Arts & Entertainment

Unethical Headline, Trump Derangement Division: Variety

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Some recent studies suggest that Trump Derangement is taking on the characteristics of mental illness. That shouldn’t surprise anyone who isn’t suffering from it, and this latest example should go into the research files.

Anne Schedeen was one of those moderately successful, fungible and forgettable actresses who can most charitably described as a “working professional.” When a sitcom role that has you starring as a puppet’s protector—Alf was an illegal alien from outer space who had crash-landed in a family’s garage, and Schedeen played the mother in the family that helped keep him secret from government authorities—-is your most famous credit, you will not get a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. But upon her death at 77, Schedeen’s family thought it appropriate to virtue-signal to their fellow Trump Haters by issuing this tribute:

“She leaves behind an extraordinary legacy of creative energy, whip smart humor, delight in her family, adoration for little dogs, burning hatred for Trump, passion for second-hand thrifting, and love for a good story. We are bereft without her. We loved her so so much, as did all who met her.”

That, my friends, is insane. Variety, meanwhile, the so-called bible of the entertainment trade, didn’t have to put that feature in the statement in its headline, but did. None of the other outlets reporting the death thought that weird section was any more worthy of highlighting than Anne’s “passion for second-hand thrifting,” because it isn’t. Variety’s typical reader, however, is just as insane as Anne Schedeen.

I cannot imagine any previous President being used in this manner. Being noted for hatred of anything as a life highlight is hardly impressive; to me, that headline demonstrates what a wan career Schedeen had. No, she was never in a successful movie, never had a big role, never was nominated for an Oscar or Emmy, BUT she did hate the President of the United States, so there’s that.

The family might as well have pointed out that she won an award in the fourth grade for an essay about her goldfish. Having one’s family hurl your hatred at a President from beyond the grave is hardly as impressive as Ahab screaming at Moby Dick right before the Whaie Whale drags him down, “Thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee!” Ahab was nuts, but at least he wasn’t mad at Moby for mean tweets and enforcing immigration laws.

The family and Variety using the death of a minor actress to spit at the President, however, is a sad, foolish madness.

Madison Square Garden/New York Knicks Ethics [ Updated ]

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

The New York Knicks finally won an NBA Championship after over half a century, bringing to a happy end one of the longest current fan base frustrations in professional sports, but also a series of ethics messes arising out of Madison Square Garden.

There were some post-victory ethics botches outside of the Garden last night. I don’t understand why winning a sports contest is provocation for a riot. I get the drunken fool effect, but even so: there were no riots in Boston when the Red Sox broke their 86 year-long World Series blight, “The Curse of the Bambino.” Gee, I wonder how many of those Knicks fans will be sent to jail for long periods on the theory that they threatened an “insurrection.” After all, President Trump made it clear that he was rooting for the Knicks. Wait, that’s it! The rioting was Trump’s fault!

Here’s an incomplete list…

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A “Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!” Spectacular!

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

1. In a clip from a post-firing interview, the unbearable Scott Pelley actually says that nobody on the “60 Minutes” staff, including Pelley, thought that the long-time left-leaning Sunday magazine show was biased. Pelley himself is living proof that the show was biased. Here’s a brief montage of Pelley being what he thought was objective and fair over the years,

2. Former National Security Advisor John Bolton pleaded guilty of deliberately mishandling classified documents, a deal that requires him to pay a $2.5 million fine. He pleaded guilty because he was guilty. ABC and NBC, however, framed the news as President Trump getting “revenge” on a critic.

“He was a prime target of President Trump’s retribution campaign, said ABC’s justice correspondent. “And tonight, sources tell ABC News Trump’s former National Security Adviser, John Bolton, is planning to plead guilty to mishandling classified information.”

That’s classic deceit and false framing for partisan purposes, but also typical of how the Axis networks cover news regarding the Trump Administration. On NBC, the same game plan was in view. “Bolton was national security adviser during Trump’s first term,” the nightly broadcast began. “Then became a fierce opponent of the President. Now, sources tell NBC News he plans to plead guilty to one count of retaining national security information. For a year and a half now, the Justice Department has been pursuing cases against the people you see here, those the President believes have wronged him…”

The investigation of Bolton’s crime began under the Biden Administration’s Justice Department. Both ABC and NBC got that in at the very end of their reports, which is deliberately reversing the priority of the facts. This was by definition not a “retribution prosecution” by Trump because it began under Biden. That information belonged at the start. The fact that Bolton was a Trump critic is of interest but not central to the story. Placed up front, however, it “poisons the well.”

