Stop Making Me Defend Chris Cuomo!

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

CNN’s most unethical, incompetent and dumbest journalist—yes, yes, I keep telling you, even worse than Don Lemon!— is once again in trouble, and once again it’s because of his conflict of interest in matters involving his brother, besieged New York Governor Andrew Cuomo.

Chris advised Andrew and senior members of his brother’s staff on how to respond to the sexual harassment allegations made earlier this year by various women, in a series of conference calls including the Democratic governor, his top aide, his communications team, lawyers and a number of outside advisers. It doesn’t matter what Chris’s advice was; you can read the Washington Post story if you’re interested, but that’s irrelevant to the ethics issue. First, anyone who would take the advice of a boob like Chris Cuomo on anything needs to have his mittens connected up through his sleeves, and second, the problem is that Chris was involved in the discussions at all, even if all he did was blow spit bubbles.

Journalists are ethically obligated to be objective reporters of the news, not participants in it, assuming journalists today even know or care what their professional ethics rules are. Chris Cuomo clearly doesn’t: he made that clear by repeatedly interviewing his brother on CNN, tossing him softball questions, and basically serving as his brother’s PR flack. The network let him do it, because it meant good ratings and “fun” TV.

Yet the Washington Post offers this knee-slapper:

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Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 5/21/2021, To A Chorus Of Cicadas

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Cicada Ethics: Sweep up all the disgusting things (and their husks) that have accumulated on your front walk at least twice a day so people don’t have to walk on them and their dogs don’t eat them.

1. Charles Grodin (1935-2021): Thanks a lot! Charles Grodin was a talented and versatile actor who was extremely good at playing dislikable characters. We can blame him (not Jon Stewart) for creating the unfortunate cultural phenomenon of the allegedly funny TV talk show host who decides he is qualified to bombard viewers with partisan rants. It’s a self-indulgent abuse of power, position and trust, but it’s also now the norm, with every late night talk show host (and Staurday Night Live) but the generally sweet James Cordon using their show as a platform to bash Republicans and conservatives and extoll progressives no matter how mockworthy they are. Grodin started the bait-and-switch (He’s funny! Wait, why is he so angry and preaching at us?) in the mid-Nineties, and though it eventually killed his show (not soon enough), the template was born.

Grodin made Ethics Alarms in 2014, with his campaign against the felony murder rule.

2. Speaking of staying in one’s lane…Yet another ugly result of social media is the phenomenon of people publishing uninformed opinions that they are unqualified to be so emphatic about. A baseball writer and recovering lawyer, Craig Calcaterra, whom I have referenced here before, has migrated from NBC Sports to substack, and is asking me to subscribe to his newsletter. Craig is funny and smart, and his baseball analysis is superior to most. But he is addicted to making political pronouncements, and while he has a right to his biased and often ignorant opinions on things he’s far from an expert on, I’ll be damned if I’ll pay to read them. For essentially the same reasons I object to watching football players “take a knee” during the National Anthem, I expect sports writers to stick to sports. Here’s a tip to anyone peddling a newsletter to me: I regard referring to the January 6 Capitol riot as a “deadly insurrection” as Democratic Party propagandist and signature significance for a pundit who is not concerned with facts.

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Friday Open Forum!

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

Or “open lines,” if you like anachronisms.

Assuming high schools can still do musicals, will be allowed to or want to, I wonder how the four classic high school musicals (all about high school) will fare. I’ve seen ’em all. “Grease” is tied with “Hairspray” for the worst (but is arguably the most fun). “Mean Girls” had its Broadway run prematurely killed by the pandemic, but the show is pretty slick and the book is the best of the four. That show’s biggest problem is the problem of the majority of hit musicals since the Seventies: the technical requirements to make it work are beyond the capabilities of most high schools (and community theaters as well).

That leaves “Bye-Bye Birdie,” the oldest of the shows and over-all, probably the best. But the Elvis craze is ancient history, high school girls don’t scream and faint any more (that’s progress at least), and much of what makes the show funny are references to Fifties cultural touchpoints (Ed Sullivan?) that today’s teens won’t appreciate or even understand. “Bye-Bye Birdie” also has a movie version that has aged badly, and was never that hot despite a great cast. Ann-Margret was never believable as an innocent high school girl. Not for a second.

