It was a competitive field to be sure, but O’Donnell, who once aspired to be a respected and trustworthy journalist, displayed how far she has fallen with her despicable performance on today’s “CBS Evening News.” You want bias? You want disinformation? You want unprofessional and unethical conduct? You want Trump Derangement? Norah had it for you. CBS should suspend her, or at least send her to a spa to calm the hell down. CBS, however, is a hack organization now employing hack journalists in complete lock-step with the Axis of Unethical Conduct. No, neither Norah nor CBS are quite as corrupt as MSNBC, but that is faint praise indeed.
Norah leapt onto the the 2024 Election Ethics Train Wreck’s extension, the “Puerto Rico Is An Island of Garbage” Ethics Train Wreck. with gusto. Imagine a news show host thinking this rant is anything but disgraceful:
“Both campaigns are locking their focus on the battleground states. Vice President Kamala Harris rallied in North Carolina and Pennsylvania today and is in Wisconsin tonight. Former President Donald Trump was in North Carolina earlier, and tonight, he is also in Wisconsin. He landed in Green Bay just a short time ago and then pulled this campaign stunt, speaking to reporters from a garbage truck, proof that he and his supporters are giving no grace to a gaffe by President Biden where he, in his explanation, inadvertently called Trump supporters garbage. This, of course, was in response to that racist joke about floating garbage told at a Trump rally just last weekend. Vice President Harris is distancing herself from the negativity and trying to drive home her unifying message that if elected, she will represent all Americans.”
Let’s see:
1. Trump’s garbage truck stunt was brilliant and well-earned by the demonizing tactics of the Harris campaign and Joe Biden’s party that began long, long before Biden called Trump supporters “garbage.” O’Donnell expects “grace”? Astounding that she would have the gall to suggest that. She and her progressive and Democrat pals have gone to great lengths to contort every statement by Donald Trump into something sinister, usually by ignoring the context or leaving out words, as with the “very fine people” lie. Biden’s slur was clear and indefensible, and watching the news media furiously try to cover for him is as damning an exhibition of how aligned the non-Fox News media is behind Harris no matter what she says or does as anyone could ask for. Like this, for example:
Nice. I heard his statement. I saw him make it. Biden was more clear than usual. He’s lying about it now, the White House is lying, so, naturally, the Axis news media is lying right along with them.
2. What Biden said was a “gaffe” only in the sense that it was stupidly timed and expressed out loud what his arrogant, totalitarian party thinks. Calling Trump supporters garbage is completely consistent with this,
as well as Biden’s State of the Union message. Norah must really think her audience, or at least Trump supporters, are brain-damaged.
3. “That” was no “racist joke.” If O’Donnell was a real journalist rather than a Kamala Harris surrogate, she would have enlightened her audience about what the joke referred to, as was her obligation. Ethics Alarms readers, all 12 of them, were given the necessary context, and O’Donnell is paid several million dollars per annum to give the public the facts they need to make informed decisions as citizens, while I’m paid…well, nothing, actually.
4. Then O’Donnell closes by promoting Harris’s epically hypocritical Emily Littella message (“Never mind!”) that Kamala is suddenly a fan of unity after spending all month calling Donald Trump Hitler and his supporters fascists.
O’Donnell’s performance was “enemy of the people” stuff, straight up. No one should take her seriously again.
Ethics Alarms 
Norah O’Donnell said:
He landed in Green Bay just a short time ago and then pulled this campaign stunt, speaking to reporters from a garbage truck, proof that he and his supporters are giving no grace to a gaffe by President Biden where he, in his explanation, inadvertently called Trump supporters garbage.
Wow, a lot to unpack here. I agree that the garbage truck stunt was brilliant. Can you imagine the empty pantsuit Kamala Harris coming up with something like that? No? Neither can I, and not because she is too nice, but because she’s simply too dimwitted.
If nothing else, this just goes to show how sharp Trump still is. No matter what you think of him personally (and for my part, I try very hard not to), he is currently fully competent to lead the country as far as mental acuity goes.
I don’t think Harris is, not because of her age, but because she’s just not smart enough. Her lack of ability to think on her feet is, to me, disqualifying. What if she has a word-salad brain lock in the middle of an important call to, say, avert nuclear war?
But back to Norah. So many pixels have been darkened talking about media bias, it’s almost hard to write anything incisive about it. The WaPo meltdown, CBS’s transparent disregard for rules they agreed to in the debate, the list goes on and on. It has come to the point that an unbiased bit of reporting is noteworthy enough to earn ethics points, rather than just being a case of ordinary competence in the profession.
