Since a lot of writers work for Jeff, I would have suggested that he have one of them draft that statement with his oversight. Presumably he means that the Post will no longer publish op-eds like this…
…but he could have just as easily written that the Post will no longer give a platform to Trump Deranged nutballs like Jennifer Rubin, who had already quit anyway. My best analysis is that Bezos has just officially said that the Washington Post is leaving the Axis, and will no longer be a reliable ally and propaganda organ of the Far Left and the Democratic Party, which now consistently advocates that the U.S. become a European-style nanny state and that personal liberties be pared back, especially those enshrined in the First and Second Amendments. If that’s the idea, it is an admirable goal, though I think it is far too late for the Post to change course, and that the 95% Democrat city of D.C. is the worst possible place to try.
It is fun to see and hear the Angry Left freak out over the announcement. Here is one of the Post’s most unethical propagandists, the eloquent Phillip Bump:
This refreshing Comment of the Day by EA Ace AM Golden concludes with a trenchant point: Why does someone need to be reading Ethics Alarms or doing their own research to be properly informed of the context of a news event rather than misled by selective reporting?
I should have included the historical precedents for the recent Trump White House decision to exercise its own discretion over what news organizations and other news sources should be included in briefings, but my point was that it didn’t matter what the “precedent” was because today’s news media and the unethical way they have covered this particular President have no valid precedents. However, AM’s perfectly illustrated point is equally important: as usual, the news media is framing anything Trump does as a “threat to democracy” rather than giving the public the information it needs to make up their own minds.
Once I read AM’s COTD, I was even more disgusted with the New York Times than I usually am. Pure deceit: the piece says that it’s a “decades long” precedent to not pick and choose among news organizations, see, so if AM’s precedents are waved in the Times editors’ smug faces, they can say, “Well, those examples were still many decades ago, so what we wrote is correct!”
But even if the Times reporters and lazy editors had been aware of the precedents AM reveals (I’d bet anything that they didn’t bother to check), they still wouldn’t have mentioned them because Trump is following the examples of two revered figures, one of them on Mt. Rushmore and the other unanimously regarded as our greatest President in the last hundred years.
And just to preempt the usual excuse that self-banned Times defender “A Friend” would typically post until I sent the comment to Spam Hell, those Times readers who are the reliable epitome of erudition, fairness and oversight saving the biased Times from itself, I checked all the nearly 2000 comments to the news story. Most agreed that Trump is an aspiring dictator, but not a single one mentioned the Roosevelts.
I want to state at the outset that the ridiculous research paper I’m about to make fun of is only one horrifying example of institutional insanity, and it would be unfair to use it to characterize the entire higher education complex. However, I do believe that a healthy and functioning scholarly sector must have a way to reject, condemn and shun such abuses of position and authority.
I’ll have more to say on this matter after revealing the head-exploding product of University of San Diego professors Diane Marie Keeling and Bethany O’Shea.
These scholars have published a study titled “Conceptualizing Black Humanity Through Geopoetic Intimacy and Resistance: Memory Making-with Geologic Materials” Here is the abstract:
Amplifying the importance of geologic processes in subject formation, the study asserts that geological time is important for understanding memory and memorials. In the Equal Justice Initiative’s Community Remembrance Projects and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, materials of geologic composition like soil, and those made from earth materials, such as steel and bricks, are employed to trope the bodies of lynching victims and weather racist geologic formations of subjecthood. The holding and eroding of violent memories crafts an intimate and resistant geopoetics of Black humanity.
The Trump administration announced today that it would choose which media outlets participates in the Presidential press pool.
Good!
“In announcing plans to hand-select the reporters who can ask the president questions at many events,” the New York Times intoned darkly, “the White House is breaking decades of precedent.” Oh NO! Another “democratic norm” breached!
