Tag: media bias

Microsoft Promotes Media Literacy as ‘Inoculation’ Against ‘Disinformation’

Foundation for Freedom Online

Microsoft has staked a claim in the growing field of “media literacy” and “digital literacy,” which aims to instruct members of the public – especially schoolchildren – in what types of digital media they ought to trust and distrust. As FFO has previously reported, media and digital literacy is the latest in a long string of pretexts by the ideologically biased censorship industry to prevent the public from accessing disfavored information sources.

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Center for Countering Digital Hate: Ending ‘Disinformation’ While Taking Aim at Musk, Conservatives

Just the News

On Nov. 4, one day prior to the 2024 presidential election, a headline on the increasingly left-leaning news aggregating site The Drudge Report screamed: “Misleading claims have been viewed more than 2 billion times on X.”

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North Dakota U.S. Sen. Kevin Cramer Demands Answers from Corporate Media Networks Over ‘Biased’ 2024 Election Coverage

Daily Caller News Foundation
Donald Trump

North Dakota Republican Sen. Kevin Cramer demanded in a Thursday letter that corporate media networks answer for their “biased” coverage of the presidential election.

The Republican’s letter, obtained exclusively by the Daily Caller News Foundation, was addressed to top network executives at Fox, CBS, Disney and NBCUniversal. Cramer’s letter called out the networks for biased coverage of President-elect Donald Trump.

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NY Times Stealth Edits Column Suggesting J.D. Vance Is a Literal Fascist After Receiving Heavy Criticism

Daily Caller News Foundation
JD Vance

The New York Times quietly changed the headline of a Saturday column linking Republican Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance to a Nazi slogan.

NYT opinion columnist Jamelle Bouie headlined his column “JD Vance’s Blood-and-Soil Nationalism Finds Its Target,” referencing a Nazi slogan to suggest that Vance’s comments about the Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, and other past rhetoric, demonstrate the Republican vice presidential candidate is a racist who should “immediately” resign his office to atone for his “ethical transgressions.” Later Saturday, after receiving heavy criticism, the Times updated the piece’s headline to read, “Shouldn’t JD Vance Represent All of Ohio?” and decided against including an editor’s note to bring attention to the change.

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Media Blame Climate Change for Soaring Insurance Rates, but Data Doesn’t Support Narrative

Just the News
A tornado touchdown in a neighborhood

Homeowners across the U.S. are seeing skyrocketing insurance rates, increased deductibles, excluded protections, and canceled policies.

Insurers say that they’re having to adjust to changing conditions to remain profitable. Among the problems they blame is inflation, rising construction costs, and costs associated with regulatory compliance. But many insurers are also blaming climate change for driving extreme weather events and increasing losses, and much of the media coverage is zooming in on this narrative.

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Media Outlets Are Misrepresenting Crime Stats to Biden’s Benefit

Minnesota Sun Staff
Joe Biden with police car in background (composite image)

Two of the federal government’s methods of measuring crime tell two different stories, complicating recent claims from the media and President Joe Biden that crime is declining.

Numerous media outlets have, in recent months, run headlines suggesting that crime is declining across the country. The statistics they’re citing, however, don’t tell the entire story.

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Bill Ackman on Washington Post Hit Piece: ‘The Public Has Been Again Misled’

Michael Patrick Leahy

Bill Ackman, the highly successful investor and Harvard graduate whose criticism of Claudine Gay’s history of plagiarism led to her resignation as President of Harvard University, published a lengthy tweet on his X account Saturday evening responding to an article about him published by The Washington Post earlier in the day, “How a liberal billionaire became America’s leading anti-DEI crusader.”

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Big Tech-Backed Group Tries to Kill California Bill Because It Could Help Conservative Media

Minnesota Sun Staff

The Chamber of Progress, a tech industry coalition backed by companies such as Google and Meta, released statements and a study arguing against the California Journalism Preservation Act (CJPA), stating it would primarily benefit conservative media outlets.

The California Assembly passed the CJPA on Thursday, a bill that compels companies like Google and Meta to pay publications for news links they post on their platforms, which would disproportionately enrich “disinformation giants like Fox News and the New York Post,” according to the Chamber of Progress. The coalition lists Google and Meta as corporate partners on its website and the Chamber of Progress’s founder and CEO, Adam Kovacevich, formerly headed Google’s U.S. policy strategy and external affairs team, according to its website. 

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Blackout on Biden Corruption Allegations ‘Markings of a State Media,’ Top Law Professor Says

Just the News

The establishment media blackout on corruption within the Biden family is the sign of a state-run media even as stories on the issue could easily win journalism awards, George Washington University Law Professor Jonathan Turley says.

