Tag: mainstream media

The Vaccine Safety Signal the Media Still Won’t Read

The serious-adverse-event signal found in the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA Covid-19 vaccine trials has been in the peer-reviewed literature for nearly four years. Mainstream media outlets, on the rare occasions they address it, have treated it not as evidence to be weighed but as misinformation to be managed — dismissed on the authority of experts without relevant expertise, or simply ignored. A recent BBC Radio 4 broadcast is a near-textbook example.

The broadcast aired on Everything Is Fake and Nobody Cares, a BBC Radio 4 series hosted by Jamie Bartlett, whose stated purpose is to ask why, in so much of modern life, fakery is no longer punished but rewarded. It is a reasonable question. The most direct answer the series has produced to date appears inside one of its own episodes.

In the episode in question, Bartlett devoted his broadcast to Dr. Aseem Malhotra and Covid-19 vaccine safety. As part of that segment, he aired a specific claim about a peer-reviewed paper I led, published in the journal Vaccine in September 2022. To evaluate Dr. Malhotra’s on-air statements, Bartlett brought in Dr. Vicky Male, a reproductive immunologist at Imperial College London. Dr. Male told listeners that the authors of the paper had been “specifically told to make it clear this paper should not be used” to support the kinds of claims Dr. Malhotra was making.

That statement is not true. No one told us that. The paper does not contain such an instruction. I am one of its authors; I have the peer review correspondence; I know what the journal asked of us and what it did not. Anyone could have checked this in five minutes by reading the paper, which runs eight pages and is open-access online. Jamie Bartlett did not check.

On the basis of an unchecked false claim about a scientific paper, Bartlett told his audience that Dr. Malhotra was spreading false information — on a podcast whose central premise is that modern life now rewards exactly this kind of thing.

Whether that reflected willful dishonesty or plain incompetence, I cannot say. The case that follows lays out what happened in enough detail for readers to decide for themselves. Both possibilities reflect poorly on a national broadcaster. Only one of them would be excusable.

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Australia Wants To Force Big Tech to Pay Legacy Media

The Australian government wants to take 2.25% of Meta, Google, and TikTok’s local revenue and hand it to legacy news publishers. The platforms can avoid the bill by signing commercial deals with those same publishers. Either way, money moves from the companies people actually use to read and share information, into the bank accounts of the established media class.

The draft legislation is called the News Bargaining Incentive. The word “incentive” is an odd choice. A levy you can only escape by paying a private third party is a tax with extra steps, and the third party has been chosen for you. Australian Community Media, Nine Entertainment, News Corp Australia, and the public broadcaster ABC sit at the front of the queue.

Communications Minister Anika Wells announced the plan in Sydney on Tuesday. “People are increasingly getting their news directly from Facebook, from TikTok and from Google, and we believe it’s only fair that large digital platforms contribute to the hard work of journalism that enriches their feeds and that drives their revenue,” she said.

The idea treats the act of users sharing links as a form of theft from publishers, rather than what it actually is, which is people choosing to talk about the news on the platforms where they spend their time.

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No, Zelensky Is Not ‘The Leader of the Free World’

Just when sensible people might conclude that American or European members of Ukraine’s sycophantic fan club cannot become even more detached from reality, a prominent member of the club proves the opposite.  This time, it is conservative pundit David French, who wins the prize in his April 26, 2026, New York Times column, “Meet the New Leader of the Free World.”   That leader is Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky.

French contends that “A remarkable thing has happened on the world’s battlefields. Ukraine – a nation that was supposed to dissolve within days of a Russian invasion – has fought Russia to a stalemate, revolutionizing land warfare in the process.  It has become an indispensable security partner in the Western alliance, including in the war against Iran.”

But according to French, such military resilience barely begins to measure the extent of Volodymyr Zelensky’s achievements. He also “is taking the next step, one that would have been unthinkable even as recently as 2024. By word and deed, he’s showing Europe and the world how the post-American free world can preserve its liberty and independence.” French then delves into well-worn episodes in which Donald Trump’s administration has alienated, antagonized, and berated America’s longtime NATO allies, thereby provoking Europe to become more self-reliant, as one manifestation of the “post-American” free world.

