Year: 2012

“Titanic” Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 35 Comments

This is Titanic week, as all of you who don’t live in tunnels like prairie dogs must know. It has been a century since the sinking of the Great Unsinkable, with the deaths of 1500 souls including some of the great artistic, financial and industrial greats of the era. James Cameron’s 1997 film is also returning this week in 3-D, which means that the misconceptions, false accounts and outright misrepresentations the film drove into the public consciousness and popular culture will be strengthened once again. I think it would be ethical, on this centennial of the tragedy, for those in a position to do so to make a concerted effort to honor the victims and their families by honoring the truth. Thanks to Cameron, this is impossible. Continue reading →

Clarifications, Retractions, Excuses and Lies: The Low Art of Pretending You Didn’t Mean What You Said

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

A figure in the public eye says something that appears sincere but that leads to negative conclusions about the speaker? Well. there are many options:

1. The speaker can stand by his or her words, and take the consequences.

2. The speaker can regret the words, express remorse, apologize, and ask forgiveness.

3. The speaker can accept the criticism and agree that he or she meant what he said, but state that, upon listening to the criticism, state that he or she no longer feels that way, and would not say the same thing today.

4. The speaker can try to say that the original statement wasn’t intended to mean what anyone hearing the words would naturally think they meant, making a plausible claim that the original statement was mis-worded.

5. The speaker can deny that he or she said the words, even, in some cases, though it was on tape.

6. The speaker can say that the words were taken “out of context,” as they sometimes are, as in Shirley Sherrod’s case, when subsequent comments at the same event changed the meaning of the quote, but were edited out.

7. The speaker can say he was joking, as Senator John Kerry tried to do after he suggested that if you don’t study hard and end up ignorant, you’ll be in the military fighting with all the other dummies, or as Professor Charles Ogletree has claimed regarding his statement that a video of President Obama hugging a radical law school professor when he was a student was hidden during the 2008 campaign.

8.The speaker can say that the statement is “no longer operative”, as Newt Gingrich did after a televised interview earlier this year. Continue reading →

Bad Mother, Bad Football Coach

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

RUN AWAY!!!

Item: Arkansas athletic director Jeff Long fired stellar Arkansas football coach Bobby Petrino, the married father of four, for having an affair with Jessica Dorrell with a comely 25-year-old subordinate and lying through his teeth about it to Long and the University of Arkanasa. Commenting on the scandal, ESPN’s Calvin Cowherd described Petrino as a “great football coach.”

Wrong.

Item: In White Plains, NY., Jessica Vega, 25, has been indicted on charges of fraud and grand larceny for falsely claiming that she was dying of leukemia to inspire her friends and the community to donate money, gifts and services to her for her”dream wedding” in 2010. Later, her husband, Michale O’Connell,  discovered that the doctor’s letter she used as a prop was fake, and he divorced her. Now he’s living with her again, in Virginia, and the couple has had a second child. “She’s a good mom,” O’Connell explained.

Even more wrong.

We see this mistake all the time: observers separate core character and trustworthiness from an individual’s job performance. That cannot and should not be done, and to do it is dangerous and irresponsible.

Bobby Petrino, whose record since being hired at Arkansas had indeed been remarkable, is a miserable college coach, and not just because he is an untrustworthy and dishonest employee. In the incident that led to his dismissal,  he conducted an inappropriate on-campus relationship with a woman, who was not his wife, and who Petrino had personally added to his football staff. Petrino did not disclose he was in a relationship with the woman when he hired her, raising various issues including misuse of University funds, and after he hired her, sexual-harassment.The two were in motorcycle accident, and Petrino attempted a cover-up by calling a friend in law enforcement, leaving the scene with his mistress,  insisting to university administrators that she was not on the motorcycle with him at the time of the crash, and maintaining the lie that there was no relationship between them.   He called a press conference to “clear the air” about the accident, and continued the falsehood.

As Arkansas knew when it hired him away from the NFL’s Atlanta Falcons, Petino had a long, long record of untruthfulness, mostly exhibited in his surreptitious job hunting while being under contract, including when he jumped from the Falcons mid-season.

