Fox New

Ethics and American History Dunces: The Fox News Team [Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Ugh. Where are factcheckers when you need them?

Just now I made the mistake of lighting on Fox News for about a minute, and now my ceiling has bits of my brain and skull all over it following a violent head explosion.

Some Fox blonde with horn-rims was enthusiastically telling a panel about this fascinating bit of history she had just discovered, that an early President, William Henry Harrison, had been inaugurated on a cold day and died as a result. The entire panel oohed an ahhed like she had just announced the discovery of another Rosetta Stone. I read about Harrison’s death when I was ten, so Fox’s assembled idiots treating this rather significant episode in U.S. history like it was obscure trivia was offensive. It was also an indictment of, oh, let’s see…journalism, our education system, and society’s ignorance of history.

Moreover, Harrison, though he was only President for a month before perishing of pneumonia, was a pivotal figure in Presidential history. His was the first modern Presidential campaign (“Tippecanoe and Tyler too!”) in 1840, and his death set the precedent for all Presidential successions to follow. W.H. Harrison was also the grandfather of a future President, Benjamin Harrison, who was sandwiched between Grover Cleveland’s two terms the way Biden is sandwiched between Trump’s (and while a forgettable, mediocre Chief Executive, Benjamin was considerably more successful than Joe).

That didn’t make my head explode, though. It was when some guy on the panel said, “And Harrison was a Republican too!” followed by the horn-rimmed blonde saying with a laugh, “Yes, but it was much different back then.”

William Henry Harrison was not a Republican! He was the first Whig President. The GOP wasn’t founded until 14 years after Harrison’s death, in 1854: Abe Lincoln was only the second Republican Presidential candidate and the first to be elected.

Fake news, fake history…morons. If our journalists can’t inform the public, the least they could do is not make them more ignorant than it already is.

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Aside: The Fox News discussion was, I assume, promoted by the Trump-Deranged social media post like this one, from one of my Facebook friends: “Just wait until they discover that their Dear Leader has left them behind in the cold so he can be snug and warm with his oligarch billionaire buds.”

Ethics Dunces: Fox News, Martha MacCallum, Paul Watson, And Oh My God This Is Terrible…[UPDATED]

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Watch all of this, if you can stand it…

As I watched this horror show—I would normally say “jaw-dropping”—all I could think of was how my Dad would have reacted, other than being furious to see a fellow World War II veteran betrayed by his son and humiliated on national television. If  I ever get to that stage, he would say, “shoot me.” He was only half-kidding when he would say that, but I’m pretty sure this video would obliterate the facetious half.

This vulnerable man, now dependent on the good will and judgment of his caregivers and his fellow citizens,  s being exploited by his son as a prop, nothing more, as he is hauled around the country, half-aware, to promote his son’s project. Kant had this kind of unethical conduct pegged: he said it was always wrong to use a human being as a means to an end. I don’t have to guess what the philosopher  would say about a son using his barely conscious veteran father as his ventriloquist dummy to advance his own agenda.[Credit goes to Arthur in Maine, who flagged this video, for the ventriloquist analogy] Continue reading →

Unethical Pundit of the Week: The Daily Beast’s Dana Goldstein

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

I try not to consider political punditry unethical, except when the opinion rendered is unusually dishonest, misleading, uncivil, or unfair. Unfortunately, the current ideological blood sport fostered and nurtured by such outlets as Fox New, MSNBC, the Daily Kos and Breitbart, and carried on by such commentators as Ann Coulter and Frank Rich, make it increasing difficult to follow my own guideline. Occasionally there pieces so outrageously unfair that they make me angry, and those are ethically perilous: emotion is not conducive to balanced analysis. Usually I pass. The recent screed of Dana Goldstein on The Daily Beast, however, has to be condemned.

I just hope I can get through the process of explaining what without becoming furious.

It is entitled “Is Jan Brewer Anti-Immigrant Because She Didn’t Go to College?,” earning an ethics red flag right off the bat for intentionally equating Arizona’s anti-illegal immigration law with being “anti-immigrant,” which it is not.  Continue reading →