Journalism & Media

The Incompetent, Iowa Stubborn News Media, Wasting Our Time and Theirs

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

IOWA!!!!????

I kid you not: I have been waking up with “The Music Man” ditty “Iowa Stubborn” ringing in my head two days running [ “We can be cold as our falling thermometer in December if you ask about our weather in July; And we’re so by God stubborn, we could stand touchin’ noses for a week at a time and never see eye-to-eye….You really ought to give Iowa a try!”] and I am not happy about it. The reason I am suffering from Meredith Willson-itis, of course, is because the network and cable news shows will not shut up about the Iowa caucuses, and have been allowing their endless, pointless, non-informative, inside-baseball, useless analysis of nothing (analyzing polls is the definition of “nothing”) for how long now? A week? A month? Forever? Continue reading →

The Third Annual Ethics Alarms Awards: The Worst of Ethics 2011 (Part 2)

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

The 2011 Ethics Alarms Awards for the worst in ethics continues (you can catch up with Part I here) with the large and depressing…

 Shameless Bad Character Division

Jerk (defined as an individual who habitually places his personal benefit and ego gratification above the welfare of everyone and everything else) of the Year: Donald Trump

The Dennis Rodman Award, (Awarded to a professional athlete for a career and lifetime of  behaving like a jerk): Jose Canseco. Jose’s done it all, from being baseball’s Typhoid Mary of steroids, to getting arrested for various assaults, to writing a series of tell-all books designed to rat out the very players he corrupted, not as a service to his sport, but as revenge for it rejecting him. In 2011, he hit a new low, accepting money to appear in a celebrity boxing match (the 21st Century version of becoming a circus geek to pay the bills) and sending his less-talented, equally dim-witted, identical twin brother Ozzie to perform instead, hoping to fool the fools who hired him. This, of course, was fraud. It takes quite a jerk to take this award from Manny Ramirez, who became eligible in 2011, but Jose was up to the task.

Asshole (defined as an individual who intentionally and maliciously causes pain and harm to others because he can) of the Year: Rev. Terry Jones, the publicity-seeking leader of a tiny rural church, who caused riots and deaths abroad and ramped up political tensions between America and Muslim nations by threatening to burn, and finally burning, the Koran as a demonstration of contempt for Muslims and the Islamic faith. Continue reading →

A Frightening Figure, Setting Off Ethics Alarms

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

We don't even know how to play Russian Roulette responsibly.

On Friday, the day before Christmas Eve when much of America was thinking about sugar plums,  lay-away plans, and protesting Christmas pageants, the Federal Accounting Office released its analysis of  the net present value of the nation’s Social Security and Medicare obligations, “net present value” being  the total funds that would have to be set aside today to pay the costs of these programs in the future. Seldom do figures so clearly indict the unethical practices and statements of so many.

In fiscal 2011, the cost of the catching up on the required funding of Medicare and Social Security rose from $30.9 trillion to $33.8 trillion. That $2.9 trillion increase should be regarded as adding to the $1.3 trillion cash deficit for fiscal 2011, making a $4.2 trillion deficit—and this coming in a year in which the rising national debt was supposedly recognized, at last, as a threat to America’s stability, prosperity, and welfare. The costs of Social Security and Medicare are rising at a frightening rate, nearly doubling in the last decade, with little or nothing being done to address the problem. And there is good reason to believe that the Medicare estimates are based on unrealistic assumptions. The GAO report also includes an alternate, less rosy scenario (or perhaps “more putrid” is a better phrase) in which the projected Social Security-Medicare debt is more than $46 trillion. How serious is that? Well, the combined value of the equity in U.S. homes and the value of all publicly-traded companies is less than 20 trillion dollars.

What do these figures tell us about the ethics of the various players on the national scene? Continue reading →

Spin, Rationalizations and Denial From the Ron Paul Faithful: An Ethics Lesson

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

What does Fred Astaire in blackface have to do with Ron Paul? Not much.

There are a lot of reasons to regard Rep. Ron Paul, currently facing what should be his last hurrah in the idiosyncratic Iowa Caucuses, as the model for politics and leadership as we wish it could be. He says what he means. He doesn’t pander. He isn’t afraid of uncomfortable truths. He has integrity. This explains why the supporters of the one true libertarian in the U.S. Congress seem ready to fight to the end to preserve his presidential candidacy, though its long-term prospects are about the same as those of Frosty being elected President of Hell. They are, as a result, providing the rest of us with a textbook example of how loyalty and dedication can spawn intellectual dishonesty, cause otherwise good and intelligent people to substitute rationalizations for reason, and lead to corruption. How did all those idealistic young lawyers end up in jail supporting the plots of Richard Nixon?  Why did otherwise honest and ethical Democrats, elected officials and feminists twist their principles into pretzels to defend Bill Clinton’s using White House staff as a personal dating bar and lying about it under oath?  This is how. When you believe that a leader is good, then affirmative proof of flaws that disqualify him for leadership must be justified and explained away. It often isn’t even a conscious decision: this is cognitive dissonance at its strongest. The results, however, are the same as intentional deception.

