The Internet

Note To Matt Drudge: He’s The President. Show Some Damn Respect

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

This will be short.

This week a fly was buzzing around the President’s head at a White House event this week, and  photographers got multiple shots of the insect as it lighted briefly on various parts of the President’s face. One comic use of such a photo is, I suppose, to be expected; we all know a fly on President Bush would have been all over the media. But Drudge has used the photos for two days now. (No, I’m not showing it, and I’m not sending Drudge links for being a sophomoric jerk.) It’s not funny. It’s unfair, mean-spirited, rude and disrespectful, and would be for any President.

Cut it out.

The Saga of the Entrepreneural Legal Mentor

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments
"OK, now pay attention. I'll teach you to hunt, but it will cost you..."

“OK, now pay attention. I’ll teach you to hunt, but it will cost you…”

Attorney Kenneth Beck is reeling from a barrage of criticism he has received for placing this ad on Craig’s List:

ARE YOU RECENTLY ADMITTED TO THE BAR, OR AWAITING BAR RESULTS, BUT NEED EXPERIENCE FOR THAT FIRST JOB?

General practice attorney with more than twenty years of experience is willing to train a small number of recently admitted attorneys, or those awaiting bar results. For a monthly fee, you will be able to shadow the experienced attorney, and learn by watching the day to day practice of law. Observe the following types of proceedings, as they occur; Civil Short Calender motion arguments, foreclosure mediation’s, pre-trial conferences, Workers Compensation and Social Security hearings, real estate closings, discovery proceedings and compliance, research and general office operations. …

The unprecedented ad, now pulled, prompted nasty e-mails from his target audience and a lot of ridicule on various legal blogs. Beck hit a nerve, obviously, in fact several: the perceived venality of the profession, the desperate plight of recent law grads in a tight market, the lack of practical training students receive in law school. Some even suggested that the ad rose, or rather fell, to the level of professional misconduct. “Will this kind of revenue producer be censured by the state bar association?”, asked the blog Law and More.

That one is easy: no, because nothing about the ad raises legitimate questions about Black’s trustworthiness or honesty, and there is no clear violation of any existing rules inherent in his proposition. Still, the question lingers: even if this doesn’t nick the Rules of Professional Conduct, is it ethical? Continue reading →

Man Bites Dog! Students Trick Teacher Into No-Tolerance Violation On Facebook!

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

How stupid can schools get?

duct tapeWell, let’s see: lets mix several themes that have surfaced on Ethics Alarms lately for a potent recipe:

  • Careless Social media posts
  • Overly protective parents
  • Misfired humor
  • Kids being kids
  • Brain dead school administrators
  • No-tolerance mindset

Melissa Cairns, a middle school math teacher at Akron, Ohio’s Buchtel Community Learning Center, is on unpaid administrative leave and facing terminationafter she  posted a photo on Facebook of some of her  students with duct tape covering their mouths. “Finally found a way to get them to be quiet!!!”she wrote. Nobody disputes what happened: a student who had been given duct tape by Cairns to repair a damaged book placed a piece of tape over her own mouth as a joke. Several other students did the same, and Cairns was urged to take a photo of the silly result. Then she posted it.

Harm: none.  Possible benefits: quite a few, if it helped Cairns connect with her class in a notoriously dry subject. Reaction of the school board: ridiculous. Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: “How To Gratuitously Offend Millions of People and Prove Yourself To Be An Ignorant Jackass in 140 Characters or Less” By Travis Okulski

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

Gawker editor tweet

Presumably I don’t have to explain why the tweet above, sent out by Gawker writer and editor Travis Okulski, and eventually deleted by him after someone drilled into his skull and planted some sense there, is cruel, disrespectful, callous, ignorant, offensive and wrong.

Here’s your Ethics Quiz, and it requires you to use the previous post, which you can find either beneath this one, or here:

Would you fire Okulski if he worked for you?

The question would be easy if I asked if Gawker should fire him, since that website is shameless and largely behaves as if ethics were a unicorn or the Kraken, a mythical creature only suckers and fools believe in.

Would you give him another chance, or would you conclude that any ass who would even think this can’t be trusted to brush his teeth in the morning?

I’m very curious.

___________________________

Pointer: Fox News

Fair and Unfair Facebook Post Firings

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

frustrated-at-workWhen is it fair for an employer to fire an employee for the contents of a personal Facebook post?

  • When the post harms the business, impugns the integrity of its staff or business practices, or otherwise affects the reputation of the company in the community.
  • When the post indicates that the poster lied to a superior.
  • When the post raises legitimate doubts about the poster’s fitness for a job, either in the minds of potential client and customers, or in the judgment of employers.
  • When the post is sufficiently  disreputable and offensive to the community at large that it raises the question of whether any company that hires or has such an individual in a position of authority can or should be trusted.
  • When the post shows poor judgement of such a degree that it reaches signature significance, and legitimately causes an employer to doubt the stability, sanity, or trustworthiness of the poster. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Slate Crime Blogger Justin Peters

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments
Read the Slate crime blog, and you could end up like this in seven days...

