There&#8217;s a thought experiment I want you to sit with for a moment.
God forbid Barack Obama passed away — shot in front of thousands of people, the moment captured on every phone in the crowd and splashed across every screen in the country within minutes — and Michelle Obama was left to pick up the pieces, preserve his legacy, and carry the torch in the only way she knew how. Do you think you would see ultra-famous white comedians painting themselves in blackface and mocking the way she grieves? Without consequence? Without wall-to-wall outrage? No. Of course not. Because that would be racist, and it would be cruel, and everyone would say so loudly and immediately.
When the shoe is on the other foot, no one seems to care.
Druski — born Drew Desbordes — has become one of the most commercially ubiquitous comedic presences in America. The COVID-era social media comedian turned pop culture fixture hosts a satirical dating show, joined the 2026 season of The Voice, and has assembled a brand portfolio that reads like a Fortune 500 roll call: T-Mobile, Amazon, the NFL, Nike, Happy Dad Hard Seltzer, PrizePicks, Meta, NBC/Peacock, Dunkin&#8217;, and Google Pixel. He has over 20 million followers. He is everywhere.
And this week, he decided to use that platform to mock a grieving widow.
In a now-viral video, Druski appears in full whiteface — skin painted white, blonde wig, blue contacts, all-white pantsuit — complete with fireworks and dramatic stage lighting. He mocks Erika Kirk, the recently widowed CEO of Turning Point USA, for continuing to make public appearances in the wake of her husband&#8217;s assassination. He ridicules the Trump administration&#8217;s Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt for offering prayers and honoring American symbols during press conferences. He depicts a blonde conservative in pink, riding with a white lap dog, singing Katy Perry&#8217;s &#8220;California Girls&#8221; on the way to a drive-through. And he lampoons Erika&#8217;s composure during a recent interview with Bari Weiss, turning grief into punchline fodder.
I&#8217;ll be honest: I barely knew who Druski was before this week. Unfortunately, I know who he is now.
Here&#8217;s what I&#8217;ll give him: conservative women are not humorless. We can laugh at ourselves and take a punch. The Leavitt bit? Cheap, but fine. The drive-through? Inaccurate — the last time I heard Katy Perry sing, she was in space. But there is a line between political satire and using a widowed mother as a punchline for 80 million viewers, and Druski crossed it without flinching.
Charlie Kirk was assassinated last year in front of thousands of people, while doing the thing he loved most — talking to young people and making the case for his country. We watched it on our phones. We were horrified. Then heartbroken. Then — naively, perhaps — hopeful that the brutality of it might draw some line we could all agree not to cross. Political violence is bad. Killing people for their beliefs is wrong. Surely that much was universal.
We thought wrong. Too many on the left laughed, celebrated, and mocked the tragedy. They worked to tarnish his name before he was even buried. Jimmy Kimmel told blatant lies masquerading as jokes and was suspended for it. And now, six months later, a comedian with a nine-figure brand portfolio is degrading Charlie&#8217;s widow for daring to honor his memory — for refusing to disappear.
That&#8217;s not a comedy bit. That&#8217;s cruelty in makeup.
Druski is not some fringe provocateur. He is corporate America&#8217;s darling — the face you see when you open an app, watch a game, or scroll through your feed. So, at what point does the ubiquitous ad avatar become a liability?
This isn&#8217;t his first controversy. In September 2025, he enraged fans with a whiteface skit at a NASCAR race, portraying a caricatured &#8220;proud American&#8221; redneck. Then came the NFL Honors, where he mispronounced wide receiver Jaxon Smith-Njigba&#8217;s name in a way that left Buckeye fans — myself included — vexed. Each time, the brands shrugged.
The Daily Wire reached out to Druski’s active brand partnerships, T-Mobile, Happy Dad, and NBC/Peacock, asking whether they intend to retain Desbordes as a brand partner in light of this content. All but T-Mobile failed to respond, offering this: &#8220;The content in question is not in any way affiliated with T-Mobile, nor is it a reflection of our brand and values.&#8221; A statement of distance — but not of severance. Druski remains their Chief Swagger Officer. NBC said nothing. He remains on The Voice.
So the answer to the question in the headline appears to be: yes, you can.
At least for now.
Grief is not a costume. A widow is not a prop. And a woman who lost her husband to a political assassination — who chooses to stay in the fight and keep his work alive — deserves more than a whiteface parody from a man who hawks hard seltzer and phone plans for a living.
Conservatives don&#8217;t expect special treatment. We just expect consistency. If mockery of grief is off-limits for certain races and certain parties, it must be off-limits for all. Until corporations decide that values actually mean something more than virality and quarterly earnings, they will keep propping up figures like Druski — who demeans the bereaved and cashes seven-figure checks for the privilege.
The brands have spoken. Or rather, they haven&#8217;t. And that silence says it all.

The Voice – Season 29

T-Mobile Distances Itself From ‘Chief Switching Officer’ Druski After Sketch Mocking Erika Kirk

