Even when the White House Correspondents’ Dinner goes smoothly, it’s a huge embarrassment to journalists. And in the wake of Saturday’s shooting that interrupted the event, the spectacle of journalists cozying up to politicians is likely to get even worse.

“We’ll do it again within the next 30 days,” Donald Trump said, “and we’ll make it bigger and better and even nicer.”

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Notice that Trump said “we.” He’s not supposed to be in charge of the event – he was a guest of the press – but he will surely use security concerns to big-foot the White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA) and dictate the terms of his return appearance, unless someone has the sense to call the whole thing off.

WHCA President Weijia Jiang of CBS News has been deferential to Trump despite his ongoing campaign to feed the 1st Amendment into a wood-chipper. (See my newsletter from two weeks ago with a sample of Trump’s outrageous attacks on the press.)

As Jiang wrote in a first-person piece published yesterday, she welcomed Trump’s appearance this year because she hoped it would “restore some normalcy between the Trump administration and the press. Maybe I was naïve, but I wanted it to be a room we don’t see enough of in Washington: a bipartisan one.”

Jiang said Trump told her after the shooting, “I saw a room that was just totally unified.” She added: “Unity isn’t a word we hear much these days. But that’s how I felt, too.”

Arrrrrrg. The press isn’t supposed to seek unity with politicians. It’s supposed to seek the truth. That’s easier to accomplish – and to get the public to believe – when you’re not clinking champagne glasses with the people you’re reporting on. Jiang and other WHCA members may have good intentions, but if so, they’re such myopic journalists that they don’t understand the authoritarian threat we face. Or maybe they realize it, but refuse to pass up the opportunity to wear expensive clothes, eat tasty food, and boost their social standing – democracy be damned.

In any case, it appears that the co-stars of Washington’s next buddy movie are Trump and Jiang. At his post-shooting news conference, the president had high praise for the WHCA chief, calling her “madam chairman,” and let her ask the first question.

Plans for a dinner do-over are unclear. Jiang wrote: “Trump insists we are having the dinner again in 30 days. Let’s see.” Some Washington journalists think it would be best not to attempt another dinner this year, but Trump tends to fixate on his stupidest ideas. If the dinner does happen, look for the WHCA and the White House to work in lockstep, billing it as a patriotic gesture – an act of “unity.”

Will the event return to the Washington Hilton or will Trump push for another venue? He was quick to note that the Hilton was “not a particularly secure building” and argued that the shooting showed the need for his beloved ballroom, which he has tried to ram through, despite a legal challenge.

Beyond the arrangements for an “even nicer” makeup dinner, there are more reasons to think Saturday’s gunfire will work to Trump’s advantage with the press.

The gunman’s anti-Trump political views are already being used by the right to depict political terrorism as a left-wing problem, when it’s actually more common on the right. If journalists don’t accept the right’s spin, Trump will accuse them of covering up leftist violence.

Also, I fear the shooting will create a stronger emotional bond between Washington journalists and the people in power. It’s human nature for people who go through a harrowing event together to become closer. Politicians and the press – two groups that have a naturally adversarial role in our society – shared a jarring experience in which they faced a common danger. I’m not saying the shooting is likely to make Trump more empathetic – he’s still Trump, after all – but it might lead to a less aggressive posture by the journalists of the WHCA.

And it’s not as if White House reporters were tough on Trump before the shooting. They frequently treat his comments with wide-eyed gullibility, even though he’s the most prominent public liar of our time. They regularly normalize and sanewash his unhinged behavior.

Journalists have generally avoided pushback as Trump has called them “Piggy,” “ugly,” “nasty,” “stupid,” “slime,” “scum,” “very unpatriotic,” “obnoxious,” “disgusting,” “dishonest,” “disgrace,” “loser,” “sleazebag,” “animals,” “some of the worst human beings you’ll ever meet,” “enemy of the people,” and his all-time favorite, “fake news.”

Lesley Stahl of CBS’s “60 Minutes” once recalled a private conversation in which she asked Trump why he insulted the press.

“You know why I do it?” he said. “I do it to discredit you all and demean you all so that when you write negative stories about me no one will believe you.”

If journalists accept that version of “unity,” we’re doomed.

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This week’s media atrocity

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has played a key role in helping Trump trash America’s global standing, yet Politico cited his “savvy handling of foreign conflicts” in a story last week as if it were an established fact.

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For more than a decade, I’ve struggled with the question of why major media have underreacted to Donald Trump’s fascist movement, normalizing its corruption and cruelty.

Eventually, I came up with the “Three C’s” – cluelessness, cowardice, and complicity.

Some people assume everything journalists do is intentional. But after spending four decades in a newsroom, I know there’s a lot of sloppiness, naiveté, and delusion. So I attributed the failures of some news outlets to cluelessness.

I’m over that now.

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We’re more than a year into Trump’s second term, and no one in the media is so clueless that they can’t see what’s happening. No one can watch videos of masked federal agents executing people in the streets and think this is normal. No one can miss an entire ethnic group being smeared as “garbage” and “low-IQ.” No one can ignore the illegal war with Iran, the attempted takeover of elections or the outrageous pardons for rich people who put money in the Trump family’s pockets.

Journalists – even lazy journalists – can’t miss this authoritarian rot.

It’s not cluelessness anymore. It’s cowardice and complicity. And it’s inexcusable.

THE COMPLICIT

Fox News is practically a de facto arm of the Trump regime, but rivals, including Newsmax and One America News, covet that title. There’s also an army of podcasters promoting fascism. Some made my recent list of the 25 worst people in news media.

Partisan propaganda is one thing, but the media capture of legacy outlets is even more alarming. Jeff Bezos has sacrificed the Washington Post’s credibility in hopes that Trump will spare his other businesses, including Amazon and Blue Origin. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, who joined Bezos on the row of oligarchs at the Trump inauguration, helps disinform the public to placate Trump. And then there’s Elon Musk, who also joined the row of oligarchs and uses his X social media platform to spread white supremacist lies.

Meanwhile, the pro-Trump Ellison family has acquired CBS News and trashed its reputation. With Trump’s help, the Ellisons are a new investor in TikTok and appear on track to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns CNN.

The Trump regime also thinks it can benefit from consolidation of local TV. The Nexstar chain seeks to acquire Tegna’s stations, a move that would extend its reach over roughly 80% of the country. Achieving that big a footprint would require a change in federal rules, but Trump likes the idea, no doubt pleased by the rightward leanings of Nexstar’s NewsNation channel. It’s not a done deal, however, since last week, a federal judge ruled against it. Nexstar, of course, plans to appeal.

THE COWARDLY

Other major outlets have not thrown in with Trump, but they haven’t thrown in with democracy either. They’re protecting their profits instead of protecting our way of life.

ABC, for example, agreed to a $15 million settlement with Trump in a lawsuit it could have won. It was a shakedown scheme, and they submitted. ABC was also willing to take Jimmy Kimmel’s show off the air at the slightest application of pressure, but then reversed that decision when it proved financially inconvenient for its parent, Disney.

NBC isn’t as bad, but has avoided the confrontation with autocracy that this moment demands. CNN, meanwhile, has claimed a bizarre middle ground where it reports on Trump’s abuses, but also pays contributor Scott Jennings to lie in Trump’s defense.

Then there’s the White House Correspondents’ Association, which seems to live in fear that its members will lose their cool gigs and therefore is willing to host Trump as the guest of honor at its dinner Saturday.

The New York Times may think it’s boldly confronting Trump’s fascism, but it’s not. It reports piecemeal on Trump’s outrageous conduct, but has yet to write a loud, sweeping story with a headline like “Trump Is Dismantling Democracy.” Such a headline would be easy to support with facts that the NYT and other major media report in isolation every day. They’re simply afraid to hit the total button. I’m not sure NYT’s editors fear Trump. They may instead be afraid of coming across as an adversary when they’d rather watch the disaster from the sidelines.

In any case, when news outlets see a dictatorship forming and refuse to sound the alarm, they are cowards.

THE THIRD “C”: THE COURAGEOUS

A few mainstream outlets tell the ugly truth. MS NOW has energetically highlighted Trump’s authoritarianism, with reporter Jacob Soboroff taking a leading role on immigration, detailing the Department of Homeland Security’s abuses.

The U.S. mainstream media do such a poor job overall that one of the most reliable outlets on American politics is the Guardian, based in the United Kingdom. Other shining lights include Democracy Now, ProPublica, and The New Republic. The Associated Press often writes more truth-telling headlines and stories than other mainstream outlets, but occasionally slips up.

The Guardian, Democracy Now, ProPublica, the New Republic, and the AP are free, but welcome donations. Same for the outfit that sponsors this newsletter –COURIER – free to the public, but in need of your support.

Energetic outlets tracking right-wing propaganda include Media Matters for America, Status, and the Media and Democracy Project.

Individual voices that deserve your support include Greg Sargent, Margaret Sullivan, Radley Balko, Jamelle Bouie, Heather Cox Richardson, Jen Rubin, Rex Huppke, Steven Beschloss, Dan Froomkin, James Fallows, Jennifer Schulze, Edwin Eisendrath, Jamison Foser, Nina Burleigh, Brian Beutler, Will Bunch, Jeff Jarvis, and Elie Mystal.

It’s obvious that Republicans are trying to end democracy and establish a dictatorship. News media that don’t tell you that are failing you.

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This week’s media atrocity

A CBS headline on Friday declared: “Trump says Iranians have ‘agreed to everything,’ including removal of enriched uranium.” It wasn’t wrong. Trump did say those things. But the story’s sixth paragraph noted that Iran denied Trump’s claims. Why wasn’t that in the headline? CBS couldn't possibly have thought Iran would concede without further face-to-face talks. Soon after, Iran re-imposed restrictions in the Strait of Hormuz. That’s not cluelessness on CBS’ part. That’s complicity.

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The White House Correspondents’ Dinner is shaping up as one of those rubber chicken types of events.

But when I say “rubber chicken,” I’m not talking about what’s on the dinner plates. I’m talking about journalists with rubbery ethics showing themselves to be chickens by partying with a criminal president.

