Tag: mainstream media

DELUSIONAL: Former Washington Post Editor Suggests Paper’s Problems Come From Going Too Soft on Trump

The total meltdown of the left over the recent layoffs at the Washington Post continue to prove that the media class just doesn’t get what’s happening.

On PBS, they brought on former Washington Post executive editor Marty Baron to analyze the paper’s problems. To hear Baron tell it, the paper’s problem is that they just haven’t been hard enough on Trump, which is laughable.

Over the last decade, the paper has gone from being just plainly liberal to downright bonkers. They have embraced and promoted every anti-Trump story they could, no matter how unfounded. They destroyed their own reputation.

Transcript via NewsBusters:

BARON: And then I think he really became — took a real turn after it looked like Trump was going to be elected president yet again. And that was in 2024. And 11 days before the presidential election in 2024, they killed an editorial for — that was endorsing Kamala Harris. He said the paper wouldn’t endorse ever again for president.

And hundreds of thousands of subscribers canceled at that time, aggravating the financial problems that they had. Subsequent to that, he did all sorts of things that made things even worse, appearing at the inauguration on the stage with Donald Trump, buying the Melania so-called documentary for an exorbitant price, buying the right — Amazon buying the rights to The Apprentice.

And Amazon had bought the rights to Melania’s documentary as well. And then completely changing the opinion pages so that essentially they have no columnists who are really left of center. And they’re very deferential to Trump. And I think they lack a moral core.

And so all of that has driven subscribers away. And so for every subscriber that they get coming in through the front door because of the high-quality news coverage, I think they’re losing maybe two subscribers out the back door. Of course, I don’t know the numbers exactly, but clearly they have been losing a lot of subscribers.

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GOP senator excoriates NY Times for bad reporting on Arctic Frost, IDs reporters by name

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley on Thursday slammed the New York Times over its reporting on whistleblowers, which he claimed intended to discredit real whistleblowers who were shedding light on misconduct.

Grassley said the series of reports, which were done by New York Times reporters Glenn Thrush, Alan Feuer and Adam Goldman, date back to 2023 when Goldman wrote a report that was “designed to undermine my exposure of former FBI agent [Timothy] Thibault’s political conduct.”

“Goldman wrote his article before knowing all the facts,” Grassley claimed during floor remarks. “For one, Thibault was found to have violated the Hatch Act for anti-Trump political conduct at work. Second, Goldman’s article didn’t account for emails I released last year showing Thibault violated the FBI’s rules in opening and advancing Arctic Frost.”

Grassley said another article from last year attempted to dismiss Arctic Frost concerns by stating the FBI “took normal bureaucratic steps and precautions” when looking into the case. 

“Was this supposed to be an opinion piece on behalf of terminated FBI agents or a real news article?” Grassley questioned. “Normal steps weren’t taken.”

The senator admitted that the House and Senate are now receiving oversight documents they requested years ago, but that the production was because of cooperation from the Trump administration.

“To Attorney General [Pam] Bondi and [FBI] Director [Kash] Patel’s credit, they’ve done better in that regard than any of their predecessors,” Grassley said. “Am I fully satisfied? Of course not. But Bondi and Patel deserve credit, and if the Biden administration had done the same, I’d give them credit, too.”

Grassley also slammed the New York Times for its coverage of the Mar-a-Lago raid, accusing the outlet of mischaracterizing his post that the raid was a “miscarriage of justice,” because it did not include his full comment.

The senator additionally claimed the outlet accused his trusted whistleblowers of violating the law by disclosing subpoenas from Jack Smith, which they shared with Congress and not the media. 

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Reuters Claims Office of DNI Investigated Puerto Rico Election Machines For “Claims That Venezuela Had Hacked Voting Machines” in the U.S. Territory

In June of 2024, Puerto Rico encountered numerous problems while conducting their primary elections.  The Gateway Pundit reported that vote counts were reported as lower than the paper counts.  Some voting systems reversed totals, while some reported zero votes for certain candidates.  The discrepancies were attributed to a “software issue,” according to the Puerto Rico Election Commission’s interim president at the time, Jessika Padilla-Rivera.

There wasn’t much reporting on the American territory and the problems they had surrounding that election.  However, it did cause the election commission in the territory to call into question its contract with Dominion Voting Systems prior to the November 2024 election.

In an “exclusive” story published on Wednesday, Reuters claimed that a team working for Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard “led an investigation into Puerto Rico’s voting machines,” according to Gabbard’s office and three sources familiar with the previously unreported events.

Reuters reported:

The sources said the goal was to work with the FBI to investigate claims that Venezuela had hacked voting machines in Puerto Rico, but added the probe did not produce any clear evidence of Venezuelan interference in the U.S. territory’s elections. Reuters first reported the investigation.

