“bias makes you stupid”

Addendum To “Since The Editor Of The New York Times Just Proved That He Doesn’t Comprehend Journalism Ethics…”

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

A relentless Times apologist–you know which one—chides me for leaving out this from his  interview in the New Yorker, which is the context for the “version of the truth” gaffe, when Baquet said the quiet part out loud (if the Times-enabler hadn’t begun his complaint with “Um,” I might have let it go):

The system of “objectivity” (and I know that’s going to be a bad word) was designed to create a system—Wesley Lowery is right when he describes that—in which the organization’s job was to make sure that whatever your perspective was it didn’t get in the way of reporting the truth. I believe in that very strongly. That’s not the job of every institution. But the job of the New York Times should, in the end, be to come out with the best version of the truth, with your own political opinion held in check by editors and editing. Not everybody believes that, but I believe that. And I think that if you come to work for the New York Times—if you really want to work for the New York Times—you have to embrace that, because that’s what the New York Times is.

In fact, I intended to include that outrageous and insulting lie, but felt it would have just muddled the more important point of the post. (That, and the New Yorker site blocked my access unless I subscribed…) Continue reading →

Since The Editor Of The New York Times Just Proved That He Doesn’t Comprehend Journalism Ethics, I Guess It’s Time To Explain It….

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Past time, in fact. Some Ethics Alarms readers don’t comprehend it either, but they aren’t editing the so-called “Newspaper of Record.”

Dean Baquet, who is soon retiring as the Times editor-in-chief, and not a moment too soon, dropped this verbal smoking gun during an interview in the New Yorker:

“The job of the New York Times should in the end be to come out with the best version of the truth.”

No, he can’t be forgiven a “speako” on the fly: major media interviews aren’t like that. Baquet had an opportunity to fix that quote, but he didn’t. He didn’t because his ethics alarms, such as they are, didn’t twitch. That’s really what the Times editor, and his paper, and the vast majority of its reporters and pundits really think. The “best version of the truth” is, naturally, the version that serves the interests of the Times and its allies, because they know best.

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On “Decertification,” Everybody’s Wrong (Or Lying)…

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

When everybody’s unethical, it begins to be difficult to figure out what “ethical” would be.

In Wisconsin, some Republican officials have launched a serious (though ridiculous) “decertification” effort, an effort to persuade the Wisconsin Legislature to rescind the state’s 10 electoral votes, thereby starting a movement in other states where President Trump lost by a narrow margin and there are reasons to doubt the integrity of the count. In Arizona, a Republican state legislator running for secretary of state, and other GOP candidates for Congress, have also called for withdrawing the state’s electoral votes, which went to President Biden. Last September, Trump wrote a letter to Georgia officials asking them to decertify Biden’s Peach Tree State victory, but there was no response, appropriately.

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Our Unprofessional Professionals, Our Inexpert Experts: The Ethicist And The Economist

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

One of the most disturbing aspects of the 2016 Post Election Ethics Train Wreck was the ugly spectacle of once esteemed professions deciding en masse to ditch their integrity in order to join the “Get Trump!” mob with the cool kids. Historians, lawyers, judges, psychiatrists, scholars, civil libertarians, journalists, educators…yes, and ethicists—all these groups disgraced themselves and breached the one, overarching mandate for those who supposedly labor for the public good: be trustworthy. Then came The Great Stupid, compounding the damage to society and the culture by showing “experts” to be equally unreliable, burdened as they were by crippling bias, political agendas, and flawed skills and assumptions.

Two recent examples highlighted this trend. First up, the ethicist.

Doriane Lambelet Coleman, a professor at Duke Law School, is co-director of the Center for Sports Law & Policy and a senior fellow at the Kenan Institute for Ethics. She authored a jaw-droppingly lame op-ed for the Washington Post headlined, “Yes, Kamila Valieva should be skating in Beijing.” There isn’t a single valid ethical principle behind her entire, constructed-for-sentimentalists argument.

Her first sentence would normally make me quit reading any opinion piece: “Russian Kamila Valieva is the best figure skater on the planet, she is gorgeous to watch perform and she should be skating in Beijing.” This is the equivalent of “Barry Bonds is a great player and we should ignore the fact that’s he’s a steroid cheat.” An ethicist is openly elevating the most obvious non-ethical consideration seasoned with personal bias, that the author thinks she is “gorgeous” on the ice, over the clear ethical consideration that the skater broke the rules, and had they been enforced, she wouldn’t be at the Olympics at all.

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“Democracy Dies In Dickness”*: The Washington Post’s Racism

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

This article in the Washington Post yesterday, authored by two “reports of color,” Cleve R. Wootson Jr., a White House reporter for the Post, and Marianna Sotomayor (no relation to that other Sotomayor) who now covers the House of Representatives for the Post after coming over from NBC, gained quite a bit of notice from the conservative news media (and none at all from the much larger other side, for this passage when it was first published:

 
 
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Nice! The two post reporters managed to insult Thomas by reducing his legal opinions to knee-jerk bias, and to attack conservatives based on their race. The obvious rejoinder to this slur would be whether the Post would tolerate an article that criticized, say, Justice Kagan as issuing opinions that are in lockstep with the advocacy of “black progressives.” What does race have to do with either observation, the actual one or the hypothetical reverse negative?

