Journalism & Media

“When They Go Low, We Go High…” Suuure, Democrats: You Can’t Go Much Lower Than This

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Several of my Trump Deranged, “Knee-Jerk-Democrats-To-The-Death-Even-If-Their-Party- Started-Sending-Dissenters-To-Gulags” friends tell me that they are all exited about flavor-of-the-week Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga) ending up as the Democratic Party’s Presidential nominee in 2028. Morons. Desperate morons. In addition to the fact that Democrats have painted themselves into a “must-have-a-DEI-President-or-bust” corner (I’m going to see how many of these I can have in a single post: that’s three), Ossoff has already proven that he is an irredeemable asshole. The latest smoking gun evidence was his snide innuendo that President Trump’s ever-present aide, Natalie Harp, is some kind of POTUS comfort woman.

Sen. Ossoff slimed the President this week by saying, “He doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the emir of Qatar.” The Axis loved it because its members are contemptible and have no ethical values left; Joseph Welch’s kill shot to Senator Joe McCarthy would be appropriate here if directed at “the resistance,” Democrats, progressives and the news media: “Have you no sense of decency?” No, in fact they don’t. The Axis cheers because Ossoff proved he could “troll” Trump. What he really proved is that he’s such an asshole that he would cast aspersions on a hard-working, patriotic young woman’s morals and rectitude, which in former, more ethical times would guarantee a law suit and maybe a duel.

Nevertheless, the Axis news media, disgusting and unethical to its core and getting worse by the second, pounced. “With All My Heart, Natalie.’ Trump’s Most Devoted Aide Emerges: President Trump’s White House aide Natalie Harp is always by his side. What, exactly, does she do?” snickered the New York Times. (Why look! Permanent Times Trump-slimer Maggie Haberman co-authored the piece! I’m shocked! Shocked!). Then we have similar “Riiight-she’s-his-“aide”-and you-know-what-she’s-aiding” (that’s four) stories from the The Independent, NBC News, The Guardian, MS NOW, The Hill, CBS News, Daily Mail, Bloomberg, Yahoo News, Washington Post, Daily Kos, and more. “Meet Natalie Harp, the aide so close to Trump she once rode in an SUV trunk to accompany him” slobbers CNN.  “Yes, We Absolutely Should Talk About Natalie Harp”  writes Media Matters’ (Talk about “Have you no decency?”) Paul Waldman.

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Ethics Dunce: Playboy

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Item: 2018. The Miss America Pageant puts Gretchen Carlson, former Fox blonde turned #MeToo icon, in charge. She says it is no longer a beauty pageant. Result: the end of Miss America.

Item: 2021. Victoria’s Secret brings in Megan Rapinoe, vocal butch lesbian athlete and LGBTQ activist to rebrand the female sex fantasy company. Result: Uh, no. It quickly returned to its core values after a period of confusion, sales and turnovers…which included Megan.

Item: 2023. Budweiser brings on feminist marketing VP Alissa Heinerscheid who decided America’s top-selling beer needed to be pitched to a younger market, so she made male cross-dressing self-identified female Dylan Mulvaney the symbol of Bud Light in an ad campaign, because there’s nothing that appeals to middle-aged, bear-drinking football fans like “chicks with dicks.”

I just learned that “Playboy’s” new editor is gay in “I’ll make Playboy playful again, says its new gay editor/Phillip Picardi,” Quote:

“He wants to “destigmatise male sexuality”, he says, and “help men to build a healthier relationship” with the women in their lives. “I’m hoping we can be a space for men who feel caught between needing to be manosphere-adjacent and needing to be the performative liberal male,” he says…. “We should promote the idea that we can be excited about sex and we can be excited about each other and excited about touching each other,” he says with a cheeky grin.”

To me, that model on the current Playboy cover is androgynous, scuzzy, and reminiscent of what Hustler thought was sexy. But I am not a marketing target for Playboy, (or Hustler) and never was.

