National "Public" Radio can NOT find the story of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani's wife Rama Duwaji putting "Likes" on pages celebrating the October 7 massacre in Israel. But it CAN find stories where Mamdani is the victim of cruel Republican social media posts. GOP 'Islamophobia' is hot news, and Muslim Democrat antisemitism is not. Reporter Brian Mann's online article was splashed on NPR's home page with this headline:  NYC's Mamdani condemns Sen. Tuberville's anti-Muslim posts as 'bigotry' It began: New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is condemning a series of anti-Muslim social media posts by Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama as "bigotry." On X, Tuberville reposted an image of Mamdani next to a photo of the deadly 9/11 terror attacks in New York City, along with the words "the enemy is inside the gates." Mamdani, the city's first Muslim mayor, has been the subject of repeated verbal attacks during the Ramadan season now underway. Tuberville's second image was Mamdani hosting the first official Ramadan iftar at City Hall. NPR, normally so hostile to the mingling of church and state, makes an exception for socialist Muslims. On Wednesday, the NPR talk show 1A devoted a whole hour to "Christian nationalism" and how "concerns grow over the crumbling of the separation between church and state in the Trump administration’s military."  Mamdani also hosted an iftar dinner on March 8 for Hamas-backing Mahmoud Khalil, who drew a laudatory victim profile on NPR this week. Khalil's protest group at Columbia University not only backed the October 7 slaughter like Mrs. Mamdani, they boasted online that "We are Westerners fighting for the total eradication of Western civilization." They suggest oppressed territories of the world include Hawaii, Guam, and Puerto Rico. Most Americans would consider that an "enemy" statement. On March 12, a Washington Free Beacon article by Jon Levine had a new scandal, that Mamdani's wife "provided a featured illustration for an essay by an author who called Hamas's Oct. 7, 2023, attack 'spectacular,' has frequently decried what she describes as 'Jewish supremacist vampires, and said Jewish Israelis are 'rootless soulless ghouls.'" NPR couldn't find that, but Mann platformed Mamdani's lecture on tolerance: "When I hear such hatred and disdain unchecked in its rancor, I feel a loneliness and isolation that I know many of you have felt as well," Mamdani said. "Who here has been told, you do not belong in New York City? Who here has been told, go back where you came from?" On Thursday, Tuberville also claimed falsely that "Americans are being gunned down in the streets almost daily by Radical Islamists." Experts say attacks in the U.S. by Muslim extremists are rare and are "not resurgent," according to a 2025 study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Republican leaders have been largely silent about Tuberville's anti-Muslim posts. A growing number of Democrats, meanwhile, have condemned his statements. New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, the Democratic minority leader, described Tuberville's posts as "mindless hate." Can you believe that? We don't have daily shootings by radical Islamists. But in a week filled with violent attacks by radical Muslims -- in Virginia, Michigan, and outside Mamdani's mansion in New York -- NPR is going to say attacks are RARE?  Even then, NPR "domestic extremism correspondent" Odette Yousef and host Scott Detrow never breathed the word "Muslim" in a March 13 evening roundup of the Muslim violence. The next morning, Yousef did it again -- the assailant in Michigan was a "naturalized Lebanese American citizen," and host Scott Simon only used the M-word to refer to "an attempted attack on anti-Muslim protesters in New York." In addition to Mann's article on Sen. Tuberville, NPR has been on a streak of GOP "Islamophobia" stories, leaping off Rep. Andy Ogles tweeting about Muslims being incompatible with America. March 9: Tennessee GOP Rep says Muslims 'don't belong in American society'  March 11: What role do politics play in increased anti-Muslim rhetoric? March 13: Muslim voters react to Rep. Andy Ogles' comments that they 'don't belong' March 13: Unlike past eras, anti-Muslim GOP rhetoric draws little pushback from party leaders March 14: House GOP leadership silent as more members post anti-Muslim statements This whole trend is revealing, since vicious antisemitism among Muslim politicians, from Mamdani to Omar to Tlaib, "draws little pushback" from so-called "public radio" journalists. 

