I have referenced the parable of “The Dishonest Waiter” here several times after first encountering it in the film, “Denial.” The point is that when a waiter gives you the wrong change it can be presumed to be a simple innocent mistake, but when all of the waiter’s “mistakes” go in one direction, to his own financial benefit, one can no longer give such a waiter the benefit of the doubt: he’s dishonest, and those weren’t mistakes. Ethics Alarms finds the Axis news media as a perfect equivalent of the Dishonest Waiter now: all of their “mistakes” go to the disadvantage of Donald Trump and his party. Those who insist, “Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias,” I fear, are as dishonest as the metaphorical waiter.
Our Dishonest Waiters has been a busy bee lately. A few examples among many more…
1. The BBC. BBC’s director general Tim Davie and chief executive of news Deborah Turness resigned this week “following concerns about impartiality,” as Sky News hilariously put. Yeah: “concerns.” The BBC, as Left-biased and anti-Trump as any U.S. outlet (but with a US version to carry its bias to American viewers), deliberately edited Trump’s comment on January 6, 2020 to seem like he encouraged a riot when he did exactly the opposite. This was at least as egregious an attempt at unethical election interference as NBC letting Saturday Night Live turn its show a few days before the election into a Kamala Harris campaign ad, and “60 Minutes” editing its pre-election program to make Kamala sound less like the babbling fool that she is. The BBC insists that their effort was all a big “mistake,” lying its metaphorical head off, just as NPR and PBS flacks did telling Congress that the two propaganda outlets were “objective” before they were both justifiably de-funded.
2. The New York Times. (They had to be here, right?) In this recent Trump hit job, the Times relied on wholly misleading documents released by Democrats in Congress, again to try to use the Jeffrey Epstein connection to slime the President now that the White House ballroom nonsense is “old news” and the shutdown failed. The New York Post explained in an editorial,
“What a low and cynical move by Democrats on the House Oversight Committee — releasing just enough of a Jeffrey Epstein email early Wednesday to inspire the most hysterical possible Trump-smearing coverage. Even as they knew the full facts told a completely different story. Of course all manner of “responsible” media played along: These lapdogs with laptops offered a host of headlines with some variation of “Trump spent hours alone with Epstein victim” — dirt that in this age of the internet will be the lasting impression many Americans take away, even though it’s centrally false. Specifically, Dems circulated this carefully redacted email from the vile procurer:
“i want you to realize that that dog that hasn’t barked is trump..[VICTIM] spent hours at my house with him ,, he has never once been mentioned.”Looks terrible — until you learn that [VICTIM] is the late Virginia Giuffre, who had worked for Trump before she fell into Epstein’s clutches, and had publicly said time and again that the future president never misbehaved in the least toward her. Plus: Since Giuffre is dead, and so can’t possibly be hurt by any revelations, the only reason to block out her name was to conceal the fact that this gun had no smoke.“
Oh! And the New York Times was fooled by this trick sufficiently to bring up the Epstein smear again? Must have been a mistake.
Ann Althouse writes, “What an incredibly sleazy move, redacting the name Virginia Giuffre, as if it were to protect her, when her name has already been public, she wrote a book to get her story out, she’s told us she believed Trump did nothing wrong, and she’s no longer alive. It’s plainly and deliberately deceptive, and it’s stupid too, because the name was going to come out, as it did in less than one day. Such an idiotic distraction. I’m happy to look at any new evidence about the Epstein story, but I don’t want to waste my time on manipulations like this.”
Why didn’t the Times call out Democrats for this despicable conduct, leaving the job to the conservative NY Post that, you know, published that “fake” Hunter Biden laptop report? Another “mistake”?
3. Reuters: (I had three more examples but my computer just crashed and now I can’t find the documents. Oh well, I had this one in reserve…). Since the Left now is substantially anti-Semitic, Reuters tried to impugn those genocidal Jews with the headline out of Istanbul this week: “Turkey seeks safe passage for 200 civilians trapped in Gaza tunnels, official says.” The article began, “Turkey is working to ensure the safe passage of some 200 civilians trapped in tunnels in Gaza . . . “
Notably, the very next paragraph contradicted the “civilian” claim, rightly noting that even Hamas acknowledges that the trapped so-called “civilians” are Hamas fighters: “Palestinian militant group Hamas earlier said that fighters holed up in the Israeli-held Rafah area will not surrender to Israel . . .”
Caught in their own bias and slammed on it in the conservative and Israel media Reuters quietly pulled the article.
Ethics Alarms 
1 And because this type of reporting has become de rigueur for the media wing of the so-called Resistance, the deranged among its subscribers/readers/viewers will be that the BBC caved to Trump and is now compromised.
I saw the original speech, my friends saw the net/social media version. My husband as well. When I heard their version I was flummoxed as I knew what I’d seen with my own eyes. It’s happening time and time again..Trayvon Martin shot ‘for walking while black’, ‘hands up don’t shoot’, the truncation of Trump’s Muslim immigration remark*. One article in a Chicago newspaper trumpeted the headline “Trump’s drone strike numbers far surpass Obama’s”. I know his total drone strike number, so I thought it couldn’t be true. They fudged the numbers by leaving out one country. If I hadn’t read the article all the way through I might have been fooled.
I have found that I have to do a great amount of reading on any one issue to get the full picture. So I read the White House website, go and read the actual bills (the ‘Don’t say gay’ bill was about use of graphic sex ed materials being delayed until 3rd grade or later, not hiding one’s sexual orientation at school) , Micheal Brown and George Floyd’s autopsy reports, George Zimmerman’s trial transcript…it’s a lot of work. Most people are social media headline skimmers. There’s no middle ground. Even though they flout the rules, rules and guidelines exist for print and broadcast news. The internet expanded while rules/laws lagged far behind. It’s too late, I believe, to regulate news and journalism on the net. The cat is too far, too long out of the bag. I have no idea what can be done, and it’s discouraging.
It’s 10 years ago this December so I’ll include a refresher. If you remember feel free to skip it. A couple in San Bernardino shot up the husband’s company on the day of the company Christmas party. It was reported in the early news as someone ‘going postal’ at a company party. The later investigation revealed that:
The passport and birth certificate used by the wife to get the fiancée visa were
forged.
The couple had met on a Muslim matching website and their messages were full of
talk of jihad.
Their social media also had multiple posts praising jihad.
The house was full of bomb-making materials, crates full, and,there were several
completed pipe bombs in the attic
There were so many people in and out of the house that the neighbors suspected
that it might be a drug house.
At that point it was unknown whether it was a one-off, whether they acted on their own, and whether any further attacks. Trump was asked how he would have handled it as President and he said ‘A total ban on Muslim immigration until we find out what going on, and we can vet them better’(I can’t find the full quote now, this is to the best of my memory). I saw it live on CNN at 3:30 am. When I got up a few hours later, CNN’s headline was ‘Trump will call for a full ban on Muslim immigration’.
I copied this in from Pages because of whole paragraphs disappearing if I backspace. The formatting is weird, I’m sorry.
You are absolutely right about perusing multiple sources, and especially original sources. Journalists, PR flacks, bloggers, et. al., including here, do not make that easy. Apparently, they believe they know and can tell us exactly what we need to know. A favorite quote for years, Reagan’s “trust, but verify” no longer is operational (if it ever was). Now, distrust and, if it’s important, try to verify.
All true…although I have never pretended to be a news source, can’t be, and won’t try. As JD recently showed, I often need commentariate corrections and always want commentariate input. Nor can I post and raise issues as thoroughly as I want to if I have to pore through a dozen variously biased sources for every topic.