Baby steps: it apparently is too much right now to expect American journalism to report important events and developments objectively and fairly so the citizens of the republic can intelligently govern themselves. For now, Ethics Alarms would be satisfied if it would just avoid making the public more ignorant and less able to do its own analysis. This also appears to be, if attainable, a long way off.

Two CNN pieces today show how far the news media has to come to meet that standard, assuming they want to—which I doubt.

First, here is Harry Enten, CNN’s Senior Political Data Reporter who supposedly specializes in data-driven journalism, stating the obvious as if he had just translated the Rosetta Stone. In “2024 marks a 21st century rarity: Almost everyone thinks the election results are legitimate,” he takes more than 800 words to “analyze” a phenomenon he should have been able to explain in fewer than 50. Here, Harry, try this: “The 2024 election victory by Trump isn’t being challenged as illegitimate because he won the popular vote and his decisive Electoral College victory was not dependent on a few razor-thin margins in swing states where the rules were violated due to a pandemic.”

Incredibly Harry, who has been much praised since the election for not being as biased against Republicans and Trump as virtually everyone else at his network, doesn’t focus on that fact at all, but rather hypothesizes about the U.S. entering a new “era of acceptance.” There is nothing “new” about accepting a President-elect’s clear win in both the popular and electoral vote. The 21st Century has seen just seven Presidential elections. In 2000 and 2016, the winner lost the popular vote. The American public doesn’t comprehend the Electoral College or why we have it, our educational system doesn’t teach it, so the public is ignorant and thinks such an election has produced an “illegitimate” President. That’s two out of seven elections that were not “accepted.”

Then there was 2020, where the news media had been undermining Trump for four years, the pandemic allowed the Democratic challenger to hide while the news media lobbied for his election, and obviously insecure voting methods were allowed in key states without adequate preparation or oversight. (Enten repeats the Axis mantra that Trump’s claims about the election were “unfounded.” That’s a lie. The proper words would be “substantially, but not entirely, unprovable.”) The 2004 election, like 2020, would have had a popular vote loser win the Electoral College if just a couple of close states had flipped, so many Democrats claimed that Kerry’s loss was “illegitimate.”

To support his theme, like so many unethical “experts,” Enten elides over inconvenient facts. He says that nobody thought Obama’s reelection in 2012 was “illegitimate,” but in truth there were many reasons to feel Mitt Romney was jobbed, starting with, again, the news media bias against him, Candy Crowley’s unethical interference on Obama’s behalf when the Benghazi scandal came up in the Presidential debate, and later, when it was discovered that Obama’s IRS illicitly sabotaged the political activities of Tea Party non-profits until after Obama was safely elected.

In short, the Presidential elections where the public saw good reasons to question their legitimacy (2000, 2004, 2012, 2016, and 2020) were questioned, and those where such conditions—-close votes in swing states, egregious cheating by the news media on behalf of the winner, dodgy election security— didn’t exist were substantially without controversy (2008 and 2024). There has been no cultural shift to “acceptance.” The next time a popular vote loser wins in the Electoral College, it will be back to same old refrain.

Next we have this flagrant propaganda from CNN: “This fiery evangelical pastor offers a blueprint for Democrats’ revival in Trump’s second term.”Elevating a religious huckster to the status of an authority figure is an unethical ploy by CNN to justify more Trump-bashing using the Axis’s newly popular “Trump supporters are immoral” theme. Funny, this was a mode of analysis the current practitioners mocked when Bill Clinton was caught exploiting his intern in Oval Office hummer sessions.

The article introduces the Rev. William J. Barber II (above) as “one of America’s most persistent and eloquent spokespersons for poor and working-class Americans” who has been called “the closest person we have to MLK.” In fact, he sounds like the closest person we have to Jesse Jackson, or maybe Al Sharpton (other than Al himself, of course). Thus the Reverend is used as an excuse for CNN to publish “analysis” like this…

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Above is the initial headline MSNBC put up this week regarding Jose Ibarra, the illegal alien found guilty of murdering 22-year-old Laken Riley. It’s pretty amazing, even for MSNBC.

Riley was the George nursing student murdered and raped in February by the member of the notorious Venezualan gang, Tren de Aragua. Iberra was illegally in the U.S. but the insane Democratic policies pandering to illegals had seemed to have worked in concert to keep him here so he could inflict maximum  carnage.

He attacked his victim while she was running on a trail at the University of Georgia campus in Athens, and the murder immediately crystalized public outrage over the Biden administration’s handling of illegal border crossings. It should have: it was a perfect tipping point for a long-running national debate that shouldn’t be a debate. While lawmakers in Georgia quickly passed  tougher rules on immigration after the killing and Trump’s supporters used the tragedy to highlight his signature issue, Democrats and the progressive extremists on MSNBC rushed to issue excuses and rationalizations to insist that illegal immigrants are mostly the salt of earth, my least favorite theme being the idiotic and deceitful argument that immigrants commit fewer crimes in proportion to their numbers than American citizens.

