Journalism & Media

From First Amendment Outrage to Ethics Hypothetical: The Westboro Baptist Church vs. Brandon, Miss. Hoax

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

"Never mind!"

Bulletin: The story about how citizens and law enforcement personnel in Brandon, Miss. foiled the efforts of Fred Phelps’ homophobic Westboro Baptist Church to disrupt the funeral of a serviceman killed in Afghanistan never happened. The source of the hoax is unclear, but an enterprising Stars and Stripes blogger investigated and has determined that it never happened. The Church was never even in Brandon.

I detest fake web stories and the people who create them, as you probably know. The public is  confused enough by reality without having falsehoods, fabrications and hoaxes added to its database. Luckily, this is not a news site, but an ethics site, and my commentary about those who applauded this tale of a community conspiring to rob a group of their U.S. Supreme Court confirmed constitutional rights is as valid as when it was widely assumed that the story was real.

The foiling of Fred Phelps’ gang by “Mississippi Burning” tactics is not only an ethics hypothetical that most people flunked, but also an effective trap to lure the self-righteous into agreeing  that ends justify unethical means as long as the victims of those ends are sufficiently despicable.   This group includes one of the most quoted commentators on the story, who approved of the fictional response by the town and wrote,

“This is a template for how to handle the Westboro people. If lawsuits don’t work, other means will. Whatever it takes to keep them from harassing bereaved military families on the day their fallen loved ones are laid to rest.”

He was wrong then, and he’s wrong now.

Comment of the Day: “The Ethicists, Backing Judge Walker and Gay Marriage, At An Unacceptable Price”

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

The motion to vacate Judge Walker’s ruling on Proposition 8 has been filed, you can read it here. Since the original post, I have detected some cracks in the formerly near-united front of legal ethicists and journalists deriding Walker’s critics. Some of them are finally, grudgingly, admitting that the Judge might not have handled his potential conflict so well after all, and that the motion is not a frivolous, anti-gay outrage as they originally labelled it.  The most rickety of the rationalizations put forth on Walker’s behalf, advanced by some his most respected defenders, is that he had no obligation to reveal his own sexual orientation by disclosing his domestic arrangement because of its intimate and private nature. Yet the judge voluntarily disclosed it after his decision was in the books, raising a rebuttable presumption that his original silence was to avoid suggestions of conflict, not out of a desire for privacy.

First time commenter Jada adds her Comment of the Day to the discussion: Continue reading →

Unethical Quote of the Week: Adam Dachis

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

“All posts that belong to the Dark Side are going to feature some ideas that might be a little evil or at least require some flexible ethics. Some things will be downright horrible, and you should not do them, but are either for your information or simply for the point of interest (and will be noted as such). Your judgment and actions are your own, so think before you do anything you read here and only use your dark side for good.”

—Adam Dachis, ethics corrupter, in the “Dark Side Disclaimer” that accompanies his column on the website Lifehacker, called “Secrets from the Dark Side.”

His current “Secrets from the Dark Side” column is entitled “How to Lie, Cheat, and Steal Your Way to a Perfect Flight,” which is an accurate description of its contents. Some of Dachis’s “tips” (scams? cheats?) are interesting, some are humorous, and all (well, maybe with one exception) are unethical. Dachis, for his part, doesn’t have the guts to advocate outright the conduct that he is explicitly promoting, nor does he condemn it. As his ethically incoherent ( “Only use your dark side for good”) disclaimer demonstrates, he thinks ethics is a game of some sort, and that being a “little evil” is cute, or trivial, or something.

A true ethics corrupter, Dachis wants to avoid personal accountability for the unethical acts of his readers spurred entirely by his post, while at the same time getting credit for his cleverness. This is the Richard Nixon approach to ethical corruption, planting seeds and disclaiming responsibility for the crop, telling followers, “We could do that, but it would be wrong.” Wink, wink.

Yechhh.

Ethics Heroes: World Journalists

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Chris Hondros (left) and colleagues

I know Ethics Alarms is critical of the media and journalists for breaches of objectivity and fair reporting. Nevertheless, there are few professions more inherently heroic than journalism, especially when it requires on-the-scene reportage under dangerous conditions. This was demonstrated, once again, by the recent death of Chris Hondros, a distinguished photo-journalist who was killed last week in Libya.

May 3 is World Journalist Day, and an excellent time to honor the tough and dedicated professionals who bring us important and hard-to acquire news, often risking their lives in the process. To that end, there is no better on-line destination than the website of New York-based non-profit Committee to Protect Journalists, dedicated to making it possible for journalists to do their jobs without fear of reprisals.  There you can learn about the perils faced by media personnel all over the globe, and read about the journalists killed since January 2010 while trying to let us know what is going on in the world.

