2020 Trump Spokesman Tim Murtaugh Recalls ICY Interviews with CNN, MSNBC Partisans

Brian Flood at FoxNews.com reports on how Trump 2020 campaign spokesman Tim Murtaugh discusses his scrapping with CNN and MSNBC hosts in his new book, Swing Hard in Case You Hit It. First came CNN host Brianna Keilar, who in June 2020 pressed Murtaugh on Trump's remark that they should slow down COVID testing to get fewer positive results. "I think it would be accurate to conclude that Keilar had decided that she didn’t like me before I ever appeared on her show." Murtaugh claimed Trump was joking, and he said Keilar responded that over 120,000 Americans had died from COVID before asking, "I do not think that is funny. Do you think that is funny?" Murtaugh wrote that "Keilar decided that she would claim moral superiority and declare humor off limits, while dishonestly suggesting that the president and his campaign were laughing at the people who were dying of COVID-19." "The whole thing was a reminder that I needed to anticipate their partisanship more and treat them as though they were the political opposition, because they clearly were," Murtaugh concluded. Then there was CNN anchor Jim Sciutto, a former Obama administration official, a fact Murtaugh liked to remind CNN viewers about. "Every time I appeared on his show, he attacked aggressively from the very first word. He quite clearly viewed me as a political adversary and conducted interviews in what I felt was a condescending and accusatory manner." (Alex Christy captured it for NewsBusters.) "One day in August 2020, I appeared on his show, and he repeatedly asked me if President Trump accepted responsibility for all the American deaths attributable to COVID-19. This, obviously, was an unanswerable question in a political sense, which is exactly why he asked it," he recalled. "If I said that the president did accept responsibility, then I would have agreed with the false narrative that Trump was responsible for the effects of a virus that came from China. Additionally, I’d have handed CNN the very soundbite it was looking for," he wrote. "If I said he did not accept responsibility, it might sound callous and inconsistent, because we were simultaneously looking for credit for the president’s overall response to the pandemic, and so we would be wanting the good without taking the bad." Murtaugh explained that "any observer could see clearly that CNN’s goal was not to be a mere journalistic outlet covering current events, but that it wanted to be an active participant in the political campaign." In October of 2020, Murtaugh wrote, he was scheduled to do an interview with MSNBC’s Katy Tur, but they "demanded" he wear a mask during the live shot. "Mind you, it was a bright and sunny day, and I was standing outside, easily more than six feet away from any crew the network could have been concerned about. Tur herself was in a studio somewhere else. After it was confirmed that the mask was a condition of the live shot, I huddled over the phone with some of the campaign team back in Virginia to discuss whether I should proceed. As a group we decided that it was better to participate in the hit than to skip it, so I went through with it," he wrote. Murtaugh recounted that Tur cited the names of people who had recently died from COVID in order to criticize a tweet Trump had sent that said, "Don’t be afraid of COVID. Don’t let it dominate your life." (She started with video of Amanda Kloots, whose husband died from the disease, calling Trump "beyond hurtful.") "That wasn’t journalism. It was the ghoulish exploitation of the deaths of real people so that Katy Tur could thrill the MSNBC audience by attacking someone from the Trump campaign. It was juvenile and a bad-faith effort to specifically blame one person—President Trump—for deaths caused by a global pandemic that began in China," Murtaugh wrote. Not every cable-news host was thoroughly hostile. Murtaugh said then-CNN host Chris Cuomo came across as sincere when he told the Trump spokesperson, "I respect your effort because that’s the game," after a fiery interview in which Murtaugh mocked the anchor’s infamous on-air COVID antics with his brother Andrew, then governor of New York. Nick Fondacaro wrote about one of those interactions.

Column: Journalists Boast They're Not for Democrats, They're for 'True Facts'

National Public Radio may be funded by taxpayer dollars, but its audience is firmly on the Left. It’s literally New York Times Radio, as The Daily podcast from The Times airs on almost 300 NPR stations every weekday. Inside this airless liberal silo, they can grow very arrogant about how they Save Democracy. On April Fools Day, host Michael Barbaro brought on Times political reporter Jim Rutenberg to discuss “Ronna McDaniel, TV News, and the Trump Problem.” Rutenberg should be best known for his infamous 2016 front-page editorial announcing objectivity was officially going in the trash can (as if it was vibrantly observed before).   Rutenberg described the Trump Problem: "If you're a working journalist and you believe that Donald J. Trump is a demagogue playing to the nation's worst racist and nationalistic tendencies, that he cozies up to anti-American dictators and that he would be dangerous with control of the United States nuclear codes, how the heck are you supposed to cover him?" Rutenberg proclaimed the “objective” media must now be “oppositional.” Then The Times unfurled the arrogant motto “Truth. It’s More Important Now Than Ever,” and put it on T-shirts. This created another “Trump problem." The Republican half of the country would dismiss them as Democrat messengers (if they weren’t dismissed before). Republican listeners could break out a middle-fingers salute at the end of this podcast. They discussed how temporary CNN boss Chris Licht thought CNN “put on a jersey, took a side,” which they obviously did. Barbaro concluded after NBC's Ronna McDaniel debacle, “a network like NBC perhaps doesn’t put a jersey on, but accepts the reality that a lot of the world sees them wearing a jersey.” Rutenberg implausibly claimed, “no one wants to be wearing a jersey on our business. But maybe what they really have to accept is that we’re just sticking to the true facts, and that may look like we’re wearing a jersey, but we’re not. And that may, at times, look like it’s lining up more with the Democrats, but we’re not. If Trump is lying about a stolen election, that’s not siding against him. That’s siding for the truth, and that’s what we’re doing.” What these men are really saying is that liberal journalists want to have their cake, and eat it, too. They want to launch their flagrantly righteous takes against Trump and his voters, and they want to be celebrated as nonpartisan at the same time. “We’re wearing True Facts jerseys!” Incredibly, this wasn’t the only NPR program on April Fools Day preaching this sermon. On 1-A out of D.C. station WAMU, host Todd Zwillich also disparaged Licht’s approach, especially the Trump town hall with Kaitlan Collins. “I think that you're seeing increasingly, luckily, journalists who cover politics realize they're not in the old game anymore, that neutrality doesn't only not serve them anymore, but doesn't serve the public anymore,” Zwillich proclaimed. “It doesn't mean being partisan. It doesn't mean you're for one side. It means you're for truth.” They seize on Trump's election denial as if it's the only issue. Both shows never touched on the Hunter Biden laptop or any other issue where the media suppressed true facts. NPR executive Terence Samuel infamously said “We don't want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories.” It was a “pure distraction.” Then The Times and other liberal outlets acknowledged the laptop was real…in 2022. This never came up because both shows failed to include any conservative guests. Because when you’re for the “true facts,” why should the “lying” side get any airtime on tax-funded radio? 

PBS Pampers Whitmer, Talks of Democrats 'Fantasizing' About Her Replacing Biden

The PBS NewsHour interviewed Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D-Michigan) on Monday night, and the mild online headline was “Gov. Whitmer discusses Democrats’ efforts to protect reproductive rights.” Anchor Amna Nawaz’s questions, if they were at all challenging, sounded like a worried Biden voter that there’s low enthusiasm and not enough courting of the party’s hard left. On abortion, Nawaz channeled the Planned Parenthood crowd and their laments Biden doesn’t proudly use the A-word: NAWAZ: You clearly and other Democratic leaders also believe this is a key issue in mobilizing Democrats, also independents. You have said previously that maybe President Biden should speak about reproductive rights and should say the word abortion more frequently than he does. He's displayed some discomfort with that, changing the language even in the State of the Union to avoid saying that word. If this is such a key issue for Democrats, does his reluctance to say that word hurt him politically? Then the anchor with Pakistani origins picked up the Israel-hating leftist voters who chose “Uncommitted” in Michigan’s primary and call the president “Genocide Joe.” Nawaz asked if Biden could “overcome some of the weaknesses we have seen President Biden displayed so far, especially with those more than 100,000 people in the primaries voting uncommitted?” Then she followed up: "As you know, those more than 100,000 people, though, were voting as a protest to oppose President Biden's stance in Israel, their conduct in the war in Gaza. They were doing it to send a message. I guess, as one of the co-chairs of the Biden/Harris reelection campaign, where would you point those protesters to say 'they heard you, they see you?'" She didn't ask" "Some imams in Dearborn have said they want to kill all the Jews? Are you proud to have their votes?" The funniest Whitmer answer came when Nawaz touted a New York Times columnist forwarding “fantasizing” that Whitmer could replace Biden this year: NAWAZ: As you know, Governor, you're seen as a rising leader in your Democratic Party. There was a recent New York Times column by Michelle Goldberg I want to ask you about, because she wrote this. She said — quote — "There are many reasons that people regularly fantasize about Whitmer replacing Biden on this year's ticket and, assuming that doesn't happen, see her as a likely presidential prospect in 2028. She insists she's not interested, but few seem to believe her" — end quote. I want to ask you, how much of that speculation do you think is fueled by what we know is low enthusiasm and dissatisfaction for the Democratic candidate in President Biden right now? And how does that change before November? WHITMER: You know, I don't know. I didn't read the article. Yeah, sure, you didn’t read the article! (Push the Lie buzzer!) Like Kamala Harris, Whitmer made noises about how proud she is to be by Biden’s side. What might a Republican ask Whitmer? That’s a good way to figure out what PBS was never gonna ask!

NewsBusters Podcast: A Fevered, Frenzied, Frazzled Media War on Trump

Once again in 2024, journalists need to justify treating Trump as a deadly bubonic plague, an impending Hitler. Treating him as one side of an election is dangerous when he is the End of Democracy. Then they claim they only have a bias in favor of Truth. Yes, they're totally not favoring the Democrats with this foam-flecked Evil Trump coverage. On April 1, the New York Times podcast The Daily tackled the "Trump Problem," which they defined as this: Why must we deal with business executives who want us to treat Trump and his voters like they are normal citizens and not a Death Star for Democracy? Host Michael Barbaro asked Times political reporter Jim Rutenberg about the impression Republicans have that the media are wearing a "jersey" for Team Biden in all of their hostility to Trump. Rutenberg's reply was simply awful: “No one wants to be wearing a jersey on our business. But maybe what they really have to accept is that we’re just sticking to the true facts, and that may look like we’re wearing a jersey, but we’re not. And that may, at times, look like it’s lining up more with the Democrats, but we’re not. If Trump is lying about a stolen election, that’s not siding against him. That’s siding for the truth, and that’s what we’re doing." This podcast airs on more than 300 "public" radio stations, which underlines how NPR is one big liberal sandbox. It wasn't even the only NPR talk program making this preposterous argument. Over on 1A [for First Amendment, get it?] from northwest D.C. at WAMU-FM, co-host Todd Zwillich offered a similar awful spin: “I think that you're seeing increasingly, luckily, journalists who cover politics realize they're not in the old game anymore, that neutrality doesn't only not serve them anymore, but doesn't serve the public anymore. It doesn't mean being partisan. It doesn't mean you're for one side. It means you're for truth.” Meanwhile, Joy Reid is comparing Trump and his followers to apocalyptic cults from David Koresh, Jim Jones, and Charles Manson. Is that what they mean as being "for truth"?  Both shows never touched on the Hunter Biden laptop or any other issue where the media suppressed and disparaged true stories. When they couldn't suppress it, they lied about it, claiming it had "all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation." Then, in 2022, the New York Times and other leftist outlets admitted the laptop was a real thing. This apparently isn't supposed to dent their "we're not for Democrats, we're for truth" spins. Right before the election, NPR executive Terence Samuel infamously dismissed the Hunter scandal: “We don't want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories.” It was a “pure distraction.” It was, he said, a "politically driven event." As if all of their wild caricatures and speculations about Trump aren't "politically driven"?  Enjoy the podcast below, or wherever you listen to podcasts.  

Ex-ESPN Host Spills: Executives Carefully Scripted Her Questions to Biden, 'No Deviation!'

Joseph Wulfsohn at Fox News has a new report that underlines once again how interviews with President Biden are very, very scripted and structured to make it easy for him. Former ESPN anchor Sage Steele told Wulfsohn the top ESPN executives crawled all over the particulars of the questions to Biden. “This was about two months after he took office,” she said. “That was an interesting experience in its own right because it was so structured. And I was told, ‘You will say every word that we write out, you will not deviate from the script and go!’" Clearly, Biden couldn’t be surprised with anything improvised. They said "To the word. Like Every single question was scripted, gone over dozens of times by many executives,  editors and executives, absolutely. I was on script and was told not to deviate. it was very much ‘This is what you will ask. This is how you will say it. No follow-ups, no follow-ups. Next!" She said, "I knew this was a lot bigger that just the wonderful editors I worked with. This went up to the fourth floor, as we said, where all the bosses, the top executives, the decision-makers are, the president of our company, the CEO, where they all worked." BREAKING: Sage Steele admits that her entire interview of Biden was carefully scripted by network executives: "Every single question was scripted and gone over dozens of times by multiple editors and executives." pic.twitter.com/drXHFZNZVt — End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) April 3, 2024 Wulfsohn said most of the ESPN-scripted questions pertained to sports leagues returning to normalcy after the Covid pandemic, but the interview made headlines at the time when Biden supported the MLB's All-Star game boycott of Atlanta following the passage of Georgia's election-integrity law. He added that Steele said her interview with Biden was "heartbreaking," referring to his mental acuity.  "I think it's really heartbreaking that the people who love Joe Biden and say they truly care about him have allowed it to get to this point," Steele said. "So I'm not even looking at this from a political angle or my beliefs in anything. This is the human side of it. And when someone is struggling, we allow them to continue to be in the spotlight and put them out there in the first place when they knew there were issues? Of course, they had to know. So it's a humanity thing with me where I don't care where anyone stands and what they vote for or who they believe in. Do you really care about that person? As a father, as a husband, as an everything." "It was satellite, it wasn't in person. We're having a technical issue. And so I had to, like, BS. I had to chitchat waiting for us to start rolling," Steele said. "Well, what he started to do, of course he has someone next to him and they keep a black, like, curtain over the lens of the camera, so you can't see him until the last second, but you can hear and we're chitchatting… So I can hear him and he goes, ‘What is this for?’… And he's, like, ‘Who am I talking to? Wait—what's her name?'" "I was going, ‘Oh, my God!'" Steele exclaimed. "And then he said, ‘SportsCenter. ESPN.’ And he goes, ‘Oh, ok.’ And so I said, you know, what do you say? ‘Hi, Mr. President. Nice to meet you.’ And so I'm trying just to fill time. And he said, ‘You know, I used to play football'… And so he started to tell football stories of his greatness. And again, I can't see him. You can see the curtain… He goes, ‘And I have the best hands.’ What do you say to that?" She later continued, "And then I said, ‘Oh, so you were a receiver.’ And he started to explain it. And here's the saddest thing — his voice just trailed off. He said, ‘I was good,’ and then he went silent, and he goes, ‘Uhh… never mind.’" Steele was attacked in 2021 for mocking biracial Barack Obama, which caused then-MSNBC host Tiffany Cross to accuse her of sounding like a "modern-day minstrel show" for white people. 

Column: PBS 'News' Hounds Are OK with Biden's Inflammatory Rhetoric

They call themselves the PBS NewsHour, but if you watch them routinely, you might call them the PBS Opposition Research Hour. They often sound like a Democrat consulting firm as they analyze Donald Trump as a dangerously extreme figure. Then they can turn around and proclaim that Joe Biden is very bipartisan in negotiating “objectively historical achievements,” as PBS anchor Amna Nawaz claimed at the State of the Union address. On April 2, PBS aired a segment titled “Analyzing Trump’s use of inflammatory rhetoric on the campaign trail.” Two days later, it was changed to “Anatomy of a Trump speech." They decided to watch all the scary passages in Trump’s recent speeches with Jennifer Mercieca, who reporter Lisa Desjardins blandly described as “an author and Texas A&M professor who specializes in political and Trump rhetoric.” PBS didn’t note that Mercieca wrote a book in 2020 titled Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump. (It was shown on screen.) Its dust cover promises to explain “how a bombastic pitchman emerged as America’s authoritarian P.T. Barnum, using nothing more than his weaponized words to transform a polarized and dispirited nation into his own reality TV show.” Does this expert shopping sound fair and balanced to anyone? As Trump denounced Biden for a “border bloodbath,” Desjardins explained he’s attacking “anyone who calls it a humanitarian crisis.” Mercieca lamented “it can’t be neutral. It can’t be a situation at the border. It has to be violent. It has to be an invasion. It has to be a bloodbath.” Seriously? Last October, their anchor Nawaz wasn’t neutral as she compared separating children from their families at the border under Trump as “one of the darkest chapters in our modern history” that echoed slavery and the internment of Japanese-Americans.   Naturally, Desjardins repeated the Democrat spin that “there’s no evidence of a bloodbath for Americans living there” (at the border), and “multiple studies show that migrants are actually less likely to commit crime than others here.” Trump lamented, “if we don’t win on November 5, I think our country is going to cease to exist. It could be the last election we ever have.” Desjardins explained Mercieca’s thesis: this is “what separates Trump,” it’s not “political razzle-dazzle, but dangerous, hyperbolic fearmongering.” If that “last election” talk is dangerous, will PBS rewind to Joe Biden’s first campaign speech back on January 5. Biden said of Trump: “He’s willing to sacrifice our democracy, put himself in power…. Trump’s assault on democracy isn’t just part of his past. It’s what he’s promising for the future…. We’re living in an era where a determined minority is doing everything in its power to try to destroy our democracy for their own agenda.” These “public” broadcasters know what Biden has said in his campaign speeches, and they’re fine with it. No one thinks it’s a lie or that it’s dangerous. Mercieca acknowledged, “All presidents run as heroes. It’s not uncommon. Joe Biden is running as a hero right now. He’s running as a hero to save democracy.” But she claimed “Donald Trump is running as a different kind of hero.” How so? Desjardins concluded the segment with this about Trump: “When he’s saying the situation is dire, when he’s saying democracy will end if I’m not elected, he is implying to some of his followers, violence may be okay.”   Biden is saying democracy will end if he’s not elected, but PBS can’t imagine his followers would ever believe “violence may be okay.” PBS makes “news” by Democrats, for Democrats. But it’s subsidized involuntarily by tens of millions of allegedly democracy-squashing Republicans. 

PBS Host Geoff Bennett Favorably Quotes Trump to Own a Florida Pro-Life Leader!

On Tuesday, PBS NewsHour interviewed a pro-life activist. But that’s not the term anchor Geoff Bennett wanted to use. He began: “Lynda Bell is president of Florida Right to Life, one of the state's largest anti-abortion groups, and she joins us now.” Conservatives are routinely “anti”-everything. Liberals are usually “pro”-wonderful things. Bennett warned: “Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has now signed two major abortion bans, initially one starting at 15 weeks and more recently one starting at six weeks, before most women even know that they're pregnant.” Most? Is that right? One study quoted by NPR in 2022 asserted it was one out of five, not “most.” The anchor pressed on:  “And Donald Trump has described a six-week ban as — quote — ‘a terrible thing and a terrible mistake.’ Why can't Republicans and anti-abortion advocates find consensus on an acceptable path forward, when overturning Roe had been a decades-long pursuit among conservatives and anti-abortion activists?”   Bell pushed back on Bennett's repeated use of antis: “Well, we pro-lifers — we like to be called pro-lifers, rather than anti-abortion. But we are pro-life. Now, the anti-life community, they want abortion. It doesn't matter. They don't care. They want abortion through birth. So they want unfettered access.” Oh, now you’ve done it! Bennett fought back: “Ms. Bell, that's not true.” Pro-abortion journalists need to be handed the 2020 Democrat platform, and find where they suggest any barrier they favor. They don’t: Democrats oppose and will fight to overturn federal and state laws that create barriers to reproductive health and rights. We will repeal the Hyde Amendment, and protect and codify the right to reproductive freedom…. Democrats oppose restrictions on medication abortion care that are inconsistent with the most recent medical and scientific evidence and that do not protect public health. Bell pointed out that the current abortion referendum on the ballot says everything it to be determined by the health-care provider: BELL: So the health care provider, when it says viability, what that means is, it's going to be determined by the health care provider. So abortion literally could go through birth. That is absolutely a fact. Now, jumping into your specific question, the six-week bill provided for rape, incest, life of the mother, medical emergency, fetal anomaly. So there were very many exceptions in there for women who needed to have an abortion procedure in these very dangerous situations for them, because we're not just pro-baby. We're pro-woman. And we don't want any woman to experience anything that would be dangerous for them. So we in the pro-life community, we love them both. We love both the babies and their moms. Then Bennett asked a question that collapses upon itself: BENNETT: Well, let me ask you this, because the data is clear that states with more abortion restrictions have higher rates of maternal and infant mortality. How are those outcomes consistent with your organization's stated goal of protecting the sanctity of life? BELL: Well, I don't know that that data is absolutely correct, and so I'd love to challenge that data as well. In fact, I'm going to look into that data. BENNETT: It's from the Commonwealth Fund. It's an independent research organization focused on health policy. First of all, how much chutzpah does it take for pro-abortion journalists to cluck at pro-lifers about infant mortality? Aren't they for the right to choose infant mortality? Second, when a journalist calls something an "independent research organization," don't bet on it. Their mission statement proclaims in its DEI section: "The Commonwealth Fund has made a commitment to become an antiracist organization." In its 2022 study, The Commonwealth Fund cites pro-abortion researchers and repeats pro-abortion terms, just like PBS. Expand below:  Introduction In anticipation of a U.S. Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade, a number of states passed “trigger laws” that would ban all, or nearly all, abortions once national abortion protections ended. In the months since the Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization in June 2022, several of these states have in fact banned abortion in most instances. Other states have enacted bans or severe restrictions since then, and others may do so in the coming months or years... For our analysis, we compared health status and health care resources in the 26 states that the [pro-abortion] Guttmacher Institute has identified as having “restrictive,” “very restrictive,” or “most restrictive” policies on abortion — which we refer to as “abortion-restriction states” — to those in the 24 “abortion-access states” that, along with the District of Columbia, have not instituted bans or new restrictions on abortion.... Conclusion Compared with their counterparts in other states, women of reproductive age and birthing people in states with current or proposed abortion bans have more limited access to affordable health insurance coverage, worse health outcomes, and lower access to maternity care providers. Making abortion illegal risks widening these disparities, as states with already limited Medicaid maternity coverage and fewer maternity care resources lose providers who are reluctant to practice in states that they perceive as restricting their practice. The result is a deepening of fractures in the maternal health system and a compounding of inequities by race, ethnicity, and geography.... Increased federal funding for reproductive health care, family planning, maternity care, and care delivery system transformations also could mitigate the impact of the Dobbs decision and state abortion bans on people’s lives. State, congressional, and executive branch actions are all needed to protect the health of women and birthing people and ensure optimal and equitable outcomes for mothers and infants.

