'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? 

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.   

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.

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 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."

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.”

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.   

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. 

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.

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.   

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. 

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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! 

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."

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. 

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. 

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.

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. 

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.

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. 

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." 

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.

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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.

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. 

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. 

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. 

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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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?

'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.

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.

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.   

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.

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. 

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. 

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.  

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!

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? 

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.

Tax-Funded NPR Thrice Harps on Fake News: Bill Kristol Is a 'Conservative'... for Biden

One of the ways that taxpayer-funded NPR and PBS shows abuse their involuntary conservative funders is by pretending people who earnestly back Joe Biden over Donald Trump can still be defined somehow as "conservative." You can be an anti-Trump conservative, but you can't be a Vote-for-Biden conservative.  On Monday's Morning Edition, NPR anchor Michel Martin harped twice on the fake news that pro-Biden pundit Bill Kristol is still a "conservative." Martin explained "Democrats hope there are enough disaffected Republicans out there to give President Biden a boost." After airing a free snippet of a Biden ad with audio of Trump attacking Nikki Haley as "Birdbrain," Martin introduced the interview this way: But is that message getting through? We're going to ask conservative writer and editor Bill Kristol about this. He previously served in the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, both Republicans. Good morning, Mr. Kristol. Martin repeated the falsehood at the end:  Okay. That is conservative writer, former Republican Bill Kristol, who served in the George H.W. Bush and Reagan administrations. Mr. Kristol, thanks so much for joining us. Make that three labels if you count the online summary: "Democrats are trying to win over Republican voters reluctant to vote for former President Donald Trump in 2024. Conservative writer Bill Kristol joins the program to see if the effort will resonate." But this notion fell apart in the actual interview:  MARTIN: And here's where I put you on the spot. As a person who has made your distaste for the former president clear, for many, many, many reasons, are you going to vote for Joe Biden? KRISTOL: Oh, yeah, I am. I did last time, and I did some work for him, and I'll do that again this time. But the key is the former Trump supporters, I think, and Trump administration members who you mentioned, getting them out there. Look, I've been against Trump since 2015. I don't have that much credibility, perhaps, with those swing voters anymore. But I think the people who do are people who said, I voted for Trump twice, or, I worked for Trump, and I saw him up close, and that's where Mike Pence and Mark Esper and people like that are so important. MARTIN: And before we let you go, do you still consider yourself a Republican? KRISTOL: No, not really. An ex-Republican. Kristol hopes Mike Pence or Mark Esper can seal the deal with those Nikki Haley voters, like Mike Pence would back Biden? PBS also recently tried to brand Kristol as a Republican on the March 14 Amanpour & Co. show:  ISAACSON: You are among the Republicans who've led the resistance to Donald Trump. Now, that he's apparently the nominee, there's no stopping him, what are you going to do? KRISTOL: I mean, I've been an ex-Republican, honestly, for a while… We can guess that the very minute a Democrat comes out against voting for Biden, no one on NPR or PBS would describe them as a "Democrat" or a "progressive."

NewsBusters Podcast: Biden Lays an Egg on Transgender Day of Easter

The hot item of the Easter weekend on conservative social media was President Biden's "compassionate" embrace of Transgender Day of Visibility when it coincided with Easter. Biden chose his woke-left voters over church-going Christian voters. The media rushed to Biden's defense. Managing Editor Curtis Houck reviews the hot takes on Biden and Trump on TV. When conservatives began tweeting, the Stelters of the world started the so-called "fact checking." The date of Easter moves around and our Transgender Day does not! So they didn't put their Transgender Day on Easter on purpose! but Biden chose to honor it.  This should be a sticky wicket for Biden, but it wasn’t. It was a no-brainer on the Left.  Meanwhile, the cable networks quickly broke out the latest Trump attack, that he spent the Christian holy day unloading his Truth Social messages. Suddenly Easter was too holy for Trump, but Biden didn't clash with the Christians. At the White House press briefing, Curtis tweeted this unbelievable tee-ball question to KJP from AP reporter Will Weissert: “So, the criticism over the Transgender Day of Visibility, the White House said that the President wouldn't abuse his faith for political purposes. Does the President think that's what Republicans are doing on this?” NBC News put out a Biden-defense piece titled "Conservatives shell long-standing White House Easter egg contest."  They  lamented a flyer circulated by the adjutants general of the National Guard inviting children of National Guard members to submit Easter eggs to the White House contest caused a controversy, with "outlets like Fox News and The Daily Caller writing stories saying the administration is banning religious themes in this year's contest." They admitted this year's flyer does say that the decorated Easter egg submissions "must not include any questionable content, religious symbols, overtly religious themes, or partisan political statements." But the White House insisted the American Egg Board's "standard non-discrimination language" has been in use for 45 years. Deputy press secretary Andrew Bates said it was "unsurprising" that some "are seeking to divide and weaken our country with cruel, hateful, and dishonest rhetoric." "President Biden will never abuse his faith for political purposes or for profit," Bates added, noting that Biden is "a Christian who celebrates Easter with family." On MSNBC, former Republican congressman David Jolly trashed Trump and Speaker Mike Johnson on Rev. Al Sharpton's show:: “The Jesus they celebrate today would be inclusive of the transgender community” Jolly implies Jesus thinks the Father is wrong to assign genders at birth. He should let the little children pick their own genders. On Monday, Morning Joe regular Donnie Deutsch explained “Here’s why I think Republicans so heinously seize on the trans issue. Obviously the numbers are not there. The amount of trans athletes competing is, men with women, 0.0001%." Republicans pouncing on men in women's sports is "tragic and it's disgusting."  Gregory on CBS with Marianne Budde, the Episcopal bishop of Washington. Ed O Keefe was guest-hosting really wanted to drive the point that Biden is a devout Catholic in his attendance at Mass. Cardinal Gregory is a very measured prelate. Being the church’s shepherd in DC ends up being very political, and the bishops in general have acted very gingerly about Biden. The cardinal stipulated that Biden is “very sincere about his faith," BUT he said the words “cafeteria Catholic.” Biden rejects the pieces of Catholic teaching that get in the way of seeking hardcore leftist Democrats. We shared how it's funny that "heinous" describes complaining about men entering women's sports, but it's not "heinous" to terminate a baby in the third trimester. Enjoy the podcast below, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. 

