60 Minutes

see cbs

SEE LESLIE STAHL LAWFARE UTAH LT GOV

SEE PRESS SUPPRESS target

see lara logan

rather? mike wallace?

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an 1026

A Republican election official says she is being threatened with investigation and criminal liability after defying the Trump administration's demands, warning that threats to American elections are now coming from inside the federal government.

Lieutenant Governor of Utah, Deidre Henderson, who oversees elections in the heavily Republican state, revealed the extraordinary pressure she has faced to give up sensitive voter information during an interview with CBS News' 60 Minutes.

Henderson states that election officials are usually threatened with attacks on election integrity coming from non-governmental actors and cyber criminals, but is now receiving pressure from the President Donald Trump administration.

"In the past two elections that I oversaw as lieutenant governor, the threats were all external: non-state actors, cyber security threats and other things," she said to correspondent Lesley Stahl before adding, “But now we also have threats coming from within our own government."

She said the Justice Department unlawfully demanded that states surrender their complete voter registration lists, including confidential information which is protected under state law.

Henderson said officials were asked to provide Social Security numbers, full dates of birth and driver's license numbers. She said federal authorities did not offer any reasonable explanation for their demands or how they planned to use the information. Henderson and 29 other states from both parties refused to give in to the demands.

After the refusal, she received a September letter from the DOJ's Civil Rights Division stating she was under investigation and involved in ongoing litigation over compliance with federal election laws. The department also threatened her with potential criminal or civil liability if she did not preserve the voting records. The dispute came after the DOJ filed a federal lawsuit seeking Utah's voter data.

The Republican Utah Gov. Spencer Cox defended Henderson after the letter became public.

"It is wrong for the DOJ to investigate or threaten the lieutenant governor for carrying out her responsibilities under Utah law," Cox wrote at the time.

Trump administration officials have argued the voter records are necessary to identify noncitizens improperly registered to vote. Harmeet Dhillon, who heads the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, told CBS that there are potentially thousands of cases under investigation.

But Henderson said Utah's own review found just 52 questionable registrations out of more than 2 million voters. The administration has sued states that refused to provide complete voter lists, even as officials say privacy laws protect the data they seek.

This warning comes at a time when a broader federal campaign is underway, including the seizure of 2020 ballots in Georgia and legal action against California over alleged noncitizen voting. The California secretary of state has challenged the government's evidence and said it is threatening eligible voters.

Henderson has no plans to back down from the threats and said she will continue to resist the DOJ’s requests.

"I have to tell myself it doesn't matter what the consequences are, as long as I feel like I'm doing what's right," she said, continuing: "I think this is an important thing for me to do, holding these guardrails, holding the line. Someone has to."

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an 10 26

Secret Service director interview tanks 60 Minutes ratings

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an 10 26

A senior CBS News editor can be heard threatening journalists that defying management could get them fired in newly released audio from a heated staff meeting, exposing an internal fight over the network's coverage of Israel and Gaza.

Shayndi Raice, the network's foreign editor and a hire of editor-in-chief Bari Weiss, delivered the warning during a Tuesday meeting with foreign bureau staff that was leaked to media reporter Oliver Darcy and executive editor Jon Passantino on the Power Lines podcast.

"This is not your publishing platform," Raice told employees, insisting that decisions about what CBS publishes ultimately rest with her and other senior leaders.

"That is called insubordination! And it's legal grounds for firing," she said of refusing management directives in a long rant that went on for 15 minutes.

The leaked audio follows reports of disputes with two high-profile 60 Minutes segments involving Israeli settler violence by Lesley Stahl and a report by Holly Williams on the third anniversary of the October 7 attack by Hamas militants.

The issue was with Williams adding the Palestinian death toll in Gaza, which was removed from the broadcast version.

Raice denied ordering the figure's removal and said she had wanted the Israeli death toll as well, wanting to distinguish the civilian casualties from combatants. She claimed that the additional info about the deaths made the report too complicated for the time reserved for the segment to air.

Williams pushed back during the meeting, saying the revisions were given to her without having a chance to discuss it.

"I was told that I had to make the changes as written, and that there was no negotiation," she said.

According to Status, Raice also told Williams she had gotten the story wrong, claiming she understood the subject better than the veteran correspondent.

Raice defended the authority of editors to reshape stories, arguing that challenging reporters and adding layers of review were essential parts of journalism. She pointed to her experience at The Wall Street Journal, which she described as “the best journalism.”

Darcy said he felt Raice's tone was condescending, adding that the veteran CBS journalists have already worked with producers, standards officials, and senior editors before their reports reach the air as standard procedure

Bari Weiss, who had no experience before heading CBS, has been a controversial addition to the newsroom, with this being just the latest in a string of controversies, with veterans on the network accusing her of bias.

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Anderson Cooper’s ‘F*ck You’ to Bari Weiss

Zeteo's media newsletter, 'Ragebait,' is back with the behind the scenes of Weiss's latest blunder at CBS News, why Stephen Colbert dgaf, and the billionaire eyeing CNN who has staffers there on edge.

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BARI?

AN 12 25

Trump rages against 'rotten apple' MTG and demands 'total apology' from CBS

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AN 9 26

CBS forced to deny wild accusations over new '60 Minutes' cast picture

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peteno cite

...

...more Emmy awards and made more money than any other news program or prime-time program for that matter. Competitors, analyzing the show’s extraordinary profits, grasped (figuratively and literally) the enormous rewards available if the news altered its intellectual formats in pursuit of wider audiences. This insight launched the transformation of news divisions into major earners for their corporate parents. The wealth and influence derived from that evolution did more to shape the nature of news and the underlying decisions concerning what was reported and how it was reported, than Lewis Powell could have foreseen or hoped. By the end of the 1970s, network news divisions were generating 60 percent of corporate profits. The news was now considered “too important to leave to journalists.” Corporate executives and accountants began devising changes to format, style, and presentation that would bring them numbers of viewers that would make them among the largest corporations on earth in terms of revenue, market capitalization and global influence.

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mma

Fox attacks Scott Pelley for accurately describing Trump’s war on the press

Written by Matt Gertz

Research contributions from Alicia Sadowski

Published 05/29/25

Fox News and Fox Business hosts are lashing out at CBS News’ Scott Pelley for criticizing President Donald Trump’s attacks on free speech and civil society, even as his network’s parent company reportedly prepares to capitulate to the president’s assault.

“Journalism is under attack,” the 60 Minutes correspondent said in a May 19 commencement speech at Wake Forest University that went viral over the weekend. “Universities are under attack. Freedom of speech is under attack.”

While Pelley did not mention the president or the White House by name, no one missed the implication — including Fox’s stable of pro-Trump zealots.

### Fox on Pelley: “Trump-hating former anchorman” who is “full of rage” should be arrested

The mainstream press’s purported Democratic partisanship and untrustworthiness is one of the pillars of Fox’s programming. On Tuesday and Wednesday, it was Pelley’s turn as the networks’ media hate object of choice.

Sean Hannity, the Trump political operative who also hosts a prime-time Fox News show, denounced Pelley’s address as “full of rage and anti-Trump rhetoric,” adding that the 60 Minutes reporter is not a journalist but a “biased liberal radical talk show host” and “a phony liar.”

Former Trump economic adviser turned Fox Business host Larry Kudlow’s take was that Pelley had “the worst bout of Trump derangement syndrome,” while Harris Faulkner claimed he was “fighting for relevance.”

On The Five, Greg Gutfeld attempted to defuse Pelley's comments about authoritarian attacks on the press by pointing out that the CBS newsman hadn’t been arrested after his speech — only for his co-host, former Trump White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, to respond that “he should have been.”

And Laura Ingraham not only panned Pelley as a “Trump-hating former anchorman” — she used the opportunity to tout the Trump administration’s effort to punish his network.

“There's nothing worse than someone who pretends to be persecuted while ignoring real persecution, or pretends to be the keeper of the truths when associated with a network that did everything it could to protect Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, even editing an interview with the VP to make her look smarter,” Ingraham said.

“So, it was bad timing for Scott's commencement sanctimony about truth and justice when 60 Minutes’ alleged corruption is being now cited as a potential sticking point in Paramount's $8 billion sale to Skydance Media,” she added. “Whoops. But the press has no one to blame but themselves.”

### Pelley is right — but his corporate bosses want to fold to Trump’s attacks

Pelley is correct about the Trump administration’s assault on the free press.

The president has long sought to discredit critical journalism. He decries reporting he doesn’t like as “fake news” and tries to chill it through a combination of personal lawsuits, threats of criminal investigations, and the weaponization of federal agencies against news outlets and their owners.

Pelley’s show and network, as Ingraham indicated, are among the biggest targets of this strategy. Trump and his allies claimed during the 2024 election that by airing two different portions of Harris’ response to an interview question — one on 60 Minutes and another in a preview of the interview shown on Face the Nation — CBS News had committed, in the president’s words, “the biggest scandal in broadcast history.” Trump called for CBS to lose its broadcast license and subsequently filed a $20 billion lawsuit against the network and its parent company, Paramount Global.

The only thing more insane than a legal attack over the editing of interview clips is Fox’s willingness to carry water for the argument. First Amendment attorneys told CNN that Trump’s suit was “ridiculous junk” and “a frivolous and dangerous attempt by a politician to control the news media.” And in January, then-Federal Communications Commission Chair Jessica Rosenworcel tossed a similar complaint filed by a right-wing group, arguing that it sought “to weaponize the licensing authority of the FCC in a way that is fundamentally at odds with the First Amendment” and turn the agency into “the president’s speech police.”

But while Rosenworcel warned against turning the FCC into “the president’s speech police,” her Trump-appointed replacement, Brendan Carr, apparently sees that as his mission. He said before taking the post that the complaint was “likely to arise” in the agency’s review of Paramount Global’s planned merger with Skydance Media, swiftly revived the probe afterward, and has slow-walked the merger ever since.

