Tag: mainstream media

Western Media Use ‘Peace’ Prize to Fuel War Propaganda

The awarding of the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize to Venezuelan far-right leader María Corina Machado took nearly everyone by surprise (with the exception of insiders who apparently used advance knowledge to profit on betting markets—New York Times, 10/10/25).

The Nobel Committee justified the award on the basis of Machado’s “tireless work promoting democratic rights” and “her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy.” However, Machado’s track record paints a very different picture (Sovereign Media, 10/11/25; Venezuelanalysis, 7/8/24).

Rather than scrutinize the opposition politician’s credentials, the media establishment seized the opportunity to whitewash the most unpeaceful elements in her background in order to advance its cynical pro–regime change agenda targeting Venezuela’s socialist government (FAIR.org, 2/12/25, 1/11/23, 6/13/22, 4/15/20). Not coincidentally, Machado’s award coincided with an escalation of US military threats against Venezuela, meaning that corporate pundits used a “peace” prize as a platform for war propaganda.

The Nobel Prize meant corporate outlets had to give their readers an idea of Machado’s political trajectory. And though some had profile pieces (Reuters, 10/10/25; New York Times, 10/10/25), there was a concerted effort to conceal the most unsavory elements. The Financial Times (10/10/25) euphemistically stated that Machado “enter[ed] politics in opposition to Hugo Chávez”—president of Venezuela from 1999 through 2013—while the Guardian (10/10/25) summed up that she has been “involved in politics for more than two decades.”

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Delusional Chuck Schumer Implies the Trump Administration is Being ‘Shielded’ by the Press

How out of touch with reality is Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer? So out of touch that he recently suggested that the Trump administration is being shielded by the press.

Schumer was talking about the fact that some media companies are being acquired by conservatives who might be more positive in their coverage of Trump and the administration. You know, the way that 99 percent of the media has treated Democrats for decades now.

In the course of his remarks, he used this to say that we aren’t going to have a free press anymore. Naturally, he tried to tie in the whole stupid ‘No Kings’ thing as well.

Transcript via Schumer’s Senate Page:

Schumer: I had a few questions this morning of my great colleague — and once again, his strength, his indomitability, and his caring about this democracy, which we all know is at risk, is just amazing and so my question relates to something he touched on before, in his discussions with our great senator from New Hampshire. There are so many ways this administration is trying to rip apart democracy and one of them, you mentioned a minute ago, is the threatening of media to just do what Trump wants and the man who’s head of the FCC seems to be an instrumentality of that.

Trump has said, things they say I don’t like should not be put on the air, and they’ve held over the heads the broadcast licenses of some of our great media companies. In other ways, they’re getting some of their friends to take over some of our media companies. And isn’t one of the greatest blows to democracy — I would ask my colleague — one of the greatest blows to democracy when we don’t have a fully free press?

And has it been a hallmark of so many of the countries that he has mentioned that are autocracies or absolute dictatorships to have no free press, so no information can come out? And doesn’t that dramatically hurt the American people, when government is shielded and can do whatever it wants — and hurt as many people as it wants — because you don’t have a free press? Shouldn’t it really frighten every American that this is a large step on the road away from democracy towards tyranny and towards authoritarian government?

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The New York Times Wants An America Without Americans

n Tuesday, Leighton Woodhouse wrote for The New York Times that conservatives are “spinning” a “mythology” that is “historically delusional.”

The delusional mythology Woodhouse is referring to? The belief that Americans are a “group of people with a shared history.”

According to Woodhouse, “The founding fathers were an assortment of people from different histories and backgrounds who coexisted — often just barely.” These “different” histories, however, were all rooted in Christianity. But Woodhouse wants readers to believe that this type of variety in Christianity proves America was born out of a multicultural diversity experiment.

Of course it wasn’t. The colonists shared a common language, moral framework, and writ large, a lineage. Yet Woodhouse insists otherwise.

The United States isn’t exceptional because of our common cultural heritage; we’re exceptional because we’ve been able to cohere despite faiths, traditions and languages that set us apart, and sometimes against one another. The drafters of the Constitution tried to create that cohesion by building a government that could transcend our divisions.

