The gift link to the NYT article at issue is here.
I’m not going to quote it or summarize it. I will characterize it: the opinion piece, Gaza’s Rubble Is the Grave of Our Future, by Ghada Abdulfattah, “a writer who lives in Gaza,” is anti-Israel, pro-Hamas propaganda that the Times has handed a large amount of space to promote. This is a “poor Gazans being victims of genocide by those inhuman, cruel Jews” essay. The writer never comes right out and says that, but her chronicling of the devastation in Gaza since the Israeli assault began three years ago is definitely aimed at conveying that misleading message.
All right, I will offer a quote:
“It isn’t just the sadness of what was demolished. Seeing endless piles of concrete brings a second layer of violence — the violence of being forced to live with destruction. Rubble doesn’t just destroy the past; it erases the future. It forces your mind to stop imagining, to stop thinking, to stop dreaming about life after today.”
Gee, I guess launching a sneak terror attack on civilians in your neighboring state, killing over 1200 people, including infants, raping woman and taking 250 hostages isn’t such a good idea, eh? Huh. Who knew?
In this article, (Gift Link) a New York Times investigative reporter explains how he has cultivated a source that he knows is distributing illegal drugs that may be fatal.
He writes in part,
“It was a small-time operation, but one that illuminated a big point for our reporting: A single person, without cartel backing, can order and redistribute potent chemicals.
I wanted to verify his account with others. But I also had to make good on my commitment not to reveal his identity. So I compared the information he was giving me with reporting I’d done with dozens of experts and law enforcement officials who told me what they understood about this market. I also spoke to people in his circle of friends and associates.
All along, I was keenly aware that the drugs Chemical Analyst was selling can be fatal. I asked him about this — as I’d asked other dealers and suppliers — and he professed here to be a libertarian. As a human, I find it terrifying the drugs he sells could kill people. It was painful to watch him use drugs himself, and I often feared for his safety. But as a reporter, I have a responsibility to explain to the public what’s really happening on the drug frontier.”
This is different from most Ethics Quizzes here, because my position is set and unshakable. The reporter’s duty “to make good on [his] commitment not to reveal [the drug pusher’s] identity” must be subordinate to his duty to society as a citizen and responsible human being. Even lawyers are authorized to violate a clients’ confidentiality to prevent death or serious bodily injury to a third party. How many people should die so that the reporter can explain what’s happening on “the drug frontier?” My verdict: none.
The reporter says he’s talked to lawyers and other journalists as well as “experts” and law enforcement officials. I doubt that he has talked with any ethicists.
Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day(that I have already told you my answer to..) is…
Would it be ethical for the reporter sic the police on this criminal? Could it be ethical not to?
“For Fox executives only, take Jessica Tarlov off the air. She is, from her voice, to her lies, and everything else about her, one of the worst ‘personalities’ on television, a real loser! People cannot stand watching her.”
….quoth the President in a Truth Social post two days ago. Tarlov is one of the rotating progressive Democrat co-hosts on Fox News’ talk show “The Five” and routinely does what she was hired to do, which is to be the house contrarian on a biased news channel, like Scott Jennings on CNN.
It’s a lonely and crummy job, but somebody’s got to do it. Jennings does it much better, but 1) he’s smart, articulate, and usually has the right side to defend, 2) the wokies and Axis agents on the panels with him are hardly the best and the brightest, and 3) Tarlov isn’t the worst of Fox’s hired Lefties, and I’d rank her as better than Juan Williams, the thankfully departed long-time holder of that role on Fox. Faint praise, I know.
But Ethics Alarms correctly slammed the Biden White House when it dishonestly attacked Greg Gutfield of “The Five” in 2023, so I shouldn’t use The Julie Principle to give President Trump a pass now. Presidents should only carefully criticize journalists and pundits by name if at all, and Trump doesn’t do anything carefully. It is punching down by definition; it looks petty, it makes him look thin-skinned and weak, and worst of all, it hands his principle-free and shameless critics an opportunity to say he’s pro-censorship.
This has been true for years, and yet Trump has a flat learning curve. It’s like a man who keeps smashing his head against a wall without figuring out that it’s not a good idea.
