Workplace

Ethics Observations On The Shemy Schembechler Firing

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

What a mess.

Glenn ‘Shemy’ Schembechler, son of legendary Wolverines football coach Bo Schembechler, the winningest coach in Michigan football history who took the Wolverines to 10 Rose Bowls, was was hired as the University of Michigan’s assistant director of recruiting on May 17. Three says later he was fired (well, “forced to resign”). His demise was caused by his habit of “liking” controversial tweets on Twitter.

A statement from the school attributed Schembechler’s forced resignation to social media activity that “caused concern and pain for individuals in our community.” Here’s one of those “liked tweets,” in a Twitter tiff over a quote from Thomas Sowell:

Ethics Observations:

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Comment Of The Day: “Let’s Play “What’s Wrong With This Guy?”!”

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

There I was, thinking dark thoughts and moping about the horrible traffic here over the weekend, and along comes A.M. Golden to remind me that this blog has always sought to inspire quality rather than quantity, with this superb Comment of the Day on the post about the enterprising Mr. Clifford, who feels that IBM isn’t him paying him enough not to work for 30 years, Let’s Play “What’s Wrong With This Guy?”! Here it is; it even has a “Facts of Life” reference!

* * *

Stipulated: The plaintiff’s disability could be a legitimate one. We don’t know. That doesn’t really change my answer.

How did we get here?

The Deep Pockets Rationalization aka The Jo Polniaczek Excuse: Named for Nancy McKeon’s character on the ’80s show “The Facts of Life.” In one episode, Jo borrows a watch belonging to her frenemy, wealthy Blair Warner, without asking so she can time herself while taking an exam. On her way back, the watch is damaged when she jumps into a quick basketball game. She blows it off because Blair is wealthy and has a lot of watches.

The Deep Pockets Rationalization states that the person with the most money should pay even if not at fault. A guy driving a Hyundai hits a guy driving a BMW. The Hyundai driver tries to argue that the BMW driver should pay for everything because he has more money. A person trips in a store and tries to compel the business to pay even though she tripped because she wasn’t paying attention to what she was doing. Or a restaurant is pressured to pay for a disfigured child’s surgery after the family failed to extort money with false allegations against employees (Remember the KFC incident from a few years’ back?).

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Unethical Website Of The Month: “The Anarchist”

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

“The Anarchist”is the website of a hate-based Toronto coffee shop of the same name. Ironically, Ethics Alarms just learned of the site’s existence as it announced the demise of the business. (Good!) The shop anointed itself as “an anti-capitalist cafe, shop and radical community space on stolen land”—yes, the owners are delusional. It was a “pay what you choose” establishment designed to spit in the metaphorical eye of evil Capitalism. Of course it went belly-up, though the fact that the carzy project lasted even a year is impressive, sort of, in the same way Brian Stelter getting hired is impressive.

Here are some highlights from the website:

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Push-Up Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

I don’t know why this took so long…

The Washington Post reports that there is a movement afoot to stop allowing young women to substitute so-called “girls’ push-ups” (with the knees on the floor) for the actual toes-on-the-ground exercise while males are still required to do the real thing. The American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM), which provides guidelines for exercise testing by fitness and medical professionals, still uses the modified push-up to assess women’s upper-body strength in its latest exercise testing textbook, published in 2021. Male strength is measured in part using the full push-up.

But Melanie Adams, a professor of exercise science at Keene State College in New Hampshire, told the Post that based on a 2022 study of female college students and push-ups that she led, the assumption that women could only do the weenie version was unwarranted. Some female college students could perform more than 20 full push-ups in succession, a total many men can’t match. Because the root exercise builds strong, important muscles in the upper-body and core, however, starting boys on real push-ups while girls are told to use the inferior version gives males a head start on superior strength that women will have a hard time overcoming.

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More Reasons Why Fox Was Ethically Obligated To Fire Tucker Carlson

/ Jack Marshall / 64 Comments

The outpouring of conservative support for Tucker Carlson is quite nauseating, and shows an unfortunate infestation of bad judgment and ethics corruption when the necessary conduct is to recognize that an ideological ally is neither trustworthy nor honest.

One report yesterday, pointing to the Fox News’ ratings crashing with Carlson’s exit, noted that younger Fox News viewers had led the stampede. Carlson is a demagogue with dubious motives, and the young are especially vulnerable to demagogues. I regard it as unethical for a news organization to put demagogues on the air for exactly that reason. (Glenn Beck is vociferously defending Carlson. Of course he is. Demagogues stick together.)

Let’s move on from the demagoguery, however, and focus on the Carlson text message published by the New York Times earlier this week (I am about two days behind in my Times spelunking). The message was sent to one of Carlson’s producers after the January. 6, 2021 riot at the Capitol:

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Hollywood Writers Fear That AI Might Replace Them. Tough!

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

The first Hollywood strike in 15 years began today, as talks with the studios broke down and the economic pressures of the streaming era sent unionized TV and film writers to picket for better pay. The strike has shut down most late-night talk shows, so it is already benefiting society. “No contracts, no content!” sign-carrying members of the Writers Guild of America chant outside various office buildings in Manhattan and L.A. The last writer’s strike shut down the industry for 100 days and helped send California into a recession.

