Tag: media

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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The Ellisons are building a media empire. Trump keeps cheering them on.

President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth publicly celebrated the wealthy Ellison family’s growing media empire in recent days, even as the Trump administration is reviewing Paramount Skydance’s deal to buy Warner Bros. Discovery and its assets including CNN for $110 billion.

“The Ellison family, two great people, great people. It’s a great family,” Trump said Monday, in remarks ahead of a Kennedy Center board meeting that referenced CBS and its upcoming broadcast of a UFC event.

On Friday, Hegseth called Warner Bros.-owned CNN’s coverage of the U.S.-Israeli war in Iran “fake news” after it reported that the administration had underestimated the risk of disruption to shipping through the Strait of Hormuz. “The sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better,” Hegseth said. A spokeswoman for CNN declined to comment on his remarks.

CNN, a longtime target of Trump’s complaints about the media, is among the most prominent assets in Paramount’s pending acquisition of Warner Bros., which requires approval from the Justice Department.

Larry Ellison, co-founder and chairman of Oracle and a longtime friend and ally to Trump, has financially backstopped Paramount’s pending deal to buy Warner Bros. and is also a major investor in the White House-blessed deal that spun off TikTok into a U.S. company. That has helped rebrand the tech billionaire and his son David into media tycoons — with some help from Trump.

The administration’s posture toward Paramount’s proposed acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery has drawn scrutiny since a bidding war erupted over the troubled media giant late last year.

After Netflix announced an $83 billion deal in December to buy most of Warner Bros. Discovery and spin off CNN and other cable properties, Trump told reporters he would be “involved” in deciding whether to approve it, citing the streaming giant’s market power as a potential concern.

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Clinton Judge Rules Hegseth’s New Pentagon Press Policy is Unconstitutional

A federal judge on Friday ruled that the Pentagon’s new press policy restricting press credential of reporters is unconstitutional.

In October, Pentagon reporters turned in their badges after they refused to sign Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s new security rule.

“Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth demanded that reporters agree by 5 p.m. Tuesday to a new policy, under which they would need to pledge to not obtain or use any unauthorized material, even if the information is unclassified — or hand over their press badges in the next 24 hours,” The Hill previously reported.

By that afternoon, Pentagon reporters turned in their badges.

The reporters turned in their badges and left the building.

The Pentagon Press Association previously released a statement blasting Hegseth.

“Today, the Defense Department confiscated the badges of the Pentagon reporters from virtually every major media organization in America. It did this because reporters would not sign onto a new media policy over its implicit threat of criminalizing national security reporting and exposing those who sign it to potential prosecution,” the PPA said.

“The Pentagon Press Association’s members are still committed to reporting on the US military. But make no mistake, today, Oct. 15, 2025 is a dark day for press freedom that raises concerns about a weakening US commitment to transparency in governance, to public accountability at the Pentagon and to free speech for all,” the statement said.

The Pentagon press pool now includes conservative outlets, including The Gateway Pundit.

The New York Times filed a lawsuit to stop the Pentagon from enforcing its new policy.

On Friday, US District Judge Paul Friedman, a Clinton appointee, blocked the Pentagon from enforcing its new policy and said it violated the First Amendment.

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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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CBS News Investigation Uncovers Massive Medicare Hospice Fraud In L.A. County

An investigation by CBS News has discovered massive Medicare fraud at more than 700 out of 1,800 licensed hospice providers in Los Angeles County

The scam utilizes stolen Medicare numbers to fraudulently enroll healthy seniors in hospice with fake terminal diagnoses, billing Medicare an average of $29,000 per patient without delivering care, to the tune of hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars.

About 31 percent of hospice and home health companies in the U.S. are registered in L.A. County but when investigators visited the addresses listed, they found no clinics, patients or healthcare workers.

Instead they found multiple red flags, including multiple hospices in one building, high rates of terminally ill patients later discharged alive, excessive billing, and staff shared across multiple companies.

The California state auditor had sounded the alarm three years ago, saying that Los Angeles County had seen the number of hospice companies increase more than six times the national average, relative to its elderly population.

Let’s put this in perspective.

The population of residents age 65 or over in California is estimated at 6.3 million while Florida estimates its population of 65+ residents at 4.9 million.

Public records show 2,279 Medicare-certified hospice organizations in California with just 208 such Medicare-certified organizations in Florida.

This raises serious questions as to why California would have more than 10 times the number of Medicare-certified hospice organizations than Florida when it has less than twice the population of 65+ residents.