All four shows are also very white—can’t have that! Rated by diversity points, the shows stack up as “Hairspray,” “Mean Girls,” and then the other two in a distant tie in Systemic Racism Hell. I suppose you could have Conrad Birdie, the Elvis character, be black, or even play him as a parody of another icons-of-color like Little Richard or Chuck Berry, but his songs would be stylistically alien to those singers.

Baseball Ethics Notes, Because I Know Baseball And I Know Ethics, And If You’re Not Interested, You Don’t Have To Read it

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Pillar

1. As predicted, Major League Baseball announced that Twins reliever Tyler Duffey has been suspended for three games and fined an undisclosed amount for “intentionally throwing a pitch behind Yermín Mercedes of the Chicago White Sox during the top of the seventh inning of Tuesday night’s game at Target Field.” Minnesota manager Rocco Baldelli was suspended for one game and fined for the incident. This all came out of the weird “unwritten rules” incident I wrote about here. Throwing at or near a player who breached an “unwritten rule” was how such rules were once enforced, and umpires allowed it. Now throwing at players deliberately is treated as the dangerous practice it always was, as the game was reminded of this week when Mets outfielder Kevin Pillar (above) was hit in the face by a fastball. Beanballs were once considered part of the game, and in fact an essential tool of the successful pitcher, and long before batters wore helmets.

2. Still more on the Mercedes incident: White Sox manager Tony LaRussa, who has been generally ridiculed for his insistence that his player should not have hit a home run on a softball league pitch when his team was ahead by 11 runs, keeps insisting that he is right and everyone else is wrong. “If you’re going to tell me that sportsmanship and respect for the game of baseball and respect for your opponent is not an important priority, then I can’t disagree with you more . . . Do you think you need more [runs] to win, you keep pushing. If you think you have enough, respect the game and opposition. Sportsmanship,” he told reporters. Well, in baseball, you never know how much you need to win. Eleven is pretty tough, but the Boston Red Sox scored 17 runs in one inning against the Detroit Tigers on June 18, 1953. You never know. It’s also sportsmanship not to cheat the fans by trying to pitch or hit as well as possible, every time, all the time. That means bad sportsmanship includes a team letting a position player pitch, which is the equivalent of a white flag. That’s how this whole thing started.

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Comment Of The Day: “Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 5/20/21: Happy Birthday, John Stuart Mill!” [Item#5]

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

As I was gagging through the previous post about Mayor Lightfoot’s astounding “defense” of her deliberate discrimination against reporters of not enough color, I realized that Humble Talent’s comment deserves COTD status. One reason is that it made me realize something I never had quite focused on before.

The section of this morning’s warm-up Humble commented upon was the Alexandria Little League’s decision that baseball coaches needed to be indoctrinated into the Church of Woke’s virtue of diversity. Humble’s account of a “social audit” in his workplace revealed that his organization got black marks for not having sufficient numbers of gay—the auditors thought none—members.

I don’t know why this never occurred to me before, but prohibiting organizations and employer from discriminating against LGBTQ people is completely separate from insisting such individuals be represented in some statistically determined level to show diversity. Why? Becasue an organization cannot and should not seek to learn an individual’s sexual identity or proclivities—it’s literally none of their business. The idea that gay Americans have unique views and perspectives that distinguish them from more traditionally sexed individuals is blatant stereotyping, and in my somewhat extensive experience just plain wrong, except perhaps in the narrow field of LGNTQ politics, and maybe not even there.

Is the lesson of HT’s’ social audit that gay applicants for a job must be openly, ostentatiously gay or there will be no “diversity” benefit in hiring them? That makes no sense at all, but it appears that this is what diversity bean-counting requires. If an employee doesn’t set himself apart by acting like “Johnny” (the late Stephen Stucker) in “Airplane!,” he doesn’t help the diversity score.

Here is Humble Talent’s Comment of the Day on item #5 in “Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 5/20/21: Happy Birthday, John Stuart Mill!”

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The Rest Of The Story, From The Ethics Alarms “What An Idiot!” Files: Mayor Lighfoot’s Justification For Her Racial Discrimination

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

That was Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s “defense” of her action yesterday announcing that she would only do interviews with black and other non-white colored reporters. Once again, I am tempted to leave this letter from Chicago Mayor Lightfoot free of any further commentary from me, since what makes it not just unethical but a stunning demonstration of so many other deficits on her part should be screamingly, stenchingly, head-explodingly obvious. Maybe I should, in my respect for readers here who I assume can recognize the trail of a toxic dolt when they see one, just let what is res ipsa loquitur “speak for itself.” I feel like the Duke, trying to stay calm when provoked in “McClintock!” and reaching the same moment of surrender:

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The Reverend Robert Wright Lee Car On The Confederate Statuary Ethics Train Wreck

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Fake Lee

I missed this, a case where refusing to subscribe to my local paper, The Washington Post, bit me. (I decided that if I have to get a flagrantly left-wing biased newspaper that has chosen to be a propaganda organ for the Democratic Party, I might as well get the best flagrantly left-wing biased newspaper that has chosen to be a propaganda organ for the Democratic Party and not #2.

