Workplace

The Pentagon Insists That Reporters Don’t Publish Secrets and Information It Doesn’t Want Revealed? Good!

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Ethics verdict: it’s about time!

This is one of those situations where my ethics alarms steered me to exactly the opposite position of almost everyone I know. Like the Axis media, they are generally pronouncing Sec. Hegseth’s cracking down on leaks at the Pentagon as one more “assault on democracy.” No, it is just another example of the Trump Administration having the guts to do what should have been done long ago.

What Hegseth called in a tweet “Press Credentialing for Dummies,” news organization reporters are now subject to the following rules:

1. No roaming free in the Pentagon. Good.

2. Reporters must wear badges identifying them as such. Good.

3. Press can not solicit criminal acts. Best of all.

Ethics Alarms has long held the position that “journalists” abuse their privilege under the First Amendment by freely (smugly, irresponsibly) engaging in information laundering by publishing leaks from individuals who broke the law or their ethical duties by telling reporters what they were forbidden to reveal. Since we now know that these untrustworthy professionals (which means they are not professionals at all) do not have the best interests of the nation at heart, making news organizations agree to reasonable restrictions as a condition of holding press credentials is the responsible course.

I endorse the analysis at Victory Girls on this issue, which wrote in part,

Freedom of the Press means that you get to REPORT news items. It does not mean you get to demand and be granted access to wherever you want. The media and far too many politicians have forgotten or are willfully ignoring that salient point….in World War II there was a slogan. A very important slogan: “Loose lips sink ships.” To be blunt, people were shitcanned from their jobs or even thrown in prison during that time period for breaking those rules. [But]in the last twenty years at least, Pentagon weenies and the media have cultivated relationships that have led to media breaking stories chock full of those “unnamed sources” about Pentagon dealings. Too many of those reports, especially during President Trump’s first term, were designed as hit jobs. 

Couldn’t have said it better myself. In protest of the new restrictions, most of the news organizations covering the Pentagon, even Fox, are boycotting the assignment rather than agree to Hegseth’s terms. The news media brought this on themselves; they will find no sympathy here. They have been, after all, “enemies of the people.” I see no reason to trust enemies with access to Pentagon secrets. In fact, doing so is unethical: incompetent and irresponsible.

Now THIS Is an Unethical Nurse!

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Yikes. Fortunately she is also a fired nurse, and, I presume, a permanent ex-nurse.

Crystal Tadlock (that’s not her above; it’s the late Louise Fletcher as nightmare nurse Rached in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”), who worked in the intensive care unit at Memorial Hermann Greater Heights Hospital in Houston, had a Mel Gibson moment abusing the police who arrested her for DWI last week on October 11.

“I’m a fucking nurse!” Crystal began, in a drunken rant that was duly recorded. “When you come through my hospital, don’t worry, I’ll let you die,” she went on. “All your family members, and this is all on recording. Greater Heights, bitch. Don’t go there.”

Oh, don’t worry, Crystal, I’m sure they won’t. I don’t know who in their right mind would, after listening to that threat. So the hospital hires medical professionals who are drunks and who are capable of killing patients as revenge, eh? Good to know.

It may be time to become a Christian Scientist.

Does anyone want to bet against my conviction that Crystal, like Mel, Michael Richards and others who have sunk their careers and reputations with similarly outrageous outbursts, will resort to the Pazuzu Excuse in her inevitable groveling apology? That she will swear that what she said doesn’t represent who she really is or express her true feelings, that those frightening threats just tumbled out of her mouth from who knows where, that “something came over her”?

CBS Staff Freaks Out Over An Exiled NYT Moderate Being Placed in Charge of CBS

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias!

CBS’s new owners have bought The Free Press and are putting its founder, rebel New York Times reporter Bari Weiss, in charge of the news division. Weiss fled the Times with a manifesto condemning her former employer for unethical progressive bias, which, of course, was an accurate assessment. If you have read or listened to Weiss you know that she is a Democrat and a liberal/progressive, just one who does try to keep her biases from tainting her reporting (though not always succeeding).

She is the best that any reasonable person can expect from today’s rotting journalism; it is a field that has disproportionately attracted those from the left end of the political spectrum for more than a century. Journalism ethics demanded that practitioners concentrate on objectivity, but that goal has been almost entirely jettisoned by “advocacy journalism,” which is a euphemism for “Leftist propaganda.” To her credit, Weiss strives to be what journalists are supposed to be: honest, fair and trustworthy.

