110 Being ethical, honest and helpful on the Internet

Radley Balko is a policy analyst for the Cato Institute specializing in "nanny culture" and consumer choice issues, including alcohol and tobacco control, drug prohibition, obesity, culture, and civil liberties. I first noticed his name on a group blog, HistoryNews Network, that was pasting into its blog document complete articles from other print and on-line sources, a huge moral and ethical lapse for an organization that itself had a long list of rules for behavior from readers who would want to comment. To be fair to Mr. Balko, I haven’t seen him do that on the group blog--but someone else in the group is. So I’m giving the whole group a thumbs down.

Then I came across an article Mr. Balko wrote on the regressive nature of cigarette taxes, how they increase crime and are a burden on the poor, and about 25 other really nasty societal and legal points in a very dense article that should have had 20-30 footnotes to really be useful. Is it the speed of the medium, its immediacy, the pressure to publish? Is it so much to ask, “Where did you get that statistic and may I see the original?”