honesty

The Ethics of Non-Voting Candidates

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

Meg Whitman, the former eBay  C.E.O. making a run at the California State House from the Republican side, didn’t bother to register to vote until 2002.  Nassau County’s candidate for attorney general, Kathleen Rice, registered 18 years before Whitman sis, but still didn’t bother to go to a polling place or cast a ballot until the same year, 2002. She calls this repeated lapse, which ended when she was 37 years old, a “youthful mistake.”

No, it was a series of the same “mistake” repeated over and over again from youth, though young adulthood, into early middle age. Continue reading →

More Lessons from the Sherrod Ethics Train Wreck

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

Gordon Peterson, venerable host of “Inside Washington” and long-time Washington D.C. news anchor, began the show’s segment on Shirley Sherrod this way:

“Some of you may remember the good old days of newspapering and TV and radio news when you had hours to work on your story, and your editors and producers had plenty of time to sift through your stuff for accuracy. If you remember that, you’re a dinosaur. Welcome to the blogosphere, the burnout pace of online news and the 24 hour instant deadline. Which brings me to the story of ousted Agriculture Department official Shirley Sherrod who was let go on the basis of a single piece of internet video that was edited out of context, posted on a conservative website, picked up on Fox News, and bought lock, stock and barrel by the Obama administration.”

That’s right, Gordon. And, as Charles Krauthammer immediately pointed out on the show, you have succumbed to the blogosphere’s unethical standards, because you didn’t check the accuracy of that statement. Continue reading →

Free Speech or Theft? The Law and Ethics of Stolen Valor

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

The U.S. District Court in Colorado ruling in the case of  US v. Strandloff, has found the “Stolen Valor Act,” 18 U.S.C. § 704(b) & (d), to be an unconstitutional infringement of free speech.  Rick Strandloff represented himself as a wounded decorated Iraq War veteran in order to rally support for veterans and opposition to the war. The original Stolen Valor Act of 2005 criminalized the wearing of military medals an individual was never awarded; later, it was expanded to included the crime of falsely saying or writing that one has been given military honors for valor. The Act says, in part, that it is a crime to…

…falsely represent [oneself], verbally or in writing, to have been awarded any decoration or medal authorized by Congress for the Armed Forces of the United States, any of the service medals or badges awarded to the members of such forces, the ribbon, button, or rosette of any such badge, decoration, or medal, or any colorable imitation of such item …

Deciding an issue like this inevitably comes down to both law and ethics. Not all speech is protected by the First Amendment, and deciding how many kinds of speech we can sensibly and reasonably prohibit requires a court and a culture to think about just how bad—how wrong–certain kinds of speech may be, based on their actual and potential harm. Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: Sheppard Smith

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

I don’t know when the last time was that a news anchor slammed his own network for shoddy journalism, but Sheppard Smith did it, to Fox News, his employer, over its complicity in the Shirley Sherrod fiasco. The criticism is well deserved. Now if only Sheppard would start calling out his network regularly when they do similar things, we might have a reliable news source one of these days.

And then, maybe some anchors at CNN, ABC, CBS and NBC  (no, MSNBC is beyond hope) would start doing their own policing! Imagine! Self-policing by the news media! Soon reporters will be free of bias, and stories won’t be hyped or buried according the news room’s political preferences! And there will be the dawning of a great new day in responsible journalism, where truth, not spin or entertainment value or ratings, will be the only goal! And we’ll be able to trust what we hear and read!!

Naaa.

Still, Sheppard Smith did the right thing. Good for him.

Fairness to Blago

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

Impeached Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich stunned everyone in the courtroom, including prosecutors, when he declined to take the stand in his own defense in his corruption trial. Continue reading →

Fairness Dilemma:When Should Past Misdeeds Affect Present Trust?

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

The Shirley Sherrod case raises a broader ethical question that surfaces frequently, both in current events and in private life. When, if ever, is it fair to lower one’s opinion and level of trust in an individual’s character based on events that occurred long ago?

In Sherrod’s case, an twenty-four year old incident she cited in a speech before the N.A.A.C.P. as a lesson in how not to behave got her fired from her job at the U.S.D.A., condemned by the N.A.A.C.P., and called a racist by conservative news commentators. This is an easy call: her instance of racial anger and bias should not be held against her for several reasons: Continue reading →

Race, Politics and Cowardice: the Unethical Victimization of Shirley Sherrod

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

The forced resignation of Department of Agriculture employee Shirley Sherrod, an African-American, is far more significant than it appears. By itself, it is a deplorable example of an innocent citizen being victimized by a convergence of unethical conduct by the media, the Obama Administration, and the N.A.A.C.P. Sherrod’s fate, however, is also a warning, a frightening sign that racial and political tensions are rapidly spinning out of control in America, and that the very institutions we should be able to trust to apply reason, competence, courage and fairness to the issue of race are displaying cowardice, dishonesty and opportunism instead. I hope this is an isolated incident. Everything tells me it is not.

This sudden ethics train wreck developed when Andrew Breitbart, proprietor of the provocative, entertaining and thoroughly Right-leaning website Breitbart.com, posted a grainy video that he said showed Shirley Sherrod, U.S.D.A.’s state director of rural development for Georgia, speaking at a March 27 NAACP Freedom Fund banquet. Continue reading →

Obama’s Unethical Gift to the Trial Lawyers

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

After January 1, 2011, when you begin to process all the new taxes coming your way and all the deductions you can no longer take, think about this:

The nation’s largest trial lawyer trade group, the American Association for Justice, has announced it was informed by Obama Administration officials that the U.S. Department of Treasury will give its members (and all tort lawyers) a tax break on contingency fee lawsuits. The new provision is expected to mirror proposed legislation by Sen. Arlen Specter, himself a lawyer, that was previously rejected by Congress last year. That bill would have allowed attorneys to deduct up-front costs in contingency fee lawsuits. Continue reading →

Shrugging Off Corrupt Fundraising Practices in Congress

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

While they were debating the just-passed financial reform bill on the floor of Congress, eight members of Congress walked out of the Capitol into fundraising meetings and events where they solicited and received contributions from the very financial institutions that the bill would regulate. Some of the contributions came as crucial votes were taken.  From a New York Times report: Continue reading →

Trust, the News and Journalist Biases: You Can’t Get There From Here

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

Over at Tech Crunch, founder Michael Arrington responds to the firing of Octavia Nasr and the resignation of Helen Thomas with this argument:

“I think journalists should have the right to express their opinions on the topics they cover. More importantly, I think readers have a right to know what those opinions are. Frankly, I’d like to know sooner rather than later just how insane some of these people at CNN and Fox News are. To stop them from giving me that information is just another way to lie to me.”

Arrington is right, of course. The pose that journalists are politically objective is almost always a fraud, and efforts by organizations like The Washington Post and the San Francisco Chronicle to prevent their reporters from doing things like attending political rallies for politicians they admire or expressing strong opinions on social websites have nothing to do with preserving journalistic objectivity, but rather with preserving the illusion of journalistic objectivity. “All this bullshit about objectivity in journalism is just a trick journalists use to try to gain credibility, and the public eats it up,” Arrington says.

But Arrington is also wrong.  Continue reading →