The Internet

Ethics Quote of the Week: Tom Hawking

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

“It’s not the role of our media and our journalists to shield us from truth; it’s their job to confront us with it. In this respect, the plurality of imagery is both a blessing and a curse, because in the sort of panic that follows an event like yesterday’s bombing, anything could be real. But equally, it’s also the volume of images and coverage — graphic and otherwise — that help us get a clearer picture of reality than we ever did in the days when our opinion was shaped by one journalist and a few photographs.”

—- Tom Hawking in his essay “The Ethics of Disaster Photography in the Age of Social Media,” discussing the controversy over whether graphic images from catastrophes like the Boston Marathon bombing ought to be published by the mainstream media, or should be toned down, edited, or withheld altogether.

Boston Marathon ExplosionHawking’s conclusions are spot-on, and you should read the entire essay here. Obviously horrendous photographs shouldn’t be thrust in readers’ and viewers’ faces; we should all have the opportunity to avoid seeing images we know would upset us. ( I have not looked at any of the graphic images from Boston. The text descriptions are plenty for me, thanks.) Leaving it to editors and journalists to decide how much realism we can stand, however, is folly. To be blunt, there is no reason to trust them. One of the blessings of the web and social media is that the traditional media no longer have the power to withhold information based on their biased and paternalistic judgement, which they are thoroughly unqualified by intellect, education  to render.

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Source and Graphic: Flavorwire (Tom Hawking)

Ethics Alarms attempts to give proper attribution and credit to all sources of facts, analysis and other assistance that go into its blog posts. If you are aware of one I missed, or believe your own work was used in any way without proper attribution, please contact me, Jack Marshall, at  jamproethics@verizon.net.

Unethical Quote of the Week: David Drumm

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

“Gosnell is on trial for 7 counts of first-degree murder regarding the deaths of seven babies, and one count of third-degree murder for the death of a female patient. Many conservatives pundits think there should be greater media coverage. Be careful what you wish for.”

–—David Drumm, guest blogger on Jonathan Turley’s “Res Ipsa Loquitur,” arguing that scrutiny of the facts behind the Gosnell late-term abortion murder trial will show that pro-life protestors at Planned Parenthood clinics forced some women to enter Dr. Gosnell’s “house of horrors,” so conservatives should be eager to suppress the ugly story, just as the main stream media has done to avoid sparking an emotional national debate over the realities of abortion.

I'll put up a more flattering photo, Professor Turley, when you stop letting unethical people write on your blog.

I’ll put up a more flattering photo, Professor Turley, when you stop letting unethical people write on your blog.

A statement like Drumm’s above is signature significance. I don’t need to read another word to know that this is a commentator driven by politics and tactics rather than principle. Why is someone like this guest blogging on Jonathan Turley’s website? Turley is a legal scholar, an ethics expert, and everything Drumm is clearly not. He does not take knee-jerk ideological positions; his commentary is not partisan, and he is a civil libertarian. Civil libertarians do not endorse media manipulation of the news in the pursuit of partisan agendas, which is exactly what Drumm does here. Continue reading →

Wikipedia Ethics And The Gosnell Trial

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments
Ah, sunlight! When all the machinations are revealed, it's a lot harder to be unethical.

Ah, sunlight! When all the machinations are revealed, it’s a lot harder to get away with  being unethical.

Apparently Wikipedia almost joined the media outlets operating a cover-up of the Gosnell baby-killing trial. For a while a debate raged on the site, with an editor advocating that the article about the abortion doctor at the center of the horrific allegations and testimony be deleted entirely, because Gosnell’s trial is only a “local multiple-murder story in Pennsylvania.”  Yes, and the Newtown murders are just a multiple-murder story in Connecticut. Outright hoaxes stay on the site for years, puff piece entries on virtual non-entities and insignificant organizations clog it, but a case with major policy implications bearing on a contentious national, bioethics  and human rights issue of long-standing isn’t worthy of a page? The editor in this case, whoever he is, is too biased and incompetent to hold the position. Had his argument prevailed, Wikipedia’s credibility and perceived trustworthiness would have been severely diminished, for an encyclopedia cannot have an ideological agenda, and the desire to marginalize the Gosnell story is smoking-gun proof of one.

Luckily, Wikipedia got it right in the end, and the article survived. What saved Wiki was transparency. The argument about the Gosnell article was open and public, and ethics always benefits when transparency reigns. You would think that would be one of the news media’s mottos…but not, apparently, when it means letting the public know how it is that certain stories get buried, marginalized and ignored.

