Media Misinformation

Kill the Media, Hide the News

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Article in Daily Kos by Thom Hartmann

Headline:  “Are Americans Being Conditioned by Our Media to Become ‘Good Germans’?”

“. . .Nazi loyalists and party-friendly oligarchs took over the press outlets that remained in a massive media consolidation project, ensuring that every headline and every radio news report served the regime much like Fox ‘News’ and rightwing hate-radio/podcasts do today for Trump. . .”

“In both 1940s Germany and today’s America, the effect is similar: the public is shielded from the human scale of state-led actions against targeted groups, making it easier for those policies to continue without mass pushback. . .”

Read the full article at:

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/8/15/2338560/-Are-Americans-Being-Conditioned-by-Our-Media-to-Become-Good-Germans?

Media Evolution or Revolution?

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Article in The Atlantic by Jessica Yellin, 8/13/25

Headline:  “The Awkward Adolescence of a Media Revolution”

Subhead:  “Truth is still alive on social media—but it’s not easy enough to find”

“There’s a quiet revolution in how millions of Americans decide what’s real. . .The Reuters Institute reports that this year, for the first time, more Americans will get their news from social and video platforms—including Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, and X—than from traditional outlets. . .”

“For anyone who cares about credible information, this is a potentially terrifying prospect. Social media rewards virality, not veracity. . .”

Read the full article at:

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/08/awkward-adolescence-media-revolution/683863/

Confusion by D.C. Federal Prosecutor?

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Article in Mediaite by Staff, 8/12/25

Headline:  “DC Reporter Confronts Jeanine Pirro on Trump Pardoning Cop-Beaters: ‘How Is This Not a Mixed Message?’ “

“U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro dismissed criticism from police of President Donald Trump’s January 6 pardons during an interview with Fox 5 reporter Jillian Smith about the administration’s decision to send the National Guard into Washington, D.C. to crack down on crime.

Smith pressed Pirro on the contradiction between the president’s pro-police messaging now and his sweeping pardons of rioters who assaulted cops during the January 6 Capitol attack. . .”

Read the full article at:

https://www.mediaite.com/crime/dc-reporter-confronts-jeanine-pirro-on-trump-pardoning-cop-beaters-how-is-this-not-a-mixed-message/

Slime the Airwaves?

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Article in Media Matters by John Knefel, 8/8/25

Headline:  “This segment exemplifies how Fox feeds garbage anti-immigrant slop to its audience

Subhead:  “A recent appearance by Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin illustrates how the network pushes bad “worst of the worst” data”

Right-wing media have worked symbiotically with President Donald Trump’s administration to manufacture false media narratives of immigrant criminality and to justify subsequent crackdowns on those communities.  . .”

Read the full article at:

https://www.mediamatters.org/immigration/segment-exemplifies-how-fox-feeds-garbage-anti-immigrant-slop-its-audience

Holy Rt. Wing Media!

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Article in Media Matters by John Knefel, 8/7/25

Headline:  “Inside the alliance between right-wing media and Trump ‘Border Czar’ Tom Homan”

Subhead:  “As the public recoils from ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ and Trump’s mass deportation agenda, conservative outlets work overtime to help Homan mislead their audiences”

“When Harris Faulkner concluded a recent interview with Tom Homan — President Donald Trump’s ‘border czar’ tasked with carrying out the administration’s mass deportation operations — she did so with a benediction.

“ ‘God bless you, Tom Homan, for keeping us safe,’ the Fox News anchor said solemnly.

Fox host Jesse Watters took a different, more threatening approach when he demanded that Rep. Delia Ramirez (D-IL), who is Guatemalan American, ‘acknowledge’ that ‘no other country is as great as the United States,’ and ‘if she doesn’t, I’m calling Homan — she’s going home.’

The devotion that Faulkner and Watters show to Homan is hardly unique in right-wing media. More than any other figure in Trump’s inner circle save perhaps deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, Homan is the person conservative outlets turn to when they need someone in Trump-world to champion the administration’s increasingly unpopular immigration policies. . .”

Read t he full article at:

https://www.mediamatters.org/immigration/inside-alliance-between-right-wing-media-and-trump-border-czar-tom-homan

Legacy Media Missing the Story?

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Article in The New Republic by Perry Bacon, 8/7/25

Headline:  “The Media Keeps Ignoring the Truth About American Politics”

Subhead:  “As the Republican Party further radicalizes, mainstream news organizations are still trying to cover politics as they always have. But alternative news sources are emerging.”

