apologies

From Hero to Idol: Congratulations, Scotty McCreery!

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Way back in March, long before the 2011 edition of American Idol had winnowed its hopeful singers down to the final thirteen, 17-year-old Scotty McCreery earned an Ethics Hero here by bravely taking responsibility for the mistreatment of another contestant in the group segment of the audition process at a time when the judges seemed to be in the mood to make someone pay for it. The incident has been forgotten, but it showed Scott to be a young man of unusual integrity and courage. Little did Ethics Alarms realize  that he was also the singer to beat, and nobody beat him. Last night, he was crowned the American Idol.

Fame and fortune changes people, as we all know, and too often for the worse. Still, McCreery’s prospects of holding on to his core values look strong, because his character looks strong, and everyone, whether or not they follow American Idol and whether or not they groove to Scotty’s milieu, Country-Western music, should applaud the entry of a talented and ethical young man into the popular culture.

Congratulations, Scotty. In March we knew you were good; we didn’t know you were this good.

The Judgement Day Leader’s Cowardly Ethics Failure

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

"It is all my fault."

After the catastrophic miscalculation of Pickett’s Charge led to the slaughter of his soldiers and the loss of the pivotal Battle of Gettysburg, Confederate General Robert E. Lee   met the bloody survivors returning from the field of fire, telling them, one by one, “It is all my fault!” To Pickett, whose division was all but wiped out, he said, “Upon my shoulders rests the blame.”

I am no admirer of Robert E. Lee, but this was his finest moment as a leader, and an example for all leaders who are followed in faith and meet disappointment or worse.  I wrote two days ago that Harold Camping, the evangelical broadcaster who proclaimed with absolute, 100%  certainty that his calculations foretelling the end of the world on May 21 were correct, had better be prepared to be held accountable when we were all still here on May 22. He wasn’t. From Reuters:

” With no sign of Judgment Day arriving as he had forecast, the 89-year-old California evangelical broadcaster and former civil engineer behind the pronouncement seemed to have gone silent on Saturday. Family Radio, the Christian stations network headed by Harold Camping which had spread his message of an approaching doomsday, was playing recorded church music, devotionals and life advice unrelated to the apocalypse.” Continue reading →

Is Harold Camping Ready For His May 22 Integrity Test?

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

"Never mind!" will not do it, Harold.

In response to a New York Magazine interviewer’s question about how he could be so sure the world was going to end on May21 (that’s tomorrow, folks!), Harold Camping, the leader of the imminent rapture movement,  said this:

“God has given sooo much information in the Bible about this, and so many proofs, and so many signs, that we know it is absolutely going to happen without any question at all. There’s nothing in the Bible that God has ever prophesied–there’s many things that he prophesied would happen and they always have happened–but there’s nothing in the Bible that holds a candle to the amount of information to this tremendous truth of the end of the world. I would be absolutely in rebellion against God if I thought anything other than it is absolutely going to happen without any question.”

The Rapture’s not happening on May 21st, but on May 22nd this good and pious man will have a big ethical decision to make. Continue reading →

How Unethical Is This Feature Story? Let Us Count The Ways:

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Next amusing list from the Houston Press: "Ten Hottest Serial Killers"!

The feature, courtesy of the Houston Press, and I’m not making this up, is headlined  “The Ten Hottest Women on the Texas Sex Offenders List”, which is sure to make another list somewhere, “The Ten Most Offensive Ideas for a Feature Story.” The author, Richard Connelly, introduced his list of child-molesting hotties by writing,

“We combed through 15 of the biggest counties in Texas and came up with the ten hottest women in the database. Warning: In some cases, we picked out the best of a series of mugshots. Alternative choices were starkly different. So click on each link before you send any marriage proposals.”

What was wrong with this article, besides the obvious drawbacks that it wasn’t funny or satirical, and that the women weren’t hot (but then, who takes a hot mug shot)?

Let’s tally them up: Continue reading →

What Do you Call A Newspaper That Defends Outrageous Journalistic Practices? How About “Di Tzeitung”?

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

If Di Tzeitung had covered the Civil War

If I could pronounce it, the Brooklyn-based Hasidic newspaper Di Tzeitung would be useful shorthand  for “shamelessly using rationalizations to defend indefensible conduct.”

Last week, the newspaper ran the now-familiar photo of President Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and others in the White House Situation Room, except that in Di Tzeitung’s version, Clinton  and the only other woman present, Director for Counter-terrorism Audrey Tomason, had magically vanished. Di Tzeitung had airbrushed them out, Politburo-style.

Of course, publishing the photo of a historic news event and altering it to convey misleading or false information (in this case, “Hillary wasn’t there”) is a substantial and wide-ranging violation of core journalism ethics, a breach of the reader’s trust, unfair, dishonest, misleading, incompetent and disrespectful. The altered photo was alternately condemned and mocked all over the media and blogosphere. Yet Di Tzeitung is largely unapologetic, and made it clear that it would do the same thing again if the opportunity arose. In a prepared statement, the editors explained why they did nothing “wrong”…well, almost nothing…challenging the Olympic record for rationalization by a news organization along the way: Continue reading →

Geronimo Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

"GERONI-"--no, I'm sorry. Let's see...uh..."

