Journalism & Media

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 →

Movie Critique Ethics: Jay Carney’s Embarrassing Lie

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

There was a different arm up Ron Zeigler’s back, but the system, and the results, were the same.

Once again, allow me to express sympathy for Jay Carney who, like all official White House spokesmen (R.I.P., Ron Zeigler—who once offered me a job, by the way…but I digress) regularly lies his head off, sometimes for good reasons, usually just because his bosses want it that way. Still, the lies come out of his mouth, so he is accountable.

Yesterday, Carney came out with this jaw-dropper regarding the multiple protests being directed at U.S. embassies in the Middle East, as well as the attack on the U.S. Embassy in Libya that left four dead, including our ambassador:

“This is a fairly volatile situation, and it is in response not to United States policy, obviously not to the administration, not to the American people. It is in response to a video, a film, that we have judged to be reprehensible and disgusting — that in no way justifies any violent reaction to it…But this is not a case of protests directed at the United States writ large or at U.S. policy, but it is in response to video that is offensive to Muslims.”

I know that the fact that President Obama’s signature charm offensive with the Arab world has been an abject failure is a bitter pill, but it would be both admirable and encouraging to see the President accepting that he was naive and learning from the experience, rather than knowing that he is prompting his spokesman to insist, against all logic and evidence, that, no, really, they still love us—they just shot a rocket at our embassy because they didn’t like a movie trailer. Continue reading →

“Marion Berry’s Dirty Asian Summer Punch” and Attacks on Free Speech From The Left

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

The United States’ has to be vigilant in protecting its unique Bill of Rights from dilution, degradation and manipulation. Once the threats came from the political right, as with the Red-baiting tactics of Sen. Joe McCarthy. Now it more typically comes from the kinder, gentler, more hypocritical political left, often in the form of threats to “hate speech,” a term that can mean pretty much whatever the kinder, gentler censor wants it to mean, and is especially handy to stifle dissent.

This First Amendment assault was on view yesterday on MSNBC, as PR loud mouth Donny Deutch, columnist Mike Barnicle and University of Pennsylvania professor Anthea Butler all agreed that the makers of the anti-Muslim video now being used as an excuse to attack embassies should be indicted. Uh, no. Making a movie cannot be a crime in the U.S.: this was what Citizens United was all about, and the principle is called “Freedom of Speech.” But bigger brains than Donny’s are trying to chip away at the right that makes America America, using the ever-popular “everybody does it” rationalization to argue that European nations prosecute those who “hurt religious feelings”, in the immortal words of our Cairo Embassy, so it must be the right thing to do.

Scared yet? If not read this post, and this, from the Volokh Conspiracy, on the arguments for limiting Free Speech being made by Prof. Peter Spiro and former Yale Dean Harold Koh, the latter now working in the Obama State Department.

Or just watch how much the bureaucrats in our nation’s capital respects the First Amendment. Or understand satire. Continue reading →

Yes, Reporters Engaged in “Collaboration” On Questions For Romney. Good!

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Hidden Camera: The mainstream media meets to plot against Mitt Romney…

Yesterday, the Right Scoop blog breathlessly announced that it had acquired a recording of what an open mic had caught in the discussion among reporters prior . to Mitt Romney’s press conference:

CBS REPORTER: “Yeah that’s the question. I would just say do you regret your question.”

UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: “Your question? Your statement?”

CBS REPORTER: “I mean your statement. Not even the tone, because then he can go off on …”

UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: “And then if he does, if we can just follow-up and say ‘but this morning your answer is continuing to sound …”

CBS REPORTER:  “You can’t say that.…”

CBS REPORTER: “I’m just trying to make sure that we’re just talking about, no matter who he calls on, we’re covered on the one question.”

UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER:  “Do you stand by your statement or regret your statement?”

This is it!, proclaimed Rush Limbaugh and, like echoes in a grotto, every other conservative talk show host and blogger, and of course Fox News, bleated the same. The smoking gun! The proof! The mainstream  is engaged in a conspiracy to destroy Mitt Romney and to re-elect President Obama! Just let George Stephanopoulos and the rest try to deny media bias now! Continue reading →

Emmett Burns Emulates Rahn Emanuel, or, What Does It Tell Us That Yvette Clarke Is NOT This Month’s Most Incompetent Elected Official?

/ Jack Marshall / 43 Comments

Brooklyn, NY, circa. 1898. If you look closely, you can see the slaves working in the windmills…

In case you missed it, Rep. Clarke, the Congresswoman from Brooklyn, NY, had thousands of American banging their heads against the wall (and, tragically, many more, like those who voted this dolt into office nodding their empty heads and saying, “She speaks the truth!”) when she told Comedy Central’s wag Stephen Colbert that Brooklyn still had slavery in 1898, a full 33 years after the Civil War and the passage of the 13th Amendment. When Colbert, in mock surprise, said, “It sounds like a horrible part of the United States kept slavery going until 1898! Who would be enslaving you in 1898 in New York?”, Rep. Clarke, eager to fill the gaps in Colbert’s knowledge of New York history,  informed him that it was “the Dutch”…who lost control of New York when “New Netherland” was conquered by the British in 1664, 200 years before the end of the Civil War. Continue reading →

Another Ethics Hero For CNN’s Anderson Cooper, and a Jumbo for Debbie Wasserman Schultz

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

“Discord? What discord?”

Anderson Cooper seems to have decided to single-handedly  stand for objective journalism in the midst of Democratic cheer-leading from most of his colleagues in the broadcast media. Of course, he chose the lowest-hanging fruit imaginable as a target: the Democratic National Committee’s ridiculous, abrasive, shamelessly dishonest chairwoman, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who earned a Jumbo for persisting in a falsehood that nobody could possibly believe.

