Today is the 30th anniversary of the debut of Fox News, a day that will live in infamy for the Totalitarian Left, much as Elon Musk’s rescue of Twitter is reviled. Americans under the age of about 50 never reflect upon what broadcast news was like before October 7, 1996, and most of them can’t imagine how crucial the conservative news network has been to our democracy.
The emergence of Fox News has had some unfortunate and unanticipated consequences too, but those who argue that the United States, its public, culture and society would be better off with no TV news options other than the liberal Democrat monopoly of reporting and opinions, which was the state of the medium before Rupert Murdoch’s daring innovation, is revealing their own bias.
The revolution may well have failed without Brit Hume, so today seems like an appropriate time to honor him. Hume started his career in national broadcast news with ABC—you know, the company that now calls “The View” a news program. In 1989, he became ABC’s chief White House correspondent and was prominent in that role until he quit in 1996 to join the new rebel network. A thorough professional, a recognizable face and a respected name, he instantly gave credibility and visibility to the Roger Ailes-led project.
I alluded to my post on the old Ethics Scoreboard about the infamous Duke lacrosse team rape case in a recent EA post, suggesting that it may be a template for what we are going to see transpire in the still developing Cornell frat house gang rape saga. Fred Davidson, a cherished reader and commenter here, tracked down the essay on The Wayback Machine and sent the link in the comments. I’m reposting that essay here. If ever a prosecutor was a candidate to be just as unethical as Mike Nifong (who was disbarred), Letitia James is it. I want to acknowledge my webmaster for Ethics Alarms who edited and formatted all my posts, the talented Lauren Larson.Would that she was still working with me now.
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From the North Carolina Bar’s Rules of Professional Conduct:
“The prosecutor represents the sovereign and, therefore, should use restraint in the discretionary exercise of government powers, such as in the selection of cases to prosecute. During trial, the prosecutor is not only an advocate, but he or she also may make decisions normally made by an individual client, and those affecting the public interest should be fair to all. In our system of criminal justice, the accused is to be given the benefit of all reasonable doubt. With respect to evidence and witnesses, the prosecutor has responsibilities different from those of a lawyer in private practice; the prosecutor should make timely disclosure to the defense of available evidence known to him or her that tends to negate the guilt of the accused, mitigate the degree of the offense, or reduce the punishment. Further, a prosecutor should not intentionally avoid pursuit of evidence merely because he or she believes it will damage the prosecutor’s case or aid the accused.“
How Durham District Attorney Mike Nifong can reconcile his handling of the Duke lacrosse rape case with this explanatory comment from his bar association’s rule governing the ethics of prosecutors is a mystery. But it is no mystery what his violation of these principles has created: one of the worst ethics train wrecks of the past ten years, a mess that can stand with such recent ethics fiascos as the Terri Schiavo dispute and the Valerie Plame Affair. In fact, Nifong’s handiwork may have caused more human wreckage than either of these. But like all ethics train wrecks, this one had more than one shaky hand on the throttle:
The Duke lacrosse team: While not earning their horrific treatment by Nifong, many of the players on the team were irresponsible in their conduct, disrespectful to the hired exotic dancer who ultimately became their accuser, and reckless in their disregard for the reputation of the university and its sometimes contentious relations with the Durham community. For example, a few hours after the alleged rape, team member Ryan McFadyen sent an email to his team mates in which he fantasized about murdering and sexually abusing strippers. It may well have been composed as a tasteless joke, but it was certainly evidence of an unacceptable level of contempt and callousness toward the human beings the team had hired to entertain them at the party, not to mention strong evidence of a brain-pan insufficiency. McFadyen was suspended after a team mate, in another ethically questionable move, decided to circulate the disgusting e-mail so that it wound up in the hands of the police and, worse still, the media. Did it have any probative value in the case? No—McFadyen wasn’t one of the players implicated or indicted. Still, he ended up suspended from school, the local media used the e-mail to make the team look like a tribe of cannibals, and the seeds of racial conflict were sown and fertilized. The e-mail effectively threw gasoline on an already incendiary situation, and contributed mightily to the lacrosse team’s coach resigning and Duke canceling the lacrosse season.
