Nah there’s no mainstream media bias”

“Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!” Tell Of The Month: “Arrgh! The National Debt Hit $40 Trillion!”

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

“…and everything was so much better when it was only at 32.67 trillion!”

Watching my Red Sox TV broadcasts from Boston(as the team I have lived and died for …metaphorically of course…most of my life inconveniently rose from the dead last month and forced me to take two and a half hours I don’t have time for out of every day to follow their adventures), it has been mordantly amusing to hear all of the Democrats running ads following a script that says they will “stand up to Trump” and “deal with the National Debt.” When anyone, including President Trump, promises to take any serious action regarding the National Debt, they are proving they are stupid, naive or lying. There is no fourth alternative.

Nevertheless, the Axis media (and others) have now decided that the newly minted $40 trillion National Debt is exponentially more alarming than the $39 trillion debt, or the $37 trillion debt, and far, far more disastrous than in 1992, when Ross Perot ran for President primarily on the platform that a debt that was then “only” $4.06 trillion and about 46% the gross domestic product was dangerous and irresponsible and Democrats mocked him mercilessly. So “National Debt reaches $40 million!” is being headlined everywhere, blathered about on CNN, MSNow and the rest because Republicans have control of the Presidency and Congress, and mid-term elections are fast approaching.

I wrote about this hypocrisy and deliberate dishonesty by the Left just four months ago. Any Democratic candidate who cites the current explosion of the National Debt as a reason to vote for him, her or Democrats (and especially Democratic-Socialists) are untrustworthy liars: the claim is signature significance. No ethical, competent, believable candidate would make such a promise even once. It is proof of organic mendacity.

I was temped to repost the last EA essay on the topic, Ethics Observations on the National Debt…, but you can read the whole thing if you want; the tag for the topic and all of the EA posts on it is here. I’ll just leave with this quote—as with the rest of the post, it is as accurate today as it was then:

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Flagrant Media Bias And Disinformation of the Year: NPR

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Here is how National Public Radio reported those statistics on D.C. crime on the one-year anniversary of President Trump ordering the National Guard to patrol the National Capital.

“Multiple studies have since found that the National Guard presence in D.C. has had no effect on violent crime, although there has been a decrease in opportunistic crimes like petty theft and vehicle break-ins.”

That summary arrives after NPR spends nine full paragraphs burying the lede, only to lie about what the lede is anyway.

When I read that [Aside: NPR had the gall to send me a solicitation for a contribution via email, signed by the NPR host who blackballed me as its ethics commentator for telling the truth about late-hit sexual harassment complaints, because I “seemed to be defending Donald Trump.] this morning I was genuinely puzzled. When I surfed past Fox News last night, Laura Ingraham was declaring that the statistics proved that Trump’s use of the National Guard was prudent and has been a great success. Two completely divergent news reports. This is why our journalism has become untrustworthy and dangerous. This is why civil discourse is nearly impossible, with citizens operating under competing distortions of reality.

And this is why President Trump was and is right to call our news media “enemies of the people.”

However, NPR’s distortion and deceit qualifies the network as a media Ethics Villain and an Ethics Corrupter. Note the chart above from the D.C. police site. A 32% decrease in murder is not “no effect” on violent crime. That isn’t just spin or bias, that’s a lie. NPR also plays language games, because that’s the Left’s specialty. “Opportunistic crimes like petty theft and vehicle break-ins” is the euphemism this nauseating excuse for a news organization uses to describe the following crimes that have decreased significantly in the past year in the District:

  • Robbery
  • Arson
  • Motor vehicle theft
  • Theft
  • Property crime
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Ten Ethics Points On Trump’s “Prime Time Address”

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

1. The President has gotten much better at delivering speeches from a teleprompter which means that he’s worked on it, something neither George W. Bush or John McCain had the commitment and diligence to do. Trump was always better when riffing, but that led into interminable, unfocused rants, like his infamous 2024 nomination acceptance speech. Last night’s speech was, for Trump, remarkably crisp, succinct, and well-delivered.

2. As he was starting off, making the speech feel like a State of the Union message, I could see in my mind’s eye all the “lies” that the Axis fact-checkers would complain about this morning. I wish the President didn’t have to describe everything he views as an accomplishment in hyperbolic terms, as a superlative: “the best,” “the greatest,” “the biggest.” Surely he must know that the habit automatically invites skepticism: if some achievement really was the best, Trump would have a difficult time getting anyone to believe it. Isn’t there an advisor, a friend, a supporter, someone who could tell him this is a self-defeating approach?

3. My vote for the most unethical hyperbole last night: “This country was dead.”

4. The President was pointed as he brought out into the open the Deep State sabotage and the mainstream media propaganda that has hindered both of his terms. Good.

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Today’s “Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!” Note, NPR Division

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

This is hack, bottom-of-the-barrel journalism at its worst.

The statistics show that the “The United States almost certainly had the lowest murder rate ever recorded in 2025” according to crime data analyst Jeff Asher. “And the available evidence suggests that we’re going to go even lower this year,” he predicts based on the numbers and trend so far.

