hoaxes

Proposed PSA: “This Is Matthew, And He Is The Face Of The Tragedy Called Confirmation Bias. Please Help!”

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

PSA

It is so easy—and tempting—to dismantle Matthew Lynch’s  jaw-dropping essay on the Huffington Post titled “12 Reasons Why Obama Is One of the Best Presidents Ever” that it is unethical, like shooting fish in a barrel. Nearly everything about the post is snicker-worthy, beginning with its timing: this is the equivalent of writing a paean to JFK the morning after the Bay of Pigs.

I have no similar reticence about slamming the Huffington Post for running such an embarrassing screed. If it was intended as satire (and I still think this is a possibility), the piece is incompetent, because when satire is so close to reality that readers can’t tell it’s satire, then it becomes a hoax. There is a possibility, I suppose, that the editors published this because Lynch’s glossy-eyed, alternate reality ravings were entertainingly absurd (they are not: they are tragic), but this would be cruelty, the equivalent of Sean Hannity’s practice of allowing an ignorant, usually poor and uneducated liberal caller to make a fool of herself, slyly impugning the intelligence of the entire American Left. Yet the Huffington Post is largely Obama-friendly: his obeisant  media may finally be moving away from the President, but not that quickly. I think “12 Reasons…” was run because the editors believed the article had substantive merit, in which case, they should all be sent to the Home for Bewildered Editors. (It also may have been planted as link bait.)

If the post was run on its substance, then the editors failed their responsibilities in another respect: they didn’t check Lynch’s facts. His opinions and justifications for them may be Oz-worthy and his alone, but when he writes a flat-out misrepresentation like this… Continue reading →

Comment of the Day: “Print the Legend Ethics: The War of the Worlds Panic”

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

war_worlds

Bravo and thanks to penn for a thoughtful and thought-provoking personal reminiscence that supports my recent post about the claim that the famous panic over Orson Welles’ famous 1938 “War of the Worlds” radio drama never happened. Here is his fascinating Comment of the Day on Print the Legend Ethics: The “War of the Worlds” Panic:

This story came up every Hallowe’en in my family as I was growing up. We had family living in Toms River and in Lakewood, NJ (about 35 miles from Grover’s Mill) at the time Orson did his thing. The different reactions to the broadcast by the people living in the two places resulted in a minor family schism which continues to this day in the attitudes of their descendants.

It was a city mouse/country mouse situation. The Lakewood adults were elementary school teachers — the sophisticates. They listened to that program as a matter of course and as they later reported, they declared this one silly from the very beginning. But then, all science fiction was silly to them (really! space ships and aleeums? pshaw!) — my father (it was his side of the family) always contended they had no imagination. My mother recalled, however, many years later (and after taking several psychology courses at the New School), that commercials or not, she was convinced they had been very disturbed, if not downright scared. Scared enough to sit through the whole “silly” program in the first place, and for the rest of their lives to focus an uncharacteristic rage on the writers … for using the name of a real location in the program. [I think this naming of Grover’s Mill may account for some of the anxiety, if not the panic — people were sooo trusting of the media in those days .. . .] Continue reading →

Print The Legend Ethics: The “War of the Worlds” Panic

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

OrsonWellesDailyNews

One of the worst results of an untrustworthy news media is that it becomes difficult, as time passes, to determine with any certainty what the truth is.

A classic example is on display today, in Slate, which celebrates the 75th anniversary of young, svelte, Orson Welles’ famous Halloween Eve broadcast of his radio adaptation of H.G. Wells’ “War of the Worlds,” with no Tom Cruise or Dakota Fanning but a nice conceit that involved telling the story through fake news flashes and eye-witness interviews. (One reporter is fried on the air by the Martian invasion vehicles.) An new NPR program and a PBS documentary both tell the familiar story of how the realistic-sounding radio play caused widespread panic among radio listeners who missed the opening credits, leading them to think that Earth was really under attack. Newspapers of the day headlined mass panic, and gave accounts of citizens running for cover, huddling in the basement, and cringing in terror.  The episode made Orson Welles a national celebrity, and launched him on his meteoric, long and strange career.