I was first made aware of the sudden re-emergence of a 2024 gang rape allegation as a media and social media obsession when a friend who was raped began posting furiously about the story on Facebook. A knee-jerk progressive, she is certain that there was a cover-up at Cornell and that the alleged victim is telling the truth, because all women must be believed.
I don’t know what really happened at the Chi Phi fraternity on a fateful October night in 2024, and neither do you, and neither does my friend. Anyone who presumes they do know based on a partisan or ideological bias has elected to board the newly launched Cornell Frat Rape Ethics Train Wreck in the dining car. Shame on them.
“Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it” is having a bad year—look at the sudden resurgence of anti-Semitism here—and fraternity rape hysteria should be viewed with particular skepticism. The infamous Duke Lacrosse case occurred in 2006 and my commentary was lost when the old Ethics Scoreboard left the building, but it is still a tag on Ethics Alarms, with this the most directly relevant post. The imaginary gang rape that disgraced Rolling Stone was extensively covered here, however, as you can see. In 2014, “Rolling Stone” reporter Sabrina Erdly wrote a feature about an imaginary co-ed named “Jackie” being gang raped at a University of Virginia fraternity party. UVA president Teresa A. Sullivan, a good little feminist, suspended all fraternities with no actual evidence of wrongdoing. But you know, men are pigs, women are always the victims, and one must always believe all women, even imaginary ones (there was no “Jackie”) when they cry “Rape!”
Ethics Alarms has analyzed several instances of false rape claims as well as the cynical #MeToo fad, which, like the Cornell episode was weaponized by the Left for political gain. The hysteria got many sexual predators their just desserts, and also amassed many unjustly maligned male victims. I don’t know what happened at Cornell, but I do know that the case has already been co-opted by Democrats to inflame a core constituency, angry white progressive women convinced that the U.S. is an oppressive patriarchy that would have the culture emulating “A Handmaiden’s Tale” if it had its way. There’s an election approaching, after all. Hence the emergence of a mother who murdered her three children as the object of sympathy.
Here are what I consider salient facts based on what we do know:
I thought the clip from “Poltergeist” fit here: Welcome back, Dana!
The New Republic, biased and dishonest as usual, bleats, “Trump Moves to Cut Off Student Loans for Tons of Degrees: Under a new rule, if your degree doesn’t make enough money, you won’t be able to get a student loan.” It terms this as “President Trump is banning students majoring in degrees that don’t make enough money from taking out college loans.”
Oooh, banning students! Sounds like a mad dictator to me!
The President isn’t “banning students” or degrees. This is a financially and educationally responsible move that should have been done decades ago. If a student wants to waste a college education on majoring in “Queer History,” or “Slavik Literature” (Plymouth State University allows students to major in “Adventure Education” by taking “Rock Climbing Fundamentals,” “Canoe Paddling Fundamentals,” “Wilderness Expedition,” and “Whitewater Kayaking”) that’s swell: they just can’t use taxpayer funds they will never be able to pay back to do it.
The Department of Education, or what is left of it, tweeted in response to that unethical New Republic analysis,
“This is fake news at its finest. First off, we’re not ‘banning’ any program. The federal government doesn’t set curriculum or programs. Here’s the truth: we are holding colleges accountable for leaving students worse off than if they never enrolled. Too many graduates report delaying major life milestones like buying a home or starting a family. Why? Because low return-on-investment programs saddled them with unmanageable debt that was never going to translate into a real-world job. Federal student loans are not a welfare program for failing college programs. American students deserve education and training pathways that prepare them for the workforce – and transparency about programs that will never pay off.”
There is a strong case to be made that college itself is now a high-cost scam that doesn’t prepare students for the work force, just anti-Israel rallies and pro-illegal immigration riots, but okay, let’s go with the hoary myth that college is essential to life success. The student debt crisis in this country has reached levels that never should have been permitted, and higher education is as expensive as it is because the schools realized that could charge absurd tuitions and the US government would enable it by backing bigger and bigger loans. Taxpayers and the government subsidizing degrees only makes sense if it incentivizes the development of skills from which the the nation and society will derive tangible, quantifiable, practical benefits. Those are also skills that have a fighting chance of translating into jobs with sufficient compensation to allow reasonable loans to be paid back.
