Ethics Alarms Presents “Fake News” Friday! Episode I: Poynter’s Code of Principles

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Poynter is a serious and justly respected  nonprofit school for journalism and journalism ethics organization. Naturally, it has been drawn into the “fake news” debate, which is unfortunate, since the issue itself has arisen not so much as part of a much-need effort to purge the new and old news media of biased and misleading news reporting, but as part of partisan attempt by the mainstream news media and others to find some explanation, any explanation, for Donald Trump’s election that doesn’t involve a genuine public rejection of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Poynter, as far as I’ve been able to determine, is scrupulously non-partisan, or perhaps hides its Democrat tilt better than the rest of its profession. Now it is being used by those who are not so trustworthy.

Poynter was in the news yesterday as a result of Facebook’s announcement that it will start “fact-checking, labeling, and burying fake news and hoaxes in its News Feed. Mark Zuckerberg announced that his social media platform will collaborate with a small list of media organizations, including Snopes, Factcheck.org, ABC News, and PolitiFact to accomplish this, and noted that these are part of an international fact-checking network under the guidance of Poynter.

Here’s a fact to check: Snopes, Factcheck.org, ABC News, the Associated Press, and PolitiFact are all partisan-biased operations to a greater or lesser extent. Facebook itself is a partisan biased organization. That Facebook would blandly cite three of these four to reassure anyone but the Democratic National Committee is proof positive that this is a cynical, untrustworthy exercise. Continue reading

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Whitney Tilson, And Bigotry

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The PPP Poll on Democrats’ 2020 preferences found that “Joe Biden leads the way for Democrats with 31% to 24% for Bernie Sanders, and 16% for Elizabeth Warren. They’re the only folks we tested with meaningful support for the nomination at this point.” Since Warren is the only one in that groups not eligible for Social Security, she’s at least the putative front-runner for the 2020 race against President Trump. That’s not bad entirely bad news for Democrats. Warren’s smart and passionate, and she’s a fiery speaker.  Unfortunately, she’s also a jerk and more important, a bigot.

Warren has been on an anti-Trump rampage for months, and an anti-Wall Street rampage forever.   She recently graced  Facebook with another anti-business rant to her nearly 2.5 million followers. In it, she condemned Whitney Tilson, who runs Kase Capital, calling him a “hedge fund billionaire” who is “thrilled by Donald Trump’s economic team of Wall Street insiders.” The Massachusetts Senator wrote, “Tilson knows that, despite all the stunts and rhetoric, Donald Trump isn’t going to change the economic system…The next four years are going to be a bonanza for the Whitney Tilsons of the world.”

This gratuitous attack was pure bigotry.  To bigots, what matters is what people are—blacks, whites, Jews, gays, men, women, Muslims, poor people, rich people, Democrats, Republicans. Also Trump voters, feminists, Christians, college students, bankers, and lawyers. Bigots assign unattractive, negative character traits to individuals based on neat categories they can be placed in, and their real beliefs, principles, and most important of all, acts don’t matter. Warren’s reference to “the Whitney Tilsons of the world” is the mark of a bigot. If you work on Wall Street, you are just like all the rest to her. Greedy. Corrupt. Bad.

The  hateful attitude from Warren is especially unfair in Tilson’s case. He was one few financial executives who publicly opposed Trump and supported Hillary Clinton. He is a lifelong Democrat, and he helped start the terrific volunteer teacher program Teach for America; he doesn’t just sit around counting his money.  (Warren, incidentally, is about as rich as he is.) Tilson was also  one of the very few Wall Street executives who  donated to Senator Warren’s campaign for the Senate. Tilson, like Warren, has supports tough regulations for his industry.  “I’m a fan of Dodd-Frank,” he said in a recent interview. ” I think banking should be boring…I worry about Wall Street returning to being a casino.” Continue reading

Ethics Dunce, Unethical Quote Of The Week, And A Kaboom! For Good Measure: Clark University

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“Coercion is the use of emotional manipulation to persuade someone to something they may not want to do – like being sexual or performing certain sexual acts. Examples of some coercive statements include: “If you love me you would have sex with me .”, “If you don’t have sex with me I will find someone who will.”, and “I’m not sure I can be with someone who doesn’t want to have sex with me.” Coercive statements are often part of many campus acquaintance rapes. Being coerced into having sex or performing sexual acts is not consenting to having sex and is considered rape/sexual assault.”

