Journalism & Media

Biden’s Apology For Abusing the Press: Not Accepted!

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments
"Sorry!"

“Sorry!”

In a classic scene from the “Animal House” toga party, the chaotic Bluto, played by John Belushi, encounters a pompous student strumming his guitar and singing a sappy folk song as co-eds swoon. Bluto suddenly seizes the guitar and smashes it to smithereens. “Sorry,” he shrugs.

This is about the level of effectiveness and sincerity achieved by Vice President Joe Biden’s office, as it apologized after taking a student photographer’s photographs of the Veep and destroying them.

From Poynter:

“Jeremy Barr, a reporter with the University of Maryland’s Capital News Service, was seated in a non-press section for the event, at which the vice president announced an anti-domestic violence initiative. Biden staffer Dana Rosenzweig approached Barr after the event and ordered him to delete photos.

“She said, ‘I need to see your camera right now.’” Barr said. The staffer called Barr’s presence in the non-press area an “unfair advantage” over the other members of the media at the event. The staffer then requested to watch as Barr deleted the photos from his camera to ensure his compliance, Barr said. After deleting the photos from the camera, the staffer asked Barr to show her his iPhone to make sure no photos were saved. Barr complied.” Continue reading →

Unethical Quote of the Week: Rush Limbaugh

/ Jack Marshall / 62 Comments

“Speaking of global warming…which has now been proven to be a hoax”…”

—-Rush Limbaugh, riffing today on his radio show regarding the evils of liberals from Obama to Bloomberg.

No, actually, Newsweek is now a hoax.

Actually, Newsweek was the hoax.

This an outright ethics foul, even if Rush believes it. If he doesn’t believe it, it’s a lie. If he does believe it, it is still a reckless, incompetent and irresponsible thing to say to millions of listeners who trust him to tell them the truth.

Global warming, or climate change, is not a hoax. Its exact extent may not be known, or as conclusively known as some scientists and commentators claim. It may be difficult to measure, and the historical data it is being measured against may be flawed. Its researchers may have biases, and have strayed too far over the line into advocacy. They may also have been too willing to stifle dissenting voices in the scientific community. How serious global warming will be, when its effects will be fully felt and how long it will last are all matters of projection and speculation, subject to error. Projections have been, and will continue to be, unreliable, and arguably, too unreliable to justify costly public policy measures. Remedies are speculative, and cost-benefit ratios are in doubt.

It is also true that many of the most vocal and visible supporters of the most dire projections by climate change researchers, as well as the most vociferous attacker of climate change skeptics, literally don’t know what they are talking about. Their fervor is driven by ideology and faith rather than actual expertise and scholarship, and anything they say on the subject should be given no weight whatsoever. This groups includes journalists, columnists, bloggers, celebrities, academics not in the sciences, public officials and leaders, including, depressingly, Barack Obama, whose State of the Union speech comments on climate change were outrageous and irresponsible: Continue reading →

Ethics Note To Paul Krugman: The News Media Isn’t Your Toy

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments
Not bankrupt, at least, not financially...

Not bankrupt, at least, not financially…

The crippling lack of respect and contempt our warring ideological factions have for those on the other side is never better illustrated that when one partisan believes a satirical negative story about an adversary stalwart that any unbiased observer whose brain wasn’t partially melted by hatred would have flagged as false in a heartbeat. Thus do our biases make us stupid. The phenomenon was the basis of some well-derived mockery  last month, when Washington Post blogger Suzy Parker fell for the silly published on the parody website The Daily Currant that Sarah Palin had joined Al-Jazeera, and used the obviously phony tale to hammer Palin for hypocrisy.  I suggested that a journalist this gullible and biased wasn’t qualified to practice her craft, as she was obviously incapable of overcoming her prejudices and personal dislikes so that she could distinguish truth from comforting fiction.

The Right mocked Parker and the Post hardest of all—suuure there’s no liberal bias in the media!—- especially the Bad Boy of rightward blogs, Breitbart. Then along comes another gag story from the same source, The Daily Currant, announcing that New York Times tax-and-spend advocate, progressive cheerleader and Pulitzer prize-winning economist Paul Krugman has declared for bankruptcy, and Brietbart, for exactly the same reasons Parker believed that Palin would go to work for the Arabs,  couldn’t figure out that it wasn’t  true. Breitbart published this: Continue reading →

“Beyond the Myth”: Disturbing and Revealing Lessons About More Than Pit Bulls

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

Beyond the Myth

“Beyond the Myth” is a 2012 documentary that provides a vivid, troubling and often moving account of “breed specific legislation” in the U.S., which primarily involves states and municipalities banning “pit bull-like dogs,’ a.k.a. “vicious dogs,” though the dogs such legislation targets are usually not vicious and often are not even pit bulls.  If you are one of the misinformed who have been convinced by biased reports and public hysteria that pit bulls are any more dangerous or vicious than any other breed, you owe it to yourself, your children, and the dog owners in your community to watch this film, which is available on Netflix.

