I made the mistake of perusing collections of the mainstream media’s fueling of the George Floyd Ethics Train Wreck, and now I have to write about them. Actually, just quoting them is enough, because they speak for themselves.
1. Just to stoke the truly unhinged, CNN featured Lt. Gen. Russel Honore (Ret.), who apparently escaped from the cutting room floor of “Dr. Strangelove.” His enlightenment: President Trump might drop nuclear weapons on U.S. cities to stop the riots, saying, “Our troops need to stand steady. The Congress and the Senate need to understand, this man has control of over 3,000 nuclear weapons…” The only responsible response to such a statement would be, “What? How did you get loose? You’re a lunatic! Get off the line!”
But this was CNN, and Anderson Cooper was in charge, so CNN just allowed this nonsense to be broadcast without objection or contradiction.
2. Guess what network featured this rant!
“I would like to tell people, man, if you gonna point a finger at the looters, the protesters, rioters, whatever you wanna call them, before you point finger at them, point every single other finger you got back at America. This is what happens when a country promises liberty and justice for all, but only gives you liberty and justice for white folks. This is what happens when one of the wealthiest countries in the world doesn’t understand the plight of the poor and the have-nots. You got 40 million people out of work, unemployment the highest it’s been since the depression era, people cooped up in the house the last few months waitin’ on stimulus checks. Yet during this whole process we continue to watch the rich get richer in this country.
“And not to mention, ain’t no good gonna come to America until they do right by black folks. Period. You can’t continue to brutalize and kill descendants of God’s children that built this country. Understand what that does to us? You know, mentally and emotionally? All this country needed was a reason. America has given black people 400-plus years of reasons to go crazy. I’m actually shocked that we didn’t snap a long time ago.
“This country continues to deny us equality, justice and just plain decency. You know … what you have in this country right now is a perfect storm of people who are ready to burn this society of white supremacy to the ground and America earned every bit of this. …”
Give up? ESPN!
Radio host Lenard Larry McKelvey, aka “Charlamagne tha God,” of whom I was blissfully unaware until Joe Biden went on his program to announce that blacks could magically change their race by deciding not to vote for him, was a featured guest on the “First Take,” program. That’s where ESPN stuffs its Leftists and race-baiters so they’ll do minimal damage during actual sports reporting. To be fair, there is no sports reporting, so I guess these Disney corporation outbursts of anti-white racism are, if not excusable, predictable.
3. CNN’s infantile Don Lemon continues to spew self-contradictory, hysterical gibberish, this time suggesting that by announcing that he will not tolerate rioters terrorizing our communities, the President is declaring “war on America.”There’s really nothing further negative I can say about this epic blot on our culture, other than to quote him:
Again, I’m not condoning violence at all, and I hope that they remain peaceful, but I hope that they stand up and fight for their rights to peacefully protest in this country, but he’s playing a very dangerous game, because this will backfire. People are upset and they’re angry. These people as I’ve been saying as well, they feel like they are occupied in their own communities by police departments. Many of them militarized police departments. Now the entire country, according to his orders, we are living under a militarized country or we will be soon and it will play out in front of our very eyes on national television.
The man is paid to go on national TV to talk like this. “Remain peaceful”! Somebody please show Don the video. “Fight for their rights to peacefully protest’! Yeah, people should riot and loot to protest their right to peacefully protest. How far gone does someone have to be not to roll one’s eyes and giggle at statements like these?
4.On CBS, Oprah Winfrey’s galpal Gayle King hosted a one-way assault on America and white citizens, cherry picking the worst examples of false accusations against blacks as representative of the culture. No balancing here: she featured one advocate of anti-white bigotry after another:
- Quoting Tim Wise, a professional race-grievance hustler, “Why is that we would be so quick to blame black folks in these cases for things they didn’t do? It’s because they all knew that that would – or at least they felt that that would be believed….American history is one in which white Americans, by and large, have been taught to have indifference or even contempt for black life. We have defined the country as a white nation where people of color are here on a guest pass. And it’s a guest pass that we think we can revoke.”
