Month: February 2024

Unethical “Journalist” of the Month: Jason Sattler

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Ethics Alarms just added “Unethical Journalist” to its categories. I don’t know why I didn’t do this earlier, but the furious “It isn’t what it is” caterwauling from so many mainstream media voices that it is absurd–absurd, I tell you!—for anyone to think that Joe Biden isn’t ready to win “Jeopardy” and recite the Constitution from memory sealed the deal. The spectacle has been as depressing for the public as it is embarrassing for the rotting profession of journalism.

Some sectors managed to barely turn around and accept reality, sort of: the New York Times, after publishing ridiculous denials from Paul Krugman and others, issued an editorial Sunday expressing alarm at the combined effect of the Biden DOJ’s Special Counsel Robert Hur’s 388 page report stating that the President had “diminished faculties” and was a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” But even that cry in the dark concluded that Biden “needs to do more to show the public that he is fully capable of holding office until age 86,” a statement that disingenuously implies that Biden has done anything that indicates he can do his job now, much less in five years.” How can he do “more” to show something is true when it is so obvious that it isn’t true? It’s like complaining that public schools need to do more to show that they are unbiased and competent.

And naturally, the Times’ only stated impetus for its alarm was not that having a mentally deficient President is a peril to the nation, but that “the stakes in this presidential election are too high for Mr. Biden to hope that he can skate through a campaign with the help of teleprompters and aides and somehow defeat as manifestly unfit an opponent as Donald Trump.” (Don Surber, a newspaper journalist turned Substack pundit, notes that his old employers, which have seen their circulation more than halved in the last 20 years and opines that newspapers have destroyed their credibility by dropping all pretense of credibility and are doomed. “It is not that the media gets the story wrong; it is that the media seldom admits it was wrong,” he writes.)

Which brings me to “journalist” Jason Sattler.

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From Texas, A “Better Late Than Never” Horror Story

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

The Texas Monthly story is titled, “The Juror Who Found Herself Guilty.” Its tone is celebratory: a juror who made an unethical decision (though the writer attempts to mitigate it in many ways throughout his article) courageously decided to undo the wrong, and succeeded. Far from being impressed with the alleged ethics hero, Estella Ybarra, I found the story infuriating, and its conclusion that Ybarra should be admired untenable.

The story is in the familiar, long-form format familiar to readers of the New Yorker, Esquire, Vanity Fair and The Atlantic. We are given more details about the lives of all the participants in a drama than we need as well as thick context about every facet of the tale. It can be summarized easily, however, and relatively quickly.

In 1990, when Ybarra was 48 years old, she served on a jury charged with determining the guilt of a Mexican-American man accused of rape. She was the hold-out juror, Henry Fonda in “Twelve Angry Men”; everyone else was certain Carlos Jaile (above) had raped an eight-year-old girl. Ybarra was not: she felt the evidence was thin. There was no physical evidence, the defendant had an alibi, and the main proof of his guilt offered was a child’s eyewitness identification after the fact. But, we are told, Estella was still learning English despite being born in the U.S. (Whose fault is that?) and didn’t understand the justice system very well. (Or that?). As a result, she allowed herself to be bullied into voting ‘guilty’ by the men on the jury, even though she was not at all convinced Carols Jaile was.

She went home after Jaile was convicted and sentenced to life in prison, and wept, we are told. This is supposed to make her seem sympathetic. Later, Estella received a certificate in the mail stating that by serving as a juror and “accepting this difficult and vital responsibility of citizenship in a fair and conscientious manner, you have aided in perpetuating the right of trial by jury, that palladium of civil liberty and the only safe guarantee for the life, liberty and property of the citizen.” Ybarra threw the document into a drawer. She told the writer, Michael Hall, that she thought to herself, “We sent an innocent man away for the rest of his life.”

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If Elephant Seals Can Learn To Be Ethical, Surely Humans Can…

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Right? Hello? Buhler?