According to CBS, in just one year, L.A. County hospices overbilled Medicare by $105 million, prompting the state to investigate and revoke the licenses of 280 hospices.

This latest revelation of potential Medicare fraud shows that the problem of scammers enriching themselves at taxpayer expense extends far beyond Minnesota, which has been under scrutiny for the past few months over the alleged theft of billions of taxpayer dollars via social services.

It also reveals the silver lining that a mainstream news organization is finally willing to do investigative reporting on suspected fraud rather than leaving the heavy lifting to citizen journalists like Nick Shirley, who blew the lid off taxpayer fraud in Minnesota and then turned his sights on California.

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Blocking the Internet Archive Won’t Stop AI, But It Will Erase the Web’s Historical Record

Imagine a newspaper publisher announcing it will no longer allow libraries to keep copies of its paper. 

That’s effectively what’s begun happening online in the last few months. The Internet Archive—the world’s largest digital library—has preserved newspapers since it went online in the mid-1990s. The Archive’s mission is to preserve the web and make it accessible to the public. To that end, the organization operates the Wayback Machine, which now contains more than one trillion archived web pages and is used daily by journalists, researchers, and courts.

But in recent months The New York Times began blocking the Archive from crawling its website, using technical measures that go beyond the web’s traditional robots.txt rules. That risks cutting off a record that historians and journalists have relied on for decades. Other newspapers, including The Guardian, seem to be following suit. 

For nearly three decades, historians, journalists, and the public have relied on the Internet Archive to preserve news sites as they appeared online. Those archived pages are often the only reliable record of how stories were originally published. In many cases, articles get edited, changed, or removed—sometimes openly, sometimes not. The Internet Archive often becomes the only source for seeing those changes. When major publishers block the Archive’s crawlers, that historical record starts to disappear.

The Times says the move is driven by concerns about AI companies scraping news content. Publishers seek control over how their work is used, and several—including the Times—are now suing AI companies over whether training models on copyrighted material violates the law. There’s a strong case that such training is fair use. 

Whatever the outcome of those lawsuits, blocking nonprofit archivists is the wrong response. Organizations like the Internet Archive are not building commercial AI systems. They are preserving a record of our history. Turning off that preservation in an effort to control AI access could essentially torch decades of historical documentation over a fight that libraries like the Archive didn’t start, and didn’t ask for. 

If publishers shut the Archive out, they aren’t just limiting bots. They’re erasing the historical record. 

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As Washington Succeeds in Wrecking Cuba’s Economy, US Media Blame the Victim

The US government’s decades-long economic blockade against Cuba is in many ways not a complicated issue. The policy of restricting trade with the country’s Communist government was put into full force under the Kennedy administration, with the explicit goal of causing enough economic hardship, hunger and desperation to spur regime change.

The UN General Assembly has overwhelmingly and consistently voted to end the embargo since a resolution to that effect was first introduced in 1992. Member countries argue that the embargo violates international law. It has cost the country anywhere between $130–170 billion since its inception, and has restricted the Cuban people’s access to food and medicine. And it has not accomplished its primary goal of overthrowing the Cuban government.

These are key points that should be included in any article reporting on Cuba’s economic struggles. However, US journalists have consistently leaned into the US government’s framing of the issue: that the country’s Communist government is largely or exclusively to blame for its financial woes (FAIR.org, 11/4/24).

As the Trump regime tightens the screws of the embargo by further restricting oil access to the country, a move that has been condemned by UN human rights experts as a further violation of international law (New York Times, 2/13/26), legacy media continue to toe the government’s line on the issue, with coverage that is either low on context or outright stenography.

President Donald Trump has tried to justify his administration’s significant escalation in tactics on the basis that Cuba represents an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to the security of the United States, primarily by supporting US geopolitical enemies. This accusation is not new: The country has previously been accused of hosting both Russian and Chinese spy bases. Despite neither claim being backed by evidence (Belly of the Beast, 2/6/26, 8/1/24), the Trump administration doubled down on them when rolling out its new and harsher set of policies.

But the administration also unveiled a new claim that upped the ante: Cuba has apparently been harboring Hamas and Hezbollah forces, not 90 miles off of our shores! “Cuba welcomes transnational terrorist groups, such as Hezbollah and Hamas,” reads an executive order from January 29,

creating a safe environment for these malign groups so that these transnational terrorist groups can build economic, cultural and security ties throughout the region, and attempt to destabilize the Western Hemisphere, including the United States.

The administration did not provide evidence to support this claim, and none has surfaced, despite local journalists’ investigative efforts (Belly of the Beast, 2/2/26).

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