CNN

Ethics Dunce, Unethical Quote of the Week and Instant Entry Into the “Bias Makes You Stupid” Hall of Fame”: CNN Correspondent Jamie Gangel

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

First the quote…

“I do want to say that when I watched the tape there was one thing I found, because of all the heated rhetoric, and that is that after he was hit, former President Trump got up and said ‘fight, fight, fight, fight.’ I think what we’re hearing from people is that’s not the message that we want to be sending right now. We want to damp it down.”

—-Longtime CNN reporter/host/hack Jamie Gangel last night, reacting to the assassination attempt

What an idiot.

Gangel and CNN are catching flack for this truly offensive and classic Trump-Deranged reaction, but whatever it is, it’s not enough.

Someone had just tried to murder him, and what the media-vilified candidate aid in the moments after that close brush with death could not reasonably be held against him even if he had said, say, just to pick random nonsense out of the air, “We beat Medicare!” But what he did say, as I just wrote in the previous post abut his raised fist, was unimpeachable, though if Trump were currently President I’m sure Adam Schiff and Maxine Waters would try to impeach him for it.

Ann Althouse gets it: she wrote this morning, after quoting Trump’s Truth Social message that concluded, “In this moment, it is more important than ever that we stand United, and show our True Character as Americans, remaining Strong and Determined, and not allowing Evil to Win,” that “No one can forget his fist pumping and repetition of “Fight! Fight! Fight!” less than 2 minutes after he “felt the bullet ripping through the skin.” But as his antagonists call for shared love — and an abandonment of fighting — he brings the love into his fight message, merging love and fighting. Notice that he isn’t calling us to fight against any human being — indeed, he calls all Americans to fight on his side.  The enemy is ‘Wickedness’ and ‘Evil’.”

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Father’s Day Morning Nausea, 2024 Election Ethics Train Wreck Edition

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Waking up this Father’s Day [Thanks, Dad, for 1) being such a terrific, selfless father 2) for continuing to be an inspiration, a role model and a guide during my highs and lows (like now), and everything in-between 3) for loving my wonderful mom and showing it so brilliantly to everyone, especially her, without interruption for almost sixty years; 4) for somehow saving so much money on a modest salary to hand over to my sister, me, and the three grandchildren through sacrifice and smart investing, because without it I would be living in a cardboard box right now, and 5) for surviving the Battle of the Bulge] to the near certainty that my son (who informed me last week that he would like me to refer to him/her/they as my daughter, Samantha. OK! ), is almost certain to ignore this rather contrived holiday (which is fine with me), a mystery in my yard in which someone or something keeps pulling the 15-foot-long heavy plastic, 7″ diameter tubing, installed to send runoff from the gutters into the garden rather than into my home’s foundation, off the down spout and dragging it into my neighbor’s yard, and another fight with a customer service rep, who, I swear, spoke exactly like Andy Kaufmann’s character on “Taxi” but faster than an auctioneer—yes, this IS a long sentence!—I sat down with Spuds to talk myself out of seppuku, drink a cup of coffee, and check what nonsense the various news networks were spouting.

Big mistake.

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SCOTUS’s 9-0 Smackdown of Democratic State Lawfare to Stop Trump Exposes the Unethical Left for All to See

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

All to see, that is, except those whose eyes have been so jaundiced by hate, indoctrination and lies that they are blind.

A 9-0 decision by an ideologically fractured U.S. Supreme Court, rejecting a cherished partisan fantasy devised to hold on to power that one party has empathically shown that it is unfit to possess, should logically result in frank admissions of error, bias, foolishness and confusion by those who insisted that the tactic thus condemned was correct, legal and wise. But today’s progressives are not logical, nor are they self-aware or particularly smart. The reactions from pundits, left-warped lawyers and others (what are the creatures on “The View”?) really should be viewed as a gift. They are telling us what they are, admitting what they are. It’s ironic: the first post of the day was titled, “Will the Disastrous Results of The Great Stupid Result in Learning, So Behavior Changes, or Will the Fools Responsible Keep Trying To Govern On Dreams Rather Than Reality?,” but it wasn’t about the Trump-Deranged learning from their absurd and intellectually indefensible embrace of the 14 Amendment Trump disqualification plot. The SCOTUS decision hadn’t come down yet. Nevertheless, the headline is apt in the aftermath of the decision and the Axis’s embarrassing tantrums. They won’t learn because they can’t learn, even though refusing to admit their mistakes makes them ridiculous, untrustworthy and unpersuasive.