—The Clark University Dean of Students office, in its definition of “Rape and Sexual Assault and Related Terms”

That’s right; Clark University’s position was that when a manipulative boy friend or, presumably, girl friend, used the age-old ploy of emotional blackmail to wheedle for sex, it constituted sexual assault. KABOOM! Brains…on…walls, can’t… typxvtu…pfg

OK, I’m better now. The Worchester, Mass. university quietly removed the outrageous definition as soon as it turned up, with appropriate mockery, on the web, and then denied it had ever been there. (This is the place where Instapundit would note the tuition paid by Clark students.)

Writes a stunned Prof. Volokh:

So saying “If you don’t have sex with me I will find someone who will” is “coercion,” and thus means that any resulting sex is not consensual. This means that getting sex that way is “rape and/or sexual assault” (because it’s “coerced sexual contact”), and in particular may well be “acquaintance rape.”

Words fail me — though they apparently failed the Clark University Dean of Students office as well.

It sounds like his head might have exploded too!

Gee, do you think this kind of increasingly common gender bullying and distortion of reason, fairness and logic for ideological ends might have caused some non-racist, non-sexist individuals to wonder what further horrors feminist-pandering President Hillary Clinton would have encouraged, and to vote for someone else? Do you think some non-white supremacists might reasonably conclude that if  eight years of a hard-left, divisive, victim-mongering Democratic administration could lead a school to employ this kind of Orwellian definition to throw young men out of their college, then eight years had done damage enough? Continue reading

My Happy Birthday Ethics Quiz: The National Review’s Theory

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Today is my annual struggle (since 2009) to try to think of my birthday as something better than “Finding Dad Dead In His Chair Day,” and I must say, Facebook Friends have been especially helpful by sending along happy birthday wishes. Since none of them de-friended me for political differences during and after the campaign, I was intrigued by this essay in the National Review, titled “Ten Reasons Left-Wingers Cut Trump Voters from Their Lives.”

Now as I have made painfully clear, I was no Trump voter, having determined early on that I would sooner undergo a head-transplant from a warthog, even a Bernie-boosting warthog, but I was no Hillary Clinton supporter either, and was especially eager to shoot down particularly stupid memes from OccupyDemocrats, MOVE-ON, and the National Federation of the Brain Debilitated when my friends posted them, which was depressingly often. (Come to think of it, most of those FBFs who are addicted to progressive memes haven’t sent me birthday wishes, the bastards, but then the National Review piece wasn’t called “Ten Reasons Left-Wingers Won’t Say Happy Birthday To Facebook Friends Who Point Out That The Memes They Post Have Been Proven To Cause Retardation In Chimps.

The article is biased, of course: it’s the National Review. Obviously its assertion is over-generalized. But how fair is its general proposition, which is that the 2016 phenomenon of people cutting off friends and family is “one-sided”? Continue reading

Fake News Ethics: A Quick Audit

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There is…

(1) fake news,

(2) misleading or incompetent reporting,

(3) news that some people call fake because they don’t like its likely effects or implications, and

(4) news that people want others to think is fake so they can peddle their own fake news.

Did genuine, unequivocal fake news affect the 2016 election—that is, the first kind, the kind peddled by hoax sites like The News Nerd, and the Macedonian junk like the story about the Pope endorsing Trump?  There’s no evidence that would suggest or support that. Many voters are naive, gullible, ignorant fools, but still: how many actually changed their votes based on complete fiction? It’s impossible to tell, but stating that this was the case is itself a form of fake news.

Democrats and partisan pundits had been using the “fake news” device to mute the voices of journalists who didn’t follow in lockstep to the mainstream media pro-Democratic march. The IRS scandal, which is real and damning, has been largely ignored by the mainstream news media and called a “nothingburger” in Obama Administration talking points.The assertion that it is a myth that the IRS is using its power to suppress conservative dissent is …..fake news.

Because Fox is the only major news outlet (I do not count the slimy Breitbart websites) that was consistently critical of the Obama administration when it deserved it (and sometimes when it did not), Democrats not-quite-successfully-enough set out to marginalize Fox, calling it “faux news” and pushing the Obama narrative that it wasn’t even a legitimate news source. Obama, in an interview with Rolling Stone (speaking of sources of fake news!), blamed Clinton’s loss in part on “Fox News in every bar and restaurant in big chunks of the country.”

