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12/24/2002 02:33:00 PM | Timothy Computer Code Ethics First, I did not see anything in the computing code I thought even directly alluded to banning the publishing of emails. I might not have caught it, but it does not seem to be there. Second, it is NOT clear to me we fall under the jurisdiction of the Dartmouth computing code. Free Dartmouth does not use any dartmouth resources (or anymore than anyone doing a private webpage), and we're not all students (and not all of us have been free press writers). It's not strictly like the Free Press, whose printing is funded by the college and hosted on the college's webpage by That doesn't mean we should publish any email, but I'm not sure that's the computing code is a barrier per se (unless we unethically obtain the email through hacking or what not- which is a no-no!). But it makes it more important that we should have a faily rigorous code of ethics on it. As for Jared saying "I would rather that if we agree to repost the e-mails and that such is appropriate in the future, that if someone did call us on it". I think at this stage, so early in the blog, it's fine to be safe than sorry, because we don't have clear guidelines. But ideally, we would not have the administrators make that determination on their alone, unilaterally. Because that means each email we leave up, we're endording it as ethical. I completely agree with Jared that now is the time to discuss this policy and thank him for giving us the opportunity to do so. But as mentioned above, I'm not sure Kumar was in violation even technically. The only thing he could have more on his side was if explicit permission to publish the email had been given, or he had asked after receiving the email if he could publish it. The only reluctance I now have about publishing the rocky emails is this: there really wasn't a need to. We could have summarized the arguments. We didn't need to quote them, and was simply easier and less work to do so. And by quoting them, some people recognize the style of writing, etc. In other words, these people didn't intend for these to be publically available as quotes. They might have thought harder about it. But is it wrong only to quote the emails, or to refer to them? Could we say Rocky is asking for comment? Why or why not? And dartobserver was going to publish them too. But again, there should not be a presumption to do so. I think had this email been newsworthy, it would have been worth publishing and ethical to do so (Kumar personally received the email, it was sent out to such a large list, all the emails were included in that one email, Kumar took out the names, they invited more involvement). So unless you think all published emails must give explicit permission, this doesn't violate ethics. But even then, the email need not have been published to make the same point, so it shouldn't have been. BUT... that doesn't mean we shouldn't publish emails if it's not warranted. I'm assuming that the Free Press has stricter standards than a blog. So let's look at what we've published there (Again, we would usually have the names removed). In a dispute over whether the Tucker Center was intolerant, a student published an email they had received from an official there. I think the presumption should be not to publish emails. But some things can trigger it so it is ethical to do so. First of all, if the email is clearly public, like an organization sending a message out to its membership list (eg. we once made fun in the commonshare of the young democrats for a stupid message they sent out). Or if a recognized college organization sends out an offensive message (we criticized a group for sending out a playboy party invitation- perhaps you don't think that is offensive, but there are good arguments why it is so, and it perfectly acceptable to base this on publically available info). And we published quotes from the email sent out publically to the entire campus. Or when the '01 class council sent out something saying we should send dirty limericks to Jim Wright, and we published that... that was definitely newsworthy (though humorously so): an official representative student group getting way out of line. Anyway, you can see we have published emails for a while, and I think these were all defensible, newsworthy and ethical. I will note that being at a college does make things different at the new york times. We do not want to destroy a sense of community in the name of reporting. Don't forget this. We're not the Review. Just because we can, doesn't mean we should. I would never quote friends, unless I told them first I was working on a story (ah...what I could have said about the Dartmouth Review boys...). But the free press is a paper: it has more responsiblity than a blog, both in terms of being ethical and in reporting important stories. I think printing stuff from official organizations is the most acceptable. Further thoughts later, interested in feedback. perma link |
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