The fact that CBS staffers are reportedly furious and frightened that a real journalist like Weiss will be their new boss should tell you all you need to know about CBS, and, by extension, broadcast news generally.

Here’s the funniest section of the Independent’s report on the matter:

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Michael Mann Helpfully Continues To Prove Just How Much “Climate Science” Is Warped By Partisan Agendas and Unprofessional Bias

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Climate change hysterics cannot discuss the basis for their passion without mentioning Michael Mann, who must be regarded as the face of whole climate change movement. Wikipedia makes him seem like a master of his domain:

Mann has contributed to the scientific understanding of historic climate change based on the temperature record of the past thousand years. He has pioneered techniques to find patterns in past climate change and to isolate climate signals from noisy data.

As lead author of a paper produced in 1998 with co-authors Raymond S. Bradley and Malcolm K. Hughes, Mann used advanced statistical techniques to find regional variations in a hemispherical climate reconstruction covering the past 600 years. In 1999 the same team used these techniques to produce a reconstruction over the past 1,000 years (MBH99), which was dubbed the “hockey stick graph” because of its shape. He was one of eight lead authors of the “Observed Climate Variability and Change” chapter of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Third Scientific Assessment Report published in 2001. A graph based on the MBH99 paper was highlighted in several parts of the report and was given wide publicity. The IPCC acknowledged that his work, along with that of the many other lead authors and review editors, contributed to the award of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, which was won jointly by the IPCC and Al Gore.

Mann was organizing committee chair for the National Academy of Sciences Frontiers of Science in 2003 and has received a number of honors and awards including selection by Scientific American as one of the fifty leading visionaries in science and technology in 2002. In 2012 he was inducted as a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union and was awarded the Hans Oeschger Medal of the European Geosciences Union. In 2013, he was elected a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society and awarded the status of distinguished professor in Penn State’s College of Earth and Mineral Sciences. In 2017, he was elected a Fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry.

Mann is author of more than 200 peer-reviewed and edited publications. He has also published six books: Dire Predictions: Understanding Global Warming (2008), The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars (2012), together with co-author Tom Toles, The Madhouse Effect: How Climate Change Denial Is Threatening Our Planet, Destroying Our Politics, and Driving Us Crazy (2016) with Megan Herbert, The Tantrum That Saved the World (2018), The New Climate War (2021), and Our Fragile Moment (2023). In 2012, the European Geosciences Union described his publication record as “outstanding for a scientist of his relatively young age”. Mann is a co-founder and contributor to the climatology blog RealClimate.

All the honors and accolades prove is how politicized the scientific community is, and how progressive bias has infected so many of the world’s institutions. His so-called “hockey stick graph,” supposedly a reconstruction of past climate temperatures, was shown to be the product of dishonest statistics methodology; for example, it conveniently ignored the Medieval Warm Period that continues to bedevil the climate change narrative.

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Stop Making Me Defend Tilly Norwood!

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Hollywood actors are freaking out over fake actress “Tilly Norwood.” That’s already a plus to the AI-generated performer’s credit: Hollywood actors deserve to be freaked out as often possible (within the boundaries of law and ethics, of course). It gives them something to scream about other than how the President of the United States is a fascist, or how as more unborn babies should be killed. And cases like this one, where their freaking out reveals just how hypocritical and intellectually shallow they are, it’s a public service: NOW do you understand why you shouldn’t pay attention to these one-trick millionaires?

Tilly Norwood, in case you never watch E! or read Variety, is an AI-generated fake actress with about 40,000 Instagram followers who don’t have a life. Tilly was created by Xicoia, the AI division of the production company Particle6, from the rib of an AI-created actor. OK, I’m kidding about that.

Eline Van der Velden, the Dutch producer who founded Particle6, claims to be seeking an agent to represent Norwood to place her in real films, ads and TV shows, unlike the fake, AI created scenes in her videos.

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Weird Tales of the Charlie Kirk Assassination Ethics Train Wreck: The Very Just Firing of Suzanne Swierc

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Do reporters understand what the First Amendment means? It would be passing strange if they did not, but to read and hear all the teeth-gnashing and garment-rending over lawyers, teachers and others justifiably dismissed for social media posts that announced to the world that they were cruel, irresponsible, biased or just not very bright, I find myself wondering.