The Tarlov nonsense is even worse that that, in fact. After Trump has “demanded” (he can’t demand, because its none of his business) that Fox fire someone like Tarlov, he’s given that individual immunity from getting dismissed no matter what she does. Fox News has to keep Tarlov or look like Trump is running the network. Fox News is too much of a Trump and MAGA lackey already.
Amanda Lynn Tully, pictured above and one of the subjects of a New York Times article (gift link!) about people so troubled by the legal and ethical requirement of living up to their student loan agreement that they move out of the country to avoid paying up. More than 40 million borrowers have federal student debt to pay back, and 7.7 million have defaulted on their loans, according to recent data from the Education Department. Anecdotal evidence and conversations on Reddit and other social media indicate that some borrowers, like the dislikable young woman pictured above, think moving to another country is a dandy way to solve their problems.
I’m seriously considering letting Ethics Alarms comment-bomber and New York Times/Axis News Media apologist “A Friend” try to defend this.
Neither the reporter who wrote the story nor the editors who passed on it, nor anyone else in the draft-to-publication process, knows what NATO stands for, yet the paper presumes to opine about it. And this isn’t Weekly Reader; this is the New York Times, supposedly the gold standard for U.S. journalism.
Why would anyone trust a news source that would do something this incompetent and careless?
[I submit that question above as a less vulgar substitute for “Does a bear shit in the woods?”]
Just sat down a while ago to wake up to what we laughingly call “the news” while cuddling my dog and drinking some Italian Roast to get my brain functioning, sort of. As usual I wandered aimlessly among CNN, Fox News and MSNOW to gauge the difference in emphasis and tone, while jumping back periodically to check with the MLB channel’s morning round-up of yesterday’s baseball games.
The second I landed on CNN, I was told that a new HUD policy put forth by…THE EVIL TRUMP ADMINISTRATION!!!!…could put thousands of homeless people “including many veterans” back on the street. HUD wants to transfer billions in funding from permanent housing to temporary housing, which means, CNN kind of explained, two-year residency. BUT, the grim-faced reporter said, many homeless would probably leave sooner than that. A judge has halted the policy’s implementation after a law suit—of course—but the report simply regurgitated what the complaint from homeless activist organizations alleged.
What they alleged, CNN appeared to believe, is the only way to see this situation. All CNN did was quote the plaintiffs’ filings. Why does HUD want to change the policy? We got no information about that at all. I have other questions: what are the benefits of “permanent housing” as opposed to “temporary housing”? What is “permanent housing” anyway? If someone is in “permanent housing,” why are they still called homeless? If they leave temporray housing before their time is up, why wouldn’t they leave permanent housing? Will spending money on temporary housing rather than permanent housing serve the homeless population better? Will it serve taxpayers better?
The accusations from the Axis media that Fox News deliberately avoided informing its audience about President Trump’s bitter and triumphant Truth Social post, “Robert Mueller just died. Good, I’m glad he’s dead. He can no longer hurt innocent people!” are not quite accurate, but close enough for what passes as journalism on those platforms now.
The Fox News website and that of local affiliates published articles that explicitly included President Trump’s widely criticized outburst that was generally considered in the “too soon!” category, but the initial reports on the air ignored it. Fox News mentioned the death of the leader of the contrived “Russiagate” scandal at least six times on TV without ever quoting Trump’s remarks and the resulting backlash. The televised segments on Fox & Friends and elsewhere featured more traditional post-mortem tributes from figures like former President George W. Bush. I happened to see periodic commentator Brit Hume criticize Trump’s whack at Mueller as pointless ugliness that “doesn’t help,” but that was more than a day after the episode occurred.
It should be clear by now that MSNOW, previously MSNBC, exists only to misinform the public and make Americans more ignorant and divided than they already are. When I learn that a friend gets his or her news from this entirely propaganda-obsessed network, I conclude, reluctantly that this friend is now an idiot, and I will have to confine our conversations to, oh, movie trivia or something.
As I peruse three news cable channels during the day, hoping to learn something either about the world or the ongoing deterioration of U.S. journalism ethics, there are certain faces that repel me like opposite pole of a magnet. Brian Stelter on CNN. Hannity on Fox News. Literally everyone on MSNOW, of course, but Jonathan Capehart is particularly prone to saying really stupid things as if they were worth listening to.
