Journalism & Media

The Gaby Rodriguez Virus—Hoax Your Friends For Fame and Profit—Spreads

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Be careful! If you catch the virus, you might lie to your family that you’re going to die, and write a book about it!

High school senior Gaby Rodriquez got fame, a book, a movie deal and awards, not to mention an A for her school project, by traumatizing her family and friends with an extended pregnancy hoax. It was inevitable that when such blatantly unethical and destructive conduct is hailed as “courageous” by media pundits and pays off in speaking fees and book contracts as well, other ambitious liars would try the same trick. Sure enough, a young straight male Christian decided to hoax his friends and family by telling them he was gay.

It’s worth lying to everyone who cares about you and trusts you for a book deal, right? Timothy Kurek’s experience posing as gay for a year is the basis of his “Jesus In Drag” coming out this fall. The Today show should slobber all over this one, and I’m sure Timothy will become a familiar butt on the couches of Ellen, Dave, Jimmy and others. And, like Gaby Rodriguez, he will be hailed for his “courage” to exploit the trust of his family and to betray his friends so he could use their discomfort as book material. Continue reading →

Fast and Furious: An Open Letter To Columnist Colbert King

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Dear Colbert King…

Dear Mr. King:

I am writing to see if you can help me understand your attitude toward the Fast and Furious scandal, as laid out in your recent weekly column in the Washington Post.

I can’t bring myself to make you an Ethics Dunce, because few journalists in any community have led such a relentless and powerful crusade against unethical government and corrupt public officials. Your columns have eloquently condemned the culture of corruption that has crippled the District of Columbia, and rallied the indignation and activism of citizens against the legacy of Marion Barry and the tolerance of public betrayal that he sowed and nurtured. You have cataloged, in shocking detail, the ethical rot that has infested the nation’s Capital, marked by lawlessness, cronyism, incompetence and greed. I respect you. I trust you. I think of you as the most credible and objective media advocate for good government that I know.

So I need to understand why you think it is fair and appropriate to call Rep. Issa a “devil” for insisting on transparency, honesty, accountability, and transparency from Attorney General Holder regarding the Fast and Furious fiasco, which left one American and untold Mexicans dead. It is the duty of Congress to exercise oversight over the U.S. government, and if there was ever an episode demanding oversight, this was it. The U.S. Department of Justice allowed the law to be broken, permitted dangerous automatic weapons to cross the border into Mexico and arm the most dangerous thugs in that country (without receiving the permission of Mexico or informing it), and then lost control of both the scheme and the weapons, with fatal results. You always write about maintaining the trust of the public in Washington, D. C. What is more fatal to trust than a law enforcement agency that intentionally allows laws to be broken without accountability? Don’t you believe that public trust in a nation’s Justice Department, its agents, policymakers and leadership is as important as public trust in the D.C. City Council? If you do, why is Issa, in your words, “engaging in cheap political opportunism” by insisting, along with others, such as the scrupulously fair Sen. Grassley, that Holder explain what happened, who was responsible, and what measures have been taken to make sure such an outrageous operation never happens again—beginning with, <gasp!>, firing somebody? Continue reading →

Supreme Court Headline Ethics: Our News Media, Misleading Rather Than Informing

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

The Supreme Court handed down its decision in Arizona v. United States today. This was the eagerly awaited case that addresses the issue of what the states can do to stem the tide of illegal immigration without encroaching on Federal authority, when Federal authority appears unwilling to enforce the nation’s immigration laws.

The decision was complex. Three provisions of the law were found to be preempted by Federal law and thus struck down, but they were provisions that have seldom been discussed in teh news media during the year-long controversy over the Arizona measure. The fourth provision covered in the opinion, the core of the law and the aspect of it that Democrats and illegal immigration advocates called “racial profiling,” was upheld, but with a caveat: if it was enforced in a fashion that violated Constitutional rights or raised preemption issues, it could be overturned later.

Meanwhile, after being smeared by the Obama Administration’s allies as politically-driven and without integrity, the split among the Justices defied the slander of its critics. Chief Justice Roberts joined the liberal wing of the Court to overturn the three provisions of the law.  Arch conservative and Bush appointee Justice Alito concurred with the banning of one of the three provisions. Hispanic Justice Sotomayor voted to uphold the papers-checking provision that the man who appointed her, President Obama, falsely described as allowing police to “harass” Hispanic citizens who were “eating ice cream” with their kids.

In short, like most Supreme Court decisions, the final opinions defied one-line analysis. This means that honest, ethical, objective and competent news sources shouldn’t and wouldn’t try to summarize the substance of the decision in a headline that was sure to mislead a reader who didn’t take the time to read the rest of the story (or, in truth, the actual opinions themselves, since the journalists who write stories about court cases generally do a terrible job). Yet here is sampling, gleaned from a Google search, of what the various publications, news networks and websites offered as headings. Judge for yourself how objective and fair they are: Continue reading →

Don’t Tell Us The Public “Doesn’t Care” About Incompetence and Corruption. It Has to Care.

