Leslie Stahl

Ethics Quote of the Week: Megyn Kelly

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

“Like maybe don’t say the laptop can’t be verified when it can,” she said, referring to Stahl’s response to the Hunter Biden laptop. How are you a journalist if you don’t want to follow up on that story? And then when your own organization verifies it, come out and do a mea culpa and admit you embarrassed yourself. Maybe don’t stealth edit the presidential candidate interview with ’60 Minutes,’ your flagship program that you’re an anchor of, without telling us, and then when it becomes a controversy, refuse to release the transcript because you’re more interested in running cover for the Dems than you are in honest reporting. Maybe don’t host a vice-presidential debate where you fact-check only one side. And then when your fact-check gets fact-checked by the vice-presidential candidate on the Republican side, you cut his mic…”

—Megyn Kelly, who has become considerably more quotable since abandoning news broadcasting for her podcast, responding to Leslie Stahl’s lamenting that “legacy media” media may be dying, that it’s all Donald Trump’s fault, and that she doesn’t know what to do about it. “I have some suggestions,” Kelly began.

Megyn was just riffing off the top of her head, of course. She could have gone on and on, as could I.

What do you call the insistence of Axis media defenders that while they may make “mistakes” (doesn’t everyone?) our journalists are noble, hard-working, objective truth-tellers who deserve our trust and respect? What is that? Denial? Delusion? Gaslighting? Outright lying? Insanity? Blindness? Stupidity? What?

What is the difference in effect between a state-run press, which is what the Founders devised the freedom of the press to prevent, and news media that voluntarily aligns itself with a single party and ideology and abuses its special status to manipulate the public, society, and elections?

Answer: There isn’t any.

Continue reading →

For The Donald Trump Files: Now THIS Is Signature Significance!

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

trumpence 60 minutes

I confess that I started to watch the Leslie Stahl “60 Minutes” interview with Donald Trump and his newly-named running mate Mike Pence, but I abandoned ship almost immediately. It was too horrible. Watching Trump (I have a similar reaction to watching Hillary) just makes me depressed, furious, and confused. As John Adams sings at the musical climax of 1776, does  anybody see what I see?

Well, I know millions do, but not nearly enough, soon enough. This Republican National Convention is a part of a national tragedy. The only question is how great the tragedy will be.

Now that I have read the transcript, I realize that I bailed shortly before the smokiest smoking gun of the many in the whole interview. This exchange, more than any other in the segment, compels the question to any Trump supporter: How can you possibly want to hire a guy like this to be your leader?  Perhaps it is more appropriate  to pose a different question, to pose it to the staggering party gathering in Cleveland to nominate this fool: How could you allow this to happen?

I wouldn’t hire someone who speaks and reasons like this to work for me in any capacity, however lowly, requiring trust, judgment or intelligence. It is signature significance as a whole, and in its parts. An intelligent, trustworthy, ethical person could never give such an interview, not in private, not in public, certainly not on national TV.

Here is the jaw-dropping exchange; I’ll mark the important sections A-K for exposition: Continue reading →

Daniel Schorr’s Ethical Legacy

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

It was interesting, though a little jarring, to read and hear the outpouring of admiration for the late CBS and NPR journalist Daniel Schorr, who died last week at the age of 93, even as the same sources were decrying the biases of Fox News. For Daniel Schorr was the herald of ideologically slanted journalism, though he never admitted it and was notable for his self-congratulatory dedication to what he called journalistic ethics. His legacy is what we have now: self-righteous journalists who refuse to separate fact from opinion, and whose definition of “fair and balanced” is “expose the bad guys—that is, those who we think are the bad guys.”

Some of the odes to Schorr’s career themselves defy any reasonable definition of objective reporting. During his 25 years at NPR, Schorr comfortably settled into reliably pro-liberal, pro-Democrat reporting, calling, for example, the Supreme Court’s decision in Bush v. Gore, “a judicial coup” by “the Gang of Five, philosophically led by archconservative Antonin Scalia.”

“Some critics of Schorr and NPR felt his analysis veered into opinion — that he had a profoundly liberal take on the world that became more evident over time,” said NPR in its obituary of Schorr.

Gee…How could they think such a thing? Continue reading →