Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s startling announcement that his company’s Facebook and Instagram sites would drop its censorious fact-checking process scared the press and leftist academics, who would no longer be able to use pseudo-scientific concepts like “misinformation” to silence conservative debate on issues like COVID, radical Islam, Black Lives Matter, and “climate change.”

Tuesday’s edition of the PBS News Hour was a prime example, with co-anchor Geoff Bennett warning in the show’s introduction: “Facebook and Instagram end their fact-checking program, a move critics say will pave the way for a spike in misinformation.”

The actual segment started out alright.

Co-anchor Geoff Bennett: Facebook and Instagram’s parent company, Meta, announced today it’s ending third-party fact-checking on its platforms, calling the decision a return to a — quote — “fundamental commitment to free expression.” Meta’s fact-checking program was rolled out in the wake of the 2016 election. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said today the rules had become too restrictive and prone to overenforcement.

A clip from Zuckerberg followed, with the CEO saying “we have reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship….”

But then Bennett was joined by guest Renee DiResta, now at Georgetown University. Not mentioned — until last year she was research manager of the online censors of Stanford Internet Observatory, one of many left-wing academic entities funded during Trump’s first term to fight online “misinformation” — at least as they defined it — a censorship regime encouraged by the Biden administration to press social media companies to squelch even true COVID-related facts.

After a clip of Donald Trump taking credit for Zuckerberg’s turnaround, he asked DiResta, “So what are the downstream implications of the political motivation behind all this?”

DiResta responded with hypocrisy by omission.

DiResta: It is probably in response to the threats that — and we call that jawboning, and we actually should see that as bad. We should see it as bad when the left does it and we should see it as bad when the right does it. We should not want to see platforms who are supposed to be providing a service of value to their users, right, who are supposed to be facilitating a speech environment that protects the user, that creates a good experience for the user. That’s what the platform should be doing. Working the referees, trying to make the people deciding the calls advantage your team, that’s what’s actually happening here, and it is capitulation to ref-working….

Yet academic censors like DiResta (and their handmaidens in journalism) had no qualms about the Biden Administration “jawboning” or “working the refs” against so-called conservative disinformation. Meta employed websites like PolitiFact that falsely claim to be nonpartisan judges of fact but in fact strongly favor Democrat “facts” over Republican ones. Another fact-checker formerly employed by Facebook was the even more slanted outfit, Snopes.

This segment was brought to you in part by Cunard.

A transcript is available, click “Expand.”

PBS News Hour

1/7/25

7:14:16 p.m. (ET)

Geoff Bennett: Facebook and Instagram’s parent company, Meta, announced today it’s ending third-party fact-checking on its platforms, calling the decision a return to a — quote — “fundamental commitment to free expression.”

Meta’s fact-checking program was rolled out in the wake of the 2016 election. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said today the rules had become too restrictive and prone to overenforcement.

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO, Meta: We built a lot of complex systems to moderate content. But the problem with complex systems is, they make mistakes. Even if they accidentally censor just 1 percent of posts, that’s millions of people.

And we have reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship. The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech. So we’re going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies, and restoring free expression our platforms.

Geoff Bennett: To discuss the implications of this shift, we’re joined now by Renee DiResta, associate research professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University.

Thanks for being with us.

Renee DiResta, Associate Research Professor, McCourt School of Public Policy, Georgetown University: Thanks for having me.

Geoff Bennett: So, let’s set the stage.

Why did Meta initially put this fact-checking program into place? And was it effective?

Renee DiResta: Yes.

So, it was launched in December 2016 in response to widespread criticism of fake news that had gone viral quite a bit during the 2016 presidential campaign. And the platform faced a lot of backlash in response to that. So the fact-checking initiative was launched as part of Facebook’s efforts to kind of restore its brand, restore trust.

It partnered with the third-party fact-checking organizations that were certified by the International Fact-Checking Network. So, it went to existing organizations that were already quite reputable. And it worked to incorporate adding context. They came up with a moderation framework called remove, reduce, inform.

Remove is when content is taken down. Reduce is when it’s reduced in distribution, it’s not pushed out to as many people. And the fact-checking piece was a really big part of inform, which tried to add a little bit more information to the stories that were going viral or articles that people were seeing in their news feed.

Geoff Bennett: Meta says it’s moving to a community notes practice, similar to what we see now on Elon Musk’s X, formerly Twitter.

What has the impact on that platform been? Can community notes be as effective as fact-checking?

Renee DiResta: It’s a little bit mixed. So it’s very hard to know what the impact of community notes is on X. It’s hard for us on the outside as academics and things to see it because a lot of data access and transparency has been reduced.

I think that community notes is a great way to restore legitimacy to content moderation, but it doesn’t necessarily actually do the job that fact-checking did in quite the same way, so better to have it as a complement.

And that’s because it’s often slow. It addresses just a very small fraction of the content. It really relies on people wanting to sit there and feeling like they should go and perform that almost, like, platform community service. On X, oftentimes, that means that you will see it happen on highly contentious political content, where people feel like some sort of emotional response.

They want to go correct the record about their guy, that kind of thing. And so you see efforts to get community notes on that type of political content. But on the flip side, it’s platforms asking users to do work for them, and it is not necessarily going to catch all of the kind of topical coverage that a professional journalist fact-checker might have more access to the ability to call somebody up and ask them if something is true, the ability to send somebody into a conflict zone to see if something is real.

So it should be a complementary process, but because this has become so politicized, we’re seeing it broached as a replacement, rather than a complement.

 

Geoff Bennett: Let’s talk more about the political dimension here, because Zuckerberg in his video statement, as we saw, he framed this policy shift as a reaction to Republicans’ November victory. And we heard him say — he called it a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech.

We know he’s visited Mar-a-Lago, he’s dined with president-elect Trump, he’s donated to the Trump inaugural fund. He just named Dana White, the CEO of UFC and a long time Trump ally, to Meta’s board.

And here’s what the president-elect, Donald Trump, said today when he was asked about this shift by Meta.

