News Stories

Excerpts of Key News Stories in Major Media

Below are highly revealing excerpts of key news stories from the major media that suggest major cover-ups and corruption. Links are provided to the full stories on their media websites. If any link fails to function, read this webpage. These news stories are listed by date posted. You can explore the same list by order of importance or by date of news story. By choosing to educate ourselves and to spread the word, we can and will build a brighter future.

Note: This comprehensive list of news stories is usually updated once a week. Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key major media news stories on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.

For the past 12 years, I have tried to share moments beyond the dramatized images of battlefield action, emotional homecomings and veterans in crisis. I've photographed the often-overlooked everyday moments that make up this military life. The constant moves and goodbyes. Objects that make up this life that don't exist in civilian domestic spaces. The days after a deployment, when a service member "re-integrates" back into the family and into civilian society. John didn't start going to therapy until after he had turned in his retirement papers. He was concerned that it might jeopardize his career. I am on my computer when John leaves a notebook on my desk. He doesn't say anything. It is the journaling he has been doing with his therapist – her new strategy to get him to open up. He starts the journal with how many US soldiers and Afghan security forces were killed in each operation and what awards were given: Silver Stars, Bronze Stars with valor, Purple Hearts. I know the casualties are what weighs most heavily on him, but he is proud of the awards given to his soldiers. Then he goes into detail about a traumatic event he experienced in Afghanistan. As I read his vivid recollections of violence – which included body parts, trails of blood and the smell of burnt flesh – tears ran down my face. I am only beginning to understand what he has been through. John's career spanned the entirety of the 20-year "war on terror."

Note: Read about the tragic traumas and suicides connected to military drone operators. A recent Pentagon study concluded that US soldiers are nine times more likely to die by suicide than they are in combat.For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on war.

The Canadian government's top scientist has released a new report on unidentified flying objects. The report from the Office of the Chief Science Advisor of Canada recommends the creation of a new federal body to standardize, collect and investigate UFO reports. "The mystery of unidentified phenomena in the sky has long fascinated humanity, capturing the public imagination and arousing both skepticism and curiosity," the new report states. "Together, the analysis presented in this report suggests that Canada would benefit from an improved process for reporting, collecting, and studying UAP sightings." The acronym UAP stands for "unidentified aerial (or anomalous) phenomena," which has largely replaced the terms "UFO" and "unidentified flying objects" in official circles. Known as the Sky Canada Project, the Office of the Chief Science Advisor of Canada launched its UAP research effort in 2022 and released a preliminary report in January. Cardiovascular scientist Dr. Mona Nemer has been Canada's chief science advisor since the role was created in 2017. "Our goal was to find the current resources and processes in place for handling and following up on UAP reports, to compare them with the best practices in other countries, and to make recommendations for potential improvements," Nemer said in the new report's introduction. "The preparation of this report has garnered more public anticipation than any project in the history of this office."

Note: Watch our videos on UFO/UAP phenomena with some of the top people in the disclosure movement. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on UFOs. Then explore the comprehensive resources provided in our UFO Information Center.

Over the last few years, allegations of secret, exotic technologies have reinvigorated claims that the DOD may be concealing scientific breakthroughs from the American public. However, if the U.S. government, or some faction within it, hypothetically came across a groundbreaking development in energy production or applied physics ... such a revolution would likely be housed deep within the Department of Energy (DOE) rather than DOD. A DOE special investigative panel concluded in 1999 that the department is "a dysfunctional bureaucracy that has proven it is incapable of reforming itself." More recently, the DOE signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the Department of Defense to confirm and enhance the "the longstanding partnership between DOE and DOD on space-related research and technology development." The MOU establishes joint working groups and promotes scientific exchange between the two departments in emerging and disruptive research fields such as advanced power and propulsion, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, next-generation communications, and autonomous or remotely piloted vehicles. The DOE also currently operates a Fusion Energy Sciences (FES) program, an Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) program, and a Nuclear Sciences program, the latter of which seeks to put together "a roadmap of matter that will help unlock the secrets of how the universe is put together."

Note: Read our concise summaries of news articles on military corruption and the mysterious nature of reality.

