Tag: media

Trump and Interior Sec Doug Burgum Nuke the Failing New York Times for Lying About Reflecting Pool Restoration at a Fraction of Obama’s $34 MILLION Hack Job

President Trump went off on the New York Times in a lengthy Truth Social post on Friday over its attacks on Trump’s renovation of the nearly half-mile-long reflecting pool, which sits between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. 

The outlet has written several hit pieces on the project to restore the filthy green water basin, built in the 1920s, which has been marred by issues, including sinking and leaking into the swamp beneath. “Hundreds of Millions of Dollars have been spent throughout the years trying to fix it, and even from its inception, in 1922, it never really worked!” Trump noted.

Still, a recent New York Times piece attacks Trump over his $13.1 million budget and the so-called “lucrative contracts” awarded to “hand-picked vendors.”

But according to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, the Trump Derangement Syndrome-infected Times ignores the scope of the project to properly seal the pool with crack and leak-proof materials for the expansion joints, which will withstand the years and changing temperatures that come with the seasons. “This is something the Obama administration didn’t understand,” Burgum said, adding that Obama “wasted millions upon millions of taxpayer dollars” with a failed project in 2012, which had a massive cost of $34 million, more than twice what Trump is paying. Notably, Obama’s botched repairs took nearly two years to complete, while Trump’s will be completed by July 4 after starting in April. 

The “Obama-era errors that failed at the cost of millions for the American taxpayer,” Burgum said, caused the pool to continue leaking a whopping 16 million gallons of water per year.

“Finally, we have professionals doing the right job for a tiny fraction of the money that has been spent, and The Failing New York Times continues to demean the work of these wonderful, talented, and proud construction professionals that are bringing this over 2,000 foot long pool, the largest in the World, BACK TO LIFE!” Trump said. “It is happening before your very eyes, and will soon be completed at a much higher level, and after doing much more work than was originally anticipated.”

Trump previously said they had to remove “eleven or twelve truckloads of filth out of the water” when a reporter asked why he would bother cleaning the monument.

Along with screenshots of an X thread by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, correcting the record, Trump slammed the Times, saying the failed news organization “should spend more of its energy on fixing its broken ‘shop,’ and celebrating America’s Greatness.”

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MSNOW Host Claims Joe Biden’s Health Was ‘Litigated Exhaustively’ But Trump’s Health is Getting a Pass

MSNOW Host Jonathan Capehart appeared on PBS this weekend and claimed that Joe Biden’s health was examined closely by the media and the public, then suggested that Trump is getting a pass on the same issue.

While this is laughable, it exposes the fact that the liberal media is really angry at Jill Biden for making the public focus on this issue once again through her recent comments about her husband.

It also shows how dishonest they are. Biden’s health issues were denied by the media for years. Anyone on the right who brought it up was labeled as a conspiracy theorist and accused of pushing ‘cheap fakes.’

Transcript via Real Clear Politics:

JONATHAN CAPEHART, MS NOW: That’s not what she even said.

The day after, said, you answered every question, Joe.

This is not helpful. This is not helpful, certainly for Democrats, who have a unique ability to circle the wagons and then just fire at each other while Republicans watch with glee. This is a sort of a second self-inflicted wound on the party, the first one being earlier last week with the draft of that autopsy that was released.

To my mind, to your point, Joe Biden’s health has been litigated up and down, even when he was in the White House, which stands in stark contrast to what is happening today with the current sitting president, who went in for yet another physical at Walter Reed. He’s only been in the job for 18 months.

Three visits to Walter Reed? Why are we, as a profession, not talking as extensively and exhaustively and urgently about the health of the sitting president of the United States, when we did that to Joe Biden for four years?

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CBS Torches Stephen Colbert After His Exit

CBS just handed Stephen Colbert the most brutal farewell a network could offer, and it should end all the debate over how and why Colbert got canceled.

