No, Rush Limbaugh and the Spinners isn’t a new singing group. It is a chorus, however, of graceless, cynical or malicious commentators who are determined to re-cast the President’s well-chosen, non-partisan and healing words in Tucson into something they can use as ammunition in exactly the kind of destructive wars of rhetoric that Obama properly condemned. Continue reading
conservative talk radio
Blood Libel Ethics and the U.S. News Media’s Integrity Dead End
First you make a baseless, inflammatory accusation–the Big Lie. Then you attack your victim for how she responds to it.
The news media’s self-destructive obsession with discrediting Sarah Palin has reached its ethical nadir, and with it any reasonable hope that U.S. journalism, as currently practiced, will be returning to credibility and respectability within the foreseeable future. Continue reading
Ethics Final For Barack Obama
Is President Obama the fair, ethical, unifying, anti-partisan president of all the people that he promised to be in 2008, or is he a Machiavellian, undercover Chicago pol, willing and ready to use divisiveness and deceit to enhance his power, silence critics and advance his agenda? During the past two years, there has been ample evidence supporting both descriptions, but his address in Arizona Wednesday could settle the issue. If the President emulates his Democratic predecessor, Bill Clinton, using the massacre in Arizona as a political wedge the way Clinton used the Oklahoma City bombing—if he adopts the philosophy of former Chief-of-Staff Rahm Emmanuel that one should never waste a crisis—then we will know the dispiriting truth about Barack Obama. Continue reading
On the Post-Shooting Finger-Pointing Apology Watch
It may be that the first apology for the partisan rush to lay twenty shootings and five deaths at the doorstep of the Tea Party, Sarah Palin, and conservatives came from Arizona Daily Star’s cartoonist, Dave Fitzsimmons, and the paper itself in an editorial today. It began with a statement from the cartoonist, and continued: Continue reading
Disrespect for a Sacred Document
Those seeking the perfect cautionary tale about the dangers of hyper-partisanship need look no further than the truly disgusting display in the last couple of days by the Democrats and liberals who criticized, ridiculed, mocked and derided the decision to read aloud the nation’s founding document, the Constitution, at the commencement of the new Congress. Continue reading
Drudge, Obama’s “$200 Million a Day Trip” and How The U.S. Public Gets Stupid
One of the many themes running through the many teeth-gnashing, garment-rending attempts by angry progressive columnist and bloggers to explain why the Democrats got their heads handed to them on Tuesday is that the voters are just stupid, that’s all. (In doing so, they duplicate the exact same arrogance that helped put all those heads on the block in the first place, but I digress.) The public is not stupid, of course, but it is often wretchedly misinformed by a news media that has lost most of its scruples and a lot of its professionalism. Once a rumor, misconception, distortion or myth gets enough publicity, it can lodge itself in people’s brains like shrapnel. Examples: Obama’s “Muslim faith” and his “foreign birth.” Other examples: the “50% divorce rate” and women only getting paid “75% of what men are paid for the same jobs.”
We should all thank Matt Drudge for giving us a wonderful lesson on how this happens, both for our future reference and protection. He recently linked to a story in an Indian newspaper that reported, based on anonymous sources, that President Obama’s trip to Mumbai was going to be accompanied by about 10% of the U.S. fleet and cost $200,000,000 a day. Continue reading
Chris Plante and the Cupcakes: Why You Can’t Trust Talk Show Hosts
A new Gallup poll shows that the public’s trust in news media has plunged to discouraging new (but completely deserved) levels. One of the side effects of this, the inevitable and correct result of the incompetence, arrogance and bias of journalists and editors every single day, is that the public has begun to trust even less trustworthy sources. For example, a large proportion of twenty-somethings get their primary news information from the Daily Show, which is today’s equivalent of using Bob Hope’s monologues as a current events resource. This is foolish beyond words, because Jon Stewart’s professional obligation is to be entertaining, provocative and funny, not fair, accurate, or responsible. Indeed, if he has an opportunity to make a hilarious joke and doesn’t do it because it would require distorting the truth, he’s breaching a professional duty. He’s accountable to no one; he has no ethical standards to meet. It is unfair to rely on Jon Stewart for the news. He doesn’t want your trust: don’t trust him.
Others…older, but no wiser…go to public issue talk shows as their primary news sources. These people are not journalists either. They may be lawyers, former military men, spooks, authors, agitators, stealth political candidates, or pundits; they may also be comedians, satirists, blowhards, ignoramuses, idiots, misanthropes, radicals, cynics, phonies or bigots. Among their ranks are too many agendas to count, in addition to those they all share: they want you to listen to them and adopt their views of the world. Those agendas are not conducive to truth either.
Some of the talk show hosts are less trustworthy than others. Take Chris Plante, for example—a B-list conservative talk show host whose primary tools are smugness and mockery. Continue reading
Chris Plante and the Absurd, Illogical, and Ubiquitous “Favorite Child” Rationalization
I apologize at the outset to Chris Plante, a Washington D.C. market conservative radio talk show host, who is far from the only individual to employ the “Favorite Child” rationalization, or even its most egregious user. Just about everybody uses this logic-free argument these days; you can hear it on TV, read it in the blogosphere, and be assaulted with it by your friends. Plante was unlucky enough to have me listening to his show when he went off into a full-throated “Favorite Child” rant in response to a caller who was troubled by the fact that Christine O’Donnell, the Tea Party Senate candidate from Delaware whom Plante had extolled, has a history of lying, saying strange things, and mishandling funds-–a quite reasonable concern when a candidate is running on a platform of honor, integrity, and fiscal responsibility. Continue reading
“Let the Buyer Beware”? How about “Let the Seller Be Fair” and “Let the Pitchman Beware”?
A recent perusal of some developments in the ghastly realm of false advertising suggests several conclusions:
1. Too many merchants and vendors traffic in deceit, misrepresentation, and out right lies in order to separate trusting customers from their money.
2. The law is a pretty blunt instrument when it comes to controlling this. Too many tricks and tricksters, seldom enough evidence.
3. The ancient common law rule of “Let the buyer beware!” is less a warning to gullible purchasers than it is a green light for unethical business practices.
4. For every instance of dishonest advertising that is stopped, there are probably hundreds that slip by.
5. Anti-government types looking for legitimate uses of taxpayer funds for critical government regulation of private enterprise should start here.
For example: Continue reading
“No Tolerance” For Adversary Free Speech at Obama’s HHS?
According to a press release sent out by the Department of Health and Human Services, “Secretary Kathleen Sebelius wrote America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), the national association of health insurers, calling on their members to stop using scare tactics and misinformation to falsely blame premium increases for 2011 on the patient protections in the Affordable Care Act.” In her letter, Sibelius wrote…
“It has come to my attention that several health insurer carriers are sending letters to their enrollees falsely blaming premium increases for 2011 on the patient protections in the Affordable Care Act. I urge you to inform your members that there will be zero tolerance for this type of misinformation and unjustified rate increases.”
This is an ethics foul, and one that is both frightening and clumsy. Continue reading
Ethics Alarms 