Newsbusters

If PBS felt any concern about the hit its reputation for balance took at Wednesday’s devastating DOGE hearing on Capitol Hill, Thursday’s PBS News Hour didn’t show it.

On the day after its CEO Paula Kerger testified to Congress that they were fair and balanced, PBS turned to the leftist group Media Matters for America. The News Hour has never invited the Media Research Center for an interview about the state of the media since the MRC was founded in 1987.

How leftist is PBS? In the face of overwhelming evidence of its leftist political agenda, PBS shamelessly turned to another discredited leftist organization as it claims to be unbiased.

After Donald Trump won a second turn, this show created a series titled “On Democracy,” as if Trump’s election wasn’t very democratic. This latest episode suggested the Heritage Foundation’s manual of recommendations Project 2025 was a threat to democracy.

Why? Heritage scholar Mike Gonzalez, who testified in the DOGE hearing, wrote the Project 2025 chapter on why PBS and NPR should be defunded. PBS associates itself with democracy. 

This segment began: 

GEOFF BENNETT: Time now for our series “On Democracy,” where we hear a range of perspectives on how government should function what led to this moment in American history, and where the country goes next. Our primary focus tonight is Project 2025, the conservative policy project authored by former Trump administration officials, which became a flash point [for Democrats] during the presidential campaign. Angelo Carusone has studied that 900-page document. He’s president of Media Matters, a progressive nonprofit focused on researching and analyzing news media, including disinformation and online ecosystems….

Bennett toadied to his left-wing guest even more so than usual.

You have emerged as an expert on Project 2025, this road map that then-candidate Trump during the campaign repeatedly disavowed. Now the architect of Project 2025 was just quoted as saying the way that Trump has implemented it has exceeded his wildest dreams. When you look at the way President Trump has expanded his executive authority, he’s dismantled federal agencies, he’s purged the federal work force, how much is Project 2025 guiding this work?

After prodding Carusone with “How should those opposed to what he’s doing, how should they fight back?” Bennett repeated the assumption from the latest Media Matters study — of the political tilt of the top podcasts — that pro-Trump voices have a huge advantage in the current media ecosystem.

BENNETT: And the right and Trump-friendly voices have an advantage here, because the other part of your work is looking at their saturation in the media ecosystem. Tell me about that.

Is this talk of the “media ecosystem” at large a convenient way to change the subject from the undeniable liberal bias of network news, cable news, and public broadcasting specifically, especially after the DOGE hearing?

Carusone claimed, “When you add it all up, the right and right-leaning and right adjacent programming accounts for 82 percent of the major online shows. That’s podcasts. That’s streaming channels. That’s narrative dominance.” Bennett nodded along to the figures, and just facilitated like he was hosting an infomercial: “And that includes podcasts that aren’t overtly political like sports and comedy podcasts, for instance.”

After Carusone’s claim that “72 percent of explicitly non-political programming contained not only political content, but right-leaning political content,” Bennett replied: “It’s quite an asymmetry. I mean, is there any way that Democrats could account for that in a way that is authentic?”

Later on, Bennett saw the supposed right-dominated media (a notion that conveniently pretends MSNBC, CNN, PBS, NPR, and the three major news networks don’t exist) as a threat to democracy.

BENNETT: And that speaks to the broader implications about what it means for our democracy.

CARUSONE: That’s right. And so unless there’s a real concerted effort around that asymmetry, the problem is not only going to not get better. It’s only going to get worse, because let’s keep in mind that when we talk about all the tech oligarchs and the tech giants rolling back their policies, cozying up to Trump, it’s not just that the leaders are doing that. It actually affects the rules of their algorithms, what their systems are doing. That imbalance is only going to speed up because the very systems that support them are actually privileging right-wing lies and right-wing misinformation.

PBS conveniently skipped over the past speech-silencing effect of those “tech oligarchs” and their policies, which are being rolled back under Trump: Under pressure from both the Biden administration and its own leftist employees, social media platforms spent years squelching conservative speech online, from COVID rules to BLM to transgender issues. 

Oddly, while Bennett brought up “disinformation” at the start, and Carusone wound up by mentioning “right-wing misinformation,” the actual Media Matters study mentions neither word.

This segment was brought to you in part by Raymond James.

A transcript is available, click “Expand.”

PBS News Hour

3/27/25

7:38:33 p.m. (ET)

Geoff Bennett: Time now for our series On Democracy, where we hear a range of perspectives on how government should function, what led to this moment in American history, and where the country goes next. Our primary focus tonight is Project 2025, the conservative policy project authored by former Trump administration officials, which became a flash point during the presidential campaign. Angelo Carusone has studied that 900-page document. He’s president of Media Matters, a progressive nonprofit focused on researching and analyzing news media, including disinformation and online ecosystems. I spoke with him days ago. Angelo Carusone, welcome to the “News Hour.”

Angelo Carusone, President, Media Matters for America: Thanks for having me.

Geoff Bennett: You have emerged as an expert on Project 2025, this road map that then-candidate Trump during the campaign repeatedly disavowed. Now the architect of Project 2025 was just quoted as saying the way that Trump has implemented it has exceeded his wildest dreams. When you look at the way President Trump has expanded his executive authority, he’s dismantled federal agencies, he’s purged the federal work force, how much is Project 2025 guiding this work?

Angelo Carusone: What Project 2025 provided was sort of the core story here, which was to — who’s the bad guy? And that was the deep state. And they basically said, essentially, most of the federal government, most of the federal workers were part of this deep state, a conspiracy to sort of prevent Donald Trump or anybody else from implementing major changes and then — and sort of a conservative agenda. And then the second thing it did was not only provide who the bad guy was, but then who’s the good guy. And, in this case, the good guy is not just Donald Trump. It’s a unitary executive. So that is it. Obviously, there’s a lot of policy that Project 2025 has sort of provided the framework for, but essentially it was a story. And it was a story of who’s the bad guy and who’s the good guy? And, to that extent, that story is playing out exactly according to plan. The only major difference is the timeline. It’s just moving along a lot faster. We’re basically in sort of like the fifth or sixth month of Project 2025, according to the book, even though we’re only in the second month of the administration.

