Journalism & Media

Ignorant and Stupid Headline of the Year (So Far): Citizen Free Press

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

“DEI comes for Romeo and Juliet”

As EA columnist Curmie likes to say, and I’m sure he will, “Oh bloody hell.”

Citizen Free Press has taken over the conservative news aggregator title from the once ubiquitous Drudge Report, after the latter went pseudo-woke and virulently Trump-Deranged. CFP is conservative and Trump-lovin’ all righ; it’s headline links are also frequently juvenile (“Nancy Pelosi should have kept her pie-hole shut!”). Now we know that nobody connected with the website 1) knows more about theater, drama and Shakespeare than the average Frisbee and 2) doesn’t know what DEI means despite constantly complaining about it.

The linked story tells us that a West End production of “Romeo and Juliet” in London will feature a white actor as Romeo and a black actress as Juliet.

Non-traditional casting has been flourishing in the theater at all levels since at least the 1970s, and creative casting and conceptions of “Romeo and Juliet” are among the most common and varied of theatrical practices. Casting a mixed race couple in that classic tragedy is almost as routine now as casting two white lovers. (I saw a production with that mix just last year). There have been professional versions with two men as R&J, two women, two “non-binaries.” There have been production in which the doomed lovers are played by septuagenarians. The Montegues and Capulets have been transported to China, the African Plains, the hillbilly Appalachians a la Hatfield and McCoys, and galaxies far, far away.

Some of these wild re-workings of the ancient script have been good and even great. Do the right-wing dufusses who run the site not know about the obscure musical called “West Side Story,” in which “Romeo,” aka “Tony” is white, and “Juliet,” or “Maria,” is Puerto Rican? That “DEI” version premiered in 1957.

To sum up: there is nothing “DEI” or even novel about mixed-race casting of “Romeo and Juliet,” or any Shakespeare play, for that matter.

Jeez, conservatives…you really have to get out more. Try to keep up. That was pathetic.

No Wonder We Can’t Trust Political Journalists If They Do THIS…

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Why am I not surprised?

White House correspondents are constantly stealing things from Air Force One. In February, the president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, Kelly O’Donnell , felt compelled to send what was described as a “terse email” to her colleagues reminding them taking items like embroidered pillowcases, wine glasses, whiskey tumblers, blankets and gold-rimmed dinner plates “reflects poorly” on the press corps as a whole.

Really? I did not know that! Who would have guessed? Thanks, Kelly!

Actually, O’Donnell’s warning received no responses at all, reportedly, though one member of the press corps apparently returned a pillowcase he had pilfered.

Politico reports that this has been going on for a long time, with reporters stealing taxpayer purchased items with the Air Force One insignia on it being treated as a “rite of passage.” “On my first flight, the person next to me was like, ‘You should take that glass,’” one current White House reporter told Politico. And then the corrupting correspondent “was like”—OK, guess the rationalization.

Come on, guess! I’ll give you 30 seconds….

Time’s up! Politico quotes thusly: “They were like: ‘Everyone does it.’” Ah yes, the #1 Rationalization of them all, and the watermark of the ethically unlettered, “Everybody Does It.” Politico: “Several colleagues of one former White House correspondent for a major newspaper described them hosting a dinner party where all the food was served on gold-rimmed Air Force One plates, evidently taken bit by bit over the course of some time” and ” Reporters recalled coming down the back stairs after returning to Joint Base Andrews in the evening with the sounds of clinking glassware or porcelain plates in their backpacks.”

Politico apparently thinks this is all hilarious, ending its story with a facetious, “Are you IN POSSESSION OF AIR FORCE ONE DINNERWARE? We want to hear from you. And we’ll keep you anonymous! Email us at westwingtips@politico.com.“

We receive our information about the work of our President and his staff through the filter of people without even rudimentary ethics alarms: arrogant, unprofessional, untrustworthy and self-indulging assholes.

The New York Times Uses Joe Lieberman’s Death to Spread the 2000 Election Big Lie Again

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

The just can’t help themselves. In “Revisiting Florida 2000 and the Butterfly Effect,” New York Times reporter reminds readers (or as I would prefer to ssay, “whines”) that “the evidence is strong that Al Gore would have won had it not been for an infamous ballot design in Palm Beach County.” The Times will not, when Jimmy Carter dies, reminisce that “the evidence is strong” that if Jimmy Carter had not used the single Presidential debate against Ronald Reagan to appeal to the authority of his then 13-year old daughter Amy regarding nuclear proliferation, Carter would have been elected to a second term,” but then that wouldn’t have given the hypocritical paper an opportunity to claim, falsely and with complete knowledge that the claim was false, that Reagan’s history-altering election wasn’t legitimate. Nate Cohn, one of the rising leftist propagandists in the Times stable of dishonest pundits, does pivot to that claim regarding George W. Bush’s election.

