When someone in the elitist media is accused of a pro-Trump bias, PBS News Hour won’t consider having on any conservative media critics (like NewsBusters) to discuss it. Instead, they routinely turn to CNN’s Brian Stelter to echo their thoughts on how the media should maintain a fierce anti-Trump bias. On Monday night, PBS host William Brangham asked this unintentionally funny question: "In your view, as a media analyst and critic, does it feel like a lopsided piece of journalism or does it feel like it lives up to 60 Minutes' normal standards?" Lopsided liberalism is their normal standard! Stelter implied it, that being fiercely anti-Trump is normal:  STELTER: I think, if this segment had aired one or two or three years ago, people would have said it's a normal 60 Minutes segment. It is in line with CBS standards. There's nothing particularly unusual about the segment. However, we now live in this very politically heated time, where Paramount is under tremendous pressure from the Trump administration and Paramount is trying to cozy up to the Trump administration because of various deals that are in the works. Bari Weiss has been an opinion editor at The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, but Brangham implied to PBS viewers that she's not a journalist! Where are the fact checkers? BRANGHAM: Someone who was privy to some of these internal conversations at CBS spoke to one of my colleagues and said this, that: "Bari Weiss is not a journalist, and she has just confirmed that for all the world to see." She herself has, again, defended this decision and said the piece will run when it feels appropriate. This is -- she is the editor in chief. What have you been hearing from within CBS about the fallout from this move? STELTER: Many CBS staffers say this is the moment they have feared all year long, with corporate meddling and political pressure tainting the journalism at CBS. They fear it's a blow to the network's credibility…. The broader concern among CBS staffers will remain. And that is that the company is vulnerable to political pressure. Every few days, President Trump complains about 60 Minutes. He did it again on Friday night. He complains about the owners of Paramount. Is there a firewall in place between the corporation and the newsroom? That remains the giant question. Notice how they complain about "political pressure tainting the journalism," as if the least political journalism is the most aggressively biased journalism. They don't mind political pressure from the left, that doesn't "taint" anything. But conservative pressure? It's....a cancer?  BRANGHAM: Where do you think this ends? Does this continue to be a cancer inside CBS, or will this too blow over? STELTER: The journalism will continue to speak for itself, and the reporting will continue to get out, as we have seen today, in spite of some attempts to stop it or to pause it. And this is something that is part of a broader free speech and First Amendment test that we're living through in the U.S. We're at the end of the first year of Trump 2.0. And I would say the media is largely winning, largely succeeding, largely passing that stress test. But the test is real, and we see that test under way right now at CBS.

The elitist media have pouncing on dissension between some of the biggest names in conservative media and have been using it to try to portray a movement and a Republican Party in disarray, in danger of destruction. The coverage has been predictable, but what happened Monday night on CNN's NewsNight was an exercise in only policing the right wing. Host Abby Phillip began her show this way: "Tonight we are getting a fresh glimpse into the deep divisions that are splintering President Trump's MAGA coalition. There is bitter infighting that exploded at that Turning Point USA Annual Convention over the weekend, and it exposed some serious rifts over things like conspiracy theories, bigotry, anti-Semitism and extremist views. Some of MAGA's biggest stars threw jabs at each other."  