New York Times

VP Vance’s Speech and the Complete Unmasking of the Totalitarian American Left: Part II [Updated]

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

That’s the chest of CNN’s Jake Tapper above. He was making a little frowny-face yesterday for the idiots viewing CNN who are too dim to realize that the accusatory headline is a non-sequitur, like “I like ice cream, can you swim?” The White House suspending the AP’s White House privileges—that’s privileges, which are distinct from rights, Jake—has nothing to do with freedom of speech or even the First Amendment, so the implied hypocrisy is more fake news.

Added: On “Twitter/X” J.D. Vance responded to another journalist making the same “point”:

The remarkably negative (and ignorant, and biased) Axis media reaction to J.D. Vance’s speech in Germany proves one again that as often as President Trump exaggerates, calling the news media the “enemy of the people” was neither excessive, unfair nor untrue. That’s exactly what it is. It is now the enemy of democracy as well, and nothing illustrates that better than the rush to condemn the Vice-President for telling European leaders to stop censoring speech based on political content.

It takes special chutzpah for any media organization to accuse Trump of stifling press coverage when he has made himself more accessible to the news media in less than a month than Joe Biden was in four years. I would also venture that the Associated Press could get more useful information surfing the web that it ever got from Biden’s idiotic, stumbling, incompetent, lazy paid liar Karine Jean-Pierre. The AP has proved itself conflicted, partisan and anti-Trump as well as unreliable. Why should it be entitled to attend press briefings instead of, say, Ethics Alarms?

Also on CNN, Nick Paton Walsh attacked Vance’s speech while defending censorship to prevent “authoritarian regimes.” This was the excuse used to justify banishing Trump from social media. I suppose it was also the excuse for blocking coverage of and commentary on Hunter Biden’s laptop on news platforms, Facebook and Twitter. Those who would punish and censor speech always have “reasons,” but the real reason is maintaining their own power and crippling the functioning of democracy. Just listen to this hack…

“Vance’s complaints struck at the heart of a key difference in the role of free speech in Europe and the United States, a much fresher democracy. In Europe, free speech is paramount and enshrined in law, but so is responsibility for the safety of citizens. Some European legal systems suggest this means you cannot falsely shout there is a “fire” in a crowded theater and escape punishment if the resulting stampede causes injury simply because you had the right to shout “fire.” In the United States, the First Amendment means you can shout whatever you want. In the smartphone and post-9/11 era, Europe has prohibited some extremist activity online. It is still illegal to advocate for the Nazis in Germany, and it should not be controversial or mysterious why. The wildly rebellious press across Europe are a vibrant sign of its free speech. And the fringe parties Vance objected to being absent in Munich are growing in their popularity. Nobody is really being shut down.”

Hilarious! Enshrined in law “but”! If speakers, writers and artists can be censored and punished for words and opinions that some authority rules “unsafe,” then there is no free speech. It’s amazing that advocates for censorship still use Oliver Wendell Holmes’ thoroughly discredited “shouting fire in a crowded theater” analogy. Ken White of Popehat, perhaps the sharpest and most eloquent blogger in captivity until he was infected with the Trump Derangement virus, decisively explained in “Three generations of a hackneyed apologia for censorship are enough” how Holmes’s famous opinion has been misused to defend government censorship of speech that mentions or threatens violence without actually inciting it on the spot. This includes “hate speech,” which is what many of the European countries outlaw and what the totalitarian Left here would love to outlaw in the U.S. “Hate speech” would mean “speech that progressives hate.” (Knucklehead Tim Walz said on national TV that “hate speech” isn’t protected by the First Amendment.) Walsh, like Walz, literally doesn’t know what he’s talking about; he is quoting an opinion he hasn’t read, and he definitely hasn’t bothered to read White’s explanation of why that defense of censorship is based on legal and constitutional ignorance.

CNN’s censorship rationalizing pales before CBS’s efforts, however. Incredibly, “Face the Nation’s” Margaret Brennan really and truly asserted to Marco Rubio that Hitler’s Germany used “freedom of speech” to spark the Holocaust. Kudos to the Secretary of State for not channeling Dan Ackroyd from the old Saturday Night Live “Point/Counterpoint” skit and responding, “Margaret you ignorant slut!” She deserved it.

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To Defenders of the Biased Mainstream Media: Ethics Alarms Challenges You to Find An Innocent Explanation For Why the NYT and WaPo Don’t Regard This Story As News [Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

Heck, even CNN reported it (but not MSNBC). Crystal Mangum, the exotic dancer who in 2006 accused three Duke lacrosse players of rape launching an ethics train wreck that ended up costing the city of Durham damages, derailed the academic careers of the three students, got the lacrosse team coach fired, and resulted in a rare instance of a prosecutor being disbarred, finally admitted what everyone should have figured out by now.

“I testified falsely against them by saying that they raped me when they didn’t, and that was wrong. And I betrayed the trust of a lot of other people who believed in me,” Mangum announced on the podcast “Let’s Talk with Kat.” “I made up a story that wasn’t true because I wanted validation from people and not from God.”

Oh.

What?

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From The Res Ipsa Loquitur Files: A “Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!” Headline For The Ages

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

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.

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Pointer: John Podhoretz

“Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!” Here’s What the New York Times Has For Readers This Morning [Updated]:

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

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.

Now for the columns:

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Comment of the Day: “’Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!’ Hilarity of the Day: The New York Times Gets It Backward Trying To Cover For Harris And Vilifying Trump”

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

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.

Here is Zanshin’s Comment of the Day on the post, “’Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!’ Hilarity of the Day: The New York Times Gets It Backward Trying To Cover For Harris And Vilifying Trump.”

***

Bite me!

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.

He uses a Times quote that begins with:

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More on the Kamala Harris Book Plagiarism Episode

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

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.”

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“Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias” Watch: The NYT Isn’t Even Pretending Any More

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

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.

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Comment of the Day: “As the NYT Enables Terrorism and Anti-Israel Hate With ‘Think of the Children!’ Porn: The Sequel”

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

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.

My NYT rewrite:

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The Sunday Times, 6/23/2024: A Snapshot of Culture, Bias, Propaganda and Values

/ Jack Marshall / 32 Comments

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.

Here are the stories:

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Ethics Heroes: New York Times Readers

/ Jack Marshall / 33 Comments

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:

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