Elizabeth's reign, from 1558 to 1603.

After World War II, Britain was adjusting to a new order in most things, including the social changes introduced by the Labor Party government immediately after the war, such as national health insurance, and the recognition that Britain was no longer be the preeminent world power, ruling a quarter of the world. The empire was shrinking, and Britain felt exhausted and lessened.

But the new, young Queen signaled hope, and the royal family shot to a position of public adulation. I remember covering the wedding of the queen’s sister, Princess Margaret, to the photographer Anthony Armstrong-Jones in 1960, when Britain went was in a kind of royal hysteria. That began to fade as the decade wore on, and that marriage began to creak and eventually dissolve.

As royal scandals multiplied and Britain became a trendsetter in fashion and the arts, Princess Diana, during and after her marriage to Prince Charles, stole much of the Queen’s thunder.

The Queen said her worst year was 1992, which she famously called an “annus horribilis” -- because of her children's domestic issues --  in a Nov. 24 speech at Guildhall to mark the 40^th anniversary of her accession. Newspapers wondered whether the monarchy was finished and whether it would either give way to a republican Britain or to one where the constitutional monarch was of little importance, as in the Netherlands, Belgium and Spain.

But Queen Elizabeth persevered and, she just turned 89, is more loved than ever. She is slightly old-fashioned, even as Buckingham Palace is anxious to remind us she uses e-mail and tweets.

She is a fabulous piece of English bric-a-brac in her omnipresent hat and gloves. Though perfectly dressed in her way, she is not a fashion idol. She was a fine horsewoman. She attends cultural events, but seems only to have a passion for horses and dogs. Critics have faulted her for how limited she is in some ways. It may be that at this point, she is as much an anachronism as the monarchy, and there is strength in that.

No longer do comedians make fun of her piping voice and her ability to ride out gaffes,  such as the time in Canada when she read the wrong speech, having forgotten which city she was visiting. The British might have come to love her for her famously dysfunctional family -- even Charles, her quirky son and heir to the throne. Scandals have touched all of her family, excepting herself and her husband, Prince Philip, although one of the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting told me that he was busy in that circle when he was young.

When she does die, Britain will enter into the most extraordinary period of mourning, followed a year or so later by a coronation. The change will be enormously expensive, from them Queen's burial to the coronation of the King. Tens of thousands of items stamped with ER (Elizabeth Regina) or the Queen's face, including mail boxes, stamps and the 20-pound note, will have to be changed.

Happily and gloriously, after 62 years as Queen, Elizabeth is, physically as well as emotionally, part of British life. She is also, in a way, the world's Queen.

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of “White House Chronicle” on PBS. His e-mail is lking@kingpublishing.com.

Looking for beauty in a scary world

 

"Wondering About Flow'' (acrylic), by KAREN RAND ANDERSON, in the "Reaching for Beauty'' show at the Coastal Living Gallery, in North Kingstown, R.I., through April 28.

Editor's note: We are reposting this to correct the title.

Frank Carini: Dog-poop pollution in the Westport River

WESTPORT, Mass.

Unlike many New England rivers, the one that shares a name with this popular summer town doesn’t have a legacy of industrial pollution buried in its sediment. But despite not being polluted with toxins from long-since-gone jewelry makers and dye manufacturers, the Westport River and its watershed still face the threat of contamination from stormwater runoff, nitrogen-rich fertilizers, failing septic systems and outdated cesspools.

In fact, one of the more commonly seen but often ignored threats — unless you happen to step in it — to this two-pronged river and its economically vital watershed is waste left on the ground by inconsiderate pet owners. While certainly not on the order of concern of, say, carbon pollution, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) does label dog waste a “pollutant.”

Sorry, Snoopy, but dog poop is 57 percent more toxic than human waste, according to the EPA, and can harbor bacteria and parasites that cause illness in humans.

This waste problem is so rampant in dog-friendly Westport and the surrounding area that the Westport River Watershed Alliance (WRWA), the nonprofit protector of the this important natural resource, was compelled this year to print a two-fold brochure entitled “The Shocking Truth About Your Dog’s Poop.”

“Even the smallest amount of dog poop is filled with bacteria,” said Roberta Carvalho, the WRWA’s science director.

It has been estimated that an ounce of dog waste can contain 650 million fecal coliform bacteria. The EPA has estimated that two to three days’ worth of dog poop from a neighborhood with about a hundred dogs would contribute enough bacteria to temporarily close a bay, and all watersheds within 20 miles of it, to swimming and shellfishing.

In 1976, the Westport River Defense Fund was created in opposition to a septage lagoon proposed by the Board of Health that would have been built near the East Branch of this tidal river. The idea to construct a sewage pit by the river to dispose of the town’s septage pump-outs created a major controversy, and resulted in what is now the WRWA.

“It didn’t happen,” Carvalho said. “It was our first victory.”

Since that battle nearly four decades ago, the Alliance has grown from 15 members to more than 2,000. Numerous projects have been developed over the years that promote education and advocacy — all in an effort to protect one of the region’s most significant coastal assets in both habitat quality and scenic beauty.

But the fact that 23 percent of shellfish beds in the Westport River are permanently closed for harvesting documents the continued problem of contamination, according to Carvalho.

In all, some 50 percent of the river’s total shellfish beds are seasonally or conditionally closed, and 76 percent of the river’s harvest potential is limited because of bacterial pollution, according to the WRWA..

“The river has gotten much better in the past 10 years, but nitrogen pollution, runoff and septic systems are still a concern,” said Carvalho, who has been with the organization for 13 years. “It’s a costly endeavor, but it is vital we protect our water resources.”

