Government & Politics

TV Payola and the Shameless Alison Rhodes

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

" 'Conflict of interest?' What's that?"

She’s not the only one, apparently. But consumer product reviewer Alison Rhodes (“The Safety Mom”), a frequent guest on national, syndicated and local TV shows, not only reviews products whose manufacturers have paid her to mention them, she is unapologetic about it.

Today’s Washington Post reveals that Rhodes, who can be seen on such shows as “Regis and Kelly”, “Today” and “Good Morning America!” as well as local news outlets around the country, raved on the air about a home electronic monitor and a backpack with a built-in alarm known as the iSafe bag without telling either viewers or producers that she had accepted payola from their makers. Rhodes, however, shrugs off the issue. She tells the Post that she doesn’t see any problem, because “I’m not going to take on any engagement with a client unless I believe in their product.”  Amazing. Meanwhile, the news programs the Post interviewed claim that they had no inkling that Rhodes was plugging the product of a client.

This brazen deception of the public is inexcusable, but the shamelessness—or ignorance— of Rhodes and the negligence of those who give her exposure are worse. Continue reading →

Bachmann and Elijah

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

"Psst! My mom is gay and doesn't need fixing. What's 'gay'?"

Rep. Michele Bachmann’s views on homosexuality are antediluvian and ignorant. Almost anything that causes her discomfort as a result of her bigotry is to be fervently desired. Almost anything. One exception is a mother using her child as a weapon against her in a war he doesn’t understand.

In the video conveniently taken by a friend of 8-year-old Elijah’s mother and subsequently posted on YouTube, the child reluctantly, after much prodding, whispers “My mom is gay and she doesn’t need fixing” in the strange Minnesota Congresswoman’s ear. If it makes some people happy to believe that Elijah did this on his own, I suppose that’s a plus; this makes two plusses when added to Bachmann’s probable pique. Sorry, it’s not enough. I know it wouldn’t create a viral video if Elijah’s mother delivered her sentiment herself, but that’s just too bad: children are not puppets, props or trained terriers, and using them to deliver political messages is unethical—unfair, irresponsible, a breach of trust, and an abuse of power. Placing a child’s programmed act on Youtube, where it will haunt him forever, just adds to the offense,

Elijah’s message was inaccurate. His mother does need fixing, just not in the way Michele Bachmann thinks she does.

 

Now THAT’s Hypocrisy! OWS Protester Tracy Postert, Hypocrite of the Year

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

Tracy Postert, before and after. Integrity is not a job requirement on Wall Street.

Out of work Ph.D Tracy Postert spent 15 days at Zuccotti Park advocating revolution, condemning the corruption of Wall Street and decrying the moral bankruptcy of the capitalist system. Then she decided to hold up a sign advertising her degree and specialty while she was protesting the evil ways of the financial district. Wayne Kaufman, chief market analyst for John Thomas Financial Brokerage, saw her on the street, was intrigued by her background in biomedical science, and took her resume. Then he asked her if she’d like to come for an interview.

Kaufman offered her a job as a junior analyst evaluating medical companies as potential investments, and she accepted. Postert has now just completed her third week as paid employee of the system she was railing against on the street, studying for exams to be a certified financial analyst.

“I want to get a perfect score,” she told the New York Post. She gets a perfect hypocrisy score already. Imagine Martin Luther King agreeing to accept  a special membership in all-white country club, or taking a lucrative job as Sen. Strom Thurmond’s advisor on racial matters. Imagine Jane Fonda signing an Army contract to recruit soldiers for the Vietnam War. Wall Street and capitalism were the embodiment of evil and injustice for Postert, until she had a chance to move from the “99%” to the 1% whose values she had sneered at.

Is there anything wrong with working as a Wall Street analyst? Hell no—unless you have derided Wall Street analysts as the scum of the earth before you had the chance to be one. I don’t assume that Tracy Postert is typical of all OWS protesters, but I am confident she is typical of many of them. Not principled, but angry. Not idealistic, but envious. Not serious, but cynical. In other words, hypocrites, just waiting for the opportunity to show it.

Here is the irony. The fact that Wall Street would make a job offer to someone as ethically inert as this intellectually dishonest and feckless class warrior shows that Occupy Wall Street is not entirely wrong about the dearth of ethical values in the business community

And the fact that an Occupy Wall Street protester would accept such an offer shows that Wall Street may be right about the protesters.

Was Butch Cassidy a Sexual Harasser?

