responsible journalism

Whatever The Huffington Post Thinks It’s Doing, It Isn’t Ethical

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

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I no longer check the Huffington Post for stories, and this latest example of its unprofessional and unethical culture is a perfect example why.

Having earlier beclowned itself by unilaterally deciding that Donald Trump did not warrant serious coverage as presidential candidate despite the fact —nauseating though it is—that he is a serious candidate and is having a massive and undeniable effect on the race, the news and opinion website now has decreed that every future story about The Donald will henceforth have appended to it the following legend:

“Note to our readers: Donald Trump is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, birther and bully who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims — 1.6 billion members of an entire religion — from entering the U.S.”

My post about the ethics vacuum displayed by the previous anti-Trump policy (which Huffpo eventually had to retract) applies with equal force to this one:

“The Huffington Post has just given us one of the worst examples of the modern news media’s abandonment of professionalism and ethics for partisan favoritism, but a refreshingly open one. Usually the biased news media doesn’t announce its unethical manipulation of what we get to hear and see.”

I must conclude that even that tongue in cheek faint praise was excessively gentle. The only way Arianna Huffington could think this well-poisoning label is anything but outrageous is if she couldn’t pick a journalism ethics code out of a line-up of baseball cards and movie posters. Since the Huffington Post, by doing this, has intentionally or not proclaimed to the world that it rejects the minimal levels of restraint, fairness, objectivity and professionalism  that necessarily accompany the description “responsible and trustworthy news media,” what is it? Indeed, what the hell is it? Continue reading →

Nuclear Crisis Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Meltdown! Radiation! Mutations! Well, I guess that's all we have to know.

I just heard, for the twelfth time, Sen. Joe Lieberman telling “Face the Nation” that the United States should put the brakes on nuclear energy plant construction “right now until we understand the ramifications of what’s happening in Japan.” Meanwhile, the anti-nukes crowd is out in full force, seeing Japan’s crisis as their opportunity to scare the bejesus out of the public, which is nervous about nuclear energy anyway since they know nothing about it, other than that something bad happened at Three-Mile Island, the Russians had a catastrophe at Chernobyl,  Jane Fonda made that scary movie, “The China Syndrome,” where they shot Jack Lemmon— “And don’t they make bombs with that nuclear stuff?”—and the fact that Homer Simpson works for a nuclear plant that creates three-eyed fish and is run by that evil old Montgomery Burns. Continue reading →