honesty

Should Steroid Users Make Baseball’s All-Star Team? Should Felonious and Hypocritical Ex-Governors Be Elected Comptroller?

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Bartolo and Eliot

USA Today sports columnist Christine Brennan made what I assume will be a controversial argument that baseball players who have tested positive for steroids at any point in their careers should be permanently banned from being honored with inclusion on baseball’s All-Star teams. This is controversial, because a lot of misguided souls, including sportswriters, think that proven steroid cheats ought to be allowed into baseball’s Hall of Fame, a much greater and more significant career honor. The issue arises because Oakland pitcher Bartolo Colon, who last year tested positive for banned PED’s (Performance Enhancing Drugs)and was suspended for 5o days, has been selected for the American League All-Star squad. Brennan writes,

“Colon, and every other performance-enhancing drug user in baseball, should never be allowed to become an All-Star, or win any MLB award. No Cy Young, no MVP, no batting title, no nothing. It doesn’t matter that he was caught and suspended last year, not this year…The bottom line is, you don’t suddenly become a non-cheater once your suspension is over. Colon is 40 years old, yet he’s having his best season in eight years. Where have we heard that before? Even though last year’s illegal testosterone isn’t still in his system, it helped build the body that he is using today…Because Colon and his tainted body are in the All-Star Game, someone like (Tampa Bay pitcher Matt) Moore is not. He has the same record as Colon, 12-3, but with a higher ERA, 3.42 to Colon’s 2.69. We’re presuming, of course, that Moore is not on PEDs, which means his season is more impressive than Colon’s because it isn’t built on a chemical foundation as Colon’s is…It’s a privilege to receive these honors, not a right. They are extras, add-ons, awards to be cheered. They do not belong to the Brauns, A-Rods and Colons of this world. Those players should be given absolutely nothing to celebrate.” Continue reading →

And This, Craig, is Why Barry Bonds Should Only Get In The Hall Of Fame With A Ticket

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments
Blame Barry, Chris.

Blame Barry, Chris.

In Baltimore, a young, slugging first baseman is leading the charge to get the Baltimore Orioles into the American League play-offs. He is on a home run pace that could net him 60  or more, and fans voted him the starting first baseman on his league’s All-Star team. Because his production this year far exceeds anything he had accomplished before, however, Chris Davis’s emergence isn’t being celebrated as much as it is being suspected. Another steroid scandal looms over major league baseball, one which threatens to engulf two former MVPs, as well as other players. Fans and sportswriters don’t trust players any more, or their power totals, not since Mark McGwire and especially Barry Bonds juiced and injected their way to shattering the game’s home run records.

This bothers lawyer/baseball blogger Craig Calcaterra, and it should., as someone concerned with justice. Of the smearing of Davis, he calls it…

“…utterly baseless speculation; Davis has always had tremendous power but is now, in the past year, matched it up with better plate discipline — is the product of a media landscape which has decided that every power hitter is a ‘roider. Jose Bautista got this treatment a couple of years ago. Davis is getting it now. Everyone who engages in this business does so because they’ve been convinced by the baseball media that such speculation is not just justified but necessary. It’s neither of those things. The drug testing system put in place had avoiding these parlor games as one of its primary justifications. But that’s not good enough for some, apparently.” Continue reading →

More Ethics Of Terrible Secrets : Falling Bullets, Moral Luck, And The Accountability Check Of A Lifetime

/ Jack Marshall / 58 Comments
Somebody's happy!

Somebody’s happy!

Seven year-old Brendon Mackey was walking with his father in the parking lot of the Boathouse Restaurant in Midlothian, Virginia at around 9 p.m. last Thursday when a bullet, apparently shot into the air by a Fourth of July celebrant, fell through his skull, killing him.

“We don’t think this was an intentional shooting. We think that somebody in or around the area was celebrating the Fourth of July. Unfortunately we think they were shooting a gun in a reckless manner and this young boy is a victim,” a police spokesman told the media. The bullet, experts say, may have been fired as far as five miles away.

