Nah there’s no mainstream media bias”

Addendum to “Yet More Evidence [That]…Our Journalists Are Disgustingly Biased and “Enemies of the People”

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

It’s even worse than that. Abby Phillips, the openly biased and incompetent host of CNN’s “NewsNight,”repeated the dishonest Axis media spin that the ISIS attack against a group of protesters outside Gracie Mansion was against NYC’s Muslim Mayor Zohran Mamdani last night.

ABBY PHILLIP: Up next, two Republicans say Muslims don’t belong here after an attempted terror attack against New York’s Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and the House Speaker Mike Johnson says nothing, really, to condemn those comments.

This lie, as discussed in the earlier EA post,had been debunked far and wide by that time, but never mind! It was apparently too good a Big Lie for a dedicated Axis propagandist like Phillip to surrender. Nobody spoke up on CNN (of course not!) to correct her, but enough abuse was heaped on Phillip that she issued a foxy “correction”…

Not “specifically” targeting the Muslim mayor, Abbe, you irredeemable hack?

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Jesse Jackson Jr. Properly Slams Obama and Biden for Trying To Turning His Father’s Funeral Into An Anti-Trump Campaign Rally

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Well good for him.

Jackson said, during a private memorial service at Rainbow Push Coalition headquarters in Chicago, that “[Y]esterday, I listened for several hours to three United States presidents who do not know Jesse Jackson.”

He continued,

“He maintained a tense relationship with the political order, not because the presidents were white or black, but the demands of our message, the demands of speaking for the least of these — those who are disinherited, the damned, the dispossessed, the disrespected — demanded not Democratic or Republican solutions, but demanded a consistent, prophetic voice that at no point in time ever sold us out as people. And it speaks volumes about who the Rev. Jesse Jackson was.”

Kamala Harris, Barack Obama, Joe Biden all used their eulogies to attack the President and his policies, though, as you might have guessed, Harris was the most obnoxious and made the least sense. “Let me just say I predicted a lot about what’s happening right now,” Harris smirked. “I’m not into saying I told you so but we did see it coming.” I’d love to ask her what it was exactly that she “saw coming.” The forceful repudiation of the weak, zombie administration she was part of? The voters’ rejection of her embarrassing DEI candidacy? Her running mate’s utter disgrace and exposure as a corrupt hack?

Jackson’s was a subtle and measured rebuke, so subtle and measured that most of the Axis media felt it necessary to ignore it. Many, realizing how inappropriate it was for Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to turn attention away from Jackson’s father and onto their hatred of Donald Trump at Jesse Jackson Sr.’s funeral, also worked to hide the Democrats’ nauseating conduct from the public…after all, there’s an election coming!

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Good News, Progressives, Democrats and Trump Deranged! The Washington Post Is Still Biased, Dishonest and Untrustworthy…

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

“Democracy Dies in Darkness.”

What a joke.

A lot of my Trump Deranged Facebook friends flipped out in fury after owner Jeff Bezos fired much of the Washington Post staff, including many unethical, lying pundits and columnists. How dare Bezos interfere with his paper’s partisan propaganda just because it was losing money by the millions? Many of my mentally ill friends announced that they would boycott Amazon in vengeance.

I’m thrilled to be able to inform my miserable friends, relatives and colleagues that they now have a reason to buck up. The Post may be gutted, but whatever remains in the ruins is still dishonest, unethical, biased and as partisan as ever.

In a story three days ago headlined, “Outside White House, hundreds protest attack on Iran, urge end to conflict,” the Post highlighted a protest that broke out near the White House hours after “Epic Fury” began. The reports chose to explain the event though the eyes of Ermiya Fanaeian, “a 25-year-old PhD candidate in political science at Howard University” whom the Post introduced as a young woman who “has lived in the United States since she was 1, but still has family in her home country of Iran.”

As “word spread of attacks there by Israel and the U.S.,” Post reporters Jasmine Golden and Liam Scott wrote, Fanaeian “grew concerned about her relatives and other Iranians” and “decided to protest the military action.” “It hits close to home,” Fanaeian was quoted as saying. “I also know that the people in Iran are the ones who are going to experience the most, the biggest consequences from these attacks.”

