It matters who owns news organizations. It matters who runs them.

Corporate media have similar profit motives that may affect their willingness to tell the whole truth, but they’re not all the same. Some news executives let journalists do their jobs with little or no interference. Others, like CBS News, owned by the pro-Trump Ellison family, are in the tank for the fascist regime.

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Last week, former “60 Minutes” correspondent Cecilia Vega provided new insight into how CBS management pressured its staff to twist reporting after federal agents murdered Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis in January.

According to Vega, CBS management asked her to include video of protesters attacking people they erroneously believed were undercover ICE agents. But Vega said her team found “no credible examples” of that.

She said she was urged to include a comment by Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey supposedly calling on city police officers to fight ICE agents. But Vega said she and her colleagues watched “every frame” of a Frey news conference and “that never happened. We could not find any instance of the mayor saying something like that.”

Vega’s account bolstered the claims made by her former colleague Scott Pelley, who accused CBS executives of pressuring him “to inject falsehoods and bias” into his reporting. Pelley said CBS News boss Bari Weiss ordered his team to make protesters look more violent and to describe Good as driving toward an ICE agent when video clearly showed her steering away.

Let’s take stock of what happened here: CBS News executives tried to help the Trump regime whitewash public executions carried out by federal agents.

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Both Vega and Pelley refused to insert falsehoods into their reporting. They were later fired. But they’re not disgruntled employees settling scores. They’re seasoned journalists appalled by what they saw.

“I’ve gone head-to-head with editors for 25 years in this business,” Vega said. “But never in my career, until now, have I felt that those edits, that those suggestions, came from a place of misinformation or politics.”

It appears likely that CBS executives were passing on disinformation they received from the Trump regime, which had falsely labeled both Good and Pretti as domestic terrorists.

Corporate media are especially susceptible to political influence because their owners often operate businesses that have nothing to do with journalism but stand to be rewarded or punished by the people in power. The Ellisons’ friendliness toward Trump earned them the support of Trump’s Justice Department in their bid to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery.

A key test of a news outlet’s culture and ethics is whether its money people can keep their thumbs off the newsgathering process. Many don’t respect any boundaries. Another threat to journalists’ honest reporting is the desire of some news executives to avoid being confrontational toward politicians, either because they fear being seen as biased or because they’re addicted to access. But journalists have a duty to apply truth to power, even if some executives flinch at that.

I experienced this flinching firsthand when I was an editor at the Chicago Tribune.

In the early days of Trump’s first term, a top editor ordered me and my staff not to say in stories that Trump was lying, or even that he was wrong. We were instructed to convey what Trump said and then say what the facts were, hoping that readers would reach the correct conclusion all by themselves.

That timidity has been common throughout legacy media, and it’s part of the reason Trump is in a position now to destroy our democracy.

Of course, soft treatment toward politicians happens in both big and little ways. Sometimes it’s a slanted headline or corruption being downplayed as “a break from norms.”

But in the case of the Good and Pretti murders, CBS executives crossed a far darker line. They took the side of lying politicians trying to justify shooting Americans. And since then, ICE has killed more people.

This wasn’t “politics.” It was a test of whether a news outlet would prioritize basic human decency. CBS News failed that test.

This week’s media atrocity

It was disgusting to see the White House Correspondents’ Association hosting Trump as its guest of honor at its dinner Friday. NBC’s Kristen Welker was caught on video yukking it up with Stephen Miller, architect of ICE’s reign of terror against immigrants and the people who defend them. Members of the Washington press are supposed to be watchdogs, but too often they’re lapdogs. The dinner sent the message that they’re all in the same club, and you aren’t.

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Trump and prediction markets are building a society of suckers

Prediction markets are perfect examples of how Donald Trump and the oligarchs who conspire with him are building a nation of chumps, a society of suckers.

These markets are online betting parlors by another name. They allow people to wager on a wide variety of questions, from“Next prime minister of Ethiopia?“ to “Where will ‘Janice STFU’ by Drake rank on the Billboard Hot 100 chart dated Aug 1, 2026?”

Prediction markets are sometimes described as a testament to “the wisdom of crowds,” but such wisdom has its limits. The markets are notoriously vulnerable to insider trading, which means people who control events or have private knowledge of what will happen can make a killing.

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Trump, who loves gray-area, funny-money opportunities like cryptocurrency and prediction markets, has made his position clear. He wants his Commodity Futures Trading Commission to have “exclusive authority” over prediction markets, with no regulation by the states. “We cannot have SCUM like Chris Christie, Letitia James, Tim Walz, and JB Pritzker setting the rules!” Trump wrote in May.

Trump’s CFTC chairman, Michael Selig, doesn’t look like much of a watchdog. This month, he praised prediction markets as “an interesting hedging tool” that helps companies “manage risk.” And the president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., is a booster, too. He has financial ties to the top two prediction markets – serving as an investor and unpaid adviser for Polymarket and a paid adviser for Kalshi.

Major news media are also in cahoots. CNBC and CNN treat Kalshi’s numbers as if they’re news – and both have financial deals to promote the company. CNBC sometimes fails to disclose that relationship when reporting on Kalshi, according to an excellent report by Aaron Rupar and Judd Legum. CNBC says it discloses its financial link only when it is “directly relevant to the story.”

CNN’s deal with Kalshi is exclusive, which means CNN can’t cite other prediction markets in its coverage, a network source told The New Yorker. If the coverage of Kalshi’s wagers were actually news instead of just sneaky product placement, why wouldn’t CNN occasionally cite other prediction markets, too?

While CNBC and CNN continue this gross perversion of their journalistic mission, other news outlets are doing fine jobs of exposing the ways these markets make our country more dishonest and exploitative. Among the most damning reports:

• About 0.1% of accounts on Polymarket collect about two-thirds of the profits, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis.

• In a stunningly dodgy tactic, Polymarket created “clone” sites on which social media influencers made fake bets before posting videos with messages like, “I just turned $500 into $100K.”

• The Associated Press reported: “A group of new accounts on the prediction market Polymarket made highly specific, well-timed bets on whether the U.S. and Iran would reach a ceasefire on April 7, resulting in hundreds of thousands of dollars in profits … At least 50 accounts, or wallets, placed substantial ‘Yes’ bets Tuesday before Trump announced the ceasefire in a Truth Social post at around 6:30 pm ET. These were the first bets made by these particular wallets.”

