Tag: journalism

SAY WHAT? Liberal Politico Reporter Suggests Somali Daycare Owners Could Justifiably Shoot People for Asking Questions

Josh Gerstein, a journalist who works at the liberal outlet Politico, tweeted something on Monday night that is raising a lot of eyebrows.

In response to the explosive report from independent journalist Nick Shirley about Somali fraud at daycare centers in Minnesota, Gerstein tweeted:

“At some point, the amateur effort to knock on doors of home daycares intersects with robust stand-your-ground laws”

Who knew that liberal journos support ‘Stand Your Ground’ laws? Of course, Minnesota, being controlled by Democrats, has no such laws, but still.

Isn’t it amazing how journalists always rush to attack the person reporting the wrongdoing in a situation like this rather than calling out, you know, the wrongdoing itself?

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Britain Has Officially Criminalized Journalism

The moment the British government began proscribing political movements as terrorist organisations, rather than just militant groups, it was inevitable that saying factual things, making truthful statements, would become a crime.

And lo behold, here we are.

The Terrorism Act 2000 has a series of provisions that make it difficult to voice or show any kind of support for an organisation proscribed under the legislation, whether it is writing an article or wearing a T-shirt.

Recent attention has focused on Section 13, which is being used to hound thousands of mostly elderly people who have held signs saying: “I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action.” They now face a terrorism conviction and up to six months in jail.

But an amendment introduced in 2019 to Section 12 of the act has been largely overlooked, even though it is even more repressive. It makes it a terrorism offence for a person to express “an opinion or belief that is supportive of a proscribed organisation” and in doing so be “reckless” about whether anyone else might be “encouraged to support” the organisation.

It is hard to believe this clause was not inserted specifically to target the watchdog professions: journalists, human rights groups and lawyers. They now face up to 14 years in jail for contravening this provision.

When it was introduced, six years ago, Section 12 made it impossible to write or speak in ways that might encourage support for groups whose central aim was using violence against people to achieve their aims.

The law effectively required journalists and others to adopt a blanket condemnatory approach to proscribed militant groups. That had its own drawbacks. It made it difficult, and possibly a terrorist offence, to discuss or analyse these organisations and their goals in relation to international law, which, for example, allows armed resistance — violence — against an occupying army.

But these problems have grown exponentially since the Conservatives proscribed Hamas’ political wing in 2021 and the government of Keir Starmer proscribed Palestine Action in 2025, the first time in British history a direction-action group targeting property had been declared a terrorist group.

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Pentagon Creates New Legion of PR Toadies

When the Pentagon announced that reporters would only be credentialed if they pledged not to report on documents not expressly released by official press handlers, free press advocates, including FAIR (9/23/25), denounced the directive as an assault on the First Amendment.

The impact of this rule cannot be understated—any reporter agreeing to such terms is essentially a deputized public relations lackey.

Many journalists, thankfully, displayed solidarity with each other and the idea of a free press when they resisted the state’s new censorship efforts. “Dozens of reporters turned in access badges and exited the Pentagon…rather than agree to government-imposed restrictions on their work,” reported the AP (10/15/25).

CNN’s Brian Stelter (10/15/25) reported:

A flyer with the words “journalism is not a crime” appeared Tuesday on the wall outside the “Correspondents’ Corridor” where journalists operate at the Pentagon. It was a silent protest of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s new policy that severely restricts press access.

The policy criminalizes routine reporting, according to media lawyers and advocates, so news outlets are refusing to abide by it. Instead, they are giving up their access to the building, while vowing to continue thoroughly covering Hegseth and the military from outside the Pentagon’s five walls.

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Columbia Journalism Review editor fired after insisting on ethics, deadlines: report

The Columbia Journalism Review fired Sewell Chan as its executive editor after he insisted on ethics, deadlines, and showing up in the office for work, the longtime journalist alleges. A journalism expert told The College Fix that it seems Chan acted appropriately and within his bounds as the executive editor.

