Newsbusters

Last Thursday, MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle met up with actor Rainn Wilson of The Office fame on his Soul Bloom podcast to discuss, among other things, the lack of trust in the news media. According to Ruhle, history began when Donald Trump decided to enter politics because she argued that he and his allies have spent their time trying to discredit the media in their attempt to remove people who challenge them.

Wilson simply asked, “40 percent of Americans don’t trust mainstream media. Why is that? How did we get here?”

Instead of looking inward, Ruhle saw a conspiracy at work, “Listen, we are seeing a huge loss in trust of all of our institutions. It’s the media, it’s medicine, it’s banking. It’s a huge problem. Because when you think about democracy and all of these pillars, they need to stand tall. They need to stand strong. And sort of losing that trust is not by accident, it’s by design.”

 

 

She noted, “If you remember when President Trump was running the first time, Steve Bannon once said, ‘the goal is to blow the whole thing up.’”

Republican distrust in the media has been on the steady decline. The last time GOP trust in the media was above 40 percent was 2003, back when Trump was still a Democrat. The last time it was above 30 percent was 2015. For independents, trust in the media has only been above 40 percent one time since 2009. So, clearly there is more than just a MAGA influence operation going on.

Nevertheless, Ruhle added, “And so I think that you’ve got mistakes made or things starting to slip while at the same time there’s a concerted effort to destroy the media because the media, the media, the news media is, in my opinion, the last light of defense of holding power accountable.”

Ruhle also claimed, “President Trump won and tons of people were shocked or angry or frustrated, and they’re tuning out. And at the same time you have the Elon Musk media machine because they want you to leave traditional media and they want you to go to X, which is a bastion of misinformation. Where there is no fact checking. So it’s a perfect storm of people saying, ‘I’m angry, I’m frustrated, I’m tuning out, I’m disconnecting.’”

Still, Ruhle insisted, “we have to simply cover what this White House is doing. And I think if we do that, right, there’s that saying, you know, trust is gained in raindrops and it’s lost in buckets, and it’s not a—yes. You’re not incorrect that the media has lost trust.”

Ruhle never did explain how she and her colleagues could go about regaining that trust. Wilson would go on to push back and claim that the media’s intense desire to hold Trump accountable contrasts with the lack of intensity they showed during the Biden years. While Wilson sought be a gracious host and spare Ruhle from criticism on that front, the truth is that Ruhle was one of the Biden economy’s biggest cheerleaders and acknowledging that mistake could be a good first step.

Here is a transcript for the April 17 show:

Soul Bloom

4/17/2025

22 Minutes, 2 Seconds

RAINN WILSON: 40 percent of Americans don’t trust mainstream media. Why is that? How did we get here?

STEPHANIE RUHLE: Listen, we are seeing a huge loss in trust of all of our institutions. It’s the media, it’s medicine, it’s banking. It’s a huge problem. Because when you think about democracy and all of these pillars, they need to stand tall. They need to stand strong. And sort of losing that trust is not by accident; it’s by design.

If you remember when President Trump was running the first time, Steve Bannon once said, “The goal is to blow the whole thing up.”

And so I think that you’ve got mistakes made or things starting to slip while at the same time there’s a concerted effort to destroy the media because the media, the media, the news media is, in my opinion, the last light of defense of holding power accountable.

Right? And you had a bit of a perfect storm, right? President Trump won, and tons of people were shocked or angry or frustrated, and they’re tuning out. And at the same time, you have the Elon Musk media machine because they want you to leave traditional media and they want you to go to X, which is a bastion of misinformation.

WILSON: Yeah.

RUHLE: Where there is no fact-checking. So it’s a perfect storm of people saying, “I’m angry, I’m frustrated, I’m tuning out, I’m disconnecting.” And then you have a force—

WILSON: Yeah. Yeah.

RUHLE: Pushing it. And, but even in the last two weeks, what we need to do is just cover what’s happening in America, right? We have to cover Democrats trying to figure out what their lane is and how they’re gonna get back on their feet.

And we have to simply cover what this White House is doing. And I think if we do that, right, there’s that saying, you know, trust is gained in raindrops and it’s lost in buckets, and it’s not a—yes. You’re not incorrect that the media has lost trust.

Don’t want some creepy man to flash his no-no bits in your young daughter’s face?

Suck it up, bigot! 

The North Kansas City YMCA in Missouri is seemingly defending a man who reportedly entered the women’s locker room and exposed his penis to a 7-year old girl and her mother. 

In an interview with Fox 4, the mother says she and her daughter had just finished swimming lessons on April 12, where she estimates “hundreds of children were present.”

The duo had entered the women’s locker room to change, when she suddenly heard a man’s voice. They exited their stall to find the creep standing there, fully naked.

“Honey, I’m a woman,” the man allegedly snapped, when the mother asked what the hell he was doing there. She claims she and her daughter weren’t the only ladies subjected to the predatory incident.

But preying on children is apparently acceptable behavior, according to YMCA, who has a track record of banning girls for asking not to change in front of men.

They almost seem proud of it.

“Individuals are allowed to use the locker room or restroom that they identify with,” stated their local branch in a defensive response to Fox 4. 

“The safety and well-being of all of our members is a priority,” they insisted…. Just not as much of a priority as placing the feelings of pervs in dresses above the safety of young girls. 

Behold a tale of two music festivals attended by two very similar groups of people – both attended by aspiring hippies in their 20s. Both were high on a sense of fearlessness and freedom that only exists in a Western civilization. 

