integrity

Twelve Ethics Observations On “The Scandal Trifecta”

/ Jack Marshall / 42 Comments

Obama

1. “The Scandal Trifecta” may be gaining traction in D.C. and in the news media as the hot term to handily describe the Obama Administration’s three instances of serious and significant misconduct: the Benghazi deceptions, the I.R.S. harassment of conservatives and conservative groups, and the Justice Department’s surveillance of Associate Press reporters. It should be rejected. I know conservatives and Republicans are especially smug and gleeful right now to have their suspicions and warnings confirmed, but this is a national crisis, at a time of dire challenges to the nation, and tragic in many ways. It is not a game, and should not be likened to one. Nor should the three situations be lumped together, though they have, to some extent, common seeds. They are each important in and of themselves, and packaging them like stop-light peppers risks allowing all or some of them receive less than the individual attention they must have. This is the first and last time I’m using the term, and I urge everyone, in the media or out of it, to similarly drop it. Labels matter, in this is a bad one.

2. Here’s someone Democrats and the rest of us can blame, in part: the left-biased news media. You see, knowing that the news media is looking to expose them when they make mistakes, blunder, show corruption and otherwise do a bad job when entrusted with the welfare of the greatest nation on earth makes our leaders better, more responsible, more objective, and more competent, out of fear, if nothing else. The media does nobody any favors when it lets its biases take over and lies down on the job—not the public, not Republicans, certainly; not the nation, not their profession, but also not even those they are desperately trying to help succeed. Continue reading →

Resolving An Ethics Alarms Ethics Conflict

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

poof-smallI just took down a post, something I have only done four times previously. This decision, unlike the others, was the resolution of a genuine ethics conflict, created in part by the recent discussions here.

Tonight I received a terse demand, phrased as a request but with a time deadline,* from a former commentary subject insisting that I remove a critical post here from nearly a year ago. The post was not factually incorrect, nor  did it make any factual assertions that could support a credible defamation claim. My commentary was pure opinion, though a fairly harsh one. I have pledged, following the inspirational example of Ken at Popehat and also attorney/blogger Marc Randazza, not to countenance web censorship involving bogus legal threats, and thus drafted and came within a finger-stroke of sending a rejection of the demand, and a strongly worded one.

Then I re-read the post at issue. It was a criticism of a tweet from a professional that I believed, and believe, had the effect of unfairly impugning an entire workplace and the identifiable colleagues of the tweeter. The tweet was wrong, but I realized that I was also wrong to highlight it here. I have been writing quite a lot lately about the inherent Golden Rule violation of web-shaming individuals for single and isolated unethical acts that fall short of illegality or such outrageous callousness or cruelty that there is a duty to warn others. I think there is a toxic cultural trend, fed by the power of the internet, that will soon make web bullies and assassins of us all, and potential victims as well. I want to fight that trend, not contribute to it. I think, in the case of that post, I was on the side that I now believe is the wrong one. It was a stupid and thoughtless tweet. It did not justify a web-shaming on Ethics Alarms. Continue reading →

Jay Carney Must Resign

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments
Ron Ziegler would understand, Jay.

Ron Ziegler would understand, Jay.

I know it hasn’t been reflected in the essays here, but I have great sympathy for Jay Carney and all of his predecessors. He has a terrible job. Sometimes it’s an inherently unethical job, as when the White House spokesperson, aka “press secretary,” is sent out to spin, tap-dance, and otherwise obfuscate for his boss, the President, presumably but not always for the good of the nation.

Nonetheless, when someone in Jay Carney’s position loses all credibility and can no longer be trusted to deliver information that can be called truthful by any stretch of the imagination, that individual has to go. The official spokesman of the White House cannot be seen as someone who intentionally lies to the press and the public, and this is the status Carney has now. He has an obligation to resign, even if his boss isn’t astute enough to tell him to, and history indicates that he is not. Continue reading →

Integrity Test For The Public And News Media: The IRS Outrage

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments
"It's OK...the King is sorry."

“It’s OK…the King is sorry.”

  • Scandal: Obama, Jay Carney, Susan Rice, Hillary and the State Department meticulously lying about the cause of the Benghazi attack during an election campaign

Media Response: “Bah! Old news [about something the press never treated as news at all]! Politics! A ‘conservative story’!”

