The Pattern: Trump Makes A Decision That Can Be Legitimately Criticized, and the Media Reports It In a Misleading and Biased Manner To Rig the Debate…

This one nearly got me!

The USA Today headline: “National parks cut free entry for MLK Day, add Trump’s birthday.” I almost leaped for my keyboard. Sure, trolling the “No Kings” Trump Deranged is fun for POTUS, but this crossed the line. It also seemed like a deliberately racially provocative act: substituting his own birthday for MLK’s among the days commemorated by the National Parks? This mandated an Ethics Dunce post that would write itself!

It was not until the end of the story (by USA TODAY hack Kathleen Wong, who “covers travel news with a passion for sustainable tourism and human-focused storytelling” —gag/ack/yecchh!) where the full list of days when admission to the National Parks will be free of charge to American citizens is listed, that I recognized the nasty partisan con.

The new list of 2026 free admission days to the National Parks during patriotic holidays: President’s Day (Feb. 16), Memorial Day(May 31), Flag Day (June 14) Independence Day weekend (July 3–5),  the 110th Birthday of the National Park Service (Aug. 25) Constitution Day (Sept. 17) Theodore Roosevelt’s birthday (Oct. 27)—Teddy launched the National Parks— and Veterans Day (Nov. 11).  I had forgotten, as I suspect many readers have, that Flag Day happens to be Trump’s birthday, but the holiday fits naturally into the category of non-interest group, non- divisive patriotic commemorations that was clearly the motivation for “patriotic fee-free days” announced by the Department of the Interior.

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“Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!” Smoking Gun of the Month

How does anyone avoid hiding their heads under a bag when they insist that our U.S. media is anything but an ethics-free partisan propaganda machine that validates Trump’s “enemy of the people” analysis every day, and often every hour of the day?

For weeks leading up to Monday’s special election in Tennessee’s 7th Congressional District pitting Trump-backed Republican Matt Van Epps against Democrat State Rep. Aftyn Behn. to replace GOP Rep. Mark Green who resigned in July, the Axis media was sounding gleeful alarms that Republicans were facing another upset, that the House of Trump was doomed, that the metaphorical wheels were falling off because the President is a senile, blundering Nazi who is mean to all those virtuous and industrious illegal aliens, and everyone regrets not electing the babbling, cackling, incompetent the Democrats tried to inflict on the country after installing a demented puppet in the White House for four catastrophic years.

Sidney Wang had the perfect analysis of the legitimacy of that “narrative” decades before it began:

The media plot, and it was and is a plot, was a replay of what we have observed for a very long time now: journalists seeing their job as demoralizing Republicans and energizing Democrats with pipe dreams, lies, rigged polls, spin and calculated deception, all aimed at the majority of Americans who lack the political literacy and critical thinking skills to know shit from shinola, pardon my French.

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CNN’s Outright “It Isn’t What It Is” Propaganda To Support The Democratic Party’s “Affordablity” Scam (Or “Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias”)

Hundreds of people sent it in, but nobody sent it to Ethics Alarms. Come one, you guys, I’m depending on you!

That clip above, in which CNN’s supposed stat guru Harry Enten deliberately (or impossibly incompetently) misinterprets a Fox News poll about what proportion of Americans think prices are higher than a year ago for various consumer products as showing how much prices have risen for those products. Nobody in the segment pointed the error out. Nobody screamed from off-camera. There has been no CNN correction or retraction.

Enten, in his usual hyperactive mode, said, “I mean, your costs are up vs a year ago!” and begins underlining to the products and reads the percentages aloud, implying costs are up by that much. Then he says, “The bottom line is this: Americans feel prices are rising in every single part of their lives”—implying that they “feel” it because just look at how much those prices are rising!—“rising ever higher and they just don’t feel like, Kate Balduan, that they can catch a break.” Well, how could they? Just look at those percentages!