But the similarities between the Nova music festival in Israel on October 7, 2023 and the Coachella concert in April 2025…ended there. 

Nova’s attendees were descended upon by 7th century murderers and rapists on paragliders, set with the sole mission to exterminate them all.

Coachella’s comrades were descended upon by the private jets of the rich, and almost famous who took to their stage to cheer on those rapists. Unlike their Israeli counterparts, these coked-out Californians left their festival as smug, yet unharmed, as they had entered it. 

Their illusion of elitism remained intact.

This episode of “Woke of the Weak” examines the hypocrisy of Coachella’s privileged dilettantes who used their overpriced music festival to egg on the destruction of the very civilization that created their cocoon of comfort. 

Tonight’s edition of Thunderdome, more commonly known as CNN NewsNight with Abby Phillip, was spicier than usual as host and’or panelists clashed over such issues as the role of the president in setting monetary policy, and the rise of “right-wing” media as trust in corporate “Legacy Media” continues to crater.

Watch as host Abby Phillip absolutely melts down and condescends at conservative panelists Scott Jennigs and Shermichael Singleton over President Trump’s attempts to influence Fed policy (click “expand” to view transcripts):

CNN’s Abby Phillip crashes out, refuses to allow Jennings or Singleton to get a word in edgewise for having the temerity to suggest that presidents may opine over Fed policy pic.twitter.com/52vYgbTyOU
— Jorge Bonilla (@BonillaJL) April 23, 2025

SCOTT JENNINGS: Do you honestly believe the president shouldn’t be able to render opinions about monetary policies?

ABBY PHILLIP: Scott, you keep repeating something that nobody ever said. No one ever said that Trump cannot have it.

JENNINGS: We’re having original thoughts here.

PHILLIP: No, no, no, no, Scott. No one ever said that Trump can’t have an opinion. The question is, should the Fed act based on that opinion? And I think it’s just common sense, right? The Fed, it should be acting based on economic information and data, not anybody’s opinion. Trump is not an economist, and as far as I can tell, does not even have a good grasp on how trade works, which is really problematic if he’s going to then turn around and start telling the Fed how to do stuff.

(CROSSTALK)

JENNINGS: …is, like, we don’t want Donald Trump to have influence over the operation of the government. And, you know, I just think it’s wrong. 

PHILLIP: We don’t want to have Donald Trump have influence over monetary policy. That is how it has worked. That is where the confidence in this system of economics comes.

JENNINGS: You said monetary policy. She said DoJ, military, FBI. What were the other —

(CROSSTALK)

PHILLIP: Hold on just a second. I’m going to reset because I’m going to change back to the original conversation because, Scott, you are attempting to change the subject multiple times. 

JENNINGS: No. I’m trying to decide if the president should have influence on our government.

PHILLIP: So, go ahead, Shermichael.

SHERMICHAEL SINGLETON: Sometimes I think we forget history. Let’s go back to LBJ. LBJ actually flew the Fed chief down to Texas, his ranch and berated him because he was pissed off about some of his decisions.

PHILLIP: Uh huh. And then what?

SINGLETON: Let’s remember.

PHILLIP: And then what?

SINGLETON: I’m going to make —

PHILLIP: No, no, no. And then what happened?

SINGLETON: I want to make my point.

PHILLIP: Finish your point. What happened?

SINGLETON: Then George H.W. Bush blamed his Fed chair —

PHILLIP: But, Shermichael, I’m going to pause you there. What happened?

SINGLETON: So, my point is — that’s not all, my God. The point that I’m trying to make —

PHILLIP: Shermichael, tell me what happened.

SINGLETON: History matters here and sometimes —

PHILLIP: It does.

JENNINGS: Shermichael, they want him to be a figurehead. They don’t want him to be the president.

SINGLETON: We talk about Trump.

PHILLIP: No, he is the president of the United States.

SINGLETON: Can I finish my freaking statement?

PHILLIP: No. No, no, no, no, no.

SINGLETON: You just interject. I haven’t concluded my thought process.

PHILLIP: I want to pause here.

SINGLETON: So, the point is —

PHILLIP: Shermichael —

SINGLETON: — there have been previous presidents..

PHILLIP: Hold on. You hold on just one second.

SINGLETON: …that had similar thought processes as to the Fed as Trump. That’s the simple position I’m trying to make here.

PHILLIP: I want to pause on your half-finished history lesson. What did the Fed do after LBJ brought him down to his ranch?

SINGLETON: Listen, to LBJ or George H.W. Bush.

PHILLIP: So, what is your point?

SINGLETON: The point is, previous presidents have been of the mindset similar to Trump that I don’t like the decision of the Fed chair, I would like the chair to change their particular opinion.

PHILLIP: I feel like I am in an alternative universe here in which you guys keep telling me that I’m saying Trump doesn’t deserve to have an opinion. He’s a human being. He’s the president of the United States. He can have whatever opinions he wants.

SINGLETON: That’s not what I said. I said that we’re forgetting history.

PHILLIP: The question is, where is the historical analogy–

SINGLETON: Trump isn’t the first president to berate or dislike the position of the Fed chair. That’s my point.

PHILLIP: Shermichael, where is the historical analogy for the Fed acting on the desire of a president to behave in a particular way and doing so while ignoring economic data? Where is the evidence of that?

