Tag: mainstream media

PLOT TWIST: ABC News Rewards George Stephanopoulos With ‘Multi-Year Contract’ – Days After Trump Inflicted Humiliating Libel Loss

In a surprise move, ABC News has rewarded its anchor George Stephanopoulos with a new contract at the network.

The Los Angeles Times were the first to report that Stephanopoulos, 63, recently agreed to a “new multi-year contract to remain with the ABC News morning program, according to several people familiar with matter who were not authorized to comment publicly.”

No further details were provided about the terms of the contract, such as its length or the size of his pay package.

The Good Morning America host, who rose to political fame as a henchman of former President Bill Clinton, was sued by Donald Trump earlier this year after repeatedly claiming that he was “found liable for rape” by a Manhattan jury.

His statements were a reference to complaints made by a woman named E. Jean Carroll, who has alleged Trump raped her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in the 1990s. She has never provided any evidence for her claims.

The deal, which has not been formally announced, will put an end to speculation that Stephanopoulos may be axed by the network after he was the subject of a humiliating libel loss in which its parent company Disney agreed to pay out $15 million and $1 million to cover Trump’s legal fees.

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Why Is The Media Being So Quiet About The Radioactive Material That Has Gone Missing In New Jersey?

Something extremely strange has been happening in New Jersey, but the mainstream media has been eerily quiet about some of the most important threads of this story.  It turns out that an “air restriction alert” banned flights over Picatinny Arsenal in Rockaway, New Jersey for “special security reasons” from November 21st through December 26th.

Many people don’t realize this, but counter-terrorism drones have been getting tested at Picatinny for years.  In addition, we have learned that radioactive material was reported missing in New Jersey in early December.  The following comes directly from the official website of the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission…

AGREEMENT STATE REPORT – SOURCE LOST IN TRANSIT

The following information was provided by the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (NJDEP) via email:

“The licensee reported to NJDEP on December 3, 2024, that a Ge-68 pin source that they sent for disposal has been lost in transit on December 2, 2024. The source is a Eckert & Ziegler model HEGL-0132, with current approximate activity of 0.267 mCi. The shipping container arrived at its destination damaged and empty. The licensee has filed a claim with the shipper. If the source is not located within the 30 days, the licensee will follow-up with a full written report to include root cause(s) and corrective actions.

“This event is reportable under 10 CFR 20.2201(a)(1)(ii).”

New Jersey Event Report ID number: To be determined

THIS MATERIAL EVENT CONTAINS A ‘Less than Cat 3’ LEVEL OF RADIOACTIVE MATERIAL

The big corporate news sources in the United States are saying very little about this.

But others are reporting about this incident.  For example, the following comes from a British news source…

A piece of medical equipment used for cancer scans was shipped from the Nazha Cancer Center in Newfield on December 2 for disposal, but the ‘shipping container arrived at its destination damaged and empty.’

The device, known as a ‘pin source,’ contained a small amount of Germanium-68 (Ge-68) that is used to calibrate a medical scanner’s accuracy. If handled without proper gear, it can cause radiation poisoning.

The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) issued an alert for the missing shipment deemed ‘less than a Category 3,’ meaning it could cause permanent injury if mishandled.

A search for this radioactive material is being conducted.

In fact, Belleville Mayor Michael Melham has confirmed that New Jersey state police have issued an alert about the radioactive material that is missing.

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Proof that Syrian ‘prisoner’ discovered and freed by CNN crew was one of Assad’s ruthless henchmen as ex-intelligence officer is now missing

A shocking image of the Syrian ‘prisoner’ who was discovered locked up Damascus prison by journalists proves that he was actually one of former dictator Bashar al-Assad’s henchmen who ruthlessly killed and tortured inmates. 

The feigned inmate was found by CNN‘s chief international correspondent Clarrisa Ward and her team while they toured an abandoned detention site last Wednesday.

He was found under a blanket trembling and exclaiming ‘Oh God! There is light!’, in a video that went viral. 

But earlier this week Syrian fact-checking organization Verify-Sy reported that the man in the clip was in fact a first first lieutenant in the Syrian Air Force Intelligence, which served former President Assad.

