Journalism & Media

Your Weekend Ethics Update

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Sure, it's touching..but is it sincere?

Here’s what you may have missed if your attention was focused on non-ethical considerations over the weekend:

  • A Washington, D.C. Charter school has been using scenarios out of horror movies to teach math—to third graders.
  • Saturday Night Live gave fallen child star Lindsay Lohan a chance to be something other than an addict and scofflaw again. Was it exploitation or was it kindness? Kind exploitation, perhaps?
  • Rush Limbaugh became a victim of his own mouth, attacking a Georgetown Law student’s advocacy of insurance-covered contraceptives not by questioning her logic—which is questionable—but her character, and in crude and degrading terms. Indefensible.
  • At least two NFL team, it was revealed, put bounties on the heads of opposing teams’ stars, offering thousands to players for knocking them off the field and into hospital beds. Unethical, a violation of league rules, cheating, and criminal…and the reaction of players is, “What’s the big deal?” A culture problem perhaps?
  • While conservatives were rending their garments in grief over the sudden death of conservative web warrior Andrew Breitbart (and too many liberals were disgracing themselves by applauding an early demise that left his young children fatherless), a far more influential and infinitely more ethical conservative voice left us: scholar, author, social scientist, philosopher, historian…and Ethics Hero Emeritus… James Q. Wilson.
  • Rush apologized after his sponsors began to flee. With great power comes great responsibility, and Limbaugh has more power than he can possibly be responsible for. He still is accountable.
  • Finally…Is a forced apology a “real” apology? It depends.

On Apologies: the Sincere, the Forced, the Cynical and the Harmful

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

"Apologize! SINCERELY!"

On February 17th, Washington Post political commentator Dana Milbank wrote a column disparaging what he called “forced apologies.” Although the context of his column and the apology he was refusing to make was too silly to bother with* (yes, there really are things too silly for Ethics Alarms to bother with) something told me I should keep his column handy, and indeed, the perfect time to consider Milbank’s argument has arrived. Forced apologies are flying all over the place.He wrote:

“…one of the most annoying components of our decaying political culture [is] false umbrage. Liberals created this form of identity politics, in which an underrepresented group claims persecution, but conservatives have embraced it. One of its most common expressions is the demand for an apology. It’s phony by definition — an apology can’t be sincere if it’s answering a demand — and the reflexive demand (like a demand for a resignation) serves only as an excuse to keep a news story alive. Sorry, but it’s time to put this tired gimmick to rest.”

Milbank’s essay included an impressive catalogue of recent demands for apologies, and since it was published there have been many more, the most recent example, of course, being Rush Limbaugh’s mea culpa for his outburst against Sandra Fluke. His central thesis, however, is wrong.

Here is the hierarchy of apologies, their function and their motivation, 1-10, from most admirable to despicable: Continue reading →

Rush’s Apology, His Power, and His Responsibility

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

They're coming, Rush!

The Sunday morning talk shows had a real Rush Limbaugh bash-fest this morning, and that’s fine: he earned it, with his ill-considered and vicious attack on Sandra Fluke for stating her opinion. This is a real career crisis for Limbaugh, I think, and he knows it. His initial reaction to the furious criticism of his offensive comments about the Georgetown Law student was to refuse to back down, as has been his response to controversies his entire remarkable career, and it has served him well. Then he realized that this controversy was different. He had crossed a line of decency, fairness and civility that the culture as a whole, not just political adversaries, would not tolerate. He apologized, saying.

“For over 20 years, I have illustrated the absurd with absurdity, three hours a day, five days a week. In this instance, I chose the wrong words in my analogy of the situation. I did not mean a personal attack on Ms. Fluke.