There is an investigation ongoing, but if history is any indication, Brendon’s killer will remain a mystery. Last Independence Day, a Michigan State student, engaged to be married, was killed the same way, by a bullet believed to have been launched into the sky by a celebrating stranger. Michelle Packard was 34. This spring, her still grieving  fiancé committed suicide.

Has a reckless celebrant with a gun  ever stepped forward voluntarily to accept responsibility for causing such a tragedy? I cannot find any news accounts that suggest it. Deaths from stray bullets fired into the air are rare: most fall to earth harmlessly, and even when they hit someone, the result is seldom a fatality. Still, firing a gun skyward is illegal, and truly reckless and stupid. My father told me that during World War II, he warned the men under his command that he would see that anyone firing a weapon into the air without good reason would be court martialed. “They really seemed surprised when I told them that the bullets came down,” he said. Continue reading →

ARRRGH! Outrageous Ethics Malpractice By “The Ethicist”!!!!

/ Jack Marshall / 38 Comments
Well, you did it again, Chuck..you made my head explode. But now I have a place to keep my keys...

Well, you did it again, Chuck..you made my head explode. But now I have a place to keep my keys…

It’s time for Chuck Klosterman, the New York Times’ designated amateur who now handles “The Ethicist” advice column, to hang it up, and let some randomly chosen unemployed New Yorker take a shot at the job. Since assuming his post, Chuck has had good moments and bad, but this botch is embarrassing, and signature significance—no one who isn’t a bona fide Ethics Dunce could make such a terrible call.

Get this: Klosterman was asked whether surreptitiously taking cuttings from plants owned by a shopping center was unethical:

“…While walking through our local shopping center, we noticed a particular plant that we both liked and decided to get it for our patio….My wife thought she could grow it from cuttings, so we went back and took about three or four cuttings from one of the many plants that were scattered around the shopping center. The plant was not hurt or damaged in any manner or form, but my gut instinct told me that this was wrong. Was it?”

Does this question really need asking? Apparently, because the fraud masquerading as an ethicist at the Times thinks it’s a “thorny” question (Chuck likes puns…maybe the column should be called “The Punster”) about an “unethical act that has a positive impact.” ( Helpful hint to Chuck: the issue is stealing.)  Klosterman then embarked on a rationalization orgy: Continue reading →

“Alleged” News Bias: ABC’s David Muir Joins The The Hilaria Baldwin Ethics Lionel Wreck

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Gomez-s-Train-Wreck-addams-family

All aboard!

Caught by Newbusters:  ABC’s David Muir referred to Alec Baldwin’s tweet calling Daily News reporter George Stark a “toxic little queen” as an “alleged slur,” while omitting any mention of Baldwin’s follow-up tweet announcing that the actor would “put my foot up your f–king ass, George Stark, but I’m sure you’d dig it too much.”

Alleged slur?

Baldwin’s slur isn’t alleged, it’s preserved in screen shots all over the internet. Muir’s claim that the obvious slur is only alleged can only mean “toxic little queen” in the context of an exchange alluding to the male target enjoying violent anal penetration can be reasonably interpreted as anything else. It cannot.

I didn’t notice—did ABC also refer to Paula Deen’s admitted use of the term “nigger” as an “alleged slur”? If it did, I apologize: Muir isn’t biased…he’s just an idiot, following ABC’s idiotic policy. But if it did not—-and it didn’t-–then Muir’s  effort to go easy on a fellow liberal’s bigotry is just one more of the little bits of proof of how left-biased the news media is that slips out periodically if one is objective and paying attention.

Of course, the Democrats and liberals among us who benefit from having the news slanted to support their candidates and issues only see alleged media bias when these smoking guns appear—just as Muir sees “toxic little queen” as an alleged slur.

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Pointer and Sources: Newsbusters

Graphic: Largescalecentral

 

GLAAD Joins The Hilaria Baldwin Ethics Lionel Wreck

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

model_trainwreck2

Ethics train wrecks can develop at any time, though sometimes the participants and the incidents involved limit the results to small-scale ethics damage. Let’s call these “Ethics Lionel Wrecks,” in honor of the model train sitting in a cardboard box in my basement. This week’s tale of Hilaria Baldwin’s mistimed tweets defines the genre.

