Journalism & Media

Post-South Carolina Confession

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Sunday morning, I am duty bound to play roulette with the talking head shows on the networks, watch “Reliable Sources,” Howard Kurtz’s weekly journalism ethics critique on CNN, and scour the Washington Post, all in search of contentious or interesting ethics topics.

But rather than listen to endless rehashes of the South Carolina Republican primary, endure Newt Gingrich’s gloating, and again hear so-called experts repetitively apply their imaginary expertise to musings about what will happen in the next primary, Florida—-last week’s consensus: Romney had South Carolina wrapped up– I am watching “MVP: Most Valuable Primate” on Encore Family. It’s about a hockey-playing chimp (named Jack, appropriately enough).

It’s not bad.

Screw it. A man can only take so much.

The Marianne Gingrich Ethics Train Wreck

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Ugh. What a mess.

The ethics miscreants:

Marianne Gingrich: Seething with hate for Newt, she decided to try to metaphorically stick a shiv in his back by airing dirty laundry from their marriage right before the South Carolina primary, a do-or-die for him. Her interview with ABC was unfair and an act of pure revenge. You couldn’t call it whistle-blowing, since anyone who doesn’t already know what a likely sociopath Gingrich is has been watching too many re-runs of “NCIS.” Gingrich’s character, or lack of it, was established and in the books by 1998. Marianne should have not had to say a word, but everything she did say, she had said before, in an interview in 2010 in Esquire. Continue reading →

Stephen Colbert’s Comedy Terrorism

/ Jack Marshall / 39 Comments

This was a lesson for me. I fell into the trap of looking past unique unethical conduct because it resembled harmless conduct I had seen many times before, a close cousin of using “everybody does it” to excuse and invalidate the inexcusable. Thank goodness Washington Post columnist Colbert King was paying attention.

In King’s column today, he catalogues the activities of Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert’s faux presidential run. I had already commented on Colbert’s gag earlier this week, but the target of my criticism was George Stephanopoulos, who devoted a ridiculous amount of time to a pointless interview with the comedian at the expense of real news. I assumed Colbert was just another in a long line of comedians who have used a presidential election year as a prop, and thus harmless….and I stopped paying attention to his antics. But as King ( his first name is pronounced KOHL-bert; the comedian’s name is Kohl-BARE) points out, Colbert has moved beyond satire into something akin to comedy terrorism, actively attempting to warp and influence the presidential selection process for laughs, and casualties be damned. King writes: Continue reading →

Occupy Brain Pans

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Allow me to translate: "Duh!"

The latest, dumbest and most telling of the endless Occupy group protests occurs today, as 111 Occupy Wall Street spin-offs across the country engage in “Occupy the Courts,” a protest to mark two years since the 2010 landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which held that the government cannot ban organizational spending on political campaigns. Move to Amend, the group that is sponsoring the protests, says that the goal is to build support for a constitutional amendment that would abolish corporate constitutional rights, such as the right to free speech, and declaring that political campaign spending is not a form of speech protected by the First Amendment.

If I were optimistic and naive, I would assume that this nonsense would finally shame the imprudent members of the media, Democratic Party and Obama administration who cynically hitched their wagons to the Occupy Wall Street anvil, hoping that eventually the groups would do or say something that justified all the attention and expense lavished on them. Instead, the Occupy movement has featured rapes, robberies, beatings, riots, obscenity, anti-Semites, homeless hangers-on, demonstrators defecating on cars, a woman placing her baby on railroad tracks, another child being abandoned to shiver in a tent, a pseudo-bomb being thrown at the White House, a demonstrator shooting a rifle at the White House, violated permits, squalor, disease and rats….all while the news media showed its stripes by maintaining with a straight face that this display was no different or worse than the comparatively dignified, focused and streamlined Tea Party demonstrations. Nonetheless, the facilitators of this embarrassment in the annals of civil protest seem determined to keep the faith until it blows up into a genuine tragedy or slinks away. If Occupy the Courts won’t convince the pols and journalists that they made an epic mistake, nothing will. But at least it settles the matter. These people have no idea, none, what they are doing. Continue reading →