Byron Allen’s Comics Unleashed officially took over CBS’s 11:35 p.m. late-night slot on Friday, May 22, under a new “time buy” deal with the network. Under the arrangement, Allen Media Group pays CBS for the time period, handles all production costs itself, and controls the advertising inventory. This means that CBS doesn’t have to spend a dime.

That’s a pretty sharp contrast from what Colbert cost it.

CBS announced the cancellation of The Late Show back in July 2025, citing financial reasons. The network said the program was hemorrhaging roughly $40 million a year. At the time, some on the left insisted that the move was political. In their minds, CBS, an anti-Trump network, was doing President Donald Trump a favor by getting rid of one of his critics.

But CBS (again) demolished that narrative.

“With this ‘time buy’ model, we have shifted an hour that was losing roughly $40 million annually to $15 million in profit — a $55 million swing,” the spokesperson said, calling it “a new business and programming model for late night that proactively addresses a network daypart that was cost prohibitive to continue.”

So in axing Colbert, the network turned the whole slot profitable. It sure sounds like CBS has now been unburdened by what has been.

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U.S. May Finally Allow Hantavirus-Exposed Americans to Leave Government-Mandated Biocontainment Facility — But Only Under 24/7 Surveillance

The mass-media driven hantavirus cruise ship panic has completely collapsed.

After weeks of fear-driven headlines about a so-called “person-to-person” hantavirus threat outside the MV Hondius, U.S. officials may finally allow the 18 American passengers to leave the National Quarantine Unit in Omaha, Nebraska, and return home.

But there is a disturbing catch. They may only be allowed to finish quarantine at home if their state posts a monitor outside their house 24/7 for the remainder of the six-week quarantine period. That monitor could reportedly be a police officer or public health worker stationed outside their home around the clock…

The largest systematic review on the Andes strain looked at 22 studies and found NO CREDIBLE EVIDENCE of human-to-human transmission.

There are still zero confirmed U.S. cases and no evidence of spread outside the cruise ship. In other words, this appears to be a dead-end outbreak.

Now, federal officials are moving from biocontainment confinement to home surveillance. Because of this unusual new requirement — a monitor posted outside the person’s home for the final half of the 42-day quarantine — at least one state, New York, has reportedly refused to allow passengers to return home under those conditions.

One passenger said:

“This is not acceptable. We’re not f*cking criminals. Unless you have a good reason to think that we are going to not comply, then treat us with respect.”

This is no different than the authoritarian biosecurity controls seen in Communist China: forced quarantine, movement restrictions, government monitors, and ordinary citizens treated as major biohazards even when the public risk is negligible.

Hantavirus will not become the next pandemic. But the biosecurity state will absolutely try to become permanent.

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CBS News Chief Bari Weiss FIRES Far-Left ’60 Minutes’ Executive Producer and Anti-Trump Correspondents

CBS News Editor-in-Chief continues draining the woke swamp at the long-compromised Sunday news program, 60 Minutes.

The Gateway Pundit has documented for years how ’60 Minutes’ repeatedly targeted conservatives and President Trump with one-sided hit pieces while giving Democrats and their allies soft-glove treatment.

The show’s credibility collapsed further after the disastrous Kamala Harris interview that triggered a major lawsuit and exposed its activist bent.

Bari Weiss, who famously walked away from The New York Times over its radical leftward lurch and cancel culture, is now applying the same standards at CBS.

Under the new Skydance/Paramount ownership, Weiss was brought in with a mandate for “actual viewpoint diversity.”

Weiss announced Thursday that she is replacing veteran executive producer Tanya Simon — a 30-year fixture at the program and daughter of legendary correspondent Bob Simon — with Nick Bilton, a tech journalist, former New York Times columnist, and documentary filmmaker with zero experience in traditional broadcast news.

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GLAAD Opposes Informing Parents About Grooming Content in Kid Shows

The fascists at GLAAD are raging against the idea that parents be informed about gay content in a children’s television show.