NewsBusters Podcast: Mark Levin Hammers CNN's Bash and Tapper

CNN is perennially offended at the thought that Donald Trump is still politically viable despite all its dirty work for Democrats. On his radio show this week, Mark Levin hammered Dana Bash for "fact checking" RFK Jr and tackled Jake Tapper's pleading for Democrats to pander harder to pro-Hamas voters.  Mark Levin took after CNN host Dana Bash for rushing to say RFK Jr. had "NO EVIDENCE that Biden himself was involved" in censoring RFK's speech. He called her a mouthpiece that burps up the Democrat talking points. Listen:  Then there was Tapper pressing the Wisconsin Democrat chair Ben Wikler about how they needed to pursue the pro-Hamas voters, where 46,000 people in the Democrat primary picked the line “Uninstructed." That's more than double Biden's victory margin in Wisconsin last time. Tapper lectured "This president must decide if loyalty to Netanyahu is worth delivering Trump the election in November. He must decide.”  In late-night comedy, NBC host Seth Meyers also lectured the president about how he needs to push around the Israelis and push a ceasefire. CBS host Stephen Colbert decided to put pressure on Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu instead. And ABC's Jimmy Kimmel was dazzled by how clean the bathrooms were in Japan and said the Japanse must say about America, "‘Oh, the garbage people! Yes, the Americans, garbage, yes!’" We also discuss the White House briefing, where NPR reporter Asma Khalid pressed Karine Jean-Pierre about punishing Israel for any of their military mistakes: "Why, thus far, there has been no consequences and why there are no consequences?" AP's Josh Boak tossed this softball: "Past jobs reports have shown that immigrants are helping the U.S. economy. Is the view of this administration that the inflow of immigrants do more to strengthen the United States or hurt the United States? Does it do more?" Enjoy the podcast below or wherever you listen to podcasts.   

Authoritarianism! PBS NewsHour Uses Poll to Imply January 6 Energy of Trump Voters

In the Brooks & Capehart pundit segment on Friday's PBS NewsHour, anchor Amna Nawaz broke out the latest NPR/PBS poll showing Biden leading Trump 50-48 (and left out the wider result -- Biden 43, Trump 41, RFK Jr. 11. Stein 2, West 1). They are using taxpayer money to do polling for their tilted narratives. Nawaz wanted the pundits to talk about their provocative question about violence being necessary: NAWAZ: In one question, we asked Americans if they felt that Americans have to resort to violence to get the country back on track. A majority, 79 percent, disagreed or strongly disagreed, but 12 percent of Democrats, 28 percent of Republicans and 18 percent of independents agreed violence might be necessary. Couple that with another question we asked about whether they wanted to see a president or a leader who's willing to break the rules to set things straight, and some 41 percent of Americans agreed with that. That includes 56 percent of Republicans, 28 percent of Democrats, and 37 percent of independents. When PBS and NPR ask this question, it's loaded. It's obviously a January 6 question, and they want January 6 to hang over this election, so they can push their Republicans-hate-Democracy spin. Many Republicans may be thinking about the 2020 rioting after George Floyd's death, which was deadlier than January 6. At least 19 Americans were killed in the first two weeks of violent protest. Six percent of Republicans strongly agreed violence may be necessary, and 22 percent agreed. Now look at other demographics Amna Nawaz could have highlighted that are similar or greater than Republicans, including on the "strongly" agree number (on page 23): Household income under $50,000: 24 percent (9 strongly agree/15 agree) Under 45: 30 percent (9/21) Age 18-29: 42 percent (14/28) Parents with children under 18: 25 percent (7/18) Blacks: 25 percent (14/11) Latinos: 27 percent (5/22) Jonathan Capehart made the obvious point that violence shouldn't be necessary, but he wasn't worried he was going to be asked about race or age:  CAPEHART: It should be zero percent who say that violence is necessary. But that didn't concern me as much as the break the rules, someone who is willing to break the rules to get the country back on track. I think, when people hear, break the rules, they're not thinking ransack the Capitol. They're thinking what they might view as little things. That's all — that's the Trump election — that's the Trump campaign right there, just wants to break the rules to get the country back on track. I broke the rules coming to the studio today. People break rules all the time… But when you're talking about Donald Trump, breaking the rules is breaking law and order, breaking social — breaking norms, and breaking democracy. As always, the lefties skip over how prosecuting Trump all over the country and trying to get his name ripped off ballots is "breaking norms." Brooks almost entirely seconded that Capehart emotion:  BROOKS: I had the exact same reaction as Jonathan. I'm not a big fan of that would you resort to violence, because I don't know what that means. I don't know what violence means in that context. And so people — when people answer that question, that they're really saying, how upset are you about the way things are going? But the breaking the rules thing, that is, to me, also much more upsetting, because that really is the seedbed of authoritarianism. And it's mostly on the right. Trump is scaring a lot of people that we have to break the rules, but it's a little on the left. You hear people say we need to bust up the system, we need to tear down the system. And that way lies authoritarianism.  And you can see it in the Philippines, you can see it in Hungary, you can see it in Poland. Whenever you have a rise of authoritarianism, it's because people think that breaking the rules is somehow OK to make the streets safe. It's sort of like the Dirty Harry defense.And, to me, it's just — that's the most worrying part of our survey. PS: The PBS NewsHour website has an article by their polling producer Laura Santhanam that reeeaaaally drives home the Trump-loathing point:  During recent reelection campaign rallies, presumptive Republican nominee and former President Donald Trump has questioned the humanity of immigrants, referred to a much debated “blood bath for the country” if he does not get reelected and describes people who have been convicted for Jan. 6 criminal offenses as “hostages.” READ MORE: Why Trump’s alarmist message on immigration may be resonating beyond his base His speeches often attempt “to convince people the country is going downhill, that things are awful and only he can fix them,” said Barbara McQuade, a law professor at the University of Michigan and author of Attack from Within: How Disinformation is Sabotaging America.  These latest poll results suggest “to some extent, these strategies are working” and highlight that “we need strong voices pushing back,” said McQuade, who served as U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan. “It’s an incredibly dangerous place to be,” she said. McQuade added that authoritarians across history have deployed this tactic, conjuring fear to manipulate people’s emotions.

'Black-ish' or SICK-ish? ABC Star Jenifer Lewis Goes NUTS About Whites on Radio Show

Fox News writer (and NewsBusters alum) Gabriel Hays reported on some wildly spicy baloney from actress Jenifer Lewis from ABC’s Black-ish on the Sirius XM radio show Mornings with Zerlina. She offered some sick-ish talk about how the white people are scared of brown people and want to “put those n------ in their places and get those wetbacks out of this country.” Lewis was clearly trying to scare minority voters into turning out to vote for Biden, because Trump is “Hitler” and will “punish” Democrat voters. "We spend half our lives choosing, trying to make a choice on bulls---. What movie tonight? Let me sit here for a half hour. No bombs going off. And we do nothing. We sit on our couches. ‘Oh, I don't believe in voting.’ You f------ idiot. If that man gets in, as soon as he takes the oath, he will have generals walk down the steps of the Capitol." Her warning grew even more dire, as she said, "He will take a hammer and break the glass where the Constitution is, and he will tear it up in our faces and say, 'Now I'm the king of the f------ world. You will bow down, b------' He will punish everybody that didn't vote for him." Lewis explained why she’s so convinced this will happen, telling host Zerlina Maxwell she recognizes his "mental illness." She yelled into the mic, "I know it because I know what mental illness looks like. That mania is unstoppable. See, this mother----- is Hitler. He didn't come to play." She added, "That mother----- will have us in camps… because we sat our fat a---- on the couch." "Black people don't want to fight you. All we want to do is feed our children and be equal," she insisted, telling Maxwell, "Honey, White people are scared. They're becoming a minority. The world is brown." The expletive-laden rant continued, with Lewis describing further punishment "White" people will seek to inflict on minorities, referring to them with racial slurs. "And they're going to do everything they can to stay in those gated communities, not pay taxes, and put those n------ in their places and get those wetbacks out of this country. We own this, b----." "You will not win because love is the answer," she added before continuing with more violent imagery. "We built this country for free while you raped us in your barns. While you whipped us. While you lynched us and cut babies out of our stomachs while we hung from f------ trees.  And you got something to say?" she asked.

Brent Bozell Explains the Media War on Trump on Fox's 'Life, Liberty & Levin'

On Sunday's episode of Life, Liberty, & Levin on the Fox News Channel, Media Research Center founder and president L. Brent Bozell explained to Mark Levin how the media are relentlessly negative in their coverage of Donald Trump, and focus largely on his legal troubles and avoid covering how President Biden is failing on the issues from inflation to immigration to crime.  Levin asked Bozell: "What do you make of the media's coverage of Biden's war on Donald Trump?" Bozell began with Trump's presidency: "Over a four year period we looked at that media's coverage of Donald Trump when he was president. And found that on average every month it was 90% negative coverage they gave. No matter what his successes and his successes, you cannot argue his successes. But they just didn't cover them." BOZELL: So we started doing it again. In February the number has gone down. It is now 89% negative, [down] from 90%. What are they covering? They are covering exactly what Joe Biden wants covered. They want his trials covered. They want those 91 felony counts covered, and they are covered and slanted against him. This is exactly what the Biden campaign wants! Why? Because if you're not going to cover the trial, you've got to cover the issues. If you are going to cover the issues you are going to look at inflation. You're going to look at interest rates. You're going to look at the border. That's out of control. You're going to look at our American cities where crime is running rampant. You're going to look at those issues and every single time they fall in favor of Donald Trump. So this is the playbook the left had. It is with the Biden campaign and it is with the news media to do nothing but focus on trials and legal woes and do it from a negative perspective. And you can't argue the numbers I just gave you -- 89 percent!  Levin then noted the media want to compare Trump to Hitler, just as they did to Barry Goldwater, to Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan. They engage in character assassination. Bozell agreed, and added the "end of democracy" spin. BOZELL: The most recent one is anti-democracy. Where did that word come from? This is a talking point, I think it came out of the Biden administration. Now everybody on the left is using it. That Donald Trump, if you elect Donald Trump you will have the end of democracy as we know it. This is the height of hypocrisy.  Bozell said NBC fired Ronna McDaniel a few days after they hired her because she was an "election denier," after they denied that Hillary Clinton lost in 2016 for years, with their empty charges that Trump colluded with the Russian government to steal the election. They denied George W. Bush won in 2000, and even in 2004, when he won bigger. Stacey Abrams denied losing the gubernatorial race in Georgia, and they celebrated her as they mangled the facts. They only want "liberal Republicans" on NBC, he said. Earlier, Bozell and Levin discussed how the media tilt toward Hamas in their war on Israel, using Hamas body counts like they were wonderfully precise. Bozell also mentioned how our Dan Schneider pointed out that Google's AI chatbot refused to answer questions about Hamas and Hezbollah terrorists, and wouldn't answer when asked: what is the capital of Israel?

PBS ‘News’ Hounds OK With Biden’s Inflammatory Rhetoric

They call themselves the “PBS NewsHour,” but if you watch them routinely, you might call them the “PBS Opposition Research Hour.”

They often sound like a Democrat consulting firm as they analyze former President Donald Trump as a dangerously extreme figure. Then they can turn around and proclaim that President Joe Biden is very bipartisan in negotiating “objectively historical achievements,” as PBS anchor Amna Nawaz claimed at the State of the Union address.

On April 2, PBS aired a segment titled “Analyzing Trump’s use of inflammatory rhetoric on the campaign trail.” Two days later, it was changed to “Anatomy of a Trump speech.”

They decided to watch all the scary passages in Trump’s recent speeches with Jennifer Mercieca, who reporter Lisa Desjardins blandly described as “an author and Texas A&M professor who specializes in political and Trump rhetoric.”

PBS didn’t note that Mercieca wrote a book in 2020 titled “Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump.” (It was shown on screen.) Its dust cover promises to explain “how a bombastic pitchman emerged as America’s authoritarian P.T. Barnum, using nothing more than his weaponized words to transform a polarized and dispirited nation into his own reality TV show.”

Does this expert shopping sound fair and balanced to anyone?

As Trump denounced Biden for a “border bloodbath,” Desjardins explained he’s attacking “anyone who calls it a humanitarian crisis.” Mercieca lamented, “It can’t be neutral. It can’t be a situation at the border. It has to be violent. It has to be an invasion. It has to be a bloodbath.”

Seriously? Last October, their anchor Nawaz wasn’t neutral as she compared separating children from their families at the border under Trump as “one of the darkest chapters in our modern history” that echoed slavery and the internment of Japanese Americans.

Naturally, Desjardins repeated the Democrat spin that “there’s no evidence of a bloodbath for Americans living there” (at the border), and “multiple studies show that migrants are actually less likely to commit crime than others here.”

Trump lamented, “If we don’t win on Nov. 5, I think our country is going to cease to exist. It could be the last election we ever have.” Desjardins explained Mercieca’s thesis: This is “what separates Trump,” it’s not “political razzle-dazzle, but dangerous, hyperbolic fearmongering.”

If that “last election” talk is dangerous, will PBS rewind to Biden’s first campaign speech back on Jan. 5? Biden said of Trump: “He’s willing to sacrifice our democracy, put himself in power … Trump’s assault on democracy isn’t just part of his past. It’s what he’s promising for the future. … We’re living in an era where a determined minority is doing everything in its power to try to destroy our democracy for their own agenda.”

These “public” broadcasters know what Biden has said in his campaign speeches, and they’re fine with it. No one thinks it’s a lie or that it’s dangerous. Mercieca acknowledged, “All presidents run as heroes. It’s not uncommon. Joe Biden is running as a hero right now. He’s running as a hero to save democracy.” But she claimed, “Donald Trump is running as a different kind of hero.”

How so? Desjardins concluded the segment with this about Trump: “When he’s saying the situation is dire, when he’s saying democracy will end if I’m not elected, he is implying to some of his followers, violence may be OK.”

Biden is saying democracy will end if he’s not elected, but PBS can’t imagine his followers would ever believe “violence may be OK.” PBS makes “news” by Democrats, for Democrats. But it’s subsidized involuntarily by tens of millions of allegedly democracy-squashing Republicans.

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The post PBS ‘News’ Hounds OK With Biden’s Inflammatory Rhetoric appeared first on The Daily Signal.

NewsBusters Podcast: The Leftist Media Often Can't 'Get Religion'

As the media bring their leftist lens to the "culture wars" and religion in politics, they're prone to simplifying everything and only covering religion when it intrudes on the new orthodoxy of wokeness. Terry Mattingly operated the site GetReligion for 20 years, and he explains how he assesses the media's handling of religion stories. We know several things from years of study. First, the media report very few religion stories. Second, the religion stories they choose to do typically focus on when churches are interjecting into the political arena (which secular reporters don't like). Third, since reporters are generally not religiously observant people, they show their ignorance of internal church matters, and bored with controversies like Catholics struggling with the Traditional Latin Mass, or religious concepts like sin and repentance. Then we focus on some recent controversies. On Monday, the Vatican released a document with a strong critique of "gender theory" and what non-religious reporters call "gender-affirming surgery." Mattingly says the media embrace of nonsensical terms like this underline they are orthodox believers, but in an opposing orthodoxy to traditional religions. Mattingly suggests Pope Francis seems to side with Biden against those American Catholics who would propose excommunication.  This broad acceptance leads to Biden and the media presenting the president as a "devout Catholic." He may attend church, but he is dramatically rejecting his church's teaching on abortion and sexuality. We explore the clash between Easter Sunday and the Transgender Day of Visibility, which pro-Biden reporters wanted to dismiss that there was any ideological or theological clash in these celebrations. There was Donald Trump promoting a "God Bless the USA Bible," and how everyone knows his personal behavior can't be seen as "Christ-like." But reporters try to suggest that Trump can't pigeonhole Biden as an opponent of Christianity, since he attends church services.  Mattingly wraps up with 3 Big Questions for religious people facing a screen-obsessed culture, and he says churches need to engage with their flocks on these measures of your faith: 1. How do you spend your time? 2. How do you spend your money? 3. How do you make decisions? Enjoy the podcast below or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

PolitiFact's 'Truth-O-Meter' Has a Dramatic Democratic Party TILT

  For International Fact-Checking Day on April 2, Eric Litke, the leader of the USA Today fact-checking squad, asked who should be fact-checking the fact checkers? His answer: “Everyone.” He argued: “Proper fact-checking requires critical thinking, deep reporting, precise writing and an obsession with fairness. But most importantly, it requires transparency.” As a website, PolitiFact is fairly transparent, but studying its work does not lead everyone to find an “obsession with fairness.” Instead, we have repeatedly found in its articles the implication of the old Stephen Colbert joke that “reality has a liberal bias,” and therefore the liberals are routinely more honest and factual than the conservatives. A NewsBusters analysis of the first three months of this year's PolitiFact articles that evaluated a named politician or public official with a “Truth-O-Meter” ruling reveals that the site fact-checks Republicans more often than Democrats and is much harsher in its opinions of the GOP side. It broke down like this: REPUBLICANS (63 fact checks) True/Mostly True: 8 (12.7 percent) Half True: 8 (12.7 percent) Mostly False/False/ Pants On Fire: 47 (74.6 percent) In the month of March, it's especially emphatic: one on the True side, 15 on the False side. Now compare it to the other Party: DEMOCRATS (39 fact checks) True/Mostly True: 22 (56.4 percent) Half True: 7 (18 percent) Mostly False/False/Pants on Fire 10 (25.6 percent) Donald Trump was fact-checked 18 times (six in each month), and none were on True side, one was Half True, and the other 17 were Mostly False or worse, including four “Pants on Fire” rulings. Joe Biden was checked 12 times, and the dominant ruling was “Half True” (six of those, or 50 percent). There was a True, a Mostly True, two Mostly False, and two False. Biden drew zero “Pants on Fire” warnings, and has only seven of those in the entire history of PolitiFact going back to 2007. Trump currently has 187. These 2024 numbers do not include articles that they chose not to evaluate on their “Truth-O-Meter,” and that would include their ridiculous article on March 27 attempting to say it wasn’t “Pants on Fire” when Joe Biden referred to the collapsed bridge in Baltimore this way: “I’ve been over many, many times commuting from the state of Delaware either on a train or by car." PolitiFact helpfully relayed that the White House “clarified” it by saying that’s not what he meant. If the count was expanded to include conservative-leaning opinion leaders, there were nine blogs about them and all nine of them were ranked as False. That includes three on Elon Musk, two on Tucker Carlson, as well as one for Franklin Graham, Sean Hannity, Benny Johnson, and Jesse Watters. That would drive the conservative/Republican total to 56 of 72 fact checks being Mostly False or worse (77.7 percent). There were no named liberal opinion leaders in this first quarter. This is why we have an ongoing tag for "Fact-Checking the Fact Checkers." This doesn't mean we're hostile to Facts. It means the "fact checkers" are not "independent." They have all the same biases and messaging tendencies as liberal reporters. 