Geoff Bennett: So where does this head next then?

Angelo Carusone: Well, one is that we’re barely through — even through the layoffs and the terminations. We have only gotten rid of about 70-or-so-thousand federal workers. Project 2025 calls for somewhere around 300,000 to about a million federal workers to be removed. So where does it go? More layoffs, more terminations. The second thing, and this is the big one, is to sort of set up a collision between the executive branch and the judicial branch. One of the big parts of Project 2025 was to make it very clear that the president and the executive has ultimate authority. And that means that you start with Congress. And Congress has largely abdicated itself to the administration. So that was sort of their first target, but politics basically said, we’re not even going to try to fight this out. We’re not even going to defend our sort of co-equal status. So now where it goes next is sort of a showdown with the federal — with the courts.

Geoff Bennett: If the strategy is all laid out and President Trump, you can argue about what he’s done. You can’t argue that he hasn’t been entirely transparent about it.

Angelo Carusone: Yes.

Geoff Bennett: How should those opposed to what he’s doing, how should they fight back?

Angelo Carusone: I think the thing that’s really important here is that we are not fighting a standard political battle. Project 2025 is really unpopular. Nobody actually really likes the policies there except a very small extreme few, but they don’t see how those policies are actually affecting them. There has to be a bigger story here. And that starts with connecting the dots to the administration’s actions and the harms that people are experiencing. That’s a political issue, but that is that’s as much of a media issue as well. And then, broadly, not this, consensus around not this. And if we are not able to win the hearts and minds, Project 2025, whatever it becomes called, will be the new norm.

Geoff Bennett: And the right and Trump-friendly voices have an advantage here, because the other part of your work is looking at their saturation in the media ecosystem. Tell me about that.

Angelo Carusone: I think the biggest challenge right now that we’re grappling with, and there are lots, but they all sort of play out in one arena, and that is an information landscape. And the real battle from my perspective is in the information war. And the right just has an enormous advantage there. They have had some advantages along the way. There’s always been a little bit of an imbalance. Talk radio and FOX News in the ’90s and early 2000s, they had dominance. They had a lot of listeners, but there were other things that counterbalanced them. So they weren’t dominant in the entire information landscape. They just spoke to a very consolidated few. That’s just not the case anymore. So we just did this really big study that looked on online voices and sort of the largest programs, sort of political and non-political, adjacent left, left adjacent, right, right adjacent. When you add it all up, the right and right-leaning and right adjacent programming accounts for 82 percent of the major online shows. That’s podcasts. That’s streaming channels. That’s just — that’s narrative dominance. That — yes.

Geoff Bennett: And that includes podcasts that aren’t overtly political like sports and comedy podcasts, for instance.

Angelo Carusone: Yes, that was the part that was the most to me surprising and yet disturbing about the study, is that of the 400-plus shows that we looked at, 100 or so of them were non-political, sports, culture. But when you actually looked at an analysis of the program, you listened to them, you coded them, we found that 72 percent of them, 72 percent of explicitly non-political programming contained not only political content, but right-leaning political content. They just branded it or framed it as something different. And that’s where this really becomes key is, is that is the lens through which people see the world. And so when all of that programming is sort of tilting the scales in favor of the right, the story that the majority of Americans are getting day-to-day is right leaning.

And I see no better illustration of that gap than if you look at in particular what’s happening with young people. Young people are accelerating and moving to the right faster than any other demographic. And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that they just happen to consume online media more than any other demographic does. That’s their primary source and yet they themselves are moving at a faster and faster clip to the right because that landscape is so heavily dominated and saturated by the right.

Geoff Bennett: It’s quite an asymmetry. I mean, is there any way that Democrats could account for that in a way that is authentic?

Angelo Carusone: I mean, that is the key issue here, right, is that they — that they’re playing with a very old playbook, that when they — they think that the issue here is about messaging and message discipline, and say, well, if we all just go out there and say the same thing at the same time, that will get our message out. That model worked 20 years ago. That doesn’t work now. In fact, it feeds into the opposite. They are feeding into the story that’s being told about them, which is that they’re puppets, that they’re inauthentic, that they don’t have anything original to say. So what does that mean in practice? Stop worrying about paid media. Ads are not going to be the solution here. Investing in storytellers — the people online that do this work day-to-day, they’re artists in a way. They’re storytellers. They’re creators. They just need the resources to continue to do what they’re doing. That will help balance out the scales. The second is to stop being so afraid. The right has an advantage. That asymmetry doesn’t just give them the ability to project a story. It also gives their leaders comfort and confidence. If I know that I could go out there and face-plant, and I have a massive ecosystem that is going to be like sandpaper to smooth out all the edges, and not only make that face-plant look like the greatest acrobatic feat ever, but somehow turn it into a reward system for me, I have a lot more comfort. I have a lot more confidence.

Geoff Bennett: And that speaks to the broader implications about what it means for our democracy.

Angelo Carusone: That’s right. And so unless there’s a real concerted effort around that asymmetry, the problem is not only going to not get better. It’s only going to get worse, because let’s keep in mind that when we talk about all the tech oligarchs and the tech giants rolling back their policies, cozying up to Trump, it’s not just that the leaders are doing that. It actually affects the rules of their algorithms, what their systems are doing. That imbalance is only going to speed up because the very systems that support them are actually privileging right-wing lies and right-wing misinformation.

Geoff Bennett: Angelo Carusone, president of Media Matters, thanks for being here.

Angelo Carusone: Thanks for having me.

During most times and among most people, good relations between Mexico and the United States would be looked upon as a good thing. But if you feverishly hate Trump, you root against American interests, like David Frum of The Atlantic magazine. It’s no big surprise since a few months ago, Frum wildly accused Trump of planning to build a network of “concentration camps.”

In his latest symptom of extreme Trump derangement, Frum snarled on Friday that the good relations currently being enjoyed by the two neighbor nations is in reality “appeasement” by Mexico. The headline was “Why Sheinbaum Can Surrender to Trump.”

Contrary to appearances, the Sheinbaum secret is appeasement. The reason Mexico’s president has not been called out for her Trump-complaisance is that the country’s political opposition and independent media are too crushed to name the policy for what it is. But the evidence is in.

