“bias makes you stupid”

Serious Question: Has US News Media Ever Treated Another President or Vice-President This Way Before?

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

And why is it acceptable now?

A completely made-up “scandal” began when The Guardian reported  on “Canoe-Gate.” “JD Vance’s team had water level of the river raised for family’s boating trip,” the outlet claimed. Though the same article said that “one source with knowledge of the matter who communicated with the Guardian anonymously alleged that the outflow request for the Caesar Creek Lake was not just to support the vice-president’s Secret Service detail, but also to create ‘ideal kayaking conditions” and that “The Guardian could not independently confirm this specific claim,” the story was reported anyway. Got that? An unnamed source claimed that Vance had ordered that a river’s water level be raised to create better kayak conditions, the news organization couldn’t substantiate the claim, yet they printed it as fact.

Then the usual suspects jumped into the fray. The New Republic’s  headline was “JD Vance Abused Power to Raise River Levels for Family Kayaking Trip.” Huffington Post declared: “JD Vance Had A River’s Water Level Raised For His Family Vacation.” The Daily Beast: “JD Vance Ordered a River’s Water Level Raised for His Family Boat Trip.” Stephen Colbert called the story an “insane spoiled baby emperor move.” (What an asshole he is. But I digress.)

There was no truth to the story whatsoever. Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi explained that the they conducted a routine trip to the Ohio area ahead of the Veep’s planned trip and one of their vessels actually ran aground. The Secret Service the increase: “It’s very normal, it’s very routine.” He said that the decision was made without input or involvement from the Vice President’s office.

Never mind, though. Vance is Donald Trump’s #2, so whatever damning stories and rumors people make up about him must be true, and must be broadcast to the world as fact. None of the news outlets noted above have retracted or taken down the false story. Of course they haven’t.

I’ll answer my own question: no, there have never been a President and Vice President who have been slandered, libeled, slimed and unfairly denigrated like Trump and Vance. By any objective measure, the first seven months of the second Trump administration has been spectacularly productive on an impressive number of fronts, yet the President’s popularity is still in negative numbers. The barrage of deliberately misleading negative propaganda is why. It hurts the government, it hurts society, it scars democracy. “Enemy of the people.” Trump coined that phrase in relation to the news media, and he was never more accurate. Journalists screamed, “How dare he!,” but Trump nailed their corrupt profession as deftly as Ronald Reagan did when he called the Soviet Union the “Evil Empire.” That’s what we have as our “journalism” now: a malign, unethical, dastardly institution determined to mislead rather than inform.

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Pointer: Res Ipsa Loquitur

It’s Time To Concede That The NYT Is Just A Partisan Propaganda Organ and Little Else

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Above is a Times front page in which the paper piled on to the international criticism of Israel in the Left’s “Think of the Children!” effort to blame Jews for the consequences of the war Hamas started and refuses to end.

“Mohammed Zakaria al-Mutawaq, about 18 months, with his mother, Hedaya al-Mutawaq, who said he was born healthy but was recently diagnosed with severe malnutrition,” the original caption to the photo said. Evil Israel is starving innocent children to death! Then, five days after the story was published, on July 29, the Times issued an editor’s note (buried at the bottom of the article) as well as a brief statement on its communications social media page that corrected its story, writing that it “had learned” that the child had underlying medical issues that affected his muscle development. Otherwise it did not retract any part of the feature, “Gazans Are Dying of Starvation,” including its now especially dubious claim that the child was suffering from malnutrition due to food shortages.

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Ethics Quiz: Teaching Constitutional Law

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

This is a bit different from the usual Ethics Alarms quiz.

Over at Dorf on Law, a site I had forgotten about, Eric Segal poses twenty questions about how Constitutional Law should be taught from this point going forward. They are:

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Why Do So Many Democrats and Progressives Think Punishing Americans For Their Opinions and Beliefs Is Ethical Conduct?

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

On Martha’s Vineyard, food store proprietor named Krem Miskevich has told lawyer and Harvard Law prof Alan Dershowitz that he can’t buy his delicious pierogis because the liberal Democrat has periodically defended Donald Trump in various columns and bad people (like Jeffrey Epstein) in criminal cases. Dershowitz has previously complained bitterly about how his progressive neighbors on the picturesque Massachusetts island community have excluded him from the social life there because he is regarded as a traitor to the cause of knee-jerk wokism.

In addition to being an illiberal bully and an American devoid of core American values like pluralism and respect for free expression, Miskevich is an ignorant idiot who doesn’t comprehend the role of lawyers in a democracy. Lawyers do not endorse the conduct or values of the clients they represent. Let me repeat that for any Miskeviches who might be drooling out there: Lawyers do not endorse the conduct or values of the clients they represent. Lawyers do not endorse the conduct or values of the clients they represent. Clarence Darrow didn’t approve of the character and conduct of child-killers Leopold and Loeb. John Adams did not endorse the conduct of the British soldiers who did the shooting in the Boston Massacre. This is enshrined in the lawyers’ Rules of Professional Conduct. It makes it possible for the 6th Amendment rights to a fair trial and legal representation to exist. Alan Dershowitz understands this. The pierogi-maker, a self-righteous fool, does not.

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WaPo “Factchecker” Glenn Kessler Is Out…Good!

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Glenn Kessler, the biased “factchecker” who has a dossier on Ethics Alarms as long an your metaphorical arm, accepted a buy-out from the hopelessly unethical newspaper and then, after starting his substack (where disgraced pundits go to die), issued an article that proved, as if there was ever any doubt, what an utter hack he is.

