The Washington Post laid off 300 employees this week, transforming billionaire owner Jeff Bezos into a James Bond villain. Chuck Todd tweeted he was “leaning into the evil rich guy stereotype.” Owners must lose hundreds of millions of dollars for that “vital pillar of democracy” -- leftist media bias.
The most annoying media reaction was that this was a dreadful surrender to Trump. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof (last seen running for office as a Democrat in his native Oregon), tweeted "Jeff Bezos, who could keep the Wash Post a pillar of American democracy with the change dug out from his limousine seats, sets an example of surrender to authoritarianism for every other business person and institution in America."
MRC Senior Research Analyst Bill D'Agostino (don't pronounce it "Dag-stinio") and MRC Free Speech America Director Michael Morris join the show to discuss the plight of the American newspaper and the new way many young Americans are getting their news -- on their cell phones. Young people today don't have any connection to reading a newspaper. Looking like a teenaged weirdo would be as easy as carrying a newspaper.
Anyone carrying an Apple iPhone is going to find only one side of the news. Our Free Speech America team found that Apple News stubbornly refrained from using any right-leaning outlets in the top 20 articles of its morning editions in January. Of the 620 top stories featured by the news app in the first month of the year, not a single one was from a right-leaning media outlet. Instead, they pushed liberal media like The Washington Post, AP, NPR, The New York Times, and the socialist British newspaper The Guardian.
That pattern is repeated in other major news apps. From January 1–31, Google News pushed 349 stories from left‑leaning outlets, which accounted for nearly 67 percent (66.7%) of its top 20 morning editions. The tech giant promoted only 14 right-leaning sources, accounting for just under 3 percent (2.6%).
Digging in our archives, Bill unearthed a 2003 MSNBC segment from the old primetime show Scarborough Country, when Joe played a conservative on TV. In response to California's intention to give driver's licenses to illegal immigrants, Scarborough labeled them 'criminals' and warned the licenses would legitimize illegal immigration by providing the most accepted ID in America.
When a grand jury on January 29 indicted former CNN host Don Lemon for allegedly participating in the disruption of a Minneapolis-area church service, the corporate media responded with unanimous outrage. But for all of their hand wringing, not a single journalist has acknowledged even once on any of the big three broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC) that Lemon’s arrest was, in fact, the result of a grand jury indictment.
Enjoy the podcast on these findings below, or the audio is found here.
