Author Archive: Ed Driscoll
August 3, 2025
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:
Awkward: Obama, Hillary Hire Same Hitman To Kill Each Other https://t.co/XXAsQEavHC pic.twitter.com/7GDEAVIblh
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) August 1, 2025
JONATHAN TURLEY: The Reveal: The Public is Finally Learning How Democrats Pulled Off the Greatest Political Trick in History.
Leonard Bernardo, who was the regional director for Eurasia at the Open Society Foundations, explained that “during the first stage of the campaign, due to lack of direct evidence, it was decided to disseminate the necessary information through the FBI-affiliated…from where the information would then be disseminated through leading U.S. publications.”
Bernardo added, “Julie (Clinton Campaign Advisor) says it will be a long-term affair to demonize Putin and Trump. Now it is good for a post-convention bounce. Later, the FBI will put more oil into the fire.”
The media (including the Washington Post and New York Times, which won Pulitzer prizes for reporting on the debunked claims) are apoplectic in dismissing these disclosures. The last thing they will do is report on how they helped sell a political hoax. The problem is that they never said it was a trick. They said it was the truth. That is why they cannot honestly cover the story. To do so would not be coverage, it would be a confession.
It appears that everyone was in on the trick: the U.S. government, the media, even foreign governments. The only chumps were the American people. Now they are about to see how it was done.
Faster, please.
Schiff can thank his own party for stirring distrust, many decades before Trump descended the golden escalator:
Some blame Watergate for this abrupt collapse of trust in institutions, but not very convincingly. For one thing, the decline in trust begins to appear in the polls as early as 1966, almost a decade before the Watergate was known as anything more than a big hole in the ground alongside the Potomac River. For another, the nation had managed unconcernedly to shrug off Watergate-style events before. Somebody bugged Barry Goldwater’s apartment during the 1964 election without it triggering a national trauma. The Johnson administration tapped the phones of Nixon supporters in 1968, and again nothing happened. John F. Kennedy regaled reporters with intimate details from the tax returns of wealthy Republican donors, and none of the reporters saw anything amiss. FDR used the Federal Bureau of Investigation to spy on opponents of intervention into World War II—and his targets howled without result. If Watergate could so transform the nation’s sense of itself, why did those previous abuses, which were equally well known to the press, not do so? Americans did not lose their faith in institutions because of the Watergate scandal; Watergate became a scandal because Americans were losing faith in their institutions.
—David Frum, How We Got Here: The 70s The Decade That Brought You Modern Life — For Better Or Worse.
August 2, 2025
WALTER DURANTY SMILES:
When was the last time a Pulitzer was awarded to a reporter for a story that turned out to be true?
— Margot Cleveland (@ProfMJCleveland) August 2, 2025
FACTS DON’T CARE ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS:
🇬🇧 Konstantin Kisin mentioned that Britain abolished slavery and half the room reacted like he personally owned a plantation.
Just calm down…. you're not being oppressed by facts. https://t.co/Be5l7vxMEs
— 鈴森はるか 『haruka suzumori』 🇯🇵 🇨🇦 🇮🇱 (@harukaawake) August 2, 2025
PEDALING DEI: Cycling Weekly Demands Bike Communities Include Fat Black Women (or They’re RACIST!).
Exit question: “Wait does this mean cycling isn’t racist today or IS racist today? I can’t keep up.“
DISPATCHES FROM THE CINCINNATI BOARD OF TOURISM:
Cincinnati Mayor Aftab Pureval says he hasn't talked to any victims of the attack: "We have significant other public safety challenges." pic.twitter.com/dzw7t1u8Bo
— Fox News (@FoxNews) August 1, 2025
What's so amazing about this story is how much more law enforcement in Cincinnati cares about convincing people that the victims DESERVED to be nearly beaten to death than condemning the savage violence.
