pudge's Journal: Joel Spolsky is Wrong Again

Joel Spolsky is wrong. He is talking about accepting products for review.

First, he misrepresents Scoble. To "prove" Scoble's logical argument is wrong, Spolsky compares it to something which is by definition unethical, because it is illegal. If it was not illegal, it is debatable whether or not it would be unethical at all. Scoble was assuming in his argument that this act was not immoral-by-law, thereby implicitly invalidating Spolsky's comparison. By setting up this false comparison, Spolsky is really committing the begging-the-question fallacy.

Second, frankly, neither what Scoble is doing, nor what Edelman is doing, is unethical, by any objective standard. You may think it is unethical according to your view of journalism. But this is part of the problem of the New Journalism World Order. I'll explain.

In the Dark Times, such standards were debated by editors and publishers and reporters and, sometimes, lawyers, and each publication or company came up with its own set of ethical standards. Some accepted any products. Some did so only with full disclosure. Some accepted none at all. None of these was objectively right or wrong, ethically speaking. A reasonable case can be made for each.

And let's be more frank: none of these decisions really had anything to do with ethics, directly. They had to do with business. If you are Consumer Reports and nothing matters more than the public perception of you as an objective researcher and reviewer of products, then that's a very different thing than a journal devoted to Microsoft Windows that gets free copies of XP.

It's not ethics. It's just business. Scoble makes a business decision to take it and disclose it. If that does not diminish his credibility, then he made the right decision.

And in this New Journalism World Order, there are, usually, no longer any editors or publishers or reporters beyond the guy in pajamas himself, and certainly no lawyers. So he makes up his own rules. And you may disagree with those rules, but your disagreement does not constitute a breach of ethics on his part.

There are, sometimes, ethical considerations, but merely accepting the product is not one of them. Doing so only raises the potential for other ethical concerns, such as whether you will be honest with your readers about how you got the product. If you took it for free and gave it a glowing review and didn't tell anyone you took it for free ... it's hard to see how that can be justified. But I'm open to you trying, if you care to. But the point is that it is not the taking of the product that is unethical.

Now Playing: Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers - Night Driver

Did we read the same blog?

[pythorlh]

I read the article, and I didn't get the same conclusion that you did. In fact, I never saw anywhere that he actually said it was unethical. He made the point about Scoble that you made about him, namely that they are commiting a logical falacy. In Scoble's case, it was that anything they do for their job is ethical. His comparison to an illegal act is a refutation of Scoble's argument, not an argument for or against the ethicality itself. Later, he goes on to decide that for him, personally, it's not

Re:

[ahamilton]

I think you missed the Joel saying "I've been thinking long and hard about this, and the only conclusion I can come to is that this is ethically indistinguishable from bribery." That is, Joel says it's unethical because he also believes that bribery is unethical, as noted when he says "For example, if Edelman paid a bribe to a government official to standardize on Windows, that would not be ethical, even though it's their job."

There's a few things wrong with that.

[Rysc]

Illegal things are not by definition unethical. If something is illegal it does not follow that it is unethical, just as if it is legal it does not follow that it is ethical. Joel was making a statement grounded in his own sense of ethics and, it appears, in his ethics it is not right for a government official to accept a bribe and it is not right for a blogger to accept a free laptop from Microsoft's marketing wing. Legality has no bearing.

It is only "Just business" if you choose to see it as just business

Re:

[pudge]

Illegal things are not by definition unethical. If something is illegal it does not follow that it is unethical, just as if it is legal it does not follow that it is ethical.

That's beside my point, which is that we see it as unethical primarily because it is illegal. It's all about perceptions. There's no objective truth in this case (I am no relativist, but that doesn't mean I think there is always a right and wrong answer for every question). His comparison is false because he is taking something we all agree is unethical (because it is illegal, but the reason why is beside the point) which Scoble would not have included as acceptable behavior.

He is misrepresenting Scoble

the angle that struck me

[Bill Dog]

From TFA:

And even though the blogger has fully disclosed what happened, their message is corrupting the medium.

These gifts reduce the public trust in blogs.

I'm upset that people trust me less because of the behavior of other bloggers.

I'll keep trying, though, to earn your trust.

Geez, I like Joel Spolsky, and like reading his opinions. But:
1) Blogs are not some vaunted medium, they're just peoples' opinions. If people trust bloggers anywhere near as much as he seems to think they should, then it's a good thi