Axis media note: CNN’s alert to my phone just now regarding the Maduro operation: “Maduro and his wife dragged from their bedroom…”
Awww.
See how mean that President Trump is? He dragged that poor couple from their bed!
CNN should be shamed out of existence.
Before I post a more substantial essay today I will have to puck the skull pieces and brain bits off of my living room ceiling, carpet, furniture and TV screen after making the mistake of watching CNN’s Abby Phillip show for ten minutes. As usual, her panel of partisan idiots (with the exception of CNN token Republican Scott Jennings) were babbling on with today’s Trump hate. I expected that, but as I routinely switch channels whenever this thing passes my eyes, I did not expect that the level of discourse would be beneath what I would expect late in a cast party when all of the woke actors are half- or totally crocked.
There was no expertise, useful analysis or objective commentary at all, just indignant repetition of Axis talking points as fact: gaslighting, or fake news for the ignorant and gullible. “Trump has used the Executive Orders to get around Congress, and changed the Presidency by doing so!” (Barack Obama openly and specifically established this as a “norm.”) “Trump just defies the Constitution and the Supreme Court lets him get away with it!” (The comment came up regrading SCOTUS taking up the birthright issue, regarding which the Trump administration has made a legal argument, and has not defied the Constitution.) “Yes! It’s just like abortion…” (No, you idiot, it is not “like abortion.” Abortion was never mentioned in the Constitution: an activist Court bent the document out of shape to turn abortion into a right that not a single Founder would have endorsed. Birthright citizenship IS in the Constitution, which is why it is unlikely that the Trump theory will prevail.) “Everything Trump does is to line his own pockets!” (Pure talking point, and one that I read or hear every single day from the Trump Deranged. How does enforcing the immigration laws, purging illegal discrimination against whites and men and trying to dismantle mainstream media and educational political manipulation “line his pockets”? “The economy is in bad shape!” (The third quarter (July-Sept) Gross Domestic Product (GDP) rose by a 4.3% annualized rate, the best in two years, which means that the economy is not in bad shape, but never mind.) And so on. All the women on the panel were wild eyed and angry (this is not professional deportment for television “journalism,” and the men, with the exception of Jennings, sat back and sagely nodded their head,s quickly shutting up if they tried to make a factual correction and were shouted over. Jennings just composed his next articulate rebuttal in his head, and waited for an opening.
Hundreds of people sent it in, but nobody sent it to Ethics Alarms. Come one, you guys, I’m depending on you!
That clip above, in which CNN’s supposed stat guru Harry Enten deliberately (or impossibly incompetently) misinterprets a Fox News poll about what proportion of Americans think prices are higher than a year ago for various consumer products as showing how much prices have risen for those products. Nobody in the segment pointed the error out. Nobody screamed from off-camera. There has been no CNN correction or retraction.
Enten, in his usual hyperactive mode, said, “I mean, your costs are up vs a year ago!” and begins underlining to the products and reads the percentages aloud, implying costs are up by that much. Then he says, “The bottom line is this: Americans feel prices are rising in every single part of their lives”—implying that they “feel” it because just look at how much those prices are rising!—“rising ever higher and they just don’t feel like, Kate Balduan, that they can catch a break.” Well, how could they? Just look at those percentages!
Are Americans so clueless that they would believe this nonsense? Apparently the Democratic Party, “the resistance” and the news media (“the Axis of Unethical Conduct” ) think so, or they wouldn’t try to get away with it every day, all over the news media. The Biden administration goofs its way into a period of 9% inflation, prices soar, the rate of inflation comes down dramatically in the Trump Administration but the same party responsible for raising the prices uses the inevitable fact that they aren’t coming down (prices as a whole never come down, they just go up more slowly) as proof that the current administration is failing. Yes, Trump shares some blame for this by saying that he would bring prices down during his campaign. He was being his usual careless talk self and meant (I guess) that he would bring some prices down, but as usual his habitual hyperbole got him into trouble. That error does not excuse lies like Enten’s, however.