In other words, Woodhouse is arguing that America is not the product of Americans at all. Rather, it’s just a cosmopolitan conglomerate held together by particular processes but not people. It’s why Woodhouse invokes “Mexican, Korean, Somalian” “anestries” as similar examples of American heritage just like English, Irish, and Scottish settlers. The implication of course is that America would be just as American even without “heritage Americans.”

But that’s not how nations work. As The Federalist’s John Daniel Davidson wrote in these pages, the very premise of the entire American legal and civic culture emerged from the specifically Christian claim that “All men are created equal,” and such conviction “arrived in America by way of settlers and pioneers who came here specifically to establish a nation where they could practice their Christian faith as they saw fit.”

“The only people who ever took that self-evident truth [that all men are created equal] and used it as a foundation on which to forge a new nation were the English colonists in America,” Davidson pointed out. Not Mexicans, not Koreans, not Somalians, but English colonists who created America and thus became the first Americans.

And despite Woodhouse’s best efforts, there is in fact such a thing as a heritage American. They are the descendants of those who settled this land, fought for its independence, and built our institutions. The great statesmen of our nation understood this. They spoke not of a diverse collection of foreigners as tying the nation together, but of a people bound by blood, memory, and the sacrifices of the generations that came before them.

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Wall Street Journal Weeps for Murderers Trump Sent to Supermax

Shortly before he left office, President Biden commuted the sentences of 37 convicted murderers. Those convicts, all on death row, were now facing life behind bars.

Two of those convicts, Norris Holder and Billie Allen, killed bank guard and former police officer Richard Heflin in a 1997 bank robbery. Other family members of murder victims were outraged and hurt by Biden’s move.

Alex Snell, the brother of Amanda Snell, was one of those people. Amanda, 20, was strangled by Jorge Avila-Torrez in 2009. “I’d rather see it go back to the way it was, where he was sentenced to death,” Snell said. “He should have gotten that penalty.”

President Biden said he commuted the sentences (save for three convicted of terrorism or hate crimes) because he had a change of heart on the death penalty, and the Wall Street Journal says he found it “needlessly cruel, as well as impossible to administer fairly.”

It seems the Wall Street Journal believes those commutations somehow absolve the convicted murderers from facing consequences for their actions, and they’re appalled that President Trump hasn’t made their lives behind bars easier.

Here’s more:

Among the last actions by former President Joe Biden before leaving the Oval Office was commuting the death sentences of 37 convicted murderers.

Hours after President Trump took over, he ordered the life sentences of these men be made, in effect, a living hell.

With that guidance, officials canceled plans to transfer most of the inmates to mainline prisons. Instead, Emil Bove III, the acting deputy attorney general at the time, ordered all but a handful requiring specialized medical treatment be housed in the U.S. Penitentiary at Florence, Colo., the harshest institution in the federal system.

Inmates at the Colorado prison—intended for the nation’s most violent—typically spend 23 hours a day alone in their cells. At a meeting in May with Attorney General Pam Bondi for families of loved ones killed by the 37 convicts, some officials said they wished conditions at the prison, known as ADX, were even worse.

Aaron Reitz, a former assistant attorney general, held a roundtable with victims’ families. “If you’re not going to be killed lawfully at the hands of the state, well, your prison sentence is going to be hard as hell,” Reitz said in an interview.

There is little sympathy for these convicts outside of the Wall Street Journal editorial room.

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To Media, Gaza Ceasefire Holds Despite Repeated Israeli Strikes

On October 10, a ceasefire was declared in the Gaza Strip, where more than 67,000 Palestinians were officially killed in just over two years of Israel’s United States-backed genocide. With an estimated 10,000 bodies still buried under the all-consuming rubble, and indirect deaths unaccounted for, this number is almost certainly a drastic underestimate. Shortly after the ceasefire took effect, US President Donald Trump pronounced the war in Gaza “over,” proclaiming that “at long last we have peace in the Middle East.”

