Journalism & Media

Final Ethics Observations on the Media’s Alito Flag Set-Up

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

…the main one being that the distress signal is appropriate, because the Axis of Unethical Conduct proved with this fiasco that it is ruthless, shameless, untrustworthy, and will do anything in 2024 to mislead the public if it might mean a few extra votes for Democrats. Or maybe the main one is that your friendly neighborhood ethicist was right about this story from the very start, which is why Fredo asked to make another appearance as my spokesman.

And this, my friends, is why we can’t have nice things.

Or a functioning republic.

Let me not get to far ahead of myself. Right now, the whole, biased, corrupt, anti-Trump, anti-conservative, Biden-protecting propaganda-spewing mainstream news media, the third partner in the Ethics Alarms-dubbed Axis of Unethical Conduct (“the resistance,” and Desperate Democrats completing the troika) is doing a mass Jumbo (“Flags? What flags?”) regarding what was its favorite earth-shattering scandal a week ago. This sudden amnesia was brought on because the Washington Post, perhaps seeking to embarrass its old rival, effectively eviscerated the Times’ “Get Justice Alito!” scoop, which EA first discussed here, and subsequently here, here, and here. (Don’t make me describe it again: I was sick of it days ago.)

Two days ago, the Post revealed that it had known about the first flag episode more than three years ago and had decided that it wasn’t newsworthy (because, as the revealed facts showed clearly, it wasn’t). Now-retired SCOTUS reporter Robert Barnes traveled to the Alito’s home on January 20, 2021, the day of Joe Biden’s inauguration, to follow-up on an anonymous tip he had received from some Alito-hating asshole neighbor about the flag. After investigating, Barnes and the Post concluded there was no story, because the flag-raising appeared to be the work of Martha-Ann Alito, Alito’s wife, not the Justice, as part of her dispute with her neighbors.

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Oh-Oh! Now It Seems That TWO Historical Flags Someone Else Has Used As Free Speech Were Seen Flying Over a Justice Alito Residence! Clearly, This Violates the “Obscure Flags” Section in the Judicial Code of Ethics….

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

The contrived Justice Alito flags controversy has exactly one valid use: it shows that the panicked Axis has lost all sense of proportion and self-preservation, that its ethics alarms are deader than Generalissimo Franco, and that between now and November nothing can be ruled out, from violent uprisings to horrified leftist wackos tearing off their clothes, painting themselves mauve and running amuck coast to coast while shouting dirty limericks. Good to know.

Here’s the New York Times, which launched the previous “Bad flag, BAD flag! “scoop (as of this moment, the Times has published nine—NINE!—articles about the flags):

Last summer, two years after an upside-down American flag was flown outside the Virginia home of Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., another provocative symbol was displayed at his vacation house in New Jersey, according to interviews and photographs.

This time, it was the “Appeal to Heaven” flag, which, like the inverted U.S. flag, was carried by rioters at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Also known as the Pine Tree flag, it dates back to the Revolutionary War, but largely fell into obscurity until recent years and is now a symbol of support for former President Donald J. Trump, for a religious strand of the “Stop the Steal” campaign and for a push to remake American government in Christian terms.

Three photographs obtained by The New York Times, along with accounts from a half-dozen neighbors and passers-by, show that the Appeal to Heaven flag was aloft at the Alito home on Long Beach Island in July and September of 2023. A Google Street View image from late August also shows the flag.

In two words, so what?

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Not Exactly An Ethics Hero (Recovering Ethics Dunce, Maybe?): Comedy Central’s The Daily Show

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Look! The Daily Show is finally choosing to mercilessly mock not just absurd Democrats, but even absurd Democrats of color! See?

Well paint me blue and call me Smurphy! True, it only took almost four years, and a Republican with such rhetorical handicaps and brain fog would have been skewered weekly, indeed daily, by all of the Axis-allied comedy shows. Think of Dan Quayle, or David Letterman’s nightly mockery of George W. Bush, and Trump, of course. Late night TV has left a lot of big laughs on the metaphorical table, but it was worth it, the writers and comics concluded—“it” being to divide the nation, insult half of all potential viewers, and abandon their supposed mission of being as funny as possible without playing favorites, and politics be damned—to “get Trump” and make the world safe for Woke Fascism.

