CNN

Ethics Dunces: Blindly Partisan and Hateful Website Commenters

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

argument

I just learned that CNN closed its online message boards. I understand why, and no, it was not a move designed to stifle the increasing volume of anti-Obama comments, as some have suggetsed. I have been thinking about writing about this for a while, and the CNN move is an ideal opportunity.

The discourse on most news aggregator websites and news sites is beyond abysmal and uncivil: it’s an embarrassment to the nation. On such sites as CNN, Mediaite, The Daily Beast, The Daily Caller, Politico and others, virtually every thread follows the same, sad, pointless, idiotic path. Maybe there are a few substantive comments, then someone makes a cheap partisan crack, followed by an exchange of increasingly nasty comments based on familiar talking points from the right or the left, then, finally, name-calling, often with a racist, sexist or homophobic tone.  If you have the patience to wade through the crap, a thoughtful comment may sneak in, but who has the time or patience, or utter emptiness of life to do the wading? Here is a section from the middle of the comments on this Mediaite story…this one was about Bill O’Reilly being critical of Obama’s handling of ISIS, but honestly, the subject doesn’t matter much,. All the threads read the same way. Eventually every one gets around to someone insulting Obama, and immediately an Obama defender will mention Bush, who was, I should note, President six years ago, but I digress: Continue reading →

Ferguson Ethics Train Wreck Catch-Up: The Shots, the Hashtag, the Huckster and the Snub

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

steam train wreck

The Ferguson Ethics Train Wreck is slowing down now, though passengers keep getting on board and it will surely pick up steam again.

Here are some recent ethics outrages, as Ethics Alarms tries to keep up:

1. The Shots:

CNN buys another seat on the train wreck

What’s wrong with this sentence? Don Lemon, CNN host, played a recording that was alleged to be of Officer Wilson shooting Michael Brown and preceded it by saying the tape had not been authenticated.

A burst of six shots can be heard, followed by a pause, and then several more shots, at least four. “He was in his apartment, he was talking to a friend on a video chat, he heard loud noises and at the moment — at the time he didn’t realize the import of what he was hearing until afterwards,” the lawyer for the unidentified man who made the recording told Lemon. “It just happened to capture 12 seconds of what transpired outside of his building.”

Almost immediately, speculation was rife that this called into question Wilson’s account, though we don’t know yet what that account is. IF the tape is accurate, this doesn’t look good for Wilson, opined one web reporter. Wait a minute! Why is CNN releasing anything that is not verified as authentic? Why not an unverified photo that purports to show a shadowy second shooter? Why not an unverified tape of Brown and a friend plotting to attack a police officer for fun? This isn’t evidence, and it isn’t news. It’s just chum in the water for a news media feeding frenzy, or more simply, crummy, irresponsible unethical journalism. Continue reading →

Ferguson Ethics Train Wreck Monday Morning Update: Taking Sides

/ Jack Marshall / 52 Comments

When do competent, rational, fair, responsible, ethical citizens, officials, journalists and organizations take sides in a racially charged controversy involving a law enforcement officer and an individual shot and killed by that officer in an incident where the circumstances and provocation have  yet to be verified?

Simple: they don’t.

So how do we explain and characterize the decisions of so many citizens, officials, journalists and organizations to take sides in the Michael Brown shooting by Ferguson, Missouri police officer Darren Wilson? That’s simple too.

They are neither competent, rational, fair, responsible, nor ethical.