Phillip then played short clips of Ben Shapiro, Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon, and Megyn Kelly, before we heard from Vice President JD Vance. VANCE: I didn't bring a list of conservatives to denounce or to deplatform. I know some of you are discouraged by the infighting over any number of issues. Don't be discouraged. Wouldn't you rather lead a movement of free thinkers who sometimes disagree than a bunch of drones who take their orders from George Soros? Phillip, who like many in the media have focused on infighting over support for Israel, and some who have refused to condemn those who have made anti-Semitic remarks, then turned to CNN's Scott Jennings, who set her straight with some interesting numbers. PHILLIP: So fundamentally, this is about whether or not there should be boundaries to the conservative movement... I mean, there are all kinds of other issues, and I will get to some of them, including the rift over Israel, which is a part of this... JENNINGS: .. For all the talk of rift, if you look at the straw poll results that they took among the 30,000 people who were there, (TPUSA AMFest) 87 percent of them said that Israel was either our top ally or an ally of the United States. Only 13 percent said no. And the number one issue facing the United States, according to the respondents, was radical Islam... Great job by Jennings, who would soon face what can only be described as left wing insanity. First up, Adam Mockler of Meidas Touch Network, who ripped Vance for not condemning anti-Semitism on the right. Then Jennings pushed him over the edge. JENNINGS: You brought up (NYC Mayor-Elect Zohran) Mamdani. Do you believe that Mamdani has shown any moral clarity when it comes to Israel and the attacks on Jews? MOCKLER: The day after he was elected, there was a swastika...drawn on a window and he immediately tweeted out and condemned it! ..There was no equivalent between the way Zohran and JD Vance have conducted themselves...(Crosstalk) Do you think JD Vance should condemn the (Nick) Fuentes? Should JD Vance condemn the Groypers? JENNINGS: He has. He told him he could eat s- - -. MOCKLER: Not on stage. He didn't do it on stage in front of the Groypers. JENNINGS:.. Mamdani got asked.. there are people on your transition team who have said it's okay to kill Jews after October the 7th, and he said, oh, well, you know, we have a diversity of political opinion. I think to throw Mamdani in with JD Vance is a huge reach. Mamdani has been the opposite but morally clear on any of this. In fact, this week a report from the ADL found that at least 20% of  Mamdani’s transition committee members have ties to radical anti-Zionist groups that openly promote terror and harass Jewish people. And last week a key member of his new staff stepped down after anti-Semitic posts resurfaced. Abby Phillip wasn't bringing that up. The liberal insanity continued as Phillip appeared to back Mockler's claims and pressed Jennings on his willingness to condemn hate speech from those on the right, and how Vance wouldn't take a side, and he didn't take kindly to it. PHILLIP: This is actually to Adam's point....if you're willing to condemn Mamdani for what you just described, again, why would you not condemn conservatives for doing effectively the same thing when you have people like, you know, Nick Fuentes who are out here? JENNINGS: Are you questioning me about what I've had to say about anti-Semitism?...I have repeatedly on this show said anti-Semitism has no place in our political discourse and we don't need to be associated with them. PHILLIP: I get that JD Vance is JD Vance. But I'm wondering about you. What's the principle that you apply to JD Vance and is it the same that as what you're applying to Mamdani? JENNINGS: I don't put them anywhere near in the same universe, A. B, look, it is up to us as conservatives to decide who we want to be associated with. I can assure you, we do not want to be associated in any way, shape, or form with Nick Fuentes or anybody approximating what he has to say, period, full stop. It will destroy us if we do it. It's interesting that Phillip and her allies on the set are so interesting in comparing conservatives to Mamdani's views on the Jews. Phillip had a chance to interview Mamdani for 11 minutes in September, and never brought up his takes on Israel and the Jews. 