SINGLETON: That’s not the premise of my argument. The premise of my argument is pretty simple. We’re making this as if it’s breaking news that Trump has a thought process about the Fed he wants restraint and act a certain way.

PHILLIP: You cannot bring history about this if you don’t want to finish the history.

SINGLETON: So have previous presidents.

PHILLIP: You’re not finishing the history, Shermichael.

SINGLETON: Okay. Well, what history am I forgetting here?

PHILLIP: You can’t bring it into the conversation —

SINGLETON: Please inform me. 

PHILLIP: You cannot bring it into the conversation if it is not germane.

SINGLETON: Why can’t I? Oh, come on, Abby.

PHILLIP: If the Fed did not act on that berating, then how is that a parallel?

SINGLETON: So, I don’t know how I can be more clear or provide more clarity here. I never stated that the Fed and either of the instances that I provided acted on the thought process or advice or anger of previous presidents.

PHILLIP: Okay. Okay. Well, great.

SINGLETON: My point is that Trump is acting in a similar manner of previous presidents and we cannot ignore that there.

PHILLIP: There’s precedents…great. There’s precedents for presidents having opinions. Thank you for that. But there is not a precedent for the Fed acting on those opinions.

SINGLETON: I never said that. I never said that. That’s not my argument.

Normally, Phillip sets the pace of debate and steps in with a ref save when a liberal is getting choked out by one of the conservatives. Here, she very clearly entered the fray- chastising both Jennings and Singleton for thinking their own thoughts on the role presidents should play with regard to monetary policy. Jennings was accused, without evidence, of trying to change the subject. Meanwhile, Singleton was not even allowed to finish his take. It is not often, even by liberal media standards, that we see such an open display of contempt for counter-narrative arguments as was displayed by Phillip. A sneering contempt, by the way, that is at the heart of America’s loss of trust in the media.

Fast forward to the debate on the significance of the departure of longtime 60 Minutes producer Bill Owens. CUNY professor Jeff Jarvis joins the panel and caterwauls about what the resignation of Owens and a potential CBS settlement with President Donald Trump may do to CBS’s value, which got a chuckle out of Jennings:

Scott Jennings: “I think people have lost trust (in CBS) for a lot of reasons that has nothing to do with this deal. pic.twitter.com/lntf3hosa6
— Jorge Bonilla (@BonillaJL) April 23, 2025

JEFF JARVIS: Shermichael, what does this do to the value of CBS, the former Tiffany Network? When people cannot know whether to trust it anymore, when they wonder what stories they’ll — they’ll be, and I know you laugh, Scott, because you’ve been the one with trust.

JENNINGS: I think people have lost trust in it for a lot of reasons. But it’s nothing to do with this deal.

Jennings is not wrong. CBS’s brand value has been eroding for many years now. The former Tiffany Network is essentially the genesis of “fake news”, and anyone doubting that can take a minute and google Dan Rather and Mary Mapes. As a result of an ongoing trust in media that began well before Donald Trump went down the gilded escalator, people go where they believe they will find credible reporting. CBS hasn’t been credible for a long time, and their ratings show it.

In another potent exchange, Jarvis continues to grouse about the state of media, and walks right into a Scott Jennings buzzsaw when trying to talk about “right wing media”:

Wild exchange: Jeff Jarvis whines about the state of media, gets schooled by Scott Jennings on the reasons behind the ascendancy of “right wing media”, and Abby Phillip waves it off in complete denial. pic.twitter.com/pT8V2kU0BA
— Jorge Bonilla (@BonillaJL) April 23, 2025

JEFF JARVIS: The bigger question is that mass media are dying. I hate to say this in the middle of (CROSSTALK).

PHILLIP: Yeah, we — we all know that. 

JARVIS: Mass media are dying. And so, if you try to think that we’re going to be- please everybody, those days are over. You’ve got to stand on some principle. You’ve got to stand for something. You’ve got to be somewhere in this — in this spectrum. And if you think you’re just going to make nice to everybody, the problem is that the right wing, hello, Scott, has, taken advantage of this situation, I think, quite cleverly, quite wisely. They’ve played into a weakness.

JENNINGS: What situation?

JARVIS: The situation of media being under attack. And so, they’ve created a situation where —

JENNINGS: You’ve almost got it. Keep going. What — what the right wing is taking advantage of is, finally, the American people saying enough is enough. They’re tired of feeling like the mass media screens out one viewpoint versus another in political coverage. They’re tired of media institutions favoring one party over another.

They’re tired of narratives over factual stories. If I had any advice for “60 Minutes” or anybody else, it would be: just cover the news and try to be fair about it and stop putting your finger on the scale, especially during the pandemic.

JARVIS: That’s — that’s — you’re — you’re talking about the old mass media myth, that you could have this thing that was in the middle. The Walter Cronkite saying, that’s the way it is, when it wasn’t for many Americans the way it was, when people were pissed off.

JENNINGS: People — but people back in those days trusted the media.

JARVIS: No, they just couldn’t be heard because there was no truth. And now that we have the Internet

JENNINGS: Look at the Gallup poll. It was here, and now it’s here. It’s fallen off of a cliff.

PHILLIP: Yeah, we — we do have — we do have that Gallup polling about trust in media.

JARVIS: It’s terrible.

PHILLIP: And now, as in recent years, and let’s be honest, Scott. A lot of this is driven by the rhetoric on your side of the aisle. I mean, it’s not —

JENNINGS: You think it’s driven by the rhetoric and not the performance?

