Professions

Rahm Emanuel, History and Hyperbole Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

There are times when obvious exaggeration is nothing worse than politeness, nothing more than an expression of admiration and affection. “You’re the best boss anyone ever had,” is in this category, especially when the boss is retiring or dying. But when one is speaking in public about controversial and historical matters involving well-known public figures, the margin between excusable hyperbole and unethical dishonesty or worse is much smaller. Al Gore learned this when he played loyal Vice-President on the day his President was impeached by vote of the House of Representatives. Gore’s statement that Bill Clinton was “a man I believe will be regarded in the history books as one of our greatest Presidents” was intended as supportive, but interpreted as a toadying endorsement of Clinton’s unsavory and dishonest conduct, impeachable or not. It probably cost Gore the Presidency.

Worse yet was Trent Lott’s clumsy effort to praise the ancient, infirm and mentally failing Sen. Strom Thurmond at his 100th birthday party. Lott said, “I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have all these problems over all these years, either.” Thurmond, running on the Dixiecrat ticket, had opposed segregation, and Lott’s comment, less fact than flattery, made him sound like he longed for the days of Jim Crow and “white only”rest rooms. The lessons of these hyperbolic gaffes are similar: if the well-intentioned compliment concerns a public figure in historical context, historical exaggerations either appear to be unjust to history or its important figures, seem to make inappropriate value judgments, or come off as a blatant effort to mislead the public.

Rahm Emanuel hit the Trifecta with his fawning farewell to President Obama, as he left the White House to run for Mayor of Chicago. Obama, he said, is “the toughest leader any country could ask for, in the toughest times any president has ever faced.”

Wow. Continue reading →

CNN’s Rick Sanchez Firing Statement: Fair or a Missed Opportunity?

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

CNN promptly fired “Rick’s List” host Rick Sanchez after a bizarre satellite radio rant in which he accused “The Daily Show” host John Stewart of being a “bigot” (presumably because he often picks on Sanchez, who is a Cuban-American) and insinuated that both Stewart and bigwigs at CNN were not inclined to give Sanchez a fair shake because they are Jews.Of course he had to go.

The question is, how should the network have handled the firing? It opted for traditional: a straightforward statement that Sanchez wasn’t a CNN employee any more, and a gracious note of thanks and good wishes:

“Rick Sanchez is no longer with the company. We thank Rick for his years of service and we wish him well.“

Blogger Sam Rubin, however, feels that CNN “blew it.” Here is the statement Rubin feels CNN should have made, taking a stand and being aggressively critical while showing Sanchez the door: Continue reading →

Yucks All Over:Sifting Through the Whitman/Allred/Diaz/Brown Ethics Train Wreck

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Is anyone doing or saying the right thing for the right reasons in the current controversy in California over Meg Whitman’s housekeeper? I think not. Let’s look at the main participants, and avert your eyes. It ain’t pretty:

Gloria Allred: Emerging out of nowhere to manufacture a campaign controversy that may sink conservative Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman’s chance of beating liberal Democrat golden oldie Jerry Brown, feminist advocate Allred is exploiting a long-time illegal immigrant for political purposes (Allred’s support for Brown goes back decades), torpedoing the campaign of a woman trying to be the state’s first female governor. Continue reading →

Food Preparation and the Right to Have Unethical Views

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Ethicist Chris McDonald, who holds forth on his  Business Ethics Blog, has a provocative post on the right to know what you’re eating on another of his blogs, the Food Ethics Blog. I have no quarrel with the main point of his post, which I recommend that you read it here.

A related point in the article, however, not involving ingredients but food preparation, caused me to stop and ponder. Dr. McDonald writes…

“… imagine again that you’re a waiter or waitress. As you set a plate of food down in front of a customer, the customer asks: “Were any ‘minorities’ involved in the production of this food? Do you have any foreigners working in the kitchen?” Appalled, you stammer: “Excuse me?!” The customer continues, “I don’t like immigrants, and I don’t like the idea of them touching my food. I have the right to know what I’m eating!” Does this customer have the right to that information? Most of us, I think, would say no, of course not. She might see that information as really important — important to letting her live her life the way she wants to — but few of us would agree that anyone else is obligated to help her live out her racist values.”

I think the customer’s request for information regarding who is preparing one’s food is a valid one. Continue reading →

Chris Plante and the Cupcakes: Why You Can’t Trust Talk Show Hosts

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

A new Gallup poll shows that the public’s trust in news media has plunged to discouraging new (but completely deserved) levels. One of the side effects of this, the inevitable and correct result of  the incompetence, arrogance and bias of journalists and editors every single day, is that the public has begun to trust even less trustworthy sources. For example, a large proportion of twenty-somethings get their primary news information from the Daily Show, which is today’s equivalent of using Bob Hope’s monologues as a current events resource. This is foolish beyond words, because Jon Stewart’s professional obligation is to be entertaining, provocative and funny, not fair, accurate, or responsible. Indeed, if he has an opportunity to make a hilarious joke and doesn’t do it because it would require distorting the truth, he’s breaching a professional duty. He’s accountable to no one; he has no ethical standards to meet. It is unfair to rely on Jon Stewart for the news. He doesn’t want your trust: don’t trust him.

