Tagged: New York Times
How to apologize – corporate edition
We’ve read a lot lately about the value of swift, full, and forthright apologies when public figures screw up. What about companies that screw up?
Blippy is a website that lets users trade updates about their consumer purchases. Recently, an obscure programming error, compounded by mistakes at Google and one small midwestern bank, allowed Google to index the credit card numbers of four or five Blippy customers, potentially exposing these numbers to people browsing the web. Co-founder & CEO Ashvin Kumar’s apology to users could serve as a model for companies that find themselves in a similar pickle. Moneyquote:
It has been a rocky weekend for Blippy. The weekend began with a front page article in the New York Times announcing our Series A financing. The elation didn’t last long. A few hours later, reports surfaced about the discovery of credit card numbers within Google’s cached search results. Our mood quickly went from elation to disbelief to disappointment. We are very sorry.
However, this is a very serious issue and simply apologizing is not enough. We’ve spent the last 48 hours working around the clock to dissect the issues, reach out to affected users, and put together a plan to ensure this never happens again.
There followed a detailed, plainspoken, 1000-word explanation of exactly what went wrong, and the steps Blippy and Google took to fix the problem. The explanation is admirably devoid of weasel words or any attempt at evading responsibility. It neither grovels nor glosses over. By treating customers with respect, it inspires reciprocal respect for the company at an awkward time.
Customers do not expect perfect products and perfect service. Their loyalty (or hostility) to a brand arises in large measure from the way a company responds to problems that inevitably arise. A willingness to listen to customers, an ethic of candor in dealings with them, and an honest determination to put things right—companies that get those three things right will enjoy excellent customer relations.
War crime – followup
The appalling Wikileaks video showing a US helicopter gunship mowing down a group of Iraqis, including two Reuters journalists, two children, and a pair of Good Samaritans whose only offense was to come to the aid of a badly injured man, continues to provoke reaction. Reader Cliff White writes:
You can’t help wondering after watching that terrible video if killing has just become a game to those soldiers in the helicopter. It’s both terribly disturbing and dismaying to listen to their casual banter as they go about their “work”. Even when they learn that children have been injured it’s no big deal, it’s someone else’s fault. I’d like to see videos like this publicly displayed every time war fever is on the rise in the country. The reality is that this kind of behaviour is not the exception in war, it is frequently the norm…. Given the situation in Iraq at the time the video was shot was it standard military practice to kill anyone carrying a weapon and anyone else who happen to be in their vicinity?
Two things are important here: While the behavior of the soldiers was shocking, it’s probably not unusual. As Cliff says, when we make the decision to go to war, we need to understand that this is exactly what we are deciding to do. Second, ultimate responsibility for this travesty lies beyond the helicopter, with the generals in the war rooms.
I have been shocked at the breadth of efforts to dismiss the video as somehow not reflecting reality, or evidence that liberals don’t support “our boys.” You expect this from right wing organs like the National Standard, where blogger Bill Roggio posted an error-riddled screed against Wikileaks, later nicely debunked by Salon.com’s Glenn Greenwald, who has been a one-man truth squad on the story. Among other things, Roggio and the New York Times chided Wikileaks for editing the tape, accusing them of redacting critical context. Wikileaks did edit the tape, but it simultaneously released the 39-minute original, completely unedited.
Greenwald’s coverage pointed me to a blogger called Jotman, who has relentlessly cataloged CNN’s cowardly coverage of the video (here, here, and here.) CNN won’t even show its viewers the most incriminating parts of the video. In a gesture reminiscent of Elvis Presley’s maiden appearance on the Ed Sullivan show, only far more sinister, Blitzer and Co. black out part of the screen when the shooting starts—all out of deference to the families of the victims, of course.
George Packer, a long time apologist for the war, pooh-poohs the video in, of all places, his New Yorker blog. The main thrust is that less worldly wise civilians fail to consider the context, fog of war, recent firefight, violent history of the neighborhood, blah, blah, blah, before condemning the soldiers’ actions. The blog is worth read both as an example of sophistry, and for the acuity of the New Yorker readers’ rebuttals.
The most apt response to this line of rationalization comes in a pair of unnamed readers’ comments to James Fallows’s blog yesterday.
First a question: If these loose rules of engagement were in common use in 2007, how do we explain the behavior of the victims? They were aware of the helicopter. Why didn’t they recognize their danger? [Ie, if it was commonplace for gunships to be shooting people with as little immediate provocation as we see, why did they dare expose themselves?]
Next, an observation: Door gunner-ship is not randomly assigned. It may well be that 99% (or 99.9%) of U.S. troops would not have allowed this tragedy to occur, but that simple fact quite possibly disqualified all those individuals from being in that position. (And I note this as a direct result of my Army tour in Viet Nam.) The same, of course, applies to Granger and gang at Abu Ghraib. It is possible to indict the individuals involved and their commanders and ‘the system’ without involving American troops categorically.