Breitbart News reported last month that the “Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced an inquiry this week into a TV ratings system that is required to warn parents about adult content in children’s shows, but has not addressed all the LGBT propaganda pushed at kids these days.”

This, of course, is long overdue. It is outrageous that sicko corporations like the Disney Grooming Syndicate sneak gay, queer, and transsexual propaganda in television shows aimed at small children. Going behind the back of parents to expose complex adult sexuality to little kids, to shatter their innocence when that innocence is vital to producing a psychologically healthy adult, is nothing less than child abuse, and it has already gone on far too long.

Naturally, the far-left GLAAD wants this outrage to continue, but GLAAD also gives away the game:

On April 22, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced a new inquiry seeking public comment by May 22 and reply comments by June 22 about whether television ratings should be modified to specifically warn parents about the presence of LGBTQ+ stories. The Public Notice frames this issue as “empowering parents to protect their children,” yet those who study media history know it is not about protecting children, rather a revival of the same tactics used to purge LGBTQ+ characters from the screen for decades.

This FCC inquiry is a brazen attempt to remove LGBTQ+ people from television, rooted in the false assertion that being LGBTQ+ needs a warning label — stigmatizing our stories and decreasing the chances they will be made at all. [emphasis mine]

Yeah, that’s right, GLAAD: if you don’t sneak this propaganda in, people will reject it. Thank you for accidentally admitting that.

Currently, television warns us in advance about content that shows actors smoking cigarettes, strobing, adult sexuality, but not that we’re about to see two hairy guys swap spit?

I have no issue with gay romance in television, movies, or wherever. The arts should be for everyone. The arts should create content relatable to everyone. No, I’m not gonna watch it. In fact, I’m going to avoid it. But I don’t resent it. This is America.

What I do resent is getting sucker-punched with it.

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Does Reporting Bad News About the Iran War Make You a Foreign Agent?

The Trump administration has made no secret of its desire to censor bad news about the Iran war. President Donald Trump even accused journalists of treason during the war. Now the administration has found a specific (if extremely tenuous) legal justification for his claims: the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).

After The Bulwark journalist Tim Miller shared someone else’s paraphrase of an Iranian TV news report about the ceasefire negotiations, the official White House Rapid Response account on X commented that Miller is “starting to take Iranian state media as fact and peddle disinformation on their behalf. Maybe Tim should register under FARA for being an agent of a foreign country.”

On its face, Miller’s criticism falls far outside of FARA. All he did was comment on a public report. But it wouldn’t be the first time the federal government tried to weaponize FARA against domestic critics.

Passed in 1938 to root out Nazi agents, the law requires anyone conducting political activities “at the order, request, or under the direction or control” of a foreign power to register publicly or face jail time or fines.

In 1951, the Department of Justice tried to prosecute civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois under FARA for republishing an international communist-led petition against nuclear weapons. A judge threw out the case after prosecutors failed to present evidence of any concrete Soviet ties. Since then, the government has mostly used FARA to prosecute foreign spies short of the Espionage Act, to add another layer of red tape to foreign lobbying, and to throw the book at corruption schemes involving foreigners.

Still, the law is “strikingly sweeping, capturing much other conduct that most people would not think should be registrable,” according to a 2022 article in Just Security, which recommended narrowing the foreign-agent law to avoid abuse. The Department of Justice once required an American church to register as a foreign agent for bringing foreign congregants to the March for Life rally in Washington, D.C. Until 2024, the department also considered paid tourism promoters foreign agents.

The first Trump administration pushed Russian, Chinese, and Qatari news outlets to register as foreign agents. The nonprofit Committee to Protect Journalists accused the Department of Justice of using FARA as a political cudgel and undermining freedom of the press.

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The mainstream media is ignoring Israel’s role in the killing of journalist Amal Khalil

Amal Khalil was a brave Lebanese reporter who for the past two decades has reported from the often dangerous southern part of her country for the Al-Akhbar daily newspaper. On April 22, while doing her job, she died in agony — and there is compelling evidence that the Israeli military murdered her. She was 43 years old.