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

The story out of South Boston about a young student who fought off a bully’s school bus attack by kicking him in the groin and is now being investigated by the school for sexual harassment (inappropriate touching, don’t you know!) made me think of many things.

It made me think of the Chinese proverb that “When the only tool one has is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.” And its longer version, which adds “especially if you are a school administrator….”. And the even longer version, which concludes with “who has the IQ of a gerbil and the judgment of Lindsay Lohan”.

It made me think about how the education profession might end the long reign of journalism as the Ethics Alarms “Most Unethical Profession” winner this year. That would be remarkable, since journalists have been especially vigorous in disgracing themselves in 2011, but education is certainly making a spirited year-end rally.

Mostly, however, it made me think of Butch Cassidy. Continue reading →

What’s Fair To Herman Cain Now?

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

I love this Cain-trapped-in-amber image, except that the idea of a future entrepreneur creating an island attraction where former disgraced presidential candidates are cloned from their preserved DNA to roam free is terrifying.

Herman Cain has withdrawn from the GOP presidential nomination competition in the wake of Ginger White’s claims that he and she engaged in a 13-year long romantic affair. He withdrew in a particularly deceitful way, saying that his campaign was being suspended. Like most of his recent conduct and statements lately, this resort to face-saving euphemism does not speak well of his character. Yes, it’s true, his quest for the White House is suspended. It is also what is technically called toast. A more honest, courageous, candid and accountable man would have said so. I think we can safety say that one way or the other, this campaign took the measure of Herman Cain, and found him to be as wanting in character as he is inexperience and diligence. The system, ugly as it is, worked.

What else can we now fairly say of Herman Cain? I believe we can fairly conclude that… Continue reading →

The Murderer and the Governor

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

When a politician announces that he is taking a "moral stand," watch out.

Guess who has more integrity: Gary Haugen, the convicted double murderer whose scheduled execution in Oregon had been scheduled for next week, or Oregon Governor John Kitzhaber, who blocked his execution?

It’s Haugen. The resident of Oregon’s death row had waived his appeals and was voluntarily submitting to his court-decreed fate when Kitzhaber stepped in, declaring his moral objections to capital punishment. But like many politicians’ objections to that other divisive social policy issue, abortion, Kitzhaber’s supposedly moral stand has more fine print than a gym membership. He didn’t commute Haugen’s sentence, or end the death sentences of the other men who have been condemned. The Governor went half way, essentially staying the executions for the term of his governorship, and pledging to seek reforms of what he called a “broken system” in 2013. Why 2013? It’s after the election, of course. Continue reading →

The Fat Kid, the Slippery Slope, and the Cliff

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

"Bill! They're putting me in foster care! How will you make THAT funny?"

Several recent ethics issues have raised the slippery slope question, which is itself a slippery slope. The rationale for any reasonable principle or act can usually be ratcheted forward in degrees until it becomes malevolent, dangerous or repugnant, including freedom, trust, loyalty, charity and honesty. Thus the easiest argument, at least for the mentally dexterous, that anything is unethical is the dreaded slippery slope.

The simple rebuttal to this is usually “let’s wait and see.” To claim that conduct is unethical for what it might lead to rather than for what it actually does is often, perhaps even usually, based on an unwarranted assumption, or a worst case scenario specifically concocted to foil otherwise unobjectionable conduct. When it is not based on an unwarranted assumption, however, is when proposed conduct or a new policy permitting it shatters a social norm or cultural standard that had previously been considered sacrosanct. In these cases, the slope isn’t merely slippery—which suggests “Be careful where you step next!”—but greased, meaning there is no longer any traction at all to stop a rapid slide to the bottom. A better cliché to use in such cases is “opening the floodgates.” Or perhaps “off a cliff.”

The recent post about the Dartmouth researchers who suggested that all manipulations of graphic images of celebrities be labeled as such is, I would argue, more floodgates than slippery slope. There is no obvious delineation point to stop the principle behind this oppressive constraint on illusion from spreading far beyond its origin. Similarly, the argument being made by the family of the mother with Stage 4 cancer that US Air is ethically obligated to refund the non-refundable tickets they could not use because of her terminal illness has no clear limits or coherent application. Are the refunds required because the mother is terminal? If she goes into remission, would the family be obligated to give the money back? What if she was only paralyzed? If the whole family was squashed by a boulder, would the airline be obligated to refund the money to their next of kin? What if the mother wounded herself terminally in a suicide attempt—would that change US Air’s supposed obligation of compassion? If so, would that mean that if the mother’s Stage 4 breast cancer occurred because she neglected to follow a physician’s recommended treatment, US Air could then refuse to refund the money without being pilloried for it? Sometimes that greased slope carries us into a swamp.

