Journalism & Media
Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 8/10/2008: Post-Newark Hangover Edition
Good morning!
Trying to get back to normal here. I hope it isn’t age, but I suspect it is: for quite a while now I have found myself foggy and exhausted up to three days after a period of stressful travel combined with one or more three-hour seminars. One reason is that I never can sleep in hotels; another is all the walking around airports lugging two heavy bags, since 1) I cannot risk checking luggage 2) My presentation materials alone weigh more than ten pounds and 3) I object to bringing rollerboards on airplanes as inconsiderate and unfair to other passengers. The side effects right now include a sprained wrist and a swollen knee.
Speaking of side-effects, one of the unfortunate ones of the craven abandonment of the field of battle by the blogs’ “resistance” participants is that traffic collapses quickly without new posts. Over at Popehat, Ken sometimes goes weeks without posting anything. Then again, maybe he’s smart enough not to pay any attention to daily, weekly and monthly fluctuation in traffic, unlike me. Once, if travel and schedule snafus stopped me from posting, I could count on Chris, deery or Charles to have a long-exchange of contentious opinions with other commenters as they maintained that there was no media bias, that Trump should be impeached because he violated “norms,” and the FBI was as professional and uncorruptable as Elliot Ness, or at least Elliot Ness as portrayed by Robert Stack. Now they have retreated into the comforting warmth on the left-wing echo chamber.
1. Tipping ethics. I was going to include this in yesterday’s salvage operation, but literally had to end the post so I could take a nap. The following tipping dilemmas occurred during my trip, not for the first time: Continue reading
Regarding Twitter, Free Expression, Alex Jones, Social Media Censorship, And “Fake News”
The journalism ethics site Poynter begins a story today , “Over the past couple of years, Twitter has done the bare minimum to fight fake news, avoiding the kind of negative press that has plagued Facebook in the process.”
Talk about a bad start. No social media platform is qualified to “fight fake news” except to allow participants to make their own cases regarding what is fake news and what isn’t. They can and do indulge in incompetent, biased and often partisan censorship, covering their tracks by employing “factcheckers” that themselves can’t be trusted not to indulge their biases and political agendas, of course. That’s what Facebook has been doing, and, proving that there is justice in the universe, suffering for it.
Twitter hasn’t been censoring what it calls fake news; it’s just been using double standards to ban conservatives for “hate speech” when parallel leftist rhetoric gets past the gate-keepers. Federalist writer Elizabeth Kantor, for example, was kicked off twitter for this tweet in tongue-in-cheek support for the new racist New York Times editor:
“@sarahjeong This whitey is cheering you on as you fight off the Twitter mob. Down with deplatforming! Plus, it’s clarifying abt. what kind of paper the NYT wants to be . . .”
Twitter told her had engaged in “hateful conduct” that violates Twitter’s terms of service: “Violating our rules against hateful conduct.You may not promote violence against, threaten, or harass other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin…”
Jeong, however, who had started the hashtag “#CancelWhitePeople” as well as many other anti-white, anti-male Twitter content, remains a valued Twitter user.
Twitter not only is partisan and biased, it also has no integrity. What upset Poynter is that Twitter didn’t join Apple, Facebook and others in their Sunday Night Purge of right-wing wacko Alex Jones. The fact that it banned Kantor for one innocuous political tweet and not her target for dozens of racist ones doesn’t seem to bother Poynter’s unethical ethicists, just that it hasn’t joined the effort to silence Jones online. Twitter, its says, is failing its duty to combat “misinformation.”
Here was the message from the Twitter CEO, communicated, naturally, in a series of tweets:
We didn’t suspend Alex Jones or Infowars yesterday. We know that’s hard for many but the reason is simple: he hasn’t violated our rules. We’ll enforce if he does. And we’ll continue to promote a healthy conversational environment by ensuring tweets aren’t artificially amplified. Truth is we’ve been terrible at explaining our decisions in the past. We’re fixing that. We’re going to hold Jones to the same standard we hold to every account, not taking one-off actions to make us feel good in the short term, and adding fuel to new conspiracy theories. If we succumb and simply react to outside pressure, rather than straightforward principles we enforce (and evolve) impartially regardless of political viewpoints, we become a service that’s constructed by our personal views that can swing in any direction. That’s not us.Accounts like Jones’ can often sensationalize issues and spread unsubstantiated rumors, so it’s critical journalists document, validate, and refute such information directly so people can form their own opinions. This is what serves the public conversation best.