Celebrities

Corporate America

Entertainment

Erika Kirk

Media Bias

Politics

Racism

Social Media

Values

This article is part of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/introducing-upstream-a-lifestyle-and-culture-section-of-the-daily-wire" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Upstream,</a> The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.
***
Perhaps the most common feature of the <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/14/politics/maha-birth-control-politics-of-the-pill">flurry</a> <a href="https://www.ama-assn.org/public-health/population-health/what-doctors-wish-patients-knew-about-birth-control">of</a> <a href="https://www.npr.org/2025/10/27/nx-s1-5535839/population-shift-birth-rate-misinformation">articles</a> <a href="https://www.kff.org/health-information-trust/misleading-narratives-and-social-media-shape-contraception-perceptions/">about</a> <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277953623004380">young</a> <a href="https://msmagazine.com/2025/12/17/young-women-teen-girls-gen-z-birth-control-beliefs-democrat-republican-tiktok-misinformation-contraception/">women</a> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/sep/17/birth-control-why-are-influencers-turning-away-from-the-pill-and-towards-natural-contraceptive-methods">rejecting</a> <a href="https://nypost.com/2025/10/09/health/ob-gyn-reveals-troubling-trend-shes-seeing-with-gen-z-women/">hormonal</a> <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/02/style/birth-control-skepticism-wellness-tiktok.html">birth</a> <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2024/03/21/stopping-birth-control-misinformation/">control</a> is the claim that their concerns are fueled by “misinformation” or based on “unfounded theories.” I’m a younger millennial. I’ve never used hormonal birth control, and I don’t plan to. But what these writers and doctors fail to grasp is how fed up women are of being told their pain is normal and prescribed a pill at 13, only to be told they have “unexplained infertility” and need IVF at 30.
It doesn’t take a medical degree to hypothesize that women’s healthcare has gone terribly wrong. It is almost entirely structured around either suppressing or bypassing the female reproductive system altogether. When journalists and doctors claim women like me are misinformed, they reject an opportunity to help make women healthier. 
For 60 years now, the standard of care for women in the United States has been a protocol that seeks not to understand and work with the female body, but to inhibit and short-circuit it. It’s no surprise that the women who watched their mothers and grandmothers unquestioningly swallow the pill and continue to suffer are now demanding a better way.
The increased rejection of hormonal birth control also comes amid a tectonic shift in medical treatment for minors.  Several major medical associations recently issued <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/pediatricians-group-says-research-doesnt-support-gender-affirming-treatments">statements</a> against pediatric gender transition in the wake of the Fox Varin lawsuit, which held medical providers responsible for performing a double mastectomy on a minor. Sex-rejection treatments and surgeries involve medicating children with puberty blockers and hormone therapies, among other things. And yet many adolescent girls, some as young as 11, are prescribed hormone therapy in the form of the hormonal birth control pill or an IUD, despite their long-term effects being largely unknown.
Of sexually active 15 to 19-year-olds, almost half are prescribed some form of hormonal birth control. This, despite the fact that there are no large randomized controlled trials on the effects of synthetic hormones during girls’ pubescent years. Some research on this cohort has shown <a href="https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article/120/5/1135/71113/Contraception-and-Adolescents?utm">reductions</a> in <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0010782408002801?utm_source">bone mass</a> and <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40097087/">density</a>, which is itself concerning. But little exists on long-term effects to adolescent brain or cardiovascular health, both of which actively require sex hormones for development. Animal studies <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40188588/">show</a> that exposure to hormonal contraceptives during adolescence has persistent effects on the female brain and behavior, though it’s unclear how this translates to humans.
Your response to women rejecting hormonal birth control will almost certainly depend upon your answer to one question: What is medicine? The same ideology that undergirds the transgender movement forms the foundation of women’s health, too: “My body, my choice.” But making your body in your own self-image is not medicine. It’s choice theory applied to the human body. And the philosophy of choice will always be insufficient because it inherently rejects the bounds of reality.
What if women’s health was actually about making women healthy instead of maximizing choice? The solution to America’s health problem is the same as the solution to transgender ideology: Respect reality, recognize that our bodies bound us and we can’t make ourselves into whatever we choose to be, and accept that women’s bodies are different from men’s. That’s not only okay but also good. Women’s bodies were made to bear children; blaming the patriarchy or <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/the-pursuit-of-equality-is-ruining-your-marriage">raging about the system</a> will not change that fact. Let medicine be about restoring the body’s natural function, not trying to change it. When we become unfocused on what the practice of medicine is in principle, people get hurt, even when medical professionals have the best intentions.
As a woman who has been on the receiving end of so-called “women’s healthcare,” it seems as though there is little will to understand the potentially negative effects of hormonal birth control, or the positive effects of working with rather than against the female body’s natural function. After all, birth control is convenient and perhaps even something of a sacrament to the feminized, sexually evolved West.
“Women have been taking the pill for decades,” I was told by a pushy doctor at an Ivy League research hospital, who wouldn’t let me leave his exam room without a prescription for the minipill for the extreme cramps I was having in my early 20s. When I asked for a hormone panel to help diagnose a potentially underlying health condition, fearful I’d be unable to conceive later in life, he said, perhaps revealing more about himself than intended, that a hormone panel wouldn’t tell him anything.
But not all women’s health practitioners are so unimaginative. Dr. Naomi Whittaker is a board-certified OBGYN and surgeon focused on women&#8217;s restorative reproductive medicine. She’s also the founder of <a href="https://www.rrmacademy.org/">RRM Academy</a>, which employs both conventional medicine and the latest in restorative reproductive techniques. “Working with the female body rather than against it is the cornerstone of what I do,” she said. “I see hormones not as a nuisance to suppress, but as a language the body uses to communicate.” She calls restoring the body’s natural function “the spirit of restorative reproductive medicine.”
Even still, the establishment offers these doctors no help. Medical associations and education do not teach the kind of medicine Dr. Whittaker practices, and they are deeply skeptical of it. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the American Society for Reproductive Medicine have <a href="https://www.asrm.org/globalassets/_asrm/advocacy-and-policy/advocacy-activities/2025/2025-08-13-joint_letter_opposing_rrm_081425.pdf">issued statements</a> and <a href="https://www.asrm.org/news-and-events/asrm-news/press-releasesbulletins/asrm-hosts-capitol-hill-briefing-for-policymakers--congressional-staff-to-hear-from-providers--patients-about-importance-of-ivf-access-realities-and-limitations-of-restorative-reproductive-medicine/">held congressional briefings</a> against restorative reproductive medicine. After all, it is a competitor to the medical status quo at a time when the government has expressed more interest in women’s health and fertility. It seems as though the medical establishment is vying for a cut of a much-hoped-for government check.
Regardless, women continue rejecting the status quo. And this rejection comes amid an explosion of so-called “fem-tech” companies marketing devices (usually wearables, such as rings or watches) to assist women in either avoiding or achieving pregnancy naturally.
These devices use sensors to track temperature, sleep, and heart rate, among other things, to pinpoint ovulation or even underlying health conditions. Natural Cycles, which uses an AI algorithm adjusted to each individual user, became the first app to be cleared by the Food and Drug Administration as birth control in 2018. And Oura, whose sensor-laden rings have become something of a <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2026/02/09/oura-ring-lobbying-rfk-maha-washington-00770320?nid=0000014f-1646-d88f-a1cf-5f46b7bd0000&amp;nname=playbook&amp;nrid=b076877d-0054-4fa6-8bd9-93aa06bde864">status symbol</a> in Washington, is aiming higher than transforming women’s healthcare: It is purporting to change the face of American healthcare altogether.
Wearables such as the Oura ring are not only designed for tracking menstrual cycles, though they can do that. They are also designed to help wearers know more about their bodies (sleep quality and blood oxygen, activity, or stress levels, for example) and to help alert them to potential illness. Only a few months ago, an older-style wearable — the Fitbit — alerted me that my heart was in arrhythmia and told me to go to the emergency room. At 31, I am not the usual candidate for atrial fibrillation, and the ER doctor assumed the device had been faulty. After performing an EKG, he was amazed to find the watch had been right. Untreated heart arrhythmias are the most common cause of sudden cardiac death in the world.
American medicine has long suffered from being reactive rather than proactive. We treat symptoms and diseases rather than teaching people how to avoid them. After all, symptom and disease management is where all the money is, and healthcare, like all businesses, needs money to survive. But wearables may be a sign that’s changing. After all, Oura’s market valuation of $11 billion dollars is more than four times greater than it was just three years ago. 
As women continue rejecting the pill, those beholden to the medical status quo will probably continue blaming women for falling prey to misinformation. That’s a lazy response. They’d do well to look a little closer: Women may be the early adopters of a new age of American medicine, rejecting pills and their unintended side effects in favor of preventative and restorative approaches, with wearables at the helm. American women seem to be ahead of the curve in heralding a return to true medicine. The only question is: Will the medical establishment get on board?
***
Katelyn Walls Shelton (<a href="https://x.com/AnnaKateShelt">@AnnaKateShelt</a>) is a visiting fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center’s Bioethics, Technology, and Human Flourishing Program and a 2025 Robert Novak Journalism Fellow. Her Substack is <a href="https://katelynshelton.substack.com/">Technically Human</a>.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

Birth Control Pills, Female Contraception Estrogen Hormones, Prescription Medicine for PMS

The Pill Revolt — Why Millennial Women Like Me Are Rethinking Hormonal Birth Control

