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Open in TheBrain

JRNL FAIL 4

see legacy

merri ok

see corp mainstream media

SEE BARI WEISS CBS CLIMATE BS ICE

see CBS 2 DUKOUPIL

SEE BILLIONAIRES BEZOS SOON

obsoleted by soc media?!

field error 3? 3 23

must remember to include fox and rtwing media

trump bribe oil ceo egypt

see false balance/ both siderism

recall normalizing

why is GUK and FT better than US on fASCISM?

msnbc does better?

not fail climate:

Among TV news networks, CNN was alone in consistently connecting California deluge to climate change 02/08/24

CNN's Jim Acosta hosts frontline community activist to discuss climate justice implications of Biden's decision to pause LNG export permits

02/01/24

NO BAK

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Under Bari Weiss, CBS News dismantled its climate team and retreated from climate reporting

Climate coverage on CBS Evening News fell 81% in January–September 2026 compared with the same months in 2025. The network also aired segments that discounted scientific warnings and downplayed the consequences of climate policy.

*Special* ProgramsClimate & Energy

Written by Evlondo Cooper

Published 10/20/26

Since Bari Weiss became CBS News editor-in-chief in October 2025, the network has dismantled the dedicated climate reporting team that helped make it a multi-year leader in broadcast coverage of climate change, eliminating most of the team last fall and laying off its last dedicated climate correspondent in spring 2026. As its climate coverage contracted, the network also aired segments that discounted scientific warnings and downplayed the consequences of federal climate policy.

A Media Matters analysis found that CBS aired 87 minutes of climate coverage across 35 segments from January 1 through September 30, 2026, a 61% decline from the 222 minutes it aired during the first nine months of 2025. Coverage on CBS Evening News fell 81%. Across the network, fewer climate segments discussed solutions, the Trump administration’s federal climate actions, or fossil fuels.

The decline in volume began before Weiss arrived, but through the first nine months of 2025, CBS continued to produce substantive climate reporting that explained how global warming affected people’s lives and scrutinized the policies and industries shaping the crisis. In 2026, CBS sharply reduced that coverage while eliminating its last dedicated climate correspondent’s position.

Topline findings

CBS’ climate coverage declined 61%. The network aired 87 minutes across 35 climate segments, down from 222 minutes across 78 segments in 2025.

Climate coverage on CBS Evening News fell 81%. The network’s flagship nightly newscast aired just 15 minutes across 10 climate segments, compared with 79 minutes across 35 segments in 2025.

Fewer climate segments addressed solutions, federal actions, or fossil fuels. Climate solutions appeared in 7 segments, down from 12 in 2025. Trump administration federal climate actions appeared in 3 segments, down from 11, while fossil fuels were mentioned in 3 segments, down from 10.

CBS dismantled the climate operation that helped make it a leader in broadcast coverage

Shortly after Weiss became editor-in-chief in October 2025, CBS dismissed most of its dedicated climate team. In a memo announcing the companywide layoffs, Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison described the cuts as “phasing out roles that are no longer aligned with our evolving priorities.” National environmental correspondent David Schechter remained for a time, but without a dedicated producer. By spring 2026, CBS had eliminated his position as well.

As its climate reporting declined, CBS amplified claims that downplay global warming

Methodology

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MMA

Fox News at 30: Even the pretense of impartiality is all but gone

Fox News at 30: Even the pretense of impartiality is all but gone

Written by Matt Gertz

Published 10/07/26

Fox News’ role as a Republican propaganda machine is clear to anyone who has bothered to peruse its programming — President Donald Trump knows it, Fox co-founder Rupert Murdoch knows it, disgraced network co-founder Roger Ailes knew it, and longtime viewers like me certainly know it. The last holdouts arguing otherwise at this late date are some combination of ignorant, naive, on the Fox payroll, lying to the public, or lying to themselves.

To wit, Fox chief political analyst Brit Hume, touting the 30th anniversary of the network’s launch on Wednesday’s Fox & Friends, offered up a hoary chestnut in praising his employer.

“We program it in such a way that for the times of the day when people are looking for hard news, they can get it,” Hume argued. “And if they’re sitting back in the evening after they watch the news, consume whatever news they like, and we do these opinion shows at night. There’s news in them for sure, but it is a mix and I think it works well and the balance is real.”

Meanwhile, viewers who tuned in to one of those daytime “hard news” hours the day before heard the anchor open her program by effectively urging viewers to vote for Republicans: “Priority No. 1, 28 days out from midterm Election Day, Republicans must maintain their majorities in the House and Senate. I'm Harris Faulkner, you are in The Faulkner Focus.”

Fox executives have attempted to draw Hume’s distinction between “hard news” and “opinion” for decades, pointing to the hours of network programming that resemble typical news shows in order to maintain their ad sales to blue-chip companies while drawing a huge audience thanks to its right-wing personalities pumping out bigotry and propaganda. But that fig leaf has been ripped to shreds since the dawn of the age of Trump, as the network effectively merged with the president’s political operation and administration.

Indeed, the increasingly propagandistic tenor of Fox over the last decade sent a number of network veterans scrambling for the exits — and then denouncing the place they had worked, in many cases for years. Their rhetoric often echoed that of Fox critics like me — Fox was deemed “a destructive propaganda machine” (former contributor Ralph Peters) rife “with partisan misinformation” (former chief political correspondent Carl Cameron), the “arm of a political party” (former political editor Chris Stirewalt), and a network whose stars “question the truth” (former anchor Chris Wallace).

But not everyone at Fox found the network’s shifts excessively distasteful. Some used Trump’s rise to become more influential than ever before.

Hume was notably speaking alongside fellow network veteran Sean Hannity, who is not merely a Fox “opinion” host but a Trump propagandist who moonlights as a presidential confidant, adviser, and political operative. Over the years, Hannity has appeared in a Trump campaign video, drafted a campaign ad, spoken at a presidential rally, employed his lawyer, and served as a back channel to him, among other ethical improprieties no other network would tolerate. Their colleagues include Trump’s daughter-in law (who hosts a weekly program that promotes his administration); two of his former White House press secretaries; and his former campaign manager, secretary of state, and top economic adviser.

That revolving door between Trump’s orbit and his propaganda outlet swings both ways — more than two dozen former Foxers have joined Trump’s administration.The former co-host of Fox’s weekend morning show now runs the Pentagon, a former co-host of its afternoon panel show oversees federal prosecutions in Washington, D.C., and a former Fox Business host (who is married to another Fox & Friends weekend co-host) leads the Department of Transportation.

Over the past decade, any purported guardrails between the “news” and “opinion” sides have been stripped away, and the network’s number of hours that even look like “hard news” shows have dwindled. At best, such programming now occupies 8 of the 19 hours from 5 a.m. to midnight — and calling even those timeslots legitimately “hard news” is a big stretch.

Special Report, the flagship “hard news” show on which Hume often appears, is anchored by a guy who golfs with Trump and has spent his second term burying scandals about the president’s family after previously devoting his program to ripping apart the Bidens over much less egregious behavior.

Amid Trump’s 2020 election subversion plot, anchor Bret Baier privately urged network brass to keep Fox from calling states for Biden, while his on-air coverage led a longtime Fox executive to comment: “It’s remarkable how weak ratings make good journalists do bad things.”

10 26 POD SAVE SHE SPIN PUNDIT?

America’s Newsroom, which provides the first “hard news” hours of the weekday lineup, is co-anchored by a former White House press secretary to President George W. Bush who is also one of the conservative co-hosts of the afternoon “opinion” panel show The Five. Other supposed “hard news” daytime anchors regularly parrot the right-wing narratives of the network’s “opinion” hosts.

Fox’s 4 p.m. and 7 p.m. hours — previously anchored by Neil Cavuto and Shep Smith, who would both often go viral for not following the Trump line — are now hosted by Republican party appendages Will Cain and Laura Ingraham.

And Fox News Digital, the network’s online reporting arm, is helmed by Hannity’s former producer, who hired several Republican political operatives and former Trump administration officials following a purge of more traditional journalists after the 2020 presidential election.

“Brit always understood opinion, which I’ve got to give him credit for — there were some news people that didn’t love the opinion part,” Hannity quipped on Wednesday’s Fox & Friends.

Those who remain at Fox to celebrate its 30th anniversary, like Hannity and Hume, either revel in or are willing to accommodate its core aims of GOP dominance and Trumpian propaganda.

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Fox News Turns 20: Two Decades Of Hate, Misogyny, And Smears Disguised As Journalism

10/07/16 12:13 PM EDT

Fox News is the Republican Party. Here are over 400 examples proving it.

05/16/22 10:59 AM EDT

Fox vets keep leaving the network and saying it is propaganda

03/28/22

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CNN and MS NOW consistently connected prolonged power outage in Gary, Indiana, to race and poverty, while broadcast news rarely did, and Fox did not

mma 9 26

Over 7 days, Fox News spent only 1 minute covering rising diesel prices caused by Trump’s Iran war

ABC, CBS, and NBC aired nearly 200 segments about three U.S. heat events without mentioning climate change

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MMA

Federal disaster reports under the Trump administration leave journalists to source climate explanations elsewhere

NASA and NOAA analyses still provide detailed meteorology, trends, and preparedness information while omitting explanations of human-caused warming that earlier federal accounts included

*Special* ProgramsClimate & Energy

Written by Evlondo Cooper

Published 09/16/26

On September 9, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced that the contiguous United States had experienced its hottest summer in 132 years of records. Its public summary provided readers, including journalists, with detailed information about record temperatures and expanding drought, but it did not explain how human-caused warming contributed to the conditions it described.

The same pattern appears in NASA’s report on July’s western heat wave and NOAA’s analysis of the July 2025 Texas floods. Across these examples, federal agencies continued to provide detailed information about the meteorology, broken records, damage, and in some cases worsening long-term trends without explaining how climate change had increased those risks.

These omissions are not isolated. The Trump administration has also disrupted other federal sources of information the public relies on to understand climate risk. In April 2025, it terminated the contract supporting the coordinating office of the U.S. Global Change Research Program, which produces the National Climate Assessment. NOAA also stopped updating its billion-dollar disaster database, and Climate.gov stopped publishing after its entire staff was laid off.

Journalists have used that research to explain extreme weather. In October 2024, MSNOW’s (then-MSNBC’s) All In with Chris Hayes referenced NOAA’s billion-dollar disaster data during an interview with agency climatologist Adam Smith. Smith explained that billion-dollar disasters had become much more frequent since the 1980s. He described how climate change adds heat to the ocean and atmosphere, contributing to extreme weather — including heavier rainfall — and noted that communities’ exposure and vulnerability compound the damage.

The billion-dollar database, Climate.gov, and the assessment program are gone. The analyses that remain are as detailed as ever — what the reports examined here no longer explain is why.

Federal climate analyses can shape reporting even when they do not appear in a published story or on-air segment. Journalists may consult them to understand an event, prepare for interviews, identify relevant questions, or check their own understanding before writing or going on air. When those accounts do not explain how climate change is contributing to the extreme weather they describe, reporters have to find that explanation elsewhere, and it may never make it into the published story.

NASA’s 2026 heat-wave analysis omitted the climate explanation previously included in its 2024 analysis

The western heat wave described in NASA’s July 15 report struck when a heat dome settled over the northern Rockies. NASA reported all-time temperature records at sites in Montana, Wyoming, and Utah, along with a tenfold increase in the rate of heat-related emergency department visits across the Mountain states during the July heat.

NASA explained how the high-pressure system trapped hot air and suppressed clouds and precipitation. Its account also placed the event within a longer-term trend, noting that “heat waves like this one have become more frequent in the United States in recent decades” and that summer heat waves “roughly doubled in number between 1980 and 2023, increasing from an average of two to four per month.”

NASA omitted the climate explanation despite contemporaneous analyses linking the same mid-July 2026 heat wave to human-caused warming. Climate Central found that human-caused climate change made the extreme heat “at least three times more likely” across large parts of the western and northern United States from July 13 through July 15, affecting more than 118 million people west of the Mississippi.

Climate Central later found that nearly half of the contiguous United States experienced temperatures “made at least five times more likely by climate change” during the mid-July heat wave.

The omission was not limited to 2026. In its June 26, 2025, account of a heat wave across the Midwest and Northeast, NASA likewise described the heat dome, broken temperature records, dangerous humidity, and widespread heat warnings, but it did not explain how global warming contributed to the extreme heat.

During a comparable eastern heat wave in June 2024, NASA combined descriptions of the meteorology, broken records, health effects, and long-term heat trends with a direct climate explanation. The agency noted at the time that the “frequency and intensity of heatwaves have increased in recent decades because of the rising concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. They expect these increases to continue in the future.”

NOAA’s 2025 Texas flood analysis did not address how warming is changing extreme rainfall

In July 2025, catastrophic flash floods swept through the Texas Hill Country, including communities along the Guadalupe River. By July 23, the reported death toll from the floods was at least 137 people.

NOAA’s analysis, first published on August 11, 2025, described the conditions that set the stage for the flooding, including prolonged drought and an influx of tropical moisture, before detailing the intense rainfall and damage that followed. The report did not connect the extreme rainfall to human-caused climate change.

But that climate connection was well established when the Texas floods struck in 2025. In a July 9, 2025, article about the floods published by The Texas Tribune, University of South Carolina climate scientist Claudia Benitez-Nelson explained that warmer air holds more moisture, enabling heavier rainfall. “Climate change is turning ordinary weather into these disasters,” she said. Climate Central also explained how global warming contributes heavier rainfall.

Earlier federal accounts of extreme flooding did make that connection, though. In an August 3, 2022, report on catastrophic flooding in St. Louis and eastern Kentucky, NASA explained that “once-rare events are becoming more likely as Earth’s atmosphere warms and can hold more moisture.”

Journalists are left to supply the climate context federal accounts omit

From June 29 through July 26, 2026, ABC, CBS, and NBC aired 194 segments about three major heat events without mentioning climate change, according to a Media Matters analysis. These events included the mid-July heat dome described by NASA. Viewers received forecasts, warnings, public health information, and reports of broken records without an explanation of how human-caused warming was intensifying heat.

Federal climate information has previously helped journalists provide that missing context.

During the July 12, 2023, episode of CNN’s Early Start, a correspondent report used the National Climate Assessment to explain how extreme flooding events are becoming more frequent and devastating. A few months later, a November 14 CBS Evening News segment about the National Climate Assessment discussed why the effects of climate change in the United States were “far-reaching and worsening,” highlighted the growing frequency of billion-dollar weather disasters, and connected U.S. greenhouse gas emissions primarily to the burning of fossil fuels.

Journalists can obtain climate explanations from other sources, including attribution researchers who provide rapid, event-specific analysis about how global warming is driving extreme weather. But that work does not replace climate context in federal accounts that reporters may already be consulting as authoritative background. When those accounts leave the connection out, more of the explanatory work shifts to newsrooms, where journalists must first recognize the gap before seeking out additional research and integrating it into their reporting.

If that additional reporting does not happen, audiences can receive detailed coverage of worsening heat, floods, and other disasters without understanding why those risks are increasing. The event, the damage, and even the worsening trend can remain visible while the human cause disappears.

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ABC, CBS, and NBC aired nearly 200 segments about three U.S. heat events without mentioning climate change

08/06/26

CNN and MS NOW consistently connected prolonged power outage in Gary, Indiana, to race and poverty, while broadcast news rarely did, and Fox did not

08/28/26

Right-wing media could use a quieter 2026 hurricane forecast to downplay climate risk before storms form

06/29/26

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NOTE BARTIROMO FIRED 9 26 SMARTMATIC AGAIN?

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Iran coverage collapsed this summer on Fox News’ evening “opinion” shows

No war but the culture war: Network stars’ references to socialism, WNBA, Fauci, now swamping Iran

Written by Matt Gertz

Research contributions from Rob Savillo & Harrison Ray

Published 09/09/26

Six months into the war Donald Trump launched against Iran, the campaign “has deteriorated into a quagmire of the president’s own making with no clear goals, no obvious strategy and no end in sight” while senior U.S. military leaders are reportedly warning that “prolonging large-scale operations against Iran is unsustainable and risks weakening their ability to confront threats elsewhere, including the U.S. homeland.”

But on Fox News — the MAGA propaganda network that urged Trump to attack Iran in the first place — some of his most devoted allies have all but completely stopped talking about it.

Fox’s evening “opinion” shows dramatically reduced their coverage of the Iran war over the summer, as the conflict they initially celebrated as an historic success became ever-more intractable and unpopular.

As Fox’s stars tamped down their discussions of the war, they instead focused their audiences’ attention on more palatable culture-war fare. Their programs became rife with warnings of the rise of socialism, fixated on race and gender debates in the WNBA, and revived attacks on former federal health official Dr. Anthony Fauci.

Media Matters identified mentions of “Iran,” “Iranian,” and “Iranians” (hereafter consolidated as “Iran”); “socialism,” “socialist,” “communist,” and “communism” (coded as “socialism”); “WNBA” and “women’s basketball” (“WNBA”); and “Fauci” across five Fox programs — the network’s highest-rated program, panel show The Five; premiere star vehicles The Ingraham Angle, Jesse Watters Primetime, and Hannity; and the “comedy” program Gutfeld!.

We found that coverage of the Iran war on those Fox evening “opinion” shows, which had already plummeted from the heady first months of the war, fell still further over the summer.

KEY FINDINGS

As Trump’s war failed to reach the speedy resolution promised by Fox hosts, they converged on a strategy in which they stopped talking about Iran and fell back on demagoguing familiar foes — seemingly in hopes of salvaging the GOP’s standing and preventing a Democratic wave in the midterm elections.

How the Iran war fell out of Fox’s evening programming

As Iran coverage falls, Fox hosts warn of a red menace

No war but the culture war — as Iran coverage fades, a new focus on WNBA, Fauci

Methodology...

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rare correction, lawyers forced?

MMA

June 26, 2026, edition of Fox Business' Mornings with Maria Bartiromo

MARIA BARTIROMO (ANCHOR): Meanwhile there's this, Kevin O'Leary appeared as a guest on this program back on May 11 and discussed the ongoing controversy surrounding his planned data center project in Utah. Now, he made certain claims relating to the opponents of that project. Mr. O'Leary has now corrected the record and explained that he has no evidence that the Alliance for a Better Utah, Elevate Strategies, Josh Kanter, Taylor Knuth, or Gabrielle Finlayson are funded by China or the Chinese Communist Party. Fox News Media is likely — likewise aware of no evidence that they are funded by or acting at the direction of or in coordination with Chinese interests in opposing Kevin O'Leary's project. Fox News Media apologizes for the error.

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MMA How broadcast TV news covered environmental justice in 2025 | Media Matters for America 5 26

How broadcast TV news covered environmental justice in 2025

Special ProgramsClimate & Energy

Written by Evlondo Cooper

Published 05/27/26

Environmental justice coverage — reporting that connects the harmful effects of pollution, environmental hazards, or policy decisions to socially marginalized communities — remained nearly absent from corporate broadcast TV news last year, even as environmental risks and pollution exposure affected communities across the country.

In 2025, ABC, CBS, and NBC aired just 2 environmental justice segments combined, a further decline from recent years and the lowest level recorded since 2018. The absence of environmental justice reporting is not a gap in topic coverage, but a failure to explain how environmental risk is distributed across vulnerable communities. Broadcast networks aired numerous segments about industrial accidents, pollution, and regulatory changes, but these were typically framed as isolated environmental hazards rather than examined through a justice lens. This coverage failed to explain how environmental harms can compound existing vulnerabilities tied to poverty, racial discrimination, rural isolation, and other forms of social and economic marginalization.

This distinction is critical: Environmental hazard coverage — such as reporting on industrial accidents, fossil fuel infrastructure, and public health harms — describes what happened. Environmental justice coverage explains that environmental harms do not impact all communities equally. Certain communities are more at risk than others, and that is a question of exposure, power, and accountability. Without that lens, coverage can document the hazard while obscuring the conditions that made some communities more vulnerable, leaving audiences with an incomplete account of who is harmed, why those harms persist, and who benefits when the causes remain unnamed.

Environmental justice is also distinct from climate justice. While climate justice focuses more broadly on unequal climate impacts and equitable climate responses, this analysis uses a narrower environmental justice standard focused on the “development, implementation, and enforcement of protective environmental laws, regulations, and policies” and whether environmental harms or risks disproportionately affect specific communities by race, color, national origin, or income.

Key findings}:

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On April 22, 2025, CBS Evening News aired a segment examining cuts to an Environmental Protection Agency program designed to reduce pollution “in minority and low-income communities,” explicitly linking federal policy decisions to disproportionate environmental harm and public health impacts.

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In 2025, the Trump administration advanced a series of disastrous environmental policy changes, such as workforce reductions at the Environmental Protection Agency, which included eliminating the EPA's Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights and regional environmental justice divisions; regulatory rollbacks; and a proposed repeal of the endangerment finding, which underpins federal limits on greenhouse gas emissions. That proposal came to fruition in February of this year, when the EPA finalized a rule overturning the endangerment finding.

These policy changes have direct environmental justice impacts. Communities of color and low-income communities are often located in proximity to environmental hazards and rely on federalsupport to address environmental harm.

For example, the Trump administration terminated $180 million in congressionally authorized funding supporting projects focused on “environmental justice” and “environmental and public health challenges that local communities identify as priorities, from watershed cleanups to air-quality monitoring, stormwater infrastructure, remediating lead and asbestos poisoning, and reducing childhood asthma," before a federal court ruled the termination unlawful.

These kinds of cuts, alongside weakened regulatory authority, can mean fewer inspections, delayed cleanup, and weaker enforcement, compounding exposure in areas where residents already face elevated risks.

Broadcast coverage of these developments largely failed to provide this context, leaving viewers uninformed about how changes to environmental enforcement and regulatory authority could affect vulnerable communities already facing disproportionate pollution exposure.

The expansion of artificial intelligence infrastructure and data centers has introduced a new set of environmental risks. These technologies require large amounts of electricity and water and can contribute to emissions, particularly when powered by fossil fuel-based energy systems. Data centers can also be “disruptively noisy,” to the point where some residents living near them have reported sleep disruption and headaches. This is consistent with findings from public health researchers: Noise pollution is linked to poor sleep, learning and mental health issues, heart disease, and even hypertension.

These impacts are largely borne by marginalized communities. One study found that “nearly half” of U.S. data centers are “in census tracts with above-median environmental burdens, such as air pollution, park access and water pollution,” while many others were located in communities with “social vulnerability indicators, such as poverty and lower education levels.” State-level reviews show that new facilities are frequently sited near low-income communities and communities of color.

This pattern raises clear environmental justice concerns. The environmental burdens associated with data centers — including increased nitrogen oxide pollution and heavy water use in drought-prone regions — are often concentrated in communities that already face higher exposure to environmental hazards but are “desperate for economic development.”

Despite these risks, broadcast news coverage in 2025 rarely examined the uneven distribution of these impacts. Only one segment, aired by NBC, reported that pollution from artificial intelligence infrastructure could harm a nearby Black community.

Broadcast networks aired numerous segments about industrial accidents throughout the year, including refinery explosions, chemical plant fires, a lithium plant explosion in California, oil leaks along the Gulf Coast, and manufacturing plant accidents. Events like these pose immediate risks to the surrounding communities, including exposure to toxic chemicals, degraded air quality, and potential long-term health effects.

These incidents would have been excellent opportunities for networks to discuss environmental justice. Industrial facilities are “more likely to be located in low-income communities of color,” where residents face multiple other stressors that could make them more vulnerable to the health impacts associated with chemical exposure. The risks associated with these facilities are not limited to acute events such as explosions or leaks; they are part of ongoing patterns of exposure shaped by “land-use decisions, regulations, and market-based forces.”

Broadcast coverage of these events typically focused on the immediate impacts, such as evacuations, injuries, and air quality warnings. For example, after an explosion and subsequent fire at Chevron’s El Segundo refinery in October, coverage across broadcast networks emphasized the explosion, emergency response, and safety conditions, but it failed to examine the effects that long-standing pollution burden caused by the refinery had on the surrounding communities. Reporting rarely extended beyond the incident itself to examine the historical factors that shape industrial siting or the cumulative risks faced by residents.

Segments that met our criteria for environmental justice coverage explicitly identified how environmental risks affect marginalized communities and connected those impacts to broader systemic conditions.

(NewsHour is included to contextualize coverage of environmental justice for comparison purposes only. PBS is excluded from corporate broadcast totals due to differences in funding structure and program format.)

Stronger coverage would begin by treating unequal exposure as a key detail of the story, rather than an optional follow-up. When a refinery explodes, a chemical plant burns, a water system fails, or federal protections are weakened, the central questions should include who is most exposed, what risks those communities already face, and what public or private decisions shaped those conditions.

All this matters because environmental harm is not distributed randomly. As mentioned above, industrial facilities are frequently concentrated near communities with less political and economic power. Aging infrastructure, weak enforcement, land-use decisions, and regulatory rollbacks can turn already overburdened communities into places where residents breathe polluted air, drink unsafe water, face higher health risks, or struggle to recover after disasters.

In majority-Black Birmingham, Alabama, residents living near a former coke plant and a federal Superfund site lost EPA funding for an air-monitoring program meant to help document the pollution they breathe every day.

Reporting that stops at the agency announcement, for example, rather than examining who relied on the funding or protection being cut, misses the larger public-interest question: Why are vulnerable communities repeatedly placed in harm’s way?

A stronger environmental justice framework would also broaden the range of sources included in environmental coverage. Official statements, company responses, and emergency briefings are necessary but not sufficient. Grassroots organizations, environmental health researchers, legal advocates, former regulators, and local public health officials can often provide the context needed to understand how exposure compounds over time. Community members should not just appear as witnesses after a disaster; they’re often the people with the most direct knowledge of recurring pollution, complaint histories, health concerns, and enforcement failures.

Environmental justice reporting also requires outlets to connect policy decisions to material outcomes. Regulatory rollbacks, permitting and zoning decisions, enforcement changes, and infrastructure development can determine where pollution is allowed, which violations are addressed, and whose complaints are taken seriously. Coverage that reports these decisions without explaining their consequences leaves viewers without a clear understanding of the stakes.

This approach would not require every environmental story to become a long investigation. It would require networks to consistently incorporate context into the reporting they’re already doing.

A chemical spill can be reported as a breaking news event while also noting who lives nearby and whether the facility has a history of violations. A refinery explosion can include emergency response details while also explaining the pollution burden surrounding the facility. A story about federal environmental cuts can identify which communities depend most on federal programs. A report on new energy or technology infrastructure can examine not only economic benefits, but also who bears the environmental costs.

Broadcast networks have the reach and resources to make those connections visible. Doing so would give audiences a fuller account of environmental risk and strengthen accountability for the industries, institutions, and public officials that shape exposure. Without that context, environmental harm is too easily presented as isolated, unavoidable, or disconnected from power. That’s why environmental justice should not be treated as a niche topic or a special frame reserved for rare segments. It must become a basic standard for reporting on pollution, public health, infrastructure, and environmental policy.

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  1. ### How broadcast TV news covered environmental justice in 2024

06/17/25 11:19 AM EDT

  1. ### How broadcast TV news covered environmental justice in 2023

04/03/24 9:59 AM EDT

  1. ### How broadcast TV news covered environmental justice in 2022

03/16/23?

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mma

Millions of people will lose healthcare coverage following GOP rollback of ACA subsidies. Over four months, Fox News has barely acknowledged it. | Media Matters for America

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AN 5 26

Margaret Sullivan, a Guardian US columnist, argues that mainstream media has largely normalized the extraordinary corruption and chaos of President Trump's second term, treating scandals as routine political theater rather than threats to democratic governance.

Sullivan catalogs Trump's disturbing behavior and policies: his admission that he's not thinking "even a little bit" about Americans' personal finances during Iran negotiations, his apparent drowsiness in meetings, his unhinged social media posts, and his constant lies about the Iran war. She also points to larger abuses of power including the $1 billion ballroom project and the controversial $1.8 billion "anti-weaponization fund"intended to compensate Trump allies, potentially including January 6 rioters, using taxpayer money.

Yet, she argues, these developments receive minimal sustained coverage. Sullivan observes that what would have triggered weeks of headlines and possible impeachment proceedings in previous administrations is now treated as simply "Trump being Trump"—as if his presidency exists outside the normal bounds of journalistic scrutiny. The sheer volume of scandals has created what observers call a normalization effect, where each outrage fades before the next one emerges.

The media's failure to maintain consistent scrutiny reflects a broader pattern of editorial capitulation. Major newsrooms have faced criticism for treating Trump's statements and actions with an evenhandedness inappropriate to the gravity of the issues. Cable news networks, in particular, have been accused of balancing coverage between what Trump says and the factual record, effectively granting credibility to false claims through what media critics call "both-sides" journalism. Meanwhile, network evening newscasts have dramatically reduced investigative reporting in favor of shorter segments that struggle to convey the complexity and severity of institutional corruption.

Sullivan highlights a stark contrast between media treatment of Trump and his predecessor. One observer noted the irony that journalists helped force Biden from his reelection campaign for being too old, yet ignore that Trump, now 79 and turning 80 next month, displays apparent physical and mental decline that hasn't received comparable scrutiny. During Biden's final weeks in office, cable news devoted extensive coverage to his debate performance and calls for his withdrawal. By contrast, reporting on Trump's fitness for office has remained scattered and episodic, with major outlets declining to launch sustained investigations into the president's cognitive state or capacity to govern.

The media's response to the slush fund story exemplifies this pattern. While The New York Times initially led with the story, quoting Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington calling it "one of the single most corrupt acts in American history," mainstream outlets quickly moved on. NBC's evening news shifted focus to other stories within days, while Fox News offered cursory coverage, primarily amplifying Trump allies like JD Vance. More significantly, few major outlets followed up with investigative reporting on how the fund would function, who would benefit, or the legal mechanisms through which taxpayer money would be distributed to Trump associates.

Media analysts have pointed to structural factors driving this coverage failure. Advertising-dependent networks benefit from the viewership that Trump generates, creating perverse incentives to cover him constantly but not critically. Editorial decisions at major outlets have increasingly emphasized breaking news cycles over sustained investigations, making it difficult for newsrooms to maintain focus on a single issue long enough to move public opinion or trigger political consequences.

Sullivan identifies what she calls the "flood the zone" strategy—a deliberate technique to overwhelm media capacity for sustained investigation. With constant outrages competing for attention, journalists struggle to maintain focus on any single scandal before the next emerges. Trump threatens Cuba, dismisses Americans' budget concerns, and pursues authoritarian relationships, yet none receives adequate investigation. Critics note that this strategy relies on media outlets' existing bias toward episodic rather than thematic reporting, making sustained coverage of systemic corruption nearly impossible.

Sullivan argues that corporate media remains "highly distractible and largely deferential," not entirely unhappy with Trump's presidency because it generates constant outrage and viewership. Studies of cable news during Trump's second term show that major networks devote significant airtime to Trump-related stories while devoting proportionally less time to investigative reporting or policy analysis. Meanwhile, independent journalists like Terry Moran call the slush fund "plunder" and urge media to abandon euphemistic language like "controversial" in favor of plainly describing the corruption. Moran and others have criticized mainstream outlets for using passive construction and weasel words that obscure agency and accountability.

The contrast between independent and corporate media coverage has become stark. Substack writers, newsletter journalists, and smaller outlets have published detailed investigations into specific abuses—the ballroom project, the tax return shields, the slush fund mechanisms—with minimal competition from major newsrooms. This fragmentation means that critical information reaches only engaged readers who actively seek out independent sources, while mainstream audiences encounter only sanitized summaries.

Sullivan concludes that by the time readers finish her column, mainstream media will have already moved on to the next scandal, continuing a cycle that obscures the systematic dismantling of democratic norms and the abuse of power for personal gain. The result is a public sphere increasingly unable to hold power accountable through the mechanisms of informed democratic participation.

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MMA

  1. Before the claim unraveled, Fox News gave ICE’s detention of two supposed relatives of Qassem Soleimani tons of coverage

04/24/26 4:20 PM EDT

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CBS axed its last climate reporting pillar

CBS’ climate coverage was already shifting toward misleading framing before the network reportedly cut its last dedicated climate reporter

Special ProgramsClimate & Energy

Written by Evlondo Cooper

Published 04/03/26

CBS News is laying off national environmental correspondent David Schechter, reportedly leaving no one at the network dedicated to covering climate change. That means that when CBS does cover the issue, the reporting will be more likely to omit scientific context and elevate misleading or contrarian framing, a shift already visible in the network's limited coverage so far in 2026.

Schechter’s departure is part of a broader round of cuts and restructuring

CBS is reportedly eliminating its last dedicated climate reporter as part of a wider round of layoffs affecting approximately 6% of staff. The cuts also include correspondents across the newsroom and the shutdown of CBS News Radio, ending the network’s radio service after almost 100 years on air.

CBS also cut another correspondent, Dave Malkoff, a national correspondent whose work included climate and environmental reporting across the network’s platforms.

The layoffs come as CBS News struggles with declining ratings and a shrinking audience. In the first quarter of 2026, it was reported that CBS Evening News was on track for its lowest-rated first quarter of the 21st century, while CBS Mornings is also heading toward record lows, even as competitors ABC and NBC grew during that period.

The changes to CBS’ climate coverage began in October 2025, when the network dismissed most of its dedicated climate team as part of a broader newsroom overhaul. Producers were reassigned or let go. What had been a sustained reporting effort was reduced to one dedicated climate correspondent and a handful of reporters who occasionally covered climate among their other beats. By this spring, the structure that supported climate reporting at CBS was already gone, and Schechter was left covering the beat in a newsroom no longer set up to support the work.

Dedicated climate reporting at CBS connected science, policy, and real-world impacts – and its degradation is already showing up in coverage

David Schechter was part of a group of CBS correspondents who regularly covered climate, helping integrate the issue into national reporting rather than treating it as an isolated topic. That work did not happen in a vacuum. It was supported by producers and internal coordination that helped reporters connect extreme weather, public health, and economic impacts back to climate change and the policies shaping it.

Schechter was not just covering climate as an abstract issue. He was reporting on how it was affecting people in real time and who was being left exposed.

During the June 8, 2024, episode of CBS Saturday Morning, Schechter examined heat-related disparities, interviewing Ken Rye, whose mother died in her apartment during a heat wave after her building failed to turn on the air conditioning. Schechter connected rising temperatures to inequality, public health, and climate justice.

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From the June 8, 2024, episode of CBS Saturday Morning

During the August 8, 2024, episode of CBS Evening News, he reported on the link between climate-driven heat and labor conditions, federal policy, and worker safety.

These segments showed what climate reporting looks like when someone is responsible for following the story, incorporating scientific context, connecting the issue to policy, and highlighting the communities most affected by climate change.

After October, the shift was immediate. CBS aired just 7 climate segments between Weiss’ takeover in October and the end of the year, a sharp drop from earlier in 2025.

When climate reporting did appear on CBS, it looked different.

During a January segment on CBS Evening News, the network highlighted the surprising health of polar bears despite melting sea ice, elevating an outlier narrative long used by climate skeptics. Not only did the segment not situate its findings within the overwhelming consensus on climate change, but anchor Tony Dokoupil also concluded by telling viewers that “experts have been wrong before,” reinforcing a line commonly used to cast doubt on established climate science.

A December segment on youth climate anxiety followed a similar pattern. Instead of examining the material impacts driving youth concerns, the segment reframed climate coverage around personal decision-making and cultural debate, echoing narratives that downplay risk and shift attention away from systemic causes of global warming.

This is what happens when no one is dedicated to the beat.

There was no one consistently responsible for bringing scientific context into the story. No one to connect individual events to broader climate trends. No one to challenge weak sourcing or misleading framing before it reaches viewers.

That was the state of CBS’ climate coverage before Schechter was laid off. His departure makes it clear that CBS is no longer willing to even pretend climate is worth covering in a way that reflects the science, the stakes, or the people most affected.

MMA

  1. ### CBS’ leadership in broadcast news climate coverage is chipping away under Bari Weiss

:{03/04/26

  1. ### CBS News’ climate anxiety segment laundered right-wing climate framing as the network shifts its coverage under new leadership

:{01/13/26

  1. ### How climate correspondents are driving improvements in corporate broadcast news' climate coverage

03/29/23

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MMA

CBS’ leadership in broadcast news climate coverage is chipping away under Bari Weiss | Media Matters for America

In recent years, Media Matters' climate studies have found that CBS has played a leading role in broadcast journalism on the issue, routinely airing the highest volume of climate segments, featuring more climate scientists and experts than its peers, and devoting greater attention to climate solutions. That leadership has functioned as an anchor within the broadcast ecosystem, helping to sustain climate visibility even as other networks have fluctuated.

Now, tectonic shifts at the network, sparked by new ownership and Trump’s campaign targeting legacy media, means its leadership on climate coverage could be slipping away, with notable changes in tone and volume of coverage already underway. Even in 2025, as corporate broadcast news reporting on the climate crisis dropped to just over 8 hours — a significant decline from its 2022 zenith of nearly 23 hours — CBS still accounted for nearly half of that time. But the vast majority of its coverage aired before Bari Weiss was installed as its editor-in-chief, with only 20 minutes of climate coverage airing across 7 segments between Weiss’ takeover in October and the end of 2025.

CBS has historically led its broadcast counterparts in climate coverage

For the fifth consecutive year, CBS has led corporate broadcast climate coverage. In 2025, CBS accounted for 48% of total broadcast climate minutes. Both its nightly news program, CBS Evening News, and its Sunday morning political show, Face the Nation, led their counterparts in climate programming.

But volume of coverage is not the only indicator cementing CBS’ role as the top climate communicator in corporate broadcast news. While networks underreported the Trump administration’s attacks on climate science and action overall, CBS accounted for more than half of the segments that did discuss the Trump administration’s climate actions. As in prior years, the network also led on solutions-related climate segments and coverage that included climate scientists.

Shifts at the network put CBS’ future climate leadership in question

In October 2025, months after the Trump administration greenlit Skydance Media’s acquisition of CBS’ parent company, Paramount Skydance installed Bari Weiss, founder of The Free Press, as editor-in-chief of CBS News. The newly created position granted Weiss broad authority over editorial priorities, and soon after her appointment, CBS dismissed most of its dedicated climate team as part of a newsroom restructuring, removing much of the institutional capacity responsible for the network’s climate coverage portfolio. According to Heated, a memo announcing the layoffs from Paramount Skydance head David Ellison indicated that the network was “‘phasing out roles that are no longer aligned with our evolving priorities.’” Heated further reported that “today, the only person remaining at CBS News to cover climate change is national environmental correspondent David Schechter, who no longer has a dedicated producer.”

The editorial implications of this shift are consequential. Under Weiss’ leadership, The Free Press has consistently elevated climate skeptics and contrarians, published content downplaying or misrepresenting established scientific findings, and employed rhetorical frames long associated with right-wing media coverage of climate change.

While journalists and staff exit CBS, Weiss is bringing on influencers who may not adhere to the same journalistic standards. One hire, Peter Attia, a controversial longevity influencer, has already resigned due to backlash over lewd emails he exchanged with late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. In a less-reported exchange, Attia shared an article with Epstein from prominent British climate skeptic Matt Ridley, who has argued that “global warming is good for us.”

Early signs that CBS is abandoning its leadership role in producing consistent and quality climate coverage

CBS’ climate output has already shown a discernible decline since its change in leadership. After Weiss assumed editorial control in early October, CBS aired only 7 climate segments through the end of 2025, marking an immediate contraction in the network’s climate reporting footprint relative to earlier months in the year and as compared to the same period in 2024.