“Playboy” is already the walking dead, but still, the Santayana quote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” is germane here, as is the principle that when an institution, tradition or product no longer has a place in the culture, you can’t save it by destroying its identity and integrity by pretending that it’s something else. Let these things die with dignity, or at least go down fighting.

“Baseless”?

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

How many times have you read or heard Axis “journalists,” Democrats, the Trump Deranged and your smug and brainwashed social media friends mock any suggestion…especially those by Donald Trump…that our election results are untrustworthy and the 2020 election may have been stolen, by saying the claim is “baseless”? I can find that denial in new online content still, and would, if my sock drawer wasn’t in such bad shape.

Since that election in the teeth of The Great Stupid, the assessment here on Ethics Alarms has remained the same, to wit: It is impossible to prove the election was stolen, but the suspicion is far from “baseless.” Moreover, the fact that the Axis of Unethical Conduct’s rote rebuttal continues to be that the claim is “baseless” is itself justification for that suspicion.

Democrats held their primary election for Wisconsin governor last week with the party terrified that Democratic Socialists of America candidate Francesca Hong would be the victor, putting what the party considers to be a flippable U.S. Senate seat in the hands of a nut case who wants to eliminate Thanksgiving and defund the police. Despite all pre-primary pollsters declaring that Hong had a double-digit lead over Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, Cowley managed to win the primary in the early morning hours. But something was clearly amiss.

Milwaukee Election Commissioner Paulina Gutierrez said when she arrived at the courthouse in Milwaukee County, 5 out of the 9 USB drives she brought with her did not have the absentee vote results they were supposed to contain. That amounted to 15,000 ballots, and Crowley won by only 3,783 votes. Election officials re-downloaded the missing information, or that’s what they said they were downloading, and brought the drives back to the courthouse. Crowley was declared the winner by the Associated Press at 2:34 a.m.Meanwhile, NBC News chief data analyst Steve Kornacki was on camera, so stunned he couldn’t speak.

The video of Kornacki learning about the USB debacle was posted to Twtter/ X. His long moment of stunned silence has been making its way around social media. The Daily Mail posted a section where Kornacki could not help but laugh and asked NBC News national politics reporter Ben Kamisar, “Are you serious?” when the two learned that restarting the process might take hours.

“We’re kind of, indefinitely waiting for them to get their act together here,” Kornacki told Kamisar later. “It really is coming down to this one giant update in Milwaukee, but man, we waited 90 minutes for them, they did this whole procession, and then they find out there’s nothing on the sticks,” he said. “The audience has been with us for four, six hours in some cases, for this moment that didn’t happen…I think we are gonna wrap it here, for the reasons we’re saying here … I want you to know, I hate doing this to you.”

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Flagrant Media Bias And Disinformation of the Year: NPR

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Here is how National Public Radio reported those statistics on D.C. crime on the one-year anniversary of President Trump ordering the National Guard to patrol the National Capital.

“Multiple studies have since found that the National Guard presence in D.C. has had no effect on violent crime, although there has been a decrease in opportunistic crimes like petty theft and vehicle break-ins.”

That summary arrives after NPR spends nine full paragraphs burying the lede, only to lie about what the lede is anyway.

When I read that [Aside: NPR had the gall to send me a solicitation for a contribution via email, signed by the NPR host who blackballed me as its ethics commentator for telling the truth about late-hit sexual harassment complaints, because I “seemed to be defending Donald Trump.] this morning I was genuinely puzzled. When I surfed past Fox News last night, Laura Ingraham was declaring that the statistics proved that Trump’s use of the National Guard was prudent and has been a great success. Two completely divergent news reports. This is why our journalism has become untrustworthy and dangerous. This is why civil discourse is nearly impossible, with citizens operating under competing distortions of reality.

And this is why President Trump was and is right to call our news media “enemies of the people.”

