Ethics Alarms Award Nominee

A Note On The Mainstream Media Practice Of Making Facts Vanish By Pretending That They Never Existed…[CORRECTED}

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

On CBS This Morning, yesterday, the hosts interviewed comic Sandra Bee, host of the almost entirely Trump-bashing cable show, “Full Frontal.”  Oprah sock-puppet  Gayle King asked  Bee about the upcoming White House Correspondent’s Dinner, this year to be hosted by a non-comedian, with the plaintive query, “Don’t we need fun, too, Samantha? The country is so divided and so nasty and so mean…So, how do you navigate those waters? How do you know how far you can go to the line without crossing it?”

What a fascinating question to ask a comedian who called Ivanka Trump a feckless cunt on the air! Not only that, but Bee never apologized to the First Daughter for doing so; she just issued a stunning non-apology apology that I wrote about here. Bee has also called  Fox News viewers  Nazis and racists, and derided  Kirstjen Nielsen, ex-Department of Homeland Security Secretary, a “lying ghoul.”  She doesn’t navigate these waters, Gayle, you unforgivable, pandering hack. She has, in fact, explicitly stated that she has no interest in civility, in the course of not apologizing to Ivanka for calling her a cunt in public: Continue reading →

Pssst! CBS! “NCIS” Is Confusing People About Sexual Harassment And Sexual Assault!

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

“NCIS” starring Mark Harmon and an ensemble cast, is the second longest running scripted drama on television at 15 full seasons (trailing only “Law and Order: SVU,” which will apparently continue until Mariska Hargitay drops dead of old age) and the seventh longest running such show since television began. A breezy procedural that records the adventures of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, it depicts a diverse team that demonstrably idolize its leader, the enigmatic and tragic Jethro Gibbs, and support each other like a family.

As with all series that run this long and go into syndication while the show is still being produced ( “Criminal Minds,” “The Simpsons,” “NCIS LA,” and “Blue Bloods” is getting there), I eventually got sick of “NCIS” and hadn’t watched it for several seasons. However, last night’s Red Sox game was so dispiriting that I gave up for an inning or so, and peeked in to see how Gibbs and the gang were doing in Season 16. Almost immediately, I witnessed Harmon’s character planting a kiss on the face of the team’s new forensic specialist, Kasie Hines (Diona Reasonover, who appears to be about 18) just as he had often kissed Hines’s predecessor, Abby Sciuto (now departed Pauley Perrette), as you can see in the clip above. I gathered from Kasie’s reaction that this was the “new kid’s” first kiss from Gibbs, and she behaved as if it was both a surprise and the thrill of a lifetime.

For God’s sake.

A leader, manager, or supervisor should not, cannot, and must not kiss (or hug, or in my view, even touch) subordinates, particularly when the supervisor is male and the subordinate is female. This conduct was never appropriate, but beginning around 1980 the law began flagging it as potentially discriminatory, and once sexual harassment law crystallized—and Joe Biden’s memory to the contrary, that was a long time ago—such kisses, touches and hugs could be actionable. Continue reading →

On The Other Hand, Georgia Republicans Who Think Their “Ethics in Journalism Act” Is A Solution To Mainstream Media Bias Are Incompetent

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

The previous post notwithstanding, “Ethics in Journalism Act” is a cure worse than the disease. It is disturbing to see Republicans imitating Democrats by trying to thwart core Constitutional rights, but there is no other way to describe this exercise in foolishness, grandstanding, pandering, ignorance and/or stupidity.

The Georgia House of Representatives is considering , HB 734, sponsored by six Republicans who have apparently never read the Bill of Rights. if passed into law, it  would create a Journalism Ethics Board with nine members appointed by Steve Wrigley, the chancellor of the University of Georgia—and if he supports this monstrosity, it’s time to send him packing. The board would design a process by which journalists “may be investigated and sanctioned for violating such canons of ethics for journalists, to include, but not be limited to, loss or suspension of accreditation, probation, public reprimand and private reprimand.”

Sure! What a great idea! Put a government-created body in charge of overseeing the content of what journalists write and publish! Why didn’t someone think of this before?

I wonder how many Supreme Court opinions directly or indirectly signal that such a scheme is illegal, impossible, and offensive to our Constitution? A hundred? Two hundred? I wonder how many appellate court and Supreme Court opinions, including dissents, could be cited to support the “Ethics in Journalism Act?” Actually, I don’t wonder at all. There are none, because one of those monkey-human hybrids they are creating in China could figure out that the act is unconstitutional through the First and Fourteenth Amendments.

