Character

Ethics Dunce: Mirlande Wilson

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

"Share? Why should I share?"

Mirlande Wilson was part of a lottery pool formed in the Maryland McDonald’s where she works, and claims that she bought one of the three winning tickets that will split the $640 million dollar Mega Millions jackpot. But Wilson told the New York Post that although she did take part in the pool, she bought the winning ticket on her own and has no intention of splitting the winnings. A co-worker who took part in the pool dispute’s Wilson’s story and says Wilson was given additional money late Friday night to buy extra lottery tickets before the Mega Millions drawing.

Why are people like this? Yes, I know, greed…still: does winning a fortune have to turn people into utter, irredeemable jerks? Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: What To Do With a Bad Seed?

/ Jack Marshall / 59 Comments

A horror story from Cowlitz County, Washington:

Little Rhoda didn't know what she was doing was bad! Suuuuuure she didn't...

When she was was 11 years old, Cassandra Ann Kennedy decided that her father didn’t love her enough, and that she would have a happier life if he wasn’t around any more. So that she made up a story that her father had raped her, told police, and..voila! In 2002 her father was convicted of rape and  sent to 15 years in a Washington state prison.

In January of 2012, Cassandra, now 23,  confessed that it was all a lie. “I did a horrible thing,” Cassandra told detectives. “It’s not OK to sit and be locked in this horrible place for something you didn’t do. It’s just not right.”

Figured that out all by yourself, did you, Cassie? Continue reading →

Jimmy Kimmel Is Still An Evil, Child-Abusing Jerk, and Apparently I’m The Only One Who Notices

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

I have written twice before about ABC late night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel’s penchant for urging his viewers to inflict emotional distress on their trusting children, because Jimmy and other mean-spirited jerks get a big kick out of watching kids scream and cry following cruelty from their parents. As I wrote the last time Kimmel issued one of his “challenges,” which was to spoil Christmas for your kid by giving them  horrible gifts (like a half-eaten sandwich):

“Children are not props for Jimmy Kimmel’s sadistic amusement, and parents who are willing to use their children this way… are, to be blunt, rotten, despicable, and untrustworthy parents. Something important—Compassion? Kindness? Empathy? Loyalty? Responsibility? Love? — is absent in their parental make-up, and that void is being cynically exploited by Kimmel, who has crossed the threshold from arrested adolescent to full-fledged villain. Since Kimmel has twice been rewarded with positive publicity for egging on parents to harm their kids, what can we expect next from Jimmy?…There’s almost no limit to the great YouTube videos one can create when you’re willing to lie to your kids to upset them.”

Well, now we know. Jimmy asked parents to pre-chew their kids food and serve it to them, to see their horrified reactions. Last night, he showed the hysterically funny “winners.” One disgusted and enraged teenage girl, finally told by her folks that the prank was Jimmy Kimmel’s idea, said to the camera, resoundingly, “You suck, Jimmy!”

Indeed he does. Continue reading →

Senator Vitter Thinks Bribery and Extortion Are Ethical

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

"...and U.S. Senators..."

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar was initially restricted to a lower salary than other Cabinet members because he was a U.S. Senator when the salaries were raised. The Constitution bars members of the House and Senate from appointment to any U.S. office where compensation was increased during the lawmaker’s term. (Did you know that? I didn’t.)  President George W. Bush in 2008 signed legislation rolling back the Interior Secretary’s salary so that President Obama Salazar could appoint Salazar.

Once Salazar joined the Obama Cabinet, however, he was eligible for a raise. But Senator David Vitter (R-La.) saw a chance for some leverage. He wrote Salazar to inform him that he would place a hold on the bill to raise his salary until Salazar agreed to approve six new deep-water oil drilling permits every month. In effect, Vitter threatened to withhold over $19,000 in salary that Salazar had every right to receive in order to force him to take the actions Vitter favored. How does Vitter’s conduct differ from offering a bribe? No at all, as far as I can see. How does it differ from extortion? Not much. Vitter was trying to force a Cabinet officer make decisions motivated by his own financial interest rather than what he believed was in the best interest of the nation. He was creating an unethical conflict of interest. Continue reading →

First Amendment Ethics and the Conundrum of the Despicable Blogger

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

Attack-blogger Crystal Cox---exercising her rights, jeopardizing yours.

