murder rates

The New York Times Proves Why Journalists Can’t Be Trusted To “Fact-Check” Since They Don’t Know What A Lie Is

/ Jack Marshall / 32 Comments

jaccuse2

Ugh.

I finally grabbed a barf bag and read the New York Times attack piece from the weekend titled “A Week of Whoppers.” Silly me: Donald Trump lies so often that I simply took it on faith that the Times would have no trouble finding real and substantive lies to expose from The Donald. Instead, what I found were a few genuine lies of no great significance lumpod with statements that were obviously not meant literally, off-the-cuff remarks that any objective listener would assume were just generalizations, self-evident hyperbole, or opinion. None rose to the level of outright attempts to deceive on the magnitude of “I never sent or received classified material,” or “wiped? Like with a cloth?”

Needless to say, but I’ll still say it, none came within a Washington mile of lies like “I did not have sex with that woman,”  which is one Hillary Clinton attempted to facilitate. It is depressing that any reporter, editor or reader would find the analysis that all 31 of these alleged “lies by Trump were “lies” fair, rational or convincing. Alexander Burns and Maggie Haberman prove themselves to be partisan hacks with this weak piece of anti-Trump hype. The statements flagged here are so clearly the result of a concerted anti-Trump bias that editors must have assumed that few would actually read them, and just take the headline and sheer size of the feature as proof that the Times had legitimately proven massive dishonesty.

And it had: its own.

Here are all 31 alleged Trump “lies,” with the Ethics Alarms verdicts on each. Continue reading →

FACT: The New York Times’ Front Page Anti-Gun Editorial Was Misleading And Deceitful, And Here’s Why

/ Jack Marshall / 72 Comments

silencers and guns

I already posted on the ethics deficits in the New York Times front page editorial (First time since the 1920s! AHHHHHHH!!!) that was gaining such embarrassing hosannas from liberals and anti-gun zealots over the weekend. To sum up that post, the Times wrongly connected its hype to a terrorist incident irrelevant to its argument, simply to gain emotional traction; made an impossible and largely symbolic demand, focused on a class of guns that has minimal impact on national gun deaths; and, like most calls for “gun control” of late, including the President’s, was aimed at gaining incremental public acceptance of gun confiscation and banning, while pretending otherwise.

That post did not point out, however, that the Times intentionally neglected to inform its readers and those it hoped to persuade (or mislead, panic, or stampede) of the above essential news that is not only “fit to print,” but that must be printed if a newspaper is going to claim that “the attention and anger of Americans should also be directed at the elected leaders whose job is to keep us safe but who place a higher premium on the money and political power of an industry dedicated to profiting from the unfettered spread of ever more powerful firearms.”

The fact is that per-capita murders in the U.S. are at their lowest level since FBI records began (in 1960), and they are trending downwards. There is no “crisis,” at least no gun crisis. Terrorism is another story.

The Times makes the point that “motives do not matter to the dead” (a failed attempt to justify piggy-backing the grandstanding editorial on a terrorist attack that no plausible gun regulations would have stopped), but it is just as true that lethal weapons “do not matter to the dead.” If it is, as the Times piously says in accusing them of callousness and corruption, the job of elected leaders “to keep us safe,” our elected leaders, by the evidence of the statistic, are doing an excellent job. Continue reading →