Journalism & Media

Just Stop It—You’re Embarrassing Yourselves

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Oh yeah? Well this guy is a ROMNEY supporter!

As evidence grows that the keynote speaker at the Democratic National Convention may have been practicing law in Massachusetts—the state she seeks to represent in the U.S. Senate—without proper legal authorization, the description of the matter in the mainstream media, to the extent that it is mentioned at all, is that “the conservative blogosphere” is making the accusation. This ritual drives me to distraction, as readers of Ethics Alarms know. But if conservatives want to be given more respect when they uncover a legitimate story that the biased media will try to ignore or bury, they have to stop indulging themselves in utter garbage like this. Continue reading →

More Revelations Regarding Elizabeth Warren’s Alleged Unauthorized Practice of Law, and Why This Matters

/ Jack Marshall / 36 Comments

Prof Jacobson, on his blog Legal Insurrection, is in line for an Ethics Hero award with his tenacity regarding Elizabeth Warren’s dubious qualifications to engage in the practice of law in  Massachusetts. The overwhelming reaction by his colleagues in legal academia, and mine in the legal ethics community, has been to airily dismiss his arguments as trivial, far-fetched and thinly disguised political warfare, since Jacobson is an unapologetic conservative blogger (and a distinguished one.) Meanwhile, the mainstream media has, I think it is fair to say, completely ignored the story.

Part of this is undoubtedly because of the ignorance of most journalists regarding the importance of the legal ethics rules in question. Part of it is probably due to the accurate assessment by editors and TV news producers that the average American’s brain would switch off right around the time the story mentions Massachusetts Rule of Professional Conduct Rule 5.5 Subsection (c), and will start wondering about how Blair from “The Facts of Life” is going to do on “Survivor.” And part of it, infuriatingly, is because most journalists are willing to forgo the ethical duties of their profession in order  to ensure that a Democrat wins back Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat, and character be damned.

The rude brush off Prof. Jacobson is getting in this wagon-circling exercise is wrong in every way, and does injustice to every person and institution involved, including the Massachusetts legal establishment, the legal profession, ethical lawyers (which, believe it or not, the vast majority of them are), Senator Brown, the U.S. Senate, Massachusetts voters, and the American public. Bar associations across the country regularly punish ordinary lawyers who practice law without proper authorization, and there is a reason: a lawyer who won’t or can’t obey the most basic requirement of the profession—be sure you are practicing law legally—should not be trusted to handle the important transactions and controversies of their clients’ lives. Continue reading →

A Tale of Two Panders

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

I know. I’ve hated the pander-panda pun since Sen. Paul Tsongas called Bill Clinton a “pander bear” in 1992. But the newborn baby panda at the National Zoo died yesterday, there’s no way to write about it on an ethics blog, so this was the best I could do to register my condolences. Forgive me.

What would be the response of an objective and balanced news media—that is, one determined to treat both candidates equally unfairly—to  an Obama equivalent of the infamous Romney dismissal of “47%” of the electorate? We really can’t tell from the closest comparison, candidate Obama’s infamous and also surreptitiously taped 2008 comments in ultra-liberal San Francisco, condescendingly describing blue-collar Pennsylvanians who, he said, “get bitter, [and] cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”  That was while he was running against another media darling, Hillary Clinton, so it presumably got more play than it would have if he were facing a hated Republican.

Better intelligence comes from Jennifer Rubin’s criticism today of Obama’s answer to an interviewer on the Spanish language cable station Univision, who asked him what his greatest failure was. Why, failing to achieve comprehensive immigration reform, of course! (“This is a Hispanic channel, right?”)

Really?, wonders the conservative Rubin. How about… Continue reading →

CNN and the Ambassador’s Journal: Unethical or Ick?

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

Answer: Ick

Ambassador Chris Stevens, murdered in Libya in what is now finally being described as a planned terrorist attack (and not spontaneous film criticism, as the Obama Administration successfully persuaded the media to claim for more than a week), left a brief hand-written journal behind that somehow was retrieved by CNN instead of the U.S. government. When Anderson Cooper revealed that the journal had been reviewed by reporters and used to cover the story of the Benghazi attack, both the slain diplomat’s family and the State Department criticized the network, which said,

“We think the public had a right to know what CNN had learned from multiple sources about the fears and warnings of a terror threat before the Benghazi attack which are now raising questions about why the State Department didn’t do more to protect Ambassador Stevens and other US personnel.Perhaps the real question here is why is the State Department now attacking the messenger.”