One thing that the public just doesn’t understand about lawyers is that their job sometimes involves fighting for the most despicable people imaginable, because those despicable people have legal objectives they have a right to pursue as citizens, and because the principles underlying the fight are important, even if the particular clients—and often their objectives too–are blights on humanity.

Over at Popehat, Ken has chronicled a classic example, in which First Amendment specialist Eugene Volokh (he of the Volokh Conspiracy) and the Electronic Freedom Foundation are backing blogger Crystal Cox as she appeals a $2.5 million defamation judgment against her, in which an Oregon judge ruled that bloggers did not have the same protection against defamation claims under the First Amendment as journalists do. Cox, of whom I was blissfully unaware until Ken’s post, is clearly the kind of person who is a menace on the internet, lacking basic decency, fairness, scruples and common sense, and yet stimulated by the power that the medium provides her. The signature act that established this for me is revealed by Ken at the top of his post:

“Here’s the most important thing you need to know about blogger and “investigative journalist” Crystal Cox: when she got angry at First Amendment attorney Marc Randazza, she didn’t just register the domains marcrandazza.com and fuckmarcrandazza.com and marcrandazzasucks.com in order to attack him. She registered jenniferrandazza.com and nataliarandazza.com — the names of Randazza’s wife and three-year-old daughter.”

Yup, that’s enough, all right: signature significance. Is there any chance that an individual who would do this even once could be an ethical, reasonable, fair person?  No! Only an unethical creep would even consider such conduct; with a normal person, the ethics alarms would be ringing so loud that they would be paralyzing. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Eric Wemple

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Talk about ethics blindness.

Find that loose screw, Eric, and then tell Spike where it is...

On his Washington Post blog, Eric Wemple gushes like Old Faithful about sweet, contrite, courageous Spike Lee, who appropriately apologized (and paid an undisclosed sum) to the Florida couple whose address he had accidentally tweeted to help get George Zimmerman harassed, attacked or killed—that being his clear intent by trying to send Zimmerman’s address to the world, or more specifically, the New Black Panthers’ vigilantes. Wemple was blown away by Spike’s willingness to accept responsibility for his boneheadedness and admit he was wrong:

“Yet his reaction to the mishap rehabilitates the good name of an honest apology. Lee used no qualifiers, no minimizers, no excuses — and no ‘I am sorry if anyone took offense to my actions.’ Just plain regret and shame. Score a victory for the apology.”

So “I’m sorry I nearly got you killed; honest, I was trying to get that other guy killed!” is an impressive apology, is it? Continue reading →

Ethics Hero Emeritus: National Guard Sergeant Dennis P. Weichel Jr. (1983 -2012)

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

There are those who say that human beings are incapable of truly altruistic conduct, and that everything we do, no matter how outwardly generous and selfless, is in fact self-serving. There are others, and I am among them, who believe that human beings have natural ethical instincts that lead them to sacrifice for the benefit of society generally, those in peril, and those who are weaker than themselves, especially children. Those instincts can be nurtured by our culture or extinguished by it, but I believe that they are there in most of us….for a while, at least, sometimes weak or dormant, but there, nonetheless.

They were obviously there in Specialist Dennis P. Weichel Jr. of Providence, Rhode Island, a National Guardsman serving in an Afghan province east of Kabul. On March 22, he left the 16-ton gun truck he was riding in to disperse local children who were wandering in front of his heavily armored convoy, searching for treasure, the brass shell casings that could be melted down for other uses or be sold.  Suddenly a small girl saw a casing and ran into the path of one of the huge military vehicles. Weichel, a father of three, dashed to her, grabbed her, and threw her to safety unharmed. The gun truck struck the Guardsman instead, fatally injuring him.

Weichel was engaged to be married. He is the first member of the Rhode Island National Guard to die in Afghanistan.

Nothing can erase the tragedy of the U.S. serviceman who turned mass murderer in Afghanistan a month ago, and Weichel’s heroism is unlikely to change any hearts and minds there. That wasn’t Weichel’s objective anyway. He saw a young life in danger and acted, risking his own. It would be a better United States if all of us were raised to react as he did, and if our culture more unambiguously encouraged our best instincts rather than our worst ones. The cliché mouthed by politicians is that our military combat personnel are fighting for American values. Dennis Weichel demonstrated that they also carry American values with them, and in his case, he displayed the very finest.

Weichel was promoted posthumously from specialist to sergeant and awarded the Bronze Star, which is appropriate, and Rhode Island’s flags are being flown at half-mast. The honor he most deserves, however, is to be remembered and emulated by the rest of us.