NPR Insider BOMBSHELL: We Lost Public Trust by Lurching Leftward, Refusing to Correct

There’s a blockbuster article at Bari Weiss’s website The Free Press today, headlined “I’ve Been at NPR for 25 Years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust.” Will the writer still be at NPR after this article makes the rounds? It’s Uri Berliner, a Senior Business Editor for the “public” radio giant. He begins by establishing that he's a standard NPR-type liberal, but he's concerned about the current tilt of NPR's audience:  Back in 2011, although NPR’s audience tilted a bit to the left, it still bore a resemblance to America at large. Twenty-six percent of listeners described themselves as conservative, 23 percent as middle of the road, and 37 percent as liberal. By 2023, the picture was completely different: only 11 percent described themselves as very or somewhat conservative, 21 percent as middle of the road, and 67 percent of listeners said they were very or somewhat liberal. We weren’t just losing conservatives; we were also losing moderates and traditional liberals.  Berliner thinks NPR used to be more balanced (we'll agree to disagree), but it all went awry with Trump, and collusion:  Schiff, who was the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, became NPR’s guiding hand, its ever-present muse. By my count, NPR hosts interviewed Schiff 25 times about Trump and Russia. During many of those conversations, Schiff alluded to purported evidence of collusion. The Schiff talking points became the drumbeat of NPR news reports. But when the Mueller report found no credible evidence of collusion, NPR’s coverage was notably sparse. Russiagate quietly faded from our programming.  Berliner also found this never-admit-error tendency with the Hunter Biden laptop (a "pure distraction") and the Covid lab-leak theory, which had too much "Wuhan flu" energy. One colleague on NPR's Science Desk "compared it to the Bush administration’s unfounded argument that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, apparently meaning we won’t get fooled again." But it gets really interesting when he turns to NPR CEO John Lansing and how he reacted after George Floyd's death in police custody in 2020:  “When it comes to identifying and ending systemic racism,” Lansing wrote in a companywide article, “we can be agents of change. Listening and deep reflection are necessary but not enough. They must be followed by constructive and meaningful steps forward. I will hold myself accountable for this.” And we were told that NPR itself was part of the problem. In confessional language he said the leaders of public media, “starting with me—must be aware of how we ourselves have benefited from white privilege in our careers. We must understand the unconscious bias we bring to our work and interactions. And we must commit ourselves—body and soul—to profound changes in ourselves and our institutions.” DEI broke out at NPR, complete with "affinity groups" for employees by race and sexuality, and the DEI lingo police:  In a document called NPR Transgender Coverage Guidance—disseminated by news management—we’re asked to avoid the term biological sex. (The editorial guidance was prepared with the help of a former staffer of the National Center for Transgender Equality.) The mindset animates bizarre stories—on how The Beatles and bird names are racially problematic, and others that are alarmingly divisive; justifying looting, with claims that fears about crime are racist; and suggesting that Asian Americans who oppose affirmative action have been manipulated by white conservatives. Berliner thought NPR didn't have enough fairness and balance of viewpoints. "Concerned by the lack of viewpoint diversity, I looked at voter registration for our newsroom. In D.C., where NPR is headquartered and many of us live, I found 87 registered Democrats working in editorial positions and zero Republicans. None." Click on how Berliner decided to crusade a little inside NPR:   So on May 3, 2021, I presented the findings at an all-hands editorial staff meeting. When I suggested we had a diversity problem with a score of 87 Democrats and zero Republicans, the response wasn’t hostile. It was worse. It was met with profound indifference. I got a few messages from surprised, curious colleagues. But the messages were of the “oh wow, that’s weird” variety, as if the lopsided tally was a random anomaly rather than a critical failure of our diversity North Star.  In a follow-up email exchange, a top NPR news executive told me that she had been “skewered” for bringing up diversity of thought when she arrived at NPR. So, she said, “I want to be careful how we discuss this publicly.” For years, I have been persistent. When I believe our coverage has gone off the rails, I have written regular emails to top news leaders, sometimes even having one-on-one sessions with them. On March 10, 2022, I wrote to a top news executive about the numerous times we described the controversial education bill in Florida as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill when it didn’t even use the word gay. I pushed to set the record straight, and wrote another time to ask why we keep using that word that many Hispanics hate—Latinx. On March 31, 2022, I was invited to a managers’ meeting to present my observations. Throughout these exchanges, no one has ever trashed me. That’s not the NPR way. People are polite. But nothing changes. So I’ve become a visible wrong-thinker at a place I love. It’s uncomfortable, sometimes heartbreaking. Even so, out of frustration, on November 6, 2022, I wrote to the captain of ship North Star—CEO John Lansing—about the lack of viewpoint diversity and asked if we could have a conversation about it. I got no response, so I followed up four days later. He said he would appreciate hearing my perspective and copied his assistant to set up a meeting. On December 15, the morning of the meeting, Lansing’s assistant wrote back to cancel our conversation because he was under the weather. She said he was looking forward to chatting and a new meeting invitation would be sent. But it never came. I won’t speculate about why our meeting never happened. Being CEO of NPR is a demanding job with lots of constituents and headaches to deal with. But what’s indisputable is that no one in a C-suite or upper management position has chosen to deal with the lack of viewpoint diversity at NPR and how that affects our journalism.  Berliner is holding out hope now that Lansing stepped down as CEO and NPR selected Katharine Maher (not a journalist) as the new CEO. Most of us have no optimism about a Chris Licht-ian move toward fairness. 

Column: PBS Brings Tar and Feathers for William F. Buckley

In the earlier decades of the Public Broadcasting Service, conservatives could feel that they had some fraction of a platform on William F. Buckley’s Firing Line. That PBS presence no doubt spurred the makers of the American Masters series to offer a two-hour program titled “The Incomparable Mr. Buckley.” In the opening credits, they typed in “Insufferable” first, then crossed it out. That word reflects the view of the political and financial base of PBS. Fans of Buckley might enjoy the video clips of Buckley jousting with the elites in the 20th century, but the style of this show was annoying, in that whenever experts were speaking, they were entirely off-screen. This documentary by Barak Goodman is neither a valentine to Buckley nor a fair-and-balanced recitation of his life and times. Conservatives are interviewed, but the final product carries the distinct odor of PBS’s liberal arrogance. In the tainted timeline of this program, Buckley triumphs with the election of Ronald Reagan and then the end of the Cold War, and then it’s all downhill for the troglodytes on the Right. Historian Geoffrey Kabaservice speaks over footage of Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh about conservatism being taken to an extreme as the Republicans took Congress in 1994. This is so PBS. In the Bill Buckley special, Newt and Rush channel "dark emotions and even hatreds" as the fuel for conservatism. Earth to PBS: Do you HONESTLY think the Left and the Democrats never churn up "dark emotions and even hatreds"? Have you ever watched Joy Reid? pic.twitter.com/iASnYl5xj3 — Tim Graham (@TimJGraham) April 6, 2024 Gingrich, he claims, “teaches Republicans to talk in a new way about Democrats being a source of infection and disease and disloyalty and decay.” Then there’s footage of Limbaugh making fun of the “ugly broads” of feminism. Over ominous music implying villainy, Kabaservice argues “Buckley did endorse Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh. At some level, he understood that politics requires emotion, as well as intellect, and maybe it requires dark emotions and even hatreds.” This would match the spirit of PBS’s Firing Line with Margaret Hoover, where the liberal Republican puts on guests like journalist Tim Alberta, who recently denounced the Limbaugh show as poisoning Christians with “an unceasing stream of venom and ugliness and hostility, antagonism, hatred.” Leftists have an annoying habit of thinking fear and loathing and ugliness and venom are somehow unique to the Republican half of America. They, by contrast, are apparently all sugar and spice and everything nice. Have they watched five minutes of The Reidout or The View? Both sides (and center-huggers like Kabaservice) are capable of love and hatred, comfort and fear, civility and incivility. But on PBS, they must locate Experts to slam Buckley for “tolerating and sometimes even encouraging some of the nastier, more extreme aspects on the Right…by the end, it was clearly the nastier forces had won out.” There’s no name on screen to figure out who’s the mudslinger here. PBS can never be judged for encouraging the nastier, more extreme aspects of the Left, because in their bubble, no one is ever nasty or extreme where they reside, in a perfect Eden of politics. Geoffrey Kabaservice returns for the final pitch on that “dark side” of the conservative movement, which was “white Americans” didn’t like “change” (because they were racists, apparently): “Buckley understood that it was part of his role to keep a lid on the dark energies that fueled the conservative movement, but not to repress them entirely, because it was those kind of resentments that he was drawing on that gave conservatism its power as a movement.” PBS’s American Masters on William F. Buckley Jr, who died in 2008, 'The Incomparable Mr. Buckley,' ended by blaming him for Jan. 6. Over Jan. 6 video: “What people, particularly in the Trump years, have come to realize more clearly is that there always was a dark side to the… pic.twitter.com/FBdvia6Phg — Brent Baker 🇺🇦 🇮🇱 (@BrentHBaker) April 6, 2024 Once again, PBS thinks the Democrats get their power from warm wellsprings of idealism and compassion. The Republicans get theirs from nurturing racism, sexism, homophobia, and xenophobia. Watching this program gives this conservative one overwhelming reaction: I want my involuntary contributions to PBS refunded. Insult me with someone else’s money.

Firing Lies: PBS ‘Documentary’ Tars, Feathers Onetime Host William F. Buckley

In the earlier decades of the Public Broadcasting Service, conservatives could feel that they had some fraction of a platform on William F. Buckley Jr.’s “Firing Line.”

That PBS presence no doubt spurred the makers of the “American Masters” series to offer a two-hour program titled “The Incomparable Mr. Buckley.” In the opening credits, they typed in “Insufferable” first, then crossed it out. That word reflects the view of the political and financial base of PBS.

Fans of Buckley might enjoy the video clips of Buckley jousting with the elites in the 20th century, but the style of this show was annoying in that whenever experts were speaking, they were entirely off-screen.

This documentary by Barak Goodman is neither a valentine to Buckley, nor a fair and balanced recitation of his life and times. Conservatives are interviewed, but the final product carries the distinct odor of PBS’ liberal arrogance.

In the tainted timeline of this program, Buckley triumphs with the election of Ronald Reagan and then the end of the Cold War, and then it’s all downhill for the troglodytes on the Right.

Historian Geoffrey Kabaservice speaks over footage of Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh about conservatism being taken to an extreme as the Republicans took Congress in 1994.

Gingrich, he claims, “teaches Republicans to talk in a new way about Democrats being a source of infection and disease and disloyalty and decay.” Then there’s footage of Limbaugh making fun of the “ugly broads” of feminism.

Over ominous music implying villainy, Kabaservice argues, “Buckley did endorse Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh. At some level, he understood that politics requires emotion, as well as intellect, and maybe it requires dark emotions and even hatreds.”

This would match the spirit of PBS’ “Firing Line with Margaret Hoover,” where the liberal Republican puts on guests like journalist Tim Alberta, who recently denounced the Limbaugh show as poisoning Christians with “an unceasing stream of venom and ugliness and hostility, antagonism, hatred.”

Leftists have an annoying habit of thinking fear and loathing and ugliness and venom are somehow unique to the Republican half of America. They, by contrast, are apparently all sugar and spice and everything nice.

Have they watched five minutes of “The Reidout” or “The View”? Both sides (and center-huggers like Kabaservice) are capable of love and hatred, comfort and fear, civility and incivility.

But on PBS, they must locate experts to slam Buckley for “tolerating and sometimes even encouraging some of the nastier, more extreme aspects on the Right … by the end, it was clear the nastier forces had won out.” There’s no name on screen to figure out who’s the mudslinger here.

PBS can never be judged for encouraging the nastier, more extreme aspects of the Left, because in their bubble, no one is ever nasty or extreme where they reside, in a perfect Eden of politics.

Kabaservice returns for the final pitch on that “dark side” of the conservative movement, which was “white Americans” didn’t like “change” (because they were racists, apparently): “Buckley understood that it was part of his role to keep a lid on the dark energies that fueled the conservative movement, but not to repress them entirely, because it was those kind of resentments that he was drawing on that gave conservatism its power as a movement.”

Once again, PBS thinks the Democrats get their power from warm wellsprings of idealism and compassion. The Republicans get theirs from nurturing racism, sexism, homophobia, and xenophobia.

Watching this program gives this conservative one overwhelming reaction: I want my involuntary contributions to PBS refunded. Insult me with someone else’s money.

COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM

The Daily Signal publishes a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Heritage Foundation.

The post Firing Lies: PBS ‘Documentary’ Tars, Feathers Onetime Host William F. Buckley appeared first on The Daily Signal.

NPR Insider Uri Berliner: We Downplayed Global 'Explosion of Antisemitic Hate'

Joseph Wulfsohn at Foxnews.com explored what NPR senior editor Uri Berliner wrote about Israel in his bombshell expose at The Free Press, run by former New York Times editorial writer Bari Weiss. This may be the biggest insider story since Bernard Goldberg wrote about CBS News in his book Bias. But in this case, Berliner is still inside NPR….at least, for now. First, he mentioned Israel on a list: “There’s an unspoken consensus about the stories we should pursue and how they should be framed. It’s frictionless—one story after another about instances of supposed racism, transphobia, signs of the climate apocalypse, Israel doing something bad, and the dire threat of Republican policies. It’s almost like an assembly line.” Then he was more specific: We have approached the Israel-Hamas war and its spillover onto streets and campuses through the ‘intersectional’ lens that has jumped from the faculty lounge to newsrooms. Oppressor versus oppressed. That’s meant highlighting the suffering of Palestinians at almost every turn while downplaying the atrocities of October 7, overlooking how Hamas intentionally puts Palestinian civilians in peril, and giving little weight to the explosion of antisemitic hate around the world. Berliner's page at NPR.org shows he helped with a 2022 story on how Adidas cut Trump-backing rapper Kanye West loose after anti-Semitic outbursts. But since October 7, NPR's been more aggressive in promoting the Council on American-Islamic Relations (and their claims of exploding Islamophobia) than the Anti-Defamation League, and both are firmly on the Left.  Wulfsohn reported Berliner went more in-depth on the Honestly podcast.  "To me, this is probably the most troubling thing because you know, in the weeks immediately following October 7, we saw Jewish students being locked into a library where pro-Palestinian protesters were banging on the door. We saw ‘Glory be to the martyrs’ projected on a school building. We saw posters of kidnapped children and elders being ripped down, and we really didn't cover this sort of stunning outburst of antisemitism for a number of weeks," Berliner told host Bari Weiss. "And the first story of any significance that we did on antisemitism was a story about pro-ceasefire Jews getting a bunch of crap from their Zionist relatives. And that was like the first story we did about antisemitism of any significance. And to me, it was like, ‘What is going on here?’" It appears Berliner was referring to a report published Oct. 28 titled "For some Jewish peace activists, demands for a ceasefire come at a personal cost." "This is one of the things I brought up with our senior news executives. And I will say, you know, when I bring these things up, everyone is polite. They say, 'It's a good point. I understand your perspective.’ But I don't think things changed," Berliner added. Berliner also mentioned his negative reaction when NPR colleagues started advocating for the terms preferred by what he vaguely called a "Middle Eastern journalism affinity group." We could guess the terms in question included "genocide," "terrorism," and "from the river to the sea." "I do remember on October 10, this was three days after the attack when Israel has not responded, this was in our union chat group," Berliner said. "We had one journalist saying, let's use this guidance from this Middle Eastern journalism affinity group about the language we use describing this war that's about to start. And I said no. We should not get our guidance from journalism advocacy groups. I don't think we should get our guidance from the ADL, no. We need to make our own decisions about how we cover this. I got a lot of pushback, people say, 'No, this isn't political. This is just using the precise language,' but it was a very tense exchange." This is what the Left does. Using "politically correct" or "sensitive" lingo "isn't political," it's "precise." 

NewsBusters Podcast: PolitiFact Is NOT 'Obsessed with Fairness'

When PolitiFact won the Pulitzer Prize (for national reporting) in 2008, the committee touted how they used "probing reporters and the power of the World Wide Web to examine more than 750 political claims, separating rhetoric from truth to enlighten voters." It's not that simple. It's not always so cut and dried to locate "truth." While USA Today fact-checking boss Eric Litke says fact-checkers should be "obsessed with fairness," our latest NewsBusters study of PolitiFact demonstrates a significant partisan aggression against Republican politicians. Named politicians in the GOP were tagged as "Mostly False" or worse in almost 75 percent of fact checks, while the Democrats landed on that False side only 26 percent of the time. Blogs tagging the Republicans as false (47) were almost five times as common as blogs tagging the Democrats as false (ten). PolitiFact's selection bias seems to operate along the lines of the old Stephen Colbert joke that "Reality has a liberal bias." Republicans drew more "fact checks" (63 to 39), but it started with a 20 to 1 disparity in the first three weeks in January. I called attention to it on Twitter, and suddenly they added five Democrat fact checks, including two for President Biden and two for Vice President Harris.  It evened out in February -- 17 Republican checks to 14 for Democrats -- but the tilt was egregious. Thirteen of 17 GOP fact checks were tagged "Mostly False" or worse, and only two on the True side. But eleven of the 14 Democrat checks were on the True side -- eight True, three Mostly True. No one should expect fact-checking groups to calibrate their checks so that the distribution of "False" claims is equally distributed. But what PolitiFact's doing here is the opposite: it's making sure the Party of Trump stands out as the less honest and trustworthy party. That doesn't "enlighten voters" as much as encourage voters to check the D. Enjoy the podcast below or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

PBS NewsHour Touts Film About Being a Trans Man Embedded with the Taliban

PBS NewsHour may have some sort of quota to meet for the number of supportive stories they must file for the transgender lobby. On April 4, they touted a new documentary available on Amazon Prime and Apple TV under the headline "Documentary captures journalist’s gender transition while embedded with Taliban." GEOFF BENNETT: The film Transition follows queer Australian filmmaker Jordan Bryon as he embeds with a Taliban unit he is documenting for The New York Times. But Bryon is undergoing his own transformation as a transgender man and has to keep his identity a secret. Bennett's co-anchor Amna Nawaz did the softball interview: NAWAZ: You begin documenting one group of Taliban fighters after the Taliban retake control of the country. And, at the same time, you are in the process of your own gender transition. At what point do you decide, I need to start turning the cameras the other way and start telling my own story as part of this? JORDAN BRYON: I started the medical transition like five months before the Taliban took over, and, objectively, as a filmmaker, I was thinking it could be interesting to document this process in a place like Afghanistan, and because I wanted to use my story to show the version of Afghanistan that I had experienced, which was a really beautiful, loving, welcoming Afghanistan. Monica Villamizar, the co-director of Bryon's film, explained how she got involved:  VILLAMIZAR: I had heard about him before as this Australian D.P., cinematographer who had really, really intimate access to the Taliban. So, in my imagination, I was already wondering, who is this guy and how did he get such intimate access? And that's when we met. And Jordan said, "Come here, but I'm not sure I want to do a film about myself." And I convinced him, because I really think it takes enormous courage to do something so intimate about your own process, but I really thought his story was extraordinary. Nawaz raised the notion that Bryon would have to leave (to make the film), and once the film was out, he couldn't go back. "I just wonder how you reflect on that decision now." BRYON: It was a big decision. I lived in Afghanistan for six-and-a-half years, and it's the most significant relationship I have ever had. It is an incredible place. And, as a filmmaker, it's a gift. But when Mon convinced me to make the film, I knew then that the film would mean that I would have to cut my ties with Afghanistan, most likely for the foreseeable future at least. And I'm hoping that the film adds value to the world and adds conversations to people that make it worth having to end that relationship for a while. Villamizar called their film a "love letter to journalism." It certainly sounds like a love letter to transgenderism. This would match our findings overall, that over a seven-month period last year, the PBS NewsHour guest count on LGBTQ issues was 19 to 1, and the "1" was lesbian tennis icon Billie Jean King volunteering her objections to men competing in women's sports.

REVEALED: Biden Team Pressures Snopes, USA Today Into More Favorable Spin

Every White House team seeks to pressure the media into more favorable coverage. It's only natural to discover Team Biden can have their way in influencing liberal operations to edit things they've already posted. But it usually happens on the "down low," where there's no proven connection. Thomas Catenacci at FoxNews.com reported on Thursday that Snopes.com changed a rating on of their fact checks from "Mixture" to "False" in an article headlined "Is Biden Administration Banning Gas Stoves Over Climate Change Concerns?" Nur Ibrahim of Snopes noted Richard Trumka Jr., a member of the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), said such a ban was "on the table." "This is a hidden hazard," Trumka told Bloomberg at the time. "Any option is on the table. Products that can’t be made safe can be banned." A month earlier, Trumka said regulating gas stoves needs to be a priority "whether it's drastically reducing emissions or banning gas stoves entirely" because of their climate and health impacts, CBS News reported. But Snopes, which originally gave its "mixture" rating as a result of Trumka's statements, changed the rating to "false," stating the CPSC is "not currently considering a ban on gas stoves." Snopes' updated article included additional comments from the CPSC and downplayed Trumka's earlier statement. However, Snopes only altered its article after pressure from the CPSC to do so, according to emails exchanged between CPSC and White House communications officials and obtained by watchdog group Functional Government Initiative (FGI) through an information request. "Sent over tough letter to this writer yesterday when the initial claim was rated as 'mixed,'" CPSC communications director Pamela Rucker Springs wrote in an email to White House assistant press secretary Michael Kikukawa Jan. 11, 2023, linking to the updated Snopes fact check. Kikukawa responded enthusiastically, saying the alteration would be "so helpful going forward." Snopes then tweeted it was "simply false" to presume that they changed it due to CPSC "pressure." It's obvious that they received an angry call, and then changed it. They just hope nobody connects the dots.  Jason Cohen at the Daily Caller (who interned with us) reported earlier that USA Today altered a Monday headline on Donald Trump’s current abortion stance after the Biden’s campaign blasted the outlet’s coverage. Trump said on Monday that states should craft their own abortion laws, which many, including USA Today, interpreted as opposition to a federal ban on killing the unborn. But the Biden campaign pressured the media with predictions Trump would end up signing a national ban.  “Trump kept his word to overturn Roe in his last term, and he will not rest until he has banned abortion across the entire country. Period,” Biden campaign Deputy Communications Director Brooke Goren said on the call. “We all know this and the coverage needs to reflect it.” These are the same people who are enraged when Republicans point out they support abortion at any time for any reason up until birth across America.  USA Today’s initial headline on David Jackson's report was “‘The will of the people’: Trump opposes national abortion ban; says states should decide.” Goren called that “particularly egregiously false.”  About two hours after the conference call, it was changed to “Donald Trump says states should decide abortion policy, avoids talk of a national ban” — without noting the change with an editor’s note. Mediaite first reported the change. “Our mission is to report the facts as accurately as possible,” a USA Today spokesperson told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “As part of our routine editorial process with breaking news, headline updates are not uncommon. In this instance, the headline was updated to more precisely reflect the story.” Updates aren't uncommon. What's uncommon is learning how Team Biden pressures "more precise reflections." This is about a partisan pro-abortion prediction of what Trump would do, not a fact. 

