“This Week with George Stephanopoulos”

Dark and Brooding Thoughts

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Denis McDonoughFrom Politico:

White House chief of staff Denis McDonough suffered a slip of the tongue Sunday when he offered the first name of an American woman held hostage by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.

In an interview with host George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s “This Week” about the ongoing situation with a Japanese hostage held by ISIL, McDonough mentioned the woman’s first name, which is not public knowledge.

No, Politico, this is not a “slip of the tongue.” McDonough was appearing on a full slate of Sunday morning shows, and he had certain objectives and parameters which, as a professional and a high-ranking advisor to the President of the United States, he was bound and obligated to be competent to fulfill, or he should not have accepted the assignment. There weren’t that many of them. One was not to reveal the name of an ISIS hostage, and he couldn’t do that. He was not properly prepped, or trained, or focused on his assignment.

It’s not because “anyone can make a mistake.” Professionals do not make such mistakes, and if they do, they are in the wrong profession. This occurred, as so, so, SO many other fiascos have, because this entire Administration is led by, staffed by and advised by hyper-partisan incompetents who learn nothing, understand nothing, and place the interests of the United States at constant risk; because a culture of arrogant incompetence has been allowed to flourish under the abdication of journalists to call it to account; and because the potential critics whose allied philosophies would make them the most effective voices to call for accountability are too biased, cowardly, or lacking in integrity to do so.

You can’t trust our national leadership. If you do, you are a fool. This has nothing whatsoever to do about policies, parties, or loyalty.

As I ponder this, I am trying to understand the character of a man who could preside of over such a incompetently staffed and managed administration and still deliver the defiant, dishonest, destructive and divisive speech he gave to the Congress last week.

That may be a futile effort. But I doubt that I  can continue to muster respect for those who continue to offer excuses and rationalizations for this ongoing tragi-comedy of unapologetic ineptitude rather than to face reality and try to help the nation survive the next two years.

That’s what I’m thinking tonight.

I wish I weren’t.

Ethically Incoherent Statement Of The Month: Van Jones

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments
Van Jones: Reasonable or biased?

Van Jones: Reasonable or biased?

Van Jones, the former White House “czar” of something or other turned smooth-talking racialist warrior on CNN’s “Cross-Fire” and various TV panels, was arguing for frank racial dialogue on ABC’s “This Week With George Stephanopoulos,” in the context of the protests over the Ferguson and Staten Island police grand jury decisions. Sounding reasonable as he often does, Jones then said that what should be an area of agreement is the need for a special prosecutor whenever police misconduct is before a grand jury, noting that it was an “obvious conflict of interest”for prosecutors who work with police as a core element of their job.

I have addressed this argument before, but let me be clearer. This is a conflict of interest that a competent and ethical prosecutor should acknowledge and be able to deal with as the legal ethics rule require. The prosecutor should get a waiver from his or her client—not the victim’s family, but the government the prosecutor represents—and honestly assess whether the fact that the police serve the same client will prevent the prosecutor from being fair and objective. If the answer is yes, then the prosecutor must recuse, but I see no reason why the answer should be yes, if the prosecutor is ethical and worthy of the position.(Jones and other advocates for this “solution” have a bias against prosecutors, whom they view as presumptively unethical.)

Theoretically, every case in which an officer’s credibility determines whether a citizen should be charged poses the same conflict: it is endemic to the prosecutor’s job. Indeed, prosecutors have a very good reason to want bad cops punished and removed from the police force; I’m not at all certain that there is a necessary bias on the part of prosecutors in favor of letting such cops escape legal consequences of their actions. That assumption is based on the assumption that prosecutors don’t care about  justice. Nobody who doesn’t care about justice becomes a prosecutor. Why would they? It is a hard, frustrating job and the pay isn’t anything special.

The strongest argument for a special prosecutor is a different ethical problem, the appearance of impropriety. If the decision to prosecute or not is tainted with suspicion of bias, then the justice system is compromised and breaks down. This is why, for example, it is terrible that the Justice Department, a super-politicized one at that, is supposedly investigating the I.R.S. scandal.