But once again, the mainstream U.S. media is guilty of sickening malpractice. Journalists are supposed to make special efforts to follow the story when their colleagues are killed in action, but the leading American cable news networks, so far, have mostly not reported her death at all. On MS NOW, the more progressive outlet, nothing on air. Ditto for CNN, (although the network’s “CNN International” subdivision did air a 2:16 report — which most American subscribers will have missed). Neither did the major legacy TV networks cover the story: nothing on ABC, NBC, or CBS.

(There was one honorable exception, on the PBS News Hour. Geoff Bennett raised the killing of Amal Khalil in an interview with Israel’s ambassador to the U.N., Danny Danon, and pressed Danon hard.)

Here’s what actually happened. Back in 2024, Amal Khalil had already received death threats from an Israeli media commentator with close ties to the military, who warned her to leave southern Lebanon. On April 22, 2026 she was reporting near the village of al-Tiri when an Israeli air strike hit the vehicle in front of her. As usual, she had been wearing protective equipment that clearly identified her as a journalist. She and a fellow reporter took refuge in a nearby home. That reporter, Zeinab Faraj, told the Associated Press “Amal was crawling, she was wounded — her nose and head and shoulder and leg.” Both women were able to speak by phone to family and other colleagues. 

Then, a second Israeli air strike hit their refuge. Rescue workers got to her colleague, but the Union of Journalists in Lebanon charges that Israeli forces used stun grenades to prevent further efforts to free Amal. She continued to lay in that rubble for hours, surely in pain. Six hours later, the rescuers finally got through. But she had already died.

Back to the mainstream U.S. media. Unlike television news, newspapers did not entirely ignore the killing of Amal Khalil, but their coverage was mostly minimal, with — so far — little or no follow-up. One New York Times report especially stood out for its grotesque contortions to try and hide the compelling evidence that the Israeli military had prevented her rescuers from saving her. 

The sub-headline to Max Bearak’s April 23 report telegraphed the paper’s concealment strategy. “Mourners paid respects to Amal Khalil, who remained trapped under rubble for hours before emergency medics recovered her body.” You had to read all the way down to the 7th paragraph to learn who had actually “trapped” her, and was stopping those “emergency medics.” And, astonishingly, here was the explanatory sentence: “The Israeli military denied in a statement that it had prevented rescuers from reaching the injured journalists, and said the incident was under investigation.”

This is quite extraordinary. The New York Times is reporting Israel’s denial before it even bothers to tell you what the charge is. 

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Mediaite Founding Editor Colby Hall Out After Suspension for ‘Fabricated Quotes’

Colby Hall, the founding editor of the far-left media site Mediaite, is out after a 30-day suspension for, among other things, fabricating quotes.

In the middle of last month, Mediaite’s editor-in-chief Joe DePaolo announced Hall’s suspension.

“We presented the findings to Colby Hall, who insists the errors were purely a result of sloppiness in how he aggregated and categorized information, not from the use of AI,” DePaolo wrote. “Regardless, it is completely unacceptable, and Colby has been suspended from Mediaite pending further investigation.”

What was fascinating is that Hall was exposed by his ideological counterparts in the far-left media. From my earlier report:

On Monday, the far-left media outlet Status told Semafor that One Sheet “appeared to outright fabricate a quote and attribute it to our very own Jon Passantino, putting us on heavy blast on its website and newsletter for something we never did.”

Semafor further reports that since its launch, One Sheet has serially misattributed quotes to the wrong people and outlets, including CNN, Fox News, Status, and Politico. In other words, those dumb enough to pay for One Sheet were misinformed about who said what. Hell, I can’t imagine anyone dumb enough to read Mediaite for free.

Semafor summed it up as a “series of mishaps… including misattributed information and made-up quotes.”

