Quixotic GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy is an entertaining and occasionally thought-provoking feature of the primary season because, whatever you may think of his positions, he’s unusually articulate and adept at spontaneous responses. His outburst in Scott County, Iowa, when a Washington Post reporter asked him to “condemn white supremacy and white nationalism” is a classic.
He was asked the “gotcha!” question following the endorsement of his candidacy by former Iowa GOP Rep.Steve King, who was punished by the party after repeatedly appearing to embrace white supremacists and their rhetoric. Ramaswamy took off like Harold Hill telling the crowd about the dangers of a pool table in River City:
Among the Ethics Alarms long-promised essays that have yet to be posted (you never know when one will finally pop up!) is the Ethics Alarms Fake News Directory. A story that has ended up on many MSM news sources reminded me of why what I thought it would be an easy list to compile turned into a chore. It has appeared in the Washington Post, USA Today, Rolling Stone, Variety, CNN, the Hill, the Chicago Sun -Times, Yahoo!, AOL and dozens—yes dozens— more. The breathlessly urgent story: Barack Obama shared his list of favorite songs for 2023, or, as the Post put it, “Obama’s 2023 bangers include Beyoncé, Burna Boy and Blondshell.”
There was real news about Obama recently: several conservative-leaning news sources like the New York Post and Fox News reported that the ex-President had lobbied Harvard’s governing body to keep unqualified serial plagiarist Claudine Gay as president of Obama’s alma mater. Of course, the “good” media didn’t see that as newsworthy, or felt that the public didn’t need to know about it. Instead, many of them chose to treat Obama’s annual favorite music list as worthy of breaking news treatment.
This is favoritism and propaganda by innuendo. Only a celebrity presumed to be deserving of top of the cognitive dissonance scale status can get such treatment. The publications that printed this non-news as news are pushing readers to adopt their position: this is an inarguably good and great man of iconic stature, and so attention should be paid to his every thought, statement and opinion. It is a familiar media propaganda tactic and was one of the ways the news media propped up Obama during his mediocre terms as President (and I’m being kind) when they treated his college basketball tournament bracket choices as worthy of attention. These same news sources didn’t think the Hunter Biden laptop discovery was news in the middle of a hotly-contested election, nor did it rush to cover an accusation by a former Biden Senate staffer that he had raped her, but the music playlist of a politician with no special expertise in music at all—at least Bill Clinton played the saxophone—warranted coverage.
I shouldn’t even be writing about this completely silly and worthless story. It exemplifies, however, the cesspool that we are going to be dunked in for all of the next year. Here’s how it goes:
ACT I
The mainstream news media decided to exploit the Christmas season as an opportunity to take a cheap shot at Donald Trump, since that is considered the patriotic duty of anyone who has ever had contact with him, and because he is a threat to democracy. So, as Columbus’s twin “Home Alone” movies were au courrant once again, Rolling Stone and some other enterprising Trump-bashers dredged up a three-year old Business Insider interview in which has-been movie director Chris Columbus, apparently looking to curry favor with the monolithic woke Hollywood community, revealed that Trump had “bullied” his way into the cameo he performed during “Home Alone 2.”
That is the headline to this news report by Metro and carried by MSN on the death of Gaston Glock, the Austrian engineer who formed the Glock firearms company in 1963.
It’s as flagrant an example of biased journalists editorializing in news story headlines as you are ever likely to see. This represents a reporter, editor and publication distorting and manipulating the news to make a political statement. The anti-gun movement is especially fond of the appeal to emotion over facts that it represents.
Glock, as far as we know, never profited at all from anyone’s death or killing. He would have made the same profits if no one had ever fired one of his company’s guns. The headline is a lie, and yet MSN felt it was appropriate to circulate it on the web. The analogies to this kind of warped logic write themselves, and you can come up with them as easily as I can.
There was a time not so long ago when only underground newspapers, and supermarket tabloids would indulge in this level of garbage journalism.
