Journalism & Media

Martin Luther King Day Ethics Overview, 1/20/2020: Another Warren Lie, The Times’ Misandry, Doris Kearns Goodwin Gets Dorian Grayed, And More

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

Let us be grateful today for Rev. Martin Luther King.

I have no doubt that the nation would be a worse place today without the leadership of Martin Luther King, and I believe a holiday dedicated to honoring him is appropriate. He is also a symbol, perhaps, of the toxic hypocrisy dividing the nation, as well as the excesses and exploitation of the civil rights movement since his death.

From Jonathan Rauch’s review of Christopher Caldwell’s new book, “The Age of Entitlement”:

In Caldwell’s telling, the Civil Rights Act, which banned many forms of discrimination, was a swindle. Billed as a one-time correction that would end segregation and consign race consciousness to the past, it actually started an endless and escalating campaign of race-conscious social engineering. Imperialistically, civil rights expanded to include “people of color” and immigrants and gays and, in short, anyone who was not native-born, white and straight — all in service of “the task that civil rights laws were meant to carry out — the top-down management of various ethnic, regional and social groups.”

With civil rights as their bulldozer, in Caldwell’s view, progressive movements ran amok. They “could now, through the authority of civil rights law, override every barrier that democracy might seek to erect against them”; the law and rhetoric of civil rights “gave them an iron grip on the levers of state power.” And so, today, affirmative action discriminates against whites and then lies about it; public and private bureaucracies trample freedom of association; political correctness stigmatizes dissent and censors language and even thought; “every single state must now honor” Martin Luther King Jr., “and affirm its delight in doing so.”

1.  Senator Warren’s latest lie! The previous post about Warren lying omitted her most recent one, which came up while I was drafting it.

Campaigning in Iowa,  Warren was asked  when she plans on using presidential authority for some of her policy agenda instead of relying on Congress. She responded in part,

“Let me remind you, I think, I’m the only one running for president whose actually been on the executive side. Remember, after the consumer agency was passed into law, Barack Obama, President Obama, asked me to set it up. So I set up a federal agency. We effectively went from two employees the day I walked in the door to about 1000 and spent a year getting it up and operational.”

Now, as I did yesterday regarding an alleged Trump lie, the use of “I think” can be a defense to an accusation of lying, since it means, “I could be mistaken.” In Trump’s case, what he erroneously thought (that he had been on more TIME covers than anyone else) could have plausibly been caused by not knowing facts that were not well known or easily found. There is no way that Warren could have thought that her smidgen of executive experience exceeded that of her competition for the nomination. Joe Biden was Vice President, also on the “executive side,” and was in charge of more than helping to set up one tiny agency. Bernie Sanders was once mayor of Burlington, Vermont. Mayor Pete is, after all, a mayor. Mike Bloomberg was Mayor of New York City, which many regard as the equivalent of being a governor. Continue reading →

Ethics Observations On The Great 1 Cent Target Toothbrush Controversy

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

In Massachusetts, David Leavitt found that Target had mislabelled an electric toothbrush as costing $0.01 rather than $100. When he eagerly rushed to take advantage of the obvious error, a Target checkout employee refused to sell the item at that price, and the store manager backed up the employee.

This set Mr. Leavitt, who says he is a journalist (he appears to be a gaming writer), off into a full-scale social media attack on Target. “This [Target] manager Tori is not honoring the price of their items per Massachusetts law,” tweeted Leavitt, including the young manager’s photo. He then indignantly announced that he had called the police on the Target manager, and said he was prepared to take her and the store to court.

This being social media in the United States of America, where everything, even toothbrushes, is political and a provocation to go to battle,  Leavitt’s vendetta was seen as an unjust  progressive vilification of business, so conservatives rallied to Tori’s defense. The  #TargetTori hashtag was born, and a GoFundMe page raised $28,000 to send her on a well deserved vacation.

Observations: Continue reading →

Sunday Ethics Warm-Up, 1/19/2020: In Which The Conundrum Is Posed, “Can A Warmed-Up Warm-Up Still Be Called A Warm-Up?

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

Hmmmm…

Well, that was strange. Yesterday’s warm-up turned into the long post about Judge Staton’s disturbing dissent, and by the time I had finished it and the previous “fake news” compendium, my window for getting the Saturday Warm-Up up had slammed shut. Today’s Warm-Up is largely made up of the items that were wiped off the board by the Obama-appointed judge’s “whenever the courts really, really think national policy should be different from what it is, they have the power to change it by edict” opinion.