As usual, the strike is about money. But far down the list of objectives for its contract negotiations under a section titled “Professional Standards and Protection in the Employment of Writers,” the union says it wants to “regulate use of material produced using artificial intelligence or similar technologies.”

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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.”

The Tucker Carlson Firing Aftermath

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

Tucker Carlson behaved in a manner that would get any employee fired from any organization with two atoms of integrity and professionalism to rub together unless the organization was completely in thrall to The King’s Pass. It is really as simple as that; this isn’t hard. Nevertheless, pundits, politicians and hack journalists on both sides of the ideological divide set out to misrepresent the event in order to promote their own world views, confusing the American public when they should be illuminating a basic ethics and life competence issue.

Let’s see...why not start with one of the biggest hacks out there, CNN’s former fake journalism ethics watchdog and veteran Fox News-a-phobe, Brian Stelter? “Why Tucker Carlson’s Exit From Fox News Looks Like an Execution” is the title of his analysis in “Vanity Fair,” itself now a nest of progressive propaganda merchants (but Stelter lowers the net ethics quotient anyway).  The answer to Stelter’s question is, he offers, this: “He’s not being given a chance to say goodbye. It is technically possible, I suppose, that Carlson turned down a chance to sign off on his own terms. But my 20 years of experience covering cable news suggests otherwise.”

Wow. This guy is really something. Completely inept and intellectually dishonest, Stelter has to begin an article by reminding readers how special he is. Of course Carlson wasn’t given a chance to give a last broadcast. He was fired for cause. When you are fired for cause, security ushers you out of the building. Your bosses don’t give you anything but a severance package—maybe—and ten minutes to put your stuff in a cardboard box. Allowing a likely bitter and angry demagogue like Carlson to “say good bye” is like the Charles Addams cartoon where a guy arrested for making obscene phone calls is allowed to make his one call and he makes another obscene one. What Fox did with Carlson wasn’t “an execution.” It was a standard firing.

Over at the New Republic, long-time leftist hysteric Michael Tomasky (whose biased news analysis helped drive me away from The Daily Beast) writes in “Why Fox News Is Going to Get Worse—a Lot Worse” that Carlson is certain to be replaced by someone who is “more trolly, more racist, more pro-Putin, and just all-around more outrageous than Carlson.” Tomasky is just using Carlson’s demise as an excuse to attack Fox News when it has done the right and responsible thing for once, and at significant cost: its value dipped a billion dollars on the news of the firing. In the process, he repeats the Big Lies that the Left wielded against Carlson in its efforts to silence him, because censoring opposition is how Big Blue rolls these days; it’s so much more effective than trying to win a debate with facts and logic.

Carlson’s not “racist,” but the playbook demands that anyone who questions color-based, George Floyd Freakout policies must be a racist. Tucker’s not “pro-Putin,” he’s anti-US involvement in the Russia-Ukraine war, a defensible position. Carlson, moreover, was far less outrageous than the jerk he replaced, Bill O’Reilly, so why does Tomasky assume Carlson’s replacement will be worse than he was?

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Ethics Hero: Fox News

/ Jack Marshall / 55 Comments

Now THERE’s something I never thought I’d put in a headline…

“FOX News Media and Tucker Carlson have agreed to part ways,” Fox News announced today in a statement. “We thank him for this service to the network as a host and prior to that as a contributor.”

Good.

There will be a lot of cheering from those on the political left who wanted to censor Tucker, but he brought this upon himself, and in fact the move was late in coming. Carlson’s was the network’s most-watched prime-time show, and the most popular and profitable news commentary TV show on cable. In 2022, “Tucker Carlson Tonight” averaged 3.32 million total viewers and received the largest audience with the golden 25-to-54 age demographic. But as Ethics Alarms has pointed out repeatedly, he is an ethics corrupter on the national scene, and the evidence in the Dominion defamation law suit that Fox just settled for three-quarters of a billion dollars proved that he couldn’t even be trusted to tell viewers what his real opinions were.

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Dear Proudly Obese Lady: It Is Not Everyone’s Obligation To Solve Your Problems

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

I hate to be unkind, but this is a Popeye if I ever there was one.

Jaelynn Chaney (above) is a fat positivity activist, which is jake with me, sort of, if I apply the “its not the worst thing” rationalization. (Maybe Bud Light will put her on a beer can, if possible.) However, she is now demanding, via a Change.Org petition, that the rest of us pay to make it easier for her (and her not quite as obese love-bunny to fly on commercial airlines.

Poor Jaelynn! As she writes in her repetitious and ungrammatical introduction to her demands,

Air travel should be comfortable and accessible for everyone, regardless of size. As plus-size travelers, my partner and I have unfortunately experienced discrimination and discomfort while flying. During a flight from Pasco to Denver, my fiancé was subjected to hateful comments, disapproving looks, and even refusal to sit next to them, amounting to discrimination. Similarly, on another flight, I was forced to occupy only one seat with immovable armrests that caused me pain and bruises. Being forced to occupy only one seat can result in pain and vulnerability to poor treatment from fellow passengers, including hateful comments, disapproving looks, and even refusal to sit next to them. This mistreatment of plus-size passengers is unacceptable, and it highlights the urgent need for better policies that protect the dignity and rights of all passengers, regardless of size. Unfortunately, plus-size passengers often experience discomfort and discrimination when flying. The lack of a uniform customer-of-size airline policy is unacceptable and must be addressed.

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