American journalism has experienced a spectacular collapse in the last 25 years – daily newspaper circulation has declined from over 60 million subscribers to just over 20 million. And the trend is accelerating: According to the Pew Research Organization, the average monthly number of unique visitors to the websites of the country’s top 50 newspapers plummeted 20 percent in one year from 2021 to 2022.
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by Carl M. Cannon For the American media, 2024 has been a fiasco. And it’s still only February. Nine days into the new year, highly respected Los Angeles Times editor Kevin Merida resigned rather than tolerate another round of layoffs and the meddlesome ways of a billionaire publisher and his…
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Bill Ackman, the highly successful investor and Harvard graduate whose criticism of Claudine Gay’s history of plagiarism led to her resignation as President of Harvard University, published a lengthy tweet on his X account Saturday evening responding to an article about him published by The Washington Post earlier in the day, “How a liberal billionaire became America’s leading anti-DEI crusader.”
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Former Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson on Tuesday confirmed that he had traveled to Russia to interview President Vladimir Putin, insisting that he had a duty as a journalist to inform people.
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The widely-read Associated Press (AP) has received numerous donations from far-left groups, leading to the outlet’s reporting on so-called “global warming” from a clearly left-wing slant akin to the language used by such groups.
As reported by the Washington Free Beacon, the AP received $300,000 in 2022 from the Denmark-based KR Foundation, a nonprofit group which claims to be focused on the “rapid phase-out of fossil fuels,” as well as transforming journalists into “community activists for climate change.” KR further intends to force “U.S. banks out of fossil fuels,” and shut down “some existing [oil and gas] infrastructure.”
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The true danger to American democracy comes from the radical left. Just don’t expect to hear it from the mainstream media.
On Nov. 9, Americans learned that law enforcement intercepted a handful of fentanyl-laced letters intended for election offices across at least five states, including Georgia’s Fulton County. While alarming, fentanyl isn’t like anthrax – briefly touching it isn’t deadly. But ingesting it is – just ask the families of the 74,000 Americans who died from fentanyl in 2022 alone, much of it produced in China and smuggled in through President Biden’s wide-open southern border.
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James O’Keefe, the undercover journalist and founder of Project Veritas, posted a video to the website Vimeo on Monday, announcing he would be leaving PV amid a dispute with the nonprofit’s board of directors. One America News (OAN) reporter and Veritas-linked journalist Neil McCabe tweeted out the announcement late Monday morning.
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The private consortium that reported election “misinformation” to tech platforms during the 2020 election season, in “consultation” with federal agencies, targeted several news organizations in its dragnet.
Websites for Just the News, New York Post, Fox News, Washington Examiner, Washington Times, Epoch Times and Breitbart were identified among the 20 “most prominent domains across election integrity incidents” that were cited in tweets flagged by the Election Integrity Partnership and its collaborators.
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Friday morning on the Tennessee Star Report, host Michael Patrick Leahy welcomed Republican Arizona Gubernatorial Candidate Kari Lake to the newsmakers line to talk about her recent endorsement by Donald Trump, her goals, and the fake news.
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A prestigious academic journal has egg on its face for publishing a hoax paper that claimed to find widespread concerns about “undue” conservative influence in higher education.
“Right-wing money strongly appears to induce faculty and administrators … to believe that they are pressured to hire and promote people they regard as inferior candidates, to promote ideas they regard as poor, and to suppress people and ideas they regard as superior,” according to the abstract in Higher Education Quarterly.
Peer reviewers failed to perform basic due diligence on the paper submitted in April and approved in October, neglecting, for example, to verify that authors “Sage Owens” and “Kal Alvers-Lynde III” were UCLA professors as they claimed. Owens even used an encrypted email service for correspondence with the journal.
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An 82-second movie trailer was supposedly all it took for two of the most perpetually outraged—and chronically wrong—political pundits to quit their gigs at Fox News.
“The trailer for Tucker Carlson’s special about the Jan. 6 mob at the Capitol landed online on Oct. 27, and that night Jonah Goldberg sent a text to his business partner, Stephen Hayes: ‘I’m tempted just to quit Fox over this,’” New York Times media columnist Ben Smith revealed in an unnecessarily lengthy article on November 21 to explain why the pair resigned before they were let go by the network, as a Fox executive later confirmed to the Washington Post. “‘I’m game,’ Mr. Hayes replied. ‘Totally outrageous. It will lead to violence. Not sure how we can stay.’”
Carlson’s documentary, “Patriot Purge,” aired in three separate segments on the network’s streaming service, Fox Nation, a few days later. It’s unclear whether Goldberg or Hayes watched the film in its entirety but additional commentary—given to Smith over Zoom while “clad in athleisure,” a word intended to lend muscularity to two of the laziest commentators in the business—suggests that neither did.