Pompously titled ‘“Democracy Dies in Darkness’ — but what if the lights are going out from within?,” his screed whines that he had to leave the Post as a matter f principle because he was urged to do what he could so the Post would “appeal more to Fox News viewers.” Gee, tough one. What would that be? Maybe not beginning every inquiry with the assumption that the Axis narrative is the correct one? Not working so hard to appeal to the Post’s 90% Democratic readership’s biases? Actually checking facts rather than opinions?

To Kessler, of course, appealing to Fox viewers means tacking news analysis to appeal to racist, ignorant fascists—you know,

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Observations on the Cincinnati Beatdown

/ Jack Marshall / 35 Comments

While languishing in the hospital, this was the story that I felt most frustrated about not being able to post. Not that I could get a single, clear, spin-free account of what happened. In the aftermath of some Cincinnati event or festival or something, a black man and a white one got into a verbal altercation. The white guy seems to have uttered a racial slur, precipitating a brawl that was quickly joined by a mob of black youths who beat up the white guy and then turned their anger on a white woman who tried to intervene, knocking her unconscious and kicking her as she lay helpless on the ground. An estimated hundred bystanders, most or all of them black, stood by taking videos, laughing, and cheering the mob violence on. There was only one call to 911.

1. Almost all of the national coverage of this incident has been on Fox News. The New York Times, interestingly, hasn’t reported the story at all. The natural question has been raised: If a black man and woman had been attacked and beaten by a mob of young whites as 100 white bystanders cheered them on, there would be protests in the streets and calls for “justice.” Why the double standard?

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Ethics Dunce: President Trump

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

[My leg is still killing me, I hope not literally, and sitting at my desk is excruciating, but I have to post this, truncated though it may be.]

The President should not cave to the “Think of the Children!” lobby that wants the United States to send aid to a rogue, terrorist state that is also the enemy of a just combatant the U.S. is supporting. It seems that he is. That is asinine and cowardly.

If children are starving in Gaza, the Gazans, and specifically Hamas, are responsible. Not Israel. Not the United States. The mission in warfare is to win the war, and one does not win a war by making warfare less unpleasant for the enemy. Frankly, it astounds me that I, or anyone, should have to make this point.

The last time the United States won a war (I do not count Grenada) was World War II. The Pentagon did not allow the publication of photographs of dead babies and malnourished Japanese and German children for exactly the reason we are seeing now, and have seen many times since 1945. War is ugly, and winning a war requires acts that in any other context are rightly regarded as immoral and unethical. This what a professional military is for: it (theoretically) doesn’t become sentimental about the necessities of warfare.

[Footnote: This was one of my late father’s objections to “Saving Private Ryan.” He said it was an insult to George Marshall and a deliberate effort to confuse the public to claim that the General would feel obligated to reduce the sacrifice of any single family while his army’s mission was to win a war.]

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Comment of the Day: “About That Climate Change ‘Consensus’”….

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

It’s about time recent EA comment auteur Holly A. was recognized with a Comment of the Day, and she actually had two strong candidates back-to-back. I chose the second. Both involved the same issue: garbage “climate change” advocacy and activism unhinged to actual facts. In the first comment, Holly impressively examined both the professors and the paper that sparked my post. I responded with gratitude, but noted that the technical details of the paper were not my concern. I wrote in part,

The ethics bottom line remains the same. There is not any “consensus.” The data is inconclusive. The hysteria is manipulated and politically motivated. Spending large amounts of treasure to alleviate a problem that is not well-understood is irresponsible. The news media has no interest in informing the public, and the people and politicians talking most loudly about climate change literally don’t know what they are talking about.

Fair?

Here  is Holly A.’s response, the Comment of the Day on the post, “About That Climate Change ‘Consensus’”….

***

I would say mostly fair.

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Sydney Sweeney Indeed Has Great Genes and Those Freaking Out Over Her Jeans Ad Do Not

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

If an attractive black model or actress had made this commercial, nobody would be complaining. But because Sweeney is white and blonde, and because the American Left has lost its mind, a classic provocative blue-jeans ad (Remember Brooke Shields saying “Nothing gets between me and my Calvins”?) is being cited as proof that America is embracing Hitler’s Master Race narrative. Sure.

This warrants an Ethics Alarms “Bite Me!” if anything does.

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About That Climate Change “Consensus”….

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

MIT’s Richard Lindzen, Professor of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences, Emeritus, and Princeton’s William Happer, Professor of Physics, Emeritus, have published a paper titled Physics Demonstrates That Increasing Greenhouse Gases Cannot Cause Dangerous Warming , Extreme Weather or Any Harm.

Wait! How can that be?! We are told by climate change hysterics in government, universities, news organizations and international organizations—and Robert Kennedy, Jr,!—that there is no question that we are doomed if we don’t immediately curtail carbon-based fuels, stop flying, stop using gas-powered cars, stop fighting world government, stop having babies, stop using plastic ARRRRGH! AND we have been assured that this is the consensus of the scientific community, and not to grovel to these apocalyptic prognostications is to “reject science.”

Now, all of this has always been a pack of lies, speculation and hyperbole, but our betters (that is, progressives, artists, academics and Hollywood) have been allowed to pound this junk into the heads of the logically challenged and scientifically ignorant for decades, often harvesting votes and lucre all the while. I don’t know whether the latest paper is wrong just as you don’t know that the scientific opinions behind the “We’re all going to die!” papers are right. However, enacting draconian measures on faith, guesswork and speculation is irresponsible, or in technical terms, really, really stupid.

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