The Washington Post

Ethics Alarms Banishes “The Smoking Gun,” Unethical Website of the Month

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments
"This? Sure, this fits our mission. Post it!"

“This? Sure, this fits our mission. Post it!”

“The Smoking Gun” website has been linked on Ethics Alarms from the start, as its published documents from various sources can be an invaluable resource in uncovering unethical conduct in business, government, and popular culture.  Being linked here, however, carries an implied conviction that a site is itself ethical, or at least makes a good faith effort to be so. I can no longer say this with confidence about the “The Smoking Gun,” and thus am deleting its link while designating it the Unethical Website of the Month. Let’s not forget that it is owned by Time-Warner.

Why the ban? A hacker by the name of Guccifer hacked into Bush family AOL accounts, stole private messages and photos and posted them online  to embarrass the Bush family and violate their privacy. “The Smoking Gun” then re-posted all of it, including a private letter from George W. Bush to his family about planning the funeral of his father. Continue reading →

Fair Is Fair: The Times Isn’t Perfect, But It’s Time I Paid For It

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

nyt-paywallEver since the New York Times instituted its paywall system, which forces you to subscribe to its cyber-version once you use the site more than 20 times in a 30 day period, I have been economizing on my Times use rather than pay its (reasonable) subscription fee. One reason was money; one reason was that I usually don’t have to use the Times more than 20 times a month, with other good news sources out there that charge nothing at all; and a last reason is that the Times annoys me with its hard left-wing bias, well to the left of the Washington Post, which is hardly balanced, and inappropriate, in my view, for the publication that holds itself up as the exemplar of American journalism. The exemplar of American journalism should be objective and non-partisan, damn it, or at least try to be.

I have to admit, however, that even with its biases, the New York Times is still the best news source I know. I get the Post delivered to my door every day, and read the print copy of the Times only when I am on the road. I am always struck at how often a Times story or feature is directly relevant to my work, compared to any of its competition, including the acclaimed publication I read every day. Yesterday I learned that the Times has scheduled yet another round of lay-offs and buy-outs. It is in financial trouble, like all newspapers, and I can no longer justify refusing to do my part to help it survive as long as it can. The Times has given a lot to me, my readers and my field, and what it has provided has come with tangible expenses that are becoming more difficult to cover. The paper drives me crazy sometimes, but it remains a vital resource; it is unfair to focus my disillusionment with the journalistic field at the best of it, much as I would like to see the Times set an even higher standard. Right now, the battle is to allow the Times to maintain the journalistic standard, however flawed, that it sets now.

I just signed up for a cyber-subscription. The Times has earned my support, and with it struggling to keep the print flowing, I can no longer justify taking my 19 free articles a month and giving nothing back in return.

The Worst Ombudsman Ever Strikes Again!

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

"Wait! Wait! It wasn't that good a story! Why did you have to pay so much attention to it? Now Our friends are all mad and everything!"

Patrick B. Pexton, whom Ethics Alarms dubbed The Worst Ombudsman Ever last Fall, has cemented his title with yet another example of bias and incompetence. By rights, he should be in a spirited battle for WOE with New York Times “public editor” (a.k.a ombudsman ) Clark Hoyt, who, among other derelictions of duty, has refused to criticize Times columnist Charles M. Blow for blatant anti-Morman bigotry. At least Hoyt writes about journalistic ethics, which is his (and Pexton’s) job to do, though not always well. The ombudsman’s proper role in any organization is to serve the public interest by answering and resolving complaints against the organization, calling foul when the organization does wrong, and making standards clear when it does not. In a new organization, the ombudsman is the guardian of journalistic ethics, and all that implies, from fairness to objectivity to competence. Pexton seems to see his function as an advocate for the Post when it is under attack, and for the Obama Administration when the opportunity presents itself. That does not serve the public interest.

Thus it is that Pexton has written a bizarre and gratuitous  defense of a Post story that went viral on the internet, arguing that it wasn’t the Post’s fault that so many people paid attention to it, that the story was no big deal, really, and that “only our reactive, partisan, hyperventilating media culture” made it one. Isn’t that strange? A newspaper’s story gets quoted and circulated, and its ombudsman feels that he has to apologize for it? What was the matter with the story? Was it wrong? That would justify Pexton’s professional <Cough!> attentions. Well, no, it wasn’t wrong. Was it unfair? Er, not really, no. What then? Continue reading →

The Romney and Paul Smears: Time For U.S. News Media To Admit Its Bias And Address It

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

"Mitt Romney is the one in the middle. Or so we're told. Seems plausible to us."

Although the left-leaning bias of the majority of the news media is frighteningly/absurdly/amusingly/frustratingly obvious (depending on your point of view) every single day, the standard response to complaints remains, 1) “What about Fox?” and 2) “Bias? What bias?”  The latter response, if not proof of dishonesty or pathological denial, is one of the symptoms of the problem: the mainstream media is so used to being biased that bias is now the status quo.

