Nah there’s no mainstream media bias”

Nah, There’s No Anti-Israel, Anti-Jewish Mainstream Media Bias…

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Britain’s media regulator (Great Britain doesn’t have a First Amendment, remember, so the government can punish dishonest, biased journalism. This is not a good thing…) said today it is investigating a BBC documentary about the dire fate of children in Gaza. The BBC removed the program, “Gaza: How To Survive A Warzone,” from its streaming service earlier this year after it was revealed that the 13-year-old narrator, “Abdullah,” is the son of Ayman Alyazouri, Hamas’s deputy minister of agriculture.

Oh. Sounds fair and objective to me! The media reports says this information “emerged.” Translation: the BBC was caught. News programs purporting to be factual must not materially mislead the audience in Great Britain, or so they claim. Imagine if the U.S. had such a regulation and enforced it. There would be no broadcast news.

The independent production company that made the program didn’t share the background information regarding the father of the young narrator’s Hamas ties, claims the BBC. Hoyo Films, which produced the documentary, claims it didn’t “intentionally” mislead the BBC. The BBC meanwhile, was wonderfully trusting and incurious—you know, like good journalists are supposed to be. After all, it’s not like anyone is out to vilify Israel as it tries to survive while protecting its citizens from being raped, murdered and kidnapped by terrorists.

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Do You Have Any Clue Regarding Whether the US Bombing of the Iranian Nuclear Facilities Were Successful or Not? I Don’t.

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

I just heard President Trump at his press conference, rambling as only he can, declare that the news outlets claiming his surprise bunker-busters attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities was not as effective as the U.S. claimed were “losers” and liars. Meanwhile, a CNN article, followed by the New York Times, citing leaked classified documents, and thus unnamed sources of those illegally retrieved materials, announced that “Early US intel assessment suggests strikes on Iran did not destroy nuclear sites, sources say.” Reporters Natasha Bertrand, Katie Bo Lillis, and Zachary Cohen wrote that “the US military strikes on three of Iran’s nuclear facilities last weekend did not destroy the core components of the country’s nuclear program and likely only set it back by months, according to an early US intelligence assessment that was described by four people briefed on it.” It continued, “The assessment, which has not been previously reported, was produced by the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon’s intelligence arm. It is based on a battle damage assessment conducted by US Central Command in the aftermath of the US strikes, one of the sources said.”

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Kudos To The New York Times For Finally Eliminating All Doubt That It Is a Democratic Party Propaganda Organ And Not a “Newspaper”…

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

This would be an Unethical Quote of the Week if there were any reason to believe what the New York Times says about President Trump, and if the Times didn’t make equally unethical quotes every day.

Here’s part of the Times editorial titled, “Antisemitism Is an Urgent Problem. Too Many People Are Making Excuses”:

“…The political right, including President Trump, deserves substantial blame. Yes, he has led a government crackdown against antisemitism on college campuses, and that crackdown has caused colleges to become more serious about addressing the problem. But Mr. Trump has also used the subject as a pretext for his broader campaign against the independence of higher education. The combination risks turning antisemitism into yet another partisan issue, encouraging opponents to dismiss it as one of his invented realities.

Even worse, Mr. Trump had made it normal to hate, by using bigoted language about a range of groups, including immigrants, women and trans Americans. Since he entered the political scene, attacks on Asian, Black, Latino and L.G.B.T. Americans have spiked, according to the F.B.I. While he claims to deplore antisemitism, his actions tell a different story. He has dined with a Holocaust denier, and his Republican Party has nominated antisemites for elected offices, including governor of North Carolina. Mr. Trump himself praised as “very fine people” the attendees of a 2017 march in Charlottesville, Va., that featured the chant “Jews will not replace us.” On Jan. 6, 2021, at least one rioter attacking the Capitol screamed that he was looking for “the big Jew,” referring to Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, Mr. Schumer has said.”

It gives me great pleasure to know that Times boot-licker ” “A Friend,” the long-banned EA commenter who has set a nearly unbreakable record for unauthorized posts here, most bleating about how unfair I am to the noble Times, will be desperately searching for a way to rationalize that verbal offal without having to admit, “Okay, the Times editors are partisan hacks.”