One segment about youth climate anxiety aired during the December 29 episode of CBS Evening News elevated and echoed right-wing media’s approach to minimizing climate risk by laundering a narrative long used to shift attention away from climate consequences and responsibility toward cultural debates about individual life choices.

In 2025, CBS aired 54 minutes of climate coverage in January, making it the network’s peak month. This year, the network aired only one climate segment in January — a headline report on the evening news lasting approximately 20 seconds on the surprising health of polar bears, despite the loss of sea ice, in the Norwegian Arctic. While the report may seem innocuous, it is not breaking news; a similar study appeared on a climate skeptic site in 2015, and the argument has been used by climate deniers to claim that alarmists were wrong about the severity of climate change and its impacts — in this case, on the “symbol of climate change,” the polar bear. The new study was also shared on climate denier Marc Morano’s site. With a seeming nod to the climate skeptic community, Evening News anchor Tony Dokoupil concluded: “Experts say the bears are still in trouble long term, but hey, the experts have been wrong before.”

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From the January 29, 2026, edition of CBS Evening News

But the segment was not just a nod toward skeptics. It represents a choice on the part of CBS to report an outlier of the climate crisis rather than any number of studies or events that support the overwhelming consensus on global warming. These newsroom changes in quantity and quality of coverage, which bear the fingerprints of Weiss’ contrarian approach to news, signal a looming void in the national climate information ecosystem.

Conclusion

Broadcast news remains a central agenda setter, shaping not only national narratives but also the priorities of policymakers, regulators, and institutional decision-makers while continuing to reach large audiences. A sustained reduction in climate coverage risks leaving the public less prepared to understand the stakes of climate policy decisions, the material consequences of regulatory changes, and the growing disparities in climate risk across communities.

Within this broader contraction, changes at CBS News carry outsized significance.

If CBS retreats from its prior role as the corporate broadcast climate-reporting leader, responsibility for sustaining rigorous, science-based, and context-rich coverage will fall more heavily on NBC and ABC. To meet that responsibility, broadcast networks must increase reliance on climate scientists, policy experts, and frontline communities; integrate federal climate actions and regulatory changes far more consistently into climate coverage; move beyond episodic weather reporting toward sustained examination of systemic drivers and solutions; and resist political and market pressures that undermine the visibility and credibility of climate journalism.

Without such shifts, the contraction in climate coverage documented in 2025 risks deepening in 2026, at a moment when climate impacts are accelerating, federal policy is in retrenchment, and voters are approaching a consequential midterm election cycle with diminishing access to the kind of clear, comprehensive climate information needed to make informed decisions.

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  1. ### How broadcast TV networks covered climate change in 2025

03/04/26 10:06 AM EST

  1. ### Corporate broadcast news fumbles January jobs report

02/12/26 4:45 PM EST

  1. ### Mainstream news coverage almost totally ignored Bannon’s extensive ties to Epstein

12/11/25

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MMA

Corporate broadcast news fumbles January jobs report

02/12/26

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CBS Evening News inverts its network's own reporting on ICE arrestees’ low rates of violent criminal histories

CBS reported that less that 14% of people in ICE custody have charges or convictions for violent criminal conduct, but CBS Evening News distorted the data to suggest the opposite

Written by John Knefel

Published 02/11/26

A CBS Evening News segment wildly distorted CBS News’ own reporting, incorrectly suggesting to viewers that a much higher percentage of people held by Immigration and Customs Enforcement have violent criminal histories than is actually the case.

On February 9, CBS News published an exclusive report under the headline: “Less than 14% of those arrested by ICE in Trump's 1st year back in office had violent criminal records, document shows.” The article stated that although roughly 60% of ICE arrestees had criminal charges or convictions, “the majority of the criminal charges or convictions are not for violent crimes.” For example, about 1.4% of people held by ICE have been accused or convicted of sexual assault, and about 0.5% have been accused or convicted of homicide. By contrast, 7.6% percent of ICE arrestees with a so-called criminal history simply have a DUI.

The Department of Homeland Security data undercuts a central, load-bearing myth deployed by right-wing media and the Trump administration to justify its nationwide crackdown on immigrant communities — namely, claims that ICE and Border Patrol are going after the “worst of the worst.” In fact, nearly 40% of people in ICE custody have no violation other than a civil immigration infraction.

Viewers of CBS Evening News on February 10 got an entirely inverted picture, one that more closely aligns with the Trump administration's preferred narrative.

“ICE arrested nearly 400,000 people in President Trump's first year in office,” said anchor Tony Dokoupil. “Of those, nearly 60% had criminal histories, meaning charges or convictions, including many for serious crimes such as drug trafficking and child pornography, and several thousand cases involving rape or murder."

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From the February 10, 2026, edition of CBS Evening News

Dokoupil and his producers here are being wildly misleading. The relatively low percentages of ICE arrestees charged or convicted of murder or sexual assault are noted above. The CBS News article doesn’t specify the number of people accused or convicted of child sexual abuse material, though that would likely be captured in the data around sexual assault. The report also doesn’t list rates for drug trafficking per se, though it would presumably be a subset of charges or convictions for “dangerous drugs,” which it lists at 5.7%

Dokoupil then contradicted the very framing CBS Evening News led with. “At the same time, however, less than 14% had violent criminal records and nearly 40%, more than 150,000 people, had civil immigration offenses but no criminal history at all,“ Dokoupil said.

CBS Evening News here is attempting to have it both ways. The introductory copy and accompanying graphics paint a picture of the Trump administration prioritizing threats to public safety, and the subsequent clarification acts as little more than an afterthought. Immigrants are situated first and foremost as a threat, an impression barely mitigated with a little cover-your-ass language at the end.

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From the February 10, 2026, edition of CBS Evening News

CBS Evening News’ mangling of its own reporting is less surprising taken in context. In October, “anti-woke” media figure Bari Weiss was named CBS editor-in-chief by David Ellison, whose Skydance Media had recently purchased Paramount, CBS’ parent company. His father, Larry Ellison, is a close ally of President Donald Trump and one of richest men in the world.

Weiss has a long history of controversy, and her short tenure at CBS’s helm has already produced more. In December 2025, Weiss pulled a 60 Minutes segment detailing torture and other horrific conditions at a prison in El Salvador where the Trump administration had rendered 252 Venezuelans. The segment ultimately aired the following month after a substantial backlash within CBS and from the broader public.

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AN 2 26

Earlier this week, President Donald Trump sat down with NBC News reporter Tony Llamas for a wide-ranging interview on multiple subjects. However, Llamas often let the president lie without pushing back. Now, CNN is taking Llamas to task for not doing his job — while debunking Trump's lies.

In a Thursday article, CNN's Daniel Dale did a point-by-point fact-check of Trump's biggest lies, and admonished Llamas for doing little to counter what he called Trump's "rapid-fire dishonesty." The CNN fact-checker observed that while NBC published a fact-check of Trump's claims after the interview, Llamas himself frequently responded to Trump's outright falsehoods with "right" or "yeah," and sometimes "didn’t acknowledge them at all."

"Llamas’ hands-off approach to the president’s falsehoods left people watching the interview on television and through social media clips without immediate corrective information on a variety of pressing subjects," Dale wrote. "An exchange about inflation, for example, was littered with a bunch of inaccurate Trump figures and assertions that Llamas let pass by with the word 'right.' And in one case, when Trump claimed it’s only 'very few' product prices that have stubbornly refused to fall during this presidency, Llamas initially responded with a comment that made it sound like he was endorsing the false claim: 'Yeah, very few. I get it.'"

When it came to Trump's insistence about presiding over an increase in prices of consumer goods, Trump insisted to Llamas that the increases are limited to "very few" items. But Dale wrote that the Consumer Price Index was actually 2.7 percent higher in December 2025 compared to December 2024, and many more products have become more expensive since Trump's second term began than have become cheaper.

Dale also disputed Trump's claim to Llamas that he "inherited the worst inflation in the history of our country." The all-time highest inflation rate of 23.7 percent was actually set in 1920. And while former President Joe Biden saw the inflation rate jump as high as 9.1 percent under his watch in 2022, that was a 48-year high. Dale credited Llamas for telling Trump that Biden had to contend with the Covid-19 pandemic, which was the chief cause of high inflation rates.

Trump also told the NBC reporter that gas prices were "$1.99 a gallon" in 2026, though Dale found that the average price for a gallon of gas was $2.89 per gallon according to data published by AAA. GasBuddy head of petroleum analysis Patrick De Haan told CNN that out of more than 150,000 gas stations, only 18 to 34 offered gas prices under $2 per gallon. Dale reminded readers that Llamas' only response to Trump's claim was "yeah."

"An average over those dates would be 28 stations over the course of the week, or 0.018% of all U.S. stations. I think I’d rather find the needle in the haystack at that point," De Haan said.

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AN 1 26

CNN staff finally revolt over conservative commentator Scott Jennings

AN 1 26

CNN slammed for employing 'Scumbag Scott' Jennings after he was caught misquoting Tim Walz

Carl Gibson

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MMA

CBS News’ climate anxiety segment laundered right-wing climate framing as the network shifts its coverage under new leadership (https://www.mediamatters.org/cbs/cbs-news-climate-anxiety-segment-laundered-right-wing-climate-framing-network-shifts-its)

01/13/26

VID]

December 29, 2025, episode of CBS Evening News

CBS News downplayed climate risks to focus on personal decision-making

Throughout the segment, Evening News treated climate change as contextual background in a story explicitly framed around youth climate anxiety and individual reproductive choices. Global warming was presented as one influence among many, not as a driver of instability meriting examination on its own terms. The framing steered viewers to question whether climate is given too much weight in personal decision making, effectively displacing a discussion about the real, worsening, and existential impacts of climate change.

After citing a survey showing that climate concerns influence some young people’s reproductive decisions, the story pivoted to fertility and economic data suggesting that declining birth rates are driven by economic factors rather than climate change. Regardless of whether this is even accurate, the claim further narrowed the frame, positioning climate concern as secondary and contestable rather than as a rational response to worsening conditions and separating climate disruption from the harm it compounds.

To reinforce that narrowing frame, CBS featured Alina Voss, communications director of the American Conservation Coalition, which CBS described as an “environmental nonprofit that promotes conservative values.” The ACC describes itself as a “pro-innovation,” limited-government organization that prioritizes market-based approaches to environmental issues. Voss told viewers that “the innovation is working” and, according to the correspondent, expressed confidence that “technology will protect families from the worst impacts of climate change,” a claim the segment did not challenge or contextualize. By presenting that reassurance without scrutiny, the segment also laundered technological optimism, a familiar narrative that downplays climate change.

CBS News echoed right-wing media’s approach to minimizing climate risk

Climate anxiety tied to decisions about child-rearing has repeatedly featured in right-wing media commentary. For example, a 2023 Fox News segment blamed “globalist” and “climate alarmist” propaganda for declining birth rates, accusing environmental advocates of teaching young people to fear having children and calling climate concern an “anti-human agenda.” In this framing, climate anxiety is cast as ideological manipulation rather than as a response to worsening material conditions.

The CBS segment followed this same narrative framing. By filtering the issue of climate risk through questions about family planning, CBS shifted attention away from climate impacts and accountability into lifestyle and cultural debates. The effect is consistent with right-wing media’s coverage more broadly: Climate change is treated as something for individuals to weigh or manage rather than as a public risk that demands corporate and political scrutiny. Whether the focus is natalism, consumption, or culture, the narrative maneuver is the same. Climate concern becomes a matter of judgment or preference, not a response to escalating harm.

This approach also aligns with well-established patterns documented in climate communication research showing how climate skeptics purport to accept the reality of global warming, even as they minimize its urgency. By emphasizing individual choices and optimistic solutions, while eliding discussion of current impacts and responsibility, this type of coverage reduces pressure for accountability — without necessarily disputing the science.

By emphasizing individual choices and optimistic solutions, while eliding discussion of current impacts and responsibility, this type of coverage reduces pressure for accountability — without necessarily disputing the science.

The segment aired amid a shift in editorial direction at CBS News

For several years, CBS News stood out among broadcast networks for its sustained climate reporting that foregrounded science, impacts, and solutions. That approach has been disrupted. In late 2025, newsroom restructuring eliminated nearly all of CBS’ dedicated climate reporting capacity. In light of these changes, the youth climate anxiety segment suggests that CBS News plans to use climate change as a backdrop — when it's mentioned at all — rather than as a subject of direct examination.

Reports from inside the CBS newsroom suggest Bari Weiss herself proposed the segment back in October using broad outlines that closely mirror the segment CBS ultimately aired, and the narrative framing is consistent with editorial patterns long present in The Free Press, the outlet she founded. Rather than interrogating climate disruption as a material crisis, The Free Press has frequently covered the story through a right-wing media lens that frames climate concerns as exaggerated and alarmist. Writers associated with the outlet like Lucy Biggers have argued that young people today were wrongly led to believe they have “no future” because of climate change, insisting that “no one should have climate anxiety.”

What this signals for CBS News' climate coverage in 2026

By rerouting climate coverage into questions about personal judgment and lifestyle choice, the segment reproduced a familiar right-wing move shifting attention away from emissions, policy, and industry responsibility toward whether people are overreacting.

This narrative framing has been increasingly used by the fossil fuel industry and its right-wing media allies to blunt climate action and accountability without explicitly denying the science. It works by narrowing the frame until the structural causes and effects of climate change disappear from view. Responsibility is redirected away from government and industry. Consequence is softened by treating climate as background context. Urgency is recast as excess.

When CBS News adopts this framing, it does not merely downplay climate risk. It allows a corporate and political narrative designed to shield power and avoid accountability to circulate as mainstream reporting. The effect is not subtle. It constrains what viewers are encouraged to question and who they are encouraged to hold responsible at precisely the moment when the Trump administration's policy choices and regulatory rollbacks carry immediate, measurable consequences in a world of rapidly escalating climate impacts.

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  1. ### Media Matters weekly newsletter, December 5

12/05/25 10:49 AM EST

  1. ### The year the media oligarchs bowed to Trump

12/03/25 10:00 AM EST

  1. ### Under the leadership of Bari Weiss, The Free Press’ climate change coverage mirrors that of right-wing media outlets like Fox News

11/04/2

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Fox ignores Trump pardoning Honduran drug trafficker while accusing Dems of supporting Venezuelan drug traffickers

Written by Matt Gertz

Research contributions from Rob Savillo

Published 12/09/25 2:43 PM EST

How do you spin the president you support pardoning a notorious drug trafficker amid your weekslong campaign to convince viewers that your political enemies are pro-trafficker? For the propagandists at Fox News, the answer is just to pretend it didn't happen.

President Donald Trump announced on November 28 his intention to pardon former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández, who had been serving a 45-year sentence in federal prison after a U.S. court convicted him of “helping drug traffickers send tons of cocaine to the United States in exchange for millions of dollars in bribes that fueled his political career.” Trump claimed Hernández had been “treated very harshly and unfairly,” though he later said he knew “very little” beyond what he had been told by “very good people that I know.” (Axios credited, in part, a “persistent lobbying campaign” by former Trump adviser and fellow pardon recipient Roger Stone, who touted his role in securing the pardon.) Hernández was released following the pardon’s issuance on December 1.

Fox has devoted just over 6 minutes of airtime to the Hernández pardon, according to a Media Matters review of the network’s programming from November 28, when Trump announced his intention to pardon Hernández, through Monday. Special Report, the flagship “straight news” show anchored by Trump golfing buddy Bret Baier, and the weekend daytime shows The Sunday Briefing and Fox News Live provided the bulk of the network’s coverage. Fox & Friends Weekend also ran a headline read.

The only other mentions of the story on Fox came when Democratic co-hosts on the panel show The Five raised the issue during segments about the Trump administration’s purported counternarcotics effort aimed at alleged drug trafficking from Venezuela, which Trump claims is directed by Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Since early September, U.S. military strikes undertaken at Trump’s behest, aimed at what the administration claims are boats trafficking drugs in the Caribbean, have killed at least 87 people and destroyed 23 boats.

Co-host Jessica Tarlov pointed out on December 2 that Trump’s pardon of Hernández disproves “the story about this administration being focused on eradicating American society of drugs.” On Monday, co-host Harold Ford Jr. similarly challenged his colleagues to state whether or not they approved of the president granting clemency to a convicted drug trafficker (Fox contributor Tyrus and co-host Dana Perino responded that they did not while co-host Kayleigh McEnany mocked Ford for landing on a “niche issue” she said she hoped Democrats would “hang on” in the midterm campaigns).

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From the December 8, 2025, edition of Fox News' The Five

Fox’s chyron as Ford began talking — “Dems stick up for narco terrorists” — speaks to the tenor of Fox’s coverage of the U.S. strikes off Venezuela. While experts have described the U.S. campaign of extrajudicial killings as “patently illegal,” the strikes have been widely praised on Fox, where hosts and anchors regularly accuse Democrats who raise legal questions about them of supporting the traffickers.

“It's either you're pro drug dealers, drugs going throughout Europe and throughout this country, or you're for taking out those boats,” host Brian Kilmeade said on Friday’s Fox & Friends — a program which has so far not covered Trump’s pardon of a man actually convicted of helping traffic drugs “throughout this country.”

Likewise, Fox host Will Cain has said of Democratic criticism of the strikes, “Maybe it’s that they are against law and order,” while anchor Harris Faulkner asked of those questioning the strikes, “Are they working against America and for the drug cartels?” Neither has addressed the Hernández pardon on their program or questioned whether it shows Trump to be “against law and order” or working “for the drug cartels.”

And Fox stars Laura Ingraham, Jesse Watters, and Sean Hannity have not told their viewers about the pardon, even as all three have praised Trump for authorizing the Caribbean boat strikes.

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MMA

Corporate broadcast news covered this year’s COP30 global climate summit for 2 minutes — cable networks covered it for just over 3 hours

Fox News used COP30 to attack Gavin Newsom and undermine climate science

Special ProgramsClimate & Energy

Written by Allison Fisher

Published 11/26/25

COP30 — which proceeded without an official U.S. delegation — opened on November 6 while the main sessions got underway on November 10 and concluded on November 21.

This year’s conference sought to address numerous issues, creating a roadmap to phase out fossil fuels and a landmark declaration on the threat of disinformation in addressing climate change and a newly proposed initiative to reduce deforestation.

As in previous years, the gathering was met with protests by Indigenous and civil society groups calling for stronger climate action. This year, although 2,500 Indigenous people gathered in Belém, Brazil, for the summit, only 14% (360 individuals) received credentials to attend negotiations. (No members were part of Brazil’s official delegation.) By contrast, fossil fuel lobbyists were overrepresented at the COP30 climate negotiations to the chagrin of climate organizers and Indigenous climate activists. In one demonstration on November 14, indigenous groups blocked the entrance to the conference and demanded to speak to Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

Reporting on the protests by TV news outlets was sparse, while the attendance of California Gov. Gavin Newsom was widely covered. CNN and MSNBC discussed how the U.S. is falling behind in the clean energy technology race while China gains ground. Additionally, 22% of segments mentioned Bill Gates’ controversial climate memo to world leaders. Meanwhile, Fox News coverage attacked Newsom and undermined climate science.

Two brief headline reports, one from ABC and one from CBS, focused on the protests at the conference. Much of the broadcast coverage focused on a fire that broke out in one of the convention halls on November 20 — though none of the coverage of the fire offered more details about the climate conference.

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From the November 21, 2025, edition of NBC's Today

CNN’s coverage of COP30 featured several experts, including Christiana Figueres, a Costa Rican diplomat who was the executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change during the 2015 Paris climate accord negotiations; Margaret Barry, a climate litigation fellow at the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University; Kim Cobb, climate scientist and director of the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society; as well as former vice president and climate advocate Al Gore.

A key narrative through CNN’s coverage was the state of the clean energy transition and China’s role in it.

In an interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on November 8, Figueres explained some of the progress since the landmark Paris agreement in 2015: “Ten years ago, one in every hundred vehicles that were being sold was electric. Now, we have one in five. We have two times as much investment into renewable energy as we do into fossil fuels. Solar has been deployed 15 times faster than we ever expected 10 years ago, and on and on and on. There are many proof points that there is a new economy rising.”

Amanpour also interviewed Al Gore, who pointed out the cost of the U.S. ceding the clean energy economy to others.

“China is now exporting to other countries more green technology like electric vehicles and windmills and solar,” Gore said. “The value of their green tech exports now far exceeds the exports from the United States to the rest of the world. … We’re seeing this transition away from fossil fuels and toward renewable energy and electric vehicles and batteries and these exciting new technologies that are pollution-free, they create three times as many jobs per dollar spent compared to the old dirty fossil fuels, and that’s where the economic future is.”

Climate scientist Kim Cobb made a similar argument on CNN Newsroom With Fredricka Whitfield*:

“China, of course, [is] transitioning its economy very, very quickly to clean energy sources. About 84% of the demand last year in China for electricity was met by clean energy sources. They are owning EVs, batteries, and solar cells to the tune of 78% of global manufacturing taking place in China for a $2 trillion industry. So right now what we’re looking at is China taking a very bold leadership role and charting its clean energy future. The U.S., in the meantime, swimming very much upstream against the global currents of deployed renewables, which are cheaper than fossil fuels right now.”

While MSNBC covered the climate conference for roughly 13 minutes, its coverage included similar narratives about clean energy. On his November 16 show, host Ali Velshi noted: “Now, in America's absence, China is stepping up as a global leader in climate science. The Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air reported last week that China's carbon emissions have been flat or falling for 18 months straight. Part of that is attributable to a record amount of renewable energy expansion in China. In 2024, the country installed 333 gigawatts of solar power capacity — that's more than the rest of the world combined.”

Video Citation}:

From the November 12, 2025, edition of Fox News' The Five

Discussing COP30 earlier in the same segment, Greg Gutfeld declared that the “climate agenda has been fully discredited” and that “the climate computer models have been shown to be corrupt.” He went on to falsely claim, “They are wrong on predicting everything from the temperature increases to the snow or ice melting.”

Laura Ingraham announced that scientists’ warnings on climate change have been “total scams.”

The network also hosted its usual round-up of climate contrarians and skeptics including Marc Morano, Bjorn Lomborg, Michael Shellenberger, and Victor Davis Hanson, and Fox coverage continued to cite the controversial October 28 climate memo from Bill Gates to global leaders ahead of COP30 to suggest that climate change is no longer considered a crisis requiring immediate action.

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From the November 15, 2025, edition of Fox News' The Journal Editorial Report

“I think what Bill Gates is really saying is something reasonable,” Lomborg agreed. “Talk about how you think about climate — he’s saying sure, it’s a problem, but it’s not the end of the world.”

In reality, 2025 is set to be the “second or third warmest year on record,” the World Meteorological Organization reports. The warmest year overall remains 2024, which was likely “the first calendar year with a global mean temperature of more than 1.5°C above the 1850-1900 average.”

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Baier, Bartiromo pass on MBS criticism, score seats to his gala

Written by Matt Gertz

Published 11/19/25 MMA

Fox News chief political anchor Bret Baier and Fox Business anchor Maria Bartiromo, who scored invitations for Tuesday night’s lavish White House banquet honoring Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, both passed on criticizing President Donald Trump for his pathetic excuse-making about Crown Prince Mohammed ordering the brutal murder of the U.S.-based dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

Khashoggi was an outspoken critic of the crown prince who wrote columns for The Washington Post criticizing his native Saudi Arabia’s repressive regime from his self-imposed exile in Virginia, London, and Istanbul. In October 2018, he was reportedly lured to the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, killed by Saudi operatives, and dismembered with a bone saw, generating an international scandal stoked further by the CIA’s subsequent determination that Crown Prince Mohammed ordered his assassination. Fox, meanwhile, spent the weeks after Khashoggi’s murder running cover for both Trump and Crown Prince Mohammed.

Trump, who has a fundamentally transactional view of U.S. foreign policy, an affinity for brutal dictators, and a tendency to dehumanize journalists, offered little interest in Khashoggi’s fate at the time. And he became enraged on Tuesday afternoon when ABC News chief White House correspondent Mary Bruce dared to ask the crown prince a question about Khashoggi’s murder during their joint Oval Office appearance.

The president interrupted Bruce, calling her outlet “fake news” and “one of the worst in the business.” He then said of Khashoggi: “You’re mentioning somebody that was extremely controversial — a lot of people didn't like that gentleman that you’re talking about. Whether you like him or didn't like him, things happen, but he [the crown prince] knew nothing about it. And we can leave it at that. You don't have to embarrass our guest by asking a question like that.” Crown Prince Mohammed, for his part, said Khashoggi’s murder was “a huge mistake and we're doing our best that this doesn't happen again.”

When Bruce asked Trump a question later in the press conference about the Jeffrey Epstein files, the president blew up again, criticizing her “attitude” and complaining that she had asked Crown Prince Mohammed, “a man who is highly respected,” “a horrible insubordinate and just a terrible question.” In a depressing commentary on the current state of U.S. press freedom, he then suggested that federal regulators should strip ABC’s broadcasting license “because your news is so fake and it's so wrong.”

Trump’s repeated defenses of a foreign tyrant’s murder of a U.S.-based journalist — and his suggestion from the White House that his administration should destroy an outlet for asking “insubordinate” questions about it — drew immediate attention from news outlets and harsh criticism from many journalists.

But Baier had nothing to say about it when he discussed the press conference with Fox anchor Martha MacCallum on The Story that afternoon. Instead, sounding like a Trump spokesperson, he touted the “massive” scale of impending “deals” between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, and commented that Trump, “in his defense of all things MBS, realizes that that relationship is crucial to his thought about the way forward in the Middle East.” He added that Crown Prince Mohammed’s response on Khashoggi was the same as what Baier described as the “solid answer” the crown prince had given Baier in a previous interview.

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From the November 18, 2025, edition of Fox News' The Story

Baier did not directly address Trump’s outburst during Special Report that night, though correspondent David Spunt mentioned it during a packaged report, and John Roberts, who subbed in as anchor while Baier was in Washington, D.C., to attend the banquet, brought it up with the panel.

Bartiromo, for her part, did not mention the Khashoggi exchanges herself on her show Wednesday (a correspondent ran a brief headline read on it during the program, but Bartiromo did not comment on it). Instead, she touted Trump’s role in securing what she termed Crown Prince Mohammed’s “massive investment into America.”

Bartiromo is a total Trump shill, while Baier’s overhyped reputation serves to conceal his usefulness to the administration. But both have done enough for the president to garner what Trump suggested on Tuesday was a very exclusive seat at the gala honoring the crown prince.

“We could have sold the big ballroom out three times in honor of this gentleman,” Trump said at the end of their joint appearance. “So, I made a lot of enemies because I have a lot of people that are invited tonight or are unable to come because of the size constraint.”

“This would be a perfect night to have that ballroom open,” he added. “If we had that open, we'd have a lot of people very happy. Right now, we have a lot of unhappy people because they all want to be with us tonight to honor this great man.”

You don’t get a ticket to such an event by offering “insubordinate” comments about the “great man” who the U.S. intelligence community says set in motion the vicious murder of a critical journalist.

//

Jamal Khashoggi and the bloody bill for Trump's anti-press rhetoric

10/12/18 12:13 PM EDT

  1. ### Fox News downplays Khashoggi's murder: “Saudi Arabia is one of the safest places to be a journalist in the world”

10/20/18 2:20 PM EDT

  1. ### Bret Baier touts CBS News’ move toward “more balance” and “coverage that’s fair”

10/24/25

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5 YR OLD B ROLL ON FOX? btb SAYS MOLO COCK ONLY BURNED FEET OF PROTESTOR, NOT BLDG? 10 25

AN PP 11 25

When President Donald Trump told reporters on Sept. 5 he’d started looking at sending the National Guard to Portland, Oregon, he said it was because of something he saw on television.

He said the city was being destroyed by paid agitators. “What they’ve done to that place, it’s like living in hell,” he said, a comment that became an internet meme as some Portland residents juxtaposed it with tranquil images of the city.

Trump didn’t say which channel he watched; he said at one point he saw something “today” and at another “last night.”

The evening before, on Sept. 4, Fox News aired a two-and-a-half-minute segment spotlighting protests outside a federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office in Portland. Similar footage aired the morning of Trump’s remarks. The president went on to announce Sept. 27 on Truth Social that he would send troops, saying that he was “authorizing Full Force, if necessary.”

He later said he’d told Oregon’s governor, Tina Kotek, that “unless they’re playing false tapes, this looked like World War II. Your place is burning down.”

ProPublica examined months of Fox News’ coverage and reviewed more than 700 video clips posted to social media by protesters, counterprotesters and others in the three months preceding the Sept. 4 broadcast.

The review found that the news network repeatedly provided a misleading picture of what was happening in Portland.

As The Guardian and The Oregonian/OregonLive have reported, Fox News on Sept. 4 used footage from the 2020 protests after the police killing of George Floyd and said it was from 2025. We found two clear cases from that night as well as one that seemed to match a scene filmed at a key site of the 2020 protests. Fox also mislabeled two other dates of actions shown on screen, and one broadcast implied that a protest from elsewhere was happening in Portland.

Fox News chyrons about Portland the week of Trump’s remarks carried phrases like “violent demonstrators,” “protesters riot,” “anti-I.C.E. Portland rioters” and “war-like protests.” One host said protesters were attacking federal officers.

This portrayal of protesters as routinely instigating violence or rioting was also misleading.

As ProPublica reported last week, most clashes between protesters and police before the Fox News segment did not result in any criminal charges or arrests alleging protesters committed violence. What’s more, based on news releases from federal and local authorities, charges and arrests for assault, arson or destruction of property were almost entirely confined to a period that ended the night of July 4.

Videos after that date captured numerous images of federal officers forcefully moving in on protesters without corresponding criminal charges alleging protester violence.

A spokesperson for Fox News did not respond to ProPublica’s requests for comment.

The Department of Homeland Security did not answer requests to comment on its officers’ tactics.

White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said of action on the ground in Portland: “This isn’t a peaceful protest that’s under control, like many on the left have claimed, it’s radical violence. President Trump is taking lawful action to protect federal law enforcement officers and address the out-of-control violence that local residents have complained about and Democrat leaders have failed to stop.”

Here’s how Fox News’ coverage of the Portland story was misleading.

Fox News Said It Was 2025. It Wasn’t.

Protests in 2020 in the wake of Floyd’s murder by a police officer attracted large, sometimes violent crowds to Portland — along with a federal law enforcement response authorized by Trump.

The protests outside the ICE facility have typically been far smaller. Still, Fox spliced footage from 2020 into its coverage this year and claimed it was from 2025.

The Fox News correspondent in the segment that aired the night Trump was watching TV said: “On this night in late June, police used tear gas.”

The accompanying image appears to be not from the ICE building but from the federal courthouse in downtown Portland, more than a mile away. A nearly identical scene was shown in aFox News video five years earlier. Footage that aired Sept. 4, shot at a slightly different angle, blurs out spots where graffiti was visible on the building in Fox’s July 2020 broadcast.

Almost immediately after showing the courthouse scene, the segment cuts to another image as the correspondent says, “federal police used tear gas and flashbangs.”

On screen at that moment is a U.S. Navy veteran who was pepper-sprayed and repeatedly struck with a baton. But it didn’t happen in September 2025. The video was posted on social media on July 18, 2020.

The Fox News segment about the ICE protests soon shows an American flag burning.

That image was posted on social media July 16, 2020.

The location: the base of a downtown Portland statue more than a mile away from the ICE building where protests are happening in 2025.

On the webpage for its Sept. 4 video segment, Fox News added an editor’s note at least two weeks later: “This video contains footage from protests in Portland in 2020 and 2025.”

“Still Going On”

After mislabeling 2020 events as 2025, Fox’s Sept. 4 evening broadcast explicitly drew a connection between the two periods.

“The protest chaos, which began with riots aimed at social justice in 2020, has severely damaged Portland’s reputation,” the correspondent said.

The dramatic footage at this moment shows fires in the street and was broadcast on Fox on Aug. 19, 2020, the day after a crowd smashed through windows and set items on fire in the headquarters for the government of Multnomah County, where Portland is located.

We don’t know for certain which broadcast got Trump thinking about Portland. The White House did not respond to questions about what Trump watched. But the president said on Sept. 5 that what he’d seen about Portland on TV was “unbelievable.”

“I didn’t know that was still going on,” he said. “This has been going on for years.”

The reality: Portland’s 2020 social justice protests, which resulted in hundreds of arrests and continued for months, turned sporadic by early 2021. Protests in years since have led to occasional property damage, but nothing in Portland has matched the scale of events that followed Floyd’s death.

Portland police Chief Bob Day said at a Sept. 29 press conference that the city had been inaccurately portrayed through the lens of the protests in 2020 and 2021.

“What’s actually happening, and the response we’re seeing both from Portlanders and from the Portland Police Bureau,” Day said, “is not in line with that national narrative. And it is frustrating.”

A Riot That Wasn’t

In a Sept. 2 segment featuring the video from a day earlier, anchor Bill Hemmer said it shows “riots raging.” Anchor Trace Gallagher teased another Sept. 2 news segment by once again showing the video, saying, “It’s a riot outside a Portland ICE facility.”

The Sept. 4 segment shows Julie Parrish, an attorney for a neighbor of the ICE facility, accusing Portland police of saying, “Meh, we’re just gonna let violent rioters do this for 80 straight nights.”

The physical behavior of protesters that was captured on the video is not violent. The camera instead shows federal agents advancing on them. In the moments before officers tossed munitions into the crowd, videos show, one protester was blowing bubbles. The Portland police did not declare a riot, a legal designation that allows for an elevated police use of force. (They declared a riot just once, a police spokesperson said, on June 14.)

The Sept. 1 protest had “little to no energy,” according to an internal Portland police summary, before federal officers dispersed the crowd to collect a prop guillotine that had been brought. Katie Daviscourt, a Trump-aligned commentator who filmed the clips, noted on X that protesters were having dance parties and that their main problems were “not leaving restricted areas, burning a flag, and possessing a deadly object (guillotine).”

ProPublica found a similar pattern for the three months before Fox’s Sept. 4 broadcast: clashes that on most days and nights had no criminal allegations of protester violence to explain them.

After dozens of arrests and charges were announced in June through July 4, federal prosecutors accused just three people of crimes at the ICE building in the roughly two months leading up to Fox’s Sept. 4 broadcast.

During that same two-month time frame, ProPublica’s review found numerous instances of police using force: videos from more than 20 days or nights with federal officers grabbing, shoving, pepper-spraying, tackling, firing on or using other munitions on protesters.

No local arrests or federal criminal charges were announced on these days or nights, and only a handful of dates corresponded with incidents of protester aggression later asserted by federal authorities in their legal case for sending troops.

Asked whether Fox News accurately represented her footage, Daviscourt said: “I stand by my four months of accurate reporting.”

Parrish told ProPublica she had collected evidence that “shows ongoing and persistent activity” outside the facility that under statute and police directive “would be considered riotous, unlawful assembly and/or disorderly conduct.” She declined to share this evidence, saying it was privileged as part of her client’s file.

Her lawsuit on behalf of a neighbor living near the ICE facility, which sought to require police to enforce Portland’s noise ordinance, was dismissed.

The Reappearing Neighbor

A Sept. 5 “Fox & Friends” segment showed a neighbor from an apartment building confronting protesters over noise, shouting at protesters: “Turn that (bleep) down, it’s midnight! … We the people need sleep!”

Fox said it happened Tuesday, which would have been Sept. 2. Co-host Ainsley Earhardt said, “This has been going on for months now, but a lot of this since Labor Day,” as the video shown on screen sandwiches footage of the neighbor between other scenes from the Labor Day protest.

“This is a chaotic city,” co-host Brian Kilmeade said.

The next day, the clip of the neighbor appeared again on Fox News. This time, the network said the footage was from Wednesday, or Sept. 3.

In reality, the confrontation was captured on video months before. Daviscourt published the video on June 29 on X.

On the two September nights that Fox said the neighbor’s confrontation happened, ProPublica’s review found no videos of violent clashes posted on social media, and federal authorities announced no arrests.

For example, according to a Portland police email from 11:22 p.m. on Sept. 3: “There are still about 20 people hanging around but only 4 were even on the sidewalk in front of the building.”

Misrepresentations Continue After Trump’s Guard Order

On Sept. 28, the day Trump’s order was implemented, a Fox News broadcast played a clip of Kotek saying that Guard troops were not needed in Portland, then immediately cut to a clip of a hectic scene of protesters clashing with police.

“Wish she could see some of those images,” the anchor said. Sarcastically, as a co-anchor chuckled, she added: “Look at that. Just a peaceful protest.”

A small box on the screen showed the footage wasn’t from Oregon.

It was from Illinois.

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National news media outlets nearly silent on potential Trump family self-dealing pharmaceutical scheme

Each of the major cable and broadcast networks buried the potential TrumpRx-BlinkRx conflict of interest

Written by Harrison Ray

Research contributions from Rob Savillo & Tyler Monroe

Published 10/16/25

Major cable and broadcast news outlets seem to have largely ignored a Wall Street Journal report that Donald Trump Jr. stands to potentially benefit financially from a deal between BlinkRx and the government-run TrumpRx pharmaceutical program. Apparently, neither The New York Times or The Washington Post covered the Journal’s findings either.

According to the Journal, BlinkRx has also organized a summit in December which will facilitate meetings between the country's top drugmakers, feature "'small group meetings' with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz and Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary", and “conclude with a dinner at the Executive Branch, an exclusive new club founded by Trump Jr. and his close friends.”

Tony Carrk, executive director of Accountable.US, explained of the announcement:

After derailing serious initiatives in place to finally let Medicare negotiate cheaper drug prices on some of the most expensive life-saving medicines, the President wants praise for pushing a mail-order scheme that experts say won’t significantly lower costs for patients — but will put more money in his son’s pocket. This is presidential self-dealing at its most craven.

Both The New York Times and The Washington Post also seem to have ignored the revelation during the study period.

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MMA 10 25

Frequent Fox appearances are central to the Trump administration's climate and energy misinformation strategy

Special ProgramsClimate & Energy

Written by Evlondo Cooper

Research contributions from Harrison Ray

Published 09/29/25

Fox News and Fox Business have not simply covered President Donald Trump’s destructive climate and environmental agenda — they have served as the administration’s preferred vehicles for selling it to the public.

Since late July, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin, Energy Secretary Chris Wright, and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum have made dozens of appearances across Fox News and Fox Business programs to defend the proposed repeal of the EPA’s endangerment finding, shift blame for soaring electricity bills away from fossil fuel volatility, and portray offshore wind projects as both unreliable and dangerous.

By turning to Fox networks, senior Trump officials gain a platform where destructive environmental deregulation is framed as common sense and basic policy questions are never asked. What emerges from these appearances is not legitimate debate or accountability journalism, but a symbiotic relationship that allows the Trump administration to launder harmful misinformation through Fox’s news and opinion programming — leaving viewers with a distorted picture of climate science, energy policy, and the real stakes of the administration’s environmental rollbacks.

Topline findings

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin

Zeldin has leaned on Fox’s coverage to launder claims that climate regulations are illegitimate and that reliance on renewable energy is driving economic pain.

During the August 13 episode of Fox Business’ Kudlow, Zeldin argued that the endangerment finding — a 2009 scientific determination that provided the legal framework for the EPA to regulate greenhouse gas emissions — rested on “a lot of mental leaps” and claimed that “the Clean Air Act doesn’t make any reference to the greenhouse gases.” (In reality, the Supreme Court’s Massachusetts v. EPA ruling explicitly found that greenhouse gases qualify as air pollutants under the Act.) He paired that dismissal with charges that Obama-era scientific findings were exaggerated and “pessimistic,” and closed the segment by promoting natural gas pipelines as the only path to affordable energy and job growth.

