New York Times

And Another “Good Illegal Immigrant” Sob Story From the Times…

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

I feel constrained to post this after someone suggested that in the Bret Stephens essay I was bestowing Ethics Hero status on the Axis media’s top propaganda mouthpiece. The op-ed by professional illegal immigration romanticizer Isabel Castro (above) is a far more representative piece in a genre the Times is particularly fond of: demanding sympathy for individuals facing deportation entirely because of their own choices and conduct.

The title is a hoot: “How the ICE Raids Are Warping Los Angeles.” It is like a Chicago paper during the Prohibition and Capone’s zenith publishing a column called “How the FBI is Warping Chicago.” A sample..

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“What’s Going On Here?” I Have No Idea, and Neither Do You

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Two maybe major news stories have broken on conservative news media this week, but neither of them appear in the nation’s most prestigious newspapers this morning. I haven’t checked, but I’m reasonably certain that I won’t hear about those “BREAKING!” developments on NPR, PBS, CNN or MSNBC either.

Why would that be? Well, one explanation is that the stories are fake news. The other…Come on now, you should be able to figure it out by now!

In Story One, FBI Director Kash Patel turned over to Congress a declassified intelligence report involving a Chinese plot to mass-produce fake U.S. driver’s licenses to facilitate Chinese nationals in the U.S. obtaining fake mail-in ballots that would be cast for Democrat Joe Biden in the 2020 election. The intelligence reports from August 2020 weren’t corroborated or fully investigated, but were taken back from intelligence agencies by the FBI at about the time that then-FBI Director Chris Wray testified there were no known plots of foreign interference ahead of the 2020 election. Some sources report that the FBI tried to destroy the evidence. The investigation was stopped even though U.S. Customs and Border Protection intercepted nearly 20,000 fake licenses, a possible corroboration of the buried report.

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Kudos To The New York Times For Finally Eliminating All Doubt That It Is a Democratic Party Propaganda Organ And Not a “Newspaper”…

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

This would be an Unethical Quote of the Week if there were any reason to believe what the New York Times says about President Trump, and if the Times didn’t make equally unethical quotes every day.

Here’s part of the Times editorial titled, “Antisemitism Is an Urgent Problem. Too Many People Are Making Excuses”:

“…The political right, including President Trump, deserves substantial blame. Yes, he has led a government crackdown against antisemitism on college campuses, and that crackdown has caused colleges to become more serious about addressing the problem. But Mr. Trump has also used the subject as a pretext for his broader campaign against the independence of higher education. The combination risks turning antisemitism into yet another partisan issue, encouraging opponents to dismiss it as one of his invented realities.

Even worse, Mr. Trump had made it normal to hate, by using bigoted language about a range of groups, including immigrants, women and trans Americans. Since he entered the political scene, attacks on Asian, Black, Latino and L.G.B.T. Americans have spiked, according to the F.B.I. While he claims to deplore antisemitism, his actions tell a different story. He has dined with a Holocaust denier, and his Republican Party has nominated antisemites for elected offices, including governor of North Carolina. Mr. Trump himself praised as “very fine people” the attendees of a 2017 march in Charlottesville, Va., that featured the chant “Jews will not replace us.” On Jan. 6, 2021, at least one rioter attacking the Capitol screamed that he was looking for “the big Jew,” referring to Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, Mr. Schumer has said.”

It gives me great pleasure to know that Times boot-licker ” “A Friend,” the long-banned EA commenter who has set a nearly unbreakable record for unauthorized posts here, most bleating about how unfair I am to the noble Times, will be desperately searching for a way to rationalize that verbal offal without having to admit, “Okay, the Times editors are partisan hacks.”

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Pre-Coffee Ethics Thoughts…

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

An early morning meeting I had to drive a long way for got cancelled at the last minute, and now I’m walking around like a zombie Maybe trying to type up a few percolating ethics matters will help me wake up…

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It’s Comforting, Somehow, To Know That NYT’s Thomas Friedman Is As Much A Hateful, Trump-Deranged Hack As Ever

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

I pay as little attention to Times opinion writer Thomas Friedman as possible, as he is in equal measures unethical and absurd. My curiosity wasn’t even piqued when I saw the title of his op-ed in today’s New York Times: “I Have Never Been More Afraid for My Country’s Future.” The rational response to that whine is “Who cares what you think? You’ve proved beyond all doubt that you are confused, biased and deluded!” After all, this is the same pundit who wrote, the last time I deigned to dismantle his idiocy (six years ago), that evil President Trump was “protected by big media outlets.” Got that? Donald Trump, who has been assailed by biased and dishonest reporting more than any previous U.S. President, has been protected by the news media! The rest of the column in question was similarly unhinged; I quoted an Althouse commenter who wrote, “I understand this doesn’t meet any federal definition for hate speech, and I dislike the notion that any speech be so labeled in a free speech society. However, Thomas Friedman’s article is what I consider hate in written form.”

