Bad Press

The Biden campaign, and by proxy, the Biden White House, released an unusual ransom list of debate conditions that the media and Trump campaign must meet for there to be any presidential debates this year. The list of demands include dissolving the Commission on Presidential Debates, a move that the media just one president ago stated would erode trust in the American media. Other demands include no live studio audience and cutting microphones for other participants. The Biden campaign also demanded the debates only be on four networks: CNN, ABC, Telemundo or CBS.

In January 1984, Blade Runner and Alien director Ridley Scott shot an Apple computer Super Bowl commercial mocking Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four — and it changed the television advertising landscape forever. It featured a woman in a white tank top and bright red shorts destroying a monochrome screen with a sledgehammer. This week, Apple CEO Tim Cook promoted a new ad titled “Crush” that gave the exact opposite message and led to a furious backlash on social media. The ad begins with lights coming on in a factory setting with cultural items and artifacts stacked on top of each other, all gathered on a giant industrial press. Then the press begins to lower as a Sonny and Cher song plays.

Uri Berliner, an economics and business reporter for NPR, resigned his position on Wednesday morning. His resignation comes after he was handed a suspension by NPR, five days without pay, for a piece he wrote last week citing how the publicly-funded radio and publishing news organization has become a vessel for ideologically driven progressive activism. He cited people he hears from who have abandoned NPR’s traditional programming, which has found itself consumed by gender and race theory, with a splash of climate panic. Yet what was eerily noticeable was how silent Berliner’s colleagues in the media have been, clearly retaliating against him for speaking his mind, independently. Neither the NPR union nor SAG-AFTRA released statements.

In the 2017 film I, Tonya, a biopic based on the Tonya Harding conspiracy and attack on figure skater Nancy Kerrigan, Martin Maddox (actor Bobby Cannavale) describes himself as a reporter for Hard Copy and calls it a “a pretty crappy show that ‘legitimate’ news outlets looked down on — and then became.” There was an entire spurt of tabloid news programming that spawned up in the 1990s, Hard Copy being one of them, along with Inside Edition, which gave us Bill O’Reilly.

Former Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna Romney McDaniel was invited to the cafeteria, where she was promptly told by the cool kids that she can’t sit with them. The news cycle sits on day five of what has been a week- and weekend-long struggle session over NBC’s hiring of McDaniel to provide election-year analysis. Which leads us to wonder: are there any adults still working at NBC and MSNBC? McDaniel’s hiring simply could not stand with the elite of MSNBC like Chuck Todd, Joe Scarborough and Nicolle Wallace (all former political operatives) as they issued on-air apologies over NBC management to hire someone so closely attuned to a political party they don’t belong to. Jen Psaki would like a word.

Chris Farley would have had his sixtieth birthday last week. One of the comedian’s most memorable live bits happened when, after being introduced by Late Show host David Letterman, burst through the back of the auditorium doors, charged down the audience aisle, slugging applauding attendees in the arm, grabbing them and eventually dumping a plant in a dumpster outside the theater. He ended this entrance with a double cartwheel — no small feat for someone of Farley’s stature at the time.The crowd was treated to a hilarious moment of personal interaction with one of comedy’s biggest stars at the time. That was then, though. It’s apparent to just about everyone how far late-night comedy and variety shows have fallen.

Ever since the release of Special Counsel Robert Hur’s report on Joe Biden’s illegal handling of classified materials and documents (he “stored” them in open boxes and grocery bags in his home garage, where Hunter Biden crashed during the pandemic), there has been a media blitz to combat its characterization of the president as “a well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory.” Notes in the report also revealed that Biden had trouble remembering key dates from his personal and professional biography, like when he served as vice president or the year that his son Beau died of brain cancer.

After CNN ousted Chris Licht, who attempted, at least, to moderate CNN’s biased news coverage, the floundering network has found itself in limbo, unsure of how much more it wanted to lean into a professional, “definitely not biased” news infotainment network. Now, new boss Mark Thompson has signaled a clear direction for the network in this election year: All Donald Trump, All the Time, with changes once again to its morning and midday line-up. All CNN is really doing, though, is shuffling deck chairs around the network as ratings continue to languish behind networks like the History and Hallmark channels.

As long as there exists an upper Acela Corridor audience, the Atlantic will be there to fearmonger Donald Trump and make him the center of their universe. The January issue of Laurene Powell Jobs Monthly was dedicated to Trump — and you can almost hear the trumpets coming out of the editorial meeting as they all congratulated themselves on another job well done. It was an all-hands-on-deck effort that precedes other all-hands-on-deck efforts, warning of the power of Trump and the fragility of our American democracy. Once again, the Atlantic’s impressive roster of MSNBC green-room regulars gets the equation exactly backwards.

While you’ve been preoccupied with Thanksgiving, or following international conflicts or rising inflation, California governor Gavin Newsom quietly signed Assembly Bill 873 last month.Assembly Billy 873 is an “act to add Section 33548 to the Education Code, relating to pupil instruction” on media literacy. In short, government-mandated standards on “ethical media” have now become required teaching for all K-12 students in California public schools. Included in the curriculum outline are several talking points, including that “the proliferation of online misinformation has posed risks to international peace, interfered with democratic decision-making and threatened public health.