And a conclusion: Until one can say one would apply precisely the same reasoning and the same judgment without knowing the nationality of the miscreants, one flounders.
and:
You might — MIGHT — justify the initial attack on the group on the ground, but the American soldiers were itching to fire on the two men whose only crime was that they were trying to come to the aid of a wounded man. Those men in the van clearly did not have any weapons, and posed no threat to anyone. But the American soldiers were almost pleading with their command to be given permission to kill them. If you are going to excuse this by putting it into “context,” then you can excuse almost any behavior.
War crime – reaction
Some reaction to yesterday’s Wikileak disclosure of horrific footage from an American helicopter gunship mowing down unarmed* civilians, as crewmen gloated over the killings.
I can’t pretend to know the full truth or circumstances of this. But at face value it is the most damaging documentation of abuse since the Abu Ghraib prison-torture photos. As you watch, imagine the reaction in the US if the people on the ground had been Americans and the people on the machine guns had been Iraqi, Russian, Chinese, or any other nationality. As with Abu Ghraib, and again assuming this is what it seems to be, the temptation will be to blame the operations-level people who were, in this case, chuckling as they mowed people down. That’s not where the real responsibility lies.
Huffington Post’s Dan Froomkin:
Reporters working for WikiLeaks determined that the driver of the van [that arrived on the scene after the initial carnage and tried to rescue an injured man, only to be destroyed by the gunship] was a Good Samaritan on his way to take his small children to a tutoring session. He was killed and his two children were badly injured.
A New York Times dispatch from Mosul, Iraq, reports that the family of 22-year-old Reuters photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen, who was killed in the incident, burst into tears as they watched the video.
“At last the truth has been revealed, and I’m satisfied God revealed the truth,” said Noor Eldeen, the father of the photographer… “If such an incident took place in America, even if an animal were killed like this, what would they do?”
Salon.com’s Glenn Greenwald notes that the Pentagon was forced to admit Sunday that its initial whitewash of a similar war crime in Paktia Province, Afghanistan, February 12 was false.
[A]fter surrounding a home where a celebration of a new birth was taking place, [US soldiers] shot dead two male civilians (government officials) who exited the house in order to inquire why they had been surrounded, and then shot and killed three female relatives (a pregnant mother of ten, a pregnant mother of six, and a teenager).
WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange on MSNBC:
In this case, we really have unique material that shows how modern aerial warfare is done… [It] shows the debasement and moral corruption of soldiers as a result of war. It seems like they are playing video games with people’s lives.
Assange and Greenwald joined Iraq expert and surge architect Brett McGurck and Lt. Col Anthony Shaffer on MSNBC’s Dylan Ratigan show to discuss the incident. I have embedded the conversation below, but the video does not show up on some browsers. You can link to it here.
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
* Several sources say at least one person in the video appears to have a rifle dangling off his shoulder. I didn’t notice it. However, the people from the passing van who happened on the scene and attempted to remove the man injured in the first assault man were the clearly unarmed.
OK Go
I don’t normally post videos with 6.8 million views, but the Chicago band OK Go‘s latest home-made, Rube Goldberg, paint-ball spectacular is irresistible. Plus it comes with a great yarn about the counter-intuitive value of giveaway Internet content, and the pea-sized brains of record company dinosaurs.
Ira Glass, host of the great National Public Radio show This American Life, calls OK Go “living catnip.” They direct their own videos, shoot them on shoe-string budgets, and, in the words of singer Damian Kulash, Jr., “we see them as creative works and not as our record company’s marketing tool.”
In a recent New York Time op-ed piece, Kulash explained how OK Go posted its homemade 2006 video, “Here it goes again,” on YouTube without record company EMI’s knowledge or permission, a technical violation of its recording contract. The video won a Grammy, tens of millions of fans saw it, thousands poured into OK Go’s concerts, and EMI made lots of money.
How did the record company react? By pressuring YouTube to curb the viral spread of its videos. Technically, they did this by blocking embedding. Kulash explains after the jump:
Who still uses a pay phone?
The New York Times checked out a sidewalk booth outside the Fast & Fresh Supermarket Deli & Grocery on Queens Boulevard in Kew Gardens, NY.
Benjamin Patir called his son because he was lonely and, perhaps more important, because he had a quarter. Robert J. Covelli called his son, too, to find out if, at some point during the more than 24 hours he spent in custody, he had become, for the first time, a grandfather. Frank Federico, fresh from a courthouse jail cell, called his mother, who spared him any lectures and asked him if he needed a ride home.
