Tag: mainstream media

Fact Check: Premier Smith claims Russian interference is happening in the referendum campaign. Is it?

Speaking to Focus Punjabi on OMNI TV, Premier Danielle Smith said, “There are various shares of information online that appear to be amplified by different bot farms that may have a link to Russia.”

The whiffs of foreign interference in the referendum have yet to turn into a smoking gun of any sort. That’s why the premier was careful to use the terms “may” and “appear” in her statement. The foreign interference bogeyman has been an effective tool for federalists to discredit an independence movement which has existed far longer than the internet has.

The source of the latest allegations is Cipher AI, which is a tool that scans foreign media sites. Cipher’s recent snapshots (roughly 150 flagged items over two-week windows in July and August 2026, about 80% linked to Russian content farms) document amplification of anti-government or pro-separation talking points.

That volume is modest against the total volume of Canadian social media discussion on energy policy, federal-provincial relations, and the referendum. Russian bot farms also plug Temu items and porn sites. It doesn’t mean they are being guided by foreign governments or have an agenda at play.

Identifying “foreign interference” requires more than detecting non-Canadian IP addresses, Russian-language origins, or content farms. Cipher flags “dubious claims” from foreign media or proxies and tracks amplification. Human reviewers then decide whether material qualifies as disinformation or coordinated influence. This step is subjective.

Alberta Public Safety Minister Mike Ellis reported that the RCMP found “no credible information” suggesting the separatist movement itself has been subject to foreign interference. CSIS sent a form letter to NDP Leader Naheed Nenshi saying they are watching the situation, but monitoring a risk is not the same as confirming that risk has materialized into significant interference capable of steering results.

The U.S. element cited in reports is largely public and open. Presidential rhetoric about Canada as a potential “51st state,” meetings between independence advocates and alleged U.S. officials (with no commitments reported), and commentary from Trump-aligned media figures. There is no coordinated campaign, and there haven’t been efforts to interfere in Alberta from south of the border.

There has been no indication of significant overseas foreign interference in Alberta’s referendum campaign.

Past reports involved a group in the Netherlands making money for themselves by creating pro-independence YouTube channels and a noodle merchant from Indonesia who made $14 from Facebook by placing pro-independence postings.

Albertans are capable of distinguishing messaging and determining how to vote. The ground game in the referendum is what’s moving the needle in the independence movement through public meetings and door-knocking campaigns.

Foreign interference is an insignificant factor in the campaign despite how hard federalists are trying to amplify that narrative.

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Debunking Corporate Media Propaganda: Americans Are NOT Wealthy. Here’s The Truth About The US Economy.

It is often said that the United States is the richest country on Earth. This is a myth.

It is certainly true that, in the United States, there are some very, very rich people, including the wealthiest billionaires on Earth, and the first ever trillionaire (Elon Musk).

However, when you look at the country as a whole, you see that the US is not a relatively prosperous nation.

This article will analyze a broad set of data, including several different indicators, that show how Americans are not wealthy compared to people in other advanced economies.

Americans are NOT wealthier than Europeans

US media outlets constantly promote a pernicious narrative, claiming that, supposedly, the United Kingdom is poorer than Mississippi, the poorest US state.

This misleading idea is especially common on the US right. Trump’s MAGA supporters often disparagingly refer to Europeans as “Europoors”.

Even some European media outlets have published articles claiming that “American families are so much richer than us”.

This is completely ridiculous — and, frankly, false.

UBS, the major Swiss bank, publishes an annual Global Wealth Report. The document is written primarily for rich investors, but it includes some interesting data that can be relevant to everyday people.

In the 2026 report, UBS calculated the wealth per adult in the 30 richest economies in the world. What was especially useful about this report was that it included both average wealth and median wealth.