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I Hereby Solemnly Pledge, With My Hand On My 1967 Boston Red Sox Yearbook Turned To The Photo Of Tony Conigliaro, That I Will Vote For All African-American Politicians, Regardless Of Policies Or Party, Who Declare That They Will Not Exploit Racial Divisions, And Will Never Blame Criticism, Justified Or Not, On The “Racism” Of Their Critics

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

That politician would not be new New York Mayor Eric Adams.

Adams yesterday ranted at reporters for not being sufficiently laudatory regarding his performance so far in his still-young term. “If you want to acknowledge or not, I have been doing a darn good job and we just can’t live in this alternate reality,” Adams fumed. To what does the Democrat attribute what he says is this lack of appreciation? Of course!

“I’m a black man that’s the mayor but my story is being interpreted by people that don’t look like me. How many blacks are on editorial boards? How many blacks determine how these stories are being written? How many Asians? How many East Asians? How many South Asians? Everyone talks about my government being diversified, what’s the diversification in the newsrooms? Diversify your newsrooms so I can look out and see people who look like me.”

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So…Would Georgetown Law Dean Treanor Have Suspended Philosopher Stephen Kershnar?

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

We’re still waiting to see if Georgetown University Law Center, my disgraceful alma mater, will fire scholar Ilya Shapiro for expressing doubts that limiting the pool of Supreme Court nominees using factors that have absolutely nothing to do with judicial competence, experience or acumen is the best way to get the optimum Court. The statements condemning Shapiro by GULC’s Dean have been indefensible, consisting of woke virtue-signaling and speech-chilling posturing. It worked: none of the law school’s faculty have had the courage or integrity to oppose him, essentially abandoning their support for academic freedom.

This caused me to wonder in the Law Center would be similarly hostile to philosopher Stephen Kershnar of the State University of New York at Fredonia if he were instead a GULC faculty member. Kershnar, you might have read, gave a recent interview about “sexual taboos” on the philosophy podcast Brain in a Vat.The politically conservative Libs of TikTok posted a video about it and social media went metaphorically berserk. Kershnar expressed doubt that adults having sex with minors is necessarily wrong, and raised some hypotheticals and examples to make his point. Grandmothers in some cultures fellate baby boys to soothe colic, for example. Kershner also opined that the harm to children and teens who engage in sex with adults has not been established, and he made a terrible Rationalization #22 (“It’s not the worst thing”) argument that children participate in a number of activities besides sex that they don’t fully “understand” and which aren’t generally considered to be harmful. He also posed thought experiments, like…

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Update On The Alleged Clinton Spying Scandal: “What’s Going On Here?” We Still Don’t Know Thanks To The Untrustworthy News Media…And That Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

So…did “Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign “pay” an internet company to ‘infiltrate”’ servers at Trump Tower and the White House in order to link Donald Trump to Russia”? as the conservative New York Post reported one hour into February 13? That report was quickly picked up and expanded on by other news sources, notably Fox News, but only the so-called “conservative media.” Ethics Alarms reported on that depressing phenomenon the same day, noting,

If you only follow the mainstream media, meaning only those outlets that are directly doing everything they can, every day, in every way, to bolster Democratic Party narratives, progressive agendas and the prospects of minimizing the public’s support of the Republican Party, you are learning about this for the first time. If, however, you also check the conservative news and commentary sources that perform a service with their own biases by preventing the ongoing betrayal of public trust by the mainstream media from completely deceiving the nation, then you know about this breaking story already….As of right now, there are not enough facts and details to analyze the ethical implications of the story itself. However, there can be no doubt that a similar breaking story that implicated Republicans, and especially Donald Trump, would be screaming out from headlines and broadcasts from all the mainstream news sources. Thus there is sufficient evidence to conclude that this is one more striking example of the degree to which the news media is, as that crazy President Trump said years ago in perhaps his most perceptive moment, “the enemy of the people.”

Yesterday, nearly two days after the story was broken by those evil conservative news organizations, the New York Times against assumed its role as the gang-leader of the biased mainstream media, and finally mentioned the story. Its spin: ‘There goes that mains stream media conspiracy machine again!” Continue reading →

Will The Audacious “It Isn’t What it is” Propaganda Assault By The American Left Succeed?, Part 2

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Taking off from Part 1 (which took off from this), let’s review some (only some) of the anti-democratic conduct of the Democrats, their Congress and their President.

  • We saw President Biden withdraw troops from Afghanistan without consultation with Congress and in opposition to the military, abandoning thousand of U.S. citizens in the process.