Also, it’s remarkable how this bias (and you have always been right about how it makes one stupid) has resulted in reporters simply abdicating their most fundamental responsibility — checking their facts. Instead, she nauseatingly declares the joke “racist” (I didn’t know Puerto Ricans were a race) as though she were a Harris campaign operative. Fundamental competence in reporting is now a rare quality among the mainstream media, if it is to be found at all.
And finally, why in God’s name would Trump or his supporters give “grace” to a man who has constantly attacked both throughout his term? Biden has not given former president Trump one iota of grace, and many times attacked his supporters either directly or indirectly, usually with hoaxes and made-up nonsense. Even if Biden is simply senile and that accounts for his remarks, he has earned every inch of the garbage truck rebuke by Trump.
https://babylonbee.com/news/report-millions-of-garbage-bags-seen-lining-up-outside-polling-station
And I also saw an ad for “Garbage for Trump” t-shirts on their website. That one is probably real, I’d guess.
At least Trump has a sense of humor, something sorely lacking from the progressives.
And yet that was one of the themes the Axis floated last week: Trump in grim, never smiles, has no sense of humor, while Harris is “joyful.”
That just seems to be the most ridiculous thing to possibly try to pass off as truth. A person would need to be completely disconnected from reality to believe that. Trump jokes all the time. It is one of the reasons he is so entertaining. He has great comedic timing.
Cackling at suffering refugees is not ‘joyful’.
That Babylon Bee link was awesome.
I about had a stroke when I read that. No grace? No grace? Remember when Trump said that without reform, the next few years would be a bloodbath for the US auto industry, and leftist media told everyone he had threatened political violence if he didn’t win? If O’Donnell wants to see grace, I suggest she look in the dictionary, between “gaslight” and “grifter”. One of the old paper dictionaries, mind you, so you know they haven’t changed the definition in the past five minutes.
“Please forgive him, for he not knoweth what he said,” Trump intoned, paraphrasing the Bible. “Terrible to say a thing like that, but honestly, he doesn’t know.”
When Harris tells her supporters to forgive Trump for saying something stupid, O’Donnel can talk about grace.
How does the Washington Post reconcile the fact that when the apostrophe is used it indicates a possessive and nothing followed “supporters”. Perhaps they need some grammar lessons.
Yeah. That was a head-scratcher. I checked my Strunk & White apostrophe rules and came away wondering, “Apostrophe? What apostrophe?”
jvb
Well, you DO know it’s the crux of the biscuit, right? 🙂
I guess they mean he said “Trump’s supporters’ garbage”?
jvb
So, the talking point memo told Dem operatives to drag out the old “Joe Biden is gaffe-prone” line. Haven’t seen that one deployed in quite some time. They seem to have put it away when Joe was starting to flame out while still running. Calling anything he said brilliant or simply completely ignoring it was the order of the day. Now he’s just a lame duck president it’s safe to say he’s just a loveable gaffe-meister again. Interesting.
I think Norah O’Donnell has finally exceeded her sell by date. That radiantly beautiful Texas beauty pageant face has carried her second-rate brain as far as it can. Say what you will about the Fox blonds, they are more astute and make Norah look like a stuffed blouse.
I think it’s safe to say that we’ve reached a point where:
1) airwave news broadcasts (whether TV or radio) and print news are almost completely corrupted and untrustworthy
2) a recorded video of nearly every event exists on the internet
Because of this, I can use the untrustworthy sources in #1 to tell me something happened. Then I can use the various recorded videos in #2 to see the true details around that event.
So as an example, a media outlet from #1 reports “President Biden said xxx.” I go to the internet and start searching various video repositories for examples of the incident. I watch several versions of the incident, where I discover what President Biden REALLY said. It takes a bit more work on my part, but I’m much more likely to get the truth.
And honestly, this is how we should be vetting what we see/hear on the news…at least until the proverbial (or maybe literal) tsunami washes in and razes these corrupt institutions to the bedrock such that they can maybe be rebuilt.
Without apologies to Bill Clinton, I call the process “triangulation.” You look at the matter at hand from at least two different sources and get, literally and figuratively, some perspective. And then, of course, you can always watch what KJP said about it in a briefing for some comic relief.
As to Biden, the gaffe machine, Yesterday I heard his mental state described as so bad that you would never put him on the cash register at a pumpkin patch, and here he is as chief executive of the United States. Yep, that’s what it boils down to.
O’Donnell is not fit to do traffic and weather on a local morning show.