To get you revved up to post on important or intriguing, ethics matters, here is an actual comment I just kicked out of moderation:
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You should see all of the sincere letters I get from people who will pay to have articles printed in Ethics Alarms on topics having no conceivable connection to the topic of the blog who have obviously never read a single post.
And ignore facts, history common sense and reality. Like so much of the Hamas-Israel Ethics Trian Wreck, this car has value unrelated to the war itself. Now we can understand why the Times op-eds are the way they are.
The Times just published a column by a recent edition to its stable of extreme woke pundits. Lydia Polgreen opines, in “This Photograph Demands an Answer,” that the news media should bombard the public with photographs that will flood readers’ minds with emotion, making rational, objective analysis difficult or impossible.
Many people may want to look away, to see the world as they prefer to see it. But what should we see when we see war? What should war demand all of us to see and understand? Given my experience in war zones, it is a rare thing for a violent image to stop me in my tracks. But I believe that this is an image that demands to be seen….And so I ask you to look at these children. They are not asleep. They are dead. They will not be part of the future. But know this: The children in the morgue photo could be any children. They could be Sudanese children caught in the crossfire between two feuding generals in Khartoum. They could be Syrian children crushed under Bashar al-Assad’s bombs. They could be Turkish children who died in their beds when a shoddily constructed apartment block collapsed upon them in an earthquake. They could be Ukrainian children slain by Russian shells. They could be Israeli children slaughtered in a kibbutz by Hamas. They could be American schoolchildren gunned down in a mass shooting. These children are ours.
Pulling fire alarms? Child’s play. Challenging a Senate hearing witness to a rumble? Peanuts!
Felicia Franklinwas relieved of her job as Clayton County (Georgia) Board of Commissioners vice chair after the September incident above, recorded on police body cameras. Her condition was apparently caused by downing three 40-proof Hennessy and Grand Marnier drinks, a glass of wine and some beer, along with cannabis oil.
Franklin is suing the county, claiming that she was drugged with GHB, but, as you can hear in the video, there was no evidence of that. She’s a class act, to be sure: after she was roused from her unconscious state on the sidewalk, lying in her own urine, Franklin began screaming, crying, cursing at and pushing away the first responders.
“The Clayton County Board of Commissioners deemed the removal of Franklin as vice chair and additional sanctions in the best interest of the county, citing behavior unbecoming of the position,” county officials said in a statement. Ya think? “The Board finds its citizens expect its elected officials to behave in a manner which brings a positive reflection on the citizens, businesses, and employees of the county,” it went on to say.
Do citizens still expect that? If so, how do people like Franklin, Rep. Jamaal Bowman, and Senator Markwayne Mullin get elected? Margaret Bryant, a county resident and Franklin supporter, shows how: she told reporters the board should have been more forgiving.
“I think it was a bad move and an unfair move,” Bryant said. “Who hasn’t done something they are ashamed of?”
Good point. What elected official hasn’t gotten roaring drunk, passed out on the sidewalk, fought with EMTs as they were taken to the hospital, then lied about it? Come on! Be fair!
Well, at least the troll presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy has some uses. His hectoring pulled an “A Few Good Men”- style “You’re goddamn right I did!” confession from ex-CNN pretty boy hack Chris Cuomo. Fredo wasn’t admitting that he ordered a “Code Red,” though/ Instead, Cuomo spat out proof not just of his own lack of journalistic ethics but also of the ethics void in U.S. journalism as a whole.
At one point in his contentious interview on Cuomo’s NewsNation cable show, Ramaswamy challenged the host to “Look the audience in the eye and tell them how you covered for your brother.” Cuomo immediately shot back, “You don’t want to take care of your family, that’s fine. Of course I covered for my brother. Of course I help my brother. Of course I do.”
It is depressing to me that I feel it necessary to write anything here at all, other than to post the video above.
Mullins decided to make a Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee hearing about personal animus between him and Teamsters chief Sean O’Brien. He read into the record tweeted insults by O’Brien, who had called the Oklahoma Republican a “moron” and “full of shit” among other juicy descriptors. This precipitated the disgusting display above, with Mullin daring O’Brien to a fistfight, “right here, right now,” and both men apparently preparing to due battle in the U.S. Capitol. “If you want to run your mouth, we can be two consenting adults. We can finish it here,” Mullins said.
Luckily committee chair Bernie Sanders appeared to have some sense of honor and decorum, and ordered Mullin to stand down, saying, “You are a United States Senator! Sit down!” Mullin is a former professional MMA fighter, and apparently needed reminding.
For unexplainable reasons, my wife and I have been watching old episodes of “48 Hours” of late. You know the show, I assume: the CBS documentary/news magazine has been broadcast on the network since January 19, 1988, though in periodically mutating forms. It is currently the only remaining first-run prime time shows appearing Saturday nights on the four major U.S. broadcast TV networks, and as such illustrates what dinosaurs those networks are and where they are headed.
