“Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias” Watch: The NYT Isn’t Even Pretending Any More

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

I’m kind of ticked off: Ann Althouse mocked many of the same unethical items in the Sunday Times front page this morning that I noticed immediately, but Ann gets up earlier on Sundays than I do.

The Times has this:

If you bother to read the article, a “60 Minutes” interview apparently is the one that the Times thinks isn’t “friendly.” Anyone who believes that didn’t watch the Vice-Presidential debate. CBS is a card-carrying member of the Axis; not only that, but interviews on that show are edited before they air. Does the Times really expect us to believe that one of Harris’s attacks of Authentic Frontier gibberish won’t end up on the cutting room floor? As for the others: “The View”? “The View?”The  biased, race-baiting progressive ignoramuses on the dumbest new show on television (Remember: Sonny Hostin, the one lawyer on the show, implied that the eclipse was proof of climate change  doesn’t interview Democrats, they fawn over them. The ladies recenly let Biden lie almost non-stop in his “historic” appearance, and when he boasted about the “Violence Against Women Act,” nobody asked him about the rape accusation against him by a former Senate staffer—that would have been “unfriendly.” Colbert uses political guests, all Democrats, to set up Trump-bashing, his obsession.

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Another Week, Another Dumb Question To “The Ethicist”

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

There was a time when I thought I would have enjoyed the job of being the New York Times advice columnist, “The Ethicist.” In the last year or so, however, the questions the current column-holder has answered have tended to indicate basic ethics problem-solving skills among the public have fallen to an abysmal level. And these are supposed to be the best questions received by Kwame Anthony Appiah, a philosophy professor at NYU. Heavens to Betsy, what are the other questions like?

This week’s top question was this:

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The Fake James Earl Jones Problem

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

Oh yeah, I can see where this is going…

Vanity Fair reports that in 2022, Lucasfilm and Skywalker Sound hired a Ukrainian startup called Respeech to recreate Darth Vader’s voice for its upcoming mini-series “Obi-Wan Kenobi.” The recently departed James Earl Jones was then alive but 91 and his voice was waeker and not as resonant as in his “THIS is CNN!” days. Using AI, Respeech used archived “Star Wars” sound tracks footage to recreate Jones’ iconic Darth Vader’s tones from the original 1980s trilogy. Jones was satsified with the fake version of him, and signed off on using his archival voice recordings for future (lousy) “Star Wars” spin-offs. When “Obi-Wan Kenobi” premiered, nobody guessed that Darth Vader’s voice was AI generated.

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An Ethics Estoppel, Double Standard Classic From The Axis After Walz’s Meltdown

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

I actually laughed out loud reading Politico’s “Walz says he ‘speaks like everybody else.’ And it’s not working for the campaign.” representative excerpts:

  • “’Any time you are forced to go off message is never welcome,” said Mike Mikus, a Democratic strategist in Pennsylvania. ‘But in the end, voters are looking for somebody who is more concerned about what these candidates are going to do to improve their lives than, ‘Did he get every single fact correct?’”

That was the one that got me  laughing. It is exactly the argument Trump defenders have been making for years, to the sneers of the Left.  How dare any Democrat resort to it?

  • “Yeah, look, I have my dates wrong,” Walz told reporters in Harrisburg. “I was in Hong Kong in China in 1989. … I speak like everybody else speaks. I need to be clearer.”

Another Trump defender line: “He speaks like normal people.” Continue reading →

Ethics Alarms Exclusive: PBS Is Using Public Funds and Its “Educational Programming” to Promote Kamala Harris

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

I hate to append that corny clickbait “Exclusive” to this post’s headline, but I want to be clear: nobody else has noticed the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s latest, and in my view, most unethical and blatant effort to influence the election in order to elect Kamala Harris.

I just searched online: I appear to be the only one who has noticed so far, or at least who has written about it. Not Fox News, the devoted mob of conservative pundits at PJ Media, the Washington Free Beacon, Joe Concha—of course not the Times, WaPo, CNN et al., which are are pretending PBS is beyond reproach and as unbiased as…they are.

On October 1, the Public Broadcasting System premiered an episode of “The American Experience” titled, “The American Vice President: Rethinking a political afterthought.” Like the other installments in the long-running educational series, it was a mini-documentary about an aspect of American history, using historical footage and interviews to tell an enlightening story. I began watching it from my point of view as a student of American history, government history and the Presidency in particular. Halfway through—-it shouldn’t have taken that long, but it was 5 am. this morning—I realized what the real message was: “Kamala Harris is qualified to be President of the United States.”

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I Could Defend This Principal, But I Won’t…

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

The Bellevue School District in Washington, like so many others as well as our college campuses, has experienced a plague of anti-Semitism since the October 7, 2023 terrorist attack by Hamas against Israel. The phenomenon has been particularly ugly there, with students taunting Jewish classmates in one episode by chanting “Gas the Jews!” Phantom Lake Elementary in the district discovered a swastika drawn on one of its walls on campus. , someone tagged the west wall on campus with a swastika. Principal Heather Snookal sent a reassuring email to parents about the incident, but then felt compelled to send a woke DEI disclaimer so no swastika-lover from another culture would be offended. She really did this. No, I’m not making it up.