Tony McAleer was just 16 years old when he ... became active in the White Aryan Resistance, where he became a leader. But 15 years later, he left that life behind and embarked on a path of healing. He's since founded a non-profit, Life After Hate, which helps other people leaving white supremacy groups, written a book called The Cure For Hate, and starred in a documentary about his journey. "When I left the movement, I still had the beliefs intact," [said McAleer]. "It's not just the ideas in someone's head, it was my whole identity. It was who I hung out with, the videos I watched, the music I listened to. It's challenging to get someone to admit that what they believe is wrong. I left the movement behind, but I was still a jerk. I still had all of the wounds that were spilling out all over everywhere. I used humour, sarcasm, putting people down, I could verbally destroy people without any violence. I was still a jerk because I hadn't dealt with the source of my anger and hatred, the source of my self-loathing." It wasn't till I met a counsellor – who was Jewish – in 2005. I went through about 1,000 hours of ... counselling and really got to the root of who I was. The more he connected me to my humanity, the more I could recognize the humanity in others. And the more I could connect to the humanity in others, the more I could recognize the humanity in myself. It's very important that we learn to call out behaviours, we call out ideology, call out the activity, but we need to call the human being in.

Note: For more, watch our latest 20-min video on what can transform a divided world, where you'll hear the powerful words and stories from those at the edge of death, leaders who reached across deep divides, and even a former neo-Nazi who left hate. Explore more positive stories like this on healing social division.

For most of my life, I saw my father as the ultimate provider; he worked long hours as a doctor and took pride in that he never missed a day of work. While we knew he loved us, he would rarely, if ever, say the words "I love you." But after an aneurysm, a helicopter ride to the hospital, and hours of surgery gave him a new perspective on life, I've noticed a change in him. His chances of survival were slim – at least that's what I assumed it meant when my brother, who's also a doctor, said: "This doesn't look good." He said: "I'm sorry. It's really hard to watch people you love when they are in pain." These words – from my father who showed little emotion and rarely said "I love you" – felt surreal. I wondered how he could be so selfless, worrying about others while he was in great pain. At that moment, I felt a deep affection for him. In the past, he was quick to state his opinion on any given topic; now I see him listening more, thinking before he shares his perspective. When I talk to him on the phone, his voice is softer, and before we hang up, he says, "I love you." Witnessing my father become more open has reminded me that I still have room to grow. I believe that my father and I both learned something that day. He learned to say "I love you," and I learned that even when people present themselves as impervious, it doesn't mean they're not feeling emotions. We all just have different ways of expressing them.

Note: Explore more positive stories like this on near-death experiences.

A recent study published in Collabra: Psychology has found a notable decline in people's motivation to stand out or be unique over the past two decades. Researchers analyzed data from over one million people between 2000 and 2020, measuring various aspects of uniqueness, including willingness to defend beliefs, adherence to rules, and concern over others' reactions. Results revealed declines across all three areas. The new study was motivated by evidence suggesting that people are increasingly concerned about the social consequences of expressing opinions, particularly in online spaces where scrutiny is often harsh and widespread. Polling data and past research suggested that fear of isolation or criticism might make people more cautious about sharing beliefs or acting in ways that draw attention. At the same time, rising social anxiety and sensitivity to judgment could make people more hesitant to express uniqueness. Given these shifts, the researchers wanted to track whether and how people's desire for uniqueness had changed over a 20-year period. The largest decline, at 6.52%, was in people's willingness to publicly defend their beliefs. The study also found a decline, albeit less steep, in people's willingness to break rules, indicating that people are less inclined to challenge norms or social expectations than two decades ago. Over time, people have become more reserved in behavior, choosing to conform to social norms rather than push boundaries.

Note: Over half of Americans are self-censoring out of fear of being cancelled or alienated from their community. From gender medicine research, the psychology field, social justice movements, to Middle East politics, a Cato Institute poll found that 71% of Americans believe that political correctness has silenced important societal discussions, and 58% of Americans reported that the current political climate prevents them from sharing their political beliefs. Is this the world we want to create?

A series of corporate leaks over the past few years provides a remarkable window in the hidden engines powering social media. In January 2021, a few Facebook employees posted an article on the company's engineering blog purporting to explain the news feed algorithm that determines which of the countless posts available each user will see and the order in which they will see them. Eight months later ... a Facebook product manager turned whistleblower snuck over ten thousand pages of documents and internal messages out of Facebook headquarters. She leaked these to a handful of media outlets. Internal studies documented Instagram's harmful impact on the mental health of vulnerable teen girls. A secret whitelist program exempted VIP users from the moderation system the rest of us face. It turns out Facebook engineers have assigned a point value to each type of engagement users can perform on a post (liking, commenting, resharing, etc.). For each post you could be shown, these point values are multiplied by the probability that the algorithm thinks you'll perform that form of engagement. These multiplied pairs of numbers are added up, and the total is the post's personalized score for you. Facebook, TikTok, and Twitter all run on essentially the same simple math formula. Once we start clicking the social media equivalent of junk food, we're going to be served up a lot more of it–which makes it harder to resist. It's a vicious cycle

Note: Read our latest Substack focused on a social media platform that is harnessing technology as a listening tool for the radical purpose of bringing people together across differences. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Tech and media manipulation.

