Journalism & Media

Scott Pelley’s Self-Immolation Proves How Corrupt and Biased the “60 Minutes” Culture Was

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

A year ago I wrote, after Scott Pelley gave a full-Trump Deranged commencement speech at Wake Forest,

“Scott Pelley has long been the most openly biased and partisan of the ’60 Minutes’ team (well, he and Leslie Stahl), and his speech is an instant “It isn’t what it is” classic. His arrogance and fury reveals a destructive, untrustworthy profession beginning to realize that the jig is truly up: they have betrayed their nation and its ideals, and nearly everyone knows it, or as President Trump so wisely observed, our journalists are indeed ‘enemies of the people.’ It is rumored that Pelley is likely to be dumped at CBS: Good.”

Well, it took a year and a turnover in management, but Pelley is finally out. The speech is fun to look back on today, because the pompous Pelley intoned, “America works well when we listen to those with whom we disagree and when we listen and when we have common ground and we compromise….To move forward, we debate, not demonize. We discuss, not destroy.” Yet when a new regime led by New York Times refugee Bari Weiss began the task of reforming the rotten “60 Minutes” Democratic propaganda machine that had embarrassed the network by editing Kamala Harris’s interview a week before the 2024 election to make her seem (sort-of) coherent—not an easy task—Pelley was no longer interested in listening, discussing, or compromising. He was determined to demonize. In a meeting called by Nick Bilton, the new executive producer of “60 Minutes,” Pelley accused Bilton’s boss, Weiss, of “murdering” the iconic Sunday news program. “She was brought in to kill it, and she’s been doing exactly that,” he said, adding, “She has no qualifications for her job; you have slender qualifications for this job. The changes that she’s made at the ‘Evening News’ have been catastrophic, so why should we expect that any of this is going to be any better?”

He went on to mock Bilton’s assurances that he cared about the program. If Pelley had been trying to get fired, he could have hardly done a better job. And sure enough, he got his wish, as Bilton delivered the following “Bye-bye!” letter in short order:

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On Capital Punishment Porn From The New York Times

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

“For 90 Minutes, I Watched an Execution Go Horribly Awry” [Gift link!]is an unethical opinion piece. It is manipulative and an appeal to emotion, while pretending to make a persuasive argument against capital punishment using deflection and misdirection, tying three separate ethics issues together as one. The author’s methodology is to argue that killing someone can be icky. So?

The author is a criminal defense lawyer, so you might think I should cut her some slack. I won’t. It is acceptable for a lawyer to use trickery, logical fallacies and rhetorical cheats to convince a jury, because that is what defense lawyers have to do to zealously represent their clients. A newspaper’s readers, however, are not jurors. A publisher and paper’s editors should maintain journalistic standards, which demand truthful communication that is not calculated to deceive or confuse. The New York Times, however, is not an ethical newspaper, and is interested in advancing agendas, not fair and responsible punditry. Even the headline is deceitful. Her client’s execution by lethal injection was botched, but he survived. His execution was delayed for a year by the governor. She doesn’t reveal that little detail until the next to last paragraph. Surprise! The execution attempt went ‘horrible awry,” but there was no execution.

Author Maria DeLiberato is a mission lawyer, meaning that she takes cases to accomplish a personal objective, in her case, opposing the death penalty. She begins by telling us that she believes Tony Carruthers, her condemned client, was wrongly convicted. That issue is 100% irrelevant to the focus of her article, which is that executions in Tennessee (and presumably elsewhere) are often botched and excruciatingly painful as a result, making them “cruel and unusual punishment,” an 8th Amendment violation. She argues that Carruthers was innocent, which is a different ethical issue entirely. A botched execution is exactly as painful and torturous whether the condemned is guilty or not. Like a good lawyer (but an unethical writer) DeLiberato pre-sets the dial to sympathy and indignation by framing Carruthers’ ordeal as an unjust one. But even a perfect, quick and painless execution of an innocent individual is wrong beyond redemption: it doesn’t become more wrong because the killing takes longer.