When the Trump administration tried a similar tactic in his first term, blocking Time Warner’s purchase by AT&T while the president railed against Time Warner subsidiary CNN, AT&T stood firm, fought it out in court, and won. Several law firms who fought back when Trump targeted them for retribution in his second term have also found success.

But Paramount and its chair, Shari Redstone, who reportedly “stands to clear billions of dollars on the sale of Paramount,” are apparently setting a different, more craven path. Reports have indicated for months that Paramount executives are eager to settle Trump’s lawsuit in hopes that his administration will then approve their deal. In April, 60 Minutes executive producer Bill Owens stepped down in light of what Pelley suggested was increasing, inappropriate Paramount scrutiny of CBS News reporting. CBS News President Wendy McMahon was forced out in May, saying, “It’s become clear the company and I do not agree on the path forward.”

Paramount’s capitulation appears to be coming to a head. The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that the company has offered Trump’s lawyers a $15 million settlement, but “Trump’s team wants more than $25 million and is also seeking an apology from CBS News.” The apology, the Journal reported, had been a sticking point for McMahon. Meanwhile, Trump’s legal team reportedly “threatened another lawsuit against CBS related to alleged bias of its news coverage,” while Trump himself responded to a different 60 Minutes broadcast by calling for the network to lose its license and directed Carr to “impose the maximum fines and punishment.”

If Paramount folds in the face of Trump’s extortion, Redstone may get her big merger payday. But the result will only encourage the president to make more attacks on CBS News and other news outlets. His aim is to quell negative reporting by any means necessary, and his appetite for humiliating and delegitimizing the press cannot be sated without news outlets becoming as servile as his Fox propagandists.

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both cands since 60s trump 1st to duck, leslie stahl walk off apology

earlier Trump had backed out of CBS 60 Minutes interview because they would not promise not to factcheck;

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HEAD GUY RESIGNS

mma 4 25

President Donald Trump is ramping up his assault on the press, opening new avenues for federal retribution against outlets which displease him as his administration prepares to mark 100 days in office.

Trump has long railed against journalists as the “enemy of the people,” used the power of the state as a cudgel against the industry in his first term, and promised more of the same in his second.

His return to office brought what Columbia Journalism Review’s Jon Allsop described as a “sharp, often contemptuous rupture” between the federal government and the press, with the White House seeking over the last few months to dominate reporters, place new restrictions on critical outlets, and lift up right-wing propagandists in their place.

The president’s threats against news outlets have been so extreme for so many years that by contrast, such moves struck some observers as “small beer” or “trivial nonsense.”

But Trump’s talk is cheap until it isn’t — at any time, on a whim, he or the assortment of ideologues and shills he’s appointed can set the gears of government grinding against his foes. And this weekend brought a sharp escalation and worrying signs for the future.

Justice Department ends restrictions protecting journalists}:

Attorney General Pam Bondi on Friday laid the groundwork for the imprisonment of journalists who produce reporting that damages the president’s interests.

In an internal Justice Department memo, Bondi rescinded Biden-era protections which restricted prosecutors “from seeking records and compelling testimony from members of the news media,” stating this was necessary “in order to identify and punish the source of improper leaks” by individuals whose conduct she described as “treasonous.”

Notably, her memo targets not just the leaking of classified information but also “disclosures that undermine President Trump’s policies, victimize government agencies, and cause harm to the American people.”

Trump regularly rails against reporting based on anonymous sources. Bondi’s move raises the prospect of the Trump administration responding to such reports by forcing reporters to choose between revealing their sources and going to jail.

Bondi, a Trump loyalist who previously parlayed frequent Fox appearances defending Trump into a post on his first impeachment legal defense team, will apparently be making the call over when the Justice Department uses that legal tool.

Other top prosecutors and investigators who might weigh in include her deputy, Emil Bove, who previously represented Trump in state and federal prosecutions; Ed Martin, the lawyer for January 6 defendant who now serves as interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia; FBI Director Kash Patel, who has called for the federal targeting of journalists; and his extremely online deputy, the former Fox host Dan Bongino.

How far will they go? Trump wants them to go very far indeed.

### Trump calls for investigations of media pollsters

Trump responded on Monday to new surveys which show his approval ratings plunging in light of his catastrophic tariff rollout by calling for investigations into the pollsters and the media outlets which conduct them.

Trump claimed in an early morning post on Truth Social that results from New York Times/Siena and ABC/Washington Post polls were due to the surveys “looking for a negative result.”

“These people should be investigated for ELECTION FRAUD, and add in the FoxNews Pollster while you’re at it,” he wrote. “They are Negative Criminals who apologize to their subscribers and readers after I WIN ELECTIONS BIG, much bigger than their polls showed I would win, loose a lot of credibility, and then go on cheating and lying for the next cycle, only worse.”

Trump regularly accuses his media foes of breaking the law, and in a March speech at the Justice Department headquarters he instructed its employees to “watch for” their “totally illegal” behavior.

The president is currently suing Iowa pollster J. Ann Selzer over the results of one of her presidential campaign surveys.

Trump has personally dictated Justice Department investigations into two former officials from his first administration who became critics, as well as into ActBlue, the hub for Democratic campaign fundraising — and he could launch a similar legal assault on any news outlet which displeases him at any time.

### A cry of desperation from CBS News

60 Minutes anchor Scott Pelley Sunday’s broadcast with a blunt explanation for the resignation last week of Bill Owens, a journalist with decades of experience at CBS News and the show’s longtime executive producer.

“Our parent company, Paramount, is trying to complete a merger,” he said. “The Trump administration must approve it. Paramount began to supervise our content in new ways. None of our stories has been blocked, but Bill felt he had lost the independence that honest journalism requires.”

Trump and his administration had targeted CBS News for retribution following a 60 Minutesinterview of Kamala Harris, the editing of which the president alleged had been unfair to him.

Trump launched a lawsuit seeking $10 billion in damages from the network, which First Amendment attorneys described as “ridiculous junk” and “a frivolous and dangerous attempt by a politician to control the news media.” Brendan Carr, his handpicked chair of the Federal Communications Commission, is conducting an investigation into the editing that former FCC commissioners have denounced.

Rather than stand firmly behind the company’s journalists, Paramount Chair Shari Redstone is reportedly seeking a settlement with Trump and an agreement with Carr that will allow the company’s merger to go through.

### Trump gloats about media owners bowing to his will

Trump thinks he’s winning his battle against the press, as The Atlantic reported in a recent interview with the president:

“Tell the people at The Atlantic, if they’d write good stories and truthful stories, the magazine would be hot,” he said. Perhaps the magazine can risk forgoing hotness, he suggested, because it is owned by Laurene Powell Jobs, which buffers it, he implied, from commercial imperatives. But that doesn’t guarantee anything, he warned. “You know at some point, they give up,” he said, referring to media owners generally and—we suspected—[Washington Post owner Jeff] Bezos specifically. “At some point they say, No más, no más.” He laughed quietly.

Trump understands that many of the news outlets whose work he decries are owned by multinational corporations or wealthy magnates whose business interests make them vulnerable to federal retaliation.

After only a few months in office, he’s seen the pressure he’s exerted on CBS News push it to the breaking point, while the resolve of major newspaper owners is seemingly crumbling. And he has years more time in office to try to break them to his will.

### Trump is trying to throttle the free press — and U.S. moguls are going along with it

02/04/25 9:00 AM EST

### Donald Trump’s authoritarian playbook to crush the free press in a second term

10/29/24 9:09 AM EDT

### Trump is threatening to use the government to “come down hard” on the free press. Believe him.

11/30/23

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stated on February 6, 2025 in an Instagram post:

A ‘60 Minutes’ clip shows Kamala Harris lying while cameras roll. “

By Sofia AhmedFebruary 11, 2025

Unedited Kamala Harris interview on ‘60 Minutes’ doesn’t show host confronting Harris about lying

If Your Time is short

The unedited ‘"60 Minutes" interview with former Vice President Kamala Harris didn’t show correspondent Bill Whitaker confronting Harris for lying during the interview when the cameras were off. It showed a crew member gathering extra over-the-shoulder footage and room tone for the broadcast post-interview.
A Feb. 5 "60 minutes" statement says the broadcast was "not doctored or deceitful" but "journalists regularly edit interviews — for time, space or clarity."

See the sources for this fact-check

CBS News on Feb. 5 released an unedited video of its October "60 minutes" interview with former Vice President Kamala Harris. The release came after President Donald Trump sued the network, claiming it deceptively edited the interview.

Social media users are claiming that a clip of the new unedited footage shows Harris lying on camera and being pressed for the truth when the cameras stopped.

"Propaganda: 60 Minutes allows Kamala Harris to lie while the cameras are rolling. When they’re off they confront her asking her for the truth," a Feb. 6 screenshot from an X account reposted on Instagram read. The post included a video of "60 Minutes" Correspondent Bill Whitaker, a crew member and Harris interacting.

This post was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about ourpartnership with Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and Threads.)

Elon Musk reshared the post Feb. 6 on X, the social media platform he owns.

IFrame Content

But the clip doesn’t show Whitaker confronting Harris about lying after the cameras are turned off. It showed a crew member gathering extra footage after the interview ends.

The video’s full unedited and transcript showed a crew member asking Whitaker to ask another question at the end of the interview to get an "over the shoulder shot."

Whitaker asks Harris how she will get a divided Congress to carry out her plans; a crew member then asks for 30 seconds of silence to collect room tone, or dialogue-free ambient sound to use in editing, before saying that the cameras were off.

Once the crew member tells Whitaker and Harris the cameras have stopped rolling, Whitaker asks "How will you?" while laughing.

The rest of the interaction goes:

Harris: It’s going to be taxes. It’s going to be literally the economists — I mean, they’re — From, each, the spectrum —

Whitaker: But I hear what you’re saying about the economists. This is true.