Column: 'Public' Radio Isn't Dedicated to the Masses

Is National Public Radio fair and balanced? Do they care what you think? NPR has a “Public Editor” to monitor listener complaints and concerns, but as we all know, the majority of their listeners are going to complain they’re not “progressive” enough. In 2021, Public Editor Kelly McBride appeared on Brian Stelter’s CNN podcast to praise NPR’s decision to allow their journalists to go to (leftist) public protests so they can “bring their full humanity to work with them.” When Stelter asked about NPR’s critics, McBride dismissed any conservative complaints about a leftist tilt because they are not “genuinely interested in improving NPR.” McBride claimed her job was to coach NPR “to achieve its own internally stated goals. It doesn’t help to be magnifying disingenuous criticism.” To balance NPR is to harm NPR? NPR senior editor Uri Berliner wrote a bombshell expose for the Free Press website, chronicling NPR’s blatant bias on subjects from Russian collusion conspiracy theories to the Hunter Biden laptop. NPR didn’t report negatively on Donald Trump, they sought to “damage or topple Trump’s presidency.” Is McBride going to find that this internally stated criticism isn’t worth considering? NPR media reporter David Folkenflik countered with an official word salad from NPR chief news executive Edith Chapin rejecting Berliner’s critique: "We're proud to stand behind the exceptional work that our desks and shows do to cover a wide range of challenging stories," she wrote. "We believe that inclusion — among our staff, with our sourcing, and in our overall coverage — is critical to telling the nuanced stories of this country and our world." “Inclusion” of conservative viewpoints is something NPR refuses to do. Folkenflik has been an NPR media reporter since 2004, and he has never interviewed me or anyone else at the Media Research Center for one of his reports on media performance, including in his multitude of hostile stories on Fox News.  But Folkenflik recently filed several stories from fervently anti-Israel leftists at The Intercept complaining that The New York Times was too pro-Israel in reporting about sexual assaults committed by Hamas terrorists on October 7, 2023. You can complain from the Left that Hamas is presented as too violent, but you can’t complain from the right that Republicans are painted as Jim Crow racists or fascists. CNN media reporter Oliver Darcy wasn’t as calm as Folkenflik. He hated this Berliner critique from the start. In his April 9 newsletter, he skeptically stated the idea that NPR is "supposedly embracing" a progressive view, and Berliner "felt more aligned with the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal than NPR." So Darcy wants to deny NPR's identity is on the Left, and then he signals that it is. Darcy expressed disgust that “Fox News quickly pounced” on the article, and it may lead to a “Jim Jordan type” to hold an oversight hearing on NPR tilt. Horrors! On April 10, Darcy was at it again. Berliner's expose on NPR is "nothing short but a massive gift to the right," whose top priority is "vilifying the news media." This is weird coming from Darcy, who routinely vilifies Fox News as fake news and argues it should be deplatformed by cable companies. Freedom of speech does not mean “freedom of reach,” Darcy and Stelter have argued. On a daily basis, taxpayer-funded NPR is nothing short of a massive gift to the Left, pumping out progressive propaganda to over 1,000 stations.  Because it has “public” in its branding, too many Americans still think it’s a service to everyone…. and not just to the Democrats who insure the millions keep flowing.

NewsBusters Podcast: Nina Totenberg Radio Exposed Again as Leftist Den

This week, National Public Radio senior editor Uri Berliner sent shock waves through their staff by going public with an article on The Free Press website about how they lost the public's trust due to an explicit animus against Donald Trump. Since Trump entered politics, the public radio network's audience has become even more dominated by very liberal Americans. But it didn't start with Trump. NewsBusters can tell you NPR has demonstrated a leftist bent from the beginning. NPR legal reporter Nina Totenberg destroyed the Douglas Ginsburg nomination to the Supreme Court in 1987, then tried again with Clarence Thomas in 1991. This animus against conservatives didn't kick in suddenly in 2015. Totenberg, both on NPR and on talk shows, brazenly represented the leftist tilt of NPR, wishing out loud that Sen. Jesse Helms (or one of his grandchildren) would get AIDS, and proclaiming after 9/11 that she was ashamed of America when news broke that terrorism suspects were held in secret CIA prisons. There were other outrages over the years on NPR, but Totenberg was the "face" of left-wing activism. NPR executives tried to claim that "inclusion" of differing views is an NPR value -- but anyone who listens to NPR on a regular basis quickly figures out that this is a taxpayer-funded liberal sandbox. There's no real room for conservative views. When Republicans appear, NPR staffers are on the attack. CNN's Oliver Darcy complained that Uri Berliner's article demanding more viewpoint diversity on NPR was a "massive gift to the Right." On a daily basis, taxpayer-funded NPR is nothing short of a massive gift to the Left, pumping out progressive propaganda to over 1,000 stations.  Because it has “public” in its branding, too many Americans still think it’s fair and balanced and a service to everyone, which only signals they're not paying enough attention to the product. Enjoy the podcast below, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

WSJ SCOOP: New York Times Bosses 'Seek to Quash Rebellion in the Newsroom'

Wall Street Journal news-industry reporter Alexandra Bruell broke a story on Friday about managers at The New York Times struggling with the intolerance of new employees who are "applying ideological purity tests" to stories on "sensitive topics like the transgender community and social justice." Those kids coming out of college don't bow to the wisdom of their elders who may still want to portray themselves as neutral and independent of ideological camps. The Bruell story was headlined: New York Times Bosses Seek to Quash Rebellion in the Newsroom After internal upheaval over coverage of sensitive topics like the Israel-Gaza war, management renews emphasis on independence and neutrality Bruell began with the internal squabble over Hamas weaponizing sexual-assault on October 7, which ended up being a multiple-story obsession of NPR media reporter David Folkenflik after someone working on The Daily podcast (which airs on hundreds of NPR stations) complained to The Intercept, a radical-left site. “The idea that someone dips into that process in the middle, and finds something that they considered might be interesting or damaging to the story under way, and then provides that to people outside, felt to me and my colleagues like a breakdown in the sort of trust and collaboration that’s necessary in the editorial process,” Executive Editor Joe Kahn said in an interview. “I haven’t seen that happen before.”   It's a little funny when newspapers who routinely rely on leakers have to deal with internal leakers. They don't wonder if it causes "a breakdown of trust and collaboration that's necessary in the governing process." But it's also amusing that Kahn is aware that America's top colleges are sending him employees that think neutrality is an objectionable concept: Kahn noted that the organization has added a lot of digital-savvy workers who are skilled in areas like data analytics, design and product engineering but who weren’t trained in independent journalism. He also suggested that colleges aren’t preparing new hires to be tolerant of dissenting views. “Young adults who are coming up through the education system are less accustomed to this sort of open debate, this sort of robust exchange of views around issues they feel strongly about than may have been the case in the past,” he said, adding that the onus is on the Times to instill values like independence in its employees. Bruell noted some pitched battles over transgender issues, from an internal Slack forum over a trans-related opinion piece by Times opinion columnist Pamela Paul to an open letter signed by more than 1,000 contributors over the article “The Battle Over Gender Therapy,” and the framing of the article “When Students Change Gender Identity, and Parents Don’t Know.”  She also recalled how editorial-page editor James Bennet and science reporter Donald McNeil were let go after internal staff turmoil. Finally, we had to love what publisher Arthur Gregg Sulzberger thinks the "emotion-free" stories are:  Kahn said the Times’ national desk now is bigger and more equipped to cover an unprecedented election. The Times will also be more committed to covering misinformation in the 2024 election, with a team of eight to nine people, he said. In January, Sulzberger shared his thoughts on covering Trump during a visit to the Washington bureau. It was imperative to keep Trump coverage emotion-free, he told staffers, according to people who attended. He referenced the Times story, “Why a Second Trump Presidency May Be More Radical Than His First,” by Charlie Savage, Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman, as a good example of fact-based and fair coverage. 

New NPR CEO Haunted by Woke, Anti-Trump Tweets As Editor Exposes Bias

New NPR CEO Katherine Maher tried to rally the troops on Friday with a memo to staff that vaguely attacked NPR senior editor Uri Berliner's expose of the taxpayer-funded network's viewpoint diversity. She never actually mentioned Berliner, or seemed to engage with his overall argument. Instead, she vaguely expressed insult at Berliner noting the existence of a pile of identity groups among the employees: "Questioning whether our people are serving our mission with integrity, based on little more than the recognition of their identity, is profoundly disrespectful, hurtful, and demeaning." Maher just unfurled rah-rah "we have the best people" verbiage: "This is the work of our people, and our people represent America, our irreducibly complex nation. Given the very real challenges of covering the myriad perspectives, motivations, and interests of a nation of more than 330 million very different people, we succeed through our diversity. This is a bedrock institutional commitment, hard-won, and hard-protected." “Our people represent America, our irreducibly complex nation,” she added. “We succeed through our diversity.” No. NPR doesn't not represent the simplest diversity, letting conservatives have a voice. This is why Berliner turned from internal conversations to public expression. In the end, Maher just supports more internal talk, not an engagement with "the enemy," the conservatives who are shut out. She announced they were "establishing quarterly NPR Network-wide editorial planning and review meetings, as a complement to our other channels for Member station engagement." The New York Post reports that Maher's history of woke tweets before she joined NPR is now haunting this new controversy: In January, when Maher was announced as NPR’s new leader, The Post revealed her penchant for parroting the progressive line on social media — including bluntly biased Twitter posts like “Donald Trump is a racist,” which she wrote in 2018. This wouldn't hurt her with a hiring panel at NPR. It would certainly be a plus!  “I mean, sure, looting is counterproductive,” Maher wrote on May 31, 2020. “But it’s hard to be mad about protests not prioritizing the private property of a system of oppression founded on treating people’s ancestors as private property.” (This perfectly matches a network whose "Code Switch" team touted the book In Defense of Looting and lauded a professor saying anti-police riots should be described as "rebellions.") The next day, she lectured her 27,000 followers on “white silence.” “White silence is complicity,” she scolded. “If you are white, today is the day to start a conversation in your community.” NPR is also the network that took the founders of Black Lives Matter announcing they were "Marxist-trained" and attempted to argue that they weren't really pushing communism.  The Post noted Maher came to NPR from the Wikimedia Foundation. "Maher earned a bachelor’s degree in Middle Eastern and Islamic studies from New York University, according to her LinkedIn account, and grew up in Wilton, Conn. — a town that her mother, Ceci Maher, now represents as a Democratic state senator."

Fox News Host Notes 'MSM' Skips NPR Hubbub, Would Leap On Fox Insider Expose

On Sunday's MediaBuzz show on the Fox News Channel, host Howard Kurtz brought on ex-NPR reporter Juan Williams to recall his own in-house experience with the radical left inside NPR. Kurtz also noted most of the "mainstream" media have skipped any mention of the hubbub over NPR senior editor Uri Berliner's expose.  KURTZ: You know, The New York Times waited the two days and then a did a sort of 'NPR in Turmoil' piece but didn't get into any of the specifics. Nothing in The Washington Post, nothing at Politico, nothing on air at CNN or MSNBC. Doesn't that prove Berliner's point? If this had been a senior Fox person speaking out, I think it would have been covered nine seconds later! WILLIAMS: Oh, I don't think there's any question, I can tell you that.  The liberal dissidents inside Fox News turn to anti-Fox authors like Brian Stelter or Michael Wolff instead of going public, and remain anonymous until they can dish to the next Fox-hater who comes along.  Williams argued that the media, from NPR to Fox, identify with an audience, so NPR can boast they're not for the "Big Lie" (like Fox faced in court), but the crusading for your audience against that can lead to a "blindness." So NPR can't admit that Hunter Biden's laptop wasn't entirely fictional or a "pure distraction." Earlier, Kurtz recounted how Williams was forced out of NPR in 2010 for admitting he was scared of Muslims on airplanes on Fox's O'Reilly Factor, which led Williams to write a book titled Muzzled: The Assault on Honest Debate. Williams underlined this was before Trump. WILLIAMS: I think what we've seen time and again at NPR is an insulated cadre of people, liberals, I think, for the most part who think they are right-thinking, they're well educated people, that they think they're good people, and it can lead, I think, to a sort of arrogance.  So someone like me, I think you've known me a long time. I'm no flaming conservative, but I am too conservative a black guy for their taste. They would say, well, why is he willing to hear this out, to talk to a Justice Thomas, to deal with black conserv -- they don't -- For them it was, like, that doesn't fit with advocacy groups who say we need to do more in terms of black American experience. You know, obviously, I've written, I think, best-selling books about the black experience in America. But it didn't fit with their understanding.  Kurtz noted that NPR now has a database to log in all of their guests by race, gender, and sexual orientation, which suggests a DEI database of experts. WILLIAMS: I think this has gone to an extreme but, again, you know, there's just an interesting angle here which is it's conservatives at NPR battling against liberals.  KURTZ: Berliner voted against Trump twice. He's not a right-winger.  WILLIAMS: Right.. What you have is sort of, liberals against more people trying to prove they're more liberal. That's the very conversation in that very niche media environment. And I think this is highly regrettable because from the kind of journalistic experience I've had, you want people challenging ideas, people pushing you so that you're doing your best at not only getting the facts, or but presenting a balanced picture to the audience.  Even back when Williams came out with his book on being muzzled, NPR executives forwarded a, well, "Big Lie" that NPR was ideologically diverse. NPR media reporter David Folkenflik did a story quoting NPR executive Margaret Low Smith bizarrely claiming "NPR is a stunningly open-minded place. We're deeply encouraging and in fact appreciative of different points of view. Everybody knows that we apply journalistic rigor to absolutely every story we tell." Insert laugh track! 

NewsBusters Podcast: Harsh Bill Maher Bluntly Backs Child Murder

On his Real Time show on HBO, Bill Maher bluntly agreed that abortion is murder, and he favors it, since there are eight million people on Earth already. As they brought up Arizona and how that’s going to be a disaster for Republicans, Maher described pro-life Americans this way: “They think it’s murder, and it kind of is. I’m just okay with that. I am. There [are] 8 billion people in the world, I’m sorry, we won’t miss you. That’s my position on that.” British journalists Gillian Tett and Piers Morgan told Maher his view was "harsh." They agree on the principle, but wish he'd be less honest. Journalists and comedians scream "False" when people tell the truth about Democrats favoring abortion until birth. Our abortion debate constantly obsesses over what we might call the pro-life extreme, that abortion is murder, whatever the reason, at whichever month it occurs. So the establishment can NOT focus the debate on the pro-abortion extreme – when is it too late for an abortion? Jake Tapper and Kristen Welker and even Saturday Night Live fake-news anchor Colin Jost insisted it was "false" that Democrats support abortion up until birth, and that an abortion late in pregnancy never, ever happens. This avoids the obvious point: what limits do Democrats support? None. Cue the Democrat platform of 2020: Democrats are committed to protecting and advancing reproductive health, rights, and justice. We believe unequivocally, like the majority of Americans, that every woman should be able to access high-quality reproductive health care services, including safe and legal abortion. We will repeal the Title X domestic gag rule and restore federal funding for Planned Parenthood, which provides vital preventive and reproductive health care for millions of people, especially low-income people, and people of color, and LGBTQ+ people, including in underserved areas. Democrats oppose and will fight to overturn federal and state laws that create barriers to reproductive health and rights. We will repeal the Hyde Amendment, and protect and codify the right to reproductive freedom. [We condemn acts of violence, harassment, and intimidation of reproductive health providers, patients, and staff.] We will address the discrimination and barriers that inhibit meaningful access to reproductive health care services, including those based on gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, race, income, disability, geography, and other factors. Democrats oppose restrictions on medication abortion care that are inconsistent with the most recent medical and scientific evidence and that do not protect public health. And NPR's new CEO sends a love note to staff -- you're just the best! -- without engaging with insider Uri Berliner's eye-opening account of an utter lack of viewpoint diversity and any unwillingness to consider any offering of a conservative counterpoint in so-called "public" radio. It makes it easy to mock their silly nightly insistence they're about All Things Considered. Enjoy the podcast below, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

NPR Internal Critic Uri Berliner SUSPENDED Without Pay for Going Public on Bias Complaints

In his latest company-man report, NPR media reporter David Folkenflik revealed that NPR senior editor Uri Berliner was suspended without pay for five days (beginning Friday) for deciding his years of internal advocacy for more fairness and balance in NPR's coverage had been fruitless, so he went public.  Folkenflik disclosed that Berliner, as a senior editor for Business, had edited many of his stories, and shared with him the formal rebuke from management: In presenting Berliner's suspension Thursday afternoon, the organization told the editor he had failed to secure its approval for outside work for other news outlets, as is required of NPR journalists. It called the letter a "final warning," saying Berliner would be fired if he violated NPR's policy again. Berliner is a dues-paying member of NPR's newsroom union but says he is not appealing the punishment.... In the rebuke, NPR did not cite Berliner's appearance on Chris Cuomo's NewsNation program last Tuesday night, for which NPR gave him the green light. (NPR's chief communications officer told Berliner to focus on his own experience and not share proprietary information.) The NPR letter also did not cite his remarks to the New York Times, which ran its article mid-afternoon Thursday, shortly before the reprimand was sent. So that means the article for The Free Press and his interview on their podcast is what's being punished, and specifically for reporting the fact that 67 percent of NPR's current audience identifies as liberal or very liberal. In rebuking Berliner, NPR said he had also publicly released proprietary information about audience demographics, which it considers confidential. He said those figures "were essentially marketing material. If they had been really good, they probably would have distributed them and sent them out to the world." Berliner repeated his message to Folkenflik that a taxpayer-funded news outlet has a special obligation for fairness:  "I love NPR and feel it's a national trust," Berliner says. "We have great journalists here. If they shed their opinions and did the great journalism they're capable of, this would be a much more interesting and fulfilling organization for our listeners." Folkenflik then cited CEO Katherine Maher's pom-pom memo celebrating NPR's employees and without mentioning Berliner by name, she claimed he offered "a criticism of our people on the basis of who we are" and not the content of their journalism. Berliner took great exception to that, saying she had denigrated him. He said that he supported diversifying NPR's workforce to look more like the U.S. population at large. She did not address that in a subsequent private exchange he shared with me for this story. (An NPR spokesperson declined further comment.) Berliner also criticized the collection of Maher's woke tweets that surfaced before NPR hired her:  In an interview with me later on Monday, Berliner said the social media posts demonstrated Maher was all but incapable of being the person best poised to direct the organization. "We're looking for a leader right now who's going to be unifying and bring more people into the tent and have a broader perspective on, sort of, what America is all about," Berliner said. "And this seems to be the opposite of that." Folkenflik's piece was balanced by a mention of conservative scholar Christopher Rufo, and paragraphs of fierce criticism of Berliner from other NPR journalists:  Morning Edition host Michel Martin told me some colleagues at the network share Berliner's concerns that coverage is frequently presented through an ideological or idealistic prism that can alienate listeners. "The way to address that is through training and mentorship," says Martin, herself a veteran of nearly two decades at the network who has also reported for The Wall Street Journal and ABC News. "It's not by blowing the place up, by trashing your colleagues, in full view of people who don't really care about it anyway." Several NPR journalists told me they are no longer willing to work with Berliner as they no longer have confidence that he will keep private their internal musings about stories as they work through coverage. "Newsrooms run on trust," NPR political correspondent Danielle Kurtzleben tweeted last week, without mentioning Berliner by name. "If you violate everyone's trust by going to another outlet and sh--ing on your colleagues (while doing a bad job journalistically, for that matter), I don't know how you do your job now." ....NPR Investigative reporter Chiara Eisner wrote in a comment for this story: "Minorities do not all think the same and do not report the same. Good reporters and editors should know that by now. It's embarrassing to me as a reporter at NPR that a senior editor here missed that point in 2024." Google these critics and NewsBusters and you'll see they are firmly on the Left on the job.

