A competitor approaches you with a lucrative bid for your consulting services company. The advantage of the sale is clear: your shareholders get rich, and you are guaranteed a secure, cushy position as a senior vice president. You could afford that pristine, dream yacht! Your customers would benefit from the larger, integrated enterprise whose accounts are globally managed by subject-matter experts. And the only disadvantage of the deal is that your employees would have to be let go.

What’s your decision? Where are your priorities (in order from greatest to least)?

1. Shareholders. Customers. Employees.
   "It’s a great deal! Two out of three ain’t bad."
2. Customers. Shareholders. Employees.
   "I think my customers would benefit more if I were a group executive."
3. Shareholders. Employees. Customers.
   "My shareholders appreciate that we care for our employees, but I have bills to pay and kids to feed. I think our shareholders know best."
4. Employees. Shareholders. Customers.
   "My employees are not fans of unemployment, but our shareholders think we should lay off the lot to provide the most value to our customers. I agree."
5. Customers. Employees. Shareholders.
   "I’ll consider the offer. My customers love the idea, but our employees have been with us for years. I need to know they’ll be safe when they hit the streets."
6. Employees. Customers. Shareholders.
   "Never! My employees are best-of-breed. I handpicked them myself. Over the years, they have formed close relationships with our customers. Our customers would not trust anyone else with their accounts. And our shareholders? They’re fat cats living large on our success. I doubt they would see value in change."

Steve Danuser commented on Raph Koster’s Signs of the Time, “Cable news is a joke. The FCC only cares about censoring smut, not monitoring fairness.” I could not agree more. I watch comedy shows — The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, The Colbert Report, and Real Time with Bill Maher — to get my daily dose of news and commentary. I think there was a recent poll that suggested most people do the same.

I believe the redesign and new direction of Time Magazine does signal a shift from simply reporting the news to increasing reader and viewer participation through discussion. After all, when I watch comedy shows, I expect a fair degree of bias, generalizations, and distortions of the truth. These shows amply bait the audience to delve deeper into their topics of interest on their dime. If you watched the film 300, chances are that when you returned home from the theaters, you jumped onto the Web and surfed to Wikipedia to learn more about the history of Leonidas I and Sparta. That is the power of entertainment.

This transformation, however, does not indicate the end of news reporting. Worthwhile commentary is driven by facts. If publishers of information were to engage in providing commentary on commentary, they would be relegated to blogs. News wires will continue to thrive and exist, but I think they will move deeper behind the scenes than usual.

With regards to Danuser’s statement about Federal Communications Commission and fairness, I wrote an editorial shortly after Superbowl 38 on that same issue. I have included the full text below.

Superbowl Sunday was a great day for TiVo whose viewership increased 180% in reaction to the stunt where Justin Timberlake was to pull away Janet Jackson’s bustier to reveal her red-lace brazier. As we know now, Timberlake pulled away too much. TiVo announced that hundreds of thousands of households used its unique capability to pause and replay live television to repeatedly view the incident. Also reported was a 12% increase of halftime viewership from last year.

While media and technology companies continue to profit, an intelligence failure in FCC prompted Chairman Michael Powell to launch an “investigation” into the Jackson-Timberlake stunt, and the entire halftime show. Powell cited “thousands” of complaints about the segment and commented, “I knew immediately it would cause great outrage among the American people which it did. We have a very angry public on our hands.”

Powell expressed his “great displeasure” of the incident in a telephone call to CBS President and CEO Mel Karmazin, who buckled under to FCC pressure. “Clearly somebody had knowledge of it. Clearly it was something that was planned by someone.” Powell appealed to parents claiming he was watching the game with his two children, and found the incident “outrageous” calling it “a classless, crass, and deplorable stunt.”

Powell added, “I don’t think that’s being moralistic, and I don’t think that’s government trying to tell people how to run their businesses. I don’t think you need to be a lawyer to understand the basic concepts of common decency here.”

Common decency should be a set of culture-specific moral principles for what is “right and appropriate” for consumption. If requiring empathy with the FCC edition of common decency is not being moralistic, then Plato and Socrates were not philosophers. Respecting hopes that children will develop in a safe and friendly environment is not unreasonable; however, the same is untrue of ignoring the silliness, as Presidential Candidate Howard Dean would say, of such a wasteful and clearly prejudicial “investigation.”

The authority on broadcasting ethics lacks the intelligence to make an informed decision to the exclusion of executive subjectivity. Superbowl halftime viewers were undeniably entertained and the American public is likely to care less about Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction than the more vociferous advocates of a “common decency” that disregards the complete viewership. FCC endeavors to appease minority demands instead of majority desires. Describing FCC as undemocratic and its moral prescriptions as detrimental to civil liberties would not be far from the truth.

FCC common-decency regulations are moral prescriptions forcibly imposed on public media organizations that provide entertainment and news. Due to hefty penalties associated with violations of FCC laws, media providers are bullied into conforming to what FCC thinks is “right and appropriate” for Americans regardless of actual culture and sensibilities.

