Month: March 2012

A Secret Service Betrayal

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

A despicable former Secret Service agent named Dan Emmett has self-published “Within Arm’s Length,” a tell-all  book about his work protecting the Clintons.  I’m not going to repeat any of his stories, and nobody should read his book either. This kind of thing is another fever on the way to the complete death of trust and professionalism.

Emmett’s job was to guard the First Family, and as part of his job he saw them all in private and unguarded moments. The Clintons had to trust that his sole objective was to ensure their safety, not to gather juicy material for a book, and they should not have had to worry about whether every stray remark or imagined slight would later find its way to the internet. “Within Arm’s Length” is nothing less than betrayal, and in my view, it falls just short of treason, and perhaps not short at all. Undermining the relationship between the Secret Service and the President of the United States, which this book does, threatens the safety of future Presidents. For agents to do their jobs, they must be trusted to the extent that nothing is withheld from them out of fear that they will disclose it. Emmett proves that such unquestionable trust is unwarranted, and in this sad era where betrayal is rewarded or shrugged off as predictable, probably impossible. Continue reading →

One Small Step For Honesty, Integrity and Freedom of Expression, One Small Defeat for Really Dumb Political Correctness

/ Jack Marshall / 32 Comments

Wait---WHAT'S THAT ON THE JERSEY??? NOOOOOOOO!!!!

The Houston Astros will be celebrating their 50th anniversary this baseball season. It hasn’t been a great half-century for the Astros—the team only made it to one World Series and lost in a four game sweep; its stadium was once named “Enron Field,” and the team was responsible for the introduction of fake grass to the sport—but they are still here, and that’s something. The planned celebration was to include the release of authentic jerseys from the first edition of the team in 1962, when they were called the Houston Colt 45’s. The 2012 Astros were going to play a game in those jerseys, but Major League Baseball decreed that the original logo couldn’t appear on the shirt—because it was a pistol.

This is the kind of political correctness nonsense that borders on attempted mind-control. Treating pictures of guns as if they are some kind of cultural contagion is not only offensive and silly, in this case it is air-brushing history. The original logo was what it was. A picture of a gun is quite appropriate, since the team was named after a gun. Honestly—what lunatic came up with this edict, and how come he or she wasn’t thrown into a padded room? Continue reading →

Well THAT Didn’t Take Long: The Next Step in School Censorship of Student Speech

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

Huh. You know, I just didn't think it would come from the schools! Well, live and learn...

Ethics Alarms has been steadfast in its position from the very first reports of schools presuming to punish students for what they post online, in their own time, in their own homes. That position is, and will forever be, that this is a gross abuse of power that must not be tolerated, much less encouraged. Every time I have written about this, there have been defenders of the practice. This story, from Minnesota, should convince them of how wrong they are. Continue reading →

Actor Ethics: Welcome to Colombia!

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Yes, Sarah Bernhardt was probably unethical too. Actors!

I just blacklisted an actor, at least as far as my theater company is concerned, and I feel badly about it, because I don’t like banishing artists even when they deserve it. This individual did deserve it, however.

I held auditions a couple of months ago for a very difficult and complex production requiring special talents and a large cast. The turn-out was excellent, and the quality of talent was superb, with the actors obviously excited about the project. Since the script needs to be tailored to individual performers, the fear of an actor dropping out after being cast was especially strong (the maxim in the theater community is “cast early, cast often…”), so I took the unusual step of asking every auditioner who had a good chance of being cast to be honest about their commitment to the show. “If you want to be considered for this project,” I said, “I need to have your assurance that you are serious about it and will not tell me, after we have decided to cast you, that you have changed your mind. The show is like a big jigsaw puzzle, and casting you will affect whether we cast other actors, not just in your role but in roles that interact with yours. And I definitely do not want to cast someone who is going to turn around in a week or a month and say, ‘Sorry, I got a better offer.’ This is a commitment, and if we are committing to you, I need to know that you are committing to us.”