Here are the kinds of people who have been running our government, journalism, entertainment, law schools and universities:

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Another “Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!” Smoking Gun: Trying to Pretend That Another Murder by an Illegal Immigrant Isn’t Blood on Biden’s Hands

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

On today’s CNN’s “AC360,” host Anderson Cooper described the “horrifying” details of student Laken Hope Riley’s murder on the University of Georgia campus last week, then quickly pivoted to spinning that “the revelation the suspect was in this country unlawfully” had caused the murder to be “politicized.” Earlier, CNN’s Jake Tapper similarly adopted the “Republicans pounce!” tactic, saying “They’re seizing on this as an example of Biden’s failure to protect the American people and secure the border.”

Damn right, because that’s what it is. This death should be politicized: it’s Willie Horton all over again, except that Biden and the open-borders Democrats didn’t just goof by releasing one dangerous criminal to prey on the public, they have released many, and are releasing many more. Trump on Truth Social said the obvious, that Riley’s murder should’ve ‘never happened.’” Of course it should never have happened. Illegal immigrants shouldn’t be allowed to roam free, and this one had already been arrested more than once.

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CNN’s Brianna Kellar and the News Media’s “Think of the Children!” Refrain in Support of Hamas

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Yes, it’s “Imagine” time again. Mainstream media talking heads and hacks have apparently been playing the John Lennon’s sweet and fatuous ode to nonsense over earbuds as they sleep, judging from the angle they repeatedly return to as they push anti-Israel propaganda on the public.

CNN’s Breanna Keilar had a typical “Think if the children!” exchange with Israeli spokeswoman Tal Heinrich yesterday.

Keilar (talking over and interrupting her guest as she Heinrich expressed regret that children in Gaza were being placed in harm’s way): “Tal, when you see those pictures coming out of Gaza, do you see why some people don’t have hope looking at those pictures?”

Heinrich: “Well, we are in the middle of a war that Israel did not start, and did not want.”

Keilar: “It is prosecuting it forcefully, and you see the pictures here.”

Heinrich: “When Hamas started this war — hope and peace and a better future for the region — that is the greatest enemy of terrorists. Once we eliminate these terrorists, we eliminate the rule. We hope that there will be other voices, pragmatic ones that want to work with us towards peace. This is what we want. We want to live in this region peacefully. That’s what Israelis have always wanted. But first, Hamas must be gone, and then we hope that the Palestinian society will de-radicalize. We can’t have — you know, what our troops are finding right now, on the ground, in certain neighborhoods in Gaza, pictures of children, women with guns, Hamas uniform tailored for children. And Hamas terrorists that we have arrested—”

Keilar (interrupting): “Does that make the children justifiable enemies to you? Is that what you’re saying? Does that make all of the children justifiable enemies to you? I mean, you’re raising the specter of them being used in military uniform.”

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“Now THIS Is Gaslighting…Or Outright Lying…Or Senility…” Follow-Up: Biden Was So Dishonest, CNN Felt Compelled To Practice Real Journalism

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

In yesterday’s post titled “Now THIS Is Gaslighting…Or Outright Lying…Or Senility…,” Ethics Alarms discussed the now common phenomenon of Democrats, especially Joe Biden, dealing with the unpleasant reality of what their incompetence and corruption has wrought by simply asserting that the opposite of that reality is true. That post was focused only on Biden’s outrageous claims that Americans were better off financially after nearly three years of “Bidenomics,” and, even more absurdly, that the “knew it.”

But I did not read the whole speech. With few exceptions, like this one…

…I don’t waste time listening or reading what President Biden says unless another source points me to a particular selection: after all, I have a sock drawer to maintain. Moreover, I have known for decades that Biden lies, plagiarizes, says whatever his pea-brain thinks is useful at the time, and since he started leaking brain cells and IQ points, I also know at any moment he is liable to announce that he is Marie of Rumania. As it turns out, Biden’s claims about the financial fortunes of Americans was just the tip of a rather large metaphorical ice berg, and CNN, now trying to regain its squandered credibility and reputation after dumping the worst of its biased hacks (Brian Stelter, Chris Cuomo and Don Lemon), though far from all of them, could not resist a genuine “factcheck.”

