Journalism & Media

Ethics Observations on the President’s Response to His Obamas-As-Apes Post

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

 REPORTER: “Mr. President, you frequently criticize Joe Biden for not knowing what is going on in his name. This racist video that was posted is on your social media.”

 PRESIDENT TRUMP: “I know what’s going on a hell of a lot better than you do! You don’t know what’s going on! I know what’s going on.  No, Joe Biden didn’t have a clue, but we know everything. And when you look at what’s happening with our economy, think of it, we’re way years ahead of schedule. We have thousands and thousands of businesses being built right now, so Joe Biden had no clue. If Joe Biden were elected or if Kamala were elected, we wouldn’t have country right now. We won the election because of minority voters.”

 REPORTER: “Does this post maybe hurt Republicans with, you know, Black voters after the…”

  PRESIDENT TRUMP: “You know, I was, look, we did criminal justice reform. I did the historically Black colleges and universities. I got them funded. Nobody has been, and that’s why I got a tremendous, the highest vote with male Black voters that they’ve seen in many, many decades. I’ve done great with them. Black voters have been great to me. I’ve been great them. Black voters has been great me. I’ve been great to them.  And I am, by the way, the least racist president you’ve had in a long time, as far as I’m concerned. We have — I’ve had a great relationship. Think of what I’ve done. Criminal justice reform. Nobody else could do it. Obama couldn’t do it, nobody could do. Clinton couldn’t. They actually went the other way. They went into a very bad thing for African American people, Black people. They went to a — they did very bad things. I did very good things. But criminal justice reform, and then I funded the universities, which nobody else was willing to do. They were going every year, they’d come back to Washington and they’d be begging for money, begging. I got to be friendly with some of the heads of the schools and they would come back and they would literally tell me they’re forcing us to beg. I’m the one that got them long-term financing and more than they were looking for.  So there’s nobody that’s done more. And I think maybe more than anything else was criminal justice reform. They’ve been trying to get it for years. And I’m the one that got it done, so nobody can tell me about that.”

 “That somebody posts, the staffer posts, you know, posts. And I knew it was all about, if you take a look at that, and see the whole thing, it was a small section at the very end. But that was about fraudulent elections, which we have, a lot of them. We’re gonna get it stopped. And I liked the beginning, I saw it, and just passed it on.”

Observations:

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BREAKING: DEI Bias Eats The A.P.’s Brains

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Why would the Associate Press feel the world needs this “news” when Savannah Guthrie’s mother is still missing?

The Associated Press is troubled that there are so many white athletes at the Winter Olympics. No, it really offered a new story that says this. No I am NOT kidding. The apparently woke-mad Chris Nisi complains in “Europe’s rising diversity is not reflected at the Winter Olympics. Culture plays a big role” [Note: “Culture plays a big role”= “Bulletin: Water is Wet.”]…

Immigration from Africa and the Middle East has transformed the demographics of Europe in recent decades. And while the growing diversity is reflected in many sports such as soccer — Sweden’s men’s national team has several Black players including Liverpool striker Alexander Isak — it hasn’t made a dent in winter sports…At the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics, Sweden is sending a team made up almost exclusively of ethnically Swedish athletes, with NHL player Mika Zibanejad, whose father is from Iran, a rare exception. That hardly reflects the diversity of the Nordic country: About 2 million of its 10 million residents were born abroad, about half of them in Asia or Africa, according to national statistics agency SCB.

The lack of athletes of color at the Winter Olympics — and in winter sports in general — has been a recurring theme in the U.S., which is sending one of its most diverse teams to the Games. It hasn’t gotten the same attention in Europe.