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

The Washington Post broke the ethics story of the weekend, documenting a blatant conflict of interest on Capitol Hill that has many members of Congress making decisions on legislation directly affecting companies in their stock portfolios, and trading the stock contemporaneously with those decisions.

Based on the depressing dialogue on the Sunday public affairs shows regarding the Fast and Furious scandal—-especially the dialogue issuing from panelists who have obviously received and memorized received the Obama Administration and Democratic Party talking points—-I would assume that the American people can’t be bothered with this matter, and think it is a waste of time. After all, according to panelist after panelist who was either a mainstream media pundit or an Obama surrogate, all the American people care about is the economy and jobs. The fact that the U.S. Justice Department may be run by incompetents and law-breakers—who cares? The fact that nobody gets fired for approving a policy that breaks laws and gets innocent people killed—so what? The American people are, we are told, one-track mind morons, unable to focus on more than one problem at a time, and incapable of seeing the interrelations between problems. I wonder–might the fact that Congress may be corrupt and the Executive Branch, including Justice, may be irresponsible and inept have any bearing on the ability of the government to oversee the economy effectively? Don’t be silly, former New Mexico Governor and Clinton acolyte Bill Richardson told us yesterday. The public isn’t that sophisticated. The public doesn’t care about who’s cheating, who’s breaking the law and who’s incompetent! The people only want to talk about jobs! So, apparently, that is all the journalists and pundits should talk about, and all that policymakers should spend their time on.

No wonder none of those Sunday shows spent any time on this Post front page story: Continue reading →

The 77% Lie: Just Because a False Statistic Is Useful and Traditional Doesn’t Make It Less Unethical To Keep Using It.

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

Sure, lie to us, Mr. President. As long as its for a good cause.

In 2000, CNN anchor Bernard Shaw used the statistic that “women are paid only 77 cents for every dollar men receive for the same work” in a question to Joe Lieberman during the Vice Presidential candidates debate, prompting me to turn or the TV and write a letter to CNN. The statistic had long been debunked as misleading and inaccurate for years by every objective observer who examined it. The unspoken assumption that figure is meant to convey is that this supposed gap reflects sexism in the workplace. It dates from the early days of NOW and the feminist push for the Equal Rights Amendment, an activist-concocted lie, like many of the global warming “facts” mouthed by Al Gore, designed to simplify a complex phenomenon into something unequivocally persuasive. For Shaw, a journalist, to repeat a false and misleading statistic as fact in a nationally televised debate was inexcusable, and irresponsible journalism.

Did I mention that this was in 2000?

The 77% stat is one of my two pet fake statistics (the other being the statement that 50% of all U.S. marriages end in divorce, used by culture warriors on both the left and right), and I have vowed not to let either pass without a red flag until I either drop dead or people stop lying. So I don’t care to hear, thank you, about how I’m picking on the President Obama when Mitt Romney has been using some misleading facts too. I know he has. But when a President of the United States whose supporters laud as a genius and scholar, and who pledged not to mislead the American people promotes his campaign with a widely publicized statistic that he has to know misinforms the public, I believe that’s alarming, insulting, and infuriating.  The fact that Democrats and feminists have been using the same lie for over three decades doesn’t make it less offensive, but more. Continue reading →

The Weeping Bus Monitor: A Half-Million Dollars For Incompetence

/ Jack Marshall / 106 Comments

Karen Klein is the 68- year-old bus monitor who is the unwilling star of a viral video (below) showing her being insulted and mocked by 12-year-olds on a school bus.

Continue reading →

Fast and Furious: AG Holder’s Ethics Train Wreck

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Let’s get a few things settled.

If you look closely, you can see Eric Holder in his engineer cap.

Fast and Furious is a true scandal, not a trumped-up distraction, just as Watergate wasn’t a “third-rate burglary.” When the U.S. government intentionally allows laws to be broken, secretly seeds violent crime in a neighboring country and gets both foreigners and Americans killed as a result, that’s a scandal any way you cut it. The U.S. Congress has an oversight role to play after such a fiasco, and getting to the bottom of what went sour is its duty, regardless of how much enjoyment partisan Congressmen appear to have making Administration officials sweat. Any politician or member of the media who suggests otherwise is trying to manufacture a cover-up and intentionally misleading the public. The mantra that “this is a waste of time when Congress should be doing the nation’s business” was used by Republicans during Watergate, Iran-Contra, and the Valerie Plame affair, and by Democrats during Whitewater, Lewinsky, and now, as Fast and Furious is finally bursting out of the hole of obscurity where the biased media tried to stuff it. A badly managed, law-breaking Justice Department isn’t trivial, and when utterly stupid, reckless operations like Fast and Furious come to light, it is essential that there be full disclosure and accountability. The voices trying to bury this scandal do not have the best interests of the United States or the public at heart. Let’s start with that.

