Journalism & Media

Ethics Train Wreck on “Morning Joe”

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Coincidentally, the previous VICE President was frequently called a "Dick"

Time Magazine editor Mark Halperin, a frequent contributer to MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” program,  took one more chunk out of the tradition of gentility and civility in public discourse, not to mention broadcast journalism, by referring to the President of the United States as “a dick” Thursday morning. He was promptly suspended by the network, which was also the scene of Ed Schultz referring to conservative talk show host Laura Ingraham as a “right wing slut.”

Obviously the inhibitions supposedly bred into Americans about vulgar language in inappropriate places—like live TV—are crumbling fast, along with the tradition of respect for the office of President. What is more interesting about the incident, however, is how Halperin was egged into his gaffe by co-host Joe Scarborough, with an assist from Mika Brzezinski. Scarborough then took no responsibility for the incident at all. Continue reading →

The Despicable Nadya Suleman and Ethics Estoppel

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Nadya Suleman, a.k.a. Octomom, strikes a dignified pose

From the beginning, the only thing keeping Nadya Suleman from being unequivocally despicable has been the lingering suspicion that she was mentally ill. It might be more than a suspicion, to be fair: having octuplets by artificial insemination when one already has six young children and no viable means of support could be called “proof.”  Now even that malady is an insufficient defense: the issue is settled, and she is despicable beyond redemption. One cannot call her the worst mother on the world, sadly, because every day brings the story of another infant thrown down a laundry chute or left in the care of a six-year-old while mom goes partying or looking for drugs. She may be, however, the worst mother ever to become famous for being a mother.

In the latest issue of InTouch magazine—the rag is one full step down from Us magazine, and one half-step up from The National Enquirer—Suleman confesses that she now reviles her octo-brood. “I hate the babies, they disgust me,’ she says. “My older six are animals, getting more and more out of control, because I have no time to properly discipline them.” Elsewhere in the article she bellyaches about how hard it is being a single, unemployed, narcissistic, absurd, irresponsible mother of fourteen children. “The only way I can cope is to lock myself in the bathroom and cry. Sometimes I sit there for hours and even eat my lunch sitting on the toilet floor. Anything to get peace and quiet,” she laments. Yes, Octomom says she regrets having all the children. Continue reading →

Group Bigotry: Is This The Way It’s Going To Be? AGAIN?

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

I'm a fan of women's curves, but I expected their learning curve to be better than this.

I already covered this topic when Christiane Amanpour held an unrestrained “males are inferior managers because all the blood rushes to their penises” session on ABC’s “This Week” a few Sundays ago, but since it is becoming clear that the outbreak of gender bigotry in the media is more widespread than ABC, a second alarm is warranted.

This week’s Time magazine has a column by Meredith Melnick entitled “Why Women Are Better at Everything.” Among its contents:

•    “Recently in the Wall Street Journal, MarketWatch columnist David Weidner noted that women ‘do almost everything better’ than men — from politics to corporate management to investing.”

•    “What’s the problem with men? ‘There’s been a lot of academic research suggesting that men think they know what they’re doing, even when they really don’t know what they’re doing,’ John Ameriks, the author of the Vanguard study, told the New York Times.”

•    “Women, who have only 10% of the testosterone that men have, seem inured to the phenomenon, according to Coates.”

•    “So, basically, the more women around, the better, as the Journal’s Wiedner said. His column referred to a recent book by Dan Abrams called Man Down: Proof Beyond a Reasonable Doubt That Women Are Better Cops, Drivers, Gamblers, Spies, World Leaders, Beer Tasters, Hedge Fund Managers, and Just About Everything Else.”

•    “…women are better soldiers because they complain about pain less. They’re less likely to be hit by lightning because they’re not stupid enough to stand outside in a storm. They remember words and faces better. They’re better spies because they’re better at getting people to talk candidly.”

•    “Of course, to most women none of this is much of a revelation.” Continue reading →

Oh, Shut Up! There Is Nothing Wrong With “Go the F*** to Sleep”

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

If they think "Go the F*** to Sleep" is bad....

The guilt-mongers and Child Over-Protection Patrol have set their sites on “Go the F*** to Sleep,” Adam Mansbach’s children’s book parody, a cranky, profanity and obscenity-laced release for frustrated and sleep-deprived parents of small children everywhere.

“Imagine if this were written about Jews, blacks, Muslims or Latinos,” intones Dr. David Arredondo, quoted by CNN. He is an expert on child development and founder of The Children’s Program, in the San Francisco metropolitan area, which provides consultation and training for those working with troubled youths. Yes, Dr, imagine. Then it wouldn’t be a humorous satire for the amusement of perfectly loving parents.

“Nobody is suggesting that there’s a connection between Adam Mansbach’s book and child abuse or child neglect,” writes Karen Spears Zacharias, whose essay suggests that there is a connection between Adam Mansbach’s book and child abuse or child neglect. “Still, there’s no denying the reason “Go the F*** to Sleep” should be kept out of reach of children is because of its violent language and because of the way it demeans children.”

OK, there’s a book that is an inside joke for parents that relieves their guilt over the occasional horrible thoughts they have about their children, and children shouldn’t read it, because they wouldn’t understand. So what? Since when was there something inappropriate about enjoying books that shouldn’t be shared with children? I wouldn’t let my child read Dr. Spock, either. Continue reading →

The Washington Post Flunks Integrity, Conflicts, and Trustworthiness

/ Jack Marshall / 32 Comments

Newspaper...Heal Thyself!

The incidents of blatantly untrustworthy conduct by supposedly prestigious news organizations have become so numerous that they are almost no longer newsworthy themselves. Journalists failing their core ethical standards when maintaining them would be inconvenient? That’s not news. That’s the status quo.