A report published last month in the journal Marine Mammal Science relates what scientists, specifically wildlife biologists and seal specialists, had never observed before, or even thought possible. In January of 2022, a male elephant seal, all two tons of him, galumphed into the surf to rescue a seal pup from drowning. “The rising tide had pulled the pup out to sea and, too young to swim, it was struggling to stay afloat. The [pup’s mother] was still on the beach, answering the pup’s plaintive cries with calls of her own, which attracted the attention of a nearby male….he gave the female a sniff and then ‘charged out into the surf’…When he reached the pup, he used his body to gently nudge it back to the beach — probably saving its life.”

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Forget “Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!” The Proper Reaction Should Be “What the Hell Is the Matter With You Hacks?”

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

The furious wagon-circling by left-biased journalists (or “journalists,” for short) in response to the DOJ Special Counsel’s stunning “Look! The Emperor has no clothes!” declaration in his report is another smoking gun in the “controversy” over whether Donald Trump was as right as he has ever been to call the media “enemies of the people.” It might even be the smokiest gun of all—more damning than the news media’s blatant cheer-leading for Barack Obama’s candidacy and destructive Presidency, more damning than its Black Lives Matter pandering during the BLM riots and its fearmongering during the pandemic, even more damning, perhaps, than its successful efforts to hide the evidence of Hunter Biden’s laptop until Donald Trump was safely defeated.

Confirmation bias and willful blindness still have their limits. How can any American with two brain cells to rub together observe the shameless gaslighting compiled in the video above and not be offended, disgusted, and angry?

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Saturday Night Ethics Fevers, 2/10/2024

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Hardly anyone is reading or commenting today, so I guess it’s as good a time as any to clear the inventory…

1. Today’s incompetent elected official: Pennsylvania State Rep. Kevin Boyle (D-Philadelphia) is shown in a video that turned up on social media ranting and threatening people at a bar. It is unknown right now when the video was taken; from an ethical point of view, it doesn’t matter. Elected officials who disgrace themselves and their constituents like this…indeed, even less than this, should resign immediately. One time is too many. A spokesperson for the Pennsylvania House Democrats blathered, “We are aware of a video circulating on social media. It is very troubling.” “Rep. Boyle has been open about his personal challenges,” the spokesperson wrote. “We are encouraged that our colleague and dear friend is seeking help. Our commitment to delivering mental health services does not stop at the Capitol Steps. One of the main reasons we advocate so strongly for mental health access is the reality that challenges can and do happen to anyone, and seeking treatment should be encouraged, not stigmatized.”

No. When an elected official behaves like that in public, his conduct should be stigmatized. He can seek treatment as a private citizen. He has no right to serve in a public position of trust when he has behaved that way.

The same, incidentally, applies to President Biden.

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Ethics Quiz: The Governor’s Ex

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

We are getting closer to the Fani Willis hearing, which should be fun, but another Democrat has raised eyebrows with what seems like another outburst of nepotism and the appearance of impropriety.

Uber-woke Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey (D, as if you didn’t know) nominated her former girlfriend, Gabrielle R. Wolohojian, to serve on the state’s Supreme Judicial Court. Wolohojian is currently a Massachusetts Appeals Court Associate Judge. (About “girlfriend”: I’m afraid I’m using that term because I just heard lesbian comic Sandra Bernhardt’s rant about the cold inappropriateness of the favored term “partner” “What are we, a gay law firm?,” she said. No, I didn’t find the routine especially funny, but it stuck in my brain anyway…)

Wolohojian seems eminently qualified for the new position. Her law degree was earned at Cornell; she has been a partner at a major law firm; she clerked for a US District Court judge, and she has 15 years of experience on Massachusetts Appeals Court.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

Is Healey’s nomination still unethical if Wolohojian is legitimately qualified?

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My Annual Boycott the Super Bowl Edition…[Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Feb. 9th was the 60th anniversary of the Beatles appearing on the Ed Sullivan Show, leading me to muse on what other momentous cultural (as opposed to political and international) events American society has shared in caring about and observing since. There haven’t been many. I remember that the first Super Bowl, when the AFL and the NFL agreed on a championship game between the upstart rebel league and the establishment attracted such intense interest and coverage (two networks covered the game—when has that happened since?) which was a wipe-out by the NFL’s Green Bay Packers. I didn’t know any families that didn’t watch that first one. Once upon a time, everybody tuned in to the Academy Awards: it was a unifying ritual, but no more. It is disturbing to think that there can’t be a unifying cultural event in the U.S. today, but I’m coming to that depressing conclusion.