Declaring that the government will only back a student’s loan when 1) that loan is likely to be repaid and 2) when the loan is paying for a benefit to society rather than a self-indulgent frolic is responsible leadership. Unique among U.S. Presidents, Donald Trump sees his most responsible acts reflexively condemned through a combination of misrepresentation, bias and animus. I’m surprised there isn’t a college major in that.
And I get — we get to go, or at least to dinners, sometimes off-the-record dinners between journalists, columnists, and politicians. And I would say, over the last two years, used to be, when you were at a dinner, an off-the-record dinner with the Democratic politician, there was distance between the journalists and the Democrats, because they’re politicians.
But if I could vent one pet peeve about us, starting in 2015, we in the mainstream media learned that, if you bash Donald Trump, the clicks go up, the ratings go up. It became the business model. And I’m not saying we’re — we play it straight. We do our job, but it’s become the business model.
Our job is to keep some distance. In my view, at many places and in many of the dinners I have been to, there’s no distance anymore. And that is a problem for the media. And that is our problem. We have got to reestablish some distance from the Democratic Party. These are people we cover. They’re not people we root for. They’re not people we’re spin doctors for. They’re people we cover. And I do think we have done a not ultimately excellent job at maintaining as much distance from the Democrats as we keep from the Republicans.
—-David Brooks, the New York Times’ Stockholm Syndrome fake conservative pundit, on PBS, further amassing Ethics Villain points with wild equivocation as he whitewashes the news media’s leftward and pro-Democratic Party bias by purporting to criticize it.
🚨 THE VIEW HOST QUESTIONS PATRICK CLANCY FOR DIVORCING LINDSAY CLANCY ‼️ Sara Haines questioned how Patrick’s marital love ended so quickly after Lindsay killed their 3 children. Patrick has since remarried. Do you agree with Haines? #LindsayClancy#PatrickClancy
[Sorry for stooping to using TikTok, but it had the only suitable clip that WordPress would let me embed…]
“The View” is trying to get its own private dining car on the Lindsay Clancy Trial Ethics Train Wreck. First Sunny Hostin uses the issue to declare that she was the “lone juror” who got a man declared not guilty after he killed a woman and made her into a delicious soup…and it turns out that she was lying about the whole thing and wasn’t the “lone juror” after all. Now Sara Haines—how can anyone determine which of these opinionated, wokeness-infected, ignorant women is the dumbest?—expressed her shock that Lindsay Clancy’s husband (now remarried) would divorce the woman who murdered his children. After all, Haines says, don’t the marriage vows state “in sickness or in health”?
Well yes, Sarah, but at least the vows I took didn’t have a “whether one of us murders our kids or not” clause in there.
Haines really and truly asks, “How did the marital love end so quickly?” Gee, that’s a real brain-teaser. Domestic abuse activists argue that “marital love” has been abandoned once a husband punches his wife in the face, but that’s obviously bad and inexcusable. Murdering the children is more nuanced. Good question, Sara. I’ll have to think about that….
How is someone as dumb and confused as Haines on television anyway? The inconvenient truth about all journalism is that the vast majority of reporters just aren’t very bright, and certainly not as smart as they think they are. Nonetheless, we allow them to have public platforms and exposure that consistently accomplish the opposite of what our Founders believed made “the press” essential to a functioning democracy. Heck, we allow them to manipulate elections. Haines and her colleagues—not just the confederacy of dunces on “The View” but reporters and pundits generally—make the public less informed, less astute, less ethical and less responsible. Somehow this stupid woman—yes, I hold that asking why a man would divorce his wife after she murdered three children, especially their three children, is signature significance: no intelligent person even thinks that’s a puzzle, never mind announcing it on national TV—managed to be a correspondent on NBC and ABC. What does that tell us about the competence, judgment and trustworthiness of broadcast news?
Related questions:
Will anything cause ABC to recognize that calling “The View” a news program is a disgrace, and that the network metaphorically soils itself and the culture every time it gives this coven of morons gets another hour to lobotomize the public?
