Where’s “A Friend” when you need him? The Ethics Alarms self-banned NYT defender who keeps trying to sneak into the comments anyway would have to get especially creative with this despicable headline in the print edition. I’d love to read how he would try to spin this one, but that would mean I’d have to read his unauthorized comment before spamming it, and I won’t.
This one is even worse than the typical “fake news” Times headlines, as the jury’s verdict in the Daniel Penny case makes the official facts of the case that Penny was not “choking a rider” but was restraining a dangerous and menacing lunatic in order to protect other riders. The headline is misleading, deceitful and an obvious attempt to cover for Manhattan’s unethical District Attorney, Alvin Bragg.
And this is the “best” newspaper in the United States. One of the main reasons I was rooting for a Trump win is that it would represent a rebuke of the biased mainstream media, which has debased itself, politics, and civic literacy with its complete commitment to progressive propaganda. The headline is a perfect example of what voters were symbolically spitting on with their votes for Donald Trump.
Main article: “Trump at the Garden: A Closing Carnival of Grievances, Misogyny and Racism. The inflammatory rally was a capstone for an increasingly aggrieved campaign for Donald Trump, whose rhetoric has grown darker and more menacing.“
#2: “Inside the Movement Behind Trump’s Election Lies”
#3: “Far-Right Figures Escalate Talk of Retribution and Election Subversion“
A ways down the page we see, “A Trump Rally Speaker Trashed Puerto Ricans. Harris Reached Out to Them.” Added: I didn’t read the piece, but the headline was misleading and deliberately so. The “speaker” was a comedian, and he was doing a routines. Ah. So the idea is that his jokes were meant seriously, and because it was a Trump rally, Trump endorsing the jokes as if they were serious positions.
I love this Comment of the Day. It is as perfect an example as we will ever see of a thoughtful, careful, articulate, and civil rebuttal of a post or position here. This COTD, by EA veteran Zanshin, focused on my disgust regarding the New York Times’ self-indicting and desperate attempt to cover for Kamala Harris’s claim that she worked for McDonald’s as a student (you know, part of that humble middle class upbringing) by criticizing Donald Trump for not accepting her word as Discovered Truth. Harris asserting that anything happened is not evidence, based on her well-documented proclivities. In particular, I pointed out that a Kamala Harris résumé that didn’t list her supposed stint as a burgermeister was deceitfully employed by the Times to imply that her claim is true.
I apologize for getting this up a bit late; I didn’t not expect subsequent events, like Trump’s master-trolling of Harris (and the Times) by doing a campaign stunt having him acting like a McDonald’s employee, the absurd tantrum thrown by the Axis over it, Tim Walz whining on “The View” that the stunt was “disrespectful” to Mickey D employees (How?), and still, neither the company nor the Harris campaign has produced any evidence that Kamala’s tale isn’t in the same category as Walz’s claim that he was in combat and Joe Biden’s claim (among others) that his uncle was eaten by cannibals.
The Times appears to be unfamiliar with the concept of “burden of proof.”
I love the comment and admire it, but as I stated in the thread, I don’t agree with it, though it is a “lucid, intelligent, well thought out” argument.
That was my first thought when I read Jack’s statement (promise? warning?threat?) “I have yet to ban a commenter for doing no more than saying the mainstream media isn’t flamingly, ostentatiously, democratically and destructively biased in favor of progressives and Democrats, but the day is coming, and it’s coming fast.”
But the part in above statement regarding Jack’s judgement about the mainstream media is rather broad and at some places even vague. (note 1) And therefore very hard to prove or disprove
So, I decided to set myself a smaller task. Can I find an example in this blogpost where Jack writes negatively about mainstream media while not warranted by the facts. An example that even might suggest that Jack is a little bit biased against the mainstream media.
I think I have found such an example. Bear with me. The example I want to discuss is the one where Jack discusses the text in the Times regarding Ms. Harris having worked at McDonalds or not.
In a post three days ago, Ethics Alarms examined Christopher Rufo’s claim that Kamala Harris engaged in plagiarism in her first book, and concluded, based on the New York Times reportage, that unlike, for example, the substantial plagiarism indulged in by ex-Harvard president Claudine Gay, prompting her exit, Harris’s uncredited lifting and copying (in a book written with a co-writer, or maybe not written by Harris at all) was careless and accidental rather than deliberate.
