“Trump derangement? What Trump derangement?”
Unethical Quote Of The Week: NYT Columnist Thomas Friedman
New York Times
Are Men Really Supposed To Accept Misandry And Anti-Male Bigotry? I Strongly Suggest That They Don’t…
…unless they want to allow women to make them second-class citizens as pay-back for all those years of male domination.
Just as anti-white racism is considered justifiable and benign by a large lump of progressives, misandry and flagrant anti-male rhetoric has been similarly given a stamp of approval by much of the Left and the mainstream news media. I’ve been pointing out this unethical double standard and hypocrisy for a long time, notably in 2011, when ABC News hosted an all-female roundtable to discuss how inferior men were as managers and leaders, and how much better women are.*
It has only become worse and more blatant since then. The Washington Post published this op-ed by Suzanna Danuta Walters, Professor of Sociology and director of the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at Northeastern University.. A sample:
So men, if you really are #WithUs and would like us to not hate you for all the millennia of woe you have produced and benefited from, start with this: Lean out so we can actually just stand up without being beaten down. Pledge to vote for feminist women only. Don’t run for office. Don’t be in charge of anything. Step away from the power. We got this. And please know that your crocodile tears won’t be wiped away by us anymore. We have every right to hate you. You have done us wrong. #BecausePatriarchy. It is long past time to play hard for Team Feminism. And win.
Meanwhile, the New York Times didn’t feel that misandry AND racism should disqualify their choice for a place among their editors, Sarah, from whom a typical tweet is “white men are bullshit.” Now one of the three, generally awful in various ways, women who are certain to be the Democratic Presidential nominee in 2020, Kristin Gillibrand, tweeted out last year, “Our future is: Female. Intersectional. Powered by our belief in one another. And we’re just getting started.”
Imagine any other group in place of “Female,” and what would be the fate of the author. Yet it is just a few ticks from the primary message of the last women to run for President, who repeatedly argued that her gender alone should be enough to make voting for her the right thing to do.
The latest installment of the increasingly open anti-male bigotry from progressives, Democrats and the news media arrived last week in a jaw-dropping piece of misandry from Tina Brown, the British tabloid mistress who is only regarded as less odious than Rupert Murdock because of her lack of male genitalia, and the fact that she’s a feminist, of course. I know I do a lot of fisking on Ethics Alarms, but sometimes, as with Brown’s steaming plop of rhetorical offal, merely pointing out is general that it stinks lets the sample off too easy. This thing, called “What Happens When Women Stop Leading Like Men,” demands vivisection. Read the whole ridiculous, insulting thing if you must, but here is what you are in for.
It begins with sufficient signature significance to make anyone expecting a fair or rational essay to give up on the spot: Continue reading
Afternoon Ethics Warm-Up, April 2, 2019: Maddow, Schultz, Pugh, Fosse, AOC, And All That Jazz…
Good afternoon!
1. If anyone cared, this would do in Rachel Maddow. The fact that so many of my otherwise intelligent and reasonable liberal friends insist that Rachel Maddow is God’d gift to journalism was a mystery to me when she first brought her perpetual smirk to MSNBC. It perplexed me greatly as she so obviously hyped and twisted her commentary, and once she became the #1 Russia-Trump conspiracy theorist on TV, I admit that I have lost the edge of respect for anyone who still watches her. Rachel Maddow bottomed out, I’d say, yesterday, when she was saying this last week:
“It’s hard to believe that they’d leave the newly appointed Attorney General William Barr to himself to personally pick through the [Mueller] report to try to figure out which mentions in this 400-page report might pertain to an open case”They wouldn’t leave that to Barr to do that. Mueller would have done that!
Mueller’s team would have done that as part of producing anything that they handed over outside their own offices. They’ve done that with every other document they have produced in the course of this investigation. You’d assume they’d be able to do that for this document too. But William Barr says, [exaggerated sigh] it’s taking him a really long time because he’s having to do all that himself.”
