Business & Commercial

The Man On The Subway Tracks

/ Jack Marshall / 162 Comments

 

Subway Headline

It is destined to become a classic case in photojournalism ethics. Someone pushed 58-year-old Ki Suk Han pushed onto a 49th Street station  subway track in New York City. R. Umar Abbasi,  a New York Post freelance photographer was  on the platform when it happened, and took a photo as the subway train bore down on the terrified man. He was killed, and the photo became a lurid, if dramatic, Post front page.

There have been many ethical questions raised about the incident. Let’s examine them.

Was it ethical for the New York Post run the photo?

This is the easiest of the issues: of course it was. The photo is dramatic, the incident was news, the paper had an exclusive, and readers were interested. The Post might have decided that it would be in better taste not to run the photo, and that decision might be praiseworthy. Still, there is no good argument to be made that such a photograph is outside the range of acceptable items for publication. By the ethical standards of 21st Century journalism, admittedly low, the Post’s call isn’t even close to the line. Objections to the photo on ethical grounds are pure “ick factor.” Continue reading →

Fair Is Fair: The Times Isn’t Perfect, But It’s Time I Paid For It

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

nyt-paywallEver since the New York Times instituted its paywall system, which forces you to subscribe to its cyber-version once you use the site more than 20 times in a 30 day period, I have been economizing on my Times use rather than pay its (reasonable) subscription fee. One reason was money; one reason was that I usually don’t have to use the Times more than 20 times a month, with other good news sources out there that charge nothing at all; and a last reason is that the Times annoys me with its hard left-wing bias, well to the left of the Washington Post, which is hardly balanced, and inappropriate, in my view, for the publication that holds itself up as the exemplar of American journalism. The exemplar of American journalism should be objective and non-partisan, damn it, or at least try to be.

I have to admit, however, that even with its biases, the New York Times is still the best news source I know. I get the Post delivered to my door every day, and read the print copy of the Times only when I am on the road. I am always struck at how often a Times story or feature is directly relevant to my work, compared to any of its competition, including the acclaimed publication I read every day. Yesterday I learned that the Times has scheduled yet another round of lay-offs and buy-outs. It is in financial trouble, like all newspapers, and I can no longer justify refusing to do my part to help it survive as long as it can. The Times has given a lot to me, my readers and my field, and what it has provided has come with tangible expenses that are becoming more difficult to cover. The paper drives me crazy sometimes, but it remains a vital resource; it is unfair to focus my disillusionment with the journalistic field at the best of it, much as I would like to see the Times set an even higher standard. Right now, the battle is to allow the Times to maintain the journalistic standard, however flawed, that it sets now.

I just signed up for a cyber-subscription. The Times has earned my support, and with it struggling to keep the print flowing, I can no longer justify taking my 19 free articles a month and giving nothing back in return.

The Ethics Attic: Notes From Around The Web

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

messy attic

[I’m still feeling lousy, so in an effort to conserve some energy while keeping the torch high, I’m presenting a few links that the ethics-minded might enjoy visiting. Normally I would write about some of these, so consider yourselves lucky.]

  • Historian Paul Finkleman delivers that harshest verdict yet on the hypocrisy of Thomas Jefferson regarding civil rights and slavery. You should then read David G. Post’s splendid contra essay here. (The last two sentences in Finkleman’s op-ed are pretty much indefensible.)
  • A fascinating reflection, inspired by the movie “Lincoln,” on Utilitarianism and “the ends justifies the means.”
  • In fact, the program is a benign one, but considering the issue raised in my last post, it is hard to imagine more perfect symbolism for the American public trading self-sufficiency for government protection than the trade described here.
  • If you missed the recent George Will column, a frightening one, about the assaults of free speech and thought around the campuses of American universities, you have another chance to read it, here.
  • I only recently learned that 3-D copiers are a reality, and Dr. Chris MacDonald, on his always excellent Business Ethics Blog, has some insight on their ethical implications here.
  • Once again this year, I have an essay in The 2013 Hardball Times Baseball Annual, and publisher Dave Studenmund references my analysis of the Stephen Strasburg affair here.
  • Finally, thanks to Mary Wright on the HR Gazette for posting the Ethics Alarms Apology Scale.

The Colin Kaepernick Tattoo Controversy: “Ick,” Not Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 68 Comments
How can he pass with a back that looks like that?

How can he pass with a back that looks like that?

