journalistic integrity

Fast and Furious: AG Holder’s Ethics Train Wreck

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Let’s get a few things settled.

If you look closely, you can see Eric Holder in his engineer cap.

Fast and Furious is a true scandal, not a trumped-up distraction, just as Watergate wasn’t a “third-rate burglary.” When the U.S. government intentionally allows laws to be broken, secretly seeds violent crime in a neighboring country and gets both foreigners and Americans killed as a result, that’s a scandal any way you cut it. The U.S. Congress has an oversight role to play after such a fiasco, and getting to the bottom of what went sour is its duty, regardless of how much enjoyment partisan Congressmen appear to have making Administration officials sweat. Any politician or member of the media who suggests otherwise is trying to manufacture a cover-up and intentionally misleading the public. The mantra that “this is a waste of time when Congress should be doing the nation’s business” was used by Republicans during Watergate, Iran-Contra, and the Valerie Plame affair, and by Democrats during Whitewater, Lewinsky, and now, as Fast and Furious is finally bursting out of the hole of obscurity where the biased media tried to stuff it. A badly managed, law-breaking Justice Department isn’t trivial, and when utterly stupid, reckless operations like Fast and Furious come to light, it is essential that there be full disclosure and accountability. The voices trying to bury this scandal do not have the best interests of the United States or the public at heart. Let’s start with that.

Fast and Furious was so jaw-droppingly dumb that its very stupidity is almost a boon to defenders of Attorney General Holder’s department, since the normal reaction to such facts is that some crazy Republican must have made up the whole thing. Unfortunately, this really happened.  In 2009, the US government allowed Arizona gun sellers to illegally sell automatic weapons to suspected criminals. Then ATF agents (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives)  were directed to  allow the guns to “walk” across the border and be delivered to the Mexican drug cartels. The House Oversight Committee’s report explains, “The purpose was to wait and watch, in hope that law enforcement could identify other members of a trafficking network and build a large, complex conspiracy case…. [The ATF] initially began using the new gun-walking tactics in one of its investigations to further the Department’s strategy.”

Gee. What a great plan! What could possibly go wrong?

Oh, only everything.

1,608 weapons ended up in the bloody hands of Mexican criminals. The ATF lost track of them, until they turned up at shootings and crime scenes. Many Mexicans, though we don’t know how many, died from being shot by the planted guns, and when a US federal agent, Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry, was killed by one of them in battle with drug-runners, the fiasco became public. (ATF whistle-blower also helped.) In a sensible, fair, ethical system, the next steps would follow like Summer follows Spring:

  • The news media would give the story major coverage  and do its own, unbiased, competent investigation.
  • The Administration would express horror and regret, and set about its own internal investigation.
  • Both parties of Congress would aggressively seek answers, and make certain that systemic failures were exposed and responsible individuals were identified.
  • Those responsible would resign or would be fired.

But we do not have a sensible, fair, ethical system, at least as it is currently functioning. As a result, the Fact and Furious mess has become an ethics train wreck that appears to be gathering steam. The evidence so far: Continue reading →

Should Black Journalists Be Promoting Race Loyalty As a Virtue?

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Go Team!

On Sunday’s “Washington Watch with Roland Martin” on TVOne, host Martin questioned several black journalists about the support shown by the Obama administration and black leaders for Attorney General Eric Holder, currently stonewalling Congress regarding a full accounting of what occurred in the “Fast and Furious” debacle.

“Many Republicans are calling on him to resign by demanding he release more documents, also in the Fast and Furious case,” Martin said.  “So, I want to ask the panel, is this White House doing enough to protect the attorney general? And also, where is black leadership? I mean, here you have Eric Holder, who has been — first of all, he was a high-ranking official in the Justice Department under President Bill Clinton. He becomes the black, first African-American attorney general. He has been very aggressive on many issues. But some folks are saying that look, he’s been taken to the woodshed and he is not getting the kind of support that you would think he would be getting.”

This is a disgraceful question that assumes that unethical conduct—racial bias— is somehow admirable. What difference does it make that Holder is the first black attorney general? How could that justify the media, the White House, black leaders or Congress treating  a black Attorney General any differently than they would treat a white, Asian or Cherokee Attorney General? Isn’t the issue whether he is a competent and effective Attorney General? Shouldn’t that judgment be race blind? Aren’t black journalists, like white journalists, obligated to keep race out of their assessments of how public officials behave? Continue reading →

Dear News Media: Please Stop Spinning…It’s Unethical. Also Embarrassing.

