hypocrisy

Stop Picking On Mike Tyson

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments
This time, it wasn't your fault, Mike.

This time, it wasn’t your fault, Mike.

“Law & Order: SVU” cast former heavyweight boxing champ Mike Tyson as a prisoner and past victim of child abuse victim, who murdered one of his abusers. The episode bombed for the NBC show during the crucial “sweeps” ratings period, and Washington Post TV writer Lisa De Moraes attributes the failure to the show’s insensitivity in casting Tyson.  She wrote in today’s Post,

“Before the episode aired, about 7,000 people signed a petition asking NBC to recast the role. The petition was created by an ardent “SVU” fan who is a rape survivor and who said she felt betrayed by the stunt casting. Among those who signed the petition: “NCIS” star and abuse survivor Pauley Perrette. Tyson was arrested in 1991 and charged with raping then-18-year-old Miss Black America pageant competitor Desiree Washington; he was convicted and served three years of a six-year prison sentence.”

If the “Law and Order” producers erred in casting Tyson, it was in under-estimating the fecklessness, bias and hypocrisy of the viewing public.  Continue reading →

But What If David Gregory Shot the Pitbull?

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments
Illeagl? Well, it depends. Just WHY are you breaking the law? Is it for GOOD or ILL?

Illegal? Well, it depends. Just WHY are you breaking the law? Is it for GOOD or ILL?

Another hybrid ethics tale has surfaced! Cross pitbulls (or whatever a reporter thinks passes for one) with the gun law debate and the District of Columbia’s refusal to bring charges against David Gregory for breaking its gun laws on national television,  and…bada bing! This (From the Washington Post) :

“The bloody paw prints travel the length of a city block, from a Northwest Washington street corner where police said an 11-year-old was mauled by three pit bulls to the welcome mat at the dogs’ owner’s home. Two days after the attack, in which police said all three dogs were fatally shot, the prints were a reminder of what happened at Eighth and Sheridan streets on Sunday afternoon. Police said a neighbor and an officer shot the pit bulls as they sank their teeth into the boy’s legs, arms, stomach and chest…An uncle of the victim’s said the boy was riding a new Huffy dirt bike with orange rims he had gotten for Christmas. The uncle said his nephew emerged from an alley onto Sheridan Street, where he collided with the pit bulls. D.C. police said the unleashed and unattended dogs attacked the boy before a neighbor who saw it went into his home, got his handgun and fired once, hitting one of the dogs. A D.C. police officer on bicycle patrol heard the shots, and authorities said he shot and killed the other two pit bulls…Of the shooters, the 34-year-old uncle said, “They did the right thing.”

“D.C. police said they are reviewing the incident and have left open the possibility that the neighbor could be charged with violating the District’s gun laws. A police spokesman would not say whether the gun was legally registered. Even if it was, using it on a D.C. street is illegal…”

Some Post readers were appalled that such a heroic action could result in prosecution. Wrote one, indignantly:

“That prosecutors would even consider bringing gun charges against the Northwest D.C. resident who saved an 11-year-old’s life by shooting one of three pit bulls that were brutally mauling the child speaks volumes about the mindless absurdity of the city’s gun laws, to say nothing of the zealous anti-gun sentiment that more broadly permeates officials’ thinking here…If the good Samaritan who acted quickly in this case to save a child possessed his gun unlawfully, police and prosecutors should by all means confiscate it. But contemplating further charges against him is as unconscionable as it is ridiculous.”

No, what’s ridiculous is to have gun laws that are enforced according to the policy that if a citizen does a good thing with his illegal gun, then it’s fine; only bad acts with guns will result in prosecutions. Continue reading →

What Al Should Have Said

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I have no illusions about Al Gore, but he will always occupy a warm place in my heart.

Gore

My first run-in with Al Gore was long ago. I had taken over the president’s job at a struggling national health promotion organization, and Sen. Gore was our angel in Congress. Health care screening was his mission back then, and he opened doors to sponsors, allies and funding around the country. Then, one day, he stopped answering our phone calls. We were curtly told that Sen. Gore was no longer the Herald of Preventive Health Care. Now he was the guru of something called “the information super-highway,” and we would have to fend for ourselves. (The organization went belly-up a year later). Thus I learned that Gore was nothing if not opportunistic, and perhaps not the guy you would want to be in a World War II foxhole with if he spoke fluent German.

