If you have a friend or colleague who can’t stand Sarah Palin—and who doesn’t?—the Joe McGinniss story gives you an infallible was to gauge their ability to be fair and objective, as well as their ability to apply the Golden Rule. Palin and her family are victims of a bad neighbor and an unscrupulous, venal and predatory author. The fact that one doesn’t like certain victims of wrongdoing because of their political beliefs, their accents, or their talent for uttering simplistic sound-bites calculated to drive Democrats crazy shouldn’t obliterate one’s ability to determine right from wrong. Continue reading
journalistic ethics
Unethical Quote of the Week: The Richard Blumenthal Campaign
“I think in the end, the people of Connecticut care a lot more about what’s happening today in their lives, whether they’re going to keep their homes, their health care and their jobs.”
…. Conn. Senate candidate Richard Blumenthal (D) campaign adviser Marla Romash in an interview with The Associated Press, adopting the crisis-tested Bill Clinton tactic of insisting that matters like the honesty of elected officials has no bearing on their fitness for their jobs, and is a distraction from the real interests of the public.
Translation: “In the end, we know the public doesn’t care if its elected representatives are liars who, for example, claim to have fought in Vietnam when they didn’t, as long as they deliver the pork. Heck, you’ve seen it: Senators can be outright crooks, and they’ll still get the votes.”
The Blumenthal Vietnam scandal, as I predicted, is serving as wonderfully useful ethics test for other politicians, the media, Democrats, and Connecticut voters generally. Continue reading
More Ethics Confusion at The Washington Post
Washington D.C. theater scene blogger and critic John Glass has caught the Washington Post with its ethical pants down. He alertly notes that a line in a recent Post story about the appointment of a new Artistic Director for the prestigious Studio Theater reveals that interviews for the position took place in Washington Post offices. Studio is an active Post advertiser that, like all D.C. area theaters, is significantly dependent on the paper’s theater reviews for its audiences. In this regard it is also in competition with other theaters for the Post critics’ approval. Doesn’t this situation require objectivity and an arm’s length relationship between the newspaper and the theater? Why is the Washington Post actively involved in a professional theater’s choice of artistic leadership? Continue reading
Ethics Collision at MSNBC
Donny Deutsch, a guest host at MSNBC, lost his gig, at least for now, after including MSNBC’s Angriest Man, commentator Keith Olberman, in a segment called “America the Angry.” It examined how media pundits are stoking public anger with inflammatory rhetoric and appeals to emotion rather that reason. MSNBC objected to the criticism of one of its own on its own airtime.
Based on stated policy, the objection and Deutsch’s punishment were justified. MSNBC boss Phil Griffin had send a stern warning to all producers and on-air talent, saying, Continue reading
The Hannity-Fox-Tea Party Connection
When you don’t stop something that is obviously unethical until people start screaming and pointing fingers, the reasonable presumption is that it wasn’t the fact that it was unethical that made you take action, but that you were going to be criticized for it. Thus Fox honcho Rupert Murdoch’s last-second cancellation of Sean Hannity’s appearance at a Tea Party event get no ethics brownie points—in fact, quite the contrary. Continue reading
Ethics Hero: CNN
CNN has begun to get hammered in the ratings, in the midst of a policy change that has the venerable cable news staking out novel ground: it is being objective. This used to be known as “journalism.” Continue reading
Cowardice Trumps Duty: The Oprah Bio Freeze-Out
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
Fox Nation: Fair, Balanced, Biased, and Incredibly Gullible
If you read a story like this, what would you think?
“Famed global warming activist James Schneider and a journalist friend were both found frozen to death on Saturday, about 90 miles from South Pole Station, by the pilot of a ski plane practicing emergency evacuation procedures.
One friend of Prof. Schneider told ecoEnquirer that he had been planning a trip to an ice sheet to film the devastation brought on by global warming. His wife, Linda, said that she had heard him discussing the trip with his environmental activist friends, but she assumed that he was talking about the Greenland ice sheet, a much smaller ice sheet than Antarctica.
“He kept talking about when they ‘get down to chili’, and I thought they were talking about the order in which they would consume their food supplies”, Mrs. Schneider recounted. “I had no idea they were talking about Chile, the country from which you usually fly or sail in order to reach Antarctica.”
I would think, “This has got to be a gag.” Wouldn’t you? Continue reading
Unethical Website of the Month: Bloomberg News
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
Dubious Ethics Studies, Part I.
Thanks to Malcolm Gladwell (Blink) and the one-word titled books he has inspired, we are being exposed to more social science research than ever before, much of it with relevance to ethics. I’ll admit to using some of these when they support my point of view, and that is the problem: what such studies supposedly signify often tell us more about the biases of the analysts than the behavior of the subjects. Two recent studies illustrate the point. Continue reading
Ethics Alarms 