“Nah there’s no mainstream media bias”

Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias! George Stephanopoulos vs. Rep. Byron Donalds

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

As everyone knows by now, Donald Trump, appearing at the Black Journalists Association conference, responded to a question about whether he regards Harris as a D.E.I candidate by going in another direction, one that raised the issue of Harris’s integrity and ever-changing positions.

“Well, I can say, no, I think it’s maybe a little bit different,” Trump began. “So, I’ve known her a long time indirectly, not directly very much, and she was always of Indian heritage. And she was only promoting Indian heritage. I didn’t know she was black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn black. And now she wants to be known as black. So, I don’t know, is she Indian or is she black? But you know what, I respect either one.”

Trump was trolling, as usual, and spitting into the metaphorical wind, also as usual, so the reaction was entirely predictable, as EA already discussed here. It’s a week later, and the Axis is still trying to make a Trump ad lib the focus of its campaign “coverage.”

On ABC today, George Stephanopoulos couldn’t restrain his inner Democrat hack and flipped out because Trump surrogate Rep. Byron Donalds refused to concede that Harris’s manipulation of her various ethnic identity cards wasn’t a legitimate point for Trump to make. Here’s the full exchange:

Continue reading →

Just In Case You’ve Forgotten, April Ryan is Still an Ethics Dunce, the News Media Is Still Biased, and Trump is Still Not a Weenie

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

I guess there is still some hope that race-baiting, anti-white racist, Trump-Deranged, dumb-as-a-shoehorn journalist April Ryan is slowly sliding into oblivion where she belongs. Once she was a CNN correspondent, which admittedly is nothing to be proud of, but now she toils for the Grio, a racist, race-baiting, American television network and website that says its area is “black news.” Funny, I thought news was news for everyone! Oh well, live and learn. Next on Ryan’s career freefall? Oh, maybe Hip Hop Weekly? But never mind.

April has a long Ethics Alarms dossier, the most recent entry in 2020, when she reprimanded reporters for writing about a leaked recording of Joe Biden making unpalatable comments about the “defund the police” movement. As Jonathan Turley said at the time, “[W]e are moving dangerously close to a de facto state media with the cooperation of Big Tech companies.  Ryan believes that it is outrageous to rely on unapproved material if it is critical of Joe Biden (despite her use of such material for the last four years against Trump).”

Indeed she does. My favorite Ryan episode was in 2017, when she hectored Trump press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders at the end of a press briefing in which Sanders confirmed the administration’s position that toppling statues of historical figures is both bad history and bad civics by shouting, “Sarah, is slavery wrong? Sarah, is slavery wrong? Does this administration think that slavery was wrong? Sarah, does this administration believe slavery was wrong?”

A class act, to be sure.

The latest April Ryan sighting came as Donald Trump bravely and appropriately agreed to take questions in Chicago today from members of the National Association of Black Journalists. Ryan, of course, was in the camp of the members who have pledged to follow the “Trump is a racist” narrative, contrived though it is. “The reports of attacks on Black women White House correspondents by the then president of the United States are not myth or conjecture, but fact,” Ryan tweeted, or Xed. The group’s co-chairwoman of the convention, Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah, resigned in protest: after all, why give a Presidential candidate a chance to change minds that have already been made up? Yeah, this is the perfect group for April Ryan.

Continue reading →

Today’s “Nah There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!” (Or “Nah, The Mainstream Media Doesn’t Want to Rig The Election!”) Note Of the Day…[Expanded and Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

From Axios…

Nice.

There have been a lot of iconic or otherwise memorable photographs of Presidents over the decades that placed a sitting POTUS in a positive or sympathetic context. They were all liberally used to promote that President’s leadership and popularity. Such as…

and…

and

and…

and…

and..

and…

and…

Continue reading →

Wow. The Trump-Deranged Media Hacks Are Still Flogging the Ridiculous Alito Flag Angle!

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Now this is desperation. The upside-down U.S. flag incident that the New York Times treated as a “scoop” three-and-a-half years after it took place started falling apart almost immediately, so then the Times concocted an even more attenuated flag-based theory that Justice Joseph Alito had signaled his approval of the January 6, 2021 rioting at the Capitol. In neither case was there any evidence that Alito flew the flags or was aware of their significance; he explained the incidents, but, see, because he’s a conservative SCOTUS Justice, the Axis just assumes he must be lying.

The fact that the second flag was used by Black Lives Matter more prominently than by the J-6 idiots? Never mind. That the same flag had been flying without incident for 50 years outside the City Hall of the wokiest city on the continent? So what? That the sainted Justice Ginsburg unambiguously signaled her conflict of interest regarding all things Trump with a symbolic protest she made explicit? That the attack on Alito had to rely on the pre-women’s liberation, anti-feminist theory that a husband is responsible for the conduct of his wife? Hey, this is the American Left of 2024: Double Standards and Hypocrisy Don’t Matter when you’re trying to save democracy! That the Washington Post reporter who investigated the Alito home’s fluttering distress symbol when it happened decided it was a proverbial nothingburger?

