A dumb or obviously biased opinion column in what passes today for our journalism platforms arguably isn’t strictly “unethical.” It does, however, demonstrate incompetence, contempt for the public, or in many cases indolence, as in “Hey Marge! We need something to fill that space on the Op-ed page!” “Oh hell, let’s publish that thing about reparations. It will be good for a few Letters to the Editor.” “Okay! You got it!”
And so we get junk like “Illinois city’s reparations plan is misguided, divisive and likely unconstitutional” on the Fox News website. To begin with the obvious, this is old news. I wrote about Evanston, Illinois’s City Council’s bat-house crazy plan back in June, and the city has been obsessed with this since the it agreed in 2019 to use tax revenue from recreational marijuana sales to generate a reparations fund.
“This year, Evanston, Illinois, will send $25,000 payments to 44 Black residents and descendants of Black residents who lived in the city between 1919 and 1969,” writes Erec Smith, a research fellow at the Cato Institute and a former associate professor of rhetoric at York College of Pennsylvania. Oh! He must be an expert, then! How come he can’t spell “Eric”?
Erec continues,
“At its core, the Evanston program is race-specific, providing benefits solely to Black residents who meet narrow historical criteria. This raises an obvious legal question: Can the government dole out money based on race? Critics have already flagged the program as constitutionally questionable under the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. Beyond legality, there is a broader question about fairness. The program compensates some individuals while excluding others who may face equal or even greater financial need. Wealthier Black residents in Evanston receive the same payments as those struggling economically, while low-income residents of other races receive nothing. Isn’t a poor White person more in need of that money?”
Ethics Alarms 
“The public has always cared so much about the rotten, rapey billionaire who died almost six years ago that they were always going to demand to see every email he ever wrote or received.”
The public is interested in knowing who among our elected officials, former elected officials or otherwise elitist population abused these young women and girls. I don’t think that’s unreasonable. The only reason they’re reading the emails now is because no one can produce a list of names – perhaps one never existed.
The Democrats only wanted to see one name in Epstein’s documents. Their interest began and ended there.
AM…there have been many, many, MANY terrible, abusive people who had close ties with celebrities and politicians. Harvey Weinstein is the most obvious example. The public was briefly interested in his victims, but there was no interest in his enablers once Harvey was caught and prosecuted. That’s because the news media and the political parties didn’t try to play the guilt-by-association game, mostly because Weinstein’s best pals were Democrats like Hillary Clinton and David Bois. An earlier example was Frank Sinatra. If the news media (and the Kennedeys) hadn’t protected him but instead kept bringing up his pals in the Mob, the public might have demanded a reckoning. It didn’t. Then there was the Kennedy family itself, which was tied to the Mafia through Sinatra. The focus isn’t on the victims, it is on whose members, funders and allies get slimed by the documents.
Whether they should or not, the public doesn’t care at this point about the victims, just the “gotcha!’s.
I am suffering from an existetnial fugue. It seems everyone is in the epstein file, or visited the island except me. I never got an invitation so my ego has been permantly bruised.
I am not worthy!
Oprah Winfrey was listed, saw a random before and after clip of the View hens. Hilarious whiplash going from “Anybody in there is guilty!” to “Being connected doesn’t necessarily mean criminal activity.”
Re: No. 1. Oh, the irony. First, if you were a person of color living in Evanston, Illinois, it must have been pretty darn nice. Almost a “don’t throw me in the briar patch situation.” Second, didn’t legalizing pot put the street vendors out of business? Weren’t we told black guys only went into selling drugs because that was the only way they could make a decent living? So, you’ve taken away their only way of making a decent living to fund giving some of them a check derived from selling what they used to sell for profit? Why not just legalize the street sale of pot and eliminate the government middleman? I’m assuming very few of the legitimate pot vendors are minority owned. If, as we are told by Chuck Schumer, black people can’t manage to get a voter ID card, they surely can’t work their way through the licensing maze involved in getting a pot selling license, never mind the legal fees and other fees and costs.
Re No. 2: When I saw a summary of the piece, I thought it was going to be a levelheaded piece saying releasing investigatory files was just a bad idea. Cue Homer Simpson: Duh-oh!