celebrity

The Ethics Agony of Angus T. Jones

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

How could such a lucky kid complain?

Angus Jones, the “Half” of CBS’s resilient sitcom “Two and a Half Men, ” is receiving heavy doses of criticism and mockery in entertainment circles (and Blog World, of  course) for being so ungrateful and graceless as to post a YouTube video condemning the very TV show that has made him rich and famous over the last nine years, taking him from childhood to majority. The video was posted by the Alabama-based church Forerunner Chronicles, which apparently Baptized Jones recently. “You cannot be a true God-fearing person and be on a television show like [‘Two and a Half Men’]. I know I can’t. I’m not okay with what I’m learning, what the Bible says, and being on that television show.” He goes on to say,

“I’m on ‘Two and a Half Men’ and I don’t want to be on it. Please stop watching it. Please stop filling your head with filth.”

Is this disloyal and ungrateful conduct toward a show, a cast and employers that have given Jones wealth, celebrity and fame? Undoubtedly. If he had come by this station in life through his own efforts and fully informed choices, I would agree with the Hollywood chorus accusing the 19-year-old of “biting the hand that feeds him.” Jones, however, was indentured to “Two and a Half Men” at the age of ten, which is to say that he had little say in it or his life path so far. His parents, like the parents of most child actors, decided that his innate performing talent was worth a lot of money to them and him, and that this was reason enough to launch him into a field with a century-long track record of turning children into dysfunctional celebrity addicts, often setting them on the road to addiction, isolation, depression, failure, and death. Continue reading →

Ethics Quote of the Day: Rear Admiral Sean Pybus

/ Jack Marshall / 51 Comments

“We do NOT advertise the nature of our work, NOR do we seek recognition for our actions. Today, we find former SEALs headlining positions in a Presidential campaign; hawking details about a mission against Enemy Number 1; and generally selling other aspects of NSW training and operations.  For an Elite Force that should be humble and disciplined for life, we are certainly not appearing to be so.”

—-Rear Admiral Sean Pybus, Commander of Naval Special Warfare Command, in a letter sent to all members of the Special Operations community telling  them to stop revealing information about their secret operations. The letter was sent out as “No Easy Day,” a Navy Seal’s unauthorized account of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, hit the book stores.

The letter is said to be the beginning of a concerted effort by the military to discourage an accelerating trend among Navy SEALs of cashing in on their notoriety and exploits.

Good luck. When a culture based on professionalism, sacrifice, discretion and honor meets a larger culture that values none of those things as much as celebrity, publicity, personal aggrandizement and financial rewards, the results are pre-ordained, and the key word is corruption. The SEALs won’t be able to fix themselves unless they can figure out how to fix America, and compared to that, finding bin Laden was a walk in the park.

______________________________

Facts: NBC

Graphic: By Hero

Hurray for the “O!” in “The Star Spangled Banner,” And The Man Who Put It There

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Wild Bill Hagy, on the job

When the Washington Nationals hosted the Baltimore Orioles in an interleague baseball game, many Orioles fans attended to root for their team, the long-diminishes but suddenly (and, I fear, temporarily) resurgent O’s from Charm City. Nobody who has attended Orioles games in Camden Yards was surprised that the Orioles fans shouted out a loud “O!” as the National Anthem reached its climax, in the line, “Oh say does that star-spangled banner yet wave?” They have been doing this, joyfully and with full-throated enthusiasm, for over four decades.

Washington Post sportswriter Mike Wise to his keyboard to express his annoyance and indignation. Calling the O’s fans who engage in the traditional shout “cretins,” Wise wrote,

“…By claiming the lyrics, if only for a moment, you fundamentally undermine the idea that the song was written to unite instead of divide. A national anthem is a national anthem, not a convenient vehicle for one’s immense pride in his or her team.”

Allow me to retort!

Baloney. Continue reading →

The Tragedy of Monica Lewinsky

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

At 21, Monica Lewinsky was charmed into an illicit sexual relationship by the President of the United States, a master charmer with a long record of similar dalliances. There are millions of extra-marital affairs in the U.S., but one involving the most powerful man in the country was certain to be at the center of historic media attention. Bill Clinton knew it, and he understood the risks. Monica Lewinsky did not and could not, and it was her life that was thrown tragically, permanently, off its tracks. Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: Actor Ryan Gosling

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Ryan Gosling....ready for action!

Caught on video: Hollywood hunk Ryan Gosling (“The Notebook”) saw a fight developing on the streets of NYC, dropped his bag of groceries and used his personal-trainer toned bod to break it up.

Stopping violence in public can be dangerous, and I wouldn’t recommend it for everyone. Gosling obviously knew what he was doing, however, and what he was doing was fulfilling the citizen’s duty to fix a problem when he or she can. Proactive participation in society, including discouraging misconduct whenever possible, is profoundly ethical, and too rare. The actor not only stopped a brawl, he also established himself as a member of that endangered species, the celebrity who deserves to be a role model.

Gosling doesn’t just play heroes in the movies—-he knows how to be the real thing.

A Batboy Sells Out His Heroes

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Don't trust him, Roy...he's doing research for a book!

Luis Castillo became a batboy for the New York Yankees at the age of 15, and for eight baseball seasons shared the clubhouse with his hometown heroes. Now he’s cashing in, having written a tell-all memoir of his experiences  that dishes on Derek Jeter, Alex Rodriguez, Roger Clemens and others, all of whom trusted him to be fair, respectful, and discreet.

