CNN

ARRGGH!! Beyonce..ARRRRGHH!!!

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Misdirection

Just “Arrrrgh!”

First, Beyonce ducks a question (at pre-Super Bowl  press conference) about whether she really lip-synced the National Anthem at the Inauguration, as discussed extensively here , here, and here,

by using Clintonian parsing—no, she wasn’t lip-syncing ( because that means just moving one’s lips to a song, and technically she was singing. It’s just that the audience may have been hearing her recording and not her real voice.) Then she “answers”…by singing the song, brilliantly, without accompaniment. (Of course it was planned.) Then CNN’s awful morning anchor Carol Costello AND CNN’s headline writer state that Beyonce “answered her critics” by doing so.

For the love of…Arrrrgh!

That was NOT an answer! This was masterful, if screamingly obvious (to all but CNN) misdirection and manipulation.The question posed was not “Can you sing “The Star Spangled Banner?,” but “Did you lip-sync?”, which means, as she well knows, “Did you sing it live at the Inauguration, and was the live rendition what we heard?” Her rendition of the song at the press conference was no more responsive to the question than a sudden riff on “Trouble in River City” or “Turkey in the Straw.” Then pathetic CNN calls it an answer, as if singing the song two weeks after the event in question settles the issue. Our professional journalism establishment at work. (in the version I saw, Costello didn’t even mention that Beyonce gave a technical “no” to the “did you lip-sync?” query before bursting into song.

ARRRRGHHH!

 Beyonce could have cleared up the controversy weeks ago by either admitting that she lip-synced, or by denying it. Asked about the matter directly, in front of TV cameras, she avoided the question again. That was an answer, all right, but not the one CNN and the singer implied it was.

The answer was “Yes.”

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Spark: CNN

Graphic: Soda Head

“Should CNN Fire Piers Morgan?” It Should, But It Can’t.

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments
If only.

If only.

In the wake of the tsunami of criticism directed at CNN talk show host Piers Morgan for his anti-gun rantings, particularly during his interview with Gun Owners of America president Larry Pratt, Slate posted a Quora response to the question, “Should CNN Fire Piers Morgan?” from internet entrepreneur Mark Rogowski, who begins his answer (summary: “no”) with the rejoinder, “For what? For having an opinion?”

No, Morgan should be fired for allowing his opinion to lure him into thoroughly rude, unprofessional, abusive and inappropriate interview practices, which a major news network like CNN shouldn’t permit, endorse, tolerate or risk recurring. That’s why. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Piers Morgan

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments
Hoping to someday be as professional as Larry King.

Hoping to someday be as professional as Larry King.

I know, I know.  It is hardly worth the effort to point out that Piers Morgan is an unprofessional, biased and narrow-minded hack who has accomplished the impossible and managed to make Larry King seem like the late Tim Russert by comparison.  Morgan’s recent demonstration of his ethical and intellectual deficiencies as an interviewer, however, is too extreme to ignore.

Morgan was interviewing Larry Pratt of Gun Owners of America regarding the Newtown massacre and discussing possible measures to prevent such tragedies. Angered and frustrated by Pratt’s insistence that eliminating so-called “gun-free zones,” such as the one where the fatal shooting took place, and arming teachers would do more to prevent future such tragedies than tougher gun laws, Morgan suddenly resorted to name calling and insults, such as…

  • You are talking complete and utter nonsense….
  • You’re an unbelievably stupid man, aren’t you?…
  • What a ridiculous argument. You have absolutely no coherent argument whatsoever. You don’t give a damn, do you, about the gun murder rate in America. You don’t actually care….
  • It’s complete nonsense….
  • I know why sales of these weapons have been soaring in the last few days. It’s down to idiots like you….
  • You are a dangerous man espousing dangerous nonsense, and you shame your country. Continue reading →

Unethical Quote of the Week: CNN Morning Anchor Carol Costello

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

“There was criticism when Jim Lehrer was initially named to be a moderator. People said: ‘oh, another white guy; he’s too old to be doing this; we live in a new world — we don’t need an old-fashioned journalist doing these things any longer.’”

—-CNN Morning host Carol Costello, communing with PBS head Paula Kerger over Mitt Romney’s (obviously correct) assertion that public support for PBS has got to go, and joining in the despicable Democratic spin that President Obama’s less-than-stellar performance in the first debate was moderator Jim Lehrer’s fault.

Worst of the worst? I mean, if you don’t count MSNBC?

Carol Costello, Soledad O’Brien; Soledad O’Brien Carol Costello. Who is the most biased, smug, unethical news host not on MSNBC? Just when I think O’Brien has locked up the prize, Costello comes roaring back with something like this.