French seems downright awestruck at Ukraine’s alleged military prowess. “This might be difficult for many readers to grasp – given our nation’s longstanding military supremacy – but the largest and most battle-hardened land force in the Western world may well be the Ukrainian Army.”  He adds that “It’s also worth noting that the U.S. forces have much less combat experience than Ukraine forces – especially when it comes to combat with a great power.”

But there’s more!  Ukraine’s military “is the only Western force that has fully adapted to modern drone warfare.  Indeed, Ukraine is arguably the world’s leader in drone warfare.”

Observers who recall the Western news media’s hyped propaganda offensive during the prelude to the Persian Gulf War may be experiencing a sense of déjà vu.  Prominent news correspondents insisted (while maintaining sober expressions) that Iraq was a borderline military superpower.  Of course, in that case the purpose of the propaganda was to generate fear of Iraq as a military threat.  In this case, the propaganda is an attempt to convince a skeptical global audience that Ukraine is a surprisingly capable military bulwark against Russia, Iran, and other authoritarian threats.  The current disinformation is nearly as flagrant, however, as during the earlier episode.

Russia continues to make gains on the battlefield, slowly conquering additional Ukrainian territory. The bloodied Ukrainian forces appear increasingly beleaguered, and Russia (because of its much larger population and military reserves) is better positioned for a continuing war of attrition.  Western officials and their media allies have gone to great lengths to obscure the fundamental reality that Russia is winning the war, albeit in a costlier and more grinding fashion than the Kremlin had assumed.  The credibility of arguments that Moscow cannot continue to sustain the drain on its manpower is not enhanced by the continuing refusal of Western analysts to provide even a rough estimate of Ukrainian casualties.  Such clumsy attempts at concealment suggest that the actual news about that issue is not good.

If the battlefield situation were not worrisome enough for Ukraine, major domestic political fractures have occurred over the past year.  Zelensky’s latest moves also alienated some of his most reliable supporters and apologists in the West.  When prominent establishment media outlets such as the Financial Times, the Spectator, and Politico all began to publish stories critical of the Ukrainian leader’s undemocratic moves in late 2025, there was a sense that attitudes even among pro-Ukraine Western elites were shifting.  That trend has quietly continued in 2026.

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NOW THAT’S FUNNY: Democrat Party Mouthpiece Stephen Colbert Tells the NY Times He’s ‘Nonpartisan’

Stephen Colbert, host of the soon to be discontinued Late Show, was recently interviewed by the New York Times and had the audacity to claim that he’s nonpartisan. It’s the funniest thing he has said in years.

Colbert has completely ruined the legacy of the Late Show by turning it into his own personal political soapbox that basically functions as a super PAC for the Democrat party. Almost all of his guests are Democrat politicians and he spends every night telling the country how much he hates President Trump.

It’s why the show is losing millions of dollars a year and why it is being taken off the air forever next month.

FOX News reports:

Colbert calls Trump ‘authoritarian’ but rejects ‘partisan’ label in exit interview with NY Times

As talk show host Stephen Colbert prepares to depart from his show, he condemned President Donald Trump during a Tuesday interview with The New York Times.

CBS announced in July that it had canceled “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” and that it would officially go off the air in May 2026. Liberal critics have accused CBS and Paramount of ending the show to appease Trump and receive approval for a long-planned merger between Paramount Global and Skydance Media.

Colbert spoke out about the saga in a New York Times interview headlined, “Stephen Colbert Gets Ready to Hang It Up.” When asked by the Times why the FCC and Trump administration are “focused” on him, Colbert argued this is simply authoritarians being authoritarians.

“Authoritarians don’t like anybody who doesn’t give them undue dignity. Comedians are anti-authoritarian by nature. And authoritarians are never going to like anybody to laugh at them,” he said. “The number of newspeople who have said to me or Jon Stewart or any of the guys who do this, ‘God, I wish I could say what you say on air.’ And we can.”

“I think that upsets them,” he added further. “I think it might be upsetting that we really do not live in their world of principalities and powers.”

It’s possible that Colbert is just trolling the public with these claims, as he is so obviously partisan, to a fault.