Birth Control

Health

Pregnancy

Technology

Upstream

Women

Imagine it’s Valentine’s Day at Silicon Valley Middle School. The cafeteria is covered in construction-paper hearts. Everyone pretends not to care — while caring very much. And the most popular kids — the ones who decide who’s cool, who eats lunch alone, and who gets stuffed into lockers — are quietly deciding who deserves a Valentine and who gets the dreaded, “Sorry, we’re just friends.”
Now swap out the middle schoolers for Apple News, Google News, Microsoft’s MSN, and Yahoo News, and you have a pretty good picture of today’s media ecosystem.
Instead of candy grams, these platforms hand out something far more valuable: visibility, traffic, and perceived legitimacy. Algorithms play matchmaker. Editorial choices determine who gets asked to the dance, who goes stag, and who doesn’t even get through the door.
The pattern is hard to ignore.
Research from the Media Research Center examining the “<a href="https://newsbusters.org/blogs/free-speech/heather-moon/2026/02/13/it-took-apple-news-100-days-publish-right-leaning-article">Big 4 News Apps</a>” found that left-leaning outlets dominate coverage, while right-leaning outlets are routinely sidelined or completely buried.
Start with Google News, the alpha dog at the lunch table. Google appears especially fond of The New York Times — not a casual acquaintance, but the kind of devotion that fills a notebook margin with hearts. Between Halloween and Valentine’s Day, Google featured about twice as many New York Times stories (215) as its next most-featured outlets, CNN (122) and the BBC (105). Because Google’s news feed appears by default on millions of Android and Samsung devices, that preference carries enormous national reach.
Looking at 106 days of data since Halloween, Google News promoted 1,757 stories. Almost 70% came from left-leaning outlets, 29% from centrist sources, but just 2% from right-leaning media.
Like Google, Apple News also has a bestie from the print world. The Washington Post receives frequent top placement and prominent visibility. Since Halloween, Apple has featured the Post 109 times. Other regulars in Apple’s rotation include NBC News (89), Reuters (86), and the Associated Press (85).
<div id="attachment_1044207" style="width: 872px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1044207" class="size-large wp-image-1044207" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/02/GettyImages-1132776284-862x576.jpg" alt="CUPERTINO, CA - MARCH 25: Apple Inc. CEO Tim Cook speaks during an Apple product launch event at the Steve Jobs Theater at Apple Park on March 25, 2019 in Cupertino, California. Apple Inc. announced the launch of , it's new video streaming service, and also unveil a premium subscription tier to its News app. (Photo by Michael Short/Getty Images)" width="862" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/02/GettyImages-1132776284-862x576.jpg 862w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/02/GettyImages-1132776284-300x200.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/02/GettyImages-1132776284-768x513.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/02/GettyImages-1132776284.jpg 1024w" sizes=" (max-width: 862px) 100vw, 862px" />Michael Short/Getty Images</div>
Overall, of AllSides-rated outlets, Apple News featured 75% left-leaning outlets, 25% centrist outlets — and zero right-leaning outlets in the period studied. Zero is on purpose. Zero means being locked out of the dance. Zero is indefensible. 
Next comes Microsoft’s MSN, whose reach comes from its enormous footprint on desktop computers. While its distribution is not quite as disturbing as Apple’s or Google’s, its preferences are still clear. MSN is more than smitten with Newsweek, publishing 316 Newsweek stories between Halloween and Valentine&#8217;s Day. That level of attention would make any publisher blush.
MSN’s mix included about 10% right-leaning outlets and 37% centrist outlets — higher shares than its competitors, but still leaving Left-leaning sources with the largest slice of attention at 53%.
And then there’s Yahoo News. It’s easy to joke about Yahoo, but the platform draws more than 200 million monthly views, something achieved by only three other outlets. Think of Yahoo as the bad boy who got held back a grade but has a date at every party. And Yahoo certainly plays the field.
Yahoo occasionally features right-leaning outlets, but it has a serious thing for smaller, radical outlets — Buzzfeed, Salon, the New Republic, Rolling Stone, Huffington Post and Mediaite.
Yahoo is also unique among the Big 4 in relying heavily on its own in-house reporting. Those stories leaned left and accounted for a large share of featured content (269 stories). Of the 1,715 stories Yahoo promoted in the study period, 88% came from left-leaning outlets (by far the most of any of the news apps), 6% from centrist organizations, and 6% from right-leaning sources.
Defenders of these platforms argue they are simply promoting “mainstream” outlets with proven “reliability.” But Americans aren’t buying that claim. Gallup polling shows trust in national media has never been lower.
There are reasons for that collapse in confidence. Many Americans remember years of breathless coverage of the Russia collusion narrative, the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story, the dismissal of the Wuhan lab-leak evidence, and persistent shielding of President Biden’s cognitive deficiencies. They’ve also watched elitist media advocate aggressively for DEI, ESG and anti-ICE movements — while insisting they are neutral observers.
Distribution is power. A newsroom can produce solid reporting, but Apple, Google, MSN, and Yahoo are clearly trying to control the narrative. The political Left has long understood that institutions shape culture and public opinion. Today, the Big 4 news apps are the institutions: enormously powerful, largely opaque, and virtually unaccountable to the public.
So yes, it’s Valentine’s Day. And in the digital cafeteria, Google, Apple, MSN, and Yahoo are still handing out cards to the favored few and pushing others into lockers.
But another holiday is coming. The Fourth of July is only months away, and federal regulators are examining whether dominant tech platforms have unfairly restricted competition in parts of the media ecosystem. Congress should also continue to investigate the role Big Tech plays in shaping what Americans see and don’t see.
In a free country, the biggest companies should not determine who is allowed into the dance and who is not, who gets a voice and who gets left out in the cold. Freedom must be available to all.
* * *
Dan Schneider is Vice President for Free Speech at the Media Research Center.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

Digital NEWS Text Glowing on a Computer Keyboard for Breaking News

The Love Affair Continues: Study Shows Big Four News Apps Still Heart Left-Wing Media

Apple

Google

Leftists

Media Research Center

Microsoft

New York Times

News

Silicon Valley

Yahoo

Vogue&#8217;s Spring 2026 issue delivered a fawning puff piece extolling the virtues of Governor Gavin Newsom (D-CA) — complete with a photo spread from celebrity-favorite photographer Annie Leibovitz — just as he prepares to wrap up his final term as governor and plan his next move.
Newsom has long been considered a heavy favorite to win the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028 — and if he does choose to throw his hat into the ring, his February 1 Vogue profile (written by Maya Singer) could easily be considered an in-kind donation to his campaign.
Indeed, Singer refers to Newsom as &#8220;presidential&#8221; in her first paragraph. Of course, that came only after she describes him as &#8220;embarrassingly handsome.&#8221;
<blockquote>Let’s get this out of the way: He is embarrassingly handsome, his hair seasoned with silver, at ease with his own eminence as he delivers his final State of the State address.</blockquote>
And the fawning continues. Paragraph two begins: &#8220;It must drive Trump nuts. Newsom: lithe, ardent, energetic, a glimmer of optimism in his eye; Kennedy-esque. Add to that his stunning wife and four adorable kids, and the executive strut of a self-made millionaire who has spent the past seven years at the helm of a state big, complex, and rich enough to be a nation of its own.&#8221;
Singer continued in that same vein, observing the differences between her previous Zoom meetings with the California politician and the moment she sat down with him in person.
<blockquote>As he spoke, late-summer sun slanted in through the windows, bathing Newsom in an oh so California magic-hour glow. I’d prepared for this sit-down by consuming the spectacle of Gavin Newsom—tweets, TV hits, interviews, umpteen episodes of his podcast, This Is Gavin Newsom—and was having a hard time taking in the man. His actual molecular reality. Immaculate. Fantastic at gab, like a windup doll.</blockquote>
Her words painted a picture — not just of Newsom, but also of a writer smitten by the subject of her piece.
“Newsom’s lanky frame was folded onto a sofa a bit too low-slung for him. This made him lean back—away from me,” Singer wrote, musing, “Or it could be that his body language had nothing to do with ergonomics and is a function of Newsom’s quality of being at once gregarious and aloof.”
Singer spoke with Newsom about his decision to start a podcast — “This is Gavin Newsom” — and to kick it off with a conversation with the late Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk.
“My purpose in having Charlie on wasn’t to discuss his politics. I don’t share his politics. I don’t like the way he talked down to people. I don’t like what he said about the gay community and minorities,” Newsom said, claiming that his purpose had been centered on finding out what Kirk was doing to reach so many people — young men, in particular.
“Wake up. There’s 40 percent or whatever it is in this country that feels deeply differently than we do, and we need to understand this movement and not be so quick to dismiss it. Divorce is not an option. So what are we going to do about this?” Newsom continued. “We’ve got a lot of work to do—rebranding, rebuilding, a lot of work as a party. Wake the hell up.”
Pushing back on critics who’d attacked him for allowing Kirk a platform, Newsom argued that it was Kirk who had platformed him: “I didn’t have one follower. He had millions.”
The governor’s strategy appears to have worked on at least one person: Singer.
“Newsom,” she wrote, “has been vindicated by history.”
Critics were quick to call out the clear bias in Singer’s writing.
Kevin Dalton wrote on X, “‘Let’s get this out of the way: He is embarrassingly handsome, his hair seasoned with silver, at ease with his own eminence as he delivers his final State of the State address.’ —Vogue, apparently taken over by a 15-year-old girl with a crush on Gavin Newsom or Izzy.”
Former White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer called the whole thing, “Very Beto.”
“The Gavin Newsom piece in Vogue is something to behold. A true monument to sycophancy, obsequiousness and outright slobbery,” Gerry Callahan said, adding, “The writer, Maya Singer, abandons all professional dignity and acts less like a reporter and more like a golden retriever whose owner just returned from a long trip.”