Are Americans so clueless that they would believe this nonsense? Apparently the Democratic Party, “the resistance” and the news media (“the Axis of Unethical Conduct” ) think so, or they wouldn’t try to get away with it every day, all over the news media. The Biden administration goofs its way into a period of 9% inflation, prices soar, the rate of inflation comes down dramatically in the Trump Administration but the same party responsible for raising the prices uses the inevitable fact that they aren’t coming down (prices as a whole never come down, they just go up more slowly) as proof that the current administration is failing. Yes, Trump shares some blame for this by saying that he would bring prices down during his campaign. He was being his usual careless talk self and meant (I guess) that he would bring some prices down, but as usual his habitual hyperbole got him into trouble. That error does not excuse lies like Enten’s, however.

If CNN was a real practitioner of journalism, which it is not (I don’t think there is a single trustworthy news organization anywhere today), Enten would have used the Fox News poll the way it was explained on Fox: to show the large gap between the reality of U.S. prices and the public perception of it, in part because of Axis lies. To take one obvious example, gasoline is down from a year ago and anyone who drives a car knows it. But Enten implied that the cost of gas is up “54%”!

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Another “Good Illegal Immigrant” Sob Story From the New York Times…

If I were bloggress Ann Althouse (and how can you be sure I’m not?) I’d begin this post with a quote from the story, like:

“But Perez-Bravo had most of his family and several members of his church at the hearing, and his lawyer said that he was “connected to the city in deep ways.” He regularly cooked for 60 people at church barbecues. He had a son who was about to graduate from high school, a boss who wrote letters testifying to his work ethic, and a pastor who was willing to pay a $1,000 bond on his behalf and risk her house as collateral. “This is a kind family and they help everybody,” the pastor testified. “We’re going to help him.” The judge ruled that he could return home with an ankle monitor until his next court date as long as he stopped using Kluver’s name and Social Security number….”

… Then I’d add a wry and probing observation or two, maybe a pedantic discourse on what “connected to the city” means, and leave it to commenters to analyze the story. I’m tempted to do an Althouse impression here, but I won’t, because I want to be unequivocal.

This situation isn’t as complex and wrenching as the Times reporter tries to make it. An Guadamalan came to the the U.S. illegally, broke the law repeatedly to stay here, and screwed up the life of an American citizen in the process. Finally he was caught, and that’s good. I have no sympathy for noble illegal immigrant the Times weeps for: he got more out of his dishonesty and disrespect for American sovereignty than he deserved.

Instead of the one quote from “Two Men. One Identity. They Both Paid the Price— Thousands of undocumented workers rely on fraudulent Social Security numbers. One of them belonged to Dan Kluver”, I’ll give you several with this gift link. Note that the Times, of course, uses the still-in vogue cover-phrase for “illegal immigrant.” When I read “undocumented worker,” I know I’m being misled by a biased source with an agenda.

Here are the quotes with some brief reactions from your heartless host:

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Note To ABC News: “Live By The Bias, Die By The Bias!”

ABC News got its just desserts on Sunday, when Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent made an appearance on ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” to discuss with George the government shutdown and correctly characterize it as the Democrats holding the innocent Americans hostage while they try to refuse to acknowledge that they no longer run the country.

Bessent made it clear—because, you know, it’s the truth— that the Democrats’ aim was to sabotage Trump’s record going into the midterm, as he described the “human costs” of the Left’s tantrum including holiday air travel, cargo transport and supply chain disruptions. When Stephanopoulos acted as he always does, as an advocate for his political party, Bessent pointed out his hypocrisy.

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Unethical Rant of the Year: MSNBC Left-Wing Propagandist Lawrence O’Donnell

Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias! Lawrence O’Donnell, right up there with the most shameless Axis media hacks in captivity even compared to the rest of MSNBC, usually goes his merry way slamming Republicans, conservatives and President Trump, avoiding inconvenient facts, objectivity and balance at all costs, appealing only to American who don’t want news or fair analysis, just confirmation of their own world view. When people decry the harsh division in American society today, O’Donnell is one of the prime villains, in part because he has been championing “advocacy journalism” ( as in unethical journalism) for so long.