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A Tuesday article in MSNBC suggested that Republicans’ use of the phrase “Let’s go Brandon” is worse than the Nazi ‘Sieg Heil’ salute.
The author noted a recent comparison of “Let’s go Brandon” to the Nazi salute. “To this I say: Calm the hell down; that’s an insult to Nazis. And furthermore, Biden doesn’t have the gall to steamroll these would-be Nazis like Joseph Stalin’s army did in Berlin.”
The article also called “Let’s go Brandon” a “significant downgrade from the glory days of the far right,” and said the phrase is “inoffensive and very vanilla” when compared to “Lock her up” and “Build the wall.”
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Former President Donald Trump asked the Pulitzer Prize committee on Sunday to strip awards to The Washington Post and The New York Times, arguing their award-winning stories in 2016 and 2017 alleging Russia collusion lacked “any credible evidence “
The newspapers’ reporting was “based on the false reporting of a non-existent link between the Kremlin and the Trump Campaign. The coverage was no more than a politically motivated farce,” Trump wrote in a letter to interim Pulitzer administrator Bud Kliment.
Trump noted that multiple investigations have dismissed any notion of collusion between his campaign and the Kremlin and that a recent indictment by Special Prosecutor John Durham traced some of the key allegations to people tied to Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
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Thursday morning on Frist Principles with Phill Kline, host Kline welcomed The Star News Networks CEO and Editor in Chief Michael Patrick Leahy to the phone lines to discuss the changing landscape of journalism and Big Techs’ partnership with social media titans.
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Thursday morning on First Principles, host Phill Kline welcomed The Star News Network’s CEO, Michael Patrick Leahy to the phone lines to discuss the influence of Zuckerberg’s money on the 2020 election and altered state election laws.
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German publishing company Axel Springer announced Thursday it intends to acquire the digital news outlet Politico which could reportedly cost up to $1 billion.
The acquisition of Politico will add to Axel Springer’s portfolio of news outlets which include Morning Brew and Insider, according to a press release from Axel Springer.
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Twitter has permanently banned Alex Berenson, a former New York Times journalist who has become a major critic of Big Tech censorship and coronavirus lockdowns and mandates.
Responding to an inquiry from Fox News, where Berenson has been a frequent guest during the pandemic, a spokesperson for Twitter replied that “The account you referenced has been permanently suspended for repeated violations of our COVID-19 misinformation rules.”
Berenson responded on his Substack page, where he posted a message titled “Goodbye Twitter.”
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Susan King is stepping down as dean of the University of North Carolina’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media.
The university announced the decision yesterday.
The Hussman School faced backlash from progressives after it apparently backed off from a plan to give Hannah-Jones tenure for her work as the Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism.
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Journalism professors at UNC Chapel Hill are protesting a “core values” statement that upholds objectivity as a key tenet of news reporting.
Faculty members of UNC’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media converged last week to bemoan a statement of values that’s etched in granite and is found in the lobby of their school.
The core values statement, installed two years ago, touts objectivity, impartiality, integrity and truth-seeking, and after their kvetching session that statement was reportedly scrapped from the school’s website, the News & Observer reports.
In 2019, Walter Hussman, a UNC alumnus and owner of a media conglomerate of newspapers and other media outlets, donated $25 million to the UNC journalism school. Part of the donation contract installed those values into the school’s wall and mission, according to UNC’s website.
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Journalists and scientists have more in common than you’d think—at least they should. Scientists seek to understand and explain how the natural world works. They observe, ask questions, and approach new information with skepticism as they work through a careful process to determine what is true.
Journalists, in theory, use the same curiosity and rigor to provide the information we need to make good decisions in our lives. According to the Society of Professional Journalists, a core tenet of journalism is to “seek truth and report it.” In both worlds, negligence begins where skepticism ends, creating dangerous opportunities for peddlers of misinformation.
The Environmental Working Group’s (EWG) annual “Dirty Dozen” list is a perfect marriage of scientific and journalistic negligence. Each year, the EWG, a controversial, agenda-driven organic activist group, purports to rank the top 12 fruits and vegetables most contaminated with pesticides. And each year, the media takes the bait without fail, and the coverage reads like sponsored content.
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Over the past four years, American news organizations have not merely shredded their own credibility, but have piled those tattered shreds into a heap, poured gasoline onto the pile, and incinerated it. Anyone who still believes what they see on CNN or read in the New York Times is in the throes of a delusion. As much as we might wish to laugh at the plight of the media, now so obviously lost in the helpless hysteria of Trump Derangement Syndrome, we are not better off as a nation as a result of the catastrophe that has befallen American journalism.
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