Boy, have I been asleep at the switch with this one.
The Unethical Website of the Month was a regular feature on the Ethics Alarms predecessor The Ethics Scoreboard, but I have fallen down on the job. There are probably more unethical websites than ever, but the last one officially posted here was in July (though this site also qualified a month later). Here is an area where reader tips would be especially helpful, because typically (or tipically?)I only stumble across unethical websites by accident.
That’s not the case this time, however. NewsGuard has been around since 2018, and I have been blithely ignorant of it nonetheless. Here is how it describes itself on its “About” page:
Founded by media entrepreneur and award-winning journalist Steven Brill and former Wall Street Journal publisher Gordon Crovitz, NewsGuard provides transparent tools to counter misinformation for readers, brands, and democracies. Since launching in 2018, its global staff of trained journalists and information specialists has collected, updated, and deployed more than 6.9 million data points onmore than 35,000 news and information sources, and cataloged and tracked all of thetop false narratives spreading online.
Among other indicators of the scale of its operations is that NewsGuard’sapolitical and transparent criteriahave been applied by its analysts to rate news sources accounting for 95% of online engagement with news across nine countries.
Impressive! What the page doesn’t tell you is that it has received about 750 thousand dollars from the federal government. It claims, however, to be completely transparent about its “investors” and income ( “Revenue Sources: NewsGuard’s revenue comes from Internet Service Providers, browsers, search engines, social platforms, education providers, hospital systems, advertising agencies, brand safety providers, researchers, and others paying to use NewsGuard’s ratings and Nutrition Labels and associated data.”) “Only” $750,000 seems like a proverbial drop in the bucket for a government that spends like Barnacle Bill the Sailor, but being funded in any way by the government means that a conflict of interest exists that needs to be prominently revealed. I find NewsGuard so non-user friendly and confusing that it would qualify as an unethical website on the basis of incompetence alone, but it is also untrustworthy.
Yes, it’s “Imagine” time again. Mainstream media talking heads and hacks have apparently been playing the John Lennon’s sweet and fatuous ode to nonsense over earbuds as they sleep, judging from the angle they repeatedly return to as they push anti-Israel propaganda on the public.
CNN’s Breanna Keilar had a typical “Think if the children!” exchange with Israeli spokeswoman TalHeinrich yesterday.
Keilar (talking over and interrupting her guest as she Heinrich expressed regret that children in Gaza were being placed in harm’s way): “Tal, when you see those pictures coming out of Gaza, do you see why some people don’t have hope looking at those pictures?”
Heinrich: “Well, we are in the middle of a war that Israel did not start, and did not want.”
Keilar: “It is prosecuting it forcefully, and you see the pictures here.”
Heinrich: “When Hamas started this war — hope and peace and a better future for the region — that is the greatest enemy of terrorists. Once we eliminate these terrorists, we eliminate the rule. We hope that there will be other voices, pragmatic ones that want to work with us towards peace. This is what we want. We want to live in this region peacefully. That’s what Israelis have always wanted. But first, Hamas must be gone, and then we hope that the Palestinian society will de-radicalize. We can’t have — you know, what our troops are finding right now, on the ground, in certain neighborhoods in Gaza, pictures of children, women with guns, Hamas uniform tailored for children. And Hamas terrorists that we have arrested—”
Keilar (interrupting): “Does that make the children justifiable enemies to you? Is that what you’re saying? Does that make all of the children justifiable enemies to you? I mean, you’re raising the specter of them being used in military uniform.”
The conservative news media and punditry sites are exploding with criticism of the New York Times for publishing the op-ed on December 24 written by Yahya Sarraj, mayor of Gaza City. Sarraj was appointed mayor by Hamas, the terrorist organization that has ruled Gaza for more than a decade. The piece is self-evident proaganda that seeks to create outrage and sympathy for Gaza in the wake of Israel’s retaliation for the Hamas terrorist attacks in Israel on October 7 and its invasion of the Gaza Strip.
