Etiquette and manners

Unethical Headline Of The Month: Mediaite

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments
Mediaite leads the way...

Mediaite leads the way…

Watch this Effing Clip of a Cruise Boat Crashing into a Pier in San Diego

Really, Mediaite? Effing? EFFING?  When did you start hiring 13-year-old detention students to write your headlines? Is “fucking” now an acceptable adjective at Mediaite? You do know that “Effing” is just code for “fucking,” right? What ineffable quality is it that you think “effing” adds to the story or the headline? Humor? What an insult to your readers. “Attitude,” or “‘tude”? I don’t read your website for attitude, I read it for news and commentary on public affairs and how they are covered, unless the post is by left-wing hack Tommie Christopher, in which case I’m reading to find out just how much naked, dishonest partisan bias and Hillary boot-licking you’ll tolerate before being responsible and firing the clown, because he really is an embarrassment.

He’s not as much of an embarrassment, however, as having “effing” in a headline. Gratuitous vulgarity to appeal to—what, Trump supporters? 21st Century Holden Caulfields? Morons? Who? Certainly not anyone literate or who appreciates professional journalism standards or societal civility.

Ethics Observations On The Michelle Fields-Corey Lewandowski Ethics Train Wreck

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

trainwreck6

Michelle Fields, a stand-in reporter for Breitbart, gets manhandled at a Trump rally while trying to ask The Donald a question. She complains, the Trump organization attacks her, her Trumpized employers refuse to back her, and now battery charges have been filed in North Carolina against Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s campaign manager, whom Fields says grabbed and bruised her. Meanwhile, multiple members of the Breitbart staff, including website star Ben Shapiro and the reporter, have resigned.

What’s going on here, and why does it matter?

1. It matters because what should have been a minor episode has turned into a full-scale ethics train wreck, with the still-growing passenger list including Donald Trump, his campaign, Breitbart, Fox News, the justice system, Fields, Shapiro, the Washington Post, Piers Morgan, and Trump’s embarrassing supporters. Nothing has escalated into a nasty and destructive battles of wills, because Donald Trump creates a culture in which winning and never apologizing turns every dispute into ugly confrontation and warfare.

2. This is how Trump as President would and could start a real war. His entire philosophy precludes common sense and diplomacy. Just because an incident is trivial in substance doesn’t mean its implications can’t be significant, and this is an excellent example. Look at how it developed. Trump’s staff embraces the culture he has created and endorses—thuggishness, misogyny, a contempt for manners, a refusal to be gracious, insistence on winning above all, even when the benefits are dwarfed by the costs. A government and nation under Trump would do the same. A complaint over fishing rights or an imagined diplomatic gaffe would deteriorate and escalate, with President Trump shouting insults from the Oval Office. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunces: Salon And Old Donald Trump Date Lucy Klebanow

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments
Stop picking on this guy. He vanished long ago.

Stop picking on this guy. He vanished long ago.

I’m not even going to quote from the lower-than-low-blow kiss-and-tell article by Lucy Klebanow in in Salon titled “My awful date with Donald Trump: The real story of a nightmare evening with a callow but cash-less heir.” I couldn’t finish reading it, so quickly was it apparently that I, like you, didn’t need to start, so self-evidently unethical and inexcusable was its motive and topic.  There is nothing newsworthy within it, and while its unjustifiable incursion into the area of privacy that every human being, even celebrities, have a right to enjoy isn’t quite at the Hulk Hogan sex tape level, it is no less wrong.

This same, mean-spirited, essay could be written about me, or you, and definitely about Lucy Klebanow, by anyone who happened to have a one-time social encounter with us that didn’t show us at our best. What has Donald Trump done to exempt him from the basic human courtesy of keeping the details of such inevitable social disasters on the way to maturity and wisdom between the two participants? Nothing. Nothing, because nothing, not even Trump’s own indiscretions about others, can do this. The Golden Rule applies here like epoxy: we don’t do this disgusting thing, because nobody wants their own repulsed bad dates to do it to them. It’s a terrible thing to do. To anyone. Period. No exceptions. Continue reading →

A Brief Note On The Site’s Background Images

/ Jack Marshall / 30 Comments

Limp wrist O

The Ethics Alarms web design uses backgrounds to illustrate ongoing ethics issues in the news. For some time, the background has featured a photo of Donald Trump, whose candidacy I regard as a long-running ethics train wreck of uncertain destination. I could justify leaving it up until sanity regains control and he is finally subdued and returned to the Crackerjack box from whence he came. That could take eight years, however.

