Tag: mainstream media

Flashback: 7 Media Mouthpieces Who Repeated The Lie That Russia ‘Hacked’ The 2016 Election

The corporate media have insisted for years that Russia hacked the 2016 election or colluded with Trump to steal it. The hoax was already thoroughly debunked, but documents released by Tulsi Gabbard on Friday revealed that the Obama administration “manufactured” the evidence behind the narrative.

A House report Gabbard declassified on Wednesday further revealed how the Obama administration manipulated the contents of an intelligence report to push the claim that Putin “aspired” to help Trump. The “only classified information” cited as evidence for the assertion was “one scant, unclear, and unverifiable fragment of a sentence” in a “substandard” report. Nonetheless, the corporate media for years acted as willing propaganda arms for the Democrat Party, uncritically and relentlessly peddling the claim that Russia helped Donald Trump win in 2016. 

Following the release of the DNI report on Friday and the House report on Wednesday, legacy outlets unsurprisingly rushed to downplay the bombshells. While the media continue to run cover for themselves and the Obama administration, here is a reminder of seven Democrat mouthpieces who perpetuated the Russia collusion hoax. 

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After Spreading Russia Hoax Lies, Media Lie Again To Bury Evidence They Lied

Newly declassified documents confirm that Obama-era intelligence officials pushed the discredited Steele dossier that served as the nexus of the Russia collusion hoax in a bid to kneecap Donald Trump before he could set foot in the White House. But instead of reckoning with the truth, the propaganda press is scrambling to discredit the revelations — not because the evidence is lacking, but because it’s a damning indictment of the media’s complicity.

Nine years ago, the media breathlessly peddled the now discredited claim that then-candidate Trump colluded with Russia to win the 2016 election. At the heart of the hoax was the Steele dossier — opposition research created by a former British spy, paid for by Hillary Clinton’s campaign, and laundered into the intelligence community.

On Wednesday, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard declassified a 2020 report by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence showing — among other things — that members of the intelligence community were concerned with several aspects of the dossier, such as credibility. In fact, according to the report, two senior CIA officers contended that the dossier should have been omitted from the ICA “because it failed to meet basic tradecraft standards.” In fact, the information in the dossier was so flawed that “every CIA analyst and operations officer” asked about the dossier made sure to “emphasize that they had nothing to do with the decision to include Annex A” and could not “vouch” for it.

Pretty damming, right? And that’ not even half of it. Additional coverage of the findings can be found here, here, and here.

One would think the media would be all over a story this explosive — historic levels of government corruption and a weaponized intel apparatus. While a functioning press would be digging into this (like us here at The Federalist!), the propaganda press is actually doing the opposite, trying to discredit the news.

“Trump’s intel chief Tulsi Gabbard reignites political battles with 2016 election documents on Russia,” CBS News’ Olivia Victoria Gazis wrote.

“‘It’s just wildly misleading’: Why the administration’s latest allegations about the Russia investigation don’t add up,” read a headline from CNN’s Jeremy Herb and Katie Bo Lillis.

Ironically, Herb and Lillis (the latter of which was involved in a massive defamation case this year that ended with a jury finding CNN is literally fake news) claim the declassified document “conflate[s] and misrepresent[s]” the findings of the intelligence community. But according to the declassified report, the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) “misrepresented both the significance and credibility of the dossier reports.”

“Trump rehashes years-old grievances on Russia investigation after new intelligence report,” The Associated Press’ Erick Tucker and Chris Megerian wrote. According to the Bobbsey twins, decisions to review the corrupt intelligence apparatus and their involvement in the 2016 Russia collusion hoax is “backward-looking.”

“Gabbard Releases New Documents Targeting Obama Administration,” The New York Times’ Julian E. Barnes wrote.

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MSNBC Contributor Goes Full Drama Queen Over Colbert Cancelation: ‘Really Scary’

People on the left truly seem to live in an alternate universe. During a recent segment on MSNBC, contributor Molly Jong-Fast reacted to the Colbert cancelation by saying that it’s ‘really scary.’

It’s scary that a TV show got canceled? That happens all the time. In this case, the show in question was losing tens of millions of dollars a year.

She actually goes on and compares this situation to the McCarthy anti-communism hearings. This isn’t even remotely similar to that but she takes herself and her words so seriously.

“And even if it’s not quid pro quo, the idea of self-censorship. And I talk about my grandfather, Howard Fast, who was jailed by McCarthy during The House UN-American Activities, that that our government has done this before, that history is very much filled with moments like this.”