When the offers went out, a few actors nonetheless refused. One had just learned that she needed to seek more lucrative employment because her husband had been laid off; another had union problems. Over the next several months, there was another major loss, as an actress whom I had cast even before auditions—right before the delivery of her first child—told me that parenthood was more involving in reality than she had predicted when she committed to jumping into a major role so soon. I had thought this might happen, and, frankly, now felt that she was making the right decision.  I told her: “As a director, I was happy to let you be irresponsible for the benefit of my show, but as a parent, I’m glad your priorities are straight.”

The other day, however, one of the actors who had gladly accepted a role sent our producer a terse e-mail saying:

“Unfortunately, I can no longer do the show.  Thank you so much for all your help with everything; I’m very sorry for the inconvenience.” Continue reading →

Needed: An Ethics Alarm For Twitter

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Pat Heaton, Twitter road kill.

Twitter, I have concluded, is itself an ethics trap. What the social networking site allows one to do is to take the usual, daily, routine moments of bad judgment, bad manners, carelessness meanness, incivility, indiscretion and stupidity that we all are guilty of on a regular basis, and magnify their perceived harm and significance exponentially. For the famous, this is especially perilous—witness “Everybody Loves Raymond” star Patricia Heaton, one of Hollywood’s few  open conservatives. She decided to join the Fluke-Limbaugh Ethics Train Wreck with a snotty tweet (“If every Tweaton sent Georgetown Gal one condom, her parents wouldn’t have to cancel basic cable, & she would never reproduce — sound good?”), and it has turned into a career crisis. Pre-Twitter, such a sentiment could have been shared orally with a few friends in snark-fest, or sent as an e-mail to a few trusted associates. But the tweet was viewed as piling on, which it was.

Even the non-famous are at risk: many women were outed on various blogs as idiots for tweeting after the Grammys how much they would like to be beaten up by Singer Chris Brown. Nobody knows when a badly thought out or offensive tweet will be re-tweeted into immortality. Then there is Twitter negligence. Pop idol Justin Bieber just engaged in that form of unethical Twitter conduct. Instead of sending a partial phone number to one friend, he sent it to all of his thousands of followers, who then drove a poor innocent crazy by flooding him with over 1000 phone calls. Continue reading →

Comment of the Day: “Ethics Train Wreck Extra: the Lawyer, the Advisor, and the Kennedy”

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Let's give a warm, Ethics Alarms welcome to attorney MAX KENNERLY!

Max Kennerly, the attorney who has argued that Sandra Fluke could legitimately sue talk show host Rush Limbaugh for his on-air insults, rebuts the Ethics Alarms post finding his argument disturbing. I’ll have a response at the end. Here is his Comment of the Day on “Ethics Train Wreck Extra: the Lawyer, the Advisor, and the Kennedy”:

“Who said anything about “silencing?” Defamation is a civil claim that, when proven, results in a monetary judgment, nothing more. Limbaugh’s still free to say what he wants.

“I assume your response to the “it’s not silencing” argument is something like, “he’s not technically silenced, but his speech is chilled.” To that, I ask which scenario is more chilling: Continue reading →

Ethics Quote of the Week: Ethics Alarms

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

“The lesson: the absence of respect for the opinions of others, accompanied by a lack of humility and a surplus of contempt for fairness and civility, will doom even intelligent, talented and hard-working individuals to inevitable failure, because they cannot be trusted, not by employers, not by colleagues, not by friends.”

—Me, from January of last year, writing about the demise of Keith Olbermann at MSNBC

Rush, Sandra, Bill, and Jack, plus many, many others, please—please— take note.

Ethics Hero: —Wait For It—Rush Limbaugh!

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

No, not for that!

For this:

Odd...one would think that a bed company would be familiar with this expression. Well, NOW it is!

After Rush Limbaugh’s personal attack on Sandra Fluke for her testimony before some House Democrats generated furious backlash and activist threats of boycotts of his sponsors, Sleep Train, which calls itself  “the No. 1 Bedding Specialist on the West Coast, and most recognized mattress retailer in the region,” announced that it was ceasing its advertising on Limbaugh’s daily radio show. It had been a national sponsor for 25 years. “As a diverse company, Sleep Train does not condone such negative comments directed toward any person,” the company said in a statement. “We have currently pulled our ads with Rush Limbaugh.”