CBS Host Ed O'Keefe Prods DC Archbishop to Categorize Biden as a 'Cafeteria Catholic'

On Easter Sunday, CBS’s Face the Nation turned to two prominent Washington religious leaders: Cardinal Wilton Gregory, the Catholic archbishop of Washington and Rev. Mariann Budde, Bishop of Washington for the Episcopal Church, which is politically a better fit for Biden. White House correspondent Ed O’Keefe was the substitute host, and he seemed most interested in underlining how Biden faithfully attends Catholic services, and not so much whether he’s in complete contradiction with Catholic teaching on the hot-button social and sexual issues. He kept pressing the Cardinal on if Biden “resonates” with Catholic voters: ED O'KEEFE: In the case of the president, do you get a sense that his regular attendance and adherence to the faith resonates with American Catholics? CARDINAL GREGORY: I could say that he's very sincere about his faith, but like a number of Catholics, he picks and chooses dimensions of the faith to highlight while ignoring or even contradicting other parts. There is a phrase that we have used in the past, a cafeteria Catholic, you choose that which is attractive and dismiss that which is challenging. REV. BUDDE: Or, as Thomas Aquinas would say, you allow your conscience to guide you. Gregory has been very careful in his public remarks on the president, so even dropping the “cafeteria Catholic” line was a bit surprising – more surprising than Budde’s Biden boosterism. O’Keefe played dumb about Biden contradicting the church aggressively on abortion and on this day, promoting a “Transgender Day of Visibility” on social media. ED O'KEEFE: Is there something on the menu he's not ordering, in your view, so to speak? WILTON CARDINAL GREGORY: Well, I would say there are things, especially in terms of the life issues, there are things that he chooses to ignore or he uses the current situation as a political pawn rather than saying, look, my church believes this – Budde interrupted: BUDDE: It's also possible to be a practitioner of the faith as a public leader and not require everyone that you lead in your country to be guided by all of the precepts of your faith, right? O'KEEFE: And in my coverage of him, it seems that is what he believes. BUDDE: That's what I would interpret. There’s a point that a Catholic president shouldn’t impose every Catholic teaching into public policy. But O’Keefe and Budde are seeking to have it both ways: Biden’s a “devout Catholic” and a devout Democrat, and never mind how much they can’t logically coexist. O’Keefe kept pressing on Biden’s “resonance.” ED O'KEEFE: Is there any Biden effect in the pews, perhaps? GREGORY: I would not put a lot of emphasis on that. ED O'KEEFE: Okay. GREGORY: He does attend church regularly with great, you know, devotion. But he also steps aside some of the hot-button issues or uses the hot-button issues as a political tool, which it's not – it is not the way I think we would want our faith to be used. Budde then gushed over how she "admires tremendously" Biden's attendance at funerals at their Washington National Cathedral, pretending it's amazing that a politician would stay for the whole service.  PS: Earlier in the show, O'Keefe pressed Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio) to criticize Donald Trump for ads selling a "God Bless the USA" Bible:  "I got to ask, President Trump this past week unveiled what he calls the God Bless the USA Bible, which not only has the words of scripture in it, but also the text of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and a few other things. Do you think it's appropriate for the former president, for the likely Republican nominee to be selling such a product?" When Turner detoured around an answer, O’Keefe pressed again: "Okay but you wouldn't buy a copy of this Trump Bible, would you?" Turner said "I'm not writing a check for that."

Bill Maher Implies Ronna McDaniel's More Dangerous Than the Communists

On Friday night's Real Time, somehow the discussion of NBC/MSNBC hiring and quickly firing former RNC boss Ronna McDaniel turned into a discussion of the Communist Party. Bill Maher implied that McDaniel was more of a danger to democracy than the Communist Party USA ever was. Maher's opening question to columnist Fareed Zakaria and former Trump Defense Secretary Mark Esper: “How do you represent this large part of the country that does not believe the election was legitimate? How do you say to people ‘we want to include you, but we can't deny that what you think is stupid’?” This depends on the polling question. You can believe Biden was elected, that he won the Electoral College, and still say “no” if the question hinges on “legitimate.” Because the media and Big Tech suppressed damaging stories like the Hunter Biden laptop – which our MRC poll showed could have swung the swing states to Trump. This is especially important when they’re discussing freedom of speech, because powerful forces worked to suppress free speech right before the election. Zakaria said Bill Clinton lied under oath and he can be on MSNBC, and Stacey Abrams was an election denier. Esper agreed. Maher rejected this line:  Ronna McDaniel worse than a communist? @BillMaher suggests so, contending he’s “not sure “ Gus Hall was for “the violent overthrow of the United States” because “you can elect a communist government. Italy did it all the time.” #RealTime pic.twitter.com/OAMr8IBXBr — Brent Baker 🇺🇦 🇮🇱 (@BrentHBaker) March 30, 2024 BILL MAHER: I’m not with you on the idea that a lie is a lie. Bill Clinton's lies, Obama's lies, whoever lies are different from the election doesn't count when our guy doesn't win, that is a separate thing. I get that point of view. FAREED ZAKARIA: I agree but my point is you have to recognize that the end of the day if you're in favor of free speech – look, you say these are lies, they are against the American system. We've had communists run for the presidency of the United States. When I was in college I invited Gus Hall, the communist party candidate, he believed in the violent overthrow of the United States. Fine! In a liberal democracy you get to say your piece and we get to debate it. By the way, it would be good TV to have Rachel Maddow ask her some of the questions. MARK ESPER: that’s right. MAHER: I'm not sure he was for the violent overthrow of the United States, ZAKARIA: He was for the overthrow. MAHER: He wanted communism which is a form of government. ZAKARIA: Which is not liberal democracy. MAHER: No, it is not. ZAKARIA: You would have to overthrow the government to get to it, right? MAHER: No! You can elect a communist government, Italy did it all the time. [Laughter] ZAKARIA: Gus Hall was a little more hardline than the Italian communists, who were basically communists in name. Some Italian communists gained office in local elections, but Italy never had a national communist government. How is it that Maher can suggest Gus Hall is a more legitimate "democrat" than Ronna McDaniel? Gus Hall ran a party that was aligned with (and financially supported by) the Soviet Union, America's greatest adversary. Their goal was to spread communism worldwide, and end democracy. Maher implied that since Trump is presently leading, that implies half the country thinks Trump won last time. That's an energetic stretch. It's likely there are Biden voters who are switching in current polls due to Biden's mismanagement of the country. They're hardly "election deniers." The real sticking point here is that Trump supporters who violently rioted at the Capitol on the day the presidential election was certified have given evidence to the Left that anyone who opposes Biden is "anti-democratic." Our media thinks that if you rig the election the right way, you haven't rigged the election, you "fortified" it. You saved democracy by rigging it. 

NPR Host Still MAD at 'Cowardly' Biden Team for Folding on Nina Jankowicz Censorship Board