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Donald Trump has agreed to be the guest of honor when the White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA) holds its annual dinner April 25.

Trump explained on social media why he plans to attend the dinner for the first time as president: “Because the Press was extraordinarily bad to me, FAKE NEWS ALL, right from the beginning of my First Term, I boycotted the event, and never went as Honoree. However, I look forward to being with everyone this year. Hopefully, it will be something very Special.”

Something special alright.

Trump has:

• Defunded NPR and PBS

• Targeted TV shows for cancellation

• Shaken down TV networks for large lawsuit settlements

• Threatened to jail reporters

• Helped his rich supporters take over news outlets

• Kicked the Associated Press out of reporting pools for refusing to use the made-up name “Gulf of America”

• Attacked female reporters with insults such as “Piggy” and “ugly”

• Used regulatory power as a weapon to try to get journalists to cover his Iran war more favorably, and said their failure to do so was “almost treasonous”

• Tried to impose oppressive access rules for reporters at the Pentagon – rules that have been rejected twice by a federal judge

• Praised a politician for criminally assaulting a reporter

Yet the correspondents’ dinner – sometimes described as a “nerd prom” – is shaping up as an embarrassing embrace of the Trump regime. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reportedly has been invited by CBS to attend the dinner, and other news organizations are struggling with the question of whether to welcome members of the Trump regime to their satellite parties surrounding the dinner.

Some journalists, apparently grasping the fact that the dinner will make them look like toadies, will wear “​​pocket squares and pins with the words of the First Amendment, in a subversive gesture supporting press freedom,” according to the Status newsletter. The merch, sold by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, will feature a hand-drawn design by CNN’s Jake Tapper.

Those pocket squares will certainly show the fascists. What a crushing blow against the empire.

Even before the MAGA movement came along, the correspondents’ dinner was a terrible idea. Yes, I know – it helps pay for scholarships and education about the 1st Amendment. But it also shows journalists cavorting with the politicians they’re supposed to dispassionately cover. It undermines trust in journalism. It creates the impression that the press and the politicians are in cahoots, performing in a choreographed Washington pageant, and only pretending to be adversaries now and then.

Over the years, the correspondents’ dinner became something of a roast of both politicians and the press. But the snowflakes among the Washington elite grew uneasy when the powerful got skewered.

A memorable kerfuffle came in 2018 when Trump’s press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, attended and was mocked by comedian Michelle Wolf. Referring both to Sanders’ lies and her makeup, Wolf said the press secretary “burns facts and then she uses that ash to create a perfect smoky eye.”

The mainstream media rushed to Sanders’ defense. WHCA President Margaret Talev of Bloomberg News said Wolf’s jokes tainted the group’s “unifying message.” New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman said it was “impressive” that Sanders didn’t walk out.

I don’t know why White House correspondents liked Sanders so much. Anita Kumar of Politico and Francesca Chambers of Dailymail.com held a going-away party for Sanders when she left the press secretary job in 2019. This was two months after the release of the Mueller Report, which included Sanders’ admission that she had lied to the press.

Lately, the WHCA has tried to avoid making people uncomfortable. A departure from that came last year when the group hired comedian Amber Ruffin, a Trump critic, to provide entertainment. But before the event, the WHCA unhired her. The stated reason: “to ensure the focus is not on the politics of division.”

This year, the association is playing it safe with entertainment by Oz Pearlman, a “mentalist” who performs tricks such as mind-reading people’s personal PIN numbers. If only he would read what’s under those suspicious redactions in the Epstein files.

Some people believe the correspondents’ dinner in 2011 accelerated Trump’s quest for power. Then-President Barack Obama spent several minutes mocking Trump, who had questioned whether Obama was a natural-born citizen. Since then, the entire country has been punished for Trump’s humiliation.

But if the WHCA allows Trump to celebrate his taming of the news media, that would be especially humiliating.

And that’s why the correspondents’ association must come to its senses. It could disinvite Trump, or it could simply call off the event. There’s precedent for a cancellation, which happened in 1951 because of “the uncertainty of the world situation.” News reports got no more specific than that, but the announcement coincided with key events in the Korean War.

Now the nation is on war footing again, with Trump threatening to wipe out a “whole civilization” of 93 million people. The WHCA could call off the event because of “the uncertainty of the world situation” and avoid the certainty that its members would be forever remembered as suck-ups to a dictator.

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This week’s media atrocity

Republicans are looking at a midterm disaster as they blunder through an illegal war, but Politico’s “Dems in disarray” theme marches on. “Dems’ Iran options run low,” Politico informed us last week.

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The master of political pragmatism, Niccolo Machiavelli, wrote in the 16th century that “at times it is a very wise thing to simulate madness.”

Four centuries later, another pragmatist, Richard Nixon, made use of the “madman theory” – the idea that you can win negotiations by making your opponents afraid you’ll do something crazy if they don’t make a deal. In Nixon’s case, he tried to convince the Soviet Union and North Vietnam that he had an itchy finger on the nuclear trigger.

But we’ve never had a president who acted as mad as Donald Trump.

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I’m not the first person to apply the madman theory to Trump, of course, but I want to put it in the context of his illegal war and address the question of whether both the American people and the Iranians should be deeply frightened by his approach to warmaking.

There’s evidence that Trump consciously uses the madman theory. During trade talks with South Korea, he supposedly told his negotiators to warn their counterparts that “if they don’t give the concessions now, this crazy guy will pull out of the deal.”

There’s also evidence that Trump doesn’t care about committing atrocities. When asked on Monday whether hitting Iran’s power plants would be a war crime, he said: “I’m not worried about it.” And no one familiar with him would think he’s kidding about that. He’s comfortable with violating the law.

His messaging has been so bonkers that you’d like to think it’s just an act.

There’s the frequent rhetoric by Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth casting the war as a modern-day crusade, with Christian warriors determined to smite the Muslims.

There was the Sunday social media post in which he dropped the F-bomb, called the Iranians “crazy bastards,” threatened war crimes, and mocked Islam by writing, “Praise be to Allah.”

There was his claim Monday that the Iranian people hate their leaders so much that they want their country to be bombed. “When they don’t hear bombs go off, they are upset,“ Trump said.

And there was his social post this morning warning that if Iran does not capitulate, “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”

Perhaps he’s managed to convince the Iranians that he’s insane. But that doesn’t mean the madman theory will work.

Penn State professor Roseanne McManus, in her superb essay on the theory in Foreign Affairs, noted that while the idea sounds compelling, it’s often ineffective, as it was with Nixon in Vietnam. There are two reasons why. First off, it’s difficult for leaders to persuade adversaries that they’re truly mad. And even if they do, they may still fail. “That is because by engaging in such behavior, lead­ers have trouble persuading oppo­nents that they will stand by any commitments.”

That second issue is a particular problem with Trump, who has made a career of breaking promises, both in business and in politics. Making a deal with Trump is as reliable as paying tuition to Trump University.

Also, Iran remembers that it had a nuclear deal with the United States until Trump backed out of it as part of his campaign to erase the legacy of his predecessor, Barack Obama.

If Trump were really trying to use the madman theory to get a better deal, he wouldn’t do things that make Iran’s leaders dig in their heels, such as posting about Allah or falsely blaming Iran for the U.S. attack that killed more than 100 Iranian schoolchildren. His conduct has likely made the Iranians think that any deal at this point would be a deep humiliation for both their religion and their country.

Trump’s madman act is having a more obvious effect in the United States, where more than 8 million people protested against him last month and talk of removing him from office via impeachment or the 25th Amendment is gaining steam. Even as we watch him exhibit deranged behavior day after day, he somehow manages to shock us anew. I just wish he’d shock the mainstream media into amplifying the issue of his unfitness for office.

At a press conference Monday, a reporter – finally – asked him about public calls for an assessment of his mental health. “I haven’t heard that,” Trump lied. “But if that’s the case, you’re going to have to have more people like me.”

No, thank you, sir. This train’s crazy car is full.

The president’s actions are so beyond the norm that rational observers are worried he might resort to using a nuclear weapon to subdue an enemy he falsely claimed was “defeated” weeks ago.

Trump defends his decision to attack Iran because “you can’t put nuclear weapons in the hands of a lunatic.” But the bitter irony is that Trump’s election is what put nuclear weapons in the hands of a lunatic.

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This week’s media atrocity

Some news outlets celebrated Sanewashing Sunday after Trump’s unhinged social media post threatening war crimes and mocking Islam. The Associated Press said his rhetoric was “fiery.” The New York Times gave the post a sheen of rationality, saying Trump seemed “emboldened” by the rescue of an American flier. The Times’ David Sanger remarked on CNN that the post was “unusually vivid.” Even Fox News did better, running a headline reporting that “Trump goes ballistic with profanity-laced threat.”

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That’s why we’re expanding our coverage to follow the money and investigate the power players in and outside the government. With a new database by Thorian AI, we have unprecedented access and ability to navigate more than 1.2M files and we’re sharing access—and what we’re finding—with you.

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Mainstream media don’t pay nearly enough attention to the fact that the Republican side of Congress is a bastion of bigotry. Members who are not spewing white supremacist garbage themselves are often ignoring it or defending it when their colleagues do it.

It’s not acceptable for one side of Congress to resemble a Klan cookout, and it’s also not acceptable for journalists to treat it as non-news. Because it’s getting worse all the time.

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In 2019, back when Republicans bothered to pretend they weren’t racist, they stripped Iowa’s Rep. Steve King of his committee assignments because he defended white supremacy. But three weeks ago, Rep. Andy Ogles of Tennessee tweeted, “Muslims don’t belong in American society,” and he faced no discipline.

Instead, House Speaker Mike Johnson defended him:

There’s a lot of energy in the country and a lot of popular sentiment that the demand to impose Sharia law in America is a serious problem. That’s what animates this. The language that people use — it’s different language than I would use — but I think that’s a serious issue. … It’s not about people as Muslims; it’s about those who seek to impose a different belief system that is in direct conflict with the Constitution.

That’s intellectual dishonesty. That’s a moral vacuum where a conscience should be.