The three men used the same curbside pay phone on a busy block of Queens Boulevard last week. So did Carlos Luciano, who lent his cellphone to his wife. And Alex Santana, who bought a banana to get change. And Marvin McCain, a subway conductor trying to call in sick, and two men uninterested in giving their names or explaining why, at midnight on a neon-lit stretch of Kew Gardens, Queens, they had to make a call.
Give it away … or make them pay?
O’Reilly, the world’s largest publisher of tech books, decided in 2008 to remove digital rights management — copy prevention software — from its ebooks. The result? In the 18 months since, ebook sales are up 103%.
Long Island’s Newsday, the 11th-largest-circulation newspaper in the US, is one of the first non-business newspapers to put its website behind a pay wall — a step The New York Times and all of Rupert Murdoch’s papers are said to be considering. The result? In three months, Newsday’s $5-a-week website has attracted 35 paying subscribers.
Hat tip: SP.
A father responds to the Down’s ‘cure’ debate
Silas Donham responds to posts on the New York Times Motherlode blog criticizing those who would reject potential chemical treatments intended to improve intellectual function of infants with Down syndrome. This difficult topic provoked a debate here on Contrarian that was remarkably thoughtful and respectful. But when the Times picked up on our discussion, many commenters were incredulous that any parent would hesitate accept such treatments for their children. A few had nasty things to say. Silas responds:
First, the disclosure: I am Jenn Power’s husband, father to Jacob and Josh, and son to contrarian.ca, the blogger who got all this started. Like Jenn, I have spent my adult life living and working intimately with people who have intellectual disabilities.
Many of the contributors to this discussion seem to be imagining a magic pill without risk or side-effect that would remove the intellectual impairment associated with Down Syndrome. Medical treatments like that do not exist. Of course Jenn and I want our children to have every advantage, and the fullness of potential, which is available to them. Our boys have glasses, they have tubes in their ears, they attend school as well as physio-, occupational, and speech therapy, a clinic that focuses on eating difficulties, an adaptive swim program, a youth group, church, friends’ birthday parties, etc. One of my boys had surgery to repair a hole in his heart. I home-schooled them for a year to get ready for regular school. But we would not allow a medical researcher, however sincere and well-meaning, to take a potential chemical blender to their brains in infancy. Thank you, no. In that sense, our boys are just fine the way they are.
Many of you have posed questions from the imagined viewpoint of a person with a disability: if you had Down Syndrome, wouldn’t you want to be “cured”? Can you imagine a person with no legs NOT wanting a treatment that would give him legs? It is a sad observation that the voices of actual people with disabilities are usually absent from discussions of this type (thanks to Ingrid in San Francisco for bucking that trend). In fact, their answers to these questions are often not what you would expect. I first contemplated that idea when I heard a CBC radio piece produced by Dave Hingsburger, a counsellor and disability rights activist in Toronto. Over the course of a two-hour program, Hingsburger talked to many members of the disability community, including people with Down Syndrome, as well as a man who has no legs. At some point in the course of other discussions he asked each person he talked to whether, if presented with a pill that would get rid of their disability, they would take it. Without exception, they all said no.
At the time, this was an earth-shattering notion for me. But the fact is that I know many people who have intellectual disabilities. No-one I know sees themselves as diseased, suffering, or in need of a cure. So who is really imposing their viewpoint here?
Jenn framed her response to this medical research in terms of the benefit she has received from her relationships with people with disabilities, and the benefit society as a whole stands to gain from them. Unfortunately some of you have construed that to mean that people with disabilities should be kept in a limited, suffering state so the rest of us might benefit. Several of you even made the hurtful comparison between our boys and “therapy animals.”
Perhaps it is a symptom of the way people with disabilities are devalued in our society that we so often feel the need to justify them by naming the benefit other people receive from them. No other group in society needs to do this. However, that is not the basis by which we make decisions about our boys’ lives. Everything we do (including the hypothetical rejection of experimental brain treatment) for them is with their best interests at heart. And to respond to other posters, we have not forgotten what might happen to our boys when we are no longer around. That is why our whole lives are devoted to people with intellectual disabilities, from our parenting to our professional lives with L’Arche to our involvement in the local school to our involvement in discussions such as this one. A society that recognizes the gifts of people with disabilities is one that goes beyond inclusion and tolerance to real relationship.
People are complicated organisms. Tinkering with one aspect affects a host of others. As a society we tend to overvalue independence and intellectual competence. These things do not bear a linear relationship with happiness or quality of life. There are a lot of independent people who lead very lonely lives. In my experience of people with intellectual disabilities, the ones who are more capable and independent are often the ones who have the hardest time finding a place of belonging, and who therefore lead lives of greater suffering. I don’t mean to say that capability is a bad thing; I just mean that it is complicated, and that makes the ramifications of this treatment hard to predict.
