Journalism & Media

Comment of the Day: “Comment of the Day: ‘Unethical (and Stupid) Quote of the Month: Zohran Mamdani’”

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Gee, we haven’t had a Comment of the Day on a Comment of the Day for quite while around here. This one was especially satisfying. Reacting to Extradimensional Cephalopod‘s discouraged coda to his COTD on Mayor-to-be Mamdani’s scary-stupid victory rant, Old Bill registered commentary that should have been already featured on or in every legitimate news source. Unfortunately, there are no legitimate news sources, and the fact that OB’s point has been so far almost completely ignored by the Axis media has been making me doubt my own sanity. Am I missing something? How is a President supposed to actually lower grocery prices after inflation he had no responsibility for hit 9% under his predecessor, particularly after less than a year in office? How dare the Democrats choose “affordability” as a rallying cry against Trump when the affordability crash happened on their watch? Do they think the public is that stupid? IS the public that stupid?

Please don’t tell me that you really can fool all of the people all of the time.

It was high time for Old Bill ( we once had several Bills among the commentariate, now all among the missing; maybe they are hanging out with A Friend, Curmie and Charles Green somewhere….) to have another Comment of the Day. He is among the most attentive and prolific commenters Ethics Alarms has, and we should be grateful for him. I certainly am.

Here is Old Bill’s Comment of the Day on “Comment of the Day: “Comment of the Day: ‘Unethical (and Stupid) Quote of the Month: Zohran Mamdani.’” I know its mostly a quote, but it is the right quote, I hadn’t seen it, and maybe you haven’t either.

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“I was hoping from what I’d heard about Mamdani earlier that he was standing up for legitimate concerns of the people regarding the government and the economy.”

This is the “affordability” talking point Dems have surfaced and harped on over the last few months and during the off-year elections. Remember when everything was “income inequality” and everyone pretended they’d read Thomas Piketty’s book.

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NYT Subscriptions Surge, Meaning That Journalism’s One-Way Bias and Ethics Rot Is Not Going Away Soon

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

In a post yesterday, I wrote, in the final note on the ethical implications of this week’s election results,

“None of this would have unfolded in quite the same way, I am certain, without a corrupt journalism sector that has totally abdicated the duty of its profession in favor of partisan propaganda. I am more convinced than ever that the Republic will not function efficiently or engender responsible citizenship until there is news media commitment to fair, objective, responsible, unbiased and honest communication to the public of what it needs to know to make intelligent decisions about their governance. There has been some progress toward that end this year, but not nearly enough.”

Well, evoking William Barrett Travis when Santa Anna demanded the surrender of the Alamo, the New York Times “answered with a cannon shot.”

“The Times’s Profit Jumps With 460,000 More Subscribers” the headline today reads. “The Times now has 12.33 million total subscribers to all of its products. It has said it is aiming for 15 million by the end of 2027.” The article (gift link!), which you can read yourself if you have the stomach for it, has lots of other good news for the Times bottom line,

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The President’s “60 Minutes” Interview

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

President Trump sat down for a full interview with “60 Minutes” yesterday, and was grilled by CBS correspondent Norah O’Donnell (as I was once, though not on that show). The transcript and the video are here. Under the new regime of CBS News Czar (“Editor-in-Chief”) Bari Weiss, there were no deceptively edited sections as in the infamous and unethical (and, I believe, illegal) Kamala Harris interview a year ago when the network switched around her responses to try to deceive voters into believing that the Democrat isn’t, you know, a babbling idiot.

This post’s purpose isn’t to critique O’Donnell’s questions. She was appropriately respectful, aggressive and professional except that her facial expressions conveyed her hostility, which is unprofessional but now common practice among Axis broadcast journalists. The shot above was typical: she looked at the President of the United States as if he were a six-foot talking cockroach. Nor am I going to praise or criticize the substance of Trump’s responses, though I note that he showed an excellent knowledge of American Presidential history when he pronounced Joe Biden as our Worst President Ever.

It is simply to point out that the Trump Derangement narrative that this President is mentally failing and as cognitively disabled as Joe Biden (“Just in a different way” as one sufferer told me on Halloween) is either delusional or deliberately dishonest. The interview was slam-dunk proof of that, and yet this slander/libel is Axis cant now. I regard the claim as evidence of a genuine disruption of thinking ability. Bias makes you stupid, and in this case, bias is making these poor people ridiculous.

