Ethics Train Wrecks

“Jeopardy!” Ethics,” 2023

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

“Jeopardy!,” the apparently eternal TV game show that has persevered even as its once difficult questions have become increasingly pitched to the less-than-astute, ended its 2023 with a surprise. Mayim Bialik, the actress who is also (for an actress) unusually credentialed educationally, announced this month that she has been let go as a host of “Jeopardy!” Since 2021, Bialik, who had previously portrayed “Big Bang Theory” head nerd Sheldon’s girlfriend on the series, had shared the role of host with legendary “Jeopardy!” champ Ken Jennings. Bialik was the more reliable and professional of the two, perhaps because of her long performing background. Jennings was at the center of far more gaffes and controversies, though Bialik had her share. This season, for example, she disallowed all three contestants’ answers of ”Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn” because she found their pronunciations of the Russian writer and dissident’s name insufficiently accurate.

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CNN’s Brianna Kellar and the News Media’s “Think of the Children!” Refrain in Support of Hamas

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Yes, it’s “Imagine” time again. Mainstream media talking heads and hacks have apparently been playing the John Lennon’s sweet and fatuous ode to nonsense over earbuds as they sleep, judging from the angle they repeatedly return to as they push anti-Israel propaganda on the public.

CNN’s Breanna Keilar had a typical “Think if the children!” exchange with Israeli spokeswoman Tal Heinrich yesterday.

Keilar (talking over and interrupting her guest as she Heinrich expressed regret that children in Gaza were being placed in harm’s way): “Tal, when you see those pictures coming out of Gaza, do you see why some people don’t have hope looking at those pictures?”

Heinrich: “Well, we are in the middle of a war that Israel did not start, and did not want.”

Keilar: “It is prosecuting it forcefully, and you see the pictures here.”

Heinrich: “When Hamas started this war — hope and peace and a better future for the region — that is the greatest enemy of terrorists. Once we eliminate these terrorists, we eliminate the rule. We hope that there will be other voices, pragmatic ones that want to work with us towards peace. This is what we want. We want to live in this region peacefully. That’s what Israelis have always wanted. But first, Hamas must be gone, and then we hope that the Palestinian society will de-radicalize. We can’t have — you know, what our troops are finding right now, on the ground, in certain neighborhoods in Gaza, pictures of children, women with guns, Hamas uniform tailored for children. And Hamas terrorists that we have arrested—”

Keilar (interrupting): “Does that make the children justifiable enemies to you? Is that what you’re saying? Does that make all of the children justifiable enemies to you? I mean, you’re raising the specter of them being used in military uniform.”

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Harvard’s Claudine Gay Scandal Just Keeps Getting Better, Though I Guess We Shouldn’t Be Surprised That An Unethical University Uses Unethical Lawyers

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

It’s really a shame that I have to post this today, when the Ethics Alarms traffic consists largely of metaphorical tumbleweeds blowing down the empty dusty streets. However, we know most of the news media is trying to bury the series of revelations that prove that the leader of higher education rot hired an unqualified president because she was black, female, and a DEI agent, and that because she is black and female, Harvard is employing lies, excuses and rationalizations to avoid dumping her when a white male president who had been revealed as a plagiarist in scholarship and a blathering fool before Congress would have been fired in a flash.

I know this blog is a small, tinny voice in the vast wilderness, but it’s something.

Above you see excerpts from a 15 page letter sent to the New York Post threatening to sue on Harvard’s behalf if the paper continued to report the discovery by conservative reporter Christopher Rufo and others that Gay had plagiarized the works of other scholars by using their words and ideas as her own without attribution in dozens of instances, including her Harvard dissertation. The Post points out that Harvard, through its attorneys at Clare Locke, stated that there was no plagiarism and that the allegations were false before Harvard had bothered to investigate the claims. This also means that Gay approved of the letter, which she knew was itself “demonstrably false”:

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If You Are Troubled By The Ferguson Effect, Wait Until The Aurora Effect Kicks In

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

The surge in homicides following the Michael Brown fiasco in Ferguson, Missouri sparked a debate about whether the demonizing of police by the news media, lawyers seeking quick liability pay-outs every time a perp was killed in a confrontation with police, and progressive politicians demonstrations, and the anti-police hostility they engendered triggered the murder spike. City Journal contributing editor Heather Mac Donald, among others, identified a “Ferguson Effect,” in which police were pushed into passive law enforcement for fear of criminal prosecutions primed by political factors and the kind of life- and career-wrecking publicity that savaged Officer Darren Wilson, who was found by a grand jury to be blameless in Brown’s shooting. Since that 2014 ethics train wreck, the Ferguson Effect has metastasized thanks to the George Floyd freakout, the Black Lives Matters riots, and the conviction and imprisonment of the group officers involved. It is indisputable that proactive law enforcement is dangerous now both in the streets and in the aftereffects when events turn ugly.If police are going to be sitting ducks for moral luck prosecutions, it requires a martyr or a fool to take the kinds of risks today’s social and legal climate engenders.

Next up on the metaphorical social justice shooting gallery: paramedics.

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Now THAT’s Going To Leave A Mark…I Hope!

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

[I am especially grateful for this story because it gives me a perfect oportunity to post my favorite John Wayne clip, from “McClintock!”]

