Business & Commercial

Should Child Actors Be Banned?

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments
Amanda Bynes: A child star's evolution

Amanda Bynes: A child star’s career path

I posed this question years ago to Paul Petersen, a noted child performer himself (on the classic “The Donna Reed Show”) and for decades the courageous advocate for past and present child stars. He has fought for legislation to protect their assets and their welfare, often attracting hatred and attacks from stage parents in the process, but draws a hard line at banning kids in stage, screen and TV. “Gotta have those cute kids, Jack” he replied, essentially admitting that as brutal as pre-adult careers in show business often were, the public would never give up their lovable moppets. I don’t dispute Paul’s clear-eyed acceptance of reality, but I also think his answer ducks the question. As he knows better than anyone (you should check out the website of his non-profit organization here, and consider sending a contribution his way), the carnage on young lives a too-early introduction into one of the most callous and mind-warping of professions brings is well-documented and undeniable. Enablers and apologists, not to mention greedy parents willing to cash in their kids’ chances at a healthy childhood for fees and residuals, point to the prominent child stars (Shirley Temple, Brooke Shields) who did not grow up miserable, dysfunctional, and lost, but that is like arguing that child abuse is tolerable because some victims recover from its wounds.

The evidence of child stardom’s destructive effects is ever-present, so much so that the public has become inured to it, and hardly notices. Incidents and quotes exposing Justin Bieber’s gradual evolution into a narcissistic jerk have been regular features of the tabloid news, as have weekly hints that former Disney star Miley Cyrus is heading off the rails. Her infamous fellow alumna from the Mouse Factory, Lindsay Lohan, continues to cement her credentials as the poster girl for child stars gone bad, and just yesterday, former Nickelodeon comic Amanda Bynes was ordered to undergo psychiatric examination following the latest in a year’s worth of weird conduct.

Over at Cracked, a former child star who managed to escape the Biz with her sanity, values and reputation intact weighed in with an unusually sensitive (for Cracked) essay entitled, “7 Reasons Child Stars Go Crazy.” The author is Mara Wilson, now virtually forgotten despite the fact that she is barely in her thirties and the Broadway musical adapted from her most popular film, “Matilda,” was a 2013 Tony winner.  Wilson identifies the key factors dooming her less fortunate colleagues as… Continue reading →

Well, Let’s Kill All The Lawyers, Then!

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

One reason why democracy doesn’t seem to be working very well is that the public is becoming increasingly ignorant about what makes it work at all. Evidence of this trend comes by way of a provocative study by the Pew Research Center, which polled the public regarding which professions it believes contribute the most to society.

The results can be found in this press release, this summary, and this article in The Careerist, but here is a snapshot:

Worth study

Continue reading →

Magazine Cover Ethics: The Cute Terrorist and The Rolling Stone Boycott

/ Jack Marshall / 73 Comments

tsarnaev-rolling-stone-feature

Is it just my flawed impression, or are Americans increasingly less supportive of free speech, free thought, and artistic expression? If so, that is a worrisome development for our democracy and its culture, and if so, yes, I believe the willingness of our government and its leaders to maneuver around the Bill of Rights in “ends justify the means” conduct has fueled the trend.

Now Rolling Stone is the target. The Sixties magazine icon had the nerve to place Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaevon its latest edition’s cover, looking like a male model, and, we hear, the families of the victims are outraged and their communities prefer their sensibilities over liberty. Jumping on the bandwagon, retailers have decided to make all publications afraid to challenge its readers by announcing that they won’t sell the issue in Boston, and there are hints of an advertiser boycott.

Unfair, un-American, dangerous and silly. Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: The Ice Cream Sundae Dilemma

/ Jack Marshall / 30 Comments

ice-cream-pic

It just took me more than 10 hours of assorted travel hell to reach this Colorado resort where I’m giving a keynote speech at the Utah Bar’s annual convention. I arrived in my room close to midnight, and I was parched and annoyed. I decided to indulge myself by ordering a nice, cool treat from the late night menu—a vanilla fudge sundae, with roasted pecans, whipped cream, and a cherry on top.

The young and earnest resort employee arrived 20 minutes after my call, and I signed for the dessert. It wasn’t until I had several spoonsful that I noticed something was missing: no pecans.

Your Ethics Quiz:

Should I have called up room service and demanded the promised nuts? Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: Thomas McGregor

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments
"Just paying off my student loans..."

“Just paying off my student loans…”

One of the criteria for admission to the practice of law is proof of good character, and what is considered proof of bad character will keep even a stellar law grad out of the courtroom. Bad character can be inferred from many kinds of conduct—criminal convictions, lies under oath, and failing to meet financial obligations, among others. The latter has occasionally blocked an otherwise qualified young lawyer from entering the profession when unpaid debts get out of hand, and that means that the most prominent unpaid debts in recent headlines, student loans, can sometimes foil a legal career. New York law grad Robert Bowman, last I checked, was still trying to convince the New York Bar that being over $400,000 in debt on his student loans didn’t mean he wasn’t fit to practice law. So far, he hasn’t succeeded.

Maybe he should follow the lead of Thomas McGregor.  Continue reading →

Gov. Bob McDonnell And The Compliance Dodge

/ Jack Marshall / 32 Comments

GiftsThe bottom line is that Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell accepted what looks to any objective observer like a bribe–several bribes, in fact—and whether he is in technical compliance with his states laws and ethics rules doesn’t change the fact that he is, by definition, corrupt and untrustworthy.

