CNN was unapologetic even after they were found liable for their malicious defamation of Navy veteran Zachary Young last year. And in reporting on FBI Director Kash Patel’s $250 million defamation suit against The Atlantic for their recent reporting about him, on Monday, CNN’s The Situation Room suggested was just him “performing” for President Trump and suggested he should have just ignored the possible defamation because more people have since read it. In giving a rundown of the suit, chief media analyst Brian Stelter rhetorically scoffed at any possibly the suit legitimacy. According to him, Patel was only “performing” for President Trump: Yeah this defamation lawsuit charges The Atlantic with actual malice and seeks $250 million in damages. Patel vowed to sue in the hours before this article came out on Friday. So, now this morning his lawyers are following up filing this lawsuit in DC. And really, you know, performing what Patel knows his boss, President Trump, wants to see; a very aggressive response to these charges in The Atlantic. Stelter noted that the lawsuit alleged “actual malice”: So the lawsuit goes through point-by-point and says that all these charges against Patel are false. And it says the lawsuit - the lawsuit charges that The Atlantic published these statements with “actual malice.” Those two words are the key in any defamation suit. Actual malice is the very high legal standard that public figures have to prove in order to win a defamation suit. They have to prove that The Atlantic knew these claims were false, or had a reckless disregard for the truth.   CNN's Brian Stelter dismisses Kash Patel's defamation suit against The Atlantic as just "performing" for Trump. He had no issue with the mag only giving Patel 2 hours to respond (CNN did the same when they maliciously defamed Navy vet Zackary Young). CNN ends by suggesting that… pic.twitter.com/tfI6PCRiba — Nicholas Fondacaro (@NickFondacaro) April 20, 2026   CNN knew actual malice quite well since it was proven they acted with it against Young. The evidence presented to the jury was clear; former chief national security correspondent Alex Marquardt had messaged colleagues that he was going to “nail this Zachary Young Mfucker” while saying the report was going to be “your funeral bucko.” Editors called him a “shit” and “a shitbag” who had a “punchable face.” Those CNN messages came out via discovery. So, discovery would be the phase where any actual malice against Patel maybe uncovered. If there’s any to be found. Stelter also didn’t have an issue with The Atlantic only giving Patel two hours to respond, and gave their defense for them, suggesting the sheer quantity of anonymous source made it an open-shut case: Now, Patel's lawyers are going to argue that The Atlantic didn't ask for comment until a couple hours before it published. But The Atlantic will probably say in response, ‘hey, we had two dozen sources all throughout the government who describe these concerns.’ He didn’t have a problem with it because CNN had a similar policy. They only gave Young two hours to respond too. Finally, at the end of the segment, Stelter and The Situation Room co-hosts Pamela Brown and Wolf Blitzer suggested Patel should have just ignored the allegedly defamatory report because suing them caused more people to read it: STELTER: It's still up on the homepage as the Atlantic dot com, and it's one of the most read articles on the website and has been ever since it came out on Friday evening. Wolf, Pamela. BROWN: Now it’s getting even more attention with this lawsuit. BLITZER: Yeah, for sure. STELTER: That’s right. Essentially, their attitude was ‘just let us in the media say what ever we want regardless of the facts.’ It seems as though CNN didn’t learn their lesson. The transcript is below. Click "expand" to read: CNN’s The Situation Room April 20, 2026 11:25:58 a.m. Eastern WOLF BLITZER: New this morning, the FBI director, Kash Patel, is suing The Atlantic magazine for $250 million over an explosive story that alleges his colleagues are concerned about heavy drinking and unexplained absences. PAMELA BROWN: CNN chief media analyst Brian Stelter is here in The Situation Room. So, what do we know about this lawsuit. Brian. BRIAN STELTER: Yeah this defamation lawsuit charges The Atlantic with actual malice and seeks $250 million in damages. Patel vowed to sue in the hours before this article came out on Friday. So, now this morning his lawyers are following up filing this lawsuit in DC. And really, you know, performing what Patel knows his boss, President Trump, wants to see; a very aggressive response to these charges in The Atlantic. Now, the lawsuit says that sentences like this one from reporter Sarah Fitzpatrick are false. Here's what Fitzpatrick wrote. She said, “Several officials told me that Patel's drinking has been a recurring source of concern across the government. They said that he is known to drink to the point of obvious intoxication.” The