National "Public" Radio has a nasty tendency to believe in "free speech for me, and not for thee." Every night it airs All Things Considered, which fails to consider granting conservative rebuttals to all its left-wing propaganda. So it's natural it's all in favor of vigorous censorship of troublesome social-media speech. Remember its 2020 lecturing that the Hunter Biden laptop wasn't at all a story. They also complain that the 2024 election is too important to allow free speech.  On March 21, NPR's On Point aired a program on "How disinformation 'sabotages America'" with MSNBC contributor Barbara McQuade. Host Meghna Chakrabarty went on a surprising tear about how the Biden administration was "cowardly" for discontinuing its "Disinformation Governance Board" and its crusading leftist chief Nina Jankowicz. Meghna is still down with Nina.  MEGHNA CHAKRABARTY:  There are those who recognize our freedoms and our open society and are using those things to exploit us. For example, in this country, we all revere our First Amendment right to free speech. And that's true whether you're on the left or the right or anywhere in between. And there's a reason for that. Free speech is what allows us to speak out against our government when we see something that we disagree with, or we see something that's wrong, or we want to advocate for something different and better. So it's a cherished right for everybody. But I think it makes the word censorship a powerful weapon. Because anything that in any way tries to regulate speech can be labeled censorship, and everyone immediately backs down from it. The Biden administration had set up a disinformation agency run by Nina Jankiewicz, who is a disinformation scholar, and immediately the far right started calling it the censorship bureau, a censorship board. And so they closed it up. They closed up shop. That was a failure of the Biden administration. I will say just because some critics are saying it's a censorship board. I think the Biden administration, cowardly, it was a cowardly act for them to shut it down. So do I blame the people for criticizing the administration? No, I actually hang the blame right on the Biden administration for that. This overt critique of Team Biden made the MSNBC contributor uncomfortable, but she tried to play along: McQUADE: Sure. But they didn't want to take the political hit. Because the word censorship is so loaded that they didn't want to even be accused of engaging in censorship. Right now, there is a case argued before the Supreme Court the other day. I don't think the justices are going to have any of it. Based on their questioning, a lawsuit filed suggesting that when the Biden administration merely goes to social media companies and flags for them false claims about quack COVID remedies that are life threatening and says, "Hey, you might want to take that down. That's dangerous to public safety and human life." That is a violation of the First Amendment rights of the people who are making up these false claims about COVID remedies. Don't mention that some "false claims" about COVID, like it likely emerged from a Chinese laboratory, were heavily censored, even though they are now considered legitimate information. Unsurprisingly, Meghna said she's spoken with Nina "many times" on NPR, so she's mad her radio buddy got the boot, and then reached for the reliable "she got death threats" defense: I completely agree with you about the pressure the Biden administration was under regarding its disinformation board. And in fact, Nina Jankowicz, who was supposed to head that board, we have spoken with her on this show many times, and one of the times was not long after the administration shut down that disinformation board, and she made it clear that one of the reasons was she was, speaking of threats that you mentioned earlier, Barbara, she was receiving direct threats, which were definitely a danger to her safety, her being and her family. So it wasn't just like people screaming on social media. There was adequate concern that her life could be in danger, and I don't want to dismiss that. I want to repeat that. That, in and of itself, it makes sense that anyone would step back from that. At the same time, you're exactly right when we don't necessarily want to blame the Biden administration for all the disinformation in our information ecosystem now. But simultaneously, and I respectfully say this, no one expects Donald Trump to step back from the disinformation carnival that he's been powering around the United States for the past many years, that's just not going to happen. No one expects all the foreign actors who are using disinformation to influence American thought. They're not going to step back from it either. All that's left for us who care deeply about a functioning American democracy is to expect more of the people in power who do want to protect democracy. And I just wanted to offer that to you as the reason why I do look to the Biden administration to try to do more. They have all the power right now in terms of proposing new legislation or cases that they want to bring to court, et cetera. So I wanted to hear what you thought about that is it not fair to expect more from people like, like you and me, like you said, like the Biden administration, even people at the state level who have a place in our society. To do more, to say more about protecting democracy. McQUADE: Yeah, I'd like to see some of this come from Congress in terms of initiating legislation. CHAKRABARTI: Congress, yes. McQUADE: Where Joe Biden is, I think, vulnerable is the fact that Donald Trump is also his political rival. And so anything that he offers in an effort to neutralize Donald Trump's disinformation, I think it's spun as disinformation, as solely a political effort to neutralize his political opponent. And so it makes it very politically fraught for him as a direct opponent of Donald Trump. But sure, I think everybody in leadership should be working against this threat. Because it is so great. I think it is something that our justice department should be working on. I think it's people at the federal, state, and local levels should be working on, because it is so corrosive to our society.

After Ronna, New Lefty Spin: Aren't Paid Pundits 'More Trouble Than They're Worth'?

In the wake of NBC’s Ronna McDaniel debacle, “mainstream” media reporters have begun to argue that partisan pundits aren’t useful any more. We can’t ignore that this is a very useful spin if you want to prevent any more paid Republican contributors in this election cycle. In The New York Times, reporter James Poniewozik set the tone: Can you really rely on well-connected partisans to give you unvarnished analysis about their once and perhaps future colleagues? Would viewers be better served by news networks’ seeking out a wide range of voices than hearing predictable takes from regular panelists? Isn’t it better to leave the reputation-laundering to Dancing With the Stars? That show had a link to Poniewozik insisting Trump press secretary Sean Spicer shouldn't be allowed to "tap dance out of infamy." NPR media reporter David Folkenflik noted NBC executive Cesar insisted they would "redouble our efforts to seek voices that represent different parts of the political spectrum."(We won’t hold our breath.) Folkenflik threw cold water on paid GOP pundits: “There are more than 330 million Americans and thousands of political professionals. Why pay for the right to interview them? Does anyone think Newt Gingrich will boycott television appearances if he's not paid?” We would think unpaid contributors would be freer to speak their mind, but everyone appearing on a “mainstream” network run by Democrats fears they’ll never be invited again if they’re too, well, free-spirited in their dissent. The fullest argument against paid partisan punditry came from Associated Press media reporter David Bauder, whose headline wondered: “Network political contributors have a long history. But are they more trouble than they’re worth?” Bauder turned to several leftist experts to underline the new thesis. Mark Lukasiewicz, a former NBC executive who is now dean of Hofstra University’s communications school, argued you cannot challenge the credibility of leftist media on leftist media. That’s somehow advocating for that network ….not to exist? “Journalists in a lot of newsrooms are starting to think more about the stakes, thinking about the costs of delivering a large audience and a platform to someone who doesn’t fundamentally believe in a system that allows that platform to exist,” Lukasiewicz said. “I think there is a higher bar for somebody who is on the payroll of a journalistic institution, rather than just somebody you interview.” Bauder also turned to radical Jay Rosen, who explicitly argued the Republicans are the antonym of “public service.” “To remain itself, the MAGA movement has to practice election denial, minimize the events of Jan. 6, and treat the news media as a hate object for pointing this out,” said Jay Rosen, a New York University professor and author of the Pressthink blog. “Extending the hand of welcome is just too costly for a self-respecting newsroom with a public service charter, as NBC learned this week.” Networks should retire this category of contributors and switch to a system relying on their own journalists and vetted, unpaid experts, he said. "Vetted experts" is code for "Republicans who we don't hate," which means "Michael Steele Republicans."