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CBS Is About to Have a Big, Expensive Stephen Colbert Problem — and Howard Stern Is the Precedent

There’s precedent for this: Twenty years ago this year, Howard Stern left terrestrial radio, opting for the Sirius Satellite (later Sirius XM) moneybag. Twenty years later, Howard Stern has gone from an A-list superstar to a has-been; the natural consequence of hiding behind a paywall for so long.

Without the feeder system of terrestrial radio to onboard new fans, eventually, his older fans lost interest and left, and nobody new took their place. And now Howard Stern — a man whose audience was once 20 million strong — has become a complete and total nobody.

Consider: Stern’s 1993 “Private Parts” book sold over 1.1 million copies. It was the fastest-selling title in Simon & Schuster history.

A few decades later, he released the book “Howard Stern Comes Again” (2019) with the exact same publisher, Simon & Schuster. While accurate book stats are tricky to track, in one listing, Stern’s 2019 book was credited with just 265,295 sales, finishing about 2,500 units behind Mark Levin’s seventh-ranked book title, “Unfreedom of the Press.” (There were even anecdotal reports of Stern’s book being sold at the dollar store, the tragic fate of so many over-published and under-demanded book titles.) Stern’s audience is a pitiful sliver of what it once was.

And eventually, that’ll be Stephen Colbert’s fate, too. But don’t focus on that yet: The important part is what happened after Stern announced he’d be leaving terrestrial radio (Oct. 6, 2004) but before he actually left on Dec. 16, 2005.

Stern spent much of his final months on terrestrial radio hyping up how awesome his new satellite radio show was gonna be (often by throwing shade at traditional radio). It led to a 43-page CBS lawsuit for “[misappropriating] millions of dollars’ worth of CBS Radio air time for his own financial benefit.” (The lawsuit was later settled, with Sirius paying CBS Radio a few million bucks, while also receiving rights to rebroadcast Stern’s old radio tapes.)

In retrospect, nobody at CBS should’ve been surprised: Of course Stern was gonna hype up his move to satellite! His new financial model depended on it! (Indeed, Stern later sued Sirius XM — and lost — when he demanded a payment of $300 million for the new subscribers gained via the Sirius-XM merger.)

Here we are, twenty years later, and CBS is in the same exact situation as before.

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VOA managers met with Chinese to discuss more favorable coverage for Beijing

Voice of America (VOA) managers met multiple times with Chinese officials seeking to influence more favorable U.S. coverage of their country, part of a larger dynamic that proved to the “detriment of America” and its taxpayer-funded media operation for the world, Trump adviser Kari Lake told Just the News.

Lake, the president’s senior adviser for the U.S. Agency for Global Media, said the meetings with communist China officials both in Washington and abroad were discovered as part of an investigation that exposed undue foreign influence on the VOA’s operations.

“We found out in our investigations over the months that I’ve been here, that the CCP, operating out of the embassy in Washington, D.C. … were meeting regularly with VOA management to tell them how they should be covering China,” Lake said Tuesday night in a wide-ranging interview on the Just the News, No Noise television show.

Lake said the coverage was skewed to portray the country in a positive light, and that at least one VOA official with the Mandarin language division had pledged his support for the CCP at one of the meetings.

“I mean, you can’t make this stuff up. It’s so crazy. But then over the years, it got more brazen, and I understand that VOA management, some of them, actually went over to China and met with CCP officials there,” she said. 

Lake also confirmed previous Just the News reporting that VOA hired multiple Chinese nationals with ties to Chinese state media, and sponsored hundreds of visas for other foreign journalists to come work at the USAGM subsidiary. 

The agency used J1 cultural exchange visas, which are not designed for use as a general work authorization, to sponsor more than 400 foreign journalists from 2009 through the end of the last administration. Nearly 100 of those are from countries that could present particular security concerns, including at least three Chinese nationals who worked for Chinese Communist Party-controlled state-owned media outlets.

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“The Gloves Are Off…Go F**k Yourself!” – Stephen Colbert FLIPS OUT After President Trump Savagely Mocks Him Over His Cancelled Show

Fired CBS host Stephen Colbert threw a tantrum and lashed out at President Trump last night after getting fired.

As The Gateway Pundit reported, CBS canceled The Late Show with Stephen Colbert last Thursday for financial reasons, especially given the low ratings. The show will end after the next season in May 2026.

The following day, Trump celebrated the news while mocking Colbert’s low ratings.