Congressional Republicans unveiled evidence last week that nine members of the first family were allegedly receiving funds from figures in multiple foreign countries, but “the media is insisting that this is no scandal because there is not directly proof of payments to Joe Biden,” Turley wrote in an opinion article Friday for The Hill.

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Harlan Crow Refutes Accusations, Speaks Out on Clarence Thomas Attacks: ‘Political Hit Job’

Minnesota Sun Staff

Harlan Crow said media reports on his friendship with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas are “factually incorrect” and part of a “political hit job” in an interview Monday with The Dallas Morning News.

Crow said it’s possible for people to simply be friends without having an “angle” and slammed the media for attempting to spin his friendship with Thomas into something it’s not. “I think that the media, and this ProPublica group in particular, funded by leftists, has an agenda to destabilize the [Supreme] Court,” Crow told The Dallas Morning News.

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Commentary: The Problematic Rise of ‘Media Literacy Education’

RealClearWire

New Jersey is enlisting public-school teachers and librarians to show children how to combat what it calls the grave threat of disinformation.

“Our democracy remains under sustained attack through the proliferation of disinformation,” Gov. Phil Murphy said in signing the nation’s first law mandating “information literacy” instruction for all K-12 students. The law, which aims to provide students with the “critical thinking” skills necessary to differentiate between “facts, points of view, and opinions” will, Murphy proclaimed, ensure “that our kids … possess the skills needed to discern fact from fiction.”

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Commentary: Even Corporate Media Is Calling Out Biden’s Absurd Economic Fairytales

Minnesota Sun Staff

With only days left until the midterm elections, the advertising blitz from the political spin doctors has reached a fever pitch and the sound bites we’re hearing aren’t very sound, especially the ones from the White House on the economy. But heated rhetoric is hardly a replacement for facts and figures so, to borrow a phrase from the show Dragnet, let’s discuss “just the facts, ma’am.”

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‘They’re Complicit in All This’: Ron Johnson Slams Media for ‘Covering Up for the Democrats’

Minnesota Sun Staff

Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin mauled media outlets for “covering up for the Democrats” during an appearance on “Sunday Morning Futures.”

“As corrupt as the Biden family is, and we’ve known this literally for years, the news media has, Sen. Grassley and I have, but what may be even more troubling is the corruption within federal law enforcement and inside a corrupt, complicit and dishonest media,” Johnson told host Maria Bartiromo.

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Fed-Backed Censorship Machine Targeted 20 News Sites: Report

Just the News

The private consortium that reported election “misinformation” to tech platforms during the 2020 election season, in “consultation” with federal agencies, targeted several news organizations in its dragnet.

Websites for Just the News, New York Post, Fox News, Washington Examiner, Washington Times, Epoch Times and Breitbart were identified among the 20 “most prominent domains across election integrity incidents” that were cited in tweets flagged by the Election Integrity Partnership and its collaborators.

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Minnesota U.S. Senator Klobuchar Tables ‘Media Cartel’ Bill After Cruz Adds Anti-Censorship Amendment

Minnesota Sun Staff

Sen. Amy Klobuchar has temporarily tabled a bill allowing journalists to negotiate with Big Tech companies on the distribution of their content after Sen. Ted Cruz added an anti-censorship amendment.

The Journalism Competition and Preservation Act of 2021 (JCPA), first introduced by Klobuchar in March of last year, “creates a four-year safe harbor from antitrust laws for print, broadcast, or digital news companies to collectively negotiate with online content distributors (e.g., social media companies) regarding the terms on which the news companies’ content may be distributed by online content distributors.”

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MSNBC Contributor, Ex-Spy Chief Hint Trump Deserves Execution over Classified Records Dispute

Admin

Amid published reports that former President Trump is improperly holding classified papers, including nuclear documents, at his Florida compound, MSNBC contributor Michael Beschloss and former CIA Director Michael Hayden are intimating via social media that Trump should be executed.

The Washington Post has reported that the FBI raided Trump’s Mar-a-Lago compound on Monday in order to retrieve “nuclear documents” they believed were improperly stored there.

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Commentary: The Evolving Style Sheets of Big Media Institutionalize Political Bias

Admin

Many publications provide their writers with “style sheets,” a list of dos and don’ts with respect to things like diction, punctuation, grammar, and linguistic etiquette. My personal list of “dos” includes the Oxford comma (apples, oranges, and pears: that last comma is requisite) and, in most cases, using the singular masculine pronoun after collective nouns like “everyone” and “someone” (e.g., “Everyone likes to have his [not ‘their’] own way”).

