Journalism & Media

I Guess It’s Nice That NBC Is So Open About Its Bias, Loyalties and Motives Now…

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Anyone: give me a benign explanation for this tweet from NBC News today…

Any takers?

The least damning explanations for this would be that whoever is running the NBC News X account is an idiot. But who hired him? Who trained him?

To state the obvious, the fact that the head of the Biden autopen investigation used an autopen is not newsworthy, ironic, or hypocritical. First, there is no evidence that Comer didn’t fully control the procedure. Second, he’s not President. Third, a subpoena does not confer a benefit on anyone. Fourth, there are no allegations of other serious usurpations of Comer’s power and position. Fifth, there is no indication that Comer is suffering from crippling dementia.

The tweet is an extraordinary example of really, really desperate whataboutism. It would be embarrassing f it came from a hyper-partisan junior House member. For such partisan spin to come from a major news organization is nauseating.

Smug, Self-Satisfied Progressive Asshole of the Year: David Litt

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

The obnoxious screed “Is It Time to Stop Snubbing Your Right-Wing Family?,” authored by an obscure writer I never heard of (three of his better-known mentors are above) and hope I never hear of again, was deemed appropriate content for New York Times readers, and not as satire either.

Litt epitomizes the type of insufferable elitist jerks that have made the modern Left the pit of despond that it has become over the last decade or so. Yuck. Was this guy ever a tolerable human being? The Times should be required to publish a full analysis of how Litt got this way as a public service, kind of like that episode of “I Love Lucy” where her book draft was sought by a publisher to use in a how-to tome to illustrate what writers shouldn’t ever do.

The column is about how Litt “felt a civic duty to be rude” to his wife’s younger brother because he hadn’t seen the light and surrendered his mind to the Woke and Wonderful. A few excerpts will tell you all you need to know about Litt, but I may add a little commentary here and there:

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Nah, There’s No Anti-Israel, Anti-Jewish Mainstream Media Bias…

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Britain’s media regulator (Great Britain doesn’t have a First Amendment, remember, so the government can punish dishonest, biased journalism. This is not a good thing…) said today it is investigating a BBC documentary about the dire fate of children in Gaza. The BBC removed the program, “Gaza: How To Survive A Warzone,” from its streaming service earlier this year after it was revealed that the 13-year-old narrator, “Abdullah,” is the son of Ayman Alyazouri, Hamas’s deputy minister of agriculture.

Oh. Sounds fair and objective to me! The media reports says this information “emerged.” Translation: the BBC was caught. News programs purporting to be factual must not materially mislead the audience in Great Britain, or so they claim. Imagine if the U.S. had such a regulation and enforced it. There would be no broadcast news.

The independent production company that made the program didn’t share the background information regarding the father of the young narrator’s Hamas ties, claims the BBC. Hoyo Films, which produced the documentary, claims it didn’t “intentionally” mislead the BBC. The BBC meanwhile, was wonderfully trusting and incurious—you know, like good journalists are supposed to be. After all, it’s not like anyone is out to vilify Israel as it tries to survive while protecting its citizens from being raped, murdered and kidnapped by terrorists.

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Regarding the Stupid Epstein Client List: the Phrase “Hoist by Their Own Petard” Comes to Mind…[Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

Observation the First: Morons!

More…

1. So…Director of the F.B.I. Kash Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino are throwing public hissy fits over the Justice Department stating in an unsigned memorandum that there is no evidence that Jeffrey Epstein, the dead convicted sexual predator, had a client list and used it to blackmail elected officials, celebrities, and other powerful people. The memo also declared that Epstein committed suicide. Patel and bongino are behaving this way because they are unprofessional and untrustworthy, though everyone should have known that already. The professional manner in which to demonstrate a serious disagreement with one’s superior, organization or client is to resign, stating why to the extent permitted by the terms of your job. The President should fire both of them immediately.

2. I don’t care about Jeffrey Epstein or his alleged client list. Nobody should at this point. He was a walking, talking ethics train wreck, and now he’s dead. Good! A collection of documents, including emails and schedules revealed by The Wall Street Journal showed, among other things, that Woody Allen frequently socialized with the billionaire. Gee, what a surprise. So what are we supposed to do with such information? We already know that Bill Clinton and Prince Andrew, creepazoids both, were pals with the sex maniac (I’m talking about Epstein, now, not Woody…). Other than as tabloid fodder, what value does such intelligence have? I have the Red Sox winning streak to worry about and a sock drawer to alphabetize. Shut up.