About that…. serial Ethics Alarms Ethics Dunce Eric Wemple, who is the Washington Post’s “media critic” these days, thus telling you all you need to know about the credibility of the Washington Post, was actually allowed to issue an op-ed yesterday condemning his own paper for its “deference to Justice Alito” handing “a scoop to the New York Times.” In this thing, Wemple really says that the Post ignored a “sizzling tip” in 2021. That there was a nautical distress signal flag flying over the Alito home was a sizzling tip! Sizzling! Yes, he really wrote that.

Continue reading →

Final Ethics Observations on the Media’s Alito Flag Set-Up

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

…the main one being that the distress signal is appropriate, because the Axis of Unethical Conduct proved with this fiasco that it is ruthless, shameless, untrustworthy, and will do anything in 2024 to mislead the public if it might mean a few extra votes for Democrats. Or maybe the main one is that your friendly neighborhood ethicist was right about this story from the very start, which is why Fredo asked to make another appearance as my spokesman.

And this, my friends, is why we can’t have nice things.

Or a functioning republic.

Let me not get to far ahead of myself. Right now, the whole, biased, corrupt, anti-Trump, anti-conservative, Biden-protecting propaganda-spewing mainstream news media, the third partner in the Ethics Alarms-dubbed Axis of Unethical Conduct (“the resistance,” and Desperate Democrats completing the troika) is doing a mass Jumbo (“Flags? What flags?”) regarding what was its favorite earth-shattering scandal a week ago. This sudden amnesia was brought on because the Washington Post, perhaps seeking to embarrass its old rival, effectively eviscerated the Times’ “Get Justice Alito!” scoop, which EA first discussed here, and subsequently here, here, and here. (Don’t make me describe it again: I was sick of it days ago.)

Two days ago, the Post revealed that it had known about the first flag episode more than three years ago and had decided that it wasn’t newsworthy (because, as the revealed facts showed clearly, it wasn’t). Now-retired SCOTUS reporter Robert Barnes traveled to the Alito’s home on January 20, 2021, the day of Joe Biden’s inauguration, to follow-up on an anonymous tip he had received from some Alito-hating asshole neighbor about the flag. After investigating, Barnes and the Post concluded there was no story, because the flag-raising appeared to be the work of Martha-Ann Alito, Alito’s wife, not the Justice, as part of her dispute with her neighbors.

Continue reading →

Oh-Oh! Now It Seems That TWO Historical Flags Someone Else Has Used As Free Speech Were Seen Flying Over a Justice Alito Residence! Clearly, This Violates the “Obscure Flags” Section in the Judicial Code of Ethics….

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

The contrived Justice Alito flags controversy has exactly one valid use: it shows that the panicked Axis has lost all sense of proportion and self-preservation, that its ethics alarms are deader than Generalissimo Franco, and that between now and November nothing can be ruled out, from violent uprisings to horrified leftist wackos tearing off their clothes, painting themselves mauve and running amuck coast to coast while shouting dirty limericks. Good to know.

Here’s the New York Times, which launched the previous “Bad flag, BAD flag! “scoop (as of this moment, the Times has published nine—NINE!—articles about the flags):

Last summer, two years after an upside-down American flag was flown outside the Virginia home of Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., another provocative symbol was displayed at his vacation house in New Jersey, according to interviews and photographs.

This time, it was the “Appeal to Heaven” flag, which, like the inverted U.S. flag, was carried by rioters at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Also known as the Pine Tree flag, it dates back to the Revolutionary War, but largely fell into obscurity until recent years and is now a symbol of support for former President Donald J. Trump, for a religious strand of the “Stop the Steal” campaign and for a push to remake American government in Christian terms.

Three photographs obtained by The New York Times, along with accounts from a half-dozen neighbors and passers-by, show that the Appeal to Heaven flag was aloft at the Alito home on Long Beach Island in July and September of 2023. A Google Street View image from late August also shows the flag.

In two words, so what?

Continue reading →

“Stop Making Me Defend Justice Alito!”—The Stupid Sequel

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

I can’t believe the Axis is still running with the ridiculous attack on Justice Alito because his house had an upside-down flag flying after the January 6, 2021 Capitol riot. I’m this close to resigning from the Association of Professional Responsibility Lawyers because so many members—about 75% of the organization is Trump-Deranged—are trying to support the claim that the episode represents “an appearance of impropriety” requiring the Justice to recuse from cases involving the election, trump, or future elections.

