Carolyn Jack

Editor and CEO, Geniocity.com
A project of The Genius Group LLC

When doing what’s right seems bad for business

Business has had a dark side ever since the earliest hominid tried to trade a banana he secretly knew to be rotten for his neighbor’s useful sharp stick. Mr. Hominid probably needed that stick a minute later to fend off the fangs of his cheated and furious customer. 

People have been deliberately selling the public shoddy or dangerous goods and useless or harmful services ever since. Patent medicines made mostly of alcohol, toys full of lead, cigarettes, cars that explode in flames when fender-bent from the rear, no-money-down mortgages, oil-well investments, melamine-laced infant formula - the list is enormous, outrageous and ongoing.

It’s hard to imagine the people who thought up and sold these things as anything but criminals or worms or both. It shocks us that they could do what they did, all the more because – as in Arthur Miller’s “All My Sons” - they are so often people like us, with families they want to protect. 

In fact, the difference between them and many other run-of-the-mill business people may be only a difference of degree. We first-time entrepreneurs – baby business leaders that we are – need to watch carefully how the big boys and girls act and then watch ourselves even more closely.

What will we do if a politically connected acquaintance or a big customer asks us, in essence, to take a dive for money – to pad the figures, buy inferior supplies from her nephew, to remain silent about the pollution in the housing development’s soil in exchange for a share of the construction work? What if using the cheaper, more brittle plastic means we’ll turn a profit on each teething ring instead of just breaking even – though there’s a slight chance the ring can shatter into shards in the baby’s mouth? 

Even trickier: What if our friends or families pressure us to be loyal instead of honest? What’s more important? Protecting their reputations or the public’s trust in our companies?

It’s probably easy for all of us to think we’d have the moral strength to resist temptation, bullying or sentiment and champion the good. But an awful lot of people end up dealing with their dilemmas by saying and doing nothing. Why? Well, most of us have seen what happens to resisters and whistleblowers.

I’m looking at this issue and at myself because I work in an industry founded on, and sustained by, its courage to speak the truth. The media tend to be scorned and railed against by the public – not just because we have some incompetent and unprincipled members, like every other business, but because, in speaking truths as accurately as we can, we upset people of all kinds who disagree or just don’t want to hear.

That is a virtue. The press doesn’t exist to reinforce prejudices, fawn on authority, suppress facts and puff those who pay. Organizations that do those things are not gathering and sharing news: They’re practicing public relations at best and propaganda at worst. And yet, journalists feel it when people don’t like us or what we do. We’re human – we’d prefer to be admired, rather than the opposite. We’d prefer people to buy our news and pay to advertise in our publications.

But not if they expect us to take that dive in exchange. So we have to have thick skins and strong spines to keep on working when leaders and readers and advertisers harangue us and try to get us to change our standards. It takes guts to conduct our business the way it must be conducted. And I think I can speak for the majority of journalists when I say it’s easier to stand up for the truth when you remember that you’re serving a public that must have accurate information if its members are to help one another, govern themselves and stay free. 

That’s why so many of us – and so many others who understand the value of an independent press - have been shocked at Donald Rosenberg’s demotion from his position as the longtime classical-music critic of The Plain Dealer. Whether the newspaper was legally at fault in demoting him is not mine to say, but I believe there can be few in our industry who don’t think this action was a flagrant violation of every fundamental journalistic tenet and ethical standard.

The newspaper’s editors evidently thought Rosenberg’s reviews were hurting their relationship with the renowned and civicly influential Cleveland Orchestra and its supporters. They must have decided that letting him do his job properly and state his informed views honestly was bad for The Plain Dealer’s bottom line. They actually got it backwards – and in taking the dive, have damaged their company’s credibility.      

Those of us in the business who speak out about such violations protest not to tear this or any other media company down, but to save it. It’s typical for companies, like nations, to equate patriotism with cheerleading or acquiescence when true patriotism actually lies in refusing to let the thing you love be less than its best. Ethical journalists are thus true patriots, including patriots of their own industry: whistleblowers by definition and vigilant members of the whole village it takes to raise our profession and our community to greatness.

Our business is having trouble enough adapting to the digital revolution – it won’t survive at all if it compromises quality. We might as well sell the public rotten bananas.