incompetent journalism

“We Understand One Of My Colleagues Raped You. Here, Have A Taco, And Shut Up”

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

taco

Some sadistic and none-too skilled cynic appears to be writing the news, and I don’t appreciate it, especially the news about how our justice system deals with rape.

Felipe Santiago Peralez, a La Joya, Texas police dispatcher, repeatedly assaulted, raped, terrorized,  and forced a woman into performing various sex acts during an “all night invasion of her body” while she was in the custody of the La Joya police department for a misdemeanor probation violation. Even after Peralez’s colleagues and superiors saw the jail security video, they refused to take his victim to a hospital for an examination as required by Texas law for all rape investigations. One of them was  kind enough, she says, to offer her a taco. (It is unknown if she actually ate the taco, or if it was yummy.) An officer also told her that if she breathed a word about what happened, she was liable to go “missing.”

This happened in 2014. The La Joya police chief at the time also saw the video, and reported it to city authorities. As a result, a Hidalgo County grand jury charged Peralez with three counts of civil rights violations and one count of “official oppression”—yes, I would agree that a cop sticking various objects, organic and otherwise, into a confined woman’s vagina without her consent qualifies as “oppression”— and he was sentenced to a whopping 6 months in state jail and 30 days in county jail after a plea bargain.

See? Those Texas types know how to handle rapists with rough, effective frontier justice…none of this lame California sentencing, with a rich kid Stanford swimmer getting just six months because he promises that he’ll devote his life, well, some time anyway, to telling other rich kids not to drink so much that they think unconscious women are blow-up sex dolls. Yup, none of that slap on the wrist nonsense in Rick Perry’s domain! There, a police rapist gets six months AND another month. It serves him right! Don’t mess with Texas!

All of this comes to light in a law suit filed by the victim, referred to as A.R., that names Peralez, the City of La Joya, its former and current police chiefs, its city administrator, several La Joya police officers, the city of Peñitas, its police chief and two more officers there, and asks for 70 million dollars in damages.

I feel like I’m losing my mind. How can an entire community become so corrupt that it would behave this cruelly and unjustly? The police officer who warned A.R. to keep her mouth shut was a woman. The whole story reads like the screenplay of a lurid revenge fantasy like “I Spit On Your Grave,” except that it’s missing the fun part where the victim meticulously tracks down her abusers and tortures them to death in the most ingenious and disgusting ways possible. Of course, it appears that A.R. would have to track down the whole town, including its police force and the grand jury. And the local news media. When the justice system delivers this kind of outrage, isn’t the media supposed to report it, and loudly? Maybe reporters were told that they might go missing too.

Or someone offered them tacos.

The absence of any national reporting on this two-year-old horror is just one of the aspects of the story I find disturbing. Such as… Continue reading →

Dear CNN: Why Did You Try To Explode My Head This Morning?

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

kaboom

At the climax of a debate regarding the merits or lack of same of Trump University, CNN “legal expert” Paul Callan said this—about three seconds after I sat down to watch, in my pajamas, before a single sip of coffee:

“I find myself thinking about Thomas Jefferson, author of the Constitution…

Did the legal expert correct himself the second he heard this infamous factoid of the uneducated escape his mouth? No.

What about Chris Cuomo, the cocky CNN moderator of this “debate”? Did he correct Callan? Did he even realize what he said was a historical howler? You couldn’t prove it by his next statement to the Trump spokesperson via video feed: “Well, Callan has pulled out Thomas Jefferson on you for his grand finale! What’s your response?”

His response should have been,

“Yes, Chris, Callan just “pulled out” some fictional figure named Jefferson who wrote the Constitution in Paul’s false-fact-crowded brain. Now if he had attended Trump University, he would know that Thomas Jefferson wasn’t even a participant in the Constitutional Convention. He was in Paris at the time. Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, Mr. Callan. A real “legal expert” would know that, and so would a competent journalist, Chris. And you guys call Donald Trump ill-informed!”

It wasn’t his response, though. Of the three, being a Trump mouthpiece, he is the one least likely to know what Jefferson did or didn’t do. His actual response was: “When Callan pulls out the Constitutional Convention, I know he’s really in trouble.”

You know, that  famous convention they had in Boston in 1860, where Thomas Jefferson’s Constitution was signed by John Hancock, Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt. That one.

We’re all in trouble.

These are the people Americans will depend upon to “explain” the issues and candidates this election cycle.

KABOOM!

More on this topic later, after I find the super glue and that missing piece of my skull….

Ethics Verdict On George Zimmerman’s Gun Auction: Ick, But Not Unethical

/ Jack Marshall / 86 Comments
Only used once!

Only used once!

