Journalism & Media

Playing Bud Light Spin The Bottle

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

The facts are pretty straightforward. The parent company of Budweiser hired an ambitious, arrogant, woke woman to take over the marketing of Bud Light, which was the best selling beer in America. Having little understanding of the product’s market, and being so infected with wokism that she couldn’t comprehend the depth of the cultural divide regarding the current pro-transgender fad, she made the bone-headed decision to associate the brand with Dylan Mulvaney, a biological male internet performance artist who poses as female, both satirizing genuine transsexuals and celebrating them. From that moment, Bud Light was in a binary trap of its own making with no way out. The reaction against the botched marketing decision was over-whelming, with calls for a Bud Light boycott and a sudden fall-off ins sales. When the company tried to backtrack, including the sacking of its clueless marketing guru, the LGTBQ market also turned on the brand.

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Rhetorical Question: How Can The Public Make An Informed Decision About Who Should Be President With Unethical Journalism Like This?

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

The answer is “It can’t.”

I don’t know what else to say about the above. Which is worse? PBS’s flagrantly partisan and anti-Trump double standard (the government-funded network had no similar warning appended to Present Biden’s hysterical and irresponsible “Soul of the Nation”diatribe, aka. “the Reichstag speech,” in which he told Americans that his political opposition represented a threat to democracy, or Fox News’ outrageously partisan chryon, which I honestly thought was a hoax when I first saw it.

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Update: More Ethics Observations On The Trump Indictment [Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

For the record, I am royally sick of this topic already, and it’s just starting, with more than a year to go. I’m sick of Trump, I’m sick of the Democrats’ “destroy the village to save it” obsession with stopping Trump without just winning elections fairly and squarely, and I’m sick of the hypocrisy on all sides, and I’m really sick of reading obnoxious comments in moderation from single-minded ignoramuses who won’t even try to examine all sides of a complex issue, probably because they aren’t capable of it.

Sure, I’ll double down. I wrote on Friday that the decision to indict Trump was wildly irresponsible (if you didn’t discern that from my comparison to cloning dinosaurs, maybe you need to find another blog to hang out at) and was a utilitarian botch of existential proportions, and the tsunami is already developing, as that tweet above from a generally perceptive conservative Twitter wag indicates. Also predictably, gloating Democrats are tossing more of the afore-mentioned jet fuel on the fire, like this asshole:

Yecchhh. But let’s dig in…

1. The last post on this matter has surpassed the number of comments that allow normal people to read them all, so I’ll be overlapping a bit. For example, Alan Dershowitz also framed the indictment as I did, writing in Newsweek that it was “The Most Dangerous Indictment in History,” and saying in part,

This moment portends a massive change in the norms of this nation that all Americans who care about the neutral rule of law should pay close attention to, for it raises the specter of the partisan weaponization of the criminal justice system—not just by the Democrats targeting Trump but by Republicans who will certainly retaliate when they regain control of the criminal charging process.

That is how a large proportion of the public will regard it, and the evidence is irrelevant. Dershowitz also reminded me of Big Lie #6, “Trump’s Defiance Of Norms Is A Threat To Democracy.”

Remember? Democrats are hoping you won’t, but throughout the Trump Presidency, the accusation from the “resistance”/Democratic Party/mainstream media alliance (The Axis of Unethical Conduct) was that Trump was undermining democracy by not following unwritten “norms”—you know, like not using impeachment as a partisan tactic, not attempting to de-legitimatize the President, his election, and the Supreme Court, not weaponizing a health emergency to justify loosening election integrity measures, not intentionally violating the Constitution with Executive Orders like the one requiring Federal workers to be vaccinated, not giving a national speech declaring anyone who opposes his policies of being fascists and dangers to democracy…wait, I’m sorry! Those were some of the norms Democrats chose to defy; I get confused sometimes. My point is that the hypocrisy is staggering. There is a reason no former President or current major Presidential constender has ever been arrested or indicted by the rival party: it reeks of Third World dictatorships, and almost guarantees dangerous national division. This is why Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon.

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Ethical Quote Of The Month: Dan Abrams

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

“We are supposed to be in the business of calling out the spin, not creating it…If we want the public to trust us in the news business, how can the entities themselves lie or spin their own news?”

