“Gotcha!” Of “Gotcha’s!” The Washington Post Admits That It “Stands By” False Reporting!

Good to know. Thanks, WaPo!

In one of the Jonathan Turley essays discussed here, the increasingly red pilled GW law prof appropriately scored the Washington Post’s partisan hack of hacks, Philip Bump, whose consistently unethical reporting jaunts would be a blight on responsible journalism if responsible journalism was around any more to be blighted. A burst of exorbitant loyalty that the Post will rue moved the paper to rise to Bump’s defense with the ill-advised message to Turley you see above.

I bet Turley was laughing out loud as he loosened his fingers to type a follow-up article for his blog. The Post had handed him one of the great “gotcha‘s!” in “Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias!” history. By saying that it “stood behind” the reporting of their partisan stooge, the Post had endorsed now indisputable examples of biased, partisan, incompetent, irresponsible and dishonest reporting. Turley could now use the full range of his legal talents to prepare a crushing brief to show, not only the depth of Bump’s corruption, but that of the Post’s as well!

And use it them he did.

Washington Post Stands by Philip Bump’s Claims on Lafayette Park, the Hunter Biden Laptop, and Other Controversial Claims is Turley’s gleeful headline. It deserved an exclamation point. The professor reviews Bump’s despicable work on the Lafayette Park kerfuffle, The Hunter Biden Laptop cover-up, the FBI’s Spying on the Trump Campaign, and the Russian Collusion hoax.

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Ethics Quote Of The Week: Lawyer John Eastman On The Georgia Trump Indictments

“I am here today to surrender to an indictment that should never have been brought.  It represents a crossing of the Rubicon for our country, implicating the fundamental First Amendment right to petition the government for redress of grievances.  As troubling, it targets attorneys for their zealous advocacy on behalf of their clients, something attorneys are ethically bound to provide and which was attempted here by “formally challeng[ing] the results of the election through lawful and appropriate means.”  – An opportunity never afforded them in the Fulton County Superior Court. Each Defendant in this indictment, no less than any other American citizen, is entitled to rely upon the advice of counsel and the benefit of past legal precedent in challenging what former Vice President Pence described as, “serious allegations of voting irregularities and numerous instances of officials setting aside state election law” in the 2020 election.  The attempt to criminalize our rights to such redress with this indictment will have – and is already having – profound consequences for our system of justice. My legal team and I will vigorously contest every count of the indictment in which I am named, and also every count in which others are named, for which my knowledge of the relevant facts, law, and constitutional provisions may prove helpful.  I am confident that, when the law is faithfully applied in this proceeding, all of my co-defendants and I will be fully vindicated.”

John Eastman, respected conservative legal scholar, lawyer, law professor and former Dean of Chapman University Law School, as he surrendered last week to authorities on charges in the Georgia case alleging an illegal plot to overturn the Trump’s 2020 election loss.

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“Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!” The Times’ Dishonest And Biased “Fact Check” On “Trump’s Election Lies”

If I never had occasion to write another ethics post about Donald Trump again, I would be thrilled. Unfortunately, he won’t shut up or disappear, and the Axis of Unethical Conduct (the “resistance,” the Democratic Party and the increasingly outrageous news media), recently joined by the justice system, won’t stop their misconduct.

Today the New York Times again disgraced themselves and their now shattered reputation for accuracy and fairness beyond what even I have come to expect. Signaling that Trump cannot expect anything approaching objective coverage and analysis of his various trials, the Times today offers a “fact check” headlined, “Fact-Checking the Breadth of Trump’s Election Lies: The former president faces multiple charges related to his lies about the 2020 election. Here’s a look at some of his most repeated falsehoods.”

I decided to factcheck the fact check, suspecting what I would find but in the end stunned by how openly the Times failed to deliver on what it promised. It’s astoundingly deceitful, and aimed at readers who just want to see Trump punished because they hate his guts. I won’t fisk the whole thing, but here’s more than enough to show you what the Times has become:

  • “…In public, he made more than 800 inaccurate claims about the election from the time the polls began closing on Nov. 3, 2020, to the end of his presidency, according to a database compiled by The Washington Post.”

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And Speaking Of Mainstream Media Bias, Spinning For Democrats And Misleading The Public, This NYT Report Is A Classic

When I read this astoundingly mendacious story in the Times, the first thing that I was reminded of was the memorable moment in “Plain Trains and Automobiles” when John Candy confidently tells a dubious state trooper that his burned out, roofless wreck of a car is “safe to drive.” (This goes right into the Ethics Alarms Clip archive.)

President Biden has repeatedly insisted that he has no knowledge of his son Hunter’s various sleazy business schemes, and that Joe never discussed Hunter’s money-making activities with him. Yet yesterday, in his nearly five hours of closed-door testimony to the House Oversight Committee, a former business partner of Hunter’s, Devon Archer, revealed that President Biden met with and spoke to his son Hunter’s international business associates on about 20 occasions as Hunter sought consulting deals (translation: lucrative influence and access peddling arrangements).

Hilariously, Archer claimed that the Joe Biden was not party to any of his son’s business deals. You see, Hunter Biden was just trying to sell the idea that he could provide access to his powerful father—by providing access to his powerful father. He was claiming that he could influence his father by showing that he could persuade him to pick up the phone, drop by and shake hands. Yet, reports the Times, Democrats on the panel insisted that it wasn’t what it was, by definition.

