Month: May 2012

Jamie Lynn Grumet, Child Abuser

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Those were the days….

My focus in the earlier post regarding Time Magazine’s borderline kiddy porn cover, showing a young woman with one breast exposed as a three-year-old child simultaneously sucks on it and eyes the camera, was the sleazy professional ethics behind such a flagrant attempt to attract sales through titillation. It never occurred to me that the photograph was real, and that the model had dragooned her own toddler son into the public eye as the world’s most-viewed breast-feeder. It never occurred to me because it seemed obvious that doing this would be spectacularly irresponsible and wrong, indeed a form of child abuse and as well as an abuse of parental power.

Ironically, I was a sucker. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: France

/ Jack Marshall / 37 Comments

France

France doesn’t seem to comprehend it yet, but it is embarking on an uncharted and dangerous journey by installing a leader whose lifestyle argues for the irrelevance of marriage.

Valérie Trierweiler, the partner of France’s newly-elected president François Hollande, is being referred to world-wide as France’s new, and unmarried, “First Lady.” She seems like a serious, admirable professional, and there are certainly benefits to any nation by having a woman of substance, intelligence and talent at or near the top of that country’s public figures. I know very little about Hollande, but I am assuming that he is qualified for the difficult job he is undertaking, and that he, like Trierweiler, are mature adults who have every right to structure their personal relationships however they please. That assumption, however, requires the omission of the duties of leadership from the calculation. Leaders cannot make personal decisions based only on their own needs, but must make those decisions while acknowledging an immutable and long-proven fact: leaders have a disproportional, almost frightening power to influence, shape and change a culture, and the more successful and popular  leaders are, the greater that power is. Continue reading →

Ethics Heroes: Seniors at Lexington (Ky) Catholic High School

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

The fun prom…in the parking lot.

When Lexington (Kentucky) Catholic High senior Hope Decker, 18 tried to take sophomore Tiffany Wright, 16, to the school’s senior prom as her date, school officials told the couple that they would not be admitted, because their unholy same-sex coupling violated the Catholic Church’s teachings. Defiant, the couple tried to enter the school’s gymnasium that night, where the prom was held, but as promised, their tickets were refused. So their fellow students held an impromtu protest prom outside the official one, in the parking lot. They played music from their cars, and set up a table for refreshments.

“We had a wonderful night, and we were surrounded by true friends,” Wright said. “I’ll remember it for the rest of my life.”

Here is what else she will remember for the rest of her life: Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: The Boston Red Sox

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Hold onto this one, Derek.

They can’t play baseball very well right now, but the Boston Red Sox*, my home town team, currently in last place in the American League East, knows how to make an ethical and generous gesture of respect and gratitude.

It has been largely forgotten now, but pitcher Derek Lowe was a big disappointment to the Red Sox during the regular 2004 season, barely winning as many games as he lost and pitching to a high earned run average. In the play-offs and World Series, however, Lowe was as good as good as a starting pitcher could be, going 3-0 and winning the clinching games of both the team’s stunning comeback play-off series win over New York and it sweep of St. Louis to win Boston’s first World Championship since 1918.

Tired of Lowe’s inconsistency and unpredictability (he had a reputation of partying too hard, especially on road trips), the Red Sox let him leave as a free agent after the 2004 season. Since 2004 he has been for the Atlanta Braves what he often was for Boston: a sometimes brilliant starting pitcher with a deadly sinkerball, and for the Red Sox, a distant memory. Last season Lowe’s home was robbed, and among the more than $90,000 of baseball memorabilia that was stolen was his Championship ring from that 2004 season. His insurance covered the monetary loss, but the ring, Lowe’s personal symbol of his key role in a Historic sports event, was lost forever.

Last week, when he was in Boston with his latest team, the Cleveland Indians, Lowe beat the Red Sox as a starting pitcher, and later received a message from the Red Sox owners that they wanted to give him something. Then John Henry, Larry Lucchino and Tom Werner, the trio of tycoons who have owned the team for a decade,  personally presented him with a 2004 World Series ring to replace the one that was stolen from his Florida home. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: The Daily Beast

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Does this look like a Panamanian fisherman to you?

The American public is cynical and mean-spirited enough, I think. It doesn’t need any more shoves in that direction from the crass hipsters at The Daily Beast.

Tina Brown’s site, recently named as the Web’s top news agregator, noted the follow-up to a story highlighted on Ethics Alarms, the stranded fishermen who were ignored by a passing cruise ship even though its passengers had alerted the crew. Two of the fishermen subsequently died; one of the survivors is suing Princess Cruises. The Beast intro to the story began this way:

“One U.S. cruise line has a litigious Robinson Crusoe on its hands.”

