Journalism & Media

Obama, Trayvon Martin, Biases and Kansas City Burning

/ Jack Marshall / 34 Comments

In Kansas City, Missouri, a 13-year-old East High School student was walking home after the end of his daily classes when he was grabbed by two older teens just as he reached his front porch. They pinned his arms behind his back,  poured gasoline on him, and set him on fire. The victim of the attack was rushed to an emergency room, where he was treated and released. Doctors fear possible damage to his lungs and eyes, but outside of losing his eyebrows and some hair, he only suffered first degree burns.

The boy is white; his attackers were black. They allegedly said, as they were lighting him aflame, “You get what you deserve, white boy.”

This frightening incident occurred on March 2. I only recently learned of it, because the news media didn’t treat it as a national story. Though the boy’s attackers have not been found, no activists are demanding that the police chief resign. There have been no marches or protests, and students aren’t walking out of Kansas City schools. Nobody, as far as I can determine, has claimed that this is just the tip of a lurking race iceberg, and that it shows the racial hate of blacks toward whites that is hidden by the media and the culture. Most of all, the President of the United States did not say , just to give a wild, hypothetical example… Continue reading →

Integrity Test For The Left

/ Jack Marshall / 34 Comments

So...how many progressives and Democrats agree with Voltaire? I wonder.

It should be obvious by now that the furious indignation leveled at Rush Limbaugh for his denigrating rhetoric against activist Sandra Fluke has been expropriated by those who want to limit free speech to their own standards of what constitutes acceptable discourse….and opinion. This has made itself evident both by the strained efforts of eager Limbaugh boycotters to distinguish his use of misogynistic words and the same or worse language used by friendly boors and misogynists against conservative targets. There is a distinction: Rush was engaging in illogical below-the-belt bullying of a barely-public figure for the offense of disagreeing with him, while Bill Maher, for example, was just showing his contempt and disrespect for women generally, which is what anyone who uses the terms “twat” and “cunt,” as he did, is doing. The argument that this ethical divide is so great that it justifies boycotts on one side and complete apathy—or even appreciation!—on the other is unsustainable, which is why Limbaugh’s statement that the organized campaign to take him off the air is not based on the Fluke affair at all. “They’re not even really offended by what happened,” he said. “This is just an opportunity to execute a plan they’ve had in their drawer since 2009.” Continue reading →

Our News Media’s Integrity Vaccum: The Malia in Mexico Blackout

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Here is a good example of how framing is critical in analyzing the news. When various conservative blogs and commentators started complaining that the AP’s report on the Obamas’ oldest daughter spending spring break in Mexico was disappearing from news media websites across the net, I saw it as a non-story from an ethics perspective, and certainly not, as was being suggested, an example of White House censorship of legitimate news. If I was President  Obama and my young teenage daughter was in Mexico, I’d ask the media to leave her alone too.

I thought other criticism of the President in this incident was unfair as well. Some critics suggested that it was irresponsible of the First Couple to allow their daughter to travel anywhere in a nation where the State Department had issued an advisory that it was not safe to travel. The Obamas are bad parents now? I assume that they are certain that their daughter will be safe, and have taken appropriate measures to ensure that. This is not within the realm of legitimate topics for political sniping.

Thus I wasn’t going to write about this, just as I decide not to write about a wide assortment of ethics-related events and topics that I consider and discard every day. By looking at it as an issue of  government and leadership ethics, however, I missed the real story, which involves journalistic integrity and courage. The Obamas certainly had a right to ask that Malia’s spring break travels be unreported, but a responsible and fair U.S. news media would have told them, politely, no. Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: Holder’s “Brainwash” Comment

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

"You WILL feel differently about guns!"

The death of founder Andrew Breitbart hasn’t slowed down his website’s ability to dig up provocative and embarrassing videos one bit. Its latest is a bit of off-putting rhetoric from Eric Holder, when he was the Clinton Administration U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., telling a D.C. audience that the long-term solution to gun control is to “brainwash” the  public into opposing firearms. Holder said…

“What we need to do is change the way in which people think about guns, especially young people, and make it something that’s not cool, that it’s not acceptable, it’s not hip to carry a gun anymore, in the way in which we’ve changed our attitudes about cigarettes.”

He went on to outline steps that could be taken to “really brainwash people into thinking about guns in a vastly different way.”

Seeing this as a major “gotcha” for the embattled Attorney General, who is already facing growing criticism both for his oversight (or lack of it) of the Fast and Furious gun-smuggling fiasco and his evasive testimony about it before Congress, conservative critics are jumping on the 1995 statement to bolster calls for Holder’s resignation.

Your Ethics Quiz today: Is it fair to criticize a U.S. Attorney General’s statement that he wants to “brainwash” the  public into rejecting a core Constitutional right, when the statement is more than 15 years old, and was made while he was in a different job? Continue reading →

Here’s a Proposal: Republicans Stop Saying That Obama’s a Muslim, and Democrats Stop Saying that The Supreme Court “Stole” The Presidency For Bush

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Law professor/blogger Ann Althouse properly chastises The National Review’s Jonathan Cohn for designating “Bush v. Gore” as the most earth-shattering case of the 21st Century, and not just because the case, decided in December of 2000, occurred in the 20th Century.

“Ridiculous! I can’t believe Cohn doesn’t know that if the case had gone the other way Gore would still have lost in the end!”, Althouse writes, reminding her readers of the results of the objective, meticulous and multiple recounts performed by journalists in 2001, which showed—much to the surprise of the counters, who were dying to be able to report that Gore had been robbed—that “George W. Bush would have won a hand count of Florida’s disputed ballots if the standard advocated by Al Gore had been used.”

I can believe Cohn wrote what he wrote, because the claim that Bush’s presidency was “stolen” has been a cornerstone of Democratic political warfare and unscrupulous hard Left activists since the chad-counting stopped. It stoked the base, misled the public, increased partisan anger, divided the country and undermined Bush’s presidency, all good things from a partisan perspective (and the truth be damned), just as Republicans have been happy to allow the unjustified doubts about President Obama’s loyalty and citizenship linger among its most fanatic partisans. Continue reading →

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.