CNN launched an investigation into the man’s identity and confirmed that he was not a ‘civilian father’ named Adel Gharba, but rather Salama Mohammad Salama. 

Citing local sources, CNN said in a statement Monday that Salama ‘was known for running the Air Force Intelligence Directorate’s checkpoints in the city’ and was accused of ‘having a reputation for extortion and harassment’.

Now, an image, that was shared with CNN by locals and Verify-Sy, shows Salama wearing a sly smirk behind a desk that appears to be inside a government office. 

He is dressed in military uniform, further proving his links to the Assad regime. 

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‘The View’ Co-Host in Hot Water: Alyssa Farah Griffin Caught Coaching Federal Witness and Known Liar Cassidy Hutchinson – May Face Criminal Investigation

The Committee on House Administration’s Subcommittee on Oversight Chairman Barry Loudermilk (R-GA) released a second interim report on Tuesday addressing the events surrounding January 6, 2021.

The report not only highlighted widespread failures but also issued damning allegations against key members of the now-disbanded January 6 Committee.

“This interim report reveals that there was not just one single cause for what happened at the U.S. Capitol on January 6; but it was a series of intelligence, security, and leadership failures at several levels and numerous entities,” Loudermilk said.

The most explosive revelation from Loudermilk’s report pertains to the conduct of Liz Cheney. The report alleges that Cheney personally coached the committee’s so-called “star witness,” Cassidy Hutchinson, to alter her testimony—without Hutchinson’s attorney present.

Witness tampering is a federal crime.

Now we know why the sham committee deleted their communications from the public.

They all should be looking at prison time.

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Syrian ‘Moderate Rebel’ Removes ISIS Patch At Prompting Of American Journalist

Video footage has recently emerged taken by journalist James Longman advising ‘rebels’ in Syria that the ISIS logo on their uniforms will be misunderstood by Western audiences. Longman, who is ABC News’ Chief International Correspondent, demonstrates a trend of American journalists going to war zones to essentially coach combatants on how to better present themselves to the outside world. Mainstream media has for many years pushed the myth of “moderate rebels” in Syria seeking to topple Assad, which they finally did this month.

One of the militants, who might be a member of the US-designated terror group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham or possibly another hardline Islamist faction, attempts to claim to the US journalist that the emblem does not represent ISIS. Still, the man wearing the ISIS patch seems to take the hint and dutifully removes it for the camera. They swear to ABC’s Longman that they are not Daesh (or ISIS), even while openly sporting its symbols.

Having examined the disturbing video, Ali Abunimah of Electronic Intifada – who speaks Arabic – has issued the following reaction: “I’ve seen this video circulating today, along with the claim that James Longman told the fighter to remove the ISIS patch. He does not do that in this video clip. But it’s not much of a ‘confrontation’ either. And however Longman intended it, the fighters appear to interpret his comments as friendly advice on how to present themselves and in fact remove the patch. Understandable that this is reminding people of how Western media colluded in the rebranding of the Azov Battallion in Ukraine that they had been accurately describing as hardcore Nazis just months earlier.”

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Trump Sues Des Moines Register and Pollster J. Ann Selzer for ‘Brazen Election Interference’ After Fraudulent Iowa Poll Shows Kamala Harris Ahead

President-elect Donald Trump is taking legal action against the Des Moines Register and its pollster, J. Ann Selzer, accusing them of “brazen election interference” and fraud.

On Monday morning, President-elect Donald Trump announced his intention to sue the Des Moines Register and its pollster, J. Ann Selzer, after Selzer’s manipulated final poll, published just days before the 2024 election, falsely claimed Kamala Harris was leading Trump in Iowa—a prediction proven wildly inaccurate when Trump secured a decisive 13-point victory in the state.

By late evening, Trump followed through, filing the lawsuit in Polk County, Iowa, under the Iowa Consumer Fraud Act.

The lawsuit targets the Des Moines Register, Selzer & Company, and the newspaper’s corporate parent, Gannett, Fox News first reported.

