Journalism & Media

Ethics Quote Of The Week: Dinesh D’Souza

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

“The mainstream media can’t risk covering the Twitter Files. If they admit rampant collusion between govt agencies and Twitter, they’ll have to inquire about Facebook, YouTube, Apple, Google. The whole censorship regime would unravel. Better to pretend nothing’s happening!”

—-Conservative scholar and author Dinesh D’Souza, via Twitter, of course.

Whatever one may think of D’Souza, and wherever one may fall in the partisan divide, I don’t see what other explanation there is for the stubborn, self-destructive refusal by the mainstream media to acknowledge what the Twitter files’ reporting by Matt Taibbi et al. has revealed. (Once again today, the New York Times contains no mention of the issue at all.)

It’s a mass, extended Jumbo. Continue reading →

Comment Of The Day: “The Other Shoe Drops: How Will The MSM Deny Twitter’s Viewpoint Censorship Now?”

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Bill Wolf’s Comment of the Day is four days old, and yet in light of subsequent developments, like this, this, this and this, it seems as fresh as new-fallen snow….

Here is Bill’s self-described rant/analysis sparked by “The Other Shoe Drops: How Will The MSM Deny Twitter’s Viewpoint Censorship Now?”:

***

Okay. I acknowledge that this qualifies as a rant. However, rants can be cathartic.

The “Free Press” is failing us again or more accurately stated: continues to fail us. The US being the American people. “Democracy Dies in Darkness”. True, but who is casting that shroud of darkness upon the country?

Our Founding Fathers were aware of the might and necessity of the “power of the pen” as they set upon their task to form the country’s government. So much so that they felt it necessary to address it as a preeminent limitation of government’s power. But why did they feel so strongly of the need for a free press? Perhaps Thomas Paine said it best: “Society in every state is a blessing, but government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one. The trade of governing has always been monopolized by the most ignorant and the most rascally individuals of mankind.”

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Further Ethics Observations On “The Twitter Files”

/ Jack Marshall / 34 Comments

1. Wow. The mainstream media is really determined to die on this hill. It really believes that if it pretends that there is nothing sinister, undemocratic or dangerous about how a bunch of snotty, self-empowered progressives conspired—and succeeded!–to manipulate public opinion, access to information and public discourse to advance a partisan agenda, eventually everyone will forget about it as if it didn’t happen. This is exactly the approach it took with the Hunter Biden laptop story in the first place, and clearly, it has learned nothing and changed nothing. Bury, deny, and “It isn’t what it is” are still the tactics of choice. And they are certain that the public is, most of it anyway, lazy, apathetic, gullible and stupid.

That, they may be right about.

2. However, this unforgivable attempt to deny an important news event indicts the media as much as the Twitter files indict Twitter. I find it impossible to believe the virtually unanimous reaction to this story hasn’t been coordinated. Continue reading →

Ethics Quote Of The Month: Bari Weiss, Concluding Part 5 Of “The Twitter Files”

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

“Ultimately, the concerns about Twitter’s efforts to censor news about Hunter Biden’s laptop, blacklist disfavored views, and ban a president aren’t about the past choices of executives in a social media company. They’re about the power of a handful of people at a private company to influence the public discourse and democracy.”

Exactly.

I’ll have observations of my own tomorrow. For now, let me just post a readable version of the fifth Twitter stream to describe the unethical, destructive and despicable censorship and double standards that Twitter employees engaged in, a blatant and undeniable effort by people who had neither the acumen, judgment or objectivity to pursue their own agendas at the cost of open discussion, argument and dissent.

As before, you will have to go to the source to see the many fascinating attachments: Continue reading →

Unethical Quote Of The Week: CNN Contributor Van Jones

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Van was speaking of the Brittany Griner prisoner trade with Russia…

“This is huge. First of all, that’s a decade-defining image when you saw her wife sitting there, Kamala Harris was there, president is there, such a human image, and yet it just shows this president got it done. He cared enough about this individual person to get her home. It was shocking for young Americans to see an icon like that snatched, locked up, treated like garbage and nine years, ten years for bringing some cannabis oil, medically prescribed. So these are decade-defining images. I guarantee you there will be young people 10, 20, 30 years from now who will remember this moment because she is an icon. It’s really, really extraordinary. And people are talking about this other guy. He’s so terrible. Look, there’s a lot of terrible people in the world, a lot of terrible people in Russia. What you can’t allow to happen is have a black female icon treated like garbage and America do nothing about it. Something was done about it, and people are going to be proud of that.”

