Journalism & Media

What Shannon Epstein Does Is Not National News And It Is Unethical Journalism To Pretend It Is

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

From The Blaze:

On Thanksgiving Day, Shannon Epstein, 25, climbed aboard a Spirit Airlines flight headed from New Orleans to New Jersey. However, after the plane left the gate but before it could take off, Epstein allegedly began causing a scene, accusing a Latina family seated near her of “smuggling cocaine.”

Because of the wild accusation, airport officials decided to redirect the plane back to the gate so that Epstein could be removed. However, she refused to cooperate, reports say. When deputies tried to force her to deplane, she became “extremely combative,” said Capt. Jason Rivarde of the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office.

During a scuffle with six deputies at Louis Armstrong International Airport, Epstein supposedly caused several injuries. She has been accused of biting one officer in the arm to such an extent that she broke the skin. She has also been accused of kicking another officer in the groin.

Many other news sources including NBC News, Yahoo! and The New York Post are headlining this story and giving it far more circulation and attention than the typical “wacko goes nuts on an airplane” tale.

Why do Shannon Epstein’s antics matter? They don’t. She’s irrelevant to the nation, national security, the economy and the culture. Thousands of more substantive crimes have been committed by similarly insignificant people since she had her meltdown.

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On The Trump-Deranged And Totalitarian Left’s Elon Musk Twitter Takeover Freakout

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

Rick Wilson is the disgraced Republican operative who helped fund the corrupt Lincoln Project to undermine President Trump. His recent self-indicting tweet was another product of his Trump Derangement once Trump’s purely partisan banishment from Twitter was ended by its new CEO, Elon Musk. The argument that it does anything but constrict public discourse to block a former President and current political leader from using a social media platform is untenable on its face. Wilson’s amusing unmasking, however, was small potatoes compared to how the entire resistance/Democratic Party/mainstream media alliance has donned neon-blinking signs reading: “I’m a totalitarian and proud of it!” on their heads.

The tantrums over the prospect of an even playing field on Twitter have been voluminous, indeed too many to catalogue. The “clear and present danger”: conservatives, Republicans and objective critics of the Left’s agenda, policies and protected tribes will now have the same opportunity to engage on Twitter as their esteemed opponents have had for years. This is, we are being told in various levels of hysteria, a threat to democracy. After all, criticism of the Left’s pets and pet projects is hate speech; criticism by the Left of those conservative fascists is just warning the public. Accurate assertions that the Left finds inconvenient are “misinformation”—you know, like Hunter Biden’s laptop—while fake news and false assertions that demonize Republicans and conservatives are legitimate political speech.

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Unethical Quote Of The Month: CNN Intelligence Analyst Robert Baer

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

“And you know, this freedom of speech is just nonsense because you can’t go in a movie theater and yell ‘fire.’ It’s against the law.”

—Former CIA case officer and current CNN intelligence analyst Robert Baer, arguing that Elon Musk’s allowing banned users—like Donald Trump—back on Twitter and not censoring “misinformation” constituted a security risk.

You know that feeling when you think you have made a persuasive argument, or at least fooled people into thinking you have, and then something comes out of your mouth that proves you don’t don’t know what you’re talking about? No, me neither, but if Robert Baer didn’t have that feeling when he uttered the ethics and legal nonsense above, he should have.

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Ethics Observations On Trump’s Dinner With Kanye (And Nick)

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Last week Donald  Trump  had dinner at Mar-a-Largo with Kanye West—I’ll start calling him by his new name, Ye, once I’m convinced that it’s not just another gimmick, or in other words, “never”—as well as Nick Fuentes, a 24-year-old leader of an annual white-supremacist event called the America First Political Action Conference, and Karen Giorno,  a veteran political operative who worked on Trump’s 2016 Presidential campaign. Never in my memory has the identity of dinner companions ever been used by the media as a supposed smoking gun against the dinner’s host. West, you may recall, had a much publicized meeting with Trump when he was President; he has recently been “cancelled” for making what seemed like anti-Semitic comments. (Kanye, it is fair to say, is mentally unstable and a publicity addict, and is likely to say anything at any time.) Fuentes dining with Trump, however, has been the focus of most of the criticism from the media, political figures, and others. The Times’ house anti-Trump specialist, Maggie Haberman wrote,

Even taking at face value Mr. Trump’s protestation that he knew nothing of Mr. Fuentes, the apparent ease with which Mr. Fuentes arrived at the home of a former president who is under multiple investigations — including one related to keeping classified documents at Mar-a-Lago long after he left office — underscores the undisciplined, uncontrolled nature of Mr. Trump’s post-presidency just 10 days into his third campaign for the White House.