Gabbard’s office, in a statement to Reuters, confirmed the May investigation but denied a link to Venezuela, saying its focus was on vulnerabilities in the island’s electronic voting systems. Her team took an unspecified number of Puerto Rico’s voting machines and additional copies of data from the machines as part of its investigation, a spokesperson for Gabbard’s Office of the Director of National Intelligence said.

A source with direct knowledge of the investigation confirmed that the event in May did happen, but it was not tied to any specific claim of Venezuelan interference, nor was the scope of the investigation specific to foreign interference.  However, there was evidence of foreign involvement discovered, but no country was pointed out specifically by our source.

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CBS News Pulls ’60 Minutes’ Episode After Contributor Appears in Epstein Files

It was always presumed that the fallout from the unsealing of the Jeffrey Epstein files would hit some pretty big names.

Those presumptions turned out to be rather accurate.

Now, apart from just former first couples, CBS News’ flagship program, “60 Minutes,” has become the latest entity to be unceremoniously caught up in the Epstein scandal.

Epstein was a wealthy but disgraced sex offender who had powerful friends and allegedly ran an underage sex trafficking ring to help satiate those friends.

He died in 2019 before any definitive answers could be pulled out of him.

In lieu of those answers, however, public attention recently turned to the troves of sealed government documents related to Epstein.

That hot-button issue eventually boiled over into the Congressional “Epstein Files Transparency Act,” which mandated that the Department of Justice release all the files in a searchable and downloadable format.

The unsealing of these documents has connected some major figures to Epstein — beyond just suspicion and hearsay — such as billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates, former President Bill Clinton, and countless others.

(Much to the chagrin of his loudest critics, President Donald Trump’s association with Epstein isn’t nearly as sordid as some of the other big names mentioned.)

And now these documents have connected a new CBS News contributor to the salacious situation — over 1,700 times.

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Looking to Blame Anyone But Israel for Youth’s Anti-Israel Turn

Younger Americans are turning against Israel. “On both the left and the right, young Americans are growing more skeptical of offering unconditional US support to Israel,” Politico (9/29/25) reported. Brookings (8/6/25) ran the headline “Support for Israel Continues to Deteriorate, Especially Among Democrats and Young People.” According to the Forward (11/21/25), “Younger Jews are more than twice as likely to identify as anti-Zionist than the overall population.”

Pro-Israel media are looking for blame. It’s often easy to paint youth opinion that is out of sync with official state policy as emotionally driven social justice warriorism, the result of hearts not yet hardened by life’s cold realities. The Zionist media narrative is looking for the culprits who have apparently miseducated our youth, turning them not just into Israel critics, but Jew haters.

At the Atlantic (12/15/25), Yair Rosenberg wrote a piece headlined “The More I’m Around Young People, the More Panicked I Am,’” with the subhead, “Anti-Jewish prejudice isn’t a partisan divide—it’s a generational one.” To his credit, Rosenberg starts off reporting on very real instances of antisemitism, but then watch carefully what he does in the middle:

Young people also tend to be more critical of Israel than their elders, leading a minority to excuse or even perpetuate anti-Jewish acts in America in the name of Palestine. These critics are likely to consume anti-Israel content on their social-media apps of choice. The platforms then funnel some of those users toward antisemitic material—a sort of algorithmic escalator that ends up radicalizing a percentage of them.

In the first sentence, the only evidence Rosenberg cites is a link to his own article (Atlantic, 5/22/25) about how “Elias Rodriguez allegedly shot and killed two people as they were exiting an event at the Capital Jewish Museum,” with the headline “A Dangerous Disguise for Antisemitism.” Rosenberg said the “assailant used the Palestinian struggle as a pretext to harm Jews.”

But as I have previously written (FAIR.org, 5/29/25), much of the media framed this attack as antisemitic without any factual basis. While there was plenty of evidence that the act was political, with Rodiguez’s manifesto denouncing Israel as a “genocidal apartheid state,” there wasn’t any evidence that the attacker held antisemitic views, or targeted the event because of the faith of the victims. If someone obsessed with Saudi Arabia’s aggression in Yemen killed two Muslim workers at the Saudi embassy, that would certainly be anti-Saudi political violence, but not necessarily anti-Muslim terror.

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The View TURNS on Bill Gates as Epstein Files Close In on Tech Billionaire

Something unexpected has happened on cable TV, and it’s a sign that disaster is coming for tech billionaire Bill Gates.

In the latest tranche of the Epstein Files, emails drafted by Jeffrey Epstein suggest that Gates contracted an STD from sleeping with “Russian girls” and had planned to secretly medicate his then-wife, Melinda.

Bill has denied the allegations, but Melinda interestingly did not. Instead, she expressed “unbelievable sadness” reflecting on their marriage and Gates’ association with Epstein.

When asked about this during an interview with 9 News Australia, Bill Gates said he doesn’t know what Epstein was thinking with the email, suggesting Epstein may have been trying to “attack” him in some way.

