responsibility

To Edit, or Not to Edit: A Blogging Ethical Dilemma

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

I was just simultaneously reading an excellent, if not particularly revolutionary, article about blogging ethics and checking out the latest comments on the Immortal Tide (with Acti-lift!) Debate. Suddenly I found myself wishing that the author, whose essay concentrated on editing blog posts, had also addressed the issue of editing blog comments.

Unlike some blog platforms, WordPress does not have a feature that allows commenters to review or spell-check their own posts. Despite this, many of the regular commenters here have a better record of avoiding typos than I do, and I have preview and spellcheck features. When they make a spelling or grammatical error (and I notice it), I will fix it for them: WordPress allows me to edit comments. Sometimes a commenter will e-mail me personally and request an edit, and I am happy to oblige.

A while ago, one new commenter whose post was riddled with spelling and grammatical errors accused me of letting her errors stand to make her look unintelligent because she had disagreed with my original post, while I continued to edit comments that were more friendly. In her case, I actually hadn’t read the previous typo-infested comment that she was referring to, and treated her complaint as a request to edit it, which I did. But it was a mess, and I wondered then if it made sense, or was even fair, to turn an inarticulate, careless comment into a clear and persuasive one.

Today I have read several posts on the endless Tide commercial thread from a 15-year-old girl. The post is in text-speak, essentially, without capitals, punctuation or any attention to style. It is a clear comment, however,even if it is obviously the expression of a 21st Century teen. Should I edit her comment to give it more credibility, by punctuating it, for example?

What is an ethical editing policy regarding comments on an ethics blog? The options, as I see them, with their ethical pros and cons: Continue reading →

Comment of the Day: “Facebook Wars: Parental Abdication, School Abuse of Power”

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

The Comment of the Day is from Joshua, from the lively thread on the post “Facebook Wars: Parental Abdication, School Abuse of Power.” Continue reading →

Michael Palmer’s Ethics No-Brainer

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Physician/novelist Michael Palmer is something of the new Michael Crichton, though unlike the eclectic late author of “Jurassic Park,” Palmer generally restricts himself to medical thrillers. He is promoting his latest novel, “A Heartbeat Away,” with a series of “ethics brainteasers,” as he called them in a recent Twitter post. Here is the latest, which he posted on his Facebook page and asked fans to discuss:

“What if a close friend confides to you that he/she has committed a heinous crime and you promise that you’ll never tell. However, you soon discover that an innocent person has been accused of the crime and is possibly facing significant jail time. You plead with your friend to give him/herself up, but he/she refuses and reminds you of the promise. What should you do? What if the if jail time was only a few months? What if the sentence was death?” Continue reading →

Facebook Wars: Parental Abdication, School Abuse of Power

/ Jack Marshall / 57 Comments

Student Facebook pages were much in the news yesterday. One student was suspended from an Illinois school for posting a list of girls at his high school ranked by appearance and sexual proclivities, while another school, Uniondale High, contacted authorities in Nassau County who prevailed upon Facebook to take down a similar page posting provocative comments about high school girls in various area high schools. Uniondale says it has a “no tolerance” policy toward cyber-bullying.

When did schools suddenly acquire disciplinary control over what students do when they aren’t at school? Continue reading →

CNN and John King, Endorsing “Newspeak” and Disgracing American Journalism

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

And so it begins.

CNN’s John King: “Before we go to break, I want to make a quick point. We were having a discussion about the Chicago mayoral race. My friend Andy Shaw used the term ‘in the crosshairs’ in talking about the candidates. We’re trying, we’re trying to get away from that language. Andy is a good friend, he’s covered politics for a long time, but we’re trying to get away from that kind of language.”

What “kind of langauge”? Oh, you know: vivid language. Metaphors. Similes. Can’t have that on CNN, because, as everyone knows, a completely unrelated use of a cross-hairs graphic on a Sarah Palin campaign map had nothing to do with the shooting of  Rep. Gaby Giffords and 19 others, but the media decided to make everyone think it was the fault of the map anyway. So now a news network, which is supposed to convey information, is apologizing for a guest’s use of the word “cross-hairs” in a context that had nothing to do with violence. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Cancer Researcher Sook Shin

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Sook Shin and her husband are respected cancer researchers at an Oklahoma University research lab, committing their lives to finding a cure for prostate cancer. The couple recently stopped at a Panera Bread restaurant for a quick meal, and returned to their car to find a window broken, and their Apple computer, carrying years of data—the product of thousands of hours and research dollars—including, they say, a possible cancer cure, gone. Tragically, they had not backed up the data. Continue reading →

“Cat Ballou” Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

It is generally believed that Lee Marvin’s drunken horsemanship (as well as the comic appearance of his horse, which also appeared to be drunk) greatly assisted his winning the 1966 Academy Award for Best Actor. In case you are considering riding your own horse or mule while in a state similar to Marvin’s “Kid Shelleen,” this article may be of interest. While it is undoubtedly unethical to ride a horse while intoxicated (irresponsible, reckless, and dangerous to both the horse and anyone near it), it may not be illegal, because a horse is not a vehicle.

Unavoidable Ethics: Giffords Needs To Resign

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

Rep. Giffords doesn’t have to face this inevitable decision now or tomorrow or in the next few weeks. She will have to face it, however, and as soon as she is well enough to evaluate her situation realistically, she owes it to her district and the country to step down, and let someone take her place as Representative of the 8th District of Arizona. Continue reading →

Police Raid Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

At 5:30 a.m. on Thursday of last week,  police officers, weapons drawn, burst into the home into the house and pointed guns at the McKay family of Spring Valley, New York. David McKay said officers were screaming for someone named Michael, and when he tried to explain that nobody by that name lived there, the police pulled him, in his underwear, outside into the freezing cold. Then officers ordered McKay’s 13-year-old daughter out of her bed at gunpoint, a trauma that caused her to vomit, faint, and later to have an asthma attack. Continue reading →

Unethical Web Post of the Month: William Rivers Pitt

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

I had been unaware of the existence of a writer named William Rivers Pitt before yesterday, and I now I will look back on those days of naive and blissful ignorance with nostalgia and deep mourning for innocence lost. The face of unreasoning hate and bigotry is always ugly, but one seldom encounters such purple-complexioned, vein-popping, spittle-spewing fury on the web, especially from a published author with a vocabulary exceeding “Deliverance” levels. I had been aware of the website Truth-Out, a hard Left commentary site that I now know exercises no editorial discretion whatsoever.

Mr. Pitt’s rant is entitled “The Wrath of Fools: An Open Letter to the Far Right,” which, if it were written by anyone with a history of the relative moderation of, say, Richard Cohen, Nancy Pelosi or Bill Maher, I would assume was satire. Continue reading →