1. Sausage biscuit ethics. I’m fond of sausage biscuits for breakfast, but the 7-11 variety have a garbage-y taste, and the sole local McDonald’s that I’m not boycotting for ethics transgressions is mobbed in the morning. Of the frozen variety, I will not patronize a company, Jimmy Dean, which uses its dead founder as a TV spokesperson without pointing out that he’s dead. Over the holidays, I tried a lesser and much cheaper brand of frozen sausage biscuit, Tennessee Pride, and they were good enough.

Yesterday I bought another box. When I pulled out a bag of two “sausage biscuits,” I saw that the sausage was sitting between two small buns, unlike the contents of the previous box. Buns are not biscuits, but the label on the box read in large type, “Sausage Biscuits.” I did notice, however, that the photo on the box showed buns.

Would that fact be a complete defense against an accusation of false labeling? I doubt it, but it doesn’t matter. “Fool me once” is once too many.

2. Res Ipsa Loquitur: “an informed public.” Twitter user @Golfergirl2018  shared a post she saw on Facebook, written by someone who sympathizes with antivaxx parents (you know…morons) who don’t want to put “chemicals” in their kids. “I think instead of chemical shots the doctors should give a small piece of the virus, so the body can build immunity,” he wrote.

BRILLIANT! Why didn’t someone think of that long ago?

Yes, it is unethical and irresponsible to publish opinions on topics you haven’t researched, don’t understand, and know nothing about. I wonder how many social media posts would survive if this were recognized as a rule of commentary? Continue reading →

Comment Of The Day: “The Many Species Of Fake News”

/ Jack Marshall / 36 Comments

Few things make me happier than when a commenter relieves me of the duty of writing about a topic.

In 2017, after the New York Times published a spectacularly dishonest list of President Trump “lies” since his inauguration,  I wrote a post demonstrating just how outrageously the Times was warping the meaning of “lie,” and also applying a biased standard to Trump’s statements. I wrote,

In presenting this unethical project, the Times took unethical advantage of its readers’ confirmation bias. When the “Lie” list was printed, the Times made certain that it would require super-human dedication and extraordinary eyesight to read it, through the devices of listing every item and the Times commentary in horizontal sequence and in half the usual size type-face. (See above) This ensured that almost no readers would make the Herculean effort to read the whole thing , especially since the well-trained Times reader already “knows” that Donald Trump is a liar. In addition, the explosion of tiny words created the visceral response of “Wow! Look at all those lies!” which is exactly the effect the Times editors wanted.

But that isn’t reporting, and it isn’t journalism. The “list” was a page-size, visual, ad hominem attack. The Times wasn’t seeking close scrutiny of its list, nor was it interested in making any rebuttal easy or likely.

We have learned that the Times list was largely assembled from various fact-checker columns. That is a red flag, and explains many of the most embarrassing inclusions on the list. None of the fact-checkers are trustworthy. All of them are biased, Snopes and PolitiFact worst of all, and they consistently register opinions that the writer disagrees with as “false.” Many, many of the items on the Times list are in this category.

The entire exercise was an extension of #16 on the Fake News list, “Dishonest Factchecks. Here was a typical “lie” according to the Times, and its “proof”:

Jan. 21 “A reporter for Time magazine — and I have been on their cover 14 or 15 times. I think we have the all-time record in the history of Time magazine.”

Says the Times, “Trump was on the cover 11 times and Nixon appeared 55 times.”

Trump was making the general point that he had been on TIME’s cover a lot. He guessed that the number was 14 or 15; it was 11. That is what is known as a  non-material misrepresentation: it’s meaningless and harmless, and certainly not an intentional deception. (“Heh, heh…I’ll make those poor, gullible fools think I was on TIME”s cover 14 times when it was ONLY ELEVEN!! BWAHAHAHAHAHA!!!) Then he said he “thinks” that’s a record. When someone says “I think” it means the speaker is acknowledging that he may be wrong. But Trump is not accorded the usual leeway given to everyone else, including other elected officials.

When a list includes something this clearly contrived, that list has no credibility. I found going through the Times list annoying, then shocking, and finally infuriating. So when the Washington Post pulled the same stunt, I kept putting off giving it the same treatment that I did the Times’ exercise in lies about lying.

Thus I was thrilled to receive this Comment of the Day from stalwart Steve Witherspoon, on the post, The Many Species Of Fake News: Continue reading →

The Many Species Of Fake News

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

I should have  compiled this list  long ago; now I’ll be able to cite the exact variety of fake news we are discussing. Right now I have 19, but I will be updating and expanding this post and the resulting list. I’m certain I missed some. Suggestions from readers are encouraged.

1. Outright false stories deliberately published to mislead. This is what supporters of the news media want to be the only news labeled as fake. The infamous report that the Pope had endorsed Donald Trump is an example. The category includes hoaxes that the purveyors claim are jokes, when nothing abut their content or presentation is humorous.

