Journalism & Media

How Many Other Government Workers Are Like This, I Wonder…

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I presume that I have made it clear over the years that I regard James O’Keefe’s hidden camera “gotcha!” stings both unethical journalism and just flat-out unethical generally. This is “the ends justifies the means” exemplified; I don’t care how much corruption O’Keefe uncovers and what outrages he broadcasts. His methods are unjustifiable. A so-called investigative journalist who uses such tactics is untrustworthy.

Having said that, I don’t feel constrained to ignore the evidence his wrongful methods reveal when it is persuasive, for this isn’t the courtroom. His latest bust is an example. Deshaun Eli Mack (above), a Family Services Specialist with the Nevada Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), was caught on one of O’Keefe’s hidden cameras admitting how he manipulates the system to offer extended emergency Medicaid coverage to illegal immigrants, proudly boasting, “I get them emergency medical all the time… just because I want to.” Emergency Medicaid for illegals is supposed to be granted on a month-to-month basis and only for severe conditions. Mack said on camera, however, that he ignores the policy and the process.

“They’re supposed to apply every month,” he said, “so I just approve them for 12 months… because I can. I make it so. I bend the rules a lot….I will twist and turn our provisions to fit the way that I want them to be.”

Nice. The arrogance is as nauseating as it is unsurprising. Asked if he felt that he was subverting the law, Mack answered, “I do that a lot.”

O’Keefe’s group confronted Mack with the surreptitious recording, and he denied that what he was recorded saying was really true. “I say a lot of things that I don’t mean,” Mack said, adding “I lie all the time.” “None of those words I said were true,” he insisted.

It should be extremely easy to check that. But even if Mack was telling the truth when he said he was lying, can a government agency defend employing someone who “lies[s] all the time”?

__________________

Pointer: JutGory

It’s About Time: CNN Gets Called On Its “It Isn’t What It Is” Rhetorical Dishonesty and Bias

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

and…

Good.

All ethical and aware Americans should treat their Axis-supporting friends, relatives and colleagues similarly. What both Miller and Hamill did was to label propaganda what it really was, and not allow it to falsely present itself as “journalism.”

“Welcome Summer!” Open Forum

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

Last week on YouTube’s “The Morning Meeting,” Mark Halperin and Dan Turrentine appeared to acknowledge Ethics Alarms’ “Julie Principle.” They just didn’t know what it was called.

President Trump had delivered the commencement address at West Point while wearing a red MAGA cap (Oh NOOOO! He’s violating “norms” again!) and on Monday published a Memorial Day Truth Social post like some of his previous holiday wishes—you know, one of his “Merry Christmas, you filthy animal!” style shots. Halperin noted that many Democratic critics and pundits, right on cue, were freaking out.

“If you read [historian] Heather Cox Richardson or the emails and texts I get from my Democratic sources, as I said before, the Trump administration’s over. And it’s just a bankrupt, you know, corrupt mess and he’s already a failed president and he’s not getting anything done. That’s their point of view. They also are very taken with his wearing a MAGA hat … to give … a West Point graduation speech,” Halperin said. “They’re taken with his tweet, his Truth Social post, saying ‘Happy Memorial Day’ and criticizing Joe Biden. And they’re back to a Adam Schiffian and [biased and Trump Deranged historian] Heather Cox Richardson point of view, which is everything Trump does is an epic disaster and that the American people will turn on him and Republicans in the midterms because he’s impolite.”

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The Atlantic’s Editor Tries Another Dishonest Excuse For The Axis News Media Covering Up Biden’s Dementia

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

I am reaching my contempt overload limit from the excuses and spin the mainstream media enemies of the people are floating to slime out of their culpability for the Biden dementia cover-up.

Now Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of “The Atlantic,” among the worst of the Trump-Deranged, Democratic Party totalitarianism-enabling Axis media, tried gaslighting us with this one during an interview with CNN Ethics Villain Jake Tapper on PBS’s “Washington Week”: See, allegations that the news media covered for Biden show a “misunderstanding of journalism”! Reporters need “credible sources” to report anything, see, so without “insiders” admitting on the record that the alleged President was a shambling vegetable, reporters couldn’t report it.

Let me get this straight: what everyone could see and hear since 2019 and earlier couldn’t be reported, couldn’t be verified, and couldn’t be investigated even though it was self-evident that the “insiders” were lying, making excuses about “one bad night,” Joe’s “stutter” and “cheap fakes,” and even when a mountain of circumstantial evidence like the avoidance of interviews, Cabinet meetings and unscripted appearances was in plain sight?

Sure. Whatever you say, Jeff. The news media never reports unsubstantiated “facts” without iron-clad “verification.” Like, say, “Hand up, don’t shoot!,” right?