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

[I’m on the road in Syracuse, and posting to the site has become slow and challenging thanks to losing half the letters on my keyboard, including a, s, and c. The problem has required me to compose by copying words from other sources and pasting them into sentences—you know, like ransom notes cut from newspaper headlines?—or using the online keyboard, which is like writing in alphabet soup. This means that I may have to add some fixes when I get home tonight, and that I will be about five topics behind. Thanks for your patience.]

The coverage of the Wisconsin recall was not a good sign for those of us hoping that the news media might choose to reform its ethics and objectivity standards in time to serve the public properly during the 2012 campaign season. Remember when Fox was the only network openly cheerleading for particular candidates, political figures and parties? MSNBC soon topped it in that regard to a nauseating extent, and now all of the networks, and much of the print media, are following the trend.

It makes no sense in the case of the recall. Why should journalists have a position to push in Wisconsin politics? Why are they taking the sides if public unions? The phenomenon has to be market driven, or, in the alternative, the result of widespread stupidity. Yes, I suspect the latter. Continue reading →

Time and Newsweek: Reaching The Dregs, and Ethics Be Damned

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

Dishonest or tasteless? Irresponsible or sensational?  A lie or a crime? The nation’s two, sad, archaic, useless, shameless, diminished news magazines, Time and Newsweek, both reached new lows this week as both magazines desperately brayed for readership with eye-catching covers that are to good journalism what Britney Spears will be to good judging in her new gig as a panelist on “X-Factor.”

I was going to make this an ethics quiz—which is more unethical?—but decided it was futile. The Time cover is colorable kiddie porn, using a (God, I hope!) photoshopped image* that no child should  be permitted to see on a news stand. The Newsweek cover, in addition to continuing the publication’s unconscionable deification of Barack Obama no matter what he does, is a lie. Obama isn’t gay. Newsweek is making a rhetorical link between Obama’s (vastly over-praised and still tepid endorsement of gay marriage) empathy with gays and Bill Clinton’s faux-status as the nation’s “first black President, but it is fatally flawed, logically and graphically. Everyone knows Bill Clinton isn’t literally black (except, perhaps, in the way Elizabeth Warren is Native American), but we can’t see that Obama isn’t gay from his image on the cover. All there is the copy: “The First Gay President.” There are people who will believe that, and who will see the cover without buying the magazine, since almost nobody buys either magazine any more.

Neither cover is responsible journalism. Both are graphic desperation, with neither magazine showing respect for readers, their topics, or their own distinguished pasts.

* Boy, was I wrong.

____________________________________________

Graphics: Time and Newsweek

Ethics Hero: CNN’s Anderson Cooper

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Will wonders never cease —- an outbreak of legitimate, fair and balanced journalism on CNN!

Once again, I find myself in the conflicted position of bestowing Ethics Hero status on someone who did no more than meet his professional duties. This is broadcast journalism we are talking about, however, where unbiased professionalism is as rare as the ivory-beaked woodpecker. Anderson Cooper may have been just doing his job, but he was doing it well and ethically, which means that he qualifies as a promising role model as we head into the ugliness that promises to be the 2012 campaign. Continue reading →

“Baghdad Bob” Dionne’s Orwellian Flackery

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Baghdad Bob

There was a time long ago when columnist E.J. Dionne Jr. was legitimately regarded as the liberal twin of uber-consvervative Charles Krauthammer, a persuasive, analytical, fair, ideologically consistent political commentator. Somewhere along the line Dionne decided to recast his role as a full-time flack for the Democratic Party. His cheerleading became shrill and increasingly dishonest, often to the point of ridiculousness: James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal now regularly refers to Dionne as “Baghdad Bob,” after Saddam Hussein’s ridiculous Information Minister during the Iraq invasion, who issued straight-faced  on-air declarations that the Americans were being thrashed even as world viewers could see convincing contrary evidence in news reports, and Iraqi citizens could see the truth out their windows.

I now ignore Dionne, because he has no credibility at all. His readers must consist almost entirely of close-minded partisans on the left seeking comfort food, close-minded partisans of the right seeking an injection of adrenaline, and unsuspecting, trusting readers who don’t realizethat they are being misled. Having just finished posting here about Connecticut lawmakers passing a ban on the death penalty that is as cowardly as it is incoherent, my early morning head nearly exploded to see the headline on Dionnes’ column this morning about the same law. The headline?