In an earlier tweet from another Twitter account, Twitter stated,
“As we have stated publicly, we strongly believe Twitter should not be the arbiter of truth nor do we have scalable solutions to determine and action what’s true or false.”
Bingo. Continue reading
Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 8/7/2018: Back in the USSR
Good Morning!
1. Self-Promotion Dept. I’m heading off to New Jersey today, to present one of my musical legal ethics seminars—3 hours!—for the New Jersey Bar Association. The real star is my long-time partner in these shows, New York-based singer/musician Mike Messer, who channels Freddie Mercury, Bob Dylan (with harmonica!), Paul Simon, even Johnny Cash in the various song parodies. This one is called Ethics Rock Extreme, and ends, like all of my musical seminars, with a sing-along. Yes, we get lawyers to sing the chorus of the “Piano Man Parody”…
Sing us the Rules, you’re the ethics man
Sing us the Rules tonight!
We’re stuck in an ethics dilemma here
So tell us what’s wrong and what’s right!
(No, “Back in the USSR” is not one of the songs we do.)
2. First Amendment for me, but not for thee: In an embarrassing episode that is also telling, the Newseum has capitulated to a storm of protests from journalists and will no longer sell its popular “Fake News” mercahndise…like this shirt…
online or in its gift shop. “We made a mistake and we apologize. A free press is an essential part of our democracy and journalists are not the enemy of the people,” the Newseum announced Saturday in a groveling blog post. “Questions have also been raised regarding other merchandise. As an organization that celebrates the rights of people from all political spectrums to express themselves freely, we’ve historically made all types of political merchandise available for our guests to purchase. That has included former and current presidential slogans and imagery and merchandise from all political parties. We continue to do so in celebration of freedom of speech.”
Translation: “In celebration of free speech, we will acquiesce in the censoring of a particular expression of opinion on a humorous T-shirt, because it hurts journalists’ feelings.”
Again, I ask: why does anyone trust journalists and the organizations they represent? Continue reading
Monday Ethics Afternoon Warm-Up, 8/6/18: Relatively Trivial Edition
1. Facebook Conduct I Could Do Without Dept. A friend who happens also to be on Facebook just posted his opinion about a matter and added, “If you don’t agree, don’t respond, just unfriend me.” I’m tempted to unfriend him for that. What a cowardly, lazy, arrogant stunt.
2. He’s also dead wrong in his opinion, which has to do with this “good illegal immigrant” news item. My friend thinks that the wife of a Marine should get a pass despite being in violation of immigration laws because her husband served his country. I don’t disagree with the principle he’s espousing, but it’s not the law. If there should be law that gives some kind of leniency to the spouses of military personnel, then draft it, debate it, and pass it. The Marine fought for a nation of laws, not a nation where law enforcement makes up the laws as it goes along. This was the Obama approach: we just won’t enforce the laws against this particular group of law-breaker that we like.
3. How dumb can “cultural appropriation” complaints get? This dumb:
In women’s mag “Marie Claire,” Krystyna Chávez argues that deciding to pluck your eyebrows so that they are very thin is “cultural appropriation.” writing that she was was horrified when she saw a photo of Rihanna with her new, skinny eyebrows. Chávez writes in a piece titled “I’m Latina, and I Find Rihanna’s Skinny Brows Problematic.” Unfortunately, as Katherine Timpf points out, a Louisiana State University student named Lynn Bunch wrote an op-ed last year declaring that thick eyebrows that cultural appropriation:
“Current American eyebrow culture also shows a prime example of the cultural appropriation in the country. The trend right now is thick brows, and although a lot of ethnic women have always had bushy, harder-to-maintain eyebrows, it has only become trendy now that white women have started to do it.”
Boy, the outbreak of such serious statements of idiotic opinions makes me feel unsafe…because I’m afraid that I am surrounded by lunatics, in a culture that is encouraging warped values and reasoning to such an extent that for a disturbing number of Americans, no idea sets off the Stupid Alarms.
