Journalism & Media

The Project Veritas Ethics Train Wreck (So Far)…[Updated!]

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Train-Wreck air

This was certainly inevitable. Project Veritas is an unethical journalism organization with a one-way bias (that’s to the Right, in case you have been studying loftier matters), meaning that it is not interested in truth or informing the public, but only the truth (maybe) that benefits a particular political agenda. But unethical people and organizations where the ends justify the means is a motto provoke unethical responses in the other direction—it is the ethics version of Newton’s Third Law—and that is where ethics train wrecks come from.

The ends of Project Veritas’s various unethical means have been revealing and valuable in many cases. A corrupt community organizing group, ACORN, was exposed, as it deserved to be. Planned Parenthood’s ghoulish lack of respect for human life was also exposed, with fewer consequences. It wasn’t really necessary for Corporation for Public Broadcasting executives to be gulled into saying for posterity that the taxpayer-funded company is progressive and biased because that should be screamingly obvious to anyone who isn’t biased themselves. But progressives (and those brainwashed by the progressive media) continue to gaslight critics with the Jumbo-esque “Bias? What bias?” defense of the indefensible, so this Project Veritas hit was satisfying, if not ethical.

Now, as we knew it would, those embarrassed or exposed by Project Veritas are striking back. The focus is President Biden’s troubled daughter Ashley’s diary, in which, among other things, she suggests that her father showered with her when she was a child. The diary found its way into the clutches of Project Veritas before the election, though it did not publish any of it. (Its explanation for this choice, that O’Keefe felt doing so would be seen as a “cheap shot,” defies belief coming from the King of Cheap Shots, but never mind.) Apparently, the New York Times’ investigation found, Ashley left her diary behind when she moved out of the home of a friend, and it was found by a woman named Aimee Harris, who moved in after Ashley left. {The Times feels it necessary to detail Harris’s personal and financial problems, which is completely irrelevant to the diary. That’s a real cheap shot. Her conduct is what matters in the report, not her problems.)

Harris, whom the Times makes sure we know “was a fan of Mr. Trump,” meaning she was by definition evil, learned that Ashley had stayed there previously and had left some things behind. Harris apparently found the diary.

Subsequent debates center on whether the diary was lost or abandoned. I don’t care about the legal haggling: Harris was ethically obligated to contact Ms. Biden and ask what she wanted done with it. The options for responses were a) “Sent it back to me”; b) “Destroy it,”and c) “I don’t care what you do with it.” Only c) would have entitled Harris to read Biden’s private entrees, or to give it to anyone but Biden.

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And The Latest Desperate Rationalization As Abortion Advocates Search For A Persuasive Argument To Justify Allowing Pregnant Women The Unilateral Right To End Another Human Being’s Life Is….

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Unborn children in heaven

…..this intellectually dishonest opinion piece by Kate Cohen in the Washington Post. It is titled “How would you feel if your mother had aborted you?’ Easy. I’d feel nothing,” and embodies several themes in the abortion-loving Left’s escalating freak-out over the very real possibility that Roe v. Wade will be overturned or limited by the current Supreme Court.

One theme is that that abortion advocates almost unanimously continue to avoid dealing with the other human party in the equation whose interests are at stake: the unborn human being. Another is using collateral attacks on religion and faith to minimize the belief by religious people that it’s wrong beyond question to kill an innocent individual for the benefit of a more powerful one. The third…

Well, let me address the second a bit again. Progressives are largely hostile to religion and the religious, whom they regard as unsophisticated, superstitious rubes. Since people tend to project their biases and attitudes on others, those who want open season on fetuses think they score points by linking the anti-abortion side of the debate to something they think is ridiculous. It is not a genuine argument but rather a cognitive dissonance trick. They are counting on a someone conflicted about the abortion debate being pulled to their side by the association with a different subject they regard with contempt. It is the same kind of tactic as using “The Handmaiden’s Tale” as a false map for the dystopian future abortion fans claim awaits if Roe goes down: linking abortion to something horrible, even a science fiction story, will diminish the appeal of the anti-abortion position, not with logic or reason, but with a negative association alone.