The New York Times has one of their sob story features [gift link!] about an employee at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana who found herself the target of online abuse and ultimately a negative employment action for posting this sentiment on Facebook: “If you think Charlie Kirk was a wonderful person, we can’t be friends.” The “private” statement went viral, as they say (if you think anything you post on line is “private,” you are a fool at the very least), and five days after it went up, Suzanne Swierc was fired as the director of health and advocacy at Ball State.

Good. It would have been irresponsible not to fire her, but Times writer Sabrina Tavernise writes that firings like hers raise “questions about the limits of free speech.” Some of the alleged more than 145 people fired in the wake of Kirk’s assassination may raise those questions, but not this one.

As is par for the course, the Times story mischaracterized the meaning and import of the central fact in the story: what Swierc posted. She didn’t express anything specifically negative about Kirk. She did not cheer on his death or call him names. Her post declared her inability to be “friends” with anyone who held an opinion about Charlie Kirk that was different from hers. Those one cannot be friends with, as opposed to those one hasn’t become friends with yet, are expressly adversaries, persona non grata or even enemies. Treating anyone as an enemy because of their opinions and openly announcing that this is one’s practice is an embrace of bigotry and intolerance. It is proof of dead ethics alarms.

A university staff member responsible for providing services to students as director of health and advocacy (whatever that means) or any other function cannot be trusted to do so fairly if that is her attitude. If it isn’t her attitude, Swierc should not have written that it was.

Swierc was fired, not for her opinion of Charlie Kirk, but because she proved she was unable to deal fairly with people holding diverse viewpoints. Sadly, surveys indicate that a lot of Americans have this malady, and the bulk of them are progressives: if you don’t think like they do, you’re by definition a bad person and not worthy of their friendship. That is an unethical mindset as well as a disqualifying one for many jobs.

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Mets Announcer Gary Cohen Was Right and Cubs Rookie Matt Shaw Is…What, Exactly? And What Am I?

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

Chicago Cubs rookie third baseman Matt Shaw skipped the Cubs’ game against the Reds on Sunday after receiving a call from Charley Kirk’s widow. Instead, the player attended the memorial event for the assassinated activist at State Farm Stadium in Arizona. Shaw is not just a Kirk admirer: Shaw had something of a personal relationship with Kirk that he described as important to him, though they were not close friends.

During Tuesday’s Mets-Cubs game at Wrigley Field, game, Mets play-by-play announcer Gary Cohen said, “Shaw had Cubs world in a tizzy this weekend when he was not here for the Cubs game with the Reds — a game they lost (1-0) and in which his lack of presence was felt. It was later revealed that he had been given permission to attend Charlie Kirk’s funeral.”

Cohen added, “I don’t want to talk about any of the politics of it, but the thought of leaving your team in the middle of a race for any reason other than a family emergency really strikes me as weird.”

Naturally, Kirk-worshiping Mets fans erupted on social media, with some pledging to boycott any games announced by Cohen and others insisting that he be fired. Now, Cohen didn’t say anything negative about Charley Kirk at all. Moreover, he was 100% right. It is very weird, although weird would not be my word for it. Skipping an important game in the waning days of a baseball season when your team seeks your services is selfish and unprofessional. Shaw is a rookie and “only” makes the MLB minimum of $760,000; nonetheless, that salary commits him to being available to play if he is healthy. This wasn’t his wife giving birth or a desperately sick child or the death of a parent—the MLB Players’ Union bargained for special leave for such events.

Some wags have pointed out that the rookie is hardly a star: he’s about a league average hitter, though his fielding at third is outstanding. That misses the point. He was obligated to play baseball, not to go to a memorial ceremony. An actress bailed on an ethics program she was supposed to assist me on, with almost no notice, because her grandmother died. ProEthics, as in me, blackballed her after that, and I told her not to bother auditioning for any professional shows in the D.C. area I directed. Woody Allen said that 80% of success is just showing up, and I couldn’t trust this alleged professional to do that.