Poor Ermiya! This is the news media playing the cognitive dissonance game. Let’s watch the President’s attack on an international villain and purveyor of terrorism that has been declaring “Death to America!” and planning death to Israel for decades, as filtered through the emotions of an innocent young female student worried about her family.

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On the Colbert “Equal Time” Nonsense…

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Gee, what a surprise. Democrats don’t like the Federal Communications Commission “Equal Time” rule applying to non-news shows when hey try to influence elections.

The Communications Act of 1934, once aimed at radio, now mostly applied to television, includes a provision regarding coverage of political candidates. If a station gives airtime to one candidate, then the same station must offer comparable time to other candidates competing in an approaching primary or election.  Regarding campaign ads, a station selling airtime to one candidate also has to offer to sell the same amount of time to other candidates for the same office. Exceptions to this rule include newscasts, “bona fide” interview programs, and coverage of live events or documentaries. Candidates appearing in non-news, entertainment programming near to elections now trigger the provision.

As they should.

CBS late-night host Stephen Colbert, on the way out already from his all-Democratic-cheer-leading-all-the-time show, attacked his own network this week after he was stopped from airing an interview with Texas state Rep. James Talarico (D), a U.S. Senate candidate, because of the FCC ’s equal-time rule.

“You know who is not one of my guests tonight?” Colbert asked his audience. “That’s Texas state representative James Talarico. He was supposed to be here, but we were told in no uncertain terms by our network’s lawyers, who called us directly, that we could not have him on the broadcast.” On cue, his partisan studio audience booed.

“Then I was told, in some uncertain terms, that not only could I not have him on, I could not mention me not having him on,” Colbert continued. “And because my network clearly does not want us to talk about this, let’s talk about this.”

Boy, isn’t he funny? My sides ache from laughing! No wonder Colbert is regarded as a comic genius. Admit it, the guy is hilarious.

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Why No, I Didn’t Know That!

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Free-lance journalist Michael Tracy pointed out on “X” that all of the “victims” who Rep. Jayapal demanded that Pam Bondi apologize to were adults at the time of their claimed victimization by Jeffrey Epstein. Tracy asked if any news organization bothered to mention that rather salient point, especially since the Left’s narrative connecting President Trump to Epstein rests on calling Trump a presumed “pedo”-by-association.

It seems the answer is no. I certainly assumed the hand-raising women at Bondi’s hearing were all sexually exploited as minors.

The Epstein obsession is such an Ethics Train Wreck, and such a dumb one my eye-balls hurt from rolling. If Democrats succeed in the mid-terms because of the duel mendacities of the Epstein innuendos and the even dumber “affordability” talking point (“How dare Trump not lower the prices our incompetence raised?”), I think it will be fair to say that the American public is no longer intelligent enough for a republic.

I recommend a conservatorship.

In an excellent Wall Street Journal piece (which I no longer can find) on what the Epstein files didn’t include, the author wrote that the news media and Democrats are focusing on Trump’s past denials that he ever knew or suspected what his fellow billionaire was doing, when what they should be focusing on was that he alone among the many names being exposed in the files “got the hell out of there,” as soon as Epstein’s teenage girls turned up.

But that wouldn’t be “advocacy journalism.”

The Fantasy Headline

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

I don’t want to dwell on the headline above from the Times, but this is just another example of how, as in democracy’s death of a thousand cuts, our journalists deceive, confuse and manipulate public opinion. They also think they are clever about it, just as they think they are smarter than they are.

“President Trump on Thursday announced he was erasing the scientific finding that climate change endangers human health and the environment, ending the federal government’s legal authority to control the pollution that is dangerously heating the planet,” the Times piece begins. “The action is a key step in removing limits on carbon dioxide, methane and four other greenhouse gases that scientists say are supercharging heat waves, droughts, wildfires and other extreme weather.”

Well.

