Ethics Dunces

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

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Over on last week’s Friday Open Forum, there is a discussion about “pet peeves.” Obviously one of mine is people who insist that there is no mainstream news media bias, despite the overwhelming evidence that the vast majority of news organizations, reporters, editors, broadcast news hosts and pundits are committed to “advocacy journalism” (that is, unethical journalism) and determined to advance the policies, ideology and major figures who reside on the left side of the political spectrum. I regard such people, which include a disturbing number of my friends and relatives, as one of four things: naive, dishonest, in denial, or not as bright as I thought they were due to bias, which, as we all know, makes us stupid.

I have felt this way for a long time (Hmmmm…I wonder when “Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias” became a tag on Ethics Alarms?), but if 2024 didn’t make anyone who maintained that our news organizations and “journalists” were largely objective realize that they had been duped, there is no hope for them.

The New York Times, naturally, is usually Exhibit A here, not because it is the most left-biased news organization (MSNBC gets that title, easily) but because the paper is regarded, still, as the gold standard of American journalism. For the Times to be so flagrantly biased and so often in thrall to the radical Left (See: “The 1619 Project”) is a rank betrayal of the American public and our democracy as well as journalism, all of which need independent, objective news reporting from the so-called “legacy media.” If the best news source is partisan, biased, and devoted to propaganda, what course is there for the public but to be cynical, distrustful, and ultimately uninformed?

And indeed we are.

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“And Now, The Rest of the Story!” MLB Bans Those Two Assholes For Life…

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Hey, maybe Major League Baseball reads Ethics Alarms!

In this post in October, EA reported that in the bottom of the first inning in Game 4 of the World Series with the Yankees losing 2-0, NY lead-off hitter Gleyber Torres “hit a high pop-up into right field foul territory. Dodgers right fielder Betts caught the ball with his glove, but” Asshole #1 grabbed Betts’ glove with both hands, opened it, reached inside with his right hand and knocked the ball back onto the field, as Asshole #2 assisted him. It was on national television for all to see, so the umpires, thank goodness, got the call right and ruled fan interference. Torres was called out. I ruled it the most egregious example ever of fans deliberately trying to interfere with a player’s efforts during a baseball game, and called for Austin Capobianco (Asshole #1) and John P. Hansen (Asshole #2) to be banned from attending baseball games for life.

It took three months for some absurd reason, but Major League Baseball finally has banned them from attending games at big league ballparks, probably forever. Good.

The league sent a letter to A1 and A2 this week informing them of the decision.

“On Oct. 29, 2024, during Game 4 of the World Series at Yankee Stadium, you interfered with play by intentionally and forcefully grabbing a player. Your conduct posed a serious risk to the health and safety of the player and went far over the line of acceptable fan behavior,” said the letter, released today. “Based on your conduct, Major League Baseball is banning you indefinitely from all MLB stadiums, offices, and other facilities,” the letter continues. “You are also hereby banned indefinitely from attending any events sponsored by or associated with MLB. Please be advised that if you are discovered at any MLB property or event, you will be removed from the premises and subject to arrest for trespass.”

There is justice in the universe. I would have preferred to see the letter end with a promise that if either miscreant is discovered at any MLB property or event or even so much as wearing baseball cap, he will be summarily wrapped in unwashed jock straps and have his eyelids stapled open while he is forced to watch the execrable film, “The Babe Ruth Story” starring William Bendix (which Ted Williams called “the worst movie I ever saw,” though he never saw “The Exorcist II”) on an endless loop until he can’t stop screaming and begs to have his eyes gouged out. But that’s just me.

I can live with this resolution.

“Too White A Christmas”: Additional Ethics Observations

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

As promised, I am adding some of my own concerns to Curmie’s post two days ago on the controversy regarding the lack of “diversity” among the ensemble in a Sacramento production of the meh Broadway musical, “Elf.” I know many out there in EA Reader Land don’t give a rip about casting ethics. Ethics Alarms has posted on it often, because I believe, as with a lot of ethics issues in particular industries and areas of the culture, it has larger significance than only where the controversy arose.

Curmie covered most of the ethical issues in this kerfuffle well, as he always does, but I have some pointed conclusions that I think bear emphasis.

The whole episode illustrates what’s fatally wrong with DEI in general and the Left’s obsession with it. It has become an ideology unmoored to the real world. The mission of a theater director or producer must be, first and beyond all else, to put on the best production possible. We can argue about other priorities, but not that. Putting on the best production possible means, without exception, casting and staffing the production with the most talented, experienced, reliable professionals the production can afford. The entire discussion Curmie explores among four theater professional reveals the crippling mission confusion and ideological fanaticism that has infected if not most of the entertainment business, far too much of it.