The new star San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick is tattooed all over. Does this mean that he is unqualified to be a leader, a role model, an ethical exemplar, as NFL quarterbacks are supposed to be? The Sporting News’ columnist David Whitley argued in a column that indeed Kaepernick’s tattoos do mean that, and as you would expect, the number of coherent points he could mount in support of that position equaled exactly zero. He did, however, give everyone a terrific example of how people who don’t comprehend ethics make what they think are ethical arguments.

His column is about ethics, because ethics is central to leadership. Whitley believes that Kaepernick’s tattoos undermine his ability to lead by compromising the values he represents to those who must follow him. And those values that tattoos undermine are??? Well, Whitely doesn’t really explain that. He says that tattoos on a quarterback send the wrong message because prisoners get tattoos in the Big House. This is a man who is hostage to cognitive dissonance. Presumably if Stephen Hawking or Barack Obama showed a tat, he’d be fine with Kaepernick’s decorations. When I was kid, it wasn’t prisoners but sailors who we identified with tattoos. I knew a Pearl Harbor survivor with a big one—this neither convinced me that he was a rotter instead of a hero or made me want to get a giant anchor needled into my arm. Popeye had a tattoo, and we all loved Popeye. He also ate spinach. We didn’t. Continue reading →

In the Wake Of The BP Disaster, Another Andersonville Trial

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments
Someone has to be held responsible, even if nobody is to blame.

Someone has to be held responsible, even if nobody is to blame.

I don’t know about you, but I was certainly surprised to discover that in the view of the Justice Department, two men I had never heard of, Robert Kaluza and Donald Vidrine, were the ones responsible for the April 20, 2010 explosion of a BP oil rig that caused millions of barrels of oil to leak into the Gulf of Mexico for months, polluting the waters and the shores and causing billions of dollars of damages. That is the clear implication of the decision to prosecute the two rig  supervisors for manslaughter in the deaths of the eleven BP workers who perished in the blast.

Obviously, this makes no sense at all. Other government authorities have treated the BP spill as resulting from a complex series of errors, misjudgments, and regulatory violations on the part of several companies and their management teams. The allocation of responsibilities and damages will take years to unravel. How then can Kaluza and Vidrine, who are accused of disregarding abnormally high pressure readings that according to the government should have alerted them to the danger of a  blowout at BP’s Macondo well, be the ones facing criminal charges and prison time? How can this be fair, just, or even possible?

It isn’t fair or just. It is possible because it is easier to finger the two middle-managers who inherited the flawed well equipment that was a ticking time bomb than to put a whole company, or many companies, behind bars. As the F.B.I. agent investigating the theft of the Declaration of Independence keeps telling Nicholas Cage’s treasure hunter in the Dan Brown rip-off  movie “American Treasure,” “Somebody has to go to jail.” Kaluza and Vidrine may be the designated villains for the BP spill. Their only crime was one of moral luck: they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, the final links in a tangled chain of incompetence, corruption and miscalculations. Continue reading →

The Asperger’s Child, the Company With A Heart, and the Cheapskate Parents: A Cynical Ethics Tale

/ Jack Marshall / 36 Comments

This is a sweet and gooey ethics tale with, I fear, a fishy center.

James, luckily captured in spontaneous celebration over the completely unexpected gift from the LEGO company

James, luckily captured in spontaneous celebration over the completely unexpected gift from the LEGO company

James Groccia of West Boylston, Massachusetts was nine years old when he told his parents that his dream gift was an Emerald Night Train LEGO Set. His parents, seeking to build his character before he could build his dream train. told the boy that he had to save up for the expensive set, which cost $100. James has Asperger’s Syndrome, which means that he obsesses about things that interest him to an extreme degree, and he made the Lego set the object of his tunnel vision. After two years of meticulous saving, he finally had enough money saved to purchase his prize—-and discovered that it had been discontinued. Now the  Emerald Night Train could only be obtained from collectors or in expensive online auctions, costing far more money than James had saved. The boy was devastated.

At the suggestion of James’ Asperger’s counsellor, his mother helped him write a letter to LEGO, explaining his devotion to the toy and asking if the company could track one down for him. It responded, with regret,  that indeed the Emerald Night Train LEGO Set was out of stock and was no longer made. Then, a few days before James’s birthday this October, a box addressed to James arrived at the family home. Yes, Virginia, it was a brand-new model of the Emerald Night Train! The accompanying letter from Lego said, Continue reading →

“Liz and Dick,” The Ethics Train Wreck Movie

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments
The real producer behind "Liz and Dick"?