Sorry. I know that made you throw up in your mouth a little. Me too.

Lately, readers whose gorges react similarly to mine when forced to view Mr. Trump’s visage have been calling on me to take him down, which I have reluctantly done. I can’t promise that he won’t be back, but the new background is the very strange photo from yesterday of President Obama letting his hand and arm go limp as it is raised by Cuba’s dictator—but his health care is grrrrreat!— Raul Castro.

I’m not sure what exactly is unethical here, or who is the unethical one, but something is. I would only suggest that if an American President chooses to boost the credibility and prestige of a ruthless tyrant, he can’t simultaneously act like his host has cooties. It certainly looks like Obama is saying, “Oops! I don’t want to look as if I am friends with this guy!”

I would suggest that this awkward moment is something that should have been worked out well in advance, as it was wholly predictable.

The Indefensible “Nigger” Double Standard

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

Andrea Quenette, a University of Kansas communications professor, has been on paid leave for four months after a group of her students filed a complaint that she had used the racial epithet nigger in  response to a question in class. She was asked about  her views on the best way to talk about race with  students, and replied that as a white woman, she found it  difficult to relate to minority groups’ challenges because she has not experienced racial discrimination herself.  She added that unlike other campuses where there had been over racist incidents, she “had not seen “nigger” spray painted on walls at KU.”

For saying this, she was subjected to campus-wide humiliation, an interruption in her teaching career and an investigation, of what I cannot imagine. She was talking about the word, she is a communications professor, words are her business, and it is impossible to talk about the word “nigger” seriously without using it (and no, codes like “N-word”  are either the exact same as using the word itself, or politically correct conventions that show just how silly word-o-phobia really is. Take your pick.) Finding offense with her using “nigger” in this context is simply a “gotcha” by race-baiting students. and as nonsensical as the gag in “The Life Of Brian” where the priest who condemns a Hebrew citizen by committing the blasphemy of speaking the name of God, “Jehovah,” is stoned by the crowd because he speaks the forbidden name in order to utter the condemnation. Nevertheless. Professor Quenette, while keeping her clearly worthless job, was sentenced to mandatory cultural competency training, a.k.a. political correctness indoctrination, and to have a second faculty member work with her to ensure that her curriculum include more diversity.

If she had enough sense, courage and integrity to be qualified to teach at the college level, she would have told the school to take its job, its curriculum, its rejection of academic freedom, its craven capitulation to race-bullying and its disgusting treatment of faculty members and shove them all. But no, she’s a good, submissive  social justice zombie who just made a mistake, and it’s time for her to grovel.

Spurred by this miserable marker of how low higher education has sunk, my indispensable issue scout Fred puckishly sent me this, a Washington Post opinion piece from a year ago. The column, by  African American free-lancer Michael Arceneaux, was sparked by an incident I also commented upon a year ago, when Kentucky guard Andrew Harrison muttered “Fuck that nigga”  behind his hand into a live microphone while answering a post-Final Four game news conference question about Wisconsin player Frank Kaminsky, whose heroics had led to Kentucky’s 71-64 victory.  My position on Harrison, then as now, was this: Continue reading →

Don’t Say The System Doesn’t Work—It Worked Perfectly With Marco Rubio

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments
As it turned out, this told us everything we need to know...

As it turned out, this told us everything we need to know…

Pundits, professors and even China are saying that the U.S. system of identifying qualified Presidential candidates doesn’t work or “is broken” because Donald Trump appears to have slipped through the net. But the occurrence of what Herman Kahn called “an unpredictable convergence of bad management and bad luck” only proves what Ethics Alarms has noted over and over again: no system, even the best, works all the time. I’ll post an article about all the people and circumstances that poked that hole in the Trump net once my nausea subsides, but in the meantime, I want to point out that the system worked perfectly with Marco Rubio. He wasn’t fit to be President, and the system exposed him brilliantly.

