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      BBC accuses White House of misrepresenting fatal Gaza attack report

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      The BBC has defended its reporting on the war in Gaza and accused the White House of misrepresenting its journalism after Donald Trump’s administration criticised its coverage of a fatal attack near a US-backed aid distribution site.Senior BBC journalists said the White House was political point-scoring after Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, accused the corporation of taking “the word of Hamas with total truth”. She also falsely claimed that the BBC had removed a story about the incident.Leavitt launched her attack on the BBC after being asked about reports that Israeli forces opened fire near an aid distribution centre in Rafah. Brandishing a print-out of images taken from the BBC’s website, she accused the corporation of having to “correct and take down” its story about the fatalities and injuries involved in the attack.The Hamas-run health ministry had said at least 31 people were killed in the gunfire. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) later said at least 21 Palestinians were killed by IDF troops.In a briefing on Tuesday, Leavitt said: “The administration is aware of those reports and we are currently looking into the veracity of them because, unfortunately, unlike some in the media, we don’t take the word of Hamas with total truth. We like to look into it when they speak, unlike the BBC.“And then, oh, wait, they had to correct and take down their entire story, saying: ‘We reviewed the footage and couldn’t find any evidence of anything.’”The BBC swiftly issued a robust statement. It said that casualty numbers were updated throughout the day from multiple sources, as is the case of any incident of the kind in a chaotic war zone. It also clarified that the accusation from Leavitt that the BBC had removed a story was false.“The claim the BBC took down a story after reviewing footage is completely wrong,” it said. “We did not remove any story and we stand by our journalism.View image in fullscreen“Our news stories and headlines about Sunday’s aid distribution centre incident were updated throughout the day with the latest fatality figures as they came in from various sources … This is totally normal practice on any fast-moving news story.”It said the White House had conflated that incident with a “completely separate” report by BBC Verify, the corporation’s factchecking team, which found a viral video posted on social media was not linked to the aid distribution centre it claimed to show. “This video did not run on BBC news channels and had not informed our reporting,” it said. “Conflating these two stories is simply misleading.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe BBC called on the White House to join forces with its calls for “immediate access” to Gaza. International journalists are prevented from entering by Israel.Jonathan Munro, the deputy director of the BBC News, said the claims were wrong, adding: “It’s important that accurate journalism is respected, and that governments call for free access to Gaza.”Jeremy Bowen, the corporation’s international editor, accused the White House of launching a political attack. “To be quite frank, the Trump administration does not have a good record when it comes to telling the truth itself,” he said. “She’s making a political point, basically.“Israel doesn’t let us in because it’s doing things there, clearly I think, that they don’t want us to see otherwise they would allow free reporting.“I’ve reported on wars for the best part of 40 years. I’ve reported on more than 20 wars. And I’m telling you, even when you get full access, it is really difficult to report them. When you can’t get in, it’s even harder.” More

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      NPR sues Trump administration over funding cuts it says violate first amendment

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      National Public Radio, the US public broadcaster that provides news and cultural programming to more than 1,000 local stations, has filed a federal lawsuit against Donald Trump’s administration, challenging an executive order that cuts federal funding to the public broadcaster as an unconstitutional attack on press freedom.The lawsuit, which landed on Tuesday in federal court in Washington, argues that Trump’s 1 May executive order violates the first amendment by targeting NPR for news coverage the president considers “biased”.“The intent could not be more clear – the executive order aims to punish NPR for the content of news and other programming the president dislikes,” NPR’s CEO, Katherine Maher, said in a Tuesday statement. “This is retaliatory, viewpoint-based discrimination in violation of the first amendment.”NPR, which Maher describes as non-partisan news, was joined by three Colorado public radio stations in seeking to have the order permanently blocked and declared unconstitutional.The executive order instructs federal agencies to “cease Federal funding for NPR and PBS” and eliminate indirect sources of public financing. The White House defended the move, claiming NPR and PBS “have fueled partisanship and left-wing propaganda with taxpayer dollars”. The White House cited a few examples it said demonstrated bias, including editorial decisions around coverage of transgender issues, the Hunter Biden laptop story and Covid-19’s origins.Trump’s criticism of public broadcasting notably intensified after a former longtime NPR editor wrote a viral article in the Free Press claiming the organization had become too progressive and left-leaning, with some of the article’s subject matter making it into the executive order as well. Maher herself has also been caught in the crossfire, with past posts about “white silence” in the wake of the George Floyd murder getting spotted on social media, before she was in journalism and ran NPR.The lawsuit describes the order as “textbook retaliation and viewpoint-based discrimination” that threatens “the existence of a public radio system that millions of Americans across the country rely on for vital news and information”.NPR says its funding structure has evolved since its 1970 founding. Today, member station fees comprise 30% of its funding, corporate sponsorship provides 36%, while just 1% comes directly from federal sources. The non-profit media organization now employs hundreds of journalists whose work is broadcast by local stations across the United States – and vice versa puts a national spotlight on local news stories with on-the-ground context and reporting – and is part of the White House press corps.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“NPR has a first amendment right to be free from government attempts to control private speech as well as from retaliation aimed at punishing and chilling protected speech,” Maher said in the statement. More