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“What’s Going On Here?” Oh, Just the Usual Biased and Slanted Journalism Making It Impossible to Know What’s Going On Here…

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

I cannot describe how sick I am of this phenomenon.

Here is the Conservative Brief’s report on the recent decision by a judge not to take further steps enforcing his order that the Trump White House cease discriminating against the Associated Press following its refusal to embrace the President’s renaming of the Gulf of Mexico. Headline: “Associated Press Loses Court Case To Regain Coveted White House Access.” But it didn’t “lose the case.” Still, the slanted analysis was reported as fact by the conservative news site PJ Media. Here’s the New York Times spin. [Let’s see if the Gift Link works this time…]. Headline: “Judge Rejects A.P.’s Challenge to New White House Press Policy, for Now.” For now. “The judge said that he needed more time to determine whether the new policy was discriminatory, but said that the elimination of rotating access for newswires was ‘facially neutral.’”

Here’s the Associated Press: “Judge won’t take further steps to enforce his order in AP case against Trump administration.” “U.S. District Judge Trevor N. McFadden, who handed the AP a victory last week in its efforts to end the ban, said it’s too soon to say that President Donald Trump is violating his order — as the AP suggests. ‘We are not at the point where we can make much of a determination one way or another,’ said McFadden, ruling from the bench. ‘I don’t intend to micromanage the White House.’”

Having read these three reports and a couple more, what seems to be the story is that the judge who said that the White House couldn’t punish the AP for which name it chooses to call the Gulf by banning it from White House functions (thanks to the White House announcing publicly that this was its motivation, making the ban a government infringement on free speech), the Associate Press could not insist that it has special privileges due to its once-justifiable status as long-time trustworthy news source, and could be placed in rotation with other news services instead of keeping a regular, permanent spot in the press pool.

The judge made clear what his conclusion was: that the proverbial jury is still out on whether the White House is engaging in viewpoint discrimination, which it may not do, or simply treating the AP like any other news service. However, he did reject the idea that because the AP has been anointed with special deference by past Presidents, the Trump White House is constitutionally obligated to continue them.

Especially since the AP now sucks. (But the judge didn’t say that.)

A Morning “Nelson”! Condign Justice For NY A.G. Letitia James

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

This story has so much delicious irony to it, I’m afraid to look in the mirror for fear that I have literally turned into Nelson Muntz, the “Simpsons” character who mocks everyone else’s misfortunes.

The Federal Housing Finance Agency has referred New York Attorney General Letitia James to the Department of Justice for alleged mortgage fraud. Bill Pulte, director of FHFA alerted U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi in part,“Based on media reports, Ms. Letitia James has, in multiple instances falsified bank documents and property records to acquire government backed assistance and loans and more favorable loan terms…This has potentially included 1) falsifying residence status for a Norfolk, Virginia-based home in order to secure a lower mortgage rate and 2) misrepresenting property descriptions to meet stringent requirements for government backed loans and government assistance.”

You can read the documents here and here. In one case, the Democratic Party hit-woman charged with executing the lawfare against Donald Trump so he couldn’t run for President received a lower mortgage rate by falsely swearing that a home in Norfolk, Virginia would be her “primary residence” when her job as New York’s Attorney General required her to live in that state. In the other, James misrepresented a five-unit property as a four-family unit to receive “a conforming loan through the Freddie Mae/Freddie Mac Form 3033,” which is only available for buildings with four or fewer units. Hilariously, this is the same woman who prosecuted Donald Trump for misleading financial statements, intoning that “No one is above the law.” Perfect!

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Can This “Democratic Norm” Be Saved?

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

One of the most hackneyed attacks on President Trump is that he violates “traditional democratic norms.” Of course, this is another Democratic Party double standards play: most assertive Presidents ignore some “traditional norms” while forging new ones, and the last Democrati in the White House crushed some surprising traditional norms I thought were secure, like the norm of enforcing immigration laws, and the norm of selecting Cabinet members on the basis of their abilities rather than their EEOC categories, the norm of holding press conferences, the norm of having the elected President actually be the President, and the norm of not dropping out of a re-election campaign once it has begun so the party can install a more promising replacement without the formality of primaries and a democratic nominating process.