Okay, he’s a liar—but doesn’t his football record prove he’s great at his job? No…because he’s an educator; he coaches students, young men, in whom he’s supposed to imbue the principles of good character. Petrino can’t do that, because his own character is swill. Having someone with Petrino’s propensity to lie and break laws, rules, and commitments when it suits his needs to do so can only warp young minds, and a coach that wins games at the price of nurturing liars and cheats doesn’t belong on any college campus. He’s not a “great coach,” but an ethics corrupter.

But he’d be a better mother than Jessica Vega, I think. What kind of monster tells everyone including her husband-to-be that she has terminal cancer so she can have a glamorous wedding? A very, very sick one, I assume. Someone whose values are rotted through, and for whom the depths of her perversity and heartlessness are incalculable. She not only shouldn’t be raising children; she shouldn’t be permitted in the same room with them, lest her vile, sociopathic sensibilities and utter contempt for others seeps into their young souls like industrial pollutants contaminating ground water.

Sure, she’s a good mother… if the objective is to raise Lucretia Borgia, Joseph Mengele, Pol Pot and Voldemort.

 

 

Ethics Quote of the Week: Former Fox Mole Joe Moto

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

“I am a weasel, a traitor, a sell-out and every bad word you can throw at me… but as of today, I am free, and I am ready to tell my story, which I wasn’t able to fully do for the previous 36 hours.”

–—Joe Moto, upon getting his walking papers at Fox News. Moto, a producer on the O’Reilly show, had been sending anti-Fox posts to the gossipy and ethics-free website Gawker, denigrating the company that was paying his salary. His work as the “Fox Mole” didn’t last long, as he was discovered and fired after only two undercover posts.

Joe Moto, while at Fox News

Joe Moto is a fick.* He can’t justify his conduct, which is as low as it gets. In his statement above, which is part of his first post-Fox column, he acknowledges that he has no ethical argument left to him for his disloyal, cowardly breach of an employer’s trust, but informs the world that he intends to cash in anyway. I will say this clearly: anyone who ever hires this guy for any job, from working in TV to yard work, is insane. Continue reading →

Trayvon Martin’s Mother Says That The Killing of Her Son Was An Accident. Well, That’s Certainly A Generous and Reasonable Thing For Her To—Wait, WHAT???

/ Jack Marshall / 38 Comments

Great. Thanks for that statement, Sybrina. Now look what you've done to my head!

You think the Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman Ethics Train Wreck is almost done? Ha! I would love for you to be right, but the signs are not promising:

  • Yesterday, the special prosecutor ended the suspense and announced that Zimmerman would be charged, putting a sock in the collective mouths of activists who claimed that the case was already closed. That was nice, but it also allowed Al Sharpton to claim that it was the demonstrations, the threats and the public outcry that forced that outcome. This is bad in three ways:

1.) It suggests that the U.S. justice system can be manipulated by mob rule;

2.) It tells the public that any citizen might be arrested, not because law enforcement believes it has a legitimate case, but because his rights have been balanced against other political and popular factors and found to be dispensable; and

3.) He may be right. Angela Corey, who made the decision to charge Zimmerman without a grand jury, strongly denied Sharpton’s point, and we should all hope she was being truthful.

  • But she almost certainly over-charged. Again, with a second degree murder charge, she is saying that there was no self-defense and that Zimmerman shot Trayvon out of spontaneous anger, animus or other cause that does not include any excuse or legally recognized mitigating factor. Here’s hope again: I hope she has sufficient evidence to support this. Otherwise, she has set everyone up for another round of mob fury and even violence, when Zimmerman is released by the judge who must rule on the “Stand Your Ground” law’s application to Zimmerman before trial, or when a jury finds that the evidence doesn’t support the charge beyond a reasonable doubt. Unethical: if Corey took this path  intentionally to take the city and state off the hook, guaranteeing that a judge would take the heat, and everyone could attack the judiciary for following the law, since that is the current fad. Unethical: if she overcharged to give the jury the unenviable job of freeing Zimmerman, since people are used to blaming Florida juries. (See: Anthony, Casey) Requiring less suspicion is the theory, advanced by some defense lawyers, that Corey is over-charging to put leverage on Zimmerman (he will be facing life imprisonment) and squeeze him to agree to a lesser charge, like manslaughter. Prosecutors are not supposed to charge citizens with crimes they know they can’t prove in trial; it is professional misconduct. I know, Jack McCoy used to do it all the time on Law and Order. So do too many prosecutors. It’s still unethical.
  • Zimmerman promptly turned himself in, which means that his blabber-mouth lawyers were even more unethical than I thought they were, suggesting that Zimmerman was on the run and out of state when, obviously, he wasn’t. George is well rid of these two.

