“Nah there’s no mainstream media bias”

“Republicans Pounced” So Hard That Biden’s FAA Chief Nominee Who Was Completely Unqualified Had To Withdraw [Link Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

That’s the embarrassingly unfit Biden nominee to head the Federal Aviation Administration above during his confirmation hearing, in the process of saying, “Huh?” or “Whaa?” which characterized his response to material questions from Senators regarding the job he irresponsibly agreed to take. Ethics Alarms wrote about the awful performance of Phil Washington here, concluding in part,

What is ominous about Washington’s hearing responses is that he apparently didn’t feel it necessary to educate himself regarding the subject matter of his appointment at all.

This is a pattern with Biden’s “diversity” appointments, as illustrated just last week by the hearing responses of a nominee for a district court judgeship. Apparently, however, the mainstream news media considers Republicans mean and probably racist to ask questions designed to find out if the designated head of the FAA knows enough to keep planes from falling out of the sky. Here’s Reuters:

Exclusive: Biden nominee to head FAA withdraws after Republican criticism:

WASHINGTON, March 25 (Reuters) – U.S. President Joe Biden’s nominee to head the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is withdrawing his nomination after Republican criticism that he was not qualified to serve WASHINGTON, March 25 (Reuters) – U.S. President Joe Biden’s nominee to head the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is withdrawing his nomination after Republican criticism that he was not qualified to serve as the top aviation regulator.

False. Washington withdrew his nomination because his pathetic responses to legitimate questions raised serious doubts that he was qualified to serve as the top aviation regulator. Naturally, the media wants to blame Republicans, because that’s how journalists see their job now. Only two people are at fault for Washington’s fall: Washington, for accepting a nomination for a position he seemingly lacked qualifications for and not having the diligence or integrity to prepare for questioning, and the President, who again seemed to elevate skin-tone over experience and qualifications for an important position. Reuters dutifully related the White House spin: “an onslaught of unfounded Republican attacks on Mr Washington’s service and experience irresponsibly delayed this process, threatened unnecessary procedural hurdles on the Senate floor, and ultimately have led him to withdraw his nomination today.”

Reuters didn’t think the serious allegations that Washington was corrupt were worthy of mentioning. Senator Ted Cruz provided details on a criminal investigation involving Washington:

“Unfortunately, the problems with Mr. Washington’s nomination don’t end with his lack of aviation experience. There are also serious concerns regarding outstanding allegations that Mr. Washington engaged in misconduct during his time as the head of the Los Angeles Metro. He has been named in multiple search warrants in an ongoing criminal public corruption investigation, and he’s been the subject of multiple whistleblower complaints.

“One search warrant was executed just last September, not very long ago. It contained allegations that Mr. Washington pushed forward lucrative no-bid contracts to a politically-connected nonprofit to run a sexual harassment hotline that was hardly ever used, and that he did so in order to stay in the good graces of a powerful politician on LA Metro’s board. The allegations are the kind of local corruption sadly we see far too often across this country, in both parties.

“But a whistleblower who exposed the details of this alleged pay-to-play contracting scheme claims to have been retaliated against by Mr. Washington. After Mr. Washington left the LA Metro the agency settled these claims with the whistleblower for $625,000. I practiced law for a long time. you did as well. A $625,000 check is not a nuisance check. It’s not a “go away” check. It’s indicative that there’s a real there, there. Whistleblowers don’t get settlements for more than a half a million dollars if their claim is baseless.”

To Washington’s credit, if he had any choice in the matter, at least he had the sense to pull his name.

On Andrea Mitchell’s Anti-DeSantis Lie And Aftermath: A “Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!” Classic

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Was I dreaming, or was Andrea Mitchell once a relatively trustworthy journalist? Was it working at MSNBC that rotted her professionalism away completely, as with poor Chris Matthews?

Because this is disgusting.

Last week, on her pompously titeled show “Andrea Mitchell Reports,” Mitchell asked Kamala Harris, “What does Governor Ron Desantis not know about black history and the black experience when he says that slavery and the aftermath of slavery should not be taught to Florida schoolchildren?” Florida’s governor never said that, not has he advocated that, nor has any other Republican official or pundit not now residing in a padded cell. That’s a deliberately dishonest Democratic, anti-DeSantis, pro-Critical Race Theory talking point designed for consumption by lazy, gullible and uninformed citizens.