In this sense, governmental morality is an artificial mechanism for limiting progress and freedom. Through these restrictions on citizens, the government gains power that the Founding Fathers had never intended or wanted the government to possess. This is not an advocacy of anarchy, however. This is a call to the public to realize that FCC severely endangers First Amendment liberties.

“Treat others as you would want to be treated by them” is a moral that I learned as a child. Although philosophers call this moral the ethic of reciprocity, most people are probably more aware of the name The Golden Rule. Variations have appeared throughout history from the words of Confucius to the doctrines and traditions of every major religion. With so much coverage, I am always taken aback when someone or some organization fails to practice this ethic.

David Edery recently called my attention to a short-lived public relations debacle involving Sony Computer Entertainment America (SCEA) and Kotaku, a popular rumor mill for interactive entertainment. The trouble brewed like so:

1. Kotaku discovered a rumor concerning new Sony technology.
2. Kotaku, after deciding to publish the story, sought information from SCEA.
3. SCEA requested that Kotaku refrain from publishing the story.
4. Kotaku questioned this request.
5. SCEA informed Kotaku that their access rights would be revoked.
6. Kotaku published the story and sent a copy to SCEA.
7. SCEA revoked the access rights previously granted to Kotaku and demanded the return of SCEA property lended to Kotaku.

David describes this incident as “public relations lunacy” and “one of the most foolish public relations moves in the history of the video game industry.” [I think the latter description is exaggerated.]

I disagree with the claim that the actions of SCEA were foolish. SCEA acted rationally, reasonably, and sensibly in the face of yellow journalism. Kotaku had already decided to publish the story prior to contacting SCEA. Kotaku did not provide SCEA a legitimate opportunity to control the story. Kotaku was going to publish the story with or without additional information, clarification, confirmation, or consent from SCEA.

Given that Kotaku denied the nondisclosure request, this incident indicates that Kotaku considers content more important than healthy relationships with their content partners. I argue that the credibility and reputation of Kotaku can and should be questioned. I would advise that people be wary of the information they provide to Kotaku as this incident suggests that the editors of Kotaku cannot be expected to stay mum about information mistakenly shared. Since Kotaku editor Brian Crecente described himself and the editors of Kotaku as journalists, not bloggers, I believe that Kotaku should be held accountable for their behavior as journalists.

Instead of civil respect for the Golden Rule, what can be observed are Kotaku readers praising the editors of Kotaku for “sticking it to the Man.” Kotaku let that image be created in the minds of their audience. In effect, their failing to satisfy standards of journalistic integrity is a direct contribution to the sphere of social problems that businesses in this industry face.

I would agree that SCEA made a mistake though. If SCEA were serious about their nondisclosure request, SCEA could have offered an alternative solution after receiving a lukewarm response to their request. SCEA could have offered other information for another story in exchange for delaying the publishing of potentially valid information about their new technology. There are always ways to maintain mutually beneficial relationships with respectable journalists. Those ways simply need to be found.

Richard Edelman is the president and chief executive officer of Edelman, the largest independent global public relations firm. Edelman is an interesting company because of their heavy investment in Web 2.0 and especially blog technologies. They recently launched a blog portal to aggregate content published by their numerous corporate bloggers, including Richard Edelman and Steve Rubel.

Richard published a piece today concerning Tolerance and the Role of PR. In principle, I disagree with his comments, one in particular:

We should not simply excuse the perpetrators on the grounds of momentary lapses of judgment. Words matter, often as precursors to action or indicators of future behavior. We need to hold our public figures, whether actors, government officials or businesspeople, responsible for their statements. We should not be so quick to forgive or forget.

Do words really matter? Do claims to act necessarily correlate to action taken? We have asked favors of people who never satisfied our expectations. We’ve assigned tasks to people that were never completed. It’s human nature: people often say one thing and do another. I’m reasonably certain Richard can relate as nobody seriously involved with a business practice cannot have ever encountered goldbricks.

That said, words matter in certain contexts. A masked figure holding a pistol to your temple who demands your valuables uses words that matter. Words matter when context matters. Richard discusses a recent celebrity drunk-driving incident involving actor and director Mel Gibson, criticizing his reputation management practices as “a bit too cute” of a ploy. Compare the case of the hold-up thug with the case of a belligerent, middle-aged alcoholic entertainer. Which context matters?

Trick question. Both contexts matter; however, each context is relevant to certain people. In the former example, the people who are directly affected consist of a single person whereas in the latter example the people who are directly affected primarily consist of Jewish community activists.

Yet, the importance of each context is contrasted by the result of the claims to perform. The likelihood of that single person being murdered is far greater than the likelihood of Mel Gibson inciting a new wave of antisemitic persecution with a passive generalization. The case involving the hoodlum is obviously more significant and progressively more influential than the case involving “in-the-cuff” remarks by a Hollywood celebrity of dwindling popularity.

Were some people encouraged by Mel Gibson’s brief quip? Undoubtedly, but we should not forget that those people who are encouraged by hatred are actively searching for emotional support for their hatred regardless of whether that support is derived from Mel Gibson or tanks rolling around the West Bank. We must remember that these reasons for hatred are not causes of hatred; they’re usually symptoms of greater problems.