Outfielder Johnny Damon was the heart and soul of the 2004 Boston Red Sox, the team that broke “the Curse” and finally brought a World Series title to Beantown after 86 infamous, frustrating years. But Red Sox brass didn’t want to give him a four year guaranteed contract when he became a free agent in 2005, and the New York Yankees were willing, so Johnny Damon shaved his beard and cut his shaggy hair to play with the team Bostonians love to despise. Every time since then, when he came to bat in Fenway Park wearing pinstripes, a chorus of boos and jeers showered down on him from the same fans who once cheered his every move. Continue reading
Journalism & Media
Conservative Stories, Liberal Stories: Isn’t a Drunk Senator Just Plain News?
A Youtube video shows Montana Senator Max Baucus (D) giving a rambling rant of a speech from the Senate floor, waving his arms and slurring his speech like Uncle Billy in “It’s a Wonderful Life,” as he condemns Republicans for being overly partisan in the run-up to the health care bill vote. Was he drunk? It sure looks like it to me, based on some considerable experience with such things, but no, the real reason he looks drunk to me must be my right-wing political bias, because only conservative blogs and media seem to see anything intoxicated about the good senator’s speech at all.
This isn’t just silly; it is harmful. Continue reading
JFK the Philanderer: What Does It Mean?
Honest, I’m not picking on the Kennedy’s. That this surfaced today is a coincidence. But if you cross Ted Kennedy and Tiger Woods, you get Jack Kennedy, and what should appear on the web this morning but a surprising photograph:
TMZ, the celebrity trash website that likes to publish paparazzi photos of supermodels with spinach between their teeth, has a genuine scoop: it has gotten its cyber-hands on a photograph that appears to show a bevy of naked women frolicking on a yacht as a young Senator Jack Kennedy lounges nearby. [UPDATE: As explained by The Smoking Gun here, and discussed in a later Ethics Alarms post here, the photo was a hoax. The ethical issues raised by it and discussed below are still valid, however.] Continue reading
Farewell to the NY Times’ Ethics Blog
Well, the New York Times has spoken: it apparently doesn’t think ethics commentary blogs are worth the trouble: it quietly deep-sixed Randy Cohen’s “The Moral of the Story” blog less than a year after launching it. Continue reading
The Wrong Lesson from Tiger’s Fall
So that’s the lesson, is it?
As the year end lists almost unanimously “award” Tiger Woods the distinction of engineering the Scandal of the Year, pundits also seem to be nearing consensus on the lesson we should take from the golfer’s fall, which is: “Don’t make athletes and celebrities your role models or heroes. They are human beings like everyone else, and are guaranteed to disappoint you.”
Oh, I see…it’s all our fault. Continue reading
Remembering Ted Kennedy Fairly
Today, on the Sunday before the new year, the New York Times Magazine has its annual issue of brief profiles of famous, important, and not-so-famous-but-still-important people who breathed their last in the past twelve months. It is always a fascinating collection; for me, the exercise is a slap in the face, focusing my wandering attention upon how many remarkable lives and achievements have escaped my awareness and proper appreciation—and this is only a small, random collection. The last of the profiles, however, was about a life I knew a lot about: Ted Kennedy. In my view, the piece fails an ethical imperative. It doesn’t mention Mary-Jo Kopechne. Continue reading
Well, It’s Better Than Senator Burris’s Version…
[An Ethics Alarms reflection on the Christmas Eve Senate vote passing that esteemed body’s version of health care reform…in the tradition of “A Visit From Saint Nicholas,” because 1) you haven’t read enough parodies of that poem this year, 2) it seemed appropriate, but mostly 3) the version Sen. Burris read on the Senate floor was so terrible that I had to get its taste out of my mouth.]
Ethics Notes: Santa, the Senate, and Snow
Some random thoughts on ethics matters as I try to simultaneously finish the Ethics Alarms 2009 Best and Worst lists and deal with a series of bad extension cords running up my Christmas tree…
Ethics Quote of the Week
“Nice try, Ted Alvin Klaudt, of Walker, S.D.”
The South Dakota Daily Republic, in an editorial commenting on former state lawmaker Ted Klaudt’s warning to South Dakota’s media this week that they cannot use his name without his prior authorization.
Klaudt claimed that he name was protected by his recent copyright of it, a transparent attempt to avoid news media mention of Klaudt’s 2007 sentencing to 44 years in prison for four counts of second-degree rape. The ex-legislator was convicted of touching the breasts and genitals of his two foster daughters while conducting phony examinations on the girls on the premise that he would help them sell their reproductive eggs.
He apparently wants to have the sole legal right to call such conduct “Klaudting.”
Ethics Alarms salutes the Daily Republic for having the courage and wit to immediately challenge Klaudt’s efforts to muzzle the press.
Ethics Dunce: Sen. Charles Shumer
It’s a minor news event with a couple of ethics lesson, but as usual, the media’s focus is on the wrong one.
New York’s U.S. Senators, Gillibrand and Shumer, were talking away on their cell phones before take-off. The flight attendants announced, as they have been doing on flights since before Cher’s first retirement tour, that it was time to ditch the electronic devices and turn off the cell phones. The senators ignored the instructions, and kept talking anyway, because, you know, their work is So Very Important. Continue reading
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