Style sheet prescriptions (and proscriptions) can be more elaborate, and can affect substantive as well as stylistic matters. Over the last year or so, I have noticed an innovation, at once stylistic and substantive, that has taken root throughout the regime media. It is this: whenever referring to Donald Trump and the 2020 presidential election, be sure to insert editorial comments to the effect that any concerns about the fairness of that election are “baseless” or the result of “lies.”

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Victor Davis Hanson Commentary: The Exasperated American

Minnesota Sun Staff

A large majority of Americans now have no confidence in Joe Biden and his administration, which often polls below 40 percent, with negatives nearing 60 percent.

Despite the 15-month catastrophe of his regime, the level of his own unpopularity remains understandable but still remarkable. After all, in 2020 voters already knew well of his cognitive deficits and the radicalism of his agenda. They saw both clearly starting in 2019 and during the 2020 Democratic primaries, the primary debates, and the general election.

So what did Biden’s voters imagine would happen when a cognitively challenged president, controlled by hard-Left subordinates, entered office — other than what he has done?

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Free Speech Criticism Has Unlikely Source: The Press

Minnesota Sun Staff

When the far-right website Infowars was banned by all the major tech platforms in 2018, mainstream media outlets didn’t come to the defense of founder Alex Jones, whom they described as a conspiracy theorist.

Two years later, the same outlets had a similar non-response when Big Tech imposed another media ban — this one on the New York Post, one of America’s oldest and most well-established newspapers.

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Report: Mother’s Death Chicago Teachers’ Union Claimed Was Due to COVID-19 Was from Alcoholism

Susan Berry, PhD

A Cook County Medical Examiner’s toxicology report states a parent the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) claimed died due to the spread of COVID-19 from the classroom to her home, actually died from chronic alcoholism.

Chicago City Wire said it obtained the report from the medical examiner that stated Denisha Henry, 32, died in September at Stroger Hospital in Chicago of “chronic ethanolism.”

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Media Wage Harassment Campaign Against Freedom Convoy Donors Doxxed In GiveSendGo Hack

Minnesota Sun Staff

Media outlets are continuing to message small-dollar donors to the Freedom Convoy whose identities were leaked to the public after a hack of crowdfunding site GiveSendGo.

The personal information of roughly 90,000 donors to the Freedom Convoy, a group of truckers and hackers protesting Canada’s vaccine mandates and COVID-19 restrictions, was leaked after hackers breached GiveSendGo late Sunday. The leaked data included names, email handles, IP addresses and zip codes, and was provided to “journalists and researchers” by Distributed Denial of Secrets, an activist group hosting the information.

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‘Mutually Beneficial’: Major News Outlet Expands Climate Change Reporting Funded by Left-Wing Activist Groups

Minnesota Sun Staff

The Associated Press announced Tuesday that it had secured funding from several progressive interest groups to hire two dozen climate change reporters.

The outlet referred to the groups’ funding as “philanthropic grants” and promised that the groups wouldn’t have any editorial control over the climate change content published, according to an announcement. But the five organizations — the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Rockefeller Foundation, Quadrivium and the Walton Family Foundation — are well known for pushing a variety of left-wing causes and funding Democratic political campaigns.

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Commentary: CNN and the Future of ‘Fake News’

Minnesota Sun Staff

CNN is dying. Its president, Jeff Zucker, was just fired. (Or, rather, he “resigned.”) The network’s viewership is plummeting, and fewer than 500,000 people on average tuned in last month. Advertisers don’t send their dollars there much anymore, and the “stars” the network once had either have been removed for cause or caught up in sex or other scandals.

Chris “Fredo” Cuomo threatened to burn the place down after getting fired last year. Why does the parent company—AT&T, a telephone megacompany—put up with it? CNN is a drag on the parent company’s earnings, a thorn in its side, and a hit on its reputation. Wouldn’t a rational actor cancel the network altogether or sell it off and be done with it? With $150 billion in debt, no wonder AT&T decided to sell the ailing network to the Discovery Network. AT&T will no doubt benefit from getting out of politics.

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Commentary: The Plot to Sabotage Trump

Admin

This was the CNN headline as written by Jake Tapper: “Former Trump administration officials hold call to strategize against former boss’ efforts in 2022 and 2024”

This was the headline from London’s Daily Mail: “More than 30 former Trump officials hold secret call aimed at working against the former president’s efforts to sway 2022 midterms and 2024 presidential election”

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America Ranks Last in Public Trust for Its News Media, Report Finds

Minnesota Sun Staff

A survey released Tuesday ranked the United States last among 46 countries in media trust, falling below democracies and autocracies across the world.