She ought to be fired. It’s as simple as that. Her statement is racist and ageist in the worst sense or the words; her implication is an unforgivable insult to a veteran newsman infinitely her superior, and her the content of her statement is proof of a deficient mind. Fire her. The AARP should demand it; the Republican should demand it; the Democrats should demand it, and CNN should see it as essential to maintaining whatever shred of credibility and integrity it has left. Continue reading →

CNN and the Ambassador’s Journal: Unethical or Ick?

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

Answer: Ick

Ambassador Chris Stevens, murdered in Libya in what is now finally being described as a planned terrorist attack (and not spontaneous film criticism, as the Obama Administration successfully persuaded the media to claim for more than a week), left a brief hand-written journal behind that somehow was retrieved by CNN instead of the U.S. government. When Anderson Cooper revealed that the journal had been reviewed by reporters and used to cover the story of the Benghazi attack, both the slain diplomat’s family and the State Department criticized the network, which said,

“We think the public had a right to know what CNN had learned from multiple sources about the fears and warnings of a terror threat before the Benghazi attack which are now raising questions about why the State Department didn’t do more to protect Ambassador Stevens and other US personnel.Perhaps the real question here is why is the State Department now attacking the messenger.”

Well, there are interesting theories about that, since what the late Ambassador had written suggests that there was fear of a terrorist attack in the vicinity of the 9/11 anniversary, yet both Secretary Clinton and President Obama went to great lengths to characterize the Benghazi violence as prompted by spontaneous and legitimate rage over an American’s exercise of his right of free speech. There is a rebuttable presumption that the State Department was prepared to bury the implications of what Stevens wrote, since everything else it has done in relation to his murder has been misleading or pusillanimous. In the latter category is using Stevens’ family as its excuse for bashing CNN for delivering on its duty to provide what the public “has a right to know.” Continue reading →

Someone Please Explain to Soledad O’Brien That Attorney General Holder is NOT “Exonerated” Regarding Fast and Furious

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

So much attitude, so little comprehension…

[I apologize to all for not posting anything yesterday. I was handling back-to-back seminars, and had to drive a long distance in-between. by the time I got back home late afternoon, I was too wiped-out to write anything coherent, and that state persisted until I went to bed. I’ll be trying to catch up today.]

CNN’s partisan hack morning anchor Soledad O’Brien was smirking and raising eyebrows to beat the band yesterday morning, as she announced to her audience that the Inspector General’s report on the Justice Department’s deadly botch of its so-called gun-walking scheme, codename Fast and Furious, had “exonerated” Attorney General Eric Holder. I suppose I am giving O’Brien the benefit of a considerable doubt here in assuming that she knows what the word means, but to exonerate is to free from blame or responsibility. The 471 page report does state that there is no evidence that Holder knew about the operation before it had gone horribly wrong, as some Republicans had maintained. On the other hand, it also states that there is no evidence that Holder knew about the operation before it had gone horribly wrong. Continue reading →

The State of Our News Media in a Nutshell

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Preparing for an early legal ethics program for Virginia CLE, I made the mistake of tuning in to Headline News’ morning show hosted by chirpy eye-candy Robin Meade. Breathlessly, she announced that an amazing baseball game had occurred last night in Seattle that ended at 4 AM! What followed was a three-minute routine with Robin’s sports guy, who pattered on about how long the game was, how the Beatles sang the National Anthem, how FDR threw out the first ball, showing his high school yearbook photo to show what he looked like when the game started, on and on. None of this was funny, of course, because it made no sense: the fact that the game lasted a long time didn’t send the beginning of the game back in time. The CNN editors somehow thought this was so hilarious that it justified taking up the time that Headline News could have devoted to actual news of substance, which was once the point of the channel, a compressed summary of breaking stories. That was the least of the problems with the segment, however:

  • The 18-inning game was about 5 hours long, which is noteworthy but hardly remarkable. It ended at 1 AM, however, not 4 AM. The time is measured in the time zone in which a game takes place, not whatever time zone the copywriters think will make it sound longer.
  • The sports guy announced the final score as 2-1. It was not. The score was 4-2. After an extended routine about how amazing and long the not-very-amazing and not especially long game was, the CNN team was obligated to at least get the key fact right: the score.
  • That’s not all. Perhaps in homage to the late George Carlin, who in his pre-hippie days used to do a sportscaster routine in which he said, “And now last night’s baseball scores: 4-3, 8-1, and in a real squeaker, 2-1!” , neither Robin nor her colleague ever revealed who won the game. (The Baltimore Orioles won.)

So, in summary, Headline News took almost three minutes to highlight a baseball game in order to make lame jokes, then failed to accurately inform the audience of the game’s score or winning team. The game, by the way, was an important one, as it allowed the Orioles to tie the New York Yankees for first place in the American League East.

This is, in a nutshell, the state of broadcast news today: sloppy, self-indulgent, unprofessional, incompetent, and untrustworthy. If they can’t give the results of a baseball game accurately, why in the world would we trust their coverage of anything?