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No, Peggy Noonan, The Washington Post Became An Untrustworthy Blight On America Long, Long Ago And I Can Prove It…

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

I just saw the above and felt it was as good a visual intro to this essay as any. Now keep in mind that here I am not suggesting that the recently gutted Washington Post is necessarily a worse travesty of journalism than the rest of what we laughingly call our news media. I just had Fox News on in the background while I reorganized my sock drawer and heard it breathlessly cover the disappearance of Savannah Guthrie’s mother for a full ten minutes. Fox is doing this, I surmise, to avoid discussing President Trump’s latest social media scandal, as I do here. But I digress….what prompted this EA post is this recent bit of nostalgia in the Wall Street Journal from Peggy Noonan, Ronald Reagan’s favorite speechwriter, who wrote in part,

The diminishment of the Washington Post hits hard because it feels like another demoralizing thing in our national life. Our public life as a nation—how we are together, how we talk to each other, the sound of us—isn’t what it was. It’s gone down and we all feel this, all the grown-ups. The Post was a pillar. The sweeping layoffs and narrowing of coverage announced this week followed years of buyouts and shrinking sections. None of this feels like the restructuring of a paper or a rearranging of priorities, but like the doing-in of a paper, a great one, a thing of journalistic grandeur from some point in the 1960s through some point in the 2020s. I feel it damaged itself when, under the pressure of the pandemic, George Floyd and huge technological and journalistic changes, it wobbled—and not in the opinion section but on the news side. But I kept my subscription because that is a way of trusting, of giving a great paper time to steady itself….But the Post’s diminishment, which looks like its demise, isn’t just a “media story.” Reaction shouldn’t break down along ideological lines, in which the left feels journalism is its precinct and is sad, and the right feels journalism is its hulking enemy and isn’t sad. Treat it that way and we’ll fail to see the story for its true significance. The capital of the most powerful nation on earth appears to be without a vital, fully functioning newspaper to cover it. That isn’t the occasion of jokes, it’s a disaster…I fear sometimes that few people really care about journalism, but we are dead without it. Someday something bad will happen, something terrible on a national scale, and the thing we’ll need most, literally to survive, is information. Reliable information—a way to get it, and then to get it to the public. That is what journalism is, getting the information.

First, let me say that I am impressed that Peggy still writes as beautifully as ever, and I forgive her for being married to the guy who fired me at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (and who tried to cheat on her with one of my interns until I intervened). However Noonan is one of the NeverTrump Republicans, and bias has clearly made her stupid regarding the Post’s bias and abandonment of fair, accurate, objective journalism as its mission. Come on, Peggy…

  • “Our public life as a nation—how we are together, how we talk to each other, the sound of us—isn’t what it was.” Yes, and the Post has been a significant catalyst for this.
  • “The Post was a pillar.” When was the Washington Post last a “pillar”? Watergate?
  • “… a thing of journalistic grandeur from some point in the 1960s through some point in the 2020s.” As I will shortly demonstrate, the Post had become a Democratic Party, progressive mouthpiece long before that.
  •  “Reaction shouldn’t break down along ideological lines, in which the left feels journalism is its precinct and is sad, and the right feels journalism is its hulking enemy and isn’t sad.” In fact, that’s exactly what is happening, because conservatives, Republican and ethicists recognized that the Post had become a partisan weapon, and the Mad Left regarded it as its champion of useful disinformation and public deception. 
  • “The capital of the most powerful nation on earth appears to be without a vital, fully functioning newspaper to cover it.” Appears? APPEARS??? That condition has been obvious to anyone with the integrity to admit it since at least 2008, when the Post joined most news organizations in campaigning for Barack Obama. This included blaming the bi-partisan 2008 economic meltdown on only Republicans when Ted Kennedy’s and Barney Frank’s fingerprints were all over the debacle, calling GOP VP candidate Sarah Palin unqualified when she had more relevant experience for the Presidency than the Democrats’ Presidential nominee, and mocked her intellect while ignoring Obama’s running mate’s well established IQ issues.
  • “I fear sometimes that few people really care about journalism, but we are dead without it.” In the immortal words of John McClane, “Welcome to the party, pal!” But the Post wasn’t engaged in journalism, and hadn’t been for many years. Where was Noonan then? Why wasn’t she sounding the alarm?
  • “Someday something bad will happen, something terrible on a national scale, and the thing we’ll need most, literally to survive, is information.”  Something bad? You mean like the nation being locked-down based on the teachers’ unions refusal to do their jobs, Deep State health officials lying about what they knew,  and the Democratic Party’s desire to crash the economy to get rid of Donald Trump? Like an election being held in 2020 with insecure ballots and blue states violating their own election laws? Or a President being demented and his wife and staff running the country while the news media assisted in the cover-up? Like a group of Democratic prosecutors targeting the greatest threat to their continued power and using third world tactics to try to lock him up? Those kinds of “bad things?”
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Calling “A Friend”! Tell Us Again How The New York Times Is Non-Partisan, Fair, and Trustworthy…

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Yeah, I’m trolling. So sue me.

