fairness

Racism, the Media, and Reverend Wright Distortions

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

He’s b-a-a-a-a-a-c-k! (Sort of….)

This has been happening to me a lot lately. I see a political story with ethical implications, and decide to pass. I think, “Nah, this is another ‘the news media is in the tank for Obama story”—it’s pretty obvious; I don’t need to go there.” Then the story starts to churn, the news media, left and right, distorts it thoroughly through spin and stupidity, and pretty soon I can’t stand it any more.

The controversy over a proposed, and rejected, Super-Pac ad blitz focusing on the President’s controversial relationship with Rev. Jeremiah Wright—demagogue, radical, racist—began when a leaked copy of a proposal prepared for conservative billionaire Joe Ricketts was leaked to the New York Times. The Times’ decision to put the proposal on its front page was sadly typical, and irresponsible. We don’t what wacky proposals circulate in the back rooms of both parties and their allies, and I don’t see why we would want to know, unless, as in this case, the objective was to suggest a series of things that aren’t true. Prime among them was that the Romney campaign was preparing to mount a full-bore attack on the President’s character. Nothing has suggested that, except the Times, whose story forced the presumed GOP nominee to apologize for a mode of attack 1) he had nothing to do with and 2) had never been approved anyway.

This was unfair, slanted and biased conduct by the Times, and the point at which I decided, “Oh, heck, we’ll be seeing the Times and the Washington Post, not to mention the broadcast media, pulling this until November. People either will recognize it for the partisan bias  it is, or they won’t.”

Then came Carol Costello on a typical morning for CNN, when she or the regular morning host Soledad O’Brien spend every AM sneering at Republicans and looking at the camera all dewy-eyed whenever President Obama’s name comes up. Costello, who I have concluded sets my teeth on edge even worse than the smug O’Brien, began her day with this: “Today’s question: Will racial politics work in 2012?” Continue reading →

When Unethical Approaches Evil: The Clarence Aaron Pardon Fiasco

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Clarence Aaron, waiting for justice

I read about Clarence Aaron four days ago. It has bothered me ever since. The short version of this horror story is that a young man, outrageously sentenced to three consecutive life sentences for a drug offense despite being a first offender, was poised to receive a pardon from President Bush but did not, because the Pardon Attorney charged with job of presenting the case to the President inexplicably left out critical  information that would have all but guaranteed his freedom. The attorney’s name is Ronald Rogers: he was the Pardon Attorney under Bush, and is still in that post today.

I have been trying to figure out what ethical breach would describe what Rogers did, a difficult task in the absence of an explanation from him. Was this incompetence? Laziness? Was it a lack of diligence—was he careless? Did Rogers sink Aaron’s case because he doesn’t like blacks, or doesn’t like drugs, or doesn’t like pardons? Does he lack empathy? Sympathy? A heart? Continue reading →

Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman Ethics Train Wreck Update: An Integrity Test For The Lynch Mob

/ Jack Marshall / 46 Comments

As Emily used to say, “Never mind!” Al? Spike?

The news coverage of the  emerging evidence in the Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman was slow in coming this week, perhaps because it makes the news media look bad. Reluctantly, however, it is finally getting out, though perhaps not with the breathless urgency the media mustered when it was actively manufacturing fake evidence—-a doctored 911 tape, a grainy film showing no injuries to Zimmerman’s head—so Martin’s shooter could be pronounced a killer-racist before he was even charged.

ABC News, perhaps attempting to atone for its disgraceful coverage of the case in March, released a through report on its website of latest developments, revealing that:

  • “Two police reports written the night that George Zimmerman shot Trayvon Martin said that Zimmerman had a bloody face and nose”
  • “Zimmerman seemed to have a battered nose and bloodied face…and the back of his clothing was soiled with wet grass…Zimmerman was also bleeding from … the back of his head.”
  • “Two witness accounts appear to back up Zimmerman’s version of what happened when they describe a man on his back with another person wearing a hoodie straddling him and throwing punches.”
  • “The documents state that Zimmerman can be heard yelling for help 14 times on a 911 call recorded during the fight.” Continue reading →

Editor, Plagiarist and Ethics Dunce Extraordinaire Robert Ripley Meets His Worst Nightmare…

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

….and that nightmare is Duane Lester, a hard-working, honest, courageous, organized and determined blogger who wasn’t going to let a newspaper rip him off and get away with it. Lester researched and posted an original local news story, a true scoop, and days letter was shocked to find that a local paper, the Oregon Times Observer, had lifted his entire post and put it on the paper’s front page, without credit, permission, or attribution. Shocked and unprepared for such flagrant and shameless appropriation of his labors, he researched the issue, wrote a letter, and then visited the paper to demand payment. Brilliantly, he also brought along a friend with a video camera.