Governor Newsom And San Francisco Mayor Lurie Announce New Funding For Homelessness And Mental Health Ffforts In The City

Vogue Puff Piece On Gavin Newsom Delivers Overdose Of Cringe

2028 presidential election

Gavin Newsom

Media

Vogue Magazine

People Magazine and several other outlets are getting dragged for the headlines they used to report the death of cartoonist Scott Adams on Tuesday.
Adams, best known for creating the satirical comic strip “Dilbert,” died at the age of 68 following a terminal cancer diagnosis. Most mainstream outlets stuck to the facts or buried their criticisms of Adams deep in the article copy. The Left despised him for being a conservative and a huge fan of Donald Trump.
But some outlets put their bias front and center. People ran an article by staff writer Victoria Eden, which had the headline: “Scott Adams, Disgraced Dilbert Creator, Dies at 68,” and followed up with the subheading, “&#8217;Dilbert&#8217; was pulled from wide circulation after Adams’ racist rant in 2023.”
Social media followers expressed their frustration over the phrasing.
“You cannot hate the media enough,” one X reply <a href="https://x.com/mattvanswol/status/2011128217609130295">said</a> in response to the article being tweeted from the official People X account. That tweet was later deleted, but the article with the same headline still remains on the website as of Tuesday afternoon.
The outlet also removed Edel’s name from the online article and replaced it with “People Staff” after commenters began calling her out by name on the social media platform.
It wasn’t just People disparaging Adams as they reported on his death. While The New York Times selected a neutral headline on their website, the accompanying social post was more opinionated.
“Breaking News: Scott Adams, whose comic strip &#8216;Dilbert&#8217; was a sensation until he made racist comments on his podcast, has died at 68,” the legacy outlet shared in an X post.
“Stuff like this used to make me angry, but I honestly laughed as your hack behavior is too predictable. You will be hated until your dying days, you have no loved ones, when you die, people will rejoice,” one response to the NYT post <a href="https://x.com/Cernovich/status/2011135485494829274">said</a>.
“You have no shame. Unreal,” echoed <a href="https://x.com/realELFIGURIN/status/2011129288146210992">another</a>.
BBC News went with the <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y320k72vyo">headline</a>: “Controversial Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams dies aged 68.” NPR also <a href="https://www.npr.org/2026/01/13/nx-s1-5413219/scott-adams-dilbert-dies">referred to</a> Adams as a “controversial cartoonist” in their article.
“Scott Adams, ‘Dilbert’ Creator Who Courted Controversy, Dead at 68,” the headline from far-Left outlet Rolling Stone <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/scott-adams-dilbert-creator-dead-obtiuary-1235496233/">said</a>.
Some X users contrasted this phrasing to how mainstream outlets covered other notorious figures like convicted sex predator Jeffrey Epstein. For Epstein’s death, The New York Times ran the headline, “Jeffrey Epstein Dead in Suicide at Jail, Spurring Inquiries.”
The controversy these outlets reference goes back to the “Dilbert” cartoon being dropped from major newspapers following an incident in 2023. During a podcast episode, Adams discussed a Rasmussen poll, which found that nearly half of black Americans were unable to agree with the phrase, “It’s okay to be white.” Adams’ reply suggesting that the poll results indicate that black Americans are a “hate group” went viral.
“Based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from black people. Just get the f*** away,” Adams said at the time after commenting further on race relations and crime.
“Wherever you have to go, just get away. Because there’s no fixing this. This can’t be fixed. So I don’t think it makes any sense as a white citizen of America to try to help black citizens anymore. It doesn’t make sense. There’s no longer a rational impulse. So I’m going to back off on being helpful to black America because it doesn’t seem like it pays off.”

Scott Adams

People Magazine Obit Calls Scott Adams ‘Disgraced Dilbert Creator,’ Spurring Backlash

People Magazine Obit Calls Scott Adams 'Disgraced Dilbert Creator,' Spurring Backlash

Conservatives

Death

Mainstream Media

U.S.

