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Comment of the Day: “More Interview Ethics: Janet Mock Ambushes Piers Morgan”

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

XY

Ethics Alarms encourages long form comments, especially when they are as carefully reasoned, authoritative and well-written as the one presented here, by zoebrain, the Ethics Alarms expert on all things trans, gendered, re-gendered and more.

The new, complex and divisive ethical issues arising from gender matters have appeared here with increasing frequency, most recently in the post that inspired this comment—actually two comments—that attempts to enlighten the cyssies among us. I think it is required reading for anyone who wants to understand this complex subject, which is certain to generate more ethics dilemmas and controversies. I am grateful for all comments, but I want to send special thanks to the author, who obviously spent a lot of time and thought on what follows.

Here is zoebrain’s Comment of the Day on the post, “More Interview Ethics: Janet Mock Ambushes Piers Morgan”...

First, I better say why this is important, why the distinction between “used to be a boy” and “used to look like a boy” isn’t just some sterile, trivial and pedantic squabble. Continue reading →

More Interview Ethics: Janet Mock Ambushes Piers Morgan

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

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Piers Morgan, CNN’s imported British tabloid reporter turned Larry King replacement, invited trans author and activist Janet Mock on his show to promote her new memoir, “Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love & So Much More.” As I watched the interview (because of Mock and not Morgan, who makes my skin crawl), I was struck by how far such interviews have come since David Susskind would invite transgendered individuals on his PBS show—this was classy, remember—and essentially hold them out as freaks. Morgan was respectful and supportive, though the sensationalist aspect was still there but muted: the text under Mock during her interview read “BORN A BOY,” and “was a boy until age 18,” which are, though accurately describing how most CNN viewers would understand Mock’s journey, over-simplified and counter to how Mock describes herself.

Mock seemed happy, Morgan seemed gracious. Then Mock went on Twitter and Buzzfeed to pronounce Morgan a clueless, ignorant, biased jerk.  He was, shockingly, “trying to do infotainment” Mock said. Morgan’s show is the epitome of infotainment, and everybody knows it. She criticized him for “sensationalizing” transgender people while neglecting a substantive discussion about her book. The sales of Mock’s memoir depend on its sensational aspects, again, as she and her publisher well know. Mock accused Morgan of asking the same kinds of embarrassing questions about body parts and boy friends that non-trans people are inevitably curious about. Well, of course he did…because that’s what his audience is curious about.

None of this was communicated to Morgan either before, during, or after the interview. Morgan, who is no Sam Rubin, was incensed, and struck back via Twitter, since that is the forum where Mock chose to publicly attack him. In various tweets and exchanges he called Mock cowardly, “churlish,” and shameful, and criticized her allies as well, as she successfully brought down the progressive hoards on Morgan’s head. The same week, he invited her back to on the show along with a panel so he could defend himself while assailing her conduct. You can read the transcript of that show here.

What’s going on here? Continue reading →

Governor Cuomo’s Selective Anti-Gun Fervor: And This Is Why So Many Americans Have No Respect for Laws Or Lawmakers

/ Jack Marshall / 35 Comments
Guns are a public menace! We must not permit lawless, reckless gun possession! Unless its a member of my staff, of course, in which case, meh, no biggie.

“Guns are a public menace! We must not permit lawless, reckless gun possession! Unless it’s a member of my staff, of course, in which case, meh, no biggie.”

[UPDATE: Jerome Hauer disputes some of the reported facts in this post. I have yet to find any sources that have different facts, but I will revisit both the story and my conclusions, and make appropriate revisions, retractions, or clarifications if and when warranted. You will find Mr. Hauer’s comment, and my reply to him, below.]

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has been the source of some of the most excessive anti-gun rants making up the sorry legacy of the Post Sandy Hook Ethics Train Wreck. It was a year ago that a unveiled a package of strict gun restrictions, saying that with “the senseless massacre in Newtown, Connecticut… New York must say enough is enough to gun violence.” Oh, Gov. Cuomo hates guns, believe you me.

So what do you think happened when it was revealed that Jerome Hauer, Cuomo’s Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Services Commissioner appointed in 2011, had not only been carrying a handgun to work ever since, but also, incredibly, took out the gun and used the laser sighting device attached to the barrel as a pointer in a presentation to a Swedish delegation on Oct. 24? Hauer was not only breaking the Cuomo-backed law barring state employees from packing a weapon at their workplace, but also was modeling the kind of ignorant and dangerous firearm misuse that undermines any claim that he was a safe, responsible, well-trained gun owner.

What happened appears to be this: as soon as the Governor got word that Hauer’s illegal and reckless conduct was about to be revealed in the press, the Homeland Security chief received a quick waiver from New York’s Office of General Services Commissioner RoAnn Destito. The waiver, of course, could not make his prior conduct legal. Continue reading →

Unethical Website Of The Month: Get Covered America, But Hey, These Are All Just Bumps In The Road And The Fact That The Same People Who Keep Making These Stupid Decisions Are The Same Ones Who Are Supposed To Make The Law Work Shouldn’t Cause Anyone To Get All Negative And Cynical Or AnyThing!

