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LinuxWorld Senior Editorial Staff Resigns
sachmet writes "In light of the interview with Fuat Kirccali, James Turner has announced on his blog the immediate resignation of the LinuxWorld senior editorial staff." From the post: "We regret that Sys-Con Media has
been unable to apply a standard of journalistic ethics that we can comfortably operate
under. We feel that recent articles published with the consent of Sys-Con Media fail to
meet minimum generally accepted journalistic codes, and because the management of
Sys-Con Media has failed to acknowledge that the articles are by all informed judgment
ethically unsupportable, we have decided we must find other avenues for our work."
Well duh, i remember a company i worked for around the time kernel 2.4 came out that had purchased an award from them for an 'award winning linux workstation' that didnt exist yet. my bosses came to me and said, here: design an award winning linux workstation we can sell quickly because the orders are already coming in. they even got a plaque to put on their wall and everything about their 'award winning linux workstation' which didnt exist yet. honestly i wonder how much of that crap went on.
It will certainly be a costly action on his part
It was an unpaid position, wasn't it?
The strange thing about this is that the trademarks that they use (Linux Business News) etc. belong to Linus Torvalds. Effectively this means he is endorsing these magazines. What is he doing about this? Claiming that there is no need for morality in the world as usual???
These people are so obnoxious (violating international law and codes of ethics among journalists), there's only one way out: They should be nixed.
Toon Moene (physicist at large).
If only more journalists follows principles like this we would have a better media:
1. Define a set of values
2. Tell the truth
3. Respect human dignity
4. Recognize the complexity of human nature
5. Be distrustful of unchecked power.
6. Foster a diversity of views
7. Challenge "group think."
8. Take time to listen and to think.
9. Encourage criticism and self-examination
10. Correct mistakes
Have a look at a brief description of each of them.
I respect the folks who resigned. I read Fuat's interview and just couldn't believe that anyone who is involved in any form of journalism just couldn't get what was wrong with O'Gara's article.
But what the hell *is* LinuxWorld? All the folks who resigned were apparently unpaid?? Does anyone besides Fuat make any money for their work? Why would anyone give their time for free to such a tool? I've never really looked at the site prior to this flamefest so I don't have a good feeling for what the heck it is. Was it a useful interesting magazine? If so, why wouldn't they pay their people?
We can just block the whole of sys-con's output from our computers without catching the apparently very nice people at LinuxWorld in the crossfire.
For the love of God, please learn to spell "ridiculous"!!!
Why go through the trauma of dealing with a duplicitous idiot like Fuat if you're not even getting paid? It's bad enough dealing with cretins like this when they're actually putting food on your table, but to do it for free?!?!
Glad to see you guys will be finding a more suitable outlet for your work. For what it's worth, I'm proud of you and hope to follow in your footsteps soon.
(posting anonymously because I DO get food on my table indirectly from SysCon)
No they have had internal battle for 6 months on the nature of MOG articles, they asked with the publishing of that article for MOG to be pulled and the offices of SYS-CON pubicly distance themselves from MOG. The first part was done but the recent interview showed the Officers saw nothing wrong with the article, so the editors left.
So you wording is wrong and disregards the lesser actions taken before drastic action was threatened and then acted upon. There was dialogue and the dialogue was mostly ignored.
I was thinking of the immortal words of Socrates, who said: "I drank what?" - Chris Knight (Val Kilmer)- Real Genius
If you REALLY want to make a statement fellow /.er immediately cancel your Sys-Con subscriptions. Then go a step further to discourage others from wasting their money on Sys-Con publications.
/. community is behind them 100% and will not stand for this lightly.
After all these folks who resigned are geeks of high knowledge and high moral fiber who are making the ultimate sacrifice for OUR community and on behalf of one our most important members. They are standing up for what's right. They are standing up for Groklaw. We need to stand up for them.
They gave up their jobs for reasons the right reasons. If there is a time to hit Sys-Con where it hurts it's now and financially.
It's not just about standing up for our own, it's also about letting these folks know that the
There's a special place in heaven for PJ and the LinuxWorld Senior Editorial Staff.
If PJ really is a little old lady who lives modestly, and who's a member of the Jehovah's Witness sect, there's nothing wrong with publishing that. THAT gives insight into a public figure. If the phone number listed in the article was truly obtained from an old news release, then that too would be ethical, if tasteless.
But, public figure or not, publishing people's home addresses is outside the generally accepted practices of professional journalists. Sarcastic commentary and personally identifying information about about elderly relatives is outside the generally accepted practices of professional journalists. Mocking their religious choices and age is outside the generally accepted practices of professional journalists.
Doing so with obvious spite is calculated to increase people's disgust.