Trump’s attorneys argue the poll was a deliberate and orchestrated attempt to deceive voters and sway the election in Harris’s favor.

“Contrary to reality and defying credulity, defendants’ Harris Poll was published three days before Election Day and purported to show Harris leading President Trump in Iowa by three points; President Trump ultimately won Iowa by over thirteen points,” the lawsuit states.

The suit highlights Selzer’s reputation as a so-called “gold standard” pollster—an image that the media has long used to lend credibility to her work. Yet, as Trump’s lawyers point out, Selzer’s track record is far from spotless.

“Selzer had prided herself on a mainstream reputation for accuracy despite several far less publicized egregious polling misses in favor of Democrats” and said she “would have the public believe it was merely a coincidence that one of the worst polling misses of her career came just days before the most consequential election in memory, was leaked and happened to go against the Republican candidate.”

“The Harris Poll was no ‘miss’ but rather an attempt to influence the outcome of the 2024 Presidential Election,” the lawsuit states, adding that “defendants and their cohorts in the Democrat Party hoped that the Harris Poll would create a false narrative of inevitability for Harris in the final week of the 2024 Presidential Election.”

“Instead, the November 5 election was a monumental victory for President Trump in both the Electoral College and the Popular Vote, an overwhelming mandate for his America First principles, and the consignment of the radical socialist agenda to the dustbin of history.”

According to the lawsuit, the Democrat Party and its media allies were desperate for an artificial boost ahead of the 2024 election, given Kamala Harris’s undeniable weaknesses as a candidate.

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CNN Admits Reporter Duped: Assad ‘Victim’ Found In Syria Prison Was Regime Intel Officer

The long and colorful history of major media promotion of false, government-serving narratives has a new chapter. 

Last week, CNN aired a melodramatic report from reporter Clarissa Ward that was supposed to show a CNN crew amazingly rescuing a victim of the Assad regime from the bowels of a Damascus dungeon. After days of mounting skepticism and pointed questions ricocheting across social media, alternative new sites and here at ZeroHedge, CNN now says the “rescued” man was actually a regime intelligence officer, and there are reports that he himself perpetrated crimes against civilians

The man identified himself as Adel Ghurbai, and said he lived in the central Syrian city of Homs. However, over the weekend, the self-described Syrian fact-checking site Verify-Sy said he was actually Salama Mohammad Salama, aka “Abu Hamza”, an infamous and cruel first lieutenant in Syrian Air Force Intelligence: 

Abu Hamza reportedly managed several security checkpoints in Homs and was involved in theft, extortion, and coercing residents into becoming informants. According to locals, his recent incarceration—lasting less than a month—was due to a dispute over profit-sharing from extorted funds with a higher-ranking officer. This led to his detention in one of Damascus’s cells, as per neighborhood sources. 

…

Despite his seemingly innocent and composed demeanor in the CNN report, Salama has a grim history. He participated in military operations on several fronts in Homs in 2014, killed civilians, and was responsible for detaining and torturing numerous young men in the city without cause or on fabricated charges. Many were targeted simply for refusing to pay bribes, rejecting cooperation, or even for arbitrary reasons like their appearance. These details were corroborated by families of victims and former detainees who spoke with Verify-Sy.

On Monday, CNN posted a report — written by Tim Lister and Eyad Kourdi but not Ward — revealing the network had been duped. Unsurprisingly, the rolling ratings disaster that is CNN stopped short of taking responsibility for its failure. CNN did credit Verify-Sy for first reporting the man’s apparent real identity, which CNN corroborated with its own canvassing of residents in the Bayada neighborhood of Homs. Considering the crimes Salama is accused of, the CNN follow-up article ends on a darkly amusing note: “Salama’s current whereabouts are unknown.” Yes, Ward yearned to bask in the glory of saving a regime victim, only to be exposed as aiding and abetting the escape of an apparent regime criminal.  

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Mental Illness In the Political & Media Class

In one of Cicero’s letters to a friend, he references Pompey the Great’s decision to divorce his wife, Mucia. Cicero attributes it to Pompey’s discovery that she was having an affair with Julius Caesar. Cicero believed that Caesar had many affairs with the wives of Roman patricians, and he perceived this as a sign that Caesar was a dangerously aggressive man.

