Following pressure from stockholders, AT&T reluctantly produced a report comparing its campaign contributions to its stated (woke, naturally) “values.” Surprise! While publicly proclaiming its left-approved virtues, the company gave millions to politicians holding opposing views.
From 2018 to 2021, AT&T donated at least $574,500 to the politicians who crafted and passed Texas’s voting reform legislation and at least $99,700 to Georgia Republicans who helped pass the law Joe Biden called “Jim Crow on steroids.” Now, neither law was actually a restriction on the right to vote, but the company has pandered to progressives who believe both laws are, posturing as an ardent supporter of “voting rights” as defined by the Left. This is a deceitful metaphorical tightrope to walk.
In AT&T’s 2020 Diversity, Equality and Inclusion Report, CEO John Stankey said one of the company’s “core values” was “gender equity and the empowerment of women.” Most women interpret that to mean support for Roe-style abortion rights, but from 2018 to 2021, AT&T donated $301,000 to the sponsors of Texas’ restrictive abortion law, and after it was passed an signed, gave $50,000 directly from its corporate treasury to the Texas Senate Republican Caucus which unanimously voted in favor of the abortion regulations, and $30,000 to House Speaker Dade Phelan (R), a champion of the bill.
In 2022, the majority of members of Congress given donations by AT&T opposed the “Dream Act,” though the company had previously proclaimed its support for the illegal immigration-supporting measure.
The principles elucidated by the June 2023 Supreme Court ruling outlawing affirmative action admissions policies at colleges and universities are apparently going to have to be fought out in lawsuits corporation by corporation, as many DEI execs seem determined to employ racism as a company mandate, but the “good” kind—that is, discrimination against whites, and especially white males.
America’s First Legal (AFL), a pro-bono non-profit public interest law firm has filed a federal civil rights complaint against Macy’s alleging egregiously illegal and unconstitutional hiring practices. AFL’s letter to Macy’s announcing the complaint is here.
A Macy’s 2019 press release —this company was ahead of the George Floyd Freakout DEI fad!—titled a “Bold Vision To Advance Diversity and Inclusion and Ensure The Company Reflects The Diversity Of The Customers and Communities Served” laid out a five-point plan to “[a]chieve more ethnic diversity by 2025 at senior director levels and above, with a goal of 30 %,” and to initiate a “12-month program designed to strengthen leadership skills for a selected group of top-talent managers and directors of Black/African-American, Hispanic-Latinx, Native American and Asian descent.” Racial quotas are illegal. The 30% quota requires managers to favor specified races and ethnicity races in hiring decisions, which directly breaches civil rights laws (though you and I can imagine how the company would try to argue that a goal isn’t a quota.) The plan also directs Macy’s advertising to hire 50% of all actors in their commercials from minority groups, meaning, obviously, non-whites.
I wonder how many other companies have internal directives like that? Based on what I see on TV, I’d guess quite a few.
I can’t avoid it this time: the episode comes too close on the metaphorical heels of Curmie’s examination of biased and misleading reporting (here and here) and the post about the desperate AUC (the Axis of Unethical Conduct) settling on declaring Trump an American Hitler as its best shot at keeping him out of the White House if they fail at “locking him up.”
What happened next was so similar to what was described in my post that it’s almost comical. In an Iowa town hall with Sean Hannity on Fox News, Trump was asked about the current scare-mongering narrative that he was going to be a dictator. Trump, who apparently can’t stop himself from trolling, said,
“He says, you’re not going to be a dictator, are you? I said no, no, no — other than day one. We’re closing the border and we’re drilling, drilling, drilling (for oil). After that I’m not a dictator.”
And how was that quote relayed on multiple outlets? “Trump says he’ll be a dictator from Day One.” See? He admits it!Aaron Rupar, the same shameless hack I mentioned in the earlier post, tweeted, “Trump admits he plans to do some dictatorial things on “day one” of his second term.” Rupar’s a dishonest asshole, but he’s not stupid. He knows that what Trump was describing isn’t “dictatorial,” but he exploited, as usual, Trump’s inflammatory language.
The executive branch has statutory power to close borders under certain circumstances. If Trump used that power, it wouldn’t be “dictatorial,” it would be legal and backed by democratically- determined laws. If the President doesn’t have statutory power to do something, he can’t do it. As for “drilling”: all Trump can do is lift Biden’s executive orders blocking drilling. The measures he’d be eliminating were no less “dictatorial” than his orders cancelling them. The President can’t order private companies to drill (or else what, shoot the executives?). So once againTrump was being careless in his rhetoric, thus throwing raw meat for his foes in the media and the Trump-Deranged to freak out over. And, of course, they took the bait.
Trump enjoys doing this, even though it fuels the hysterical and biased coverage of everything he says or does, even though it increases political divisions in our society. He’s having fun giving the news media what it wants, and they have no scruples or restraint either. The rest of the country are victims.