“I absolutely love that Colbert got fired. His talent was even less than his ratings,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

Colbert expressed confusion over being fired for financial reasons, pointing out that The Late Show is currently No. 1 in ratings and suggesting an ulterior motive.

“Over the weekend, someone at CBS followed up their gracious press release, followed up with a gracious anonymous leak saying, ‘They pulled the plug on our show because of losses pegged between $40 million and $50 million a year.” $40 million is a big number. I could see us losing $24 million, but where would Paramount have possibly spent the other $16 million?” Colbert said, referencing Paramount’s decision to settle a lawsuit with the Trump Administration over the editing of Kamala Harris’s 60 Minutes interview.

“Over the weekend, it sunk in that they’re killing off our show, but they made one mistake: They left me alive. And now, for the next 10 months, the gloves are off,” Colbert boasted.

After reading off Trump’s Truth Social post, which responded to his termination, Colbert lost his temper.

How dare you, sir?! Would an untalented man be able to compose the following satirical witticism?” Colbert fired back. “Go f**k yourself!”

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CNN Doctor Who Raised Alarms Over Trump Diagnosis Is an NAACP ‘Health Equity’ Director, Not a Practicing Physician

A CNN doctor who painted a dark picture of President Donald Trump’s health appears not to have practiced medicine since her residency, instead spending her career as a diversity, equity, and inclusion specialist. She is also an “apostle” of a church whose leader describes Trump as the “antichrist.”

Chris Pernell, a frequent television doctor on CNN and other news stations, warned last week that President Trump’s broadly unremarkable diagnosis of chronic venous insufficiency could be more than it seemed.

“It is a disease that is progressive,” Pernell said. “And what that means is that if there aren’t conservative treatments, elevation, compression, medication, if needed, to treat accompanying ulcers or skin changes, it can worsen and actually put a person at risk for deep venous thrombosis.”

Pernell went on to suggest other potential complications as a result of chronic venous insufficiency.

“If a person is sitting or standing for prolonged amounts of time, you can get chronic venous insufficiency, and while it is not life threatening, it can be debilitating,” she added. “You can develop ulcers in addition to skin discoloration. And if a person develops ulcers, you want to make sure those ulcers aren’t infected.”

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Here’s What The Corporate Media Won’t Tell You About Rising Measles Cases

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported 1,309 confirmed cases of measles in the U.S. as of July 15 — the highest number of cases in three decades. The fearmongering corporate media have rushed to blame decreasing vaccine rates and “unvaccinated” populations. But largely missing from or downplayed in these outlets’ coverage are important data points and questions about what may be exacerbating the outbreaks.

The Associated Press reported concerns that the outbreak has been worsened by post-Covid “vaccine hesitancy” and lackluster funding for vaccination programs. CBS acted shocked that HHS Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. — who, the outlet claimed, “has a history of making false and misleading claims about vaccines” — would recommend the measles vaccine. CNN likewise blamed “falling vaccination rates” and “increased travel.” An expert warned NPR that the U.S. may be close to losing its elimination status and blamed this on “vaccine hesitancy.”

The latest available CDC data shows a measles vaccine rate of about 92.7 percent for kindergartners in the 2023-2024 school year. This is down 2.5 percent from the 2019-2020 vaccination rate, a modest drop considering the fallout from the CDC pushing and the federal government seeking to mandate the experimental Covid vaccine in 2021. For comparison, the vaccination rate was between 61 and 66 percent for children between 1 and 4 years old from 1971 to 1985.

Furthermore, there are currently only 35 more measles cases than the total number recorded in 2019, according to the CDC. This is still about 800 fewer cases than recorded for the year of 1992 — the last time the number exceeded 1,300. It is also far lower than the 9,600 cases in 1991. Yet the corporate media continues to drive a narrative of fear based on the point that we are seeing “the most measles cases in more than 30 years.”

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Debunking the 100,000 Medicaid Deaths Myth

“More Americans will die—at least 100,000 more over the course of the next decade,” wrote Yale law professor Natasha Sarin in a June 9 Washington Post column about the Medicaid cuts in President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

“That isn’t hyperbolic,” Sarin added. “It is fact.”

The average reader might be inclined to believe Sarin, who holds a Harvard Ph.D. in economics as well as a Harvard law degree, and served in the Treasury Department during the Biden administration. But contrary to her characterization, her claim is both hyperbole and not “fact.”

Sarin’s assertion reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the concept of “statistical lives saved.” In particular, she and several other prominent journalists misinterpreted a recent working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).

