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| Volume 49, Number 3, Fall 2000 |
ON THE LISTSby Bob Finn nasw-talk
To greatly oversimplify the debate about STATS, which has been raging in one form or another for a year or more, Norman and Sheldon charge that STATS has a hidden, right-wing agenda, and that this agenda becomes obvious when the organization's funding sources are revealed and when some of the positions they take are decoded. Boyce argues that "if you are looking for easy clues to a political agenda, funding is only one factor. You would also want to know profit motives, personality of the researchers including factors like optimism vs. pessimism and degree of paranoia, presence or absence of coercion, and perhaps other factors as well, maybe even including the politics of the researchers' parents." This brief summary clearly does not do any party in this debate full justice. To follow the latest round, go to the nasw-talk archives at nasw.org/lists/ starting at September 15 and look for the subject headers "Who pays for the study?" and "STATS." nasw-freelanceLois Morris is having a tough few months. Not only did she lose a copyright suit she should have won (see information about her saga on the Web site and The Free Lance), but now a publication apparently wants her to submit her interview tapes to a fact checker. On September 8, she wrote, "I've always submitted transcripts, relevant sections of transcripts, and/or the interviewees' phone numbers. In 20 years of freelancing, nobody's ever asked for/insisted on tapes, and it sticks in my craw." Well it sticks in a lot of other craws as well. Dodi Schultz, for example, replied "These are your personal notes, made in the course of your (self-employed) work. They may well contain material irrelevant to the story you've just completed . . . that is none of this magazine's business, perhaps material of a personal nature . . . They're your property, and the publisher has no right to them." Blake Powers wrote: "If the magazine is one for which I would like to continue to do work, I might, repeat, might, offer to provide copies of the tapes but not the originals. I would also tell them how much it will cost to get them copied and that as it is not covered in the contract that they will need to pay that before I turn the copies over." Several others suggested that Lois duplicate just the parts of the tapes that support quotes in the story, and that sparked a technical discussion on the best way to accomplish that. Jean Lawrence proposed taking a passive-aggressive approach and saying, "Gosh, I must have taped over them." She also wondered whether a fact checker would actually listen to a long interview tape. And Jennie Dusheck realized that this suggested an approach a bit toward the aggressive side of passive-aggressiveness: "Maybe one could make the tape even longer by splicing in conversations with telemarketers." To follow this discussion, look for the subject headers, "Hand over my tapes?" and "duping tapes." nasw-prOn September 7, Barb Chamberlain asked, "What policy does your university or institution have for authorizing announcements about new products or research? Who signs off (what level of authority) on the copy of a press release?" She received an interesting range of responses. Mary Beckman of the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory was at one end of the range. "My god. Here, it's EVERYONE," she replied, "including the mother of the researcher and the security guards of every building. With 6,000 employees, it can be somewhat overwhelming." Caltech, where I used to work, was at that end of the range as well. Every release I wrote had to be approved by the assistant vice-president for public relations, the vice-president for institutional relations, every researcher and student mentioned in the release, the researcher's division chairperson, any non-governmental donors mentioned in the release, and occasionally the Institute's provost or president. It took a minimum of two weeks to a month to collect all those approvals. According to Kelli Whitlock, Ohio University, where she works, is all the way at the other end of the range. "We send our releases to the source for fact-checking only; they often offer editorial comments, but we're not obligated to honor them." A'ndrea Messer says that Penn State has a similar policy: "In general, the only person who signs off on a news release is the researcher him or herself. If it is graduate student work, sometimes the grad student will have their advisor OK it and I recommend that, but they don't need to." The University of Southern California Health Sciences Campus falls somewhere in the middle of the range, writes Lori Oliwenstein: "Here, only my boss (the director of public relations on the health sciences campus) and the researcher(s) in question look over a release on research (usually a publication of research findings), unless it's just fraught with potential problems-in which case, the sky's the limit on people who will have their say. If a drug company or some such is involved and needs to see the copy, they're given it as well. And sometimes, if my boss or I are concerned about anything, we'll ask a colleague of ours on our main campus to give it a read, or a department chair, or whoever might have more expertise and/or a more critical eye than the researcher doing the work." To follow this discussion, look for the subject header "Invention disclosure media policy." Bob Finn moderates NASW's Web site and e-mail lists at http://www.nasw.org. His e-mail address is cybrarian@nasw.org. |
If you ever
find yourself in a narrow alleyway, and you happen to see Norman
Bauman and Sheldon Rampton on your left, and Boyce Rensberger
on your right, my advice is, duck. Norman, Sheldon, and Boyce
were the major combatants in a series of discussions on nasw-talk
concerning an organization called STATS (The Statistical Assessment
Service,