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Worse Than A Mere “Unethical Quote,” Lawrence O’Donnell’s Rationalization For Theft Marks Him As An Ethics Corrupter

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell has all sorts of red flags in his resume. He went to Harvard for one thing, and describes himself as a “European socialist.” At Harvard you can’t major in journalism: you work on the daily paper, The Crimson. O’Donnell didn’t do that: he wrote for the fake news satirical student publication, the Lampoon. O’Donnell became an openly biased and agenda-driven MSNBC news anchor by making TV contacts while writing scripts for TV’s imaginary leftist nirvana White House fantasy, “The West Wing.” Later he was Keith Olberman’s stand-in on MSNBC, which should tell you all you need to know.

And yet…much as I fart in his general direction, as he personifies just how vile MSNBC is and just how self-lobotomizing anyone is who uses it to get their “news,” I am shocked at the degraded character and shame-free embrace of ethical relativism O’Donnell displayed yesterday.

The big news coming out of the “Get Trump!” fiasco in Manhattan was that the prosecution’s star witness Michael Cohen, already a disbarred lawyer and a convicted perjurer, further enhanced his credibility by admitting that he had stolen $30,000 from his employer and client, Donald Trump. Here is how O’Donnell described it:

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“Stop Making Me Defend Justice Alito!”—The Stupid Sequel

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

I can’t believe the Axis is still running with the ridiculous attack on Justice Alito because his house had an upside-down flag flying after the January 6, 2021 Capitol riot. I’m this close to resigning from the Association of Professional Responsibility Lawyers because so many members—about 75% of the organization is Trump-Deranged—are trying to support the claim that the episode represents “an appearance of impropriety” requiring the Justice to recuse from cases involving the election, trump, or future elections.

Ann Althouse somehow dredged up this follow up by a silly substacker named Chris Geidner who claims to be an “award-winning journalist.’ People actually pay to read what this idiot writes? Clearly, I’m doing something wrong….

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Unethical Quote of the Week: NBC’s “Meet the Press” Host Kristen Welker

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

“Will you accept the election results no matter what happens?”

—Kristin Welker, “Meet the Press’s” latest star in an interview of Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla), demonstrating that she’s not much of an improvement over her Democratic Party operative predecessor, Chuck Todd.

“Will you accept the election results no matter what happens?” If Welker were brilliant, which she is obviously not, I would give her credit for a masterful “when did you stop beating your wife” “gotcha!” question. As it is, I’ll credit her for giving us an invaluable example of how much the mainstream media is committed to enabling an undemocratic Democratic Party.

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In Case You Were Wondering: Yes, the Washington Post Is, In Its Panic, Even More Openly Pimping For Biden Than The New York Times

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

…which, you have to admit, is quite an achievement. It also is terrified of democracy and the just desserts its proper functioning portends, like the rest of the Axis of Unethical Conduct. For example, I am stunned that the Axis (“the resistance”/Democrats/ the mainstream media) is stooping to try to use a four year-old completely ambiguous incident involving the flying of the distress signal (and upside down U.S. flag) over the Alito home to argue for the Justice’s recusal from any of the Trump cases that may come the Supreme Court’s way. Senator Durbin, among the more shameless Senators, is beating that DOA metaphorical horse; depressingly, some of my Trump-Deranged colleagues in the Association of Professional Responsibility Lawyers are arguing that the complaint against Alito is valid, even though his wife flew the flag, and if she didn’t nobody can prove otherwise.

Nothing approaches, however, the Washington Post editorial on May 8th in which the paper directly stated in black-and-white that the threat of Donald Trump being elected was so dire that it justifies Machiavellian measures. “So trim your principles, Democrats, and pander away,” the Post concludes. ” Just remember: The only thing worse than playing Machiavelli for a good cause is playing Machiavelli for a good cause and losing.” This monstrosity actually appears to argue that its okay if Biden’s tactics to win the election ends up killing some blacks, as long as Trump is defeated. Collateral damage, I guess.

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I Wonder: Does the New York Times Know That Carol Moseley Braun Isn’t A Persuasive Argument For The Intrinsic Diversity Value of Black Female Senators?

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Or does it know but doesn’t want its readers to know?