Somewhere, I sometimes suspect, there is a mega-computer that scans all news, media, films, TV, video games and pop music offerings, alerting various minority groups to fresh new opportunities to manufacture complaints based on victim-posturing and absurd political correctness. The thought has passed through my brain once again, as I see reports such as the one that appeared in the Washington Post this morning, describing how Native American advocates are offended that the codename for the military operation that killed Osama bin Laden was “Geronimo,” named after the iconic Apache warrior.

A codename, as the term implies, is a word or name intended to stand for something other than its actual meaning and historical significance. Ergo, the Manhattan Project was not a plan to drop New York City on Japan. Many codenames have had absolutely no relationship to their military meanings; what is important is that they not be too hard to remember or too easy for enemies to figure out. The mission to get bin Laden could have been named “Meat Loaf,” “Lindsay” or “Charlie Sheen,” all of whom would have been honored and amused, presumably. The military picked “Geronimo.” Continue reading →

Unethical Website of the Month: Wonkette

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

That's right, Wonkette---GET HIM!!!

Wonkette the left-leaning political snark site, showed its true colors ( I flagged the site as ethically unbearable in a post six years ago, when it defended Dan Rather during “Memogate”) when it allowed editor Jack Steuf to post “satire” early this week  ridiculing Sarah Palin’s toddler son Trig, who is a Down Syndrome child. Entitled “Greatest Living American: A Children’s Treasury of Trig Crap On His Birthday,” the post contains sick-humor jokes about the 3-year-old ( After quoting from a Palin posted birthday poem for Trig referencing his dreams, Steuf snickers, “What’s he dreaming about? Nothing! He’s retarded!”) and proceeds to use the child as its target while demeaning Palin.  A sample:

“That strange man yelling unintelligibly at Sarah Palin? He’s merely a lowly shepherd proclaiming the birth of our savior. Today is the day we come together to celebrate the snowbilly grifter’s magical journey from Texas to Alaska to deliver to the America the great gentleman scholar Trig Palin. Is Palin his true mother? Or was Bristol? (And why is it that nobody questions who the father is? Because, either way, Todd definitely did it.) Continue reading →

Manny Post Script: The Signature of a Jerk

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Manny Ramirez, the now-retired ex-baseball slugger, provoked the predictable responses from the media and fellow players in the wake of his sudden retirement after being notified that he would be the first major league player to face a 100 game suspension for failing a mandated PED test (that’s “performance enhancing drugs” for all of you who don’t know who Barry Bonds is), because no player had ever been caught TWICE before.

Everyone was in agreement that this meant: Continue reading →

The Saga of the Racist Juror and the Angry Judge, Chapter Two: “Never Mind!”

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

 

"Oh! You're REALLY a racist? That's OK then...I thought you were LYING about being a racist, and I just hate that!"

When we last left Federal Judge Nicholas Garaufis, he had just sentenced a potential juror to jury duty for life because of her racist and anti-police answers on a jury questionnaire. Then many commentators, including Ethics Alarms, pointed out that punishing a woman for her views, however offensive, was an abuse of judicial power. I wrote:

 

“This was outrageous abuse of power by a judge, and a slam dunk First Amendment violation. Her opinions are ugly, but there is nothing illegal about having ugly opinions, and  government punishment based on a citizen’s opinion is a dangerous Constitutional breach. A judge can’t dictate how a potential juror thinks or what she believes. He can’t take vengeance on a woman who is hateful, either. She has a right to her hate.”

Today the judge released the woman from the lifetime sentence, saying that it really wasn’t her racist views that angered him, but rather that she had made an obvious attempt to get out of jury duty by putting offensive answers on the jury questionnaire. “My ruling was not based in any way upon whether or not you held any racist views. It was apparent you did not tell the truth,” Judge Garaufis told the woman. “You were the only juror who indicated that you had every form of bias imaginable. You were lying to the court in order to be excused.”

Ah, It wasn’t that she was a racist, but that she pretended to be a racist.

What a minute..huh? Continue reading →

Integrity Check: Obama’s Embarrassing Transparency Pledge

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

President Obama is getting a mixture of ridicule and contempt from some pundits over the revelation yesterday that he accepted an award for transparency in secret. From Forbes:

“President Obama was scheduled to receive an award from the organizers of the Freedom of Information Day Conference, to be presented at the White House by “five transparency advocates.” The White House postponed that meeting because of events in Libya and Japan, and it was rescheduled…That meeting did take place – behind closed doors. The press was not invited to the private transparency meeting, and no photos from or transcript of the meeting have been made available. The event was not listed on the president’s calendar…Nor is the award mentioned anywhere on the White House website, including on the page devoted to transparency and good government. Were it not for the testimony of the transparency advocates who met secretly with the president, there wouldn’t seem to be any evidence that the meeting actually took place.”

I can guess why the President didn’t want to publicize the meeting: the same day, he had to go on television and explain why he hadn’t been transparent to the U.S. Congress about his military plans in Libya. Or perhaps he knew that the news was about to leak that the Fed had secretly sent billions in loans to foreign banks during the financial crisis, not telling the public because it would make them worried and angry. Or maybe it was the just the dawning realization that transparency in government is often neither wise nor safe, and that he was sick of being embarrassed by awards that only point  up the yawning chasm between Obama’s idealistic words and reality. (See: 2010 Nobel Peace Prize) Continue reading →