However, NPR’s distortion and deceit qualifies the network as a media Ethics Villain and an Ethics Corrupter. Note the chart above from the D.C. police site. A 32% decrease in murder is not “no effect” on violent crime. That isn’t just spin or bias, that’s a lie. NPR also plays language games, because that’s the Left’s specialty. “Opportunistic crimes like petty theft and vehicle break-ins” is the euphemism this nauseating excuse for a news organization uses to describe the following crimes that have decreased significantly in the past year in the District:

  • Robbery
  • Arson
  • Motor vehicle theft
  • Theft
  • Property crime
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Ethics Quiz: The “Incestuous” Candidacy

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Troy Jackson, the latest un-democratically selected candidate being offered to the public by Maine Democrats, is the Great White Male Hope for the unprincipled party as it tries to take over the U.S. Senate “by any means necessary.” You will recall that he became a necessary means after much-heralded lying, Nazi woman-abuser Graham Platner was revealed to be…well, a lying, Nazi woman-abuser. Oopsie!

Jackson has little in his record or character to suggest fitness to serve as a U.S. Senator, but what conservative critics are focusing their fire on is this, as the New York Post reports:

“Maine Democratic Senate candidate Troy Jackson is in a long-term relationship with his high school sweetheart — who is also his second cousin, according to a new report. Jackson, 58, and Lana Pelletier share two adult sons and the same great-grandparents, according to Thursday’s report by independent journalist Steve Robinson, who notes that such relationships are both legal under state law and not uncommon in the rural North Maine Woods region, near the Canadian border.While Jackson, a onetime logger and the former president of the Maine State Senate, has described Pelletier as his wife in the past, locals tell Robinson the couple has never been legally married.

“Jackson grew up in the village of Allagash (population 237 as of the 2020 census) and attended nearby Fort Kent High School with Pelletier.According to geneological records unearthed by Robinson, Jackson’s maternal grandmother — Albertine Pelletier O’Leary — and Pelletier’s paternal grandfather — Louis A. Pelletier Sr. — were siblings, making Jackson’s mother, Colleen McBreairty, and Pelletier’s father, Louis Jr., first cousins.Since 1985, Maine law has prohibited marriages to an individual’s parents, grandparents, children, grandchildren, siblings, nieces, nephews, aunts, or uncles.”

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of this Weekend:

Is this a legitimate campaign issue?

Legal Insurrection concludes, “All Maine Democrats had to do after Platner dropped out was find a normal person to take his place. It’s amazing that such a simple task was a challenge.” The conservative site reposts many contemptuous tweets, such as conservative pundit Jim Treacher’s…

OUT: Third Reich

IN: Second cousins

and Stephen L. Miller’s “The plan? We convince them to drop an abusive Nazi and then replace him with someone married to his own cousin.”

My view? I find this the kind of right wing “gotcha!”pearl-clutching that loses conservatives credibility. It’s mainly (Mainely?) Ick rather than ethics. He didn’t marry his cousin, he sort-of married his second cousin, which isn’t illegal incest in Maine or as far as I can find, anywhere else. Franklin D. Roosevely married and had children with his distant cousin (you’ll notice that they had the same last names). Thomas Jefferson and John Adams married third cousins; John and Abigail’s line was eventually stuffed with geniuses and high achievers. I have a long-time friend (well, she used to be a friend until Trump Derangement caused her to cut me off, and I was a particularly good and generous friend…grrrrrr!) who chose her first cousin as her third husband, which my late wife found disgusting. They were past the children stage; I found it interesting but hardly scandalous.

Wrong! Athletes Should Shut Up About Political and Social Issues and Do What They Are Paid To Do.

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

I remember sports columnist Steve Buckley, now with the Athletic (the Times’ captive sports publication) from my halcyon days in Boston. Now he’s issuing badly-reasoned, ethically blind sports commentary from a national platform. Yecchh.

As a special annoyance, his poorly-reasoned observations on sports figures weighing in on national controversies are under a misleading headline: “Aaron Rodgers, Sophie Cunningham speak out. Caitlin Clark doesn’t. Either way, they lose.” I assumed from those words that Steve was going to echo my long-time position regarding narrow-range celebrities in general: “Shut up and sing/dance/act/ dribble/run/kick/pitch.”

But no.