As a professional debunker of bad research, I can say with some authority that the authors of that study, Dartmouth economist Angela Wyse and University of Chicago economist Bruce D. Meyer, wrote an excellent paper—a rarity among academic studies these days. But the University of Chicago’s press office trumpeted the paper’s findings, declaring, “Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act saved about 27,400 lives between 2010-22,” which is highly misleading. 

That take was echoed in coverage of the study by major news outlets. “The expansion of Medicaid has saved more than 27,000 lives since 2010, according to the most definitive study yet on the program’s health effects,” reported Sarah Kliff and Margot Sanger-Katz in The New York Times. Their May 16 article was headlined “As Congress Debates Cutting Medicaid, a Major Study Shows It Saves Lives.” 

The story was also picked up by Time (“Medicaid Expansions Saved Tens of Thousands of Lives, Study Finds”), NPR (“New Studies Show What’s at Stake if Medicaid Is Scaled Back”), NBC News (“Proposed Medicaid Cuts Could Lead to Thousands of Deaths, Study Finds”), and several other news outlets. These journalists either didn’t read the study, didn’t understand it, or willfully misrepresented its findings for partisan reasons. 

In the past, conservative opponents of Medicaid have been equally guilty of misconstruing academic research to support their policy views. That is what happened with the most famous study on the subject, The Oregon Experiment—Effects of Medicaid on Clinical Outcomes, which The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) published in 2013. The NBER and NEJM papers offer a similar account of Medicaid’s impact on health, but both have been misinterpreted.

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The Department of Justice Just Sided with RFK Jr. Group’s Claim That News Orgs Can’t Boycott Misinformation

The Children’s Health Defense (CHD), a nonprofit founded by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to end “childhood health epidemics by eliminating toxic exposure,” submitted an antitrust complaint against The Washington Post, the BBC, the Associated Press, and Reuters in January 2023. On Friday, the Justice Department published a statement of interest in favor of the CHD, which implores the federal court hearing the case to recognize that harm to viewpoint competition is grounds for antitrust prosecution. 

In the case, Children’s Health Defense v. Washington Post, the CHD alleges that the defendants violated federal antitrust law through their establishment of the Trusted News Initiative (TNI) shortly before the COVID-19 pandemic. The complaint claims that the TNI formed a “group boycott” to exclude publishers of “misinformation” partially or entirely from popular internet platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn.

The complaint cites a March 2022 statement by Jamie Angus, senior news controller at BBC, who said “the real rivalry now is…between all trusted news providers and a tidal wave of unchecked [reporting] that’s being piped out mainly through digital platforms,” as evidence of “the economic self-interest behind the TNI’s group boycott [and] the anti-competitive purpose and effect of that boycott.” CHD misconstrues the meaning of Angus’ words in an attempt to persuade the court that the TNI is a “horizontal agreement among competitor firms to cut off from the market upstart rivals threatening their business model.”

CHD alleges that TNI’s restrictions are unreasonable not only because they “collusively reduce output” and “lower product quality”—conventional indicators of illegal collusive behavior—but because “they suppress competition in the marketplace of ideas.” Assistant Attorney General Abigail Slater of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division is running with CHD’s argument.

Slater said that the “Antitrust Division will always defend the principle that the antitrust laws protect free markets, including the marketplace of ideas,” in a press release. In the department’s statement of interest, Slater references the majority opinion from U.S. v. Associated Press (1945) to argue that “right conclusions are more likely to be gathered out of a multitude of tongues, than through any kind of authoritative selection.”

Joseph Coniglio, director of antitrust and innovation policy at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, agrees with Slater that “collusive viewpoint restrictions can be antitrust violations.” However, he emphasizes that, “if the platforms allegedly taking down content are not defendants and don’t have vertical agreements with…TNI to do so, it’s hard to see how the latter could be illegal.” (CHD alleges that censorship “by Facebook, Google and Twitter, [caused] damages to date of over $1,000,000,” but does not name these platforms as defendants in its suit.)

Slater’s statement was submitted amid ongoing litigation between Media Matters and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the other federal antitrust enforcement agency. The FTC opened an investigation into Media Matters in May for facilitating an alleged advertising boycott against the social media platform X. Advertising holding companies Omnicom Group and Interpublic Group of Companies agreed not to enter into “any agreement or practice that would steer advertising dollars away from publishers based on their political or ideological viewpoints” as a condition of their merger settlement with the FTC in June. Media Matters has challenged the FTC’s probe into its operations on First Amendment grounds.

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