Point of order: Nobody accused George Floyd falsely, as far as we can tell. He was arrested for breaking the law. Mike Brown was not falsely accused. The vast majority of blacks involved in police-involved shootings, like the majority of whites in such events, in fact had engaged in criminal activity. Meanwhile, these same journalists and activists have been arguing that those who accuse men of rape and sexual assault should be be presumed accurate. Wise’s argument is a straw man, and ought to have been identified as such by someone.
Then we heard Ibram X. Kendi, a professor at American University, tell us that since the Jim Crow era, white people have had the right of using the police to their advantage. “They recognize that they have the privilege to call a police officer with the belief that the police officer, even if they’re in the wrong, will be on their side.,” he said, evoking the Central Park Cooper vs Cooper confrontation, in which the police were not on the side of the white woman, and after which it was the white woman who was vilified across the culture.
King, emotional and pandering as always, wrapped up the segment by saying,
“…I look forward to the day where black people in this country are not first judged as suspects and not law-abiding citizens first. I worry now when my son goes to walk his dog in L.A., in the climate that we’re living in. I get very worried just when he steps outside doing ordinary things to walk the dog. And he said to me that somebody said to him, be tired, be exhausted, but never be diminished. So I try to hold on to that. But these are very scary times, very frightening times we’re living in. I thank you for that story, it’s very important to show the history. Thank you very much.”
Complete and utter gaslighting.
5. Finally, as a grand finale, here is CNN’s monument to conflicts of interest, privileged advancement in defiance of ability, and family connections, Chris Cuomo, displaying his quality of improvised thought. If you find this enlightening or perceptive, heaven help you:
Who is speaking to this country and telling them, telling these people that you’re seeing on your screen that there is an answer to this? That there is something other than outrage and the language of pain to process in this situation? Our best answer can’t be police marching down a street in a major city chasing back citizens of this country. We have to be able to do better. You shouldn’t have to rely on a CNN correspondent to speak to the truth and pain of what is hitting an entire part of this coy. It’s not [Sara Sidner’s] job. It’s not my job. It’s not the job of these police, to make this stop. Where are our leaders? If you want to say, well, these people need to go home, that’s what stops it, personal responsibility, we would have never been having this conversation if you didn’t have people take to the streets. If there were another way for this to have been done, we wouldn’t be here. We wouldn’t keep coming back to this place.
(….)
You’re watching this all over the country whether it’s the nation’s capital or New York or Atlanta or San Francisco or Long Beach and of course all emanating out of Minnesota, remember people will not like what they see. That is almost always the case when people take to the streets to fight against a system that they believe is doing things that are not American. It’s hard to please that same system. I mean, think about it. We don’t like that they’re not listening to the law and not following the curfew. Well, their issue is that following the curfew, following the rules, does not work both ways in their communities. Or there are people who believe that that is true about minority communities. Yes, they’re members of the majority, but they believe that America should treat everybody the same way. So, you’re not going to have a protest of the system that the system likes….But the appetite, the hunger for people to understand that somebody gets it and sees it for what it is and says that it’s wrong is that strong.
_____________________________
Source: Newsbusters
Ethics Alarms 
As with most lying propaganda, this intended to keep the rational and sensible on the sidelines, primarily with guilt, to let the anti-American and destructively insane run amok cowing the populace until it is perhaps too late to establish any semblance of order. Then the rational and sensible who finally rise to defend themselves are outnumbered and outgunned. Mark my words, if US troops are deployed to bring order, the next move for Antifa will be to overrun the prisons to add to their numbers.
The narrative that I have been observing on the stressful cesspool that is Facebook:
* How dare you judge people who have been oppressed for so long for acting out, asshole!
* See, asshole, it was out of state provocateurs who were causing the rioting!
* I find it disturbing that so many people will condemn rioting, but not condemn the murder of Floyd
* No, I did not say it was racist to condemn the violence, lol I just find it disturbing that those who do won’t call out the murder that started it all!
* LOL, look at Trump hiding in his bunker. Why doesn’t he just talk with the protesters
* 100,000 death, 40 million unemployed, police violently attacking cities – this is Trump’s legacy
This crap just goes on and on. A lot of it posted by a member of the media on his personal account, who will deny there is any media bias against Trump.