While was saying that it was suspicious that Barr wouldn’t seek Mueller’s assistance with the redactions, the chyron underneath her read,
“Barr: Special Counsel Is Assisting with Redactions”
Unlike the much-mocked Fox News gaffe, in which the talking heads were correctly reciting the story while the chyron said that Trump was pulling aid from “three Mexican countries“, this time the chyron was right, and the talking head was wrong. It might just be me, but I’d rather the actual reporters to be telling the truth, and graphics be messed up. Continue reading
Sunday Ethics Refresher, 3/24/2019 [PART I]: Bad News And Disenchantment
It will be a
Good morning!
if I stay away from the network talking head shows…
1 Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias! Ann Althouse has a valid observation (some commenters feel it has been obvious for a long, long time) this morning…she writes in part,
I’m seeing 2 big examples of how the media are reporting good news for Trump this weekend. It’s really embarrassing for them because the 2 stories are very big and very good for Trump and, in both, the same move is made to turn it into something negative and ominous.
1. The Mueller investigation has concluded, and though we can’t read it yet, we know that it means that there will be no charges against Trump or any of his people that have to do with colluding with Russians to affect the election. Though some Russians were charged and some of Trump’s people were charged with lying to investigators, the whole reason for the special investigation seems to have been a phantom. After 2 years of uncertainty and anxiety, this is an immense relief and vindication for Trump. Fantastic, upbeat news. Now, here’s how the NYT is presenting the story on the top, left corner of its front page:
As Mueller Report Lands, Prosecutorial Focus Moves to New York
The work by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, may be done, but prosecutors in Manhattan and elsewhere are pursuing about a dozen other investigations.
It all but ensures that a legal threat will continue to loom over the Trump presidency.
2. Under Trump, the Islamic State has been ousted entirely from the territory it had taken over. This is a distinct, satisfying military victory in what has been a long and difficult war. It is the second story on the NYT front page right now, where it looks like this:
THE ISLAMIC STATE
Its Territory May Be Gone, but the U.S. Fight Against ISIS Is Far From Over
• Thousands of Islamic State fighters are still at large in Iraq and Syria, rearming and regrouping.
• The U.S. and its partners still face significant battles against the group elsewhere, in Afghanistan, West Africa and the Philippines.
So watch for it. The rule is: When something good for Trump happens, find the nearest bad thing and make that the focus of the news report.
No other U.S. President has been treated like this by the news media, and this treatment has been consistent from the beginning of his administration. It’s goal, and effect, is undermine public trust and distort public perception. Continue reading
Nancy Pelosi And Impeachment Ethics
Clearly, it’s time to revisit impeachment ethics issues, after Nancy Pelosi’s snide declaration (after saying that she is always respectful of the Presidency, mind you), that the President “wasn’t worth it,” it being the political risk of sending him to a trial in the Senate. We should pause a second to acknowledge the hilarity inherent in the Speaker saying that impeachment wasn’t desirable because it would be “divisive to the country” and “divides the country.” The Democrats, led by Barack Obama, who pointed the way, have intentionally and cynically sliced and diced the country into victims and villains, champions of the oppressed and deplorables, for a decade, unforgivably risking national strength, comity, and peace for speculative electoral gain.
We haven’t added a new Plan to the list of “resistance” and Democratic Party coup attempts—for that’s what they are–including impeachment theories, since last July, though many of the classics re-emerged in the news. Remember, there were law professors who advocated impeaching Trump before he was inaugurated. Here’s where it stands:
Impeachment And Coup Plans.
Plan A: Reverse the election by hijacking the Electoral College.[Status: FAILED and DEAD, until it rises again in 2020]
Plan B: Pre-emptive impeachment. [Status: FAILED and DEAD]
Plan C : The Emoluments Clause. [Status: Still twitching! ]
Plan D: “Collusion with Russia” [Status: On life support]
Plan E : ”Trump is mentally ill so this should trigger the 25th Amendment.” [Status: Amazingly, still being talked about .]
Plan F: The Maxine Waters Plan, which is to just impeach the President as soon as Democrats control both Houses, because they can. [Status: Hope springs eternal!]
Plan G : “The President obstructed justice by firing incompetent subordinates, and that’s impeachable.” [Status: LAME, but ONGOING]
Plan H: “Tweeting stupid stuff is impeachable” [Status: ONGOING]
Plan I: “Let’s relentlessly harass him and insult him and obstruct his efforts to do his job so he snaps and does something really impeachable.” [Status: ONGOING]
Plan J : Force Trump’s resignation based on alleged sexual misconduct that predated his candidacy. .[Status: FAILED and DEAD]
Plan K: Election law violations through pay-offs of old sex-partners [Status: ONGOING]
Plan L: The perjury trap: get Trump to testify under oath, then prove something he said was a lie. [Status: To be determined.]
