BBC

The President Sues the BBC, and It’s the Right Thing To Do.

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

The complaint filed yesterday in the Southern District of Florida states:

‘In the BBC Panorama documentary titled “Trump: A Second Chance”… first broadcast on October 28,2024, the BBC intentionally and maliciously sought to fully mislead its viewers around the world by splicing together two entirely separate parts of President Trump’s speech on January 6, 2021…. The Panorama Documentary deliberately omitted another critical part of the Speech in such a manner as to intentionally misrepresent the meaning of what President Trump said. The Panorama Documentary falsely depicted President Trump telling supporters: “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be there with you. And we fight. We fight like hell and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”… 

President Trump never uttered this sequence of words. This fabricated depiction of President Trump during the Speech was false, deceptive, and defamatory given that President Trump’s actual and full remarks during the Speech were (a) “Now it is up to Congress to confront this egregious assault on our democracy. And after this, we’re going to walk down and I’ll be there with you. We’re going to walk down, we’re going to walk down. Anyone you want but I think right here, we’re going to walk down to the Capitol and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressman and women, and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them” (Remarks made on January 6, 2021, 12:12p.m. Eastern Standard Time, 14:52 into the Speech), and then, much later, (b) “[B]ut I said ‘Something’s wrong here, Something’s really wrong, can’t have happened.’ And we fight, we fight like hell, and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore,” (Remarks made on January 6, 2021 at 1:07 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, 69:30 into the Speech). 

“Moreover, the BBC purposefully omitted President Trump stating, less than one minute after urging supporters to cheer for their senators and congressmen, “I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard” (Remarks made on January 6, 2021, 12:13 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, 15:48 into the Speech).”

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Nah, There’s No Anti-Israel, Anti-Jewish Mainstream Media Bias…

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Britain’s media regulator (Great Britain doesn’t have a First Amendment, remember, so the government can punish dishonest, biased journalism. This is not a good thing…) said today it is investigating a BBC documentary about the dire fate of children in Gaza. The BBC removed the program, “Gaza: How To Survive A Warzone,” from its streaming service earlier this year after it was revealed that the 13-year-old narrator, “Abdullah,” is the son of Ayman Alyazouri, Hamas’s deputy minister of agriculture.

Oh. Sounds fair and objective to me! The media reports says this information “emerged.” Translation: the BBC was caught. News programs purporting to be factual must not materially mislead the audience in Great Britain, or so they claim. Imagine if the U.S. had such a regulation and enforced it. There would be no broadcast news.

The independent production company that made the program didn’t share the background information regarding the father of the young narrator’s Hamas ties, claims the BBC. Hoyo Films, which produced the documentary, claims it didn’t “intentionally” mislead the BBC. The BBC meanwhile, was wonderfully trusting and incurious—you know, like good journalists are supposed to be. After all, it’s not like anyone is out to vilify Israel as it tries to survive while protecting its citizens from being raped, murdered and kidnapped by terrorists.

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Wow! Apple’s AI Bot Is Already Acting Like Real Live Journalists! [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

…by making stuff up and publishing it!

From the BBC: “The BBC made a complaint to the US tech giant after Apple Intelligence, which uses artificial intelligence (AI) to summarise and group together notifications, falsely created a headline about murder suspect Luigi Mangione. The AI-powered summary falsely made it appear that BBC News had published an article claiming Mangione, the man accused of the murder of healthcare insurance CEO Brian Thompson in New York, had shot himself. He has not. Now, the group Reporters Without Borders has called on Apple to remove the technology. Apple has made no comment.”

This must make human journalists shiver in their boots! If an AI bot can create fake news stories like Hunter Biden’s laptop being just Russian information, the U.S. economy doing great, President Joe Biden being sharp as a tack and Donald Trump emulating Nazis by holding a rally in Madison Square Garden,” who needs live lying reporters to mislead the public and generate fake news?

Reporters Without Borders, also known as RSF,sadit was was “very concerned by the risks posed to media outlets” by AI tools like Apple’s. See? They see the threat!

The group also said the BBC incident proves that “generative AI services are still too immature to produce reliable information for the public.” But hat proof evident long before this incident: Remember “Hunter de Butts?” Michael Cohen’s AI fiasco?

Vincent Berthier, the head of RSF’s technology and journalism desk, explained the obvious: “AIs are probability machines, and facts can’t be decided by a roll of the dice. RSF calls on Apple to act responsibly by removing this feature. The automated production of false information attributed to a media outlet is a blow to the outlet’s credibility and a danger to the public’s right to reliable information on current affairs.”

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How Much More Evidence Will It Require For Climate Change Hysterics To Admit That The Field Is Corrupted By Uncertainty, Dishonesty and Hype?

