Business & Commercial

Ethics Dunce: ABC News

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Watching the ethical standards of the major network news department crumble away is like watching a sand castle  on the beach disintegrate with each new wave. There really is no resistance, or hope. It is just a matter of time.

Thus the announcement that ABC News paid $200,000 to Casey Anthony, the Florida woman who is accused of killing her two-year-old daughter, Caylee, comes as not so much of a surprise as just a further peak at the inevitable. Critics are pointing with outrage to the fact that ABC announced that it is cutting hundreds of jobs, as if this is somehow hypocritical. In truth, they are two sides of the same coin. Journalistic ethics have always been the most fragile of professional ethics systems, more dependent on success than principle. When there was limited competition, the networks could burnish their images by conforming to ethical standards and making sure everyone knew it. Now, however, web-based news, blogs and cable news networks are carving up their pie. Most of the consumers of news don’t care about ethics, and the National Enquirer, which has always practiced checkbook journalism, is up for a Pulitzer. Continue reading →

ACORN, the Saint’s Excuse, and the Ruddigore Fallacy

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Today’s New York Times discusses the impending end of ACORN, brought down by bad publicity, loose oversight, sloppy governance, and a little matter of the cover-up of a million dollar embezzlement. It would be helpful to other non-profit organizations that do needed good works to learn the proper lessons from ACORN’s fate, but the reaction of some supporters don’t advance that cause. Bertha Lewis, Acorn’s chief executive, has blamed “relentless, well-funded right-wing attacks” for ACORN’s demise, painting the organization as a victim rather than its own assassin. ACORN’s leader’s thought that the usual standards of good governance, diligence, and competence didn’t apply to it, because the group’s mission was virtuous and its accomplishments great. Continue reading →

So Much For “Don’t Be Evil”: YouTube and Google Ethics on Display

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

The Business Insider has posted evidence gathered by Viacom in its lawsuit against Google, consisting primarily  of e-mails and instant messages. It is far from conclusive on the legal issues, which revolve around YouTube and Google’s unauthorized use of copyrighted material. It is very conclusive, however, regarding how often any ethics alarms went off with various Google and YouTube executives as they contemplated bottom line issues: rarely.

Here is a startling example.  In a 2005 e-mail exchange YouTube co-founder Steve Chen reasoned thusly: Continue reading →

Ethics and Irony: the Postman Rings Twice for ACORN

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

“The Postman Always Rings Twice,” James M. Cain’s novel that is better known as a 1946 film noir classic starring Lana Turner and John Garfield, has a famous ironic twist. The story’s hapless drifter narrator escapes punishment for a murder he helped commit, but gets executed anyway for a death that was really an accident. Cosmic justice is done, if not legal justice. It turns out that the postman rang twice for ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, too. Continue reading →

Web Ethics, Due Diligence, and the Happy Maxi-Pad

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

There is no denying it any more. It is per se unethical to pass along information discovered on the web to anyone, much less to put it on a blog or in an e-mail, until you have performed due diligence and determined with reasonable certainty that it is accurate and true.

All the more reason, then, to praise the Snopes “urban legends” website, which does a superb job tracking down and clarifying web hoaxes, rumors and other misinformation. A lot of the latter isn’t even intentional, but the consequences of not checking the facts can still be significant and harmful,

I thought about this after encountering an amusing bit of web lore that many of you may have already seen, on aan old blog post that introduced the piece like this: Continue reading →

Legal Advertising Ethics: The Public’s Not THAT Gullible, 2nd Circuit Rules

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

The fact that lawyers are prohibited by their professional ethics standards from engaging in conduct that is misleading or dishonest has caused many state bars to hold the profession to restrictions on advertising that would ban most of the TV commercials we see every day for any other product or service. For example, lawyers cannot engage in self-praising hyperbole and say, for instance, that the Firm of Slash and Burn is “the best real estate law firm in Miami,” because the statement is not objectively true or cannot be proven to be accurate.

While many states have gradually surrendered in the battle to keep lawyer advertising unusually forthright and dignified (you can see what monstrosities this has wrought here) New York actually toughened its lawyer advertising rules a few years ago, decreeing.. Continue reading →

Nomar, Beantown, and the Legacy Obligation

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Organizations have histories, and that means they have debts to pay. Time moves on, and personnel changes, but the organization that neglects the human beings who played major roles in defining their image, goals, achievements and success has breached its integrity, and violated its Legacy Obligation.

For nearly eight seasons, shortstop Nomar Garciaparra was the face, heart, and soul of the Boston Red Sox. A spidery gymnast in the field who completed the Holy Trinity of Hall of Fame-bound shortstops—Jeter, A-Rod and “Nomah” —who lit up the American League in the mid-Nineties, Garciaparra was a home-grown fan idol. He did everything wonderfully and with panache; Ted Williams, the city’s reigning baseball god, pronounced him his official successor.

Then, suddenly, it all unraveled. Continue reading →

Hollywood Ethics: Variety’s Conflict of Interest Problem

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

That show biz media “bible”, Variety, finally seems to have reached the point where it can no longer pretend that its inherent conflicts of interest don’t exist. The magazine is simultaneously in the business of promoting movies, TV and stage shows, accepting expensive ads from producers, and depending on inside access for its reporting,  yet it purports to offer objective critical reviews of the output of the very people and companies whose patronage it depends upon to exist. It’s an impossible balancing act, and truth be told, Variety reviews have never had much credibility in Hollywood or anywhere else. But whatever pretense of integrity the publication had came crashing down with a lawsuit by Calibra Pictures, a small independent film company that had signed a $400,000 contract with Variety in which the publication promised to help Calibra’s new release, “Iron Cross,” ( featuring the final performance of the late, great, Roy “We’re gonna need a bigger boat!” Scheider, who died in 2008) find both a distributor and critical acclaim. [ Ethics Violations #1 and #2—Dishonesty and Breach of Integrity: Don’t promise what you can’t deliver, and don’t sell your independence and objectivity] Continue reading →

Spam Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

I was not previously familiar with the extent of that scourge of all blogs, spam. Nor did I realize that deciding which comments qualified for instant deletion would involve an ethical balancing act, but it does, and I am getting the hang of it.

WordPress, thankfully, gives its blogs a program that flags the most obvious spam, fake, automatically generated comments that have nothing to do with the post they are attached to, entered only to get publicity for websites that are selling something. Sending out this junk is pretty sleazy: it aims to junk up a serious website with dishonest drivel and use it as an unwilling billboard, usually for less-than-admirable products and services. The worst ones try to waste my time as well, falsely “alerting me” that my blog doesn’t work with their browser or that my RSS feed is malfunctioning. This kind of spam never gets through the door. Continue reading →

Ethics Alarms: the News, the Web, and Other Things

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Why People Think the Media is Biased, Reason 61,567: Chris Matthews recently mocked new Mass. GOP Senator Scott Brown for signing a book deal to write his autobiography. “Didn’t people used to write their memoirs after their careers?” Matthews sneered. Gee, Chris, I don’t know: Weren’t you extravagant in your praise for Sen. Barack Obama’s autobiography, published before he was half-way through his first term?

How Writers Are Different From Lawyers: A free-lance writer lays out her ethical principles here, which includes not lending her talents to causes she doesn’t believe in. She is on firm ground, because citizens don’t have a Constitutional right to have their ideas professionally communicated to the world. Citizens do and must have the right to use the laws of their country for their own benefit, however, and to have the best representation possible when they are accused of crimes. That is why we can make judgments about a writer’s principles based on her choice of clients, but to do the same with lawyers is an attack on the principles of democracy. Continue reading →