It sure seems like everyone’s gone to the Moon in Virginia. No traffic, missing neighbors, nobody for Spuds to go nuts over when we take a walk: it’s so quiet outside, I feel like Burgess Meredith in “The Twilight Zone.”
If you’re out there, what better way to reach than to launch a thread about an ethics issue?
I shouldn’t even be writing about this completely silly and worthless story. It exemplifies, however, the cesspool that we are going to be dunked in for all of the next year. Here’s how it goes:
ACT I
The mainstream news media decided to exploit the Christmas season as an opportunity to take a cheap shot at Donald Trump, since that is considered the patriotic duty of anyone who has ever had contact with him, and because he is a threat to democracy. So, as Columbus’s twin “Home Alone” movies were au courrant once again, Rolling Stone and some other enterprising Trump-bashers dredged up a three-year old Business Insider interview in which has-been movie director Chris Columbus, apparently looking to curry favor with the monolithic woke Hollywood community, revealed that Trump had “bullied” his way into the cameo he performed during “Home Alone 2.”
“Nah, there’s mo mainstream media bias!”
That is the headline to this news report by Metro and carried by MSN on the death of Gaston Glock, the Austrian engineer who formed the Glock firearms company in 1963.
It’s as flagrant an example of biased journalists editorializing in news story headlines as you are ever likely to see. This represents a reporter, editor and publication distorting and manipulating the news to make a political statement. The anti-gun movement is especially fond of the appeal to emotion over facts that it represents.
Glock, as far as we know, never profited at all from anyone’s death or killing. He would have made the same profits if no one had ever fired one of his company’s guns. The headline is a lie, and yet MSN felt it was appropriate to circulate it on the web. The analogies to this kind of warped logic write themselves, and you can come up with them as easily as I can.
There was a time not so long ago when only underground newspapers, and supermarket tabloids would indulge in this level of garbage journalism.
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Pointer: Steve-O-in NJ
At a New Hampshire town hall, long-shot GOP Presidential wannabe Nikki Haley was asked what she believed caused the Civil War. She answered,
“I think the cause of the Civil War was basically how government was going to run. The freedoms and what people could and couldn’t do….I think it always comes down to the role of government and what the rights of the people are. And I will always stand by the fact that I think government was intended to secure the rights and freedoms of the people. It was never meant to be all things to all people. Government doesn’t need to tell you how to live your life. They don’t need to tell you what you can and can’t do. They don’t need to be a part of your life. They need to make sure that you have freedom. We need to have capitalism. We need to have economic freedom. We need to make sure that we do all things so that individuals have the liberties so that they can have freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom to do or be anything they want to be without government getting in the way.”
When the questioner said it was “astonishing” that she didn’t mention slavery, Haley replied: “What do you want me to say about slavery?” and called for the next question.
Confirmation bias may be the most destructive bias of them all, creeping into the best of minds and casing them to malfunction wildly, and, in tragic cases like that of Basil Smilke, causing them to say and do things that destroy their credibility while making them look ridiculous. This is the bias that makes human beings see and believe what they want to see and believe when a conflicting reality is right in front of them.
I actually did a Danny Thomas spit-take when I read Smilke’s opinion column on CNN’s website titled, “Kamala Harris is not a liability. She may be Democrats’ best weapon.” I got a mouthful of coffee on Spuds, who was lying on me, and he was not pleased. Reading the headline, I was prepared to see that the crazy thing had been authored by a student at Madame Louisa’s Home for the Bewildered, but no. Smilke appears to be well credentialed and to have all his faculties, not that being a professor and director of the Public Policy Program at the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute of Hunter College is the highest step on the academic ladder, but hey: Hunter has more credibility than Harvard, and it doesn’t allow plagiarism.
Now, I recognize that Smilke is also a Democratic Party political operative and consultant, so there is an alternate explanation for the piece that doesn’t make him look like a confirmation bias-infected moron. He could be lying to the public and to Kamala Harris in the hopes of getting a job. That would be unethical, of course, but then he’s a Democratic Party political operative and consultant.
His opinion piece—and why would even CNN publish something this absurd?—reads like it was written under the influence of some powerful mind-altering drug. Here is his argument:
“Jeopardy!,” the apparently eternal TV game show that has persevered even as its once difficult questions have become increasingly pitched to the less-than-astute, ended its 2023 with a surprise. Mayim Bialik, the actress who is also (for an actress) unusually credentialed educationally, announced this month that she has been let go as a host of “Jeopardy!” Since 2021, Bialik, who had previously portrayed “Big Bang Theory” head nerd Sheldon’s girlfriend on the series, had shared the role of host with legendary “Jeopardy!” champ Ken Jennings. Bialik was the more reliable and professional of the two, perhaps because of her long performing background. Jennings was at the center of far more gaffes and controversies, though Bialik had her share. This season, for example, she disallowed all three contestants’ answers of ”Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn” because she found their pronunciations of the Russian writer and dissident’s name insufficiently accurate.
College Fix, which has been the source of several EA posts this year, has provided an amusing (or depressing) compendium of 71 people, places and things that “were declared racist or in need of ‘anti-racist’ action” by academics or on college campuses. The list is, shall we say, provocative and revealing. Here are 25 of my favorites and their links; Ethics Alarms covered some of them:
Boy, have I been asleep at the switch with this one.
