Journalism & Media

Unethical Web Headline of the Month: The Huffington Post

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

This photo has almost nothing to do with the subject of this story.

It wasn’t only HuffPo, to be fair. Every single news website that covered the story used the same misleading, sensational idea in its headline, but The Huffington Post’s version was the worst:

Anthony Stewart, 15-Year-Old From Syracuse, N.Y., Jailed For 7-Cent Robbery

Awww..poor Anthony! And what a mean judge! What did the mischievous tyke do, steal the change from the little bowl by the cash register at the Subway sandwich shop? Knock over a lemonade stand? No, actually, he did this: (From the CBS New website):

“Anthony Stewart was found guilty of first-degree robbery earlier this month for beating and kicking a 73-year-old man and robbing him of seven cents. Prosecutors say the victim was on his way to a store last December when the two teenagers ran up from behind, knocked him into a snow bank, then kicked and punched him. The two teens had handguns, which Stewart later admitted were BB guns, prosecutors said.”

Even though both the victim and Stewart’s partner in crime identified him, Anthony Stewart, unlike his accomplice, refused to plead guilty and insisted on a jury trial. He lost his gamble, and the judge, as judges are wont to do, penalized him for not admitting his guilt. The victim’s other attacker had been sentenced as a youthful offender, meaning the he will have his record sealed and won’t be labeled a felon, though he still will spend up to four years in a state juvenile facility. Stewart, however, didn’t get the youthful offender break, and will come out of prison two to six  years from now with a felony conviction on his permanent record.

“If you admitted like a man, then I would have sentenced you exactly as I did Mr. Ninham,” the judge told Stewart. “But you still denied committing a crime, despite a mountain of evidence.”

Let’s get this straight: the seven cents had nothing to do with the sentence, other than the fact that it changed the crime from a criminal assault to a robbery. I don’t know why these two dummies bothered to steal seven lousy cents, when they found that this was all the old man was carrying. Still, it established that they would have stolen whatever he had, whether it was 7 cents or  $7,000 dollars. Two teenagers, armed with weapons, beat a man and robbed him. It was a brutal attack, and the fact that they only got 7 cents out of it is moral luck and cosmic irony, but it doesn’t, and shouldn’t, make the criminals any more sympathetic.

So why did the Huffington Post (and CBS, and the New York Daily News, and Yahoo, and Newser, and Fox…) use a headline that made it sound like the American Justice system was doing its Kafka imitation, and a photo of the young African-American teen calculated to tug on our heartstrings and make Al Sharpton go bananas?

Because they lie, that’s why. Because they don’t care that lots of people just read their dishonest headlines and never finish the story, and then tell their family and friends about the insane judge who is ruining a boy’s life because he took 7 cents. Because all they care about is web traffic, and the journalistic ideals of factual and objective reporting are so dead, they wouldn’t even make it as zombies.

Even with the facts of the attack revealed (in the HuffPo article, seven paragraphs from the lead), an astounding number of commenters on the various sites took their cues from the headlines, and expressed horror and outrage. It was a white judge—racism must have been behind the sentence! The boy just made a mistake, and what harm did he do—after all, he only took 7 cents! Why should Anthony be penalized for making the system prove him guilty beyond a reasonable doubt?

Fools all…but fools nourished by unscrupulous media like the Huffington Post. Anthony deserves every second of his sentence, and the felony record too. He participated in a violent and armed attack on an elderly man, and if he wanted mercy from the judge, he should have admitted his guilt. That’s the system.

Anthony’s asinine lawyer, who either gave him awful advice or failed miserably by not talking him out of pleading not guilty, fatuously told the judge,  “For 7 cents, now you’re making someone a felon for the rest of his life.”

No, he made himself a felon for the rest of his life, and it wasn’t “for seven cents.”

But don’t worry!  Anthony will be OK. I’m sure the Huffington Post will have a job for him.