In the ten days following the implementation of the ostensible truce, the Israeli military reportedly killed at least 97 Palestinians in Gaza and wounded 230, violating the ceasefire agreement no fewer than 80 times. One might have expected, then, to see a headline or two along the lines of, I dunno, “Israel violates ceasefire”—or maybe “So much for ‘peace’ in Gaza.”

No such headlines turned up in the Western corporate media—not that there weren’t some pretty spectacular violations to choose from. On October 17, for example, eleven members of the Abu Shaaban family, including seven children and three women, were blasted to bits in Gaza City’s Zeitoun neighborhood while attempting to reach their home. According to the Israelis, the family’s vehicle had trespassed over the so-called “yellow line,” the invisible boundary arbitrarily demarcating the more than 50 percent of Gazan territory still occupied by the genocidal army. 

Then on October 19, Israel bombed the living daylights out of central and southern Gaza and killed dozens after alleging a ceasefire violation by Hamas—an allegation that not even Trump found convincing, but that enabled such impressively passive headlines as “Strikes Hit Gaza After Truce Violations Alleged” (Guardian, 10/19/25). Once the carnage was complete, the BBC (10/19/25) assured readers that “Israel Says It Will Return to Ceasefire After Gaza Strikes.” For his part, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu informed the Knesset that the Israeli military had dropped 153 tons of bombs on Gaza during this particular, um, pause in the ceasefire.

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COLBERT FACT-CHECKS KJP: Biden’s Former Spokesperson Gets Schooled on National TV After Calling His Ouster a ‘Betrayal’

It finally happened. Even Stephen Colbert, the late-night comedian who’s spent years carrying water for the Biden White House, has had enough.

During an awkward and brutally honest exchange, Colbert dunked on Biden’s press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre (KJP) after she tried to paint Joe Biden’s ouster as some grand “betrayal” by his own party.

But Colbert wasn’t buying it.

KJP immediately launched into her typical talking points about Biden being “engaging” and “putting the American people first,” but Colbert hit back with a dose of reality.

That’s when things went downhill for KJP fast. As she blamed critics for an “ugly assault” on Biden, Colbert cut her off.

Transcript via Vigilant Fox:

COLBERT: “I saw a guy who I had not seen backstage… It seemed like a dramatically different person. And at 81 years old, that’s not entirely unexpected. You can imagine why people got so worried.”

KJP: “No one is saying that he didn’t age. I’m talking about did he have… the mental acuity, was he able to govern? And the man that I saw nearly every day was someone who was engaging, understood policy, and was always putting the American people first.”

COLBERT: “I don’t think anybody questioned his heart or his policies. But it takes more than that to be the President of the United States. And in a moment of great pressure on stage, we saw someone shock us and worry us, and nothing could assuage that worry. So I don’t think it was necessarily a betrayal of Joe Biden as other people saying, ‘We don’t think we were shown the Joe Biden that you saw.’”

KJP: “I saw every day a really ugly assault on someone who had 50-plus years of experience and who, again, objectively had done a good job as President of the United States. And it was heartbreaking to see that type of behavior.”

COLBERT: “What happened was the debate performance. Everything is downstream of that.”

KJP: “And no one is saying that the debate performance wasn’t shocking, wasn’t a disappointment. No one is saying that.”

COLBERT: “Disappointment is such a light term.”

KJP: “I use your word.”

COLBERT (mocking): “It was harrowing. Look, listen, we’re never going to agree on this.”

KJP: “We’re not.”

COLBERT: “Other than the fact that I’m glad that you came here tonight and I’m telling you to wrap over there. Would you like to say one more thing before we go?”

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CNN’s Tapper: Dems Created Expiration Date for Obamacare Subsidies, Not GOP

On Friday’s broadcast of CNN’s “The Lead,” host Jake Tapper pushed back on Rep. Jamie Raskin’s (D-MD) claim that the expiration of Affordable Care Act subsidies that are at issue in the government shutdown is a Republican policy by noting that the expiration date for the Obamacare subsidies is something Democrats put in place, not the Republicans.

