Media
To us, a free and trustworthy press is everything. We deeply believe media has the power to significantly contribute to the health of our democracy and, without honest journalism, democracy’s very survival would be at risk.
Investigating and reporting instances of corruption, fraud, social injustices, misconduct and abuse of power by individuals, corporations, and/or governments is invaluable to the public interest – and many journalists knock it out of the park. There was Vice News’ reporting on white supremacist groups during and after the Charlottesville domestic terrorist attack and Buzz Feed’s heartbreaking coverage of China’s internment of the Uyghurs. The Washington Post did a deep dive into the Pandora Papers, which uncovered a massive offshore financial system used to hide money and shield corrupt and criminal behavior, and incredible reporting by The New York Times revealed how the United States tried to hide an airstrike in Syria that killed dozens of civilians.
ProPublica – an independent, nonprofit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest – reported on child separation at the border during the first Trump administration, which included audio tapes of hysterical children detained by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, then followed that with their explosive “Secret IRS Files” investigation. ProPublica also published an exposé on Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ close – and, in our opinion, highly inappropriate – relationship with a GOP megadonor. Incidentally, the Clarence Thomas article really ticked off some conservatives, to the point where Fox News now sometimes refers to ProPublica as a “left-wing nonprofit,” which they are not. They are just really, really good and good journalism often ticks people off.
All that said, there is something that has been bothering us since Donald Trump descended that escalator in Trump Tower to announce his first run for the presidency. We hate to join the negative chorus against the media in any way, but it’s true there are elements of it that have gotten sideways.
In our minds, there were two huge things that happened at almost the same time – and they collided into one another causing a perfectly awful storm. As Donald came down that elevator – upending our politics and much of our culture – media was already going through an extremely difficult transition. Because the Internet had given anyone and everyone access to a public platform, it had already cut deeply into traditional newsrooms. Journalists were at risk of losing their jobs and, to keep them, clicks, likes, and being first seemed to become the overriding goals. This new reality created new motivations for journalists. For example, a decade ago, we would never know what my favorite newspaper reporter looked like. Even today, The Economist doesn’t include the name of the person who writes each article.
But now, print journalists are everywhere, especially on cable news (and are we crazy or does it seem like they also have brand new gym memberships and stylists?!?). Many of them have published books which, much like their television appearances, usually reveal if they are “Team Red” or “Team Blue” – then their bylines show up in The New York Times or The Washington Post, in what should be straightforward, unbiased articles.
This new dual role is hard for the American public to reconcile (or trust) because, once we know a reporter’s personal political views, proclivities and biases, it’s exceedingly difficult for us to believe they can simply switch those off every time their hands hit a keyboard or camera lights come on. We’re suspicious because we all know the limitations of being human. We also know that just-the-facts new stories don’t get the same number of clicks and likes that salacious ones do. Buy any reporter a shot or two of tequila and I bet anything most would admit that, while at times incredibly frustrating and utterly exhausting, Donald J. Trump has been, on balance, a huge windfall for their careers.
Listen, we get it. American journalists are asked to achieve one of the trickiest balancing acts in the world, especially during a time when the U.S. president calls them “fake news” and “the enemy of the state;” threatens to throw them in jail; and actively tells his followers on television, social media, and in person at political rallies to attack them mentally and physically.
He just never stops. In August 2025, he posted on Truth Social: “Despite a very high popularity and, according to many, among the greatest 8 months in Presidential History, ABC & NBC FAKE NEWS, two of the worst and most biased networks in history, give me 97% BAD STORIES. IF THAT IS THE CASE, THEY ARE SIMPLY AN ARM OF THE DEMOCRAT PARTY AND SHOULD, ACCORDING TO MANY, HAVE THEIR LICENSES REVOKED BY THE FCC. I would be totally in favor of that because they are so biased and untruthful, an actual threat to our Democracy!!!”
In the first nine months of his second term, President Trump barred the Associated Press, Reuters and Bloomberg News, among others, from the White House while inviting in a correspondent from Russian state media and very MAGA-friendly podcasters and correspondents. These include one from One America News – who told Trump that foreign leaders had “praised” his “courage and conviction,” then asked him what gave him “the moral courage” to start talks with Putin about Ukraine – and one from Real America’s Voice, who also happens to be the boyfriend of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and was the guy who accused Volodymyr Zelensky during that despicable Oval Office meeting of “not respecting the office,” asking him: “Why don’t you wear a suit?” (We're sure he and Marjorie had a big laugh over that one, not realizing how absolutely horrifying it was.)
