by Richard Truesdell and Keith Lehmann As was proven during the 2024 election cycle, we are well beyond the scope of mere bias in the legacy media. Given the shrinking audience influence coupled with massively declining income from severe loss of cable subscriptions and advertising revenue, American media outlets have chosen…
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Microsoft has staked a claim in the growing field of “media literacy” and “digital literacy,” which aims to instruct members of the public – especially schoolchildren – in what types of digital media they ought to trust and distrust. As FFO has previously reported, media and digital literacy is the latest in a long string of pretexts by the ideologically biased censorship industry to prevent the public from accessing disfavored information sources.
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On Nov. 4, one day prior to the 2024 presidential election, a headline on the increasingly left-leaning news aggregating site The Drudge Report screamed: “Misleading claims have been viewed more than 2 billion times on X.”
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North Dakota Republican Sen. Kevin Cramer demanded in a Thursday letter that corporate media networks answer for their “biased” coverage of the presidential election.
The Republican’s letter, obtained exclusively by the Daily Caller News Foundation, was addressed to top network executives at Fox, CBS, Disney and NBCUniversal. Cramer’s letter called out the networks for biased coverage of President-elect Donald Trump.
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The New York Times quietly changed the headline of a Saturday column linking Republican Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance to a Nazi slogan.
NYT opinion columnist Jamelle Bouie headlined his column “JD Vance’s Blood-and-Soil Nationalism Finds Its Target,” referencing a Nazi slogan to suggest that Vance’s comments about the Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, and other past rhetoric, demonstrate the Republican vice presidential candidate is a racist who should “immediately” resign his office to atone for his “ethical transgressions.” Later Saturday, after receiving heavy criticism, the Times updated the piece’s headline to read, “Shouldn’t JD Vance Represent All of Ohio?” and decided against including an editor’s note to bring attention to the change.
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Homeowners across the U.S. are seeing skyrocketing insurance rates, increased deductibles, excluded protections, and canceled policies.
Insurers say that they’re having to adjust to changing conditions to remain profitable. Among the problems they blame is inflation, rising construction costs, and costs associated with regulatory compliance. But many insurers are also blaming climate change for driving extreme weather events and increasing losses, and much of the media coverage is zooming in on this narrative.
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Two of the federal government’s methods of measuring crime tell two different stories, complicating recent claims from the media and President Joe Biden that crime is declining.
Numerous media outlets have, in recent months, run headlines suggesting that crime is declining across the country. The statistics they’re citing, however, don’t tell the entire story.
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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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Election integrity champion Gina Swoboda was elected chair of the Arizona Republican Party on Saturday, prompting negative coverage from the mainstream media. Endorsed by both Donald Trump and Kari Lake, she won the election in a landslide over another MAGA conservative, Arizona Corporation Commissioner Jim O’Connor, but The New York Times portrayed the election as chaotic and evidence of the party’s “yawning ideological divide.”
The article said Swoboda “runs a nonprofit group that has falsely claimed to have found huge discrepancies in voting records in a number of states.” The article linked to a piece by ProPublica which reported on the work of Swoboda’s Voter Reference Foundation (VoteRef). VoteRef discovered discrepancies between the number of voters and the number of ballots cast in numerous states. ProPublica cited objections to the report from several election officials as evidence the work was invalid.
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Constitutional legal scholar John Eastman, who served as an attorney to former President Donald Trump during the 2020 election lawsuits, is being prosecuted in both Georgia and Washington, D.C., and has undergone a disciplinary trial by the State Bar of California due to his role. Eastman’s criminal attorney filed a pleading in the Georgia RICO prosecution on Monday asking to move up the date to accept a plea agreement in that case so his trial can proceed sooner, explaining that his situation was different than Trump’s which needs a later date. The mainstream media claimed Eastman was attacking the former president, with NBC reporting that Eastman “takes digs” at Trump.
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The Chamber of Progress, a tech industry coalition backed by companies such as Google and Meta, released statements and a study arguing against the California Journalism Preservation Act (CJPA), stating it would primarily benefit conservative media outlets.
The California Assembly passed the CJPA on Thursday, a bill that compels companies like Google and Meta to pay publications for news links they post on their platforms, which would disproportionately enrich “disinformation giants like Fox News and the New York Post,” according to the Chamber of Progress. The coalition lists Google and Meta as corporate partners on its website and the Chamber of Progress’s founder and CEO, Adam Kovacevich, formerly headed Google’s U.S. policy strategy and external affairs team, according to its website.
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The establishment media blackout on corruption within the Biden family is the sign of a state-run media even as stories on the issue could easily win journalism awards, George Washington University Law Professor Jonathan Turley says.
Congressional Republicans unveiled evidence last week that nine members of the first family were allegedly receiving funds from figures in multiple foreign countries, but “the media is insisting that this is no scandal because there is not directly proof of payments to Joe Biden,” Turley wrote in an opinion article Friday for The Hill.
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Harlan Crow said media reports on his friendship with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas are “factually incorrect” and part of a “political hit job” in an interview Monday with The Dallas Morning News.