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04/14/2025

Kyle Mantyla RWW

Steve Benen @ The Maddow Blog: Trump leans into the idea of sending American criminals to a Salvadoran prison

Trump has spent months talking about deporting American criminals. The White House has said it’s a real idea. Maybe we should take the threat seriously.

Hannah Allam @ ProPublica: American Rendition: Rümeysa Öztürk’s Journey From Ph.D. Scholar to Trump Target Languishing in Louisiana Cell

Rümeysa Öztürk’s arrest and detention reveal what President Donald Trump’s deportation campaign looks like on the street level.

Jonathan Mahler @ The New York Times Magazine: How the G.O.P. Fell in Love With Putin’s Russia

What explains the Trump administration’s radical reversal toward Moscow?

David Gilmour @ Mediaite: Trump Demands FCC Punish ‘CBS Fake News’ for ‘Out Of Control’ 60 Minutes: ‘They Should Pay a Big Price’

President Donald Trump launched a new attack on 60 Minutes, this time demanding regulatory retribution over recent segments on Ukraine and Greenland — calling on “highly respected” FCC chair Brendan Carr to “impose the maximum fines and punishment” possible on “out of control” network CBS.

Alex Galbraith @ Salon: "He's going to have a third term": Bannon tells Maher Trump is sticking around in 2028

Bannon's comments come after Trump shared he's "not joking" about an unconstitutional third-term.

Will Neal @ The Daily Beast: DOJ Wants to Give Capitol Rioters a Refund for Damage They Caused

Court documents filed this week suggest some insurrectionists could receive a check for their troubles.

Warren Throckmorton @ Telling Jefferson Lies: Mike Johnson's False Jefferson Prayer: The Rest of the Stor

On January 3, 2025, Louisiana Representative Mike Johnson was re-elected to be Speaker of the House. In his acceptance speech, he quoted a prayer that he said Thomas Jefferson said every day during his presidency and every day of his life thereafter. There is a problem with this story. The prayer was written 56 years after Jefferson died. Jefferson never said the prayer even one day of his life.

John Fea @ The Way of Improvement Leads Home: Expect to see more David Barton in the coming year

This past week David and Tim were invited to the White House as part of a team planning special faith focused events for the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

Melody Schreiber @ The New Republic: Measles Is Spreading, and RFK Jr. Is Praising Quacks

Last week, an 8-year-old girl became the second child and the third person to die of measles in the current outbreak. But it was Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services, who dominated the news cycle.

Phil Williams @ News Channel 5: Men behind Tennessee's Christian nationalist settlement: 'This country belongs to Jesus,' not the Jews

Andrew Isker compares Jews to "foster children," who cannot be trusted with the family credit card. C.Jay Engel argues Jews "have largely operated at odds with the Old American way of life."

Christine Fernando @ The Associated Press: An emboldened anti-abortion faction wants women who have abortions to face criminal charges

As Kristan Hawkins, president of the national anti-abortion group Students for Life, tours college campuses, she has grown accustomed to counterprotests from abortion rights activists. But more recently, fellow abortion opponents, who call themselves abortion abolitionists, are showing up to her booths with signs, often screaming “baby killer” at her while she speaks with students. Hawkins has had to send alerts to donors asking them to help pay for increased security.

BRUTAL New 60 Minutes Report Exposes Trump Admin Crimes - YouTube

555,825 views Apr 6, 2025 Bulwark Takes

Tim Miller reacts to a devastating new report from 60 Minutes, revealing even more details of the shocking treatment of Venezuelan migrants detained by the Trump administration in El Salvador and highlighting the Trump officials responsible. Watch the 60 Minutes report: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/photojou...Get in touch with your elected officials and demand they help stop this atrocity: https://www.usa.gov/elected-officials

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an 3 25

The new book Murder the Truth: Fear, the First Amendment, and a Secret Campaign to Protect the Powerful by The New York Times business investigations editor David Enrich chronicles an ongoing campaign by the wealthy and powerful to overturn the landmark Supreme Court decision New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, which in 1964 established bedrock protections against spurious defamation and libel cases in the U.S. legal system. By “subject[ing] people to this torturous, long-running and extremely expensive legal process,” those who can afford to pay for expensive and threatening defamation lawsuits can silence any public criticism and suppress others’ rights to free speech, says Enrich. “It has huge implications for our democracy and the ability of everyone to speak their mind.”

IFrame Content

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

We turn now from attacks on the right to protest to attacks on press freedom. President Trump is escalating his criticism of the news media, claiming many outlets are engaged in illegal activity. This is part of what he said last week during a speech at the Great Hall of the Department of Justice.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I believe that CNN and MSDNC, who literally write 97.6% bad about me, are political arms of the Democrat Party. And in my opinion, they’re really corrupt, and they’re illegal. What they do is illegal. … These networks and these newspapers are really no different than a highly paid political operative. And it has to stop. It has to be illegal. It’s influencing judges, and it’s entered — it’s really changing law, and it just cannot be legal. I don’t believe it’s legal.

AMY GOODMAN: President Trump’s comments come amidst a right-wing push to overturn protections for the press to investigate public figures, a right guaranteed by the landmark 1964 Supreme Court decision New York Times v. Sullivan.

We’re joined now by David Enrich. He’s New York Times’ business investigations editor. His new book is titled Murder the Truth: Fear, the First Amendment, and a Secret Campaign to Protect the Powerful.

If you can start off — it’s great to have you with us, David — by talking about what this Supreme Court decision, this landmark decision in the 1960s, Sullivan, was all about?

DAVID ENRICH: Well, it was brought on behalf of supporters of Martin Luther King, and it basically detailed this litany of abuses by Southern officials. The gist of it was completely true: Southern officials were trying to preserve white supremacy. Some of the facts were either wrong or exaggerated, and a powerful Southern official named L.B. Sullivan, sued The New York Times and won at trial. And the goal, basically, of Sullivan and his pals was that by filing lawsuits that seized on tiny little inaccuracies, you could punish the media for covering the civil rights movement.

And so, this went up to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court ruled, in a unanimous decision in 1964, that in order to preserve free speech and allow people to write and criticize and investigate powerful people and institutions, the media and the public needed breathing room so that if they got a fact wrong by mistake or made an honest error, they would not be sued into oblivion. And so, that Supreme Court ruling has really set the stage for decades of investigative journalism and for normal people, non-journalists, as well, to speak up and kind of reveal abuses and criticize people who hold positions of power, both at the national level or at a community level, as well.

AMY GOODMAN: And what does this mean for the First Amendment?

DAVID ENRICH: And it means that the First Amendment gives everyone the right to speak and to interrogate powerful people, and you do not need to worry about — there should not be a legal cloud hanging over your head when you criticize or investigate someone powerful, and you do not need to worry that an innocent mistake is going to bankrupt you because of litigation.

AMY GOODMAN: So, let’s go back to 2016, Donald Trump vowing to make it easier to sue news organizations.

DONALD TRUMP: I’m going to open up our libel laws, so when they write purposely negative and horrible and false articles, we can sue them and win lots of money. We’re going to open up those libel laws, so that when The New York Times writes a hit piece, which is a total disgrace, or when The Washington Post, which is there for other reasons, writes a hit piece, we can sue them and win money.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that was before Donald Trump became president the first time around. Talk about the significance of what he’s saying and the overall campaign, as in your subtitle, the Secret Campaign to Protect the Powerful.

DAVID ENRICH: Well, when Donald Trump made those remarks in 2016, it kind of acted as the firing of a starter’s pistol in a race, and it sent a signal to the entire kind of conservative movement, and, in particular, the conservative legal movement, that a race was on to try to dismantle some of the long-standing First Amendment protections for the media and for others. And you can trace very directly back to that speech that he gave in Fort Worth, Texas, in February of 2016 the arrival on the scene of this kind of small cottage industry of high-priced lawyers whose entire practices were devoted to suing and threatening news outlets.

And the more successes they piled up, the more the strategy caught on, so that by the time — and within a couple of years, there was a real grassroots movement, funded and fueled by the likes of the Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation, the Claremont Institute, to really weaponize defamation laws to make it much, much scarier, really, especially for small and independent news outlets and journalists, to write about powerful people — not just the president of the United States, but across — but in their local communities, a big company, maybe a powerful real estate developer, things like that. And this strategy has now worked its way all the way up to the Supreme Court, where there is increasing support for either doing away with New York Times v. Sullivan altogether, or at least chipping away at it around the edges.

AMY GOODMAN: So, you’re the business investigations editor at The New York Times. What led you to write this book?

DAVID ENRICH: Well, we were getting, and still do get, inundated with legal threats basically every time that we start writing about or investigating someone powerful. And it occurred to me — you know, The New York Times is in a pretty good position to handle that kind of threat, but it occurred to me a few years ago that, you know, the experience might be very different if you worked at a smaller outlet or if you were an independent journalist. And, you know, there are so many independent journalists right now, which I think is a really good thing for the media and a good thing for our democracy. But it’s people with a Substack newsletter or a blog or a podcast who are uniquely vulnerable to these types of threats and these types of litigation, because they are enormously expensive to defend against.

And they’re not always meant to — these challenges are not always meant to win in court. They’re often meant to just subject people to this torturous, long-running and extremely expensive legal process. And a lot of people make the economically rational decision, which is that in the face of those threats and in the face of that litigation, they’re going to back down rather than fight, which is exactly what the people making those threats want you to do.

AMY GOODMAN: So, talk about how Hulk Hogan or, as you point out, much more relevantly, Peter Thiel fit into this story.

DAVID ENRICH: Yeah, so, Peter Thiel had a long-running grudge against —

AMY GOODMAN: And explain who he is.

