Tag: mainstream media

CNN liable for defaming Navy veteran in Jake Tapper segment, $5 million awarded

On Friday, a Florida jury found CNN guilty of defamation in a case brought forth by US Navy veteran Zachary Young against Jake Tapper and the network. Young alleged that Tapper had defamed him on his show. The verdict came after eight hours of deliberation.

Young was working to evacuate Afghans during the Biden administration’s chaotic military withdrawal from that nation in August 2021. Tapper misrepresented Young and his work and Young stated that he hasn’t been able to work since.

CNN was ordered to pay compensatory damages, with jurors still needing to decide how much the outlet will pay in punitive damages. The damages will be at least $5 million, Law & Crime said. “In sum,” they write, “jurors awarded Young $4 million for lost employment and $1 million for pain and suffering, and said that CNN should also be subject to punitive damages.”

According to the Free Beacon, Young alleged that a segment which aired in November 2021 on The Lead with Jake Tapper singled him out and portrayed him as an “illegal profiteer” who operated in a “black market.” Young, who said the segment irreparably destroyed his business, Nemex Enterprises, and reputation, worked to evacuate Afghans during the Biden-Harris administration’s deadly and chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan. He testified that since the segment ran. he hasn’t worked or made money. 

During closing arguments, CNN attorney David Axelrod claimed that the story was “accurate” and “tough but fair” and that Young should have gone out of his way to convince journalists with the outlet that he wasn’t “shady.”

“Mr. Young put himself in the story, not CNN. He inserted himself into it to make a buck,” Axelrod told the jury. He added, “Use your common sense. Do you see a conspiracy or do you see people just doing their best?”

Devin Freedman, Young’s lead attorney, told jurors, “This is supposed to be the most trusted name in news. CNN is so arrogant, they are so used to getting whatever they want.”

“But they stand up here and they talk down to us with bold-faced lies about what the segment’s gist really is, and they expect you to believe it,” he continued. “I mean, do they think we’re all stupid?”

During opening statements, Freedman said that they were able to confirm that 1.6 million people viewed the broadcast, with high-range estimates hitting 2.7 million. “The correction was seen by 942,000 people. But let’s be honest, the correction didn’t do anything. Doesn’t matter. The man can’t get hired. It doesn’t matter how many people saw it. They issued a correction because they were trying to get out of a lawsuit.”

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Famed Liberal Cartoonist Arrested for Possession of Child Porn — Report

According to NBC News, Darrin Bell, a 49-year-old Pulitzer Prize-winning leftist political cartoonist from the California Bay Area was arrested Wednesday in Sacramento County on suspicion of possession of child pornography.

He was booked into the Sacramento County jail on possession of child porn, according to Internet Crimes Against Children detectives who were tipped off by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

While searching Bell’s home, investigators discovered 134 videos of child pornography linked to an account owned and controlled by Bell in addition to computer generated/artificial intelligence child pornography, according to authorities, NBC News reported.

Bell previously drew cartoons for the Daily Californian and contributed to the San Francisco Chronicle in addition to other media outlets. He got his start at UC Berkeley.

One example of his work likens supporters of President Donald Trump to Nazi Party members.

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MSNBC Broadcasts Joy Reid’s Utterly Insane California Wildfire Conspiracy Theory

At this point in 2025, everyone pretty much knows what to expect from MSNBC race baiter Joy Reid.

Whether she’s raging about black people, white people, President-elect Donald Trump, or just raging for the sake of raging, Reid is a known, established entity — unfortunately.

So it should come as little surprise that Reid was back on her nonsense during her show’s Monday broadcast, spewing her usual rhetoric.

You can watch watch her idiocy for yourself below…

If you just can’t bring yourself to watch Joy Reid (and this writer can’t blame you … at all), the MSNBC talking head was discussing the raging wildfires that have razed swathes of southern California.

That, in and of itself, is totally fine.

But, as she is wont to do, Reid couldn’t just offer a recap and some prayers.

No, she had to bust out her tinfoil hat.

“The vulture capitalists are already circling, hoping to snap up the burned up properties for pennies on the dollar, so they can hedge fund them,” Reid said. This writer must admit that, given the lengthy tendrils of groups like BlackRock, Reid almost makes a good point here. Almost.