We have almost a year of this to go. Isn’t that great?
The title for this two-part edition of Curmie’s Conjectures refers to a song by the Irish punk band the Boomtown Rats, “Don’t Believe What You Read,” which includes not only the title admonition but also lines like “I know most what I read will be a lot of lies / But you learn really fast to read between the lines.”Part I of this exercise attempted to suggest something of the parameters of the problem. As Jack suggested in his introduction to that piece, it’s not an exhaustive list of the various forms of journalistic chicanery, but I hope it served as a representative sample.
Here in Part II, I’ll attempt the daunting task of examining strategies to “read between the lines” and come at least a little closer to the truth of what happened in a given situation. So, what to do? How do we determine if that less-than-objective source we’re reading actually has this one story right, especially if it’s the only source about a particular story? Boy, do I wish there was an easy answer to this one. That said…
The most effective means of ascertaining the truth, of course, is to get different perspectives on the issue. I think I’ve mentioned both here and on my own blog that when I was in England doing my MA (at the time “Don’t Believe What You Read” was released, as it happens), I’d alternate between reading the Telegraph, which leaned right, and the Guardian, which leaned left. If the former said “X but Y,” thereby suggesting that Y was the more important point, the latter would likely say “Y but X.” But whichever paper you read, you’d know that X and Y, though perhaps seemingly in opposition, were both true, and both worth knowing about.
Of course, both the Telegraph and the Guardian were, whatever their political perspectives, both reputable news sources. That’s a statement that would be difficult to make about many of the most prominent news media in this country in the 2020s. Equally importantly, as suggested in Part I, the problem is often that we hear only from one perspective.
There are three possibilities for why this should occur. One, which is (alas!) probably the least likely, is that both X and Y editors make an honest decision that a story is or is not newsworthy. Or X media outlet knowingly runs with a story that is either grossly distorted or fabricated altogether. Or outlet Y, knowing the story casts their team in an unfavorable light, ignores it, hoping it will just go away. At some point it becomes untenable to try to ferret out the true motives; the truth of the story may be a little easier to discern, although there are no guarantees.
[I am particularly grateful for this installment of Curmie’s Conjectures because it assuages my guilt a bit. As longtime readers here know, I occasionally promise posts that never show up, or do, but so long after the promise that it’s embarrassing. Years ago, I promised a post defining and examining all journalistic tricks that I classify as “fake news,” and I use the term broadly to include misleading headlines, burying the lede, omitting key information thatundermines the writer’s agenda, poisoning the well and other techniques. I started the thing, got frustrated and overwhelmed, and never finished it. Here Curmie doesn’t exactly present what I intended, but he touches on much of it, and as an extra bonus, he wrote it more elegantly than I would have (as usual). JM.]
I doubt that this blog has ever before turned to punk rock for ethics advice, but Boomtown Rats composer/frontman (and Live Aid impresario) Bob Geldof had it right in a song that’s probably more relevant today than it was 40+ years ago: “Don’t Believe What You Read.” Well, not uncritically, at least. At our host’s suggestion, I’m about to enter the fraught territory of trying to decide if a story published by an obviously biased media outlet might, this time, just be accurate.
It’s difficult of late to find a news source that only leans in one direction or the other, rather than proselytizing for the cause. The news networks and major newspapers have carved out their market shares based on feeding their viewers and readers what they want to be fed. Whether the advent of Fox News was a trigger or a reaction is up to individual interpretation, but there’s absolutely no doubt that we’re now in an era in which news as reported is determined largely by editorial positioning, rather than the other way around.
It’s inevitable that, to steal a line from another of my favorite musicians, Paul Simon, “a man hears what he wants to hear, and disregards the rest.” Fighting our own biases is not made easier by the knowledge that learning from experience and confirmation bias are opposite sides of the same coin. If a story appears only on Fox News and the Drudge Report, or only on AlterNet and MSNBC, there’s an excellent chance that the indignation is feigned and the actual events are something of a nothing-burger.
But “usually” is not “always.” As a society, we’re well aware of the tale of the boy who cried wolf and the miraculous last-second basket from well past half-court. We nod and smile at the suggestion that stopped clocks are right twice a day.
There are a few variations on the theme of biased journalism. The first, editorializing in a news story, is generally the easiest to spot and the easiest to counteract. If there are words like “communist,” “Nazi,” or “un-American” to describe a US politician, or phrases like “unborn children” or “reproductive freedom,” you’re reading an editorial, whether the article identifies itself as such or not. There’s nothing wrong with editorializing; it’s what I do here and on my own blog, after all. But I also try to not to suggest that what I write is completely objective.