AR-15 lapel pins come and go among congressional Republicans, but bigotry is a constant:

• Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama said in 2022 that Democrats want reparations for Black Americans “because they think the people that do the crime are owed that.”

• Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado said last year that Rep. Al Green, who is Black, had a “pimp cane.”

• Rep. Troy Nehls of Texas said in 2024 that then-Rep. Cori Bush, who is Black, got death threats because she was “so loud all the time,” and that her husband, also Black, was a “thug.”

• Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona appeared in 2021 at a conference founded by Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes, and Gosar once made the preposterous claim that the neo-Nazi “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017 was organized by “an Obama sympathizer.”

• Rep. Glenn Grothman of Wisconsin said in 2022 that Black Lives Matter “doesn’t like the old-fashioned family.”

• Republicans such as Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York, and Rep. Brian Babin of Texas push the Great Replacement Theory, which claims that the left is deliberately orchestrating the cultural replacement of white people with non-white immigrants as part of some nefarious power grab. The most radical promoters of this theory specifically blame Jewish elites and refer to a “white genocide.”

In some cases, MAGA bigots apologize for their offensive comments or delete their tweets – after showing their followers what they really think.

Rep. Clay Higgins of Louisiana helped spread the lie in 2024 that Black immigrants from Haiti were eating people’s dogs and cats, tweeting: “These Haitians are wild. Eating pets, vudu, nastiest country in the western hemisphere, cults, slapstick gangsters. … All these thugs better get their mind right and their asses out of our country before January 20th.” Higgins eventually deleted the post, earning an attaboy from Speaker Johnson: “That’s what you want a gentleman to do. … We believe in redemption around here.”

Rep. Mary Miller of Illinois said in prepared remarks outside the U.S. Capitol in 2021 that “Hitler was right on one thing. He said, ‘Whoever has the youth has the future.’” After an uproar, she apologized for “using a reference to one of the most evil dictators in history.”

Miller also raised eyebrows last year after tweeting that “it’s deeply troubling that a Muslim was allowed to lead prayer” in the U.S. House since “America was founded as a Christian nation.” (The Constitution disagrees with Miller on the “Christian nation” claim, and she also was wrong about the prayer leader being Muslim. He’s Sikh.)

Christian nationalists in Congress who spread Islamophobia have made a special target of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a Muslim who was born in Uganda to Indian parents and came to the United States at age 7. Here are just a few of the gems:

• Rep. Randy Fine of Florida tweeted: ​“Zohran Mamdani must be deported immediately. The only thing I want to see him running for is his gate at JFK for his deportation flight back to Uganda.”

• Rep. Brandon Gill criticized Mamdani for eating biryani, a rice dish, with his hands: “Civilized humans in America don’t eat like this. If you do not embrace Western traditions, return to the Third World.” A strange claim given that eating biryani with one’s hands is common in South Asia, and plenty of supposedly “Western traditions” involve eating food (such as pizza, wings, burgers, and fries) with one’s hands.

• Alabama’s Tuberville posted a photo of Mamdani next to a picture of the 9/11 attack, with the words “The enemy is inside the gates.”

Yet Wisconsin’s Grothman said that “the idea that we have a huge racial problem is preposterous.” I think Republicans’ racial problem is what’s preposterous. And not highlighted enough.

It’s what I call “the one-off problem.” News outlets often produce small stories focusing on individual acts rather than writing sweeping stories about an overall trend. They do the same thing with Donald Trump’s obvious mental unfitness, reporting narrowly about single examples of his unhinged behavior without noting that his behavior in general is unhinged.

A few news outlets, such as the New York Times and PBS, have occasionally reported on how the Republican side of Congress is an oasis for racists. More outlets need to say it, and say it loudly.

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This week’s media atrocity

The New York Times headline and summary below credit Trump with “freestyle” and “improvisational” diplomacy. Words like “disorganized,” “amateurish,” and "haphazard” would be more accurate. And what’s with saying the standoff “raises fresh doubts”? There are no fresh doubts – there are longstanding doubts. Better to say “deepens doubts.”

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There’s a strong incentive in today’s news media to be awful. If you’re really awful, you can draw a huge audience and make big money.

But awfulness disgusts decent people. So I compiled this highly opinionated list of the 25 worst people in the news media. I cast a wide net here: Anyone who reports, analyzes, or disseminates news is eligible for this list. I call these dishonors the “Worsties.”

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Candace Owens

The queen of crackpots claims, without evidence, that French President Emmanuel Macron’s wife, Brigitte, was born male. Yet millions love Owens’ carny act. She has more than 24.5 million followers and subscribers on her platforms, an 80% increase since Jan. 1, 2025, according to Media Matters.

Scott Jennings

CNN pays this guy to lie. He blamed the devastation of the Los Angeles wildfires on diversity hiring in the fire department.

Jeff Bezos

There aren’t too many media owners on this list, but after his vandalism of the Washington Post, it’s impossible to leave Bezos off.

Joe Rogan

This podcaster endorsed libertarian Ron Paul in 2012, progressive Bernie Sanders in 2020, and fascist Donald Trump in 2024. Now he says he feels misled by Trump. Rogan’s lack of a coherent political philosophy doesn’t stop him from sharing his political philosophy with millions.

Bari Weiss

She’s a right-wing opinion editor masquerading as a straight-news editor, overseeing the trashing of CBS News. (And the Ellison family gets a dishonorable mention for hiring her.)

Tim Pool

It’s no wonder this podcaster was funded by Russia (supposedly without his knowledge): He spreads hate and disinformation. When Trump took office last year, Pool posted: “Trans people officially don’t exist anymore.” Last December, he amplified false claims that a Palestinian student was linked to the shooting at Brown University.

Benny Johnson

Check out the video in which this dead-souled podcaster visits the headquarters of USAID to giddily celebrate its closure – a move by the Trump regime that has caused hundreds of thousands of deaths overseas. (Johnson, like Pool, was funded by Russia, supposedly without his knowledge.)

Greg Kelly

This Newsmax anchor was offended by pastels in the Super Bowl LX logo, calling it “a little bit LGBT queer-ish.” He said the NFL is “trying to destroy America.”

Chris Cuomo

CNN fired him as an anchor for a breach of ethics after he covertly used his journalism connections to investigate people accusing his brother, then-New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, of sexual harassment. NewsNation hired the CNN castoff. His prime-time show regularly features former Fox sexual harasser Bill O’Reilly.

Jesse Watters

This Fox host says billionaires should “make the homeless people in Skid Row fight like gladiators” to entertain the public.

Matt Walsh

This podcaster said it would be better for a child to have an arm cut off than to be raised by gay parents.

Megyn Kelly

I wrote a whole piece recently about this podcaster and former Fox host. Last year, she seemed to downplay Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes, saying “somebody very close to this case” told her Epstein ”was not a pedophile” – that “he wasn’t into, like, 8-year-olds” but “liked 15-year-old girls.” (Which would make him a pedophile, Megyn.)

Brian Kilmeade

This Fox host had a solution to the problem of mentally ill homeless people: “Involuntary lethal injection … or something. Just kill them.” He later apologized.

Sean Hannity

This longtime Fox host said there should be a “political litmus test” for people who want to move from blue states to red states to make sure they don’t bring their “idiotic left-wing radicalized policies” with them.

Ainsley Earnhardt

This Fox host said Taylor Swift “needs to have babies” and claimed the United States defeated “communist Japan” in World War II.

Nick Fuentes

This podcaster who dined with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago in 2022 is a Holocaust denier. In 2019, he used “cookie baking” as an analogy for Jews being murdered in Nazi death camps, saying, “Six million cookies? I’m not buying it.”

Tucker Carlson

He platformed Nick Fuentes on his podcast last year. Even some fellow right-wingers thought that was too much. Others defended it.

Lachlan Murdoch

This Fox Corp. CEO carries on the mission of his father, Rupert, to destroy our democracy.

Ben Domenech

Meghan McCain’s husband faced a plagiarism scandal early in his career, but that didn’t stop him. He later co-founded The Federalist, which until 2017 had a “black crime” tag to aggregate stories on that topic. Fox News features Domenech as a contributor.

Laura Ingraham

This Fox host declared five days after the start of the Iran war that “Trump has already won in Iran.” Eighteen days later, there’s so much winning that Mideast energy facilities are in ruins, U.S. gasoline prices are way up, and Trump is sending more troops to the region.

Kathleen Parker

How does someone keep a job at the Washington Post after writing a column before the 2016 election headlined “Calm down. We’ll be fine no matter who wins” and following it up with one in 2018 headlined “Calm down. Roe v. Wade isn’t going anywhere”?

Bill Maher

Fox likes to call him a “liberal” when he criticizes the left, as if that means liberals know they’re wrong. Maher isn’t a liberal. He’s a tool.

Riley Gaines

She’s the perfect symbol of today’s attention economy. Finish in a tie for fifth place with a trans woman in a swim meet, get mad about it, create a career as an anti-trans crusader, and get a podcast on Outkick and Fox about politics and culture.

Elon Musk

X’s owner promotes lies and white supremacy on a massive scale. Truly one of the worst human beings alive today.

Mark Zuckerberg

The Meta CEO’s appearance in the row of oligarchs at the 2025 Trump inauguration made it clear that he’ll play nice with the president to keep making billions. Last year, Meta dropped third-party fact-checking, which no doubt pleased Trump, the most outrageous liar in public life.

Agree with me? Disagree? Think I missed anyone? Give me your comments.

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RIP CBS radio news.

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The most reliable measure of the quality of the news media’s war reporting is how much the Trump regime is freaking out about it.

Brendan Carr, chair of the Federal Communications Commission, is threatening to yank broadcast licenses if news outlets don’t cheerlead for the war.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is complaining about the media’s focus on war deaths and is trying to rewrite their headlines. He’s even barring photographers from his briefings, reportedly because he finds pictures of him “unflattering.”

Donald Trump is reacting to fake online videos – including one purporting to show the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln on fire – by falsely claiming that Iran has been “working in close coordination with the Fake News Media” to show the videos and that those involved “should be brought up on Charges for TREASON.”

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The regime looks thin-skinned and panicky. And indeed Trump should be alarmed because major news organizations — so far – are doing a strong job of chronicling his reckless military adventurism in the Mideast.