lawsuit says that the Fitzpatrick article falsely asserts many things about Patel, including that, quote “he is a habitual drunk, unable to perform the duties of his office, is a threat to public safety, is vulnerable to foreign coercion, has violated DOJ ethics rules. Et cetera. Et cetera.” So the lawsuit goes through point-by-point and says that all these charges against Patel are false. And it says the lawsuit - the lawsuit charges that The Atlantic published these statements with “actual malice.” Those two words are the key in any defamation suit. Actual malice is the very high legal standard that public figures have to prove in order to win a defamation suit. They have to prove that The Atlantic knew these claims were false, or had a reckless disregard for the truth. Now, Patel's lawyers are going to argue that The Atlantic didn't ask for comment until a couple hours before it published. But The Atlantic will probably say in response, ‘hey, we had two dozen sources all throughout the government who describe these concerns.’ Here's the statement from The Atlantic just a few moments ago, saying, quote, “We stand by our reporting on Kash Patel, and we will vigorously defend The Atlantic and our journalists against this meritless lawsuit.” CNN has not independently corroborated the anecdotes that are in that Atlantic article, but the title is pretty stark. It says the FBI director is M.I.A. It's still up on the homepage as the Atlantic dot com, and it's one of the most read articles on the website and has been ever since it came out on Friday evening. Wolf, Pamela. BROWN: Now it’s getting even more attention with this lawsuit. BLITZER: Yeah, for sure. STELTER: That’s right. BROWN: Brian Stelter, thank you so much.

Variety reports that Tina Fey talked about the very political sketches on Saturday Night Live at a "History Talks" event on Saturday in Philadelphia produced in tandem by the History Channel and Comcast. She joked on a grandiose note: “One fifth of America’s history has been covered by Saturday Night Live… Which one will last longer?” Fey talked about her Sarah Palin sketches in 2008, when many people thought Palin – and not Fey – said “I can see Russia from my house.” Sketch comedy becomes reality to some people. “We always worked really hard to make sure they were what we call a ‘fair hit.’ It only felt like it would work if it was based in something that was true. Sometimes people will ask me, ‘Does SNL try to control the narrative of politics?’ And they really do not. You really can’t because if it’s not true, it will not be funny.” Conservatives could seriously question if “fair hit” is an actual standard. Then there’s the question of “who’s hit.” Fey listed as her favorite impressions Darrell Hammond’s Al Gore, Dana Carvey’s George H.W. Bush, and Matt Damon’s Brett Kavanaugh. The Kavanaugh confirmation hearings sketch came with the season debut in 2018, and mocked Kavanaugh as seriously unglued. But Fey fondly remembered Damon’s impression. “He came in and just played him so perfectly, it helped alleviate a frustration that many viewers of those hearings had,” Fey said. “It only works if it’s correct.” As usual, the sketch was therapy for leftists. Variety summarized Damon's game: "His explosive performance poked fun at Kavanaugh’s questionable explanations of yearbook jokes widely interpreted as references to lewd sexual exploits and heavy binge drinking." This cold-open went on for 13 minutes -- instead of the typical five or six minutes.      Fey could have been asked about how this Kavanaugh sketch compared to their 2022 cold-open kissy-face after Ketanji Brown Jackson was confirmed. Ego Nwodim’s Jackson assured the Commander in Chief that as the first black woman to join the Supreme Court, she had to “work twice as had as a white man my entire life and spend an entire week listening to Ted Cruz call me a pedophile.” Is that a "fair hit" that works because it's "correct"? No. Sen. Cruz asked Jackson about her sentencing of child pornography suspects. Other cast members in the sketch played Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Thurgood Marshall, Harriet Tubman, and Jackie Robinson. Later in that show, the mockery of Republican Senators continued, as pro-abortion cast member Cecily Strong mocked Sen. Marsha Blackburn for asking Jackson what is a woman, which shouldn't be a trick question. Jackson's answer -- "I'm not a biologist" -- was begging for satire. Instead, SNL mocked Sen. Blackburn as somehow a silly Southern bimbo who can't appreciate that gender is "kind of a nuanced, complicated question," as Colin Jost claimed. As Fake Blackburn tried to explain with "stupid" pictures, Jost asked: "Why is defining a woman even relevant to a confirmation hearing?" Fake Blackburn ended the skit with this zinger: “If you don’t know what a woman is, how ya gonna take her rights away?” Anyone who thinks SNL is a "fair hit" show is drunker than Matt Damon's Kavanaugh.   