NewsBusters Podcast: The 'Democratic Party' Aims to Squash 'Spoilers'

 The Democratic Party turns out to be a pretty funny name, because they’re really interested this year in keeping everyone else off the ballot. Third-party "spoilers" like RFK Jr. must be treated by the media as a "threat" to democracy, since democracy and the Democrats are treated as synonymous.  Kennedy's announcement of running mate Nicole Shanahan -- a lawyer and ex-wife of Google founder Sergey Brin -- drew only brief notice on Tuesday night. PBS NewsHour offered 45 seconds, CBS 30 seconds, and NBC? Just eight seconds.  Alex Christy found Trump's 2020 primary opponents drew 115 TV interviews on the liberal networks, but Biden's 2024 primary opponents drew only 25. While he ran as a Democrat, RFK Jr. had two. Over on ABC's The View, Nick Fondacaro reported Joy Behar became unglued as she ranted about how “Somebody has to ask him: why are you doing this! Why do you want to destroy the election and hand it to Trump if possible?!”  She also claimed he was doing a disservice to the family name, saying: “He's a Kennedy. His forefathers are rolling over in their graves with this. His own family is telling him to get out. We already have one clown in the race. Do we need two of them?” Moderator Whoopi Goldberg really bought into the conspiracy theories, claiming Kennedy’s trying to “buy the election.” This at least came before Biden raised $25 million plus in one night next to Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, and Stephen Colbert. Then we revisit the scene of the Ronna McDaniel debacle, and how "mainstream" media reporters are now trying to claim hiring partisan pundits just doesn't make sense any more. Which might sound like "don't replace Ronna with a different Republican." Enjoy the podcast below, or wherever you listen to podcasts!   

Biden Commits Train Brain Fart, PolitiFact Sprays Spin Against the Plain Truth!

President Biden obviously misspoke on Tuesday when he implied he went over Baltimore's Francis Scott Key Bridge commuting by train or by bar. Because obviously, there were no train tracks over the Key Bridge. The facts mangled here are in Biden's sentence. But the unofficial Biden press secretaries at PolitiFact somehow pretended that Biden wasn't in the wrong. He was wronged.  There was no "Truth-O-Meter" rating for anybody, which would suggest these Poynter Institute functionaries know they're messing around. Their target is a Twitter account called @CensoredMen (which seems to be "pro-Palestinian," as the media politely say). It was archived as shared on a Facebook group page titled Gavin Newsom Is a Douche. The tweet is factual:  #BREAKING: Joe Biden says he's commuted over the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore many times via train. The problem is that the bridge features no train tracks... PolitiFact's Ciara O'Rourke, who often "checks" crazy anti-Biden items on social-media platforms and spins in Biden's favor (such as he is, in fact, a human being), jumped in with the pro-Biden/not-factual spin. The either/or in this sentence just can't be stretched:  Here’s what he said March 26 at the White House:  "At about 1:30, a container ship struck the Francis Scott Key Bridge, which I’ve been over many, many times commuting from the state of Delaware either on a train or by car." The White House clarified Biden’s comments to the New York Post, which ran a story headlined: "Biden claims he commuted over collapsed Baltimore Key Bridge by train’ many times’ —  but it doesn’t have any rail lines." "The President is clearly describing driving over the bridge while commuting between Delaware and (Washington) D.C. during his 36-year Senate career," the New York Post quoted White House spokesperson Robyn Patterson saying in a statement. Biden has a long history of commuting to the capital.  In other words, "the President is clearly describing what he MEANT to say, not what he actually said." O'Rourke followed up with more irrelevant blather about how Biden loved taking Amtrak trains.  PS: Our Maryland friends have pointed out you'd be a doofus to exit off I-95 to commute over the Key Bridge on I-695. Google Maps shows that route from Wilmington to Washington just looks like you're trying to delay your arrival: 

Column: Jon Stewart, the Tribeca Trickster of Real Estate

On March 25, The Daily Show host Jon Stewart uncorked a typical not-so-funny sermon about how Donald Trump overvaluing real-estate properties was not a “victimless crime.” Trump has been found liable for fraud despite no banker or financier ever claiming Trump victimized them. Then the New York Post reported talk-show host Tim Pool tweeted that in 2014, Stewart sold his 6,280-square-foot Tribeca duplex to financier Parag Pande for $17.5 million. But according to 2013-2014 assessor records obtained by the Post, the property had an estimated market-value at only $1.882 million. The actual assessor valuation was even lower, at $847,174. “Records also show that Stewart paid significantly lower property taxes, which were calculated based on that assessor valuation price,” the Post reported, “precisely what he called Trump out for doing in his Monday monologue.” In his original tenure at Comedy Central, Stewart was making an estimated $25-30 million dollars a year for his satirical labor. Stewart tried to mock people for comparing the two overvaluations and alleged under-taxpaying. His sarcasm was over the top: “OMG!! I've been caught doing something not remotely similar to Trump! I guess all I need to do now is start a fraud college, steal classified docs, bankrupt casinos, pay hush money, grab pussies, discriminate in housing, cheat at golf and foment insurrection and you'll revere me!” Liberal journalists energetically went to work on Stewart’s behalf, proclaiming it’s all “apples and oranges.” But Stewart clearly felt he could pompously mock Trump and no one would ever notice how he made out like a bandit. Why would Parag Pande pay so much more for a property than its assessed value? (Pande sold it in 2021 at a 26 percent loss.) Is it because he’s a Democrat who’s donated to Joe Biden and Cory Booker? The liberal elites didn’t care. Jon Stewart is always beyond suspicion. Comedians are their most honored spin soldiers. Conservative media outlets are making a point. New York Attorney General Letitia James is an elected Democrat, elected on a platform of ruining Trump. She’s not fair or objective. New York Post columnist Miranda Devine reported on James landing on the exact opposite side of a dispute where the American Irish Historical Society dramatically overvalued its building, but James is intervening on their behalf. What Letitia James and Jon Stewart and the entire Democrat messaging machine are doing is prosecuting Trump for something they wouldn’t do for anyone else. Politics explain why Trump is being prosecuted by elected Democrat Tish James, by elected Democrat Alvin Bragg, by elected Democrat Fani Willis, and by Democrat-appointed prosecutor Jack Smith. Do you remember the 1990s, when anchormen like Dan Rather couldn’t say the name Kenneth Starr without calling him a “Republican” independent counsel? The networks are now completely incapable of describing the Democrats prosecuting Trump as Democrats. They pretend all of these prosecutions have no political motives whatsoever. That is simply misinformation.  So remember when Jon Stewart makes fun of oafish millionaires and billionaires, and how they couldn’t possibly know what it’s like to be an average American who can’t exploit their wealth. Stewart never looks in the mirror. Add the dittos for the other Democrat millionaire jesters – John Oliver, Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Meyers, and so on.  All the Democrat messaging machine tells us is how Stewart is such an admirable advocate for military veterans and 9-11 first responders. They’re all on the same team, and they are all about doing PR spin for each other. The most atrocious spin is that these outlets are the “fact-based” media in the “mainstream” of America. 

