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MEDIA

‘You Don’t Know What You’re Talking About’: Rubio Wipes the Floor With Brennan Over Iranian Nukes Sarah Anderson

https://pjmedia.com/sarah-anderson/2025/06/22/must-watch-rubio-wipes-the-floor-with-brennan-again-this-time-over-iranian-nukes-n4941059

There are some things I’d never do in life. I’d never challenge Usain Bolt to a race. I’d never have a conversation with Clarence Thomas and pretend to know more about the law than he does. I’d never volunteer to tackle Derrick Henry, and I’d never try to tell Peyton Manning how to throw a football. And I’d certainly never try to outsmart Secretary of State Marco Rubio on something like foreign intelligence.  

But Margaret Brennan doesn’t seem to know how to stay in her lane. I guess she enjoys embarrassing herself on national television? That’s the only thing I can come up with. 

Rubio made the media rounds on Sunday morning, and among his appearances was a spot on “Face the Nation.” As you can imagine, Donald Trump’s decision to beautifully bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities was the topic of discussion. Brennan seemed to fancy herself some sort of foreign intelligence expert, and as you can also imagine, Rubio made her look like an absolute moron.  

The interview started with Brennan asking about Iran’s capabilities to retaliate against the United States.  

Rubio responded by saying that Iran should choose peace, but that the United States is prepared for anything the regime could throw our way. He also doubled down on the fact that this was not an attack on the country but simply a move to eliminate their nuclear capabilities. He concluded: 

So this mission was a very precise mission. It had three objectives, three nuclear sites. It was not attack on Iran. It was not an attack on the Iranian people. This wasn’t a regime change move. This was designed to degrade and/or destroy three nuclear sites related to their nuclear weaponization ambitions, and that was delivered on yesterday. What happens next will now depend on what Iran chooses to do next. If they choose the path of diplomacy, we’re ready. We can do a deal that’s good for them, the Iranian people and good for the world. If they choose another route, then there will be consequences for that.

Suddenly, Journalists Don’t Want To ‘Follow The Money’

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/06/13/suddenly-journalists-dont-want-to-follow-the-money/

“Just … follow the money.” – Deep Throat, All the President’s Men

That use to be the watchword for investigative journalists. If you want to uncover corruption, find out where the money is coming from and where it is going. At least it use to be.

Today? Not so much. At least not when doing so could implicate Democrats or upset the left’s agenda.

Case in point is the Los Angeles riots. There’s plenty of reason to believe that the riots are being organized and financed by unsavory characters whose mission is to foment division and violence in the United States.

Some of the money is likely coming out of taxpayer pockets.

Marxist Party for Socialism and Liberation, which has ties to the Chinese Communist Party, is said to be behind some of the protests, according to the New York Post. The Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles staged a rally last Thursday to protest ICE arrests (but claims it has had nothing to do with the riots). That group got more than $46 million in federal grants in 2022 and 2023, as well as millions from California taxpayers.

“Another group involved in organizing the LA riots is the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), a radical leftist American union with extensive overseas ties,” says Heritage senior fellow Mike Gonzalez. “Then there are the ‘charities’ helping the rioters, such as Mutual Aid Los Angeles Network, Operation Healthy Hearts, LA Poverty Department, and Mutual Aid/Social Therapy.”

One scene captured by Fox News showed rioters unloading a truckload of Bionic Shield face masks that go for about $60 each. The FBI later arrested the guy driving the pickup truck, who faces charges of conspiracy to commit civil disorder.

But who paid for those masks? Who is buying “commercial grade fireworks … with shrapnel being put in,” that Los Angeles Police Chief Jim McDonnell says are fired at officers?

The FBI is investigating the financial ties behind the riots. The mainstream press could care less.

How the Media Manufactured a ‘Genocide’ A data-driven investigation into the way coverage of Israel’s war in Gaza surpasses actual genocides in Darfur, Rwanda, and beyond by Zach Goldberg

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/media-manufactured-genocide-gaza

Concept creep describes the phenomenon in which morally potent terms expand beyond their original definitions into ever broader applications. As these terms become more diluted, they also become politically weaponized, shifting public perceptions, priorities, and policy.