Crow said it’s possible for people to simply be friends without having an “angle” and slammed the media for attempting to spin his friendship with Thomas into something it’s not. “I think that the media, and this ProPublica group in particular, funded by leftists, has an agenda to destabilize the [Supreme] Court,” Crow told The Dallas Morning News.
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New Jersey is enlisting public-school teachers and librarians to show children how to combat what it calls the grave threat of disinformation.
“Our democracy remains under sustained attack through the proliferation of disinformation,” Gov. Phil Murphy said in signing the nation’s first law mandating “information literacy” instruction for all K-12 students. The law, which aims to provide students with the “critical thinking” skills necessary to differentiate between “facts, points of view, and opinions” will, Murphy proclaimed, ensure “that our kids … possess the skills needed to discern fact from fiction.”
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With only days left until the midterm elections, the advertising blitz from the political spin doctors has reached a fever pitch and the sound bites we’re hearing aren’t very sound, especially the ones from the White House on the economy. But heated rhetoric is hardly a replacement for facts and figures so, to borrow a phrase from the show Dragnet, let’s discuss “just the facts, ma’am.”
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Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin mauled media outlets for “covering up for the Democrats” during an appearance on “Sunday Morning Futures.”
“As corrupt as the Biden family is, and we’ve known this literally for years, the news media has, Sen. Grassley and I have, but what may be even more troubling is the corruption within federal law enforcement and inside a corrupt, complicit and dishonest media,” Johnson told host Maria Bartiromo.
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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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Amid published reports that former President Trump is improperly holding classified papers, including nuclear documents, at his Florida compound, MSNBC contributor Michael Beschloss and former CIA Director Michael Hayden are intimating via social media that Trump should be executed.
The Washington Post has reported that the FBI raided Trump’s Mar-a-Lago compound on Monday in order to retrieve “nuclear documents” they believed were improperly stored there.
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Many publications provide their writers with “style sheets,” a list of dos and don’ts with respect to things like diction, punctuation, grammar, and linguistic etiquette. My personal list of “dos” includes the Oxford comma (apples, oranges, and pears: that last comma is requisite) and, in most cases, using the singular masculine pronoun after collective nouns like “everyone” and “someone” (e.g., “Everyone likes to have his [not ‘their’] own way”).
Style sheet prescriptions (and proscriptions) can be more elaborate, and can affect substantive as well as stylistic matters. Over the last year or so, I have noticed an innovation, at once stylistic and substantive, that has taken root throughout the regime media. It is this: whenever referring to Donald Trump and the 2020 presidential election, be sure to insert editorial comments to the effect that any concerns about the fairness of that election are “baseless” or the result of “lies.”
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A large majority of Americans now have no confidence in Joe Biden and his administration, which often polls below 40 percent, with negatives nearing 60 percent.
Despite the 15-month catastrophe of his regime, the level of his own unpopularity remains understandable but still remarkable. After all, in 2020 voters already knew well of his cognitive deficits and the radicalism of his agenda. They saw both clearly starting in 2019 and during the 2020 Democratic primaries, the primary debates, and the general election.
So what did Biden’s voters imagine would happen when a cognitively challenged president, controlled by hard-Left subordinates, entered office — other than what he has done?
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When the far-right website Infowars was banned by all the major tech platforms in 2018, mainstream media outlets didn’t come to the defense of founder Alex Jones, whom they described as a conspiracy theorist.
Two years later, the same outlets had a similar non-response when Big Tech imposed another media ban — this one on the New York Post, one of America’s oldest and most well-established newspapers.
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A Cook County Medical Examiner’s toxicology report states a parent the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) claimed died due to the spread of COVID-19 from the classroom to her home, actually died from chronic alcoholism.
Chicago City Wire said it obtained the report from the medical examiner that stated Denisha Henry, 32, died in September at Stroger Hospital in Chicago of “chronic ethanolism.”
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Media outlets are continuing to message small-dollar donors to the Freedom Convoy whose identities were leaked to the public after a hack of crowdfunding site GiveSendGo.
The personal information of roughly 90,000 donors to the Freedom Convoy, a group of truckers and hackers protesting Canada’s vaccine mandates and COVID-19 restrictions, was leaked after hackers breached GiveSendGo late Sunday. The leaked data included names, email handles, IP addresses and zip codes, and was provided to “journalists and researchers” by Distributed Denial of Secrets, an activist group hosting the information.
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The Associated Press announced Tuesday that it had secured funding from several progressive interest groups to hire two dozen climate change reporters.
The outlet referred to the groups’ funding as “philanthropic grants” and promised that the groups wouldn’t have any editorial control over the climate change content published, according to an announcement. But the five organizations — the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Rockefeller Foundation, Quadrivium and the Walton Family Foundation — are well known for pushing a variety of left-wing causes and funding Democratic political campaigns.
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CNN is dying. Its president, Jeff Zucker, was just fired. (Or, rather, he “resigned.”) The network’s viewership is plummeting, and fewer than 500,000 people on average tuned in last month. Advertisers don’t send their dollars there much anymore, and the “stars” the network once had either have been removed for cause or caught up in sex or other scandals.