As unethical, irresponsible and arrogant as the news media is, and as often as they abuse their rights, their immunity from government sanctions and control must be absolute. As Clarence Darrow said, “In order to have enough liberty, it is necessary to have too much.” No aspect of our society fits that description more perfectly than Freedom of the Press.

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

I wonder what part of “make no law…abridging freedom of speech or of the press” Republicans in George don’t understand?

 

The Pulitzer’s Deliberate Ethics Blindness [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

It was incredible: the only qualified candidate for the Pulitzer Prize just happened to be the spouse of a Pulitzer board member! What are the odds?

[Note: an incompletely edited and proofed version of this post was mistakenly published. I apologize. Thanks to Tim LeVier for flagging the problem.]

All awards and prize organizations are subject to fair suspicion about their integrity, and collectively, they undermine each other. The Academy Awards get criticized by prominent blacks, and suddenly the number of black nominees explodes. The Nobel Prize committee, once the epitome of a well-respected and trusted awards program, exposes its political bias by giving a Peace Prize to Barack Obama for no good reason whatsoever.

Then, beginning in late 2017, in an expose published late last year by a Swedish newspaper, the Swedish institution was rocked by accusations  from18 women who said they were sexually harassed or assaulted by French arts promoter  Jean-Claude Arnault, who is married to poet Katarina Frostenson and is friends with Horace Engdahl, both  members of the  Academy that awards the Nobel Prize in literature.  Arnault was sentenced to two years in prison after being found guilty of raping a woman in 2011. This ugly publicity cast unwelcome light on more unethical conduct: a club called Forum that Arnault and Frostenson owned received a subsidy from the Academy. Yes, the members were voting finnacial benefits to themselves.  There were also credible reports of Frostenson giving names of winners to Arnault before they were announced,, allowing him place wagers and win money with insider information. As the scandal expanded, Frostenson and Engdahl refused to resign. Three other members of the Academy left in protest.

Nice. The Committee decided not to award a Nobel Prize for Literature in 2018.

I’m surprised they didn’t just give it to Barack Obama.

This brings us to the Pulitzers, which have always been suspect. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce, “Racially-Charged Epithets” Division: NBC Baseball Writer Craig Calcaterra, And Anyone Who Agrees With Him

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

See above. Ick.  This is your brain on political correctness and convoluted social justice double standards. It’s not pretty.

Last week, Wednesday White Sox shortstop Tim Anderson was thrown out of a game and suspended after a fight broke out on the baseball field between his team and the Kansas City Royals. The cause doesn’t matter here, but the Royals pitcher, Brad Keller, threw at Anderson for being flamboyantly demonstrative after hitting a home run.

Anderson was also suspended by MLB, and it turned out that the reason for his punishment was that during the fight he called Keller a “weak-ass fucking nigger.”

Here is Anderson…

This is Keller.

Continue reading →

Wow—Is This The Most Contrived Feminist Complaint Ever Put Into Print? [CORRECTED]

/ Jack Marshall / 43 Comments

Lindsay Crouse—the writer, not the actress, as I originally assumed in the original version of this post— has an op-ed in the New York Times called “Why Don’t Women Get Comebacks Like Tiger Woods?” (Thanks to Althouse for pointing me to it: I tend to avoid the Sunday Times Review section since it became a repetitious Trump-bashing fest week after week.)

Here’s Crouse’s argument, condensed, in her own words: Continue reading →

Arrested For Sexist Tweets

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

One of the early Ethics Alarms posts about schools disciplining students for their use of social media involved a male student who rated his female classmates in a Facebook post. In 2016, Harvard  cancelled the men’s soccer season as punishment for “the widespread practice of the team’s players rating the school’s female players in sexually explicit terms.” [The Ethics Alarms Quiz about that episode, which I just read, as well as the 156 comments it generated including two Comments of the Day, is a good one, and I’ll offer it here as another Ethics Alarms archives feature worth revisiting: Ethics Quiz: The Harvard Soccer Team’s “Locker Room Talk.”]

At Perrysburg High School in Ohio, however, the reaction of administrators to a similar incident plows new and especially alarming ground.  After many students reported his Twitter account for rating the school’s female students in derogatory terms, the school had him arrested and charged with “telecommunications harassment.”NBC reports that 18-year-old Mehros Nassersharifi has been issued a summons to appear in court, and faces expulsion from the school.His account, @GirlsRanked, purported  to list the “hottest girls” at Perrysburg.

No news yet if the school plans on confining him in an Iron Maiden or branding “SEXIST!” on his face.