In August 2020, I illustrated in these pages how terms like racism, white supremacy, and privilege saw a dramatic surge in media usage, significantly reshaping public and political perceptions and discourse. The same dynamic, I feared, was beginning to reshape another crucial term: genocide.

Genocide is going the way of racism and white supremacy, I observed on Oct. 19, 2023. Israel hadn’t yet invaded Gaza, but the mainstream media template for response to Hamas’ murderous Oct. 7 attacks was already set. Sure enough, by 2024, mentions of genocide in The New York Times (1.43% of all articles) had eclipsed the paper’s earlier peak for white supremacy (1.41% in 2020) and, though not matching the peak for racism/racist(s) (7.2% in 2020), still reflected a similar pattern of conceptual escalation.

Upon closer examination, however, much like the widespread surge in race-related terminology during the “Great Awokening,” The New York Times was far from alone, as references to genocide reached unprecedented highs across numerous major news outlets, including The Guardian and the Associated Press.

To confirm that these recent spikes were driven primarily by the Israel-Gaza conflict—and to place them in historical context—I analyzed how frequently each of the six outlets paired genocide with countries or groups historically associated with genocide allegations or acts. Using Nexis Uni, I tracked annual coverage associating genocide with well-documented historical cases, including Rwanda (1994), Darfur (2003-2008), Bosnia (1995), Myanmar (2017-present), and the Yazidis (2014-2017).

The results were striking and unambiguous: Coverage linking Israel with genocide has surged far beyond every other agreed-upon historical case of genocide across all examined outlets. In The New York Times, for example, articles pairing Israel and genocide reached levels more than nine times higher than the peak for Rwanda and nearly six times greater than for Darfur. Similarly, in The Guardian, more than 1 percent of all articles now reference both Israel and genocide—a frequency unmatched by any other pairing in recent decades.

As Rioters Burn Cars and Clash With Cops, CNN Cites ‘Lawful Protests’ and Broadcasts Broadway Play CNN analyst Juliette Kayyem, who called to slash tires of truckers protesting COVID-19 restrictions, now downplays LA unrest

https://freebeacon.com/media/as-rioters-burn-cars-and-clash-with-cops-cnn-cites-lawful-protests-and-broadcasts-broadway-play/

As anti-ICE rioters torched cars and clashed with police in Los Angeles on Saturday, CNN described the chaos as “lawful protests” with “some unrest.” The comments came after the network cut away from its broadcast coverage of the violent protests to air George Clooney’s journalism-themed Broadway musical.

“So there’s unrest. Let’s start with, there’s protests, lawful protests, which is allowed in this country,” said CNN senior national security analyst Juliette Kayyem, who is also a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School. “There is some unrest, generally dealt with by local law enforcement and if there needs to be state support through state police, and sometimes even national guard under a governor’s authority.”

Kayyem’s comments came after CNN turned its focus away from Los Angeles and toward Manhattan’s theater district, where it aired a “special” live broadcast of Good Night, and Good Luck, Clooney’s Broadway adaptation of the 2005 film chronicling former CBS broadcaster Edward R. Murrow.

CNN ran a segment on Los Angeles around 6 p.m. eastern time before cutting to interviews with Clooney and the play’s director, a Washington Free Beacon review found. A “pre-show” special then aired from 6:30 to 7 p.m. before the play aired uninterrupted from 7 to 9 p.m. CNN also aired a post-show panel hosted by Anderson Cooper, cutting away from it at one point to detail the clashes in California and break the network’s roughly three-hour gap in coverage. Kayyem then joined for much of the 10 p.m. hour.

The violence in Los Angeles unfolded as protesters attempted to impede ICE raids taking place in the city. They burned an American flag, vandalized cars, setting one on fire, and pelted rocks at law enforcement officials, injuring one. Dozens were arrested throughout the day for “imped[ing] agents in their ability to conduct law enforcement operations.”