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments
"hey...hey...I gotta toast! HERE'S TO OMABACARE!!"

“hey…hey…I gotta toast! HERE’S TO OMABACARE!!”

The government taxpayer-funded Affordable Care Act promotional entity called Get Covered America is either desperate, stupid, or the invention of Saturday Night Live.

Via its website, the same crack public servants who brought you Obamacare have designated this Saturday as National Youth Enrollment Day for the new system, a day designed to increase the  youthful sign-ups for the law that are both essential to its success  and lagging badly, in part because the HealthCare.gov was and is a disaster, but mostly because the bill’s architects had no idea what they were doing, or at least not enough.

National Youth Enrollment Day will be marked by various keen events. One of them, happily promoted on the GCA website, is a pubcrawl through Austin.

From the CDC:

“There are approximately 88,000 deaths attributable to excessive alcohol use each year in the United States.This makes excessive alcohol use the 3rd leading lifestyle-related cause of death for the nation. Excessive alcohol use is responsible for 2.5 million years of potential life lost (YPLL) annually, or an average of about 30 years of potential life lost for each death. In 2006, there were more than 1.2 million emergency room visits and 2.7 million physician office visits due to excessive drinking. The economic costs of excessive alcohol consumption in 2006 were estimated at $223.5 billion.”

I guess the planned smoker to promote the AFA, as well as the pork pig-out and orgy were vetoed for some reason, so the pub crawl was the best they could come up with. Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: Alex or Alexis?

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments
Actually, his friends called him "Alex"...

Actually, his friends called him “Alex”…

The Daily Caller believes it has caught the White House in an attempt to erase a Presidential gaffe from history:

“White House officials have quietly changed an official transcript to hide President Barack Obama’s embarrassing historical error during his international press conference with French President Francois Hollande. Obama’s error came when he misnamed Alexis de Tocqueville, a clear-eyed Frenchman who explained the subtle miracle of American culture and democracy in the 1830s. His book is a classic, partly because his insights about Americans’ social equality and civic society have become commonplace among centrists and conservatives. But Obama called him “Alex” in front of the French and U.S. press, and while facing banks of TV cameras. The White House’s official transcript, however, hides the presidential error by using the correct name. It now says that Obama declared: “Alexis de Tocqueville — that great son of France who chronicled our American democracy.

“Obama’s error was slight, but badly timed, partly because Obama is holding a state dinner for Hollande tonight.”

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz:

Is the White House transcript alteration of the President’s shortened version of de Tocqueville’s first name a mere edit of a trivial and immaterial miscue by President Obama (ethical) or an attempted cover-up, as the Daily Caller argues, of “an embarrassment for a President who claims to have been a constitutional scholar, and a judicious student of American history” (unethical)?

My answer: Continue reading →

Good News On Business Ethics? Maybe: The Ethics Research Center’s 2014 National Business Ethics Survey

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

ERC surveyThe Ethics Resource Center, a distinguished Washington, D.C. based ethics research and consulting firm, performs a survey of business employees every two years to measure trends in workplace ethics. It’s 2013 survey and report was released last week, and appears to bear good tidings. Workplace misconduct is on the decline, the data says.  41 percent of employees observed misconduct in 2013, way down from 55 percent in 2007. Moreover, ERC’s “National Business Ethics Survey,” which polled 6,400 U.S. employees, found that only 9 percent of employees polled felt pressure to compromise their standards in 2013, down from 13 percent in the previous survey in 2011.

ERC Chairman Michael G. Oxley  (of Sarbanes-Oxley fame) said in a release,“The results of the survey are encouraging and show that companies are doing a better job of holding workers accountable, imposing discipline for misconduct, and letting it be known publicly that bad behavior will be punished.”

Among the survey’s intriguing findings:

  • “Over the last two years, observed misconduct fell in every one of the 26 specific categories we asked about in both NBES 2011 and NBES 2013.
  • “Pressure to compromise standards, often a leading indicator of future misconduct, also was down – falling from 13 percent in 2011 to nine percent in the latest survey.”

Less encouraging are these: Continue reading →

The Republican Pattern Of Deceitful Tactics: Can This Party Be Trusted? No.

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

cdn-media.nationaljournal.com

I owe an apology to Michael Steele, the ethically clueless, dim-bulb predecessor to Reince Priebus as Chairman of the Republican National Committee. Still nauseous from Steele’s despicable 2010 fake census mailing fundraising scam, I referred to Priebus era deceptions like employing misleading editing of excerpts from Solicitor General Donald Verrilli’s defense of the Affordable Care Act before the Supreme Court, and sending out solicitations for donations that look like overdue bill notices as examples of “the Curse of Michael Steele.”  I’m beginning to think, however, that Steele wasn’t the problem, and that it was he who was infected by the unethical instincts of the GOP, rather than the other way around.