Thus we add to the passenger list of the Ferguson Ethics Train Wreck the following, who publicly took sides this weekend and today:

  • The Obama Administration. Three White House representatives will attend Brown’s funeral. This signals an official acceptance of the Brown family narrative, at this point completely unverified, that police misconduct and racism were involved in the death of their son, or if not, and I’m sure the White House will have some spin to dispute this, that is how it will be perceived by activists and how the White House wants it to be perceived. This may be good politics (though I don’t think intentional divisiveness is good, but the White House and I differ on that point), but it is horrible leadership, and a slap in the fact to all law enforcement, which is now being told by those representing the President of the United States that it is presumed to be in the wrong when there is a controversy over the exercise of force involving an African American

Continue reading →

Monday Morning Lessons in News Media Bias, Incompetence, and Manipulation of Public Opinion

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Side profile of a journalist typing on a typewriter

It took all of 15 minutes this morning to see the incompetence and bias of the new media in action regarding two politically charged events currently unfolding:

1. The Washington Post: The Rick Perry Indictment

On page A3 of the Washington Post front section, this report by Post reporter Sean Sullivan was sub-headlined like this:

Texas governor denies any impropriety in feud with district attorney

Continue reading →

CNN’s Carol Costello, Making CNN Viewers Dumber Yet Again

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Lauren-Bacall-To-Have_l

The least we should be able to ask of the news media, since they obviously can’t be trusted to report the news competently, objectively or fairly, is to not make the public more stupid and ignorant than it already is. CNN’s Carol Costello, a prime offender in the incompetent and biased, can’t even clear this low bar.

This morning, as the networks interrupted their around the clock Robin Williams death coverage to note the passing of famed screen siren Lauren Bacall at the ripe old age of 89, Costello led her report by referencing Bacall’s “beauty, talent, and wit.” Her wit was represented by a clip of her famous line as “Slim” in “To Have and Have Not” (1944):

“You know you don’t have to act with me, Steve. You don’t have to say anything, and you don’t have to do anything. Not a thing. Oh, maybe just whistle. You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve? You just put your lips together and… blow. “

But this quote has no relationship at all to Bacall’s wit, and she was indeed witty. The line was written by Jules Furthman, or perhaps William Faukner, both credited with the screenplay, inspired by Ernest Hemingway, who wrote the novel and created the character Bacall was playing. A seven-year-old could have been just as witty, with these guys putting words in her mouth.

Incredibly, a ridiculous number of people really think actors are responsible for the lines they say on stage or on screen. This is, you’ll agree, idiotic and an embarrassment, and CNN should not be encouraging such a misconception.

And yet it did.

CNN Presents The Carol Costello Rule: If A Network Issues One Unethical Suspension Of An Innocent Employee Based On Deranged Political Correctness, It Is Obligated To Issue Another

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments
Smug, dishonest, unprofessional, illogical, unfair, biased, unethical: "THIS is CNN."

Smug, dishonest, unprofessional, illogical, unfair, biased, unethical: “THIS is CNN.”

I just have to stop watching CNN is the morning, because it places everyone in my house at risk for head shrapnel.

The main danger is the smug, biased, ethically-jumbled Carol Costello, CNN’s late morning anchor after the New York governor’s telegenic brother has finished indoctrinating us into his view of the world. Today, Costello was taking a victory lap, implying that she helped get Stephen A. Smith suspended by ESPN for daring to suggest that women bear some responsibility for avoiding placing themselves within range of an abuser’s fists. (Interestingly, Costello had no similar directives for ABC, which quietly allowed Whoopie Goldberg to make the same (valid) point on “The View” with no adverse actions whatsoever. See, a woman is allowed to state some uncomfortable truths, but the same truth in the mouth of a man is offensive. Learn the rules, for heaven’s sake!) Then Costello played a clip of her earlier argument why ESPN was wrong not to suspend Smith. She said …

“It’s nice that Smith apologized, but I wonder if the network will do what it ought to do and suspend Smith. Look, in 2012, the management of ESPN expressed outrage when two employees used the phrase “a chink in the armor” when referencing  Jeremy Linn, the Asian Basketball player. One employee was suspended for 30 days and the other was fired. So why is ESPN giving Smith a pass?”

Continue reading →

Incredible: The Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman Ethics Train Wreck Is Still Rolling!

/ Jack Marshall / 39 Comments

trains_collision

I didn’t think I’d get a post up this morning—I am rushing to get ready to travel to NYC to speak about municipal lawyer ethics—but I made the mistake of turning on CNN.