Chan, who recently started a new job at the University of Southern California as a senior fellow in its Annenberg communications school, alleges the school fired him after “three pointed conversations.”

Chan (pictured) is the former editor of the Texas Tribune and also worked for the Los Angeles Times and New York Times.

“One was with a fellow who is passionately devoted to the cause of the Gaza protests at Columbia and had covered the recent detention of a Palestinian graduate for an online publication he had just written about, positively, for CJR,” Chan wrote in a LinkedIn post.

“I told him there was a significant ethical problem with writing for an outlet he had just covered,” Chan wrote.

This description fits CJR Journalism Fellow Meghnad Bose, who wrote an article about the Substack page Drop Site News for Columbia Journalism Review in February.

In late March, Bose wrote an article for Drop Site about Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate and Palestinian activist, arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement on March 8. The article quotes Khalil’s claim that his arrest was a “direct consequence of exercising [his] right to free speech as [he] advocated for a free Palestine and an end to the genocide in Gaza.”

Bose did not respond to two emails sent in the past week that asked about the accuracy of Chan’s statements on what happened.

While Chan declined to comment further to The Fix, a journalism professor at DePauw University said, “it would seem [Chan] has a good point in trying to reel in the apparent conflict of interest for the one fellow.”

“This kind of management would be expected from an executive editor who values the reputation of his outlet,” Professor Jeffrey McCall told The Fix via email. McCall regularly writes about journalism ethics and the media.

“Normally, an executive editor has wide leeway in making personnel and content decisions, and it appears Chan was perhaps having his role undercut,” McCall said.

“Conflict of interest policies are essential to any media organization in that they protect both the readers and the reporters, and provide transparency for news decisions,” he said.

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Wikileaks: USAID Spent Half-Billion Influencing Journalism through Shady NGO “Internews Network”

The fallout and aftermath of Elon Musk’s investigation into USAID as part of President Trump’s radical revolution in his second-term in office, has revealed stunning reports of government funding for far-left efforts and wasteful efforts. Musk has said that Trump has authorized him to look into the Department of Education, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and explosively, the Pentagon.

Wikileaks is now claiming that another part of the far-left USAID funding has been influencing foreign and domestic media with nearly half-a-billion dollars in U.S. taxpayer funding for the “Internews Network”, a non-profit funded primarily by the government that trained journalists, pushed certain news and agenda that fit the government’s desires, and also that the network developed “exclusion lists” that were meant to pressure advertisers to bankrupt other media outlets that did not serve the government’s agenda.

The U.S. government was also pushing such ‘exclusion lists’ through a variety of other state-supported organizations and entities, such as the Stanford Internet Observatory, the University of Washington, Yale, Newsguard, and by coercing big tech companies like Facebook, Amazon, and Google. This was all part of the left’s Censorship Industrial Complex.

The Gateway Pundit is litigating against the government at the moment in Missouri v. Biden on related issues about censorship, deplatforming, and demonetization.

Internews supported and funded those censorship efforts.

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How a Secluded 1984 Conference Forged Israel’s Unprecedented Influence Over US Media

As Israel’s October 1 invasion of Lebanon unfolds, the media’s complicity in shaping public perception raises urgent questions, particularly when viewed through the lens of a controversial 1984 conference where influential advertising and media figures gathered to refine Israel’s narrative strategies. This conference laid the groundwork for a sophisticated propaganda campaign—Hasbara—that sought to sanitize Israel’s actions and cast its military operations in a favorable light. Today, as Western journalists whitewash, distort, and conceal Israel’s the realities of Israel’s deadly campaign of violence, the enduring legacy of this meeting becomes alarmingly clear, revealing how narratives crafted decades ago continue to shape the coverage of a conflict that claims countless lives.

In the first week of October, Israeli forces fired 355 bullets at a car containing a five-year-old, then shot at rescue workers who rushed to save her life. A horrific crime – yet, per many Western media headlines, she was simply a “girl killed in Gaza.” The circumstances and perpetrators of her death, if mentioned at all, were invariably buried at the bottom of reports, well hidden from the 80% of the news-consuming public who only read headlines, not accompanying articles.