The Washington Post, devastated by layoffs, still managed to publish the pre-war story that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Dan Caine, privately warned Trump that war with Iran would carry serious risks. Trump reacted to the reporting with a highly suspect claim that Caine told him any conflict would be “easily won.”

After Trump ordered the attack on Iran, many news outlets noted his muddled rationale, including the claim that Iran’s nuclear program was an ongoing threat even though he insisted nine months ago that it was “obliterated.”

The New York Times, whose irresponsible reporting pushed the United States toward war in Iraq two decades ago, has published hard-hitting stories this time, such as:

• “Wars Often Lose Public Support Over Time. Trump Started This One Without Much.”

• “How Trump and His Advisers Miscalculated Iran’s Response to War”

• “How the Iran War Could Raise the Cost of Gas, Food and Travel”

Other news outlets have also reported aggressively. When the Pentagon was slow to disclose U.S. injury numbers, Reuters reported that about 150 servicemembers were hurt, prompting the Pentagon to offer its own number, 140.

The U.S. media were especially strong in investigating who attacked an Iranian girls’ school, killing about 175 people, many of them children. Impressive journalism on the air strike was done by Reuters, the New York Times, NPR, Bellingcat, NBC News, and the BBC. The NYT broke the news that a preliminary Pentagon assessment put the blame on the U.S. military.

Meanwhile, Trump tried to make the world believe the Iranians killed their own schoolchildren. But no one bought it. The cover-up was so lame that usual Trump apologists Megyn Kelly and Laura Ingraham demanded real answers.

Jennifer Schulze, a media critic who was formerly news director at Chicago’s WGN-TV, had some concerns about early coverage of the war but thinks it has improved over time. “As the Trump administration makes more mistakes and tells more lies, the accountability journalism has ramped up big time,” she said. (Schulze’s excellent Indistinct Chatter newsletter featured an in-depth look at news coverage of the girls school attack.)

Americans have been poorly served by past war coverage, such as when the media bought the George W. Bush administration’s lies about Iraq in 2002 and 2003. I was an editor on the Chicago Tribune’s nation/world desk at the time, and believe me, we were skeptical, but not enough. There was a common feeling that Bush must have valid intelligence about weapons of mass destruction or he wouldn’t push so hard for war. Turns out, he didn’t.

The media’s strong initial performance this time is remarkable considering the news industry’s diminished financial resources. This White House is also much more hostile to the idea of letting reporters go where they can see things.

That’s important because independent close-up observation is the best way to evade government spin and find the facts. I learned that lesson one night in 2003 when I was editing a Tribune story about the invasion of Iraq. As our deadline neared, I saw a wire report that a British official in London had announced the fall of the city of Um Qasr.

We checked with our correspondents in the war zone.

“Don’t put that in,” said one reporter. “I’m a mile from Um Qasr and there’s still fighting going on. I can hear it.”

An important part of reporting is actually being there, rather than relying on what somebody told somebody who told somebody. That’s why it was alarming when WaPo laid off its entire Mideast staff in early February. CNN got a reporter into Iran for a few days recently; he was the only Western TV correspondent to secure a visa to report from the country.

While I’m praising the news coverage, I’m not saying all of it has been top notch.

Major media aren’t paying enough attention to how Israel’s Bibi Netanyahu manipulated Trump into the war. Early on, WaPo had a strong story about Netanyahu’s prodding, and the NYT has addressed the risks of the U.S.-Israel war alliance. But more must be written.

Schulze told me she was surprised there wasn’t more attention on how the Trump regime announced the war to the public. “America went to war and the POTUS didn’t bother to explain that to the country in a live nationwide broadcast,” she said. “Instead Trump posted two videos and started calling reporters on the phone to talk about the war. The press should have made a bigger deal out of all that.”

But in general, major U.S. media are covering the war well, in a departure from a decade in which Trump generally had his way with them. Let’s hope a desperate Trump doesn’t scare them back into timidity.

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This week’s media atrocity

The story on Fox News’ website about Brendan Carr’s threat against TV networks made it seem normal for the government to tell journalists what they can report. Fox enables fascism.

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ICYMI: MAHA & the Midterms

Last week, COURIER’s virtual event in partnership with 3.14 Action drew 22K+ live viewers across platforms. The event featured Hank Green, Dr. Mary Trump, Representative Lauren Underwood, Shaughnessy Naughton, and Dr. Vin Gupta discussing how misinformation and policy decisions affect healthcare access and costs in the U.S. Missed it? Watch the full replay on YouTube.

This event is part of a broader series on science, health, and public policy in American democracy. Our next conversation, Facts vs. Fiction: The Fight for Science in American Democracy, is happening Thursday, June 11. RSVP today!

Stephen Miller is the fevered brain that is pushing a Trump dictatorship.

He’s the head cheerleader for white nationalism, the architect of state terror against immigrants, and a determined enemy of the rule of law, except for the law of the jungle — the law of brute force.

He’s the 21st century American version of a Nazi.

And he has the ear of the convicted felon in the White House, which makes him one of the most dangerous people alive.

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Both the news media and Democrats need to make Miller the ugly poster child for the fascist assault on our country.

It’s in the media’s interest to do so because awareness of Miller’s influence helps the public understand the regime’s frightening goals.

It’s in the Democrats’ interest to do so because Miller is an offputting creep who can be accurately cast as a Republican supervillain during the midterms. He even looks like Dr. Evil. Republican Sen. Thom Tillis compares him to Grima Wormtongue, the sycophantic adviser to the king in “The Lord of the Rings.”

Even as a young person, Miller was an annoying punk. At Santa Monica High School in California, he’s remembered for a speech in which he said: “Am I the only one who is sick and tired of being told to pick up my trash, when we have plenty of janitors who are paid to do it for us?”

Miller graduated from Duke, where he wrote a right-wing column for the student newspaper. He went on to work as a congressional staffer, but found his full flower selling toxic hate to Trump. When Miller’s input on early Trump policies such as the Muslim ban became clear in 2017, Miller went on TV to declare that “the powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned.” That raised eyebrows. Powers that “will not be questioned” – in a democracy?

The early overexposure of Miller prompted Trump to keep him in a mostly behind-the-scenes role, but a substantial one. When Trump 2.0 happened, Miller became deputy chief of staff and drove the campaign to deport millions of immigrants, including those with no criminal record.

Miller has set a goal of 3,000 deportations per day, but the regime’s masked agents have fallen short despite their often illegal tactics. After Border Patrol murdered Alex Pretti on a Minneapolis street, Miller lied that he was “a domestic terrorist” and a “would-be assassin.”

While Trump’s racist demagoguery seems motivated by his personal lust for money and power, Miller comes across as more of an ideological hater. He declares entire groups of people to be unworthy of human rights.

Last week, he used the fight against drug cartels as an excuse to urge Latin American defense officials to commit violence against “savages” without worrying about legalities. “You’re dealing with a lot of lawyers in your own country, I’m sure,” he said. ”You have my permission not to listen to them.”

After the Trump regime’s illegal war against Iran included blowing up a girls’ school, Miller praised the military because they were “not fighting politically correct.” Miller supports the idea that the U.S. government can kill at will – pushing the old, discredited notion that “might makes right.”

Discussing the deadly raid on Venezuela that led to the United States stealing the country’s oil, he said: “You can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. Those are the iron laws of the world.”

No doubt, Hitler, Stalin, and Mao felt the same way.

In 2024, Miller made it clear that immigrants from certain countries are simply unwelcome: “If you import the Third World, you become the Third World.”

Last month, he tweeted: “Various societies have tried sourcing cheap labor from non-functioning states. The West is the first to import failed-state labor with full political rights: welfare, voting, and citizenship for the migrants and their families. When citizenship is global, self-rule is impossible.”

This view goes against the entire American experience, in which people dissatisfied with life in their “non-functioning states” came here and made good – including Miller’s own great-great grandfather, Wolf Laib Glosser, who fled Russian-held Belarus in 1903.

It’s also dishonest for Miller to suggest that immigrants are a drain on welfare. A recent study by the libertarian Cato Institute found that immigrants pay more in taxes than they get back in government benefits, and it’s not even close. Another slam against immigrants – that they bring crime – is flat wrong: Immigrants commit fewer crimes than native-born Americans.

Some journalists realize the destructive influence that Miller wields. Praiseworthy news outlets include the “PBS NewsHour,” NBC News, and The New Republic, whose Greg Sargent wrote an outstanding story last December headlined “Inside Stephen Miller’s Dark Plot to Build a MAGA Terror State.”

But will Democrats make the obnoxious and unlikable Miller a key target in their midterms messaging? Will they run against Miller’s extremism and in solidarity with the vital contributions of immigrants?

One of the most cartoonishly wicked members of the Trump regime, Kristi Noem, got fired last week. Perhaps the harsh spotlight previously trained on her can be shifted to Miller.

Sen. Tillis said Sunday that Miller was a “big problem” for Trump. But he’ll be a problem only if Democrats seize the opportunity to make him a liability for the entire Republican Party in the midterms.

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This week’s media atrocity

Nexstar, the nation’s leading owner of local TV stations, needs the Trump regime’s approval to merge with Tegna and become even bigger. So Nexstar curried favor last week with a reprehensible ad for its NewsNation cable channel that took the side of Trump liar-in-chief Karoline Leavitt in denouncing CNN and specifically reporter Kaitlan Collins for asking Trump tough questions. An absolutely shameful move by Nexstar.

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Join COURIER and 3.14 Action on March 12 for MAHA & the Midterms: How Trump and RFK Jr.’s Agenda Costs Americans.

This live conversation will examine how political choices are reshaping healthcare access ahead of the midterms. We’ll break down how Trump, RFK Jr., and the broader MAHA agenda are impacting public health, who benefits, and what’s at stake for families across the country.

Featured Speakers include:

• Hank Green, Author + Creator

• Dr. Mary Trump, Psychologist + Author

• U.S. Representative Lauren Underwood, Member of Congress + Registered Nurse

• Shaughnessy Naughton, 314 Action President

• Dr. Vin Gupta, Physician + Medical Analyst

Stay tuned for more speaker announcements.