The whole story, as well as the enlightening and satisfying confrontation between the Blogger and the Word Thief, is on the resulting video. There is a lot to see here.

Continue reading →

Pay Attention, Children! Doing the Right Thing Isn’t Right If It Violates A Stupid Rule!

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Then, after this relaxing break, he returned to his supervisor position in Wayne County…

It appears that no-tolerance policies in the schools may not be alienating students after all. Some of them, at least in Michigan, are learning the no-tolerance way and applying it in the workplace.

Not John Chevilott, though: he just doesn’t get it, probably because when he went to school, they didn’t have no-tolerance policies. A veteran public-works employee in Wayne County, Michigan, he was mowing grass in Detroit’s Brightmoor neighborhood when he found a loaded revolver. He called the police and waited for them to  pick up the gun, but they didn’t appear. Chevilott finished the job and took the weapon to the police after work. The gun had been stolen in 2005, records showed, and police told him that he had handled the situation well.

Wayne County, however, has a no-tolerance policy forbidding employees from possessing  weapons on work property. After all, there’s no reason for a worker to have a gun, except in the extraordinary situation where one is just hanging around, loaded, and the worker picks it up. But how often would that happen? It’s no wonder nothing about that situation was written into the rule, and rules, as they say in the schools—the schools where kids chew their pizzas into the shape of pistols and get suspended, the schools where kids disarm fellow students of knives and are expelled, and the schools where four-year-old boys kiss girls and get arrested for sexual assault—“rules are rules!”

John Chevilott, who had been on the job 23 years and scheduled to retire in two days, was fired for violating the policy, even though his supervisors understood that the gun wasn’t his, that he had turned it into police, that it was loaded, that it was as much a threat to public safety lying in the grass as any weapon brought to work by an employee, and that he had “possessed it” only to get it into the hands of law enforcement officials.  To be fair, they also suspended Chevilott’s foreman, who knew about the incident, for not reporting the infraction. Continue reading →

Chris Matthews Gets A Lesson On The Golden Rule

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Don’t forget…Cliff almost WON Jeopardy!

Chris Matthews, the MSNBC “Hardball” host, has frequently mocked Sarah Palin’s knowledge and intelligence, and often used an iconic TV game show to do it. Such as:

  • “Is this [vice presidential debate] about her brain power?… Do you think cute will beat brains?…Do you think she’d do better on the questions on Jeopardy! or the interview they do during a half-time?…My suspicion is that she has the same lack of intellectual curiosity that the President of the United States has right now and that is scary!”
  • “They find these empty vessels who know nothing about the world! Nothing about foreign policy! Who immediately begin to spout the neo-con line. I read her book — it’s full of that crap….It’s unbelievable how little this woman knows!…Don’t put her on Jeopardy!” Continue reading →

Ethics Heroes: Seniors at Lexington (Ky) Catholic High School

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

The fun prom…in the parking lot.

When Lexington (Kentucky) Catholic High senior Hope Decker, 18 tried to take sophomore Tiffany Wright, 16, to the school’s senior prom as her date, school officials told the couple that they would not be admitted, because their unholy same-sex coupling violated the Catholic Church’s teachings. Defiant, the couple tried to enter the school’s gymnasium that night, where the prom was held, but as promised, their tickets were refused. So their fellow students held an impromtu protest prom outside the official one, in the parking lot. They played music from their cars, and set up a table for refreshments.

“We had a wonderful night, and we were surrounded by true friends,” Wright said. “I’ll remember it for the rest of my life.”

Here is what else she will remember for the rest of her life: Continue reading →

Ethics Quote of the Week: Washington Post Blogger Greg Sargent

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

“But when it comes down to it, this all happened too long ago and too early in Romney’s life to know with real certainty whether it’s revealing of any of those things or not — particularly when it comes to who Romney is right now. I can’t get around the simple fact that I wouldn’t want to be judged today by some of the things I did in my teens, and I suspect many others feel the same way.”

—Washington Post blogger-from-the-Left Greg Sargent, concluding his post entitled, “What Does Mitt Romney’s Bullying Tell Us?”

My god, man! I think you’ve discovered The Golden Rule!

Who the heck is THAT guy?