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End of the Baseball Season Ethics Recap, 11/2/25, Part 2

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

For those readers who ignore the EA baseball posts: this isn’t one, except for this brief note on baseball competence. Isiah Kiner-Falefa of the Toronto Blue Jays pulled a (as it turned out) game-losing brick in the 9th inning when he was out by a mini-micron trying to score the winning run from third base. He was out in a force play, with the catcher barely scraping home plate before the base-runner’s shoe hit it. At the time, I thought, “Why is he sliding?” then forgot about it in the excitement of the play and all that followed the rest of that incredible game. But it is being pointed out in some post-game articles this morning that if Kiner-Falefa had just run straight to the plate, he would have been safe….and there was no reason for him to slide. It isn’t hindsight. The bases were loaded. It was going to be a force play at home if the ball was hit on the ground, and it was. A slide always gets a runner to a base a bit slower than running through. The catcher, Will Smith, didn’t need to tag him, and a slide is only necessary to avoid a tag. The Jays infielder’s mental mistake lost the Series as surely as “Snodgrass’s muff” or Bill Buckner’s error (more than that one, actually), but I bet nobody remembers it in the wild collage of everything else that happened. Poor Jays catcher Kirk will feel like the goat for hitting into a DP with the tying and winning runs on base with only one out to lose the game in the 10th. . But the #1 culprit was Kiner-Falefa. An MLB player should know the rules.

Now on to more mundane matters…

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Ethics Villain Revealed: Barack Obama [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

For once, the New York Times is reporting one of those over-heard conversations from an anonymous source who is violating trust to reveal it that harms the reputation and image of a progressive hero, though maybe the Times staff is so far gone that it doesn’t realize the import of the leak.

Former President Barack Obama, the Times revealed, phoned New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani today, November 1. The architect of the foundering progressive take-over of American government and culture spoke with the front-runner for “roughly 30-minutes.” According to the leakers, who spoke “on condition of anonymity” to describe the private conversation, Obama said that he “was invested in Mr. Mamdani’s success” beyond the upcoming election. The two (Muslims?) “talked about the challenges of staffing a new administration and building an apparatus capable of delivering on Mr. Mamdani’s agenda of affordability in the city.”

On the call, Obama reportedly spoke admiringly about Mamdani’s campaign. “Your campaign has been impressive to watch,” he told the charismatic communist, according to the sources.

During the campaign (and before it) Mamdani has made it Waterford crystal clear that he supports Hamas and does not believe that Israel has a right to exist. As a watermark of the anti-Semite, he has repeatedly described Israel’s legitimate armed response to the Gazan terror attack of October 7, 2023, as “genocide.” Those not in favor of obliterating Israel might well have regarded these themes in Mamdami campaign for mayor serious missteps. Obama, if the account is to be believed, seems to think being anti-Israel is just hunky-dory, but as we’ve seen, that’s where his party and its most fervent members have been tending for years.

Obama offered to be a “sounding board”—as in coach, mentor, advisor— when Mamdani wins the election, with the two agreeing to meet in person at some point in Washington, D.C.. Mamdani reportedly thanked the former president for the encouragement and told him that he had drawn inspiration for his own recent speech on Islamophobia from Mr. Obama’s speech on race during his first presidential run.

That Mamdani speech was the one in which he implied that voting against him was a sign of bigotry. Yeah, there’s no reason in the world for New Yorkers to be wary of Islam. What did Muslims ever…oh. Right.

A spokeswoman for Obama refused to verify the report, but a spokeswoman for Mamdani said, “Zohran Mamdani appreciated President Obama’s words of support and their conversation on the importance of bringing a new kind of politics to our city.”

You know. Communist politics.

My guess is that Obama is quite ticked off, because this leak almost certainly came from the Mamdani camp, which has seen its candidate’s support dwindle in recent days, though probably not enough.

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Unethical Rant of the Year: MSNBC Left-Wing Propagandist Lawrence O’Donnell

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias! Lawrence O’Donnell, right up there with the most shameless Axis media hacks in captivity even compared to the rest of MSNBC, usually goes his merry way slamming Republicans, conservatives and President Trump, avoiding inconvenient facts, objectivity and balance at all costs, appealing only to American who don’t want news or fair analysis, just confirmation of their own world view. When people decry the harsh division in American society today, O’Donnell is one of the prime villains, in part because he has been championing “advocacy journalism” ( as in unethical journalism) for so long.

Here’s his Ethics Alarms dossier. The last time I bothered to mention him at all (he’s always biased and unethical: The Julie Principle applies), was last year when I elevated him from mere Unethical Broadcast Journalist to Ethics Corrupter. Yes, I defended O’Donnell once…for being caught on video screaming at the MSNBC staff and shouting “fuck” among other epithets. I don’t think anyone’s most embarrassing private moments should be made “viral.”

However, this time attention should be paid, as Willy Loman’s widow says at the end of “Death of a Salesman.” O’Donnell snapped on the air yesterday and began denigrating Scott Jennings, the articulate, restrained token conservative and Donald Trump advocate on CNN’s on-air team. Jennings does a superb job vivisecting the usually emotional, knee-jerk, woke Trump-Deranged fury that he encounters on the various panels and in the numerous discussions he participates in, providing a much-needed counterpoint on CNN, which has evolved into MSNBC lite: reliably unethically biased, but with occasional outbreaks of non-partisan reality.

