If I have learned one thing writing Ethics Alarms since 2009 is that I don’t know anything, particularly regarding which posts will spark the most interest or the most lively debates. I never expect the usual volume of commentary on my baseball ethics posts (the first ethics post I ever wrote, on the old Ethics Scoreboard, was on baseball: Pete Rose), but yesterday’s quiz regarding Red Sox pitcher Peyton Tolle’s impulsive hug of an opposing player as he applied an inning ending tag spawned commentary that raised some aspects of the incident that I never considered.
[Oh: I’m from Old School Boston. I have always been uncomfortable with hugs of any kind, from any one, for any reason. I have learned over the years when to submit and also when taking the initiative in a hug is expected of me and therefore only polite.]
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For transparency purposes, I have to disclose that I am a big fan of hugging.
It took a very long time for me to realize that not everyone likes to be hugged, though. Also, that there is a time and a place to hug people.
A workplace setting, for example, that wants to be taken seriously might want to discourage hugging among colleagues and, especially, between superiors and subordinates. An employee that wants to be taken seriously might decide that hugging people in the office undermines that goal. One never knows how another person may react to spontaneous hugging, after all. It might be welcomes, it might be spurned, it might give you an unwanted love interest or it might get you reprimanded by HR.
During a baseball game, a player is expected to be professional. Is it any different from being in a boardroom, a classroom or an examining room?
Wow, it takes some impressive ineptitude to get two “Incompetent Elected Official of the Month” designations in less than 30 days, but this creep was up to the challenge.
Yesterday the House voted 413-2 to censure Edwards. The House Ethics Committee recommended the action after it found last month that he had engaged in unprofessional and inappropriate behavior with two former female staffers. EA wrote about that stage of this episode here.
Edwards then stood up and sort-of-kind-of apologized, but not really, saying,
“I want to say something directly and publicly to the two women who have been at the center of all of this. I am sorry. I’m sorry that my actions, my judgement or the way that I expressed a friendship ever put either of you in an uncomfortable position. My intentions were only grounded in what I understood our friendship to be and in genuine admiration and respect that I had for each of you. Not only as professionals, but as people. I ask each of you, Republican and Democrat alike, to look beyond the headlines and examine what the committee actually found. I am not asking for special treatment, I am asking for fair treatment. I am asking you to decide if the punishment before you is supported by the evidence proportional to the conduct actually established.”
Many of you don’t get it, but baseball is a wonderful laboratory for general ethics problems, revelations and teachable moments. To wit…
Ketel Marte, 32, is one of the top second basemen in baseball, indeed one of the top players in the game at any position. However, Marte failed to show up for a game last week with his team, the Arizona Diamondbacks in the middle of a pennant race. He deserted his team mates without letting anyone connected with the Diamondbacks know the reason for his absence or his whereabouts for more than 24 hours. His manager, Torey Lovullo, said he was dealing with “personal problems,” then Marte was determined to be injured and was placed on the injured list. Cameras subsequently caught him enjoying himself at a casino. This isn’t the first time Marte has gone AWOL either: he did it last season too.
The Athletic, which serves as the New York Times captive sports service, asked Diamondbacks General Manager Mike Hazen why the Diamondbacks tolerate Marte’s behavior. The answer made me nauseous.
“He’s an extremely talented player,” Hazen said Wednesday. “At some point, there’s a balance between what you are willing to deal with to get a level of production that can win you baseball games. We’re in the business of winning baseball games.”
Milwaukee Brewers shortstop Cooper Pratt has a bright future ahead of him, but it is brighter now because his manager, Pat Murphy taught him a lesson about what it means to be a professional in general and a Major League Baseball player in particular.
As you can see in the video, Pratt hit what looked like an easily caught pop-up in the fifth-inning of last night’s game against the New York Mets, so he jogged down the baseline more slowly than Pete Rose used to run to first after a base on balls. The Mets, because they stink this year, managed to mess up the play and the ball dropped in for what would have been a double if the kid had been running hard. Standing on first, he looked surprised to see that Murphy was replacing him with a pinch-runner, pulling him off the field in an old-school public rebuke for unprofessional play.
Yes, this news made my head explode. I will be picking up pieces of skull and bloody lumps of gray matter for the rest of the day.
Sarah Miller Espinosa, an arbitrator, ordered The Washington Post to rehire anti-white, racist, biased and dishonest opinion columnist Karen Attiah, whom the paper properly fired in September because of her social media posts regarding the assassination of Charlie Kirk. The Post has to compensate her with back pay too.