By contrast, on October 15, Sky News was very keen that its viewers know the names and faces of four “teenage” IDF soldiers “killed” in a “Hezbollah drone attack,” humanizing and infantilizing individuals who, by mere token of their service in Israel’s military, are by definition, guilty of genocide. In passing, the same report briskly noted: “‘23 die’ in Gaza school strike.” Their identities, ages, and photos, let alone clarity on who or what murdered them, weren’t provided.

Moreover, the inverted commas incongruously hovering around the number of Palestinians killed subtly undermined that claim’s credibility while reducing the child victims to an afterthought compared to the considerably more important quartet of deceased IDF genocidaires. MintPress News senior staff writer Alan MacLeod put it succinctly when he Tweeted, “In years to come, students in university departments around the world will be studying the propaganda embedded in this headline. It’s truly incredible how much propaganda has been packed into 16 words.”

The mainstream media’s systematic use of distancing and evasive language, omission and other duplicitous chicanery to downplay or outright justify Israel’s murder of innocent civilians while simultaneously dehumanizing their victims and delegitimizing Palestinian resistance against brutal, illegal IDF occupation is as unconscionable as it is well-documented. Amazingly though, ‘twasn’t ever thus. Once upon a time, mainstream news networks exposed Israel’s war crimes without qualification, and anchors and pundits openly condemned these actions on live TV to audiences of millions.

The story of how Western media was transformed into Israel’s doting, servile propaganda appendage is not only a fascinating and sordid hidden chronicle. It is a deeply educational lesson in how imperial power can easily subordinate supposed arbiters of truth to its will. Comprehending how we got to this point equips us with the tools to assess, identify, and deconstruct lies large and small – and effectively challenge and counter not only Israel’s falsehoods but the entire settler colonial endeavor.

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Journalism & Democracy in a Time of Genocide

Last month in New York at separate forums, two senior Democrat figures – John Kerry and Hillary Clinton – pointed to what they saw as major problems: the First Amendment was “an obstacle to building consensus,” and the “narrative” in the press needs to be (even more) “consistent.”

The challenge presented by the free flow of ideas and information in the digital world, to those accustomed to maintaining control of the narrative, defines our moment in history and the fragility of democratic freedoms.

Those calls for less freedom of speech and for more consistency in messaging to the public by the Fourth Estate, come at a time when large sections of the public have lost trust in a legacy media too consistent in its messaging, and incapable of providing the information and analysis that will enable them to know and fully understand what’s happening.

Many have turned to social media where they are alerted to the work of independent journalists and experts whose commentary is not welcome in the Western mainstream press but which provides a multitude of perspectives that are more useful in navigating our world, in understanding our place in it, and indeed how we might be responsible for some of its very significant problems – perhaps that we may be on the wrong side of history.

With respect to foreign policy the legacy media have an unacknowledged partisan perspective, the rectitude of which is reinforced through the validation of all singing from the same song book.

We have learnt to pay attention to messaging emanating from the U.S. political class, because its allies will be expected to concurrently tackle the same issues, in this case, to reign in the problem presented by free speech (the freedom both to speak and to hear) common to Western democracies, rendering the population less manageable in its thinking, importantly in the level of its support for war, and at the ballot box.

In Australia, where there is no constitutional or legislated protection for free speech, the 18c “hate speech” provision of the Racial Discrimination Act which made “insult” and “offence” a test for breach of the law, was introduced by a Labor government.

The criteria for breach make this law rife for weaponisation and efforts led by George Brandis under a Liberal government to amend the provision failed, with significant opposition coming from Pro-Israel Lobby groups.