Got it? The good relations between Mexico and the USA is the result of “appeasement” …at least according to poor Frum who can’t stand the idea of Mexico cooperating with a United States led by Trump.

It really irks Frum that Mexico agreed to cooperate with the USA on six fronts. 

President Trump has made six big demands of Mexico. Sheinbaum has granted them all. Let’s proceed, one by one:

1.He wants much more active Mexican cooperation on immigration enforcement at the U.S.-Mexico border.

2.He wants Mexico to receive people deported from the United States, including people who are not Mexican nationals.

3.He wants Mexico to adopt a more militarized approach to drug interdiction.

4.He wants a new tariff regime to shift more North American manufacturing from Mexico to the United States.

5.He wants Mexico to join U.S. trade actions against China.

6.He wants Mexico to submit politely to this shakedown, and not make too much fuss.

And after going into detail about how well these specific areas of cooperation are working, Frum grumbles that it is the result of “appeasement.”

Even if Sheinbaum’s appeasement approach were Mexico’s best option, her model cannot be emulated by other states, especially democratic ones. A prerequisite for her strategy is that she leads a society that is consolidating into a one-party state, with a media subject to ever more stringent restrictions and government control.

…Sheinbaum’s political biography is that of a cadre of the left. But today, the most important political cleft is not the fading distinction between right and left, but the rising conflict between liberal and illiberal, democratic and autocratic. As Mexico follows America into illiberality, Mexico’s leadership finds itself surprisingly favored by Trump’s Washington, along with Russia, Saudi Arabia, and El Salvador. In contrast, the formerly close U.S. ally Canada is consigned to join Ukraine, Denmark, Panama, and the democracies of Europe and East Asia on the Trump enemies list.

Sheinbaum’s policy of Trump appeasement may well be the least-bad course open to Mexico. But it should be seen for what it is, not misunderstood as the brave resistance it most definitely is not.

Got that? Cooperation with the United States while it is led by Trump can be due only to “appeasement” …at least in the highly agitated mind of David Frum. Try to imagine him boiling over if his native Canada were more cooperative.

“That’s what I’m talking about. Bring that resistance!”

That was self-described Republican Michael Steele on Saturday’s edition of MSNBC’s The Weekend, urging far-left Dem Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal to resist Donald Trump.

Steele and Jayapal each claimed that they have very different views on many issues, but are united in resisting the predations of Orange Man Bad.

But when’s the last time anyone heard Steele forcefully express his supposedly still-Republican views on the show? His positions have been indistinguishable from those of his highly-partisan Dem co-hosts, Alicia Menendez and Symone Sanders. 

Speaking of the latter, Sanders repeatedly waved her handkerchief [see screencap] to show her solidarity with the people attending Jayapal’s town halls who cry over the DOGE efforts to shrink the federal government. 

Wanting to preserve her far-left street cred, Jayapal claimed: “All of us know, that America has been cruel at many, many, many times in our country’s history.” 

She also mentioned that later today, she will be speaking “at one of the Tesla takedowns.” So Jayapal is trying to fulfill Jasmine Crockett’s birthday [which falls today] wish: “All I want for my birthday is for Elon Musk to be taken down.” Sharp keys to be distributed to all in attendance?

Jayapal also accused the Trump administration of “disappearing” people. She warned that while it’s only been immigrants for now, all Americans are at risk of being disappeared. Ay caramba: ¡Los Desaparecidos! 

Jayapal claimed that Trump’s goal is to enrich the “very tiny” number of the super rich, while “everybody else is down and and literally destroyed.” Yikes! Well, look at the bright side, Pramila. If 99% of the population is “literally destroyed” by Trump, at least that should make it easier to find a parking spot.

Note: Beyond urging Jayapal to “bring that resistance,” Michael Steele chipped in with some shots of his own at our country and at Trump. He called the Constitution “wonderful,” but added “the Framers didn’t include you or me in [it].” And he absurdly claimed that the Resistance is about “this idea that you and me are not worthy to be Americans.” What?
Here’s the transcript.

MSNBC
The Weekend
3-29-25
9:39 am EDT

MICHAEL STEELE: Democratic Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal has been hosting packed town halls in Washington State, addressing her voters’ about federal funding cuts. Hundreds of constituents have gathered to voice their anxieties about potential Republican-backed changes to programs like Medicaid and Social Security. 

The Congresswoman has also kicked off a program she’s calling the Resistance Lab, a series of sessions aimed at turning the anger of those constituents into action.

MICHAEL STEELE: That’s what I’m talking about! Democratic Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal of Washington joins us now. Bring that resistance, Congresswoman! Let’s talk. C’mon. 

WOMAN AT JAYAPAL TOWN HALL: 40% of my team was fired Today I had a tell a grad student who had traveled here from Maine that the person she was most excited to meet was not available for her to talk to [chokes up.]

. . . 

PRAMILA JAYAPAL: I think, you know, we are starting to literally stock tissue boxes at our town halls . . . There was another woman who got up, and she’s pregnant. She has a young child already, and she was in tears, and she said she was Googling, how do I go to Canada to get a vaccine for my baby? 

. . . 

The cruelty, I mean, I think that I was on a plane back from Seattle, or to Seattle the other day, and the flight attendant pulled me aside, and he said, When did America become so cruel? Now, you and I both, all of us know, that America has been cruel at many, many, many times in our country’s history. But there was an idea that we were trying to be better. 

. . . 

And I’m going to go speak at one of the Tesla takedowns later today across the country. But people talk about how this was supposed to be about, you know, draining the swamp. Remember those words, draining the swamp? This is like a whole out stealing from the American people. 

. . . 

The whole goal here is power to be able to unilaterally slash and burn so that a very tiny few group of people at the top are able to get even richer and richer, and everybody else is down and and literally destroyed in terms of their families. 

. . . 

MICHAEL STEELE: Congresswoman, let the record reflect that, you know, you and I in any other universe, probably on Earth 2, 3, and 4, would disagree a lot on a lot of big policy issues. 

SYMONE SANDERS: He’s still a Republican.