• Some prediction markets let people to bet on wildfires. “Experts are sounding the alarm,” says CNN. “They fear it risks incentivizing arson.”

• Kalshi will soon begin taking bets on the outcomes of clinical drug trials. Nothing bad could come from that, right?

• Trump’s teleprompter operator is suspected of using his inside knowledge to win more than $100,000 betting on Kalshi about what the president would say in his major speeches.

• Spotify removed about 500,000 streams from Malcolm Todd’s song “Earrings” after its strong performance on the charts was linked to manipulation tied to Kalshi bets.

• Polymarket pays “influencers” to insert its product into social media conversations. Among them: former Politico reporter Rachael Bade, former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, anti-trans activist Riley Gaines, leftist commentator Brian Krassenstein, and right-wing podcaster Benny Johnson (who was also funded by Russia, supposedly without his knowledge).

• Billionaire Peter Thiel, the money man behind JD Vance’s political career, is a major investor in Polymarket.

The greed of Team Trump and the mainstream media have empowered prediction markets to separate many people from their money while allowing a few to quietly profit from dodgy schemes.

CNBC and CNN aren’t the only media companies with prediction market ties. Polymarket has a partnership with Dow Jones, publisher of the Wall Street Journal, though it must be said that some of the most negative stories about prediction markets have appeared in the WSJ.

Polymarket also has a cooperation agreement with Substack, the publishing platform for this newsletter, which is sponsored by COURIER Newsroom. I have had no dealings with any prediction market and pledge to never take their money.

If you see a journalist or influencer posting positively about a prediction market on social media, ask them in the comments whether they have any financial ties. I have done that myself and aim to do it more often.

Prediction markets, as currently operated, stink to high heaven.

This week’s media atrocity

Reacting to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s campaign to boost testosterone levels in the military, Fox host Jesse Watters declared: “Women on base, you guys better be careful. Port calls, women in Asia, you better be careful. Because these guys are going to be wild animals and you better watch out.”

Yep, rape is hilarious if you’re an idiot like Jesse Watters.

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Federal agents went to New York Times reporters’ homes last week to deliver subpoenas in their investigation of news coverage that displeased the Trump regime.

This is bad news for both journalism and democracy. But it’s entirely predictable. News outlets that minimize and normalize Republican authoritarianism will eventually find it at their doorstep.

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The NYT has been simultaneously great and terrible in its coverage of MAGA. Its investigative reporters have often exposed individual abuses, but its news editors have failed to shape a coherent warning about the broader threat to our freedom. Too often, they’ve been clueless or trivializing.

When Donald Trump called for “termination” of the Constitution, the NYT put the story on Page 13. When he lied about immigration and the economy in an address to Congress, the NYT praised his “game show flair.” When he vowed to take back the Panama Canal by force, the NYT called it a desire ”to expand America’s footprint.” When he showed that his brain was broken by bizarrely swaying to music at a campaign rally for 39 minutes, it was merely an “improvisational departure.”

During the 2024 presidential campaign, NYT Executive Editor Joe Kahn said the survival of democracy was not a top priority in the Times’ coverage:

It’s our job to cover the full range of issues that people have. At the moment, democracy is one of them. But it’s not the top one — immigration happens to be the top [of polls], and the economy and inflation is the second.

The NYT seemed to take civil liberties more seriously last week after receiving subpoenas over its coverage of problems with Qatar’s “gift” of a new Air Force One to Trump. The regime’s investigation is “a brazen act” that “should shock the conscience of any American,” the NYT said.

Of course, the NYT isn’t the only mainstream outlet that once thought it could ride out the fascist movement without getting confrontational with the fascists. Some journalists at legacy news organizations act as if they live in a very safe space. They’re part of the power structure. They have lawyers and researchers and expense accounts and multiple layers of editors to keep them out of trouble. Nothing bad could happen to them, right?

ABC News may have thought it was protecting itself by settling a Trump lawsuit for $15 million over host George Stephanopoulos’ comments that Trump had been “found liable for rape” in the E. Jean Carroll case. Technically, under New York law, it was sexual abuse, not rape, even though a judge in the case said it would be considered rape in “common modern parlance.” ABC had a good chance of winning the lawsuit because Trump is a public figure and would have had to prove Stephanopoulos knowingly made a false statement.

Instead, ABC surrendered, which encouraged Trump to sue other media outlets. Stephanopoulos signed a new contract and the network moved on.

But for tyrants, there’s never enough acquiescence.

ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel often mocks Trump on his late-night show, and Trump’s hatchet man at the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, went after Kimmel last September. Carr’s FCC can’t shut down networks, but it does have the power to launch investigations and pull the licenses of network-owned local affiliate stations.

Seizing on Kimmel’s comments after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, Carr made his threat:

We can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to change conduct to take action on Kimmel or, you know, there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.

Nexstar and Sinclair, two major local TV chains, pulled Kimmel’s show, and then ABC suspended him. But the regime’s heavy hand caused a major stink – and inspired calls for a boycott of Disney, ABC’s parent company. The bid to silence Kimmel fell apart, and he went back on the air.

Now Trump and Carr are going after ABC’s “The View,” whose hosts have long irritated the regime. Carr’s FCC is questioning the show’s claim that it qualifies as a news show exempt from “equal time” rules. As ABC puts it, “the FCC wants to control who is allowed to appear on the show.”

This time, ABC is fighting back, launching an ad campaign urging viewers to submit comments to the FCC. Tens of thousands have done so.

Better late than never, ABC. It’s well past time for other legacy outlets to defend the 1st Amendment and themselves. But so many of them continue to betray their duty to a free society.

We’ll soon see another demonstration of that subservience with the redo of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on July 24, featuring Trump. You’ll recall that a gunman interrupted the event in April, and the White House Correspondents’ Association vowed to reschedule the dinner in cooperation with the nation’s most prominent enemy of the free press.

The dinner – which should be abolished – will carry some suspense about what Trump decides to say. Back in April, some of us anticipated that journalists would sit there and take it as Trump ripped the “fake news.” But he is unpredictable. To its credit, the NYT does not participate in the WHCD, though it does cover it. Maybe it will once again praise Trump’s “game show flair.”

Trump, who can turn anything into a cheap carny act, is coy.

