The Internet

“Do The Vicious And Stupid Thing”—A Spike Lee Production

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Ethics Dunce Extraordinaire: Director Spike Lee

The film director, writer, social critic, sports fan and incurable hot-head has apparently tweeted—twice— the home address of George Zimmerman, who is the man who shot Trayvon Martin.

Meanwhile, the New Black Panthers have placed a cash bounty on “capturing” Zimmerman, and he is also receiving death threats.

If someone uses the Lee-tweeted address to go and kill Zimmerman—certainly within the realm of possibility given the over-heated, emotional and irresponsible rhetoric over Martin’s death—Lee  won’t be prosecuted. But his conduct is vicious and criminal in spirit.

Well, Twitter has wrecked plenty of lives; it’s just a matter of time before it ends one. Spike Lee is just the man to make it happen.

There is no excuse for this.

 

Easy Call: Employers Asking For Facebook Passwords? It’s Unethical. So Let’s Stop It.

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

Ethics Alarms’ predecessor, The Ethics Scoreboard, had a feature known as “Easy Calls,” where I would render periodic ethics verdicts I thought should be obvious. Today’s talk radio and blogosphere sensation, the report that asking for a job applicant’s Facebook password is becoming a common practice of employers, is a classic easy call. And like a lot of those on the Scoreboard, an amazing number of people are getting this easy call wrong anyway.

For example, I heard lawyer-radio talk-show host Laura Ingraham today mock complaints about the practice, saying it was a legal request. Sure, it’s legal. It is still wrong, an indefensible incursion of personal privacy. “You are always free to look for a job somewhere else,” Ingraham says, as if that makes everything fine. Being free to reject an unfair and coercive job requirement doesn’t make it any less unethical. Law professor Orrin Kerr says that the Facebook demand is in the same league as demanding a job applicant’s house keys. Let’s see, what else could a prospective employer ask? Continue reading →

Our News Media’s Integrity Vaccum: The Malia in Mexico Blackout

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Here is a good example of how framing is critical in analyzing the news. When various conservative blogs and commentators started complaining that the AP’s report on the Obamas’ oldest daughter spending spring break in Mexico was disappearing from news media websites across the net, I saw it as a non-story from an ethics perspective, and certainly not, as was being suggested, an example of White House censorship of legitimate news. If I was President  Obama and my young teenage daughter was in Mexico, I’d ask the media to leave her alone too.

I thought other criticism of the President in this incident was unfair as well. Some critics suggested that it was irresponsible of the First Couple to allow their daughter to travel anywhere in a nation where the State Department had issued an advisory that it was not safe to travel. The Obamas are bad parents now? I assume that they are certain that their daughter will be safe, and have taken appropriate measures to ensure that. This is not within the realm of legitimate topics for political sniping.

Thus I wasn’t going to write about this, just as I decide not to write about a wide assortment of ethics-related events and topics that I consider and discard every day. By looking at it as an issue of  government and leadership ethics, however, I missed the real story, which involves journalistic integrity and courage. The Obamas certainly had a right to ask that Malia’s spring break travels be unreported, but a responsible and fair U.S. news media would have told them, politely, no. Continue reading →

Ethics Corrupters on The Web: Symptoms of a Cheating Culture

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

I encountered this charming example of high school cheating advice quite by accident. There is a stunning amount of this kind of thing on the web, and perhaps what is most impressive about it is the matter-of-fact way it is received. This example was posted on a Facebook page, and the few posters who registered objections to it as cheating were ridiculed. mocked and insulted by the rest as prudes, fools, judgmental ass-holes, “holier-than thou” bitches, and worse. One commenter couldn’t understand why this would  even be called cheating. “Nobody’s copying any  exam answers!”, he asked, puzzled.

The trick here reminds me of a response I got from a lawyer in an ethics seminar, as I was discussing a hypothetical in which an attorney had promised to review a non-profit client’s by-laws that had to be included in a crucial grant submission. Continue reading →

Funny! But Unfair.

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Here’s conservative news aggregator Matt Drudge’s top of the page lead headlines at the moment…

If you are going to try to make the (silly and petty) argument that there is something unseemly about the President taking a break from the heavy lifting his job entails to indulge his passion for March Madness basketball, then make it. Implying it this way is snide and unfair; it reminds me of the trouble the Harvard Crimson got into years ago when its printer placed a photo from an art exhibit that appeared to depict two young people engaging in oral sex right next to a headline that read, “New Cafeteria Opens at Radcliffe.”

Funny!  But still wrong.

As I’m sure Matt Drudge knows this.

He just doesn’t care.

The Ethics Verdict on the Homeless Hotspot Project

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

BBH Labs, the innovation unit of the international marketing agency BBH, hired members of the Austin, Texas homeless population to walk around carrying mobile Wi-Fi devices, offering high-speed Internet access in exchange for donations. Thirteen volunteers from a homeless shelter were hooked up to the devices, given business cards and put in shirts with messages that designated them as human connections. “I’m Rudolph, a 4G Hotspot” read the label on the homeless man on the New York Post’s front page with the lead, “HOT BUMS!”