Harris might have won a bit of respect had she corrected Mitchell, but she’s an unethical hack too, so naturally she acted as if it was a fair question.Or she didn’t know it was nonsense: with Harris its hard to tell.

DeSantis’s press secretary was on the job, tweeting,

Indeed it does. From the  state requirements,  guidelines DeSantis supported and approved: Continue reading →

Presidents Day Ethics Warm-Up: Sick Of Presidents Edition

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

Usually Ethics Alarms has a special Presidents Day feature, but not this year. I hope the mood passes, but right now I am thoroughly sick of the office. Three passions have driven the course of my life, beliefs, interest, pursuits, education, relationships and careers: baseball, Gilbert and Sullivan, and the Presidents of the United States. At this moment, I am disgusted with two of the three.

The accolades being heaped on Jimmy Carter as he has announced that he will wait to die with his family near rather than seek more medical care further sours my mood, because it cripples me with cognitive dissonance. All Presidents deserve the nation’s gratitude and respect, and Carter has led a life devoted to public service. Yet he was a terrible President, and did as much damage to the nation in his four years as any modern POTUS—at least until Joe Biden arrived.

1. “Red Joan” Not helping my mood was watching “Red Joan,” the 2019 British film celebrating the foolish Melita Stedman Norwood, a British civil servant who became a KGB spy in the post-war years. She was convinced that she was doing a good and ethical thing to send nuclear secrets to Stalin’s government so the USSR could develop its own atom bomb. The movie is fictionalized enough that Norwood, played by Judy Dench, is given a different name (Joan Stanley), but the beliefs she espouses are accurate representations of Norwood’s various explanations and rationalizations.

She thought Communism was the hope of the future; she thought the Russians “deserved” to have the nuclear advances developed by the U.S. and Great Britain shared with them; she thought the US using the atom bomb to end World War II was mass murder; and she believed that giving the Soviets the ability to wield nuclear power would prevent World War III—and continued to justify her treachery with the last excuse after she was exposed and caught in her 80s, taking credit for “saving millions of lives.”

My head exploded when the British nuclear scientist who was her lover erupted over learning that she had sent his work to the Soviets, telling her it was madness to give such secrets to a “ruthless dictator” like Stalin. “But we didn’t know that then!” Joan protests.

That’s what ethicists call “contrived ignorance.” Continue reading →

The State Dept.’s Online News Blacklist: Unconstitutional And Sinister, But The MSM Doesn’t Care, And The Public Is Too Ignorant To Object

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

That’s quite an ironic masthead, as you will soon see.

Reason Magazine reports:

The Global Disinformation Index (GDI) is a British organization that evaluates news outlets’ susceptibility to disinformation. The ultimate aim is to persuade online advertisers to blacklist dangerous publications and websites.

One such publication, according to GDI’s extremely dubious criteria, is Reason.

GDI’s recent report on disinformation notes that the organization exists to help “advertisers and the ad tech industry in assessing the reputational and brand risk when advertising with online media outlets and to help them avoid financially supporting disinformation online.”

The U.S. government evidently values this work; in fact, the State Department subsidizes it. The National Endowment for Democracy—a nonprofit that has received $330 million in taxpayer dollars from the State Department—contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to GDI’s budget, according to an investigation by The Washington Examiner‘s Gabe Kaminsky.

The other publications on the US government supported blacklist, which lists the 10 “riskiest online news outlets,”are the New York Post, Real Clear Politics, The Daily Wire, The Blaze, One America News Network, The Federalist, Newsmax, The American Spectator, and The American Conservative.

No viewpoint discrimination there!

Continue reading →

I Excuse Rob Reiner For Saying Something This Stupid Because He’s An Actor. For A Pundit Inflicted On The Public By The New York Times To Say It Is Journalistic Malpractice

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Once again, Michelle Goldberg pulls into the lead for “Worst and Most Biased New York Times Columnist.” This is impressive, because so many Times columnists are unethical blights on national soul. Paul Krugman, Gail Collins, Charles M. Blow, Maureen Dowd, Jamelle Bouie…it’s an awful group; I could teach a “Bias Makes You Stupid” ethics course using only their columns as materials. I doubt that even these pundits would be foolish enough to claim Biden is a “great President.” Here I am, still comparing records to determine if he’ll be regarded as the worst President ever, and she claims that.