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Friday Open Forum, or “Help Me Find More Bananas Ethics Stories!”

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

On my birthday (also known as “Finding Jack’s father dead in his chair day”) in 2025, I began a post thusly…

“I missed this pre-Great Stupid story in 2019, when it was a harbinger of stupid things to come, and missed it again this year, when it was back in the news a few days ago. It wasn’t too long ago that Fred and Pennagain reliably alerted me to ethics stories around the web that I otherwise might have missed. A few of you do send me story ideas regularly, but something like this shouldn’t slip through the cracks.”

“This” was a recurring story about various reactions to absurdist artist Maurizio Cattelan taping a banana to a wall at an art show in 2019 and calling it “Comedian.” In 2019, performance artist David Datuna ripped the banana off the wall and ate it, so Cattalan just taped another banana to another wall. I missed that one and in 2024 was urging readers to keep my EA runway full. I am doing so again. I can’t find every rich ethics story out there all by myself. I still welcome guest post submissions too.

The story in 2024 was that a Chinese cryptocurrency entrepreneur named Justin Sun bought the silly artwork for $6.2 million at auction and, in front of cameras, ate the banana as a gesture of conspicuous consumption to show how rich he was. Well, “Comedians” sparked another stupid incident last month: The Pompidou-Metz museum in Paris announced that it had filed a criminal complaint for theft against the unknown art-lover (or banana-lover) who took down the most recent banana to be featured in “Comedians” and ate it.

The museum also announced that it had replaced the banana.

Now it’s your turn again to write about more trenchant ethics events like that one, or more sophisticated issue that may lack appeal.

How’s That Computer Strike-Calling System Working?

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

My verdict: it’s an improvement over relying entirely on the fallible home plate umpires, but ethical problems remain.

The current system gives each team two challenges if they think a ball or strike call is wrong. The teams can keep challenging as long as the ABS (Automated Ball and Strike) system backs their judgment. If a challenge proves mistaken, the team loses the challenge.

We have learned that knowing when a ball or strike call is wrong from the players’ perspective is harder than it looks. A few players are really good at it, but most are not. Because the prospect of a key pitch call being blown at a crucial juncture late in the game when the victimized team is out of challenges looms large, players have become increasingly reluctant to challenge pitches early in a game.

Ironically, the system takes accountability from umpires in some cases. In a recent Red Sox game, Boston’s opponent was out of challenges. In the 7th inning with the game close, a 3-2 pitch was called out of the strike zone, and Boston’s batter walked to first base with two outs. The pitch was, in fact, a strike, and should have ended the inning. Instead, the Sox had a long rally, scoring six runs. The announcers harped on the fact that it was the miscalculations of the losing team in using up their two challenges that opened the floodgates, but that’s not why the team lost. The team lost because the umpire blew the call, and it’s his job to call pitches correctly.

This situation, and there have been many of them so far this season, convinces me that players should not have to challenge bad calls, and the results of games should not depend on whether an umpire’s botch is challenged or not. The ABS system knows when a ball is in the strike zone with every pitch. If an umpire calls a ball a strike or vice-versa, the bad call should be instantly overturned without having to be challenged.

Remembering the Remarkable Sheb Wooley [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

My favorite ubiquitous unknown character actor of all time is probably amazing Whit Bissell, this guy….

…who appeared in many classic films and tons of TV series despite having the dramatic range of a mannequin. But Sheb Wooley is the focus of this “Duty to Remember” post. I love performers who excel in multiple realms, and while Sheb isn’t quite in Hedy Lamar’s league (but who is?), he was versatile, and has one distinction that nobody is likely to equal, ever.

Sheb was best known for his role in Westerns. He was a regular cast member in the famous TV series “Rawhide,” renowned as the show that made Clint Eastwood a star and for the memorable theme song sung by Frankie Lane (“Move em out!”). He also played the brother of the dreaded villain in “High Noon” who had vowed to kill Sheriff Gary Cooper, and was one of the three Miller accomplices gunned down by Cooper (and Grace Kelly) in the climax of one of the greatest Westerns ever made. Decades later, Sheb had a key role in another classic: he was the high school principal who hires disgraced college basketball coach Gene Hackman to take over a tiny Indiana school’s basketball team in “Hoosiers.”

