Journalism & Media

Stop Making Me Defend Cracker Barrel!

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Wow. Just when I thought the Left’s outrage machine had reached new levels of absurdity over an attractive white woman advertising bluejeans by using a very old play on words (Jeff Goldblum uses the same one in “Jurassic Park”),the Right’s outrage machine says “Hold my beer!”

Cracker Barrel stripped its old logo of both its barrel and its “cracker,” and all of a sudden it was Bud Light all over again. The company’s stock even crashed. How the decision could possibly be seen as some kind of kowtow to wokeness is beyond me, and should be beyond everyone who isn’t Woke Deranged.

The old logo was archaic, messy and unattractive. Okay, so the old guy sitting by the barrel looked white, but he was yellow, for heaven’s sake. This isn’t like removing Uncle Ben or Aunt Jemima, or that naughty Native American lass whose Land O’ Lakes box could be rigged to make a wallet peep show. I’d compare the Cracker Barrel change to Kentucky Fried Chicken becoming KFC, and no one freaked out over that, though, admittedly, it transpired before both conservatives and progressives had gone nuts in their distrust of each other.

The one aspect of this nothingcracker that supports the fevered conspiracy theory on the Right is the Cracker Barrel management’s deplorable past record as a pandering, cowardly, principle-free bunch of weenies.

Here is the Ethics Alarms post (from 2020) about the last time this company entered the culture wars. I still haven’t forgiven it.

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Incompetent Re-Branding of the Decade?

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Amazing. Mediaite, an MSNBC cheerleader, calls this thing above as ‘surprisingly elegant.” Elegant? MS is best known as a disease, and a nasty one. If someone says, “I have MS now,” the proper result is, “I’m so sorry! What’s the prognosis?” More pandering from Mediaite: “Media rebrands usually stink. Quibi. Tronc. Syfy. The graveyard is crowded with names that sounded bold in the boardroom and ridiculous everywhere else, which is why MSNBC’s new identity as MS Now feels like such a surprise. It’s not perfect. It’s not thrilling. But it’s… smart.” Hey, everybody! It’s smart to make your new identity the common name for a dread disease! Is it possible that no one mentioned this among the dozens—hundreds?—of alleged professional marketers and image consultants involved in the process? Just to make sure I’m not imagining this, I just Googled “MS.” The result:

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Ethics Dunces: Rolling Stone, and Everyone Else Who Thinks Assaulting Law Enforcement Is OK As Long As the Missile Is Funny

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

The Justice Department has fired employee Sean Charles Dunn after video showed him throwing a submarine sandwich at the chest of an law enforcement officer as a gesture of defiance against President Trump’s entirely legal executive take-over of crime control in the District of Columbia. He hurled the sandwich at the officer’s chest and tried to run away. When Dunn was apprehended, he told police: “I did it. I threw a sandwich.”

FBI Director Kash Patel announced that Dunn had indeed been “charged with felony assault on a federal officer.” Attorney General Pam Bondi noted on social media that “if you touch any law enforcement officer, we will come after you.” And he was fired.

The arrest, the charge and the employment action were all appropriate, but the Axis news media decided to weigh in as a fan of interfering with law enforcement and subjecting officers to thrown items, although doing so, whatever the missile, is pure assault and also battery (if the thrown item connects with its target).

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Open Forum!

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Three weeks after I inflicted a giant hematoma on (in?) my leg, I’m still having trouble getting past the two-post-a-day barrier, in great part because I’m hopeless on a laptop, and sitting at my desk in the office is still painful. I’m sorry: I’m missing a lot; the EA runway looks like a Reagan National flight stop due to high winds and thunderstorms.

A needed observation on the Trump Presidency so far: wow. That wow isn’t about what Trump and his team are doing, but the fact that they are doing it. I’ve compared Trump II to Andrew Jackson, but I now believe he is channeling my favorite President of all (again, in terms of Oval Office conduct, not policy), Teddy Roosevelt. Teddy, like Trump, was a Presidential activist and believed in using the power he had to do things, fix things, and project American power abroad. He also believed fervently in American exceptionalism, as all Presidents (and citizens) should. Like TR, Trump is trying to stop international conflicts that don’t directly involve the United States: Roosevelt was the first U.S. President to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and Trump has already exceeded his accomplishments in that sphere.