Isn’t that amazing? What gall. It isn’t the fact that the debt (that Obama promised to reduce) is now just short of 20 TRILLION dollars, with Obama adding a record $7.917 trillion to it, it’s that the one news source that actively exposed that fact was available to middle class voters that led to Hillary’s loss.  It wasn’t that the Affordable Care Act didn’t let Americans keep their health care plans as Obama repeatedly swore it would, it was that Fox News kept reminding its viewers of that (as the rest of the news media soft-peddled it) , while also publicizing that thanks to the Affordable Care Act, one’s health care insurance was less affordable unless the government was paying for it. It wasn’t that Hillary Clinton had lied about her e-mail tricks for over a year, the problem was that Fox was responsibly reporting that she was lying, unlike CNN, NBC, and the rest.

You know. Fake news.

As part of an organized effort up and down Democratic groups, ranks, allies and media operatives to de-legitimatize Donald Trump’s victory, the definition of “fake news” has been conveniently expanded. The Washington Post published a jaw-droppingly sloppy, partisan piece last week alleging that

The flood of “fake news” this election season got support from a sophisticated Russian propaganda campaign that created and spread misleading articles online with the goal of punishing Democrat Hillary Clinton, helping Republican Donald Trump and undermining faith in American democracy, say independent researchers who tracked the operation.”

Continue reading

No Charges In The Keith Scott Shooting, And An Ethics Test For Black Lives Matter

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Yesterday,  Mecklenburg, North Carolina District Attorney Andrew Murray announced that the investigation into September’s fatal police shooting of Keith Lamont Scott had found no legal wrongdoing. This meant, in addition to the fact that officer Brently Jackson, who is black, would not face trial, that the two-days of riots inflicted on Charlotte after the Scott’s death were even more inexcusable than riots generally are. People who claimed on social media that they had seen the shooting and that Scott was unarmed admitted to investigators that they hadn’t seen what they said they saw. Evidence in the case showed that Scott stepped out of his SUV  holding a gun—his DNA was retrieved from the weapon found at the scene—and ignored at least ten commands from the five officers on the scene to drop it. Individuals who behave like that are likely to get shot, and deserve to be. No case, no outrage, no systemic racism.

Following the shooting, however, this was a Mike Brown encore, complete with angry, loud, false accounts and social media rumors focused on making Scott’s death another rallying point for race-hucksters, politicians who felt they could benefit from dividing the country by color, and irresponsible pundits.

From the Ethics Alarms post on September 21: Continue reading

Unethical Facebook Post Of The Month: The Fired KFC Employee

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We can make short work of this one. The post, which is being circulated around social media with great glee, embodies an unethical impulse, breach of confidentiality, and vengeance. It is miles away from the other end of the disgruntled ex-employee spectrum, but on the spectrum nonetheless, along with taking a shotgun to one’s former office and firing away. Trying to harm an employer because you got yourself fired simply illustrates the kind of character deficits that resulted in the termination.

As with everything else in life,there is an ethical way to get fired. That would be to shake the hand of the one who handed you the pink slip, state your appreciation for the chance to work and sincere regret that it did not work out, then to say good-bye and good luck to fellow workers, then walking out with head held high. Leaving while darkly muttering “You’ll be sorry!” under your breath, or trying to harm the company’s reputation or business though retaliation later, is both unethical and stupid. Calvin better hope his ill-considered message doesn’t get into any potential employer’s hands. You’d have to be nuts to hire someone like him.

His is the not-so-secret recipe for distrust and failure.

Let’s Hear No More About Facebook “Values”

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The New York Times reports that Facebook has developed software that will enable partner Chinese companies to monitor popular stories and topics that Facebook users share across the social network. Facebook’s partner would have power to decide whether those posts should show up in users’ feeds and suppress posts from  in specific geographic areas. The censorship and information-suppressing software  was created to help Facebook get into China, a lucrative market where the social network has been blocked. CEO Mark Zuckerberg is, sources say, full supportive of this effort by Facebook to make the subjugation of Chinese liberty easier.

One of Facebook’s core mission statements is “Make the world more open and connected.” Like so many mission statements, it is public relations deception. If Facebook was devoted to this mission, it would not even consider breaching its intent, letter and spirit by spending time and money to develop censorship software.

