bias

The Part of Legal Ethics The Public Will Never, Ever Understand

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Sen. Brown has the pulse of the public on this issue, and like the public, he’s ignorant.

Especially since politicians like Scott Brown keep making sure that they misunderstand.

In this week’s Massachusetts Senate debate between Sen. Scott Brown and Democratic challenger Elizabeth Warren, Brown slammed the anti-corporate crusader, the self-styled intellectual catalyst for the Occupy Movement, for accepting $250,000 from the Travelers insurance company to help the company deny claims for asbestos poisoning. He said:

“You chose to side with one of the biggest corporations in the United States: Travelers Insurance. When you worked to prohibit people who got asbestos poisoning, and I hope all the asbestos union workers are watching right now. She denied, she helped Travelers deny those benefits for asbestos poisoning, made over $250,000 in an effort to protect big corporations….”

Brown is accurately stating the way most people look at lawyers and what they do. But he is absolutely mistaken. His characterization of what Warren did is incorrect, and his inference of hypocrisy is unfair.  It is all the worse because he is a lawyer himself. If Senator Brown, as a lawyer, doesn’t understand what’s wrong with his accusation, he should. If he does know, then he is undercutting his own profession for political gain. [NOTE: The original version of the post incorrectly stated that Brown was not a lawyer. My thanks to Mass lawyer James Flood III for flagging the error.] Continue reading →

Someone Please Explain to Soledad O’Brien That Attorney General Holder is NOT “Exonerated” Regarding Fast and Furious

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

So much attitude, so little comprehension…

[I apologize to all for not posting anything yesterday. I was handling back-to-back seminars, and had to drive a long distance in-between. by the time I got back home late afternoon, I was too wiped-out to write anything coherent, and that state persisted until I went to bed. I’ll be trying to catch up today.]

CNN’s partisan hack morning anchor Soledad O’Brien was smirking and raising eyebrows to beat the band yesterday morning, as she announced to her audience that the Inspector General’s report on the Justice Department’s deadly botch of its so-called gun-walking scheme, codename Fast and Furious, had “exonerated” Attorney General Eric Holder. I suppose I am giving O’Brien the benefit of a considerable doubt here in assuming that she knows what the word means, but to exonerate is to free from blame or responsibility. The 471 page report does state that there is no evidence that Holder knew about the operation before it had gone horribly wrong, as some Republicans had maintained. On the other hand, it also states that there is no evidence that Holder knew about the operation before it had gone horribly wrong. Continue reading →

Comment of the Day: “Yes, Reporters Engaged in ‘Collaboration’ On Questions For Romney. Good!”

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Dwayne N. Zechman, who has one or two other Comments of the Day to his credit, has authored another in response to the post regarding conservative alarms over evidence that reporters coordinated their questions before Mitt Romney began a press conference on the protests and violence at Middle East embassies. My position was that there is nothing sinister in this as long as it results in the politician or candidate being grilled actually answering legitimate questions. Reporters should do this with all question sessions, if politicians insist on spinning, ducking, and prevaricating. Obviously, if reporters employ this strategy with Romney and not the President, that raises an ethical problem, but a different ethical problem.

Here is Dwayne’s Comment of the Day in response to the post, Yes, Reporters Engaged in “Collaboration” On Questions For Romney. Good!.  I’ll have a further comment at the end.

“I *do* have a problem with the Press Corps acting this way because it sets up a dangerous future license for them to engage in groupthink with no checks and balances against it. (Indeed, the First Amendment would correctly, though tragically, protect it.) Continue reading →

The Replacement Ref and the Conflicted Debate Moderator: How We Become Ethically Stupid

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Note to NFL: Don’t hire Gwen Ifill as a replacement referee.

Poor Brian Stropolo was only behaving like a respected national journalist on the political scene; why didn’t it work?

Stropolo, on the crew of NFL replacement refs (that’s scab refs, if you belong to the NFL refs union, which is currecly locked out) was assigned to yesterday’s New Orleans Saints-Carolina game. He was suddenly pulled from the assignment by the league on  Sunday morning, when it came to the NFL’s attention that he had represented himself on his Facebook page as an enthusiastic Saints fan, even appearing on his page in a Saints uniform.

