Journalism & Media

Ethics Dunce: National Public Radio

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

…or maybe I’m the Ethics Dunce: I assume that NPR’s management cares whether half the country sees it as progressive cant parrot and a water-carrier for the Democratic Party. Maybe they don’t; maybe they have assumed deplorables don’t listen to “Marketplace” and “Fresh Air,” and certainly don’t contribute much during radiothons. I know I don’t touch the local NPR stations (there are two of them) ever since the “Car Talk” guys ended up in the garage for good and after I was dumped as NPR’s ethics guy because I was insufficiently critical of Donald Trump.

Where was I? Oh, right….National Public Radio appointed a new CEO, Katherine Maher, who had to hustle to scrub her social media record after the announcement because she periodically issued intemperate woke garbage in the past. Among the gems tracked down by reporter Shannon Thaler at the New York Post,

  • “Trump is a racist.”
  • “I mean, sure, looting is counter-productive. But it is hard to be mad about protests not prioritizing the private property of a system of oppression founded on treating people’s ancestors as private property”
  • “white silence is complicity”
  • “I grew up feeling superior (hah, how white of me) because I was from New England and my part of the country didn’t have slaves, or so I’d been taught.”

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Ethics Quote of the Week: Fox News Comic Greg Gutfeld

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

“Everyone understands how bad the world would be without journalists because we haven’t had any for decades.”

—Fox News court jester Greg Gutfeld, justly mocking the whines of the Washington Post’s ridiculous Taylor Lorenz about the lay-offs in her profession, if it can be called that any more.

The rest of his rant is amusing and well-deserved, but that single sentence is enough to accurately describe the failure of Lorenz’s colleagues and peers, and the total lack of self-awareness displayed by this inexplicably employed hack, who, in a typical outburst last month, proclaimed that “Anyone who’s worked as a journalist at the [New York Times] knows that journalists there are absolutely allowed to loudly espouse political opinions, you just have to espouse the *right* political opinions. Right wing opinions are fine, left wing opinions are not.”

It’s Come To This: Snopes Spins Madly To Claim the President Doesn’t Look Ridiculous

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Presidents through the years have frequently allowed themselves to be photographed looking silly. My favorite example, which I first saw and giggled over at about the age of 10, is the famous shot above of dour Calvin Coolidge wearing an India headdress. Author Josh King wrote in “Dukakis and the Tank” that the first rule of political photo ops is “Never put anything on your head!” Before Coolidge put on the headdress while being named an honorary chief in Deadwood, South Dakota during a campaign stop in 1927, advisors told him he would “look funny.” “Well it’s good for people to laugh, isn’t it?” Coolidge replied.

I would like to think that President Biden had the same rationale for wearing his hard-hat backwards at a bar with some union construction workers…

…but I fear that in his current deteriorating mental state he could mistake Jill for a hat.

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A Boomerang For Republicans In New Hampshire [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

OperationChaosII

You may recall that Rush Limbaugh was lambasted in the non-conservative media when in March of 2008  he launched Operation Chaos.  Rush directed his zombie followers to vote in Democratic primaries for Hillary Clinton to stop Barack Obama from clinching the Democratic nomination early and to maximize the chances of a messy Democratic nominating convention. In 2016, Rush declared Operation Chaos, The Sequel open for business.   He instructed the Dittoheads to vote for socialist Bernie Sanders, whom none of them would consider voting for in a real election even if someone was pulling their fingernails out with pliers to make them Bernie Bros.  Instapundit, Newsbusters and other rightward sites cheered Operation Chaos II on.  As Ethics Alarms concluded at the time, “Conservatives are no more ethical than progressives, it’s just that their lack of ethics expresses itself in different ways.”

Or the same ways, in some cases. Trump Derangement, after all, justifies anything and everything, so Democrats in New Hampshire pulled off their own version of Operation Chaos (and didn’t even give credit to Rush, since departed to that Big Talk Show in the Sky, for their inspiration).

Exit polls in the New Hampshire primary indicated that  70% of Nikki Haley’s votes came from from non-Republicans who, at least one analyst surmised,  had no intention of voting for her in a general election. They would be Biden voters, presumably, and some said so. More non-Republicans voted for Haley, in fact, than Republicans. (Also, Haley got more votes than the President did, but you had to write in Joe’s name, so that may not mean much.) Haley received a paltry 40,938 Republican votes compared to Trump’s 172,202, but the Left’s version of Rush’s unethical stunt allowed the mainstream media to spin the results into a “Trump is weaker than he thought” narrative.

In 2016, I wrote that “Rush’s steaming pile of depraved Machiavellianism is not worth my composing a new brief against it.” Then, I reprinted part of what I had written  about Operation Chaos the first time. For the sequel, I substituted Bernie for Hillary. This time, I’ll use Nikki Haley, and I also have to replace “Republicans” with “Democrats” and strike the references to conservative pundits like Mark Levin who were cheering on Rush’s stunt.

And yes indeed, it is satisfying that the GOP and conservatives were hoisted by Rush Limbaugh’s stinky, unethical old petard. Continue reading →

The NY Times Promotes Big Lie #4 (“Trump Is A Racist/White Supremacist”) Again

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

“Nah, there/s no mainstream media bias!’“

Despicable.