The progression:

1. George Stark Starts the Train

This one began when the pregnant wife of actor/ pitchman/liberal blowhard/ bully Alec Baldwin was called out by the Daily Mail for tweeting trivial, giddy messages during the funeral of recently departed actor James Gandolfini. That would have been certifiably disrespectful conduct in the rare sub-category of Funeral Ethics; indeed Ethics Alarms certified it. The problem is that Mail reporter George Stark was wrong.

Salon explained that the error was caused by “a technical glitch on Twitter that reflected GMT instead of ET…an analysis of the source code of Hilaria Baldwin’s tweets reveals that she tweeted between 11 am and 2 pm, as opposed to 8 am to 11 am. The Daily Mail has stated that “the tweets did appear accurately timed on mobile devices such as smartphones and iPads,” but “the only way MailOnline was able to establish the REAL time the tweets were sent was by viewing the twitter web page source code, something almost no normal member of the public would ever do.”

I have no idea what the hell that means, but I was one of the people who relied on Stark’s report, which seemed convincing, with screen shots of the tweets themselves and their timestamps. Was he unethically sloppy, as Baldwin and others have claimed, or was this just an excusable mistake? Twitter is new enough that there may be some justification for not checking the source code before using the time stamp to conclude something from a tweet: I can’t determine whether there is a journalistic protocol for this at the Daily Mail or elsewhere. Before a reporter attacks the conduct of a pregnant woman at a friend’s funeral, he would presumably be obligated to be certain of his facts, since readers, like me, will assume that he was. If this really was, as Salon says, a freak Twitter glitch, then Stark was unlucky rather than unethical.

2. Ethics Alarms rides the rails Continue reading →

Slate Gives Us A Lovely Example Of Deceit

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

Deceit_Cvr_CMYK

Thanks, Slate!

A lot of people have trouble with the concept of deceit, which is the intentional use of apparently true statements to deceive. Now I have a wonderful example to give them, thanks to Slate’s use of the most sneaky of lies as its recent contribution to the Post Sandy Hook Ethics Train Wreck, Media Anti-gun Propaganda Division.

Slate compiled a list it called “How Many People Have Been Killed By Guns Since Newtown,” and illustrated it with an “infographic.” The list was widely used in the current “those crazy Republican gun nuts have blood on their hands” campaign led by the President, the Vice President, Mayor Bloomberg and others.  The list is unreliable, however, as an advocacy device, since one of the names it includes is Boston Marathon terrorist Tamerlan Tsarnaev, killed in a shootout with police. How many other gun casualties are on the list that are perfectly justified, legally and ethically, unless one is an anti-gum absolutist who thinks neither the police nor other law enforcement should have access to firearms either? Quite a few, it turns out.

The only explanation for including Tsarnaev (and the others) is to mislead the public and inflame fear and passion by maximizing the raw number of names on the “shooting death list.” Yes, this is literally an accurate (I guess) list of every gun death since Newtown, but if the purpose of the list is to dramatize the need for anti-gun measures in the wake of the Sandy Hood shooting, why is a Boston Marathon child-killer on the list? What does his death have to do with the defeat of gun-control legislation in the Newtown aftermath, or the Newtown massacre generally? Nothing…except that it inflates the number, to be used in fear-mongering and misrepresentation. And that is exactly how Slate’s list is being used…as if it didn’t know. Those defeated, Newtown-inspired anti-gun measures would not have have saved the terrorist, nor does anyone sane wish they could have. Continue reading →

Inspector Generals, Intimidation, Integrity and The IRS Scandal

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments
IG J. Russell George. NOW I get it!

Treasury Dept. IG  J. Russell George. NOW I get it!

I certainly feel ignorant and foolish about this. Silly me: I always thought that inspector generals, those charged with flagging and investigating incompetence, corruption and wrongdoing in our government, were independent and objective, and beyond political influence from above. Why did I think that? I thought that because without such independence, what we may be getting in these supposedly honest and thorough IG reports is not the whole truth and nothing but the truth, but rather what the particular IG thinks he or she can get away with and still keep the job. Was I the only one who didn’t know this?