Long-time readers of Ethics Alarms know that the site has visited the issue of anti-pit bull cruelty and bigotry frequently, most recently here. For those who have read and absorbed what I have written and the references I provided, there will be much that is familiar in “Beyond the Myth,”; nevertheless, I found the documentary shocking. I had no idea how pit bull bans worked in cities like San Francisco and Miami, with Gestapo-like raids on private homes culminating in harmless and beloved family pets being confiscated and slated for death if a police officer concluded that they have “5 out of 8” physical traits identified with pit bulls. Nor was I aware of how many of these dogs were being euthanized—tens of thousands every year—for being born with a broad  head or a deep chest that meant they were legally branded as “vicious.”

The stories of the individual dog owners who have organized, lobbied, sued, and in some cases had to move out of their homes to protect a loving canine companion are also inspiring, if astounding. Wounded veterans have even had their service dogs taken from them. The most illuminating aspects of the documentary, however, are: Continue reading →

Unethical Quote of the Week, Sequester Ethics Train Wreck Division: U.S. Dept. of Agriculture Officials

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

“We have gone on record with a notification to Congress and whoever else that ‘APHIS would eliminate assistance to producers in 24 states in managing wildlife damage to the aquaculture industry, unless they provide funding to cover the costs.’ So it is our opinion that however you manage that reduction, you need to make sure you are not contradicting what we said the impact would be.”

—- U.S. Agriculture officials, responding to Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service official Charles Brown after he asked “if he could try to spread out the sequester cuts in his region to minimize the impact.” Brown quoted the response in an internal e-mail obtained by the Washington Times.

Why isn't the news media screaming?

Why isn’t the news media screaming?

Assuming that Brown’s account is accurate, the e-mail appears to show, in the interpretation most favorable to the Obama Administration, that at least one federal department believes that its job is to ensure that the across-the-board sequester cuts do as much tangible harm as possible, even where it is possible to mitigate that harm through effective management. The interpretation least favorable would conclude that President Obama has issued internal orders to the effect that any effort to lessen the cataclysmic results he and his Cabinet members predicted prior to the sequester deadline is forbidden, since it would undermine the political strategy of creating public anger against Republicans.

I don’t know where the truth lies. I can say that here in Washington, D.C., both Democrats and Republicans, without the benefit of the e-mail, seem to have adopted the worst case interpretation, which is shocking. Even more shocking is that the sick culture here is largely shrugging this off as “hardball politics” on behalf of the President and his Democratic allies. I cannot fathom this, just as I cannot fathom why all news media, left and right, are not screaming like the Donald Sutherland pod duplicate at the end of the remake of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” if they also believe this is true. Continue reading →

The Corrupting Culture of MSNBC: A Case Study

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments
Get out while your ethics alarms still work, Rachel. They're already breaking down.

Get out while your ethics alarms still work, Rachel. They’re already breaking down.

I’m not interested in criticizing MSNBC for bias. It intends to be biased; serving as the far Left alternative to Fox News is its niche, and was a conscious business choice. What is interesting is observing MSNBC as a case study in how the pressures of a corrupt institutional culture eventually destroy the integrity and ethical judgment of essentially ethical people. From a point where it was merely left-leaning, MSNBC has gradually jettisoned any shred of objectivity, and most remnants of fairness. Much of the transformation was wrought by Keith Olbermann during his fiery tenure, but others have picked up the baton.

The most obviously corrupted have been Andrea Mitchell, Chris Matthews, and Rachel Maddow, all previously well-credentialed and with distinguished service as legitimate and respectable journalists. Under the spell of MSNBC, Matthews has devolved into an angry, race-baiting, smearing hack; the days of grilling Republicans and Democrats with equal fervor on “Hardball” have yielded to shrill, one-sided advocacy. Mitchell’s reporting has gradually abandoned any pretense of neutrality. The greatest tragedy here, however, is Maddow. She is young, smart, articulate and skilled. She doesn’t hide her progressive orientation, but once she appeared to be a rising star, a probing journalist with a point of view, but one committed to being professional and fair within that point of view.

