Journalism & Media

Why Doesn’t The New York Times Think Kamala Harris Paying For Al Sharpton and Oprah To Give Her Suck-Up Interviews Is “Fit To Print”?

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Apparently the lessons of the past election are not sinking in for many as quickly as some thought.

Since the election, it has been confirmed that the Harris campaign paid Oprah Winfrey’s production company Harpo a million dollars for the elaborate event including Winfrey’s fawning interview of Harris on stage, and that it paid Al Sharpton’s National Action Network a half-million dollars before Sharpton did his Harrs interview. This is unethical. It is cheating. To the extent that the interviews were  journalism ( Winfrey used to be a journalist and is still accorded the credibility and status of one, Sharpton pretends to be a journalist rather than what he is, a race-hustler, on MNBC) accepting such payments create a conflict of interest and a breach of journalism ethics. Even if they are not technically unethical journalism, the lack of transparency is.

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Three Arrogant Pundits, One Crippling Delusion

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

The delusion is that the American people are stupid.

I easily could have written “hundreds of pundits” instead of three, but these three, CNN’s Michael Smerconish, often said to be the most fair and objective of CNN’s talking heads, which tells you something, the New York Times’ David Brooks, once an arrogant, pseudo-intellectual neocon conservative and now a fully indoctrinated Stockholm Syndrome progressive rationalizer, and Times guest Trump-basher Roger Rosenblatt, a writer of some note.

I read about Smerconish last night, and his assertion irritated me the most of all. His theory about why Harris lost and Trump won was based on what he calls “The Boomerang Effect,” “I don’t want it all distilled into this one sound bite or conclusion, but at the top of my list, I’ll say it that way … It’s like a parenting lesson. The more that you tell people what they can’t do, what’s intolerable, you must not do this, you should not do this, the more they’re going to rebel,” Smerconish said. “Maybe they would have ultimately come to their own conclusion and rejected Donald Trump. I don’t know. But I think that the constant browbeating and the combination of the media influence and the four indictments, one conviction, and showing that god-awful joke from Madison Square Garden a week in advance of the election on a loop — and I felt it, and I said it.” He went on, “I can’t sit here, Aiden, telling you, well, this is the way I called the election, but I definitely felt the potential for a boomerang effect, and I think that came true. I really do.”

Translation: “The American people are like children, and we superior intellects in the news media must lead them in such a way that the poor, ignorant, foolish dears think they are coming to their own conclusions.”

I was immediately reminded of song from the musical “The Fantastiks,” in which two father muse about the complexities of parenting. It’s called “Don’t Say No.” Sample lyrics:

“Why did the kids put beans in their ears?
No one can hear with beans in their ears.
After a while the reason appears.
They did it cause we said no.”

It never occurred to Smerconish, or any of the myriad other pundits who bias has made so stupid that they are useless, that the public, or enough of them to prove Abe right again, voted after correctly evaluating the issues, the choices offered to them and alternative courses for the nation going forward. No, they only voted for Trump because the Axis propaganda was too aggressive. After all, voting for Hitler is like putting beans in your ears.

Next up we have David Brooks. I’m sick of reading Brooks, who masks a simplistic view of politics with psychobabble that some might take and complex analysis. I have to give Ann Althouse a pointer for flagging his column titled ““Why We Got It So Wrong.” Ann writes, “If you were “so wrong” before, why would I look to you for right answers now?” Heh. She says she just skimmed it. I read the whole thing.

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On the Other Hand (As Capt. Hook Liked to Say), There Are Columnists Like The Appropriately Named Sabrina Haake….

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

Once again, I find myself asking, how can an alleged opinion writer issue utter crap like this and live with herself? How can a newspaper justify publishing it, or pay someone so dishonest or rock-dumb to write it? How can anyone with two brain cells to rub together read it and say, “Duhh..yup! Sound’s right to me!“?

This fraudulent authority is a trial lawyer who claims to specialize in First Amendment cases, though her screed here tells us that she doesn’t get that free speech thingy. Sabrina is also a failed Democratic candidate for Congress. Her essay is called, “Trump didn’t win; disinformation did.” If I didn’t write an ethics blog, that headline alone would be sufficient for me to eschew the pleasure of reading it.

Just listen (well, metaphorically) to this woman…

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Two Stupid Questions and One Damning Answer

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

If there areany lingering doubt about why the news media has no credibility with the American people and its influence is diminishing like an ice cube left of the sidewalk on a hot summer’s day, ponder these two questions at yesterday’s White House press briefing.

