Journalism & Media

The 1776 Report: Addendum

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Declaration

I noted the rapid memory-holing of the Trump Administration’s 1776 Commission’s report yesterday. Then I read this article about the report by the New York Times’ “culture reporter’ whose beat is intellectual life and “the world of ideas.” It is a useful barometer of the biases the Times’ staff has against core American values as well as the Left’s thinly-veiled contempt for much of what our culture is built upon. It also reveals the paper’s assumption about its readership’s biases.

Right at the start, the article thinks it is smearing the report and its authors by asserting “its claims derive from arguments that have long circulated on the right.” Ooooh, “the right.” THOSE demons and troglodytes. In truth, most of the “ideas” have represented majority historical and philosophical thought in the U.S. until the ascent of race conflict as the defining feature of the nation became the cant of the increasingly anti-American educational establishment.

Here are some of the report’s conclusions that the Times mocks:

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Telling Unethical Quote Of The Week: Elie Mystal

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Elie Mystal

Joe Biden’s Inaugural Address calling for unity was extravagantly praised by the news media. Were they empty words of convenience? We shall see. The first clue will be whether Democrats allow the “snap impeachment” of President Trump to continue to become the unconstitutional spite trial of citizen Donald Trump. That just might be considered divisive. The likelihood is getting stronger even as the mainstream media is reporting that the siege of the Capitol had been planned in advance, so claiming that Trump “incited a riot” is false on its face….but this is what happens when the objective is just to accuse someone without bothering to wait for a thorough investigation.

Also working against “unity”—totalitarian regimes love unity; in fact, they insist on it—is the certainty that the mainstream news media will now constantly be parading its despicable double standards before the public daily. Seldom has blogger Ann Althouse, a moderate liberal who found herself defending a President she disliked almost as much as I did over the last four years, duplicated my thoughts more exactly than she did yesterday when she wrote in part,

“I’m not watching the TV, not thinking about the inauguration. I’m uninterested in hearing analysis of the speeches, the poetry, the song-belting, the executive orders, the race-and-sex firsts. Bored by social media posts about how happy this or that person I follow happens to be about all those things. …The main reason I am averting my eyes is that I don’t want exposure to all the favorable, flattering media. The media were so awful to Trump, whatever he did. The sudden shift to bathing Biden in sunlight just feels so wrong to me. It seems sappy and patronizing. But I hope Biden does well, and I’ll be giving him a chance.”

Which is more than 99% of the AUC did with President Trump.

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Inauguration Day Ethics Warm-Up, 1/20/2021: Welcome And Good Luck, President Biden!

/ Jack Marshall / 70 Comments

Biden P

1. Too late! Fox News fired Chris Stirewalt yesterday. He is the veteran politics editor who was the prime onscreen face of the supposedly conservative-tilting network’s election night projections that Joseph Biden . had defeated President Trump in Arizona. Arnon Mishkin, a long-time Democratic Party pollster, was Fox News decision desk chief for the 2020 presidential election. He called the state of Arizona and its 11 electoral votes for Joe Biden at 11:20 p.m. Eastern time on election night, not long after the polls closed. Fox news anchor Bill Hemmer, standing at the Fox News election map, expressed surprise. “What is happening here? Why is Arizona blue?” he asked. “Did we just call it? Did we just make a call in Arizona?”

Stirewalt quickly came onscreen to defend the network’s decision, explaining that vote margins were too great in Arizona for the Republican candidate to overcome. He assured viewers that “We’re going to be careful, cautious, and earnest,” adding that “Arizona is doing just what we expected it to do and we remain serene and pristine. He dismissed voter fraud claims, “Lawsuits, schmawsuits — we haven’t seen any evidence yet that there’s anything wrong.” Mishkin also came on camera later to defend the call. I found him supercilious and obnoxious.

Reflecting on the decision to fire Stirewalt, the usual media suspects are pointing out that in the end, Fox’s call was correct. That’s pure moral luck. Fox News was the first news outlet to call Arizona for Biden, anmd when your brand is the news network that balances the hard progressive, Democratic, anti-Trump bias of 95% of the news media, that’s a stupid unforced error. Stirewalt has to be aware of the company’s brand and best interests. Why jump the gun to call a state Trump probably needed to win? Furthermore, Stirewalt’s “Arizona is doing just what we expected it to do” sounded like spin, because it was. The polls, including Fox’s, had already been proven wildly off, and the voting “expectations” were based on polling.

It would not have cost Fox anything to wait to call Arizona, especially since networks declaring winners in states is subjective, unnecessary, and arguably manipulative. Regular Fox viewers were alienated, and this was predictable. President Trump denounced the networkand urged supporters to watch Newsmax and One America News instead. He should not have done that, but it was also predictable. Stirewalt was substantially responsible for losing Fox News viewers and revenue, and accomplished nothing.

He deserved to be fired. I would have fired him too.

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Evening Ethics Night-Cap, 1/18/2021: What A Terrible Bunch Of People!

