Tag: mainstream media

SHOCK! CBS News Reporter Lands Job With Left-Wing Activist Group Days After Firing

Former CBS News correspondent Scott MacFarlane has got himself a job at the left-wing MeidasTouch Network just nine days after being fired from the network.

MacFarlane announced Monday that he will join MeidasTouch as chief Washington correspondent and host a daily program titled Scott MacFarlane Reports.

The move comes after his departure from CBS News, where he covered Congress and the Justice Department, including cases related to January 6th and prosecutions of President Trump.

Despite joining a network known for its links to the Democratic Party, MacFarlane insisted he is not shifting into opinion journalism.

“I’m not an opinionist, not an editorialist,” MacFarlane said in a message posted on X.

“I’m far from a politician. I’m an enterprise reporter. Have been for a quarter century.”

“What I’ll do is bring this enterprise reporting to all the components of the MeidasTouch network, all the contributors of the MeidasTouch Network.”

“It’s important when we underscore how significant this moment is, this moment of unique political toxicity and unique political danger.

“MeidasTouch and I have long shared this same philosophy — you don’t platform lies. You don’t platform conspiracy theories. And you don’t allow for the whitewashing of history.”

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The Treasury just declared the U.S. insolvent. The media missed it

The U.S. government is insolvent. That’s not hyperbole — it’s the conclusion drawn directly from the Treasury Department’s own consolidated financial statements for fiscal year 2025, released last week to near-total media silence. The numbers: $6.06 trillion in total assets against $47.78 trillion in total liabilities as of September 30, 2025.

Importantly, the $47.78 trillion in reported liabilities does not include the unfunded obligations of social insurance programs like Social Security and Medicare — those are disclosed separately in the off-balance-sheet Statement of Social Insurance (SOSI).

The government’s consolidated balance sheet position, excluding the SOSI, deteriorated by nearly $2.07 trillion between FY 2024 and FY 2025, reaching a staggering negative $41.72 trillion. Total liabilities are now nearly eight times the value of reported assets. The largest drivers were a $2 trillion increase in federal debt and interest payable (now $30.33 trillion) and a $438.8 billion increase in federal employee and veteran benefits payable (now $15.47 trillion).

The Off-Balance-Sheet Iceberg

The off-balance-sheet picture is even more alarming. The 75-year unfunded social insurance obligation surged by $10.1 trillion in a single year, rising from $78.3 trillion in FY 2024 to $88.4 trillion in FY 2025 — driven primarily by a $6.9 trillion jump in projected Medicare Part B shortfalls and a $2.5 trillion increase for Social Security. The Treasury’s Statement of Long-Term Fiscal Projections shows the 75-year fiscal gap widening from 4.3% of GDP in FY 2024 to 4.7% in FY 2025.

If the $88.4 trillion in 75-year off-balance-sheet obligations were added to the $47.8 trillion in official balance sheet liabilities, total federal obligations would now exceed $136.2 trillion — roughly five times U.S. annual GDP.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued a disclaimer of opinion on the U.S. government’s FY 2025 financial statements — the 29th consecutive year it has been unable to determine whether the statements are fairly presented. This is primarily due to serious, ongoing financial management problems at the Department of Defense and weaknesses in accounting for interagency transactions.

What $136 Trillion Looks Like in Your Living Room

Not only has the financial press ignored the consolidated financial statements, but most members of Congress and members of the general public will not read the consolidated financial statements. Documents like the consolidated financial statements are not the kind of thing you want to read before driving. If that’s not bad enough, most people cannot relate to the trillion-dollar numbers in the financial statements. Therefore, it is appropriate to translate them into terms that people will understand.

Most people cannot relate to trillion-dollar figures on a government ledger. So consider this: divide every number by 100 million — drop eight zeros — and federal finances look like a household budget in freefall.

That household earns $52,446 and spends $73,378 — running a $20,932 annual deficit. Its total liabilities and unfunded promises amount to $1,361,788 against just $60,554 in assets, leaving it $1.3 million in the hole. Uncle Sam, by any accounting standard, is insolvent.