Glenn Kessler, the Post’s “Factchecker” who tries to be objective but is so marinated in his organization’s biases that he fails as often as not, tried to save face for his employers by revealing that a man who has repeatedly represented himself as a descendant of General Robert E. Lee (On his website, Rob Lee describes himself as “a descendant of Confederate General Robert E. Lee.”) in order to justify toppling statues of the Confederate icon is, in fact, nothing of the kind. He is as much a relative of General Lee as Elizabeth Warren is a Cherokee. Nonetheless, the Post published an opinion piece on June 7, 2020, by Rev. Robert E. Lee VI titled, “Robert E. Lee is my ancestor. Take down his statue, and let his cause be lost.” The Post editor identified the author as the fourth great-nephew of Confederate General Robert E. Lee. The headline, the description, and the justification for publishing the op-ed were, in order, a lie, journalism negligence, and misinformation. That was a year ago. Now Kessler decides to check the facts? Nice job, Speedy.

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Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 5/20/21: Happy Birthday, John Stuart Mill!

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

Mill

John Stuart Mill (1806–73), was born on May 20, not merely the most important figure in ethics to have a connection to this day, but also the most important human being born on this day in the history of civilization—yes, even more than Cher, who turns 75 today. Mill’s refined the concept of liberty that required the freedom of the individual in opposition to state control. He was the most influential proponent of utilitarianism, the crucial ethical theory developed by Jeremy Bentham. He helped reform scientific inquiry and research, recognizing the pervasive risks of confirmation bias, by clearly explaining the premises of falsifiability as the key component in the scientific method.

Mill was also a Member of Parliament and a towering figure in liberal political philosophy. You have certainly heard or read his most famous quote: “A society that will trade a little liberty for a little order will lose both, and deserve neither.”

A thorough biography and analysis of his work is here.

1. Justice Breyer doesn’t care about making sure the Supreme Court doesn’t get more conservative. Good. That’s not his job. Democrats realize that their control of the Senate is hanging by a thread, “thread” defined as a few superannuated Senators who could drop dead any second, giving the GOP a majority. Thus they are increasingly pushing Justice Stephen G. Breyer, 82, to retire now so Joe Biden can name an appropriately liberal replacement (who will also have to be female and black, vastly limiting the pool of possible choices without concern for actual legal competence.) “Breyer’s best chance at protecting his legacy and impact on the law is to resign now, clearing the way for a younger justice who shares his judicial outlook,” wrote Erwin Chemerinsky, the hyper-partisan dean of the law school at the University of California, Berkeley in The Washington Post this month. Got that? The 80+year-old Democratic Senators have to hold on to their jobs like grim death, but Breyer is being lobbied to retire. Hypocrisy, they name is Democrat! But it isn’t Breyer:

The Justice has been particularly vocal about the importance of not allowing politics to influence judges’ work, including their decisions about when to retire. “My experience of more than 30 years as a judge has shown me that, once men and women take the judicial oath, they take the oath to heart,” he said last month in a lecture at Harvard Law School. “They are loyal to the rule of law, not to the political party that helped to secure their appointment….If the public sees judges as politicians in robes, its confidence in the courts, and in the rule of law itself, can only diminish, diminishing the court’s power.”

I wonder if he’s read (or seen) “The Pelican Brief”…Meanwhile, research suggest that retirement tends to kill Supreme Court Justices. A paper in The Journal of Demography studied the effects of retirement by Supreme Court justices on their future longevity, and found that the effect of retirement was about the same as smoking two packs of cigarettes a day. The Democrats don’t care if Breyer dies sooner than later, though, as long as he does it when they can pick his successor, or after he’s quit.

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Ethics Hero: Chicago Tribune Reporter Gregory Pratt

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Gregg Pratt

This was a pleasant surprise. Right before taking Spuds out for his afternoon jaunt, I read the jaw-dropping story that Chicago’s Democratic Mayor Lori Lightfoot had announced via a spokewoman that she would now grant interviews only to “journalists of color.” This was such flagrant bias and racism by Lightfoot that journalists were reluctant to believe it. But it was and is true.