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From the August 13, 2025, episode of Fox Business' Kudlow

Energy Secretary Chris Wright

Wright has similarly leaned on Fox to attack renewable energy as too costly, unreliable, and an obstacle to America’s economic and technological ambitions. He also used his appearances to make sweeping claims that fossil fuel expansion is the only realistic path forward and to blame renewable energy for electricity price increases.

During a segment about the “importance of unleashing U.S. energy” to meet growing demand from artificial intelligence on the September 4 episode of Fox & Friends, Wright told viewers that artificial intelligence represents “perhaps the highest use of electricity.” Later that day on Fox News’ The Ingraham Angle, Wright described offshore wind projects as a “guaranteed” driver of higher electricity costs, telling host Laura Ingraham that wind and solar are “variable, parasitic sources” that make the power grid less reliable and more expensive. He also claimed that by adopting offshore wind, the United States would be “competing for the most expensive electricity in the world.” Ingraham did raise the issue of higher electricity costs during the Trump administration but allowed Wright to spin, evade, and double down on falsely blaming renewable energy.

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From the September 4, 2025, edition of Fox News’ The Ingraham Angle

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum

Burgum has also used Fox appearances to promote the administration’s fossil fuel expansion agenda while attacking renewables as unreliable and costly.

During the August 2 episode of Fox Business' Maria Bartiromo’s Wall Street, Burgum defended the administration’s proposed rollback of the endangerment finding, agreeing with Zeldin and Wright that the EPA had overstepped its authority. He also blamed increased energy costs on Obama- and Biden-era climate regulations, pushed deregulation as a way to unleash economic growth, and attacked offshore wind.

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From the August 2, 2025, episode of Fox Business' Maria Bartiromo’s Wall Street

For example, on Kudlow, after Zeldin dismissed the endangerment finding as “a lot of mental leaps,” Fox host and former Trump economic adviser Larry Kudlow never pointed out that it was grounded in the Supreme Court’s 2007 Massachusetts v. EPA decision and decades of scientific consensus. Nor did viewers hear that it has prevented hundreds of thousands of premature deaths and delivered billions in net economic benefits.

And when Wright insisted that renewables drive up electricity prices on The Ingraham Angle, the Fox host did not mention that analysts instead point to fossil fuel volatility, surging demand from AI data centers, and Trump’s own decision to roll back and cancel renewable energy projects as the primary drivers of increased electricity costs.

On Mornings with Maria Bartiromo, as Burgum railed against offshore wind energy and celebrated coal and gas as the foundation of energy dominance, Bartiromo never noted that solar energy combined with battery storage is now the cheapest and fastest-to-build source of new power, or that clinging to coal plants saddles consumers with higher bills while increasing pollution. Instead, the segment cast fossil fuels as the only reliable option, ignoring the economic and health benefits of renewables.

The Trump administration’s reliance on Fox News and Fox Business is not incidental; it is a core communications strategy. By prioritizing their appearances on Fox networks, officials like Zeldin, Wright, and Burgum gain access to a powerful megaphone while shielding themselves from scrutiny or accountability. Fox’s “straight news” programs give their talking points the appearance of neutrality, and its opinion hosts repeat and amplify those same claims until they harden into conventional wisdom.

The result is the laundering of misleading talking points: Administration officials feed misinformation into Fox, the network recycles and legitimizes it, and audiences are left with a propagandistic narrative that obscures the public health costs of climate change and environmental deregulation and dismisses the economic benefits of clean energy.

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Fox ignores climate change while covering collapsing houses along the North Carolina coast

:{SpecialPrograms Climate & Energy:(style="font-family:Merriweather"):}:

Written by Ilana Berger

Published09/19/25

During a September 18 segment, Fox & Friends covered the most recent instance of a house collapsing into the Atlantic Ocean — this time on Hatteras Island in North Carolina — and mentioned erosion along the coast, but left out that climate change is contributing to the problem. Sea-level rise and erosion from increasingly severe storms has helped claim 11 other homes in the unincorporated community of Rodanthe, North Carolina.

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From the September 18, 2025, edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends

CARLEY SHIMKUS (CO-HOST): A stilt house collapsing on the shore along the Outer Banks of North Carolina this week. It's now the 12th home claimed by the Atlantic Ocean in the past five years. The two-story beach home fell at the north end of Hatteras Island. Thankfully, the home was empty at the time. Officials say recent storms have worsened erosion, leading to more collapses like this. Those are your headlines, guys. Huge home.

AINSLEY EARHARDT (CO-HOST): It's interesting they let them just collapse. They don't destroy them before, knowing this is going to happen.

SHIMKUS: Yeah, that's right. And clearly the ocean is moving up the shore or they wouldn't have built that home in the first place.

EARHARDT: It's a big problem. It's a big problem on the East Coast. And you spend so much to have that beachfront property and then, you know — over time, it's gone.

SHIMKUS: It is, yes.

The Charlotte Observer correctly implicated the role of climate change in its reporting on the home’s destruction, highlighting that Hurricane Erin in August generated “waves as high as 50 feet,” causing “severe erosion in some places along the East Coast.”

The Observer noted that “the home was well away from the ocean and behind a vegetated dune when it was built in 1969. But a series of storms, which have occurred more frequently in recent years due to climate change, carved away the beach and the dune and brought the surf up to the pilings of the home and a string of others to its north and south.”

While the Fox & Friends segment mentioned that worsening storms “have caused erosion,” the network has repeatedly downplayed any connections between hurricanes and climate change, which has been making storms grow rapidly and more intense, destroying homes and businesses. Fox has also downplayed the threat of sea level rise, which occurs “mostly due to a combination of melt water from glaciers and ice sheets and thermal expansion of seawater as it warms,” according to NASA.

As FactCheck.org pointed out, “For every inch of sea level rise, approximately 100 inches of beach are lost, according to NASA oceanographer and climate scientist Josh Willis.”

Trump’s Department of Energy recently published a so-called “critical review” of climate science, which included several climate contrarians as authors and “cherry-picks text, data, and studies that paint an incomplete picture” in order “to suggest rising sea-levels in the US are only due to land-sinking,” according to the Union of Concerned Scientists. The DOE report uses limited information to claim that there is “no obvious acceleration beyond the historical average rate of sea level rise.”

Meanwhile, members of the Cape Hatteras National Seashore, which manages the coastal area that was impacted, told The Charlotte Observer that “there are probably dozens of homes endangered on the oceanfront.”

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mma

Fox News mostly ignored warnings from FEMA employees that Trump is setting the stage for a “disaster on the level of Hurricane Katrina”

09/04/25

  1. ### National TV news coverage of Hurricane Katrina’s 20th anniversary was solemn and respectful but largely elided the structural inequalities the storm exposed

09/04/25

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MMA EVLONDO C

The Trump administration’s repeal of the Environmental Protection Agency’s endangerment finding marks one of the most consequential climate and environmental rollbacks in modern U.S. history. In the aftermath of the announcement, CNN aired interviews with EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin and Energy Secretary Chris Wright, which are among the only major network appearances by either official since the repeal. Zeldin and Wright have seldom appeared on non-Fox outlets; their recent CNN interviews presented the network with rare opportunities to question senior officials directly about a coordinated policy campaign that threatens to undermine decades of climate and public health protections.

There is precedent for how the media can falter during these high‐stakes moments. For example, in 2018, after the first Trump administration attempted to bury a major federal climate report on Black Friday, all five Sunday morning political shows covered the story. However, much of that coverage featured climate denial, soft‐pedaled the findings, and framed the issue narrowly as partisan debate. The following month, in response to the outcry, then-host of NBC's Meet the Press Chuck Todd opened an episode dedicated to climate coverage by declaring that the program would no longer debate the existence of climate change, acknowledging that such framing misleads audiences and undermines urgency.

Unfortunately, in August 2025, as the Trump administration moved to erase the legal foundation for regulating climate pollution, those same dynamics resurfaced. CNN’s interviews with senior officials framed their positions as one side of a conventional political debate rather than as part of a governance strategy with immediate, material consequences for the climate, public health, and environmental enforcement.

CNN was offered rare access to top Trump climate officials at a moment of extraordinary policy consequence

CNN’s interviews with Wright and Zeldin aired a few days after the administration proposed repealing the EPA’s 2009 endangerment finding — the legal foundation for regulating greenhouse gas emissions. Rescinding the finding would gut the agency's core climate authority and open the door to deregulating emissions across multiple sectors.

These segments represented a rare opportunity for direct, public-facing accountability outside of the protective ecosystem Fox News creates for Trump administration officials. Media Matters has documented how Fox has repeatedly provided Zeldin a friendly platform to reframe deregulatory moves as economic reform and to portray climate funding as partisan waste. Fox has played the same role for other senior Trump officials, most recently including Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who used the network to defend FEMA’s response to catastrophic flooding in Texas.

These appearances, in which administration officials have often gone unchallenged, serve to reframe and defend policies that weaken environmental protections, limit federal disaster response accountability, and risk significant harm to public health. CNN’s interviews were among the few opportunities to press the officials advancing this agenda at a moment of extraordinary policy consequence.

Chris Wright’s CNN interview allowed him to spew climate denial under the guise of scientific neutrality, while Zeldin's reframed a regulatory gutting as legal housekeeping

During the August 5 episode of CNN’s The Source with Kaitlan Collins, Energy Secretary Chris Wright used a solo, prime-time interview to promote an anti-science Department of Energy report — one designed to undercut the climate consensus and is already being cited to justify rollbacks on environmental protections. The report disputes the urgency of climate change, downplays sea level rise, and frames increased carbon dioxide as beneficial for plant growth. Wright echoed and amplified these points in the interview, adding that “nobody who is a credible economist or scientist” sees climate change as a major threat and repeating that carbon dioxide is “a fertilizer.” The interview aired again during the August 9 episode of The Source: Weekend.

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From the August 5, 2025, episode of CNN's The Source with Kaitlan Collins

Collins raised substantive issues: the report’s rushed timeline, hand-picked, climate-contrarian authors, the fact that “the EPA is already using this [report] to change its policy,” and that scientists said their work was misrepresented. But these points were handled in isolation, without sustained follow-up to clarify that the DOE document diverges sharply from the consensus positions of federal agencies such as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, as well as the Fifth National Climate Assessment, which was produced by the U.S. Global Change Research Program.

Wright sidestepped Collins’ EPA point by insisting the report wasn’t “radical” and was in “the conventional lines,” invoking the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report citations to give the appearance of rigor and alignment with established science, even as its conclusions distort that science. He leaned on process language — “open for public comment,” “part of a dialogue” — to shift the frame toward procedural disagreement, casting objections from scientists as normal debate rather than evidence of distortion. Collins’ choice to frame those objections as “some people say” made them easier for Wright to dismiss and reinforced the idea that this was simply another area where reasonable people can disagree.

Instead of forcing a clear accounting of the report’s aims and its role in advancing anti-climate science policy, the interview became mired in procedural talk. That shift blurred the stakes for viewers and left the core of the report — an ideologically driven, anti-science document already being used to justify rolling back climate and environmental protections — largely unexamined. In the absence of sustained scrutiny, Wright was able to present it not as a political weapon against climate science, but as a credible contribution to policymaking.

During the August 4 episode of CNN’s State of the Union, guest host Kasie Hunt opened her interview with EPA Administrator Zeldin by explaining the purpose of the EPA’s endangerment finding and asking Zeldin about climate science. She also raised the issue of the insurance crisis tied to climate risk and, toward the end of the interview, noted that Zeldin had the power to leave the rule in place. Although Hunt pressed for clarity around certain questions, most of them landed as isolated challenges rather than part of a sustained effort to correct or contextualize misleading claims.

:{Video

Citation

From the August 3, 2025, episode of CNN's State of the Union

When asked about rising insurance costs, Zeldin pivoted, saying that “there has been a greening of the planet that’s been taking place” and “it’s important to note that emissions have been down.” The first statement reframes rising carbon dioxide as a net benefit, sidestepping the severe and widespread harms associated with climate change. The second tacitly concedes the desirability of reducing emissions, yet uses that very point to argue against retaining the EPA’s core climate authority. These two points undercut each other, but more importantly, both misrepresent the stakes of the repeal. Hunt did not press Zeldin to reconcile the contradiction or to explain how either point justified removing the agency’s central regulatory tool.

The interview ended with Hunt asking, “Do you think the federal government should have a role in trying to combat climate change?” followed by her observation that Zeldin was “taking an action” and “could just leave it alone.” By then, the moment to draw clear lines between his rhetoric and the consequences of his policy had passed. Without sustained clarification, viewers were left with Zeldin’s account — one that misrepresented both the scope of the endangerment finding and the implications of its repeal.

In both interviews, the hosts surfaced substantive issues but left them as isolated exchanges, allowing senior Trump officials to reframe the stakes, deflect from the core science, and leave viewers without a clear accounting of how their actions would weaken climate protections.

A pattern of deference lets Fox-fortified narratives pass unchallenged

CNN’s handling of the Wright and Zeldin appearances reflects a broader pattern in which media figures conducting high-stakes interviews with senior Trump officials avoid sustained challenges to the administration’s narratives. During Earth Month this year, CBS’ Face the Nation hosted Zeldin and asked about his efforts to clawback $20 billion in climate funding — but offered no pushback when he relied on vague economic justifications, procedural deflections, and claims that had already been dismissed by a federal judge. The exchange also never addressed the environmental justice consequences of Zeldin’s actions or the public health costs of EPA workforce cuts.

In June 2024, Face the Nation gave Doug Burgum space to deny that then-candidate Trump had asked oil executives to direct campaign contributions to him. Fox News later celebrated the segment as a rhetorical win for Burgum, citing the host’s passivity as proof he had neutralized the issue. That reaction underscores how Fox functions as both a refuge for Trump officials and a megaphone for their preferred narratives. For years, the network has given these officials space to frame regulatory rollbacks as economic reform and climate funding as partisan waste.

When administration officials appear on mainstream platforms, the bar must be higher

Although CNN and other major TV outlets have produced strong reporting on the administration’s anti-climate actions, that reporting did not surface during these interviews. Instead, Wright and Zeldin were not pressed on documented harms or contradictions. When mainstream interviews fail to apply sustained, adversarial questioning, they create accountability gaps that allow harmful narratives to go unchallenged.

Live interviews with senior officials driving climate rollbacks are rare moments for direct, public accountability. These are also moments when weak framing or deference can shape public understanding long after the segment ends. The stakes are material: The decisions under discussion affect emissions, public health, and the resilience of vulnerable communities. Here are a few dos and don’ts for meeting those stakes in real time.

Don’ts:

Dos:

Holding the most powerful decision-makers to account in these moments is not just good journalism — it is essential to making the stakes of their actions visible to the public.

//

  1. ### Fox News shields EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin as he promotes the most destructive climate rollback in EPA history

07/31/25 12:45 PM EDT

  1. ### In March, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin denied NY Times reporting that the agency would eliminate its research arm. On Friday, the EPA did just that.

07/21/25 5:18 PM EDT

  1. ### Fox News runs defense for Trump administration on its delayed response to Texas flooding

07/17/2

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How broadcast TV news covered environmental justice in 2024

Special ProgramsClimate & Energy

Written by Evlondo Cooper

Published 06/17/25 MMA

Corporate broadcast news coverage of environmental justice declined in 2024. ABC, CBS, and NBC aired a combined total of just 7 environmental justice segments, compared to 9 such segments in 2023. This continues a multiyear trend of declining airtime dedicated to stories about how environmental racism, economic exploitation, and environmental degradation disproportionately harm vulnerable communities.

Environmental justice refers to the disproportionate impact of environmental harms — such as air and water pollution, toxic exposure, or policy neglect — on communities that are already socially or economically marginalized. These include Black, Latino, Indigenous, and low-income populations that are more likely than other groups to live near industrial facilities, aging infrastructure, or fossil fuel extraction sites and bear the brunt of pollution to the air, land, and water.

Media Matters reviewed morning and evening newscasts on corporate broadcast networks ABC, CBS, and NBC from January 1 through December 31, 2024. Segments were coded as relating to environmental justice if they included coverage of environmental impacts, regulations, or health hazards and identified a specific marginalized community as affected. For the first time, the study includes weekend morning and evening news programs and ABC’s GMA3. Weeknight and weekend episodes of PBS News Hour were reviewed for comparison but are not included in the segment total.

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'Weird reluctance to criticize': Expert explains why media ignores Trump's decline

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Broadcast TV news mentioned solutions in 23% of its climate coverage in 2024

04/17/25

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mma

Broadcast nightly news largely failed to cover looming Trump tariffs

Economists predict price spikes and job losses from proposed tariffs on Canada, Mexico, and China

Written by Zachary Pleat

Published 01/31/25

Weeknight broadcast news programs from ABC, CBS, NBC, and PBS have largely failed to cover President Donald Trump’s expected 25% tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico and 10% tariffs on imports from China since he announced them the day he took office for a second time on January 20. Economists are predicting that the tariffs, which the White House has confirmed are scheduled to take effect February 1, will function as an import tax paid by U.S. customers, leading to price spikes, higher inflation, and the loss of hundreds of thousands of American jobs.

Economists have predicted significant job losses and increases in the inflation rate from Trump’s upcoming tariffs

Both of the CBS segments and the lone PBS segment did mention that the tariffs were likely to increase prices and/or inflation. The failure of ABC and NBC to inform their nightly viewers at all about the issue is even more glaring in light of their significant digital coverage of the tariffs.

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an 1 25

Early Monday morning, January 13, a bombshell announcement came from longtime Washington Post columnist Jennfier Rubin: She is leaving the Post and is starting a new publication with attorney Norm L. Eisen, known for his legal analysis for CNN and his years as ambassador to the Czech Republic under the Obama Administration.

Rubin isn't holding back in on her reasons for leaving the Post. The Never Trumper is highly critical of Post/Amazon owner Jeff Bezos for, she says, trying to curry favor with President-elect Donald Trump — who, Rubin believes, did the Post a huge disservice when he killed an endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris during the 2024 election.

During a January 13 interview with CNN, Rubin said of The Contrarian — her new media venture with Eisen — "Our goal is to combat, with every fiber of our being, the authoritarian threat that we face."

READ MORE:Revealed: Allies are grilling career intel staff to ensure total loyalty to Trump

Rubin told CNN that Bezos and other media figures have "bent the knee" to Trump, lamenting, "the Post, along with most mainstream news outlets, has failed spectacularly at a moment that we most need a robust, aggressive free press."

Rubin was equally biting in an interview with CNBC, arguing that Bezos and others have "scrambled to enlist Trump-friendly voices."

The former Post columnist told CNBC, ":{Corporate and billionaire owners of major media outlets have betrayed their audiences' loyalty and sabotaged journalism's sacred mission — defending, protecting and advancing democracy."

In an official statement, Rubin complained, "The Washington Post’s billionaire owner and enlisted management are among the offenders. They have undercut the values central to The Post’s mission and that of all journalism: integrity, courage, and independence. I cannot justify remaining at The Post."

READ MORE:'Fascist ideology': Veteran actor slams 'orange idiot' Trump for 'nonsense' claims about LA wildfires

Rubin continued, "Jeff Bezos and his cronies accommodate and enable the most acute threat to American democracy — Donald Trump — at a time when a vibrant free press is more essential than ever to democracy’s survival and capacity to survive."

For many years, Rubin, now 62, was known as a conservative and voted GOP in presidential elections. But she has been a blistering critic of Trump, voting Democratic in the presidential elections of 2016, 2020 and 2024. And she has said that she no longer identifies as "conservative" because Trump and the MAGA movement have badly tarnished that word.

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Cable news is barely covering Trump and GOP plans to slash Medicaid 12/10/24 mma

Mainstream news coverage of the economy was inadequate in the lead up to the 2024 Election

12/20/24

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AN 12 24

Patrick Soon-Shiong—the biotech billionaire whose moves as owner of the Los Angeles Times have prompted a wave of resignations and subscription cancellations—is reportedly now asking the paper's editorial board to refrain from publishing pieces about Republican President-elect Donald Trump.

Oliver Darcy's Status newsletter accused Soon-Shiong of "meddling for MAGA" by requesting that Times members of the board and opinion writers, according to an internal memo, "take a break from writing about Trump."

Based on the memo viewed by Darcy, Soon-Shiong has asked editors to send him "the text of every editorial and the name of its writer" prior to publication, prompting staff "concerns about the ability of the board to do its job without fear of retaliation," according to Status.

Darcy wrote that the memo came from staffers who "said they were notifying [executive editor Terry] Tang, who oversees both the newsroom and opinion section, of Soon-Shiong's alarming actions because the newspaper's ethics policy requires employees to report 'anything that might cast a shadow on the Times' reputation.'"

"Glad I already resigned or I would have to do it now."

Responding Wednesday to the Status report, former Times senior legal affairs columnist Harry Litman wrote on social media, "Glad I already resigned or I would have to do it now."

Darcy's newsletter follows reporting last week that Soon-Shiong scuppered a draft editorial criticizing some of Trump's Cabinet nominees, telling editors that it could not run unless accompanied by a piece presenting an opposing view.

Earlier this month, Soon-Shiong said he planned to embed an artificial intelligence-powered "bias meter" in Times articles and editorials.

Soon-Shiong—a surgeon by training—has praised three doctors tapped for Trump's Cabinet. He has also dined with Trump, calling it an "incredible honor."

While Soon-Shiong has owned the Times—for which he paid $500 million as part of a multi-outlet deal—since 2018, the extent of his involvement in the paper's operations made headlines in October after he blocked its editorial board from endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris for president.

The decision—which Soon-Shiong said was based partly on a desire for more balance in the Times opinion section and partly on Harris' complicity in the U.S.-backed Israeli war on Gaza—prompted the resignation of editorials editor Maria Garza.

Other resignations have followed as "morale in the newsroom has plummeted," according to Darcy.

Litman explained on his Substack following his resignation earlier this month that he does not "want to continue to work for a paper that is appeasing Trump and facilitating his assault on democratic rule for craven reasons."

"My resignation is a protest and visceral reaction against the conduct of the paper's owner, Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong," he wrote. "Soon-Shiong has made several moves to force the paper, over the forceful objections of his staff, into a posture more sympathetic to Donald Trump."

Contrasting Soon-Shiong's hands-on leadership style with TheWashington Post's multicentibillionaire owner,Chicago Tribune contributor Steve Chapman wrote on social media:

Jeff Bezos: "Nobody ever wrecked the reputation of a respected newspaper as fast as I did." Patrick Soon-Shiong: "Hold my beer."

The Los Angeles TimestoldThe Guardian that its management team "is currently reviewing the concerns" expressed in the editors' memo.

MMA

Cable news is barely covering Trump and GOP plans to slash Medicaid

Written by Harrison Ray

Research contributions from Chloe Simon & Tyler Monroe

Published 12/10/24

Cable news networks largely ignored changes the incoming Trump administration and congressional Republicans are reportedly considering to limit access to Medicaid.

The proposals have raised alarms among health care advocates, who warn of potentially devastating impacts to vulnerable populations including children, seniors, and people with disabilities.

Since November 14, CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC have given the Republicans’ potential plans only 40 minutes of coverage. MSNBC led networks with over 33 minutes coverage. However, both CNN and Fox News largely failed to cover the story. CNN devoted just 6 minutes to the potential Medicaid cuts, while Fox News devoted less than a minute of coverage.

During Trump's first term, Arkansas implemented the strictest work requirements in the country. A recent PubMed Central study of the outcomes in Arkansas said the added requirements “led to coverage losses associated with significant negative impacts on medical debt and affordability of care, without improving employment.” It added:

We find no evidence that the policy succeeded in its stated goals of promoting work and instead find substantial evidence of harm to health care coverage and access. Our results should provide a strong note of caution for federal and state policymakers considering work requirement policies in the future.

Congressional Republicans have also hinted at returning to their 2017 proposal of enacting block grants, which cap federal funding to state-level Medicaid programs. As an article from Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) explained at the time, “The potential impact [of enacting block grants] is significant. More than 10 million who got insurance through Obamacare are on Medicaid and could be affected.”

A more recent analysis from KFF explained that if Republicans went ahead with cuts to Medicaid by decreasing the federal matching rate for people covered under the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion, the “health coverage implications would likely be significant.” It explained:

This financing change would shift a substantial amount of Medicaid spending from the federal government to states. States would then need to decide whether to use states funds to make up for the lost federal funding or cut coverage. Given the challenges states would face replacing substantial lost federal funds, the health coverage implications would likely be significant and could reverse gains in financial security, access to care, and health outcomes. A large body of prior research shows that Medicaid expansion has helped to reduce the uninsured and improve access, affordability, and financial security among the low-income population. More recent research shows improvements in health outcomes and continues to show positive effects for providers (particularly rural hospitals) and for sexual and reproductive health.

CNN aired only 1 segment about the GOP's plans and an additional 10 mentions, bringing the network's total coverage to just over 6 minutes.

Meanwhile, MSNBC gave the plans the most coverage, airing at least 9 segments, along with several mentions, bringing the network total to just over 33 minutes. Of any show on any network, MSNBC's All In with Chris Hayes provided the most coverage of the plans, discussing them for at least 7 minutes.

Methodology...

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alternet-

The end of left-leaning news?

'Maximum chaos and upset': Rachel Maddow describes nightmare election scenario

Thom Hartmann

November 23, 2024

Have you heard that Comcast is planning to sell MSNBC? Is Rupert Murdoch planning to buy it? Will America’s media landscape soon resemble those of Hungary and Russia?

Without the rightwing media juggernaut, Donald Trump probably wouldn’t be president next year and wouldn’t have won in 2016. That said, the progressive media landscape looks like it might be about to get a whole lot worse.

Comcast, which owns NBC and its subsidiaries CNBC and MSNBC (among other media outlets) announced this week that they’ll be spinning off MSNBC (among others) next year.

And the consequences are already showing up. It was reported this week that Rachel Maddow just took a substantial annual pay-cut because of the uncertain future of the network.

In part, this probably reflects a belt-tightening at Comcast, but is also an indication of how legacy media — which now includes cable properties — are taking a hit from newer digital media, from social media to podcasts to web-based networks and programs.

The principal analyst and VP of content for the market research company eMarketer, Paul Verna, told the AP that:

“The writing is on the wall that the cable TV business is a dwindling business,” and, the AP noted, is “predicting future consolidation of the networks or acquisitions through private equity.”

Private equity (like Bain Capital) and large media operation acquisitions have a long history of gutting media properties to increase their profitability; often this includes what a study by Stanford University researchers described as a trend to “substitute coverage of local politics for coverage of national politics, and use more conservative framing.”

Air America radio (for which I wrote the original business plan and which carried my program) was on the air in virtually every major market in the United States, having leased over 50 major, high-powered radio stations from Clear Channel.

My program regularly beat Rush Limbaugh in the ratings: When I was invited to the Obama White House following that election, one person associated with the campaign noted to me privately that they believed Air America had played a meaningful role in Obama’s 2008 election.

That same year, Mitt Romney’s private equity company, Bain Capital, acquired Clear Channel and, in 2009, began reclaiming their stations, replacing Air America content with mostly sports. By coincidence, around that same time it appears Romney decided he’d run against Obama in the next election.

As Air America lost station after station, its ability to earn revenue through selling advertising collapsed. By 2010, the entire network was bankrupt just in time for Romney to run for president.

Will the same thing happen to MSNBC? Stay tuned.

Similarly, Republicans in Congress are salivating over Elon Musk’s rhetorical war with NPR after the network stopped using Xitter when Musk labeled the news network as “state-affiliated” media.

As the headline on Fox Business notes:

“Elon Musk renews calls to defund NPR after clip of CEO resurfaces on X: 'Your tax dollars' are paying for this.’”

Musk, of course, will be in charge of identifying those parts of government or institutions funded by government which can be cut to help pay for Trump’s planned $4 trillion in tax cuts for billionaires.

While it won’t fit her proposed new role as UN Ambassador, Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, a top member of Republican House leadership, was unambiguous, posting to Xitter: “I will DEFUND NPR.”

This is nothing new: Republicans in the House voted this past July to remove all federal funding for NPR by 2026; Musk and Ramaswamy, working hand-in-glove with Marjorie Taylor Greene (who was just made chairperson of the new subcommittee charged with implementing their recommendations) could probably speed up that timeline.

While NPR goes to great lengths to avoid political bias in their news (the Corporation for Public Broadcasting even hired last month, “in response to right-wing criticism,” multiple editors specifically to spot and stamp out any progressive perspectives that may creep into their reporting), if they were crippled, it’s safe to assume the roughly 1,500 rightwing hate radio stations in the country stand more than ready and willing to pick up their radio audience.

Rightwing billionaires brought us Fox “News,” Sinclair, two other web- and cable-based rightwing TV channels, nationwide networks of hate radio (now also in Spanish), tens of millions of dollars in subsidies to rightwing podcast hosts, and the destruction of about half the nation’s local newspapers.

Not to mention an entire network of billionaire-funded hard-right phony “pink slime” newspapers that pop up around the country every election year.

There’s no equivalent politically-tilted media systems on the left; Democratic-leaning billionaires have stayed out of the media space ever since Romney’s company took down Air America.

The closest TV and radio counterparts we have are Free Speech TV (available on the web, Dish, Sling, Roku, AppleTV, and DirecTV) and the Progress Channel on SiriusXM (my daily program is carried on both).

In the print media space, Substack is growing (although they also carry hard-right content) and provides a solid community of progressive publications (like HartmannReport.com), but that’s a drop in a much larger ocean; even The Washington Post and The New York Times don’t come close to the strength of editorial bias found in the Murdoch family’s The New York Post or The Wall Street Journal.

Publications like The New Republic, Mother Jones, The Nation, and The Guardian provide solid progressive content, but all have funding bases that are trivial compared to conservative publications supported by rightwing billionaire networks. Ditto for websites like Raw Story, Common Dreams, Alternet, LA Progressive, Democratic Underground, and Daily Kos.

As my old friend and the former CEO/founder of Air America, Jon Sinton, noted on his excellent “reluctant” Substack newsletter:

“The left-wing silo is barren. A couple of old line newspapers and magazines. MSNBC and a handful of smallish digital platforms and shows. Pod Save America stands nearly alone as a left-leaning podcast with a large audience.

“By contrast, the right-wing silo is vast and deep. It houses YouTubians, TikTokkers, broadcasters on Fox, Newsmax, Sinclair TV stations, and talk radio stations; posters on social media; and narrowcasters on myriad podcasts.”

All, I would add, heavily supported by rightwing billionaires. As Politico reported in 2014, the Heritage Foundation used to give $1 million a year to Sean Hannity and $2 million a year to Rush Limbaugh alone.

A close acquaintance who was, for years, a mid-level rightwing talk show host told me how a dozen or more times a year he’d give a speech at a random high school and would receive a check for $20,000-$30,000 by a rightwing foundation as a “speaking fee” each time. It was their way of supporting conservative talk radio.

Again, there is literally nothing like that on the left. Not even close.

I’ve repeatedly called for progressive billionaires to jump into the media space, and perhaps the Musk/Trump assaults that are coming will provoke some to act. It may be wishful thinking, but if it does happen it can’t come too soon.

In the meantime, we all must support (and share with our friends) those outlets where we find useful news and information; if we fail to, America’s media landscape may soon mirror Hungary’s and Russia’s with every station and publication praising Dear Leader 24/7/365.

NOW READ: The America-attacking Trump is coming for our military — and then he's coming for us

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As mainstream media said voters didn’t know Harris, top print newspapers’ front pages featured considerably more coverage of Trump

11/04/24 mma

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Mainstream media don’t have to take the right's phony outrage over Biden’s “garbage” comments seriously

Written by Gideon Taaffe

Published 10/30/24 mma

Some mainstream media outlets aided the inevitable right-wing outrage cycle regarding President Joe Biden's comments about a racist joke made at a Trump rally by adopting right-wing media's framing.

Speaking to nonprofit Voto Latino, Biden reacted to a comedian at Trump’s weekend rally calling Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage,” saying, “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporter’s — his — his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American. It’s totally contrary to everything we’ve done, everything we’ve been.”

NBC senior White House correspondent Gabe Gutierrez initially reportedthe comments as Biden calling Trump supporters “garbage”; Biden later clarified what he said, writing on social media, “Earlier today I referred to the hateful rhetoric about Puerto Rico spewed by Trump's supporter at his Madison Square Garden rally as garbage—which is the only word I can think of to describe it. His demonization of Latinos is unconscionable. That's all I meant to say. The comments at that rally don't reflect who we are as a nation.”

basket of deplorables problem? trying to get last few undecided?]

The next day, Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris told reporters that Biden “clarified his comments, but let me be clear: I strongly disagree with any criticism of people based on who they vote for.” She mentioned that she had called for unity in a speech the previous night, saying, “You heard my speech last night. I believe the work that I do is about representing all the people, whether they support me or not. I will be a President for all Americans.”

Even though Biden clarified his comments, many in the mainstream media posted headlines suggesting Biden called Trump supporters “garbage” and that his comments could give the right “a way to pivot away” from the overwhelming racism at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally.

The Associated Press incorrectly wrote that Biden “suggests Trump supporters are ‘garbage’ after comic’s insult of Puerto Rico.” ABC News wrote up right-wing media’s bad-faith outrage, saying in a headline that Biden “angers GOP associating ‘garbage’ with Trump supporters.” NPR framed Biden’s comment as “a divisive remark” in a piece titled “Harris urged unity in her closing argument. Biden's ‘garbage’ line undercut that.”

Biden’s comment predictably led to a deluge of apoplectic reactions from right-wing media figures, who falsely claimed that the president called all Trump supporters “garbage” and made comparisons to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” comment during the 2016 election cycle. (That comment was also misleadingly covered at the time, with some saying she was referring to all Trump supporters, when Clinton was specifically talking about voters who supported Trump for “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic” reasons.)

Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk fearmongered that Biden “is using dehumanizing language towards 80 million Americans,” adding, “They think you are garbage, therefore worthy of elimination.” Fox News called the comments the “2024 campaign’s October Surprise.” The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh said that the comments are “the kind of seething, anti-American contempt that you only find among Democrat elites.”

While right-wing media engage in bad-faith outrage over Biden’s comments, Trump has repeatedly disparaged the United States and Democrats during his campaign. He recently said America is “like a garbage can for the world” and has ramped up demonizing rhetoric toward immigrants and political foes. Trump has called Democrats “evil,” “dangerous,” and “enemies from within,” going as far as suggesting he will use the military against “radical left lunatics.”

By adopting the right-wing framing about Biden’s remarks, the mainstream media are enabling a false narrative that both sides are ramping up hostile rhetoric. They don’t need to engage in the right’s latest efforts to deflect from Trump’s racism and extremism.

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10 24 ymail judd pop info

owner Jeff Bezos spreads his hands after a ceremonial ribbon cutting during dedication ceremonies for the new Washington Post offices on January, 28, 2016 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

Jeff Bezos is the second-richest person in the world, with a net worth of approximately $211 billion. Most of Bezos' wealth is derived from his 9% stake in Amazon, the company he founded. Bezos also founded and owns Blue Origin, a private space exploration company worth billions.

Bezos also owns the Washington Post, which he purchased in 2013 for $250 million in cash. Is Bezos now making decisions at the Washington Post to protect and enhance the value of his other enterprises? Many current and former employees of the Washington Post believe so.

The business interests of Amazon and Blue Origin — and, therefore, Bezos — are inextricably linked to the federal government. Consider:

In 2021, Amazon was awarded a $10 billion cloud-computing contract with the National Security Agency. It also has a portion of a $9 billion cloud-computing contract inked in 2022 with the Department of Defense and a multi-billion dollar cloud-computing contract with the CIA.

In 2023, the Federal Trade Commission sued Amazon, alleging "the online retail and technology company is a monopolist that uses a set of interlocking anticompetitive and unfair strategies to illegally maintain its monopoly power." The lawsuit seeks "a permanent injunction in federal court that would prohibit Amazon from engaging in its unlawful conduct and pry loose Amazon’s monopolistic control to restore competition."

> In May 2023, Blue Origin was awarded a $3.4 billion contract to build a lunar lander for NASA. Between 2025 and 2029, the company is expected to compete for $5.6 billion in space launch contracts for the Pentagon.

The Washington Post, unlike Amazon and Blue Origin, has been a money loser for Bezos, reportedly running a deficit of $100 million last year. More importantly, Bezos believes that former President Trump's hostility toward the Washington Post, which produced critical coverage of Trump's presidency, cost his companies billions in government contracts. In 2019, Amazon sued the federal government for awarding a $10 billion cloud-computing contract to Microsoft, alleging that Amazon lost out on the contract based on Bezos' ownership of the Washington Post:

President Trump has made no secret of his personal dislike for Mr. Bezos, Amazon, and the Washington Post, or of his express desire to harm them. The seeds of this animus originate with the Washington Post's coverage of him before he even was elected President. That coverage placed Mr. Bezos, Amazon, and the Washington Post directly in the crosshairs of President Trump's wrath.

…After he assumed office, President Trump grew "obsessed" with Mr. Bezos and determined to "f'*** with him." His new powers expanded his ability to punish Mr. Bezos for the Washington Post's coverage of him

…President Trump has frequently referred to the "Amazon Washington Post" as a single entity, and he has frequently hurled invective against Amazon whenever the Washington Post publishes articles that he believes slight him or his Administration. President Trump has also repeatedly claimed the Washington Post is selling "fake news," and he has called it an "[e]nemy of the [p]eople[.]"

In a few months, it is possible that Trump will be president again. This time, Bezos faces an even more acute threat to his business interests. Elon Musk, who owns Blue Origin's chief rival SpaceX, has aligned himself closely with Trump, spending tens of millions in support of Trump's campaign and making appearances in swing states on Trump's behalf.

On Friday, days before the election, Washington Post publisher William Lewis — installed by Bezos earlier this year — announced that "the Washington Post will not be making an endorsement of a presidential candidate in this election." The announcement, less than 2 weeks before Election Day, was a break from decades of precedent. Bezos made the decision, according to the New York Times, after the Washington Post "editorial board had already drafted an endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris."

Marty Baron, the former Executive Editor of the Washington Post, slammed Bezos' decision as "cowardice" and linked it to Bezos' desire to appease Trump. Baron said it would backfire, and Trump would "see this as an invitation to further intimidate owner [Bezos]."

Hours after Lewis published the announcement, Trump was seen meeting with Blue Origin CEO David Limp. Steven Cheung, the Trump campaign's chief spokesman, embraced the suggestion that the meeting and the announcement of the non-endorsement were linked.

Robert Kagan, who worked at the Washington Post for two decades and resigned immediately following Lewis' announcement, said the meeting was evidence of a quid pro quo. “Trump waited to make sure that Bezos did what he said he was going to do, and then met with the Blue Origin people,” Kagan told The Daily Beast. “Which tells us that there was an actual deal made, meaning that Bezos communicated, or through his people, communicated directly with Trump, and they set up this quid pro quo.”

According to CNN, "Amazon CEO Andy Jassy also recently reached out to check in" with Trump.

The apparent capitulation to Trump illustrates the danger of billionaires scooping up major media organizations as a side hustle. For nearly everyone, the price Bezos paid for the Washington Post is an unfathomable amount of money. For Bezos, it's less than half the $575 million he paid for his new 417-foot superyacht, Koru, and its 246-foot support yacht, Abeona, which has a helipad, accommodations for staff, and storage for smaller boats and jet skis.