You would think he could get some praise from the Axis for this. Nah. The news media is still relentlessly attacking him and everything he does, and there are enough Stage 5 Trump Derangement victims and gullible, manipulated fools among the public to keep Trump’s polling numbers under water.

To his great credit, President Trump doesn’t seem to care. Among the many ways his second term is breaking with conventional wisdom, he has turned his lame duck status into a weapon. Fascinating. There is so much to see and learn from going on. Those who refused to pay attention are missing a great show and a transformational Presidency, as Trump joins the lofty company of Washington, Andy, Honest Abe, Teddy, FDR and the Gipper.

Over to you…

It’s Time To Concede That The NYT Is Just A Partisan Propaganda Organ and Little Else

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Above is a Times front page in which the paper piled on to the international criticism of Israel in the Left’s “Think of the Children!” effort to blame Jews for the consequences of the war Hamas started and refuses to end.

“Mohammed Zakaria al-Mutawaq, about 18 months, with his mother, Hedaya al-Mutawaq, who said he was born healthy but was recently diagnosed with severe malnutrition,” the original caption to the photo said. Evil Israel is starving innocent children to death! Then, five days after the story was published, on July 29, the Times issued an editor’s note (buried at the bottom of the article) as well as a brief statement on its communications social media page that corrected its story, writing that it “had learned” that the child had underlying medical issues that affected his muscle development. Otherwise it did not retract any part of the feature, “Gazans Are Dying of Starvation,” including its now especially dubious claim that the child was suffering from malnutrition due to food shortages.

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Observations on the Cincinnati Beatdown

/ Jack Marshall / 35 Comments

While languishing in the hospital, this was the story that I felt most frustrated about not being able to post. Not that I could get a single, clear, spin-free account of what happened. In the aftermath of some Cincinnati event or festival or something, a black man and a white one got into a verbal altercation. The white guy seems to have uttered a racial slur, precipitating a brawl that was quickly joined by a mob of black youths who beat up the white guy and then turned their anger on a white woman who tried to intervene, knocking her unconscious and kicking her as she lay helpless on the ground. An estimated hundred bystanders, most or all of them black, stood by taking videos, laughing, and cheering the mob violence on. There was only one call to 911.

1. Almost all of the national coverage of this incident has been on Fox News. The New York Times, interestingly, hasn’t reported the story at all. The natural question has been raised: If a black man and woman had been attacked and beaten by a mob of young whites as 100 white bystanders cheered them on, there would be protests in the streets and calls for “justice.” Why the double standard?

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As If Any More Proof Was Needed, Trump 1.0 Nemesis Jim Acosta Reveals Himself Beyond All Question To Be An Unethical Hack

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

You see, no decent, ethical journalist would even think of doing this. No intelligent journalist—or pest removal professional—would either. Yet this is the guy CNN sicced on President Trump and his press secretaries in his first term. This irredeemable partisan hack became a broadcast news star with neither the common sense, acumen, professional skills or decency to justify such status, which he is making a living off now.

This is CNN. This is Jim Acosta. This is the state of American journalism.

Former CNN correspondent Jim Acosta released the video of him interviewing an AI-generated version of Joaquin Oliver, who is dead. He’s one of the 17 victims of the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, the tragedy that also inflicted David Hogg on the world, as if the shooting itself wasn’t horrible enough.

The avatar was animated from a photograph of the late 17-year-old who appears wearing a beanie while speaking in a monotone digital voice. Acosta begins by asking, “What happened to you?” to which the AI version of Oliver responds, “I was taken from this world too soon due to gun violence while at school. It’s important to talk about these issues so we can create a safer future for everyone.”

Let’s pass on the conduct of the parents in creating the creepy thing, which is right out of an episode of “Black Mirror.” The topic is journalism ethics. Today’s reporters are so estranged from the concepts of honesty, respect, objectivity, responsibility and trustworthiness that no ethics alarm pings when someone says, “Hey Jim! Apparently there’s an AI version f one of those dead Parkland kids. Why don’t you interview him? Maybe he’ll say something nasty about Trump!”

