Journalism & Media

Half Ethics Hero: Wisconsin Talk Radio Host John Murphy

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

angry-caller

Longtime Eau Claire, Wisconsin radio talk show John Murphy walked out of of his WAYY studio midway through his morning show this week.

He had just finished telling his listeners that he would not be chased out of the industry he loves but that, “I’m through doing this show as it is.” The sports talk show scheduled to follow Murphy started early to cover for his absence after a commercial break. The frustrated talk show host had been on Eau Claire radio for 34 years, for the past 14 years as a host of the “WAYY Morning Show,” a typical local call-in program where the  callers discussed and debated local, state and national news. Murphy quit, he said, because the discourse this year gradually stopped being civil, and had degenerated into a partisan and ugly exchange of nastiness and hate.

“It started with a lot of Trump and Clinton stuff, but now that same kind of vitriol is starting to permeate our local races and local issues,” Murphy explained.  “After a while, day after day and week after week, that starts to wear on you.”  Murphy said he knows that many of the callers hurling insults “are educated, wonderful people who have become caught up in this hurricane of hate.” He says the frustration had been building up inside him for months, and that he was beginning to engage in some of the same behavior he deplored. Continue reading →

Ethics Observations On The Current State Of 2016 Presidential Campaign Before Hurling Myself Out The Window, PART 2

/ Jack Marshall / 62 Comments

lost-in-the-parking-garage

[When I arrived at this morning’s destination, a law firm in Northern Virginia, I found myself in a huge nightmarish underground parking garage, with inadequate signage, that was beneath four large office buildings. Once I drove beyond my desired elevator looking for an unreserved parking space, I found myself totally lost and disoriented. Everywhere I turned signs indicated that I was beneath the wrong building, and there were no apparent arrows pointing back to where I had come from. I was in there for a half an hour, going in circles.  When I asked for help from other drivers, they just shrugged and said that it was a confusing garage, or that they were lost too. Eventually, I parked the car between two rows, called security to say that I was trapped with my hazard lights on, and needed assistance.Eventually someone arrived  to lead me back to where I wanted to be. I now realize that this is  an excellent metaphor for the plight of the ethical, responsible voter in this train wreck election. The lights keep blinking, but nobody’s coming.]

To continue where I left off in Part I.:

9. The fact that all of the accusations against Trump might be true does not mean that Trump’s counter-accusation that this is a coordinated assault by the Democrats and the Clinton Campaign isn’t also true. The timing is suspicious. Democrats have apparently decided that they can’t win Presidential elections by running fair and transparent campaigns; there have to be sudden revelations of mysterious origins or impetus: Bush’s DWI arrest in 2000, Dan Rather’s faked National Guard letter in 2004, the Romney “47% ” tape in 2012, and now this. Not only are elections no longer decided on the issues and the positions, skills and demonstrated abilities of the candidates, the party that has denied that character matters is the main purveyor of character-based “October surprises.”

10. I have been waiting for the “Hillary Clinton Same-Sex Lover” October surprise from Trump and the Republicans. I’m pretty sure she’s out there. If she doesn’t surface now, it will mean one of these are true:

…The GOP and Trump are  too inept to find her.

…They found her or them, but are afraid of “backlash,’ which makes no sense at all. If you are willing to run Donald Trump for President, backlash is no longer an issue.

…Hillary treats her lovers well, and none are willing to betray her.

….They hate Trump more than they love money or notoriety

…They are afraid for their lives.