“I don’t know whether or not I will give the same rather nasty statements, at least as it concerns certain people,” he wrote in June. “But we will soon find out.”

This week’s media atrocity

The Hill, anticipating an announcement of Sen. Mitch McConnell’s death, prematurely published a story headlined, “DO NOT USE: A lookback at Mitch McConnell’s time in the Senate.”

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I’m increasingly worried about “media capture.”

That’s when rich people buy up mass-communication companies and use them to disinform the public and empower a strongman leader.

In the United States, the trend is disturbing.

Last month, the right-wing Murdoch family’s Fox Corp. announced plans to buy streaming TV platform Roku, which is used by 100 million American households. Also last month, the U.S. “Justice” Department fast-tracked the pro-Trump Ellison family’s bid to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery, parent company of CNN. The Ellisons have already gained a share of TikTok with Trump’s help and taken over CBS News, where they hired right-wing favorite Bari Weiss to promote pro-Trump disinformation.

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Clearly, the Ellison family is pursuing media capture in collaboration with the regime.

Trump’s DOJ approved Ellison-owned Paramount’s bid to buy Warner Bros. Discovery, and thus take control of CNN, before its own staff had a chance to oppose the deal on antitrust grounds. State attorneys general and/or European regulators could still block the sale, but the smart money says the Ellisons’ takeover is a done deal.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is cheerleading for it. In March, he denounced “more fake news from CNN” and said, “The sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better.”

So what would that mean for CNN’s coverage?

I predict a slow slide to the right. CNN reports sharply about Trump at times, and does a good job of running clips of his past statements to demonstrate his hypocrisy. But it generally stops short of the obvious sweeping conclusion that he’s building an authoritarian government. Journalists like Jim Acosta and John Harwood who were really hardnosed about Trump have left the network. Meanwhile, MAGA liar Scott Jennings remains on CNN’s payroll.

Some CNN journalists seem worried about the prospect of pro-Trump bias, especially if Bari Weiss’ role expands to cover CNN too. Scott Pelley was fired at CBS after accusing Weiss of “murdering ‘60 Minutes.’” He said she pressured the program to make Minnesota protesters look “more violent” and to report that shooting victim Renee Good drove her car toward an immigration agent when she didn’t.

The New York Post’s Charles Gasparino reported that CNN’s staff is “in a panic” over the likely takeover, and he quoted an unnamed Paramount insider as saying, “Yes, I know people are scared but we’re looking to produce a news product that appeals to 70% of the country that is either center left or center right. Why be scared of that?”

David Ellison likes to cite that 70% figure, but it’s wrong. Polls show that only about 40% of American adults put themselves in the center. But whatever the number, a more legitimate approach would be to avoid pandering to the supposed center and instead “center” the truth. Report the facts. Keep liars off the air.

I don’t expect that to happen at CNN. Nor do I anticipate a dramatic lurch to the right. That was Weiss’ big mistake at CBS, costing it both credibility and viewership. I suspect the Ellisons have learned their lesson and will turn the dial only slightly to the right, allowing a few more Republicans to tell a few more lies.

One of CNN’s strengths is its international coverage, and that may face the greatest threat. The Ellisons are major supporters of Israel under Benjamin Netanyahu’s leadership, as is Weiss. Also, If the Ellisons’ Paramount buys WBD, 15% of the combined company will be owned by the Saudi sovereign wealth fund. Yes, the people who murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

CNN is sometimes disappointing now. It’s likely to get worse.

Now the good news

Counterbalancing the troubling prospects for CNN is what is happening every day on MS NOW: hard-hitting, well-focused, fact-based news.

Since the former MSNBC separated from NBC last October and changed its name to MS NOW, it has found its footing as a major pro-democracy voice in our country. While other networks and the New York Times clutch their pearls and say Trump is “testing norms,” MS NOW is calling out corruption and authoritarianism. It calls lies “lies.”

But it would be wrong to think of MS NOW as just the liberal flipside of Fox News. MS NOW is focused on real issues that matter to people’s lives. Fox is focused on culture clashes to instill fear and hatred. Also – and this is most important – MS NOW seeks to convey the truth, unlike Fox, which routinely twists the facts to mislead its viewers.

MS NOW features some of the best journalists in the business. Nicolle Wallace’s concentration on the threat of a dictatorship reflects a depth of understanding often lacking in corporate media. Jacob Soboroff, a leading reporter on the abuses of Trump’s immigration crackdown, has a new weekend show. Carol Leonnig regularly breaks news on national security and law enforcement, while Lisa Rubin deftly explains complex court cases.

The likely decline of CNN and the growing influence of MS NOW are demonstrated by legal affairs correspondent Paula Reid leaving CNN amid reports that her next newsroom will be at MS NOW.

I still have problems with the self-indulgent Joe Scarborough on MS NOW’s “Morning Joe,” but in general the network is a smart news operation that respects its audience. We need more like it.

This week’s media atrocity

NPR embarrassed itself with Nina Totenberg’s false report that Justice Samuel Alito was retiring. Totenberg called it “the worst professional mistake of my more than 50 years in journalism." But I think it was the second worst. The worst was Totenberg continuing to cover the Supreme Court despite maintaining a decades-long close friendship with Ruth Bader Ginsburg. If Totenberg wanted to be her friend, she should’ve gotten off the SCOTUS beat.

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Birthright citizenship survived the latest session of the Supreme Court, no thanks to Donald Trump and the Court’s far right wing.

The 14th Amendment’s language is abundantly clear: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

But Trump and other white supremacists think birthright citizenship encourages immigration by Black and brown people, so they attack it. Considering the closeness of the ruling – with four of nine justices saying a ban wouldn’t violate the Constitution – Republicans probably will revisit this issue if they remain in power.

As the United States marks its 250th birthday, we must face the fact that the party in control of the White House, Congress, and the Supreme Court opposes key aspects of the Constitution.

Remember what Trump posted on social media in December 2022 when he called for the overturning of the 2020 election: “A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.”

Clearly, many leading Republicans consider the Constitution optional. Even the Bill of Rights – the first 10 amendments to the Constitution – is not safe from the march of MAGA fascism. I decided to take an amendment-by-amendment look, not always from a technical legal view (I’m not a lawyer), but from a philosophical view.

