Journalism & Media

Unethical Headline Of The Year (So Far): Conservative Website “Hot Air”

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Ugh.

How disgraceful. Here is the headline: “Clarence Thomas must resign because he went on vacation or something.” Despicable.

Justice Thomas, the most extreme conservative jurist on the U.S. Supreme Court, already, in the assessment of Ethics Alarms, has been shown to have engaged in unethical judicial conduct by raising a flaming appearance of impropriety with his acceptance of lavish junkets from an activist conservative billionaire and his failure to report them. The verdict here in April was that Thomas is obligated to resign, and that is still the verdict. His inexcusable conduct not only undermines his own credibility but the credibility and legitimacy of the entire Supreme Court.

But now, there is evidence that Thomas’s conduct was even worse than what was reported last Spring. From Pro Publica:

A cadre of industry titans and ultrawealthy executives have treated him to far-flung vacations aboard their yachts, ushered him into the premium suites at sporting events and sent their private jets to fetch him — including, on more than one occasion, an entire 737. It’s a stream of luxury that is both more extensive and from a wider circle than has been previously understood. Like clockwork, Thomas’ leisure activities have been underwritten by benefactors who share the ideology that drives his jurisprudence. Their gifts include: At least 38 destination vacations, including a previously unreported voyage on a yacht around the Bahamas; 26 private jet flights, plus an additional eight by helicopter; a dozen VIP passes to professional and college sporting events, typically perched in the skybox; two stays at luxury resorts in Florida and Jamaica; and one standing invitation to an uber-exclusive golf club overlooking the Atlantic coast. While some of the hospitality, such as stays in personal homes, may not have required disclosure, Thomas appears to have violated the law by failing to disclose flights, yacht cruises and expensive sports tickets, according to ethics experts. Perhaps even more significant, the pattern exposes consistent violations of judicial norms, experts, including seven current and former federal judges appointed by both parties, told ProPublica. “In my career I don’t remember ever seeing this degree of largesse given to anybody,” said Jeremy Fogel, a former federal judge who served for years on the judicial committee that reviews judges’ financial disclosures. “I think it’s unprecedented.”

Jeez, I hope it’s unprecedented! The degree of arrogance and dunder-headedness that led Thomas to do this is astounding. He’s known he’s had a target on his back since he was nominated for SCOTUS; he knows, or should know, that he is going to be scrutinized for missteps like no other Justice in the Court’s history. For Thomas to accept such trips and luxuries from parties who stand to benefit from the results of the Court’s deliberations is as irresponsible for a controversial Supreme Court Justice as it would have been for Jackie Robinson to secretly run a numbers game while he was playing for the Dodgers.

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Everyone, Literally Everyone, Needs To See This…

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Whatever one thinks of Tucker Carlson, the interview is a public service and raises too many ethics questions to count.

It is nicely paired with this revelation…

Whatever one thinks of Tucker Carlson, the interview is a public service and raises too many ethics questions to count. Is the previous chief of the Capitol Police (full disclosure: the current occupant is an old friend) a completely reliable, objective and unbiased source of information regarding the January 6, 2020 riot? Of course not. Nonetheless, the lack of interest in his perspective displayed by the January 6 Star Chamber and the mainstream media is both indefensible and suspicious.

Your reactions should be both helpful and illuminating.

The Mike Brown Lie, Back By Popular Demand

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Yesterday, August 9, was the nine year anniversary of one of the many distorted, exploited and incompetently reported race-related incidents that have hurled the United States decades backwards in race relations. It was on August 9, 2014 that hulking thug Michael Brown was shot and killed by policeman Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri in self-defense after Brown escaped custody, tried to take Wilson’s gun, and charged him with all of his 300 pound bulk. But because the 18-year-old’s pal and partner in crime told the credulous media that Brown had put his hands up and cried “Hands up don’t shoot!” before the fatal shot, Brown’s death was reported as an execution by a racist cop. This, in turn, resulted in horrific riots in Ferguson, full-scale social justice virtue-signalling by the mainstream media (like the 2014 display by CNN’s hacks above, referencing both the Brown shooting narrative and the death of Eric Garner), and a boost to the fortunes of the racist Blacl Lives Matter movement, which had been launched by another falsely reported tragedy, the death of Trayvon Martin.