[Arrgh. 1. The data is misleading. 2. The issue is illegal immigrants, which the Left continues to describe as just “immigrants” so it can accuse conservatives of opposing all immigration. 3. All crimes committed by illegal immigrants should not have been committed at all and are the result of progressive open border madness and its fatuous accompanying appeal to emotion, “These are just human beings trying to have a better life for themselves and their families.” I’m sorry I mentioned this. The “fewer crimes” cheat makes me furious. I apologize for the tangent. ]

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Just two days ago Ethics Alarms featured a somewhat sarcastic post “thanking” BlueSky for “provid[ing] a wonderful way for the intolerant, doctrinaire, anti-speech progressives who have divided the country and the culture while endangering civic discourse and democracy to show exactly who and what they are.”

But seriously folks, the new Twitter/X competitor, like so many things embraced by the Angry Totalitarian Left in recent years, is another shot to the solar plexus of a functioning democracy.

Kevin Roose , the technology columnist for The New York Times and a co-host of the Times tech podcast, “Hard Fork” illustrates why the platform is so sinister while praising it in a Times column. “You may be wondering why Bluesky — an experimental social media app that was started in 2019 under Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s former chief executive, before becoming an independent company in 2021 — is attracting so much attention these days,” he writes.

No I don’t wonder at all: it’s clear as a bell on my nose. My Trump Deranged Facebook Friends have made the reasons they are fleeing to BlueSky explicit. They don’t want to be exposed to any opinions, news or events that challenge their biases and partisan assumptions. They regard anyone who doesn’t bow down to progressive cant, even as it is proving intellectually and practically bankrupt by the minute, as stupid, immoral and a blight on existence. BlueSky is the web equivalent of joining a cult or a commune.

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And so it begins. Starting today, as I already wrote about at excessive length here, I enter a period of involuntary nostalgia, regret and sadness, beginning with today’s anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, followed tomorrow by my first wedding anniversary in 43 years with no marriage to celebrate. Maybe this explains why I have even less sympathy for my Facebook friends still weeping, raging and making asses of themselves over the election loss by the worst major Presidential candidate in at least 150 years. Let’s see what they’re up to [I’m checking Facebook….]

Oh! It’s stupid meme day! One FBF posted this meme inspired by Communist Robert Reich…

George Soros and Bill Gates, of course, are purely benign in their use of their resources. Another posts this trenchant commentary:

Ugh. Please do better…

Rob Reiner has puzzled me for a long, long time. He can’t be stupid; his father Carl  was a brilliant writer and comic, quick on his feet, witty, and able to hold his own with Mel Brooks, Woody Allen and Neil Simon. Rob was once an excellent film director: “This Is Spinal Tap (1984), “The Sure Thing” (1985), “Stand by Me” (1986), “The Princess Bride” (1987), “When Harry Met Sally,” (1989), “Misery (1990), and “A Few Good Men” (1992). I’m also an excellent director, so maybe I’m inclined to assume that talent is linked to intelligence. But Reiner’s success in Hollywood has crashed as his partisan progressive fervor has slipped into fanaticism.

His Ethics Alarms dossier is frightening. In 2022, he actually tweeted this,

and didn’t expect to be laughed at. His Trump Derangement worsened, resulting in this tweet

and later, when he denied on Bill Maher’s HBO show that the press buried the Hunter Biden laptop story and then deflected to, “You know it’s not justified? Using armed violence to try to kill people in the Capital. That’s not justified!” I wrote at the time,” So many once intelligent people are like Reiner now. Isn’t that frightening? Don’t some Americans, the ones who aren’t too far gone, hear a celebrity talk like that and think, “Wait…I’m on the same side as that guy? Do I sound like that? What’s happened to me?”

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Is the New York Times really so desperate for anti-Trump, “let’s kill all the unborn babies” screeds that they have to dip into the high school newspaper pool? I saw this op-ed by a 16-year-old girl in The Salt Lake Tribune, which picked it up from the New York Times. There is no excuse for it. Titled, “I’m 16. On Nov. 6 the Girls Cried, and the Boys Played Minecraft,” the piece is irresponsible to publish for many reasons:

• I don’t believe that it is likely to have been the 16-year-old’s work alone. I believe it was influenced by adults, and that they used her to promote their views, on the theory that “out of the mouths of babes” would have more persuasive power than “out of the mouths of pro-abortion extremists who believe nothing is more important than allowing mothers to kill unborn children.
• The named author, whose name I will not mention here so as to in some tiny way mitigate the harm this publicity is likely to inflict on her, is too young to give valid consent to being exploited in this manner. The op-ed is forever. She isn’t out of high school. She shouldn’t have to begin adulthood already branded as self-branded bigot, sexist, demonizer of a President and abortion activist.
• It would be a poor op-ed unworthy of publication if it were written by an adult.

Here are just a few excerpts to give you the spirit the thing: Continue reading →