Richard Cohen, National Interests, and the Ethical Duties of the US to the World

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

There used to be no columnist who infuriated me more consistently than Richard Cohen. Those were the hazy, golden days before I discovered E.J. Dionne, Paul Krugman and Harold Mayerson, however, whose rigid ideology virtually precludes objective analysis. Cohen isn’t biased, he’s just wrong more often than not. But he is also capable of bursts of moral and ethical clarity. Today was an example, as he took on the isolationist voices on the left and the right that make up a large component, if not the majority, of our elected leadership today.

Cohen begins by recounting a section from  Erik Larson ‘s book,“In the Garden of the Beasts,” about how the American foreign policy establishment in the Thirties resisted efforts by William Dodd, then ambassador to Germany, to protest the Hitler government’s increasing persecution of Jews. Humanity, and the U.S., paid a steep price for its inward-turning perspective after World War I, as we abdicated our traditional role as defender of liberty, freedom, democracy and human rights on the world stage. Continue reading →

God, Beck, and the Confirmation Bias Trap

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Hurricane Irene proves that God agrees with Glenn Beck. Glenn Beck says so, and he must be right, because God agrees with him. Hurricane Irene proves it.

Policy makers, decision-makers, journalists, and indeed all of us have an ethical obligation to be on the alert for confirmation bias, that insidious human tendency to interpret all external phenomena as confirmation of our established opinions and beliefs. Why do we have the obligation? We have it because confirmation bias makes us dogmatic, inflexible, close-minded, incompetent, and, in a word, stupid. Life can make us wiser, but not if we misinterpret everything so as not to disturb our most cherished certainties. Continue reading →

In the Aftermath of Biden’s Human Rights Betrayal, Little Integrity From The Media

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Like Diogenes of Sinope searching for an honest man, Ethics Alarms has been searching for a political progressive, here or anywhere, who will acknowledge the blatant pro-liberal, pro-Obama, anti-conservative, anti-Republican, anti-Tea Party bias of the mainstream media. Obvious examples are routinely explained or rationalized away, even when they are criticized by a media outlet’s own internal ombudsmen and ethicists.

The media’s coverage of the recent toadying remarks of Vice-President Biden to the Chinese, as he gave a pass to China’s  long-time policy of limiting families to one child, has been a particularly vivid and disgraceful case in point. Despite the fact that Biden’s remarks were a shocking diplomatic gaffe and human rights betrayal, they were almost solely criticized by Republicans and conservative pundits, and only fleetingly covered at all by the mainstream media. While the so-called “conservative media” kept Biden’s gaffe in the news, the rest either covered the coverage, as in “Right Wing Critics Attack Biden,” or framed the criticism of Biden as a pro-life vs. pro-choice dust-up, as if anyone but a lunatic could describe a program limiting births by law  as “pro choice.” Continue reading →

Biden’s China Gaffe

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Homer Simpson made some comments in China yesterday,,,wait, my mistake. It was Joe Biden.

I saw the transcript of the Vice President’s remarks in China yesterday, and several thoughts went through my mind:

 How craven. How callous.What a betrayal of decency and American values!

————

 This is what happens when a once-great country is a trillion dollars  in debt to a human rights monster.

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I hesitate to speculate what other nations that look to the U.S. as the champion of human rights must think when they hear the American Vice-President call forced abortion “a policy which I thoroughly understand.” Continue reading →

The West Memphis Three, Still Abused By Unethical Prosecution

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Their real killer is still loose, but law enforcement doesn't care: it has the West Memphis Three to blame.

The release this week of the men railroaded into prison as teenagers for the 1993 killing of three young Cub Scouts in West Memphis Arkansas was covered by the news media in superficial and misleading fashion, concentrating on the human interest aspects of the event—a “happy ending” in which three wrongfully accused and convicted men finally get justice. This overshadowed the disgraceful performance of the justice system in general and the Arkansas justice system in particular. The circumstances of the men’s release were only slightly less revolting than their conviction, and the method by which it was achieved was thoroughly unethical.

Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jessie Misskelley Jr. had been in jail for 18 years, with Baldwin and Misskelley serving life sentences and Damien Echols languishing on death row. They are almost certainly innocent. Continue reading →

A Batboy Sells Out His Heroes

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Don't trust him, Roy...he's doing research for a book!