The Tampa Bay Times recently reported on the experience of citizen Ray Bellamy, who wanted to make a political contribution to Alex Sink, a Democrat running for Congress in Florida.  A Google located “http://contribute.sinkforcongress2014.com,” and sure enough, there was a large photo of Sink and the trappings of a campaign site. Assuming he was at the correct destination and without reading the text, Bellamy clicked on a button at the bottom of the page, sending $250 to Sink’s campaign, or so he thought. But the button was under the words, “Make a contribution today to help defeat Alex Sink and candidates like her,” which Bellamy also didn’t read. He felt he had been tricked. He had. Continue reading →

What A Hollywood Journalist Calls “Ethics”

/ Jack Marshall / 33 Comments
Listen to me, Roger, and I mean this in the nicest way: stick to gossip.

Listen to me, Roger, and I mean this in the nicest way: stick to gossip.

The Hollywood wagons are already circling around Woody Allen, accused—again, but now as an adult who can speak for herself—by Dylan Farrow of sexually abusing her when she was only 7 years old. Reading some of the statements issuing from Tinseltown, I am struck again by the ugly opposition any non-celebrity victim must face when accusing a powerful industry figure of wrongdoing. Luckily, many of the most vociferous defenders signal their desperation and their lack of basic comprehension of the issues, undermining their arguments.

Exhibit A is veteran Hollywood journalist Roger Friedman, who was quick to issue an article alleging, as he has for 20 years, that Dylan’s story is all part of a Mia Farrow plot to destroy innocent Woody. On his website, Friedman headlines his piece, “Mia Farrow Uses Close Pal Journalist in Woody Allen War: Writer of Latest Piece is Close Friend.” Friedman’s concept of what constitutes a “conflict of interest” is intriguing. His argument is that Times journalist Nicholas Kristof, who published Dylan’s open letter on his blog, is friends with Mia Farrow (Friedman implies that they are romantically involved while specifically saying that he isn’t implying it–his evident journalistic sliminess would undermine even a fair article, which this is not), and that this makes Dylan’s letter less credible. What he doesn’t explain, since he can’t, is why the same letter would be any more credible or reliable whether Kristof published it or someone else did. Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: Dylan Farrow (and Observations On Her Open Letter To Woody Allen’s Fans)

/ Jack Marshall / 55 Comments

dylan-farrow

Dylan Farrow was 7 years old when, she alleges, her adoptive father Woody Allen began sexually molesting her. Although this became the focus of the legal and public relations battle between her mother, actress Mia Farrow and Allen as their once romantic and domestic relationship—-already destroyed by Allen’s courtship, seduction and marriage of Dylan’s older, also-adopted sister Soon Yi—exploded onto the scandal sheets more than 20 years ago, the now-married Dylan has never spoken out about it herself, though her mother and other siblings have. Allen avoided any criminal charges despite an investigation that found probable cause, and his popularity among film-goers and his stature in Hollywood seemed to be undamaged. Last month, however, a lifetime achievement award at the Golden Globes (accepted by a fawning Diane Keaton) re-opened the unhealed wounds for the Farrows, and Allen’s Oscar nomination last week for his original screenplay for “Blue Jasmine” was apparently too much.

Now Dylan Farrow has decided to tell her own story, and has done so in open letter form, published on the blog of New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof.

I ask that you read it now, here, before you read anything else. Her courage in writing this powerful statement earns the right to have it received on its own terms.

Observations: Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Slate Editor David Plotz

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

SlateDavid Plotz, journalist and editor of the on-line culture magazine Slate, takes on the California Supreme Court in an essay in his magazine, harshly criticizing the 7-0 decision yesterday to deny Stephen Glass the opportunity to practice law in the state. Glass has been attempting for almost 20 year to persuade some state that a star journalist who was exposed as a pathological liar is a trustworthy lawyer. Plotz’s attack on the opinion as smug and self-righteous says a lot more about Plotz and his field of journalism than it does about the court. It  exposes the perils of a non-lawyer delving into legal ethics without even a modicum of research. Mostly, the exercise shows how far journalism has fallen, when the editor of a prestigious on-line journalistic enterprise essentially denies the importance of professionalism. “It’s a job,” he concludes about the law, trying to bring lawyers down to the depths of his own, thoroughly debased line of work.

Not that the decision isn’t ripe for criticism, for it is. In particular, the majority reasoning continues the legal field’s strange hypocrisy of applying a far more stringent standard to the character of those trying to get their licenses that it does to those who have proven themselves unworthy of holding them. The District of Columbia, supposedly one of the toughest jurisdiction regarding legal discipline, recently administered a mild reprimand to a Justice Department attorney who had been practicing on a suspended license for more than two decades. John Edwards, whose trail of lies while deceiving his dying wife and devising schemes to hide his pregnant mistress in order to gull the Democratic party into nominating him for President, has managed to avoid any discipline at all despite the fact that his continuing leave to practice law disgraces every lawyer on the planet. And, of course, the very same court Plotz derides now recently delivered the stunning conclusion that a non-citizen who entered the country illegally and engaged in years of lies to remain here is nonetheless fit to be a lawyer. (Naturally, Plotz liked that decision.) None of these are mentioned in the post. Continue reading →