We're witnessing insanity. https://t.co/drOJAu7mrQ
— Jason Howerton (@jason_howerton) August 2, 2025
HAMAS KICKS SAND IN THE FACE OF ITS EUROTRASH SUPPORTERS, RELEASES GROTESQUE VIDEO OF HOSTAGE:
Hamas has released a new hostage video, and this one is the most grotesque one yet. Evyatar David, who has been held since October 7th, 2023, can be seen digging his own grave in an underground tunnel. The signs of intentional starvation are unmistakable, with the hostage’s body severely emaciated.
That comes amid a rash of claims of mass starvation of Palestinians in Gaza by government leaders and the international press. So far, though, every piece of photographic evidence offered (that I have seen reported on) has turned out to be false. On Wednesday, The New York Times was forced to offer a correction because it had run a picture of a child as proof of starvation taking place. In reality, he had a preexisting genetic condition that caused his appearance, and his siblings and mother appeared to be well fed.
Numerous such hoaxes have been perpetrated over the last month as the “mass starvation” narrative has become prevalent. But now we know for sure that some people are starving in Gaza. They just aren’t the types of people the press will slap on their front pages.
Exit quote: “There’s this thing Hamas does where, when international sentiment is most on their side, they rush to advertise how animalistic and depraved they are. It’s almost as if the terrorist group enjoys flaunting its evil in the face of those bending the knee to them. It’s a sadistic power play, knowing that the Eurotrash nations will still fall in line.”
Related: As seen in this week’s Power Line Week In Pictures:
REPORT: Joe Biden Has Dirt on Kamala Harris and Is Prepared to Use It.
During Friday’s edition of his “Morning Meeting” newsletter on his 2WAY platform, [Mark] Halperin dropped a not-so-subtle warning: if Harris ever turns on Biden, the former autopen president’s handlers are ready to unleash a barrage of “embarrassing” information to put her in her place.
“I’m going to break a little news here, okay? We talk all the time about what did Kamala Harris know and when did she know it about his cognitive decline… if the Biden people decide that Kamala Harris is coming after Joe Biden, wait till you hear the Palinesque stories about how much they tried to help her be prepared to be vice president and be in a position to run and how much they decided: not happening,” Halperin explained.
“And if the Biden people feel threatened, you will hear stories about Kamala Harris as vice president that will not make her look good. Okay? So there’s a closeness to the couples — it’s not like they’re at war currently — but I’m telling you, if Joe Biden feels threatened, if his people feel threatened by her, this is going to escalate in a big way,” he added.
The New York Post has the headline: Biden allies will unload ‘Palinesque’ stories about Kamala Harris’ failings if ex-veep discusses his cognitive decline: report.
Halperin argued that Harris would have a “hard time defending against the stories if that dam bursts.”
Journalists Alex Thompson and Jake Tapper detail some of the frustrations Biden loyalists had with the VP in their recent book, “Original Sin.”
In the book, Harris was described as a “regular headache” for the White House, according to Biden people.
“She often shied away from politically tough assignments when Biden had accepted such assignments as vice president,” the authors write. “She even turned down seemingly simple asks, such as headlining DC’s Gridiron Club dinner.“
“Many on the Biden team felt that Harris didn’t put in the work and was also just not a very nice person,” according to the book. “Several quietly expressed buyer’s remorse: They should have picked [Michigan Gov. Gretchen] Whitmer” as Biden’s running mate in 2020.
Just by uttering the P-word, the Biden Politburo reduces the odds of Harris getting far in the 2028 election cycle. And that’s on top of her getting trapped by Colbert on the question who is leading the Democrat Party. Add that to New York magazine saying, “Kamala Harris Won’t Run in 2026. She Should Skip 2028, Too,” and it’s clear that the left wants to put Harris in the rearview mirror as quickly and thoroughly as possible.
UPDATE: More attacks against Kamala from her fellow leftists: CNN panel shreds Harris’ Colbert interview for her lack of solutions after ‘six months to figure it out.’
