But in recent years, with the introduction of GoPros, smartphones and accessible encryption techniques, a new kind of vigilante “journalist” (and I’ll get to why I used scare quotes in a second) has emerged. They’ve allowed us to watch live streams of worldwide Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, riots in Ukraine and most recently, the Ferguson protests after card-carrying journalists were reportedly purged out of police-occupied areas with tear gas. This is problematic in the growing blog culture of the new media landscape – people who don’t have the necessary training to handle themselves as members of the press make for even more misinformation coming out online, especially when they don’t properly contextualize situations such as the Ferguson riots.

A line of police cars with high beams on greats anyone trying to enter #Ferguson. It's shut down. No media allowed. pic.twitter.com/pPE2m4G0UQ

— Antonio French (@AntonioFrench) August 12, 2014

The #mediablackout hashtag appeared on Twitter without any real contextualization; people were tweeting it in tandem with #IfTheyGunnedMeDown and similar hashtag campaigns but it wasn’t clear what exactly the #mediablackout entailed until the arrests of Al-Jazeera, Huffington Post and Washington Post journalists surfaced.

Outrage doesn’t.

What's happening it's just disgusting and cruel and inhuman. #PrayForFerguson #mediablackout pic.twitter.com/oeJX0gCt0T

— Danya Fernanda✨ (@bestof28) August 14, 2014

Outrage isn’t a substitute for information. Sure, the public is taking notice on restrictions of journalism but a few attention-grabbing tweets aren’t going to reverse a media blackout. We need people on the ground like the affected journalists to get publicly angry, and even Obama took their side, albeit after some presidential jargon condemning violence against police:

There’s also no excuse for police to use excessive force against peaceful protests or to throw protesters in jail for lawfully exercising their First Amendment rights. And here in the United States of America, police should not be bullying or arresting journalists who are just trying to do their jobs and report to the American people on what they see on the ground.

All that aside, whether or not you believe that the Disney Channel purposely aired throwback episodes of old shows to distract youths from the news, I don’t need to tell you that press freedom is a myth in America. What’s most concerning about Ferguson isn’t citizen journalism, it’s, as Sandy Davidson, a professor of communications law at the Missouri School of Journalism weighed in:

… every piece of information Ferguson officials have tried to keep from leaking has come back to bite them. Despite vocal outcries from community leaders, Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson has refused to release the name of the officer involved in Brown’s shooting, citing death threats against the officer. It’s a valid concern, and one Davidson said is supported by legal precedent. She cites a 1982 appellate case in her home state of Missouri, which held that public information can be withheld if releasing it would cause a “foreseeable risk of harm.” The Supreme Court let the decision stand in 1983.

But legal or not, withholding information has consequences, including a risk that those withholding the information will be perceived as having something to hide. “You can’t trust what you don’t know,” Davidson said. “Anytime a veil of secrecy is thrown on something, I think it leads to speculation, which can get more and more odious.”

As long as transparency isn’t the norm, information is going to suffer. This should be a no-brainer, but this makes it all the more important that we fight for press freedom and attempt to instruct people on how to conduct citizen journalism properly.

While I was away at the “Life is Improv” FEE seminar and YALCon, Jeremy Scahill was sniffing around for some new federal documents on counterterrorism, particularly the Terrorist Screening Database. His revelations, which were posted to The Intercept yesterday included:

• 16,000 people, including 1,200 Americans, have been classified as “selectees” who are targeted for enhanced screenings at airports and border crossings.

• There are 611,000 men on the main terrorist watchlist and 39,000 women.

• The top “nominating agencies” responsible for placing people on the government’s watchlists are: the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

• The top five U.S. cities represented on the main watchlist for “known or suspected terrorists” are New York; Dearborn, Mich.; Houston; San Diego; and Chicago. At 96,000 residents, Dearborn is much smaller than the other cities in the top five, suggesting that its significant Muslim population—40 percent of its population is of Arab descent, according to the U.S. Census Bureau—has been disproportionately targeted for watchlisting. Residents and civil liberties advocates havefrequently argued the Muslim, Arab and Sikh communities in and around Dearborn are unfairly targeted by invasive law enforcement probes, unlawful profiling, and racism.

