Washington Post

NewsGuard, WaPo, and the Unethical Mobius Strip

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

The Global Engagement Center, the State Department’s foreign disinformation center and a sinister censorship invention of the Obama Administration, lost its funding after the re-written continuing resolution in Congress to resolve the budget stand-off was approved. The original version, killed in part by the opposition of President-Elect Trump, included funding for the agency of around $61 million, supporting 120 people on staff.

Good riddance. Elon Musk had, correctly, called the GEC the “worst offender in U.S. government censorship & media manipulation.” Along with the Biden Department of Homeland Security, it provided taxpayer funds to NewsGuard, the laughably biased “non-partisan” news disinformation “watchdog” that the Axis media uses to deny that it is what it is. “This company rates news sites’ credibility. The right wants it stopped,” a Washington Post disinformation piece was headlined on Chritsmas Eve. Here is literally the only thing you need to know about both the movitations of the Post and the neutrality and objectivity of NewsGuard. Are you ready?

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“Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!” or “Now THAT’S an Unethical Headline!”

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Really, that Washington Post headline from yesterday is impressive. It has just 13 words, and yet there are six separate pieces of misinformation in it. Bravo!

1. and 2. Elon Musk didn’t “force” anything.

3. The Trump Presidency hasn’t started yet. If it had started, that would be a Constitutional crisis, and Milloy as well as the Washington Post are among those responsible for it, since they deliberately ignored the scandal of a diminished capacity White House resident for almost four years.

4. Uh, there was no shutdown, and only an idiot would have thought there would be.

5. A Presidency that hasn’t begun can’t collapse by definition.

6. Chaos is what the Biden Presidency is in now.

Details aside, it is also an excellent example of the fake news category I call “future news.” When what is happening doesn’t supply sufficient fodder for reports and pundits to attack Republicans and their favorite ideology’s opponents, attack those you want to hold responsible for what might happen.

It is hard to choose among Milbank, the despicable Phillip Bump, the deluded E.J. Dionne, dim bulb Ruth Marcus, old hack Eugene Robinson, boringly predictable Kathleen Parker and the certifiably bonkers Jennifer Rubin (all of whom have damning EA dossiers) as the most egregious partisan propaganda agent on this rapidly declining newspaper. Milbank would certainly be a worthy choice. Despite Jeff Bezos’s intermittent efforts to drag the once esteemed paper back from the brink, its staff is obviously so biased and lacking diversity of thought that the task seems impossible.

I keep my digital subscription to the Post because I need to check it for Ethics Alarms issues, because it’s my local paper, and mostly because it reminds me that the New York Times could be worse. But I do believe that bias has made the Post too stupid to survive: I wonder if it will last the next four years.

Why wouldn’t any sane and ethical editor tell Milbank, “Dana, I love ya, but that column makes you look like an apoplectic old fool and this paper look ridiculous. Now that you’ve gotten that out of your system, go write something that won’t cause spit-takes all over America”?

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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Breaking: Not Only Can Democrats and Harris Not Fool All the People All the Time, They Can’t Even Fool The Washington Post!

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

I just posted on “X”:

“!! The Washington Post just announced it won’t endorse a Presidential candidate. This is not only a victory for Trump, it should send Democrats to their panic rooms. The message is how terrible a candidate Harris is, and the narrative that she is otherwise has collapsed.”

Good.

There is hope.

No, I Really Am Finding the Desperation and Panic of Democrats and the Media As They Realize Harris Is Losing Hilarious, Because It Is…

/ Jack Marshall / 33 Comments

In a post yesterday, I stated that I found the New York Times’s pathetic efforts to cover for Kamala Harris’s apparent lie that she worked at McDonalds “hilarious.” This was followed by a marvelous comment by long-time commenter Zanshin (First comment: April, 2013), soon to be posted here as a Comment of the Day, who wrote in part, “I think we all can agree that the essence of his analysis is not that this part of the Times article is genuinely funny but rather that the quote is a proof of the Times’ humiliating debasement of its professional duties as an objective news source.” I should have been clearer, I guess. The essence, in addition to constituting proof of the Times’ humiliating debasement of its professional duties as an objective news source and making me laugh outright (because I did), it is also throbbing evidence that the Axis is freaking the hell out, no longer able to restrain itself from trying the most obviously desperate tactics, whistling, now screaming, past the graveyard, aware that only a miracle (or massive fraud by their party) can save them, and exposing their panic for all to see.

To which I respond, “GOOD, you assholes. You deserve it, and I am reveling in your pain.”

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“Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!” Two Glaring Examples…

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

1. The former reliably progressive, Democrat-supporting Rolling Stone reporter Matt Taibbi nicely exposed the Washington Post’s astoundingly flagrant Democratic operative Phillip Bump (EA dossier here) on Taibbi’s substack. (I have been temped to subscribe, but…)

In “Note to Philip Bump: The Washington Post columnist speaks on CNN; a brief reply” he writes:

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Wow. The Trump-Deranged Media Hacks Are Still Flogging the Ridiculous Alito Flag Angle!

