Journalism & Media

Sunset Ethics Reflections, 10/19/2022: How Much Of This Stuff Matters, Anyway?

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

I’m increasingly feeling like it is impossible to distinguish the important and substantive ethics developments from those that are just annoying or depressing. For example, this:

That’s the new  Anna May Wong quarter, honoring the Chinese-American actress who joined the Hollywood community during the silent film era. Yes, it’s “historic”: she is the first Asian American to appear on US currency. This is the fifth new coin in the American Women Quarters Program. The others, all appearing in 2022, feature poet and activist Maya Angelou (of course); the first American woman in space, Sally Ride; Cherokee Nation leader Wilma Mankiller; and suffragist Nina Otero-Warren.

I don’t really care, but Wong is a trivia answer. She only is getting this honor because of her race. Quick: name a famous Anna May Wong role or film. Hint: There aren’t any. Handing out honors like having one’s image on a quarter based on race alone is racial discrimination. You want important American women on some quarters? Fine: try Eleanor Roosevelt. Abigail Adams. Harriet Beecher Stow. Lillian Hellman. Babe Zacharias. Marion Anderson. Sophy Treadwell. Emily Dickinson. Inventor-Actress Hedy Lamarr. Heck, Julia Child. There are hundreds of women who contributed more to U.S. society and culture than Anna May Wong, but she was the “right” color.

The question is whether this kind of thing is too trivial to bother with, or whether it is another unethical precedent-setting, tiny metaphorical cut.

1. No, John, this isn’t a medical record, and it doesn’t help. In a useful example of how one can convince everyone that he is indeed hiding something, the John Fetterman campaign released a letter by Dr. Clifford Chen saying that the Pennsylvania Democrat running for the open U.S. Senate seat  has “significantly improved” following his stroke in May and “can work full duty in public office.” The campaign  called this a “medical report” after Fetterman’s refusal to release his  health records began being criticized even in the Democratic Party allied news media. “Overall, Lt. Governor Fetterman is well and shows strong commitment to maintaining good fitness and health practices. He has no work restrictions and can work full duty in public office,” Chen wrote. But Chen, while he is one of Fetterman’s doctors, is a Democratic Party donor and a Fetterman donor as well. That’s a conflict of interest, and a letter from one’s physician is not the equivalent of health records. Why not just release the records? Well, we know why. It’s the same reason that Donald Trump doesn’t release his tax returns. Continue reading →

A MSM Reporter Who Delivered Objective, Ethical Journalism Is Openly Attacked For It

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Good!

Almost as infuriating as the unholy alliance between a totalitarianism-aspiring political party and the large majority of the news media determined to play Pravda is the persistent denial that such an alliance exists despite mountains of daily evidence. (It’s a right wing conspiracy theory, you know.) This episode, small as it might seem, shows both reporters and Democrats outing themselves.

NBC reporter Dasha Burns commented on the air that Pennsylvania Senate candidate John Fetterman appeared to have trouble understanding their conversation prior to their interview, because his closed caption device allowing him to read questions in text while she was asking them wasn’t on yet.

This kind of information used to be known as “reporting,” back when journalists saw their jobs as informing the public about objective facts they needed to know. But Fetterman, who is still recovering from the effects of a major stroke that would have prompted an ethical candidate to withdraw from a Senate race is going to great lengths to avoid letting the public know how serious his comprehension and communications problems are. Naturally, his party, desperate to hold on to control of the Senate, wants to keep Pennsylvania voters in the dark as well. Also naturally, the mainstream progressive media, of which NBC is a card-carrying member, is expected to assist in this deception, and certainly not undermine it with that old-fashioned “reporting” stuff.

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Yesterday’s Biased Mainstream Media 2022 Election Panic Exhibit B: The Washington Post’s Gaslighting

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

If you were troubled by yesterday’s Exhibit A regarding the degree to which the mainstream media is “all-in” to try to somehow convince potential voters that everything is really hunky-dory so they should vote Democrat next month, Exhibit B will really unsettled your grits. That would be this analysis by Washington Post political reporter Phillip Bump, a “numbers” guy who is only robbed of the title of Most Shamelessly Partisan WaPo Columnist because Dana Milbank is still at large. (Trump-Deranged Jennifer Rubin has become such a hack that she doesn’t qualify as a columnist any more.)

Bump’s contrived thesis is that there is no big crime problem that can be laid at the feet of Democrats and the Biden Administration; it’s all the concoction of Fox News and right wing conspiracy theorists. His excuse for this exercise in gaslighting was a Fox News segment in which political analyst Gianno Caldwell asked Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y) about rising crime rates. Caldwell’s brother was shot dead in Chicago in June, so I guess one could perhaps argue that he has a distorted view of matters, and that the the whole rising crime thingy is his imagination. But it isn’t, which is perhaps the reason Nadler refused to answer the question.

