Law & Law Enforcement

Nomar, Beantown, and the Legacy Obligation

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Organizations have histories, and that means they have debts to pay. Time moves on, and personnel changes, but the organization that neglects the human beings who played major roles in defining their image, goals, achievements and success has breached its integrity, and violated its Legacy Obligation.

For nearly eight seasons, shortstop Nomar Garciaparra was the face, heart, and soul of the Boston Red Sox. A spidery gymnast in the field who completed the Holy Trinity of Hall of Fame-bound shortstops—Jeter, A-Rod and “Nomah” —who lit up the American League in the mid-Nineties, Garciaparra was a home-grown fan idol. He did everything wonderfully and with panache; Ted Williams, the city’s reigning baseball god, pronounced him his official successor.

Then, suddenly, it all unraveled. Continue reading →

Hollywood Ethics: Variety’s Conflict of Interest Problem

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

That show biz media “bible”, Variety, finally seems to have reached the point where it can no longer pretend that its inherent conflicts of interest don’t exist. The magazine is simultaneously in the business of promoting movies, TV and stage shows, accepting expensive ads from producers, and depending on inside access for its reporting,  yet it purports to offer objective critical reviews of the output of the very people and companies whose patronage it depends upon to exist. It’s an impossible balancing act, and truth be told, Variety reviews have never had much credibility in Hollywood or anywhere else. But whatever pretense of integrity the publication had came crashing down with a lawsuit by Calibra Pictures, a small independent film company that had signed a $400,000 contract with Variety in which the publication promised to help Calibra’s new release, “Iron Cross,” ( featuring the final performance of the late, great, Roy “We’re gonna need a bigger boat!” Scheider, who died in 2008) find both a distributor and critical acclaim. [ Ethics Violations #1 and #2—Dishonesty and Breach of Integrity: Don’t promise what you can’t deliver, and don’t sell your independence and objectivity] Continue reading →

Pit Bulls and Bigotry

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Writer Charles Leerhsen has experienced a conversion. After witnessing his best friend being viciously attacked and nearly killed on a city street without provocation, he has embraced bigotry with both hands. Now he writes screeds condemning not the attacker, but all individuals of the attacker’s race. In a passionate and angry essay for The Daily Beast, he denigrates not only those individuals but also anyone who defends them, such as “certain PC urban professionals who long to tell the world that they are super-sensitive and understanding souls.”

It’s an ugly essay, emotional, doctrinaire, and illogical, employing the well-worn racist technique of generalizing from the individual to the group and back again. Why would any respectable media outlet print such bile?

Perhaps it is because Leerhsen’s best friend was Frankie, a Wheaton terrier, and Frankie’s attacker was a pit bull. Continue reading →

Ethics Alarms: the News, the Web, and Other Things

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Why People Think the Media is Biased, Reason 61,567: Chris Matthews recently mocked new Mass. GOP Senator Scott Brown for signing a book deal to write his autobiography. “Didn’t people used to write their memoirs after their careers?” Matthews sneered. Gee, Chris, I don’t know: Weren’t you extravagant in your praise for Sen. Barack Obama’s autobiography, published before he was half-way through his first term?

How Writers Are Different From Lawyers: A free-lance writer lays out her ethical principles here, which includes not lending her talents to causes she doesn’t believe in. She is on firm ground, because citizens don’t have a Constitutional right to have their ideas professionally communicated to the world. Citizens do and must have the right to use the laws of their country for their own benefit, however, and to have the best representation possible when they are accused of crimes. That is why we can make judgments about a writer’s principles based on her choice of clients, but to do the same with lawyers is an attack on the principles of democracy. Continue reading →

Gawker Asks: “Why Were the Democrats So Ethical?”

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

One could hardly find a more illuminating window into the unethical political and media culture festering in this country than to read today’s “scoop” on (yecch!) Gawker, the celebrity-stalking, rumor-mongering website that makes TMZ look like The Economist.  Its breathless lead:

“Did you know that Scott Brown—the new star Republican Senator—was accused of harassing a female campaign worker in 1998? We have the documents to prove it. Did the Democrats blow an opportunity to keep their 60th Senate seat?” Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Itawamba County, Miss. School Board; Ethics Hero: Constance McMillan

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

It will be interesting, as well as depressing, to see how many innocent bystanders are injured as various institutions and organizations emulate Washington D.C.’s Catholic Charities’ “solution” to its objection to  gay Americans having legally enforced rights to do what anyone else can. That organization’s draconian solution was that if a benefit can’t be withheld from gays, then the benefit isn’t worth giving. Thus, because it believed that providing health benefits to the now legally recognized same-sex spouses of gay employees would imply endorsement of conduct it considers sinful, the charity eliminated spousal benefits for all new employees, harming the innocent to show contempt for…well, the innocent.

Who could pass up logic and justice like that? Not the Itawamba County, Miss. school board! Continue reading →

Solution to the Starbucks Gun Controversy: Try Ethics!

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Starbucks is under fire from anti-gun advocates for its policy of allowing patrons in states that permit open carrying of firearms to sip their espresso with guns on their hips. This has, of course, provoked the usual high dudgeon from Second Amendment supporters, NRA members, conservative media, and—who knows?—maybe a few postal workers getting ready to blow. Continue reading →

Public Privacy and the Ubiquitous Camera

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Everybody has a camera…well, almost everybody. Thanks to cell phones, we can be recorded in still or video formats almost every second of the day. We are our own Big Brother.  So much so, in fact, that it is hard to muster too much fright and indignation over increasing use of public cameras by the government. Boston police, for example, now have immediate access to street video of shootings, robberies, and homicides on many city streets, and use real time images to send information about the suspects and crimes to responding officers. Continue reading →

Neighborhood Ethics and the Snow Babe

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

It’s time to play “Who’s the Worse Neighbor?”!

It’s clear that the media take on the New Jersey story about the risqué snow sculpture will favor the snow-artist neighbor and ridicule the Puritanical neighbors, but the ethics fouls may be on the other side.

A brief summary: a woman and her son used the ample snow on their lawn and the their substantial sculpting talents to make a life-size, headless, armless, torso and trunk of a rather well endowed naked woman instead of the more traditional Frosty the Snowman. If this  “came to life one day,”  that traffic cop would arrest it for indecent exposure. Continue reading →

Essay: Ending the Bi-Partisan Effort to Destroy Trust in America

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Both the Pentagon shooter and the Texas I.R.S. attacker were motivated by a virulent distrust of the U.S. government, the distrust mutating into desperation and violence with the assistance of personal problems and emotional instability. We would be foolish, however, to dismiss the two as mere “wingnuts,” the current term of choice to describe political extremists who have gone around the bend. They are a vivid warning of America’s future, for the media, partisan commentators, the two political parties and our elected officials are doing their worst to convert all of us into wingnuts, and the results could be even more disastrous than the fanciful horrors the Left and the Right tell us that the other has planned for us. Continue reading →