Tag: Journalism

Buying the News: Documenting the Takeover of Local Journalism by Leftwing Donors

RealClearWire
"The Chronicle" Newsroom, 2007

American journalism has experienced a spectacular collapse in the last 25 years – daily newspaper circulation has declined from over 60 million subscribers to just over 20 million. And the trend is accelerating: According to the Pew Research Organization, the average monthly number of unique visitors to the websites of the country’s top 50 newspapers plummeted 20 percent in one year from 2021 to 2022.

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Progressive Knight Foundation Training Journalists on How to Write About Likely 2024 Election Lawsuits

Rachel Alexander
Heather Gerkin, Bob Bauer, Ben Ginsberg

The progressive Knight Foundation (KF) is providing training to journalists ahead of the 2024 general election on election related legal issues. KF announced in July that the organization would fund election news coverage “primarily in swing states.” It will also provide journalists with “explainers and training …from The Associated Press.”

“One local news organization in each swing state will also receive a grant to serve as an ‘anchor,’ bolstering the distribution of election-related coverage with editorial partners in their state.” So far, most of KF’s grants in Arizona have gone to Arizona State University.

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Minnesota State Rep. Calls Gov. Walz a ‘Masterful Liar’ After Another Officer is Murdered in Minnesota

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Tim Walz and Walter Hudson

Walter Hudson, a Republican Minnesota state representative from Albertville, joined Liz Collin on her podcast to speak out on failed leadership and how “lies about public safety” have continued to put police officers in danger.

Last week, Minneapolis Police Officer Jamal Mitchell became the fifth first responder in Minnesota to be murdered in just a little over a year — the 10th in this region.

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Commentary: Technology Changes and Bipartisanship are Causing Journalism’s Woes

RealClearWire
Journalists Press

by Carl M. Cannon   For the American media, 2024 has been a fiasco. And it’s still only February. Nine days into the new year, highly respected Los Angeles Times editor Kevin Merida resigned rather than tolerate another round of layoffs and the meddlesome ways of a billionaire publisher and his progressive political activist daughter. Two weeks later, California’s largest newspaper announced it was shedding 20% of its staff, including half of its Washington bureau. Sports Illustrated was still reeling from an ethical lapse that cost its CEO his job (the magazine used AI to generate news stories under fake bylines) when management told the staff in a seven-minute Jan. 19 Zoom call of mass layoffs. Many SI journalists were terminated that day via email. Earlier that week, new Baltimore Sun owner David D. Smith met with the apprehensive staff of his new acquisition. The meeting didn’t go well. Smith, a television executive, told the reporters and editors at the venerable 187-year-old daily that he hadn’t read the paper in years. That didn’t stop him from insulting the quality of their journalism. Nor did Smith disavow his previous critique of U.S. print journalism as being “so left-wing as to be meaningless dribble.” Perceived bias…

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Bill Ackman on Washington Post Hit Piece: ‘The Public Has Been Again Misled’

Michael Patrick Leahy

Bill Ackman, the highly successful hedge fund manager and Harvard graduate whose criticism of Claudine Gay’s history of plagiarism led to her resignation as President of Harvard University, published a lengthy tweet on his X account Sunday evening responding to an article about him published by The Washington Post earlier in the day. Here is that post in its entirety:

I am sure all of us have had the experience of reading a story about a subject you know well and finding it replete with inaccuracies and falsehoods. One then turns the page and reads an article about a subject one knows less well and makes the mistake of believing that this other story is accurate. I am guilty of this sin. I am sadly repeatedly reminded to mistrust what I read in the media, and I am not alone. Destruction of confidence in our media is contributing to societal breakdown, and that is a very unfortunate state of affairs.

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Associated Press Paid by Left-Wing Groups to Spin Global Warming Coverage

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The widely-read Associated Press (AP) has received numerous donations from far-left groups, leading to the outlet’s reporting on so-called “global warming” from a clearly left-wing slant akin to the language used by such groups.

As reported by the Washington Free Beacon, the AP received $300,000 in 2022 from the Denmark-based KR Foundation, a nonprofit group which claims to be focused on the “rapid phase-out of fossil fuels,” as well as transforming journalists into “community activists for climate change.” KR further intends to force “U.S. banks out of fossil fuels,” and shut down “some existing [oil and gas] infrastructure.”

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MTSU Teaches ‘Social Justice Journalism’ Track

Matthew Giffin
MTSU

Middle Tennessee State University offers a “Social Justice Journalism” track of study for undergraduate students.

The track is called the Social Justice Journalism concentration, which students can declare if they are pursuing a major in journalism. A concentration is a specialized track of study an undergraduate student can pursue within their declared major, according to Academic Info.