DAVID MARCUS: The Russia hoax is simple. Democrats lied and half the country believed them.
The United States of America has now spent almost a decade embroiled in “Russiagate,” and its citizens have been bombarded from both sides with theories, names, and anonymous quotes. But it all really comes down to one thing: Democrats lied, and half the country believed them.
In the 24 pages of never-before-seen declassified files released Thursday, we saw in cold, calculated black and white exactly how the Clinton campaign crafted the lie that Donald Trump was colluding with Russia to influence the 2016 election.
* * * * * * * *
The Clinton campaign knew all too well that their lackeys in the media would eat up this half-baked nonsense with a spoon, and probably win awards for it, which is exactly what happened.
What the media wasn’t told at the time was that field officers in the CIA objected to the lies and were run over because, according to their then-Director John Brennan “it rings true.”
Read the whole thing.
Related: Former Rolling Stone Editor Couldn’t Hold His Tongue on This Aspect of the Russian Collusion Hoax Anymore. Matt Taibbi writes:
I’ve tiptoed for years around what I believed to be true about this case, worrying some mitigating fact might emerge. Now, there’s no doubt. Hillary Clinton got in a jam, and the FBI, CIA, and the Obama White House got her out of it by setting Trump up. That’s it. It was a cover-up, plain and simple…
At the outset of 2016, Hillary Clinton was in a world of self-inflicted hurt. Having put her entire life as Secretary of State onto a private server, opening up the possibility for an unprecedented penetration of American cybersecurity, she was facing a grave and damaging federal investigation. The story that she “chose not to keep” (read: delete) over 30,000 emails had been broken the previous year, and the details were appalling, with private computer specialist Paul Combetta belatedly wiping them out in what he called an “oh, shit” moment, three weeks after the issuance of a Congressional subpoena.
Matt Margolis adds, “Rather than face the fallout, Clinton’s team orchestrated a diversion—and the national security establishment was all too happy to play along. What started as a desperate political ploy became a full-blown federal inquisition, complete with media cheerleaders and intelligence assets. And the result was years of turmoil, millions wasted, and a presidency undermined by a hoax. Now it’s time to follow the evidence and start holding people accountable for the seditious conspiracy that’s torn this country apart.”
TWENTY MINUTES INTO THE FUTURE? Vultures circle SNL as source reveals death knell for historic show that’s burning through MILLIONS.
I still think NBC should go full circle and replace SNL with what it replaced in 1975 — reruns of the Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show. Dirt cheap to air, and infinitely more fun than anything the network could put together now.
August 1, 2025
GREAT MOMENTS IN HARD-HITTING FLEET STREET JOURNALISM:
THE NEW YORK TIMES IS REALLY LEANING AWFULLY HARD INTO THAT WHOLE “PARTY OF DEATH” MEME: Donor Organs Are Too Rare. We Need a New Definition of Death.
In New York State, with a population of 20 million, there are on average fewer than 500 cases suitable for organ procurement and transplantation each year.
Far more often, people die because their heart has permanently stopped beating, which is known as circulatory death. However, precisely because the blood has stopped circulating, organs from people who die this way are often damaged and unsuited for transplantation.
The need for donor organs is urgent. An estimated 15 people die in this country every day waiting for a transplant. We need to figure out how to obtain more healthy organs from donors while maintaining strict ethical standards.
New technologies can help. But the best solution, we believe, is legal: We need to broaden the definition of death.
Jeff Blehar tweets in response, “When I got my first driver’s license, a friend warned me not to elect to be an organ donor. “Dude, they’re going to try to declare you dead before you are to harvest your organs.” I thought that was the stupidest, most paranoid conspiracy theory I’d ever heard. Now this.”
Mark Hemingway asks, “Do the authors of this NYT op-ed grasp that they have massively set back organ donation with this? Who’s going to agree to be an organ donor if docs are musing out loud about taking your organs when you’re still alive?”
