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

Media Bias

Politics

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

Entertainment

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

Leftists

Media Research Center

Silicon Valley

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.
<iframe loading="lazy" title="Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia&#039;s founder/co-founder - Jung &amp; Naiv: Episode 792" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/uswRbWyt_pg?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>
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

News

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

In a <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/11/04/bbc-arabic-bias-pushed-hamas-lies/">blistering internal report</a> that reads like an indictment of the BBC’s own integrity, whistleblower documents reveal that BBC Arabic deliberately downplayed Israeli suffering in the Gaza war while racing to air unverified, Hamas-sourced claims designed to cast the Jewish state as the villain. The memo, written by Michael Prescott, a former adviser to the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines Committee, accuses the Arabic service of systemic bias, misinformation, and a shocking tolerance of antisemitic voices.
According to the report, BBC Arabic repeatedly parroted Hamas talking points while omitting or minimizing Israel’s perspective — even when evidence contradicted militant propaganda. Allegations against Israel were rushed to broadcast “without adequate checks,” suggesting not mere carelessness but, as Prescott wrote, “a desire always to believe the worst about Israel.”
The BBC’s English-language coverage told one story; its Arabic wing, quite another. In July 2024, after Hezbollah rockets killed nine children in the Israeli town of Majdal Shams, the BBC’s English site mentioned the victims and Israel’s retaliation. BBC Arabic? It omitted the children’s deaths entirely, highlighted Hezbollah’s denials, and the next day suggested Israel might have faked the attack.
Prescott’s letter accuses BBC Arabic of providing a platform to extremists who openly glorify violence against Jews. One contributor, Samer Elzaenen — who once posted “We shall burn you as Hitler did” — appeared on the network 244 times. Another, Ahmed Alagha, who called Jews “devils” and “not human beings,” appeared more than 500 times. Yet BBC executives defended these individuals as “eyewitnesses,” not staff reporters. Prescott wasn’t buying it: “Most viewers would consider hundreds of appearances… to amount to being part of the BBC’s reporting team.”
The report also blasted the BBC for amplifying Hamas propaganda about Gaza’s death toll, long after the United Nations revised down its own inflated statistics. BBC Arabic continued to treat Hamas-run agencies as credible sources, even after internal reviewers warned that claims of Israeli “mass graves” and “genocide” lacked any independent verification.
In one instance, BBC coverage suggested Israeli forces buried thousands of Palestinians in hospital courtyards — a narrative later disproven, as the graves were dug by Palestinians themselves. Another blunder involved a claim that 14,000 babies were “hours from starvation,” when the real number referred to children at risk over a year. The BBC quietly corrected the article online — but repeated the falsehood the same night on “Newsnight.”
Perhaps most damning, the BBC misreported that the International Court of Justice had ruled Israel’s war a “plausible genocide.” That was false — and took months to correct. Former BBC television director Danny Cohen condemned the leadership’s response: “Having made such serious and misleading errors, BBC executives chose to hide them from the public rather than correct the record.”
When internal reviewers flagged these issues, senior managers brushed them aside. Jonathan Munro, the BBC’s news content chief, praised BBC Arabic’s “exceptional journalism” and even bragged it was “almost as trusted as Al Jazeera.” Prescott shot back: “Is Al Jazeera the new gold standard? The BBC exists to reflect British values — not echo Qatar’s propaganda outlet.”
The scandal follows another major credibility crisis for the corporation — a Panorama documentary that doctored a Donald Trump speech to make it appear he incited the Capitol riot. Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy and media regulator Ofcom now face growing calls to launch a full investigation into the BBC’s bias and editorial collapse.
As the memo concludes, “The BBC is prone to claiming it gets equal complaints from both sides. But looking at the evidence, it’s hard to argue the BBC is biased toward Israel. Quite the opposite.”
At a time when Britain’s taxpayer-funded broadcaster is supposed to counter global disinformation, it is helping Hamas craft its narrative and eroding trust in one of the nation’s most sacred institutions.