I try to rate Presidents by their own standards, and by his own stated standards, Biden has been a failure. He said he needed to bring a divided country together, and by fully placing himself in thrall to the most radical segments of the Left, he has made the partisan and ideological divide worse, and dangerously so. Like Obama, his policies and rhetoric have exacerbated racial tensions. Long a supporter of the military, he has overseen a brutal weakening of the Armed Forces, by making woke indoctrination a priority over national defense. A supposed women’s rights advocate, Biden has allowed trans-mania to undermine women’s sports. While giving lip service to Constitutional Rights, his administration has used its power and influence to illegally urge private entities to censor speech. He has allowed the National Debt to explode; he has presided over such extreme inflation that wage increases cannot keep up. The horde of illegal immigrants pouring over the border has never been more overwhelming, yet he allows his Vice President and Cabinet members to claim that “the border is secure.” He has openly endorsed racial discrimination in his appointments. After joining in the Democratic chorus that Trump “undermined democratic institutions,” Biden has used the “bully pulpit” institution to focus hate on political opponents. His Justice Department allowed illegal harassment of Supreme Court members. The FBI has been revealed as partisan and corrupt. Under his Transportation Secretary there have been more crises in the system than at any time since 9/11. His fecklessness in international relations allowed Putin to feel secure in invading Ukraine. Biden has harmed the nation with purely symbolic and otherwise useless climate change measures, like cancelling the XL Pipeline. Crime rates are soaring; and worst of all, he has indulged his party’s increasing thirst for constraining personal liberties, free expression and dissent.

I could go on, but it is exhausting and depressing.

And Michelle Goldberg says Biden is a great President, because… Continue reading →

And There It Is, The Smoking Gun! A Pulitzer-Winning Journalist Declares That His Biased Partisan Opinion Is “Fact”

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

This is a fact: most of today’s journalists really think like this, being arrogant, self-inflated, ignorant and incompetent hacks who believe “journalism” means advancing the “greater good” through their craft, the “greater good as defined, of course, by them..

During a National Press Club panel last month supposedly on the journalistic challenges of covering extremism—meaning “How do we make sure as many Democrats are elected as possible, since that is the party 98% of us support?”, Wesley Lowery, the former Washington Post reporter who won the Pulitzer Prize for journalism for his coverage of the Ferguson race riots, told his fawning audience,

“We have one political party that traffics in the same talking points as white supremacists, be it on immigration, be it on Muslims, be it on any number of issues, where the mainstream political rhetoric could be written by avowed racists…I’ll be honest, I don’t think very much about the mantle of neutrality. It’s either raining outside or it’s not raining outside. I’m not particularly interested in sounding neutral about which it is….[The Republican Party] is a mix of nativism, of anti-urbanism, of anti-cosmopolitanism, a fear of immigrants. It’s the exact same things that drove the Klan movement of the 1920s. But to say that in public—the way that Newsbusters is going to headline the write-up of this panel is going to be that I compared Donald Trump to the Klan. Right? Now this is a literal true factual description. How can we understand our moment if we are not allowed to make any comparison or add any context?”

Continue reading →

The Mainstream Media’s Reflex Defense of Biden’s Classified Documents Is A “Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!” Classic

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

The excellent substack newsletter “Public” has an excellent summary of how flagrantly the news media set out to spin the still unraveling Joe Biden classified document story. The article notes that in their zeal to protect the “good” party (for that’s their mission now) news outlets got way ahead of the facts, and now have to extract themselves from a mess of their own making. Yesterday the Washington Post yesterday published a piece trying to excuse its reporters’ bias by claiming that they tried to be fair and balanced. Read the whole Public article, but here are the highlights: Continue reading →

On The Biden Administration’s Proposed Gas Stove Ban

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

If this doesn’t make a lot of Americans understand the conservative agenda items seeking smaller government, less powerful government agencies and reduced federal regulation, nothing will.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission is opening a period of public comments on the “dangers of gas stoves.” An estimated 40% of the public uses gas stoves. Most restaurants use gas stoves; some foreign cuisines, like Chinese varieties, depend on them. Nobody has complained noticeably about gas stoves being deadly in the 200 years they have been in use. Never mind: CPCP commissioner Richard Trumka Jr. told Bloomberg News, “This is a hidden hazard. Any option is on the table. Products that can’t be made safe can be banned.”