2. Fake headlines and clickbait. There is so much of this that I’ll just pick the first one that comes up in my Ethics Alarms search. In May of 2019, the headline “Ciara Accepted Into Harvard University’s Prestigious Business School”  (Ciara is a pop diva.) appeared in several sources. No, she was about to attend aBusiness of Entertainment, Media and Sports programat the B-school that lasted all of three days.

3. Incompetent reporting. This occurs because so many journalists and editors have the IQs of cucumbers and went to school in tents. Here’s a recent one: ABC reported that a third of Australia was on fire.

The story went on:

The size of the fires across the country are twice as large as the state of Maryland and bigger than several other states, including Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts and New Jersey.

Not just wrong, but hilariously wrong. The actual comparative size of the wildfires to the US was this:

As blogger Stephen Green explained, ABC used  a map its staff didn’t understand. That map  reflects what a Japanese weather satellite picked up as hotspots on the continent. They weren’t fires. Continue reading →

From The Increasingly Stuffed “Nah, There’s Mo Mainstream Media Bias!” Files: Politico Changes A Headline

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

What’s going on here? Apparently either a Politico editor or a representative of the Democratic Party/”resistance”/mainstream media alliance to bring down the President (aka The Axis of Unethical Conduct, or AUC) realized that the headline on the left conveyed an unequivocally positive message regarding Trump. That was a violation of the three-year plan, so the change was ordered. It was especially egregious since impeachment is the objective now, based on the narrative that President Trump is a threat to all that is good and right. Can’t have a positive headline now. Come on!

The USMCA is the new United ­States-Mexico-Canada Agreement.

[The near unanimous vote in the Senate didn’t include Bernie Sanders (he’s Statler, Joe Biden is Waldorf…or is it the other way around?) because, Bernie says, there was “not a single damn mention” of climate change.]

Can anyone point to an example in the Obama administration where a positive headline regarding a victory for the President was replaced in order to suggest that it was less impressive? Does anyone think there ever was such a case?

Hell, I might even post this one on Facebook to see all the rationalizations and excuses my deranged friends come up with. It should be a hoot. Once again I miss the self-exiled “resistance” commenters here, a bright bunch whose machinations and comical pretzelling in their denials that the news media was biased and no more trustworthy than a rabid honey badger were always worth admiration and mirth.

_________________________________

Pointer: Erin Perrine

Please use this link to post on Facebook, because Mark Z won’t let Ethics Alarms links appear there. Not fake enough, I guess…https://twitter.com/CaptCompliance/status/1218336309955256322

Ethics Dunce: ESPN Baseball Commentator Jessica Mendoza

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

(Jessica giggles too much too...)

This answers a question I’ve had ever since softball player Jessica Mendoza was added to the ESPN Sunday Night Baseball broadcast team: how can a nice, all-American girl like Jessica not gag having to work with Alex Rodriguez, one of the most loathsome personalities in baseball history?

Rodriguez, after all,  was caught twice using banned  PEDs (performance enhancing drugs), lied repeatedly throughout his career to the public, the press, and team authorities, was handed one of the longest suspensions ever given to a player, and was caught cheating in various ways whenever he thought he could get away with it. (My personal favorite was when he shouted “Mine!” as he ran from second to third while a pop-up was over the infield, causing the opposing shortstop to let the ball drop because he thought a team mate had called for the ball. ) His odious presence in the ESPN booth is why I  usually refuse to watch games broadcast by the trio of A-Rod, Jessica and play-by-play man Matt  Vasgersian—well, that and the fact that they are terrible, habitually engaging in inane happy-talk that often has nothing to do with what’s happening on the field.

Yesterday Mendoza appeared on ESPN Radio’s “Golic and Wingo” show to discuss the baseball’s sign-stealing scandal that has—so far, because more is coming— led to the firing of three teams’  managers, the dismissal of a successful general manager, and  cast a long shadow on the World Championships of the Houston Astros in 2017 and the Boston Red Sox in 2018. Oakland A’s pitcher Mike Fiers made himself a likely permanent pariah in his sport by blowing the whistle to the press on his former team, the 2017 Houston Astros, who engaged in an elaborate sign-stealing scheme via hidden cameras, electronic relays and, uh, trashcan banging for the entire 2017 season and post-season. The consensus, at least in public, around the game is that Fiers did the right thing for the long-term integrity of baseball.

Jessica disagrees. Her basic position is the same as inner city gangs and the Corleone Family: don’t be a snitch. She told Golic, Continue reading →

Is This The Most Unethical Book Review Ever?

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

It has to be close, because I don’t know how a book review can be more unethical.

