Alveda King, the niece of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., shared a pro-life meme on Facebook that claims that readers’ grandmothers carried part of them inside their wombs. Facebook chose to impugn the post by claiming it “lacked context.” Well of course it did. It’s a meme. The topic is complex, and the meme only summarizes one interpretation of the facts. It seems clear that Facebook applied a different standard for this expression of a point of view that could be judged an anti-abortion opinion than it had for literally millions of left-of-center memes it users have posted. For example, Facebook had no problem with this idiotic meme posted by a friend of mine who should know better:
Talk about “missing context”! Nor did Facebook have any issued with this meme during the Kavanaugh hearings:
Context? How about outright lies? Nah, there’s no Facebook anti-conservative bias…Continue reading →
— Chelsa Messinger (@ChelsaMessinger) May 10, 2022
This is a weird ethics quiz, I’ll admit: it involves conduct that didn’t really take place.
In a game between the Cleveland “Guardians” (they are really the Indians) and Chicago White Sox, Cleveland had a runner on second with two outs when Owen Miller lifted an easy fly to right field, where Chicago outfielder Gavin Sheets should have easily made the play. Instead, in what is technically called a “clank,” the ball bounced right off his glove and went past him for an embarrassing error. The runner on second scored, and Cleveland’s radio color commentator, former player Rick Manning, could be heard saying “Areyou shitting me?” as play-by-play man Tom Hamilton described the error.
Much hilarity ensued on social media.
Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…
What is the fair and responsible consequence for a professional broadcaster who utters a spontaneous vulgarity or obscenity on the air?
1. Now here’s an even more obnoxious sign of the times: cereal boxes presuming to indoctrinate kids. What possible excuse is there for this, on the side of this Kellogg’s box:
I don’t care about the box design or the cereal: it’s a product, and if a parent wants to buy it, swell. It’s a marketing gimmick. Yuck, but so what? However, this, on the side panel, steps over the line into the culture wars and indoctrination. Not on my breakfast table…
2. Oh, fine: the Treasury Secretary is an idiot as well as an Ethics Dunce. Janet Yellen is now on record as endorsing one of the more offensive and cretinous arguments in favor of Roe v. Wade: snuffing out more children in the womb is good for the economy! “I believe that eliminating the right of women to make decisions about when and whether to have children would have very damaging effects on the economy and would set women back decades,” she said in response to a question at a Senate Banking Committee hearing. Continue reading →
The Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communications (ACEJMC) has voted to downgrade the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media to “provisional accreditation” status. Why? ACEJMC felt that the school’s commitment to “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) was less than robust after journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones turned down a tenured position there. A controversy over her hiring arose in 2021 when Hannah-Jones was offered the Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism, but only as a five-year contract position instead of tenure. Then, after her supporters forced the trustees to offer tenure by accusing them of racism—it always works! —Hannah-Jones rejected the school to take a tenured position at Howard University.
“[T]he UNC Hussman School is dealing with an existential crisis both internally and externally,” the ACEJMC wrote. “The [Hannah-Jones] controversy… exposed long-standing problems. Many stem from inconsistencies in executing the goals in the 2016 Diversity and Inclusion Action Plan.”
No, the fact that the school offered a thoroughly exposed fake historian and fact-manipulating, racist journalist a teaching position at all raise questions about Hussman being fit to train journalists. Nikole Hannah-Jones is an unscrupulous activist, not a journalist, and the dishonesty and misrepresentations of American history in her polemic “1619 Project” are not in serious dispute. She should not have been offered the chair in the first place. The should not be employed as a journalist, never mind being paid to teach journalism. Continue reading →
It’s rare that one sees blunt incivility in an old and revered political publication like the National Review, but here was the headline of Charles Cook’s column there yesterday:
The New York Times’ Editorial Board Is Apparently Extremely Stupid
I had read the editorial and my reaction had been the same, except that I would have been tempted to leave out “apparently.” I’d also categorize this as old news, at least to readers of Ethics Alarms. Then, for a nonce, I regretted the absence of self-exiled commenter “A Friend,” since his predictable efforts to defend the indefensible in the Times would have been particularly entertaining in this case.
Imagine that every state were free to choose whether to allow Black people and white people to marry. Some states would permit such marriages; others probably wouldn’t. The laws would be a mishmash, and interracial couples would suffer, legally consigned to second-class status depending on where they lived.
This is the newspaper that is regarded as the flagship of the news media. This is the newspaper that holds itself up as a paragon of objective news analysis. This is a newspaper that claims that its perspective isn’t skewed by a progressive bias.
This is the newspaper I have been paying almost 90 bucks a month to have delivered every day for four years. Yes, I’m stupid too.
Here, in part, is what Cooke writes in his understandable disgust: Continue reading →
The paper acquired the online game Wordle earlier this year after it became a viral hit. Answers to the puzzle game are assigned months in advance. In a pure coincidence reminiscent of the London crossword puzzle incident that almost derailed D-Day, yesterday’s Worldle answer happened to evoke the current freakout over the draft Supreme Court opinion that suggests that Roe v. Wade may finally be going down for the count. The answer was “fetus.”
Can’t have that! The Times moved quickly to de-trigger the game for sensitive (and virtuously woke) devotees, writing,
Major Clipton’s been AWOL lately. Good to have him back, since his commentary is especially germane.