STEELE: I’m still a Republican. But here’s where you and I are aligned, and I think it’s important for America to know what this moment requires from each of us. This idea that we have in front of us a threat, a direct threat to our liberties, to our sense and appreciation of freedom, and more importantly, the fundamental constitutional idea that every one of us, you and me, despite our policy disagreements, are still Americans. 

We’re still protected by this wonderful Constitution that the Framers didn’t include you or me in, right? But we now own it. So I appreciate the storylines that you’re leveling up about resistance to this idea that you and me are not worthy to be Americans. 

. . . 

This isn’t resistance because I don’t like where you stand on health care or resistance because I don’t like where you stand on taxes. This is resistance because we don’t like what Donald Trump and Elon Musk and Pam Bondi and Pete Hegseth are doing to our country? 

. . . 

JAYAPAL: They are actually disappearing people, and this is something that hasn’t gotten enough attention. They are literally taking people on the streets in a way that you might see in authoritarian governments, and they are disappearing them out of the country or into jails far, far away from where their families are. 

And it’s happening by the hundreds and it’s being praised as something 
is just about immigrants. But let me tell you something. This is about every one of us, because if you can do that to a legal permanent resident, somebody who’s here on a legal valid visa because you don’t like what they are saying or you don’t agree with them, then every American has to worry about what that means for them. 

. . . 

We’re doing this resistance lab and tomorrow we’ll have, I think it’s now over 1,800 people plus over 120 groups that are going to be Zoomed in for this training on how you resist and what are the most effective tactics to resist dictators trying to take over democracies. 

SANDERS: Thank you, Michael [again waves her hanky.]

STEELE: I saw the hanky, and we’ll leave that exclamation point by Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal right there. 

Ya can’t make it up.

Unless, of course, you’re The New York Times.

The other day the Times, “the paper of record” as it likes to call itself, headlined: 

In His Second Term, Trump Fuels a ‘Machinery’ of Misinformation

President Trump’s first four years in the White House were filled with falsehoods. Now he and those around him are using false claims to justify their policy changes.

The Times story says that Trump and his team “are effectively institutionalizing disinformation.” The story continues: 

Audrey McCabe, an analyst at Common Cause, a nonpartisan government watchdog, said the administration had pursued a strategy of ‘disinformation overload’ that was overwhelming not only its opponents but also the judicial system.

And then the Times goes on to say: 

False narratives that once percolated in the darker corners of the internet are now advanced by Mr. Trump and his appointees and amplified by a media echo chamber, muddying the political discourse and 

compounding a broader erosion of trust in institutions themselves.

Talk about a lack of self-awareness or self-reflection, not to mention “effectively institutionalizing disinformation”??!!!

And what does the Times not report in this story?

Recall this headline from Hans Von Spakovsky and Stephanie Luiz of the Heritage Foundation, writing over here at Fox News back there in the stone age of 2021: 

Will New York Times, Washington Post return Pulitzer for misleading Russia collusion stories?

This is not the first time the prize was awarded for misleading and discredited coverage

This story decidedly unmentioned by the Times reports: 

In 2018, journalists from The New York Times and The Washington Post won a Pulitzer Prize in national reporting for their biased and inaccurate coverage of Russia’s alleged collaboration with the Trump campaign to interfere with the 2016 election, a claim we now know was a hoax. So when are they going to return the prize? 

….In a series of 10 articles, Times reporters propagated a narrative detailing fictitious connections between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign, the president’s transition team, and the administration. 

The Mueller investigation as well as the Senate Intelligence Committee affirmed that there is no evidence that President Trump or his staff conspired with the Russian government to impact the 2016 election. Special Counsel John Durham is now indicting some of those who were involved in creating what amounted to a political hoax that dogged the Trump administration for years. 

Despite these findings, and the inaccuracies in the Times’ articles, the Pulitzer Prize board has not repealed the award. (Note that all principals are alive and perfectly capable of responding.)

Safe to say, – were there a prize for this “institutionalizing of disinformation” (to use The Times own characterization)  on the utterly phony Trump/Russia hoax-  The Times would have won hands down. 

In fact, perhaps its time to re-write that paragraph from The Times cited above.

As the Times propagandized it reads: 

False narratives that once percolated in the darker corners of the internet are now advanced by Mr. Trump and his appointees and amplified by a media echo chamber, muddying the political discourse and compounding a broader erosion of trust in institutions themselves.

But re-written accurately it might read:

False narratives that once percolated in the darker corners of the internet are now advanced by The New York Times and amplified by a liberal media echo chamber, muddying the political discourse and compounding a broader erosion of trust in institutions themselves.

Which in turn would re-write that original and phony Trump headline this way: 

In Trump’s Second Term, The New York Times Fuels a ‘Machinery’ of Misinformation

President Trump’s first four years in the White House were filled with New York Times falsehoods. Now The Times and those around the paper are using false claims to justify their policy changes.

As irony would have it, The Times this week illustrates its “machinery of misinformation” by publishing unchallenged an opinion piece by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Clinton – seriously!- attacks Trump for “cozying up to dictators like Russia’s Vladimir Putin.” Hello? Obviously, both Clinton and The Times hope readers have completely forgotten that it was Secretary Clinton herself who visited Moscow and presented Putin’s Foreign Minister Lavrov with a “reset button.” 

In his book Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency, National Review’s Andy McCarthy wrote: 

Ah yes, let’s remember the Obama-era ‘Russia Reset.’ It was announced with great ceremony by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, brandishing a red plastic ‘Reset’ push-button that she presented to her counterpart, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. Oops: The button was mislabeled Peregruzka (the Russian word for “overcharge”) rather than Perezagruzka (reset). As investigative journalist Claudia Rosett observes, the Kremlin still keeps the button on display in a museum at the Foreign Ministry, ‘less a souvenir of U.S.-Russia camaraderie than a symbol of American folly.’”

In her current Times piece Clinton is un-mysteriously silent about her decided screw up.  (And yes, what about those Clinton-deleted 33,000 missing e-mails?). But to the media point here, there is no reminder from The Times about the irony in The Times publishing this column that easily qualifies as a piece in the paper’s very own “‘Machinery’ of Misinformation”.

As noted at the beginning in this space, ya can’t make it up.

Unless you’re the New York Times.