Here is how NPR starts its story:

“As the U.S. nears its 250th birthday, it’s doing pretty well by at least one measure: the national murder rate.”

That’s not news reporting. That’s partisan damnation with faint praise, while also engaging in deliberate misrepresentation. The story states that President Trump has achieved the best result in reducing the murder rate since at least 1960. That’s not, by any reasonable use of the English language, doing “pretty well.” It is an extraordinary success, and should be reported as such.

Then there is “at least one measure,” because, you see, everything else is terrible, but NPR’s Trump Deranged listeners assume that, so a major Trump accomplishment has to be minimized in the reporting. The technique is called “poisoning the well” and it isn’t journalism, it is pure bias. NPR, like the rest of the Axis, can’t tell a straight news story fairly, directly or honestly without applying a negative spin if President Trump is involved. You can almost hear the sneers: the outlet might as well had written,

“Well, how about that, the asshole did something right!”

“Look! Trump lucked out this time!”

“Hey, I guess everything the President does can’t blow up in his face!”

“Even a blind squirrel will find a nut now and then!”

As Clarence Darrow memorably said at the end of his closing argument in the Sweet case,

“I am the last one to come here to stir up race hatred, or any other hatred. I do not believe in the law of hate… I believe in the law of love, and I believe you can do nothing with hatred.”

So I am wrestling my brain to the ground to fight hating these awful, arrogant, unprofessional, smug and destructive people. They refuse to extend even moderate respect and decency to the President of the United States. They do everything in their power to distort facts, data, reality and analysis to confuse the public and turn it against their own leader. They will not give credit when it is due, and they will not assign responsibility where it belongs, if there is any way to twist the facts to impugn President Trump.

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Show and Tell Ethics: Five Observations on Michelle Obama’s Unethical Skirt

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

I was going to make this an Ethics Quiz, which is typically what I do with issues I believe can generate multiple and diverse ethics verdicts from the analytical and perceptive readers here, and often with matters I am not certain about myself. However, Michelle Obama’s custom designed skirt she decided to model as she appeared on a stage at the new Obama Presidential Center in Chicago this week before “stakeholders” (Translation: Donors) was so indefensible by anyone who has not been permanently Obamafied, the crippling mental state where one is incapable of criticizing anything either Obama does or has done, ever, that my building a quiz around it would be dishonest.

As you can see, the former First Lady “wore a pencil skirt adorned with a large portrait of her late mother. The custom Acne Studios design was a tribute to Marian Robinson who died in 2024, aged 86.”

Ethics Observations:

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Scott Pelley’s Self-Immolation Proves How Corrupt and Biased the “60 Minutes” Culture Was

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

A year ago I wrote, after Scott Pelley gave a full-Trump Deranged commencement speech at Wake Forest,

“Scott Pelley has long been the most openly biased and partisan of the ’60 Minutes’ team (well, he and Leslie Stahl), and his speech is an instant “It isn’t what it is” classic. His arrogance and fury reveals a destructive, untrustworthy profession beginning to realize that the jig is truly up: they have betrayed their nation and its ideals, and nearly everyone knows it, or as President Trump so wisely observed, our journalists are indeed ‘enemies of the people.’ It is rumored that Pelley is likely to be dumped at CBS: Good.”

Well, it took a year and a turnover in management, but Pelley is finally out. The speech is fun to look back on today, because the pompous Pelley intoned, “America works well when we listen to those with whom we disagree and when we listen and when we have common ground and we compromise….To move forward, we debate, not demonize. We discuss, not destroy.” Yet when a new regime led by New York Times refugee Bari Weiss began the task of reforming the rotten “60 Minutes” Democratic propaganda machine that had embarrassed the network by editing Kamala Harris’s interview a week before the 2024 election to make her seem (sort-of) coherent—not an easy task—Pelley was no longer interested in listening, discussing, or compromising. He was determined to demonize. In a meeting called by Nick Bilton, the new executive producer of “60 Minutes,” Pelley accused Bilton’s boss, Weiss, of “murdering” the iconic Sunday news program. “She was brought in to kill it, and she’s been doing exactly that,” he said, adding, “She has no qualifications for her job; you have slender qualifications for this job. The changes that she’s made at the ‘Evening News’ have been catastrophic, so why should we expect that any of this is going to be any better?”

He went on to mock Bilton’s assurances that he cared about the program. If Pelley had been trying to get fired, he could have hardly done a better job. And sure enough, he got his wish, as Bilton delivered the following “Bye-bye!” letter in short order:

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Another “Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!” Smoking Gun, As If We Needed Any More…

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

This exchange…

Ethics villain, Jim Acosta eventually quit CNN in a snit because it began showing a little bit of balance regarding President Trump, but how was such a partisan, biased Axis hack allowed to be CNN’s White House correspondent in the first place? The guy is an A1 Choice USDA -certified ethics villain and, incidentally, an asshole.

Cheer-leading for Colbert is signature significance, to begin with. Gutfield is correct on the facts: it has been verified repeatedly that CBS was losing millions on Colbert.

