Workplace

How to Lose Trust

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

The AP reports that the White House, in measuring the effects of the economic stimulus program, is counting employee raises in salary as “jobs saved.”

“More than two-thirds of 14,506 jobs credited to the recovery act under spending by just one federal office were overstated because they counted pay increases for existing workers as jobs saved,” Brett Blackledge and Matt Apuzzo write. This kind of Orwellian funny business with definitions is an old trick, of course, but also the kind of  deception that President Barack Obama was supposed to eliminate. It is, after all, dishonest. It would be better to learn that this was the inadvertent mistake of some secretary somewhere, but no: according to the story, the Administration stands by its calculations, and defended the use of raises as “jobs saved.”

“If I give you a raise, it is going to save a portion of your job,” HHS spokesman Luis Rosero said.

Rosero then proceeded to sell the reporter a share of the Brooklyn Bridge. One of the resullts of this “logic” is that  it allows the Administration to save more jobs than there were in the first place. For example, to measure the jobs saved at the Southwest Georgia Community Action Council,they multiplied the 508 employees by 1.84 — the percentage pay raise they received — and voila!  935 jobs saved!

The problem with this, besides the obvious (it’s ridiculous!), is that it erodes the President’s most precious commodity: trust. People who twist facts and numbers like this are either con-artists or incompetents, and you shouldn’t never trust either. Today the papers were all about Democrats worried about the election results, but in the long run, this story is much more ominous.

Reporters, Spouses, Conflicts, and Dissonance

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

The Washington Post’s ombudsman, Andrew Alexander, recently wrote a column discussing the seeming conflict of interest created for a Post reporter because of who she married.

Juliet Eilperin covers climate change for the paper. Her husband, Andrew Light, is an expert on the same topic, and coordinates international climate policy at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank. Alexander says that while Eilperin often gets quotes from her husband’s organization, he is never involved, and that the Eilperin-Lights maintain a strict separation of their careers. None of which answers the question: can she be an objective reporter on her Post beat, which happens to be in the same field where her husband makes his living?

The Post ethics rules, Alexander duly points out, say the Post is “pledged to avoid conflict of interest or the appearance of conflict of interest, wherever and whenever possible.” Obviously, there is an appearance of a conflict of interest here. Perhaps Eilperin would be vigorously critical of a policy pronouncement coordinated by her husband, or maybe she would consciously or unconsciously allow her affection and commitment to her husband color her reporting. We don’t know, and she may not even know. One might think that we would know she was unbiased if she filed stories that put her husband, his views or his employers in a bad light, but even that isn’t certain. It might mean she was over-compensating for bias. It might mean that her views on climate change policy had soured because Andrew was in the dog house, or that she had come to resent his work for the Center, because it took time away from the family. Either way, the fact that Eilperin’s husband is linked to the climate change issue and particular views on that issue must exercise a powerful influence over her judgment.

The principle in force at work here is cognitive dissonance, often referred to in the media but seldom correctly. A psychologist named Leon Festinger devised a scale—-vertical, with zero in the center, extending upwards from +1 to +100, and downwards from -1 to -100. The Cognitive Dissonance Scale is used to measured how positive and negative attitudes toward people and things subconsciously influenced attitudes toward other people and things that they had connections to and associations with, through the involuntary reduction of cognitive dissonance. For example, you dislike an author and his books. You love a particular political cause. You discover that the author is a vocal supporter of that cause. This creates cognitive dissonance that your mind must resolve; you cannot continue to hold such a low opinion of the author and such a high opinion of his cause. You will change the values to bring them more into line with each other; you will reduce the dissonance.

If you love the cause more than you detest the author (using Festinger’s scale, imagine that the author is a  minus 6, and the cause is a plus 16), the cognitive dissonance will be resolved by your gradually feeling more positively toward the author, and conceivably, less positively toward the cause, so they eventually they meet or almost meet around plus 10. Suddenly, you have more interest in the author’s books. Your attitude has been adjusted. You may also be more open-minded when listening to adversaries of the cause you once blindly supported, because its value is lower, even though you didn’t consciously change your opinion. Cognitive dissonance and the process whereby it silently adjusts and manipulates attitudes explains much of advertising, political affiliations, biases, and how powerful, popular leaders, celebrities and institutions  influence public culture for good or ill. It also explains why close relationships can create conflicts of interest.

There are many movies about lawyers in which, for dramatic or comic effect, a trial pits an attorney-husband against his attorney-wife (“Adam’s Rib”) or an attorney-parent against an attorney-son or daughter (“Class Action”). But in real life, these adversary situations usually require informed consent by the clients, because they raise suspicions. Would a husband really go all out to make the woman he was married to look like a fool in court? In the movies, there is usually a manufactured competition between the related lawyers, but the appearance of conflict still remains. Depending on the situation, one attorney-spouse’s relationship to the other could create such a likely conflict that even client consent wouldn’t justify continuing the adversary representation. Suppose, for example, that the attorney-wife knew that her husband’s job at the firm depended on him winning. She has a stake in him winning the case now. How can she give all her loyalty to her client, who is paying  her to defeat her husband?

