Prof. Glenn Reynolds

Ethics Dunces: Everybody Connected With This Ridiculous Story

/ Jack Marshall / 41 Comments

 

"Just remove that offensive bumper sticker, sir, and they'll be no trouble."

“Just remove that offensive bumper sticker, sir, and they’ll be no trouble.”

USA Today, NBC, Yahoo! and other news outlets are snickering as they report the story of an elderly couple pulled over by two police cars in Tennessee because a Buckeye leaf decal on their car, signifying their fealty to the Ohio State football team, was mistaken for a marijuana leaf by the men in blue. “What are you doing with a marijuana sticker on your bumper?” one of the cops asked the Jonas-Boggionis, the occupants of the vehicle. It was all a big misunderstanding! Boy, are those Tennessee cops dumb, not to be able to tell a Buckeye leaf from pot!

In classic “what’s wrong with this story?” fashion, not one of the news media reports, in their hilarity over the cops stopping the couple out of official botanical and sports ignorance, noted  that the police would have been just as wrong if the decal DID portray a marijuana leaf. It’s called the First Amendment, guys—perhaps you’ve heard of it? It’s the same Constitutional amendment that allows you media reporters to do the rotten, incompetent job you do covering the news without  being declared by law to be the menace to a free and informed society you are. You know, it might be helpful, when the police engage in a blatant First Amendment violation and abuse of state power, for reporters to recognize and explain it to the public as such, rather than make the news story about how the police stopped the Jonas-Boggionis for the “wrong reason.” Even if they had stopped it for what the stories say is the right reason, it would be the wrong reason. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Slate Crime Blogger Justin Peters

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments
Read the Slate crime blog, and you could end up like this in seven days...

Read the Slate crime blog, and you could end up like this in seven days…

Slate triggered a mini-ethics train wreck by hiring a non-lawyer for what any fool could surmise would be an assignment that would often require knowledge of the law: covering the broad issue of crime for Slate’s readers. Note: to all those scambloggers who insist that there are no good jobs in which having a law degree would be an obvious asset: here’s an example. Their note back to me: “Oh, yeah? This why didn’t Slate hire one of us?”

Touché! I presume, however, that this was because the journalist Slate did hire, Justin Peters is an editor at the Columbia Journalism Review and has pals in Slate’s management…or, in the alternative, the online magazine has a death wish. I don’t think Slate has anything against lawyers. Peters is unethical, because ethical professionals don’t accept jobs they are unqualified to perform. Then again, journalists increasingly are unaware of the concept of ethics, so now we are back to Slate, and why they would hire someone to opine in a law-strewn field without knowing shinola about the law. Continue reading →

Ethics Quote of the Week: Prof. Glenn Reynolds

/ Jack Marshall / 41 Comments

“A 20-year-old lunatic stole some guns and killed people. Who’s to blame? According to a lot of our supposedly rational and tolerant opinion leaders, it’s . . . the NRA, a civil-rights organization whose only crime was to oppose laws banning guns. (Ironically, it wasn’t even successful in Connecticut, which has some of the strictest gun laws in the nation.) The hatred was intense. One Rhode Island professor issued a call — later deleted — for NRA head Wayne LaPierre’s “head on a stick.” People like author Joyce Carol Oates and actress Marg Helgenberger wished for NRA members to be shot. So did Texas Democratic Party official John Cobarruvias, who also called the NRA a ‘terrorist organization,’ and Texas Republican congressman Louis Gohmert a “terror baby.” Nor were reporters, who are supposed to be neutral, much better. As The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg commented, ‘Reporters on my Twitter feed seem to hate the NRA more than anything else, ever. ‘Calling people murderers and wishing them to be shot sits oddly with claims to be against violence. The NRA — like the ACLU, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers or Planned Parenthood — exists to advocate policies its members want. It’s free speech. The group-hate directed at the NRA is ugly and says ugly things about those consumed by it.”

–—- University of Tennessee law professor (and conservative blogging icon) Glenn Reynolds, in a USA Today op-ed piece called “Reflections on Newtown.”

Stop the NRAI’m tempted to go further than Prof. Reynolds and suggest that this also says ugly things about what the extended recession has done to our culture, which once was characterized by the initiative, determination and innovation to solve problems, but now increasingly resorts to the useless strategy of  pointing fingers. The tradition of picking out convenient public scapegoats to blame and demonize in response to complex societal problems is a long-running historical phenomenon around the world, but it seems to me that the United States has never before embraced it with the fervor we are seeing now.

Thank You, Mayors Emanuel, Menino, Wright and the Rest, For The Chick-fil-A Ethics Train Wreck!

/ Jack Marshall / 84 Comments

“…As someone who supported gay marriage long before President Obama did (which is to say, long before a couple of months ago), I’m nonetheless gratified to see people standing up to the bullying that the left-political class has aimed at this honest business simply because its owners failed to change their views in synch with President Obama.“—Instapundit blogger Glenn Reynolds

Good work, Rahm!

I’m with Professor Reynolds 100%, except that I know that many of the people mobbing Chick-fil-A franchises across the country yesterday, in backlash to Democratic politicians attempting to use the power of elected office to stifle free speech and impose mandatory thought conformity, were also doing so because they saw it as implicit support of the anti-gay marriage position.

And this, my friends, is why the ends do not justify the means.

I have read misguided blog post after misguided blog post and endured self-righteous commenters who are beyond idiotic who endorse the disgraceful comments of Menino, Emanuel, and the other anti-democratic bullying mayors, councilmen and aldermen because “they are standing up for what is right.” Maybe…but in doing so by mounting what amounts to an official attack on a private business and citizen, they are embracing what is undeniably wrong, according to this country’s values: government and its officials telling the public, not what they should do, which is a proper role of the government, but what they must say and believe, which is what the Constitution decrees that government  must never do.

What does this clear abuse of power accomplish? As with any time unethical methods are applied to seek “good” ends, it forces both advocates and opponents to either accept unacceptable conduct, or to ally themselves with those who oppose what they believe is right, in order to reject a wrongful means of accomplishing it.  Continue reading →

Blood Libel Ethics and the U.S. News Media’s Integrity Dead End

/ Jack Marshall / 75 Comments

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 →