integrity

Unethical Website of the Month: Bloomberg News

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Seldom does any news media organization make its absence of fairness and objectivity on a topic so obvious that there isn’t some room for argument, but Bloomberg managed to scale the heights with its headline to a story by reporter Heidi Przybyla. Her report covered the results of a Bloomberg poll designed to create a profile of the members of the Tea Party movement, which has been holding multiple demonstrations across the country to protest passage of President Obama’s health care reform bill.

The poll results themselves were unremarkable, given what we already have learned about the Tea Partiers’ objectives and objections. Over 90% of those polled by Bloomberg said that they feared that the nation was turning to socialism, with the federal government trying to control too many aspects of  Americans’ lives. In answer to another question,  70% felt that Obama’s Administration needed to put more resources into job creation. So Przybyla, her editors and Bloomberg’s management chose to headline the report with this:

“Tea Party Advocates Who Scorn Socialism Want a Government Job” Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Sen. John Ensign

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

John Ensign, the GOP senator from Nevada, recently gave an interview to the website Politico that was unhinged from reality. He is either shameless, desperate, or in need of treatment. Ensign decried a “gotcha” mentality in the press and implied that the news media has treated him unfairly. Is he kidding? Continue reading →

The Marcelas Owens Bias Test: What’s Wrong With This Picture?

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

The photo in question, which you can see here, shows young Marcelas Owens being embraced by Vice President Joe Wash-My-Mouth-Out -With-Soap Biden as President Obama signs the health care reform bill.

If you see nothing wrong with using an 11-year-old boy who has lost his mother as a PR prop, go to the back of the ethics class. Sure, Marcelas probably enjoyed the trip to Washington and all the attention. Those microcephalics (pin-heads, in carny-speak) who used to be exhibited in circus freak shows enjoyed the attention too. But an 11-year-old cannot give consent to being used as a cynical political “freak” to tug at the heart strings and convince easily swayed people with an intellectually dishonest inference. Continue reading →

Rep. Bart Stupak: Double-Reverse Ethics Dunce

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Michigan Democrat Bart Stupak has been wrong in so many ways lately it is hard to keep count. If you are going to be wrong, however, the ethical way is to have integrity and at least be consistent in your wrongness. He couldn’t even do that right. He did manage to become Ethics Alarms’ first Double-Reverse Ethics Dunce. That’s something.

First, Stupak staged a revolt in the House to insist that the original House health care reform bill didn’t wouldn’t mandate the use of taxpayer funds for abortions.

What was wrong with this?  Oh, only everything…. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: ABC News

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Watching the ethical standards of the major network news department crumble away is like watching a sand castle  on the beach disintegrate with each new wave. There really is no resistance, or hope. It is just a matter of time.

Thus the announcement that ABC News paid $200,000 to Casey Anthony, the Florida woman who is accused of killing her two-year-old daughter, Caylee, comes as not so much of a surprise as just a further peak at the inevitable. Critics are pointing with outrage to the fact that ABC announced that it is cutting hundreds of jobs, as if this is somehow hypocritical. In truth, they are two sides of the same coin. Journalistic ethics have always been the most fragile of professional ethics systems, more dependent on success than principle. When there was limited competition, the networks could burnish their images by conforming to ethical standards and making sure everyone knew it. Now, however, web-based news, blogs and cable news networks are carving up their pie. Most of the consumers of news don’t care about ethics, and the National Enquirer, which has always practiced checkbook journalism, is up for a Pulitzer. Continue reading →

ACORN, the Saint’s Excuse, and the Ruddigore Fallacy

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Today’s New York Times discusses the impending end of ACORN, brought down by bad publicity, loose oversight, sloppy governance, and a little matter of the cover-up of a million dollar embezzlement. It would be helpful to other non-profit organizations that do needed good works to learn the proper lessons from ACORN’s fate, but the reaction of some supporters don’t advance that cause. Bertha Lewis, Acorn’s chief executive, has blamed “relentless, well-funded right-wing attacks” for ACORN’s demise, painting the organization as a victim rather than its own assassin. ACORN’s leader’s thought that the usual standards of good governance, diligence, and competence didn’t apply to it, because the group’s mission was virtuous and its accomplishments great. Continue reading →