The Olympic rosters of France, Germany, Switzerland and other European winter sports nations look a lot like Sweden’s: overwhelmingly white and lacking the immigrant representation seen in their soccer or basketball teams…”

 

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No, Peggy Noonan, The Washington Post Became An Untrustworthy Blight On America Long, Long Ago And I Can Prove It…

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

I just saw the above and felt it was as good a visual intro to this essay as any. Now keep in mind that here I am not suggesting that the recently gutted Washington Post is necessarily a worse travesty of journalism than the rest of what we laughingly call our news media. I just had Fox News on in the background while I reorganized my sock drawer and heard it breathlessly cover the disappearance of Savannah Guthrie’s mother for a full ten minutes. Fox is doing this, I surmise, to avoid discussing President Trump’s latest social media scandal, as I do here. But I digress….what prompted this EA post is this recent bit of nostalgia in the Wall Street Journal from Peggy Noonan, Ronald Reagan’s favorite speechwriter, who wrote in part,

The diminishment of the Washington Post hits hard because it feels like another demoralizing thing in our national life. Our public life as a nation—how we are together, how we talk to each other, the sound of us—isn’t what it was. It’s gone down and we all feel this, all the grown-ups. The Post was a pillar. The sweeping layoffs and narrowing of coverage announced this week followed years of buyouts and shrinking sections. None of this feels like the restructuring of a paper or a rearranging of priorities, but like the doing-in of a paper, a great one, a thing of journalistic grandeur from some point in the 1960s through some point in the 2020s. I feel it damaged itself when, under the pressure of the pandemic, George Floyd and huge technological and journalistic changes, it wobbled—and not in the opinion section but on the news side. But I kept my subscription because that is a way of trusting, of giving a great paper time to steady itself….But the Post’s diminishment, which looks like its demise, isn’t just a “media story.” Reaction shouldn’t break down along ideological lines, in which the left feels journalism is its precinct and is sad, and the right feels journalism is its hulking enemy and isn’t sad. Treat it that way and we’ll fail to see the story for its true significance. The capital of the most powerful nation on earth appears to be without a vital, fully functioning newspaper to cover it. That isn’t the occasion of jokes, it’s a disaster…I fear sometimes that few people really care about journalism, but we are dead without it. Someday something bad will happen, something terrible on a national scale, and the thing we’ll need most, literally to survive, is information. Reliable information—a way to get it, and then to get it to the public. That is what journalism is, getting the information.

First, let me say that I am impressed that Peggy still writes as beautifully as ever, and I forgive her for being married to the guy who fired me at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (and who tried to cheat on her with one of my interns until I intervened). However Noonan is one of the NeverTrump Republicans, and bias has clearly made her stupid regarding the Post’s bias and abandonment of fair, accurate, objective journalism as its mission. Come on, Peggy…

  • “Our public life as a nation—how we are together, how we talk to each other, the sound of us—isn’t what it was.” Yes, and the Post has been a significant catalyst for this.
  • “The Post was a pillar.” When was the Washington Post last a “pillar”? Watergate?
  • “… a thing of journalistic grandeur from some point in the 1960s through some point in the 2020s.” As I will shortly demonstrate, the Post had become a Democratic Party, progressive mouthpiece long before that.
  •  “Reaction shouldn’t break down along ideological lines, in which the left feels journalism is its precinct and is sad, and the right feels journalism is its hulking enemy and isn’t sad.” In fact, that’s exactly what is happening, because conservatives, Republican and ethicists recognized that the Post had become a partisan weapon, and the Mad Left regarded it as its champion of useful disinformation and public deception. 
  • “The capital of the most powerful nation on earth appears to be without a vital, fully functioning newspaper to cover it.” Appears? APPEARS??? That condition has been obvious to anyone with the integrity to admit it since at least 2008, when the Post joined most news organizations in campaigning for Barack Obama. This included blaming the bi-partisan 2008 economic meltdown on only Republicans when Ted Kennedy’s and Barney Frank’s fingerprints were all over the debacle, calling GOP VP candidate Sarah Palin unqualified when she had more relevant experience for the Presidency than the Democrats’ Presidential nominee, and mocked her intellect while ignoring Obama’s running mate’s well established IQ issues.
  • “I fear sometimes that few people really care about journalism, but we are dead without it.” In the immortal words of John McClane, “Welcome to the party, pal!” But the Post wasn’t engaged in journalism, and hadn’t been for many years. Where was Noonan then? Why wasn’t she sounding the alarm?
  • “Someday something bad will happen, something terrible on a national scale, and the thing we’ll need most, literally to survive, is information.”  Something bad? You mean like the nation being locked-down based on the teachers’ unions refusal to do their jobs, Deep State health officials lying about what they knew,  and the Democratic Party’s desire to crash the economy to get rid of Donald Trump? Like an election being held in 2020 with insecure ballots and blue states violating their own election laws? Or a President being demented and his wife and staff running the country while the news media assisted in the cover-up? Like a group of Democratic prosecutors targeting the greatest threat to their continued power and using third world tactics to try to lock him up? Those kinds of “bad things?”
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My Head Just Exploded Over This News of the Corruption Of Our Legal System That I Didn’t Know About Because The Media Decided a “Today” Host’s FAMILY CRISIS IS MORE IMPORTANT…!!!