PHILLIP: Absolutely. 

Only could a cloistered member of the Acela Media believe, let alone publicly say, that distrust in media is driven by conservatives as opposed to an ongoing pattern of media suck. Conservatives did not suppress Hunter’s laptop or the lab leak theory, or actively participate in concealing Joe Biden’s decline from the American public until book deals could be had. The media did that. Trust numbers reflect that. 

Finally, Jennings delivers a roadmap to regaining lost credibility. But will a post-deal CBS (or anyone else in the Legacy Media, for that matter) heed Jennings’ advice? It remains to be seen.

.@ScottJenningsKY: My point is this: if you’re CBS or any other news outlet, the reason that you have lost trust ought to be obvious to you. And the way to fix it also ought to be obvious to you. And it has nothing to do with Donald Trump and everything to do with the product.… pic.twitter.com/bPk4Xom2Dp
— Jorge Bonilla (@BonillaJL) April 23, 2025

JENNINGS: My point is this: if you’re CBS or any other news outlet, the reason that you have lost trust ought to be obvious to you. And the way to fix it also ought to be obvious to you. And it has nothing to do with Donald Trump and everything to do with the product. Just try to make a better product that appeals to more people, and the way you appeal to more people is by not crapping on half or more than half of the country because of their values and political viewpoints.

PHILLIP: I think that that is a fair, just — if we were sort of on another planet. Out of context, it is a fair description of what is necessary in this moment.

Jennings is right inasmuch as this has everything to do with the product that media are delivering. And because they are Trump-deranged, the product will continue to be Trump derangement. And, on clue, Phillip’s rebuttal proves Jennings’ point. Time will tell whether they adjust. But if Abby’s performance is any indicator, it doesn’t seem likely.

An exit palate-cleanser: Watch as former Bernie Sanders advisor Chuck Rocha finds bipartisan consensus with Jennings and Singleton, as they bond over former Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emmanuel getting yelled at by some white Karen progressive podcast host:

.@ChuckRocha, reacting to Rahm Emmanuel getting yelled at on an AWFUL’s podcast: “That’s what I need, another woke white woman telling me what to do.” pic.twitter.com/1riUdeEoiq
— Jorge Bonilla (@BonillaJL) April 23, 2025

ROCHA: That’s what I need. I need another white woman telling me what to do.

JENNINGS: I was going to say, I mean, with all due respect to our colleague, him getting yelled at by one of these liberal white ladies on a podcast is like the most– Shermichael and I cannot get –this is the content America needs.

SINGLETON: Oh, it is. (CROSSTALK)

JENNINGS: Getting yelled at by liberal white ladies, who are dragging your party into the depths.

 

National Public Radio’s “roving national correspondent” Frank Langfitt uncovered the least surprising story of the week: Liberal professors think Trump is a tyrant. The actual headline for the Tuesday morning text report read “Hundreds of scholars say U.S. is swiftly heading toward authoritarianism.”

It’s laughable to portray left-wing campus professors as agents of democracy when academe is incredibly one-sided, but NPR took the survey all too seriously.

A survey of more than 500 political scientists finds that the vast majority think the United States is moving swiftly from liberal democracy toward some form of authoritarianism.

In the benchmark survey, known as Bright Line Watch, U.S.-based professors rate the performance of American democracy on a scale from zero (complete dictatorship) to 100 (perfect democracy). After President Trump’s election in November, scholars gave American democracy a rating of 67. Several weeks into Trump’s second term, that figure plummeted to 55.

“That’s a precipitous drop,” says John Carey, a professor of government at Dartmouth and co-director of Bright Line Watch. “There’s certainly consensus: We’re moving in the wrong direction.”

And when did this survey began collating scholarly opinion on the state of American democracy? During Trump’s first year in office, of course!

Carey said the decline between November and February was the biggest since Bright Line Watch began surveying scholars on threats to American democracy in 2017. In the survey, respondents consider 30 indicators of democratic performance, including whether the government interferes with the press, punishes political opponents and whether the legislature and the judiciary can check executive authority.

Not all political scientists view Trump with alarm, but many like Carey who focus on democracy and authoritarianism are deeply troubled by Trump’s attempts to expand executive power over his first several months in office.

….

When these scholars use the term “authoritarianism,” they aren’t talking about a system like China’s, a one-party state with no meaningful elections. Instead, they are referring to something called “competitive authoritarianism,” the kind scholars say they see in countries such as Hungary and Turkey.

The group’s definition of “competitive authoritarianism” seemed suspiciously curated to fit a certain president, though the study also found “Democrats are more supportive of aggressive action – including violence – against corporate CEOs in the name of economic justice than are Republicans…” But don’t wait up for a story on that inconvenient statistic, at least not on taxpayer-funded NPR.

In a competitive authoritarian system, a leader comes to power democratically and then erodes the system of checks and balances. Typically, the executive fills the civil service and key appointments — including the prosecutor’s office and judiciary — with loyalists. He or she then attacks the media, universities and nongovernmental organizations to blunt public criticism and tilt the electoral playing field in the ruling party’s favor.

Once again, feel free to smirk at the idea that only Trump used loyalist prosecutors to try and tilt the electoral playing field. NPR allowed one dissenting voice.