Few people will be sad to see him leave the airwaves. He is a smug, preachy, unfunny, bore. He took a show that used to be for the enjoyment of the whole country and turned it into something that mocked and belittled the half of the country that doesn’t vote the way he wants them to.

Maybe he can get a new ‘nonpartisan’ show on MSNOW. That’s where he really belongs, anyway.

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Jimmy Kimmel Invents an Outrageous Lie While Defending His Cruel Assassination ‘Joke’ About the President and First Lady

ABC late-night host Jimmy Kimmel came up with one of the most pathetic lies imaginable while deciding to defend his wicked joke about President Trump.

As The Gateway Pundit’s Kristinn Taylor reported, Kimmel previously made an assassination joke about First Lady Melania Trump and her husband President Donald Trump, saying she looked like an “expectant widow.”

This happened just two days before another deranged terrorist tried to take out the president.

“And of course, our first lady, Melania, is here. Look at Mel, so beautiful. Mrs. Trump, you have a glow like an expectant widow,” Kimmel said during a mock White House Correspondent’s dinner last week.

“You know, Melania’s birthday is on Sunday,” he added. “That’s right. She’s uh, planning to celebrate at home the same way she always does, looking out a window and whispering, “What have I done?”

“As you’re all aware, Melania is a movie star now. Her documentary had a score of 10% on Rotten Tomatoes, which is a website named after her husband’s testicles.”

This ‘joke’ generated such widespread outrage that both the President and First Lady issued scathing statements condemning Kimmel. President Trump also called on ABC to fire the alleged ‘comedian.’

On Monday night, Kimmel not only defended his sick words, but astoundingly claimed that he was just talking about Donald and Melania’s age difference.

Is that the best lie he could come up with?

“It was a very light roast joke about the fact that he’s almost 80 and she’s younger than I am,” Kimmel fibbed. “It was not by any stretch of the definition a call to assassination. And they know that.”

“I’ve been very vocal for many years speaking out against gun violence, in particular,” he continued. “But I understand that the First Lady had a stressful experience over the weekend and probably every weekend is pretty stressful in that house?”

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FCC Launches UNPRECEDENTED REVIEW OF ABC Stations After Kimmel’s “Expectant Widow” Jab

The federal government is cracking down on ABC’s broadcast licenses in direct response to Jimmy Kimmel’s latest vile comments, this time on First Lady Melania Trump. 

The FCC, under Trump appointee Brendan Carr, is directing eight Disney-owned TV stations to file early license renewals tied explicitly to Kimmel’s “expectant widow” monologue that he may have gotten away with had an assassination attempt against Trump not occurred on the same day.

White House Communications Director Steven Cheung was forthright In a post on X, declaring “Jimmy Kimmel is a shit human being for: Making a disgusting joke about assassinating the President. Doubling down on that joke instead of doing the decent thing by apologizing. ABC needs to fire him immediately and he should be shunned for the rest of his life.”

The controversy erupted after Kimmel, during a skit on his show last Thursday portraying himself as master of ceremonies for the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, told Melania Trump: “Mrs Trump, you have a glow like an expectant widow.”

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The Latest Trump Assassination Attempt, How Media Narratives Fuel Violence

The April 25, 2026 attack at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner was the fifth documented attempt against President Donald Trump in less than a decade. The first, largely forgotten by the media, came in 2016, when Michael Steven Sandford attempted to seize an officer’s weapon at a Trump rally in Las Vegas.

The most widely remembered was Thomas Matthew Crooks opening fire at the Butler, Pennsylvania rally on July 13, 2024, killing one rallygoer and grazing Trump’s ear, producing the iconic photograph of Trump raising his fist and shouting “Fight, fight, fight.” Between the fourth and fifth attempts on the president’s life, conservative Christian commentator Charlie Kirk was assassinated while engaging students in open dialogue on a university campus.

The media enabled violence against both men through sustained false framing. Trump was portrayed for years as a Russian asset and a threat to democracy. Using out-of-context quotes and selective framing, the media painted Kirk as a racist and a homophobe. Some on the left called for the deaths of both men and celebrated when Kirk was killed.