Maddow has joined the MSNBC gun control push, but she has so much company there among the entire span of U.S. journalists that I can hardly blame her that on MSNBC. Misleading video editing has become a staple of her employers, however, as in the disgraceful Neil Heslin “heckling” story, and now Maddow appears to have embraced the technique when it suits her narrative. Last week, to add to the “gun control opponents are heartless and callous monsters” theme that is currently popular in the media, Maddow showed a video of Sen. John McCain at an Arizona town meeting, responding to a woman whose son was killed in the Aurora shooting asserting that assault weapons were responsible and ought to be banned. Maddow introduced the clip by saying,“this happened.” What was then seen and heard was McCain tersely answering the woman by saying she needed “straight talk,” and that the legislation she favored would never pass Congress. [See Maddow’s video here] Continue reading →

The Washington Post Gives Up On Independent Ombudsmen: 1) Too Bad, Because It Needs One Desperately and 2) No Wonder, Since Its Last One Was A Bozo

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments
Agreed: He's an improvement over the last ombudsman. But the Washington Post readers deserve better.

Agreed: He’s an improvement over the last ombudsman. But the Washington Post readers deserve better.

The Washington Post, which in 1970 became the first newspaper to employ a full-time “independent ombudsman” to explore reader complaints and exercise ethical oversight, has given up on the concept, pronouncing it a device “created decades ago for a different era.” You know–that era when people trusted the news media, and occasionally were given good cause to do so. Now the Post will rely on a “reader representative” named from the newspaper’s staff.

So much for “independence.”

Giving up on ombudsmen after having Patrick B. Pexton filling the role for the last two years is a little like giving up eating after Thanksgiving at my late Aunt Anna’s house. Her green, slimy, Wonder Bread turkey stuffing had to be tasted (but, oh God, never swallowed!) to be believed. Similarly, Pexton was an utter disgrace as an ombudsman, making excuses for unethical Post excursions into partisan hackery, and apparently completely unaware that his own biases mirrored those of his paper, which supposedly placed him in his job to offer perspective, not cover. And just as I seriously considered never again taking the risk of putting food in my mouth after that memorable holiday dinner in 1966, I can understand the Post thinking, as Pexton’s two year contract mercifully expired last week, thinking, “If we can’t do better than this clown, why have the position at all?” Continue reading →

Of Pastry Guns, Fear-Mongering, And Bad Policy

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments
What made the Doughboy attack the school? No one knows. He had been fired, that was plain. But luckily, Josh was ready for him...

What made the Doughboy attack the school? No one knows. He had been fired, that was plain. But luckily, Josh was ready for him…

In a day that will live in infamy, I took to my keyboard one December morn in 2011 and wrote, “Can political correctness “no-tolerance” idiocy in the schools get any worse than punishing a child for the shape of his pizza slice?” The presumptive answer was “No!”, but as any observer of the national scene now knows, I was dead wrong. Now it appears that I was not only wrong about how deranged the phirearmophobics could become, I was even wrong about the limits to irrational terror caused by arguably gun-shaped foodstuffs wielded by children.

WBFF Fox in Baltimore reported that

“Children at Park Elementary School went home with a letter late today explaining there was a disruption in school. 7-year-old Josh Welch was sent home from school for accidentally sculpting his breakfast pastry into a gun. The school suspended Josh for two days because he “used food to make an inappropriate gesture.” Continue reading →

Ethics Quote of the Week: The Washington Post Editors

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

“To govern is to choose. By missing Friday’s deadline for averting $85 billion worth of across-the-board spending cuts to defense and domestic programs, Congress and President Obama have chosen not to govern. Instead, each side has concluded that its interest lies in letting the “sequester” proceed as scheduled — and then trying to win the political blame game….”

—-The Washington Post, in its lead editorial today, as the sequester deadline passed.

gordian-knot1While so many other Obama supporting media organizations continue to absolve the President for any responsibility in this disgraceful episode, his hometown newspaper, blue as blue can be, has been uniquely  fair and objective on this issue. The Post’s blueness manifests itself in overly-gentle terms to describe conduct that deserves far harsher terms, much as Bob Woodward’s using the term “mistake” to describe President Obama’s claim that he didn’t propose the sequester in the first place, when the accurate term is certainly “lie.”  For example, the Post editors, later in their piece, say this: Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: Business Week’s Cover Apology

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Can you believe this?

Business Week Cover

What is this, a “Count the stereotypes” puzzle?

How could this manifestly, incontrovertibly, racially offensive cover get the green light for any professional publication in 21st Century America? I am aghast.

It gets worse. Here is the apology issued by the Josh Tyrangiel, the magazine’s editor:

“Our cover illustration last week got strong reactions, which we regret. Our intention was not to incite or offend. If we had to do it over again we’d do it differently.”

Your Ethics Quiz Question for the day:

How do you rank this on the Ethics Alarms Apology Scale, and why?

You can check the scale here.

I’m too aghast to write anything else.

Good night.