Journalism & Media

Climate Change Ethics: Prof. Muller’s Study and Media Incompetence

/ Jack Marshall / 57 Comments

At  issue is not whether global warming is occurring, or even whether it is man-made. The issue is how incompetent, biased and astoundingly uncritical the media coverage of the issue has been and continues to be. Now major news publications and respected columnists are participating in yet another global warming ethics train wreck, which helps nobody and nothing.

Here’s is Prof. Richard Muller, a Berkeley physicist, toward the conclusion of his 2003 paper on global warming data:

“Let me be clear. My own reading of the literature and study of paleoclimate suggests strongly that carbon dioxide from burning of fossil fuels will prove to be the greatest pollutant of human history. It is likely to have severe and detrimental effects on global climate.”

Now here is the Washington Post’s Brad Plumer, on a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed by Muller announcing the results of his research:

“Back in 2010, Richard Muller, a Berkeley physicist and self-proclaimed climate skeptic, decided to launch the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project to review the temperature data that underpinned global-warming claims. …So what are the end results? …As the team’s two-page summary flatly concludes, “Global warming is real.” Continue reading →

The Media’s Birther Smear On Rick Perry

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

The race for the Republican nomination for president has a long way to go, but the winner of the title of Republican Contender Most Unfairly Abused By The Media has probably been wrapped up. It’s Texas Governor Rick Perry, in a romp.

I’m not sure why, exactly. I suppose the combination of a southern, gun-carrying, capital punishment-supporting, openly religious, conservative Republican just has too many characteristics that the typically Democratic, liberal atheist, gun-hating journalists who overwhelmingly populate the newsrooms instinctively want to destroy. They still have an obligation to do it fairly and honestly, however. Where Perry is concerned, fair and honest seem to be forgotten.

Last week I heard David Letterman say that Perry “is starting to look like someone who crawled out from under a painted rock.” This was a reference to the Washington Post’s unconscionable front page “expose” about a hunting lodge where Perry either did or did not hunt before the name “Niggerhead” had been painted over on a rock that bore the longtime name of the area. Most fair commentators have pronounced that story weak and badly conceived, but as the Post no doubt knew it would, the story has attached itself to Perry, creating fodder for cheap-shot artists like Letterman and Bill Maher, and scarring his reputation.

The enmity toward Perry has not abated. Checking the web over the weekend, I found links to stories proclaiming that Perry had come out as a “Birther,” challenging the validity of President Obama’s citizenship. Continue reading →

Donna Brazile Opens An Ethics Can Of Worms On “The Good Wife”

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Is this the real Donna Brazile or the fake one?

The increasingly common practice of using real political figures playing themselves in dramas made me queasy from the beginning, and now I know why.

“The Good Wife,” CBS’s excellent legal drama now highlighting that network’s Sunday nights, has made such blurring of the real and fictional something of a trademark, featuring such real-life political power-player as Fred Thompson and Vernon Jordan in past episodes, not merely in cameos, but participating in substantive scenes as their real-life selves. Last night, Democratic Party strategist Donna Brazile, who had earlier in the day participated in Christiane Amanpour’s roundtable on ABC, played herself in the episode’s fictional meeting between her and  Eli Gold (Alan Cumming), the ethics-free campaign manager for the Good Wife’s Creepy Husband, Peter Florrick (Chris Noth). I must say, Donna Brazile made an extremely convincing Donna Brazile. She has a future in acting, as long as she can play herself. The problem is what fictional Donna Brazile told fictional Eli Gold, and the immediate, and confusing real life ethical issues it raises. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Fox News

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Hang on, Rod...that phone call is coming any minute now....

Apparently to remind us that it too, like CNN and MSNBC, applies cynical and insulting standards when deciding what its audience will regard as trustworthy commentary, Fox News has announced that it is hiring former South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford as a contributor during the 2012 election cycle. Sanford was forced to resign after he shamelessly used his office as a means to conduct a long-distance adulterous romance with his South American fire-cracker soul-mate, going AWOL while supposedly doing his state’s business and lying about it in the process. Is this as bad as what Eliot Spitzer, the disgraced New York governor whom CNN deemed an appropriate hire as a the star of one of its prime time programs, did to end his political career? No. Is it still irresponsible?

Oh yes: Continue reading →

Hilary Swank Gets Nelly Furtadoed. And It’s Still Wrong

/ Jack Marshall / 38 Comments

What's that, Mr. Kadyrof? You want me to give you a private ethics seminar for a half-million bucks? What!!! I am outraged! I spit on your filthy lucre! KIDDING!!!!!

I seriously considered taking the Ethics Alarms post on singer Nelly Furtado posted here in March and substituting actress Hilary Swank’s name for Furtado, and Chechen despot Ramzan Kadyrov for now-deceased Libya dictator Muammar Gaddafi. It is the same controversy and issue with the same result: an American performing artist sells her performing talents to a brutal foreign leader, and is bullied and shamed by human rights advocates and media critics into apologizing profusely and donating the large fee ( a million dollars in Furtado’s case, a reported half-million for Swank) to charity.

This was wrong in March, and it’s wrong today.

