Journalism & Media

Ethics Quiz: How Jean Carroll Got To Sue Trump For A Sexual Assault Allegation Over Two Decades Old

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

When I was discussing the recent jury verdict finding Donald Trump liable for defamation and sexual assault with an astute trail lawyer friend, he expressed surprise that the sexual assault civil case wasn’t barred by the statute of limitations, as the criminal case was. Among the glaring problems with the jury verdict was that it found by a preponderance of the evidence that the sexual assault—not the rape allegation , which, strangely, is what Trump called a lie on social media, prompting the defamation suit—took place even though Carroll couldn’t say what year it had occurred in. “This is the reason we have statute of limitations,” my learned friend said. “Memories fade, evidence is lost, testimony becomes unreliable. I’m amazed New York’s statute allows this.”

Well therein lies a tale. The statute didn’t allow it until, coincidentally <cough> last year. The Adult Survivors Act was passed by the New York legislature and signed by Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul in 2022. It created a “one-year lookback window for survivors of sexual assault” to legally pursue their alleged abusers, irrespective of when the abuse took place.

It was and is a blatantly political measure, pandering to the #MeToo crowd, which itself is deeply conflicted and corrupt. Now bad, bad men like Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby and…surprise! Donald Trump, can be sued during a convenient one year window no matter how long ago their alleged sexual misconduct took place, or how blurry memories of the details may be. Never mind that the protection against unfair sexual assault and sexual harassment lawsuits based on accusations that only surface when the accuser calculates that there are forces at play in society (like “Believe all woman”) making a victory likely should be available to all citizens. Never mind that such late-hit lawsuits rely on emotion and politics as much as evidence.

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Next Up On The Rapidly Expanding List Of Speech Progressives Want To Censor: “Fear Speech”

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

New York Times reporter and opinion writer Julia Angwin has been given a prominent space in the latest Sunday Times to expound on why another kind of speech needs to be suppressed, controlled and if possible, censored: “fear speech.”

Already the relentlessly radicalizing progressive hoard has embraced the anti-American concept of censoring other kinds of speech according to their very subjective definitions: “misinformation,” meaning opinions or analysis they disagree with, or distortions of truth that emanate from someplace or some one not devoted to advancing the Left’s goals and agendas, and “hate speech,” which they want to have excluded from First Amendment protections as they define it on a case by case basis. Now the Times is starting the metaphorical ball rolling to target more speech that these two categories might miss. Its designated messenger declares,

This year, Facebook and Twitter allowed a video of a talk to be distributed on their platforms in which Michael J. Knowles, a right-wing pundit, called for “transgenderism” to be “eradicated.” The Conservative Political Action Coalition, which hosted the talk, said in its social media posts promoting the video that the talk was “all about the left’s attempt to erase biological women from modern society.”

None of this was censored by the tech platforms because neither Mr. Knowles nor CPAC violated the platforms’ hate speech rules that prohibit direct attacks against people based on who they are. But by allowing such speech to be disseminated on their platforms, the social media companies were doing something that should perhaps concern us even more: They were stoking fear of a marginalized group.

Note the carefully crafted rhetoric: stoking fear of a marginalized group. Stoking fear of a group to marginalize it as much as possible for political gain is apparently hunky-dory, as in…

She continues,

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Res Ipsa Loquitur: Our Incompetent News Media

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

During today’s historic coronation of King Charles III, covered live by all of the news networks, the American reporters on ABC, NBC and CBS all referred to Charles being “coronated.”

The proper term is “crowned.” Dozens of sources would have so informed them—if they had done minimal research. No, it is not a big thing. It is just one more example of how negligently and lazily our journalists perform their jobs.

And thus once again I have to ask: Why does anyone trust these people? How can anyone trust these people? Journalism is no longer a profession in the United States. It is self-indulgent, privileged club.

Weird Tales Of The Great Stupid: The Phony Women’s Poker Tournament

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

This whole story is so ridiculous on so many levels that it nicely encapsulates just how stupid The Great Stupid has become. Allow me to explain…

Dave Hughes, 70, entered what was advertised as an all-women poker tournament at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Florida and won $5,555. This somehow sparked outrage, but all-female poker tournaments are illegal in Florida, violating the state’s anti-discrimination laws. Any man could have entered, but for some reason, only he did. The other 82 players were female.

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Ethics Dunce: National Guardsman Jon Lynch

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

There is no excuse for this.

New Hampshire-based Air National Guardsman Jon Lynch made a promotional ad for the social media platform TikTok, announcing,

“My name is Jon Lynch, and I’m a member of the National Guard. I use my TikTok channel to spread helpful and useful information to benefit military members and their families. TikTok allows me to give other military members and other families these experiences to appreciate this life that they’re in.”