The story is sub-headlined: “Wilson!”, a reference to Tom Hanks’ volleyball companion in the film “Castaway,” who meets his end at sea.* Continue reading →

Time and Newsweek: Reaching The Dregs, and Ethics Be Damned

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

Dishonest or tasteless? Irresponsible or sensational?  A lie or a crime? The nation’s two, sad, archaic, useless, shameless, diminished news magazines, Time and Newsweek, both reached new lows this week as both magazines desperately brayed for readership with eye-catching covers that are to good journalism what Britney Spears will be to good judging in her new gig as a panelist on “X-Factor.”

I was going to make this an ethics quiz—which is more unethical?—but decided it was futile. The Time cover is colorable kiddie porn, using a (God, I hope!) photoshopped image* that no child should  be permitted to see on a news stand. The Newsweek cover, in addition to continuing the publication’s unconscionable deification of Barack Obama no matter what he does, is a lie. Obama isn’t gay. Newsweek is making a rhetorical link between Obama’s (vastly over-praised and still tepid endorsement of gay marriage) empathy with gays and Bill Clinton’s faux-status as the nation’s “first black President, but it is fatally flawed, logically and graphically. Everyone knows Bill Clinton isn’t literally black (except, perhaps, in the way Elizabeth Warren is Native American), but we can’t see that Obama isn’t gay from his image on the cover. All there is the copy: “The First Gay President.” There are people who will believe that, and who will see the cover without buying the magazine, since almost nobody buys either magazine any more.

Neither cover is responsible journalism. Both are graphic desperation, with neither magazine showing respect for readers, their topics, or their own distinguished pasts.

* Boy, was I wrong.

____________________________________________

Graphics: Time and Newsweek

Ethics Quiz: The Conundrum of the Crushed Crab

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

“OH THE HUMANITY! I mean…well, you know what I mean…”

A good friend related this scene on Facebook, and asks if she is losing her mind:

She was shopping at the open air fish market on Maine Avenue in Washington, D.C. when a vendor, whose cart was full of live blue crabs, had an escape attempt. One of the crustaceans made a dash for freedom, only to be squashed by the wheel of the cart.  “I screamed and then burst into tears,” she wrote. “It was awful. I tried to save the little guy.”  Then she realized that people were laughing at the drama, thinking it was a comedy….laughing at the crab getting crushed and at my friend for being upset by it.

She wrote: “Now I know he was destined for a pot of boiling water. But somehow – seeing that little creature getting run over was just too much for me. I know someone was going to eat that crab – but do we have to be cruel?”

Your Post-Mothers Day Ethics Quiz for crab mothers everywhere:

Were the laughers cruel, or merely recognizing a funny scene when they saw one? Continue reading →

Dear Alabama Farmers: Am I Sorry That You Are Inconvenienced By Enforcing The Law And No Longer Have Sufficient Illegal Immigrants To Exploit? No.

/ Jack Marshall / 121 Comments

It continues to boggle my fairly unbogglable mind to see how many illegal immigration apologists and open-border advocates regard these kinds of stories as support for not enforcing immigration laws.

This is from a news item by Jay Reeves of  the Associated Press:

“Some Alabama farmers say they are planting less produce rather than risk having crops rot in the fields a second straight year because of labor shortages linked to the state’s crackdown on illegal immigration. Farmers interviewed by The Associated Press say they had no choice but to reduce acreage. They fear there won’t be enough workers to pick crops at harvest time. The crops are often picked by Hispanic migrants, both legal and illegal….” Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Sportswriter Jason Reid

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

I really don’t care how bad you feel, Jason.

In designating national sportswriter Jason Reid an Ethics Dunce because of his sensitive, thoughtful, brave but ultimately unethical column this morning, I don’t intend to suggest that his ethical failing is unusual, or noteworthy for any reason other than the fact that it is universal.

Sometimes we are all like Jason Reid, I think. We all engage in conduct that we suspect is wrong, but we enjoy it. Gradually, truth breaks through our denial and we cannot avoid the conclusion that the conduct is wrong; still, despite the fact that we do not believe human beings should willfully do wrong, we persist in the conduct.

Because we enjoy it.

Reid’s column is titled “Seay’s Death Forces Uncomfortable Questions For Football Fans,” referring to the recent suicide death of former NFL star Junior Seau, the second suicide of a former pro football star in recent weeks. The uncomfortable question is the same one I raised on Ethics Alarms in November of 2009, which tells you how many NFL fans read ethics blogs. I wrote then,

“Simply put, it is wrong to pay money to persuade people to permanently damage themselves for our entertainment. No fight fan can watch Muhammad Ali today, recalling his nimble wit and amusing patter, and not feel complicity in his current near-mute condition, the result of being induced to box after his skills were eroded by time. When we know, and players know, that playing football in the NFL is going to lead to premature dementia for a significant number of players who will accept the risk if the money is right, can we ethically continue to provide that money?”

Sportswriters don’t read ethics blogs either, so in May of 2012, Reid has decided that this and related questions need asking. So he writes.. Continue reading →

Bizarro World Legal Ethics Update….

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

This just in:

You know that aneurysm-inducing defense in the case of the Republican consultant who created a robocall designed to trick black Democrats into not voting on election day?

It worked. Continue reading →