“I think it is absolutely absurd that during these very serious political times, we are discussing personal sexual recreational activities before members of Congress. I personally do not agree that American citizens should pay for these social activities. What happened to personal responsibility and accountability? Where do we draw the line? If this is accepted as the norm, what will follow? Will we be debating if taxpayers should pay for new sneakers for all students that are interested in running to keep fit? In my monologue, I posited that it is not our business whatsoever to know what is going on in anyone’s bedroom nor do I think it is a topic that should reach a Presidential level.

“My choice of words was not the best, and in the attempt to be humorous, I created a national stir. I sincerely apologize to Ms. Fluke for the insulting word choices.”

Was it a “real” apology? I’m going to discuss the issue of apology ethics in the next post, but yes, it was as real as most apologies. If one’s definition of apology is ” a statement of contrition and regret freely and sincerely given,” the answer is no. Very few apologies meet that high standard, if only for the reason that few of us will apologize unless an apology benefits us in some way or is unavoidable. Rush’s reputation is based on daring, outrageousness and his refusal to back down from the ‘truth” despite assaults from the “drive-by” media and the politically correct; he, of all people, would never apologize for anything he said on his show if he had any choice in the matter. In this case, I assume that Limbaugh was hearing from his affiliates, his sponsors, other talk show hosts, and political figures that he was courting disaster if he didn’t back down. Continue reading →

Ethics Hero Emeritus: James Q. Wilson (1931-2012)

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

“Denmark or Luxembourg can afford to exhibit domestic anguish and uncertainty over military policy; the United States cannot. A divided America encourages our enemies, disheartens our allies, and saps our resolve—potentially to fatal effect. What General Giap of North Vietnam once said of us is even truer today: America cannot be defeated on the battlefield, but it can be defeated at home. Polarization is a force that can defeat us.”

James Q. Wilson wrote that, in an essay on America’s polarization. The scholar, author, philosopher and social scientist who died yesterday at the age of 80 was a passionate conservative who believed in winning arguments, influencing policy and changing conduct with the power of ideas, facts, studies and analysis. That the media, especially the conservative media, treated the death of Andrew Breitbart as a thunderclap and the death of Wilson as a footnote tells us as much as we need to know about our culture, values and intellect. I watched GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum respond to the news of Breitbart’s death as if the culture warrior was the equivalent of Martin Luther King. Breitbart died too young, at 43; he had a family, and reputedly was a nice guy. But his contribution to the American scene was to use his various websites to increase the intensity of partisan warfare, and to help banish fairness, compromise, civility and mutual trust from public discourse. One of the last videos of Brietbart showed him screaming insults at Occupy protesters.

I had stopped using Breitbart’s sites for source material: I couldn’t trust them. The editing of James O’Keefe’s ACORN sting was one strike; the misleadingly truncated Shirley Sherrod speech was another. I wasn’t going to wait for a third. It tells me something alarming about conservatives in this country that such an unethical new media figure could be so lionized upon his death, when his methods were so frequently aimed at destruction rather than elightenment.

Wilson, in contrast, got substantive and wide-ranging results.His 1981 essay “Broken Windows” argued that community policing, rather than mere law enforcement, was the secret to changing urban culture. He wrote (with co-author George Kelling): Continue reading →

Rush’s Misogyny: No Defense

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

This is one of Rush's ugly pictures. He's earned it.

Any idiot, except Rush Limbaugh, apparently, could identify Rush’s outrageous, uncivil, mean-spirited, and ignorant (does he really think a woman has to take more birth control pills the more she has sex?) rant against Georgetown Law student Sandra Fluke (who testified before Congressional Democrats to advocate insurance coverage of contraceptives) as indefensible. That is why I wasn’t going to insult anyone’s intelligence by stating the obvious by posting to that effect. But a commenter here reminded me of the Ethics Alarms post about Bill Maher’s misogyny when he called Sarah Palin a “dumb twat” on his HBO show, and I decided that it should be made clear that as despicable as Maher’s statement was, Rush’s was worse. Continue reading →

“Baby-Killing” Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 173 Comments

No "moral right to life"?