Former Ethics Alarms idol Ken White of Popehat works for this guy. Ken was once a truth-teller, someone whose integrity I admired and tried to emulate. How sad.

Comment of the Day: “…Unethical Quote of the Week: David Axelrod”

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Prolific and historically literate EA commenter Steve-O-in NJ has been uncharacteristically scarce around these parts of late, but when he does weighed-in the quality of his commentary remains stellar. I’m going to have his Comment of the Day on the post “The Sequel to “Is It Ethical to Continue to Slam Former President Biden Now That It Has Been Revealed That He Has Metastatic Prostate Cancer?”— Unethical Quote of the Week: David Axelrod” kick off what bids fair to end up as “Why the Democratic Party Has Disqualified Itself From National Leadership” Monday.

Every single Democrat who runs for office should be confronted with the fact that their party spent four years defiling the Constitution and ignoring the will of their own voters. They should be asked, again and again, how do you dare associate yourself with a party that would do this? What’s your excuse? Why should any voter trust anyone who runs as a Democrat now? What does your party stand for, if it would exploit a man it chose to have the most challenging leadership responsibilities in the world knowing he wasn’t mentally able to do the job, as a means of letting backroom, unelected ideologues and partisan hacks secretly chart U.S. policy? Every Democrat office-holder or candidate should be forced to either condemn his or her party or beg for forgiveness and a second chance.

And the public’s response to their entreaties should be the same as mine: “Never!”

Here’s Steve-O…

***

There’s no way I can be other than disgusted by this manipulative tactic by the same party who regularly bashed Reagan for being a senile old man while in office and came up with at least 20 ways to attack Trump as unfit. Reagan stumbled twice in eight years, once after being shot and having major surgery, again after seven years in office plus that and according to the left he was unfit the entire time, despite no one from the White House staff and no personal or government physician coming forward to verify any allegation of senility. No one unbiased has come forward to say Trump is unfit. His biased niece doesn’t count, and neither do disgruntled former employees. Former vice president Pence, former ambassador Nikki Haley, and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo all have nothing to lose by spilling now, and every reason to do it after being publicly shut out of this administration, but none of them have.

Yet we all watched Biden deteriorate before our eyes, to the point where he could barely walk and couldn’t answer even softball questions, and the left tried to gaslight this nation by saying it was all Republican dirty tricks. This, the party of Dick Tuck, the original political dirty tricks man, whose members regularly insult the GOP as being a party made up of idiots and morons, had the audacity to accuse the same party of being masters of dirty tricks. This, the media who parlayed a single stumble, a golf swing, and a tennis serve gone wrong into a lasting image of Gerald Ford as an oaf and a klutz who couldn’t do anything right, had the audacity to bury multiple stumbles, an obvious old-guy shuffle, multiple obvious needs to be shown where to walk after initially going the wrong way, inability to answer easy questions, and a hundred other obvious signs of deterioration and THEN accuse those who pointed them out of trying to lie and deceive. If Biden hadn’t finally fallen apart in full view of the entire nation to the point where no farther denial was possible, these people would still be lying to us about Biden being sharp as a tack and having more energy than someone half his age.

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“Jake Tapper, Ethics Villain” Continues—Today’s Episode: “Jake Is Unethical, But He’s Not Stupid”

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

In a just released video, conservative scholar and commentator Victor Davis Hanson adds his perspective to the Jake Tapper scandal, a sub-scandal to the Biden Dementia cover-up conspiracy of which he was a part, itself a sub-scandal of the Democratic Party’s descent into aspiring totalitarianism. From the transcript…

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See How They Spin! One Axis Hack Interviews Another To Try To Rationalize Away The Media’s Complicity in the Biden Dementia Cover-up

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Axis hack #1…

Ezra Klein!

Axis hack #2…

Ethics Villain, CNN’s Jake Tapper!

Almost exactly a year ago, I excoriated the New York Times and Public Enemy Ezra Klein, the infamous “advocacy journalist” responsible for founding uber-Axis propaganda organ Vox, for a wildly unethical Klein disinformation piece titled, “Seven Theories for Why Biden Is Losing (and What He Should Do About It).” Guess what Klein didn’t see as a reason Biden was behind in the polls. Somehow, the fact that the alleged President was obviously suffering from dementia escaped his notice. (Suuuure it did…). The closest Klein got to that flaming, throbbing, flashing red alarm was “Voters think Biden is too old.” Just voters, mind you! I wrote, “[Biden’s] obviously declining mentally, and any fool can see he’s too old to hold any job, much less the most difficult one in the country.” But Ezra Klein, who was not declining mentally (and couldn’t possibly decline ethically, except into negative numbers), actually argued that Biden should do more debates with Trump, not just two, and that “all Biden needs to do is persuade enough voters that he is more capable than the erratic criminal defendant across the stage, who turns 78 next month.” What Klein meant was that all the complicit partisan media hacks—like Klein—had to do was to hide Biden’s incapacity from voters until election day. And that’s what they tried to do, except that Biden couldn’t even get through one debate without making it plain that his brain was mush.