Reviewing individuals' social media to conduct ideological vetting has been a defining initiative of President Trump's second term. As part of that effort, the administration has proposed expanding the mandatory collection of social media identifiers. By linking individuals' online presence to government databases, officials could more easily identify, monitor, and penalize people based on their online self-expression, raising the risk of self-censorship. Most recently, the State Department issued a cable directing consular officers to review the social media of all student visa applicants for "any indications of hostility towards the citizens, culture, government, institutions or founding principles of the United States," as well as for any "history of political activism." This builds on earlier efforts this term, including the State Department's "Catch and Revoke" program, which promised to leverage artificial intelligence to screen visa holders' social media for ostensible "pro-Hamas" activity, and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services' April announcement that it would begin looking for "antisemitic activity" in the social media of scores of foreign nationals. At the border, any traveler, regardless of citizenship status, may face additional scrutiny. U.S. border agents are authorized to ... examine phones, computers, and other devices to review posts and private messages on social media, even if they do not suspect any involvement in criminal activity or have immigration-related concerns.

Note: Our news archives on censorship and the disappearance of privacy reveal how government surveillance of social media has long been conducted by all presidential administrations and all levels of government.

Data brokers are required by California law to provide ways for consumers to request their data be deleted. But good luck finding them. More than 30 of the companies, which collect and sell consumers' personal information, hid their deletion instructions from Google. This creates one more obstacle for consumers who want to delete their data. Data brokers nationwide must register in California under the state's Consumer Privacy Act, which allows Californians to request that their information be removed, that it not be sold, or that they get access to it. After reviewing the websites of all 499 data brokers registered with the state, we found 35 had code to stop certain pages from showing up in searches. While those companies might be fulfilling the letter of the law by providing a page consumers can use to delete their data, it means little if those consumers can't find the page, according to Matthew Schwartz, a policy analyst. "This sounds to me like a clever work-around to make it as hard as possible for consumers to find it," Schwartz said. Some companies that hid their privacy instructions from search engines included a small link at the bottom of their homepage. Accessing it often required scrolling multiple screens, dismissing pop-ups for cookie permissions and newsletter sign-ups, then finding a link that was a fraction the size of other text on the page. So consumers still faced a serious hurdle when trying to get their information deleted.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Tech and the disappearance of privacy.

In Silicon Valley, AI tech giants are in a bidding war, competing to hire the best and brightest computer programmers. But a different hiring spree is underway in D.C. AI firms are on an influence-peddling spree, hiring hundreds of former government officials and retaining former members of Congress as consultants and lobbyists. The latest disclosure filings show over 500 entities lobbying on AI policy–from federal rules designed to preempt state and local safety regulations to water and energy-intensive data centers and integration into government contracting and certifications. Lawmakers are increasingly making the jump from serving constituents as elected officials to working directly as influence peddlers for AI interests. Former Sen. Laphonza Butler, D-Calif., a former lobbyist appointed to the U.S. Senate to fill the seat of Sen. Dianne Feinstein, left Congress last year and returned to her former profession. She is now working as a consultant to OpenAI, the firm behind ChatGPT. Former Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., recently registered for the first time as a lobbyist. Among his initial clients is Lazarus AI, which sells AI products to the Defense Department. The expanding reach of artificial intelligence is rapidly reshaping hundreds of professions, weapons of war, and the ways we connect with one another. What's clear is that the AI firms set to benefit most from these changes are taking control of the policymaking apparatus to write the laws and regulations during the transition.

Note: For more, read our concise summaries of news articles on AI and Big Tech.

