Month: April 2023

Jerry Springer (RIP) Was An Ethics Corrupter

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Jerry Springer has died at 79. I’m not glad he’s dead, but when someone has as damaging an effect on the culture as he did, the fact belongs in his obituary. Attention should be paid.

Springer was the epitome of an ethics corrupter. He held the poor, uneducated, non-too-bright and badly socialized up to public ridicule. He encouraged foolish people to embarrass themselves on TV. He also sent the message to many of his less civilized, socialized and mature viewers that the best way to deal with conflict is a punch in the chops.

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Gun Control Advocates Would Be More Persuasive If They Didn’t Rely On Big Lies And Fake Statistics: The Latest From Kamala Harris

/ Jack Marshall / 71 Comments

The only example of a similarly polluted public policy debate I can think of right now is the hoary “women are payed 76 cents for every dollar a man is paid for the same job” myth. Wait: there are the inflated and misleading Wuhan virus fatality stats. And come to think of it…never mind, we’re talking about the Bill of Rights here. The fake statistic in Harris’s tweet—and to be fair, her claim didn’t originate with her—representing a toxic hybrid between the “Do something!” gun hysteria and the “Think of the children!” rationalization—is popping up everywhere lately. Frankly, I believed it when I first saw it last week. After all, as Harry Reid would say, it works. But it’s a Big Lie.

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Ethics Quiz (“The Password Is ‘Civility'”): Fired For A Foul-Mouthed Faux Pas

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

ESPN fired national baseball reporter Marly Rivera, an ESPN Radio MLB analyst who has also appeared on baseball telecasts, after an incident at Yankee Stadium in which she called a female reporter from another outlet a “fucking cunt” during an altercation. The incident was caught on someone’s cell phone video (of course), and posted on social media. When the clash and the vulgarity got back to Rivera’s employer, ESPN canned her.

Rivera had been with ESPN for 13 years, working for ESPN’s English language platforms as a writer and on-air personality, and for ESPN Deportes. Reportedly she attempted to apologize to the object of her epithet, but was rebuffed.

Your Ethics Alarms Civility Quiz of the Day is…

Was it fair and responsible to fire Rivera for her outburst?

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What A Surprise: Trump’s Scorched Earth Premptive Attack On Ron DiSantis Is Hypocritical, Dishonest And Divisive

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

Ronald Reagan’s “First Commandment” was “Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican.” Donald Trump is no Ronald Reagan, and he’s only a Republican of convenience; nevertheless, his strategy of using negative campaigning to kneecap his presumed competition for the Republican Presidential nomination before Florida’s Governor Ron DiSantis has even announced his candidacy is particularly odious. Launching these attacks would be revolting if they were fair and accurate, but they are not.

That is who and what Donald Trump is, however. He’s not going to broaden his base this way, or make it more likely that the GOP can defeat the Democrats in 2024. Right now, he doesn’t care about that: all that matters is winning the nomination, and, like Scarlett O’Hara, he’ll think about the consequences tomorrow after playing as dirty as he has to.

I know I’m repeating myself, but what an asshole this guy is. It is a searing testament to just how unfit to govern the Democrats and Joe Biden are that I had to vote for him in 2020, and it really wasn’t that difficult a decision.

This week Trump and his campaign vomitted up a document claiming that “the real DeSantis record is one of misery and despair,” and arguing that Florida was a terrible place to live. This assertion has an immediate ring of hypocrisy surrounding it, since Donald Trump chooses to live there.

The Wall Street Journal was moved to fact-check Trump’s ruthless indictment, and it’s a legitimate fact-check, not the kind one gets from, say, the Washington Post. WSJ points out…

1. The Trump release relies on links to progressive-biased studies and anti-DiSantis news reports claiming that Florida is unaffordable and unsafe, and includes, “ESPN wrote that Florida is the Worst State in The Nation To Die.”

ESPN?

2. Many of the statistics cited in the Trump hit piece come from groups with progressive agendas, those that Trump would typically dismiss as “fake.” It cites a 2022 Oxfam report that says Florida is the 29th best state for workers, but down-rates states that have “so-called ‘right-to-work’ laws” and those that, like Florida, don’t allow “localities to implement their own minimum wage laws.” Trump has never been a fan of unions or the minimum wage. It also cites the Florida Policy Institute, which wants illegal immigrants to be able to obtain obtain driver’s licenses. “Wasn’t immigration Mr. Trump’s signature issue in 2016?” asks WSJ. “They say politics makes strange bedfellows, but Mr. Trump’s one-night stand with this outfit is bizarre.”

Indeed.

3. Trump’s vicious hit job relies heavily on the website WalletHub, which ranks Florida 26th on its “best states for working moms” ranking using a witches brew of “17 relevant metrics” that were given different weights, a classic device in pseudo-science. Many WalletHub rankings not mentioned by Trump’s campaign rank Florida highly: the site says Florida is the second best state in which to retire, second best for starting a business, second best for for fewest Wuhan virus restrictions, the second “most fun” state, fourth best for teachers, sixth for low taxes, and the seventh best state to live in. This is the epitome of cherry-picking, a dishonest and unethical advocacy trick.

