Journalism & Media

Observations on a Jobs Graph

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

That provocative graph above is brought to you by Apollo Global Management.

It purports to reveal what proportion of new jobs added each year since 2016 were in the private and public sectors. I have no way of telling whether the numbers are accurate, whether the manner of presenting them is fair, and whether Apollo has an agenda in presenting them this way. I guess that’s the first ethics observation. It is now impossible to trust news accounts, statistics, analysis, surveys, studies and data, no matter where it comes from. We can add this to the fact that photographs, films, recordings and videos are also untrustworthy.

But here are some more observations on the off chance that the numbers are correct and can be trusted:

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Today’s Unethical (and Stupid) Headline of the Day: “Ten Year-Old American With Brain Cancer Deported Because She Fell Out of the Wrong Vagina”

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

To be fair, that headline is supposed to be funny: it is the work of the humorous news aggregator and satire site “Fark,” which posts links to stories that can support snarky, sarcastic, vulgar or wise-ass headings. I don’t find that headline anything but obnoxious, however, especially since a large number of “Think of the children!” saps and pro-open borders activists will be shaking their heads sadly after reading it.

The linked story is by NBC News which sports the only slightly less obnoxious header, “U.S. citizen child recovering from brain cancer deported to Mexico with undocumented parents.”

A fair, un-biased headline would read, “Illegal immigrant couple deported, along with their children.” That’s what happened. The fact that one of those children has a medical condition is irrelevant. (That’s the girl above. I would think her blurry face problem is at least as serious as her brain tumor…). The implication that the child was the focus of the action rather than her parents is deliberately misleading (that’s deceit, by definition). And the parents aren’t “undocumented,” they were here illegally. The use of “undocumented” is always a tell: anyone who uses it it trying to glide over the illegal status of someone who has no ground to complain if they are sent back to their nation of origin.

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The 2024 Gallup “Americans’ Ratings of Honesty and Ethics of Professions”

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

I write a post about this annual Gallup survey every year, but my observations apart from the obvious have been increasingly redundant. This will be reflected in my comments this year as well, largely because little has changed significantly since 2023. Gallup writes in its introduction,

Gallup began measuring public trust in various professions in 1976, initially covering 14 jobs. Over the years, the list has changed, with some occupations added and others removed. Since 1999, 11 professions have been tracked annually, while others have been included periodically.

The average very high/high ethics rating of the core 11 professions has decreased from routinely 40% or higher in the early 2000s to closer to 35% during most of the 2010s. It rose slightly in 2020, to a seven-year high of 38%, reflecting enhanced public trust in healthcare workers and teachers during the pandemic. Thereafter, the average declined each year through 2023, when it reached 30%, and it held there in 2024. This mirrors the long-term decline in Americans’ confidence in U.S. institutions.

There is mordant humor in that text: the enhanced public trust in healthcare workers and teachers was wildly misplaced. The healthcare profession was inept and dishonest during the pandemic, and the teachers unions crashed the economy by lobbying to keep the schools closed for their own interests. It also reflects the trend I’ve see in these surveys for years: the public tends to trust occupations they have to trust, explaining why pharmacists and nurses have always been among the most trusted professions.

One reason the trust freefall has slowed, I believe, is that so many professions are trusted so little now that there isn’t much farther for them to fall. Only 8% of those surveyed trust Congress strongly: I’d assume that just the number of apathetic ignoramuses in the population would account for that number. It will be interesting to see if this clown show…

…drives trust in Congress lower still in the 2025 survey. And who knows what horrors are to come?

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Monday Ethics Catch-Up, 3/10/25

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

That meme above was just posted on my Facebook page today by a previously functional Georgetown Law Center lawyer of mu acquaintance. Could the whining of the Trump Deranged be any more humiliating and irrational? How tragic: a duly elected President of the United States is following through on his campaign promises in record time. Or is the whiny Democrat on the verge of tears because her party is behaving like seven-year olds? I doubt it.

