Journalism & Media

A Federal Judge Gets Benchslapped For An Unethical Times Column

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

On May 24, 2024, while Supreme Court Justice Jackson was dreaming of playing “Medea,” The New York Times published an op-ed entitled, “A Federal Judge Wonders: How Could Alito Have Been So Foolish?” by Senior Judge Michael A. Ponsor of the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts.  Judge Ponsor addressed the flying of an upside-down American flag and the “Appeal to Heaven” flags outside homes owned by Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, a controversy covered thoroughly on Ethics Alarms.

The ethics verdict here was that the controversy was contrived, and that the attack on Alito was politically motivated, biased, and wrong. Judge Ponsor, however, opined that “any judge with reasonable ethical instincts would have” recognized that the flag displays were improper because they could be perceived as “a banner of allegiance on partisan issues that are or could be before the court.”

Let me inject here, “Sure, by an idiot!” “The appearance of impropriety is a reason-based standard. “Hey, this SCOTUS judge’s wife flew the same flag that began the HBO John Adams series: that must mean that her husband is in the bag for President Trump!” is not a reasonable perception.

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On the ABC $16 Million Libel Settlement

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

ABC News agreed last week to pay $16 million to settle Donald Trump’s libel case over George Stephanopoulos’s “This Week” broadcast in March, in which he repeatedly said, while interviewing Republican Congresswoman Nancy Mace, that Donald Trump had been “found liable for rape.” He had, in fact, been found liable for sexual assault but not rape, and this had been well-publicized at the time.

Trump sued ABC, and I assumed it was a nuisance suit made for effect rather than in expectation of winning. In fact, I regarded it as this close to being frivolous. That it wasn’t was proven by the settlement.

News media fans (I am not one) and journalism advocates are apoplectic over the settlement, believing that it weakens the “power of the press” to distort, lie and manipulate public opinion as the news media has been doing increasingly and shamelessly in one direction on the ideological scale for more than two decades. Good. The news media is careless, reckless, arrogant and unprofessional, as well as unaccountable. If the ABC defeat makes them a little bit more wary and careful to be sure of their facts, it is to everyone’s benefit, including journalists.

It couldn’t have happened to a better target than Stephanopoulos. He is a partisan hack, and never should have been allowed to pretend to be a journalist after serving as one of Bill Clinton’s henchmen. The Times v. Sullivan case requires that a journalist must demonstrate actual malice toward a public figure before a defamation suit gets past the First Amendment, and in most cases miscreants like George are saved by their own incompetence. I was certain that he would be saved this time— ah, rape, sexual assault, tomato-tomahto, who cares, what’s the difference. Of course, everyone knows except maybe Ethics Alarms vigilante press defender “A Friend” that Stephanopoulos and about 90% of his colleagues are hostile to Donald Trump, but general antipathy is usually not enough to show malice.

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Justice Jackson’s Broadway Adventure: Double Ethics Standards…Again

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

“Here come de judge!”

Above are some examples of SCOTUS Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson making a spectacle of herself in her Broadway turn last weekend in the musical “& Juliet,” a LGBTQ adaptation of William Shakespeare’s “Romeo & Juliet.” Jackson portrayed Queen Mab, described as a “she/her” character on a production poster, in two scenes written especially for her. “I just also think it’s very important to remind people that justices are human beings, that we have dreams, and that we are public servants,” Jackson told“CBS Mornings” prior to the performance. One of her dreams was apparently to be an actress, long ago. (She made the right choice going into law.)

Except that judges, and especially Supreme Court justices, don’t have the option of doing whatever they feel like or dream about, as least if they are conservative justices. All of the criticism of the Roberts Court in the past few years has been over alleged ethical violations by the Justices making up the 6-3 conservative majority. The Justices appointed by Democrats Obama and Biden are, of course, as pure as Ivory Soap. And yet…

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On Trump’s Fight Fight Fight Perfume

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

No doubt about it, one of the “norms” that President-Elect Donald Trump is shredding, stomping on and setting on fire is the tradition of Presidents not using their office, visibility, popularity and influence to sell products, with their names as brands. I’m not sure doing this had even occurred to previous White House residents; it certainly never occurred to the Founders…or me, to be honest.