4. WSJ also points out that hundreds of thousands of Americans are moving to Florida, which strongly suggests that the public doesn’t agree that the state teems with “misery and despair.” The Census Bureau says Florida gained a net 318,855 under DiSantis from July 2021 to July 2022, and leads all states, by far, in attracting new residents.

One conservative blogger writes in reaction to the attack,

[W]hat makes Trump any different than Biden, who constantly lies about the GOP with absurd claims such as the ones being made by Trump? What makes Trump any different than those Democrats and media outfits who smeared him for years during his presidency? What makes him any different than those trying to smear him now?

Are there really still people who expect consistency, integrity, fairness or The Golden Rule from Donald Trump? He believes that the ends justify the means. He fights to win. Collateral damage doesn’t trouble him one bit, and ethics are for suckers. By attacking DiSantis and in his manner of doing so, he is showing once again that whatever his faults, pretending to be someone he’s not isn’t among them.

Comment Of The Day: “I THOUGHT This Issue Would Eventually End Up At The Supreme Court, And Here It Is!”

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Now that the question of whether Donald Trump was violating the First Amendment when he blocked nasty commenters on his tweets (like every other Twitter-user could do) has some distance from the reflex “That asshole! Serves him right that the courts stopped him” response from the Trump Deranged, the issue has sparked some varied and interesting commentary. Yesterday’s EA post sure did; I even managed to trigger a violent argument between two long-time esteemed commenters here.

I remain very ambivalent on the issue. Here is Rich in CT’s Comment of the Day raising a parallel that is one of the reasons.

***

I serve on a local board, and in Connecticut at least, there is no inherit right for the public to speak in any particular forum (during the conduct of official business). If comments are allowed, it is up to the discretion of the board (pursuant to applicable bylaws), and they can be limited to a specific topic to help the board make a lawful and effective public policy decision. Disruptive comments can be barred. My board has never had to remove a disruptive individual, but we have that right if needed as they speak as our guests.

We’ve had heated exchanges, and have had to frequently warn the public that comments must remain on topic and civil. Allowing uncivil comments, in fact, can create a “hostile forum” that can potentially bias the commission again a particular applicant. Courts can vacate decisions made during such conditions, and made adjudicate the application itself, taking the decision completely out of the commission’s control.

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Unethical Quote Of The Day: Wesley Lowery In “The Columbia Journalism Review”

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

“We pull no punches: when the weight of the objective evidence is clear, we must not conceal the truth through euphemism; rather, we should employ direct language. Our aim is not to be perceived as impartial by the people we imagine are our readers, but to accurately inform them about the world they live in.” 

—-Reporter Wesley Lowery, Journalist in Residence at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY, in his essay, “A Test of the News”

When I encountered the essay titled “A Test of the News” in the Columbia Journalism Review, I foolishly anticipated a careful diagnostic analysis of why American journalism was so ethically wretched, and a perceptive prescription for fixing the problem. Boy, do I have a flat learning curve. Why would I ever think that, knowing what I, what you, what anyone who has been paying attention knows from observing the carnage unethical, incompetent, biased journalism has inflicted on American democracy over the past decade? My delusion was especially unforgivable since 1) Lowery is a journalist, 2) he’s a Pulitzer Prize -winning journalist, and you know what kind of journalists the Pulitzers like, and 3) he’s also an college instructor. Education is running neck and neck with journalism as our most thoroughly unethical profession, though journalism is clearly the one most likely beyond repair.

The first three paragraphs of Lowery’s screed were bad enough, but I didn’t reach the point where I normally would have stopped reading until paragraph #4:

“To this day, news organizations across the country often rely on euphemisms instead of clarity in clear cases of racism (“racially charged,” “racially tinged”) and acts of government violence (“officer-involved shooting”). Such decisions, I wrote, are journalistic failings, but also moral ones: when the weight of the evidence is clear, it is wrong to conceal the truth. Justified as “objectivity,” they are in fact its distortion.”

When a police officer shoots an arrested suspect who tries to take his gun from him and then charges him with his 300 pound bulk, that is “government violence, “and the “weight of evidence is clear”—you know, as in “Hands up, don’t shoot!” That recycled Black Lives Matters mythology pretty much reveals all I need to know about Wesley Lowery, and he confirms my conclusion with the egomaniacal quote at the beginning of this post. He believes, as do so many editors and reporters echoing the same arrogant delusion, that journalists, narrow as their education and experience is, are capable of explaining to the public the true nature of the world they live in. This means the world view journalists want them to live in. Yet reporters do not know when the “weight of objective evidence is clear”; they don’t have the depth, wisdom or intellect to know what the “truth” is (don’t make me list examples again), and what ideological propagandists like Lowery call “accurate” includes shading, spin, soaked with bias, and the strategic omission of facts that undermine their narratives. The delusion is that having an outsized bullhorn automatically confers the ability to use it responsibly.

