“Fox News Sunday”

NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell’s Super Bowl Deception

/ Jack Marshall / 33 Comments
"Well, I may not remember any of it, but the Commissioner says I'll life a long life..."

“Well, I may not remember any of it, but the Commissioner says I’ll live a long life…”

Today millions of Americans will gather around televisions, partying and cheering the spectacle of young men maiming and killing themselves for our entertainment pleasure during America’s most popular sporting event, the Super Bowl. An unknown but significant number of those athletes, we now know, are likely to be unable to recognize family members by the time they are 45, and several may take their own lives in despair.  Nonetheless, the official position of the National Football league is that all is well, and Commissioner Roger Goodell was touring the Sunday morning news shows to put out the propaganda claim that  pro football is good for everyone, even the players who accumulate concussions like the rest of us collect aggravation.

Presumably to appeal to the large proportion of the Super Bowl audience who know little about the sport, as well as the gullible fans who do, Goodell told Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace (who, if he had the knowledge, wit and integrity,  should have stopped him and protested) in response to Wallace’s question about the NFL’s ongoing concussion scandal, that NFL players live longer and are on the whole healthier throughout their lives than the general population.

This is deception, and intentionally misleading.

Goodell is taking advantage of the fact that all the measures of the mortality of pro football players are flawed, which is why last year the NFL Players Union commissioned Harvard to do a 100 million dollar study of the health of ex-players and how to improve it.  The union claims that the average age of death of an ex-NFL player is 57 years, which would directly contradict Goodell’s claim.  This figure is supported by a 2011 study by the University of North Carolina, as well as insurance company actuarial statistics.

The figure, however, seems statistically unlikely.  Measuring the life expectancy of any group of adult men, even those engaged in risky behavior, will yield an average life expectancy that is better than the general population. Why? Because men in the general population die as infants, children, young adults, and before they would be old enough to play football. Thus the NFL and defenders of the brutal game continue to promote the 2012 study that found that NFL players outlive the general population. If accurate—and the players find the study difficult to believe, as do I—it can be argued that this study is also flawed. It compares apples—strong, affluent, college educated upper-middle class men—to oranges–everyone else, including the poor, unemployed, uneducated and poorly nourished. Attempting to get around this problem, one blogger compared the deaths of NFL players to other celebrities whose death notices were prominently published. His conclusion: there was no denying the fact that pro football players appeared to die sooner that non-football players from the same general class, but there was no justification to believethe mid-fifties mortality figure.

So do we know how much playing pro football lowers life expectancy, or even if it does? No….and neither does Roger Goodell. The studies are in conflict. However, we do know that a disproportionate number of the players who may live well into their golden years will do so unable to think clearly, remember their children’s names, or care for themselves, because they accepted big paychecks to allow their brains to be permanently bruised and catastrophically damaged. I don’t call that living or being healthy, and Goodell shouldn’t pretend that it is, or cite as fact what is a disputed contention at best.

Playing pro football isn’t good for you, and if the studies ultimately prove that ex-NFL players are really likely continue breathing as long as the rest of us despite their brain injuries, that just helps us understand why they have been killing themselves.

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Sources: CP24, Boston.com, Lotsa ‘Splaining, USA Today, Forbes

More Than a Fool: Bachmann, John Quincy Adams, and Wikipedia

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

John Quincy Adams, Sixth President, slavery foe, and time-traveling Founding Father

I will strive a bit longer to avoid concluding that Michele Bachmann is as irresponsible, dishonest and dangerous as I strongly suspect that she is, though my determination may not last the time it takes to write this post. I won’t wait any longer to conclude that she is a fool.

In one short week since the controversy erupted over Fox News anchor Chris Wallace daring to ask her on the air, “Are you a flake?” and her subsequent botching of both her answer and the question’s fevered aftermath, she has stumbled into two flaky episodes. One—her mixing up Western movie star icon John Wayne with serial child killer John Wayne Gacy—was at least funny. The other, far less forgivable—her claim that the Founding Fathers “worked tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States”—has signature significance. Continue reading →

“Are You a Flake?” Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

"Are you Michele Bachman?"

With only four well-chosen words, Fox News anchor Chris Wallace accomplished several objectives Sunday, all of them in the best tradition of ethical, objective, responsible journalism.