The Damage of Health Care Reform “By Any Means Necessary”

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

I have no idea whether the health care reform bill, assuming it finally gets passed in one form or another, will make things better or worse, and if you are honest about it, neither do you…and neither, I am certain, do most of the elected representatives who will have voted for it or against it (or for it and against it) by the time the dust clears. To only cite the most obvious proof, the bill’s current form was just posted yesterday, giving Congress 72 hours to read and understand over 2,000 pages of technical jargon and badly-written prose. I don’t believe I have ever read 700 pages a day for three days at any point in my life, and if I have, I know it had to be something more diverting than a health care bill.

Relying on second-hand analysis—also by individuals who haven’t read the current bill—simply puts us (and the members of Congress) at the mercy of the biases of those rendering the opinions. For example, one of my favorite commentators, Robert Samuelson, has persuasive arguments against the bill here and here, while one of my least favorite, Paul Krugman, weighs in on the bill’s virtues here and here. Now, I think Krugman has squandered his credibility by blatant untruths in the past (One howler, his infamous statement about the national health care systems of Canada and Great Britain that “We’ve all heard scare stories about how that works in practice; these stories are false” is derisively quoted almost daily by Wall Street Journal blogger James Taranto as he relays tales of national health care horrors from the London press), but the man has won a Nobel prize: maybe he’s right and Samuelson is wrong. I really don’t know.

I do know this, however: whether the bill proves to be disaster or panacea, the manner in which President Obama and the Democrats have gone about passing it has done real and lasting harm.  Continue reading →

Remember Davy Crockett (and thank you, Fess Parker!)

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

If you don’t remember Fess Parker, who died this week as an 85-year-old winery owner, you missed the Fifties. Parker played Davy Crockett in Walt Disney’s TV miniseries about the lively Tennessee frontiersman, and did it with such sincerity and style that he not only turned coonskin caps into a national craze, he also rescued Davy Crockett from creeping obscurity. Continue reading →

Ethics and Irony: the Postman Rings Twice for ACORN

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

“The Postman Always Rings Twice,” James M. Cain’s novel that is better known as a 1946 film noir classic starring Lana Turner and John Garfield, has a famous ironic twist. The story’s hapless drifter narrator escapes punishment for a murder he helped commit, but gets executed anyway for a death that was really an accident. Cosmic justice is done, if not legal justice. It turns out that the postman rang twice for ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, too. Continue reading →

The Sestak Affair, the White House, and the Corruption of America

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

The Rep. Joe Sestak affair, still playing out, is a depressing reminder of how the process of corruption works, and more depressingly, how corruption spreads like a virulent flu, leaping from individuals  to organizations to institutions and finally to our culture itself.

Back in September, the Denver Post ran a well-sourced article stating that in order to protect Democratic Sen. Michael Bennett from the threatened primary challenge of popular former state Colorado House Speaker Andrew Romanoff, the White House, in the person of Jim Messina, President Barack Obama’s deputy chief of staff, told Romanoff  that a plum position in the administration would be his if he avoided the primary. The Post’s sources said that Messina offered specific suggestions, including a job at USAID, the foreign aid agency.  Romanoff, who apparently turned down the deal and is currently opposing Bennett in Colorado, refused to answer any questions.

This was treated as a local story, and the national media ignored it. Then, last month, a similar story surfaced, this time from a Congressman. Pennsylvania Congressman Joe Sestak, gearing to to run against party-switching  U.S. Senator Arlen Specter in the Pennsylvania primaries, told a Philadelphia TV news anchor that “someone” at the White House tried to discourage him from running, and also offered him a job (rumored to be Secretary of the Navy)  if he would back off. Like Romanoff, Sestak refused.

Again, hardly anyone paid attention, because all the national media wanted to do is talk about health care reform, the economy, and really important stuff like how Ellen was going to do on American Idol. Continue reading →