True, Acosta is pretty much the bottom of the barrel in the profession that is already the bottom of the profession barrel, but still, it wasn’t that long ago that a stunt like this would be considered outrageous if attempted by a shock jock like The Greaseman or Howard Stern. I would say that this is the canary dying in the mine, except that then Chris Cuomo or Don Lemon might interview an AI version of the canary.

[Even WordPress is disgusted; it won’t let me download a photo of this asshole.]

Sydney Sweeney Indeed Has Great Genes and Those Freaking Out Over Her Jeans Ad Do Not

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

If an attractive black model or actress had made this commercial, nobody would be complaining. But because Sweeney is white and blonde, and because the American Left has lost its mind, a classic provocative blue-jeans ad (Remember Brooke Shields saying “Nothing gets between me and my Calvins”?) is being cited as proof that America is embracing Hitler’s Master Race narrative. Sure.

This warrants an Ethics Alarms “Bite Me!” if anything does.

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Trump Derangement Monday Begins With a “Nelson” [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

The New York Post reports that a Manhattan rally in support of “Late Show” host Stephen Colbert drew about 20 protesters yesterday. The NYPD police who were there to prevent violence (I can’t believe I am writing this!) quickly left when the indignant Trump-haters dispersed after just a few minutes. The leaders of the stupid “We’re With Colbert” rally outside the CBS Broadcast Center on Manhattan’s West Side had said that the protest was part of a nationwide call for “integrity.”

As we all know, late night network talk shows go with integrity like sushi goes with Turkish taffy and ketchup.

“Our country is not perfect, never has been,” said the event’s organizer, whose name isn’t worth mentioning since he is clearly, you know, a moron. “But we’ve always had the First Amendment, and now Mango Mussolini is trying to take that from us.” Right. The party this guy obviously supported actually set up a federal agency to restrict speech, conspired with the news media to embargo facts, statistics and news that it found inconvenient to its aspirations, conspired with that news media to feed partisan propaganda to the public, employed a White House spokesperson who routinely spewed disinformation, and pressured social media platforms to censor critics. Then it ran a ticket that openly promoted censorship of “hate speech,” which means, as always, “whatever the Axis of Unethical Conduct doesn’t like.” “Mango Mussolini” (Nice!) is anti-First Amendment because he correctly sought to hold CBS accountable for a brazen act of election interference as it surreptitiously tried to make Kamala Harris seem less like the babbling fool that she is and was caught red-handed.

Meanwhile, another clear example of how the President’s weaponizing of tariffs is defying the doomsayers cannot attract any positive coverage from most of the “enemies of the people”, nor, of course, the “my mind’s made up don’t confuse me with facts” Trump Deranged like whatever his name is above. The EU trade deal announced yesterday “will likely not do much for economic growth on either side,” sayeth the Times, despite confessing elsewhere that the European Union had agreed to purchase $750 billion of American energy over three years and to increase its investment in the United States by more than $600 billion above current levels. How could that possibly be a bad thing? How could critics not give the President some credit for the deal? That’s easy: whatever President Trump does or says is by definition bad.

Seems fair…

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July Send-Off Ethics Round-Up, 7/27/2025

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

The fact that my leg appears to be rotting off seriously impeded my Ethics Alarms activity this entire week, so a round-up of lingering ethics tales is desperately needed. The stupid wound, complete with a giant blood-blister the size and color of an eggplant, isn’t going to hurt any worse if I sit at my desk a bit longer, so here we go…

1. That painting above, “American Progress” by John Gast in 1872, was posted on the Homeland Security Facebook page with the message, “A Heritage to be proud of, a Homeland worth Defending.” Right, and right. Some Americans weak in citizenship are apparently offended by the statement and the painting. What’s wrong with them, and how did they get this way? The U.S.’s saga is objectively an inspiring one. I do not blame Native Americans for being bitter about how things worked out for them, but a Stone Age civilization was going to fail eventually one way or another, and the resulting culture, society, government and civilization has been a blessing to humanity. My only cavil with the painting is that it might be deliberate trolling. I think government departments and agencies shouldn’t troll. Neither should Presidents.

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