Nah there’s no mainstream media bias”

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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Ethics Quote of the Month: CBS Evening News

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

“On too many stories, the press has missed the story. Because we’ve taken into account the perspective of advocates and not the average American. Or we put too much weight in the analysis of academics or elites, and not enough on you.” That changes now. The new CBS Evening News starts Monday at 6:30 p.m. ET on CBS.”

—Out of the mouth of new anchor Tony Dokoupil, on behalf of CBS News.

CBS, like ABC, NBC, PBS, CNN, MSNBC and Fox News, has allowed political agendas and unprofessional practices, not to mention laziness and bias, to make broadcast journalism untrustworthy, corrupt and destructive to a well-functioning democracy for decades. Now, after New York Times rebel Bari Weiss has been installed by the network’s new owners to restore balance, fairness, objectivity and competence to CBS News, once the gold standard for TV news reporting (or so we thought), CBS is promising a reset. That would mean a good faith attempt to return to ethical journalism.

Do you believe it? There are good reasons to be dubious, and that statement, which was presumably drafted with some care, is one of them:

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Last Head Explosion of 2025 (I Hope)

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Before I post a more substantial essay today I will have to puck the skull pieces and brain bits off of my living room ceiling, carpet, furniture and TV screen after making the mistake of watching CNN’s Abby Phillip show for ten minutes. As usual, her panel of partisan idiots (with the exception of CNN token Republican Scott Jennings) were babbling on with today’s Trump hate. I expected that, but as I routinely switch channels whenever this thing passes my eyes, I did not expect that the level of discourse would be beneath what I would expect late in a cast party when all of the woke actors are half- or totally crocked.

There was no expertise, useful analysis or objective commentary at all, just indignant repetition of Axis talking points as fact: gaslighting, or fake news for the ignorant and gullible. “Trump has used the Executive Orders to get around Congress, and changed the Presidency by doing so!” (Barack Obama openly and specifically established this as a “norm.”) “Trump just defies the Constitution and the Supreme Court lets him get away with it!” (The comment came up regrading SCOTUS taking up the birthright issue, regarding which the Trump administration has made a legal argument, and has not defied the Constitution.) “Yes! It’s just like abortion…” (No, you idiot, it is not “like abortion.” Abortion was never mentioned in the Constitution: an activist Court bent the document out of shape to turn abortion into a right that not a single Founder would have endorsed. Birthright citizenship IS in the Constitution, which is why it is unlikely that the Trump theory will prevail.) “Everything Trump does is to line his own pockets!” (Pure talking point, and one that I read or hear every single day from the Trump Deranged. How does enforcing the immigration laws, purging illegal discrimination against whites and men and trying to dismantle mainstream media and educational political manipulation “line his pockets”? “The economy is in bad shape!” (The third quarter (July-Sept) Gross Domestic Product (GDP) rose by a 4.3% annualized rate, the best in two years, which means that the economy is not in bad shape, but never mind.) And so on. All the women on the panel were wild eyed and angry (this is not professional deportment for television “journalism,” and the men, with the exception of Jennings, sat back and sagely nodded their head,s quickly shutting up if they tried to make a factual correction and were shouted over. Jennings just composed his next articulate rebuttal in his head, and waited for an opening.

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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…

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

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

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

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”)

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

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…

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

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!”

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

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

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

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

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

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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