“…Sports people (and this includes sports media people) who weigh in on political and social issues can count on being inundated with anonymous directives that they should “stick to sports.” It’s a mystery who these people are who feel empowered to tell others to stick to sports. The mere utterance suggests somebody with a doctorate in government affairs, or who perhaps has served in Congress or the diplomatic corps. The hypocrisy is at once comical and frightening. We like it when our athletes offer their opinions on this or that issue, except when we disagree with those opinions. (Stick to sports!) And athletes who choose not to play this silly parlor game are dismissed as cowards. At the risk of boring you with seventh-grade civics, but to use a kitschy sports term to make the point, this would be a good time to have a Turn Back the Clock event that teaches and celebrates the protections of the First Amendment. And if you happen to be a member of a championship team who’s been invited to the White House, go ahead and go. Or don’t go. Do that First Amendment thing and tell everyone else to screw off. For sports people who want to take a stand on this or that issue and who are prepared to deal with the avalanche of positive and negative commentary that ensues, go right ahead. For athletes who choose to say nothing, allow them that right. Why does everything have to be so complicated?”

Because things are complicated, Steve—now I remember why I skipped your work at the Boston Herald—and because they are complicated, most sports celebrities have nothing of value to contribute in understanding them. Celebrities do, however, have outsized metaphorical megaphones that give their usually simple-minded opinions far more influence on the public than is healthy for democracy and the quality of civic discourse. I know why Buckley has his own simple-minded view of this issue: sportswriters are, with few exceptions (not him, obviously), also unqualified by intellect, education, experience and skill, to comment publicly on political and social policy matters. Like all journalists, they think they are smarter than they are. This column is a useful piece of evidence to the contrary.

The inspiration for Buckley’s piece was Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Aaron Rodgers criticizing Dr. Anthony Fauci after the Ethics Villain repeatedly invoked the Fifth Amendment during a Senate hearing last week, plus Sophie Cunningham‘s public statements regarding trans-females competing in women’s sports, along with fellow WNBA star and team mate Caitlin Clark’s refusal to get drawn into the controversy. Right off the bat (that’s a sports metaphor), Steve trips on his sneaker laces by mixing apples and oranges (a fruit analogy).

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Another Nauseating Chapter From The Presumed-Racism-and-Police- Brutality Playbook

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

This kind of confirmation bias-driven sliming of law enforcement has become the norm since the Obama Administration and its leader’s unforgivable sanctification of Trayvon Martin as his crypto-offspring because Martin was black and got himself shot. The news media loves it, however, and you know, Freedom of the Press.

Bryan Axel Ramirez Gomez (above) died in February after starting a shootout with police in Elkhart, Indiana. His last stand lasted only a few second, because two police officers who were crack shots put him down quickly and safely despite others being close to the exchange.  Yet that rather straightforward cause-and-effect result generated this headline from WNDU-TV, the NBC-owned affiliate in South Bend, about 20 miles from Elkhart, two days after the shooting:

Family of teen killed by Elkhart police seeks state investigation amid wave of violence

The deliberately anti-law enforcement and pro-deadly punk story continued,

“The family of a 17-year-old killed by Elkhart police is calling for state investigators to take over the case as the community grapples with three separate shootings and a stabbing in a 48-hour span. Bryan Axel Ramirez Gomez died Sunday around 2 a.m. in an officer-involved shooting. A memorial now sits at High Dive Park where he was killed. Alfredo Ramirez-Gomez, the teen’s brother, spoke at a vigil for Bryan on Tuesday afternoon and demanded the release of police footage: “Bryan was a bright kid, he was a member of this community, this is where he grew up,” Ramirez-Gomez said. “As for his cause of death, we can’t really point fingers yet. We just ask and demand that the footage comes out from the car and from the vest.”

Right. “We can’t point fingers yet” but Ben Crump is on our auto-dial. The response is reflex: the family is angling for a big settlement from the city. Blogger Robert Stacy McCain points out:

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As If The Fauci Scandal Wasn’t Enough “Republicans Pounce!” Fodder For The Dishonest Axis News Media…

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

It is axiomatic that whenever a news event casts legitimate shadows on Democrats, progressives or their allies, the story is framed by the Axis media as a partisan attack by the political Right (Republicans, conservatives, President Trump) with the event itself de-emphasized. “Republicans pounce!” is the short-hand name for the phenomenon.