While discussing the expiration of the Affordable Care Act subsidies and the politics of the issue, Raskin said, “I have not heard any Democrats, none have said to me, oh, let’s just allow this terrible Republican policy to go forward so we can beat them on it next year.”

Tapper then said, “Congressman, you called it a terrible Republican policy. Democrats are the ones that put in this end date into these COVID-era Obamacare premium extensions, not Republicans. But, be that as it may, do you have the votes? If Speaker Johnson (R-LA) were to say, okay, fine, we’re going to have a vote on this tomorrow, have you and your Democratic colleagues lobbied five to ten Republicans in the House to support you so that if this were to come up for a vote, it would pass?”

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Watch Margaret Hoover’s Justice Kennedy Interview To See Why Trust In Media Is At Record Lows

If anyone is wondering why Americans’ trust in corporate media to report the news fairly and accurately is at the lowest level in recorded history, then watch PBS Firing Line host Margaret Hoover’s interview with retired Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy.

Released last Friday, the roughly half-hour-long exchange was supposedly intended to focus on Kennedy’s recently released memoir about his life and time serving on the nation’s highest court. It’s very clear after watching the discussion, however, that Hoover had other plans in mind.

From beginning to end, it’s glaringly apparent that Hoover’s entire goal in speaking with Kennedy was to use the conversation as an opportunity to discredit the current Supreme Court and try and bait the retired justice into attacking Donald Trump, whose presidency she falsely portrayed as an authoritarian regime with no respect for the rule of law.

In her first query, Hoover asked Kennedy how he sees his “role” as a retired justice at a moment “when the rule of law is being tested and the courts are under attack.” The “question,” of course, isn’t really a question, but an accusation dressed up as a question.

Borrowing a trick used by fellow media hacks like CBS’s Norah O’Donnell, Hoover is dishonestly insinuating that it’s Trump who is “testing” the law like no president before him, and that his criticisms of lower courts for issuing overreaching edicts represent an unprecedented attack on the judiciary. It’s probably safe to assume that this insinuation doesn’t include Democrats like Joe Biden and Chuck Schumer actually threatening SCOTUS, left-wing anarchists picketing outside Republican-appointed justices’ homes, or a trans-identifying leftist attempting to assassinate Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

While this was only the first “question,” feigning ignorance about Democrats’ egregious conduct and actions would go on to become a prominent feature of Hoover’s style throughout the rest of the interview.

While quoting from Kennedy’s book about the need for all branches of government to exercise their powers in accordance with the Constitution, the CNN contributor said matter-of-factly to Kennedy, “In recent weeks, we have seen the Department of Justice indict two of the president’s political enemies after he publicly demanded it,” and “We’ve seen National Guard troops be sent to states over governors’ objections. The president has repeatedly pushed the limits of the law.”

“Is the executive branch exercising its powers to the extreme?” Hoover asked, while completely ignoring how Biden’s Justice Department attempted to imprison Trump before the 2024 election, sought (and acquired) jail time for former Trump officials, targeted and arrested Christians and pro-lifers, and much more.

The Firing Line host similarly lied by omission when she asked Kennedy about what would happen “if one of the branches — for example, the executive branch — doesn’t choose to follow the Supreme Court?”

“I don’t know that we’ve ever had this,” Hoover said, insinuating that Trump is going to “defy” SCOTUS if it rules on a case in a way he doesn’t like.

Well, as much as it would disappoint Margaret to learn, America actually has “had this” happen — under Biden. When the Supreme Court declared the Biden administration’s student loan bailout to be unconstitutional, the administration tried time and again to sidestep the ruling, disregarding the high court’s decision without a second thought.

Yet, for all her supposed newfound respect for the Supreme Court, Hoover tried her best to discredit it.

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White House Slams TMZ Report Claiming Donald Trump Considering Commutation of Sean “Diddy” Combs — Calls It “Completely Fraudulent”

The White House struck back at a fake news report from TMZ alleging that President Donald Trump was “seriously considering” commuting the prison sentence of disgraced rap mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs.

According to TMZ’s October 20 exclusive, a “high-ranking White House official” claimed Trump was “vacillating” and could sign a commuting order for Combs’ 50-month sentence as early as this week.

