The Internet

“Birthers”: Unethical, or Merely Deranged?

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Retired Air Force Lieutenant General Thomas McInerney, a military expert who appears as an analyst on Fox News, has submitted an affidavit in support of Army Lieutenant Colonel Terrence Lakin, who is refusing to deploy to Afghanistan because of his belief that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States. Lakin faces a court-martial for his refusal. Thus has General  McInerney officially admitted to being a “birther,” one of the legion of conspiracy theorists who deny Constitutional eligibility for the White House.

From McInerney’s affidavit: Continue reading →

Manny, Kanye, and the Farce of Self-Serving Apologies

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Two habitual bad actors in the world of entertainment apologized this week, for similar reasons and with equivalent credibility.

First, baseball slugger Manny Ramirez issued an apology to his former team once removed, The Boston Red Sox, for forcing the team to trade him in the middle of the 2008 pennant race because Manny was faking injuries, refusing to hustle during game, assaulting employees, and poisoning team morale and discipline. “I think everything was my fault,” Ramirez said. “You’ve got to be a real man to realize when you do wrong. Hey, it was my fault, right? I’m already past that stage. I’m happy. I’m in a new team,” Manny told reporters. He was with a new team, all right: the Dodgers, his previous team, let him go to the Chicago White Sox for nothing because, well, he was faking injuries, dogging it in the field…same act, different stage. So what was the apology about?

Manny, or more likely his agent, realizes this most recent break with a team as the result of his habitually juvenile and unprofessional attitude might cost him a lot of money at contract time—Ramirez is a free agent after all. So contrition was called for—two full years after he laughed off any suggestions that he was at fault for the Boston debacle, and proved that he had been loafing on the field by playing in L.A. like he was on fire. This isn’t an apology; it’s damage control, and thus is a deceitful and dishonest apology that has nothing whatsoever to do with genuine regret. The big tip-off is that Ramirez felt he had to explain why his apology was so admirable. Yes, Manny, you have to be a real man to admit you’re wrong; a real jerk to fake an apology to fool a future employer into believing that you’ve turned over a new leaf, and real fool to believe anyone will fall for it.

Then there is rapper Kanye West. Continue reading →

Child Exploitation or Great Adventure: What We Need To Know About “The Biking Vogels”

/ Jack Marshall / 94 Comments

America was just introduced to the biking Vogel family, as they embark on a charm offensive seemingly with a potential reality show in their sights. They appeared on ABC’s “Good Morning America” on Labor Day, and expect to get a boost in publicity thanks to a typical softball interview by a beaming stand-in for George Stephanopoulos. (Video taken and selected by the Vogels themselves accompanied the interview, further allowing them to present their trip in the most favorable light.) It would be have been both responsible and right, however, if the Vogels had been asked more pointed questions, probing the serious issue of whether John and Nancy Vogel may be exploiting and even abusing their children in pursuit of fame, fortune, and  an “Easy Rider” life-style that being parents of young children ought to preclude. Continue reading →

ER Ethics: “Oh…should I not have done that? Was that wrong?”

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Most Unethical Facebook Conduct of the Week: Staff members at a Long Beach, California hospital took pictures of a gruesomely wounded man in the emergency ward (his throat was cut) and posted them on Facebook. Yes, they really did they did. Continue reading →

Well, If The Washington Post Won’t Fire A Reporter For Intentionally Publishing Lies, At Least It Gets Angry At Him

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Mike Wise, a Washington Post sportswriter and columnist deliberately posted a phony scoop (about Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger) on Twitter, as an experiment to see how widely it would be picked up. His plan, he now says, was to correct the lie with a follow-up tweet.  Due to bad luck or the intervention of the God of Journalism, however, his Twitter account froze, and what was supposed to be a near immediate correction took almost forty minutes. Several internet sites, from the Miami Herald to NBC’s ProFootballTalk, passed on the original tweet, attributing it to Wise.

Faced with a staff reporter who intentionally published a lie for no other reason than to see what would happen, the Post reacted according to its concern regarding the seriousness of his conduct—that is, deceiving those who trust him, as a member of a legitimate media organization, to report only the truth and to respect the trust of his and his paper’s readers—and suspended him for one month. Continue reading →

Ignorant Juror, Malfunctioning Jury, Dysfunctional Justice

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

It was bound to happen, which is not to say that there is any excuse for it.  A juror during on a day off from trial, told the world via Facebook that she had already decided the defendant was guilty, writing that it was “gonna be fun to tell the defendant they’re guilty.” This statement, in addition to showing a disturbing lack of compassion and empathy, not to mention meanness, also was a violation of her duties as a juror. The trial wasn’t even finished, the jury hadn’t deliberated, and yet Hadley Jons, 20, had already decided on her vote and was bragging about it. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Beau Friedlander

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Beau Friedlander is a contributor to the Huffington Post who decided it was time to show just how vicious, uncivil and unhinged a committed progressive could be, there being ample evidence of these qualities on the other side of the political spectrum. So…

1. Friedlander wrote an angry and hate-filled rant slandering Tea Party members, Mormons, and Republicans and the American public generally;

2. He included, as the piece’s centerpiece, this:

“I hereby offer to negotiate a $100,000 payday to the person who will come forward with a sex tape or phone records or anything else that succeeds in removing Glenn Beck from the public eye forever. I am not offering the cash myself, but I will broker the deal and/or raise the money for what you bring to the table. (And it better be good.) If you have the goods, or if you want to contribute to a slush fund to buy more takedowns (probably not tax deductible), please contact me at: glennbecksextape@gmail.com.” Continue reading →

More Spam Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Increasingly, specialty blogs are sporting posts asking whether particular practices are ethical. That is a good thing. The unfortunate part is that too many of the posters lack the tools to answer the question.

You would think the proprietor of a website called “Pro Blog Service,” for example, would be capable of at least spotting the ethical issues in his query about blogging, but no. In a post entitled “Is It Unethical To Edit Spam Comments?“, he describes the common spamming practice of sending in a comment to a blog post that expresses bland and non-specific praise for the original post in order to get a URL publicized. He asks, Continue reading →

Unethical Headlines of the Week: Wired and Slate

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

The headline on the website Wired reads:

“Colonel Kicked Out of Afghanistan for Anti-PowerPoint Rant”

Slate picked up the story and gave it a slightly different spin in its headline, taking its cue from Wired:

“Colonel Fired for Hating PowerPoint”

These are provocative headlines, raising issues about the First Amendment, a fanatic insistence on conformity in the military, and even dark conspiracies involving the U.S. Army and Microsoft. However, they are completely and intentionally misleading. The colonel was not fired for hating PowerPoint, and he didn’t go on any “anti-PowerPoint rant.” Here is what really happened, in Wired’s own words: Continue reading →

Nettleton Middle School, Embracing Racism in 2010

/ Jack Marshall / 30 Comments

Help me out here: which category does this story fall under:

  • School administrator incompetence?
  • Warped community ethical  standards?
  • Racial quotas run amuck?
  • Evidence of human devolution?
  • Proof that time travel is real?

I’m not sure. I do know that when a memo like this one is issued by a school principal, indicating that class officers for the sixth, seventh and eighth grades are restricted by race, there had better be a lot of firing going on, really soon, up and down the entire school system and maybe the town government as well, because the people in charge must not be trusted for one more second to have anything to do with educating American children. Continue reading →