Facebook’s real mission is making a fortune by expanding into new markets. Let us not debase the topic of this blog by defaulting to Rationalization # 25. The Coercion Myth: “I have no choice!”

Facebook has a choice, the ethical one. That choice is to tell China it has a choice: either accept Facebook without censorship, of do without it. Google and Twitter, neither exactly paragons of virtue, have been blocked there for refusing to yield to the government’s  censorship requirements. Boy, when a company isn’t even as ethical as Twitter..wow.

This is the company we are going to trust to decide what is “real news.”  Ridiculous.

Prominent Democratic Party supporter Zuckerberg, like the party itself, is insufficiently allergic to the methods and objectives of totalitarianism.

Four Unethical Dispatches From The 2016 Post Election Ethics Train Wreck: #4

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The last of our four unethical missives (the previous ones are here, here, and here) comes from the CEO of Grubhub. But first, consider the election night Facebook discourse above, by the chief executive of San Diego cybersecurity start-up PacketSled, Matt Harrigan. The key tweets are a bit hard to read. The top left one says he’s going to kill the President-Elect. The bottom left says he’s getting a sniper rifle.

He has been placed on leave by his board.

Good move.

GrubHub Inc. CEO Matt Maloney was a bit more genteel, writing to his employees The Day After:

SUBJECT: So… that happened… what’s next?

I’m still trying to reconcile my own worldview with the overwhelming message that was delivered last night. Clearly there are a lot of people angry and scared as the antithesis of every modern presidential candidate won and will be our next president.  While demeaning, insulting and ridiculing minorities, immigrants and the physically/mentally disabled worked for Mr. Trump, I want to be clear that this behavior – and these views, have no place at Grubhub. Had he worked here, many of his comments would have resulted in his immediate termination. 

We have worked for years cultivating a culture of support and inclusiveness. I firmly believe that we must bring together different perspectives to continue innovating – including all genders, races, ethnicities and sexual, cultural or ideological preferences. We are better, faster and stronger together.  Further I absolutely reject the nationalist, anti-immigrant and hateful politics of Donald Trump and will work to shield our community from this movement as best as I can.As we all try to understand what this vote means to us, I want to affirm to anyone on our team that is scared or feels personally exposed, that I and everyone else here at Grubhub will fight for your dignity and your right to make a better life for yourself and your family here in the United States. 

If you do not agree with this statement then please reply to this email with your resignation because you have no place here. We do not tolerate hateful attitudes on our team.I want to repeat what Hillary said this morning, that the new administration deserves our open minds and a chance to lead, but never stop believing that the fight for what’s right is worth it. 

Stay strong, Matt

The key text was this…

“I absolutely reject the nationalist, anti-immigrant and hateful politics of Donald Trump and will work to shield our community from this movement as best as I can….If you do not agree with this statement then please reply to this email with your resignation because you have no place here.”

There’s nothing wrong with nationalism, in moderation. Trump isn’t anti-immigrant, he’s anti-illegal immigrant. What constitutes the politics of Donald Trump and whether or not it is hateful is open to interpretation. Nonetheless, Maloney is clearly saying that his employees must agree with his partisan views (and selective sense of diversity or inclusion), or they forfeit their jobs.

After it was pointed out to Maloney that the e-mail demanded ideological conformity, was probably illegal under some state laws (like California) and was gallactically stupid, he tried to explain with a deceitful apology, writing in part, Continue reading

Partisan Hypocrisy And Dishonesty: A Facebook Case Study In Clinton Corruption

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The unethical individual in this case is an old and cherished friend. She isn’t a fool. She is, in most matters, compassionate, fair, informed, thoughtful and rational.  I cannot begin to describe how disappointed I am in the lack of integrity and self-awareness in her conduct.

Before the election, she posed the meme above.  That’s the friend I know, or thought I knew before the toxic values of Hillary Clinton corrupted her.

After the election, she has posted this, a typically vile, sneering anti-conservative screed by Paul Krugman. A quote:

We thought that the great majority of Americans valued democratic norms and the rule of law.It turns out that we were wrong. There turn out to be a huge number of people — white people, living mainly in rural areas — who don’t share at all our idea of what America is about. For them, it is about blood and soil, about traditional patriarchy and racial hierarchy. And there were many other people who might not share those anti-democratic values, but who nonetheless were willing to vote for anyone bearing the Republican label.

