Journalism & Media

Thoughts About The Axis News Media Burying The Minnesota Fraud Scandals…

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

This is the season of holiday wishes, reflections and aspirations. Do you know what my Ethics Alarms wish is? I wish that at least one reader, ideally one of our five commenters, would finally write in saying something like,

“I have to confess, I’ve been denying your regular, almost annoyingly repetitious assertions that the mainstream media is biased, that it is a member of what you call the Axis of Unethical Conduct, that the major legacy media sources now practice progressive, Democratic Party propaganda to the exclusion of balanced and fair (that is, ethical) journalism, that this results in a profound warping of the Democratic process, that the news media is in fact dedicated to promoting the power of the Democratic Party and its anti-American policy agenda, and that Donald Trump was correct when he pronounced the news media the ‘enemy of the people.’ But I can’t in good conscience deny this any more. You are right, and have been right all along.”

Actually there is one kamikaze commenter who should write this but who is banned and I still won’t let his comment stay up even if he does. With that single obnoxious exception, however, yes, that admission would make my year…not that the conclusion shouldn’t have been screamingly obvious to everyone for years.

I was thinking about this as I observed the current unethical news media self-indicting efforts to pretend that the unfolding Minnesota fraud scandal in the Somali community and elsewhere is a footnote to the “real” news. The Times did a relatively thorough report a full month ago; it has been fairly silent since, however, as the full expanse of the fraud scandal has unfolded. Network news has largely ignored the story too. Incredibly, the Minnesota Star-Tribune did not include the scandal in its 2025 list of top news stories. Today in CNN’s list of “Five things” readers should know about, developments in the Minnesota story is nowhere to be seen.

According to Axios, the Somali 9 billion dollar scamming wasn’t one of the top search topics, unlike Bad Bunny and Stephen Colbert (See, you have to know about a topic in order to search for it…well played, “journalists”!) The Hill gives us another classic example today of the oft-mentioned phenomenon that when Democrats have been caught in scandals or misconduct, it is the Republican/MAGA reaction that is the news: “MAGA World zeroes in on Minnesota over fraud scandal.” Other examples this month: The Guardian: “The right wing has seized on fraud cases in the state” and ABC News: “Trump has seized on the ballooning controversy in recent days …”

Other diversionary framing include the panic in the Somali community as ICE cracks down on Minnesota’s large unassimilated community consisting of people whose native culture regards cheating the government as a good thing. “ICE pounces!” is that theme. This is CNN: Anxiety grips Minneapolis’s Somali community as immigration agents zero in on the Twin Cities.

It isn’t only the Somalis: Minnesota, under the watchful eye of knuckleheaded Governor Tim Walz, has a fraud problem throughout its social welfare system. Why is an amateur Youtuber, Nick Shirley, making headlines with his Boy Scout merit badge-level investigative reporting? Where are the pros? Why wasn’t “60 Minutes” on this story like bees on a honeypot? CBS news reported the Somali scandal on December 11, but it’s been crickets since. But Shirley uncovered another Minnesota fraud, a hilarious one, last week: a Somali-owned daycare center with no children and a sign reading “Quality Learing Center.” The Quality Learing Center received $4,000,000 from Minnesota taxpayers.

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Last Head Explosion of 2025 (I Hope)

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Before I post a more substantial essay today I will have to puck the skull pieces and brain bits off of my living room ceiling, carpet, furniture and TV screen after making the mistake of watching CNN’s Abby Phillip show for ten minutes. As usual, her panel of partisan idiots (with the exception of CNN token Republican Scott Jennings) were babbling on with today’s Trump hate. I expected that, but as I routinely switch channels whenever this thing passes my eyes, I did not expect that the level of discourse would be beneath what I would expect late in a cast party when all of the woke actors are half- or totally crocked.

There was no expertise, useful analysis or objective commentary at all, just indignant repetition of Axis talking points as fact: gaslighting, or fake news for the ignorant and gullible. “Trump has used the Executive Orders to get around Congress, and changed the Presidency by doing so!” (Barack Obama openly and specifically established this as a “norm.”) “Trump just defies the Constitution and the Supreme Court lets him get away with it!” (The comment came up regrading SCOTUS taking up the birthright issue, regarding which the Trump administration has made a legal argument, and has not defied the Constitution.) “Yes! It’s just like abortion…” (No, you idiot, it is not “like abortion.” Abortion was never mentioned in the Constitution: an activist Court bent the document out of shape to turn abortion into a right that not a single Founder would have endorsed. Birthright citizenship IS in the Constitution, which is why it is unlikely that the Trump theory will prevail.) “Everything Trump does is to line his own pockets!” (Pure talking point, and one that I read or hear every single day from the Trump Deranged. How does enforcing the immigration laws, purging illegal discrimination against whites and men and trying to dismantle mainstream media and educational political manipulation “line his pockets”? “The economy is in bad shape!” (The third quarter (July-Sept) Gross Domestic Product (GDP) rose by a 4.3% annualized rate, the best in two years, which means that the economy is not in bad shape, but never mind.) And so on. All the women on the panel were wild eyed and angry (this is not professional deportment for television “journalism,” and the men, with the exception of Jennings, sat back and sagely nodded their head,s quickly shutting up if they tried to make a factual correction and were shouted over. Jennings just composed his next articulate rebuttal in his head, and waited for an opening.

