Rick comments on my ethics verdict regarding the most recent James O’Keefe “sting,” this one exposing a biased NPR exec and an ethically-weak NPR fundraiser: Continue reading
Utilitarianism
Why NPR’s Wrongs Don’t Make James O’Keefe Right
James O'Keefe, Ethics Corrupter
And the NPR Ethics Train Wreck continues…
Between union hysteria in Wisconsin, carnage in Libya, and tsunamis, the fact that James O’Keefe’s fake Muslim billionaire act exposed more NPR integrity issues was drowned out by shouting, gun shots and water. In fact, the second victim of O’Keefe’s sting may have taught us more about NPR than the first.
In the surreptitious audiotape of NPR’s continued encounters with the fake potential big bucks donor, NPR’s director of institutional giving, Betsy Liley, is heard advising the supposedly wealthy Muslim donor how the network could help “shield” his group from a government audit if it accepted the $5 million he was offering. It seems pretty clear from the tape that this was not what the sting was set up to prove: what the “Muslim donor” really wants is to get a promise from NPR that it will slant the news content the his way if the gift is big enough. Liley stood her ground on this core journalistic principle admirably—so much for the claim that George Soros bought NPR’s advocacy with his recent gift—but fell into another trap of her own making.
NPR spokeswoman Dana Davis Rehm said in a statement that Liley’s comments on the tape “regarding the possibility of making an anonymous gift that would remain invisible to tax authorities is factually inaccurate and not reflective of NPR’s gift practices. All donations—anonymous and named—are fully reported to the IRS. NPR complies with all financial, tax, and disclosure regulations.” That’s undoubtedly correct; Liley was not merely ethically wrong but also literally wrong, for what she was suggesting almost certainly couldn’t happen. However, the fact that she would say such a thing believing it could happen, or think it was acceptable if it did happen, or try to acquire a large donation by persuading a donor to believe it could happen, all point to the one conclusion: NPR’s culture is ethically compromised, and the organization’s leadership has failed to meet its obligations to create an ethical culture there. The sting is more disturbing than the earlier one that caught an outgoing NPR executive taking extreme partisan positions that belied NPR’s position that it is objective and unbiased. The comments of Ron Schiller just confirmed what many, including me, thought was already apparent in the tone of NPR’s work. I had also always assumed, however, that the place was professionally and ethically run (excepting the tendency to fire employees for expressing politically incorrect opinions on Fox News).
So this settles it, right? O’Keefe is a hero?
No, he’s not. James O’Keefe, in fact, is an ethics corrupter, an individual who weakens the public’s ethics by encouraging it to accept his dubious values. Continue reading
Unethical Website of the Month: Lovely-Faces.Com
If the Guinness World Record for smugness and arrogance-holding creators of Lovely-Faces.com’s “logic” became acceptable, kidnapping President Obama would be a dandy way to demonstrate that the Secret Service was incompetent, and triggering a “fire sale” crash of technology-based U.S. systems would be a fine way to show that they are insufficiently protected. Paolo Cirio, a media artist, and Alessandro Ludovico, media critic and editor-in- chief of Neural magazine, claim that their goal of showing how Facebook makes identity theft too easy justifies their means of proving it: stealing 250,000 Facebook member profiles and organizing them into a new dating site—without the members’ permission, of course. Continue reading
Planned Parenthood Gets The ACORN Treatment
Taking its inspiration from James O’Keefe’s infamous ACORN stunt, and anti-abortion group called Live Action videotaped actors as they asked Planned Parenthood staff at a New Jersey clinic for advice while disguised as a pimp and one of his prostitutes. Sure enough, just like in the incident that helped destroy ACORN, the eager-to-please Planned Parenthood staff member cooperated, advising the couple how to get abortions and other services for the “pimp’s” prostitutes, some of them described as illegal immigrants and girls as young as 14.
The episode raises several ethical issues: Continue reading
Judge Vinson’s Ruling on the Individual Mandate, Rejecting Utilitarianism
Judge Roger Vinson of Florida’s Northern District Court has struck down the much-debated individual mandate in the new health care reform law, and more striking yet, has ruled that the entire law fails to meet constitutional requirements as a result. Lawyers more skilled than I will be analyzing the opinion today and long afterward, but the opinion is also notable for its ethical approach. Continue reading
Where We Miss Morality: The Unmarried Mothers Disaster
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
Lying to Mom
The call was from my mother’s case worker at the hospital.