Sargent, being a designated left-wing mouthpiece for a newspaper that often fulfills that role itself, naturally toes the company line in most of his post before having this lucid ethical moment. He spends part of the article speculating on what the Post’s “bombshell story” about what Mitt did or maybe did in prep school might suggest about Romney—all the better to throw out indictments “from some” like cruelty, “a real mean streak,” “a disdain for the weak,” just to plant a seed in the minds of voters that might bloom Greg’s way by November. But he edges into Ethics Hero territory for making the necessary “Never mind!” point in fairness and common sense. Continue reading →

The Romney “Pranks” Smear and Fairness Blindness

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Amazingly, the real Doug Neidermeyer grew up to be a hell of a nice guy. But by all means, let’s judge him by the jerk he was in 1962. That’s fair.

Occasionally I am genuinely shocked at how blatantly unfair people are on certain topics. Sometimes it is people generally; sometimes the people shocking me are those who I respect, and their unfairness outbreak sets me running to the mirror to check for tell-tale symptoms in my own visage, like a righteousness rash or bias buboes. I am never surprised by the unfairness of the media, politicians, or Lawrence O’Donnell, but even with them, I persist in the silly hope that some shred of decency survives.

The Washington Post’s despicable exposition of ancient recollections of Mitt Romney’s mean-spirited and boorish conduct while being enrolled in that well-known cauldron of mean-spirited and boorish conduct—prep school—has caused me serial episodes of shock. The blatant unfairness of dredging up pre-majority incidents to denigrate a presidential candidate should be so obvious that would expect writers, pundits and readers of all ideological persuasions to toss such swill back in the face of the incompetent waiter who served it…but no. Far and wide, people who should know better, think better and be better are waving the Post’s front page like a bloody flag. I’m embarrassed for them, and for any political affiliation that removes basic ethics alarms so effectively.

The story was offensive and unforgivable enough online, where I saw it yesterday, but on the front page of the Washington Post, where it appeared today, it is beyond belief. The story takes up almost half the front page: you would think the Martians had invaded. My first thought was: “Wow…the liberal establishment must really think Obama’s in trouble!” And so he is. But that’s no excuse.

All the usual suspects have seized on the Post’s hit job to paint Mitt Romney as some kind of a closet monster—again, on the basis of his actions as a spoiled, rich kid with a famous father going to school at a snooty prep school where they breed the kind of creeps represented by Greg Marmalard and Doug Neidermeyer in “Animal House.”

I should mention, in passing, that I am fairly certain that in college I knew personally one of the models for both Marmalard and Neidermeyer, an arrogant, ultra-preppy, ultra-conservative, tall, handsome student who was an outspoken supporter of Richard Nixon and who was known and roundly detested by the Harvard Lampoon types that wrote the “Animal House” screenplay. And guess what? He grew up. He was not “raped in prison” after Watergate, like Greg, or “shot by his own men” in Viet Nam, like Doug. He became a dedicated philanthropist and a courageous father, and has accomplished more good since college than all the fine liberals who ridiculed him combined. Citing his college conduct (when he was older that 17) as indicia of his character today makes about as much sense as—no exactly as much sense as—using Mitt Romney’s prep school actions to judge him now. That is to say, none.

Rick Jones, the smart and sensitive teacher and blogger who sometimes weighs in here, shocked me with his own boarding of the anti-Romney train in the wake of the Post smear. Still, his post on the topic, which you can read here, is more persuasive, fair and articulate than the others around the web written by those with names you might know better, so let me focus on Rick’s well-stated versions of their arguments. Rick writes: Continue reading →

The Washington Post’s Teenage Romney Smear Job

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

This just in: When he was 2 months old, Mitt Romney made boom-boom in his didies!

The Washington Post, which reached its previous nadir of attempted disgraceful and irresponsible character assassination of a GOP Presidential candidate with its “Niggerhead” hit job on Gov. Rick Perry*, sunk lower still with today’s stunningly unfair attack on Mitt Romney. Reporter Jason Horowitz wrote a bottom-of the-barrel story about an incident in which Romney bullied and harassed a gay class mate when Romney was at prep school, and 17-years-old. Naturally, this was published to contrast with President Obama, finally being shamed into announcing his support of gay marriage, in order to embarrass Romney, and force him to apologize for an episode that took place nearly a half-century ago when he was legally a minor.

If you want to read this garbage, it is here. You shouldn’t want to, however. It has no relevance to Mitt Romney or his qualifications for the Presidency. Paying any attention to it at all, even if you are actively trying to torpedo Mitt, is a bright-line violation of the Golden Rule…unless, of course, you never did anything you’re now ashamed of when you were a selfish, hormone-addled, ignorant teen, and are perfectly willing to have colleagues and potential employers judge your current character on the wedgies you handed out in gym class. Continue reading →