DAVID ENRICH: Yeah, Peter Thiel is one of the most powerful people in Silicon Valley. He was an early supporter of Donald Trump, and he’s very closely aligned with people like Elon Musk. And he —

AMY GOODMAN: Co-founder of PayPal.

DAVID ENRICH: Co-founder of PayPal, yes, and one of the owners of Palantir, as well. And he had a long-running grudge against the website Gawker, because Gawker was really pioneering a form of journalism that was very skeptical of Silicon Valley elites and was kind of puncturing some of the bubble surrounding them. And so he set out in the early 2010s to destroy Gawker. And he went searching. He hired a bunch of people. He put a bunch of money into this. And he eventually settled on a case involving Hulk Hogan. Gawker had published a snippet of a sex tape involving Hulk Hogan.

And so, Peter Thiel secretly financed and organized a multifaceted legal campaign using Hulk Hogan as a vehicle for retribution against Gawker. He won — Hulk Hogan won. Peter Thiel won. Gawker was destroyed. And this became a real blueprint for other billionaires and other powerful people to really attack the media. They saw that they — a well-funded, well-orchestrated, secret legal campaign — had the ability to absolutely destroy a well-established media outlet.

AMY GOODMAN: So, Gawker was destroyed. Now talk about some of the Supreme Court justices’ views. Particularly begin with Clarence Thomas.

DAVID ENRICH: Well, Clarence Thomas, during his confirmation hearings in 1991, expressed real support for New York Times v. Sullivan. He then went through a period where he got some very negative media coverage, and his views seemed to shift. And so, by 2019, Clarence Thomas became the first sitting Supreme Court justice to openly call for the overturning of New York Times v. Sullivan.

His argument originally was grounded in the 45 words of the First Amendment, which do not mention libel or defamation, and therefore should not — he argued that should not be protected under the First Amendment. Really, though, this was a part of a campaign by Thomas and his allies to really erode the powers of the media and the protections for the media and normal people to speak up when they saw abuses and to criticize people like him.

And so, he, now joined by Neil Gorsuch, as well, have really embraced this call and are trying to recruit other justices, I think, and are calling for other people to file lawsuits that might make their way up to the Supreme Court that will challenge these long-standing precedents that protect, again, not just press freedoms, but the right of a person in a community to circulate a petition, for example, or make a comment on Facebook about their mayor, things like that. So this is not just about protecting journalists. It’s really about protecting anyone who wants to stand up and have their voice heard on matters of public importance.

AMY GOODMAN: Where does Neil Gorsuch stand?

DAVID ENRICH: Gorsuch has joined Thomas in wanting to have this overturned. And his views really — and he views Sullivan as protecting all sorts of online defamatory speech. The arguments that he has made — I mean, one of the things I do in this book is really deconstruct those arguments. And it turns out, a lot of them are premised on not just kind of faulty logic, but inaccurate data that he cited, that he got from a law review article that was filled with a lot of false assumptions and kind of misinterpreted data. And so, he has actually had to correct his opinion calling for the overturning of New York Times v. Sullivan, but it is still being cited to this day by the conservative legal movement as one of the real kind of sources of information and authority that should be used to overturn it.

AMY GOODMAN: You begin your book, the prologue, “A Panicked Phone Call.” You tell the story of Guy Larson [sic]. Tell us who he — Guy Lawson — is.

DAVID ENRICH: So, Lawson is an American journalist and author who wrote a book that became the basis for the movie War Dogs, with — starring Jonah Hill. And the book basically tells the story of how these three stoners from Miami Beach become international arms traffickers. It’s kind of a rollicking, really fascinating tale. Some of the action is set in Albania. And there’s a bit part in the book played by the son of Albania’s former prime minister, who is kind of an autocratic strongman. And the details in the book, as far as I’ve been able to determine, were completely accurate. But for argument’s sake, the son of the strongman claims that he was kind of smeared in the book and that some of the facts were wrong, so he filed a lawsuit against Lawson in U.S. court, and it’s worked its way — it’s been kind of years winding its way through the legal process. It got dismissed by multiple courts. But years later, it worked its way up to the Supreme Court, and it became one of the latest vehicles to try and challenge Sullivan.

:{And it was seized on by people who had been inspired by Clarence Thomas, who had basically issued an open invitation to lawyers and, you know, prospective litigants, begging them to bring him a case that he could used to overturn Sullivan. It made its way up to the Supreme Court. They did not get enough votes to actually overturn Sullivan, or even hear the case, but it became another vehicle for Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch to really, you know, bring this issue much more to public light and to argue forcefully that Sullivan should be overturned.

And those calls, while unsuccessful — they did not get the Supreme Court to change the legal standard — they inspired hordes of lawyers, activists and other judges at lower levels across the country to really lean into this argument. And you can look at cases all over the country, and you can see that they are slowing down, they are taking longer, they’re not getting dismissed as quickly. And that creates all sorts of pain and difficulties for — especially for local and independent journalists, who now have much kind of higher odds of being dragged through expensive litigation.}:

AMY GOODMAN: So, you talk about — let’s look a some of the cases that President Trump is involved with right now. He sues ABC. He sues The Des Moines Register. He sues CBS. Is he trying to bring these cases to the Supreme Court? Now, of course, ABC, there was a settlement. Explain what these cases were about and what it means to settle.

DAVID ENRICH: Yeah, well, first of all, Trump is very much trying to get a case to the Supreme Court that will lead to the overturning of Sullivan. I don’t think any of those three cases you mentioned are the likely vehicles, but there are a bunch of others working their way through the federal appeals system that I think stand a much better chance.

These more recent lawsuits against ABC, CBS and The Des Moines Register are all pretty clearly efforts by Trump and his allies to weaponize the law to get — to kind of punish criticism and to deter others from speaking up and saying critical things. And they involve different legal theories. The ABC case was a straight-up defamation case. The Des Moines Register and the —

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, ABC case, where George Stephanopoulos had said President Trump —

DAVID ENRICH: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: — was found civilly liable for rape. Now, again —

DAVID ENRICH: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: — the judge in the case said, in common parlance, this case would be about rape.

DAVID ENRICH: Yeah, and even in the technical details, that he was actually found liable by the jury for sexual abuse, not rape. But so, even if you assume, for argument’s sake, that that’s an important difference and that Stephanopoulos got it wrong — and I think Stephanopoulos would say he didn’t get it wrong — but for argument’s sake, let’s say he did get it wrong. That is exactly the type of mistake that is supposed to be protected by New York Times v. Sullivan, because it is an honest, good-faith error, and you should not be held liable. ABC nonetheless decided that it was prudent to settle this case.

AMY GOODMAN: Or Disney did —

DAVID ENRICH: Well, right.

AMY GOODMAN: — which owns ABC.

DAVID ENRICH: Disney, as parent company, did. And, I mean, I think the rationale for that — and we’re seeing this play out in other settings, as well — is that these big multinational companies, that have varied interests, are trying to protect their corporate interests and do not feel like having outstanding litigation against the president of the United States is in their best interest, and so they are, pretty clearly, I think, taking the side of their profits in the long term over the First Amendment concerns that many of their journalists have. And you’re seeing a very similar dynamic playing out with CBS right now.

AMY GOODMAN: And CBS is the case of 60 Minutes.

DAVID ENRICH: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: And Trump is suing them for $20 billion, I think, at this point, for how they edited a Kamala Harris piece.

DAVID ENRICH: Yeah, and this is the very definition of what I think is a meritless lawsuit. And at the time the lawsuit was filed, there were some discrepancies in the way CBS kind of cut or aired parts of Kamala Harris’s interview with 60 Minutes. We now have the full, unedited transcript. We have the full, unedited recordings of those interviews. And it is plainly clear, objectively, that the interview, while edited, was not done so deceptively. There are not material differences between the different things that aired on different CBS shows. And so, the lawsuit, clearly, to me at least, and certainly all the legal observers I’ve spoken to, with the exception of people aligned with Trump, is not a strong legal argument. And yet, CBS’s parent company, which has a multibillion-dollar merger pending, that it needs —

AMY GOODMAN: Paramount.

DAVID ENRICH: Yeah — that it needs federal approval for, has started talking with the Trump side about possibly settling this. And the rationale, again, is quite clear: They are concerned, on the Paramount side, that if they do not settle this, that the Trump administration is going to essentially punish them by holding up this multibillion-dollar merger. And so, you have journalists and, I think, media executives at CBS who are apoplectic about the prospect of settling this, because, A, they are on very strong legal footing, and, B, it would set a terrible precedent that the companies are going to cave to this kind of legal extortion. But I think — we’ll see what happens.

AMY GOODMAN: How does protection of the press in the United States compare to other countries? And talk about libel tourism.

DAVID ENRICH: Yeah. So, the U.S. is — the First Amendment is a really special thing in the U.S. It’s one of the things that distinguishes America from many other democracies. So, if you look at countries like the U.K., for example, or Australia, which are, you know, very democratic — small-D democratic countries, it is much harder for journalists and others to write critical things or to investigate powerful people and institutions in those countries, because their libel laws make it much easier to sue, and that also allows you to much more easily and kind of potently threaten people.

And so, you have — in the U.K., for example, we’ve had this phenomenon, as you just said, called libel tourism, where people, rich people, like Russian oligarchs, and big companies file lawsuits against journalists from all over the world in the British court system. And that has created a real chilling effect even for American journalists, who sometimes find themselves getting sued in British courts just because you published something. It goes online. It’s accessible probably everywhere in the world. That can expose you to liability in the British court system.

Now, it’s getting a little bit harder to actually bring those suits right now, but, to me, it’s a really clear reminder of the importance of the protections we have in the U.S. It really does differentiate this country from many others. And it means we have a much more robust and aggressive media. And again, it also means that just normal people who want to circulate a petition online can do so without fear that if they get a fact wrong, they are not going to be bullied and intimidated and potentially sued because of just minor inaccuracies.