For most of its existence, Wikipedia has been hailed as a marvel of the digital age: a sprawling, collaborative encyclopedia written by anyone and corrected by everyone. An open marketplace of knowledge. A monument to the democratization of information.
But democracies — political or epistemic — rarely collapse in an instant. They erode from within. And what my team at the Media Research Center (MRC) has uncovered about how Wikipedia operates, and how carefully it conceals that machinery, should alarm anyone who believes a self-governing society depends on an open, honest information sphere.
<a href="https://mrcfreespeechamerica.org/blogs/free-speech/luis-cornelio/2025/11/17/how-wikipedia-infiltrated-colleges-train-next-generation">Our recent investigation</a> shows that Wikipedia and its educational partner, Wiki Education, have developed a vast, little-known system for shaping, and increasingly weaponizing, the content millions of Americans rely on every day. What we found is not simply concerning; it reveals the quiet architecture of an ideological project. It is also possible that, in attempting to hide its operations, Wikipedia has crossed legal lines that could carry serious consequences.
Wikipedia’s co-founder, Larry Sanger, has said openly that the platform no longer reflects its original mission of neutrality. It has become a curator of political narrative, amplifying the messaging of the left rather than serving as an impartial arbiter of knowledge.
<h2>The Blacklist(s)</h2>
Wikipedia is transparent about one thing: it blacklists right-leaning news outlets and conservative non-profits. But even this admission obscures more than it reveals. In reality, <a href="https://mrcfreespeechamerica.org/blogs/free-speech/luis-cornelio/2025/02/03/exclusive-wikipedia-effectively-blacklists-all-right">Wikipedia maintains three tiers of blacklists</a> — Blacklisted, Deprecated, and Generally Unreliable — each designed to exclude certain publishers from the encyclopedia’s information ecosystem.
The “Blacklisted” category is the most severe. Sources here are blocked entirely; links cannot even be submitted for review. This is Wikipedia’s “do not pass go” list. It includes outlets such as the Heritage Foundation, Breitbart News, and the Washington Examiner. Content from these organizations is not debated or fact-checked, it is simply turned away at the gate.
The second level, “Deprecated,” involves sources that are “generally prohibited.” Users attempting to cite to these sources receive warnings, before Wikipedia’s editors almost always reject the suggestions. LifeSiteNews, Newsmax, The Daily Caller, and Blaze Media fall here. The effect is the same as the first list, exclusion, just with a thin procedural layer.
The third category, “Generally Unreliable,” is essentially a blacklist with a tiny escape hatch. Wikipedia discourages use of these sources and directs contributors to “more reliable” outlets. The Daily Wire is stuck in this purgatory: technically citable, but heavily disfavored.
The disparities this system produces are staggering. The Daily Wire has been cited only 445 times across Wikipedia. The New York Times, by contrast, appears in more than 1.6 million citations — meaning Wikipedia cites the Times nearly 4,000 times for every single Daily Wire reference. Similar gaps exist with Newsweek, Politico, and The Washington Post, which are cited hundreds of times more frequently than their far more reliable conservative counterparts.
More broadly, <a href="https://mrcfreespeechamerica.org/blogs/free-speech/luis-cornelio/2025/02/03/exclusive-wikipedia-effectively-blacklists-all-right">MRC research shows</a> that Wikipedia cites to left-leaning outlets almost 20 times more often than to right-leaning outlets. <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/695762/trust-media-new-low.aspx">Trust in the media is at an all-time low</a>, specifically because of the bias injected into news stories. Wikipedia intentionally magnifies that bias, resulting in gross distortions of reality. We have documented Wikipedia’s smears against many political figures, including President Donald Trump, Secretary Pete Hegseth, and Charlie Kirk. 
When gatekeepers designate half the country’s media ecosystem — representing tens of millions of readers — as inherently “unreliable,” the result is not a pursuit of truth. It is a systematic silencing of outlets disfavored by the ideological left. The encyclopedia built on openness now thrives on exclusion.
<div id="attachment_1011409" style="width: 874px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1011409" class="size-large wp-image-1011409" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/12/GettyImages-1079587192-864x576.jpg" alt="skynesher. Getty Images. Male teacher giving a lecture from desktop PC during a class at computer lab." width="864" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/12/GettyImages-1079587192-864x576.jpg 864w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/12/GettyImages-1079587192-300x200.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/12/GettyImages-1079587192-768x512.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/12/GettyImages-1079587192-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/12/GettyImages-1079587192-2048x1365.jpg 2048w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/12/GettyImages-1079587192-1800x1200.jpg 1800w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/12/GettyImages-1079587192-1200x800.jpg 1200w" sizes=" (max-width: 864px) 100vw, 864px" />skynesher. Getty Images.</div>
<h2>The Student Army</h2>
Yet the core of the MRC’s latest findings lies not in the blacklist itself, but in the machinery feeding content into Wikipedia: Wiki Education, a California nonprofit created as a spin-off of the Wikimedia Foundation, operating with its funding, personnel, and blessing.
Wiki Education recruits college professors to assign Wikipedia editing as coursework. Since 2010, more than 145,000 students have participated, generating over 120 million words of content. On the surface, this could be a civic success story — young people helping build a shared public resource.
But the reality, based on the courses Wiki Education recruits and supports, is far more ideological. Classes such as Queering Religion, Critical Race Feminisms, Queer of Color Critique, Gender and Identity in STEM, and similarly activist-oriented seminars are not fringe exceptions; they are typical of the curriculum Wiki Education promotes.
These disciplines are not merely academic; they are frameworks for political activism. And the content they generate — guided by ideology rather than neutrality — flows directly into Wikipedia. The encyclopedia becomes the final destination for arguments crafted within contemporary left-wing academic theory.
<h2>The Taxpayer Foots The Bill</h2>
Even more astonishing is that this ideological pipeline is largely underwritten by taxpayers. Because Wiki Education embeds itself in public universities, it leverages state-funded faculty, classrooms, and infrastructure to funnel student labor into Wikipedia. Students believe they are learning digital literacy; in practice, many are producing politicized content for a global platform.
The pattern extends to Wiki Education’s leadership. Every traceable political donation from its senior staff and board flows to Democratic candidates, progressive PACs, and left-aligned advocacy groups. While not illegal, it reveals the institutional alignment shaping the organization’s priorities.
<h2>A Potential Legal Problem</h2>
This coordinated system — Wikipedia funding Wiki Education, Wiki Education training student editors, students supplying content that reinforces Wikipedia’s ideological filters — creates not only an informational problem but potentially a legal one.
When Wikipedia spun off Wiki Education in 2013, the structural ties between the two organizations remained unusually close. Yet Wikipedia has insisted in court filings, sworn under penalty of perjury, that it is merely an “interactive computer service,” not a “publisher.” It did so to seek the liability protections of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
If Wikipedia effectively controls Wiki Education as an alter ego — training, directing, and financing its editorial labor — then it may have misrepresented its true operations under oath. Filing false statements in court is a crime under state and federal law. Attorneys general in jurisdictions where Wikipedia has invoked Section 230, like the state of Florida, may have ample reason to investigate those claims. And while the U.S. Department of Justice has its hands full unwinding the malfeasance committed during the Biden administration, Attorney General Pam Bondi might be interested in this, too.
<h2>Why It Matters</h2>
Wikipedia is not just a reference site. It is infrastructure. It consistently dominates Google search results — Google itself being a company that aggressively manipulates search results to push its own ideology. And modern AI systems, including chatbots, draw heavily from Wikipedia’s content pipelines. When Wikipedia’s entries tilt, so does the entire information ecosystem.
Its blacklist system also has downstream economic effects. Being labeled “unreliable” reduces an outlet’s visibility, decreases traffic, and predictably harms ad revenue. The encyclopedia’s judgments ripple outward into media markets and public perception.
Given these stakes, Congress should investigate. So should the Federal Trade Commission. And attorneys general, especially in cases where Wikipedia has defended its corporate structure under oath, should scrutinize whether the organization misrepresented how it operates.
Wikipedia has every right to express ideological preferences. But it does not have the right to cloak them behind false claims of neutrality to donors, to engage in deceptive or anticompetitive practices, or to misrepresent its structure in legal proceedings.
Transparency requires accountability. And it is long past time for the public to understand what Wikipedia has become.
* * *
Dan Schneider is Vice President for Free Speech at the Media Research Center.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