Also among the group that is welcomed with open arms into the White House is Jack Posobiec, who helped spread the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory and said publicly in 2024 that his goal was to “overthrow” democracy; Julie Kelly, who was instrumental in starting the January 6th was an inside job conspiracy theory; and Tim Pool who, along with Benny Johnson and Dave Rubin (all right-wing social media influencers), was a well-paid mouthpiece for Tenet Media – an outfit that federal investigators and prosecutors now say was “a $10 million scheme to create and distribute content to U.S. audiences with hidden Russian government messaging” in order to “sow division and trick Americans into unwittingly consuming foreign propaganda” in an “attack on our democracy.” According to the indictment, Dave Rubin received a $100,000 signing bonus, plus $400,000 a month, to produce four videos a week for Tenet’s YouTube channel and Tim Pool was paid $100,000 per video, which he produced weekly. Tim Pool, Dave Rubin and Benny Johnson have said they were unwitting “victims” of the alleged scheme and have not been charged with any crimes.
… but let’s examine Benny Johnson a little closer. One day after President Trump announced he was taking over Washington, D.C.’s police department and activating the National Guard to reduce crime, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt called on Benny first in the press briefing. Saying claims that D.C. was not dangerous were “lies” – and thanking Leavitt for “making this city safe, because no parent should have to go through what my family went through” – Johnson launched into a story about how he had recorded murders on a security camera outside his home and how his “house was set ablaze in an arson.” < On Truth Social, he had gone even further, posting edited footage from the camera, writing: “Here’s a mass shooting and murder in my front lawn, followed by my house being set on fire with my wife and infant child inside.” >
Problem is, The New York Times discovered through records from the D.C. police and fire departments that – although the D.C. police did investigate a shooting on the Johnson’s block in October 2020, where three people were sent to hospitals with “non-life-threatening injuries” – no one has been murdered on that block since 2017… and his home was never on fire.
Truth is clearly not Mr. Johnson’s strong suit. In 2014, he was fired from BuzzFeed News after they found instances of plagiarism in 41 of his articles. While at the Independent Journal Review, a conservative news site, he was accused of plagiarism again three years later, then suspended and demoted after publishing an article that falsely implied that a trip to Hawaii former President Obama had taken was somehow linked to a federal judge’s ruling on President Trump’s first-term travel ban. Later that year, Johnson had to retract an article including social media posts that were falsely attributed to the Antifa movement.
After reviewing Johnson’s YouTube channel, Media Matters – a progressive media watchdog and research center – discovered the channel has a history of pushing election misinformation, bigotry and extreme conspiracy theories. For example, they found that at least 38 videos posted between May and August 2024 pushed election misinformation, receiving a combined 7.6 million+ views.
Johnson’s channel has also claimed – without evidence – that President Joe Biden “believes in child sacrifice;” that “COVID was a woke virus used to take away Donald Trump’s three biggest political weapons;” that the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse in Baltimore was an intentional terror attack; that the 2023 East Palestine, Ohio, train derailment was “leftist ecological and racial terrorism” against an “almost entirely white community;” and that “the modern transgender ideology movement … is now radicalizing activists into terrorists.”
This is a guy Karoline Leavitt sees fit to call on first in White House press briefings? Are you okay with that?
Make no mistake, calling on people like Benny is no mistake … and it’s not like Donald Trump & Co. are even trying to keep their propaganda strategy a secret. A deputy assistant to the president who runs his digital team said that, when it comes to critics, the goal is not to “reframe the narrative” but to completely drown them out, providing “pushback in the harshest, most forceful way possible.” White House communications director Steven Cheung posted on X that their goal is “FULL SPECTRUM DOMINANCE.
There is no question that what we just described is part of the perfectly awful storm we mentioned earlier. But so is this…
On January 23, 2021, Roy Peter Clark – a senior scholar and vice president of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, a nonprofit journalism school that owns the Tampa Bay Times and operates PolitiFact – wrote an article in response to the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol. Actually, he wrote an article about another article written in The Washington Post about the attack on the Capitol.
Naturally, we quickly went to the article he referenced, which was published on January 6th, and found the writing to be – as most Washington Post writing is – masterful. I also found most of the writing in the front-page piece perfectly appropriate: “With poles bearing blue Trump flags, the mob bashed through Capitol doors and windows, forcing their way past police officers unprepared for the onslaught. Lawmakers were evacuated shortly before an armed standoff at the House doors. The woman who was shot by a police officer was rushed to an ambulance, police said, and later died. Canisters of tear gas were fired across the rotunda’s white marble floor, and on the steps outside the building, rioters flew Confederate flags.” No problem here, the journalists were simply reporting exactly what we all saw with our own eyes – nothing more, nothing less (with the possible exception of saying police officers were “unprepared for the onslaught,” which seems a bit more like commentary).