“Connecticut’s Courage” Continue reading →

George Zimmerman and the “Racial Profiling” Canard

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Racists, all of 'em.

On the frequently disgusting but reliably gripping CBS drama “Criminal Minds,” viewers quickly get accustomed to hearing the FBI profiler heroes alert police and public to be on the look-out for a “white, middle-aged man.” Why man? Easy: virtually all serial killers are male. Why white? Same thing: although a rare black serial killer comes along (the D.C. snipers were African-American), the vast majority of serial killers from Jack the Ripper onward have been Caucasian.

You know, I just don’t feel denigrated by the fictional FBI’s alert (the real FBI would do the same.) Telling the public that the individual butchering prostitutes or massacring families is the same race as I am isn’t bias, bigotry or racism, it’s logic. It is also, beyond question, racial profiling, which, under the right circumstances, makes sense, prevents crime, catches criminals, and isn’t unethical or racist in the least.

So effectively have civil rights advocates and the media managed to bias the public against rational racial profiling, however, that the phrase itself has become a synonym for racism. When you mangle and distort a descriptive term in this way, blurring the distinctions between phrases and concepts, the culture gets a lobotomy and forced aphasia. What is the term for a fair and legitimate conclusion that a particular crime in a particular area is more likely to be performed by one race than another? Right now, the term is racism. Continue reading →

Proposing “The Bachmann-Plouffe Rule”

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

My new rule could stop this from happening to me in the very near future, and perhaps you as well!

I am ready to bestow my ever-lasting loyalty and admiration, not to mention a lifetime Ethics Hero award and maybe even a monthly stipend upon the first broadcast journalist who pledges to employ henceforward what I will call “The Bachmann-Plouffe Rule.”  ABC’s George Stephanopoulos emphatically did NOT employ the rule this morning in his back-to-back interviews of White House advisor David Plouffe and Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann, inspiring me 1) to name the rule and 2) throw my newspaper at the TV screen. Twice.

I don’t have the transcript, but I can fairly describe the exchanges. Plouffe was routinely mouthing Obama re-election talking points, when Stephanopoulos pressed him on the issue of gay marriage, specifically regarding the fact that the Democrats are talking about having a national campaign platform plank that explicitly endorses it, while the President has notably declined to give a clear endorsement of same-sex marriage. George asked why Obama doesn’t just declare that he supports it, and, if he does not do so, whether his ambivalence will place him at odds with his party’s position.

Plouffe didn’t answer the question. Continue reading →

Our News Media’s Integrity Vaccum: The Malia in Mexico Blackout

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Here is a good example of how framing is critical in analyzing the news. When various conservative blogs and commentators started complaining that the AP’s report on the Obamas’ oldest daughter spending spring break in Mexico was disappearing from news media websites across the net, I saw it as a non-story from an ethics perspective, and certainly not, as was being suggested, an example of White House censorship of legitimate news. If I was President  Obama and my young teenage daughter was in Mexico, I’d ask the media to leave her alone too.

I thought other criticism of the President in this incident was unfair as well. Some critics suggested that it was irresponsible of the First Couple to allow their daughter to travel anywhere in a nation where the State Department had issued an advisory that it was not safe to travel. The Obamas are bad parents now? I assume that they are certain that their daughter will be safe, and have taken appropriate measures to ensure that. This is not within the realm of legitimate topics for political sniping.

Thus I wasn’t going to write about this, just as I decide not to write about a wide assortment of ethics-related events and topics that I consider and discard every day. By looking at it as an issue of  government and leadership ethics, however, I missed the real story, which involves journalistic integrity and courage. The Obamas certainly had a right to ask that Malia’s spring break travels be unreported, but a responsible and fair U.S. news media would have told them, politely, no. Continue reading →

Funny! But Unfair.

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Here’s conservative news aggregator Matt Drudge’s top of the page lead headlines at the moment…

If you are going to try to make the (silly and petty) argument that there is something unseemly about the President taking a break from the heavy lifting his job entails to indulge his passion for March Madness basketball, then make it. Implying it this way is snide and unfair; it reminds me of the trouble the Harvard Crimson got into years ago when its printer placed a photo from an art exhibit that appeared to depict two young people engaging in oral sex right next to a headline that read, “New Cafeteria Opens at Radcliffe.”

Funny!  But still wrong.

As I’m sure Matt Drudge knows this.

He just doesn’t care.