While the vast majority of scholars surveyed say Trump is pushing the country toward autocracy, other professors strongly disagree. James Campbell, a retired political scientist at the University at Buffalo, SUNY, says Trump is using legitimate presidential powers to address long-standing problems. Campbell points to Trump’s use of tariffs to try to push companies to bring manufacturing jobs back to the United States….Campbell adds that he thinks many political scientists may see Trump as autocratic because they don’t like him or his politics.

Then the litany of Trump’s alleged anti-democratic actions resumed.

In another example, Trump has withheld or threatened to withhold billions of dollars from universities, including Harvard, Princeton and Columbia, citing concerns about antisemitism. Scheppele says Orbán also targeted universities that had been critical of his government.

And yet the Obama administration used the same levers of federal control to pressure universities to adhere to #MeToo standards of prosecuting alleged sexual misconduct by students, violating due process procedures to applause from the left and the approval of the press.

Is there any political schtick more tedious now than comparing President Trump to Hitler? Politico posted an article noting Al Gore did this at a Climate Week event in San Francisco, and Real Clear Politics co-founder Tom Bevan tweeted with a smirk, “Gore says the same thing Democrats have been saying for a decade.”

The Democrats campaigned heavily in 2024 claiming Trump represented an end to democracy, and they lost the election. But it hasn’t slowed them down in the slightest.

The “independent fact checkers” who act as a publicity arm of the Democrats never “fact check” anyone calling Trump a “fascist” or comparing him to Hitler or Mussolini or Pol Pot or “insert mass-murdering dictator here.” PolitiFact screeches “Pants On Fire” when a Republican calls a Democrat a “socialist,” but “fascist” is always fair for categorizing conservatives.

Bill Maher’s recent dinner with Trump spurred angst-riddled articles on the Left. In The Washington Post, Mexican journalist Leon Krauze compared Maher’s dinner with Trump to journalists and politicians who were charmed in private meetings by Castro, Stalin, and Mao. He wrote of New York Times reporter Herbert Matthews being in thrall to Castro.

So it was extra-special when The New York Times published an op-ed by Larry David, who loves making a friendly impression of socialist Bernie Sanders on Saturday Night Live. The title was “My Dinner with Adolf,” making an incredibly unfunny mockery of Maher meeting with Trump.

In his satire, this poseur imagined he saw Hitler laugh: “Suddenly he seemed so human. Here I was, prepared to meet Hitler, the one I’d seen and heard — the public Hitler. But this private Hitler was a completely different animal. And oddly enough, this one seemed more authentic, like this was the real Hitler. The whole thing had my head spinning.”

Oh, Larry is dizzy, all right. Face-plant dizzy.  

What was actually funny was Times deputy opinion editor Patrick Healy explaining why they accepted this drivel: “Times Opinion has a high bar for satire — our mission is geared toward idea-driven, fact-based arguments — and we have a really, really high bar for commenting on today’s world by invoking Hitler.”

So a president who’s been a great friend of Israel and who’s currently withholding federal money for universities with a nasty antisemitism problem is somehow today’s Hitler?

Healy acknowledged “callbacks to history can be offensive, imprecise or in terrible taste when you are leveraging genocidal dictators to make a point.” But he claimed “Larry’s piece is not equating Trump with Hitler. It is about seeing people for who they really are and not losing sight of that.”

Fact check: False. Larry is clearly and imprecisely equating Trump with Hitler, just like almost everyone else on the Left.

In a 2020 interview with New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, Larry sang the same bitter notes about Trump: “The man has not one redeeming quality. You could take some of the worst dictators in history and I’m sure that all of them, you could find one decent quality. Stalin could have had one decent quality, we don’t know!”

Many leftists scold each other for “humanizing” Trump, when apparently the proper thing to do is perennially dehumanize him. They can’t “normalize” Trump by admitting he might have one redeeming quality. They have more hope that mass-murdering Stalin was more redeemable. Then they assert they are the sanest ones, the ones not divorced from reality.

CBS News, the makers of such hits as “DOGE will make you catch Ebola” and “DOGE will get you eaten by bears” have just submitted a new entry into the DOGE-fear mongering genre: DOGE will cause air pollution in underserved communities. Cute, for sure, but there is a Stacey Abrams-sized hole in their reporting on DOGE-cut EPA grants.

Watch as CBS finds a DOGE-cut program at the Environmental Protection Agency that they can report on (click “expand” to view transcript):

DAVID SCHECTER: Last year the EPA awarded Alicia Kendricks’ non-profit a half million dollars to continue monitoring the air in this Dallas neighborhood, where soot from diesel trains and the fumes from a shingle factory pushed pollution levels 2-3 times higher than the rest of the city.

ALICIA SCHECTER: This is about proof.

KENDRICKS: This is about proof.

SCHECTER: The Trump administration has frozen the funds, calling grants like this “radical and wasteful government DEI programs.” Without the money, the monitoring network is off-line, in need of maintenance.

KENDRICKS: If we’ve done our part and you’re not going to follow up your end of it and you are the federal government, who can trust the federal government? Who can trust what you say?

SCHECTER: Proving their air is polluted has unlocked solutions such as the donation of this clinic-in-a-box.

KENDRICKS: It’s fully equipped.

SCHECTER: So it’s like a little doctor’s office.

KENDRICKS: Yes.

SCHECTER: When it opens, residents, many without access to health care, can be treated for illnesses like asthma, which is double the state average here.

Would this clinic be here if not for the air monitors?

KENDRICKS: So, actually, I’m going to say no.

