Journalism & Media

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 →

Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 1/13/2020: Oh Oh! The Oscars Are Racist And Sexist Again!

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

 

“I love the smell of napalm in the morning!”

1. Thoughts on the announced Oscar nominations. Well, very few African Americans made it, and no female director despite all the blatant lobbying for “Little Women” director Greta Gerwig.  Thus I have to conclude that the Academy of Motion Picture Sciences DOES have a measure of integrity after all,  because it will catch all sorts of hell for this. Even after adding many voters “of color” and kicking out some ancient, unwoke voters members, it’s still a mostly white field, maybe because the most deserving candidates happened to be the wrong color this year. It doesn’t matter: the Academy will be beseiged again for implicit racism. Watch. And it will seek “reforms.” The problem is that race-based categories looks like apartheid. The only other alternative is to have secret quotas, which is what I thought were already in effect.

It doesn’t help that both Al Pacino and Joe Pesci were nominated as Best Supporting Actors for, in Pacino’s case, standard issue Al, and in Pesci’s case, an embarrassingly  flat performance. If the Academy is going to give out legacy nominations, why not some token nominations for minorities? I bet there were 50 “of color” performances this year objectively superior to these two from the dead-fish “The Irishman.”

2. It amazes me that so many Americans defend Meghan Markle’s “Megxit.” I know, I already wrote about this, but her conduct appears to be a continuation of the Obama phenomenon, where a prominent individual exploits her race to declare all criticism as based on racial bias. “Black Britons” as the New York Times calls them, are lining up to support Markel because they allege she was “savaged” by the British tabloids because of her race. Similarly, the Times finds dark implications in the fact that the Royal Family didn’t rally to her side when she came under fire: they must be racists too. All the evidence I’ve seen suggests that they didn’t support Markel because she’s an annoying jerk: Occam’s Razor applies.

If she really married into the Royal Family and didn’t know that the tabloids would be dissecting her every word and move, she was negligent and foolish. Did she consider chatting with Sarah Ferguson, or did Markle think the Duchess of York was attacked because of media bias against redheads?

For once I agree with ex-CNN talking head Piers Morgan, who wrote, “I’ve seen some disgraceful royal antics in my time, but for pure arrogance, entitlement, greed and willful disrespect, nothing has ever quite matched the behavior of the ‘Duke and Duchess of Sussex.’

She has provoked a crisis in the monarchy to further her own goals of unearned mega-celebrity. I have a Facebook friend who argues that since royalty is unethical, Meghan should be praised for setting out to bring it down in England. (Yes, he’s a Communist.) The real Markle is already becoming more apparent. She has said that she will only move back to the U.S. after President Trump is out of office, already pandering to the Angry Woke. Disney announced that it had a voice-over deal with her, with her compensation to be donated to a charity….but she made that deal as a Royal, not a rebel. Disney has the right, but not the guts, to void the arrangement. Continue reading →

Why Almost Nobody Is Interested In Ethics…

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Kudos to Ann Althouse for finding this monstrosity: “3D Printing and the Murky Ethics of Replicating Bones.” Ann quips, “The murkiness in getting to the point of what’s murky in the ethics is evidence of what a sensitive problem it is.”

The forum, ironically enough, is RealClear Science, and the author is Sarah Wild, a South African science journalist and author. It may help to know that she hails from Undark, an e-mag that purports to to “explore science in both light and shadow, and to bring that exploration to a broad, international audience.” Should I be suspicious of the magazine because Charles M. Blow is on its board? No…but I am.

The article is incompetent structurally because it doesn’t begin to explain exactly what the “murky ethics issues” are until about  half way through a very long article, and it’s hard to read when one is asleep. Even after the issues are drip-drip-dripped out, it is never made clear by the author what established ethical principles are involved. The ethics issue of scientists taking bones of unidentified people from burial sites in other nations has always been, for me, an ick vs. ethics controversy. The original owners of the bones are not harmed in any way, and if those individuals’ families aren’t aware of the whereabouts of the remains and have taken no steps to assert control over them, they are not harmed either. Continue reading →

Sunday Ethics Warm-Up, 1/12/2020: Broken Ethics Alarms, An Ethics Conflict, And “Who Are You Going To Believe, Me Or Your Own Eyes?”