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

2024 has been a revealing one on Ethics Alarms regarding the climate change debacle. Let’s review, shall we? Here, we discussed the New York Times complaining that an action movie didn’t have enough climate change propaganda. Here, we learned that the Biden administration’s “climate adviser” is a lawyer, not a scientist, and engaged in fanciful, unscientific fearmongering, like claiming that cliamte change was causing the wildfires in Maui and California. Here, we discussed an esteemed British climate scientist who argued that the only way to control global warming sufficiently to save the world is to “cull the human population,” ideally through pandemics. Here, an expert testifying before Congress about the need to spend trillions of dollars that the U.S. doesn’t have to be “carbon neutral” revealed himself as a phony.

The introduction to all of this arrived in September of last year, when Patrick T. Brown, the co-director of Climate and Energy at The Breakthrough Institute, essentially blew the whistle on his own colleagues, writing in part, “…it is critically important for scientists to be published in high-profile journals…[a]nd the editors of these journals have made it abundantly clear, both by what they publish and what they reject, that they want climate papers that support certain preapproved narratives—even when those narratives come at the expense of broader knowledge for society. To put it bluntly, climate science has become less about understanding the complexities of the world and more about serving as a kind of Cassandra, urgently warning the public about the dangers of climate change…[This] distorts a great deal of climate science research, misinforms the public, and most importantly, makes practical solutions more difficult to achieve.”

Well, 2024 isn’t over yet. Now the BBC has formally admitted that all the hype about climate change killing off the polar bears was a deliberate falsehood. Responding to a reader complaint, the BBC wrote, “The article reported on the death of a worker who was attacked by two polar bears in Canada’s northern Nunavut territory, and said such attacks are rare because “The species is in decline, and scientists attribute it to the loss of sea ice caused by global warming – leading to shrinking of their hunting and breeding grounds.”

Oops! After the challenge, the BBC wrote, “Research carried out by the ECU confirmed scientists agree climate change will cause a reduction in sea ice, which is likely to have a long-term detrimental effect on polar bears and overall population numbers…. However evidence from the Canadian Wildlife Service and the Polar Bear specialist group of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature appears to suggest numbers are stable overall at present and not in decline as stated.”

But wait! There’s more!

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Good Elon, Bad Elon: Round And Round And Round Twitter Goes And Where It Stops, Nobody Knows…

/ Jack Marshall / 33 Comments

I’m still hoping for the best with Elon Musk’s brave though chaotic attempt to rescue Twitter from the agents of progressive and Democrat propaganda….but I’m not going to spend a lot of time ramping up Ethics Alarms new presence on the platform until I am confident that I won’t have to quit in disgust again.

This week so far there have been two Twitter-related events that I view as ethically encouraging:

1. Musk tweaked National Public Radio as it so richly deserves by labeling it “state-affiliated media” on the platform. Trying to be nice, Musk changed the label to “government-funded media,” causing NPR promptly to throw a fit and quit Twitter, announcing that it would “no longer post fresh content to its 52 official Twitter feeds, becoming the first major news organization to go silent on the social media platform.” (Well, except for the New York Post when Twitter silenced it to keep the Hunter Biden laptop story from hurting Joe Biden at the polls.)

Amusingly, NPR puffed itself up with hot air, huffing that the network is protecting its credibility and its ability to produce journalism without “a shadow of negativity.” “The downside, whatever the downside, doesn’t change that fact,” NPR CEO John Lansing said, “I would never have our content go anywhere that would risk our credibility.”

I guess he means “other than NPR,” whose partisan toadying is legendary.

Lansing continued the hilarity by writing, “It would be a disservice to the serious work you all do here to continue to share it on a platform that is associating the federal charter for public media with an abandoning of editorial independence or standards.” Standards? Hmmm...I can’t recall the last NPR ethics story EA has posted; let’s see…HA! Just a week ago: NPR Wonders If Transgender Athletes Have A Physical Advantage Over Female Competitors. Before that: NPR Says There Are “Pros And Cons” Of A Candidate For Governor Calling Someone “Motherfucker” During A Speech…

Care to guess the party affiliation of the candidate NPR was defending? Tough one! Why, it was Beto O’Roarke, the Democratic candidate to unseat GOP Texas Governor Abbott. NPR described O’Rourke’s gutter language as a “snappy interjection,” though the snappy interjection was somehow not fit to print. The NPR headline used “f-bomb” while the text employed “motherf*****”. We pay taxes for this garbage “analysis”?

The indignant NPR excuse for objecting to “government funded” is also self-indicting. NPR’s own news story says,

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“Oh, That Wouldn’t Happen Here!” Wanna Bet?

