It’s lucky you’re dead, Dave, because this would kill you…
Matt Lauer, as the primary host of the “Today” show, reigns where once distinguished journalists and professionals like Dave Garroway, Bryant Gumble, Tom Brokaw and Frank McGee made the show a morning oasis of news and pleasant banter. Yesterday Lauer, who has already revealed himself beyond any reasonable argument as a hack (yes, “Today” has had other hacks), showed himself to be an unmannerly creep as well. Continue reading
I posted earlier here about the efforts by lawyers (and bloggers) Marc Randazza and Ken at Popehat to foil the despicable operators of “IsAnybodyDown?” That vile website solicits and uses nude photos of women who have not given permission for them to be posted. It often posts contact information for the women as well, and, as a final touch, promotes an alleged legal service that guarantees that it will get the photos taken down. This is a good bet, since the legal service is operated by the same two men who run the site, though it is very unlikely that the “lawyer” really exists. After Marc and Ken challenged the site, its purveyors launched another one accusing them of secretly working for pornography interests and being funded by the Mob.
These are not, in other words, nice people.
In his most recent post about their ongoing battle, Ken recounted an e-mail exchange with Chance Trahan, who founded and operates “IsAnybodyDown?”with Craig Brittain. It is an exchange that confirms what one would assume about someone who engages in a business like his. A typical tweet from Chance to Craig reads in part, “You aren’t shit to the world you immoral fuck.” Yet Ken was moved to reflect upon even this individual’s humanity, applying the Golden Rule to and musing about how even the likes of Trahan and Brittain can have redeeming qualities. In doing so he provided as profound and lovely reflection on the ethical process of reciprocity, as well as kindness, fairness, forgiveness and empathy. With Ken’s permission, I present it here. Continue reading
Go get em, Marc!
First Amendment lawyer Marc Randazza is a genuine Ethics Hero. I speak from personal experience: when a cyber-bully was trying to use a threatened libel lawsuit to force me to remove a posted opinion he didn’t like, Marc (thoughtfully referred by Ken at Popehat), generously offered his time and advice…and Marc does this all the time. Right now he has a different mission: exposing a revolting cyberscam and hounding the perpetrators into retreat. His target is the website “Is Anybody Down,” and a more disgusting web enterprise would be hard to imagine, and its parasitic creation, the “Takedown Lawyer.”
I’ll let Marc explain why he has “Is Anybody Down” on his hit list:
“Here’s their business plan:
- Step one: Register the domain name “isanybodydown.com”
- Step two: Get ahold of nude photos of people who never consented to having their photos published.
- Step three:Publish them, along with their names, home towns, and links to their facebook profiles.
So now how do you “profit?” Well, openly saying “I’ll take down the photo for $250,” would probably create some legal issues for you. So, instead, you create a fake lawyer persona and say “I am an internet lawyer, named David Blade, III, and I’ll get your pics down for $250.” Continue reading
—Attorney/blogger Ann Althouse, commenting on the doleful expression on CBS newswoman Norah O’Donnell’s face after the report that the network’s focus group of undecided voters scored last night’s debate a victory for Mitt Romney.
The video:
Althouse’s observation is perceptive, as hers often are. Although many studies have found that the facial expressions, body language and vocal inflections of broadcast news journalists influence audience perceptions and opinions, and carry at least as much potential for bias and slanted reporting as the news content itself, few of O’Donnell’s colleagues, if any, make any effort to ensure that these non-verbal communications are objective as a matter of professionalism and fairness. This is because broadcast journalism has largely abandoned fairness, objectivity and professionalism as priorities or industry standards. Continue reading
“Your Honor! I object!”
Sarah Naughton, for 8 years a Cook County (Chicago) prosecutor, was arrested and charged after she and a male companion caused a disturbance in an adult store when they were asked to leave ( they appear to have been bombed). After banging on the windows and calling out obscenities, the two got in a tussle with the store’s employees, and Sarah allegedly bit one of them on the leg. She also apparently pulled the infamous, “Do you know who I am?” card, to which I guess I would have answered, “Lindsay Lohan?”
Here is video of the aftermath: the prosecutor is the one wailing and insulting the officers as she sits handcuffed on the pavement.
She has been placed on administrative leave for now.
I know: we all have our bad days and nights, and some of us don’t handle liquor very well. Naughton apparently hasn’t done anything like this before; on the other hand, her conduct does not exactly burnish the reputation of Chicago Law enforcement. Your Ethics Quiz, as we head into an ethically challenging weekend (as they all are):
Does this unfortunate private behavior in this one incident show that she lacks sufficient trustworthiness and professionalism to represent the Cook County prosecutor’s office? Continue reading
Ethics Alarms’ 2011 Commenter of the Year tgt, who found this story and passed it on, asks,
“How is a horrible stoner rock band more ethical than everyone in politics?”
It’s a great, if sorrowful, question.
A.V. Club has a feature (which could be called “Start a Feud”) in which it asks a rock performer what song he or she hates, and why. Jenn Wasner, one half of the Baltimore indie-folk duo Wye Oak (“a blend of Southern culture and Northern sensibilities…”) submitted to this invitation to get in trouble, and fingered the song in the video above, “Scars,” by Papa Roach.