Over at The Daily Caller, Wesley Messamore, who is Editor in Chief of the HumbleLibertarian.com, has registered an impassioned and angry defense against Paul critics who, like me, regard the content of his newsletters from the Eighties and Nineties an automatic disqualification for Paul as a presidential nominee. I don’t mean to pick on Messamore: his arguments are typical of Paul defenders; he’s no worse than the rest. His article, however, neatly covers all the unethical tactics Paul’s followers have had to embrace to convince themselves that their hero hasn’t failed the leadership test.

Here they are: Continue reading →

Ethics Blindness in the Media: ESPN and the Syracuse Post-Standard Keep a Child Predator on the Prowl

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

I know it is difficult keeping up with all the sports child molestation stories. This isn’t the Penn State football program scandal, where university officials carefully looked the other way while football coaching legend Jerry Sandusky apparently was using the campus to trap and abuse kids. This isn’t the Bill Conlin scandal, in which the sports writer just accorded the highest honor from his peers has also been accused of sexually molesting children. The topic is the Syracuse University basketball scandal, where once again an alleged molester was allowed to escape detection and prosecution for years, this time because of a perverted concept of journalistic ethics.

In 2002, ESPN and the Syracuse Post-Standard were given an audiotape on which the wife of Bernie Fine, the Syracuse University assistant basketball coach now accused of serial sex abuse, told one of the alleged victims of molestation that she knew “everything that went on” with her husband’s crimes. Both the paper and the network decided not to run stories based on the tape and the victim’s claims, and never sent it to law enforcement authorities.

They kept the tape in the files, until the step-brother of Bobby Davis, the former ball boy who made the initial recording, came forward to accuse Fine of molesting him, too. Then the tape was released, and Syracuse University fired Fine the day it aired.

The question: why didn’t the Post-Standard or ESPN give the tape to the police? How many children were molested because they didn’t? Continue reading →

The Romney and Paul Smears: Time For U.S. News Media To Admit Its Bias And Address It

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

"Mitt Romney is the one in the middle. Or so we're told. Seems plausible to us."

Although the left-leaning bias of the majority of the news media is frighteningly/absurdly/amusingly/frustratingly obvious (depending on your point of view) every single day, the standard response to complaints remains, 1) “What about Fox?” and 2) “Bias? What bias?”  The latter response, if not proof of dishonesty or pathological denial, is one of the symptoms of the problem: the mainstream media is so used to being biased that bias is now the status quo.

There has been plenty of evidence in 2011, however, that the problem is getting worse, and both the public and self-government are being badly served as a result. Recently there was another flutter of statements from pundits and others, like Bill Clinton, that the media obviously favored Obama over Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination battle. Of course it did. That the media then went on to outrageously tilt its coverage in Obama’s favor durin the campaign for the general election is hardly capable of contradiction: Obama was on more magazine covers, got more video time, received more consistently hagiographic stories, his questionably-qualified running mate was barely criticized while the press couldn’t attack McCain’s enough…in short, it was a disgraceful abdication of professional duty. How can journalists decry the influence of Super-PACs and big money in elections when the news media, the most powerful communications factor of all ( because it has—still—the remains of a reputation for being objective, fair and accurate) is consistently biased? Not only is that a bigger problem, it is one journalists themselves have the power to fix…if they wanted to, if they cared. Continue reading →

Fairness for Ron Paul

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

So as not to leave you in suspense longer than necessary, let me be direct: fairness to Ron Paul means firmly declaring him unqualified to run for President on the Republican ticket in 2012.

The reason is old, which means that we should have been having this discussion months ago, before Paul first set foot on a debate stage. In the late Eighties and Nineties, while Paul was out of Congress, he published a group of newsletters to true believers called “The Ron Paul Political Report,” “Ron Paul’s Freedom Report,” “The Ron Paul Survival Report,” “The Ron Paul Investment Letter,” and “The Ron Paul Greyhound Racing Tip-Sheet.”  Okay, okay, I’m sorry: that last one is made up—I couldn’t resist. But the others are real.