NewsBusters Podcast: PBS and The Atlantic Merge in the Liberal Bubble

Last August, PBS announced it was entering a partnership with the leftist magazine The Atlantic to rebrand its Friday night journalist roundtable show Washington Week. We've studied six months of this merger, and it's no surprise that it's dramatically anti-Trump and anti-Republican. Our PBS analyst Clay Waters shares his findings.  Over the last six months, more than half (88) of the 157 topics addressed focused on Republicans, over twice as many as those focused on Democrats (38). As we like to ask, “who’s the president?” Democrats control the White House and the Senate, but all the heat is on Republicans. The panelists only come from liberal outlets from PBS and NPR to The New York Times and The Washington Post. No Fox News reporters need apply!  These panelists spent 149 minutes opining about Republicans, and nearly 90 percent of it was negative. For Republicans in Congress, it was 99 percent negative. Trump opponents like Nikki Haley and Mitt Romney drew the positive opinions. By contrast, the Democrats received just 66 minutes of opinionated commentary, split much more evenly (57% negative vs. 43% positive). Congressional Democrats drew only 17.8 percent negative coverage. Biden drew 61 percent negative opinion, but a bunch of that was reporting his polling struggles and his failure to please the hard left. Perhaps the most amusing defense of Biden came in a discussion of Trump mocking his age and acuity:  Mark Leibovich: Can I just actually just point out, though, that, I mean, it’s not just making an issue of Biden’s age, it’s lying, it’s saying he’s senile, saying he’s demented, saying he’s out of it. I mean, I think it’s important to sort of state for a fact that a lot of these are just -- Goldberg: Right. Mentally, he’s quite acute. Leibovich: It seems like it. Clay found Republicans were branded as “extreme” 11 times over the study period. Democrats never were. The Washington Week crew ignored scandals by "The Squad" and only gave 34 seconds to the gold-bars bribery scandal of Sen. Bob Menendez. Then there's their time and tone on Hunter Biden: 104 total seconds, 75 seconds positive, 29 seconds negative. or 27.9 percent negative. Poor Hunter's just trying to get his life together!  Enjoy the podcast below, or wherever you satisfy your podcast itch.  

CBS Airs Long Story on Illegal Crossing in Arizona, Biden Unmentioned

In the second half hour of CBS Mornings on Wednesday, they aired a long segment on the massive influx of illegal immigration, but there was no mention of Biden causing it. The president was only mentioned at the end, as immigration reporter Camilo Montoya-Galvez claimed “The last immigration law passed by Congress was in 1990.” That’s strange. The left-leaning Migration Policy Institute has a timeline of major immigration laws and lists ten laws passed since 1990. Nancy Chen began the report by noting federal judges “decided to continue a block on the controversial SB 4 border law in Texas,” but “Texas has actually seen a big drop in attempted crossings. Instead, one of the busiest sections for illegal arrivals now is a remote area of Southwest Arizona.” That’s where CBS sent its young reporter, who noted there’s a new record in migrant deaths (none of them Biden’s fault). The death count went from 300 in Fiscal Year 2019 to 895 in Fiscal Year 2022. CAMILO MONTOYA-GALVEZ: In its latest public count, Border Patrol documented a record 895 migrant deaths in one year, including 142 in this sector alone. This makeshift encampment behind me can be a lifeline for migrants crossing this treacherous terrain here along the Arizona border. You can see migrants behind me getting food, water, and basic necessities here before being transferred over to Border Patrol agents. In just five months, the Tucson sector recorded over 300,000 migrant apprehensions, more than any other section of the border. BENJAMIN SALCIDO: Here's the border fence here. This is the Sasabe Port of Entry. MONTOYA-GALVEZ: Border Patrol agents like Benjamin Salcido  largely act as first responders. SALCIDO: We're not in the business of losing lives. Any life that we can spare, whether it be a fellow agent or a migrant in distress. To save a life, that's part of the job. TV reporters love this "migrants crossing treacherous terrain" spin, putting the empathy with the poor illegal immigrants just looking for a better life, and the border enforcers are supposed to be "first responders" instead. Notice the lack of Biden when the CBS reporter asked what's driving the border crisis?  MONTOYA-GALVEZ: What is driving this unprecedented flow of people to the US? JASON OWENS (US Border Patrol chief): Everything that comes across our border illicitly is under the control and dictation of the cartels and the smugglers. MONTOYA-GALVEZ: In an exclusive interview, Border Patrol Chief Jason Owens said his agency is on track to record two million migrant apprehensions for the third consecutive fiscal year. In the interview, Owens wouldn't commit to the notion that Republican Gov. Greg Abbott's energetic enforcement efforts are driving down crossings and "migrant apprehensions" in Texas:  MONTOYA-GALVEZ: We have seen a sharp increase in migrant crossings in Arizona and California, and the numbers in Texas have remained low compared to last year. Governor Abbott has credited his policies, the razor wire, the arrests, the busing of migrants to cities for that geographic shift, if you will. Is that accurate? OWENS: Hard to say. Could it have had some impact? Sure. Is it the one panacea that`s corrected the problem? I don't think that's a fair statement. Now here's the weird part: when you turn to the Owens interview as featured on CBSNews.com, Owens sounds much tougher on illegal immigration! he calls it a "national security threat" and talks tough about punishing illegal immigration. They wouldn't put that on the TV! 

Hyperbolic MSNBC’s Ronna McDaniel Debacle

The word broke on March 26 that NBC News was reversing its decision to hire former Republican Party chair Ronna McDaniel as a political commentator. MSNBC hosts across the schedule broke out into frenzied denunciations of whichever executive who thought that McDaniel should be paid to speak anywhere on this hypnotically/robotically anti-Trump network.

In one of her typical half-hour jeremiads, Rachel Maddow compared McDaniel to a mobster and a pickpocket. “You wouldn’t—you wouldn’t hire a wise guy, you wouldn’t hire a made man, like a mobster, to work at a DA’s office, right? You wouldn’t hire a pickpocket to work as a TSA screener. And so I find the decision to put her on the payroll inexplicable. And I hope they will reverse their decision.”

There was no need for NBC News to hire McDaniel. One can look at the election results during her tenure at the Republican National Committee and question her expertise at winning elections. But this mobster talk underlines once again that MSNBC is not a “news” channel. It’s a hyperbole channel, constantly fearmongering its audience that the end times are near for democracy.

Maddow claimed this hiring wasn’t about Republicans vs. Democrats. It’s about “bad actors trying to use the rights and privileges of democracy to end democracy.” There are no “fact-checkers” who will get in the way of this talk. Maddow is like Bluto in “Animal House” saying, “when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor.” Facts don’t matter. Rallying your audience is all that matters.

This was the essence of Maddow’s rant:

I want to associate myself with all my colleagues both at MSNBC and at NBC News who have voiced loud and principled objections to our company putting on the payroll someone who hasn’t just attacked us as journalists, but someone who is part of an ongoing project to get rid of our system of government. Someone who still is trying to convince Americans that this election stuff, it doesn’t really work. That this last election, it wasn’t a real result. That American elections are fraudulent.

Every conservative who’s ever watched Maddow lowlights knows that she was a leader in the Collusion Corps, someone who obsessed night after night over how the 2016 election was fraudulent because the Russians interfered with it. MSNBC doesn’t suggest that every election is fraudulent. It’s only when Democrats lose that they imply (for years) that it was fraudulent.

Since Hillary Clinton lost the election in 2016 and ran around telling people it was stolen from her, Maddow has hosted a series of fawnathons with her. They discussed why Russian President Vladimir Putin decided to back Donald Trump in 2016. In 2018, Clinton even suggested the Russians may have used the National Rifle Association to funnel money into the election.