UPDATE: “Doctors Finally Have the Guts to Demand Your Guts,” Jim Treacher writes.
The world of advertising went crazy–or woke, anyway–a few years ago. Obese, unattractive models; “body positivity”; trans spokesmen; rampant political correctness. A reaction has been under way for a while, as companies like Budweiser and Target have been punished by customers for portraying a woke image. The current American Eagle jeans campaign is widely (and correctly) seen as a milestone in the return to normal advertising standards.
Another blow against woke advertising was struck yesterday, when Jaguar Land Rover announced the retirement of its CEO after a stint of only three years:
In his three years as chief executive, Adrian Mardell, 64, has overseen both its strongest profit levels in a decade and a controversial rebrand when the company ditched its “growler” logo and promoted its shift to electric vehicles.
You may recall Jaguar’s ill-fated ad campaign, which featured weird, androgynous models and no cars:
I know I’m beating a dead horse car brand here, but compare the above to this 2015 ad, which leaned heavily on the reputation of the Jaaaaaag man:
Still though, not everybody has gotten the message that woke is dead, at least as a selling tool: LIV Golf hires Bud Light’s woke ex-marketing exec Alissa Heinerscheid after transgender marketing campaign cratered brand.
BIGLY CHANGE: Corporation For Public Broadcasting to Shutter After Trump Cuts.
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting said that it will begin to wind down operations after President Donald Trump signed a package of spending cuts that ended its federal funding.
“Despite the extraordinary efforts of millions of Americans who called, wrote, and petitioned Congress to preserve federal funding for CPB, we now face the difficult reality of closing our operations,” CPB President and CEO Patricia Harrison said in a statement Friday.
“CPB remains committed to fulfilling its fiduciary responsibilities and supporting our partners through this transition with transparency and care.”
CPB said that it informed its employees that the majority of staff positions will end with the close of the fiscal year on Sept. 30, 2025.
Related: Sesame Street Is Coming to Netflix With New & Old Episodes Streaming In 2025.
For more than a half a century, Sesame Street has been a beloved cornerstone of children’s media, enchanting young minds and nurturing a love of learning. Now Elmo, Cookie Monster, Abby Cadabby, and all their friends are coming to Netflix later this year, with Sesame Street’s all-new, reimagined 56th season — plus 90 hours of previous episodes — available to audiences worldwide.
The new season will feature fresh format changes and the return of fan-favorite segments like Elmo’s World and Cookie Monster’s Foodie Truck. Expect new ways to play along as Cookie Monster opens his very own Cookie Cart on Sesame Street, and explore Abby’s Fairy Garden, a home to surprising and delightful magical creatures.
No word yet on whether or not Elmo will be holding any Nuremberg rallies at his new home.
Vice President JD Vance gleefully weighed in on the controversy over Sydney Sweeney’s ad for American Eagle jeans — encouraging liberals to keep the outrage coming.
“My political advice to the Democrats is continue to tell everybody who thinks Sydney Sweeney is attractive is a Nazi,” Vance said jokingly on Friday’s episode of the conservative “Ruthless” podcast. “That appears to be their actual strategy.”
Vance, mining the political vein of the latest culture-war clash, continued, “I mean, it actually reveals something pretty interesting about the Dems, though, which is that you have, like, a normal all-American beautiful girl doing like a normal jeans ad, right? They’re trying to sell, you know, sell jeans to kids in America and they have managed to so unhinge themselves over this thing. And it’s like, you guys, did you learn nothing from the November 2024 election?”
This is from show business bible Variety, which has consistently referred to Flash star Ezra Miller as “them,” even editing the quotes of someone who claims she was assaulted by him, and tut-tutting, “At the time of the interview, it was unclear whether the woman was aware Miller uses they/them pronouns.” So I’d love to know how this story is being received both in the newsroom, and by Sweeney’s potential employers in Hollywood.
RUY TEIXEIRA: Democrats Should Give Up on #Resistance 2.0.
