Character

This Biased Journalism Fiasco Explains So Much It Should Be Taught In Journalism AND Ethics Classes

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias! And sure, journalism is a profession! You can always trust journalism icons!

No…no…and no.

Business Insider published an alleged news article headlined, “More people actually moved out of Florida than New York or California in 2021.” Part of the ongoing effort on both the political Rights and the Left to sink Florida Governor Ron DiSantis’s chances of keeping Donald Trump off the GOP 2024 Presidential ticket, the story claimed to debunk the conventional wisdom that the ultra Woke states are bleeding residents while DiSantis’s state’s population is growing. 674,740 residents left Florida, BI told us, exceeding the total of 433,402 residents who had fled California and the 287,249 residents moving out of New York.

It was pure confirmation bias. The stats were unbelievable on their face, but the Business Insider staff believed them anyway, because they wanted to. After being roundly smacked on social media, BI reversed itself with a replacement post headlined, “We got it wrong: More people moved out of New York and California than Florida in 2021,” that revealed,

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Incompetent Elected Officials Of The Month: Oregon Mayors Dean Sawyer And Matt Diaz

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

It demonstrates a critical lack of integrity to claim you believe one thing when addressing the community that elected you and to privately say the opposite. It is also irresponsible and incompetent to assert positions your supporters would object to in less-than-reliably private forums, like social media. As an extra layer of incompetence, two Oregon mayors were active on social media behaving like this when they clearly didn’t understand the perils of social media (though I bet they do now).

First let’s take the case of Dean Sawyer, the three term mayor of Newport, a city of about 10,000 residents in Oregon. A 30 year police force veteran, he joined a private Facebook group called “LE (that is, Law Enforcement) Only in2016, two years before he was elected mayor. All these years, while he has been extolling “diversity” and celebrating LGTBQ+ “pride,” he was mocking both, as well as progressive sacred cows like illegal immigrants, in his posts, often with particularly vulgar and juvenile memes. (During “Pride Month,” for example, Sawyer posted a photo of disgusted-looking, scantily clad women in a dressing room with the legend, “Strippers waiting for EMS to untangle the new girl’s balls from the pole.”) his luck ran out as it usually does with reckless social media users. Somehow Oregon Public Broadcasting got a tip and managed to track down Sawyer’s politically incorrect and wildly hypocritical posts. Then it wrote, in a special report headlined, “For years the mayor of an Oregon Coast city has posted hateful memes on Facebook”...

Since 2016, Sawyer has posted racist memes mocking Mexicans and endorsing former President Donald Trump’s hardline policies on immigration. One post in April made fun of trans swimmer Lia Thomas. Several mocked Bud Light, which has drawn the ire of Republicans for the company’s business relationship with trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney. Both Thomas and Mulvaney have been targets of right wing smear campaigns and online harassment.

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Of Local Radio, Law vs. Ethics, Ruthless Capitalism And “It Is What It Is”: The WOAS Saga

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

WOAS 88.5-FM is a high school radio station, one of only 200 remaining in the U.S., that has been broadcasting from the Ontonagon High School building in Michigan since 1978. It has only10 watts of broadcasting power, but is still one of only two radio stations in Ontonagon, on Michigan’s western Upper Peninsula. Not only does it provide some listening variety for the town, it also is a valuable educational and recreational vehicle for high school students. Two snack vending machines inside the school largely cover WOAS’s costs, and everyone is a volunteer. After school hours, members of the community volunteer their time as disc jockeys.

WOAS is a Class D station, the lowest FCC classification, covering low-power, noncommercial radio stations. These are considered too weak and disposable to warrant regulatory protection, so when unprotected” from other broadcasters, which can legally overpower its signal or simply apply to take over the station’s place on the dial. WHWL 95.7-FM, with10,000 times the broadcasting power of the school station, applied to the FCC to take over its frequency and place on the radio dial. The FCC said, “Sure! Go ahead!” granting a license for a new station on 88.5 FM, where WOAS lives. The high school radio station now has to find itself a frequency, which costs money, or go gently into that good night.

When the high school asked the radio giant why it chose its place on the radio dial to invade, the answer was classic Bill Clinton: it did it because it could. The big station said it needs to expand and FCC rules allow them to just take over. A consultant looked at available frequencies available to WHWL to add stations, and it deemed 88.5 FM “the best.”

The fact that a high school was currently operating from there was not, apparently, part of the equation, or considered at all.

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Now THAT’S An Unethical Lawyer…And Maybe Two

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

The Cleveland Plain Dealer reports that lawyer James Saunders, who previously worked for the Internal Revenue Service, violated the law by voting twice in both the 2020 and 2022 national elections. His public defender Scott Roger Hurley—he’s on the right above— is arguing that his client should be acquitted because it was “an accident.” “Mistakes do happen, accidents do happen,” he told the court.

Suuuuure.

Saunders voted in two separate locations in two separate states: Cuyahoga County in Ohio, and Broward County in Florida, and in both elections. “The fact that you do that in consecutive general elections I think takes ‘accident’ to the land of imaginary doubt, and not reasonable doubt,” the prosecutor said.

Ya think?

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In Which Your Host Loses His Oldest CLE Organization Client For Telling The Truth

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

I and my ethics training company just got cancelled by the Continuing Legal Education organization that was my very first client when we started ProEthics over 20 years ago. Our seminars have always received top evaluations from lawyer attendees; nos small achievement in the legal ethics field. They also have made our long-time partners a lot of money. We had never needed to re-negotiate our arrangement, and my state tour with a new legal ethics program was a yearly occurrence every fall. This year, however, we had heard nothing about future dates or requests for possible program ideas (I have introduced most of my musical legal ethics seminars with Mike Messer with this group), and it was getting a little late. Grace sent an inquiry to the long-time contact who has handled our programs, and got back a stunning, “We have decided not to use you this year” letter. One shocking realization was that it was clear from the letter that the decision had been made long ago. After two decades, the organization did not have the courtesy to let us know about their decision, or to discuss their concerns with me before making it.