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Well, Hel-LO!

“Seinfeld” fans remember Jerry’s Uncle Leo, whose trademark was an over-enthusiastic, “Hel-LO!” The recurring character was played by the late Len Lesser, an obscure Hollywood bit player until the “Seinfeld” gig made him a familiar face. Well, I was watching “Bells Are Ringing,“ the 1960 film version of the hit Broadway musical known for the standards “Just in Time” and “The Party’s Over” (one of my Mom’s favorite songs), on TCM. The film is a reminder of just how luminous Judy Holliday was; she had won the Tony for playing the musical’s starring role on Broadway, and attention should be paid. Tragically, his was her last movie—during filming she was fighting the cancer that eventually killed her —-and I don’t know if there has ever been a female musical comedy star of greater range and presence. Anyway, there’s a number in the film where Judy tells Dean Martin that New York’s grim mass of humanity during rush hours will thaw if strangers only say “hello” to each other. Dean is skeptical, but he tries it on a dour-looking man waiting in the mob, whose face instantly breaks into a brilliant smile at the greeting. “Hel-LO!” the man responds to a surprised Dino, and soon everyone is happily saying hello to each other. You guessed it: the dour-looking man was played by “Uncle Leo” himself, Len Lesser. His catch phrase in “Seinfeld” was a deliberate reference to that bit, one of the very few memorable moments in the elderly actor’s career.

This is really a long introduction to a different point: I get a lot of ethics ideas from watching old movies. For example, I watched 1967’s “The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre,“ one of schlockmeister Roger Corman’s few films with an A-list cast and a big budget. The film’s solemn narrator is uncredited, but he is obviously meant to make the casual audience member think it’s Orson Welles. It wasn’t Welles, however: it was master vocal artist Paul Frees, who had a great, and often used, Welles impression. I assume he was uncredited so no one would realize that the narrator wasn’t the weighty Welles, but the voice of Boris Badinov from “Rocky and Bullwinkle.”

I don’t know how Corman got away with this.

1. Ah, the accurate, trustworthy news media. Reuters reports, “A South African military plane crash-landed on Thursday at the Goma airport in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, a U.N. spokesman said….two sources at the airport, speaking on condition of anonymity, said there did not appear to be major damage to the plane.”

Here’s the plane:

2. Apparently the Democratic Party’s strategy regarding the economy is to just flagrantly lie about it. “The U.S. economy is working just fine for people like me. But it is badly broken for the vast majority of Americans,” Mike Bloomberg said this week. That counter-factual statement echoes Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders…pretty much the Democratic field, and it is demonstrably false.

The Atlanta Federal Reserve Bank’s monthly Wage Growth Tracker shows that Americans in the lower wage brackets are making more money, and at a better rate than they have for a very long time. Here’s a graph: Continue reading →

A Fake News Story About Fake News!

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

The New York Times end-of-year whine about how mean President Trump has been to the news media was headlined (in the print edition), “Trump Attacked News Media Even More in 2019.” That’s an assertion of fact. What does it mean? Well, the first sentence of the story reads, “On Twitter, President Trump deployed the phrase “fake news” 273 times this year — 50 percent more often than he did in 2018.” Is calling a story published by the news media “fake news” an “attack”? What if the story is objectively false or misleading as most—not all, but most—of those in question were?

For example, last week MSNBC aired an Iranian state media claim that the second round of rocket attacks on U.S. military installments in Iraq killed 30 U.S. soldiers, and that “we have just stepped over the precipice.” That’s irresponsible and lousy journalism. MSNBC hadn’t checked the claim, it just rushed it on the air. I don’t want to hear the Clintonian rationalizations that this wasn’t technically fake news, because the report was that the Iranians were saying that the 30 soldiers had been killed. It was a false report; it was misleading; it would upset the families of servicemen in the area (one journalist criticized it as “journo-terrorism”), and there was no excuse for it. If this kind of unprofessional hackery is criticized, by me, for example, is that an attack?