How thrilling—[Cory Booker] wants to fight! Cue the applause from Democratic activists, who can never get enough of this stuff. But to what avail? Famously, it failed to stop Trump from winning the 2024 election. And so far nonstop Democratic fulminations in Trump’s second term have been notably unsuccessful in resuscitating the party’s toxic brand. The recent Wall Street Journal poll found Democratic party favorability 30 points underwater (favorable minus unfavorable), the worst result in 35 years. Ratings for both Trump and the GOP were much higher.
And voters, despite their negative views of Trump’s performance on key issues, still prefer Republicans to Democrats on these issues:
- Illegal immigration (R+24)
- Immigration (R+17)
- The economy (R+12)
- Inflation and rising prices (R+10)
- Foreign policy (R+8)
- Tariffs (R+7)
- The Russia-Ukraine war (R+5).
This shouldn’t be much of a mystery. Voters are taking Joe Biden’s famous advice and applying it to the Democratic Party: “Don’t compare me to the Almighty; compare me to the alternative.” Voters are doing just that, comparing Democrats to the alternative and Democrats are coming out on the short end of the comparison. Voters evidently believe, whatever the problems with the Trump/GOP approach on these issues, Democrats are unlikely to do much better and conceivably quite a bit worse.
In short, voters get that Democrats hate Trump; they’ve already priced that in. Endlessly reminding voters of that fact and how Trump must be #Resisted! does nothing to change Democrats’ fundamental problem: voters neither like nor trust them and therefore do not find them an obvious choice over their opponents.
If that’s true, why do so many Democratic politicians persist in reading—loudly—from the #Resistance script?
Because they’re enthrall to their rabid social media-obsessed base, whom they spent a decade relentlessly programming to believe that Trump is SuperMechaOrangeHitler, and who went all in on transing kids and illegal immigration. How do you simultaneously keep their support and dial back the rhetoric to say, 1995-era language? The best you can do is hope that a candidate with rock star appeal such Obama in 2007 emerges, and hope that the economy fails sufficiently or can be portrayed to have failed sufficiently to allow him or her an opening. (See also: Carter, Jimmy in 1976, and Clinton, Bill in 1992.)
UPDATE: How badly are the Democrats polling on the issues? So badly that even house organ CNN has noticed:
CNN: It keeps getting worse for Democrats.pic.twitter.com/alZ4y4YBwt
— Defiant L’s (@DefiantLs) August 1, 2025
ED MORRISSEY: Harris to Colbert: Trump Broke Me.
If anyone has reason for gratitude toward “the system,” it’s Harris. She is and has always been an intellectual lightweight who counted on “the system” to keep her in office. It was the Democrat establishment that ensured she kept winning elections in California despite her demonstrable lack of talent for campaigning or even for normal conversation. It was “the system,” among Democrats, that carried her to the US Senate, where she could have spent several successful decades safely ensconced in the system’s Club of Clubs, cosseted forever by California Democrats as the incumbent.
Instead, Harris got bored with the lifetime sinecure less than halfway through her first term, choosing to run for president in 2019. She then jumped at the chance to play second banana to the man she accused of being racist in the primary when her bid flopped, in a process where “the system” ensured nearly no other competition except Karen Bass and maybe Val Demings. (Biden pledged to pick a black woman as his running mate, you will recall.) Harris proved herself so inept at the VP role that the White House sidelined her within the first five months of the Biden Regency.
Read the whole thing. As Ed writes, “That’s not to say this clip doesn’t feature the broken, however. Both Harris and Colbert are broken. Donald Trump broke them both. And they resent the hell out of it.”
And Colbert, at least according to New York Post, got the better of the exchange with the would-be president: Stephen Colbert needles Kamala Harris after she fails to answer simple question.
Former Vice President Kamala Harris was unable to say who the current leader of the Democratic Party was in an interview with Stephen Colbert — leaving even the lefty talk show host exasperated.
