James Cameron, whose ground-breaking film “Avatar” will soon be the top-grossing movie of all time, is currently being bashed in some of the more obscure corners of the blogosphere for plagiarism. This time the criticism is not based on his blatant borrowing from Russian science fiction, but for his lifting of ideas from an American master of the genre, Poul Anderson. Anderson wrote a novella in 1957 entitled “Call Me Joe” that chronicled the adventures of a paraplegic who becomes telepathically merged with a manufactured alien life form created to explore a planet. He is exhilarated by the sensations and power of his artificially-created body, and eventually is seduced into abandoning his humanity completely to become a significant figure in the development of a new civilization. Along the way, he battles vicious alien creatures. Sound familiar? Yes, these are major components of “Avatar” as well. Continue reading
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“The Ethicist” Strikes Out Again
I’ll make a deal with Randy Cohen,”The Ethicist” of The New York Times Magazine: I’ll stop criticizing his column when he stops justifying dishonesty. Lately, Cohen has not only been advising his correspondents to avoid telling the truth but headlining the questions where he does so.
Lie proud, Randy!
This week’s endorsement of forked tongues surrounded the sensitive issue of designating a guardian for one’s child. Parents had asked their good friends, another married couple, if they would agree to care for their daughter in the event that the parents perished while she was a child. After the couple enthusiastically agreed, the parents learned that their friends were not sufficiently responsible with their finances, and liked to “live large.” They no longer trust the couple with their daughter’s welfare, and want to re-assign the responsibility of being emergency guardians to relatives. This will require the parents to change their wills.
Their question to “The Ethicist”: Do they have to tell their friends? Continue reading
Ethics Hero: Conan O’Brien
I know I just used one of Conan’s farewell comments as the Ethics Quote of the Week, and I know saluting him again risks my being called a Conan booster, which I am not. (Full Disclosure: Conan and I graduated from the same college, and my mother thinks that should matter to me. It doesn’t.) I have also been accused of not having enough Ethics Heroes, and it is a fair beef. I would be remiss not to give Conan that designation for a segment of his “Tonight Show” farewell that I left out of the earlier post. It was this: Continue reading
Believe it Or Not: An Unethical Sorority Dress Code
Abuse of power comes in all shapes and sizes. Witness the sorority Pi Phi, which apparently is hell-bent on proving that “Mean Girls” was a documentary. The fashion website “Fashionista” got its cyber hands on the sorority’s dress code, which makes West Point look lenient.
Here are some examples from the six page manifesto, the invention of Pi Phi’s rush chair: Continue reading
The Ethics Verdict on Haitian Luxury Cruises
Luxury cruise lines and their passengers are being condemned in some quarters for continuing to dock their ships at Haiti’s private beaches while the rest of Haiti is in the midst of destruction, death and horror. “Royal Caribbean is performing a sickening act to me by taking tourists to Haiti,” one critic wrote one poster on CNN’s “Connect the World” blog. “Having a beach party while people are dead, dying and suffering minutes away hardly makes me want to cruise that particular line,” wrote another. Continue reading
Media Ethics and Haiti
- Rebecca Solnit has written a powerful piece questioning the news media’s accounts of “looting” in Haiti. She argues that people in the midst of a disaster with a breakdown of infrastructure and government assistance are acting reasonably and justifiably when they take food and other necessities from abandoned stores. She believes that media accounts emphasizing looting warp the public perception of what is happening, vilifies the victims of the disaster, and prompts excessive measures against the “looters,” who are only trying to survive. She has a point. You can read her whole piece here.
- There is something oppressive and coercive when so many networks and cable channels interrupt regular programming to carry a telethon, as they did last night. It turns an appeal for help into a demand for help. Continue reading
Hell Freezes Over: Olbermann Relents
If any of the talk radio and cable news demagogues (Rush, Glenn, Laura, Ed, Michael, Marc, Bill, Monica, Rachel, Chris and the now-unemployed shouters over at Air America) have ever publicly admitted their rhetorical excesses, I’ve missed it. Thus I was stunned to witness just such an admission from arguably the worst offender of all, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann. Continue reading
Final Ethics Alarms on the Coakley-Brown Race: Fairness and Honesty Take a Holiday
Some concluding Ethics Alarms from the Brown-Coakley Senate race, many with the same dispiriting lesson: hyper-partisan zealotry is causing many Americans to abandon their senses of fairness, proportion, and common sense : Continue reading
Martha Coakley, Bloody Socks and Democracy
If Republican Scott Brown, the former Cosmo fold-out, defeats Martha Coakley, the designated 60th Senate vote for Obamacare, in the special election in Massachusetts to fill Ted Kennedy’s long-time seat, there will undoubtedly be a flurry of columns about how she was beaten, in the end, by irrelevant, trivial gaffes that only prove how silly and provincial Massachusetts voters can be. In particular, the state’s voters will be ridiculed for rejecting Coakley after she airily dismissed Boston Red Sox legend Curt Schilling as “a Yankee fan.” O.K., so she doesn’t follow the Red Sox. Big deal. You want to choose a senator on stuff like that? Continue reading
Ed Schultz Shows How to Be Wildly Unethical in Fifty Words Or Less
The pattern is distressingly clear now. Fox News finds an arrogant, doctrinaire talking head on the Right, Bill O’Reilly, and soon its Left-tilted rival, MSNBC, has recruited an even more arrogant, doctrinaire talking head on that side of the spectrum, the assaultive Keith Olbermann. O’Reilly uncivilly calls those he disagrees with “pin-heads,” while Olberman calls them “the Worst Person in the World.” This motivates Fox to find a commentator on the Right who makes O’Reilly seem modest and measured, Glenn Beck. This, naturally, pushed MSNBC to look under every rock to find a liberal host who can out-Beck Beck.
The bad news: they succeeded, and found Ed Schultz, who is louder, cruder, more uncivil and less fair than any of the above-mentioned blowhards. The worse news: if you out Beck Beck, no responsible station should put you on the air. Continue reading
Ethics Alarms 