BBC Announce Plans For A Major Shake-Up Of The Corporation

Damning Report Accuses BBC Of Whitewashing Hamas And Fueling Anti-Israel Bias

anti-Israel

Bias

Hamas

Pro-Hamas

MediaFest says it’s the largest media convention in the country, aimed at both student and professional “journalists.” This year, one of our top writers, White House correspondent Mary Margaret Olohan, was set to participate in a session for young reporters on how her faith fits into her work.
Until they found out she was a conservative.
That’s the story from the <a href="https://www.cjr.org/feature/student-journalism-mediafest-fraught-religion-faith-reporting.php" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Columbia Journalism Review</a>, which revealed yesterday that Olohan and another journalist, The Daily Signal’s Virginia Allen, were pulled from the event after complaints from a he/him “student media adviser” at Oregon State University named <a href="https://see.oregonstate.edu/directory/steven-sandberg">Steven Sandberg</a>.
Sandberg had been “browsing” the event schedule when he saw, according to CJR, a “portion of the conference called the ‘Faith Track’” that included authors with “pretty far-right, anti-LGBTQ language.”
Sandberg alerted the “non-partisan” organizers of the conference and told them that “LGBTQ students are feeling targeted by our administration, by the government, and by society.” Sandberg told them he was “disappointed to see them bring in people who espoused anti-LGBT views,” and they buckled.
Olohan was alerted that she’d been removed from the event by the ethics committee chairman at the Society of Professional Journalists, a man named Michael Koretzky, who told other organizers that they “found reporting problems” with Olohan’s work.
The only problematic article cited from Olohan, who has without question broken more stories of consequence in her young career than Koretzky will in his lifetime, was <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/exclusive-bill-would-block-abortionists-from-flushing-baby-remains-into-public-water-systems?author=Mary+Margaret+Olohan&amp;category=News&amp;elementPosition=undefined&amp;row=0&amp;rowType=Vertical+List&amp;title=EXCLUSIVE%3A+Bill+Would+Block+Abortionists+From+Flushing+Baby+Remains+Into+Public+Water+Systems" target="_blank" rel="noopener">an exclusive</a> on a bill from Congressman Brandon Gill that would make it illegal to dump aborted baby remains into publicly-owned water systems.
The suggestion from Koretzky was that the article wasn’t balanced enough. Now, if he has an abortionist who would like to defend flushing babies down the toilet, we’d love to dig into that belief. But we never believed the issue was with our journalism, and now, that’s confirmed.
Koretzky was looking for an excuse to cancel Olohan because Sandberg and the pronoun mafia demanded he do so, and the angry left is the real ombudsman of the liberal media elite. And Sandberg was so proud of his work that he ran to the Columbia Journalism Review to tell the story of how he preserved a safe space for his LGBTQ students.
Any suggestion that MediaFest will be a conference with balance is delusional. One of the featured speakers will be New York Times grifter Nikole Hannah-Jones, who has made <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/1619-project-creator-raked-in-1m-last-year-for-college-speeches-on-inequality?author=Luke+Rosiak&amp;category=News&amp;elementPosition=undefined&amp;row=0&amp;rowType=Vertical+List&amp;title=1619+Project+Creator+Raked+In+%241M%2B+Last+Year+For+College+Speeches+On+Inequality" target="_blank" rel="noopener">millions of dollars</a> spreading lies through the 1619 Project, which argues that systemic racism is in America’s DNA.
We challenge the Society of Professional Journalists to find a single piece of balanced work she’s ever produced, but guarantee that it will find them all as radical as her most recent piece, which <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/28/magazine/charlie-kirk-rhetoric.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">attacked Charlie Kirk as a bigot</a> just a few days after he was laid to rest.
Her session at MediaFest is titled, “How journalists can (and should) cover attempts to erase Black history.” It will be moderated by Koretzky’s colleague at Society of Professional Journalists, Celia Wexler, who serves as the group’s Washington, D.C., president.
We don’t expect Koretzky to get it, nor do we understand how he’s been put in charge of ethics of anything. His body of work includes a 2019 piece inspired by a convention he attended with high school journalists — about all the sex he’s had in his life.
We wish we were joking. Its <a href="https://journoterrorist.com/2019/04/11/news-to-me/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">opening line</a> (we don’t recommend clicking, but it’s hard to believe without the proof) is: “Almost all the sex I’ve had is because of journalism.” It goes on to tell the tale about a time a “sexual encounter” at a journalism conference ended in “bloodshed” because he was bitten on the penis.
Again, he was inspired to write this because he was “presenting a couple of sessions tomorrow to high school journalists.”
A year later, <a href="https://journoterrorist.com/2020/02/12/banned/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">he wrote</a> about how he himself was now banned from attending certain journalism events because, he transparently explains, the aforementioned article on his sexcapades.
“We also were contacted by students and spoke with members who were extremely concerned about your blog post related to seemingly non-consensual sex and journalism conventions,” he says he was told. There was also an accusation that he told a student he could “make or break her career.” He denies it.
We’re partly glad Olohan is, as the kids say, “marked safe” from the MediaFest confab, but also disheartened.
Every few years, the liberal media elite proclaim that they care about being balanced and hearing both sides. And we’re sure that every few years there are people who believe them. Don’t be one of those people.
Young journalists don’t need MediaFest or the Society of Professional Journalists anymore. They will teach you to do everything wrong, and you’ll end up like Koretzky or Sandberg.
There are now great alternatives, like the National Journalism Center, The Fund For American Studies, and even conservative undergraduate journalism programs like the one at Hillsdale College.
The young journalists gathering at MediaFest are being trained to believe that there is only one set of acceptable facts, even if it doesn’t fall on the same side as objective truth. The prospect of hearing the other side has media advisers like he/him Sandberg throwing up arms.
The media elite don’t actually believe there are two sides. That’s why when Elon Musk opened up X to free speech, they ran away to BlueSky — which, not coincidentally, is where you can find most of the journalists featured on MediaFest’s panels.
But they’re also not the real elite anymore. Their monopoly on information has shattered, in a large part because Americans are increasingly turning to reporters like Olohan and The Daily Wire for news.

