Journalism & Media

Landrieu’s Pay-off: Ethical and Playing by the Rules

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

[Like you, I am thoroughly tired of seeing Claude Rains’ Capt. Renault quoted in these situations, but sometimes his famous “Casablanca” line is too apt to resist. This is such a time.]

Pundits are “shocked—shocked!” that Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu traded her vote to allow debate on the health care bill for $100 million dollars of earmarked funds for Medicaid subsidies in her state. Fox demagogue/clown Glenn Beck called Landrieu a prostitute and a hooker. Time Magazine columnist Mark Halperin accompanied his condemnation of Landrieu with a disgusting photoshopped picture of the Senator sporting the infamous semen-hair gel ‘do from the raunchy comedy, “What About Mary?” The deal was widely called a bribe by indignant bloggers, angry conservatives, and even some liberals. Continue reading →

The Ethics of Dithering

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

At some point, delaying  an important leadership decision stops being resposnible, and begins being unethical.

The White House put out word today that President Obama’s decision regarding troop levels in Afghanistan is on the verge of being revealed. When it is, a few things are certain. If his decision is to increase troop levels to the degree requested by the Pentagon, Obama’s pacifist Left supporters will be furious. If it is to withhold more troops and prepare for U.S, withdrawal, supporters of an aggressive war policy on the Right will go on the attack. If it is anything in between, neither of these camps will be happy.

It is also certain that nobody will be able to tell if what the President has decided is the “right” decision. Continue reading →

Dallas Forgotten and the Duty to Remember

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Yesterday was November 22. According to the vast majority of the news and entertainment media, it was no different from any other day, apparently. In all likelihood, the same was true of most Americans. “Oh, yeah…November 22! Better buy that turkey!”

November 22 is not like any other day in America, however. It is the date in 1963 that John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 46 years old and the 35th President of the United States of America, was assassinated on the streets of Dallas. Continue reading →

Ethics and the Great Climate Change E-mail Heist

/ Jack Marshall / 30 Comments

Warning! Stormy ethics waters ahead!

Computer hackers invaded the server at the influential Climatic Research Unit at The University of East Anglia, in eastern England, and left with over a decade’s worth of correspondence between leading British and U.S. scientists, including 1,000 e-mails and 3,000 documents. The information was passed on to dozens of salivating bloggers and science-minded websites, which  launched selections from the stolen material into the climate change debate just in time for the upcoming U.N. conference on the topic in Copenhagen. Continue reading →

Spoiling “Precious”

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Courtland Milloy is a Washington Post Metro columnist, which means that his job is to decry racial outrages even where there are none. This time around, he has been offended by “Precious,” the nearly universally acclaimed movie about an abused black teenager, and attacks it with gusto. [Typically I would link to the piece here. I’m not, and you will soon find out why.] Continue reading →

Lobbyist Ventriloquism and the Abysmal State of Congressional Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

When Washington, D.C. attorney Robert Trout delivered his closing argument in the trial of former Rep. William Jefferson (now known as “Inmate CB476881”) for, among other things, accepting a large cash bribe that was later found in his office freezer, he told the jury that the prosecution was hypocritical and unfair. After all, he said, “If seeking political help was a crime, you could lock up half of metropolitan Washington, D.C.” Jefferson’s actions may have been unethical, and they were certainly a mistake, but really now: isn’t this just what all Congressmen do? Jefferson, Trout argued, just got a little bit carried away.

Jefferson was convicted, so there is some distance left for our faith in our elected representatives to fall before it hits rock bottom. The argument was still ethically disturbing in two respects. First of all, Trout’s pitch amounted to a jury nullification plea, a defense in which a jury is encouraged to ignore the law, and that is unethical lawyering.

Second, Trout may well have been right. Continue reading →

The Ethics of Bigotry, Part III:Tom Yawkey’s Red Sox Racism, and How Not to Prove It

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Tom Yawkey owned the Boston Red Sox for four decades and his wife Jean owned them for one more; it is accurate to say that he was the most influential individual in the storied team’s existence. Yawkey bought the team in the mid-Thirties, after it had suffered through one of the worse stretches of awful play on record, sparked by an earlier owner’s fire sale of its best players, including Babe Ruth. Yawkey ran the Red Sox with an open checkbook and a stated objective of giving the city of Boston the best championship money could buy. Soon the once-pathetic team was fielding all-time greats like Jimmy Foxx, Joe Cronin, Lefty Grove, and a brash young phenom named Ted Williams. By the time Yawkey died in 1976, the Red Sox had one of the largest, most loyal and fanatic fan bases in sports, and the team was entrenched in New England culture. Boston remains properly grateful, and the re-naming of the street outside Fenway Park “Yawkey Way” is no perfunctory tribute. (The names of Yawkey and his wife Jean are spelled out, vertically,  in Morse Code on the famous hand-operated scoreboard on Fenway Park’s left field wall.

The Red Sox came close, but they never won that World Championship under Yawkey.  One of the primary reasons was that the Yawkey way was racist. Continue reading →

The Trouble With Sarah

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

A toxic mixture of elitism, class bias, sexism and the liberal slant of the media has made Sarah Palin the most unfairly treated public figure in memory. Even when the double standards were obvious–Palin  derided as “unqualified” to lead, when the Democratic presidential choice had even less relevant experience; non-stop portrayals during the 2008 campaign as a loose-cannon flake, while the Democratic vice-presidential candidate was largely ignored despite a long and hilarious career as…a loose-cannon flake; David Letterman’s long refusal to apologize for his joke about Palin’s young daughter being sexually assaulted, despite the taboo against using the young children of public figures as joke fodder—the attacks have never abated or retreated to any reasonable standard of fairness. Continue reading →

Race, Eleven Bodies, and the Media’s Disgrace

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

They are finding decomposed bodies in the Cleveland home of  Anthony Sowell,  eleven lat last count. Police had visited the house before the discovery and noticed the smell, but never followed up, even though they knew the owner was a violent sex offender. No ethics controversies so far: the police were obviously careless and incompetent, and Sowell was, well, a serial killer. There are no ethical serial killers.

The ethics issue that screams to me in this story, however, is all about the women: all missing for months or years, all young, from poor families, and  black. Did you see any national media stories about them when they were missing persons and not abused corpses? I didn’t. Continue reading →

Showdown at Brookstone: An Ethics Train Wreck

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Thanks to the enterprising employees at Brookstone, that odd chain that sells expensive gadgets for tasks that aren’t that important anyway, Ethics Alarms now encounters what has all the signs  of a genuine Ethics Train Wreck. Ethics Train Wrecks are situations where one unethical act sets off a chain reaction of bad judgment and rash behavior, and by the time all the carnage is over, anyone who was near the event, and those who tried to make sense out of it or clean it up, end up looking bad and arguing with each other. Recent Ethics Train Wrecks include the Valerie Plame affair and the Prof. Gates arrest. President Obama won’t get involved in this one (I hope!), but it has it all: gender, religion, workplace relations, law, Fox News. Continue reading →