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Unethical Trigger Warning Of The Month: Citizens Free Press

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

That’s one of Elon Musk’s biological sons (he has a lot of them) above, now a trans-female model—not there’s anything wrong with that— named Vivian Wilson. The Daily Mail has a very tabloid story (as in “Who the hell cares about this stuff?”) telling us that Vivian is featured as a model in the latest Savage x Fenty new Pride-themed collection. Be still, my beating heart!

You can read the story here, if your sock drawer is in order and you have no life, but my concern involves how the link to the story was presented by Citizen Free Press, the conservative news aggregator that took over that market from the Drudge Report when Matt went woke and NeverTrump a decade ago. Here’s how the site described the link:

Elon Musk biological son poses for female lingerie ad — Warning, photos are disturbing

I expected Vivian to be posed on disemboweled kittens or famine victims with that trigger warning. No, the photos that are supposed to be “disturbing” are shots like the one above. How much of a weenie cum snowflake would someone have to be to find that photo upsetting enough to mandate a trigger warning? It’s a standard issue fashion shot. Is it supposed to disturb us because its a model with a y chromosome? If that’s the point, then I view the warning as legitimizing transphobia. Even trans-themed photographs that cause my ethics alarms to go off—remember this one, of a Disney “fairy godmother”?—

shouldn’t be considered so trauma-producing that people need an advance warning lest they be struck blind or something.

The somewhat less obnoxious explanation for the “warning” is that it’s a clickbait trick by the site; you know, if it requires a warning, everyone will be curious and click on it. Well, that’s dishonest. As an ethicist, I find the gratuitous trigger warning, indeed trigger warnings in general, far more disturbing than a photo of a biological male doing a convincing female model impression. Good for her! Brava!

It is episodes like this that create needless erosion of respect for conservative values and sensibilities.

Ethics Villain: Jill Biden [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

There are lively debates among historians regarding who was the best First Lady (I view it as a dead heat between Abigail Adams and Eleanor Roosevelt), but the contest for the Worst First Lady Ever is settled. It’s Jill Biden, easy. Edith Wilson hid her husband’s stroke from the nation but at least she wasn’t complicit in letting an unfit and mentally declining man run in the first place. Woodrow was a terrible human being, but until his stroke he wasn’t an incompetent one. Michelle Obama was and is loathsome, but she didn’t do much substantive damage while she was in the White House. She left that to her husband.

I’m going to give you a gift link to the New York Times’s notably uncritical report on Jill’s new spin on her husband’s crack-up during that fateful debate with Donald Trump, when the mentally declining President descended into authentic frontier gibberish. The Times:

“I don’t know what happened,” the former first lady said in an interview with “CBS News Sunday Morning.” “As I watched it, I thought, ‘Oh, my God, he’s having a stroke.’ And it scared me to death.” In a 30-second snippet of the interview, which is scheduled to air in full this weekend, she said that she had never seen her husband have a meltdown like the one she saw when he took the debate stage in Atlanta. Next week, she is releasing ‘View From the East Wing,’ a memoir of her time as first lady.”

I call bullshit, and so should everyone else. There is so much wrong with that fake narrative if boggles the mind:

1. She’s lying. Everyone had seen Biden freeze, become disoriented, mumble and get confused repeatedly for nearly four years. Months before, Special Counsel Robert Hur released a 388-page report on President Biden’s retention of classified material. In opting not to bring charges, Hur said that Biden would appear to the jury too befuddled to find guilty of the requisite intent. “We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” Hur wrote. “Based on our direct interactions with and observations of him, he is someone for whom many jurors will want to identify reasonable doubt. It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him — by then a former president well into his eighties — of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.” Sure sounds like a man every American should feel secure having his finger on the nuclear button! Yet the Axis chorus of partisan hacks continued to tell the public that Joe was “as sharp as a tack.”

