cheating

The Democrats’ Fake Tea Party Candidate

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Gamesmanship or cheating? In everything from baseball to trial litigation that involved competition and adversaries, there is a large gray area where the distinction between clever tactics and dishonest manipulation is a source of continuing controversy. No arena is so rich with a tradition of dubious maneuvers as the political one, and when a campaign season is especially intense, as this one is, there are certain to be strategems that cross the line.

When the mysterious Alvin Greene won the South Carolina Democratic primary to run against Republican Jim DeMint, some Democrats cried foul, claiming that the Forrest Gumpish Greene (though Forrest never was charged with showing pornography to a student, or they cut that sequence out of the movie) was a Republican plant. Not a shred of evidence ever surfaced to support that accusation (the unsubstantiated accusation is itself an old campaign trick), and it never made much sense, either. Greene barely campaigned and his unfitness for office was blatantly obvious if anyone had bothered to pay attention to him; if he was a plant, he was a spectacularly bad one.

The decoy candidate device is being used this campaign cycle however, and it is being used, ironically enough, by Democrats, marking another instance of the useful principle that the people who are most suspicious of cheating are often the ones who are most likely to cheat.  Continue reading →

Ethics Quote of the Week: Former NFL agent Josh Luchs

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment
“That night I sat in my hotel room making a list of pros and cons in my head. Sure, it was breaking NCAA rules, but I would be helping Kanavis out. How would I feel if my mom was sick and I didn’t have money to help her? I went through this for hours and finally decided to do it. The next morning I went to the bank, pulled out some of my bar mitzvah money, $2,500 in cash, showed up at Kanavis’s door and told him, “Kanavis, I gave this a lot of thought, and I want to help you out. I know how I would feel if it was my mom.”

—Former registered NFL player agent Josh Luchs, describing to Sports Illustrated one of thirty incidents in which he gave money to college players to persuade them to sign up as clients.
………..
Yes, if it was Luchs’s mom, and he thought he could con an agent into handing over illicit cash using her as an excuse, he might have tried this too. Thus do we see how a profession that is faced with many ethical dilemmas is completely unprepared to apply even rudimentary ethics analysis to come to a correct decision. Luchs frames his dilemma to make him out to be a good guy, but what he was actually doing is exploiting a college kid’s personal problems to reel him in, breaking NCAA rules on the way and jeopardizing the player’s career. Did Luchs explain that accepting the money might lead to sanctions for both the player and his college? Apparently not. More importantly, Luchs wasn’t giving money to the athlete to help his family out; he was giving the money as the quid in an implied quid pro quo arrangement: “I help your mother, you sign with me. Deal?” Continue reading →

What’s the Matter With Direct TV?

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Okay, you Direct TV defenders…if you can stop rolling on the floor with hilarity over people being tasered by police officers and having their food adulterated by redneck waitresses for a second, explain this one to me.

In a current Direct TV commercial about the joys of paying your satellite bill online, a woman enthusiastically chirps, “No more “borrowing” stamps from the office!” Yes, not only does Direct TV assume that everyone steals stamps from their work place, but they think it’s no big deal. If it was anything to be ashamed of, the ad wouldn’t accuse its potential customers of doing it, now would they?

Stealing stamps or anything else of value from your job isn’t cute, and it isn’t right. Who are these people? How did they get this way? This time, they don’t even have the excuse that it’s just for laughs, because this commercial is all business. I think Direct TV’s ads show a company with an ethically corrupt culture, so much so that its management and staff just assumes everyone is just as dishonest and selfish as they are. If they’ll steal stamps, they’ll pad my bill.

So please explain to me, Direct TV fans, why accusing us of stamp stealing is all in good fun.  Otherwise, I think I’ll be going back to cable. It is beginning to look like there is something seriously wrong with this company.

Leona Gage: A Celebrity Liar Ahead of Her Time

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Leona Gage died last week, and there are people who love her and will miss her. But Gage’s obituary would have never been deemed worth of mention in major newspapers had it not been for a series of lies she concocted in 1957 because “she needed the money.” She was Miss USA that year, until contest organizers discovered that, contrary to what she had said,  she wasn’t single ( a requirement then); wasn’t waiting “until she was 26” to have a boyfriend (she had been married twice at 14, and already had a child), and wasn’t 21…she was just 18. Continue reading →

Wildlife Documentary Deception

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Great. CNN and NBC weren’t enough: now we can’t trust the National Geographic channel and Animal Planet.

Chris Palmer, a veteran wildlife photographer, recently went on NPR to talk about his new book. In Shooting in the Wild: An Insider’s Account of Making Movies in the Animal Kingdom, Palmer reveals the secrets of his trade, which apparently include renting trained animals when the ones in the wild won’t cooperate and putting M&M’s in the carcasses of prey, so the predators eat with gusto. He also expound on the use of a sound-effects technician to simulate sounds of animals breathing, chewing, drinking and flying. “You can’t get close enough to a bear to record his breath or his splashing in the water. If you got that close, you’d be in great danger,” he told NPR.

