Journalism & Media

Unethical Quote of the Week: The Washington Post Editors

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

“In their anti-abortion fervor, they thought that requiring ultrasounds, even transvaginal ones, was justified if it would change the minds of some women who’d considered ending their pregnancies”

—The Washington Post, in an editorial condemning the efforts of Virginia’s Republicans to pass a measure requiring an ultrasound scan of the fetus before a woman could get an abortion. The bill, which had been poised for passage, evaporated after it was revealed that women in the earliest stages of pregnancy would be required to suffer an invasive procedure, and Republican Governor Bob McDonnell announced that he would not sign it in its current form.

Seldom has an editorial managed to be so frighteningly dismissive of human life while being entirely correct on the issue it was discussing. Continue reading →

Charles M. Blow’s Bigoted Anti-Mormon Tweet, Chapter 2: Ironies, Regrets, and Hypocrisy on the Left

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Charles M. Blow, trapped in regret-apology hypocrisy. Fortunately for him, his paper doesn't care.

Charles M. Blow, the New York Times columnist who sent his followers an uncivil, unprofessional and bigoted tweet regarding Mitt Romney and his faith during Wednesday’s debate [“Let me just tell you this Mitt ‘Muddle Mouth’: I’m a single parent and my kids are *amazing*! Stick that in your magic underwear.”] issued a fascinating…something...today in response to criticism, which did not come from the supposedly bigotry-sensitive left. He tweeted:

“Btw, the comment I made about Mormonism during Wed.’s debate was inappropriate, and I regret it. I’m willing to admit that with no caveats.”

It is fascinating to me that this is being called an apology by Blow’s supporters and conservative critics alike. If it is an apology, and that is open to dispute, I’d like someone to explain to me how Blow can use “regret” as a stand-in for “I apologize,” and yet the same commentators who are interpreting the word that way have insisted that President Obama’s repeated use of “regret”to refer to past U.S. foreign policy actions was not the equivalent of apologizing, and have in fact stated that this interpretation by conservative critics is “a lie.”

Among those who have defended the President in this way, I believe, is Charles M. Blow. Continue reading →

Albert Pujols, Stan the Man, and the Shameless Jeremy Lin Censors

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

THIS is "El Hombre." Stan's Polish, by the way. Do you care? Does the Asian American Journalists Association?

If you don’t know who Albert Pujols is, you should: he’s probably the best hitter in baseball, a slugging first baseman whose career so far has already guaranteed him a spot in baseball’s Hall of Fame. Over the winter he left his original team and the city that worshiped him, St. Louis and its Cardinals, because, though the team he professed to “owe everything” offered him a deal that would guarantee that his great-grand children could be beach bums all their lives, a team in Southern California, the Angels, offered him even more, so he can light his cigars with C-notes and pave his driveway with gold.. I think elevating money over every other value to that extent is an unethical and culturally corrupting choice, and said so at the time.

Now Albert has re-endeared himself to me  by publicly objecting to the Angels’ pre-season promotional campaign calling him “El Hombre.” “What?” you say. “I thought you have been condemning political correctness in the discussion of athletes with ethnic identities! Don’t you think it’s ridiculous for Pujols, who is of Hispanic descent, to object to a nickname that plays on his heritage?” Indeed I have been condemning such political correctness and over-sentivity, and still do. But that isn’t why Albert is objecting.