The survey, commissioned by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, was conducted among 92,000 people worldwide, and found that among those in the U.S., just 29% said they trusted their news media the majority of the time. Finland ranked the highest at 65%, while Slovakia, Hungary and France each ranked just above the U.S. at 30%.

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Commentary: President Biden’s First Press Conference in Less than 600 Words

Minnesota Sun Staff

There is absolutely no crisis at the southern border, and Trump caused it. Also Trump wanted small children to die at the border. I don’t. That’s just another reason people say I’m a good person.

Despite what you’ve heard, there is no surge of immigration. There’s just springtime, man. The fact that we need to open up military facilities to house this influx, well, that just shows what a fine job we are doing correcting Trump’s problems.

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FAKE NEWS: CNN Botches Story About Virginia Man Arrested at Police Checkpoint in Washington D.C.

Minnesota Sun Staff

Virginia man who was arrested at a police checkpoint in Washington D.C. over the weekend, has been released from custody following a brief court appearance.

Although initial news reports hyped the story, investigators said they do not consider Wesley Beeler, a security contractor who was working in the area, to be a threat to public safety.

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Jake Tapper on White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany: She ‘Lies the Way that Most People Breathe’

Admin

CNN anchor Jake Tapper said Sunday that he wouldn’t put White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany on air because she “lies the way that most people breathe.”

Tapper told CNN’s Brian Stelter that throughout President Donald Trump’s term, “you had to steel yourself for interviews with people that might misrepresent the facts.” The CNN anchor said that “once somebody proved themselves to be a liar, I just stopped booking them.”

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Commentary: Between Narrative and Reality, Which Will Prevail?

Minnesota Sun Staff

by Roger Kimball   Oscar Wilde was such a card. Sitting for his viva voce examination in Greek, he was given a passage to translate from one of the Passion stories in the New Testament. He started in and was barreling along fluently. At some point, one of the examiners interrupted,…

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Commentary: Fox News and the Theft of the 2020 Presidential Election

Minnesota Sun Staff

Fact check:  Joe Biden is not the President elect.  This will come as a horrible shock to Fox News and the other left-wing media.  A candidate becomes President Elect when either the other candidate concedes, or the Electoral College meets and votes that candidate into the Presidency.

Of course, Fox News’ biggest concern right now is probably not who has won the election.  Perhaps one day, business students will read case studies on how Fox News destroyed its brand overnight. 

One thing conservatives noticed early in the evening of November 3, was that Fox was calling states for Biden almost immediately, but Trump states were not called nearly as fast.  One of the biggest questions of that night, is why did Fox call Arizona for Biden immediately after the polls closed?

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Chris Butler Commentary: Conservatives Don’t Want an Echo Chamber, They Just Want Big Media to Do Their Jobs

Chris Butler

Big Media must challenge and address their own confirmation biases about conservatives and about Trump voters first, before they lecture Trump voters about their beliefs.

The illusion is over. Before Donald Trump came along Big Media always teetered close to the edge of the line with their biases, but after 2016 they crossed that line and they pushed forward. Just this week many people believed that CNN’s Jake Tapper threatened Trump voters for not accepting, per the media, that Joe Biden is president-elect. Also last week, Anderson Cooper, also of CNN, described Trump as an “obese turtle.”

People in Big Media may not know any Trump voters. People in Big Media may not count any Trump voters among their list of friends.

But I know Trump voters — and they are irate.

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Commentary: Six Days Later, Fox News Still Hasn’t Corrected its ‘Bad’ Call on the House

Minnesota Sun Staff

Despite what Fox News might think, this election – as it drags ever closer to unreality – is not decided by Fox News. 

On Election Night, Fox News Channel’s decision desk “called the House,” saying Democrats would gain five seats. This happened while Californians were still voting. Why does that matter? Because there are four districts in California that Democrats won from Republicans in 2018 and which Republicans were trying to retake. They are likely to win at least three of them. 

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Commentary: The Establishment Media Is Ignoring What Just Happened In Iran, But We Won’t

Minnesota Sun Staff

While the establishment media have studiously ignored reporting the story, the social media accounts of Middle East and national security experts have been abuzz with questions and information on the huge explosion or explosions that recently rocked a site believed to house one of Iran’s nuclear weapons facilities – the facilities that Obama and the Iranians claimed do not exist.

Rick Moran writing for our friends at PJ Media reported the explosion happened in the Alborz mountains, just east of Tehran. Satellite photos show the massive extent of the blast. The area of the blast near Iran’s Khojir missile base was identified in 2017 as a nuclear research facility despite Iran’s pledge to reveal all its nuclear infrastructure in the nuclear deal with the West.