Such a characterization is more fake news. The news media is constantly pushing the dishonest and self serving position that to criticize journalists for their proven ethical breaches and betrayal of their duty to keep the public informed is to attack them, ergo this is an attack on journalism itself, hence it is an attack on Freedom of the Press, therefore it is an attack on democracy itself. Calling the news media on its now near complete transformation into a left-wing propaganda machine is, they surmise, is tarred by this false characterization built on successive unwarranted leaps of logic.

Journalists appear to really believe their own fake news in this case. I hear and read it over and over again: the decline in the public’s trust in news reporting, as reflected in many surveys and polls, is President Trump’s doing, as part of his grand plan to become a dictator. (See Big Lie #3). Their narcissistic delusion that they and their profession are beyond reproach is self-evidently in direct opposition to reality: the reason for the decline of American journalism’s credibility is its own, reckless , escalating dishonest, incompetence, bias and untrustworthiness.

The article is a good example of this itself. The second sentence in the piece says that the President “demanded ‘retribution’ over a ‘Saturday Night Live’ sketch.” Yes, that was self-evidently stupid, but what does a late night comedy show have to do with the news media? Nothing.

The article then moves on to another Big Lie it has repeatedly advocated,  #6: “Trump’s Defiance Of Norms Is A Threat To Democracy.”

The “norm” in this case is, I guess, a President remaining passive and prostrate while most of the journalistic establishment openly allies itself with your adversaries—even foreign adversaries, like Iran— and dedicates its reporting to destroying your ability to govern. The Times writes, “Mr. Trump’s vilification of the news media is a hallmark of his tenure and a jagged break from the norms of his predecessors: Once a global champion of the free press, the presidency has become an inspiration to autocrats and dictators who ape Mr. Trump’s cry of ‘fake news.’”

Calling this a “jagged break from the norms of his predecessors” is another variety of fake news: fake history, in which the news media deliberately or incompetently makes the largely historically ignorant public more ignorant by falsely describing the past. My “favorite” example of this kind of fake news was when Presidential historian Doug Brinkley was put on the air by CNN on election night to salve the despair of Hillary supporters by explaining that America seldom elects the same party to the Presidency three terms in a row. What he said was completely wrong on the facts, not wrong as an opinion, just false. Nobody challenged him; there was no correction. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunces: Authors Stephen King And Don Winslow

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

Winslow, King, and their extortion target

Wow. Talk about having defective ethics alarms.

Bestselling novelists Stephen King and Don Winslow (he’s a best-selling detective novelist; I assume you know who King is) have offered to donate $200,000 to St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital if  White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham will finally hold a press conference, something the Administration stopped having ten months ago.

I assume you can quickly assess what is wrong with this, even though these successful, wealthy, adult men cannot:

  • They seem to think their wealth entitles and empowers them to manipulate the President of the United States,

   What hubris. What arrogance.

  • The two writers are using sick children as their hostages to try to bend the White House to their will.

Nice. Continue reading →

Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 1/10/2020: Clean Up On Aisle Ethics!

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Good morning.

1. Poll report! In the “just what is Pete Buttigieg?” poll, “panderer” and my personal favorite, “asshole,” are running neck and neck:

The previous poll on fat-shaming isn’t close, with about 90% siding with fitness guru Jillian Michaels…

The poll asking which idiotic statement about the U.S. blowing up the Iranian terror chief produced a landslide for Rep. Omar:

2. Baseball Hall of Fame Ethics. MLB’s sportswriters who made public their votes for the Hall of Fame (the results of the election will be announced Jan. 21) all voted for #1 steroid cheat Barry Bonds and almost certain cheat Roger Clemens. This depressing revelation reflects the fact that they are young, and also that they have the ethical analysis skills of marmots. Chris Haft, for example, wrote, “I initially refused to vote for Bonds or Clemens, but they are guilty for their alleged wrongdoings only in the court of public opinion. That’s not damning enough not to vote for a guy.” I don’t even know what he thinks that means. That there wasn’t a trial? Former Washington Post writer Richard Justice wrote, “I weigh the ethical questions of the so-called “Steroid Era” every year. My essential position has not changed. Unless a player has been suspended by MLB for PED use, I give him full consideration.” In other words, if he wasn’t caught he should continue to get away with it all the way into the Hall. There is absolutely no question that Bonds played the last half of his career so loaded with PED that they were coming out of his ears. This is like saying that you are convinced that O.J was innocent because he got away with it.