She can’t. And though ombudsman Andrews ties himself in knots to argue that Eilperin is in a different position, she isn’t. She has a stake in her husband’s success, which is on only one side of the climate debate.  She also has a stake in keeping his love, respect and trust. Can we trust her to be completely unbiased? Presumably, if he isn’t in her dog house, Andrew Light is very high on Juliet Eilperin’s dissonance scale. If she is to be properly objective as a reporter, his positions and those of his employer should be right at the middle of the scale—zero, neutral. But that will create dissonance. That position will eventually, inevitably carry a positive value, because she associates it with her husband.

Her marriage creates, therefore, at least an appearance of bias, and probably actual bias. There is nobody to consent to the conflict, because the equivalent of the lawyer’s client for a reporter isn’t the paper she works for, but the public itself. Short of the Post holding a public referendum, the public can’t  consent or refuse to consent. Nor should they have to. Surely Eilperin can report on another topic. Surely the Post has other qualified reporters who aren’t married to warriors in the climate change wars.

Alexander closes his article by giving Eilperin the benefit of the doubt: “It’s a close call, but I think she should stay on the beat. With her work now getting special scrutiny, it will become clear if the conflict is real.” Wait a minute…what about that “appearance” phrase in the Post’s own Code? Real or apparent conflicts are prohibited; the whole point is not to wait to see “if the conflict is real,” meaning, I suppose, that Eilperin starts obviously slanting her climate change reporting. Some observers think she’s doing this already, and that’s the point. Because of who she married, we can’t trust that she will successfully battle cognitive dissonance and give objective analysis.

If the Post cares about its integrity and avoiding the appearance of conflicts of interest, they need a new climate change reporter, and Juliet Eilperin needs a new beat.

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Forgetting What We Know

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Ethics evolves. It isn’t that what is right and wrong actually changes, but that human beings gradually learn, sometimes so slowly it can hardly be detected. For example, slavery was always wrong, but for centuries very few people who weren’t slaves understood that fact. There was never anything immoral about being born gay and living accordingly, but it has taken all of the collected experience of civilization to make this dawn on most of society. While we are learning, and even after we have learned, there are always those who not only lag behind but who work actively to undo the ethical progress we have made. We assume these individuals will come from the ranks of ideological conservatives, misapplying valid concepts like respect for tradition, suspicion of change for change’s sake, and a reliance on consistent standards, making them slow to accept new wisdom . Sometimes, however, the people who try to make us forget what we know come from the left side of the political spectrum, misusing values such as tolerance, freedom, empathy and fairness in the process. This is especially true when it comes to the topic of sex. Liberals fought so long and well to break down the long-established taboos about sex that many of them lost the ability to comprehend that unethical conduct can  involve sex in any way.

The most striking recent example is the bizarre defense of Roman Polanski, best known as the director of the horror classic, “Rosemary’s Baby.”

Polanski has been a fugitive from American justice since 1978. In 1977,  he was charged with raping a 13-year old girl, who told a grand jury that the director had plied her with champagne and drugs, taken nude pictures of her in a hot tub, and then had sexual intercourse with her despite her pleas to be taken home. His lawyers negotiated a plea agreement that dropped the rape charge in exchange for Polanski pleading guilty to the lesser charge of “unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor.” ( Polanski was 44 when he had sex with the young teen.) When it appeared that the judge in the case might not accept the plea deal and force him to face the rape charge, Polanski fled the U.S. Since that time, he has directed in Europe, staying out of countries that could extradite him, and traveling primarily between France, where he was protected by that nation’s limited extradition practice, and Poland. He got careless this year, and on September 26, 2009, was arrested at the Zurich airport when he arrived to receive a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Zurich Film Festival. Swiss authorities are preparing to send him back to the U.S.

This is not a complicated situation. Statutory rape. A rape under circumstances—drugging—that would be rape with an adult victim, with the drugs rendering consent meaningless. Fleeing from justice. By what logic could someone argue that Polanski is a victim, and that law enforcement officials are the wrongdoers? There is none. Logic will never lead us to such a conclusion. Despite this undeniable fact, many individuals with respect and following in the entertainment industry as well as some journalists, argued that Polanski was being mistreated.

Some arguments were offensive: on “The View,” Whoopie Goldberg argued that drugging and having sex with a 13-tear-old wasn’t “rape-rape,”  implying that statutory rape is an archaic crime rooted in outdated concepts of sex, rather than the real crime of forcing a woman to have sex in an alley at the point of a knife. Some were ignorant: the eminent legal scholar Debra Winger pronounced Polanski the victim of “technicalities,” and suggested that the case should be “dead” because it was three decades old. Winger is apparently unaware that major crimes like rape are not subject to any statute of limitations, and that’s no technicality. She and others also claimed that Polanski had a right to flee because the judge  “reneged” on the absurdly lenient plea deal agreed to by the prosecutor at the time. Wrong: judges are not bound by plea agreements that they feel are inappropriate; watching any TV lawyer show would teach them that. Some of the arguments for Polanski were just jaw-droppingly stupid, such as the claim by some of his fellow directors that international film festivals should be respected as sanctuaries from arrest, like a church.