The real producer behind “Liz and Dick”?

There was another movie I watched on TV when I was too sick to move, think, or, in this case, change channels: “Liz and Dick,” the infamous Lifetime Movie Network bio-pic starring Lindsay Lohan. Was it lousy? Sure it was lousy; there was no way such a film could have been anything but lousy. Lousy cable movies, however, are hardly news or uncommon, especially on LMN. Indeed, this one was probably in the upper 25% for the outfit that regular creates starring vehicles for the likes of Erika Eleniak and Kellie Martin. This one, however, was an ethics train wreck quite apart from its aesthetic flaws.

The whole project begins with a lie, albeit a popular and elaborately supported one, which is that Elizabeth Taylor was anything special as an actress. She was not. Taylor parlayed uncommon beauty, public sympathy, and later sexual notoriety into mega-celebrity status that drooling male movie critics disgracefully interpreted as genuine talent. She had a thin, unpleasant and brittle voice that made her already limited range even more so. She couldn’t play comedy, and didn’t have the chops for hard drama either. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Rapper and Hip-Hop Music Mogul Ryan Leslie

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments
I wouldn't mess with this guy. No way.

I wouldn’t mess with this guy, Ryan.  No way. But be my guest…

The real mystery for me in this silly scenario is why the rapper would think he could publicly promise a $1 million reward and not have to make good on it. Any rational theories will be received with pleasure.

Ryan Leslie, who has penned a hit song or two and performs as a hip-hop artist himself, had his laptop and external hard-drive stolen while he was on tour in Cologne, Germany two years ago. Apparently he felt that the demos and songs on the equipment had potential, because he offered $20,000 for the laptop and hard-drive’s return. When that didn’t work, he upped the reward to $1 million. A man named Armin Augstein found the computer while walking his dog in a park not far from where the computer had been taken, and he turned it over to German police. When the man claimed his reward, Leslie refused to hand it over, claiming that Augstein must have been involved in the theft, though police found no evidence supporting that allegation. Continue reading →

The Ethics Agony of Angus T. Jones

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

How could such a lucky kid complain?

Angus Jones, the “Half” of CBS’s resilient sitcom “Two and a Half Men, ” is receiving heavy doses of criticism and mockery in entertainment circles (and Blog World, of  course) for being so ungrateful and graceless as to post a YouTube video condemning the very TV show that has made him rich and famous over the last nine years, taking him from childhood to majority. The video was posted by the Alabama-based church Forerunner Chronicles, which apparently Baptized Jones recently. “You cannot be a true God-fearing person and be on a television show like [‘Two and a Half Men’]. I know I can’t. I’m not okay with what I’m learning, what the Bible says, and being on that television show.” He goes on to say,

“I’m on ‘Two and a Half Men’ and I don’t want to be on it. Please stop watching it. Please stop filling your head with filth.”

Is this disloyal and ungrateful conduct toward a show, a cast and employers that have given Jones wealth, celebrity and fame? Undoubtedly. If he had come by this station in life through his own efforts and fully informed choices, I would agree with the Hollywood chorus accusing the 19-year-old of “biting the hand that feeds him.” Jones, however, was indentured to “Two and a Half Men” at the age of ten, which is to say that he had little say in it or his life path so far. His parents, like the parents of most child actors, decided that his innate performing talent was worth a lot of money to them and him, and that this was reason enough to launch him into a field with a century-long track record of turning children into dysfunctional celebrity addicts, often setting them on the road to addiction, isolation, depression, failure, and death. Continue reading →

Lindsay Stone Scores A Jumbo: The “I Didn’t Intend To Do What I Did When I Intentionally Did What I Did” Excuse

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

I have to give Lindsay Stone credit. You will seldom see as pure an example of an outrageous denial of the undeniable in a public apology as the one she just authored. Brava! And good luck with the job hunt.

Stone, who is an idiot, and her friend, who is an idiot whose name has yet to be tracked down by the media, collaborated on a photo showing Stone giving an upturned middle finger to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, while yelling something by the sign there that says “Silence and Respect.” The photograph was posted on Stone’s Facebook page and naturally went viral. Thousands of protesters bombarded the website of their employer, Living Independently Forever, with demands that the two be fired. Today, they were.

Before the inevitable axe fell (more on that in a bit), Stone posted this remarkable explanation:

Continue reading →