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Another Ethics Hero For CNN’s Anderson Cooper, and a Jumbo for Debbie Wasserman Schultz

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

“Discord? What discord?”

Anderson Cooper seems to have decided to single-handedly  stand for objective journalism in the midst of Democratic cheer-leading from most of his colleagues in the broadcast media. Of course, he chose the lowest-hanging fruit imaginable as a target: the Democratic National Committee’s ridiculous, abrasive, shamelessly dishonest chairwoman, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who earned a Jumbo for persisting in a falsehood that nobody could possibly believe.

The Democrats walked into a controversy of their own making when they approved a platform that removed any mention of God (since God is not, presumably, a Democrat, I don’t know why anyone cares) and an assertion that Jerusalem is the proper capital of Israel. Both of these apparently were also approved by the candidate, President Obama, and conservative blogs and the Republican campaign had a field day with the supposed implications of both. [This was a classic “tit for tat,” because the Democrats had loudly insisted that anything appearing in the GOP platform was attributable to Mitt Romney.] Someone, maybe the President, then concluded that God and Jerusalem needed to go back into the language to stem the bleeding, and what followed was a raucous, and, depending on your orientation, embarrassing or ugly display on the convention floor, with some delegates booing the return of God and Jerusalem and with a repeated voice vote that allowed them back sounding much more like a tie than the required two-third ayes. Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: Was CNN’s Soledad O’Brien Unethical to Crib From A Liberal Blog, or Just Unlucky To Get Caught?

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Conservative media sources are calling CNN’s Soledad O’Brien biased and unobjective (Soledad O’Brien? Biased? Nawwwww!) because a CNN cameraman inadvertently caught her cribbing from the leftward blog “Talking Points Memo” for ammunition as she questioned  Virginia House of Delegates Republican member Barbara Comstock regarding new-GOP Veep nominee Paul Ryan’s budget proposals. The blog post she was reading from was called “The Myth of Paul Ryan The Bipartisan Leader.” At one point, O’Brien claimed to be reading a release from Senator Wyden’s (D-OR) office, but  she was actually reading an excerpt from the blog that included a quote from Wyden. Newsbusters, the conservative counterpart to the Left’s Media Matters, regards this is a real gotcha!, concrete proof of  the unethical coordination between the mainstream media, progressive attack blogs, and the Democratic party.

Your Ethics Quiz for today: Was O’Brien’s use of the Talking Points piece to debate Comstock unethical journalism? Continue reading →

Of Fareed Zakaria, Scraping, Plagiarism and Hypocrisy

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Is it “Oops!”, “Damn!” or “Better luck next time”?

I once had a dear friend in the DC theater community who committed an industry taboo when he mounted a play before, rather than after, obtaining the performing rights. His company was in the red, and his intent was to get some advance sales to pay the licensing fees that he otherwise couldn’t afford. It was a desperate, foolish scheme and an unethical one, as he readily admitted, and my friend paid dearly for it, as he was fired as the head of the theater company he had founded, and rendered a pariah in the community. What always infuriated him, however, was the instant condemnation and pious pronouncements he received from his peers in the theater world. “I know for a fact that everyone of them either would have done the same thing or had done the same thing, or worse, to keep their theaters running,” he told me.  “I was wrong and I know I was wrong, but for them to act as if I am some kind of a monster when I know they are really thinking, ‘Yikes! I better be more careful, that could have been me!’ is driving me crazy.”

I wonder if disgraced CNN host and Time writer Fareed Zakaria is thinking the same thing as his colleagues in the news media and assorted web commentators are describing him as a plagiarist and an untrustworthy fraud in the wake of his suspension for lifting a paragraph from another writer’s work  and putting it in his own Time essay without attribution. After the parallel passages were flagged on the conservative website Newsbusters (you didn’t think he would have been outed by a liberal site, did you—or that Newsbusters would have been looking for plagiarism from a rightward  journalist?) both Time and CNN suspended Zakaria indefinitely.

This was the appropriate response. Zakaria is an opinion journalist, or a pundit: the idea that he is surreptitiously cribbing from others undermines his credibility substantially and perhaps fatally. That is not an entirely fair description of what Zakaria did, however.  What he engaged in was “scraping,”  the web-age technique where an author cuts and pastes a passage or more from another work and uses it as the foundation for a portion of a supposedly original article. When the passage in question is substantive, contains the ideas and conclusions of the author  whose work is being scraped, or is the product of another writer’s research, that is indeed plagiarism. When the passage being scraped is something the borrowing author could have written himself, however, it is more accurately described as lazy. It is still wrong, but it does not necessarily rise to the level of intellectual theft that can reasonably justify calling the author untrustworthy. Continue reading →