Kellen Winslow and Dave Chappelle

One is a Cleveland Browns football star, the other a rising television comedy star on Comedy Central. Both sought fame and fortune, and both achieved it, signing huge contacts and making themselves beloved by their fans and indispensable to their employers. Now both have by their own actions violated their obligations, contractual and otherwise, to their employers and their fans, because they decided to accede to their own desires regardless of the consequences to others.

They both have excuses. Winslow has incapacitated himself for the coming football season and perhaps diminished his career permanently by playing around on a mega-motorcycle that he wasn't qualified to operate. He crashed. It was an accident. It doesn't matter: it was an accident that he should never have put himself in a position to have. Chappelle, according to a recent interview with Time Magazine, says he just had to shut down the hit comedy show Comedy Central paid him 50 million dollars to create and star in because, well, the pressure was just too much. He was stressed. He wasn't confident that he could deliver material that met his artistic standards. So Chappelle shut down his show, abandoned his cast and crew, and left the cable comedy channel with a gaping hole in its schedule.

Apparently nobody bothered to tell these uncommonly talented young men that with fame comes added obligations. It is like being part of a family, only even more burdensome. You have an obligation to take care of yourself mentally, physically and emotionally, because others, lots and lots of others, depend on you for their livelihood and happiness. You can no longer, Kellen Winslow, indulge your taste for risky outside activities, because the body you injure is no longer just your own. You cannot, Dave Chappelle, just bug out to South Africa for an unscheduled mental health break, because people and businesses depend on you. If you couldn't handle the pressure, you should have turned down that 50 million.

Kelvin, Dave: success, fame and fortune come with one of the most basic ethical obligations: showing up. To make yourself important to others without understanding and accepting that loses you the trust that you will eventually become vital to sustaining your career.

It also gets both of you the title of Ethics Dunce.

The Peabody Awards

In the wake of the Newsweek Koran-in-the-toilet fiasco, The Ethics Scoreboard was seriously considering making a declaration: journalism wins the ethics booby prize among U.S. professions, as the most ethically clueless, untrustworthy, consistently self-serving and rationalization-driven of all. Worse than lawyers, worse than academics, worse than used-car salesmen. Okay…maybe not worse than television psychics, but it's a close call. Every day, it seems, another newspaper columnist or reporter is discovered to have made up facts or copied the work of others. Every day, the bias in fact reporting on the evening news and in the major print media seems more thinly-disguised.

But no, we decided. This is an over-reaction. This is the American press, after all, a bulwark of our freedoms. Surely this hallowed profession can't be that far gone!

And then the Peabody Awards decided to confer broadcast journalism's most prestigious award on Dan Rather and Mary Mapes, his producer in the National Guard papers scandal that cost both of them their jobs.

Now, the Peabody people will undoubtedly say that since the awards were for a completely different story (Mapes and Rather exposed the Abu Ghraib prison scandal on the Wednesday "60 Minutes"), it shouldn't matter that these same two journalists later violated the most basic principles of accuracy, fairness, competence, and integrity. And the proper response to this argument is, I think

Have you people completely taken leave of your senses??

Let's imagine…

• That Major League Baseball decides to honor Barry Bonds with an "Anti-Drug Crusader" award based on a kids program he set up in San Francisco. "It's irrelevant that Barry is currently enmeshed in a steroid scandal," MLB asserts.
• That the Josephsen Institute (the renowned ethics organization) awards Tom DeLay an Ethics Stalwart Award because he's never missed teaching a Sunday school class in the last 25 years. "Our award isn't based on his political activities," the Institute explains.
• That Harvard Business School gives a special Inspirational Corporate Leader Award to Ken Lay. "Our decision is based on his superb series of speeches to young business school students in 1999," the Dean explains.

Do we detect a pattern here?

The Peabody Awards are supposed to stand for something. When they start honoring journalists who have displayed blatantly bad judgement and wreckless disregard for ethical standards, those qualities are what they stand for, regardless of the specific justification of a particular award. This principle is why, to cite a famous example, Pete Rose will never be voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame for his achievement as the all-time hits leader. He bet on baseball, and risked the sport's integrity. You can't honor the man for legitimate achievements without the honor having the effect of minimizing the ethical transgression. And the misconduct of Rather and Mapes was major, significant, and recent. These awards to these journalists say that using forged documents to break a story that might effect a national election are no big deal.

If the Peabody Awards believe such journalistic sins are no big deal, the Peabody Awards are no big deal. From here on, the Awards stand for the proposition that ethics in journalism are less important than breaking a big story.

But I guess we knew that already, didn't we?