Republican Nomination Ethics Points, 1/18/2012

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

I’m sitting here watching the GOP Final Four debate. Here are some brief ethics observation on a lively day in the race:

  • At the opening gun, Newt Gingrich gave a bravura performance of indignation personified when moderator John King asked him about the looming ABC interview of his ex-wife, Marianne, in which she impugns Newt’s character and claims that he asked her to agree to an “open marriage.” He told King it was a despicable question and said that the issue was not worthy of mention. Good act, but of course the question of character is relevant, and of course Gingrich, who has none, wouldn’t think so. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Greta Van Susteren

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Newt: ” Honey, I’m divorcing you to marry the woman I’ve been cheating on you with for the last 6 years.” Marianne: “Fine. Just wait til you run for President. I’ll be ready.”

Newt Gingrich’s second (of three) wife, Marianne Gingrich, has said in the past that she had it within her power to  end her ex-husband’s career with a single interview. This is not as remarkable as it sounds; just consider how many political spouses past and present have or had that power regarding their own power partners. Let’s see: Eleanor Roosevelt…Jackie Kennedy…Coretta Scott King…Lady Bird Johnson….Pat Nixon…Hillery Clinton, of course…Bill Clinton…Laura Bush…Tipper Gore. That’s just for starters. I have no doubt that Marianne Gingrich might be able to tell tales that would make any of these women feel fortunate by comparison, but on the other hand, what could she say that would be a surprise? Anyone who doesn’t know by now that Newt is about as miserable an excuse for a human being as one can be and avoid being shot or imprisoned hasn’t been paying attention.

This is the problem, however. People don’t pay attention, and have the memories of Eric Holder under Congressional questioning about Fast and Furious. After Gingrich’s deft response to Juan Williams’ accusatory race-baiting question at the last South Carolina debate sparked a standing ovation, you would have thought that he was the new star on the scene to hear callers on conservative talk-radio rave.* Yes, yes, Gingrich is smart and articulate. So were Richard Nixon, Tom DeLay, Huey Long and Joe McCarthy. So were Professor Moriarty and Goldfinger. We know Newt is smart; we also should know other things about him by now, like the fact that he’s an untrustworthy narcissist and a cur.

Apparently Marianne Gingrich has decided to do America a favor and to remind amnesiac Republicans once and for all who they were cheering this week. She has taped a two-hour spill-the-dirt interview with ABC News. The Gingrich camp is in a panic, and supposedly there is an ethics debate at ABC about whether the interview should air before the critical South Carolina primary, possibly Newt’s last chance to stop the Mitt Romney juggernaut, or after. Fox host and legal analyst Greta Van Susteren comes down on the side of holding the interview in the can until Monday. On her blog, she writes: Continue reading →

Mitt’s Gift

/ Jack Marshall / 30 Comments

South Carolinian Ruth Williams says she was praying for divine guidance as to how she would pay a late electric bill when she found herself in the crowd around the Mitt Romney campaign bus. When she told the Republican presidential front-runner about her plight, he reached into his wallet and handed Ruth around $50 to help her keep her power on.

That bastard!

He only did it for the publicity, of course. (Though there were no cameras present.) Or he did it to show he was better than her. Romney gave her the money because he’s such a rich SOB that it was throwing crumbs to a peasant. Yesterday on CNN, a Democratic operative cited the incident as proof of how out of touch Romney is with the needs and feelings of regular Americans. After all, she said, he just carries all this cash around with him—it was like his betting Rick Perry that $10,000. (Williams says Romney emptied his wallet and gave him everything he had. Wow…the tycoon carries 50 bucks around.)

Over on MSNBC, where every act by a Republican is evil personified,  guest Joy-Ann Reid, a blogger for theGrio.com, was furious; she said that the hand-out proves Romney is a racist. Continue reading →

“Ask Amy” Tackles A Classic—And Misses

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Advice columnist Amy (of the syndicated column “Ask Amy”), was just asked one of those questions that every advice maven has to have in their files, with the perfect answer ready to go. If Amy had her answer prepared, it was  the wrong one.