TikTok is a popular app that allows users to upload their short videos, sometimes leading to lucrative social media stardom. It is owned by the China-based ByteDance technology company. TikTok is believed to be a source of data on Americans and American institutions for the Chinese government, as well as a potent propaganda vehicle.

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Today’s IIPTDXTTNMIAFB…

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

That’s “Imagine if President Trump did X that the news media is accepting from Biden.”

I hate quoting the GOP hit machine, but sometimes attention mus be paid.

All I ask is for the same standards of decorum, taste and civility to be applied equally, fairly and objectively. Is that so unreasonable?

I’m assuming that the “boy” Biden was addressing was not black. However, if Trump had dared to use a similarly condescending term, it would have been cited as further evidence of his autocratic instincts.

Wait, WHAT? The White House Is Caught Rigging Biden’s Press Conference To Make Him Appear More Competent Than He Is, And The Washington Post’s Analysis is “Everybody Does It” And “Republicans Pounce”?

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias!

How do these people look at themselves in the mirror without retching?

Paul Farhi was the veteran Democratic operative (aka a MSM reporter) the Post assigned to spin this scandal. “President Biden was photographed holding a notecard Wednesday, revealing the stage managing behind many political media events,” he began. Oh, the euphemism is “stagemanaging,” is it? What the “notecard” was is called a cheat sheet, and what it signifies is cheating, and lying to the public.

The card in Biden’s hand—he’s so diminished mentally that he can’t even cheat competently–read “Question # 1,” and directed the President to call on Los Angeles Times reporter, Courtney Subramanian. The card included Subramanian’s name, a pronunciation guide, her affiliation and a headshot. The card also included Subramanian’s question: under the heading “Foreign Policy/Semiconductor Manufacturing,” the card read, “How are YOU squaring YOUR domestic priorities — like reshoring semiconductors manufacturing — with alliance-based foreign policy?”

Biden called on her for the first question, she asked what she was supposed to, and Biden offered an uncharacteristically detailed and coherent response. Farhi’s spin: “White House press office employees have routinely polled reporters about their priorities and interests in advance of news meetings to anticipate what their boss might be asked while on the podium. The practice is also common in news conferences with Cabinet secretaries, such as the secretary of defense and secretary of state.” Fine, that’s their job. And it is an ethical reporter’s job to say, “Sorry, you’re just going to have to find out when I’m called on.” Sure Presidential aides want to brief POTUS on what the likely topics are. Rigging the questions in advance, however, is something completely different. It’s called cheating. This is particularly true in this case, when much of the pubic is concerned about the President’s cognitive abilities. Presenting him as able to whip off a detailed answer to a reporter’s question when in fact he was tipped off and the reporter was in cahoots with the White House is pure deception.

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Unethical Quote Of The Day: Wesley Lowery In “The Columbia Journalism Review”

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

“We pull no punches: when the weight of the objective evidence is clear, we must not conceal the truth through euphemism; rather, we should employ direct language. Our aim is not to be perceived as impartial by the people we imagine are our readers, but to accurately inform them about the world they live in.” 

—-Reporter Wesley Lowery, Journalist in Residence at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY, in his essay, “A Test of the News”

When I encountered the essay titled “A Test of the News” in the Columbia Journalism Review, I foolishly anticipated a careful diagnostic analysis of why American journalism was so ethically wretched, and a perceptive prescription for fixing the problem. Boy, do I have a flat learning curve. Why would I ever think that, knowing what I, what you, what anyone who has been paying attention knows from observing the carnage unethical, incompetent, biased journalism has inflicted on American democracy over the past decade? My delusion was especially unforgivable since 1) Lowery is a journalist, 2) he’s a Pulitzer Prize -winning journalist, and you know what kind of journalists the Pulitzers like, and 3) he’s also an college instructor. Education is running neck and neck with journalism as our most thoroughly unethical profession, though journalism is clearly the one most likely beyond repair.

The first three paragraphs of Lowery’s screed were bad enough, but I didn’t reach the point where I normally would have stopped reading until paragraph #4:

“To this day, news organizations across the country often rely on euphemisms instead of clarity in clear cases of racism (“racially charged,” “racially tinged”) and acts of government violence (“officer-involved shooting”). Such decisions, I wrote, are journalistic failings, but also moral ones: when the weight of the evidence is clear, it is wrong to conceal the truth. Justified as “objectivity,” they are in fact its distortion.”