“48 Hours” illustrates a lot of other things too, I have discovered, many of them carrying useful, disturbing, or surprising ethical and cultural implications. Although the show’s format is sometimes chucked to cover a breaking news story, most of its astounding number of episodes are devoted to “true crime” tales, usually mysteries and recently solved cold cases.
The formula seldom varies: we get a quick description of a U.S. locale, snippets of local citizens describing it in glowing terms, then an ominous overview of the participants in the ugly event we are about to hear, almost invariably a shocking murder. Then the CBS host—here’s how old the show is: the original host was Dan Rather—is shown interviewing family members, witnesses, law enforcement officials, journalists, lawyers, jurors and other participants. The show is carefully apolitical, but it is still a fascinating series of snapshots of our society and the treatment of it by the news and entertainment media.
Among the striking impressions that emerge from the accumulated impact of “48 Hours”—
A protest sign at the massive Pro-Hamas rally in London last week
I have been procrastinating in finishing this series, waiting for a final shoe to drop and instead being buried by dozens. So let’s get it out of the way, admitting that the ethics rot being exhibited by the American Left’s anti-Semitism, obtuseness regarding the nature of war and appalling ignorance of history is now on full display for all to see and retch over. When it stops nobody knows, especially me. Ethical people can only hope that there are appropriate consequences. I can’t begin to thoroughly cover the revolting developments, but this is the best I can do…
1. Perhaps the most ethically head-exploding news was that four photojournalists who provide reporting and photos for major news media outlets like Associated Press , CNN, the New York Times, Reuters, and others were apparently embedded with the Hamas terrorists as they murdered Israeli civilians in the sneak October 7 attack.. The question being raised is: Did they have advance notice of the assault, and yet simply go along to get vivid photos to sell? Or to put it another, more pointed way, did the AP, CNN, the New York Times, and Reuters know about the Hamas terror attack in advance…a and do nothing to warn Israel?
Of course they are all denying it. This would violate specific principles of journalism ethics, and you and I know how seriously this organizations take those….
Properly, “salmagundi” describes a salad or cold plate made from disparate ingredients that may include meat, seafood, eggs, cooked and raw vegetables, fruits, pickles, or something else. Metaphorically, the word is sometimes used to describe a chaotic confluence of things, ideas or people, forming an incoherent mess. That is how Ethics Alarms will use the term going forward. An Unethical Salmagundi (U.S.) will describe one of those mass collisions of people, situations and institutions that are devoid of ethical logic, discipline or comprehension. An ironically named U.S. will be more disorderly and incomprehensible than an ethics rain wreck, and impossible to sort out. Here is an example from the weekend’s news:
One reason (out of , oh, a thousand or so) that I dread another four years of Donald Trump is the inevitable avalanche of “get Trump!” stories from the mainstream news media, trying to instill fear based on what he reportedly said or thought or considered as reported by some malign mole, or, as in this case, deliberately spinning some off-the-top-of-the-head careless musings into existential threats to the nation. These are sinister and disgusting breaches of journalistic ethics supporting Trump’s description of the media as “enemies of the people,” or, in the alternative—there’s that darn Hanlon’s Razor again!—move evidence that bias makes you, or in this case, them, stupid.
I have a confession: when I read the multiple headlines screaming that Trump had said that he would prosecute political foes if he was elected President, I just assumed that he really said that. What’s the matter with me? I know all of these sources are corrupt, dishonest, and determined to undermine Trump’s candidacy by any means necessary, and yet I still default to the romantic, Pollyanna notion that journalists can be trusted.
When I saw this news story, I felt just like the Ghostbusters in the scene above from”Ghostbusters II.” Few ethics train wrecks have been as controversial and as ugly as that set in motion by the rape and nearly fatal beating of the Central Park jogger, Trisha Meili, in New York City on April 19, 1989. You can refresh you memory (if you were around then) here. To briefly summarize, six young black and Hispanic men were identified in part by statements from the white victim, who had suffered brain damage and lost most of her blood. All were indicted, though one, Steven Lopez, pleaded guilty to a different assault to have the rape charges dropped. The others came known as The Central Park Five—Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana, and Korey Wise —-were convicted of rape and battery charges and served sentences ranging from seven to thirteen years. The way the case had been handled by police and prosecutors had long been criticized, as well as mood of public opinion and the news media, which demanded retribution with little concern for facts, fairness or due process. (Does this sound like any other recent sensational case of more recent vintage?)
Nobody doubted the Five’s guilt: they had all confessed under tough (as in illegal) police questioning, but later recanted. Donald Trump, then only a celebrity real estate mogul, paid for a full page newspaper ad demanding they they be convicted and executed. It read in part, “Mayor Koch has stated that hate and rancor should be removed from our hearts. I do not think so. I want to hate these muggers and murderers. They should be forced to suffer … Yes, Mayor Koch, I want to hate these murderers and I always will. … How can our great society tolerate the continued brutalization of its citizens by crazed misfits? Criminals must be told that their Civil Liberties End When an Attack On Our Safety Begins!”
Ethics Alarms 