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Lily-White MSNOW Guest Calls Black Republican Byron Donalds a ‘Bigot’ and Compares Him to a Drug Dealer 

During a recent broadcast on MSNOW, John Fugelsang, a supposed actor and comedian, was invited on as a guest. When the host began talking about the Florida governor’s race, Fugelsang called black Republican Byron Donalds a ‘bigot’ and then proceeded to compare Donalds to a drug dealer.

There is nothing white liberals hate more than a conservative black person. We have seen countless examples over the years of liberals lashing out at black people who vote for and support Republicans.

It’s ugly, and so is Fugelsang.

Transcript via NewsBusters:

CATHERINE RAMPELL: So, speaking of potentially flipping certain offices, as I mentioned in the last segment, the Republican primary to replace Florida governor Ron Desantis has been like, totally nuts. You have the Trump-endorsed candidate, Byron Donalds. You have this bigoted guy, James Fishback. And Donalds, of course, has endured — has embraced the anti- weaponization fear.

FUGELSANG: Hey, let’s be clear. Donalds is a bigot, too. He’s a bigot as well. Come on, now.

RAMPELL: Okay, if you say so. Florida has not actually had a Democratic governor that is elected in over 30 years. Like since I was a child growing up in Florida. And so my question to you is, given this sort of clown car of candidates who are running on the Republican ticket, is this the chance for David Jolly, who’s running as the Democrat, to actually finally turn that governor’s mansion blue?

FUGELSANG: A lot will depend on who the Republicans pick. I think.

RAMPELL: Well, who’s the good one?

FUGELSANG: Who’s the best — as a comedian or as a civic society? It’s hard to say. I mean, Byron Donalds is like the guy you’d buy weed from and then watch him put other men in jail for selling weed, isn’t he? So there’s that.

David Jolly gets to come out there and say, “I’m not a radical. I was a Republican. And then I looked around and saw what was going on. Their entire MO is selling the Democratic party as communist, radical, groomer, transgender lunatic.”

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WSJ Hid Reporter’s Soros-Funded Ties in Kushner Albania Hit Piece

The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) published a report this month on the Albanian corruption case entangling Jared Kushner’s resort project that was co-written by an editor at a newsroom funded by George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, a tie the paper did not disclose to readers.

The August 8 report, “The Suspected Gangster Causing Headaches for Kushner’s Albania Deal,” carried the byline of WSJ staff reporter Eliot Brown and Vladimir Karaj. The story detailed prosecutors’ allegations against Artur Shehu, a landowner who sold property to the Kushner-backed development group before Albanian authorities sought his arrest in a cocaine trafficking and money laundering case.

Karaj is an editor at the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network’s (BIRN) Albania office, which runs the outlet Reporter.al. BIRN’s own donor page states that the Open Society Foundation Albania funds the network’s anti-corruption program “through investigative reporting and closer cooperation between journalists and civil society organizations.” Reporter.al is grant-funded by the same Soros foundation.

The prosecutors’ office driving the case, known as SPAK, traces directly to the same donor network. SPAK was created under Albania’s 2016 justice reform, an overhaul the U.S. backed with roughly $270 million in USAID spending routed through organizations tied to Soros over fifteen years.

Andi Dobrushi, the executive director of OSF Albania, described his foundation’s role plainly.

“OSF Albania has been the main funder of the entire reform process,” Dobrushi said.

Six Republican senators, including Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), pressed the State Department in 2017 to examine the relationship between USAID and the Soros foundations in Albania. Judicial Watch later obtained embassy records through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) litigation showing the U.S. mission in Tirana gave the Soros organization input into its own program funding reviews.

Open Society has rejected characterizations linking its work to U.S. government money. The foundation called claims that it receives USAID funding or directs the agency’s spending “manifestly false,” saying it sets its own priorities and uses its own funds.

Kushner’s $1.4 billion Sazan Island project faces daily protests in Tirana. Prime Minister Edi Rama, who has been described as Soros-linked and calls Alex Soros his “brother in Tirana,” has vowed the development will proceed.