Aided by Rick Santorum’s over-heated rhetoric, the concept of infanticide (I’m against it, by the way) has been hot in the marketplace of ideas lately.

A group of medical ethicists at Oxford made headlines by arguing that parents ought to have the option of killing their newborns because they are “morally irrelevant” and thus ending their lives is no different from abortion. After some recent examples of the press mangling the real message of scholarly papers, I was dubious about the news reports, but son of a gun, that’s what these ethicists wrote.

The article, entitled “After-birth abortion: Why should the baby live?”, was authored by Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva, who argue, Continue reading →

Ryan Braun, Steroids and Fairness

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

If Ryan Braun is innocent, this man, who never met him. tried to ruin his career. It can happen…you know, like Mark Furman tried to frame O.J.

The strange case of Ryan Braun, the 2011  National League Most Valuable Player who tested positive for steroids during the post-season play-offs, once again raises the perplexing ethical issue of fairness when formal procedures concerning alleged wrongdoing are involved.

Braun’s positive test sent a shudder throughout baseball. He was supposed to  be one of the game’s rising young “post-steroid era” stars. For Braun to be caught cheating was a discouraging reminder that the game had not left its disastrous days of pumped-up stars and dubious records behind: now the legitimacy of an MVP season was being called into question. Braun vehemently denied the charges (as every positive-testing player has) and appealed them, a move that had been futile in every previous case. To literally everyone’s surprise, however, the three member arbitration panel ruled 2-1 in Braun’s favor. Although the report of the independent arbitrator who cast the deciding vote has yet to be released, the reason Braun prevailed appears to be that the Major League Baseball contractor who had  responsibility for sending Braun’s urine samples to the testing facilities had to store them at his house for the weekend because FedEx had closed before he could mail them to the lab. This created a sufficient break in the chain of custody, it seems, to make the results invalid. Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: Journalist Harris Meyer

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Harris Meyer is an Ethics Hero because he won’t let a bad lesson go unchallenged.

Meyer is an award-winning  freelance journalist and a former editor at the Yakima (Wash.) Herald Republic. That was the paper that first broke the story of Gaby Rodriguez last year, which I wrote about here. With the encouragement of her high school principal, Rodriguez, a senior, embarked on some amateur social science research that involved deceiving everyone in her life except her mother, one (of seven) siblings, her boyfriend, and the principal. She pretended that she was pregnant, suing padding. She faked the pregnancy for months, finally announcing the sham in a student assembly. This extended hoax was supposedly designed to expose how pregnant teenagers are treated by their peers and others. It was, by any rational standard, a despicable thing to do—a betrayal and exploitation of her friends,  her boyfriend’s family, her siblings and teachers. Deception on such a scale must be justified, if at all, by both need and necessity. Were there other, less destructive ways to investigate the treatment of pregnant teens? Sure there were; interviews come to mind. Collecting published journals and other accounts. But Gaby’s unethical stunt was in spiritual synchronicity with a reality show-obsessed culture, where fake is entertaining and collateral damage is of no concern.  I wrote: Continue reading →

Weekend Ethics Catch-Up

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

If you took an ethics break this last weekend of February, here’s your Ethics Alarms make-up assignment:

 

Comment of the Day: “Charles M. Blow’s Anti-Mormon Tweet, Chapter 2…”

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Michael, who is now the Ethics Alarms all-time leader in the Comment of the Day category, scores another with a thought-provoking post inspired by the New York Times’ stunning disinterest in its columnist tweeting a religious slur about Mitt Romney. I’ll have some added reflections at the end. Here is his Comment of the Day on “Charles M. Blow’s Anti-Mormon Tweet, Chapter 2…”:

“I remember an article about this when I was in college. In analyzing how the news media treated different races, they came up with the PC Hierarchy. Anyone higher on the hierarchy can criticize or be insensitive to anyone below them. If there is a conflict between two groups, the one higher on the PC scale is assumed to be right”

PC Hierarchy of Races… Continue reading →