Journalism & Media

Mike Daisey Follow-up: Behold! The Classic Response of the Self-Righteous and Unethical!

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Mike Daisey in China. Or, standing in front of a big poster. What difference does it make which, really?

Soon after I posted my article about Mike Daisey’s representation of fabricated events and facts as truth in his January feature on NPR, the actor/activist posted this dismissive explanation on his own blog.  It is Dan Rather’s Memogate excuse taken to the next level, the epitome of self-justification of the unapologetic zealot who believes that all is fair in the battle against (what he regards as) evil, employing a full battery of rationalizations for unethical conduct:

1) Daisey’s lies don’t matter, because they were used to expose a real problem (a.k.a “the ends justify the means”); Continue reading →

Unethical Quote of the Month: Mike Daisey

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

“Well, I don’t know that I would say in a theatrical context that it isn’t true. I believe that when I perform it in a theatrical context in the theater that when people hear the story in those terms that we have different languages for what the truth means.”

—Actor, writer, activist Mike Daisey, in an interview with NPR’s Ira Glass, exploring how Daisey was able to justify fabricating facts and accounts for the earlier aired—and just retracted—“American Life” installment called “Mr. Daisy  Goes To The Apple Factory.” NPR checked the particulars of Daisey’s first hand account of the human rights and labor violations he claimed to witness at Apple’s factory in China, and found that the writer had embellished, exaggerated,  and misrepresented much of what he reported. What NPR had broadcast as journalistic reporting was an excerpt from Daisey’s acclaimed touring one-man stage show, “The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs.”

Mike Daisey, lying to us for our own enlightenment

Daisey’s quote, which is both illuminating and chilling, argues that using made-up stories and personal accounts in a theatrical context qualifies as truth, even if the same misrepresentations in a journalistic context are inappropriately false. The problem with his argument, and the flawed ethical theory behind it, is that both the NPR audience and his theater audience believe that Daisey is telling the truth. Daisey’s solution to the problem is simple: his one-man show does tell the truth…it just uses lies to do it. Continue reading →

Comment of the Day: Anti-Bullying Mis-steps: The Perils of Changing Cultural Norms (Part 2)

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

From Penn, excellent and valuable insight on “The Hunger Games” controversy, going into relevant issues and facts that my post did not. Here is his Comment of the Day on the post, Anti-Bullying Mis-steps: The Perils of Changing Cultural Norms (Part 2):

“The purpose of this argument scares the hell out of me. As one press-screener’s review had it, and as the trailers make clear, “The Hunger Games” tells the story of a televised fight to the death between(sic) a group of youngsters in which only one can survive.” If I believed there were any merit to the MPAA system, yes, R is what it should be. [“This Film is Not Yet Rated” is the movie to see on this subject.] Continue reading →

Revisiting the Tragedy of the Dead Child in the Locked Car

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

Almost two years ago, I wrote about Washington Post feature writer Gene Weingarten’s provocative and sensitive 2009 exploration of the tragic cases in which a distracted parent leaves a small child in an over-heated car. The issue, now as then, is how society should treat such parents, who are without exception crushed with remorse and guilt, their lives and psyches permanently scarred. Weingarten’s original piece, which won him a 2010 Pulitzer, did not take a position on how such parents should be treated by the criminal justice system. In today’s Washington Post, he does.

Weingarten writes:

“The parents are a continuing danger to no one, nor could anybody sanely argue that fear of prison is even a minuscule factor in preventing this. So we are left with the nebulous notion of punishing, for punishment’s sake alone, an act of accidental negligence that by its nature subjects the doer to a lifetime of agony so profound that it is unfathomable to anyone who has not lived it. Prosecution is not, in my view, warranted.”

Weingarten is thoughtful, analytical, reasonable, compassionate and fair. He is also, in this case, dead wrong. Continue reading →

Comment of the Day: Time To Retire Editorial Cartoons—With Gratitude

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Cartoonist and frequent combatant on Ethics Alarms Barry Deutsch did not disappoint—I was counting on a strong reply from him—in commenting on my post about political cartoonists. And I think he has me convinced. I think what I should have suggested, rather than advocating sending newspaper political cartoonists to the trash bin of history (soon to be followed by newspapers themselves), is that editors exercise some discretion over when an editorial cartoon, even by a respected cartoonist, just doesn’t meet editorial standards.

Here is Barry’s persuasive and educational Comment of the Day on the post Time To Retire Editorial Cartoons—With Gratitude:

“Oh, how could I possibly resist this thread?

“1) At his best, Tom Toles is a wonderful cartoonist, elegant and with an incredibly distinctive style. But he hasn’t been at his best for years. The particular cartoon you’re talking about — which can be seen here, if anyone’s curious — is an embarrassment.

“The problem with that Toles cartoon isn’t that it takes a side, or that it paints with a broad brush; many good cartoons do both those things. The problem is, it’s painfully stupid.

“2) There are good political cartoonists doing interesting work, but they’re mostly not found in mainstream newspapers.

“3) Even the best political cartoonists tend to produce more mediocre than great cartoons.

“4) It’s a very, very rare reader who can recognize the artistic merit of a political cartoon that they strongly disagree with politically.

“5) The economic base has fallen out from under political cartooning; every year, fewer and fewer newspapers support a staff cartoonist, and those that remain are seeing their incomes and outlets shrinking. And no one’s yet found a business model for political cartooning to thrive on the web.

“As a result, the most talented new cartoonists usually aren’t going into political cartooning, because they want to be able to eat and pay rent.