Wikipedia

From Open Encyclopedia To Ideological Weapon: Wikipedia’s Hidden War On Truth

American Universities

Censorship

Democrats

Investigation

Students

Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales reportedly stormed out of an interview after being pressed on why he referred to himself as the site’s “founder.”
The incident occurred while Wales was speaking with Tilo Jung for the German political podcast “Jung &amp; Naiv.” When Jung pressed him to clarify if he’s the founder or co-founder, Wales responded, “I don’t care. It’s the dumbest question in the world.”
Jung pressed the topic, asking if there was a “dispute” over the issue. “What are the facts?” Jung asked. “Well, it’s not a fact, it’s an opinion, so you can have whatever opinion you like,” Wales replied. 
Jung tried to nail down that detail again, saying, “For you, you’re the founder?”
“Can I just say again, it doesn&#8217;t matter. I&#8217;ve answered your question four times,” Wales said firmly. He then stood up and said, “You know what? I&#8217;m done. Thank you.”
“What&#8217;s going on?” Jung asked as Wales seemed to head for the exit, prompting Wales to say over his shoulder, “It&#8217;s stupid. Don&#8217;t ask me stupid questions.”
“How is that stupid?” Jung wondered.
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This isn’t the first time this particular issue has caused strife. During a 2023 <a href="https://lexfridman.com/jimmy-wales-transcript/#chapter1_origin_story_of_wikipedia">interview</a> with Lex Fridman, Wales also called the question of who founded the most popular online encyclopedia “unimportant” and “not that interesting.” 
“I actually think Larry Sanger doesn’t get enough credit for his early work in Wikipedia, even though I think co-founder’s not the right title for that,” he said at the time.
Wales is the co-founder of Wikipedia along with Larry Sanger, but Sanger exited the project in 2002 and has been speaking out against it ever since.
“Wikipedia is badly biased. The original policy long since forgotten, it no longer has an effective neutrality policy. It now touts controversial opinions on politics, religion, and science. And examples have become embarrassingly easy to find,” Sanger <a href="https://x.com/lsanger/status/1260975408167759873">shared on X</a> in 2020 alongside a link to a blog post detailing some of the worst offenses. 
Those listed included a “Barack Obama article completely fails to mention many well-known scandals: Benghazi, the IRS scandal, the AP phone records scandal, and Fast and Furious, to say nothing of Solyndra or the Hillary Clinton email server scandal—or, of course, the developing ‘Obamagate’ story in which Obama was personally involved in surveilling Donald Trump.” 
“It is time for Wikipedia to come clean and admit that it has abandoned NPOV (i.e., neutrality as a policy). At the very least they should admit that they have redefined the term in a way that makes it utterly incompatible with its original notion of neutrality, which is the ordinary and common one,” Sanger wrote in the post. “Of course, Wikipedians are unlikely to concede any such thing; they live in a fantasy world of their own making.”
In September, President Donald Trump announced that the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform was investigating Wikipedia over alleged pro-Kremlin, anti-Western, and anti-Israel bias, and that it was raising serious concerns given that AI chatbots heavily rely on the site’s information, as The Daily Wire previously <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/trump-goes-to-war-with-wikipedia-over-political-slant">reported</a>.
Sanger expressed his gratitude for the probe, saying, “I am glad that Congress is investigating the use of foreign and U.S. government funds to pay for biased editing on Wikipedia. … There is clearly massive support for this sort of investigation.”
The co-founder added that Wikipedia “makes broad editorial decisions about what constitutes reliable sources, which must be respected by large numbers of participants. … The Wikipedia Foundation could address the situation, but does not.”  He noted that the Wikipedia Foundation also “refuses to reveal the identity of its most powerful editors or to override decisions by editors.”

Jimmy Wales

Wikipedia Co-Founder Storms Out Of Interview After Being Asked Simple Question

Podcast

President Donald Trump said on Friday he would likely sue the BBC next week for as much as $5 billion after the British broadcaster admitted it wrongly edited a video of a speech he gave but insisted there was no legal basis for his claim.
The British Broadcasting Corporation has been plunged into its biggest crisis in decades after two senior leaders resigned following accusations of bias, including over the editing of Trump&#8217;s speech on January 6, 2021, when his supporters entered the Capitol.
Trump&#8217;s lawyers had initially set a Friday deadline for the BBC to retract its documentary or face a lawsuit for &#8220;no less&#8221; than $1 billion. They also demanded an apology and compensation for what they called &#8220;overwhelming reputational and financial harm,&#8221; according to a letter seen by Reuters.
The BBC, which has admitted its editing of Trump&#8217;s remarks was an &#8220;error of judgement,&#8221; sent a personal apology to Trump on Thursday but said it would not rebroadcast the documentary and rejected the defamation claim.
&#8220;We&#8217;ll sue them for anywhere between $1 billion and $5 billion, probably sometime next week,&#8221; Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One as he headed to Florida for the weekend.
&#8220;I think I have to do that, I mean, they&#8217;ve even admitted that they cheated,&#8221; he said. &#8220;They changed the words coming out of my mouth.&#8221;
Trump said he had not spoken with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, with whom he has built a solid relationship, about the issue, but that he planned to call him this weekend. He said Starmer had tried to reach him, and was &#8220;very embarrassed&#8221; by the incident.
The documentary, which aired on the BBC&#8217;s flagship &#8220;Panorama&#8221; news program, spliced together three video excerpts from Trump&#8217;s speech, creating the impression he was inciting the January 6, 2021, riot. His lawyers said this was &#8220;false and defamatory.&#8221;
In an interview with British right-leaning TV channel GB News, Trump said the edit was &#8220;impossible to believe&#8221; and compared it to election interference.
&#8220;I made a beautiful statement, and they made it into a not beautiful statement,&#8221; he said. &#8220;Fake news was a great term, except it&#8217;s not strong enough. This is beyond fake, this is corrupt.&#8221;
Trump said the BBC&#8217;s apology was not enough.
&#8220;When you say it&#8217;s unintentional, I guess if it&#8217;s unintentional, you don&#8217;t apologize,&#8221; he said.
BBC Chair Samir Shah sent a personal apology on Thursday to the White House and told lawmakers the edit was &#8220;an error of judgement.&#8221; The following day, British culture minister Lisa Nandy said the apology was &#8220;right and necessary.&#8221;
The broadcaster said it had no plans to rebroadcast the documentary and was investigating fresh allegations about editing practices that included the speech on another program, &#8220;Newsnight.&#8221;
The dispute has escalated into the broadcaster&#8217;s most serious crisis in decades. Its director general Tim Davie and head of news Deborah Turness quit this week over the controversy amid allegations of bias and editing failures.
Starmer told parliament on Wednesday he supported a &#8220;strong and independent BBC&#8221; but said the broadcaster must &#8220;get its house in order.&#8221;
&#8220;Some would rather the BBC didn&#8217;t exist. Some of them are sitting up there,&#8221; he said, pointing to opposition Conservative lawmakers.
&#8220;I’m not one of them. In an age of disinformation, the argument for an impartial British news service is stronger than ever.&#8221;
The BBC, founded in 1922 and funded mainly by a compulsory license fee, faces scrutiny over whether public money could be used to settle Trump&#8217;s claim.
Former media minister John Whittingdale said there would be &#8220;real anger&#8221; if license payers&#8217; money covered damages.
(Reporting by Nandita Bose and Andrea Shalal in Washington, Costas Pitas in Los Angeles and Sam Tabahriti in London; editing by Leslie Adler, Tom Hogue and Shri Navaratnam)

Donald Trump

Trump Says He’ll Likely Sue BBC For Up To $5 Billion Over Edited Speech

Courts

World

The BBC issued an official apology to President Donald Trump on Thursday for a misleading edit of his January 6 speech, though it rejected his allegation of defamation.
In its apology, the BBC admitted to splicing together portions of Trump’s January 6 speech in a way that made it appear that he was calling for violence. The apology comes after Trump threatened to file a $1 billion defamation suit against the media outlet over its “Trump: A Second Chance?” documentary broadcast by BBC Panorama. 
“This program was reviewed after criticism of how President Donald Trump’s 6th January 2021 speech was edited,” the outlet said in a statement on its Corrections and Clarification page. “During that sequence, we showed excerpts taken from different parts of the speech. However, we accept that our edit unintentionally created the impression that we were showing a single continuous section of the speech, rather than excerpts from different points in the speech, and that this gave the mistaken impression that President Trump had made a direct call for violent action.”
“The BBC would like to apologize to President Trump for that error of judgement. This programme was not scheduled to be re-broadcast and will not be broadcast again in this form on any BBC platforms,” it added. 
In a separate letter to the White House, BBC Chair Samir Shah again apologized to Trump. 
&#8220;While the BBC sincerely regrets the manner in which the video clip was edited, we strongly disagree there is a basis for a defamation claim,” he <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c874nw4g2zzo">said</a>. 
For the last week, the BBC has been roiled over the controversy, with two executives <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/bbc-execs-resign-after-j6-doc-twists-trump-footage-out-of-context">announcing</a> their resignation on Sunday over the incident and a leaked internal memo discussing problems of “systematic bias” at the outlet. 
&#8220;Like all public organizations, the BBC is not perfect, and we must always be open, transparent and accountable,” said Tim Davie, one of the executives who stepped down last weekend. “While not being the only reason, the current debate around BBC News has understandably contributed to my decision. Overall the BBC is delivering well, but there have been some mistakes made and as director general I have to take ultimate responsibility.”
In a separate <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/11/13/bbc-doctored-trump-speech-second-time-newsnight/">report</a> on Thursday, The Telegraph said that BBC Newsnight had edited Trump&#8217;s January 6 speech in a similar manner in a 2022 episode. A lawyer for Trump told The Telegraph that it was “now clear that BBC engaged in a pattern of defamation against President Trump.&#8221;
Trump has filed numerous lawsuits against news outlets over defamation allegations. In one instance, he was paid $15 million by ABC News after he sued the outlet over false claims made by anchor George Stephanopoulos.