The media campaign against Trump began before his first election. On September 23, 2016, reports surfaced that U.S. authorities were investigating Trump campaign figure Carter Page for possible ties to Russian influence operations. This was the first public story directly linking a Trump associate to Russia. Fusion GPS, the opposition-research firm hired by the Clinton campaign, had directed Christopher Steele to share his findings with the media as early as mid-September 2016, weeks before the election.

On October 7, 2016, DHS and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper issued a public statement attributing the hacking of Democratic officials and the WikiLeaks releases to Russian intelligence acting to benefit Trump. On January 10, 2017, BuzzFeed published the Steele dossier in full, the same day Jeff Sessions’s confirmation hearing began, triggering wall-to-wall media saturation of the Russia narrative. The FBI’s own investigation, Crossfire Hurricane, had been formally opened on July 31, 2016, though the Durham Report later concluded it lacked an adequate factual basis.

The Russia narrative, the claim that Trump was a foreign-installed puppet being blackmailed by Vladimir Putin, ran for Trump’s entire first term and shaped two impeachment proceedings. The Mueller Report found no evidence of criminal conspiracy. The Durham Report concluded the FBI launched its investigation without an adequate factual basis and applied a double standard not applied to the Clinton campaign. The narrative collapsed only after nearly three years of continuous coverage built on material that, as Durham confirmed, lacked a factual foundation from the start.

Despite Russiagate collapsing, the media still runs with it from time to time, ostensibly on slow news days. However, Trump’s second term has been more acutely shaped by media framing him as a tyrant and a threat to democracy. The Intercept ran a 2024 piece arguing Trump “represents an existential threat to democracy” and that the warning “must be repeated, over and over again.” NPR aired a segment in which a political scientist argued the press had an “obligation” to cover Trump as a threat to democracy in the same way it covers climate change, with no opposing view presented.

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ABC Not Firing Jimmy Kimmel After Melania ‘Widow’ Comments Feels Like Network Flipping Off Millions

Liberal TV network ABC has ignited volcanic backlash by refusing to fire “comedian” Jimmy Kimmel, who is continuing to recklessly incite violence against conservatives.

In refusing to curb Kimmel’s dangerous rhetoric, ABC made clear not only its toxic left-wing bias, but also its disregard for public safety and national security.

The brouhaha erupted on April 23, when Kimmel flippantly joked about the multiple assassination attempts on President Donald Trump by referring to first lady Melania Trump as an “expectant widow.”

Kimmel made the inane comments while performing a mock White House Correspondents’ Dinner skit on his late-night talk show.

During the sketch, the left-wing foghorn pretended to be speaking to attendees.

“Our first lady Melania is here… so beautiful,” Kimmel said. “Mrs. Trump, you have a glow like an expectant widow.”

This jab ignited renewed criticism when another presidential assassination attempt occurred two days later at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in Washington, D.C.

On Monday, the first lady urged ABC to finally take a stand against political violence by ousting Kimmel.

“Kimmel’s hateful and violent rhetoric is intended to divide our country,” she wrote on X.

“People like Kimmel shouldn’t have the opportunity to enter our homes each evening to spread hate.”

“Enough is enough. It is time for ABC to take a stand,” Melania said.

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USC historian defends Southern Poverty Law Center funneling payments to KKK leaders 

The Southern Poverty Law Center’s payments to the handful of remaining white supremacist groups in the country are just like how Jewish groups took down extremists, according to a University of Southern California historian.

Professor Steven Ross made the comments during an interview last week with National Public Radio. He has a book coming out about “racist” and “antisemitic groups” in the 20th century. 

Last week, the Trump administration announced federal charges against the Southern Poverty Law Center, accusing it of defrauding donors. The 14-page complaint says the SPLC paid informants within the Ku Klux Klan and other white hate groups. At the same time, the group was fundraising off the alleged resurgence and influence of those same organizations.

But Professor Ross rushed to defend the payments to white supremacist groups, linking that activity back to the work of Jewish groups in the 1940s and onward to infiltrate hate groups.

