New York Times

Unethical Quote of the Month: Julia Angwin

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

“I guess it’s no surprise that Superhuman believed it could, in my opinion, break the law. We live in a world where A.I. companies are grabbing every bit of writing, art and music without consent. Where our president is launching wars without the consent of Congress that our Constitution requires. Where Jeffrey Epstein spent years coercing girls too young to provide consent into sexual relations”

—NYT “investigative journalist” Julia Angwin, dragging a flase and ignorant attack on President Trump into her op-ed about a lawsuit having nothing whatsoever to do with him.

Once again, I challenge the oblivious defenders of the New York Times and those who insist that the Axis news media isn’t a full-time Democratic propaganda operation to defend a passage that should never have made it into print.

The essay was headlined, “Why I’m Suing Grammarly,” and the writer had a valid and interesting story to tell on a hot topic: the failings of artificial intelligence. The A.I. editing service Grammarly apparently attaches the names of prominent writers to some of its re-write suggestions. Not only have the writers “quoted” not agreed to the use of their names and authority, the suggestions attributed to them might make them sound like unpublished hacks. Angwin writes,

“Like all writers, I live by my wits. My ability to earn a living rests on my ability to craft a phrase, to synthesize an idea, to make readers care about people and places they can only access through words on a page. Grammarly hadn’t checked with me before using my name. I only learned that an A.I. company was selling a deepfake of my mind from an article online. And it wasn’t just me. Superhuman — the parent company of Grammarly — made fake editor versions of a range of people…In my home state of New York, the century-old right of publicity law prohibits a person’s name or image from being used for commercial purposes without her consent. At least 25 states have similar publicity statutes. And now, I’m using this law to fight back. I am the lead plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit against Superhuman in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, alleging that it violated New York and California publicity laws by not seeking consent before using our names in a paid service…”

Fascinating and informative…and absolutely irrelevant to President Trump, the Iran War and the Constitution. But Julia couldn’t help herself. She couldn’t help herself because she is surrounded all day by Trump Deranged hysterics and bubble-dwelling boobs who spend every waking hour hating everything the President of the United States says or does, so she couldn’t resist inserting an attack on POTUS in her column, even though it was as wrong as it is was gratuitous.

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The Rest of the Story: CNN’s Abbe Phillip Forced To Issue On Air Apology

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

As chronicled here, CNN’s talking heads lied repeatedly in an attempt to blame the attempted terrorist bombing in New York City on anti-Muslim, right-wing bigots. First Abbe Phillip repeated the Big Lie that had already been proven false, then she deceitfully continued it with a misleading “clarification” on X, and then “The View’s” fake conservative Ana Navarro repeated the fake Axis narrative a day later. The criticism of Phillip’s lie was so loud on social media that CNN apparently told their incompetent (but black and female, so she will be hard to fire) to do an on air apology, so we got this:

Verdict: 1. Too late. 2. Not good enough. She’s still lying.

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Two “Opinions”…

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

A dumb or obviously biased opinion column in what passes today for our journalism platforms arguably isn’t strictly “unethical.” It does, however, demonstrate incompetence, contempt for the public, or in many cases indolence, as in “Hey Marge! We need something to fill that space on the Op-ed page!” “Oh hell, let’s publish that thing about reparations. It will be good for a few Letters to the Editor.” “Okay! You got it!”

And so we get junk like “Illinois city’s reparations plan is misguided, divisive and likely unconstitutional” on the Fox News website. To begin with the obvious, this is old news. I wrote about Evanston, Illinois’s City Council’s bat-house crazy plan back in June, and the city has been obsessed with this since the it agreed in 2019 to use tax revenue from recreational marijuana sales to generate a reparations fund.

“This year, Evanston, Illinois, will send $25,000 payments to 44 Black residents and descendants of Black residents who lived in the city between 1919 and 1969,” writes Erec Smith, a research fellow at the Cato Institute and a former associate professor of rhetoric at York College of Pennsylvania. Oh! He must be an expert, then! How come he can’t spell “Eric”?

Erec continues,

“At its core, the Evanston program is race-specific, providing benefits solely to Black residents who meet narrow historical criteria. This raises an obvious legal question: Can the government dole out money based on race? Critics have already flagged the program as constitutionally questionable under the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. Beyond legality, there is a broader question about fairness. The program compensates some individuals while excluding others who may face equal or even greater financial need. Wealthier Black residents in Evanston receive the same payments as those struggling economically, while low-income residents of other races receive nothing. Isn’t a poor White person more in need of that money?”

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A Happy Valentine’s Day To All, And To “A Friend,” A Gift!

