Guess which one. Three tries, and the first two don’t count.

Yes, it’s journalism of course. I hate to keep harping on this, but until I stop seeing, reading and hearing corrupted individuals who were once fair and honest insisting that there is no mainstream media bias (or telling me that they get their news from MSNBC), attention must be paid. This year is already an orgy of disgraceful, slanted reporting employing flaming double standards, and it is sure to get much, much worse.

Here is a column in the Columbia Journalism Review, a publication of perhaps our most respected journalism school (though not by me). The author is Jon Alsop, who writes for the New York Review of Books, Foreign Policy, and The Nation (a red flag there, and by “red” I mean “Marxist”) , among other outlets, and he authors CJR’s newsletter “The Media Today.” It is an unapologetic argument for reporters to deliberately report on Donald Trump negatively and with the explicit purpose of undermining his image and support.

The pretense for this smoking gun is the latest example of intentional Trump-smearing, the Big Lie that Trump called for a literal “bloodbath” if he loses the election.

Some, Alsop writes, “claimed that the media was taking the ‘bloodbath’ comment out of context: it came during a section of Trump’s speech about the state of the US auto industry, and was clearly meant, these people said, in an economic sense.” “Claimed”? It was taken out of context and deliberately distorted. Later in the piece, Alsop even concedes “on balance, that he was using the word in an economic sense.” So why does Alsop excuse and offer support those who “countered that it was fair to highlight the remark, arguing, variously, that Trump doesn’t deserve the benefit of the doubt given his long history of violent rhetoric, that it’s not at all clear that he was only referring to the auto industry, and that even if he was, his use of the word ‘bloodbath’ was still hyperbolic to the point of demagoguery”? Alsop thinks this is a dilemma, you see: it’s ” the latest installment in the debate (which we’ve covered often here at CJR) as to how the media ought to handle [Trump’s] rhetoric, given its frequent violence and dishonesty.”

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I read  “How Trump’s Allies Are Winning the War Over Disinformation/Their claims of censorship have successfully stymied the effort to filter election lies online” in the New York Times this morning and was properly disgusted with the Times’ lockstep endorsement of Big Tech (and thus federal government) censorship of “disinformation and “misinformation,” cover words progressives use to describe opinions and framing of facts that undermine the Axis’s official narratives or that threaten their policy agendas. I was not, however, surprised. How could anyone be surprised? The Times censored the Hunter Biden laptop story. The Times embargoed the rape accusation against Joe Biden. The Times hyped the Wuhan virus threat with extraordinary misrepresentations and fearmongering while applauding social media efforts to suppress dissenting views that turned out to be correct. The Times took down an op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton because its woke staff found his position offensive There are so many more examples that it would be pointless (and boring) to list them.

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Yes, it’s come to this. Spending almost all of my time with my very confused dog when I’m not sifting through records, emails and bills, fielding kind calls from old friends, worrying myself sick and feeling guilty and lost, I’ve been looking for sources of hope and inspiration in history, culture and entertainment. (Teddy Roosevelt’s wife and mother died on the same night, in the same house.) When one gets down all the way to “Annie,” things are clearly getting desperate.

That clip above of Andrea McArdle at the Tonys is the start of a playlist that shows the actress singing her signature song 34 times from 1977 to 2022. If you skip to the last one, you’ll discover that she sounds remarkably the same. I once staged that song in a revue: on opening night, the dog playing Sandy, a Malamute- Airedale cross named “String,” barked twice at the end of the song, exactly on cue. She had never done it before, and never did it again, but boy, the audience went nuts.

1. Here’s something positive, sort of: The Great Stupid is clearly worse in great Britain than here so far. The Fitzwilliam Museum, owned by the University of Cambridge, decided that as part of its overhaul of its exhibitions to make them more “inclusive,” it needed to slap a sign by a classic British countryside painting noting that such artwork can stir feelings of “pride towards a homeland” but that “landscape paintings were also always entangled with national identity…The countryside was seen as a direct link to the past, and therefore a true reflection of the essence of a nation.” This, however, makes such art problematical: “The darker side of evoking this nationalist feeling is the implication that only those with a historical tie to the land have a right to belong.” In another part of the collection, visitors were told that portraits of wealthy and uniformed personages “became vital tools in reinforcing the social order of a white ruling class, leaving very little room for representations of people of color, the working classes or other marginalized people.” Such portraits, the museum insists, “were often entangled, in complex ways, with British imperialism and the institution of transatlantic slavery.”

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Eventually I’ll have to stop paying attention to these, I suppose. There are so many of them, they are intensifying and getting worse, and they represent such insulting gaslighting, dishonesty and “it isn’t what it is” propaganda that these does of brain poison wouldn’t be worth condemning if there weren’t so many gullible, easily manipulated citizens lacking critical thinking skills, adequate civic education, and yes, ethics alarms.

Last week I have sensed an uptick in the desperation from the Axis of Unethical Conduct (you know: “the resistance,” Democrats and the mainstream media) as its dream of using the politicized legal system to defeat Donald Trump seems to be fading on all fronts. I found Michael Tomasky’s typical screed in the New Republic refreshingly transparent on that score:
We Have to Beat Donald Trump. Clearly, the Broken Legal System Won’t. To people like Tomasky, the legal system is broken because the Left can’t just declare Trump an enemy of the state, lock him up or at least ban him from running without bothering with little details like evidence, non-partisan, independent prosecutors, and due process.