Well, there are interesting theories about that, since what the late Ambassador had written suggests that there was fear of a terrorist attack in the vicinity of the 9/11 anniversary, yet both Secretary Clinton and President Obama went to great lengths to characterize the Benghazi violence as prompted by spontaneous and legitimate rage over an American’s exercise of his right of free speech. There is a rebuttable presumption that the State Department was prepared to bury the implications of what Stevens wrote, since everything else it has done in relation to his murder has been misleading or pusillanimous. In the latter category is using Stevens’ family as its excuse for bashing CNN for delivering on its duty to provide what the public “has a right to know.” Continue reading →

Romney’s “Worst Weeks” and the 27th Rationalization

/ Jack Marshall / 48 Comments

Yeah, yeah, but did you hear what Mitt said to raise money?

Normally I would consider the surreptitious taping and then publicizing of a quasi-private meeting unethical, writes a lawyer colleague, “but these are not normal times.”

I thanked him profusely for alerting me that I had inexplicably allowed a hoary, classic rationalization for unethical conduct with a distinguished pedigree to escape the Ethics Alarms list, though this was not, I gather, his original intent. I just remedied the embarrassing omission, dubbing this “The Revolutionary’s Excuse.” Here is the entry:

27. The Revolutionary’s Excuse:

“These are not ordinary times.” Continue reading →

Someone Please Explain to Soledad O’Brien That Attorney General Holder is NOT “Exonerated” Regarding Fast and Furious

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

So much attitude, so little comprehension…

[I apologize to all for not posting anything yesterday. I was handling back-to-back seminars, and had to drive a long distance in-between. by the time I got back home late afternoon, I was too wiped-out to write anything coherent, and that state persisted until I went to bed. I’ll be trying to catch up today.]

CNN’s partisan hack morning anchor Soledad O’Brien was smirking and raising eyebrows to beat the band yesterday morning, as she announced to her audience that the Inspector General’s report on the Justice Department’s deadly botch of its so-called gun-walking scheme, codename Fast and Furious, had “exonerated” Attorney General Eric Holder. I suppose I am giving O’Brien the benefit of a considerable doubt here in assuming that she knows what the word means, but to exonerate is to free from blame or responsibility. The 471 page report does state that there is no evidence that Holder knew about the operation before it had gone horribly wrong, as some Republicans had maintained. On the other hand, it also states that there is no evidence that Holder knew about the operation before it had gone horribly wrong. Continue reading →

The State of Our News Media in a Nutshell

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Preparing for an early legal ethics program for Virginia CLE, I made the mistake of tuning in to Headline News’ morning show hosted by chirpy eye-candy Robin Meade. Breathlessly, she announced that an amazing baseball game had occurred last night in Seattle that ended at 4 AM! What followed was a three-minute routine with Robin’s sports guy, who pattered on about how long the game was, how the Beatles sang the National Anthem, how FDR threw out the first ball, showing his high school yearbook photo to show what he looked like when the game started, on and on. None of this was funny, of course, because it made no sense: the fact that the game lasted a long time didn’t send the beginning of the game back in time. The CNN editors somehow thought this was so hilarious that it justified taking up the time that Headline News could have devoted to actual news of substance, which was once the point of the channel, a compressed summary of breaking stories. That was the least of the problems with the segment, however:

  • The 18-inning game was about 5 hours long, which is noteworthy but hardly remarkable. It ended at 1 AM, however, not 4 AM. The time is measured in the time zone in which a game takes place, not whatever time zone the copywriters think will make it sound longer.
  • The sports guy announced the final score as 2-1. It was not. The score was 4-2. After an extended routine about how amazing and long the not-very-amazing and not especially long game was, the CNN team was obligated to at least get the key fact right: the score.
  • That’s not all. Perhaps in homage to the late George Carlin, who in his pre-hippie days used to do a sportscaster routine in which he said, “And now last night’s baseball scores: 4-3, 8-1, and in a real squeaker, 2-1!” , neither Robin nor her colleague ever revealed who won the game. (The Baltimore Orioles won.)