Pompey apparently didn’t take the matter too seriously, and according to Suetonius, he humorously called Caesar “Aegisthus,” the name of a Greek mythological character who was known to have seduced a king’s wife. It’s likely that Pompey later regretted not taking it seriously when Caesar waged war against him and defeated him in the so-called “Caesar’s civil war.”

It takes a lot of energy, drive, and ambition to get ahead in this competitive world, but I’ve often wondered if these advantageous traits are sometimes—or perhaps even frequently—combined with mental disorders.

In recent years I have watched many prominent figures in the public forum say and do things that strike me as expressive of a mental disorder.

According to the NIH National Institute of Mental Health:

Mental illnesses are common in the United States and around the world. It is estimated that more than one in five U.S. adults live with a mental illness (59.3 million in 2022; 23.1% of the U.S. adult population). Mental illnesses include many different conditions that vary in degree of severity, ranging from mild to moderate to severe. Two broad categories can be used to describe these conditions: Any Mental Illness (AMI) and Serious Mental Illness (SMI). AMI encompasses all recognized mental illnesses. SMI is a smaller and more severe subset of AMI. Additional information on mental illnesses can be found on the NIMH Health Topics Pages.

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ABC, George Stephanopoulos to Pay $15M to Trump in Rape Defamation Suit.

ABC News and its anchor, George Stephanopoulos, have reached a settlement with President-elect Donald Trump in a defamation lawsuit. The agreement, filed publicly on Saturday, will see ABC News pay Trump $15 million as a charitable contribution toward his Presidential foundation and museum. In addition, the network will cover $1 million in Trump’s attorney fees.

The settlement arises from a lawsuit Trump filed after Stephanopoulos made claims during a March 2024 interview on “This Week” that Trump had been found liable for rape. These statements were made in an interview with Rep. Nancy Mace following a civil case involving E. Jean Carroll, where the jury found Trump liable for sexual abuse, not rape, under New York law. The settlement includes ABC News and Stephanopoulos releasing a statement of “regret” over the inaccurate claims, which will be included as an editor’s note in the related article.

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Martha MacCallum Can’t Believe John Kirby’s Outrageous Response to Her Question: ‘Why Not Just Take One Down and Figure Out What’s Going On?’

In a jaw-dropping interview with Fox News’ Martha MacCallum, White House National Security Communications Advisor John Kirby struggled to provide clear answers about a bizarre and alarming series of drone sightings in New Jersey.

MacCallum, unimpressed by Kirby’s evasions, grilled him relentlessly on why the administration hasn’t even bothered to shoot down one of these drones to uncover their origins.

Instead of providing clarity, Kirby fumbled through talking points about “policy options” and “inter-agency conversations.” His repeated refrain of “we don’t know” underscored what critics have described as the Biden administration’s signature approach to crises—delay, deflect, and deny.

During the interview, MacCallum confronted Kirby over his outrageous claim during the White House press briefing, where he brushed off more than 3,000 reports of “car-sized drones” as mere misidentifications of helicopters or airplanes.

Martha MacCallum:
A lot of people were unhappy with that comment you made yesterday and felt like you were telling people they were nuts or that they didn’t know what they were seeing with their own eyes.

John Kirby:
No, not at all, Martha. That’s the farthest thing that I would ever do. I was simply reiterating what the FBI and what the Department of Homeland Security have relayed to us about what they’ve been able to corroborate. We haven’t been able to corroborate everything. I said many of the corroborated sightings have turned out to be piloted aircraft. I didn’t say all of them.

And what I said was those are the ones we were able to corroborate. There’s certainly ones that we have not been able to, and we don’t know the answer to it. And I strongly recommend that for folks that are seeing these things and documenting them to share that as they can with Department of Homeland Security and the FBI, the investigator.

Kirby couldn’t even look at the photographic evidence presented during the interview as he conveniently turned off his monitor to avoid distractions. MacCallum called out the absurdity of the situation, asking how a former admiral and current top White House official could dismiss clear visuals of the drones.

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