That’s just the normal stuff, though. Sheb Wooley was also a successful Country music star and songwriter (often under the name “Ben Colder”) and in 1958, penned and performed one of the most memorable novelty songs in a decade filled with them. That’s Sheb singing “The Purple People Eater” in the video above. His most impressive distinction, however, was as the voice actor for the Wilhelm scream, the stock recording of a man in the process of a experiencing a violent death. Because it has been used in in nearly 750 films including the first three “Star Wars” movies and the original “Indiana Jones” films, Sheb Wooley has “appeared” in more movies than any American actor. And his scream, which you can enjoy here, is still being used in new productions (it’s a film school in-joke), so Wooley’s voice keeps acquiring new roles. The most current list is here.

I must mention that the actor who is probably Sheb’s runner up for the title of “Most Film Credits Ever” is James Hong, the actor best known, perhaps, as the annoying maitre’d at the Chinese restaurant Jerry, George, and Elaine futilely wait to dine at in a famous episode of “Seinfeld.” [Notice of Correction: I originally included Kramer as one of the group. He was omitted from the episode, and apparently that cause a bit of tension behind the scenes.] Hong, who is 97, has inflated his own list of credits with his work as a voice actor, and has over 600 credits.

No hit songs, though, and no immortal scream.

Unethical Trigger Warning Of The Month: Citizens Free Press

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

That’s one of Elon Musk’s biological sons (he has a lot of them) above, now a trans-female model—not there’s anything wrong with that— named Vivian Wilson. The Daily Mail has a very tabloid story (as in “Who the hell cares about this stuff?”) telling us that Vivian is featured as a model in the latest Savage x Fenty new Pride-themed collection. Be still, my beating heart!

You can read the story here, if your sock drawer is in order and you have no life, but my concern involves how the link to the story was presented by Citizen Free Press, the conservative news aggregator that took over that market from the Drudge Report when Matt went woke and NeverTrump a decade ago. Here’s how the site described the link:

Elon Musk biological son poses for female lingerie ad — Warning, photos are disturbing

I expected Vivian to be posed on disemboweled kittens or famine victims with that trigger warning. No, the photos that are supposed to be “disturbing” are shots like the one above. How much of a weenie cum snowflake would someone have to be to find that photo upsetting enough to mandate a trigger warning? It’s a standard issue fashion shot. Is it supposed to disturb us because its a model with a y chromosome? If that’s the point, then I view the warning as legitimizing transphobia. Even trans-themed photographs that cause my ethics alarms to go off—remember this one, of a Disney “fairy godmother”?—

shouldn’t be considered so trauma-producing that people need an advance warning lest they be struck blind or something.

The somewhat less obnoxious explanation for the “warning” is that it’s a clickbait trick by the site; you know, if it requires a warning, everyone will be curious and click on it. Well, that’s dishonest. As an ethicist, I find the gratuitous trigger warning, indeed trigger warnings in general, far more disturbing than a photo of a biological male doing a convincing female model impression. Good for her! Brava!

It is episodes like this that create needless erosion of respect for conservative values and sensibilities.

The “Who Cares?” Anti-Trump Judicial Ruling Of Them All

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Even Trump doesn’t care, raising the question of why it’s such a big deal to the Trump Deranged. From the Washington Post:

“A federal judge issued a ruling this week temporarily blocking key parts of President Donald Trump’s effort to transform the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, throwing the institution’s future into a state of uncertainty…He installed himself as the Kennedy Center’s board chair and brought in loyalists as trustees who voted last year to add his name to the building. Programming priorities shifted, acts have withdrawn or dropped out, ticket sales plummeted and more than 100 employees resigned or were laid off.

“In March, the board agreed to Trump’s plan to close the center for a two-year renovation. But U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper on Friday granted in part a request from Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-Ohio), temporarily blocking steps toward the closure. He also ordered Kennedy Center officials to remove Trump’s name from the center’s building and branding.

“…Cooper has ordered the removal of Trump’s name from the building’s white exterior wall, a little more than five months after it was installed when the board, stacked by Trump with those loyal to him, voted to rename the institution “The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.” They have two weeks to remove it and scrap references to it from the website.

“Congress gave the Kennedy Center its name,” Cooper wrote in his opinion, “and only Congress can change it.”