“6) Some of the most interesting political cartoonists have gone so far away from traditional political cartooning that no one even recognizes what they’re doing as political cartooning. See, for instance, Joe Sacco, who does journalism in comics form; his second book on Palestine, “Footnotes In Gaza,” is one of the best books about life in Gaza anyone’s done, in prose or comics.

Time To Retire Editorial Cartoons, With Gratitude

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

The nuanced subtlety of Pulitzer Prize winning Herb Block. Translation: "Nixon's a crook." Brilliant!!!

All right, hear me out. I love cartoons. I used to aspire to being a cartoonist. I have good friends who are cartoonists, and I know there are cartoonists who are strong contributors to Ethics Alarms. But for many years it has appeared to me that editorial cartoons have become an increasingly archaic form of commentary, one that misinforms the public and contributes to the venom and lack of nuance in public discourse.

Cartoons, by their very nature, deal in caricature, exaggeration and extremes for metaphorical and humorous effect. The practical effect of this, however, is that the opinions expressed through cartoons are also “supported” in a manner that would be outrageous in a written opinion piece. I know: you can’t hold a cartoon to the same standard as an op-ed. Fine—then don’t put it on the editorial pages. Continue reading →

Greg Smith’s Urgent Ethics Alarm

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

“Today is my last day at Goldman Sachs. After almost 12 years at the firm — first as a summer intern while at Stanford, then in New York for 10 years, and now in London — I believe I have worked here long enough to understand the trajectory of its culture, its people and its identity. And I can honestly say that the environment now is as toxic and destructive as I have ever seen it”

This, says Greg Smith, is how the leadership of Goldman Sachs sees its clients.

With that, Goldman Sach’s executive Greg Smith began his remarkable op-ed in the New York Times, sending his former employers into crisis mode, panicking investors, and setting the financial, political and journalistic worlds buzzing. Obviously, it was an exposé about ethics as much as anything else.  Smith described a corporation-wide breach of trust with clients, a culture in which leadership openly derided those the company pledged to serve as “muppets,” and apparently, sheep to be sheared:

“It makes me ill how callously people talk about ripping their clients off… I don’t know of any illegal behavior, but will people push the envelope and pitch lucrative and complicated products to clients even if they are not the simplest investments or the ones most directly aligned with the client’s goals? Absolutely. Every day, in fact.”

Smith cites a breakdown in leadership, resulting in a corruption of values: Continue reading →

Funny! But Unfair.

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Here’s conservative news aggregator Matt Drudge’s top of the page lead headlines at the moment…

If you are going to try to make the (silly and petty) argument that there is something unseemly about the President taking a break from the heavy lifting his job entails to indulge his passion for March Madness basketball, then make it. Implying it this way is snide and unfair; it reminds me of the trouble the Harvard Crimson got into years ago when its printer placed a photo from an art exhibit that appeared to depict two young people engaging in oral sex right next to a headline that read, “New Cafeteria Opens at Radcliffe.”

Funny!  But still wrong.

As I’m sure Matt Drudge knows this.

He just doesn’t care.

The Process Can Be Ugly, And Sure Was This Time, But This Is How Cultural Ethics Standards Change

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

Greta was the tipping point.

The Rush Limbaugh-Sandra Fluke Ethics Train Wreck is over at last, but unlike with many such debacles, something positive occurred. I believe that an emphatic cultural standard was established that calling a woman—any woman, famous or not, liberal or conservative—a derogatory term designed purely to denigrate her by denigrating her gender will not be considered acceptable in political, quasi-political or arguably-political commentary henceforward. If such rhetoric occurs in a comic or entertainment context, no politician or elected official can appear to endorse the individual who utters the offensive words.

I’m not arguing right now whether this is a good or a bad development, but merely that it happened, and that it is a real change. For this to happen, a conservative radio talk show host had to use the terms “slut’ and “prostitute” to make the botched satirical point that a feminist law student activist who argued that free contraceptives were a woman’s right was the equivalent of women who wanted to be “paid for sex.” If pundits and bloggers had merely declared this statement uncivil and cruel, nothing more would have happened, and the incident would have been quickly forgotten. But sensing political points to be scored in an election year, and with the added incentive of being handed what was seen as powerful ammunition to attempt a frontal attack against a detested partisan critic, Democrats,  progressives, feminists, activists, Obama strategists and left-biased journalists decided to cast the Limbaugh’s poor judgment in extreme terms. Continue reading →

A Secret Service Betrayal

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

A despicable former Secret Service agent named Dan Emmett has self-published “Within Arm’s Length,” a tell-all  book about his work protecting the Clintons.  I’m not going to repeat any of his stories, and nobody should read his book either. This kind of thing is another fever on the way to the complete death of trust and professionalism.

Emmett’s job was to guard the First Family, and as part of his job he saw them all in private and unguarded moments. The Clintons had to trust that his sole objective was to ensure their safety, not to gather juicy material for a book, and they should not have had to worry about whether every stray remark or imagined slight would later find its way to the internet. “Within Arm’s Length” is nothing less than betrayal, and in my view, it falls just short of treason, and perhaps not short at all. Undermining the relationship between the Secret Service and the President of the United States, which this book does, threatens the safety of future Presidents. For agents to do their jobs, they must be trusted to the extent that nothing is withheld from them out of fear that they will disclose it. Emmett proves that such unquestionable trust is unwarranted, and in this sad era where betrayal is rewarded or shrugged off as predictable, probably impossible. Continue reading →