I may have to start a sister blog…
4. And you thought Trump Derangement Syndrome was silly.New York-based UMA Health, an online mental health marketplace, is providing free, confidential therapy sessions to Mets fans who are in emotional turmoil as a result of the team’s disappointing season, which cratered is last week’s 25-4 loss to the Washington Nationals, the worst loss in Mets history—yes, even worse than any of the embarrassing drubbing the team received in its first, horrible season in 1962, when “the Amazin’ Mets” lost a record 120 games.
UMA says its tongue in cheek promotion is meant to bring attention to the important role of therapy, and to eliminate the stigma of going to a therapist.
That’s odd: I think the promotion does the opposite, suggesting that therapy is self-indulgent, useless, useless bunk, which it too often is. I have an amusing personal story that explains my bias here, which I will leave for another time. If something is important your profession is to enlighten the world about its benefits, however, is it competent to promote it like this? Continue reading
Sunday Ethics Reflections, 8/5/2018: Abdication, Arrogance, Airbrushing
1. If you want to seed a civil war, this is how you do it…Why is this incredible story just an item on the daily ethics potpourri? For one thing, I don’t see why much commentary is necessary, or should be. I don’t typically write about robberies or murders, or other outright unethical acts that all but the worst sociopaths can recognize in a trice as unethical. I feel the same way about this, from the Wall Street Journal:
A mob surrounded ICE’s office in Southwest Portland June 19. They barricaded the exits and blocked the driveway. They sent “guards” to patrol the doors, trapping workers inside. At night they laid on the street, stopping traffic at a critical junction near a hospital. Police stayed away. “At this time I am denying your request for additional resources,” the Portland Police Bureau’s deputy chief, Robert Day, wrote to federal officers pleading for help. Hours later, the remaining ICE workers were finally evacuated by a small federal police team. The facility shut down for more than a week. Signs called ICE employees “Nazis” and “white supremacists.” Others accused them of running a “concentration camp,” and demanded open borders and prosecution of ICE agents. Along a wall, vandals wrote the names of ICE staff, encouraging others to publish their private information online.
Federal workers were defenseless. An ICE officer, who asked that his name not be published, told me one of his colleagues was trailed in a car and confronted when he went to pick up his daughter from summer camp. Later people showed up at his house. Another had his name and photo plastered on flyers outside his home accusing him of being part of the “Gestapo.”
Where were the police? Ordered away by Democratic Mayor Ted Wheeler, who doubles as police commissioner. “I do not want the @PortlandPolice to be engaged or sucked into a conflict, particularly from a federal agency that I believe is on the wrong track,” he tweeted. “If [ICE is] looking for a bailout from this mayor, they are looking in the wrong place.”
The phrase, “particularly from a federal agency that I believe is on the wrong track” mandates impeachment on its face. It is not the mayor’s proper role to decide who deserves the protection of the city against lawbreakers. “There is no place for personal, political bias when it comes to providing public safety services to our communities,” Portland Police Association president Daryl Turner said in a statement on Facebook. “In that respect, our Mayor, who is also our Police Commissioner, has failed miserably.”
Also:
- How many readers of Ethics Alarms saw broadcast news accounts of this incident and the Portland mayor’s conduct? It is the tendency to set out to bury and hide the worst examples of progressive and resistance excess that is the smokiest of smoking guns showing the degree to which journalists are actively attempting to indoctrinate and mislead rather than inform.
- Do the citizens of Portland really condone this?
The Signature Significance Of The Left’s Endorsement Of Sarah Jeong (Part II): The Ethics Alarms Quiz
Following up on the previous post…
Prof. Glenn Reynold opined this morning that President Trump should read Sarah Jeong’s racist, anti-male, anti-police tweets at rallies (See Item #4 at the link.)
It certainly would be a powerful and nearly unrebbutable response to the current journalistic assault on the Trump Administration for impugning the news media. What do you call a journalistic establishment that willingly gives power and influence to a young Asian-American who tweets #CancelWhitePeople? Would #CancelJews? be similarly benign? Hiring and defending someone like Jeong certainly creates the rebuttable presumption that the news media is the enemy of at least some of the people, no?
Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…
Is Reynolds right? Should Trump read Sarah Jeong’s Tweets at rallies?
Unlike most Ethics Alarms quizzes, where I ask a question because I am genuinely torn regarding the answer, in this case I made up my mind the second I read Reynold’s comment.