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African American writer William Spivey apparently had no compunction about writing a non-satirical essay in Medium and the web magazine “Level” with the title,”Where Are the Black People in Shogun?” This means that he didn’t think the headline and multiple statements in the article would make rational readers laugh coffee out of their noses. It also means, I think it’s fair to conclude, that he has been conditioned/indoctrinated not to be able to enjoy any dramatic presentation that doesn’t include “people like him,” narrowly defined in his case as “people who are the same color or a reasonable approximation thereof” rather than “human beings with emotions, feelings, thoughts and activities that we all can relate to, learn from and find engrossing, entertaining, moving or enlightening.”

I very much doubt that Aristotle, who thought a lot about such matters, would be writing laments headlined, “”Where Are the Athenians in Shogun?” even if he had been bombarded with DEI and woke craziness like we have been. After all, Aristotle had an independent and logical brain that wasn’t easily overwhelmed.

The headline and the essay also mean that the poor guy is incapable of enjoying a good story and dramatic presentation (Everyone’s saying that the “Shogun” remake is good; I haven’t see it). His attention always goes immediately to bean-counting demographics, because he believes that “diversity” must be imposed on every aspect of our existence whether it makes sense or not. I feel sorry for him; I also feel sorry that his ilk are multiplying around us like cancer cells.

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I find this ethics controversy specially opaque.

In San Marcos, Texas, Kristy Kay Money and Rolf Jacob Sraubhaar own a home in the city’s Burleson Historic District. It has a large metal “Z” bolted to an iron balcony on the front of the house, a reminder of the home’s original owner (and builder) Frank Zimmerman. He was a local businessman and the owner of the city’s historic theater; he also served as San Marcos mayor from 1949 to 1951. Zimmerman is commemorated around the town: a plaque states he “came to San Marcos in 1922, beginning a 47-year career in the theater industry with the purchase of the Grand Opera House and the original Palace Theater.”

But in 2016, it was discovered that a Palace Theater advertisement in the San Marcos Record dated March 28, 1924  proclaimed “KU KLUX KLAN DAY.” A related article titled “Klan Picture Coming” told readers, “A treat is in store for every person within 20 miles of San Marcos.  The Palace Theatre has been fortunate in booking the two-reel motion picture showing the Ku Klux Klan activities at the recent Dallas fair. It will be shown in connection with the regular admission price of 10, 20 and 30 cents, next Wednesday and Thursday.” Zimmerman’s theater also hosted screenings of Woodrow Wilson’s favorite film, “Birth of a Nation.”

Money and Sraubhaar decided they didn’t need a constant reminder of their home’s Klan-tainted history. They now want to remove the balcony and the Zimmerman “Z.” Their home is in a historic district, however, and though it has not been declared a historic structure itself, the San Marcos’ Historic Preservation Commission has to approve the proposed alteration. Last year it voted unanimously to deny their application to make the changes. The couple is now suing, but never mind that:

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

Should the government protect historic structures and artifacts that relate to dark events and less than admirable figures (by today’s values) in local and American history?

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Well, I’ll include one movie-related note. Grace, the late Mrs. Marshall, was amazing in her ability to spot continuity errors in films, and logical gaffes and plot holes annoyed her greatly, even more than they do me. (The “impact tremors” when the T-Rex is approaching in “Jurassic Park” was a particular target of her scorn: water would ripple in the glass, but at the climax of the film the dinosaur somehow creeps up on everybody to surprise the raptors and rescue the heroes. Grace mentioned it every time we saw the film, which was often.) The Times has a feature called “As Oscars approach, an honest look at beloved sports movies’ glaring plot holes.” The holes cited are the kind of things Grace would hate, but these are hardly “beloved sports movies.” In fact, almost all of them stink. Not one comes close to being on my list of the best sports movies (which are all ethics movies too.) You would have to staple my eyelids to my forehead to get me to watch “Happy Gilmore.”

1. Stop making me defend the public school system! On what must have been a slow outrage day, the Daily Caller took after this assignment, allegedly screen-shotted by a 16-year-old student:

Yeah, it looks like a dumb assignment, but absent context and the class work around it, there is no fair way to be sure. But what struck me about the Daily Caller’s critique was this: “If your child is incapable of writing more than 10 or so sentences on World War I, you have failed to educate them. Therefore, you have failed as a parent and you’re continuing to do so if you keep allowing schools to get away with not doing their job — a job you pay them for with your taxes every year.”

The failure of parents to do their duty of educating their kids as well as the deterioration of public education are important issues, but World War I illiteracy isn’t proof of either. I had a very good public school education, and my father was teaching my sister and me history all the time, but The Great War was largely ignored by both. It has always been a black hole of U.S. history along with the War of 1812, for a variety of reasons. There’s a lot more to American history than that remarkably pointless war, and the Revolution, the Civil War and World War II get most of the limited time the schools have to cover conflicts, as they should.

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