Journalism & Media

Pine Tar Redux: the Pole Vaulter, the Bracelet, and Technicalities

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Sports Illustrated is crying foul over the story of a female high school pole vaulter whose jump in the final event had apparently won the meet and the league championship for her team  until the opposing coach called a rules infraction:  she was wearing a friendship bracelet, which was prohibited, and according to the rule book, grounds for disqualification.

SI says this is bad sportsmanship. Nonsense. Enforcing the rules of a sport cannot be poor sportsmanship. The objective is to win within the rules. A team that wins without following the rules cannot claim that “good sportsmanship” requires that the rules be ignored for its benefit. Continue reading →

Photo Ethics: Kagan at the Bat

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

The Wall Street Journal is being assailed by some gay and lesbian advocates for running an old photo of Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan, bat raised, waiting for a pitch in a softball game. “It clearly is an allusion to her being gay. It’s just too easy a punch line,” said Cathy Renna, a former spokesperson for the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation who is now a consultant. “The question from a journalistic perspective is whether it’s a descriptive representation of who she might be as a judge.”

What???? Continue reading →

The Ethics of Silencing Hate

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Good and just people are not just bothered by the bad things people do, but also by the bad things they may be thinking while they do it.  This is reasonable, on its face, because a lot of  the time (though far from always), misconduct arises from ideas, emotions, motives and intentions that are not very admirable and sometimes despicable. The indisputable connection between what we think and what we do increasingly is fueling the idea that we can and should try to control people’s thoughts—not by encouraging good ones through education, culture, philosophy, role models and positive reinforcement, but by preventing bad thoughts through punishment, enforced conformity, censorship, and linguistic controls.

The civil rights movement, once dedicated to wiping out discrimination, which is a kind of conduct, now focuses on eliminating bigotry and bias, a form of thought. Hate crime legislation extends penalties for criminal acts beyond the act itself to what the criminal was thinking while he committed it.  The term “hate speech” is frequently used to describe any intense negative opinion as a way of both suppressing and de-legitimizing political opinion. The label effectively argues that an opinion, even a reasonable opinion by itself, should be shunned and even suppressed based on the “illegitimacy” of the thought process used to arrive at it.

As many predicted, this device or tendency (which you call it depends in part on how cynical you are) has intensified with the election of our first African American president, allowing the kind of intense opposition rhetoric, satire, condemnation, hyperbole and ridicule that has been directed at virtually every president before him to now be characterized as hate speech, or proof of racial prejudice. People, of course, have a right to engage in this tactic, but it is wrong.

Over on Facebook, over a million people have joined a fan page called “DEAR LORD, THIS YEAR YOU TOOK MY FAVORITE ACTOR, PATRICK SWAYZIE. YOU TOOK MY FAVORITE ACTRESS, FARAH FAWCETT. YOU TOOK MY FAVORITE SINGER, MICHAEL JACKSON. I JUST WANTED TO LET YOU KNOW, MY FAVORITE PRESIDENT IS BARACK OBAMA. AMEN”, inspired by a joke that is a lot older than Barack Obama, and probably older than Millard Fillmore. Continue reading →

“The Ethicist” and Helping Illegal Immigrants

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Randy Cohen’s first response in this week’s installment of “The Ethicist” (in the Sunday New York Times Magazine) isn’t exactly unethical, but it isn’t exactly ethical, either, if little things like obeying laws still matter to you. The real value of Cohen’s column this time is to remind those who blithely condemn Arizona’s illegal immigration enforcement statute as “cruel,” “racist” or “un-American” the extent to which the Federal Government’s failure to control our boarders and enforce the immigration laws has corrupted and confused us all.

Stuart Gold, from Brooklyn (and I respect Stuart for making his name public) queries Randy about how he should deal with knowledge that a local supermarket is exploiting some illegal immigrants working there by not meeting the legal requirements for minimum wages and working conditions. Stuart is friendly with the workers and wants to help them, but he doesn’t want to get them fired or deported. Cohen tells him to advise them of their rights if they don’t know them, but to leave any proactive steps to them.

