Lawyers being lawyers, it is not surprising that a New York Times article about the unhealthy physical stresses endured by contestants in the “Biggest Loser” reality show inspired a legal blog to wonder how long it would be before the show was hit with a large law suit. “I’m waiting for the first person to have a heart attack,” THR, ESQ quotes Dr. Charles Burant, a professor of internal medicine at the University of Michigan, as saying. The core problem is not liability, however. The problem is that the show is horribly, indefensibly unethical. It shouldn’t be waiting for a lawsuit, or a heart attack. The program is wrong to continue, advertisers are wrong to support it, and we are wrong to watch it. Continue reading
Arts & Entertainment
Ethics Dunce: Marc Levin
Mark Levin is the resident screamer among conservative talk show hosts, and basic civility is clearly not on his menu, as he routinely cuts off any caller whose opinions vary from his by deriding the caller as an “idiot” or a “drone,” his pet word for liberals. One of Levin’s stunts is to broadcast presidential addresses, like President Obama’s speech last night on Afghanistan, with “commentary,” meaning that he delivers nasty asides, sarcastic quips and mocking rants while the President is speaking. Continue reading
Ethics Dunces: NBC and the Today Show
NBC has announced that the couple that crashed the White House dinner, thus breaching national security as well as basic standards of honesty and manners, will appear on the Today Show. This adds one more reason to detest the two, who by combining the two things the news media can’t resist—the Obamas and reality show wannabes—have inspired the irresponsible news media to once again neglect genuinely important news events in favor of trivia. But the real ethics miscreants are NBC and the Today Show. Given two self-involved, irresponsible fools who break into the White House in order to become celebrities, the network and its morning show decide to make certain that their plan achieves its goal. And if this motivates the next, slightly more unhinged would-be celebrity to do something more harmful to innocent people or the nation? Hey, as long as the ratings are boffo, why should the Peacock Network worry about irrelevant issues like the President’s safety? Continue reading
“Scroogenomics”: Clueless About Holiday Ethics
I had decided to write about the new book “Scroogenomics: Why you shouldn’t buy presents for the holidays”early yesterday. I should have assumed that our current Scrooge-in-Chief, George Will, would have the same idea. He did, and greeted his readers with typically sour tidings as he heartily endorsed this commercially clever and ethically fatuous book. The brain-child of economist Joel Waldfogel, “Scroogenomics” argues that holiday gift-giving makes no economic or social sense, and is a net drag on everyone. Will’s quote from it is as revealing as any:
Gifts that people buy for other people are usually poorly matched to the recipients’ preferences. What the recipients would willingly pay for the gifts is usually less than the givers paid. The measure of the inefficiency of allocating value by gift-giving is the difference between the yield of satisfaction per dollar spent on gifts and the yield per dollar spent on the recipients’ own purchases.
All of which means that Waldfogel (and Will) are hopelessly confused about the social and ethical value of gift-giving, which has little to do with the ratio of “the yield of satisfaction per dollar spent.” Continue reading
“The Good Wife” and Bad Ethics
Julianna Margulies’ latest attempt to find another hit series after “ER” is a lawyer drama, “The Good Wife.” It tells of the travails and trials of a former litigator who returns to law firm practice after her prosecutor husband, played by “Mr. Big” Chris Noth, is sent to the slammer in a scandal that also involved marital infidelity. As lawyer dramas go, “The Good Wife” is fairly good about not distorting the legal ethics rules. It still slips up, however, as this week’s episode showed. Continue reading
Dallas Forgotten and the Duty to Remember
Yesterday was November 22. According to the vast majority of the news and entertainment media, it was no different from any other day, apparently. In all likelihood, the same was true of most Americans. “Oh, yeah…November 22! Better buy that turkey!”
November 22 is not like any other day in America, however. It is the date in 1963 that John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 46 years old and the 35th President of the United States of America, was assassinated on the streets of Dallas. Continue reading
Spoiling “Precious”
Courtland Milloy is a Washington Post Metro columnist, which means that his job is to decry racial outrages even where there are none. This time around, he has been offended by “Precious,” the nearly universally acclaimed movie about an abused black teenager, and attacks it with gusto. [Typically I would link to the piece here. I’m not, and you will soon find out why.] Continue reading
Ethics Dunces: The Learning Channel, and Us
Remember “Jon and Kate Plus 8,” the late, unlamented TLC cable hit that managed to destroy the Gosselin family, turn a mother of eight young children into a single mom, and raise troubling questions about child labor and the exploitation of kids by the entertainment industry? Apparently the only thing the Learning Channel remembers about it is all the money the channel made from the show, because it has recruited yet another family to exploit and destroy. Continue reading
Player Dementia and the Fan’s Dilemma: Is Watching N.F.L. Football Unethical?
It is Sunday, and much of America is ready to settle in front of millions of wide-screen, high-definition television sets to watch Sunday’s favorite entertainment: NFL football. The last thing football fans want to think about today is ethics, and today, perhaps, they shouldn’t have to. Although we are not there yet, the time is fast approaching when not only football fans, but the companies that buy commercials, the merchandisers that sell NFL-licensed jerseys and posters, the TV networks, and the nation itself may have to consider a difficult ethics question: is supporting pro-football unethical? Continue reading
Ethics Quote of the Week
“”Mamas don’t let your babies grow up to be Kanye,” they sang. “Let them pick guitars and drive them old trucks, ’cause cowboys have manners,they don’t interrupt..”
Country Music Award show hosts Brad Paisley and Carrie Underwood, in a parody of the song, “Mamas, Don’t Let Your Children Grow Up to Be Cowboys,” giving a much-deserved shot to rapper Kanye West for disrupting Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech at the MTV awards. Swift also was a big winner at the CMA’s, but West was nowhere to be seen.
Ethics Alarms 