MixCollage-14-Nov-2025-07-28-AM-8897

BBC Apologizes To Trump For Misleading Jan 6 Clip, But Won’t Own Up To Defamation

Defamation

Executive

January 6

The BBC is in dire straits. 
The BBC is a state-funded enterprise in much the same way that NPR is a state-funded enterprise. The BBC has been the dominant broadcast platform in the United Kingdom for decades, going all the way back to World War II.
For the last several decades, they have just been a left-wing agitprop organization. But now they are absolutely falling apart thanks to their extraordinarily dishonest attacks on President Trump.
According to <a href="https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/bbc-chairman-apologizes-for-error-in-edit-of-trump-speech-0fe74118?gaa_at=eafs&amp;gaa_n=AWEtsqf781o2BxWmESpy94akpjS_SOnvktxokVenvnnMPy6tJ-fywHqZCCn9uJ3C1xM%3D&amp;gaa_ts=69138fec&amp;gaa_sig=kc-AZqr5Ns4_DEx0ceuxv-1KbM20bCfSonvth9cyYdEk3d0ZpXL-gT6wLovg8uQpQ_IJ8IQY6HUYgz6HF0v35Q%3D%3D">The Wall Street Journal</a>:
<blockquote>President Trump has threatened to file a $ 1 billion lawsuit against the BBC over the way the U.K. state broadcaster edited one of his speeches in a documentary last year. BBC Chairman Samir Shah apologized Monday for the controversy, which has plunged the broadcaster into crisis. The apology came a day after BBC Director-General Tim Davie and BBC News Chief Executive Deborah Turness said they were leaving the organization following criticism from the White House. </blockquote>
What happened? There was an episode from the BBC’s flagship investigative series called Panorama, which ran one week before the 2024 United States election.
You may ask, did that affect the election? It doesn&#8217;t matter. The job of the BBC is to cover the news, not make the news up. 
One week before the election, they ran a piece in which they spliced together things that President Trump said on January 6, 2021, to make it look as though he himself personally was leading an armed insurrection at the Capitol building.
That was not true.
In order to achieve this effect, they had to cut out 24 pages of material. They cut from one part of the speech, and then they fast-forwarded 50 minutes and cut together the last part of the speech to clip them together, and then basically put in ellipses in order to make it seem as though President Trump himself was personally calling on people to follow him to the Capitol building and to assault the Capitol building.
If you watch that original clip, they had a music bed underneath, which connected the first part of the statement to the last part of the statement. It is not as though they had some sort of interpolation from a narrator explaining that much later in the speech, President Trump made the second part of the statement.
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/bss-ep-2315-member-exclusive?elementPosition=4&amp;row=2&amp;rowHeadline=Latest+Episodes&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Episodes+Carousel"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-large wp-image-974957" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-1024x171.webp" alt="DailyWire+" width="1024" height="171" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-1024x171.webp 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-300x50.webp 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-768x128.webp 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-1536x256.webp 1536w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-2048x341.webp 2048w" sizes=" (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></a>
The Journal continued:
<blockquote>According to a letter from Trump’s lawyers, the BBC faces a legal claim for at least $1 billion unless the documentary is retracted, an apology published and compensation paid to the president. The letter set a deadline of Friday. The broadcaster said in a statement that it would “respond in due course.”</blockquote>
This follows hard on a <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/11/06/read-devastating-internal-bbc-memo-in-full/">19-page memo</a> that was put out by a top staffer at the BBC named Michael Prescott. He was an independent adviser to the BBC&#8217;s Editorial Guidelines and Standards Board, and he wrote a 19-page memo pushing the idea that the BBC had become a biased and ridiculous organization. He wrote: 
<blockquote>Dear Board Members,
You may know that I have been one of the two independent external advisers working alongside the EGSC. I held this role for three years and stood down in the summer.
I departed with profound and unresolved concerns about the BBC. Since leaving, I have thought long and hard about what, if anything, to do about this.
My conclusion is that these concerns are serious enough for me to draw them to your attention, in your oversight role of the BBC.
What follows is a summary of what were, in my view, some of the most troubling matters to come before the EGSC during my term.
My view is that the Executive repeatedly failed to implement measures to resolve highlighted problems, and in many cases simply refused to acknowledge there was an issue at all. </blockquote>
Prescott pointed out that there was tremendous bias with regard to the U.S. election. He specifically pointed out that edit in the Panorama program. He said, “This was one of the most shocking sets of issues uncovered during my time with the EGSC. If BBC journalists are to be allowed to edit video in order to make people ‘say’ things they never actually said, then what value are the Corporation’s guidelines, why should the BBC be trusted, and where will this all end?&#8221; 
And yet top members of the staff said, “There was no attempt to mislead the audience about the content or nature of Mr. Trump’s speech before the riot at the Capitol. It’s normal practice to edit speeches into short form clips.”
These kinds of shenanigans occurred repeatedly. They did this with comments that President Trump made about Liz Cheney. There are reports in which the BBC routinely ignored its own guidelines, giving excessive coverage, for example, to that rogue Iowa poll that suggested that Kamala Harris was going to win the state by a substantial margin. Of course, President Trump won the state pretty easily.
“During my time as an advisor to the EGSC it became clear the BBC fell too easily for putting out ill-researched material that suggested issues of racism when there were none,” Prescott wrote. Then he listed chapter and verse across the BBC in which they basically manufactured a bunch of racial issues where no racial issue existed.
They went out of their way to promote idiocies about biological sex and gender. Prescott noted:
<blockquote>I was told that time and time again the LGBTQ desk staffers would decline to cover any story raising difficult questions about the trans-debate. The allegation made to me was stark: that the desk had been captured by a small group of people promoting the Stonewall view of the debate and keeping other perspectives off-air. Individual programmes had come to lack their own reporters as a counterweight. &#8230; 
There was also a constant drip-feed of one-sided stories, usually news features, celebrating the trans experience without adequate balance or objectivity. &#8230; There&#8217;s a constant drip feed of one sided stories, usually news features celebrating the trans experience without adequate balance or objectivity.</blockquote>
One example of this might be a report that happened in 2024 from the BBC, in which they reported that male breast milk was just as nutritious for babies as female breast milk. You may be asking yourself, what is male breast milk? The answer is that if you pump men full of estrogen, you will get some secretions from the nipples that are not actually like female breast milk.
But the BBC had an interest in pretending that males can become females. And so <a href="https://x.com/millihill/status/1987836199969382892">they ran with this report</a>.
This is what the BBC is. It’s true on a wide variety of issues.
It&#8217;s particularly true about the Hamas-Israel war. According to the UK Telegraph, the BBC was forced to correct two stories every single week about the Gaza conflict since the October 7 attacks on Israel.
That’s insane. How many stories can you retract before you finally lose all credibility? BBC Arabic had to make 215 corrections and clarifications over the past two years on stories that were found to be biased, inaccurate, or misleading.
The BBC despises Israel, and it’s not possible for them to make it any clearer. For example, in November 2023, BBC editor Jeremy Bowen falsely reported that Israel had blown up the Al Ahli Hospital in the Gaza Strip.
That wasn’t true. He later <a href="https://www.yahoo.com/news/bbc-jeremy-bowen-admits-got-194844026.html">admitted he got it wrong</a>, but said he didn’t feel bad at all that he got it wrong, saying, “I don&#8217;t regret one thing in my reporting, because I think, I think I was measured throughout. I didn&#8217;t race to judgment.” 
Interviewer: “But you said that the building had been flattened.”
Bowen replied, “Oh, yeah. Well, I got that wrong because I was looking at the pictures and like, what I could see was a square that appeared to be flaming on all sides. And there was a, you know, sort of a void in the middle. And it was, I think it was a picture taken from a drone. And so, you know, we have to piece together what we see. And I thought, ‘Well, that looks like the whole building&#8217;s gone.’ And that was my conclusion from looking at the pictures. And I was wrong on that. But I don&#8217;t feel too bad about that.”
It doesn&#8217;t feel bad at all, because this is the way the BBC operates. They start with the conclusion, and then they backfill the news in order to reach that particular conclusion.
So, is it any surprise that the BBC is a disaster area or that they&#8217;re in serious trouble now?
It is long past time for the BBC to admit what it is, which is an agitprop organization on behalf of the political Left. They have been for decades. Nothing has changed.
And this latest brouhaha is just more evidence that the government should not be subsidizing media organizations such as NPR, PBS, or the BBC in Britain, because you wind up with left-wing media sponsored by taxpayers.