Imagine if Stropolo had made a controversial game-changing call that handed the game to his beloved Saints!  But then, it was up to Stropolo and the league  to imagine it long before any inappropriate game assignment was made. For Stropolo not to notify the league of his web-wide admission of pro-Saints bias when he was assigned to referee a Saints game shows a complete absence of ethics training, instincts and sensitivity. How could this not occur to him? How could the NFL not have a vetting process for refs that would discover team allegiances? Where is the Code of Conduct to remind clueless referees about the “appearance of impropriety,”and the importance of preserving the NFL’s integrity by avoiding any suspicion that referees are tilting games in the direction of teams they root for in their off days? Continue reading →

Buzz Bissinger’s Primer on Unethical Reasoning

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Sportswriter Buzz Bissinger, already an Ethics Dunce in good standing, has contributed something immensely valuable to the world of ethics: a cover story for Newsweek that can serve as a teaching aid in college ethics classes.

Titled “I Still Believe in Lance Armstrong,” Bissinger lurches from one rationalization to another, contradicting himself repeatedly along the way. This is a professional journalist, writing in his field, for what once was a respected news commentary magazine. Why is so much of the public unable to tell right from wrong? Because they spend a lifetime reading junk like this: Bissinger’s essay could be Exhibit A.

Bissinger begins by talking about the reactions of his son, a cycling enthusiast who worshiped Armstrong, to the recent news that the tarnished athlete would no longer challenge the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency’s efforts to strip him of his titles:

“Caleb is not blind. He said it was hard not to read the statement and conclude that when Armstrong said, ‘There comes a point in every man’s life when he has to say ‘Enough is enough’ ” and that he was finished fighting the United States Anti-Doping Agency’s fanatical attempt to strip him of his victories, what lay below the outrage was an admission that he may well have cheated with performance enhancers in order to win. That bothers my son. It is why he called the stunning announcement a ‘sad day.’ But it is also why he called it a ‘weird day’ emotionally because of the constant effort to make Armstrong into a villain.” Continue reading →

Unethical Mindsets: “You Can’t Be A Feminist If You’re Anti-Abortion”

/ Jack Marshall / 78 Comments

Oxymoron?

I don’t know how I ended up on the Bea Magazine site, but I did, and I made the mistake of reading an article and a comment thread on the topic of whether feminists can be “pro-life,” or anti-abortion, if you aren’t a fan of euphemisms. As I expected, but not as I hoped, the consensus was that indeed, opposing abortion requires one’s ejection from the feminist tent, at least in the view of this particular cadre of feminists.

“Brillliant Nora Ephron,” the post by Diane notes, wrote that “You can’t call yourself a feminist if you don’t believe in the right to abortion.”  Well, Nora wasn’t so brilliant that day, because this is classic backward reasoning. It is framing reality by using ideology, the crystallization of confirmation bias into its most dangerous, poisonous and historically destructive form. It embraces the statement, “my mind’s made up, don’t confuse me with facts.” Indeed, it requires that facts be seen, filtered and interpreted through a pre-existing template that requires and then dictates a given result. Continue reading →

Unethical Quote of the Week: Yahoo Washington Bureau Chief David Chalian

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

“[Mitt Romney and the GOP] are happy to have a party with black people drowning.”

–—Yahoo! Washington Bureau Chief David Chalian, caught on an open mike during the Republican National Convention and broadcast live. Chalian was promptly fired.

I didn’t believe it, to be honest. When I stumbled upon Rush Limbaugh ranting about how the broadcast media was trying to make the case that the Republicans should cancel their convention because of Hurricane Isaac heading to Louisiana, that it was callous and insensitive for them not to, I thought Rush was having one of his increasingly frequent paranoid moments. Yet incredibly, he was not. I personally heard the theme echoed on ABC, on CNN, on NBC and, of course on MSNBC, the latter repeatedly. How “awkward” it was going to be for the GOP to be “having a party” while people were again suffering in New Orleans. How hard it was going to be to explain, how “bad it would look.” Then came Chalian’s gaffe, which was, it is clear, not a sudden Pazuzu moment, but a symptomatic one, as he felt comfortable enough in a thoroughly hateful anti-Republican media culture to make his absurd and insulting comment. Continue reading →

Ethics Quote of the Month: Arthur Brisbane

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

“I had taken up the public editor duties believing “there is no conspiracy” and that The Times’s output was too vast and complex to be dictated by any Wizard of Oz-like individual or cabal. I still believe that, but also see that the hive on Eighth Avenue is powerfully shaped by a culture of like minds — a phenomenon, I believe, that is more easily recognized from without than from within. When The Times covers a national presidential campaign, I have found that the lead editors and reporters are disciplined about enforcing fairness and balance, and usually succeed in doing so. Across the paper’s many departments, though, so many share a kind of political and cultural progressivism — for lack of a better term — that this worldview virtually bleeds through the fabric of The Times.As a result, developments like the Occupy movement and gay marriage seem almost to erupt in The Times, overloved and undermanaged, more like causes than news subjects.”