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‘Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!’ An Unethical Quote and an Exposé

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Ethics Alarms made it clear, I hope, that one reason I believed that it was crucial for Donald Trump to win the election was to decisively foil the news media’s attempt to defeat him through relentless unethical journalism. To be honest, I sometimes think, like right now, that this was even more important than rejecting the nascent and sometimes not-so-nascent totalitarianism of the 21st Century Democratic Party and the American Left. It is now clear to even the most die-hard propagandists masquerading as “independent journalists” that the mask is off, the jig is up, and all but the most gullible and ignorant of the American public don’t trust them any more. That’s wonderful, but if reform is on the horizon, it’s barely detectable.

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Political Cartoon Ethics: Talk About Picking The Wrong Hill To Die On!

/ Jack Marshall / 43 Comments

Ann Telnaes, “a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist” (So what?) for The Washington Post, announced that she was resigning after editors rejected a cartoon depicting WaPo’s owner, Jeff Bezos, genuflecting toward a statue of President-elect Donald J. Trump.

On her substack, Telnaes called the newspaper’s decision to kill her cartoon a “game changer” that was “dangerous for a free press.”

Riiight. The cartoon shows Jeff Bezos and other media figures prostrating themselves to Trump, which is not only untrue, it’s juvenile. That cartoon could have been published in a middle school newspaper. The Post has had a succession of knee-jerk, shrill progressive scolds as political cartoonists in an unbroken line since the partisan-biased Herb Block was also a “Pulitzer Prize winner”—- you know, like the Post was for its false reporting on the Russian Collusion hoax. Like Nikole Hannah-Jones and the New York Times were Pulitzered for creating the anti-America propaganda screed called “The 1619 Project.”

Ethics Alarms has long maintained that political cartoons don’t warrant presence on editorial pages because 90% of them or more communicate grade-school level political sophistication through the jaundiced eyes of artists lacking education, perspective and critical thinking skills. That drawing above illustrates the Ethics Alarms position nicely.

Telnaes is throwing a hissy-fit because she isn’t allowed to publish an obnoxious and simple-minded cartoon—it also isn’t remotely funny—attacking her employer with a cheap shot. The Trump-Deranged, progressives and Democrats on the Post—that is, 98% of the staff, were triggered because Bezos chose not to have his paper endorse Kamala Harris, the worst candidate a major party has run for President since, oh, maybe Horace Greeley in 1872, except that Horace was smarter than Kamala and he never waffled on his positions, which were a matter of record.

It would be a different if the cartoon the artist is so determined to see promoted was interesting, trenchant, original or clever, but it isn’t. The baseball equivalent would be a .216 hitting player quitting his team because the manager chose to leave him off the line-up card.

Ethics Dunce: ESPN (Disney)

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

The College Football Playoff quarterfinal at the Allstate Sugar Bowl between the University of Georgia Bulldogs and Notre Dame, postponed from New Year’s Day to yesterday afternoon because of the deadly terrorist attack on Bourbon Street began with a solemn rendition of the National Anthem, a moment of silence, and a defiant crowd chant of “USA! None of this was deemed worthy of broadcasting by the main platform for the event on cable, ESPN. After all, they had ads to sell.

ESPN cut to a commercial break as the moment of silence began, and deliberately—don’t buy the narrative that it was inadvertent—chose not to let the national audience see the emotional prelude to the game including the “U.S.A!” eruption from the crowd. Disney and ESPN are so blinded by their institutional wokeness that they couldn’t recognize that the pre-game ceremonies had cultural and societal significance.

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Social Media Doesn’t Make College Kids Act Like Morons—Being Morons Make College Kids Act Like Morons

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

(I’m always happy when I can justify posting a Charles Addams cartoon.)

I’m sure this discouraging episode will somehow make it into the dispute over whether TikTok, which apparently gathers data from millions of Americans to put in the clutches of China’s Dark Masters, should be banned or not. The incident isn’t about TikTok, however.

Apparently there is now a viral TikTok-promoted fad in which people lure suspected sexual predators to some location, lie in wait for them, and either call the police or, for even more fun, beat them up. The “game” is modeled after an unethical vigilante TV reality show on ABC that lasted three seasons; I wrote several posts about it on Ethics Alarms’ now unavailable predecessor, The Ethics Scoreboard. Starring “Dateline” reporter Chris Hanson, the show that aired from 2004-2007 would use the internet and phone calls to lure someone seeking underage sexual companionship to a hidden camera ambush. The entertainment came from watching Hanson walk out from behind a bush and make the sick bastard huminahumina his way into coast-to-coast humiliation. The pre-crime predators who were thus “caught” almost never were convicted of anything.

