NBC

Silly Ethics Dunce: NBC Sports

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

It almost seems absurd to mention this trivial ethics misdemeanor when discussing a soulless, greedy TV network that happily promotes a sport that sends young men onto its fields to maim their brains so team owners and sponsors can make millions. Yet somehow this level of moronic rote wokeness deserves our attention.

Here is part of what the election last month was a reaction against. Let’s hope NBC and the equally disgusting National Football League are tardy enough reading the metaphorical room that they both lose audiences, popularity and millions. I know it won’t happen. But I’m a dreamer…

Jayden Daniels, the quarterback of the Washington Commanders, set a record last night as he led his politically correctly named team into the NFL play-offs while breaking the old record for most rushing yards by a rookie quarterback. A Washington QB had held the previous record too: Robert Griffin III ran for 815 yards in his rookie year (2012), and Daniels topped him with 830.

So NBC quickly put that graphic up that you see above, but not before blotting out the name of Griffin’s team when he was playing…the REDSKINS!

NBC had to protect the delicate sensibilities of Sunday night football fans who thrill to see players break bones and crack skulls, making sure that their viewers wouldn’t suffer psychic trauma by being reminded that the Commanders once had a racist name, or so the Mad Left decreed. Thus it made sense to a news organization that it should misrepresent history, tamper with evidence and sacrifice truth to satisfy progressive crazies—you know, like it has done regularly for years now—and as PBS was doing tonight until I couldn’t stand watching any more, running a documentary about what a great President Jimmy Carter was.

Nah, airbrushing away a team name on a jersey is petty censorship. I know it. I also know that a news organization that will bother lying about something nobody cares about won’t blink at lying when it advances its own interests.

Stupid Thanksgiving Tricks [Repaired]

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

“It’s The Great Stupid, Charlie Brown!”

1. I saw that meme on Facebook today. Is that the kind of misinformation social media platforms are supposed to censor, or is there value in learning that one’s Facebook friend is a moron?

2. On today’s Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade broadcast on NBC, three separate hosts mispronounced “Rockettes.” One called them the “Rockets,” another said “Rockeets,” and a third said “ROCK-ettes, with the accent on the first syllable. The Radio City Music Hall iconic kick-line dancers have been part of the parade for decades, and NBC has had broadcast rights for the event all year. Yet their “journalists” couldn’t bother to check to see what the perennial act is called? (Or learn to read?)

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Journalism! An NBC Reporter Steals a News Story on the FEMA Scandal, Tries To Blur it, Gets Caught…

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Three days ago, the Daily Wire broke the news that a FEMA employee ordered workers to bypass the homes of Trump supporters as they surveyed the damage caused by Hurricane Milton in Florida. This was a damning story in many respects; among them, Republican claims that this was happening were “fact-checked” by the Democratic Party allied media and declared “misinformation” before the truth came out.

The Daily Wire, Ben Shapiro’s conservative website, broke the story because the mainstream media was probably burying it, but once it was out, every outlet had to report it and credit the Wire. Well, almost every outlet. NBC Breaking News reporter Mirna Alsharif, formerly of CNN, used the Daily Wire report without giving credit to the source. Hey, maybe she should apply to be President of Harvard! Then she omitted key information to try to make the scandal less clear.

But social media pounced, as it should have. The reporter’s responses were unprofessional, to say the least. Then she killed her Twitter account after being thoroughly exposed….

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Why We Can’t Trust Polls, Chapter 6,741…

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

I saw the NBC poll showing President Biden leading Trump by 3% in a six-way race over the weekend. I thought, “What the hell? This is proof positive that the U.S. public is too stupid to vote, and needs to be put under a conservatorship or something. Had the “Trump is Hitler! AHHHHHHH!” propaganda campaign by Biden, the Democrats and the news media really obliterated the natural implications of facts, like the fact that the President’s mind is falling apart in chunks, and that leaving him in office amounts to surrendering to a Soviet-style shadow collective? As it quickly turned out, no, the demonization campaign probably got Trump shot, but the public as a whole isn’t quite that hopeless.