If CNN was a real practitioner of journalism, which it is not (I don’t think there is a single trustworthy news organization anywhere today), Enten would have used the Fox News poll the way it was explained on Fox: to show the large gap between the reality of U.S. prices and the public perception of it, in part because of Axis lies. To take one obvious example, gasoline is down from a year ago and anyone who drives a car knows it. But Enten implied that the cost of gas is up “54%”!
You see, no decent, ethical journalist would even think of doing this. No intelligent journalist—or pest removal professional—would either. Yet this is the guy CNN sicced on President Trump and his press secretaries in his first term. This irredeemable partisan hack became a broadcast news star with neither the common sense, acumen, professional skills or decency to justify such status, which he is making a living off now.
This is CNN. This is Jim Acosta. This is the state of American journalism.
Former CNN correspondent Jim Acosta released the video of him interviewing an AI-generated version of Joaquin Oliver, who is dead. He’s one of the 17 victims of the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, the tragedy that also inflicted David Hogg on the world, as if the shooting itself wasn’t horrible enough.
The avatar was animated from a photograph of the late 17-year-old who appears wearing a beanie while speaking in a monotone digital voice. Acosta begins by asking, “What happened to you?” to which the AI version of Oliver responds, “I was taken from this world too soon due to gun violence while at school. It’s important to talk about these issues so we can create a safer future for everyone.”
Let’s pass on the conduct of the parents in creating the creepy thing, which is right out of an episode of “Black Mirror.” The topic is journalism ethics. Today’s reporters are so estranged from the concepts of honesty, respect, objectivity, responsibility and trustworthiness that no ethics alarm pings when someone says, “Hey Jim! Apparently there’s an AI version f one of those dead Parkland kids. Why don’t you interview him? Maybe he’ll say something nasty about Trump!”
True, Acosta is pretty much the bottom of the barrel in the profession that is already the bottom of the profession barrel, but still, it wasn’t that long ago that a stunt like this would be considered outrageous if attempted by a shock jock like The Greaseman or Howard Stern. I would say that this is the canary dying in the mine, except that then Chris Cuomo or Don Lemon might interview an AI version of the canary.
[Even WordPress is disgusted; it won’t let me download a photo of this asshole.]
…or, “Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias!” Or, “THIS is CNN…”
Apparently the Axis media has made the considered decision to continue its unethical behavior from the first Trump term by employing any means necessary to create distrust in the elected President. This strategy, which is not only unethical journalism but despicable citizenship that is dangerous to national stability, also deliberately exploits and aggravates Trump Derangement Syndrome, which I now genuinely believe needs to be recognized by the American Psychiatic Association as a mental disorder. Because it is: the things many of my otherwise intelligent, educated and rational friends are posting on Facebook this year are heartbreaking. For example, several once-rational friends think this is a trenchant meme:
Morons. I’ll write a post about this current delusion later today, but it illustrates the point.
What this despicable “enemy of the people” is doing by deliberately publicizing an anti-ICE app may be legal, but it is undeniably unethical. The Trump administration should prosecute anyway.
Joshua Aaron (above: he looks exactly like I assumed he looks!) is a musician and software developer who, because he’s an anti-American, pro-lawbreaking asshole, created an app called ICEBlock. It’s a descriptive name: it allows advocates of open borders and opponents of law enforcement to post sightings of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers across the country. Then the law-breakers they are seeking can more effectively avoid capture, and those who want to attack, harm, kill, or impede ICE agents have a metaphorical “leg up.” That’s nice.
I just heard President Trump at his press conference, rambling as only he can, declare that the news outlets claiming his surprise bunker-busters attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities was not as effective as the U.S. claimed were “losers” and liars. Meanwhile, a CNN article, followed by the New York Times, citing leaked classified documents, and thus unnamed sources of those illegally retrieved materials, announced that “Early US intel assessment suggests strikes on Iran did not destroy nuclear sites, sources say.” Reporters Natasha Bertrand, Katie Bo Lillis, and Zachary Cohen wrote that “the US military strikes on three of Iran’s nuclear facilities last weekend did not destroy the core components of the country’s nuclear program and likely only set it back by months, according to an early US intelligence assessment that was described by four people briefed on it.” It continued, “The assessment, which has not been previously reported, was produced by the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon’s intelligence arm. It is based on a battle damage assessment conducted by US Central Command in the aftermath of the US strikes, one of the sources said.”