The reporter challenged Gates on why this accusation against him wasn’t true when other Epstein file revelations were accurate.

Gates sidestepped the question and asserted his own version of events.

“It’s factually true that I was only at dinners. I never went to the island. I never met any women,” he replied.

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UH-OH: Whoopi Goldberg and Other Members of ‘The View’ Are Mentioned in the Epstein Files

The ladies of The View have been harping on the Epstein Files for months. Like all other members of their party, they thought that this was an effective way to attack Trump.

But would it surprise you to find out that these same idiots are actually mentioned in the Epstein Files themselves?

Kudos to Nicholas Fondacaro of NewsBusters for digging up this incredibly funny information.

As Fondacaro reports at NewsBusters, someone named Whoopi Goldberg even reached out to Epstein for help with a flight:

Whoopi Goldberg Requested Epstein Jet Fly Her to Monaco Charity Event

A NewsBusters investigation of the Epstein Files discovered that cast members of ABC’s The View were mentioned nearly four dozen times. Despite the files being a major topic of discussion on the show, as they tried to tie President Trump to criminal activity, none of the cast members addressed their names appearing in the same files. One cast member was seemingly interested in borrowing one of Epstein’s infamous private jets.

A search of the cast members’ names on the Department of Justice website returned nearly four dozen (46) references.

Moderator Whoopi Goldberg led the way with 21 references, co-host Alyssa Farah Griffin clocked in with 20, Joy Behar had three, and Ana Navarro had two. Fortunately for co-hosts Sunny Hostin and Sara Haines, they weren’t mentioned at all (as of the release of the latest batch of files).

The search for references did take into account Goldberg going by just her first name, Farah Griffin’s maiden name, and Hostin’s maiden name (Cummings) and real first name (Asunción; with and without the accent mark)…

The e-mail was requesting possible use of one of Epstein’s private jets to help Goldberg attend a White Feather Foundation charity event in Monaco.

“Whoopi Goldberg needs a plane to get to Monaco. John Lennon’s Charity is paying for it. They don’t want to charter so they are looking for private owners,” the e-mail began.

How funny is this?

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CNN Admits the Vast Majority of Americans, Including Democrats and Black Americans Support Voter ID Laws

CNN analysts were forced to admit that, even according to their own polling, the issue of voter ID laws is not controversial and is supported by well over 75 percent of Americans.

“Photo ID to vote, and the American people are with NickiMinaj. Because what are we talking about here. Take a look here, favor voter ID to vote. Look, I’ve got all this polling here going back since 2018 you’ll notice on all of it, its all north of 75 percent,” CNN’s Harry Enten said. “Seventy-six percent, 76 percent, 76 percent, 81 percent, and then 83 percent in the last year of Americans agree with Nicki Minaj, they favor photo ID to be able to vote.”

“What about by party, what’s the party breakdown?” the CNN host asked.

“Yeah. Normally, you might expect, hey, there’d be a big divide by party, with Republicans really for it and Democrats really against it. But not really here. I mean, just take a look here, favor voter ID to vote, you got 95 percent of Republicans, pretty much all of them, but even 71 percent of Democrats favor photo ID to vote,” Enten continued.

“So again, Nicki Minaj posting that on X. And what you see is that the American people, actually, it’s not really all that controversial. The American people are with Nicki Minaj, whether they are Republicans or even if they are Democrats. We’re talking about 7 in 10 Democrats agreeing with Nicki Minaj that you, in fact, should show a voter photo ID to vote.”

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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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DNI Tulsi Gabbard Responds to “Blatantly False and Slanderous” Congressional and Media Accusations Regarding Integrity of Elections

After Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was photographed in Fulton County during the execution of a search warrant for 2020 election evidence, several members of Congress began to call into question DNI Gabbard’s authority to be involved.

Senator Mark Warner, vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, “sharply criticized” the presence of the DNI in Fulton County.  According to NBC News:

Warner said there were only two explanations for national intelligence director’s trip: either Gabbard believed the case had a link to foreign intelligence, and she failed to abide by her legal obligation to inform congressional committees about it, or she was tarnishing the nonpartisan reputation of the intelligence agencies with a “domestic political stunt designed to legitimize conspiracy theories that undermine our democracy.”

“Either scenario,” Warner added, “represents a serious breach of trust and a dereliction of duty to the solemn office which she holds.”

According to The Democracy Docket, David Becker, the founder of the Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR), told reporters last week:

“The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has no domestic responsibilities.  There is no reason for the director of national intelligence to be in any kind of voting site. She has neither the authority nor the competence to assess anything in that voting site. And so it’s incredibly troubling to see something like that.”

CEIR received over $65 million in “Zuckerbucks” during the 2020 election.  Becker is also the co-founder of the Electronic Registration and Information Center, a non-profit that has been tasked with maintaining voter rolls for more than a dozen states.

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