Another variation on the theme, and a personal pet peeve, is what I call a Schrödinger sentence, because it is simultaneously true and not true. For example, I’ve seen a whole lot of conservative commentary on this blog that “progressives want X.” (“X” in this context, of course, has nothing to do with what Elon Musk renamed Twitter.) True, there are enough progressives who advocate for X to make the noun plural, but I’m a progressive, and I’m a big fan of not-X. The implication—or, rather, one possible implication—of the sentence is that in order to be a progressive, one must want X. That is no more true than suggesting that all conservatives believe in Jewish space lasers. And I really resent being told what I believe.
One comment only: It is astounding and damning that a woman with the erudition of Harvard’s president could do not better than repeatedly resorting to pre-memorized, non-responsive, probably lawyer-crafted boilerplate in response to Stefanik’s questions.
It immediately remind me of former slimeball Congressman Gary Condit (well, he’s still probably a slimeball) in the infamous 2001 ABC interview about intern Chandra Levy, then missing. Condit was romantically linked to his intern, and considered a suspect in what was eventually found to be Levy’s murder. Every time Connie Chung asked directly about their relationship, Condit repeated the mantra, “Well, once again, “I’ve been married 34 years. I have not been a perfect man. I have made mistakes in my life. But out of respect for my family, out of a specific request by the Levy family, it is best that I not get into the details of the relationship.”
This, naturally, made him look guilty. As it turned out, he wasn’t.
But President Gay is guilty of hypocrisy and cowardice.
In the latest “Dr. Who” adventure on the BBC (if you don’t know about this long-running cult scifi show, google it), Sir Isaac Newton is played by an actor of Indian heritage:
This raises several issues, most of which Ethics Alarms has delved into before:
1. Does it matter? As Curmie declared in his Comment of the Day regarding my post about another BBC production in which Anne Boleyn was played by a black actress…yes, it does, but it depends on the context and the objective of the casting. The major consideration in any non-traditional casting is whether it works, meaning that the casting isn’t distracting, that it adds something to the work beyond being just a gimmick. (The black Anne Boleyn was a gimmick.) In Curmie’s opinion, almost nobody was likely to see the black actress in the role and think, ““I didn’t know Anne Boleyn was black.” I am less certain of that assumption in the case of a brown Isaac Newton.
Long ago I added Snopes.com to the Ethics Alarms blacklist of untrustworthy websites for a series of dishonest and pro-Left “fact-checks” that were nothing of the kind. (You can see the once “urban legends” site’s Ethics Alarms dossier here.) For some reason—-maybe they want to restore their tarnished reputation before the 2024 campaign so they can be an effective Democratic Party hit squad again?—the site did a fact-check on this anti-Trump tweet, another volley in the current Big Lie #3 assault by the Axis of Unethical Conduct as it shifts into first gear in its “by any means necessary”effort to save Joe Biden and defeat Trump:
Snopes concluded that the Biden-Harris claim was contrived and false:
Dr. Pepper held its annual, silly, Dr. Pepper Tuition Giveaway at halftime during the game between the Texas Longhorns and the Oklahoma State Cowboys over the weekend. Two college students had to toss as many footballs as they could into their respective Dr. Pepper-branded bins five yards away within the allotted time, with the winner getting $100,000. It was a close contest, with the two tied at 10 successful tosses each at the end, forcing an overtime 15-second period. And they tied again, at 16, forcing a second overtime period.
Ryan Georgian, a freshman at the University of Pennsylvania finally defeated Gavin White, a junior at Ohio State University, for the big prize. The students had been chosen for the stunt based on their video submissions to Dr. Pepper.
But wait!
A review of the video showed that Georgian only was successful in five tosses in the first overtime, but was somehow credited with six, forcing the final show-down. I see five “refs” in the picture. Apparently one of them can’t count, and the others weren’t paying attention. Were these real football referees, or just guys dressed up as refs? Was anyone paying attention? The mistake wasn’t flagged until after the game, on social media.
I was not a bit surprised to learn that only around 8% of professional magicians are women, as yesterday’s New York Times feature informed me. Magic was one of my main hobbies well into high school, and I even put on a few magic shows. (I still have a trunk full of magic apparatus under my bed.) It was clear early on that while boys were suckers for magic tricks, girls were mostly bored by them. It is one of those pursuits like fast cars, baseball, ventriloquism, juggling, playing soldier, and poker that somehow tend to be hot-wired into male genes while being mostly absent from the females of the species. I don’t know why, and I don’t care why, frankly.
But that’s not the message the Times wants to convey. Focusing on a few female professional magicians (one of whom is performing because her late husband, Harry Blackstone, Jr, did), it tells us that the dearth of female wand-wavers is due to “sexism, wardrobe limitations and the enduring stereotype that women best serve as the audience’s distraction.”
Yes, it’s the disparate impact fallacy again. “I think for many years, no one really thought of the need for women to be the magician,” Gay Blackstone told the Times. “But now, as we’re coming up with different roles and different things we want to be doing, then there’s no reason why women can’t be just as great as men.”
Ethics Alarms 