The Post, Espinosa wrote, “did not have good and sufficient cause” to terminate Attiah and violated its labor agreement. “The Washington Post failed to establish the grievant engaged in gross misconduct,” she concluded.
Oh, really?
In its report on this gob-smacking ruling, the NY Times cites Appiah’s BlueSky post that read, “Refusing to tear my clothes and smear ashes on my face in performative mourning for a white man that espoused violence is … not the same as violence,” as representative of the offending chain that the columnist issued after Kirk’s assassination. In the EA report on the episode, I focused on this one:
Oooh, damning! Racist! Except that Kirk never said that, despite the fact than Attiah put the statement in quotes. What he said, according to Attiah’s source, The Guardian, was…
“If we would have said that Joy Reid and Michelle Obama and Sheila Jackson Lee and Ketanji Brown Jackson were affirmative action picks, we would have been called racists. Now they’re coming out and they’re saying it for us … You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person’s slot to go be taken somewhat seriously.”
The quote was not about black women at all, but referring to four specific and named black women who Kirk believed had demonstrated that they were not qualified for the positions they occupied. (I’d say that three of the four clearly warrant Kirk’s assessment; I’m not sure about Michelle. I would have used Kamala Harris).
Attiah, then, rewrote the quote to make Kirk seem prejudiced against all black women. She used quotation marks, though what she wrote was not what he said. She intentionally lied to readers to make Kirk’s assassination seem deserved. That’s why she was fired by the Post, and the only point of contention is why, as an anti-white, racist hack with no regard for journalism ethics (not that the Post wins any prizes in that area either), she was working for the paper in the first place.
The Washington Post, in defending Attiah’s sacking, maintained that her rant about Kirk injured “the integrity” of the organization and violated standards requiring employees to use social media with civility and respect. “Karen’s social media feed yesterday and today is beyond the pale, completely unacceptable for someone associated with Opinions,” the Post’s opinion editor wrote after her outburst. The arbitrator disagrees! A columnist lying on a public platform, fabricating a quote and using it to support a racist “opinion” isn’t a black mark on the integrity of the newspaper that employs her. Good to know.
To be fair, the Post was irresponsible to hire the woman in the first place. She should never have been hired, and should have been fired—well, except according to the strange standards of Espinosa—in 2023, when Attiah made as ass of herself by opining that a newly unveiled sculpture (in Boston) celebrating the marriage of Martin Luther King and Coretta “perfectly represents how White America loves to butcher MLK.” Oopsie! The sculptor was black and the commission that approved the design was mostly black. I wrote at the time,
“Appiah is a ridiculously careless and dumb racist. How could someone publish a diatribe like she did without checking to see whether the artist was white? She could because she is such a racist that it never occurred to her that something she objected to wasn’t the fault of whites. This is the apex of racism, its most ugly form. To the KKK, everything wrong with their nation was the fault of blacks, Catholics and immigrants. To Hitler, all of Germany’s ills were attributable to Jews. To people like Attiah—and don’t kid yourself, there are a lot of them—whites are the enemy, evil and a human pathogen on society. That’s bad enough that it should disqualify her from a position of authority and influence at the Washington Post. But she also has exposed herself as frighteningly lacking basic reporting skills and journalistic integrity. She is doubly untrustworthy. No apology, no excuse-making can erase this debacle. I am eager to see if the Post has the courage and professionalism, as well as respect for its readers, to do what has to be done. My guess? No.”
But based on this arbitrator’s ruling, there is literally nothing Attiah could write that would disqualify her from having a platform for her hate, ignorance, dishonesty and stupidity on the opinion pages of the Washington Post. The mind boggles: Castrate all men! Put the Jews in camps! Kill Trump! “I am Marie of Romania!” Attiah’s lawyer called the decision “a landmark victory for one of our nation’s crusading journalists.”
Over the past year, I have been professionally involved in several cases involving arbitration. In too many of them (and one is too many), the arbitrator’s decision was incomprehensible and incompetent. Many arbitrators are ancient retired judges; others are incapacitated by unstated biases. Arbitration clauses exist to save the immense costs of litigation, but when the result is a howler like this one, it demonstrates a triumph of finances over logic.
I also want to mention that almost all of the Times readers who commented on this declaration that no columnist’s opinions are so repulsive and biased that they are grounds for firing for cause thought it was wonderful.
I will grant this to some of my more Trump Deranged friends: they do give me some excellent ethics blog fodder.