Even more legitimate commentators lost their bearings. In a stunning Op-ed called “The Outrageous Arrest of Roman Polanski,” Washington Post columnist Ann Applebaum argued that it was wrong to arrest Polanski because:

  • Polanski’s mother died in Auschwitz and his pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, was butchered by the Manson clan. This is a non-sequitur. Personal tragedies and hardship never can justify or mitigate harm done to another.
  • Polanski has suffered for his crime “in notoriety, in lawyers’ fees, in professional stigma. He could not return to Los Angeles to receive his recent Oscar. He cannot visit Hollywood to direct or cast a film.” An astounding statement. He has lived well in Europe and continued to work as a film director. The justice system does not acknowledge lawyer fees as punishment, and rightly so. If fees, notoriety, and professional stigma are sufficient punishment for child-rape, surely Bernie Madoff, currently in prison for the remainder of his life, should go free for the lesser crime of defrauding investors out of billions of dollars.
  • His victim, now in her forties, says she forgives him. Victims do not, should not and can not waive the criminal laws. Forgiveness is an excellent ethical value, but there is understandable self-interest in Polanski’s victim’s attitude: she has moved on in her life and has no desire to revisit this traumatic experience. She is not the only stake-holder here, however. Society has a legitimate interest in prohibiting rape and sexual violence against children, and that means that rapists must not evade punishment, no matter what the preference of their victims may be.
  • Polanski is 75. The fact that Polanski is facing his just punishment for a crime he committed now, in his Golden Years, rather than when he younger is 100% his own fault. Applebaum made the equivalent of the apocryphal plea by the defendant who murdered his parents that he deserved leniency because he was an orphan.
  • If Polanski wasn’t famous, “no one would bother with him.” I think she’s wrong about this, but even assuming she is correct, famous fugitive rapists advertise to the world that if you are rich and powerful, you can get away with rape. There are excellent, practical, societally valuable reasons to take special care that famous criminals are brought to justice.

The real, and true conclusion, is that if Polanski’s crime didn’t involve sex, neither Applebaum nor his other defenders would lift a finger to support him. It took liberals and women’s rights advocates decades and decades to get across the concept that rape, sexual domination, sexual discrimination and harassment were not about sex, but about misuse of power, abuse of trust, and the disrespect and unfair treatment of women. Yet all it takes is a popular and artistically respected director to make some forget that lesson.

Or a popular TV talk show host. David Letterman, forced by an extortion scheme to admit on the air to a series of sexual affairs with staffers, was able to cast himself as the victim and avoid professional consequences. Yet he was essentially no different from the infamous male corporate executives of the pre-sexual harassment era, using their female subordinates as company-paid harems. Gloria Steinem and other feminists fought to hammer into American culture the concept that when an individual has power over one’s livelihood, there can be no true “consent” to sexual relationships initiated by the boss. I would have written “successfully hammered,”  but the lesson vanished when the boss was funny old Dave.

Talk show host (and Letterman employee) Craig Ferguson tut-tutted against “holding late-night talk-show hosts to the same moral accountability as we hold politicians or clergymen.” The code word here is “moral”: Ferguson and others were suggesting that objections to Letterman’s conduct were rooted in moral rectitude, the idea that sex—recreational sex, older man/younger woman sex, adulterous sex— was wrong. But Letterman is accountable, exactly as any supervisor (including a politician or clergyman) is accountable when he abuses his position and influence to turn the workplace into a personal sexual hunting ground. His escapades weren’t “personal conduct”—another of the bogus defenses raised on Letterman’s behalf—because they occurred in and affected the workplace. Letterman’s predatory sex was thus workplace conduct, and legally prohibited conduct at that. This was classic third-party sexual harassment under Title IX, a “hostile work environment” created when other female employees receive the message that they are required to be sexually accessible in order to succeed. Letterman’s conquests’ “consent,” invalid anyway because of his position, couldn’t mitigate the toxic and inherently unfair culture the illicit relationships created.

It should have been no surprise when former Letterman writer Nell Scovell, writing on Vanity Fair’s website, recently revealed that the sexually-charged atmosphere on Letterman’s show caused her to feel demeaned as a woman and led to her resignation. All those “consenting personal relationships,” in other words, caused her professional hardship. Yet even Scovell, good industry liberal that she is, has forgotten the lesson. “I don’t want compensation. I don’t want revenge. I don’t want Dave to go down (oh, grow up, people). I just want Dave to hire some qualified female writers and then treat them with respect,” she wrote.
“Oh, grow up people.” Grow up: don’t require accountability or consequences when unethical, harmful workplace conduct involves sex…because sex is good, remember?  Remember the pill, abortion rights, Woodstock? Except that sex, like many good things, can be involved in very unethical, harmful conduct. Until individuals like David Letterman and Roman Polanski “go down” for such conduct, it will continue, and innocent people will continue to be hurt.
We should have learned that by now.