In a comment I made to this post, explaining why some of my friends whom I know well, respect, and have seen fall into the pit of despond since Trump 2.0 got underway, I wrote in part,

First, there are many liberals, many of them devout Christians, who really do think that the United States should be in the business of income re-distribution and hard government over-sight of virtually all individual activities. Even though they know government is untrustworthy and incompetent as well as corrupt, they won’t give up—or are in denial about–the dream. They also somehow thought that the US was really on the way to this Nirvana, and living in a bubble—the arts, education, academia, the non-profit sector, they have been bombarded for years by one-way propaganda. They also tend to trust the news media, which is dominated by people with a similar orientation. Such individuals, who may be wise and perceptive in most other areas, shift to pure emotion now because they were under the influence of the mirage that the country was overwhelmingly in favor of the nanny state, and it isn’t and never was. Trump is the most jarring human splash of ice water in the face that these people could experience, so their reaction is visceral, emotional (angry) and irrational.

We need to learn from people who react this way. My sister, for example, is essentially furious now all the time. It’s all rooted, unfortunately in hatred for Trump, some of it legitimately based on one comment or another, some on class prejudice and intellectual snobbery, a lot on ignorance of history and leadership, and too much on getting lied to by the news media. My sister, for example, insisted that the GOP was to blame for the illegals tidal wave because Trump killed the bill that was the best that anyone could do to stem that tide. But that was just an Axis lie, as Trump made clear in his SOTU. He didn’t need that law, and neither did Biden. My sister is also very intelligent about most things, but regarding Trump she is a fully programed useful idiot.

I don’t know how these people can be saved.

Then there are the completely ethically crippled Trump Deranged responsible for these bumper-stickers…

I have yet to discover what group or collection of psychopaths is responsible for them, but the way Democratic officials have been acting of late, I would not be surprised to find their origin to be from some pretty damning places.

In other ethics news…

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Why Having Donald Trump as POTUS Drives Me Crazy (a Continuing Series), Reasons 1-4

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

This post is partially catch-up: I decided to make this a continuing series so that I can have an accurate record of the posts dealing with the ethical dilemmas and conflicts created by this most unique White House occupant.

Reason #1 I mentioned here a couple of weeks ago: Trump and the reaction to him by the Axis of Unethical Conduct creates so many ethics controversies that it throws the balance on Ethics Alarms out of whack. I resent it. I get sick of focusing on national affairs and politics, which, I swear, are not where my greatest interests lie. But I also am trying to cover the entire ethics landscape in the limited time available to me. Trump and the intense reactions to him make that all but impossible.

Reason #2 is the way Trump Derangement renders so many friends, relatives, colleagues and associates emotionally and intellectually dysfunctional. My brilliant younger sister, for example, has been angry at me as well as the world ever since November 5; I can hear it in her voice. On Facebook, one or more of my friends embarrass themselves every day with rants, reductive outbursts, or inexcusably ignorant declarations, and nobody challenges them because a) it’s futile and b) if you do, one or more friends will decide you’re a fascist. Here’s one that I just saw:

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They Make Such a Nice Couple! Ethics Dunce: Texas A&M University; Ethics Hero: The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE)

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

Texas A&M students started holding “Draggieland” (“drag” mixed with “Aggieland,” get it?) at the campus theater complex in 2020. Five years later, however, the tradition was slapped down as the school’s Board of Regents voted to ban all drag events on the 11 Texas A&M campuses.The board’s resolution reads in part,

“The board finds that it is inconsistent with the system’s mission and core values of its universities, including the value of respect for others, to allow special event venues of the universities to be used for drag shows [which are] offensive  [and] likely to create or contribute to a hostile environment for women.”

I’d guess a pre-law student with a closed head injury could correctly explain what’s wrong with that silliness, but luckily the student body at Texas A&M will have a better champion than that, The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, aka FIRE. FIRE moved in to fill the breach when the ACLU decided to be woke rather than defend free speech and expression regardless of which side of the partisan divide was attacking them, and this low-hanging fruitcake edict prompted the organization to file a federal lawsuit. It backs the Queer Empowerment Council, a coalition of student organizations at Texas A&M University-College Station and the organizers of the fifth annual “Draggieland” event that was scheduled to be held on campus on March 27, and aims at blocking the policy as a clear violation of the First Amendment. Which it is. FIRE asked a court in the Southern District of Texas to halt Texas A&M officials from enforcing the ban.

