As If Any More Evidence Was Needed That NBC Has Dead Ethics Alarms…

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

NBC Olympics announcer Leigh Diffey got his call of the 100-meter dash gold medal win for Noah Lyles wrong. Lyles edged out Kishane Thompson of Jamaica by a 0.005 seconds to claim the USA’s first gold in the event since 2004. He incorrectly declared Thompson the winner on the live broadcast, which is understandable, since the two runners were also confused about who had won. Reportedly NBC planned to replay the full race again “with added context,” meaning that Diffey’s call will be “corrected.”

I’m hoping that some rogue staffer with functioning ethics alarms talked them out of it: so far, I can’t find the video of the replay or any commentary confirming that NBC went through with its plan as reported.

The fact that NBC Sports even considered doing it is ominous enough, however. An announcer’s call is part of the sporting event itself. Many calls that were later assessed as unprofessional (“THE GIANTS WIN THE PENNANT! THE GIANTS WIN THE PENNANT! THEY’RE GOING CRAZY! WWWEEEAAAHHHOOOOO!”) or incorrect nonetheless entered the Memorable Broadcasting Hall of Fame, or would have if there were such a place. The fact that Diffey reported the wrong runner as the victor just shows how close the finish was.

Does it not register on these people that the more they are caught covering up their own errors and mistakes, the less reason the public has to trust anything they show or say? Apparently not.

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Pointer: Curmie

Stephanopoulos? Chris Cuomo? If You Think U.S. Journalists Have Jettisoned Avoiding Conflicts of Interest As a Foundation of Journalism Ethics, “Good Morning Britain” Says “Hold My Beer!”

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

The background: There has been violent rioting in Great Britain’s Rotherham, Middlesbrough, Bristol, Bolton and other parts of the country following a stabbing attack in which three children attending a dance class were killed. Rioters have trashed and looted shops, set fire to vehicles and attacked police officers.

ITV, the alternative to the venerable BBC that dominates British television, had an interview with Home Secretary Yvette Cooper about the deepening domestic crisis on its popular morning show, a “Today Show” rip-off, “Good Morning Britain.” And who was the hard-hitting, independent, unbiased journalist given the assignment of handling the interview yesterday?

Why, it was none other than veteran broadcaster, GMB host and former Labour chancellor Ed Balls….Cooper’s husband.

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The U.S. District Court for D.C. Finds That Google’s Search Engine Is An Illegal Monopoly: 1) Of Course, and 2) Good!

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

The ruling found that Google acted illegally to maintain a monopoly in online search. Ya think? The statistics showed that Google had about 95% of the online search market, that “google” had become synonymous with “online search,” and that internal memos showed that executives acknowledged that Google’s quality of search could decline without having any negative impact on the company.

This is essentially the attitude and conditions that prevailed before the court-ordered break-up of Bell Telephone’s monopoly. “Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In” had a running joke with Ernestine the Bell Operator (Lily Tomlin) snorting and responding to complaints with “We don’t care! We don’t have to care: we’re the phone company.” The D.C. District Court found that Google is like that.

The ruling doesn’t come soon enough to stop Google from trying to manipulate voter opinions and votes as November approaches, and the company that once had the motto “Don’t be evil” has been turned to the Dark Side for a long time. Nonetheless, this development is an important steep toward disassembling an unethical and dangerous source of power and influence in American society.

You can read the opinion here.

There is hope.

Ethics Quiz: The Google AI Olympics Commercial

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Google pulled that ad after a wave of criticism on social media.

Is the ad encouraging children to use AI instead of writing their own messages and letters? Is it an invitation to cheat in school? Does it suggest that robots are better at expressing genuine human feelings than humans are? Is having someone, or something, write your fan letters to a personal hero a cop-out? A lie?

Is the commercial “Ick!”, unethical, or just ominous?

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

Is that Google AI ad irresponsible, corrupting—unethical? Did an ethics alarm fail to sound that should have?

“This Is Kamala Harris” Episode #2: Kamala Explains Cloud Computing

/ Jack Marshall / 69 Comments

This ridiculous section of an as yet undated Harris speech (or appearance, or nervous breakdown) would have once fallen into the Ethics Alarms Julie Principle category. Yes, yes, we all know that the Vice President is a babbling idiot, and there’s no point in pouncing on every time she proves it; after all, fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly. That, however, was before the Democratic Party, in its desperation after being caught deceiving the American people (with the aid of its propaganda organs, the biased and unethical news media) that President Biden wasn’t teetering on the brink of total senility, decided to make Kamala its nominee for President while bypassing primaries, debates, voting, competition—you know, that whole democracy thingy they claim to be protecting.

Now, however, the various emerging examples of Harris talking off the top of what we generously call “her head” becomes suddenly relevant, and not to be ignored out of pity and kindness. As I wrote in installment #1 of “This is Kamala Harris” last week…

“Evidence like this will be buried, ignored, or denied by the mainstream media, just like Hunter Biden’s laptop, until enough Americans have been deceived to put Harris in the White House….Harris’s distorted values, cracked logic, obnoxious character and arrogance are all intolerable, and most normal people will see that, if they only are allowed to read, watch and hear. “

Why is this particularly ludicrous example of Kamala being Kamala (I know, we have been told that using her first name is sexist and racist. Bite me.) significant? Several reasons, including the fact that almost all the major news sources now know about it but have refused to mention it, just as they continue to hide the substance of Harris’s extreme policy positions. Yet if Joe Biden, at least once the order had gone out to bring him down, had babbled like this the MSM might well have cited it as more proof that there were squirrels in his attic, metaphorically speaking or in actuality. And in contrast, as we all know and as I wrote in the earlier post, “each word out of Donald Trump’s ever-open mouth will be spun and fact-checked to put him in the worst light possible.”