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Ethics Dunce: The Chicago-Sun Times

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Morons.

The Chicago Sun-Times published a list of 15 recommended books to read this summer as Memorial Day looms. Ten of the 15, two-thirds, were made up titles. Then the Philadelphia Inquirer published the same phony list, headlined “Summer reading list for 2025.” There was the well-reviewed tome “Tidewater Dreams” authored by Chilean American novelist Isabel Allende. Her “first climate fiction novel”! (She’s real, the book wasn’t.) Then there was “The Rainmakers,” set in a “near-future American West where artificially induced rain has become a luxury commodity.” That artificially induced novel was supposedly written by 2025 Pulitzer Prize winner Percival Everett. (Nope!) The list also included “Deep Thoughts” by Joe Biden, a book of blank pages.

OK, I’m kidding about that one…

Of course, of course, the phony list was generated by an AI bot, because that’s what the bots do: make up stuff. Who doesn’t know that by now? Well, apparently journalists don’t, because they are lazy practitioners of a profession that no longer observes basic ethical standards of competence and responsibility. A while back I wrote the post “By Now, No Lawyer Should Be Excused For Making This Blunder” about the lazy lawyers who used Chat GPT to write legal memoranda and briefs that inevitably included fake case cites. Arguably, journalists and editors have even fewer excuses for falling into that trap.

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Integrity Test For Climate Change Hysterics

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Well waddya know! The U.S. is on the verge of setting records for all-time low temperatures in May. That’s funny. I thought humanity was doomed because the world is burning up.

Of course, I don’t think one unseasonally cold month has any more significance than one unseasonably cold day, but that’s not how the climate change cabal has been playing their game. No, every time the temperature seems especially high anywhere in the USA, the activists, most of whom know as much about climate science as I know about fixing a carburetor, start screaming, pointing, and crying out, “See? SEE?” They do the same thing with seasonal wildfires, hurricanes, floods and, at least on The View, earthquakes and eclipses. They get away with it too, because the unscrupulous politicians they elect and the dim-bulb progressive pundits and reporters who work for those politicians always endorse and rationalize the climate change hysterics’ propaganda, even after every prediction, every projection, every deadline to save humanity proves to be hooey.

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CNN Gathers Enemies of the People to Sit Around and Lie Among Themselves To Fool Its Audience..What IS That?

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

I mean, other than “disgusting?”

From “Real Clear Politics”: Ethics Villain Jake Tapper hosts Lying Racist Van Jones and Obama Propagandist David Axelrod on CNN in a discussion of the “shocking” revelations regarding how Joe Biden was a walking vegetable while he was supposedly the “sharp as a tack” President of the United States….

TAPPER: Van, I remember how emotional you were in the immediate moments after the June 27, 2024, debate because of what you saw on the stage. And with all this new reporting coming out — and I should disclose that I gave both of you copies of the book so you would have a little bit more information. Do you feel like you were duped, Van? Like, how do you feel?

JONES: First, this book is extraordinary. I don’t care who you are, left, right, or otherwise. Anybody who cares about this country and about just the dynamics of power, this is “the emperor’s new clothes” playing itself out in real time. Everybody knew, but everyone was afraid to say — except for David Axelrod, for two years — that something was wrong here. I was shocked. I love Joe Biden. I don’t like him. I love him. I got a chance to work with him when I was a part of the Obama administration and loved him more every day. I was shocked to see his condition when he came out. And so was the world. And that wasn’t the first time he was in that condition. The book makes it very, very clear. There are people who knew and said nothing. And that is a crime against this republic. And I think the Democrats are going to pay for a long time for being a part of what is now being revealed to be a massive cover-up.

Here, let me fix that for you, asshole: “….for being a part of what is now being revealed to be a massive cover-up” in which all of us were complicit. I’m sure that’s what you meant to say, you shameless totalitarian hack.

Conservative pundit Stephen Green adds, “Biden’s decline was obvious in 2020 — for those with eyes — and yet Democrat insiders still thought that Biden was better than any of the alternatives in 2020.” And I’ll add to that: last February I wrote, regarding President Trump’s attendance at the (yecchh) Super Bowl,

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