Journalism & Media

Most Biased, Unprofessional Journalist of the Month: Norah O’Donnell

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

It was a competitive field to be sure, but O’Donnell, who once aspired to be a respected and trustworthy journalist, displayed how far she has fallen with her despicable performance on today’s “CBS Evening News.” You want bias? You want disinformation? You want unprofessional and unethical conduct? You want Trump Derangement? Norah had it for you. CBS should suspend her, or at least send her to a spa to calm the hell down. CBS, however, is a hack organization now employing hack journalists in complete lock-step with the Axis of Unethical Conduct. No, neither Norah nor CBS are quite as corrupt as MSNBC, but that is faint praise indeed.

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The 2024 Election Ethics Train Wreck Births the “Puerto Rico Is An Island of Garbage” Caboose

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

So it’s come to this.

The 2024 election is its own, massive ethics train wreck, as the tag will show you. It officially began with Democrats (and the news media, but I repeat myself) spending too long lying to the public about Joe Biden’s deteriorating mental state and deciding to select a Presidential nominee Soviet-style bypassing all democratic norms and processes. The party broke all previous campaign records for hypocrisy by taking this course while already making the dangerous claim that Republicans are the threats to democracy, and that Donald Trump as President would never allow another free election again. Amazingly, the campaign has gone downhill ethically since that point.

Just as tornadoes sometimes spin off little baby cyclones that still are deadly enough to kill people, the big Ethics Train Wrecks (or ETWs) as designated by Ethics Alarms, like the 2016 Post Election Ethics Train Wreck, the Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman Ethics Train Wreck and the Wuhan Virus Ethics Train Wreck (which spawned the Biden Presidency Ethics Train Wreck), often generate related ethics train wrecks that cause a lot of their own damage.

But I did not foresee that a Don Rickles-style “roast comic’s” jab at an ongoing news story would or could, even in the Age of the Great Stupid, turn into a controversy dominating headlines when the election is so near and serious matters should be the public’s focus.

I’ll summarize the events as efficiently as possible to get to the main point:

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“Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!” Here’s What the New York Times Has For Readers This Morning [Updated]:

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Main article: “Trump at the Garden: A Closing Carnival of Grievances, Misogyny and Racism. The inflammatory rally was a capstone for an increasingly aggrieved campaign for Donald Trump, whose rhetoric has grown darker and more menacing.“

#2: “Inside the Movement Behind Trump’s Election Lies”

#3: “Far-Right Figures Escalate Talk of Retribution and Election Subversion“

A ways down the page we see, “A Trump Rally Speaker Trashed Puerto Ricans. Harris Reached Out to Them.” Added: I didn’t read the piece, but the headline was misleading and deliberately so. The “speaker” was a comedian, and he was doing a routines. Ah. So the idea is that his jokes were meant seriously, and because it was a Trump rally, Trump endorsing the jokes as if they were serious positions.

Now for the columns:

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Further Observations on the Washington Post Declining To Endorse Harris

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

1. The surprise move has sparked a “Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias” spectacular! Editor-at-large Robert Kagan, resigned in protest. “People are shocked, furious, surprised,” said an editorial board member. Wait: why does the staff care so much that the Post isn’t officially endorsing Harris? They care because they are partisan and biased. They want their paper to do everything it can to help Harris and defeat Trump, not to to report the news objectively, and not to be officially neutral. That the staff reacted this way tells us all we need to know about the Post’s trustworthiness, if we didn’t know it already.

2. Endorsements were justifiable when newspapers maintained some semblance of objectivity. In today’s rotting journalism, however, with “advocacy journalism” holding sway and the Post being a particularly flagrant offender (I cancelled my Post subscription because the New York Time was less biased!) an endorsement doesn’t mean what it once did. That was, “We have assessed the candidates and their positions. We now can state our measured conclusion: X is the responsible choice for voters.” Now, an endorsement only means, “We have been favorably reporting on the Democratic candidate while being relentlessly negative about the Republican candidate, and all our reporters and editors are Democrats and progressives. Of course we’re endorsing X.”

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Academic Ethics Villains: Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

It is time to call these two partisan operatives in the guise of professors what they are: hypocrites, hacks, abusers of authority and totalitarian enablers. Naturally, they are Harvard government professors, my college and my major. I already have my Harvard diploma turned face to the wall and on the floor; there’s not much else I can do is burn it. But I consider these two unethical academics—they shouldn’t be called “scholars”—and insult to me, and any readers who are capable of non-Trump-Deranged thought. The New York Times is complicit by repeatedly giving them a platform to sell books and mislead the public.