We don’t know whether this potential brain treatment will lead to greater quality of life for people with Down Syndrome. We don’t know what its risks and side-effects might be. We do know that people with disabilities are undervalued, insufficiently supported, and too seldom consulted or in control of the decisions that affect their lives. Why don’t we put more work into supporting the weaker members of society, combating bullying and abuse, and discovering and learning from the experience of people who have disabilities, and get less excited about expensive, unproven treatments that may do more harm than good?
Haiti
I was struck by the portentously antiquarian wording of the New York Times’ lead headline the morning after the calamity in Port-au-Prince:
Haiti Lies in Ruins; Grim Search for Untold Dead
I may eventually have something to say about this ghastly, stultifying event, but for the moment, I am speechless.
Welcome New York Times Motherlode readers
For those who have followed the debate over potential treatments for Down syndrome in the New York Times parenting blog Motherlode to its source here on Contrarian, I have assembled a series of links you might want to follow.
Our discussion of this issue began with this post back in November. Jenn Power elaborated on her concerns here, and Dr. Ahmad Salehi, the Stanford researcher whose work touched off the discussion, responded thoughtfully here. Jenn’s husband Silas Barss Donham, my son, weighed in here.
Other reader commented here, here, and here.
Jenn is the community leader of L’Arche Cape Breton in Iron Mines, Nova Scotia, a community for “people with developmental disabilities and those who choose to share life with them.” It’s one of about 130 L’Arche communities around the world founded by the acclaimed humanitarian and philosopher Jean Vanier. A few links:
- L’Arche Cape Breton website.
- L’Arche Wikipedia entry.
- Jean Vanier’s Wikipedia entry.
- Jenn’s blog about disabilities.
- Jenn’s hilarious vacation blog.
- An amazing video Jenn produced in which L’Arche “core members” talk about their hopes and fears.
- A video of my twin grandsons, Josh and Jacob, singing “If you’re handsome and you know it….”
- Josh and Jacob singing the Robert Munsch song, “I love you forever.“
- Josh and Jacob singing Canada’s national anthem, sort of.
You may have gathered that I’m very proud of my daughter-in-law. It was distressing to see so many Motherlode commenters leap to the conclusion that, because Jenn recoiled at the prospect of chemical treatment for her sons’ intellectual impairment, she must be selfish or patronizing. In fact, Jenn is one of the least selfish, most compassionate and giving people I know. My own post on Motherlode elaborates on her admirable work.
NY Times picks up our Down syndrome thread
Motherlode, a New York Times blog on parenting, has picked up on Contrarian’s discussion about potential treatments for the intellectual impairment associated with Down syndrome — and touched off quite a debate of it its own.
Our own discussion began with L’Arche Cape Breton Community Leader Jenn Power’s disquiet at the assumption that Down syndrome constitutes a disease in need of curing. Jenn, who is both the adopted mother of identical twins with Down Syndrome and — disclosure — my daughter-in-law, spoke eloquently of Down traits that don’t need fixing:
[I]ncredible smiles, overflowing affection, stubbornness, great sense of humour, cute toes, love for orange pop and Rita MacNeil, endless capacity to forgive… the list goes on and on. I am not sure I can articulate why, but I find this article both upsetting (lump in my throat and eyes welled with tears right now) and disturbing. Why does everything need a “cure?”
The Times quoted at length from Jenn’s subsequent, more detailed Contrarian post, and from Stanford University researcher Dr. Ahmad Salehi’s thoughtful response here as well. Motherlode’s thread on the subject has now attracted more than 100 comments. Several are thoughtful and constructive, but a shocking number come from people quick to condemn Jenn as “selfish” or “patronizing” for not jumping at the chance to chemically enhance her sons’ cognitive skills.
Many Contrarian readers are familiar enough with Jenn to know her life is the antithesis of selfishness. As I wrote in my own comment on Motherlode:
As the leader of this extraordinary [L'Arche] community, Jenn manages an incredible range of human emotions, trials, joys, and tribulations, along with the myriad practical details required to manage any large group of diverse people. She does this with enormous tact, kindness, generosity, wisdom, humor, firmness, practicality, and love. And immense hard work.
From this I conclude that, despite decades of progress integrating developmentally challenged citizens into society, we have a long way to go in overcoming the kneejerk tendency to view people like my grandsons as less good and less valuable than the rest of us. That’s our loss as much as it is theirs.
In a separate post aimed at New York Times readers, I will include links to all our Down syndrome posts, and to several short videos featuring the extraordinary folks at L’Arche Cape Breton, including my esteemed two grandsons, Josh and Jacob.