Even though Barack Obama’s untra-partisan and race-obsessed Attorney General, Eric Holder, would have loved to show that Darren Wilson had murdered Brown, it was once again demonstrated that, as John Adams said, “Facts are stubborn things.” His  DOJ found that there was no credible evidence to back up the “hands up, don’t shoot” narrative. To the contrary, forensic and eye-witness evidence made it clear that Brown, who had just committed a petty theft and intimidated a shop-owner, punched Wilson after the officer arrested him, tried to grab pistol in the patrol car, and after he had bolted from the vehicle charged at Wilson, precipitating the fatal shooting. A grand jury exonerated Wilson, whose career was destroyed and life was ruined, but he was just a white cop, so c’est la vie! Continue reading →

KABOOM! The Progressive Propaganda Media Is This Desperate To Stop RFK, Jr.

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

This is pretty funny, actually, or would be, if we hadn’t seen similar tactics used repeatedly against the previous President of the United States.

Here’s what Robert Kennedy, Jr. tweeted in its entirety:

Since the assassination of my father in 1968, candidates for president are provided Secret Service protection. But not me. Typical turnaround time for pro forma protection requests from presidential candidates is 14-days. After 88-days of no response and after several follow-ups by our campaign, the Biden Administration just denied our request.  Secretary Mayorkas: “I have determined that Secret Service protection for Robert F Kennedy Jr. is not warranted at this time.” Our campaign’s request included a 67-page report from the world’s leading protection firm, detailing unique and well established security and safety risks aside from commonplace death threats.

Got that? Okay, now what about that tweet seems sinister to you, other than what RFK Jr. is alleging?

Here, let me give you some time…

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Nate Silver Tells The Truth About Media Bias: Ethics Hero

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

The only surprising aspect of Nate Silver’s latest substack essay is that he actually wrote it and had the courage to put it on the web. He is honest about mainstream media bias, and until he got kicked off his own creation, the 538 blog, Silver was a willing accomplice in this rot in the foundation of our democracy, making a lot of money in the process. Now—finally—he’s using his substantial critical thinking and research skills to expose the bad guys (his former pals before they rejected him : yes, I suspect there’s a measure of vengeance in this)who continue to successfully warp public knowledge and the process of an informed democracy by convincing sufficient number of ovine citizens that the concept of progressive media bias is a right-wing conspiracy theory. The focus of his traitorous analysis is how Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter has helped address the effects of the media’s partisan bias.

In “Twitter, Elon and the Indigo Blob,” Silver becomes one of the very few progressives of note to admit what has been going on under their cultural assault. Some others include Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, and Bari Weiss, but Silver is more scientific and detached than any of them, and as a result, his analysis is more persuasive and, I hope, more disruptive to the blue wall of silence the progressive Borg has erected around a throbbing, obvious, disgusting truth.

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Ethics Quote Of The Month: Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky)

/ Jack Marshall / 90 Comments

I was literally going to start this post with nearly the exact same statement, except I was going to ask how many progressives and die-hard Biden defenders would have the integrity to condemn the revelation that Facebook and Instagram censored posts and changed their content moderation policies after unconstitutional pressure from the Biden White House.

Not that this should have surprised anyone; it certainly didn’t surprise me, Censorship, deception and suppression of news, facts and reality is how the current mutation of the Democratic Party rolls, and Big Tech and social media have joined the mainstream media as their enablers and accomplices.

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Unethical Website Of The Month: American College of Forensic Examiners Institute

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

This post is juuust a little bit late. The website in question is still up, but has been involved in “website maintenance” for years, though promising to be back in “a few days.” It won’t be: GOOD. However, it is instructive to consider the saga of this epically unethical website in light of the recent revelation that the most famous forensic expert of them all, Dr. Henry Lee, used fake forensic evidence to help send two teenagers to prison for 30 years for a crime they didn’t commit. It is also useful perspective for the current fealty the political Left and the mainstream media wants Americans to pledge to “experts” who will explain why progressive policy cant just “follows the science.”