Media Response: “Oh, Please!—a typical conservative conspiracy theory…what? It really happened? Well, the public doesn’t care about it, and “Pigford” is a funny name, so no harm…”

Well, let’s try something really new. I wonder if the IRS admitting that it targeted and harassed conservative non-profit groups in an election year qualifies as a scandal that calls into legitimate question the ethics and competence of the Obama Administration, in the eyes of our fair and objective press, the guardian of our freedoms.  Is there any depth to the media’s complicity with this government’s misconduct? I suppose we’ll find out.**

From the Associated Press: Continue reading →

Angel Hernandez’s Botched Home Run Call, Continued: Now THIS Would Justify Over-Ruling It

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments
"You blew that call deliberately! Didn't you? DIDN'T YOU???"

“You blew that call deliberately! Didn’t you? DIDN’T YOU???”

Yesterday I wrote about the terrible, tomato-worthy botch of a home run call by Angel Hernandez in an Oakland-Cleveland baseball game, and how as bad as it was, the rules of the game don’t permit such rules to be over-turned, and thus over-turned they must not be, lest the game’s integrity be damaged. But on the Dan Patrick radio sports show today, renowned baseball writer Peter Gammons theorized that Hernandez may have refused to credit Adam Rosales of the A’s with a home run, despite the instant replay proving to anyone with eyes that it was not a double as he had ruled, because he, like many if not all major league umpires, hates the concept of allowing instant video replay to over-rule umpire judgments.

And, of course, Hernandez has a well-earned reputation as a spiteful jerk.

Hernandez would never admit to so unprofessional an act, but I think Gammons’ speculation is fair, and also very possibly correct. The alternative is to conclude that Hernandez literally can’t see, which seems unlikely. What seems far more likely is that he and his umpiring crew decided to register a nasty and unprofessional protest over the gradually expanding trend in Major League Baseball of letting technology do better what umpires have traditionally done well. Continue reading →

Once Again, Fairness vs. Integrity In A Baseball Controversy

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments
George Brett was a bit chagrined when his home run was disallowed...

George Brett was a bit chagrined when his home run was disallowed…

It has happened again, as it has thousands of times since the great game of baseball was invented. A result that is permitted by the rules violates the sense of fairness of  objective observers, who thereupon demand that the result be “fixed,” after the fact, by baseball’s powers that be. The most infamous recent example of this scenario was in 2010, when umpire Jim Joyce robbed a deserving pitcher of the perfect game he had pitched (27 batters, 27 outs) by calling the final batter safe at first on a close play, when the player was obviously (to all but Joyce, that is), out. The umpire quickly and openly admitted his error after the game, but there is no provision in the baseball rules for the League or Major League Baseball reversing an umpire’s judgment call after the fact, no matter how bad it was or how unjust the results. Baseball’s Commissioner Bud Selig, to his credit, refused to yield to the popular outcry to give the unfortunate Detroit Tigers pitcher, Armando Galarraga, the achievement and place in baseball history that should have been his. The rules say that unless umpires have actually misinterpreted the black letter rules of the game, there is no remedy. Umpire errors, like player errors, are part of the game.

Last night, what should have been a game-winning home run was called a double by umpires, and what was worse, they held to their mistaken call even after the mandated video review MLB now allows for disputed home run calls. The umpires viewed video that clearly shows the Oakland A’s Adam Rosales’ hit clearing the wall, but crew chief Angel Hernandez bizarrely claimed that the video wasn’t conclusive enough to justify a reversal. Since the A’s lost the game by one run, this altered the result, and there have been calls for an official reversal with the game being replayed. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunces: Voters In South Carolina’s 1st Congressional District

/ Jack Marshall / 44 Comments
Oh, thank you, South Carolina...No sooner do I get my head put back together, and you make it explode AGAIN...

Oh, thank you, South Carolina…No sooner do I get my head put back together, and you make it explode AGAIN…

The news that disgraced ex-South Carolina governor Mark Sanford, who showed that he would abandon his duties, lie to his constituency, misuse public funds, enlist state-paid staff in a personal deception and betray his wife and children was nonetheless deemed fit for election to the U.S. House of Representatives, while disgusting, is certainly well-timed for this forum.