Maddow concluded by lobbying the executives who allow her on air: “Acknowledge that maybe it wasn’t the right call. It is a sign of strength, not weakness, to acknowledge when you are wrong. It is a sign of strength. And our country needs us to be strong right now.”

That may be the funniest line of all. Maddow is notorious for refusing to concede she’s wrong, especially about Trump.

In 2019, Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple constructed a devastating timeline of all of Maddow’s promotions of the baseless dungpile called the Steele Dossier. He noted Maddow called it “creepy” and “unwarranted” when Michael Isikoff said she’d “given a lot of credence” to the dossier on his podcast.

Why couldn’t she acknowledge she was wrong? Instead, “Maddow declined to provide an on-the-record response to the Erik Wemple Blog.”

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What NBC’s Ronna McDaniel debacle reveals about the state of journalism today

The NBC fiasco where they hired and then almost immediately fired Ronna McDaniel shows the collapse of news in journalism. Whining MSNBC host Maddow is a prime example of the problems.

Column: Hyperbolic MSNBC's Ronna McDaniel Debacle

The word broke on March 26 that NBC News was reversing its decision to hire former Republican Party chair Ronna McDaniel as a political commentator. MSNBC hosts across the schedule broke out into frenzied denunciations of whichever executive who thought that McDaniel should be paid to speak anywhere on this hypnotically/robotically anti-Trump network. In one of her typical half-hour jeremiads, Rachel Maddow compared McDaniel to a mobster and a pickpocket. “You wouldn't -- you wouldn't hire a wiseguy, you wouldn't hire a made man, like a mobster to work at a DA's office, right? You wouldn't hire a pickpocket to work as a TSA screener. And so I find the decision to put her on the payroll inexplicable. And I hope they will reverse their decision.” There was no need for NBC News to hire McDaniel. One can look at the election results during her tenure at the RNC and question her expertise at winning elections. But this mobster talk underlines once again that MSNBC is not a “news” channel. It’s a hyperbole channel, constantly fearmongering its audience that the end times are near for democracy. Maddow claimed this hiring wasn’t about Republicans vs. Democrats. It’s about “bad actors trying to use the rights and privileges of democracy to end democracy.” There are no “fact checkers” who will get in the way of this talk. Maddow is like Bluto in Animal House saying “when the Germans invaded Pearl Harbor.” Facts don’t matter. Rallying your audience is all that matters. This was the essence of Maddow’s rant: "I want to associate myself with all my colleagues both at MSNBC and at NBC News who have voiced loud and principled objections to our company putting on the payroll someone who hasn't just attacked us as journalists, but someone who is part of an ongoing project to get rid of our system of government. Someone who still is trying to convince Americans that this election stuff, it doesn't really work. That this last election, it wasn't a real result. That American elections are fraudulent." Every conservative who’s ever watched Maddow lowlights knows that she was a leader in the Collusion Corps, someone who obsessed night after night over how the 2016 election was fraudulent because the Russians interfered with it. MSNBC doesn’t suggest that every election is fraudulent. It’s only when Democrats lose that they imply (for years) that it was fraudulent. Since Hillary Clinton lost the election in 2016 and ran around telling people it was stolen from her, Maddow has hosted a series of fawnathons with her. They discussed why Vladimir Putin decided to back Trump in 2016. In 2018, Hillary even suggested the Russians may have used the National Rifle Association to funnel money into the election. Maddow concluded by lobbying the executives who allow her on air: “Acknowledge that maybe it wasn't the right call. It is a sign of strength, not weakness, to acknowledge when you are wrong. It is a sign of strength. And our country needs us to be strong right now." That may be the funniest line of all. Maddow is notorious for refusing to concede she’s wrong, especially about Trump. In 2019, Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple constructed a devastating timeline of all of Maddow’s promotions of the baseless dungpile called the Steele Dossier. He noted Maddow called it “creepy” and “unwarranted” when journalist Michael Isikoff said she’d “given a lot of credence” to the dossier on his podcast.  Why couldn’t she acknowledge she was wrong? Instead, “Maddow declined to provide an on-the-record response to the Erik Wemple Blog.”

Lesley Stahl of '60 Minutes' Rips Jim Jordan, Says X Is 'Rife with Trash Talk & Lies'

On Sunday night, the hatchet-job specialists at 60 Minutes were back on the attack against conservatives. It was a 13-minute segment provocatively titled “The Right to Be Wrong.” On one side of this cockeyed chronicle were the allegedly non-ideological, nonpartisan “misinformation researchers” – Kate Starbird, Darrell West, Katie Harbath – who are presented as people in favor of “fact checking” and opposed to “hate speech.” They line up neatly with the CBS narrative. On the other side was Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, who was presented as someone who doesn’t favor facts, but does support freedom for “hate speech.”  Stahl refers to “conservatives” or “the right wing” eight times, but never finds a label for her favored “misinformation experts.” It started out funny, as she told viewers "Conservatives claim that the companies have engaged in a conspiracy to suppress their speech." The rest of the segment is Stahl unfurling a "conspiracy theory" that conservatives are engaged in an effort to "chill" the "misinformation researchers," those nonpartisan truth-tellers.  Reminder! Stahl had 13 minutes to report, but was never going to revisit her comical interview with Donald Trump before the 2020 election (sections of which she wouldn't put on the air). Trump talked of the Biden family taking millions from China and other countries, and Stahl shot back "All these things have been investigated and discredited." Biden scandal? "It can't be verified." Hunter's laptop? Again, "It can't be verified."  The joy of being CBS News is being able to only choose the facts you want to choose, and to refuse to verify what you do not want to be verified. When someone suggests there are other facts and other stories, you turn to "misinformation researchers" to pluck out how the conservatives are the ones who are sloppy with information. Stahl avoided any mention of Big Tech giants suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story before the election in 2020. She questions Jim Jordan about questioning the 2020 election, but not about the pro-Biden suppression. Stahl also wasn't going to tell you that her expert Kate Starbird worked from a National Science Foundation grant from the Biden administration and donated to many Democrats.  WATCH: 60 Minutes profiled a misinformation academic researcher named Kate Starbird a "leader of a misinformation research group" that tried to get Big Tech companies to silence conservatives during the 2020 election. 60 Minutes failed to point out that Starbird is a serious… pic.twitter.com/ygogCh9ybr — Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) March 25, 2024 Stahl asked her alleged nonpartisan expert "Did your research find that there was more misinformation spread by conservatives?" Starbird said "Absolutely," that in the 2020 election "there was more information spread by people that were supported by Donald Trump or conservatives. And the events of January 6 underscore this." The tweets from the CBS show weren't subtle:  After Elon Musk took over X, most fact-checkers were fired. The site is now rife with trash talk and lies. "The toothpaste is out of the tube," says Darrell West of the Brookings Institution. https://t.co/ShSbzksR7L pic.twitter.com/2y9pvdgcJT — 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) March 24, 2024 Jordan insisted to Stahl that the American people are smart enough to figure out what's misinformation, but of course, liberals think the American people are idiots when they don't vote for liberals. The best part of the segment was Jordan marveling at how he's supposedly the chilling effect! His probe is "intimidating" The poor "nonpartisan" researchers!  Lesley Stahl asks Rep. Jim Jordan: Is his goal to chill misinformation researchers? https://t.co/rlNyIsbg8R pic.twitter.com/Ls8Hu8yQbk — 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) March 24, 2024