According to Slate authors Jefferson Pooley and Michael Socolow, it never happened. Declaring the story of the “War of the Worlds” panic a myth, the authors state without equivocation that the newspaper accounts, headlines, commentary and interviews, were fabricated:

“Radio had siphoned off advertising revenue from print during the Depression, badly damaging the newspaper industry. So the papers seized the opportunity presented by Welles’ program to discredit radio as a source of news. The newspaper industry sensationalized the panic to prove to advertisers, and regulators, that radio management was irresponsible and not to be trusted. In an editorial titled “Terror by Radio,” the New York Times reproached “radio officials” for approving the interweaving of “blood-curdling fiction” with news flashes “offered in exactly the manner that real news would have been given.” Warned Editor and Publisher, the newspaper industry’s trade journal, “The nation as a whole continues to face the danger of incomplete, misunderstood news over a medium which has yet to prove … that it is competent to perform the news job.” Continue reading →

Ethics Indictments And Observations On “The Greatest Race Hoax Since Tawana Brawley.”

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments
Hey Oberlin! Can't you take a joke?

Hey Oberlin! Can’t you take a joke?

On  February 2013, the small, elite, ultra-liberal arts (both ultra liberal and ultra-arty) campus of Oberlin College was horrified by a series of racist and anti-Semitic posters, graffiti and anonymous emails. The classes were cancelled for intense self-examination and soul-searching; the news media reported on the shocking episode with dire reflections upon the increasing racial tensions in the U.S. Progressive pundits went further, flogging the story as proof of the assault on minority rights from the right, sparked by their rejection of a black President. From BET’s commentary on the Oberlin incidents:

“The sad truth is that the infection of intolerance is pervasive in American society in the age of Obama. We’re living in an era when Supreme Court justices consider the right to vote for African-Americans to be a form of “racial entitlement.” We’re in a period where Republican candidates for president cavalierly refer to the nation’s first Black commander-in-chief as the “food stamp president.” This is the period in American history that has seen the most highly orchestrated assault on minority voting since the end of Reconstruction. And in the midst of it are Republican elected officials boasting about it.in which two students made seemingly racist and other such for the purpose of getting a reaction on campus, not because they believed the hostile messages.  At least one of the two was an Obama supporter with strong progressive, anti-racist politics.”

It has now been conclusively confirmed by investigative reporters and bloggers that the perpetrators of the wave of apparent racial hate were two students, inseparable friends, who were not conservatives, Republicans or racists, but “pranksters” and provocateurs, who engaged in the conduct to see how the campus would “over-react.” One of the students, Dylan Bleier, had organized a voter drive for President Obama in 2008. His Facebook page announced him as a supporter of the ACLU, a Democrat, a member of the Green Party, and someone who placed “civil rights” at the top if his  interests and priorities. This means that there was not an outbreak of racism on one of the most liberal college campuses in America, but that two progressive students set out to make it seem that way—it was essentially a prank. Continue reading →

On The Duty To Snuff Out Web Hoaxes

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

nigerian prince“Today’s” web page has a well-considered feature dealing with the common situation of a friend on Facebook or e-mail who is spreading a web hoax, false rumor or bad information. It’s threshold query: do you have an obligation to correct it? The short answer is yes, but with caveats. You can’t spend all your time knocking down web nonsense, and there are some hoaxes that aren’t important enough to devote much time to killing.

A few years ago, a smart and canny lawyer friend circulated an e-mail advising people who were in the throes of a heart attack to intentionally cough, citing a source that had given this as a helpful survival tip. One of those on her distribution list immediately e-mailed her and everyone else alerting them that the advice was completely wrong, and potentially deadly. That timely correction may have saved a life.