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      Win a game show, become a US citizen? We’ve entered the realm of the truly depraved | Dave Schilling

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      I guess Republicans really love game shows. Just a few days after Fox aired its “isn’t Trump wild” guessing game, What Did I Miss, it was revealed that the TV producer Rob Worsoff has pitched the United States Department of Homeland Security on a series premise he calls The American, which would give immigrants a chance to compete in a series of challenges for the prize of US citizenship. The actual process of winning citizenship is obviously too boring to film. Filling out an N-400 form? Snore. A written exam? I’d rather watch a dog eat grass. Skip all that and give us an obstacle course instead.People have stupid ideas all the time. My child thought it would be fun to squeeze lemon juice in his hot chocolate. He took one sip, almost barfed on the table, then begged me to order him another, lemon-less beverage. Stupid ideas are great, because most of them are harmless. “Oh, I ate a large bug off the ground. Whoops.” The only stupid ideas that are a problem are the ones where the actual government considers cosigning them. The DHS assistant secretary Tricia McLaughlin was asked by Time magazine what the status of Worsoff’s pitch was and responded via email that it “has not received approval or rejection by staff”.Gotta really think this one through, I guess. Something like this must be thoroughly vetted by serious people. How cruel is this one, exactly? How desirable is the bloodthirsty demo for advertisers these days? Can we sell a presenting sponsorship? And is this for streaming or broadcast? Can we get Chris Hardwick to host? These are all vital questions to consider before making a decision in show business.Such an idea would be eye-rollingly low-class in normal times, but as the Trump administration attempts to ramp up deportations and to do away with the constitutional right of citizenship by birth (and federal courts bravely fight back), this dumb concept travels at warp speed to the dimension of the truly depraved. The US Citizenship and Immigration Services website takes great pains to describe the process of becoming an American as solemn and full of responsibility. Step 10 of the site’s “10 Steps to Naturalization” is “Understanding U.S. Citizenship”. It states: “Citizenship is the common thread that connects all Americans. Check out this list of some of the most important rights and responsibilities that all citizens – both Americans by birth and by choice – should exercise, honor, and respect.”Yes, but what if you had to guess the number of jelly beans in a jar first?To make his pitch even more appealing to the bigwigs in Washington, Worsoff suggested a few choice ideas for challenges that correspond to the most stereotypical aspects of life in America’s 50 states. A pizza-making contest for New York, a rocket-launching challenge for Florida, and a “gold rush challenge” for California. Nothing says “vital skills for living in 2025” like panning for gold in a pair of tattered Levi’s 501s. Perhaps Levi’s will sponsor the segment. Gosh, this thing pays for itself.But why stop there? Maybe a Breaking Bad-themed meth-making challenge for New Mexico. Polygamy challenge for Utah? How efficiently can you operate a turn-of-the-20th-century steel mill in Pennsylvania? Can you safely land a plane at Newark airport? For Washington state, you just have to answer trivia questions about Seattle inaccuracies in the sitcom Frasier. The possibilities for inanity are significant.In order to advance to the next round of this bottomless pit of human misery, contestants would be subjected to a vote, which Worsoff described as “like a presidential election”. Oh, how fun. Can you contest the results of that vote, too? Worsoff said in an CNN interview that his idea is “not like the Hunger Games”. Mostly because the costume budget isn’t as high.The Democratic opposition in Congress has, naturally, lined up to publicly condemn such a grotesque notion. The New York congressman Jerry Nadler said on X (formerly known as a useful platform for conversation) that “human lives are not game show props.”A nice sentiment, but I must be the bearer of bad news. Human lives have been game show props since the invention of the form. In 2005, Fox (why is it always Fox?) aired a reality show called Who’s Your Daddy, where a woman had to guess which of eight men was her real father. If she guessed correctly, she’d win both an awkward conversation and $100,000. Presumably the cash prize would go directly to her therapy bills. Bravo’s Real Housewives franchise, while not a game show (the real winners are the viewers, I suppose) is a reality universe where women frequently abuse alcohol to the detriment of their own lives and the lives of others around them. If human lives are not props in these shows, are they even entertaining to the masses?An idea like The American, then, is the natural extension of the genre, taking someone’s desperation, fear, and overwhelming desire and squeezing all the drama possible out of it. Worsoff told CNN that he had pitched this idea to previous Democratic administrations, but weirdly, we never heard about it back then. It’s only now that such a concept feels enough in line with the zeitgeist of immigration paranoia that Worsoff felt emboldened to speak freely about it.He said: “I’m putting a face to immigration. This is a great celebration of America.” Yes, it is a celebration of America. Specifically our worst impulses: the desire to make everything a game and revel in the bread-and-circuses spectacle of life and death, but to cloak it in nobility and charity. Worsoff continued: “I’m very fortunate and lucky and honored to be an American. And I want everybody to understand the process.”At no point did I think that a pizza-making contest was part of the process.