Netflix to Air Documentary on 'Extraordinary' Dan Rather, the 'True American Hero'

Dan Rather tweeted "I am humbled and honored to share some exciting news.  A lot of very talented people have produced a documentary about this reporter’s life." A puff piece movie honoring Rather with actors wasn't enough. Now there's a gushy Rather "nonfiction" film. Variety's Michael Schneider set the stage:  Netflix has set Rather, the documentary about veteran journalist Dan Rather‘s landmark career in news for an April 24 premiere on the streamer. The feature utilizes the story of Rather’s life on television to also explore the evolution of broadcast journalism, the troubles a free press now faces, along with the slide of American society from hard-fought advances in social justice and democratic freedoms. The doc first premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival last June. Film producer and director Frank Marshall, who founded Amblin Entertainment with his wife Kathleen Kennedy and with Steven Spielberg, is at the helm: “This is a very personal project for me,” Marshall said in a statement. “When you look at Dan’s body of work, it’s remarkable. The collection of stories he has covered, it’s my history too, and the history of our country over the past 60 years. I’ve always admired his passion, his intelligence, his humor and his commitment to the truth and it’s been an honor to get to know Dan and tell his extraordinary story.” Rather is set to appear at a screening in Austin at an Alamo Drafthouse there, and Alamo Drafthouse founder Tim League is also a huge Rather fan:  “Watching Rather, I saw a North Star of what American journalism is meant to be, driven by a thirst for the truth and the desire to share that truth with the people,” League said. “We are honored to have the opportunity to screen this wonderful film and honor a true American hero.” This is the closest Variety came to Rather's fake-National-Guard-documents scandal, and it's not close: "With unrestricted access to Rather, the film takes on the highs and lows of his time at CBS News, including his controversial exit as CBS Evening News anchor." There was no mention of George W. Bush or the National Guard. The IMDb page lists who will appear in the film, in addition to fiercely protective daughter Robin Rather: it's Samantha Bee, Douglas Brinkley, Andy Cohen, Mark Cuban, Soledad O'Brien, Shepard Smith, and Margaret Sullivan. Former CBS News colleagues Tom Bettag and Howard Stringer are also on the list.  A Michael Schneider story from last year suggested in its headline that the film "Restores Some Justice to His Lengthy Career." A "brilliant career," oozed the subhead. It had more gush from Marshall about his "truth" telling.

Column: NPR Morning Star Steve Inskeep Lamely Swats at Their Suspended Dissident

National Public Radio senior editor Uri Berliner has been suspended for his unauthorized critique of the insular liberal bias of his network. NPR star and Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep took to his Substack blog to slam Berliner’s article as “filled with errors and omissions.” “His colleagues have had a rich dialogue about his mistakes,” Inskeep crowed, and dropped the bomb that it was “an article that discredited itself.” For example, Inskeep declared an error in that Berliner found in D.C. voter records that NPR had 87 registered Democrats and no registered Republicans. When he was asked about Berliner at the San Antonio Book Festival, he says he told them “I am a prominent member of the newsroom in Washington. If Uri told the truth, then I could only be a registered Democrat. I held up my voter registration showing I am registered with ‘no party’. Some in the crowd gasped. Uri had misled them.” Berliner didn't address if anyone was registered as “no party.” He did write there were zero Republicans. Did Inskeep refute that? No. Several NPR veterans harrumphed they registered as “no party,” just as left-wing journalists will tell pollsters they are “independents.” Inskeep wrote, “While it’s widely believed that most mainstream journalists are Democrats, I’ve had colleagues that I was pretty sure are conservative (I don’t ask).” That rebuts Berliner how? When Inskeep challenged Berliner personally on his claim that the editing process was “frictionless,” he said Berliner acknowledged they have newsroom debates, but “the real test is what we broadcast or publish.” Inskeep leaves out what Berliner wrote about – that they put out a lot of stories on “supposed racism, transphobia, signs of the climate apocalypse, Israel doing something bad, and the dire threat of Republican policies.” Anyone who listens to NPR programs gets an earful of those. You have to laugh when Inskeep’s best defense is “everybody else did it, too.” He admits NPR did not report on the Hunter Biden laptop, but Berliner “leaves out the context: Other organizations also held off on the story because of doubts about the laptop’s authenticity. It wasn’t confirmed until much later.”   Now who’s engaged in “omissions”? NPR not only refused to report on the laptop, their top news executive Terence Samuel openly boasted “we don't want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don't want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions.” That implies they weren’t going to touch this story, like it was a decaying rat corpse in the gutter. Samuel signaled the same contempt on the horribly named evening newscast All Things Considered in June of 2021, suggesting to anchor Mary Louise Kelly they should seek the "whole truth," but exclude the liars: “It's not a matter of representing just opposite voices, but more voices and excluding the voices that are just pure disinformation.” After those “other organizations” confirmed the laptop contents were real, nothing changed. Kelly brought on Samuel in 2023 to proclaim Trump would not be allowed to speak on NPR live as he was indicted because he was such a liar, but Kelly (as in 2021) didn’t bring up Hunter’s laptop. But the most ridiculous line in Inskeep’s critique is claiming Berliner advocates “viewpoint diversity,” but he didn’t embrace it in his article, which spurred all his “errors and omissions.” If NPR is so committed to viewpoint diversity, would Inskeep agree to debate Berliner on air at NPR for an hour or two? Probably not. NPR hasn’t said one word on air about Berliner’s complaint.

Woke New NPR CEO Katherine Maher Donated to Democrats Like Stacey Abrams

Conservative Twitter is having a ball with woke new NPR CEO Katherine Maher's tweets drew a New York Times story (which isn't in the paper). The headline was gentle, about criticism over "Tweets Supporting Progressive Causes." Benjamin Mullin noticed one showed Maher wearing a "hat with the logo for the Biden presidential campaign." (He left out the Covid mask). He also noticed this colorful tweet:  "Had a dream where Kamala and I were on a road trip in an unspecified location, sampling and comparing nuts and baklava from roadside stands. Woke up very hungry." NPR spokeswoman Isabel Lara rebutted Maher "was not working in journalism at the time and was exercising her First Amendment right to express herself like any other American citizen." Now she is "fully committed to NPR's code of ethics and the independence of NPR's newsroom." Maher repeated that line: NPR is independent, beholden to no party, and without commercial interests." But just like her tweets, our search of Maher's campaign contributions show she's a fan of the Democratic Party:  -- In 2017, $1,500 to former congressman Tom Perriello in an unsuccessful run for governor of Virginia. -- In 2018, $500 to Matthew Brown in an unsuccessful run for governor of Rhode Island. -- In 2020, it was a year for women of color: $275 (in 11 donations of $25) to Jennifer Carroll Foy in an unsuccessful run for governor of Virginia, $100 to MSNBC pundit Maya Wiley in an unsuccessful run for mayor of New York City, and $500 to the “Fair Fight PAC” of election-denying leftist Stacey Abrams, who still thinks she won the governor's race in Georgia in 2018. That's back when election denial was cool in Democrat media circles. Mullin's story ended with Maher at a "town hall-style meeting" with NPR employees, and naturally, she was asked about NBC's ill-fated decision to give a contributor slot to former RNC chair Ronna McDaniel, who was too close to election deniers. Maher proclaimed “I think that the most effective way that I have seen this play out is, if you’re bringing somebody into a story that is pushing a deliberate distortion, be extraordinarily well-prepared to push back and very prepared with the information necessary, the irreducible facts.” Take that, Stacey Abrams? PS: Christopher Rufo appeared on Fox News to underline Maher's wokeness:  Fox's Jesse Watters brings on Chris Rufo to describe NPR CEO Katherine Maher's old tweets: "It is the most vapid left-wing propaganda imaginable....It's like Mad Libs for Left-Wing women." I hope @davidfolkenflik can realize if this sounds one-sided....what is NPR? pic.twitter.com/d9NntyCTR5 — Tim Graham (@TimJGraham) April 17, 2024

BREAKING: NPR Dissenter Uri Berliner Resigns After Suspension, Attacks

Shortly before 11 am on Wednesday, NPR senior business editor Uri Berliner resigned at about the time his suspension without pay was going to end. The most important part was where he took on woke new NPR CEO Katherine Maher: "I cannot work in a newsroom where I am disparaged by a new CEO whose divisive views confirm the very problems at NPR I cite in my essay at The Free Press." Maher's pom-pom memo to NPR staff (posted publicly on NPR.org) claimed Berliner (who wasn't named) was attacking NPR staff not for what they report, but "who they are."   My resignation letter to NPR CEO @krmaher pic.twitter.com/0hafVbcZAK — Uri Berliner (@uberliner) April 17, 2024   While many of us thought Berliner's days were numbered when his essay was posted, it would be a test of NPR's intolerance to see if Berliner could remain. He could not.  Earlier on Twitter/X, Berliner reposted this from the New York Times media reporter:   scoop: NPR's top editor said in a meeting with the new CEO and show hosts Wednesday that she didn't want to make Uri Berliner a "martyr."https://t.co/p6iJBXmVkL We're told that everyone at the network is mindful of the disaster created by Juan Williams' firing in 2010. — Ben Mullin (@BenMullin) April 11, 2024   "Martyr" is too strong a word, but it is an exhibit of their complete unwillingness to listen to a critique on fairness and balance and groupthink and wokeness. It begs for a congressional hearing with Berliner and with Maher, maybe shoulder to shoulder.  And Berliner reposted this from former Bush staffer Peter Wehner:   People on the right who are praising NPR's Uri Berliner for his courage - and he is courageous to speak out - are in many cases the same people who have been too intimidated/cowardly to speak out against MAGA and the moral depravity of Donald Trump. Just sayin'. — Peter Wehner (@Peter_Wehner) April 10, 2024   Berliner voted against Trump twice. But voting for Democrats isn't enough in this taxpayer-funded sandbox for leftists. You have to be in sync with all the leftist lingo and the interest groups that push it, from GLAAD to CAIR. 

NewsBusters Podcast: NPR Says Bye-Bye Berliner, Hello to Censoring CEO

After stirring up a hornet's nest at NPR about a leftist tilt, senior editor Uri Berliner resigned Wednesday, but that doesn't mean NPR types can refute his argument on their seemingly inevitable insularity and intolerance. New CEO Katherine Maher insulted Berliner as attacking staffers for "who they are," when he was criticizing them for engaging in identity politics first, not journalism. Berliner announced "I cannot work in a newsroom where I am disparaged by a new CEO whose divisive views confirm the very problems at NPR I cite in my essay at the Free Press." Maher's tweets show she supports race-based reparations, rioting, and the Black Lives Matter movement. She believes "America is addicted to white supremacy." She talks about "cis white mobility privilege" without smirking. She won't have children because "the planet is literally burning." At NPR, these tweets are not disqualifying -- they're qualifying. Berliner warns against journalists identifying with a "tribe" -- race, gender, religion, or sexual preference. Maher embraces racial tribalism, beginning with a pledge to overcome her own white privilege. We looked at campaign donation records and found Katherine Maher gave about $3,000 in campaign donations in the Trump years (all to Democrats). The one that resonated most was a 2020 contribution of $500 to "Fair Fight PAC," a charity of left-wing election denier Stacey Abrams of Georgia. Election denial is cool -- when Democrats do it. In her previous job, Maher went hunting for "misinformation" was about stifling any information that seemed pleasing to her hate object, Donald Trump. At Wikipedia she refused to tolerate "misinformation" on COVID before they knew much about it. So much was unknown, and yet they had the arrogance to shut down narratives that they thought Trump would be pushing. Enjoy the podcast below, or wherever you listen to podcasts.   

Column: Do Celebrities Have Deeper Liberal Thoughts?

When Laura Ingraham wrote her book Shut Up and Sing in 2003, the Left didn’t read the book as much as overreact to the title. The title implied something important. While celebrities gain a “platform” they feel compelled to use, do their opinions reflect any expertise? Or is fame more important than logic? Celebrities often lead with emotion, and expect to cause an emotional reaction. They don’t expect “independent fact-checkers” to examine their emotions. Exhibit A is an April 15 interview of Hillary Clinton on The Kelly Clarkson Show. Pop singer Clarkson brought up an Arizona judge ruling that an abortion ban originally passed in 1864 could stand. "Did you ever think in your lifetime we would see that happen?" Clarkson asked. "It's just insane to me the thinking that went on in 1864. It's a very different world. We know a lot more now. We are going backwards." Hillary agreed: “It is horrifying in every way.” She said “there’s a cruelty to it.” No one gets to suggest that maybe there’s something cruel or horrifying about ripping apart the body of an unborn baby. Clarkson said she was hospitalized both times she was pregnant. "I literally asked God, this is a real thing, to just take me and my son in the hospital for the second time, because I was like, 'It's the worst thing,'" she said, growing emotional. “It was my decision, and I’m so glad I did it. I love my babies, but to make someone... You don’t realize how hard it is. The fact that you would take that away from someone, that can literally kill them. The fact that if they’re raped by their family member and they have to — it’s just like insane to me.” Emotion dominates, realities don’t intrude. Pregnancy from rape (especially from a family member) is uncommon. The abortion lobbyists always play up the rare cases, but the dead baby is the “solution” in every deadly “choice.” On the same day, MSNBC host Jen Psaki played a preview of an upcoming interview with singer John Legend, who thinks his opinions match his stage name. Psaki was touting the man’s robotic repetition of every MSNBC and CNN pundit spinning against Trump. “He is part of a two-tiered system of justice but not the way he thinks he is,” proclaimed Legend. “He is getting way more concessions than the average criminal defendant would get. He is getting delays, he's got access to all kinds of lawyers that are filing this and filing that, delaying every trial, and most people don't have access to that kind of lawyering, don’t have access to the kind of concessions the justice system will provide to you if you can afford it.” Of course, Trump is a wealthy man who can afford a team of lawyers. So did O.J. Simpson. All of that resolutely ignores Trump is not “the average criminal defendant.” He’s a former president and the presumptive Republican nominee for president. I think we can guess in advance Psaki the Biden Press Secretary didn’t ask this crooner how many of these Trump prosecutions would be proceeding if Trump retired from politics in 2017, or why Trump was indicted for things when Biden wasn’t (like possessing classified documents).    Celebrities can echo progressive pundits like Joyce Vance or Van Jones, but somehow their proclamations are especially deep thoughts. We love how they sing, so their political views resonate with a crackle. They are not smarter than the average voter, but they can expect no one will disturb their emanations with any fraction of opposition. Call it celebrity privilege.

WashPost Promotes NPR Staffers Loathing Critics of Their 'Legendary' Network

The Washington Post is covering NPR’s Uri Berliner controversy – now that he’s resigned. The front of Thursday’s Style section ran a story by media reporter Elahe Izadi with the usual framing of “conservative activists” vs. “public radio network.” As if this isn’t “right versus left.” This was the online headline: Turmoil at NPR after editor rips network for political bias The public-radio network is being targeted by conservative activists over the essay, which many staffers say is misleading and inaccurate. Izadi and the Post suggested that your critique is self-discrediting if it can be cited by conservatives. On its face, it seemed to confirm the worst suspicions held by NPR’s critics on the right: that the legendary media organization had an ideological, progressive agenda that dictates its journalism. [Imagine that!] The Free Press is an online publication started by journalist Bari Weiss, whose own resignation from the New York Times in 2020 was used by conservative politicians as evidence that the Times stifled certain ideas and ideologies… Izadi’s story was stuffed with NPR reporters and executives huffing that they’re not putting out a slanted left-wing product. They’re an “independent” outlet doing “fact-based reporting.” Disagree with that? It’s a “bad-faith” argument. The liberal bubble is thick. Several prominent NPR journalists countered that impression. “We have strong, heated editorial debates every day to try and get the most appropriate language and nuanced reporting in a landscape that is divisive and difficult to work in as a journalist,” Leila Fadel, host of Morning Edition, told The Post. “Media and free independent press are often under attack for the fact-based reporting that we do.” She called Berliner’s essay “a bad-faith effort” and a “factually inaccurate take on our work that was filled with omissions to back his arguments.” "Errors and omissions" are a constant NPR-employee talking point, as in Steve Inskeep's blazing attack on Substack. Izadi didn’t come to conservative critics for rebuttal – like ask Leila about her puffball interview with Liz Cheney, promoting her claim that the current Republican Party is a "danger to the country." But it grew worse: Ayesha Rascoe went for guilt by association, that any conservative critique of NPR is responsible for encouraging anonymous numbskulls on the internet: No news organization is above reproach, Weekend Edition host Ayesha Rascoe told The Post, but someone should not “be able to tear down an entire organization’s work without any sort of response or context provided, or pushback.” There are many legitimate critiques to make of NPR’s coverage, she added, “but the way this has been done — it’s to invalidate all the work NPR does.” …Rascoe, who, as a Black woman host for NPR, says she’s no stranger to online vitriol, but one message after Berliner’s essay labeled her as a “DEI hire” who has “never read a book in her life.” “What stung about this one was it came on the basis of a supposed colleague’s op-ed,” whose words were “being used as fodder to attack me,” Rascoe said. “And my concern is not about me, but all the younger journalists who don’t have the platform I have and who will be attacked and their integrity questioned simply on the basis of who they are.” Izadi's piece read like a long list of internal NPR complaints without any inkling of what all liberals know: NPR is a left-wing sandbox. It's "public," but it's owned by the Left. Berliner betrayed his colleagues by assailing its "legendary" status. 

NewsBusters Podcast: A Fervent Obsession with Trump Trial Jury Selection

The Manhattan trial of Donald Trump on "hush money" charges drew hundreds of minutes of TV obsession this week. The pro-Biden media is now enjoying talking about a “split screen” of Trump stuck in court on trial, President Biden on the campaign trail. ABC morning host Michael Strahan reported on Trump “test[ing] the patience of the judge while President Biden hits the campaign trails in a battleground state.” Meanwhile, the impeachment of Homeland Security Mayorkas was briefly covered and derided as a partisan stunt. George Stephanopoulos called it a "partisan" impeachment, unlike his salesmanship for the Trump impeachments.  Managing Editor Curtis Houck has the details and clips. Reporters from ABC's Mary Bruce to CBS's Nancy Cordes helpfully spun for Biden's campaign stops in Pennsylvania, where Biden said he's a Scranton guy who understands the middle class, while Trump is a clueless rich guy working for the rich guys. This split screen is exactly what the Democrats want -- Trump pinned in the courtroom, Biden making weird clips in Wawa that are carefully staged to sell he's "with it." The music and lyrics suggest Trump has engaged in "hush money" payments to a porn star and is now caught in a "criminal fraud" trial, while Biden is the honest guy searching out the common man. It's not "news," it's messaging. They can't find time to cover Biden making bizarre gaffes like his implication that his Uncle Ambrose was eaten by cannibals when his plane crashed in World War II. Rich Noyes posted a study on NewsBusters on Monday showing that ABC, CBS, and NBC usually avoid mentioning that Trump's prosecutors (like Alvin Bragg in this case, or Letitia James and Fani Willis in others) are elected Democrats seeking to build their brand by "getting Trump." NBC occasionally mentions the "D," but ABC and CBS seem allergic to it. Overall, 90 percent of stories have no party label. Instead, they just show Trump complaining it's "rigged," as that's an unfounded complaint about public-spirited nonpartisans who hold powerful people accountable. Enjoy the podcast below, or wherever you listen to podcasts.   

So Sad! Brian Stelter, Post Reporter Can't Get Press Credentials from Trump Campaign

Charlotte Klein at Vanity Fair was upset that the Trump campaign is “cutting off access” to reporters who are extremely hostile to Trump, including Brian Stelter (also of Vanity Fair) and Washington Post reporter Isaac Arnsdorf, whose new book is titled Finish What We Started: The MAGA Movement’s Ground War to End Democracy. Klein protested the book “has been praised by two such members of that movement, Steve Bannon and John Fredericks, both of whom had Arnsdorf on their shows and recommended the book to their audiences.” That’s bizarre. By contrast, the Trump campaign took exception to the “End Democracy” hype. Since February, Arnsdorf has not been permitted to enter campaign events as credentialed media. That doesn’t mean he can’t cover events. He just has to sit where regular folks do. Klein lamented "that requires getting to rallies much earlier, which could be a deal breaker for some journalists given their busy schedules." Cry a river. “Nobody has been denied any access to our events,” Cheung said in a statement. “If reporters want to cover our events but are unable to secure a coveted press badge, they are more than welcome to apply for general admission tickets in order to experience our events." Arnsdorf declined to comment on the situation, but a Post spokesperson said the paper “will continue to fairly, accurately and independently report on the presidential campaign.” They don’t sound fair, accurate, or independent. They sound like Democrat operatives. He's not alone: In recent weeks, the campaign has taken similar punitive measures against other reporters, according to multiple sources familiar with the moves. An Axios reporter had their credentials approved for an event and then revoked the same day, following the publication of a story about the Trump-led Republican National Committee’s struggles in swing states. (An Axios spokesperson declined to comment.) At least one other Post reporter was temporarily denied press credentials to multiple events after accurately reporting on Trump’s public statements. Most recently, Brian Stelter, a special correspondent for Vanity Fair, was denied press access to Trump’s rally in Schnecksville, Pennsylvania  This is true and I know it firsthand — I applied for press credentials for Trump's most recent rally in Schnecksville, Pennsylvania and was rejected https://t.co/CpUHMb2WHy — Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) April 19, 2024 Klein conceded that the Trump campaign’s press engagement has even earned it praise. Some reporters have said they have in certain ways been easier to deal with than Joe Biden’s campaign, according to The New Yorker’s Clare Malone, who recently wrote a piece about Trump spokesman Steven Cheung headlined, “The Face of Donald Trump’s Deceptively Savvy Media Strategy.” Still, some hostile reporters are still "unnerved by the retaliatory behavior" and what will happen next. “This is the calm before the storm. Once there’s a press plane with 30 to 40 reporters flying around all the time, that’ll be when they’ll really have to deal with it,” the first political reporter told me. “Negative stories will be coming thick and fast and they haven’t had to deal with this since 2016; in 2020 they just had the White House pool. It’s only gonna get worse, I think.”