It's no secret that cable news networks have partisan reputations. But new research shows the divide extends beyond which party a network appears to support. Over the past decade, these networks have increasingly focused on criticizing the opposing political party, a tactic researchers say is less about informing viewers and more about "selling anger." "These networks are more interested in talking about the opposing political party rather than their own candidates. This was not the case 15, 20 years ago," said Diego Garcia, the ... co-author of the working paper. The findings show that politics dominates cable news, accounting for about 60% of all named individuals mentioned–rising to over 75% during election years. But more revealing is who gets talked about: MSNBC spends more time discussing Republicans than Democrats, while Fox News focuses more heavily on Democrats. In 2024, Fox covered Democrats 60% of the time, with MSNBC showing the reverse. Garcia speculates that cable networks began to test different kinds of content when social media became widespread in the mid-2010s, and discovered that outrage boosts viewership. "I think Fox was the first one to figure this out, and they started pushing this negative rhetoric in their news," he said. "They're actually now the No. 1 cable news channel in the U.S. by far." Fox News now commands over 60% of the cable news audience–a dramatic jump from a more evenly split landscape a decade ago.

Note: Watch our 31-min video titled, "How to Transform Media Polarization, One Echo Chamber At A Time." For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on media manipulation.

Health practitioners are becoming increasingly uneasy about the medical community making widespread use of error-prone generative AI tools. In their May 2024 research paper introducing a healthcare AI model, dubbed Med-Gemini, Google researchers showed off the AI analyzing brain scans from the radiology lab for various conditions. It identified an "old left basilar ganglia infarct," referring to a purported part of the brain – "basilar ganglia" – that simply doesn't exist in the human body. Board-certified neurologist Bryan Moore flagged the issue ... highlighting that Google fixed its blog post about the AI – but failed to revise the research paper itself. The AI likely conflated the basal ganglia, an area of the brain that's associated with motor movements and habit formation, and the basilar artery, a major blood vessel at the base of the brainstem. Google blamed the incident on a simple misspelling of "basal ganglia." It's an embarrassing reveal that underlines persistent and impactful shortcomings of the tech. In Google's search results, this can lead to headaches for users during their research and fact-checking efforts. But in a hospital setting, those kinds of slip-ups could have devastating consequences. While Google's faux pas more than likely didn't result in any danger to human patients, it sets a worrying precedent, experts argue. In a medical context, AI hallucinations could easily lead to confusion and potentially even put lives at risk.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on AI and corruption in science.

Tor is mostly known as the Dark Web or Dark Net, seen as an online Wild West where crime runs rampant. Yet it's partly funded by the U.S. government, and the BBC and Facebook both have Tor-only versions to allow users in authoritarian countries to reach them. At its simplest, Tor is a distributed digital infrastructure that makes you anonymous online. It is a network of servers spread around the world, accessed using a browser called the Tor Browser, which you can download for free from the Tor Project website. When you use the Tor Browser, your signals are encrypted and bounced around the world before they reach the service you're trying to access. This makes it difficult for governments to trace your activity or block access, as the network just routes you through a country where that access isn't restricted. But, because you can't protect yourself from digital crime without also protecting yourself from mass surveillance by the state, these technologies are the site of constant battles between security and law enforcement interests. The state's claim to protect the vulnerable often masks efforts to exert control. In fact, robust, well-funded, value-driven and democratically accountable content moderation – by well-paid workers with good conditions – is a far better solution than magical tech fixes to social problems ... or surveillance tools. As more of our online lives are funneled into the centralized AI infrastructures ... tools like Tor are becoming ever more important.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Tech and the disappearance of privacy.

August 4, 2025 marks the 30th anniversary of Operation Storm. Little known outside the former Yugoslavia, the military campaign unleashed a genocidal cataclysm that violently expelled Croatia's entire Serb population. Croat forces rampaged UN-protected areas of the self-declared Serb Republic of Krajina, looting, burning, raping and murdering their way across the province. Up to 350,000 locals fled, many on foot, never to return. Meanwhile, thousands were summarily executed. As these hideous scenes unfolded, UN peacekeepers charged with protecting Krajina watched without intervening. Meanwhile, US officials strenuously denied the horrifying massacres and mass displacement amounted to ethnic cleansing, let alone war crimes. Operation Storm was for all intents and purposes a NATO attack, carried out by soldiers armed and trained by the US and directly coordinated with other Western powers. Despite publicly endorsing a negotiated peace, Washington privately encouraged Zagreb to employ maximum belligerence, even as their ultranationalist Croat proxies plotted to strike with such ferocity that the country's entire Serb population would "to all practical purposes disappear." High-ranking Croat officials privately discussed methods to justify their coming blitzkrieg, including false flag attacks. In preparing for the offensive, Croatian soldiers were trained at Fort Irwin in California and the Pentagon aided in planning the operation.

Note: Learn more about how war is a tool for hidden agendas in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. For more, read our concise summaries of news articles on war.