Although Palmer attributes the increase in the use of staged and fake footage in nature films to tighter budgets and shooting schedules, surely we had an inkling that this went on from the very beginning. The inventor of the form, Walt Disney, used animals as documentary actors in movies like “The Incredible Journey,” and I always assumed that Disney’s “true life adventure” nature films like “Jungle Cat” and “The Living Desert” included staged scenes, including battles between animals that were far from spontaneous.

Disney, however, is in the entertainment business. When wildlife documentaries announce themselves as real, they should be real, and if the producers staged sequences, rented animals, or used M&M’s, they have an ethical obligation to tell the audience. This goes for sounds as well. After all, there are people who think big snakes make the roaring sound the CGI villain makes in “Anaconda”; the fake sounds in nature films mislead many more. Real life footage is supposed to teach us something, not stuff our heads full of more misinformation.

That’s the job of CNN and NBC.

There is a lot of amazing wildlife footage that is not staged; the question now, in light of Palmer’s book, is how we are supposed to identify the fakes. The sound effects are a good clue. I will say this: if I find out that the story of Christian the lion was faked, I’m going to be angry.

But there is always “the battle at Kruger.”

[Thanks to Lauren Larson for the tip.]

Darek Jeter, Rob Neyer, and Baseball’s Traditional Deceptions

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

ESPN blogger Rob Neyer has once again called for baseball to punish “cheaters” which he defines as, among other things, “lying to an umpire” and faking an injury, though there are no rules against either. His impetus was an incident in last night’s Rays-Yankee showdown, in which Yankee shortstop Derek Jeter convinced the home plate umpire that he had been hit by a pitch, when replays showed that the ball actually hit his bat. The subterfuge led to two runs for the Yankees and the ejection of Rays manager Joe Maddon, who argued the call to no avail.  Jeter later admitted that he had fooled the umpire, and seemed to be rather pleased with himself.

This has Neyer rather confused. He writes that Jeter ought to be punished for his dishonesty, because ” it wasn’t fair that Jeter was awarded first base. It wasn’t fair to pitcher Chad Qualls, or to Qualls’ teammates or his manager or to the thousands of Rays fans watching and listening to the evening’s dramatic events.” Yet then Neyer immediately points out that Jeter did “nothing wrong.” So Jeter should be punished because he did nothing wrong? If what Jeter did is in fact dishonest and unfair, of course it is wrong.

But it’s not, any more than bluffing in poker is unfair and dishonest. Continue reading →

Ethics Tip To Arizona Voters: Never Trust A Party That Cheats

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

A Republican operative in Arizona has recruited three homeless men to run for office on the Green Party ballot, in the expectation that they will siphon off Democratic votes.  A New York Times report depicts the operative, Steve May, as openly admitting his tactic, and not regretting it in the least. Democrats, says the Times, are furious. But everyone else should be too. Here is just some of what is wrong with May’s conduct: Continue reading →

Elevator Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Randy Cohen surprised me today. “The Ethicist,” in his weekly column in the Times Magazine, responded to a  question from a Chinese citizen whose office building had only one working elevator, resulting in long lines of office workers waiting to catch a lift to distant floors. Cohen’s inquirer asked if it was unethical for him to run up the stairs to a higher floor, and secure a place on the elevator before it arrived on his original floor, one below.

Cohen said he was “cutting in line,” and that it was unethical. Randy may well be right, but I’m not immediately convinced. Continue reading →

Gift or Bribe? Barry Bonds’ Generosity to the NABJ

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

Barry Bonds, the retired baseball slugger who used banned or illegal performance enhancing drugs to fuel a late-carer transformation that allowed him to grow from merely great into Superman, breaking every home run record in sight as a result, has adamantly maintained his innocence despite a mountain of circumstantial evidence, positive drug tests, and the verdict of common sense. He has also played the race card when it seemed convenient to his cause. Bonds’ cheating ways have made him rich beyond belief, and his only real problems now are 1) the likelihood of a Federal perjury trial next year in connection with his Grand Jury testimony that he never knowingly took steroids, and 2) the fact that few of the sportswriters who vote for the Hall of Fame seem inclined to enshrine steroid cheats, based on their rejection, so far, of Mark McGwire, whose steroid-assisted single season home run record Bonds broke while he was especially pumped-up.

Both of these problems could conceivably be helped by some positive press opinion, something that Bonds has never cultivated, being inclined to treat all journalists as if they were something he had to wipe off the bottom of his shoe. Thus it raised eyebrows when  it was announced that the charitable foundation created and controlled by Barry Bonds has donated $20,000 to The National Association of Black Journalists. NABJ president Kathy Times told the Associated Press that the money will be used to fund an annual award promoting entrepreneurial spirit. Continue reading →

Charlie Rangel’s Defense and Buster Olney’s Fallacy

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Charlie Rangel’s defense against the ethics charges against him is, in part this: I’m not the only one, so it’s unfair to punish me.” From the Washington Post:

“He was not the only lawmaker to solicit donations in this manner, his lawyers argue, saying that peers who did the same thing were not punished. With a trial of Rangel by the House ethics committee possible by mid-September, his legal team reached across the Capitol to point a finger at Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who helped raise money for a center named for him at the University of Louisville. Rangel’s team cited similarities with the recently deceased Sen. Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.) and with former Republican senators Trent Lott (Miss.) and Jesse Helms (N.C.).”

OK, a question: what’s the matter with that argument? Continue reading →