Don’t miss this conversation. RSVP today!

What is the ultimate authority of a king?

It’s to decide whether people live or die, based on his personal preference, and allowing no challenge to his whims.

That’s the power that Donald Trump holds right now.

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The Trump regime’s war against Iran is illegal under U.S. law. Article I, Section 8, Clause 11 of the Constitution gives Congress – not the president – the power to declare war. The War Powers Act allows the president to send the military into “hostilities” only after Congress authorizes it or there’s “a national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces.”

Neither happened here.

The United Nations Charter bans offensive warfare but allows for self-defense. The Trump regime pretended it acted defensively when it joined Israel in killing Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and scores of schoolgirls in attacks that also led to at least four American deaths. No matter what Trump says, this was a war of choice, illegal under the UN charter. British Defense Secretary John Healey said it was up to “the U.S. to set out the legal basis of the action that it took.”

But the Trump regime only occasionally feels the need to explain itself. Laws have become quaint relics. Citizens sue over the law, judges rule on the law, and fascists ignore the law. The other two branches of government have largely surrendered – the GOP-run Congress by not asserting its authority and the Supreme Court by giving the president criminal immunity for “official acts.”

Trump has long thought himself to be above all laws, even on matters of life and death. He made that clear a decade ago when he said, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters.” In 2020, he declared, “When somebody is the president of the United States, the authority is total. And that’s the way it’s got to be. It’s total.”

Obviously, he hasn’t reconsidered that view.

Since returning to office last year, Trump has trained the American people to accept the idea that he can kill people with no legal process and no consequences. About 150 people on boats in the Pacific and Caribbean are dead because Trump claimed without evidence that they were drug traffickers. He felt like killing them, so he did. Two of the victims survived a first strike that wrecked their boat, but were killed in a second strike. That was either a war crime or murder. Trump and his henchmen got away with it.

Also dead as a result of Trump’s decrees are Renee Good and Alex Pretti, executed on the streets of Minneapolis. Trump sent masked agents into the city and encouraged their violence. There’s almost no chance that anyone will be charged with Good’s death, and justice in Pretti’s death appears unlikely too.

It’s up to pro-democracy advocates and the news media not to accept a system based on politicians’ abuses of power instead of the law that was written, debated, and approved over our nation’s 250 years.

Many Democrats and a few Republicans in Congress are pushing for a vote on the assault against Iran, belatedly. Expect lies and other maneuvers by Trump’s congressional allies who’d prefer not to vote at all because they hate accountability. They want to keep their seats and let Trump make all the decisions.

The news media also have a huge part to play, if only they will. The rule of law needs to be explained to the public. People don’t have the Constitution memorized. Journalists need to explain that the Trump regime is repeatedly violating the law. When the media cynically accept lawbreaking as the new normal, they help normalize it.

If neither politicians nor the media will help rein in the president, the American people will have to. There’s an opportunity to display “people power” later this month: the “No Kings” rallies on Saturday, March 28. Invite your family and friends. It’s important. Because defending our democracy is a life-and-death matter.

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This week’s media atrocity

The New York Times published a story Wednesday about how Trump is undermining trust in our elections and pushing dishonest schemes to rig the midterms. Yet in the middle of the story, NYT wrote: “Democrats are sounding alarms — and sometimes sounding downright alarmist — as they war-game for extreme subversion scenarios.”

By describing legitimate concerns as “downright alarmist,” they undercut their own story and pleased the people plotting to steal the midterms.

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Join COURIER and 3.14 Action on March 12 for MAHA & the Midterms: How Trump and RFK Jr.’s Agenda Costs Americans.

This live conversation will examine how political choices are reshaping healthcare access ahead of the midterms. We’ll break down how Trump, RFK Jr., and the broader MAHA agenda are impacting public health, who benefits, and what’s at stake for families across the country.

Featured Speakers include:

• Hank Green, Author + Creator

• Dr. Mary Trump, Psychologist + Author

• U.S. Representative Lauren Underwood, Member of Congress + Registered Nurse

• Shaughnessy Naughton, 314 Action President

• Dr. Vin Gupta, Physician + Medical Analyst

Stay tuned for more speaker announcements.

Don’t miss this conversation. RSVP today!

In the summer of 2024, my wife and I took our 12-year-old twin grandsons to Washington, D.C. We sat in the House of Representatives gallery. We saw the names on the Vietnam wall. We visited Abe Lincoln in his big marble chair.

We chose to take the boys to the nation’s capital because we thought there was a strong possibility that the character of our country would vanish if Donald Trump was elected that fall. I remember standing in front of the capital’s classical architecture and worrying that these monuments to democracy would soon become cold symbols of an evil empire.

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One of the places we toured was the White House, whose East Wing no longer exists. Trump destroyed it with a un-democratic decree after lying to the public that he would spare it. The East Wing now seems like the perfect example of how much has changed.

Yet some elements of the news industry act as if what’s happened since the 2024 election is normal politics that’s not worth loud headlines or the sounding of public alarms. Among the news events:

• Masked federal agents are executing people in the streets.

• A massive Homeland Security bureaucracy is building a gulag of concentration camps.

• Trump, already convicted of 34 felonies, is taking corrupt payoffs from foreigners.

• Trump disparaged Somali Americans, calling them “garbage.”

• Trump is trying to dictate who can appear on TV.

• Trump is preparing to attack Iran with no input from Congress.

• Trump threatens to use the military to seize Greenland, an ally’s territory.

• Trump is stealing Venezuela’s oil and has sold it for $1 billion so far.

• Trump has murdered at least 148 people on the high seas, claiming they’re drug traffickers but offering zero evidence. (Even if he had evidence, American justice requires a trial. And drug trafficking is not a capital crime.)

Presidential actions that would have been unimaginable in the past are happening daily. Yet there’s still a tone of normality in mainstream media coverage. What we should be seeing is crisis coverage – sweeping news stories with headlines like “Trump is building a dictatorship” and “Trump’s bizarre actions raise doubts about mental fitness.” Even with smaller stories about the daily outrages, the media should be telling the public how unusual the development is.

Instead of a weak headline like “Trump Calls on Netflix to Oust Susan Rice From Its Board” (New York Times), we need headlines like “Trump warns Netflix of ‘consequences’ unless it pulls top Democrat from board” (Guardian). The Guardian’s version nods to the political motive and accurately casts it as a threat, not a suggestion. An even better headline would be: “In new threat against a private business, Trump demands Netflix fire top Democrat from board.”

The media need to make it clear that this is not normal. Americans are not all political science majors or ethicists. Plenty of people don’t understand separation of powers, conflicts of interest, or abuses of power. It’s the media’s job to explain it to them.

Instead of a generic headline reading “Angry Trump slams six Supreme Court justices who nixed his tariffs” (Roll Call), news outlets should have given us headlines that focused on the most outrageous and abnormal aspect of Trump’s reaction: his claim that “foreign interests” influence the Supreme Court. Trump, of course, provided no evidence for this reckless and utterly abnormal accusation.

Too many news outlets underplay Trump’s corrupt authoritarianism because they don’t want to look like they’re taking a partisan stand. But opposition to Trump isn’t inherently partisan – for most of us, it’s simply the defense of decency. Legacy media outlets don’t think like that, though. They’re focused on the bottom line: They don’t want to offend potential conservative customers (who are probably watching Fox News anyway), and they don’t want to get in Trump’s crosshairs and provoke him to sabotage their businesses.

Keeping their heads down and collecting revenue is what corporate media do. They haven’t received a press release to officially announce the arrival of the dictatorship, so they prefer to write small stories instead of sweeping ones. They think it’s safer to describe the symptoms without diagnosing the disease.

If you watch Tuesday’s State of the Union address, pay attention to how much the networks focus on the trappings of tradition, rather than the way Trump’s words and actions are trashing the American way of life.

Our freedoms are slipping away as you read this sentence. Don’t let the media tell you that’s normal.

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This week’s media atrocity

I’m just catching up to an AI mini-scandal at the Conde Nast-owned Ars Technica publication on Feb. 13. The tech publication said it published an article that included “fabricated quotations generated by an AI tool and attributed to a source who did not say them. … This appears to be an isolated incident.” As news outlets try to save time and money by reducing their human workforces, we’ll see a lot more “isolated incidents” in the future.

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The State of the Swamp

Join DEFIANCE.org and COURIER at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. or virtually tomorrow, February 24th, for the State of the Swamp, a rebuttal to Trump’s State of the Union.

Opposition figures, current and former elected officials, celebrities, and other leaders will gather to tell the truth and to counter Donald Trump’s lies. Speakers include Robert DeNiro, Jim Acosta, Mehdi Hasan, and Senator Ron Wyden.

Use discount code COURIER15 for 15% off tickets

RSVP

Here are 50 examples of unhinged behavior by a man who possesses the nuclear codes. Donald Trump’s supporters and some journalists ignore or laugh off his individual bizarre actions. Taken together, they’re cause for deep alarm.

1. Trump blamed Rob Reiner for his own murder, citing “the anger he caused others” by criticizing Trump.

2. He told a rally crowd that dead golfer Arnold Palmer had a large penis.

3. He posted an AI video in which a cartoon Trump used a warplane to drop shit on protesters.

4. He warned Canadians that if they made a trade deal with China, the Chinese would abolish hockey in Canada.

5. He posted a video of the Obamas as apes.

6. At a rally, he bizarrely stopped the proceedings and stood on stage swaying to music for 39 minutes.

7. He said six Democratic members of Congress were guilty of a crime “punishable by DEATH!” when they reminded soldiers of their duty to refuse illegal orders.

8. He called Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy a “dictator,” but when asked about it later, he said, “Did I say that? I can’t believe I said that.”

9. As death and destruction racked Gaza, he posted an AI video of “Trump Gaza,” an imaginary resort with a golden statue of himself.

10. He said: “They have this new word called ‘affordability.’”

11. He said the phrase “priming the pump” was coined by him “a couple of days ago.” (It’s been used in an economic sense for about a century.)