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

nightcap

1. Wow. Now that’s a sex scandal even in France! Olivier Duhamel, a prominent French political scientist, radio show host and television commentator has quit his media and university posts after being accused of committing incest with his teenage stepson more than 30 years ago. His resignations included the Sciences Po university, where Duhamel, now 70, headed the body overseeing the renowned Paris institution. A book called “La Familia Grande,” just published and written by one of his stepchildren, revealed that Duhamel abused her twin brother beginning when he was 14. The brother told the news media, “I confirm that what my sister has written about the actions of Olivier Duhamel toward me is correct.”

Addressing her step-father directly in the book, Camille Kouchner wrote: “I am going to explain to you who sound off on the radio, you who offer the gift of your analysis to students, and strut about on TV stages. I am going to explain that you could, at least, have said sorry.”

Now there is a #MeToo-style incest movement in France, #Metooinceste, with over 20,000 tweets so far posted on accounts of people who say they had been sexually abused as children by adult family members.

2. This would be pretty embarrassing, if only the news media had the integrity to point it out. DC AG Karl Racine pronounced himself outraged that anyone would compare the Black Lives Matter riots to the Capitol riot. Last week, Racine called comparisons (accompanied by accusations of double standards and hypocrisy), “shocking and outrageous.”

Right. The BLM riots resulted in at least 8 dead, hundreds of wounded officers, and over $2 billion in damages. The D.C. installment of the riots attacked the White House and injured 150 officers. 60 members of the Secret Service’s Uniformed Division were injured holding off the mob while President Trump and his family were taken to a bunker. 65 Park Police officers were wounded and 11 had to be hospitalized, as compared to the January 6 toll of 60 Capitol Police and 58 D.C. cops injured.

One difference is that Democrats and the media accused police of violently assaulting “peaceful protesters” instead of condemning the BLM mob whose members threw bricks, bottles, fireworks, and bodily fluids at law enforcement officers. The BLM rioters set the White House gatehouse and the Church of the Presidents on fire. D.C. Democrats responded by demanding law enforcement leave and naming a plaza “Black Lives Matter.”

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Comment Of The Day: “Crowbar, ProBar, Whatever…”

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

poke the bear

Disclaimer:The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect those of Ethics Alarms or ProEthics, Ltd.

I probably should post that before every Comment of the Day. I don’t choose a COTD because I necessarily agree with it. In the case of Null Pointer’s Comment of the Day below, there are some conclusions I don’t agree with and some assertions I am dubious about, but the over-all thrust of the comment is spot-on.

There is also an Ethics Quote of the Week in there:

“I read this quote on some Lefty site tonight: “’Pretty funny, no? …On Fox & Friends, the nitwit anchors can’t even agree on what is wrong or right!'”

Journalists aren’t supposed to decide what’s “wrong or right,” but it is clear that progressives, and that obviously includes most journalists and their editors, do, and that’s exactly why they are tending toward totalitarianism and away from democracy.

Here is Null Pointer’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Crowbar, ProBar, Whatever…“

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Crowbar, ProBar, Whatever…

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

toy train wreck

Fake news, fake hero, media bias, unethical joke, Poe’s Law—this tiny ethics train wreck, an insignificant side-track in the 2020 Election Ethics Train Wreck, is still depressing…

First, CNN reported that the heroic Rep. Ted Lieu, one of the most unethical and hateful members of Congress (so naturally he’s been designated an impeachment manager by Pelosi) grabbed a crowbar as he prepared to do battle with the rogue demonstrators who rushed the Capitol for the hell of it on January 6.

Nothing like the news media pumping up a toxic jerk just because he’s a Democrat…confirmation bias at its worst. CNN’s reporter heard what he or she wanted to hear, but Lieu did not, in fact, grab a crowbar. He grabbed a ProBar energy bar, so CNN had to issue a correction:

“CORRECTION: A previous version of this story misstated that Rep. Ted Lieu grabbed a crowbar before leaving his office. He grabbed a ProBar energy bar.“

This, in turn, prompted some wag to post this fake CNN correction:

Fake CNN correction

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Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 1/15/2021: Tapper, AOC, Fox, And The Brick

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Trump inaug riots

I don’t know about you, but I’m really looking forward to finding out how the media and Democrats distinguish the “mostly peaceful protests” in Washington around Biden’s inauguration next week and the equivalent in 2017, when the antifa was going around punching “Nazis” in the face. Funny, the fact that Hillary Clinton stated that she was part of “the resistance” and that the sainted John Lewis said that Trump was not a “legitimate President had no influence on that riot whatsoever…

1. I’m sure this is just a coincidence. During the shutdown which effectively killed the economy that was President Trump’s primary argument for re-election, I successfully fought off the nagging little voice in my head that said that this was a deliberate effort by Democrats to use the pandemic as a excuse to wreck the Trump administration’s record. I mean, who would be that Machiavellian to put millions out of work just to win an election? Then the teacher’s unions used their influence to keep the schools closed—but I still ignored that little voice.