Now another metaphorical shoe has dropped.
The Times claimed to show plagiarism expert Jonathan Bailey the passages Rufo cited as plagiarized. It reported that he ruled that the material taken without attribution “were not serious, given the size of the document.” Now Bailey writes that he was unaware of a full dossier with additional allegations.” That means that the Times gave readers the impression that he had seen all of the questionable sections when he had not.
Now that he has reviewed everything, Bailey’s conclusion is a bit different. He writes that he now believes that the “case is more serious than I commented to the New York Times.” And with that, we are thrust into a sick version of Johnny Carson’s launching pad quiz show, “Who Do You Trust?” I will not leave you in any unnecessary suspense : the answer is “Nobody.”
I’m kind of ticked off: Ann Althouse mocked many of the same unethical items in the Sunday Times front page this morning that I noticed immediately, but Ann gets up earlier on Sundays than I do.
The Times has this:
If you bother to read the article, a “60 Minutes” interview apparently is the one that the Times thinks isn’t “friendly.” Anyone who believes that didn’t watch the Vice-Presidential debate. CBS is a card-carrying member of the Axis; not only that, but interviews on that show are edited before they air. Does the Times really expect us to believe that one of Harris’s attacks of Authentic Frontier gibberish won’t end up on the cutting room floor? As for the others: “The View”? “The View?”The biased, race-baiting progressive ignoramuses on the dumbest new show on television (Remember: Sonny Hostin, the one lawyer on the show, implied that the eclipse was proof of climate change doesn’t interview Democrats, they fawn over them. The ladies recenly let Biden lie almost non-stop in his “historic” appearance, and when he boasted about the “Violence Against Women Act,” nobody asked him about the rape accusation against him by a former Senate staffer—that would have been “unfriendly.” Colbert uses political guests, all Democrats, to set up Trump-bashing, his obsession.
This is an unusual Comment of the Day by Chris Marschner (on the post,“As the NYT Enables Terrorism and Anti-Israel Hate With ‘Think of the Children!’ Porn”), but it makes an important point, indeed, the crucial point that exposes the intellectual dishonesty of the Times’ “Think of the Children!” campaign to demonize Israel as it tries to defend its right to exist.
***
I reworked the original Times story to reflect a similar situation in the mid-20th century. All I did was change the name and the players. If the Times had written its report this way, then the Brits, the French, the Poles, the Czecks and others would be goose-stepping to their new bosses and Israel would not exist.
It is obvious to any rational thinker that when a nation faces existential peril from zealots who believe they are the rightful heirs of the entire region and that no one except the devout believers of Mohammed may live peacefully there, that when they are attacked they must eliminate the immediate as well as the long term threat in order to minimize civilian losses. We did this twice in the Pacific and Europe when despots saw opportunities for empire building.
I’ve been meaning to try this for some time, so “here goes nuthin.” These are the ethics-relevant headlines (with links) in today’s print version of the New York Times. If you tell me in the comments which ones you would like me to share in a special “gift” format that takes them out from behind the paywall (I can’t do that for all of them) I’ll go back and do that.
Who would have thought that New York Times readers could do such a terrific Peter Sellers impression?
Paul Krugman, once a Nobel Prize winner, now the very model of a modern progressive hack, issued his contribution to the current “Protect Joe Biden!” hysteria among pundits and journalists. It’s called “Why You Shouldn’t Obsess About the National Debt,” and if this won’t get the Nobel people to demand their prize in economics back, nothing will.
The intellectual dishonesty of the piece is stunning even for Krugman—I remember how an old friend favorably posted one of Krugman’s columns to Facebook and the scales fell from my eyes making me realize that the old friend was an idiot and had always been one—and the rationalizations he uses to shrug away the $34 trillion national debt are breathtaking in their audacity. Some examples:
Ugh. The old “public officials are responsible for keeping their wives in line” canard, which for some reason is only applied to conservatives by the mainstream news media. Or we could file this under “Hail Mary attempts to get the Supreme Court’s conservative Justices to recuse themselves so SCOTUS won’t strike down the totalitarian Left’s conspiracy to “get” Donald Trump by any means necessary, and law, ethics and democracy be damned.”