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Flashback: Depressing How Little Has Changed In 16 Long Years…

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I was looking for an appropriate “Night Before Christmas” post and found this instead, a parody I wrote on Christmas Eve in 2009, the very first year of Ethics Alarms, in reaction to the ethically-tainted passage of the “Affordable Care Act,” which didn’t make health care affordable. I knew the bill was smoke and mirrors and that it would not accomplish what it was supposed to do.  I knew that we would be in one mess or another as a result of the ugly thing, supposedly the signature legislation of the Obama Administration…and sad thing is that it probably was. What does that tell you?

I was struck, as you will be, how much of my mordant satire seems relevant today, and how little has changed.

So let’s travel back to that halcyon year, and the day before Christmas…

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Christmas Eve Ethics Dunce: Jazz Drummer Chuck Redd

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Because he is angry at President Trump and the Kennedy Center board for adding the President’s name to the cultural center, musician Chuck Redd cancelled the Christmas Eve jazz concert at the Kennedy Center that has been a tradition for more than 20 years. “When I saw the name change on the Kennedy Center website and then hours later on the building, I chose to cancel our concert,” Redd told The Associated Press . Redd is a drummer and vibraphone player who has presided over holiday “Jazz Jams” at the Kennedy Center since 2006.

Well, jazz musicians aren’t known for their critical thinking skills or ethics acumen. Let me get this straight, Chuck: you think a fair way to punish Trump and the board for the name change is to disappoint jazz fans in the Washington area who had nothing to do with the decision. Nice.

What an asshole.

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Donald and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Week, Part I: 4 Self-Inflicted Wounds

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

I began by titling this depressing post “Incompetent Elected Official of the Month: President Trump,” but that seemed inadequate somehow. Maybe there’s no heading that could adequately express what an awful week the President had, how it was entirely unnecessary, how all of his deep political wounds were self-inflicted (okay, his clueless Chief of Staff helped), how much harm it did to his administration, influence and prospects of success, and how much he helped the Axis of Unethical Conduct when without his assistance the serious news would have had it staggering. <Breathe, Jack, breathe!>

EA covered three of the epic fiascos, but now I have to cover the fourth. The others were, in chronological order,

1. Trump’s petty, cruel, stupid attack on beloved director Rob Reiner immediately after he and his wives were stabbed to death by their son. I believe that his infamous Truth Social post may prove to be the tipping point in his administration. Recall that the Bush II Presidency was sent into a death spiral even before the 2008 economic crash because he was vacation when Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans and flew over the devastation. Then the inept Democratic mayor of the city, with help from Kanye West, successfully created the narrative that Bush shrugged off the disaster because he “didn’t care about black people.”

2. Trump’s presumed-competent Chief of Staff inexplicably gives interviews to a 100% anti-Trump Axis member, Vanity Fair, in which she dished about colleagues, suggested chaos in the White House, and opined that the President resembled an alcoholic even though he is a lifetime abstainer.

3. Trump allows his hand-picked Kennedy Center board to add the President’s name to the landmark, launched as a memorial to President Kennedy in the wake of his nation-shattering assassination, and to quickly plaster it on the front of the building. This was so stupid and gratuitous that I don’t want to think about it, but it sure gave my Trump Deranged theater friends on Facebook ammunition.

But wait, there’s more!

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The President Sues the BBC, and It’s the Right Thing To Do.

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

The complaint filed yesterday in the Southern District of Florida states:

‘In the BBC Panorama documentary titled “Trump: A Second Chance”… first broadcast on October 28,2024, the BBC intentionally and maliciously sought to fully mislead its viewers around the world by splicing together two entirely separate parts of President Trump’s speech on January 6, 2021…. The Panorama Documentary deliberately omitted another critical part of the Speech in such a manner as to intentionally misrepresent the meaning of what President Trump said. The Panorama Documentary falsely depicted President Trump telling supporters: “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be there with you. And we fight. We fight like hell and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”… 

President Trump never uttered this sequence of words. This fabricated depiction of President Trump during the Speech was false, deceptive, and defamatory given that President Trump’s actual and full remarks during the Speech were (a) “Now it is up to Congress to confront this egregious assault on our democracy. And after this, we’re going to walk down and I’ll be there with you. We’re going to walk down, we’re going to walk down. Anyone you want but I think right here, we’re going to walk down to the Capitol and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressman and women, and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them” (Remarks made on January 6, 2021, 12:12p.m. Eastern Standard Time, 14:52 into the Speech), and then, much later, (b) “[B]ut I said ‘Something’s wrong here, Something’s really wrong, can’t have happened.’ And we fight, we fight like hell, and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore,” (Remarks made on January 6, 2021 at 1:07 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, 69:30 into the Speech). 

“Moreover, the BBC purposefully omitted President Trump stating, less than one minute after urging supporters to cheer for their senators and congressmen, “I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard” (Remarks made on January 6, 2021, 12:13 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, 15:48 into the Speech).”