It is also prudent and kind to be especially protective of seniors and others you know who may be new to the internet. That damned Nigerian prince and your friend who is stranded in a foreign country and needs money to get home still fool nice, gullible people after all the warnings and articles. It’s a jungle out there, and we all have a duty to warn each other when we see predators lurking.

The Today article, “Friends Spreading Internet Hoaxes?…” is here.

____________________________________

Pointer: Fark

Source: Today (NBC)

Unethical Quote of the Week: Rush Limbaugh

/ Jack Marshall / 62 Comments

“Speaking of global warming…which has now been proven to be a hoax”…”

—-Rush Limbaugh, riffing today on his radio show regarding the evils of liberals from Obama to Bloomberg.

No, actually, Newsweek is now a hoax.

Actually, Newsweek was the hoax.

This an outright ethics foul, even if Rush believes it. If he doesn’t believe it, it’s a lie. If he does believe it, it is still a reckless, incompetent and irresponsible thing to say to millions of listeners who trust him to tell them the truth.

Global warming, or climate change, is not a hoax. Its exact extent may not be known, or as conclusively known as some scientists and commentators claim. It may be difficult to measure, and the historical data it is being measured against may be flawed. Its researchers may have biases, and have strayed too far over the line into advocacy. They may also have been too willing to stifle dissenting voices in the scientific community. How serious global warming will be, when its effects will be fully felt and how long it will last are all matters of projection and speculation, subject to error. Projections have been, and will continue to be, unreliable, and arguably, too unreliable to justify costly public policy measures. Remedies are speculative, and cost-benefit ratios are in doubt.

It is also true that many of the most vocal and visible supporters of the most dire projections by climate change researchers, as well as the most vociferous attacker of climate change skeptics, literally don’t know what they are talking about. Their fervor is driven by ideology and faith rather than actual expertise and scholarship, and anything they say on the subject should be given no weight whatsoever. This groups includes journalists, columnists, bloggers, celebrities, academics not in the sciences, public officials and leaders, including, depressingly, Barack Obama, whose State of the Union speech comments on climate change were outrageous and irresponsible: Continue reading →

Ethics Note To Paul Krugman: The News Media Isn’t Your Toy

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments
Not bankrupt, at least, not financially...

Not bankrupt, at least, not financially…

The crippling lack of respect and contempt our warring ideological factions have for those on the other side is never better illustrated that when one partisan believes a satirical negative story about an adversary stalwart that any unbiased observer whose brain wasn’t partially melted by hatred would have flagged as false in a heartbeat. Thus do our biases make us stupid. The phenomenon was the basis of some well-derived mockery  last month, when Washington Post blogger Suzy Parker fell for the silly published on the parody website The Daily Currant that Sarah Palin had joined Al-Jazeera, and used the obviously phony tale to hammer Palin for hypocrisy.  I suggested that a journalist this gullible and biased wasn’t qualified to practice her craft, as she was obviously incapable of overcoming her prejudices and personal dislikes so that she could distinguish truth from comforting fiction.

The Right mocked Parker and the Post hardest of all—suuure there’s no liberal bias in the media!—- especially the Bad Boy of rightward blogs, Breitbart. Then along comes another gag story from the same source, The Daily Currant, announcing that New York Times tax-and-spend advocate, progressive cheerleader and Pulitzer prize-winning economist Paul Krugman has declared for bankruptcy, and Brietbart, for exactly the same reasons Parker believed that Palin would go to work for the Arabs,  couldn’t figure out that it wasn’t  true. Breitbart published this: Continue reading →

Ethics Thought Experiment: Let’s Play “What If?”

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments
"This SWAT gag is, like, hilarious, Kendall!"Totally, Kylie. Hey, look! They just shot Khloe!""Awesome!!!"

“This SWAT gag is, like, hilarious, Kendall!
“Totally, Kylie. Hey, look! They just shot Khloe!”
“Awesome!!!”