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Nate Silver Tells The Truth About Media Bias: Ethics Hero

The only surprising aspect of Nate Silver’s latest substack essay is that he actually wrote it and had the courage to put it on the web. He is honest about mainstream media bias, and until he got kicked off his own creation, the 538 blog, Silver was a willing accomplice in this rot in the foundation of our democracy, making a lot of money in the process. Now—finally—he’s using his substantial critical thinking and research skills to expose the bad guys (his former pals before they rejected him : yes, I suspect there’s a measure of vengeance in this)who continue to successfully warp public knowledge and the process of an informed democracy by convincing sufficient number of ovine citizens that the concept of progressive media bias is a right-wing conspiracy theory. The focus of his traitorous analysis is how Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter has helped address the effects of the media’s partisan bias.

In “Twitter, Elon and the Indigo Blob,” Silver becomes one of the very few progressives of note to admit what has been going on under their cultural assault. Some others include Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, and Bari Weiss, but Silver is more scientific and detached than any of them, and as a result, his analysis is more persuasive and, I hope, more disruptive to the blue wall of silence the progressive Borg has erected around a throbbing, obvious, disgusting truth.

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Easiest Ethics Quiz Ever!

Your Ethics Alarms Easiest Ethics Quiz of All Time is…

Do you detect any bias in the CNBC lists of the Best and Worst States to Live and Work in?

Here they are:

CNBC’s top 10 worst states to live and work for 2023 are

  1. Texas
  2. Oklahoma
  3. Louisiana
  4. South Carolina and Alabama (tie)
  5. Missouri
  6. Indiana
  7. Tennessee
  8. Arkansas
  9. Florida

CNBC’s top 10 best states to live and work for 2023 are

  1. Vermont
  2. Maine
  3. New Jersey
  4. Minnesota
  5. Hawaii
  6. Oregon
  7. Washington
  8. Massachusetts and  Colorado (tie)
  9. Connecticut

One of the criteria for determining the best states to live and work in is is the extent to which they permit relatively unrestricted abortion, since many single women regard this as a priority. Ironically, such states are not desirable places for unwanted children to ever have a chance live or work, but this was not one of the criteria.

USA Today and other mainstream media outlets reported the CNBC woke propaganda effort uncritically without noting the obvious. The USA Today article began, “How does life in your state compare to the rest of America?”

Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias!

At CNN, More Smoking Gun Evidence Of Malign Mainstream Media Partisan Bias

You have to feel a little bit sorry for Media Matters. The far-Left propaganda outlet that specializes in spinning for progressives while supposedly flagging “fake news” on the right has to restrict itself primarily to Fox News, though it does participate enthusiastically when it wants to assist the mainstream media in burying stories like the discovery of Hunter Biden’s laptop or the mysterious <cough!> discovery of cocaine in the White House. NewsBusters, in contrast, has almost the entire mainstream media spectrum to mine for outrageously biased and unethical news coverage, even with its own conservative bias in full operation. And the alleged giants of the once honorable field of journalism keep churning out frightening examples like this:

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This Biased Journalism Fiasco Explains So Much It Should Be Taught In Journalism AND Ethics Classes

Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias! And sure, journalism is a profession! You can always trust journalism icons!

No…no…and no.

Business Insider published an alleged news article headlined, “More people actually moved out of Florida than New York or California in 2021.” Part of the ongoing effort on both the political Rights and the Left to sink Florida Governor Ron DiSantis’s chances of keeping Donald Trump off the GOP 2024 Presidential ticket, the story claimed to debunk the conventional wisdom that the ultra Woke states are bleeding residents while DiSantis’s state’s population is growing. 674,740 residents left Florida, BI told us, exceeding the total of 433,402 residents who had fled California and the 287,249 residents moving out of New York.

It was pure confirmation bias. The stats were unbelievable on their face, but the Business Insider staff believed them anyway, because they wanted to. After being roundly smacked on social media, BI reversed itself with a replacement post headlined, “We got it wrong: More people moved out of New York and California than Florida in 2021,” that revealed,

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One Ethics Villain Promotes Another, As The Associated Press Pimps For Black Lives Matter On Its Anniversary

Sometimes an ethics story defies my ability to devise an appropriate headline. The AP story “Black Lives Matter movement marks 10 years of activism and renews its call to defund the police” is a prime example. The story is even worse than the headline (“activism” is a deceitful and deceptive euphemism for violence, lies, divisiveness and fraud), with the once-trustworthy news organization displaying the worst of U.S. journalism’s ethics rot.

The scam that is Black Lives Matter has done nothing but damage since its emergence in 2013, but to hear the AP tell it, this is a movement for Americans to honor. Let’s see…I haven’t checked yet, and I promise to reveal what I find: is the AP’s reporter who wrote this junk, Aaron Morrison, an African American?

Why yes, he is! What a coinkydink. This piece of propaganda could only have been written by a devoted supporter; the AP rigged the story. That’s American journalism in 2023.

Let me provide some highlights with commentary:

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Playing Bud Light Spin The Bottle

The facts are pretty straightforward. The parent company of Budweiser hired an ambitious, arrogant, woke woman to take over the marketing of Bud Light, which was the best selling beer in America. Having little understanding of the product’s market, and being so infected with wokism that she couldn’t comprehend the depth of the cultural divide regarding the current pro-transgender fad, she made the bone-headed decision to associate the brand with Dylan Mulvaney, a biological male internet performance artist who poses as female, both satirizing genuine transsexuals and celebrating them. From that moment, Bud Light was in a binary trap of its own making with no way out. The reaction against the botched marketing decision was over-whelming, with calls for a Bud Light boycott and a sudden fall-off ins sales. When the company tried to backtrack, including the sacking of its clueless marketing guru, the LGTBQ market also turned on the brand.

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