Here’s his Ethics Alarms dossier. The last time I bothered to mention him at all (he’s always biased and unethical: The Julie Principle applies), was last year when I elevated him from mere Unethical Broadcast Journalist to Ethics Corrupter. Yes, I defended O’Donnell once…for being caught on video screaming at the MSNBC staff and shouting “fuck” among other epithets. I don’t think anyone’s most embarrassing private moments should be made “viral.”

However, this time attention should be paid, as Willy Loman’s widow says at the end of “Death of a Salesman.” O’Donnell snapped on the air yesterday and began denigrating Scott Jennings, the articulate, restrained token conservative and Donald Trump advocate on CNN’s on-air team. Jennings does a superb job vivisecting the usually emotional, knee-jerk, woke Trump-Deranged fury that he encounters on the various panels and in the numerous discussions he participates in, providing a much-needed counterpoint on CNN, which has evolved into MSNBC lite: reliably unethically biased, but with occasional outbreaks of non-partisan reality.

For some reason a sole voice of non-Axis perspective on a rival network is deeply offensive to O’Donnell. How dare Jennings defend President Trump? How dare he undermine the perpetual efforts of the news media to destroy him and defeat his policies? The Unethical Rant of 2025 was the result. Here is the whole amazing thing:

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CBS Staff Freaks Out Over An Exiled NYT Moderate Being Placed in Charge of CBS

Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias!

CBS’s new owners have bought The Free Press and are putting its founder, rebel New York Times reporter Bari Weiss, in charge of the news division. Weiss fled the Times with a manifesto condemning her former employer for unethical progressive bias, which, of course, was an accurate assessment. If you have read or listened to Weiss you know that she is a Democrat and a liberal/progressive, just one who does try to keep her biases from tainting her reporting (though not always succeeding).

She is the best that any reasonable person can expect from today’s rotting journalism; it is a field that has disproportionately attracted those from the left end of the political spectrum for more than a century. Journalism ethics demanded that practitioners concentrate on objectivity, but that goal has been almost entirely jettisoned by “advocacy journalism,” which is a euphemism for “Leftist propaganda.” To her credit, Weiss strives to be what journalists are supposed to be: honest, fair and trustworthy.

The fact that CBS staffers are reportedly furious and frightened that a real journalist like Weiss will be their new boss should tell you all you need to know about CBS, and, by extension, broadcast news generally.

Here’s the funniest section of the Independent’s report on the matter:

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‘Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!’ The NYT on the Kirk Assassination…

Not for the first time, the New York Times, like the Axis media it rules over as the “news source of record,” has reminded me of the “dishonest waiter. 

In “Denial,” the film about the lawsuit by British Holocaust denier and fake historian David Irving against American Deborah Lipstadt, the late, great Tom Wilkinson as Lipstadt’s barrister Richard Rampton, in the process of excoriating Irving to the court where the case is being tried, evokes the analogy of “the dishonest waiter” in a memorable speech:

“My lord, during this trial, we have heard from Professor Evans and others of at least 25 major falsifications of history. Well, says Mr. Irving, ‘all historians make mistakes.’ But there is a difference between negligence, which is random in its effect, and a deliberateness, which is far more one-sided. All Mr. Irving’s little fictions, all his tweaks of the evidence all tend in the same direction: the exculpation of Adolf Hitler. He is, to use an analogy, like the waiter who always gives the wrong change. If he is honest, we may expect sometimes his mistakes to favor the customers, sometimes himself. But Mr. Irving is the dishonest waiter. All his mistakes work in his favor. How far, if at all, Mr. Irving’s Antisemitism is the cause of his Hitler apology, or vice versa, is unimportant. Whether they are taken together or individually, it is clear that they have led him to prostitute his reputation as a serious historian in favor of a bogus rehabilitation of Adolf Hitler and the dissemination of virulent Antisemitic propaganda.”