“While the symbol is often associated with hate and intolerance due to its use during World War II, it is important to acknowledge that the swastika has deep historical and cultural significance in other parts of the world,” Snookal wrote. “I apologize that I didn’t acknowledge this in my previous communication.”

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Incompetent Elected Official of the Month, Res Ipsa Loquitur Division: Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga)

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Does there need to be much more evidence than that absurd tweet from yesterday? Greene preceded this with a conspiracy theory-esque map showing that it was mostly GOP-tilting regions that got hit hardest by Hurricane Helene.

Presumably no rebuttal is necessary, but I have some reactions…

  • What is she talking about?
  • What the hell is she talking about?
  • What the bloody hell is she talking about?
  • Who is “they”?
  • Who voted this idiot into Congress?
  • How can Republicans with IQ’s in double digits avoid being associated with a House member who constantly embarrasses her party, the Congress, and the human species with outbursts like this?
  • I’m racking my brains to think of a dumber and more irresponsible assertion from a House member of either party in the history of the institution. Compared to Greene, fellow Georgia rep Hank Johnson (D-Ga), who memorably expressed concern that Guam might tip over because the U.S. had so many troops there, is Galileo.

What a great time, with House control hanging in the balance, for Greene to make her party look too brain-damanged to put its shoes on the right feet.

Ethics Verdict: This Is Unforgivable, and Accountability Is Mandatory

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

“Holy Crap!” indeed.

I have to come to the harsh but unavoidable ethics verdict that anyone who votes for the same political party responsible for us having a President in this condition is stupid, irreversibly ignorant, completely uninformed, or a mindless partisan robot eager to love Big Brother.

As I recently reminded readers by quoting from this post in early 2020, the fact that Joe Biden was losing his already tenuous grip on competence was evident before the Democrats nominated him. I wasn’t unusually perceptive; the Democratic Party’s Dark Leaders had to know that the assorted demagogues, anti-US socialists and empty suits competing with him for the Presidential nomination that year had little chance of defeating the Evil Donald Trump, and also that Biden was literally unfit to hold office. Then the pandemic struck, and the party, which aspires to be called The Party henceforth, realized that they could hide Joe in the basement, pretend he wasn’t losing marbles daily, and use pandemic terror spread by its media allies to justify useful changes in election security. Voilà! Victory “by any means necessary.” [Harry Reid chimes in from the Lake of Fire where he now resides, “Romney lost, didn’t he?”]

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Friday Open Forum!

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

This is one of the days I already have the topics lined up I want to post about, so try to do me a favor. While exploring ethics issues of your own choosing here, please don’t preempt me so I have to go looking for new topics unless you choose to write on one of the topics below in sufficient detail that I don’t have to. THAT I always appreciate. The looming posts are on:

  • The school principle in Washington state who responded to someone scrawling a swastika on a campus wall by reminding parents that in some cultures the symbol “has deep historical and cultural significance in other parts of the world.”
  • The hilarious response of the Harris campaign to the sudden focus on Tim Walz’s habit of lying his fool head off, nicely exposed in his debate with J.D. Vance.
  • Ethics issues raised by AI’s ability to play Rich Little and convincingly imitate celebrity voices, and…
  • President Biden’s bone-chilling response when asked “What do the states in the storm zone need — after what you saw today?” Biden said, in sum,”Which storm?”

Here is also a good place to note that I won a million dollar bet with myself that indefatigable New York Times apologist “A Friend” would respond to this post with along protest. Unfortunately “A Friend” got himself banned long ago by 1) violating the comment policies by telling me how to moderate EA and 2) eliminating any chance of being reinstated by defying the ban any time he feels like commenting, conduct that is disrespectful of the forum, and me. Here’s a tip: if you get banned, the proper and almost always successful response is “I’m sorry, I understand, and I promise to be good if you give me a second chance.”

I don’t read these unauthorized replies before sending them directly to Spam Hell, but in this case my eye caught just enough words in the first paragraph to see where the post was going: Because the Times included an op-ed critical of Walz in the same batch as M. Gessen advocating partisan bias and censorship by journalists, A Friend thinks that justifies the Times giving a regular platform to an opponent of ethical journalism and free speech. It doesn’t. There are more than one rationalizations on the list with commentary that explains that, as in the discussion of “Ethics Accounting.”

Why Is Someone Who Could Make This Argument An Opinion Writer For The New York Times?

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Oh, wait, now I see. M. Gessen is trans or something, refers to whatever he/she is as “they,” and the fact that “her”their” gender identity is non-traditional means that “their” opinion on political matters must have value. No, of course it makes no sense, but never mind. That’s the Times these days. It still doesn’t excuse letting someone who thinks like this have a platform in the most read newspaper in the country.

The Times provided a transcript to the podcast called “The Real Loser of the V.P. Debate.” Here are some representative quotes (in my view, the podcast isn’t worth listening to):

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