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February 2004 Ethics Dunces
Unbelievable. Sometimes, you don't have to be good to be ethical; you just have to be paying attention. Wouldn't you think, with all the accusations, attacks and innuendos concerning administration cronyism in connection with Halliburton, the company once run by Vice-President Cheney would make sure its conduct was squeaky clean and beyond reproach when it got a government contract in Iraq? Even if the company were the epitome of evil, this would be the natural course of action. People with an agenda are out there gunning for you, just itching to prove that you won your contract on influence rather than merit. You can't afford an innocent screw-up, much less a major scandal. It is time to be extra-vigilant, to put in extra compliance mechanisms from top to bottom. Make sure your subcontractors are thoroughly vetted, make sure every last penny is accounted for and on the up and up. You have no choice: you have to be ethical, not just because you should be anyway, but because you're being watched like a hawk, because political enemies of your former CEO are just salivating over the prospect of tying him to any corruption on your part.
So now Halliburton has admitted that some of its subcontractors were dishonest, and that it overcharged the government about 25 million dollars for its work in Iraq. It is also launching a new ad campaign that emphasizes that it is the company's expertise, not its Washington connections, that have attracted big government contracts. This is called locking the barn door after the herd has fled. Halliburton couldn't do its work properly and without corruption knowing it was under a microscope. The cronyism accusations have always been unfair (tell me: how much time do you spend trying to enrich your former employer?), but never mind. Halliburton is the very model of an ethics dunce.
Pointing out that Jayson Blair is unethical is like announcing that General Franco is dead. However, he is also apparently clueless. In the "Can you believe this?" category comes news that Blair wants to set up a journalism scholarship in his name at his alma mater, the University of Maryland, which he naturally assumed was trying to figure out just the right way to cement its connection with the disgraced ex-New York Times reporter-fantasist-plagiarizer.
The publisher of Blair's upcoming book floated the concept in an interview with Editor and Publisher. "It will be up to him what the amount will be," Viner said. "But it will be enough for more than one scholarship. He did not want to promote that and make it a promotional device; he just wanted to do it."
Not surprisingly, the, dean of Maryland's Philip Merrill College of Journalism, Tom Kunkel, quickly responded that the school would rather fill its halls with diseased tarantulas, or words to that effect. Kunkel's students indeed need to remember Jayson Blair, but not that way.