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Disgusting Trump-Hating Forbes Editor Who Threatened Firms that Hired Former Trump Officials Is Fired Over $6 Million Secret Payment

Disgusting Trump-hating Forbes content editor Randall Lane was fired this week after receiving a secret payment of about $6 million from the founder of a firm that does business with the magazine.

Randall Lane frequently joined MSNBC where he often trashed President Donald Trump.

Forbes is an American business magazine founded by B. C. Forbes in 1917 that publishes finance, business, industry and investing topics. You would think they would LOVE Donald Trump, the greatest business president since Calvin Coolidge, but not this guy.

Lane was the content editor of the page who was famous for going after companies that hired former top Trump officials.

This is what communists do – not capitalists.

Lane was fired for hiding a $6 million secret payment from RJ Shook, the founder of the firm that worked with Forbes to publish wealth adviser rankings.

The payment was made after RJ Shook sold a majority stake in Shook Research to PPC Enterprises, a private equity firm, last August.

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CBS star Matt Gutman accused of sexual harassment in bombshell lawsuit amid ratings fight

CBS star Matt Gutman is facing a bombshell sexual harassment lawsuit as his turn behind the “CBS Evening News” desk helped deliver the struggling network a ratings boost.

The show averaged 4.1 million viewers for the week of July 27, according to Nielsen, its best weekly audience in 17 weeks and its first time topping 4 million viewers since late March.

Gutman was filling in for vacationing anchor Tony Dokoupil.

Gutman, 48, was sued Friday by former ABC News field producer Samira Said, who accused him of making inappropriate sexual remarks during two assignments several years ago.

Said filed the lawsuit in Los Angeles Superior Court, naming Gutman, ABC News and parent company The Walt Disney Co. as defendants.

In one alleged incident, Said claims Gutman began discussing and rating the appearance of a female correspondent while the two were waiting on a public line during an assignment.

The suit says Gutman “initiated a discussion rating a female correspondent’s appearance and reducing her professional standing to a numerical score based on her physical attributes.”

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PBS broadcaster loses access to 50TB of data comprising 70 years of TV history after contracted cloud storage vendor goes defunct — public TV channel sues Iron Mountain data center, which hosts archival materials, to ensure preservation

Nine PBS is afraid that it will lose over 70 years of archival materials and programming after its contracted cloud storage vendor has apparently gone out of business. According to Current, the channel used Open Source Storage, or OSS, for storing over 50TB of data — but it suddenly lost access to its data earlier this year. Nine PBS has been working with OSS and its predecessor since 2019 and intended to renew its contract on March 6 of this year. The company never responded and abruptly cut off the station’s data access even though it still had 30 days to retrieve its data after the contract ended.

The station dug a little bit deeper when it discovered that the OSS website no longer existed and was listed as delinquent under the Colorado Secretary of State. It also discovered that OSS utilized Iron Mountain’s services, so it sent a demand letter to the latter to preserve its data and to “pay any reasonable costs associated with its demand.” At the time, Iron Mountain did not confirm or deny that it possessed Nine PBS’ data.

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WaPo’s Assessment of Potential 2028 Dem Field Reads Like a Program for a Sad Circus

We have a lot of fun mocking the hopefuls for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination these days. Hey, train wrecks are fascinating in so many ways. There will be plenty of time to worry about one of them actually winning when 2028 gets here, but for now, let’s just have at the spectacle of stupidity they have over there. 

While we content ourselves with effortless mockery, the Democrats’ flying monkeys in the mainstream media have to pretend that their best hopes for regaining the White House aren’t merely a bunch of Stalin knockoff goofballs. 

Good luck with that. 

The Washington Post frequently takes a look at the Democratic field and assesses the viability of each potential candidate at that time. Sports fans call it a power rankings. I’ll give you the first four paragraphs of the latest WaPo look at the Dems just to set the tone:

The Democratic field for president is still wide open and unsettled. The very early list includes former presidential candidates, governors, senators, House members and celebrities. While no one on this list has officially declared, some candidates have been more open than others about wanting to run.