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

In case you can’t tell, I’m madly disgusted about this, “this” meaning both the episode I’m going to write about, and the fact that I didn’t hear or read about it immediately because of our incompetent, irresponsible news media deciding that their dumb audience would rather share feelings with Savannah Guthrie.

From the New York Times: [Gift link!]

“A former obstetrician-gynecologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who was convicted in 2022 of sexually abusing patients must be given a new trial, a state appeals court said on Monday, overturning the former doctor’s conviction. The former doctor, James M. Heaps, 69, was sentenced to 11 years in prison in April 2023 after jurors in the Superior Court of Los Angeles County found him guilty of three counts of sexual battery by fraud and two counts of sexual penetration of an unconscious person. U.C.L.A. has already paid about $700 million to settle claims of sexual misconduct against Mr. Heaps, who was affiliated with the university in various roles from 1983 to 2018.

“A three-judge panel on the California Court of Appeal ruled on Monday that Mr. Heaps had been denied a fair trial because the trial judge never told Mr. Heaps’s lawyer or the prosecutors on the case about a note that the jury had sent while it was deliberating in October 2022.

The “Note to Judge” said that a recently seated alternate juror had “expressed to us that his limited English interfered with his understanding of the testimony, resulting in every case being the same, and his mind is already made up.”

Under the California Code of Civil Procedure, people who lack “sufficient knowledge of the English language” cannot serve on trial juries. The appeals court ruled that Mr. Heaps’s conviction must be overturned.”

“We recognize the burden on the trial court and regrettably, on the witnesses, in requiring retrial of a case involving multiple victims and delving into the conduct of intimate medical examinations,” the appeals court wrote. “The importance of the constitutional right to counsel at critical junctures in a criminal trial gives us no other choice.”

The Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office said in a statement that it planned to retry Mr. Heaps ‘as soon as possible.’ Mr. Heaps will be sent back to county jail, the office said, and a court could release him on bail.”

I will now pause a bit while you mop your skull and brain bits off your computer screen. I’ve found that Windex does a good job, though you have to pick up the bigger pieces with your fingers.

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Ethics Quote of the Week, Self-Delusion Division: Jeff Stein, Washington Post’s Chief Economics Correspondent

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

“This is a tragic day for American journalism, the city of Washington and the country as a whole. I’m grieving for reporters I love and whose work upheld the truest and most noble callings of the profession.They are being punished for mistakes they did not cause.”

—-Jeff Stein, The Post’s chief economics correspondent, bemoaning the lay-offs today of some 300 Washington Post journalists

Who does Stein think he’s kidding? Or is he completely oblivious to his own paper’s abandonment of fair, honest and objective journalism that is a major, if not the only reason for the Washington Post’s demise?

Stein was quoted in the New York Times’ gloating report of today’s metaphorical massacre. It wrote in part,

“The Washington Post carried out a widespread round of layoffs on Wednesday that decimated the organization’s sports, local news and international coverage.

The company laid off about 30 percent of all its employees, according to two people with knowledge of the decision. That includes people on the business side and more than 300 of the roughly 800 journalists in the newsroom, the people said.

The cuts are a sign that Jeff Bezos, who became one of the world’s richest people by selling things on the internet, has not yet figured out how to build and maintain a profitable publication on the internet. The paper expanded during the first eight years of his ownership, but the company has sputtered more recently.”

The Washington Post figured out too late that the country only needed one all-Democrat-all-the-time biased paper, and that the New York Times was better at its biased reporting and pandering to its bubble than the Post anyway.

