Journalism & Media

The Ethics of Interviewing Kids on Camera

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

 

Art Linkletter was right: "Kids say the darndest things!"

When I initially learned about  Chicago TV station WBBM editing  an interview with a 4-year-old boy last month to make him sound like an aspiring gang-member when he actually said that he wanted to be a policeman, I decided to pass. I try to avoid making obvious observations, and nobody could defend the conduct of the station’s editors, who intentionally truncated the child’s remarks to the interviewer to make them sound chilling. The larger question of whether the child should have been interviewed at all, however, is more challenging. We see kids being interviewed on TV all the time, and it is far from certain that reporters are doing so ethically.

In the wake of  the WBBM incident, journalistic ethics expert Al Thompkins reprinted his guidelines for interviewing juveniles on the Poynter site. I’m an admirer of Thompkins, but I found his guidelines almost as chilling as the distorted interview itself. Here is his guidance on the issue of interviewing kids, with my reactions: Continue reading →

Word Use Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

"Super Glue doll? "Mucilage buddy?" "Fly-paper friend"

Ah, politics! Words that are dishonest are winked at by the media without objection, and harmless terms generate apologies that support ignorance and vagueness.

I. Colorado Republican Congressman Doug Lamborn apologized yesterday for using the term “tar baby” during a Friday appearance on a Denver radio program.  Lamborn said this: “Even if some people say, ‘Well the Republicans should have done this or they should have done that,’ they will hold the President responsible. Now, I don’t even want to have to be associated with him. It’s like touching a tar baby and you get it, you’re stuck, and you’re a part of the problem now and you can’t get away. I don’t want that to happen to us, but if it does or not, he’ll still get, properly so, the blame because his policies for four years will have failed the American people.” Continue reading →

No Winners, Only Losers in the Debt Ceiling Train Wreck

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

I object to “a pox on all their houses” assessments on principle, because it encourages the lack of accountability. If everyone is at fault, nobody is at fault, or at least nobody will be willing to accept responsibility as long as he or she or they can point fingers at someone else. Reading all of the clichéd “Winners and Losers” columns in the media this morning as the debt ceiling crisis winds down, however, convinces me that there were no winners, only losers, in this sorry spectacle. In the latter group I include the writers of the “Winners and Losers” pieces, which are all just spin, obvious and biased attempts to extract a writer’s favorites from the train wreck using the rhetorical Jaws of Life.

They are all losers, all of them, together with the United States of America. The perfect storm of cowardly, irresponsible, reckless, stupid and arrogant leadership weakened the recovery, weakened the economy, weakened foreign faith in American investments, weakened American prestige, split the Republican Party, revealed the Democratic Party as hell-bent on chasing the European-style nanny state even as their model is crumbling abroad, exposed the Tea Party as a unmannerly mess of deluded doctrinaire ideologues with no grasp of political or economic realities, and most disastrously of all, showed the American President to be hopelessly, pathetically, frighteningly weak, devoid of leadership skills and leaderly instincts. Continue reading →

Ethics Quote of the Week: Washigton Post Reader Elizabeth Grover

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

“Sun wrote: ‘Most doctors will not perform abortions beyond 22 or 24 weeks for various reasons, including legal concerns, social stigma, inadequate training or inexperience.’ She left out perhaps the biggest reason: Most doctors believe that late-term abortions are morally wrong.”

—-Elizabeth Grover of Washington, D.C., in a letter published in the Washington Post “Free for All” section. Reader Grover was commenting on a glowing Post profile of Maryland physician Dr. LeRoy Carhart by feature writer Lena Sun, extolling his willingness, indeed eagerness, to perform late term abortions, which are illegal in several states. Dr. LeRoy dismissed state restrictions on abortions of any kind as “ridiculous.”

Grover was absolutely correct to flag the bias and misrepresentation in Sun’s article. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Larry Flynt

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

BLECHHHH!

I know, I know. “In other news, the Earth spins, and the Atlantic ocean is wet!” Nevertheless, it is occasionally worth the trouble to remind ourselves what an unprincipled sleaze Larry Flynt is, especially with people still around who argue that he’s a hero.

Flynt announced on Nancy Grace’s show last night that talks are ongoing with Casey Anthony to have her nude and tattooed bod featured in Hustler magazine for $500,000 up front plus 10% of all profits. Flynt said he decided to make the offer after concluding there was a big market for seeing the acquitted child murder suspect in the buff. Continue reading →

Unethical Quote of the Week: WSJ Blogger James Taranto

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

This werewolf attack on Nazi soldiers doesn't weaken the case that Sen. Kerry didn't deserve his medals.

Alternate title:  “Smearing John Kerry”, Part II. The quote:

“The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth disputed whether John Kerry deserved some of his five medals. A large part of Kerry’s defense was an appeal to the authority of veterans who supported him–one of whom has now been revealed to have received a medal he doesn’t deserve. This doesn’t prove the Kerry detractors were right, but it certainly doesn’t weaken their case.”

–—James Taranto, the usually astute and witty author of the conservative Wall Street Journal blog, “Best of the Web.” He is referring to the child porn conviction and retraction of the Silver Star of  Wade Sanders, who rose to Sen. Kerry’s defense during his 2004 race against President Bush, when The Swiftboat Veterans for Truth claimed that Kerry had lied about his war record.

