journalism

On Idiots, Book-Burnings, and Journalistic Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Let’s keep this post as abstract as possible, as the less publicity the renegade Gainesville book-burners get for their idiotic stunt, the better.

Why is a dim-witted “protest”by a fifty member church that we were all blissfully unaware of until recently a national, international, or even local news story? I am pretty sure I could gather a group of fifty friends in the parking lot across from my house on Arbor Day and burn an effigy of ultra-prolific junk novelist James Patterson to protest the many trees that have died to bring his books to Barnes and Noble. Would that be newsworthy—a few wackos doing something just to get attention? Does the public have a right to know about a trivial and pointless event that is only occurring so that the media will make it news?

Let us now assume that there is a powerful James Patterson cult, funded by an eccentric billionaire fan, and that it has acquired nuclear weapons. Continue reading →

“Hyping,” Reporting, Responsiblility, and Race

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

On Aug. 6 in Washington, D.C., a violent brawl broke out among  70  people, most of them teenaged or close to it, at the Gallery Place Metro Station.  There were arrests, and several people landed in the hospital. Pitched battle in the usually staid D.C. subways are not daily occurrences, yet the Washington Post apparently found itself short-handed, faint of heart, or both: its initial and follow-up stories on the event had little information. What started the fight? What happened? Who were the combatants? How long did it last? Continue reading →

Cowardice Trumps Duty: The Oprah Bio Freeze-Out

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Sometimes professionals reveal the flaws in their ethical armor in their handling of the little things.

Celebrity shark Kitty Kelley, who has wounded other celebrities with dirty-linen airing, unauthorized biographies (supposedly her hatchet job on Frank Sinatra caused Ol’ Blue Eyes to consider having her whacked), has sunk her teeth into Oprah Winfrey. The usual, well-worn method that get such bio-trash sold is a media tour, and Kelley is a veteran of it, having used interviews and talk-show experiences to make best-sellers out of her bios of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Elizabeth Taylor, Frank Sinatra, Nancy Reagan, the British Royal Family, and the Bushes. But these were just icons, super-stars, idols, royalty and world leaders; now that Kelley is taking on the Big O, all bets are off. It has been reported in multiple sources that the usual facilitators of Kelley’s book plugging efforts have been turning Kelley’s publicist down. They don’t want to cross Oprah. Continue reading →

“Lawmiss” and the Plain Dealer’s Dilemma

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

The Cleveland Plain Dealer made one of those fateful first steps that ends in a journey to ethics no-man’s land when it decided to check the e-mail address of a repeat anonymous commenter on the paper’s website. “lawmiss” had been especially abusive in comments about one of the newspaper’s reporters, so instead of just deleting the comment for violating the site’s rules against personal attacks, an enterprising editor tracked down its source. Continue reading →

Fracking Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

The Eric Massa affair quickly revealed itself as the spectacle of a foolish, narcissistic, dishonest man trying to milk every drop of attention out of the well-deserved implosion of a political career that never should have begun in the first place. Fortunately, there was a side benefit: its reporting by the media exposed the dishonesty of the practice of fake civility. Genuine civility is one of the foundations of ethical conduct, though admittedly a shaky one right now. Fake civility, however, is cynical, dishonest, disrespectful and, on top of all that, silly and ineffective.

One of the inappropriate supervisory moments that punched Massa’s ticket out of Congress was that he told a male staffer, in the presence of others, that “I should be fucking you.” Someone at the Mainstream Media High command issued a memo that the gentile and classy way of reporting this statement was “I should be fracking you.” Not that there was any pretense about what the word signified. On the Headline News morning show with giggly news-bimbo Robin Meade (an in-your-face insult to every serious female broadcast journalist in America), Meade listened to the “fracking” account and said—every one of the times the story was repeated during the program— some version of “Gee, I never heard that word before (giggle)!” Whereupon the newsreader replied with some form of “I know (snicker) neither have I!” They were far from the only ones. Dana Milbank used the same code in his account of Massa’s messes in the Washington Post.  “Fracking” is the euphemism of the week. Continue reading →

Dallas Forgotten and the Duty to Remember

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Yesterday was November 22. According to the vast majority of the news and entertainment media, it was no different from any other day, apparently. In all likelihood, the same was true of most Americans. “Oh, yeah…November 22! Better buy that turkey!”

November 22 is not like any other day in America, however. It is the date in 1963 that John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 46 years old and the 35th President of the United States of America, was assassinated on the streets of Dallas. Continue reading →

Ethics Alarms at Ethics Alarms: A Case Study

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

A journalist from a well-known sports publication called me, and wanted to get my thoughts for an article he was writing, as well as quote me in his story. I like to help journalists, and it never hurts professionally to get quoted, so I readily agreed. We set a time to talk that was convenient for both of us, later in the week. I gave him my email address, and he said he would send me his contact information before he called at the agreed upon day.

My schedule changed, and the call was going to be difficult. I needed to contact him to reschedule, since I knew he was on a deadline. But I had no contact information, because he never sent the email as he had promised. I called the publication and waited through the endless phone trees and recordings. They knew who he was, but didn’t have a phone number, and wouldn’t take a message. Finally, I tracked down his home number, and left a message.

Days passed, and he did not contact me or confirm that he had received my message (I included several alternate times for our call.) Meanwhile, I boned up on the topic, which was interesting ethically but also more extensive than my current familiarity with it. Since I hadn’t heard from him, I had to assume that he had not received my message and the appointment was still on. Though I was traveling, I arranged to be at my cell phone at the designated time, with his call to be relayed to me from my office. I waited for his call for the better part of an hour. Outside, in Times Square, in 45 degree weather.

He never called. I haven’t heard from him at all.

And I am ticked off. Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: Peter Shellem (1960-2009)

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Newspapers are on the ropes these days, and sometimes I am not sorry. Even the best of them are too often sloppy, superficial, biased and incompetent. If they go down for the count, however, we will dearly miss the likes of Peter Shellem, an old-fashioned gum-shoe reporter who used his professional skills not only to find the truth, but to save lives in the process.

If you were not a regular reader of  the Harrisburg, PA Patriot-News, the odds are that you never heard of Shellem. I  hadn’t, until I read his New York Times’ obituary this morning.  His passion was investigating the cases and prosecutions of convicted prisoners when something about their guilt didn’t seem quite right to him.  The Times notes that Defense attorney Barry Scheck called Shellem ” a one man journalism innocence project.”  Shellem’s investigations freed five wrongly convicted Americans, one of them who had been in jail 28 years, since he was fourteen.

A colleague at the Patriot-Ledger, in a remembrance, writes that Shellem did what he did because he was genuinely offended that our justice system could be so unjust. In this he was ahead of his time, for only recently, in the wake of the Duke lacrosse scandal, has the  extent and impact of prosecutorial excesses begun to inspire the media and law enforcement to scrutinize past convictions and current prosecutions with due skepticism.  There are more innocent people behind bars than we once believed, as well as many guilty prisoners who did not receive the rights guaranteed them as citizens. Peter Shellem didn’t help all of them directly, but his work did.

It appears that Peter Shellem committed suicide. Though he was apparently dissatisfied with his life, we should not be. His work was meaningful; his impact on the lives of others was profound, and his work set  high ethical standards for us all. His credo: If you see a wrong, fix it. If you recognize injustice, expose it. If you detect corruption, stop it.

We should all aspire to follow his example.