The Times headline must have been labored over intensely to come up with a phrasing that didn’t read immediately as racially biased, since what is being described is racial bias, if standard “good” racial bias : “Democrats Aim for a Breakthrough for Black Women in the Senate.” The “breakthrough” is electing black women rather than white women or men, meaning that the party is declaring a preference for candidates based on gender and color. Funny, that was called bigotry when I was a lad. But black women are better than white women or any kind of man. Or they deserve success and power more. Or something: I better read my DEI manual again.

But never mind: it was the beginning of the article that struck me like a John Wayne punch in the jaw:

Carol Moseley Braun, one of only two Black women to have been elected to the Senate in U.S. history, was in Paris on Wednesday when she was informed that another Black woman, Angela Alsobrooks, had won the Democratic nomination for an open Senate seat in Maryland.

“Praise the Lord,” she said with relief and surprise. “That’s wonderful.”

…“It’s been a long time coming,” said Ms. Moseley Braun, who became the first Black female senator when she was elected from Illinois in 1992 and now serves as chairwoman of the United States African Development Foundation. The second, from California, is now the vice president, Kamala Harris. A third, Laphonza Butler, Democrat of California, was appointed to fill a vacant seat, but is not running for re-election.

Ah, Carol Moseley Braun! (That’s her above.)The first, “historic” black female Senator was, not to beat around the bush, a serial crook, protected by the corrupt Democratic establishment under Bill Clinton, and now by the New York Times, because anything that undermines the DEI, “good discrimination” narrative isn’t news “fit to print,” or in this instance, history fit to print.

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I Hate to Say “I Told You So,” But I Told You So: Tucker Carlson Had Shown Himself To Be Exactly What Ethics Alarms Said He Was…

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

… a smug, narcissistic, ethics-challenged, unprincipled, Machiavellian demagogue who helps pollute our civic discourse rather than enhance it. Of course, Tucker had already proved that, but because he was fairly articulately bloviating cherished right-wing talking points and arguments every night on his top-rated Fox News show, conservatives and Republicans were blinded to his rather obvious flaws. (Do I have to post the Cognitive Dissonance Scale again? Nah, I’ll just link to the tag this time…)

Upon the arrival of Carlson’s 100th show since Fox News fired him (one more example of doing the right thing for the wrong reasons), several publications have noted that Carlson’s focus has descended into cheap tabloid territory as he desperately seeks publicity, clicks and eyeballs. Of course he has. Carlson doesn’t need the money (he’s a trust fund kid and has a net worth estimated at $30 million); he could easily maintain whatever integrity he had and present serious, useful analysis from the conservative side on whatever platform he used as he waits for his Fox contract to run out. Nah, he wants fame and power. Sooooo….(From Unherd)

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Stop Making Me Defend Justice Alito!

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Ugh. The old “public officials are responsible for keeping their wives in line” canard, which for some reason is only applied to conservatives by the mainstream news media. Or we could file this under “Hail Mary attempts to get the Supreme Court’s conservative Justices to recuse themselves so SCOTUS won’t strike down the totalitarian Left’s conspiracy to “get” Donald Trump by any means necessary, and law, ethics and democracy be damned.”

A New York Times headline yesterday shouted, “At Justice Alito’s House, a ‘Stop the Steal’ Symbol on Display.” Wow, what symbol was that? It was an upside-down American flag, seen flying over (much reviled, almost as much as Clarence Thomas) Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s house for a few days in January 2021. Because the flag was up in the period between the January 6 riot at the Capitol Joe Biden’s inauguration, the Times infers that the flag meant that Alito thinks the 2020 election was stolen from former President Trump.

Of course the Times dredged up some unethical ethics experts to deceive their readers about the seriousness of this. “Judicial experts said in interviews that the flag was a clear violation of ethics rules, which seek to avoid even the appearance of bias, and could sow doubt about Justice Alito’s impartiality in cases related to the election and the Capitol riot,” writes the Times, ostentatiously avoiding mentioning the names of the experts who said, as I would have, “What? This is nothing!”

“It might be his spouse or someone else living in his home, but he shouldn’t have it in his yard as his message to the world,” said Professor Amanda Frost at the University of Virginia law school. This is “the equivalent of putting a ‘Stop the Steal’ sign in your yard, which is a problem if you’re deciding election-related cases,” she said.

Uh, no it’s not, but that analysis is the equivalent of the professor wearing an “I am a partisan hack!” sign on her forehead.

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