2. After Biden’s embarrassment in the debate, Jill went into full cover-up mode. “You answered every question!” she exclaimed, treating the President of the United States like a second-grader. His gibberish was bad enough that she thought he had a stroke, she says now, but not bad enough to have him checked out. Biden had refused to have a cognition test: after this episode, wouldn’t a caring wife be obligated to insist on a medical examination? Of course she would, except that the reality was that Biden’s debate performance was not out of character at that point. His staff and family were thinking, “Oh no. I was afraid this would happen.” Their response after the debate, joining in the agreed upon narrative that “he had a cold…he was tired….he just had a bad night…it could have happened to anyone…he’s always had a stammer…Trump rambled too!” proves that there was no new concern for Biden’s well-being, only concern that the jig was up.

3. In February of 2020, I wrote in part…

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From the Res Ipsa Loquitur Files:

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

Nice.

I’d say that qualifies as an unethical tweet, wouldn’t you?

It doesn’t matter what the Democratic Party’s social media account was responding to, does it? (Stephen Miller referred to Democratic Party candidate for Texas governor as “trans.” Not that there’s anything wrong with that..) What does matter is that the party that has (often justifiably) condemned Donald Trump for immoderate social media posts, lack of self-control in his rhetoric and an addiction to ad hominem attacks stooped well below anything Trump has ever tweeted with a “Sopranos-esque” “Shut up you ugly fuck!”

That doesn’t mean the President won’t eventually go that low, but for the nonce, I really don’t care to hear anyone from that party (or that pimps for it, like, you know, the news media) criticizing the President for unpresidential language.

The tweet also tells us, as others have, what the character and attitudes of young Democrats are. If you don’t like mis-installed ethics alarms of current Democrats and progressives, just wait for the ones coming up the ranks.

In related news, Chicago’s WGN reports:

“An alderperson for the City of Waukegan was charged after allegedly mailing in a vote on behalf of her dead mother. Dr. Sylvia Sims Bolton was charged with knowingly falsifying election material, a felony, and disregarding election code, a misdemeanor.The investigation began in March, according to the Lake County clerk’s office.According to election records, a vote by mail ballot for Mary Sims, her mother, was issued and mailed by the Lake County Clerk’s Office on Feb. 5.On Feb. 12, the Lake County Clerk’s Office processed the cancelation of Mary Sim’s voter registration after receiving notification of her death record from the Illinois Department of Public Health.

The ballot was returned on Feb. 26

During a review, election officials identified that the voter’s death record had been processed prior to the return of the ballot. After evaluating the returned envelope and confirming that the ballot had been submitted after the voter’s recorded date of death, the matter was escalated internally and reported to the Lake County Sheriff’s Office for investigation.

Bolton is accused of voting for her mother after she had passed away. She surrendered Wednesday morning.

‘The safeguards and verification procedures in place within our election system worked exactly as intended,’ said Anthony Vega. ‘Our staff followed established protocols, identified the irregularity, and immediately coordinated with law enforcement to ensure this matter is thoroughly investigated. Protecting the integrity of our elections remains our highest priority.’

The investigation did not uncover any facts linking the above allegations to her city duties as an alderperson.”

Gee, I wonder what party the “alderperson” belongs to? Since the media report doesn’t say, I’m assuming she’s a Democrat. (She is.) And how ironic that the only person who uses the mail-in ballot system to cheat happens to be an elected official!

Okay, I’m being arch. The Democratic party likes cheating and gaslighting. Just as Biden’s Homeland Security Secretary said under oath that the Southern border was secure and the entire party (as well as its media enablers) insisted that President Biden was “sharp as a tack,” it has claimed for years now that there is “no evidence” of widespread voter fraud and the more secure election procedures are “a return to Jim Crow.”

Ethical Quotes of the Week: Medal of Honor Recipients Will Swenson and Matt Williams

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Her face (as usual when she isn’t interviewing a Democrat or an Axis ally) etched with pain. ABC’s awful Margaret Brennan dragged out the “Everything is Terrible Under President Trump” Big Lie and asked two Congressional Medal of Honor recipients a “When did you stop beating your wife?”-style question. “What specifically makes you optimistic? Because this country, at times, can feel dark, these days, there’s a lot of darkness. What makes you feel optimistic?,” she asked.