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

Behold (below) yet another “smoking gun” delineating the bias and lack of objectivity and integrity of the New York Times. The paper is the very model of a modern “dishonest waiter”, for all of its double standards, contradictions and hypocrisy goes one way: to advance progressive agendas and Axis propaganda. See?

Yet for years now, self-banned commenter “A Friend” has comment section-bombed Ethics Alarms with defenses of the New York Times when it is criticized here, usually with posts beginning with “Come on, Jack!” These get sent to EA Spam Hell when they show up as soon as I see them of course, each one putting “A Friend” even deeper on the black list than he already is.

Today, however, to show my love for all of this blog’s readers, even the trolls, deranged and assholes, I will offer a symbolic temporary suspension of “A Friend’s” ban, if he offers a sincere, rational, defense of the Times’ “Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!” performance in this case.

Can he (or anyone) rebut my conclusion that the Times, forever allying itself with climate change confirmation bias victims, has proven that it will contrive an argument that literally any occurrence, statistics or phenomena is proof of the dire effects of climate change according to “scientists,” which often means to the Axis media of which it is a charter member, “some old guy with a duck on his head holding the Bozo Chair in Chemistry at Itawamba Community College that we found after searching for a week.”?

The offer will stand for 48 hours.

I’m expecting great things.

Gee, Who Could Have Ever Predicted That Marijuana Use Would Become a Problem? Me, For One…

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

I really try not to get emotional over ethics stories, but the current Editorial Board declaration in the New York Times headlined, “It’s Time for America to Admit That It Has a Marijuana Problem” makes me want to run screaming naked into Route 395.

The U.S. had a marijuana problem a half century ago, when an earlier wave of The Great Stupid washed over the land and all manner of important lessons a healthy and functioning society needed to remember and institutionalize were deliberately tossed away because a lot of passionate, anti-establishment assholes were sure that they knew better than anyone “over 30.” I fought this destructive development from college, when I watched one of my room mates suffer short term memory loss from getting stoned morning and night; in law school, when the student running my lightboard for a production of “Iolanthe” erased all the light cues that we had taken six hours to set up because he was higher than the moons of Jupiter, all the way onto this blog. I put up with the mockery of classmates and dorm mates over the fact that I would not “try” pot (“It’s illegal” wasn’t a winning argument, so I settled on “It’s stupid and destructive.”). I drew a line in the sand with my addiction-prone wife, a former pot-head who was already an alcoholic. My fellow lawyers quickly learned not to get stoned around me because they knew I regarded buying and selling pot when it was illegal grounds for reporting them to bar authorities and respected my integrity enough to have reasonable doubts that I might not pretend that I didn’t know what I knew.

I carried the battle onto Ethics Alarms as the relentless pro-stoner propaganda was heading to victory, resulting in the legalization of the drug, the inevitable result of which the assholes who edit the New York Times have the gall now to tell us “Oopsie!” about after being a significant part of the mob mentality that inflicted it on the public, probably forever.

Back in 2011, I drafted a post that I never finished titled, “To My Friends the Pot-Heads: I Know. I’ve Heard It All Before.” It began:

“I take a deep breath every time I feel it necessary to wade into the morass of the Big Ethical Controversies, because I know it invites long and fruitless debates with entrenched culture warriors with agendas, ossified opinions, and contempt for anyone who disagrees with them. War, abortion, religion, prostitution, drugs, torture, gay marriage…there are a lot of them, and all are marked by a large mass of people who have decided that they are right about the issue, and anyone disagreeing with them is stupid, evil, biased, or all three. Contrary to what a goodly proportion of commenters here will write whichever position I take, I approach all of these issues and others exactly the same way. I look at the differing opinions on the matter from respectable sources, examine the research, if it is relevant, examine lessons of history and the signals from American culture, consider personal experience if any, and apply various ethical systems to an analysis. No ethical system works equally well on all problems, and while I generally dislike absolutist reasoning and prefer a utilitarian approach, sometimes this will vary according to a hierarchy of ethical priorities as I understand and align them. Am I always right? Of course not. In many of these issues, there is no right, or right is so unsatisfactory—due to the unpleasant encroachment of reality— that I understand and respect the refusal of some to accept it. There are some of these mega-issues where I am particularly confident of my position, usually because I have never heard a persuasive argument on the other side that wasn’t built on rationalizations or abstract principles divorced from real world considerations. My conviction that same-sex marriage should be a basic human right is in this category. So is my opposition, on ethical grounds, for legalizing recreational drugs.”