12. He said he invented the word “equalizing.” (It’s been around since 1599.)

13. He used a Sharpie to doctor a government weather map to show a hurricane threatening Alabama when it wasn’t.

14. He said he felt worse about ICE’s murder of Renee Good because Good’s parents were Trump supporters.

15. He told graduating West Point cadets a story about a businessman’s trouble with his “trophy wife.”

16. He posted an AI video about “medbeds,” a kook theory that the elite cure their illnesses with high-tech medical beds that they hide from the rest of us.

17. He said falsely that Portland, Ore., was “burning to the ground ... you don’t even have stores anymore.”

18. He said undocumented immigrants accounted for “107%” of job growth under Joe Biden. (Impossible.)

19. He said he’ll drop prescription drug prices “1,000%.” (Impossible unless he pays us to take drugs.)

20. He said he’s the “father of IVF.”

21. He claimed Article 2 of the Constitution means “I have the right to do whatever I want as president.” (Um, no.)

22. He said about Covid: “If we stop testing right now, we’d have very few cases, if any.”

23. He said: “They call me the president of Europe.”

24. He posted an image of himself as Lt. Col. Kilgore from the movie “Apocalypse Now,” declaring that “‘I love the smell of deportations in the morning” and Chicago would “find out why it’s called the Department of WAR.”

25. He threatened to block funds for a New York-New Jersey tunnel unless Penn Station and Dulles Airport were named after him.

26. He wants to make Canada “the 51st state.”

27. He praised Montana politician Greg Gianforte for a criminal assault in which he body-slammed a reporter.

28. He posted an AI video of House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries sporting a sombrero and a thick mustache.

29. His official White House social media account posted a doctored picture of a Minnesota protester to make it look like she was crying.

30. He called Obama “the founder of ISIS.”

31. He said it was “absolutely sabotage” when a United Nations escalator abruptly stopped while he and Melania were on it. (Turns out, a videographer with Trump’s delegation accidentally tripped a safety feature.)

32. He called for higher home prices, saying he didn’t want “somebody that didn’t work very hard” to be able to afford a home.

33. He suggested bringing “light inside the body” and injecting a disinfectant to cure Covid.

34. He called Somali immigrants “garbage.”

35. He lied that Haitian immigrants were eating house pets.

36. He said immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.”

37. He called his political opponents “vermin.”

38. Asked about child sex trafficking charges against Ghislaine Maxwell, he said, “I wish her well.”

39. He told Norway that because he didn’t get the Nobel Peace Prize he felt no “obligation to think purely of Peace,” and demanded U.S. ownership of Greenland (held by Denmark, not Norway).

40. He said Frederick Douglass, who died in 1895, “has done an amazing job.”

41. He said the Battle of Gettysburg was “so beautiful in so many different ways.”

42. He falsely quoted Robert E. Lee as saying, “Never fight uphill, me boys, never fight uphill.”

43. He cited “the late great Hannibal Lecter.” (Who is neither late nor great.)

44. He lied that “your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later” after school-ordered surgery to change their gender.

45. He said Napoleon’s “one problem is he didn’t go to Russia that night because he had extracurricular activities, and they froze to death.”

46. He compared himself to a gangster: “I’ve been indicted more times than Alphonse Capone.”

47. He said, “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?” (Crazy to say it even if you think it.)

48. He said his uncle John told him he taught the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Never happened. Kaczynski didn’t attend MIT, and Trump’s uncle died 11 years before Kaczynski was identified as the Unabomber.

49. When CNN’s Kaitlan Collins asked a question about Jeffrey Epstein, who raped children, Trump criticized her for not smiling.

50. He keeps bragging about passing cognitive tests.

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This week’s media atrocity

CBS News shared statistics put forth by border czar Tom Homan and a Homeland Security news release claiming huge increases in assaults and threats against ICE agents. CBS dutifully said in its news story: “Neither Homan nor the release gave a timeframe for that surge, nor did they give a source for the assault and threat claims.” So why did CBS amplify their statistics?

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Ants living in the acacia tree help protect it by attacking herbivores that try to eat the leaves or bark. Meanwhile, the acacia tree provides the ants with nectar.

In biology, this is called symbiosis, a mutually beneficial relationship.

In political journalism, this phenomenon is called access, with newsmakers providing reporters with information and the reporters giving them publicity. I don’t know whether the reporters are more like the ants or the tree. You can figure that one out.

What I do know is that journalists’ desire for access to newsmakers often makes them behave in ways that don’t benefit a third stakeholder: the public. Cynical politicians know they can use “exclusives” to spin reporters and make them more compliant. Indeed, access has become an addiction in political journalism.

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The addiction to access explains CNN host Dana Bash’s behavior Sunday when Dr. Mehmet Oz, the Medicare and Medicaid chief, pretended the Trump regime’s anti-vaccine stand had nothing to do with the current measles outbreak. Bash let out a mild “Oh, come on,” but let him keep dissembling, and ended with, “Thank you so much for being here.”

The addiction to access is why the New York Times got giddy last month about Donald Trump giving its reporters a two-hour interview. The NYT’s excitement was so pronounced that it published a sidebar about its preparations for the interview, telling readers that one reporter “stopped in for a haircut” at a barber shop beforehand, and another reporter wore “something sentimental: a gold tie clip that belonged to his grandfather.” In another sidebar, the NYT wrote about “the many faces of Trump,” saying he “played the part of the gracious host, pushing a button that summoned a valet bearing waters and Diet Coke.”

The addiction to access is why CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss’ “main concern” in covering the Trump regime is “being able to book its main players on her network’s shows,” according to an insider interviewed by the New Yorker recently.

The addiction to access is why White House reporters showed up as usual after the Associated Press was kicked out of briefings for calling the Gulf of Mexico by its correct name.

The addiction to access is why no correspondent immediately spoke up in defense of a reporter when Trump called her “piggy,” or when Trump criticized another reporter for not smiling as she asked him about child rapist Jeffrey Epstein.

The addiction to access explains why NBC’s Tom Llamas, in a nearly hourlong interview with Trump last week, did not ask a single question about Jeffrey Epstein. He did ask: “If you look at the polls, most Americans say that they don’t like how you’ve handled immigration, right, especially what’s happening in Minneapolis. How do you change their minds?” Not: Why don’t you stop shooting people? But in effect: How do you convince them it’s OK to shoot people?

The addiction to access is why Fox News coordinates its lies so closely with Trump’s: It’s an obvious ants-and-acacia-tree arrangement in which Fox covers up for Trump and Trump gifts Fox with regular mini-exclusives. For example, Trump appeared on “Fox & Friends” and announced an arrest in the Charlie Kirk assassination: “I just heard about it five minutes before I walked in. ... They have the person that they wanted. So you have breaking news, don’t you? You always have breaking news, Ainsley [Earhardt]. Sean [Hannity] is going to be very disappointed that we’re not doing it on his show.”

The addiction to access may have compelled ABC News to pay $15 million to Trump’s presidential library to settle a lawsuit it could have won. And sure enough, ABC then got an exclusive Oval Office interview with Trump early in his second term.

One of the smartest tactics of the Trump regime is providing heaping helpings of social posts and video appearances that can be processed by the media to fill their TV shows and websites. Chief Trump liar Karoline Leavitt calls this “transparency,” but in fact, it just gives his propaganda a wider audience.

Reporters don’t have to be this needy. They could find other people to talk to who aren’t officially tasked with lying. They’ve even done so on occasion. The Trump regime tried to intimidate reporters who cover the military by imposing new access rules. Instead, the vast majority of journalists – including even Fox News – left the Pentagon rather than agree to rules that they be accompanied by official escorts while in the building and risk expulsion should they report information not approved by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth for release.

Reporters have managed to write revealing stories about Trump’s military adventurism in Venezuela and elsewhere despite the lack of access. Maybe it’s been more difficult, but it probably leads reporters to more facts and less spin.

Good journalism thrives on a hard-nosed relationship with newsmakers. Bad journalism makes reporters into collaborators with the newsmakers they cover.

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This week’s media atrocity

The choice is easy this week: The Washington Post’s layoffs of about a third of its staff is the further trashing of an iconic news outlet by billionaire owner Jeff Bezos, who could easily afford to operate the Post at a loss and still keep his $500 million yacht. I gave up on the Post last summer when it was obvious that Bezos was using it to placate Trump and protect his other businesses, such as Amazon and Blue Origin.

When the layoffs came down, Bezos and publisher Will Lewis showed themselves to be loathsome cowards by failing to address the staff, leaving their underlings to do it. A few days later, Lewis resigned with an announcement referring to “two years of transformation.” That’s quite a euphemism for vandalism.

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Join COURIER and 3.14 Action on March 12 for MAHA & the Midterms: How Trump and RFK Jr.’s Agenda Costs Americans.

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Last week, right-wing influencer Megyn Kelly said Alex Pretti was asking for it when Border Patrol agents shot him 10 times, murdering him on a Minneapolis street.

“I know I’m supposed to feel sorry for Alex Pretti, but I don’t. I don’t,” Kelly said. “Do you know why I wasn’t shot by Border Patrol this weekend? Because I kept my ass inside and out of their operations.”

That comment made me recall the brief moment when I thought Kelly might be standing up for decency. It was at about 9:15 p.m. ET on August 6, 2015, when the then-Fox News anchor asked Donald Trump a question at a presidential debate:

“You’ve called women you don’t like fat pigs, dogs, slobs, and disgusting animals. … You once told a contestant on ‘Celebrity Apprentice’ it would be a pretty picture to see her on her knees. Does that sound to you like the temperament of a man we should elect as president?”

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Wow, I thought. She’s standing up for women.

Turns out, she was grandstanding for one woman – herself.

Trump fired back at Kelly and the media delighted in their supposed feud even though it soon developed a championship wrestling vibe. Kelly pretended not to like the attention. “He was so very focused on me that I became the story,” Kelly said, “and you know, you never want to be the story when you’re a newsperson.”

Yeah, right.

Eight months after their confrontation, Kelly met privately with Trump, afterward describing him as “gracious.” The next month, he granted her an interview and said he’d stop attacking her “because I think I like our relationship right now.”