Trump Threatens $1b Lawsuit Against BBC Over ‘Defamatory’ Coverage

How Bias And Dishonesty Brought Down The BBC

Ben Shapiro

England

Great Britain

Lawsuit

Legacy Media

Opinion

Television

According to the BBC, President Donald Trump has <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/11/10/britain-bbc-crisis-trump-panorama/8fe0a43a-be1e-11f0-8eee-a78486b4c797_story.html">sent a letter</a> to the news outlet threatening legal action after the network aired an edited clip of Trump’s January 6, 2021, remarks in a documentary that was presented out of context.
BBC Director General Tim Davie and CEO of News Deborah Turness have both <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3vn25d5dq7o">stepped down</a> following revelations that the documentary misled viewers by deceptively editing Trump’s speech.
According to <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/11/03/bbc-report-reveals-bias-donald-trump/">The Telegraph</a>, a leaked internal BBC memo revealed that the program spliced together separate portions of Trump’s remarks, making it appear he explicitly encouraged chaos at the Capitol. The memo also reportedly warned of “systemic problems” of bias within the BBC&#8217;s coverage, including its Arabic service’s reporting on the Israel-Gaza conflict.
The fallout was immediate. Davie, who had served as director general for five years, admitted, “There have been some mistakes made and as director general I have to take ultimate responsibility.” Turness, who ran the BBC’s News and Current Affairs division, followed suit, saying that the documentary controversy had “reached a stage where it is causing damage to the BBC &#8230; The buck stops with me.”
The edited clip showed Trump saying, “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and I’ll be there with you. And we fight. We fight like hell.”
In reality, Trump stated, “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re gonna cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women.” More than <a href="https://www.npr.org/2021/02/10/966396848/read-trumps-jan-6-speech-a-key-part-of-impeachment-trial">8400 words later</a>, he declared, “Most people would stand there at 9 o&#8217;clock in the evening and say I want to thank you very much, and they go off to some other life. But I said something&#8217;s wrong here, something is really wrong, can have happened. And we fight. We fight like hell. And if you don&#8217;t fight like hell, you&#8217;re not going to have a country anymore.”
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-media-max-width="560">
NEW &#8211; Internal whistleblower memo claims BBC edited footage of Trumps Jan 6 speech by splicing footage together to mislead viewers, in a documentary aired last year — Telegraph <a href="https://t.co/5vhtP8l35B">pic.twitter.com/5vhtP8l35B</a>
— Disclose.tv (@disclosetv) <a href="https://twitter.com/disclosetv/status/1985388625480090070?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 3, 2025</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
BBC Chair Samir Shah has since apologized, admitting the broadcast represented an “error of judgment.” But critics argue the damage is already done, pointing to years of mounting accusations that the BBC’s news division has drifted leftward.

MixCollage-10-Nov-2025-09-43-AM-9060

Trump Threatens To Sue As BBC Scrambles Over Misleading J6 Documentary

deceptive editing

Fake News

Two BBC executives announced their resignations on Sunday after controversy erupted around the U.K. public broadcaster over its portrayal of President Donald Trump in a documentary on the January 6 Capitol riot.
BBC Director General Tim Davie and CEO of News Deborah Turness announced their resignations less than a week after an internal BBC memo surfaced, saying a documentary on the events of January 6, 2021, painted Trump dishonestly. The documentary removed key context from Trump’s rally speech that day, falsely portraying Trump as having encouraged rioting at the Capitol.
“Like all public organisations, the BBC is not perfect, and we must always be open, transparent and accountable,” Davie said in a <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1k02vr1my2o">statement</a>. “While not being the only reason, the current debate around BBC News has understandably contributed to my decision. Overall the BBC is delivering well, but there have been some mistakes made and as director general I have to take ultimate responsibility.”
Turness released her own statement, saying that the controversy around the BBC Panorama, which created the documentary, “has reached a stage where it is causing damage to the BBC.”
“In public life leaders need to be fully accountable, and that is why I am stepping down,” she said, adding in defense of the BBC, “[w]hile mistakes have been made, I want to be absolutely clear recent allegations that BBC News is institutionally biased are wrong.”
The documentary at the center of the departures is titled “Trump: A Second Chance?” and it first aired a week before the 2024 presidential election.
Last week, the contents of an internal memo written by former outside editorial standards adviser Michael Prescott were leaked and published in <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/11/03/bbc-report-reveals-bias-donald-trump/">The Telegraph</a>.
The documentary “completely misled” viewers, the memo said. It had included Trump telling his supporters to “fight like hell” while omitting that he had encouraged rally-goers in Washington, D.C., that day to protest “peacefully and patriotically.”
The report in The Telegraph sparked a response from Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., who suggested that the BBC is “FAKE NEWS.”
“The FAKE NEWS ‘reporters’ in the UK are just as dishonest and full of s*** as the ones here in America!!!!” Trump Jr. <a href="https://x.com/DonaldJTrumpJr/status/1985415134903161307">posted</a> on X after the contents of the BBC memo were published.
The memo has motivated backlash in the U.K. from the country’s opposition Conservative Party.
“These are extremely concerning revelations that could seriously undermine the brand and reputation of the BBC,” Nigel Huddleston, the shadow culture secretary, told The Telegraph. “The BBC license fee is justified on the basis of impartiality and trust. There can be no justification for this kind of deliberate manipulation and the spreading of misinformation.”

BBC Execs Resign After J6 Doc Twists Trump Footage Out Of Context

BBC Execs Resign As UK Broadcaster Roiled Over Doctored Trump Footage In J6 Documentary

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