There’s no quiz necessary here. What the school has done is far, far worse than a high school kid’s juvenile Twitter account. It is also one more item on my growing list of how the cancerous progressive fervor for installing “woke” attitudes into the culture using force and intimidation continues to metastasize.

No, you can’t prosecute someone based on the content of a Tweet. Every single student at Perrysburg High School should already know that, and indeed should have known it since the sixth grade at least. Yet apparently the teachers and administrators at the school don’t know it. First Amendment? What First Amendment? Continue reading →

Ethics Tweet Of The Month

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Patrick was the long-time blogging partner of Ken White on Popehat.

Haberman, currently employed by the New York Times to manufacture negative news stories about President Trump, was fully engaged in trying to re-elect Barack Obama by spinning everything about Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign as negative. Seven years after participating in one of the most disgracefully biased Presidential campaign coverage jobs by the news media in U.S. history, Haberman now evinces regret. Unbelievable. I suppose seven years from now, after the nation has been torn apart by hyper-partisan violence arising from the Left’s media-enabled coup attempts, Haberman will tell us that, upon reflection, that her shameless peddling of “resistance” narratives and Big Lies may not have been such a good idea.

Nah.

 

Cross-Filed Under ” Historical Airbrushing” And “Corporate Cowards”: Damn You For Making Me Defend Kate Smith, Even If It Means I Get To Bash The Yankees!

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

My father hated Kate Smith. Hated her. The jumbo alto radio star from the Thirties and Forties was still showing up on TV variety shows in the Sixties and Seventies, and my father always made us change the channel when she appeared. Smith had made a virtual career out of belting her four-square rendition of Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America,” and Dad regarded it as patriotic pandering and exploitation. Thus it seemed appropriate that two teams we all hated in Boston, the New York Yankees and the NHL’s Philadelphia Flyers, periodically used the recording of Smith—and sometimes Smith herself— singing the song during games. Once 9-11 caused baseball to add the song during all games at the Seventh Inning Stretch (time to end that, by the way), Kate’s immortality seemed assured, especially in Yankee Stadium, where her rendition was rotated with a few other versions.

Then some enterprising social justice fanatics and “Hader Gotcha!” masters decided to do a deep dive and find something on Kate Smith. What they found was that among her hits in the Thirties were two songs that make Stephen Foster seem like Snoop Dog. One was “Pickaninny Heaven,” which described a “colored” paradise  with “great big watermelons,” and the momentarily famous “That’s Why Darkies Were Born,” which we will look at in some detail later. These presentist censors—remember, presentism is the fallacy of judging conduct from the past by the updated ethics and values of the present—protested to the Yankees, and that’s all it took to get Kate banished, presumably forever.  (The Flyers have also banned Kate.) The mighty Yankees whimpered in a public statement,

“The Yankees have been made aware of a recording that had been previously unknown to us and decided to immediately and carefully review this new information,. The Yankees take social, racial and cultural insensitivities very seriously. And while no final conclusions have been made, we are erring on the side of sensitivity.”

Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce, Cultural Dunce, Journalist Dunce—Yes, These Are Our Elite Journalists, Folks!—Times Reporter Maggie Haberman

/ Jack Marshall / 39 Comments

This would have a KABOOM! tag, but my head is all exploded out today.

But think about it as you read: Haberman has been the primary reporter for the New  York Times on “Russiagate,” and she is obviously Trump Deranged, infected by crippling confirmation bias, and to be crude because sometimes crudity is called for, a total dumb ass.

New York Post reporter Nikki Schwab tweeted today, “Edelweiss” was being played as we walked into the @WhiteHouse”

The woke and culturally literate Haberman responded in horror, “Does…anyone at that White House understand the significance of that song?” Yes, Haberman, who has been crippled by the “resistance” narrative that the President is a Nazi, thinks “Edelweiss” is a Nazi anthem, because, well, see the descriptors above.

No, you lazy, biased, musical theater-challenged moron, “Edelweiss” is the anti-Nazi anthem sung by Baron Von Trapp at the climax of “The Sound of Music,” the artistic creation of two Jews, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, Jr. The  paternal head of the singing family defiantly sings the song as a sentimental salute to Austria before the Nazi’s took over, as the Austrians sing and the Nazis scowl. It’s a scene much like the famous Marseillaise scene in “Casablanca.” Maybe Maggie also thinks the French national anthem is pro-Nazi. Why not? It’s no more ridiculous than her misunderstanding of “Edelweiss.” Continue reading →