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

People always tell me they watch the BBC because it isn’t biased like American broadcast news. It must be the British accents: the BBC is relentlessly, overwhelmingly left-biased. This is a socialist nation that is smothered in political correctness. It’s at least as untrustworthy as any US news source.

Here’s a case in point: the BBC changed the testimony of a rape victim who referred to her alleged rapist as “him.” That was a reasonable choice on her part, because, well, because of the rapist’s “part.” Never mind: Facts Don’t Matter in jolly old England either: the victim’s words were changed to avoid “misgendering” the rapist in an article on the BBC website, which replaced every reference to “he” or “him” with “they” or “them.”

Wait—was it a gang rape? The BBC said in response to the episode was, “Our only intention when deciding on language is to make things as clear as possible for audiences.” Now that’s hilarious! In what universe is calling a single person “them” and “they” clearer than calling a rapist who did the deed with an attached male sex organ “he” and “him”?

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Will The BBC’s Princess Diana Scandal Be A Tipping Point For Public Acceptance That The News Media Can’t Be Trusted? [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

DIANA

I hope so. It’s a long shot, but you never know when something is the proverbial final straw. The BBC is often held up as a model of ethical journalism—that’s nonsense, but a lot of Americans believe it. Now we have proof of just how scummy and corrupt the BBC is, and the company can’t deny it.

An investigation into the BBC’s conduct that produced the 1995 interview of Princess Diana by Martin Bashir revealed that the interview was based on despicable and unethical practices. This shouldn’t surprise anyone who remembers Bashir, who became an MSNBC host and was sacked after saying on the air that Sarah Palin should be forced to eat shit. He handled the sensational interview in which Diana talked about her bulimia, the miseries of royal life, and her husband’s ongoing infidelity with Camilla Parker Bowles. Her shocking attacks on the Royals completed her rift with Buckingham Palace and, as Prince William said yesterday, damaged Diana’s relationship with Prince Charles beyond repair.

Even for a journalist, what Bashir did was beyong unethical tending into evil. Bashir told Diana’s brother, the Earl of Spencer, that he had acquired canceled checks proving the Royal Family was paying individuals, including Charles’ aides, to spy on Diana. He “acquired” them because he had the BBC’s graphics department to mock up fake checks to show to Spencer. This “evidence” convinced the Earl that Diana’s fears were justified, so he told her immediately about the supposed surveillance plot. This, in turn, so infuriated Diana that she agreed to a “tell-all” interview.

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Is It Possible All News Organizations Are This Incompetent? Nah, Couldn’t Be…

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments
Booker Hoax

That’s the uncanny Booker imposter on the left, the real Senator on the right…

There is incompetence, and there is mind-melting, skin-flaying, “You did WHAT???” incompetence. A story that I read while laughing last night is the latter. Here is the whole thing, from The Hill:

The BBC has apologized for airing an interview with someone posing as Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) on Friday.

According to a post on the BBC website, the interview only aired at 3 p.m. EST last Friday but was not used any other time.

“In our Newshour radio programme on Friday, a man claiming to be Senator Cory Booker was interviewed in what appears to be a deliberate hoax,” the BBC wrote in a post it called a correction and apology.

“We have apologised to Senator Booker and are looking into what went wrong to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

The message was posted to the BBC website over the weekend and the network made an on-air mea culpa Monday. The BBC declined to comment on how the incident occurred or when the faux U.S. politician was booked. Press representatives from Booker’s office did not immediately comment on the incident.

Now I’m laughing again. This would be embarrassing for my high school newspaper, The Arlington High Chronicle, but the BBC? An apology is hardly sufficient. This goes way beyond fake news to fake newsmaker, fake interview, fake journalists, and fake trustworthy news organization. I’m trying to think of a similarly outrageous news media botch, other than CNN allowing Don Lemon, Chris Cuomo and Brian Stelter to masquerade as competent commentators. After all, at least they really are Don Lemon, Chris Cuomo and Brian Stelter...or are they?

Other observations:

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Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 1/10/2019: Rabbits, Time Lords, Elephants And Fools

/ Jack Marshall / 38 Comments

Good morning.

This a reluctant warm-up, and I was tempted not to create distractions from the previous post, which is important, especially so because there is a near complete media embargo on what the Times did. Has anyone seen a mention of it anywhere besides here and in the conservative media? I haven’t. Yet a more convincing example of  what the news media has become could not be imagined, and the public has the right to know. I want people to be outraged about this. I want people to shake the story in the face of their biased journalism-defending friends. I want to see the cowards who fled the discussions here accusing me of bias return and explain how this could happen innocently, or try to justify it, or continue to insist that there is no organized effort to destroy the Trump Presidency and with it our democratic institutions.

I admit it: this episode makes me as angry as I am disgusted and worried.