A democratic norm that is definitely on death’s door in the Trump Administration is the traditional respect the President has extended to reporters and journalists. Yesterday, President Trump was openly hostile and insulting to CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins when she questioned him in the Oval Office on the deportation of El Salvadoran national Kilmar Abrego Garcia. He called her a “low-rated anchor” while insulting her employer, CNN. Passing a question off to Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, the President sniped, “Can you just also respond to that question because you know it’s asked by CNN and they always ask it with a slant because they’re totally slanted because they don’t know what’s happening. That’s why nobody’s watching them.” Ouchie! Later in the session, Trump responded to another question about Garcia from Collins by saying, “How long do we have to answer this question? Why don’t you just say, ‘Isn’t it wonderful that we’re keeping criminals out of our country’? Why can’t you just say that? Why do you go over and over …and that’s why nobody watches you anymore! You have no credibility.”

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Today’s Unethical (and Stupid) Headline of the Day: “Ten Year-Old American With Brain Cancer Deported Because She Fell Out of the Wrong Vagina”

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

To be fair, that headline is supposed to be funny: it is the work of the humorous news aggregator and satire site “Fark,” which posts links to stories that can support snarky, sarcastic, vulgar or wise-ass headings. I don’t find that headline anything but obnoxious, however, especially since a large number of “Think of the children!” saps and pro-open borders activists will be shaking their heads sadly after reading it.

The linked story is by NBC News which sports the only slightly less obnoxious header, “U.S. citizen child recovering from brain cancer deported to Mexico with undocumented parents.”

A fair, un-biased headline would read, “Illegal immigrant couple deported, along with their children.” That’s what happened. The fact that one of those children has a medical condition is irrelevant. (That’s the girl above. I would think her blurry face problem is at least as serious as her brain tumor…). The implication that the child was the focus of the action rather than her parents is deliberately misleading (that’s deceit, by definition). And the parents aren’t “undocumented,” they were here illegally. The use of “undocumented” is always a tell: anyone who uses it it trying to glide over the illegal status of someone who has no ground to complain if they are sent back to their nation of origin.

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Comment of the Day: “Ethics Verdict: Justified, Necessary, and Ethical”

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

This refreshing Comment of the Day by EA Ace AM Golden concludes with a trenchant point: Why does someone need to be reading Ethics Alarms or doing their own research to be properly informed of the context of a news event rather than misled by selective reporting?

I should have included the historical precedents for the recent Trump White House decision to exercise its own discretion over what news organizations and other news sources should be included in briefings, but my point was that it didn’t matter what the “precedent” was because today’s news media and the unethical way they have covered this particular President have no valid precedents. However, AM’s perfectly illustrated point is equally important: as usual, the news media is framing anything Trump does as a “threat to democracy” rather than giving the public the information it needs to make up their own minds.

Once I read AM’s COTD, I was even more disgusted with the New York Times than I usually am. Pure deceit: the piece says that it’s a “decades long” precedent to not pick and choose among news organizations, see, so if AM’s precedents are waved in the Times editors’ smug faces, they can say, “Well, those examples were still many decades ago, so what we wrote is correct!”

But even if the Times reporters and lazy editors had been aware of the precedents AM reveals (I’d bet anything that they didn’t bother to check), they still wouldn’t have mentioned them because Trump is following the examples of two revered figures, one of them on Mt. Rushmore and the other unanimously regarded as our greatest President in the last hundred years.

And just to preempt the usual excuse that self-banned Times defender “A Friend” would typically post until I sent the comment to Spam Hell, those Times readers who are the reliable epitome of erudition, fairness and oversight saving the biased Times from itself, I checked all the nearly 2000 comments to the news story. Most agreed that Trump is an aspiring dictator, but not a single one mentioned the Roosevelts.

Here is AM Golden’s illuminating Comment of the Day on the post, “Ethics Verdict: Justified, Necessary, and Ethical”…

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Jeez, Somebody Tell Him!

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

I subscribe to the oxymoronically-named Ethics & Journalism newsletter. After the featured piece in today’s edition, I will be reconsidering that commitment.

Here is the beginning of the essay titled “Fostering a Culture of Newsroom Independence: How to fight anticipatory compliance,” authored by the director of this NYU project, Stephen J. Adler. Hold on to your head!

