The Censorship Question
- WEALTHY: 5 fearless predictions (Andrew Gordon)
- HEALTHY: Stroke prevention for women (Jon Herring)
- WISE: Michael Kinsley on censorship
ALSO IN THIS ISSUE:
- The pros and cons of policing the Web (Michael Masterson)
- $97 gets you where you want to go (Lori Appling)
- Add "imprecation" to your vocabulary
You Deserve Answers… And Now You’re Going to Get Them
If you haven’t gained the wealth you crave, you need to do something differently.
Why? Because all change, all progress begins with a single decision, a single action.
Are you ready to seize the final piece of the puzzle? The missing ingredient to coast you all the way to financial freedom? You deserve answers and now you’re going to get them.
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- Patrick Coffey
5 Hot Trends to Keep on Your Wealth-Building Radar
By Andrew M. Gordon
It’s fine and good to look back on last year and see what took off and what got stuck in the mud. But it’s a bad idea to bet on last year’s trends. Trends aren’t automatically renewed on a yearly basis – like government-office lease contracts. If they were, we’d be investing in the trends of the year before last or 10 years ago, for that matter.
Some trends will subtly shift this year and some will reverse course. And some will just keep on doing what they’ve been doing. With this in mind, here are some fearless predictions for this year.
| Last Year’s | This Year’s | |
|---|---|---|
| Hot Commodity: | Uranium | Corn |
| Country on the Rise: | Venezuela | Thailand |
| Fastest-Growing Energy: | Biodiesel | Nuclear/Solar |
| Hottest Sector: | Real Estate | Health Care |
| Fastest Exchange: | Dow | NASDAQ |
New technologies are coming into their own. The energy situation is in a state of flux. Some countries down on their luck are reviving. Others are going in the opposite direction. 2007 will be an interesting year, and I’m going to have lots of fun helping you invest wisely and safely.
[Ed. Note: Andrew Gordon, ETR's financial expert, is the editor of our new investment service, INCOME. Each month, he uncovers specific stocks that promise safety (first and foremost), along with much higher-than-average profit potential.]
"In any event, the proper question isn’t what a journalist thinks is relevant but what his or her audience thinks is relevant. Denying people information they would find useful because you think they shouldn’t find it useful is censorship, not journalism."
Michael Kinsley
Internet Forums & Blogs: The Censorship Question
By Michael Masterson
To get ready for the $1.65 billion sale to Google back in October, YouTube started "cleaning up" its site. One of the videos it deleted was an entry from Michelle Malkin titled "First They Came," about authors, politicians, and film makers who have been targeted by Islamic terrorists.
Because Malkin is considered to be a right-wing fundraiser, the video entry was interpreted by critics as political. YouTube bought into the criticism and dumped the video, which led to protests from the other side. The protesters claimed that YouTube had loads of videos promoting the terrorist point of view.
Which brought New York Times columnist Tom Zeller Jr. to the question: How do you police these things? They are, after all, set up as mechanisms for people to post just about anything they want.
In his article for the paper, Zeller quoted Jeffrey Rutenbeck, Dean of Communication and Creative Media Division at Champlain College in Burlington, VT, who said that attempts to censor Internet sites "almost always raises awareness of an issue. And this provides a great conversational landscape." Rutenbeck pointed out that other efforts to censor sites have backfired when the communities withered after censorship was implemented. "A lot of communities just died a slow death … because they became so intolerant of anything that could offend anyone in the group."
He said he thought YouTube might face the same problem if it enforces its policy of removing any video that is "unlawful, obscene, defamatory, libelous, threatening, pornographic, harassing, hateful, racially or ethnically offensive, or encourages conduct that would be considered a criminal offense, give rise to civil liability, violate any law, or is otherwise inappropriate."
I have – as you can imagine – my own thoughts on this issue. But before I tell you what they are, I thought you’d like to hear from some people who have a great deal of experience in this area.
ETR’s Position
MaryEllen Tribby, who runs ETR, says that she tries to maintain a balance between respectfulness and the desire to provoke thoughtful responses with all communications with readers – a balance the ETR editorial team strives to maintain in our ETR e-zine.
"Some writers bring up subject matter that hits a nerve with our readers," Suzanne Richardson, ETR’s Managing Editor, told me. "But we feel it’s important to expose our readers to all sorts of different perspectives, even if those viewpoints cause discomfort among some of them.
"That doesn’t extend to using overly crude language, racist, sexist, or otherwise offensive remarks," she said. "That gets edited out."
"As publishers," says MaryEllen, "our goal is to provide useful and unique research and information. A legitimate writer should be able to do this without making inflammatory remarks.
"However, it is also our job to educate and enlighten our readers by raising awareness and creating controversy. This is why the Internet is such a useful tool. Not only can our readers talk back to us via Speak Out (ETR’s reader forum), they can talk to each other. That makes us (as publishers) more accountable for our messages. We need to believe in our ideas so that if a reader disagrees with something said on our reader forum, we should be able to counter the point – but never delete the posting."
AWAI’s Position
Katie Yeakle, who runs AWAI, has a similar policy. She pretty much lets AWAI members say whatever they want when they post comments on the AWAI member forum, but draws the line at commercialism under the guise of free speech.
"We don’t like people selling their products to our people without our permission," she says. "AWAI also has a policy against malicious, racist, and sexist copy, and anything overtly offensive or in bad taste."
How do readers react to this sort of policing?