Good.

Rubio thought that he could follow the successful plan that put Barack Obama Barack Obama in the White House in 2008, despite similar deficiencies in experience. Like Obama, he was a young, fresh, minority candidate with a natural base, who projected intelligence and was an impressive speaker. The political and campaign processes, however, and his reaction to the stress of them, exposed his many flaws. The Obama plan wouldn’t be enough this time, in no small part because Marco Rubio is no Barack Obama: Continue reading →

“A Nation Of Assholes” Epilogue, Baseball Edition

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

To be fair, Donald Trump supporters and Trump himself are not the only ones who would transform the United States into a rude, boorish snakepit of jerks and narcissists.

There is Bryce Harper, for example, shown above in his minor league days blowing a kiss to a pitcher after a home run.  In a much discussed interview with ESPN, Harper decried the “unwritten rules” of Major League Baseball, which, among other things, disapprove of showboating, trash-talking, styling, and showing up  opposing players. Naturally, many sportswriters, whose IQ and ethical standards hover perilously close to those of the juvenile, none-too-swift Harper, are flocking to his side.

“It’s a tired sport because you can’t express yourself. You can’t do what people in other sports do,” Harper said in the interview. “I’m not saying baseball is . . . boring . . . but it’s the excitement of the young guys who are coming into the game now who have flair. If that’s Matt Harvey or Jacob deGrom or Manny Machado or Joc Pederson or Andrew McCutchen or Yasiel Puig — there’s so many guys now who are so much fun.”

Nobody’s against fun, of course, and there have been many players past and present whose unique flair was justly celebrated. Harper, not being a rhetoric master, probably mixed up the harmless with the toxic in his list unintentionally, but there’s no excuse for Pulitzer Prize-winning sportswriter Tom Boswell, other than the fact that intellectual dishonesty is his career calling card.

“From Willie Mays basket catches to Pete Rose sprinting to first on a walk to Dennis Eckersley fanning his finger-pistol at hitters he had struck out, baseball needs all the authentic extroverted individuality it can get, ” writes Boswell in his piece about Harper in the Washington Post. Ah yes, the device of the deceptive metaphor. Willie Mays used the basket catch because that’s the way he caught baseballs. Pete Rose ran to first on walks because he hustled.

The pistol routine Eckersley used (occasionally)? He was being a jerk. Continue reading →

The Flat Learning Curve Continues: Obama Skips Nancy Reagan’s Funeral. Of Course He Does.

/ Jack Marshall / 112 Comments
Obama's job learning curve: still flat.

Obama’s job learning curve: still flat.

I wasn’t going to comment on this until two of my many clueless Facebook friends had to mock an indignant article about it on a conservative site. I don’t think Obama skipping Nancy Reagan’s funeral is worthy of outrage, but it is sad. It’s almost as sad as the degree to which the people who elected him have never comprehended what his job is.

Obama is not attending Nancy’s funeral because he was previously committed to attend a vital event called South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive festival. Michelle Obama will speak at the funeral, but she is also speaking at the festival, making it obvious that the President could also do both if he wanted to. He doesn’t want to, just as he didn’t want to show respect to a sitting Supreme Court Justice who had died suddenly by attending his funeral.

That’s Obama; we should know him by now. He’s a petty, small man, but more important, he doesn’t seize opportunities to repair the poisonous partisan divide that he helped create because he doesn’t understand the symbolic nature of the Presidency, or just doesn’t give a damn. That attitude—I think both are true— has played a major role in creating the non-functioning government and the societal divisions he will leave as his primary legacy. Continue reading →

Observations On The Democratic Candidates Debate In Flint, MI.

/ Jack Marshall / 47 Comments

Dems debate

Here’s the transcript.