Media self-censorship, anticipatory compliance, capitulation, bending the knee. Whatever you call it, it represents one of the most insidious means by which people with power can squelch news reporting that doesn’t serve their interests. You don’t have to arrest or fire reporters—you just have to make them increasingly afraid that you will.

Donald Trump’s second term—and the ascendancy of billionaire press antagonists—has already created an environment in which journalists feel more pressure than ever to self-censor or soften their coverage to ensure that they stay on legally and politically safe ground. How does a reporter, or a newsroom full of them, guard against sheltering in such truth-killing safe harbors?

To some degree, long-standing newsroom ethical guidelines can help stiffen reporters’ spines. The Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics has it right: journalists should “deny favored treatment to advertisers, donors, or any other special interests, and resist internal and external pressure to influence coverage.” I also like this from the Boston public media station WBUR:

“Decisions about what we cover, how we do our work, and what we report are made by our journalists. We are not influenced by those who provide WBUR with financial support.… We are not swayed in our journalistic mission by those in power or those who attempt to manipulate our journalism.’”

But even more important than adhering to ethics guidelines, I believe, is preserving the culture of journalistic independence that thrives at countless successful newsrooms and has shone at some of those now under the most pressure, such as the Associated Press, Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and CBS News. Maintaining such a culture—and thus summoning the courage to practice independent journalism in the face of any threats—has been a hallmark of these institutions for generations….

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Friday Open Forum (and a Couple of Other Things)

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Thing I: The most obvious ethics issue going on is, still, the post 2024 election Axis freakout. I’ve never seen anything remotely like it. When Ronald Reagan, whom the Democratic establishment in Washington regarded as a Neanderthal, washed-up actor whose most memorable film had him co-starring with a chimp (“Bedtime for Bonzo”), the reaction of liberals and Democrats wasn’t nearly this hysterical…or demeaning to them. The news media has been equally bonkers. The faces of network news anchors and hosts when a Trump administration supporter is talking are uniformly mask of pure hatred: I started noticing this yesterday. It reminded me of Katie Couric when she interviewed Ross Perot in the “Today Show” with an expression she reserved for people like David Duke…or Satan. Facial expressions and body language that tell an audience that an interviewer detests her interview subject is unprofessional, but it has now become the norm.

The same faces, restrained (and sometimes unrestrained fury) have been on display as the Democratic Senators question virtually all of Trump’s nominees. It says something that Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman, who was derided by the Right for running for the Senate after suffering actual brain damage from a stroke,has emerged as the sole voice of reason in his party. “There isn’t a constitutional crisis, and all of these things ― it’s just a lot of noise,” Fetterman said this week. “That’s why I’m only gonna swing on the strikes. I’m still wishing him the best. I’m effectively rooting for [Elon Musk] and all the nominees because they’re working for America.” This should be the position of all Democrats and progressives, especially since, unlike 2017, the majority of American feel the same way, and it is the way Americans have usually regarded newly elected POTUSes and their emerging administrations.

The fury being directed at Elon Musk, a brilliant man who is giving his time to his nation as it tries to solve the problems of government bloat, waste, corruption and abuse that everyone at least claims they want to solve is an embarrassment for the Democrats and their Axis allies. Infamous dim-bulb Georgia Congressman Hank Johnson (he’s the one who worried that Guam would flip over because too much U.S. military material was on the island) raged yesterday, “What does that mean when an unelected billionaire can waltz into our agencies and slash and burn the whole thing to the ground like a Taliban terrorist, This level of corruption is shocking. President Trump and the Republicans in Congress, all of whom have abrogated their legislative power to the King, have handed the keys to the nation’s treasury to unelected co-president Elon Musk. Their actions are taking what we know as corruption to a whole new level. This is Banana Republic style corruption at its ugliest.” I guess it shouldn’t be surprising that this idiot doesn’t know how the Executive Branch works, but the frightening thing is that so many lawyers are behaving similarly based on their social media rants. Is it possible that they are really this stupid.

Thing 2: The guest post submissions I solicited a week ago are finally coming in: another will go up today. I thank you all: what I have seen so far is of excellent quality. This effort to try to keep up with an unprecedented wave of ethics stories while freeing me from a permanent government and politics beat is important; I also want to emphasize that it does not eliminate the Comment of the Day feature here. (I think I have at least one of those languishing).

I’m sorry: that was a longer intro than I anticipated.

The stage is yours.