Bezos did not get to the point where he could afford such yachts through his dedication to journalistic integrity. He became the second-wealthiest person in the world by prioritizing the bottom line. And it appears that continues to be his priority.

The Washington Post's incoherent defense

Lewis claims that the decision not to endorse a presidential candidate was based on principle. Specifically, Lewis says the decision was guided by the belief that the Washington Post's mission "is to provide through the newsroom nonpartisan news for all Americans, and thought-provoking, reported views from our opinion team to help our readers make up their own minds."

Lewis doesn't explain why, if that was the case, the Washington Post editorial board endorsed candidates for U.S. Senate and House earlier this month. If it is about the principle that readers should "make up their own minds," why does that principle only apply to presidential candidates?

Further, Lewis tried to insulate Bezos from the fallout. The Washington Post reported that the "decision to no longer publish presidential endorsements was made by The Post’s owner, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, according to four people who were briefed on the decision."

Lewis attempted to undermine his own paper's reporting, claiming that "[r]eporting around the role of The Washington Post owner and the decision not to publish a presidential endorsement has been inaccurate." But Lewis did not directly dispute that it was Bezos' decision. Instead, he said only that Bezos "was not sent, did not read and did not opine on any draft" — a claim that no one actually made.

Washington Post staff was not buying it. 17 members of the paper's opinion staff signed onto a statement calling the decision not to endorse a "terrible mistake." The Washington Post Guild, the union that represents the paper's reporters, said in a statement that the decision "undercuts the work of our members at a time when we should be building our readers’ trust, not losing it." Legendary Washington Post journalists Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward called the decision "surprising and disappointing, especially this late in the electoral process."

One could legitimately conclude that newspaper endorsements have outlived their usefulness. It is the timing and context of the Washington Post's change that is raising alarm bells.

The billionaire owner of the LA Times

Patrick Soon-Shiong, the billionaire owner of the LA Times, also abruptly demanded his publication stay neutral in the presidential election. Soon-Shiong bought the paper for $500 million in 2018.

Soon-Shiong is a healthcare and biotech entrepreneur whose companies rely on the federal government. His companies regularly seek FDA approval for new drugs, vaccines and therapies and federal funding for research.

The editorial board had planned to endorse Kamala Harris and publish a series of columns tentatively titled "The Case Against Trump." But in a post on X, Soon-Shiong said he offered the LA Times editorial board "the opportunity to draft a factual analysis of all the POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE policies by EACH candidate during their tenures at the White House, and how these policies affected the nation." Soon-Shiong said that "[i]nstead of adopting this path as suggested, the Editorial Board chose to remain silent and I accepted their decision."

Soon-Shiong did not explain why he did not demand a similar approach for U.S. House and Senate races, state ballot initiatives, and many other contests facing California voters. Beginning in September, the LA Times has endorsed in dozens of races up and down the ballot.

In response to the spiking of the presidential endorsement, 200 LA Times staff members signed an open letter calling on Soon-Shiong to "provide readers with an explanation for not issuing an endorsement, along with clarity about the broader endorsement process."

Three members of the paper's editorial board have resigned. "I am resigning because I want to make it clear that I am not okay with us being silent," Mariel Garza, the LA Times editorials editor, said. "In dangerous times, honest people need to stand up. This is how I’m standing up."

---

===

maybe premATURE, 1 DAY?

Newspaper front pages continue to bury Trump’s former chief-of-staff saying the former president is a fascist who praised Hitler

Only the Los Angeles Times focused a front-page article on John Kelly describing Trump as “the general definition of fascist” and saying he praised Hitler. The New York Times buried its own scoop.

Written by Courtney Hagle

Published 10/24/24 12:33 PM MMA

This week, The New York Times reported that former President Donald Trump’s former chief-of-staff John Kelly said Trump is a fascist, that he has expressed admiration for Adolf Hitler, and that he repeatedly denigrated soldiers and the military. The Los Angeles Times was the only one of five top U.S. newspapers to focus a front-page article on Kelly’s comments, while the Times continued to bury its own scoop.

The Times’ report, drawn from multiple interviews with Kelly, marked Kelly’s most extensive on-the-record comments about Trump. He detailed Trump’s “dictator approach to government” and concerning disregard for the Constitution, confirmed that Trump has made disparaging comments about the military and wounded soldiers, and spoke about Trump claiming that “Hitler did some good things.”

As Media Matters reported yesterday, the morning after the story broke, it was not covered on the print front pages of The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, or The New York Times.

Today, the story was adequately covered only on the front page of the Los Angeles Times, with the headline “Ex-aide: Trump is unfit, ‘fascist’.” The Washington Post discussed the comment in a piece focused on Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris calling out Trump, titled “Harris, in escalation, calls Trump a fascist.” As journalist Adam Serwer noted, the frame served to position Kelly’s comments as an “aside in a bigger story framed as a partisan attack by his rival.”

The Wall Street Journal and USA Today did not cover the news on their front pages at all. Neither did The New York Times, which placed its own reporting on A12 of today’s print edition. [PIX OF FT PAGES]

===

mma 10 24

During a segment analyzing Vice President Kamala Harris’ and former President Donald Trump’s Univision town halls, host Elián Zidán failed to contextualize Trump’s connections to Project 2025, citing the network’s fact-checking division elDetector to misleadingly say it is false that Project 2025 is “Donald Trump’s plan if he is elected president.”

Project 2025 — a comprehensive transition plan organized by right-wing think tank The Heritage Foundation to guide the next GOP presidential administration — is the conservative movement’s most robust policy and staffing proposal for a potential second Trump White House. Its extreme agenda represents a threat to democracy, civil rights, the climate, and more. The project has deep ties to Trump; as CNN reported, “at least 140 people who worked in the Trump administration had a hand in Project 2025.”

During a segment called “Después de las Respuestas,” Zidán, who is the host of Noticiero Univision Edición Nocturna, highlighted a quote from Harris during her own town hall in which she said, “I urge everyone to look into Project 2025, which is Donald Trump's plan if he is elected president.” Without context, Zidán said that according to elDetector, the statement is “false. And that is [because] this 900-page text was developed by the Heritage Foundation … not Donald Trump.”

Video

CitationFrom the October 17, 2024, edition of Univision's Noticiero Univision

ILIA CALDERÓN: Very good, let's now invite Elián Zidán. He has elDetector of truths, lies, and also misleading statements from the candidates during both town halls. Elián.

ELIÁN ZIDÁN: Ilia, Felix, Enrique. That's right. During the town hall, Kamala Harris said, and I quote, “I urge everyone to look into Project 2025, which is Donald Trump's plan if he is elected president." According to elDetector, this statement is, let’s see, it’s false. And that is [because] this 900-page document was developed by the Heritage Foundation, an organization that also leads conservative reforms. Not Donald Trump.

The Trump campaign has lately attempted to distance itself from efforts to promote or speculate about “future presidential staffing or policy announcements.” However, Project 2025 is significantly more developed than the Trump campaign’s transition initiative, called Agenda47. And given that the Heritage plan has the backing of virtually the entire conservative movement and links to numerous former Trump officials and advisers, it appears all but inevitable that Trump and his allies will rely on the policies and personnel assembled by Project 2025 if he is reelected in November.

Connections between Trump and his allies to the Heritage Foundation and Project 2025 include:

//

  1. ### Univision knows how to fact-check Trump. Will the network do it during his town hall?

10/09/24

  1. ### Maduro, Castro, Ortega: Spanish-language right-wing media compare Democrats to Latin American dictators

08/27/24

  1. ### The right’s incendiary immigration rhetoric is spreading in Spanish media

04/22/24

---

Hurricane Milton spurred deeper climate coverage. But national TV news shouldn't need historic storms to connect weather and warming.

10/16/24 mma

---

===

Broadcast news shows and print outlets largely ignored Gen. Milley calling Trump “fascist to the core”

Only one article from The Washington Post and one segment from NBC News covered the comments

Written by Tyler Monroe

Published 10/14/24 3:01 PM EDT

Reporting surfaced on October 11 that Milley called Trump “fascist to the core” in comments reported in journalist Bob Woodward's upcoming book War. The comments were the latest in a long back and forth between Milley and Trump, with the former president previously suggesting Milley be executed for his comments that Trump was “shameful” and “complicit” in the January 6 attack.

Broadcast and print news almost completely ignored Milley’s characterization of Trump as “fascist.” From October 11, when the comments were first reported, through 12 p.m. ET on October 14, ABC’s Good Morning America, World News Tonight, and This Week; CBS’ Mornings, Evening News, and Face the Nation; and NBC’s Today and Nightly News all failed to mention Milley's comments. Among corporate broadcast news programs, only NBC's Meet the Press discussed the comments at all, with anchor Kristen Welker asking former Rep. Liz Cheney about Milley's comments.

Media Matters also reviewed print articles across five of the top U.S. newspapers by circulation for coverage of Milley's comments and found only one article in The Washington Post mentioning them. The Los Angeles Times, USA Today, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal all failed to cover Milley's comments calling Trump fascist.

On the October 11, 2024, edition of All in with Chris Hayes, Ian Bassin stressed the need for the American press to put the comments from Milley on “banner headlines.”

===

why is GUK and FT better than US?

an 1024

kns

Republican strategist's attempt to minimize former President Donald Trump's threat of "enemies within" spurred a swift fact check and heated debate on CNN Monday morning.

Conservative commentator Shermichael Singleton was checked by CNN anchor Jim Acosta as he tried to claim Trump's threat to sic the military on political enemies was limited only to those who live in the U.S. without citizenship status.

"I think he's talking about immigration," Singleton said. "And when you look at—"

The video player is currently playing an ad.

"No, no, no," interrupted Acosta. "He was talking about what he called radical left people in this country. Americans. Political opponents."

Singleton shrugged off what Acosta described as a "dangerous" threat — arguing Republicans cared more about policy than rhetoric — and in doing so outraged Democratic strategist Julia Roginsky.

"Let me just say something right now," Roginsky said. "This is not Donald Trump saying crazy stuff...he's done this before."

Roginsky argued Trump meant what he said at a Coachella rally over the weekend that he'd bully Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) into supporting his border control policies by threatening to withhold "fire money....for all the forest fires."

She pointed to recent reports from two former staffers who said Trump tried to block wildfire relief from reaching California in 2018 until he was shown voter data proving supporters lived there and raised a crucial concern.

"There were people around him [during his first term] to stop the worst impulses...they're not going to be there this time around," she said. "He's basically letting the voters know that, you know, this is what you're voting for."

When Acosta asked if Democrats needed to do more to call out Trump's authoritarian rhetoric, Roginsky replied with an incredulous shake of the head and a figurative finger pointed at his industry.

"The media has not done enough to call this out," Roginsky snapped back. "Here you have a fascist — and General Milley is right because all of the markers of a fascist exist in Donald Trump — and yet our news media has not done enough, by any stretch of the imagination, to call this out."

As proof, Roginsky pointed to intense media scrutiny of President Joe Biden's age and Gov. Tim Walz' (D-MN) location during the Tiananmen Square protests 35 years ago.

Singleton, given a chance to respond, interestingly did not slap back with a defense of his political party — but of colleagues in the media he argued could not be blamed for focusing more important issues than Trump's rhetoric.

"We have covered it," he said. "i just think there are far more consequential issues that impact people's day-to-day lives."

"With all do respect," Roginsky replied, "Take a look at the ratio. This is an existential problem."

---

===

The good, the bad, and the ugly of Sunday morning political shows’ coverage of Hurricane Helene misinformation

Impacted states are pleading for bad actors to stop spreading deliberate misinformation

Special ProgramsClimate & Energy

Written by Allison Fisher

Published 10/07/24 mma

Misinformation related to the ongoing response to Hurricane Helene, which has created widespread devastation across six states and left at least 232 dead, is disrupting relief operations, and a number of local and state officials are calling on bad actors and the Trump campaign to stop spreading the lies.

The Sunday morning political shows attempted to address this hurricane misinformation with varying degrees of success. With the exception of Fox News Sunday, all the shows rightly pointed out the threat misinformation and unfounded conspiracy theories pose to the response efforts while flagging some of the most prevalent lies polluting these efforts.

The most prevalent misinformation has centered on the distribution of Federal Emergency Management Agency aid, specifically the false claims that federal assistance is limited to $750 per affected individual and that FEMA funds are lacking due to spending on immigrant assistance. Bad actors have also pushed an overarching falsehood that the response has been a failure.

Both ABC and CBS hosted good-faith actors who debunked the falsehoods while also confirming that the federal efforts have been strong. CNN and NBC hosted bad actors who refused to acknowledge the misinformation and continued to push the false claim that the federal efforts have been a failure even in the face of repeated fact checks by the anchors.

Even though the misinformation appears to be constructed to attack the response of the Biden-Harris administration, none of the networks provided the context that former president Trump has a track record of doing what he accused the federal government of, such as withholding hurricane disaster relief to North Carolina and Puerto Rico allegedly for political reasons or the recent revelations that Trump “refused to approve disaster aid for California after deadly wildfires in 2018 because of the state’s Democratic leanings.”

Material to misinformation around the adequacy of FEMA funds is the fact that Republicans, just days before Hurricane Helene made landfall, voted down additional FEMA funds requested by the White House, and House Speaker Mike Johnson has declined Biden’s request to convene Congress to consider a special relief package for impacted states. However, these facts were also absent from the coverage.

The good: ABC, CBS focused on misinformation and officials’ explanations that it can hamper recovery efforts

ABC’s *This Week* foregrounded an interview with FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell by reporting that “in North Carolina, they are still working to survey the damage and to reach survivors as a wave of misinformation from the former president and his allies hampers the recovery effort.”

They added: … “In the wake of Trump's various claims, FEMA launching an anti-rumor tool this week to combat those messages, with local officials calling on people to ignore online falsehoods. … Law enforcement is monitoring threats towards public officials prompted by disinformation and conspiracy theories, including specific individuals linked to FEMA and other recovery agencies.”

Video

CitationFrom the October 6, 2024, edition of ABC's This Week

In the interview, ABC anchor George Stephanopoulos asked Criswell whether they had the resources they needed. She responded:

“Absolutely, George. We, again, we moved resources in before this storm happened. We embedded our staff in the state to work side by side so we could quickly employ those resources to where they were needed, and as we continue to see how long we're going to have to provide this level of sustained support, we will continue to do that.”

Criswell also lamented about the misinformation that “we're putting politics ahead of helping people,” while emphasizing the danger. “I need to make sure I can get the resources to where they’re needed, and when you have this dangerous rhetoric like you're hearing, it creates fear in our own employees,” she said.

On CBS’*Face the Nation*, moderator Margaret Brennan reported that a North Carolina state senator had been “posting on Facebook asking people to stop conspiracy theory junk” and asked Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC), “Who or what is fueling that kind of misinformation and do you think it is harming recovery efforts?” He responded in part:

“Many of the observations are not even from people on the ground. I believe that we have to stay focused on rescue operations, recovery operations, clearing operations, and we don't need any of these distractions on the ground. It’s at the expense of the hard-working first responders and people that are just trying to recover their life.”

Brennan also questioned Tillis on the misinformation that Trump and others in right-wing media are spreading, such as falsely claiming that money intended for hurricane relief was being diverted to immigrants.

Tillis expressed disapproval of the administration’s border policy but capitulated that it was not impacting the hurricane response, saying: “We have the resources that we need. We're going to have to go back and pass more resources. We could have a discussion about the failure of this administration's border policies and the billions of dollars it’s costing. But right now, not yet is it affecting the flow of resources to Western North Carolina.”

“It has not been a factor, to be clear,” Brennan emphasized.

### The bad: CNN, NBC brought on Trump campaign spokesperson Lara Trump and Sen. Tom Cotton, and both spread misinformation

On CNN’s State of the Union, anchor Dana Bash tried to fact-check Trump’s misinformation in an interview with Lara Trump, but the Trump campaign spokesperson persisted in her false claims.

Bash brought up specific misinformation spread by the right-wing media and Trump, including that “FEMA is only offering $750 to Americans who have had their homes destroyed.”

“That's not true,” she clarified. “He's also echoing conspiracy theorists online who falsely claimed that the administration is redirecting disaster money for undocumented immigrants.”

In response, Trump doubled down on the false claims and repeatedly insisted that there is a relationship between the migrant crisis and the hurricane response, falsely claiming, “You have migrants being housed in luxury hotels in New York City. We have paid so much money from our tax dollars into the crisis that didn't need to happen. We could redirect money to help people immediately on the ground.”

Video

CitationFrom the October 6, 2024, edition of CNN's State of the Union

While Bash repeatedly fact-checked Trump’s response, she still provided a platform for the Trump campaign to push hurricane response lies and create the impression that the federal government’s relief efforts have been lacking.

Similarly, on NBC’s*Meet the Press* anchor Kristen Welker questioned Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) about hurricane misinformation, stating, “We know former President Trump has made, quite frankly, a series of baseless claims, including that the Biden administration is intentionally withholding aid from where Republicans live, also saying that FEMA funds are being redirected to migrants. Both those claims have been debunked. They’re false.”

Cotton twice claimed that Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp is calling the response “lackluster,” even after Welker corrected that Kemp “said we got what we needed.”

Cotton also falsely claimed that it took days to deploy helicopters and claimed that “there's not enough money left in the fund” while suggesting that the reason is because billions of dollars have been spent to put up migrants “in hotels and give them room service and maids.”

Welker fact-checked his response, saying, “Those funds are coming from a different federal fund, not from disaster relief, just to be clear. And what DHS Secretary Mayorkas said is that it has the money it needs for now, but not necessarily through the end of the year for future hurricanes.” But Cotton doubled down, saying:

“It is true that FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security have been spending billions of dollars on migrants. … I would note that this administration seems to have no problem finding money when they want to spend it on their priorities. When they need hundreds of billions to pay off student loans for graduate students in gender studies programs, they somehow find it. When it's trying to get helicopters to deliver food and water and cellular service and life-saving medicine into the mountain valleys, they somehow can't seem to find the money.”

Welker reiterated that the funds are different and that millions have already been distributed to those impacted.

In his newsletter, media critic Oliver Darcy asked about Cotton, “Why do news networks continue to invite the dishonest GOP senator on to abuse their platforms in the first place?”

Darcy was referring to Cotton continuing to lie about the 2020 election, but the point stands for his refusal to set the record straight on FEMA funding as well. Darcy went on to add:

As Jake Tapper — who also recently invited Cotton on his program — said years ago in the aftermath of the insurrection, “If you’re willing to lie about [the election], what else are you willing to lie about? And why should my viewers listen to you?”

### The ugly: Fox News Sunday glossed over misinformation and aired an inaccurate Trump statement without context

Fox News Sunday’scoverage of Hurricane Helene failed to cover the ongoing issue of misinformation altogether, instead focusing on the two presidential candidates’ recent comments on recovery efforts, reporting that Vice President Kamala Harris returned this week to North Carolina and “pledged ongoing federal support” and “former President Trump has said the current administration has done a lousy job.”

The show punctuated the statement with a clip of Trump saying: “They are doing the worst job on a hurricane than any administration has ever done.”

Video

CitationFrom the October 6, 2024, edition of Fox News Sunday

This is false: While the storm, made worse by climate change, is among the most deadly to hit the United States mainland, the response started even before the storm made landfall and is ongoing.

The Biden administration has approvedfederal assistance for multiple states, including Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, Virginia, and Georgia. On September 29, the White House released an updated fact sheet detailing the administration's “continued response efforts to Hurricane Helene,” noting that tens of thousands of state and federal personnel are helping victims across several states. This includes 50,000 personnel helping to fix power outages, 3,300 personnel allocating federal resources and helping with search and rescue operations, and 200 medical responders providing health services.

On October 2, Biden approved deployment of up to 1,000 active-duty soldiers to support the delivery of food, water, and other critical commodities to impacted communities.

===

thom 3

an 9 24 no lnx

this week may well see a court decide the fate and future of Fox “News” and thus the Republican Party, at least in its current hard-right neofascist form. And odds are Fox viewers are blissfully ignorant about the pitched battle that just played out in a Reno courtroom over the future of their beloved propaganda outlet.

Sir Keith Murdoch was the notoriously racist and misogynist owner of a small newspaper chain in Australia. It was inherited by his son, Rupert, who — using sensationalism and bigotry — turned it into a multi-billion-dollar enterprise that spans three continents.

Former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd called Rupert Murdoch “the greatest cancer on the Australian democracy” in the pages of The Sydney Morning Herald, the New York Times of Australia. Noting that Murdoch owns about “two thirds of the country’s print media,” Rudd wrote:

“In Britain, Murdoch made Brexit possible because of the position taken by his papers. In the United States, Murdoch's Fox News is the political echo chamber of the far right, which enabled the Tea Party and then the Trump party to stage a hostile takeover of the Republican Party. In Australia, as in America, Murdoch has campaigned for decades in support of tax cuts for the wealthy, killing action on climate change and destroying anything approximating multiculturalism.”

When Rupert was divorcing his second wife he put most of the family’s businesses into a trust, apparently to prevent her from grabbing a larger share of his wealth. The terms of that trust stipulate that when Rupert dies, his four children — Lachlan, James, Elisabeth, and Prudence — would share equal votes and power over the business dynasty their father had inherited from his father.

But now Rupert — who’s 93 years old — is having second thoughts, because James, Elisabeth, and Prudence are apparently not all that enthusiastic about Fox “News” and other Murdoch media outlets nakedly lying to and whipping up hatred among their viewers and readers, both here, in Australia, and in the UK. Only Lachlan, Rupert’s oldest son, is loyal to his father’s vision of peddling-hate-for-billions-in-profits.

So, Rupert went to court in Reno — the proceedings are sealed, but the case began last week and wrapped up yesterday (although we don’t yet know the result) — to try to break the trust and hand exclusive or primary control of his fiefdom to Lachlan.

Fox “News” viewers have no idea that they’re being constantly lied to, both by commission (like telling them the 2020 election was stolen by voting machines) and by omission. They think they’re seeing the world “as it is” and getting fair and balanced “truth” and “straight talk,” which is why Fox “News” is so potent.

Without Fox “News” there probably never would have been a January 6th coup attempt, and, given how thin their margins were, likely no 2000 Bush or 2016 Trump presidencies.

The stakes here are enormous. Some media observers believe that a major role in Barack Obama’s 2008 victory was Air America broadcasting my program and others to well over two-thirds of America with big stations in 62 major markets. (That ended when Mitt Romney decided to run for president and had his company buy Clear Channel, then flip all of the stations Air America was leasing from them from progressive talk to sports, killing the network in 2010.)

Similarly, the rise of Fox following Reagan fast-tracking Murdoch’s US citizenship has played a huge role in Republican victories across the nation and the solid hold the GOP has on red state America, where Fox and rightwing hate radio predominate.

Activist investors in the Fox media caliphate have tried to force a vote at the upcoming shareholders’ meeting that would require Fox “News” to label their opinion programming — which constitutes most of their programming — as “opinion.” An attorney for the activist shareholder group, Luke Morgan, told US News & World Report:

“There can hardly be a more significant issue for Fox than its misinformation problem. This is precisely the sort of issue that is appropriate for shareholder input.”

Nonetheless, to Murdoch’s great delight, no doubt, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) ruled last week that Fox doesn’t have to start informing its viewers when their talent crosses the line from reporting to indoctrinating.

Weirdly, this drama within an Australian family may well determine the fate and future of the Republican Party and the conservative and MAGA movements in the US. The future of democracy in America.

It’s a real-life Succession drama and may take months to resolve.

Keep an eye on this story. While it’s probably the most under-reported major news story in America right now, the outcome will have far-reaching consequences for all of us.

---

Broadcast news, Fox News failed to cover deaths stemming from Georgia's six-week abortion ban

09/19/24 mma

===

Mirroring how ABC’s debate moderators treated climate change, cable news networks aired 31 hours of post-debate coverage without a single mention of climate

Special ProgramsClimate & Energy

Written by Evlondo Cooper

Published 09/16/24 mma

ABC News relegated climate change to a brief, last-minute question during the September 10 presidential debate — even as millions of Americans faced a stark backdrop of climate-driven disasters.

The consequences of this choice to downplay the climate crisis extended beyond the debate itself — major cable news networks completely ignored the issue in more than 31 hours of combined post-debate coverage.

This omission highlights a systemic issue in news media: The frequent deprioritization of climate change despite the urgent and pervasive harm global warming is causing to communities across the country. In fact, 99% of Americans experienced at least one alert for extreme heat, wildfires, storms, or flooding this summer.

As climate-related events continue to reshape America, this lack of substantive coverage from influential news sources raises significant concerns about public awareness of this critical issue in the context of the 2024 election.

Climate activist and founder and director of Fossil Free Media Jamie Henn captured the frustration of many observers in a post that encapsulated the moderators’ negligent climate coverage during the debate, adding that “it basically sums up the American mainstream media's approach [to] the issue”:

These observations highlight the disconnect between the urgency of the climate crisis and its treatment in presidential debates. This disconnect was further amplified during the extensive post-debate coverage, where climate change was conspicuously absent despite cable news networks dedicating significant airtime to analyzing the debate:

ABC's deprioritization of climate during the debate marked a step backwards from recent improvements. By relegating climate to a brief, last-minute question, the network’s moderators failed to build on the more substantive climate discussions in 2020, signaling to other news outlets that it was not a priority topic. This editorial decision had a ripple effect, influencing the focus of post-debate coverage across the major cable news channels.

Other issues raised during the debate, such as reproductive rights and immigration, received correspondingly in-depth coverage in post-debate discussions. In contrast, the brief treatment of climate change led to its complete omission from subsequent coverage. Networks instead filled this void with predictable partisan narratives, further sidelining this important topic.

This systemic neglect reflects and reinforces the marginalization of climate issues in political discourse. The cumulative effect is a missed opportunity to inform voters about a critical issue, contributing to the ongoing cycle of climate inaction in politics and media.

These events highlight the importance of moderators getting presidential candidates to discuss climate change. However, the responsibility extends beyond these high-profile debates. Throughout the election cycle, national TV news outlets must rise to the challenge of conveying the gravity of the climate crisis to the American public.

Climate change impacts the economy, national security, public health, and many other issues. News coverage should highlight these connections, showing how global warming is reshaping Americans’ lives and intersecting with key election issues.

National TV news networks must also provide voters with comprehensive information on candidates’ climate stances, pushing beyond sound bites to examine the details and effects of their proposals. Voters deserve to understand how potential leaders plan to address this existential threat with the urgency it deserves.

Finally, cable news outlets should treat climate change as a central, not peripheral, election issue, and emphasize its connections to other policy concerns. By integrating climate discussions into wider election coverage, news outlets can elevate this vital issue to the forefront of political discourse, providing voters with the comprehensive information they need to make informed decisions about our shared future.

===

alternet-Home | Corporate media keeps hiding the the truth about madman Donald Trump

Corporate media keeps hiding the the truth about madman Donald Trump

D. Earl Stephens

September 15, 2024.

We have a complete madman running for the President of the United States, and it would be about damn time our national media started reporting it this way.

We are just over seven weeks from a landmark election that will determine America’s standing in the world, and her ability to protect the rights, welfare and lives of her citizens.

With all of this on the line, we have bitterly learned that we can no longer count on the fourth estate.

It’s a terrible thing. They have catastrophically failed us like never before.

We have been forced to wait helplessly, and wonder if these incompetent, ponderous idiots will ever stop ignoring what is so clearly right in front of our tired eyes: a dangerous maniac backed by a massive propaganda network that disgracefully fills his dark, billowing sails, allowing him to rumble unchecked and uncovered across the American countryside, taking a blowtorch to the truth, dead aim on our vote and our election workers, and repeating insane, dangerous and racist conspiracy theories that assault our senses, and could well result in the death of our democracy and many of our citizens.

That run-on sentence has never needed writing more, because while I typed it, our media continued to massively underreport, and even disgracefully normalize its chilling message.

This is NOT OK, people.

We must demand that our collective media FINALLY removes their blinders and their heads from their asses and starts reporting on what WE KNOW they have been seeing and hearing from the 300-lb. sack of dirt, and his revolting followers in Congress who swoon at his fat, little feet to provide him cover.

Donald J. Trump means America harm, goddamnit, and he is getting sicker and crazier by the minute.

So tell me: At what point does this become the only thing worth leading every major media outlet in this country????

At its core, the mission of the working press is cut and dry and pretty easily executed: Reporters and news departments are assigned to cover various beats and report out to the American people about what is happening in their coverage areas. The press has the privilege of being where we too often can’t, so that they can tell us what has transpired on the football field, or the court room, or a theater of war, or the school board meeting, or on the election trail …

We depend on them to be our eyes and ears, to describe as vividly as possible what is happening where they are. We depend on them to provide this information to the editorial leaders in their respective newsrooms, who are tasked with processing it all and giving it the weight and “play” it deserves.

We depend on their news sense and professionalism to understand what is important and what isn't.

We depend on them to be accurate and credible, because without those two things, they are done, and we all suffer for it.

Again, it really isn’t that difficult a job to carry out, but man, is it monumentally important.

Well, right now our incompetent and potentially bought-off media is making a complete and utter mess of things, and only a damn fool would rate their coverage of this election as even remotely accurate and credible.

It’s an absolute disgrace is what it is.

The Republican candidate for president is a complete madman. A racist. Unhinged.

Even the slightest amount of fact-checking and casual observation would confirm this.

So WHY isn’t it being reported this way????

We are in the middle of a national emergency, and I am going to continue to use my small but sturdy platform built on years in the newspaper business to ask just one more time:

What the hell is going on in our nation’s newsrooms? WHAT can they possibly be covering that is more important than the most serious internal threat to America since the Civil War?

We must ALL keeping asking these questions until we get a damn answer. Our safety and our democracy depend on it.

The guy they are normalizing is a slovenly, dirty old man incapable of cogently reciting even the most basic political policy. That should be the very least we expect from a candidate — even policy that was written FOR HIM like Project 2025.

The guy they are bucking up as some legitimate candidate often forgets where he is, and confuses people all the time. He talks up murderous dictators like Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un, and talks down leaders — even American presidents — who have stood with us for decades.

This is what traitors do.

He doesn't understand or respect NATO, geopolitical affairs, or even American history. And he damn sure doesn’t understand the economy. Trump’s hotel and casino businesses have declared bankruptcy SIX times. He couldn’t even sell steaks, for crying out loud. So listen to me, you media suckers, and take this note:

Trump inherited a perfectly good economy from Barack Obama in 2016, who brought us back from the brink after Republican George W. Bush’s disastrous presidency, and left it smoldering in flames by the time he finally exited the scene by taking a torch to our Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Were any you watching this????? Seriously, WERE YOU????

Look, just because he SAYS he built a great economy during his repulsive four years in the White House does not make it so. Why not do some real reporting, and look into that?

He often gives answers to even the easiest questions as if he were auditioning to be the star of some deranged carnival. Here’s but one answer of hundreds like this, he offered up about providing affordable child care last week:

Well, I would do that, and we’re sitting down — you know, I was, somebody, we had Senator Marco Rubio, and my daughter Ivanka was so impactful on that issue. It’s a very important issue. But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about, that — because, look, child care is child care. It’s, couldn’t, you know, there’s something, you have to have it — in this country, you have to have it.

But when you talk about those numbers compared to the kind of numbers that I’m talking about, by taxing foreign nations at levels that they’re not used to — but they’ll get used to it very quickly — and it’s not gonna stop them from doing business with us. But they’ll have a very substantial tax when they send product into our country.

Those numbers are so much bigger than any numbers that we’re talking about, including child care, that it’s going to take care.

We’re gonna have — I look forward to having no deficits within a fairly short period of time, coupled with the reductions that I told you about on waste and fraud and all of the other things that are going on in our country, because I have to stay with child care.

I want to stay with child care, but those numbers are small relative to the kind of economic numbers that I’m talking about, including growth, but growth also headed up by what the plan is that I just, that I just told you about.

We’re gonna be taking in trillions of dollars, and as much as child care is talked about as being expensive, it’s, relatively speaking, not very expensive compared to the kind of numbers we’ll be taking in. We’re going to make this into an incredible country that can afford to take care of its people, and then we’ll worry about the rest of the world.

Let’s help other people, but we’re going to take care of our country first. This is about America first. It’s about Make America Great Again. We have to do it because right now we’re a failing nation, so we’ll take care of it. Thank you. Very good question. Thank you.

Well? That’s a direct quote right there.

Time and again, you sanitize all this crap as if it were your job to listen to the nuclear-grade bullshit he spits out about God knows what, and twist yourself in a pretzel trying to explain to your readers what you think he was trying to say.

That is NOT your job, you fools. Your job is to simply report word for word what he said. And if it doesn’t make any sense, well you better damn well report it that way.

And what about Tuesday night’s debate? That one should have mercifully ended his career forever. He was so overmatched, so insane and so revolting, that the very least one of his gross lackeys could have done was lasso him and use a two-ton winch to drag him off the stage.

Instead, the aforementioned Rubio called it “a big win” for his master.

Senator Lindsey Graham said he had “the best closing in presidential debate history.”

Both of these feeble men warned us of the dangers of Trump in 2016. Now they disgracefully run cover for him. Is this no longer worth a mention? Can they ever be trusted again?

Here’s what your headline should have been after that debate:

TRUMP AGAIN PROVES HIMSELF COMPLETELY UNFIT FOR LEADERSHIP

I didn’t see that one anywhere. Why? What debate were you watching?

His despicable attack on Haitian-Americans right now, is no different than his attack on Asian-Americans four years ago, or his attack on Mexican-Americans four years before that. And what about his lifelong attacks on Black Americans, including the repulsive “birther issue” he created in the dark pit that doubles as his filthy mind to attack Obama?

He is the literal definition of a bigot. Why won’t you call him that? Does accuracy scare you?

His is a mountain of steaming hate — the throttle between his addled brain and filthy mouth is now completely burned out and inoperable. He’s the racist drunk at the end of the bar screaming into his empty shot glass and trying to make all his miserable problems everybody else’s.

He’s a convicted felon, admitted woman-abuser, and is charged with violently attacking the United States of America.

There is literally nothing he won’t do to win this election.

NOTHING.

Do any of you doubt he will will continue to incite violence when he loses on November 5th? Do any of you doubt that were he to win he would order his orcs to exact revenge on anybody and everybody he deems disloyal, including you? Do any of you have any doubt he will spread all manner of lies and hate between now and election day that will further muddy the waters of our once unassailably honest election system?

Any doubt at all?

Why aren’t you reporting it then? Why aren’t you giving this the urgency the potential end of our country as we know it demands? People’s lives are on the line, you blithering idiots.

This is the biggest story you will ever cover and you are blowing it so catastrophically I literally shake every time I am forced to address it.

You are cowards, you are worthless, and you have failed in your quest to uphold your most basic responsibility to the public: accurately and credibly reporting the truth.

The end of America is potentially here, and you are either too damn stupid to know it, or worse: complicit in its demise.

Those are the facts, and it would be about damn time you started paying attention to them.

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here.

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Sunday morning political talk shows failed to highlight dangerous Trump comments from over the weekend

09/09/24 mma

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see normalizing

an 9 24

Dangerously misleading': How the beltway media sanitizes Trump’s 'unhinged' rambling

Alex Henderson

September 04, 2024

Former President Donald Trump often accuses the mainstream media of pushing "fake news" when they give him any type of negative coverage. The mainstream media, Trump argues, are hopelessly biased against him. And Trump has, at times, even accused right-wing Fox News and Fox Business of being unfair to him in their coverage.

But journalist Parker Molloy has a totally different perspective.

In an article published by The New Republic on September 4, Molloy argues that many mainstream media reporters are guilty of "sanitizing" Trump in their coverage and downplaying just how "unhinged" his "incoherent ramblings" are.

READ MORE:Deep-red states meet 'wall of hostility' in forcing Christian nationalism on public schools

Molloy previously addressed this topic in an article published by Media Matters on March 12, 2020. And the reporter believes the problem has "only worsened" since then.

"As Trump's statements grow increasingly unhinged in his old age," Molloy warns, "major news outlets continue to reframe his words, presenting a dangerously misleading picture to the public."

Molloy cites the New York Times' recent coverage of Trump's speech at Moms for Liberty's annual summit as an example.

"While speaking at an event put on by the extremist group Moms for Liberty," Molloy observes, "Trump spread a baseless conspiracy theory that 'your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation' — referring to transition-related surgeries for trans people. In their write-up of the event, a glowing piece about how Trump 'charmed' this group of 'conservative moms,' the Times didn't even mention the moment where he blathered on and on about a crazy conspiracy that has and will never happen."

READ MORE:'Gender chasm': GOP panics over huge Harris lead among women as Trump chases 'bro vote'

Molloy emphasizes that reporters do their audience a disservice when they treat Trump like a normal politician and fail to adequately report the more "unhinged" things he says.

"This 'sanewashing' of Trump's statements isn't just poor journalism; it's a form of misinformation that poses a threat to democracy," Molloy argues. "By continually reframing Trump's incoherent and often dangerous rhetoric as conventional political discourse, major news outlets are failing in their duty to inform the public and are instead providing cover for increasingly erratic behavior from a former — and potentially future — president."

Molloy continues, "The consequences of this journalistic malpractice extend far beyond misleading headlines. By laundering Trump's words in this fashion, the media is actively participating in the erosion of our shared reality."

READ MORE:'They all think you’re nuts': Latest Conway ad shows GOP voices in Trump’s head

*Read Parker Molloy's full article for The New Republic at this link.

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Chevron’s faux news site exploits local journalism’s decline, epitomizing the fossil fuel industry’s insidious greenwashing strategies

Special ProgramsClimate & Energy

Written by Evlondo Cooper

:{:{Published 08/28/24}:

Chevron-sponsored “news” site Permian Proud represents one of the fossil fuel industry's latest and most insidious greenwashing strategies, exploiting the decline of local journalism to shape public opinion in oil-rich regions. This tactic epitomizes a broader trend of deceptive practices by Big Oil, which — combined with national TV news’ failure to scrutinize the industry amid the escalating climate crisis — highlights an urgent need for robust accountability reporting.

Chevron's PR firm published a local “news” site without journalists

Felicia Alvarez's investigation for Floodlight, published in the Louisiana Illuminator, exposed Chevron's Permian Proud as a calculated ploy to manipulate public opinion under the guise of local journalism. The site, devoid of actual reporters or editors, is crafted by a San Francisco PR firm and a Chevron public affairs adviser, eliminating any pretense of editorial independence or journalistic integrity.

A search of the Permian Proud’s two-year-old website shows just a smattering of stories about climate change or greenhouse gas emissions — despite the oil and gas industry’s leading role in causing the climate crisis. As of Aug. 12, there were two stories mentioning climate change; one is a recap of a Texas Tribune series about training oil and gas workers and the other quotes a Chevron official about new techniques for measuring methane emissions.

The site has plenty of articles boasting of the importance of the Permian Basin and Chevron, sprinkled in with coverage of events, sports and awards given to local residents.

One story reported on Chevron receiving the highest environmental rating in the Permian Basin. Another announced that Chevron plans to boost its production to meet U.S. energy needs.

And the site reported on a $145,000 company donation to help students in Carlsbad, New Mexico — to pursue careers in energy and natural resources.

Notably absent is any critical coverage of the oil industry's environmental impact or role in the escalating climate crisis — and an eroding local media landscape leaves local residents vulnerable to a distorted view of the oil industry's true impact on their communities and the planet.

“Many of the counties within the Permian Basin are considered ‘news deserts,’ or areas with limited access to local, credible news sources,” Alvarez writes. “Of the 61 counties considered part of the Permian Basin region in Texas, 13 counties had no local newspapers, and the majority had only one newspaper, according to the news desert map maintained by the University of North Carolina.”