1st Amendment

When Trump tries to cancel late-night comedians’ TV shows and threatens lawmakers with death for urging the military to follow the law, it’s obvious that he doesn’t believe in freedom of speech. This amendment also prohibits “an establishment of religion,” yet the right is taking many steps toward making Christianity the state religion.

2nd Amendment

This is the part of the Bill of Rights that right-wingers have long been most passionate about. Yet when Alex Pretti was shot to death in Minneapolis while carrying – not brandishing – a legally registered handgun, the Trump regime said his death was his own fault because he was armed.

3rd Amendment

This might be the part of the Bill of Rights with the least modern relevance, but the thinking behind it is relevant to Trump’s attempts to send the military into U.S. cities as an occupying force. It states: “No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.” The Framers wanted the military beholden to the public, not the other way around.

4th Amendment

This gives people – not just citizens, but all people – the right “to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.” It requires authorities to secure legal warrants before conducting searches. Yet the Department of Homeland Security routinely violates this right. Republicans such as Sen. Roger Marshall claim “it’s just not practical” to secure judicial warrants for every single undocumented immigrant, arguing that administrative warrants – issued by Homeland Security itself – are enough.

5th Amendment

This right guarantees that no person – not “no citizen,” but no person – shall be “deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” Yet the Trump regime kidnapped immigrants and shipped them to a torture prison in El Salvador without court proceedings – and even defied a federal judge’s order to turn around planes that were en route. The 5th Amendment has an exception for wartime actions, and the regime made a bogus claim that the detained migrants were “conducting irregular warfare” against the United States.

6th Amendment

This right states that “in all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial.” The Trump regime is ignoring that by murdering more than 200 people on boats in the Pacific and Caribbean. It accuses them of drug trafficking, but presents no evidence and avoids going through the courts by calling them soldiers in an imaginary “war” that’s taking place overseas.

7th Amendment

This guarantees the right to a trial by jury. The regime isn’t disputing that, but as the previous paragraph points out, it’s simply skipping the trial altogether.

8th Amendment

This is the ban on “cruel and unusual punishment,” which would seem to include murdering people on boats without charging them with a crime or presenting evidence against them. But once again, it’s supposedly a “war” conducted on foreign territory, so the Bill of Rights is conveniently deemed irrelevant.

9th Amendment

This amendment states that all powers not stipulated in the Constitution as belonging to the government belong to the people. Yet Trump, through his many executive orders, is systematically trying to claim powers he doesn’t really have.

10th Amendment

This goes along with the previous one. It reinforces that powers that are not conferred on the federal government “are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” Yet Trump is trying to steal control of elections from the states. A Supreme Court ruling this week defeated a Republican-led attack on mail-in voting, but Trump is still campaigning hard to pass the “SAVE America Act” as another means of suppressing the vote.

Other constitutional amendments Republicans hate

• 15th: This amendment declares: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Yet Republicans are putting up barriers to try to reduce minority voter turnout.

• 19th: This gives women the right to vote – and some Chrstian nationalists want to repeal it. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shared a video on social media in which pastors said the vote should be taken away from women.

• 22nd: This amendment says, “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice.” Yet Trump keeps bringing up the idea of running for a third term. And some of his judicial nominees have refused to rule that out.

Have a nice Independence Day, and let’s get busy defending our freedom from right-wing authoritarianism.

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Over the last six days, Fox News’ website has posted 21 separate stories and videos about Caitlin Clark. There were two stories on Wednesday, five more stories on Thursday, another five stories on Friday, an additional five stories and a video on Saturday, two more stories on Sunday, and one on Monday.

Was this because Clark did something extraordinary in the history of women’s basketball? No. This news tsunami occurred because Clark, a white heterosexual woman, was flagrantly fouled by a Black lesbian woman. It occurred because Fox and other right-wing propagandists are determined to exploit Clark as a symbol of white victimization.

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Clark is a fine basketball player – a dazzling passer and a shooter with amazing range. She’s the league’s most famous player, though not its best one. She’s average at best on defense, leads the league in turnovers per game, and isn’t even the top scorer on her own team.

Yet she’s clearly gifted and fun to watch. So it’s a shame that the right’s racial agenda has cast her as a great white hope mistreated in a league dominated by Black women. Players who handle the ball a lot and drive to the basket often get fouled, whether they’re white and named Clark or not. Sometimes the refs miss the call.

An uncalled cheap shot on Wednesday was the trigger for Fox’s latest gusher of white grievance. Clark lost her footing, fell in a tumble and was punched in the throat by the Phoenix Mercury’s Alyssa Thomas. While no foul was called at the time, Thomas later received a one-game suspension, and certainly deserved it.

Fox, which has often portrayed Clark as a victim, went into overdrive, running headlines like “Haters who framed Caitlin Clark’s success as racial now dismiss race when she’s targeted on the court.”

MAGA politicians weighed in, too:

• Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita tweeted: “That’s it? Just one game? Pathetic.”

• Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa tweeted that Clark “gets consistently treated unfairly on the court.”

• Rep. Tim Burchett of Tennessee told the tabloidy TMZ Sports outlet: “I think it’s trashy. She gets the crap kicked out of her.” (TMZ has gotten “exclusives” from Burchett before, including one story headlined “Rep. Tim Burchett Says the Only Bad Bunny He Knows Was His Horny Pet Rabbit.”)

One of the ugliest reactions to the Clark-Thomas incident came from Dan Dakich, who hosts the “Don’t @ Me” podcast for Fox News’ Outkick. He called Thomas’ foul “street justice ghetto style.” As he showed a photo of the incident, he said, “That picture will be a poster on the wall of every African American lesbian basketball player slash woman in America, right there. Holding the white girl down with a couple other people around and putting her in a chokehold.”

“Chokehold” was an exaggeration by a racist idiot. It was a flagrant foul, but not a chokehold.

Dakich was also outraged that “angry African American lesbians” excluded Clark from the WNBA’s 30th anniversary poster. But he undercut his own complaint by noting a report that Clark was left off because she didn’t license the poster company to use an image of her face. Other famous players, Black and white, were omitted from the poster, too, but Dakich focused on “fellow white women who made the sport … Diana Taurasi, nowhere to be seen. Sue Bird, nowhere to be seen. Elena Delle Donne or whatever the hell her name is, nowhere to be seen.”

Yep, Dakich was really standing up for “whatever the hell her name is.”