Well, Tom Friedman 2025 says “Hold my beer!” One of my Trump Deranged lawyer-actor friends sucked me into reading Friedman’s latest “hate in written form” by posting with approval on Facebook this excerpt from “I Have Never Been More Afraid for My Country’s Future“:

“This whole Trump II administration is a cruel farce. Trump ran for another term not because he had any clue how to transform America for the 21st century. He ran in order to stay out of jail and to get revenge on those who, with real evidence, had tried to hold him accountable to the law. I doubt he has ever spent five minutes studying the work force of the future.”

Wow. It takes a special kind of dishonesty to say that Trump ran for President to stay out of jail when the only reason he was prosecuted anywhere was to stop him from running for President. Impressively, all of the Althouse commenters defenestrations of Friedman’s 2019 Trump hate apply exactly to his recent column. Let’s see another ludicrous excerpt…hmmm, which to choose, there are so many…Ah! Here’s a good one:

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A Morning “Nelson”! Condign Justice For NY A.G. Letitia James

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

This story has so much delicious irony to it, I’m afraid to look in the mirror for fear that I have literally turned into Nelson Muntz, the “Simpsons” character who mocks everyone else’s misfortunes.

The Federal Housing Finance Agency has referred New York Attorney General Letitia James to the Department of Justice for alleged mortgage fraud. Bill Pulte, director of FHFA alerted U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi in part,“Based on media reports, Ms. Letitia James has, in multiple instances falsified bank documents and property records to acquire government backed assistance and loans and more favorable loan terms…This has potentially included 1) falsifying residence status for a Norfolk, Virginia-based home in order to secure a lower mortgage rate and 2) misrepresenting property descriptions to meet stringent requirements for government backed loans and government assistance.”

You can read the documents here and here. In one case, the Democratic Party hit-woman charged with executing the lawfare against Donald Trump so he couldn’t run for President received a lower mortgage rate by falsely swearing that a home in Norfolk, Virginia would be her “primary residence” when her job as New York’s Attorney General required her to live in that state. In the other, James misrepresented a five-unit property as a four-family unit to receive “a conforming loan through the Freddie Mae/Freddie Mac Form 3033,” which is only available for buildings with four or fewer units. Hilariously, this is the same woman who prosecuted Donald Trump for misleading financial statements, intoning that “No one is above the law.” Perfect!

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Why Hasn’t This Been a Headline Yet?

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

My Wuhan Virus-phobic friends and relatives pooh-poohed my assertion that the pandemic death statistics were being hyped and inflated by the news media and the CDC to keep the public terrified and in doors (and, quite possibly, unable to participate in a fair election.) For all I know they still don’t believe it, in part because the infuriating hasn’t been shouted from the roof-tops. A lead story on ever news network and a headline in every newspaper would be appropriate. It shouldn’t take all that, of course: I figured out we were being conned when the New York Times started running scare obituaries about 92-year-old black women who were “killed by Covid” while they were also suffering from cancer, high blood pressure and diabetes.

I had, frankly, forgotten about the fact that the news media still hasn’t taken responsibility for their unethical fear-mongering until I stumbled upon this, from July 18, 2023, in the 17th paragraph of a New York Times subscriber newsletter piece called “A Positive COVID Milestone” by David Leonhardt. He was one of the worst of the Times’ progressive op-ed writers until he was demoted. Leonhardt wrote: “The official number [of Wuhan deaths] is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had [the] virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death….CDC data suggests that almost one-third of official recent Covid deaths have fallen into this category. A study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases came to similar conclusions.”

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Today’s “Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!” Smoking Gun…[Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

I’m going to have to keep posting pieces like this until anyone who insists that the Axis media is “independent and non-partisan” gets laughed out of the room and has to change their name and identity.

