Popular Culture

Comment of the Day: “The Barefoot Contessa and the Compassion Bullies”

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

He's young, sick, and poor. His mother must be right, then.

Gary, an occasional commenter, grabs the Comment of the Day with a provocative one on a post from quite a while back. To refresh your memory, a sick child named Enzo Pereda asked the Make-A-Wish Foundation to get him a one-on-one cooking experience with “The Barefoot Contessa,” Ina Garten. Garten refused, and the boy’s mother led an online shaming exercise, condemning Garten, encouraging boycotts of her Food Channel show, and launching other bloggers and media on an anti-Ina rampage. Ethics Alarms’ verdict was that the boy’s mother was engaged in compassion bullying, demanding that this cable celebrity do her child’s bidding, alter her own schedule and priorities, and grant her son’s arbitrary “wish” because he happened to be ill. Garten had no obligation whatsoever to do what someone, or even everyone, might consider a kind act, and the one who was acting unethically was Enzo’s mother.

Gary’s comment goes to the heart of what Ethics Alarms is all about. Here is his Comment of the Day on “The Barefoot Contessa and the Compassion Bullies.”  I’ll have some additional comments at the end: Continue reading →

Comment of the Day: “The Provocative T-Shirt Problem:

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

"Oh yeah? Well, your good manners and dignity offend ME!"

Sometimes I receive terrific comments to posts via e-mail, and sometimes I decide to make them Comments of the Day. And sometimes I decide to do that and forget, like I did with this comment, from Neil Penny, in response to my July 26 post about Dollywood forcing a patron to cover the mild political message on her T-shirt that “might offend some.” Neil’s comment was about the anecdote included in my post, relating how the dress code at my college was brought down by a concerted effort to comply with its letter rather than its spirit, and how the subsequent loss of decorum in the dining hall was regarded my many students, including me, as a diminishment of the experience.  Here is that lost “Comment of the Day”—my apologies to Neil for the delay: Continue reading →

Major League Baseball, Forgivability, and List Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Unforgivable?*

Bleacher Reports is an enjoyable sports website, and it gives opportunities to aspiring writers and bloggers, some of whom are quite talented.  In addition to typical opinion pieces and reporting, the site has a fondness for lists, often trivial to the extreme, like “The 50 Ugliest Athletes of All Time.” The titles are all misnomers, because there is almost never any criteria given for the choices or their relative ranking. An accurate title would be, “The Fifty Athletes I Think Are The Ugliest.”  And of course, who cares? (Don Mossi, by the way, was the ugliest athlete ever, no matter what anybody says.)

A recent list, however did bother me. It is called “The Fifty Most Unforgivable Acts in Baseball History,“ and much of the problem with it lies in the title itself. If you are going to write about history, there is a duty perform diligent research, even for a silly online list. Misrepresentations online have a large probability of misleading people.  The title is a misrepresentation, like “The 50 Ugliest Athletes,” but unlike that list, there is some harm done. The list isn’t close to complete; it isn’t consistent; it isn’t well-researched. I’d bet that the author, Robert Knapel, wrote it off the top of his head.  Anyone who looked at the list and assumed, as the author represents, that these are truly the low points—“the dark side,” as the author puts it—of major league baseball would be seriously misinformed.

There are unequivocally, probably universally recognized incidents and events that are infinitely worse that most of the items on the list.  Just a  few samples: Continue reading →

CNN, Burying the News to Protect Its Own

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Come on, CNN! Who do you expect us to believe---you, Piers Morgan, or Paul?

Here is a suggested rule of reason for integrity-challenged media organizations. If they are intent on being so venal and cynical as to hire high-profile low-lifes who inflate ratings at the cost of the organization’s credibility, they can at least make their new employees agree that in the event of the inevitable scandal or embarrassing revelation, the infamous/dubious quasi-journalist understands and agrees that his or her employers will cover the matter like locusts on a wheat field, and with just as much mercy.

Reason, however, like ethics, has very little place in American broadcast media these days. Even though Piers Morgan, the new Larry King on CNN, is awash in allegations of phone hacking from no less than the King Beatle himself, Paul McCartney, CNN itself is ignoring the story, using the pathetic excuse that it isn’t a story until there is smoking gun evidence or until Morgan actually has to testify in England.

Morgan, for his part, appears to be lying through his teeth. Continue reading →

The Saga of Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt: Life in a Culture That Values Lies

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Post-surgery Montag, trying to stay famous

If you have taste, a job, and a brain, or don’t read a lot of “Us” and “People” in doctors’ offices, you may never have heard of Spencer Pratt and Heidi Montag. They were stars of the once popular TV reality show “The Hills,” and despite being two vacuous and shallow individuals of minimal common sense, talent or education, they presumed that they could ride the “famous for being famous” gravy train in celebrity-and-media obsessed America indefinitely. They couldn’t.

The Daily Beast features a horrifying interview with the pair, which is worth reading for its ethics lessons on several levels. For one thing, the degree to which the culture of dishonesty has progressed in America  surprises even me. Allowing yourself to be presented to the public as a completely manufactured personality in exchange for fame and fortune has always been part of the celebrity experience, but the reality show phenomenon has removed it from everything else—now the lie is all there is. And there are thousands upon thousands of attractive, young dimwits who actually aspire to such ersatz enshrinement in the culture as their life’s pursuit. Paris Hilton and the Kardashian sisters are these deluded individuals’ goddesses, despite the fact that 1) there are not 500 IQ points among the four of them and 2) they all have the benefit of rich trust funds to fall back on, so their jaunts as pop culture comets are more like diversions than careers, though profitable ones. Continue reading →

The Folly of Sacrificing Integrity to Kindness in Competitions

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

"Great idea, Mandy! Let's elect President Obama our school Homecoming Queen! He could use a a boost."