McDonnell, once considered a rising star in the national GOP firmament–and who knows? Considering the competition, he may be still!—has been steadily soiled and diminished by  revelations of dubious gifts and payments to his family and a corporation jointly owned by him and his wife by wealthy businessman Jonnie R. Williams Sr, chief executive of dietary supplement manufacturer Star Scientific Inc. So far, the gifts and payments appear to include, Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz! Richmond Law School’s “Cool” Ad: Lame, Deceitful…Or Just Advertising?

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Richmond ad Richmond-Law-ad

So, what do you think? Such esteemed legal commentators as TaxProf Blog and Above the Law have mocked and condemned the above Richmond Law School ad directed at law school applicants deciding where to plant their hopes. “The clubhouse leader for the lamest law school ad of 2013” snarked the former. “Calling it “lame” or “uncool” or “hackneyed” or any of the other words in the English language that denote a distinct inability to appear genuine or interesting doesn’t do the ad justice,” declared the latter. Then there is the little matter of puffery, which usually means deceit, spin, or exaggeration, except that in advertising such lies (for that is what they are) are mostly accepted as part of standard practice. That employment within nine months stat cited is dubious in the judgment of those who feel only legal jobs should count–apparently Richmond Law includes jobs where a JD is considered an asset, but the graduates are not working as lawyers. (On the other hand, almost every  job I’ve had since I graduated from laws school has been in the “JD advantage” category, and I’m satisfied with the results.) Continue reading →

GLAAD Joins The Hilaria Baldwin Ethics Lionel Wreck

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

model_trainwreck2

Ethics train wrecks can develop at any time, though sometimes the participants and the incidents involved limit the results to small-scale ethics damage. Let’s call these “Ethics Lionel Wrecks,” in honor of the model train sitting in a cardboard box in my basement. This week’s tale of Hilaria Baldwin’s mistimed tweets defines the genre.

The progression:

1. George Stark Starts the Train

This one began when the pregnant wife of actor/ pitchman/liberal blowhard/ bully Alec Baldwin was called out by the Daily Mail for tweeting trivial, giddy messages during the funeral of recently departed actor James Gandolfini. That would have been certifiably disrespectful conduct in the rare sub-category of Funeral Ethics; indeed Ethics Alarms certified it. The problem is that Mail reporter George Stark was wrong.

Salon explained that the error was caused by “a technical glitch on Twitter that reflected GMT instead of ET…an analysis of the source code of Hilaria Baldwin’s tweets reveals that she tweeted between 11 am and 2 pm, as opposed to 8 am to 11 am. The Daily Mail has stated that “the tweets did appear accurately timed on mobile devices such as smartphones and iPads,” but “the only way MailOnline was able to establish the REAL time the tweets were sent was by viewing the twitter web page source code, something almost no normal member of the public would ever do.”

I have no idea what the hell that means, but I was one of the people who relied on Stark’s report, which seemed convincing, with screen shots of the tweets themselves and their timestamps. Was he unethically sloppy, as Baldwin and others have claimed, or was this just an excusable mistake? Twitter is new enough that there may be some justification for not checking the source code before using the time stamp to conclude something from a tweet: I can’t determine whether there is a journalistic protocol for this at the Daily Mail or elsewhere. Before a reporter attacks the conduct of a pregnant woman at a friend’s funeral, he would presumably be obligated to be certain of his facts, since readers, like me, will assume that he was. If this really was, as Salon says, a freak Twitter glitch, then Stark was unlucky rather than unethical.

2. Ethics Alarms rides the rails Continue reading →

The Illegal Immigration Bill: A 37 Year Ethics Train Wreck Rumbles On, With No End In Sight

/ Jack Marshall / 33 Comments

trainwreck6

The details of the “immigration reform bill” moving through Congress like a water buffalo through a snake are less important than the fact that some action is being taken regarding a problem that has been cynically, incompetently, dishonestly and negligently allowed to fester since the last illegal immigrant accommodation law was passed in 1986. This is one of the rare cases in which doing almost anything is more responsible than doing nothing, and that is the beginning and the end of the list of the bill’s virtues. This is an ugly ethics train wreck  in which there are no heroes, only dunces and villains. There may be a worse one, but at the moment, I can’t think of it.

The 11,000,000 or more illegal aliens in this country have to be given some way to attain citizenship and get out of the shadows. That is an unavoidable, pragmatic reality, the best of a stinking pile of unethical options. All the rationalizations for doing this are unethical, except one: they are here, we allowed them to get here and allowed them to stay, and now we are out of choices. It’s our fault, which is to say our incompetent, irresponsible government’s, and now we have to swallow hard and accept the consequences. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Jim Carrey

/ Jack Marshall / 49 Comments
Jim Carrey, not fooling as much as we thought...

Jim Carrey, not fooling as much as we thought…

There are no rule, laws, or principles of ethics that requires that an actor who usually portrays an ass actually has to be an ass, but if there were, Jim Carrey would be in complete compliance with them.

Jim Carrey announced via Twitter that he now objects to  “Kick-Ass 2,” the soon-to-be-released movie he stars in, citing as his reason the December, 2012 Sandy Hook shooting, which he apparently thinks will be made worse by the movie, or would have been caused by it if the film had come out earlier, or, well, something.  “I did Kick-Ass a month [before] Sandy Hook and now in all good conscience I cannot support that level of violence,” Carrey tweeted. “I meant to say my apologies to others [involved] with the film. I am not ashamed of it but recent events have caused a change in my heart.” Continue reading →