Tim Walz, the Minnesota Knucklehead whose national exposure during the 2024 campaign showed the nation that 1) progressives like him don’t like freedom of speech, 2) and haven’t read the First Amendment; 3) Kamala Harris picked an understudy who was almost as unqualified to be President as she was; and 4) Minnesotans are out of their minds to elect such a boob governor. But, amazingly, with the dearth of competent, trustworthy, non-wacko leaders in the increasingly absurd Democratic Party, Walz is looking (everything is relative, after all) pretty good, since the alternatives are Gavin Newsom, AOC, Pete Buttigieg and “None of the above.” So, as the man who managed to make J.D. Vance seem like Abe Lincoln in their debate goes around the country saying the same kinds of dumb things he said while helping Democrats lose the White House, the Axis media feels unethically obligated to mitigate the negative impact.

Walz was in Eau Claire for a town-hall-style event aimed at supporting his party’s candidate for Chief Justice of the Wisconsin [NOT Minnesota, as the first version of the is post carelessly stated] Supreme Court. [The position at Ethics Alarms is that electing judges is unethical and, duh, guarantees critical decisions will be based on politics rather than that law thingy.] The New York Times writes that “Groups backed by Musk have poured millions of dollars into the race on behalf of the conservative candidate, Brad Schimel.” Yes, those groups backed by Musk are called “conservative groups” and “the Republican Party.” Why didn’t the Times write that “groups inspired by Abraham Lincoln” support Schimel? Democrats are promoting the contest as “The People vs. Musk.” [I hope to have a post on Musk Derangement up later today.]

To be fair, it should be noted Fox News et al. routinely describe progressive advocacy groups as “supported by George Soros.”

Back to Walz: in his speech to the crowd, Walz called Musk a “dipshit” and, later, an “unelected South African nepo baby.” Nice.

The Times headline: “Taking a Page From Trump’s Book.”

Three Word Summary of “Working at Anheuser-Busch, I Saw What Went Wrong With the D.E.I. Movement”: “It was D.E.I.”

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

“The principles that built great American companies are simple: Hire the best people, serve your customers well and let merit and financial results determine success. While expanding opportunity and making employees feel welcome are worthy goals, how D.E.I. policies were carried out often strayed from these foundational principles and might have even created other forms of discrimination.”

It might have even created other forms of discrimination! Gee, ya think?

In a jaw-dropping example of the “Tell me something I don’t know” variety of journalism, the New York Times gives us “Working at Anheuser-Busch, I Saw What Went Wrong With the D.E.I. Movement” (Gift link!). Anson Frericks tells us that water is wet with the solemnity of a doctor announcing a cancer diagnosis. He was shocked–shocked!—when his company, having announced its commitment to “DEI,” turned down a beneficial distribution arrangement with another company because “being associated with Black Rifle was too politically provocative, especially in progressive circles.” This, in 2022, two years after the beginning of the George Floyd Freakout, made Anson realize that his employers were more interested in virtue-signalling to the Looney Left than selling beer.

What did he think “diversity, equity and inclusion” was going to mean?

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Comment of the Day: “Ethics Verdict: Justified, Necessary, and Ethical”

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

This refreshing Comment of the Day by EA Ace AM Golden concludes with a trenchant point: Why does someone need to be reading Ethics Alarms or doing their own research to be properly informed of the context of a news event rather than misled by selective reporting?

I should have included the historical precedents for the recent Trump White House decision to exercise its own discretion over what news organizations and other news sources should be included in briefings, but my point was that it didn’t matter what the “precedent” was because today’s news media and the unethical way they have covered this particular President have no valid precedents. However, AM’s perfectly illustrated point is equally important: as usual, the news media is framing anything Trump does as a “threat to democracy” rather than giving the public the information it needs to make up their own minds.

Once I read AM’s COTD, I was even more disgusted with the New York Times than I usually am. Pure deceit: the piece says that it’s a “decades long” precedent to not pick and choose among news organizations, see, so if AM’s precedents are waved in the Times editors’ smug faces, they can say, “Well, those examples were still many decades ago, so what we wrote is correct!”

But even if the Times reporters and lazy editors had been aware of the precedents AM reveals (I’d bet anything that they didn’t bother to check), they still wouldn’t have mentioned them because Trump is following the examples of two revered figures, one of them on Mt. Rushmore and the other unanimously regarded as our greatest President in the last hundred years.

And just to preempt the usual excuse that self-banned Times defender “A Friend” would typically post until I sent the comment to Spam Hell, those Times readers who are the reliable epitome of erudition, fairness and oversight saving the biased Times from itself, I checked all the nearly 2000 comments to the news story. Most agreed that Trump is an aspiring dictator, but not a single one mentioned the Roosevelts.

Here is AM Golden’s illuminating Comment of the Day on the post, “Ethics Verdict: Justified, Necessary, and Ethical”…

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