Tag: journalism

Pentagon Fires Stars and Stripes Publisher, Editor-in-Chief, and Reporter for “Insubordination”

The Pentagon moved Friday to fire three senior employees at the taxpayer-supported military newspaper Stars and Stripes, accusing them of “insubordination” amid an escalating battle over the publication’s direction.

Publisher Max Lederer, Editor-in-Chief Erik Slavin, and Middle East reporter Lara Korte were each served with separation notices and given five days to appeal, according to CBS News⁠.

The stunning shake-up comes as the Trump administration works to overhaul the military publication, drag it into the 21st century, and eliminate the “woke distractions” that have infected institutions across the federal government.

Slavin and Korte claimed they were targeted over interviews they gave to CBS News without authorization for a segment that aired in July.

Slavin told CBS that the Pentagon accused him of insubordination after he publicly declared that any effort to control the newspaper’s reporting would cross a “red line.”

“According to the notice, I am being fired for stating in a CBS interview that censorship of news for service members would constitute a red line,” Slavin said.

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ABC Wants Free Speech Protection And A News Exemption — It Cannot Have Both

Disney and ABC walked into federal court this week demanding a judge protect them from the Trump administration — arguing the FCC is running a retaliatory campaign against their broadcast licenses because the White House dislikes what they air. It is a serious First Amendment claim. It is also being made simultaneously with an argument, in a separate FCC docket, that The View is functionally identical to Meet the Press.

Both things cannot be true at once.

The FCC, under Chairman Brendan Carr, ordered early license renewal reviews for Disney’s eight owned-and-operated ABC stations in April — the first such action in more than 50 years. The timing followed a dust-up over Jimmy Kimmel mocking Melania Trump, and landed on top of an existing FCC probe into Disney’s DEI practices. ABC’s 45-page lawsuit, filed before U.S. District Judge Loren AliKhan, calls it a retaliatory campaign against protected speech and asks for a temporary restraining order.

At the same time, Disney’s lawyers have spent months arguing in a separate FCC docket that The View — a daytime opinion panel anchored by Joy Behar and Whoopi Goldberg — qualifies for the “bona fide news interview” exemption to the federal equal time rule. That exemption, written into law in 1959, lets stations host one candidate without owing every rival candidate equal minutes. The catch: the programming has to actually function as journalism.

A NewsBusters count of The View’s full 29th season found 87 liberal guests against 5 conservative ones — a 95-to-5 ratio. The year before was worse: 128 liberal guests, 2 conservative, better than 98 percent one-sided. One of those two conservative bookings only happened because Marjorie Taylor Greene was feuding with her own party that week.

That is not a rounding error. That is a programming decision made deliberately, year after year, by a staff that knows exactly what it is producing.

Co-host Ana Navarro told her audience on air earlier this year to “vote Democrat.” ABC is now asking a federal agency to treat that same program as a neutral news broadcast.

Here is the reality Washington’s media class refuses to say plainly: both sides can be wrong at once. The FCC ordering accelerated license reviews because a president dislikes a late-night comedian’s jokes is exactly the kind of government content-based pressure the First Amendment was designed to stop. That is a real concern, and conservatives who forget it when the target is a network they dislike are making a mistake they will regret.

But ABC’s position is equally dishonest. A program booking political guests at a 95-to-5 liberal ratio is not a discussion. It is a caucus meeting with commercial breaks. Free speech protects ABC’s right to run an all-left-wing panel every weekday morning. It does not entitle ABC to call that panel a news program when the equal time rule is inconvenient, and a protected editorial product when the FCC comes knocking.

Disney CEO Josh D’Amaro vowed this week that ABC “won’t be told how to run” its business. He is right that government does not get to dictate editorial content. He is wrong to pretend The View is journalism. The American public deserves honesty from both the FCC and the network — and right now it is getting spin from both directions.

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Democrat Rep. Seth Moulton ERUPTS and Knocks Down Reporter’s Camera When Pressed on Endorsing ‘Nazi Tattoo’ Senate Nominee Graham Platner

Democrat Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA) lost it on camera Wednesday when a reporter pressed him on whether he plans to endorse the scandal-plagued Maine Democrat Senate nominee Graham Platner ahead of the midterms.

The Massachusetts congressman appeared to erupt in anger and knocked down a camera rather than give a straight answer about backing the controversial candidate.

The tense moment, captured by Fox News’ reporter Cameron Cawthorne, comes as Democrats face growing questions about party unity and which radical nominees their leaders are actually willing to stand behind in key races.

As The Gateway Pundit has reported, Graham “Nazi Tattoo” Platner, the self-described communist and oyster farmer, won Maine’s Democrat Senate primary earlier this month despite a growing list of serious scandals.

Platner has a chest tattoo resembling the Nazi SS Totenkopf (Death’s Head) symbol. He claims he got it in 2007 in Croatia without knowing its meaning and later covered it up.

He has also been hit with old Reddit posts in which he called himself a “communist,” wrote “all cops are bastards,” agreed that rural white Americans are “racist and stupid,” and referenced political violence and armed resistance.

Additional reporting revealed Platner sent sexual text messages to other women while married and faced accusations from multiple ex-girlfriends of unsettling and, in at least one case, physically threatening behavior.

He has also drawn fire for deleted Reddit comments blaming sexual assault victims and telling them to “take some responsibility.”

Moulton himself previously rushed to Platner’s defense. In late May he told CNN that Platner “clearly made a mistake” with the Nazi-linked tattoo but “owned that mistake,” “took responsibility for it,” and that it was “not disqualifying.” Moulton contrasted Platner favorably with Republican Sen. Susan Collins, whom he accused of doing “Donald Trump’s bidding.”