You see the trick? She framed the question so that it would mean “I’m optimistic despite how terrible things are with this Fascist President.” But Will Swenson, on the right, didn’t fall into her trap. He answered,

“Well, ultimately, because we’re in Washington, D.C., and everything revolves around politics, we have to remember that politics aren’t everything. American lives continue on. Children are born, children go to school. Lives are achieved. Dreams are achieved. This country is a great place. It’s not politics. It’s not just what’s the news bites coming off of media. Ultimately, we continue forward as a country, continually imperfect, continually evolving forward, always trying to achieve a more perfect union. That’s what’s important to remember, what we can achieve aspirationally. No other place in history, time or on this planet have ever gotten to where we are today. We need to be proud of that, and we need to remember that is what we stay focused on, what we can be.”

Then Brennan, disappointed with the answer, tried to reframe it to meet her agenda, saying, “What we can be, and the promise of it….” Ah. So you agree there’s nothing NOW to feel good about, but maybe things will get better! She is scum. When Brennan asked the same question to Matt Williams (on the left) he also plowed under her “gotcha!” attempt, saying,

“You know, I agree with Will. I think, you know, it’s- it’s so important to remember who we are as a country, and take an opportunity to celebrate that, and think about all the- the challenges that we’ve overcome, how far we’ve actually come. You know, I think if you- if you frame it that way, you think very deeply about our trials and tribulations from beginning to today, we’ve made tremendous strides. Our country is, you know, we’re a super- global superpower. Our economy is doing well. All those things are great. And- and take politics aside out of this whole conversation. Just talk about our communities, that- that we live in, and the people that you surround yourself with, and your families, and the opportunity to be free and, you know, choose what school you go to, and where you want to live and do what you want to do, and what career path you go down or don’t if you want to, you know, I mean, there’s so much to be positive about. And I think the opportunity to celebrate America’s 250th birthday, you know, over the course of this next year is- is amazing. There’s so many great places to visit. You know, the National Mall is going to be full of Americana. And what we’re going to- celebrating ourselves, which I think we should take the time to do. I think it’s very important. You know, across the country, you know something we’re very passionate about at the National Medal of Honor Museum in Arlington, Texas, is a phenomenal beacon that stands to talk about and house our, not only our story, the story of the Medal, and what the Medal represents itself. And I would challenge people to go there and celebrate our history as well. You know, it’s so important. There’s so many great things to go do and great things to visit and don’t just take part in it, because it’s something to do on a weekend, right? Think about why you’re doing it, and when you’re there in the crowds and you’re enjoying yourself, and you’re taking your family to go talk about our country and celebrate our country, actually celebrate it. Be grateful for what you’ve got and the opportunity that was provided for you. If you do that, I don’t see how you can’t be optimistic about our future.”

Disappointed that her “dark times” leading question failed, Brennan ended the interview.

Another “Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!” Smoking Gun, As If We Needed Any More…

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

This exchange…

Ethics villain, Jim Acosta eventually quit CNN in a snit because it began showing a little bit of balance regarding President Trump, but how was such a partisan, biased Axis hack allowed to be CNN’s White House correspondent in the first place? The guy is an A1 Choice USDA -certified ethics villain and, incidentally, an asshole.

Cheer-leading for Colbert is signature significance, to begin with. Gutfield is correct on the facts: it has been verified repeatedly that CBS was losing millions on Colbert.

A swollen staff is part of the reason; the other reason is that Colbert deliberately alienated half the country.

Acosta then defaults to the Axis narrative that President Trump got Colbert cancelled. It’s a lie, flat out. “Dear Leader” is a sarcastic name used by the Trump Deranged. This Axis “advocacy journalist” was out to trash President Trump from the moment he was elected,

Then Acosta privets to the “poor fired employees” guilt trip. They lost their jobs because the show they were working for was losing money! It happens to the best of us (and me, several times). That’s how business works in the U.S. Too bad this isn’t the socialist worker’s paradise Acosta and his fellow travelers dream about. And Gutfield didn’t celebrate the staff losing their jobs anyway. He stated that the staff was ridiculously huge, which it was.