Has there been anyone who hasn’t expressed horror at the death of George Floyd?
The media is the 21st century crack dealer.
They provide that which alleviates the sickness of true introspection
Here is another aspect to George Floyd. I do not submit this to undervalue the fact that his death was cruel and a result of brutal treatment — it was — but more to support my idea about a rising culture of Black criminality. The media do not report this and are complicit in other narrative interpretations.
But this time would’ve been different!
Actually, how the media descended to these unethical depths is no mystery at all.
In the early- to mid-90s, the news media was at an all-time high. Newspapers were welling for fabulous multiples; there was really only one cable news network (the acronym that must not be named) and the alphabet channels still dominated broadcast news.
The press caught wind of this newfangled Internet thingie. They started covering it, even to the point of hyping it. People became interested. As did much of the country, the news media became besotted by the potential of this new medium. Remember how many so-called “dot com” companies sprang up? The news media, too, drank the kool-aid, figuring that online production would be cheap and they could move the display ad concept that had kept them beautifully profitable for centuries over to the Web.
And they made their content available for free.
That was the biggest mistake. Only one major American news outlet – the Wall Street Journal – decided from the outset that its content had tangible value and that it would charge for access. They made some content available gratis, but if you really wanted the valuable information the WSJ published you had to pay for it.
At this point, all the other newspapers (and the TV outlets) continued offering content gratis. And here comes the next blow: display advertising online DOES NOT WORK. It didn’t take marketers long to realize that web ads, unlike display ads, were directly trackable (in fact, that was one of the premises advertisers were sold by the media outlets: you can close the loop on spend vs. sales).
So an increasing number of people STOPPED buying the papers, preferring their content online. The online advertising of the time didn’t work, because it was old-style thinking in presenting ads; it wasn’t yet based on the idea that you build massive databases and target ads directly to the people most likely to buy that product. And with fewer dead tree editions going out, the rate bases for the conventional model had to be cut – and cut again.
Ah, but there’s more. The barriers to entry to set up a newspaper or TV outlet is a massive chunk of change. But an online news source? Those are CHEAP to launch. So facing declining rate bases, an audience who had been thoroughly trained to believe that news content is free and increasing competition, the news outlets started seeing serious erosion of customer base.
What to do? Start charging for content? We can’t do THAT! So we’ll cut staff. The grizzled veteran reporters and editors – those who at least employed some modicum of self-restraint when it came to inserting opinion into reportage, and who by tenure had the biggest paychecks – were the first to go, usually via buyouts. They were the lucky ones; they got out when the getting was good. Who replaced them? Younger staff. Staff without the experience, staff who didn’t have a steely-eyed editor in chief screaming at them to get their $#!+ together. And much of this staff came in via a university system that was already indoctrinating, rather than educating, students.
All types of media took it in the shorts with this, but it was especially the smaller-community outlets that suffered the most. This put more of the market (what was left of it, anyway) into the hands of the larger-city newsrooms – and guess what? Most large cities are LIBERAL!
We cannot forget that news outlets are not their to provide us with news – they’re there (mostly) to turn a profit. They do so by giving their audiences what their audiences want. It’s a lot cheaper to cover and package media to a metro area of a million people than it is to do the same for a STATE with a million people – and even in THOSE states, the cities (and the bulk of the audience) tends to be… well, you know.
Without going into too much detail, the media outlets miscalculated on social media just as badly as they did with the Web at the start. Like the Internet and how people would actually use it, the news media made a lot of noise about this additional Next Big Thing but really didn’t understand it – or how to use it.
They finally figured it out, but the damage was done. Today, media outlets COUNT on people sharing their stories, because when they do, that generates page views and a chance to show some advertising. Each click might generate a tiny fraction of a cent, but when the business is already struggling, you’ll take those pennies.
So: that’s how we got their. MASSIVE miscalculation about the Web. MASSIVE miscalculation about how to provide content. MASSIVE miscalculation about how to cover costs. Failure to foresee proliferation of more competition – and either start that highly-targeted competition themselves, or buy them out (like Facebook and Google do any time someone comes up with a new approach that threatens their bases).