I don’t know how we go forward from here. Is America a failed state and society? It looks truly possible.

 

No despair there!

Next up was this hysterical piece, from the New Yorker, called “An American Tragedy.” I can’t let this part go unanswered, because it is becoming the accepted manipulative and deception euphemism of the election. Hillary’s beaten, she’s gone, and unlike Richard Nixon, she’s not going to rise like Dracula and make a comeback. I want to leave her alone just as I never want the slimy Clintons to darken my brainpan again, but first, I want the biased journalists who tried to sell her as Joan of Arc to stop the lies.

The author writes,

“Hillary Clinton was a flawed candidate but a resilient, intelligent, and competent leader, who never overcame her image among millions of voters as untrustworthy and entitled.”

Donald Trump could just as justifiably could be called “flawed,” as well as Pol Pot. What are the “flaws” this cover-word is hiding? Well, she is greedy, venal, willing to use conflicts of interest and influence peddling for personal gain, violates rules and laws when she knows she is shielded by her power and crony connection from accountability, a ruthless foe of the victim of alleged sexual assault when it is advantageous, and an outspoken advocate for them when that is advantageous. When she is caught, she lies. When the lies are exposed, she spins, and her apologies are misleading too. That’s why she “never overcame her image among millions of voters as untrustworthy and entitled“—she IS untrustworthy and entitled, and couldn’t hide it long enough to be elected President over a completely unstable, ignorant ass. Resilient—I’ll give her resilient. Intelligent too, although she sure did and said some incredibly stupid things for an intelligent person. But competent? Competent people learn about cyber-security when they run the State Department. Competent people are not “extremely careless” (rather than “grossly negligent”) in handling classified information.

Then my friend posted this, from Vanity Fair. It’s a letter Hollywood liberal Aaron Sorkin supposedly wrote to his daughter. It is full of scaremongering like this:

“The Klan won last night. White nationalists. Sexists, racists and buffoons. Angry young white men who think rap music and Cinco de Mayo are a threat to their way of life (or are the reason for their way of life) have been given cause to celebrate. Men who have no right to call themselves that and who think that women who aspire to more than looking hot are shrill, ugly, and otherwise worthy of our scorn rather than our admiration struck a blow for misogynistic shitheads everywhere. Hate was given hope….And the world took no time to react. The Dow futures dropped 700 points overnight. Economists are predicting a deep and prolonged recession…”

Yes, “economists” like Paul Krugman, who wrote Tuesday night that the stock market would NEVER recover. The stock market rebounded almost immediately, and stocks are now soaring. Bias makes you stupid.

Not finished yet in her efforts to avoid despair, my friend posted this editorial from the New York Times, which encompassed boiler-plate progressive talking points:

“There is a planet to save. The earth is in peril from a changing climate no matter how many deniers say otherwise. There may be millions of immigrants to shield from a Trump homeland-enforcement regime. State and local governments may need to step in if the federal government retreats from protecting consumers or helping educate children. And there may be sick people to care for, should Mr. Trump dismantle the Affordable Care Act.”

Of course, Mrs. Clinton never articulated a course for “saving the planet” or its price-tag, because she knows that spending massive amounts on speculative “fixes” will make the debt even more frightening than it has become under Obama, and will require either cutting social spending or massive tax hikes. That part is just Bernie-speak. There are no legal immigrants to shield from anything, and the New York Times just declared that the prospect of enforcing our laws is apocalyptic. Under federal funding and guidance, America’s education at all level is disgraceful now. And the Affordable Care Act has mass heath care increasingly affordable for those who didn’t need a government subsidy. Trump might try something else that actually works? The monster.

The specifics are a tangential issue though, I know. The point is that this, and a huge number of other irresponsible editorials, assays, columns creeds and internet posts like them, are seeding despair. So are the Clinton Corrupted who are plastering them all over public media.

On this last one, I lightly pointed out to my friend that the essay was less that fair or accurate, as did another.

She deleted both comments.

Now I understand, unfortunately. That reasonable, measured, rational, responsible appeal to calm and fairness was only supposed to apply to Republicans. Since my friend never dreamed that she might be held to the same standards she preached to those whose opinion she did not agree with or respect, she never considered having to follow her own advice, or the ethical value of doing so.

Like anything else, ethics is just another political tool to the politically corrupted, to manipulate and deceive.