Real nice, right?

Pretty much all of the key information on the leaks is included in the document, but my favorite part of this was Scahill’s tweet:

US government, pissed we were publishing our story, tried to undermine us by leaking it to other news organization right before we published

— jeremy scahill (@jeremyscahill) August 5, 2014

With publications like the Intercept popping up with such talented journalists, I honestly don’t know why the general public has any faith in the US government anymore. The AP has a watered-down version of the same story, but they really took a hit to their credibility. Looks like we may need a new stylebook in the future.

Additionally, Steven Sutton’s talk at Yalcon about campaign strategy had a large component on how to weasel your way around press questions. Unfortunately my notes on this talk weren’t the best, but my takeaway was that yeah, the government is afraid of us on every scale. So, take a cue from Jeremy Scahill and don’t underestimate your power as a journalist.

Along with the other Sirius XM listeners who hadn’t cancelled their subscription over this, I anxiously waited for Monday’s O&A show, which featured a dejected-sounding Opie and Jim not only lamenting their co-host’s firing, but the predictable fan and media reaction.

According to Opie, the main issue with the tweets was timing; they came before a holiday weekend and an upcoming planned hiatus. “If we could’ve got back on the radio, me, Anthony and Jimmy, we would’ve figured our way out of this one. Easily. Because the jokes would’ve been there.”

They also criticized the Washington Post’s op-eds, along with other publications’ similar knee-jerk reactions.

Whenever a political correctness crisis like this happens, passages like this are standard:

“Some supporters cite First Amendment rights, as they always do in such cases, until someone helpfully points out that freedom of speech does not mean freedom of speech without consequences. You have the right to say or Tweet whatever you want and others have the right to object and be offended. Depending on what the contract says, your employer has the right to forgive or fire. I know few people who could insult colleagues or toss a string of vile invective at potential clients and come into work the next day as though nothing had happened.”

Embarrassing, isn’t it? Because judging by the way Opie, Anthony and Jim talk to their fans and people who call into the show, Sirius XM should have pulled the plug a long time ago if that’s how their contracts work; the same contracts that lock the remaining jocks into a show they barely want to be part of anymore. It’s astounding how so much of the media response reflects an outright misunderstanding of not only Anthony’s motives in the infamous tweets, but O&A’s entire brand.

Was the “black friend” tweet all part of Anthony’s “shock” routine? Probably. This writer’s reasoning is so skewed that the comments on the article make more sense.

Commenter Mcaff has a more articulate (read: less expletive-ridden; “debating” free speech often seems akin to banging your head against a wall) response than I would’ve come up with on the fly:

“I have listened to Opie and Anthony and I strongly disagree with almost everything Anthony Cumia says. He’s usually wrong on a range of topics from gun control to race relations. His co-hosts are a bit to the left on most issues and the debate makes for lively, entertaining radio. I strongly disagree with Cumia, but I WANT TO HEAR EVERY WORD OF IT. In my opinion, Reverend Al Sharpton has made far more inflammatory remarks on his television program but I WANT TO HEAR HIM TOO. They both have the right to voice their opinion and I have the right to hear them.”

This type of response also underscores the points that Jeremy Weiland makes in his essay that I linked to last week.

If PC shills at the Washington Post really wanted to end racism, they wouldn’t waste netspace on articles like this, and would talk incessantly about prison demographics, poverty statistics and the drug war instead.

Anthony had tweeted one of his racist rants about a black woman who punched him in the face in Times Square when she thought he was taking a picture of her. Social media is pretty inextricably linked to public figures, especially radio personalities who promote their Twitter pages on the air, so the argument that it was his “personal” twitter doesn’t hold much water. Did Sirius XM have every right to fire him? Of course. But that doesn’t mean they didn’t make an awful move.

Now whether or not the woman was justified in assaulting Anthony, whether or not he was creeping on her, is irrelevant. Opie and Anthony have been on the air for twenty years, and before they were with SiriusXM, they raised hell on terrestrial airwaves with stunts like Whip ‘em Out Wednesdays, Homeless Charlie and several other deliberately crass radio bits with abject disregard for political correctness, especially on Cumia’s part.