Alvarez reveals that Permian Proud isn't an isolated experiment:

It is also part of a network of Chevron-owned news outlets amplifying the company's viewpoint while publishing feel-good stories about local events and people. The same San Francisco public relations firm that provides content for Permian Proud runs the Richmond Standard news site in Richmond, California. It also operates an English-language website in Ecuador, where the energy giant has fought back decades of litigation.

This model, replicated across Chevron's operational areas, forms part of a broader strategy to control the narrative as the fossil fuel industry faces mounting scrutiny.

Permian Proud ignores climate crisis as Texas faces escalating climate disasters and environmental injustice

Texas recently endured a record-breaking heat wave, with temperatures soaring above 110 F in multiple cities. The Washington Post reported that Abilene shattered its all-time high at 113 F, while other cities set new August records. This extreme heat isn't just uncomfortable, it's potentially deadly — and it’s straining the state's power grid to its limits.

This recent crisis is just the latest example of Texas’ extreme vulnerability to climate change. A stark analysis from Public Citizen reveals that between 1980 and 2022, a staggering 44% of all billion-dollar climate and weather disasters in the country affected Texas. The state faces an onslaught of heat waves, hurricanes, floods, droughts, and wildfires that are increasing in both frequency and intensity.

The climate crisis is also creating significant financial impacts for Texas residents. Erin Douglas of The Texas Tribune reported that insurance rates in Texas have skyrocketed by 22% in 2023, twice the average national increase. Even more troubling, “many areas of the state are likely underpriced relative to their climate risk, according to a model created by the First Street Foundation, a nonprofit group of academics and experts that quantifies climate risks,” suggesting that the financial strain on homeowners is only set to worsen.

Notably, the fossil fuel industry operating in Texas bears outsized responsibility for climate change, amplifying the risks facing communities across the state:

Texas emits more greenhouse gas emissions than any other state, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. It accounts for 14% of the nation’s climate-warming emissions, and produces more than twice the total emissions of California, the next largest greenhouse gas emitter. Texas is also the nation’s largest oil and gas producing state, accounting for more than 40% of the nation’s oil production.

Beyond the climate impacts of the fossil fuel industry, Texas also faces severe environmental justice challenges. Low-income communities and communities of color bear a disproportionate burden of industrial pollution — in Port Arthur and Houston, the concentration of petrochemical facilities and other polluting industries near residential areas is a direct result of historical segregation and discriminatory land-use practices. The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality's permitting decisions, particularly for facilities like concrete batch plants in Harris County, have further entrenched these disparities, leading to ongoing health risks for vulnerable populations.

The fossil fuel industry deploys multifaceted deception campaigns like Permian Proud to delay climate action

As the climate crisis intensifies, the fossil fuel industry has shifted from outright denial to a broader PR campaign employing more insidious forms of deception. This multifaceted approach, exemplified by Chevron's Permian Proud, aims to manipulate public opinion and delay climate action.

Recent investigations reveal oil giants are targeting youth via gaming platforms, exploiting inconsistent social media ad labeling, and rebranding as “clean energy providers” while promoting false solutions. In addition, The Guardian exposed the industry's funding of legal efforts to block climate action, with the Republican Attorneys General Association receiving $5.8 million from oil and gas interests since 2020.

These coordinated efforts — from exploiting declining local journalism to influencing younger generations and funding legal challenges — demonstrate the fossil fuel industry’s determination to shape public opinion and policy in its favor. As climate change impacts worsen, the industry's tactics aim to preserve its dominance in a decarbonizing world despite scientific evidence demanding a rapid transition away from fossil fuels. Outlets like Permian Proud are just one facet of this larger industry campaign, underscoring the urgency of recognizing and counteracting these corporate greenwashing strategies.

Local news vacuum enables corporate narrative control

The erosion of local journalism in the United States has reached crisis levels, creating dangerous information vacuums. A Media Matters analysis in May starkly illustrated this problem: Donald Trump's recent corrupt offer to Big Oil executives, asking them to raise $1 billion for his presidential campaign while assuring that they'd be getting a “deal” due to the taxation and regulation they would avoid if he is reelected, was almost entirely ignored by top local newspapers and TV markets in key battleground states.

The 2023 Medill Local News Initiative report quantifies this crisis: Over 50% of U.S. counties now have just one local news source, or none at all. The rate of newspaper closures averages more than two per week, with 2,900 papers having shuttered since 2005 — and “all but about 100 were weeklies, which are often the sole provider of local news in small and mid-sized communities.” Most significantly, 43,000 newspaper journalists representing two-thirds of the industry's workforce have lost their jobs.

This systemic erosion of local news coverage is creating information vacuums across the country, leaving communities vulnerable to misinformation and unchecked corporate narratives — with far-reaching implications for public information and democracy. The absence of robust local journalism directly impacts civic engagement, political accountability, and public understanding of critical issues like climate change and climate solutions.

National TV news fails to consistently connect climate dots, enabling industry narratives

As local journalism crumbles, the responsibility of national media to provide comprehensive reporting about critical issues such as global warming becomes even more crucial.

However, recent Media Matters studies reveal that national outlets are falling short, particularly in their coverage of climate-related extreme weather events in places such as Texas. This failure at both the local and national level creates a dangerous information vacuum that fossil fuel companies like Chevron are eager to exploit.

In February, only 2% of cable and corporate broadcast news segments about the Texas wildfires mentioned climate change. Similarly, just 3 out of 21 broadcast news segments connected January’s Texas flooding to climate issues, while 5% of national TV news segments about the June 2023 Texas heat wave mentioned climate change.

This pattern of omission extends far beyond extreme weather coverage, undermining public understanding of the broader climate crisis. In 2023, for example, a mere 12% of climate segments on corporate broadcast networks mentioned fossil fuels. This persistent failure to connect the dots between fossil fuel consumption, global warming, and their cascading harms leaves viewers uninformed about the true drivers of climate change.

The information vacuum created by this lack of context in extreme weather reporting enables misleading narratives from the fossil fuel industry to flourish unchallenged. Chevron's Permian Proud, for instance, exploits this gap to further its Big Oil agenda, shaping public opinion in oil-rich regions without meaningful counterbalance from mainstream media. This vacuum also allows broader industry greenwashing campaigns to go largely unexamined.

Better news reporting on climate change and corporate accountability is crucial to combating industry narratives

Amid declining local journalism and inadequate national coverage, Chevron’s Permian Proud demonstrates that fossil fuel companies are increasingly willing to fill the void left by traditional journalism with their own content.

In the face of these corporate-sponsored narratives, real news outlets must be pressured to provide coverage that consistently connects extreme weather events and fossil fuels to climate change and potential solutions. This comprehensive approach is essential for public understanding of the climate crisis and for holding the fossil fuel industry accountable, empowering news audiences to cut through Big Oil's propaganda and understand the true scale of the challenge we face.

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How Oil Companies Manipulate Journalists | The Nation

drilled

“kill the story.”

That’s what Alan Jeffers, a media relations manager at ExxonMobil, told the Houston bureau chief of Reuters in October 2016, about a year after InsideClimate News, the Los Angeles Times, and Columbia Journalism School began publishing reports revealing ExxonMobil’s decades-long campaign to deny climate science.

https://www.thenation.com/

The Reuters bureau chief had forwarded Jeffers a press release from the Center for Media and Democracy about a filing the group made to the IRS alleging that the American Legislative Exchange Council was abusing its nonprofit status by lobbying for Exxon’s climate-denial policies. (The Reuters journalist did not respond to requests for comment.)

“It’s inaccurate and misleading to your readers and part of the activists’ stated objective to delegitimize a company that obeys the law, provides a product we couldn’t live without and generates significant jobs and economic activity for the country and the world,” Jeffers wrote.

“Hey man, I just said somebody asked me to file on it,” the Reuters bureau chief responded. “I didn’t say a story was going to run.”

Jeffers apologized (“clearly need more coffee… sorry again for the rant”) and forwarded the exchange to Cynthia White, Exxon’s then–government affairs manager.

“This is so great,” White wrote back. She joked that all Exxon employees should change their e-mail signatures to include Jeffers’s claims about activists trying to delegitimize the oil giant.

This exchange is part of a trove of 4,700 internal oil-and-gas-industry documents released by House Oversight Committee Democrats in late April in advance of its bicameral hearing with the Senate Budget Committee, “Denial, Disinformation, and Doublespeak: Big Oil’s Evolving Efforts to Avoid Accountability for Climate Change.” The documents are the second cache of materials obtained from a House Oversight investigation into the industry’s campaign to deceive the public on how its products drive the climate crisis.

As a reporter, it’s satisfying to see how the companies we cover talk about journalists in private. The documents range from company materials discussing marketing strategy to moments of internal strife as execs clash with colleagues and reporters. I have to confess to loving some of the mess, from higher-ups at Shell expressing frustrations about the company’s president to Exxon CEO Darren Woods taking issue with the use of spacing in a document.

Stepping back, these documents also reveal what coverage these fossil-fuel companies are pleased to receive, the kinds of reporters they try to curry favor with, and the ways they try to manipulate journalists. They also show how Big Oil could actually get a more pliant media it so desperately wants.

In September 2015, InsideClimate News and the Los Angeles Times, in collaboration with Columbia University, published their first reports on how ExxonMobil conducted its own climate-science research and yet for decades continued to fund climate denial and lobby for inaction on climate change. In an internal e-mail sent in early December of that year, Pamela Kevelson, then a corporate communications writer at Exxon, discussed how the company could continue to push back on the stories.

“We don’t actually dispute much of what these stories report…but it’s how you interpret the facts,” Kevelson wrote (emphasis in the original).

The question is why did THEY interpret the facts so negatively?

It helps to really hammer home the difference between these advocacy-funded journalists and traditional journalists. If I am an energy reporter at the New York Times…am I looking at these stories and thinking, “Wow. That’s a great scoop. Wish I got that.” Or am I thinking, “The story seems pretty thin, and it sucks that these guys are getting attention for that article.” My guess is it’s the latter.

(InsideClimate News was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for its reporting on Exxon.)

For nearly a century, the oil and gas industry has been obsessed with controlling its image in the media, especially in outlets that cater to elite audiences. Beginning in 1970, Mobil Oil Corporation ran advertisements promoting its product and views in the New York Times opinion section that were designed to look like columns—material that later became known as “advertorials”—and also sponsored PBS’s Masterpiece programs. The partnership, the company’s vice president for public affairs, Herb Schmertz, later said, helped establish Mobil, which merged with Exxon in the 1990s, in the public’s eye as “the thinking man’s oil company.”

But in the middle of the last decade, that carefully constructed image began to crumble. Kevelson was both correct and off the mark in her predictions of how journalistic powerhouses would react to the story that Exxon lied to the public. Though outlets like The Washington Post, The New York Times, and the television networks were slow to cover the Exxon revelations, a number of outlets began to examine what Big Oil knew about how its product was driving climate change and when the industry knew it.

A slew of legal action followed. First, investigations from attorneys general in New York, Massachusetts, and the US Virgin Islands, and then, beginning in 2017, a cascade of lawsuits from cities, states, tribes, and municipalities. There were nearly 30 ongoing cases as of the start of this year, according to the Center for Climate Integrity. Meanwhile, the 2015 Paris Agreement, for the first time, got the world to promise to bring down emissions. Many major oil companies, sensing a PR opportunity, put out statements in support of the accords.

The documents released by the Senate Budget Committee, which range from 2015 to early 2022, portray an industry searching for a foothold in a changing world. While publicly declaring support for the Paris Agreement and touting “green” initiatives and projects, executives strategized how to spin narratives with journalists that would help protect their bottom lines and insulate them from further climate criticism.

One BP strategy document set a goal for the company to “get more stories placed,” including ones around “our climate position,” and to “focus on engaging non-traditional, specialty publications and outlets, while getting stories placed in national news outlets, ideally on the front page.”

Controlling the narrative—particularly in business publications—took top priority for executives. In early 2021, BP produced a five-page memo for an unnamed executive to prepare for an “on-the-record, exclusive to [The Wall Street Journal] about bp’s journey to net zero and how we are reducing methane at our Permian Basin assets”—a favorite topic of oil majors eager to demonstrate good behavior in order to head off government methane regulations. That same year, a lengthy internal e-mail chain prepared BP executives for an upcoming Bloomberg Businessweek story on gas flaring. “We expect this to be neutral/fair coverage but could be negative,” BP’s head of corporate communications warned.

Collecting information about reporters has also been part of oil companies’ media strategies. The five-page BP memo defines the Journal as a “highly regarded global outlet,” and says the reporter “has always been a fair and balanced reporter when working with bp.” In 2018, Shell executives compared similar notes on a Seattle Times reporter writing on a carbon price who had asked a question of the company. The reporter “is not a media activist,” one media manager wrote, but “he’s shown a personal enthusiasm for some form of a carbon tax in Washington (and California).” The e-mail notes Shell’s efforts to have an off-the-record call with the reporter “in an attempt to reason with him.”

One particularly clarifying exchange came in June 2019, as BP executives wrestled with how to respond to a question from The Guardian—a left-of-center publication in the United Kingdom, BP’s home country—regarding calls for the European Union to more ambitiously cut its emissions. (Later that year, the EU introduced a proposal to become “carbon-neutral” by 2050.).

“I think how we answer this question, to the Guardian in particular, is important, and not straightforward,” one executive wrote. “Whereas our comments on ambitious targets in the past might have been that they are costly, damaging and difficult to achieve, comments that might have been perceived as opposition, I don’t think we can make such comments any longer on targets that are intended to deliver the Paris goals.”

Sometimes, oil companies misjudged the types of reporters they were dealing with—with disastrous results. In 2019, Shell invited journalist Malcom Harris, author of a book on millennials and a*Nation* contributor, to speak at an internal company workshop. Harris did what any good journalist would do: He checked to see if there was an NDA, then attended the meeting and took notes. The resulting report in New York magazine, “Shell Has a Plan to Profit From Climate Change,” is a PR person’s nightmare: an on-the-ground account of how Shell is “hoping to leverage their incumbency, and fossil-fuel wealth, to lay claim to the world’s clean-energy future as well.”

In internal e-mails after Harris’s article was released, Shell PR executives were appropriately apologetic. “I am really sorry that there was nothing we could do in this instance,” a senior spokesperson wrote.

Other executives, however, were more blasé. “I don’t know this publication,” one wrote. “Does anyone read it? I hope not…”

“New York mag is a local rag,” another replied. “It’s often confused with the prestigious New Yorker magazine—but there is really no comparison.”

This year has already been one of the worst for working journalists: More than 500 jobs have been slashed in 2024 alone. Award-winning outlets that made their names fearlessly challenging big businesses, like Vice and BuzzFeed News, no longer exist, while others, like The Intercept and the Center for Public Integrity, are teetering on the edge. Even more worrying, more than half of US counties are no longer covered by a local news outlet.

The very nature of how media is supported and paid for is also changing. Many outlets that have managed to survive—and even thrive—in this media hellscape have a blatantly corporate bent, relying on pricey company subscriptions: Start-ups like Punchbowl, Axios, The Information, and Politico offer premium access for hundreds or thousands of dollars a year. Media reporter Max Tani wrote for Semafor last month about how outlets are increasingly shying away from tough investigative stories, as a worsening legal climate and a greater emphasis on the bottom line make editors less eager to take on stories that could have costly legal fees down the line.

Big Oil, meanwhile, is supporting the business model of the remaining major US outlets. A recent investigation by *Drilled* and *The Nation* found that Bloomberg, Reuters, Politico, The Washington Post, and The New York Times all count major fossil fuel producers as clients for their in-house production studios, events businesses, and other branded content. The New York Times alone took in more than $20 million from fossil fuel companies over a three-year period. (Climate reporters that Drilled and The Nation spoke to for the piece on paid content panned the practice, saying running ads from oil and gas companies undermined the work they were doing to report accurately on climate.)

I can easily see how the crumbling journalism ecosystem could give Big Oil the media environment of its dreams: one that is increasingly favorable to executives who pay for subscriptions, staffed with journalists under pressure from owners to stick to corporate-friendly coverage rather than investigative work that could undercut their funding.

At the very least, these documents released by the Senate Budget Committee provide lessons for journalists dealing with oil companies—to know that they’re keeping notes on you, your outlet, your potential opinions on climate action, and whether or not you can come around to their narrative. Journalists now know that Big Oil has a playbook, and it’s our responsibility to study it and factor that into our coverage.

I hope reporters on all beats get savvier about how they cover business, especially oil and gas. But it’s tough just to keep any kind of job in journalism these days, especially when you’re sticking your neck out there. The Reuters bureau chief, for what it’s worth, after 12 years with Reuters, now works in corporate communications for Aramco Americas, a subsidiary of Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil-and-gas company.

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The real reason corporate media won't cover Trump's attacks on democracy

D. Earl StephensSeptember 02, 2024

We need to talk about the abominable headline below, and how it is we have come to the fatal point where The New York Times and our broken mainstream media seem to need the America-attacking Donald Trump a helluva lot more than the America-attacking Donald Trump seems to need The New York Times and our broken mainstream media.

substackcdn.com

During the past few, rocky years my feelings about the newspaper I grew up reading as a kid — the paper that influenced me more than any other to become a newspaperman — in the New Jersey suburbs have evolved from surprise, to shock, to disappointment, to anger, to rage, to complete revulsion ...

Aside from platforming maniacal, caustic headlines topping spurious content like the one above (which I promise to get to in a minute), this newspaper’s inability to spot the biggest news story of our lifetimes, and treat it with the heft it deserves, is journalistic malpractice, and a very real danger to our country.

The Times isn’t alone in its mishandling and disregard of the continuing attack on our country and its institutions that back it up. In fact, I can’t point to ONE so-called reputable news source in our “mainstream” media that has appropriately sounded the alarms, and given this perpetually breaking news story the treatment it demands.

There is not a single day that toddles by, when I don’t sit at my cluttered desk as the retired newspaperman I ultimately became, and stare at my keyboard wondering just what in the hell is being discussed in the newsrooms of our most foremost “news” operations in this nation.

Why have they abandoned us, and the most important story in the world?

Our country has been under steady attack for nearly four years now. Why aren’t our newsrooms on wartime footing? Bare minimum, why haven’t Democracy Desks been set up in these broken newsrooms staffed with journalists who do nothing but monitor the Republicans’ movements as they ruthlessly defend an attack on America, and go about annihilating truth, justice, and our right to even vote?

What news could possibly override monitoring the dangerous maneuvers of a sociopath, who is still free and on the loose after unleashing his rabid attack dogs to besiege our Capitol, stomp on law enforcement officials, seek out political leaders for harm and hanging, and prevent the certification of our vote, while doing nothing for three hours except root for the attack’s success?

Backed by his morally busted political party, the son of a bitch means to finish us off whether or not he ever gets power again. He is the literal definition of a terrorist and/or an authoritarian strongman — a thug. He bows to murderous fascists like Putin, and openly revels in their success.

There’s not a single thing I have typed here that isn’t completely true. So what in the hell is going on with our addled media, and their disgusting refusal to do their jobs?

Why just the the other day, this pathetic man outdid even himself when he illegally barged into Arlington National Cemetery for a photo op. He once again disgraced our fallen, who he has called “suckers” and “losers” to get his wrinkled, orange mug in front of a camera.

My God. Now let’s pretend what would happen if Joe Biden or Kamala Harris did something like that …

It has been more than 160 years since a threat like this presented itself in the United States of America, and we know how that turned out. Hundreds of thousands dead and wounded, an assassinated president, cities in ruin, and the very real chance that America would not be able to rebuild itself again.

She did, but all these decades later, still walks with a limp from that horrific period in her life.

We are but 69 days from repeating all this, though it could be even worse this time, because if the enemies of our Democracy win this election they will have successfully breached our Capitol, and will be setting up headquarters in our White House.

The repugnant Confederacy, thank God, never made it that far last time.

So I ask again: Just what in the hell is being discussed in all these newsrooms while Trump bangs the drums of hate, follows the roadmap created for him in Project 2025, and backstopped by a radical, bought-off Supreme Court, bolstered by known election-deniers, promises retribution to anybody who dares get in his way?

Since that terrible attack on our Democracy began four years ago, our broken media has given us almost nothing but normalization and capitulation.

How else to explain this headline and the story it trumpeted written by one of the NYT’s leaders in its editorial department, Deputy Opinion Editor Patrick Healy:

substackcdn.com

What matters most? You mean, the safety and well-being of our country and its citizens from those who would attack it?

Of course it didn’t mean that ...

That headline and the one I lead this piece with above topping an offensive, ridiculous slice of gaslighting by the ultra-Conservative Rich Lowry of the National Review, were splashed across the pages of The New York Times on Monday.

And let’s get this out of the way quickly: Yes, I understand that they were produced by the editorial department of this dumpster fire of a news source, but if that makes you feel any better about things, then they have you right where they want you: accepting that running this kind of propagandist bilge is acceptable.

It’s not.

It’s not from any news source that wants us to take them seriously, and displays the credibility that any reputable news organization must possess to serve its readership adequately.

My only plausible guess for the mainstream media’s failure to cover the attack on our country, besides sheer and incomprehensible incompetence, is that they are hedging their bets. Trump has been undeniably good for their bottom lines, which looks to me to be the only damn thing they truly care about.

If Trump goes away, so does the money. And what of the millions of dollars of tax cuts he’s promising to once again give the owners of these pompous rags?

Otherwise, there’s no making sense of any of this.

Regular readers will know that this is not the first time I have written about our media’s catastrophic failure to protect and inform us. And fair warning: Unless things radically change with the way our mainstream media comport themselves in the coming days, it won’t be the last.

I take these threats to our country and our media institutions very seriously, and I have learned many of you do, too. You (we) are owed a damn explanation for the greatest failure by our media in the 248-year history of our country.

We are furious about it, we have a right to be, and we deserve some damn answers PRONTO.

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. Follow @EarlofEnough

note slippage from 3rd hand to 2nd hand;

she calls her work reporting and “source”

mma

fox shrugs at Maria Bartiromo’s peddling of “kind of racist” election fraud lies

Written by Matt Gertz

Published 08/21/24

Fox’s response to Fox Business anchor Maria Bartiromo peddling thirdhand election fraud falsehoods she didn’t bother to check demonstrates how the network has abandoned anything resembling journalistic standards in its quest to return Donald Trump to the White House.

Bartiromo repeatedly told her Fox Business viewers this week about a “Democrat operation” to register “massive lines of illegals” to vote at Texas government offices, a story she originally attributed to the wife of a friend of a friend and made no apparent effort to verify. Her thirdhand gossip was swiftly debunked by the local Republican Party and the Texas Department of Public Safety, with a spokesperson for the latter noting that her conspiracy theory was “kind of racist.”

It should go without saying that at any credible news outlet, an anchor promoting wild claims they hadn’t verified that promptly dissolved like this would be facing disciplinary action for breaching standards. But Fox apparently doesn’t have standards barring its purported journalists from citing gossip they haven’t bothered to try to confirm on the air.

Zeteo News media columnist Justin Baragona reached out to a Fox spokesperson on Tuesday about whether Bartiromo planned to address or correct her false claims about undocumented immigrants registering to vote en masse in Texas.

“According to a Fox News spokesperson, Maria Bartiromo was clearly citing a source of hers and never said she confirmed the story,” Baragona subsequently posted to X. “The spox also said it is worth noting that Republicans have been speaking a lot about this issue of noncitizens voting in recent months.”

Meanwhile, Bartiromo did not mention her debunked claims on her Wednesday show, though she did ask the Republican member of Congress she hosted questions like, “Do you have any evidence that you can share with us that tells us that illegals are registered to vote?” and “Do you think you’ll be able to stop it? I mean you’ve got 76 days before the election. How many people will be voting illegally?”

Fox’s response simply emphasizes the problems with Bartiromo’s coverage:

But all of that is bad!

If you work at a national cable news network, you’re not supposed to feed your viewers thirdhand, unverified gossip simply because it supports the claims of a political party, and if you do that and the story is subsequently debunked by everyone who bothers to actually try and look into it, that’s a black mark on your credibility.

I don’t want to suggest there was some halcyon day when Fox acted responsibly — the network prioritized Republican political success from its founding — but there was a time when the network’s executives at least tried to curtail its most obvious and indefensible journalistic failings.

When the hosts of Fox & Friends in 2007 cited a right-wing outlet’s quickly debunked report that then-Sen. Barack Obama had attended an extremist Islamic madrassa as a child, the network made clear both publicly and privately that its standards had been violated.

Host Steve Doocy issued a clarification on the show’s next edition. John Moody, at the time Fox’s vice president for news, also acknowledged to The New York Times that the network had erred. “The hosts violated one of our general rules, which is know what you are talking about,” he said. “They reported information from a publication whose accuracy we didn’t know.”

Moody also sent a daily editorial note to staff stating what should have been the obvious: “For the record: seeing an item on a website does not mean it is right. Nor does it mean it is ready for air on FNC.”

Seventeen years later, seeing a text from a friend detailing a story the friend’s friend heard from their spouse apparently means it is ready for air on Fox. The spokesperson’s comments about Bartiromo effectively confirm as much. And meanwhile Jesse Watters, the network’s biggest star, is now apparently preparing to send a staffer to Hawaii to “dig deep” and “get the truth” about Obama’s birth certificate.

It all makes perfect sense when you recognize that Watters, Bartiromo, and the spokesperson work not at a news outlet, but a propaganda network that is in the tank for Trump’s presidential campaign. The peril for Fox, however, is the Dominion Voting Systems defamation lawsuit shows how letting people like Bartiromo spin up poorly sourced conspiracy theories to benefit Trump can get very, very expensive.

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  1. ### Maria Bartiromo's wild and “kind of racist” election conspiracy theory collapses immediately

:{:{08/20/24}:

  1. ### Fox News and the MAGA media are lining up their shot at American democracy

:{:{05/14/24}:

  1. ### Maria Bartiromo's source for election conspiracy theories: “The Wind tells me I’m a ghost, but I don’t believe it."

02/16/23

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mma

Bartiromo's wild and “kind of racist” election conspiracy theory collapses immediately

Bartiromo, who was deeply involved in promoting the Dominion election conspiracy theories that Fox News paid for, is at it again

Written by Matt Gertz

Research contributions from Lis Power

Published 08/20/24

Maria Bartiromo repeatedly used her Fox Business show to peddle an election fraud conspiracy theory that she claimed originated with the wife of a friend of a friend in Texas and that she made no apparent effort to confirm. But when the Texas Department of Public Safety and the local Republican Party investigated her reckless allegation, they discovered that none of it was true.

On Sunday morning, Bartiromo posted an item to X alleging that “a massive line of immigrants” had been obtaining driver’s licenses and registering to vote at three Department of Motor Vehicles offices in Texas:

From a friend ...

Friend of mine’s wife had to take her 16 yr old son to the DMV this week for a new license. Couldn’t get an online appointment(all full) so went in person and had to go to 3 DMV’s to get something done. First DMV was in Weatherford. Had a massive line of immigrants getting licenses and had a tent and table outside the front door of the DMV registering them to vote! Second one was in Fort Worth with same lines and same Dems out front. Third one was in North Fort Worth had no lines but had same voter registration drive.

Bartiromo brought the wildly flimsy allegation to Fox’s airwaves the following day, having apparently done no independent reporting to confirm claims that she said originated with the wife of a friend of her friend.

She brought up the story in at least three segments on the Monday and Tuesday editions of her Fox program — including in interviews with two Republican U.S. senators.

Indeed, the story became even more sinister for the Fox audience, with Bartiromo alleging that the people registering to vote were not just “immigrants,” as stated in her X post, but “illegals.” A spokesperson for the Texas Department of Public Safety noted that assuming that nonwhite Texans are undocumented is “kind of racist” and called her story “simply false.”

Bartiromo first flagged the story during a Monday morning interview with Sheriff Thad Cleveland of Terrell County, Texas, and Republican strategist Michael Balboni.

“I'm serious about this issue of illegals voting, and I want to get your take on this,” Bartiromo told Balboni. “Apparently, the DMV offices right now are packed with illegals right now trying to get driver's licenses, and they're getting Social Security cards, driver's licenses, apparently, in very short order after coming into the country. They want to get them naturalized as soon as possible before the election.”

She returned to the subject later in the segment, saying that a “person … spoke to me about this this weekend” detailing how DMV offices had been “jam-packed with illegals” and claiming that “he” had told her there had been a voter registration “tent and a table” in Weatherford, Texas, that had been “an obvious Democrat operation.”

Bartiromo further discussed the DMV conspiracy theory during an interview with Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI). This time, she said the allegation came not from the wife of a friend of a friend, as she originally wrote on X, but from “a friend” who had personally seen the “massive lines of illegals getting licenses” and registering to vote, and texted her directly.

“I reported, earlier, and over the weekend, that a friend had sent me a text this weekend telling me that they went to DMV for a new license, and there were lines and lines of illegals all over the DMV office, the Department of Motor Vehicles,” Bartiromo said. “There was one in Weatherford, Texas, massive line of immigrants getting licenses. They had a tent outside and a table to register them to vote.”

“So, what is going on in terms of illegals voting in this election? And do you think that is the reason that the border has been wide open for three and a half years?” she asked.

Video

CitationFrom the August 19, 2024, edition of Fox Business' Mornings with Maria

“Yeah, I’ve been saying that for about three and a half years,” Johnson replied, quickly pivoting from Bartiromo’s anecdote to the “great replacement” conspiracy theory. “I saw no other explanation of why Joe Biden-Kamala Harris would open up the border, presenting a clear and present danger to America, other than to change the electorate to bring in more people — it would be, you know, very beneficial to them from a standpoint of getting elected.”

“Democrats want to make it easy to cheat,” he added. “They want to change the electorate, that is what this has all been about, and it’s destroying this country.”

Bartiromo discussed the story with a second senator on Tuesday.

“I got a tip over the weekend that these DMV offices are jam-packed with illegals and they’re getting them Social Security cards and drivers' licenses,” she told Sen. Roger Marshall (R-KS). “Do you have any evidence that illegals are registered to vote?”

Others who saw Bartiromo’s initial X post did what she apparently failed to do and tried to confirm her story.

Sgt. William Lockridge, spokesperson for the Texas Department of Public Safety, told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram that the account Bartiromo promoted was “simply false” and “kind of racist.”

From the Monday report:

Contrary to Bartiromo’s friend’s wife’s account, there is no office for the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles in Weatherford. Folks there get their licenses at a DPS Driver License office.

Still, no such tent and table were set up outside the office last week.

“None of it is true,” Lockridge said, adding that the assumption that non-white Texans lined up to get their driver licenses are immigrants or illegal is “kind of racist.”

“Just because these people aren’t white, that doesn’t mean they’re illegal,” he said.

There was a table set outside the DPS Driver License office in Lake Worth on Friday, Lockridge said, but not at the other two sites mentioned in Bartiromo’s post.

Similarly, Brady Gray, the chairman of the Parker County GOP, said on X that his group had spent “24 hours investigating the claims” Bartiromo made about Weatherford and found them to be “erroneous.” From the post:

  1. While we are everyday registering more voters in Parker county, there has been no large submission of registrants consistent with the claim.
  1. All voter registration applications in the county are processed by the county EA office (County Voter Registrar) and are uploaded to SOS to verify the applicants eligibility to vote (i.e. citizenship, etc.). Not only have there been no recent instances of ineligible individuals attempting to register in Parker county, there have only been two in the last 15 years.
  1. The DPS office has confirmed that there have been no tents or tables and no one registering voters on their premises, and that if it were the case they would be told to leave, as it is not allowed.

Bartiromo’s ludicrously thin claims of Democrats trying to register undocumented immigrants to vote in the 2024 presidential election fit neatly within her recent career.

Bartiromo promoted a series of wild claims about election fraud following the 2020 election. Her deeds included hosting Trumpist lawyer Sidney Powell to baselessly allege that Dominion Voting Systems had rigged the vote against Donald Trump. She brought Powell on after Powell forwarded her an email from a woman who claimed that Dominion’s software flipped votes from Trump to Joe Biden — and also that “the Wind tells me I’m a ghost, but I don’t believe it.”

Her Dominion segments were featured in the company’s defamation lawsuit against Fox, which resulted in her network paying a record settlement. But they had no apparent impact on her standing at Fox: She retains a weekly Fox News show and a three-hour weekday show on Fox Business, giving her platforms where she can ask U.S. senators about unverified thirdhand claims.

That leaves her well-positioned to help Trump if he once again tries to subvert a presidential election.

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Fox News totally ignored new report showing violent crime is down — while running more than 4.5 hours of violent crime coverage 08/15/24 mma

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Broadcast news and major papers failed to cover report of possible Egyptian bribery involving Trump

08/12/24 mma

===

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Only 4% of national TV news segments about Hurricane Beryl mentioned climate change

07/11/24 mma

note crm conspir echo escalator

:{:{6 24 an}:

"Real Time" host Bill Maher recently noted that when Republicans and right-wing media outlets find a new talking point, they work it to death regardless of its merits. And he cited the claim that President Joe Biden is using some type of drug or stimulant ahead of his first 2024 debate with presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump as a prime example.

Right-wing media outlets have been claiming that if Biden performs well against Trump in the June 27 debate that CNN is hosting in Atlanta, it will be because he is getting an unfair advantage via a stimulant. But there is no proof or evidence to support that baseless claim.

In an op-ed published on June 26, the Washington Post's Aaron Blake details how that claim took off in right-wing media.

READ MORE: Political vets who've debated Biden or Trump dish on how to do it

"When Fox Business Network host Maria Bartiromo asked Rep. Greg Murphy (R-N.C.) about the just-announced presidential debate last month," Blake explains, "she prefaced the question oddly. 'So, let me get you to put your doctor's hat on for a second, given the (GOP) Doctors Caucus that you are leading'…. What did being a doctor have to do with handicapping the debate?.... Murphy quickly took the cue, though, launching into a baseless suggestion that Biden might take something to enhance his performance."

Blake continues, "He said Biden 'must have been jacked up' during his State of the Union address in March — that 'they gave him something.' Murphy gave no evidence but said he could provide proof for his claim to Bartiromo 'offline.'"

The Washington Post columnist notes that "a little more than 40 days" after that Bartiromo/Murphy conversation, "such evidence still hasn't seen the light of day." But Trump and allies like Fox News hosts Jesse Watters and Sean Hannity, Blake adds, continue to promote their claim anyway.

"Responsible journalists don't just accuse people of drug use based upon suspicion," Blake argues, "and there's still no actual evidence."

READ MORE:Trump fears strong Biden debate performance — and is already prepping response

*Aaron Blake's full Washington Post column is available at this link (subscription required).

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mma 6 24

The recent extreme heat event that swept across the U.S. Southwest in early June — the first major heat wave of the year, which was made three times more likely because of climate change — served as a stark reminder of the escalating climate crisis. It also demonstrated the urgent need for national TV news coverage that consistently connects extreme weather to human-caused climate change.

Yet corporate broadcast and cable news shows largely ignored the climate connection in their coverage, and they missed other crucial opportunities as well: to connect the heat wave to recent climate attribution studies, to spotlight extreme heat’s impact on vulnerable populations, and to inform viewers about the climate implications of the 2024 election.

National TV news networks aired extensive coverage of the heat wave, as they typically do for highly visible extreme weather events. Multiple segments highlighted the anomalous and record-breaking nature of the heat wave, yet the coverage failed to consistently connect the event to climate change, despite the clear and robust connection between extreme heat and global warming.

On cable, CNN devoted 53 minutes to the extreme heat event across 25 segments, with 2 segments mentioning climate change. MSNBC aired 46 minutes of coverage across 16 segments, with 3 segments that mentioned climate change. And Fox News aired 15 minutes across 13 segments, without any mention of climate change.

On the corporate broadcast networks, CBS aired 16 minutes across 12 segments, with 5 segments mentioning climate change. NBC aired 27 minutes across 17 segments, with 1 segment that mentioned climate change. And ABC aired 11 minutes across 14 segments, with 1 segment that mentioned climate change.

While national TV news largely failed to connect the extreme heat to global warming, there were a few notable segments that made the connection between climate change and its consequences such as extreme heat.

Some of those came on the June 7 episode of *NBC Nightly News* and the June 9 episode of MSNBC’s Alex Witt Reports. The latter featured a wide-ranging interview about the causes and effects of the heat wave with climate scientist Kim Cobb, who also called for fossil fuel accountability.

Video

CitationFrom the June 9, 2024, episode of MSNBC's Alex Witt Reports

National TV news coverage of the extreme heat event largely failed to report on how these events disproportionately harm vulnerable populations such as the elderly, low-income communities, and laborers, among others. This lack of coverage overlooks the real-world consequences of inadequate climate action.

However, there were some notable segments that did report on how extreme heat harms vulnerable communities. One of the strongest segments that aired during the studied period was on the June 6 episode of MSNBC's Chris Jansing Reports, which featured interviews with Basil Smikle, director of the Roosevelt House Institute of Public Policy at Hunter College and author and climate reporter Jeff Goodell, among others.

The segment detailed the disproportionate impact of climate change on vulnerable populations, particularly communities of color, low-income families, and the imprisoned, and emphasized the urgent need for a climate justice approach that is responsive to these communities’ specific challenges.

Video

CitationFrom the June 6, 2024, episode of MSNBC's Chris Jansing Reports

Video

CitationFrom the June 8, 2024, episode of CBS Saturday Morning

National TV news shows missed an opportunity to incorporate climate into their extreme heat coverage, despite findings that clearly link global warming to the exacerbation of extreme heat events and increased mortality rates. Notably, research from Climate Central indicated that the heat wave from June 5-7, which affected over 229 million people across North America, was made at least three times more likely by human-caused climate change.

This crucial scientific context, while referenced during the June 4 episode of *CBS Evening News* and the June 5 episode of ABC’s *Good Morning America*, was largely absent from the coverage, leaving viewers without a full understanding about the direct link between climate change and the heat wave they were experiencing.

Missed opportunity to connect climate change impacts to the 2024 election

National TV news largely failed to connect Trump’s campaign rhetoric and climate policy actions to the tangible impacts of climate change, notably during coverage of his rallies in Arizona and Las Vegas where attendees required medical treatment due to extreme heat.

The Trump administration rolled back environmental protections, and he has promised to reverse Biden administration climate actions in exchange for fossil fuel industry campaign donations, as well as mocked those harmed by climate change impacts. But TV news coverage did not effectively link these policies and actions to the immediate and severe consequences of extreme heat at his events.

It's essential for national TV news to provide this context, as informed voting on climate policies is crucial, especially in regions that are increasingly experiencing the consequences of climate change.

Notable segments that attempted to address this angle included the June 5 episode of CNN’s *The Lead, where climate correspondent Bill Weir used the occasion of extreme heat to note the harmful climate implications of Trump’s climate policies and his attempted quid pro quo with the fossil fuel industry, and the June 9 episode of MSNBC’s *PoliticsNation, which mentioned Trump's climate denial in the context of people passing out at his Arizona and Las Vegas rallies.

Video

CitationFrom the June 9, 2024, episode of MSNBC's PoliticsNation

Tell extreme weather stories through a climate lens

Coverage should consistently explore whether and how climate change may have influenced specific weather events, addressing the impact global warming has on these occurrences.

Contextualize extreme weather events

Networks should strive to connect individual extreme weather events to the broader narrative of the global climate crisis. This approach helps illustrate the cumulative effects of climate change and the urgent need for action.

Incorporate climate justice

When covering extreme weather, TV news media must discuss climate justice, which focuses on the disproportionate effects of climate change on socially marginalized communities. These impacts often manifest most acutely during extreme weather events.