“The Late Show” host asked Harris — who announced this week she would not be running for governor of California next year — to identify who she believes is in the driver’s seat for her party.
But Harris balked at the simple question and refused to name a single Democrat.
“There are lots of leaders,” she said.
Colbert, who wasn’t satisfied with the answer, pressed her, asserting there’s “generally a leader” of the party and asking again if any names came to mind.
Harris wouldn’t budge.
“I think there are a lot — I’m not going to go through names because then I’m going to leave somebody out and then I’m going to hear about it,” she said.
She doesn’t have the chutzpah to identify herself as leading the party, and she’s so toxic as a brand, she can’t name someone else, lest he or she be tainted by being associated with her: Not Me! Book-Peddling Kamala Harris Tells Stephen Colbert Who’s Leading the Democrat Party (Watch).
COLBERT: “Who is leading the Democratic Party?”
KAMALA: “There are a lot of leaders.”Translation: There is no clear leader. And if she is to nominate a leader by endorsing them with her opinion, she will be eaten alive by her party. She is captured.
pic.twitter.com/PgSw0hF6t2— Autism Capital 🧩 (@AutismCapital) August 1, 2025
In February of last year, after her heavily edited interview with 60 Minutes, I wrote, “Kamala flubbed the ‘why do you want to be president’ layup question even worse than Ted Kennedy in 1980.” A year and a half later, again on friendly turf with a CBS interviewer, she still can’t make the sale.
July 31, 2025
21st CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: I co-parent with ChatGPT — I love turning off my brain and letting AI help raise my child.
She’s tech-ing a break from burnout.
Even with an in-person partner, Lilian Schmidt was sick of shouldering the mental load of motherhood.
So, she’s trained ChatGPT to become a second mommy — tasking it to draft shopping lists, create meal plans, plan birthdays and vacations, and revolutionize bedtime.
“I’ve built my own bot to be our co-parent,” Schmidt, 33, a corporate brand strategist, based in Zurich, Switzerland, told SWNS.
“I use it to make me a better mom,” bragged the blond, who heavily leans on artificial intelligence for help raising and wrangling her three-year-old daughter. “I’d never go back.”
And why would she? It’s a parenting throuple that really clicks.
Hey, it’s all fun and games until Grok goes MechaHitler and orders the kid off to the Bund deutscher Arbeiterjugend.
SHE WAS MURDERED IN MIDTOWN MANHATTAN. THE INTERNET CELEBRATED IT:
My initial reaction was relief.” That’s what Penny, a 30-year-old sociologist from Tampa, Florida, told me about seeing the news of Blackstone real estate executive Wesley LePatner’s killing in the lobby of a Manhattan office building.
“Her death, as a valuable instrument to such evil corporations, is nothing to mourn. Thousands of Americans die every day from situations that her company exacerbates, such as the affordable housing crisis.”
I reached out to Penny via direct message on Reddit, after I found one of her comments about the news of LePatner’s murder. Her comment made a joke about the amount of money the victim spends on her children’s private school. When I wrote to Penny directly, asking how she made sense of the news, she got back to me right away.
In no time at all after shooter Shane Tamura went on a rampage Monday, killing four innocent people before turning the gun on himself, the shock and horror over what happened competed with a frenzy of social media posts, including Penny’s, that celebrated LePatner’s death on mainstream sites from YouTube to Reddit to Instagram.
I saw dozens of them that night, and spent hours messaging back and forth with the people who wrote things like “I’m shocked it’s not more common,” and “Rest in Piss.”
As Ed Morrissey wrote in April after Taylor Lorenz went full fangirl on Luigi Mangione, “The problem with Che Fever is that it sets the incentives to deliver on that prophecy. That’s why we’re seeing an explosion in violence, such as the arson at Josh Shapiro’s governor’s mansion, assassination attempts on Donald Trump, attacks on Tesla owners and dealers, and the thuggery of Hamasniks on college campuses. The Taylor Lorenzes of the media use them to promote La Causa and hail the violent nutcases as brave soldiers for change. And that’s because the moral compasses of the Taylor Lorenzes of the media skew toward cowardly backshooters and Molotov-cocktail throwers as ‘morally good,’ whether they admit to it or not.”