But that’s the Times: an institutional ethics villain assisting two individual ethics villains. Nice.

I’ve been flagging the indefensible dishonesty and scholarship-as-propaganda of these two since 2018, when they were lionized by the Axis of Unethical Conduct (“the resistance,” Democrats and the mainstream media) for their Big Lie launching book, “How Democracies Die.” They’ve published more similar screeds since. I wrote in part (If you like, skip to the end of the long quote, but this is necessary perspective for the rest of the post):

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Breaking: Not Only Can Democrats and Harris Not Fool All the People All the Time, They Can’t Even Fool The Washington Post!

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

I just posted on “X”:

“!! The Washington Post just announced it won’t endorse a Presidential candidate. This is not only a victory for Trump, it should send Democrats to their panic rooms. The message is how terrible a candidate Harris is, and the narrative that she is otherwise has collapsed.”

Good.

There is hope.

Note To Candidate Trump: Civility Isn’t Bullshit

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Today’s “Trump is a terrible person and you have to vote against him even though there is literally no rational reason to vote for Kamala Harris” article is “At a Pennsylvania Rally, Trump Descends to New Levels of Vulgarity.” Of course he did. Public discourse and civility, all a part of the crucial ethics value of respect, have plummeted precipitously as Ethics Alarms predicted here and chronicled since, most recently yesterday. Trump has unquestionably been a catalyst for the coarsening of American speech and culture, but as this tag will show you, so many prominent individuals and institutions followed his lead and escalated the rot that blaming Trump alone would be, well, the kind of thing the Trump Deranged do every day.

Naturally, as Vulgarian-in-Chief, Trump couldn’t let himself be reduced to relative civility by Congresswomen saying things like “Let’s impeach the motherfucker!,” iconic actor Robert De Niro getting cheers at events by screaming “Fuck Trump!,” or a coded phrase meaning “Fuck Joe Biden!” being plastered on T-shirts, banners and mugs. Sooooo, as the Times gleefully informs us…

Mr. Trump opened his speech at the airport in Latrobe, Pa., with 12 minutes of reminiscing about the golfer Arnold Palmer, who grew up in the Western Pennsylvania town and for whom the airport was named. His monologue culminated in lewd remarks about the size of Mr. Palmer’s penis. Moments later, Mr. Trump gave the crowd an opportunity to call out a profanity. He went on to use that four-letter word to describe Ms. Harris. “Such a horrible four years,” Mr. Trump said, referring to the Biden-Harris administration, as he surveyed the crowd of hundreds of people in front of him. “We had a horrible — think of the — everything they touch turns to —.” Many in his audience — which was mostly made up of adults but included some children, infants and teenagers — eagerly filled in the blank, shouting, “Shit!” Minutes later, Mr. Trump urged his supporters to vote, telling them that they had to send a crude message to Ms. Harris: “We can’t stand you, you’re a shit vice president.”

Oh, nice. That’s the way to make America great again.

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Link Misinformation and Deceit

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

In the previous post, a link on “ludicrous and incompetent campaign” will take readers to an excellent Manhattan Contrarian essay documenting how Kamala Harris’s deliberately non-substantive campaign is the most “unserious” Presidential run in American history. That means that it is an honest link, doing what a link to another source is supposed to do: provide reference and authority.

This morning, I was reading Nate Silver’s Bulletin on substack. Nate, who is unalterably left-biased but tries really hard to pretend he’s not, was musing about Trump being too old to be running for President (he’s right about that) and gives us this sentence, with a link: “Considering the long history of old presidents seeking to hold onto power when they were clearly diminished — there were many such cases before Trump and Joe Biden — we should probably just have a Constitutional amendment that says a president can’t be older than 75 on Inauguration Day.”

“Really?” I thought. I think I’m a reasonably thorough and informed student of the American Presidency, and I’m not aware of “many such cases” before Biden. In fact, I can think of just one: FDR, who unforgivably ran for a fourth term in 1944 knowing that he was dying of heart failure. Roosevelt wasn’t particularly old, either: he was 63 when he died.