Plan M: Guilt by association. Prove close associates or family members violated laws. [Status: Ongoing.]
Plan N: Claim that Trump’s comments at his press conference with Putin were “treasonous.”
I’m sure you’ve noticed that the soft coup-complicit news media hasn’t been predicting impeachable results from the Mueller investigation lately, which seems odd, since they have been fanning flames of anticipation and suspicion from the day it started. This is because most rational observers are pretty certain that Trump, as he has said from the beginning, did nothing wrong, and certainly nothing impeachable regarding Russia. Never mind: Democrats have made it clear that this soon-to-be-pronounced dead horse will be flogged by them into goo as long as it attracts donations and is a viable means of stopping the elected President from doing the job he was duly elected to do. Continue reading
Unethical Op-Ed Of The Year: “Time To Panic” By David Wallace-Wells
Just in time to lay a foundation for Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’s hysterical and hilarious “Green New Deal,” the New York Times’ February 16 Sunday Review section devoted its front page entirely to an essay by David Wallace-Wells called “Time to Panic.” It is, of course, about climate change. The Times presented it on a scary red background, with an illustration of someone peaking through their fingers, as if they were watching a tense moment in a horror movie. (I actually do that, sometimes.)
The article is afear-mongering piece that extols fear-mongering, so it basically disqualifies its own credibility. The author’s credibility? It’s a mystery: I spent about 20 minutes on Google trying to determine what Wallace’s background is, and failed. The Times just says that he is an author, and has a whole book coming out, “The Uninhabitable Earth,” from which this junk is adapted. Various bios I could track downonly say that he is a “non-fiction writer”–I don’t know about that. So I’m going to assume that he is just a journalist who has adopted climate change as his hobby horse, and it seems to be working out for him. Since he’s not trained as a scientist–presumably if he had any actual independent technical understanding of climate science he would be waving that credential—we know that like Al Gore, Ocasio-Cortez and whichever Kennedy it is who want to lock up climate change “deniers,” his understanding of the topic is entirely second hand: he chooses to believe reports and summaries of scientific research that he doesn’t know enough to critically evaluate. We also know that, like Gore and Ocasio-Cortez, who has floated the theory that the earth has only 12 more years before becoming Hell, he believes in hyping and over-stating in order to motivate the public. He says so outright: Continue reading
Ethics Quote Of The Month: Andrew Sullivan
I understand now: if someone beats a drum inches from my face and insults me, and I just stand there, I’m taunting HIM. My mistake. I did not know that….
“To put it bluntly: They were 16-year-olds subjected to verbal racist assault by grown men; and then the kids were accused of being bigots. It just beggars belief that the same liberals who fret about “micro-aggressions” for 20-somethings were able to see 16-year-olds absorbing the worst racist garbage from religious bigots … and then express the desire to punch the kids in the face. How did this grotesque inversion of the truth become the central narrative for what seemed to be the entire class of elite journalists on Twitter? That’s the somewhat terrifying question.”
—Andrew Sullivan, in “The Abyss of Hate Versus Hate” in New York Magazine.
He goes on…
Ruth Graham on Slate saw a 16-year-old she’d seen on a tape for a couple of minutes and immediately knew that he was indistinguishable from the “white young men crowding around a single black man at a lunch counter sit-in in Virginia in the 1960s” or other white “high school boys flashing Nazi salutes.” Even after the full context was clear, Graham refused to apologize to the kid, or retract her condemnation: The context didn’t “change the larger story” which, she explained, was bigotry toward Native Americans. She cited Trump’s use of the name “Pocahontas” for Elizabeth Warren as evidence. But using a bullhorn to call Native Americans “savages” and “drunkards at the casino” to their faces a few minutes earlier on the same tape was not worth a mention?
