New York Times

The New York Times Publishes A Feature About Ethics And Doesn’t Mention Ethics Once, Part I [#8 Corrected!]

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

This should be expected, since the Times no longer practices ethics, shows much interests in it, or demonstrates that it understands what ethics is.

In a bizarre feature called “The Virtues of Being Bad,” 16 writers (I never heard of any of them, and I follow such things) wrote confessionals about their “guilty pleasures” of doing bad things, supposedly the only “bad” things they do. (In most cases, I doubt it.) Here is the annoying introduction…

“Mocktails and sunscreen, masking and mindfulness — for those of us who strive to be upright, responsible citizens, the constant reminders of various ways we ought to be good are all around us. They’re almost enough to make you forget the pleasures of being a little bit bad. We asked 16 writers — most of them respectable adults — about the irresponsible, immoral, indulgent things they do. Transgression has the power to teach us something about how we ought to live. But it’s also just … fun?”

I’ll briefly comment on the ethical logic—if any— being displayed in each of the 16 sections, rating the combination of unethical conduct described and rationalizing it in a public form from 0 (not unethical at all) to 5 (very unethical). I won’t mention the authors, because, frankly, I don’t care who they are. Any feature that confounds non-ethical considerations like “fun” with ethical conduct is too subversive and badly reasoned to generate anything but contempt. Along with the ethics score, I’ll also assign a jerk score to each of the authors, again from zero (not a jerk) to 5. Here we go with the first eight; 9-16 will be discussed in Part 2.

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“Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!” The Times’ Dishonest And Biased “Fact Check” On “Trump’s Election Lies”

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

If I never had occasion to write another ethics post about Donald Trump again, I would be thrilled. Unfortunately, he won’t shut up or disappear, and the Axis of Unethical Conduct (the “resistance,” the Democratic Party and the increasingly outrageous news media), recently joined by the justice system, won’t stop their misconduct.

Today the New York Times again disgraced themselves and their now shattered reputation for accuracy and fairness beyond what even I have come to expect. Signaling that Trump cannot expect anything approaching objective coverage and analysis of his various trials, the Times today offers a “fact check” headlined, “Fact-Checking the Breadth of Trump’s Election Lies: The former president faces multiple charges related to his lies about the 2020 election. Here’s a look at some of his most repeated falsehoods.”

I decided to factcheck the fact check, suspecting what I would find but in the end stunned by how openly the Times failed to deliver on what it promised. It’s astoundingly deceitful, and aimed at readers who just want to see Trump punished because they hate his guts. I won’t fisk the whole thing, but here’s more than enough to show you what the Times has become:

  • “…In public, he made more than 800 inaccurate claims about the election from the time the polls began closing on Nov. 3, 2020, to the end of his presidency, according to a database compiled by The Washington Post.”

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And Speaking Of Mainstream Media Bias, Spinning For Democrats And Misleading The Public, This NYT Report Is A Classic

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

When I read this astoundingly mendacious story in the Times, the first thing that I was reminded of was the memorable moment in “Plain Trains and Automobiles” when John Candy confidently tells a dubious state trooper that his burned out, roofless wreck of a car is “safe to drive.” (This goes right into the Ethics Alarms Clip archive.)

President Biden has repeatedly insisted that he has no knowledge of his son Hunter’s various sleazy business schemes, and that Joe never discussed Hunter’s money-making activities with him. Yet yesterday, in his nearly five hours of closed-door testimony to the House Oversight Committee, a former business partner of Hunter’s, Devon Archer, revealed that President Biden met with and spoke to his son Hunter’s international business associates on about 20 occasions as Hunter sought consulting deals (translation: lucrative influence and access peddling arrangements).

Hilariously, Archer claimed that the Joe Biden was not party to any of his son’s business deals. You see, Hunter Biden was just trying to sell the idea that he could provide access to his powerful father—by providing access to his powerful father. He was claiming that he could influence his father by showing that he could persuade him to pick up the phone, drop by and shake hands. Yet, reports the Times, Democrats on the panel insisted that it wasn’t what it was, by definition.

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Where Reporting Ends And Propaganda Takes Over: The NYT On Affirmative Action

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

Dominating today’s New York Times front page (above) is a report headlined “How It Feels to Have Your Life Changed By Affirmative Action” online and “Inside the Lives Changed by Affirmative Action” in the print version of the Times. The piece is naked and blatant advocacy for the Constitution- and U.S. law-violating policy that has been given temporary pass by a conflicted Supreme Court multiple times despite an unavoidable fact: it’s discrimination, and the Constitution doesn’t distinguish between good discrimination and bad discrimination. By the principles and values this nation was founded upon, all discrimination on the basis of qualities like religion, race, gender and ethnicity is wrong.