The night before, my mother, 89, had fallen in her apartment, the seventh fall in ten days and, like the others, a direct result of her stubborn refusal to use a cane or a walker despite her unsteadiness. This time she had not been able to dissuade me from taking her to the emergency room, where we both lingered until nearly 6 AM as she was X-rayed, CAT-scanned, and given a battery of tests. The staff felt she needed to be checked-in to stay for a couple of days, especially since she was hallucinating. I agreed, over Mom’s protests; it would also provide me some more time to figure out how to prepare my home for her to move in, at least temporarily. There is no way I am going to let her fall again.
Now the case worker was calling to tell me that my mother was resisting treatment. She wanted to go home, she said, and was physically resisting efforts to give her an M.R.I. Would I please come over and persuade her?
The hospital was only fifteen minutes away, and as I drove there, I pondered various strategies. With my mother, you get one shot. If your first argument doesn’t persuade her, nothing will. I could explain why the M.R.I. would help the doctors clear her for release, but that one could backfire if the test revealed something that in fact led to a longer stay. One ploy kept pushing itself to the front of the line: Continue reading
TARP Ethics Dilemmas: A Guide For Advocates and Critics
Surprise! The TARP bailout of October 2008 seems to have turned out remarkably well. The Troubled Assets Relief Program, which was and still is attacked by conservatives and Tea Party critics as a $700 billion bailout for Wall Street giants who should have been allowed to fail, is now anticipated to eventually only cost the federal government about $25 billion, according to the Government Accounting Office.
When a policy that is widely criticized as wrong-headed in principle actually works, it presents ethical problems for both advocates and critics alike.
A few helpful tips: Continue reading
Bush’s Torture Admission, Absolutism, and America’s Survival
George W. Bush, currently hawking his memoirs, has admitted in the new book and in interviews about it that yes indeed, he approved waterboarding of terrorist suspects, believed it was legal, and moreover offers evidence that the information thus acquired saved American lives. W’s opinion on these matter are hardly a surprise, but they have re-energized the defenders of the Administration’s policies of “enhanced interrogation” and rendition of apprehended terror suspects to foreign locales where the interrogation techniques were “enhanced” even more.
“NOW do you agree with the policy?” they ask, as if the answer was obvious. “The information prevented a horrific terrorist attack on Heathrow Airport (in England). See? See?”
Let us assume, just to simplify things, that everything is as President Bush represents. Waterboarding was, by some legitimate analysis, legal. The information saved American lives and prevented terrorist attacks. Do these facts mean that the use of torture—and waterboarding is torture, whether one defines it as such or not—by the United States of America was justified, defensible, and ethical?
No. I don’t think so. I believe that for the United States of America to approve and engage in the use of torture is by definition betrayal of the nation’s core values, and thus threatens its existence as the nation our Founders envisioned as completely as a foreign occupation. I wrote on this topic in 2009… Continue reading
Unavoidable Bias in the Embryonic Stem Cell Research Controversy
In the embryonic stem cell research ethics debate, I come out on the “pro” side. Nonetheless, a New York Times article this morning shows clearly how thoroughly and unavoidably biased scientists and researchers in the field are, leading to the conclusion that the decision whether stem cell research is ethical or not, and whether, or to what extent, it should be permitted, cannot be left to them.
The article, by Amy Harmon, begins,
“Rushing to work at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center one recent morning, Jason Spence, 33, grabbed a moment during breakfast to type “stem cells” into Google and click for the last 24 hours of news. It is a routine he has performed daily in the six weeks since a Federal District Court ruling put the future of his research in jeopardy. “It’s always at the front of my brain when I wake up,” said Dr. Spence, who has spent four years training to turn stem cells derived from human embryos into pancreatic tissue in the hope of helping diabetes patients. “You have this career plan to do all of this research, and the thought that they could just shut it off is pretty nerve-racking.” Continue reading
Ethics Alarms 