It was like shooting fish in a barrel. Biden said, “I was able to cut the federal debt by $1.7 trillion over the first two years.” That’s pure fiction. CNN pointed out, correctly, that the national debt has increased by more than $5.7 trillion during Biden’s presidency so far. Now, it is theoretically possible that this addled fool doesn’t know the difference between the deficit and the debt, but that’s material misrepresentation, because reducing the debt means that the U.S. actually owes less money, while reducing the deficit only means that the debt has increased less than it has recently because the government is spending more than it is taking in. CNN wasn’t through debunking this piece of fiction:

It’s worth noting, as we have before, that Biden’s Friday comments would be missing key context even if he had not inaccurately replaced the word “deficit” with “debt.” It’s highly questionable how much credit Biden himself deserves for the decline in the deficit in 2021 and 2022. Independent analysts say it occurred largely because emergency Covid-19 relief spending from fiscal 2020 expired as scheduled – and that Biden’s own new laws and executive actions have significantly added to current and projected future deficits. In addition, the 2023 deficit is widely expected to be higher than the 2022 deficit.

And CNN wasn’t done.

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It Only Took Nearly Three Years And 9-11 Exploitation, But CNN Finally Treats A President Biden Lie The Way It Treated President Trump’s

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

This is progress, I suppose, and it doesn’t auger well for President Biden’s 2024 campaign if the most Democratic propaganda-minded members of the mainstream media (like CNN) starts actually critiquing his persistently embarrassing performance as President. Some of the usual suspects mentioned Biden’s increasingly typical imaginary story, but most buried it in their news report. MSNBC was one of the few that did headline the lie, but did so to explain that Biden did visit the site of the tragedy nine days later (the White House “explanation”) so don’t be so nit-picky. It also had Lawrence O’Donnell engage in a bit of obvious whataboutism, as he ignored Biden’s falsehood but ranted about “Donald Trump’s most vile lie about 9/11” that he “lost hundreds of friends” on 9/11. Otherwise, Biden’s false claim was highlighted by the New York Post, the National Review, Fox News (of course), and other conservative media, plus the least biased and most reliable (but still left-leaning) of the fact-checking services, Fact-check.org.

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Ethics Observations On A Rare Outburst Of Anti-Biden Candor On CNN…

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Well. Let’s see…

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At CNN, More Smoking Gun Evidence Of Malign Mainstream Media Partisan Bias

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

You have to feel a little bit sorry for Media Matters. The far-Left propaganda outlet that specializes in spinning for progressives while supposedly flagging “fake news” on the right has to restrict itself primarily to Fox News, though it does participate enthusiastically when it wants to assist the mainstream media in burying stories like the discovery of Hunter Biden’s laptop or the mysterious <cough!> discovery of cocaine in the White House. NewsBusters, in contrast, has almost the entire mainstream media spectrum to mine for outrageously biased and unethical news coverage, even with its own conservative bias in full operation. And the alleged giants of the once honorable field of journalism keep churning out frightening examples like this:

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CNN’s Internal War Over The Trump Townhall Shows How Corrupt And Dangerous U.S. Journalism Has Become

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Of all the offensive, obnoxious and outrageous things Donald Trump has said or tweeted, none infuriated progressives more than his calling the news media the “enemies of the people.” This is ironic, because nothing he’s ever said was more true or important to express.

Ace of Spades, the conservative blogging provocateur who is often as incisive as he is inflammatory, issued an impressive examination of what is transpiring at CNN in the wake of last week’s Trump “townhall.” He predicts, as others are predicting, that CNN chief Chris Licht’s days are numbered because the programming went against the pure, near-MSNBC level of full-throated Democratic propaganda CNN has been selling as “news” for more than a decade. It seems clear—and it really shouldn’t be surprising—that the audience CNN has nurtured by slanting its reporting isn’t interested in opposing views, perspective or objective analysis. Thus there has been a sudden drop in CNN ratings following the Trump event similar to the exodus from Fox News following the removal of its demagogue-in-chief, Tucker Carlson. Both migrations are evidence of ethics corruption, but of the two, punishing CNN for what once would have been considered responsible and necessary journalism is the more ominous.

Ace’s various references reveal, among other things…

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