      Dave Schilling is a Los Angeles-based writer and humorist More

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      in Elections

      CBS News President to Depart Amid Network’s Tensions With Trump

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      Wendy McMahon, the president of CBS News and Stations, had allied herself with Bill Owens, the “60 Minutes” executive producer who recently resigned.CBS News faced another shock wave on Monday after its president, Wendy McMahon, abruptly said that she would exit her post, the latest development in an ongoing showdown between the news division and President Trump.Ms. McMahon, whose full title was president of CBS News and Stations, said in a memo that “it’s become clear the company and I do not agree on the path forward.”Tensions between Ms. McMahon and CBS’s parent company, Paramount, have simmered for months, a period that Ms. McMahon described in her memo as “challenging.”Paramount is in talks to settle a $20 billion lawsuit brought by Mr. Trump that accused “60 Minutes” of deceptively editing an interview last year with his Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris. Many legal experts have called the suit baseless, but Paramount’s controlling shareholder, Shari Redstone, has said she favors settling the case. She is seeking the Trump administration’s approval for a multibillion-dollar sale of her company to a Hollywood studio, Skydance.The situation prompted the executive producer of “60 Minutes,” Bill Owens, to resign last month, saying he no longer enjoyed his usual journalistic independence. At the time, Ms. McMahon took pains to signal her support for Mr. Owens, saying that “standing behind” the producer “was an easy decision for me.”Her embrace of Mr. Owens and “60 Minutes” put Ms. McMahon at odds with Paramount executives who were anxious about the show’s reporting about the Trump administration. Within CBS News, some journalists expected Ms. McMahon to be gone within months. But the timing of her announcement, less than 24 hours after Sunday’s season finale of “60 Minutes,” still raised eyebrows.Ms. McMahon’s tenure atop CBS News, which she took over in August 2023, has been rocky at times.An overhaul of “CBS Evening News,” introduced earlier this year, has failed to connect with viewers, and ratings for the flagship newscast have fallen sharply. Besides the tussle with Mr. Trump, the news division also faced internal criticism from Ms. Redstone over a “60 Minutes” segment in January about the war between Israel and Hamas.And Ms. Redstone openly criticized Ms. McMahon’s handling of an October incident involving the “CBS Mornings” anchor Tony Dokoupil, who in an interview had challenged the author Ta-Nehisi Coates’s views about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.CBS News executives rebuked Mr. Dokoupil on a newsroom-wide call, saying his interview fell short of editorial standards. Ms. Redstone said that move was “a mistake” and that Mr. Dokoupil “did a great job with that interview.” More

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      Megyn Kelly puts Trump clash behind her to ride the Maga media wave