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Ethics Quiz: The Lawyer’s Facebook Post

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Insurance litigator Bradley Dlatt was fired by law firm Perkins Coie and has been erased its website after he posted on Facebook,

“Charlie Kirk got famous as one of America’s leading spreaders of hatred, misinformation and intolerance.The current political moment—where an extremist Supreme Court and feckless Republican Congress are enabling a Republican president to become a tyrant and building him a modern-day Gestapo for assaulting black and brown folks—is a result of Charlie Kirk’s ‘contributions’ to American media and politics. Hell, Kirk would likely be flattered by the underlying claim. His Turning Point USA began as a sort of Misbehaved Young Republicans and eventually overshadowed traditional right-wing organizations like CPAC in dictating the shape of American conservatism. Not to diminish Donald Trump’s media instincts, but when polls suggest young men turning more conservative helped get Trump to this point, that’s all Kirk. And he can take credit for all that flows from that, including the current Supreme Court making a straightfaced proclamation that forgiving student debt is executive tyranny and then deciding that sending people to South Sudan without due process is just “practicing executive authority the right way.” It’s not “celebrating” a murder just because you decline to whitewash Kirk’s legacy by acting like he “was practicing politics the right way” as Ezra Klein belched out onto the pages of the New York Times. Klein apparently believes saying that the guy who tried to murder Paul Pelosi with a hammer should be bailed out by some “patriot” or responding to the murder of George Floyd by calling him a “scumbag” is “the right way.” It’s a stunning display of pathological centrism brain: a compulsion to champion an angle that almost no one in the real world shares and then preen as though being an outlier is a sign of genius. Because while liberals didn’t think Kirk practiced politics the right way… neither did conservatives! If they’re being honest with themselves, the highest compliment conservatives give Kirk is that he broke politics. He saw the dusty, genteel norms of the post-War political divide and tossed them aside to build a following. He took Rush Limbaugh’s model and pushed it beyond its limits. That said, no one in this country should be murdered for their political speech. Wishing comfort to his wife and children in this difficult time. “

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day: Continue reading →

We Don’t Have To Debate This, Do We? Brian Kilmede Is an Ethics-Challenged Idiot and Fox News Must Fire Him Immediately.

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

Why hasn’t he been fired already? Why wasn’t he pulled off the air with a giant hook before he could complete what would laughingly be called his “thought”?

“Fox & Friends” co-anchor Brian Kilmeade, who has long been an embarrassment on Fox News’ routinely embarrassing news happy talk moring show “Fox and Friends,” said during a discussion with fellow (almost equally annoying) anchors Lawrence Jones and Ainsley Earhardt last week that homeless people (like the maniac who killed the young woman on the train in Charlotte) should be given “involuntary lethal injection(s).” Homeless problem solved!

Jones began the assault on due process, civil rights and decency by saying about the homeless, “A lot of them don’t want to take the programs. A lot of them don’t want to get the help that is necessary. You can’t give them a choice. Either you take the resources that we’re gonna give you, or you decide that you’re going to be locked up in jail. That’s the way it has to be now.” Kilmeade added. “Or, involuntary lethal injection — or something. Just kill them!”

Nice.

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Comment of the Day: Glenn Logan

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

The assassination of Charlie Kirk and the aftermath of spin and consequences has brought out the best of veteran commenter Glenn Logan, who just had a distinguished COTD two days ago. Here is another, this one on the post, “Ethics Dunce: Stephen King.”

Among Glenn’s points was the topic of an EA post that his supersedes. Glenn writes,

“Getting someone fired for dancing on the grave of a person unlawfully killed in front of his family while speaking to a group of college students is not “cancel culture.” It is justified societal opprobrium for awful, unethical behavior that casts significant doubt on their possession of important qualities of caring, fairness, respect and humanity that are absolutely required for a society to function even at a basic level.”

Bingo.

Above you see an (incomplete) spreadsheet of individuals who have openly celebrated or justified Kirk’s assassination. I doubt that it is compete (and surprised that it is so short), but never mind: the issue is which of them deserve to be fired.

  • There are 19 teachers who are, to use Glenn’s term, ghouls on the list. All of them should be fired. Teachers have to convey values as well critical thinking to their students. Believing in political violence disqualified them for either job.
  • 23 on the list have jobs that I would hold are irrelevant to expressed opinions, even ones as repulsive as cheering o a murderer. If cognitive dissonance causes others to avoid them or boycott their services, that the risk one takes no matter what opinion is broadcast to the world. The 23 includes several nurses, a veterinarian, a data analyst, two librarians, some physicians, two restaurant workers, a barber, a “processor,” an “assistant,”an author, a flight attendant, a few therapists, a business owner, a trans activist, a BLM organizer, IT support staff, a “patient support” staffer, a “wealth manager,” a retail manager and a real estate agent. These should probably not be fired.

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