Seeking enlightenment from Silver on this fascinating topic, I clicked on the link. The link (to another Silver essay) does not show us “many cases” of “old” and “clearly diminished” Presidents seeking to hold on to office. It doesn’t give any examples other than Woodrow Wilson (he doesn’t mention FDR), and Silver’s evidence that Wilson was “seeking” to “hold onto office” before his stroke is like Obama once musing about how nice it would be to have a third term. Wilson told someone he thought he could win another term (he couldn’t). Silver also mentions Truman, who was neither decrepit nor diminished when he left office at 69. Until the Great Depression and World War II allowed Roosevelt—who would have kept running for more terms until he dropped, a true American dictator— to break the unwritten rule against more than two terms set by George Washington’s precedent, officially seeking a third elected term was taboo.

So Silver’s link falsely informed readers that there was authority for the statement it was linked to, and there was not. I should have written about the misleading link practice before, because it is increasingly common and it is unethical. I see it in the New York Times and the Washington Post; I see it on other blogs and substacks. Oh, the links don’t always go to sources that don’t fit the link description, that’s why the deceptive practice works.

False-linkers know that most people don’t click on links; they want to read one post, not two or five. So when they see Nate’s link on “many such cases,” they assume, reasonably enough, that the link will show them many such cases, and that’s all they want to know: Nate isn’t making this up. See, there’s a link to his source!

But he was making it up, and the link doesn’t support his assertion in the the post containing the link.

Link deceit is just an internet version of an earlier version of the practice that still is common: footnotes in scholarly works and case sites in legal documents that are not really what a reader will assume they are. I have a book right here on my desk, a historical tome, that has over 700 footnotes, many of them with nothing more than a book or published paper title and an author. I assume, with such footnotes, that they indicate there is authority for what the book author has written, but I won’t usually check the source footnoted. Almost nobody will. However, in the past, when writing my own scholarly articles, I have checked footnoted references, and sometime discovered that they were like Silver’s link—not what they were represented as supporting by the author. I am told by litigators that it is shocking how many cases cited in the memos and briefs they read contain cites that don’t stand for what the cite’s placement suggests, or in some instances, cites to cases that don’t exist.

Scholars do this at some risk: you never know when a Christoper Rufo might be checking on you. Lawyers doing it risk serious ethics sanctions. The journalists, bloggers and pundits who use this deceit, however, figure that the risks are minimal: if they are caught, they just say “Oopsie! I made a mistake!” and move on to the next article…and more misleading links.

More on the Kamala Harris Book Plagiarism Episode

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

In a post three days ago, Ethics Alarms examined Christopher Rufo’s claim that Kamala Harris engaged in plagiarism in her first book, and concluded, based on the New York Times reportage, that unlike, for example, the substantial plagiarism indulged in by ex-Harvard president Claudine Gay, prompting her exit, Harris’s uncredited lifting and copying (in a book written with a co-writer, or maybe not written by Harris at all) was careless and accidental rather than deliberate.

Now another metaphorical shoe has dropped.

The Times claimed to show plagiarism expert Jonathan Bailey the passages Rufo cited as plagiarized. It reported that he ruled that the material taken without attribution “were not serious, given the size of the document.” Now Bailey writes that he was unaware of a full dossier with additional allegations.” That means that the Times gave readers the impression that he had seen all of the questionable sections when he had not.

Now that he has reviewed everything, Bailey’s conclusion is a bit different. He writes that he now believes that the “case is more serious than I commented to the New York Times.” And with that, we are thrust into a sick version of Johnny Carson’s launching pad quiz show, “Who Do You Trust?” I will not leave you in any unnecessary suspense : the answer is “Nobody.”

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Half-Ethics Hero: Kamala Harris

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Kamala Harris is going into the metaphorical lion’s den and will be interviewed on Fox News by news anchor Bret Baier. Earlier in the campaign, she rejected a Fox News debate with Donald Trump, to which he had already agreed. Good for her.

The official Democratic Party position has long been to denigrate Fox because it does not follow the pro-Democrat/progressive propaganda mission of the other major networks. Barack Obama said, more than once, that it didn’t qualify as a legitimate news source. The Party has long shown hostility toward Fox News; it formally barred the network from hosting a primary debate in 2020. Hillary Clinton, as the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee, had one Fox News interview and that was the last one by a POTUS candidate from her party in the last eight years. President Biden refused to appear on Fox.

Harris gets only a half-Ethics Hero not because hers is an act dictated by crisis. If one has any doubt that internal polls, external polls, and basic vibes show Harris’s cynical, gossamer campaign on a losing flight path, her decision to have an interview with a journalist who might not be planning on voting for her should dispel it.

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