Fast and Furious was so jaw-droppingly dumb that its very stupidity is almost a boon to defenders of Attorney General Holder’s department, since the normal reaction to such facts is that some crazy Republican must have made up the whole thing. Unfortunately, this really happened.  In 2009, the US government allowed Arizona gun sellers to illegally sell automatic weapons to suspected criminals. Then ATF agents (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives)  were directed to  allow the guns to “walk” across the border and be delivered to the Mexican drug cartels. The House Oversight Committee’s report explains, “The purpose was to wait and watch, in hope that law enforcement could identify other members of a trafficking network and build a large, complex conspiracy case…. [The ATF] initially began using the new gun-walking tactics in one of its investigations to further the Department’s strategy.”

Gee. What a great plan! What could possibly go wrong?

Oh, only everything.

1,608 weapons ended up in the bloody hands of Mexican criminals. The ATF lost track of them, until they turned up at shootings and crime scenes. Many Mexicans, though we don’t know how many, died from being shot by the planted guns, and when a US federal agent, Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry, was killed by one of them in battle with drug-runners, the fiasco became public. (ATF whistle-blower also helped.) In a sensible, fair, ethical system, the next steps would follow like Summer follows Spring:

  • The news media would give the story major coverage  and do its own, unbiased, competent investigation.
  • The Administration would express horror and regret, and set about its own internal investigation.
  • Both parties of Congress would aggressively seek answers, and make certain that systemic failures were exposed and responsible individuals were identified.
  • Those responsible would resign or would be fired.

But we do not have a sensible, fair, ethical system, at least as it is currently functioning. As a result, the Fact and Furious mess has become an ethics train wreck that appears to be gathering steam. The evidence so far: Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: NBC’s Andrea Mitchell

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Yesterday, Ethics Alarms discussed the deceptive editing of a Mitt Romney campaign video to make him look out of touch “with how real people live,” the attack line used so successful against President George H.W. Bush by Bill Clinton, after Bush had expressed amazement at grocery store price scanners. MSNBC host Andrea Mitchell cackled over the clip, which conveniently left out the point Romney was making. Naturally, other liberal flacks in the media picked up the theme, and cited the falsely edited segment.

Mitchell subsequently responded to complaints regarding the blatantly biased and unethical edit, and you can watch her response below: a huge shrug, and a dishonest “we didn’t have the chance” to play the whole thing (and instead decided to laugh at the Republican candidate for looking like a fool because we intentionally made him look like a fool.

Continue reading →

Ethics Quote of the Week: Washington Sports Writer Sally Jenkins

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

“Overreaching by government is far more harmful than any of the alleged offenses. It has poured more poison into the system than is contained in any needle.”

—-Sally Jenkins, writing in the Washington Post sports pages about the Roger Clemens prosecution.

Elsewhere in her column, Jenkins writes:

“Someone in authority at the Justice Department should have said to the federal investigators who pursued Clemens since 2007 on perjury charges, “You don’t have the evidence that can win a conviction.” The government never had a case, and knew it didn’t have a case (or at least should have), and brought the case anyway.”

Bringing a case when a prosecutor doesn’t have sufficient evidence is the epitome of unethical prosecution, and the Clemens case certainly qualifies. I can’t write much about this now, because I am preparing to give an ethics seminar to Washington D.C. government attorneys about legal ethics in government practice. I always find the government attorneys to be extraordinarily informed regarding ethical standards, and to have excellent ethical instincts. I will be talking about the Clemens case, and the Ted Stevens prosecution that went so horribly wrong, and the Fast and Furious investigation, in which a Federal Prosecutor announced his intention to take the Fifth Amendment if he was called before Congress. I will be talking about a lot of things.

There is obviously a problem.

___________________________

Spark: Ron Sarro

Source: Washington Post

Graphic: The Cell Phone Junkie

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.

The News Media’s Election Year Ethics, Part 2: NBC Does A Breitbart

/ Jack Marshall / 39 Comments

MSNBC serves up a lie sandwich for its viewers, and Jonathan Capehart chows down.

The Washington Post’s Op Ed page, courtesy of the paper’s liberal blogger Jonathan Capehart, was mocking Mitt Romney—he’s an out-of-touch rich guy, you know—for “waxing amazed at what he just saw or who he has just met as if he were a traveler in a strange and distant land for the first time.” Wrote Capehart:

“…Romney added to his parade of wonder with this beauty after visiting a well-known roadside convenience store chain in Pennsylvania. ‘Where do you get your hoagies here? Do you get them at WaWas? Is that where you get them? Well, I went to a place today called WaWas. You ever been to WaWas? Anybody been there? Some people don’t like . . . I know, I’m sorry. It’s a big state divide. But we went to WaWas . . . I was at a WaWas. I went to order a sandwich. You press a little touchtone key pad.… You touch this, touch this, touch this, go pay the cashier, and there’s your sandwich. It’s amazing!’

“What’s amazing is that Romney is seeking to lead a nation he appears to be visiting for the very first time. Pity he won’t settle for a t-shirt instead of the presidency as his souvenir” Continue reading →