Read the Slate crime blog, and you could end up like this in seven days…

Slate triggered a mini-ethics train wreck by hiring a non-lawyer for what any fool could surmise would be an assignment that would often require knowledge of the law: covering the broad issue of crime for Slate’s readers. Note: to all those scambloggers who insist that there are no good jobs in which having a law degree would be an obvious asset: here’s an example. Their note back to me: “Oh, yeah? This why didn’t Slate hire one of us?”

Touché! I presume, however, that this was because the journalist Slate did hire, Justin Peters is an editor at the Columbia Journalism Review and has pals in Slate’s management…or, in the alternative, the online magazine has a death wish. I don’t think Slate has anything against lawyers. Peters is unethical, because ethical professionals don’t accept jobs they are unqualified to perform. Then again, journalists increasingly are unaware of the concept of ethics, so now we are back to Slate, and why they would hire someone to opine in a law-strewn field without knowing shinola about the law. Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: Petter’s Sex For Facebook Likes Deal

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

Sex for Likes

First Stan Musial dies, and now this.

 Petter Kverneng is an awkward  Norwegian teen. He wants to have sex with Cathrine, the love of his young life, and she 1) doesn’t or 2) wants to make him earn the privilege by showing how much he wants her or 3) wants to humiliate him first and then if she has to have sex, well, whatever. The story goes that she told him she would have sex with him if he could score 1,000,000  “likes” on Facebook. A large internet message board decided to either help out Petter or stick it to Cathrine, and now the pimply-faced youth has  1.2 million “likes” on his Facebook page.

Get ready, Cat.

Let us take an ethics inventory, shall we? What is interesting about this stupid story, if indeed it is true, is that many of its turns could be seen as both ethical and unethical. Continue reading →

The FIRE To The Rescue Again: But How Can This Keep Happening In U.S. Schools?

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

MontclaireThe FIRE, admirable campus First Amendment watchdog and champion that it is, is once again charging to the rescue of an innocent student being subjected to censorship, oppression and mind-control by a Stalinist state university…in new Jersey. Its victory is pre-ordained, as you will shortly see. The troubling questions are: Why are there schools in a democracy that act like Montclair State, presuming to tell students how to speak to each others and what views they can communicate in public? How do administrators that make and enforce such manifestly unethical and unconstitutional rules get hired in higher education—indeed, how are they bred at all? Finally, what vile and totalitarian principles does a school run by such dictators teach its students?

The facts of the case warrant little debate. Montclair State, in northeastern New Jersey, suspended Joseph Aziz, a 26-year-old graduate student, for comparing another student’s legs to “a pair of bleached hams” in a YouTube comment and defying a resulting ban on his internet speech. After his YouTube comments came to the attention of the school, Montclair State Coordinator of Student Conduct Jerry S. Collins  barred Aziz from all physical, verbal, and electronic contact with the student he had referred to in his YouTube comments. He also issued a virtual gag order, forbidding Aziz from posting on “any social media regarding” the student in question. Continue reading →

Is It Fair that Manti Te’o’s Dead Girlfriend Hoax Might Make Him A Less Attractive Draft Choice?

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Don’t be silly. Of course it is.

You'd think the green skin would have tipped him off....

The non-existent girlfriend. You’d think the green skin would have tipped him off….

If you are not aware of the particulars of this weird and confusing tale, read the extensive account here, and good luck to you. From an ethics perspective, all that matters is:

  • Somebody perpetrated a web hoax, creating an imaginary online girlfriend for Notre Dame football star Manti Te’o.
  • The young man told the media a touching story about how his grandmother and girlfriend had died the same day.
  • Without checking any aspect of the story, outlet after outlet repeated and embellished the tale, despite the fact that the girlfriend never existed.
  • In his comments to the press, Manti Te’o never revealed that he had not, in fact, ever met the woman face to face. Indeed, many of his comments suggested otherwise.
  • As of this writing, no one is certain who created the fake girlfriend, or whether Manti Te’o was in on the deception. Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: Cartoonist Ted Rall

/ Jack Marshall / 34 Comments

cartoon_plagiarism_444045

It is always courageous and exemplary when someone calls out his own profession for deficient ethical standards, and this is what political cartoonist Ted Rall has done on his blog. The topic: plagiarism in editorial cartoons, which is bad enough. Rall, however, makes strong case that the unethical practice flourishes because syndicates, editors, publications, honors committees and the professional associations tolerate it, and journalists don’t seem to care. He also blows the whistle on the practice known as self-plagiarism, where a cartoonist recycles his previous work as new. Rall writes, Continue reading →