Donald Trump, Former President of the United States (R) and Current U.S. President-Elect: Honestly, I think they have come a long way, Meta, Facebook. I think they have come a long way.

Question: Do you think he’s directly responding to the threats that you have made to him in the past?

Donald Trump: Probably. Yes, probably.

Geoff Bennett: So what are the downstream implications of the political motivation behind all this?

Renee DiResta: It is probably in response to the threats that — and we call that jawboning, and we actually should see that as bad. We should see it as bad when the left does it and we should see it as bad when the right does it.

We should not want to see platforms who are supposed to be providing a service of value to their users, right, who are supposed to be facilitating a speech environment that protects the user, that creates a good experience for the user. That’s what the platform should be doing. Working the referees, trying to make the people deciding the calls advantage your team, that’s what’s actually happening here, right?

It is capitulation to ref-working. And what you see, if Meta had come out and said, we are launching this fantastic new community notes initiative, that would have been absolutely great. And that would have been just a routine feature set policy shift from a large social media platform that does that constantly.

But it was the tone of the communication. It was the specific language used in it that was very transparently saying, we are doing this in response to a shift in the political winds.

And I just don’t think that we should want to see our social media platforms quite so buffeted by political winds.

Geoff Bennett: Renee DiResta, thanks for your insights. We appreciate it.

Renee DiResta: Thank you.

As the Los Angeles wildfires rage on, the corporate media are compelled to cover some of the issues that have emerged. But as we see with NBC’s coverage of the shortage of water for fire hydrants, there is a reluctance to cover underlying political incompetence. 

Watch as the water shortage is treated as though it were a supernatural mystery:

MORGAN CHESKY:  We joined Los Angeles Fire Captain Adam Van Gerpen in the Pacific Palisades.

ADAM VAN GERPEN: This hydrant has no- no water in it.

CHESKY: Where lack of water, critical to battling a still-active wildfire, frustrated crews. This one from San Francisco.

What should the water pressure be right now, ideally?

FIREFIGHTER: I mean, you want 50 to 80 as your ideal hydrant pressure.

CHESKY: And what have you got?

FIREFIGHTER: I’m bouncing between zero, 50, it’s- it’s not a consistent pressure.

CHESKY: As nearby hydrants failed and water pressure fell, firefighters above switching from offense to defense.

CHESKY: When you run out of water in that engine…

FIREFIGHTER: Not much we can do then. VIDEO SWIPE) We came out, this is our first job for the day.

CHESKY: Flames burning for precious minutes before any reinforcements could arrive.

FIREFIGHTER: Had we had water earlier on in the firefight, we probably could have stopped it from getting this big.

CHESKY: This is something we have not seen often but when the hydrants are dry, crews have to rely on these tanker trucks because the fire waits for no one.

Morgan Chesky’s reporting focused on the struggle of firefighters to get water into these burning areas before they are completely wiped out. But there was no focus on local officials, or on the ongoing debate over water management in California. 

By omitting any mention of the underlying problems at the local and state level, the report seems to absolve officials who should otherwise be grilled by the media- and perhaps would have been if the elected officials in question were Republican. 

To their credit, NBC did not attempt to Trumpwash the story, at least not yet. That is, they did not engage in the media practice of reporting on a controversial issue in such a manner so as to frame President-Elect Donald Trump’s statement on that issue as more scandalous than the issue itself. 

As further details of the structural failures that aggravated the response to these fires become available, it remains to be seen whether NBC will continue to refrain from Trumpwashing the story and focus on the local failures. 

Click “expand” to view the full transcript of the aforementioned report as aired on the NBC Nightly News on Thursday, January 9th, 2025:

LESTER HOLT: The task of fighting such a massive area of fire is immense. And as Morgan Chesky reports, the struggle for water is complicating the fight on the front lines.

MORGAN CHESKY: Tonight, a relentless firefight far from over. Front line crews facing challenges that only start with the flames.

What do we got going?

FIREFIGHTER: So what we have is the fire has already burned through here.

CHESKY:  What we’re looking at right now could’ve been caused by a single ember.

FIREFIGHTER: One ember could’ve caused this.

CHESKY:  We joined Los Angeles Fire Captain Adam Van Gerpen in the Pacific Palisades.

ADAM VAN GERPEN: This hydrant has no- no water in it.

CHESKY: Where lack of water, critical to battling a still-active wildfire, frustrated crews. This one from San Francisco.

What should the water pressure be right now, ideally?

FIREFIGHTER: I mean, you want 50 to 80 as your ideal hydrant pressure.

CHESKY: And what have you got?

FIREFIGHTER: I’m bouncing between zero, 50, it’s- it’s not a consistent pressure.

CHESKY: As nearby hydrants failed and water pressure fell, firefighters above switching from offense to defense.

CHESKY: When you run out of water in that engine…

FIREFIGHTER: Not much we can do then. VIDEO SWIPE) We came out, this is our first job for the day.

CHESKY: Flames burning for precious minutes before any reinforcements could arrive.

FIREFIGHTER: Had we had water earlier on in the firefight, we probably could have stopped it from getting this big.

CHESKY: This is something we have not seen often but when the hydrants are dry, crews have to rely on these tanker trucks because the fire waits for no one. 

The situation a familiar one for the captain, a 25-year veteran of the LAFD. Mere blocks away, another call coming in for another home up in flames.

If we had any wind right now, completely different firefight?

VAN GERPEN: 100% different firefight.

CHESKY: Just feet away, a million dollar view burned beyond recognition.

VAN GERPEN: There’s not even a single home from this entire viewpoint that we can see that has survived.

CHESKY: If you had officials in front of you right now, what would you ask for to have had a proper firefight here?

VAN GERPEN: More firefighters, more fire hydrants, more air dropping capabilities. We need more of everything.

CHESKY: Tonight, these crews doing whatever they can with whatever they have. Fighting a historic disaster head on.

HOLT And Morgan, this all coming out of a red flag warning. Do those remain in effect?

CHESKY: Yeah, Lester, they absolutely do. And that’s one of the big concerns of the crew we embedded with today. They tell us that one ember can travel up to two miles. And that is why until that red flag warning expires at 6PM on Friday, everyone needs to stay on guard because a potential fire could pop up almost anywhere. Lester.