Graham was just one media voice among countless others, and I don’t mean to single her out. The reason I do is because her argument about the fuller context is now the norm in elite media, and it’s the underlying reason for the instant judgment. “Racism” now only means “prejudice plus power,” so what the adult Black Israelites yelled was nowhere near as bad as what a white teenager didn’t say. No empirical evidence could ever deny that underlying truth, as a piece at Deadspin insisted, after admitting that, well yes, there were “four black men who seem to belong to the Black Israelites … yelling insults.” No mention of the content of those insults, of course.
Across most of the national media, led by the New York Times and the Washington Post, the narrative had been set. “I’m willing to bet that fifty years from now, a defining image of this political era will be that smug white MAGA teen disrespecting a Native elder and veteran. It just captures so much,” Jessica Valenti tweeted. “And let’s please not forget that this group of teens … were there for the March for Life: There is an inextricable link between control over women’s bodies, white supremacy & young white male entitlement.” This is the orthodoxy of elite media, and it is increasingly the job of journalists to fit the facts to the narrative and to avoid any facts that undermine it.
There’s a reason why, in the crucial battle for the legitimacy of a free press, Trump is still on the offensive. Our mainstream press has been poisoned by tribalism. My own trust in it is eroding. I’m far from the only one.
Now THIS Is Gender Bias: The Undeserved And Dishonest Hyping Of Elaine May
BRILLIANT!
As someone who tried, often unsuccessfully, to promote female stage directors in Washington, D.C.’s professional theater scene, I am sympathetic to the cause of providing more opportunities for women to direct at a high level, including Hollywood, as well as addressing directly the many and varied obstacles women face. One is a dearth of historical role models in the field. Quick, now, name five successful and respected female film directors. One just died, Penny Marshall. The pioneer in the field, actress Ida Lupino, always turns up on such lists, but which of her six films in the 50’s is a classic? “Hard, Fast and Beautiful?” “The Bigamist?” I’ve seen all of the films she directed, and she was a solid, professional director (and also an excellent actress). But Stanley Kubrick she wasn’t. Katheryn Bigelow has to be on the list, and she’s directed several excellent films, including “The Hurt Locker,” which won a
“Best Picture” Oscar. But her resume would rank somewhere around 500 or so in a gender-blind list. Okay, that’s three.
The reasons for this are not merely discrimination in the show business industries, though that is certainly a major factor. However, as we have seen and continue to see among activists for other traditionally marginalized groups, admitting inconvenient truths that counter a group identify narrative is neither popular nor common. Unfortunately, such activists have a bad and unethical habit of hyping the accomplishments of members of their favored groups, perpetuating falsehood “for the common good” and making themselves less credible and respectable advocates as a result. In politics, we saw this repeatedly during the 2016 campaign when Hillary Clinton was described as being one of the “most qualified” Presidential candidates in American history, as assertion that is simply untrue by any objective standard. As with the Clinton hyping, it is particularly troubling when the talents and accomplishments of a an individual are hyped by journalists to advance an agenda. Journalists are not practicing their craft ethically when they intentionally try to deceive the public and distort the record, regardless of their supposedly good intentions.
Now, you might say, and I might be inclined to agree, that when current journalism standards have sunk as low as they are now, and when the news media appears to be capable of previously unimaginable deceptions in an effort to advance one political party over another, a New York Times female film critic’s efforts to bootstrap the cause of female directors by absurdly hyping the directing skills of Elaine May is small potatoes indeed. However, “The Marvelous Ms. Elaine May,” by chief Times film critic Manohla Dargis, is worthy of genuine alarm. In it, an accepted “authority” sets out to claim that black is white, that May has been an outstanding film director when she hasn’t even been a good one. She relies on the ignorance of her readers to make this argument, because May’s films—she’s directed four–have been such flops that the odds of a readers having seen all of them are daunting. Worse, I have to assume that Dargis is doing this for political reasons. Either that, or she is so gender-biased that she can’t see straight.
The article’s existence in the pages of the Times tells us that even arts reporting is now polluted beyond trust and recognition by political agendas and propaganda. Moreover, its goal is to intentionally misinform the public.