To begin on an upbeat note: there is a house on the route I walk Spuds in the evening that has started having elaborate lawn and porch decorations all year round. The elaborate Halloween display began in late September and lasteduntil November, when a giant inflatable turkey took over as well as some horns of plenty. Right after Thanksgiving the outrageous Christmas decorations went up. January featured a 2022 display, which gave way to the family’s best yet, a Mardi Gras-themed salute complete with purple, green and orange lights, New Orleans street signs, and plastic beads hanging from the trees. That was up through March. During April, the yard was being landscaped, and I wondered what was in store for May.
There is a full-size inflated Jabba the Hutt on the porch.
I am tempted to knock on their door and tell the family what a boon their whimsy is to the neighborhood. It is such a welcome contrast with the many virtue-signalling scolds who subject us to Black Lives Matter endorsements and various rainbow lawns signs shouting such profound messages as “Love is Love” and “Ramalamadingdong.”
1. Ethics Villain: Jen Psaki, and President Biden is accountable. The demonstrations outside the homes of Supreme Court Justices continue, Justice Alito has been moved to a secure, undisclosed location, and Psaki muttered platitudes when asked if Biden condemns the [illegal!] harassment of the Justices. She also was asked if Biden condemned the leak, and she ignored the question.
The Washington Post has published a full-on attack piece against Herschel Walker, the former college football star and pro player who has been endorsed by Donald Trump in his effort to become a Republican Senator in Georgia. Walker is running against Democrat Raphael Warnock, who probably only won his seat in the January 2021 special election because Trump wouldn’t shut up about how he really won the 2020 election, and then a mob of idiots triggered by those claims stormed the Capitol. The Post’s anti-Walker piece is unusually tough, but Walker is an unusually inviting target. I would be more charitable to the Post’s motives if I had ever seen the paper be similarly critical of a black Democrat.
There is a rebuttable presumption that the Post’s anti-Walker fervor is at least partially a product of Trump Derangement: if Trump has endorsed him, Walker must be…well, cue the Birds Lady:
However, as Ethics Alarms has already noted, Walker does show the signs of an untrustworthy candidate, Trump notwithstanding. Thus the Post’s examination of other disturbing aspects of his character, background and statements would be just good journalism—if it devoted similar efforts to Democrats and progressives. It doesn’t. The Post looked the other way when Warnock was running for the Senate and his wife made credible accusations of spousal abuse, for example. That doesn’t mean the the Post should ignore Walker’s unsavory side, but playing favorites is unethical journalism.
One of the Walker statements quoted by the Post is enough for me: I wouldn’t need more to decide to write in the Easter Bunny rather than vote for him. At a Sugar Hill, Georgia church Walker said in March, “At one time, science said man came from apes. Did it not? Well, this is what’s interesting, though. If that is true, why are there still apes? Think about it.”
Yikes. I have thought about it, and anyone who would say or think something like that has the critical thinking skills of a sea sponge and is brick-ignorant to boot. That’s signature significance for a candidate who shouldn’t get into the Senate without a ticket. Everything else the Post reveals, including disturbing stories about Walker’s emotional stability, is piling on after that.
That cold open from last week’s Saturday Night Live was a perfect illustration of the maxim, best articulated by the late, great, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, that “You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts.” Satire must be granted considerable license, but basing nasty mockery on a deliberate misrepresentation is unethical even if it is funny. The SNL skit above isn’t funny, unless one finds deliberate misrepresentation and outrageous laziness funny. I don’t.
The opening narration essentially takes the skit out of the realm of humor into the murky world of propaganda and public disinformation. Alito’s draft only states that “no woman has a right to an abortion” in the context of Roe v. Wade’s legally flawed and factually sloppy argument that the U.S. Constitution guarantees such a right through the unenumerated right of privacy. The SNL phrasing is deceitful, technically accurate but misleading. The draft does not state that no woman should have an abortion, and specifically states that the opinion takes no position on whether abortion should be legal or not.
It is not a great surprise to see that the libertarian magazine Reason opposes abortion restrictions; one would assume so, given the libertarian creed. (Libertarians Ron Paul, a former House member, and his son, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky), however, both oppose abortion, and take the position that life begins at conception.) However, if the publication is going to declare that Justice Alito’s draft opinion in Dobbs is badly reasoned (and a publication named “Reason” should be careful when it makes such a claim if it wants to maintain a reputation for integrity) it has an obligation to rebut that reasoning competently and fairly.
Thus when I saw the headline on Reason’s website, “Alito’s Draft Opinion That Would Overturn Roe Is a Disaster of Legal Reasoning,”I clicked on it eagerly. Legitimate legal analyses of the draft have been in short supply, with even supposedly respectable legal scholars from the pro-abortion camp resorting to hysterical pronouncements rather than dispassionate argument.
Inexcusably, the author of the article under the clickbait headline doesn’t come close to making the case that the Justice’s draft fits that hyperbolic description. Worse, it is quickly apparent that she wouldn’t know a “disaster of legal reasoning” if, to quote Matt Hooper in “Jaws,” one swam up “and bit [her] in the ass.” As I read her mess, I thought, “Elizabeth Nolan Brown can’t possibly be a lawyer.” Indeed she isn’t. Her graduate degree is in theater.
Alveda King, the niece of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., shared a pro-life meme on Facebook that claims that readers’ grandmothers carried part of them inside their wombs. Facebook chose to impugn the post by claiming it “lacked context.” Well of course it did. It’s a meme. The topic is complex, and the meme only summarizes one interpretation of the facts. It seems clear that Facebook applied a different standard for this expression of a point of view that could be judged an anti-abortion opinion than it had for literally millions of left-of-center memes it users have posted. For example, Facebook had no problem with this idiotic meme posted by a friend of mine who should know better:
Ethics Alarms 