On Monday morning, leading national press organizations and over 250 has-beens — including Dan Rather and Sam Donaldson — showed their hatred for President Trump and his voters by demanding White House correspondents and other D.C. journalists denounce President Trump to his face at this Saturday’s White House Correspondents Dinner (WHCD). The letter ordered attendees to “forcefully demonstrate opposition to President Trump’s efforts to trample freedom of the press” since allowing Trump to attend — an invitation extended to him by CBS’s Weijia Jiang the White House Correspondents Association (WHCA) board — was “a profound contradiction of [the dinner’s] purpose” to celebrate the D.C. media’s “vital and irreplaceable role” in the First Amendment and America itself. The letter’s first two paragraphs served up enough gag-worthy, pontifical, pretentious smarm that illustrate why Americans across the political spectrum loathe the national media’s ego believing they themselves embody the First Amendment (and not every single America) and are the bulwark to keeping the country safe (and not our military and first responders).   Incredibly, this was just one elongated sentence: The collective weight of the administration’s actions — retaliatory access bans, coercive regulatory investigations, frivolous lawsuits against the press, defunding of public broadcasting, dismantling of international broadcasting, physical restrictions on journalists, personal verbal attacks on reporters, assaults on the media in official White House press releases and social media posts, the arrest of journalists, and the pardoning of those who committed violence against the press — represent the most systematic and comprehensive assault on freedom of the press by a sitting American president. The egotists asserted that while “[t]here is a long tradition of presidents attending the White House Correspondents Association Dinner,” exceptions must be made because “these are not normal times” and “wear[ing] pocket handkerchiefs or lapel pins with the words of the First Amendment” is insufficient. “[W]e believe the White House Correspondents Association should take stronger action by issuing – from the podium – a forceful defense of freedom of the press and condemnation of those who threaten that freedom, followed by a standing toast to the First Amendment and a pledge to continue upholding such a critical cornerstone of our democracy,” they continued. The letter even tried to argue they’d be pushing back against “any officeholder” who would do what Trump did, which was interesting considering Trump hasn’t prosecuted reporters the way the Obama administration did or clamped down on freedom of speech the way the Franklin D. Roosevelt and Wilson administrations did during both world wars. Probably thinking they’re modern-day Martin Luthers penning a new 95 Theses, what followed next was 22 examples of “Trump Administration’s Attacks on Freedom of the Press.” In actuality, each bullet point contained multiple examples. Starting with being worked up over the Gulf of Mexico name change to Gulf of America, the letter included misleading and omission-filled grievances. These over-the-hill former reporters had one Tonka truck-sized bullet point that could be boiled down to being outraged Trump has called reporters “terrible”: President Trump has engaged in a sustained pattern of personal verbal attacks on individual reporters, including calling ABC reporter Mary Bruce ‘a terrible person and a terrible reporter,’ calling Bloomberg News reporter Catherine Lucey ‘piggy,’ calling CBS reporter Nancy Cordes a ‘stupid person’, calling New York Times reporter Katie Rogers ‘a third-rate reporter’ and ‘ugly both inside and out,’ calling CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins ‘the worst reporter,’ calling ABC reporter Rachel Scott ‘obnoxious’ and ‘a terrible reporter, ” a pattern disproportionately targeting women journalists. Trump also threatening to revoke ABC’s broadcast license when the network’s reporters asked questions he disliked. They also took issue with the White House creating “an official government webpage titled ‘Hall of Shame,’ naming and targeting individuals journalists and news organizations for reporting that the administration disagreed with.” The White House made a website to call out false and biased reporting?! We’re just like North Korea! There were predictable bullet points on the administration’s successful defunding of NPR and PBS, whining they “serve more than 999 percent of the American population, including rural communities that rely on public media for emergency and disaster information.” Someone should ask the Texas Hill Country if NPR and PBS helped save lives last July. We, in fact, did and the answer was no. These so-called esteemed journalists also purposefully omitted the context to two successful Trump lawsuits against ABC News and CBS’s then-parent company Paramount Global. Notice they never said why Trump sued the two organizations. In the first case, falsely saying someone was found “liable” of rape is a serious charge these supposed constitutional experts should be concerned