Link extreme weather events to the 2024 election

It is crucial for coverage to show the relationship between extreme weather events, climate change, and candidates’ political platforms. This helps voters understand how candidates' policies might or might not mitigate future climate-related challenges.

Demand accountability from the fossil fuel industry

Broadcast and cable news networks must consistently hold the fossil fuel industry accountable for its significant role in driving global warming. This includes discussing how industry actions contribute to climate change and highlighting the environmental and social consequences of their operations.

===

:{:{mma 5 24}:

accident day after hush money def implodes after fox pushed fail guy?

over a handful of hours on Tuesday, the right’s conspiracy theory ecosystem concocted a sinister plot by President Joe Biden to assassinate his predecessor out of the banal fact that FBI agents received standard instructions on the use of force before conducting a court-ordered search of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in 2022.

Hundreds of pages of filings were unsealed on Tuesday in Trump’s classified documents case, revealing that the former president — who is charged with 40 federal criminal counts related to his alleged willful retention of documents after leaving the White House — had multiple documents marked “classified” in his bedroom that were discovered months after the 2022 search.

Credible outlets reviewed the documents and produced a wave of news stories detailing what a judge described as “strong evidence” of Trump’s allegedly criminal acts. Meanwhile, Trump’s MAGA media supporters ginned up a counternarrative based on a credulous reading of a deceptive argument from Trump’s lawyers that was included in the unsealed documents.

The story that emerged from the right-wing media echo chamber posits that pro forma language provided to FBI agents before the 2022 search which stated that “law enforcement officers of the Department of Justice may use deadly force when necessary” was actually part of a Biden scheme to assassinate Trump. This is both a horrific accusation to make without evidence and facially absurd for any number of reasons. (Why would the Biden administration issue assassination orders in writing and then conduct the Mar-a-Lago search on a date specifically selected because Trump would be in New York instead?) But it spread quickly from its initiation by a key figure in the right’s January 6 disinformation community, through the ranks of MAGA influencers, to Trump himself, and then to the Fox News airwaves.

By Tuesday night, Trump’s campaign had issued a fundraising email in which the presumptive Republican presidential nominee alleged of the Biden administration, “You know they’re just itching to do the unthinkable … Joe Biden was locked & loaded ready to take me out & put my family in danger.”

The startlingly quick adoption of an unhinged conspiracy theory shows how the right-wing media apparatus operates, dreaming up convoluted but inflammatory nonsense and bombarding their audience with it. Here’s how it happened.

Right-wing fabulist turns standard FBI policy into “mind-blowing” story

The right-wing writer Julie Kelly, in a series of Tuesday afternoon posts on X (formerly Twitter), purported to reveal the “bombshells” she had uncovered by scouring the unsealed documents.

“Tons of new unsealed filings on classified docs case--I will try to post as much as I can (there goes the workout) but this is mind-blowing,” she posted at 1:21 p.m. ET. “FBI authorized the use of deadly force at Mar-a-Lago.”

She included a screenshot of a filing from Trump’s lawyers which stated that the FBI’s “Operations Order” for the Mar-a-Lago search “contained a ‘Policy Statement’ regarding ‘Use of Deadly Force,’ which stated, for example, ‘Law enforcement officers of the Department of Justice may use deadly force when necessary.’”

IFrame Content

Kelly went on to post the “Policy Statement” and claim that the instructions show that “the FBI risked the lives of Donald Trump, his family, his staff, and MAL guests for a publicity stunt to make it look like Trump stole national security files.” She added, “People need to be arrested for this.”

In reality — and as more credible journalists pointed out — those instructions are standard for FBI searches.

“These are the rules that apply to FBI agents whenever they do anything,” Reuters reporter Brad Heath wrote in response to Kelly’s initial claim on X. He added, “Agents - like all cops - can use deadly force when met with a sufficiently serious threat. The policy the FBI followed here applies all the time; they are the same rules agents follow when walking down a sidewalk.”

“One clue that this is the generic DOJ use of force policy — not something cooked up for Mar-a-Lago, let alone ordered by the president — is that it talks about the use of warning shots in prison,” Heath noted in response to Kelly’s post with the “Policy Statement.”

The FBI would later issue a statement confirming that the bureau had “followed standard protocol in this search as we do for all search warrants, which includes a standard policy statement limiting the use of deadly force.”

IFrame Content

Kelly is among the foremost proponents of the right’s January 6 counternarrative. She has argued that the violent rioting at the U.S. Capitol by Trumpists who assaulted scores of law enforcement officers “was probably the biggest instance of police brutality that this country has seen since the Civil Rights movement,” described a police officer who testified before the January 6 select committee as a “crisis actor,” and suggested that the FBI fabricated the pipe bombs discovered at the Republican and Democratic national headquarters that day because it is “an enforcement arm, a surveillance arm of the Democratic Party.” And her interpretation of the filings made no sense and was quickly debunked.

None of that slowed down the ranks of MAGA influencers, who quickly seized on her story.

MAGA influencers run with “assassination” nonsense

Within minutes, influential figures in the MAGA movement adopted Kelly’s interpretation and effectively began competing for the most overwrought response as they furiously posted on X. Many alleged that the document showed a Biden-directed assassination plot against Trump.

“The FBI authorized the use of **deadly force** when they raided Mar-a-Lago,” Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk commented. “You read that right. They were authorized to kill Trump employees, possibly even assassinate Trump himself, to exact their political revenge.”

“The FBI authorized the use of deadly force when they raided Mar-a-Lago?” wrote podcaster and former One America News host Liz Wheeler. “Were they hoping to assassinate Trump or his family or employees? This is insane.”

“So that was the real reason for the FBI raiding a president’s home: an excuse to use deadly force against Donald Trump,” offered The Federalist’s Sean Davis. “The court case was just plan B for the corrupt DOJ and FBI.” He added, “The FBI is a domestic terrorist organization.”

Trump ally Laura Loomer similarly argued that the document shows “a possible assassination attempt of President Trump by the Biden regime and FBI!”

Trump and the GOP lie that this shows Biden is “A SERIOUS THREAT TO DEMOCRACY”

Trump and his campaign are very attuned to the nonsense his online supporters generate, and within hours they adopted their bogus narrative.

At 5:21 p.m. ET — just four hours after Kelly’s initial post — Trump posted on his Truth Social account: “WOW! I just came out of the Biden Witch Hunt Trial in Manhattan, the ‘Icebox,’ and was shown Reports that Crooked Joe Biden’s DOJ, in their Illegal and UnConstitutional Raid of Mar-a-Lago, AUTHORIZED THE FBI TO USE DEADLY (LETHAL) FORCE. NOW WE KNOW, FOR SURE, THAT JOE BIDEN IS A SERIOUS THREAT TO DEMOCRACY. HE IS MENTALLY UNFIT TO HOLD OFFICE — 25TH AMENDMENT!”

Trump’s campaign posted his comment to X, where it was quickly reposted by an arm of the Republican National Committee.

IFrame Content

The former president’s most unhinged congressional supporters chimed in.

“The Biden DOJ and FBI were planning to assassinate Pres Trump and gave the green light. Does everyone get it yet???!!!!” commented Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA).

His biggest media supporters were not far behind.

Fox “news” and “opinion” sides parrot the MAGA spin

Right-wing commentators have spent the last nine years figuring out how to respond to Trump’s massive lies. At this point, everyone who retains a major platform knows their role is to, at the least, soft-pedal his unhinged claims, and at most, to prove they are on board with the MAGA movement by treating them as truth.

That’s what played out on Fox’s airwaves after Trump declared that the FBI’s use of standard orders for the Mar-a-Lago search showed that Biden is “A SERIOUS THREAT TO DEMOCRACY.”

Fox could have provide credible reporting tamping down on the lies circulating online. The network employs people who report on the Justice Department and FBI and even has Kerri Kupec Urbahn, a former top aide in the Trump DOJ, on the payroll. If the network wanted to find out if the FBI orders were standard, it would be really easy to do so.

But Fox’s business model and its political agenda both depend on propagandizing for Trump, so that’s not what happened. Instead, around an hour after Trump’s Truth Social post, FoxNews.com sent the following push alert: “BREAKING NEWS New docs reveal Biden DOJ authorized ‘deadly force’ in Mar-a-Lago raid.’” Here’s how the story’s promotion looked on the website’s front page:

From FoxNews.com at approximately 6:23 p.m. on May 21, 2024.

When the network first discussed the story later that hour on the flagship “news” show Special Report, the segment focused on the same “deadly force” language Kelly had flagged.

Bret Baier, the network’s chief political anchor, opened by highlighting that “former President Trump's attorneys argue the Biden administration Justice Department authorized the use of deadly force if necessary” during the Mar-a-Lago search. Correspondent Kevin Corke responded that the order is “quite shocking.”

Baier went on to downplay the notion that the FBI instructions were standard.

“There may be some people, Kevin, who say that this is just a policy statement of standard operating procedures put inside this operations order for this specific raid,” he said. “But obviously it's not standard operating procedure when you're going into the house of the former president, who happens to be protected by Secret Service.”

Video file

CitationFrom the May 21, 2024, edition of Fox News' Special Report.

When Baier offered a similar comment later in the hour during a panel segment, contributor Byron York described the situation as “kind of worrisome” because the FBI was supposedly “loaded for bear and prepared for the possibility of some sort of violent confrontation with the Secret Service. … The idea that it was prepared for this way, as opposed to, say, worked out in advance, is really troubling.” (In fact, the FBI ensured that “the Secret Service would receive a heads-up a few hours before FBI agents arrived to avoid any law enforcement conflict,” The Washington Post has reported.)

Fox’s “opinion” hosts have been running with the story ever since.

CitationFox News screenshots, 5/21/24 and 5/22/24

“They were actually thinking of using deadly force, or it's on the table that might be necessary at Mar-a-Lago?” Laura Ingraham asked Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO). “Deadly force? OK. It’s really lawfare, it’s not funny. Something actually could have gone down I guess at Mar-a-Lago, beyond just looking for the documents.”

Jesse Watters and Jeanine Pirro went even further on Watters’ show, with the host declaring, “Authorized armed agents to use deadly force in the Mar-a-Lago raid. That is insane. Is there any justification for that?”

“Absolutely not,” Pirro replied, adding that “my mind as a prosecutor goes to maybe they wanted the engagement of physical force. Maybe they wanted to come in without FBI, without DOJ, without all of that identifying so that they could engage in deadly physical force.”

Sean Hannity called the “deadly force” language a “shocking new revelation.” He acknowledged it was “boilerplate language” but nonetheless asked, “Why was Merrick Garland prepping for a possible, what, shootout?”

Fox was still carrying Trump’s water on Wednesday morning:...

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another jrnl fail (foreign migrant shoplifter//

After Fox News promoted a hoax about homeless veterans being “evicted” from New York hotels to house migrants last year, some of the network’s anchors said they would provide viewers more information “as we get it.” That promise was apparently disingenuous: Fox has yet to report that the originator of the bogus story now faces federal fraud charges.

On Wednesday, federal prosecutors charged Sharon Toney-Finch, an Army veteran whose Yerik Israel Toney Foundation claims to “help homeless and low-income military service veterans in need of living assistance,” with multiple counts of fraud. They alleged that she raised funds for the group by falsely claiming to have received a Purple Heart after surviving a terrorist attack and spent the group’s money on personal expenses. They also alleged she received “hundreds of thousands of dollars in disability benefits” by falsifying her military discharge paperwork to match her story.

Toney-Fitch drew notoriety as the source for a May 12, 2023, New York Post report in which she alleged that nearly two dozen homeless veterans her organization had been helping were kicked out hotels in upstate New York to make room for migrants.

The story became a cause celebre for right-wing commentators seeking to demonize migrants and attack Democratic politicians. But Toney-Smith’s tale collapsed within days, as local news outlets reported that she had fabricated her story and the homeless veterans had never existed.

Fox, which relentlessly portrays migrants as dangerous criminals conducting an “invasion” of the United States, picked up Toney-Fitch’s hoax the day after the Post published its initial story. Fox News and Fox Business gave the story, which Fox claimed to have “confirmed,” more than an hour of credulous coverage over six days.

“This is pretty infuriating, homeless vets who served our great country, they’re being put out on the street and replaced by illegal immigrants,” prime-time star Sean Hannity alleged in one such segment.

But as the story unraveled, Fox personalities began backtracking and admitting they had been duped. On May 24, 2023, several Fox anchors read an on-air statement which said in part, “We've since learned that veterans advocates misled local officials, and it now turns out those eviction claims were false. We want to update you on this story, make sure the record was set straight, and we’ll get more to you as we get it.”

Apparently the “veterans advocate” behind the story facing criminal charges after allegedly faking a Purple Heart and defrauding the government of hundreds of thousands of dollars in benefits wasn’t worth mentioning.

==

no lnx gfx

top 5 newspapers continue to mostly ignore presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s inflationary policies

Newspaper coverage following the release of the February CPI report, which included the period after Trump clinched the GOP nomination, only mentioned his inflationary policies in 2 of 71 articles that discussed inflation

WRITTEN BY ZACHARY PLEAT

PUBLISHED 04/23/24

Media Matters’ analysis of print newspaper articles covering inflation during the period after the release of the February 2024 Consumer Price Index report again found almost no mention of the inflationary policies that former president and current presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump implemented during his term or has proposed for a second term should he win this fall. Media Matters found that Trump's inflationary policies were mentioned in just 2 out of 71 articles (3%) published during the review period. Previously, Trump’s inflationary policies were mentioned in only 6% of print articles following publication of the December 2023 CPI report and in zero print articles covering inflation following publication of the January 2024 CPI report.

These policies include proposals for the imposition of new across-the-board tariffs, mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, and more tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. We looked at the top five U.S. newspapers by circulation — The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and the Los Angeles Times — from March 12 through April 9.

Trump's inflationary policies were mentioned in only 3% of inflation articles

Our analysis showed that for the period between March 12 and April 9, 2024 — which includes the period between the releases of the February and March 2024 CPI reports — only 2 out of 71 (or 3%) articles covering inflation mentioned that some of Trump's policy proposals for a second term, as well as his past policies as president — tariffs, mass deportations, and tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations — would worsen inflation.

A chart showing that for the period of March 12, 2024, through April 9, 2024 — covering the period from when the February 2024 CPI report was released to the release of the March CPI report — only 2 out of 71 (3%) articles covering inflation mentioned that some of Trump's policy proposals for a second term, and his past policies as president — tariffs, mass deportations, and tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations — would worsen inflation

Trump's attacks on Biden's record on inflation and the economy were quoted in 7% of print news articles about inflation during this time period

Our analysis showed that 5 out of 71 (7%) print news articles on inflation for the period between March 12 and April 9, 2024, included a quote from Trump attacking President Joe Biden's record on the economy and/or inflation, more than the number of articles that mentioned Trump’s own inflationary policies.

A chart showing that 5 out of 71 (4%) print news articles on inflation between February 13 and March 11 included a quote from Trump attacking President Joe Biden's record on the economy and/or inflation

Less than half of articles covering inflation during this time period mentioned positive indicators in the economy

Less than half of print newspaper articles on inflation for the period between March 12 and April 9, 2024, included context addressing recent gains in wages, job creation, and/or economic growth, with 30 of 71 (42%) articles mentioning the strength of the overall economy. This marks an overall decline from the beginning of the year. Between January 11 and February 13, 56% of articles mentioned positive economic indicators; this number dropped to 40% between February 14 and March 11.

A chart showing that that a slightly higher percentage of print newspaper articles on inflation included context of the current economic conditions between March 12 and April 9 compared to the previous month, with 30 of 71 (42%) articles mentioning the strength of the overall economy.

Experts have explained that several of Trump's policy proposals and past policies make inflation worse

Per reporting from The Washington Post, former chief economist for the Trump administration's Council of Economic Advisers Casey B. Mulligan “estimated in an interview that Trump’s 10 percent import tariff proposal would add an extra percentage point to inflation, or a quarter percent a year if spread out over four years.” [The Washington Post, 1/7/24]

Conservative economist Doug Holtz-Eakin suggested that Trump’s trade and immigration policies might lead to a “wage-price spiral,” a condition in which pay increases and prices push one another upward and thus cancel out any seeming benefit for workers. [The Washington Post, 1/7/24]

Conservative American Enterprise Institute economist Michael Strain also suggested that Trump's mass deportation policy “could spark a wage-price spiral, which would be inflationary.” [Politico, 3/7/24]

Center for Economic and Policy Research senior economist Dean Baker: “Trump is promising massive tax increases in the form of tariffs, which will send inflation soaring if he carries through with them.” [Twitter/X, 3/2/24]

Former Federal Reserve economist Claudia Sahm stated that Trump's plan of “jacking up tariffs and cutting off immigration are both inflationary." [Twitter/X, 2/29/24]

Adam Posen, president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, explained that Trump's mass deportation plan “would lead to very sudden spikes in prices of key goods like fresh produce, hotel rooms, and housing repairs.” [The Washington Post, 1/7/24]

Economic Policy Institute chief economist Josh Bivens: “If a future Trump administration really did deport millions of workers, that would be inflationary.” [Politico, 3/7/24]

The U.S. International Trade Commission found that the Trump administration's tariffs on Chinese imports had the effect of “raising costs for American companies” and “increased prices of US products.” [Bloomberg, 3/16/23]

The Federal Reserve raised interest rates following Trump's tax cuts to counter their inflationary pressure. The Tax Policy Center explained that since Trump's tax cuts were “enacted at a time when unemployment was low and output was near its potential level,” “the increase in demand was offset by tighter monetary policy, as the Federal Reserve held interest rates higher than they otherwise would have been to prevent an increase in inflation.” [Tax Policy Center, January 2024]

Methodology...

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4 24 pix = vids

Climate solutions coverage on broadcast news programs declined in 2023

Corporate broadcast news coverage of Earth Day could boost the quantity and quality of coverage in 2024

Special PROGRAMSCLIMATE & ENERGY

WRITTEN BY ALLISON FISHER

RESEARCH CONTRIBUTIONS FROM EVLONDO COOPER

PUBLISHED 04/16/24

In 2023, corporate broadcast news mentioned climate solutions in only 22% of climate segments, or 95 out of 435 — a decline from the previous three years. 2023 broke a trend of improvement in quantity of climate solutions coverage: Solutions were mentioned in 29% of segments in 2020, 31% of segments in 2021, and reached a zenith of 35% in 2022.

In general, discussion of solutions should happen alongside discussions of the myriad climate impacts, including extreme weather, that make up the bulk of climate reporting on broadcast TV news. The best coverage of climate solutions does two things: It centers on solutions that are at scale with what is needed to reduce carbon emissions, and it avoids — or at the very least vets — solutions pushed by corporations and fossil fuel interests, which often do little to tackle the root cause of global warming.

As Earth Day coverage ramps up, this study looks at which networks have led the way on climate solutions coverage, how networks covered solutions in 2023, and what networks can do to improve this coverage in April and beyond.

* CBS led its competitors in climate solutions coverage, mentioning solutions in 49 segments (33% of its segments), followed by NBC with 28 (20% of its segments) and ABC with 17 (12%). The vast majority of these segments on CBS (37) aired on the network’s morning news program *CBS Mornings*. CBS has led on climate solutions coverage for the last three years running — in fact, the network has led the field in overall volume of climate coverage since at least 2020.

One example illustrates the nuance the network brings to climate solutions coverage. A segmentthat aired on May 1 addressed one common critique of renewable energy sources — the environmental impact of wind turbine blades and solar panels that are no longer in use. The segment featured a company that recycles renewable energy materials, keeping them out of landfills. The segment provided key context around this subject, including that solar is the fastest growing energy source in the U.S. and that renewable energy is key to addressing climate change by allowing us to move away from fossil fuels while addressing a side effect of the rapid buildout of renewable energy, which has been exploited by bad faith actors.

The highest concentration of climate solution coverage came in April

NBC led with climate solutions coverage in April, with 9 segments, followed by CBS with 8 and ABC with 5. Notably, while CBS and ABC had their peak overall coverage in July, NBC’s was in April, when it aired 1 hour of climate coverage.

One climate solutions segment that appeared on NBC, during the April 20 edition of NBC Nightly News*, discussed local climate solutions related to food waste while connecting the effort to the broader climate crisis. Correspondent Anne Thompson noted, “Each year, food loss and waste in the U.S. produces emissions equal to the planet-warming carbon dioxide from 42 coal-fired power plants.”

Renewable technologies such as solar and wind energy were mentioned in 22 segments. The topics ranged from action taken by the Biden administration to drive renewables to the role of renewable energy in meeting international climate agreements to even challenges faced by renewable energy.

Corporate broadcast TV news is vetting fringe and false solutions

Broadcast TV networks gave little airtime to fringe or false solutions. Fringe solutions are those that are generally unproved or prohibitively expensive like carbon capture and sequestration. False solutions are those that would not make any meaningful difference, such as carbon offsets, or represent questionable strategies for solving climate change, like many corporate net zero pledges. False solutions have also derived from industry or conservative talking points — like fracked natural gas as a bridge fuel and “clean coal.”

Unlike in previous years, broadcast networks did not discuss carbon offsets as a viable climate solution for industry and corporations in our monitoring. Carbon capture technology appeared in only 2 segments — and in both cases the technology was discussed in relation to a new proposed power plant rule that identifies carbon capture technology as one way carbon-intensive power sources could reduce emissions.

ABC’s World News Tonight reported on the rule when it was announced on May 11, noting, “A new rule will allow power plants to use carbon capture to reduce their emissions while still burning fossil fuels.”

During the June 29 edition of *CBS Mornings*, senior national and environmental correspondent Ben Tracy did a deeper dive into the technology while reporting on the new rule, noting that “some critics say that carbon capture is actually an expensive and misguided distraction in the fight against climate change.”

Two segments referenced geoengineering, a controversial approach to addressing climate impacts.

[vid]

ABC’s Good Morning America aired asegment on April 18 on efforts to address the water shortages happening along the Colorado River, which included a discussion of “weather modification or cloud seeding.”

And CBS Saturday Mornings aired a segment on April 22 about some limited scientific support for geoengineering due to the fact that climate change mitigation efforts are not ramping up fast enough. The segment focused on solar engineering — a set of technologies to cool the earth by reflecting sunlight back into space.

CBS’ Tracy once again approached the subject critically, asking two individuals experimenting with geoengineering to cool the earth, “Should a couple of tech bros be the guys experimenting with this with no scientific background?”

The segment made it clear that shifting away from fossil fuels is still necessary and that these technologies are “a sign of desperation” and are thought by some critics to be dangerous.

Corporate broadcast TV news is generally not connecting climate solutions to the drivers of climate change (fossil fuels) and to climate-fueled extreme weather events

In one positive example, ABC explicitly tied fossil fuels to environmental degradation and solutions during its Earth Day coverage. Reporting on the role of plastics in consumer products on the April 21 edition of Good Morning America, guest Anna Robertson of The Cool Down — a climate and sustainability media platform — said plastic is “created by using fossil fuels, which create pollution in our atmosphere.” The segment went on to offer consumer-based solutions to reducing plastic use.

While it is prudent to offer audiences accessible individual solutions during Earth Day coverage, Earth Day has unfortunately often been co-opted by corporations to promote “green consumerism” and put the onus of solving climate change on individual people rather than the industries that are most responsible for carbon emissions.

While individual actions are important in solving climate change, and mass consumption drives many of the climate and environmental problems that the planet faces today, this approach to sustainability is problematic because what’s really needed to solve the climate crisis is widespread societal change and collective action that forces a rapid reduction in fossil fuel use.

While networks fell short in connecting climate solutions to the broader issue of fossil fuel emissions, they did a better job connecting solutions directly to sectors that contribute to global emissions. For example, there were 7 segments that discussed solutions to make the fashion industry — which contributes up to 10% of global carbon dioxide output — more sustainable. There were also 7 segments that discussed solutions related to the transportation sector, which is the largest contributor to climate pollution, and there were 9 segments discussing solutions within the food industry (food waste alone contributes 10% of global emissions).

Likewise, networks should integrate discussions of solutions into extreme weather coverage and other moments when climate change’s impacts are the most visible. Major extreme weather events garner a high volume of coverage across morning and evening news programs, but too often this coverage does not include discussions about how to mitigate the emissions that are driving increasingly destructive and deadly weather events. In 2023, only 2% (10 of 435) of segments mentioned both an extreme weather event and a climate solution.

In one positive example, during the July 26 edition of *CBS Mornings* the network aired an interview with climate policy expert Leah Stokes, who discussed the connection between last summer’s historic heat waves and climate change and the need to stop burning fuels. The segment concluded with Tracy pointing out that “demand for electric vehicles is accelerating and renewable energy is more abundant and cheaper than ever, but unless we dramatically cut planet-warming emissions this record hot summer might be the coolest one we have left.”

But this example is the exception, not the rule. In order to tell the full story of the climate crisis, broadcast news networks have to clearly connect climate solutions to both the problem and the impacts those solutions seek to address.

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After Navalny’s death, a Fox host ignores Trump’s pro-Putin past | Media Matters for America

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hannity guardiaN ANGEL FAIL 2 24

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fail

On February 28, Fox News host Jesse Watters hosted “James Lee” on his show to discuss the murder of Laken Riley on the campus of the University of Georgia. Watters did not disclose, however, that Lee is actually James DePaola, who has had multiple run-ins with the law himself, including when he became violent over a grilled cheese sandwich his wife had made, prompting his 12-year-old daughter to call the police.

On February 28, Athens-Clarke County Mayor Kelly Girtz held a press conference. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that the press conference had been interrupted multiple times by protesters, includingJames DePaola.

Law-enforcement officers did not remove anybody from the room while Girtz spoke, but police asked Athens resident James Depaola several times to wait his turn to speak.

“We the people are tired of this lawlessness,” Depaola told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution after the press conference ended. “We are being put last.”

DePaola also spoke to Flagpole.com at the press conference.

Later that day, Watters hosted “James Lee” on his show and played footage of DePaola interrupting the press conference, praising him for his actions. (Watters’ full “migrant crime spree” segment can be viewed here. Watters likens his guest to Rick Santelli's rantin 2009 that kicked off the tea party. His guest concludes by telling Watters that “You don't get the credit you deserve as a patriot and a real journalist.”)

CitationFox News Channel, 2/28/24

He can also be seen shortly before the 4-minute mark in a video of the press conference posted by NBC News, when the camera pans away from the lectern.

James Lee certainly appears to be James DePaola, as others have begun to notice.

The Georgia Gazette has a picture of a “James Lee DePaola” related to a 2023 booking at Whitfield County jail. The picture appears to be the same man.

pix

Citationvia Georgia Gazette

The site also has a booking picture from a 2020 booking in Gwinnett county.

Citationvia Georgia Gazette

But before advising Fox News on immigration policy, DePaola was previously best known for violently threatening his wife after deciding that she had used too many slices of cheese on his grilled cheese sandwich, leading to his young daughter calling the police. As Time reported in 2016:

A man wanted just two slices of cheese on his sandwich, so when his wife used three slices in his grilled cheese sandwich, he became irate.

Angered at the sight of all the extra cheesiness, James DePaola became agitated and violent, yelling at the woman, Michele DePaola. According to WSB-TV, DePaola then ripped the landline out of the wall so his wife couldn’t call the police and reportedly screamed at her intensely. The couple’s 12-year old daughter who witnessed the incident called the police to the scene, according to Athens-Clarke County police.

James DePaola was charged with obstruction of a 911 call and criminal trespass/damage to property over what the police now refer to as “the grilled cheese incident”. DePaola has a history of “abusive behavior,” and was often “excessively critical and controlling of day to day things in life” like sandwiches, apparently.

Fox5 Atlanta posted a booking picture of DePaola at the time, making clear he is from Athens-Clarke County; the site also mentioned that two of his other young children were present when he threatened his wife.

pix]

Citationvia Fox5 Atlanta

While this may be Jesse Watters’ ideal guest, we cannot recommend that news outlets take public policy advice from someone violently triggered by an unexpected slice of cheese.

The real question is why Fox News didn’t tell its audience DePaola’s full name.

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an 1 24

The mainstream media is full of incompetent idiots

D. Earl Stephens

andRaw Story

January 13, 2024}:

Let’s get right to it …

Too many journalists who occupy, or spend their professional lives orbiting the newsrooms of our mainstream media are incompetent, and most likely working in their important jobs for all the wrong reasons.

Worse yet, most of the leaders of these newsrooms are either bought-off corporate tools or dangerous innocents, who have absolutely no idea what they are doing in their crucial jobs, while the end of life as we know it hinges in large part on their ability to sound the alarms and let the world know what is at stake this year.

READ: Behold: Donald Trump the chosen son — and religious con

I am sadly not wrong about this.

At a time when we’ve never needed fair, hard-hitting coverage of the fascist Republican Party’s attack on our Democracy more, our journalists are catastrophically failing us, and the Fourth Estate as a whole is facing a crisis in confidence from the American public that might ultimately lead to its extinction.

The decline of the press and their inability to do the most basic thing in the news business — identify and cover the biggest stories of the day — has hit extreme levels.

How else do you explain the dangerous and shoddy coverage of the most ominous internal threat to the United States of America since the Civil War: the end of our Democracy.

How is it after watching and listening to the anti-American deviant, Donald Trump, and his pathetic minions in the Republican Party recklessly comport themselves can our media forget that one of the first things to go under fascist, authoritarian regimes is their right to conduct their business freely?

These people are inches from losing their professional freedoms because in large part of their blinding incompetence, and we are THIS close to losing our Democracy forever because they seemingly haven’t even gotten as far as identifying this very real threat to us, and their livelihood.

It boggles the mind, and as a veteran of nearly 30 years in newsrooms, 16 of those years in leadership, I am absolutely disgusted.

How DARE they.

Ever since the fatal election of the racist, soulless Trump in 2016, the press has come under fire for how they helped enable one of the darkest days in American history.

This is not breaking news.

Many members of the working press have since acknowledged their mistakes in the run-up to that election. Their failure to call a lie a lie and a racist a racist, for instance, helped normalize the savage, Trump.

Their nonstop coverage of his unhinged, heinous rallies where he insulted the disabled, and our war veterans, and failure to easily draw the stark distinctions between him and the accomplished, decent woman he was running against was journalistic malpractice.

Many of them told us they learned their lesson, and if Trump, or something like him, ever ran again they would be ready.

If only.

They have actually gotten worse.

The examples are many but let’s take a look this past weekend for just one sample of their massive incompetence these days.

Consider what happened on Meet the Press Sunday. This news program used to be the shining example of nonpartisan, hard-hitting journalism. Power was called into account on a weekly basis.

Now it is a complete mess that has no sense of itself. It’s where politicians eagerly go to recite their party’s talking points, and slap back hard at any host who dares to interrupt them.

On Sunday’s episode of ineptitude, Meet the Press host Kristen Walker was interviewing Elise Stefanik, the House Republican chairwoman.

Stefanik is currently steeped in warped, dark MAGA propaganda. Like many woman in her party, she is strutting down every runway she can find, to see if maybe, just maybe she can catch the vulgar Trump’s bloodshot eye, and have the honor of being his ceremonial whipping-girl on his fascist ticket.

It’s disgusting.

Sure as hell, it took Stefanik no time at all to do her Radical Right routine of telling one known lie after another. The doe-eyed Welker tried to politely nudge her back in her lane, before Stefanik knocked her off the road altogether, and took control of the wheel.

Stefanik: “We will see if this (2024 election) is a legal and valid election.”

Welker: “Will you only commit to certifying the results (of the election) if former President Trump wins? Does that mean only if former President Trump wins?”

Stefanik: “No, it means if they’re constitutional. What we saw in 2020 was unconstitutional circumventing of the Constitution, not going through state legislators when it comes to changing election law.”

I mean, holy shit. In other words, if the election doesn’t work out for us democratically, we’ll just once again move onto some hard-core lawbreaking to change minds.

Short of hitting back with facts, Welker should have just ended the interview about nine times, but didn’t.

Instead, Stefanik just kept backing up and running over her, and was going completely unchallenged when she vomited that the convicted attackers of our Democracy were actually “January 6 hostages" and should be pardoned.

Excuse me?

What in the hell is going on here?

Welker and Meet the Press aren’t the lone offenders of course. The New York Times and The Washington Post can spend three days reporting on completely unreliable polls they paid to conduct, while Trump spends his time literally telling all us “vermin” the new and creative ideas he has come up with for burning everything to the ground around him.

Those newspapers barely even take a sniff at the madman’s unhinged plan of attack, and instead spend their editorial resources wondering how he is polling in some diner in Pennsylvania.

Last month, while Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was on Capitol Hill literally begging for help while his country fights against our shared enemy, Vladimir Putin, the radical right-wing Heritage Foundation decided it was a good time to fly in one of Putin’s greatest allies, Hungary’s leader, Viktor Orbán, for talks with unspecified Republican members of Congress.

You couldn’t ask for a more stark juxtaposition of what the two parties stand for than that. You also couldn’t ask for a better example of how little the press cares for the subject of our Democracy.

Orbán’s visit barely got a sniff in the mainstream media.

Ironically, we only know of this meeting thanks to some tremendous reporting from outside the mainstream media’s toxic bubble by the The Guardian.

In their story about this fascist confab, The Guardian illuminated that:

Hungary has been portrayed by conservative media as an anti-“woke” paradise and model for the United States. Some far-right Republicans, such as Kari Lake and Paul Gosar, said they would like to see the “Hungarian model” transplanted to the US, especially when it comes to immigration and family policies. CPAC went to Hungary for the second time this year, and former Fox News host Tucker Carlson shot multiple episodes in Hungary touting Orbán policies.

Orbán has returned the favour by lavishing praising Trump … The Hungarian prime minister has criticized the multiple federal indictments against the former US president and called the judicial procedure a “very communist methodology” in a recent interview with Carlson.

So on December 11, while Democrats were trying to rally support for Ukraine, Republicans in Congress were meeting behind closed doors with a Hungarian dictator, Tucker Carlson bestie, and close Putin ally.

So, I say again: What in the hell is going on here?

I am sympathetic to a point to the argument that the corporate overlords who own too large a percentage of our major media companies are squeezing budgets, and worse, trying to dictate editorial policy in their newsrooms.

I know this is a popular theory, but it doesn’t explain why the alleged journalists who populate these places put up with that. Have they no shame?

I know scores of damn good journalists who were forced out of the business because of the death of newspapers over the past couple of decades, and the ever-shrinking opportunities to apply their journalistic expertise elsewhere.

There’s not one of them I talk to, however, who can believe what they are seeing with the pathetic coverage a majority of the press is giving to our threat to Democracy. There’s not one of them who wouldn’t have walked out the door and sounded the alarm if they had been ordered by management to ignore this threat.

So I’m back to where I started.

I now believe the media’s appalling treatment of the attack on our Democracy is a simple matter of incompetence, and/or lack of guts on the part of too many in the journalism field. Welker’s display on Sunday was the best example you’ll ever see of both.

What are these so-called journalists doing in their editorial meetings each day when they are discussing the news?

Why haven’t they setup Democracy Desks that do nothing but cover the greatest threat to America in 160 years? Why aren’t they breaking down and detailing what is at stake if, God forbid, our Democracy is overrun by a fascist leader who will never leave office and starts jailing them if they don’t toe the party line?

You’ll find some phenomenal reporting on this subject in places like The Atlantic, but we need more than monthly deep dives into this attack if we hope to survive it.

I never thought I’d type this, but the only place I feel I can get accurate reporting these days is when a natural disaster is threatening America. If a hurricane is bearing down on the United States, you can count on mass pandemonium, and all-hands-on-deck treatment in all these newsrooms.

It’s a bit much, but at least there is some real urgency in the way they approach these looming disasters.

They can’t wait to report on all the gory possibilities if we take a direct hit by one of these storms. They remind us what we need to do to be prepared, and where we can go to get help if necessary.

They make sure we understand the stakes.

They do this because they want to protect their readers and viewers. They do this because people are vulnerable. They do this because they never want to be accused of ignoring such an ominous threat. They do this because they know people are watching, and there is some real money to be made ...

If only they were smart enough to approach the catastrophic threat to our Democracy with the same sense of responsibility and vigor.

NOW READ: A 38-year-long Republican scam may soon be over — thanks to women

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. Follow @EarlofEnough and on his website.

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NBC and CBS evening news shows failed to cover a report that Trump’s businesses received millions from foreign countries while he was in office | Media Matters for America

National TV news coverage of COP28 was sparse and inconsistent | Media Matters for America

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National TV news largely ignored FBI report showing crime rates declined significantly in 2023 | Media Matters for America

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Fox’s purported “news side” glosses over report on Trump’s business payments from foreign governments | Media Matters for America

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an 1 24

as the third anniversary of the deadly January 6 insurrection approaches this weekend, one columnist is calling on journalists and editors to stop treating the future of democracy like a standard partisan issue.

In her latest column for The Guardian, Margaret Sullivan expressed her frustration about the beltway media's tendency to find a both-sides angle when covering former President Donald Trump's repeated threats to democracy.

"In a constant show of performative neutrality, journalists tend to equalize the unequal, taking coverage down the middle even though that’s not where true fairness lies," Sullivan wrote, urging reporters to "get beyond delivery and appearances, to get beyond poll numbers and approval numbers – all the things that they are most comfortable with."

"The mainstream media is not nearly as comfortable with communicating the larger concepts, even when the stakes are this high," Sullivan continued. "Constantly under attack from the right, they fear looking like they are 'in the tank' for a particular candidate or party, so they fall back on those traditional building blocks of coverage – numbers, polls, approval ratings."

"That may have worked in the past, or at least been relatively unobjectionable," she added. "Not any more."

Sullivan cited several examples of false "both sides" narratives in prominent publications, including a New York Times article that she said was "typical of the mainstream media’s tone and focus." That article noted that President Joe Biden was giving a speech in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania on the anniversary of January 6 to remind Americans that his predecessor's lies about the 2020 election helped fuel an attack on the US Capitol, but framed it as "an effort to redirect attention from Mr. Biden’s low approval numbers." ABC News had a similar approach in a recent article with the headline "One attack, two interpretations: Biden and Trump both make the Jan. 6 riot a political rallying cry."

Vanity Fair special correspondent Molly Jong-Fast criticized that headline in a post to X (formerly Twitter).

READ MORE:Michigan elections chief: 'Direct line' between Trump's Detroit call and January 6 riot

"There aren’t two sides to a violent insurrection in the United States capitol," she tweeted.

In her column, Sullivan lauded former Washington Post executive editor Marty Baron's blunt evaluation of the threat to democracy Trump posed when he said the ex-president is "the only politician I’ve heard actually talk about suspending the constitution."

"He’s talked about using the military to suppress entirely legitimate protests using the Insurrection Act. He’s talked about bringing treason charges against the then-outgoing chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. He’s talked about bringing treason charges against Comcast, the owner of NBC and MSNBC. He’s talked explicitly about weaponizing the government against his political enemies," Baron said. "And, of course, he continues to talk about crushing an independent press... all of those [threats], by nature, by definition, are authoritarian."

Sullivan ended her column by asking journalists and editors to "remember that being in favor of democracy isn’t a journalistic crime. In fact, it’s a journalistic obligation."

READ MORE:'We're going to come after the people in the media': Trump ally calls for prosecuting journalists

Read Sullivan's full columnby clicking here.

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mma 1 24

BROCK BENEFIEL (HOST, THE CLIMATE POD) : On the other side, on the flip side of that, just recently, just within the last month, we've seen so many layoffs, especially of climate journalists, investigative reporters. We've seen this at Vox and Washington Post and CBC, Conde Nast. Like we’re seeing really good climate media — if not entirely disappear — be somewhat, resources being diminished.