Sleep Train is, to use the vernacular, a corporate worm. It began advertising with Limbaugh when it was a small company, and he has treated it well. At a moment when the talk show host was under attack by political opponents who want to get him off the air and be free of influential political commentary that often spears their cherished objectives, the company not only abandoned Limbaugh but kicked him when he was down. It was also deceitful about it: while it’s announcement sounded unequivocal, in fact it had only suspended its ads rather than withdrawn as a sponsor. Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: The Problem of the Buried Video

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

"He stole my vote!"

The video is meaningless. It shows college student Barry Obama speaking at a 1991 rally for radical college professor Derek Bell. At one point, the future president hugs Bell. So what you say? No kidding. That doesn’t mean that the anti-Obama truth squad wouldn’t try to make something out of it; indeed, they are now. The video has surfaced as Andrew Breitbart’s farewell poke in the eye to Democrats, and it’s not much of a poke.

The only interesting aspect of the tape is that Harvard Law professor Charles Ogletree said that he had the video and buried it during the 2008 campaign.  “I hid this during the 2008 campaign,” Ogletree said. “I don’t care if they find it now.”

Your Ethics Quiz: Is it unethical for an individual to hide theoretically damaging material relating to a presidential candidate he favors until after the election, if the material in fact contains nothing that would affect the vote of any individual with  intelligence superior to that of the average civic-minded horseshoe crab?

My answer: Definitely. I don’t care whether the information is extra-marital affairs, drug use, a DUI or appearing at a frat party in a tutu. No one has the right to withhold information, even stupid and useless information, from the media and electorate.  If the information is relevant, then the public has a right to know about it. If it isn’t, as this tape appears to be, then why hide it? If the tape was intentionally kept from the public, the conduct can’t be defended on the basis that it did no harm—the intent was to do harm. If one person would have changed his vote because he doesn’t want a President who ever hugged Derek Bell, even though that person is probably a fool, no one had no right to take away that vote through deception.

It’s all hypothetical, apparently, because Prof. Ogletree has explained that his “confession” was a joke, and was understood as such when he made it, if not reported that way. [Thanks to Barry Deutch for the link.]

So nobody hid anything, and those those horseshoe crabs who voted for Obama weren’t deceived after all.

Ethics Train Wreck Extra: the Lawyer, the Advisor, and the Kennedy

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

The faith-based institution mandate set the train on its fateful journey,  Rush Limbaugh sent a second locomotive into the stalled caboose after the first train jumped the track, and box cars are still tumbling in all directions:

  • Robert Kennedy, Jr., senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council and co-host of the nationally syndicated weekly talk radio show “Ring of Fire”, picked now to tweet this, which rapidly went viral on the internet:

Didn’t we just hear the ladies of The View explain that a word is a word, and it didn’t matter which gender was on the delivering or receiving end of “slut”? Is anyone calling for Kennedy to apologize for using the same uncivil language that has Rush Limbaugh in hot water? In fact, Kennedy’s verbiage is distinguishable: it is directed at a Senator, not a law student; calling a man, especially a politician, a prostitute is not as provocative as using that term to describe a woman, no matter what Whoopi says; Kennedy is clearly using the term metaphorically (so was Limbaugh, but it was too close for comfort, since the topic was sex); and, as one conservative wag said, call girls are classier than sluts. All true, and yet the willingness of Kennedy to use similar terms of denigration in public while the Right is pointing to Bill Maher and shouting hypocrisy indicates one of two things, and maybe both: 1) Kennedy is so confident that a double standard is in play that he feels completely comfortable in rubbing everyone’s face in it, or 2) this is just further proof of the generational dilution of talent, intelligence and skill in the Kennedy clan. Yes, I think “both” is fair. Continue reading →