She (and her co-reporter Alan Feuer) also quoted several figures who condemned Trump’s guest list:

  • “To my friend Donald Trump, you are better than this,” David M. Friedman, who was Mr. Trump’s longtime bankruptcy lawyer and then his appointee as ambassador to Israel, wrote on Twitter. “Even a social visit from an antisemite like Kanye West and human scum like Nick Fuentes is unacceptable. I urge you to throw those bums out, disavow them and relegate them to the dustbin of history where they belong.”
  • “This is just another example of an awful lack of judgment from Donald Trump, which, combined with his past poor judgments, make him an untenable general election candidate for the Republican Party in 2024,” said Chris Christie, a former governor of New Jersey who is considering a candidacy of his own.
  • “Matt Brooks, chief executive of the Republican Jewish Coalition, said, ‘We strongly condemn the virulent antisemitism of Kanye West and Nick Fuentes, and call on all political leaders to reject their messages of hate and refuse to meet with them.’”
  • Jonathan Greenblatt, the C.E.O. of the Anti-Defamation League, condemned Mr. Trump’s meeting with Mr. Fuentes, [saying], “Nick Fuentes is among the most prominent and unapologetic antisemites in the country…He’s a vicious bigot and known Holocaust denier who has been condemned by leading figures from both political parties here, including the R.J.C….[that  Trump ]“or any serious contender for higher office would meet with him and validate him by sharing a meal and spending time is appalling. And really, you can’t say that you oppose hate and break bread with haters. It’s that simple.”

Observations:

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Ethics Hero: Florida Catholic School Principal Tonya Peters, No Weenie She

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

In a seventh grade English class at St. Charles Borromeo Catholic School in Port Charlotte, Florida, the teacher was presenting Mark Twain’s “Tom Sawyer,” using an uncensored version, which is to say, “Tom Sawyer.” The classic novel, like its larger, more ambitious cousin “Huckleberry Finn,” uses the now taboo “n-word” in a society today that should be too sophisticated and wise by now not to know that declaring words taboo is ethically and intellectually indefensible. One African-American community website’s news report on the incident states, “Anyone who has read an unedited version of those books know how racially insensitive they were.” Well:

  • Any one who has only read an “unedited”, meaning bowldlerized, version of “Tom Sawyer” hasn’t read “Tom Sawyer,” and
  • Great literature isn’t supposed to be “racially sensitive”; it’s supposed to be enlightening.
  • The issue of watering down language that some may find offensive in literature is well-considered in this essay.

As described in the letter above, when members of the class read the book out loud and the word “nigger” was uttered, the students began “acting up,” laughing, making comments, and generally acting like undisciplined 7th graders, which they were. When the teacher could not calm them down, she improvised a creative but risky solution: having the children repeat the word over and over again. The idea, obviously (though not sufficiently obvious for any of the media reports to figure out) was to rob the “taboo” word of power by repetition. It’s an old linguistic trick that kids should be familiar with (i know I was): when any word is repeated enough, it becomes just a sound, which is all any word is. (This device becomes the climax of the excellent horror film “Pontypool,” in which something causes the English language to become deadly, destroying everyone’s brains.) Continue reading →

‘HA! You Fell For The Trap, White Boy!’

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

I almost made this an Ethics Quiz, but then decided that there is only one ethical answer.

Star high school quarterback Marcus Stokes posted a video of himself in a car singing a rap song that used the term “niggas.” Or maybe it was “niggers.” We can’t find out, you see, because our infantile, unethical news media will only write  that he said the “N-word,” and the video has been deleted. Journalism!

Stokes’ video caused the University of Florida to rescind its scholarship offer. Stokes is white; there is little question that if he were the right color, singing the song and posting it would not have raised any issues at all. But as Yahoo!’s Murjani Rawls observes, “Saying the N-word as a white person goes into another territory,” at least in the hypocritical, race-obsessed worlds of sports and academia. Continue reading →

I Don’t Understand NBC’s “Misinformation” Policy. OK, OK, I Think I Really Do….