The Democrats walked into a controversy of their own making when they approved a platform that removed any mention of God (since God is not, presumably, a Democrat, I don’t know why anyone cares) and an assertion that Jerusalem is the proper capital of Israel. Both of these apparently were also approved by the candidate, President Obama, and conservative blogs and the Republican campaign had a field day with the supposed implications of both. [This was a classic “tit for tat,” because the Democrats had loudly insisted that anything appearing in the GOP platform was attributable to Mitt Romney.] Someone, maybe the President, then concluded that God and Jerusalem needed to go back into the language to stem the bleeding, and what followed was a raucous, and, depending on your orientation, embarrassing or ugly display on the convention floor, with some delegates booing the return of God and Jerusalem and with a repeated voice vote that allowed them back sounding much more like a tie than the required two-third ayes. Continue reading →

Weather Wars: How the Media Is Trivializing Democracy

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Everybody talks about the weather but…wait a minute!  Why is everybody talking about the weather during the election year political conventions? First we had the liberal media trying to shame the Republicans into cancelling their Tampa convention entirely on the theory that it would be heartless and, yes, racist to “party” while Hurricane Isaac was “drowning black folks” in New Orleans. That was disgraceful and stupid, and now the conservative media, led by Rush Limbaugh, is claiming that there is a conspiracy by Democrats to blame the weather in Charlotte—and even to get liberal media outlets to falsely forecast a storm–to provide cover for the change of venue for President Obama’s speech from a 70,000 seat open stadium to a 20,000 seat arena. I’m not kidding—all the conservative talk shows were blatherings about this all day, as were many of the red blogs. Their point: Obama couldn’t fill the 70,000 seat stadium, so this is a face-saving measure that the media is assisting by hyping the threat of storms. And maybe that is why the speech is being moved—WHO CARES?

There is a duty on the part of those who engage in high-profile coverage of politics, not merely to be fair and accurate, but not to degrade the process and trivialize our elections in the process. No wonder so many Americans, indeed a majority, are so alienated by the political process and its coverage that they can’t be bothered to vote. With all the issues, critical, nation-defining ones, that the two parties need to clarify and articulate their view on to the nation, pundits are attacking the parties because of their responses to the weather?  The conservative weather nonsense is less offensive than the race-baiting over Isaac, but at least twice as stupid. What does the size of Obama’s audience have to do with employment, Iran, Afghanistan, Solyndra, Fast and Furious, immigration reform, the deficit, the debt..anything? This is playground-level nonsense, babies throwing sand in the sand box, and it hurts America. If this kind of utter garbage is going to decide our elections, then why should anyone care about issues or the real abilities and character of the men running for office?

America needs to care and pay attention, yet our trivial, petty, polarized, biased, incompetent, arrogant, nasty, silly, partisan media is going out of its way to make the campaign so sordid and absurd that soon only sordid and absurd voters will be able to stomach it.

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Spark: Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin

Sources:

Ethics Alarms attempts to give proper attribution and credit to all sources of facts, analysis and other assistance that go into its blog posts. If you are aware of one I missed, or believe your own work was used in any way without proper attribution, please contact me, Jack Marshall, at  jamproethics@verizon.net.

Exposing the Fact Check Game

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Ethics Alarms generally doesn’t deal in links alone, but I just had the experience of working for several hours on an ethics issue only to see an excellent post on the same tipic pop up on my computer screen, rendering my work both moot and inferior.  James Taranto, the sharp, funny, perceptive Wall Street Journal political blogger and wag  has long been fuming about the bias and incompetence of so-called “fact-check” features, as have I. He has never before done as thorough an analysis of their performance, however, as today, and it bears reading.

Taranto is a conservative, and the charge of leftward bias accompanies his commentary, but I don’t see how it could be otherwise. If there is a right-leaning fact-check feature, I haven’t encountered it. I continue to respect the Annenberg Foundation’s Factcheck.org, as it does the best job of controlling its own liberal bias and generally avoids the devices Taranto flags in his article. Still, its bias is often detectable, as I told its managing editor a few years ago when she addressed a luncheon I attended. She denied it; I had examples. She was not happy with me. Continue reading →

Buzz Bissinger’s Primer on Unethical Reasoning

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Sportswriter Buzz Bissinger, already an Ethics Dunce in good standing, has contributed something immensely valuable to the world of ethics: a cover story for Newsweek that can serve as a teaching aid in college ethics classes.

Titled “I Still Believe in Lance Armstrong,” Bissinger lurches from one rationalization to another, contradicting himself repeatedly along the way. This is a professional journalist, writing in his field, for what once was a respected news commentary magazine. Why is so much of the public unable to tell right from wrong? Because they spend a lifetime reading junk like this: Bissinger’s essay could be Exhibit A.

Bissinger begins by talking about the reactions of his son, a cycling enthusiast who worshiped Armstrong, to the recent news that the tarnished athlete would no longer challenge the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency’s efforts to strip him of his titles:

“Caleb is not blind. He said it was hard not to read the statement and conclude that when Armstrong said, ‘There comes a point in every man’s life when he has to say ‘Enough is enough’ ” and that he was finished fighting the United States Anti-Doping Agency’s fanatical attempt to strip him of his victories, what lay below the outrage was an admission that he may well have cheated with performance enhancers in order to win. That bothers my son. It is why he called the stunning announcement a ‘sad day.’ But it is also why he called it a ‘weird day’ emotionally because of the constant effort to make Armstrong into a villain.” Continue reading →

From the Head Down: Six Questions and Answers About “No Easy Day”

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

I smell fish.

1.  Question: Has “Mark Owen,” the Navy SEAL from Team 6 who has written an account of the Osama bib Laden kill mission (real name: Matt Bissonnette), engaged in unethical conduct by doing so? Continue reading →