Luis Castillo became a batboy for the New York Yankees at the age of 15, and for eight baseball seasons shared the clubhouse with his hometown heroes. Now he’s cashing in, having written a tell-all memoir of his experiences  that dishes on Derek Jeter, Alex Rodriguez, Roger Clemens and others, all of whom trusted him to be fair, respectful, and discreet.

The recurrent theme from the media’s commentators, which I heard repeated on CNN this morning as it hosted Castillo in his book-hawking efforts (in this case he told an embarrassing anecdote about Yankee catcher Jose Posada) is that “Castillo is able to divulge Yankee secrets in his new memoir because he was part of the last group of batboys who did not have to sign confidentiality agreements.”

This is accurate, but wrong. It is also typical of what passed today as journalistic ethics. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Christine O’Donnell

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Like ham and eggs, Abbott and Costello, or motherhood and apple pie, “dunce” and Christine O’Donnell will forever be paired. Why her embarrassing run for the U.S. Senate didn’t consign her to permanent obscurity I do not know, but she was back in the public eye again tonight, on an apparently slow day for getting guests for Piers Morgan, to talk about her new book. When the host dared to stray into subject matter O’Donnell didn’t want to talk about, however, she quit the interview, leaving Morgan with dead time and an empty chair.

There is no excuse for this abominable behavior. Morgan was not being rude, nor was he straying from ethical interview practices. An interviewee does not have the right to control an interview, and a public figure who is asked about public statements and the contents of a book bearing her name may not call “foul” with any justification. As for walking out in the middle of a televised interview, O’Donnell conduct is indefensible–unfair to her host, disrespectful of her audience,  uncivil, and cowardly

Morgan deserves some of the blame for agreeing to waste airtime on someone who has proven beyond any question that she possesses neither the skills, talent, intelligence, character or judgment to even qualify for D -list celebrity status, much less to be taken seriously as a political figure.

She is, in short, a dunce–ethically, socially, and intellectually. After this performance, anyone who books her for anything other than a “Dunk the Witch” carnival attraction deserves whatever they get.

To the Pro-Obama Race-Baiters: “Have You No Sense of Decency at All?”

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

Ah, if only Joseph Welch and his well-aimed indignation were here today!

We knew, way back when President Obama was running for his first term, that the temptation to paint any opposition to his leadership or his policies as proof of racism would be irresistible  for the less ethical among his supporters in the Democratic Party and among the media. This came to pass, but we should prepare for much worse.  Now that the President has a thoroughly wretched record and is, to an extent I personally haven’t seen since the paranoid days of Richard Nixon, attempting to avoid accountability by blaming everyone in sight—a thoroughly unleaderly display—the race-baiters have served notice that they will be out in force this time as well, more shameless than ever. Continue reading →

The Warren Jeffs Sex Tapes and the Media’s Ethical Incoherence

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Warren Jeffs and his happy, happy wives---caught on tape!

Warren Jeffs, the Texas polygamist recently convicted of raping his child-wives, was sent to his richly-deserved prison sentence with the help of some horrific tape recordings of Jeffs proselytizing his young victims on their God-directed duty to satisfy his sexual needs, and more tapes that recorded his grunts and pants as he had sexual intercourse with them.

The Salt Lake Tribune requested and received copies of the tapes as well as other evidence in the trial. Then, according to an explanation in the paper, it editors had extensive discussions internally regarding the journalistic ethics of making the tapes generally available online. The paper’s decision:

“We opted to post only clips because we did not believe it would be ethical to make recordings of sexual assault, in action or imminent, easily available on the Web. Young girls can be heard in the tapes, and the jury’s decision was clear: These girls are a predator’s victims. In our role as journalists covering difficult stories, we vow to do our jobs while minimizing harm. In choosing not to provide these materials, we acted to minimize harm.

“What you will hear if you listen to the clips is Jeffs explaining and justifying his abuse of young girls in the name of religion. His “teaching” is helpful in understanding the case and the jury’s decision.”

This is hypocrisy of the highest order, and an abuse of a news organization’s function. Continue reading →