—Lawyer, TV pundit and news host (“Nightline”) Dan Abrams, condemning NBC’s story that Chuck Todd was leaving “Meet the Press” to spend more time with his family.

Oh, bingo, Dan! And the answer to Abrams’ rhetorical question is: Given how much, often and routinely they lie, news organizations shouldn’t expect the public to trust them, yet they do, because they have no respect for the public’s intelligence and no regard for the duty of journalists in a democracy to keep citizens informed.

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“Thanks, Tucker!” Carlson’s First Twitter Show Confirms The Ethics Alarms Verdict On His Firing By Fox

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

The last time I was compelled to write about Tucker Carlson following his surprise firing by Fox News, I wrote,

The outpouring of conservative support for Tucker Carlson is quite nauseating, and shows an unfortunate infestation of bad judgment and ethics corruption when the necessary conduct is to recognize that an ideological ally is neither trustworthy nor honest. One report yesterday, pointing to the Fox News’ ratings crashing with Carlson’s exit, noted that younger Fox News viewers had led the stampede. Carlson is a demagogue with dubious motives, and the young are especially vulnerable to demagogues. I regard it as unethical for a news organization to put demagogues on the air for exactly that reason.”

Yesterday, Carlson premiered his new show on Twitter, and was kind enough to confirm that analysis, far from the first Ethics Alarms has made marking the one-time Golden Boy of America’s only conservative-biased network as a cynical, manipulative, self-promoting and untrustworthy narcissist.

You can watch Carlson’s Alex Jones imitation here. Only a deliberate conspiracy-monger would say this for public consumption:

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“Dear April: No, Don’t Have Children. Your Letter Proves You Are Too Dumb To Be A Responsible Parent”

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

That would be my entire response to this recent query from “April” to Kwame Anthony Appiah, the ethics scholar whom the New York Times dubs “The Ethicist”(hold on to your skull; it almost blew mine):

I have always loved babies and children. I babysat throughout high school and college, and do so even now as a full-time engineer. My fiancé was drawn to me because of how much he appreciated my talent with and love for children. We have many little nieces, nephews and cousins whom we love but don’t get to see often. We also have always been clear with each other that we would try to have biological children soon after getting married.

That being said, my fiancé and I, who are both Generation Z, care deeply about the planet and painfully watch as scientists predict that the earth will reach 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming by the 2030s. Is it selfish to have children knowing full well that they will have to deal with a lower quality of life thanks to the climate crisis and its many cascading effects, like increased natural disasters, food shortages, greater societal inequity and unrest?

We realize that a child’s very existence adds to our carbon footprint, but as parents we would do our best to foster an environmentally friendly household and try to teach our children how to navigate life sustainably. My fiancé says that because we are privileged as two working engineers in the United States, we can provide enough financial support to keep our children from feeling the brunt of the damage from climate change. Is it OK to use this privilege?

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Ethics Hero: ESPN Pundit Stephen A. Smith

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Boy, that’s a headline I thought I’d never write! Smith was a major reason I dropped ESPN from our satellite package: here’s a typical post about his work. The kind of loud-mouthed opinionated jackass that I’d get up and move away from if he was holding forth near me at a bar, if Smith were a white pundit who talked about blacks the way Smith talks about whites, he would be fired mid-sentence. I still stand by the last thing I wrote about Smith in that post: “‘Ethics Dunce’ doesn’t really describe someone like Smith, an arrogant narcissist who feels entitled to inflame racial resentment and division while not only profiting from it, but complaining that he isn’t profiting from it enough. What is that? Maybe it’s just as simple as ‘asshole’.”

And yet…here we are. That video above is from Smith’s podcast, “The Stephen A. Smith Show.” In this case, the fact that Smith sees anti-black racism in all things actually helps. His bias, and he’s all bias, all the time, gives him credibility here. If anyone would be thrilled to excuse black culture malignancy by crying “systemic racism,” it would be Smith. Instead, the amazing number of shootings in Chicago over the Memorial Day Weekend prompted Smith to ask the black community: “When are we going to look at ourselves when it comes to black people being killed in the streets of America?”