One of the scholars that Harvard President Claudine Gay ripped off without proper attribution has issued a full-throated condemnation in the Wall Street Journal. Carol Swain, author, researcher and a retired Vanderbilt professor considered one of the pioneers in the field of race in politics and government doesn’t get into the high weeds of Gay’s pathetic performance before Congress on the matter of her campus’s harassment of Jewish students, focusing instead on the other reason the Harvard diversity hire is demonstrably unqualified for her prestigious position. Swain writes in part,

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After Harvard’s Wagon-Circling: This Will Not End Well….

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

While I was certain that Harvard would not have the integrity or guts to dump its albatross of a president having trapped the university in DEI Hell by selecting a black female social justice warrior in the first place, I have never held any illusions that this reflex circling of the progressive wagons and rote vote of confidence would do anything to slow Harvard’s demise. To be curt: the nation’s most prestigious university—for now—has a flat learning curve.

Isn’t that ironic.

Here are three updates on the ongoing Harvard debacle:

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A “Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!” Smoking Gun: An Insider Confirms The Ethics Rot At The New York Times And In American Journalism

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

The bad news is that the platform for this powerful exposé is The Economist, which most Americans don’t read. Another problem is that the essay by former Times opinion editor James Bennet is prohibitively long: over 17,000 words. Nonetheless, everyone should read it, especially those who still hold on to the myth that “advocacy journalism” is journalism, that’s it’s healthy for our democracy, or that the New York Times can be trusted to convey facts rather than propaganda.

The piece is titled “When the New York Times lost its way,” and the author begins by focusing on the Senator Tom Cotton op-ed piece that he was forced to take down and that cost him his job. It is understandable that Bennet feels that way, but the fact that he would point to that episode and not many others that occurred before it shows his own blindness and bias. Apparently the Times announcing in late 2016 that it would henceforth frame the news to ensure that Hillary Clinton, or pushing the Hillary-seeded Russian collusion myth for two years didn’t qualify as signature significance of a corrupted paper, but pulling a conservative U.S. Senator’s op-ed because the Times staff disagreed with it does. Well, that one cost Benett his job, after all.

Ironically, Bennet’s biases enhance his credibility: in many ways he’s a classic Democratic, Trump-hating progressive, and yet he’s still blowing a very loud whistle on his colleagues. Is he a “disgruntled ex-employee”? Sure he is; Bennet is bitter and disillusioned, and maybe that’s why he felt it necessary to write such an exhaustive piece. Nonetheless, his argument is persuasive. If the Times was the newspaper it claims to be (and that Bennet shows it is not), it would have published his essay itself.

The article is here, and to encourage you to read it, I’ll point out some representative passages:

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Confirmation Bias Test: The Rasmussen 2020 Voter Fraud Survey

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Trump’s reaction aside, what is a fair, rational, measured way to evaluate the results of the just-relased Rasmussen survey about voter fraud in the 2020 election?

The headline is “One-in-Five Mail-In Voters Admit They Cheated in 2020 Election.” The findings, in brief:

1. “More than 20% of voters who used mail-in ballots in 2020 admit they participated in at least one form of election fraud.”

2. “21% of Likely U.S. voters who voted by absentee or mail-in ballot in the 2020 election say they filled out a ballot, in part or in full, on behalf of a friend or family member, such as a spouse or child, while 78% say they didn’t.”

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The Harvard President’s New Scandal: Now The Only Way Gay Can Prove She’s Fit To Lead The University Is To Leave It [Expanded & Updated]

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

City-Journal, arguably the best of the conservative websites, has extensive coverage of the plagiarism allegations against Claudine Gay, whose presidency of Harvard was already on shaky ground following her awful testimony before Congress regarding the burgeoning anti-Semitism on campus. It is too detailed for me to summarize correctly, and if I cut and paste sufficient amounts of the piece I’ll be plagiarizing, so you should read all about it here. (You may have to register, but access is free.)

Disgustingly, the New York Times and the Washington Post have not reported this yet. That’s outrageous, and one more screaming example of how the Left circles its wagons any time an ally seriously screws up. Harvard is to progressive indoctrination in education what the Times is to progressive propaganda in journalism, but the last thing the mainstream media needs now is another Hunter Biden laptop fiasco. Harvard is very much in the news already for it’s ugly role in the Hamas-Israel Ethics Train Wreck; Gay is now a central figure, and for the plagiarism development to be given the “nothing to see here” treatment by the news media is spectacularly foolish as well as unethical. [Update: This afternoon, after Harvard mentioned the plagiarism issue, both the Times and the Post finally reported on it its digital editions.]

But I digress…I had initially assumed that the accusations that Gay had violated Harvard’s own policies on citations, credit to other scholars and plagiarism were like past attacks on controversial authors like Ann Coulter, technical but non substantive, the sort that could be dug up on many published public figures by those seeking to damage their reputations. I was mistaken, however. Gay’s violations are substantive and substantial. Moreover, Gay appears to have appropriated material from one of the most significant scholars in the field of racial issues in American, now retired Vanderbilt professor and author Carol Swain.

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Incompetent Elected Official Of The Month, Ethics Dunce, Unethical Quote Of The Month: Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.)

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Imagine: this guy is on the House Judiciary Committee! Imagine again: here is what passes for rational, logical, responsible rhetoric on MSNBC.

Asked about the disgraceful performance of the three college presidents under questioning from Rep. Elise Stefanik, Rep. Raskin pulled out every irrelevant anti-Republican talking point he could think of to avoid criticizing fellow woke warriors, beginning with saying he hopes a college president would take action when there are calls for genocide on campus because “lax Republican gun laws” mean “we’ve got to take very seriously” people making threats.

Yes, the debacle at the hearing was about gun control. Then he really got rolling:

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