I have a difficult time not concluding that those using the anti-religion, association tactic are malign people because of their association with it. The belief that killing an innocent human being is wrong isn’t only a religious belief and bedrock moral tenet. It is basic ethics as well, a conclusion virtually all societies have accepted based on human experience. That’s where ethics comes from: one doesn’t have to be religious to strongly object to killing human beings, indeed religion isn’t necessary to reach that conclusion at all. Whether one reaches the position that legal abortion consists of one powerful human being who has had the opportunity to live ending that opportunity for a weaker human being for her own sole benefit and is therefore wrong, through religion, Kant, Rawls, basic ethical analysis, logic, common sense or some other path is irrelevant. You got there. Congratulations. It’s the ethical place to be.

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Comments On Another IIPTDXTTNMIAFB Classic

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

Yes, President Biden really does seem to think the word is “expodentially.” Based on the way he uses it, the word the President means is “exponentially.” Now, normally I regard excessive attention being paid to an eccentric mispronunciation by a public figure as petty and unfair. Jimmy Carter famously pronounced “nuclear” as “nucular.” My father, an articulate and literate man, mispronounced “fiasco” as “fiesca” for some reason, no matter how many times I corrected him.

But if President Trump kept repeating a blatant mispronunciation of a word (for that matter if George W. Bush did) we would never hear the end of it. Comics like Stephen Colbert and Trevor Noah would beat the mockery into a pulp by overuse. This would be have been cited as proof that Trump is a moron. Proof that he never reads. Proof that he should be removed via the 25th Amendment. Remember “covfefe”? Trump tweeted that once, and it was obviously a typo. Never mind: he was mocked about it for weeks.

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The Police Traffic Stop Ethics Dilemma

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Coltin LeBlanc

The Kim Potter trial in Minnesota has focused special attention on the recurring incidence of police shootings of motorists after traffic stops. Potter, now an ex-cop, fatally shot Daunte Wright when he appeared to be preparing to flee the stop, because she mistakenly drew her gun and fired it instead of her taser. The news media, as usual, is pre-biased against the police, and its analyses have reflected that, despite the fact that stopping a car has frequently proven fatal for many police officers, and there is ample justification for heightened caution and suspicion when approaching a stopped vehicle. The Washington Post unhelpfully issued a fatuous editorial headlined, “Being pulled over for a broken taillight shouldn’t end in death. Too often, it does.” Yes, indeed it does, and this is virtually always because of a combination of uncooperative and alarming behavior by the motorist and a mistaken, excessive, or poor choice of a response by police in the split second the officer has to assess the situation and act.

One way to prevent what “should” never happen is for police to just allow infractions on the highway and never stop cars. That would work. It would also result in some highway deaths caused by the uninhibited law-breaker that “shouldn’t happen,” but there are prices for everything. This is where law enforcement policy will soon arrive if the anti-police lobby gets its way and police are fired and prosecuted every time a driver sets in motion a sequence that ends in his or her own death.

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Ethics Alarms Factcheck: Facebook Admitted Factchecks Aren’t Factchecks

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Confusion4

Verdict: TRUE!

“Factchecks” became ubiquitous in the media with a vengeance after Donald Trump was elected, though they had been around for a while. This is how Trump ended up with a database of the 30,000 “lies” he had told: a majority of those were defined as such by partisan “factcheck” sites like Snopes, Politifact and The Washington Post’s service headed by poor Glenn Kessler. The exercise was always dishonest and deceptive to the core. I am proud to say that long before Trump was President, during the Bush II administration, I was at a conference that featured the head of FactCheck.org, the best of the factcheckers, but still, as the saying goes, the best of a bad lot, and after her speech I questioned her about a recent verdict by her service that was obviously pure opinion and tainted with progressive bias. She became immediately defensive, and then lapsed into huminahumina double talk. I nailed her, and she knew it.