Ahead of November’s midterm elections, the field is starting to take shape as a major debate roils the party: Is the surging progressive movement helping or hurting Democrats’ chances to take back the White House in two years?

Some Democrats argue it’s time to embrace bold, progressive policies to boost their party’s popularity among working-class voters. Others think centrists will stand out.

“I think Democratic voters are going to get incredibly pragmatic when it comes to 2028,” said John Anzalone, who served as the chief pollster for President Joe Biden’s winning 2020 campaign.

The MSMers are still fleshing out how they want to deal with the commie insurgents. Some are so freaked out that I’ve actually seen hints of journalism from them. I’ll probably write something about that next week. The author of this article has opted for — I love using this word regarding leftists — whitewashing the mess with the “surging progressive movement.” It’s the set-up for her mention of “centrists” in the next paragraph. 

There are no centrists in the Democratic Party, not even relative to the Democratic Socialists of America. Also, as I’ve been writing all summer, the only real difference between the establishment Dems and the DSA upstarts is the average age of the people claiming to be one or the other. What WaPo is trying to do here is make it seem as if there has been some sort of Dem course correction by asserting that there are objective ideological differences in a party that hasn’t allowed them since Lyndon Johnson was a young racist. 

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Axelrod Can’t Believe His Ears as He Learns Obama Got on 2008 Ballot With Election Fraud, Resulting in Criminal Convictions of Multiple Dems

Election meddling does not happen. At least, that’s what top Democratic Party officials believe, but it’s possible they just have a short memory or were not paying attention.

Former Chief Strategist and Senior Advisor to the Obama Administration David Axelrod either forgot, did not remember, or played dumb on CNN Tuesday evening when faced with the reality of such a case in Indiana.

Axelrod found himself hearing it from former White House spokesman and political commentator Pete Seat on “Anderson Cooper 360” and looked completely dumbfounded when Seat reminded him that Democrat officials in Indiana — Seat’s home state — were convicted of petition fraud relating to the 2008 primary.

“The gentleman you previously worked for, David Axelrod, Barack Obama got on the ballot because Democrats in that county submitted fraudulent ballot petition signatures.”

“People, including the Democrat county chair, went to jail over that.”

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How Big Ag Seized Control Over Media, Research, Policy and the Marketplace

Journalist Amy Westervelt has spent years documenting how the oil industry used public relations, think tanks and university partnerships to shape public opinion and influence public policy.

But in a recent interview on the “Real Organic Podcast,” Westervelt said she increasingly sees many of those same tactics in industrial agriculture.

“I am finding so many parallels in the agriculture space,” said Westervelt, host of the investigative podcast “Drilled” and author of the forthcoming book, “Brought to You By: Inside Big Oil’s Total Information War.”

She said large agricultural companies, like their counterparts in the fossil fuel industry, have established research centers that help generate academic support for policies that benefit industry.

“It’s like they need a certain amount of … credible information from academics to be able to make the policy argument for certain things,” she said.

Throughout the interview, Westervelt suggested these efforts are part of a broader corporate strategy designed not simply to influence markets, but to shape public debate before policy decisions are ever made.

‘Corporations start to have multiple problems with democracy’

Westervelt traced the origins of modern corporate public relations to the early 20th century, arguing that growing public scrutiny prompted businesses to rethink how they protected their interests.

“Corporations start to have multiple problems with democracy” as new laws, investigative reporting and broader voting rights threatened business interests, she said. That’s when you see “the birth of corporate PR.”

Rather than simply selling products, corporations sought to mold public opinion before voters could demand greater oversight, according to Westervelt.

“These companies need a way to shape the information that voters are getting in a way that will make them more likely to vote against their own interests and in the interests of the corporations that have a lot at stake,” she said.

Over time, industries refined those tactics, using increasingly sophisticated methods “to try to shape the context that they’re operating in and to deal with … ‘creeping democracy,’” Westervelt said.

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