1. In a lighter vein, on the topic of life competence…In  Yala National Park in Sri Lanka, a 41-year-old man was reportedly trying to impress other tourists by getting out of his car (which is illegal) and attempting to hypnotize an elephant. The man’s name has not been released, but now they call him Matt, because the unimpressed elephant trampled him flat. Now watch them blame the elephant. Says Professor Turley, who found this story, ” some at the scene suggested that alcohol may have played a role.”

Ya think?

What is the ethical response to someone who gets himself killed like this?

2. It looks like we have at least two ethically-challenged new Congresswomen...Rep. Tlaib of “impeach the motherfucker fame” unreeled a combination of Authentic Frontier Gibberish (AFG) AND ethical ignorance as she continued to dig her hole following the outburst. Tlaib told CNN on this week that she’s “very unapologetically me” [Rationalization #41 A. Popeye’s Excuse, or “I am what I am.”] and her constituents “are kind of used to my realness, used to this passion that I have” [Excuse me a second…Gag! Uck! Gack! Yecch! Ptuii!…This is #44, The Unethical Precedent, or “It’s Not The First Time.”

“And I know for many people, it did — it did get the best of me at that moment and for many people it might have been very much a distraction…”what I want to do is not allow women like myself that have every right to be angry and upset and mad and to curse — that somehow they’re not allowed to do it in some sort of public forum.”

Ah! She’s an idiot. Women and everyone else have a right to be vulgar, uncivil, insulting, obscene, undignified and generally rude in public. The fact that they have the right to act badly doesn’t mean it is right. Most relatively educated 12-year-olds understand this, and Tlaib, who is in Congress, doesn’t. Continue reading →

UPDATE: More Ethics Notes On The Comey Firing Meltdown

/ Jack Marshall / 168 Comments

In this matter, at least, President Johnson was right…

1. In 1867, the Radical Republican dominated Congress passed The Tenure of Office Act, an unconstitutional breach of the Separation of Powers that took away the President’s ability to fire his own Cabinet members without the legislature’s approval. President Andrew Johnson, extremely unpopular in the victorious North and more so with his own party (Johnson was a Democrat, added to Lincoln’s ticket as Vice-President to bolster Lincoln’s desperate bid for re-election in 1864), deliberately defied the law by firing War Secretary Edwin Stanton, a Lincoln appointee and an ally of the Radicals. In response, Johnson’ own party led a n effort to impeach him, and he was narrowly saved from conviction by a single vote in the Senate. The Act was soon ruled unconstitutional, as Johnson said it was. As lousy a President as he was, Johnson had every right to fire someone who served at his pleasure, and doing so was not an impeachable offense.

2. The Democrats and journalists who are—absurdly, irresponsibly, embarrassingly, hysterically—calling for President Trump’s impeachment for firing James Comey neither know their history  nor respect democracy. Just check off the names of anyone, including your friends and colleagues, who make this argument, as hopeless, deranged partitions without perspective or integrity. I’m making my own list, with early entries like Maxine Waters and Vox, which beclowned itself by writing that a President’s lawful firing of a subordinate who clearly deserved it raises the  possibility of impeachment. At least the Radical Republicans had an unconstitutional law to back that theory: Vox has nothing but, of course, the Left’s hate campaign against the President of the United States. Then there are Reps. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) and Mark Pocan (D-WI)  who also think a firing for cause is grounds for impeachment. Gallego:

“We are certainly moving down that path. There is a lot of runway until we get there, but the president is not helping himself by firing the person investigating him. … We don’t have the numbers to do something right now, but when it comes to a point when we feel there is no other recourse, you’d have — I think — we’d have the full support of the Democratic caucus.”

Pocan said that impeachment might be possible “if there was obstruction of justice by firing [the] FBI director … We’re seeing Democrats and Republicans concerned with timing of this decision … We would first need a majority in Congress or some Republican votes … but we need to keep every tool available to make sure the President follows the law.”

Ethics alarm: who elects idiots like these? I have searched for any situation, anywhere, in which a legal and justifiable firing of an official was prosecuted as “obstruction of justice.”  Nor is an act that is neither a crime, nor a “high crime or misdemeanor,” nor something a President isn’t clearly empowered to do “moving down” the path of impeachment.

3. This is public disinformation, aided and abetted by the news media. The primary ethics issue in the Comey firing is that it is just another stage of an unethical, dastardly effort by Democrats, progressives, the left-leaning news media and their allies to veto a Presidential election that they lost by their collective arrogance and incompetence, and to undermine the United States’ elected leader no matter what harm comes to the nation as a result. The firing itself was legal, ethical, and responsible, indeed overdue. Representing it as otherwise is designed to cause fear and confusion among the public. Responsible citizens are obligated to counter this in any way they can. Continue reading →