Thursday was a day of terror at a Synagogue in Michigan and at Old Dominion University in Virginia, and it was the latter incident that provided what must have been an uncomfortable situation for those in charge of making editorial decisions in the liberal media. No one was killed at the Synagogue, except the person who drove his bomb filled car into the building in an obvious terror attack, but one person was killed and two wounded in the other, obvious terror attack at an ROTC classroom at Old Dominion, but would the media tell all about that attacker? The answer for the big three network nightly newscasts is mostly yes. Mohammed Jalloh, the shooter who was killed in the attack, served in the National Guard, and in 2016 pleaded guilty to attempting to provide material support to ISIS, and was sentenced to 11 years in prison. That's the easy part. But would the media specifically raise the issue of his early release, and would they play the clip of the FBI Agent in charge who said that Jalloh shouted  "Allahu Akbar" during Thursday's attack. ABC's Pierre Thomas did both on ABC's World News Tonight THOMAS: Tonight terror on the campus of Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, with members of the school's ROTC program targeted by a suspect with ties to ISIS. The suspect has been identified by the FBI as 36-year-old Mohamed Jalloh, a former member of the Virginia National Guard. Sources tell ABC News he calmly walked into the classroom, asked if it was an ROTC class, and then shot the instructor several times, and two students who were wounded. The instructor later died. And then came the key statement from FBI Special Agent Dominique Evans, "We have confirmed reports that prior to him conducting this act of terrorism, he shouted, or stated Allahu Akbar." And Thomas concluded his report by providing specific information, and raising some good questions. THOMAS: Jalloh was convicted in 2016 of attempting to provide material support to ISIS and trying to acquire weapons for an attack on U.S. Soil. He served eight years of an 11-year prison sentence and was released in 2024. Jalloh was under five-year supervised release in which he was to check in with his probation officer regularly. He was also subject having his internet activity reviewed. But Tonight so many questions, including how a convicted felon got a gun and whether he's recently been under surveillance. MUIR: Yeah, major questions moving forward. Both CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly News also presented Agent Evans saying that Jalloh had stated Allahu Akbar during the attack, but left the viewer to do the math on his sentence, without spelling it out the way ABC's Thomas did, that he served only 8 years of an 11 year sentence.  Based on past performance it can certainly be considered surprising that the big 3 networks all edited in the Allahu Akbar remark. Meanwhile, both The PBS News Hour and FNC's Special Report With Bret Baier skipped the statement while each one did say that the attack is being investigated as an act of terrorism. 

A founder of the Mexican Communist party.  Does that sound like someone for whom politics in general was incidental and communism in particular was just a passing fad? Of course not, but that is how Mexican muralist Diego Rivera is often depicted in the media. As for his sometime wife and lover, Frida Kahlo, she was even more fanatic in her devotion to communism. She was not only a party member, but a staunch Stalinist as well. And yet it appears that the their communist connection which was at the core of their beings as well as their art, as the Diego Rivera painting on this page reveals, could be whitewashed out of their media portrayals yet again. The evidence for this comes from a Variety story on Thursday by Anna Marie De La Fuente, "Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera Netflix Series in the Works." The closest Variety comes to mentioning their communism comes in this brief observation in passing: "The still untitled show will delve into their lives and explore how shifting political, social, and artistic upheavals shaped their relationship and oeuvre." Blink and you would have missed the vague reference to communism. Actually, if you don't blink you also miss the communism reference, because it doesn't exist.  It would be interesting if the Netflix series about Rivera and Kahlo dares to at least touch upon the devout communism of both those artists. However, judging from past media attempts to cover the pair, one should not expect too much. A good example was the 2002 big budget film Frida starring Salma Hayek that absurdly treated her (and Diego Rivera's) communism only very lightly. The leftist Current Affairs wrote in April 2025 about the absurdity of ditching the communism at the core of of Kahlo and Rivera in "How Frida Kahlo Went From Communist to Kitsch." ...The definitive biography of Kahlo is Hayden Herrera’s Frida, from 1983, and it covers her politics in considerable detail—from her childhood fascination with the ongoing Mexican Revolution, to her reading of Marx and Hegel as a teenager, to her later engagements with both Trotskyism and Stalinism. But sadly, a lot more people get their history from big-budget movies than from 400-page hardcover books, especially in the United States. There are two major films about Kahlo’s life: one a dramatization from 2002 with Salma Hayek in the lead role and the other a documentary released on Amazon Prime in 2024. Like Herrera’s book, both are simply called Frida, and both have their strengths. But they also distort their subject in important ways and, above all, downplay Kahlo’s devotion to the communist cause. The 2002 Frida, directed by Julie Taymor, really ought to be called Frida and Diego, the title it reportedly had at one point during its long and troubled development. Ostensibly, it’s an adaptation of Herrera’s book. At the time, Harper Perennial even released a new edition of the biography with the movie poster as the cover. But really, the film is less a straightforward biopic and more a romantic drama. It frames Kahlo’s life mainly through her romantic and sexual relationships—primarily with fellow artist Diego Rivera, but also with Leon Trotsky when he was exiled to Mexico in the late 1930s, and occasionally with a variety of female side characters. The tagline on one of the cinema posters reads “prepare to be seduced,” and that sums up the film’s approach. When communism comes up, it’s usually because Rivera (played with aplomb by Alfred Molina) or Trotsky (a slightly underwhelming Geoffrey Rush) are expounding about it. Kahlo takes part in their arguments and their protests; she helps Rivera crank out communist pamphlets on a clunky printing press and supports him when he feuds with Nelson Rockefeller over his decision to paint Lenin into his latest mural. But she seems to have little political initiative of her own. The implication is that she’s a communist mainly because the men in her life are. Instead of a portrait of her as a serious political thinker, we get a lot of prurient stuff about her sex life, whether she’s seducing the same woman Rivera has just slept with (out of jealousy, it’s implied) or having a fling with the much-older Trotsky. The performances save this version of Frida from being truly bad—both Hayek and Molina inhabit their roles perfectly—and Taymor’s use of color, plus the occasional stop-motion skeleton, bring Kahlo’s art to vibrant life. The film looks like one of her paintings, but as a portrait of the painter, it’s incomplete. It remains to be seen if the Netflix series will reflect at least a semblance of reality and cover in proper detail the very strong association with communism of both Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo instead of pretending that it was a mere sideshow for both.