Back in St. Louis, you see, they also tried to call Pujols “El Hombre,” in a deliberate evocation of the city’s most famous and celebrated slugger, the great Stan “The Man” Musial, one of the best and most admirable players in baseball history. Pujols put a stop to it. There was only one player in the city who could carry the title “The Man”, he said, and that was Musial, who is alive and in his 90’s. Just saying “the Man” in a different language didn’t change the fact that the honor was Musial’s, and shouldn’t be taken  away. Stan Musial was and is “the Man;” Pujols respected that, and defended it Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: NY Times Columnist Charles M. Blow, and the Times, If It Doesn’t Do Something About Him

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Behold the above tweet from last night, appearing on the Twitter feed of Charles M. Blow, a regular New York Times op-ed columnist. And note:

  • This is supposed to be a respected and respectable journalist of the preeminent U.S. newspaper, and he is sending gutter-level messages via social media, plus
  • …his tweet immediately descends to crude name-calling (“Muddle-Mouth”) aimed at a Republican presidential candidate, and
  • …goes lower still, making first a crude reference to underwear, and
  • …making the reference a religious slur as well. Continue reading →

Facebook’s Weird Ethical Standards

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

I know, they're too small to read. Never mind; they also don't make any sense

The idea of Gawker, a website that shares the ethical standards of the seamier denizens of “Rick’s” in “Casablanca,” doing a legitimate ethics expose gives me a brain cramp, but the gossip site has given a platform to a Facebook whistleblower, sort of.

I say “sort of,” because knowing Gawker, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that he was paid to rat out his former employers-once-removed (he was hired by  Facebook’s outsourcing firm that handled his training—oDesk), making him ethically less of a whistleblower than a candidate for Gawker’s editorial board. The argument, I suppose, would be that a dollar an hour, which is what Gawker’s source says was his princely reward for doing Facebook’s dirty work, shouldn’t buy much loyalty and confidentiality, if any. Ethically, that’s false: you are obligated to abide by the terms of bad deals if you voluntarily agree to them. Practically speaking, it is true. A worker a company exploits is likely to harbor more animus than good will, and it isn’t the happy workers who blow whistles. Fine: neither Gawker’s source nor Gawker are ethically admirable. On to Facebook.

The whistleblower is Amine Derkaoui, a 21-year-old Moroccan who was recruited by an outsourcing firm to screen illicit Facebook content. This is what he was paid a dollar an hour for, which, when one considers the news reports flying around recently about how rich Mark Zuckerberg is, and after the company filed its record $100 billion IPO, seems unequivocally exploitive. His real exposé, however, involves what he was paid to do, which was to be Facebook’s censor. Derkaoui supplied Gawker with a bootleg copy of part of Facebook’s abuse standards, which lays out what the company believes is appropriate and what it believes should be banned from the web. Thus it is Facebook’s morality, revealing the ethical standards that the company embraces. Continue reading →

Climate Wars Ethics: Gleick’s Lie, and the Death of Trust

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

You cannot fight for the truth with lies. Why is this so hard to learn?

This is a big ethics story, with general ethics lessons and serious public policy repercussions in an area already muddled with ethical misconduct on all sides. I’m going to restrict Ethics Alarms to the purely ethical analysis. and, at the end, point out some of the excellent articles that the incident has inspired regarding the policy implications of it all.

Last week, leaked documents prepared for a board meeting of the libertarian think tank, the Heartland Institute, were published on various blogs and websites. The Institute is a major player in the effort to disprove, debunk or discredit scientific studies showing man-made climate change, and block the adoption of anti-climate change policies while undermining public support for them.  One of the most provocative documents was a “Climate Strategy” memorandum laying out Heartland’s secret efforts in sinister terms. The source of the documents, and the one who made them available to global-warming promoting bloggers, was a mysterious individual calling himself “Heartland Insider.”

Now the source has revealed himself, and it is a prominent climatologist on the front lines of the climate change battle, scientist Peter Gleick of the Pacific Institute. Gleick explained what occurred in a column at the Huffington Post: Continue reading →

Ethics Alarms Recap: A Long Weekend of Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

If the long Presidents Day weekend took you hither and yon and away from ethical dilemmas and controversies, welcome back! Here is what went on here in a lively three days:

Punishment for Color Blindness: ESPN’s Unfair and Cowardly Suspension of Max Bretos

/ Jack Marshall / 71 Comments

What Max Bretos means by "chink in the armor." Not that ESPN cares.

