Comment of the Day: “The Washington Post Drops Its Resident Op-Ed Socialist. Good.”

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Post paper

The honor of the first Comment of the Day in 2016 goes to pennagain, previously penn, who assesses the forces turning our journalistic establishment to ethics mush. It is not a pretty scenario, but well worth thinking about. He was inspired by my article about the Washington Post dropping socialist pundit Harold Meyerson in part because he wasn’t getting enough clicks. Where it stops, nobody knows.

Here’s pennagain:

Twelve [delivered Washington Post daily print editions in another commenter’s apartment building] down to two is about what the trend is for paper subscriptions running out, and free internet use taking over. In the short run, probably, the metro papers will all go behind the paywall while smaller ones hold out for local advertisers, but for now there is a steady drop in print and a rise in online subscriptions, with a (temporary) small increase in access to both. All news media — newspapers, television and radio — are losing ground to the fragmentation of the internet universe as it “narrowcasts” to further and further special interests. The long run is not a pleasant prospect.

In the meantime, the born-to-the-web generation has been raised on free news, as have a majority of the current readers who lost their home-delivered (now less than 400) newspapers.

My concern is that perception of news is probably down about the same (12:2) — the smaller the screen, the poorer the perception. Internet pages are awash with advertisements up and down the sides and through the middles, flashing and flickering, sounding out automatically (this is fairly recent distraction and, I think, a true impingement on privacy), not to mention the seductive invitations between paragraphs to links that frequently cut into the text itself.

In a medium where the whole story could be presented as such on one “page,” it is cut into pieces and continued-on other screens, each of which takes more and more time to load its own load of ads. More incentive for those not desperately hooked to the story to check out one of the links or the next site down the line instead of getting all the information saved for more advertising. Click.

Continue reading →

Pssst! CNN! Don Lemon Was Drunk On The Job On New Years Eve, And It Matters

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

Drunk Lemon

The news media and social media apparently thinks its funny that CNN’s Don Lemon, one of the network’s hosts of the New Year’s dawning, an unexpected event about as newsworthy as the sun coming up, was not only drunk as a skunk most of the night but didn’t seem to care who knew it.

I think the yearly breathless coverage of the Times Square festivities is boring, dumb and stupid (People keep saying they are so excited. What are they excited about? If a big ugly ball doing exactly what you knew it would do at midnight really excites you, your life has run off the road into a muddy ditch, and I pity you), so I only cruised by the CNN coverage around 10 PM. Lemon co-hosted the network’s New Year’s Eve special with correspondent Brooke Baldwin at Tipitina’s bar in New Orleans., and had that look in his eyes and that tone in his voice that I know too well. This surprised me, but I didn’t feel like beginning 2016 with a train wreck, so I decided to watch “Rain Man” with my wife, who had never seen it. (We haven’t been invited to a New Years Eve party since 1982.)

By all accounts, Lemon was indeed smashed, and left his judgment, manners and good sense in those cups of champagne, beer and heaven knows what else he was guzzling all night. Some of the evidence, other than how he looked and sounded, which was plenty… Continue reading →

Unethical Tweet Of The Month: Carly Fiorina

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

carly tweetThe above New Year’s Day tweet was issued by Republican Presidential hopeful Carly Fiorina, now campaigning in Iowa for February’s caucuses, as Stanford and Iowa prepared to do battle in the Rose Bowl. (It was a rout: Iowa got clobbered.)

Fiorina is a  Stanford alum, and the tweet backfired, it seemed, with many on Twitter finding the tweet revealing, and not at all in a good way.

Are there any plausible translations of the tweet that reflect well on Carly’s character? Let’s see: Continue reading →

First Fick Of The New Year: Stephen Roseman

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

hamface

Web hoaxer Stephen Roseman posted a picture of a dog with a piece of ham on its face on Facebook, and counting on the power of suggestion, managed to horrify a lot of dog lovers while garnishing internet “prayers.” Here’s what he wrote along with the photo above…

This poor dog was badly burned and disfigured trying to save his family from a house fire
One like = one prayer One share = ten prayers

Lots of people liked and shared; I was previously unaware of the growing practice of equating “likes” on Facebook with prayers. Others, not so susceptible, and not so tender-hearted, perhaps, realized that the dog was a ham, and mocked everyone who fell for the scam. The hoax also set up religious Facebook users to be mocked by the likes of the Huffington Post and Ann Althouse, because equating Facebook likes and sharing with praying is so much more ridiculous than, say, Buddhist prayer wheels (one spin = thousands of prayers ), or, for that matter, folding your hands, closing your eyes, and moving your lips.