Boy, the media will never give up a fake narrative, will it? There was CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin, whom I have now down-graded to “Untrustworthy Hack,” enlightening us regarding the Detroit trial of Theodore Wafer, 55, a white man who is charged with  killing an unarmed 19-year-old Detroit African- American woman on his front porch by shooting through the door of his home. Says Toobin: “His defense is even weaker than Zimmerman’s, because…”

With that one dishonest, despicable. misleading and inflammatory word—-even— CNN’s legal analyst continued the myth that Zimmerman was wrongly acquitted of the charges against him. Toobin is lying, and knows he is lying (because you have to know you are lying for it to be a lie), because every half-educated lawyer who watched the trial knows that the prosecution didn’t prove its case, and couldn’t. Wafer’s defense can’t be even weaker than Zimmerman’s, because Zimmerman’s defense to the charge of murder was not weak in any way. All the evidence prevented supported Zimmerman’s defense, which was the doctrine of self-defense against a reasonable threat of bodily harm. (That Zimmerman caused the situation that led to the shooting did not undermine the strength of  that defense.) By suggesting that defense was weak, Toobin continues the manufactured, racially-divisive narrative that Zimmerman “stalked” Martin, that the killing was racially motivated, and that the jury was racially biased to a acquit him-every element of which is false based on the actual facts of the case. Naturally, the CNN hosts didn’t have the wit, knowledge or guts to stop Toobin.

Or fire him

Children Make Us Stupid, Or “Why Are U.S. News Networks Assisting Brutal Palestinian Propaganda?”

/ Jack Marshall / 72 Comments

child victim

“Children make us stupid” is but a corollary to the law often stated here, “Bias makes you stupid.” Our natural bias in favor of caring for, protecting and seeking happiness for children is genetically wired into our being. Thus, in action movie after action movie, when the villain puts a gun to a child’s head, the hero invariably drops his weapon, apparently giving the world over to dictatorship, pestilence or death to save one rosy-cheeked kid. (Well, except for Dirty Harry, who picks off the creep holding the gun to the kid’s head with one well-aimed shot.) The trade-off is really, really stupid, and not ethical either: sacrificing the welfare of the many for a single child is simply illogical and wrong. But to those sentimentalists who don’t strain themselves by thinking, and to cynical politicians who know better but also know that convincing morons is all it takes to win “a majority” ( “…if even one child’s life can be saved…“—President Obama, 2013 State of the Union Message), the human bias that gives irrational priority to children is pure gold.

Obama’s use of the false ethic was  his call for gun control in the wake of the Sandy Hook tragedy, in which an anomalous attack on a grade school was used to make it seem like children were being hunted down like rabbits. We are currently watching another classic demonstration of the “children trump everything” fallacy, and it is both a logical and an ethical fallacy:  the emotional and irresponsible rhetoric over the fate of the unaccompanied South American children being sent to the United States as a predictable response to Democratic promises of a better life, a college education, and eventual citizenship. The fact is that child illegal immigrants are just as illegal and just as undesirable as any other variety: they are just cuter, sadder, less culpable and easier to use to demonize principled opposition.

It is not surprising that the Palestinians, who pioneered using children as suicide bombers, figured out that sacrificing their own kids might be a dandy way to turn public opinion against Israel in its long, mad, apparently endless quest to eliminate the Jewish state. Israel turned over control of Gaza to the Palestinians there, and the Palestinians elected Hamas, which seeks, as written policy, the elimination of Israel. Instead of  using its resources to create a state and a stable infrastructure for society, Hamas spent millions importing and producing rockets, launchers, mortars, small arms, and even drones to do battle with Israel. It built a network of tunnels, and stockpiled the weapons in hospitals, religious sites, and crowded residential areas, using these locales to fire a barrage of rockets into Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Continue reading →

The News Media Giveth, The News Media Taketh Away…Now If Only We Could Trust Its Motives

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments
Today, Johnny's old quiz show would have to be re-titled, "Who CAN You Trust?"