—Race-obsessed pundit Van Jones, once Barack Obama’s “Green Jobs Czar,” blathering on to try to justify President Biden trading an arrogant, dumb, America-bashing athlete who defied State Department travel warnings for money and got caught with illegal drugs in Russia, for an international arms dealer and terrorism purveyor, Viktor Bout, who is a good bet to kill lots of people with his skills.

That’s a little long for an Unethical Quote, but the full thing is necessary to give a proper sense of just how ethically obtuse, factually-nonsensical and outright stupid the quote is. Van Jones has proved over the past that he is not incapable of perceptive analysis, but he persists in outburst like this one, usually conscening race, that make him one of the epitomes of the Ethics Alarms motto, “Bias Makes You Stupid. Jones is smarter than this quote makes him sound, so we must assume that he knows what he’s saying is garbage, but he’s saying it on CNN anyway.

Ethics Strike One.

  • “Decade defining image?” Stop insulting our intelligence. Griner will be completely forgotten as soon as she quits basketball, and only lightly remembered before that. How many people remember Bo Bergdahl now?

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More Twitter Revelations…Crickets Or Denials From The Complicit Mainstream Media And The Left’s Censorship Beneficiaries

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Keep it up, guys. With every effort to deny that what happened was what happened, the corrupted U.S. journalists and their employers erode public trust in their profession further, and with it their power. Eventually, there will be a breaking point and an ugly reckoning. Good. They have been asking for it. Yeah, keep up the gaslighting and denial. The fools really think they can bury the story. Even at Memeorandum, which is usually an objective news aggregator, the tweeted revelations by Bari Weiss and Matt Taibbi are invisible. (Top story as I write this: a soccer reporter has died.) Very disappointing: I thought they were better than this. Still, the site’s bias is worth knowing about. I will not trust it as I have in the past.

Here’s a smoking gun: look at the transcript of an NPR interview with Newt Gingrich. Newt is unethical slime, but he’s very intelligent unethical slime, and when his personal agendas don’t interfere with his analysis, he is worth listening to. (I learned more in a private two hour seminar with young Newt when he was a Congressman than I learned in many full Government courses at Harvard.) Pay special attention to the NPR interviewer’s refusal to deal with reality that implicates NPR:

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The Other Shoe Drops: How Will The MSM Deny Twitter’s Viewpoint Censorship Now?

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

Just as Ethics Alarms was flagging the frantic efforts among the left-biased news media and others to deny the obvious and accurate implications of Twitter’s Hunter Biden laptop story censorship—the social media platform deliberately used its power to mislead the public and bolster Democrats— New York Times refugee Bari Weiss dropped the next metaphorical shoe, reporting on more newly released Twitter documents that show its pre-Elon Musk regime was “creating blacklists, preventing disfavored tweets from trending, and actively limiting the visibility of entire accounts or even trending topics—all in secret, without informing users” and all based on an anti-conservative, pro-progressive agenda.

I can’t wait to see how The Washington Post, Phillip Bump and TechDirt apply Yoo’s Rationalization (“It isn’t what it is”) to muddy the issue this time.

Bari Weiss revealed her conclusions from studying the evidence sent to her by Twitter Avenger Elon Musk in a Twitter stream like the one employed by Matt Taibbi in the earlier revelations—you know, about how the Hunter Biden laptop facts were censored, which the New YorkTimes, Washington Post and the news networks shrugged off as “a nothingburger” because it was “old news,” Hunter Biden didn’t matter, and the laptop story wouldn’t have changed the result of the election anyway, so who cares if was censored by Twitter, and yes, them too?

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The Twitter Hunter Biden Laptop Censorship Proves Social Media’s Anti-Democracy Slant, And The Media’s Rush To Excuse It Proves Theirs

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

This was a test of integrity for the mainstream news media, and they, most predictably, flunked it, and outed themselves as the shamelessly unethical propaganda-spewing hacks they are. Depressing, but good to know, as if we didn’t know already.

As an exemplar of the whole, ugly, revolting effort to dismiss evidence that a biased and partisan Twitter staff deliberately buried a news story that might have harmed Joe Biden’s prospects of winning the 2016 election, Phillip Bump’s “analysis” in the Washington Post could hardly be more damning. Its very headline is an unethical rationalization and an appeal to consequentialism: “No, limiting the Hunter Biden laptop story didn’t cost Trump the election.”

Let’s just start with that, okay? Continue reading →

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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