The question was the deathless classic, “I just found out my husband has been having an affair with a married co-worker. Should I tell the other spouse?”

Amy gets it half right: she tells the reader that the other spouse has a right to know; that this is not a case of meddling because the reader is directly involved in the betrayal; and that not to make sure the other spouse learns the truth would now be abetting the deception. All true. BUT…

…Amy forgets the Golden Rule as it applies to the reader’s husband’s adulterous lover (yes, the rule still applies to busted wrongdoers) and the whistleblowers obligation to minimize needless harm. She tells the victimized wife to spill the beans to the victimized husband.

Wrong.

The adulterous wife deserves the opportunity to tell her husband herself. That would allow her to reveal the affair to her spouse with the least damage to the marriage, and providing that opportunity to her is kind and fair. Amy should have told her reader to contact her husband’s paramour and say this: “I will be calling your husband and telling him about your relationship with my husband in three days. You should tell him the truth yourself, and then all he needs to say to me when I call is, ‘Yes, she told me.’ But if you haven’t told him, he’ll hear it all from me.”

File it away, Amy, and get it right the next time.

Comment of the Day: “The Darkness of the Right, Pissing Away American Values”

/ Jack Marshall / 41 Comments

Is that you, Rod?

This is a treat. I was hoping that my post about the most ethically-challenged of the Right’s uber-patriots cheering corpse desecration would flush out a full-throated cheerleader, and here he is!

In his indignant reply to Bill ( a Marine himself), first time commenter Haddit (who, I gather, has “haddit” with all this ethics talk) gives a bravura performance of exactly what ethics-free thinking will get you in this and other war-related issues. It turns people into clones of the ridiculous general (played by the late, great Rod Steiger) in Tim Burton’s “Mars Attacks,” whose nuanced response to every dilemma is “Kill! Kill! KILL!” ( I know, I know…in the movie it turns out that the general was right after all. It is a satire.)

Here is Rod’s, er, Haddit’s Comment of the Day (to Bill) on my post about the infamous pissing Marines, The Darkness of the Right, Pissing Away American Values. You’re welcome for the editing, Haddit. I’ll have some final comments after the featured rant:

“Are you kidding me? They should be punished?????? We train these guys and gals to be heart-breakers and life-takers, but “oh no don’t piss on the enemy”? I say we put all the bodies of our enemies in a giant blender and dump their remains on the cities where they lived and let’s see how long they screw with us. Desecrating bodies……….What does a bullet or a bomb do, man? War is being insane, doing insane things. Sane folks don’t KILL other folks. So, we teach em to be insane but with rules? THERE ARE NO STINKING RULES. KILL, KILL, KILL come the cries of our military men and women while in training. “WHAT MAKES THE GRASS GROW”???? “We don’t go to war to die for our country, we make the other poor bastard die for his country.” Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: George Stephanopoulos

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

ABC News presents: "This Week with Bud Abbott"

Today George Stephanopoulos began “This Week with George Stephanopoulos,” his Sunday ABC current events show, with 15 minutes of a pointless, irrelevant, unfunny interview with Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert, who, in the proud tradition of Pat Paulsen, is again running a fake presidential campaign.Such stunts have always been about cheap publicity, ratings and entertainment, and have as much pertinence to public affairs and national politics as Taylor Swift’s recipe for chili. For ABC News to devote a full 25% of its weekly overview to this nonsense is disrespectful to viewers, who do not tune in to George, Paul Krugman, Peggy Noonan and the rest for yuks. I know how to find Colbert, who is a talented satirist and an engaging performer, when I’m in the mood for him. For Stephanopoulos to waste my time with his failed audition as the next Bud Abbott—his attempt to riff with Colbert was painful to watch, and essentially killed the comic’s act—was  a breach of journalistic integrity and responsibility, not to mention comedy malpractice.Does the New York Times, just for the heck of it and for funsies, spontaneously devote a quarter of its front page to knock-knock jokes, because it’s their paper, and what the hell? No, because it has a job to do, and people depend on the Times to do it. Continue reading →