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Inadequate Notes on the State of the Union Ethics Train Wreck

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

This is exhausting. It is why I dreaded another Trump term, even though re-electing the Democrats after they had so disgraced themselves with the Joe Biden administration was, n my view, indefensible. I don’t want to keep writing about all this crap: Trump’s habitual excesses and rhetorical hyperbole, the partisan factchecking, the Axis news media propaganda, the absurd spectacle of Fox News gleefully spinning everything Trump of the Republicans do as marvelous while CNN and MSNBC give the public stony expressions and unrestrained hatred of the elected President of the United States; the increasingly unhinged conduct of Democrats, and the pathetic declarations of Trump Derangement by my Facebook friends (How did that February 28 boycott work out for you, morons?) The State of the Union debacle and its aftermath showed that while some of this has moderated from Trump’s first term in office, its not nearly enough. Will it really be this way for all four years? I see no reason to hope that it won’t be.

I accumulated over a dozen episodes and articles that would support individual post here related to the aftermath of Trump’s speech, and I don’t feel like writing any of them. I’ll touch on some in what follows, a random set of largely disgusted notes and observations….

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Addendum: “Gee What a Surprise: NOAA ‘Adjusts’ Its Historical Weather Data Just As ‘Climate Change Deniers’ Claim They Do

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

As it happens, the day that I posted on NOAA’s inherently ethically dubious “adjustments” to historical climate data, a blog post by The Manhattan Contrarian turned up in my email following up on the same ABC News story that sparked my post. It is well worth reading. His conclusion:

“If the NOAA data adjustments cannot be tied to specific metadata like station moves or instrumentation changes, then they are not really scientific “data,” but rather just opinions of people who are interested in promoting the global warming narrative. They are completely unusable for purposes of making public policy.”

Yes, but the manipulated data does make charts like the “hockey stick” graph above seem convincing, even though all those data points come from after-the-fact guesses about what the real data should be.

Regarding the Washington Post’s New Opinion Page Policy…

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Do you understand what this means? I don’t.

Since a lot of writers work for Jeff, I would have suggested that he have one of them draft that statement with his oversight. Presumably he means that the Post will no longer publish op-eds like this…

…but he could have just as easily written that the Post will no longer give a platform to Trump Deranged nutballs like Jennifer Rubin, who had already quit anyway. My best analysis is that Bezos has just officially said that the Washington Post is leaving the Axis, and will no longer be a reliable ally and propaganda organ of the Far Left and the Democratic Party, which now consistently advocates that the U.S. become a European-style nanny state and that personal liberties be pared back, especially those enshrined in the First and Second Amendments. If that’s the idea, it is an admirable goal, though I think it is far too late for the Post to change course, and that the 95% Democrat city of D.C. is the worst possible place to try.

It is fun to see and hear the Angry Left freak out over the announcement. Here is one of the Post’s most unethical propagandists, the eloquent Phillip Bump:

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Comment of the Day: “Ethics Verdict: Justified, Necessary, and Ethical”

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

This refreshing Comment of the Day by EA Ace AM Golden concludes with a trenchant point: Why does someone need to be reading Ethics Alarms or doing their own research to be properly informed of the context of a news event rather than misled by selective reporting?

I should have included the historical precedents for the recent Trump White House decision to exercise its own discretion over what news organizations and other news sources should be included in briefings, but my point was that it didn’t matter what the “precedent” was because today’s news media and the unethical way they have covered this particular President have no valid precedents. However, AM’s perfectly illustrated point is equally important: as usual, the news media is framing anything Trump does as a “threat to democracy” rather than giving the public the information it needs to make up their own minds.

Once I read AM’s COTD, I was even more disgusted with the New York Times than I usually am. Pure deceit: the piece says that it’s a “decades long” precedent to not pick and choose among news organizations, see, so if AM’s precedents are waved in the Times editors’ smug faces, they can say, “Well, those examples were still many decades ago, so what we wrote is correct!”

But even if the Times reporters and lazy editors had been aware of the precedents AM reveals (I’d bet anything that they didn’t bother to check), they still wouldn’t have mentioned them because Trump is following the examples of two revered figures, one of them on Mt. Rushmore and the other unanimously regarded as our greatest President in the last hundred years.

And just to preempt the usual excuse that self-banned Times defender “A Friend” would typically post until I sent the comment to Spam Hell, those Times readers who are the reliable epitome of erudition, fairness and oversight saving the biased Times from itself, I checked all the nearly 2000 comments to the news story. Most agreed that Trump is an aspiring dictator, but not a single one mentioned the Roosevelts.

Here is AM Golden’s illuminating Comment of the Day on the post, “Ethics Verdict: Justified, Necessary, and Ethical”…

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