George Zimmerman is auctioning off the 9-millimeter pistol he used to shoot Trayvon Martin on a website called GunBroker.com.

Zimmerman wrote,

“I am honored and humbled to announce the sale of an American Firearm Icon The firearm for sale is the firearm that was used to defend my life and end the brutal attack from Trayvon Martin on 2/26/2012.”

George goes on to say that the proceeds will be used to “fight [Black Lives Matter] violence against Law Enforcement officers” and to “ensure the demise of Angela Corey’s persecution career and Hillary Clinton’s anti-firearm rhetoric.”

Social media is going  nuts with hate, with many comments wishing that someone would buy the gun and shoot Zimmerman with it.

Now hear this:

There is absolutely nothing unethical in any way about Zimmerman selling his property, including the gun that he used to shoot Trayvon Martin.

The gun has historical and cultural significance. Despite its grisly past, someone may want to purchase it.  Booth’s derringer is exhibited at Ford’s Theater, and nobody has ever taken offense at someone purchasing and exhibiting the gun that killed a President and American icon. Continue reading →

Facebook Manipulation, Ben Rhodes And Hillary’s Tech Minion’s Missing Emails: Seeking A Path To Objective Analysis (PART 1 of 2)

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

mind-control2

There are at least three news stories sending off toxic fumes right now, all—coincidentally?—suggesting sinister doings on the Left.

First, we have the Ben Rhodes story, where a key Obama foreign policy aide (with no experience in foreign policy but a degree in creative writing) boasts to a journalist on the record about how the Obama Administration, under his brilliant management, tricked journalists into misleading the public.

Second, we have Facebook employees revealing that Facebook is working hard at indoctrinating its users by pushing news items favorable to the Great Progressive Awakening while suppressing stories that might create sympathy for rightward politicians and causes.

Finally, we have the interesting news that the State Department can’t find Bryan Pagliano’s emails from the time he served as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s senior information technology staffer during her tenure there.

In order for citizens to have any chance of processing these events so as to have an accurate, as opposed to comforting, view of the forces directing their fates, they must banish all biases while simultaneously keeping a firm hold on their accumulated experience. How do we do that? Is it even possible?

The immediate, reflex reactions to stories like these, are, in no particular order,

I don’t believe it.

AHA! I knew it!

So what?

ARGHHHH! We’re doomed!

Good.

So how did the Mets do today?

The last one, sadly, is the most common. It is also arguably the most unethical, for the corruption of democracy thrives on apathy almost as much as it feeds upon, and nourishes, ignorance. Most Americans don’t know or care who Ben Rhodes is. Most don’t understand why Hillary Clinton’s emails are such a big deal, and are happy to accept that false narrative, fanned by Hillary herself, that it’s all a big invention by the right-wing conspiracy. Continue reading →

The Ben Rhodes Confession: Apparently The Corruption And Dishonesty Of The Obama Administration Isn’t Even News Any More

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments
I would at least think the revelation that The Simpsons' Nelson Muntz was a White House foreign policy advisor would be news...

I would at least think the revelation that The Simpsons’ Nelson Muntz was a White House foreign policy advisor would be news…

From today’s Washington Post:

“One of President Obama’s top national security advisers led journalists to believe a misleading timeline of U.S. negotiations with Iran over a nuclear-disarmament agreement and relied on inexperienced reporters to create an “echo chamber” that helped sway public opinion to seal the deal, according to a lengthy magazine profile.

Ben Rhodes, the deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, told the New York Times magazine that he helped promote a “narrative” that the administration started negotiations with Iran after the supposedly moderate Hassan Rouhani was elected president in 2013. In fact, the administration’s negotiations actually began earlier, with the country’s powerful Islamic faction, and the framework for an agreement was hammered out before Rouhani’s election.

The distinction is important because of the perception that Rouhani was more favorably disposed toward American interests and more trustworthy than the hard-line faction that holds ultimate power in Iran.”

In other words, the Obama Administration manipulated the news media to deceive the American public. The objective was to make the public less concerned about the trustworthiness of the Iranian government and the motives of the Obama administration regarding an agreement that resulted in Iran receiving billions  of dollars in exchange for a promise to do what it has never done before, adhere to an international nuclear treaty.

Since this information arrived in the form of a boast from Obama’s chief foreign policy advisor, in a tone reminiscent of the revelations of Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber, it qualifies as a smoking gun indictment of the President’s integrity, honesty, competence and transparency.

Let me correct that: another smoking gun.