Now from Cleveland comes the story of the 200 lbs. + 8-year-old Cleveland Heights boy who has been taken from his family and placed in foster care because county case workers decided that his mother wasn’t doing enough to control his weight.  Continue reading →

Ethical Quote of the Week: Will Wilkinson

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

After the headlines and the drama, the real grunt work of democracy begins...or not.

“…now that the Occupy movement has succeeded in shining a spotlight on its primary concerns — rising inequality, political corruption, and debt peonage — Occupiers and their allies now ought to pull up stakes, give up their whimsically undemocratic semi-privatization of public spaces, and endeavor to reform public policy through the democratic institutions established to make the collective determination of binding public rules legitimate. Moving on to seek reform through established democratic channels would require giving up the insolent and frankly disrespectful presumption that these often radically left-wing congregations somehow represent not only a majority of Americans, but 99% of them. It would require Occupiers to square up to the fact that their movement’s implicit ideology is an ideology, and a minority ideology at that — just one among our society’s many rival moral and political worldviews. The intransigence of the Occupy movement suggests an unwillingness among its numbers to take seriously the fact of pluralism, and the corollary impossibility of consensus, which makes majoritarian democratic procedures necessary in the first place.”

—Blogger Will Wilkinson, in his essay, “The Occupy Movement’s Enthusiasm and Contempt For Democracy” on bigthink.com (Think Big).

You can read the entire essay by Wilkinson, who is much more supportive of the Occupy movement than I am, here.

Good thinking, good work.

Now Here’s A Terrible Idea: Mandated Disclosures for Photoshopped Images of Celebrities!

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

And if you look real closely at the lower left corner, you'll read, "The model for Venus was a short, middle-aged bald man named Gino. His appearance was altered by the painter in the creation of this painting."

Here is another candidate for enshrinement in the Pantheon of Well- Intentioned But Terrible Ideas.

In an article published Monday in the journal “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,” Dartmouth researchers Hany Farid, a professor of computer science, and Eric Kee, a doctoral student, propose a rating system of publicly displayed photographs of models, actors and celebrities to let viewers know exactly how and how much an image has been altered by photoshopping, airbrushing or other means.

“Impossibly thin, tall, and wrinkle- and blemish-free models are routinely splashed onto billboards, advertisements and magazine covers,” the two write. “The ubiquity of these unrealistic and highly idealized images has been linked to eating disorders and body-image dissatisfaction in men, women, and children.” In the interest of limiting the damage caused by unrealistic images of human beauty, the researchers argue that graphic images should include labels that disclose  “geometric adjustments” such as slimming legs, hips and arms, as well as adjusting facial symmetry—reducing a nose in size, or slightly enlarging eyes.  Users of such photos should also flag photometric adjustments that change the appearance of skin tone, blemishes and texture, such as wrinkles, dark circles under the eyes or cellulite, say the researchers.

Please, for the love of God, nobody introduce these guys to Sarah Deming and her lawyer, who are suing the distributers of the film “Drive” because the trailer was more exciting than the movie. And let us all remember this proposal when we are tempted to pooh-pooh accusations that the government is regulating creativity, commerce, art and enterprise right out of existence, and with them, individual liberty as well.The tea parties should use Farid and Kee’s article for recruitment. Continue reading →

Cain’s Mistress: Don’t Blame The Media This Time

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

One of the side-effects of the news media’s routinely displayed lack of fairness and integrity is that its motives can be challenged even when it does its job properly. The media itself is completely at fault for creating this opportunity for spin artists to confuse the public with blame-shifting arguments, but the blame-shifters are shameless and despicable.  Thus we have to listen to a conservative talk radio barrage of accusations that Ginger White, the woman who has surfaced with the tale of a 13-year long affair with Herman Cain, was “dug up” by “them” in a coordinated effort to “get” a rising black conservative. This morning, such claims were proliferating all over the AM dial.

Politico opened the door for this, of course, with its unsourced, anonymous, still detail-free account of sexual harassment complaints of an undefined nature filed against Cain and settled over a decade ago. The stories never should have run without names and facts, and the subsequent appearance of other Cain accusers can’t change that. Publishing such a story, in violation of basic journalistic ethics principles, was unfair, and did look like a media hit job, though when the media is involved, Hanlon’s Razor (“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”) applies. As William Jacobson wrote over the weekend, Continue reading →