As I strolled with my over-enthusiastic dog, trying to keep him from leaping to greet strangers, eating cicadas and pulling me over in his joy in being alive, I mused, “Now, if Hispanic and black reporters have any integrity at all—which is in question, since journalists in general lack integrity today—they will reject Lightfoot’s blatant discrimination, and make it clear that she will either grant interviews irrespective of race and ethnicity, or Chicago’s reporters will not interview her or anyone speaking for her at all.”

All news organizations, local and national, also have an ethical obligation to emphatically condemn Lightfoot’s divisive and un-American policy. I also wondered, as I tried to stop Spuds from rolling in the grass like Teri Garr rolling in the hay in “Young Frankenstein” (“Roll, roll, roll…”), how did the United States end up with so many unethical, incompetent mayors? New York City, Portland, Minneapolis, Washington, D.C., Seattle, Chicago, Atlanta—it’s like a horror movie.”

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From The Ethics Alarms Mailbag: “Are Unwritten Rules Unethical?”

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

unwritten rules

The short answer is “No,” but the context of the question is fascinating, because it’s an example of the problem with unwritten rules generally. Unwritten rules are cultural norms, that’s all, and all cultures have them. They serve as manners, social balms and traditions that fill in the inevitable gaps and loopholes that formal, written rules inevitably leave uncovered. But cultures evolve, and extreme situations create exemptions where cultural norms no longer make sense.

No culture has more so-called unwritten rules than baseball, and this situation from two days ago triggered the question.

With the Chicago White Sox, currently with the best record in baseball, were ahead of the pathetic Minnesots Twins 15-4. The Twins, not wanting to waste a real pitcher on a blwo-out, turned to utility infielder Willians Astudillo to face the ChiSox in the final inning. Throwing a the classic “nothing ball” that most non-pitchers bring to the mound in such situations, Astudillo retired the first two batters but fell behind 3-0 to White Sox catcher Yermin Mercedes. On the next pitch, a lob to get the ball over the plate, Mercedes swung away blasted the 47 mph toss out of the ball parkfor a 16-4 lead.

The Twins broadcasters and many of the Twins players were offended, saying that Mercedes had breached the unwritten rule that says players shouldn’t try to “show up” the losing team in a rout. You don’t steal bases, you don’t sacrifice, and you don’t swing away at an “eephus pitch” to get a cheap home run. It’s essentially a Golden Rule based unwritten rule, though when it applies is a matter of dispute. Baseball teams have made up some very large deficits through the decades: a win is never a sure thing no matter what the score. Eleven runs, however, is certainly a big enough gap to make the rule relevant: the odds against a comeback are astronomical.

On the other hand, players are paid according to their statistics. Mercedes’ homer off of a non-pitcher will look the same in the record books as if Jacob DeGrom had thrown the ball.

But wait…there’s more! In the next game, an eventual 5-4 Minnesota win,Twins manager Rocco Baldelli andT wins reliever Tyler Duffey were ejected (they will also be fined and suspended) after Duffey threw a fastball behind Mercedes in retaliation for the “unwritten rule” breach. Baldelli, following the usual script, swore that the pitch was an accident, and that it was just a coincidence that his reliever scared the hell out of the same player who hit the controversial home run the previous night.

Then White Sox manager Tony La Russa announced that he agreed with the Twins throwing at his player, because Mercedes had broken an unwritten rule! This, in turn, was also an unwritten rule. Managers must not criticize their own players in public, and never, ever endorse the opposing team throwing at one of them. (I’ve never heard of any manager doing this.)

The White Sox did not take LaRussa’s violation well. Chicago pitcher Lance Lynn tweeted, “If a position player is on the mound, there are no rules. Let’s get the damn game over with. And if you have a problem with whatever happened, then put a pitcher out there.”

Exactly.

Unwritten rules are ethical if:

  • Everybody knows what they are
  • They have a legitimate purpose
  • It is understood that as there are always exceptions where written rules don’t apply, there are exceptions where unwritten rules don’t apply,
  • Everyone pays attention to the evolving nature of the culture involved, and
  • It is understood that unwritten rules exist to make a culture more reasonable and rational. If an unwritten rule doesn’t accomplish that, then the rule should be revoked.

___________________________

Pointer: JutGory

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