Yet the Post published this in its Style section, with the movie reviews, gossip columns and crossword puzzle. The Rhodes profile itself was published by the New York Times Magazine, not the newspaper itself. In other words, the two major U.S. dailies that were among the news sources duped by Rhodes and Obama, think this is interesting, entertaining even. They don’t perceive it as news and apparently they don’t think it is wrong. Continue reading →

As Usual When Gender Discrimination In Wages Is The Issue, There Is More To The Women’s Soccer Lawsuit Than The Media Wants You To Know

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

women's soccer

The gender wage discrimination issue makes my head start to hurt every time it is raised, which, I admit, has made me grateful that Hillary and Bernie have been concentrating on the other progressive issues they fill with half-truths and deceit. Some of those are the wealth gap, mass incarceration, the evil of big banks, discrimination against Muslims, trigger-happy police, campus sexual assault, climate change, gun violence  and the minimum wage. As with these pet progressive agenda items, it isn’t that there aren’t real problems there that require effective policy initiatives, but that advocates are so infuriatingly dishonest when debating them—exaggerating statistics, demonizing opponents, and persisting in using false facts, studies and myths long after they have been definitively disproved.

If the new media was competent and even-handed, challenging the false assertions as they should, this would not be such an impediment to rational debate. The news media is seldom objective, however. On all of these issues and more, it plays the role of advocate and partisan ally with depressing regularity. An activist on the keft has to make a truly outrageous statement to even be challenged, as when Black Lives Matter organizer Aaron Goggans suggested on CNN yesterday that black on black crime is a “myth.”

There is gender discrimination in wages; I have seen it up close, in my family and in companies and organizations I have worked for. I have personally taken action to address it. The issue is complicated, however, and not close to the absurd “77 cents on the dollar” figure that has been employed, unchanged and virtually unchallenged, for decades, nor is it fairly represented by studies that show how men in the same careers make more over their working lives than women.

Never mind; the news media allows the issue to be debated in an atmosphere dominated by misrepresentations. My reflex approach is that  until advocates for a position are willing to stop lying, spinning, and demonizing, I will pointedly avoid supporting them. Call it the Clean Hands Doctrine. Gun control is one example. Climate change is another.

When  five players on the U.S. Women’s Soccer team filed a federal complaint last week accusing U.S. Soccer of wage discrimination because, they said, they earned as little as 40% of what players on the United States men’s national team earned despite reaching the team’s third World Cup championship last year, I read and heard nothing but cheers from women’s advocates, Democrats, pundits and Facebook posters I also read nothing but sexist snorting from the conservative side. (“Wanna know how to get paid the same as men for playing soccer? Try out for the men’s team! HAR!” ). The truth, as usual, is somewhere in the middle, but you wouldn’t know that from reading most accounts or watching the news channels. Continue reading →

Dead Ethics Alarms At CNN: Gee, What Could Be Wrong With “Objective” Moderators Kissing One Of The Candidates?

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Good catch by Ann Althouse: Hillary Clinton walks onto the stage last night and gets kisses on the cheek from CNN town hall moderators Jake Tapper and Roland Martin. What the hell?

This is unethical  in so many ways…

It suggests excessive familiarity between the journalists and the candidate, undermining the credibility of the journalists…

It perpetuates and validates a sexist, demeaning custom that causes problems for women in the workplace. As usual, Hillary is a feminist, unless she isn’t….

It creates an appearance of impropriety….

It signals that journalists are not objective, critical reporters, but friends and colleagues of those they exist to criticize….

It’s a double standard, for a kiss is not the same as a handshake. Either kiss Bernie Sanders too, or don’t kiss Hillary….

It is flagrantly unprofessional….

Also, ick.

It took a while, but CNN’s unethical culture is finally corrupting Jake Tapper.

Ethics Observations On The GOP New Hampshire Debate

/ Jack Marshall / 30 Comments

Rubio meltdown

Two ethics controversies occurred before the ABC debate (transcript here) even began.

  • DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz really is a shameless and audacious hack. Does anyone seriously defend her? After being justly criticized in the news media for unabashedly hiding the Democratic candidates debates, staging them on weekends and against football games to smooth the road for Hillary, she actually had the epic gall to accuse the GOP of doing the same thing in a tweet yesterday, which read:

“Hmmm, wondering why @GOP trying to hide their #GOPdebate on the Saturday of #SuperBowl weekend no less?!”

Is she that lacking in self-awareness? Was she mocking herself? Is she an idiot? After she was blasted left and right for the tweet, she either revealed her real objective or concocted a face-saving retort:

“.@TheDemocrats debates set viewer records. Both parties’ broadcast network debates on wknds. Replies to SuperBowl #GOPdebate make my point,”

Whether this was her original intent of a U-Turn, it was also her trademark, a ridiculously transparent lie. “TheDemocrats debates set viewer records” is deceit: all the debates by both parties have exceeded previous viewer levels, but the Republican debates have significantly out-drawn the Democrats. There is no doubt that the Democrats would have drawn more had they avoided weekends like Republicans did, and that the fact that they did not was entirely intentional.