Basically, I’m not sure what Sirius XM was expecting when they allowed O&A on their airwaves. Those two aren’t known to put their tails between their legs. The company’s official statement, as posted on Rolling Stone said:

“SiriusXM has terminated its relationship with Anthony Cumia of the Opie & Anthony channel. The decision was made, and Cumia informed, late Thursday, July 3 after careful consideration of his racially-charged and hate-filled remarks on social media,” Sirius XM said in a statement. “Those remarks and postings are abhorrent to SiriusXM, and his behavior is wholly inconsistent with what SiriusXM represents.”

It’s pretty easy to condemn defenders of Anthony as awful, insensitive racists, and granted some of them are. It’s not like he claims to be some great humanitarian, but you would think that Americans would understand the first amendment at this point. Anyone who would circlejerk about how offended they are would also probably change the station if they heard O&A.

Furthermore, Sirius XM’s decision comes down to an institutional interest in protecting political correctness. Cancelling Opie and Anthony may be bad for business in the short-term, especially since the program is available live only to customers who pay for extra channels, but as Jeremy Weiland’s 2012 essay critiquing political correctness says:

“Yes, saying racist shit sucks — it is hurtful to social conviviality as well as certain individuals, and it has the potential to perpetuate narratives and prejudices that hold us all back. But given that the channels of media are controlled by an elite few corporations, the piling on and blacklisting that follows such an utterance is out of proportion with what the organic social sanction would entail. While we may not care about the feelings of the bigot, we may not immediately see how the media’s use of these incidents serves their interests — programming, articles, interviews, and other opportunities for increased attention and advertising revenue — over our interests, which involve genuine healing, understanding, and contrition.”

There we go. One of the underlying tenets of Opie and Anthony’s messages to the public is that political correctness is a charade, and while it sucks that Anthony needed to be kicked off the air to prove that point, it’s still solidly proven.

Like I said a few weeks ago, radio is one of the best venues for unpopular opinions, but Sirius XM really dropped the ball with this one. They won’t end racism, but they will set a precedent that their company is an enemy of free speech.

This 2011 Live from the Compound bit, is an interesting twist of foreshadowing.

“I spoke with a number of journalism schools, to see how the growing issue of cyber-security was being handled, and found a range of approaches. I turned to my alma mater, Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, and spoke with Emily Bell, the director of Columbia’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism, a dual master’s program in journalism and computer science, which is in its first year. She says that issues of cyber security bother her “immensely,” but at this point, most students aren’t receiving detailed instruction about it. The only cyber-security course being taught takes place within the computer science program, which is only offered to the students enrolled in the Tow Center’s double major. Bell says discussions are underway for how to introduce this more broadly to the curriculum.”

This is great, but not all journalism students want to (or have the means to) go on to graduate school, much less at Columbia, much much less as a double major. Everyone I’ve spoken to who’s taken undergraduate journalism or general communications classes said that data security wasn’t brought up in the classroom.

Now I’ll be honest, as an undergrad, I’m a bit lazy with my data. I’m not reporting on anything particularly hard-hitting or of national interest, so I’m not too worried that anything journalistic on my computer or iPhone is incriminating. Most of what I know about journalistic data security is from my own research and a seminar I attended at the national Society of Professional Journalism conference hosted at Boston College this past April. In only about an hour, the presenters explained TOR, encrypted messaging, email protection, and general data security measures journalists should know about like using burner phones. There’s no reason these skills shouldn’t be applied in every undergraduate journalism class. Since I’m not done with my degree program I’ll give my school the benefit of the doubt for now, but most students I talk to don’t even know what TOR is, and that’s extremely problematic for the future of this field.

A few years after Santo’s piece, NYU journalism professor Adam Penenberg had this gem of an excuse why not:

“… the NYU program didn’t require all students to learn comsec [communication security] for the same reason that they didn’t require all students to learn ‘how to line up ‘fixers’ in a war-ravaged nation or go undercover with a hidden camera. Only a fraction of students will ever need those skills.'”