Once again, America’s Newspaper of Record is doing straight-up reportage:
BENJAMIN WEINGARTEN: Supreme Court Killed Universal Injunctions in Name Only.
On June 27, the Supreme Court handed President Donald Trump what he hailed as a “GIANT WIN,” finding that lower courts had “likely” overstepped in ordering universal injunctions blocking many of the president’s policies.
While the Court’s 6-3 opinion in Trump v. CASA appeared to disarm Trump’s opponents of perhaps their most potent legal weapon, his adversaries had other ideas.
In the weeks since, Trump’s challengers have seized on the ruling’s openings – especially the use of class-action suits in which a handful of plaintiffs may allege harm and seek relief on behalf of all similarly situated parties – to continue leveraging lower court judges to block the president’s orders.
Norm Eisen, one of the architects of a so-called “rule of law and shock and awe” strategy to blanket the administration with dozens of lawsuits, quickly helped bring a case before New Hampshire’s district court. The suit aimed to enjoin the president’s ban on birthright citizenship not only with respect to five named plaintiffs, but for “a nationwide class of all other persons similarly situated.”
On July 3, the district court ruled in the plaintiffs’ favor in that case, over the Trump administration’s objections. Other plaintiffs prevailed in a separate case in the D.C. District Court challenging the president’s crackdown on asylum claims at the southern border.
Scholars on both sides of the universal injunctions issue agree that CASA’s impact may be limited.
Stanford Law Professor Mila Sohoni, a supporter of universal injunctions, wrote in CASA’s aftermath that “the court may have in the end accomplished little beyond handing the executive branch a litigation victory.”
Josh Blackman, a constitutional law professor at South Texas College of Law Houston, who has opposed universal injunctions in congressional testimony, told RealClearInvestigations, “I’m not sure how much CASA will actually check the ability of lower courts to halt presidential policies.”
Read the whole thing.
DISPATCHES FROM THE HOUSE OF STEPHANOPOULOS: Ex-ABC News reporter admits employer biased against Trump due to lack of ‘viewpoint diversity.’
“Let’s talk about bias. I worked at ABC News for almost 28 years, and I’m proud to say that,” [Terry] Moran wrote on his Substack on Tuesday. “But: Were we biased? Yes. Almost inadvertently, I’d say. ABC News has the same problem so many leading cultural institutions do in America: A lack of viewpoint diversity.”
Moran explained that ABC News was run by “White men” when he joined the network, but the Disney-owned news organization made efforts to increase diversity to change the company “for the better.”
“But there was one way ABC did not change and did not diversify. It is no secret. There are hardly any people who supported Donald Trump at ABC News,” Moran wrote.
“And this is bound to impact coverage, not so much out of malevolent bias… but more out of what is a kind of deafness,” Moran continued. “The old news divisions don’t hear many of the voices of the country, because those voices aren’t in the newsroom. Yes, news teams go out with a microphone and a camera and accost people at Trump rallies; but to me that often comes off as weirdly anthropological and inaccurate, kind of like trying to understand nature by visiting a zoo.”
So ABC has more diversity in terms of skin color, but no ideological diversity. And the same can be said for all three broadcast networks. Cal Thomas asked Leslie Stahl in 2003, “Can you name a conservative journalist at CBS News?” She hemmed and hawed but of course couldn’t answer the question. Last year, NBC and MSNBC anchors revolted en masse when management tried to bring in former RNC chairwoman Ronna McDaniel as an analyst. Only Republicans who never vote for Republicans are allowed at the Peacock Network:
And of course, everything Moran describes above predates Trump’s arrival onto the American political scene for half a century.