Weiye Loh's Library tagged Accountability → View Popular, Search in Google

Jul

2011

journalism.sg » News Corp inquiry raises questions about media accountability

The pressure to meet a daily strike rate on scandals and denouements made his UK tabloid editors slide beyond legality into allegedly criminal practices now being more thoroughly investigated by the Met and Parliament. NoW or The Sun were not alone in this. Phone-hacking and payoffs to police are alleged to be widely practiced by all the tabloids.
All of this raises existential questions about the un-wisdom of allowing such media ownership concentration and the urgent need to: quarantine media from politicians, government and Big Business; protect citizens from intrusive paparazzi and privacy invasion; establish a press ombudsman with real statutory powers, and hold editors accountable for sins of commission and omission.

journalism.sg/...ons-about-media-accountability

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News News of the World Accountability

One is reminded of the pathetic performance of BP CEO Tony Hayward at the US Senate hearings on the Gulf of Mexico oil rig disaster. BP employed 90,000 staff globally. Tony Hayward denied awareness of the cost-cutting obsessions which compromised safety standards across the company. He did not know who approved such dangerous compromises and how such risky operations at sea were supervised. Perhaps he too was betrayed by the people he trusted?
Two high profile CEOs of high profile global corporations, both clueless when internal malpractice explodes into world news? Such lame excuses are unacceptable from corporate chiefs and political leaders. They are given too much power over people, resources and policy to be allowed to slither away.
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- Mr Murdoch espoused no particular political ideology. Some might call it a lack of principles. If anything was consistent in his media philosophy, it was profitable opportunism. If that meant pandering to the public appetite for ritual sacrifice of the rich and famous, so be it. If that meant offering a megaphone to Christian fanatics of America’s Bible belt and the kooky Tea Party wing of the Republicans, he would oblige. If bare breasts and titillation will outsell rival tabloids, fine.

Jul

2011

The Meaning of Accountability - GovLoop - Social Network for Government

The word “accountability” ranks right up there with “freedom,” “justice,” and “democracy” – words commonly used and thought to be understood by all. But that is wrong. It is a term that is complex and misunderstood, and subject to abuse in political discourse. But more importantly, because there is a lack of clarity, there are many different approaches used by politicians and public administrators to pursue it.

www.govloop.com/...the-meaning-of-accountability

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Accountability Politics Democracy

The first report, Public Accountability: Performance Measurement, the Extended State..., by Melvin Dubnick and H. George Fredrickson, is an academic piece filled with numerous concepts of accountability.
“Accountability is both a word and a bundle of concepts. As a word, accountability is notoriously ambiguous . . . “and as a concept, it has been around for centuries. It is basically social in nature; it must involve two or more individuals for it to come into place.

Accountability is typically associated with actions taken ‘after the fact’ . . to fix responsibility for perceived human errors (e.g., the response to Hurricane Katrina). But Dubnick and Fredrickson note that these after-the-fact approaches to accountability are often premised on before-the-fact expectations and assumptions about the behavior of individuals, groups, and even nations. These premises often lead to preventative accountability approaches such as internal controls, ethics training, performance reports, financial reports, etc. The question is: do they work and are they worth the cost?

The authors observe: “According to proponents of accountability-centered reforms, enhanced accountability will (among other things) result in greater transparency and openness in a world threatened by the powerful forces of hierarchy and bureaucratization. . . accountability will bring formal and precise measures of performance to government so the public can know how well their government is meeting public expectations.” But Dubnick and Fredrickson aren’t so sure about how valid this is.
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- The second report -- Don’t Count Us Out: How an Overreliance on Accountability Could Un... by Public Agenda and the Kettering Foundation – is more provocative, and maybe more disturbing (as its title implies!). It is based on the premise that “institutions think of accountability primarily in informational terms while citizens think of it in more relational terms.”
- The authors call into question whether accountability, as defined by leaders and institutions “enhances problem solving and generates more public trust and cooperation.” They found that government leaders see accountability as measurement that drives improved performance, while citizens see accountability as responsibility by leaders and citizens themselves. Leaders focus on quantitative measures such as performance and targets, while citizens focus on qualitative measures such as moral, ethical, responsiveness, and compassion.
  
  The Kettering report concludes: “. . . the language of accountability – with its focus on numbers, metrics, benchmarks, and transparency – is not reassuring. For many Americans, it seems to have almost the opposite result, conveying that leaders do not understand or accept the ethical, moral, and human dimensions of the problem.” The authors point to specific examples in the sectors of education, health care, and banking. They suggest that increasing dialogue among stakeholders may be a potential “game-changer” in some sectors.