SCHECTER: The EPA has canceled more than 400 previously awarded grants including Kendricks’.

The report demonstrates that CBS is not serious about reporting on program cuts at the EPA. Setting aside the merits of the program, it is but a drop in the bucket compared to the massive waste found by DIrector Lee Zeldin and the DOGE team. 

It is interesting that CBS would choose to report on this program, while remaining silent on a large-scale grift that can only be compared to Latin American vote-buying schemes.

Per Fox News:

Failed Democratic Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams is facing condemnation from conservatives after she appeared on MSNBC to defend a $2 billion initiative under the Biden administration’s EPA to purchase green energy appliances for Americans. 

“Stacey Abrams linked Power Forward Communities received $2 billion in tax dollars in 2024 after reporting just $100 in revenue the year before. They were so unqualified that the grant agreement required the NGO to complete ‘How to Develop a Budget’ training within 90 days,” EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said in comment provided to Fox News Digital on Sunday. 

The Stacey Abrams grant was a big chunk of what Zeldin described as the Biden administration “throwing gold bars off the Titanic” in its waning days. The grant was apparently set up so that Abrams could replace individuals’ appliances with newer, more efficient appliances. Ahead of the election. Essentially a South American socialist vote-buying scheme, funded by the American taxpayer.

We heard nothing from CBS or the rest of the Legacy Media as the details of this humongous grift went public as its underlying program got cut. But now they want to spread victim porn over a far smaller grant. This is why trust in media continues to crater.

Speaking of trust: here are anchors Maurice DuBois and John Dickerson defending the departing producer Bill Owens. 

CBS Evening News goes to the mat for departing producer Bill Owens pic.twitter.com/wxmlb1lrnx
— Jorge Bonilla (@BonillaJL) April 23, 2025
Click “expand” to view full transcript of the aforementioned report as aired on the CBS Evening News on Tuesday, April 22nd, 2025:

JOHN DICKERSON: There are reports that the Environmental Protection Agency plans to fire about 280 staffers who work on reducing pollution in minority and low-income communities. And will reassign another 175.

MAURICE DuBOIS: The staffers in the EPA’s Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil RRights would be among the latest to be hit by the Trump cost-cutting ax.

DICKERSON: National Environmental Correspondent David Schechter reports from Dallas on the impact of another round of funding cuts at the EPA.

DAVID SCHECTER: What is this thing?

ALICIA KENDRICKS: So this is an air monitor.

SCHECTER: Last year the EPA awarded Alicia Kendricks’ non-profit a half million dollars to continue monitoring the air in this Dallas neighborhood, where soot from diesel trains and the fumes from a shingle factory pushed pollution levels 2-3 times higher than the rest of the city.

SCHECTER: This is about proof.

KENDRICKS: This is about proof.

SCHECTER: The Trump administration has frozen the funds, calling grants like this “radical and wasteful government DEI programs.” Without the money, the monitoring network is off-line, in need of maintenance.

KENDRICKS: If we’ve done our part and you’re not going to follow up your end of it and you are the federal government, who can trust the federal government? Who can trust what you say?

SCHECTER: Proving their air is polluted has unlocked solutions such as the donation of this clinic-in-a-box.

KENDRICKS: It’s fully equipped.

SCHECTER: So it’s like a little doctor’s office.

KENDRICKS: Yes.

SCHECTER: When it opens, residents, many without access to health care, can be treated for illnesses like asthma, which is double the state average here.

Would this clinic be here if not for the air monitors?

KENDRICKS: So, actually, I’m going to say no.

SCHECTER: The EPA has canceled more than 400 previously awarded grants including Kendricks’.

KENDRICKS: Can we still empower these residents to have this data?

SCHECTER: Can you?

KENDRICKS: I don’t know. I don’t know yet. The EPA left a lot of question marks in everybody’s minds.

SCHECTER: And Kendrick can no longer find the staffers who supported the group’s work. We wanted to speak to them, too, but employees are not free to talk to the media.

JUSTIN CHEN: I think they’ve been placed in a very difficult position.

SCHECTER: Justin Chen is the EPA union representative in Texas.

Do you think the EPA is still interested in protecting the environment?

CHEN: I think the people in the agency are still interested in protecting the environment. I can’t really say for those outside of it, you know, who control the purse strings and give the kind of orders.

SCHECTER: The Trump administration says cutting programs such as Kendricks’ eliminates special treatment for any one group. But what she sees as a country turning its back on the health and safety of communities that bear the heaviest burdens of pollution. 

KENDRICKS: If you’re not here to protect the environment that we live in, what are you here for? What is your agency for?

DuBOIS: So, David, some people might watch this and say, “this is the outskirts of town.” What do you say to people who think that?

SCHECTER: I actually live 10 miles from Alicia’s neighborhood, and you understand that this is a pocket of pollution, and there are pockets all over the place. And pollution, I don’t have it in my neighborhood, it is borne unevenly by different communities. That was the whole idea behind the concept of environmental justice and an Office of Environmental Justice. That some communities have a heavier burden than others, and they should get extra relief from that. The Trump administration says all communities, all people should be treated the same.

DICKERSON: How is Alicia Kendricks’ grant or her situation? What is the update on that at the moment?

SCHECTER: I just got off the phone with her a moment ago. It has been frozen and then unfrozen by a court and then refrozen again, so they are still sitting there in limbo. What she’s saying is lost, beyond the money, is the sense of trust. When the administration says “trust us, we’ll help you, then the next administration says “no, we’re not going to help you,” it just further erodes how they feel in that community about the government. 