The Post could have survived, I believe, by becoming a national paper that strove for even-handedness and objectivity, leaving the Frustrated Right to the Wall Street Journal and the Angry Left to the Times. USA Today had failed miserably at filling that niche (Have you read that rag lately? Weekly Reader used to be more informative!). The opportunity was there once, but many years ago. Instead, the Post continued to inflict flagrant Axis hacks on its dwindling non-woke readers, propaganda agents like E.J. Dionne, Richard Cohen, Dana Milbank, Phillip Bump, Kathleen Parker, Eugene Robinson, Jonathan Capehart and more. Since the local readership was about 95% Democrat, hey, why bother being fair or non-partisan?

Well, people like me and my wife constituted one reason. The Post is my local paper, but we got so sick of its spin and bias, particularly its efforts to sanitize Bill Clinton’s corruption and lies during Monicagate, that we paid three times what the Post cost to have the New York Times delivered every morning. I confess that I was influenced in my decision by the suffering of my professional theater company, which deliberately eschewed the navel-gazing woke dramas that were slobbered over by the Post’s theater critics and was repeatedly slammed and snubbed by the paper’s critics for it.

I remember one of the few times the Post’s chief critic deigned to attend an American Century Theater revival (they were virtually all revivals) of Gore Vidal’s satirical political thriller, “The Best Man.” She actually wrote that Vidal’s script was dated and unbelievable, because a Presidential candidate would never lose an election because of character issues, that only his policies mattered. This was, of course, while the Post was licking Bill Clinton’s metaphorical boots.

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Fact: MS NOW, aka MSNBC, Is Entirely A Leftist, Woke, Untrustworthy Anti-Trump Propaganda Operation [Corrected!]

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

…and anyone who admits to using that network for news should be ashamed of themselves, as well as ignored when they opine on political issues.

Just when I think the news media cannot get more biased, unprofessional and dishonest, something like this happens…usually on CNN, MSNBC, or in the New York Times.

MS NOW used an AI-enhanced image of Alex Pretti, the anti-I.C.E. activist who was killed by a U.S. Border Patrol agent during an immigration enforcement operation. Naturally, the faked photo made him look better than he really did, a public opinion manipulation tactic as old as photography and unethical to its core. This is cheap Cognitive Dissonance Scale game-playing, because “lookism” is embedded in our DNA. A nicer-looking figure is more likely to land in positive territory on the scale than a fat troll: remember how much sympathy there was online and in the media for the handsome young terrorist who maimed all those innocent people in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing? The alteration of Pretti’s image was subtle, but the point is why do it at all? Anything to make attacking Trump and supporting open borders more persuasive, I suppose.

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Don Lemon Was Never A Real Journalist, and He Can’t Claim to Have Been One When He Invaded That Church

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Not to say I told you so, but I told you so: Ethics Alarms flagged Don Lemon as an unethical, biased, arrogant, preening disgrace as a journalist long before he was finally canned by CNN, and he has done nothing but live up to my assessment, indeed, show how restrained it was, since. See? I’m smart!

Over the weekend an anti-ICE mob stormed a church in St. Paul on the theory that one of the pastors was an ICE agent. I know, that makes no sense to me, either. They interrupted the service, chanting Renee Good’s name, “Hands up, don’t shoot” and other nonsense that had nothing to do with the service was shut down. Lemon was part of the mob.

The administration has been investigating the disruption at the church as a violation of the Face Act, a law that makes it a crime to physically obstruct or use threats of force to intimidate or interfere with a person seeking to participate in a service at a house of worship. It seems pretty clear that this is what the mob did, and that Lemon is as guilty and any of the thugs who did this.

Lemon filmed the event and claimed he was just there as a journalist. No, he’s an ex-journalist, as am I: I was on the staff of my high school newspaper. Lemon made his claim of being at the illegal intrusion as a reporter rather than a participant is weak, and made weaker by his comments on the podcast “I’ve Had It” with Jennifer Welch. “And there’s a certain degree of entitlement. I think people who are, you know, in the religious groups like that,” Lemon said. “It’s not the type of Christianity that I practice, but I think that they’re entitled and that that entitlement comes from a supremacy, white supremacy, and they think that this country was built for them, that it is a Christian country, when actually we left England because we wanted religious freedom. It’s religious freedom, but only if you’re a Christian and only if you’re a white male, pretty much.”