And I’m still ignoring it now, but I have to say, the timing of this would support a conspiracy theory…

stephen_miller_lockdown_narrative_changes_01-15-2021

Nah. Can’t be.

2. Is it possible that Fox News doesn’t understand why it exists? Fox has had a catastrophic ratings crash since election night, when it called Arizona for Biden ahead of several other organizations, seemingly pointing to a Trump defeat. This, combined with Chris Wallace’s questionable fairness to the President when he moderated the first debate, caused an avalanche of conservatives to abandon Fox News for NewsMax, which is surging. Last week Fox News finished third behind MSNBC and CNN, which hasn’t happened since the Clinton administration.

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For The “Scared Yet?” Files: Glenn Greenwald On Parler’s Take-Down

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

List of apps

Greenwald, who lost his own organization for insisting on fair reporting on the Hunter Biden scandal deliberately hidden from the public by the partisan media, has delivered an excellent account of what was done to Parler. This is why Ethics Alarms subscribes to his new platform, substack. He is one of that nearly extinct species, a journalist who reports the facts, wherever they may lead.

Of the attack on Parler, the surging alternative to Twitter, Greenwald writes in part,

If one were looking for evidence to demonstrate that these tech behemoths are, in fact, monopolies that engage in anti-competitive behavior in violation of antitrust laws, and will obliterate any attempt to compete with them in the marketplace, it would be difficult to imagine anything more compelling than how they just used their unconstrained power to utterly destroy a rising competitor…In October, the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law issued a 425-page report concluding that Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google all possess monopoly power and are using that power anti-competitively. For Apple, they emphasized the company’s control over iPhones through its control of access to the App Store….Parler learned that Google, without warning, had also “suspended” it from its Play Store, severely limiting the ability of users to download Parler onto Android phones. Google’s actions also meant that those using Parler on their Android phones would no longer receive necessary functionality and security updates….

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From The “Scared Yet?” Files…Ethics Dunce: Cumulus Media; Ethics Hero: Mark Levin

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

zipping the lip

It’s interesting, isn’t it? The Washington Post, which has been suppressing news unfavorable to progressives and Democrats for years, delivered a thorough and competent report on conservative Cumulus Media muzzling its hosts regarding doubts about the legitimacy of the 2020 election.

The Post reports:

Cumulus Media, which employs some of the most popular right-leaning talk-radio hosts in the United States, has told its on-air personalities to stop suggesting that the election was stolen from President Trump — or else face termination.…

“We need to help induce national calm NOW,” Brian Philips, executive vice president of content for Cumulus, wrote in an internal memo, which was first reported by Inside Music Media. Cumulus and its program syndication arm, Westwood One, “will not tolerate any suggestion that the election has not ended. The election has been resolved and there are no alternate acceptable ‘paths.’ ” The memo adds: “If you transgress this policy, you can expect to separate from the company immediately.”

Some comments, in no particular order:

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Ethics Cool-Down, 1/8/2021: Be Afraid…[Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 79 Comments

I checked: over the past seven years, no fewer than six regular Ethics Alarms commenters have written me to say they were withdrawing from the blog for reasons related to their emotional, mental or physical health.

Ethics is supposed to be good for you…

1. The President announced that he would not be attending Joe Biden’s inauguration, thus overtaking Hillary Clinton as the “worst loser” in all of American Presidential history. Andrew Johnson declined to see in his successor, President Grant, and was certainly bitter, but he didn’t lose the election: he wasn’t even nominated. John Adams, who did lose to Jefferson in his bid for a second term, didn’t attend his lifetime frenemy’s swearing in, but had the valid excuse that he was mourning the death of his son Charles. John Quincy Adams, John’s son, comes closest to Trump’s sore loser act, as he also refused to go to the inauguration of the man who defeated him, Andrew Jackson. However, “Quincy” had good reason to be afraid of “Old Hickory,” who was furious with Adams for letting his campaign attack his wife.

Trump should attend the inauguration, of course, though I am not surprised that he isn’t. It would be a unifying gesture, and would also show character, courage, and patriotism. It is an important tradition for the incoming and outgoing Presidents to jointly engage in the orderly transfer of power.

2. The vise tightens. Apparently Big Tech and social media have decided not to even try to hide their collective assault on free expression and dissenting views:

  • Twitter permanently banned the President of the United States from its platform. I don’t care what their official excuse is: this is a major communications source placing its fist down hard on one side of the scales of political discourse. It signaled this long ago, for those of us who weren’t trying to gaslight the public. Civil libertarians should be concerned, but they aren’t, because they almost unanimously are perfectly happy to see those they don’t like or disagree with silenced. Iran’s Ayatollah, meanwhile, can still send out tweets while he supports terrorism.
  • Facebook also banned the President from its platform. Again, this is purely partisan political censorship. The US is facing a single party in control of two branches of the government allied with the news media, social media and the tech firms to stifle dissent and political opposition.

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