The words were “Are you a flake?,” posed to Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, who is running for President.  The question…

1. Properly forced a conservative darling to address her most striking weakness, belying Fox’s well-deserved reputation for bias toward figures its viewers admire…

2. Was a near-perfect example of the “off-the-wall” question technique, which has exposed more than one pretender to high office (Hello, Mike Dukakis!) as less than desirable.

3. Simultaneously gave Bachmann an opportunity to show how quick she could think on her feet while demonstrating important leadership traits like self-awareness, humor, wit, and grace, or, in the alternative, demonstrate the opposite.

How did she do? Well. Judge for yourself: Continue reading →

And the 21st Untrustworthy Candidate is: West Virginia Gov. Joe Manchin!

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

West Virginia’s Democratic Governor, Joe Manchin, currently running for the open U.S. Senate seat, has now caused me to regret my selections on the Ethics Alarms “Untrustworthy Twenty” within hours of posting it.  Manchin belongs on it; oh brother, does he ever. I had missed his nausaeating performance this Sunday on Fox, in which he attempted to retract his endorsement of the Obamacare legislation last March, explaining that he didn’t understand key details of the law when he publicly supported it. Continue reading →

Fox News Sunday Ethics Revelations: Wallace and Fiorina

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

Two things were stunningly in evidence during today’s interview of GOP Senate candidate Carly Fiorina (trying to unseat Barbara Boxer in California) by anchor Chris Wallace on “Fox News Sunday.”

The first is that Chris Wallace does not conform to the media stereotype of a Fox journalist, a thinly veiled Republican operative committed to pushing a conservative agenda. If only interviewers on CNN, NBC, CBS and ABC were so unwilling to accept evasion, half-truths and nostrums from Democrats. Kudos to Wallace for doing his job, not lobbing softballs, and exemplifying journalistic integrity where most people least expect it.

The second is that candidate Fiorina, yet another Tea Party darling, is a fake. Continue reading →

On Obvious Lies and Sen. McCain

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

I have long been fascinated by the self-evident public lie. Sometimes the product of desperation, sometimes arrogance, sometimes contempt, each example poses a set of equally unattractive interpretations. Does the liar really believe the obvious lie is true, in which case he or she is deranged? Does the liar think that enough people will believe something so demonstrably false, meaning that he or she holds a deplorable lack of respect for the intelligence of the public? Is the liar so fearful and cowardly that he or she cannot summon the integrity to admit what is obvious, even though doing otherwise looks ridiculous? Or, as is surprisingly often the case, does the liar have so little regard for the truth and such a deficit of shame for lying that he or she doesn’t care that the lie is obvious?

When elected officials and others holding high office resort to the obvious lie in a matter of any importance, it should disqualify them from continuing in office. An obvious lie obliterates public trust. For example, when Janet Napolitano had the gall to pronounce department’s anti-terror airplane security measures a success because, be sheer luck, passengers foiled the so-called “Underwear Bomber,” she forfeited any future trust in her honesty of competence. (She is still Secretary of Homeland Security, however.)

The excuse sometimes offered by obvious liars after the fact is an ethics “Catch 22.” They argue that an obvious lie is a harmless lie, because nobody could possibly believe it. (Over on “The Ethics Scoreboard,” a spectacular version of this argument launched the continuing feature of “The David Manning Liar of the Month,” after Sony tried to justify its use of a fictional movie critic, “David Manning,” to attach glowing—but fake— blurbs to lousy films, like the Rob Schneider comedy “The Animal.” When its deception came to light, Sony protested its practice was harmless because nobody believed critical praise in movie ads anyway.) The defense conveniently ignores the question of why anyone would offer a lie they didn’t expect anyone to believe. It is really a consequentialist scam: if I try an outrageous lie and it works, great; if it doesn’t, then it wasn’t a lie.

What do we make, then, of Sen. John McCain’s stunning claim in a recent Newsweek interview that “I never considered myself a maverick” ? Continue reading →

Was Brit Hume Unethical?

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

I’ve been thinking about Brit Hume’s controversial remarks on Fox News about Tiger Woods for two weeks now, trying to identify what was wrong with them. Not whether I agreed with them, or whether I would have said something similar myself, but what was wrong with them: did his comments suggesting a Christian path for the troubled golfer constitute a breach of professional ethics, or ethics generally? Continue reading →