As George moved to another topic, Jones blurted out a final statement that caused me to spit-take a mouthful of coffee. It undermined all of his finely tuned rhetoric about fairness and non-partisan dialogue about race, and exposed, ironically, his own biases. He said;

“If there had been a special prosecutor in Ferguson, we would have had a different result.”

AHA! Continue reading →

Ethics Dunces: ABC News, Jonathan Karl and the Sunday Morning “Roundtable”

/ Jack Marshall / 39 Comments

Republican Texas Governor Rick Perry is being threatened with prison by a per se unethical and illegal grand jury indictment, obtained by special prosecutor Michael McCrum, that attempts to criminalize not merely political tactics, which is how critics are describing it, but the essential and obligatory efforts of a state’s elected leader  to remove a corrupt and unqualified district attorney who is unfit to serve, corrupt,defiant….and drunk as a skunk.

You can read various eviscerations of the indictment here, here and here; there are many more. So far, I can’t find a respectable legal source that finds the indictment anything better than jaw-droppingly absurd and an abuse of prosecution. Jonathan Chait, a left-ish pundit and far from a Perry fan (much like me, except for the left-ish part), nicely expresses his contempt of the charge here. A short hand version would be that Perry has been threatened with jail based on what he said about vetoing a bill, which seems like a First Amendment violation to me.

The reason for the Ethics Dunce call on ABC is that this morning, the network reported on the indictment of Perry and its effect on his Presidential prospects in 2016 without explaining the reason for the Governor’s actions that the prosecutor is straining to call illegal. A simple, thorough, clear explanation would be sufficient to cause any reasonable reader or listener to cry “What? You’re kidding! That’s not possible!” That explanation, however, was not forthcoming on ABC, and has been missing from other reporting as well. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Van Jones

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments
Slavery, 2014 style.

Slavery, 2014 style.

On this Sunday’s edition of ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulis, the weekly gorge-rising moment occurred when former White House “czar” and alleged truther turned pundit Van Jones weighed in on the Donald Sterling saga, noting that in the NBA owner’s taped remarks he arrogantly alluded to the fact that his highly paid NBA players are dependent on him for their livelihood. To plenty of nods and amens around the table (the Sunday talk shows no longer even attempt to attempt partisan or ideological balance), Jones said that this “sounded more like 1814 than 2014.”

I will observe again, though no one in the panel was fair enough to because Sterling is disgusting and doesn’t deserve journalistic fairness, that these comments were spontaneous and off-the-cuff, and not designed to withstand the scrutiny of critical parsing and hostile analysis, as few private conversations are. But that is a secondary point.

The main point is that nobody in the ABC roundtable, including moderator Stephanopoulis, was impertinent, brave, professional or competent enough to note that last week, rancher Cliven Bundy was crucified for making an ignorant statement that minimized the horrors of slavery, and that Jones’s idiotic comparison was as bad or worse. Continue reading →

Supreme Court Integrity and the Useless Times-CBS Poll

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

If you dislike these people,but haven’t read their actual opinions, don’t know their names and are basing your opinion on what other people say, I don’t care what you think, and neither should anyone else.

I suppose there may be could be some uses for the recent New York Times-CBS poll measuring public attitudes about the Supreme Court. It could be used to launch, for example, a discussion about how little the public understands about the Court and how it operates. It might prompt a discussion about the recklessness of the two parties, which regularly attack the integrity of the Court every time it arrives at a decision that one of them doesn’t like. It might even prompt a refresher course on what went on during the 2000 Florida vote recount, and why that case required the Supreme Court to play a unique role that had nothing to do with helping George Bush “steal the election.” All of these would require an unformed and responsible newsmedia. however, so what the poll is prompting instead  misleading debates among talking heads about what the Court needs to do differently.