The recurrent theme from the media’s commentators, which I heard repeated on CNN this morning as it hosted Castillo in his book-hawking efforts (in this case he told an embarrassing anecdote about Yankee catcher Jose Posada) is that “Castillo is able to divulge Yankee secrets in his new memoir because he was part of the last group of batboys who did not have to sign confidentiality agreements.”

This is accurate, but wrong. It is also typical of what passed today as journalistic ethics. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Christine O’Donnell

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Like ham and eggs, Abbott and Costello, or motherhood and apple pie, “dunce” and Christine O’Donnell will forever be paired. Why her embarrassing run for the U.S. Senate didn’t consign her to permanent obscurity I do not know, but she was back in the public eye again tonight, on an apparently slow day for getting guests for Piers Morgan, to talk about her new book. When the host dared to stray into subject matter O’Donnell didn’t want to talk about, however, she quit the interview, leaving Morgan with dead time and an empty chair.

There is no excuse for this abominable behavior. Morgan was not being rude, nor was he straying from ethical interview practices. An interviewee does not have the right to control an interview, and a public figure who is asked about public statements and the contents of a book bearing her name may not call “foul” with any justification. As for walking out in the middle of a televised interview, O’Donnell conduct is indefensible–unfair to her host, disrespectful of her audience,  uncivil, and cowardly

Morgan deserves some of the blame for agreeing to waste airtime on someone who has proven beyond any question that she possesses neither the skills, talent, intelligence, character or judgment to even qualify for D -list celebrity status, much less to be taken seriously as a political figure.

She is, in short, a dunce–ethically, socially, and intellectually. After this performance, anyone who books her for anything other than a “Dunk the Witch” carnival attraction deserves whatever they get.

The Saga of Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt: Life in a Culture That Values Lies

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Post-surgery Montag, trying to stay famous

If you have taste, a job, and a brain, or don’t read a lot of “Us” and “People” in doctors’ offices, you may never have heard of Spencer Pratt and Heidi Montag. They were stars of the once popular TV reality show “The Hills,” and despite being two vacuous and shallow individuals of minimal common sense, talent or education, they presumed that they could ride the “famous for being famous” gravy train in celebrity-and-media obsessed America indefinitely. They couldn’t.

The Daily Beast features a horrifying interview with the pair, which is worth reading for its ethics lessons on several levels. For one thing, the degree to which the culture of dishonesty has progressed in America  surprises even me. Allowing yourself to be presented to the public as a completely manufactured personality in exchange for fame and fortune has always been part of the celebrity experience, but the reality show phenomenon has removed it from everything else—now the lie is all there is. And there are thousands upon thousands of attractive, young dimwits who actually aspire to such ersatz enshrinement in the culture as their life’s pursuit. Paris Hilton and the Kardashian sisters are these deluded individuals’ goddesses, despite the fact that 1) there are not 500 IQ points among the four of them and 2) they all have the benefit of rich trust funds to fall back on, so their jaunts as pop culture comets are more like diversions than careers, though profitable ones. Continue reading →

What Today’s Broadcast News Regards As “Credentials”

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

"Yes, yes...journalism degree, experience at a local affiliate, blah, blah...but no rapes? Arrests? Scandals? Sexual abuse? Miss, you have NO credentials that make you valuable as a network reporter! Wait--what's your bra size?"

Good for media ethics pundit Howard Kurtz for blowing the whistle, however gently, on ABC News’s hiring of Elizabeth Smart as a contributing on-air expert on missing children cases. “Does that strike anyone as odd?” he writes.

Well, it depends what you mean by “odd,” Howard.

If you mean, does it surprise me that a broadcast media outlet, one of the journalistic mutations that hired Eliot Spitzer, fresh off his prostitution disgrace, to headline a current events show on CNN, that puts a giggly fold-out-come-to-life  like Robin Meade in charge of Headline News’ morning, and that, like Fox News, chooses its female newsreaders and guest pundits according to their degree of resemblance to Mamie Van Doren or Raquel Welch, would hire a young, attractive blond woman with no credentials other than her role as the victim of kidnapping, sexual abuse and rape, as a correspondent, why no, I don’t find it odd at all.

If you mean, do I find it odd that a supposedly professional news network would so blatantly abandon professional standards  just to cash in on the Casey Anthony uproar, however, then…wait, no, I don’t find that odd either. Revolting, but not odd. Continue reading →

Ethics Star and Ethics Hero Emeritus: Elizabeth Taylor, 1932-2011

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

 

You did good, kid! Thanks.

I appreciated Elizabeth Taylor, who died yesterday, as a movie star, though I was never a fan. That she was astonishingly beautiful, there is no doubt, an actress who defined the word “voluptuous” when it didn’t mean”implants.” Like many of the Golden Age stars, acting was secondary with Taylor, who had such on-screen presence that she could steal a movie ( “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”) from the likes of Paul Newman, Burl Ives, Judith Anderson, and yes, Tennessee Williams by just lounging around in a slip. Her best adult performance was probably her first, “A Place in the Sun”; her Oscars were more or less frauds, the first (“Butterfield 8”) as a film community gesture of sympathy for her health problems, and the second, for “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” as one of those nods for playing against type without embarrassing yourself that Hollywood likes to bestow on its favorites. Continue reading →