Most of the time, single posts on Twitter/X aren’t worth rebuking with an entire piece, but Washington Post media reporter Paul Farhi laid out an absolute banger this weekend when he lamented the idea of “citizen journalists” not being as professional, trained or equipped as he or his colleagues at major news outlets like the Post, New York Times or CNN. The idea that citizen journalists are not every bit as capable as journalists employed by these outlets (and others) is ridiculous and should be rebuffed.Farhi posted, “Someone invented the phrase ‘citizen journalism’ a few years ago to describe amateurs doing the work of pros. Yes, it occasionally works, but probably no more often than ‘citizen cop,’ ‘citizen attorney’ or ‘citizen soldier.

Legislative scuffles breaking out on the floors of parliaments are a tradition as old as democracy itself, dating back at least to the Ides of March. Sometimes a good dust-up is necessary to restore the norms and decorum of the democratic process. From Egypt to Canada, to Japan, Kenya and Great Britain, physical altercations between government representatives have become a regular occurrence. The United States Congress, though, has astonishingly been mostly free of violence between colleagues on both sides of the aisle. Consider that we even made it through the Trump years without a single physical confrontation in the White House or the halls of Congress.

After an explosion in Gaza this week, Hamas asserted that an Israeli airstrike had targeted a hospital, killing up to 500 civilians. Outraged at this evidence-free claim, news outlets such as the New York Times, Washington Post and Associated Press all repeated it, without confirmation or investigation. Several members of Congress, including Palestinian sympathizers Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, condemned the “attack,” again, without waiting for confirmation.As evidence began to mount that Israel had not committed this act, the New York Times began to stealth-edit their original story — updating their original headlines several times.

In the week-long fallout from the Hamas massacre in Israel and Israel’s military counteroffensive, the sitting president and the GOP front-runner were more publicly focused on their own pet projects than the concern that Americans were perhaps trapped in Israel. As of today, the death count of Americans murdered by the Hamas excursion stands at thirty, and it may rise. That number is also not accounting for the dozen or so hostages that the State Department cannot or won’t confirm. To the public, Americans in Israel seem to be little more than an afterthought to this administration, much the same way the Biden administration would not be forthcoming about Americans trapped in Afghanistan.

For years, the Gaza Strip conflict has been as much about media optics as anything else. Hamas, the controlling party in Gaza, have become expert media manipulators. They carefully stage propaganda for the mostly sympathetic international media and our own media here in the US. In the wake of the worst terror attack against Jews since World War Two, however, that has seen the death toll rise to more than 1,000 victims and 150 hostages, you would think Hamas would be about to lose the optics war. Not so fast.What began as breaking news reporting by American outlets quickly shifted to the default position of sympathizing with Palestinians, and focusing almost solely on Israel’s retaliation, as has usually been the case with this conflict.

“In this country, no one is above the law” has become a rallying mantra of both our national media and increasing, the Democratic Party (but is there a difference, really?). Attorney General Merrick Garland used this phrase on 60 Minutes this past Sunday, as did President Joe Biden during a friendly kid glove chat with ProPublica reporter John Harwood. As justification for pursuing more than ninety indictments on several fronts against former president Donald Trump, on everything from electioneering to housing classified documents, the left has pounded the tables on the rule of law being the most important foundational principal to the survival of the Republic itself.

Last October, after several questions arose about the severity of then-candidate John Fetterman’s stroke, his campaign released a health update — not a medical record, mind you. We have yet to see any medical records from John Fetterman. We had to rely on several nonsensical answers he provided during a debate that revealed the nature of his condition. In October of last year, Fetterman’s doctor — and campaign donor — assured the public that the would-be senator was “recovering well from his stroke” and “has no work restrictions and can work full duty in public office.”So why is it then that protocol for the United States Senate must be upended to accommodate the senator from Pennsylvania?

Now that truant Greta Thunberg is all grown up and aging out of her usefulness, progressive groups and our media are on the hunt, American Idol-style, for the next great Climate Teen. Just as the left puts teenagers on the frontline for gun control, and the Biden administration uses rosy-cheeked heartthrobs (much like Hamas does with human shields) to yell at people on TikTok, the media is desperately thirsty for a new batch of young climate activists with the charisma of boy band stars and the backing of thousands of lawyers and parents with political ambitions — they just won’t tell you that last part. Take the case of Badge and Lander Busse from Montana.

You may or may have not noticed, but there is currently a writers’ and actors’ strike happening across Hollywood. Major film productions have been shut down, as have regular television and streaming shows. No new content. Anywhere.  This also applies to all late-night talk shows. There hasn’t been a fresh new episode of Stephen Colbert’s Late Show, or The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon or Kimmel. All three network shows have downed tools in solidarity with the strikers. The question is: has anyone noticed, beyond their niche core audience of coastal liberals, for whom such programs have become little more than political group therapy sessions?

Donald Trump is executing an identical debate strategy that he deployed in 2016, right down to the same complaints and threats of boycotts against Fox News and their debate moderators.   Trump is currently threatening to boycott the first GOP primary debate on Wednesday August 23, citing his lead in the polls and what he projects to be unfair treatment by moderators Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum. Not only is Trump threatening to skip the debate, according to three sources speaking to CNN, Trump is looking to counter the debate by offering his services to other networks — or even Tucker Carlson, who is reportedly considering the offer.