with: President Trump filed a lawsuit against ABC News and anchor George Stephanopoulos, which Disney — ABC’s parent company — settled for $15 million directed to the future Trump Presidential Library, plus $1 million in legal fees, a settlement that legal scholars warned would produce a chilling effect on network journalism. President Trump filed a lawsuit against Paramount, the corporate parent of CBS News, over the editing of a ‘60 Minutes’ interview. Paramount settled, paying $16 million to the future Trump Presidential Library — despite legal experts characterizing the suit as frivolous and predicting CBS would prevail at trial. The settlement came as Paramount sought FCC approval for a multibillion-dollar merger. We’ll flag one more that was particularly comical: “Within the first hours of his second term, President Trump suspended hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign aid specifically designated to support press freedom overseas.” Six major journalism trade groups signed on, including the lead journalism organization, the Society of Professional Journalists. Keep these in mind when they try to claim they work for you: Society of Professional Journalists, National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ), National Press Photographers Association, Freedom of the Press Foundation, Coalition for Women in Journalism, Radio Television Digital News Association/ Along with Donaldson and Rather, other former legacy journalists included Claire Atkinson (Murdoch family stalker), Tom Bettag (ABC), Pam Coulter (CBS), Ann Curry (NBC), Bob Faw (NBC), Charles Jaco (CNN), Jackie Judd (ABC), Rita Kempley (Washington Post), Andrea Koppel (CNN), Vicki Mabrey (ABC), Peter Maer (CBS), Kevin Newman (ABC), Bob Orr (CBS), Bill Press (CNN), Lisa Stark (ABC), and Kevin Tibbles (NBC).

Voters who heard first-hand President Donald Trump’s explanation of why the U.S. is at war with Iran are far more likely to understand and support the military mission than those who counted on the media to tell them what to think, results of a new national survey of voters reveal. The McLaughlin Poll survey of likely midterm voters, conducted April 8-15, measured differences in voter knowledge and opinions between those who watched President Donald Trump’s televised address to the nation on April 1 and those who relied on media reports. “Voters who watched President Trump’s address directly support military action by a decisive 67% to 29%, while those relying on media coverage are essentially split,” Pollsters John and Jim McLaughlin wrote Friday, reporting the survey’s results. Likewise, fully 59% of all voters who watched Trump’s speech also correctly identified the purpose of the U.S. military mission as an effort to stop Iran’s nuclear weaponry program. In contrast, only 38% of voters who didn’t watch Trump’s address - but merely consumed information filtered by the media - cited Iran’s nuclear threat. Instead, they mistakenly attributed the mission to motives like “taking oil” and “regime change.” Overall, 44% of likely voters correctly identified stopping Iran’s nuclear program as the goal. In contrast, just 25% of voters who regularly watch left of center news networks correctly identified the purpose of the military action. The differences are “a direct reflection of how information is delivered—and distorted” by dishonest, agenda-driven legacy media, the pollsters explain. As a result of this media malfeasance, voters’ understanding and approval of the mission is distorted. The harmful influence of the media’s filtering and misrepresentation of the issue is significant, given that only about a third (32%) of voters polled said they actually watched the president’s speech. The bias of cable news networks is particularly harmful, as 68% of voters reported that they regularly watch these networks. Those who watch left of center cable news were less likely to view Iran as a threat, even if the hostile regime were to develop and build a nuclear weapon. Of all voters, three times as many said Iran would use its nuclear weaponry to attack the U.S. and its allies as said it wouldn’t (61% vs. 00%, with 19% undecided/no answer). In contrast, less than half (48%) of those who regularly watch left of center cable news said Iran would launch a nuclear attack, while nearly a third (30%) said it wouldn’t. Notably, Independent voters are much less likely to be influenced by cable news. While roughly a quarter of both Democrats (25%) and Republicans (23%) do not regularly watch cable news networks, fully 40% of Independents shun cable news. The more voters are accurately and fully informed about Iran, the more likely they are to support the U.S. military mission there, the McLaughlin pollsters note: “When voters are reminded of Iran’s long record as a rogue state—killing Americans, taking hostages, and attacking U.S. forces — support for military action climbs to 59%, while only 32% disagree.” …. “Six in ten voters say the United States must ‘finish the job once and for all’ to prevent future conflict. Only 30% disagree.” Watch Pres. Donald Trump's full (April 1, 2026) address to the nation below.