The professor is wrong. There is no way the President can read Jeong’s anti-white, anti-male tweets publicly (or refer to them on Twitter) and not appear to be deliberately stirring up racial hate and division. Indeed, doing so would increase racial hate and division. Even though this is the dangerous path Democrats are deliberately following, his job and ethical duty as President is to avoid just the kind of groups hate and distrust the Left is seeding as its repugnant strategy to regain power. I have no doubt that using Jeong to demonstrate how depraved his opponents are becoming would be politically advantageous, but the risks are too great.
If he wants to note here and there that the Times has hired an editor who is a racist, that is defensible….if he can leave it at that.
The Signature Significance Of The Left’s Endorsement Of Sarah Jeong (Part I)
Hi, White America! I want you dead! And now, the technology news…
Are you already sick of the controversy over the New York Times hiring Sarah Jeong? Don’t be. The mainstream media and the now officially-derailed progressive establishment want you to move on, as in Move-On.Org’s definition, meaning …
… but there is a lot to see, and it is important to see it clearly.
Are these…
…racist tweets? Of course they are. Denying that they are is Orwellian, but progressives have been tending to 1984 for quite a while now, and denying it all the while. Would any journalist tweeting the equivalent sentiments about any other race have a career left in anything but wreckage? No. Rosanne Barr, a comic, not a journalist, was fired, branded a pariah and non-person, and had her hit ABC show cancelled for a single racist tweet about one woman. These are but a sample of many tweets from Jeong about an entire race (and often an entire gender). Not only is her career not in tatters, it is advancing.
What this means is that the Left, including the mainstream news media that is represented by the New York Times, the traditional exemplar, the role model, the standard-setter, now unapologetically and openly endorses an unethical, dangerous and divisive double standard. Non-whites can engage in hateful, racist speech against whites, and women can use sexist, misandrous rhetoric against men, and that’s not only acceptable, but deserved. Continue reading
Saturday Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 8/4/18: Baseball And Bisons And Jerks, Oh My!
Good Morning, Fenway!
Going to make sure the Sox beat the Yankees again today?
1. Nice. The Democratic National Committee declined to play the Republican National Committee in their annual softball game this year.
You know, I now actively search for examples of Republicans behaving like divisive, snotty assholes, because I’m really sick of being accused of favoring that hollowed out, irresponsible. principle-free party. But when it comes to demonizing the opposition and bottom-of-the-barrel civility, the Democrats always seem to lap the field. Of course, this latest insult is pure virtue-signaling to the “resistance” base. Where a responsible party would be trying to lead its members and followers in the direction of comity and respectful disagreement, the DNC is taking a stand in favor of ideological apartheid.
2. This is great: I get to criticize the New York Yankees! Do say a little prayer, or something, for poor Chance Adams, the New York Yankee farmhand summoned to pitch today’s game against the Boston Red Sox with the Yankee season on the line.
The Yankees have the second best record in baseball, but also have the misfortune to play in the same division as the team with the best record, the Boston Red Sox. If the Yanks finish second, their play-off, and thus World Series chances, will rest on a single game between them and the other American League Wild Card team, who will almost certianly have a better starting pitcher on the mound. New York has lost the first two games of a four game series in Boston, dropping them from 5 and a half games behind the Sox (not too bad, with 50 games to go) to 7 and a half games ( scary, when chasing a team with a current winning percentage of just under .700). If the team falls 8 and a half games behind, especially with its best player injured, gargantuan slugger Aaron Judge, that one game crap shoot will become the most likely scenario.
Thanks to some bad luck and some miserable management of the pitching staff, the assignment of navigating the Good Ship Yankee away from the shoals of ignominious defeat has been shifted to the shoulders of Adams, who 1) has never pitched in a major league game before, 2) will be facing the top offense in baseball, 3) in front of the famously rabid Fenway Park faithful, and 4) isn’t all that good. This is profoundly unfair. It almost seems as if Yankee management wants to use the rookie as an excuse for failure.
Meanwhile, he will become an infamous answer to a trivia question, like ill-fated Booby Sprowl, a Boston rookie pitcher who was thrust into a similar crisis by Boston manager Don Zimmer when the position of the two teams was reversed in 1978. Like Zimmer, Yankee manager Aaron Boone had other options that didn’t involve over-burdening a green young athlete of uncertain skills. For example, he could resort to a “bullpen game,” like the Tampa Bay Rays have been doing, with surprising success, all season. After all, the Yankees have the best and deepest bullpen in the universe.