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Who Do You Trust, CNN Or Don Lemon? (Hint: It’s A Trick Question)

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Here is how Don Lemon announced his firing from CNN on Twitter…

Here was CNN’s response:

Lemon is an incorrigibly unprofessional and biased pseudo-journalist who has one of the most damning and extensive Ethics Alarms dossiers extant. he’s thrown tantrums, made up fake history, lied, peddled fake news and appeared drunk on the air. I think my favorite inexcusable babbling self-indulgence by Don was this, but I easily could have missed one, or dozens. Anyone that believes anything Don Lemon says, writes, publishes or tweets is dangerously gullible.

CNN, meanwhile, kept Lemon on the air in a high-profile, prime-time slot despite his lack of integrity and journalism competence, because it viewed him as an attractive messenger for its steady diet of biased, slanted and occasionally fabricated news stories serving its management’s partisan objectives. CNN is a little less trustworthy than Fox News, and a little more trustworthy than MSNBC, or, to be brief, completely untrustworthy.

The answer to the question posed in the headline is “Neither.”

I THOUGHT This Issue Would Eventually End Up At The Supreme Court, And Here It Is!

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

A federal appeals court in New York ruled in 2019 that President Trump’s Twitter account was a public forum from which he was powerless to exclude people based on their viewpoints. Judge Barrington D. Parker Jr. wrote for a unanimous three-judge panel of \ the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, “We conclude that the evidence of the official nature of the account is overwhelming…We also conclude that once the president has chosen a platform and opened up its interactive space to millions of users and participants, he may not selectively exclude those whose views he disagrees with.”

I wondered at the time if the ruling was a by-product of anti-Trump mania, and I still wonder if the same ruling would have been made had the sensitive official tweeter been Barack Obama. I confess to being torn on both the ethics and the law regarding the matter.

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The Tucker Carlson Firing Aftermath

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

Tucker Carlson behaved in a manner that would get any employee fired from any organization with two atoms of integrity and professionalism to rub together unless the organization was completely in thrall to The King’s Pass. It is really as simple as that; this isn’t hard. Nevertheless, pundits, politicians and hack journalists on both sides of the ideological divide set out to misrepresent the event in order to promote their own world views, confusing the American public when they should be illuminating a basic ethics and life competence issue.

Let’s see...why not start with one of the biggest hacks out there, CNN’s former fake journalism ethics watchdog and veteran Fox News-a-phobe, Brian Stelter? “Why Tucker Carlson’s Exit From Fox News Looks Like an Execution” is the title of his analysis in “Vanity Fair,” itself now a nest of progressive propaganda merchants (but Stelter lowers the net ethics quotient anyway).  The answer to Stelter’s question is, he offers, this: “He’s not being given a chance to say goodbye. It is technically possible, I suppose, that Carlson turned down a chance to sign off on his own terms. But my 20 years of experience covering cable news suggests otherwise.”

Wow. This guy is really something. Completely inept and intellectually dishonest, Stelter has to begin an article by reminding readers how special he is. Of course Carlson wasn’t given a chance to give a last broadcast. He was fired for cause. When you are fired for cause, security ushers you out of the building. Your bosses don’t give you anything but a severance package—maybe—and ten minutes to put your stuff in a cardboard box. Allowing a likely bitter and angry demagogue like Carlson to “say good bye” is like the Charles Addams cartoon where a guy arrested for making obscene phone calls is allowed to make his one call and he makes another obscene one. What Fox did with Carlson wasn’t “an execution.” It was a standard firing.

Over at the New Republic, long-time leftist hysteric Michael Tomasky (whose biased news analysis helped drive me away from The Daily Beast) writes in “Why Fox News Is Going to Get Worse—a Lot Worse” that Carlson is certain to be replaced by someone who is “more trolly, more racist, more pro-Putin, and just all-around more outrageous than Carlson.” Tomasky is just using Carlson’s demise as an excuse to attack Fox News when it has done the right and responsible thing for once, and at significant cost: its value dipped a billion dollars on the news of the firing. In the process, he repeats the Big Lies that the Left wielded against Carlson in its efforts to silence him, because censoring opposition is how Big Blue rolls these days; it’s so much more effective than trying to win a debate with facts and logic.

Carlson’s not “racist,” but the playbook demands that anyone who questions color-based, George Floyd Freakout policies must be a racist. Tucker’s not “pro-Putin,” he’s anti-US involvement in the Russia-Ukraine war, a defensible position. Carlson, moreover, was far less outrageous than the jerk he replaced, Bill O’Reilly, so why does Tomasky assume Carlson’s replacement will be worse than he was?

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