HOLT: Morgan Chesky, thank you.

 

Thursday was the most eventful day in the $1 billion defamation suit against CNN – so far – as the testimony of Navy veteran and Plaintiff Zachary Young concluded. The previous day’s emotional testimony from Young seemed to temper the ability for CNN’s lead counsel David Axelrod (not to be confused with CNN commentator David Axelrod) to be combative and accusatory. With a night of rest after the testimony, Axelrod felt confident unleashing his rage at Young; at one point shouting at him about his time in the CIA, and drawing Judge William Scott Henry’s anger with an ambush document and repeatedly insulting Young on the stand.

The fate of the defamation case against CNN even hung in the balance at one point.

Axelrod picked up the cross-examination by questioning Young about taking operation security measures. But Axelrod didn’t seem to want an answer. Axelrod kept interrupting Young as he tried to explain how operational security measures (not knowing names) were meant to prevent unnecessary risk for the operation and the operators. Axelrod kept trying to make the security concerns about Young fearing for himself in Austria not the operator is Afghanistan.

The interactions between Axelrod and Young were tense throughout. At one point, Axelrod accused Young of being a war profiteer taking advantage of desperate people. “Were you profiting off of desperate Afghans desperate to get out,” Axelrod repeatedly attacked. Young pointed out that he only took money from corporations for Afghanistan evacuations.

“The way I word it or the way you word it, it doesn’t matter,” Axelrod raises his voice.

Axelrod’s anger boiled over as he tried to get Young to answer about his relationship with the CIA, even shouting at him over it. “What’s your relationship with the CIA?! I’m asking you now!” This outburst drew an objection from Young’s lead counsel Vel Freedman, which drew a sidebar between the lead counsels and Judge Henry.

When the sidebar concluded, Judge Henry ordered that information about Young’s history with the CIA off limits since it was classified.

Axelrod even had an attitude against Young’s methods of running his evacuation operations, without ever coordinating one himself.

Young’s close contact on the ground in Afghanistan was a Ukrainian national named Yuri who was the one overseeing the other local operators carrying out the evacuations. Axelrod took issue with Young’s trust with his man (who Young knew since his time in the CIA) and how Young would pay Yuri and Yuri would distribute it to the men under his command.

When the jurors were allowed to submit written questions to Young, one was about how his relationship with Yuri began. He was not able to talk about it because it was classified.

He also tried  to make an issue out of Young not knowing how many operators Yuri was working with and their names, despite Young’s noted adherence to operational security measures.

One of the more contentious moments was when Axelrod had tried to accuse Young of withholding evidence from discovery, namely his bank account in Austria. This drew an impassioned objection from Young’s lead counsel Vel Freedman. Afterward, Judge William Scott Henry told the jury that over the course of the case he had not ordered Young to turn over the bank account information. The jurors nodded in response.

In another instance of Axelrod’s antics possibly not swaying the jury was when he was hammering how Young referred to Kornetsky (CNN’s source to go after) a “spiteful bitch” after she accused him of being a mercenary and pocketing millions.

Of the six jurors and two alternates, six were women. There was no discernable reaction from them. When the jurors were allowed to submit written questions to Young, none of them were about his feeling toward CNN sources or reporters.

At one point, the fate of the trial seemed to be in question after an extended side bar gave way to Judge Henry ordering the jury to leave the courtroom. Clearly angry, Judge Henry announced that Axelrod had a “just discovered document” he wanted included as evidence and had casted “aspersions” on the plaintiff. 

Calling it an “ambush document” and “trial by ambush” Freedman objected to it being added to the record.  Axelrod declared that Young had “perpetrated a fraud on this court” as he produced a contract with Helios Global Inc. signed by Young a month after the CNN report aired. Axelrod made a grandiose show of the document and even threatened to file a fraud motion: “Later on today, after I confer with counsel, we’ll be filing a motion about fraud on the court and gross discovery abuses.”

Freedman noted that Young had answered questions about his association with Helios at a deposition 15 months ago and that CNN withheld the document to ambush Young in cross-examination. Judge Henry grilled Axelrod on why CNN only turned this document over on the third day of trial:

Why wasn’t this document or obtaining things from Helios, because it did come up during the course of his October 2023 deposition. So, I mean a year and three months ago…Why didn’t this get obtained until 2 o’clock yesterday afternoon on the third day of trial? And I know you’re going to say because they didn’t produce it.

Judge Henry left the courtroom to consider where things went next in his chambers. Upon returning, he would allow Axelron to make question Young on Helios, but warned: 

I’m going to be pissed off if we continue to do this [try to add new evidence] on a daily basis…I don’t expect this to happen again. I think I said that the last time. If there’s other things that y’all have that y’all haven’t put on an exhibit list, I don’t want to see this showing up for the first time in my courtroom.

Axelrod drew Judge Henry’s wrath again when he again insulted Young on the stand. Judge Henry threatened a “$100 fine” for personal aspersions going forward. The money would go toward North Florida Legal Services. Axelrod wanted to pay $100 right then and there in “good faith.”

But while Axelrod put on that show for Judge Henry, that bravado was largely absent when the jury returned; gone was that shouting and arm waving. And for all the suggestions that the document would blow up Young’s case, Alexrod didn’t hammer it the same way that he did with Young’s contracts and tax documents.

Axelrod didn’t give Young the proper opportunity to explain the contract with Helios.

During redirect, Young explained that the contract with Helios was not a contract for work or for jobs. According to Young’s sworn testimony, Helios allows those with a security clearance to essentially sign with a company that will hold their clearance so that they appear as being active when they’re between companies that utilize it, that way it doesn’t go inactive and they lose it.

And with that, Young’s time on the stand came to an end.

 

While the liberal broadcast and cable networks largely behaved themselves Thursday in their coverage of the official state funeral for late former President Jimmy Carter, there were a few wacky exceptions with CNN using the fact that Carter’s FBI director is still alive to bash President-Elect Trump demanding change at the agency.