Let me note here that I admire the talents of Elaine May, whom I first encountered when she and her long-time partner Mike Nichols did a series of beer commercials tha ran during Red Sox games. She was a deft sketch comedian, and also a sharp writer of satire. My theater company in Arlington, Virginia produced her most successful play, the Off-Broadway hit “Adaptation.” However, after the team of Nichols and May broke up, Nichols became on of the most critically-acclaimed and successful film directors of the last 50 years, and May didn’t. Dargis hints that sexism and discrimination were the culprits, because May was also a “brilliant” director. This is worse than claiming the Hillary was the most qualified candidate in history. It’s more like saying that she ran one of the best campaigns in history. I’ve watched all four of Elaine May’s movies. Can’t fool me! Continue reading
You Know, That WAS An Excellent Post On October 20, 2016!
In response to my recent question in a comment thread about when Ethics Alarms first noted that the Democratic Party was embracing totalitarian attitudes, tactics and principles, reader and commenter Zoltar Speaks tracked the post down, which, as I had speculated, was published in late October, 2016, right before the election. It was interesting, in light of having just passed the two year mark in the Trump Presidency, to review my thoughts at the time. Upon re-reading it, I conclude that there is nothing in that post I would retract, and that I wish I was as smart every day was I was on October 20, 2016. This section, however, really stood out in light of what has occurred since; the context was the last debate between candidates Trump and Clinton: Continue reading
Sunday Ethics Round-Up, 1/20/2019: Blogging Angry
Yeeee-hah!
I’ve been angry all day about the absolute perfidy and vicious dishonesty of the news media, magnified by the hate-fed gullibility of my friends on social media. I wanted to wait until my fury subsided before composing the warm-up. No luck.
1. The most egregious example of incompetent, biased, mob journalism yet? Meh. That story of how online left-wing gossip site BuzzFeed concocted a fake report that suggested impeachable conduct by Donald Trump, and how it was accepted without question by the mainstream media which spent all day feeding a buzz about imminent impeachment until the Mueller investigation had to make a public announcement that the story was crap? The New York Times had it on page 11. The original false story, of course, was on the front page, above the fold. Just for giggles, I checked to see what Rachel Maddow was saying at MSNBC, since she is supposed to be the Best of the Worst, and MSNBC had been reveling in a virtual impeachment orgy. I guess she has been learning at the knee of Al Sharpton; maybe his office is next to hers. She went full Tawana Brawley. Rachel’s spin was that just because this didn’t happen doesn’t mean it couldnt have happened, because we all know that Trump should be impeached and thus this doesn’t really change anything. Then she brought on the editor of BuzzFeed who told her audience that he stands by his story.
I’ve been feeling a lot like Cassandra lately. Long ago I concluded that Maddow was a charismatic fraud, smug and pursuing an agenda, and completely untrustworthy. “Oh no!” protested several of my moderate and progressive friends in the ethics field. She’s wonderful! Funny! Fair! Never biased!
One reason I’m angry is that so many of my friends have allowed themselves and their integrity to be corrupted. I expected better of them. Maddow is an ethics corrupter.
2. Then there was the Catholic schoolboy in the MAGA hat. This was a flash Ethics Train wreck I stumbled upon it on Facebook: one of my friends there posted a CNN link with a video about an ugly episode after the March for Life in which a group of Catholic school teens wearing MAGA hats harassed and mocked an elderly Native American man who was engaged in some kind of religious ritual. In response to a comment, my friend wrote that this was one more ugly example of what the current “racist environment” had created—in other words, it’s all Trump’s fault. Since the guy is in a profession in which integrity as well as objective and unbiased consideration of facts is part of the job description, I felt this cheap shot was not only unwarranted but misleading to others who might regard him as more than just the usual Facebook goof, and so I noted that a) wearing a Trump campaign cap doesn’t make you racist and b) because someone misbehaves wearing a Trump hat no more implicates him than wearing a Boston Red Sox cap implicated Alex Cora. His response was to write me a terse note demanding that I not comment on his edicts, and then he blocked me.
That turned out to be just the beginning. I hadn’t followed it, but the story turned out to be yet another manufactured fake news story in support of an anti-Trump narrative. The video was deceptively edited. The Native American Man confronted the kids, not the other way around, and a couple of them smirked at the old wacko beating a drum in their faces. He turned out to be a serial activist who had pulled such stunts before, trying to provoke confrontations. He, it turned out, was mocking the boys, not the other way around. Meanwhile, a radical Black Nationalist group was also shouting at the kids. Continue reading
Ethics Alarms 