That’s nice. I’m sure all of my friends and colleagues in the arts community will be happy now. Actually no, I know they won’t. My Trump Deranged friends and colleagues have made it quite clear that they won’t be happy until Donald J. Trump is dead and hanging like a pinata on a tree somewhere, and can be pelted with rotten fruit by people screaming like banshees. Ann Althouse this morning raised a fascinating conspiracy theory regrading “What’s going on here?” Her take: “I’m going to assume he didn’t want to fix this place, and the best — or most entertaining — way to avoid blame for letting it rot was to bait a judge into preventing him from saving it.”

Actually, he did more than that. When the President put his name on the building, it naturally caused the infants in the arts community to cut off their metaphorical noses to spite their faces. After duly noting how silly the re-naming of the building was in this post, I wrote in this one:

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The Freedom 250 Concert Ethics Train Wreck

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Would it be too much to expect all of America’s talented performers to unite in patriotic passion and non-partisan good will to help the nation celebrate its 250th anniversary?

Apparently, yes! As John Lennon would have said if he were possessed by “Bob” from “Twin Peaks”: “All you need is HATE! Bwahahahahahahaha!” Well, hate and stupidity.

Would it be too much to expect that those in charge of organizing such an event to be willing and able to enlist performing artists who are in their primes, widely popular, and invited on the basis of their achievements and skills rather than their political endorsements?

Also, tragically, yes. What drooling yahoos selected that bunch of has-beens, geezers and B acts to headline “The Great American State Fair”? And Milli Vanilli? Is that a joke? Please let it be a joke! Milli Vanilli is to singing groups as Joe Biden was to the Presidency. It was a fake group. It was caught lip-synching on live TV! Quite appropriately, many conservative, Republican and MAGA supporters are disheartened by these bottom-of-the-barrel scrapings, as this selection of tweets highlighted by “Not the Bee” demonstrates:

From the other end, the Left is seeking an encore of their anti-American tantrum in 2017, when any half-decent performer who wasn’t already an outspoken MAGA captive was threatened with shunning by all the Woke and Wonderful if they performed at any of Trump’s inauguration festivities, leaving the President with community theater stars and marginal performers who would only appear at the Grammys if they bought tickets to the balcony. Last week fading country star Martina McBride joined the list of performers backing out of the upcoming “Freedom 250” concerts. Morris Day, Young MC, and the Commodores, also announced they were dumping the gig. The series is being produced by an organization founded by Donald Trump, see, so that means that the concerts are…

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Another “Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!” Smoking Gun, As If We Needed Any More…

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

This exchange…

Ethics villain, Jim Acosta eventually quit CNN in a snit because it began showing a little bit of balance regarding President Trump, but how was such a partisan, biased Axis hack allowed to be CNN’s White House correspondent in the first place? The guy is an A1 Choice USDA -certified ethics villain and, incidentally, an asshole.

Cheer-leading for Colbert is signature significance, to begin with. Gutfield is correct on the facts: it has been verified repeatedly that CBS was losing millions on Colbert.

A swollen staff is part of the reason; the other reason is that Colbert deliberately alienated half the country.

Acosta then defaults to the Axis narrative that President Trump got Colbert cancelled. It’s a lie, flat out. “Dear Leader” is a sarcastic name used by the Trump Deranged. This Axis “advocacy journalist” was out to trash President Trump from the moment he was elected,

Then Acosta privets to the “poor fired employees” guilt trip. They lost their jobs because the show they were working for was losing money! It happens to the best of us (and me, several times). That’s how business works in the U.S. Too bad this isn’t the socialist worker’s paradise Acosta and his fellow travelers dream about. And Gutfield didn’t celebrate the staff losing their jobs anyway. He stated that the staff was ridiculously huge, which it was.

[I will link to Jim Acosta’s ugly EA dossier when WordPress is functioning better, which it currently is not, and its “Happiness Engineers” (Yuck!) have been useless.]

He’s an Ethics Villain. When people complain about Trump calling the news media the “enemy of the people,” Jim Acosta is Exhibit A in the President’s defense.

Note: Exhibit B could be Dana Milbank, whom the Washington Post finally jettisoned as one of its partisan columnists after years of Axis hackery. Today on ABC he cited as one of the three reasons Kamala Harris lost the election was “the backlash against a black woman being the Democratic nominee.” Just thinking that, never mind saying it in public, disqualifies anyone as a serious and trustworthy analyst. Milbank was a political reporter and columnist for the Washington Post for 25 years.