Journalists for Genocide The media constitutes the eighth front in the war to exterminate IsraelMelanie Phillips

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/

Next month, the London freelance branch of Britain’s National Union of Journalists is to hold a meeting to discuss ”the ethics and realities of reporting genocide when the only journalists on the scene are being slaughtered.”

The meeting is being sponsored by the hard-left Labour MP and former Corbyn apparatchik John McDonnell, who has accused Israel of murder and called for its economic and military isolation.

So a fair, balanced and objective discussion, then.

Accusing Israel of “genocide,” when it’s fighting a just war against genocidal attack, when it’s allowed into Gaza tens of thousands of tons of food and other aid, when it’s repeatedly moved Gaza’s civilians out of harm’s way and has killed a far lower proportion of civilians to combatants than any other military in war, denotes either illiteracy, imbecilism or malice.

As for “the only journalists on the scene being slaughtered,” a number of those individuals have been exposed as terrorists masquerading as journalists.

Yesterday, the Israel Defence Forces said it had killed two Islamic jihadi terrorists who had posed as journalists and who had operated from a command centre in the courtyard of the Al Ahli Hospital in Gaza. So not only were these individuals not journalists but they were terrorists engaged in the war crime of using a hospital as cover for terrorism.

Will the NUJ meeting discuss the “ethics and realities” of that?

Taking Sides: Wikipedia Advances Anti-Israel Narratives By Aaron Bandler

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2025/06/06/taking_sides_wikipedia_advances_anti-israel_narratives_1115040.html

Wikipedia, the world’s go-to site for information that professes to take a neutral point of view, is coming under fire for alleged anti-Israel bias in the sources it favors and content it delivers to millions of readers. 

The criticism is coming from several quarters, including a bipartisan group of 23 members of Congress who, in an April letter, expressed “deep concern regarding antisemitism” found in the online encyclopedia. The entries routinely highlight the work of anti-Zionist scholars and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), according to a review by RealClearInvestigations, while dismissing the views of Israel’s defenders. Amnesty International, which casts Israel as genocidal, is considered a reliable source for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, while the Anti-Defamation League, which rejects that view, is not. 

A vigil for victims of antisemitic violence, Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Pilgrim, gunned down last month in Washington, D.C.
AP

The controversy has emerged during a sharp rise in antisemitism around the world, including the recent murders of two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington, D.C., and the firebombing in Boulder of protesters demanding the release of hostages taken by Hamas. Critics argue that the online encyclopedia is fueling this hatred by publishing biased entries that are presented as objective statements of fact. 

Wikipedia is produced by volunteer editors who are instructed to follow a set of rules as they summarize the work of authoritative sources, which can include those that appear to be biased. Its consensus model encourages editors to work out their differences collegially and reach a compromise that balances the different viewpoints of sources to ensure neutrality. But critics say that so many academics and NGOs hold left-leaning views that cast Israel as the oppressor and Palestinians as the oppressed that it is hard for editors to avoid publishing biased statements as neutral ones. 

Consider Wiki’s entry for “Gaza genocide” – a title that, critics argue, takes sides. It begins with this statement: “According to a United Nations Special Committee, Amnesty International, and other experts and human rights organizations, Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people during its ongoing invasion and bombing of the Gaza Strip as part of the Gaza war.” The entry then lists several paragraphs of evidence, including large-scale deaths of Palestinians, the forced displacement of most of the population, and starvation. 

Where’s the other side of the story to establish neutrality? Not until the seventh paragraph do readers learn that Hamas’ attack in Israel, killing 1,139 people, sparked the invasion of Gaza. But rather than calling Hamas a terrorist group – a classification used by the U.S., EU, U.K., Canada, and other democratic nations – whose avowed goal is the destruction of Israel, the entry describes the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas as a response to Israel’s historic treatment of Palestinians. 