Once his hoax was discovered, Roseman posted the following admission on his Facebook page: Continue reading →

The Washington Post Drops Its Resident Op-Ed Socialist. Good.

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Workers Unite

The Washington Post has jettisoned Harold Meyerson, who has been the leftest of the leftists on the Washington Post op-ed pages for about 13 years…not surprising, as he also serves as editor at large for The American Prospect. Mayerson, according to his last column, was told that he was a goner because he was losing readers and because his columns were repetitious, which they certainly were. How many times, after all, can one read “Workers Unite!”?  From Occupy Wall Street to BlackLivesMatter, there was no revolt of the oppressed and downtrodden that Meyerson didn’t support, nor any standard issue socialist/progressive position that he did not wholeheartedly embrace.

The Post has other kneejerk leftists among their pundits, a disproportionate number in fact (this was also part of the Post’s motivation to let Meyerson go), but I found Meyerson more infuriating than the others because he seemed so much more intelligent than his positions and statements would suggest. He was the epitome of an opinion journalist whose opinions seemed to be calibrated to achieve a grander agenda, rather than honest expressions of truth or even what he really believed. He is a columnist in the Saul Alinsky tradition of liberalism, willing to bend truth for the greater good, to win converts for the Great Worker Rebellion, or whatever it would be.

No newspaper should employ a journalist who is willing to deceive its readers, even on the pretense of saving the world.

Continue reading →

Call For Nominations Of The Best And Worst In 2015 Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments
...and don't come back!!

…and don’t come back!!

As always on January. 1, I am laboriously reviewing  the more than a thousand posts published here over the past year to assemble the annual Ethics Alarms Best and Worst in Ethics of 2015. It’s a horrible job, both because of its labor intensive nature and because many posts remind me of horrors that my mind had managed to suppress in the interests of my sanity…and as I don’t have to tell you, 2015 was an awful year.

I don’t know why I’ve never  invited nominations before, but I would love to get some submissions from the assembled. Be sure to explain why you think a particular topic is Best or Worstworthy. Be sure to niminate a Commenter of the Year—volume counts, but so does quality. You can nominate yourself, too.

Don’t worry abut being too late: I may not get through with this ordeal until early next week.

Oh, by the way…

Happy New Year!

And be afraid.

Be very afraid.

 

Update On Hillary’s Stupid E-Mails: She Lied, Of Course.

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

HillaryClinton phone

Once Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton’s fake competition for the Democratic nomination, declared twice during televised debates that since the public was “sick of hearing” about Clinton’s stupid e-mails, most of the news media decided that it had permission to stop covering the issue. That serves the public interest badly, of course, since the public has a right to know whether a woman presuming to become President of the United States either 1) lied in to  face of the public by stating outright that she never sent or received classified material on her illicit private e-mail server, 2) was unable to recognize what was obviously classified material, thus placing it at risk on an unsecured server, and/or 3) has the technological acumen of an Irish Setter. An old Irish Setter.

More than 1,200 emails from Hillary Clinton’s private server during her time at State have now been deemed classified, after the agency publicly released its eighth batch of the messages late Thursday.

On New Years Eve, the State Department released roughly 5,500 more containing more than  1,200 e-mails culled from the private account that Clinton exclusively used while Secretary of State. New Years Eve, when as few people would notice as possible. This kind of stunt has become expected from that most transparent of all administrations, as it routinely tries to bury bad news. There was bad news too: Continue reading →

What’s More Unethical Than A Web Hoax? How About A Scientific Journal Hoax?

/ Jack Marshall / 40 Comments

mom-kiss

The Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice, a respected scientific journal, published a supposedly peer-reviewed study in its current issue finding that kisses from mommy are not an effective way of remedying children’s boo-boos. Several news outlets fell for the hoax, including The Daily Caller.