However, in other parts of the article, words used to describe the Capitol attack included “attempted coup,” “saboteurs,” and the phrase “much of it incited by the president’s incendiary language.” Of The Washington Post article, Mr. Clark said, “I am astonished by the way the lead was written, and by an epiphany: Language that pushes the boundaries of traditional neutrality can be used in a responsible news report.”
We could not disagree more with this statement. In all honesty, his words really scare us. It is imperative that news coverage be 100% neutral, with the goal of nothing beyond presenting raw, vetted facts. The reader must then be trusted to make an independent, informed decision based on facts and facts alone. Please believe us when we say this is not a thread we should pull on.
The words/phrases “attempted coup,” “saboteurs,” and “much of it incited by the president’s incendiary language” do not belong in a Washington Post front-page news story, at least not on the very day of the event when emotions are high, information is still being gathered, and investigations hadn’t even started. At that early juncture, they belong in its opinions and editorials section – if even there.
Unfortunately, this very thing has happened A LOT since Donald Trump came down that escalator in Trump Tower. From the beginning, many journalists have fallen right into his trap, chasing every distraction he throws down and giving him the oxygen he so desperately craves. During his first term especially, some in the media seemed to calculate that, since Donald Trump was such a “danger” to this country, they had the responsibility to fight back with anything and everything they had at their disposal – even if it meant sacrificing a few basic journalism rules here and there. Hey, desperate times call for desperate measures, right?
Wrong. That’s nothing more than misguided justification. Two wrongs do not make a right.
In his article, Mr. Clark also referenced another author, Samuel Hayakawa, who wrote Language in Thought and Action. In this seminal book, Hayakawa argues that reporters should avoid “loaded” language and always understand that it is not their job to declare something good or bad. Hayakawa warns that straightforward reporting is the only remedy for malicious propaganda which, around the time of his writing, had been widely disseminated by the Nazis.
He is so right. The only thing more dangerous than brazen lies told by a destructive leader is overcompensation – somehow convincing oneself that the actions of this person are so terrible that it gives everyone else permission to abandon their own moral principles.
This part of the perfectly awful storm is a MAJOR problem, especially on cable news. One of our favorite things to do is switch back and forth between MSNBC (which recently changed to MS NOW) and Fox News when big news stories break. Based on this unscientific experiment, we can personally attest to the fact that, depending on the cable news channel they watch, Americans are living on two completely different planets. The last thing we need is for this phenomenon to spread beyond cable.
Let’s use Fox News as an example because we know for a fact they blatantly mislead and manipulated their audience for years. The hundreds of thousands of pages of internal emails, texts, and other communications that Fox News was forced to provide during the defamation lawsuit brought against them by Dominion Voting Systems proves this beyond a shadow of a doubt.
In the years before the 2020 election, then chairman and CEO of Fox News Roger Ailes and its owner Rupert Murdoch had an uncanny read on what Fox’s audience wanted to hear and worked tirelessly to give them what they wanted, irrespective of journalistic integrity. But after the election, it became clear there was a high cost to doing business this way. In the process of providing its viewers exactly what they wanted to hear for all those years, Fox inadvertently handed all editorial decisions to them, essentially letting the tail wag the dog.
This business model worked fine when the stakes were relatively low, but in the weeks after the 2020 election – when the stakes couldn’t have been higher – Fox’s chickens came home to roost. Rupert Murdoch and Fox News had a choice to make: Should they stick to reporting the truth and risk losing some of their audience to new players like Newsmax, or follow some of their audience down a rabbit hole of election lies and conspiracy theories?
They made the wrong choice. As Fox host s#@# stirrers and executives from the top down privately scoffed at – and denounced – the election fraud claims being made by Donald Trump and his clown show surrogates, their airwaves shamelessly perpetuated falsehoods and conspiracy theories for nothing more than ratings.
We hope these people have done some serious soul searching since then. What good are high ratings when you sell your country out? What exactly is the price for your soul?
Thankfully for us but unfortunately for them, Fox News’ insidious and duplicitous behavior was all revealed in black and white thanks to the Dominion lawsuit. God bless you, Dominion! You did your country a tremendous service.