A swollen staff is part of the reason; the other reason is that Colbert deliberately alienated half the country.

Acosta then defaults to the Axis narrative that President Trump got Colbert cancelled. It’s a lie, flat out. “Dear Leader” is a sarcastic name used by the Trump Deranged. This Axis “advocacy journalist” was out to trash President Trump from the moment he was elected,

Then Acosta privets to the “poor fired employees” guilt trip. They lost their jobs because the show they were working for was losing money! It happens to the best of us (and me, several times). That’s how business works in the U.S. Too bad this isn’t the socialist worker’s paradise Acosta and his fellow travelers dream about. And Gutfield didn’t celebrate the staff losing their jobs anyway. He stated that the staff was ridiculously huge, which it was.

[I will link to Jim Acosta’s ugly EA dossier when WordPress is functioning better, which it currently is not, and its “Happiness Engineers” (Yuck!) have been useless.]

He’s an Ethics Villain. When people complain about Trump calling the news media the “enemy of the people,” Jim Acosta is Exhibit A in the President’s defense.

Note: Exhibit B could be Dana Milbank, whom the Washington Post finally jettisoned as one of its partisan columnists after years of Axis hackery. Today on ABC he cited as one of the three reasons Kamala Harris lost the election was “the backlash against a black woman being the Democratic nominee.” Just thinking that, never mind saying it in public, disqualifies anyone as a serious and trustworthy analyst. Milbank was a political reporter and columnist for the Washington Post for 25 years.

Ethics Quotes of the Week: David Harsanyi and Seth Mandel on Nicholas Kristof’s Anti-Israel Libel

/ Jack Marshall / 38 Comments

“The only question now is whether Kristof is a dupe for Hamas apologists who can’t be trusted to apply basic journalistic standards to his writing or a willing participant who doesn’t care about them. Either way, he doesn’t deserve to be a journalist”

David Harsanyi in “Nick Kristof’s grotesque journalistic malpractice”

“We want to believe that Nick Kristof and all the people who defended and shared his article are just like us—believers in honesty, men and women of integrity, a community of truth-seekers with a baseline sense of human decency. We want to believe this in part because of that very sense of human decency. But we are making a massive error. Kristof’s named sources not only provided no evidence for his lurid bestiality fantasies but themselves were also people with massive credibility deficits…And there’s another reason we want to believe that Israel’s critics are morally intact. Plenty of them are. Those are probably the ones we don’t hear from. Unfortunately, the ones we keep hearing from don’t believe this conflict has anything to do with where Palestinians live but rather that Israelis live at all.”

Seth Mandel in “The End of Our Illusions.”

I don’t cite these two pieces as an appeal to authority. I reached the same conclusions in my post here before I read either of them. They do, however, reinforce my conclusion that Kristof, the Times staff that published his swill, and anyone you know who cites it, defends it or believes it are not to be trusted or respected. They are bent, or they are stupid and ignorant. There is no less damning conclusion.

From the “Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!” Files:

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Several readers sent me this. It is despicable, of course. I am genuinely in despair over how our journalism is behaving, especially as a key midterm election looms and the most unethical, power-obsessed, dishonest and un-American major party threatens to inflict chaos on society.

I shouldn’t have to explain what’s wrong with that NBC news smear above, but for the record…

1. Kyle Rittenhouse having a serious spider bit is, if anything, less important as national news that Nancy Guthrie’s disappearance. The item obviously was dredged up to take a cheap shot at Rittenhouse.

2. He didn’t “open fire,” which is a deliberately misleading and deceitful description of his actions. Rittenhouse defended himself, as a jury trial determined.

3. That “2020 civil rights rally” was a dangerous riot.

4. The term “gunman”is inherently pejorative, and, again, is intended to be.

5. “Advocacy journalism” again. Advocacy journalism is unethical journalism.

As in 2024, the Democratic Party needs to be decisively rejected and defeated because it is the entire Axis up for election along with it. If the biased, propaganda-flinging, partisan news media isn’t crushed and reformed soon, I don’t see how American democracy, including individual rights, can possibly survive. Remember, it is NBC engaging in this smear, not MSNOW, or CNN. It’s an ancient legacy news source. Horrifying.

These are the links for the Kyle Rittenhouse Ethics Train Wreck. I even wrote a song parody about it, as the Axis campaign to punish Rittenhouse was so blatant it was satire worthy. “The Twelve Lies of Rittenhouse” is here.

Today’s “Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!” Note of the Day, Starring, Naturally, The New York Times…

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

“How the Southern Poverty Law Center Drew the Ire of Conservatives”

That was the Gray Lady’s headline yesterday regarding the Southern Poverty Law Center’s scheme that had it supporting violent hate groups “under the table” so the SPLC could raise money from dupes and saps to defeat them.

What do you think, the most flagrant “Republicans pounce!” example ever?

I am moving ever closer to a policy that will require a ban from the EA comment section for anyone who dares to insist that the mainstream news media isn’t consistently and despicably biased in its reporting. That position has shifted from the realm of spin, stupidity and partisan gaslighting into straight-up lying and signature significance.