I suppose that it is possible that she doesn’t exist, but I  doubt it. This is one of a variety of long-term Washington whispers that are almost always based on fact. No, of course it shouldn’t make a difference at the polls; it would just be one more piece of evidence of what we know already: Hillary is a self-fueled fabrication whose public persona and positions are more lies than fact. However, if you supporter her, you are already at peace with that…..in other words, corrupted. Continue reading →

Ethics Observations On The Current State Of 2016 Presidential Campaign Before Hurling Myself Out The Window, PART 1 [ UPDATED ]

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

jumping-through-a-window

Yesterday marked the official beginning of the Bill Cosby Effect attaching itself to Donald Trump. Apparently (supposedly, allegedly…) spontaneously  spurred by Trump’s incredible-the-moment-he-said-it  statement to Anderson Cooper during Sunday’s debate that he never did any of the things he boasted about to Billy Bush, numerous women suddenly stepped out of obscurity to claim trump sexual assaulted them. We now have…

Jessica Leeds, 74, who claims the Trump groped her “like an octopus” when they were seated next to each other in first -class on a flight thirty years ago.

Rachel Crooks, who didn’t know Trump as  a 22-year-old receptionist at a real estate development company in Trump Tower in Manhattan when he  kissed her without warning, consent or invitation  in 2005.

People Magazine writer Natasha Stoynoff, who wrote a piece yesterday claiming that while on assignment  to interview Donald and Melania Trump, Donald forcibly pushed her against a wall and “stuck his tongue down her throat.”

Mindy McGillivray, 36, another reporter, who told the photographer accompanying her on assignment 13 years ago that “Donald Trump just grabbed my ass!”

Cassandra Searles, Miss Washington 2013, who wrote on Facebook yesterday that Trump “continually grabbed [her] ass and invited [her] to his hotel room.”

Five in one day! I’ll have to check to see if that beats Cosby’s single day record. I think it’s close. I am certain that more accusations will have surfaced before today is over, and maybe before I post this. How many more of these victims—real ones; there may be some false accusations mixed in there—are there? As with Cosby, the sky’s the limit. I’d bet hundreds as a conservative estimate. An entitled, arrogant sexual predator like Trump starts early, and doesn’t reform.

UPDATE  (10/14/16 ): Three more accusers came forward today.

Observations: Continue reading →

KABOOM! Just…KABOOM!

/ Jack Marshall / 42 Comments

atom-bomb-cloud

Now I think understand why Ann Althouse, an intelligent, rational lawyer and law professor, has begun holding a “Most Loved Rat” contest on her blog to see which of her rat doodles are most popular. I’m less creative, I guess (though I also draw good rat cartoons!)—my head just explodes. It exploded last night.

It’s hard to explain exactly what did it.  Here I was, watching a series of baseball play-off games (since the Red Sox had been eliminated by the Cleveland Indians the day before), and Neil Patrick Harris appeared yet again to tell me that “Heineken Light makes it OK to flip another man’s meat.” (I wrote about the gratuitous vulgarity of this ad here. Apparently this makes me a homophobe.)

Wait…isn’t flipping another man’s meat sexual assault? What is the difference, in lack of respect and sexual assault ethics, between grabbing a woman by the pussy, as Donald Trump so eloquently put it, because you’re a rich celebrity, and flipping another man’s meat because…of beer? 
Continue reading →

Unethical Headline Of The Week: Gateway Pundit: No, Conservatives, A Clinton Advisor Did Not “Admit She Hates Everyday Americans”

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments
Nice graphic, Gateway Pundit! Stupid post, though...

Nice graphic, Gateway Pundit! Embarrassing post, though…

Just because progressive blogs are playing this game doesn’t make it OK for you to do it to0.

Here’s the headline, on a breathless post  conservative blogger Jim Hoft:

WIKILEAKS BOMBSHELL: Hillary Advisors Admit She “HATES EVERYDAY AMERICANS”

Now here is the “bombshell”:

hillary-hate-americans-575x371

Continue reading →

The Bias And Incompetence Of Media “Fact-Checkers” In One Stupid Tweet

/ Jack Marshall / 32 Comments

nbc-factcheck

In the last (I wish it were the last) Presidential debate, Donald Trump said that Hillary Clinton should apologize for “the 33,000 e-mails that you deleted, and that you acid washed.” The tweet above was the instant response of NBC’s “fact-checkers.”  No, it’s not a parody.

