Give the soap to Melissa, Ralphie...
That certainly settled it: Melissa Leo is an inexcusable boor after all.
Winning the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, Leo blurted out, “Really, really, really, WOW” and then,“When I watched, it looked so fucking easy!”
And thus do tasteless, disrespectful, uncivil so-called professionals degrade our language, public standards of decency and respect for others. Continue reading
"Hi! I can't answer the phone now, but please leave a message!"
Teresa Danford’s son, Lance Cpl. Mark Rhyne, is deployed in Afghanistan, where he is only able to call home once or twice a month. He has been overseas for seven months. On Valentine’s Day, Teresa, an employee of Crane Interiors in Woodbury, Tennessee, received one of her son’s precious phone calls at her job, on her personal cell phone. She was promptly suspended for three days without pay, for Crane has a no cell phone call policy for employees. Her manager informed her that she would be fired if it ever happened again. Continue reading
Ethics Hero, Scotty McCreery
“American Idol’s” group portion of its winnowing process always is the most fascinating chapter of its yearly saga, as the singing competition briefly shifts into full reality show mode. I’ve never been convinced that it was a fair method to judge aspiring singers who were competing as solo acts, as it frequently results in superior vocalists being dumped because they couldn’t sing harmony, learn choreography and lyrics under pressure, or play well with others. I know you have to get that mass of ambition and ego reduced to 24 people somehow, but group day is the equivalent of throwing darts at a dartboard.
It makes for great ethics scenarios, though. The format guarantees it, as the contestants have to form groups of four or five in a cruel process reminiscent of choosing sides for pick-up baseball games, guaranteeing that some people will end up feeling like the fat kid who always gets chosen last, if at all.
Last night there were several featured ethics dramas, with the judges, as they have been all season, being less than consistent in their responses to them. Continue reading
“(CLARIFICATION: Palin did not, in fact, say this. It was a tongue-in-cheek link to an article that was intended as a joke.)”
—Time Magazine, dishonestly claiming one act of unethical journalistic conduct to cover for a worse one.
Maybe I owe blogger TBogg an apology. I thought only left-wing Palin-haters could be so disoriented by ideological fervor that they could believe the satirical story claiming that the former Alaska governor had told Sean Hannity that Christina Aguilera should be banished for botching the lyrics of the National Anthem. But no: Us Weekly, the celebrity gossip magazine, and Time Magazine (!!!) both fell for the same spoof. Us, at least, had the integrity to admit that it had made a mistake and to apologize. Time, disgracefully, issued the above dodge, claiming that a fabled news magazine suddenly decided to start printing “tongue-in-cheek” fake stories that portray national political figures as fools. Continue reading
The headline reads:
Palin Says She’d Deport Christina Aguilera for Botching the National Anthem
Although nothing Sarah Palin has ever said or done suggests that she would ever advocate such a ridiculous thing, and despite the fact the headline appeared on a clearly labeled comedy site, with the story including such over-the-top statements as…
“Palin also levied criticism on the Obama administration for allowing “spicy Latin princesses” to do the jobs of American pop divas. “Unemployment is at nine percent, yet we have to suffer through a performance by a foreigner with a poor grasp of the English language? If I were president, I’d deport Ms. Aguilera back to wherever it is she’s from and give Amy Smart a call.”
..despite all this, prominent Angry Left blogger TBogg took the story completely seriously, and so did many of his followers, who piled on in a “boy-is-that-woman-ever-stupid-like-all-the-other -Tea-Baggers” orgy of contempt. Continue reading
Much of my weekend was occupied by reading, writing, thinking, and talking about the bizarre controversy over a community theater production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “The Mikado,” which, by a series of misunderstandings, misdeeds, hypocrisies and journalistic malpractice, has created much anger and unhappiness for no legitimate reason at all. If you are late to the story and want to catch up, you can do so here, here, here, and here.
For the first and perhaps only time I can honestly say that Ethics Alarms is the most reliable source on a story. There may be plenty of ethicists who are more knowledgeable, scholarly, prudent and experienced than I am regarding ethics theory, but none of them knows this topic—Gilbert and Sullivan and “The Mikado”, like I do. I have 50 years experience performing, directing, studying, parodying and laughing at the works of these Victorian geniuses. The second I read the astoundingly wrong-headed interpretation being attached to the Missoula Community Theatre’s inclusion of Sarah Palin in Ko-Ko’s famous song “I’ve Got a Little List,” I surmised exactly what was going on, and my assessment has been confirmed by everything that has come to light since.
I will summarize what we now know in brief (well, briefer than reading all the posts) form:
And so it begins.
CNN’s John King: “Before we go to break, I want to make a quick point. We were having a discussion about the Chicago mayoral race. My friend Andy Shaw used the term ‘in the crosshairs’ in talking about the candidates. We’re trying, we’re trying to get away from that language. Andy is a good friend, he’s covered politics for a long time, but we’re trying to get away from that kind of language.”
What “kind of langauge”? Oh, you know: vivid language. Metaphors. Similes. Can’t have that on CNN, because, as everyone knows, a completely unrelated use of a cross-hairs graphic on a Sarah Palin campaign map had nothing to do with the shooting of Rep. Gaby Giffords and 19 others, but the media decided to make everyone think it was the fault of the map anyway. So now a news network, which is supposed to convey information, is apologizing for a guest’s use of the word “cross-hairs” in a context that had nothing to do with violence. Continue reading
First you make a baseless, inflammatory accusation–the Big Lie. Then you attack your victim for how she responds to it.
The news media’s self-destructive obsession with discrediting Sarah Palin has reached its ethical nadir, and with it any reasonable hope that U.S. journalism, as currently practiced, will be returning to credibility and respectability within the foreseeable future. Continue reading
Is President Obama the fair, ethical, unifying, anti-partisan president of all the people that he promised to be in 2008, or is he a Machiavellian, undercover Chicago pol, willing and ready to use divisiveness and deceit to enhance his power, silence critics and advance his agenda? During the past two years, there has been ample evidence supporting both descriptions, but his address in Arizona Wednesday could settle the issue. If the President emulates his Democratic predecessor, Bill Clinton, using the massacre in Arizona as a political wedge the way Clinton used the Oklahoma City bombing—if he adopts the philosophy of former Chief-of-Staff Rahm Emmanuel that one should never waste a crisis—then we will know the dispiriting truth about Barack Obama. Continue reading
It may be that the first apology for the partisan rush to lay twenty shootings and five deaths at the doorstep of the Tea Party, Sarah Palin, and conservatives came from Arizona Daily Star’s cartoonist, Dave Fitzsimmons, and the paper itself in an editorial today. It began with a statement from the cartoonist, and continued: Continue reading
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