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Now this is desperation. The upside-down U.S. flag incident that the New York Times treated as a “scoop” three-and-a-half years after it took place started falling apart almost immediately, so then the Times concocted an even more attenuated flag-based theory that Justice Joseph Alito had signaled his approval of the January 6, 2021 rioting at the Capitol. In neither case was there any evidence that Alito flew the flags or was aware of their significance; he explained the incidents, but, see, because he’s a conservative SCOTUS Justice, the Axis just assumes he must be lying.

The fact that the second flag was used by Black Lives Matter more prominently than by the J-6 idiots? Never mind. That the same flag had been flying without incident for 50 years outside the City Hall of the wokiest city on the continent? So what? That the sainted Justice Ginsburg unambiguously signaled her conflict of interest regarding all things Trump with a symbolic protest she made explicit? That the attack on Alito had to rely on the pre-women’s liberation, anti-feminist theory that a husband is responsible for the conduct of his wife? Hey, this is the American Left of 2024: Double Standards and Hypocrisy Don’t Matter when you’re trying to save democracy! That the Washington Post reporter who investigated the Alito home’s fluttering distress symbol when it happened decided it was a proverbial nothingburger?

About that…. serial Ethics Alarms Ethics Dunce Eric Wemple, who is the Washington Post’s “media critic” these days, thus telling you all you need to know about the credibility of the Washington Post, was actually allowed to issue an op-ed yesterday condemning his own paper for its “deference to Justice Alito” handing “a scoop to the New York Times.” In this thing, Wemple really says that the Post ignored a “sizzling tip” in 2021. That there was a nautical distress signal flag flying over the Alito home was a sizzling tip! Sizzling! Yes, he really wrote that.

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Apparently the News Media Has Decided That It Was Time For Another Ferguson-Style Phony Racist Police Story

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

This kind of journalism goes well beyond unethical to near evil.

Here are the bare facts about the death of 26-year-old Dexter Reed on March 21, 2024, after his car was pulled over by Chicago police. He had been arrested on July 13, 2023 and charged with felony aggravated unlawful use of a weapon. Reed had also been arrested on April 20, 2023 and charged with retail theft. After Reed was stopped on March 21 of this year, he refused to obey officers’ commands, and then started shooting. One shot wounded a Chicago police officer. Four officers returned fire, and Reed died in the exchange.

Now here is how the Washington Post began telling the story, in reports this week with these headlines: “Videos show Chicago police fired nearly 100 shots over 41 seconds during fatal traffic stop,” and “Police fire 96 shots in 41 seconds, killing Black man during traffic stop.”

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Ethics Hero: The Washington Post

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

I know what many of you are going to say. The Washington Post is an unalloyed ethics villain. It has distorted facts and editorialized in news reports. It employs indefensible partisan propagandists like Philip Bump. It even “stood by” Bump’s false reporting when Prof. Turley exposed it.The paper played a substantial role in rigging the 2020 election by deliberately slanting its reporting against then-President Trump and in favor of Joe Biden. It is unquestionably an unethical, biased, partisan news source.

That, however, makes its editorial titled “Donald Trump deserves his day in appeals court” all the more remarkable and praiseworthy. The ridiculous and obviously politically-motivated New York civil case verdict against Trump that originally required him to post an unprecedented $464 million bond in order to appeal it has been mocked and condemned in the conservative media. It should have been, for it is transparent effort to cripple the putative GOP Presidential nominee financially so he is handicapped in his campaign against President Biden. Most of the Trump Deranged, in contrast, have cheered the result. As a certifiable Trump-detesting news organization, however, the Post’s call for fairness and due process for their frequent target carries more weight and persuasive power than any argument appearing in the New York Post, the Washington Free Beacon or Fox News.

Highlights from the editorial:

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Ethics Quote Of The Month: Political Cartoonist Michael P. Ramirez

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

“Today, political correctness and the woke movement have defined words and images as weapons that should be banned for offending political categories and self-defined oppressed groups. It is tolerance of all ideas—except those they disagree with, and it follows the adage that if you can’t win the argument, you change the rules. It treats people as children who must be shielded from conversation, unable to manage a verbal exchange without supervision, and it is a direct threat to freedom of speech and liberty—as well as the truth.”

—Political cartoonist Michael P. Ramirez, whose cartoon mocking the hypocrisy of Hamas for decrying the deaths of Gaza civilians while it used civilians as human shields was pulled by the Washington Post for supposedly engaging in racial stereotypes after its staff objected vehemently.

The original cartoon and the Post’s craven decision to pull it was discussed on Ethics Alarms, here. “How ironic,” I wrote, “now Ramirez can draw a similar cartoon about the Washington Post’s hypocrisy.” Ramirez decided to write an essay instead. He continues in part,

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