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False Redemption and the Michael Vick Fallacy

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Michael Vick was once a star quarterback for NFL’s Atlanta Falcons. Then it was discovered that he was secretly in the illegal dog-fighting business, breaking the law and being brutally cruel to dogs in the process. This lost him his job, his contract, his freedom, and many millions of dollars. Now he’s a star quarterback again, leading the Philadelphia Eagles. Last Monday night, he had what some have called the best game any quarterback has had in the NFL in forty years. Many are celebrating his return to stardom as an inspiring example of rehabilitation and redemption. After all, he’s a hero again.

Not to me, he isn’t.

It well may be that Michael Vick is a changed man, but the jury is out on that; it’s just taking longer to get a verdict than it did for his dog-fighting charges. There is absolutely no nexus between Vick’s resurgence on the football field and his character. Continue reading →

Palin, Ifill, Contempt and Respect: A Cautionary Tale

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

One reason why it is both right and prudent to treat others respectfully is that we seldom can know the true measure of an individual’s abilities and character. All human beings are complex, and all deserve an almost limitless benefit of the doubt before it is wise to dismiss them as unworthy of decent, respectful treatment. When we assume that someone whom we really don’t know very well is stupid, or evil, or not worth paying attention to, we not only treat them badly, we also put ourselves in peril, both of violating the Golden Rule, and also of looking foolish. Mockery, the child of contempt, is especially dangerous. When we mock others, we assume a superiority that may prove to be illusory.

Have I fallen victim to this ethical error? You betcha.

Which brings us to Sarah Palin. Continue reading →

Manny, Kanye, and the Farce of Self-Serving Apologies

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Two habitual bad actors in the world of entertainment apologized this week, for similar reasons and with equivalent credibility.

First, baseball slugger Manny Ramirez issued an apology to his former team once removed, The Boston Red Sox, for forcing the team to trade him in the middle of the 2008 pennant race because Manny was faking injuries, refusing to hustle during game, assaulting employees, and poisoning team morale and discipline. “I think everything was my fault,” Ramirez said. “You’ve got to be a real man to realize when you do wrong. Hey, it was my fault, right? I’m already past that stage. I’m happy. I’m in a new team,” Manny told reporters. He was with a new team, all right: the Dodgers, his previous team, let him go to the Chicago White Sox for nothing because, well, he was faking injuries, dogging it in the field…same act, different stage. So what was the apology about?

Manny, or more likely his agent, realizes this most recent break with a team as the result of his habitually juvenile and unprofessional attitude might cost him a lot of money at contract time—Ramirez is a free agent after all. So contrition was called for—two full years after he laughed off any suggestions that he was at fault for the Boston debacle, and proved that he had been loafing on the field by playing in L.A. like he was on fire. This isn’t an apology; it’s damage control, and thus is a deceitful and dishonest apology that has nothing whatsoever to do with genuine regret. The big tip-off is that Ramirez felt he had to explain why his apology was so admirable. Yes, Manny, you have to be a real man to admit you’re wrong; a real jerk to fake an apology to fool a future employer into believing that you’ve turned over a new leaf, and real fool to believe anyone will fall for it.

Then there is rapper Kanye West. Continue reading →

Well, If The Washington Post Won’t Fire A Reporter For Intentionally Publishing Lies, At Least It Gets Angry At Him

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Mike Wise, a Washington Post sportswriter and columnist deliberately posted a phony scoop (about Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger) on Twitter, as an experiment to see how widely it would be picked up. His plan, he now says, was to correct the lie with a follow-up tweet.  Due to bad luck or the intervention of the God of Journalism, however, his Twitter account froze, and what was supposed to be a near immediate correction took almost forty minutes. Several internet sites, from the Miami Herald to NBC’s ProFootballTalk, passed on the original tweet, attributing it to Wise.

Faced with a staff reporter who intentionally published a lie for no other reason than to see what would happen, the Post reacted according to its concern regarding the seriousness of his conduct—that is, deceiving those who trust him, as a member of a legitimate media organization, to report only the truth and to respect the trust of his and his paper’s readers—and suspended him for one month. Continue reading →

Celebrity Jerk in Training: Justin Bieber

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

It’s good to know teenie-bopper idol Justin Bieber is already practicing for the day when he will be a full-fledged, arrogant, self-absorbed, celebrity jerk, assuming his career survives puberty.