NewsBusters Podcast: Angry Peacocks Prance Against Ronna McDaniel Joining NBC

From NBC's Meet the Press to MSNBC's Morning Joe, the liberal bubble is in a furious revolt against ex-RNC boss Ronna McDaniel joining their team as a commentator. They want her fired before she begins. But they're all for ideological diversity....yeah, right. They can't stand anyone who defends Donald Trump or who would vote for him. Chuck Todd appeared on his old show to demand the NBC brass apologize to Kristen Welker for the embarrassment of having to interview the new NBC commentator. She grilled her for 20 minutes. Todd said some mockable things in his Sunday sermon.  First, that McDaniel's party apparatus was guilty of "character assassination" of the press. Earth to Chuck:  Have you never engaged with the possibility that Republicans think YOU and your network do LOTS of character assassination of Trump, and of anyone remotely associated with Trump, as in everyone who’s ever voted for Trump? Then we can laugh at Chuck taking umbrage that “we gave her NBC News’s credibility." Credibility? In the public eye? What the media's approval rating? It’s lower than Congress. It’s lower than Biden. Then there’s the final kicker: Chuck reassuring Welker that they've assembled around the table to “bolster that editorial independence.” Editorial independence? This is coming out of Chuck Todd, who with his wife Kristian Denny Todd hosted a dinner party in 2015 to honor Hillary Clinton campaign communications director Jen Palmieri. Here at NewsBusters, I broke the story that Mrs. Chuck Todd’s Democrat consulting firm made $2 million off the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign. But Todd could never muster the editorial transparency to tell viewers about this financial conflict on the many occasions he interviewed Bernie Sanders. The obvious comparison to McDaniel is former White House press secretary Jen Psaki, who waltzed right out of the Biden White House into hosting a Sunday show on MSNBC, which debuted about a year ago. Four months later, they loved that enough to give her the Monday night Chris Hayes hour at 8 pm Eastern. You can also cite Symone Sanders-Townsend, who also ambled right into hosting a weekend show on MSNBC out of the Kamala Harris  PR shop. McDaniel isn't hosting a show. She's being paid to take all the abuse that these Democrats can muster. On Morning Joe, the comedy continued. Mika Brzezinski insisted they're all for NBC bringing conservatives on TV, but not the Trumpian "election deniers." Joe Scarborough then laughably claimed he's a conservative now, more conservative than all those Trump stooges he battles.  The ladies of The View uniformly protested the McDaniel gig. The hilarity there was Alyssa Farah claiming "I feel very strongly, obviously, that there needs to be Republican representation in media." As if that's what she's doing?  Enjoy the podcast below, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. 

CREEPY Capehart Lusts for New York AG Letitia James to Take Over Trump Tower!

PBS and MSNBC are sometimes hard to tell apart. On Friday night's PBS NewsHour pundit panel, former MSNBC personality Geoff Bennett raised the unprecedented, norm-shattering $454 million civil bond hanging over Donald Trump from the civil-fraud trial of Democrat Attorney General Letitia James. Bennett played a Fox News clip where host Martha MacCallum asked Trump lawyer Alina Habba if Trump would go to foreign leaders for money, like Joy Behar is claiming. Habba evaded an answer.  PBS, showing a Fox News clip? But they hate Fox. Here's the thing: MSNBC played this clip on eight different programs on Wednesday and Thursday, starting with Joy Reid. Jimmy Kimmel also played the clip in his monologue.  PBS pundit -- and MSNBC weekend host -- Jonathan Capehart said going to foreign governments would be dumb: "I think someone who's running for president of the United States should automatically say, yes, I owe a half-a-billion dollars. I'm not going to go to foreign governments, because that would open me up, as president of the United States, to foreign interference and foreign influence." This is how shameless these leftists are, that they can inveigh against taking many millions of dollars in foreign influences and not think of the Biden family's millions of dollars in foreign influence-peddling all over. But then Capehart overtly expressed his lust for New York Attorney General Letitia James, a Democrat who campaigned on ruining Trump, to take Trump Tower and a golf course. That's "accountability." CAPEHART: But we're not talking about any old, regular person. And, of course, he's going to take the money from wherever he can get it. That's been his entire career. And I have to disagree with David. No, take the properties. If any of us at the table were in that situation, we would be in serious trouble. And it would be within the right of the attorney general to say, you know what, we're going to take your golf club or we're going to take your tower. And, quite honestly, I would love to see the A.G., the New York attorney general, do that, because then it would be the most tangible sign for the nation, the world, and for Donald Trump that you have been held accountable. Earlier, David Brooks stipulated for a moment that this enormous fine has no precedent: "I have a few problems with the seizure. The Associated Press did a good survey. They looked like at 70 years of cases like this. And in cases where there was no clear victim, they have never seized assets before. And so if the people who claim a lot of this is a political witch-hunt, I think that Associated Press, I found it kind of alarming that the Trump case is not being treated like the other cases." But then, surely to keep the leftist audience at PBS from fainting, he leaned into the foreign-influence idea: "you take what a desperate Donald Trump is likely to do, do what his son-in-law did, go to the Saudis and get some money, and it just opens up for a desperate Donald Trump all sorts of corrupt possibilities." The NewsHour is funded by you, the American taxpayer, and by American Cruise Lines. 