“Swatting,” the ultra-vile and dangerous “joke” in which someone falsely calls down a SWAT team on a household that is neither in peril or threatening it, is seriously and criminally wrong—even when the victims are the almost as vile, if not necessarily dangerous, Kardashian family. The victims of a “swatting prank” yesterday, the rich, spoiled, vulgar and useless reality show family immediately reminded us of why someone might be moved to swat them by making a big joke out of the whole thing, or at least the younger generation of Kardashians did. I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait until sisters Kendall and Kylie Jenner are posing in obscenely tacky and expensive boob-exposing outfits while having inane and semi-grammatical conversations on their own E! reality show. SWAT me now, Lord!

But let’s not talk about how unethical swatting is, which is obvious, or how depressing the celebrity of the Kardashians is, which is makes me want to stick my head in a fryer. Let’s muse on what will happen if and when one of these swatting incidents leads to an exchange of gunfire—perhaps because a Second Amendment enthusiast is convinced that President Obama is making his big move to enslave the populace, and by God, he’s not going down without a fight. Let’s also muse on what will happen if that exchange of gunfire results in the deaths of one or more children. Just to make sure something happens in our hypothetical, let’s stipulate that the dead children are white, cute, and recently recorded a tear-inducing video urging world peace and racial harmony. Continue reading →

Is It Fair that Manti Te’o’s Dead Girlfriend Hoax Might Make Him A Less Attractive Draft Choice?

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Don’t be silly. Of course it is.

You'd think the green skin would have tipped him off....

The non-existent girlfriend. You’d think the green skin would have tipped him off….

If you are not aware of the particulars of this weird and confusing tale, read the extensive account here, and good luck to you. From an ethics perspective, all that matters is:

  • Somebody perpetrated a web hoax, creating an imaginary online girlfriend for Notre Dame football star Manti Te’o.
  • The young man told the media a touching story about how his grandmother and girlfriend had died the same day.
  • Without checking any aspect of the story, outlet after outlet repeated and embellished the tale, despite the fact that the girlfriend never existed.
  • In his comments to the press, Manti Te’o never revealed that he had not, in fact, ever met the woman face to face. Indeed, many of his comments suggested otherwise.
  • As of this writing, no one is certain who created the fake girlfriend, or whether Manti Te’o was in on the deception. Continue reading →

The Shock Jocks and the Suicide: A Moral Luck Cautionary Tale

/ Jack Marshall / 37 Comments
With every action we take, we're rolling the dice...

With every action we take, we’re rolling the dice…

Jacintha Saldanha, a nurse at the King Edward VII hospital in Great Britain, happened to be the staffer on duty when two Australian disc jockeys made a prank call to the hospital ward where the Duchess of Cambridge was staying for treatment of the symptoms of her recently disclosed pregnancy. The DJs, Mel Greig and Michael Christian,  pretended to be the Queen and Prince Charles, and the gullible nurse discussed the royal patient’s condition with them, violating protocol and security.  Three days later, Saldanha, the 46-year-old mother of two, was found dead of an apparent suicide.

Now the disc jockeys are off the air indefinitely, and being pilloried as virtual murderers in some local media as if Saldanha’s death was a predictable and reasonable outcome of their admittedly irresponsible gag. It wasn’t. Presumably the same people screaming for Gaig’s and Christian’s heads would also be doing so if the nurse had been asked, in the fashion of a gentler, dumber era of phone pranks, if she had Prince Albert (tobacco) in a can (“You do? Then for God’s sake, let him out!”) and killed herself in humiliation. This was not a natural outcome of their juvenile routine. This was an unhinged over-reaction that had to have underlying causes far deeper than a practical joke phone call. The shock jocks were the victims of moral luck, the same phenomenon that leaves a tipsy partier who drives home without incident a respected citizen, but turns a driver who is no more intoxicated and  attended the same party into a community pariah because a careless child ran in front of his car. The two drunk drivers were identical in their conduct. One was lucky. The other was not. Continue reading →