You see, when Donald Trump uses rhetorical devices like metaphor, hyperbole, irony and anything else that a reasonable and educated person would understand as not being meant literally, the pro-Clinton, pro-Democrat, anti-conservative, anti-Republican, anti-ethical, anti-democracy  journalism “fact-checkers” intentionally treat the statement as if it was meant literally, so they can call Trump a liar, and build on the narrative that he lies even more than Hillary does, so, the reasoning goes, Hillary’s lies don’t matter

That they do this repeatedly and increasingly obviously has the effect of making it impossible for their commentary to be trusted when Trump does lie, which is often. It also raises the question of whether these people are too dumb themselves to provide analysis of anything, and, quite possibly, to dress themselves. Continue reading →

Nobody Cares, But NBC Has Been Wildly Unethical In The Trump-Bush Video Affair

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

nbc-peacock-ap

NBC deserves to be condemned for its conduct in many ways in reference to the Trump Pussy Tape episode, going back eleven years.

1. NBC technicians allowed Trump to continue talking without his realizing that his microphone was on. Unethical, and unprofessional, as well as a pure Golden Rule violation. Basic decency, fairness and professionalism requires that when a guest is doing this, his mistake must be  made known to him at the earliest possible time. This is the rule when someone continues to speak on a conference call believing the call has ended. It is the ethical thing to do  when you are in a bathroom stall and your opponents in a law suit start discussing strategy while they are washing their hands. I have several times, at taped seminars, begun to answer questions during a break and realized that I was still being recorded. Sometimes a technician has reminded me. Worse (but funnier) I have done a full “Naked Gun”, using the Men’s Room while wearing a live mic…and the technician dashed in to get me to turn it off, just in time. (Well, almost.) Allowing a guest to embarrass himself on tape as Trump did is despicable and unprofessional in every way.

2. NBC betrayed its own employee, Billy Bush, by not alerting him, either.  Disloyal, unfair, and uncaring.

3. Once the recording was made, it should have been destroyed as soon as anyone in authority realized the participants were speaking without knowing the mics were on.

4. Attorney Robert Barnes makes a compelling argument that NBC’s conduct violated California Penal Code 632, which criminalizes the act of any person who “without the consent of all parties” records their conversations. Of course, violating the law is also unethical. Trump might  have a just lawsuit, though the damage can’t be undone: the pussy’s out of the bag, so to speak.

5. Bush, as an NBC employee, should have been told about the recording and its contents long, long before it was made public. NBC was obligated to inform him as a basic courtesy. Continue reading →

Trump’s Tape Is Disgusting; This Is Much Scarier…Or Should Be

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments
"Hillary is experienced! Hillary is healthy! Hillary is young! Hillary is progressive! Hillary never attacked her husband's victims! You are a chicken!"

“Listen to my voice! Hillary is experienced! Hillary never lies! Hillary is healthy! Hillary never knowingly send e-mails with classified contents! Hillary is young! Hillary’s Middle East policy brought peace and stability!  Hillary never attacked her husband’s victims! You will vote for Hillary! And you are a chicken!”

Blogger-muckraker Glenn Greenwald reports today on leaked strategy e-mails from the Hillary Clinton campaign that show ongoing coordination between the campaign and journalists to advance her candidacy and place her in power. The natural defense of the Clinton Corrupted to this is predictable (“Everybody does it!), and because it impugns the integrity of the news media, I doubt that Greenwald’s findings will even be widely reported. As he writes in his conclusion,

“All presidential campaigns have their favorite reporters, try to plant stories they want published, and attempt in multiple ways to curry favor with journalists. These tactics are certainly not unique to the Clinton campaign…But these rituals and dynamics between political campaigns and the journalists who cover them are typically carried out in the dark, despite how significant they can be. These documents provide a valuable glimpse into that process.”