Naturally, the White House Correspondents’ Association, which was delegated the job back when the entire journalism establishment wasn’t allied with a single party and dedicated to bringing down the administration of any elected President who didn’t embrace their policy preferences, attacked the change in the manner of a proverbial stuck pig. “This move tears at the independence of a free press in the United States,” wrote Eugene Daniels, a Politico reporter and the president of the association. “It suggests the government will choose the journalists who cover the President. In a free country, leaders must not be able to choose their own press corps.”
In a functioning democracy, journalists exist to inform the public, not to bend elections to the will of the news outlets. Calling the current news media independent insults the intelligence of anyone who has been paying attention to the deterioration of journalism ethics, aka. honesty, fairness, transparency, objectivity, competence and independence, over the past two decades.
Also, any Politico reporters should be hiding his head under a bag after the revelations about how it accepted “subscriptions” from the Biden Administration while covering it, and mostly positively at that. Here’s the unbiased Politico headline of today’s announcement: “White House seizes control of press pool, will decide which outlets cover events with President.” Oooh, “seizes!” Scary! Sounds awfully Hitler-y doesn’t it? The White House didn’t “seize” anything: it has always had the power to decide who attends press briefings, and it is asserting it.
This was just reposted by a very astute and generally learned lawyer friend (who, I should mention, is a retired USAID employee who never returned to the land of her birth except for visits and who has lived abroad for decades). I could write about this screed for pages, but I’ll leave it to you.
I will only observe that Ethics Alarms commented critically on many of the incidents and statements listed when they occurred, while others are framed according to Axis media narratives (look at the sources) or are the kind of exaggerations and hyperboles that Trump critics call “lies” when he engages in the same techniques.
I will also observe that making this statement without considering who and what this admittedly flawed leader is opposing and the demonstrated values and conduct of the alternative is hypocritical, deliberately misleading, or, ironically, stupid.
As EA noted in last night’s post, MSNBC finally fired Joy Reid and ended her nightly racist, unhinged rants on the network. For this it deserves no special credit or plaudits, for Reid was objectively terrible, getting worse as her Trump Derangement raged, and should have been fired years ago….for this head-exploding incident, for example.
“Joy Reid’s show “The ReidOut” ended tonight. And Joy is not taking a different job in the network. She is leaving the network altogether and that is very, very, very hard to take. I am 51 years old. I have been gainfully employed since I was 12. And I have had so many different types of jobs you wouldn’t believe me if I told you. But in all the jobs that I have had, in all of the years I have been alive, there is no colleague for whom I have had more affection and more respect than Joy Reid. I love everything about her. I have learned so much from her. I have so much more to learn from her. I do not want to lose her as a colleague here at MSNBC, and personally, I think it is a bad mistake to let her walk out the door. It is not my call and I understand that, but that’s what I think. I will tell you, it is also unnerving to see that on a network where we’ve got two—count them, two—non-white hosts in prime time, both of our non-white hosts in prime time are losing their shows, as is Katie Phang on the weekend, and that feels worse than bad no matter who replaces them. That feels indefensible. And I do not defend it.”
All righty then! There we have it: a full-throated endorsement of racial quotas, discrimination in hiring and career advancement, and double standards. For a special bonus, Maddow endorsed the practices and conduct of an unethical and untrustworthy former colleague, which means that Maddow is unfit to appear on any respectable news organization’s broadcasts.
All research indicates that the majority of Americans, not having the IQ’s of Pet Rocks, recognize that our bloated government is corrupt, inept and wasteful. Pew Research polling concluded that 56% of Americans felt that way last year. “Nearly 2/3 of Americans fear that our government is run by corrupt officials, stated another survey. In January, A.P.-NORC researchers found that 70% of Americans believe corruption in the federal government is a serious problem.
Despite these beliefs, only 39 % of Americans polled gave DOGE a “favorable” rating in the latest The Economist/YouGov poll, with”unfavorable” at 36%, and the human slugs who chose “don’t know” came in at a whopping 25%. Another poll this month found only 49% approving DOGE’s cost-cutting efforts.
I wish I could promise that this will be the last Ethics Alarms post about Democrats and the Axis being in denial over the reasons for President Trump’s victory last November. I hope it will. The capacity for self-delusion in this pathetic bunch, however, knows no bounds.