How do Democrats continue to get votes when siding with progressives means associating oneself with the likes of Sara, Sunny, Whoopi and Joy, never mind Bernie, Kamala, AOC, Fredo, Ayanna, Jasmine, Gavin, and Zohran?
When did American woman lose their ethical bearings?
“Did you know my school was bad like this when you decided to put me here?” she asked…“So you had money to send me to one of the best schools, and you chose not to?” she said, hurling her words. “Because other kids are disadvantaged, you didn’t want to put me in a great school?” Najya was asking what I’d accomplished by not choosing the “best” school for her. And the honest answer is, I don’t know. When it comes to the choices my husband and I have made about public education, these days I feel that I failed both my values and my child.”
…because it is petty and disgusting….and unethical, of course.
President Trump Truth Socialed this out at the end of last week:
BREAKING NEWS: I am pleased to announce that the United States of America has entered into an Agreement with The Kingdom of Denmark, and Greenland, that gives the United States permanent control over security, and all other needs, in Greenland, completely addressing ALL of our many U.S. concerns.
There will be NO COST to the United States! At my direction, we worked with representatives of Denmark and Greenland to guarantee that the United States will FOREVER have the complete ability to do what is necessary in Greenland in order to secure and defend the security of Greenland, and the United States of America.
Additionally, from now on, no U.S. adversary can EVER have a base in Greenland, have a military presence in Greenland, or make sensitive investments in Greenland, without our express written approval.
For over 100 years, Presidents have known the strategic importance of Greenland, but NONE of them were able to do anything about it. I am proud to be the President that permanently and conclusively addressed this very important situation. This is an “Infinite Life” Agreement, there is no end! We are very honored and proud of what has just taken place, and everything agreed to today will be cherished by the American People.
We will immediately begin the process of developing a large Military presence in the appropriate part of Greenland, of which there are many. We will work with the people of Greenland in its development and construction. This solution is a great one for the United States of America, Denmark, Greenland, and all of our Allies. We look forward to working with the wonderful people of Denmark and Greenland toward a magnificent future with respect to this large, and highly strategic, parcel of land. We will be very protective of it!
This is a dream come true for the United States of America, one that is very important, historic, and special. Thank you for your attention to this matter!
President DONALD J. TRUMP
Also last week, ancient crooner and current Fifties station disc jockey for Sirius-XM Pat Boone respectfully suggested, as a passionate Trump supporter, that President Trump should shut up more often. Of course that’s good advice, and also futility exemplified. In the President’s defense, however, he feels that he has to salute himself because the Axis news media won’t report honestly on his successes, which have been considerable. Getting what Trump wanted out Greenland proved that his meat-axe negotiating style worked to the U.S.’s advantage after all the mockery and nastiness from the Democrats and the Trump Deranged. Here’s how the news media covered it:
The New York Times said, “U.S. Has Reached Security Deal on Greenland, Trump Says — The full contours of the deal were unclear, but Denmark and Greenland both indicated they expected an agreement to be signed soon.” trump made the “contours” pretty clear, I thought: It costs us nothing, it is permanent, the U.S. can build military bases, and to all intends and purposes, the U.S. has control of that big chunk of ice.
The Washington Post reported, “Trump hails Greenland security deal that falls short of takeover.” The U.S. doesn’t want or need ownership, but the Post has to frame Trump’s success as a failure. Nice.
The Economist sniffed: “Donald Trump drops demands to own Greenland, but the harm has been done.”
Bloomberg reported, “U.S. Strikes Greenland Deal to End Row That Threatened NATO.” That’s certainly misleading framing. Here’s The Atlantic: “The Greenland Fiasco Stumbles to an End.” How exactly is it a fiasco if the U.S. gets what it wanted? “President Trump announced an agreement that appeared to satisfy all parties but came at a great cost,” the magazine continued. Not monetary cost: what is the rag talking about? Oh: the episode got Denmark annoyed at us? The Horror.
The President may have scored a victory with major implications for U.S. security, but we shouldn’t be distracted from the more serious problem: the Kennedy Center is closing down for repairs.