“Maternal kisses are not effective in alleviating minor childhood injuries (boo-boos): a randomized, controlled and blinded study“ described the results of research allegedly conducted on 943 pairs of toddlers and their mothers and designed to determine whether a kiss from a child’s mother after a minor injury significantly reduced the child’s distress.

There were plenty of red flags in the study beyond its ridiculous subject matter. For example, the “researchers” wrote that they intentionally constructed scenarios in which children would hurt themselves. In one scenario, the authors claimed that they placed chocolate in an area where a child would bump his head trying to reach the chocolate. In another, they said that the researchers placed a child’s favorite object behind a heated coil so the child would burn herself trying to access the object. Continue reading →

Columnist Malpractice On The Tamir Rice Tragedy

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments
This is not how police saw Tamir Rice before he was shot, but never mind: the points is to horrify the public, not to accurately explain what happened.

This is not how police saw Tamir Rice before he was shot, but never mind: the objective is to inflame public opinion, not to accurately convey what happened and why.

Washington Post reporter Lonnae O’Neal found herself compelled by the Tamir Rice grand jury decision to write the kind of irresponsible column for the paper that can be written but shouldn’t be written—not by a professional journalist, not when public passions are inflamed, not when complex and entangled issues need analysis, careful words, perspective and wisdom. It is an emotional scream of pain and frustration, unleavened by objectivity, fairness or restraint. Such columns do much damage, and no good. Such columns are destructive. I hope writing it relieved her pain, but that’s not justification enough.

I was alerted to the kind of column it would be  by its first sentences:

A 12-year-old black boy walks into a Cleveland park, plays with a toy gun and, within seconds of arriving, a police officer shoots him dead. His partner tackles the boy’s 14-year-old sister as she rushes to his side, handcuffs the girl and shoves her into a squad car, helpless, as her brother lay dying.

If we want to accurately describe the event that ended  Tamir Rice’s life so prematurely from the perspective of people who loved him, and of people mourning the senseless death of a child, those who read about the boy’s death and want to cry to the skies, “Why? How can this happen?,” then that is a defensible beginning….maybe.  That is not her intent, however. The intent of her column is to indict “the system” for not indicting the officer who shot Tamir Rice. With that intent, the description is a lie, a manipulative appeal to pure emotion that willfully and negligently makes the system, which is not and must not be based on emotion, incomprehensible.  Continue reading →

Observations On Donald Trump Playing The Bill Card On Hillary Clinton.

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

dueling_bills_12-30-15-1

Veeery interesting.

After Hillary accused Donald Trump of being a sexist, which, of course, he indubitably is, Trump, who believes that when hit one should hit back twice as hard, immediately pointed out, in his typically clumsy, sloppy but somehow effective way, that for someone married to Bill Clinton to play “the woman’s card” was, shall we say, hypocritical. Then fate took a hand: Bill Cosby finally faced a few bars of music in court, and some journalists and pundits began musing about the differences and similarities between Bill C. and Bill C. (I flagged this problem for the Clintons over a year ago.)

Then elder pundits did some figuring, and realized that a large number of younger voters, the Democratic Party’s base, don’t know very much at all about Monica, Paula, Kathleen, Juanita, Gennifer and Dolly, Bill Clinton’s impeachment, or loss of his law license, in part because the news media has been an active Clinton family enabler for over a decade, and in part because our education system fails to educate. Thus a decisive component of the Hillary cheering section just think of Bill as a revered former President elder statesman, and did not gag, as I did, when this guy of all guys was made the centerpiece of the 2012 Democratic National Convention themed to decry the “war on women.”

But wait! There’s more! When Trump carried his new vendetta to the Today Show, lovely, light-weight, biased co-host Savannah Guthrie revealed herself to be both ignorant and a tool by calling the Monica affair “alleged.”  Mary Bruce on  Good Morning America also referred to Bill’s infamous womanizing as “alleged sexual misconduct and infidelity.” Ignorance or Clinton protecting? Bill’s infidelity is as “alleged” as O.J.’s skills with a knife.

Finally, a feminist, Democrat, usually reliable Clinton ally on the Washington Post editorial staff, Ruth Marcus, Trump is right: “Bill Clinton’s sordid sexual history is fair game.” for Hillary opponents.

Which, of course, it is.

Observations: Continue reading →