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      It was the night before a US presidential election that Donald Trump had called the most important in history. Who could close the deal at his campaign rally in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania? The answer was Megyn Kelly. Trump “will keep the boys out of girls’ sports where they don’t belong”, the rightwinger podcaster said to rapturous applause. “And you know what else? He will look out for our boys, too. Our forgotten boys and our forgotten men.”Turning around and pointing at Trump supporters wearing hard hats, Kelly eulogised guys “who’ve got the calluses on their hands, who work for a living, the beards and the tats, maybe have a beer after work, and don’t want to be judged by people like Oprah and Beyoncé, who will never have to face the consequences of her [Kamala Harris’s] disastrous economic policies. These guys will. He gets it. President Trump gets it. He will not look at our boys like they are second-class citizens.”It was a remarkable intervention by a former cable news anchor whom Trump branded “nasty” when they feuded bitterly during his bid for the White House in 2016. Now Kelly and the former president understood their value to one another. Both knew what it is to be at rock bottom but, 24 hours after the Pittsburgh rally, both were celebrating their own unlikely comebacks.Kelly, 54, has become one of the most influential figures in rightwing media. Her eponymous podcast moves with rare dexterity from heavyweight political interviews – such as the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, and director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard – to topics such as Joe Biden’s cognitive decline to celebrity gossip about the likes of Halle Berry, Sean “Diddy” Combs, Meghan Markle and the Kardashians.Clearly the formula works. The Megyn Kelly Show posted a record-breaking 176% year-over-year surge in subscribers in the first quarter of 2025, according to TheRighting, a media company that tracks rightwing outlets. She trails Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson but has pulled ahead of Bill O’Reilly, Mark Levin, Charlie Kirk, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham and Steve Bannon.This makes her one of the most prominent cheerleaders for Trump and shapers of his Maga (Make America great again) agenda, most especially its hostility to immigrants and transgender rights. Kelly is even emerging as a rival to her former employer Fox News, which dominated the narratives of Trump’s first term in office.Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, said: “Megyn Kelly’s various transformations can make you dizzy if you follow them. The days when she had credibility as a truth-seeker are over, and now she’s strictly in the business of following clicks.“Her campaigning with Trump, including on the last night, confirms what the business model is. She is trying to establish herself as the preferred media outlet for the Maga movement. She is demonstrating that even Fox is now vulnerable and is being picked apart by the podcasters who become the viewer choice.”Kelly started out as a lawyer and has described the environment at her early law firms as having a “kill or be killed” mentality. She transitioned to journalism after being inspired by reporters who were cool under pressure. Raised in a Democratic household, she has said she was “really wasn’t political” when she joined Rupert Murdoch’s conservative Fox News network in 2004.Kelly became a leading prime-time personality and star of the right’s culture wars. But a question to Trump during the 2016 primary debate about his past comments on women provoked him to unleash crude and misogynistic attacks, including: “There was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.”Meanwhile her accusations of unwanted sexual advances by Fox News’s chief executive, Roger Ailes, helped lead to his firing. The difficult environment led Kelly to leave for NBC in 2017. She admits her time there “ended disastrously” after just a year when she created a furore by suggesting that it was fine for white people to wear blackface on Halloween.But like Tucker Carlson and Piers Morgan, Kelly has reinvented herself for the new age of fragmented digital media where tie-wearing authority figures are out and smash-mouth influencers are in. In 2020 she launched a daily podcast then switched to a live radio format in a deal with SiriusXM. A video version streams on YouTube with clips shared on various platforms gaining hundreds of millions of views a month.Frank Luntz, a political and communications consultant and pollster, said: “She had an audience on Fox that was undeniable. She didn’t succeed on network television because that audience is too broad.