And that’s the point. Fox and other exploiters of Caitlin Clark’s story don’t really care about women’s sports except as a vehicle to stoke outrage and drive clicks.

There’s a legitimate issue about the quality of WNBA officiating and whether play is too rough. Clark often complains about it, but not in racial terms. I have seen no evidence that race or sexual preference are factors. Other players may resent the adulation toward her, but if that’s a motive for fouling Clark, I think it’s rare. (I’m no expert, but I watch a lot of WNBA games and have written about basketball in the past. My brother Matthew and I co-authored Globetrotter: How Abe Saperstein Shook Up the World of Sports, a biography of the Harlem Globetrotters founder.)

I’d just like the right wing to find something else to cynically overreact to and leave basketball alone. Enough with headlines like the one in Gateway Pundit reading, “Was Caitlin Clark Assaulted in WNBA Game Because She’s a Single Christian Straight White Girl?”

MAGA demagogues like to attack trans people by talking about “keeping men out of women’s sports.” But this Caitlin Clark “controversy” is a case where the men who need to stay out of women’s sports are the MAGA demagogues themselves.

This week’s media atrocity

Regular readers know that sometimes I cite a genuine news industry “atrocity” and other times I’m using the word more loosely to just point out something annoying. This week, it’s the latter. Politico wrote a stupid story last week headlined “Democrats grapple uncomfortably with World Cup success.” As if Democrats are rooting for disaster. Ridiculous.

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There’s a yearbook photo of young Donald Trump in military school, an array of medals attached to his dress jacket. Except it wasn’t his jacket. Trump had borrowed it from a classmate because it had more medals than his own.

Then there was the time in 2015 when Trump touted himself as an expert in national security. “I know more about ISIS than the generals do,” he said.

Just last week, Trump joked about giving himself a Medal of Honor. At least it seemed like a joke.

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Clearly, in Trump’s mind he’s a genius at warmaking and diplomacy. Perhaps he should resurrect Trump University as a military and international relations school where eager students could learn these 20 key pieces of operational guidance from Trump and his regime:

1. Claim you have a “complete” deal with your enemy when you’re actually putting off the important stuff until later.

2. Insult your allies. That’s a smart way to get them to help you.

3. When your country is conducting delicate peace talks with the enemy and has signed a pledge to “refrain from the threat or use of force,” it’s the perfect time to announce that you might “blow the shit out of them.”

4. In wartime, try to pick a fight with a respected moral leader like the pope.

5. Build public confidence by creating confusion over your military goals. For example, cite regime change as a reason to go to war, then months later say, “I never cared about regime change.”

6. Even though you went to war promising to eliminate your enemy’s missiles, feel free to cut them some slack because “if other countries have them, it’s a little bit unfair for them not to have some.”

7. A “ceasefire” doesn’t necessarily mean you actually cease fire.

8. Insist that God is on your side even when you blow up a school full of children, and don’t worry about looking hypocritical when you call your enemies “religious fanatics.”

9. If you claim “control” of a key waterway when your enemy is in fact blocking it, don’t worry. Everyone will believe you and no one will mind that it’s driving up gasoline prices.

10. A great way to get respect as commander in chief is to call soldiers who died in wars “suckers” and “losers.”

11. Build public trust by declaring a mainstream news network “fake news,” then saying its war coverage will favor your side after one of your rich supporters buys the network.

12. If the war goes badly, blame your predecessors, including a guy who hasn’t been in power for nearly a decade.

13. Refer to your enemies as “very rational people” who are “nice to deal with” (but don’t let that stop you from threatening to “blow the shit out of them” a few days later).

14. Don’t let anyone tell you it’s wrong for you to send people to their deaths in a war just because you dodged the draft as a young man by claiming “bone spurs.”

15. It’s 100% legitimate to say your attacks are in “self-defense” even when you blow up a drinking water facility serving 20,000 civilians.

16. When people make financial sacrifices because of a war you started, be sure to tell them their additional costs are “peanuts.”

17. Increase your credibility by issuing a demand for “unconditional surrender” that you know will be impossible to achieve.

18. Allow your peace deal to be held hostage by a foreign leader like Benjamin Netanyahu, who remains in power only by keeping his country in a constant state of war.

19. Increase confidence in your peace deal by hiding its contents from the public for days and lying about it.

20. When you’re losing a war, throw a bunch of money at your enemy.

War is really simple, right? Especially for a stable genius. Enroll your children now.

This week’s media atrocity

Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos is bad for journalism. It’s well known that he blocked his editorial board from endorsing Kamala Harris in 2024, pledged $1 million for Trump’s inauguration, steered his opinion section to the right, laid off hundreds of employees, and bankrolled a puffy documentary about Melania Trump. Now there’s a new detail in the book “Regime Change” by Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman.

They say Bezos attended a December 2024 dinner with Trump and badmouthed WaPo’s business staff. “The people there are terrible,” Bezos reportedly told him. “They don’t listen.” Bezos was also quoted as saying the paper was his worst investment.

So why doesn’t he sell it, as advocates for quality journalism have urged? Because Bezos uses his mishandling of WaPo as a way to please Trump, who has the power to help or hurt his other businesses.

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Donald Trump is not a philosopher king. He’s a mob boss.

He’s not even doing politics. He’s running big-bucks scams by political means.

I feel the need to clarify this because some people insist on pretending there’s some overarching ideological bent to Trump’s behavior, that “America First” is a real doctrine, that Trump is the reincarnation of James Monroe or Andrew Jackson.

Trump’s motivations came up in an NPR interview last January. Host Scott Detrow asked Atlantic reporter Ashley Parker an embarrassingly naive question: “Do you have a sense of what you think Trump’s end goals are? Is it, I want to tear down democratic norms, or is it something more straightforward of, I want to be a notable, famous president, or is it even more moment to moment and topic to topic than that?”

Sure, Scott. Trump just wants to be “notable.”

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Parker answered: “I don’t think he has a particular pointed desire to tear down democratic norms … He wants to do what he wants to do unconstrained by laws and norms in the Constitution.”

Kind of a weird answer. I think she meant Trump doesn’t have a political philosophy. But he does have a one-word personal philosophy: “Gimme.”

Trump doesn’t believe in anything other than indulging his predatory appetite in all things, especially concerning money but also when it comes to the abuse of women.