Meanwhile, I hope you are boycotting the annual hoop-de-doo by the evil NFL, which happily kills its player for profit. This NFL season I didn’t catch a second of a single game, and wrote less about the cynical, ethics-free league than I have in years. The most recently discussed incident when an NFL head coach was pilloried for trying to inspire his players by extolling the teamwork of the plane hijackers who brought down the Twin Towers and bombed the Pentagon. I didn’t write about, but should have, a study from almost exactly a year ago that found chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) in the brains of 345 former NFL players among 376 former players studied. That’s 91.7% compared to the normal incidence of CTE in the general public, which is in the vicinity of .4% I didn’t write about it because, as far as I can tell, none of the sources, ethics and news, that I usually check for ethics stories bothered to treat the study as newsworthy. I assume that’s because they chose not to issue a buzzkill on Super Bowl week.

Think about that for a while, assuming that you haven’t played professional football and can think.

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Clearly, #MeToo Never Quite Got Its Message Across

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Baltimore judge Kevin M. Wilson is facing an ethics hearing in May after a female lawyer accused him of inappropriate and unwelcome touching at a bar association event at the Maryland Club in May of last year. Thecomplaining victim says that when she stopped at a table where Wilson and another judge were seated, she felt Wilson’s hand rub her leg up and down. Two lawyers witnessed this, as well as hearing the complainant tell Wilson that his behavior was inappropriate. The judge moved his hand away, but then, also allegedly, put his hand back on the attorney’s leg, moved his hand up under her skirt, and touched her buttocks.

The event was called “Join Our District Court Judges for Practice Tips on Tap,” so I guess maybe Wilson was just…tapping. 

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From the “Rules Are Rules” Files: The Matchstick Eiffel Tower

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

47-year-old Richard Plaud of France spent the past eight years assembling a model of the Eiffel Tower out of matchsticks in order to become the Guinness Book of Records record-holder in that cherished category, “World’s Tallest Eiffel Tower Model Made Out of Matchsticks.”

Aside: How many parts of that sentence justify a “What? For God’s sake, why, and who cares?” Why is there a published record for matchstick models of anything? Does the Guinness Book of Records include records for matchstick Chrysler Buildings, Pentagons, Statues of Liberty, Golden Gate Bridges? Big Ben, the London Eye? What’s special about the Eiffel Tower? Why should holding an obscure record in a book few people read or care about matter to anyone except pathetic losers desperate to give meaning to their empty lives? How shallow must a man be to devote eight years to assembling something with no utility whatsoever other than to win him mention in that silly tome?

Back to poor Richard: after he completed his project, he discovered that even though his model, at 7.19 meters, is easily taller than the current record holder for matchstick Eiffel Towers, the 6.53-meter-tall model built by Toufic Daher in 2009, his opus was ineligible for the honor. Why, you ask? 

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Ethics Hero Elon Musk vs. Ethics Villain Disney

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Elon Musk is weird, impulsive, sometimes hypocritical and often infuriating. He is also a national treasure: a true Ethics Hero in the culture wars.

Back in 2021, Disney fired Gina Carano, one of the stars of the Disney+ series “The Mandalorian” because her social media posts were insufficiently supportive of the progressive cant Disney is obsessed with (to its financial and cultural sorrow). The triggering tweet was one in which Carano, a conservative (can’t have that in Hollywood!) compared Nazi Germany’s anti-Jewish propaganda to efforts by the political left to demonize people based on their political beliefs. Proving her point, Disney canned her, explaining, falsely, that her “social media posts denigrating people based on their cultural and religious identities are abhorrent and unacceptable.”

Carano is now suing Disney and Lucasfilms. Her complaint can be read here. She is suing under California law, which states that
“No employer shall make, adopt, or enforce any rule, regulation, or policy: (a) Forbidding or preventing employees from engaging or participating in politics or from becoming candidates for public office. (b) Controlling or directing, or tending to control or direct the political activities or affiliations of employees.”

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