Hardly an upset, but wow, what an asshole. But then, you knew that, didn’t you?
Acosta was riffing on a “No Kings” Day episode of “The Contrarian” podcast hosted by fellow-Stage 5 Trump Derangement sufferer Jennifer Rubin, and attacked President Trump for having ICE enforce our immigration laws. Then he made the bizarre argument that the President is a hypocrite because two of his three wives were immigrants. They weren’t illegal immigrants, mind you, but progressive Democrats like Acosta pretend that they don’t understand the distinction.
“Where are the ICE raids at the Trump properties? Could somebody call ICE on the Trump golf course in Virginia? You’re telling me there’s nobody in there that is undocumented or has some kind of squirreliness going on with their paperwork?” he asked. “Give me a break. How many immigrants has he married? He’s got one [that would be first wife Ivana, who died in 2022] buried at his golf course in New Jersey! Isn’t she buried by the first hole or the second tee or something like that?” he asked. Rubin’s guest April Ryan, another unethical reporter, cackled along with Rubin at Acosta’s wit. “Immigrants always doing the jobs that Americans don’t want to do!” he joked.
This guy was CNN’s primary reporter on the first Trump administration. His bias was palpable, and Acosta is now revealing what kind of vicious hate-monger CNN allowed to distort the news in pursuit of his–and its— own partisan agenda.
Someone can try to amuse like-minded resistance fanatics with absurd anti-Trump bile, and one can be a tough journalist speaking “truth to power.” But a reporter who indulges in the first has no credibility trying be the latter. What are the chances that Acosta’s disqualifying contempt for Donald trump wasn’t common knowledge at CNN while he was posing as a journalist? My guess? None.
Commenting on his outburst, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said, “Jim Acosta is a disgraceful human being.” Why yes, Karoline, I believe you are correct.
As I have mentioned here before, I usually sample broadcast news by simultaneously watching CNN, Fox News, BBC America and MSNBC on the DirecTV “News Mix” channel, never staying with any of them for more than a few minutes because they all are unethical, biased, and untrustworthy and it drives me CRAZY!
Just now, I saw Wolf Blitzer (has anyone ever parlayed a cool name into such a long, undeserved TV career despite persistent mediocrity?) interview an “expert,” clearly another Trump-hating law professor. She opined that President Trump “might” be violating the Constitution ( “KING! FASCIST!”) by directing ICE to again focus their illegal immigrant raids on restaurants, farms and hotels. It’s a likely violation of the Tenth Amendment, she opined. “The Tenth Amendment reserves the policing power to the states.”
That’s funny, I thought. I don’t recall the Tenth Amendment saying anything about police, and indeed, it doesn’t. What it says is that “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
Like the Second Amendment, the Tenth was not the Founders’ most shining hour in terms of clear, unambiguous language. The Tenth continues to be a rich and never-ending target for the Supreme Court controversies, but SCOTUS did rule, in McCulloch v. Maryland, that there is a principle of implied powers where the federal government (Congress or the Executive) can exercise powers not explicitly listed in the Constitution if they are necessary and proper for carrying out its enumerated powers. Obviously the ability to enforce federal law would fall under that category, but okay ICE foes, take your best shot and see what SCOTUS says.
However, what the “expert” implied was that the Tenth explicitly included policing as one of the powers reserved to the state. Wolf, either as a deceitful accomplice or as an ignorant boob (I’m guessing the latter to give him the benefit of the doubt) just sat there nodding. Thus any viewer who wasn’t moved to check the Bill of Rights (I’m guessing that’s 99.9% of CNN’s audience) was left with the false impression that President Trump is being a dictator again by directing a Federal Agency.
Let’s see: fake news, misinformation, partisan spin, deceit. Take your pick. No wonder the Axis was able to gull thousands of citizens into wasting time on “No Kings” day.
and…
Good.
All ethical and aware Americans should treat their Axis-supporting friends, relatives and colleagues similarly. What both Miller and Hamill did was to label propaganda what it really was, and not allow it to falsely present itself as “journalism.”
Ethics Alarms 