USA Today

Americans Opine On Abortion: Thank You, USA Today, Now I Know Why We’re Doomed

/ Jack Marshall / 102 Comments

Blindfolded-People

USA Today fashions itself as the newspaper of the average American, and it may well be true. Especially since its redesign, it contains less substance than a single section of the New York Times, pedestrian writing, and mostly bite-size features designed for an audience with an attention span that finds fortune cookies challenging. Every now and then, however, a bit like Family Feud, USA Today’s proud low brow style yields valuable insight. Yesterday’s feature on abortion was such an instance, as the paper gathered reader comments on its Facebook and Twitter locales for America’s opinion regarding Missouri’s new mandated three-day waiting period for women seeking an abortion.

Now that I have reviewed the responses, it all makes sense to me now, and I think I know where we are headed. Oh, there is no valuable insight regarding the measure or abortion among the comments. What is revealing is that among all the responses chosen by USA Today, not single reader could manage sufficient objectivity and critical thinking to produce  well-reasoned, fair, thoughtful insight regarding a public policy issue that demands measuring and balancing interests, values,  and outcomes, the essence of ethical decision-making. Not one.

Here they are, with my comments in bold: Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: USA Today

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments
News you can use!

News you can use!

Increasingly, all the Obama White House has in its tool box to limit the damage of fiascos  past, present and future is its ability to manipulate the President’s  public image.  For five years an infuriatingly uncritical and submissive press allowed this administration to avoid the consequences of mistakes, problems and misconduct that would have dominated front pages for months in past years, but some vague signs of backbone have been visible of late, so the White House is cracking down.

From the journalism website of the Poynter Institute:

“A coalition of news organizations, including the Associated Press, ABC News, The Washington Post and Reuters called for better access to the president and the White House today in a letter addressed to White House press secretary Jay Carney.

The letter says, in part:

“Journalists are routinely being denied the right to photograph or videotape the President while he is performing his official duties. As surely as if they were placing a hand over a journalist’s camera lens, officials in this administration are blocking the public from having an independent view of important functions of the Executive Branch of government.”

The National Press Photographers Association also put its name to the protest. “Media organizations including NPPA have been keeping track of all the times on the president’s schedule when something has been marked ‘private,’ or when there’s been a news lid issued by the Press Office, only to find a White House photograph from the event show up a short time later on its official Web site,” NPPA General Counsel Mickey Osterreicher said. “We have never been granted access to the President at work in the Oval Office accompanied by his staff,” AP Director of Photography Santiago Lyon said. “Previous administration regularly granted such access.”

Continue reading →

Liars and Lies: Cal Thomas, Bob Beckel and USA Today’s Deceptive Debate Feature

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Beckel, Thomas…Liberal, Conservative…Liar, Liar…Disgrace, Disgrace.

 

Yesterday, after the first Presidential debate had concluded, USA Today columnists Cal Thomas and Bob Beckel’s joint feature was posted on the USA Today website; this morning, the same feature graced the newspaper’s print edition, on its op-ed page. Thomas and Beckel do a regular “point-counterpoint”-style debate which is presented as a conversation, and this one was about sprucing up the presidential debates.

“Cal Thomas is a conservative columnist. Bob Beckel is a liberal Democratic strategist. But as longtime friends, they can often find common ground on issues that lawmakers in Washington cannot” is how USA TODAY always introduces the hackneyed format. The most recent feature began like this:

BOB: Wednesday ‘s debate was déjà vu all over again. It made me wish for a fresher format. The two major party candidates for president looked and sounded presidential, standing behind two lecterns with a nice television-friendly backdrop facing a single moderator. But we’ve seen it many — too many — times before.

CAL: Don’t forget the television-friendly ties both wore after their handlers probably spent hours coming up with the right color.

BOB: And then there was the “spin room” where surrogates for both candidates claimed victory for their guy. It resembled a summer TV rerun: same script, but with different “stars.” The debate was broken into six segments, each with a question chosen by the moderator. Each was given the same amount of time to respond to the question followed by a period of discussion. The moderator, Jim Lehrer, did try to keep the candidates focused on the question at hand, but each response was obviously practiced. Except for those with HD quality sets, debates haven’t changed much since 1960.

Wait—what debate did these guys watch? Obviously, none at all.  Continue reading →

Wanted, Desperately Needed, and Lacking: Professionals, Adults and Values in the Media

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

What? Is there something wrong?

There is not a lot to say about the graphic above, other than:

  1. It is crude.
  2. It is funny.
  3. It is intentional.
  4. It is inappropriate for a general audience newspaper
  5. A competent editor should have caught it, and
  6. The graphic artist needs a warning and a reprimand.

