U.S. Society

Jerry Springer (RIP) Was An Ethics Corrupter

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Jerry Springer has died at 79. I’m not glad he’s dead, but when someone has as damaging an effect on the culture as he did, the fact belongs in his obituary. Attention should be paid.

Springer was the epitome of an ethics corrupter. He held the poor, uneducated, non-too-bright and badly socialized up to public ridicule. He encouraged foolish people to embarrass themselves on TV. He also sent the message to many of his less civilized, socialized and mature viewers that the best way to deal with conflict is a punch in the chops.

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Ethics Quiz (“The Password Is ‘Civility'”): Fired For A Foul-Mouthed Faux Pas

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

ESPN fired national baseball reporter Marly Rivera, an ESPN Radio MLB analyst who has also appeared on baseball telecasts, after an incident at Yankee Stadium in which she called a female reporter from another outlet a “fucking cunt” during an altercation. The incident was caught on someone’s cell phone video (of course), and posted on social media. When the clash and the vulgarity got back to Rivera’s employer, ESPN canned her.

Rivera had been with ESPN for 13 years, working for ESPN’s English language platforms as a writer and on-air personality, and for ESPN Deportes. Reportedly she attempted to apologize to the object of her epithet, but was rebuffed.

Your Ethics Alarms Civility Quiz of the Day is…

Was it fair and responsible to fire Rivera for her outburst?

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Who Do You Trust, CNN Or Don Lemon? (Hint: It’s A Trick Question)

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Here is how Don Lemon announced his firing from CNN on Twitter…

Here was CNN’s response:

Lemon is an incorrigibly unprofessional and biased pseudo-journalist who has one of the most damning and extensive Ethics Alarms dossiers extant. he’s thrown tantrums, made up fake history, lied, peddled fake news and appeared drunk on the air. I think my favorite inexcusable babbling self-indulgence by Don was this, but I easily could have missed one, or dozens. Anyone that believes anything Don Lemon says, writes, publishes or tweets is dangerously gullible.

CNN, meanwhile, kept Lemon on the air in a high-profile, prime-time slot despite his lack of integrity and journalism competence, because it viewed him as an attractive messenger for its steady diet of biased, slanted and occasionally fabricated news stories serving its management’s partisan objectives. CNN is a little less trustworthy than Fox News, and a little more trustworthy than MSNBC, or, to be brief, completely untrustworthy.

The answer to the question posed in the headline is “Neither.”

“Blue Bloods” Jumps The Ethics Shark

/ Jack Marshall / 51 Comments

I can’t be too hard on “Blue Bloods.”

The CBS series is an amazing phenomenon, surviving for 13 seasons (it’s been renewed for 14th) in the teeth of an anti-police, anti-law and order, anti-traditional family, anti-American political and cultural upheaval. The Tom Selleck-starring vehicle—Selleck himself is a member of the NRA board of directors–follows the adventures and careers of the devout, white, Irish Catholic Reagan family that considers New York law enforcement the “family business.” Frank (Selleck) is the Police Commissioner, Granddad was too, one son is a Manhattan police detective and the other a police sergeant whose wife is a patrolwoman. Erin, the sole daughter, is Manhattan ADA, and this season is running for District Attorney. Every Sunday the whole family gathers for dinner, and prays. There are no LGTBQ members of the Reagan family, and, so far, no bi-racial marriages.*

Back when I compiled detailed year-end awards, “Blue Bloods” was a repeat winner of the coveted “Most Ethical TV Series.” It regularly has examined complex ethics dilemmas in the work place, law and family settings, while dealing with the most extensive interlocking conflicts of interest imaginable, usually competently.

Maybe Selleck, who is reportedly retiring from the show after this season and is an executive producer, is just tired of fighting.

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Oh-Oh, Now I’m Really In Trouble: Democrats Want To Criminalize Typos

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Somehow I missed this, but it does fit in nicely with the previous post on the totalitarian drift of our oldest political party.

Stacey Plaskett, a non-voting Democrat Representative of the Virgin Islands, the ranking member of the House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, authored a letter that accused journalist Matt Taibbi of perjury in his testimony before Congress on the flimsiest of pretexts. In one “Twitter Files’ tweet and in his subsequent Congressional testimony, Taibbi, suddenly a villain in Democratic eyes because he was one of the independent reporters given access to “the Twitter files” for public release purposes, had mistakenly confused CISA, the government’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, with CIS, the Center for Internet Security, a non-profit private entity. Or he had added an “A’ by mistake, which is what I would have done. Taibbi corrected the tweet, but Plaskett accused him of deliberate dishonesty in his testimony that quoted it, writing,

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Ethics Update: The Bud Light-Dylan Mulvaney Ethics Train Wreck [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

The main development is that after Budweiser’s CEO’s fatuous non-apology fell flat, Alissa Heinerscheid, the marketing VP of the Bud Light brand, was placed on “leave of absence” status, meaning she’s been canned but the company wants to try to let passions cool down so it isn’t attacked by a non-beer-drinking LGTBQ mob accusing it of being transphobic.