He told NPR:

I’m not sure if the indictment is true or not, but the idea that there are paid informants is not illegal. These people are simply monitoring what was going on. And when they’re accused of being – stealing records, those records were sent, I’m sure, to government forces like the FBI, the Justice Department, because they weren’t doing their job.

To be clear, the informants were not simply accused of “stealing records,” like the surely dwindling check register of a random “Klan” group.

In one horrifying example, the Southern Poverty Law Center paid an organizer of the deadly 2017 Charlottesville rally. 

The unidentified perpetrator “attended the event at the direction of the SPLC,” according to the indictment. The person “made racist postings under the supervision of the SPLC and helped coordinate transportation to the event for several attendees.”

Furthermore, the group continued to pay the organizer after the deadly violence, making payments throughout 2023. In total, the left-wing group paid $270,000 to the perpetrator.

NPR host Terry Gross interjected to clarify the accusations about inciting violence, before pivoting and suggesting FBI agents do the same thing. (I mean, likely true).

“I’m [sure] the SPLC is doing the same thing because they know their informants would get in trouble, otherwise,” Ross said. “That they could be prosecuted by the government.”

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The Moral Malaise: The New York Times Makes The Case For “Microlooting” To Murder

“It is so hard to live ethically in an unethical society.” That lament heard this week from New York Times opinion culture editor Nadja Spiegelman could well be the Democratic Party’s epitaph.

Spiegelman was interviewing two left-wing influencers about how everything from shoplifting to murder may be excusable today in light of the unfairness they see in society.

The podcast, a product of the nation’s newspaper of record, reveled in the moral relativism that has taken over the American left. It featured the ravings of the antisemitic Marxist streamer Hasan Piker, who calmly explained how the murder of United Healthcare executive Brian Thompson was perfectly understandable. His rationalization came from Marxist revolutionary Friedrich Engels, who had called capitalism “social murder.” If capitalists are “social murderers,” then why not kill them? The logic is liberating and lethal for some on the left looking for a license for violence.

Mind you, this same newspaper had once condemned and effectively banned a U.S. senator for writing an op-ed advocating the use of the military to quell violent protests during the summer of George Floyd’s death. The Times even forced out its own opinion editor for having the temerity to publish such an opinion.

But glorifying murder? The suggestion of open hunting season on corporate executives did not appear to shock or repel Spiegelman. After all, we are living in “an unethical society.” She explained that many felt that the murder of Thompson, the father of two, meant that “finally, someone can actually do something about health care.”

Even liberal comedians are practicing a literal version of slapstick. Margaret Cho this week declared that “we need a feral, bloodthirsty, violent Democrat.”

To be fair, Spiegelman did concede that it might seem a bit “scary” for some to start murdering our way to social justice.

She also explained that shoplifting can be justifiable because people are “stealing from Whole Foods — not just for the thrill of it, but out of a feeling of anger and moral justification.”

New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino also contributed to the podcast, titled “The Rich Don’t Play by the Rules. So Why Should I?” She immediately threw in her own experience with “microlooting” and explained why it is arguably moral: “I have, under very specific circumstances. I will say, I think that stealing from a big-box store [isn’t] significant as a moral wrong, nor is it significant in any way as protest.”

She detailed her own past thefts and added, “I didn’t feel bad about it at all, in part because the store was a corporation. And it certainly felt, in a utilitarian sense, I was like, this is not a big deal. Right, guys?”

Not in the confines of the New York Times, where apparently you are entitled to all goods that are fit to pilfer.

The bizarre exchange highlighted the moral chasm that is opening its maw on today’s political left. In my book “Rage and the Republic,” I write about how rage helps people excuse any offense or attack. It dismisses the humanity of others and provides a license to hate completely and without reservation.

It is not really murder or theft if there are no real humans on the other side, is it?

Other columnists have defended such property crimes. Washington Post writer Maura Judkis ran a column mocking shoplifting stories as the “moral panic” of a nation built on “stolen land.” It is reminiscent of those who excused rioting in past summers “as an expression of power” and demanded that the media refer to looters as “protesters.”

Former New York Times writer (and now Howard University Journalism Professor) Nikole Hannah-Jones went so far as to call on journalists not to cover shoplifting crimes.

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