In 2021, Kristen Magnuson had to make a secret deal to continue a staple of her daily routine: swimming at her local outdoor pool. During the pandemic, the state of Washington required a vaccine passport to gain access to public spaces such as restaurants, movie theaters, and gyms. Ms. Magnuson chose not to get vaccinated. So the mother of two made a covert arrangement with gym staff. She could bypass the lobby by sneaking in through a back door. Ms. Magnuson was grateful, but she felt like a second-class citizen. Now she has a plea: Can we talk about what we went through? She isn't opposed to vaccines – her husband and children got them. She and others are asking: What would America do differently if the country could have a do-over, or faced a similar challenge in the future? Ms. Magnuson ... isn't ready to absolve top officials until they show "a recognition of harms." "I was surprised when some politicians and doctors said that those who remain unvaccinated should not be treated if they fall ill. People were not ‘bad' or ‘COVidiots' if they contracted COVID-19; they were human," [Dr. Monica] Gandhi wrote. "There is absolutely no place for stigma, judgment, and a shame-based approach in public health." The former NIH director [Dr. Francis Collins] proposed, instead, a reckoning modeled on South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission in the aftermath of apartheid. "That means people coming forward and confessing what they did that was harmful in public and asking for forgiveness," said Dr. Collins, who was appointed by President Obama and served as a science adviser to Biden. "That's very different than just amnesty."

Note: Read NIH director Jay Bhattacharya's powerful call for forgiveness despite being cancelled for having dissenting views on COVID policies. Explore more positive stories like this on healing social division.

[The] universality of music, its ability to elicit the same emotions in diverse audiences, is exactly what inspires the work of Chicago-based nonprofit Crossing Borders Music. Composed of artists trained mainly in the Western classical tradition, the group compiles and performs music from Haitian, Palestinian, Rohingya, Native American and many other marginalized communities via free concerts held in libraries, cultural centers and university spaces. "Often, we find that in the West, refugees and immigrants are defined only by the conflict in their home countries," says Tom Clowes ... the founder of Crossing Borders. "But nobody wants to be defined by the worst things that have happened to them, especially when it's not even something that they've done, but something that's happened to them." The nonprofit's musical collaborations and concerts are a bid to not just showcase these diverse and complex musical traditions, but also to create empathy and understanding for immigrants and other communities who often get overlooked because of race, ethnicity, disability, gender, sexual orientation, identity or past trauma. Crossing Borders reaches over 10,000 people in person and online each year and organized 27 free concerts in 2024. "And when we hear audience members say our music defied their expectations or broadened their worldview, or that they felt their culture was affirmed and uplifted, we know we're fulfilling our mission," Clowes says.

Note: Explore more positive stories like this on the power of art and healing social division.

The idea that American health insurance companies are using AI to analyze and adjudicate claims for approval or denial sounds terrifying, but one North Carolinian is using AI to fight back. When Raleigh resident Neal Shah had a claim denied for his wife's chemotherapy drugs, he thought it was rare, that he was the only one, that it was just bad luck. Litigating his case on phone calls that lasted for hours changed the husband and father, and he set about creating a sophisticated app that uses artificial intelligence to compare claims denial forms against health insurance contracts, before automatically drafting an appeal letter. "For a doctor to write this, it's not rocket science, but it still takes hours," Shah told ABC News 11, adding that a well-written appeal letter, sent in immediately, can sometimes get denials reversed within days or weeks, but most people either don't know they can appeal, or don't know on what grounds they can appeal. In fact, according to Shah's research, 850 million claims denials occur every year, and less than 1% are ever appealed. That's where Counterforce Health comes in, a startup that's created a free-to-use app for claims denials. For Counterforce Health, Shah brought onboard Riyaa Jadhav, a Jill of all trades who has helped grow and expand the undertaking. Together, they've built Counterforce to the point where it boasts a 70% success rate in appealing claims.

Note: Explore more positive stories like this on technology for good.