3. One “Arrgh! World War III!’ note...Stephen Kruiser, a conservative blogger, commented on the Democrats apparent disappointment that the President de-escalated after Iran’s symbolic attack on U.S. facilities, saying,

If you’re wondering whether I am implying that Democrats wouldn’t care if American troops were in harm’s way if it would help them defeat Trump in November, I am not. I’m saying it outright.

Then there was this telling piece in The Root, which was somehow posted with approval by an African American Facebook friend, proving State 4 Trump Derangement. The headline: The President of the United States Just Publicly Went Out Like a Bitch. And That’s Fine by Us.

Got that? If the President is bellicose, he’s a dangerous madman. If he is diplomatic and works to defuse the situation, he  (quoting here): “completely bitched out. In fact, before the president stepped to the podium, Managing Editor Genetta Adams called it, noting that the president ain’t about that life. “He’s going to pussy out like he did with [Speaker of the House] Nancy Pelosi and the [government] shutdown. He’s really a chicken when someone punches back.”

It literally doesn’t matter what the President does to the Deranged. It must be wrong. Continue reading →

Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 1/8/2020: War, Defamation, Bias, Abortion…What Fun.

/ Jack Marshall / 33 Comments

“

ARRGH!

Another day, another “crisis”…

Current reports indicate that Iran regards its casualty free missile strikes last night as a sufficient “tat” for the killing of their master terrorist “tit.” If so, the “ARRGH! WORLD WAR III!!” anti-Trump hysterics were, as usual, wrong, and just embarrassed us, nothing more.. Meanwhile, Iran is refusing to hand over the black box of the Ukrainian airliner that just coincidentally crashed right around the time the missiles were flying. The fact that so many Democrats have allowed their brains and loyalty to rot to the extent that they defend  this awful place in order to attack their own nation’s President is all we need to know about the trustworthiness of their party.

1. Wrapping up the Golden Globes’ ethics issues…Michelle Williams is getting predictable hosannas from her acceptance speech at the Goldden Globes, in which she thanked abortion for her success. She said she wanted a life “carved by my own hand” and “wouldn’t have been able to do this without employing a woman’s right to choose.” The New York Times called these words “potent.” I call them deceitful. I’ll praise an equivalent speech when the woman has the integrity and courage to thank the human being who involuntarily gave up his or her chance to carve out a life with their own hand. The use of “choice” as euphemism for “I get to kill someone who stands in my way” is self-deception.

2. Thinking about Trump’s threat...The President backed down from his threat to target Iranian cultural cites in retaliation for any attacks on Americans after being informed that this would be a war crime under international law. I confess, I did not know this was prohibited, and I am not certain what to think about that. I knew the destruction of ancient architecture and important cultural cites became an issue for the Allies in World War II, but this has yet to make sense to me. The whole concept of the “nice” war is ethically incoherent. The idea of war must be to win as quickly as possible, minimizing deaths and chaos on both sides, especially one’s own. If the prospect of losing a nation’s treasured cultural structures is a deterrent to war, then to say that has no “military value” is simply not true. If you can’t tolerate risking your cultural treasures, don’t get into wars.