Doesn’t sound like he was in that church as an objective observer to me. Lemon is such an idiot. Listen to him in the clip above, implying that there is a Constitutional right to burst into a church, stop a service, and protest something that has nothing to do with the service or the parishioners at all.

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Ethics Quote of the Week: Ann Althouse, As the Blogger Hits A Grand Slam…[Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

“Tolerance?! I would think it’s considered homophobic just to use the word “tolerance,” which connotes minimal acceptance and little more than a willingness to refrain from discriminating or saying actively mean things. In fact, I’d suggest it is the demand to do so much more — to celebrate pride in sexual matters and to endure indoctrination sessions that force feed questionable fine points — that has made people resistant and more likely to check a less gay-friendly box on the survey.”

—Quirky but perceptive Madison, Wis. bloggress Ann Althouse, commenting on the Times’ “Americans Are Turning Against Gay People” yesterday.

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Unethical Quote of the Week: Lawyer Kimberley Hamm, Spinning For The Clintons

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

“There’s an accommodation process when you’re talking about a President or a former President.Contempt is punitive; it’s not about enforcement. If you want to get the information, agreeing to accommodations is one way of getting it.”

—Kimberly Hamm, a partner at Morrison Foerster, after being cherry-picked by the New York Times to excuse Bill and Hillary Clinton for trying to defy a Congressional subpoena.

For some strange reason (I’m being facetious) Bill and Hillary Clinton seem to think that they are excused, unlike any other Americans (or, say, Michael Corleone) from obeying a subpoena to appear before a Congressional committee. Hamm, as we know how these things work, was tracked down as a putative objective “expert” by the Times to excuse the Clintons and impugn Republicans who are not inclined to accept their offensive and arrogant defiance, as Ethics Alarms highlighted last week.

There should be a “heightened standard” when it comes to a subpoena of a former President, Hamm said. Oh really? Show me your authority for that assertion, Counselor. But first show me where you made a similar statement about armed raids on former Presidents’ homes over disputes regarding classified documents.

What utter balderdash: “contempt is punitive and not about enforcement.” How dumb does this lawyer (and the Times) think we are? Punishment is always about enforcement. A law that has no penalty for its violations isn’t a law at all. You know, like immigration laws during the Biden Administration.

The Times reports that negotiations between Representative James Comer, the Republican chairman of the House Oversight Committee, and the slippery Clintons over their refusal to testify before his Committee in its Jeffrey Epstein investigation broke down today, “hours before a scheduled vote to hold the couple in contempt of Congress.” Read the whole thing if you like (gift link), but the basic facts are clear: the Clintons feel they have a special right to avoid being grilled in public, and they don’t.

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Calling “A Friend”! Tell Us Again How The New York Times Is Non-Partisan, Fair, and Trustworthy…

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Yeah, I’m trolling. So sue me.

A mob of Minnesota pro-open borders, anti-Rule of Law, insurrection-minded, Jacob Frey toadies and crazies invade a church service and harass parishioners on the pretense that the minister supports immigration enforcement, and the framing of the event by the nation’s alleged “newspaper of record” is to call the trespass and mass assault a “protest” and to focus on I.C.E. tactics when the issue is anti-I.C.E. tactics. The immigration control agency was not involved in this criminal act in any way, yet it is in the headline.

Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias!

For readers new to Ethics Alarms, “A Friend” is an unfriendly, denial-soaked ex-commenter here who banned himself from the comments, an act that is addressed specifically in the blog Comment Policies. Unlike even the most disrespectful and defiant bannees of the past, who typically issue a one or two finals shots and then sink into the obscurity they so richly deserve, this jerk has adamantly refused to comply with the site’s owner and moderator, me. Thus for years he has repeatedly blog-bombed posts with comments that I have to delete while also sending me emails that also go directly to spam, because he is somehow convinced that he’s smarter than everyone else. You know,

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