Of course, baseball being baseball, anything can happen. Maybe Chance Adams will shock the baseball word with a pitching gem, and become a Yankee legend. Stranger things have happened. That, however, will be pure moral luck, and will not change the fact that Adams should not be put in this position.
Now what I really want to know is whether Chance was named after John Wayne’s character in one of my favorite Westerns. “Rio Bravo”… Continue reading
Afternoon Ethics Jolt, 8/3/2018: A Lawyer Finds A New Way To Be Unethical, Verizon Makes Our Kids Obnoxious And Ignorant, And The Times Decides To Show Its Colors…
Good…afternoon.
Yes, I couldn’t get this up before noon again. Mornings have been crazy lately. And no, I’m not at the beach…I just WISH I was at the beach.
1. A legal ethics “Kaboom!“ From the New York Times account of the litigation surrounding New York Yankee great Thurmon Munson’s death when his private plane crashed in 1979:
James Wiles, one of FlightSafety International’s lawyers at the time, still contends there was no culpability in Munson’s death on the part of either company. But a trial, he said, was just too risky…. Wiles, who was present for all the depositions…said that when Yogi Berra testified, he put a box of 24 baseballs in front of him and requested he sign them. Berra, who was a Yankees coach when Munson died, grudgingly obliged, but at one point asked if Wiles was authorized to make such a demand.
“It’s my deposition,” Wiles said he told Berra.
My head exploded after reading that. There is no rule I can find that declares such a blatant professional abuse unethical, unless it is the deceitful “It’s my deposition” response, which is literally true but falsely implies that the lawyer has the power to force a witness in a deposition to do something completely unrelated to the case for the lawyer’s personal benefit. Rule or no rule, this was incredibly unethical, and a perfect example of how lawyers will come up with ways to be unethical that they can’t be sanctioned for.
2. More on the New York Times’ new editor: Yesterday, I covered the astounding—but maybe not so astounding—appointment of far-left journalist Sarah Jeong as its technology editor despite a huge archive of explicitly racist and sexist tweets. The Times’ defiant explanation, a rationalization, really, stated:
“We hired Sarah Jeong because of the exceptional work she has done … her journalism and the fact that she is a young Asian woman have made her a subject of frequent online harassment. For a period of time she responded to that harassment by imitating the rhetoric of her harassers. She regrets it, and The Times does not condone it.”
Jeong’s statement was simply dishonest:
“I engaged in what I thought of at the time as counter-trolling. While it was intended as satire, I deeply regret that I mimicked the language of my harassers. These comments were not aimed at a general audience, because general audiences do not engage in harassment campaigns. I can understand how hurtful these posts are out of context, and would not do it again.”
The issue is not whether she will “do it again”—presumably even the Times wouldn’t stand for that, but whether her many racist outbursts online do not raise the rebuttable presumption that she is, in fact, a racist. Nothing in her statement tells us that she doesn’t believe such things as “white men are fucking bullshit,” only that she didn’t aim these comments at the general public.
I find it hard to believe that the even Times is so stupid and arrogant that it will dig in its metaphorical heels and refuse to admit its gross mistake. As Glenn Reynolds writes today, Continue reading
Ethics Alarms 
Tippy Scales, the Ethics Alarms’ commentariat resident working journalist, was moved to comment on the ongoing controversy over the New York Times hiring a documented anti-white racist as one of its editors. I welcome the development, as it is signature significance for the mindset of the Times and its management: no ethical or trustworthy news publication would do such a thing. The rest of the mainstream news media has tried to bury the story, but this is one more time when Americans should feel grateful for our conservative media, with all of its own biases and flaws. I doubt that the Times will avoid the consequences of its arrogant and unprofessional act, and I think we will be hearing more about Sarah Jeong.
Here is Tippy Scales’ Comment of the Day on the post, Afternoon Ethics Jolt, 8/3/2018: A Lawyer Finds A New Way To Be Unethical, Verizon Makes Our Kids Obnoxious And Ignorant, And The Times Decides To Show Its Colors…