Congress has clearly lost control of the nation’s finances. America is facing a fiscal catastrophe. The reckoning, long deferred, is becoming impossible to ignore.

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Did Iran launch missiles at US-UK base on Diego Garcia? Here’s what to know

The United Kingdom has slammed “reckless Iranian threats” after missiles targeted a joint United States-UK military base located on the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia.

However, Iran’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Monday denied the allegations that it was behind the launch of what US media reports said were two ballistic missiles.

The US has not commented officially on the firing of the missiles at Diego Garcia, which is approximately 4,000km (2,500 miles) from Iran.

The incident over the weekend came three weeks into the war launched by the US and Israel against Iran on February 28. One of the goals of the war, they have said, is to degrade Iran’s nuclear and missile programmes.

Tehran has maintained its nuclear programme is for civilian purposes. The United Nations nuclear watchdog and US intelligence chief Tulsi Gabbard have said Iran was not on the verge of making nuclear bombs. Contrary assertions were invoked to launch the current war.

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Google Gets Caught Red-Handed Pushing Left-Wing Agenda, Silencing Conservative News

Commentator Britt Hughes is raising concerns about what she describes as a lack of ideological balance on Google News, pointing to a February analysis that examined the platform’s top morning stories.

Hughes compared the findings to earlier criticism of another major platform before turning to Google’s results.

“Do you remember when I told you that Apple News had gone three straight months without featuring a single article from a conservative news outlet in its top stories?” Hughes said.

She then shifted to Google’s performance during the same type of review period.

“Well now they can hold Google’s beer,” Hughes said.

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MSNOW’s Rachel Maddow Eulogizes Robert Mueller by Doubling Down and Insisting That RussiaGate Was Real 

Rachel Maddow, the queen of the Russia collusion hoax, was brought onto MSNOW tonight to react to the death of former FBI director Robert Mueller, who led the pointless investigation that came up with nothing.

According to Maddow, Mueller confirmed her anti-Trump conspiracy theories. She actually doubled down on the hoax during the segment. Maddow made a fortune pushing this lie to her audience and yet she has never been forced to apologize or faced consequences of any kind.

She even suggests that Mueller’s findings were shut down by then attorney general Bill Barr, who she claims outmaneuvered Mueller politically.

Mediaite has details:

Maddow joined The Weekend: Primetime on Saturday to share her thoughts on Mueller, hours after he died at the age of 81. The MS NOW veteran was complimentary of Mueller overall, but said his two-year probe into Trump failed to land a devastating blow because Barr “outplayed” Mueller.

“There’s a reason on a day like this, we need to remind people what was in Mueller’s report — what were the results of his investigation — and that’s because of a failure on his part,” Maddow said. “That is because once his investigation and his report were concluded, he was just wildly outmaneuvered by a really serpentine Attorney General named Bill Barr, who played really dirty pool when it came to the handling and release of the information from Mueller’s investigation.”

She continued:

I don’t know if he was blindsided by it or if he thought Barr was a good guy and would be a straight shooter on this, but Barr absolutely buried him in terms of in terms of the impact of of that report. And given the way that bill Barr became attorney general, Mueller and his team should have seen that coming.

If they did see it coming, they should have come up with a way to outmaneuver Barr while he was outmaneuvering them, and they didn’t.

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How Will Corporate Lobbyists Fix Healthcare? Don’t Ask—Because You Can’t

Corporate media political reporting has always been a clubby endeavor, but a recent reporting experience suggests that the insider culture in Washington, DC, is more insular than ever.

It’s often a challenge for independent media to get responses from Washington insider sources—especially on stories critical of powerful actors—but it’s become increasingly difficult even to pose the questions to those sources. Corporate news sources now issue press releases without bothering to include any information about who to contact with follow-up questions, as if the source is handing the truth down from on high.

When I first encountered this phenomenon after returning to journalism three years ago, I assumed it was a function of the laziness and/or incompetence of individual PR hacks. In my previous life, I had written a few dozen press releases, and “who’s the contact person?” was always a key question to answer in planning media outreach. But today, a failure to offer contact information increasingly appears to be a deliberate strategy to stymie journalistic inquiry.