Earlier this month, Swank and other celebrities attended Kadyrov’s birthday bash in Chechnya. She was working. But while every other corporation and contractor, as well as the United States itself, can do business around the world without being held to the impossible standard of only accepting morally exemplary customers, Swank, like Furtado, Mariah Carey and others before her, was targeted for not doing the bidding of human rights activists and sacrificing her livelihood to be their billboard. The bully in this case in the Human Rights Foundation, which unethically brutalized Swank to achieve publicity for its own mission—a worthy one to be sure, but not so worthy that it justifies a PR mugging with a $500,000 loss to its victim. Continue reading →

The Selfish Brother, the Stranded Passengers, and the Key To Ethical Problem-Solving

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Carolyn Hax is an advice and relationship columnist, not an ethicist. Still, her ethical instincts, values and ethics problem-solving technique are impeccable. This week, she schooled her readers on the most important step in approaching any ethical dilemma: define the problem correctly.

An inquirer asked Hax,

“Am I being selfish in insisting that my parents can stay with us for only two weeks after the birth of our first child? My brother thinks so and isn’t speaking to me.”

As the letter proceeded, crucial details appeared.  The writer’s parents had suffered some kind of financial crisis that required them to move into the brother’s home. The brother’s wife is pregnant. It looks like the stay will be six months, and the brother wants his sibling’s family, new baby notwithstanding, to do its fair share. Two weeks out of six months doesn’t seem fair to Bro.

Hax nailed the problem with the letter immediately: Continue reading →

Unethical Quote of the Week: Fired NPR Host Lisa Simeone

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

And NPR finds it puzzling that you can't read an ethics code, Lisa...

“I find it puzzling that NPR objects to my exercising my rights as an American citizen — the right to free speech, the right to peaceable assembly — on my own time in my own life”

—-Lisa Simeone, who was fired as host of a radio show carried by an NPR affiliate (and is likely to be fired from another NPR distributed program) for serving as a spokesperson of the Occupy Wall Street spin-off group camped out in Freedom Square in Washington, D.C. Her activities violated multiple provisions of the National Public Radio Code of Ethics.

This was a dishonest, unfair and misleading  statement. Continue reading →

Herman Cain’s Unethical Abortion Doubletalk

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

Republican presidential contender Herman Cain’s explanation of his position on abortion while chatting with CNN’s Piers Morgan is causing his growing legion of fans and supporters discomfort, and with good reason. It was ethically incoherent at best, unethical at worst. In either case, his comments show that he hasn’t devoted sufficient serious analysis to the issue to allow him to have a responsible and consistent approach. That is status quo for most Americans. It is not acceptable for a President of the United States.

Here is the relevant section of the interview (emphasis mine):

PIERS MORGAN: Abortion. What’s your view of abortion?

CAIN: I believe that life begins at conception. And abortion under no circumstances. And here’s why —

MORGAN: No circumstances?

CAIN: No circumstances. Continue reading →

NOW Is It Obvious That NPR Has A Liberal Bias Problem?

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Recently spotted swimming through the NPR Ethics Code's loopholes

[Notice to Readers: Check the update at the end of the article.]

The problem, incidentally, is not that NPR has a liberal bias, but that it so emphatically dishonest about it. Despite the Juan Williams fiasco, when the publicly funded radio network’s only Africa-American contributor was fired for politically incorrect truth-telling, despite the cover-up, when his boss twisted the Code of Ethics to justify the action (and violated it herself in the process)—despite the James O’Keefe embarrassment, with an NPR board member being recorded while sounding like a Saturday Night Live parody of a biased media leader—-and despite a spate of  naval-gazing within the organization to find ways to show the oddly deluded public that NPR is really and truly “fair, unbiased, accurate, complete and honest”… leaving “no question about [their] independence and fairness” —I’m sorry; I had a fit of the giggles there for a second—-National Public Radio can’t help itself. In the matters of bias, integrity, double standards, conflicts of interest and fairness, its ethics alarms were either never installed or have turned to cheese.

Tell Juan Williams about this: National Public Radio’s Lisa Simeone, who  hosts NPR’s nationally syndicated “World of Opera” program as well as “SoundPrint,” a program that airs on NPR’s WAMU affiliate  in Washington, D.C., has served as a spokeswoman for the Occupy Wall Street spin-off group, “October 2011,” which is currently occupying Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C. and making all the same contradictory, vague and impossible progressive/ leftist/anarchist demands that its parent is. Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: Is There An Ethical Obligation To Help An Actress Lie About Her Age?

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

An actress who is, so far, unidentified is suing Amazon.com in federal court for over $1 million in damages for disclosing her age on its Internet Movie Database website, and refusing to remove the reference when she requested, then demanded, that it do so.

She says that IMDb misused her personal information after she signed up for the “industry insider” IMDb Pro service in 2008. Soon she saw that her legal date of birth had appeared on her online acting profile. IMDb refused to remove it.

Now, she says, she is being discriminated against in Hollywood for her age (40), as is its custom. Producers won’t hire her for younger roles, because she’s now regarded as “too old.” Yet she can’t get older roles either, because she still looks much younger. The lawsuit seeks $75,000 in compensatory damages and $1 million in punitive damages.

Your Ethics Quiz question of the day:

Did the Internet Movie Data Base do anything unethical by publishing the actress’s real age without her permission? Continue reading →