Leading With Bias 

Statement on Media Misinformation on Gaza Ambassador Mike Huckabee

https://il.usembassy.gov/statement-on-media-misinformation-on-gaza/

Reckless and irresponsible reporting by major U.S. news outlets are contributing to the antisemitic climate that has resulted in the murder of two young people at an Israeli Embassy event in Washington last month and the attempted murder and terror attack on a group of pro-Israel demonstrators in Colorado on Sunday.

Without verification of any source other than Hamas and its collaborators, the New York Times, CNN, and Associated Press reported that a number of people seeking to receive humanitarian food boxes from the Gaza Humanitarian Fund were shot or killed by the Israeli Defense Forces.  These reports were FALSE.  Drone video and first-hand accounts clearly showed that there were no injuries, no fatalities, no shooting, no chaos.  It is Hamas that continues to terrorize and intimidate those who seek food aid.  The only source for these misleading, exaggerated, and utterly fabricated stories came from Hamas sources, which are designed to fan the flames of antisemitic hate that is arguably contributing to violence against Jews in the United States.  Media sources who willingly parrot these libelous allegations should recant their fake news stories, apologize, and pledge to practice actual reporting of fact instead of engaging in dangerous propaganda that assists the terror group Hamas as they continue to hold innocent hostages for over 600 days after butchering over 1,200 people on October 7th.

The efforts of GHF have resulted in over 5 million meals to civilians without incident.  For the New York Times, AP, and CNN to be part of a Hamas-fed false narrative is reprehensible.  It represents more than mere sloppy journalism.  It’s feeding and inciting violence against innocent people in the United States.

We are demanding an immediate retraction of the lies and are appealing to all media sources to act with objective professionalism to cover actual events instead of being a partner of terrorism by blindly following Hamas news releases.

Where Are the Dot Connectors? Noah Rothman

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/where-are-the-dot-connectors/

You never have to wait long before an act of right-wing political terrorism or even vandalism stirs a cottage industry devoted to “connecting the dots.” Whether the connections are valid or spurious, sleuths emerge from the woodwork to eagerly draw crisscrossing threads across the paranoiac’s corkboard, linking the violence to the figures they imagine might benefit from violence. White supremacy and white nationalism, limited-government conservatism, support for the right to life, or even just taking a special interest in your child’s education — these are ideals with the capacity to radicalize. Only the keenest of observers with the requisite educational background and insight can see it.

Given this reliable tic, the degree to which the professional dot-connectors have abdicated their role in the last several weeks is quite conspicuous.

The FBI is treating the deployment of Molotov cocktails against a variety of elderly and middle-aged supporters of Israel, one of them reportedly a Holocaust refugee, as a “targeted terror attack.” As they should. The attacker came armed not just with firebombs but with the shibboleths that so often accompany pro-Palestinian violence.

It’s the third act of terroristic violence in service to this cause in as many months. The arson attack on Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro’s home by an anti-Israel activist in April and the gunning down of two young people outside an Israeli embassy event in Washington, D.C., in May establish the trend. But the trendsetters are rarely treated to the tortured effort to establish nefarious associations that so often follows acts of right-wing violence.

It’s not like that exercise would be difficult. It wouldn’t take much enterprise to establish a through-line between the murderous violence targeting Jews and their supporters to the antisocial behavior that has typified this movement for decades — a condition that the 10/7 massacre only kicked into overdrive. Intrepid researchers might see the unheeded warning signs in the glorification of terrorism apparent among the college students who brandish Hamas and Hezbollah flags and headbands. They might identify ominous portents in the demonstrators’ efforts to block highways, bridges, and airport tarmacs — activities designed to endanger their neighbors.

The violent pro-Palestinian attack on the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters from which lawmakers were forced to flee in terror might have been treated as a sign of things to come. The menacing rhetoric accompanying this sort of activism should also have been a wake-up call. “There is only one solution: Intifada. Revolution.” “Death to America.” “Globalize the intifada.” “By any means necessary.” The network of activists who chant these and other slogans could not be more explicit about the actions they prescribe. “The slave who murders the slave master, who torches the master’s house and perhaps kills the ‘civilian’ slavers’ family and servants is wholly justified in their act,” the Australian far-left website Solidarity observes. “We do not condemn the Indigenous resistance against the violence of colonization.” That sort of candor is hardly uncommon on the fringes of society from which violent activists are drawn.