Oopsie! The network issued a correction yesterday, citing “an error with the original polling documents.” The corrected network’s online article reported that Trump led Biden by 3% in a six-way race including Green Party candidate Jill Stein, Libertarian Party candidate Chase Oliver and independent candidates Robert F. Kennedy, Jr and Cornel West.

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Biden Stabs Israel in the Back to Keep His Anti-Semitic Vote and Gets Justly Hammered For His Betrayal? Mainstream Media To The Rescue!

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

“Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias!” To be fair, it’s past time to rephrase the oft-used Ethics Alarm catch phase as, “Nah, the mainstream media doesn’t just take marching orders from the Democratic National Committee to cover for Biden’s indefensible leadership!”

Too long, I know. OK, it needs some work.

Suddenly, all through the news media over the weekend, the tale of how President Ronald Reagan intervened with a threat to withhold arms that had already been approved for delivery to Israel to force the nation to change its military strategy was being thrown in the faces of Biden critics and Israel supporters. Huh. Where did that come from?

Surprise! It came from the New York Times, the flagship of the corrupt, partisan media, just in time to fuel the “advocacy journalists'” efforts over the weekend to help block Israel’s right to defend its existence and its citizens from terrorism.

Interviewing GOP Senator Lindsey Graham, and by “interviewing” I mean debating as she took the side of Democrats, the Biden Administration, the anti-Semitic students roiling campuses and Hamas, NBC News anchor Kristen Welker said, “As you know, former President Ronald Reagan, on multiple occasions, withheld weapons to impact Israel’s military actions,” Welker said. “Did President Reagan show that using U.S. military aid, as leverage, can actually be an effective way to rein in and impact Israel’s policy?”

What a perfect factoid to weaponize for an appeal to authority and Rationalization #32. The Unethical Role Model: “He/She would have done the same thing”! The timely Times revelation: in August of 1982, Israel was shelling Palestinian terrorist strongholds in Lebanon, then a failing state in the throes of a civil war, with Palestinian forces controlling territory on its southern border. President Reagan saw films of a Lebanese child horribly wounded in the attack, and called up then Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin to threaten a withdrawal of U.S. aid if the shelling didn’t stop. Begin gave in. The Times also informed its readers that President Eisenhower threatened economic sanctions and to cut off aid to force Israel to withdraw from the Sinai Peninsula after it invaded Egypt in 1956. So, the Times concluded, “If it was reasonable for the Republican presidential icon to limit arms to impose his will on Israel…it should be acceptable for the current Democratic president to do the same.” Well, the Times wrote “they argued,” meaning defenders of all-things Democrat, but we know, or should, that by “they” in such situations, the mainstream media means “we.”

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Ethical Quote Of The Month: Dan Abrams

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

“We are supposed to be in the business of calling out the spin, not creating it…If we want the public to trust us in the news business, how can the entities themselves lie or spin their own news?”

—Lawyer, TV pundit and news host (“Nightline”) Dan Abrams, condemning NBC’s story that Chuck Todd was leaving “Meet the Press” to spend more time with his family.

Oh, bingo, Dan! And the answer to Abrams’ rhetorical question is: Given how much, often and routinely they lie, news organizations shouldn’t expect the public to trust them, yet they do, because they have no respect for the public’s intelligence and no regard for the duty of journalists in a democracy to keep citizens informed.

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Unethical Quote Of The Week: Brian Stelter

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

“Will anyone be able to police what Carlson says, or is this the point? Is it just a free for all?”

—CNN exile Brian Stelter on NBC, reacting to the news that Tucker Carlson is moving his opinions and demagoguery to Twitter, where Elon Musk refuses to censor views Stelter and his ilk don’t agree with.

I know this keeps coming up, but when did the supposedly liberal side of the ideological divide start opposing free speech rather than defending it? How did it happen? Stelter just casually endorsed speech “policing” as if there is no problem with the concept. No ethics alarms pinged at all. I can see many reasons why a news network, even a conservative-biased one like Fox, wouldn’t want Carlson to be its public face, but Twitter’s purpose is to create a town square. Stelter’s complaint is like advocating for speakers in Hyde Park’s veritable Speakers Corner to be tackled if they offend the majority.