Criticizing the work of other artists in the same field is unprofessional at best, gratuitously unkind and disrespectful. Papa Roach’s members would have been within their rights to fire back something less than complimentary in defense, at very least the observation that ethical musicians don’t take gratuitous shots at one another. What the band did however, was this: it sent Wasner flowers. Wasner was convinced it was some kind of diabolical trap, and tweeted as much. The band tweeted back: Continue reading
“Uh, Captain? Captain? We really need you up in the plane, now—we’re under attack…”
This story reads as if it were invented just to cause arguments on Ethics Alarms.
Adrienne Pine, a professor at American University, was faced with a choice: stay home and care for her baby, who had a fever, or take the child to class. She chose to take the infant to the first meeting of her “Sex, Gender and Culture” course, where the child spent her lecture alternately on her mother’s back or crawling around the room, or, at one point, being breast-fed by the professor. Pine’s Full Mommy breast-feeding act was commented upon by the school newspaper, and Prof. Pine responded to inquiries by a student reporter with a dismissive, “…the baby got hungry, so I had to feed it during the lecture. End of story,” and a defensive and defiant blog entry. She sees nothing wrong with her conduct, and regards the controversy as proof that ” a feminist anthropology course is necessary at AU.”
That’s playing the ol’ Mommy Card with gusto, Professor Pine.
She is dead wrong, as a matter of professional ethics. As a college professor,Pine has limited demands on her time, and the one thing that she is required to do is to devote full attention to her students in class. With an infant, an ill infant at that, in her care, she could not do that. She had a pure and unresolvable conflict of interest, and it was a breach of her duty to her child (at one point a student had to tell her that the baby had a paper clip in her mouth) and a breach of duty to her students (if they were watching the baby, and later that breast-feeding exhibition, they were not able to give full attention to her lecture). She had a choice to make: do one job or the other, because it is impossible to do them both at the same time. Continue reading
—-Rear Admiral Sean Pybus, Commander of Naval Special Warfare Command, in a letter sent to all members of the Special Operations community telling them to stop revealing information about their secret operations. The letter was sent out as “No Easy Day,” a Navy Seal’s unauthorized account of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, hit the book stores.
The letter is said to be the beginning of a concerted effort by the military to discourage an accelerating trend among Navy SEALs of cashing in on their notoriety and exploits.
Good luck. When a culture based on professionalism, sacrifice, discretion and honor meets a larger culture that values none of those things as much as celebrity, publicity, personal aggrandizement and financial rewards, the results are pre-ordained, and the key word is corruption. The SEALs won’t be able to fix themselves unless they can figure out how to fix America, and compared to that, finding bin Laden was a walk in the park.
______________________________
Facts: NBC
Graphic: By Hero
The ethicist in “Singing in the Rain”
For many years, I have been attempting to persuade the local professional theater community in Washington, D.C. to develop and adopt an official Code of Ethics. I have not been successful, and it’s not surprising. Theater, indeed professional show business of all kinds, has been almost ethics-free for centuries. These are tough pursuits, and tough pursuits easily gravitate toward the Law of the Jungle—“Kill or be killed”—unless the culture makes a concerted effort to evolve in a different direction. Theater certainly has not. There a few unwritten rules in theater that could form the backbone of a useful code, such as “The show must go on!”, and there have certainly been members of the profession who are thoroughly ethical, they tend to be very successful individuals who have taken on high ideals once the need to back-stab has lessened, people who are so talented and fortunate that the need to lie and cheat never arises, or, a special category, marginally talented but hard-working and versatile professionals whose trustworthiness is their primary asset. (This last group usually fares poorly in the end.)
Not only have I been unable to interest anyone in developing a code for the theater, I have never heard of one being developed anywhere else. Until now, that is. I recently learned that Kathleen Freeman, a great character actress* who died in 2001, wrote and adopted an ethics code for a small theater company, the Circle Players, that she established in Los Angeles when she was 24 years old. Continue reading
“We love you, Ann!” “I hate you, Matt!”
I was going to make Ann Curry’s method of leaving the Today Show’s anchor chair an Ethics Quiz, but decided that there weren’t sufficiently compelling arguments for more than one conclusion: her farewell drama yesterday morning was unprofessional, and in her job and her industry, but also many others, professional obligations trump candor.
I will admit up front that I never liked Ann Curry, either as a news reader nor as Matt Lauer’s partner after Meridith Viera left the show. Her open-faced demeanor, which made it crystal clear with every story and interview where her own sympathies lay, was the antithesis of objective and fair reporting, regardless of the steadily increasing number of similar practitioners, like CNN’s eye-rolling, squinting, smirking morning tag-team of Soledad O’Brien and Carol Costello. Thus it was no surprise that having received the gift of being able to have an on-air good-bye and the trust of her NBC bosses to handle her farewell properly, Curry chose instead to (or perhaps it is fairer to say “couldn’t control herself sufficiently not to..”) make it obvious to viewers that she had been dumped, that she was hurt and angry about it, and that she blamed Matt Lauer, her co-host, who was widely reported to have made her ouster a condition of his new contract. The emotions Curry was wearing on her sleeve were especially glaring while Lauer was making the traditional speech about how much Curry would be missed and ended by trying to give her a show-biz hug and kiss. Curry refused to look at Lauer while he was talking, and ducked his kiss, looking for all the world like she was hugging Jerry Sandusky or someone similarly appealing. As we say in the theater in such situations: “Nice cover, Ann!” Continue reading
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