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Commentary: Fentanyl Letters Show How Partisan Journalists Operate

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The true danger to American democracy comes from the radical left. Just don’t expect to hear it from the mainstream media.

On Nov. 9, Americans learned that law enforcement intercepted a handful of fentanyl-laced letters intended for election offices across at least five states, including Georgia’s Fulton County. While alarming, fentanyl isn’t like anthrax – briefly touching it isn’t deadly. But ingesting it is – just ask the families of the 74,000 Americans who died from fentanyl in 2022 alone, much of it produced in China and smuggled in through President Biden’s wide-open southern border.

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MTSU Student Newspaper’s Former Editor Says Faculty Adviser Was ‘In the Room’ When Editorial Board Drafted its Apology Letter to Placate ‘Free Palestine Crowd’

M.D. Kittle

The editorial board for the Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU) student newspaper issued a statement Wednesday in defense of the newspaper’s faculty adviser following the publication’s apology for running a story on an MTSU student worried about his friends in Israel.

But Matthew Giffin, the former editor-in-chief of Sidelines who wrote the profile piece, told The Tennessee Star that associate professor Stephen Leon Alligood was “in the room” when the editor’s note was crafted.

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Kari Lake Blasts Katie Hobbs and Fake News Media for Defamatory Statements Following Burglary

Neil Jones

PHOENIX, Arizona – Arizona’s Republican gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake spoke to a crowd of journalists following what she called “defamatory” statements attacking her for a burglary that occurred at her Democrat rival Katie Hobbs’s Phoenix campaign office.

“Katie Hobbs, sure enough, is a coward. She refuses to debate. She disrespects the people of this state by refusing to debate. She’s willing to make up complete, bogus stories. She knew I had nothing to do with that break-in, and yet she perpetuated that lie. You guys [the media] all fell for it, and she knew you’d fall for it,” Lake said.

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Fed-Backed Censorship Machine Targeted 20 News Sites: Report

Just the News

The private consortium that reported election “misinformation” to tech platforms during the 2020 election season, in “consultation” with federal agencies, targeted several news organizations in its dragnet.

Websites for Just the News, New York Post, Fox News, Washington Examiner, Washington Times, Epoch Times and Breitbart were identified among the 20 “most prominent domains across election integrity incidents” that were cited in tweets flagged by the Election Integrity Partnership and its collaborators.

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Academic Journal Publishes Hoax on Conservative Takeover of Higher Ed

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Man speaking in front of crowd

A prestigious academic journal has egg on its face for publishing a hoax paper that claimed to find widespread concerns about “undue” conservative influence in higher education.

“Right-wing money strongly appears to induce faculty and administrators … to believe that they are pressured to hire and promote people they regard as inferior candidates, to promote ideas they regard as poor, and to suppress people and ideas they regard as superior,” according to the abstract in Higher Education Quarterly.

Peer reviewers failed to perform basic due diligence on the paper submitted in April and approved in October, neglecting, for example, to verify that authors “Sage Owens” and “Kal Alvers-Lynde III” were UCLA professors as they claimed. Owens even used an encrypted email service for correspondence with the journal.

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Commentary: Newsletter Peddlers Offended by Real Journalism Quit

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Stephen Hayes and Jonah Goldberg

An 82-second movie trailer was supposedly all it took for two of the most perpetually outraged—and chronically wrong—political pundits to quit their gigs at Fox News.

“The trailer for Tucker Carlson’s special about the Jan. 6 mob at the Capitol landed online on Oct. 27, and that night Jonah Goldberg sent a text to his business partner, Stephen Hayes: ‘I’m tempted just to quit Fox over this,’” New York Times media columnist Ben Smith revealed in an unnecessarily lengthy article on November 21 to explain why the pair resigned before they were let go by the network, as a Fox executive later confirmed to the Washington Post. “‘I’m game,’ Mr. Hayes replied. ‘Totally outrageous. It will lead to violence. Not sure how we can stay.’”

Carlson’s documentary, “Patriot Purge,” aired in three separate segments on the network’s streaming service, Fox Nation, a few days later. It’s unclear whether Goldberg or Hayes watched the film in its entirety but additional commentary—given to Smith over Zoom while “clad in athleisure,” a word intended to lend muscularity to two of the laziest commentators in the business—suggests that neither did.

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MSNBC Article Suggests Republicans Are Worse Than Nazis

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Group of people at a Trump rally, man in a "Keep America Great" hat

A Tuesday article in MSNBC suggested that Republicans’ use of the phrase “Let’s go Brandon” is worse than the Nazi ‘Sieg Heil’ salute.

The author noted a recent comparison of “Let’s go Brandon” to the Nazi salute. “To this I say: Calm the hell down; that’s an insult to Nazis. And furthermore, Biden doesn’t have the gall to steamroll these would-be Nazis like Joseph Stalin’s army did in Berlin.”