One of the biggest issues he ran on in 2024 was avoiding foreign wars, yet now he’s desperately trying now to escape from a war of his own choice with Iran.

He’s long talked about balancing the budget, but he runs huge deficits.

He’s successfully exploited the immigration issue, spreading hatred about newcomers to this country, even though he married two of them. But even then, he’s making an exception for white Afrikaners from South Africa in an attempt to please racists like Elon Musk.

To Trump, issues are tools to attract donations, win votes, and amass power – not to benefit the public. Here’s what he really cares about:

• Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche unilaterally gave Trump and his family immunity from tax investigations. That’s outright theft from the U.S. Treasury while people like us pay our taxes.

• Trump urged the public to buy Dell computers, and the Pentagon gave the company a $9.7 billion contract. We later learned that before those actions, Trump bought at least $1 million in Dell stock.

• Trump reduced threatened tariffs on imports from Vietnam after the country fast-tracked a $1.5 billion Trump Organization resort there.

• Changpeng Zhao, the billionaire founder of Binance, helped out a Trump family business and got a Trump pardon in a money-laundering case.

• Trump approved the sale of American AI chip technology to the United Arab Emirates after a UAE sheik secretly bought 49% of a Trump crypto business.

I could go on and on with examples like this, but you get the idea.

For Trump, control over the U.S. government is not an opportunity to shape a nation’s destiny. It’s a way for him to cash in on his power. And he’s certainly done that, with profiteering that netted him and his family $4 billion in the first year of his second term, according to the New Yorker.

If Trump cares about anything other than money, it’s not the public welfare – it’s his pet projects to build European-style throwback monuments and splash gold paint on things. That’s not a philosophy or even an aesthetic. It’s an unhinged old guy playing with toys.

Yet despite the obvious grifting and bizarre distractions, Trump backers still pretend there’s an overarching vision.

Over the weekend, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth used the stupid phrase “Donroe Doctrine” to cast U.S. military aggression in the Americas as a well-thought-out strategy. The Monroe Doctrine, of course, warned European powers to stay out of the affairs of the Western Hemisphere. Hegseth said the new Donroe Doctrine, in which the Trump regime bullies its neighbors and steals Venezuela’s oil, is “an incredible reinforcement of the Monroe Doctrine.”

But it’s not a philosophy. It’s just a smash-and-grab.

Meanwhile, University of Florida professor Walter Russell Mead has compared Trump to a different president, Andrew Jackson, citing the MAGA leader’s “ideological, rhetorical, and cultural links to the Jacksonian tradition in American life.”

I suppose there are similarities. They both abused their power, uprooted people from their homes, and showed disdain for the courts. But it’s not a shared philosophy – it’s just (in the words of Ashley Parker) that “he wants to do what he wants to do.”

To me, Trump is best described with the words of the 20th century Chicago philosopher Al Capone:

“A crook is a crook, and there’s something healthy about his frankness in the matter. But any guy who pretends he is enforcing the law and steals on his authority is a swell snake. The worst type of these punks is the big politician.”

This week’s media atrocity

Trump’s Justice Department approved the merger of Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros Discovery, a move that would give the pro-Trump Ellison family control of CNN. The nightmare scenario is that Bari Weiss, who is in the process of ruining CBS News, would be given authority over CNN to ruin that network, too.

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Most voters do not study candidates’ position statements. They see a headline here and there, they hear what friends and relatives say, and they often make their decisions based on past practice or gut instincts – on what makes them feel good about themselves.

They like straight talk, or at least what sounds like straight talk. Trump has been lying to voters for more than a decade, but many people still think “he tells it like it is” because he’s blunt. He has shown us the importance of messaging.

Below are 15 tips for pro-democracy advocates preparing for a midterm election that may well determine whether you and your family live in a free country. Consider using them in your political activism and/or social media. Some of my advice applies to the mainstream media, too, but they’re not supposed to campaign for candidates. If only they would campaign for the truth, that would be enough for me.

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1. Make change part of the message.

I’m convinced that one reason Democrats lost the White House in 2024 is because they were, in essence, running to extend Joe Biden’s presidency, even after Kamala Harris took over the race. There’s a deep feeling of dissatisfaction in this country. People want change. One of the biggest mistakes Democrats could make is basing their campaigns on going back to “normal.” People don’t want to vote for the same Democrats who seem to be in the process of losing our democracy to Trumpism. To win, Democrats must trumpet a bold, new agenda. For example, there’s an illegal war going on. Oppose it.

2. Don’t waste time trying to crack the cult.

Our messaging should be aimed more at past non-voters than at current Republican voters. The majority of MAGA cult members are lost to us. Getting apathetic non-voters to show up at the polls is a more achievable goal.

3. Don’t focus only on Trump.

When Trump is your sole target, you do a favor to every other Republican who enables his fascism. Trump’s not actually on the ballot, and his political lackeys who are running this year will try to create distance from him before the midterms. We want people to vote against Republicans as a group. A good term to use is “Trump Republicans.”

4. Be a good ally.

One of the most exasperating behaviors of progressives is to attack people who agree with them almost all of the time instead of people who always disagree with them. This is not to say you have to support awful Democrats like Chuck Schumer. But keep a firm grip on who your allies and enemies are, and treat them differently.

5. Keep bringing up Epstein.

This issue has power because the regime is still covering up the truth about Trump’s former friend, sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. The reason to keep the Epstein scandal front and center isn’t to get right-wing extremists to vote for Democrats; it’s to get them to have such disgust with Republicans that they stay home.

6. Martyrs matter.

Keep reminding people about Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Republican politicians are OK with masked government thugs murdering peaceful Americans in the streets. But the vast majority of voters are not.

7. Scream about Jim Crow 2.0.

The racists on the Supreme Court and in the Republican Party have turned back the clock six decades on Black political power. If white Democrats act like it’s just political maneuvering instead of moral depravity, they won’t deserve the votes of Black people or anyone who cares about fair government.

8. Do not abandon trans people.

Look at the most popular politicians today. They’re authentic. They’re not throwing marginalized Americans to the wolves in desperate attempts to curry favor with bad actors. Voters like politicians who stand for something – and who stand with people. The Republicans’ hate campaign against trans people is an attempt to distract from their indefensible positions on key issues. When they bring up trans people as a weapon, call them the bigots that they are and refocus the conversation on GOP failures.