For some reason a sole voice of non-Axis perspective on a rival network is deeply offensive to O’Donnell. How dare Jennings defend President Trump? How dare he undermine the perpetual efforts of the news media to destroy him and defeat his policies? The Unethical Rant of 2025 was the result. Here is the whole amazing thing:

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On President Trump’s $230 Million Justice Dept. Compensation Claim

/ Jack Marshall / 40 Comments

This situation is a) unprecedented b) raises ethics issues that a typical first year law student or a bright 16-year-old could figure out c) is easily resolved, though the solution would be messy to execute and d) is being misrepresented by the news media because of course it is. I have been stalling, I admit, exploring it here because I am sick to death of Trump related controversies, but I just discussed it 45 minutes ago in an ethics seminar, so I can’t avoid the story any longer.

The Facts:  Donald Trump, then a lowly private citizen (but ex-President) submitted a claim, lodged in late 2023, seeking damages for alleged violations of his rights by the F.B.I. and the special counsel tricked -up Russian election tampering investigation. In the summer of 2024, his lawyers filed a second complaint accusing the F.B.I. of violating Trump’s privacy when it raided Mar-a-Lagoin 2022 for to search for classified documents. That claim also accused the Biden Justice Department of malicious prosecution (Gee, ya think?).

Naturally, the Biden Justice Department (which also had a conflict of interest, as it was unlikely to relish the prospect of admitting wrongdoing during the Presidential campaign, did nothing, leaving the matter to be resolved after the election. But Trump won, and many of his lawyers are now officials in the Justice Department. They have, essentially switched sides. Even the President, not known for his sensitivity to ethical matters, realizes the problem. “I have a lawsuit that was doing very well, and when I became president, I said, I’m sort of suing myself,” Trump has said, adding: “It sort of looks bad, I’m suing myself, right? So I don’t know. But that was a lawsuit that was very strong, very powerful.”

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President Tyler, President Trump, The East Wing, And Leadership [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 43 Comments

John Tyler was our 10th President (1841-1845) and the first Vice-President to reach the White House via the death of his predecessor. That was the ill-starred William Henry Harrison, the oldest elected POTUS until our recent spate of geriatrics, who died shortly after being sworn in. Tyler is regarded as an obscure and rather dishonored President—he served in Jefferson Davis’s Cabinet during the Civil War, but his one big decision was a crucial one that took guts and audacity. The U.S. may not have survived without it.

As with many parts of the Constitution, the Founders were infuriatingly vague on the question of Presidential succession. It was unclear whether the VP was to serve as an acting President until a special election was held, or whether he became President for the rest of the dead President’s term. Tyler was a Democrat who ran on a ticket with a Whig President, so settling the issue promised to be a political battle that could have escalated into a dangerous crisis. Tyler didn’t wait for Congress to debate the matter: he just took the oath of office, said “I am the President at least until until the 1844 election,” and dared anyone to try to block him. Nobody did. That set “The Tyler Precedent,” and we should all say a silent prayer to John Tyler for it.

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“Social Media Is An Idiot Detection Service,” Episode #789K

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Today’s episode, from “X”:

Sharmine Narwani, we are told, is a well-known journalist and political analyst specializing in West Asian geopolitical issues. She believes that Islam was around six centuries before Muhammad was born. She wants to spread her ignorance far and wide.

The tweet has 25,000 “loves.” I regard it as a pre-holiday “Coming Attractions” feature, warning us of the fatuous Jesus=Illegal immigrants analogies we will be getting from our woke friends (and a lot of pulpits) all too soon.

(Pointer to Glenn Reynolds, who accurately notes, “Actually, of course, it was a Jewish kingdom when Jesus was born. And it didn’t become Arab or Muslim until the Mohammedan invasion of the 7th century. Today’s inhabitants of “Palestine” are settler-colonialists. Israel is fighting a war of indigenous resistance to colonization.”

The A.I. Ethics Problem in News Reporting

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Guest post by Matthew B.

JM Introduction: This excellent post arrived on yesterday’s open forum, and thus was immediately eligible for guest column status. It is especially timely, both because of this story from the legal ethics jungle and this more alarming one:

The top United States Army commander in South Korea revealed to reporters this week that he has been using a chatbot to help with decisions that affect thousands of U.S. soldiers. Major General William “Hank” Taylor told the media in Washington, D.C., that he is using AI to sharpen decision-making, but not on the battlefield. The major general — the fourth-highest officer rank in the U.S. Army — is using the chatbot to assist him in daily work and command of soldiers.

Speaking to reporters at a media roundtable at the annual Association of the United States Army conference, Taylor reportedly said “Chat and I” have become “really close lately.”

Great. What could go wrong? Now here’s Matthew…

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One of the problems with AI is how often it is confidently wrong. This manifests itself all over the place. One of the most troubling is in the news industry. The news industry under tremendous financial pressure, and the appeal of moving towards AI generated content opens them up to completely BS stories spreading.

There are several great recent examples.

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