Naturally, because it’s Trump, the usual Axis snipers are horrified. A particularly stinky response issued from New York Times Trump-hating columnist Frank Bruni‘s poison keyboard, titled “Take a Whiff of Eau de Trump. It Reeks.” [Gift link! Ho Ho Ho!]This is what the Axis propaganda machine is left with: playground-level insults for the elected President before he can even take the oath. Honeymoon? Respect? Good faith? Patriotism? Unity? Bi-Partisanship? Nah! What are they?

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Ethics Quote of the Week: Megyn Kelly

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

“Like maybe don’t say the laptop can’t be verified when it can,” she said, referring to Stahl’s response to the Hunter Biden laptop. How are you a journalist if you don’t want to follow up on that story? And then when your own organization verifies it, come out and do a mea culpa and admit you embarrassed yourself. Maybe don’t stealth edit the presidential candidate interview with ’60 Minutes,’ your flagship program that you’re an anchor of, without telling us, and then when it becomes a controversy, refuse to release the transcript because you’re more interested in running cover for the Dems than you are in honest reporting. Maybe don’t host a vice-presidential debate where you fact-check only one side. And then when your fact-check gets fact-checked by the vice-presidential candidate on the Republican side, you cut his mic…”

—Megyn Kelly, who has become considerably more quotable since abandoning news broadcasting for her podcast, responding to Leslie Stahl’s lamenting that “legacy media” media may be dying, that it’s all Donald Trump’s fault, and that she doesn’t know what to do about it. “I have some suggestions,” Kelly began.

Megyn was just riffing off the top of her head, of course. She could have gone on and on, as could I.

What do you call the insistence of Axis media defenders that while they may make “mistakes” (doesn’t everyone?) our journalists are noble, hard-working, objective truth-tellers who deserve our trust and respect? What is that? Denial? Delusion? Gaslighting? Outright lying? Insanity? Blindness? Stupidity? What?

What is the difference in effect between a state-run press, which is what the Founders devised the freedom of the press to prevent, and news media that voluntarily aligns itself with a single party and ideology and abuses its special status to manipulate the public, society, and elections?

Answer: There isn’t any.

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To Defenders of the Biased Mainstream Media: Ethics Alarms Challenges You to Find An Innocent Explanation For Why the NYT and WaPo Don’t Regard This Story As News [Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

Heck, even CNN reported it (but not MSNBC). Crystal Mangum, the exotic dancer who in 2006 accused three Duke lacrosse players of rape launching an ethics train wreck that ended up costing the city of Durham damages, derailed the academic careers of the three students, got the lacrosse team coach fired, and resulted in a rare instance of a prosecutor being disbarred, finally admitted what everyone should have figured out by now.

“I testified falsely against them by saying that they raped me when they didn’t, and that was wrong. And I betrayed the trust of a lot of other people who believed in me,” Mangum announced on the podcast “Let’s Talk with Kat.” “I made up a story that wasn’t true because I wanted validation from people and not from God.”

Oh.

What?

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From the Res Ipsa Loquitur Files:

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

The New York Post reports that wanted posters targeting CEOs of insurance and other health care companies are appearing in Manhattan. Some say “HEALTH CARE CEOS SHOULD NOT FEEL SAFE” and include the words “DENY,” “DEFEND,” and “DEPOSE,” which are the same words that the cute assassin who shot UnitedHealthcare’s CEO wrote on his bullets. The posters also feature each executive’s salary, and some have appeared with the photos of CEOs of non-health care companies, like Goldman Sachs. ABC reports some posters say “UnitedHealthcare killed everyday people for the sake of profit. As a result Brian Thompson was denied his claim to life. Who will be denied next?”