Americans’ concern about rising crime are at their highest levels since 2016, and no wonder.

Though the number of homicides and some violent crimes dropped slightly in the first half of 2022 compared to 2021, violence in major American cities still remains dramatically higher than it was before the pandemic.

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“Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!” Sunday Continues With An Unethical Quote Of The Week From Media Matters President Angelo Carusone

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

“[Fox News] had a profound distorting effect on the news media, on our society. And if you look at what Musk says about social media, we are in the same moment, just updated 30 years later…[He] sees Twitter, and the policies that he wants to put in place and the way that he wants to use the platform, as a way to balance out those other social networks.”

—-Angelo Carusone, president of the pro-progressive media bias organization Media Matters, comparing Elon Musk’s pending acquisition of Twitter to when Fox News broke the liberal monopoly on network news more than two decades ago

Give Angelo credit: he’s right, even if he can’t distinguish a good development from a bad one. But then, that’s Media Matters for you, nearly completely ethics-free. (I generally ignore MM because it is so clearly dishonest and untrustworthy, but it does have a odoriferous Ethics Alarms dossier, here.)

These periodic themes on Ethics Alarms aren’t planned, but wowie zowie, have a lot of examples of the news media’s leftist bias been flying by today!

Caruso’s quote is signature significance for the arrogance and totalitarian instincts of such people. I seldom watch Fox News because it so often is pitched to idiots incapable of critical thought, and its star pundits like Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity are perpetually intellectually dishonest. Nonetheless, Fox News’ appearance on the scene was arguably the most important and essential development in American journalism before journalists decided not to practice journalism any more and almost completely stomp on the principles enshrined in the profession’s ethics codes.

How many news stories that the mainstream media tried to bury or distort would we have never been informed fully about (or informed about at all) without one network that existed, indeed with its own biases, to balance out the Borg-like perspective of the vast majority of its competitors?

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Today’s Biased Mainstream Media 2022 Election Panic Exhibit A: The New York Times Flags A Conspiracy Theory [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

I was going to post about this one days ago, got distracted, and then was reminded about again when I saw today’s Exhibit B (coming along soon).

As Ethics Alarms has been chronicling (incompletely to be sure), the mainstream media is as panicked as its client, the Democratic Party, about the likelihood that the multilateral disasters created by administration policies as well as the performance of progressive governors and big city mayors will lead to an epic rejection in the November mid-term elections. I expect the mainstream media, deep in the throes of a “Bias Makes You Stupid” attack, to cross even more journalism ethics lines than it has been and further undermines what’s left of its credibility as the big day approaches.

The major themes in this desperation assault on reality and public awareness seem to be…

  • …the Supreme Court letting legislatures decide how to regulate abortion is an attack on democracy.
  • …the Republicans tried to take over the government in 2021 with the Capitol riot, so the Democrats must be allowed to continue eliminating and punishing dissent in the name of freedom.
  • …Donald Trump and anyone who supports him is a Nazi, as President Biden clearly explained during his cool Adolf Hitler impression
  • …”It isn’t what it is” explains and excuses anti-white racial discrimination in public policy; the illegal immigration wave; inflation; the increase in crime, soaring gas prices, public treasury hand-outs to those who haven’t paid their college loans while the suckers who met their financial obligations are just patsies; the frightening politicizing of the Justice Department as a Leftist state policing tool; the sexualizing of  public school education and everything else that seems to be spinning out of control,and
  • ….all opposition efforts to criticize or condemn any or all of the above is “a conspiracy theory” or a “Big Lie”

Exhibit A is an example of the latter, and a pretty amusing one, if one can find the total rot of American journalism funny. Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: Kimberly Reicks

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Oh the games the news media play now, every night and every day now….

The typical left-propping mainstream media source calls Kimberly Riecks an “activist.” She is, in fact, a mother who is willing to do what more parents should do in defense of their children, their own parental rights, and the arrogant abuse of power by school boards in pursuit of ideological agendas that have little to do with the best interests of children. The conservative news sources call her “a mother”.”” or a “mom.” That is correct, but you see, the terms are positive ones. Can’t have that for a “clear and present danger” to the state.

A high school in Ankeny, Iowa held an after-school drag show for students, the apparently rogue project of a gay students organization. Parents weren’t alerted in advance, the protocols weren’t followed and the school board was supposed to investigate. No results were forthcoming, nor explanations, nor heads rolling down steps, though the event occurred in May.