But the White House rejected the claims outright.

The news outlet reported:

According to our source, the President is “vacillating” on a commutation. We’re told some of the W.H. staff are urging Trump not to commute the sentence. But, our source states the obvious — “Trump will do what he wants,” and we’re told Trump could set Diddy free as early as this week.

Diddy is serving a 50-month prison sentence for violating the Mann Act. He’s served 13 months, and with credit, he could get out in around 2 years — but none of that matters if Trump commutes his sentence.

[…]

We know almost immediately after Diddy was sentenced earlier this month, his legal team was in touch with a high-ranking White House official who has the ear of the President regarding a commutation or pardon. Just days later, Trump told the media he was aware of the ask.

A White House spokesperson described the TMZ story as “entirely false,” accusing the outlet of circumventing standard procedures, Daily Mail reported.

“There is zero truth to the TMZ report, which we would’ve gladly explained had they reached out before running their fake news,” the spokesperson told the Daily Mail. “The president, not anonymous sources, is the final decider on pardons and commutations.”

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60 Minutes Takes Left-Wing Propaganda To A New Level With Discredited Ex-DOJ Lawyer Interview

For many years now, CBS News’ 60 Minutes has served as a clear-cut example of left-wing media propaganda. So, it wasn’t completely shocking when the program ran to a discredited ex-Justice Department official to trash the Trump administration amid its ongoing legal battles.

This past weekend’s episode included a sit-down interview with Erez Reuveni, who served as acting deputy director for the Office of Immigration Litigation until early April, when he was suspended and subsequently fired for failing to “zealously advocate on behalf of the United States” in court, according to Attorney General Pam Bondi. As The Federalist previously reported, his dismissal purportedly centered around his conduct in the DOJ’s efforts to deport Salvadoran national Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a credibly accused wife-beater and MS-13 gang member.

Throughout the roughly 13-minute-long segment, CBS and 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley tried their very hardest to portray Reuveni as a courageous hero who was victimized by a corrupt, authoritarian administration that has no regard for the rule of law. And much to their satisfaction, Reuveni was more than willing to play the part.

“I think about why I went to the Department of Justice, to do justice. And I took an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution,” Reuveni said. “And my view of that oath is that I need to speak up and draw attention to what has happened to the department, what is happening to the rule of law. I would not be faithfully abiding by my oath if I stayed silent right now.”

Much of the segment focused on allegations Reuveni made earlier this year against the department and Emil Bove, a then-DOJ official who now serves as a judge on the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals. In his apparent effort to derail Bove’s nomination to the judgeship, Reuveni came forward with claims that Bove had instructed agency officials to defy potential court orders prohibiting the Trump administration from using the Alien Enemies Act (AEA) to deport suspected Venezuelan gang members.

“Bove emphasized, those planes need to take off, no matter what. And then after a pause, he also told all in attendance, and if some court should issue an order preventing that, we may have to consider telling that court, ‘f-ck you,’” Reuveni said.

“And when you heard that, you thought what?” Pelley asked, to which Reuveni replied, “I felt like a bomb had gone off. Here is the number three official using expletives to tell career attorneys that we may just have to consider disregarding federal court orders.”

(Bove — who was confirmed by the Senate to the 3rd Circuit in July — has denied the allegations and told 60 Minutes, in part, “Mr. Reuveni’s claims are a mix of falsehoods and wild distortions of reality.”)

Naturally, there’s more to the story than what 60 Minutes is letting on. At no point in the segment did Pelley bother mentioning or asking Reuveni about an internal DOJ memo previously unearthed by The Federalist that contradicts Reuveni’s claims.

Issued months before Reuveni went public with his allegations, the April 8, 2025, letter by August Flentje (Reuveni’s former supervisor) discussed litigation involving the administration’s efforts to deport Garcia and the use of the AEA. Writing of AEA-related litigation, Flentje specifically noted that, under instruction from Bove, the DOJ was to “avoid” receiving a court order throughout such legal battles — not to “defy” or “ignore” court orders.

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