If this wasn’t enough to prove that the Trayvon train wreck was still rolling, Sybrina Fulton, the dead teen’s mother, weighed in with this jaw-dropper: Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: Ashley Judd

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Actress Ashley Judd (Full Disclosure: I am a long-time fan) finally has had it with snarky and degrading public speculation about her face, her weight, her appearance, and whether the star of TV’s “Missing” has “had work done,” and properly slams the celebrity media and those journalists who either write about her like she’s a competitor in a dog show or question her conduct and character based on their assessment of what she “should” look like.  Her verdict: it’s misogyny. The acting member of the Judd family has written a passionate, perceptive, articulate (if you forgive occasional lapses into feminist jargon, like objectification otheration, and (yuck)  heteronormative) and courageous essay over at the Daily Beast. If you have a daughter, have her read it. If you have a son, have him read it too. Heck, everybody should read it….here.

I wonder if the Daily Beast editors read it.  Here is Ashley Judd, eloquently pleading that women should be assessed base on how they do their job rather than on their perceived sex appeal, and where does the website post it?

On the page called “The Sexy Beast.”

You have a lot of work to do, Ashley, but you’re fighting the right fight.

Brava.

Next To Board The Trayvon Martin Ethics Train Wreck? Why, The Lawyers, Of Course!

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

George Zimmerman attorneys Craig Sonner and Hal Uhrig explaining that their client is innocent, and how they are dropping him like a hot potato because of all the suspicious things he's been doing.

Over at the Legal Ethics Forum, the superb blog on the many and fast-moving ethical issues in the legal field, the usually reserved and impeccably professional blog founder, attorney John Steele, had this message for George Zimmerman’s ex-lawyers:

“[S] hut up, guys. Shut the h*** up. It’s not about you. It’s supposed to be about the client.  And that’s even before we get to the ethics rules on confidentiality.”*

Really, that’s about all that needs to be said.

During Ken Starr’s investigation of the Monica Lewinsky affair, his ethics counsel, former Watergate prosecutor Sam Dash, resigned with a public statement that he believed Starr had crossed ethical lines. Sam was my ethics professor in law school, and a finer man and more ethical lawyer never walked the earth, but on that day his ethics alarms broke down. A lawyer may not harm his or her client during the representation, and that includes leaving it. Why lawyers think that the fact that a case is getting a lot of publicity should alter their ethical obligations is a mystery, but they often do. If you have a dispute with a client, if you’ve decided that a client is dishonest, manipulative or can’t be trusted, or if, as in Zimmerman’s case, he takes actions that make your job more difficult or doesn’t communicate with you enough to do a competent job, fine: Rule 1.16 of the Rules of Professional Conduct says you can quit. The rule also says, however, that “…a lawyer must take all reasonable steps to mitigate the consequences to the client.” One of those reasonable steps is not to make your withdrawal a major news story. Continue reading →

Were The Marlins Right To Suspend Ozzie Guillen for Loving Fidel Castro?

/ Jack Marshall / 30 Comments

And imagine...Media Matters had NOTHING to do with it!

‘”I love Fidel Castro,’ blurts Ozzie Guillen, the new manager of the Miami Marlins, in his Jupiter, Fla., spring-training office before an early-March team workout.”