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Unethical Wise-Ass Quote of the Week: Baseball Writer Keith Law

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

“Of course, the size and length of the deal look absurd, and I doubt anyone expects Soto to still be a $50-million-a-year player in 2039, when he’ll be 40 if we haven’t burned up the planet by then.”

—Baseball writer Keith Law, writing in The Athletic regarding the impact of the Mets signing outfielder Juan Soto to a 15 year, $765 million dollar contract as discussed on Ethics Alarms here.

I’ll start with a full disclosure: I’ve had some unpleasant personal interaction with Keith Law, who is a talented baseball analyst of long-standing but out of his depth in the field of business and sports ethics, where his nasty exchanges with me occurred more than a decade ago. This quote would be flagged by me as unethical if had been made by my sister in a national publication.

Experts have an obligation to not abuse their authority, influence, presumed wisdom and ability to persuade the public. Keith Law is a very qualified commentator on all aspects of baseball, from the business of the game to talent evaluation and statistics. Unlike a lot of sportswriters, he has an impressive educational background including an undergraduate degree with honors in sociology and economics from the same disgraced but unfortunately still prestigious college that I graduated from, as well as a Masters in Business Administration from Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business. He is not, however, a climate scientist, and as it appears that his every waking hour has been and is devoted to the wide, wonderful world of baseball, it is safe to presume that he has not acquired any special expertise in the area of climate change other than what he reads in the New York Times (which owns the Athletic) and other progressive propaganda media.

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Unethical Website of the Month: “Locals”

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Nothing I like better than a big dose of frustration to start up the morning…

Glen Greenwald may be a fine and brave independent reporter, but he’s an unethical one, as I have pointed out here before. I am apparently unable to get out from his clutches, or at least from the con artists he hangs out with. As I wrote about earlier this year, I subscribed to Greewald’s substack, which he stopped contributing to because of some personal matters, but I was still charged for the subscription. (I also have had to endure some personal setbacks this year, but I have managed to fulfill my obligations to Ethics Alarms readers nonetheless, none of whom have paid me for subscriptions. Cry me a river, Glenn.) Then he announced that he was leaving Substack.

On December 10 of 2023, I received a “friendly reminder” from Glenn that my subscription to his new platform would renew in six days. I had never subscribed to the new platform, as indeed I wouldn’t trust Greenwald with another subscription if it cost me only ten cents. I had bigger metaphorical fish to fry a year ago, and never took the time to figure out what the hell was going on, but apparently my subscription renewed.

I have not heard a peep from Greenwald since that message last year, but today I received the same “friendly reminder” as you can see above. The email was “no-reply.” Nowhere was there a link to cancel the subscription, which I had never agreed to any way.

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From the Res Ispa Loquitur Files…Maddow’s Hypocrisy

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment
https://twitter.com/i/status/1865163195146477938

Althouse found this for me. Anyone who is surprised or disillusioned by Maddow’s blazing hypocrisy hasn’t been paying attention or doesn’t care that the propagandists they follow have no integrity.

“Maze’s” comment about her being an actress is, sadly, astute. The talking heads on MSNBC, to a significant extent on Fox News, and also on the other networks, are allowed and probably encouraged to telegraph their feelings (or the feelings the network’s want their audiences to think they have) about what they are reporting. Once upon a time, even the most biased of news anchors would announce the news with poker faces and neutral tones. That was considered professional then, and in fact that was and is professional for broadcast journalists: it has just become passe along with journalism ethics generally. Few mug as furiously and shamelessly as Maddow, but her bosses and clearly her audience appreciate her hamming it up: she is reported to have a salary of around $25 million.

A total contradiction like the one portrayed in the matching videos above should be signature significance for anyone paying attention: it means: “I am a partisan hack rather than the trustworthy analyst I pretend to be, and I express what I think my audience wants me to feel about what I am reporting.” People are fine with that, apparently. Fascinating.