Fake Quote Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

"Osama? The SOB had it coming."---Gandhi

Among the wise commentators who tut-tutted the unseemly rejoicing among Americans upon learning of the death of Osama bin Laden was the Rev. Martin Luther King, who sagely remarked, “I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy.” Rev. King’s words were immediately picked up and quoted yesterday in hundreds of blogs and news commentary, grateful for the silver-tongued orator and civil rights warrior’s ability to find just the right way to sum up what was troubling—to some— about the post-bin Laden festivities.

Wait...how could he do that? Rev. King is as dead as Osama! Well, he could do that because somebody decided to give his or her own sentiments the added influence, credibility and moral authority of an American hero, put their words in Rev. King’s mouth, and tweeted them to the world. [UPDATE: Now we know that’s not  exactly what happened—this time. An American teacher in Japan introduced a genuine King quote with her own sentiments, and her careless Facebook friends lost the quotation marks. Thanks to Barry Deutsch for the sleuthing.] Continue reading →

No, It Still Doesn’t Justify Torture

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

No.

The news of how Osama bin Laden was finally tracked down and killed has caused a predictable outbreak of consequentialism. It appears that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed provided some of the key intelligence that led to the successful operation in Pakistan while he was undergoing “enhanced interrogation” in CIA prisons in Rumania and Poland. “See?” Dick Cheney’s fans are saying today. “Rendition and torture work. We wouldn’t have killed Bin Laden without them. So what do you think of those tactics now?” The opponents of torture who foolishly argued against it based on pragmatic considerations—“Torture doesn’t work!”—rather than ethical ones–-“It is absolutely wrong!“—set themselves up for this.  Now what should they say? Continue reading →

Ethics Quote of the Day: Lori Palatnik

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Is "ding-dong" wrong?

“In life we must know what is good and what is evil. Yes, we are commanded to remember that there is evil in the world, and not only are we allowed to celebrate when it is destroyed, we must.”

—Mrs. Lori Palatnik, in an essay today entitled “Is It Proper To Celebrate Osama bin Laden’s Death?”

Writer David Sirotka at Salon, among others, has sharply criticized the jubilant reaction of most Americans to the terrorist’s death. He found the chanting crowds in front of the White House and Times Square disturbing, symbolizing a gleeful embrace of violence as the way to address problems, an instance of becoming the enemy in order to defeat it: Continue reading →

Trump’s Lament

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Can't you read the sign, Donald?

Was Donald Trump treated rudely and unfairly at the White House Correspondents Dinner, where he was made the target of sharp barbs by both President Obama and MC Seth Myers?

Trump thinks so, telling Fox and Friends, “Well, I really understood what I was getting into — I didn’t know that I’d be virtually the sole focus. I had no idea it would be to that extent, where you know, it was just joke after joke after joke. It was almost like, is there anyone else they could talk about?”

Trump is a poor sport, a whiner, a humorless fool, and deluded to boot. He spent the previous month accusing the President of the United States of being a liar, a fraud, a usurper, a poor student, and an illegal alien, appealing to the worst instincts of the most extreme Obama-haters and political foes. His conduct was most charitably and frequently defined as “a joke,” though it was worse than that. He comes to the Correspondent’s Dinner where the President has his one chance to skewer others the way comedians regularly skewer him, having provided by his own boorishness and hucksterism enough material to supply ten stand-up routines, not only claims to be surprised at the extent of his roasting, but is offended that he has to take his medicine. Continue reading →

Oh, Shut Up, Rush.

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I tuned in to Rush Limbaugh this afternoon expecting what I got, but hoping otherwise. Sure enough, Limbaugh spent the first half-hour of his broadcast mocking President Obama for taking “single-handed” credit for Osama bin Laden’s death, counting the number of times the President uttered the words “me,” “I,” “my,” and “mine,” and minimizing any credit due to the Chief Executive and Commander-in-Chief when the nation he leads finally accomplishes something it has been trying to do for a decade.

The President of the United States gets the blame and is held accountable for gas prices he cannot control, international upheavals, incompetent local disaster management after hurricanes, economic meltdowns caused by lazy regulators, irresponsible investors, unqualified homeowners and greedy business executives, the botched clean-up of unprecedented oil spills, the abuse of prisoners by hillbilly soldiers thousands of miles away, and every other  social, societal and economic ill imaginable. That’s his job, and he wanted it: fair or not, he has to take it. Continue reading →

Botching Big News: CNN and Fox Show How Far Their Profession Has Fallen

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

It was nearly 11 PM, E.S.T., and the sudden announcement that President Obama was about to make an important announcement “related to national security” had been hanging in the air for almost a half hour, as TV reporters, hosts and anchors speculated and waited. I was jumping back and forth between two networks when the news began leaking out about what the announcement would be: Osama bin Laden had been killed in a U.S. operation. The professional ethics on both networks promptly evaporated, as Walter Cronkite, David Brinkley and Howard K. Smith looked down from news anchor heaven and retched. Continue reading →