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The Axis Alerts Us That It Intends to Try Impeachment Plan C Again

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

The “Get Trump!” cabal is beginning to remind me of nothing so much as the Terminator as described by Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn) to a skeptical and terrified Linda Hamilton in the scene above. “That Terminator is out there. It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It can’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop. Ever. Until you are dead.” One of the main reasons that I wish the country had some safer and more reasonable option than Trump with whom to seek refuge from the totalitarian-aspiring Democrats’ blundering attempts to remake American society into some kind of socialist hellscape is that again, the “resistance,”/Democratic Party/mainstream media alliance (the Axis of Unethical Conduct) will be spending his entire term of office in furious efforts to to deny Trump the power and prestige of the Presidency while turning as much of the public as possible against him irrespective of his policies, actions or accomplishments. They can’t be bargained with. They can’t be reasoned with. They absolutely will not stop.

We were shown this once again with today’s new appeal to Plan C among the Trump impeachment/coup theories. “Trump’s Social Media Company Opens New Avenue for Conflicts of Interest: Ethics experts say Trump Media, now a publicly traded company, would present a new way for foreign actors or others to influence Donald J. Trump, if he is elected president.”

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Notes on “Misinformation”

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Note #1: See the chart above? Gee, what a surprise. Researchers found that the “factchecking” business is overwhelmingly biased toward progressives, Democrats, and the whole Axis agenda. I suppose research was needed to prove the obvious; so many people denied this because they were a) gullible, b) stupid, or c) lying. Yes, the study is from Harvard, but I think you can trust the rotting university this time.

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Unethical Quote of the Month: Lawrence Martin

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

“The greater likelihood is that extremes of free speech will continue to be tolerated, creating a pathway for more Donald Trumps.”

—Washington, D.C.-based journalist Lawrence Martin, a Canadian journalist, bemoaning how the “elites” no longer control the limits of free speech because of the internet, and the results are disastrous in a column titled, “Excessive free speech is a breeding ground for more Trumps.”

Even though this guy could be classified as a Canadian journalist, make no mistake: he is stating out loud how a large component, even a majority perhaps, feels about freedom of speech when it doesn’t stop with letting  journalists and their favorite politicians and glitterati say, state and opine about what ever they want in the public square. This is exactly what “saying the quiet part out loud” means.

For that, I suppose we should be thankful to Martin. I would say we should also be thankful that he almost exclusively writes for Canadian publications—you know, the ones that cover the Great Stupid infected country to the north that is seriously considering a law,  Bill C-63, that would establish life sentences for “speech crimes.” Oh, don’t worry: Martin feels that the bill goes “too far.” That’s nice. Based on his screed, I’m sure he favors lesser sentences. Continue reading →

Trump Sues ABC and Stephanopoulos For Defamation. Good.

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

EA discussed George Stephanopoulos’s unethical, partisan, and thoroughly biased interrogation of Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC.) about her endorsement of Donald Trump during the March 10 interview on ABC’s Sunday talking heads show, “This Week.” It was one of the more blatant examples of how the mainstream media’s partisan biases and “Get Trump!” slant has rampaged through U.S. journalism like a cancer, but nobody should have been shocked r surprised. Stephanopoulos was a Democratic operative and a Clinton minion when he was hired. His performance against Mace was George being George; it was not the first time his biases and dishonesty were put on display. ABC should never have hired him, but then ABC, like NBC, CBS, NPR, the New York Times, the Washington Post et al. have virtually abandoned ethical journalism for partisan advocacy.

Yesterday Trump’s lawyers filed a lawsuit over Stephanopoulos saying that Trump had been found “liable for rape.” The jury specifically found Trump liable for sexual abuse under New York law, but not rape. Under classic defamation law, falsely stating that a woman has engaged in illicit sexual activity was per se defamation, but 1) Trump isn’t a woman 2) defamation by a news source against a public figure is measured by a tougher standard under the New York Times decision, requiring “actual malice,” and 3) George was carefully tip-toeing around the edges of acceptable (under the law) celebrity smearing. I highly doubt that Trump can prevail. Nonetheless, I’m glad he filed the lawsuit…hell, I’m not paying for his lawyers. If significant numbers of Americans who have been metaphorically sleep-walking for the past 30 years or so finally see Stephanopoulos for what he is, and can connect the dots to realize what this tells us about American journalism, it will be a good thing.