That’s when she climbed onto the Trump train, sipping a fizzy fascist soda in the club car.

During her Fox days, Kelly had some controversial moments, such as when she insisted in 2013 that Santa Claus was white. In recent years, she’s gotten away from network TV and embraced Sirius radio and YouTube, where she’s amassed a huge right-wing audience. And not coincidentally, she’s become even more outrageous and downright nasty.

It’s reminiscent of the style of the late Rush Limbaugh, who called feminists “femi-Nazis,” said actor Michael J. Fox was “exaggerating” his Parkinson’s Disease, and described 13-year-old Chelsea Clinton as “the White House dog.”

Kelly has become Rush Limbaugh in drag. Some examples:

• When she endorsed Trump in 2024, she praised him as a “protector of women” – a far cry from her calling him out in 2015 for describing women as “disgusting animals.”

• She dismissed sexual assault by Trump, saying, “I don’t give a shit about Trump getting handsy with somebody 20 years ago. I want someone who will close the border, which he has.”

• She was so desperate to defend Trump in the Jeffrey Epstein case that she defended Epstein, too. She said “somebody very close to this case” told her that Epstein ”was not a pedophile. … He was into the barely legal type. Like, he liked 15-year-old girls.” (WE INTERRUPT THIS QUOTE TO POINT OUT THAT SEX WITH A 15-YEAR-OLD IS NOT LEGAL.) Kelly continued: “I’m not trying to make an excuse for this, I’m just giving you facts — that he wasn’t into, like, 8-year-olds. But he liked the very young teen types that could pass for even younger than they were, but would look legal to a passer-by.”

• She showed bizarre bloodlust after two men on an alleged drug boat survived the initial U.S. strike but were killed in a second strike that appeared to be a war crime. “I’d really like to see them suffer,” she said. “I would like Trump and [Defense Secretary Pete] Hegseth to make it last a long time so they lose a limb and bleed out.”

• In addition to blaming Alex Pretti for his own death, Kelly insulted ICE murder victim Renee Good: “It’s not that I have no empathy for her family, but I have empathy for them because they had a dumbass mother …”

• She said women who protest ICE are “obese and unattractive with multiple piercings, no makeup, skin issues,” and aren’t having sex with men. “If you’re having positive interactions with men where you’re going to bed with them … you’re not going out there and looking at all these men as the devil enemies who you want to hurt and kill and stop.”

Kelly’s show is obviously designed to tap into toxic masculinity and entertain people who fantasize about violence. As a supporter of the First Amendment, I believe she has a right to be this terrible. But we shouldn’t pretend she’s a “journalist,” as she claims on her X account. Megyn Kelly is a fascist propagandist selling out her country for attention and profit.

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This week’s media atrocity

Politico wrote this headline on Friday: “DOJ announces full release of Epstein files.” Full release? Wrong. Didn’t happen.

As the New York Times explained: “[Deputy Attorney General Todd] Blanche rattled off a number of reasons that the Justice Department withheld documents, saying that they were permitted under the law passed by Congress last year. They included files with personal identifying information or medical information of Epstein’s victims, material depicting child sexual abuse and material that depicted death or violence.”

Blanche also said documents could be withheld if there were ongoing investigations, but he declined to say whether there were any. And, of course, the questionable redactions mean that Politico claiming “full release” is ridiculous.

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News outlets have long conferred a high level of credibility to what government officials say. After all, they’re chosen through a democratic process, supposedly based on their competence and honesty.

In practice, of course, government officials sometimes lie and steal. And on a national level in the last decade, an entire political party has made it a matter of policy to lie brazenly to the public.

Now this party has made it a policy to cover up its own violence and even murder.

This is clear from what’s happened in Minneapolis in recent weeks, and what happened in the Chicago area before that and what happens in Homeland Security custody – 53 deaths since Donald Trump returned to power, including one this month ruled a homicide.

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Early reports about Saturday’s fatal shooting of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis were understandably vague and cautious (“Federal agent shoots and kills man in Minneapolis, officials say”). But the true test of the news media was how they handled the story as it evolved.

Soon after the story broke and the first bystander video appeared, I offered advice for the media on Bluesky: “HOMELAND SECURITY LIES ROUTINELY AS A MATTER OF POLICY. If you feel compelled to include the Trump regime’s version of events, you must include that context.”

That advice was generally ignored, of course, but the release of another video and the account put forth by Homeland Security made it clear that the government was determined to lie about the incident – as it had with the killing of Renee Good three weeks ago.

The second video of the Pretti shooting clearly showed him holding a cellphone as he attempted to help a woman pepper-sprayed by Border Patrol agents. The agents wrestled Pretti to the ground, and though he had a legally owned firearm, the video appears to show an agent taking it from him before any gunfire occurred. Then agents fired a total of 10 shots at Pretti, including three to his back, killing him.

Homeland Security’s version of the incident was that Pretti “approached U.S. Border Patrol officers with a 9 mm semiautomatic handgun” and that he intended to “massacre law enforcement.” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said Pretti was “brandishing” a weapon and accused him of “domestic terrorism.”

Some timid news outlets kept their headlines generic for hours. An exception was the New York Times – which I have frequently criticized in the past but will praise here. The NYT moved with good speed to headlines such as “Man Killed by Federal Agents Was Holding a Phone, Not a Gun” and “Videos Appear to Contradict Federal Accounts of Fatal Shooting.” It later dropped the hedging and said: “Videos Contradict Federal Accounts of Fatal Shooting.” (Here’s a gift link to an excellent NYT timeline.)

A day after the shooting, the NYT reported that the Trump regime was trying to ”justify an increasingly violent crackdown” by “immediately going on the offensive and demonizing the victim, often distorting the facts in the process.”

Homeland Security, as usual, is sticking to its lies. No investigation conducted by the regime will be credible. Already, the response of investigative agencies to Good’s murder has been so outrageous that federal officials have quit in protest.

The media’s overreliance on official accounts has long been a scandal. It has allowed law enforcement to get away with murder, literally. Journalists must stop relying on the accounts of officials they know are liars. Simple as that.

This puts the media in a tricky position: Do they believe eyewitnesses if they can find them? Do they believe advocacy groups? Attributing information to “officials” used to be a safe and easy position. Now journalists need to be more skeptical. Frankly, they should have been all along.

Video from smartphones and bodycams has made a huge difference in the public’s view of police-citizen encounters. But reliance on video has its hazards, too, in this age of AI fakery. News outlets must put adequate resources into verifying and analyzing such videos.

When I was an editor at the Chicago Tribune, we had a stark example of the dangers of trusting official accounts too much.

In 2014, a Black 17-year-old named Laquan McDonald was carrying a knife and walking away from police when he was gunned down – shot 16 times – by a white officer who had arrived on the scene only seconds earlier. The first account on the Tribune’s website relied on the account of a police union spokesman, an obviously biased source, that the shooting was justified. Officers on the scene gave false statements and police brass swept the case under the rug.

A week after Mayor Rahm Emanuel won re-election, the city disclosed a $5 million settlement with McDonald’s family, triggering new media interest. For months, the Emanuel administration resisted the release of dashcam video of the killing, until an independent journalist won a court order to pry it loose. The belated disclosure led to the second-degree murder conviction of the officer, who served three years in prison. It never would have happened without the video.

Journalists at the Tribune and other Chicago media realized we had messed up by trusting the official account. We learned a painful lesson. Everyone covering the actions of Homeland Security – the real domestic terrorists – must learn that lesson too.

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This week’s media atrocity

Fox News wins the week’s dishonors with its parroting of the government’s false talking points about Minneapolis. The regime’s lies were so obvious that even Trump apologist Maria Bartiromo was asking hard questions on Fox, while her colleagues on the network kept performing as fascist puppets:

• Fox co-host Charlie Hurt: “Only one person could have prevented this from happening and it’s Alex Pretti. He should have not been there.”

• Fox host Lara Trump: “A Border Patrol agent, in fear for his life, shot an armed man.”

• Fox host Griff Jenkins: “Why an individual would confront federal immigration law enforcement with a handgun is beyond me.”

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ICYMI: Gloves Off is officially live

COURIER founder and publisher Tara McGowan kicked off her new show with Rep. Jasmine Crockett in a candid, yet hopeful conversation about power, courage, and what real leadership actually looks like. Stream the first episode now on YouTube, Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

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Tara emphasizes the power of new, independent media as some legacy media bend the knee to the Trump regime.

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I sometimes wonder why journalists are so nice to the people who want to destroy them.

Republicans who run the government seem determined to wipe out independent oversight, to turn journalism into an obsolete job like lamplighter or video store clerk.

Trump rewards media suck-ups and punishes legitimate journalists. He accuses TV networks of “treason” and threatens to pull their broadcast licenses. The Pentagon evicts reporters for refusing to accept draconian rules. The FBI searches a reporter’s home and seizes her computers, phone, and smart watch. And for a decade, Trump has smeared news outlets as “enemies of the people.”

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Yet time after time, mainstream media give these authoritarians a platform to lie to the American people, often unchallenged. One of the media’s motives is based on a misguided principle: They think the marketplace of ideas will sort things out and it’s their job to present “both sides.” They believe that makes them fair; I think it makes them stenographers.

What’s more alarming and not at all principled is corporate media’s triangulation. They want to make their news truthful enough to keep an audience that’s attractive to advertisers while preventing it from being so truthful that it ticks off center-right customers and gains the negative attention of Trump and the tech-financial oligarchy behind him.

As one legacy outlet, CBS News, has become an organ of the dictatorship, its viewership numbers have slipped. There is a financial danger of being too Trumpy. But other major outlets know if they go the other way – if they state the dangers of the regime in frank terms – they will be punished with frivolous lawsuits, regulatory harassment, and a lack of access.

So we get news from an absurd patch of middle ground. Major media know Trump is building a dictatorship, but they’re unwilling to tell the public that Trump is building a dictatorship.

This cynical pursuit of profit at the expense of public awareness is unacceptable. In our democracy, journalists stand in a privileged position, with freedom of the press specifically protected in the Constitution. They have a duty to inform the electorate.