Apparently a kid tried to hack the Facebook page of one of Bieber’s pals, in a failed attempt to get tickets to a concert or something—it doesn’t matter. What matters is that the pop star took his revenge by tweeting to his 4.5 million Twitter followers, “Everyone call me or text,” and included the would-be hacker’s phone number. Continue reading →

A Vote for Keith Halloran Is A Vote For Hateful Politics

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

It is one thing for a comedian like Wanda Sykes to publicly wish that Rush Limbaugh’s kidneys fail (that one thing, by the way, is gratuitous nastiness without humor), and quite another for a candidate for Congress, Democrat Keith Halloran of New Hampshire, to send out a tweet to his Twitter followers expressing regret that Sarah Palin and Levi Johnston were not on board the doomed plane that crashed, killing former Alaska Senator Ted Stevens. Continue reading →

CNN’s Ocatavia Nasr: Another Victim of Cognitive Dissonance

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Octavia Nasr, a CNN editor and reporter for two decades, just got her walking papers for a 140-character tweet reading, “Sad to hear of the passing of Sayyed Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah.. One of Hezbollah’s giants I respect a lot.” The problem is that this particular “giant” was an anti-American, anti-Israeli terrorist who advocated suicide bombings and who encouraged terrorist acts by Hezbollah. In an explanatory blog post that failed to save her job, Nasr blamed the limitations of Twitter, and explained that she didn’t really admire him, just his stance against the abuse of Muslim women.

Maybe. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunces: Prof. Peter Tague and Chief Justice John Roberts

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

In today’s world of text-messaging, Twitter, Facebook and e-mail, intentionally throwing a rumor into a crowded room is only marginally better than falsely shouting “Fire!” in a crowed theater. Thus Ethics Alarms regretfully has to pronounce Georgetown Law Center professor Peter Tague’s puckish stunt of last week irresponsible and unethical.

Demonstrating how unreliable it was to accept media accounts from un-named sources, Prof. Tague told his first year law class that he had learned from a “reliable source” that Chief Justice John Roberts was about to announce his retirement. Some nimble-fingered Twitter-user (or many) promptly sent the rumor into cyberspace, where it rapidly found its way onto scoop-hungry websites, especially those made giddy by the prospect of President Obama having the chance to replace one of the Supreme Court’s most conservative judges with a progressive one. By the time Tague announced to the class that his “scoop” was a fraud, just thirty minutes later, the fake story was multiplying like a virus. Continue reading →

From Tweet to Blog to Lie: Palin’s Laughs

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Sadly, this is how the web works.

Sarah Palin was guest on Jay Leno’s return to NBC’s “Tonight Show,” and inexplicably did something of a stand-up comic routine. One of the audience members was a non-admirer of Palin named Michael Stinson, who didn’t think she was funny. After the taping he sent out a “tweet” on his Twitter account that read, “Listen for me laughing, no one else is.” Stinson says he was shocked when he saw the broadcast, as Palin’s jokes seemed to be getting big laughs. He sent out another Tweet that read, “I know sound. And it’s my opinion that audio portions of Sarah Palin’s March 2nd appearance on Jay Leno’s Tonight show were added or amplified, edited before broadcast to make it appear that Sarah Palin was more welcome than she was.” Continue reading →

Save Lindsay Lohan

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

It’s interesting, isn’t it? People who would never think of ridiculing the sick or mentally ill, who would never dream of condemning emotionally crippled individuals broken by dysfunctional families, will gleefully heap public abuse on a celebrity with the same problems. Why is this? A human being in trouble is a human being in trouble. It seems, however, that with the exception of little girls who fall down wells, the more people who know you are in crisis, the less sympathy you are likely to get.

Take, for example, the sad case of actress Lindsay Lohan, a talented young woman cursed with two narcissistic and exploitive parents. Continue reading →