#1. TIME’s correspondent Brian Bennett asked the President’s incompetent paid liar, “President Trump has promised to launch the largest deportation in American history when he becomes president. Are there steps that President Biden is taking in the next 70 days to try to protect certain populations in the United States from deportation? Does he want to extend parole or take other steps that would protect people from that deportation?”

Good one, Brian. “What steps is the President taking to prevent President Trump from enforcing laws that his administration has refused to enforce?” To members of our woke journalistic cabal, this makes perfect sense.

#2. Bloomberg’s Skylar Woodhouse asked, “President-elect Trump — there’s reports that Elon Musk is having a lot of sway in terms of his decisions, in terms of who President-elect Trump is, you know, having come into his administration, sitting in on meetings with — with foreign leaders, and Elon Musk has said, you know, there’s parts that he wants to sort of reshape maybe the government. Is President Biden concerned at all over Elon Musk’s influence over President-elect Trump and potentially what that could look like for our country?”

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Comment of the Day: “Wait, WHAT??? Unethical Quote of the Month: NPR CEO Katherine Maher”

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Let me begin by thanking commenter Edward for tracking down the source of the Maher quote, which at the time I posted I could not track, and my source, Elon Musk, didn’t help any by not bothering to include it in his post. It is the Ted Talk above, made when Maher was CEO at Wikipedia.

Not to leave you in any unnecessary suspense, I hate her talk with the fury of a thousand typhoons. Any time I hear the “you have your truth and I have mine” New Age blather, I tune out, spit three times, and have a stiff drink. It is a cornerstone of woke ideology and subjective ethics, and I say to hell with it.

Nonetheless, Extradimensional Cephalopod does his usual meticulously fair and open-minded response, this time to my question of whether the statement, “I think our reverence for the truth might have become a bit of a distraction that is preventing us from finding consensus and getting important things done,” could be justified. He does as good a job as I can imagine anyone doing, but I’m not buying. Before realizing I should post this as a COTD, I replied to EC’s post on the original essay’s thread; I’ll re-post it following his (its?) Comment of the Day on the post, “Wait, WHAT??? Unethical Quote of the Month: NPR CEO Katherine Maher”…

***

“…what possible context could justify it?”

I can’t guarantee that Maher meant what she said in a benign sense, but such a sense does indeed exist.

Allow me to rephrase the statement in question:

Before: “I think our reverence for the truth might have become a bit of a distraction that is preventing us from finding consensus and getting important things done.”

After: “I think our obsession with forcing everyone to agree with our interpretations of the available evidence interfered with us finding enough relevant points of agreement that we could establish mutually acceptable approaches on important issues.”

The confusion lies in the conflation of “truth” to mean three different things:

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Wait, WHAT??? Unethical Quote of the Month: NPR CEO Katherine Maher

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

“I think our reverence for the truth might have become a bit of a distraction that is preventing us from finding consensus and getting important things done.”

—NPR CEO Katherine Maher

Elon Musk posted the video of Maher saying this…

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1856343280344010803

I can’t find the date of that speech or the context of the quote, but what possible context could justify it? If that isn’t pure Big Brother, what is? “Can’t let the truth get in the way of progress!” This is the totalitarian mindset that (I hope) was one of the things enough voters rejected a week ago. This is the ends justifies the means ideology embraced by the Axis of Unethical Conduct, including the news media that lied, dissembled, covered up and broadcast false narratives during the campaign and, of course, long before.

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Journalism! An NBC Reporter Steals a News Story on the FEMA Scandal, Tries To Blur it, Gets Caught…

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Three days ago, the Daily Wire broke the news that a FEMA employee ordered workers to bypass the homes of Trump supporters as they surveyed the damage caused by Hurricane Milton in Florida. This was a damning story in many respects; among them, Republican claims that this was happening were “fact-checked” by the Democratic Party allied media and declared “misinformation” before the truth came out.

The Daily Wire, Ben Shapiro’s conservative website, broke the story because the mainstream media was probably burying it, but once it was out, every outlet had to report it and credit the Wire. Well, almost every outlet. NBC Breaking News reporter Mirna Alsharif, formerly of CNN, used the Daily Wire report without giving credit to the source. Hey, maybe she should apply to be President of Harvard! Then she omitted key information to try to make the scandal less clear.

But social media pounced, as it should have. The reporter’s responses were unprofessional, to say the least. Then she killed her Twitter account after being thoroughly exposed….