Some, or many, Trump-haters out there…or the Democratic National Committee—after all, Democrats cheat—sent out into social media the above fake photos of the President kissing White House aide Natalie Harp, the young aide who has been targeted by the Angry Left as a possible object of Trump’s sexual attention. This went “viral,” The Washington Post claims, though if my fanatically Trump-Deranged Facebook friends didn’t peep about it, and they believe anything if it can be interpreted a barely negative about the President, I am dubious.
So the Washington Post decided to make certain that as many people see the photos as possible. Althouse’s immediate reaction was “WaPo wants you to know it’s fake… but you’ve got to see this, got to get it imprinted on your fragile brain.” Bingo. The Post even introduces the fake photos with “‘Hoaxes like these are “death by a thousand cuts’ that chip away at people’s trust, one expert said.” And here’s another cut! I wonder if the Post staff stood around in a mob while the article was being prepared, chanting “CUT! CUT! CUT! CUT!”
The Post did include references to BBC journalist and fact-checker Shayan Sardarizadeh’s nine-part thread on X, explaining his process for determining that both images were resolutely fakes. That arrives deep into the article however.
In 2003, Barbara Streisand sued to force an aerial photographer to remove a photo of her Malibu cliff-top mansion from a website. The lawsuit made the photo into global news, and hundreds of thousands of views and downloads when the photo had only been downloaded six times, twice by Babs’ lawyers, before the controversy. Techdirt later coined the term “The Streisand Effect,” which has come up many times on Ethics Alarms. Frankly, I’m surprised that the Axis of Unethical Conduct hasn’t been using AI-generated fake photos far more than it has so far. “CUT! CUT! CUT! CUT!” Of course it is an unethical and despicable practice, but as Harry Reid will remind us from the Lake of Fire in Hell, “It works!”
He’s not wrong. And MSNOW, CNN and Politico are not by any stretch of the imagination the “independent” news organizations they say they are, or even genuine journalists, since it is remarkably obvious that they are really “Democratic Party surrogates with press credentials,” as one wag accurately describes them. And they are, as the President stated in one of his most audacious, bold and correct assessments, “enemies of the people.”
It is also true that as pivotal mid-terms approach, those three outlets and many others are throwing a major portion of the weight of the news media into spinning, concealing, misrepresenting and and prioritizing news stories in the manner most likely to push votes to Democrats and Socialist/Communists, not based on facts, law, common sense, logic or the best interests of the nation, but based on an ideological agenda.
Never mind. Trump’s actions here are futile, and I assume he knows it; if he doesn’t, then he has a bunch of lawyers to fire. He’s doing this to focus attention on the Axis news media’s unethical and corrosive efforts to manipulate elections, as it did in 2016, 2020, and 2024. Yes, it’s unethical for a President to deliberately violate the Constitution knowing that his actions will be struck down. It’s also unethical for journalists to use First Amendment protections to abuse their power and undermine democracy, but there is nothing in the Constitution that stops them from doing it
“The White House belongs to the American people and the decisions made inside are funded by our tax dollars,” MS NOW said in a statement posted on X. “MS NOW intends to take any and all steps necessary to defend our First Amendment rights and the essential role of independent journalists in our democracy,” it added. The First Amendment guarantees freedom of the press.
Yada yada. That’s all the right rhetoric. Too bad it’s such a scumbag organization using it.
“We have a right under the U.S. Constitution to do our reporting without hinderance or interference from the government and this ban is an illegal assault on this fundamental right,” CNN said in a statement posted on X. “We will not be deflected from our duty to hold the government and other public bodies to account, and we will continue to report on the actions and processes of this administration without fear or favor,” the statement added.
Of course, CNN made virtually no effort to hold the Obama and Biden administrations “to account,” but were, instead, complicit in their unconstitutional behavior. The Constitution, however, doesn’t say what biased and unethical news organizations can’t do, just what the government can’t do to them.
Politico Press, the publication’s communications team, said that “POLITICO will continue to fairly report on this White House and future ones. We will vigorously defend our First Amendment rights against any attempt to restrict them.”
The funny word in that statement is “continue.”
Nevertheless, President Trump doesn’t have a legal leg to stand on, making the metaphorical ethical leg mighty weak as well.