The headline “Chink in the Armor: Jeremy Lin’s 9 Turnovers Cost Knicks in Streak-stopping Loss to Hornets” appeared on ESPN’s mobile web site last week, and it was quickly removed. ESPN apologized, then fired the over-night headline writer who thought it would be cute to make a racially-offensive play on words between the derogatory slur for a person of Chinese descent, and the old, respectable, and the completely non-racial phrase meaning “a flaw or weak point.”

ESPN’s response to the tasteless headline was appropriate.

But it wasn’t enough for ESPN, which was under a full barrage from the  political correctness police and race bullies as well as Jeremy Lin fanatics. So the station also decided to make a victim of  innocent anchor Max Bretos, suspending him for 30 days because he used the expression Wednesday when he asked New York Knicks legend Walt “Clyde” Frazier on air about Lin.

“If there is a chink in the armor, where can he improve his game?” Bretos asked. Continue reading →

Ethics Quote of the Week: Chris Matthews

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

“Loyalty is the heart of Pat’s being. He is loyal to country, to church, to neighborhood to heritage. To Pat, the world can never be better than the one he grew up in as a young boy. Blessed Sacrament Church and Grade School, Gonzaga High School, Georgetown University. No country will ever be better than the United States of America of the early 1950s. It’s his deep loyalty to preserving that reality and all its cultural and ethnic aspects that has been his primal purpose and is what has gotten him into trouble. Not just now but over the years.”

—MSNBC talking head Chris Matthews, in his wistful on-air tribute to Pat Buchanan, who was fired from his long-time role as the left-wing network’s token hard-right conservative.

"Pat, I may disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it...on some other network."

Matthews’ quote helps explain why loyalty is the most corrupting of the ethical virtues. Loyalty is important and admirable, but when it is divorced from the other values, it can lead to rigidity, stubbornness, and corruption. When a person, organization or cause no longer embodies the qualities that justified the loyalty in the first place, loyalty can undermine ethical conduct as strongly as any vice.

The right is attempting to frame Buchanan’s dismissal as part of a conspiracy to silence conservative voices. I never understood why Pat was on MSNBC anyway, unless it was to have a particularly Jurassic conservative around to make MSNBC’s extreme liberal bias look reasonable by comparison. It was Buchanan’s latest book, “Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive 2025?,” that finally triggered his ouster. I haven’t read it, but I’ve heard Buchanan on this topic sufficiently already. He may not be a racist, xenophobe, homophobe and anti-Semite, but his confusion of the need to hold on to American cultural values, with which I agree, with the need to keep America as white, Christian, heterosexual and Anglo-Saxon as possible is hard to distinguish from racism, homophobia, xenophobia and anti-Semitism. If I were running a news network, I wouldn’t employ him. Continue reading →

Gotcha Nation

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

"Don't you see? It's not a lunch, IT'S A SMOKING GUN!!!!!!!"

For once, I wasn’t sucked in on this one, despite multiple nudges from readers. The story was that a pre-schooler’s lunch, lovingly packed by her mom and containing a turkey and cheese sandwich, a banana, potato chips and apple juice, was vetoed by an elementary school diet-cop, who forced her to get an approved cafeteria lunch that consisted of three chicken nuggets. Then the girl’s mother got a “you’re not properly feeding your child’ notice from the school, and a bill for the cafeteria lunch. Pushed my Drudge, picked up by Fox (“Preschooler’s Homemade Lunch Replaced With Nuggets”) and flogged for days by Rush, Sean, Laura, Mark, Bill and the rest of the conservative airwaves and blogosphere, the tale was widely cited as the tipping point of Big Brother unleashed. This was the work of Michelle Obama’s food crusade, and the harbinger of jack-booted indignities to come! Parents told what to feed their kids! The end of Democracy! Barack Obama’s evil plot exposed! Continue reading →