AMY GOODMAN: So, finally, after you wrote this book, Murder the Truth: Fear, the First Amendment, and a Secret Campaign to Protect the Powerful, were you more or less hopeful?

DAVID ENRICH: Oh my goodness, less hopeful. We have a real problem right now in this country. We have very strong legal protections, and yet people and companies and institutions are, on a daily basis, threatening journalists and threatening normal people, and they are getting their way a lot of the time, and that’s with our legal protections in place. And the assault on these protections is very much underway. It’s a very much alive threat, I think. And we’re seeing the White House engage in this almost on a daily basis, it seems. So I think the threat is growing, and it has huge implications for our democracy and the ability of everyone to speak their mind and criticize powerful people.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to talk about some of the particular cases you look at in the book after the show, and we’ll post it as a web exclusive at democracynow.org. David Enrich, New York Times business investigations editor. His new book, just out, Murder the Truth: Fear, the First Amendment, and a Secret Campaign to Protect the Powerful.

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MMA

Trump is trying to throttle the free press — and U.S. moguls are going along with it

Written by Matt Gertz

Published 02/04/25

President Donald Trump is wasting no time in carrying out his goal of throttling the free press. Over the first two weeks of Trump’s presidency, his appointees have wielded federal regulatory authority to punish outlets the president dislikes — and American media moguls are responding with submission.

Trump has turned standard conservative attacks on journalists into one of the hallmarks of his political agenda.

He takes as his model Hungary’s autocrat Viktor Orban, who has “effectively dismantled the news media in his country” as “a central pillar of Orban’s broader project to remake his country as an ‘illiberal democracy,’” as New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger noted in an extraordinary warning last year.

During his first term in office, Trump repeatedly tried to leverage state power against his despised “fake news,” and together with his Project 2025 allies has developed a playbook to attack, defund, and delegitimize news outlets in his second.

Major media companies began signaling before Trump took office that they were willing to play ball with his administration in order to preserve their business interests. But since Inauguration Day, as Trump’s appointees have begun showing their intentions, executives at several news outlets have gone into full retreat.

CBS News preps for a Trump settlement

In the final weeks of the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump denounced CBS News’ editing of a 60 Minutes interview with Vice President Kamala Harris as “the biggest scandal in broadcast history” and declared that CBS should be stripped of its broadcast license. But in addition to invective and threats, Trump also filed a lawsuit against the outlet for producing journalism which displeased him.

The suit, which alleged that CBS airing different portions of Harris’ answer to a question in different venues constituted “partisan and unlawful acts of election and voter interference,” drew derision from First Amendment attorneys, who described its legal theory to CNN as “ridiculous junk” and “a frivolous and dangerous attempt by a politician to control the news media.”

But over the past few weeks, reports have indicated that CBS News’ parent company, Paramount, may be preparing to settle the suit with Trump. Such a settlement would be “an extraordinary concession by a major U.S. media company to a sitting president, especially in a case in which there is no evidence that the network got facts wrong or damaged the plaintiff’s reputation,” as The New York Times put it.

But Paramount needs federal approval for its proposed merger with Skydance Media, the production company founded by filmmaker David Ellison, and apparently sees giving the president a payoff as a valid way to smooth the path. Pressure for the settlement is coming from top Paramount shareholder Shari Redstone, the Times reported, who “stands to clear billions of dollars on the sale of Paramount.”

LA Times’ biotech industry owner goes all-in for RFK Jr.}:

Billionaire doctor Patrick Soon-Shiong once drew plaudits for using a small fraction of the vast fortune he made in the biotech industry to purchase and sustain his hometown newspaper, the Los Angeles Times.

But Soon-Shiong’s involvement in the paper’s operations has become more heavy-handed since the final months of the presidential campaign, with the owner repeatedly weighing in on Trump’s behalf. Over the past few weeks, Soon-Shiong, whose medical patents are subject to federal oversight, has begun cheerleading for the confirmation of the anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as secretary of health and human services.

“‘I truly believe [Kennedy] has the American public's best interests at heart,’ Soon-Shiong tweeted Tuesday in a post he pinned to the top of his account on X, formerly Twitter, for much of last week,” NPR reported. “It was one of 18 messages promoting Kennedy that Soon-Shiong — a billionaire surgeon and medical inventor — posted over the course of four days, which included Kennedy's confirmation hearing on Capitol Hill.”

Soon-Shiong’s support for Kennedy appears to have bled into his paper’s operations as well. On Friday, an op-ed contributor accused the paper of deceptively editing the piece he submitted in order to remove his criticisms of Kennedy’s nomination.

### CNN tries to move on

Journalists at CNN regularly drew vicious attacks from Trump and his supporters during the president’s first term. During a tone-setting press conference shortly before he took office, Trump lashed out at then-White House correspondent Jim Acosta as “fake news” and “terrible.” And Trump’s salvos at the network went beyond just words — his Justice Department tried to block a merger involving CNN’s then-parent company..

This time, CNN’s corporate leadership appears less willing to leave the network vulnerable to Trumpian retribution. Network chief Mark Thompson led an editorial meeting the day before Inauguration Day in which he instructed CNN talent “to be forward-thinking and to avoid pre-judging Trump” and to avoid “expressing any outrage of their own” or “relitigat[ing] the past,” former CNN reporter Oliver Darcy reported in his Status newsletter.

As for Acosta, he left CNN last week rather than accept Thompson’s offer to anchor the network’s coverage from midnight to 2 a.m. ET.

### Trump’s FCC targets ABC, CBS, NBC, NPR, and PBS

The tip of the president’s anti-press spear is Brendan Carr, a Republican member of the Federal Communications Commission whom Trump elevated to chair. Carr authored Project 2025’s chapter on the FCC and has notably refused to reject Trump’s repeated calls for the commission to yank the licenses of broadcast networks whose reporting he dislikes.

Following his promotion, Carr sent a letter to Bob Iger, the CEO of ABC parent company Disney, in which he denounced the network for having “contributed” to the “erosion in public trust” and pointedly referenced the FCC’s regulatory power.

Carr also restored a right-wing group’s bias complaints targeting NBC, CBS, and ABC for purportedly biased coverage of the presidential campaign, which his predecessor had dismissed. In response to the CBS complaint, the FCC demanded that CBS News provide the unedited transcript and tapes of Harris’ 60 Minutes interview, adding government pressure to the benefit of Trump’s private lawsuit. The network ultimately submitted to what one legal expert described as a “highly partisan intervention” with “no historical antecedent.”

And on Wednesday, Carr announced a new FCC probe of underwriting announcements produced by NPR and PBS, “with an eye toward unraveling federal funding for all public broadcasting.”

### Defense Department retaliates against news outlets

The Pentagon announced Friday night that the defense correspondents at NBC News, The New York Times, Politico, and National Public Radio are all required to vacate their dedicated workspaces. Their spots will instead go to the right-wing One America News Network, New York Post, and Breitbart — and theoretically to the progressive HuffPost, which does not have a Pentagon reporter and did not request space.

The move came a week after the Senate confirmed former Fox News host Pete Hegseth as defense secretary.

Take Trumpist threats to jail journalists seriously

:{09/23/24

Donald Trump’s authoritarian playbook to crush the free press in a second term}:

:{10/29/24

“Fake News Networks”: Trump and Project 2025’s goal to attack, defund, and delegitimize the press}:

10/16/24

===

press suppr

an 10 24

Donald Trump early Thursday morning amplified his calls to have CBS investigated for its editing choices in an interview with Vice President Kamala Harris, declaring that the development is "totally illegal" and demanding the government "take away the CBS license."

Trump on Wednesday lobbed an unproven accusation against CBS's "60 Minutes" over the program's taped interview with Harris, accusing the show of deceptively editing its interview to present Harris in a better light. Trump was criticized for his response, which was compared to "dictator talk."

The vice president sat down for an interview with correspondent Bill Whitaker, who asked at one point whether Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu was listening to the Biden administration's concerns about the war in Gaza, and the Trump campaign pointed out that her answer was different in a promotional clip posted on social media from what she said in the full interview that aired Monday night.

“The work that we have done has resulted in a number of movements in that region by Israel that were very much prompted by or a result of many things," Harris says in the truncated clip, "including our advocacy for what needs to happen in the region.”

However, in the interview, her immediate response to the same question was: “We are not going to stop pursuing what is necessary for the United States to be clear about where we stand on the need for this war to end.”

Trump previously called for an investigation Wednesday, but escalated those calls Thursday, saying Harris should now "concede the election.

"A giant Fake News Scam by CBS & 60 Minutes. Her REAL ANSWER WAS CRAZY, OR DUMB, so they actually REPLACED it with another answer in order to save her or, at least, make her look better," Trump wrote on Truth Social. "A FAKE NEWS SCAM, which is totally illegal."

He continued:

"TAKE AWAY THE CBS LICENSE. Election Interference. She is a Moron, and the Fake News Media wants to hide that fact. An UNPRECEDENTED SCANDAL!!! The Dems got them to do this and should be forced to concede the Election? WOW!"

---

===

an 10 24

Suggesting that Vice President Kamala Harris “isn’t competent to run a bingo game at the community center,” Trump senior adviser Stephen Millerlaid into a top Harris spokesperson Monday night for suggesting that Donald Trump backed out of a "60 Minutes" sit-down interview because the former president is “avoiding the media.”

The social media feud between Miller and Harris-Walz senior national spokesperson Ian Sams ensued shortly after the airing of the traditional “60 Minutes” candidate interview, which Trump was notably absent from despite originally agreeing to.

“Scott Pelley opens ‘60 Minutes’ outlining in great detail how Donald Trump agreed to sit for an interview, including quoting Steven Cheung phone calls and text messages, before canceling,” Sams wrote on X. “Yikes. Why is Trump avoiding the media? Why won't he answer questions from real outlets?”

