First you make a baseless, inflammatory accusation–the Big Lie. Then you attack your victim for how she responds to it.
The news media’s self-destructive obsession with discrediting Sarah Palin has reached its ethical nadir, and with it any reasonable hope that U.S. journalism, as currently practiced, will be returning to credibility and respectability within the foreseeable future. Continue reading
The Academy of Motion Picture Sciences will be giving an honorary Oscar to French director Jean-Luc Godard, and nobody who knows anything about film can object to the award on the basis of merit. Godard is one of the most influential film makers who ever yelled “Cut!;” there are dozens of film classes about his work in schools all over the country. He makes great movies, and has for decades. He deserves the honor.
Or does he? Mr. Godard, it seems, has also been resolutely anti-Jewish, at least in his sentiments, for almost as long as he has been making classic films. Some in the industry and without are questioning whether Hollywood should be honoring a likely Anti-Semite.
Excuse me…did I miss something? When did the rest of the Oscars get junked, leaving only the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award? Continue reading
CNN promptly fired “Rick’s List” host Rick Sanchez after a bizarre satellite radio rant in which he accused “The Daily Show” host John Stewart of being a “bigot” (presumably because he often picks on Sanchez, who is a Cuban-American) and insinuated that both Stewart and bigwigs at CNN were not inclined to give Sanchez a fair shake because they are Jews.Of course he had to go.
The question is, how should the network have handled the firing? It opted for traditional: a straightforward statement that Sanchez wasn’t a CNN employee any more, and a gracious note of thanks and good wishes:
“Rick Sanchez is no longer with the company. We thank Rick for his years of service and we wish him well.“
Blogger Sam Rubin, however, feels that CNN “blew it.” Here is the statement Rubin feels CNN should have made, taking a stand and being aggressively critical while showing Sanchez the door: Continue reading
The proposed Ground Zero mosque should be a straightforward ethics issue, but it is not. Now it is bound up in a thoroughly confusing debate that confounds and blurs law, ethical values, history, rights, and human nature. Everyone is right, and everyone is wrong.
Yes, it’s an Ethics Train Wreck, all right. This one is so bad I hesitated to write about it—ethics train wrecks trap commentators too—in the vain hope that it would somehow resolve itself with minimal harm. That is obviously not in the cards, however; not when the Anti-Defamation League weighs in on the side of religious intolerance, thus forfeiting its integrity and warping its mission. The wreck is still claiming victims, and there is no end in sight. Continue reading
Seven seniors at a high school at a La Quinta, California high school have been suspended for three to five days, causing some of them to miss graduation, because they participated in a role-playing game, organized on Facebook, after school during their own personal time. The school administrators found the game objectionable, which you will be able to understand. But nobody was hurt, and no laws were broken.
That is all we really need to know. That the seniors were disciplined by the school for an activity completely unrelated to school is a pure abuse of power. This is an outrageous extension of school and government authority into the private lives of the students involved. It should not matter what the game was…not to the school. The governments of La Quinta, California and the United States couldn’t outlaw the game, nor could they forbid citizens to play it, not could they punish citizens that did.
Now, because you may be curious, here’s a description of the game. Continue reading
Ethics Alarms 