“Mocking Haley, Trump Adds to His Long History of Racist Attacks—The former president is again focusing on race and background as he campaigns against Nikki Haley in New Hampshire.” crowed the New York Times in what was allegedly a news report. The story is another installment of Big Lie #4 on The Big Lies Of The “Resistance” Directory, “Trump Is A Racist/White Supremacist.”

The fact that the Times is still doing this—that lie is one of the hoariest and most persistent in the whole ugly batch—means, quite simply, that the paper can’t be trusted. Simple as that. Its editorial policy is to lie about Donald Trump, and other things, of course, but if a news organization will lie about anything to forward an agenda, then it should never be trusted.

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Ethics Observations On The 2023 Gallup “Americans’ Ratings of Honesty and Ethics of Professions”

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Not a surprise, but still an ominous trend...

As usual, those polled were asked, “Please tell me how you would rate the honesty and ethical standards of people in these different fields — very high, high, average, low or very low?”

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A “Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias” Classic: CBS Reports on the Fani Willis Scandal

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Now that the anti-Trump, Democrat propaganda-promoting, biased and incompetent mainstream media has been forced to cover the unfolding Fani Willis ethics debacle that threatens to swallow her partisan “Get Trump!” prosecution, it is giving us blazing examples of just how untrustworthy its coverage can be. The headline above looms over CBS’s “news” story that is really a lame and transparent effort to try to spin the Fulton County DA out of the mess of her own making.

The focus of the report is that poor Fani just about had to hire her lover as one of the prosecutors in the high profile case against Donald Trump, because she was “unable to find someone in the DA’s office with the stature and credentials needed for the case,” and “turned to at least two other legal heavy hitters in Atlanta who turned the job down.” Then the article, while conceding that Nathan Wade had little relevant experience, tells us that Wade was Willis’s “friend and mentor” <cough!> and that she told colleagues he “had the toughness to handle the scorched-earth legal tactics that Trump’s lawyers and their co-counsel were likely to employ in the legal battle.” You know, because Trump is such an evil bastard.

Then the article explains that…

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Incompetent Elected Official of the Month: Oklahoma State Senator: Nathan Dahm, (R-Broken Arrow)

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Senator Dahm has introduced Senate Bill 1837, the “Common Sense Freedom of Press Control Act.” Here are its main provisions:

“Each individual reporter, producer, writer, editor, or any other employee involved in the production of content distributed by a media outlet is hereby required to:

a. complete a criminal background check conducted by the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation,
b. receive a license as prescribed by the Corporation Commission as provided in subsection C of this section,
c. complete a propaganda-free safety training course of no less than eight (8) hours as prescribed by the State Department of Education, which shall be developed in coordination with PragerU,
d. provide proof of liability insurance no less than One Million Dollars ($1,000,000.00), and
e. submit to quarterly drug testing for illicit substances to be administered by the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation”

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Fani Willis Is Toast and Those Arguing That She Isn’t Are Revealing Their Own Ethics Problems

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

When Ethics Alarms first published a commentary related to the unfolding Fani Willis scandal, it was under the headline, “Since the Media is Sure to Report This Major Ethics Story As Late As Possible If At All, I’m Going To Risk Commenting On It Too Soon…” That was a week ago, and it is now clear, though not definitively proven, that indeed Willis did hire her adulterer boy freind as one of the prosecutors on her Trump case, that she has benefited from it personally, and that she has a fatal conflict of interest that will eventually require her removal from the case, probably bar sanctions, and perhaps even criminal charges. Willis using a church appearance to try to shift the issue to racial persecution by the Evil Right was a fairly obvious indication that the allegations in a court filing are true; so is that fact that neither Willis nor her “great friend” have denied the allegations, which would be the obvious move if the scandal was imaginary. Nonetheless, as I expected, the news media is still slow-walking the story, and the usual Trump-Deranged suspects among law professors, legal ethicists and lawyers are trying hard to muddy the water so the public sees the facts as right wing conspiracy-mongering and unethical attacks on the righteous pursuers of their idol.

Mark well those lawyers, ethicists, pundits, professors and publications that try to defend Willis. They have told you, and everyone paying attention, that bias has either made them stupid, or that they are willing to lie “for the greater good.” They are untrustworthy, in either case.

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Friday Forum Open For Business…

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

Things are getting ugly out there. My favorite story that I haven’t written about yet is the New York City school that has kicked out the students so it can house illegal immigrants. The kids will he schooling over Zoom—and we all know how well that works. Guess how the MSM is reporting it, if it is reporting it at all? Media Matters called the play: “Right-wing media melt down over NYC using a public high school to shelter migrants overnight ” during a winter storm. “Republicans pounce!”

Oh…that’s lovely “Emily Pellegrini” above, the sensational digital model created with the assistance on an AI program. After just four months on Instagram, she has nearly 150,000 fans and is well on her way to being a web influencer. I think Natalie Portman should sue, especially since Emily may be a better actress than she is.

But I digress. See if you can find some of the beauty in ethics today.