Only a fraction of journalism students need to learn how to protect their information? It should be a no-brainer that any type of data, particularly email or phone correspondence, which journalists use most often, can potentially fall into the wrong hands and become incriminating. Not all students are techies, but modern journalism requires at least a base knowledge of technology, considering most of it is now on the internet. The days of meeting Deep Throat at a parking garage are long gone; although face-to-face conversation is still the most secure method of gaining information, this is not always possible as your sources may be halfway across the globe.

Susan McGregor, Columbia journalism professor offered the best rebuttal:

“As for the question, Does everyone have to learn this stuff? McGregor says, absolutely. Journalists have a collective responsibility; it’s as important as closing and locking the door behind you when you walk into your apartment building. ‘You may not be covering the NSA, but a colleague of yours might,’ says McGregor. ‘Unless you’re working really on your own, you have a responsibility to protect the person who is vulnerable or may be targeted within your organization by being responsible yourself. If you are not being responsible, you are exposing the people you work with, potentially.'”

Undergraduate journalism classes usually have a section on media law; my school has a whole required class on it. While of course it’s important to know how to deal with a lawsuit, wouldn’t it make sense to learn how to prevent one in the first place? There is concern over making students paranoid, but isn’t a healthy amount of paranoia necessary in the current security state?

McGregor is right – if you wouldn’t leave your apartment door unlocked, you wouldn’t leave all of your data out in the open fields of the web.

Una delle differenze che colpiscono di più, però, è l’assenza di una visibile cultura della sicurezza. Una volta ho diviso uno spinello con alcuni ragazzi sul giardino del municipio di Belfast, in una zona ad alto traffico, mentre parlavamo di politica della cannabis. Anche se fumare marijuana è illegale (i semi si trovano facilmente in negozio ma è illegale coltivare la pianta, pertanto la politica del governo irlandese è ancora meno sensata di quella del governo federale americano) questi giovani non sembravano preoccupati dalla possibilità di finire dentro.

Il quartiere di Temple Bar a Dublino era pieno di turisti ubriachi e chiassosi in giro per il fine settimana, ma i servizi di sicurezza dei bar riuscivano a tenerli a bada senza la presenza spiacevole della polizia. Tutte le volte che ho comprato alcolici non mi hanno mai chiesto documenti. I baristi e i negozianti di alcolici non sembrano temere la chiusura per aver servito un poliziotto sotto copertura con documenti falsi. Non mi è neanche capitato di vedere un poliziotto in uniforme a Belfast, Dublino o nelle altre principali città irlandesi che ho visitato. La gente lascia il cane senza il guinzaglio, lascia che i propri figli corrano davanti a loro, e non gli ripugna l’idea di invitare un americano sconosciuto a bere una pinta all’ora di pranzo. Se c’erano telecamere di sicurezza non le ho viste. Tranne all’aeroporto, non sono mai passata attraverso un metal detector.

Questo è particolarmente importante se si considera che Belfast era uno dei luoghi più pericolosi d’Europa ai tempi dei Disordini, la città più bombardata nel Regno Unito fino al 2001, piagata ancora oggi da settarismi che potrebbero diventare violenti in qualunque momento. I “muri della pace” a Belfast ovest sono una grossa barriera di cemento che si allunga minacciosamente tra i quartieri dei lavoratori cattolici e protestanti, con dei passaggi che vengono aperti a certe ore. Praticamente non c’è accordo su una soluzione del settarismo, e anche se la città si modernizza e attrae turisti in misura esponenziale con uno scenario culturalmente ricco, i muri rimangono, ricoperti di graffiti, messaggi propagandistici e scoloriture dovute alle bombe.

Eppure dalla fine dei disordini l’indice della qualità della vita di Belfast è più alto che a New York e altre città a basso tasso di criminalità.

Il passaggio alla dogana con il nord ha richiesto circa cinque minuti; una donna molto cortese mi ha fatto due domande riguardo le ragioni del mio viaggio. La maggior parte dei problemi sono fortemente regionali, ma ho dovuto rispondere a meno domande come straniera a Belfast che come cittadina negli Stati Uniti al mio ritorno. Immagino che il turista medio si lasci impressionare meno da qualche ventenne fatto che si gode la rara giornata di sole che dagli agenti di polizia con armi d’assalto attorno alla Casa Bianca e agli angoli delle strade di New York. Non sono così ingenua da credere che l’Irlanda sia l’utopia delle libertà civili, ma posso dire di essermi trovata più sicura nelle zone più malfamate di Belfast che in una Times Square piena di poliziotti.