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More Disney Ethics: The NYT Movie Critic’s Review Of “The Little Mermaid” Highlighted What’s Wrong With Disney’s Wokism, But Conservatives Didn’t Notice

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Ah, the curse of confirmation bias! So determined are conservative pundits and bloggers to condemn the New York Times as being a full conspirator in the effort to wokify U.S. society and culture that it missed the paper’s movie critic admitting that the movement wasn’t working. Wesley Morris, who is clearly Democrat, progressive, and an African American, began his review of the already controversial live action version of “The Little Mermaid” thusly:

The new, live-action “The Little Mermaid” is everything nobody should want in a movie: dutiful and defensive, yet desperate for approval. It reeks of obligation and noble intentions. Joy, fun, mystery, risk, flavor, kink — they’re missing. The movie is saying, “We tried!” Tried not to offend, appall, challenge, imagine.

“Dutiful and defensive, yet desperate for approval. It reeks of obligation and noble intentions.” That’s a perfect, if incomplete, description of what political correctness and the cultural fascists of the Left have wrought. But because the critic appended  “kink” at the end of “joy, fun, mystery, risk, flavor,” the qualities he felt the movie was missing, that word was all the critics of the critic could see. “NY Times ripped for piece lamenting lack of ‘kink’ in new ‘Little Mermaid’: ‘The left sexualizes kids'” Fox News announced, and it was typical.

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An Ethics Alarms “Ripley” For WaPo: It Engaged In Objective Journalism (Sort Of)

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

[“The Ripley” officially entered the Ethics Alarms lexicon in August of 2021, signifying an ethics story that so outrageous it defies belief. Admittedly, events like incorrigible left-biased mainstream media outlets like the Washington Post undermining their own agenda by publishing information that makes Democrats look bad were not the intended topics for the new category, but when I have, in the past, awarded “Ethics Hero” awards to unethical news sources that unexpectedly told the truth, readers here have objected on the grounds that doing your job ethically and professionally should not be considered heroic. I have to agree, and so episodes like this one will now be eligible for a “Ripley.”]

Conservative news aggregator Citizens Free Press headlined its link to this story, “How did this get past Wash Post censors?” It’s a fair question. The Post’s feature is “Why are red states hiring so much faster than blue states?,” and it begins by pointing out what Al Gore might call and inconvenient truth, except that his inconvenient truth was mostly hooey:

We ranked the 50 states by their hiring rates and were swiftly struck by a trend so clear that — if it holds up — should be front-page news: Republican-leaning states are hiring faster than blue states.
 
Of the 17 fastest-hiring states, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 14 voted for Trump in 2020. The top two Biden-voting states, Georgia and Nevada, are probably best classified as purple (Biden-blue Delaware is the other). The 10 slowest-hiring states all went for Biden.

The story is accompanied by this chart:

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Ethics Quote Of The Month: Heather Mac Donald

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

“When government abdicates its responsibility to maintain public safety, a few citizens, for now at least, will step into the breach. Penny was one of them. He restrained Neely not out of racism or malice but to protect his fellow passengers. He was showing classically male virtues: chivalry, courage and initiative. Male heroism threatens the entitlement state by providing an example of self-reliance apart from the professional helper class. And for that reason, he must be taken down.”

—Heather Mac Donald, in her scorching essay, “Daniel Penny is a scapegoat for a failed system”

That paragraph continues,

A homicide charge is the most efficient way to discourage such initiative in the future. Stigma is another. The mainstream media has characterized the millions of dollars in donations that have poured into Daniel Penny’s legal defense fund as the mark of ignorant bigots who support militaristic white vigilantes.

There is no way law enforcement can or should avoid at least exploring a manslaughter charge when an unarmed citizen is killed after a good Samaritan intervenes in a situation that he or she sees as potentially dangerous. Nevertheless, what appears to be the planned vilification of ex-Marine Daniel Penny by Democrats and the news media to put desperately-needed wind back in the metaphorical sails of Black Lives Matter and to goose racial division as the 2024 elections approach graphically illustrates just how unethical and ruthless the 21st Century American Left has become. (I know, I know, we don’t need any more evidence…). Mac Donald’s essay is superb, as many of hers often are. Do read it all, and them make your Facebook friends’ heads explode by sharing it.

Here are some other juicy and spot-on excerpts:

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