The media, its staff, celebrities and assorted vulgarians and boors seem to be determined to make public square America as uncivil as a locker room, as crude as a peep show, and as juvenile as a junior high school farting contest. Professionals, including USA Today editors and publishers, can either do their duty and discourage this intentional rudeness in their products and services, or shrug it away. Similarly, our culture needs to decide if we are going to just define our deviancy down some more, and accept gratuitous sexual innuendo that will gradually make the whole population into a bunch of snickering Beavises. Continue reading →

Obama’s Social Security Cover-Up, as the Media Snoozes

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

USA Today ran a sensible editorial a couple of weeks ago calling for the Obama administration to stop cravenly caving to groups like the AARP, Congressional Democrats, and increasingly, liberal/progressive commentators who claim that Social Security isn’t really a budgetary problem. The fiction: since Social Security has received more from taxpayers than it has had to pay out since 1983, the Social Security Trust Fund has built up a whopping $2.5 trillion, guaranteeing enough to meet the program’s obligations ( despite yearly deficits, now that the population is senior-heavy) until the money is scheduled to run out in 2037. The truth: the trust is empty. Congress had raided it regularly for non-Social Security spending, so now the yearly Social security deficits (37 billion dollars last year, a projected 45 to 57 billion in 2011, and a half trillion total in the decade underway) are putting a direct burden on the already reeling Federal budget.

Good for USA Today: this is responsible, public-spirited journalism. the public has heard so many lies from politicians and elected officials about Social Security that it is thoroughly misinformed and confused, and an informative, unbiased editorial from the nation’s most read newspaper is exactly what is needed. But the Obama administration couldn’t handle the truth, so it trotted out White House Budget Director Jacob Lew, who denied that there was a problem, writing in response… Continue reading →

Where We Miss Morality: The Unmarried Mothers Disaster

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

USA Today included an editorial yesterday about the explosion of births to unmarried mothers in America that has exacerbated many societal problems. It’s a stunning story : in 1960,  the figure was 5.3%; by 1970, in the teeth of the cultural upheaval launched in the late 60’s, it had  more than doubled to 10.7%.   In 2009, 41% of children born in the USA were born to unmarried mothers,  including a frightening 73% of non-Hispanic black children.  The editorial suggested that reversing the trend is a priority, but was short on ideas for how to address it. Notably absent was the method of social control that had served the United States well since 1776, and had been effective world-wide since the institution of marriage: calling it wrong. Continue reading →

Jaw-Dropping Lie of the Year: Nancy Pelosi

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

“And we did all of this while restoring fiscal discipline to the Congress by making the pay-as-you-go rules the law of the land.”

–—House Speaker, soon to be Minority Leader, Nancy Pelosi in a Nov. 9 op-ed in USA Today, listing the achievements of the Democratic Congress under her leadership.

The pay-as-you-go rules, which require new spending  to be offset with new revenue or spending cuts, were adopted by the House in 2007 and became law in 2010. Significantly, the very same bill that established pay-as-you-go—or PAYGO—raised the debt limit by $1.9 trillion. Signed into law on Feb. 12,  PAYGO was waived less than two weeks later when the Senate voted for a $15 billion job creation bill.…that was not offset by new revenue or spending reductions.

In fact, the PAYGO rule is waived constantly: it was designed that way. Continue reading →

Web Hoaxes: Would You Trust This Lawyer?

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

In an earlier post this month, I related the story of Ethan Haines, an unemployed, newly-graduated lawyer who was staging a hunger strike, he said, to protest the fact that law schools misled their recruits about the employment prospects of their graduates. I was not sympathetic, and concluded:

“Law degrees still are valuable credentials, as is a good legal education, and if Haines got a good legal education, he received everything a law school is obligated to provide. Turning the degree into a career is his responsibility, and it is wrong for him to claim that anyone but himself is accountable for his present unemployed state.”

His stunt was more than an avoidance of responsibility and accountability, however it was a lie. Continue reading →

Ethics Tip For Police Being Videoed: Smile!

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Every now and then one learns about a practice that seems so obviously wrong that it is difficult to believe it could really occur in America. The police’s broad power to confiscate property used in the commission of a crime stunned me when I first read about it in law school. Municipal government use of the power of eminent domain to take private property and turn it over to corporate interests for profit-making development, as in the Kelo case, was another example. During the health care reform debate, I learned that our elected representatives not only didn’t bother to read major legislation, they thought there was nothing wrong with not reading it. I’m still scratching my head over that one.

The increasingly common phenomenon of police arresting citizens for recording arrests and other police activity on video is the most recent example of conduct that is so wrong it is hard to believe it happens—but it does. Continue reading →