It was a challenging task, but an esteemed panel of NewsBusters editors, led by MRC President David Bozell and MRC’s Vice President for Research and Publications Brent Baker, boiled down all the biased outbursts from lefty hack hosts, anchors, reporters and pundits in 2025 and on December 17 announced The Media Research Center Award for Worst Quote of the Year.   Of course, every year, there is way too much bias for just one category. So we broke down the Worst of 2025 into five additional categories (The Craziest Analysis Award; The Trashing Trump Award; The Damn Those Conservatives Award; The ICE Breakers Award for Hating Trump’s Deportation Policy; and the Celebrity Freak-Outs Award).  Today, we present the WORST OF 2025: The ICE Breakers Award for Bashing Deportations.    WINNER     “We are normalizing a government agency disappearing people. We are normalizing, we’re talking about it like it’s no big deal that they are kidnapping people and transporting them to concentration camps, both domestic and foreign….Everybody who says, ‘Oh this is not the America I know,’ I can guarantee you it is the America I know.”— Former MSNBC host Tiffany Cross on CNN’s NewsNight, July 8.   RUNNERS-UP   “If they [Trump administration] could snatch students off the street without any pushback or recourse, they will do it to any of us. To be very clear, it’s going to be the people of color and vulnerable communities that are next in line.”— Host Symone Sanders on MSNBC’s The Weekend, April 19.   “I posted about the fact that there are little Anne Franks, right? Anne Frank in Chicago – her name is Anita Franco, and she is terrified.”— NPR’s Latino USA anchor Maria Hinojosa on MSNBC’s The Weekend, September 20.   “On the issue of immigration, there are a lot of people who are appalled by what the administration is doing. And there will be times for civil disobedience….Let’s say she [Wisconsin Judge Hannah Dugan] did escort this guy out the door. If federal enforcement agencies come to your courtroom and you help a guy escape, that is two things. One, it strikes me as maybe something illegal, but it also strikes me as something heroic.”— New York Times columnist/PBS contributor David Brooks on PBS’s News Hour, April 29.

Steven C. Bush, chairman, president, and CEO of Apple Bank— the largest state-chartered savings bank in New York state — spoke with MRC Business about his optimism for the future of American capitalism amid troubling trends. MRC Business staff met with Bush during the December 10, JBiz Expo in Atlantic City, New Jersey organized by Orthodox Jewish Chamber of Commerce CEO Duvi Honig. As the leader of a bank that managed $19 billion in assets, he's concerned as support for socialism and communism grows amongst young Americans. Bush stipulated that this is “something we have to take seriously.” In his view, while there are plenty of societal and historical factors that explain this trend — much of it driven by the explosion of social media — he expressed confidence that there will be a massive self-correction as in days past when the unworkability and destructiveness of socialist and communist policies was put on full display. The Ameritopian Shift Towards Socialism and Communism One of the most troubling trends discussed with Bush was the growing fascination with communist and socialist ideas amongst young people in the United States. MRC presented Bush with a recent NBC poll that showed that support for capitalism and free markets fell under fifty percent for the first time in seven years. A recent survey by the Cato Institute and YouGov paints a troubling picture: 62 percent of Americans aged 18–29 say they hold a “favorable view” of socialism, and 34 percent say the same of communism. One of the reasons for this, said Bush, was that the spectre of  the horrors of communism that was front-and-center during the Cold War has largely disappeared in the 21st century: The [communist] model that used to occupy a significant part of the time during the Cold War is gone. So conscious awareness of that is gone. I was in the Soviet Union as Gorbachev was just coming in. I spent time in communist Hungary and communist Poland; communist East Germany — in particular, I criss-crossed Checkpoint Charlie multiple times … I’ve seen this from all angles. But I think the vividness of what that all was is largely lost on people because it feels like ancient history.  Bush argues we live today in an “Instagram world. And if you can just kind of bop around and have a catchy video then that’s what moves the world.” What made it easier in the 20th century for people to do a more realistic comparison of capitalism and communism was precisely because Americans were able to witness both systems operating in real time across a litany of countries, according to Bush: You always find yourself including in those days — taking the actual reality of capitalism in a specific, actual context and comparing it to some idealized version of communism. So you had those things you could point to and say, ‘Here’s this. Here’s that. Why not try it out? Why not make a visit?’ That’s not really there anymore. So, in a way, the triumph of the West has been so complete that it’s kind of taken away those concrete examples. Another problem, Bush observed, was that in winning the Cold War, there was a failure by the West to “deliver outcomes” to the economic problems that followed that would eradicate any flirtation with the dictatorial systems of the past. In effect, the West entered into a “stasis” where it would be unclear for the foreseeable future how well different problems were addressed. Therefore, frustration from the masses arose at the failures from the public-private sector like the 2008 financial crisis, 9/11 and COVID-19, which made the victory “sugar rush” post-Cold War dissipate relatively quickly. Bush advised MRC that one strategy for policymakers would be to “understand the reasons” why people are now adopting this radical, left-wing view favorable to communist and socialist structures. He argued much of it can be explained by the intervening experiences of the populace during crises that the West reneged on addressing appropriately. However, he stipulated that in democratic societies, there is the capacity to self-correct: One of the benefits of kind of — leaving even economics to the side — but just democratic systems is that they have some capacity to self-correct. So, look at New York 1973-1974 and then look at New York fifteen years later — dramatic recovery. Because people felt the sting of failure — bankruptcy, all these kinds of things — and enough people were willing to play it out over a longer period of time that the system self-corrected.  