One of them erupted in typical Trump deranged outrage because, as explained in this WaPo story, the Pentagon fired the publisher and the editor-in-chief of “Stars and Stripes,” the military news publication funded by the Department of Defense. This was, you see, another example of Trump “censorship.” In interviews with CBS, the fired editor insisted, “I am working for Stars and Stripes. Not for the Pentagon. Not for any administration. Not for any policymaker. I am here to cover the military community.” Another argued, “These firings are a shame for the institution and service members, who swore to defend the Constitution and deserve the right to a free and independent press.”
My Trump Deranged friend seems to believe that the Pentagon is obligated to employ “advocacy journalists” who are free to undermine the military command, including the Commander in Chief. If the Pentagon can fire editors of “Stars and Stripes,” and it can, then the publication can’t call itself independent. The military has no reason to tolerate or fund a publication that is critical of military command or the Commander in Chief, undermining military morale and general order.
In past eras, Stars and Stripes has always had an pro- military bias; of course it has. But now we have veterans in uniform disrupting Congressional hearings, and there is a war on. If “Stars and Stripes “wants the option of criticizing military command rather than reporting military news and promoting the Armed Services, great: let it find a funding source other than the Pentagon. Otherwise, it is beholden to the best interests of the military as the military command defines them.
The military is not a democracy. The Pentagon didn’t permit a “free and independent press” during World War II. It is disingenuous for a “Stars and Stripes” editor or reporter to say on CBS that she doesn’t work for the Pentagon when the Pentagon’s funds pay her salary.
[Note of correction: Sloppily, carelessly and unforgivably, I stated in the post that Floyd was convicted of first degree murder, and he was not. Chauvin was convicted of unintentional second-degree murder, third-degree murder (which is manslaughter), and second-degree manslaughter and convicted on all of the charges, resulting in a 22.5 year prison sentence. That result is still unconscionable given the facts and equivocal evidence. But let’s get the facts right. My apologies.]
Derek Chauvin, who was convicted of murdering George Floyd for many reasons, none fair, valid or based on justice or civil rights, once again has a chance to see his kangaroo court conviction thrown out.
A new court filing by Chauvin’s lawyer, the third aimed at getting Chauvin’s indefensible murder conviction reversed, alleges, among other things, ‘illegal’ and ‘fraudulent’ conduct by Governor Tim Walz, Attorney General Keith Ellison, and the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office.” Greg Joseph contends that there were serious breaches of proper procedure and due process by authorities because the Black Lives Matter mob was so determined to use George Floyd’s death as a righteous rallying point to advance a social and political agenda.
Ya think?
Joseph contends that a grand jury was never convened to review the evidence behind the charges, because, as he rightly concludes, “Hennepin County’s unlawful charges against Mr. Chauvin were not severe enough for the mob.” Governor Tim Walz instead “referred the case to (Minnesota Attorney General and confirmed anti-white racist) Keith Ellison, who signed and e-filed a second unfounded complaint against Derek Chauvin that included the murder charge.”
Is anyone surprised that they did everything possible to cut corners to destroy Chauvin, and justice be damned? Not me.
What is the ethical way to handle a serious mistake for which you are completely responsible?
Hint: it isn’t what the radio station’s employee did in this fiasco.
Yesterday, the British Office of Communications (Ofcom) issued its report on an incident in May that was not covered very thoroughly in the former Colonies across the pond. The U.K. radio station Radio Caroline had aired three pre-recorded statements during “The Barry Marsh Show” announcing that King Charles had died. He hadn’t died. Nevertheless, the third statement said “news media” had confirmed that the King was dead. “God Save the King” was then played, the announcement was repeated, and there were 16 minutes of dead air. When regular programming resumed, Barry, whoever he is, apologized to listeners.
“I’ve just been informed that we’ve played in error some information a little earlier, I didn’t hear this myself, but it is incorrect, it’s a technical issue, and of course we apologize,” the host said. To the station’s audience, King Charles had been “dead” for about a half an hour.
How did this happen, you well may ask. Here’s how: Radio Caroline, which plays music from the 1960s to today, was streaming from a remote location. A staffer was performing maintenance on a studio computer and found the three files prepared for King Charles’ death.
Although the files “are accompanied with a set of strict instructions to presenters and managers to follow before being aired,” the staffer played the files “out of curiosity.” This stopped the stream from the presenter’s remote location, and broadcast the pre-recorded announcement on the air. Barry was on a call and didn’t immediately notice that his show was telling people that the King had died.