There has been plenty of evidence in 2011, however, that the problem is getting worse, and both the public and self-government are being badly served as a result. Recently there was another flutter of statements from pundits and others, like Bill Clinton, that the media obviously favored Obama over Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination battle. Of course it did. That the media then went on to outrageously tilt its coverage in Obama’s favor durin the campaign for the general election is hardly capable of contradiction: Obama was on more magazine covers, got more video time, received more consistently hagiographic stories, his questionably-qualified running mate was barely criticized while the press couldn’t attack McCain’s enough…in short, it was a disgraceful abdication of professional duty. How can journalists decry the influence of Super-PACs and big money in elections when the news media, the most powerful communications factor of all ( because it has—still—the remains of a reputation for being objective, fair and accurate) is consistently biased? Not only is that a bigger problem, it is one journalists themselves have the power to fix…if they wanted to, if they cared. Continue reading →

Comment of the Day: “The Washington Post Flunks Integrity, Conflicts, and Trustworthiness”

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

I do want to hold the line on featuring Comments of the Day that I think exemplify awful ethical reasoning, as opposed to those that are provocative and enlightening, to a minimum. This one, however, is too rich to ignore. It is the defense of an apparent journalist for the ethics-busting behavior of the Washington Post in the recent Jose Antonio Vargas incident using a dizzying array of alibis and rationalizations, including “they’re better than most,” “people don’t care,” “you have to cheat to stay in business,” “they are better than the alternative,” and others. It also resorts to the time-honored “who are you to judge?” and “you couldn’t do a better job.”

If this is typical of how journalists view their profession’s ethical obligations—and I think it is—the comment explains a lot. You can read my lin-by-line response after the original post. Here is the Comment of the Day, by okonheim: Continue reading →

The Washington Post Flunks Integrity, Conflicts, and Trustworthiness

/ Jack Marshall / 32 Comments

Newspaper...Heal Thyself!

The incidents of blatantly untrustworthy conduct by supposedly prestigious news organizations have become so numerous that they are almost no longer newsworthy themselves. Journalists failing their core ethical standards when maintaining them would be inconvenient? That’s not news. That’s the status quo.

Patrick B. Pexton, the Washington Posts’s ombudsman, had to write about the strange case of Jose Antonio Vargas, the celebrated journalist, once employed by the Post, who admitted last week that he was an illegal alien.  In particular, he had to write about 1) why a Post editor, Peter Perl, continued to employ Vargas and hid his immigration status for eight years after learning that he was in the country illegally and 2) why Vargas’s 4000 word piece about his deception (and the Post’s complicity in it) was killed by another Post editor, resulting in its being picked up and published by the New York Times. So the in-house ethics watchdog wrote about it, and concluded—nothing.  Continue reading →

Abuse of Power and Press Intimidation At The White House

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

"Hey, Herald! Get with the program!"

In response to a complaint by the Boston Herald about the limited access its staff would have to President Obama during his visit to Boston,  Matt Lehrich, an Obama aide, attributed the treatment to the White House’s objections to a front page opinion article by former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney in which he attacked the administration’s job-creation record. “I think that raises a fair question about whether the paper is unbiased in its coverage of the president’s visits,”  Lehrich told the Herald in an email.

And maybe it does. Then again, there is a mountain of evidence that hundreds of media outlets, including four of the five major TV news organizations, the New York Times, The Washington Post, and many others, are also biased in their coverage of everything this president does–favorably. Apparently the White House, which has already disgraced itself by repeatedly attacking the one critical network by name for the state offense of not falling into line, can’t abide the fact that some print journalists are as prone to be critical of him as Chris Matthews is likely to get tingles up his leg every time Obama opens his mouth. Their response? Make it harder for the unfavorably biased journalists to cover the news. Continue reading →

Loop-Hole Ethics and The New York Times

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

The NYT’s website paywall plan floats in a sea of holes.

Ariel Kaminer, author of “The Ethicist” column in The New York Times Magazine, made an interesting assertion in her answer to a reader who asked about whether he could exploit several loop-holes in the Times’ new paywall plan for its website.

Noting that he was a struggling freelance journalist who visits the Times website often, he asked if it was unethical for him to use his parents’ free access to the content, since they are subscribers.  Then he Mused about other scenarios. “If I buy online access, can I share the password with my live-in girlfriend, even if I move to New York for the summer? What about our other housemates?” Continue reading →

Hypocrisy of the Year: The Islamophobic New York Times Company, Washington Post, Et Al.

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

The New York Times, as well as the Washington Post and other major newspapers, have piously condemned those who raised objections to the proposed Islamic center in Manhattan, near the site where nearly 3,000 Americans met their death at the hands of Islamic extremists. The Times, the Post, their fellow papers and many of their columnists and bloggers proclaimed that a peaceful religion was being smeared by bigoted Americans and political leaders smitten with “Islamophobia.”

Then, on October 3, a Sunday installment of the prize-winning comic strip “Non Sequitur” was censored from the pages of the Post, the Times-owed Boston Globe (the Times itself has no cartoons) and almost 20 others. The strip, you see, jokingly suggested that an image of Muhammad the Prophet, which strict Islamic principles decree must never be shown or ridiculed under threat of a fatwah, might be hidden among the depicted happy characters in the manner of the “Where’s Waldo?” children’s books. Continue reading →

Unethical Quote of the Week: Columnist Eugene Robinson

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

“According to polls, Americans are in a mood to hold their breath until they turn blue. Voters appear to be so fed up with the Democrats that they’re ready to toss them out in favor of the Republicans — for whom, according to those same polls, the nation has even greater contempt. This isn’t an ‘electoral wave,’ it’s a temper tantrum.”

—Op-Ed writer Eugene Robinson in the Sept. 3 Washington Post

The surest proof that a citizen or commentator is partisan beyond the point of fairness, objectivity, or even common sense is the abandonment of the ethical principle of accountability. Voters with this malady re-elect demonstrably corrupt politicians, cheats and liars, using the argument that they are still the “best candidates.” While this is fortunate for elected officials, past and present, like Tom DeLay, Bill Clinton, Charlie Rangel, Maxine Waters, Eddie Johnson, Ted Stevens, and many, many others, it guarantees bad government and a rotting political culture, perpetrated by increasingly arrogant, unresponsive, incompetent and dishonest public servants. Continue reading →