Media Misinformation

How do Media Cover Nazis?

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Article in Raw Story bu Thom Hartman, 2/23/25

Headline: “Why is the media ignoring Trumpworld’s latest shout-outs to hardcore racists”

“One of the enduring mysteries in today’s American political life is why so many Republican politicians and their friends are adopting or promoting openly Nazi symbols, iconography, and slogans.

“Is it a shout-out to the hardcore racists and haters that make up the GOP’s base, or just a performance to get enough votes to win elections? Or a proclamation that the end-goal of Republican governance is the destruction of American democracy, perhaps in deference to Vladimir Putin? How about it’s being a bizarre attempt at trolling people old or well-educated enough to remember or know what Nazism inevitably leads to?

“And why are America’s mainstream media so unwilling to even report on, much less discuss, all the Nazi and neo-Nazi references surrounding Trump and today’s captive Republicans?

“Elon Musk, Trump’s #1 campaign donor and co-president, threw two Nazi “Sieg Heil” salutes following Trump’s inauguration, causing the media to fall all over itself trying to make excuses for his behavior. Actual, declared Nazis and white supremacists were thrown into an ecstatic tizzy, however, with the Ohio Proud Boys posting the clip with the words, ‘Heil Trump!’ ”

https://article.wn.com/view/2025/02/23/Why_is_the_media_ignoring_Trumpworlds_latest_shoutouts_to_ha/

 

 

 

Attack The Press, Control The Nation

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Article in Daily Kos by Morgan Stephens, 2/21/25

Headline:  “Oh look, the White House is using social media to smear reporters”

“Donald Trump’s White House is using its state-run ‘Rapid Response 47’ account to push lies, attack reporters, and hype fake poll numbers—blurring the line between official governance and a MAGA propaganda machine.

In a post on X Friday, the ‘Rapid Response 47’ account posted a clip of White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt answering a question by NBC News Chief White House correspondent Peter Alexander on the White House north lawn.

“ ‘MUST WATCH: @PressSec smacks down Fake News loser @PeterAlexander as he tries to run cover for the WASTE, FRAUD, and ABUSE in the federal government,’ the account posted to its more than 723,00 followers.

“But Alexander asked a reasonable question, and it was far from the ‘smackdown’ the page claimed it was.

“ ‘We’re now hearing from constituents in some traditionally red districts complaining about what they say is the chainsaw approach, saying that it’s being done very sloppily, the cuts to jobs and spending. How do you respond to that criticism?’ asked Alexander.

“ ‘I love how the media takes a few critics when the overwhelming response from the American people is support for what this administration is doing,’ replied Leavitt.”

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/2/21/2305338/-Oh-look-the-White-House-is-using-social-media-to-smear-reporters?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=top_news_slot_8&pm_medium=web

Some Media Spread Lies

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Article in Mediaite by Isaac Schorr, 2/20/24

Headline:  “Conservative Media Should Tell the Unvarnished Truth About Donald Trump’s Ghastly Attacks on Ukraine”

Subhead:  “Nefarious forces are at work in the shadows.”

According to Mark Levin, there are ‘a handful of pseudo-intellectuals funded by the likes of George Soros and Charles Koch’ who are ‘adopting policies that in many ways are un-American’ and would have once made others wonder if they were working for a foreign government. . .

“On Wednesday’s edition of his radio show, Levin ably debunked a series of misleading and outright false claims about the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine. . .

“Stating the obvious, Levin observed that ‘Ukraine did not invade Russia. Russia invaded Ukraine. What were they supposed to do? Roll over and play dead?’ he asked incredulously.

“Who are these Soros-funded pseudo-intellectuals? Who are these un-American, pro-Putin knaves?

Over the last few days, Donald Trump, JD Vance, and Elon Musk have taken turns assassinating the character of Ukrainian leadership and parroting the propaganda of Russian leadership..”

https://www.mediaite.com/opinion/conservative-media-should-tell-the-unvarnished-truth-about-donald-trumps-ghastly-attacks-on-ukraine/

 

No Ranting by Miller on CNN?

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Article in Raw Story bu Jennifer Bowers Bahney, 2/20/25

Headline:  “CNN cuts off Stephen Miller as he uses ‘softball’ question to launch into anti-media rant”

“CNN’s Boris Sanchez cut away from a White House press briefing Thursday after a reporter lobbed a “softball question” to Trump aide Stephen Miller that set him up perfectly to begin bashing the ‘liberal’ media and former President Joe Biden.

“The reporter began, ‘So, you spoke about DOGE; you said roughly $50 billion is set to be cut in a year of waste, fraud and abuse by unelected bureaucrats. We’re hearing this ironic narrative from the president’s critics and the left-wing media that Elon Musk is an unelected bureaucrat, and he’s doing all this terrible stuff. Isn’t one of DOGE’s objectives to get rid of the federal bureaucracy, the deep state?’ . . .”

 

Abnormal Media Are Propaganda

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Article in The Guardian by Bernie Sanders, 2/19/25

Headline:  “Can Trumpism be defeated? Absolutely. Here’s how”

Subhead:  “What we are fighting for is not ‘utopian’ or unachievable. Trumpism can and must be defeated”

“. . . Trumpism has significant control over large parts of the media from which millions of Americans get their information. Fox and Musk’s platform X, among others, are not normal media outlets. Their basic function is not to cover the ‘news’ but to spread rightwing extremist ideology.

“Trumpism is utilizing the concept of the ‘big lie’ in a way that has never, in this country, been seen. Day after day, blatantly dishonest statements and conspiracy theories are propagated – and repeated over and over and over again.