Kimberly Reicks, who is a mother of a student in the district, came to a public meeting of the School Board dressed as one of the drag performers, and said in part,

Does this outfit make you turn your head? Does this outfit seem appropriate for anybody here to see? This is what the man dressed like in front of our kids. So if this makes your head spin — if this pisses you off in any way, shape, or form — it should. Because I’m embarrassed to stand here in the outfit that I am in today, but I have a point to prove — that this outfit should not be ever accepted in our schools anywhere.

and

Where’s the transparency in this? How are we going to entrust you — the board members — to do what is right for us parents and make sure that the kids know what is right?

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It Looks Like Donald Trump Was Betrayed By Another One Of His Lawyers, Someone Else…Or Himself

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Just because Trump is paranoid doesn’t mean almost everyone around him isn’t trying to stab him in the back.

From the New York Times:

Shortly after turning over 15 boxes of government material to the National Archives in January, former President Donald J. Trump directed a lawyer working for him to tell the archives that he had returned all the documents he had taken from the White House at the end of his presidency, according to two people familiar with the discussion.

The lawyer, Alex Cannon, had become a point of contact for officials with the National Archives, who had tried for months to get Mr. Trump to return presidential records that he failed to turn over upon leaving office. Mr. Cannon declined to convey Mr. Trump’s message to the archives because he was not sure if it was true, the people said.

The story was leaked to, naturally, Maggie Haberman, the full-time Trump Fury on the Times staff. She’s currently peddling a book full of anti-Trump tales, gossip and embarrassments. A lot of her stories over the last six years have been about what the President supposedly said behind closed door, or suggested, or asked others to do, none of which actually came to anything but the point is to make Trump look bad, dangerous or stupid. Of course, ethical aides, associates and lawyer don’t tell hostile reporters (or anyone at all) about such conversations because they are in the positions they are because the President trusts them. Donald Trump has been betrayed by such people more times, I would estimate, than all of the last six Presidents combined. Continue reading →

‘Hi! I’m Chris Cuomo! I’m An Incurable Dummy, A Proven Liar, Proudly Biased, Unprofessional, I Was Fired For Sexual Misconduct And Ignoring Conflicts Of Interest, And Now I Want You To Let Me Tell You What To Think…’

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Those weren’t quite his words, but that is a fair summary of the message sent by disgraced CNN face-man Chris Cuomo, aka. Fredo, as he launched his new NewsNation show, creatively named, “Cuomo.”

“So, this show is going to be different than what I’ve done in the past because I’m different and I’ve spent a lot of time looking and listening on the sidelines…It’s obvious to me that we need people in my position to do more,” Chris babbled in his premiere yesterday. “To not just play or even referee the game that is plaguing our politics and society. That means exposing the game, show when it’s played, show how it’s being played, and also to be more transparent about where my head is on the issues that we cover.”

Who are people in “his position,” do you think? People who only got their prominent jobs on TV news (not to mention an admission to law school) because their fathers were famous and popular governors of New York? People who think “hate speech” isn’t protected by the First Amendment, as Cuomo once claimed on Twitter? People who use their positions of public trust to pimp for their corrupt brothers? There is nothing, quite literally nothing, about Chris Cuomo or his record at CNN before he was justly though tardily fired that would make any human being with enough functioning brain cells to give a marmoset a good game of Scrabble think, “Hey, I can learn something from this guy!”

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Stop Making Me Defend Kamala Harris!

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Ugh. Even the trustworthy right-ish media misled inexcusably on this one, and, of course, “Republicans pounced.”

Two days ago, Indian actress Priyanka Chopra Jonas asked Harris at a Democratic National Committee event about the Biden administration’s goals as a “global influencer” on climate policy when it comes to poorer countries.

“It is our lowest-income communities and our communities of color that are most impacted by these extreme conditions and impacted by issues that are not of their own making,” Harris replied. “And so we have to address this in a way that is about giving resources based on equity.”

How did this become a statement by Harris about how aid would be distributed to communities in Florida and South Carolina in the wake of Hurricane Ian? Let’s see:

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Ethics Quiz: The Crystal Flute

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

The strange episode has everything: history, a President, music, bad taste, fat-shaming, historical ignorance, and more.

Lizzo, the defiantly obese pop singer, rapper and all-around musical whiz who is also a classically trained flutist, was permitted to entertain her Washington, D.C. concert audience this week by playing a crystal flute that a French craftsman and clockmaker had made for President James Madison in 1813. She was handed the sparkling instrument from Carol Lynn Ward-Bamford, a curator at the Library of Congress, then, as described by the New York Times, “played a note, stuck out her tongue in amazement, and then played another note, trilling it as she twerked in front of thousands of cheering fans. She then carried the flute over her head, giving the crowd at Capital One Arena one last look, before handing it back to Ms. Ward-Bamford.”

“I just twerked and played James Madison’s crystal flute from the 1800s!” Lizzo told the crowd. “We just made history tonight.”

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is...

Was that an appropriate and ethical use of the historical artifact?

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