The book in question is Ruth Marcus’s unconscionable hit piece on Justice Brett Kavanaugh, “Supreme Ambition.” The forum is the book review section of the New York Times, which has been trying to smear Kavanaugh since he was nominated for the Supreme Court, and even since the contrived attempt to defeat him by ancient and uncorroborated accusations of misconduct when he was a teenager—when he was a teenager—when he was a teenager (no three times is not enough repitition to emphasize how despicable this was) failed, as it should have. The objective, trustworthy reviewer the Times chose to assess the book was Adam Cohen. He writes speeches for and advises New York’s socialist mayor Bill de Blasio, and authored “Supreme Inequality: The Supreme Court’s Fifty-Year Battle for a More Unjust America,” coming out next month.

Yup, the perfect guy to provide an objective review of an anti-Kavanaugh book.

It is clear by now that progressives and the mainstream media have added the Brett Kavanugh confirmation hearing to the shooting of Mike Brown, the death of Trayvon Martin, and the fake Russian Collusion theory as narratives they will falsely characterize until the stars turn cold. Incredibly,  Cohen writes at the end of his review,

“As important as the Kavanaugh battle was for the court, however, there was something even more profound at stake: whether, on the most important questions, our nation is capable of putting the public interest ahead of partisanship, and whether the truth matters. The forces aligned for partisanship and against truth are stronger than ever.”

Cohen’s review is a prime example of the condition he claims to be condemning. What “truth”? Not a single fact was produced during the hearing that had any relevance to Brett Kavanaugh’s fitness to be a Supreme Court Justice. His record as a judge was impeccable and beyond reproach. Ah, BUT…Marcus and Cohen point to this: Continue reading →

Ethics Observations On The CNN Democratic Candidates Debate [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 30 Comments

The full debate transcript is here.

(Or you could read “Moby-Dick” instead,  here, which I highly recommend.)

  • After enduring a long analysis of the December debate, the Ethics Alarms assembled shouldn’t need a sequel so soon— I don’t know what the Democrats think they’re accomplishing by having two of these guaranteed fiascos within a three-week period.

Virtually everything said last night we’ve heard before; every impression of this weak,weak,weak slate of candidates was already established.

  • Yes, it’s good to have the field whittled down to a manageable six, but it also wrapped in neon the hypocrisy of the Democratic party. The party of women  had just two women on stage, one a near impossible dark horse, and the other old, white, and whether Bernie said so or not, unelectable. The party “of color” had  no black, Asian, Native American  or Hispanic representatives on stage (, I won’t make the obvious Elizabeth Warren crack, only allude to it here, which I guess is the same thing.) The supposed party of the young presented four candidates over 70. The party that hates the rich had one billionaire and three millionaires among the six. The party that wants to smother the First Amendment right to spend money to promote political candidates (or attack them) by voiding Citizens United includes one aforementioned billionaire who has literally bought his way into the debates, and another, Mike Bloomberg, lurking in the wings.

This is not, in short, a party of integrity. Res ipsa loquitur. Continue reading →

In Case Someone, Like The Mainstream News Media, Is Claiming That The Justice Department Just Cleared Hillary Clinton Of Wrongdoing, Don’t Believe Them

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Hillary Clinton was engaged in a long and lucrative influence peddling scam known as the Clinton Foundation.  It was a a brilliant, technically legal way to fund the family’s international travel, perks, and opportunity to set up lucrative deals for the family while pursuing other interests, but its was as corrupt as Rasputin’s beard was long.

The proof is in the chart above, unless you have been hit over the head with a skillet. Why would the Foundation’s donations dry up once the two senior Clintons were out of power and without prospects of regaining a measure of it?  Three guesses, and the first two don’t count.  Donations reached $134 million in 2010, right after Hillary became secretary of state, and stayed in that range through 2016. When she lost the election, support crashed, going from $217 million in 2016 to $26 million in 2017. The foundation fired 22 staffers and shuttered the Clinton Global Initiative.

There’s no mystery about what the Clintons were pulling. I teach a course every year on foundation ethics, and often discussed what a general counsel’s duties were once one discovered that their charity or non-profit was using the  non-profit tax laws this way. Nobody can argue it isn’t clever, though its not really unique: a lot of non-profits use the illusion of good works—just enough to meet legal requirements—to essentially launder funds. In this case, the foundation let foreign nations and others bribe the Clintons while getting a tax deduction. Sweet!

The Washington Post described the Justice Department investigation of the foundation as an effort to “mollify conservatives clamoring for more investigations of Hillary Clinton” about “vague corruption allegations.” Fake news. There’s been nothing vague about the accusations. I wrote about the foundation’s corruption many times, like here, in 2015, and here, in 2016, or here. Continue reading →