So, in summary, Headline News took almost three minutes to highlight a baseball game in order to make lame jokes, then failed to accurately inform the audience of the game’s score or winning team. The game, by the way, was an important one, as it allowed the Orioles to tie the New York Yankees for first place in the American League East.

This is, in a nutshell, the state of broadcast news today: sloppy, self-indulgent, unprofessional, incompetent, and untrustworthy. If they can’t give the results of a baseball game accurately, why in the world would we trust their coverage of anything?

______________________

 

Comment of the Day: “Yes, Reporters Engaged in ‘Collaboration’ On Questions For Romney. Good!”

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Dwayne N. Zechman, who has one or two other Comments of the Day to his credit, has authored another in response to the post regarding conservative alarms over evidence that reporters coordinated their questions before Mitt Romney began a press conference on the protests and violence at Middle East embassies. My position was that there is nothing sinister in this as long as it results in the politician or candidate being grilled actually answering legitimate questions. Reporters should do this with all question sessions, if politicians insist on spinning, ducking, and prevaricating. Obviously, if reporters employ this strategy with Romney and not the President, that raises an ethical problem, but a different ethical problem.

Here is Dwayne’s Comment of the Day in response to the post, Yes, Reporters Engaged in “Collaboration” On Questions For Romney. Good!.  I’ll have a further comment at the end.

“I *do* have a problem with the Press Corps acting this way because it sets up a dangerous future license for them to engage in groupthink with no checks and balances against it. (Indeed, the First Amendment would correctly, though tragically, protect it.) Continue reading →

Chuck Klosterman: Worst New York Times “Ethicist” Ever

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Silhouette of a fraud.

First there was Randy Cohen, the original author of The New York Times Magazine’s “The Ethicist” column. Randy had some quirks, mostly ideological, that made his supposedly ethical advice unreliable: for example, he advised a tech worker who stumbled upon child porn on an employee’s office computer not to report it, because Cohen believes the legal penalties for child pornography are too severe. Citizens ignoring the law whenever they think the law shouldn’t apply to them is a blind spot for Randy, a rather large one.

Then there was Ariel Kaminer, Cohen’s short-lived replacement. Her advice was dreadful about 20% of the time, as when she said it was acceptable for a law school applicant to draft his own letter of recommendation for a lazy professor who couldn’t be bothered to write a real one to sign.

But the current embodiment of “The Ethicist,” Chuck Klosterman, officially locked up the title of worst Times “Ethicist” yet with his jaw-dropping, ignorant and wildly unethical advice this week to an inquirer who asked whether it was unethical for him to give leftover wine from a party to “the benign ‘drunkards’ who ‘hang out and drink’ at a nearby corner. Klosterman says no! It’s fine! Go ahead! His “reasoning,” if Reasoning will graciously accept my apologies for calling it that, follows. To save time, I will intersperse my commentary throughout, rather than scream, bang my head against the wall, clean up the blood, and then comment. Here’s Chuck: Continue reading →

The Replacement Ref and the Conflicted Debate Moderator: How We Become Ethically Stupid

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Note to NFL: Don’t hire Gwen Ifill as a replacement referee.

Poor Brian Stropolo was only behaving like a respected national journalist on the political scene; why didn’t it work?

Stropolo, on the crew of NFL replacement refs (that’s scab refs, if you belong to the NFL refs union, which is currecly locked out) was assigned to yesterday’s New Orleans Saints-Carolina game. He was suddenly pulled from the assignment by the league on  Sunday morning, when it came to the NFL’s attention that he had represented himself on his Facebook page as an enthusiastic Saints fan, even appearing on his page in a Saints uniform.

Imagine if Stropolo had made a controversial game-changing call that handed the game to his beloved Saints!  But then, it was up to Stropolo and the league  to imagine it long before any inappropriate game assignment was made. For Stropolo not to notify the league of his web-wide admission of pro-Saints bias when he was assigned to referee a Saints game shows a complete absence of ethics training, instincts and sensitivity. How could this not occur to him? How could the NFL not have a vetting process for refs that would discover team allegiances? Where is the Code of Conduct to remind clueless referees about the “appearance of impropriety,”and the importance of preserving the NFL’s integrity by avoiding any suspicion that referees are tilting games in the direction of teams they root for in their off days? Continue reading →