Among the other reasons the video is significant:

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Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias! George Stephanopoulos vs. Rep. Byron Donalds

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

As everyone knows by now, Donald Trump, appearing at the Black Journalists Association conference, responded to a question about whether he regards Harris as a D.E.I candidate by going in another direction, one that raised the issue of Harris’s integrity and ever-changing positions.

“Well, I can say, no, I think it’s maybe a little bit different,” Trump began. “So, I’ve known her a long time indirectly, not directly very much, and she was always of Indian heritage. And she was only promoting Indian heritage. I didn’t know she was black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn black. And now she wants to be known as black. So, I don’t know, is she Indian or is she black? But you know what, I respect either one.”

Trump was trolling, as usual, and spitting into the metaphorical wind, also as usual, so the reaction was entirely predictable, as EA already discussed here. It’s a week later, and the Axis is still trying to make a Trump ad lib the focus of its campaign “coverage.”

On ABC today, George Stephanopoulos couldn’t restrain his inner Democrat hack and flipped out because Trump surrogate Rep. Byron Donalds refused to concede that Harris’s manipulation of her various ethnic identity cards wasn’t a legitimate point for Trump to make. Here’s the full exchange:

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Confronting My Biases, Episode 13: Old Guys With Long Scraggly Beards

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

I saw two men today with this fashion statement, the Rutherford B. Hayes look. Actually, that photo above is the one where his beard looks relatively kempt. On the other hand, Rutherford gets something of a pass because he grew to adulthood in the era where long beards were inexplicably in, especially among Civil War officers, and he was one. Today, however, long scraggly gray or white beards send out multiple messages to me, none of them good. Like:

  • “I’ve given up. I’m old, and I don’t care how I look. I’m not even trying any more. Tomorrow, I may not wear pants.”
  • “Hey, I’ve never done anything that earned anyone’s deference or respect, but maybe if I look like Heidi’s grandfather, someone will treat me better.”
  • “I’m Santa Claus on the skids!”
  • ‘I’m retired and you’re not! Ha Ha!”

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Ethics Observations on the Doug Emhoff Scandal

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

The story was first broken by the Daily Mail, a UK tabloid:

Kamala Harris’s husband’s first marriage ended after he got his children’s nanny pregnant, DailyMail.com can exclusively reveal.

Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff cheated on his first wife Kerstin with the blonde nanny, who also taught at their children’s pricey private school.

The woman, Najen Naylor, 47, did not deny the story when approached by DailyMail.com at her home in the New York millionaires’ playground, The Hamptons.

She would not comment, except to say, ‘I’m kind of freaked out right now.’

A close friend with direct knowledge of the affair and pregnancy told DailyMail.com that Naylor did not keep the child – though her social media shows a video of a mysterious baby girl named Brook in 2009, the year the baby would have been born.

Another  friend, Stacey Brooks, who mothered twin boys around the same time as Naylor was expecting, also did not deny any of the claims – but said she would not divulge further information without Naylor’s permission.

What’s going on here? Observations:

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GLAAD “Falls Into The Trap” of Enriching Itself

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

What happens, in these situations, is that a non-profit, charity or activist organization becomes so impressed with its own virtue as it chooses to define it that its leaders decide self-enrichment is not only justifiable, but a right. Why should they sacrifice and suffer, when the for-profit executives and leaders whose companies inflict scars on the earth, the culture, society or the public, live in comfort and extravagance? It is so unfair!

And thus we get repeating stories like what the New York Times published yesterday about GLAAD, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation. [ I like GLAAD: it nominated one of my theater’s shows for a local award!] As you might imagine, the group is riding high these days, flushed with victories in legislatures and the courts, seeing the culture supine before it in fear of being branded discriminatory. Things are going particularly well with GLAAD’s efforts to encourage children to change their genders without input or interference from their parents. Hooray.

The Times reports in part:

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What Do You Believe?

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

Not exactly ethics, but proto-ethics: our beliefs vastly affect, even control, how our ethics alarms are calibrated, what makes them sound, and what disables them. Beliefs can be biases (not all biases are bad), but they also constitute what our linear constant is for navigating the chaos of life—and we all need that. Beliefs define our values as well as how we interpret the world.

In the most famous scene from the cult baseball film “Bull Durham,” Crash Davis, the iconoclastic minor league catcher played by Kevin Costner, is asked what he believes. He answers (unrealistically rapidly, as if he had memorized the speech in advance, which has always bothered me from a directorial perspective, but I digress)

“I believe in the soul, the cock, the pussy, the small of a woman’s back, the hanging curve ball, high fiber, good scotch, that the novels of Susan Sontag are self-indulgent, overrated crap. I believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. I believe there ought to be a constitutional amendment outlawing Astroturf and the designated hitter. I believe in the sweet spot, soft-core pornography, opening your presents Christmas morning rather than Christmas Eve and I believe in long, slow, deep, soft, wet kisses that last three days.” 

My list is better (and longer) than Crash’s, and I’ll probably post it later, but right now I’d like to see what the readers here believe.

I started to think about this when I realized that I have no idea what one of the Presidential candidates believes, and I am not entirely sure what the other one believes either. I think that Donald Trump, based on his family background and the culture he was raised in, believes in the capitalist system, individuality, entrepreneurial spirit, minimal government interference with personal liberties, traditional male and female roles, strong leadership, not being a weenie, America as a force for good in the world, American exceptionalism, that abortion is wrong, that he is almost always right and is the one person he can trust to fix what he sees as wrong with our government, and that the 2020 election was rigged against him.

I have no clue what Kamala Harris believes.

This is a problem.

What do you believe, if you are comfortable revealing it?

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[I thought everyone should be reminded that the great Frankie Laine sang songs other than “Rawhide.”]