9-11. Choose the right words.

Three bits of advice on framing:

• When you’re talking about the attack on abortion rights, say, “They’re taking away women’s right to control their own bodies.” Cast it as an issue of personal freedom. Which it is.

• It’s not “gun control” – it’s “gun safety measures” or even “sensible gun safety measures.”

• Call it “gay marriage” or “same-sex marriage” if you want, but “marriage equality” is better.

12. Highlight the most detestable Trumpers.

Remember how Republicans used to run against Nancy Pelosi in congressional races nationwide? Democrats should do that with the worst characters in the Trump regime. They should zero in on Trump aide Stephen Miller as a supervillain, along with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, a blatant liar, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, a religious extremist who once paid $50,000 to a woman who accused him of sexual assault.

13. It will always be the economy, stupid.

Don’t stop talking about inflation, especially gasoline prices. Remind people that Trump said, “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation” and called the huge increase in gas prices “peanuts.”

14. Don’t act like it’s 1956.

Never call Trump the “leader of the free world.” Mock anyone who does. Avoid language that makes this criminal presidency seem like a traditional presidency from the last century. Do not “respect the office” when a criminal is running it.

15. Be patriotic.

We know this country has done terrible things throughout its history. But it’s also been a land of opportunity that has attracted immigrants from all over the world. Don’t surrender the flag-waving to Republicans. The “No Kings” messaging is smart because it reminds people that our country was founded in a revolt against a king. And we’ve got another king to defeat this year.

This week’s media atrocity

A storied news operation, CBS News, and its most prestigious program, “60 Minutes,” have been destroyed by the super-rich to please Trump. The fascists want to do this to every legitimate news outfit around.

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The Future of the Democratic Party is on the Ballot

Join COURIER and MeidasTouch on Wednesday, June 10 at 7:00 PM ET for the NY-12 Primary Debate, featuring George Conway, Alex Bores, Laura Dunn, Nina Schwalbe, and Micah Lasher.

In one of the country’s most closely watched congressional races, candidates will debate the future of the Democratic Party at a moment of growing frustration, generational change, and political upheaval.

Candidates will debate the issues shaping the 2026 midterms, including affordability and housing, immigration, corruption and money in politics, democracy reform, climate, AI regulation, and American leadership in a second Trump era.

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Lying is a sacrament in the Church of MAGA, an affirmation of unquestioning loyalty. If you’re willing to debase yourself with outrageous dishonesty, welcome to the club.

During Trump’s first term, the president and his lackeys didn’t want to testify under oath because they might have faced perjury charges if they lied. Republicans called it a “perjury trap.” That’s as cynical as it gets: Being asked to tell the truth was a “trap.”

The news media can’t put Republicans under oath, so lying is safer. Corey Lewandowski, the “friend” of disgraced former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, was truthful about his falsehood in 2019, declaring: “I have no obligation to be honest with the media.”

I’m not suggesting that all Republicans lie alike. By my count, there are at least 10 different flavors.

1. Opposite lying

“I have some of the best poll numbers I’ve ever had,” Trump said after some of the worst poll numbers he’s ever had.

2. New-math lying

Trump’s impossible claim that he cut drug prices by 600% is a sign of mental instability. Yet some people laugh it off and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. even defended it. “President Trump has a different way of calculating percentages,” said RFK Jr. “There’s two ways of calculating percentages. If you have a $600 drug and you reduce it to $10, that’s a 600% reduction.” No… it’s… not.

3. Big lying

Trump and his media mouthpiece, Fox, spread the Big Lie that the 2020 election was rigged. Fox paid a $787 million settlement for its dishonesty, but Trump went unpunished. When the Big Lie fueled a coup attempt, we heard more ridiculous disinformation, such as Rep. Andrew Clyde calling the assault on the Capitol a “normal tourist visit” and Sen. Tom Cotton saying Trump’s actions were “core political activity at the heart of our democracy.”

4. Small lying

Some Trump dishonesty seems purely for amusement. He installed a plaque at Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Va., reading: “Many great American soldiers, both of the North and South, died at this spot. The casualties were so great that the water would turn red and thus became known as ‘The River of Blood.’” That didn’t happen. Totally made up.

5. Criminal lying

Trump, who became a convicted felon because he falsified business records (another form of lying) to cover up his hush-money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels, likes to keep fellow liars around him. Dirty trickster Roger Stone was convicted of lying to Congress. Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, pleaded guilty to making false statements to the FBI and then tried to withdraw that plea. Bernard Kerik, a Trump ally and former New York City police commissioner convicted of tax fraud and making false statements, spent three years in prison. Another Trump ally, former Rep. George Santos, was convicted of fraud and identity theft.

Trump gave clemency to all four. Stone, Flynn, and Kerik received pardons, while Santos got his sentence commuted, which wiped out court-ordered restitution for his victims.

6. Righteous lying

Sometimes Republicans admit they’re lying, but say they’re doing it for the greater good. JD Vance defended his hoax about Haitian migrants eating dogs and cats by saying, “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”

7. Know-nothing lying

When reporters ask House Speaker Mike Johnson about a controversy, he often claims to know nothing about it. If he was really that ignorant, he should be removed as speaker. Instead he’s blatantly lying… which means he should be removed as speaker.

8. Tag-team lying

On April 30, Sen. Tim Scott and Rep. Steve Scalise found two different ways to lie about the same thing.

Scott claimed: “Gas prices continue to come down.” In fact, the average price for regular gasoline on that date was $4.30 a gallon, up 27 cents from a week earlier and up $1.12 from a year earlier. Steve Scalise claimed that “two years ago, we were paying almost $6 a gallon. Right now it’s in the $3s.” Nope. It was $4.30 when Scalise said that, and two years earlier it was $3.65, not even close to $6.

When Republicans lie like this, there’s often a lack of media pushback, but after Scalise’s dishonesty, CNBC’s Joe Kernen called him out. In Scott’s case, however, Fox Business’ Maria Bartiromo just ignored the lie and moved on.

9. Predictive lying

Before Trump’s election in 2024, transition co-chair Howard Lutnick denied that RFK Jr. would become Secretary of Health and Human Services. “He’s not going to be the secretary! No!” Lutnick said. Of course, RFK Jr. got the job. Lutnick also said Trump wouldn’t consider hiring people tied to Project 2025 because they were “radioactive.” Of course, Trump did hire them.

