The World as it is

I have already begun to develop a dark, pessimistic view of the corporate world and I shudder to think of what it might become when I have lived a longer in life. This blog has permitted me to exhibit positive sparks of thoughts and ideas, a slight shimmer of hope, but today I'm writing a reality check, as inspired-- if you can call it that --in part by this book "The World as it is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress" by Chris Hedges.

The book is a compilation of politically charged essays that were originally published in Truthdig (see it here), a progressive news website. It was recommended to me when I started to blame myself for not being able to find a job. A journalist, who worked mostly abroad, he writes

Because the press is not concerned with distinguishing truth from news, because it lacks a moral compass, it has become nothing more than courtiers to the elite, shameless hedonists of power and absurd court propagandists.

Accountability

I have been having somewhat of an email debate with a website (probably best not to name it) regarding some of their posted information about medications that can be taking while breastfeeding. My argument is not against their recommendations-- I lack the information to really know whether it is true --but in their lack of citations, references or further recommended reading.

In their response, I was slightly appalled to read "We cannot put references in for every drug a mother might take. Besides most wouldn't be able to access them or, more importantly, to understand them."


So today, dear website writer, I hold you publicly accountable for what you have said.

1. If you are unable to reference every drug that you present, how can you claim this as conclusive evidence? It seems to me that you should only present the drugs that you know about, in order not to misinform.

2. Access: I have complained about this one before, but unless we lobby for more public access and encourage the use of publicly available articles, we will get nowhere. I spoke to someone at a talk about Research and Media and he felt that articles that are published in private journals will fizzle out in time, given the growing number of publicly available ones. The demand will shift, which we already see in the form of public databases or even google books and google scholar. The hope is also to have key informants, leaders, I suppose, that people may turn to who have access to the information that is needed.

3. Won't be able to understand them. This part hurts me, because I wonder whether our hearts are in the right place when we put out information guidelines to the public, whether we really believe that they will be effective, whether we really believe in capacity-building. How can we foster health literacy if we water down all the information? How can we expect the public to decipher messages strewn in corporate campaigns if they cannot understand research? Understand the words: accountable, conflict of interest, transparent, public or private, corporate funder, and so on.

Do we 

lower the standard 

or 

do we raise it?

Conflicts of interest and Transparency

I quite liked a quote on the UN Public Administration Program website (here) regarding Ethics, Transparency and Accountability:

The explosion of new information and communication technologies is also allowing for a rapid, global diffusion of ideas and practices, enabling the public to demand higher standards of ethics, transparency and accountability in the public sector.

In my reply to this email today, I wrote:

To sum, I thought the information you presented was interesting, especially in its clear clarification of which drugs can be taken while breastfeeding, I just wanted to see a little accountability. As an outsider looking at your website, I look for endorsements. I look for any sign that your information has been tainted by conflicts of interest, even in the form of a simple statement. These are words that the public needs to learn and grow used to.

Book cover from KPFK 90.7 FM website