“Now, once again, she’s gone back to what she’s particularly good at, which is appealing to a segment of the population that wants to hear her explanation for what’s going on in a more detailed and factual fashion than what you might get on cable. It’s the right medium at the right time and she’s the right host.”In a world where newspaper reporters can be frowned upon for expressing an opinion in a tweet, Kelly is unabashed about owning her own bias. “Yes, I’m still a journalist,” she told the New York Times newspaper in March, “but I’m in this new ecosystem where the old rules don’t apply. I’m in this world with, yes, Charlie Kirk and Dan Bongino and Ben Shapiro, but my world is also Joe Rogan and Theo Von.View image in fullscreen“It’s a very large world, and how the consumer receives it is by going on YouTube.com on their television screen, or going to the vertical integrations on Instagram or TikTok and just taking in content. What’s the content that you want to receive? I’m on the list of content creators, and so the fact that I’m also a journalist who breaks news and reports on news is an extra. But what’s most important in my business now is authenticity.”Kelly’s renaissance is impossible to divorce from “owning the libs” mentality of Trump and his Maga movement. She told the New York Times: “It’s one of my core missions in life to defeat wokeism.” Her podcasts have foregrounded anxieties over illegal immigration and transgender children taking part in school sports.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTransgender people are a particular obsession for Kelly. In a 2023 interview she forced Trump on the defensive when she grilled him over whether a man can become a woman. In a Republican primary debate, she caricatured the former New Jersey governor Chris Christie’s stance on gender-affirming care for minors and demanded: “Aren’t you way too out of step on this issue to be the Republican nominee?”And when another Republican candidate, Nikki Haley, said children should not be allowed to transition but those who are 18 and older should “live any way they want to live”, Kelly responded furiously on X: “This is utter bulls***. The WRONG ANSWER & an unnecessary weird pander to the rabid trans lobby. The answer is NO, A MAN CANNOT BECOME A WOMAN.”Ari Drennen, LGBTQ programme director at Media Matters for America, a non-profit watchdog, said: “Megyn Kelly is very good at understanding where her audience is and where they want her to be and that’s part of why she’s been able to be so successful in this new media environment. There’s no doubt that throughout the 2024 presidential campaign she was a voice who was pushing GOP candidates to move further to the right on trans issues.”But Kelly is far from a one-trick pony. She has gained particular traction this year with a topic far from Washington: the rancorous legal battle between the actors Justin Baldoni and Blake Lively stemming from the film It Ends With Us. Media Matters’ research found that between 1 January and 20 March, Kelly mentioned Baldoni or Lively 440 times, an average of more than five times a day.She also interviewed Baldoni’s lawyer in a video that has 10m views on TikTok. Drennan said: “She’s leading the way with this celebrity gossip type stuff that has proven to be fertile ground for a lot of these rightwing creators this year.”Other examples include the Daily Wire alumni Brett Cooper and Candace Owens, Drennan noted. “The right has figured that out much better than the left. I feel like on the left there tends to be more of a separation between the types of podcasts and shows that are covering celebrity gossip and the types of shows that are covering daily stuff that’s happening with the Trump administration.”The right is also cashing in. In February Fox Corp acquired Red Seat Ventures, a production company that manages Kelly and Carlson’s shows. In March Kelly announced plans for her own podcast network, MK Media, another sign of how she is riding the Maga wave and adapting to the evolving media landscape.Dan Cassino, author of Fox News and American Politics and a government and politics professor at Fairleigh Dickinson University in Madison, New Jersey, said: “The economics of cable TV or broadcast TV and the economics of podcasting are very different. Essentially this allows her to be her own boss. The fact that other people have decided she shouldn’t be on TV or can’t attract the audience that would allow her to be on TV any more is irrelevant because you can be profitable at a much lower scale.“Part of this is also a reflection of the realities of media. Nobody has huge audiences any more. The days when you’ve got a 20 share or 30 share are gone and are never going to happen again. Podcasting is not different in type; it’s different in extent.”Meanwhile, after all the years of their chequered relationship, Kelly would not describe herself as a Trump surrogate but is playing that role to great effect. As the president, who has spurned the neocon wing of the Republican party, toured the Gulf region this week, she remarked with bracing candour: “I feel like when I was on Fox News, all we did was cheerlead these wars – and kind of dismiss, or express disdain, for people who had serious questions about them … With the benefit of all this hindsight, that was wrong.”The unholy alliance reminds David Litt, an author and former speechwriter for President Barack Obama, of the old observation that in politics there are no permanent enemies, and no permanent friends, only permanent interests.Litt commented: “The crux of Trump’s argument was I’m a bad guy but you need me in the White House anyway. Nobody could speak to that argument – both Trump’s personal lack of character and, by endorsing him, say we need him anyway – better than Megyn Kelly. He knew that and she knew that. They saw a moment of symbiosis.” More