Thus the popular shrugging talking point by Obama Administration defenders on the partisan payroll (Jay Carney, White House staff, enabling members of Congress, Axelplouffe, etc.) and off of it (the news media) that the IRS inspector general J. Russell George “investigated” and found no political influence in the decision to target and impede conservative organizations is even more dishonest that I originally thought. That oft-repeated statement was always misleading spin, because George, by his own admission, only performed an audit, which is supposed to be the prelude to a full investigation. Now, however, a former IG has explained that inspector generals who displease the Obama high command risk losing their jobs. (Presumably this has always been a peril of the IG job, so I am not suggesting that this unacceptable state of affairs is unique to this administration.)

In his testimony before Congress, George said that he never was able to determine who, if anyone, directed the ideologically-based scrutiny, because no one would tell him. Former IG Gerald Walpin writes, Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: Joe Concha at Mediaite

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments
Berman and Romans: mystery solved. Well, not really a mystery, maybe "Marshall incompetence addressed" is more accurate,..

Berman and Romans: mystery solved. Well, not really ” mystery solved;” maybe “Marshall incompetence addressed” is more accurate,..

Lots of kind readers pitch in here to help Ethics Alarms do its lonely job better and more efficiently. Some of you e-mail me with typos, which are getting fewer thanks to a new a new proofreading regimen, others send me links to stories that raise ethics issues, and others still offer off-site critiques and comments that are helpful and thought-provoking. I do not expect that kind of generous assistance from major media blogs that get more traffic in the time it takes me to post an article than Ethics Alarms gets in a week. Thus it was a nice surprise to wake up this morning to Joe Concha’s post at Mediaite, properly chiding me for getting the CNN anchors wrong on the recent Simon Cowell egging story, and best of all, giving me the right names, which I had failed to find, as in “didn’t do my due diligence and look hard enough.”  [For the record, it was not Chris Cuomo and Kate Bolduan who I heard cheering on the woman who threw eggs at Simon Cowell during “Britain’s Got Talent,” but John Berman and Christine Romans, who now inherit the Ethics Dunces honor that should have been theirs from the beginning.]

The fact that Concha enlightened me while taking full advantage of the egg angle (“Blogger’s Got Talent? In Egg-Filled Irony, Ethics Alarms Gets CNN Hosts Wrong” is the headline) and chiding me for my fact-checking inadequacies is beside the point—-I deserved it. What matters is that I’m grateful that 1) he’s reading about ethics, which should be discusses on Mediate every day, given the state of the news media, 2) that he found the right anchors and 3) told me, so I could finally get that post right….which I will do as soon as I post this.

Again, my apologies to Chris Cuomo and Kate Bolduan for unjustly labeling them Ethics Dunces. I wish them good luck on their new show, and may I never have the occasion to mark them as Ethics Dunces again, in contrast to Soledad O’Brien, whom they replace.

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Facts: Mediaite

Supreme Court Justice Powell’s Ethical Dilemmas

/ Jack Marshall / 39 Comments
Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell

Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell

The New York Times, anticipating next year’s Supreme Court consideration of the gay marriage problem, tells a fascinating story about the late Justice Lewis Powell, who was the swing vote in the 1986 case of  Bowers v. Hardwick, which was overturned in 2003, upholding a Georgia law outlawing sodomy.

During the consideration of the case, Powell told his colleagues that he had never met a homosexual, though in reality he had more than one gay law clerk during his tenure, and according to at least one of the former clerks, knew it.  (Powell even quizzed one of them about the mechanics of gay sex.) The reason he told his fellow Justices an untruth, the theory goes, is that he knew there was a stigma in the legal profession and in Washington connected to being gay, and he wanted to protect his law clerks.

Yet Powell, after flip-flopping on Bowers, finally came down on the side of a state’s right to make homosexual sex a crime. Continue reading →