Chuck Todd Leads NBC 'Meet the Press' MELTDOWN Over NBC Hiring of Ex-RNC Boss

Internal liberal outrage boiled over into an on-air struggle session on Meet the Press. NBC just hired Ronna McDaniel immediately after she was removed as Republican National Committee leader, and so moderator Kristen Welker punched away at McDaniel for 20 minutes, and when that was finished, they had a roundtable about the horror of NBC's hiring, combined with this awkward interview, which was scheduled before the personnel move.  Everyone on set seemed blissfully unaware of how it looked to the public when NBC was negotiating with White House press secretary Jen Psaki about a position while she was still at the White House. No one's ever complained in a Sunday morning meltdown. Former host Chuck Todd began the internal decompression with a fulsome apology:  TODD: Look, let me deal with the elephant in the room. I think our bosses owe you an apology for putting you in this situation because I don't know what to believe. She is now a paid contributor by NBC News. I have no idea whether any answer she gave to you was because she didn't want to mess up her contract. She wants us to believe that she was speaking for the RNC when the RNC was paying for it. So she has – she has credibility issues that she still has to deal with. Is she speaking for herself or is she speaking on behalf of who's paying her? Once at the RNC she did say that,"Hey, I'm speaking for the party." I get that. That's part of the job. So what about here? I will say this. I think your interview did a good job of exposing I think many of the contradictions. And, look, there's a reason why there's a lot of journalists at NBC News uncomfortable with this because many of our professional dealings with the RNC over the last six years have been met with gaslighting, have been met with character assassination. So it is – , you know, that's where you begin here. And so when NBC made the decision to give her NBC News' credibility you've got to ask yourself, "What does she bring NBC News?" And when we make deals like this, and I've been at this company a long time, you're doing it for access, access to audience. Todd concluded by again praising Welker's grilling: "I think you did everything you could do. You got put into an impossible situation, booking this interview, and then all of a sudden the rug's pulled out from under you. You find out she's being paid to show up. That’s – that’s unfortunate for this program, but I am glad you did the best that you could, and that's why the three of us are on here, to try to bolster that editorial independence." They're so deep inside a Democrat bubble they have no idea half of America starts pointing and laughing when they talk about "editorial independence." NBC, the network that had Kennedy offspring Maria Shriver as a reporter for years, and then hired Chelsea Clinton as a reporter (and she'd never been a reporter).  Kimberly Atkins Stohr seconded Todd's emotion: “So her credibility is completely shot. So I have to do what Maya Angelou said, I believe what they do and not anything that she said today. And in that I know that she habitually lied, she habitually joined Trump in attacking the press – members of the press, including this network, in a way that put journalists at risk, in danger.” Stephen Hayes of The Dispatch, an anti-Trump website, began with the obvious point about conservative criticism: "if you've read some of the criticism of NBC that has come since the announcement it is very clear that some of the critics just don't want to be confronted with Republican voices or conservative arguments. So there is that. And that's bad. We should want to have a robust exchange between people who believe different things.” Then Hayes agreed with the anti-Trump feelings: “But I agree with what's been said here. I mean, that's not what Ronna McDaniel is doing. That's not what she's been doing. And she has huge credibility problems, not because she's been a partisan spinner on behalf of the Republican Party, but because she not only presided but directed, drove, the Q-Anonization of the Republican Party during her tenure.” Hayes failed to put Psaki's hiring on the table. It concluded with Todd bizarrely claiming he always cared about "ideological diversity" on his show. He did?? TODD: Look, it is important for this network and for always to have a wide aperture, okay, and covering voters that have disparate beliefs. Having ideological diversity on this panel is something I prided myself on. We take – you and I both took plenty of grief when you have ideological and political diversity. I think all of us in mainstream media do a terrible job sometimes of geographic diversity and all this stuff. But I sort of call into question and sometimes people think they understand the politics of this country when they're sort of in a very, very, very blue city. You know, this is a Washington operative who I don't think is going to bring the network what they think it wants to bring to the network. I understand the motivation, but this execution I think was poor. Then Welker turned to a liberal-bubble interview with former Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, where she wanted to know all about preserving abortion rights and putting Trump in jail. If it's Sunday, it's a liberal bubble on Meet the Press. 

NO BLOODBATH FRENZY: On CNN, James Carville Talked Up 'Wet Work' (Murdering) Trump

At FoxNews.com, our old MRC colleague Alexander Hall reported a double standard in the use of political metaphors this week. After all of the leftist media hyperventilating over Donald Trump using the word "bloodbath" to describe the economy in a second Biden term, CNN brought on "Ragin' Cajun" James Carville to describe how Team Biden needs to do the "wet work" on Donald Trump. That's slang for an assassination. But Carville apparently has rhetorical immunity. He gets to use violent metaphors, and that's fine.  Cooper played a clip of Joe Biden exaggerating what Trump said about the "Latino community," as if illegal immigrants and the "Latino community" were the same. It was Trump's opening campaign speech in 2015 about Mexico not "sending their best," and some immigrants are criminals and rapists. Cooper offered the floor to Carville: "You are a proponent of the President and all his spokespeople in the campaign doing that more and more." "Yeah, not so much him," Carville responded. "I mean, to be candid, Anderson, President Biden is not the best attack politician I've ever seen in my life, and I'll leave it at that. But there are a lot of people to do what I call 'the wet work.'" "Sounds like a mob hit," Cooper replied. "Well, it's kind of, but it's paid TV and stuff like that. But yes, that's a CIA term," Carville said. "Take a guy out." He continued, "But he doesn't need to do the wet work. People like me and other groups in the party need to do that. He's not very good at it. I don't think people want to hear from that. And then he can, you know, cruise along here at a better altitude. But this has got to be done, and they've got to press this advantage right now when they have it." Hall noted this is standard operating procedure for Carville, and no one takes exception. In January, when asked by MSNBC's Jen Psaki how Biden and his spokespeople should go after Trump, Carville said "I would tell the president and his campaign just, we got your back, dude. We are going after him with a meat cleaver, okay? A rhetorical meat cleaver, if you will, but that's what we're going to do." During that same segment, Carville added boot-on-your-neck imagery: “We do what we got to do. And that’s where we are right now. We have to keep the foot on this guy, right on his neck, take our heel, and twist it.” In late February, Carville brought the violent metaphors to CNN anchor Jim Acosta, "I’m a big believer in politics, when you got somebody down, you just kick the living you know what out of 'em. And I think that’s what the White House needs to do, and I think Democrats around the country need to jump on this early and tank them."

USA TODAY Canonizes St. Al Gore in Sappy Interview: 'Climate Icon Talks Hope and Regrets'

USA Today can often sound like a large advertisement for the Left, and never more so than on Monday’s front page celebrating the wisdom and compassion of former Democrat Vice President Al Gore. The infomercial headline: “Climate icon talks hope and regrets.” There's no acknowledgment Gore paid for this message, but it sounds like he did.  McPaper’s national climate reporter Dinah Voyles Pulver was like most environmental journalists – extremely one-sided activists, always treating the climate panic as climate “reality.” That's what Gore's group is called, the "Climate Reality Project." Pulver began: In an era when mounting disasters made worse by the warming climate raise fears for the Earth’s future, Al Gore could simply say “I told you so.” Instead, the silver-haired grandfather regrets not pushing even harder to raise awareness during his more than four decades of trying to warn the world about the dangers of climate change. “I guess I could have done more, wish I had done more I guess,” Gore told USA TODAY in an exclusive interview last week. Derided by climate change skeptics and pundits for decades, and subjected to memes making light of his concern about global warming, Gore soldiers on. Then came a list of questions that sounded like they were written by a Gore staffer on his “Climate Reality Project.” She began by asking what’s the “greatest need” to address public perception on climate? Gore said more activists in your local community, but added some biblical panic: Of course Mother Nature is the most powerful advocate. I often say that every night on the TV news is like a nature ride through the Book of Revelation and indeed almost every day now we see these extreme climate-related events all around the world. When asked "What's your biggest frustration?," Gore said Big Oil's shameless lies: Well, that we haven't made more progress, and that some of the fossil fuel companies have been shameless in providing, continuing to provide lavish funding for disinformation and misinformation.... I was pretty slow to recognize how important the massive funding of anti-climate messaging was going on. I underestimated the power of greed in the fossil fuel industry, the shamelessness in putting out the lies.… They are continuing to do similar things today to try to fool people and pull the wool over people's eyes just in the name of greed. "Anti-climate messaging" is typically skipped in "objective" media reporting -- it's loaded with Gore's "Book of Revelation" doom and rarely balanced in any way by dissent. Gore demanded the world bow to his will and cut carbon emissions in half by 2030, and words like "radical" or "extreme" are never used.