CBS also had a few moments in political toolery with one moment insisting Carter was anything but “a weak President” and then another invoking the apocalyptic Los Angeles-area wildfires as proof Carter has been validated in his environmental views.

On CNN, special correspondent Jamie Gangel arrived at this topic when highlighting the fact that Carter outlived most of his staff and cabinet members, but three still alive would be in attendance with one being Judge William Webster, who served as FBI director from 1978 to 1987.

Leave to CNN during its coverage of the state funeral for Jimmy Carter to attack President-Elect Trump for wanting a new FBI Director pic.twitter.com/c7rLXq1PJs
— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) January 9, 2025
Gangel relayed a conversation she had with Webster and his wife about his role and that Carter “believed the FBI should be separate” from politics and the White House:

I spoke to Judge Webster and his wife Linda this past week. They told me two interesting stories. One, we should all keep in mind that Jimmy Carter, the Democrat, picked Judge Webster, the Republican, to be head of the FBI, knowing that Webster the Republican would go on for a 10 year service. It was a — you know, Jimmy Carter thought the man was right for the job. It wasn’t about politics and Linda Webster also told me one of their favorite stories is that Jimmy Carter never interfered with what Judge Webster did. He always worked through the Attorney General. He believed the FBI should be separate. And except once. Once President Carter, they don’t know why, called then-FBI Director Judge Webster to ask about something out West. And the FBI director said, if we can, we’ll do it and Jimmy Carter said — understood, you know, hands off. 

If it wasn’t already clear, Gangel would make the link to Trump: “Very different from today, where Christopher Wray is going to be resigning so that Donald Trump can appoint his own FBI director.”

The ridiculously partisan Abby Phillip — host of CNN NewsNight (aka CNN Thunderdome) — was all too eager to continue that saying that “[h]earing Jamie talk about his respect for the independence of the FBI, seeing Hunter Biden on the screen and some of those folks that we’ve just been discussing” struck a chord with her.

She added that Carter made “the independence of the FBI…a relatively new phenomenon,’ but still “so important for him to take those ideas and to hold fast to them so that they could become a part of the American system for decades after that.”

Unfortunately, Phillip argued, “we’re in another area” in which “all of [Carter’s values are] being revisited.”

“Perhaps all of that is being revisited, but one of the things about Jimmy Carter’s legacy throughout all of these things, whether it’s how he governed, how he thought about American energy, how he thought about the future, how he thought about the importance of science and engineering and future proofing this country, he saw beyond his four-year term,” she gushed.

Over on CBS, 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl — who covered Carter in the second half of his lone term — complained that for “all these years, he was looked upon as a weak president” and that presidents have been told not to end up like him.

CBS’s Lesley Stahl argues Jimmy Carter wasn’t “a weak president” and says the last few days have shown America’s “open[ed] our eyes to what he accomplished…so much more than we realized” pic.twitter.com/QMDdEjgOin
— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) January 9, 2025
Stahl argued the country has, decades later, “we’re really opening our eyes to what he accomplished and to what kind of a person, a man he was” and “accomplish[ed] so much more than we realized when he was president.”

“He turns out not to have been a weak president at all. He accomplished much more than we realized and you’ve talked about some of it. Some of it was that he brought human rights into the forefront of our foreign policy. He accomplished many acts that got passed on energy. He did the Camp David Accords and he stood for bipartisanship…[W]e need to remember the spirit that he brought to the presidency,” she said.

Later during the funeral, outgoing CBS Evening News anchor Norah O’Donnell and liberal historian Douglas Brinkley tag-teamed to tie the Los Angeles fires as validation of Carter’s beliefs about alternative energy and global warming (click “expand”):

 

 

O’DONNELL: I’m also struck too in — for a president who served our country almost half a century ago, that his vice president wanted to make sure in this eulogy to point out his early efforts of bringing attention to climate change.

BRINKLEY: Jimmy Carter and climate change, we can go on for — for days on CBS News, because he was deeply concerned about our planet’s diminishing resources and the way we’re — we’re not doing proper stewardship. Remember, Carter got in trouble with the so-called — the crisis of confidence speech, because he was holding Americans basically that we are six percent of the world’s population using up 35 percent of the world’s natural resources and Carter believed that the sun was eternal and hence why he put the solar panels on the White House and was trying to get us into an alternative energy mode, because he knew so clearly the scientific evidence was there on the damage of fossil fuels.

O’DONNELL: And then Reagan removed those solar panels. And now half a century later, this was a debate even in the short presidential election where the President-Elect is promising to drill, baby, drill, famously and where also the other big story that we’re watching at this hour too is what’s happening in L.A. County.

BRINKLEY: And not just with L.A. County, but all of our lakes and rivers and the lands that Jimmy Carter became a watchdog for. He — one of the first things he did in political life wa create the Georgia Conservancy to conserve Georgia coast lands around Jekyll Island, to conserve Okefenokee Swamps, to stop a dam at the Kattachoee [sic] — Chattahoochee River in Georgia and this extended throughout his life. And that’s why he became such great friends with Ted Turner, who I don’t think’s here. Ted turner is 86 and not well, but they were as inseparable as can be.

To see the relevant transcripts from January 9, click here (for CBS) and here (for CNN).

Our readers are well aware that one of MRC Business’s biggest pet peeves has been the extent to which the leftist media went to bat for the insanity of Bidenomics the past four years. But The Washington Post’s pseudo-conservative columnist Jennifer Rubin is arguing like they just discovered its made-up stroke of genius yesterday.

“Surprise! The media just discovered Bidenomics works,” railed Rubin in yet another senseless screed published Jan. 9. “Trump is getting a strong economy. If only the media had explained the Biden economic achievements,” Rubin whined, as if simping for Bidenomics wasn’t exactly what the media have been doing throughout President Joe Biden’s entire term, including her own newspaper. Was she living under a rock this whole time?

Her delusional reference to “Biden economic achievements” is also nothing short of laughable, given the inflation-laced nightmare Biden’s policies stimulated in the first place and is still reverberating throughout the U.S. economy.