And it actually would’ve been a fine point had she ended it there. Surely you see where this is going.

“But the worst part,” Reid said, before hilariously catching herself and adding, “other than the fires themselves, has been the lies” Nice catch, Joy.

“Though if there is one thing the billionaire right is, they are consistent,” said Reid, whose net worth is generally accepted to be in the millions.

“They want California, America’s biggest state economy,” Reid continued, “because if they can take California and retrofit it with their ugly, right-wing policies, the way they’ve ruined Florida and Texas, and every other red state where poverty rates are high and education is warped, and non-white immigrants, pregnant women, victimized girls, and LGTBQ folks live in fear, then the fight for permanent control of America is basically over.

“They can drill and frack California until the fires this past week pale in comparison.

“They can rip out all the forests and hand over the land to developers, Florida-style.

“They can drive out the brown people, and the black and Asian people, or just sink them into the same apartheid they’ve created in Texas, and they will control enough electoral votes if they control California to never have to worry about another presidential election.”

Wow. Where to even begin with that unhinged rant? Let’s just go in order.

Her near-good point about BlackRock-like entities aside, Reid’s rant is rife with inaccuracies.

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REPORT: Washington Post’s Traffic is Cratering – Has Fallen by Nearly 90 Percent Since 2021

The Washington Post appears to be facing an existential crisis.

The troubled left-wing newspaper, which is owned by former Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, has reportedly seen its traffic crater by nearly 90 percent since 2021.

It has also seen a considerable decline in revenue despite Bezos making clear that he will not subsidize its losses.

Semafor reports:

Over the last four years, web traffic has cratered. According to internal data shared with Semafor in recent weeks, the Post’s regular daily traffic last year sunk to less than a quarter of what it was at its peak in January 2021.

That month, the Post briefly reached a high of around 22.5 million daily active users following the attack.

But by the middle of 2024, its daily users hovered around 2.5-3 million daily users.

Last year, Washington City Paper noted that the Post had stopped publicly disclosing its traffic numbers in press releases, after a 60% decline in monthly traffic.

On Friday, The Wall Street Journal reported that the Post’s revenue fell from $190 million in 2023 to $174 million last year.

Having once positioned itself at the heart of the anti-Trump resistance, the iconic Washington newspaper most famous for breaking the Watergate Scandal is currently embroiled by internal turmoil as its activist employees lash out at Bezos’s own political pivot.

A former Trump critic, Bezos has recently taken a much more sympathetic tone towards Donald Trump and sent him enthusiastic congratulations following his landslide election victory in November.

Following his victory, Bezos also traveled to Mar-a-Lago to meet with the president-elect and has even donated $1 million to his inauguration fund.

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The Plain Truth About “The Man from Plains” and Jimmy Carter’s BIG Lie

Once again Americans have been inundated by a tsunami of one-sided “news” coverage and an officially sanctioned mourning period and state funeral were exploited (at taxpayers’ expense) for political purposes, as we were subjected to a hagiographies of former President Jimmy Carter.

We endured hours of propagandistic MSM radio and TV reportage (or what passes for it), whether we liked it or not, often preempting regularly scheduled programming, that has totally failed to provide a full, comprehensive view of the Carter presidency, completely missing its very dark side, in particular Carter’s Big Lie.

This includes outlets that purport themselves to be “Left,” such as The Nation. Consider the obituary penned by that outlet’s editorial director and publisher Katrina vanden Heuvel, which never so much as mentions Carter’s unforgivable sins. The Nation may flatter itself as being “America’s leading source of progressive politics and culture,” but the fact that it ignores Carter’s crimes makes it, at least in this case, no better than MSM. (This could account for why The Nation drastically cut back its print publications in 2023, declining from a weekly to a monthly. If an “alternative press” outlet fails, like the corporate media, to do probing analysis and investigative journalism, why should someone bother to read and subscribe to it?)[1]

Instead, the rosy picture flooding the airwaves et al. is of the simple “Man from Plains,” a Georgia peanut farmer who rose to the White House during the post-Vietnam War, post-Watergate period by promising the world-weary American people that he would never lie to them. On December 29, 2024, an Atlanta Journal-Constitution headline ballyhooed: “Jimmy Carter was nation’s Sunday School teacher.”