And the staffer responsible for this mess? He or she (the sources say “they,” which is stupid and useless…but woke!) panicked…and ran away, leaving the office.
Brilliant.
Radio Caroline says it “took the matter very seriously, and much activity was taking place during those 30 minutes leading up to the apology.” Yet the station says that the staffer responsible was “reprimanded” and has “apologized.” That is not taking the matter seriously.
A staffer who has otherwise performed well in a job can legitimately and ethically be given a second chance after a major error like this, but the staffer’s reaction is not pardonable. The individual lacks the character, composure, judgment and sense of responsibility to justify a second chance. “They” cannot be trusted.
It is workplace management like Radio Caroline’s that is creating an epidemic of incompetence across the United States, including in national, state and local governments, and apparently worldwide. Falsely telling the British public that the King is dead is a minor inconvenience compared to all the expense, inefficiency, frustration and damage this kinder, gentler approach to management causes.
Is it really that hard to not be a total asshole while you are an elected representative supposedly serving the public good? Members of Congress represent the nation, our Constitution and the Founders while they have that honor. Why can’t they all recognize their duties, which include being a role model and not bringing disrepute upon the institution, and conduct themselves accordingly? (To turn it around a bit: why are voters so lazy and inattentive that they elect such creeps?)
Today’s featured creep is GOP Rep.Chuck Edwards, who just dropped out of the race for his seat, leaving his party with no candidate and no incumbant going into a crucial mid-term election that will determine whether Congress spends the next two years impeaching the President. He wrote on “X” yesterday,
“After much prayer and reflection, I’ve decided to withdraw from my re-election campaign. I will complete my current term. Serving Western North Carolina has been the honor of my life. Thank you for your trust, prayers, and support. God bless WNC and America.”
Gee, he mentioned prayer twice and God once in a 43 word post; I guess that means he must be a good man. (I’m sure a disturbing number of people believe that.) If serving was such an honor, why did he behave like Harpo Marx ? The House Ethics Committee recommended this week that Edwards be censured for “persistent unprofessional and inappropriate conduct towards two young female staffers.” Translation: he engaged in sexual harassment in the workplace.
Segers had taken to social media to posted his views on transgender athletes playing in women’s sports. “I don’t see transgender people becoming oppressed or being oppressed … life is unfair” he posted, along with, “I’m not against anyone living out their lives the way they want, but I am against their rights superseding the rights of other people. That’s a little bit foul.” He also mocked the posting of preferred pronouns: “If you asked me what my preferred pronouns are and it’s not obvious to you that I’m a he/him, that I’m good with he/him — Surely you don’t need any help. I’m not wearing a dress.”
The social media Furies descended on the actor with a vengeance, accusing him of being transphobic, homophobic, yada yada. You know the script.
Prof. Turley believes that the performer’s human rights have been unfairly and hypocritically “curtailed,” writing in part,
“Other actors have expressed support for transgender players without any response other than praise in the latest example of the rising McCarthyism on the left.This is only the latest termination over the political views of artists in New York. As the song states in Hadestown, “It’s an old song. It’s a sad song. But we’re gonna sing it anyway.” We have previously discussed how private companies can fire employees for public conduct or statements that bring controversy to their business or products. However, even though the First Amendment does not govern such controversies, there remains a free speech issue. Free speech goes beyond the confines of the First Amendment and private companies can engage in censorship that curtails this human right. The question often comes down to consistency in companies enforcing content-based standards. I did not like some of the comments of Segers, but there is little question that equally strong comments against “cisgender” athletes or for transgender athletes would not result in such termination…Whether it is actors, athletes, or academics, there is a demonstrably different level of tolerance for controversial views on gender. Take Segers’ statements, swap the nouns or pronouns, and ask yourself if there would have been a cancel campaign, let alone a termination. It is not the fact of the controversy but the lack of consistency that is so problematic in these areas.”
Yes, but. This is Broadway, and a Broadway musical. Broadway’s audience pool is shrinking and its ticket prices exclude all but the relatively wealthy. Musicals are especially dependent on the the affluent LGTBQ demographic: I would wager that the percentage of gay Americans who have heard of “Hadestown” is double or more the percentage of non-LGTBQ members of the public. Having a prominent cast member in a Broadway musical making public comments that are likely to offend its core audience is unacceptable, and the producers were only protecting their show, their investment, and the rest of the company by sending Segers packing.