A mob of Minnesota pro-open borders, anti-Rule of Law, insurrection-minded, Jacob Frey toadies and crazies invade a church service and harass parishioners on the pretense that the minister supports immigration enforcement, and the framing of the event by the nation’s alleged “newspaper of record” is to call the trespass and mass assault a “protest” and to focus on I.C.E. tactics when the issue is anti-I.C.E. tactics. The immigration control agency was not involved in this criminal act in any way, yet it is in the headline.

Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias!

For readers new to Ethics Alarms, “A Friend” is an unfriendly, denial-soaked ex-commenter here who banned himself from the comments, an act that is addressed specifically in the blog Comment Policies. Unlike even the most disrespectful and defiant bannees of the past, who typically issue a one or two finals shots and then sink into the obscurity they so richly deserve, this jerk has adamantly refused to comply with the site’s owner and moderator, me. Thus for years he has repeatedly blog-bombed posts with comments that I have to delete while also sending me emails that also go directly to spam, because he is somehow convinced that he’s smarter than everyone else. You know,

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“Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!” Challenge: Defend This Column…

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

I warn you, however: it you try and are serious, I’ll may ban you for being dishonest, or too stupid to participate in an ethics colloquy.

Aaron Blake, a senior political reporter for Washington Post who hails from Minnesota (oh-oh!) authored this steaming pile of bias for, no surprise, CNN. The title: “Why Trump accepting Machado’s Nobel Peace Prize is no laughing matter.” Somehow, this Trump Deranged mega-hack argues that there is something sinister about the President of the United States accepting a sincere gift from a foreign visitor. The essay itself is the essence of Trump Derangement. It defines the warped thought processes whereby anything this President does is by definition wrong because he did it.

Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado has explained, several times, why she handed over her Nobel Peace Prize to the President, saying, graciously, “He deserves it.” A very strong argument can be made that she’s right on the facts, but never mind: Blake jumps immediately to the worst imaginable appeal to authority: he notes in his second paragraph that Jimmy Kimmel, easily the most repellent personality on network television today, made fun of the award. The column, incredibly, manages to go down hill from there…

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Hey, Here’s An Idea! Let’s Wait To See What’s Going On Before We Criticize A Trump Administration Decision

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

What a concept.

The Trump administration has ended the lease agreement for three public golf courses in Washington. The Interior Department said it was terminating the lease because the nonprofit that runs the courses have failed to meet the terms of the lease. That, at this point, is all we know. The D.C. bureaucrats who operate the courses say they have done a wonderful job. If so, it will be the only case I know of where D.C. bureaucrats have done a good job at anything, but I’ll withhold judgment until I have, you know, some actual facts.

Personally, I don’t see why the District of Columbia, a small area carved out of Maryland (and formerly Virginia) expressly to house the government of the United States should have any golf courses. Parks? Sure I get parks. Museums? Ok. But golf is an elitist sport that is too time consuming and expensive for a lot of people, takes up a ridiculous amount of space, and has been criticized by environmentalists and other critics for centuries. It is not, in other words, an unalloyed benefit to communities, society, and certainly not governments.

Until the public and the news media know, as in the question that should begin any ethics inquiry, “What’s going on here?,” there should be no criticism of the Interior Department’s action at all. None. And yet, just yesterday when the announcement came out, a Trump Deranged friend was certain, certain, that it was nefarious. Why? Because President Trump is evil!!! EVIL!!!

The news media’s coverage of this relatively minor story has been a parody of anti-Trump bias employing innuendo, false framing, speculation and presumption of guilt. Let’s take the Associated Press, shall we?

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