Una vecchia in un negozietto di Cork fa notare che gli irlandesi stanno zitti se vedono qualcosa che non li riguarda. La cultura della paura e la mania di persecuzione, l’atteggiamento del tipo “se vedi qualcosa dillo” così diffuso tra gli americani, in Irlanda semplicemente non esiste.

Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.

Sure, it’s nice to have on in the background when you’re driving, but the days of gathering around the radio for the latest news, radio dramas and presidential addresses pretty much ended with the introduction of TV. Radio gave a voice to black communities across the United States, public forums for politicians and commentators of all political persuasions, and allowed people to hear music they never would’ve dreamed of pre-Internet.

And yet people tend to forget that noncommercial radio is pretty much the only place where free speech in its most raw form still exists on a public forum. Although I’m only halfway through reading “Rebels on the Air” by Jesse Walker, I’ve gotten the point that the history of radio is colored with innovation springing from state regulations and creative middle fingers to the bureaucrats who attempted to control the airways. One of the best examples of this is the development of frequency modulation:

 “As the 1920s progressed, the inventor [Edwin Howard Armstrong] became obsessed with the idea of eliminating static through a technology he called Frequency Modulation, or FM. Most engineers believed that this was impossible – in the mathematician John Renshaw Carson’s then famous words, that, “static, like the poor, will always be with us.” In 1933, Armstrong unveiled his invention and proved Carson wrong… Armstrong tried to convince his old friend David Sarnoff, the head of the RCA, to invest in his work, but Sarnoff believed the future of broadcasting lay in television, not FM… So he used his clout at the Federal Communications Commission to hinder Armstrong’s invention.”

Long story short, after a bunch of uphill battles against regulatory measures, FM became a mainstay of radio. Walker’s book was published in 2001 however, right before the explosion of podcasts and Internet radio.

My own love affair with radio began when I was a senior in high school in 2011 (yes, Clinton was in office when I was born) when I got a chance to work on OutCasting, a radio show that started out as a bit on WDFH, a now-defunct public radio station based in Westchester County, NY. OutCasting has since been distributed to 41 Pacifica-based public radio stations across the country, and is readily available as a podcast. The project started as a way to give a voice to LGBT youth, is mostly created and produced by high school students, and is looking at a pretty bright future. During my second year of college, I interned at Townsquare Media of the Hudson Valley, which distributes several commercial radio stations.

I’ve seen firsthand the way radio fosters community, even though it’s easy to scoff at commercial outlets. The popularity of podcasts like Welcome to Night Vale harken back to the days where a “War of the Worlds” broadcast was mistaken for a real alien invasion, PRX’s Love and Radio turns the mundane into a surreal sound experience, Opie and Anthony have brought their crass, deliberately un-PC stunts to the airways for twenty years, C4SS has its own podcast feed, and still more podcasts are produced by people without soundproofing, advanced audio technology or professional producers.

Podcasting is something literally anyone with a microphone and a little bit of patience can do. Trevor wrote an excellent guide to studioless podcasting awhile back, and I guess this is something of a call to action to fill the Internet airways and iTunes libraries with whatever the hell you want.

Last week I talked about how print can be used to undermine authority, but radio exists in the same camp. The FCC can stop us from using words they don’t like, but they can’t do anything about the manpower and ideas radio can generate.

One of the most striking differences, however, was Ireland’s surface lack of security culture. I spoke to a few lads openly sharing a spliff on Belfast’s city hall lawn, a high-traffic area directly in the city center, about cannabis policies. Although smoking marijuana is illegal – seeds are readily available for retail sale but it is illegal to grow the plants, so the Irish government’s regulations actually make less sense than the American federal ones – these dudes didn’t seem like they were worried about being busted.