[I will link to Jim Acosta’s ugly EA dossier when WordPress is functioning better, which it currently is not, and its “Happiness Engineers” (Yuck!) have been useless.]

He’s an Ethics Villain. When people complain about Trump calling the news media the “enemy of the people,” Jim Acosta is Exhibit A in the President’s defense.

Note: Exhibit B could be Dana Milbank, whom the Washington Post finally jettisoned as one of its partisan columnists after years of Axis hackery. Today on ABC he cited as one of the three reasons Kamala Harris lost the election was “the backlash against a black woman being the Democratic nominee.” Just thinking that, never mind saying it in public, disqualifies anyone as a serious and trustworthy analyst. Milbank was a political reporter and columnist for the Washington Post for 25 years.

So NOW the Climate Change-Hyping “Experts” Admit That Their Fear-Mongering Models Were Garbage!

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment
GUEST POST BY RYAN HARKINS

[From your host: I know the headline and graphic is my style and not Ryan’s. The valuable commentary below came out of a thread on the last Open Forum. I decided that it was worthy of a stand-alone guest post, especially since I should have written pretty much the same post when this news was first reported. Also, with this post I am officially Christening “The Climate Change Hysteria Ethics Train Wreck.” I should have done it years ago. JM]

I’m seeing some news that the IPCC (the International Panel on Climate Change) has rejected the RCP8.5 model as pretty much an impossible scenario. What is significant about this is how much research and how many policies were based on this scenario. With the IPCC actually stating that RCP8.5 is simply not plausible, the foundation for so much of the climate change hysteria has been ripped away.

To provide a little more detail, RCP8.5 is one of thousands of different models (computer simulations) trying to predict the impact of human activity on climate change up to the year 2100. These models try to take into account factors like human population growth, adoption or rolling back of climate policies, differing degrees of climate forcing due to carbon dioxide (because the science is definitely NOT settled on how much forcing CO2 actually contributes), and a host of other factors. RCP8.5 has always been one of the most extreme models, predicting an increase of 8.5 W/m^2 by 2100. There are scores of other models that are far more modest in their projections, and certainly observed data has favored models that project something closer to 3.4 W/m^2, though even those are diverging from observed data as time goes on.

The upshot, though, is the sheer scope of how much of the world’s climate policies are based on RCP8.5. From this article, we have

“Why this matters: these scenarios live in policy. The now-implausible upper-end scenarios — RCP8.5, SSP5-8.5, and SSP3-7.0 — are not just academic constructs used in esoteric research. They are embedded in the policies and regulations of most of the world’s largest economies, found across the world’s most important multilateral institutions, and used in the climate stress tests that govern hundreds of billions of dollars in bank capital. National climate impact assessments in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Canada, Australia, Japan, and the Netherlands all use RCP8.5 or SSP5-8.5 as a reference scenario. The Network for Greening the Financial System framework, used by more than 140 central banks, has utilized a “Hot House World” scenario calibrated to RCP8.5 physical risk into the bank stress tests run by the European Central Bank, the Bank of England, the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, the Banque de France, and the US Federal Reserve. The World Bank’s Climate Change Knowledge Portal, which provides the climate diagnostics that feed into the Country Climate and Development Reports for more than 100 client countries, defaults to SSP5-8.5 and SSP3-7.0.”

We have trillions of dollars worldwide tied into climate policies. Europe is practically destroying itself trying to achieve Net Zero targets. Industries are dying, people are facing energy insecurity, prices are skyrocketing, and the entire continent is growing in unrest over the devastation to livelihoods. All this comes from countries making policies based on a model that people have warned for years is unrealistic. But the good news is at least with the IPCC ruling the scenario implausible, there is no defense for anyone to keep using those high-end scenarios to craft policy.

Sadly, I’ll bet few policies are actually updated to reflect this ruling.