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Ethics Dunce: Brooke Shields

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

Brooke-Shields-barbara-walters

This post pains me. I am a long-time admirer of Brooke Shields. She navigated the perilous waters of child stardom as well as anyone, survived an overbearing (and often unethical) stage mother, and managed to turn her childhood and teen super-modeling career into long and variegated show business success that included several Broadway shows and a successful TV sitcom, all while appearing to maintain at least the appearance of sanity and good sense. However, during a recent interview with Dax Shepard on his “Armchair Expert” podcast, Shields decided to attack legendary broadcast journalist Barbara Walters for an interview she did of the then-15-year-old in 1981.

The podcast was following the trail of an October interview the current version of Shields, the one that is 56, did for Vogue. In that one, Shields expressed anger at the famous Calvin Klein ad that immediately preceded her intense cross-examination by Walters, the naughty TV spot that had the leggy teen clad in skin-tight jeans saying provocatively, “You want to know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing.”

In Vogue Shields said of the ad, “I was very naive. I didn’t think it had to do with underwear. I didn’t think it was sexual in nature. I’d say that about my sister, nobody could come between me and my sister… they didn’t explain [the double-entendre] to me.” As for the interview discussing the ad with Walters, Shields described her questions probing Shields’ sexuality as “practically criminal.”

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Is Your “Little Library Contributing To the Gentrification” Of Your Black Neighborhood? No, The Problem Is That You’re A Racist And A Hypocrite. Fix It!

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Racist library

The New York Times has an astounding, depressing op-ed by a black woman, a “journalist and an author” named Erin Audrey Kaplan in which she announces unequivocally racist, bigoted, anti-white sentiments without a hint of self-awareness. It would be nice to think the Times printed her hateful essay as a “Don’t be like this bigot!” cautionary tale. Knowing the Times as I do, I doubt it.

Kaplan writes that she lives in “a mostly Black and Latino city in southwestern Los Angeles County.” She decided to build a Little Free Library (one of my neighbors in Alexandria has one) in her front yard. The birdhouse-like object (see it in the photo above?) invited pedestrians walking by to borrow (and later return) a book. Kaplan says she erected hers “to signal to my longtime neighbors that we had our own ideas about [community] improvement, and could carry them out in our own way…I envisioned it as a place for my neighbors to stay connected during the pandemic.”

She relates that she took pleasure in observing various neighbors stopping at the tiny library and accepting its friendly invitation, until…

..a young white couple happened by. She writes,

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Now THIS Is Spin…

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

WILl report

The Wisconsin State Journal’s coverage of the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty’s examination of the 2020 election in the state is headlined, “Conservative law firm’s review of 2020 election: No ‘big steal,’ but plenty of problems” and says in part,

“10-month review of Wisconsin’s 2020 elections conducted by a conservative Milwaukee law firm… found no evidence of the kind of fraud being alleged by allies of former President Donald Trump… who falsely contend last year’s presidential election was ‘stolen.’ At the same time, the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty found ‘it is almost certain’ that ‘the number of votes that did not comply with existing legal requirements exceeded Joe Biden’s margin of victory.’ With the country’s two major political parties sharply at odds over whether the 2020 presidential election was legitimate, the review, released Tuesday, walks a fine line in asserting there were serious problems with the way elections were run in Wisconsin in 2020, but that it’s very unlikely those problems denied a Trump a second term….

The news media just can’t play it straight, particularly where Trump is involved.

Note that the story has to note that it was a “conservative law firm” performing the study, so its results are in question from the start, or at least that’s what the Journal wants readers to assume. Then notice that the claims of a stolen election are unequivocally described as “false,” though the report being discussed found that it’s only “unlikely” that the irregularities their research uncovered “denied a Trump a second term.” Yet if it is indeed “almost certain” that ‘the number of votes that did not comply with existing legal requirements exceeded Joe Biden’s margin of victory,” then it is possible that such votes—just illegal, I guess, but not “fraudulent”?—did “steal ” the election.