In Worcester, Massachusetts (that’s pronounced “Wuster,” you Bay State ignoramuses!) students at Assumption University came to the wrong assumption that the “To Catch a Predator” game was a good use of their time. Easton Randall, Kevin Carroll, Isabella Trudeau, Kelsy Brainard, and Joaqin Smith, all 18, decided that a “creepy guy” was a sexual predator, so a female student used dating site Tinder to lure him to where he would think was a meeting place for a hook-up with a 17-year old girl. They had enlisted about 30 other students to lie in wait with them, and the mob chased and assaulted him as the stunt was recorded. Oh, the views it would attract! Randall told police that the idea was to emulate “the Chris Hansen videos where you catch a predator and either call police or kick their ass,” but the incident “got out of hand and went bad.”

Ya think?

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I’m Shocked! There Were More Campus Speakers Censored In 2024 Than In Any Previous Year on Record

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Now guess what kind of speakers were the ones primarily shut down. Hey, take a shot: you’ve got at least a 50-50 chance of being right! \Wow! You guessed it! In fact, the variety of censored speakers and their censors were more ideologically diverse than I expected.

FIRE maintains a “campus de-platforming database.” The free speech advocacy group explains,

“A deplatforming attempt is a form of intolerance motivated by more than just mere disagreement with, or even protest of, some form of expression. It is an attempt to prevent some form of expression from occurring. Deplatforming attempts include efforts to disinvite speakers from campus speeches or commencement ceremonies, to cancel performances of concerts, plays, or the screenings of movies, or to have controversial artwork removed from public display. An attempt to disrupt a speech or performance that is in progress is also considered a deplatforming attempt, whether it succeeds or fails.”

In 2024, its records indicate, there were 164 attempts at this kind of censorship on American campuses; FIRE has the receipts here. It was a record.

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Ethics Dunce and Human Smoking Gun: The Ridiculous Stacey Abrams

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Oh, just shut up, Stacey.

Is she still around? I would have thought that Abrams had so beclowned herself that even MSNBC wouldn’t…no, never mind, that’s impossible. I was about to write that even MSNBC wouldn’t be so silly as to give her a forum, but at this point MSNBC is so desperate to keep woke (and Trump Derangement) alive that it will give any progressive hack air time.

In an interview with Chris Hayes (talk about “Oh shut up!”) the always self-promoting Georgia “voting rights activist” wanted everyone to understand that Donald Trump won the 2024 election “but it wasn’t a landslide. It was an evenly divided nation. He got more people, but this was not the seismic shift where 57, 58 percent of America said no. It was less than 50 percent of the electorate who said this is what we want.”

Abrams is a laughing stock, or if you aren’t laughing at her, then you are part of the American Left’s problem. She managed to run twice for Georgia governor without any serious qualifications, losing both times. While the Axis was condemning Donald Trump for insisting that the 2020 election had been stolen and refusing to concede, Abrams was refusing to concede that her first loss to Republican Brian Kemp for the Georgia statehouse wasn’t legitimate while her party and its press embraced a damning, “Well, in her case, it’s OK!” double standard because she’s black, female, and “gooble gobble one of us!”

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Silly Ethics Dunce: NBC Sports

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

It almost seems absurd to mention this trivial ethics misdemeanor when discussing a soulless, greedy TV network that happily promotes a sport that sends young men onto its fields to maim their brains so team owners and sponsors can make millions. Yet somehow this level of moronic rote wokeness deserves our attention.

Here is part of what the election last month was a reaction against. Let’s hope NBC and the equally disgusting National Football League are tardy enough reading the metaphorical room that they both lose audiences, popularity and millions. I know it won’t happen. But I’m a dreamer…

Jayden Daniels, the quarterback of the Washington Commanders, set a record last night as he led his politically correctly named team into the NFL play-offs while breaking the old record for most rushing yards by a rookie quarterback. A Washington QB had held the previous record too: Robert Griffin III ran for 815 yards in his rookie year (2012), and Daniels topped him with 830.

So NBC quickly put that graphic up that you see above, but not before blotting out the name of Griffin’s team when he was playing…the REDSKINS!

NBC had to protect the delicate sensibilities of Sunday night football fans who thrill to see players break bones and crack skulls, making sure that their viewers wouldn’t suffer psychic trauma by being reminded that the Commanders once had a racist name, or so the Mad Left decreed. Thus it made sense to a news organization that it should misrepresent history, tamper with evidence and sacrifice truth to satisfy progressive crazies—you know, like it has done regularly for years now—and as PBS was doing tonight until I couldn’t stand watching any more, running a documentary about what a great President Jimmy Carter was.

Nah, airbrushing away a team name on a jersey is petty censorship. I know it. I also know that a news organization that will bother lying about something nobody cares about won’t blink at lying when it advances its own interests.