When it isn’t performing its tax-payer funded role as a progressive propaganda mouthpiece, PBS is still capable of doing valuable investigative journalism. In 2012, a notable example was the Frontline series called “The Real C.S.I.,” blowing the whistle on the forensic science racket then being extolled weekly on network TV as all-but-infallible. There were a lot of head-exploders in the series, among them that fingerprints might not be as unique as we have assumed, but one of the main discoveries in the series was that criminal trials all over the country were being influenced by “graduates” of the American College of Forensic Examiners Institute (ACFEI), an on-line diploma mill founded and operated by a shady entrepreneur named Robert O’Block. ACFEI would certify someone as a forensics expert essentially for cash, though there was an “exam” that had a more than 99% pass rate. PBS interviewed a reporter who took the exam and got her certification despite knowing little more about forensic science than the average “C.S.I Miami” fan. O’Block, meanwhile, had turned fake credentialing into an empire, with 14 separate certification scams. These in turn churned out an estimated 70,000 fake forensic experts who were routinely admitted as legitimate testifying expert witnesses by judges who accepted O’Block’s meaningless certificates as sufficient proof of expertise.

O’Block also sent one certification to a prison inmate and bestowed another on his cat. ACFEI was never recognized by the US Department of Education’s Distance Education/learning Department, or the Federal Trade Commission/FTC, but most of the time neither judges nor defense attorneys took the time to check.

In 2017, O’Block, then 66, fatally shot himself after killing his 27-year-old girlfriend. On the disciples of this pillar of rectitude and ethics did a substantial segment of the American criminal justice system and its juries place their trust as they sent accused American to prison.

Investigative reporter Radley Balko wrote in part upon the occasion of O’Block’s demise,

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From The Res Ipsa Loquitur Files: The State of Certainty And Reliability of Climate Change Forecasts And Analysis

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

Since some EA commenters have chosen to send their credibility to die on the metaphorical hill of Rep. Omar’s ridiculous climate change tweet of last week, I felt this paired set of reports made an important point. Amazingly, so far at least, these irreconcilable contradictions—and this is far from the only one in the climate change “settled science” debate—- don’t seem to shake the faith of climate change fanatics even a little bit.

Which itself is useful information….

Ethics Quiz: Fox News’ Charitable Gifts

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

“Fox Giving” facilitates charitable donations using the donation management platform “Benevity.” The Fox News Corp. matches donations up to $1,000 to various non-profit organizations and charities that satisfy the the platform’s criteria. But…Oh Horror!... among the organizations Fox ends up contributing to under this system are the Satanic Temple, the Trevor Project, Planned Parenthood (and local Planned Parenthood branches), and the Southern Poverty Law Center. The Fox’s donation policy states: “FOX will not match or provide volunteering rewards to : Donations to organizations that discriminate on the basis of a personal characteristic or attribute, including, but not limited to, age, disability, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity characteristics or expression, marital status, … pregnancy or medical condition either in its selection of recipients of the organization’s services, funds, or other support; in delivery of services; or in its employment practices.”

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What Should Ethics Alarms Call Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene After Her Hunter Porn Stunt? Ethics Dunce? Incompetent Elected Official?

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

I choose “disgusting.” The GOP Georgia representative embarrasses me as an American. And she’s incompetent and unethical.

A member of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, Rep. Greene thought it was appropriate to use her allotted time during a hearing to display nude photographs of Hunter Biden in various situations that could not be put on non-porn television (except, in this case, C-Span, as in the photo above). A member of Congress was displaying graphic shots of the President’s son engaged in sexual acts with alleged prostitutes. “Here is proof Hunter Biden paid prostitutes through his law firm, OWASCO PC, and trafficked his victims across state lines in violation of the Mann Act,” she tweeted. “Not only that, IRS whistleblowers confirm Hunter Biden committed tax fraud by deducting payments to prostitutes from OWASCO’s taxes.”

The photos “proved” neither. In a trial, they would be excluded as prejudicial and irrelevant.

“Before we begin, I would like to let the committee and everyone watching at home know that parental discretion is advised,” Greene said. That was thoughtful. The obscene photos shed no light whatsoever on any of the matters regarding the President’s sad and corrupt son that are legitimate topics of Congressional attention: whether he engaged in influence peddling with foreign governments that benefited his father or influenced his actions, and whether he has been shielded from the legal consequences a non-Presidential family member would face who engaged in the same activities. Greene claimed the photos were important supporting evidence regarding a tax fraud coverup and special treatment that resulted in Hunter cutting a deal with federal prosecutors to plead guilty to two minor tax crimes.

Oh. Huh?

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