‘No Surprises’ unsurprising fiasco

Last November, my healthcare politics online newsletter, Healing and Stealing (11/7/25), published an investigation of a national coalition of health insurers and other big businesses. The Coalition Against Surprise Medical Billing includes major business lobbying trade associations like the National Retail Federation, National Restaurant Association, National Association of Manufacturers and the health insurance industry trade group AHIP. Through those associations and business/labor health policy alliances, most of the largest employers in the US and many major labor unions are part of the Coalition, in alliance with the health insurance companies that sell them health plans for their employees.

The Coalition lobbied for passage of the No Surprises Act. The law, passed in December 2020 and signed by President Donald Trump, limits the amount that patients have to pay out of pocket when they unknowingly see a doctor or use another service that is not covered in their health insurance plan’s network. The law also set up a new arbitration system to resolve disputes—between employers and insurers on one side, and hospitals, labs, doctors’ offices and ambulance companies on the other—over the rest of the bills.

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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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CNN Continues Lying About Child In ‘Bunny Hat’ Who Was ‘Detained’ By ICE

Even as the White House naively attempts to placate Democrats by adopting a softer tone on deportations, the media are lying about immigration law enforcement as fiercely as ever.

CNN on Friday promoted an online streaming special centered on migrant children by referring back to 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos, the Ecuadorian child temporarily allowed into the U.S. with his parents by the reckless Biden administration. An immigration judge recently denied Ramos’ family’s asylum claim, meaning they’re cleared for removal. That’s another way of saying the case has been adjudicated and it’s time for Liam to go home. But CNN anchor Sara Sidner instead chose to lie about the circumstances of that whole episode.

“Do you remember this image?” she said with a photo of Ramos on screen. “It became the haunting face of a Minneapolis immigration crackdown that left that community reeling. It shows 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos with his Spiderman backpack and bunny hat being detained by an ICE agent while his mom is feet away inside their home.”

CNN’s poor audience would be led to believe “Little Liam” (as he was referred to by another anchor later in the day) was playing in the crisp white snow when a fed snatched him from his unsuspecting parents, ready for immediate deportation, all while his helpless mother stood by crying. That’s not what happened.

In reality, immigration authorities were attempting to detain Liam’s father, Adrian Alexander Conejo Arias, who was with his son outside their home. The father fled, leaving Liam alone, and when agents tried to unite him with his mother, who was inside, she refused to open the door, effectively leaving the child abandoned, according to the Department of Homeland Security. When the father, Adrian, was eventually captured, he requested that his son go with him to a detention facility, so he did.

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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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MSNOW Cutting Some ‘News’ Shows to Focus on Anti-Trump Resistance Programming

MSNOW, the left wing network formerly known as MSNBC, is dropping the charade of being a ‘news’ network to focus on their real money maker, which is anti-Trump resistance TV shows.

This is actually a smart move for them.

People who watch MSNOW are not going there for news, they watch to have their anti-Trump biases confirmed. They watch to cheer on as the hosts insult Trump and all things Republican.

NewsBusters reported:

Rating MS DOWN? MS NOW Shakes Up Network Line Up, Anchors Out

After being cast out into the wilderness by NBCUniversal last year, things didn’t appear to be going well for the rebranded “MS NOW.” On Wednesday, a shakeup was announced that saw daytime completely reshaped with two anchors losing their seats with at least one already announcing that she had quit, Morning Joe experiencing some shrinkage, while a new face would appear during the 11th Hour, among other shifts.

Going down the line up, first, Morning Joe will be losing an hour. After spending some time at an inflated four hours of Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski shrieking at the camera, the purported preferred morning show for Washington D.C. insiders would be returning to just three hours.

Anchor Stephanie Ruhle will be leaving The 11th Hour and taking over that lost hour from Morning Joe, as well as the following one. Meaning her time slot would be 9 a.m. to 11 a.m.

One of the more noteworthy line items in the shakeup was Ana Cabrera losing her position as an anchor of the 11a a.m. slot, and her announcement that she would be leaving the company.

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