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There’s No Crying In Tennis!

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Poland’s No. 8 seed Iga Świątek beat the U.S.’s 13th seed Amanda Anisimova 6-0, 6-0 in the Wimbledon women’s final yesterday. That’s a slaughter in tennis, ending Anisimova’s feel good story as an underdog in humilation.

Świątek is one one of the best players in the world; though this is Świątek’s first Wimbledon title it’s her sixth Grand Slam title. She was favored to win, but no one has won the Women’s finals 12 games to none in a Grand Slam tournament since 1988. Anisimova’s wipe-out is being attributed to nerves; if she were a male player, the explanation would be “choking.”

Worse, however, is that after the match Anisimova started weeping, covered her head with a towel and left the court. When she came back to a huge reception from the crowd, she was still sobbing. After receiving the runners-up’s plate at center court, she cried some more as she addressed the crowd.

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More Fun With Zohran!

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Zohran Mamdani, the slick Muslim communist who bids fair to be New York City’s next incompetent, ruinous mayor, is already showing himself to be useful and amusing in the ways that he is inspiring his Axis defenders to reveal to all just how dishonest and corrupt they are. For example…

Item I: The New York Times, which broke the story on how Mandani claimed to be black on his application to Columbia, has been attacked in some woke quarters (that is, much of New York City) for, you know, practicing actual journalism rather than burying inconvenient news and issuing useful leftist propaganda. Keith Olbermann, Professional Progressive Asshole, tweeted on behalf of the lunatic fringe by issuing this…

Since the story has been authenticated by multiple sources including  Mamdani himself, one must wonder what “standards” Keith is referring to if not “the Axis media’s job is to support all Democrats and progressives, and to deceive the public to the extent possible when necessary.”

Times assistant managing editor for “Standards and Trust” Patrick Healy rushed to tweet the official explanation for why the Times would published such a story. Oddly, the paper never did this when it was asserting that Donald Trump colluded with the Russians to steal the 2016 election, or when it was publishing misleading statistics to terrify readers about the Wuhan virus so a panic-fueled lockdown would wreck the economy, or when it declared that the Deep State intelligence community was quite sure that Hunter Biden’s laptop was a nothingburger. But I digress. Healy grovelled,

“Our reporters obtained information about Mr. Mamdani’s Columbia college application and went to the Mamdani campaign with it. When we hear anything of news value, we try to confirm it through direct sources. Mr. Mamdani confirmed this information in an interview with The Times. Mr. Mamdani shared his thinking about the limitations of identity boxes on forms like Columbia’s, and explained how he wrote in “Uganda,” the country of his birth – the kind of decision many people with overlapping identities have wrestled with when confronted with such boxes. We believe Mr. Mamdani’s thinking and decision-making, laid out in his words, was newsworthy and in line with our mission to help readers better know and understand top candidates for major offices.

“We sometimes receive information that has been hacked or from controversial sources. The Times does not solely rely on nor make a decision to publish information from such a source; we seek to confirm through direct sources, which we did with Mr. Mamdani. On sourcing, we work to give readers context, including in this case the initial source’s online alias, as a way to learn more about the person, who was effectively an intermediary. The ultimate source was Columbia admissions data and Mr. Mamdani, who confirmed our reporting.

“We heard from readers who wanted more detail about this initial source. That’s fair feedback. We printed his online alias so readers could learn more about the person. The purpose of this story was to help illuminate the thinking and background of a major mayoral candidate.”

Translation: “Oh please, please, don’t be mad at us! We were just trying to be a real newspaper for a change! It’s been a while!”

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July 4th Open Forum!

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Light whatever ethics fuses you choose here today. As usual, traffic is minor on a long weekend. I have only one matter to pass on: Sen. Bernie Sanders’ dishonest and aburd criticism of the Paramount/CBS/”60 minutes” settlement, which would be an “Unethical Quote of the Week” if so many Axis hacks and liars hadn’t been saying the same thing. Quoth Bernie,

“Paramount’s decision will only embolden Trump to continue attacking, suing and intimidating the media which he has labeled ‘the enemy of the people.’ It is a dark day for independent journalism and freedom of the press — an essential part of our democracy. It is a victory for a president who is attempting to stifle dissent and undermine American democracy.”

Asshole.

In order:

1. Trump should be “emboldened.” The media has been indulging in fake news, manipulated reports, partisan bias and anti-democratic fact-hiding for far, far too long, and a reckoning is overdue as well as necessary.