"It makes some of them angry," Katie admits. "But here’s how I see it: If you’ve worked hard to build your own business and create a community, if you’ve invested time and energy and money in growing your company, you wouldn’t necessarily want to let someone else piggyback on your success. With a public forum, people have access to an audience they wouldn’t otherwise have. If they are allowed to advertise their own products or services to this group, they haven’t really earned the results.
"We do have traditional ways for other companies to gain access to our file. If someone has a product, I’m happy to review and promote it if I think it’s a good product. But people sometimes try to use a public forum as a way to circumvent industry-accepted advertising rates. And that doesn’t fall under the realm of free speech."
Katie argues that there is a difference between huge public forums like The New York Times, Google, and YouTube and the smaller, more private forum a business’s customers have access to. Organizations with a broad, universal reach may need to have different rules about what they censor and what they allow. A video about terrorism would be completely out of place on the ETR forum, for instance, while it seems perfectly natural on YouTube.
"When you have a public forum that you’ve invited people to," Katie says, "you must have agreed-upon standards for appropriate discourse. And, as a business owner, you have the right to curtail people who fail to conform to those standards."
Which Tack Should You Take With Your Site?
In some cases, curbing what people say is not about racy remarks or commercial pitches. Forum operators must also decide whether to take steps to keep the posts on topic. In a chat setting, it is common for comments to go off on tangents that are totally unrelated to the forum’s focus. For example, a chat on real estate could degenerate into a discussion of the latest celebrity gossip. And, before you know it, the latest paparazzi shot of Britney Spears pops up.
How sites handle this sort of thing varies. Some forums have an active moderator to keep things on track, while others trust that conscientious posters eager to remain on topic will steer the conversation back where it belongs. Still others feel that whatever posts are made in a forum are the prerogative of whoever is online at that moment, regardless of their adherence to the stated topic.
My view is that you should maintain a consistent standard with the information you publish, but not censor reader feedback on your blog or reader forum – neither the nasty racist/sexist/vulgar stuff nor the bogus commercial stuff.
Controversy creates interest, and idiotic, malicious, and outrageous reader responses to your ideas and advice will only make your site more provocative.
I’d even allow commercial plugs on the reader-response portions of your site. For one thing, they are very hard to control (especially the good ones). Plus, any time you spend policing them is time you could be spending on creating new commercial copy for yourself.
Your readers are smart enough to figure out what is coming from you and what is coming from other readers. They will sort the wheat from the chaff.
As I said, the bad stuff will only make your site more interesting. Let it be.
[Ed. Note: What do you think? Should reader forums be censored? If so, how? By whom? Weigh in at ReaderFeedback@gmail.com.]
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5 Ways to Avoid the Third-Leading Cause of Death in the U.S.
By Jon Herring
Thousands of studies have shown that a healthy lifestyle can reduce the risk of heart disease. But relatively few have addressed the effect of a healthy lifestyle on your risk of having a stroke.
Stroke is the third-leading cause of death in the United States (behind cancer and heart disease). And while men are stricken more frequently than women, it is still a concern for all of us. Unfortunately, until recently, much of the research on prevention has been performed only in men. But new research has helped to isolate the risk factors for women.
Researchers from Harvard Medical School studied over 35,000 women to determine which healthy lifestyle attributes can be associated with a reduced risk of stroke. They determined that women should focus on the following:
- Never smoking
- Having no more than 10 drinks per week
- Exercising at least four times per week
- Maintaining a low but healthy body mass index
- Eating a healthy diet high in fiber, folate, and omega-3 fatty acids, and low in trans-fats and glycemic load
- Sounds like common sense to me. And, I assure you, if you follow the suggestions above, you will not only reduce your risk of stroke but just about every degenerative disease known.
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Travel Tip: Now You Need a Passport for Mexico, Canada, the Caribbean, or Bermuda
By Lori Appling
As of January 23, 2007, if you’re traveling between countries in the Western Hemisphere by air, you’ll need a passport. For some destinations, a birth certificate or driver’s license used to be enough. No longer. The new rule applies to air travel only. And as early as January 2008, you’ll need your passport when traveling by boat or on land, too.
The message? Get a passport now.
Allow the U.S. government six weeks to process your application, which costs $97. Or, for an additional $30, hurry the process and get your passport in two weeks.
You’ll find details and forms at the official government website.
If you’re really in a rush, a "passport expediter" can – for a fee on top of the government-processing fee, of course – have your passport to you in as little as 24 hours. Here are two such providers:
- Passports and Visas – $149 gets you a passport in 24 hours, $119 in 2-3 business days; $89 guarantees you’ll have it in 4-6 business days, and for $59 you’ll have it in 7-10 business days.
- American Passport Express – $179 gets you a passport in 24 hours, $129 in 2-3 business days; $99 guarantees you’ll have it in 4-6 business days, and for $59 you’ll have it in 6-9 business days.
[Ed Note: Lori Appling is the director of AWAI's Travel Division, which publishes programs and holds workshops that help people get paid to travel. To find out how you can turn your travels into an income-producing venture, join their next Ultimate Photography Workshop in Charleston, SC.]
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Word to the Wise: Imprecation
An "imprecation" (im-prih-KAY-shun) – from the Latin for "to invoke harm on" – is a curse.
Example (as used by Wayne Johnston in The Colony of Unrequited Dreams): "After a while, he stopped hurling imprecations… and, as he often did after such an outburst, became quite remorseful."
[Ed. Note: Become a more persuasive writer and speaker ... build your self-confidence and intellect ... increase your attractiveness to others ... just by spending 10 VERY enjoyable minutes a day with ETR's new Words to the Wise CD Library.]
Michael Masterson
Copyright ETR, LLC, 2007
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