CNN's Jake Tapper Brings In 'Fact Checker' Daniel Dale to Knock Trump's Opinions

CNN's resident "fact checker" Daniel Dale usually shows his face on air when CNN wants to attack Donald Trump. On Thursday's The Lead with Jake Tapper, Dale confessed that Trump's statements during jury selection were mostly just opinion, but he mocked the "false conspiracy theory" that President Biden had something to do with Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg's prosecution, even though an Associate Attorney General joined Bragg's team.  JAKE TAPPER: Daniel, we just heard a little speech from Mr. Trump. What did you make of it? Did he say anything that was not true? DANIEL DALE: He did. I mean, it was mostly uncheckable, subjective opinion, but he did say a few things that weren’t quite right at very least. So he repeated his false conspiracy theory that essentially that Joe Biden is behind this case, which was brought by a locally elected [Democrat!] district attorney. He said Biden is behind it. He has his top people working with the DAs office to make sure everything goes right. There is no basis for that. That appears to be a reference to a former Justice Department official who went to work for the DA’s office. But there’s no sign that was anything but his own employment decision. In fact, this former official, Matthew Colangelo, had previously been a colleague of DA Bragg, so he rejoined his old colleague. At least CNN is mentioning Colangelo in passing. If this were a Trump Justice Department official arriving on a Biden prosecution, it would be a major scandal of partisanship. CNN would be aggressively digging for anonymous insiders to decry this plot. Then the Canadian Trump-basher turned to the usual "no evidence" claims on the Biden impeachment inquiry: DALE: He also claimed that Joe Biden is a crooked president should be on trial. I think that’s mostly opinion, but I think it’s worth noting, Jake, that we’ve had this extended Republican House investigation impeachment inquiry, no evidence of impeachable offenses, high crimes and misdemeanors, let alone criminal offenses. And then I should note, as you did briefly, that, you know, he read this big pile of documents of articles citing headlines denouncing the case. I googled some of them as he was speaking, so he read one — talking about the whopping outrage in Trump’s indictment. Well, that’s harsh criticism. Where was it from? A Fox News column. He mentioned the Daily Caller, another right wing publication. I googled another headline from the right wing National Review he mentioned. So there are some liberal scholars, legal experts, publications who have raised questions about this case. But that pile he showed was largely his usual friends, the usual suspects praising Trump, defending Trump in the conservative media. Dale (and Tapper) weren't going to mention CNN's own legal analyst Elie Honig isn't impressed with Bragg's effort. This was for left-wing consumption, as in this headline at Mediaite: "CNN’s Daniel Dale Torpedoes Trump’s Attack On Biden — Rips Quoting ‘Usual Suspects’ Like Fox In Courthouse Rant."

NPR's 'Domestic Extremism' Reporter: Trump Could Cause Violence Against Jurors

One way the leftist media want to add juice to the Trump trial is to suggest the jurors will be threatened by Trump outbursts in court or on social media. On Friday’s All Things Considered, they brought in “NPR domestic extremism correspondent Odette Yousef” to spread the conspiracy theory that Trump messages will lead to violence. They really should be blunter, and just call her the Far Right warning correspondent. AILSA CHANG: Odette, you've looked at what it can mean to serve on a jury for a Trump trial, like the safety concerns, the repercussions personally. Tell us what you're finding. YOUSEF: So, Ailsa, the challenge here is that, you know, jurors need to feel that their privacy and safety are not at risk when they serve. But the court also needs to maintain some transparency to court proceedings so that there's public faith in the process. And finding that sweet spot is challenging, and it's been especially hard in the Trump trials. And that's because Donald Trump owns a social media platform, Ailsa. And so, you know, we've seen this pattern, a correlation, where, when he posts criticism about specific people or processes, what follows are threats. And this has already been happening in this case. Judge Merchan's own daughter has been at the receiving end of harassment. And I've spoken to some people, including a former juror on a trial involving a Trump affiliate, who've been just stunned that there haven't been more protective measures set up at the outset of this trial, given what's happened in the past. Notice the vagueness around “Merchan’s daughter,” who could be a minor, for all we know. NPR hasn’t mentioned Loren Merchan on air, and the only thing the shows up in NPR’s search engine is an online AP dispatch that underlines she’s a professional Democrat: Loren Merchan is president of Authentic Campaigns, which has collected at least $70 million in payments from Democratic candidates and causes since she helped found the company in 2018, records show. The firm's past clients include President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and Senate Majority PAC, a big-spending political committee affiliated with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. Senate Majority PAC has paid Authentic Campaigns $15.2 million, according to campaign finance disclosures. Even AP tries to claim it’s a “daisy chain of innuendoes” to connect the judge to the daughter. Yousef then turned to former Obama aide and CNN analyst Juliette Kayyem (but just like Merchan, NPR launders out the Democrat background).  YOUSEF: She's a former national security official. She says at this point, courts should be expecting Trump to complain about the proceedings and that some of his followers may respond in violent ways. JULIETTE KAYYEM: It feels like we're sort of sleepwalking into 2024. It's just our democratic institutions that used to have these norms, but, well, those norms no longer are holding. And we have to accept that and prepare with the expectation that violence or the threat of violence is going to be part of our democratic processes, at least for the short term. Yesterday, I joined @NPR All Things Considered to discuss with Odette Yousef how we seem to be "sleepwalking" in 2024 as Trump continues with intimidation and threats of violence. How to keep jurors safe? Assume they are not. https://t.co/xpkCfP32Sy — Juliette Kayyem (@juliettekayyem) April 20, 2024 This is how pro-Biden news outlets are "setting the table" for the trial. That Trump will inspire violence by objecting to the partisanship on display (including in the press). This is the media trying to create a "gag order" through intimidation: CHANG: Well, I am curious, Odette -- if these so-called norms don't seem to be holding right now, how are you seeing that play out? YOUSEF: You know, there was a policy paper, Ailsa, released earlier this year by the National Conference of State Court Administrators that identified juror safety and well-being among the top issues that need to be addressed these days. And that's not just for the Trump trials. You know, someone with the organization mentioned the Kyle Rittenhouse trial, Derek Chauvin's trial... CHANG: Yeah. YOUSEF: ...Trials of people in Trump's orbit. We are in a moment now in the U.S. where norms have shifted. People who are civically involved, whether it be in trials, in election administration, on school boards, you name it, are now increasingly targeted with violence or the threat of violence. And that's a reality that won't reverse itself overnight, and it chills democratic participation. So people who can should be thinking about safety of these people in ways they may not have had to consider before.

CNN's Zakaria Nudges Michael Douglas to Tout Biden's Brain: ‘He’s Sharp As A Tack!’

On Sunday's CNN's Fareed Zakaria GPS brought on 79-year-old actor Michael Douglas to plug his new Benjamin Franklin movie on Apple TV+. Zakaria nudged Douglas, a liberal Democrat, to vouch for Biden's mental acuity. From what he's heard, Douglas says Biden's "as sharp as a tack." Isn't that what all the Democrats say off the talking-points list?    ZAKARIA: So you and Biden are about the same age. Are you one of those people who wished he had, bowed out and let the field choose somebody else? How do you think about that? DOUGLAS: Well, I think that I walk a little similar to him. And the people that I’ve talked to and everybody that I have, say he’s sharp as a tack! He’s fine. We all have an issue with memories as we get older, we forget names. He’s overcome a stutter in his life. But let’s just say that his entire cabinet, including his vice president, everybody in his cabinet would be more than happy to work with him again in the next term. I cannot say that about the other candidate running because nobody in his cabinet from 2016 wants to be involved with him. Can we be sure that nobody in Trump's first-term cabinet would come back? Fact-checkers? It's obviously much easier to be in Biden's cabinet when no one at CNN is trying to get you removed for being a Trump selection (and trying to ruin your post-Trump career on top).  Zakaria then "went there" to where voters have concerns, that Biden won't be sharp as tack in 2026, or 2027. This answer may not have been what he wanted:   ZAKARIA: Do you -- do you think when you -- you know, everyone says, yes, he is OK now, but -- you know, what's it going to be like the next four or five years? But you're -- you're going to work for the next four or five years. You're not retiring. DOUGLAS: Well, I'm not. However, I will say we did Franklin in 2022. And after 165 days of shooting, for seven months, I haven't worked since. So, I took '23 off and we're going into '24. And I must say I'm enjoying the time off. And I think he'll be fine. Thank you very much. In the first half of the interview, Douglas talked about his reading of philosophy and his "Jewish roots," but Zakaria didn't have any questions about the Islamists vs. Israel or anti-Semitism on campus. This was more like a Larry King celebrity interview.

NewsBusters Podcast: Hillary Clinton Says Trump Wants to 'Kill His Opposition'

As pro-Biden media outlets argue that Donald Trump's criticism of his legal adversaries is endangering lives, Hillary Clinton claimed on a podcast that Trump would like to "kill his opposition," and the media find that's not dangerously suggestive. Democrats (like congressional candidate Nate McMurray in New York) tweeting "Die MAGA Die" shouldn't be questioned. On a podcast with her old lawyer Marc Elias, Hillary said "Trump was like, you know, just gaga over Putin because Putin does what Trump would like to do: Kill his opposition, imprison his opposition, drive journalists and others into exile, rule without any check or balance."  Where are the so-called "independent fact-checkers"? Because if we used the typical Daniel Dale/Politifact standard, you’d expect them to say there’s no evidence Donald Trump ever said “I’d love to kill my opposition like Putin does, but nobody will let me.”  Maybe the media would get upset if a Republican tweeted "Die Hamas Die." That wouldn't be "mostly peaceful protest."  On the Left today, Hamas is viewed as more virtuous than people wearing red MAGA hats. On the Left, the American conservative is always the most evil enemy. No one on the Left is really an enemy, not compared to the domestic extremists on the right wing. Meanwhile, the Meet the Press gang gang was a little happy on Sunday. Steve Kornacki announced Donald Trump does lead Joe Biden 46% to 44% in the latest NBC News poll, but the margin decreased from five points to two, and Trump is down two points when they add Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and other third-party candidates.  Even so, Andrea Mitchell was worrying out loud that "the problem for Joe Biden and the Democrats" is Trump's trial is "crowding out everything else." Biden can't tout his steel tariffs or his student-loan "relief" handouts (going against democratic norms to buy Democrat votes). As if the media can't help but overshadow Biden with all the Trump-trial obsession?  Over on ABC, Politico's Jonathan Martin sounded a different note of panic: "I think if the election's about Trump, Biden's got a lot better chance." (That's the media's rationale for wall-to-wall coverage.) "Right now, Biden's problem is this election is about Joe Biden." Martin's lecturing the voters that they're focused on the wrong guy. Enjoy the podcast below, or wherever you listen to podcasts.   

'No Evidence'! Dana Bash Yells at Gov. Kristi Noem Over Who's Behind the Trump Trial

Gov. Kristi Noem (R-S.D.) saddled up for another fight against CNN host Dana Bash on Sunday’s State of the Union. Two years ago, Bash pushed Noem around, insisting she support an abortion for a raped 10-year-old girl in Chicago. Noem kept attacking the rapist. On Sunday, the combat resumed over the Trump trial in Manhattan. Bash kept pressing Noem about how she couldn’t possibly support Trump if he was convicted, and pulled out the usual “No Evidence” fussing when Noem attacked the Bidens. BASH: Prosecutors allege Donald Trump falsified business records to hide hush money payments weeks before the 2016 election. As I mentioned, he violated both state, tax and federal campaign finance laws. So, are you saying that, even if that's true, he shouldn't have been charged and that he's above the law? NOEM: What I'm saying is that these prosecutors are using someone as -- whose testimony has been proven to be a liar. Michael Cohen has lied before Congress multiple times. That's their main witness. I would say that he certainly is not someone who can be trusted to do the right thing during this jury trial. They're also using a woman's testimony [Stormy Daniels] who signed a letter saying that this affair did not happen, that she has testified in the past that this never occurred. And so now they're going forward with a case built on that and saying that, because Donald Trump paid his legal bills, that now he can be prosecuted for something that even the person that alleged it happened is saying did not happen. Noem added: "When I'm walking around this state and talking to people, talking to people across the country, they don't even know which trial this is. They're like, I don't remember which one this isn't about. Is this the one they're coming after him for this or this?" Where Bash really got agitated and wouldn't let Noem finish a sentence is when the governor said "the Democrats and the activists are using this trial to derail him, to keep him in court, instead of out talking to Americans about what their real concerns are." She then interpreted that more narrowly as if only Biden was trying to derail Trump, when all the Democrats are, including the entire staff of CNN. NOEM:  And their real concerns are their everyday lives. They need a leader in the White House who gets up every day and puts them first and doesn't raise their taxes, doesn't overregulate them, take away their freedoms and give all our money to other countries, instead of making sure that we're taking care of America first and keeping us safe and secure. BASH: I just want to say for the record there's absolutely no evidence that President Biden is involved in this. This is the case that is being brought in the state of New York by the Manhattan DA. NOEM: And that's what I think is remarkable, is that, if you look at President Biden and what he's done and what his son has done, and the fact that... BASH: That has nothing... NOEM: ... they are not being prosecuted for some of their crimes... BASH: That -- OK, that has -- that has nothing to do with this. NOEM: ... that they have committed, it's really kind of unprecedented. BASH: That has nothing to do with this. Bash finished with this: "But kind of big picture, Governor, if Donald Trump is convicted in this trial, will you still support him in November?" PS: After Noem, Bash questioned Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D-Ill.) and she was still on a "no evidence" kick as she typically pressed the Democrat from the left, that Biden was too weak in attacking Trump:  We, of course, have seen the split screen that we're going to continue to see, President Biden campaigning, former President Trump in court. Biden is deliberately avoiding talking about Trump's legal issues on the trail because he doesn't want to play into the claims that he's orchestrating the political prosecution, which I guess I should say again that there's no evidence of. But just as a political strategic matter, do you think ignoring it is a mistake, or should Biden be reminding voters at every turn that the Republican nominee is currently on -- involved in a criminal trial? 

Column: Anti-Censorship Group PEN America Canceled by Pro-Hamas Authors

The leftist “free expression” group PEN America collided with a brick wall of radicals who don’t like anyone who expresses a sympathetic view of Israel after the Hamas slaughter of October 7. Their literary awards ceremony had to be cancelled due to a substantial withdrawal of authors striking a “pro-Palestinian” pose. If you disagree with that view? You’re “complicit” in genocide. Agree with the mob, or you favor mass murder. Their view is so obviously correct that they cannot understand how anyone could possibly disagree with it. “We refuse to gild the reputation of an organization that runs interference for an administration aiding and abetting genocide with our tax dollars,” a group of nominees wrote in an April 17 letter addressed to PEN America leaders. “And we refuse to take part in anything that will serve to overshadow PEN’s complicity in normalizing genocide.” Of 61 authors and translators nominated for a book prize this year, 28 declined. For the most prestigious book prize — the PEN/Jean Stein award, which comes with $75,000 — nine of 10 finalists dropped out. The fiasco will continue. PEN America’s annual World Voices Festival has also been hemorrhaging participants. Activists want heads to roll. “The fact is that Israel is leading a genocide of the Palestinian people. PEN’s perpetuation of false equivalences, their equivocation and normalizing, is indeed a betrayal.” PEN America replied: “The current war in Gaza is horrific. But we cannot agree that the answer to its wrenching dilemmas and consequences lies in a shutting down of conversation and the closing down of viewpoints.” This furor underlines what conservatives have been saying about PEN’s self-righteous “book ban” posture. They’re not “anti-censorship.” They’re promoting a leftist revolution in literature and libraries. What the Left wants is a system where the "experts" — educators and librarians — select all the books, and the "nonexperts" — parents — shut up and accept them. So it’s amazing to see the Left eating its own over who can position themselves with moral authority as the most “pro-Palestinian.”  Free expression is nowhere to be found. The Washington Post reported many of the withdrawing activists objected to a January event where author Randa Jarrar was physically removed after she screamed incessantly during a PEN-sponsored discussion of American comedian Moshe Kasher’s memoir Subculture Vulture, which featured Israel-supporting actress and Jeopardy host Mayim Bialik. Protesters were the censors: “Jarrar and other protesters from the group Writers Against the War on Gaza were shouting, through a loudspeaker, the names of Palestinian writers killed in Gaza.” The group tweeted video, complaining: “With delusional liberal aplomb, PEN America claims objectivity while platforming genocidal Zionists and silencing Palestinians.” As usual with the radicals, “objectivity” or "bothsidesism” is painted as evil, and anyone speaking in support of Israel is automatically a maniacal Zionist who must be deplatformed. The Post story ended with a quote from novelist (and former Andrew Cuomo speechwriter) Camonghne Felix: “We cannot hope to change every institution, but we hope that by changing ourselves what we will accept, that the organizations will have no choice but to bend towards us.” The notion of free expression is going to crumble when the leftist “negotiating” position is “no choice but to bend.”

NPR CEO Disses 'Distraction' of Bias Complaints, 'Bad Faith' Criticism of Her Tweets

Wall Street Journal media reporter Alexandra Bruell secured an interview with new NPR CEO Katherine Maher, and naturally, she discovered NPR doesn't want anyone focusing on the "distraction" of leftist tilt. They don't want anyone disturbing their "mandate" of taking taxpayer money from Republicans and whacking them with it. The headline defined it:  NPR Chief Defends Coverage, Accuses Critics of ‘Bad Faith Distortion’ of Her Views Katherine Maher said controversy stemming from an editor’s essay criticizing the radio network has been a distraction Bruell offered a sort of "poor thing" spin in how Maher's tenure had a rocky start with the Uri Berliner expose and conservative Christopher Rufo's unearthing of her woke tweets before joining NPR:  Critics have scrutinized her political views and seized on past comments she made on everything from the First Amendment to misinformation to the idea that written history is tilted toward the worldview of white men.  “All of this frankly is a bit of a distraction relative to the transformation our organization needs to undergo in order to best serve our mandate,” Maher said in an interview. Which "mandate" is that? We aren't told. She said NPR should be open to criticism...but clearly, she prefers internal conversations, not objections from, you know, the "public" when it comes to public radio. “We have robust conversations across the organization, including in response to the article,” she said. “Clear and well-reasoned pieces” from reviewers, like a write-up from NPR’s public editor and Poynter executive Kelly McBride that examined coverage of Israel and Gaza, have “found that our journalism is really solid,” Maher said. Citing McBride is especially perfect, since McBride went on Brian Stelter's podcast and divided NPR critics as supporters (liberals) and "bad faith" critics (conservatives). McBride sounds less like a Public Editor (working on behalf of the audience) and more like a Public Cheerleader (working on behalf of company morale). Maher's rah-rah memo to staff (posted on NPR's website) attacking Berliner for criticizing staffers for "who they are" instead of their on-air propaganda wasn't enough:  Days after Maher sent a note to staff addressing Berliner’s essay, NPR employees wrote to her urging stronger support for employees and asking her to call out factual inaccuracies in the piece “Without true leadership, resentment and discontent are festering among your staff,” the staffers wrote.  In a statement, Berliner said, “I wish that the company would have addressed and taken seriously some of the points I made.” If NPR wants to foster a broad range of views, “suspending and then rebuking a staffer is not the best way to go about it,” he said. The Journal reporter somehow didn't get any reaction from Rufo about all the Maher tweets about "cis-White mobility privilege" and so on. Maher tried to suggest her personal opinions are set aside in her professional life:  “There are many professions in which you set aside your own personal perspectives in order to lead in public service, and that is exactly how I have always led organizations and will continue to lead NPR,” she said. But Maher's attack on Berliner for his complaints about wokeness and "affinity groups" in the newsroom surely reflect her publicly-aired personal wokeness. Maher said their internal research shows people see NPR as “accurate and intellectual,” she said. “We want to be able to speak to folks as though they were our neighbors and speak to folks as though they were our friends.” That's not the way conservatives hear it on the radio.