Ann Althouse somehow dredged up this follow up by a silly substacker named Chris Geidner who claims to be an “award-winning journalist.’ People actually pay to read what this idiot writes? Clearly, I’m doing something wrong….

Continue reading →

Unethical Quote of the Week: NBC’s “Meet the Press” Host Kristen Welker

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

“Will you accept the election results no matter what happens?”

—Kristin Welker, “Meet the Press’s” latest star in an interview of Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla), demonstrating that she’s not much of an improvement over her Democratic Party operative predecessor, Chuck Todd.

“Will you accept the election results no matter what happens?” If Welker were brilliant, which she is obviously not, I would give her credit for a masterful “when did you stop beating your wife” “gotcha!” question. As it is, I’ll credit her for giving us an invaluable example of how much the mainstream media is committed to enabling an undemocratic Democratic Party.

Continue reading →

Stop Making Me Defend Justice Alito!

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Ugh. The old “public officials are responsible for keeping their wives in line” canard, which for some reason is only applied to conservatives by the mainstream news media. Or we could file this under “Hail Mary attempts to get the Supreme Court’s conservative Justices to recuse themselves so SCOTUS won’t strike down the totalitarian Left’s conspiracy to “get” Donald Trump by any means necessary, and law, ethics and democracy be damned.”

A New York Times headline yesterday shouted, “At Justice Alito’s House, a ‘Stop the Steal’ Symbol on Display.” Wow, what symbol was that? It was an upside-down American flag, seen flying over (much reviled, almost as much as Clarence Thomas) Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s house for a few days in January 2021. Because the flag was up in the period between the January 6 riot at the Capitol Joe Biden’s inauguration, the Times infers that the flag meant that Alito thinks the 2020 election was stolen from former President Trump.

Of course the Times dredged up some unethical ethics experts to deceive their readers about the seriousness of this. “Judicial experts said in interviews that the flag was a clear violation of ethics rules, which seek to avoid even the appearance of bias, and could sow doubt about Justice Alito’s impartiality in cases related to the election and the Capitol riot,” writes the Times, ostentatiously avoiding mentioning the names of the experts who said, as I would have, “What? This is nothing!”

“It might be his spouse or someone else living in his home, but he shouldn’t have it in his yard as his message to the world,” said Professor Amanda Frost at the University of Virginia law school. This is “the equivalent of putting a ‘Stop the Steal’ sign in your yard, which is a problem if you’re deciding election-related cases,” she said.

Uh, no it’s not, but that analysis is the equivalent of the professor wearing an “I am a partisan hack!” sign on her forehead.

Continue reading →

So It’s Come To This, Has It? “Media Watchdogs” Now Watch Out For Political Correctness Non-Conformity…

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Can you spot what’s troubling, alarming, ominous, about the photo above?

Feathers!

That’s Washington Commanders (Shhhhh: they used to be called “the Redskins”) coach Dan Quinn above wearing a T-shirt depicting two feathers hanging off the Commanders’ “W” logo. The New York Times instantly did its best Donald Sutherland (in the “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” finale, when the protagonist of the movie has been revealed as completely pod-ified) imitation….

…with a story headlined, “Dan Quinn dons unsanctioned Commanders shirt as future of team’s stadium discussed on Capitol Hill.” Playing the part of co-opted Donald was Times sportswriter Ben Standig, who blew the metaphorical whistle on Twtter/”X” writing, “So, the shirt. This is not a team-sanctioned item. Not sure if Quinn got this at an Etsy shop or elsewhere. Do your thing, Twitter.”

You know: cancel him, shun him, brand him a racist, get him fired.

Oooh, “unsanctioned”! How long before all of us will need permission from our enlightened, woke and empowered censors before our shirts can be safely purchased and worn without dire social consequences?

Standig got right on the scandal of the Commanders’s coach daring to wear a shirt that evoked his team’s previous nickname, which was finally changed when—you should be able to recite this by now—-“a lifetime black petty criminal overdosing on fentanyl and resisting a lawful arrest died under the knee of a bad white cop in Minnesota.” This incident obviously mandated that an NFL team in Washington D.C. capitulate to long-standing contrived protests over a team name (that was never intended as a slur nor taken as one by the vast majority of Native Americans) and a now-banned team logo designed by a prominent leader of Montana’s Blackfeet tribe.

I live in the Washington, D.C. area. Literally nobody likes the politically correct, “inoffensive” name “Commanders” except the non-football fan activists who demonstrated their power by forcing the team to change it. It’s like a scalp hanging from their belts.

In related news, Rhode Island has announced that it will join 11 other states and require all lawyers must submit to DEI indoctrination—sorry, training—in order to maintain their law licenses.

Resistance is futile.

And, may I note with pride, where else on the World Wide Web will an NFL coach’s choice of attire evoke pop culture references to “Apocalypse Now,” “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” and “Star Trek: The Next Generation”?