A chyron on the reputedly left-leaning MSNBC dutifully instructed us that Carter was a “humanitarian and peacemaker.” As flags fly at half-staff, the 39th president is being lionized and lauded for brokering a peace deal in the Middle East, and for subsequently being awarded a Nobel Peace Prize, championing human rights, pioneering alternative energy, building Habitat for Humanity houses, the Carter Center’s election monitoring abroad and eradicating of diseases, and so on.

Commentator after commentator extols the Georgian as our most exemplary ex-president, while some do mention (in passing) some problems that took place when this one-term president was in the White House, such as an oil crisis and his failure to bring U.S. hostages home from Tehran while he was still in office. But I have not heard a single talking head dare delve into the dirty deeds and tricks of the Carter presidency, the reverberations from which we are still living with today.

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Israel Bombs, America Yawns and Gatekeepers Con

As gatekeepers of the corporate information bazaar, you have served Israel well.  Echoing the propaganda of Tel Aviv and Washington has become mainstream fare, with omission at the heart of the campaign.  

Thomas Jefferson, America’s third president, judiciously wrote in 1789: “Whenever the people are well informed, they may be trusted with their own government.”  Unfortunately, today’s media mind managers have forgotten that.  The public’s right to know the truth about Israel’s genocidal war on Palestinians, supported by the United States, has been subordinated to currying the favor of special interest groups and monied interests.   

You have been tranquilized by your intimate relationship to the national security state, ever willing to espouse the pro-Israel views of the White House, State Department, the Pentagon, and most, if not all, members of the American political class.

British novelist, George Orwell, in a passage from his prophetic novel, 1984, aptly described the relationship that has evolved between the establishment media and Israel; he wrote:  “If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.”  

There is a tendency among journalists to believe in their individual autonomy, although most work in large, hierarchical, corporate media organizations.  Many have convinced themselves that they are engaged in watchdog journalism, when they are, in fact, acting as stenographers for the powerful.  

In the case of Israel, journalists quickly learn compliancy, what can and cannot be said to protect careers.  While pro-Israel reporting and editorializing are rewarded, exact narratives and historical perspectives suffer repercussions.   

Censors have become unnecessary because an ideological self-censorship has formed and congealed.  Many of them can recall instances when they were told not to antagonize powerful interests and advertisers, and can name principled  journalists, like the late Helen Thomas and John Pilger, who were banished for saying the “unacceptable.” 

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Mainstream Media Ignoring Ethno-Religious Genocide Under Syria’s New Rulers

Mainstream Western media previously wrote several puff pieces on Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and its US-designated terror leader Abu Mohammad al-Jolani in the wake of Assad’s ouster, but now that same media is completely ignoring the atrocities taking place under Jolani’s watch.

Various armed allied groups of HTS are rampaging through the central and northern countryside, attacking Christians and Alawites, in a developing ethno-religious genocide. It has only been one month since Assad was overthrown.

Initially HTS and other factions, which includes foreign groups such as Chechens and Uyghurs, rounded up individuals and tortured or executed them under the guise that they were former “Assad regime agents”.

Now, according to regional reports, the jihadists are dropping even this pretense and are simply taking over Alawite villages. Serious problems and threats are also being reported in the historic ‘Valley of the Christians’ (or Wadi al-Nasara, which lies in Western Syria in Homs governate).

Various locations have seen jihadists seeking to impose public segregation of the sexes, Islamic head-coverings, and blanket bans on alcohol… 

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BACKFIRE: Gavin Newsom’s Meet the Press Interview Turns into a Major Disaster – Wild Gestures, Word Salads, and More

Gavin Newsom decided to take his PR campaign to national television on Sunday, and the results were a major disaster with notable word salads, wild gestures, and more.

As The Daily Mail reported, NBC News Correspondent Jacob Soboroff traveled to Altadena, a census-designated place in the San Gabriel Valley in California which has been tormented by the Eaton Fire, to meet with the disgraced governor.