Still, I can’t imagine how hard it must be to be the unlucky loser of the highest office in the land in one the nation’s rare popular vote/electoral vote splits, and I admire the fact that Al’s not in a rubber room by now. I thought his concession speech in 2000 was one of the high-points of political nobility during my lifetime, and the  Saturday Night Live appearance that was Gore’s farewell to politics will always stand as one of the bravest, quirkiest, saddest, funniest, most fascinating public breast-barings in media history. Al is a phony, and an opportunist, and I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could throw him, but he’s lived out a roller-coaster life in the hot lights of center stage, and I’m not certain I could do it any better. Continue reading →

New Mexico Abortion Wars: Yes, It’s A Terrible Law, But Not A Terribly Unethical One

/ Jack Marshall / 50 Comments
Paving the road to hell? New Mexico lawmaker Cathrynn Brown

Paving the road to hell? New Mexico lawmaker Cathrynn Brown

My friend (and Ethics Alarms Ethics Blogger of the Year) Rick Jones went full-Django on New Mexico State Legislator  Cathrynn Brown for her proposed, now withdrawn, measure forbidding women who are pregnant as the result of incest or rape from getting an abortion on the theory that it constitutes “destruction of evidence.” The attempt launched Rick into rare form:

“Every once in a while someone mixes up a cocktail of such mind-melting stupidity, monumental inconsistency, and transcendent arrogance that there is little for the rest of us to do but drop everything and gaze in slack-jawed wonderment at the inanity before us. Behold, therefore, one Cathrynn Brown (right), a New Mexico legislator whose latest bill rockets off the scale, leaving “moronic” and “horrific” as feeble understatements of the idiocy involved.”

Whoa, Nelly!

Let’s calm ourselves and consider, shall we? Continue reading →

Bizarro World Ethics in North Carolina

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments
bizarro_world

Also known as “North Carolina”…

The Bizarro planet, occasionally mentioned on “Seinfeld,” was a humorous feature in Superman comics, a cube-shaped planet populated by flawed clones of Superman and Lois Lane. Nothing made sense on the Bizaaro world, since its denizens were sub-cretinous, their traditions absurd, and their logic inverted. They threw away food and ate the plates—that sort of thing, hilarious if you’re a nine-year old boy in 1962.

I sometimes refer to “Bizarro World ethics,” which invokes the principle that it is difficult, if not impossible, to be ethical in a culture where a lack of ethics is the norm, just as behaving normally with Bizarro Supie and Bizarro Lois would be rude and confusing to them. This is the dilemma facing North Carolina, which is apparently trying to devise an ethical way to run a state lottery. That is a hopeless goal. It is like insisting on clean mud-wrestling, non-violent Jason Statham films, or healthy junk food. State-run lotteries are by definition unethical. The states that run them, and almost all do, have traded principle for encouraging and endorsing activities they once declared harmful and criminal, as a cowardly way to acquire revenue without paying the political price of raising taxes.

By doing this, they… Continue reading →

Hollywood’s Ridiculous Hypocrisy on Guns

/ Jack Marshall / 36 Comments
"Say hello to my little friend! And while we're on the topic of guns, don't you think it's time to be sensible about gun control?"

“Say hello to my little friend! And while we’re on the topic of guns, don’t you think it’s time to be sensible about gun control?”

In a move stunningly unconscious to outrageous hypocrisy, the group “Mayors Against Illegal Guns” have posted a video on on its website and Youtube (of course), featuring an impressive array of solemn Hollywood celebrities chiding Americans for not doing something about guns “yesterday” and to “demand a plan” to end gun violence. The problem? Many of these same celebrities owe their presence on the video to Hollywood’s obsession with gun violence, without which they would be just anonymous pretty faces. They owe their mansions and private planes to that gun violence too, which they have happily, willfully and lucratively acted out in scores of violent films and television shows. How can they presume, given how they make their living, to lecture anyone on the topic of guns?

I have some theories. Many of them are dumb as bricks. Most of them are automatic co-signers of the manifesto for any cause branded as liberal, the Hollywood religion,and don’t bother to think about whether it is consistent with their life choices or not. Probably all of them, working every day in one of the most ethics-free, cut-throat, dishonest and hypocritical sub-cultures that has ever existed in the United States are completely numb to the concept of hypocrisy, as apparently are the mayors, who work in the culture of politics, which is only somewhat better. Continue reading →

Unethical Quote of the Week: Howard Kurtz

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

“Gun owners often say they want the government to leave them alone; why then are some clamoring for Gregory to be prosecuted?”

—-CNN Media ethics watchdog Howard Kurtz, in a column defending “Meet the Press” host David Gregory’s on-air violation of a D.C. gun law

Wait...WHAT???

Wait…WHAT???