Stelter went on to say, “I think this is the point. It is a free-for-all. It’s what Elon Musk wants to provide. This move from Tucker may cement Twitter as a right-wing website.”

Wow. If a platform doesn’t censor speech, it must be “right-wing.” (How did this happen?)

Imagine: NBC hired this hack. By all means, as long as he’s roaming free, he should say whatever comes into his dishonest, biased, intellectually corrupt little mind. It’s informative: now we know the kind of news analysis the Peacock Network endorses.

I Don’t Understand NBC’s “Misinformation” Policy. OK, OK, I Think I Really Do….

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

I am tempted to conclude that it involves an official distinction between “good” misinformation and “bad” misinformation, the former being fake news that benefits Democrats, and the latter being actual facts that undermine progressive narratives.

For example, NBC has suspended veteran reporter Miguel Almaguer, who has been MIA since he reported that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul didn’t let on that he was in danger when cops showed up at his San Francisco home right before he was assaulted with a hammer. His scoop story went live on “Today” and then was summarily retracted hours later.

That Pelosi’s attack was proof of how Republicans were a “clear and present danger” to the nation became a prominent part of the news media/Democratic Party last ditch effort to limit GOP gains in last week’s election, so Almageur’s inconvenient facts—if they were facts, and we do not know—were apparently an intolerable injection of objective journalism into whatever it is that NBC News does now. (Whatever it is, as Harry Reid would say, “It works!”) NBC says it is “investigating.” Funny, the Pelosi attack was daily fare before the election; now it’s already dated trivia. On CNN’s Headline News this moring, Robin Meade spend almost ten minutes reviewing last night’s results on “The Masked Singer.” Omigod! The Singing Avacado was kicked off the show!!!! How is Paul Pelosi doing? Has he elucidated any of the mysteries surrounding his attack? Any news about what motivated the wacko who attacked him? Who cares? The Democrats held on to control of the Senate! Paul Pelosi? Who’s he?

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On John Fetterman’s Speech Problems…

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

..and neck problems? What the hell is that thing?

I have tried to find the full video of Pennsylvania Democrat John Fetterman’s “John Fetterwoman” speech that is supposed to show how bad his speaking problems are post-stroke, but so far I’ve failed. I was going to post one of the  edited videos that highlighted his problems, but decided that I couldn’t trust any of them.

Now the mainstream media, and notably NBC News, is (predictably) trying to rescue Fetterman and their clients, the Democratic Party. NBC wrote, “The videos include slight edits, such as cutting out the sound of the audience to make it appear as if he had abruptly stopped speaking (some of the stops occurred when he was pausing during moments of applause and crowd reaction, according to unedited videos seen by NBC News). Other edits cut Fetterman off mid-sentence, to create the perception that what he was saying was nonsensical…. The videos could run afoul of Twitter’s rules against political misinformation, even though they are still available…. Experts have warned that such lightly edited videos, also sometimes called ‘shallow fakes,’ can be particularly effective pieces of misinformation.” Continue reading →

From The “Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!” Res Ipsa Loquitur File…

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Assassination attempt on Justice Kavanaugh? Who’s “Justice Kavanaugh”?

Yes, it’s a Jumbo. But it’s worse than that…

Newsbusters reporter Kevin Tober recorded the relative minutes of coverage on the Sunday news talk shows for the January 6 Capitol riots show trial and the attempted assassination of Justice Brett Kavanaugh. The totals:

ABC: Capitol riot: 19:11; Kavanaugh: 0:00

CBS: Capitol riot: 19:31; Kavanaugh: 0:00

NBC: Capitol riot: 36:25′ Kavanaugh: 0:00

CNN: Capitol riot: 18:10; Kavanaugh: 0:00

We already know that MSNBC wants Kavanaugh dead, so there is no need to include that network’s ration. NPR was little better, twice mentioning the Kavanaugh episode without actually reporting on it: “a man arrested near Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s house.,” and “we learned of the arrest of an armed man outside Justice Kavanaugh’s house.” That was it. This is what your tax dollars get you in timely news reporting. Continue reading →