Friday, August 26, 2016

The Ethics of ... Niagen?

I was discussing with students in class the other day the various journalism codes of ethics that exist, what they say, etc., when I pointed to this page via SPJ that provides a list of "Other Codes of Ethics (see left). Go ahead, visit the page. Click on the RTNDA code.

When you do, you get not exactly the most ethical of codes. It's an ad for niagen, some bogus supplement. What's fascinating is if you look at the URL, it's on the RTNDA server. The url is: http://rtnda.org/where-can-you-get-niagen/. If you visit the legitimate RTNDA site and click ethics, it takes you to the real code. How someone managed to plant this bogus supplement ad on the RTNDA site, I'll never know. And why SPJ refers to it, I'll never know either.


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