If the mainstream publishes only several perspectives on news, then we want to publish 30.
~~ Disinformation cofounder Richard Metzger [1]

I couldn't help but notice that if a bomb went off in this place, it would be curtains for Radical Paranoid Theory in the USA.
~~ MTV satirical cartoonist Adam Mortimer [2]

The conspiracy and subculture search-engine Disinformation offers media ethicists a unique real-life case study of how the dot.com industry is changing traditional ethical concerns.

For reasons I will outline below, the Internet challenges some aspects of the Kantian and Utilitarian frameworks that underpin many university-level philosophy courses. As Disinformation's editor since November 1999, I have found it more pragmatically useful to draw upon emerging integral, memetic, and biopsychosocial systems models that seem to more closely resemble the Internet's chaotic and ever-shifting conditions. [3] These models have been discussed by sociologists examining media ethics. [4] This does not mean that Kantian and Utilitarian frameworks are irrelevant - both schools have a rich legacy only now being discovered and applied by many business and media ethicists. [5]

Ichak Adizes' corporate lifecycles model integrates the study of ethics and organisational growth; both are necessary factors for studying the dot.com economy and its unique ethical crises. [6] Adizes contends that as organizations pass through courtship, infant, go-go, adolescence, and prime growth eras, their management faces different ethical uncertainties, as well as a variety of traps which may kill-off the entity altogether (late and extinct eras). [7]

Co-founded by Richard Metzger [8] in 1996, Disinformation has survived death threats, ethical crises, and industry changes, to become a popular Internet vortal. [9] Disinformation represents the counterculture's consolidating "marketeer wave" [10]; its go-go era pirate/cable network model avoids CNN's prime-era institutional self-mythology. [11]

Conspiracy filmmaker Oliver Stone sheltered Disinformation's courtship-era, but the site's infancy-era was notoriously troubled. In what subsequently became known as the "Great World Wide Web Swindle", [12] Los Angeles-based AMD Interactive (a subsidiary of cable television conglomerate TCI) funded an early prototype for $1 million. TCI believed it would establish rapport with the then-lucrative X-Files audience for nefarious commercial purposes. [13]

Despite publicity generated by Disinformation's first-run of on-line Heavens Gate material and its unapologetic confrontation of America's sociopolitical extremes, [14] conservative TCI CEO John Malone personally intervened - an action widely perceived by the industry as corporate self-censorship - and ended TCI's funding. But Metzger had not yet signed over Disinformation's content or corporate identity copyrights, so he took the existing development material, and became part of Razorfish Studios in 1999.

The TCI debacle and the editorial transition from Richard Metzger to myself could have been an ethical minefield. [15] High-profile sites that have avoided editorial-oriented ethical crises such as Getting It and APBNews have suffered from "ruinously intense competition" (James Martin) and post-Dotcom Crash funding limits; the Internet is littered with "ghost sites" (Bruce Sterling).

Internet means-of-production itself is thus an arena of ethical concern: self-empowered small skunkworks teams are the norm for fast-cycle development. These are likened to working in digital sweatshops or the classical Hollywood studio system's production line; forum sites now promote whistle-blowing and disclosure of corporate secrets as a form of prank. [16] Despite this, the Internet shares open-ended and bottom-up access that was integral to the Multiperspectitalism media model (Henry Gans), but is more amorphous in nature and trans-national in scope (and closer to Nietzsche's asperspectivalism in ideals).

An audience minority has argued that Disinformation's anti-censorship and counterculture credentials were undermined by its corporate connections [17] (the infancy era events influenced audience perceptions regarding impartiality as an ideal). For example, when Disinformation's Webby Awards 2000 nomination was announced, I was queried by activist media about the possible "conflict of interest" between its corporate ownership and the fact that a high-level Razorfish executive was an awards judge. [18]

This largely fear-driven critique of impartiality has become synonymous in the post-Cold War period with the demise of bi-polar politics, [19] academia's interest in Postmodernist relativism, and the rise of new activism [20] (notably anti-globalism [21] and Culture Jamming). [22] Extreme forms of this critique are flawed by a "monological gaze" [23] which reduces complex organisational structures, moral ideologies, and belief systems to rhetorical sound-bites.

Organisational factors do impinge upon Internet-related ethical decision-making. In her book Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics, ethicist Jane Jacobs outlines conflicting 'Commercial' and 'Guardian' syndromes that occur in the business and media spheres. [24] The organisation's agents may face monstrous hybrids that result from malignant fusion [25] or systemic moral confusion: "when either moral syndrome - guardian or commercial - embraces functions inappropriate to it." [26]

Thus a philosophical discussion of Internet media and impartiality must encompass the sites' past circumstances (including any lingering "historical wildcards") and the interactive effects of audiences and wider sociopolitical movements. Who demands impartiality, for what purpose, when, and why?

New Media editors increasingly recognise that philosophical impartiality relies upon "ecologies of mind" (Gregory Bateson) which filter and contrast different mind-sets, values, and worldviews. [27] The Internet's infant Global Brain seems to reflect our own mind's processes of interpretation and selection of information (such as generalisation, distortion, deletion, and nominalisation). [28]

Usually a site avoids the pretence of impartiality altogether, by deploying 'advocacy' journalists who adhere to a specific ideology or mythic-membership group, such as Alexander Cockburn (Counterpunch), David Horowitz (Salon), or Dr. Laura and Oliver North (Townhouse).

Another way of avoiding impartiality and impending censorship from within [29] is to generate external controversies. Matt Drudge (The Drudge Report) broke the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky scandal, even though it was known by The New York Times: the Fourth Estate remains conservative. [30] Disinformation has flirted with smaller-scale controversies: it was amongst the first news sites to publish Heaven's Gate on-line material; Senator John McCain was questioned on ABC News about his 1980s links to a right-wing Arizona press subsequent to underground publisher Todd Fahey's expose.

Industry advocacy groups also avoid impartiality, and may have undisclosed agendas. For example, Accuracy in Media, a corporate-funded lobby group, has a well-documented history of intimidating liberal journalists with flak. [31] This means that Internet-based media operates at a conceptual distance from both mainstream society and traditional media forms, even when sites are created as on-line extensions of pre-existing publications.