Bush did note that self-corrections can in fact take time and be very painful. But he concluded that he had “a lot of confidence that time will heal” the extreme leftward shift of the American electorate (particularly amongst younger voters) and that “there will be a self-correction.” “Was World War II a self-correction,” Bush asked rhetorically. “That was a pretty painful self-correction. So not all self-corrections are easy or desirable but I don’t know what choices we have. So I think it’s important to figure out why — it’s one thing to just sort of denounce [the skid towards pro-communist sentiments]. But what’s behind it and what can you do that go to root causes and try to improve that?” One important point to consider, according to Bush, is whether today’s generation believes they will be able to live as well as their parents did given the current state of the inflation-rattled economy. “If you’re kind of gleaning the answer is ‘No,’” said Bush, it’s vital to realize that “loss is more painful than gain is pleasurable. So the experience of loss — even if it’s a loss of expectation; loss of hope, these are painful experiences to have and it generates resentment at the nominal causes of what’s there.” The Apple Bank CEO noted that America — being a land founded by Puritans — is pretty big on moral panics: “There’s always a moral panic going on of one kind or another. Each one is different and you don’t want to take anything for granted.” However, Bush noted that the current movements towards communism amongst young people are being fomented by the “traditional enemies” of capitalism (ex. Antifa), which at this point “have the benefit” of “being critics of the status quo, which is a fun place to be, because you can just come up with solutions — get votes.”  The Social Media Monster: The 21st Century Vehicle of the Hammer and Sickle Movement In Bush’s view, the effectiveness of communist and socialist messaging has been massively amplified by the social media phenomenon of the 21st century. The media environment, as a result of social media, has been largely fragmented as Bush analyzed. As opposed to the 20th century where young people in school were watching public television in addition to shows on the same three news channels ABC, CBS and NBC — “that is so not the case right now,” Bush stated. Because of the new availability of social media platforms, “people are able to go down rabbit holes. And there’s so much to choose from. Any butterfly that passes by will attract people based on whatever they happen to be doing at the moment.” Local coverage has also been gutted in Bush’s estimation as a result of this media fragmentation, leading consumers to just be peppered with a 24-hour, minute-to-minute, news flash flood about controversial national issues and while being largely oblivious to what’s going on in their own neighborhoods.  And with this new media dynamic comes a shockwave of bad ideas. And the knee-jerk reaction by the masses to double down on bad ideas like communism and socialism despite evidence to the contrary, argued Bush, is a major obstacle to self-correction that has been made much worse by social media: In the world of social media where everything is public, it’s much more difficult to change your mind. Plus we have these roving bands of witch hunters looking around on social media to just pummel people. Whether it’s just the Twitter-sphere, or whatever it is now — the X-sphere, Instagram — you get all these people who are just weighing in on other people. Bush joked in turn that these “people should get out of the house and meet some new people for real — face to face. So I think that has exacerbated a lot of this because it’s difficult to have long form conversations” through these mediums.  The algorithms on social media, Bush observed, “are not there to encourage thoughtfulness. They’re there to get clicks” and the subsequent “confirmation bias is just massive.” And the humorous aspect of it all is that most of the radical political commentators who take advantage of this algorithmic structure really “don’t know anything about” the issue they’re addressing “other than what they read somewhere in a Substack newsletter,” Bush quipped. In effect, just “criticizing the establishment wisdom” becomes the “primary virtue” in itself, rather than actually generating meaningful solutions to real problems. The system of social media, Bush concluded, “is not a system built for self-correction. It’s a system built for self-gratification for an outrage generation and personal validation” based on performative entertainment. The irony is that these Big Tech platforms like Facebook, TikTok and Instagram that are fomenting communist and socialist ideas (whether wittingly or unwittingly) are in fact using the capitalist structure to do so: It’s a consumer good. So you’re selling pleasure and you’re selling being right. And you’re selling calling out the evil-doer and that I think is — I don’t know how we fix this. This is a new genie loose in the world and I don’t know how that gets solved. But it’s not helping. It is impeding the self-correction — kind of natural process. As a result, Bush theorized unfortunately that “we may have to fall farther before we change or the next generation just turns off social media.” All we can do is hope and pray that this self-correction comes sooner rather than later.

