Ethics Dunces: Paula Deen and “Uncle Bubba”

April 17, 2014 / Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Like breaking up via text message and telling your spouse you want a divorce in an e-mail, here’s a crummy use of technology that we should hope doesn’t catch on.

Uncle Bubba’s Seafood & Oyster House, a restaurant owned by Paula Deen and her younger brother, Earl W. “Bubba” Hiers Jr., told all of its employees that the place was going out of business on its Facebook page, and that was all. The message:

“Since its opening in 2004, Uncle Bubba’s Oyster House has been a destination for residents and tourists in Savannah, offering the region’s freshest seafood and oysters. However, the restaurant’s owner and operator, Bubba Heirs, has made the decision to close the restaurant in order to explore development options for the waterfront property on which the restaurant is located. At this point, no specific plans have been announced and a range of uses are under consideration in order realize the highest and best use for the property.The closing is effective today, Thursday, April 3, 2014. Employees will be provided with severance based on position and tenure with the restaurant. All effort will be made to find employees comparable employment with other Savannah restaurant organizations.”

Yechh.

Cruel, rude, impersonal, cowardly. Also callous, lazy and inefficient: how many employees were told by third parties about the announcement?

Well, at least Paula’s not a racist. I wonder if the Food Network fired Paula via Facebook? I’m pretty sure it didn’t.

_____________________

Pointer: Evil HR Lady

Facts: CBS

“Alleged” News Bias: ABC’s David Muir Joins The The Hilaria Baldwin Ethics Lionel Wreck

June 30, 2013 / Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

All aboard!

Caught by Newbusters: ABC’s David Muir referred to Alec Baldwin’s tweet calling Daily News reporter George Stark a “toxic little queen” as an “alleged slur,” while omitting any mention of Baldwin’s follow-up tweet announcing that the actor would “put my foot up your f–king ass, George Stark, but I’m sure you’d dig it too much.”

Alleged slur?

Baldwin’s slur isn’t alleged, it’s preserved in screen shots all over the internet. Muir’s claim that the obvious slur is only alleged can only mean “toxic little queen” in the context of an exchange alluding to the male target enjoying violent anal penetration can be reasonably interpreted as anything else. It cannot.

I didn’t notice—did ABC also refer to Paula Deen’s admitted use of the term “nigger” as an “alleged slur”? If it did, I apologize: Muir isn’t biased…he’s just an idiot, following ABC’s idiotic policy. But if it did not—-and it didn’t-–then Muir’s effort to go easy on a fellow liberal’s bigotry is just one more of the little bits of proof of how left-biased the news media is that slips out periodically if one is objective and paying attention.

Of course, the Democrats and liberals among us who benefit from having the news slanted to support their candidates and issues only see alleged media bias when these smoking guns appear—just as Muir sees “toxic little queen” as an alleged slur.

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Pointer and Sources: Newsbusters

Graphic: Largescalecentral

GLAAD Joins The Hilaria Baldwin Ethics Lionel Wreck

June 30, 2013June 30, 2013 / Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Ethics train wrecks can develop at any time, though sometimes the participants and the incidents involved limit the results to small-scale ethics damage. Let’s call these “Ethics Lionel Wrecks,” in honor of the model train sitting in a cardboard box in my basement. This week’s tale of Hilaria Baldwin’s mistimed tweets defines the genre.

The progression:

1. George Stark Starts the Train

This one began when the pregnant wife of actor/ pitchman/liberal blowhard/ bully Alec Baldwin was called out by the Daily Mail for tweeting trivial, giddy messages during the funeral of recently departed actor James Gandolfini. That would have been certifiably disrespectful conduct in the rare sub-category of Funeral Ethics; indeed Ethics Alarms certified it. The problem is that Mail reporter George Stark was wrong.

Salon explained that the error was caused by “a technical glitch on Twitter that reflected GMT instead of ET…an analysis of the source code of Hilaria Baldwin’s tweets reveals that she tweeted between 11 am and 2 pm, as opposed to 8 am to 11 am. The Daily Mail has stated that “the tweets did appear accurately timed on mobile devices such as smartphones and iPads,” but “the only way MailOnline was able to establish the REAL time the tweets were sent was by viewing the twitter web page source code, something almost no normal member of the public would ever do.”

I have no idea what the hell that means, but I was one of the people who relied on Stark’s report, which seemed convincing, with screen shots of the tweets themselves and their timestamps. Was he unethically sloppy, as Baldwin and others have claimed, or was this just an excusable mistake? Twitter is new enough that there may be some justification for not checking the source code before using the time stamp to conclude something from a tweet: I can’t determine whether there is a journalistic protocol for this at the Daily Mail or elsewhere. Before a reporter attacks the conduct of a pregnant woman at a friend’s funeral, he would presumably be obligated to be certain of his facts, since readers, like me, will assume that he was. If this really was, as Salon says, a freak Twitter glitch, then Stark was unlucky rather than unethical.

2. Ethics Alarms rides the rails Continue reading →

Food Network Thought Crimes

June 21, 2013April 17, 2014 / Jack Marshall / 35 Comments

[Now that is a headline I never conceived of having to use.]

“Love your cooking, Paula, but that joke you laughed at in 1996 means that you’re racist scum. Rot in Hell.”

Paula Deen, Southern cuisine star of the Food Network, has been fired because of the public uproar after she admitted in a law suit deposition that she had, on occasion and in the past, used the term “nigger” and tolerated racist jokes. This outburst of honesty (she was under oath at the time) apparently justifies social network hatred being directed her way in waves, and Jake Tapper, on CNN (WHY do I keep watching CNN?) conducting an inquisition this afternoon in which he asked third parties whether formerly using “the N-word” means Deen is a racist.

I don’t give two hoots about Paula Deen or her career. I watch the Food Network about as often as I watch MSNBC or YES. She has always seemed more than a little bit silly and dim to me, and the reasons for her popularity elude me. But if there are many Americans who grew up in the South when Deen did who never used “nigger” and who never laughed at a racist joke, I’ll be shocked. That isn’t a “everybody does it” excuse. That is a “stop condemning people who reflected their narrow culture until they gained some perspective and wisdom” explanation. My father grew up in Kentucky in the 20’s and 30’s. Do I think he would have answered a deposition the same way Deen did? I sure do, and if one percent of those attacking Deen now possess sufficient integrity, honesty and essential fairness to be worthy of licking my Dad’s combat boots, I’ll be even more shocked. Dad is hardly the only admirable individual who spoke this way in his younger years. During his successful campaign for the U.S. Senate in Virginia, former Democratic Senator and war hero (and my classmate) Jim Webb bravely admitted that he had also used “nigger” when he was younger, and that crucifying his Republican opponent, George Allen, for similar, long-past indiscretions was unfair. He was right about Allen, and his defense applies to Deen as well. Continue reading →

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