“Hey liar, Trump has done dozens of hours long press conferences with adversarial media,” Miller wrote in a reply to Sams. “Kamala has never done one adversarial interview in any setting anywhere and never done one single solitary press conference. Kamala isn’t competent to run a bingo game at the community center.”

Sams left his position as a Biden administration spokesman for oversight and investigations in August to join the Harris-Walz campaign as a top spokesperson, the Washington Post reported. He previously served as national press secretary on Harris' 2020 presidential campaign, according to the publication.

Miller is a longtime Trump adviser and architect of the Trumpadministration's “zero tolerance” family separation policy.

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:{:{trump cancel 60 min,}:

1x 50 yrs, PO leslie stahl

ingraham fact check him vph in NC today 3 hrs}:

10 24 msnbc

an 10 24

former President Donald Trump on Wednesday lobbed a baseless accusation against CBS's "60 Minutes" over the program's taped interview with Vice President Kamala Harris.

Writing on his Truth Social platform, the former president accused "60 Minutes" of deceptively editing its interview to present Harris in a better light.

"I’ve never seen this before, but the producers of 60 Minutes sliced and diced ('cut and pasted') Lyin’ Kamala’s answers to questions, which were virtually incoherent, over and over again, some by as many as four times in a single sentence or thought, all in an effort, possibly illegal as part of the 'News Division,' which must be licensed, to make her look 'more Presidential,' or a least, better," Trump wr

He continued:

"It may also be a major Campaign Finance Violation. This is a stain on the reputation of 60 Minutes that is not recoverable - It will always remain with this once storied brand. I have never heard of such a thing being done in 'News.' It is the very definition of FAKE NEWS! The public is owed a MAJOR AND IMMEDIATE APOLOGY! This is an open and shut case, and must be investigated, starting today!

It is difficult to understand what the former president is talking about given that vid]

and Harris speaks cogently over long periods of time without any apparent edits.

Trump backed out of doing an interview with "60 Minutes" last week after he told the program that he didn't want them to fact check the things that he has been saying on the campaign trail, such as his false claims about Haitian immigrants eating locals' pets in Springfield, Ohio.

===

3 24

The Moms for Liberty 60 Minutes interview was such a disaster that their allies are scrambling to do damage control | Media Matters for America

'Didn’t really care how many laws had to be broken': Trump lawyer John Eastman grilled on 60 Minutes - Alternet.org

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timing odd/ after indict --> NYC

https://www.alternet.org/seditious-scumbag-marjorie-taylor-greene/

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'Didn’t really care how many laws had to be broken': Trump lawyer John Eastman grilled on 60 Minutes - Alternet.org

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morano 5 23

allison blonde glasses blk blazer but cleavage in focus 11b biden electric rural TVA running water new deal; literally a money lander scheme GND

solandra make work job blackout, $ to rt ppl but well connected donors; higher energy cost, less electricity

wow pretty terrifying hope ppl wake up rather than go along w corrupt agenda; corp media cbs in focus insect eat sci in germany soybean deforestation livestock feed; newsflash there is no global food crisis related to climate,gov't made supply chain problemw/ policy; chem farming, eu crush small fam farm to meet net zero goal that's what 6o min dutifully report; psyop kids in school, mfg food crisis; ad oan live 5/mo credible unbiased less than cable stay informed; cleavage

gmail oann.com/video/in-focus-video/climate-depot-founder-on-team-biden-the-radical-climate-agenda/

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no lnx

as part of her interview with CBS News' Lesley Stahl, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) was asked about some of her past actions, like chasing school shooting survivor David Hogg from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.

Greene didn't appreciate the questions about it, saying that it doesn't show the full breadth of her life.

:{:{}:

One of the things Greene yelled at Hogg was that if he was protected at school by security guards, there wouldn't be mass shootings. The MSD high school had a security guard, however. It didn't help.

Stahl also asked Greene about her claims that Democrats were a "party of pedophiles."

:{:{}:

"They are not pedophiles. Why would you say that?" asked Stahl.

:{:{}:

Greene defended it.

:{:{}:

"Democrats, democrats support," she struggled. "Even Joe Biden, the president himself, supports children being sexualized and having transgender surgeries. Sexualizing children is what pedophiles do to children."

"Wow. Okay," Stahl said, clearly taken aback.

Children aren't allowed to have transgender surgeries, and it's something that Republicans continue to be fact-checked on.

Transgender children and those with gender identity issues are about who they are, not about being sexually molested. So, it's unclear how Greene jumps from transgender people to pedophiles. Greene provided no other evidence of "sexualizing children" other than her problem with gender identity.

"But my question really is, can't you fight for what you believe in without all that name-calling and without the personal attacks?" asked Stahl.

:{:{}:

"Well, I would ask the same question to the other side, because all they've done is call me names and insult me nonstop since I've been here, Lesley. They call me racist. They call me anti-semitic, which is not true. I'm not calling anyone names. I'm calling out the truth, basically."

"Pedophile?' Stahl asked again.

"Pedophile — call it what it is," Greene said.

Those who fight actual child sex trafficking and work to help protect child molestation have spoken out about the Republicans using such language so casually, saying that it belittles the very real struggles survivors have faced. At the same time, it also diminishes the word by using it as an insult for anyone that supports LGBTQ rights.

Greene has never offered an apology to those she belittles with her attacks, much less to Democrats she has lied about.

See the segment below or at the link here.

Marjorie Taylor Greene struggles when asked to justify her 'over the top' attacks on Democrats

youtu.be

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

'Lighting the match': Marjorie Taylor Greene blasted for off the rails rant defending Trump ›

Marjorie Taylor Greene's Manhattan protest plans undercut by fellow lawmaker: 'Not to be taken seriously' ›

'Platforming stupid': 60 Minutes evokes outrage by interviewing Marjorie Taylor Greene ›

Deniers Would Rather Trump Said Nothing

Trump said a couple of things the deniers don’t really want him to say, including:

“I don’t think it’s a hoax” and “I’m not denying climate change.”

Joe Bast, former CEO of the Heartland Institute, and his climate denier kin are happiest when the President doesn’t talk about it at all. A year ago, Bast provided his reason for applauding the President’s silence, quoted and memorialized in the video below:

“The President has done a great job by not talking about global warming. The less the President talks about it, the less often it appears in news stories and on TV, the less often its going to be an issue. So, this is how big issues disappear.' Trump Questioned on Climate by Reporters in Georgia While Touring Hurricane Damage

Predictions for Hurricane Michael went from a predicted Category 1 on October 7 to making landfall at just below Category 5 three days later, surprising meteorologists and foiling predictive computer models.

While touring areas damaged by the massive storm in Georgia on Monday,reporters continued to press Trump on climate change and he continued trying to change the subject and inform us that he has “the cleanest air on the planet.”

...

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Whistleblowers: DEA attorneys went easy on McKesson, the country's largest drug distributor

A 60 Minutes/Washington Post joint investigation into the DEA's response to the opioid epidemic again finds investigators who hit a brick wall in Washington

2017

Dec 17

CORRESPONDENT

Bill Whitaker

In October, we joined forces with the Washington Post and reported a disturbing story of Washington at its worst - about an act of Congress that crippled the DEA's ability to fight the worst drug crisis in American history - the opioid addiction crisis. Now, a new front of that joint investigation. It is also disturbing. It's the inside story of the biggest case the DEA ever built against a drug company: the McKesson Corporation, the country's largest drug distributor. It's also the story of a company too big to prosecute.

In 2014, after two years of painstaking inquiry by nine DEA field divisions and 12 U.S. Attorneys, investigators built a powerful case against McKesson for the company's role in the opioid crisis.

Our reporting turned up the leader of the DEA team, David Schiller, who tells for the first time how his investigators hit a brick wall in Washington when they tried to hold the powerful company accountable.

fullmain.jpg

David Schiller CBS NEWS

David Schiller: This is the best case we've ever had against a major distributor in the history of the Drug Enforcement Administration. How do we not go after the number one organization? In the height of the epidemic, when people are dying everywhere, doesn't somebody have to be held accountable? McKesson needs to be held accountable.

Holding McKesson accountable meant going after the 5th largest corporation in the country. Headquartered in San Francisco, McKesson has 76,000 employees and earns almost $200 billion a year in revenues, about the same as Exxon Mobil. Since the 1990s, McKesson has made billions from the distribution of addictive opioids.

David Schiller: I was with DEA for over 30 years. I was the Assistant Special Agent in Charge for the Denver Field Division.

Bill Whitaker: How many people did you supervise?

David Schiller: Approximately 100.

"They're killing people. And their motive? This is all for financial gain. That's the problem."

Before he retired in August, Schiller had supervised investigations in drug trafficking and money laundering cases, but he considered the case against McKesson to be the single most important investigation of his lifetime.

Bill Whitaker: What did they do that was wrong?

David Schiller: The issue with McKesson was they were providing millions and millions and millions of pills to countless pharmacies throughout the United States, and they did not maintain any sort of due diligence. This wasn't just happening in Denver, Colorado. This was happening in Los Angeles, California. It was happening in Detroit, Michigan. It was happening in New York City. It was a national problem and nobody wanted to deal with it.

McKesson told us when it comes to the opioid crisis and pills flooding into American communities, there's plenty of blame to go around: drug makers; other distributors; doctors; pharmacies, all played a role.

But in 2008, McKesson agreed to pay $13.3 million in fines for failing to report huge orders of hydrocodone to shady internet pharmacies. After that settlement, the company promised to do a better job of monitoring shipments of controlled substances. Now, special agent Schiller and his team had caught McKesson again shipping suspicious orders of opioids.

DEA investigators discovered that McKesson was supplying pharmacies and doctors, that were fronts for criminal drug rings and pills were ending up on the black market.

David Schiller: And everybody kept saying, "It's just a prescription drug. It's a pill. It's a liquid. What's the big deal?" And I would say, "They're killing people." And their motive? This is all for financial gain. That's the problem.