And it just makes me very nervous about the way climate will be covered in the United States and in so many other countries if there are not more journalists being hired to cover climate, more good journalists having the time and the resources that they need to cover climate. And I just always get really worried about the business models for journalism, just writ large.

I had this conversation with Jane Glove a couple weeks ago talking about local journalism and, with climate journalism, this show would not exist without amazing climate journalists who are doing the real work, the real investigative work that is time-intensive, and it's resource-intensive. and it's really, really hard. I think that there's like a chilling effect when you see these layoffs to someone even wanting to do this work. I'll just open it up, though, to a bigger question of if you see any bigger trends unfolding in climate media that we should be aware of as we go into 2024.

EVLONDO COOPER (SENIOR RESEARCHER, MEDIA MATTERS): You know, it's interesting just speaking on that, I think any of these individuals who've done this amazing reporting would be an asset for any major news organization that's looking to deepen their climate reporting. I mean, to me this is an easy way to instantly 10x, 100x your reporting. And it does concern me as well, this kind of consolidation of media, the laying off of investigative reporters, people that kind of really dig in and do the hard work of exposing waste, fraud, and abuse, of exposing the fossil fuel industry. And it's concerning as well.

And as far as trends, I don't know. I think it sounds like a broken record. I think, you know, we've seen improvement in the last two years, specifically around broadcast coverage of climate. This year was a little concerning. I feel like they fell back into some of those same patterns of failing to connect extreme weather, of failing to provide these kinds of important climate moments, like the National Climate Assessment, COP28, the coverage they deserve. Missing big climate policy stories.

And so I think going forward, it's critical. I'll tell you one trend that excites me, and I hope that it translates over to how the media covers climate change. There are increasingly large number of polls being produced that show that majorities of Americans, including a majority of Republican or conservative Americans, are concerned about climate change and want to see something happen. And I think that reality has to penetrate the way national TV news networks cover climate change because despite what they say, people are concerned. But they don't want to just watch the doom and gloom all the time. They want to know what they can do. They want to feel empowered. They want to feel engaged. They want the government to do something about it. So you should be asking the politicians on your show, “What are you going to do to address the concerns of your constituents who are tired of seeing these extreme weather events happening in their communities, who want stronger climate policies, who want clean energy, and renewable energy?”

And so I think that's a trend, a positive trend, that if these broadcast networks and cable news networks were smart, they would respond to the will of what their viewers want. And instead of saying, “Oh, it's a ratings killer,” or. “Nobody really—” produce the reporting, and then people will come. You know, you have a podcast like yours and many others that have really great audiences who are concerned about this.

A lot of these folks migrated away from cable news and broadcast news because they no longer, you know, discuss the things that are important to them or has the depth that's important to them. And if you want to see some of that audience return, address some of the things that are important to them, like climate change, and do deep and substantive reporting because people do care, they are concerned, and they want to see something done.

National TV news coverage of COP28 was sparse and inconsistent}:

:{:{12/15/23}:

  1. ### National TV news covered Trump’s buried climate assessment with gusto. Biden’s assessment barely made the air.

:{:{11/17/23}:

  1. ### National TV news coverage of this summer’s record-breaking extreme weather exposed troubling trends

09/27/23

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many grfx not here

mma 12 23 matt g

the failures of legacy news outlets paved Donald Trump’s path to the presidency in 2016.

Obsessive, spectacle-minded coverage from major broadcast and cable networks and print and digital publications helped push the real estate mogul and reality TV star ahead of the pack during the Republican primary, as their top executives touted the resulting boom in ratings and profits.

And while critical scrutiny of Trump’s bigotry and authoritarianism increased during the general election campaign, outlets remained wedded to a “both sides” vision of journalism which resulted in disproportionate coverage of relatively minor scandals involving Trump’s Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton — particularly in the days just before the election.

The result was a narrow Trump victory, followed by four years of chaos, corruption, cruelty, conspiracy theories, mass death, proto-fascism, election subversion, and, ultimately, insurrection.

The twice-impeached, four-times-indicted former president is now seeking a return to office, with a stated goal of using the federal government to exact “retribution.” He has openly toyed with the “termination” of the Constitution’s limits on presidential power, promised to unleash the FBI and Justice Department on his enemies, and said he would act as a “dictator,” albeit only on “day one” of his term.

But for much of this year, the legacy news outlets that helped usher Trump to power were complacent. Nakedly authoritarian comments from the would-be president drew relatively muted coverage, while his potentially disastrous policy proposals were often ignored. If the press’s over-coverage aided Trump’s previous ascendance, this time around he has benefited from its relative neglect.

Media Matters is naming the legacy media our Misinformer of the Year for 2023.

The press plays an essential agenda-setting role in American politics. Decisions made by news executives, editors, TV newscasters and bookers, reporters, and pundits determine which issues the public sees, reads, and hears about, and the tone with which those topics are covered.

Media Matters produced a series of studies this year assessing the news coverage of Trump by the nation’s five largest newspapers by circulation (the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post); the Big Three broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC); and the three major cable news networks (CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News). While the news media have become increasingly fragmented, those outlets feature relatively large audiences and both retain an outsized influence on and reflect broader trends in the industry.

Our studies found that while many individual journalists at those networks and publications produced vital reporting on Trump’s actions and plans, the overall coverage of the outlets often did not meet the moment.

Data: Major news outlets keep downplaying Trump’s incendiary remarks and hazardous policies

Trump’s involvement in the January 6 insurrection, in which his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol in an effort to subvert the results of the 2020 election, is perhaps the single most salient aspect of his political career.

But after Trump launched his new campaign with two January rallies, 77% of cable segments, 62% of top newspaper articles, and all broadcast news segments about the campaign failed to mention that role.

After President Joe Biden announced his reelection bid in April, we found that media coverage would often highlight his age but not Trump's, even though the former president is only three years younger.

Reviewing five months of coverage in major newspapers, we found that of all the articles that mentioned the age of either candidate, all five papers mentioned Biden’s age a great deal more.

We further determined that cable news mentioned Biden’s age 4 times as often as Trump’s in a four-day period in September beginning with the release of a poll that included questions about both candidates’ ages and health.

Major outlets not only provided comparatively little coverage of Trump’s age, but they also downplayed a series of verbal gaffes and incoherent statements he made. In September and October, Trump mixed up the authoritarian leaders of Hungary and Turkey; confused his former Republican opponent Jeb Bush and Jeb’s brother, former President George W. Bush; mixed up a number of his Democratic opponents with former President Barack Obama; and made a garbled statement accusing Biden of leading the country into “World War II.”

None of those remarks were covered on broadcast news, and they received relatively light coverage from the cable networks.

We also found that Trump received relatively lax coverage for a series of unhinged, extremist comments he made over the last four months of the year.

When the former president and likely Republican nominee suggested that Gen. Mark Milley, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, deserved to be executed for his criticism of Trump, the comments were ignored by the Big Three broadcast networks and Fox, and they received 21 and 41 minutes of coverage, respectively, from CNN and MSNBC.

We subsequently reviewed coverage after Trump complimented the terrorist group Hezbollah as “very smart”; accused migrants of “poisoning the blood of our country”; said that “liberal Jews” are voting “to destroy America”; and called for “ideological screening” of immigrants and the barring of those who don’t like “our religion.”

Only the Hezbollah remark received more than 12 minutes of coverage from a cable news network or any broadcast coverage at all (just over 1 minute of coverage combined across ABC and NBC).

Likewise, in November Trump repeatedly pledged to “root out” his political opponents, who he claimed “live like vermin within the confines of our country” and want to “destroy America,” drawing comparisons from experts on authoritarianism to the rhetoric of genocidal fascist dictators.

But the remarks were largely ignored, drawing significantly less coverage from major outlets than the outlets gave Clinton’s description of some Trump supporters as a “basket of deplorables” in 2016.

grf]

The legacy press did no better in covering some of Trump’s most consequential policy ideas this year.

Trump announced in August that he plans to impose a 10% tariff on all imported goods, the revenue from which his campaign team said would go toward tax cuts slanted toward the rich. Experts decried the tariff plan as “a disaster for the U.S. economy” that would raise prices for American consumers, particularly the poor and middle class, and potentially trigger “global economic chaos.”

But Trump’s tariff proposal received vanishingly little television coverage over the following month. ABC, CBS, and NBC did not cover it on their national morning, evening, or Sunday political talk shows. CNN and MSNBC each provided less than 1 minute of coverage, within a single segment, and neither addressed the potential impact for Americans, while Fox ignored the plan.

In November, Trump said that if he is elected he wants to “terminate” the Affordable Care Act, which provides health coverage to 35 million Americans and protects the coverage of many more with preexisting conditions. We found that the broadcast networks totally ignored Trump’s threat. While the cable news networks covered Trump’s threat in 35 segments, they largely ignored its potential consequences for the public.

2024 will push political journalism to the breaking point

There were signs of improvement as the year came to a close. The New York Times produced major investigations on the Trump team's radical, authoritarian plans for if he returns to power, while The Atlantic devoted an entire issue to analyzing what will occur “If Trump Wins.” Each set the agenda for the rest of the press, drawing substantial secondary coverage.

The legacy press also might be turning a corner on coverage of Trump’s extremist rhetoric. When he first accused migrants of “poisoning the blood of our country” in a September speech, ABC, CBS, and NBC all ignored the comment, while CNN, Fox, and MSNBC combined to give it only 22 minutes of coverage over two weeks. But when he repeated the vile remark in December, the same outlets gave it the attention it deserved: Each broadcast network ran at least 3 segments on the comment, and the cables combined for more than 11 times as much airtime (245 minutes) over the course of only four days.

It's possible that as the presidential primaries come to a close, reporting focusing on “not the odds, but the stakes” will become more of the norm rather than the exception.

But the job of the political press will become only more difficult over the next year. Republicans and right-wing media will pressure journalists to repeat the mistakes they made during Trump’s first general election campaign. They have spent years assembling a series of debunked conspiracy theories and bad-faith innuendoes related to the business interests of Biden’s son, Hunter, and next year they plan to leverage those phony grievances to impeach the president. Republicans recognize that they lack actual incriminating evidence of wrongdoing by Joe Biden — but they know that if they can stir up a scandal, they can give legacy news outlets something to talk about besides Trump’s alleged criminality.

Fox News host Jesse Watters laid out the plan in August.

“Without the impeachment, you have back-to-back-to-back-to-back Trump trials,” he explained. “The media’s not going to cover anything else. Biden’s going to hide, and Trump is going to be criminalized on TV. But if Republicans time this right and follow the evidence where it leads, impeachment is going to run counter to the Trump trials next year.”

Watters knows that such a plan could work on journalists because a similar approach succeeded in 2016. A return to that form would put the American experiment in democracy — and the free press itself — in jeopardy.

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TV news coverage since Trump threatened to repeal the ACA mostly failed to mention these critical stakes | Media Matters for America

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as Rupert Murdoch steps down as the head of Fox, his destructive legacy remains

Murdoch’s efforts to inject American homes with right-wing misinformation have torn families apart

WRITTEN BY AUDREY MCCABE

PUBLISHED 11/17/23

During Rupert Murdoch’s 25-year tenure as the head of Fox, he created a right-wing misinformation machine, subsidized by cable customers, that played an essential role in former President Donald Trump’s rise to power and subsequent attempts to stay in power by stealing the 2020 election. The network has divided not just Americans, but also families, with the anger and bigotry stoked by Fox destroying relationships among loved ones.

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an 11 23 no lnx

The death of the New York Times

D. Earl Stephens

November 13, 2023

After being a loyal reader for the better part of 60 years, I have officially run out of respect for The New York Times.

I have come to the grudging realization that this newspaper is actively playing a part in undermining our Democracy by convening a political horse race, and backing a burnt-orange, reprehensible, racist traitor, and his dirty trainers, who mean our country harm.

I believe they are doing this because they have lost their way and their morals, and have carefully dug out a tributary that flows from the obscene river of cash that is currently poisoning our politics, and runs directly into the bottomless pockets of the broken decision-makers whose fat asses are comfortably stuffed in the chairs of their front offices.

Unrest and instability might be bad for our Democracy, but they are damn good for business at The New York Times.

I take no pride in writing what I believe is this necessary piece.

I have been a steady reader of the “Gray Lady” for most of my life. Growing up in New Jersey, I actually aspired to work at the place as a starry-eyed kid, who pedaled his bike around delivering newspapers after school each day.

That never happened, and mostly by design. It turns out I got far more of a thrill working for smaller, underdog newspapers that stood up for their readers, called power to account, and strived to make a real difference in their communities.

Still, I never lost my respect for The Times — until now.

Their news presentation was boring, gray and haughty, but their writing and editing was second to none, and I had a certain amount of confidence that if there was an important world or national story that needed telling they’d get to it before anybody, and fire it out there for all to see.

In the wake of the terrible blast on November 8, 2016, that blew a hole through America’s decency, it took me no time at all to write in so many words, that it would be professional journalism organizations like The New York Times that would dig deep into Trump’s gory affairs, and begin exposing him for what he was, and always had been.

They would save the day, because that is what good journalism can do when it is done right.

They’d cover his White House like a blanket. When he invariably did completely terrible, anti-American things like defending Vladimir Putin’s attack on America while standing next to the murdering fascist in Helsinki, they’d put a laser focus on it, and make sure everybody in the world understood why that really mattered.

Yes, their treatment of Hillary Clinton’s emails (and the woman herself) leading up to the 2016 Election was a journalistic crime spree, but I still had confidence they would make amends for that malfeasance.

If you are saying to yourself right now that I was a gullible fool, and I was served my just deserts, I am saying that is completely fair.

I still believe I was mostly right, at least for a time, and The Times did start turning around some pretty good stuff that covered the burnt-orange traitor with shame. Just as quickly, however, they resorted to ultra-cheap, both-sides journalism, even when there was nobody even close to the incomparably awful, lying, pussy-grabbing racist and his fawning party on the other side.

And if I never read another 77-column-inch story dedicated to what 11 Trump supporters are saying about anything while inhaling black coffee in a Pennsylvania diner it will be too soon.

What has finally driven my lifelong respect for the paper to an end was yet another poll they conducted with Sienna College that went to print this weekend focusing on six swing states. The poll was accompanied by hundreds and hundreds of column inches devoted to a bunch of ridiculous numbers culled from a sampling of American voters that was so small, the 11 Trump voters at the diner looked more significant and reputable by comparison.

I guess The Times wanted everybody on the face of the Earth to know that according to them Joe Biden was in trouble in these six swing states, and that their burnt-orange steed was snorting hard and closing with a huff on the outside.

We can try to play stupid for a minute and pretend the leadership at The Times had somehow talked itself into believing it was performing some kind of helpful journalism to its readers by producing this bought-and-paid-for bilge, but that just doesn’t add up.

There are too many people there who know full well that a news organization’s job is to report the news, not make it. By devoting three full news cycles to this outlandish slop, the paper made it crystal clear they valued themselves and their bank accounts more than their readers.

Essentially, they told their readers this: “We are glad you are paying us to cover the news, but we just did something we think is important and we are going to spend the next three days patting ourselves on the back and telling you why we’ve come to amazing conclusions that we think are so bloody important. Please make sure you sign your checks before sending them to us. You’re welcome.”

I’m not going to wade too deeply into the results of this poll for reasons I will get to in a second. And frankly, I don’t know how many polls have to be wrong before people stop paying attention to them altogether. Still … I would like to know why Republicans were oversampled by The Times in this particular foray into professional guessing.

The Times has not provided an answer to this question, but it is a fact their minuscule sample size of the American public was predominated by right-leaning voters.

As to polls in general ... To start, they are often ridiculously wrong, as we’ve seen time and time again since, ironically, Trump was somehow elected despite being given a one-in-five chance on Election Day 2016 by these expert pollsters.

More consequentially, depending on their murky results, polls can also present a very dangerous bias and these days are being used mostly by Republicans to suppress the vote. Nobody has more practice in the ghoulish art of voter-suppression than they do.

Let me tell you just one grievous story about how bogus poll results were used to re-elect the vomit-inducing Ron Johnson (another one of Putin’s fast friends, incidentally) in last year’s senatorial race here in Wisconsin, and how the Democratic Party inexplicable and disastrously fell for this ruse.

In the final weeks of the race, polls were released in Wisconsin showing Johnson running 4%-to-7% points ahead of his firebrand of a challenger, Democrat, Mandela Barnes.

These numbers were a bit of stunner because incumbent Democratic Governor Tony Evers was also on the ballot, and was running slightly ahead of his Trump-kissed challenger.

It was also obvious to anybody who was actually covering this campaign, instead of floating poll numbers into the air about it, that it was crystal clear Barnes was closing like a freight train on the fading Johnson.

I was at two of Barnes rallies in the final days of the campaign and the man was drawing huge crowds, and was positively on fire. He was connecting, and I had no doubt in my mind that the race was going to be very close.

Trouble is, the Democratic National Committee got wind of these bad polls for Barnes and pulled the money they had planned to allocate to his campaign during the final week, and instead deployed it to other races they deemed closer and safer around the nation.

Turns out, Johnson prevailed by less than ONE percentage point. It was agonizingly close. Nobody will ever convince me otherwise that if the DNC had stayed with Barnes he would be in Washington right now representing my state in the Senate.

Oh, and Evers won his race in a cakewalk. So much for those polls.

In this case, bad polls actually scared the DNC away. In too many other cases, polls can convince prospective voters that maybe the person they are supporting doesn’t stand a chance. This might cool their support for him or her on Election Day.

I’d guess that both of these things conspired to sink Barnes, which still makes my stomach turn.

But back to this NYT poll, and why what’s left of my hair is on fire.

It turns out that buried deep inside the print editions of their endless, breathtaking coverage of their flimflam poll, was this juicy nugget they had to hope almost nobody would see:

“Polls have often failed to predict results of elections this far out.”

I mean, holy s---.

This isn’t burying the lede, it’s completely obliterating it.

Oh, and on Tuesday? Democrats once again exceeded expectations and those blasted polls in nationwide elections, and won just about every important race on the docket.

Ever since Trump and his Republicans attack on our country and subsequent coup attempt in 2021, I have been calling for The Times and ALL major media companies to establish Democracy Desks in their newsrooms.

Every day — hell, every HOUR — Republicans are doing something to undermine our Democratic Republic here in America, whether it be squashing voting rights, refusing to certify elections, threatening DOJ officials, flat lying about the results of these elections, supporting dictators around the world, banning books detailing our nation’s choppy history, all of the above, and more.

It never ends. There is no bigger overarching story in America right now than Republicans’ surge toward fascism.

WHY isn’t this being given the editorial weight it deserves?

I’ve said it many times and I’ll say it again right here: If the Republicans are successful in taking down our Democracy and installing an authoritarian regime in Washington, one of the very first things to go will be our freedom of the press, and THEN where will The Times be?

It is ludicrous that their readers aren’t being educated everyday about what the Republicans have in mind and how devastating it would be to the citizens of this country if they ever got back into the White House.

For one thing, it’s fair to posit there would never be another election again -- at least not one that would be remotely fair.

Ever since the disaster in November, 2016, just enough Americans have risen up and gotten active stamping out the flames of fascism Republicans have so frantically been fanning.

But we could use a little help.

That would start with some first-class journalism and reporting about things as they are. That would start with knocking it the hell off with these stupid polls that predict nothing, and start dealing with our terrifying realities.

That would mean spending the time and resources necessary to really dig in, and actually start reporting only the news that’s fit to print.

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. Follow @EarlofEnough

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Major national outlets adopt House GOP spin to protect rich tax cheats | Media Matters for America

  1. ### Tucker Carlson’s dangerous lie that Biden is targeting his audience with “87,000 armed IRS agents”

08/16/22 1:00 PM EDT

  1. ### Fox’s IRS dystopia hasn’t materialized, but the GOP is still trying to cut its funding

04/20/23 1:27 PM EDT

  1. ### Right-wing media are telling their audience a weaponized Democratic government “is at war with you”

08/09/22

mma 11 23

Several major national news outlets are promoting House Republicans’ deceptive spin as the party seeks to leverage emergency funding for Israel to enact its top priority of protecting wealthy tax cheats.

President Joe Biden requested $105 billion in emergency supplemental funding earlier this month. His proposed package includes military aid to Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan; money to enhance U.S. border security; and humanitarian aid for Palestinian, Israeli, and Ukrainian civilians.

But in a Fox interview last week, newly minted House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) said he planned to split up the package and pass stand-alone Israel funds that would be offset by what he called “pay-fors in the budget.” Johnson explained, “We’re not just printing money to send it overseas. We’re going to find the cuts elsewhere to do that.” House Republicans released their bill on Monday, which pairs $14.3 billion for Israel with $14.3 billion in cuts from the enhanced funding for the Internal Revenue Service passed in last year’s Inflation Reduction Act.

Crucially, this is neither a pay-for nor an offset in any real way but would actually lead to an increase in the deficit: The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the IRA’s $80 billion for the IRS over 10 years, which includes a boost to enforcement spending, would “yield $180 billion in additional revenue for a net savings of $100 billion.” Just last week, the IRS reported that the IRA funds had allowed it to launch a crackdown on wealthy tax cheats that had already brought it $160 million in back taxes.

But the right is violently opposed to the government forcing wealthy taxpayers to pay what they owe. Right-wing propagandists have been screaming about that provision since it was proposed, describing increased funding for the IRS as, among other things, a dystopian plot to “hunt down and kill middle class taxpayers.” Republicans, meanwhile, made overturning those funds their top priority.

Johnson’s proposal uses the Israel aid package as an opportunity to achieve the Republican goal of protecting wealthy tax cheats. He’s counting on journalists to fail to explain this to their audiences — and in many cases thus far, that bet has worked out for him.

Some major news outlets promoted the GOP’s spin that the IRS funding cuts “offset” or “pay for” the Israel spending, while providing no information to their readers indicating that those cuts will likely increase the deficit.

The influential Punchbowl AM newsletter reported that the Johnson bill’s Israel funding “would be paid for by cutting an equal amount from the Inflation Reduction Act’s IRS enforcement,” adding that “the House GOP leadership team considered a host of bipartisan pay-fors, but opted to cut IRS money with hopes of dividing Democrats and solidifying GOP support” and “a standalone Israel bill with offsets is a no-go for the Democratic-led Senate.”

Reuters reported that the House GOP legislation would “provide $14.3 billion in aid to Israel by cutting funding for the Internal Revenue Service.”

And CBS News’ write-up claimed that “House Republicans want to pay for emergency aid to Israel by cutting funding to the IRS” and the bill would “would pay for aid to Israel by cutting the same amount in funding that was allocated to the IRS under the Inflation Reduction Act.”

Other outlets similarly privileged the House GOP’s false “offset” framing, but either acknowledged later in their report that the IRS cuts would increase the deficit or at least cited critics making that point.

The Washington Post’s article initially described the Republican bill as “a proposal to pay for emergency aid for Israel’s war against Hamas by cutting IRS funds aimed at cracking down on rich tax cheats and improving taxpayer service.” But the Post went on to provide a detailed accounting of what the IRS funding goes toward, and noted: “Using the IRS funding to offset the Israel aid might not actually save money: The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office had estimated in 2022 that the $80 billion IRS expansion would cut the deficit by more than $100 billion by improving collections and enforcement.”

NBC News’ article featured the subheadline “The newly minted Republican speaker is seeking to pay for aid to Israel by slashing $14.3 billion from IRS funds in the Democratic president's signature law.” But the body of the piece instead accurately described the bill as only “rescinding the same amount of IRS funding” as it included in Israel aid, and noted that “the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has projected that the funds will ‘increase revenues by approximately $200 billion’ over a decade.”

CNN’s write-up claimed in its second and third paragraphs that “the GOP-led bill includes the same amount in spending cuts, rescinding $14.3 billion that had been allocated to the IRS as part of the Inflation Reduction Act,” and that “Democrats are warning that the bill’s offsets could cost it passage in the House.” In paragraph 10, it cited Sen. Patty Murray’s (D-WA) statement that “the cuts House Republicans are proposing would actually increase the deficit by curbing the IRS’ ability to go after billionaire tax cheats.”

And Semafor’s Principals newsletter led with the news that House Republicans had “unveiled a bill that would pay for $14.3 billion in assistance to Israel by slashing funding from the IRS” and that Johnson had “argued that emergency funding should be balanced by cuts elsewhere in the budget,” but later cited Sen. Mitt Romney’s (R-UT) statement opposing “reducing our tax collections by shrinking the IRS.”

It’s not impossible for outlets to get it right. Some reporters pointed out to their audiences that the GOP’s spin is deceptive rather than echoing it.

The Wall Street Journal reported that the House Republican’s bill “purports to pay for itself by rescinding $14.3 billion of the $80 billion that Congress gave to the Internal Revenue Service last year to improve the agency’s technology and enforcement,” then immediately added, “Cutting the IRS enforcement budget, in fact, would increase budget deficits by making it harder for the agency to catch tax cheats.”

Politico Playbook likewise reported that the Republican bill “not only seeks to offset the spending with cuts elsewhere but taps Democrats’ signature domestic policy legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act, to do it,” but then immediately debunked that language.

“As a policy matter, reversing the bill’s IRS plus-up doesn’t make a lot of sense. Cutting the agency’s planned enforcement surge against tax evaders would have the perverse effect of increasing budget deficits, not trimming them,” it stated. “But as a political matter, the logic is impeccable: The libs, after all, were owned.”

Johnson’s first major move as speaker was to try to deceive the press (and through it, the public) in order to achieve one of his party’s long-sought objectives. His success in getting credulous reporters to adopt his spin is an ominous sign for the months ahead.

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National broadcast and cable networks are barely covering Trump’s recent gaffes and incoherent statements | Media Matters for America

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borderline fails?

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Major US newspapers and broadcast TV news outlets often failed to report on Jim Jordan’s role in undermining the 2020 election – and ignored the risk to certification in 2024 if he becomes speaker | Media Matters for America

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https://www.mediamatters.org/broadcast-networks/only-4-national-tv-news-segments-about-catastrophic-wildfires-hawaii-mentioned

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the past year has seen a global surge in climate activism, spurred by the escalating climate crisis, including controversial actions such as throwing paint and food at venerable works of art, bringing bustling city traffic to a halt, and disrupting major athletic competitions, among others.

A Media Matters analysis of coverage by major national TV news networks and the top five U.S. newspapers by circulation reveals a troubling trend: Coverage of such disruptive climate protests over the last year was not only limited, but also heavily skewed, often focusing on the disruptive tactics of the activists rather than the urgent climate message driving their actions. Coverage also rarely pointed out the increasingly hostile and punitive response from police and governments that these provocative tactics have increasingly drawn.

From May 30, 2022, to July 31, 2023, Media Matters found:

For example, in the week leading up to Earth Day 2023, broadcast networks allocated just over 3 hours of coverage to the global event and less than an hour on Earth Day itself. But when it comes to more confrontational climate actions, the media attention is hardly consistent or proportional.

Climate activists engaged in civil disobedience are often portrayed merely as disruptors, with the news media failing to adequately communicate the grave climate concerns that drive their actions. Furthermore, the intensifying government responses to these acts of dissent — from heightened policing to punitive legislation aimed at deterring future activism — are frequently sidelined in the reporting, creating an incomplete picture of the full stakes involved in these protests.

From May 30, 2022, through July 31, 2023, broadcast TV news networks aired just 7 segments about various climate protests. ABC aired 4 segments about climate protests, followed by NBC with 2, and CBS with 1. None of the corporate broadcast networks’ segments about climate protests referenced scientific warnings about climate change or mentioned the escalating legal reprisals against controversial climate actions.

During the same period, CNN and MSNBC aired 36 segments about climate protests, with 7 mentioning scientific warnings about climate change. CNN aired 26 protest segments, with 4 climate science mentions, followed by MSNBC, with 9 segments and 3 mentions.

One of the better segments connecting climate protest to climate science aired during the April 23 episode of *CNN Newsroom Live*, which used the occasion of Earth Day to discuss the dual strategies climate activist group Extinction Rebellion was deploying to draw attention to the crisis and also included a detailed accounting of the climate threats facing the planet.

MSNBC was the only cable network to air a segment that mentioned the legal backlash against climate activists. Ayman Mohyeldin, host of MSNBC’s Ayman, explicitly denounced the jailing of climate activists during a November 13, 2022, segment about imprisoned Egyptian journalist and activist Alaa Abd el-Fattah’s hunger strike during the United Nations’ COP 27 climate conference.

The host declared, “Look, there is no environmental justice without social justice. Governments cannot tackle the world’s climate needs with sobriety and urgency, while simultaneously imprisoning young activists around the world who are at the very forefront for the calls for change.”

Despite these notable exceptions, broadcast and cable networks have largely provided limited and decontextualized coverage of climate protests. Most of their coverage focused on the art protests, specifically Just Stop Oil activists who threw soup at Vincent van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” at the National Gallery in London last October. The activists who used charcoal to dye the Trevi Fountain in Rome black in May also received coverage from mainstream TV news outlets.

This reporting often neglected to connect the activists’ provocative methods to the pressing climate concerns propelling their actions or to mention the intensifying government reactions to these protests. This incomplete representation creates an information vacuum, conveniently filled by right-wing media, which could further skew public understanding of the climate crisis and its advocates.

Overshadowing its mainstream cable news competitors, Fox again dominated cable news coverage of climate protests during the studied time period. The network aired 144 segments, which is four times CNN and MSNBC’s combined coverage. Fox also covered a much wider variety of climate protests than its cable news counterparts, with numerous segments abouts the demonstrators who protested the Congressional Baseball Game last July, the activists who deflated dozens of SUV tires in Boston in April, and the protesters who interrupted Wimbledon in July.

In 8 segments, Fox also explicitly denied or downplayed the climate emergency driving the activists’ actions. For example, during a segment that aired on the May 22 episode of *Fox News Tonight* about Roman climate protesters who dyed the Trevi Fountain black to draw attention to the link between fossil fuel consumption and devastating floods in northern Italy, correspondent Trace Gallagher noted, “Historians inconveniently remind the protesters that the rain drought pattern in northern Italy has been happening for thousands of years, maybe millions.”

Fox’s coverage routinely mocked and derided climate activists. For example, during the May 23 episode of Fox News’ *The Five*, co-host Jeanine Piro called the Trevi Fountain protesters “lunatics” and asked, “Is there something off in their brain that makes them do this?”

During the June 1 episode of *Fox & Friends*, Fox host Carley Shimkus said it was “positively hilarious” that one of the climate protesters who interrupted a Swedish dance competition had been deliberately hit by a piece of camera equipment, before the hosts mused about assaulting hypothetical protesters who happened into the Fox News studio.

Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade again wished violence upon climate activists during a July 6 segment about a protest that disrupted Wimbledon, saying he hoped that security “roughed up” the protesters.

The Washington Post led with 15 total articles about climate protests, 7 of which mentioned the scientific warnings about climate change; the Los Angeles Times followed with 7 articles with 4 mentions; The New York Times ran 6 articles with 2 mentions; The Wall Street Journal ran 2 articles with no mentions; and USA Today ran 1 article with no mentions. The New York Times and The Washington Post were the only top five newspapers to mention the legal reprisals against climate protesters, with 3 and 1 mention, respectively.

The coverage within the United States' leading newspapers revealed diverse, often conflicting narratives, where nuanced insights coexisted with more surface-level stories about climate protests, even within the same publications, creating a stark contrast in the way the protests were presented to readers.

For example, the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and The Washington Post each published several articles that examined the ominous scientific warnings about climate change fueling the urgency of the protests, providing readers a more complete understanding of the activists' cause. However, these same newspapers also published other articles that ignored the larger story of the climate crisis and focused on the protesters’ tactics. The lack of context in these pieces clouded or obscured the urgent message that activists sought to convey. This mixed approach underscores the need for more consistent, comprehensive, and empathetic reporting of climate protests that reflect the gravity of the issue at hand.

Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal’s 2 print articles about climate protests during the studied period were uniform in their condemnation of the activists and their tactics. The right-leaning newspaper is owned by the Murdoch family, which also owns Fox News among a number of other right-wing media outlets.

Regarding legal reprisals, The Washington Post published a strong editorial on June 16 that decried the Vietnamese government’s imprisonment under false pretenses of Hoang Thi Minh Hong, who is described as “the country’s leading climate activist.” And a July 12 New York Times article about various climate protests at museums noted that the United States was approaching a “tipping point” as “prosecutors have brought serious federal charges against protesters who threatened the safety of art at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, which is a federal institution.” But such coverage remains sparse.

The increasingly oppressive response to provocative climate protests, characterized by brutal policing and punitive legal measures, reflects a broader trend in criminalizing dissent to deter protesters and inhibit the global mobilization efforts of environmental movements.

This dearth of coverage not only overlooks an alarming pattern of legislative hostility toward current iterations of climate activism, but it also ignores the array of so-called “critical infrastructure” laws crafted to penalize environmental protests that have been enacted across numerous states. These laws, often advocated by the fossil fuel industry and their proxies, propose severe penalties for protests near fossil fuel infrastructure and prescribe hefty fines for organizations supporting such actions, and they have already caused a great deal of harm among the U.S. climate activist community.

In January, 26-year-old Manuel “Tortuguita” Terán was killed by law enforcement officers during a raid on the Defend Atlanta Forest encampment. Other forest defenders have subsequently been charged with domestic terrorism for protesting the construction of a police training facility in Atlanta, dubbed “Cop City.”

Meanwhile, during protests of the construction of the Line 3 pipeline project in Minnesota, a thousand-mile crude oil pipeline from Canada to Wisconsin, the Enbridge pipeline company paid police officers to harass and mass arrest climate activists and entangle them in complex and expensive legal proceedings.

And choosing to focus sparse coverage of climate protests on the disruptive tactics of activists can have further harmful implications. By portraying protesters as threats rather than as citizens responding to an existential crisis, media narratives provide fodder for right-wing outlets and social media influencers to rationalize violence. This escalates risks for frontline climate activists and adds to the pervading environment of fear and intimidation.

Unfortunately, significant incidents and policy changes often go underreported. For instance, the United Kingdom introduced draft legislation posing unprecedented restrictions on the right to protest, yet this development received little attention in mainstream media.

Similarly, several American states have passed laws that exonerate drivers who hit protesters with their vehicles, a frightening development considering similar incidents in Australia andGermany.

National news media bear a substantial responsibility for reporting on climate protests with depth, substance, and accuracy, especially given the torrent of harmful narratives from right-wing media outlets such as Fox News which frequently seek to distort and diminish the urgency of climate change. Mainstream news outlets must thus strive to provide comprehensive coverage that transcends a narrow focus on protest tactics and emphasizes the scientific underpinnings of the protests, the heightened legal repercussions faced by activists, and the increased criminalization of these vital expressions of dissent.

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https://www.mediamatters.org/labor-unions-and-workers-rights/blockbuster-year-labor-cable-news-coverage-large-strikes-has

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Following the indictment of disgraced former President Donald Trump on federal charges for his attempt to remain in office after losing the 2020 election, mainstream media outlets are seemingly bending over backward to seek commentary from Republican sources, many of whom end up spreading misinformation and spin, or simply wasting what could have been useful airtime.

Some outlets privileged Trump’s bogus argument that the indictment violates his First Amendment rights

In contrast to these other outlets, the Associated Press article covering this flimsy defense of Trump provided ample commentary from legal experts to debunk it.

The piece explained that the indictment conceded “that Trump had the right to falsely claim that fraud had cost him the election and to legally challenge the results,” but noted that it also stated that “the conduct of Trump and six co-conspirators he’s alleged to have plotted with went far beyond speech.”

It quoted George Washington University law professor Mary Anne Franks arguing of Trump’s election lies, “When you say it to another person and the two of you speak in a way and exchange information in a way that leads to action — that you want to take action to do something with that speech — then arguably it becomes unprotected.”

And it cited Cornell Law School constitutional law expert Michael Dorf, who argued: “Insofar as he’s giving instructions, and planning to do things that are themselves illegal and involve action, like the signing of false certificates and so forth, that’s not a very good defense.”

Conservative guests also made false arguments on-air

During an interview with CNN, former Trump-appointed Attorney General Bill Barr, who was a material witness to Trump’s conduct in the months following the election, explained why Trump’s defense is baseless. “All conspiracies involve speech, and all fraud involves speech,” Barr explained. “So, free speech doesn’t give you the right to engage in a fraudulent conspiracy.”

Contrary to Barr’s straightforward assertions about this case, some of the conservative guests to whom mainstream outlets are turning are providing no added value to discussions of the indictment, instead propagating misleading claims:

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https://www.mediamatters.org/supreme-court/americas-most-read-newspapers-did-poor-job-covering-likely-consequences-scotus

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https://www.mediamatters.org/climate-deniers/right-wing-media-downplay-hottest-day-modern-history-help-twitters-community-notes

no lnx twt

Right-wing media downplay the hottest day in modern history with the help of Twitter’s community notes feature

Special PROGRAMS

CLIMATE & ENERGY

WRITTEN BY ILANA BERGER

PUBLISHED 07/11/23

In response to widespread mainstream coverage of what scientists say was the hottest day in modern history, right-wing media predictably downplayed extreme heat with the help of Twitter’s community notes feature.

Scientists say July 6 could have been the hottest day in some 120,000 years, reaching a global average temperature of 63.02 degrees Fahrenheit. It was the fourth straight day to set or tie that record. A wide variety of other news outlets covered the record-breaking heat, including CNN, which tweeted on June 5: “The planet saw its hottest day ever this week. The record will be broken again and again” and linked to an article.

Before long, some users were claiming that CNN was being dishonest in its wording. A community note, a feature that allows users to “add context” below “potentially misleading” tweets, appeared below it:

Image of CNN tweet: "The planet saw its hottest day ever this week. The record will be broken again and again"

But this information was already front and center in CNN’s article, right under the lede.

Reporter Laura Paddison wrote: “On Monday, the average global temperature reached 17.01 degrees Celsius (62.62 Fahrenheit), the highest in the US National Centers for Environmental Prediction’s data, which goes back to 1979. On Tuesday, it climbed even further, reaching 17.18 degrees Celsius and global temperature remained at this record-high on Wednesday.”

The note even cited the very same article that was already linked in the tweet. Nonetheless, right-wing media piled on, creating another fake “gotcha” moment:

Fox & Friends Weekend co-host Will Cain told frequent Fox News guest and climate change denier Marc Morano that CNN is dishonestly convincing climate protesters they are “living on the edge of apocalypse”:  Morano falsely claimed that warming isn’t significant because “we're on an almost nine-year no change in temperature going back to about 2014-15 now.” Cain added: “All of this climate change data that we have, it’s short term as well. We can’t go back. We don’t know. I know they suggest —we don't know the climate over every ounce, every moment of this world's history.” [Fox News, Fox News Tonight, 7/8/23]

Blogger and climate change denier Tony Heller: “According to @CNN, earth is hotter now then when palm trees grew at the poles. #ClimateScam.”  [Twitter, 7/6/23]

British conservative activist and “social media commentator” Adam Brooks: “Community notes hand CNN a big custard pie in the face… climate propaganda is out of control. Agenda.” [Twitter, 7/6/23]

Fox News contributor Joe Concha: “CNN's version of the beginning of time is apparently the year before the network launched in 1980…” [Twitter, 7/6/23]

The Federalist co-founder Sean Davis:“If you legitimately believe that yesterday was literally the hottest day IN ALL OF HISTORY, then you are too stupid to exist and you should be deported.” [Twitter, 7/5/23]

Singer and frequent Timcastguest Phil Labonte: “It wasn’t the hottest day ever.” [Twitter, 7/5/23]

Megan Kelly Show producer Steve Krakauer: “‘Hottest day ever”’* *since 1979 haha.” [Twitter, 7/5/23]

Former Fox News producer Kyle Becker wrote that the record “is an absolute lie”:  Becker highlighted the well-known fact that Earth was hotter in the Paleozoic era and that “life on earth flourished in both of these eras, despite much higher carbon dioxide levels and much higher average global temperatures.” This life did not include humans and this fact does not disprove the existence of human-caused climate change. [Twitter, 7/5/23]

Gov. Ron DeSantis press secretary Jeremy Redfern tweeted a graph of global temperature over 500 million years and wrote, “Guys… .” [Twitter, 7/5/23]

Grabien founder and radio producer Tom Elliott: “CNN: Did you know the world started 150 years ago?” [Twitter, 7/5/23]

Importantly, the fact that the current modeling used to measure the global average temperature was implemented in 1979 doesn’t mean we don’t know anything about global temperatures before then.