Why do Democrats tolerate a sleaze like Wasserman Schultz? It is natural to judge a party by its leadership, and she is neither bright, nor honest, nor effective,  nor appealing.

The other issue was the unfairness of leaving Carly Fiorina out of the debate. I don’t pretend to understand the formula used to demote the candidates, but since all of the other potential debaters–Gilmore, Graham, Huckabee, Santorum, Paul—had dropped out, either Fiorina should have been given a chance to debate herself for two hours, which would have been fun, or be in the main debate. Her New Hampshire poll numbers are equivalent to several who debated last night.

Debate observations: Continue reading →

Ethics Observations On The Post-Iowa Republican Accusation Orgy

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

Cruz wins

A brief summary: After Ted Cruz shocked the poll-worshiping Donald Trump and the incompetent pundits with a first place finish in Iowa, and after a gentle, gracious, classy concession speech by someone impersonating Trump, subsequent days have been filled with accusations from Ben Carson that Cruz deflated the sleepy doctor’s vote total by spreading rumors about Carson dropping out of the race. Cruz apologized for his camp’s part in the confusion, but blamed CNN for misleading news reports, which were inspired by a vague tweet from the Carson camp about the candidate going home to Florida rather than on to New Hampshire, where the campaigning continues. CNN then accused Cruz of blame-shifting. Meanwhile, Trump found that impersonator and shot him, or something, and now says he will sue Cruz, or the Republican party or someone for some combination of Cruz not being a natural born citizen, his campaign’s sending out a deceptive mailer, and stealing Carson’s votes, and will demand a caucus do-over.

Observations:

1. Carson’s incompetence is at the root of this whole mess. His staff, as the caucuses were getting underway, put out an ambiguous tweet that Carson would not be going on to New Hampshire,, but was going home. Since Carson’s campaign has been falling apart in chunks for weeks now (this news today, for example) , his support in the polls has been falling, he was inert through the last debate and has no rational excuse to be running anyway, several news organizations assumed that the message meant that his withdrawal was imminent. I assumed that’s what the tweet meant. Carson’s staff is inept: that was a ridiculous tweet to make at that time. He should take full responsibility for all the confusion.

2. CNN and the various media sources that sent out tweets and statements also suggesting that Carson was quitting are also accountable for sloppy journalism. CNN is denying that its reporters gave out wrong information, but they did. First Chris Moody tweeted…

“Carson won’t go to NH/SC, but instead will head home to Florida for some R&R. He’ll be in DC Thursday for the National Prayer Breakfast.”

“Carson won’t go” to the site of the next two primaries is wrong. The word “immediately” was missing. Then CNN’s Jake Tapper tweeted…

“BREAKING: @moody has learned @realbencarson will return to FL following , will not go to either NH or SC”

CNN itself tweeted this:

“After the , @RealBenCarson plans to take a break from campaigning http://cnn.it/Iowa”

CNN’s protests that Cruz is using them as a scapegoat is a lie on its face. The network and its supporters jumped the gun, and suggested that Carson was quitting without confirming this with his organization. If it had any integrity…well, we know the answer to that, don’t we?

3. I can’t let this pass: last night, Fox’s Bill O’Reilly railed at CNN, calling its defense of its reporting “ludicrous” and declaring, “That news agency screwed up big time and apparently doesn’t care.”

He continued:

“The state of American journalism is on the verge of collapse. Ideology has permeated hard news coverage and honest reporting is becoming almost scarce, especially in political circles.”

Bill O’Reilly said this. Bill O’Reilly. Continue reading →

Our Unaccountable, Irresponsible, Incompetent, Untrustworthy News Media, Ethan Couch Division.

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments
CNN's credibility

CNN’s credibility

(Yes, apparently this is going to be Blank Graphic Saturday.)

I just watched a CNN report that stated, “Ethan Couch’s attorney convinced the judge that the teen suffered from “‘Afflienza”‘

This is 100% false. The judge never said a word about “affluenza” in her order, nor did her words to Couch suggest that she agreed with the lawyer’s desperate “affluenza” theory, conveyed by a paid expert.  (There is no such malady as “affluenza.”)

This is not in dispute: the judge did NOT accept this theory, and the fact that she gave the teen probation with a heavy load of conditions—another fact left out of the CNN report on Couch’s disappearance—does not suggest that she did. Thus CNN is spreading a narrative rather than conveying truth, in the process ignoring easily available evidence (the court transcript) that has not changed in two years and intentionally misleading its audience.

A news organization that allows this to happen cannot and must not be trusted.

About anything