Instead of finishing and posting that essay, I posted this one, which used as a departure point a Sunday ABC News “Great Debate” on hot-point issues of the period featuring conservatives Rep. Paul Ryan and columnist George Will against Democratic and gay Congressman Barney Frank and Clinton’s former communist Labor Secretary Robert Reich. [Looking back, it is interesting how all four of these men went on to show their dearth of character and integrity. Ryan proved to be a spineless weenie, rising to Speaker of the House but never having the guts to fight for the conservative principles he supposedly championed. Frank never accepted responsibility for the 2008 crash his insistence on loosening mortgage lending practices helped seed, preferring to blame Bush because he knew the biased news media would back him up. Will disgraced himself by abandoning the principles he built his career on in order to register his disgust that a vulgarian like Donald Trump would dare to become President. Reich was already a far left demagogue, so at least his later conduct wasn’t a departure. I wrote in part,

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Unethical Quote of the Week: Lawyer Kimberley Hamm, Spinning For The Clintons

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

“There’s an accommodation process when you’re talking about a President or a former President.Contempt is punitive; it’s not about enforcement. If you want to get the information, agreeing to accommodations is one way of getting it.”

—Kimberly Hamm, a partner at Morrison Foerster, after being cherry-picked by the New York Times to excuse Bill and Hillary Clinton for trying to defy a Congressional subpoena.

For some strange reason (I’m being facetious) Bill and Hillary Clinton seem to think that they are excused, unlike any other Americans (or, say, Michael Corleone) from obeying a subpoena to appear before a Congressional committee. Hamm, as we know how these things work, was tracked down as a putative objective “expert” by the Times to excuse the Clintons and impugn Republicans who are not inclined to accept their offensive and arrogant defiance, as Ethics Alarms highlighted last week.

There should be a “heightened standard” when it comes to a subpoena of a former President, Hamm said. Oh really? Show me your authority for that assertion, Counselor. But first show me where you made a similar statement about armed raids on former Presidents’ homes over disputes regarding classified documents.

What utter balderdash: “contempt is punitive and not about enforcement.” How dumb does this lawyer (and the Times) think we are? Punishment is always about enforcement. A law that has no penalty for its violations isn’t a law at all. You know, like immigration laws during the Biden Administration.

The Times reports that negotiations between Representative James Comer, the Republican chairman of the House Oversight Committee, and the slippery Clintons over their refusal to testify before his Committee in its Jeffrey Epstein investigation broke down today, “hours before a scheduled vote to hold the couple in contempt of Congress.” Read the whole thing if you like (gift link), but the basic facts are clear: the Clintons feel they have a special right to avoid being grilled in public, and they don’t.

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Calling “A Friend”! Tell Us Again How The New York Times Is Non-Partisan, Fair, and Trustworthy…

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Yeah, I’m trolling. So sue me.

A mob of Minnesota pro-open borders, anti-Rule of Law, insurrection-minded, Jacob Frey toadies and crazies invade a church service and harass parishioners on the pretense that the minister supports immigration enforcement, and the framing of the event by the nation’s alleged “newspaper of record” is to call the trespass and mass assault a “protest” and to focus on I.C.E. tactics when the issue is anti-I.C.E. tactics. The immigration control agency was not involved in this criminal act in any way, yet it is in the headline.

Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias!

For readers new to Ethics Alarms, “A Friend” is an unfriendly, denial-soaked ex-commenter here who banned himself from the comments, an act that is addressed specifically in the blog Comment Policies. Unlike even the most disrespectful and defiant bannees of the past, who typically issue a one or two finals shots and then sink into the obscurity they so richly deserve, this jerk has adamantly refused to comply with the site’s owner and moderator, me. Thus for years he has repeatedly blog-bombed posts with comments that I have to delete while also sending me emails that also go directly to spam, because he is somehow convinced that he’s smarter than everyone else. You know,

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FFF! First Friday Forum of 2026…

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

The New York Times started the New Year with a column by one of its more recently-hired progressive-biased columnist. His name is Carlos Lozada: the Times’s DEI office finally noticed in 2022 that it didn’t have a Hispanic pundit, I guess—and his self-written description is hilarious when compared to his column kicking off 2026. “I strive for fairness, honesty and depth,” he writes. “I believe that there is something called truth, and I do my best to approximate it. My overriding value is skepticism. Along with all Times journalists, I am committed to upholding the standards of integrity outlined in our Ethical Journalism Handbook.”