The Temple Bar district in Dublin was full of drunk, rowdy tourists over the weekend, but the various bar security guards held it down without a leering police presence. I was not asked for identification a single time that I purchased alcohol. Irish bartenders and liquor store owners don’t seem like they’re sweating in their boots that they’ll be shut down for serving an undercover cop with a fake ID. I also did not see a single uniformed police officer out in Belfast, Dublin, or any of the major cities I visited in Ireland. People leave their dogs unleashed, let their kids run ahead of them, and have no qualms about inviting an unfamiliar American to sit with them for a lunchtime pint. If there were security cameras on the streets, I didn’t see them. I didn’t have to step through a single metal detector outside of the airport.

This is especially remarkable considering Belfast was one of the most dangerous places in Europe during the Troubles, the most heavily bombed city in the UK up until 2001, and is still plagued by sectarianism that could turn violent at any time. The “peace walls” in West Belfast are a thick concrete barrier ominously running between Catholic and Protestant working-class neighborhoods with gates between them that only stay open during set hours. Basically, no one can agree on a solution to the sectarianism, and although the city is modernizing and attracting tourists exponentially with a rich cultural scene, the walls stand, marked by graffiti, propaganda messages and discoloration from blast bombs.

Yet Belfast enjoys a higher quality of life index than New York City and similar lowered crime rates since the Troubles.

Northern Irish customs took about five minutes; I was asked about two questions by a very pleasant woman concerning my business there. Most of their problems are highly regional, but I still had to answer fewer questions as a foreigner in Belfast than as a native citizen of the United States when I flew back. I’d imagine that a few stoned 20-somethings enjoying the rare sunny day is a less disconcerting sight to the average tourist than the assault rifle-toting police officers outside the White House and on NYC street corners. I’m not so naive as to assume that Ireland is a utopia of civil liberties, but I can say that I felt safer in the “sketchier” areas of Belfast than I do in crowded, cop-filled Times Square on a regular basis.

An older woman at a small shop in Cork remarked that Irish people don’t say anything if they see something that doesn’t immediately concern them. The culture of fear and persecution, the “see something, say something” attitude that is so prevalent among Americans, simply does not exist in Ireland.

Translations for this article:

• Italian, Ulster: Alternative alla Cultura della Sicurezza e della Paura.

Everyone going into journalism has probably heard that journalism is dying, or at least that brick-and-mortar newspapers are. This is quite misleading; with the upsurge in media technology, while niche publications and media start-ups in recent years have given aspiring journalists in the United States and Europe more mediums and avenues for their interests and ideas than ever, the assumption that print is dead is pretty Western-centric. As travel becomes more restricted, especially for members of the press, this assumption is understandable.

Why the shift to print? The 2011 State of the Media report said:

“Countries with either evolving democracies or at least evolving capitalist systems tend to drive newspaper growth, which helps explain why Hungary (6.9%) Kosovo (12.5%) and Russia (9.3%) are also on the list of countries where newspapers are launching in bigger numbers, helping advertising revenue grow. Volatile as it is, Afghanistan also saw its paid daily newspaper titles jump 12.5% in 2009.”

It’s safe to say that movement towards capitalism drives the growth of news as the market for news expands and literacy rates go up. This isn’t rocket science. What’s more interesting is this:

“Still a fourth factor affecting the health of the newspaper industry is government subsidy. In several countries, the government offers substantial subsidies to help the newspaper industry thrive as a matter of public policy. The amount and nature of the subsidy can vary widely, and it is difficult to pin down how widespread the subsidies are—they are being scaled back in some places and increased in others. Ireland, for instance, has devoted hundreds of thousands of Euros per year to subsidize Gaelic-language press.”

Aside from Ireland, where Gaelic-language media tends to have a niche, if culturally significant market, the government subsidizing news in developing nations is a red flag. That said, newspapers can slip further under the radar than easily trackable online media, even though they logistically take longer to produce. With Turkey’s recent Twitter ban though, and similar Internet restrictions worldwide, it makes sense that regional news is easier to circulate when it’s written down.

This 2008 Economist article reinforces that point:

“Publishers in India benefit from a long tradition of press freedom. But papers in countries with more meddling governments are also, by and large, doing well. This is especially true of small newspapers. Governments with limited resources are often ill-equipped to monitor a profusion of local and regional newspapers. In Mali, for example, newspapers are popping up “like mushrooms”, says Souleymane Kanté, the local manager for World Education, an American NGO that aims to eradicate illiteracy. The Malian government keeps large national publications in line, Mr Kanté says, but local and regional papers have some breathing room.”