DICKERSON: All right. David Schecter. With that reporting. Thank you so much, David.

SCHECTER: Thank you.

 

The New York Times has a nasty, Soviet-style habit of putting political personalities they don’t approve of on the psychiatrist couch. Elisabeth Bumiller, writer at large for the New York Times and a former Washington Bureau Chief at the paper, issued a self-righteous, unprofessional screed in Monday’s “Washington Memo” slot, “In the Words of the Trump Billionaires Who Run the Economy,” in which she psychoanalyzed Trump-supporting billionaires and condemned them as soulless monsters bereft of empathy.

The opening sounds like something from a left-wing group’s press release, but this is a news story in the Times.

Sometimes the billionaires running the federal government sound like they’re talking to other billionaires.

“THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!!” President Trump wrote on social media last week, offering a stock tip that appeared aimed at the investor class rather than ordinary Americans watching their plummeting 401(k)s.

Howard Lutnick, the secretary of commerce, has said his mother-in-law wouldn’t be worried if she didn’t get her monthly Social Security check. Elon Musk, who is slashing the Social Security Administration’s staff, has called it a “Ponzi scheme.” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has asserted that Americans aren’t looking at the “day-to-day fluctuations” in their retirement savings.

….

Democrats say the comments show how clueless Mr. Trump and his friends are about the lives of most Americans, and that this is what happens when billionaires run the economy. Republicans counter that highlighting the quotes as unfair cherry picking, and that in the long run everyone will benefit from their policies, even if there’s pain now. Psychologists say that extreme wealth does change people and their views of those who have less.

Give Bumiller one cheer for using the word “pounced” when Democrats attack Republicans.

The opposition has swiftly pounced on their comments. Senator Chuck Schumer, the New York Democrat and minority leader, said that Mr. Trump and his rich friends live in a “billionaires’ bubble,” while Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent, called out Mr. Lutnick on social media.

“Maybe your mother-in-law wouldn’t complain if she didn’t get her Social Security check, but tens of millions of seniors struggling to survive would,” Mr. Sanders wrote. “How out of touch are you, not to realize that?”

A lot, at least according to pollsters.

Bumiller launched her pompous, personalized analysis off of comments by pollster Frank Luntz accusing Musk and Trump of not showing empathy, 

Paul K. Piff, an associate professor of psychological science at the University of California, Irvine, has studied the psychology of the rich for nearly two decades. He said that research shows that as a person’s wealth increases, more often than not empathy and compassion for others decreases. Professor Piff cautioned that there are exceptions, and that he was not speaking specifically about the billionaires in the Trump administration.

But he said excessive wealth has profound effects on a person’s character. “You certainly have more power and more influence over people in your life,” he said. Money, he added, “buys you space and distance from people, and alongside that comes this increased focus on your own self….”

Susan Pinker, a Canadian psychologist who was a writer for The Wall Street Journal’s Mind & Matter column about human behavior and earlier wrote The Business Brain column for The Globe and Mail, said the rich live in their own world.

Bumiller was clearly aiming her psychobabble at Trump-supporting rich people, not billionaires in Hollywood or on the left (George Soros did make a cameo as “the billionaire liberal philanthropist” in her tally of the uber-wealthy.)

Steven Pinker, the Harvard psychologist who is Ms. Pinker’s brother, said he was not convinced that the billionaires’ comments were because of their wealth. “A more immediate cause may be cognitive dissonance,” he said, referring to the psychological state that can occur when people’s actions don’t align with their beliefs.

“In the case of the Trump administration,” Professor Pinker said, “they have little choice but to twist themselves into artisanal pretzels in order to defend the indefensible.”

On Tuesday’s CNN This Morning, commenting on new reports that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth held a second Signal chat [that included his wife] in which military plans were discussed, host Audie Cornish said: 

“At some point, does it move from it’s a joke to he’s a joke? And I’m not saying that’s what’s happening, but, like, it starts out, Operation Overshare, and then next thing you know . . .”

So Audie’s not saying . . . but she’s saying. Got it.

Cornish also made the comical claim that Hegseth is “not getting criticism from longtime Democrats.”  As PBS correspondent Lisa Desjardins has reported:

“Scores of Democrats are calling for Hegseth to resign.”

And who would have better sources among Democrats than PBS?!

And, yet again, Cornish assembled an unbalanced, left-leaning panel. 

Jerusalem Demsas of the highly Trump-hostile Atlantic described President Trump’s alleged reluctance to listen to criticisms of Hegseth as “highly dangerous.” Demsas’ bio mentions that she spent years working on “political campaigns.” Googling didn’t turn up just which campaigns she worked on, but let’s go out on a limb and venture that neither Ted Cruz nor Marjorie Taylor Greene were in the mix.

And then there was panel regular Chuck Rocha, a Democrat strategist. Someone who might be called an attention, um, hound—to put it politely. 

During the discussion, wanting to draw attention to his Texas headgear [an absurd bit of showboating unless he had a bronco tied up at the curb], Rocha said of Hegseth’s Signal controversy:

“It’s went [sic] on from felt cowboy hat season to straw cowboy hat season, and we’re still talking about it.”

Finally, Kristen Soltis Anderson, a Republican strategist and pollster. Though certainly not MAGA, she made the solid point that when it comes to assessing the political damage to Trump from news of this second Signal chat revelation: 

“I just think any damage you would have already seen would have come from the first revelation.” 