Even more shocking was the reason given for our dismissal. Last year, as I faced very small in-person groups with most of the attendees watching via Zoom, I made a point of thanking and congratulating those who made the effort to come in person, and urging those who had not to remember that remote training is not as effective as in-person training, and that ethics in particular was a topic in which interaction and engagement were crucial, features that are difficult to impossible using Zoom. This, we were told in the letter, did “not respect those who work diligently within our own Distance Education Department to provide remote options for attorneys.”

I did not denigrate the staff at all; I didn’t even know the organization had a Distance Education Department. What my comments did do, and appropriately so, was to alert lawyers to something they need to know. CLE isn’t just for getting mandatory credits. It is supposed to make lawyers better. Most data indicates that remote training with Zoom or similar methods don’t do the job: they are convenient, and lawyers like them because they can rack up billable hours and write emails while turning off their video and pretending to pay attention. But just as with children whose learning crashed with the substitution of distance learning for live instruction, lawyers are cheating themselves, their clients and the profession by undergoing CLE Lite when they should be challenged in a classroom.

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When Ethics Alarms Don’t Ring AND You’re A Moron: The Roman Colosseum Vandal

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

First, the moral: Cultural literacy is a life competence obligation both at home and abroad. Now the tale:

I had been planning on a post about the manhunt in Rome for the unethical tourist caught on video carving “Ivan + Hayley 23/6/23” into a brick on a wall of the Colosseum. Authorities went looking for “Ivan;” meanwhile, not only is destruction of natural and historical sites an occasional Ethics Alarms theme, but in this case the video-taker’s conduct was also questionable: he was more interested in taking a viral video than he was in stopping the vandalism.

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From The Res Ipsa Loquitur Files…

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Can’t handle criticism, can’t take a joke, believes that effective rhetoric that counters their assertions should be silenced.

In short, PETA reveals itself as typical of progressive activists in 2023.

Ethics Quiz: The Cruel And Dishonest Grandfather

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

This is a different sort of Ethics Quiz. Usually we consider whether particular conduct is ethical or unethical, but not in this instance. The conduct this Ethics Quiz examines is unethical by definition.

Ethics Alarms last looked at the nauseating saga of little Navy Joan Roberts [Biden] in January, here. She is the 5-year-old love child (or at least one of them) of President Biden’s wastrel son Hunter, of laptop and Burisma fame. That means she is also President Biden’s granddaughter. There is no way around it: that’s a fact, established by science, which we know Joe worships.

This week, the lawsuit and paternity dispute regarding Hunter, Navy Joan and her mother, Lunden Roberts were resolved in a settlement that involved Hunter agreeing to a new level of child support and Lunden agreeing not to legally change Navy’s last name to Biden. Everything about this case reveals new vistas in Hunter’s creepiness, but really, we knew that, and the fact that a Presidential offspring is an embarrassment is neither relevant to assessing the character of the father nor especially unusual. What is unusual is Joe Biden’s cruel treatment of a little girl who has done nothing to deserve it, and that does reflect on the President’s character.

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Ethics Quote Of The Week: “George The Atheist”

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

“I’m not doing this. Enough is enough. Leave me alone. Period. I’m not doing this. Fine me if you want. I don’t care. Catch the car thieves and check-washers first.”

—-New York Times commenter “George the Atheist” responding to an article about New York City’s new mandatory food waste composting law.

God bless George. This is classic American civil disobedience, and nothing demands it more than useless and futile anti-climate change virtue signalling burdening citizens who have real problems to worry about. Big Brother thinks it is entitled to just keep piling more and more obligations, expenses duties, routines and annoyances on citizens, and will keep doing so, ratcheting up the basic burdens and expense of daily life in the process, until sufficient numbers of people stand their ground, say “No,” and reverse this toxic trend.

Sadly, there aren’t enough Georges in Democratic-run cities and states, not nearly enough. This is why one has to avoid piles of human fecal matter in San Francisco, and watch shop-lifers operate without fear in most major cities, and why so many woke school boards continue to program ideological indoctrination in the public schools. It’s also why I still see young people, not just elders who might (but probably don’t) have a valid reason other than being fearful Democrats, wearing masks while riding bicycles, jogging alone and driving solo in their own car. Most people—even most Americans, who live in an embedded (but weakening) culture that emphasizes suspicion of authority and reverence for personal liberty—are inclined to just knuckle under to the abuse of power, because they lack the integrity, courage and certitude to say “No.” They are weenies. Those who wield power rely on them.

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Pointer: Althouse

 

 

Joy Reid, Harvard, Althouse, And Affirmative Action

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Straining to engage in her trademark “cruel neutrality,” esteemed blogger Ann Althouse stepped up to defend MSNBC’s Joy Reid and stepped in it, as the idiom goes, in the process. Ann defended Reid, claiming that she never said or implied that she was admitted to Harvard because of affirmative action.

“I think Ramaswamy is distorting (or, less likely, not hearing and understanding),” Ann wrote in part. “…She says she got high grades and test scores in high school, but she wouldn’t have thought to try for Harvard if Harvard hadn’t come out to her small, majority-black town and recruited. She was strongly encouraged to apply. The Supreme Court hasn’t changed the power of schools to recruit in places like hers. Reid never says her scores and grades wouldn’t have been enough if she were not black.”

Uncharacteristically, Althouse didn’t do her homework. In the MSNBC segment, Reid was basically regurgitating her blog post saying the same things, and that was headlined, “I got into Harvard because of affirmative action. Some of my classmates got in for their wealth.”

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