Associated Press media reporter David Bauder found a fascinating nugget in an otherwise predictable lecture on media ethics from former Washington Post executive editor Marty Baron. He gave the keynote address of the Peter F. Collier Awards for Ethics in Journalism at New York University. (This is not the Peter Collier who wrote books with David Horowitz.)  Alongside the usual lectures about the awfulness of Trump, there was a single note about how the press failed in reporting on Biden's cognitive decline:  Each of us probably can point to other instances where we went astray. Here’s one to think about: Did we live up to our truth-seeking mission early this decade as we saw Joe Biden struggling cognitively and physically while holding the most powerful position on earth? I don’t believe we did. Did some among us shy from aggressively exploring his intellectual acuity and physical health for fear of aiding Donald Trump’s campaign and alienating loyal readers, viewers and listeners? My guess is yes. If so, would that be an ethical breakdown in our profession? Again, I’d say yes. One thing is for sure: Our credibility was damaged. I didn't see Baron saying this back in the 2023 or 2024. He was doing the usual War on Trump material. In this speech, he immediately followed up: "Now we are living with an administration that actively obstructs our search for truth. President Trump and his allies seek to extinguish all independent arbiters of fact. The press is among them." Leftists are always "independent arbiters" when they go after Trump.  This was the more typical Baron bellowing:  If one challenge to that ethic of vigilance is the president’s malicious war on the media, another comes from those who enjoy press freedoms but abdicate the corresponding duties. I’m talking, for instance, about cable networks that function as mouthpieces and bullhorns for the administration, who routinely funnel on-air personalities into its top positions and who supply them with lucrative landing spots when they exit. These outlets render themselves largely indistinguishable from the government they are supposed to cover.... If the founders of this country had wanted lapdogs in lieu of watchdogs, they would have at least hinted at that in the formative documents that are their legacy. Those documents had deep flaws, but that was not among them. Stenography and propaganda are clearly not the ethic of the First Amendment. Notice how this conflicts with Baron's notes on failing to hold Biden and his team accountable. Under Democrats, the liberal outlets can be accused of being "mouthpieces and bullhorns" and stenographers and propagandists.  Baron and his pals in the media establishment imagine they aren't pitching their "news" at a partisan audience -- while the Post sells "Democracy Dies In Darkness" T-shirts and baby onesies. Baron slammed the Ellisons and their hire Bari Weiss for aiming for an audience in the political center at CBS News. That's political!  The new owner of CBS and the current editor-in-chief of the news division, for instance, set an explicit objective of appealing to the center right and the center left. That is a political goal. It is not a journalistic one. And it is a far cry from how Jack Knight instructed his newsroom: “Get the truth and publish it.” That is a journalistic goal. Media owners who substitute political goal posts for news values find refuge in sophistry. They lay claim to ethics; instead, they subvert them. Again, who is pretending that The Washington Post hasn't had political goals? The staffers were all furious at owner Jeff Bezos when the Post wasn't allowed to explicitly endorse Kamala Harris for president.