2. The press should be intimidated to make it stop abusing the freedom of the press and deliberately misleading the public.

3. The news media is the enemy of the people. The “60 minutes” scandal showed why.

4. The dark day for independent journalism arrived the first time a major news source like CBS set out to elect one candidate over another instead of reporting objectively and fairly on both. Making it clear that journalists face some adverse consequences when they betray their public trust this brightens the day.

5. The essential part of democracy is the public being reliably informed about the world, the nation and its elected officials objectively, responsibly and fairly. so they can competently participate in their own government. When the free press decides to misuse its power and special privileges to mislead the public, that’s an attack on democracy.

6. How can anyone describe what CBS did with the Harris interview (or NBC, with “Saturday Night Live,” giving Harris an illegal free campaign commercial three days before the election) as “dissent”? Answer: They can if they are dishonest, unscrupulous, shameless Machiavellian leftists like Bernie. This is the guy who said outright that Harris was pretending to be more moderate in her views to get elected, and that was fine with him. “By any means necessary,” after all!

Did I mention that Sanders is an asshole?

7. Bernie and anyone else who stood by and allowed a demented Democratic President be manipulated by unelected back-room aides is estopped from ever using the term, “undermine American democracy”again. Channeling Albert Brooks in “Lost in America,” I’d say that they can’t even use the components of that phrase, “undermine,” “American,” and “democracy.”

8. And can we please stop tolerating the “Paramount settled because it wants the merger to be approved” lie, the agreed-upon narrative the news media has pushed to shift the blame from “60 minutes” to Trunp? Paramount and CBS settled because they did not dare go through discovery, which would reveal high level emails in which various executives openly discussed how to make sure Harris won and Trump lost. Those would create a professional scandal from which CBS might never recover.

Paramount/CBS Pays For Its Unethical Election Interference: Good!

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

It looks like the settlement will amount to around 16 million dollars when all is tallied up, more than what ABC paid for George Stephanopoulos repeatedly (but not maliciously, oh no, never that!) calling Donald Trump a “rapist” on national TV. Several cynics were telling me today that this was “a drop in the bucket” for Paramount—it doesn’t matter. The settlement is an admission of wrongdoing, and what CBS and “60 Minutes” did by stealth editing a Kamala Harris interview late in the Presidential campaign to make her sound like less of an idiot was wrong, another “enemy of the people” act, and a blatant attempt to mislead voters and support the Democratic Party under the guise of journalism.

More important than the symbolism of the money perhaps is CBS’s promise to install a mandatory new rule requiring the network to promptly release full, unedited transcripts of future Presidential candidate interviews. It is the “Trump Rule.” That a television news division had to be forced into institutionalizing such transparency tells us all we need to know about the dismal state of broadcast journalism.

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Ethics Villain CNN Pushes the First Amendment Envelope

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

What this despicable “enemy of the people” is doing by deliberately publicizing an anti-ICE app may be legal, but it is undeniably unethical. The Trump administration should prosecute anyway.

Joshua Aaron (above: he looks exactly like I assumed he looks!) is a musician and software developer who, because he’s an anti-American, pro-lawbreaking asshole, created an app called ICEBlock. It’s a descriptive name: it allows advocates of open borders and opponents of law enforcement to post sightings of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers across the country. Then the law-breakers they are seeking can more effectively avoid capture, and those who want to attack, harm, kill, or impede ICE agents have a metaphorical “leg up.” That’s nice.

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Do You Have Any Clue Regarding Whether the US Bombing of the Iranian Nuclear Facilities Were Successful or Not? I Don’t.

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

I just heard President Trump at his press conference, rambling as only he can, declare that the news outlets claiming his surprise bunker-busters attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities was not as effective as the U.S. claimed were “losers” and liars. Meanwhile, a CNN article, followed by the New York Times, citing leaked classified documents, and thus unnamed sources of those illegally retrieved materials, announced that “Early US intel assessment suggests strikes on Iran did not destroy nuclear sites, sources say.” Reporters Natasha Bertrand, Katie Bo Lillis, and Zachary Cohen wrote that “the US military strikes on three of Iran’s nuclear facilities last weekend did not destroy the core components of the country’s nuclear program and likely only set it back by months, according to an early US intelligence assessment that was described by four people briefed on it.” It continued, “The assessment, which has not been previously reported, was produced by the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon’s intelligence arm. It is based on a battle damage assessment conducted by US Central Command in the aftermath of the US strikes, one of the sources said.”

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