Paleoclimatologists use fossils and ice cores to piece together what Earth was like thousands of years ago. While precise measurements are all but impossible, there is evidence to suggest average global temperatures haven’t been this high in over 100,000 years.

One thing paleoclimatologists know for sure, according to Richard Alley, a geosciences professor at Pennsylvania State University, is that if it was hotter in the past, it was naturally caused, while “the current rise is not natural, but caused by us.”

Community notes has a shaky track record

Crowdsourced notes on Twitter — a feature Elon Musk expanded in 2022 — have proved useful at times for rapidly adding highly visible context. But these notes aren’t always helpful for adding context to highly politicized issues like climate change and race, and can invite bigoted and misleading notes.

Twitter approves notes based on values it gives to each individual user that weighs in, not how many users find it helpful or unhelpful. A note can have few helpful votes and be approved; it just has to have ratings from people “with different points of view” that Twitter finds appropriate.

The values given to votes depend in part on how users have voted on community notes in the past. But some have pointed out that measuring “diversity” in this way can be flawed. Considering how Musk has empowered right-wing users in other ways, the balance of those who write community notes in the first place could potentially be ideologically skewed. In this case, the community note itself lacked key information and would have been more helpful if it specified that this was likely a 120,000-year record.

While significant, one broken record is far from the only indicator that global heating is a major threat

The argument over how to phrase this worrying benchmark is somewhat arbitrary in the scheme of global climate impacts.

The fact that July 6 was the hottest day on record shouldn’t bring the issue urgency by itself. The fact that over 100 people recently died in Mexico due to extreme heat, wildfires in Canada have burned an area the size of Virginia, and several major U.S. cities are still bracing for unhealthy air quality due to wildfire smoke should motivate the media to pay attention and lawmakers to act.

Right-wing media regularly respond to coverage of extreme heat with loud climate change denial. In July 2022, as a heat wave shook Western Europe, killing tens of thousands of people, climate skeptics responded with gaslighting and insisted everything was fine. How hot does it have to get and how many people have to die for skeptics to accept the fact that climate change is driving dangerously high temperatures? There is seemingly no limit. 

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also CBS?

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US corporate media accused of 'normalizing the hate group' Moms for Liberty

Brett Wilkins and Common Dreams July 04, 2023

ABC News this week joined other U.S. corporate media outlets in being accused of "normalizing" Moms for Liberty after publishing what one critic called a "puff piece" on the right-wing group that's behind a wave of school book bans and is linked to the neofascist Proud Boys and the Qanon conspiracy theory.

On Saturday, ABC News published an article by Brittany Shepherd titled "Moms for Liberty Are Fired Up in Philadelphia" as the self-described "parental rights" organization held its annual conference in Pennsylvania's largest city, where crowds of protesters turned out to denounce the group's bigotry.

"They call themselves joyful warriors—but this group of conservative moms are mad," Shepherd wrote in her lede.

Author and Daily Beast columnist Wajahat Ali called the article "shameful."

"Moms for Liberty is linked with the Proud Boys, a chapter quotes Hitler, they are behind book bans, they are funded by right-wing groups and... ABC News calls them 'joyful warriors,'" Ali tweeted. "The whiteness of it all is exhausting."

Historian Kevin Kruse wondered, "Did ABC let Moms for Liberty write this puff piece themselves?"

Brandon Wolf, press secretary for the LGBTQ+ advocacy group Equality Florida, noted that a Moms for Liberty chapter in Indiana included a quote from Adolf Hitler in its inaugural newsletter. The chapter chairperson subsequently apologized.

Founded in Florida in 2021 to oppose Covid-19 lockdowns and mandates, Moms for Liberty quickly gained a reputation for its anti-LGBTQ views and its harassment of school officials in service of the organization's far-right agenda.

The group—which says it has more than 115,000 members in 245 chapters in 45 states—wants to erase mention of LGBTQ+ rights, systemic racism, diversity, and other "woke" topics from school curricula.

Moms for Liberty—many of whose chapters are linked to extremist groups like the Proud Boys and Three Percenters as well as the Qanon conspiracy theory—has spearheaded a successful movement to ban books, especially ones with LGBTQ+ and racial themes, from school libraries across the nation.

The American Library Association said earlier this year that it had recorded 1,269 demands to censor books from various groups and individuals in 2022, compared to 729 challenges counted in 2021.

In her article, Shepherd wrote how the Moms for Liberty conference "showcases how local issues like education can have tremendous, galvanizing national influence, as Gov. Ron DeSantis, former President Donald Trump, and former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley tried to woo nearly 700 attendees."

The article continued:

Several key breakout sessions at the center of the group's mission, such as "Protecting Kids from Gender Ideology" and "Getting Flipped School Boards To Take Action" were kept behind closed doors, with media access barred. But still, the enthusiasm at open events was palpable, nearly bouncing off the ballroom walls.

The piece does note that Moms for Liberty is designated an extremist group by the Southern Poverty Law Center for spreading "hateful imagery and rhetoric against the LGBTQ community."

However, two paragraphs later Shepherd wrote that "Republicans will need this group to make up any lost ground" from last year's midterm elections.

In a Friday interview by MSNBC's Nicolle Wallace, extremism expert Kristofer Goldsmith urged viewers to spread the world about who Moms for Liberty are and what they stand for.

"We are talking book burning. We're talking about racism and we're talking about persecuting the LGBTQ community. These are the Proud Boys with a wig and lipstick," Goldsmith said. "That is all that they are. And because of the words 'Moms for Liberty,' not a lot of people are going to understand that."

"So folks watching this need to be evangelists, right?" he added. "You need to get out online and talk to your friends about what Moms for Liberty is, and help them understand that they are a pipeline into the most radical of extremism in this country."

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not fail?

https://www.mediamatters.org/broadcast-networks/35-climate-segments-corporate-broadcast-tv-news-2022-featured-climate-solutions

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the right-wing media echo chamber pushed a completely fictional talking point that Silicon Valley Bank had supposedly donated $73 million to Black Lives Matter, based on distortions from a far-right think tank. And in Fox News’ rush to amplify the falsehoods, which fit the network’s preposterous political narrative that SVB was a “woke bank,” purported “news” personnel behaved no differently from the network’s opinion hosts.

As a prime example of Fox’s “news” personalities pushing blatantly partisan falsehoods, on the morning of March 15, Fox News White House correspondent Peter Doocy claimed: “Roughly $73 million went to Black Lives Matter-related causes” from the bank. [vid]

and later that night, Fox host Sean Hannity said that Silicon Valley Bank “diverted a massive amount of money to left-wing causes. Now, get this, this is what we have discovered, that includes a whopping $73 million to BLM-related groups."[vid]

this is the same network that, as recently unearthed text messages and emails have shown, will actively reprimand and penalize its alleged “straight news” reporters for debunking misinformation pushed by its opinion hosts and their guests. As such, nobody in the network would have any incentive to even try to unearth the facts, because Fox News is not in any sense a real news organization.

Actual SVB donations to Black Lives Matter: $0.00

The charge itself that SVB contributed over $70 million to Black Lives Matter or closely aligned organizations is based on a supposed “BLM-funding database” maintained by the Claremont Institute, a right-wing and openly anti-democracy organization that is also closely tied to disgraced former law professor John Eastman, who was closely involved in former President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results.

The Associated Press confirmed that the database does not show any spending to Black Lives Matter, and obtained a comment in which Claremont explained it was including “reparative initiatives,” which it called “race-based, discriminatory hiring programs; race-based, sub-prime lending; partisan voter initiatives; and DEI efforts.” The AP also obtained a comment from the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, which confirmed it did not receive $70 million from the bank, and added: “Even if we did, the idea that this type of contribution would be controversial is rooted in a pathology that Black organizations don’t deserve to be funded.”

In addition, professor Rodney Ramcharan at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business explained to the AP what actual evidence of bank failure due to “woke” business practices might look like, if such a thing existed. “The bank would have suffered loan losses—writing down bad loans made to ‘woke’ firms,” he explained. “So this is not a matter of opinion, but actual data. Instead, there are no unusual loan losses or loan loss provisioning.” (Claremont had cited “sub-prime lending” as a component of such alleged “woke” practices.)

The database labels any donations that support Black people as “BLM”

Writing for the newsletter Popular Information, Judd Legum, Rebecca Crosby, and Tesnim Zekeria reported that the Claremont Institute’s own database shows a total of $0 in donations to any officially branded Black Lives Matter organization. Instead, the organization’s database also includes spending that it describes as being for “organizations and initiatives that advance one or more aspects of BLM’s agenda.”

Under this amorphous criteria, Popular Information found that Claremont had included a pledge that SVB made in 2021 to spend $50 million over the course of five years for the company’s internal initiative to connect women, Black people and Latinos with startup funding and leadership connections in venture capital. Nearly all the rest came from a $20 million pledge to “support additional COVID-19 relief” and establish a “full-ride, needs-based University Scholarship program to students at Arizona State University, Florida A&M University, Tulane University, and Xavier University.” Both Florida A&M and Xavier University of Louisiana are prominent historically black colleges and universities. (It’s unclear why Claremont lumped in funding for Arizona State and Tulane.)

Talking Points Memo editor-in-chief Josh Marshall also examined the rest of the database on supposed BLM-related corporate spending, and found that Claremont’s appraisal of corporate spending throughout the business world essentially boiled down to “it seems adjacent to Black people, so that’s ‘BLM.’” These included any corporate donations to such longstanding organizations as the United Negro College Fund and the NAACP, or minority-focused business groups such as the Executive Leadership Council or the Forum to Advance Minorities in Engineering, the latter of which was founded in 1976 by DuPont. (Also tagged as “BLM” spending in the Claremont’s database were corporate grants to the American Heart Association and U.S. Vaccine Adoption Grants.)

Keep in mind, Popular Information had also pointed out that the database defines the BLM agenda as allegedly being to “undermine capitalism, the nation state, and Western civilization.” By extension, Claremont is essentially accusing any corporate spending on Black education, health outcomes, or business development to be part of a plot to destroy Western civilization. This is the fabulist message that Fox’s reporters and the rest of the right-wing media ecosystem were so eager to spread.

Fox News drove the right-wing echo chamber’s amplification of false SVB claims

Fox’s alarmist coverage of the supposed link between SVB’s corporate giving and the BLM movement clearly spanned both its purported “straight news” side and opinion hosts, with the two camps voicing the exact same line over and over on Fox News, Fox Business, and the network’s digital properties.

Fox was not alone in spreading this falsehood; many right-wing media outlets pushed the same lies. A New York Post headline read: “SVB donated $73M to Black Lives Matter movement, social justice causes.” An article from The Federalist was headlined: “Silicon Valley Bank Pledged Nearly $74 Million To Black Lives Matter Causes.” The Washington Times, citing The Federalist, wrote: “SVB donated more than $73 million to the Black Lives Matter movement and other social justice causes.” A Washington Examiner headline read: “SVB collapse: Bank donated over $70 million to Black Lives Matter groups before closure.” Gateway Pundit declared in its headline: “Woke Silicon Valley Bank Gave Over $73 Million to Black Lives Matter Movement.” A Daily Caller headline stated: “Silicon Valley Bank Committed Over $73 Million To BLM And Social Justice Causes Before It Collapsed.” And it went on and on and on.

In an amazing turn of events, Breitbart actually issued a correction, noting that “the Claremont Institute’s definition of ‘Black Lives Matter’ included a far wider range of organizations,” and giving credit that “left-wing writer Judd Legum appropriately flagged these issues.”

So as of now, Breitbart has exhibited more journalistic responsibility than the entire roster of Fox News, including one of the network’s White House correspondents.

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in the March 9 edition of the Los Angeles Times weekly newsletter Boiling Point, reporter Sammy Roth wrote about a recent peer-reviewed study which found that minority communities in Los Angeles face higher levels of vehicular pollution than their white counterparts. The study’s abstract sums up the findings as follows:

Commuters from majority-White tracts disproportionately drive through non-White tracts, compared to the inverse. Decades of racially-motivated freeway infrastructure planning and residential segregation shape today’s disparities in who produces vehicular air pollution and who is exposed to it.

These findings are entirely uncontroversial. For example, studies looking at vehicular pollution in other cities have found similar results. There is a vast body of research showing that lower-income and minority communities in the U.S. face disproportionately higher levels of pollution than whiter and more affluent communities. There is also a well-documented history of racism in urban planning, with highways purposefully built through minority communities.

The study received little fanfare when it was published in February. A March 7 LA Times write-up of the study also received “normal levels of engagement,” per the author of the study. It wasn’t until March 9, when Roth offered some of his personal feelings about the topics of the study — noting that he “benefited from the region’s sordid history” and that he contributed “to the inequitable air pollution that Boeing’s study describes” — that Fox launched its attack on both Roth and the paper.

The following day, Fox News devoted at least 5 segments to attacking Roth and the LA Times 

In the early morning hours of March 10, Foxnews.com published an article titled “​​LA Times writer says ‘White’ drivers are ‘polluting the air’ breathed by LA’s ‘people of color.’” The article listed some of Roth’s claims, gave a brief overview of the study, and then linked to some tweets by right-wing media personalities lambasting the article (none of which actually addressed any data or evidence presented in the study).

The Fox News TV segments on March 10 followed similar framing — making Roth or the LA Times the main targets of their vitriol and acting outraged over the mere notion of environmental racism.

On Outnumbered, co-host Emily Compagno began the segment by claiming that “if you are white and a driver in Los Angeles, then the liberal media thinks that you are racist.” A chyron mentioned the L.A. Times and an image included Roth’s name. Fox News’ ​​liberal political commentator Marie Harf mentioned the study and broadly defended some of the points it made, including the fact that city highways are often built in lower-income areas and that many members of these communities don’t have cars and rely on public transport, though she said she “wouldn’t use the r-word; I wouldn’t use the ‘racist’ word about white people driving on highways.” Harf’s points about the study were generally dismissed by other guests, who instead focused on attacking the idea of environmental racism. ​​For example, Jason Chaffetz scoffed at the idea that “driving on a freeway is somehow a racist act.”

Later that evening on The Five, co-host Brian Kilmeade called the L.A. Times piece “ridiculous,” mocking the idea that “driving can be racist.” A chyron and image again mentioned the L.A. Times and Roth by name, and the study was mentioned only in passing. Co-host Dana Perino tried to reframe the issue, stating that if she was ”in a minority community,” she “would say why are you giving subsidies to rich white people for electric vehicles.” Co-host Jesse Watters then dismissed the idea of racism in this story after saying that “the Chinese are the ones polluting everybody. They are the most racist, statistically.”

On Tucker Carlson Tonight, Carlson went into a tirade over the L.A. Times piece and mocked Roth’s own background. Carlson did not mention that Roth was reporting on a study. Carlson took an absurd position on the piece, insinuating that Roth wrote “that just by breathing, white people are hurting others.” Carlson also claimed that white people are victims of “Rwanda-style race hatred” pushed by the media.

on The Ingraham Angle, Laura Ingraham did mention the study, but her opening monologue centered on attacking both Roth and the L.A. Times. She downplayed the very idea of environmental racism in general, saying, “Making people live near landfills? We're making people live next to polluting facilities? Well, that's obviously ridiculous.” She also dismissed the well-established fact that highways were purposefully built through low-income and minority communities, stating that “what this is really all about is control.” A chyron read “This is all about eliminating your freedoms.”

In the very next segment, guest Chris Bedford stated that the money going toward environmental justice initiatives is useless and that it’s a “completely insane thing” to call carbon a pollutant anyway. Meanwhile, guest Vincent Edward Ellison called Democrats “the evilest people that have ever walked the face of this earth,” adding that “they don't care that these people are suffering.”

On *Fox News at Nigh*t (airing during the midnight hour of March 11), Trace Gallagher began a segment by stating, “Driving is racist. Says so right in the LA Times, which ran a headline reading, quoting, ‘How white and affluent drivers are polluting the air breathed by L.A.’s people of color.’” He also dismissed the idea of the disproportionate impacts of minority pollution, claiming, “The study says air quality is worse a few blocks from a freeway and common sense says, it's L.A. Almost everyone lives a few blocks from the freeway.”

For his part in writing about a study and simply expressing his own feelings on racist highway practices, Roth was barraged with right-wing and antisemitic hate mail.

Fox News has a history of attacking environmental justice issues

In the aftermath of 2022’s Hurricane Ian, Vice President Kamala Harris correctly pointed out that it’s typically lower-income communities and communities of color that suffer the most from extreme weather events. Fox News personalities lambasted her over this claim, acting outraged that race was brought up at all. Some also falsely accused the administration of planning to deny hurricane aid to white communities. More recently, Fox attacked environmental justice initiatives and pushed racial grievance narratives in the wake of the Ohio train derailment.

In addition to mocking environmental justice initiatives, right-wing media will also downright ignore them, as they did when covering the Jackson, Mississippi, water crisis in 2022.

In addition to these examples, Fox also worked up a storm over environmental justice initiatives in the 2021 version of Biden’s Build Back Better bill, crying foul over modest attempts to rectify decades of racist building practices. At the time, Media Matters wrote that “Fox’s coverage of these programs has not attempted to describe what they entail or what they would accomplish for hundreds of communities. Rather, they have been used as punchlines or set up for cheap shots that reflect Fox’s racist ethos and climate denial.”

This exactly sums up Fox’s coverage of the vehicular pollution study and the resulting L.A. Times report on it. The network downplayed the facts and data surrounding disproportionate minority pollution, and instead loudly complained that it’s all a hoax or that it's actually white people who are being unfairly treated. Boeing, the author of the study, made the same point: Responding on Twitter to the right-wing anger toward his work, he stated that there wasn’t much for him to comment on because “there was no critical engagement with our data or statistical analysis whatsoever, all of which was peer reviewed.”

Promoting climate denial, protecting the wealthy fossil fuel industry, and downplaying the U.S.’ long and sordid history of racism are key themes of Fox News’ right-wing programming. Inconvenient facts like those pointed out in the study — that decades of racist urban planning have contributed to minority populations breathing in more polluted and dangerous air coming from vehicles driven by more affluent people living in other communities — would run up against Fox’s pro-fossil fuel and racial grievance agenda. It thus works for the network to aggressively deny environmental justice issues and reframe the discussion by attacking and manufacturing a backlash in an attempt to intimidate those who even dare to report on them. In this case, the intimidation did not succeed: Roth’s story ended up appearing in theMarch 13 print edition of the L.A. Times.

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https://www.mediamatters.org/broadcast-networks/how-broadcast-tv-news-covered-environmental-justice-2022

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How broadcast TV news covered environmental justice in 2022

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CLIMATE & ENERGY

WRITTEN BY EVLONDO COOPER

PUBLISHED 03/16/23 11:06 AM EDT

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Corporate broadcast TV news coverage of environmental justice dipped in both quality and quantity in 2022 compared to 2021. And like in previous years, last year’s coverage missed multiple opportunities to apply an environmental justice lens to key national stories that demanded more context about the complex harms that racism, economic exploitation, and environmental injustice have on vulnerable communities. Even the segments told through an environmental justice framework often failed to demand accountability for the public officials and industries responsible for environmental degradation or highlight solutions that exist to mitigate these harms.

Media Matters analyzed broadcast news coverage of any pollution impacts to the air, water, and soil — particularly those caused by the fossil fuel and chemical industries — as well as regulatory actions or environmental health hazards that impact specific demographic groups or communities, and counted mentions of at least one socially marginalized population as an environmental justice segment.

Media Matters analyzed the morning and evening news programs for ABC, CBS, and NBC from January 1 through December 31, 2022. In addition, weeknight episodes of PBS NewsHour were reviewed for a comparison point, but they were not included in the full dataset. This year’s study also includes the perspectives of journalists whose work either intersects with or focuses on environmental justice to learn how national TV news can develop and apply an environmental justice framework that consistently recognizes and contextualizes the experiences and challenges faced by low-income communities and communities of color.

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Key findings

From January 1 through December 31, 2022, corporate broadcast news shows — ABC, CBS, and NBC — aired a combined 12 segments about environmental impacts, regulations, or health hazards that included a mention of a socially marginalized community.

NBC and CBS tied for the most environmental justice segments (5), followed by ABC (2).

PBS NewsHour aired 10 environmental justice segments, however, these are not included in the full data set as PBS is publicly funded and the format of the program is different than that of its corporate counterparts. Weeknight episodes of the show were analyzed for a comparison point with other broadcast news shows.

The strongest environmental justice segments were stories about the adverse health effects of environmental pollution on marginalized communities.

Corporate broadcast news shows only aired 12 environmental justice segments in 2022, which is a substantial decrease from 2021

Corporate broadcast news shows aired 12 environmental justice segments in 2022. CBS and NBC tied for the most segments with 5 each, followed by ABC with 2.

Corporate broadcast news environmental justice segments from 2017 to 2022

Network 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022

ABC 3 0 0 0 2 2

CBS 11 2 4 1 13 5

NBC 5 0 1 3 4 5

This is a decrease from 2021, which saw a marked increase in the quantity and quality of environmental justice segments when broadcast networks aired 19 such segments combined.

Combined broadcast news environmental justice segments aired from 2017 to 2022

2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022

19 2 5 4 19 12

There were also fewer high-quality environmental justice segments on corporate broadcast TV news in 2022 than in 2021. Most environmental justice segments (8) were about the water crisis in Jackson, Mississippi. However, most of these segments were brief demographic mentions that failed to contextualize the systemic ills that have plagued Black and poor residents of Jackson for decades, failed to connect the water infrastructure issues facing Jackson with similar challenges faced by communities of color across the country, and failed to demand accountability on their behalf.

2022’s stronger environmental justice segments focused on the health impacts of pollution

Despite the decrease in quantity and quality, broadcast networks in 2022 aired a few strong segments about how pollution harms the health of communities of color.

The February 10, 2022, episode of ABC’s GMA3 hosted Newark, New Jersey, Mayor Ras Baraka to discuss the city’s efforts to replace nearly 23,000 lead-contaminated water lines within three years.

CitationFrom the February 10, 2022, episode of ABC's Good Morning America

CBS Mornings aired a strong environmental justice segment on February 22, 2022, about a multi-billion dollar highway extension in Houston, Texas, that will dislocate thousands of residents, many of them Black and Hispanic. Notably, the segment discussed how similar infrastructure projects disproportionately harm communities of color across the country.

CitationFrom the February 23, 2022, episode of CBS Mornings

The December 22, 2022, episode of NBC Nightly News aired a segment about the Jackson water crisis that discussed an Environmental Protection Agency investigation of the state of Mississippi for potential violations of the Civil Rights Act stemming from Gov. Tate Reeves potentially redirecting resources to improve the water infrastructure from Jackson to smaller, white communities. The segment also featured EPA Administrator Michael Regan, who observed, “We know Black, brown, tribal communities, low-income communities have seen a lack of investment, but also are on the front lines of the impacts of these lack of investments and climate change.”

CitationFrom the December 22, 2022, episode of NBC Nightly News

Broadcast news coverage in 2022 missed opportunities to apply an environmental justice lens to major national news stories

In what has been a yearly trend, national news shows missed opportunities to apply an environmental justice lens to several major national news stories. In many instances, PBS NewsHour covered issues that broadcast TV news shows largely ignored.

Supreme Court’s West Virginia v. EPA ruling

The Supreme Court’s decision in West Virginia v. EPA, announced on June 30, 2022, severely curtailed the EPA’s ability to regulate greenhouse gases. Broadcast news shows aired only a few segments about the ruling and even those missed an opportunity to report on it through an environmental justice frame. TV news reporting ignored the harm the fossil fuel industry causes to the air, land, and water of marginalized communities, omitted how the fossil fuel industry influenced the ruling, and overlooked the decision’s negative effect on the EPA’s ability to mitigate environmental injustice.

However, during the July 5, 2022, episode of PBS NewsHour, former EPA senior adviser for environmental justice and community revitalization Mustafa Santiago Ali discussed the ramifications of the Supreme Court’s ruling for vulnerable communities.

CitationFrom the July 5, 2022, episode of PBS NewsHour

Biden administration environmental justice actions

The Biden administration sought to expand on its commitments to core environmental justice issues in 2022.

The Inflation Reduction Act, which was announced on July 27 and signed into law by President Joe Biden on August 16, 2022, allocated an historic $369 billion in climate and energy provisions. Some of the key provisions included expanding access to clean energy, as well as providing funding to low-income families for home energy efficiency upgrades and tax credits for electric vehicles. However, the package also drew criticism for allowing the ongoing development of fossil fuel infrastructure and shortchanging low-income communities and communities of color.

In 2022, Biden’s EPA also created a new national office designed “to better advance environmental justice, enforce civil rights laws in overburdened communities, and deliver new grants and technical assistance,” including overseeing the dispersal of a $3 billion block grant program for climate and environmental justice that was part of the Inflation Reduction Act.

The Biden administration’s efforts represent a sea change in how presidential administrations discuss environmental justice issues, but they have largely failed to receive substantive coverage. Corporate broadcast networks’ also failed to cover the IRA’s climate provisions, choosing to frame the historic legislation almost exclusively through a political lens.

Industrial explosions, leaks, and spills

Every year, broadcast news shows air multiple segments about industrial accidents that routinely occur across the country. These stories ran the gamut from train derailments to oil refinery explosions to chemical plant fires and contamination.

Most of these segments are news briefs about a particular incident, and rarely do they contextualize the disproportionate impact these explosions, leaks, and spills have on low-income communities and communities of color. Not only do “more than 25 million people live within a mile of a crude-by-rail route,” according to the Natural Resources Defense Council, but a study produced by the organizations Coming Clean, The Environmental Justice Health Alliance for Chemical Policy Reform, and the Campaign for Healthier Solutions also found:

People living nearest to these high-risk chemical facilities (known as the fenceline areas or zones), and the businesses, schools, and hospitals in these areas, are especially at risk from disasters. They are at greatest risk of immediate death or injury, are likely to be exposed to the highest level of toxic chemicals released, and have the least amount of time to evacuate or otherwise protect themselves.

These disasters are often presented as rote, inevitable facts of life when evidence suggests they don’t have to be. One notable exception is the June 8, 2022, episode of PBS NewsHour, which examined how the area around the Port of San Diego has become a hub of industrial pollution that is harming the health of the surrounding community.

CitationFrom the June 8, 2022, episode of PBS NewsHour

Jackson water crisis

Broadcast news shows aired 8 segments about the Jackson water crisis that noted it is a majority Black city or has a poverty rate of 25%. However, these segments rarely told the deeper story about how the city’s legacy of racial and economic injustice has contributed to its ongoing water infrastructure problems.

The most recent crisis began after a boil-water notice was issued on July 30, 2022, because the city’s drinking water was potentially contaminated. In late August, Jackson took another blow to its water infrastructure after torrential rains caused the Pearl River to flood. Not only did the flooding temporarily displace residents, it also contributed to a complete system failure at the O.B. Curtis Water Treatment Plant, making the water supply for 180,000 Jackson residents “entirely unsafe to drink” indefinitely.

Like coverage of the Benton Harbor water crisis in 2021, coverage of Jackson’s water crisis highlighted the limits of broadcast news’ understanding of environmental justice. Brief demographic mentions devoid of substantive context can hide the true scale of environmental injustices by siloing them away from the public’s broader understanding of how deliberate public policy decisions result in material harm to socially marginalized people every day. Siloing the water crises in Jackson, Benton Harbor, Newark, and Flint, among many others, also obscures the breadth and depth of the problems facing vulnerable communities across the country.

Although these connections are rarely made on corporate broadcast news shows, Robert Bullard, the father of environmental justice, articulated them during the September 12, 2022, episode of PBS NewsHour.

CitationFrom the September 12, 2022, episode of PBS NewsHour

In their own words: Journalists share how national TV news can improve its environmental justice reporting

In order to bring relevant, substantively reported environmental justice stories to their audiences, national TV news must understand how environmental justice intersects with multiple different issue areas, connect the dots between what’s driving environmental injustice in different parts of the country, and demand accountability on behalf of marginalized communities. To that end, we’ve included the perspectives of journalists whose work either focuses on or intersects with environmental justice issues to learn how their experiences can help national TV news outlets expand their understanding of what constitutes an environmental justice story and develop a reporting framework to tell it.

Media Matters reached out to Yvette Cabrera, Amber X. Chen, Charles Ellison, and Yessenia Funes for their perspectives on how corporate broadcast news can improve its environmental justice coverage. Although they each have unique approaches to how their work intersects with environmental justice, they are united by a commitment to telling the stories of people who are too often ignored by corporate news media outlets.

Why is corporate broadcast news failing to produce substantive environmental justice stories?

Yvette Cabrera is a senior reporter at the Center for Public Integrity and wrote a seminal series for ThinkProgress in 2017 about the myriad ways lead exposure harms children, including the lead-to-prison pipeline — a story that lies at the intersection of environmental injustice, public health, and crime. For more than two decades, her work has focused on Latino populations and is informed by her keen understanding of the connections between so many seemingly disparate issues.

During our discussion about why broadcast TV news coverage of environmental justice too often lacks necessary context, Cabrera noted that print and online news outlets produce more substantive environmental justice stories because the nature of the television format lends itself to “responding to what’s immediate and in front of you,” while disincentivizing follow-up reporting. Referencing the recent East Palestine train derailment, she continued:

I think unfortunately what happens with television is they respond to the immediate disaster. A lot of people are currently focusing on the train derailment, which obviously causes problems in the first place when it goes off the tracks and a car is exploded. But I don't see as much questioning around why these chemicals are being transported? What are they used for? What is the need? There are communities that are put in danger every day, across the country, because of the transportation of these chemicals. Do we really need those? Which then leads you to the question, “Where are these chemicals being produced?” They're often produced in black and brown communities. We see that in Cancer Alley, in the Gulf region. Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi are often the hardest hit, and these communities have been saying, “We are being polluted on a daily basis.” But their stories don’t receive the same amount of attention.

“Every environmental story is an environmental justice story."

Amber X. Chen is a freelance journalist whose work has been published by Atmos, The Guardian, and Teen Vogue, among other outlets. Her unique approach to stories about psychedelics and climate activism, community organizers in Texas borderland communities, and Hawaii’s worsening water crisis demonstrate an expansive understanding of how environmental justice intersects with so many other issues, as well as the benefits of understanding a movement before reporting on it. In fact, before becoming a journalist, Chen was an activist involved in movement building and sees her journalism as an extension of that work. “Every environmental story is an environmental justice story,” she told Media Matters.

Her experience in environmental organizing informed her understanding of how corporate TV news shows ignore the voices of marginalized communities because it’s something she has observed in the larger environmental movement.

I was always in rooms with a lot of older, white people. And I was able to witness that the solutions they were coming up with weren't good because they ignored that people of color and low-income people are disproportionately affected by the climate crisis. And they were also being disproportionately left out of climate solutions. And so you have people sitting at the decision-making table and proposing incredibly inequitable climate solutions who are very focused on solving whatever is most immediate to them, unaware that these solutions could potentially harm communities of color.

Charles Ellison is the executive producer and host of Reality Check, a daily public affairs program on WURD, which is based in Philadelphia and is one of three African American-owned and -operated talk radio stations in the country. He is also founder and managing editor of ecoWURD.com, an environmental and climate justice journalism initiative. Ellison’s journey toward environmental and climate journalism began with bearing witness to environmental impacts, such as cancer clusters, harming residents in Philadelphia’s mostly Black neighborhoods, and he has turned his journalism into a vehicle for change, being named an Emerson Collective fellow because of his work.

When Media Matters asked Ellison why he was able to produce quality environmental journalism when corporate broadcast news, with all of its resources, does not, he noted:

We have a lot more latitude and flexibility to produce our stories, as opposed to having to package them into soundbites like broadcast and cable news. Plus: we’re accountable to the community, not company interests or advertisers. That's a major flaw in the corporate media industrial complex. It’s this constant pressure to package things in such a way that they're captured within multi-second sound bites or focus on what's the most salacious or dramatic. They’re also under pressure to not report on how climate change and environmental harms are hurting nonwhite communities. WURD is a non-partisan news organization, and we aren't aligned with any specific interest group. That allows us to tell the stories we want to because we’re independent and don’t rely on well-funded lobbying groups who work on behalf of polluting industries.

An environmental journalist who focuses on the intersection of race and environment, Yessenia Funes went to college wanting to produce impactful journalism when the personal toll of Hurricane Sandy informed her professional understanding of the myriad ways climate and environmental justice intersect with our lives. In the years since, she has produced impactful reporting about how environmental exposures are killing migrants in the Arizona desert, how increasingly worse heat waves are killing asylum-seekers trying to cross the border, how the Bolsonaro government in Brazil encouraged and ignored the murder of gay land defender Fernando dos Santos because of his environmental activism and his sexuality, and why climate activists should incorporate the elderly into their understanding of vulnerable populations at risk from extreme weather.

When asked about why online and print news reporters are able to produce deep and substantive environmental stories about vulnerable communities — as contrasted with the dearth of good environmental justice journalism on corporate TV news — Funes replied, “There are big dollars attached to broadcast news. And so I do think that’s a big part of it, right?”

She continued:

Profit is the ultimate decider here, right? You want to have views, you want to have your high ratings, you want to keep the people in charge happy by not pushing their buttons with stories they may not like. I think that's a big part of it. At Atmos, we're really lucky that we’re independently funded through our publisher. And so the only people that we need to really please are ourselves. Having our own goals and metrics may encourage us to do more climate and environmental reporting. But with broadcast outlets, I don’t imagine that's a part of their infrastructure. It's more important to keep the investors or owners or CEOs happy. And, unfortunately, climate has become such a hot button topic in politics that, depending on how you cover it, viewers can have really extreme responses to it. They can be really unhappy, or they can also be really appreciative. And I think that creates a little bit more of an unwillingness or hesitance to talk about climate or environmental justice because it's become so politicized.

How can corporate broadcast news improve its environmental justice journalism?

National TV news shows must overcome multiple challenges to develop a deep understanding of how environmental justice impacts the lives of their viewers, and apply this journalistic framework consistently to a broad range of relevant issues and stories. The journalists who spoke to Media Matters provided some further insights about how those outlets can improve their coverage of environmental justice.

Cabrera suggested that there are a wealth of stories that television journalists can tell if they are willing to keep reporting once the urgency of the breaking news story has subsided. Again referencing the East Palestine train derailment, she continued:

There are just a lot of disparities that can be highlighted as stories. It just takes going beyond the initial breaking news story to explain the environmental impacts from decisions that lead to the production of these types of chemicals and allowing these factories to exist in vulnerable communities. There are consequences that go beyond just the initial explosion. It speaks to decades of decisions that allow these chemicals in our environment, decisions that have led to the pollution of our communities. There's a wealth of stories for television journalists to tap into.

Chen noted the need for national TV news outlets to examine “every dimension of a story” to understand if there is a justice approach. She also suggested the need to hire more journalists of color and build trust with the communities they are reporting on.

I think corporate news channels have a very institutional air about them. So I definitely think they should hire more reporters of color, as they are likely to be aware of and want to report on environmental justice issues. And if television journalists want to understand a community and the issues it faces, to build that trust, they should go back to the roots of what journalism's supposed to be. Go into the community, knock on doors, talk to organizers. I really think corporate TV news is sort of skimming around the work that needs to be done. It's difficult, but it can and should be done.

Ellison also highlighted the exclusion of Black, brown, and Indigenous voices from national TV news stories about the environment and why nonwhite media outlets need to fill in the gaps.

Having someone willing and able to talk to Black people or other marginalized people where they live, you can have conversations that ask them, “Hey, what are you dealing with in your neighborhood? It seems like half the people in the neighborhood have asthma. Well let me tell you about all the methane that's polluting the city. Let me tell you how bad air pollution is in the city.” And you'll start seeing those audiences become more receptive. “Wait a second, I didn't know that. Tell me more.” Instead, we have the corporate mainstream media complex that wants to ignore marginalized voices and exclude them from environmental and climate discussions. We definitely want to get people of color, climate activists on mainstream corporate broadcasts. But we also need to hear them on Black media. They need to be on those shows, too, bringing the same messages.

Although Funes understands the orthodoxy of objectivity that journalism schools seek to instill in students, she encourages journalists to allow their instincts to guide their storytelling, especially with the stakes so high. She noted:

My approach is to consider what is upsetting me? What is exciting to me? What's something that’s sort of riling me up? What's riling up my sources? I don't really think about what story is going to do well. That's not really what I'm worried about. I'm worried about what is feeling urgent, what feels wrong, what are my sources compelling me to cover. What's not being covered? What are people missing? What are people getting wrong? That's really what drives my reporting. And I think that it's hard with broadcast news because you're really trying to sell something in a way. But I do think there's a responsibility that we as journalists have to inform the public about issues, about what's right and what's wrong. And I just think that's a really basic tenant of journalism that has gotten quite lost, especially with social media and the politicization of climate change. I think we've lost sight of what's at stake here.

Many of the challenges and opportunities for improvement expressed by these journalists were echoed by a member of the national media who spoke to Media Matters on background. When asked about the specific challenges faced by national TV news reporters who want to report on environmental justice stories, they said that it is primarily an “information barrier” driven by a lack of diverse voices in the newsroom. They also noted, “The environment is harder to cover because the newsworthy events happen over time, as opposed to coverage of big events like storms or big industrial disasters. As such, coverage of these stories comes down to being aware of what’s happening in communities of color.”

They continued:

Climate change and environmental justice are hard subjects to get people to pay attention to because they feel too big for the average viewer. It’s hard to get people interested unless it's a disaster, which is what drives corporate media coverage of that story. But it’s the media’s job to inform people “before the dam breaks.” A journalist’s job isn’t to fix problems, but they are supposed to inform people when something is wrong. But many people in media are not aware of the long-standing problems facing many vulnerable communities because they are in a bubble.

National TV news would do well to listen to the critiques of print and online climate and environmental reporters, adopt some of their approaches, and amplify their work. This includes developing and implementing a reporting framework that incorporates the experiences and challenges faced by vulnerable communities; understands how environmental justice intersects with people’s everyday lives; connects environmental harms to political and corporate policies and practices; and demands accountability for decisions that degrade the air, land, and water of fenceline communities.

If national TV news outlets committed to better informing the public about the environmental injustice that harms vulnerable communities every day, their reporting could play a pivotal role in shaping public policy responses, ensuring that local, state, and federal officials implement effective and equitable plans to confront environmental harms, and improving the life and well-being of every person — especially the most vulnerable.

To view and share the work of journalists of color who report on the environment, please visit The Uproot Project.

Methodology

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