The Obama administration knew before and after the 2016 election that Russia did not affect the vote's outcome through cyberattacks. Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard made public more than 100 pages of emails, memos and other records cataloguing what she called Obama officials' "conspiracy to subvert President Trump's 2016 victory." Both before and after Democrat Hillary Clinton's loss, the US Intelligence Community assessed that Russia played no significant role influencing the election. Among the documents was a Sept. 12, 2016, Intelligence Community Assessment that determined "foreign adversaries do not have and will probably not obtain the capabilities to successfully execute widespread and undetected cyber attacks" on election infrastructure. On Dec. 7, 2016, then-DNI James Clapper's office also concluded: "We have no evidence of cyber manipulation of election infrastructure intended to alter results." But those findings were suppressed after the FBI ... said it was going to "dissent" from the draft's conclusions "based on some new guidance." Clapper then spearheaded an alternative intelligence report claiming the Kremlin orchestrated hackings of Democratic National Committee emails ... and intervened in the presidential contest in favor of Trump. [Obama] ordered a new intelligence assessment from the CIA, FBI, NSA and DHS ... which ended up including the since-debunked dossier produced by former MI6 spy Christopher Steele.

Note: The security firm CrowdStrike was hired to investigate the alleged Russian hack of DNC servers in 2016 and found no proof that any emails from the system had been exfiltrated. All they found was inconclusive circumstantial evidence, which was presented as proof in media to the public. This deflected from the DNC and Clinton campaign's sabotage of Bernie Sanders and the damaging content of leaked DNC emails. In 2022, the DNC and Clinton campaign were fined by the FEC for obscuring their role in funding the debunked Steele dossier. Clinton also personally approved sharing another unverified claim with the press that alleged a secret Trump-Russia server connection, which helped trigger an FBI investigation later found to be discredited. Why are we not connecting the dots?

New evidence suggests that some of the highest-ranking officials in the Obama-era CIA and FBI perjured themselves regarding their claims that Russian President Vladimir Putin helped Donald Trump secure his victory in 2016. A newly released CIA review challenges their sworn denials to Congress that the Steele dossier – a discredited set of allegations about Trump funded by Hillary Clinton's campaign – was used as the basis for the years-long Russiagate probe that hamstrung President Trump's first term. The eight-page review conducted by career CIA analysts found the dossier did, in fact, worm its way into the text of the highly classified report known as an Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) to buttress the thinly sourced, yet inflammatory allegation that "Putin and the Russian Government aspired to help President-elect Trump's election chances." Former CIA Director John Brennan, for one, insisted in his sworn May 2017 testimony before Congress that the Steele dossier was not "in any way" used as a basis for the so-called ICA completed in late December 2016. Likewise, then-National Intelligence Director James Clapper said in an official January 2017 statement that "we did not rely upon [the dossier] in any way for our conclusions." The CIA review shows that the unverified and now-debunked dossier was used as support for the intelligence analysis, not just as a sidebar as Obama officials have maintained.

Note: The security firm CrowdStrike was hired to investigate the alleged Russian hack of DNC servers in 2016 and found no proof that any emails from the system had been exfiltrated. All they found was inconclusive circumstantial evidence, which was presented as proof in media to the public. This deflected from the DNC and Clinton campaign's sabotage of Bernie Sanders and the damaging content of leaked DNC emails. In 2022, the DNC and Clinton campaign were fined by the FEC for obscuring their role in funding the debunked Steele dossier. Clinton also personally approved sharing another unverified claim with the press that alleged a secret Trump-Russia server connection, which helped trigger an FBI investigation later found to be baseless. Why are we not connecting the dots?

It's been about 10 months since I wrote an essay for The Free Press in which I lamented, much more in sorrow than in anger, that NPR, my journalistic home for 25 years, had lost the trust of a large segment of the country. Public radio news had devolved into a doctrinaire source of what I called "one story after another about instances of supposed racism, transphobia, signs of the climate apocalypse, Israel doing something bad, and the dire threat of Republican policies." In 2020 alone, we dismissed the very possibility of a Covid lab leak in China, and our then–managing editor refused even to cover Hunter Biden's laptop, calling it "not really" a story. Now the crisis is at hand. Republicans control Congress and the White House, and they seem serious about what had previously been ritualistic GOP threats to cut public media. Katherine Maher, the NPR CEO ... has been called before the House Subcommittee on Delivery on Government Efficiency. The immediate past CEO of NPR, the late John Lansing, declared diversity, equity, and inclusion "the North Star" of the organization. In 2021, I found 87 registered Democrats among NPR editorial staff residing in D.C., where the network is headquartered. There were zero Republicans. Is NPR doing anything to address this seeming lack of viewpoint diversity, such as hiring journalists from conservative media, recruiting military veterans, or seeking candidates who attended religious colleges and state universities?

Note: Read more about the major problems Uri Berliner encountered at NPR. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on corporate corruption and media manipulation.

Important Note: Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key major media news stories on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.