Journalism & Media

Forget “Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!” The Proper Reaction Should Be “What the Hell Is the Matter With You Hacks?”

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

The furious wagon-circling by left-biased journalists (or “journalists,” for short) in response to the DOJ Special Counsel’s stunning “Look! The Emperor has no clothes!” declaration in his report is another smoking gun in the “controversy” over whether Donald Trump was as right as he has ever been to call the media “enemies of the people.” It might even be the smokiest gun of all—more damning than the news media’s blatant cheer-leading for Barack Obama’s candidacy and destructive Presidency, more damning than its Black Lives Matter pandering during the BLM riots and its fearmongering during the pandemic, even more damning, perhaps, than its successful efforts to hide the evidence of Hunter Biden’s laptop until Donald Trump was safely defeated.

Confirmation bias and willful blindness still have their limits. How can any American with two brain cells to rub together observe the shameless gaslighting compiled in the video above and not be offended, disgusted, and angry?

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Regarding “The Appeaser’s Apology”

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

In last week’s open forum, there was discussion regarding this incident:

During his testimony in a U.S. Senate hearing on social media and its negative effect on children, Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg responded to a question inquiring whether he had taken any action to mitigate the problem, such as firing employees, providing compensation to alleged victims or apologizing to the families of people who were harmed by posts on Facebook or Instagram, which his company also owns. In response, Zuckerberg stood up, turned to an audience including parents holding up pictures of loved ones, and said,

“I am sorry for everything that you have gone through. It’s terrible. No one should have to go through the things your family has suffered. And this is why we invested so much and will continue doing industry leading efforts to make sure that no one has to go through the types of things your families have had to suffer.”

Tasked (by himself) with deciding where this statement falls on the Ethics Alarms Apology Scale, commenter JutGory opined,

It almost looks like a Number 8 (A forced apology for a rightful or legitimate act, in capitulation to bullying, fear, threats, desperation or other coercion.), except that Zuckerberg is not apologizing for a rightful or legitimate act. The Legislators were ascribing acts to him when he did nothing.

It also looks like a 10 (An insincere and dishonest apology designed to allow the wrongdoer to escape accountability cheaply, and to deceive his or her victims into forgiveness and trust, so they are vulnerable to future wrongdoing.), except that, again Zuckerberg is not apologizing for something he did.

I think the Apology Scale needs another collateral entry that does not actually fit on the scale: The Appeaser’s Apology: A forced apology offered in response to a baseless accusation of wrongdoing because the person demanding the apology is too stupid or self-righteous to bother reasoning with.

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Stop Making Me Defend Tucker Carlson!

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I’m reasonable sure I have made my ethical assessment of Tucker Carlson clear for years now: he’s an opportunist, he’s a demagogue, he’s ambitious and it is impossible to determine what he really believes. He’s also glib and articulate, and I could not care less what he advocates or opposes, since he makes such calculations based on ratings and their perceived usefulness in giving him fame and power.

However, lately Carlson is taking flack because he is in Russia, apparently preparing to interview Vladimir Putin. The criticism is across the partisan and ideological spectrum. The Left, predictably, detests Carlson and would criticize anything he did. But conservatives are attacking him too. Bill Kristol, the NeverTrump director of Defending Democracy Together, said sarcastically, “Perhaps we need a total and complete shutdown of Tucker Carlson re-entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.” Bill Browder, the CEO of Hermitage Capital on CNN that Carlson is “either remarkably stupid or consciously evil.” “He’s not stupid,” replied CNN’s John Harwood. Adam Kinzinger, who along with Liz Cheney served as one of the only two Republicans on the House select committee that turned the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot into an extended “Get Trump!” kangaroo court, pronounced Carlson “a traitor”.

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The Deceitful January Jobs Report

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

It seems increasingly apparent that the Democrats and Joe Biden’s election strategy, besides trying to convince the public that Donald Trump is the spawn of Hitler and Satan, is to lie, deceive and gaslight voters into believing that down is up, bad is good, and that Biden has done a wonderful job even though by all visible markers his administration has been a disastrous failure.