NewsBusters Podcast: Pretending the Trump Prosecutors Are Nonpartisans

ABC and CBS almost completely refuse to identify Trump's elected Democrat prosecutors -- Alvin Bragg, Letitia James, and Fani Willis -- as Democrats, and certainly not Democrats elected on a promise to get Trump. NBC dabbles with the D. For example, elected Democrat Alvin Bragg, the District Attorney of Manhattan, was described as a Democrat in 16 of 59 evening-news stories on NBC programs. But CBS never did in 48 Bragg stories. On ABC, there were 56 stories, but viewers only once heard that Bragg was a Democrat — on February 26, 2024, when correspondent Aaron Katersky relayed how “a spokesman for Trump... called Bragg ‘another deranged Democrat prosecutor.’” He's only described as a Democrat when they can make it sound like a wild Trump accusation. Elected Democrat Letitia James, the Attorney General of New York state, NBC mentioned her Democrat-ness in seven of 26 stories. But ABC’s World News Tonight has aired 44 stories mentioning James’s civil suit against Trump and his businesses, yet only one -- back in November -- showed the word "Democrat" in a fleeting on-screen graphic that was shown for less than two seconds. CBS also had one citation (in 35 stories), but only on screen: the March 24, 2024 Sunday night newscast briefly showed a Trump campaign message demanding that “Insane radical Democrat AG Letitia James” keep her “FILTHY HANDS OFF OF TRUMP TOWER.” Elected Democrat Fani Willis, the District Attorney of Fulton County (Atlanta), Georgia drew 60 stories on ABC’s World News Tonight (60) and 39 stories on the CBS Evening News, and ZERO out of 99 mentioned she was a Democrat. NBC were the "rampant" labelers at eight out of 50 stories (meaning they skipped it in 84 percent of stories. Longtime MRC Director of Research Rich Noyes (now freelancing from Connecticut) was at MRC headquarters to explain his latest study numbers (ending right before the Trump trial in Manhattan began) and projects it into this election year. He noted that while the networks liked to point out that Kenneth Starr was a "Republican independent counsel," he was never elected, but had served as Solicitor General under the first President Bush. Enjoy the podcast below, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Top Ten Egregious Reasons to DEFUND NPR

Anyone who spends time reading about NPR on NewsBusters is going to roll their eyes when NPR executives blather about how they believe in "viewpoint diversity" and "inclusion" of important voices. It's readily apparent on a daily basis that NPR is a sandbox for left-wingers, polishing Democrats and punishing Republicans, touting liberal journalists as heroic and conservative journalists as a pox on the First Amendment. Coming up with a list of ten egregious examples to advocate for separating NPR from the taxpayers is difficult, because there are many more examples than just ten. We decided to limit it to the Trump era, since that's roughly how long Uri Berliner was complaining inside NPR. Anti-Patriotic Song. On July 4, 2018, NPR's All Things Considered ripped a classic Irving Berlin song under the headline “For 'God Bless America,' A Long Gestation And Venomous Backlash.” NPR reported that leftist folksinger Woody Guthrie thought it was "a whitewash of everything wrong in America" and that it’s “annoyed many” people (NPR staffers and audience members, surely) "who hear it as a tune of syrupy nationalism and trivialized faith." Pro-Marxism. On February 24, 2023, NPR On The Media host Brooke Gladstone touted The Communist Manifesto: "like Hamlet’s ghost, the Manifesto is both impossible and imperative in its call for action.” It’s a “stalwart text…it’s stirring! It scans!” For the oppressed, it’s “music for their dreams.” Her Marx-interpreting guest China Mieville said true communism has never been tried, and “If you see this new sadistic hard right as an inevitable feature of capitalism, then the stakes of moving beyond capitalism become ever more urgent.” Pro-Chinese Communism. On October 1, 2018, NPR’s Morning Edition celebrated the 70th anniversary of the communist takeover of China. Co-host Ailsa Chang was in Beijing to gush. “It's communist in name, but it is not the party of the proletariat; it's the party of state capitalism. And it's a party that promised to lift people out of poverty, which, you know, to be -- truth be told, it has done a spectacular job of.” Chang interviewed a young woman who said China was doing great, that “we know the leader would make steady, wise choice, unlike (laughter) the United States.” Pro-Looting. On August 27, 2020, NPR's blog "Code Switch," with the slogan "Race In Your Face," posted an interview promoting a new book titled In Defense of Looting. Natalie Escobar promoted author Emily Osterweil's view that “looting is a powerful tool to bring about real, lasting change in society. The rioters who smash windows and take items from stores, she says, are engaging in a powerful tactic that questions the justice of ‘law and order,’ and the distribution of property and wealth in an unequal society.” Pro-Rioting. On The NPR Politics Podcast on July 17, 2021, NPR reporter Danielle Kurtzleben brought on Yale law professor Elizabeth Hinton to promote her book on the acceptability of violence as a protest tactic against police. Kurtzleben explained: “You talk about these clashes as rebellions -- and quite pointedly, not as riots. It's a very meaningful choice. It really kind of shapes how the reader perceives these clashes.” Kurtlzeben proclaimed “It’s an excellent book!” Pro-Sabotage. On NPR’s Fresh Air on April 15, 2023, their movie critic John Powers praised the movie How to Blow Up a Pipeline, hailing it as “hugely timely” when “people are frustrated by society's inability, indeed unwillingness to even slow down ecological disasters like climate change.” The movie’s a fictional take on the Andreas Malm book of the same name – “the most compelling argument I’ve read for eco-sabotage,” proclaimed Powers. He praised the movie for treating the saboteurs not as villains or “parody radicals,” but as “ordinary people whose reasons we can sympathize with.” Pro-Abortion Audio. On November 3, 2022, NPR’s Morning Edition featured reporter Kate Wells at an abortion clinic in Detroit, and they actually aired audio of an abortion of an 11-week-old baby. The abortionist told the woman,“you’re going to hear this machine turn on now, okay? It makes a loud noise.” NPR’s website warned some “may find it disturbing.” The doctor advises the patient to breathe during the killing. When the baby is dead, an assistant tells the woman, “Don’t you ever tell yourself that you can’t do something.” Anti-“Fox Monster.” On 2021, NPR’s On The Media devoted an hour to what they called “Slaying the Fox Monster.” Host Bob Garfield said “we're discussing how the marketplace might force Fox News Channel into responsible behavior or even into financial catastrophe." (In 2022, NPR also promoted Fox-deplatforming activist Nandimi Jammi, who quipped “you can’t chop off Fox News’s head in a day.”) Treasonous Mitch? On NPR’s Fresh Air on October 1, 2018, host Terry Gross discussed emerging claims on Trump-Russia collusion, and she imagined Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell might be treasonous: “If it can be proven that McConnell knew that Russia was trying to interfere in our election and influence the outcome of it and then tried to cover it up, to deny that it was happening, is that treason? Is that, like, legally treason?” Washington Post reporter Greg Miller wouldn’t bite. Hunter Laptop Deniers. The most egregious example is NPR's red-hot loathing of Biden scandals. On October 20, 2020, NPR “Public Editor” Kelly McBride tweeted,  "Why haven't you seen any stories from NPR about the NY Post's Hunter Biden story?" She quoted Terence Samuel, NPR's Managing Editor for News. “We don't want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don't want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions.” He dismissed the Post story as a “politically driven event.” Today, McBride’s tweet remains, but the link to her newsletter doesn’t work. Why haven't you seen any stories from NPR about the NY Post's Hunter Biden story? Read more in this week's newsletter➡️ https://t.co/CJesPgmGvo pic.twitter.com/jAi7PnpbZf — NPR Public Editor (@NPRpubliceditor) October 22, 2020

Column: Leftist Reporters Pretend They're Not Partisan News Squashers

Eight years ago, the leftist media took great offense to being dismissed by Donald Trump as “fake news,” but they never seemed to grasp this is exactly how they painted the conservative media, as truth-defying propaganda outlets. When the Trump trial turned to the National Enquirer, we could find national unity that the Enquirer defines “fake news.” The lefties are very excited to remind voters how the Enquirer was a Trump-allied tabloid full of garbage stories. But the liberal media spread some of them. In May 2016, the Enquirer uncorked some garbage that Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) had cheated on his wife. ABC, CBS, and NBC spent a combined 15 and a half minutes spreading the word of this character assassination campaign. The pro-Biden “media reporters” are still upset this week about the Enquirer and how they played “catch and kill” with Trump accusers, squelching stories that might embarrass Trump. NPR’s David Folkenflik complained to MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace that burying salacious stories is “not a journalistic impulse, it's not even a tabloid gossip impulse, this is essentially a partisan or propagandistic arm of the Trump campaign in all but name." This is coming from NPR, which aggressively trashed the Hunter Biden laptop story as a “pure distraction.” Folkenflik engaged with the story only to dismiss it as “a story marked more by red flags than investigative rigor." When The New York Times and The Washington Post published stories acknowledging Hunter’s laptop was real in March and April of 2022, Folkenflik didn’t file a story with his regrets. He just kept attacking Fox News, his usual bread and butter. So on the Hunter laptop, we can throw it back in Folkenflik’s face – NPR’s suppression was not a journalistic impulse, and NPR was essentially a propagandistic arm of the Biden campaign in all but name. Worse yet, we fund it with our taxes. That gravy train should end. Ex-CNN reporter Brian Stelter said the same thing on Joy Reid’s MSNBC show about the Enquirer: “It has nothing to do with journalism.” David Pecker’s “not a news man. He’s an advertiser! He’s a marketer, and his product was Donald Trump.” Thanks, Sherlock Stelter. Nobody should define Mr. Pecker as a news man. Like Folkenflik, Stelter squashed the Hunter Biden laptop in 2020 as a Murdoch plot, or as a Russian disinformation campaign, because CNN’s a marketer and its product was anyone but Trump (meaning Joe Biden). Stelter also showed up on Alex Wagner’s MSNBC show. Wagner was hopping mad, asking what’s the point of a gag order on Trump when you have a “media-industrial complex that is effectively acting as a public defense line” for Trump? Once again, Wagner can’t imagine MSNBC acting as a “media-industrial complex” for the Democrats. So does Wagner wish the judge could issue a gag order for the entire conservative media landscape? No criticism allowed of the get-Trump prosecutors and judge? I thought this was a democracy. Stelter broke out the usual bravado that the liberals live on “Earth One,” and they must see what’s happening on “Earth Two,” which is an alternative universe of hallucinations. Stelter claimed “For Jesse Watters, Trump is God, and that is the programming every hour of every day on these other networks.” That sounds like some crazy religion. Would Stelter survive a little fact check on whether Fox and Newsmax perpetually pray hourly to the Orange Lord and Savior? Both sides suggest the other side of the media is fake. But both sides are slinging a lot of opinionated hot takes, and Stelter can certainly flip a flapjack on that skillet.

NewsBusters Podcast: Cassidy Hutchinson Nails Those CNN Talking Points

CNN primetime host Kaitlan Collins gushed over former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson for 20 minutes on April 24. Hutchinson nailed all the CNN-pleasing talking points. Collins introduced her as “now a frequent target of Donald Trump's, after her explosive testimony before the January 6 Committee." Hutchinson warned: "It's really important to stress that the American people were not given the truth about Donald Trump in 2016, and he won. He almost won in 2020. And he very well could win again, if the American people do not, are not made aware of who he actually is." CNN types think Trump voters are so dumb that they have no idea who Trump is. She didn't say out loud she'll vote for Biden, but her underlining of how crucial it is to defeat Trump sends the message loud and clear. She's advertising for Biden-Harris, and CNN is happy to air it for free.  Only at the end of this 20-minute interview, in the last two minutes, do we get a slight hint of how Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony turned out to be wrong, this tale of Trump grabbing the steering wheel. We know now that Trump's driver says that never happened. But Collins could only negotiate around the phony story. A Secret Service agent "could not corroborate your testimony of something that you said you were told by the White House Deputy Chief of Operations, at the time, Tony Ornato. And he's gone after you publicly as you've spoken out bravely." So Hutchinson poses as one who speaks the truth, and CNN doesn’t really want to challenge that. And it certainly doesn’t want to challenge her wild claims that this could be the final election: "what scares me more is the fact that this could potentially be the final election of our American democracy, as we know it, if he's reelected." That paranoid line couldn't please CNN bosses (or viewers) more.  Hutchinson claimed she really doesn't want to be a public person, but it's worked out well for her. She had the book deal with Simon & Schuster, and she speaks in public for money (not on CNN, but the CNN appearances don't hurt). Enjoy the podcast below, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

USA TODAY: Kyle Rittenhouse Campus Speeches Raise 'Free Speech' Questions

This will grab your attention. At the bottom of the front page of Thursday’s USA Today was this headline: Shooter Rittenhouse’s tour draws outrage College gun-rights events raise questions about free speech and its impact USA Today thinks pro-gun-rights speech “raises questions”? The online headline was even stronger: Kyle Rittenhouse, deadly shooter, college speaker? A campus gun-rights tour sparks outrage As in: Who’s approving this speech on campus? A video in the online story shows “hundreds of protesters” at the University of Memphis. “Students celebrated his departure with live music and dancing on campus.” They forced Rittenhouse to leave early. This is a triumph in the media's eyes?  Reporter Cybele Mayes-Osterman sounded like an editorial writer from the beginning: Kyle Rittenhouse is not a typical college campus speaker. In 2020, at the age of 17, he took an AR-15-style rifle to a Black Lives Matter demonstration and fired it, killing two people and injuring a third. Rittenhouse said he pulled the trigger in self-defense and was acquitted of wrongdoing. He has since penned a book, “Acquitted,” and has set out on a series of college speaking events dubbed the "Rittenhouse Recap." He is slated to appear Thursday at Clemson University in South Carolina. Rittenhouse is selling books, and ostensibly promoting the right to bear arms on campus, but he’s also trying to persuade young people to join the conservative movement. The key group behind the appearances, Turning Point USA, is led by the self-described “youth director” of President Donald Trump’s first campaign and a key ally rallying votes for Trump this year. (I left in their links, because the reporters don't tend to say Rittenhouse "shot in self-defense," just that he shot people, and that police shot Jacob Blake, but not that he was reaching for a knife.) Who's letting speakers persuade students to become conservatives? Is that where the national newspapers "raise questions about free speech and its impact"? The tour promoter is the Trump-loving Turning Point USA, which is more salt in the USA Today free-speech wound:  The provocative choice of backing the Rittenhouse tour is par for the course for Turning Point and its local affiliates, which have hosted controversial figures like Nick Fuentes, a white nationalist and Holocaust denier. But it has stirred up devastating pain and disdain in a man he almost killed. "He has used every moment to gloat and to make light of taking life," Paul Prediger said, speaking publicly for the first time about what happened in protest of a Rittenhouse speech last week at Kent State The ADL said Fuentes appeared once at Iowa State in 2019, and the local TPUSA leader resigned over it. But "Prediger" has changed his name from Gaige Grosskreutz. A few paragraphs later, the paper acknowledges Rittenhouse tweeted a video with Prediger/Grosskreutz "admitting he pointed a gun in Rittenhouse's direction before being shot."  USA Today clearly finds the Rittenhouse speaking tour as more objectionable than pro-Hamas protesters creating encampments across the country as their leaders speak of violence against the "Zionists." Their cause isn't lead by some conservative white boy beloved by Trump voters.  

Journalist Kara Swisher: 'Anti-American' To Oppose Young Pro-Hamas Protesters

On The Chris Wallace Show on CNN on Saturday morning, leftist journalist Kara Swisher claimed it was "un-American" not to support young people protesting against Israel and shutting down campuses. She said this after being confronted with protesters saying Zionists don't deserve to live.  Wallace opened the show with Joe Biden's "very fine people on both sides" quote about the protests, that "he continues to walk a fine line between defending the protesters and denouncing them." Jonah Goldberg of The Dispatch said these disruptive protests on campuses are "almost all political upside" for the Republicans. Washington Free Beacon editor-in-chief Eliana Johnson said "I think it's a missed opportunity for presidential leadership. I think it's good politics to come out against protesters who are telling Jews to go back to Poland and saying Zionists don't deserve to live. Those are direct quotes from leaders of the Columbia protests. It's good politics for Biden to stand against that. The problem for him, of course, is that the left wing of his party, Representative Ilhan Omar, are showing up at the protest to shore them up. So of course, he would alienate the left flank of his party. But I do think it's a missed opportunity for him to fade into the background of this." Swisher, a longtime Wall Street Journal tech reporter who more recently was a columnist and podcaster for The New York Times, somehow thought it was anti-American to be anti-Hamas, as our Brent Baker captured it: “Not to support” the anti-Semitic pro-Palestinian protesters taking over colleges “is sort of anti-American” – @karaswisher on CNN’s Chris Wallace Show pic.twitter.com/vLeFIZ8BxB — Brent Baker 🇺🇦 🇮🇱 (@BrentHBaker) April 27, 2024   KARA SWISHER: Well, some people are saying that, and I think you have to be -- the question is, are you for order and against chaos, or for protests and the right to free speech? And what's interesting is how quickly everyone and shifting. All the free-speech warriors are suddenly like, order, order, we must have order. And so there are heinous things that are said, but there is a line where you have to support also young people, especially when they do things that they do badly. Not to support them, is sort of anti- American in a way. JOHNSON: Free speech is fine, but USC has canceled its graduation. Columbia University has canceled classes and put them online. We've gone well beyond free speech and into shuttering the operations of universities. And I do think it's a missed opportunity for Biden to say there are limits. We've gone beyond speech and into harassment and disruption here. And we will not stand for that. LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, New York Times: Yes, I think we've also, though, seen a reaction from some of the police and others that have been deployed on campuses that have been -- SWISHER: Excessive. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Excessive, thank you. SWISHER: Like Texas today, or Indiana, because then then that's a whole different story as these young people -- you are changing the political mentality of young people right now. And if you push down too hard on it, especially at this age, and not being able to express yourselves, I think you have a much bigger problem later on. Leftists typically question any police use of force against protesters, and rarely think leftist protesters should be questioned for their tactics. We can all guess where Swisher would have come down if the "young people" had been Tea Party kids disrupting an Obama event.  They would be anti-American.

Are Journalists 'Anti-Authoritarian' as They Seek to Banish Conservative Views?

On Friday, Associated Press media reporter David Bauder looked at recent internal newsroom debates that went public, "Journalists taking the critical gaze they deploy to cover the world and turning it inward at their own employers." He cited Uri Berliner's essay on NPR, NBC dumping RNC chair Ronna McDaniel, and a fight at The New York Times over a story on sexual assault by Hamas.  Journalism as a profession attracts people who are anti-authoritarian, who see themselves as truth-tellers. Many believe the way to make an organization better is by criticizing it, said Tom Rosenstiel, co-author of The Elements of Journalism and a professor at the University of Maryland. “We’re taught to hold power to account,” said Kate O’Brian, president of news for the E.W. Scripps Co. There's one difference in these controversies: Berliner was basically forced out for exposing the Left. The other controversies were the Left enforcing their wokeness. Bauder summarized that "NPR management says he is wrong. But Berliner quickly became a hero among conservatives who hold the same belief." The AP reporter doesn't identify most of the rebels in these controversies as leftists enforcing a new ideological hard line (that Berliner was protesting):  A generational change also has emboldened many young journalists. In his own classroom, Kaplan sees more young journalists questioning traditional notions of objectivity that keep them from expressing opinions. Many believe they have the right to state their beliefs and support causes, he said. “Now you have journalists that are advocates,” Rosenstiel said. “That reflects something of a culture war that is happening inside of journalism.” Debates over coverage of the Trump administration had a similar galvanizing effect. “There are some journalists who say, ‘I’m not interested in covering conservatives because they are not interested in the truth,’” Rosenstiel said. See? There it is. The Woke Left doesn't believe in debates. They call it "bothsidesism" and insist debates be shut down, that contrary opinions somehow make "marginalized" people feel "unsafe." Are these journalists "anti-authoritarian" when they only want one side to be published? They clearly believe conservatives should become the "marginalized," now and forever. This was what happened when New York Times staffers had a fit over their newspaper posting an op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton on using National Guard troops to suppress violent rioting.  One of the most prominent thinkers on this issue, [leftist] journalist Wesley Lowery, has written that some defenders of objectivity are more interested in inoffensiveness and appearance, less so on journalistic rigor. “In pursuing objectivity, we silence the marginalized,” a Harvard student, Ajay V. Singh, wrote at the height of the debate. “In silencing the marginalized, we tip the narrative of ‘truth’ into the hands of the powerful.” The logic there is bizarre: quote conservatives, and you "silence" someone else? Wesley Lowery wrote a book with a conspiracy-theory title, They Can't Kill Us All. In Lowery's world, he thinks no one should be allowed to protest they don't want him dead, they just oppose his paranoid views. When you represent "racial justice," then you can intimidate journalists out of quoting the "anti-justice" side.

Leftist Reporters Pretend They’re Not Partisan News Squashers

Eight years ago, the leftist media took great offense to being dismissed by Donald Trump as “fake news,” but they never seemed to grasp this is exactly how they painted the conservative media, as truth-defying propaganda outlets.

When the Trump trial turned to the National Enquirer, we could find national unity that the Enquirer defines “fake news.” The lefties are very excited to remind voters how the Enquirer was a Trump-allied tabloid full of garbage stories. But the liberal media spread some of them.

In May 2016, the Enquirer uncorked some garbage that Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, had cheated on his wife. ABC, CBS, and NBC spent a combined 15-and-a-half minutes spreading the word of this character assassination campaign.

The pro-Biden “media reporters” were still upset last week about the Enquirer and how it played “catch and kill” with Trump accusers, squelching stories that might embarrass Trump. NPR’s David Folkenflik complained to MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace that burying salacious stories is “not a journalistic impulse, it’s not even a tabloid gossip impulse, this is essentially a partisan or propagandistic arm of the Trump campaign in all but name.”

This is coming from NPR, which aggressively trashed the Hunter Biden laptop story as a “pure distraction.” Folkenflik engaged with the story only to dismiss it as “a story marked more by red flags than investigative rigor.”