The glimpse shows a thoroughly unethical process whereby the Clinton campaign sets out to bias coverage, and unprofessional journalists allow them to do it. Then it is all kept secret, since allowing the public to know how “cozy” (to use Greenwald’s benign word–he is a progressive himself, after all) the relationship between journalists and those whom they claim to covering “objectively” really is would make it far more difficult for the news media to manipulate public opinion and warp democracy.

Among the revelations in Greenwald’s report

1. Lobbying and feting reporters at off-the-record events…

“The Clinton campaign likes to use glitzy, intimate, completely off-the-record parties between top campaign aides and leading media personalities. One of the most elaborately planned get-togethers was described in an April, 2015, memo — produced, according to the document metadata, by deputy press secretary Jesse Ferguson — to take place shortly before Clinton’s official announcement of her candidacy. The event was an April 10 cocktail party for leading news figures and top-level Clinton staff at the Upper East Side home of Clinton strategist Joel Benenson, a fully off-the-record gathering designed to impart the campaign’s messaging:

cocktail1-memo

“Unfriendly” reporters and pundits were not invited. This is what is called “an appearance of impropriety.” Accepting gifts and favors, including parties, from those who a reporter is supposed to cover objectively is a conflict of interest, and should be disclosed. Of course it wasn’t. Continue reading →

Unethical Quote Of The Week (Or At Least It Would Be In A Serious Campaign Where The News Media Was Interested In Covering Both Candidates Fairly): Hillary Clinton

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

2faced-hillary

“You just have to sort of figure out how to — getting back to that word, “balance” — how to balance the public and the private efforts that are necessary to be successful, politically, and that’s not just a comment about today…. I mean, politics is like sausage being made. It is unsavory, and it always has been that way, but we usually end up where we need to be. But if everybody’s watching, you know, all of the back room discussions and the deals, you know, then people get a little nervous, to say the least. So, you need both a public and a private position.”

—-Hillary Clinton, in a quote from one of those speeches she got $225,000 to make, for the National Multi-Housing Council, 4/24/13

We all knew we would eventually learn what she said in those speeches, didn’t we? It was just a matter of time. Luckily for Hillary, this leak arrived the same day as Trump’s Billy Bush piggery, giving the news media a chance to bury it for a while.

Hillary’s foe Julian Assange  released a hacked e-mail from Clinton minion John Podesta. Podesty was flagging sections of various Clinton speeches that might cause trouble for Hillary if they ever became public, so she could have an instant response, that is, spin, ready. (I have to admit, these guys are good.) The heading on this one was, Continue reading →

Observations On The Obscene Trump Audio Scandal

/ Jack Marshall / 46 Comments

4217128-caveman

A leaked audio  obtained and released by the Washington Post has Donald Trump commenting to media personality Billy Bush about his attempts to bed a married woman, a few months months after he married Melania Trump, his third wife. When he sees a beautiful woman, the GOP standard-bearer said, he  kisses her without consent.  “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything,” he explains. He describes a married woman who wouldn’t sleep with him by making fun of her as having“phony tits.” Then he advises Bush, “Grab them by the pussy.”

Nice.

But not surprising. Not even a little bit.

Observations:

1. CNN’s senior White House correspondent Jim Acosta believes this may finish Trump’s presidential campaign. Utter incompetence and confirmation bias: why does anyone listen to “experts” this dense? Acosta, and I’m sure he has lots of company, apparently has learned nothing over the past year. What kind of person who currently supports Trump despite his constant vulgarity, misogyny, meanness, dishonesty, irresponsible statements and foolishness would regard this unremarkable male jerkishness as a last straw? Of course he talks like that. I never had any doubt that he talked like that, just as I never doubted that Hillary Clinton regarded Bernie’s supporters as gullible children, as a recent leak of her candid comments revealed. Did you think Trump talked about women differently than this when he was with other guys? Continue reading →