I doubt you'll find many highly visible examples of the home addresses, phone numbers, elderly relatives, and religious affliations of the SCOX attorneys being publicized and mocked. People are justified in being angry that PJ has been subjected to that -- just as SCO's attorneys would be justified in thgeir anger if it were done to them.
I'm not sure where he stands in the pecking order, but Steve Suehring has also announced his resignation, for the same reason.
Mark Hinkle, who actually draws a salary as editor in chief, has not resigned.
Turner is to be applauded, but he's being disengenuous here: the "senior" editors were unpaid writers who used LinuxWorld as a venue to promote their consulting services. The _real_ staff -- the ones who draw a paycheck -- did not leave.
"If Daryl McBride's personal information had been published (and it seems like at some point it was, although I can't find the story now), everyone would be cheering the public's "right to know."
M'oG went to PJ's mother's home, harrassed her, and then published her address and photos of her home on the Internet. No one did anything like that to any SCOX board member, and if they had, the linux community's name would have been dragged through the mud in the media. There's only one possible reason for publishing PJ's mom's personal info, and that's "We know where you live" style intimidation, pure and simple.
Well, you seem to be mixing tabloid and news journalism in your examples. Maureen claims to be an actual journalist, not a Papparazza. If she were to get a job with the National Enquirer and publish pictures of PJ next to Bigfoot, OK, fine. But the key is that most certainly isn't journalism.
But this was getting passed as real journalism along with material that actually is real journalism on LW. What Marueen did is NOT journalism. It was a personal attack. It wasn't professional. For instance, you won't see anything like that in the NYT or WSJ. For someone who claims to be a journalist, that was reprehensible.
The response to this piece by many zealots has been much more unethical than the publishing of the article. I realize that the response, in particular the DOS and threatening email, is attributal to only a small minority of OSS and Linux supporters, and that many of the leaders in the field have spoken out against them. But the denial of those actions has been almost perfunctory. We should be screaming about those who smear the Linux and OSS name with illegal and unethical attacks at least at the same volume we're screaming about O'Gara and Sys-Con.
That's not unethical, it's flat illegal. Not to split hairs, but I don't see it as unethical because the people doing it don't claim to have a code of ethics. To me, revenge in kind isn't necessarily unfair. I agree it's a bad idea because the OSS community is fighting an uphill PR battle anyway, and fighting it against someone with a media outlet isn't smart. But to continue my prior point, that ain't journalism either.
If you choose to put yourself in the spotlight, you can expect to have the press breathing down your neck. You don't have to like it but you might as well get used to it. It's a part of American life. It's the obverse side of the "freedom of the press" coin. Would you really prefer to live in a place where the press is constrained? There are those reading Slashdot who do, in fact, live in such a place. Ask them which is preferable.
Again, ethics vs. law. I don't think anyone's calling for overturning of the 1st Amendment. People are criticizing Maureen, not the law. What Maureen did wasn't illegal. It was certainly unethical as a journalist, though not as the hack Paparazza that she is.
I basically get what you're trying to say, but I think you can be objective and still be nauseated by what she did as someone who claims to be a journalist. Thankfully, she finally made it much easier to discredit her, which to me made that article a bonehead move on her part.
It's been said before in little side comments and such, but I'm adding something else to it:
Don't just cancel your subscriptions to syscon publications, boycott their sponsors. Make it a liability for someone to advertise with SYSCON. Don't just alert SYSCON that you're buying from their advertiser's competiters, alert the advertisers that if they continue advertising in SYSCON publications, then you will send all your business to their competitors.
It wouldn't take much of this until the real person that should be resigning does: Fuat Kirccali
People have asked how this is different than other public figures like the runaway bride and I'll tell you how: Do you know the runaway bride's address? Do you know the addresses of her family? Would you have a reason to attack the runaway bride?
Part of ethics is determining each case on its own individual merit and issues. Pamela Jones runs a blog. The internet is famous for its anonymity. Your words stand for themselves. Even if you publish something controversial, you don't have to fear physical reprisal. If someone hunts you down, that's a stalker. There are laws to stop them. In essence, Maureen O'Gara did the work of a stalker and made the information available for those who would wish to do PJ physical harm. There was nothing newsworthy to make this necessary. There was no justification.