“While Trump now ‘floods the zone’ and occupies most of the political oxygen, it is imperative that we never lose sight of the progressive vision – a nation and world based on human cooperation and compassion, not greed and a ‘survival of the fittest’ mentality.”

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/feb/19/trumpism-bernie-sanders

All News is Fake! Delete it!

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Article in Columbia Journalism Review in The Media Today by Sarah Grevy Gotfredsen, 2/13/25

Headline:  “Fighting the Great Federal Website Purge”

Subhead:  “Journalists, judges, and archivists are keeping government data online.”

“Two weeks ago, when the new administration instructed agencies to scrub content related to ‘gender ideology’ from government websites, federal workers scrambled to comply, temporarily, and in some cases permanently, taking pages offline so that they might be monitored for language related to diversity, equity, and inclusion. As reported by Popular Information this week, the National Security Agency is reportedly now executing a purge of pages that contain terms including ‘privilege’ and ‘bias’ — a dragnet that is also affecting ‘mission-related’ work, according to a source and documents. The discussion around so-called ‘banned words,’ as well as the deletion of datasets inconsistent with the administration’s ideology, has left data archivists concerned.

The news media has been busy keeping track of many of the webpages that have gone dark. At the beginning of this month, the New York Times put the number of removed pages at eight thousand; Wired is periodically scanning more than a thousand government domains for their accessibility. Such projects may prove especially useful down the line, not just to the public, but to the media industry itself . . . ”

https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/trump_administration_website_purge_court_order_cdc.php

Tech-Lords Inform Us Now

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Podcast in The Nation by Paris Marx, 2/13/25

Headline: “The Tech Oligarchy’s Campaign Against the Media”

Subhead: “On this episode of Podcast ‘Tech Won’t Save Us’, Eoin Higgins on tech billionaires’ effect on the media ecosystem.”

“On this episode of Tech Won’t Save Us, we’re joined by Eoin Higgins to discuss how tech billionaires changed the media ecosystem and made it profitable for influential voices to shift to the political right.

“Eoin Higgins is a journalist and the author of Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left.”

https://www.thenation.com/podcast/archive/the-tech-oligarchys-campaign-against-the-media/

When You Let A.I. Edit Your News . . .

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Article in Slashdot by BeauHD, 2/12/25

Headline:  “AI Summaries Turn Real News Into Nonsense, BBC Finds”

“A BBC study published yesterday  found that AI news summarization tools frequently generate inaccurate or misleading summaries, with 51% of responses containing significant issues.

“The Register reports: The research focused on OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Copilot, Google’s Gemini, and Perplexity assistants, assessing their ability to provide ‘accurate responses to questions about the news; and if their answers faithfully represented BBC news stories used as sources.’ The assistants were granted access to the BBC website for the duration of the research and asked 100 questions about the news, being prompted to draw from BBC News articles as sources where possible. . .  Overall:

– 51 percent of all AI answers to questions about the news were judged to have significant issues of some form.
– 19 percent of AI answers which cited BBC content introduced factual errors — incorrect factual statements, numbers, and dates.
– 13 percent of the quotes sourced from BBC articles were either altered from the original source or not present in the article cited.”

https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/02/12/2139233/ai-summaries-turn-real-news-into-nonsense-bbc-finds

Media Gulf

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Article in The Guardian by Anna Betts, 1/12/25

Headline:  “AP excoriates White House barring of reporters as ‘alarming precedent’ “

Subhead:  “Editor Julie Pace writes to Trump’s chief of staff about ban on its journalists after AP declines to use ‘Gulf of America’ “

“The executive editor of the Associated Press sent a letter to the White House on Wednesday criticizing its decision to block two of its journalists from attending press events on Tuesday after the outlet refused to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as ‘the Gulf of America’ ”.

“I write on behalf of The Associated Press, an independent global news organization that reaches billions of people every day, to object in the strongest possible terms to the actions taken by the Trump administration against AP yesterday,” Julie Pace, the AP’s executive editor, wrote in the letter addressed to Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff.

“The issue here is free speech – a fundamental pillar of American democracy and a value of the utmost importance to all Americans, regardless of political persuasion, occupation or industry.”

Pace said that on Tuesday, the White House barred AP journalists from attending two press events with Donald Trump, “following an apparent complaint over AP’s editorial decisions regarding the Gulf of Mexico, which President Trump renamed the Gulf of America”.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/12/ap-white-house

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Article in The Hill by Dominick Mastrangelo, 2/12/25

Headline:  “Leavitt defends banning AP from Oval Office over ‘Gulf of America’ stance’ “

“White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt defended a decision by the White House on Tuesday to keep The Associated Press out of the pool of reporters allowed inside the Oval Office to cover an executive order signing with President Trump and billionaire Elon Musk.

“We reserve the right to decide who gets to go into the Oval Office,” Leavitt said during a briefing with reporters on Wednesday when asked about the move, calling it a “privilege to cover the White House.”

https://thehill.com/homenews/media/5141155-karoline-leavitt-ap-oval-office-gulf-of-america/

 

Rt. Wing Media Vultures

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Article in Media Matters by Gideon Taaffe, 2/11/25

Headline:  “Right-wing media want you to think stopping infectious diseases and feeding the poor is woke”

“Right-wing media are focused on culture war battles as the Trump administration suspends lifesaving work from the U.S. Agency for International Development, cherry-picking USAID programs to dismiss the agency as ‘woke,’ ‘radical,’ and ‘overwhelmingly hard left.’ In reality, USAID is responsible for providing health care and nutritional aid to thousands of the world’s vulnerable people, many living in war-torn regions.”

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/right-wing-media-want-you-think-stopping-infectious-diseases-and-feeding-poor-woke