The appalling coverage these days traces back to one and only one thing: a self-inflicted wound.
Thank,AIM. It’s the kiddie corps.
Well, that was sort of the mid-term status. Today, the kids are still there – and never had anyone around who could force them to grow up.
I think the same problem explains what’s happened on campuses around the country: too many way too young faculty running amok without adult supervision. See, eg., the woman at UAB and her instructions on how to bring down an obelisk.
Now THAT’S a chicken-or-egg thing. I would argue that the creeping progressivism of colleges and universities started long before that of the news bidness.
True story: in 1974, I transferred from Ohio State to Boston University as a sophomore. I was VERY “progressive” at that point in time; one of the most popular courses on campus was Poli-Sci 101, taught by none other than Howard Zinn. I was a bio major at the time, but needed some humanities electives, so I signed up (besides, I’d heard it was both entertaining and more or less a gut course).
As noted, I was a progressive at the time. I withdrew after a couple of lectures. Zinn was the most arrogant asshole I’ve ever seen in front of a roomful of students. He wanted you nodding your head in agreement, not asking questions that challenged his pronouncements. Most of the class were among the nodding.
FWIW, BU had (and has) a well-regarded journalism program. Those kids needed electives, too. One presumes a few of ’em didn’t take early retirement.
A lot has been lost (or deliberately ignored) in the static. You touched on one particular thing, and Alizia expanded it: “Nobody accused George Floyd falsely, as far as we can tell. He was arrested for breaking the law.”.
(insert here the obligatory note that none but the most depraved support brutal, bullying, corrupt law enforcement…entire movie genres flow from this truism):
We all know, however that bad cops exist, and that we can greatly reduce our chances of encountering them, just as we do for other dangers, by controlling our own actions. (insert here explanation of why no, this is not blaming the victim) Living at the fringes of law-abiding behavior is NOT the right choice of actions. As is sometimes colloquially said, “You play stupid games, you win stupid prizes”.
Another item is the fact that “Black America’s” greatest enemy and deadliest threat remains “Black America”. To focus near absolute attention and resources to the tangential problem of bad policing is neither logical nor effective, but serves the needs of the grievance industry. It’s like complaining about losing sleep due to your neighbor”s dog barking while the wolverine you tolerate in your house is gnawing off your leg.
It’s not just Cuomo who sounds inebriated or mentally disturbed. And it’s not jAFG: that’s deliberate. Then is it just my wild imagination or faulty memory to think that people in the public eye, particularly politicians (the ones most in need of this ability), no longer know how to speak? Is being able to form a complete, rational sentence spontaneously just another item absented from basic education? Or is it a matter of delayed thought processes? The further away from the teleprompter, the less sense they make. Or could it be their dormant consciences coming to life – briefly – in their mouths when they know they are telling lies?
I’ve also wondered about this, PA, and I have no explanation for it. Even Obama was notably less coherent off the cuff. It’s one reason I keep marveling at Clarence Darrow, who gave multi-hour speeches in court without notes. Or read the Lincoln Douglas debates. Is we geiing dummer? Seems like it…
I know what you’re saying, but I think that’s a different problem, and one that is directly attributable to bad education and good technology: we have lost the ability to memorize. How many phone numbers do we remember anymore — or in the case of children born after the advent of ‘devices’, were ever stored in their minds to begin with?
My best guess is that speaking extemporaneously is a lost art, due to several forces, the main one being media which altered the focus of our attention spans. One is the Pause factor. Even if something longer than ten minutes became interrupted by a commercial, I’ve seen reliable reports from streaming or (almost) commercial-free services, that viewers hit the pause button for one reason or another and “turn off” with almost the same frequency as they used to with ads. It’s not that we don’t have the same ability to focus. Just try to interrupt someone actively engaged in a game! “Gamers” have been known to focus for days… or nearly die trying.