Today, Johnny’s old quiz show would have to be re-titled, “Who CAN You Trust?”

When the remains of hundreds of children were found in what appeared to be a mass grave under an Irish orphanage, another Catholic Church scandal seemed to be rising. Last week, the Associated Press, which broke the story, released this amazing “correction”:

DUBLIN (AP) — In stories published June 3 and June 8 about young children buried in unmarked graves after dying at a former Irish orphanage for the children of unwed mothers, The Associated Press incorrectly reported that the children had not received Roman Catholic baptisms; documents show that many children at the orphanage were baptized. The AP also incorrectly reported that Catholic teaching at the time was to deny baptism and Christian burial to the children of unwed mothers; although that may have occurred in practice at times it was not church teaching. In addition, in the June 3 story, the AP quoted a researcher who said she believed that most of the remains of children who died there were interred in a disused septic tank; the researcher has since clarified that without excavation and forensic analysis it is impossible to know how many sets of remains the tank contains, if any. The June 3 story also contained an incorrect reference to the year that the orphanage opened; it was 1925, not 1926.

Or, to summarize, “Never mind. We rushed this story onto the newswires because of  preexisting biases of our reporters and editors, and breached the basic fact checking standards of our “profession” because, come on, only saps do that stuff any more. Sorry if this gave Catholic-bashers and anti-religion zealots false ammunition—we’ll work on digging up more dirt that will stand up to scrutiny. Besides, most people who saw the original story won’t see this correction, so it’s no big deal.”

How can we trust a news organization that could misrepresent a story this badly? We can’t, that’s all, and it isn’t just the Associated Press. All aspects of the news media have abandoned any pretense of objectivity, fair reporting and professionalism. Even when they do something right, one has to wonder why….for  they might not really be doing it ethically after all, no matter how it appears.

Case Study #1: Faking Hillary’s “town hall” Continue reading →

Being Fair To Hillary

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments
"I'm doing this because I think it makes me look passionate..."

“I’m doing this because I think it makes me look passionate and sincere…”

I wanted to write about fairness this morning, in part because a troll that I ended up banning yesterday kept insisting that the ethical value of fairness was about “feelings.” (Have you visited, by the way, the excellent website, listed among the links here, fairness.com? You should!) That’s nonsense, but it is certainly true that fairness is often a controversial concept, and opinions of what constitutes fairness can diverge widely.

In the process of the mainstream media trying to ram Hillary Clinton down our throats as the next oppressed group President who couldn’t be impeached no matter what she did—and how entertaining it is watching Chris Cuomo grimace, roll his eyes and bite his tongue as his female CNN colleagues shift into “Yay Hillary!” mode every morning—, the pro-Hillary journalists are increasingly becoming full-fledged campaign flacks, which is disgraceful. Watch this interview with Sen. Ted Cruz, for example, in which CNN’s Erin Burnett plays the role of a Clinton defender on Benghazi without any hint of objectivity at all. They are also, however, having to cope with the uncomfortable facts of Clinton’s career, and if they intend to keep defending her—and they do—the hypocrisy will become overwhelming.

The Melinda Henneberger of the Washington Post, for example, notes that “an unpublished interview” has surfaced in which Clinton expresses glee at the acquittal of an accused child rapist she was defending. The documents from the case show that Clinton, who was defending the man pro bono as a young lawyer, offered the kind of defense that feminists condemn, questioning the conduct and the propriety of the victim. Henneberger pre-empts criticism by properly explaining the lawyer’s duty of zealous representation before she even describes what Clinton did. Would she have handled such a story the same way if the young lawyer had been “War on Women” monger Mitt Romney? I doubt it very much. Similarly, Jennifer Rubin in the same paper wonders if the media will use Clinton’s wealth, employment of tax reduction strategies and presumed greed against her, as it did Mitt. Good question, though the answer is pretty obvious, I think. Continue reading →