–— Arthur Brisbane, New York Times’ “public editor” (that is, ombudsman), in his final column in that role. Brisbane’s tenure has been characterized by his defensiveness over accusations that the Times radiated a political agenda, and the lack of a willingness to be critical of his employers that is the hallmark of an effective ombudsman.

“By George, you’re RIGHT! There IS a dinosaur here! How could I have missed it?”

Yes, Arthur, it’s called “pervasive liberal or left-wing bias,” and it is good of you to finally notice, and honest of you to say so, even though you can’t bring yourself to do so directly. But your insistence  that such bias could manifest itself in the coverage of issues that are central to the presidential campaign without affecting the Times’ coverage of the campaign itself is laughable, touching, idiotic or sad, depending on how charitable a reader is inclined to be to a supposed professional who waits until his last gasp in a job before acknowledging the reason he should have been doing that job differently, which is to say independently, objectively, and competently.

Better late than never.

I suppose.

_________________________________

Pointer: Volokh Conspiracy

Source: New York Times

Ethics Alarms attempts to give proper attribution and credit to all sources of facts, analysis and other assistance that go into its blog posts. If you are aware of one I missed, or believe your own work was used in any way without proper attribution, please contact me, Jack Marshall, at  jamproethics@verizon.net.

Conservatives Take Note: Media Bias Doesn’t Explain Everything

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Rep. Akin and his fans.

Pervasive media bias against them has the added affect of making Republicans and conservatives both paranoid and less likely to perceive their own flaws. In this it is like racism: that black Americans know that elements of society refuse to treat them fairly makes it difficult for them to assess their own accountability when they fail. Given the opportunity to blame failure on ourselves or others, most of us are inclined to choose the latter: psychologists call it the fundamental attribution error. That tendency, however, undermines our ability to evaluate areas where we need to improve, and to improve them.

The news media’s leftward bias warps public opinion, tilts elections and distorts public policy. A few candid  journalists acknowledge this, like ABC’s Jake Tapper, who opined to Laura Ingraham yesterday that the media “helped tilt the scales” against Hillary and John McCain in 2008, saying that “Sometimes I saw with story selection, magazine covers, photos picked, [the] campaign narrative, that it wasn’t always the fairest coverage.” Weasel words for unethical media bias, true, but for a member in good standing of the liberal Beltway media like Tapper, an admirable confession. This is justly frustrating to conservatives, but they can’t let it drive them stupid, for this is the Catch 22 of all pervasive bias. If a group blames everything on bias, it begins to make the bias look justified.

Hypervocal, a snazzy blog that delves into such matters and much else, has an excellent analysis of a current example of this phenomenon, as conservatives complain that the news media is ignoring a juicy Minnesota scandal involving a gay Democrat while overplaying Rep. Todd Akin’s self-outing as an ignorant fool regarding rape, abortion, and female biology. This is such a regular refrain now any time an embarrassing event occurs involving a Republican that it is both predictable and laughable, and it is always unseemly. Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: Was CNN’s Soledad O’Brien Unethical to Crib From A Liberal Blog, or Just Unlucky To Get Caught?

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Conservative media sources are calling CNN’s Soledad O’Brien biased and unobjective (Soledad O’Brien? Biased? Nawwwww!) because a CNN cameraman inadvertently caught her cribbing from the leftward blog “Talking Points Memo” for ammunition as she questioned  Virginia House of Delegates Republican member Barbara Comstock regarding new-GOP Veep nominee Paul Ryan’s budget proposals. The blog post she was reading from was called “The Myth of Paul Ryan The Bipartisan Leader.” At one point, O’Brien claimed to be reading a release from Senator Wyden’s (D-OR) office, but  she was actually reading an excerpt from the blog that included a quote from Wyden. Newsbusters, the conservative counterpart to the Left’s Media Matters, regards this is a real gotcha!, concrete proof of  the unethical coordination between the mainstream media, progressive attack blogs, and the Democratic party.

Your Ethics Quiz for today: Was O’Brien’s use of the Talking Points piece to debate Comstock unethical journalism? Continue reading →