When The New York Times and The Washington Post published stories acknowledging Hunter’s laptop was real in March and April 2022, Folkenflik didn’t file a story with his regrets. He just kept attacking Fox News, his usual bread and butter.

So on the Hunter laptop, we can throw it back in Folkenflik’s face—NPR’s suppression was not a journalistic impulse, and NPR was essentially a propagandistic arm of the Biden campaign in all but name.

Worse yet, we fund it with our taxes. That gravy train should end.

Ex-CNN reporter Brian Stelter said the same thing on Joy Reid’s MSNBC show about the Enquirer: “It has nothing to do with journalism.” David Pecker’s “not a news man. He’s an advertiser! He’s a marketer, and his product was Donald Trump.” Thanks, Sherlock Stelter. Nobody should define Pecker as a news man.

Like Folkenflik, Stelter squashed the Hunter Biden laptop in 2020 as a Murdoch plot, or as a Russian disinformation campaign, because CNN’s a marketer and its product was anyone but Trump (meaning President Joe Biden).

Stelter also showed up on Alex Wagner’s MSNBC show. Wagner was hopping mad, asking what’s the point of a gag order on Trump when you have a “media-industrial complex that is effectively acting as a public defense line” for Trump? Once again, Wagner can’t imagine MSNBC acting as a “media-industrial complex” for the Democrats.

So, does Wagner wish the judge could issue a gag order for the entire conservative media landscape? No criticism allowed of the get-Trump prosecutors and judge? I thought this was a democracy.

Stelter broke out the usual bravado that the liberals live on “Earth One,” and they must see what’s happening on “Earth Two,” which is an alternative universe of hallucinations. Stelter claimed, “For Jesse Watters, Trump is God, and that is the programming every hour of every day on these other networks.”

That sounds like some crazy religion. Would Stelter survive a little fact-check on whether Fox and Newsmax perpetually pray hourly to the Orange Lord and Savior? Both sides suggest the other side of the media is fake. But both sides are slinging a lot of opinionated hot takes, and Stelter can certainly flip a flapjack on that skillet.

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WashPost 'Fact Checker' Glenn Kessler Aids Biden, Throws Four More Pinocchios at Trump

On Monday morning, Washington Post "Fact Checker" Glenn Kessler was tossing his "Four Pinocchios" Liar rating at Donald Trump again, this time over rent-support payments for migrants in the Democrat-run state of Michigan. In recent months, Kessler has emptied a bucket of Pinocchios on Trump and his aides, but he's conveniently avoided throwing a single Pinocchio at Joe Biden, not even when Biden blamed Trump for massive Covid deaths: "We lost over 1,200,000 people because of the slow start in all this [vaccination] process.”  Kessler ruled in February that "Biden’s phrasing is sufficiently subtle that a link is not so easily established." That's ridiculous. It looks like Glenn Kessler (D-D.C.). This was Monday's headline:  Trump and allies say Biden pays rent for ‘illegals’ in Michigan. Not true. Kessler established the federal government is assisting Michigan with rental subsidies, but it depends on what the meaning of "refugee" is. The federal government, through the Office of Refugee Resettlement, a unit of the Department of Health and Human Services, has long provided hundreds of millions of dollars a year to states and nongovernment organizations to help refugees transition to life in the United States. The Office of Global Michigan supports such efforts in the state, and in October launched the Newcomer Rental Subsidy program. Under this initiative, for up to 12 months individuals who qualify may receive as much as $500 a month in rental subsidies. Kessler repeatedly relies on 'the state" of Michigan to rebut the Trump camp, downplaying this is a Republican-Democrat fight in Michigan.  The state says these qualified applicants include refugees, asylees, people with special immigrant visas who helped the U.S. government overseas, victims of human trafficking, Cuban and Haitian entrants, Afghan nationals and Ukrainians granted humanitarian parole. These are all people legally in the United States.... the state says that it will not consider any application with a pending defensive asylum hearing.  Then he relies on "the state" to break down their rental-subsidy handouts, with this loaded summary: "In any case, more than half of the people who have been approved for rental subsidies are Afghan and Ukrainian refugees — a far cry from the murderers that Trump claims are overrunning the country." Kessler also lined up the Biden administration to rebut Trump: "An HHS spokesman said the refugee office funds could not be used for asylum seekers....A White House spokesman also disputed Trump’s claims in a statement." None of these statements were going the be challenged by Kessler. They were just going to be repeated.  Conservatives on Twitter mocked Kessler's conclusion:  The link to Biden is even more dubious. This is a state program that has received federal grant money, but there is no indication that Biden is even aware of it. So it’s absurd to run ads that claim Biden is paying rent for immigrants who are in the country illegally. Trump and MAGA Inc. earn Four Pinocchios. Kessler has repeatedly defended Democrats when Republicans make claims about the Democrats providing benefits to illegal immigrants. After all, it is an election year. 

NewsBusters Podcast: The Self-Love Flows at Reporter Party with Biden

The White House Correspondents Dinner airs live on CNN, with hours of journalists honoring themselves and how essential they are to America and to democracy. Who needs this? At dinners like this, they suggest they work in the noblest profession, and somehow it isn't encrusted with egotism and self-righteousness. We all know the way this works. The White House Correspondents Association typically hires a leftist comedian no matter which party is in control of the White House. Because leftist comedians are the ones who leftist journalists think are funny. This year it was Colin Jost, a fake-news anchor on Saturday Night Live. Back in 2009, the WHCA brought in Wanda Sykes to honor the Obamas and to rip Rush Limbaugh to compare him to Osama bin Laden and the 9/11 hijackers and say "I hope his kidneys fail." In 2017, comedian Hasan Minhaj called Donald Trump the "Liar-in-Chief" and said to the press, "You are his biggest enemy -- journalists, ISIS, normal-length ties. And somehow, you're the bad guys. That's why you gotta keep your foot on the gas." This year, it was President Biden that was telling all the reporters in the room that they have to get tougher on Trump, because he said he would be a dictator on Day One and he "promised a bloodbath when he loses again." Biden had zero-fear of the "fact checkers," since they're all assigned to monitoring Trump on a daily basis.  He joked about being a dictator to Sean Hannity, and his "bloodbath" was what Biden would do to the economy in a second term. Biden told the media he wasn't asking them to take sides....and yet democracy was at stake, so they better take sides. The next day, ABC's George Stephanopoulos uncorked a passionate Democrat editorial at the start of the show, touting how "no American president" faced criminal trials and other legal troubles, warning against how this could be "numbing" for voters (because Trump isn't losing by 30 points like they want). He couldn't talk about how all of Trump's prosecutors are Democrats desperately trying to bankrupt Trump or put Trump in jail, preferably before the election.  Enjoy the podcast below, or wherever you listen to podcasts.   

Daily Caller: White House 'Corrected' Biden Remarks 148 Times So Far This Year

As we've pointed out how the networks typically ignore egregious gaffes by President Biden, Daily Caller White House correspondent Reagan Reese reports "White House communications staff has had to correct President Joe Biden’s public remarks at least 148 times since the beginning of 2024, a review of official White House transcripts shows." The White House website posts transcripts whenever Biden gives a speech or takes questions. Reese explained the Caller looked at 118 statements, speeches and chats with reporters spanning from Jan. 1 to April 24. Communications staffers frequently correct, add to or alter Biden’s official remarks "to either bring them into compliance with official White House policy or, in some cases, reality, a Daily Caller analysis showed. In several cases, official statements had to be changed to convey the exact opposite of what Biden actually said." [Emphasis ours.] “It was then, through no — through my American Rescue Plan — which every American [Republican] voted against, I might add — we made the largest investment in public safety ever,” the White House transcript of Biden’s March State of the Union address read. ....“We must be honest: The threat to democracy must be defended [defeated],” another State of the Union excerpt reads. Reese noted the hilarious Ron Burgundy-style Biden gaffe last week, reading too much from the Teleprompter. The Biden seemingly read the word “pause” off his screen, but the original White House transcript of the president’s remarks did not include the word “pause” — it said “(inaudible).” An updated version of the transcript now includes the president’s “pause” as well as the “(inaudible).” “Four more years, PAUSE.” Biden reads the instructions on the Teleprompter, which are always clearly marked, usually with lots of parentheses, meaning ‘dummy don’t say this part, is a command!’ Feel confident with this guy at the wheel??? pic.twitter.com/RUXA5jUkZM — Steve Cortes (@CortesSteve) April 29, 2024 For comparison, the Caller looked at a few transcripts of Trump's big events in 2020 to see how many edits or corrections the Trump staff made. (Some could argue Trump surely thinks every speech is the best ever, and wouldn't want staffers correcting it.) For the State of the Union, Biden staff made 13 edits, to zero for Trump staff. For the Earth Day speech, eight edits for Biden, zero for Trump. For the National Prayer Breakfast, eight edits for Biden, while "the Trump White House adjusted the transcript once when the former president missed one word in a quote." The Daily Caller’s analysis does not include times that the White House altered transcripts without indicating there was a change -- "stealth editing." Some had to adjust a claim on history: “I kept my promise to appoint the first Black [woman] Supreme Court justice,” the White House transcript reads from a Feb. 22 campaign reception. PS: This addition of "historic" was curious:  One White House transcript from Biden’s March 9 campaign event adds “historic” in front of a reference to Vice President Kamala Harris. “Because unlike Donald Trump, I know who we are as Americans.  (Applause.)  It’s why I promised to have an administration that looks like America.  (Applause.) The most diverse Cabinet and administration in American history led by a [historic] Vice President,” the transcript reads.

Intolerant Nancy Pelosi Yells at MSNBC's Katy Tur, Suggests She's 'a Trump Apologist'

Democrats and MSNBC watchers – which are pretty much the same thing – cannot tolerate anyone making a contrary point. On Monday afternoon, MSNBC host Katy Tur interviewed former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for almost 15 minutes. She asked the usual between-us-Democrats questions, starting with how much the Democrats can insure untrammeled abortion on demand if they can stay in power. Tur worried out loud that the anti-Israel protests on campus could hurt Democrats, as radical and violent protests at the 1968 convention helped elect Nixon. But Pelosi lost all patience with Tur at the tail end of an answer lasting two minutes and 40 seconds without interruption about how Biden is great: PELOSI: There are those who have real legitimate concerns about immigration, globalization, innovation, and what does that mean to their job and their family’s future? And we have to address those concerns. And Joe Biden is doing that. Created nine million jobs in his term in office. Donald Trump has the worst record of job loss of a president. So, we just have to make sure people know. Tur interjected with a fact: “That was during a global pandemic.” This inflamed Pelosi.   “He had the worst record of any president,” Pelosi repeated in anger, karate-chopping the air in Tur's face. “We’ve had other concerns in our country. If you want to be an apologist for Donald Trump, that may be your role, but it ain’t mine.” “I don’t think anybody can accuse me of that,” Tur said. Pelosi expects MSNBC hosts to be an apologist for Pelosi. Like Andrea Mitchell, Katy Tur hits the "Trending" bar on Twitter when the MSNBC base thinks they are so Republican they should just defect to Fox News. The big "Really American" account got out the flame emojis:  🚨If you only watch ONE video today, watch Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi stuffing Katy Tur into a locker for being "an apologist for Donald Trump" after Tur attempted to defend his abysmal job loss record. Extremely satisfying!🔥🔥pic.twitter.com/hPkVtfKr1o — Really American 🇺🇸 (@ReallyAmerican1) April 29, 2024 Tur closed out by asking about the House Democrats uniting against efforts by a few Republicans to remove current Speaker Mike Johnson, and then concluded with gushy thanks: "Thank you very much for joining us. It's really wonderful to see you in person. I appreciate it."

Column: The White House Correspondents Host a Biden Rally

It was remarkable breaking news, occurring live on CNN. The White House Correspondents Association hosted a dinner and a Biden for President rally broke out. It’s only natural that CNN loves live coverage of the White House Correspondents Dinner, where the anti-Trump media celebrate themselves for how essential they are to preserving democracy and how valiantly they warn Americans that Donald Trump is democracy's antonym. President Biden’s speech made some jokes about his age – it’s that safe spot where all the late-night comedians go. But he also showed nastiness: “Yes, age is an issue. I’m a grown man running against a six-year-old.” They loved that joke on CNN. Like last year, Biden thought it was funny to insist he doesn’t have to grant access to reporters, because “I do interviews with strong independent journalists who millions of people actually listen to, like Howard Stern.” Instead, he lectured them about how Trump “has made no secret of his attack on our democracy,” and the “free press” needs to make sure the voters have “the information they need to make an informed decision.” Biden thinks a pro-Biden media needs to deliver: “I’m sincerely not asking you to take sides, but asking you to rise up to the seriousness of the moment.” He clearly means the media need to underline Trump needs to lose. Biden ripped into Trump, ranting about January 6, spewing misinformation about Trump’s attention-grabbing way of speaking. “He said he wants to be a dictator on Day One….he promised a bloodbath when he loses again.” If you’re a low-information voter, you wouldn’t know Trump joked with Sean Hannity about being a dictator for one day, and he said our economy would be a “bloodbath” if Biden was reelected. You can scold Trump for his rhetorical red meat. But that doesn’t mean journalists and presidents should mischaracterize what he says. This is not how these dinners used to work. Twenty years ago at this dinner, when President George W. Bush was lining up against Sen. John Kerry, Bush didn’t say one negative word about his opponent or one negative word about the opposing party. He made gentle jokes about the press. He didn’t urge the networks to defeat John Kerry at the anchor desk. He talked about heroic reporters in war zones, and heroic soldiers. That’s not how it unfolded in 2024. The hired comedian, Saturday Night Live fake-news anchor Colin Jost, concluded his comedy routine by remembering his late grandfather, a Staten Island firefighter, who voted for Biden in 2020. “He voted for you, and the reason that he voted for you is because you're a decent man. My grandpa voted for decency, and decency is why we're all here tonight. Decency is how we're able to be here tonight. Decency is how we're able to make jokes about each other, and one of us doesn't go to prison after.” He then repeated: “So, Mr. President, I thank you for your decency on behalf of my grandfather.” Jost said this after Biden said his opponent was a six-year-old who would spur a bloodbath if he loses. He said this after he mocked Trump as “currently spending his days farting himself awake during a porn-star hush-money trial,” and the courtroom sketch artist makes Trump look like “the Grinch had sex with the Lorax.” At least CNN allowed their contributor Scott Jennings to sum up the evening: “We had Biden speak tonight, and then we had a Biden surrogate effectively speak tonight.”  It's no wonder CNN wanted to air the whole thing live.

Ex-NPR Editor: NPR Needs Some 'Soul-Searching' About Serving All Americans

Ex-NPR senior editor Uri Berliner appeared again on Chris Cuomo's NewsNation show on Tuesday night. “I think that really, NPR has a lot of soul searching to do about representing the country at large. Being a publicly funded news organization and really trying to represent this country in all its great diversity and viewpoints.” It should seem obvious that NPR is impervious to "soul searching" since they didn't want Berliner to work there any more after he raised his questions about viewpoint diversity. Cuomo asked about morning host Steve Inskeep and then other people at NPR saying Berliner "cherry-picked" his stories and got it wrong. "Do you think in retrospect that you should have done anything different?" Berliner said no, "not at all. You know, I think even in our news in NPR newsroom, since the story was published, they've decided to institute regular reviews of coverage, which I think is a positive sign. I also think there's a conversation in this country that's happening within the media, but also more broadly about the really sad level of trust of the media and the extent to which narratives are imposed in newsrooms, whether they are legacy media and they're left leaning or whether they're coming from the right, and I think there's a large group of people that are tired of it, and are just calling out the media for doing things that are increasing the polarization in this country, so I don't regret -- I don't have any regrets.” Cuomo said "I was moved that the media left this story alone," and they didn't want to have a real examination of NPR's content. "What does it mean for you going forward? " BERLINER: Well, I you know, I think there was that there was some a lot of positive stories, including, interestingly, from college newspapers supporting what I said, and saying it's vital. And, you know, and from reporters and columnists around the country, and I would say this story lasted a lot longer than I expected it to. I thought, you know, I would write this and there would be pushback in the newsroom and it would be, you know, be over in a couple of days. You know, the head of the newsroom [Edith Chapin], criticized the story, I think she did it in a fairly respectful way, I was suspended five days without pay. I didn't object to that I didn't seek a grievance from the union. And I thought it was gonna go away after that. But then the new CEO, Katherine Maher, she injected herself into the newsroom, and she attacked me publicly and personally, and I think that extended the story, especially when people started finding out more about her views, not just the tweets, you know about America, being addicted to white supremacy, or criticizing Hillary Clinton for using the words [inaudible]. More importantly, videos that surfaced where she talked about the First Amendment being a challenge and a tricky thing when you're trying to suppress information. This is when she was running, Wikimedia, which oversees Wikipedia. And I think that really extended the story a lot.” Cuomo expressed amazement that the serious complaints within NPR were about wanting to take it further to the left, not further to the center. 

NewsBusters Podcast: The Lingo Games with 'Pro-Palestinian Protesters'

One of the ways you can always sense media bias is the terminology that the media elite decides to adopt en masse. Colleges are being occupied by "pro-Palestinian protesters," and you can't (accurately) call them "anti-Israel," not to mention "pro-Hamas." Liberals paint other liberals as pro-everything good, and the conservatives are anti-everything good. Anti-abortion, anti-gay, anti-government, anti-tax. All of this is messaging, like advertising slogans. This tendency is especially transparent on the "culture war" issues. Killing a baby is "abortion care." Seeking an amputation is "gender-affirming care." Florida adopting a six-week abortion ban is portrayed as very "restrictive." The media will use the word "protections" for whatever policies they support, like Democrats passing "protections for gender-affirming care." They'll call liberalized abortion law "protections," when the baby is clearly not protected.  Reporters casually pass along that leftists call trans surgeries "life-saving." They'll even call abortions "life-saving." On the PBS NewsHour, they filed a story that used the term "gender-affirming care" ten times, and nowhere in the report did anyone take exception to that term or anything else the transgender lobby is seeking to accomplish. It wasn't surprising, given the expert in the segment was NPR health reporter Selena Simmons-Duffin, who has filed one-sided stories in favor of abortion and the abortion lobby. Ex-NPR senior editor Uri Berliner appeared with Chris Cuomo on NewsNation and insisted “I think that really, NPR has a lot of soul searching to do about representing the country at large. Being a publicly funded news organization and really trying to represent this country in all its great diversity and viewpoints.” Berliner is no longer at NPR because almost no one in public radio believes that the taxpayer subsidies should encourage NPR to be fair and balanced. No one at NPR wants that, or if they do, they'll be sidelined like Berliner. Enjoy the podcast below, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

Column: The Public Doesn't Trust the 'Democracy-Saving' Media

The national media consider themselves essential in educating the electorate, so what happens when the electorate does not consider them a trustworthy guardian of democracy? The Associated Press and the American Press Institute just released a poll on the 2024 election and found only 14 percent of their sample expressed a great deal of confidence in election-related information they receive from national sources. By contrast, 52 percent have little or no confidence at all in the information they receive from national news organizations About half of Americans, 53 percent, say they are extremely or very concerned that news organizations will report inaccuracies or misinformation during the election. It's 83 percent if you count the middle option of "somewhat concerned." That has to hurt, since the media elites say “misinformation” is what other people offer. When faced with poll after poll showing the media are not trusted, their failure to accept these results underlines the persistent lack of trust. AP media reporter David Bauder turned to American Press Institute chief Michael Bolden, who said “Years of suspicion about journalists, much of it sown by politicians, is partly responsible, he said. People are also less familiar with how journalism works.” Let’s be uncharitable for a minute. Reporters have sown “years of suspicion about politicians.” That’s how investigating politician performance could be described. So why would investigating journalist performance draw complaints of “sowing years of suspicion”? Why can they never be evaluated for how they serve the public? Respect cannot merely be demanded. It should be earned. Mr. Bolden is implying that politicians have swindled the public, which paints the public as – how did The Washington Post put it? – “poor, uneducated, and easy to command.” Then he lobbed another insult, that people aren’t familiar with “how journalism works.” Maybe these elitists should consider that news consumers might want a mostly factual, somewhat objective product instead of hyperbolic editorializing that tells them what they should think. Obviously, the Republican half of the public isn’t going to support Democrat electioneering badly disguised as “news.” Since they refuse to consider any bowing to objectivity, they have to dismiss any demand for it as ignorance of “how journalism works.” Bolden weirdly claimed this may be because most people don’t have a journalist who “lived on their block.” Since journalists won’t meet you at the summer picnic or the Trick or Treat greetings, media outlets need to tell the public “what journalists do and how people reporting news are their friends and neighbors.” This sounds remarkably similarly to what NPR CEO Katherine Maher recently said to The Wall Street Journal as she dismissed bias complaints as a “distraction.” Maher said, “We want to be able to speak to folks as though they were our neighbors and speak to folks as though they were our friends.” Curiously, they don’t want to talk to Republicans like they’re neighbors and friends. Remember short-lived CNN CEO Chris Licht meeting with Republicans trying to say trust us, “we don’t bite.” That turned out to be (a) untrue and (b) fatal to his CNN career. Brian Stelter channeled the national media arrogance under Trump after Licht was dumped: “We were advocating for the truth, advocating for reality. Others felt that was left-leaning.” When you think reality has a liberal bias, you shouldn’t be shocked when a lot of people change the channel.