The article also called “Let’s go Brandon” a “significant downgrade from the glory days of the far right,” and said the phrase is “inoffensive and very vanilla” when compared to “Lock her up” and “Build the wall.”

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Trump Demands New York Times, Washington Post Be Stripped of Pulitzers for Russia Reporting

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Donald Trump

Former President Donald Trump asked the Pulitzer Prize committee on Sunday to strip awards to The Washington Post and The New York Times, arguing their award-winning stories in 2016 and 2017 alleging Russia collusion lacked “any credible evidence “

The newspapers’ reporting was “based on the false reporting of a non-existent link between the Kremlin and the Trump Campaign. The coverage was no more than a politically motivated farce,” Trump wrote in a letter to interim Pulitzer administrator Bud Kliment.

Trump noted that multiple investigations have dismissed any notion of collusion between his campaign and the Kremlin and that a recent indictment by Special Prosecutor John Durham traced some of the key allegations to people tied to Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

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Former New York Times Journalist Alex Berenson Permanently Suspended by Twitter

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Alex Berenson

Twitter has permanently banned Alex Berenson, a former New York Times journalist who has become a major critic of Big Tech censorship and coronavirus lockdowns and mandates.

Responding to an inquiry from Fox News, where Berenson has been a frequent guest during the pandemic, a spokesperson for Twitter replied that “The account you referenced has been permanently suspended for repeated violations of our COVID-19 misinformation rules.”

Berenson responded on his Substack page, where he posted a message titled “Goodbye Twitter.”

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University of North Carolina’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media Dean Resigns Post after Nikole Hannah-Jones Controversy

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Susan King of UNC

Susan King is stepping down as dean of the University of North Carolina’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media. 

The university announced the decision yesterday. 

The Hussman School faced backlash from progressives after it apparently backed off from a plan to give Hannah-Jones tenure for her work as the Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism. 

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Arizona’s U.S. Senator Mark Kelly Proposes Legislation to Fund Local Mainstream Media

Rachel Alexander

Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) joined U.S. Sens. Maria Cantwell (D-WA) and Ron Wyden (D-OR) to co-sponsor legislation that indirectly funds local media. The Local Journalism Sustainability Act establishes tax credits that give consumers a huge deduction on media subscriptions, subsidizes journalists’ salaries, and funds news outlets by paying for businesses to advertise.

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Commentary: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Journalism Professors Protest ‘Objectivity’ in News Reporting

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Carroll Hall UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media

Journalism professors at UNC Chapel Hill are protesting a “core values” statement that upholds objectivity as a key tenet of news reporting.

Faculty members of UNC’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media converged last week to bemoan a statement of values that’s etched in granite and is found in the lobby of their school.

The core values statement, installed two years ago, touts objectivity, impartiality, integrity and truth-seeking, and after their kvetching session that statement was reportedly scrapped from the school’s website, the News & Observer reports.

In 2019, Walter Hussman, a UNC alumnus and owner of a media conglomerate of newspapers and other media outlets, donated $25 million to the UNC journalism school. Part of the donation contract installed those values into the school’s wall and mission, according to UNC’s website.

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Michigan Undercounted Nursing Home COVID-19 Deaths, Reporter Says

The Center Square
Staff member at nursing home showing smartphone to elderly woman

ulitzer Prize-winning journalist Charlie LeDuff says Michigan has undercounted COVID-19 nursing home deaths.

The accusation follows a settlement between the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (MDHHS) and LeDuff with legal services provided by the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. LeDuff and the MCPP sued the government when it failed to provide public records as required by law.

“This data is an essential part of accurately understanding the effects of this pandemic and the public policy implemented in response,” Steve Delie, an attorney and the Mackinac Center’s FOIA expert, said in a May 21 statement. “It also leaves open the possibility that the state is undercounting the number of deaths of those in nursing homes.”

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Commentary: Journalists Become Cynical, But Not Skeptical

RealClearWire
Farm grown fruit for sale

Journalists and scientists have more in common than you’d think—at least they should. Scientists seek to understand and explain how the natural world works. They observe, ask questions, and approach new information with skepticism as they work through a careful process to determine what is true.

Journalists, in theory, use the same curiosity and rigor to provide the information we need to make good decisions in our lives. According to the Society of Professional Journalists, a core tenet of journalism is to “seek truth and report it.” In both worlds, negligence begins where skepticism ends, creating dangerous opportunities for peddlers of misinformation.

The Environmental Working Group’s (EWG) annual “Dirty Dozen” list is a perfect marriage of scientific and journalistic negligence. Each year, the EWG, a controversial, agenda-driven organic activist group, purports to rank the top 12 fruits and vegetables most contaminated with pesticides. And each year, the media takes the bait without fail, and the coverage reads like sponsored content.