CNN’s Anderson Cooper welcomed Professor and former NAACP President Cornell William Brooks to his Friday show to help him set some straw men ablaze on President Donald Trump’s order for the Smithsonian to remove all “improper ideology” at its museums. The published order gave a clear definition of “improper ideology,” but the duo insisted on talking about something else so it could accuse him of trying to “make America great by propaganda.”

Cooper began by asking, “When you hear this administration talking about improper ideology, what goes through your mind?”

 

 

Brooks claimed that “when I think about an American president charging the vice president with rooting out improper ideology at the Smithsonian, I think about a couple things. It is not the job of an American president to charge the crown jewel of American art and history and culture with having a proper ideology, right?”

He also declared that “the Smithsonian was created for the diffusion, the spreading, the expansion of knowledge, not engaging in ideology or propaganda or whitewashing our American history. And so I’m absolutely insulted by this, as I believe many Americans are in terms of our intelligence and culture are simultaneously being insulted by this executive order, which is, as many of them are histrionic and hysterical, constitutionally suspect, and dangerous.”

Cooper followed up by asserting he didn’t understand the logic behind the move, “The idea that you cannot acknowledge somebody from the past for enslaving people, for crimes they committed, for, you know, being of their time even, even if it is of their time, it seems — that’s an extraordinary thing. The idea that we can’t talk about injustices of the past seems — and acknowledge them, I don’t understand that.”

Perhaps because that’s not what the order says. The key line from the order is “Under this historical revision, our Nation’s unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness is reconstructed as inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed.”

The most important words are clearly “inherently” and “irredeemably.” Yet, Brooks still claimed, “Well, Anderson, let’s think about this. This executive order is an attempt to essentially make America great by propaganda. But let us note this. Unless we’re honest about American history, we can’t appreciate the greatness of American history.”

He added, “So, unless you acknowledge that 3.9 million people were enslaved in this country, you can’t appreciate the Emancipation Proclamation. You can’t appreciate the 13th Amendment. You can’t appreciate all these artifacts and the exhibits that attest to the resilience, the beauty, the bravery of black people.”

Another line from Trump’s order was, “It is the policy of my Administration to restore Federal sites dedicated to history, including parks and museums, to solemn and uplifting public monuments that remind Americans of our extraordinary heritage, consistent progress toward becoming a more perfect Union, and unmatched record of advancing liberty, prosperity, and human flourishing.”

“Consistent progress” certainly doesn’t sound like trying to teach the history of the 13th Amendment while avoiding slavery or similar examples.

Here is a transcript for the March 28 show:

CNN Anderson Cooper 360

3/28/2025

8:39 PM ET

ANDERSON COOPER: Professor Brooks, thanks for being here. When you hear this administration talking about improper ideology, what goes through your mind?

CORNELL WILLIAM BROOKS: First of all, Anderson, thank you for having me on and thank you for lifting up this topic. So when I think about an American president charging the vice president with rooting out improper ideology at the Smithsonian, I think about a couple things. It is not the job of an American president to charge the crown jewel of American art and history and culture with having a proper ideology, right?

So in other words, the Smithsonian was created for the diffusion, the spreading, the expansion of knowledge, not engaging in ideology or propaganda or whitewashing our American history. And so I’m absolutely insulted by this, as I believe many Americans are in terms of our intelligence and culture are simultaneously being insulted by this executive order, which is, as many of them are histrionic and hysterical, constitutionally suspect, and dangerous.

COOPER: The idea that you cannot acknowledge somebody from the past for enslaving people, for crimes they committed, for, you know, being of their time even, even if it is of their time, it seems — that’s an extraordinary thing. The idea that we can’t talk about injustices of the past seems — and acknowledge them, I don’t understand that.

BROOKS: Well, Anderson, let’s think about this. This executive order is an attempt to essentially make America great by propaganda. But let us note this. Unless we’re honest about American history, we can’t appreciate the greatness of American history.

So, unless you acknowledge that 3.9 million people were enslaved in this country, you can’t appreciate the Emancipation Proclamation. You can’t appreciate the 13th Amendment. You can’t appreciate all these artifacts and the exhibits that attest to the resilience, the beauty, the bravery of black people.

So, for example, in the African American Museum, you have a shawl that was worn by Harriet Tubman, who being the first woman to lead American troops into battle during the Civil War, she liberated 750 people. You can’t appreciate her bravery, can’t appreciate her resilience, can’t appreciate her character as an American heroine unless you fully appreciate the ugliness, the tragedy, the injustice of slavery.

Ayo Edebiri isn’t a household name yet, but “The Bear” star got plenty of media coverage last month.

Why?

X owner Elon Musk shared a false rumor that she’s attached to a female-centric reboot of “The Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise. That sparked “death threats” from the usual, pathetic suspects.

It’s neither pretty nor healthy, but it’s sadly the New Normal with pop culture news. This reporter once got a death threat for suggesting “Bob’s Burgers” had jumped the shark. 

The Edebiri threats sparked a wave of media coverage including CNN, Rolling Stone, Variety, People, The Hollywood Reporter, Vulture and more mainstream outlets.

 

Ayo Edebiri said she received “insane death threats” after Elon Musk shared a false report that claimed Disney was considering Edebiri as a replacement for Johnny Depp in the “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise. https://t.co/ap0JkakTJ7
— San Francisco Chronicle (@sfchronicle) March 12, 2025
 

That’s not all. Nearly every headline pinned the blame on Musk.

The billionaire shared Fake News, no doubt, and he should behave better given his considerable clout. He’s not to blame for strangers sending death threats her way.

That’s still how the “journalists” framed it.

We’re now learning a much bigger movie star, Gal Gadot of “Snow White” fame, had to beef up security measures in recent months. The news is getting mostly ignored in the press.

Why? Journalists can’t pin this one on Musk, Trump or other right-leaning figure. Plus, the likely threat comes from the far Left, the same group shouting “Free Palestine” and harassing Jews across college campuses.

Is there another explanation? 

 

 

Even Variety, which broke the death threat story, downplayed the news.

 “Inside Disney’s ‘Snow White’ Fiasco: Death Threats, Beefed-Up Security and a Social Media Guru for Rachel Zegler,” reads the Variety headline.