The media’s dangerous lies about Israel The world was told the IDF massacred starving Palestinians. Now the BBC admits it was ‘incorrect’. Brendan O’Neill

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/06/03/the-medias-dangerous-lies-about-israel/

1 June 2025. Make a note of that date. For there is a good chance it will be recorded as a day of infamy. As a day when the Jews were once again libelled as the slayers of innocents. As a day when the intellectual classes mimicked their benighted forebears of the medieval era and falsely accused the Jewish nation of spilling blood for sport. For many it was just an ordinary Sunday – but for those who will come to write the history of our times, it will stand out as a day of frenzied hearsay in which Jews were once again branded demons and bloodlusters.

Reports of a massacre in Gaza came early that day. It took place in Rafah, we were told, at one of the distribution centres overseen by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, the US-Israel group that’s providing aid to Gaza’s needy. With depthless cruelty, IDF troops opened fire on the half-starved Palestinians queuing for meals. Thirty-one souls were slaughtered in the ‘aid-centre attack’, as the BBC swiftly called it. A venomous fury spread through the internet. No one can deny it now, people cried: Israel is ‘replicating’ Nazi tactics. Just as the Nazis told Jews they were being put on trains for a better life, so the New Nazis promise Palestinians food as ‘a pretext for slaughter’.

There was one problem with these breathless accounts of a wicked massacre: it seems no such thing took place. Last night, the BBC backtracked. It said it has now studied the ‘graphic video’ of the ‘aid-centre massacre’ and has ruled that it is ‘incorrect’. We were told the ‘massacre’ took place early in the morning, yet the ‘direction of the shadows’ in the clip point to an event that took place ‘after 7pm local time’. More devastatingly, the Beeb geolocated the clip and found that it was filmed in a part of Khan Younis that is 4.5km from the nearest aid-distribution centre. A journalist in Gaza confirmed it: the events in the viral clip are ‘unrelated to any aid-distribution site’.

If what the BBC is now saying is correct, then we have just witnessed something truly horrifying. We have watched as an untruth spread with uncommon speed to every corner of the Earth. We have seen a serious calumny be taken as good coin by newsmakers and influencers. Worse, we’ve witnessed an eruption of bigotry. Reports of an ‘aid-centre massacre’ unleashed untold Jew hatred. Across social media, the cry went up: they’re demons, they’re Nazis, they claim to be the ‘Chosen People’ and yet they use food to tempt innocents into the path of murder. All were in agreement: the Jewish nation is the most evil nation.

CNN’s Sick Reaction to the Boulder Terror Attack Matt Margolis

https://pjmedia.com/matt-margolis/2025/06/01/cnns-sick-reaction-to-the-boulder-terror-attack-n4940354

You’d think an elderly woman getting burned alive at a pro-Israel event by a man hurling Molotov cocktails while screaming “This will end when Palestine is free” would be universally condemned as terrorism. But this is 2025, with the media’s moral compass still spinning wildly and antisemitism extremely fashionable on the political left. So, instead of acknowledging the obvious, CNN went into full denial mode the moment the FBI under Director Kash Patel called the Boulder firebombing exactly what it was: a targeted terror attack.

Despite the local police chief declining to confirm whether the Boulder attack was targeted, the FBI has classified it as such. The victims were part of the “Run for Their Lives” global walk—an event calling for Hamas to release hostages—and children were among those present. While the exact number of injuries isn’t clear yet, multiple people were hospitalized following the attack.

The suspect, Mohamad Soliman, didn’t quietly sneak in through the back door. He crashed the pro-Israel gathering in Boulder, Colorado, shouting anti-Israel slogans. He then launched into a violent assault—chucking incendiary devices at innocent people.

This isn’t hard to decipher.