How are gas stoves “unsafe”? The EPA and WHO say they “emit pollutants including nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide and fine particulate matter” above levels deemed acceptable. The sudden rush to ban the stoves appears to have been triggered by (or was waiting around hoping to find such a claim as) a single study published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. Of course, the Climate Nazis have been agitating about gas stoves on the sidelines for decades, which, they say, “jump-starts childhood asthma, increases the risk of respiratory problems, and emits planet-warming gasses.” Naturally, then, the mainstream media can be expected to cheer-lead the latest government effort to use the environment as an excuse to control American lives and choices just a bit more, because they know best. The Washington Post’s climate change propagandist gave her seal of approval yesterday.

Don’t worry about the extra costs of getting those electric ovens, she assures us. After all,

…the Inflation Reduction Act, a landmark climate bill passed last year, includes cash to help low- and moderate-income households move away from their gas stoves. Starting later this year, millions of Americans could get up to $840 off the cost of an electric or induction stove.

Inflation reduction! Landmark! Hand-outs for low- and moderate-income households, as long as they spend the money on what they’re told to! National debt? What’s that? Nah, the mainstream media isn’t pimping for the Democrats! Why would anyone think that?

Continue reading →

Two Unethical Headlines…

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

That’s a faked headline. No such op-ed ever ran in the Times, but it nearly got me. I saw it on several conservative sites, some quite reliable, but something in my softly pinging ethics alarms warned me that I should check it out before referring to it anywhere. Sure enough: “No such article exists. A fabricated headline about bullying was made to look like it came from an opinion piece by the outlet, a spokesperson with The New York Times confirmed.” It should be plain why any regular reader of the Times would assume that headline above was real. It is no more ridiculous than any number of Times op-ed headlines. A few years ago, one Times “expert” advocated allowing children—like sixth graders—to vote. A headline from 2021 read, “Yes, kink belongs at Pride. And I want my kids to see it.” Another: “Want to Get Rid of Trump? Only Fox News Can Do It.” Here’s one: “Trump’s Nacissiam Could Cost Us Our Lives.”

Add to the many examples of Times punditry bordering on lunacy the rampant Wuhan virus phobia and hysteria promoted by the Times itself (among others), and the widespread “ends justify the means” embrace the political Left has favored of late. In this context, a Times column advocating the position that we have to bully kids in order to save them is completely plausible. Continue reading →

The Associated Press’s Stunning Corruption [Link Fixed]

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

The corruption, bias, and ethical void within the mainstream media is now difficult to overstate. The latest revelation is so damning, 95% of the media isn’t reporting it, since it points to the ethics rot of one of its most esteemed members. This is the news media’s recent tactic to avoid being exposed as the lying, manipulating propaganda agents they and their partisan allies in Big Tech and social media are. Hide the facts

The Associated Press, the august and once respected newswire service, accepts donations to fund its climate coverage. In 2022, the AP received $8 million in donations to fund its climate doom reporting, with money coming from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Quadrivium, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation, all climate change alarmists. The AP isn’t alone: what it calls philanthropy-funded news is a trend, with other news sources accepting charitable funds as well. The Salt Lake Tribune, The Seattle Times and the New York Times are also accepting grants from interest groups.

Yes, non-profits are interest groups.

The $8 million over three years allows the AP to hire 20 more “climate journalists.” AP News Vice President Brian Carovillano says without giggling that the money comes “without strings attached” and asserts that funders have “no influence on the stories conducted.” He’s lying. He’s unquestionably lying: if I give a publication 8 million dollars to hire ethics specialists to report on the importance of ethics, those hires are certain to influence the publication’s content. Is there any chance the “climate journalists” will write stories about how so much climate science is speculative, politically-slanted hooey? I think not.

Continue reading →