The article suggests Zegler’s “Pro Palestine” social media post sparked the threats.

Behind the scenes, death threats toward Zegler’s co-star Gal Gadot, who is Israeli, spiked [following the ‘Free Palestine’ post], and Disney had to pay for additional security for the mother of four.

Gadot is Jewish and previously served in the IDF. She has been outspoken about supporting Israel, but it’s been a very modest part of her public persona.

That was enough to inspire pro-Palestinian supporters to not only call for her death but inspire Disney to hire security above and beyond what a traditional celebrity receives, according to Variety.

So where are the headlines about the story?

Right-leaning outlets like The Daily Mail, The New York Post and Page Six covered the news. Yahoo recycled the Variety scoop and made it the obvious headline.

That’s all, according to a good-faith Google News search.

It’s impossible not to see a connection to the Gadot news and recent media narratives. When pro-Jewish documentaries hit the market, most movie critics avoid them. If Jewish stars get canceled, threatened or worse, most media outlets similarly grow mostly silent.

And, when an A-list actress endures enough death threats to require security forces, the story barely makes a ripple in the news waters.

The cast of MSNBC’s Thursday installment of Deadline: White House was not a fan of the Trump Administration’s moves to deport Hamas supporters and anti-Semitic students. As they tell it, to do so is to bring the U.S. down to the moral level of “fascist regimes” and “countries behind the Iron Curtain.”

Alex Wagner returned from interviewing students and professors at Columbia to declare, “The Trump Administration, as much buffoonery as has gone on, has been strategic and targeted, targeting parts of our society that are either off limits or marginalized or not discussed that much, whether it’s brown people and people who don’t have papers, whether it’s federal workers who are part of this vast bureaucracy and therefore faceless, whether it’s elite academics in Ivy League institutions, they don’t—the bet is that the American public is not keyed in and is not particularly empathetic to those struggles.”

 

 

Trying to do a Pastor Martin Niemoller impression, Wagner continued, “But the reality is, as we’ve seen in dictatorships and fascist regimes across the world, first they come for one group, then they come for another. None of this ends at Columbia, right?”

Guest host Alicia Menendez then turned to former Obama State Department official and managing editor of Time magazine Rick Stengel, “None of it ends at Columbia. I think, Rick, about watching the video that we’ve now all seen of Rumeysa Ozturk sort of being confronted on the street, the fact that there is not a stated crime, the fact that there is not a stated crime in the case of Mahmoud Khalil—like, I think to Alex’s point, I think some people look at this and they say, ‘Well, we don’t know that lack of transparency is by design on the part of this administration.’”

So far, we know that Ozturk co-wrote an op-ed that repeated blood libel claims of genocide against Israel and demanded Tufts University divest from Israel. We also know Khalil’s group doesn’t believe Israel has a right to exist, which, according to Stengel’s old boss, is anti-Semitic. If the U.S. would not deliberately welcome anti-Semites when they apply for a visa, why must we continue to allow their presence after they have revealed themselves?

As it was, Menendez continued, “And I want people to understand they are testing these legal theories on immigrants with the possibility and potential of expanding it, once they know that they actually can get away with it.”

If Wagner played the fascism card, Stengel played the communism card, “Yes, it’s a process of intimidation. It’s a process of testing the system. I mean, I’m old enough to remember the Cold War. And what we used to watch was, you know, people being arrested without a warrant by people with masks over their head in countries behind the Iron Curtain. And that’s how we distinguished ourselves from those nations. We didn’t do that.”

Stengel also insisted, “We live by the rule of law and due process, and what these are all testing is the rule of law, is due process, is the 14th amendment, and look, I think laws should be tested, but not by arresting innocent people on the street so that that’s what America sees, what their government is doing. That’s shameful.”

Alternatively, being able to study in the United States is a privilege, and the people fortunate enough to have that opportunity should be thankful to the United States, not trash us and our allies as the reason why there is no peace on Earth while engaging in textbook anti-Semitism.

Here is a transcript for the March 27 show:

MSNBC Deadline: White House

3/27/2025

5:49 PM ET

ALEX WAGNER: Yeah, I actually asked a number of them. I said, “are you guys afraid?” And they said, well, again, they said, “we’re citizens. We were born here and we’re tenured. And until they come for us, we’re going to keep talking.”

But again, like, you know, the Trump Administration, as much buffoonery as has gone on, has been strategic and targeted, targeting parts of our society that are either off limits or marginalized or not discussed that much, whether it’s brown people and people who don’t have papers, whether it’s federal workers who are part of this vast bureaucracy and therefore faceless, whether it’s elite academics in Ivy League institutions, they don’t—the bet is that the American public is not keyed in and is not particularly empathetic to those struggles. But the reality is, as we’ve seen in dictatorships and fascist regimes across the world, first they come for one group, then they come for another. None of this ends at Columbia, right?

ALICIA MENENDEZ: None of it ends at Columbia. I think, Rick, about watching the video that we’ve now all seen of Rumeysa Ozturk, sort of being confronted on the street, the fact that there is not a stated crime, the fact that there is not a stated crime in the case of Mahmoud Khalil, like, I think to Alex’s point, I think some people look at this and they say, “Well, we don’t know that lack of transparency is by design on the part of this administration.”

And I want people to understand they are testing these legal theories on immigrants with the possibility and potential of expanding it, once they know that they actually can get away with it.

RICK STENGEL: Yes, it’s a process of intimidation. It’s a process of testing the system. I mean, I’m old enough to remember the Cold War. And what we used to watch was, you know, people being arrested without a warrant by people with masks over their head in countries behind the Iron Curtain. And that’s how we distinguished ourselves from those nations. We didn’t do that.

We live by the rule of law and due process, and what these are all testing is the rule of law, is due process, is the 14th amendment, and look, I think laws should be tested, but not by arresting innocent people on the street so that that’s what America sees, what their government is doing. That’s shameful.

With Washington Post associate editor Jonathan Capehart away, his former colleague Ruth Marcus stepped up to pinch-hit for him on Friday’s edition of PBS News Hour. At the end of the discussion with New York Times columnist David Brooks, Marcus claimed the reason she left the Post is because owner Jeff Bezos is trying “to limit dissent” at the paper despite dissent being alive and well at the Post.