Chris “Fredo” Cuomo threatened to burn the place down after getting fired last year. Why does the parent company—AT&T, a telephone megacompany—put up with it? CNN is a drag on the parent company’s earnings, a thorn in its side, and a hit on its reputation. Wouldn’t a rational actor cancel the network altogether or sell it off and be done with it? With $150 billion in debt, no wonder AT&T decided to sell the ailing network to the Discovery Network. AT&T will no doubt benefit from getting out of politics.
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This was the CNN headline as written by Jake Tapper: “Former Trump administration officials hold call to strategize against former boss’ efforts in 2022 and 2024”
This was the headline from London’s Daily Mail: “More than 30 former Trump officials hold secret call aimed at working against the former president’s efforts to sway 2022 midterms and 2024 presidential election”
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Russiagate is the biggest scandal in American history.
Nothing comes close in size, scope or harm to the republic than the years-long effort to cripple Donald Trump’s presidency by claiming he conspired with an enemy state to steal the 2016 election and then do its bidding as commander-in-chief.
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Back in the early 1980s when cable TV was bursting on the scene, there were four channels everybody wanted.
ESPN was one. The USA Network was another. HBO was worth paying extra for.
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The willful avoidance of facts and deliberate obscuring of what happened in Waukesha, Wisconsin is a low point in American journalism nationally.
It is stunning how much the propaganda media distorted and misreported the massacre at the Christmas parade last week.
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A survey released Tuesday ranked the United States last among 46 countries in media trust, falling below democracies and autocracies across the world.
The survey, commissioned by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, was conducted among 92,000 people worldwide, and found that among those in the U.S., just 29% said they trusted their news media the majority of the time. Finland ranked the highest at 65%, while Slovakia, Hungary and France each ranked just above the U.S. at 30%.
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There is absolutely no crisis at the southern border, and Trump caused it. Also Trump wanted small children to die at the border. I don’t. That’s just another reason people say I’m a good person.
Despite what you’ve heard, there is no surge of immigration. There’s just springtime, man. The fact that we need to open up military facilities to house this influx, well, that just shows what a fine job we are doing correcting Trump’s problems.
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Virginia man who was arrested at a police checkpoint in Washington D.C. over the weekend, has been released from custody following a brief court appearance.
Although initial news reports hyped the story, investigators said they do not consider Wesley Beeler, a security contractor who was working in the area, to be a threat to public safety.
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CNN anchor Jake Tapper said Sunday that he wouldn’t put White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany on air because she “lies the way that most people breathe.”
Tapper told CNN’s Brian Stelter that throughout President Donald Trump’s term, “you had to steel yourself for interviews with people that might misrepresent the facts.” The CNN anchor said that “once somebody proved themselves to be a liar, I just stopped booking them.”
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by Roger Kimball Oscar Wilde was such a card. Sitting for his viva voce examination in Greek, he was given a passage to translate from one of the Passion stories in the New Testament. He started in and was barreling along fluently. At some point, one of the examiners interrupted,…
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Fact check: Joe Biden is not the President elect. This will come as a horrible shock to Fox News and the other left-wing media. A candidate becomes President Elect when either the other candidate concedes, or the Electoral College meets and votes that candidate into the Presidency.
Of course, Fox News’ biggest concern right now is probably not who has won the election. Perhaps one day, business students will read case studies on how Fox News destroyed its brand overnight.
One thing conservatives noticed early in the evening of November 3, was that Fox was calling states for Biden almost immediately, but Trump states were not called nearly as fast. One of the biggest questions of that night, is why did Fox call Arizona for Biden immediately after the polls closed?
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Big Media must challenge and address their own confirmation biases about conservatives and about Trump voters first, before they lecture Trump voters about their beliefs.
The illusion is over. Before Donald Trump came along Big Media always teetered close to the edge of the line with their biases, but after 2016 they crossed that line and they pushed forward. Just this week many people believed that CNN’s Jake Tapper threatened Trump voters for not accepting, per the media, that Joe Biden is president-elect. Also last week, Anderson Cooper, also of CNN, described Trump as an “obese turtle.”
People in Big Media may not know any Trump voters. People in Big Media may not count any Trump voters among their list of friends.
But I know Trump voters — and they are irate.
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Despite what Fox News might think, this election – as it drags ever closer to unreality – is not decided by Fox News.
On Election Night, Fox News Channel’s decision desk “called the House,” saying Democrats would gain five seats. This happened while Californians were still voting. Why does that matter? Because there are four districts in California that Democrats won from Republicans in 2018 and which Republicans were trying to retake. They are likely to win at least three of them.
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Despite what Fox News might think, this election – as it drags ever closer to unreality – is not decided by Fox News.
On Election Night, Fox News Channel’s decision desk “called the House,” saying Democrats would gain five seats. This happened while Californians were still voting. Why does that matter? Because there are four districts in California that Democrats won from Republicans in 2018 and which Republicans were trying to retake. They are likely to win at least three of them.
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