Bingo. New York Times, meet David Irving! Of course in this case the victim of bias and bad faith is not the history of the Holocaust, but the life and reputation of Charlie Kirk, the conservative activist and organizer who was assassinated by a radicalized leftist who had been told by the Axis that Kirk was. Just as Stephen King pronounced Kirk a monster who believed in killing gays, the Times pronounced him an anti-Semite by attributing ananti-Semitic statement he was criticizing to him. But you see, King is just an old knee-jerk progressive celebrity (like Whoopie Goldberg, Robert DeNiro or Bruce Springstein) whom nobody should pay attention to when he opines outside of his area of expertise. The New York Times’ job is to inform the public, correctly. Yeah, I know, I know, anyone can make a mistake (Rationalizations 19 and 20) but oddly, the Times never makes such mistakes that unjustly impugn and denigrate Democrats and fellow progressives.

Then the Times added to its ethics-transgression dossier regarding Kirk by publishing this garbage op-ed: “I Was Supposed to Debate Charlie Kirk. Here’s What I Would Have Said.” The editor who green-lighted this thing should be stuffed into a barrel with fat Lithuanian midgets, to quote Woody Allen in “What’s Up, Tiger Lilly?” A socialist demagogue I blissfully had never heard of before, Hasan Piker, gave us one side of a debate that never occurred, omitting Kirk’s, or anyone’s with half a cerebrum really, rebuttals of his consistently dubious assertions, some of which included,

  • “[Kirk fell] victim to what clearly seems to be a rising tide of political violence.” Deceit: It is a rising tide of political violence against conservatives and Republicans coming from the Left’s campaign of demonization. Left that detail out, I guess. Kirk would have corrected him.
  • The United States has both very loose gun laws and more violent gun deaths per capita than any other developed nation in the world. And while shootings occur most anywhere, campuses can be especially deadly. As news broke that Mr. Kirk was shot at Utah Valley University, there was a near-simultaneous tragedy at a high school in small-town Colorado, where a 16-year-old shot two fellow students. There have been 47 school shootings this year.”

Ah yes, another anti-gun hack exploiting a murder that could not possibly have been prevented by more gun laws (except ones banning and confiscating all guns)! And calling the execution of Kirk while speaking at a college a “school shooting” is statistical manipulation designed to deceive—which is why the “school shooting” figures are wildly inflated. There is no connection or relevance between the assassination and the Colorado episode or any mass shooting.

  • The author tries to blame Kirk’s death on the usual anti-American, anti-capitalism boogiemen: “rising rents and homelessness, the destruction caused by climate change, titanic levels of inequality, and too many others to name here. Our capitalist way of life — always accumulating, never evening out — leaves more and more people to deal with these problems on their own.”

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The Hyundai Raid: Parallel Universes

Here is how Fox News reported on the massive ICE raid at a Hyundai factory in Georgia:

Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) announced the arrest of 475 illegal migrants during a major immigration enforcement raid on Thursday at a Hyundai electric car battery factory in Georgia. 

HSI Atlanta Special Agent in Charge Steven Schrank noted that while the raid was at a Hyundai facility, not all the migrants worked for the parent company. Some worked for subcontractors at the site.

“We are sending a clear and unequivocal message that those who exploit our workforce, undermine our economy and violate federal laws will be held accountable,” Schrank said during a news conference on Friday.

Here is how the New York Times reported the same story (Gift link!):

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Talk About “The Wrong Hill To Die On”: Lisa Cook’s Refusal To Obey The President’s Lawful Dismissal Is Just Defiance

The woman doesn’t have a metaphorical leg to stand on, except the disgusting (but still reflex), “There goes that racist Trump again, trying to bring down a black woman.”

“I strongly recommend that you suspend Ms. Cook from the Federal Reserve Board immediately,” states senior DOJ Ed Martin’s letter to Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell. Of course. If he doesn’t suspend her, that’s grounds to fire Powell. “No one believes it’s appropriate for her to remain in her role while serious questions linger,” wrote Martin. That’s not quite right: Democrats and the Trump Deranged believe that everyone should just refuse to acknowledge that Donald Trump is President of the United States.

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