Throughout the interview, The Mail noted Newsom appeared defensive as he often clapped and made several other glaring gestures that caught the attention of viewers as he attempted to spin his way out of his disastrous leadership. He looked more like an agitated Bernie Sanders than the calm, measured leader California needs.

During one sequence, he showed he had no clue why the reservoirs in the Pacific Palisades were left completely empty. One of them, The Santa Ynez Reservoir, has a capacity of 117 million gallons and could have played a critical role in stopping the fires as The Gateway Pundit reported.

“Was it pipes? Was it electricity? It was a combination of pipes, electricities, and pumps,” Newsom asked as he rocked and threw up his hands.

“Was that drawdown impossible because you lost seven-plus thousand structures right here anyway and every single structure we lost had a pipe that was leaking, and we would’ve lost that water pressure anyway?”

Seeing Newsom’s mannerisms caused many Americans to wonder what was wrong with him.

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ESPN Doubles Down on Making CFP About Race

On Thursday night, Notre Dame eked out a 27-24 win over Penn State in the Orange Bowl, setting the Fighting Irish up to attempt to claim their first national title since 1988. The team was led by its head coach, Marcus Freeman, who has become quite a superstar in the college football world lately. He’s a class act and comes across as a pretty decent human in general, something even his opponents recognize (heck, he’s the reason my Georgia Bulldogs aren’t in the playoffs), and he’s obviously a great coach. The entire nation has celebrated Freeman for both of these accomplishments. 

Well, the entire nation except ESPN. All the sports network seems to see is his race. 

Ever since it was determined that Freeman or Penn State head coach James Franklin would be one of the two coaches in the championship game, ESPN has been beside itself, breathlessly reporting about this idea of “making history.” For the first time, a black man would coach a team in the College Football Playoff National Championship. 

Fair enough. As I reported last month, it is historically significant, but it shouldn’t overshadow the accomplishments this man has achieved as an individual. But ESPN just won’t give it up. As soon as Notre Dame got the win last night, the network’s sideline reporter Molly McGrath interviewed Freeman and led with this question: “…you are the first black head coach to go to a national championship game in college football… how much does this mean to you?”  

Freeman, who has already addressed this topic and seemed to think it was important but not as important as the sports media wants to make it, took some time to respond before saying, “I’ve said this before — I don’t ever want to take attention away from the team. It is an honor, and I hope all coaches, minorities, black, Asian, white — it doesn’t matter — great people continue to get opportunities to lead young men like this. But this ain’t about me. This is about us. And we’re gonna celebrate what we’ve done because it’s something special.”

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Media Downplay Israeli Violations of Hezbollah Ceasefire

Israel and Hezbollah signed a ceasefire agreement at the end of November that required both sides to refrain from attacks on each other. The terms also included a mutual pullback from southern Lebanon after 60 days.

Despite the deal, Israel has subsequently launched repeated strikes on Lebanon against targets it claimed were Hezbollah, killing hundreds of Lebanese civilians. The violations began immediately, with Israel attacking journalists and vehicles mere hours after the deal was signed.

Within a week of signing the deal, the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) reported that Israel had violated the ceasefire around 100 times, killing 15 people. Shortly after these initial strikes, Hezbollah launched two strikes into the disputed border zone that it called an “initial defensive and warning response” to Israel against continued ceasefire violations. These strikes did not kill or injure any Israelis. Despite this, Israel responded by continuing its ceasefire violations, killing more and more, bringing the post-ceasefire death toll to more than 30.

Despite the overwhelming number of Israeli attacks in the post-ceasefire period, news audiences have heard that a “tense ceasefire holds” (AP, 12/1/24). Media repeatedly reported on these violations as both sides “trading” or “exchanging” fire (New York Times, 12/2/24; AP, 12/3/24; NBC, 12/3/24; Semafor, 12/4/24; Financial Times, 12/3/24; Wall Street Journal, 12/3/24). While technically accurate, such reporting frames both sides as equally culpable in violating the ceasefire, allowing media to avoid acknowledging that Israel that Israel is by far the primary and more consistent violator.

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