One of the examples she used to support her premise was New York Times Chief White house Correspondent Peter Baker’s insulting Jan. 5 news item, which bloviated how the Biden economy was supposedly great whether voters knew it or not.  Then came the kicker from Rubin: “Gosh, you are not alone if you are wondering where such upbeat reporting has been for the past few years.” Is she serious? 

It’s too bad NewsBusters Media Editor Bill D’Agostino already did an extensive compilation in January 2024 of media talking heads doing the very mindless Bidenomics fangirling Rubin claimed was lacking during Biden’s presidency, completely blowing up her argument.

The above video compilation makes the following statement from Rubin claiming that the media had a “negative news bias” on Bidenomics look completely ridiculous:

There are several explanations for why we did not have coverage commensurate with the success President Joe Biden enjoyed. The news media’s fixation on polls showing what voters thought about the state of the economy and its negative news bias (which I have written about) that refused to give proper weight to Biden’s successes failed to give voters an accurate picture of Biden’s achievements. And yet now, somehow, with the election over, the media widely acknowledges that Biden’s record is strong, something they downplayed during the election, [emphasis added.]

Really? Is that why Politico had the utter temerity to claim in October 2024 that Biden’s arbitrarily appointed 2024 successor, Vice President Kamala Harris, was riding a so-called “dream economy” into the election? The leftist media were doing everything they could to hoodwink Americans into believing that Bidenomics was the best thing since chocolate milk right before the election. But if you’re a talking head like Rubin who’s spent the past four years trying to drag Bidenomics over the finish line, living in La-La-Land is common practice for those completely out of touch with reality. 

But Rubin wasn’t finished: “Overall, the Biden record is impressive, especially in light of the recession and pandemic he inherited.” Of course, none of the statistics Rubin cited were much different from the devoid-of-context White House talking points being regurgitated by the leftist media that are devoid of context, such as the supposedly stellar jobs market, GDP growth, or that the U.S. economy is the envy of the world.

Here are a few points. A recent analysis by The Economist found that of the economic performances of 37 “mostly rich” countries in 2024, the U.S. was ranked a ridiculous 20th overall. As National Review senior political correspondent Jim Gereghty noted,”in what can at best be called a very mixed bag — ranking ninth among the 37 countries in GDP, fourth in stock market performance, 23rd in inflation, 29th in change in unemployment rate over the past year, and 31st in estimated deficit growth compared to GDP.” Not exactly flying colors, to say the very least.

Much of the economic growth Rubin is slobbering over is being bolstered by a massive government debt bomb. In other words, it’s easy for an economy to feel artificially energetic when it’s running on the equivalent of a massive sugar high. Economist Daniel Lacalle wrote in a Nov. 17 column, “Anyone who has delved into the supposedly solid headline figures can clearly see the real weakness of the U.S. economy.” Specifically, Lacalle added, “An unsustainable increase in government spending and federal debt bloated the official GDP, making gross domestic income significantly weaker than headline GDP.”

America is also in the midst of battling a major labor shortage, as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce pointed out in a Dec. 13 report. “Even if every unemployed worker were to fill an open job within their respective industry, there would still be millions of unfilled job positions, highlighting the widespread labor shortage,” the Chamber summarized. 

Also, more than half of Americans are struggling to pay bills and save money in the Biden economy due to the ongoing cost-of-living crisis. Rubin even conceded this, but outrageously spun that this as only damaging public perceptions about the economy, “(which in turn got amplified to the exclusion of ‘good news’ by the media).”  Yes, she actually wrote that.

NewsBusters Media Editor Bill D’Agostino contributed to this report.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement about the supposed return of unfettered free speech on his platforms was cynically reported in the lead story slot on Wednesday.by New York Times tech reporter Mike Isaac and Theodore Schleifer, who covers “billionaires” (though perhaps not leftist billionaire George Soros, given that criticism of him is posed as anti-Semitic)

Meta said on Tuesday that it was ending its longstanding fact-checking program, a policy instituted to curtail the spread of misinformation across its social media apps, in a stark sign of how the company was repositioning itself for the Trump presidency and throwing its weight behind unfettered speech online.

Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, said it would now allow more speech, rely on its users to correct inaccurate and false posts, and take a more personalized approach to political content….

“It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression,” Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, said in a video announcing the changes. The company’s fact-checking system, he added, had “reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship.”

Mr. Zuckerberg conceded there would be more “bad stuff” on the platforms as a result of the decision. “The reality is that this is a trade-off,” he said. “It means that we’re going to catch less bad stuff, but we’ll also reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally take down.”

After cynically stating that “few big companies have worked as overtly to curry favor with the president-elect,”.as Meta, the Times turned to the censors’ (i.e. “misinformation researchers”) handwringing without any ideological labeling.

Misinformation researchers said Meta’s decision to end fact-checking was deeply concerning. Nicole Gill, a founder and the executive director of the digital watchdog organization Accountable Tech, said Mr. Zuckerberg was “reopening the floodgates to the exact same surge of hate, disinformation and conspiracy theories that caused Jan. 6 — and that continue to spur real-world violence.”

Does the Times mean this sort of ludicrous fact-checking of the conservative Christian satire site The Babylon Bee (a site also targeted by the paper’s humor-impaired tech reporter Kevin Roose)?

In 2021, Facebook shut down Mr. Trump’s account after the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol for inciting violence, later reinstating him. Multiple studies have since shown that interventions like Facebook’s fact-checks were effective at reducing belief in falsehoods and reducing how often such content was shared.

But Meta’s move elated conservative allies of Mr. Trump, many of whom have disliked Meta’s practice of adding disclaimers or warnings to questionable or false posts….

This sounded rather extreme:

Inside Meta, Mr. Zuckerberg’s announcements were met by praise and horror.

The story eventually settled into just relaying the unflattering facts.

Mr. Zuckerberg also regretted the pressure that the Biden administration put on him to take down content related to Covid-19, a sentiment he relayed publicly in a letter to Congress last year. [Editor’s Note: And which the Times ignored for nearly two months.] In the letter, Mr. Zuckerberg said the administration overreached in requests to take down content, “including humor and satire.” In hindsight, Meta should have pushed back more on the White House’s requests, he said.