And with that spontaneous utterance, quoted in a Time magazine feature, Guillen, who was hired during baseball’s off-season to lead the long-languishing Miami baseball franchise to elusive community popularity and on-the-field success, suddenly found himself at the epicenter of a career-threatening controversy. Cuban groups in the Miami area were horrified, and demanded that Guillen be fired. Guillen immediately went on an apology tour, arguing that he had “mistranslated in his head from Spanish to English,” and that he emphatically did not “love” the Cuban dictator, but in fact hated him. Even though he said he loved him. That’s some bad translating.

“I feel like I betrayed my Latin community,” Guillen said to one Miami group, according to ESPN’s translation of his comments in Spanish. “I am here to say I am sorry with my heart in my hands and I want to say I’m sorry to all those people who are hurt indirectly or directly. I’m sorry for what I said and for putting people in a position they don’t need to be in. And for all the Cuban families, I’m sorry. I hope that when I get out of here, they will understand who Ozzie Guillen is. How I feel for them. And how I feel about the Fidel Castro dictatorship. I’m here to face you, person to person. It’s going to be a very difficult time for me.”

He got that right. Today the Marlins suspended their manager for five games, saying in a statement, Continue reading →

The Donald’s Dangerous Ethics: Loyalty Trumps Honesty On “Celebrity Apprentice”

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

Your ethics ignorance makes me angry, Donald. You won't like me when I'm angry...

The original version of Donald Trump’s self-promoting  reality show competition “The Apprentice” occasionally created a useful business ethics scenario. Once The Donald started using B-list celebrities instead of real aspiring executives, however, the show deteriorated into ego insanity and the kind of freak show conflicts one would expect with participants like Jose Canseco, Joan Rivers and Dennis Rodman.

Surprisingly, last week’s episode blundered into a substantive, if confusing, ethics lesson. It was Donald Trump’s ethical priorities that were exposed, and as should surprise no one, they are as warped as Trump himself.

I can spare you all the details of the episode, which involved the weird assortment of celebs breaking into two teams to see who could devise the better commercial for Entertainment.com, as judged by the website’s execs. As usual, the losing team’s leader and the two team members fingered by her (in this case) had to have a show-down with Trump in “the Board Room” to determine who would be on the receiving end of Trump’s trademark line, “You’re fired!” This time one of the three potential firees was none other that  old Incredible Hulk himself, Lou Ferrigno, who has distinguished himself this season as a perpetual whiner, especially adept at blaming the members of his teams rather than accepting responsibility himself. He was richly deserving of the Trump pink slip in this episode, especially for the over-the-top violent and disparaging language he leveled at a female team mate, comedian Lisa Lampanelli. In the eyes of Trump, however, Lou clinched his demise not by being an unprofessional boor, but by being…honest.

“Who do you think had the better commercial?” Trump asked the former green alter-ego of the late Bill Bixby. It sure didn’t sound like a trick question. Ferrigno responded that the winning team’s commercial was better, an eminently reasonable response given that he and the other two celebrities on the hot seat were there because the commercial they had crafted had been judged as inferior. This, however, was seen by The Donald as a rank betrayal. He fired Lou, in part for his slug-like performance on the assigned task, but mostly, he said, for Ferrigno’s “great disloyalty” to his team.

Whaa? Continue reading →

Comment of the Day: “Unethical Quote of the Week: Georgetown Professor Michael Eric Dyson”

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Presenting one of the very best Comments of the Day

Rick Jones, whose own blog Curmudgeon Central should be on everyone’s list of bookmarks and visited often, delivers one of the finest and most thoughtful comments ever to grace Ethics Alarms, and we’ve had many excellent ones. His topic is my post regarding Professor Dyson’s comments on ABC this Sunday about criticism of President Obama, but Rick makes a perceptive connection to the Trayvon Martin controversy as well.And here is the really amazing part: there is not a word here that I don’t agree with completely.

Here is his Comment of the Day, on the post Unethical Quote of the Week: Georgetown Professor Michael Eric Dyson:

“It strikes me that President Obama has come in for at least his share of sniping—legitimate and otherwise. But that isn’t the issue here. Rather, how much of that criticism is based on race? The honest answer is that we can’t say with certainty, but we can make some pretty fair conjectures. Continue reading →