Patrick B. Pexton, the Washington Posts’s ombudsman, had to write about the strange case of Jose Antonio Vargas, the celebrated journalist, once employed by the Post, who admitted last week that he was an illegal alien.  In particular, he had to write about 1) why a Post editor, Peter Perl, continued to employ Vargas and hid his immigration status for eight years after learning that he was in the country illegally and 2) why Vargas’s 4000 word piece about his deception (and the Post’s complicity in it) was killed by another Post editor, resulting in its being picked up and published by the New York Times. So the in-house ethics watchdog wrote about it, and concluded—nothing.  Continue reading →

Ethics Quote of the Week: Justice Antonin Scalia

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

“Justice Alito recounts all these disgusting video games in order to disgust us — but disgust is not a valid basis for restricting expression.” 

— Justice Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, in the majority opinion of Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association that over-turned a California law restricting the access of children to violent video games. Scalia was responding to the argument by conservative colleague Joseph Alito, who described the wide range of violent and offensive experiences a child could have though video-gaming, such as reenacting the shootings at Columbine High School and Virginia Tech,  raping Native American women or killing ethnic and religious minorities.

Scalia is the Supreme Court justice liberals love to hate, but he is the most stalwart defender of the First Amendment since Justice William O. Douglas and Justice Hugo Black on the Warren Court. As political warfare increasingly focuses on the tactic of suppressing and inhibiting speech and ideas rather than rebutting them, Scalia’s uniform rejection of any effort to squelch the free exchange of ideas, even disgusting ideas, is the last line of defense against government-imposed political correctness, nanny state thought control, and puritan censorship. While sufficiently important ends, such as protecting our children and our culture, may justify some extreme means, Scalia’s opinion reaffirms the core American principle that those means can never include government restriction of speech in its broadest definition. Continue reading →

An O. Henry Story Comes To Life

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

James Verone, a.k.a. " the Rosa Parks of health care," a.k.a. "Soapy"

The media thoroughly disgraced itself by hyping the stupid story of James Verone, an out-of-work 59-year-old man with health problems who robbed a bank in Gastonia, N.C., for $1,  and then  waited patiently for the cops to arrest him.“When you receive this a bank robbery will have been committed by me. This robbery is being committed by me for one dollar. I am of sound mind but not so much sound body,”read the note that Verone handed the bank clerk.

Verone grabbed his 15 minutes of fame with gusto, telling the local TV station that he became a thief out of sheer desperation. He needed health care, he said, and had no other way to get it than through the free care provided in jail. The problem with this is that he had plenty of better options than turning to intentionally unsuccessful crime. A hospital in Gastonia, Gaston Memorial Hospital, offers discounts up to 100% to low-income patients. There is also a free health clinic five miles from the bank Verone robbed, and more in nearby Charlotte. Or Verone could have received treatment from of the state-of-the-art medical facilities at the University of North Carolina, whose mandate is to provide “medically necessary health care to the citizens of North Carolina, regardless of their ability to pay.”

Naturally, few of the media reports, calculated to use this idiot’s stunt to shill for government-financed health care, bothered to report any of this. Continue reading →

“Are You a Flake?” Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

"Are you Michele Bachman?"

With only four well-chosen words, Fox News anchor Chris Wallace accomplished several objectives Sunday, all of them in the best tradition of ethical, objective, responsible journalism.

The words were “Are you a flake?,” posed to Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, who is running for President.  The question…

1. Properly forced a conservative darling to address her most striking weakness, belying Fox’s well-deserved reputation for bias toward figures its viewers admire…

2. Was a near-perfect example of the “off-the-wall” question technique, which has exposed more than one pretender to high office (Hello, Mike Dukakis!) as less than desirable.

3. Simultaneously gave Bachmann an opportunity to show how quick she could think on her feet while demonstrating important leadership traits like self-awareness, humor, wit, and grace, or, in the alternative, demonstrate the opposite.

How did she do? Well. Judge for yourself: Continue reading →

A Psychic Ethics Train Wreck in Liberty County

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Surprise: her anonymous tip is not credible.

I have been remiss in not discussing a recent Ethics Train Wreck that occurred two weeks ago, a fiasco that occurred in Liberty County, about an hour from Houston, Texas.

A self-professed psychic who calls herself Angel called police and told them that she had a vision that a mass grave containing the dismembered bodies of children was on the property where Joe and Gena Bankson lived. She also described some of the features of the property. That was enough for the Liberty County Sheriff’s Office, which armed itself with a search warrant and cadaver-sniffing dogs and converged on the home,  along with a mob of reporters and two news helicopters. As the police dug holes, somebody jumped the gun, and soon cable news stations flashed alerts that up to 30 bodies had been found.

There were no bodies. Continue reading →

Sorrell v. IMS Health: Legal, Ethical, and Unjust

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

The case of Sorrell v. IMS Health, which the Supreme Court decided yesterday, sharply focuses the philosophical disagreement over the role of the courts in public policy. The legal question was rather straightforward; the ethical issues are complex. Is it the Court’s duty to make bad—but constitutional— laws work, or is its duty to follow the laws, and leave it to the legislature to fix their flaws?

This was a case about incompetent  lawmaking. Gladys Mensing and Julie Demahy had sued Pliva and other generic drug manufacturers in  Louisiana and Minnesota over the labels for metoclopramide, the generic version of Reglan. The drug, used to treat acid reflux, had caused them to develop a neurological movement disorder called tardive dyskinesia. None of the generic drug’s manufacturers and distributors included warnings on the labels about the danger of extended use of the medication, even though the risk was known to them. Neither did the manufacturers of the brand-name drug. The problem was that the state statutes required generic drug manufacturers to included warnings about dangerous side effects, while federal regulations required generic drugs to carry the exact same label information as their brand name equivalent.  Continue reading →