U.S. Society

The Doritos Super Bowl Commercial

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

So obsessed was I with the Tebow Super Bowl ad that I temporarily forgot that there usually are one or more product ads that inflame the culture wars.  Sure enough, this time there were two: Audi’s “Green Police” commercial, which has political implications but no ethical ones that I can see, and the Doritos ad, chosen by post-game polls as one of the best and most popular. That one did raise some ethical issues, recently collected by conservative columnist and radio host Dennis Prager.

The spot begins with an attractive woman greeting a date at the door, and asking him inside as she gets ready to leave. She has a young son, four or five years of age, who is snacking on a bowl of Doritos. We ( and the child) see the male date’s face express some combination of excitement, lust and pleasure at the sight of the woman’s comely derriere as she walks into her bedroom. He then sits on the sofa, smiles at the boy, attempts to make pleasantries, and starts to munch on a Dorito. The child sternly slaps the man across the face, and says to him, menacingly, “Put it back,” referring to afore-mentioned Dorito chip. “Keep your hands off my mama…keep your hands off my Doritos,” he continues to the shocked date, getting nose to nose with him in the process. All the actors in the spot are African Americans.

Television commercials can be culturally damaging and irresponsible if they appear to approve, encourage, or endorse wrongful behavior and attitudes. Was this such an ad? Prager thinks so. Let’s examine his objections individually: Continue reading →

Of Presidents Day, Atticus, a Congressman’s Dilemma and Serial Moms

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Short Alarms:

  • With increasing numbers of young Americans knowing embarrassingly little about our nation’s past, the wrong-headedness of President’s Day rankles worse than ever. Rather then designate the February birthdays of our two greatest presidents—Washington, the “indispensable man” who made the United States a reality, and Lincoln, the brilliant leader/philosopher who kept it from tearing apart—as yearly commemorations of their remarkable lives and our debt to them, Congress lumped them into a generic “Presidents Day,” thereby demonstrating that it deemed a three-day weekend and consumer merchandise sales more important than our heritage. Worst of all for ethics fans, George, who “wouldn’t tell a lie,” and Honest Abe are the only U.S. Presidents remembered for their truthfulness. Yet here they are, forced to share their “day” with the likes of Woodrow Wilson, Harding, J.F.K, L.B.J., Tricky Dick and Bill Clinton. The right thing to do would be to go back to celebrating February 12 and 22. Washington and Lincoln deserve it, and so do the values they stood for.
  • Speaking of ethics icons, one of my wife’s favorites,”To Kill A Mockingbird’s” Atticus Finch, has been under attack in some quarters for being passively acquiescent in the Jim Crow morality that convicts his black client despite overwhelming evidence that he is innocent. Continue reading →

“Hard to Watch” Video: Responsible or Not?

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Over at the Huntington Post, Jason Linkins praises the edict of NBC News chief Steve Capus to curb network Olympic coverage use of the video showing Nodar Kumaritashvili’s fatal luge run. “I’m glad this decision has been reached,” Linkins writes. “The video of Kumaritashvili’s fatal luge run is difficult to watch and I do not recommend that you do so. …Here’s hoping Steve Capus will remember having made this choice come September and break with MSNBC’s grim and pointless tradition of replaying the events of September 11, 2001 in real time.”

Linkins presumably regards Capus’s decision as “responsible broadcasting.” My question is, “What’s responsible about it?” Continue reading →

The Tragedy of the Climate Change Fiasco

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Americans woke up today to a snow-covered world that might not be getting warmer after all.

You may not hear about it or read about it right away, depending on what your news sources of choice are. Many news organizations and reporters have disgraced themselves, their profession and their professional ethics standards (values trashed: competence, diligence, responsibility, honesty, objectivity, fairness) so thoroughly that they will surely wait as long as possible before admitting they were wrong, if not how wrong they were. But I know where this is going, and it is not going to be good for anyone. Ethics fiascos, a.k.a ethics train wrecks, never are. Continue reading →

Stats, Polar Bears, and “Truth by Repetition”

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

When I did marketing for a company that created annuities for the recipients of large court damages, I was armed with alarming statistics I had gleaned from the annuity industry’s publications.  Half of the recipients of large lump sum settlements or damages from personal injury and medical negligence lawsuits had dissipated all of the funds (usually calculated to last a lifetime) within two years or less. More than 75% had blown through all the cash, often millions of dollars, within five years. These figures were accepted as fact everywhere,  and we used them profitably to persuade plaintiffs, lawyers and courts to approve annuity arrangements that would parcel out the funds over the years, keeping the money safe from needy relatives and spending sprees. Then, one day, I decided to track down the studies that were the sources of the statistics I was using.

There weren’t any. I discovered a circular trail, with various sources quoting each other. Continue reading →

The Seattle Beating Tape: “Just Following Orders”

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

I know the Nuremberg defense when I hear it, and this is the Nuremberg defense.

The release of a January security video from a Seattle transit station has triggered a public uproar, and no wonder: it shows a group of girls brutally beating a young woman, including kicks to her head, as three security guards stand by, watching, doing nothing. Well, not exactly nothing: they did call for help.

Gee, thanks, guys. Would you tell them to bring some aspirin, an ice pack and a stretcher while you’re at it?

Seattle officials say that the guards appear to have done their job properly. The training manual the guards follow says “Never become involved in enforcement actions.” Continue reading →

Blizzard Ethics and Parking Space Etiquette

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

The Great Blizzard of 2010 inspired The Washington Post to publish a piece about snow ethics, focusing especially on this touchy question: Is it ethical to park in a space shoveled out by someone else?

The problem with the article is that it doesn’t ask the ethically crucial second question: Is it ethical for someone to hold one of the rare cleared parking spaces on the street open, when other motorists desperately need a place to park? Continue reading →

“Professor”= Racist?

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

The academic world has its robes in a bunch because critics of President Obama are increasingly calling him “Professor,” and not as a compliment. Various blogs and academic websites are attributing this to the anti-intellectualism of the Right, the populist dislike of academic elites, contempt for higher education, and other motives that confirm the author’s own biases.

Silly me: I naively assumed that they called Obama “Professor” because he was one, and also because his demeanor, speaking style and fondness for lecturing are professorial. Continue reading →

Outing the Judge

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

“Judge Being Gay a Nonissue During Prop. 8 Trial” says the San Francisco Chronicle headline…outing the judge in the Proposition 8 trial as gay.

If it the judge’s sexual orientation is a non-issue, why does the paper believe it is ethical to reveal it? Continue reading →

Unethical Website, the Sequel

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

The Special Olympics, now in the business of censoring the English language, has applied technology to the task with a new website, http://www.rwordcounter.org. The site allows one to enter a URL and have the site immediately searched for the offending words “retard,” and “retarded,” sort of like little teeny versions of Big Brother’s thought-police rifling through your closets and under your mattresses for bootleg copies of The Bible or Paradise Lost. Then, once the website under surveillance passes the Special Olympics Appropriate Senstitivity and Inoffensive Expression Test, it can proudly display a banner that proclaims it Clean.

Too bad the website itself is unethical, for two reasons:

1. Its purpose violates the ethical values of autonomy, fairness, tolerance, equity, openness, process, respect, and American citizenship, and

2. It is incompetent and a fraud: the damn thing doesn’t work, or at least didn’t the two times I tried it on Ethics Alarms. Apparently I could make a terrible joke here about who must have designed the site, and it would still tell me that my site was “r-word free.” I am thinking the joke, however, and hope that when the folks at the Special Olympics devise a way to detect that, as I’m certain they would love to do, their R-Word Brain Purging Unit works just as well.