Integrity. 

Violate it at your peril. This is especially true if you are running a competition, no matter how trivial it might be.

Not only may a momentary waiver of integrity for what seems like an admirable cause permanently render a competition and the honor of winning it meaningless, it well may inspire the well-meaning and misguided to stretch the questionable logic of your decision to the breaking point.

Almost everyone has seen the heart-tugging TV ad from the mysterious Foundation for a Better Life, in which a high school girl with Down Syndrome is crowned Homecoming Queen. (“True Beauty. Pass it on!”) It bothered me the moment I saw it—at least after I wiped the tear from my eye. Based on a real incident in Missouri in 2008, the spot illustrates an ethical conflict between kindness and caring on one side and fairness and integrity on the other.

Of course this was a nice thing to do. It was undeniably kind, and the student involved will surely regard it as a high point in her life. But what does the Homecoming Queen title mean now, once it has been awarded for purposes completely divorced from its original purpose? If there is another Down Syndrome student in future years who doesn’t get a crown, will this indicate to her that she is less deserving of the award, and somehow lacking, since, after all, a girl like her won in a past year? Continue reading →

Scent Branding, Mind-Control, and Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Agreed: this is scary. We're not there yet. We don't even know if "there" exists.

A recent article on the web that purported to explore the ethics of “scent branding” was fascinating for two reasons.

First, “scent branding” is a term I had never encountered before, for a practice that I had not focused on. About five seconds of thought, however, made me realize that indeed I was aware of the phenomenon, and had been for quite a while. “Scent branding”—using fragrances in a commercial environment to create a desired atmosphere and to prompt positive feelings, recollections and emotions from patrons—has been around a long, long time, though not under that label. When funeral parlors made sure that their premises smelled of flowers rather than formaldehyde, that was a form of scent branding. Progress in the science of scent allowed other businesses to get into the act: I was first conscious of the intentional use of smell when I spent a vacation at the Walt Disney World Polynesian Villages Resort. The lobby and the rooms had a powerful “tropical paradise” scent, a mixture of beach smells, torches and exotic fauna. It was obviously fake, like much in Disney World; also like much in Disney World, I found it effective, pleasant, and fun. I certainly didn’t think of it as unethical. I was normal in those days, however.

Well, more normal.

The second aspect of the article, entitled “Is it Ethical to Scent Brand Public Places?”, that caught my attention was that it had an obvious agenda. The piece was opposed to scent branding, and set out to find the practice unethical in order to justify condemning it. Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: Meat Loaf

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Bravo.

I’m sure many of you will react to this with a hardy, “What an idiot!” That’s all right. You don’t understand.

In the grandest tradition of “The show must go on!”, 70’s rock legend Meat Loaf, now 63, finished a concert in Pittsburgh after he fainted on stage and lay unconscious for a full ten minutes. He got up, apologized, explained (obscenely) that it was his asthma, and continued to sing his old hits for a cheering crowd. “Kept suckin’ on his inhaler & singing his ass off,” one fan tweeted from the scene.

Grand. I love it.

In these times when rock acts are often hours late or severely shortened by the artist’s physical or pharmaceutical maladies, and when performers in general often consider it too much of a sacrifice to give their best efforts when healthy, not to mention when they have the sniffles, Meat Loaf’s dedication to his craft and particularly his audience is impressive, although not surprising. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Larry Flynt

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

BLECHHHH!

I know, I know. “In other news, the Earth spins, and the Atlantic ocean is wet!” Nevertheless, it is occasionally worth the trouble to remind ourselves what an unprincipled sleaze Larry Flynt is, especially with people still around who argue that he’s a hero.

Flynt announced on Nancy Grace’s show last night that talks are ongoing with Casey Anthony to have her nude and tattooed bod featured in Hustler magazine for $500,000 up front plus 10% of all profits. Flynt said he decided to make the offer after concluding there was a big market for seeing the acquitted child murder suspect in the buff. Continue reading →

MSNBC Hires Al Sharpton, As “Network” Becomes Reality

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Satire no more.

Noting that MSNBC has given Rev. Al Sharpton his own show, I am compelled to ask: What is broadcast journalism’s accepted criteria now that justifies an individual’s enshrinement as a cable news commentator?

Is it name recognition? The “right” political orientation, in this case, knee-jerk liberal? A ready-made fan base?  Theatrical presence? If these are the criteria, by all means, hire Al Sharpton. Hire Alec Baldwin, Donald Trump, Rod Blagojevich and Jane Fonda, too. Gary Busey. Manny Ramirez. Hulk Hogan. Bozo the Clown.

Or is the proper and responsible criteria credibility, integrity, honesty, fairness, and journalistic credentials? If those archaic standards are still in place, or if MSNBC wants to pretend that they are, then the hiring of Sharpton marks a new low in broadcast news coverage cynicism and recklessness. Continue reading →