Gaines said, “Viewed through the lens of the history of African American women in the United States, the defeat of the first black woman nominee [of] a major party for the presidency by an openly racist and misogynistic candidate seemed to recall the voicelessness and vulnerability of black women during the eras of slavery and segregation, particularly in the Jim Crow south.” He went on to compare Harris’s defeat to how “enslaved black women endured the violence of chattel slavery and the exploitation of their labor and reproductive sexuality.” “Even in freedom, black women historically have been overlooked and marginalized, not only by white male oppressors, but also — and often — by their extensible allies: black men and white women,” he concluded.
And this guy is a tenured professor.
Wow.
The panel was held last month at UVA’s Miller Center, supposedly a nonpartisan affiliate. Yeah, that panel sure sounds “non-partisan.” Although the center describes itself as striving “to illuminate Presidential and political history accurately and fairly,” there were no dissenting voices on its panel to point out that, just for starters, its moderator was spouting indefensible nonsense. All of the panelists without exception attacked Trump and those who voted for him in an event billed as a post-election analysis delving into “the complex interplay of race, gender, and age demographics as they affected the outcome.”
Gee, how about a discussion of why having a panel of three black anti-Trump Democrats doing the delving biases the analysis? (The whole program can be viewed here)
Gaines, who really is a piece of work, also said at one point that “it’s quite likely that this election was determined by voters who did not have… as comprehensive a view of politics and the issues as… a fair amount of Harris supporters.” Just…wow. Voting for an incoherent fraud who could never articulate a clear policy position on anything is evidence of “a comprehensive view of politics and the issues.”
At another point in the discussion, the panelists expressed surprise that the abortion issue didn’t carry the day with women voters. Somebody should have pointed out to these boobs that there is literally nothing the President can do to make abortion legal or illegal. The panel did mention the overwhelming majority of black females who voted for Harris…because she is a black female. Who are the racists and sexists again?
David Hogg, had he not been a student at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School when a mass shooting occurred, might have grown up to be a useful, ethical, productive and emotionally healthy human being. Unfortunately, he is likely to be a lifetime victim of the shooting, for it propelled him into the career path of being a professional single-issue fanatic, America’s Greta Thunberg but on the issue of gun control rather than climate change. In an example of the chaos PTSD can wreak on the vulnerable, Hogg has been transformed into a cynical grifter by a mass-murderer’s bullets. It’s tragic, but that doesn’t mean his unethical conduct should be tolerated, much less rewarded.
Barely two weeks after his election as a Democratic National Committee official, Hogg began using DNC contact lists to solicit donations to his own political action committee, “Leaders We Deserve.” That PAC pays his salary of more than $100,000 a year, according to Federal Election Commission records. “David Hogg here: I was just elected DNC Vice Chair! This is a huge win for our movement to make the Democratic Party more reflective of our base: youthful, energetic, and ready to win,” reads one the texts he sent out to the DNC’s vast database. The texts include a link to his PAC.
The Chengdu Snow Village project in the Sichuan province in southwestern sought to attract tourists over the Lunar New Year holiday by promoting its property as a “winter wonderland,” showing photos of thick, gleaming white snow covering the grounds and the roofs of its cabins. When the tourists arrived, however, the “snow” they saw was obviously puffs of cotton, plastic, beds sheets and other white camouflage. One structure was covered in what looked like bedding material with visible staples.
The Snow Village issued an apology on social media blaming warm weather in the region. No, the warm weather wasn’t the problem. The problem was and is the complete breakdown in societal and cultural ethics in China, a direct result of Mao’s “cultural revolution” that induced the nation’s full embrace of Orwellian government alternate realities in the 20th Century. In 2020, as political correctness censors sought tp protect China from its accountability for the world pandemic, a Hong Kong protester summed up the ethical status of China with the memorable quote, “Don’t trust China….China is asshole! ”
Ethics Alarms 