Today some commenters on Ethics Alarms took the dubious ethical position that one ought to vote for a candidate’s “ideas” rather than his or her character, record, experience, values, talent or abilities. I surmise, then, that they now believe that those who voted for Mark Sanford because they agree with his political views were being responsible, despite the fact that the man is spectacularly, John Edwards-ly untrustworthy in every way. Continue reading →

Howard Kurtz And The Critic’s Dilemma

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments
David Niven would understand, Howard.

David Niven would understand, Howard.

The Daily Beast has canned Howard Kurtz, the only current official news media critic in captivity, and now CNN, long the home of Kurtz’s “Reliable Sources” panel show that reviews the media’s choice and manner of news coverage during the week, is “reviewing” his status with that show as well. The sudden downturn in Kurtz’s fortunes is, we are told, the result of an accumulation of mistaken stories, missed facts and sloppy reporting of his own. I’ll buy that explanation, but there is more here too.

Kurtz’s departure was overdue. I have followed him for years, and his coverage, as I have pointed out periodically, was unacceptably politically slanted for a quasi-journalism ethicist. A typical performance was when he recently criticized —correctly—Republicans who were (and are) trying to twist the Boston bombing tragedy into an argument against immigration reform. In a reply to a comment on the recent Ethics Alarms post on the same topic, I noted that media commentators who saw nothing wrong with the Democrats using a Newtown massacre that would not have been altered in any way by background checks to push for more gun controls were suddenly applying the correct standards to a similar conservative manipulation of the Boston Marathon attack: Continue reading →

Incompetent Elected Officials Of The Month: The U.S. Congress

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments
"Oh, THAT..."

“Oh, THAT…”

We know that our elected officials don’t think it is important for them to read the bills they vote for (or against.) That’s irresponsible, but this is illegal: as pointed out by Thomas Beck in the Wall Street Journal, both Houses of Congress, but especially the Senate, defy the most basic Parliamentary rule of all, one that is mandated in the Constitution. The requirement: having  more than 50% of members present, a quorum, in order to do business.

Beck:

“Congress has ignored the quorum requirement for decades, yet neither the president nor the courts has questioned the practice. The one time the Supreme Court was called upon to apply the quorum requirement was in the 1892 case of United States v. Ballin. A statute was challenged on the basis that, while a majority was present in the House when the act was passed, a majority didn’t cast votes on it. A unanimous Supreme Court explained that what matters is whether a majority is present: ‘All that the Constitution requires is the presence of a majority, and when that majority are present the power of the House arises.’ Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: The Hypocrite and the Hecklers

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments
GLAAD precedent: Emperor Hirohito reads the announcement of his Nobel Peace Prize for agreeing to end World War II...

GLAAD’s  precedent: Emperor Hirohito reads the announcement of his Nobel Peace Prize for agreeing to end World War II…

Former President Bill Clinton received the first Advocate for Change award at the GLAAD Awards in Los Angeles over the weekend. Clinton, who uniquely appears to be immune from ever being held accountable for his mistakes and misconduct, was honored by the LBGT advocacy organization for opposing a ban on same sex marriage in North Carolina, and supporting efforts to legalize same sex marriage in New York. In his remarks, Clinton attacked the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which prohibits legally married same sex couples from receiving federal benefits and protections, saying,

“I want to keep working on this until not only DOMA is no longer the law of the land, but until all people, no matter where they live, can marry the people they love. I believe you will win the DOMA fight, and I think you will win the Constitutional right to marry. If not tomorrow, then the next day or the next day.”

What Clinton did not say is that he is 100% responsible for the fact that DOMA is the law of the land, as he is the one who signed it into law in 1996. Nobody held a gun to his head: it was a popular bill in its day, and Clinton—surprise!—was following the polls. He also said at the time that he believed that the law was just.

This inconsistency—GLAAD honoring Clinton with an award for opposing a law he is responsible for inflicting on the gay and lesbian community, and his having the brass to accept it, are the stuff of Onion stories—prompted some at the event to heckle Clinton, shouting, “You signed it!”  I am tempted to cheer this development, but must pause—I object to heckling on civility and fairness grounds. One can rebut speech, but one shouldn’t seek to obstruct it. Yet there are exceptions to every rule, even in ethics. Thus your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz for today is this query:

Is it ethical to heckle Bill Clinton under these circumstances? Continue reading →