Others…older, but no wiser…go to public issue talk shows as their primary news sources. These people are not journalists either. They may be lawyers, former military men, spooks, authors, agitators, stealth political candidates,  or pundits; they may also be comedians, satirists, blowhards, ignoramuses, idiots, misanthropes, radicals, cynics, phonies or bigots. Among their ranks are too many agendas to count, in addition to those they all share: they want you to listen to them and adopt their views of the world. Those agendas are not conducive to truth either.

Some of the talk show hosts are less trustworthy than others. Take Chris Plante, for example—a B-list conservative talk show host whose primary tools are smugness and mockery. Continue reading →

“The Good Wife” Ethics, Season #2: Alicia, Kalinda, and Pretexting

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

The acclaimed CBS series “The Good Wife” premiered last night, with an episode called “Taking Control.” The title is ironic in one respect. Because the legal profession regards lawyers as being in control of the non-legal staff that works for them, good wife and whiz-bang attorney Alicia Florrick (played by Juliana Margulies) violated one of the most important legal ethics rules in the very first episode. This was far from unrealistic, however. Her ethical breach is not only a common one, but also one that many lawyers are careless about. It is also unethical conduct that the public assumes is standard practice for lawyers…because movies and TV shows make it seem that way. Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: “Dancing With The Stars” Judge Bruno Tonioli

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Bruno Tonioli, one of the judges on “Dancing With The Stars,” gave celebrity dance contestant Michael Bolton a lousy score for his lousy quickstep to the tune of “Hound Dog”with partner Chelsie Hightower, and reportedly Bolton’s  fellow dancing celebrities were “enraged”—especially since Tonioli said the performance was the “worst” dance he’s seen in 11 seasons. That may have been a little harsh, but not by much. His dancing was arguably not worse than, say, Tucker Carlson of a few seasons back, who never got out of a chair. Still, among past dance-challenged contestants who actually got on their feet, Bolton was about as bad as it gets. He made Kate Gosselin look like Cyd Charisse by comparison. Continue reading →

Mayhill Fowler and The Ethics of Quitting

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

The internet creates unfortunate opportunities for the fired, rejected, under-appreciated and disgruntled to do all sorts of harm to their previous employers and themselves. Former Huffington Post blogger Mayhill Fowler has considerately given us an object lesson in how not to leave a job, though at some personal sacrifice. Continue reading →

Wildlife Documentary Deception

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Great. CNN and NBC weren’t enough: now we can’t trust the National Geographic channel and Animal Planet.

Chris Palmer, a veteran wildlife photographer, recently went on NPR to talk about his new book. In Shooting in the Wild: An Insider’s Account of Making Movies in the Animal Kingdom, Palmer reveals the secrets of his trade, which apparently include renting trained animals when the ones in the wild won’t cooperate and putting M&M’s in the carcasses of prey, so the predators eat with gusto. He also expound on the use of a sound-effects technician to simulate sounds of animals breathing, chewing, drinking and flying. “You can’t get close enough to a bear to record his breath or his splashing in the water. If you got that close, you’d be in great danger,” he told NPR.

Although Palmer attributes the increase in the use of staged and fake footage in nature films to tighter budgets and shooting schedules, surely we had an inkling that this went on from the very beginning. The inventor of the form, Walt Disney, used animals as documentary actors in movies like “The Incredible Journey,” and I always assumed that Disney’s “true life adventure” nature films like “Jungle Cat” and “The Living Desert” included staged scenes, including battles between animals that were far from spontaneous.

Disney, however, is in the entertainment business. When wildlife documentaries announce themselves as real, they should be real, and if the producers staged sequences, rented animals, or used M&M’s, they have an ethical obligation to tell the audience. This goes for sounds as well. After all, there are people who think big snakes make the roaring sound the CGI villain makes in “Anaconda”; the fake sounds in nature films mislead many more. Real life footage is supposed to teach us something, not stuff our heads full of more misinformation.

That’s the job of CNN and NBC.

There is a lot of amazing wildlife footage that is not staged; the question now, in light of Palmer’s book, is how we are supposed to identify the fakes. The sound effects are a good clue. I will say this: if I find out that the story of Christian the lion was faked, I’m going to be angry.

But there is always “the battle at Kruger.”

[Thanks to Lauren Larson for the tip.]

Accountability Alert: The “Embarrassment” Was the Nation’s, Not Colbert

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

In a stunning failure of perception, accountability and responsibility, the second most powerful Democratic House leader, Steny Hoyer of Maryland, actually had the gall to criticize Stephen Colbert for Hoyer’s own party’s disgraceful conduct, which was egregious enough to humiliate the institution of Congress, the democratic process, and the nation as well.

“I think it was an embarrassment for Mr. Colbert more than the House,” Hoyer told “Fox News Sunday.”
“What he had to say was not the way it should have been said.”

Unbelievable. Hoyer’s party’s own committee invited Colbert, a comedian whose shtick is mocking conservative Republicans, to testify about the wisdom of allowing illegal migrant workers to harvest crops despite the fact that he has no special expertise or credibility on the subject whatsoever. Continue reading →