Bill Whitaker: One of the Former D.E.A. Administrators said that the McKesson Corporation has fueled the explosive prescription drug abuse problem in this country. Do you agree with that?

David Schiller: 100%. If they woulda stayed in compliance with their authority and held those that they're supplying the pills to, the epidemic would be nowhere near where it is right now. Nowhere near.

Bill Whitaker: So you decided to take a swing at a hornet's nest.

David Schiller: I knew that if we could get to the distributor, we could make a great impact for the United States citizens immediately. Immediately.

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McKesson Corp. Headquarters CBS NEWS

McKesson delivers more than 1/3 of all medicines in the U.S. from a network of 30 warehouses around the country. The DEA requires drug distributors to identify, stop and report orders of unusual size or frequency to the agency - something Schiller says McKesson did not do until the company learned it was under investigation.

David Schiller: They had hundreds of thousands of suspicious orders they should have reported, and they didn't report any. There's not a day that goes by in the pharmaceutical world, in the McKesson world, in the distribution world, where there's not something suspicious. It happens every day.

Bill Whitaker: And they had none.

David Schiller: They weren't reporting any. I mean, you have to understand that, nothing was suspicious?

In one case, DEA investigators discovered that McKesson was shipping the same quantities of opioid pills to small-town pharmacies in Colorado's San Luis Valley as it would typically ship to large drugstores next to big city medical centers.

Helen Kaupang: McKesson is supplying enough pills to that community to give every man woman and child a monthly dose of 30 to 60 tablets. Is that not shocking? I found it shocking.

Helen Kaupang, retired from the DEA this fall after 29 years as an investigator and supervisor. She worked with Schiller on this investigation. She says the delivery of so many pills to such small towns should have set off alarms at McKesson.

Helen Kaupang: There was no legitimate reason for that pharmacy in that little town in remote Colorado to be getting hundreds of thousands of pills over a several-year period. None.

Bill Whitaker: Did McKesson know this, or should McKesson have known this--

Helen Kaupang: Absolutely. It was their customer. They were supplyin' it. It was just outrageous. They were turning a blind eye to the very problem that we were trying to address.

Kaupang said to get around reporting suspiciously large orders, at the time, McKesson would simply raise the limit a pharmacy was allowed. No order, no matter how large, was ever reported as suspicious.

Bill Whitaker: They would set a threshold. And if they surpass their own threshold--

Helen Kaupang: Yes.

Bill Whitaker: They would just bump up the threshold to meet this new higher number?

Helen Kaupang: Yes.

Bill Whitaker: So they rigged the system.

David Schiller: Absolutely. Absolutely.

Bill Whitaker: And to be clear here, we're talking addictive opioids.

David Schiller: Highly addictive, Oxycodone and Hydrocodone in particular. That's what we're talking about. The most commonly prescribed and abused controlled substance in the United States.

Bill Whitaker: McKesson would say they're just supplying the doctors and the pharmacies. They're giving them the prescriptions they are allowed to have. How are they wrong?

David Schiller: Because they are going above and beyond those thresholds without any due diligence, with reckless regard and they don't consider any of that suspicious?

A 2014 DEA memo that outlined the investigative findings from all the field offices, obtained by 60 Minutes and the Washington Post, said McKesson, had a pattern of "dramatic increases in thresholds without justification..." And had "supplied controlled substances in support of criminal...Activities" to pharmacies.

David Schiller: I mean the president declared a public health emergency. It's on the front lines of everybody's dinner table conversation. There's not a bigger problem we have in the United States. And who led to the problem? McKesson was at the forefront.

With the opioid epidemic getting worse year by year, special agent Schiller and his team wanted to send a message to the pharmaceutical industry by hitting McKesson hard. They wanted to fine the company more than a billion dollars, revoke registrations to distribute controlled substances, and, more than anything, put a McKesson executive behind bars. But Schiller says, attorneys for the DEA and the Department of Justice retreated at the thought of going against McKesson and its high-powered legal team.

Bill Whitaker: Did a DEA attorney actually tell you that they were not going to pursue McKesson because they had lawyers who had gone to Harvard and Yale?

David Schiller: They told me those exact words, because the case would take too much time and too much effort and, by the way, "What if we lost?" I said, "What if you lost?" I go, "You-- you can't have a better case on a silver platter."

Bill Whitaker: Were they scared?

David Schiller: Yes.

Bill Whitaker: Scared of going after McKesson?

David Schiller: A better word might be "intimidated."

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Joe Ranazzisi CBS NEWS

This was at the time whistleblower Joe Ranazzisi, the DEA's then deputy assistant administrator, was sounding alarms that the DEA and Congress were bending to the will of the pharmaceutical industry. In our October report, he told us Justice Department attorneys were pressing him and his investigators to take a softer approach toward the industry.

Bill Whitaker: The summer of 2014 -- you get a request to play nice with the pharmaceutical industry.

Joe Ranazzisi: Yes.

Bill Whitaker: What do you think of that?

Joe Ranazzisi: I didn't think it was appropriate. We told 'em what they need to do. We told 'em what compliance is and how to comply with the act. We met these people over and over again. The time for meetings and reports are over. You either comply or you lose your registration.

But in the McKesson case, negotiations with company attorneys went on for more than two years. In the end, instead of the billion-dollar fine DEA investigators wanted, the company was fined $150 million. That was a record for the DEA, but Schiller called it a slap on the wrist for a fortune five company and a second-time offender.

David Schiller: There was backdoor deals being cut that we didn't know about, I didn't know about, and I was representing DEA nationally on the investigation at the highest level. How do you settle? How do you say it's okay just, "Here, write this check this time and-- and close this place for a little bit, sign this piece of paper." How do you do that? No. Put 'em in jail. You put the people that are responsible for dealing drugs, for breaking the law, in jail. Nobody's in jail. They wrote a check.

Bill Whitaker: Did you think McKesson was getting special treatment?

David Schiller: I don't think -- I know they were getting special treatment. They were getting treatment like I'd never seen in my 30-year career.

Getting special treatment, he said, from lawyers at his agency. In an e-mail, a member of DEA's senior leadership team, who sided with Schiller, told him she was overruled.

"David... I am totally against settling," she wrote, "but how do we hold their feet to the fire...? Our attorneys have us over a barrel with their refusal to go to court."

David Schiller: There is not a man or woman in DEA today that's happy with the settlement and morale has been broken because of it.

Bill Whitaker: Why did you ultimately decide to sit down and talk to us?

David Schiller: I saw what's happening to our country now with this epidemic. I saw the limitations being placed on it-- on us by our own people and chief counsel fighting with our own agents and investigators. And I know I'm gonna make a lotta enemies, because people don't like to hear the truth. I'm doing it because the truth needs to be told.

Schiller pointed out to us the $150 million fine was only about $50 million more than McKesson CEO, John Hammergren's compensation last year. He was the third-highest paid CEO in the country; only Tim Cook of Apple, and Reed Hastings of Netflix earned more. In the last earning period McKesson's revenues were up $8 billion.

We wanted to speak to a McKesson representative on camera but they declined. But in a statement, McKesson said, "In the interest of moving beyond disagreements… The company agreed to settle with the DEA and DOJ." And McKesson promised to do a better job flagging suspicious orders.

We asked the DEA about allegations its attorneys went easy on McKesson. A spokesperson told us the agreement was a good deal; that the priority was to get McKesson to do the right thing going forward. And now an independent monitor has been put in place to watch McKesson more closely.

Maggie Hassan: The pharmaceutical industry is doing everything it can to keep this epidemic going.

Bill Whitaker: That's pretty strong.

Maggie Hassan: Yeah. It is.

New Hampshire Senator Maggie Hassan has been critical of Congress for not aggressively investigating industry's role in this epidemic. New Hampshire has the second highest rate of drug overdose deaths in the country.

Bill Whitaker: What more is it going to take to convince Congress to act?

Maggie Hassan: Well, one of the things we have to do is begin to hold the pharmaceutical companies accountable for this. And right now, when you see a fine for the McKesson Company of $150 million when they make a $100 million a week in profits, that isn't gonna do it.

Bill Whitaker: What incentive do they have to change their behavior?

Maggie Hassan: Well, right now, they don't have a lot of incentives and that's something that has to be changed. This in many ways reminds me of the situation with big tobacco-- and, you know, I think it's one of the reasons you see attorneys general around the country--beginning to file lawsuits against the pharmaceutical industry--to hold them accountable for the cost of this terrible epidemic.

41 state attorneys general have banded together to sue the opioid industry. While at McKesson, John Hammergren begins his 18th year as CEO. This year, the board awarded him an additional $1.1 million performance bonus. A bonus based on ethics and accountability.

Produced by Ira Rosen and Sam Hornblower. Associate Producers, Alex J. Diamond and LaCrai Mitchell.

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David Schiller and correspondent Bill Whitaker CBS NEWS

Maggie Hassan: The pharmaceutical industry is doing everything it can to keep this epidemic going.

Bill Whitaker: That's pretty strong.

Maggie Hassan: Yeah. It is.

Bill Whitaker: What more is it going to take to convince Congress to act?

Bill Whitaker: What incentive do they have to change their behavior?

60 Minutes, Washington Post completely omit U.S. role in Yemen slaughter.

Two major media outlets spent the past two weeks whitewashing US role in the famine and bombing of Yemen. In this time, the country’s leading National Security paper, The Washington Post, has published two editorials and an explainer on the conflict and omitted, entirely, America’s military role in the campaign that’s left 15,000+ dead, two million internally displaced, and one million with cholera.