A New York Timesheadline yesterday shouted,“At Justice Alito’s House, a ‘Stop the Steal’ Symbol on Display.” Wow, what symbol was that? It was an upside-down American flag, seen flying over (much reviled, almost as much as Clarence Thomas) Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s house for a few days in January 2021. Because the flag was up in the period between the January 6 riot at the Capitol Joe Biden’s inauguration, the Times infers that the flag meant that Alito thinks the 2020 election was stolen from former President Trump.
Of course the Times dredged up some unethical ethics experts to deceive their readers about the seriousness of this. “Judicial experts said in interviews that the flag was a clear violation of ethics rules, which seek to avoid even the appearance of bias, and could sow doubt about Justice Alito’s impartiality in cases related to the election and the Capitol riot,” writes the Times, ostentatiously avoiding mentioning the names of the experts who said, as I would have, “What? This is nothing!”
“It might be his spouse or someone else living in his home, but he shouldn’t have it in his yard as his message to the world,” said Professor Amanda Frost at the University of Virginia law school. This is “the equivalent of putting a ‘Stop the Steal’ sign in your yard, which is a problem if you’re deciding election-related cases,” she said.
Uh, no it’s not, but that analysis is the equivalent of the professor wearing an “I am a partisan hack!” sign on her forehead.
(But claims by Donald Trump that the election was “rigged” are “baseless” and supported by no evidence at all….).
Ben Smith, the former media columnist for the New York Times, is hardly an unbiased interviewer when it comes to his old employer. He’s a product of the Times culture, and the Times culture is, has been and continues to be corrupted and unethical. The message of his recent interview with newish executive editor Joe Kahn is that the Times is all better now and is objective again after a teeny dip, though it hasn’t been objective in my lifetime.
What is revealing about the interview, however, is that if one can wade through the doubletalk, careful caveats, avoidance of direct statements and verbosity, Kahn admits that the Times was in the tank for Biden and the Democrats in 2020 as the pandemic and Black Lives Matter hit, and that it was wrong for the Times to do that, and they are really, really sorry and promise not to do it again.
Strangely, the Times has not apologized to Donald Trump, Republicans, the American voters and the Founders for this. His statement also puts in perspective the rote talking point, every time the news media sneeringly refers to Trump’s insistence that the election was stolen from him, that the claim is “baseless.” That the leader of the U.S. news media still regarded as the role model for the rest deliberately abandoned its already partisan-biased version of journalism for pure advocacy and propaganda in the year of a national election is very much a “base.” Ethics Alarms, among others, has said so, and was saying so in 2020. Remember those scary (and fake) Hunan virus death charts with red spikes reaching through and above the mast head? Yeah, I think we got a little carried away, says Kahn.
Oh, well that’s okay then. Everybody makes mistakes….
The man is, in order, as expert at avoiding speaking plainly as any politician, infuriatingly equivocal, blatantly partisan, and a master of spin. Nonetheless, if you can pick your way through all the fog, the confession is there. Here are some key sections with some commentary by me):
Ben Smith: “Dan Pfeiffer, who used to work for Barack Obama, recently wrote of the Times: “They do not see their job as saving democracy or stopping an authoritarian from taking power.” Why don’t you see your job as: “We’ve got to stop Trump?” What about your job doesn’t let you think that way?”
Joe Kahn: “Good media is the Fourth Estate, it’s another pillar of democracy. One of the absolute necessities of democracy is having a free and fair and open election where people can compete for votes, and the role of the news media in that environment is not to skew your coverage towards one candidate or the other, but just to provide very good, hard-hitting, well-rounded coverage of both candidates, and informing voters. If you believe in democracy, I don’t see how we get past the essential role of quality media in informing people about their choice in a presidential election. To say that the threats of democracy are so great that the media is going to abandon its central role as a source of impartial information to help people vote — that’s essentially saying that the news media should become a propaganda arm for a single candidate, because we prefer that candidate’s agenda. It is true that Biden’s agenda is more in sync with traditional establishment parties and candidates. And we’re reporting on that and making it very clear. It’s also true that Trump could win this election in a popular vote. Given that Trump’s not in office, it will probably be fair. And there’s a very good chance, based on our polling and other independent polling, that he will win that election in a popular vote. So there are people out there in the world who may decide, based on their democratic rights, to elect Donald Trump as president. It is not the job of the news media to prevent that from happening. It’s the job of Biden and the people around Biden to prevent that from happening. It’s our job to cover the full range of issues that people have. At the moment, democracy is one of them. But it’s not the top one.”
Ethics Alarms 