Nothing to see here…move along.

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Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 12/8/21: Welcome To Christmas Tree Hell

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

[Nat King Cole’s rendition of this song always makes me smile: his German is so dreadful. But what a voice! It’s like hot cocoa with a marshmallow melting in it.]

Well, the 8-foot Concolor fir tree goes up today, meaning about four hours of prickles and dead light strands lie ahead. Can’t wait!

I have a Christmas ethics dilemma on which advice would be appreciated. As I think I mentioned, Spuds, who is a canine battering ram, was romping at night in the field behind our house with a group of dog pals when one of the owners, a next door neighbor of thirty years, zigged when she should have zagged and Spuds ran right into her. Her leg was broken in two places, and now her 71-year-old husband is facing caring for her for at least several months, also taking care of their two large Belgian Shepherds, as well as a disabled family member who lives a few houses down the street. Lots of the dog-owners have dropped off holiday food for the couple, and we want to send a nice Harry and David package. How do we frame the gift in a way that sends the implied message we want to convey (“We’re thinking of you, and hope you can enjoy the Christmas in spite of everything”) and not “Please don’t sue us!” ? (I am not at all concerned on that score, for reasons social and legal.) Should Spuds sign the card, along with us?

I’ll be damned before I ask “The Ethicist,” or worse still, “Social Qs”…

1. Look! A competent list for a change! The Independent issued a list of “The Magnificent 20: the Top 2O Westerns of All Time.” I’ve lectured and written about this most ethics-minded and American of film genres, and I was pleasantly surprised that almost all of the Westerns I regard as essential made the list. Graeme Ross, the author, knows his stuff. That doesn’t mean I agree with all of it. I am not a Sergio Leone fan, and consider all of the spaghetti westerns as anti-Westerns at heart, so those are two slots I’d fill differently. As usual “The Searchers” is too high (it’s #1), and “Unforgiven” made the list, a film that I thought was over-rated from the second it came out (Sorry Clint.)

Still, only one of the Westerns included is affirmatively dreadful (Brando’s misbegotten “One-Eyed Jacks”) and an unforgivable choice. On my list (which is longer), “Lonesome Dove” is #1 (“Shane” is #2) but it’s not technically a movie, I guess. I also would include “Silverado” in the top 20. “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence” is an essential inclusion on such a list; I don’t know how it was missed. Still, a responsible, respectful and fair effort—and John Wayne has more movies on the list than anyone else, even without “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.” Good.

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Ethics Quote Of The Week: Comic Sarah Silverman [Corrected…It’s Ron De Santis, Not “Jim.” Sorry, Ron. Sorry, Everybody…]

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

1551

“The truth has to matter.”

—–Sarah Silverman, actress, comic, progressive activist, rebuking MSNBC’s Joy Reid for a typical fact-free and inflammatory statement.

Ron DeSantis, the Republican Florida governor, announced a proposal last week that would allocate $3.5 million in state funds toward re-establishing the Florida State Guard.

As an announcement explained:

The establishment of the Florida State Guard will further support those emergency response efforts in the event of a hurricane, natural disasters and other state emergencies. The $3.5 million to establish the Florida State Guard will enable civilians to be trained in the best emergency response techniques. By establishing the Florida State Guard, Florida will become the 23rd state with a state guard recognized by the federal government.

Somewhere a memo went out from Democratic Party Cheap Shot Hysteria Headquarters encouraging disgraceful reactions like this, from Democratic state Sen. Annette Taddeo, who is running for governor:

DeSantis smear tweet

On the plus side, it’s good for voters to know that Annette can’t read: note that the information that 23 states already have a state guard is right in the announcement.

Can’t read, or won’t stop trying to confuse the public? Here’s former Florida Governor Charlie Christ, making a solid effort to surpass Taddeo’s idiocy:

Crist tweet

A “secret police” with a public announcement!

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