Another is the Byte, a unit of memory size. Whether with TIVO or in The Cloud, we can store memory. There’s simply no need to keep it. The most vital information is no longer stored in and accessed from our brains. We can store everything in the devices, our thoughts and others’. With the idea of the byte — how appropriate a word to its meaning! — every idea seemed to be shorter, more concise, and faster, to flow in the latest direction. For most people, there is no taking “however long it takes” to say what you have to say no matter how important it is; the mike is only there for 32 seconds. Chris Cuomo, on the other hand, has lots of time — particularly if it’s a dead news day or if they need some filler or simply require some light entertainment
Then there’s Text – the written shorthand that led to speaking in languages that others couldn’t understand. The worst byproduct of that is a loss of human, nuanced expression. Everything texted carries the same weight. Saying the same thing aloud “with feeling” isn’t just a matter of intonation, it’s also a matter of how much time it takes, of speaking at just the right speed with just the right stress to suit the occasion. Siri doesn’t know from serious.
There’s more, but my head can’t take the strain of remembering. Darrow musta done it wif mirrors.
Jack wrote: Even Obama was notably less coherent off the cuff. It’s one reason I keep marveling at Clarence Darrow, who gave multi-hour speeches in court without notes. Or read the Lincoln Douglas debates. Is we gettng dummer?
Perhaps. But perhaps another factor is immediacy and a hyperpoliticized news environment. For quite some time now (though it’s far more obvious today), media outlets have been ready to parse and pounce on anything that could serve up raw meat to the confirmation biases of their audiences. As a result, politicos are EXTREMELY careful in what they say, and how they say it; they’re intensely guarded (ever written an elected official and received a response? One almost invariably gets four dense paragraphs of Authentic Frontier Gibberish).
The higher up the political food chain, the more cautious they tend to become. I can personally only remember two Presidents who had the talent (and it IS a talent) to speak extemporaneously, articulately, and convincingly: Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. Of course, Clinton was lying his ass off most of the time, but he still SOUNDED good… Trump actually has a BIT of this gift, but the problem is that he makes so much of it up as he’s going along.
error “jAFG.” …on the other hand, the “j” was a lucky accident; it really stands for Juvenile, as in AjFG, or Authentic Juvenile Frontier Gibberish.
I was listening to several media outlets blame all the riots on ‘white supremacists’. At first, I got mad. Then I thought about it and realized they were 100% correct.
This year we have seen several large protests from conservatives groups specifically in Virginia and Michigan . They mostly conformed to the rules for protests list featured previously. They were all viciously criticized by the press as ‘dangerous’, however. Imagine if just a few of those protesters, after the protests, had shot up some police cars or spray-painted ‘black guns matter’ on buildings? Would they get a pass? What if they were angry and wanted to be heard? What if they demanded justice for Duncan Lemp? Don’t you know who Duncan Lemp is? What if protesters in Florida burned down building demanding Michigan’s governor Whitmer resign? Why would they be treated differently? I say it is because of widespread white supremacists beliefs.
What are the excuses given for the violence? ‘People are angry’, ‘They want to be heard’, ‘They have been wronged’, and ‘Things need to change’ are typical ones. The organizers of these protests say they aren’t to blame that every single one of their ‘peaceful protests’ result in vandalism and damage (then why did you tell them to bring spray-paint?). The Virginia protest organizers were able to control thousands of gun-wielding people, making sure no one grabbed the pistol grip of an AR or muzzle-swept anyone. Do you know how hard that is? Why can’t the NAACP have the same control over their protests, don’t they have any experience?
Why the difference? Why is one group expected to behave peacefully and within the law and the other group is excused for extreme lawlessness? Well, one group is mostly black. Blacks can’t be expected to act peacefully or within the bounds of the law, we are told. When they get upset, they become violent, it is just how they are, you can’t hold it against them, we are told. This is a white supremacists argument. This behavior would never be tolerated from a group that was overwhelmingly white.
Our media, the NAACP, and most of our politicians believe, or claim to believe, that blacks in this country are incapable of controlling themselves or behaving in civilized society. From the interviews I have seen with the rioters, I think they have convinced a significant portion of black Americans of that as well. This is white supremacy, the belief that blacks are inferior to whites and incapable of behaving in society, and it is sickening to see it on display to this extent.
Hmmm. Perhaps Jack should change the name of this blog to Dangerous Thoughts.
and How To Deal With Them