The Walking Hotspots—now there’s a new horror series for AMC when they run out of zombies— were told to go to the most densely packed areas of the South by Southwest high-tech festival in Austin, Texas, where the technology trend-devouring conventioners often overwhelm the cellular networks with their smart phones. Attendees were told they could go up to a Homeless Hotspot and log on to his 4G network using the number on his T-shirt. A two-dollar contribution to the homeless man was the suggested payment for 15 minutes of service. BBH Labs paid  the wired-up homeless $20 a day, and they were also able to keep whatever customers donated.

What BBH called its “charitable  experiment” ended yesterday with the conference, and with all participants seemingly thrilled. The “Homeless Hotspot” gimmick got nationwide publicity, thirteen homeless men made some money, and conference participants got great connectivity…so why were so many people upset? Continue reading →

Well THAT Didn’t Take Long: The Next Step in School Censorship of Student Speech

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

Huh. You know, I just didn't think it would come from the schools! Well, live and learn...

Ethics Alarms has been steadfast in its position from the very first reports of schools presuming to punish students for what they post online, in their own time, in their own homes. That position is, and will forever be, that this is a gross abuse of power that must not be tolerated, much less encouraged. Every time I have written about this, there have been defenders of the practice. This story, from Minnesota, should convince them of how wrong they are. Continue reading →

Needed: An Ethics Alarm For Twitter

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Pat Heaton, Twitter road kill.

Twitter, I have concluded, is itself an ethics trap. What the social networking site allows one to do is to take the usual, daily, routine moments of bad judgment, bad manners, carelessness meanness, incivility, indiscretion and stupidity that we all are guilty of on a regular basis, and magnify their perceived harm and significance exponentially. For the famous, this is especially perilous—witness “Everybody Loves Raymond” star Patricia Heaton, one of Hollywood’s few  open conservatives. She decided to join the Fluke-Limbaugh Ethics Train Wreck with a snotty tweet (“If every Tweaton sent Georgetown Gal one condom, her parents wouldn’t have to cancel basic cable, & she would never reproduce — sound good?”), and it has turned into a career crisis. Pre-Twitter, such a sentiment could have been shared orally with a few friends in snark-fest, or sent as an e-mail to a few trusted associates. But the tweet was viewed as piling on, which it was.

Even the non-famous are at risk: many women were outed on various blogs as idiots for tweeting after the Grammys how much they would like to be beaten up by Singer Chris Brown. Nobody knows when a badly thought out or offensive tweet will be re-tweeted into immortality. Then there is Twitter negligence. Pop idol Justin Bieber just engaged in that form of unethical Twitter conduct. Instead of sending a partial phone number to one friend, he sent it to all of his thousands of followers, who then drove a poor innocent crazy by flooding him with over 1000 phone calls. Continue reading →

Taking A Stand On Privacy, As Ethics Alarms Go Silent

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

"Oh, all right---as long as I get that job."

The cultural consensus on the boundaries of personal privacy are eroding more quickly than I imagined. There are a lot of reasons for this: the intrusions of technology, increased government intrusiveness as part of anti-terror measures, utilitarian calculations that conclude that privacy should be sacrificed for supposedly more worthy objectives, like preventing bullying, or discouraging sexism and anti-gay attitudes. Whatever the reasons, it is crucial that society puts the brakes on, hard, or George Orwell’s nightmare will arrive remarkably intact, just a few decades late.

A stunning report on the MSNBC blog Red Tape reveals that some state agencies are routinely requiring job applicants, as a condition of employment, to provide full access to their social networking accounts so their otherwise private communications can be monitored. Equally disturbing, college athletes at many colleges are being required to “friend” a coach or other university personnel, who can keep tabs on what the student is posting. From the University of North Carolina handbook: Continue reading →

Charles M. Blow’s Bigoted Anti-Mormon Tweet, Chapter 2: Ironies, Regrets, and Hypocrisy on the Left

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Charles M. Blow, trapped in regret-apology hypocrisy. Fortunately for him, his paper doesn't care.

Charles M. Blow, the New York Times columnist who sent his followers an uncivil, unprofessional and bigoted tweet regarding Mitt Romney and his faith during Wednesday’s debate [“Let me just tell you this Mitt ‘Muddle Mouth’: I’m a single parent and my kids are *amazing*! Stick that in your magic underwear.”] issued a fascinating…something...today in response to criticism, which did not come from the supposedly bigotry-sensitive left. He tweeted:

“Btw, the comment I made about Mormonism during Wed.’s debate was inappropriate, and I regret it. I’m willing to admit that with no caveats.”

It is fascinating to me that this is being called an apology by Blow’s supporters and conservative critics alike. If it is an apology, and that is open to dispute, I’d like someone to explain to me how Blow can use “regret” as a stand-in for “I apologize,” and yet the same commentators who are interpreting the word that way have insisted that President Obama’s repeated use of “regret”to refer to past U.S. foreign policy actions was not the equivalent of apologizing, and have in fact stated that this interpretation by conservative critics is “a lie.”

Among those who have defended the President in this way, I believe, is Charles M. Blow. Continue reading →