Of course the practice is unethical and deliberately misleading. The news media’s coverage of the Fauci hearings was a classic of the genre. For example, ABC’s  correspondent Jay O’Brien said on Wednesday’s Good Morning America that the retired scientist would, at “85 years old,” have to face “a fiery hearing” because he “has long been a target of” Rand Paul, who obtained his “private diary.” Later, on World News Tonight O’Brien described Fauci as “the man millions of Americans turned to for answers during the COVID pandemic” now being “needled” by Republicans even though he “served in government for 54 years and has testified in more than 200 hearings.”

That commentary is revolting in its mendacity. People who do bad things need to be held responsible, and how old they happen to be when the piper must be paid is irrelevant. Citing Fauci’s age was a pure appeal to emotion: “Aw, poor old guy, can’t they just leave him alone?” The diary, legally and factually, was not private because it was created on a government platform. Yeah, sure, millions of Americans turned to Fauci for answers, including the President, and he lied to them all, repeatedly, or gave wrong answers.

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The ABA’s President Displays Why Every Non-Lawyer Doesn’t—and Shouldn’t— Trust Lawyers

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

“This is embarrassing,” Rep. Brandon Gill said, as Michelle A. Behnke ( from Madison, Wisconsin—of course she is), the president of the American Bar Association (ABA) repeatedly refused to answer direct questions, was infuriatingly evasive and displayed nauseating hypocrisy and dishonesty as Rep. Brandon Gill questioned her regarding DEI, bias and discrimination. It was embarrassing, for Democrats, progressives, fans of permanent anti-white discrimination, members of the ABA (the largest American bar association, which I refuse to join expressly because of the organization’s lack of integrity ) so flamingly displayed by Behnke, and especially all lawyers. How can the public trust a “profession” that allows such a shifty, pusillanimous, dishonest individual to represent it by leading its members’ largest and most prestigious organization?

I say this as a legal ethicist: It can’t.

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The Horror. The President Is Putting Statues Of Founders In The Rose Garden

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

President Donald Trump had a statue of Thomas Jefferson placed in the Rose Garden last week, bringing to five the number of sculptures he has added this year. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton, and a sculpture honoring Revolutionary War soldiers preceded the one honoring our third President and the author of the Declaration of Independence.

Naturally the Washington Post is sneering at the project, even going to the trouble of finding an expert, Maxwell Anderson, the former president of the Association of Art Museum Directors, to sniff that the statues statues are of “negligible artistic value.” You know, not like the Obama Presidential Library…

…or the obscene thing supposedly representing the Kings embracing

…or the King Memorial, which makes me think of Han Solo hanging on Jabba the Hutt’s wall.

The Jefferson statue is of “negligible artistic value” because President Trump selected it, just as the Reflecting Pool upgrade has to be mocked and sabotaged because it is this President’s project. Trump Derangement is pure Cognitive Dissonance Scale craziness: the President’s endorsement of dogs—fortunately he is the only POTUS in memory who hasn’t put a dog in the White House as a political prop—would have much of the Left siding with Mamdani’s anti-canine Muslims.

The statues are also irritants to the Axis and pals because the Rose Garden sculptures that arrived before Tom’s are on loan from Harland Crow, the conservative billionaire who has lavished gifts on Clarence Thomas. That’s also cognitive dissonance at work where it doesn’t belong. The owner of artwork has no relevance to the quality of the art, just as the character of the artist is irrelevant to any assessment of the artist’s work. There should be nothing controversial about the White House honoring patriots and Founders on its grounds, and there isn’t. No Chief Executive in our history has been so absurdly attacked over non-substantive matters. President Trump’s real offense is that he dared to persevere into the headwinds of presumed leftist dominance and prevailed. How dare he?

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