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Through the Revolving Door – How the Fourth Estate Vanished

For most of my lifetime the balance of temperaments in newsrooms, both in America and the U.K., has been weighted—this is plainly not a scientific judgment—strongly toward the bohemian, rebellious, and creative, and away from the respectable, conformist, and administrative on something like 70 lines to 30 lines. That division strikes me today as a pretty good corporate personality mix if you want to produce a lively, controversial, and unpredictable newspaper, magazine, television, or internet current affairs program. It didn’t track too well with partisan political divides between liberals and conservatives—which was a good thing because it meant that the common journalistic mission could and sometimes did override politics and ideology. Most newsrooms had a liberal majority but relaxed ideological attitudes. Bohemian Tories were more popular than liberal ideologues, for instance, and the most significant question you could ask about any newsroom was “Does it have an esprit de corps?”

That had less to do with the administrative virtues—important though getting expenses paid on time is to basic morale—than with bold and courageous editorial leadership shown by people as different as Arnaud de Borchgrave in The Washington Times, Roger Wood on the New York Post, Andrew Neil on the London Sunday Times, and Colin Welch as deputy editor of the Daily Telegraph. All of them had the necessary buccaneering self-confidence to drive their papers to excel in challenging not only governments but also all the respectable people, institutions, opinions, and causes mired in groupthink and self-congratulation—whom the Brits summarize ironically as “the Great and the Good”—who exercise enormous social and cultural power but too often get a pass when criticisms are being handed out.

Though we didn’t all realize it at the time, the era from the early 1980s to the start of the century was a golden age of journalism financially, technically, and creatively. And that produced freer countries and better governments. Those active in the press of those days drew a high card in the lottery of life.

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Decay, Decrepitude, Deceit in Journalism

Russiagate continues to survive like a science fiction monster resilient to bullets.   

The latest effort at rehabilitating it is an interview by Adam Rawnsley in the current issue of Rolling Stone magazine of one Michael van Landingham, an intelligence analyst who is proud of having written the first draft of the cornerstone “analysis” of Russiagate, the so-called Intelligence Community Assessment.

The ICA blamed the Russians for helping Trump defeat Hillary Clinton in 2016.  It was released two weeks before Trump assumed office. The thoroughly politicized assessment was an embarrassment to the profession of intelligence.

Worse, it was consequential in emasculating Trump to prevent him from working for a more decent relationship with Russia.

In July 2018, Ambassador Jack Matlock (the last U.S. envoy to the Soviet Union), was moved to write his own stinging assessment of the “Assessment” under the title: “Former US Envoy to Moscow Calls Intelligence Report on Alleged Russian Interference ‘Politically Motivated.’” 

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Newsgate: Reporters Caught Coordinating With Political Hacks

In my last post, “When Beat Reporters Act Like They Work for the Agency They’re Supposed to Cover,” I outlined why some reporters, such as NBC Justice Reporter Ryan Reilly, seem to carry water for those they cover rather than act as independent journalists. 

And I promised this eye-opening follow on.

Inside documents and leaks have given us graphic glimpses into the transactional journalism practiced by reporters at prominent national news groups. It amounts to our own industry scandal: Our Newsgate.

Compromised reporting has always existed as a result of covert collaborations between reporters and political interests—Democrats and Republicans alike. Some of the most exemplary hard evidence available happens to be heavy on reporters with Democrat ties. Much of it came during the scandal-ridden 2016 presidential campaign when candidate Donald Trump upended politics and ran against Hillary Clinton, who was also running against Bernie Sanders for the Democrat nomination. As you’ll see, much of the political establishment and establishment media seemed to be working on Team Hillary.

It can be argued that some individual accounts provided here can be rationalized and are not serious breaches of ethics. But taken as a whole, it’s easy to see how we as journalists have done a poor job protecting ourselves from being co-opted by organized interests, often ones that are paid and politically-motivated. Whether we realize it or not, they’ve figured out how to exploit the media and use us to publish their propaganda. It implies a broad and growing trend that has seriously undermined the credibility of the news industry.

Opinion reporters and those who work for obviously ideological news groups are entitled to publish party propaganda. It’s one matter to provide viewpoint journalism. But it’s quite another for us to pretend to be independent journalists while acting as a tool of any interest, or publishing narratives or talking points upon suggestion or demand, without disclosing we’re doing just that.

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