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Commentary: Fear of a 2016 Repeat Inspires Anti-Trump Hysteria

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Over the past four years, American news organizations have not merely shredded their own credibility, but have piled those tattered shreds into a heap, poured gasoline onto the pile, and incinerated it. Anyone who still believes what they see on CNN or read in the New York Times is in the throes of a delusion. As much as we might wish to laugh at the plight of the media, now so obviously lost in the helpless hysteria of Trump Derangement Syndrome, we are not better off as a nation as a result of the catastrophe that has befallen American journalism.

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Arizona State University Journalism School Removes People, News Items Decried as too Pro-Police

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In the last four months the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University has repeatedly removed pro-police related items after students and activists cried foul.

In June, the school rescinded a job offer to the new dean of its journalism school, Sonya Forte Duhé, after students accused her of past microaggressions and other insensitive comments. Mostly notably, Duhé had recently tweeted support for “good police officers who keep us safe.”

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Former Tennessean Editor Clint Brewer Discusses Facebook Giving Grants to News Organizations

Julie Carr

Former journalist and current public affairs strategist Clint Brewer joined The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – Friday morning on the newsmakers line.

During the second hour, Brewer weighed in on Facebook’s recent grants to local and national organizations which ironically were all left-leaning. He questioned why any self-respecting news outlet would want to take a grant when they should be figuring out ways to increase their business on their own adding that this would prevent them from reporting on Facebook objectively.

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Commentary: Rumor and Bias, Inaccuracy and Ignorance Contribute to the Low State of Journalism

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by Jeff Minick   William Tecumseh Sherman, a Civil War general not known for his delicacy of speech, once said, “If I had my choice, I would kill every reporter in the world, but I am sure we would be getting reports from Hell before breakfast.” Like many people today, Sherman detested reporters and journalists. On another occasion, he stated: “I hate newspapermen. They come into camp and pick up their camp rumors and print them as facts. I regard them as spies, which, in truth, they are.” Regardless of political persuasion, Americans have lost faith in today’s mainstream news media. Reporting on a 2018 poll inquiring about trust in major institutions, the Columbia Journalism Review found print and television news at rock-bottom, exceeded in the matter of distrust only by Congress. When asked why they distrusted the media, about 45 percent of responders cited factors such as bias, inaccuracy, and “fake news.” The results of the Mueller investigation have brought certain television and print outlets to new lows. Some have lost viewers or readers, while others, accused of Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS), have faced a barrage of criticism for their bias and for the amount of time they gave…

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Commentary: Media Needs to Stop Hiring Young Know-Nothings

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by Julie Kelly   The American news media is quick to blame President Trump for their current woes, but they have no one to blame but themselves. A revealing poll issued Tuesday shows how much the public’s trust in the news media has tanked over the past ten years: Nearly 70 percent of Americans and 95 percent of conservatives have lost faith in the media since 2008. This year’s collective and shameful performance by the Fourth Estate will erode that trust even more. We have endured the silent acquiescence of the press as a vulgar comedian insulted the president’s press secretary; public tantrums by the White House press corps; numerous corrections to articles and cable news segments that oddly always must walk back an anti-Trump angle; the revelation of unethical and possibly illegal quid pro quo between reporters and federal law enforcement officials; the publication of a petulant opinion piece authored by an unnamed Trump official clearly miffed that Trump and not he is president; and the ongoing insane, unjustified obsession with the bogus Trump-Russia collusion plotline. It’s hard to imagine how the press could restore its lost credibility any time soon. One way to clean house would be to stop populating the newsrooms and green rooms of the top media outlets in the country with young,…

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Do As We Say, Not as We Do: MSM Conveniently Reprimands Republicans, Not Democrats on First Amendment Reporting

Julie Carr
Steve Gill

During Friday’s broadcast of The Gill Report – live on WETR 92.3 FM in Knoxville – conservative political commentator and Tennessee Star Political Editor Steve Gill was humored by the one-sided and propaganda-driven reporting by the ‘fake news media,’ and it’s ability to conveniently forget the actions of the lefts attempt to conveniently silence it’s reporters… when it suits their agenda. Gill said: You know just [Thursday], three hundred and fifty newspapers around the country took President Trump to task for supposedly not supporting the first amendment because he’s been critical of the fake news media. Now despite the fact that there’s plenty of evidence that the coordinated attacks on President Trump through all the forms of media but most notably MSNBC, CNBC, and CNN are provably false so many times and the agenda, the propaganda, focus of the media in attacking Trump was really proved yesterday when again, these three hundred and fifty papers coordinated to attack the President, on a false basis. He’s not against the first amendment simply because he highlights the fact that the media is not embracing their journalistic responsibilities. And keep in mind that not so long ago when President Trump kicked CNN reporter,…

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