But when asked point-blank this week about actually endorsing the nominee, Moulton’s calm defense evaporated. The video shows him lashing out and appearing to knock over the camera instead of answering.

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Google’s New AI-Fueled Search Bar Threatens to Further Upend Journalism Industry

Google made an announcement last month that could turn the journalism world upside down, accelerating the internet’s shift toward an overwhelmingly AI-driven landscape and serving the Trump agenda of media suppression.

At its developer conference in May, the company announced the most disruptive changes to Google Search in over 25 years. Google Search will further demote its index of the web — a list of links that information-seekers can explore as they choose. Instead of prominently displaying links, it will increasingly become a destination that answers questions directly through AI, linking only to the sources it decides to reference in its overview. On the majority of our tests, the AI overview was followed by a heavy block of sponsored results and a combination of videos, short clips, trending posts, and discussions. Index links — for example, to articles on news sites and research studies — were given only a small fraction of real estate. Additionally, Google is aggressively pushing readers to use AI Mode, which completely removes the index links.

In practical terms, this means users of the world’s largest search engine will see, in response to their queries, a summary generated by an AI bot developed by a corporate behemoth with close ties to the Trump White House.

This seismic move builds upon the launches of AI Overview in 2024 and AI Mode in 2025, shifting toward nearly eliminating the user’s ability to search autonomously, and toward an overwhelmingly AI-driven experience of the internet (and therefore, for many people, of life).

We must take into account the political context in which this shift transpires. Alphabet (Google’s parent company), along with Facebook’s parent company (Meta), as well as Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Nvidia, were among major tech companies that donated to President Donald Trump’s inauguration. They have also consistently capitulated to Trump’s recent manipulations.

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Pete Hegseth’s War on Journalists (and Iran Too)

Last fall, nearly the entire Pentagon press corps was banned from the Pentagon after refusing to sign Pete Hegseth’s loyalty oath, which would have bound them to only report information “authorized” by the government (FAIR.org, 9/23/25). They were quickly replaced by pundits from Hegseth-approved outlets like One America News, Gateway Pundit and Lindell TV, which is “Pillow Guy” Mike Lindell’s pet project.

But once the Iran War got underway, it dawned on Hegseth that a Defense secretary needs to communicate with the whole country, not just the narrow slice of it reached by his favorite right-wing pundits. So Hegseth reversed course, asking the major networks to bring their cameras back to the Pentagon. They agreed, but on one condition: Some of their reporters had to be allowed to return to the press briefing room, too.

So back they came, albeit now at the back of the room. Few of these reporters—who represent outlets you’ve actually heard of, like ABC, NBC and the New York Times—are called on. Hegseth, a former Fox News weekend host, instead fields questions almost exclusively from handpicked media personalities seated in the front rows. (I’d call them reporters, but if they signed Hegseth’s 2025 oath, as most did, they’re anything but.)

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Partisan Hack Jim Acosta Warns Partisan Hacks Are Taking Over the News Business

Former CNN employee Jim Acosta is deeply worried that ‘partisan hacks’ are taking over the news business. You couldn’t make this up.

Acosta offered his comments at a hearing set up by California Senator Adam Schiff, which just makes this story even more perfect.

Acosta is really upset about the fact that the news media is changing and he is being left behind. He claims that CBS News and other outlets are going pro-Trump. That is not happening. Jim just thinks that the news is going right wing if it’s not attacking Trump 24/7.

Deadline reported:

“The news is broken, we may not be able to put the pieces back together,” former CNN White House Correspondent Jim Acosta told a packed Burbank City Hall on Friday, warning of the rise of entertainment industry oligarchs and “media domination.”

“We need to talk about busting up big media,” Acosta insisted. “This is not America what we’re seeing now.”

Citing a “danger to our democracy,” Acosta called Donald Trump’s attacks on the media “an assault on our freedom of speech … taking us down the road of Putin and China to state-controlled media.” An old and constant thorn in Trump’s paw, Acosta certainly had something to say about David Ellison’s pending $111 billion purchase of Warner Bros Discovery – the owners of CNN.

Taking a swing at “partisan hacks” running CBS News and the probability of more job losses like we saw today, and “self-censoring,” the journalist was speaking Friday at Sen. Adam Schiff’s “Lights, Camera, Competition”: Promoting American Film Production event in the former home of the Tonight Show.

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The Digital Media Oligarchy: Who Owns Online News? 

When Ben Bagdikian, an esteemed journalist and early FAIR contributor, published his groundbreaking book The Media Monopoly in 1983, he painted a troubling picture of US media consolidation, reporting that 50 corporations controlled the media business. With each reprint, that number dwindled (FAIR.org, 6/1/87). When FAIR replicated his analysis in 2011 (Extra!, 10/11), it stood at 20.

Now, over 40 years after the initial release of The Monopoly Media, the media landscape has transformed drastically. Even Bagdikian’s later editions, written at the dawn of the internet, could not fully anticipate how profoundly digital technology would reconfigure the media oligarchy.

“News” is increasingly synonymous with online news. Over half the US public (56%) say that they “often” get news through their digital devices—compared to less than 1 in 3 (32%) who often get news from TV, 1 in 9 from radio and only 1 in 14 from print publications like newspapers or magazines (Pew, 9/25/25).

Which raises the question: Who owns the leading online news sites—and, by extension, largely shapes the ideas and information that reach millions of Americans?

Each month, Press Gazette, a London-based magazine for the journalism industry, ranks the top 50 news websites in the US in order of monthly visits, based on data from the marketing firm Similarweb. FAIR tallied Press Gazette’s results over a 12-month span, from December 2024 to November 2025, to get a figure for total US visits to major news sites over that period: 45.6 billion.

More than half of those visits, nearly 25.5 billion, went to news sites controlled by just seven families or corporate entities.

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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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