The Unethical Website of the Month was a regular feature on the Ethics Alarms predecessor The Ethics Scoreboard, but I have fallen down on the job. There are probably more unethical websites than ever, but the last one officially posted here was in July (though this site also qualified a month later). Here is an area where reader tips would be especially helpful, because typically (or tipically?)I only stumble across unethical websites by accident.
That’s not the case this time, however. NewsGuard has been around since 2018, and I have been blithely ignorant of it nonetheless. Here is how it describes itself on its “About” page:
Founded by media entrepreneur and award-winning journalist Steven Brill and former Wall Street Journal publisher Gordon Crovitz, NewsGuard provides transparent tools to counter misinformation for readers, brands, and democracies. Since launching in 2018, its global staff of trained journalists and information specialists has collected, updated, and deployed more than 6.9 million data points on more than 35,000 news and information sources, and cataloged and tracked all of the top false narratives spreading online.
NewsGuard’s analysts, powered by multiple AI tools, operate the trust industry’s most accountable and largest dataset on news. These data are deployed to fine-tune and provide guardrails for generative AI models, enable brands to advertise on quality news sites and avoid propaganda or hoax sites, provide media literacy guidance for individuals, and support democratic governments in countering hostile disinformation operations targeting their citizens.
Among other indicators of the scale of its operations is that NewsGuard’s apolitical and transparent criteria have been applied by its analysts to rate news sources accounting for 95% of online engagement with news across nine countries.
Impressive! What the page doesn’t tell you is that it has received about 750 thousand dollars from the federal government. It claims, however, to be completely transparent about its “investors” and income ( “Revenue Sources: NewsGuard’s revenue comes from Internet Service Providers, browsers, search engines, social platforms, education providers, hospital systems, advertising agencies, brand safety providers, researchers, and others paying to use NewsGuard’s ratings and Nutrition Labels and associated data.”) “Only” $750,000 seems like a proverbial drop in the bucket for a government that spends like Barnacle Bill the Sailor, but being funded in any way by the government means that a conflict of interest exists that needs to be prominently revealed. I find NewsGuard so non-user friendly and confusing that it would qualify as an unethical website on the basis of incompetence alone, but it is also untrustworthy.
Yes, it’s “Imagine” time again. Mainstream media talking heads and hacks have apparently been playing the John Lennon’s sweet and fatuous ode to nonsense over earbuds as they sleep, judging from the angle they repeatedly return to as they push anti-Israel propaganda on the public.
CNN’s Breanna Keilar had a typical “Think if the children!” exchange with Israeli spokeswoman Tal Heinrich yesterday.
Keilar (talking over and interrupting her guest as she Heinrich expressed regret that children in Gaza were being placed in harm’s way): “Tal, when you see those pictures coming out of Gaza, do you see why some people don’t have hope looking at those pictures?”
Heinrich: “Well, we are in the middle of a war that Israel did not start, and did not want.”
Keilar: “It is prosecuting it forcefully, and you see the pictures here.”
Heinrich: “When Hamas started this war — hope and peace and a better future for the region — that is the greatest enemy of terrorists. Once we eliminate these terrorists, we eliminate the rule. We hope that there will be other voices, pragmatic ones that want to work with us towards peace. This is what we want. We want to live in this region peacefully. That’s what Israelis have always wanted. But first, Hamas must be gone, and then we hope that the Palestinian society will de-radicalize. We can’t have — you know, what our troops are finding right now, on the ground, in certain neighborhoods in Gaza, pictures of children, women with guns, Hamas uniform tailored for children. And Hamas terrorists that we have arrested—”
Keilar (interrupting): “Does that make the children justifiable enemies to you? Is that what you’re saying? Does that make all of the children justifiable enemies to you? I mean, you’re raising the specter of them being used in military uniform.”
For this continuing series examining the biases that make me stupid (or not), on the one month anniversary of the last installment, I want to take up the matter of drivers who slow to a crawl or even stop their vehicles entirely when they encounter a “speed hump” in the road.
This past week two such drivers almost caused my car to run into them. In recent years Northern Virginia has gone speed hump mad, putting the things virtually everywhere that isn’t a highway or a main thoroughfare. I don’t mind them, however, nearly as much as I mind the way some drivers seem to regard them as explosive devices. You can safely drive over a speed hump at a moderate velocity; your transmission or axles aren’t going to fall off if your car doesn’t slow down into single digits.
I confess: I regard drivers who freak out at speed humps as emblematic of creeping weenie-ism in the nation. I imagine such drivers as still wearing masks alone in their cars, spending nights shivering in terror over the certain doom that the world faces if we don’t start living like prehistoric cave dwellers, fearing to allow their kids to walk unaccompanied a few blocks home from school, and who want the U.S. to minimize the deployment of its military to tasks involving expanding LGBTQ rights and advancing the cause of diversity, equity and inclusion. I envision them applauding when some anti-gun fanatic shouts that it would be worth eliminating the Second Amendment “if it saved one life” and crippling the First so no feelings are ever hurt by unwelcome opinions.
Ethics Alarms 