(The mainstream media, not surprisingly, didn’t cover the Wikipedia debate, either.)

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Sources: Daily Caller1, Daily Caller2, Newsbusters

 

 

Portrait Of The Deadbeat As A Young Fick

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

christopher_robinson

We haven’t had a flaming fick for a while, but Christopher Robinson certainly qualifies for the term, denoting someone who proudly flaunts his anti-social, self-centered and unethical ways.

The man who took a photo of himself rolling in dough and then proudly posted it to Facebook, you see, is a deadbeat dad, owing three years of child support. His self-accusing photo brought him to the attention of authorities, and now he’s facing up to eleven years in prison if he’s convicted of willful non-payment.

Being a fick isn’t a jailable offense, but interestingly, most ficks find themselves in trouble with the law sooner or later.

Go figure.

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Facts and Graphic: ABC

Ethics Hero: Lawyer/Blogger Scott Greenfield

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments
No question: Justice Holmes would think Scott Greenfield is a good man.

No question: Justice Holmes would think Scott Greenfield is a good man.

Criminal defense lawyer and caustic, if trenchant, blogger Scott Greenfield stakes out a noble and correct stand on legal ethics and ethics generally in a superb post titled, “What Tastes Good To You?” Read the entire post, but his essay springs from a question that has been posed in various forums (including,  in slightly different form,the Jack Lemmon comedy “How To Murder Your Wife”), to wit:

If you could commit any crime and get away with it, what would it be? 

Greenfield’s answer, the ethically correct one, is “none” : “Just because we can get away with it isn’t a reason to do wrong.” Thus does he definitively separate himself from what Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes referred to as “the Bad Man” in his famous 1897 essay, “The Path of the Law.”  For Holmes’ “bad man” never breaks a law, but only because he abhors punishment.From this starting point, Greenfield considers a professional debate about whether the legal marketing tactic (as determined by the courts) of buying up another firm’s name as a web “key word” to lead customers to one’s competing firm is “unseemly,” which is to say, unethical, though not technically unethical under the professional rules of conduct. One of the defenders of the practice describes the division on the issue to a difference in “taste,” leading Greenfield to aim carefully and fire: Continue reading →

Self-Serving Twitter Plagiarism From Shia LaBeouf

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments
"How To Be A Jerk"

“How To Be A Jerk”

Actor Shia LaBeouf has two impressive achievements, neither anything to be proud of, but impressive nonetheless. In a showdown with World Champion Hollywood creep Alec Baldwin, LaBeouf, against all odds. managed to come off as the bigger jerk. In the process, he created, or at least gave unprecedented publicity to a new ethical transgression: Twitter plagiarism.

You will recall LaBeouf, if you recall him at all, as the former Disney Channel child star who had movie hits with “Disturbia” and the “Transformers” franchise, as well as gaining a form of lasting notoriety as Indiana Jones’ son in the fourth and lamest installment of that classic series. He also has established a reputation for being trouble, and this week it was revealed that he had been fired (the old “artistic differences” excuse) from what was supposed to be his Broadway debut in the new play “Orphans,” starring Baldwin. The exact reasons are unclear, but incompatibility with Baldwin was part of it.

How do I know that LaBeouf, rather than the famously volatile Baldwin was at fault? Simple, really. Baldwin is the show’s star; he has theater credentials; he’s an established pro. It is part of LaBeouf’s job to get along with him, not the other way around. He could also learn something from Baldwin, who, though it seems hard to imagine, was once an even bigger jerk than he is now—so big, that at one point his career had gone from losing the Jack Ryan franchise (to Harrison Ford) to playing the conductor in the sad and awful movie version of “Thomas the Tank Engine.” Baldwin knows where Shia is headed, and could help stop him from going there.

In the wake of his canning, LaBeouf took to his Twitter feed and posted various e-mails leading up to his fate. One of them was erudite and almost poetic:

“A man can tell you he was wrong. That he did wrong. That he planned to. He can tell you when he is lost. He can apologize, even if sometimes it’s just to put an end to the bickering.”

Hey! Jerk or not, this guy can write! He has a brain!

Well, no, not really: he has a computer, and can cut and paste. His words were lifted from Tom Chiarella’s essay in Esquire, “How To Be A Man.” Continue reading →

Ethics Note To Paul Krugman: The News Media Isn’t Your Toy

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments
Not bankrupt, at least, not financially...