Nutrient loading and pathogen contamination are water-quality concerns, particularly in the upper reaches of the river’s 35-mile shoreline. The river suffers from the problem of eutrophication, especially in the upper East Branch. Carvalho also is concerned about the emerging threat of chemicals from personal-care products and pharmaceuticals. In addition, she believes Massachusetts needs to do a better job phasing out antiquated cesspools and replacing them with modern septic systems or municipal sewer. Westport, for one, doesn’t have public sewer.

WRWA staffers work with local schools to educate students, from kindergarten through high school, about the importance of protecting the watershed, and the organization has partnered with municipal and state agencies to run water-quality programs. The nonprofit also promotes the use of buffer strips, rain gardens and low-impact development technologies to help keep the river and its watershed clean.

WRWA has maintained a summer bacteria-monitoring program for the Westport River since 1991, and the organization’s collection and analysis of site samples has been used by municipal and state agencies to document bacterial contamination.

The Westport River watershed spans two states, Massachusetts and Rhode Island.The watershed

The Westport River has two branches. The smaller West Branch is about 7 miles long, rising from a confluence of brooks near the village of Adamsville, R.I. The West Branch separates the village of Acoaxet from the rest of Westport — one needs to pass through Rhode Island to reach the rest of the town.

The larger East Branch is about 11.5 miles long, rising at the border of Westport and Dartmouth, at Lake Noquochoke. After a short length, the river meets Bread and Cheese Brook before reaching the head of Westport village, where the WRWA will soon move into its new home. From there, the river continues southward, fed by several brooks, before an initial widening to between 100 and 400 yards at Widows Point.

Once in Westport Harbor, the combined branches bend around Horseneck Point, before flowing into Rhode Island Sound, just west of Horseneck Beach State Reservation, at the point where Rhode Island Sound meets Buzzards Bay.

The Westport River watershed encompasses parts of Westport, Dartmouth, Fall River and Freetown, and Tiverton and Little Compton in R.I., and 85 percent of the watershed’s landmass drains into the river’s two branches.

Frank Carini is editor of ecoRI News, where this piece originated.

Sam Pizzagati: Why we need $50,000 parking tickets

All of us would like to live in a world where people always do the right thing — without anybody looking over their shoulder. But that world doesn’t exist and never will. So every society on our planet has penalties. You break the rules, you pay a price.

But penalties only work if the wrongdoer feels that price. A ridiculously tiny penalty amounts to no penalty at all.

Take traffic fines, for instance.

Most of us obey our traffic laws. We know these laws help keep our roads — and communities — safe. We also know that if we slip up and speed, we could end upstaring at a $150 ticket. If we slip up again, we could be talking really serious pain.

But not really serious pain for everyone. In today’s deeply unequal United States, some people — extremely rich people — have no reason to worry about traffic citations. If you’re pulling down $1 million a month, a couple hundred dollars for a traffic ticket won’t even register.

Billionaire Apple CEO Steve Jobs, his biographer Walter Isaacson relates, used to brazenly park in handicapped spaces and motor around without license plates. He “acted as if he were not subject” to the rules the rest of us face.

And why should any of our billionaires think different? If they break the rules, they face no real penalty. The rest of us can only hope they choose to do the right thing.

But what if traffic fines varied by income? In Finland — and a host of other nations, from Denmark to Switzerland — they actually do. “Sliding fee” fines in these nations give people with deep pockets reason to think twice before they speed or otherwise trample on community safety norms.

One Finnish businessman recently had to pay a 54,000-euro fine — the equivalent of over $58,000 — after police caught him going 65 in a 50 zone. That speeder’s income? Just over $7 million a year. Tickets in Finland have on occasion even topped $100,000.

Might the time be ripe for similar sliding-scale fees in the United States? Some of our localities have actually experimented along that line, and one person involved in those experiments back in the 1980s — Judith Greene of the nonprofit Justice Strategies — thinks we should try again.

Why? Greene points to the protests that followed last year’s deadly police shooting in Ferguson, Missouri.

In addition to police violence, those protests have helped to spotlight how local governments all across the United States are routinely gouging poor people for minor offenses. In jurisdictions like Ferguson, municipal officials have been squeezing the poor to fill their city coffers.

This squeezing, a U.S. Justice Department report earlier this year revealed, can become incredibly oppressive. The authorities in Ferguson hit one local woman with a $151 fine for two parking tickets. She couldn’t afford to pay the fine immediately. That triggered more penalties. The woman eventually paid $550 in fines and still owed — seven years later — another $541.

For cities, that’s easy — and irresistible — money. In 2011, Ferguson officials collected $1.38 million of the city’s $11.07 million in general revenue from fines and additional penalty fees. By last year, the city was budgeting to collect nearly twice that amount, $2.63 million, from municipal court fines and fees.

Ambitious revenue targets have local officials going after drivers and pedestrians alike. In Ferguson, U.S. Justice Department investigators found, a “manner of walking” violation can bring a $302 fine.

This constant preying on the poor breeds an intense and understandable community frustration. At some point, as we saw last summer in Ferguson, the frustration combusts into tragedy.

So what can we do? One small step: Instead of gouging the poor, let’s make like the Finns. Let’s make our penalties proportionate to economic circumstance. Let’s make sure our penalties amount to penalties for everyone, even if they’re rich.

OtherWords columnist Sam Pizzigati, an Institute for Policy Studies associate fellow, edits the inequality monthly Too Much. His latest book is The Rich Don’t Always Win. OtherWords.org. 

Tagged: ferguson, Inequality, Police

No forwarding address

Are many readers irritated that so few Web sites tell you the physical location in real time and space of an organization you're looking up on  its Web site? And how difficult it is to get a name of a person you can easily contact? They reside somewhere in a cloud....away from the need to deal with those pesky physical entities called people.