The values involved in this controversy are also incoherent. In “The Monument Men,” George Clooney’s sort-of accurate account of the special forces whose job was to track down and rescue great artworks stolen by the Nazis, the question is asked repeatedly, “Was retrieving this painting or statue worth sacrificing a human life?” I have no problem voting “Sure!” If the question is changed to refer to a thousand lives, or 10,000, I’m not so sure. Continue reading →

CNN Settles With Nick Sandmann

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

Nick Sandmann and CNN agreed today to a settlement in the teen’s defamation lawsuit as a result of the news media’s demonization of him and his fellow students after a videoed confrontation with Nathan Phillips, a Native American activist, outside the Lincoln Memorial. Sandmann and his schoolmates had participated in the  March for Life in Washington, D.C., and the news media reported that the video showed boys wearing MAGA caps harassing Philips. Narrative: Racist young Trump supporters abuse an elderly Native American. Sandmann was singled out because a still photo appeared to show him smirking in a condescending manner at the  man.

Another video and eyewitness accounts demonstrated that Phillips was the obnoxious aggressor, pushing into the school group waiting for its bus and beating hisdrum inches from Sandmann’s face, while the boys were subjected to racist  taunts from members of the Black Hebrew Israelites.

Eventually some journalists and  public figures  had to recant their public characterization of Sandmann as a smug racist, but not before he had become a public villain. Even his school, acting solely on press reports, condemned him.  Some journalists refused to admit that they had been wrong–wearing a MAGA cap was proof enough of bad character— or that Sandmann and his friends had been wronged.

Sandman’s lawyer, L. Lin Wood,filed a $250 million suit against CNN for sending into “millions of homes” the “idea that [Sandmann] was part of a mob…yelling racist slurs.” Still pending are similar suits on Sandmann’s behalf against NBCUniversal and  the Washington Post. Continue reading →

Babylon Bee Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 37 Comments

The Babylon Bee, as you should know by now, has taken over from “The Onion” as the hot political satire website, in part because its writers are excellent, and in part because its orientation is conservative. This is discomforting for progressives, who believe that the proper state of political humor must be all-conservative/Republican/Trump bashing all the time.

This, of course, not a healthy state of affairs, but for Democrats and progressive it is a useful one. How many network and cable comedy TV shows are there that essentially target only non-progressive positions and figures?  Seven? More? How many are balanced, or chide the liberals and Democrats as their main prey? I count…none. Comedy, at least what remains of it after the scourge of political correctness and metaphorically castrated comics cowed into their place by the “cancel culture,” is now part of the Left’s indoctrination machine.

The allies of the Democratic Party/”resistance”/mainstream media collective, what Ethics Alarms calls “the Axis of Unethical Conduct,” or the AUC, are annoyed by the very existence of a satire site that deftly points out its hypocrisy, lunacy and ugliness. Thus Snopes, the dishonest and partisan “factchecking” site, has repeatedly checked the facts on Babylon Bee stories that anyone with a functioning cerebrum should know were gags. This weak, a particularly deft Babylon Bee story really annoyed the AUC:

Perfect. Perfect. The embarrassing efforts by Democrats and media voices to falsely represent a murderous terrorist as a “revered foreign official” (as the Washington Post described him) is objectively revolting, and shows the depth of insane Trump hate, as I explained here. Because of its sharp and revealing..and funny… message, the piece was retweeted a half-million times. Naturally, it immediately came under attack by—“Surprise, surprise, surprise!“as Gomer Pyle used to say—CNN. Two reporters complained that “Some family members just called [because] their Republican friends on FB are circulating it like it’s legit.”

First, I don’t know how someone can circulate obvious satire as if it’s “legit.” Second, out of a half million or more people, it is inevitable that some will believe anything. Third, when observing the AUC reaction to the completely justifiable droning of this evil man, Poe’s Law applies in triplicate. The reaction of some of the Trump-deranged defies parody. Bernie Sanders, for example, called it the equivalent of Putin assassinating a political rival.

Then there’s the irony of news organizations like CNN, which have been flamboyantly trafficking in fake news during the entire Trump administration, complaining about satirical news stories that, unlike theirs, are not meant to deceive.

On one hand it’s annoying when another writer beats me to the punch on an issue; on the other, it does save me time. Here is The National Review’s David Harsanyi: Continue reading →