I’m not saying all journalists must be pro-democracy. In a free country, they’re allowed to be communists or fascists or whatever they want, if they do it nonviolently (which fascists generally don’t, since they thrive on violence and abuse of power).

But whatever their ideology, responsible owners of major news outlets should be honest with their audiences about what’s at stake. Their outlets shouldn’t normalize corruption and use soft language for hard truths, such as National Public Radio referring last week to the Trump regime’s “willingness to push the boundaries of the law” when the regime is way, way beyond the boundaries.

What’s especially mystifying about mainstream media’s behavior is that they’re tying the rope for their own noose. If they aren’t willing to accept a basic duty of journalism – to warn the public about dangers to their well-being – they ought to at least be selfish enough to worry about dangers to the well-being of their own industry.

Trump is trying to turn them into fascist functionaries, and they ought to be alarmed about that – unless they don’t care what they broadcast as long as they get paid for it.

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Here’s a new feature: media atrocity of the week

On CBS News’ “Face the Nation” last Sunday, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey was interviewed by host Margaret Brennan and referred to Homeland Security as an “occupying force that has quite literally invaded our city.”

Brennan responded: “You said ‘occupying force.’ Don’t you think that’s a bit much?”

Frey answered: “You can go through whatever rhetorical flourish you want, but when you have 3,000 ICE agents and Border Patrol come to the city, when you’ve got this supposed threat of 1,500 military coming to the city, yeah, that’s very much what it feels like.”

Watch the whole interview. Brennan thinks her job is to trumpet the regime’s talking points and act like Frey is overreacting when his city is under siege. And Brennan also wants to please her right-wing boss, Bari Weiss. I think that’s a bit much.

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If journalists were succeeding, the American public would be well informed and able to fend off the lies of Republican politicians and their vast disinformation network.

News flash: Journalists are not succeeding.

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That’s why the tactics of the news industry must change. It’s not enough for journalists to operate in a bubble and produce their own factual reports. They must also take aggressive action to counteract the twisted reality being pushed by others. They must become radically truthful, following these rules of conduct:

Let no lie reach the audience unchallenged.

We see it all the time on TV: Donald Trump and his co-conspirators deliver a string of lies, and the anchors correct one or two of them – or none of them – while letting all the others implant in the public mind. The news media act as if they’re helpless, but they’re not. They should adopt a firm goal to never let anyone use their platform to lie to their audience uncorrected.

Get the fact check as close to the lie as possible.

TV networks could do this in a variety of ways. They could put graphics on the screen that call out the falsehoods in real time. Or they could hit the pause button on presidential speeches and explain why a statement was false, then resume broadcasting the speech. In written stories, a good sentence would be: “Trump called Chicago the ‘most dangerous city in the world, by far,’ which it is not, by far.”

Interrupt aggressively.

A common trick of liars is to make a false statement and then keep talking and talking and talking, sometimes changing the subject so the lie seems too far in the past for an interviewer to return to it. So interrupt them in the middle of their remarks, even in the middle of sentences. That’s not rude – it’s radically truthful.

Boot people off the air if they repeatedly lie.

TV hosts should fact-check liars in real time, and if guests don’t accept the proven facts presented, the interview should end immediately – and they shouldn’t be invited back. Major media don’t do this because they’d rather maintain access to powerful people than be honest with their audience. I say, screw access. If news outlets tried harder to find new people to interview instead of the same old cast of characters, they’d produce better journalism.

If a newsmaker has a history of lying, say so.

Some people would consider it biased to write: “Trump, who has lied about unveiling a health care plan for nearly a decade, said Tuesday: ‘I have concepts of a plan.’” In fact, such a sentence would provide honest and helpful context. There’s no question that Trump is the most pervasive liar in our nation’s political history. Why give him a clean slate every time, acting as if there’s a good chance he’s telling the truth this one time? Yet that’s exactly what mainstream media do. I would point out a newsmaker’s history of lying only if they’re notorious, repeat liars. But unfortunately, that describes many Republican politicians today.

Reject normalization of corruption and insanity.

One of the great dangers of our time is that people will start thinking that it’s normal for a president to knock down part of the White House and give pardons to infamous drug traffickers. Much of what’s happening now – especially Trump’s assault on the rule of law – goes against long-held American principles. The news media need to remind people of that and explain why it matters.

Don’t give liars the headlines they want.

I’m all for headlines that are clear and direct. But the media should not lead with disinformation. A recent NBC News headline read, “FDA claims Covid shots killed 10 children and vows new vaccine rules.” The summary underneath read, “Vaccine experts said the memo was irresponsible and that it omits key details about how officials arrived at the conclusion.” Swap the main points of the headline and the summary and you’d be doing it right.

State unvarnished truths.

Trump is building a dictatorship. Say it. There’s a mountain of evidence to support that obvious conclusion. He’s not “testing the boundaries of the presidency.” He’s building a dictatorship. Tell the truth. Warn the public.

Go to war against rival news outlets’ dishonesty.

Fox News has adopted a successful strategy of trashing the coverage on rival networks in order to make its audience think everyone in mainstream media is lying except for Fox. Legitimate media should employ this tactic for good – to alert the public when other outlets are lying to them.

You see, it’s not enough to do good work. The end goal of fostering an informed public requires the news industry to protect people from disinformation. I liken it to what many racial justice advocates say: It’s not enough to avoid being racist; to contribute to a just society, we must be anti-racist. I apply the same framing to the battle against disinformation: It’s not enough to report the truth. We must defeat the liars.

Why don’t major media adopt these tactics?

Because they’re more interested in profits than public service. They could embrace the reforms I suggest here, but they won’t because of what I call the Three C’s: cowardice, cluelessness, and complicity. Some fear Trump’s retribution, some cling to outmoded news practices, and some are actively collaborating with the Trump regime.

So I’m not looking for CNN to say, “Great ideas, Mark. We’ll do it!” But if some incredibly rich people want to give me money to launch such a news outlet, they know where to find me.

Until that happens, let’s shun the news outlets that fail to confront disinformation and support the ones that do. Let’s realize that right-wing lies are poisoning our society and act to protect our fellow Americans. Let’s be radically truthful.

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Both the New York Times and the Washington Post knew about the Trump regime’s attack on Venezuela beforehand, but they agreed to keep the plan secret to protect the safety of American troops, according to the Semafor news outlet, citing anonymous sources.

This is not surprising. In fact, it’s a common practice when it comes to military operations.

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The issue came to a head during World War II when the Chicago Tribune revealed that the U.S. military had knowledge of Japan’s attack plans before the Battle of Midway. Although the story didn’t explicitly state that the U.S. had cracked Japan’s naval code, that conclusion was both logical and accurate. President Franklin Roosevelt was so angry that his government tried to charge Tribune journalists with violating the Espionage Act, but a grand jury declined to indict them. Meanwhile, the Japanese apparently overlooked the Tribune report, making only minor changes in their code for the remainder of the war. So much for the power of the press.

In a much more recent case, The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg was accidentally added to a Signal chat in which Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and others discussed a planned attack on Houthi rebels in Yemen last March. Goldberg wrote about it, but as he later explained, “we withheld specific information related to weapons and to the timing of attacks that we found in certain texts. As a general rule, we do not publish information about military operations if that information could possibly jeopardize the lives of U.S. personnel.”

But after claims “by numerous administration officials that we are lying about the content of the Signal texts,” The Atlantic decided to publish the full conversation – with the exception of the name of a CIA officer who was cited in the texts.

The media’s general deference to the U.S. military’s need for operational secrecy is likely to be tested in coming months and years. After all, Trump is perverting the mission of the military far beyond legitimate national security.

In addition to the attack on Venezuela, the Trump regime in the last two weeks has sent missiles and drones into Nigeria in supposed defense of Christians and has threatened to attack Iran in supposed defense of protesters there. In the wake of the Venezuela attack, the regime has made threatening statements about Cuba, Colombia, Mexico, and Danish-held Greenland.

Trump is also using the military as a political weapon against American cities. Last week, he backed off in Chicago, Portland, and Los Angeles after a defeat in the Supreme Court. But at the same time, he threatened to “come back, perhaps in a much different and stronger form,” raising fears he will invoke the Insurrection Act, which gives the president broad powers to use the military domestically.

The press has to ask itself: Is it still in the public interest for journalists to keep secrets about Trump’s anti-democratic use of the military? The answer isn’t an easy one, and it may well depend on the situation at hand. But the question will eventually become unavoidable.

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Five other thoughts on the Venezuela attack

It’s illegal: Trump’s abduction of Venezuela’s president and the killings of an estimated 80 people in the raid were violations of both U.S. and international law. He didn’t obtain congressional approval, as is required in this country. Major media need to spend more time explaining how the process of going to war is supposed to work in a constitutional democracy. The New York Times has done good work in this regard, both in an editorial calling Trump’s action “illegal” and in a news story questioning whether it’s lawful for Trump to “run” Venezuela.

WaPo cheers on Trump: While NYT’s editorial board denounced the attack, the Washington Post’s board demonstrated why I and many others have given up on the news outlet owned by Trump-allied oligarch Jeff Bezos. According to WaPo’s rah-rah editorial, Trump’s illegal attack was “a major victory for American interests.”

Code talkers: When the news media say the United States’ strongarm approach to Venezuela “raises legal questions,“ that’s code for “the president is violating the law, but no one is going to stop him.”

Leaky logic: It’s ridiculous for the Trump regime to say it didn’t consult Congress because of worries about lawmakers leaking information. No. 1, it’s the law, and members of Congress know their duty to keep secrets. No. 2, the regime that’s so worried about leaks is the same regime that accidentally shared attack plans with a reporter and then punished no one for it.

An efficient killing machine: There’s a tendency of major media to marvel at the skill of the U.S. military and therefore cast even their misguided assignments in positive terms. One example was a social post by Rachael Bade, the former Politico reporter who is now partnering in an online show with former presidential liar Sean Spicer. “Agree or disagree with the merits of the operation,” Bade wrote, “you can’t help but be in awe of the US military might described by General [Dan] Caine.” Yes, our military is outstanding, which is precisely what makes it so dangerous when it’s used to promote authoritarianism and conquest.

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