Many pieces on print in the developing world refer to these markets as “maturing,” but this government sidestepping places small, localized papers ahead of the game, even if literacy rates still lag behind Western numbers. The developing world’s growing print industry is expected to decline as Internet access becomes more widespread, but Internet restriction doesn’t seem like it’s going anywhere.

From Common Sense to anarchist zines, print has played a unique role in the face of the media. Limits on press freedom are a looming threat, but as the FBI discovers more and more Internet rabbit holes, maybe it’s time to throw them a curve ball and go back to basics.

Plus, Orwell probably hadn’t heard of Wikipedia. This week, ten of the biggest public relations firms signed a pledge that condemned the practice of “sockpuppeting,” or padding clients’ Wikipedia pages to their benefit. This opened up a whole new avenue to question the legitimacy of the public relations industry, one that’s already scoffed at heartily. It’s easy to picture a public relations professional as a conscienceless brownnoser, but I find it hard to believe that they are any more susceptible to corruption of information than journalists who often answer to media corporations or state-owned outlets. If you promote your friend’s band or their blog post on Facebook, you’re doing public relations. It’s not inherently evil and it’s not all that glamorous.

Anyway, here’s part of the pledge:

“On behalf of our firms, we recognize Wikipedia’s unique and important role as a public knowledge resource. We also acknowledge that the prior actions of some in our industry have led to a challenging relationship with the community of Wikipedia editors.”

Wikipedia already has a shaky reputation as a source of information because of the fact that anyone can go in and say whatever they want on a page. Your high school teachers and college professors probably weren’t too happy with you if you ever cited Wikipedia in a research paper. While the accuracy of Wikipedia is improving, anything positive or negative on a business’s Wiki page should probably be taken with a grain of salt. That said, a lot of people do use Wikipedia as a key source of information, and if your business has its own page, most people would take that as a signal that you’ve gained recognition.

In October 2013, the Wikipedia admins went on a wild goose chase after “suspicious” accounts, targeting an organization called Wiki-PR:

“Former Wiki-PR clients told the Daily Dot that they paid between $500 and $1,000 to the company for creation of a Wikipedia page, and $50 a month for monitoring any changes made to the page and resurrection of any material deleted during subsequent edits.

In other words, we’ll create the page you want and do everything we can to make sure it stays that way. It should go without saying that this practice seriously undermines the credibility of both the organization and the very forum it’s promoting. In an email, Wiki-PR’s CEO defended his company’s practices, writing that they simply “counsel our clients on how to adhere to Wikipedia’s rules” and that their services differ from those of most PR firms which “don’t know the rules as well because they do PR work, broadly, and try to promote.”

So what, though? If you’re operating under the assumption that everyone in public relations is a lying hack and that Wikipedia is a beacon of infallible knowledge, you’re wrong on both counts. Wikipedia is really trying to throw their ethical weight at these people – not unlike journalists who think they hold a sort of ethical superiority over PR folks – who are going to end up compromising their clients in the long run if their Wiki posts are inaccurate, anyway.

Here are the experts’ opinions on this. Most of them talk about open, honest and mutually beneficial communication, but this statement from Erik Deutsch, principal at ExcelPR  group and president of PRSA-LA caught my interest:

“It’s hard to argue with the principles adopted by the 10 large PR firms. That said, issuing such a statement could actually support the notion that PR pros somehow deserve to be singled out for their unique ability to wreak havoc on platforms like Wikipedia. Taken a step further, it could reinforce the view among critics that it’s inherently ‘dubious’ to get paid to write or edit a client’s Wikipedia page.”

This pretty much sums up the unfair assumption that people who want positive outcomes for their businesses should be shamed for promoting them online. Believing everything you read on the Internet is a dangerous game to begin with, and public relations firms’ bickering with Wikipedia over conflicts of interest in businesses detracts from what they should be worried about – enemies of net neutrality making life difficult for new businesses to flourish online to begin with.

Orwell would probably be most upset about the ethical policing on both ends.