Untitled design (1)

MediaFest, And Why There’s No Hope For Liberal Journalism

New York Times

Nikole Hannah-Jones

In a stunning display of media deflection, Axios criticized “MAGA influencers” for drawing attention to violent urban crime, specifically in response to the recent horrific, deadly stabbing of 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska in Charlotte, North Carolina. Instead of focusing on the deeply troubling facts of this case — a young woman fleeing war only to be killed while using public transportation — Axios decided to turn its spotlight on conservatives and Trump supporters for &#8220;elevating&#8221; the issue.
“The gruesome video of the fatal knife attack on Iryna Zarutska on a light-rail car in Charlotte is drawing attention from MAGA influencers seeking to elevate the issue of violent urban crime — and accuse mainstream media of under-covering shocking cases,” Axios tweeted, referring to its article that elaborated on the subject.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
The gruesome video of the fatal knife attack on Iryna Zarutska on a light-rail car in Charlotte is drawing attention from MAGA influencers seeking to elevate the issue of violent urban crime — and accuse mainstream media of under-covering shocking cases. <a href="https://t.co/OIj3FYfDLE">https://t.co/OIj3FYfDLE</a>
— Axios (@axios) <a href="https://twitter.com/axios/status/1965010353353625669?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">September 8, 2025</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
The attack occurred on August 22 aboard Charlotte’s light rail. DeCarlos Brown Jr., a 34-year-old man with a long criminal history, stabbed Zarutska multiple times, including once in the neck, as horrified passengers watched. Surveillance footage showed Zarutska collapsing while Brown casually stood near the doors, having removed his sweatshirt. Notably, he was reportedly riding the train without a ticket — another example of lax enforcement in urban areas. Zarutska had only recently arrived in the United States, having escaped war-torn Ukraine in the hope of a better life.
Despite the brutal nature of the crime, mainstream outlets barely offered any coverage, prompting widespread outrage among conservative commentators. Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Trump advisor Stephen Miller, and Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) amplified the story on social media.
Yet Axios — instead of investigating the clear failures of public safety, or questioning why a known repeat offender was allowed to roam free — chose to frame the story as a political tactic by conservatives. The article didn’t ask why the system failed Zarutska; instead, it asked why people on the Right were talking about it at all.
Axios seems more concerned about who is sharing the video than why the footage exists. The legacy media ran wall-to-wall coverage of racially-charged cases like that of Daniel Penny, but in Zarutska’s case, their zeal is absent.
North Carolina GOP Senate candidate Michael Whatley used the incident to criticize Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper’s soft-on-crime policies, pointing to a 2020 executive order focused on racial profiling and systemic racism.
While Zarutska is barely reported in the mainstream media, Axios wants readers to focus on the supposed political opportunism of conservatives, not the death of an innocent young woman.
Axios got hammered on social media:
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
This really is a work of art. It&#8217;s like default mode for the media on any issue:
The ________ is drawing attention from MAGA influencers seeking to elevate the issue of _______ — and accuse mainstream media of under-covering ________ <a href="https://t.co/RKIA5jOW8m">https://t.co/RKIA5jOW8m</a>
— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) <a href="https://twitter.com/redsteeze/status/1965026792458375679?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">September 8, 2025</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
The murder of Iryna Zarutska by Decarlos Brown Jr. is a story worthy of national attention. A Ukrainian refugee flees Russia’s invasion only to be stabbed to death by a repeat violent offender? National story — except it is bad politics for Dems, so it is Republicans pounce time. <a href="https://t.co/oFZXt05UxF">https://t.co/oFZXt05UxF</a>
— Jerry Dunleavy IV 🇺🇸 (@JerryDunleavy) <a href="https://twitter.com/JerryDunleavy/status/1965024300655919185?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">September 8, 2025</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
Pay attention to how Axios chose to headline this claptrap. No mention of the perp&#8217;s multiple arrests , no mention of the racial element, no mention of the refugee status of the victim. They don&#8217;t want to fuel public outrage over the dereliction of public servants responsible. <a href="https://t.co/YlgwUsyTm9">https://t.co/YlgwUsyTm9</a>
— Disinformation Expert Lizzy (@StarChamberMaid) <a href="https://twitter.com/StarChamberMaid/status/1965010988551623140?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">September 8, 2025</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
You can always count on the “conservatives pounce” narrative.
— Bethany S. Mandel (@bethanyshondark) <a href="https://twitter.com/bethanyshondark/status/1965010696107905413?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">September 8, 2025</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

Image 9-8-25 at 11.46 AM

Conservatives Pounce: Axios Targets ‘MAGA Influencers’ For Highlighting Murdered Ukrainian Refugee

Axios

North Carolina

Ukraine

Violent Crime

Menu