Take Cornish herself into account, and you’ve got a three-to-one liberal to conservative panel ratio. Fair ‘n balanced—CNN style!

Here’s the transcript.

CNN This Morning
4/22/25
6:13 am EDT

AUDIE CORNISH: Here to kick off the only other group chat that matters here is staff writer at The Atlantic, Jerusalem Demsas, Democratic strategist Chuck Rocha, and CNN political commentator and Republican strategist and pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson. 

. . . 

KRISTEN SOLTIS ANDERSON: I think in terms of Trump actually taking action, it will only be if he perceives that it is hurting his political standing. And right now, I don’t know that the second group chat revelation is as damaging or, I mean, I just think any damage you would have already seen would have come from the first revelation. 

CHUCK ROCHAS: You see a drip, drip, and it’s went [sic] on from felt cowboy hat season to straw cowboy hat season, and we’re still talking about it. 

. . . 

JERUSALEM DEMSAS: I think from policy perspective, it’s really dangerous to have a situation where the President United States or people in the administration are not interested in hearing the feedback loop that someone’s not working out. This is the head of the Defense Department! 

CORNISH: But in fairness, they hear that all the time, that it’s not working out, right? Democrats are like, that’s not working, that’s not working. 

DEMSAS: Yes, but you have to be able to evaluate the difference between your opponents disagreeing with you and someone literally sharing national security secrets. Not one but two unsecure group chats, some of which are not even people who are in the administration at all. 

. . . 

CORNISH: The other thing that’s curious is I think multiple aides actually were commenting on, exited the Pentagon. They were actually people who had worked with Hegseth at his previous nonprofit, which people said he wasn’t able to run properly. And now they are out there talking about how they were wrongly fired. And I feel like that’s not helpful in this moment, right? 

Because he’s not getting criticism from longtime Democrats or longtime Pentagon people. It’s like, his own buddies, basically.

But at some point, does it move from it’s a joke to he’s a joke? And I’m not saying that’s what’s happening, but, like, it starts out, Operation Overshare, and then next thing you know, it’s like…

The border policies of President Donald Trump have been incredibly successful in halting the flow of illegals crossing into the United States from the south.  

Such a conclusion is not surprising if it came from a conservative oriented media source. However, since that was the conclusion of a writer for the Trump hating The Atlantic magazine, it makes one scratch his head in amazement that the periodical someone let this article by Justin Gest get published on Saturday, “Migrants Are Heading South.” The subtitle of the article is also highly adulatory of Trump’s border policies, “For years, millions of people traveled through Central America north to the United States. Now that flow is changing direction.”

The big question now is which Atlantic editor is going to get into big trouble for allowing Gest’s article into print with such words not only of praise for Trump’s border policies but also criticism of the utter failure of Joe Biden on the same issue.

…For the first time in recent history, the people passing through Central America are mostly moving south. The new migration flow seems to have been triggered by the Trump administration’s crackdown on both legal and illegal crossings at the southern U.S. border. And it is already disorienting the region.

In recent years, millions of migrants from Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia, and Africa have carved a path from South America through the treacherous Darién jungle and into Panama en route north to the United States. But that massive flow is now dwindling.

Costa Rica is representative of the trend. For decades, hundreds and sometimes thousands of migrants crossed the country by bus every day, traveling the roughly 300 miles from Paso Canoas in the south to Los Chiles in the north; according to the UN-affiliated International Organization for Migration, from 2021 to 2024 more than 1.2 million people entered the country heading north from Panama.

But after peaking in August 2023 at about 84,500, the number of people migrating north through Costa Rica began to decline—dipping to 14,400 in November 2024, then 1,600 in January 2025, the month Donald Trump was inaugurated; it was 1,600 again in February, then zero as of mid-March. Meanwhile, during a six-week period in February and March, IOM estimates that some 1,200 people moved south into Costa Rica.

And yet more praise from Gest highlighting the dramatic change in direction of the migrant flow through Central America due to Trump’s border policies:

In my conversations with more than two dozen migrants in Costa Rica last month, all but one was either halting their northbound journey or returning after a period in Mexico, where they had resided while awaiting asylum interviews with U.S. officials that never took place.

Aid workers I spoke with said that bus companies had recently begun organizing additional routes from Los Chiles to interior cities farther south, such as Quesada and the capital, San José, to account for the new migration flows. At the bus terminals in Los Chiles and Las Tablillas, I observed coyotes, the exploitative human traffickers who once facilitated migrants’ movement northward, offering to guide migrants back down the route if they chose to turn around.

The migrants I spoke with were broadly aware of the Trump administration’s hostility toward immigrants, including its highly publicized deportations. Most had reversed their course simply because they didn’t think they could get into the United States. Asylum claims began to fall during the Biden administration, after it imposed restrictions.

But the Trump administration effectively ended consideration of asylum claims at the southern border when, hours after Trump’s inauguration, the White House shut down an app that the Biden administration had set up so migrants could schedule screening appointments. Migrants I interviewed said that they had waited up to nine months for their appointments and decided to turn back when those appointments were canceled. Although some migrants continue to cross the border illegally, they often have to pay smuggling sums that most of them can’t afford; El País recently reported fees between $6,000 and $10,000 per person in Tijuana.

If anybody wants to know just how successful Trump’s border policies have been, just point them to this Atlantic magazine article.