This month, HBO Max's critically acclaimed medical drama The Pitt introduced an illegal immigrant sob story into its second season. Each season of The Pitt covers a 15-hour shift in a busy Pittsburgh emergency room. Patient stories introduced in one episode continue on in later episodes as the hospital shift progresses. On March 5th, in the episode "3:00 P.M.," a 12-year-old Haitian boy named Jude (Anthony B. Jenkins) was rushed into the ER after accidentally blowing off two of his fingers with a firecracker. He had a blood alcohol level of .08 in his system. Due to the alcohol in his system, hospital staff called social services. Jude's doctors and social worker then met with his sole guardian, an adult sister named Chantal (Sasha Compère). Chantal revealed that she is overwhelmed with work, school and caregiving because her parents were deported back to Haiti 9 months ago. She and her brother are anchor babies. Her parents desperately want Jude to stay in the United States. WATCH: HBO Max's The Pitt Pushes Deportation Sob Story pic.twitter.com/4rPA8ZvFgm — HollywoodClips (@awardshowclips) March 13, 2026 Needless to say, Jude's story is a beautiful example of illegal immigrant families enriching American life. What country wouldn't want a budding alcoholic who blows off his fingers with fireworks? As the episode ends, Jude's fate remains in the balance. Will he be able to stay in the United States and clog up future emergency rooms with his delinquency? Or will he be sent to live with his lawbreaking parents in a country Hollywood celebrities insist is definitely not a "sh*thole"? Season two of The Pitt is keeping the audience in suspense. Stay tuned. PS: The CBS drama Matlock had an immigration plot on February 26. A client of Matty Matlock's firm is detained by ICE agents. He's a government contractor, but his Mexican parents never told him he is not a citizen. The lawyers ended up preventing deportation, but the client lost any right to be a government contractor. 

CNN made headlines this week after two members of their London bureau were caught at a regime party at the Iranian Embassy in the U.K., thanks to images released by Iran’s state media Iran Press. But they weren’t the only media present at the gathering. Sky News international affairs editor Dominic Waghorn could also be seen in Iran Press images rubbing shoulders with an Embassy official, taking to X to defend those there.     In a series of X posts on Thursday March 12 and Friday March 13, Waghorn belligerently defended attendance at the event by the Labour Party officials from Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Foreign Ministry and the press. “It's called diplomacy and journalism, things the @dailytelegraph once used to know a bit about before its sad demise, don’t [sic] be so absurdly disingenous [sic],” he wrote. What solicited that kind of response? A post from Telegraph political correspondent Genevieve Holl-Allen touting the original report: “EXC: Foreign Office staff attended an event at the Iranian embassy to celebrate the Islamic revolution weeks after the regime massacred thousands of its people Civil servants heard a speech from the ambassador praising Iran’s “remarkable accomplishments”   It's called diplomacy and journalism, things the @dailytelegraph once used to know a bit about before its sad demise, dont be so absurdly disingenous https://t.co/MIxk6s2env — Dominic Waghorn (@DominicWaghorn) March 12, 2026   Waghorn bitterly lashed out at The Telegraph reporters with a dose of agism: “Just to be clear again journalists and diplomats go to all kind of national day events at all kinds of embassies.  The young staff at the @dailytelegraph may be forgiven for not knowing that yet but the rest of you for goodness sake behave[.]”   Just to be clear again journalists and diplomats go to all kind of national day events at all kinds of embassies. The young staff at the @dailytelegraph may be forgiven for not knowing that yet but the rest of you for goodness sake behave — Dominic Waghorn (@DominicWaghorn) March 13, 2026   In a Thursday post, Waghorn took to defending CNN from critics who took issue with how friendly CNN had been with their coverage of Iran since the conflict began: The 'who needs Iranian state media when you've got CNN' trope is crass and cynically contrived to discredit a team of journalists who took risks to do their job and tell the story inside Iran.  Peddled by propagandists or people who should know better.  Get over it.   The 'who needs Iranian state media when you've got CNN' trope is crass and cynically contrived to discredit a team of journalists who took risks to do their job and tell the story inside Iran. Peddled by propagandists or people who should know better. Get over it. — Dominic Waghorn (@DominicWaghorn) March 12, 2026   “Top Iranian official pushes back against Trump’s ‘fire and fury’ invoking the Shia spirit of resistance.  Farsi for ‘bring it on’,” he touted in a March 10 post. Judge by a review of Waghorn’s X account, he’s a pretty staunch leftist.