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President Trump Is Spot-On About Signers For The Deaf. Of Course He’s Going To Be Attacked For It.

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

All the headlines and articles about this ongoing example of political correctness and the tyranny of a minority in action are sneering and biased. “Sign language services ‘intrude’ on Trump’s ability to control his image, administration says,” is PBS’s intro. The President is right: there is no need or justification for a signer to be standing in view while the President of the United States is addressing the nation. None. Nada. Zilch. It is distracting, of course it is. I wrote this on the issue eight years ago. Just substitute President Trump’s name for Rick Scott, and that’s the bulk of my commentary today.

“Yesterday I watched Florida Governor Rick Scott give his pre-hurricane warnings, or tried to, since standing next to him was a signer for the deaf, gesticulating and making more elaborate faces than the late Robin Williams in the throes of a fit. I have mentioned this in the context of theatrical performances: as a small minority, the deaf should not be enabled by political correctness to undermine the best interests of the majority. What Scott was saying was important, and could have been adequately communicated to the deaf citizens present by the signer standing off camera. TV viewers could and should have been able to watch a text crawl following Scott’s speech, or closed captioning. Public speaking involves verbal and visual communications, and having a vivid distraction like a professional signer—many of whom feel it is their duty to add broad facial expressions to their translations—is unfair to both the speaker and his or her audience. This is one more example of a sympathetic minority bullying the majority to establish its power.”

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If Ann Althouse Read Ethics Alarms As Often As I Read Her Blog, She Would Have the Answer to This Question…

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

I generally check out Althouse’s blog every few days because 1) she’s a smart and independent moderate, and a source of objective and unbiased takes on political events and media coverage of them 2) she’s a retired law professor with time on her hands, and thus finds possible ethics topics that I might normally miss and 3) she’s really, really weird, with obsessions about word usage, Bob Dylan, her blog’s tags (almost nobody uses the tags, reading her blog or this one), Saturday Night Live, drawings of rats (thankfully expired) and, lately, Grok. But she wouldn’t even add Ethics Alarms to her list of useful blog links (I asked), then decided not to have any blog links.

Well, I’m smart; I’m not dumb like everybody says and I want respect! If she bothered to check in on EA, she would have had an easy answer to what was a blog topic for her this week: “Help me think of a term to apply to articles like this, something that expresses why it bothers me so much, was her headline. It’s not ‘fake news,’ because it’s not even news.” The article was the Washington Post’s “Trump leans into isolation as challenges mount at home.”

Well to begin with, it is “fake news,” Counsellor. It is a news item presented by a journalist as news, and Ann herself agrees it isn’t news: that’s fake news by definition. Now I have regrets that I never completed my promised compendium of all the varieties of fake news engaged in by our biased and corrupt news media. I know I promised that a long time ago, and yes, I still think it’s relevant and important. “Fake news” is one of Trump’s most valuable additions to our lexicon, and he’s had several.

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Prof. Turley Calls “False Light” on House Democrats Sleazy Epstein Photos Smear

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

I hate that I am tempted to write this every day now, often several times a day, but how can anyone of good character and admirable values continue to support a political party, whatever its claimed beliefs are, that behaves this way?

Yesterday EA discussed the desperate Democratic Party tactic of picking 19 photos (out of thousands) that showed a young Donald Trump (and other progressive hate-objects, like Alan Dershowitz and Steve Bannon) in the company of sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein when he was known as just another billionaire on the celebrity party circuit or in the company of unidentified women. These were described in some of the Axis media as “bombshell” and “explosive” photos, though it is unclear when and where most of the photos were taken, many of them had been publicly released before, and none of them suggested any criminal, illicit or even unethical activity.

Despite that, political hack Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) had the gall to say, “These disturbing photos raise even more questions about Epstein and his relationships with some of the most powerful men in the world. We will not rest until the American people get the truth.”

He might as well have added, “And we won’t stop lying about this phony Epstein scandal either until we Get Trump!”

Today Professor Jonathan Turley, a one-time Democrat who is obviously disgusted with Democrats, pointed out that what his former party has done with the photos is a classic example of a tort known as “false light,” where true photos are presented in a misleading and harmful way to damage a reputation or otherwise harm an individual via innuendo . It is essentially photographic deceit. He writes,

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An Inquirer Asks, “How Can I Stop My Wife From Badgering Our Friends About Climate Change?” How About….

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

…showing her that her hysteria is based on lies, bad stats, politicized “science” and hooey?

I admit it, that headline sucked me in to reading “Social Q’s,” a Times advice column that puts wokeness over wisdom, causing me to put it on the EA blacklist.

“My wife has become an eco-warrior,” a married weenie writes. “She has strong feelings about the environment and other people’s carbon footprints. She challenges our friends repeatedly about their lifestyle choices. I agree with her in principle, but I can’t support her moral outrage. …Help!“

Predictably, the column’s proprietor, Phillip Galanes, begins by saying, “I would begin by praising her, rightfully, for her commitment to an important issue.” I’ll fix it for him: “an important issue that nobody really knows much about, especially indoctrinated progressives who are passionate about what their bubble-mates are passionate about regardless of facts.”

Much better.

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