Escalating the negligence was CBS News’ 60 Minutes that dedicated a whole 13-minute segment to the conflict and never once mentioned that the United States provides targets for the Saudi Royal Air Force as well as refuels and sells billions in weapons. America’s role in the worst on-going humanitarian crisis on earth just slipped into a memory hole.

http://www.alternet.org/media/steve-bannon-60-minutes-disgrace

http://www.alternet.org/environment/broadcast-networks-climate-coverage-was-utterly-miserable-during-election-year

Secretary of State John Kerry, in Marrakesh this week for international climate talks, recently said it “pissed him off” that there wasn’t a single question asked about climate change during the six hours of televised presidential and vice presidential debates prior to the election.

Kerry’s annoyance is justified. Given rapidly rising global temperatures, dramatic extreme weather events, the global agreement to curb carbon emissions, and stark divisions among the major party candidates, climate change deserved to be one of the most talked-about issues of the campaign. And yet, outside of a passing reference during the “town hall” presidential debate, the candidates were not asked about it, despite the fact that queries about climate change were the fourth most-popular question category submitted by the public for the town hall debate, demonstrating that voters wanted to hear about it.

But it wasn’t only the debates.

Since January, the broadcast television networks barely reported on climate, even though this year is on pace to be the hottest one in the books, setting a record for the third year in a row. Out of more than 1,700 evening, morning, weekly and Sunday public affairs news programs aired between January 1 and October 31, the four commercial broadcast networks that provided moderators for the debates — ABC, Fox, CBS and NBC — collectively aired only 32 segments and 24 briefs on the topic, a total of56 pieces. And most of the evening news segments ran less than two and a half minutes in length, while each brief was no more than three or four sentences long.

By contrast, the commercial broadcast networks found time for considerably less important topics. Take the coverage of New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady and the fallout over his “Deflategate” football tampering scandal. During the first nine months of this year, ABC, CBS and NBC aired 33 segments and 40 briefs on Brady, for a total of 73 pieces. (Fox’s lone national news show somehow missed the story.) Nearly half of the pieces — 34 — were on Deflategate and Brady’s four-game suspension. The rest reported on such riveting topics as Brady’s haircut, his new $200 cook book, and his new family dog, Fluffy.

Rating the Networks

Fox Broadcasting Company — not to be confused with 21st Century Fox’s cable channel Fox News — was by far the worst offender. The network doesn’t have a nightly news program, but it does air Fox News Sunday, a public affairs show hosted by Chris Wallace, the moderator of the third and final presidential debate. Since the beginning of the year, Fox News Sunday only broached the topic of climate change once, during an interview Wallace did with Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein on September 4. Stein mentioned it in one sentence, and Wallace changed the subject. But Fox News Sunday was not alone. The topic didn’t come up on the other Sunday morning political gabfests either unless a guest mentioned it in passing. More often than not that guest was Bernie Sanders. (Given the incidental nature of these remarks, they aren’t included in the segment or brief totals.)

ABC, where town hall debate co-moderator Martha Raddatz works, was only marginally better than Fox, and it runs a lot more news programming. The network has aired only three segments on climate change this year, and they were all variations of the same story. On January 6, Good Morning America ran a relatively long segment on a melting glacier in Iceland that is retreating about a hundred yards every year. Nightline aired a shorter version of the piece that night, and the next morning, Good Morning America did a follow-up. Since then, the network aired only seven climate-related briefs, six on Good Morning America and one on World News Tonight, which merely reported that bumblebees are “threatened by climate change” in a two-sentence piece.

Over the same time frame, NBCaired 11 segments and two briefs on climate change. Seven segments were on Today, and the other four ran on NBC Nightly News, which is anchored by Lester Holt, the moderator of the first presidential debate.

Two of the four Nightly News segments piggybacked on other news stories. On August 20, an NBC correspondent took time off from the Rio Olympics to talk with locals about deforestation. Two weeks later, on September 3, the show reported on the G-20 Economic Summit in China, where President Obama and Chinese President Xi formally committed to the Paris climate agreement. All of the individual segments were well done, but given the magnitude and urgency of climate change, the fact that NBC’s premier daily news program ran only four segments on the topic over the course of nine months is incomprehensible.

CBS, whose correspondent Elaine Quijano moderated the vice presidential debate, aired the most segments and briefs of the broadcast networks— but that’s still not saying much. Nearly all of the briefs — 14 of 15 — and more than half of the segments — 11 of 18 — were on CBS This Morning or CBS Sunday Morning.

Two segments on The CBS Evening News linked climate change with extreme weather events. A July 20 segment on the heat wave broiling residents in more than two dozen states featured a National Weather Service meteorologist explaining how climate change works in simple, understandable terms. Two months later, on September 17, the show reported that the “world is on pace for the warmest year on record, breaking marks set in 2015, 2014 and 2010. But scientists say it’s more than temperatures. They have connected man-made climate change to deadly heat waves, droughts, and devastating floods.”

Those Evening News stories were excellent, but they were two of only five climate-related segments the show aired since the beginning of the year. 60 Minutes, meanwhile, sent a correspondent to Greenland to meet with climate scientists for a segment that aired on January 31 and again on July 31. That was it for the newsmagazine, but its competition at ABC and NBC — 20/20 and Dateline — avoided the issue altogether.

Millions are Watching, and They’re Not Being Served

The relatively few climate-related segments that did air on ABC, CBS and NBC since January demonstrate that the networks are quite capable of covering the subject in a compelling way. The amount of attention they devoted, however, was nowhere near what it should have been given the magnitude of the problem.

Besides their scanty coverage, the networks missed some obvious opportunities to make the climate connection. For example, all of the evening newscasts reported on the devastating rains and flooding in Louisiana last August. According to Climate Nexus, the storm that triggered the flooding “was supercharged by running over a warmer ocean and through an atmosphere made wetter by global warming.” No matter, according to Media Matters, none of the five NBC Nightly News segments, three World News Tonight segments, or three CBS Evening Newssegments on the floods cited the climate link. That’s just bad reporting.

One other point to consider is when the networks aired the bulk of their climate stories and briefs. Nearly two-thirds of the segments (20 of 32) aired on one of the network morning shows, as did more than 85 percent of the briefs (21 of 24). Why is that important? Because nearly twice as many viewers watch the evening news shows.

That said, despite the fact that the legacy broadcast networks have lost ground to cable and online sources in recent years, all of their news shows still command sizable audiences. According to figures from the week of October 24, slightly more than 23 million people watched one of the three broadcast networks’ evening newscasts. ABC’s World News Tonight led the pack with an audience of nearly 8.19 million viewers, just edging out NBC Nightly News for the top spot. The CBS Evening News came in last with 6.79 million viewers that week.

Fortunately, to paraphrase a Nobel Prize-winning poet, you don’t need a TV network to know which way the wind blows. Despite Donald Trump’s well-publicized contention that climate change is a Chinese-inspired hoax, nearly three-quarters of American voters now say global warming is happening and nearly 70 percent support a carbon tax.

When the story of this past election is written, however, a glaring and mystifying fact for historians will no doubt be how little attention was paid to perhaps the most important issue of our time. And the failure of the commercial broadcast networks to adequately address climate change should be front and center in that story. Their track record covering climate change this year has been so pathetic, it arguably violates the spirit — if not the letter — of the federal requirement that broadcast networks serve the public interest.

Now more than ever, we need news outlets to stand strong. So far, the results are not encouraging. 60 Minutes did an absurd puff piece on Donald Trump that did not press him at all. Megyn Kelly, in order to sell books, revealed a series of anti-Trump facts that she concealed until just after the election. CBS Evening News gave a welcoming platform to a white nationalist, and Univision did the same for a member of a hate group. NPR let Breitbart editors downplay their website's white nationalism and anti-LGBTQ extremism. There is an understandable instinct to talk to supporters of the new president elect. But if that instinct becomes abject moral relativism, then we are all in danger.

Chapter 8 How Benghazi Became #Benghazi p. 150

... HC has to prove a false negative?

Town Hall katie pavlich:men in libya died as help told to stand down 168 mcfarland on Fox said pol decision to to give them adequate security po decision not to rescue them (he ran against he for senate) 169

SOCAFRICA told guys not to board plane b/c no authorization (from?) but actually guys in tripoli were told beng ppl on way back and might need medical attan, so missing them bad move; no stand down order.

but mid april 2103 sharyl Atk sez multiple whistleblowers; referred to lts leaked by issa comm (get sec clearance for lawyers to protect whist from anticipated admin retaliation, slyly suggested 171 then issa announced a hearing to see if admin suppressed info 171 --> Victoria Toensing (husb joe digenova old clinton days ark pjt)

atk had done bad report on vaccines and Fast and Furious, got CPAC award; quit cbs, joined heritage wrote book (issa at bk launch); claimed gov't hacked computer, spooky web video, stuck space bar 172

Lara Logan Dylan Davies threshold book (Simon & S, owned by CBS) not disclosed. Fox had been using him as src, but quit when he asked for $ 175

eventually did 90 sec correction; LL put on leave; book not published (LL conferred with Lindsey Graham, why a problem if she had)?

trey gowdy angling for fed judge? how does hearings help that? 177

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharyl_Attkisson fast & furious bailed to heritage sinclair

Lara Logan attacks Hastings for McCrystal this town 132 vs Taibbi

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called berman dr evil, allowed abramoff to out-outrage?

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wiki

Thomas Royal Phillips (born October 23, 1949) is an attorney with the Baker Botts firm in Austin, Texas, who was from 1988 to 2004 the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Texas. With nearly seventeen years of service, Phillips is the third-longest tenured Chief Justice in Texas history.He was appointed by Governor Bill Clements to fill a vacancy in the office in November 1987, becoming the youngest Chief Justice since Texas became a state. Phillips took office less than a month after CBS' 60 Minutes ran a highly publicized story, entitled "Justice for Sale?," which won widespread attention for its blistering critique of Texas' choice to elect judges by political party without campaign contribution limits. The broadcast alleged improperly close ties between several of the justices and their largest donors, who were amongst the state's most successful personal-injury trial lawyers.