10. Lying about lying

Beware when Trump’s press secretaries promise to tell the truth.

Kayleigh McEnany pledged: “I will never lie to you.” Then she claimed falsely that the Mueller Report was “a complete and total exoneration of President Trump.” It wasn’t, of course.

Karoline Leavitt said: “I commit to telling the truth from this podium every single day.” Then she claimed fraud fighter Trump stopped about $50 million from going “out the door to fund condoms in Gaza.” Separately, Trump said Hamas planned to use the condoms to build bombs. But the condoms were not for Hamas. They were for the prevention of sexually transmitted diseases in a province of the African nation of Mozambique called Gaza – a totally different place than the Middle East version of Gaza.

That’s how Republicans roll.

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Media critics like me complain a lot about slanted news. But we’re facing an even worse problem: no news.

Market forces and the right-wing assault on journalism have combined to create a crisis in America’s news industry. Some of the casualties:

• The nearly century-old CBS News Radio closed in May.

• The Associated Press laid off 20 journalists last month.

• Nearly 40% of all local newspapers have vanished in the last two decades.

• One in three U.S. counties does not have a single full-time journalist.

• Corporate interests are causing local TV news to disappear in some markets.

• Gallup announced in February that it would end an 88-year practice of polling on public approval of the president. The decision came as other polls showed Donald Trump’s approval ratings continuing to slide, raising questions about the timing.

• Google’s AI is diminishing traffic to news websites. Some observers fear a “zero-click” scenario in which search engines no longer link to the websites that contribute to their AI results.

• The Washington Post gutted its climate change reporting team in February, and it’s not the only news outlet doing that.

• To fend off potential AI scraping, hundreds of news outlets are blocking access by the Internet Archive and its Wayback Machine. This means consumers and journalists are denied access to important articles of the past.

• Even the loss of Stephen Colbert’s show is a loss for news, since some people learned about current events that way.

I hope you find this alarming. I certainly do. But some powerful people benefit from public ignorance. Remember Trump’s 2020 comment about Covid: “If we stop testing right now, we’d have very few cases, if any.”

Even outlets with “news” in their name often hide the news.

When new incidents of the Trump regime’s corruption and incompetence are reported, I like to go to Fox News’ website to see how they’re not covering it. It’s fairly common to see the real news ignored in favor of a red-meat issue, such as the supposed peril of transgenderism, or celebrity fluff about an actress “wowing” in a bikini.

Media Matters for America, a watchdog group, has done excellent tracking of how the leading right-wing network hides news from its audience. Here are three examples:

• Trump was asked if he considered Americans’ financial situation in his negotiations with Iran. He said: “Not even a little bit. The only thing that matters when I’m talking about Iran – they can’t have a nuclear weapon. I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation.” That dismissal of people’s struggles was significant, but it was ignored on Fox News and Fox Business over the next day, according to Media Matters’ monitoring.

• News outlets reported that an Emirati sheikh secretly invested $500 million in a Trump company before Trump promised to approve the sale of advanced AI chips to the United Arab Emirates. Fox News did not cover the story for days.

• News outlets revealed that border czar Tom Homan collected $50,000 in an FBI bribery sting and the Trump regime decided to look the other way. Nothing about it on Fox News for days afterward.

Fox has also radically downplayed other stories. In the hours after the revelation of an email in which Jeffrey Epstein wrote that a victim “spent hours at my house with” Trump, CNN reported on the story for 53 minutes. MSNBC (now MS NOW) covered it for 56 minutes. Fox News’ coverage time: six seconds.

Fox also hushed up Trump’s pardoning of a former Honduran president convicted in a huge cocaine trafficking scheme. It even muted the finding of its own poll that Trump’s approval was plummeting.

CBS News, now in the hands of the pro-Trump Ellison family and busy kneecapping “60 Minutes,” is another hider of news. When Trump pardoned Binance founder Changpeng Zhao in a money laundering case after Binance supported the Trump family’s crypto business, NBC, ABC, and PBS covered it on that evening’s news. CBS did not.

Some optimists like me had hoped the “Information Age” would promote public engagement. But instead we see access to reliable facts being diminished.

Much of the best journalism sits behind paywalls, and we’re in an era of media capture, with the enemies of democracy buying up the news industry. The Ellisons, after grabbing CBS, became part owners of TikTok through a Trump-arranged deal, and they’ve now set their sights on acquiring CNN. Meanwhile, Trump-friendly oligarch Elon Musk owns X and fellow Trump suck-up Mark Zuckerberg owns Meta.

As the right wing assaults media independence, a key source of facts – government statistics – has also come under attack. Last August, Trump fired Erika McEntarfer, head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, because of a jobs report he didn’t like. In February, White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett said Federal Reserve Board researchers should be “disciplined” for writing a report finding that U.S. companies and consumers bore 90% of the burden of Trump’s tariffs.

In an attempt to further hide what he’s doing, Trump wants to prevent leaks to the media by requiring all federal employees to sign nondisclosure agreements.

The Trump regime is at war with the truth, which is why defending it has become so important. If you can afford it, support the news organizations that have earned your trust. We need to keep them around.

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This week’s media atrocity

Many news outlets, including CNN, NPR, and CBS, called E. Jean Carroll a Trump “accuser” in stories about a Justice Department investigation related to her. But Carroll is not merely an accuser. Two juries decided that she was the victim of a sexual assault committed by Donald Trump.

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The Future of the Democratic Party is on the Ballot

Join COURIER and MeidasTouch on Wednesday, June 10 at 6:30 PM ET for the NY-12 Primary Debate, featuring George Conway, Jack Schlossberg, Alex Bores, Laura Dunn, Nina Schwalbe, and Micah Lasher.

In one of the country’s most closely watched congressional races, candidates will debate the future of the Democratic Party at a moment of growing frustration, generational change, and political upheaval.

Candidates will debate the issues shaping the 2026 midterms, including affordability and housing, immigration, corruption and money in politics, democracy reform, climate, AI regulation, and American leadership in a second Trump era.

Register now to watch live.

Thanks for your paid subscription to Stop the Presses. One of your “extras” is this weekly list in which I’ll recommend a few articles and newsletters – and even some podcasts and videos now and then.

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