The Times approach to the subject is similar to its coverage of the illegal immigration controversy. In that matter, as periodically pointed out by Ethics Alarms, the Times has given readers frequent heart-warming tales of “the good illegal immigrant,” a hard-working immigration law violator who is the salt of the earth, a wonderful parent, and yet cruelly held accountable for his or her law-breaking anyway. The motive of such articles seems clear: use emotions to overcome and blot out law, ethics, fairness and common sense. As the Supreme Court seems poised to finally call college and university affirmative action programs what they are: illegal, the Times is trying to build support for its favorite party’s inevitable accusations of racism and illegitimacy against the five or six justices who will have simply done their jobs.

The headlines tell it all. Affirmative action changed the lives of its beneficiaries for the better, so obviously, affirmative action is good, and ending it would be unethical. What is striking about the article is that none of the affirmative action beneficiaries—all black—interviewed appear to have given a second’s thought to the individual whose opportunity they seized because of their “better” color. Some express regrets because they faced, or felt like they faced, skepticism about their degrees or career accomplishments because they were presumed to be “undeserving” affirmative action beneficiaries. None hint at any regret that someone who deserved to be accepted to an elite school or program was not so they could be.

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Next Up On The Rapidly Expanding List Of Speech Progressives Want To Censor: “Fear Speech”

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

New York Times reporter and opinion writer Julia Angwin has been given a prominent space in the latest Sunday Times to expound on why another kind of speech needs to be suppressed, controlled and if possible, censored: “fear speech.”

Already the relentlessly radicalizing progressive hoard has embraced the anti-American concept of censoring other kinds of speech according to their very subjective definitions: “misinformation,” meaning opinions or analysis they disagree with, or distortions of truth that emanate from someplace or some one not devoted to advancing the Left’s goals and agendas, and “hate speech,” which they want to have excluded from First Amendment protections as they define it on a case by case basis. Now the Times is starting the metaphorical ball rolling to target more speech that these two categories might miss. Its designated messenger declares,

This year, Facebook and Twitter allowed a video of a talk to be distributed on their platforms in which Michael J. Knowles, a right-wing pundit, called for “transgenderism” to be “eradicated.” The Conservative Political Action Coalition, which hosted the talk, said in its social media posts promoting the video that the talk was “all about the left’s attempt to erase biological women from modern society.”

None of this was censored by the tech platforms because neither Mr. Knowles nor CPAC violated the platforms’ hate speech rules that prohibit direct attacks against people based on who they are. But by allowing such speech to be disseminated on their platforms, the social media companies were doing something that should perhaps concern us even more: They were stoking fear of a marginalized group.

Note the carefully crafted rhetoric: stoking fear of a marginalized group. Stoking fear of a group to marginalize it as much as possible for political gain is apparently hunky-dory, as in…

She continues,

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Well, There’s Some Good News: The NYT’s Marxist Tendencies Are Showing But Its Readers Are Unsympathetic

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

The New York Times went all out with a feature about how food delivery drivers were being exploited and under-rewarded. The headline: “$388 in Sushi. Just a $20 Tip: The Brutal Math of Uber Eats and DoorDash.”

The assumption of reporter Mark Abramson is that the more the food costs, the more the tip should be, presumably because anyone who can afford $388 for sushi should share the wealth. But a delivery driver does exactly the same amount of work for the sushi order as a he would for 20 bucks worth of egg rolls. Why is he entitled to the same level of tip as a waiter or waitress who ideally contributes to a pleasurable dining experience?

Well, he isn’t. And though the Times readers are as woke as they come, this bit of working class hero victimization propaganda was too tough to swallow. Some examples…

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Unethical Quote Of The Month: Lawyer Jerry Goldfeder

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

“You know, it’s not a slam-dunk. But I think that survives a motion to dismiss, and then let the jury decide.”

—-Jerry H. Goldfeder, a special counsel at Stroock & Stroock & Lavan LLP and an  expert in New York state election law, to the New York Times regarding Manhattan D.A. Alvin Bragg’s supposedly imminent indictment and prosecution of former President Donald Trump.

That is an flat-out unethical endorsement of prosecutorial abuse of power, for not only a lawyer, but a lawyer in a major Manhattan law firm, being quoted as authority in the New York Times, uncritically, of course.

An ethical prosecutor does not bring a case unless he or she is certain that the defendant is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. The issue isn’t whether the prosecution will prevail, but whether the prosecutor has sufficient evidence to justify it prevailing with an objective and fair jury. Surviving a motion to dismiss is not an ethical standard; it’s the bottom-of-the-barrel standard. The judge agreeing that the case has no merit at all as a matter of law, is not the equivalent of holding that the case should not be brought by an ethical prosecutor. “Hey, who knows if the guy is guilty or if we have the evidence to convict? Let’s just get it in front of a jury and see what they think!”