Also at the Times, reporter Stuart Thompson’s story with a “clever” headline backfired on social media: “Meta Says Fact-Checkers Were the Problem. Fact-Checkers Rule That False.”

Cringe!

President Biden has granted his first interview as president to a national newspaper – USA Today on January 5, with just two weeks to go before his term ends. Naturally,  reporter Susan Page was as gentle as a family member. [Down to the alert-Biden photo.] It was syrupy-soft, or soft as a baby butt. 

This is how the newspaper story began:

WASHINGTON ― President Joe Biden, both reflective and defensive as he discussed his legacy, told USA TODAY he believes he could have won his reelection bid − but isn’t sure he would have had the vigor to complete four more years in the Oval Office.

“So far, so good,” he said. “But who knows what I’m going to be when I’m 86 years old?”

So far, so good???? Page gently waited nine paragraphs to return to that issue: “Concerns about the age and acuity of America’s oldest president flared with his faltering performance in a televised debate with Trump in June.”

This line was more comical: “Biden warned that Trump risked upending the economic good times if he enacts some of the policies he advocates.” Oh sure, the voters really backed your take on the “economic good times.”

The same gush came in the print edition. See this headline/photo combo: 

“EXIT TONGUEBATH” https://t.co/5NtJmWc4xz
— Tim Graham (@TimJGraham) January 8, 2025
Page tried to paint Biden as “engaged and loquacious” during their time together:

Through an interview that stretched for nearly an hour, Biden was engaged and loquacious, though at times he spoke so softly that it was difficult to hear him. On his desk were index cards that seemed to have talking points and statistics, but he glanced at them only once, at the end, as if to make sure he had mentioned the items most important to him.

That’s code for “thanks for the interview, I upheld my part to pretend you’re totally on top of it.”

Page also let him make wild claims, such as: “His long experience has been an asset in handling foreign affairs, Biden said.” And there was this: 

That the White House agreed to this interview is a sign that, while Biden is still in a position to command the world’s attention, he wants to make the case that he has forged a robust and positive legacy. The underlying message: The impact of his presidency cannot be fairly judged primarily by controversies over his health, his on-again-off-again presidential bid and his decision to grant a sweeping pardon for his son.
“I hope that history says that I came in and I had a plan how to restore the economy and reestablish America’s leadership in the world,” Biden said. “That was my hope. I mean, you know, who knows? And I hope it records that I did it with honesty and integrity, that I said what was on my mind.”

That’s where the “honesty and integrity” headline gush oozed from. 

And to wrap it up: “His biggest disappointment, Biden said, was his failure to effectively counter misinformation, including that from Trump.” That means Democrats failed to win. 

In an interview about the interview, Page described getting a cookie from Biden. She earned that. Below is a transcript of most of Page’s questions, which establishes the sweet gentleness [hit expand]: 

It’s a natural time to think about your legacy as you’re preparing to leave, and that is of course a very big topic. I wanted to ask you, when history assesses your tenure here, what do you think will most endure?

When you think about your legacy, is there an element that you think has been overlooked? That’s not getting the attention it deserves?

You talk about your economic successes on jobs and on growth on avoiding a recession which, a lot of people thought that wasn’t possible. But one reason that Donald Trump won in November was the support he managed to get from working class voters, voters without a college education, voters who have been part of the Democratic coalition, voters who you as Scranton Joe have long identified with. Why do you think Democrats lost so much of their support in November?

There’s many things of your legacy been such big successes, but part of the economy that has proved I think to be more troublesome is inflation. And I wonder if you think you were paid too little attention early on to warnings about inflation with the American Rescue Plan or failed to recognize soon enough how much this was affecting so many Americans’ lives.

Are you concerned that when Trump’s in office, he’s going to try to reverse [Biden policies]?

Is there a single thing that does your greatest fear about what President-elect Trump will do when he’s in office?

You’ve talked about these quite significant major pieces of legislation and other things that you’ve done. I wonder, is there a thing that’s been the most disappointing to you, the single thing that’s been most disappointing that you’ve been unable to do?

You said something generic and something specific. So generically, the inability to combat mistruths. Was there something specific that you wanted to mention as well?

….Mr. President, your term is not over yet. You’re still doing things every day. Some of your supporters have encouraged you to issue preemptive pardons to people like Liz Cheney and Anthony Fauci, who Trump has threatened to target. Will you do that?

Speaking of pardons, every parent can understand why you would want to protect your son. Do you have any concerns that your pardon of Hunter sets a precedent for future presidents? One that might be open to abuse?

…’

PAGE: Three quick questions. You could answer them in a single word.
BIDEN: Sure.
PAGE: Do you believe you could have won in November?
BIDEN: It’s presumptuous to say that, but I think yes, based on the polling that…
PAGE: Do you think you would’ve had the vigor to serve another four years in office?
BIDEN: I don’t know. That’s why I thought when I first announced, talking to Barack about it, I said I thought I was the person. I had no intention of running after Beau died – for real, not a joke. And then when Trump was running again for reelection, I really thought I had the best chance of beating him. But I also wasn’t looking to be president when I was 85 years old, 86 years old. And so I did talk about passing the baton. But I don’t know. Who the hell knows? So far, so good. But who knows what I’m going to be when I’m 86 years old?

NBC senior reporter on all things internet, Brandy Zadrozny, joined MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle on Thursday’s edition of The 11th Hour to discuss Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to revise the company’s rules of what constitutes acceptable speech. Zadrozny was not there for subtlety or nuance as she suggested the door is now open for a Myanmar-style genocide.

Ruhle began by declaring, “The internet is your world. You don’t just cover this, you have faced extraordinary abuse online. Tell us what this is going to look like now that we’re not going to have guardrails.”

 

 

Zadrozny started by claiming conservative cries of censorship are false, “Well, it’s going to be worse for all the people it’s already bad for: women, minorities, immigrants, gay people, trans people, all the people who are already attacked online. Mark Zuckerberg and Joel Kaplan are now saying, ‘We’ve gone too far protecting you.’ Sometimes conservatives say they are censored, which is not true, according to the data and research. That is not actually happening. But they feel that it is, and their feelings are more important than your truth, so we are going to roll back the things that we have instituted to try to keep those users safe. We don’t care about those people.