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The Final Scene in “Michael Clayton” As a Metaphor For the 2024 Election And A Lesson For Democrats Which They May Be Incapable Of Learning…

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

In the scene above, which has already made it onto many lists of American cinema’s best ending scenes, Michael Clayton, a law firm fixer who has survived a murder attempt paid for by the general counsel of a chemical company that presents its products as boons to civilization but which is really covering up a massive pollution scandal, confronts the general counsel with his survival, knowledge of her and her company’s crimes. Unknown to her Clayton is wearing a wire, and her incriminating responses to the confrontation will bring down the company. Arthur, Clayton’s friend whom he refers to, was the whistle-blowing lawyer that the general counsel had murdered to prevent him from revealing the smoking gun company document Clayton is holding, evidence of the company’s knowing contamination that harmed or killed millions.

It is ironic that George Clooney, in what is easily his best movie and best performance, played a central role in the failed Democratic Party palace coup that resulted in the disastrous campaign and defeat of Kamala Harris. The unhinged and folish reactions of the now re-loading “resistance,” Democrats and their corrupt media allies (“The Axis of Unethical Conduct” in Ethics Alarms parlance) brought this scene to mind. You should show it to your deranged Facebook friends and relatives, but here’s a guide for you to use if they are incapable of grasping the lessons it holds…

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Unethical (and Funny!) Quote of the Week: Washington Post Columnist Catherine Rampell

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

“I’m not a Democrat. I’m a journalist.”

—WaPo columnist Catherine Rampell, after being mocked by CNN conservative contributor Scott Jennings for her standand anti-Trump talking points.

Rampell was responding to Jennings’ comment that “You still don’t understand how you lost.”

Jeez, somebody tell her! Nobody believes this myth any more. That she would even say that on national TV justifies the public’s lack of trust in the mainstream media, the Post, and Rampell. Props to Jennings for not falling off his chair in helpless laughter and rolling on the floor.

Last Election Related Post of the Day, I Promise…[Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

1. As I write this, the New York Times‘ model is predicting that Trump will win the popular vote and pegs his chances of winning the election at 90%. It’s a shame that I don’t trust anything the Times says.

2. The best column of the day came from David Harsanyi, a conservative pundit who is not a Trump fan. Best paragraph:

“The unhinged, hysterical meltdown of the Left over former President Donald Trump’s candidacy is unparalleled in modern history. Women who walk around cosplaying The Handmaid’s Tale are living in the wealthiest and freest place women have ever known. They will continue to do so, even if Trump finds his way back into the White House for four years. The very notion that “democracy” hinges on the unfettered availability of third-trimester abortions is a kind of corrosive delusion only partisanship can whip up in otherwise rational people. Then again, we already know if Trump wins, every innocuous tax cut will be treated like the Reichstag fire.”

Bingo.

3. The super fancy computer maps are distracting and no improvement over the old fashioned tote boards of the past; in fact, they are much worse. Over at Fox News, poor Bill Hemmer is constantly saying, “Sorry, sorry…there we go…oops, wrong screen…”

4. MSNBC’s propagandists are furious and in a foul mood, as well as lying their fool heads off, as usual. Joy Reid announced that black men were not supporting Trump any more than in 2020—that’s untrue. Lawrence O’Donnell went on a rant about how the Republicans get “to play by different rules than Democrats,” which qualifies as gaslighting. They were joined by smirking Rachel Maddow in gratuitous Trump-bashing: if you can’t beat him, smear him.

I hope I can stay awake to watch the meltdown if and when Trump is declared the winner.

5. It’s ugly and stupid over on Facebook, as I have had to wrestle my fingers to the floor to stop myself from picking off the ridiculous, poorly reasoned, ignorant claims and rationalizations from people who once were rational even as you and I until their brains were eaten by Trump Derangement.

6. Ann Seltzer, whose polling stunned everyone by showing Harris winning Iowa, a GOP stronghold, needs to go into another field. Trump is winning the state by 14 pts. How incompetent. How embarrassing.

7. Fox News keeps saying that if Trump wins, it will be the greatest comeback in American political history. This is just wrong. Richard Nixon will always have that distinction. He lost the Presidential election in 1960, then lost in an upset when he ran for governor of California in 1962. Everyone assumed he had signed his political obituary when he gave a bitter, self-pitying concession speech and appeared to announce that he was quitting politics. In 1964, he wasn’t a factor in the Presidential race at all, and was just practicing law in New York. Four years later, Nixon was President.

8.[Added, 1:17 am] I can’t let this pass. Juan Williams just got on Fox News and attributed Trump’s increasingly likely victory (the Times now has the likelihood at 95%) to racism and sexism. Over at MSNBC, the horrible Joy Reid actually said that Harris had run a “perfect” campaign, which is so absurd she should have been yanked off the set with a hook. This tells me that the programmed narrative if Harris loses is that it was only bigotry that defeated her, and not the fact that she was a weak and unappealing candidate who ran a terrible campaign.