It’s You, Keith.

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

The news that The Angry Man of the Self-Righteous Left, Keith Olbermann, was fired by Al Gore’s Current TV was hardly news at all, since most of us had entered a pool on when Olbermann would get jettisoned from his latest gig. The predictable episode does have an ethics lesson for all of us, however, that involves the virtues of accountability, humility, honesty and contrition.

Olbermann, true to form, attacked his former employers and blamed them for his exit, writing  via Twitter…

“…I’d like to apologize to my viewers and my staff for the failure of Current TV. Editorially, Countdown had never been better. But for more than a year I have been imploring Al Gore and Joel Hyatt to resolve our issues internally, while I’ve been not publicizing my complaints, and keeping the show alive for the sake of its loyal viewers and even more loyal staff. Nevertheless, Mr. Gore and Mr. Hyatt, instead of abiding by their promises and obligations and investing in a quality news program, finally thought it was more economical to try to get out of my contract. It goes almost without saying that the claims against me in Current’s statement are untrue and will be proved so in the legal actions I will be filing against them presently. To understand Mr. Hyatt’s “values of respect, openness, collegiality and loyalty,” I encourage you to read of a previous occasion Mr. Hyatt found himself in court for having unjustly fired an employee. That employee’s name was Clarence B. Cain. In due course, the truth of the ethics of Mr. Gore and Mr. Hyatt will come out. For now, it is important only to again acknowledge that joining them was a sincere and well-intentioned gesture on my part, but in retrospect a foolish one. That lack of judgment is mine and mine alone, and I apologize again for it.”

This, of course, is not really an apology. It’s not an apology when your message is, “I’m sorry my employers are unethical slobs who didn’t appreciate the excellent job I was doing.

Keith Olbermann has either been fired or quit under acrimonious circumstances in engagements with, count them, five broadcast organizations: ESPN, CNN, Fox, MSNBC, and now Current TV. This, despite being obviously talented and often getting excellent ratings. Olbermann is a smart guy, and yet even now, his reaction seems to be, “Why, oh, why, do people keep treating me so badly?”

It’s you, Keith! Continue reading →

The Principal Who Helped Gaby Rodriguez Fake Her Pregnancy Just Won “Principal of the Year.” The Frightening Thing Is, He Might Have Deserved It.

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Note that it says "Principal." It doesn't say anything about "principles."

I received this news from Ethics Hero Harris Meyer, the journalist who has been trying to preserve some semblance of integrity in his profession by reminding it what ethical investigative journalism is not, through his efforts to rebut the praise for Gaby Rodriguez, the high school student who deceived her family and classmates by pretending to be pregnant as her senior project. The news: Trevor Greene, the principal who helped devise Gaby’s unethical stunt and assisted her in lying to the rest of the school, has been named the state’s top high school principal by the Association of Washington School Principals.

He received this  honor, the release says, by virtue of his organizing a system of student-teacher mentorships, and guiding the school’s effort to expand and improve its science, technology, engineering and math curriculum. The fact that he also mentored a student in a blatantly unethical exercise that was, as I wrote in my original post about Gaby’s scam, Continue reading →

Ethics Flashback: A Letter From Kurt Vonnegut

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Mr. Vonnegut

[From the lovely website Letters of Note comes the memory  of this, a letter sent on November 16, 1973 to the Chairman of the Drake, North Dakota, School Board by the late author Kurt Vonnegut. The Chairman, Charles McCarthy, (a name evoking, appropriately, both the rights-flattening Senator of “Have you no decency?”  fame and the dummy) had been outraged that a teacher at the high school had used Vonnegut’s classic novel, “Slaughter-House Five,” in class, and with the support of his board, saw that all the copies of the book purchased were burned in the school’s furnace, followed by others that he deemed “obscene.” Vonnegut, whose novels teem with ethical themes, especially the importance of kindness, learned about the book-burning from news reports, and wrote the following correspondence.

Apparently he received no reply.]

“Dear Mr. McCarthy:

I am writing to you in your capacity as chairman of the Drake School Board. I am among those American writers whose books have been destroyed in the now famous furnace of your school.

Certain members of your community have suggested that my work is evil. This is extraordinarily insulting to me. The news from Drake indicates to me that books and writers are very unreal to you people. I am writing this letter to let you know how real I am. Continue reading →