An Unpleasant Reminder Of Why Ethics Alarms Holds That Editorial Cartoons Are Unethical (and Outdated) [Revised]

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

This:

[The revision referred to in the headline is that I changed the phrase “political cartoon” to “editorial cartoon” throughout the essay. My fault: that was what I meant and still mean when I use the term “political cartoon.” Obviously that confused people: I apologize. “Doonsberry” is a political cartoon; so were “Pogo” and “Li’l Abner.” They were cartoons about politics, and their primary purpose was to amuse. Editorial cartoons, like the one above, are supposed to be treated seriously, like editorials. That’s what this post is condemning. I’m an idiot for not realizaing I was confusing the issue.]

As I wrote in 2017, it’s time, long past time, really, for editorial cartoons to be sent to the ash heap of history.

To clear up any confusion: I’m not a huge fan of memes, but I’m warming up to them a little because they are unequivocally graphic jokes, intended to be outrageous, satirical, maybe offensive but always funny. Editorial cartoons evolved as artistic punditry; they might use humor, but their ultimate goal was to make serious, trenchant, ideally witty observations on the political scene while appearing in newspaper editorial pages.

With very, very, very few exceptions, editorial cartoonists are artists who are partisan one-trick ponies.They are neither as smart or as analytical as they think they are. The template for these would be Herb Block, the mysteriously acclaimed Washington Post editorial cartoonist, who thought he was being clever by always drawing businessmen with huge bellies and smoking long cigars, or making Richard Nixon look like an axe-murderer.

That shameless cartoon above was posted with approval by an old friend of mine, a history professor at an elite college. To say that I was disappointed would be an understatement. How many things are wrong with that thing? The mind boggles. The juxtaposition of the flag-raising over Iwo Jima and the majority opinion in Louisiana v. Callais makes no sense. The implication that the long-needed judicial holding that a 60 year old law crafted to deal with conditions in the Southern states in 1965 no longer is relevant to those states in the 21st century is somehow pushing the nation back 160 years is temporally, historically, factually and legally gibberish. True, it is a pictorial equivalent of the Democrat’s House leader’s meltdown, as the ridiculous Hakeem Jeffries ranted, “Because we know this unprecedented assault on black political representation, the likes of which we have not seen since the Jim Crow era, the ghost of the Confederacy has afflicted the United States Supreme Court majority and is invading and haunting the nation right now! ” That, however was, or should be, an embarrassment to all Democrats and black Americans with a 6th grade education.

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Update on “Dog-Rapegate”: Israel Is Suing the Times

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Good.

(I originally published this post without a graphic, waiting for the memes to come out. I decided on the one above…)

Israeli officials not only released a bombshell report this week extensively documenting Hamas violence on and after the October 7 terrorist ambush, but they are also suing The New York Times for libel as a response to its publishing Nick Kristof’s outrageous claim that Israel was torturing Palestinian prisoners by, among other methods, having them sexually assaulted by trained dogs. The Times also released the libelous accusation on the day before a new, thoroughly sourced report on Hamas violence, “Silenced No More,” was scheduled for release. The Times, almost alone among news outlets, refused to publish that because it reflected poorly on Hamas. It preferred to assert that Jews are training Lassie and Rin Tin Tin to get off on anal rape.

The Israeli Foreign Ministry announced May 14, “Following the publication by Nicholas Kristof in The New York Times of one of the most hideous and distorted lies ever published against the State of Israel in the modern press, which also received the backing of the newspaper, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar have instructed the initiation of a defamation lawsuit against The New York Times.”

The news media has been abusing its privilege under New York Times v. Sullivan with increasing boldness in recent years, and many have suggested (including me) that the standards for punishable slander and libel need to be re-thought in light of a profession no longer committed to honesty and independent public service. To be fair, it is jolly decent of the Times to eliminate any question that the paper is nothing less than a Democratic talking point propaganda organ. Democrats hate Israel and Jews now, or perhaps you haven’t noticed. The Times has, as I wrote here (#6), even doubled-down on Kristof’s evidence-free claims.

As CNN token conservative Scott Jennings wrote on “X”: “Dying on dog rape hill. What a choice.”