Zuckerberg himself has said that it is true, including the dreaded joke police who came for satirical articles. Nevertheless, Ruhle brought out the air quotes and wondered, “So, will this ‘community notes’ system do anything?”

Like everyone else who has defended the previous fact-checker program, Zadrozny could get herself to believe that the fact-checkers are unreliable guardians of the truth compared to partisan social media users, “It’s unclear how they are going to roll out community notes. Like, the fact is, it’s not really an effective tool on X, even though Zuckerberg said that is why we’re instituting it, because it worked so well on X. That’s just not true. Community notes take a really, really long time. Research suggests that those community notes are driven by partisan actors, and the most important thing, they are very, very, very slow.” 

Zadrozny then got really crazy as she shifted back to concerns about hateful speech, “And incitement to violence happens very, very quickly. We’ve seen what happened in Myanmar, we have seen what happened with Stop the Steal. These things happen like lightning, and with whatever community notes thing they’ll roll out, what will happen, Zuckerberg said yesterday, ‘We’re no longer going to check those things automatically.’ Machine learning, when it comes to harassment and hate speech, no more. Instead we are going to rely on users to report that. I don’t know if you ever tried to report anything to Facebook. You’re not getting a response.”

By referencing Myanmar, Zadrozny is referring to the massacre and genocide of the Rohingya people that began in 2017. However, Facebook’s fiercest critics argue the problem was more related to the company’s algorithm.

Fortunately for everyone, there is nothing in Meta’s new guidelines that suggests calling for genocide or race massacres is acceptable conduct. As for dumping machine learning, Zuckerberg has said the system simply made too many mistakes.

Here is a transcript for the January 8 show:

MSNBC The 11th Hour with Stephanie Ruhle

1/8/2025

11:36 PM ET

STEPHANIE RUHLE: The internet is your world. You don’t just cover this, you have faced extraordinary abuse online. Tell us what this is going to look like now that we’re not going to have guardrails.

BRANDY ZADROZNY: Well, it’s going to be worse for all the people it’s already bad for: women, minorities, immigrants, gay people, trans people, all the people who are already attacked online. Mark Zuckerberg and Joel Kaplan are now saying, “We’ve gone too far protecting you.” Sometimes conservatives say they are censored, which is not true, according to the data and research. That is not actually happening. But they feel that it is, and their feelings are more important than your truth, so we are going to roll back the things that we have instituted to try to keep those users safe. We don’t care about those people.

RUHLE: So, will this “community notes” system do anything?

ZADROZNY: It’s unclear how they are going to roll out community notes. Like, the fact is, it’s not really an effective tool on X, even though Zuckerberg said that is why we’re instituting it, because it worked so well on X. That’s just not true. Community notes take a really, really long time. Research suggests that those community notes are driven by partisan actors, and the most important thing, they are very, very, very slow. 

And incitement to violence happens very, very quickly. We’ve seen what happened in Myanmar, we have seen what happened with Stop the Steal. These things happen like lighting, and with whatever community notes thing they’ll roll out, what will happen, Zuckerberg said yesterday, “We’re no longer going to check those things automatically.” Machine learning, when it comes to harassment and hate speech, no more. Instead we are going to rely on users to report that. I don’t know if you ever tried to report anything to Facebook. 

RUHLE: Sister, please.

ZADROZNY: You’re not getting a response.

After Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the company will be dumping its partnership with fact-checking companies in favor of a X-like community notes-style method of combating misinformation, PolitiFact tried to fearmonger about such a move. Unfortunately for writer Angela Fu, any criticism she had could also apply to PolitiFact and its partners.

On Wednesday, Fu relied on “experts” who naturally told her what she wanted to hear. Championing one side’s experts is one reason why fact-checkers have burned their credibility. For example, in 2022, PolitiFact rated Sen. Mitch McConnell “false” because liberal experts disagreed with his take on a Democratic “voting rights” bill; the fact that PolitiFact also interviewed CATO’s Ilya Shapiro, who agreed with McConnell, had no impact on their rating.

Fu also warned, “Fact-checkers say that they’ve noticed misinformation go unchecked on X. Science Feedback, a fact-checking organization in the U.S. that was part of Meta’s program, analyzed X posts from the 2024 European Parliament elections. It found that out of the 894 tweets that professional fact-checkers identified as containing misinformation, only 11.7% had a Community Note attached.”

Because the European Fact-Checking Standards Network only provides its data upon request, readers are left to simply guess what those 894 tweets said, although climate-related issues are likely disproportionately represented. Furthermore, it is not like the fact-checkers fact-check everything themselves. Likewise, while PolitiFact may find it necessary to put a label on posts about Donald Trump not being dead, most people do not waste their time visiting such pages.

Back home, Fu writes, “A separate analysis by Poynter and Faked Up into Community Notes made on Election Day in the U.S. found that only a small percentage of notes were rated as helpful.”

That doesn’t mean what Fu seems to think it does. Having a small percentage of notes rated as helpful helps prevent abuse by trolls or hacks with agendas to push or axes to grind.

Meta, like X, will prevent abuse by requiring users of different perspectives to agree on a note, but Fu warned:

This requirement ostensibly reduces bias — one issue Meta claimed to have with its third-party fact-checking program — but experts say that in practice, it is difficult for users of different ideologies to reach a consensus. As a result, misinformation about politics or other controversial topics often goes unchecked on X.

‘The facts don’t care about if there is a consensus about them or not,’ said Maarten Schenk, co-founder and chief technology officer of Lead Stories, a U.S.-based fact-checking organization that operates in multiple languages. ‘The shape of the Earth remains exactly the same whether social media users can form a consensus about it or not.’

Yes, and misinformation, especially left-wing misinformation, goes largely unchecked on PolitiFact. Likewise, while PolitiFact has never endorsed Flat Earth Theory, it has gotten things wrong before, sometimes embarrassingly so.