A pure slime-job, this…well beneath Taranto’s standards, though he does dip low now and then, and as reprehensible an example of attack by unfair innuendo as you are likely to find, from McCarthy to Olbermann to Beck.

“It certainly doesn’t weaken their case.” No, because it has absolutely nothing to do with their case (which was weak and unfair to begin with), and since Taranto is undoubtedly smart enough to know that, this sentence, and the post containing it, was only written to suggest otherwise. Let’s see…what else “doesn’t weaken” the case of those who claim that the honors bestowed on Kerry for wartime valor by the United States of America were undeserved? Hmmm. We have… Continue reading →

MSNBC Hires Al Sharpton, As “Network” Becomes Reality

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Satire no more.

Noting that MSNBC has given Rev. Al Sharpton his own show, I am compelled to ask: What is broadcast journalism’s accepted criteria now that justifies an individual’s enshrinement as a cable news commentator?

Is it name recognition? The “right” political orientation, in this case, knee-jerk liberal? A ready-made fan base?  Theatrical presence? If these are the criteria, by all means, hire Al Sharpton. Hire Alec Baldwin, Donald Trump, Rod Blagojevich and Jane Fonda, too. Gary Busey. Manny Ramirez. Hulk Hogan. Bozo the Clown.

Or is the proper and responsible criteria credibility, integrity, honesty, fairness, and journalistic credentials? If those archaic standards are still in place, or if MSNBC wants to pretend that they are, then the hiring of Sharpton marks a new low in broadcast news coverage cynicism and recklessness. Continue reading →

Smearing John Kerry

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Quick---Who is this man, and why should his problems be news?

Guilt by association isn’t always an unethical suggestion. If all of your closest companions are members of the Mafia, I think it’s fair for me to question your values and taste in friends, if not to assume that you might leave a horse head in my bed. More often than not, however, guilt by association is unethically used for character assassination by applying the unfair presumption that an adversary’s associates’ misdeeds can reasonably be attributed to the adversary as well.

You will seldom see as pure and despicable an example of this than the current effort by some on the political Right to smear Sen. John Kerry based on recent revelations about Wade Sanders, like Kerry a Silver Star awardee, who introduced the Massachusetts Senator at the 2004 Democratic Convention.  Sanders knew Kerry when they both were Swiftboat commanders in Vietnam, and  when the Swiftboat Veterans for Truth questioned the legitimacy of Kerry’s record of heroism during that war in their infamous series of attack ads, Sanders led the counterattack. Now Wade Sanders is in Federal prison, serving a 37-month sentence for possessing child pornography, and the Navy Times reports that Secretary of the Navy has revoked Sanders’ Silver Star due to “subsequently determined facts and evidence surrounding both the incident for which the award was made and the processing of the award itself.”

What does any of this tell us about John Kerry? Absolutely nothing. Continue reading →

Cheater’s Remorse: ABC News Gets Ethical Without Knowing What “Ethical” Means

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

"Right now, cheating doesn't pay, so we're committed to ethics."

If you think ABC News is going to get any credit here for officially (sort of) banning the practice of paying so-called “licensing fees” to get exclusive interviews, I’m going to disappoint you. For there is nothing admirable about….

1….. engaging in the discredited practice of paying big money to central figures in news stories in order to gain access to them, and

2….disguising the practice by technically paying them inflated fees for the rights to photographs, even though the real reason for the pay-off is #1 above, then…

3….rejecting the practice when it leads to questions about how the network got an interview when it didn’t pay “licensing fees,” but…

4…noting that it might still go back to the unethical practice “perhaps once every couple of years,” since…

5….the other networks do it.

Yuck, pooie, ichhhh, petah!  ABC’s decision, outlined in a report by media watchdog Howard Kurtz, tells you everything you need to know about the state of ethics in broadcast journalism in general and ABC in particular, and I have seen prettier sights floating in an unflushed toilet bowl. Continue reading →

Rep. Wu and the Scourge of Government by Ventriloquist Dummies

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

I have a 90% completed post tentatively entitled “Why We Are Doomed” sitting in my drafts file, and I can’t bring myself to finish or post it. I don’t want to believe we are doomed, so the Golden Rule keeps telling me that I shouldn’t be trying to convince others we are doomed. I believe in hope. I believe that cultures, especially this culture, can do the right thing and still be successful, provided that they can find leaders and role models who represent and encourage ethical values.

On the other hand, I really do believe we, that is to say, the United States of America, are probably doomed.

A story unfolding now, a sad saga that has really been unfolding for a long time, illustrates one of the factors I lament over in my languishing draft. Rep. David Wu (D-Ore.) has been accused of an “unwanted sexual encounter” with the teenage daughter of a longtime friend. We have to be careful here, but there seems to be little doubt that the “encounter” occurred.  The Oregonian has reported that sources aware of the incident say that Congressman Wu, who is 56, “acknowledged a sexual encounter to his senior aides but insisted it was consensual.”

Wu has been a train wreck waiting to happen for a long, long time. Continue reading →