CBS 60 Minutes correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi raged against the network’s Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss when she delayed her story on how the Trump administration deported illegal immigrants from Venezuela to a “notorious” prison in El Salvador. Weiss wanted more reporting and more rebuttal from the Trump administration in it. "If the administration's refusal to participate becomes a valid reason to spike a story, we have effectively handed them a 'kill switch' for any reporting they find inconvenient,” Alfonsi complained in a memo leaked to the media. “We go from an investigative powerhouse to a stenographer for the state.” The targets of a story shouldn’t have a veto, but it’s not unreasonable to let them rebut "notorious" allegations. The hilarious piece of this argument is that 60 Minutes deserves the term “investigative powerhouse.” Back on February 17, Alfonsi gushed over German officials fining and jailing people for “hate speech” on the internet. Alfonsi let them claim that punishing people for what they say online is “protecting democracy and discourse by introducing a touch of German order to the unruly world wide web.” She asked one censor: “You're doing all this work. You're launching all these investigations. You're fining people, sometimes putting them in jail. Does it make a difference if it's a worldwide web and there's a lotta hate out there?” This is being a “stenographer for the state,” literally. Scott Pelley’s interviews with President Biden did not demonstrate an “investigative powerhouse” at work. In 2022, Pelley warmly nudged Biden: “You have lived a long life of triumph and tragedy. In November, you'll be 80. And I wonder what it is that keeps you in the arena.” Seconds later, Biden pulled out his rosary ring so Pelley could tout him as "Catholic and devout." In October of 2023, he helped paint Biden as a constructive foreign-policy player. Pelley told viewers the president was “asking for billions of dollars for Israel and Ukraine, Congress is paralyzed. Hard-right Republicans are obstructing the election of a Speaker of the House.” He asked Biden: “Does the dysfunction that we've seen in Congress increase the danger in the world?” Why, yes, Biden replied, the Republicans are terrible. Biden was painted as the family man who visited German death camps: "Mr. Biden told us images of October 7th reminded him of the Holocaust—which he has studied-- taking his family to the Dachau death camp in Germany. This is 2015, the man in the wheelchair is a Dachau survivor. Behind Mr. Biden is the president's granddaughter." It’s stenography. Two weeks earlier, Scott Pelley gently asked Attorney General Merrick Garland about how nonpartisan he was. He even asked: “Two of your ancestors were murdered in the Holocaust. Is that why you devoted yourself to the law?”  At the end, Pelley added, “if democracy is an emotional subject for Merrick Garland, maybe it's because he has witnessed how suddenly it can be threatened, in Oklahoma City [in 1995] and Washington D.C. [January 6].” Pelley asked Garland "when the history of this extraordinary time is written, what is the best that Merrick Garland can hope for?” For many years now, 60 Minutes has painted itself as an “investigative powerhouse” when it’s going after Republicans, but they often sound like their show could be called “Syrupy Minutes” when they’re interviewing their ideological allies, from the Clintons to Obama and Biden. This is why they are offended by the oversight of Bari Weiss. She represents those repulsive people who expect some fraction of balance or fairness from CBS. They don’t want any “corporate interference” in the machinations of their propaganda factory.