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REVIEW: A Bestseller in 1971, ‘None Dare Call It Conspiracy’ Lends Insight to the Events of Today

Minnesota Sun Staff

Does anyone still believe what they read in the New York Times or watch on any major television network news broadcast? Because for millions of Americans, the credibility of those news sources is at an all-time low. The internet hive mind, even in the face of blatant censorship by search engines and social media monopolies, simply offers too many verifiable, alternative facts for establishment media to get away with the kind of lying they do, and yet they persist. Exposed and discredited, they keep on lying, betting that an exhausted populace simply will not verify every single thing they report.

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‘Stunning’: William Barr Hits Establishment Media for ‘Bovine Silence’ on Collapsed Russiagate Narrative

Minnesota Sun Staff

Attorney General William Barr hit the establishment media in an interview aired Sunday for what he called its “bovine silence” regarding the debunked narrative of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian government.

In an interview on “Fox Sunday Futures,” Barr also asserted that the various government investigations into the Trump campaign’s possible ties to Kremlin were the “closest we have come to an organized effort to push a president out of office” since the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

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Commentary: Will Biden Be the Media’s Downfall or Salvation?

Minnesota Sun Staff

If we lived in a fair and just world, most of the current media would simply go away and try something else.

The problem is not that reporters are human and therefore sometimes err. The rub is not even that they are poorly educated or rarely write well.

We also expect officials to leak one-sided stories and then the media to print them without edits. These are all things baked into the media cake and the public understands, even if it does not quite accept them.

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Newspaper Giant McClatchy ‘Taking a Close Look’ at Its Cohen-Prague Reports in Wake of New Evidence

Minnesota Sun Staff

McClatchy news service says it is reviewing two reports published in 2018 that claimed to validate a key part of the infamous Steele dossier after declassified information showed that Russian operatives may have fed disinformation to dossier author Christopher Steele.

“We are taking a close look at this new information and will update or correct our story based on its merits. Until then, we continue to stand by our reporting,” McClatchy said in a statement to The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple.

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Chinese Propaganda Has Infected the U.K.’s Daily Mail Coronavirus Coverage

Minnesota Sun Staff

The Daily Mail, the popular British tabloid widely read in the United States, has published dozens of articles in recent months about coronavirus that were based on stories originating from People’s Daily, the communist party’s official newspaper, and other Chinese propaganda mills.

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Vox Scrubs China Reference from Title of Coronavirus Video

Minnesota Sun Staff

Liberal media outlet Vox removed a reference to China from the title of a video it published about the role that wildlife markets there play in the spread of infectious disease like coronavirus.

Vox’s video, which has more than 18 million views, was initially titled “Why new diseases keep appearing in China.” It is now titled: “How wildlife trade is linked to coronavirus.”

Vox acknowledged the edit in a description of the video on YouTube.

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Commentary: Fake News Media No Longer Even Trying to Hide It

Minnesota Sun Staff

Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan recently opined that journalists should not be preoccupied with objectivity with their reporting as the country enters the “Trump Unbound” era. In doing so, Sullivan bolstered and further legitimized the president’s continued battle against what he calls the “Fake News Media.”

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Project Veritas Records ABC News Staff Vent Frustrations Over Biased Coverage of Trump, Admit Networks Do Not Understand Voters

Jason M. Reynolds

An ABC News correspondent and a news producer were secretly recorded by Project Veritas venting their frustrations over their network’s refusal to cover news that matters to voters and choosing instead to cover rumors about President Donald Trump and the impeachment.

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ANALYSIS: Infanticide Is a Real Issue, Despite Establishment Media Narrative

Minnesota Sun Staff
Baby and Father

Establishment media news outlets insist that Republicans and President Donald Trump falsely emphasize Democratic support for infanticide, but the discussion of infanticide originated with the sitting governor of Virginia — and continues through 2020 presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg’s recent appearance on “The View.”

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Commentary: Schadenfreude Has Never Felt So Good

Minnesota Sun Staff

The impeachment farce will likely conclude this week – and not a minute too soon. For over a week now, my father would call me multiple times a day, in a near panic. He would watch Adam Schiff and his merry gang of Democratic goblins throw out accusation after accusation, and he was certain that the end was near.

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Commentary: Democrats Hoist Their Own Petard

Minnesota Sun Staff

Since at least 2016, CNN has mostly ceased being a news agency, but that hasn’t stopped it from being an active participant in #TheResistance. The network is so caught up in the fervor of this movement that many of its guests and regular hosts have been fired, reprimanded, or apologized for threats to the president or general obscene references (e.g., Reza Aslan, the late Anthony Bourdain, Kathy Griffin).

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