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Heluva SCOTUS Choice There, Joe!

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Great. We now have a U.S. Supreme Court Justice who doesn’t like the First Amendment. The Babylon Bee hardly had to be satirical to come up with that headline. During yesterday’s oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court in Murthy v. Missouri, the newest Justice and the only one appointed by President Biden, Kentanji Brown Jackson revealed a frightening hostility to the most important guaranteed principle of American freedom from oppressive government.

“My biggest concern is that your view has the First Amendment hamstringing the government in significant ways in the most important time periods,” Jackson told Louisiana Solicitor General Benjamin Aguiñaga as he argued against allowing Big Brother to recruit Big Tech as a political ally by intimidating social media platforms into removing posts the government finds inconvenient. I read Jackson’s quotes yesterday with genuine horror. My sister, a federal litigator of liberal tendencies, had assured me that Jackson was a smart, solid, trustworthy jurist based on her experiences appearing before her. Justice Jackson may be smart, but trustworthy she isn’t. Intentionally or accidentally, President Biden’s openly DEI appointment to fill the Court slot vacated by Stephen Breyer installed the perfect tool to assist aspiring Democrat totalitarians to achieve their agendas.

Oh please, tell us again how Donald Trump is the existential threat to democracy.

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An Ethics Alarms 2-Post Mash-Up! “Stop Making Me Defend Donald Trump Especially When He Just Barely Deserves To Be Defended!” Meets “Ethics Quiz: The RBG Awards”

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

A dissent from a well-respected contributor here spawned this post. The mainstream media is still pushing the Big Lie (discussed in this post)that Donald Trump promised to unleash a “bloodbath” if he lost the upcoming election (MSNBC mentioned it several times this morning). As I was pondering the argument (prompted by this post) that Elon Musk does not deserve the RBG Leadership Award for rescuing Twitter, now “X” from the Left-wing biased and censorious cabal that had captured it, I encountered the sequence below on the platform. Musk’s version of Twitter does not ban the progressives from spreading their “misinformation,” and he allows the crucial opportunity for countering the news media that is on display. This is undeniably a good thing. And I believe the the Notorious R.B.G. would agree.

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Ethics Quote of the Month: Missouri and Louisiana

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

“The bully pulpit is not a pulpit to bully.”

—-The attorneys for Missouri and Louisiana in their U.S. Supreme Court opposition to staying the unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit order declaring that officials from the White House, the surgeon general’s office, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the F.B.I. had violated the First Amendment by secretly pressuring social media platforms to take down posts as “misinformation.”

What a great line! I’m amazed it has never been used before: an instant classic and useful quote.

Today the U.S. Supreme Court will hear the oral arguments in a case to determine whether the Biden administration violated the First Amendment in combating that endlessly useful word to progressive and Democratic censors, “misinformation,” on social media platforms. There are four case before SCOTUS on this topic, which, among other expressions of alarm, was the target of the so-called “Twitter Files” posts organized by Elon Musk in 2022.

The case being argued today, like the other ones, arose from revealed communications from administration officials urging/ persuading/ threatening social media platforms to take down Left-unfriendly posts on the Wuhan virus vaccines, the 2020 election and Hunter Biden’s laptop and other matters. Last year, the Fifth Circuit hit the Biden administration with an injunction that severely limited this tactic. The three judge panel wrote,

Defendants, and their employees and agents, shall take no
actions, formal or informal, directly or indirectly, to coerce or
significantly encourage social-media companies to remove,
delete, suppress, or reduce, including through altering their
algorithms, posted social-media content containing protected
free speech. That includes, but is not limited to, compelling the
platforms to act, such as by intimating that some form of
punishment will follow a failure to comply with any request, or
supervising, directing, or otherwise meaningfully controlling
the social-media companies’ decision-making processes.

And the Biden administration opposed that language. Let me repeat that for emphasis: the Biden administration opposed that language. This is, you will recall, the administration and the party that has based its campaign against Republicans before the election this year on the premise that it is the Republicans and their presumptive Presidential candidate, Donald Trump, who pose an existential threat to democracy. Yet these are the same aspiring totalitarians who used the power of the government—“Nice little business you have here…be a shame if anything were to happen to it!”—to secretly coerce, pressure, and infiltrate (read the whole order linked above) social media and Big Tech platforms to do their bidding regarding what opinions and assertions could be communicated by citizens.

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