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      Yes, the media’s Biden coverage was flawed. But its reporting on Trump was far worse | Margaret Sullivan

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      With a new book out about Joe Biden’s failed re-election campaign, a media reckoning is in full swing.It goes something like this: mainstream journalism failed the voters. Reporters were complicit; they didn’t tell us how much the elderly president had declined. They didn’t dig beneath the surface of what Biden aides were doing as they covered up the physical and cognitive decline of the leader of the free world.And some of that is valid, no doubt. Under fire in recent days, CNN’s Jake Tapper, co-author of Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, has even nodded to his own role in downplaying Biden’s increasing frailty.There’s plenty of blame to go around for Biden’s ultimate loss – and the horrors that it brought the whole world in the election of Donald Trump to a second term. Bruce Springsteen laid it out to a concert audience last week as he opened his European tour: “My home, the America I love, that has been a beacon of hope and liberty for 250 years, is currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent and treasonous administration.”As a media critic, I’m always happy to see a good reckoning for the mainstream press.But this one makes me wonder. When is the reckoning coming for the failures to cover Trump effectively?At what point will there be a general acknowledgment and some serious self-scrutiny about the way big media failed to adequately convey what would happen if Trump were elected again?“I have a hard time watching journalists high-five each other over books on [the White House] covering up for Biden,” wrote the political scientist and scholar Norman Ornstein, one of the sanest commentators about politics in recent years.It’s “a diversion from their own deep culpability in Trump’s election”.What would be the elements of this reckoning?Here’s Ornstein again on what the mainstream press wrought with their hubris and their failures.“False equivalence, normalizing the abnormal, treating Trump as no real danger were the norm, not the exception.”From 2015 – when Trump first declared his candidacy for president – right through the 2024 election, the press in general didn’t get across the reality.When the New York Times infamously set the tone in 2016 by vastly overplaying the supposedly shocking scandal of Hillary Clinton’s use of a personal email server, that was only the beginning. But it was a consequential beginning since, even in our fragmented and polarized media system, the Times was then, and is now, still extremely influential.I’ve long believed that Times editors were so dedicated to proving that they could be tough on Candidate Clinton – convinced she would be the president and that Trump was no real threat – that they went way overboard.Was the fault for electing Trump entirely theirs or even the fault of the mainstream media in general led by them? Of course not. But they played a destructive role, one that has never been adequately acknowledged.Then, during Trump’s first term – and especially during the 2024 campaign – the mainstream press constantly normalized the would-be autocrat.The ever-so-apt term “sanewashing” was born to describe what was going on, and the media’s role. Talk about a cover-up. Trump’s rallies were exercises in lunacy, as he spun tales about sharks and Hannibal Lecter, rambling for hours.But the coverage seldom came close to getting across the reality. Instead, we’d hear descriptions about his “freewheeling” style or “brash” approach.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAs for the autocracy in waiting, there were excellent stories about the blueprint for his second term known as Project 2025, but it was far from obvious whether news leaders stopped to ask if voters really understood the stakes. Now we see the Trump administration quite literally enacting that same Project 2025 that he claimed he barely knew anything about.Horserace coverage prevailed, day after day. And then, when Biden’s decline became impossible to ignore – after that earth-shattering presidential debate last June – news organizations changed their tune.For weeks, there was nothing but “hey, Biden is old” coverage, once again failing to put the emphasis where it belonged: on the dangers of a Trump presidency.Heads of news organizations and reporters themselves are fond of distancing themselves from their real mission at times like these: to communicate the reality of an election’s actual stakes. Instead, they talk in lofty terms of merely covering the news, as if their daily decisions about the volume, choice and tone of coverage didn’t matter.It certainly mattered just before the 2016 election, when the entire top of a front page – and many an evening newscast – were given over to the reigniting of the justice department’s investigation of Clinton’s emails.It certainly mattered when influential opinion sections were ceaselessly baying about Biden’s cognitive decline last summer in order to force him out of the race.Despite wishful thinking, there’s no such thing as “just the facts” or complete neutrality, because editorial decisions and reporting choices always matter.What do you investigate? What is the precise wording of that news alert? How prominently do you display that story? Whom do you quote and to whom do you grant anonymity? What photo do you choose? Do you use terms like “straining the bounds of propriety” to describe what looks more like a bribe?So if the media were going to put their thumb on the scale – as they inevitably do – they ought to have done so in defense of democracy, the rule of law and human decency.The failure to do so is playing out in our shattered world, and at a frightening pace.That’s a reckoning we ought to have, but I doubt we ever will.

      Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture More

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      in US Politics

      Trump administration fires nearly 600 contractors at Voice of America

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      The administration of Donald Trump has terminated nearly 600 contractors at Voice of America (VOA), the US-funded international news network known for delivering independent journalism to countries with restricted press freedom.The firings, announced on Thursday, appeared to defy a recent court order requiring the government to preserve strong news operations at VOA. The US president has criticized the news network and accused it of spreading “radical” content.The cuts, announced on Thursday, affected mostly journalists along with some administrative staff and represented more than one-third of VOA’s workforce.Among those dismissed are journalists from authoritarian countries who now face deportation, as their visas are linked to their jobs at VOA.“Today is an incredibly difficult day as USAGM terminates many of our contractors who have devoted themselves to fulfilling VOA’s congressionally-mandated mission to deliver factual, balanced and comprehensive journalism to the world,” journalists with the SaveVOA campaign said in a statement. “Among those affected are J-1 visa holders who will be forced to leave the country within 30 days. Several of these journalists come from countries where they could be arrested or worse because of their reporting for VOA.”The group said the team was considering its next steps and remained “committed to the goal of returning all employees to their positions”.The administration cited “the government’s convenience” as the justification for the firings, taking advantage of the workers’ status as contractors rather than full federal employees.Michael Abramowitz, the director of VOA, called the move “inexplicable” and said he was “heartbroken” in an email to staff obtained by the New York Times. Abramowitz has filed a lawsuit to stop the Trump administration from closing VOA.The notification to employees told terminated staffers that they will be let go as of 30 May and instructed them to return their press credentials, badges and other VOA property by that time, according to the Hill.Kari Lake, a Trump ally and senior adviser at the US Agency for Global Media, which oversees VOA, defended the decision as legally permissible. Lake had previously denounced the agency as “unsalvageable” and accused it of corruption without presenting evidence.The federal building that houses the VOA news outlet in Washington DC was also listed for sale on Thursday.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSenator Jeanne Shaheen, ranking member of the Senate foreign relations committee, issued a statement in response to the firings:“The Trump administration’s gutting of Voice of America threatens access to independent media in places where it is needed most,” the statement reads. “It deeply weakens a critical and cost-effective tool of American influence and soft power. If Voice of America is silenced, PRC and Russian propaganda and lies will fill the void. To add more fuel to the fire, Kari Lake’s recent announcement that the Voice of America will now become a conduit for One America News Network is a gift to Russia and propagandists everywhere.”She added: “Firing respected independent journalists and employees is as strategically shortsighted as it is heartless. The Trump administration’s efforts to gut and de-fund independent media will only harm the United States in the long run.”The firings are the latest in a string of moves by the Trump administration targeting independent news organizations. The Federal Communications Commission, led by Trump appointee and the Project 2025 author Brendan Carr, has ordered investigations into NPR and PBS. Trump is also in an ongoing legal battle with 60 Minutes and CBS, and his administration previously barred the Associated Press from the Oval Office. More

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      in Elections

      Trump Administration Fires Hundreds of Voice of America Employees

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      The layoffs amounted to over a third of the media organization’s staff, and came as the Trump administration put up for sale the federal building in Washington that houses the network.The Trump administration on Thursday fired nearly 600 employees at Voice of America, a federally funded news network that provides independent reporting to countries with limited press freedoms.The layoffs targeted contractors, most of them journalists but also some administrative employees, and amounted to over a third of Voice of America’s staff. They signaled that the Trump administration planned to continue its efforts to dismantle the broadcaster despite a court ruling last month that ordered the federal government to maintain robust news programming at the network, which President Trump has called “the voice of radical America.”In another sign of the Trump administration’s hostility toward the broadcaster, the federal building in Washington that houses the media organization was put up for sale on Thursday.Michael Abramowitz, the director of Voice of America, said in an email to his staff on Thursday that the firings were “inexplicable.”“I am heartbroken,” he said. Mr. Abramowitz has sued to stop the Trump administration from closing the news organization.Kari Lake, a senior adviser at the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which oversees Voice of America, said that the Trump administration had acted within its legal authority.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More