On “The Weekend” this week, Capehart set a new low even for him. He was so horrified by the President making the quip about surprise and Pearl Harbor in front of the Japanese Prime Minister—standard fare for Trump, who enjoys doing and saying quiet parts out loud and doesn’t care who is offended—that he railed,
“I sometimes wonder, why are we not having a 25th Amendment conversation about this president?Because a comment like that, if it had come out of the mouth of President Biden, we would have been in rolling coverage about how Republicans on the Hill think that he should be removed from office for talking to an ally like that, and making that comment in response to a question from a Japanese journalist.”
I know I could spend all my time on Ethics Alarms pointing out the astoundingly flagrant bias and Trump Derangement displayed by members of the Axis media, but Capehart’s idiocy in this instance is epic. Let’s see…
Ugh. I won’t call it an ethics train wreck, because this is really another subset of the nation’s victim-mongering/tribal/white male vilification problem as well as the already running “DEI Ethics Train Wreck” and the “Trans Activism Ethics Train Wreck.”
Of course we have to have a Women’s History Museum. There are four historically “marginalized” groups, and women are the largest and longest suffering of them all. D.C. already has huge museum dedicated to African Americans, and there is a Smithsonian museum called the National Museum of the American Indian. Women have every right to feel snubbed in the current obsession with group identification. You know an LGBTQ+ museum on the Mall will be next: how could it not be?
Conservatives who argue, as one did in the comments to a recent online item about the museum, “[The museum] continues to foment the balkanization of America. The accomplishments of women are just that: accomplishments. Their fruits are enjoyed by all, not just by those of the gender/race/religion, etc of the person who made the accomplishment” are trying to lock the barn door after the horse has escaped and won the Kentucky Derby. This is “National Women’s Month.” The Democrats had a national convention celebrating “The Year of the Woman” (with Bill Clinton as a keynote speaker, but never mind…). Half of the arguments for voting for Hillary and Kamala was their lady-parts. We’re stuck with U.S. women seeing themselves as a special, separate, aggrieved and superior group for the foreseeable future, probably forever.
But there is a problem: the party that at least pretends to be the “party of women” can’t figure out what a woman is. This week House Democrats blocked legislation to establish the “Women’s History Museum” because of an amendment attached by Republicans stating, “The Museum shall be dedicated to preserving, researching, and presenting the history, achievements, and lived experiences of biological women in the United States.”
I have a very good friend, an actor, a lawyer, a Jew and a “useful idiot” for progressives, who recently wrote a passionate and articulate Facebook post about however one felt about Israel, there was no excuse, justification or salvation for people who hated Jews. And I recalled that he had been among my misguided and ethically-crippled Facebook friends who actually celebrated the election of Communist Zohran Mamdani, as had others of my friends as well as Democratic Party Presidential Nominee Kamala Harris, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and this august crew (from Mamdani’s website):
But it’s even worse. With the exception of the disgraced ex-Governor of New York who was running against Mamdani, not a single national Democratic leader would say publicly, “What???? Are you all out of your minds? This guy hates Jews! What has our party become?”
Better yet, shake the Free Beacon story in front of their smug, stupid faces like a Jack Russell Terrier shakes a rat—you know I love that image—or even better YET, do this..
Now, they will huminahumina that just because someone marries the love of his life who happens to want Jews wiped from the face of the earth doesn’t mean Mayor Mamdani feels the same way. Right. Heck, we don’t know that Eva Braun was bad, do we? Riiiight. Mayor Mamdani just used St. Paddy’s Day to compare the Irish Republican Army to Palestinians, who want Jews wiped from the face of the earth. This isn’t hard.
As for the Mamdani-chering Jews, like my friend, a smart and compassionate man, who celebrated Mamdani because he opposes Donald Trump, there are no excuses. They should be ashamed of themselves. He should be ashamed of himself. I am ashamed of him. People should turn their backs on these ethically corrupted fools like the jurors in “Twelve Angry Men” turn their backs on Juror 10 (Ed Begley) when he erupts into his final bigoted rant..
The irony? I cast that pro-Mamdani actor-friend in one of my productions of “Twelve Angry Men.”
“A representative for Mamdani did not respond to a request for comment,” notes the Free Beacon. Of course not. What would he say?
Ethics Alarms 