  • We have seen the individual liberty-defying mask and vaccine mandates in Democratic states and cities.
  • We have witnesses attempts at the state and national level to discriminate against one racial group in such benefits as Small Business assistance and pandemic remedies.
  • We have watched the Senate Majority leader directly threaten the Supreme Court if it fails to support Democratic Party policies and positions.
  • We have seen the escalating air-brushing of history, to eliminate references to individuals and ideas that the party in power opposes.
  • We have seen Democrats and their allied professions and institution attempt to discriminate against religious groups, using the pandemic to ban their activities while favoring gatherings of similar size when they supported leftist activism.
  • We have seen concerted efforts to disarm law-abiding citizens, including removing the right to bear arms from those judged mentally or emotionally ill, both historical tactics of totalitarian governments.
  • We have seen the effort to corrupt the criminal justice system and the Rule of Law by demonizing and presuming the guilt of police officers, conservative protesters and others (like Kyle Rittenhouse) based on  skin color and political preferences.
  • We have seen an endorsement of mob rule, with “defund the police” being advocated across the country, radical progressive prosecutors refusing to prosecute crimes “of need,” and police being turned into targets by more than six years of demonizing by the Left.
  • We have seen an unprecedented attack on the Constitution and various amendments, with the goal of undoing protections wisely placed in the documents by the Founders. Among the targets: the First Amendment, the Second Amendment, the Due Process Clause, the Equal Protection Clause, the amendment process (so the dead-letter Equal Rights. Amendment can pass after the deadline for adoption has passed), the Electoral College, the composition of the Senate, and more.
  • We witnessed the Democratic party embracing a Marxist, anti-American, anti-White, violent and corrupt organization, Black Lives Matter.
  • We are watching that same party continue to support a program of anti-American, pro-Left indoctrination in the public schools.
  • We are seeing the deliberate promotion of class divisions and hostility, while the Democratic Party pursues radical ideological goals such as the devaluing of citizenship, the elimination of meritocracy and the pursuit of excellence,  and
  • Perhaps most glaring of all, we witnessed, for the first time in our history, not just one but two contrived impeachments based not on the kinds of “high crimes” prescribed by the Constitution, but on the simple fact that one party had a House majority  that it abused to attempt to remove an elected President it despised, plus
  • …so, so much more that represents a gross weakening of democracy and its values by the conduct and rhetoric of Democrats. The four year effort to cripple Donald Trump’s Presidency by withholding the basic, crucial, core aura of respect and deference to the office that every other President was bequeathed by his predecessors is, in my view, the worst of these, which is why Ethics Alarms has laboriously tracked it with the tag “2016 Ethics Post-Election Train Wreck.”

This has all occurred in plain sight, so for Democrats and progressives to pick this moment in history to declare Republicans as an existential threat to democracy is Jumbo-level audacity. Is this gaslighting the result of desperation, idiocy, delusion, or “It’s so crazy, it just might work”? Continue reading →

It’s Too Early To Make Ethics Judgments On The Story, But Not To Judge The Mainstream Media’s Disgusting Bias In Ignoring It So Far

/ Jack Marshall / 33 Comments

From the New York Post, in part:

“Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign paid an internet company to “infiltrate” servers at Trump Tower and the White House in order to link Donald Trump to Russia, a bombshell new legal filing alleges.

The Friday filing from a Department of Justice prosecutor tasked with investigating the origins of the FBI’s Russian probe served to throw cold water on Democrats’ longstanding allegations of collusion.

Special Counsel John Durham filed a motion related to potential conflicts of interests in connection with the case of Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann, who is charged with lying to the feds, according to Fox News.

Sussmann allegedly told the FBI he was not working on behalf of Clinton when he presented the agency with documents that supposedly linked the Trump Organization to a Kremlin-tied bank two months before the election.

The lawyer has pleaded not guilty to the charge of making a false statement to a federal agent.

Durham’s motion reportedly alleged Sussmann “had assembled and conveyed the allegations to the FBI on behalf of at least two specific clients, including a technology executive (Tech Executive 1) at a U.S.-based internet company (Internet Company 1) and the Clinton campaign.”

Records showed he “repeatedly billed the Clinton Campaign for his work on the Russian Bank-1 allegations,” which involved an investigative firm, a tech executive, cyber researchers and numerous employees at internet companies, the motion reportedly stated…

Among the accusations leveled at that time was that suspicious DNS lookups by Russian-affiliated IP addresses “demonstrated Trump and/or his associates were using supposedly rare, Russian-made wireless phones in the vicinity of the White House and other locations,” the motion reportedly said.

The allegations “relied, in part, on the purported DNS traffic” that Tech Executive-1 and others “had assembled pertaining to Trump Tower, Donald Trump’s New York City apartment building, the EOP, and the aforementioned healthcare provider,” according to Fox’s report.

Durham said his office found “no support for these allegations,” claiming the supposed evidence Sussmann provided was incomplete and skewed…”

If you only follow the mainstream media, meaning only those outlets that are directly doing everything they can, every day, in every way, to bolster Democratic Party narratives, progressive agendas and the prospects of minimizing the public’s support of the Republican Party, you are learning about this for the first time. Continue reading →