When a police officer shoots an arrested suspect who tries to take his gun from him and then charges him with his 300 pound bulk, that is “government violence, “and the “weight of evidence is clear”—you know, as in “Hands up, don’t shoot!” That recycled Black Lives Matters mythology pretty much reveals all I need to know about Wesley Lowery, and he confirms my conclusion with the egomaniacal quote at the beginning of this post. He believes, as do so many editors and reporters echoing the same arrogant delusion, that journalists, narrow as their education and experience is, are capable of explaining to the public the true nature of the world they live in. This means the world view journalists want them to live in. Yet reporters do not know when the “weight of objective evidence is clear”; they don’t have the depth, wisdom or intellect to know what the “truth” is (don’t make me list examples again), and what ideological propagandists like Lowery call “accurate” includes shading, spin, soaked with bias, and the strategic omission of facts that undermine their narratives. The delusion is that having an outsized bullhorn automatically confers the ability to use it responsibly.

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Who Do You Trust, CNN Or Don Lemon? (Hint: It’s A Trick Question)

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Here is how Don Lemon announced his firing from CNN on Twitter…

Here was CNN’s response:

Lemon is an incorrigibly unprofessional and biased pseudo-journalist who has one of the most damning and extensive Ethics Alarms dossiers extant. he’s thrown tantrums, made up fake history, lied, peddled fake news and appeared drunk on the air. I think my favorite inexcusable babbling self-indulgence by Don was this, but I easily could have missed one, or dozens. Anyone that believes anything Don Lemon says, writes, publishes or tweets is dangerously gullible.

CNN, meanwhile, kept Lemon on the air in a high-profile, prime-time slot despite his lack of integrity and journalism competence, because it viewed him as an attractive messenger for its steady diet of biased, slanted and occasionally fabricated news stories serving its management’s partisan objectives. CNN is a little less trustworthy than Fox News, and a little more trustworthy than MSNBC, or, to be brief, completely untrustworthy.

The answer to the question posed in the headline is “Neither.”

The Tucker Carlson Firing Aftermath

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

Tucker Carlson behaved in a manner that would get any employee fired from any organization with two atoms of integrity and professionalism to rub together unless the organization was completely in thrall to The King’s Pass. It is really as simple as that; this isn’t hard. Nevertheless, pundits, politicians and hack journalists on both sides of the ideological divide set out to misrepresent the event in order to promote their own world views, confusing the American public when they should be illuminating a basic ethics and life competence issue.

Let’s see...why not start with one of the biggest hacks out there, CNN’s former fake journalism ethics watchdog and veteran Fox News-a-phobe, Brian Stelter? “Why Tucker Carlson’s Exit From Fox News Looks Like an Execution” is the title of his analysis in “Vanity Fair,” itself now a nest of progressive propaganda merchants (but Stelter lowers the net ethics quotient anyway).  The answer to Stelter’s question is, he offers, this: “He’s not being given a chance to say goodbye. It is technically possible, I suppose, that Carlson turned down a chance to sign off on his own terms. But my 20 years of experience covering cable news suggests otherwise.”

Wow. This guy is really something. Completely inept and intellectually dishonest, Stelter has to begin an article by reminding readers how special he is. Of course Carlson wasn’t given a chance to give a last broadcast. He was fired for cause. When you are fired for cause, security ushers you out of the building. Your bosses don’t give you anything but a severance package—maybe—and ten minutes to put your stuff in a cardboard box. Allowing a likely bitter and angry demagogue like Carlson to “say good bye” is like the Charles Addams cartoon where a guy arrested for making obscene phone calls is allowed to make his one call and he makes another obscene one. What Fox did with Carlson wasn’t “an execution.” It was a standard firing.

Over at the New Republic, long-time leftist hysteric Michael Tomasky (whose biased news analysis helped drive me away from The Daily Beast) writes in “Why Fox News Is Going to Get Worse—a Lot Worse” that Carlson is certain to be replaced by someone who is “more trolly, more racist, more pro-Putin, and just all-around more outrageous than Carlson.” Tomasky is just using Carlson’s demise as an excuse to attack Fox News when it has done the right and responsible thing for once, and at significant cost: its value dipped a billion dollars on the news of the firing. In the process, he repeats the Big Lies that the Left wielded against Carlson in its efforts to silence him, because censoring opposition is how Big Blue rolls these days; it’s so much more effective than trying to win a debate with facts and logic.

Carlson’s not “racist,” but the playbook demands that anyone who questions color-based, George Floyd Freakout policies must be a racist. Tucker’s not “pro-Putin,” he’s anti-US involvement in the Russia-Ukraine war, a defensible position. Carlson, moreover, was far less outrageous than the jerk he replaced, Bill O’Reilly, so why does Tomasky assume Carlson’s replacement will be worse than he was?

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