Unspoken in this case: “After all, the point is to make Trump look bad, right? If we can get a conviction, it’s frosting on the cake.”

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More “Do Something!” Climate Change Hysteria!

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

The New York Times published a serious opinion piece that argues that one good way to save the planet from climate change is to shrink the human race. It’s obvious, isn’t it? Smaller people leave less of a carbon footprint. Brilliant! Thus, Mara Altman writes,

Thomas Samaras, who has been studying height for 40 years and is known in small circles as the Godfather of Shrink Think, a widely unknown philosophy that considers small superior, calculated that if we kept our proportions the same but were just 10 percent shorter in America alone, we would save 87 million tons of food per year (not to mention trillions of gallons of water, quadrillions of B.T.U.s of energy and millions of tons of trash)….Short people don’t just save resources, but as resources become scarcer because of the earth’s growing population and global warming, they may also be best suited for long-term survival (and not just because more of us will be able to jam into spaceships when we are forced off this planet we wrecked)….When you mate with shorter people, you’re potentially saving the planet by shrinking the needs of subsequent generations. Lowering the height minimum for prospective partners on your dating profile is a step toward a greener planet.

You can’t mock people like this enough. They don’t have any practical solutions for preventing what they fear, so instead, in a “We’ve got to DO SOMETHING!” frenzy, they propose nonsense and people actually take them seriously, because they are also in a state of media propaganda-induced terror. I ultimately decided that now was an ideal time for Sidney Wang to make his first Ethics Alarms appearance of 2023, but I was sorely tempted to use this (From “Dr. Cyclops”)…

or even this, from a comic fantasy about how women could finally take over the world… Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz Of The Day: “Gotcha!” Or “Benefit Of The Doubt”?

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

That’s yesterday’s Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle, titled “Some Theme’s Missing,”, above. Does the pattern of the letter squares remind you of anything? Given that December 18 is the first night of Hanukkah, many found the resemblance of the puzzle to a Nazi swastika…disturbing. Sinister even.

Republicans pounced. New York Times-haters pounced. Donald Trump Jr. pounced, on Twitter. Israel’s Israel National News thought it notable that the swastika crossword was published following what it deemed an anti-Semitic op-ed by the Times the day before, warning that Benjamin “Netanyahu’s government…is a significant threat to the future of Israel — its direction, its security and even the idea of a Jewish homeland.”

The publication also posted a poll asking readers if the puzzle’s design was “intentional Nazi imagery or an unfortunate coincidence?” Of the 440 votes, nearly 85% deemed the symbol to be deliberate.

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And The NYT Dutifully Feeds A Misinformation Loop About Republicans Creating Misinformation About The Paul Pelosi Attack That They Caused, Of Course, And That’s A FACT! [Updated!]

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

The report above was mysteriously pulled and denied by NBC last week, not generally known to be a Republican mouthpiece. But the New York Times front page today includes as its primary “news” story, an accusatory piece headlined, “How Republicans Fed a Misinformation Loop About the Pelosi Attack.”

Oddly, the story doesn’t mention the recanted NBC story at all. I guess New York Times readers don’t need to know about that when they are assessing, right before the November 8 election, whether to vote for those evil Republicans.

Nor does the story, by undoubtedly good registered Democrats Annie Karni, Malika Khurana and Stuart A. Thompson, note that all of the theories, speculation and “misinformation” has flourished because of the strange absence of crucial information that police have but so far refuse to release: Pelosi’s 911 call, and security footage of the break-in. A reader will also search in vain for any mention of the details in the original report that caused such speculation, like the statement that there was a “third person” involved. There is no explanation of why Pelosi referred to his attacker as “a friend.” I guess I don’t understand this complex, crucial profession of “journalism,” but it would seem to me, tyro that I am, that an article about the GOP pushing “misinformation” might begin by clarifying the gaping holes in the story that have made people who don’t just swallow biased media narratives whole a teeny bit suspicious.

One thing the story is clear about, however, is that it is cold, hard, irrefutable information that Pelosi’s attacker, a mentally ill, rainbow flag embracing, Black Lives Matter-admiring illegal alien, was motivated to attack Paul Pelosi because Republicans have been saying mean things about Nancy Pelosi for some unknown reason. After all, “Mr. Pelosi’s attacker is said to have believed “Mr. Trump’s lie of a stolen election,” among other falsehoods. Said by whom? Oh, that’s not important; what’s important is that Republicans are circulating misinformation about the attack.

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