Host Geoff Bennett asked, “Lastly, Ruth, it’s great to have you here. After an impressive and impactful career at the Washington Post, you decided to step down. Help us understand why.”

 

 

After beginning by thanking News Hour for having her on “even though I’m kind of professionally unhoused for the moment,” Marcus claimed, “I had to resign because I could no longer tell my readers that I was able to write what I wanted about the things that I thought were most important to say.”

She recalled how “back in October, when Jeff Bezos, the owner of The Washington Post, decided not to run the already drafted endorsement of Kamala Harris and not to run presidential endorsements later, I disagreed with that decision and I wrote a column expressing my, I thought, polite disagreement with that decision. And it ran.”

Marcus also recalled a previous News Hour episode, “When Jeff Bezos decided that he was going to shift that — the opinion section more broadly in a way to limit dissent, as David pointed out on this segment when Jonathan was here, I also wrote a column. And that column, I had to write it because it was what I believed. I had written the previous column. That column didn’t run. And when that column didn’t run, I knew that my time at the Post had come to an end because I could no longer write what I wanted to say.”

It depends on what Marcus means by “dissent.” There are plenty of op-eds at the Washington Post that are critical of President Donald Trump and his administration, so Marcus can’t say Bezos has turned the paper into the MAGA Post. Bezos’s commitment to “personal liberties” would seem to silence conservatives more than liberals like Marcus or libertarians. As for Bezos’s devotion to “free markets,” Marcus eventually published that column in the New Yorker and wondered what he meant by that. She asked if that would include the forbidding of support for “reasonable regulation,” but based off a recent Post editorial about Trump’s environmental deregulation, the answer is no. Ultimately, the Post is still mostly the same liberal outlet it has always been; Marcus is just upset they couldn’t endorse Harris because she thinks the Post actually influences people.

Sign the petition to help us defund another MSNBC in PBS and NPR at defundpbsnpr.org.

Here is a transcript for the March 28 show:

PBS News Hour

3/28/2025

7:44 PM ET

GEOFF BENNETT: Lastly, Ruth, it’s great to have you here. After an impressive and impactful career at the Washington Post, you decided to step down. Help us understand why.

RUTH MARCUS: Well, first, I want to say that I’m really grateful to be here at the News Hour. And the reason is, after I decided to resign after 40 days, six months, and six days, but who’s counting?

BENNETT: Forty years.

DAVID BROOKS: Forty years.

MARCUS: Forty years. Sorry, 40 years, six — yes, thank you.

I had, among other comments, a lot of people from the — who are viewers of the News Hour, saying, we hope we will see you there. So I’m very grateful that you’re having me, even though I’m kind of professionally unhoused for the moment.

I decided to — I had to resign because I could no longer tell my readers that I was able to write what I wanted about the things that I thought were most important to say.

And what happened was, back in October, when Jeff Bezos, the owner of The Washington Post, decided not to run the already drafted endorsement of Kamala Harris and not to run presidential endorsements later, I disagreed with that decision and I wrote a column expressing my, I thought, polite disagreement with that decision. And it ran.

When Jeff Bezos decided that he was going to shift that — the opinion section more broadly in a way to limit dissent, as David pointed out on this segment when Jonathan was here, I also wrote a column. And that column, I had to write it because it was what I believed. I had written the previous column. That column didn’t run.

And when that column didn’t run, I knew that my time at the Post had come to an end because I could no longer write what I wanted to say.

BENNETT: Well, we are glad to have you here.

MARCUS: Thank you.

After successfully winning a consequential defamation suit against CNN in January, Navy veteran Zachary Young has media-industry publication Puck News in his sights. According to a complaint filed in Bay County, Florida’s 14th Judicial Circuit on Friday, and exclusively obtained by NewsBusters, Young accused left-leaning Puck News, via the reporting of “entertainment law expert” Eriq Gardner, of choosing to “repeat and spread the false claims of CNN.”

The alleged defamation stemmed from Gardner’s December 10, 2024 article with Young accusing Puck of uncritically parroting CNN’s defamatory claims as fact (emphasis added to highlight):

Why the deep dive into CNN’s finances? It goes back to a November 11, 2021, segment on The Lead With Jake Tapper, when reporter Alex Marquardt detailed how, following President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan and the collapse of the government, panicked locals turned to private contractors to help them flee the country. One such contractor was Zachary Young, a Navy veteran whose firm was charging people hefty fees—sometimes tens of thousands of dollars—to escape the Taliban.

The complaint also argued Gardner seemingly tried to downplay the merits of Young case by suggesting there were political forces at work behind the scenes and ignoring CNN’s factual inaccuracies:

On December 10, 2024, Puck wrote that Mr. Young’s lawsuit against CNN “may go places” because of “Ron DeSantis appointees reshaping Florida’s appellate courts, Trump allies positioned at the federal level, and a legal climate growing less hospitable to speech deemed harmful to the national interest.” (emphasis added). The December Article omits CNN’s factual inaccuracies and the devastating internal CNN emails revealed in discovery, to imply that Mr. Young’s claims were frivolous and that he was guilty of what CNN had accused him.

Young scored pre-trial wins on many of the facts of the case days before Gardner published his offending article. As NewsBusters reported on December 8, Judge William Henry ordered: “[I]mportant part of the Court’s prior ruling was that Young did not do anything criminal or illegal.”

Even after a jury of CNN and Young’s peers found the former liable for malicious defamation and awarded Young $5 million (with an undisclosed settlement on punitive damages), the complaint argued Gardner insisted Young’s case didn’t have merit and he only won because of the venue.

According to Gardner: “Late Friday, after a weeklong trial, CNN settled with Zachary Young, the Navy veteran spotlighted in a 2021 exposé on bad actors profiting from aiding Afghans escaping the Taliban… CNN’s real problem was geographical: the trial was set in Panama City, one of Florida’s deepest-red outposts.”