In the latest example, the January jobs report was hailed by Joe and his minions as more proof that the economy was not just good, but spectacular. Naturally, the news media carried the message. “January Jobs Report Was a Blowout. Disregard the Seasonal Noise” proclaimed Barrons. NPR, our Democratic Party mouthpiece, crowed, “The U.S. created an extraordinary number of jobs in January. Here’s a deeper look.” “U.S. employment soars by 353,000, stunning Wall Street,” said an obviously stunned MarketWatch. “Another shockingly good jobs report shows America’s economy is booming” said CNN. The New York Times joined the parade, as expected: “Blockbuster Jobs Report Backs Up Fed’s Patience as It Waits to Cut Rates.” NBC News was positively giddy: “The great American jobs machine keeps revving in an election year.”

My son, an auto mechanic who is, as far as I can tell, completely apolitical, had just recently conveyed a completely different picture. He says that everyone he knows is struggling financially, and that he personally had a disastrous month because he is largely paid by the hour. Few Northern Virginians were bringing their cars in to be serviced. “Nobody has any money,” he told me. He worked the fewest hours last month than any time since the pandemic lockdown. Apparently he wasn’t the only one.

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Ethics Hero: George Stephanopoulos [Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Wow. Didn’t see that Ethics Hero coming at all.

ABC’s ubiquitous news host George Stephanopoulos has a dreadful EA dossier, though it hasn’t filled up lately since I decided around 2016 that none of the Sunday Morning news shows were professional or ethical enough to take time away from my sock drawer. However, this morning he did something bold and necessary. When his guest, Super-Trumper Senator J.D. Vance, made a bonkers and irresponsible case that the President could be justified in defying the Supreme Court, George just cut him off and ended the interview.

Bravo.

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“Indictment: The McMartin Trial,” An Ethics Movie That Seems Disturbingly Relevant Today

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

How I missed the 1995 HBO film “Indictment: the McMartin Trial” for almost 30 years, I don’t know, but I did. The Oliver Stone produced legal drama about the insane events surrounding what turned out to be the start of a nation-wide freak-out over supposed Satan worship and widespread child abuse at day-care centers is unusually accurate for a docudrama. For this reason it is also infuriating. How could this have happened even once?

In August of 1983, the mother of a 2-year-old boy phoned the Manhattan Beach (California) Police Dept. claiming that her son had been sexually abused at the family-run McMartin Pre-School. That accusation prompted a series of sensational and inflammatory reports from an unscrupulous broadcast journalist (or “journalist,” for short) at WABC-TV. It also prompted the police to contact other parents with children at the school to ask if their children had been molested. Those children were, in turn, interviewed by a crusading social worker named Kee MacFarlane, who used controversial techniques to persuade the young children that they had seen and experienced terrible things, escalating from sexual abuse to having to witness ritual rapes and human sacrifices. (This was one of the seminal cases in the psychiatry profession’s “implanted memories” scandal.)

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KABOOM! Harvard’s Chief Diversity Officer Is a Worse Plagiarist Than Even Claudine Gay!

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

And there goes my head. I just painted the ceiling of my office, too.

Unbelievable! The Washington Free Beacon, in an exclusive (hey, you wouldn’t expect the New York Times, the Washington Post or the Boston Globe of “Spotlight” fame to do any investigative journalism that might embarrass a black, female DEI officer at Harvard, would you?), revealed that Harvard University’s Sherri Ann Charleston appears to have “plagiarized extensively in her academic work, lifting large portions of text without quotation marks” and even taking credit for a study done by her own husband according to a complaint filed with the university yesterday. Charleston was the chief affirmative action officer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, then joined Harvard in August 2020 as its first chief diversity officer—you know, because the negligent death of an overdosing career crook in Minnesota meant that Harvard had to launch a new bureaucracy. And what to you know? Charleston contributed to the fateful selection of former Harvard president Claudine Gay!

Charleston’s Harvard bio describes her as “one of the nation’s leading experts in diversity,” whatever that means. Oh wait…it means that she’s aces at “translating diversity and inclusion research into practice for students, staff, researchers, postdoctoral fellows and faculty of color.”

The allegations against Charleston look irrefutable and damning. From the Free Beacon report:

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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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