Right. None of the journalists at the Times strive to uphold the standards of integrity outlined in the Ethical Journalism Handbook, and Lozada proves that he’s no different from the rest of the Times pundit stable. He begins with a deliberately disingenuous premise in today’s effort titled “How Did We Get to Such a Bad Question?” (Gift link). The “bad question” is “How did we get here?” which, of course, is exactly what Lozada’s column is about. How clever. This is like the guy who says, “I’m the last person to to say X” and then says it. At this paragraph, I stopped reading:

How did we get to the so-called Trump era, for example? If your answer is about economic inequality and the forgotten man, then maybe start with the World Trade Organization or NAFTA or the decline of organized labor. If your answer is about race, then point to the backlash against the Obama presidency or against identity politics or the civil rights movement or maybe even against Reconstruction. If your answer is about our deteriorating political discourse, then call out Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh; if it’s about the nativist takeover of the Republican Party, then quote at length from Patrick Buchanan’s speech at the 1992 Republican National Convention. And so on, ad infinitum.

Yeah, I’m pretty used to that brand of bias by now. The amazing thing is that the Times is so accustomed to it as the norm that no editor saw how disqualifying Lozada’s rhetoric is. One of the major reasons for Trump’s rise was that Obama made the discriminatory philosophy behind affirmative action central to his approach to his Presidency, increasing racial division and making “Racist!” the fall-back response of the media and Democrats to any criticism of his leadership. Lozada follows suit by framing the reasonable response to Obama’s destructive eight years as…racism. “[B]acklash against the Obama presidency or against identity politics or the civil rights movement or maybe even against Reconstruction”…yeah, Carlos, white Americans who didn’t appreciate living in a culture where they were constantly vilified were expressing their hostility to the civil rights movement.

Then: “If your answer is about our deteriorating political discourse, then call out Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh.” Funny, this truth-seeker immediately fingers two conservatives who correctly called out the one-way partisan bias in the mainstream media, not the complete partisan takeovers of CNN, NPR PBS and the network news. Not Obama’s arrogant “they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them” comment, not  Hillary’s “deplorables” speech, or…

But the final smoking gun in the column is Lozada’s “if it’s about the nativist takeover of the Republican Party…” Dingdingdingdingding!  The Republicans rejecting the Obama-Biden-Democrat embrace of open borders and “the good illegal immigrants” are nativists….you know, bigots. Like Bill the Butcher in “The Gangs of New York.” That assessment is Lozada’s idea of “fairness, honesty and depth.”

Well, bye, asshole. Now we know what your agenda is.

But I digress! You write about whatever ethics issues interest you as the new year dawns…

…

Unethical Quote of the Week: “Good Illegal Immigrant”Rahel Negassi

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

“I didn’t do anything wrong,” she told him. “The only thing I’ve done is that I am Eritrean.”

—-Illegal Eritrean immigrant Rahel Negassito to her son, in the latest “Feel badly for illegal immigrants who finally get what they deserve” feature by the New York Times.

Rahel looks smug and defiant in the photo, as indeed she is. She did nothing wrong, but the (revoltingly) sympathetic story of her problems relocating to Canada from the U.S., where she has been residing illegally for 20 years, reports that she got into the country by

  • “…paying a smuggler who eventually got her to Britain, where she bought a fake British passport” to get her into the U.S.
  • …getting caught by ICE when the passport was recognized as fake
  • …being released after her application as a refugee was rejected, as a “paroled undocumented migrant.” 
  • ….living with her citizen sister for 20 years, counting on America’s slack and, for most of the period, law-ignoring immigration process to protect her.

Then as the story tells us, cruel Donald Trump was elected and set out to fulfill his campaign promise to clear as many illegal immigrants out of the U.S. as possible. A gift link is here.

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NYT Subscriptions Surge, Meaning That Journalism’s One-Way Bias and Ethics Rot Is Not Going Away Soon

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

In a post yesterday, I wrote, in the final note on the ethical implications of this week’s election results,

“None of this would have unfolded in quite the same way, I am certain, without a corrupt journalism sector that has totally abdicated the duty of its profession in favor of partisan propaganda. I am more convinced than ever that the Republic will not function efficiently or engender responsible citizenship until there is news media commitment to fair, objective, responsible, unbiased and honest communication to the public of what it needs to know to make intelligent decisions about their governance. There has been some progress toward that end this year, but not nearly enough.”

Well, evoking William Barrett Travis when Santa Anna demanded the surrender of the Alamo, the New York Times “answered with a cannon shot.”

“The Times’s Profit Jumps With 460,000 More Subscribers” the headline today reads. “The Times now has 12.33 million total subscribers to all of its products. It has said it is aiming for 15 million by the end of 2027.” The article (gift link!), which you can read yourself if you have the stomach for it, has lots of other good news for the Times bottom line,

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