1. The smug comments from Democratic pundits and operatives about how “substantive” the Democratic debates have been and how “ugly” and “childish” the GOP debates have been is really nauseating, and the news media should flag it as such. When one candidate is ugly and childish, as well as shameless about being so, the other candidates have little choice but to get down in the mud. That’s the situation in the Republican debates, and that is entirely due to Donald Trump. When, meanwhile, one candidate is notable for lack of trustworthiness and dishonesty, and her only opposition refuses to reference the major reason the public (accurately) believes her to be so,  the resulting debate will be muted. Sanders, in short, isn’t doing his job. That’s nothing for Democrats to be smug about.

2. Last week it was learned that at least 2,079 emails Clinton sent or received on her unsecured, private server contained classified material, though she initially said that she handled no classified material whatsoever. That’s at least 2,079 lies. We learned that she received those emails on two devices , a BlackBerry and an iPad that she received in June 2010, despite the fact that she said, after news broke about her personal email account,  she’d done this as a matter of convenience so she would not have to carry two devices, saying, “I thought it would be easier to carry just one device for my work and for my personal emails instead of two.” This was also a lie.

We learned that many, many  people, including lobbyists, lawmakers, White House officials, State Department employees, John Kerry and President Obama communicated directly with Clinton using her personal email address. This is just another part of the Obama Administration Ethics Train Wreck, Outrageous Arrogance and Incompetence Division. That so many should have reported it and didn’t, as well as stopped it, is no excuse for the corrupted Clinton enablers to latch onto, and it doesn’t make what she did any less outrageous and reckless. It doesn’t excuse her irresponsible conduct at all. It just shows how lazy and amateurish others were as well.

We earlier learned that hackers with ties to Russia tried at least five times to access Clinton’s account over a four hour period  on the morning of Aug. 3, 2011, by sending her emails. The Clinton campaign says there is no evidence to suggest she opened them, giving the hackers access to her computer. That is just moral luck.

Finally, we learned this week that Hillary Clinton, as Secretary of State WROTE 104 emails, using her private server, that the State Department has since designated as classified.

Was Clinton asked about anything related to her e-mail lies and incompetence regarding national security last night, or about her incompetent oversight of her own agency, which is supposedly one of the credits that makes her so qualified to be President?

No. That’s a breach of competence by CNN and Anderson Cooper, with pure complicity by Bernie Sanders. Continue reading →

Post-Debate Ethics, Part 2 (of 4): John Kasich’s Opportunity

/ Jack Marshall / 33 Comments

It is almost too late, but not quite, for Donald Trump to be derailed by a Joseph Welch-Joe McCarthy moment. I called for a qualified and competent GOP candidate to do this seven months ago, but none had the wit or courage to deliver. Since then, Trump has provided one opening after another that could have been exploited to tear away the veil of ignorance from even the eyes of the most deluded Trump supporter. One such opening was September 16, when Trump probably doomed some innocent children by promoting anti-vaxxer myths in a nationally televised debate. A medical doctor, inexplicably running for President, was standing right next to him. Did Ben Carson say, “You know, Donald, your ignorance is stunning. Vaccinations don’t cause autism, and they save lives, but as with every other topic we have talked about, you are shooting from the hip, faking expertise you don’t have, and dangerously misleading millions of trusting Americans by pretending to have expertise you don’t have. You should be ashamed of yourself. Why aren’t you?”? No, Carson, typically, mumbled something accommodating and let Trump get away with more misinformation.

Dr. Carson’s gone now, thankfully, as are many other candidates who might have burnished their own chances and clotheslined Trump with a well-planned “Have you no sense of decency?” sequel. Only one candidate remains who has any chance of pulling off the instant character assassination that Joseph Welch executed so deftly on June 9, 1954. In my post before that September 16 debate, I predicted that one of the non-Trumps would use a variation of Welch’s line, and observed that if I was wrong,  none of them “are  smart enough to be President.”

As Jeff Goldblum muses in “Jurassic Park,” Boy do I hate being right all the time.” Or being right about why I was wrong.

I don’t have much hope for John Kasich, the one remaining alternative to Trump with a chance to play Welch effectively. Continue reading →