bias

Ethics, Punishment and the Dead Child in the Back Seat

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Washington Post columnist Gene Weingarten received a Pultitzer Prize for his feature, “Fatal Distraction: Forgetting a Child in the Backseat of a Car Is a Horrifying Mistake. Is It a Crime?” Focusing on the grief of parents who caused the deaths of their own children by negligently leaving them locked in over-heated cars, Weingarten, to his credit, doesn’t advocate a position in his article, although it would be impossible to read it without feeling compassion and empathy for his subjects, both those who have been prosecuted and those who have not.

The article squarely raises a classic ethical conflict, as well as the question of the role of punishment in society. As always with ethical standards, the issue ultimately encompasses how we decide what is in the best interests of society. Weingarten points out that there is no consensus on whether parents who inadvertently kill their children in this way should be brought to court: some prosecutors bring charges, others do not. Which is right?

I don’t like my answer much, but I think it is inescapable, once the emotion is left behind. Continue reading →

The Hood Fiasco: SCOTUS Ducks An Ethical Imperative

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

Charles Hood has been on Death Row in Texas since 1990, when he was convicted of murder in the shootings of Ronald Williamson and Tracie Lynn Wallace at Williamson’s home in Plano, Tx. Hood had worked for Williamson and was living in his home. There was plenty of convincing evidence that Hood committed the murders; his defense was essentially based on mitigating circumstances. Nonetheless, it was by any logical and ethical standards, an outrageously unfair trial. Why? In a scenario that would have been laughed out of a “Law and Order” writers’ conference, the trial judge, Verla Sue Holland was sleeping the prosecutor,  county district attorney Tom O’Connell. Continue reading →

The Ethics of Those “Thousand Words”

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

The site BravoBox has a provocative post on an ever-present ethical issue on print journalism that has been with us for decades and seems to be intensifying: manipulative photo-journalism. Ethics watch-dogs come down hard on images that are photoshopped or deceptively cropped, but a publication’s choice of photo can be equally unfair when the picture hasn’t been altered at all.

A photo doesn’t have to be manipulated to be manipulative. If a picture is indeed “worth a thousand words”—and many are— responsible journalists and editor have a duty  to choose those words with as much attention to even-handedness and fairness as the words that appear in type.

As BravoBox notes… Continue reading →

The Hannity-Fox-Tea Party Connection

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

When you don’t stop something that is obviously unethical until people start screaming and pointing fingers, the reasonable presumption is that it wasn’t the fact that it was unethical that made you take action, but that you were going to be criticized for it. Thus Fox honcho Rupert Murdoch’s last-second cancellation of Sean Hannity’s appearance at a Tea Party event get no ethics brownie points—in fact, quite the contrary. Continue reading →

Obama’s Coal Mine Tragedy Verdict=Abuse of Power

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

There are two disturbing implications of President Obama’s premature condemnation of  Massey Energy for the recent tragedy at its Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia, where an explosion killed 29 miners on April 5. The first is that the President appears to have a flat learning curve, as this repeats his error in the Professor Gates fiasco in Cambridge, Mass, in which Obama condemned the conduct of a Cambridge police officer without getting all the facts. The second is that for a former law professor, Obama has a rather loose grasp on the concept of Due Process. Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: CNN

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

CNN has begun to get hammered in the ratings, in the midst of a policy change that has the venerable cable news staking out novel ground: it is being objective. This used to be known as “journalism.” Continue reading →

Fox Nation: Fair, Balanced, Biased, and Incredibly Gullible

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

If you read a story like this, what would you think?

“Famed global warming activist James Schneider and a journalist friend were both found frozen to death on Saturday, about 90 miles from South Pole Station, by the pilot of a ski plane practicing emergency evacuation procedures.

One friend of Prof. Schneider told ecoEnquirer that he had been planning a trip to an ice sheet to film the devastation brought on by global warming. His wife, Linda, said that she had heard him discussing the trip with his environmental activist friends, but she assumed that he was talking about the Greenland ice sheet, a much smaller ice sheet than Antarctica.

“He kept talking about when they ‘get down to chili’, and I thought they were talking about the order in which they would consume their food supplies”, Mrs. Schneider recounted. “I had no idea they were talking about Chile, the country from which you usually fly or sail in order to reach Antarctica.”

I would think, “This has got to be a gag.” Wouldn’t you? Continue reading →

Dubious Ethics Studies, Part I.

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Thanks to Malcolm Gladwell (Blink) and the one-word titled books he has inspired, we are being exposed to more social science research than ever before, much of it with relevance to ethics. I’ll admit to using some of these when they support my point of view, and that is the problem: what such studies supposedly signify often tell us more about the biases of the analysts than the behavior of the subjects. Two recent studies illustrate the point. Continue reading →

Biden’s Incivility: No “Big Fucking Deal”?

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

For the most part, the media and the culture have given Vice-President Joe Biden a pass on his ebullient violation of a civil discourse taboo, on national TV and during an official ceremony, caught on a microphone for all to hear. That only makes the consequences of Biden’s inability to control his potty-mouth worse, though not for Biden. Biden has made so many embarrassing public utterances that he is treated by the media and much of the public as sort of a crazy uncle, someone we expect to do and say outrageous things because he can’t help himself (it stands as the smoking gun proof of the media’s bias against Sarah Palin that her verbal mistakes were—and are—pounced upon and used as evidence of her incompetence, while her Democratic counterpart’s career-long fondness for saying silly and outrageous things was —and is—excused.) But national leaders set cultural standards, and the shrugging off of Biden’s F-bomb permanently lowers our standards of civility as much as “Baby killer!” or “You lie!” So thanks, Joe, for making America just a little bit less gentile, just a little bit cruder. We knew you had it in you. Continue reading →

The Sestak Affair, the White House, and the Corruption of America

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

The Rep. Joe Sestak affair, still playing out, is a depressing reminder of how the process of corruption works, and more depressingly, how corruption spreads like a virulent flu, leaping from individuals  to organizations to institutions and finally to our culture itself.

Back in September, the Denver Post ran a well-sourced article stating that in order to protect Democratic Sen. Michael Bennett from the threatened primary challenge of popular former state Colorado House Speaker Andrew Romanoff, the White House, in the person of Jim Messina, President Barack Obama’s deputy chief of staff, told Romanoff  that a plum position in the administration would be his if he avoided the primary. The Post’s sources said that Messina offered specific suggestions, including a job at USAID, the foreign aid agency.  Romanoff, who apparently turned down the deal and is currently opposing Bennett in Colorado, refused to answer any questions.

This was treated as a local story, and the national media ignored it. Then, last month, a similar story surfaced, this time from a Congressman. Pennsylvania Congressman Joe Sestak, gearing to to run against party-switching  U.S. Senator Arlen Specter in the Pennsylvania primaries, told a Philadelphia TV news anchor that “someone” at the White House tried to discourage him from running, and also offered him a job (rumored to be Secretary of the Navy)  if he would back off. Like Romanoff, Sestak refused.

Again, hardly anyone paid attention, because all the national media wanted to do is talk about health care reform, the economy, and really important stuff like how Ellen was going to do on American Idol. Continue reading →