Apparently,  DePaolo’s “further investigation” didn’t come out too well for Hall because Hall has announced he’s out at Mediaite to spend more time with his Substack.

“After 15 years as Founding Editor of Mediaite, I’m stepping away from the site I helped launch, and that has been my obsession for well over a decade,” he announced last week. “The decision follows the editorial errors in the One Sheet newsletter that surfaced in April. I addressed those mistakes on the record at the time, and I stand by what I said then.”

He then spun the 30-day suspension as a plus. “What I didn’t expect, when the suspension started in April, was that the past month would turn out to be one of the most clarifying experiences of my professional life,” he said. “It also gave my brain a chance to do something it hadn’t done in a long while: rest.”

He does admit that the suspension was “about as dark as anything I’ve gone through professionally.” But it was still good because he realized “I’d been running on fumes for longer than I wanted to admit, and that some of what I thought was professional rigor was actually just exhaustion dressed up as urgency.” Whatever that means.

We all make mistakes, and out of humility and even self-preservation, we need to show some grace when others make those mistakes. Making up quotes doesn’t sound like a mistake. You can accidentally plagiarize by not indenting a paragraph. I’ve done that. You can accidentally misattribute a quote. I’ve done that. The thing, though, is that after you make those errors, you know you’re prone to making those errors, so you’re extra careful about double-checking. Fabricating quotes, though?

Now, Hall says, he plans to do some consulting and disappear into that massive pile of Substack with the rest of the disgraced, like Jim Acosta and Taylor Lorenz and Ryan Lizza and Terry Moran…

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Germany Moves to Control Social Media: ‘Trusted’ News Sources To Be Algorithmically Boosted By Law

Germany is moving toward what critics are calling a sweeping new form of state influence over online speech, after plans surfaced to force social media platforms to prioritize content from government-approved outlets—raising serious concerns about censorship, narrative control, and the future of free expression in Europe.

According to documents obtained by Apollo News, regulators are preparing a system that would require platforms such as X, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok to give preferential treatment to content from so-called “reliable” media.

What makes the proposal particularly controversial is not just the intent, but the mechanism. For the first time, state-linked authorities would directly shape the algorithms that determine what information citizens see—effectively inserting government priorities into the digital public square.

At the center of the plan is the concept of “public value” media. In theory, these are outlets that provide socially beneficial information, but in practice, critics argue, they are media organizations vetted and approved by the same political system they are meant to scrutinize.

That distinction is crucial. The power to define what is “reliable” would rest with regulatory bodies tied to the state, not with citizens, readers, or independent market forces.

Once granted this status, approved outlets would receive algorithmic advantages. Their content would be pushed higher in feeds, made easier to discover, and given preferential visibility over competing voices.

The proposal does not stop there. Individual articles and videos could also be labeled as “public value,” creating a two-tier information system where some content is actively promoted while other viewpoints are quietly deprioritized.

Platforms would then be required to adjust their recommendation systems accordingly. In some cases, regulators are even discussing quotas to guarantee exposure for approved content, effectively turning private platforms into vehicles for state-guided messaging.

For many critics, this crosses a fundamental line. It transforms social media from an open marketplace of ideas into a managed information ecosystem shaped by political authorities.

Supporters of the initiative claim it is necessary to combat “disinformation” and preserve democratic discourse.

But that justification is precisely what alarms opponents. They argue that “fighting disinformation” has increasingly become a catch-all rationale for restricting dissent and controlling narratives.

“This is not about removing illegal content,” one observer noted. “This is about deciding which legal speech deserves to be seen—and which does not.”

Critics describe the system as a form of “soft censorship.” Instead of banning opposing views outright, it ensures they are drowned out by state-preferred content.
“It is reverse censorship,” analysts warn. “You don’t delete the message—you just make sure nobody sees it.”

The consequences for independent and alternative media could be severe. Outlets that challenge government policy or question mainstream narratives may find their reach quietly throttled, without any formal accusation or legal recourse.

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