Also real were periodic statements in the newsletters that could charitably be called “racially-insensitive” or not-so-charitably be called “racist.” Paul has been questioned about these before, and in the run-up to the Iowa Caucuses where he is a genuine contender is being grilled on them again. Yesterday, he walked out of a CNN interview when Gloria Borger refused to let the subject go. Continue reading →

Unethical Website: NewtGingrich.com…But Not In The Way You Think

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Ah, Dick, what might have been! If only your burglars had broken into Gingrich headquarters!

The pro-Democratic super PAC “American Bridge” bought the domain name http://www.NewtGingrich.com and now uses it to redirect anyone who reaches the site to various Web sites that highlight the ex-Speaker’s many failings, perceived flaws, or the attacks of critics. Among the places it hijacks users to are Freddie Mac’s Web site (a reference to Newt’s high-paid duty as “a historian”), Tiffany’s (where Newt infamously had a rather large bill, as if that has any significance whatsoever except to class-bashers), information about Greek cruises ( as Newt abandoned his campaign earlier this year for a cruise, while his staff labored away), or to the ad Gingrich filmed  with former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in favor of addressing climate change (because being open-minded about climate change isn’t permitted in the GOP).

The Washington Post termed the stunt “clever.” Well, I no longer expect the Post to know the difference between bad ethics and applesauce. Of course the website trick is unethical, deceiving web users and misappropriating a domain that Gingrich himself, and only Gingrich, should be able to employ. Yes, it’s legal. It is still unfair, deceptive and dishonest—wrong. When Richard Nixon’s gang used dirty tricks to upset Democratic rivals in 1968, the Post condemned the conduct as proof of “Tricky Dick’s” willingness to distort the democratic process and win by schemes rather than merit. When a Democratic group uses dirty tricks on a Republican presidential candidate, however, it’s “clever.”

The Post, as well as many of the commenters on its reporting on the faux Gingrich website, embraces the concept of ethics that holds that harmful acts performed against someone it likes is unethical, while the same act taken against someone it opposes is ethical.

There is a word for this delusion.

It’s called bias.

Ethics Dunce:The Baseball Writers Association of America

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

"Well, yes, there was THAT, but what really matters is that he was one hell of an assistant coach!"

The high-profile Sandusky/Paterno/Penn State child molestation scandal has shaken the foundation of the sports world, and in the process, given resolve to past victims of child abuse to identify their molesters. The most recent example is veteran Philadelphia sportswriter Bill Conlin, who abruptly resigned from his job as a columnist for the Philadelphia Daily News when he learned that four adults had come forward to accuse him of molesting them when they were children in the 1970s. This created am immediate crisis for the Baseball Writers Association of America, who had this year bestowed its highest honor on Conlin, the J.G. Spink Award. It never looks good when the person you have declared to represent the best of your profession is revealed as drug-dealer, a serial killer, a foreign agent, or a child molester.

Here’s how the BBWAA dealt with the matter on its website, in this “official statement”: Continue reading →

Distracted Driving, Pot, and “The Great Debate”

/ Jack Marshall / 175 Comments

As balm for Christiane Amanpour’s bruises from being kicked off her ABC Sunday show back to CNN, the network honchos let her try a different format this weekend (since nobody was watching anyway.) Styled “the Great Debate,” it pitted conservatives Paul Ryan, the GOP House intellectual, and columnist George Will against soon-to-be-retired Democratic Congressman Barney Frank and Clinton’s former Labor Secretary and perpetual Munchkin Robert Reich for the full hour, exchanging familiar talking points on the usual suspect national issues. The debate wasn’t so great, for several reasons, prime among them being the natural motor-mouth tendencies of Reich and Frank, who, I would guess, took up approximately twice the air time as the conservative pair. The teams were similarly unbalanced in cheer, with Reich as perky as his Lollipop Guild training would suggest, and Frank full of his trademark wisecracks, while Will was dour as ever (when faced with liberal cant, the columnist always looks like my high school Latin teacher did when I was botching the day’s translation) and Ryan radiated the charisma of a certified public accountant.

The most interesting exchange was when George Will derided proposed federal regulations against “distracted driving” as the latest installment of the nanny state encroachment on personal rights, saying that individual freedom should trump the government’s concern for public safety except in the most extreme circumstances. One of the good uses of absolutist reasoning is that it raises a very high bar before breaching a valid principle can even be considered, since it has to be considered as an exception if it is to be contemplated at all. Barring unsafe conduct that increases the likelihood of automobile accidents, however, is not the place for absolutism, but for utilitarianism—rational balancing. Continue reading →