He also suggested the case was just another of instance of “Republican-appointed judges…greenlighting a surge of defamation cases.” “This is intended to convey that Mr. Young’s suit is frivolous or meritless, advanced because of political allies and sympathetic Republican judges. The entire gist of the article is that these types of suits are not credible and are only gaining traction due to politics,” Young said via the complaint.

“Ignoring publicly available and credible evidence while still accepting CNN’s characterization of Mr. Young is an example of deliberately avoiding the truth,” the complaint added. “Puck and Gardner showed willful blindness to that truth by attempting to revive CNN’s already discredited narrative.”

The complain also accused Puck and Gardner of being “a mouthpiece for CNN,” citing how they were apparently privy to “CNN’s trial strategy” well before the trial started:

This information was not yet public knowledge, as the trial had not begun. Gardner had no way of knowing these facts unless he gathered them directly from CNN. And while Gardner was talking to CNN, he never once reached out to Mr. Young.

Gardner also omitted the publicly available excerpts of CNN’s internal messages that showed their actual and expressed malice against Young.

In the filing’s claims for relief, it contends Puck News was liable for defamation per se, defamation by implication, and trade libel. Further, Young “demands a trial by jury on all issues so triable.”

NewsNation’s Chris Cuomo had had “enough” with the media’s obsession with the non-scandal of the Trump Cabinet Signal chat. Declaring “this is not a major scandal,” Cuomo knocked both sides for how they were and were not addressing it. He even called out the media for coveting “scalps” they would not collect from reporting on it.

“I’ve got one word for the Signal saga: enough,” Cuomo exclaimed at the top of the show. “We all get what this is and what this is not. I say ENOUGH because we don’t need to go through the same cycle of bologna that we did in the first administration.”

Cuomo huffed that “Trump won’t own it,” despite him not being involved at all with the Signal chat.

He broke the bad news to Trump’s detractors in the “media and the left” that their hyperventilating wouldn’t result in an apology nor the “scalps” their craved, and the best they’d get was some of those involved getting sent to the ends of globe for a little bit:

We get it. Trump won’t own it. There will be no apology. Media and the left you want scalps, you’re not getting them from this. Hegseth is getting sent to Guam, Waltz is going to Greenland, and that is as close to banished either will be for now.

 

 

He also spelled out that the lesson was learned and that administration officials were admitting it behind the scenes:

There is no mystery here. The Trump folks know they messed up. They’re saying it on camera. They’re certainly saying it on background. But they also would rather be in this fight, then not. You’ve got to remember that. If they’re fighting against how the left is against them and the media and this and there’s a hoax and that; they do that all day rather than have to deal with several other fronts that I am going to talk about tonight. So, let’s just be straight about it.

The opening monologue then pivoted to defending Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg for how he handled the situation and scoffed at those who said he should done something else besides report on it (Click “expand”):

The reporters, not the problem. We get the idea. ‘He’s a lefty, his wife’s a lefties, he’s not to be believed.’ You don’t say that about the Fox folk right? They should all be part of the administration. But this guy, he shouldn’t be believed by MAGA.

Oh, and he should have alerted the Trump team right away and taken himself off the thread. You show me a reporter who says that’s what they would have done and I’ll show you a liar, okay?

Now, tell me this if Goldberg’s such a hater, why did he alert Waltz at all? Think about it. Is that what a hater would do?

“Bottom line. The Trumpers were clearly sharing classified information. It was wrong the way that they communicated it on Signal and they included the reporter. Not a hoax. He did nothing wrong,” Cuomo argued.

Cuomo continued his rant by taking swings at “the non-Trump media” for ignoring how “the operation they were talking about was a success.” “No one was hurt by this comms error –and it was an error, but nobody got hurt because of it. So, this is not a major scandal,” he declared.

“Now, if they do it again, if it compromise information, if it hurts people because that information gets out, then there’s going to be an axe involved,” he added. “But for right now, enough.”

The transcript is below. Click “expand” to read:

NewsNation’s Cuomo
March 27, 2025
8:00:28 p.m. Eastern

CHRIS CUOMO: I’ve got one word for the Signal saga: enough! We all get what this is and what this is not. I say ENOUGH because we don’t need to go through the same cycle of bologna that we did in the first administration.

We get it. Trump won’t own it. There will be no apology. Media and the left you want scalps, you’re not getting them from this. Hegseth is getting sent to Guam, Waltz is going to Greenland, and that is as close to banished either will be for now.

There is no mystery here. The Trump folks know they messed up. They’re saying it on camera. They’re certainly saying it on background. But they also would rather be in this fight, then not. You’ve got to remember that. If they’re fighting against how the left is against them and the media and this and there’s a hoax and that; they do that all day rather than have to deal with several other fronts that I am going to talk about tonight. So, let’s just be straight about it.

The reporters, not the problem. We get the idea. ‘He’s a lefty, his wife’s a lefties, he’s not to be believed.’ You don’t say that about the Fox folk right? They should all be part of the administration. But this guy, he shouldn’t be believed by MAGA.

Oh, and he should have alerted the Trump team right away and taken himself off the thread. You show me a reporter who says that’s what they would have done and I’ll show you a liar, okay?

Now, tell me this if Goldberg’s such a hater, why did he alert Waltz at all? Think about it. Is that what a hater would do?

Bottom line. The Trumpers were clearly sharing classified information. It was wrong the way that they communicated it on Signal and they included the reporter. Not a hoax. He did nothing wrong.

And yes, there’s another aspect that the non-Trump media ignores: the operation they were talking about was a success. The Houthis suck and were coming for us. No one was hurt by this comms error –and it was an error, but nobody got hurt because of it. So, this is not a major scandal.

Now, if they do it again, if it compromise information, if it hurts people because that information gets out, then there’s going to be an axe involved. But for right now, enough.

Enough with deceiving Congress with the BS ‘I don’t recalls. I don’t recalls. I don’t recalls.’ I thought that this – you guys were going to be different, though you’re going to be better than the “establishment” than the “elite” and their “games” [uses air quotes]. You do the same things that you say you were against! And from Congress, of course, you get the gotcha questions. That’s all it’s about. They can’t get to the bottom of anything.

And enough with the Trump triple step: lie, deny, defy. We lived it again and again during the first term. New players, same game plan on display.

(…)