This is reasonable advice, but look at what we have: Continue reading →

Drug War Ethics: THIS Is Excessive Force…

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Radley Balko, a senior editor at Reason Magazine, has been following the law enforcement tactic of paramilitary raids on American homes, some of which go horrible wrong, and many of which raise questions of propriety and proportion. One of the worst of these, a February raid on a family’s home in Missouri that featured the invading authorities shooting the family dog in front of a young child, is immortalized on this frightening video. The father was charged with marijuana possession and child endangerment, presumably because he used drugs in the presence of his.

Balko, who, like everyone at Reason, is a libertarian, uses the incident to press his opposition to the illegal status of recreational drugs. “This is the blunt-end result of all the war imagery and militaristic rhetoric politicians have been spewing for the last 30 years,” he writes… Continue reading →

“Everybody Draw Muhammad Day” Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 66 Comments

The “Everybody Draw Muhammad Day” mess is a wonderful example of how ethics train wrecks begin to engulf anyone who get near them. It also an example of an idea that is clever, funny, well-intentioned, and wrong. Continue reading →

Conan on “60 Minutes”: Failing His Own High Standards

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Conan O’Brien went on CBS’s “60 Minutes” this week, and managed to carefully trash NBC and Jay Leno without crossing the boundaries laid out in his agreement with NBC, which prohibited him from “disparaging” the network that treated him so abysmally and paid him 30 million dollars in the bargain. I sympathize with Conan. A “60 Minutes” softball interview (CBS is a competitor of NBC, remember, so it likes Conan, an NBC casualty and victim; “60 Minutes” only does tough interviews with people they don’t like) is good for Conan’s image, helps him publicize his national comedy tour and his new deal with TBS, and best of all, allows him to stick it to the people who did him dirt. This would be hard for anyone to resist, and obviously Conaa couldn’t. Still, it would have been better if he had. Continue reading →

More Ethics Confusion at The Washington Post

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Washington D.C. theater scene blogger and critic John Glass has caught the Washington Post with its ethical pants down. He alertly notes that a line in a recent Post story about the appointment of a new Artistic Director for the prestigious Studio Theater reveals that interviews for the position took place in Washington Post offices. Studio is an active Post advertiser that, like all D.C. area theaters, is significantly dependent on the paper’s theater reviews for its audiences. In this regard it is also in competition with other theaters for the Post critics’ approval. Doesn’t this situation require objectivity and an arm’s length relationship between the newspaper and the theater? Why is the Washington Post actively involved in a professional theater’s choice of artistic leadership? Continue reading →

The Weintraub Delusion

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Jerry Weintraub, the epically successful producer of movies and manager of legendary performers, notably Elvis Presley, has written an entertaining autobiography entitled, “When I Stop Talking You’ll Know I’m Dead: Useful Stories From a Persuasive Man.” Maybe the stories are useful, but clearly not in the way Weintraub thinks they are.

As Weintraub was promoting his book on NPR this morning, he told several stories, all amusing. One involved a period when he was managing the late singer John Denver. Continue reading →

Misrepresentation, Manipulation and Lies About Arizona, E-Mails and More, Brought to Us By Those We Trust

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Within a span of about three minutes two days ago, I heard Tony Kornheiser on his sports radio show and Joy Behar on her whatever-the-heck-it-is cable show describe the new illegal immigration statute in Arizona in almost exactly the same words: “So the police can go up to anybody for any reason at all, ask them to prove their citizenship, and arrest them if they can’t.” Now, the law specifies “reasonable suspicion,” so whatever the Arizona law permits, Tony and Joy’s version is clearly not it. Nonetheless, this is what a large proportion of the public believes, because this is what they are being told by reporters, bloggers and elected officials…and, disgracefully, the President of the United States, who once pledged to use his gifts and power to unite rather than divide us. Speaking about the Arizona law, Obama said.. Continue reading →