The Hamas-backed mayor writes in part…
“The Israelis have also pulverized something else: Gaza City’s cultural riches and municipal institutions. The unrelenting destruction of Gaza — its iconic symbols, its beautiful seafront, its libraries and archives and whatever economic prosperity it had — has broken my heart….Why did the Israeli tanks destroy so many trees, electricity poles, cars and water mains? Why would Israel hit a U.N. school? The obliteration of our way of life in Gaza is indescribable. I still feel I am in a nightmare because I can’t imagine how any sane person could engage in such a horrific campaign of destruction and death….The Gaza Zoo has been destroyed with many of its animals killed or starved to death, including wolves, hyenas, birds and rare foxes. Other casualties include the city’s main public library, the Children’s Happiness Center, the municipal building and its archive, and the seventh-century Great Omari Mosque. Israeli forces have also damaged or destroyed streets, squares, mosques, churches and parks.”
The clear and obvious answer to “why?” would seem to be “Because your government started a war, and this is what happens to places that start wars by massacring civilians, raping women, beheading babies and taking hostages.”
Newsweek has been trying to find its way for some time now, sometimes reading like part of the “conservative media,” other times staying in step with the mainstream media leftist bias. Now it is including the device above after all of its articles.
It’s a start. The weaknesses of such subjective ratings are obvious: true ideologues and the hopelessly biased can’t see any news story that isn’t slanted to support their worldview as “fair.” The data presumably can also be rigged by repeat ratings. Nevertheless, I applaud Newsweek’s effort, and would like to see more publications and news organizations use such a ratings system on their stories. Maybe the mere presence of such a check-point will provide incentive to reporters to cool the “advocacy journalism.”
We can help encourage other publication to use a ratings system by rewarding Newsweek. I’m going to use it as a source more often on Ethics Alarms.
The Associated Press reports on New York’s Governor Kathy Hochul setting up a commission to make “non-binding” recommendations regarding the state’s debt to the victims of slavery, presumably that they should be addressed by monetary reparations. This is going to take at least a year, after which Hochul assumes, I’m guessing, that she’ll be able to use reparations as a wedge issue. But I digress; the post is about this section of the story:
The idea of using public money to compensate the descendants of enslaved people is almost certain to draw a backlash from some, including some white people who don’t believe they should have to pay for the sins of long-ago ancestors, and other ethnic groups that weren’t involved in the slave trade.
The Associated Press certainly understands evil, racist “white people.” It just knows they will selfishly want to hold on to their ill-gotten wealth and protest a massive transfer of cash from those who had nothing to do with slavery to those who never experienced slavery a day in their lives or ever knew anyone who did. And surely no African-Americans will be objective enough see the logical, economic and political problems with such a plan.
The AP apparently employs no editors capable of reading that swill and had and gently saying to some proudly woke reporter, “Uh, no. This is blatant racial stereotyping. Try again. I have an idea: why not just report the facts without indulging in mind-reading or making baseless predictions of what will happen more than a year from now? Incidentally, reparations are hardly a new idea, so you don’t need to speculate about what “some white people” are ‘almost certain to think.’ You can factually report on what economists, social scientists and other experts on both sides of the issue and of a variety of races and ethnicities have already said about the concept.”
“They’re poisoning the blood of our country, that’s what they’ve done. They’ve poisoned mental institutions and prisons all over the world. Not just in South America, not just the three or four countries that we think about, but all over the world they’re coming into our country from Africa, from Asia…all over the world they’re pouring in.”
–—Presumptive GOP Presidential nominee Donald Trump during a rally in Durham, NH.
To its credit, C-Span introduced the clip of Trump blathering by noting he was talking about illegal immigrants, and I’m sure he was. However he never said “illegal immigrants” or anything similar. He just gave a number that could be illegal immigrants or just immigrants. “When they let 15, 16 million people into the country…we’ve got a lot of work to do,” he began. Wait, we “let” legal immigrants into the country: is Trump complaining about them?