The Supreme Court needs to do nothing at all differently. Continue reading →

Unethical Quote of the Week: Georgetown Professor Michael Eric Dyson

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

 “Look all of this othering of Obama, like he’s from some other planet. Everything he does is subject to a different lens and seen through a microscope that really tends to pick him apart. I think it’s indivisible from the broader issue of his race, of his being a black man with a certain kind of authority. These are impolite things we don’t want to talk about. We think that they’re being extraordinary ratcheted up. But I don’t see any other way to explain it but a remarkable resistance to the integrity of this man that has no other explanation”

—-Prof. Michael Eric Dyson, discussing criticism of President Obama’s comments on the Supreme Court during Sunday’s edition of ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos.” 

Prof. Dyson

When we look at why it is that there is a vast divide between black and white Americans regarding such incidents as the Trayvon Martin tragedy, the irresponsible comments of supposedly respectable commentators like Dyson must be given due weight. How all previous presidents must envy President Obama, whose defenders have a ready and versatile, if disgraceful, defense for any misstep, error, mistake, misstatement or policy that goes awry: it’s just racism.  What a wonderful tool to deflect criticism! Of course, it is ethically indefensible and contributes to racial divisions in the nation and society, which President Obama supposedly sought to heal, but polls must be telling the Democrats, and their flacks in the media, that it is effective.

Prof. Dyson is a scholar at a major university, and his race-baiting to discourage open and fair political discourse is thus more despicable and harmful than that of celebrities like Morgan Freeman and professional race-card dealers like Representatives Sheila Jackson Lee and Maxine Waters. Astoundingly, his outburst occurred during a discussion of President Obama’s almost universally derided and shockingly inaccurate comments about the possibility that a majority of the Supreme Court would find Obamacare’s individual mandate unconstitutional. The criticism of the President was legitimate, substantive, and richly deserved: if that criticism was based on race, than all criticism of Obama is motivated by race. That, of course, is exactly the message that Prof. Dyson wants to deliver.

Proposing “The Bachmann-Plouffe Rule”

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

My new rule could stop this from happening to me in the very near future, and perhaps you as well!

I am ready to bestow my ever-lasting loyalty and admiration, not to mention a lifetime Ethics Hero award and maybe even a monthly stipend upon the first broadcast journalist who pledges to employ henceforward what I will call “The Bachmann-Plouffe Rule.”  ABC’s George Stephanopoulos emphatically did NOT employ the rule this morning in his back-to-back interviews of White House advisor David Plouffe and Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann, inspiring me 1) to name the rule and 2) throw my newspaper at the TV screen. Twice.

I don’t have the transcript, but I can fairly describe the exchanges. Plouffe was routinely mouthing Obama re-election talking points, when Stephanopoulos pressed him on the issue of gay marriage, specifically regarding the fact that the Democrats are talking about having a national campaign platform plank that explicitly endorses it, while the President has notably declined to give a clear endorsement of same-sex marriage. George asked why Obama doesn’t just declare that he supports it, and, if he does not do so, whether his ambivalence will place him at odds with his party’s position.

Plouffe didn’t answer the question. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: George Stephanopoulos

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

ABC News presents: "This Week with Bud Abbott"

Today George Stephanopoulos began “This Week with George Stephanopoulos,” his Sunday ABC current events show, with 15 minutes of a pointless, irrelevant, unfunny interview with Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert, who, in the proud tradition of Pat Paulsen, is again running a fake presidential campaign.Such stunts have always been about cheap publicity, ratings and entertainment, and have as much pertinence to public affairs and national politics as Taylor Swift’s recipe for chili. For ABC News to devote a full 25% of its weekly overview to this nonsense is disrespectful to viewers, who do not tune in to George, Paul Krugman, Peggy Noonan and the rest for yuks. I know how to find Colbert, who is a talented satirist and an engaging performer, when I’m in the mood for him. For Stephanopoulos to waste my time with his failed audition as the next Bud Abbott—his attempt to riff with Colbert was painful to watch, and essentially killed the comic’s act—was  a breach of journalistic integrity and responsibility, not to mention comedy malpractice.Does the New York Times, just for the heck of it and for funsies, spontaneously devote a quarter of its front page to knock-knock jokes, because it’s their paper, and what the hell? No, because it has a job to do, and people depend on the Times to do it. Continue reading →