Not bankrupt, at least, not financially…

The crippling lack of respect and contempt our warring ideological factions have for those on the other side is never better illustrated that when one partisan believes a satirical negative story about an adversary stalwart that any unbiased observer whose brain wasn’t partially melted by hatred would have flagged as false in a heartbeat. Thus do our biases make us stupid. The phenomenon was the basis of some well-derived mockery  last month, when Washington Post blogger Suzy Parker fell for the silly published on the parody website The Daily Currant that Sarah Palin had joined Al-Jazeera, and used the obviously phony tale to hammer Palin for hypocrisy.  I suggested that a journalist this gullible and biased wasn’t qualified to practice her craft, as she was obviously incapable of overcoming her prejudices and personal dislikes so that she could distinguish truth from comforting fiction.

The Right mocked Parker and the Post hardest of all—suuure there’s no liberal bias in the media!—- especially the Bad Boy of rightward blogs, Breitbart. Then along comes another gag story from the same source, The Daily Currant, announcing that New York Times tax-and-spend advocate, progressive cheerleader and Pulitzer prize-winning economist Paul Krugman has declared for bankruptcy, and Brietbart, for exactly the same reasons Parker believed that Palin would go to work for the Arabs,  couldn’t figure out that it wasn’t  true. Breitbart published this: Continue reading →

“House of Cards” Ethics: Zoe’s Unethical Tweet And The Right To Talk To Just One Person

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

house_of_cards

At the risk of stirring up the incorrigible defenders of the vigilante Applebee’s waitress, I must again point out that using social media to make a private indiscretion a public disgrace is terrible, grossly unethical conduct that threatens our freedom, trust,privacy and quality of life. The fact that the practice is gaining acceptance as something to be feared and expected is a frightening cultural development, and we are all obligated to do what we can to condemn it and eradicate it before it becomes a toxic social norm.

The Netflix political drama “House of Cards” provided a perfect example of what is wrong with this despicable trend in its fourth episode.  Zoe Barnes, the ambitious, unethical reporter in league with Kevin Spacey’s deliciously diabolical House Majority Whip, has brought her newspaper’s editor to the point of apoplexy in a confrontation in his office.  Already considering leaving for greener pastures, the reporter goads her sputtering boss into calling her a misogynistic epithet that she senses is just on the tip of his tongue. “Go ahead,” she taunts. “Say it.”

“You’re a cunt,” he finally replies. Zoe whips out her smart phone and tweets this exchange to her thousands of followers. “Call me whatever you want, “she sneers, “but remember, these days, when you’re talking to one person, you’re talking to a thousand.”

Wrong—not unless the person you’re talking to is unethical, vindictive, has rejected the social conventions of private conversation and is consigning the Golden Rule to the cultural trash heap. Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: Michael Arrington

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

michaelarrington

Michael Arrington is a tech publisher and blogger who made a good amount of money selling his previous blog, Techcrunch. He bought a boat with some of it, a nice one, with state of the art electronics. On the day his new toy was to be delivered, he had to work through customs and Homeland Security paperwork, since the boat was built in Canada.  Something went wrong, something stupid.  He writes,

“My job was to show up and sign forms and then leave with Buddy (WA sales tax and registration fees come a week later). DHS takes documents supplied by the builder and creates a government form that includes basic information about the boat, including the price. The primary form, prepared by the government, had an error. The price was copied from the invoice, but DHS changed the currency from Canadian to U.S. dollars. It has language at the bottom with serious sounding statements that the information is true and correct, and a signature block.”

It’s serious all right. It is a government form, and signing it is a legal attest that the information is correct. Arrington continues, Continue reading →

Tales From The “Ick!” Files: If Luke Married Leia…

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Luke and Leia

Emily Yoffe, who is not Ethics Alarms’ favorite advice columnist, gets one right at Slate—a weird one, but then, that’s the only kind of question she usually chooses to answer. If I had to bet, I’d place my money on this question being a fake. Emily acknowledges that possibility, but couldn’t pass this one up, and neither can I.

A loving husband who already knew that both he and his wife (it was virtually love at first sight when they met in college) were raised by lesbian parent couples who conceived via sperm donors found out that they both have the same donor to thank for their conception. Now he thinks “sister” every time he sees his spouse, and ask 1) what should he do? and 2) should he tell his wife that he has learned that they are half-siblings? Yoffe tells this poor guy to stop feeling guilty, and that he hasn’t done anything wrong. She also advises him to get some counseling, and to suck it up and tell sis about their dilemma….but not to reveal the secret to their kids, Anteater Boy and Tilly the Boneless. Continue reading →