Some comment has been made about Jones' religion, which appears to be Jehovah's Witness. As moderator of soc.religion.christian I try to keep informed on the major Christian and almost-Christian groups. However I will warn you that I haven't had a lot of personal contact with JW's. I wouldn't quite characterize the JW beliefs as "loopy". Their most serious theological problem is rejecting the Trinity, but that's a judgement reasonable people can disagree about. It's not the sort of science fiction that you'll see in theology that I *would* characterize as loopy. I'd say it's just wrong. The most serious objections are to the authority claimed by their central organization, and the way it has somes been exercized, e.g. in prohibiting transfusions and deemphasizing higher education, as well as discipline that is considered excessively harsh by many other Christians. But none of this is relevant to the credibility of individual JWs in matters such as legal commentary. Their overall ethics, including matters such as proper handling of the truth, are as far as I can tell the usual ones. And as a moderately high-pressure sect, their members are probably more likely than the average actually to follow the official ethics. Obviously stereotypes are misleading -- you need to judge individuals. But to the extent that the JWs create a stereotype in my mind, it is not one that would discredit the credibility of Groklaw. I wouldn't necessarily depend upon a JW's judgements on how to live my life, but I find nothing improbable about a JW being an honest and competent paralegal.
With Gannon, it was shown that he had LOTS of special contacts and such with the White House.
The story wasn't about Gannon. The story was about how the White House had no problems giving special permissions to a gay hooker and allowing him to use a fake name to lob soft questions.
Now, IF MOG had turned up evidence that PJ was supported by IBM or IBM's lawyers and faked the "privacy" issue in an attempt to hide that connection, then THAT would have been the story.
But even THAT would NOT have been a reason to publish her Mom's address and pictures of her house.
Since MOG could NOT dig up the story she wanted to publish
If Gannon had NOT had any special priviledges from the White House and had NOT used a fake name, then publishing personal details about him would also be over the line.
Don't try to hide behind that bullshit.Digging into people's lives takes time and money.
There will ALWAYS be a discrepency between what the average person can spend (time and money) digging and what "the powerful" can spend.
So there will never be "a level playing field" like you believe.
It sounds more like the
So it should be VERY easy to track down the machine using that IP address at that time and find out whether it was an "attack" or an attempt to cache their server.
Here's the first step: http://www.arin.net/whois/
That should be able to tell you who owns that block.
And that's the problem. Yet in your "blog", you state:
Yet now you seem to be saying that the "distributed" portion was NOT the wget action you mentioned.
So, the "distributed" portion was nothing more or less than the
Which only leaves that single IP address with the wget command. And it should be easy to determine whether that was an "attack" or an attempt to cache their site.
The article even, by the way, specifically noted the lock on the apartment door, and the absence of tenant.
What it really sounds like, is an incitement to theft and/or violence.
This from Friday's http://www.linuxbusinessnews.com/
To Our Valued Readers: (May 13, 2005) - Our syndication arrangement with LinuxGram has recently ended after ethical questions raised by our readers in one of the stories published in last week's issue. I agree with their view on this matter; therefore I pulled the article shortly after it was published earlier this week. I apologize to our readers, to the open source community, our LinuxWorld editors, and Ms. Pamela Jones for publishing the article.
Fuat Kircaali Publisher, SYS-CON Media
Thats because her religion wasn't directly mocked, but instead was used to make false assumptions about PJ and imply worse things about her. For example:
Now, according to one of Pamela's neighbors and fellow Jehovah's Witness, being a Jehovah's Witness is pretty much a full-time job in and of itself.
I have friend's who are Jehovah's Witness, and this is a baldface lie. Sure they spend a good deal of time working for their beliefs, but it is no "full time job" for them. The way this is written it implies that PJ is part of some cult.Also:
Witnesses also don't usually get involved in worldly affairs.
This is the worst. After it is implied that PJ is a freaky religious person, it is then implied that she is a bad Jehovah's Witness. Good ones, according to Maureen O'Gara, "don't usually get involved in worldly affairs," which implies that PJ is a bad JW because the whole reason any news organization cares about her is because she is getting involved in the worldly affair called Linux. Its a cheap shot that is hidden in wording. I study marketing all day (or what it should be called "the way to say things without actually saying them") and this is obviously some unethical stuff.
Open Source Sushi
PJ's articles stand on their own merits. It is TOTALLY irrelevant who she is (although if she is NOT a paralegal, her legal procedure comments would be much less persuasive.)
As for who is paying her, if anyone, that is totally irrelevant as well. It is NOT totally irrelevant for MoG given that she has revealed inside contacts with SCO, access to information she could not have had without such contacts, and a willingness to inflate the importance of that information for SCO's benefit. All of PJ's stuff is procured from either the court records, people who witnessed court events, and the commentary of the GrokLaw community.
Finally, NO information about PJ's income source or ANY influence on GrokLaw by anyone was established in MoG's article, despite the snide reference to PJ living near to an IBM facility.
What WAS revealed is that MoG gained access to PJ's cell phone logs, which is definitely a violation of privacy and possibly illegal as well.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!