Yet, Fu further warns, “Schenk and other fact-checkers noted the discrepancy between Meta’s stated goal of reducing bias and its decision to switch to a system so vulnerable to political biases.”

It is attitudes like that that led Zuckerberg to make his decision. You can’t rate JD Vance “mostly false” because you didn’t share his full quote that would have him shown agreeing with you or call Donald Trump a liar for calling Kamala Harris a Marxist, but insist Joe Biden comparing Republicans to Jim Crow is nuanced and then claim you are better at reducing political bias than the average social media user.

As President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration draws closer, Google is still relentlessly working to bring down his cabinet-level picks and other nominees. 

MRC researchers consistently found a glut of leftist articles and personal attacks when searching Google for the names of Trump’s cabinet nominees along with Brendan Carr and Kash Patel, his picks to head the Federal Communications Commission and the FBI, respectively. Using media bias ratings firm AllSides, MRC researchers found that Google consistently provided double-digit ratios in favor of leftist content in the general and News tab searches performed on Dec. 26 and Jan. 2. The search giant presented no fewer than 10 times more articles from leftist sources than right-leaning sources including a host of vicious media attacks on the nominees.

General Search

Notably, Google failed to include “lean right” or “right” results for 69 percent of the Dec. 26 general searches and for 84 percent of the Jan. 2 general searches.

Researchers found that on Dec. 26 general searches yielded 12 times as many leftist articles from sources such as MSNBC, ProPublica, The Daily Beast, CNN and The New York Times.  The Jan. 2 general search yielded also 12 times more articles from hostile left-leaning sources than those from outlets that AllSides rated as right or lean right.

News Tab

The News tab results similarly had precious few “lean right” or “right” results to counterbalance the radical leftist propaganda boosted by Google such as climate cult publication Inside Climate News. Google failed to include a single “lean right” or “right” result for more than half the News tab searches on both dates.

Additionally, the News tab search results were almost as biased as the general search results, yielding 11 times as many leftist articles on Dec. 26 and 10 times as many leftist articles on Jan. 2.

Hostile Attacks on Nominees

Google also peppered its results with articles delivering personal attacks against the nominees, especially Patel, Pete Hegseth (the presumptive nominee for Defense Secretary) and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (the presumptive nominee for Health Secretary).

On Dec. 26 alone, at least six of the News tab search articles went after Patel. For example, MSNBC warned he would be a “dangerous FBI Director,” while WIRED used the headline “Kash Patel is the Hero Qanon has been waiting for.” Patel also came under fire from Newsweek, The Atlantic, The Times and NBC News.

On Jan. 2, nine out of ten articles Google provided in the News tab search results attacked Patel, using some of the same articles from the Dec. 26 search plus additional broadsides from ABC News, The Washington Post, The Bulwark and Politico. Google included an MSNBC article accusing Patel of “grifting” and indulging conspiracy theories and a New Yorker piece implausibly arguing that Patel would be a more dangerous FBI director than J. Edgar Hoover. 

Both days of News tab results also went after RFK Jr. on many different fronts from a Rolling Stone article arguing that RFK Jr. would “Make America Sick Again” to arguing that RFK Jr. “can’t be taken seriously” or that America must “tame” him. These results also featured such radical publications as Mother Jones and The Daily Beast. 

In Hegseth’s case, Google results hyped a woman’s allegations against him in both the News tab and general searches and featured articles accusing him of having a drinking problem. Both searches included a Times article using his mother against him. MRC also found negative articles by leftist taxpayer-funded websites PBS and NPR in both searches, as well as an all-out assault from The New Yorker, which aired out a wide variety of accusations against Hegseth such as drinking, financial mismanagement, infidelity, drunken statements, and more.

But Google didn’t just stack the results with leftist and legacy media and negative headlines. Google planted an atrocious short headline in the search results on both days MRC researchers did a general search for Hegseth’s name.

CNN was one of many outlets Google used to fill the results with negative headlines about Hegseth. While readers might draw negative inferences from the actual CNN title, “Police report reveals new details from sexual assault allegation against Trump’s defense secretary nominee,” Google made things far worse. People who googled Hegseth in the News tab on both dates would have found a shortened headline that says “Police report reveals new details from sexual assault,” which gives the impression that both the police and CNN agreed that there was a sexual assault. 

Methodology 

For this report, MRC Free Speech America analyzed the Dec. 26 and Jan. 2 Google Search and News tab results for the first and last names of 24 men and women nominated for cabinet-level positions in the second Trump administration as well as Trump’s choice for FCC chairman and Trump’s choice for FBI director. MRC Free Speech America created an algorithm to automate this process in a clean environment. A “clean environment” allows for organic search to populate results without the influence of prior search history and tracking cookies. 

MRC Free Speech America also utilized the AllSides media bias chart as a gauge to determine which outlets are “right” and “lean right.” AllSides notes it has a “patent on rating bias and use[s] multiple methodologies,” not a homogenous group or an algorithm. “Our methods are: Blind Bias Surveys of Americans, Editorial Reviews by a multipartisan team of panelists who look for common types of media bias, independent reviews, and third-party data.”

Readers should be aware that this report only uses the AllSides list to analyze ratings of outlets considered by AllSides to be “right” and “lean right” and does not necessarily reflect MRC’s characterizations of these outlets.

This study included leftist anti-Trump publication The Bulwark as a “lean right” result multiple times since AllSides rates The Bulwark as “lean right.” 

Nominees searched on December 26 and January 2 include Scott Bessent, Pamela Bondi, Douglas Burgum, Brendan Carr, Lori Chavez-DeRemer, Doug Collins, Sean Duffy, Tulsi Gabbard, Jamieson Greer, Kevin Hassett, Peter Hegseth, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Kelly Loeffler, Howard Lutnick, Linda McMahon, Stephen Miran, Kristi Noem, Kash Patel, Brooke Rollins, Marco Rubio, Elise Stefanik, Scott Turner, Russell Vought, Susan Wiles, Christopher Wright and Lee Zeldin.

Conservatives are under attack! Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on hate speech and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.