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

I am tempted to conclude that it involves an official distinction between “good” misinformation and “bad” misinformation, the former being fake news that benefits Democrats, and the latter being actual facts that undermine progressive narratives.

For example, NBC has suspended veteran reporter Miguel Almaguer, who has been MIA since he reported that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul didn’t let on that he was in danger when cops showed up at his San Francisco home right before he was assaulted with a hammer. His scoop story went live on “Today” and then was summarily retracted hours later.

That Pelosi’s attack was proof of how Republicans were a “clear and present danger” to the nation became a prominent part of the news media/Democratic Party last ditch effort to limit GOP gains in last week’s election, so Almageur’s inconvenient facts—if they were facts, and we do not know—were apparently an intolerable injection of objective journalism into whatever it is that NBC News does now. (Whatever it is, as Harry Reid would say, “It works!”) NBC says it is “investigating.” Funny, the Pelosi attack was daily fare before the election; now it’s already dated trivia. On CNN’s Headline News this moring, Robin Meade spend almost ten minutes reviewing last night’s results on “The Masked Singer.” Omigod! The Singing Avacado was kicked off the show!!!! How is Paul Pelosi doing? Has he elucidated any of the mysteries surrounding his attack? Any news about what motivated the wacko who attacked him? Who cares? The Democrats held on to control of the Senate! Paul Pelosi? Who’s he?

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OK, After This Ethics Alarms Officially Condemns Cheap Shots At Senator-Elect Fetterman’s Appearance…

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

I’m sorry, but that meme was just too funny to ignore, ethics or not. I’d like to think even Fetterman would appreciate it.

But that’s it for me. Mocking a political figure based on his or her appearance is the ultimate ad hominem attack, and there’s no excuse for it. The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative news source that has made useful contributions to public awareness when the mainstream media is in the process of burying a story that hurts its mission, ran a story yesterday headlined,

“John Fetterman Wears Suit to Capitol, Looks Terrible….like a funeral home director on trial for desecrating a corpse (multiple counts)“

Nice.

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Ethics Quiz Addendum: NBC’s Deceitful Headline

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

“Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias!”

NBC’s current headline on the story discussed in today’s Ethics Quiz:

Texas teacher fired after telling Black students his race is ‘superior’

As so many are beating on Donald Trump right now (and deservedly so), it is only fair to point out that his statement that the news media were “the enemy of the people” was and is spot on, and quite possibly the most important and correct observation he has ever made in public. Naturally, it is also one of the statement he is most criticized for, especially by…the enemies of the people.

That headline by NBC is a prime example. It is pure deceit; indeed, I might use it to illustrate deceit in an upcoming ethics seminar. The first line of the NBC story immediately reveals the lie (deceit is lying): “A middle school teacher in Texas has been fired after a video posted on social media showed him telling students his race is “superior.” Other ways to distort the story for the edification of people who only read headlines, or to “poison the well” for those who do read on:

“Texas teacher fired after telling white students their race is ‘superior'”

“Texas teacher fired after telling black student her race is inferior.”

“Texas teacher fired after telling black students he regards their parents race makes them inferior.”

This is a distorted, manipulated, evil headline designed to misrepresent a complex incident into a knee-jerk confirmation of systemic racism and persistent white supremacy.

Is anyone going to call it out for what it is—unethical, biased, unprofessional, and typical of today’s journalism” other than Ethics Alarms?

We shall see.

(Don’t hold your breath.)

Ethics Dunce: Jennifer Siebel Newsom, Wife of California Gov. Gavin Newsom

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

…and aspiring First Lady, presumably.

Jennifer Siebel Newsom, a former actress and documentary filmmaker testified in the L.A. Harvey Weinstein trial yesterday. The wife of California Gov. Gavin Newsom (reportedly a possible 2024 Presidential candidate when the Democrats decide to kick Joe Biden to the curb from which he never should have escaped in the first place) told the court that the once powerful Hollywood producer and major Democratic Party donor raped her in a hotel room in 2005. She spoke of the devastating effect it had on her in the 17 years since…wait, what? Let’s go through that again 2005? And she never told the police or warned any of the other women who Harvey went on to sexually assault, rape and abuse? Why would that be?

“Because you don’t say no to Harvey Weinstein,” she ‘explained.’ “He could make or ruin your career,”

Oh.

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