Good. She deserved to be fired. She placed political DEI grandstanding ahead of her job, which is to sell beer. It is fine to try to expand a market, but the trick is to do that without alienating the market you have. This isn’t really an exotic concept, though it appears to have eluded Disney as well. It’s stunningly simple. If someone likes and has loyalty to a product, and the product deliberately links itself to an image or spokesperson that the loyal consumer doesn’t like, doesn’t want to endorse, doesn’t agree with, or just finds off-putting or icky, the consumer is very likely to have second thoughts about the brand. What’s so hard about that?

Before making the blunder [Notice of Correction: Here I originally wrote “after,” which was wrong. Sorry. ], Heinerscheid had arrogantly described her approach as a necessary turn away from “fratty, kind of out of touch humor.” Then she led her company to embrace a controversial drag performer whom many regard as ridiculing women while repulsing men. She must have thought she was immune from consequences, as a “historic” DEI hire by a beer company. She set back the cause of female executives in her industry while hurting the product she was supposed to help.

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Unethical Website Of The Month: Only Dinosaurs

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

I’ve seen weirder websites, but not many.

Only Dinosaurs is the website of the “Custom Animatronic Dinosaur Manufacturing Expert,” which describes itself as providing “cost-effective realistic animatronic dinosaur manufacturing services from China.” You can get instant online quotes in minutes, orders in days! But that’s not the reason the site is unethical.

The amount of mistaken and confused information the public gets on the web ranges from harmless to deadly, and Only Dinosaurs has managed to perpetrate some that I never thought was information at all.

The site has a page called “The Top 15 Friendliest Dinosaurs.” It begins with this fifth grade English exposition (I’m guessing the whole site is translated from Chinese, and none too well at that):

If you’ve watched the movie, “Jurassic Park,” you might probably believe that all dinosaurs are big and scary, and they all eat humans. That’s not particularly true. So, if you find yourself really scared of dinosaurs, I have news for you — not all dinosaurs are mean and scary. In fact, some of them are actually pretty friendly and downright cute. So, enough about the T-Rex; let’s have a look at some of the friendliest dinosaurs ever. The tip here is, if the dinosaur is an herbivore, then it’s probably going to be a friendly one since it’s not after blood. However, you can’t risk guessing it right? Therefore, here is a quick list first so you can take them all in:

Whoever wrote that hadn’t seen “Jurassic Park,” which is remarkable for a site that sells animatronic dinosaurs, since the movie represented the most successful and influential use of animatronic dinosaurs of all time. The movie doesn’t present all dinosaurs as “big and scary’: some are presented as big and harmless (the Brachiosurus; the Triceratops), and others are presented as not-so-big and deadly (the Dilophosaurus that eats “Newman,” though the actual beast was larger and a “veggiesaur.”) What does “not particularly true” mean? The statement that all dinosaurs were “big and scary” is definitely not true. Then the passage starts to sound like the writer believes dinosaurs are still around, but that’s okay, it’s all in fun, presumably. Nevertheless, presuming to know which dinosaur species were “friendly” is bonkers. No paleontologist has ever claimed to have discovered that from the fossil record, because the temperaments of prehistoric animals is unknown.

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For Your Ethics Reading List…

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

I’ve just ordered “Complicit: How We Enable the Unethical and How to Stop”by Harvard business school professor Max Bazerman. Having read about the book, I’m curious to see if any of his strategies have not already been discussed on Ethics Alarms extensively. I suspect not.

On his website, Bazerman writes in part,

[A]lmost all of us have been complicit in the unethical behavior of others. “Complicit” tells compelling stories of those who enabled the Theranos and WeWork scandals, the opioid crisis, the sexual abuse that led to the #MeToo movement, and the January 6th U.S. Capitol attack. The book describes seven different behavioral profiles that can lead to complicity in wrongdoing…and offers concrete and detailed solutions, describing how individuals, leaders, and organizations can more effectively prevent complicity. By challenging the notion that a few bad apples are responsible for society’s ills, “Complicit” implicates us all—and offers a path for creating a more ethical world.

The Harvard connection is one red flag; another is Bazerman’s inclusion of “systemic privilege, including white privilege” among his markers of complicity in unethical conduct and corruption. He is clearly a reliably woke member of the progressive academic mob, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that he has nothing to contribute to the topic.

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Psst! When You’re This Estranged From Human, Societal And Cultural Norms And Standards, No Advice Columnist Can Save You

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

The New York Times “Ethicist” got a jaw-dropping inquiry this week:

Nearly a year ago, I began dating two friends — I’ll call them Rachel and Dave — who were already themselves in a relationship. We all had no experience with polyamory. The throuple ended fairly quickly, with no one being at fault; the other two continued to date but broke up not too long afterward. Since then, Rachel and Dave have dated on and off, Rachel and I were casually together and Dave and I have been close friends who sleep together occasionally. There have also been relationships with others outside this group. At times, we have all behaved badly, sleeping together behind the other’s back, knowing the knowledge would hurt the other. Strong emotions, love and pain have arisen on all sides.

Throughout the past year, as multiple complex situations arose, we have all wished for a model of behavior. Monogamy-centered media suggests that one should avoid dating a friend’s ex-partner. Is this correct? And if so, can this concept be universalized? Do Rachel and Dave get “priority,” in that they should be together and I should not pursue either, because they dated first? What do we owe to our romantic partners and friends when the situations are complex?

His advice doesn’t interest me; you can read it here if it interests you. My focus is on the inquirer, predictably signed in as “Name Withheld.”

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