“Republicans in Texas are trying to gerrymander congressional districts to give the GOP a greater advantage in the U.S. House of Representatives, potentially even preserving the party’s control of the lower chamber in next year’s midterm elections. And yet, the mainstream media keeps missing the radicalism of the Republican Party—in part because too few reporters and editors follow news at the state level. . .”

Read the full article at:

https://newrepublic.com/article/198873/republican-extremism-media-ignoring-truth-politics

When a Reporter Becomes a Mouthpiece for a Tyrant

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Article in The Guardian by John Banville, 8/7/25

Headline:  “Interviewing Hitler by Richard Evans review – the most unethical journalist in history”

Subhead:  “George Ward Price, the Mail’s star reporter, landed a series of scoops in the 1930s. But who was he really working for?”

“. . .His greatest triumphs came in the 1930s, when he courted the Nazis zealously, in particular Hitler, who in Linz, on the evening after the German annexation of Austria, ‘greeted him with a smile. ‘Well, Ward Price,’ he said. ‘Always there!’

“Ward Price’s reporting came in for serious criticism, including from Winston Churchill, who declared on meeting him: ‘I see that you’ve been over in Germany again, shaking the bloodstained hands of your Nazi friends.’ . . .”

“Interviewing Hitler: How George Ward Price Became the World’s Most Famous Journalist by Richard Evans is published by The History Press

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/aug/07/interviewing-hitler-by-richard-evans-review-the-most-unethical-journalist-in-history

Unbalanced Fairness

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Update

Article in Columbia Journalism Review by Lisa Armstrong, 8/6/25

Headline:   “When Neutrality Is a Constraint”

Subhead:  “Journalism in the 1930s failed to communicate the danger of Hitler’s rise. Are we repeating the same mistake now?”

“I do not know what Brandenburg was like in 1940, when the smoke and smell of the first burning bodies drifted across the town. But on a blue-skied day in May 2019, as I sat outside what was once the Brandenburg State Hospital, I was struck by the sounds coming in—the shrieks and laughter of children from a nearby playground washing over the remains of a place where Nazis killed at least nine thousand people.

It was the proximity that disturbed me, the fact that ordinary people had lived so close to such evil. The question that I would continue to ask myself over the two-week trip through Germany and Poland was: Why didn’t journalists do a better job of warning people, by giving them the information they could have used to act? . . .”

Read the full article at:

https://www.cjr.org/analysis/when-neutrality-is-a-constraint.php

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Article in The New Republic by Michael Tomasky, 8/4/25

Headline:  “The Media’s Urge to Be “Fair” to Trump Is Killing the Republic”

Subhead:  “Seventy percent of Republicans understand that Trump’s tariffs will raise prices. Why is the press acting like they’re a huge success?”

“The New York Times remains, by any measure, our greatest newspaper. As much as liberals complain about the way it covers Donald Trump—which I did pretty aggressively during last year’s campaign—it still behooves us to remember that a lot of what we know about bad stuff Trump has done, we know from the Times. . .”

“However, it’s in the way the paper chooses to explain and interpret our nation’s politics that it so often falters. The excess of caution, the relentless urge to be ‘fair,’ the no-doubt painstaking search for the perfect headline word that will appear objective.… Oy, those headlines. ‘Trump, Claiming Weak Jobs Numbers Were ‘Rigged,’ Fires Labor Official.’ Really? ‘Claiming’? Without mentioning that Trump offered no evidence to support this ‘claim’?. . .”

Read the full article at:

https://newrepublic.com/article/198756/media-fair-trump-killing-republic-tariffs-economy

Constitution Not for All – Rt. Wing Media

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Article in Media Matters by Toni Lonergan, 8/5/25

Headline:  “Right-wing media’s campaign against due process for immigrants”

Subhead:  “Figures on the right falsely claimed that migrants don’t — or shouldn’t — get constitutionally protected rights”

“The Constitution guarantees due process rights for everyone in the United States, regardless of citizenship status, but as part of their ongoing effort to defend President Donald Trump’s mass deportations, right-wing media have repeatedly and wrongly insisted that immigrants are excluded from this constitutional protection.

“Some right-wing media figures have alleged only ‘nut jobs’ believe undocumented immigrants deserve due process, and some have claimed that even legal immigrants ‘have no rights at all.’ Others on the right acknowledged that migrants have rights but cheered at the prospect of taking them away, lamenting that constitutionally enshrined rights like due process and habeas corpus were slowing down mass deportations. . .”

Read the full article at:

https://www.mediamatters.org/immigration/right-wing-medias-campaign-against-due-process-immigrants