This is quite a spectacle, a real time unraveling and self-discrediting of a media ethicist because of biases he either cannot resist or doesn’t detect. Kurtz’s core ethical fallacy in ridiculing calls for Gregory to be held to account for a knowing, intentional, blatant and broadcast breach of a criminal law is so obvious it is stunning that he cannot see it. Kurtz is arguing that the law shouldn’t be enforced against law-breaking journalists “practicing journalism,” because they are special and deserve to be privileged, and because journalism is so important that it trumps the law. This is offensive to fairness, equality and justice, but because Kurtz is himself a journalist, he cannot see how intrinsically unethical his position is. He cannot see the most basic conflict of interest of all, self-interest, in himself. Continue reading →

The Media’s Gun Control Ethics Train Wreck Gets Its Engineer: David Gregory

/ Jack Marshall / 34 Comments

Gregory and clip

The blatant abandonment of journalistic ethics in U.S. mainstream media, well underway during its coverage of the 2012 election, finally exploded into a full-fledged ethics train wreck with television journalists’ astounding and shameless advocacy of tighter gun control laws following the Newtown elementary school massacre. Can anyone recall a previous public policy controversy in which so many telejournalists decided that it was appropriate, rather than to report on a story, to engage in full-throated advocacy for a particular position? I can’t. Rather than communicate relevant facts to their audiences and allow responsible and informed advocates for various positions to have a forum, one supposed professional journalist after another has become an openly anti-firearms scold, as if the need for new gun restrictions was a fact, rather than a contentious, and often partisan point of view.

It isn’t just the hacks, like Piers Morgan.  CNN anchor Don Lemon sounded like a candidate for office, and a rhetorically irresponsible one, when he exclaimed in one outburst, “We need to get guns and bullets and automatic weapons off the streets. They should only be available to police officers and to hunt al-Qaeda and the Taliban and not hunt elementary school children.” The reliably presumptuous Soledad O’Brien decided to reprimand Florida Republican Gov. Rick Scott when he refused to commit to seeking tougher gun laws in his state, telling him she hoped the gun conversation would become “meaningful” (that is to say, anti-gun ownership) before she was forced to “cover another tragedy.” In another interview, when a conservative academic argued for making guns more easily available among law-abiding citizens, O’Brien again turned advocate, telling him, “I just have to say, your position completely boggles me, honestly.”

Yes, well the fact that Soledad is “boggled” isn’t news: she’s easily boggled, and her opinion on gun control is no more worthy of broadcast than that of any random citizen on the street. Whether you agree with these amateur anti-gun zealots isn’t the point. Using their high-visibility positions as television reporters to expound on what they think are reasonable legislative initiatives isn’t their job, isn’t their role, is a direct violation of their duty of fair and objective reporting, and undermines effective public discourse. It’s unethical journalism.

Jumping into the engineer’s seat as this media ethics train wreck developed was “Meet the Press” host David Gregory. Part of the open agenda of the left-biased media is to demonize the National Rifle Association, which, again, is not their job, and is an unethical objective. Give the public the facts, let them hear the arguments, and allow them to come to an informed decision, not a media-dictated consensu constructed by people who are neither especially bright nor sufficiently informed, and who have no special expertise regarding guns and gun violence. Gregory, in full-anti-gun mode, brandished a gun magazine as a prop last Sunday to make a dramatic debating point against the vice-president of the National Rifle Association. In Washington, D.C., where “Meet the Press” is recorded, the magazine he held is illegal, and anyone apprehended while possessing one faces prosecution and jail time. NBC had been informed by D.C. police that Gregory could not use the magazine on the air, and Gregory went ahead and used it anyway.

He broke the law. Continue reading →

“Should CNN Fire Piers Morgan?” It Should, But It Can’t.

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments
If only.

If only.

In the wake of the tsunami of criticism directed at CNN talk show host Piers Morgan for his anti-gun rantings, particularly during his interview with Gun Owners of America president Larry Pratt, Slate posted a Quora response to the question, “Should CNN Fire Piers Morgan?” from internet entrepreneur Mark Rogowski, who begins his answer (summary: “no”) with the rejoinder, “For what? For having an opinion?”

No, Morgan should be fired for allowing his opinion to lure him into thoroughly rude, unprofessional, abusive and inappropriate interview practices, which a major news network like CNN shouldn’t permit, endorse, tolerate or risk recurring. That’s why. Continue reading →

Unethical Quote of the Month: 34,812 Americans*

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

“British Citizen and CNN television host Piers Morgan is engaged in a hostile attack against the U.S. Constitution by targeting the Second Amendment. We demand that Mr. Morgan be deported immediately for his effort to undermine the Bill of Rights and for exploiting his position as a national network television host to stage attacks against the rights of American citizens.”

—- The language on a petition posted at whitehouse.gov and signed by 34,812 American citizens,* asking the Obama Administration to deport Piers Morgan.

brainless-empty-open-head-screamingYou can’t get much more ignorant, hypocritical and dumb than this, can you? A talk show host criticizes the Second Amendment, and these fools think the appropriate remedy for “his effort to undermine the Bill of Rights” is for the government to punish him with deportation, thus violating the First Amendment, from the Bill of Rights.

Passionate, engaged, and completely incapable of rational thought: what a frightening combination.

* UPDATE, 12/26/2012  The number is now over 75,000, and still rising. If every American who can’t see that this petition represents an absurd contradiction signs it, we’re looking at about 200,000,000 people, maybe more. This would probably spell doom for Morgan’s show, as it would mean that the only people conceivably dumb enough to watch him want him deported.

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Pointer: Drudge