Long time Gainesville, Georgia talk radio host Martha Zoller, who was a friend of the Media Research Center, very sadly passed away this morning, June 22, at age 67.  At the MRC’s “2015 Gala Featuring the DisHonors Awards: Roasting the Most Outrageously Biased Liberal Reporting,” Zoller took the stage, at the October 8 event held at the National Building Museum in Washington, DC, to present the “Puppy Love Award.”  The three nominees were Rachel Maddow, Charlie Rose and Lawrence O’Donnell. Video below: Long time Gainesville, Georgia talk radio host Martha Zoller, who was a friend of @TheMRC and @NewsBusters, very sadly passed away this morning, June 22, at age 67. At the MRC’s “2015 Gala Featuring the DisHonors Awards: Roasting the Most Outrageously Biased Liberal Reporting,”… pic.twitter.com/g7VxG5jF47 — Brent Baker (@BrentHBaker) June 22, 2026   For several years, Zoller generously gave her time to serve as a judge for the MRC’s annual “Best of Notable Quotables: Awards for the Year’s Worst Reporting.” She regularly invited MRC staff into her radio show to discuss liberal media bias and other issues. AccessNorthGA reported on her death: “One of WDUN’s longest active radio personalities and mainstay Georgia political commentator, Martha Zoller, passed away Monday at the age of 67.  “Zoller, who had hosted The Martha Zoller Show on WDUN AM 550 and FM 102.9 since 2019 and had previously been a regular on-air voice for the station from 1994 to 2009, passed away at Northeast Georgia Medical Center in Gainesville on the morning of June 22 after a sudden illness. She had previously announced plans to step away from daily radio after June 26 due to ongoing health concerns.... “In addition to her radio career, Zoller ran for 9th District U.S. Congress as a Republican in 2012 and was also a member of the State Board of Education, representing District 9 in Northeast Georgia.” Radio Insight has more from her colleagues. Earlier posts on DisHonors Awards participants who have passed away: > “Lucianne Goldberg, RIP, Video of Her at MRC’s 2002 DisHonors Awards” > “Midge Decter, RIP; Video of Her At MRC’s DisHonors Awards in 2005” > “Herman Cain Presents ‘Funny Clips’ at MRC’s 20th Anniversary Gala” > “Witty Anti-Media Allegory and Joke from the Late T. Boone Pickens” > “Witty Remarks By Stan Evans, RIP, at the MRC’s 2006 ‘DisHonors Awards’”  

When the Left complains that Donald Trump's an authoritarian for opposing the "prestige media," be aware that the Left insists that their media establishment must be defined as "trusted news." They've succeeded in pushing that view on the Big Four news apps -- Apple, Google, MSN, and Yahoo. Now Kurt Zindulka at Breitbart cited a report from London’s Daily Telegraph, that the Labour Party government under lame-duck prime minister Keir Starmer is set to hold talks this week on plans to require companies such as Facebook and YouTube to prioritize content produced by publicly-owned media broadcasters like the BBC and Channel 4. Imagine if the Biden administration had demanded that Facebook and YouTube promote PBS journalism as the gold standard. That's a very self-promoting media initiative. But the BBC is best known in recent months for its malignantly false editing of a Donald Trump speech from January 6, making it sound like he called on his supporters to riot inside the Capitol. The following month, the British public broadcaster was forced to admit that it had shared fake news about President Trump supposedly wanting to put former Congresswoman Liz Cheney in front of a “firing squad,” when he actually criticized her as a war hawk: "Let’s put her with a rifle standing there, with nine barrels shooting at her, OK?" Recently, a BBC presenter wrongfully asserted three times that Nigel Farage had said “white, cold rage” was justified in response to Henry Nowak’s death in police handcuffs because his murderer said he was a racist. In reality, the Reform boss had said that “pure, cold rage” was an understandable public response. Labour's plans aren't just intended to prop up failing BBC. The government also plans on pressuring social media firms to promote their supportive private media establishment, including ITV. The Telegraph quoted anonymous sources within the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, said they were pressuring the social-media giants in order to help the British public “discover trusted news sources” on the internet.

The free market reforms instituted by The Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos seem to have taken a firm hold as its old guard commentariat is now openly repudiating the pipe dreams of socialism. The Post columnist Megan McArdle chose to hit leftists with a pretty harsh reality check in her June 21 op-ed headlined, “Socialism is back in vogue. Wait for reality to set in.” McArdle argued that while “[i]t has never been a better time in America to be a socialist” as ardent communists and anti-capitalist politicians now run uber-liberal blue cities like Seattle and New York City, “the excesses of progressive governance are helping to make the party’s brand toxic in the less true-blue areas.” As she concluded in her sub-header, “Taxing the rich sounds good, until they move away.” Who knew capital incentive was a thing for a functioning economy! When considering the recent uptick in prominent CEOs signaling their retaliatory measures to leave Zohran Mamdani’s New York City following his insane taxation threats, McArdle’s implication was that this is reflective of how unworkable the economy-killing socialist model really is: Without the exuberant demand from an oversize millennial generation, mayors are rediscovering the hard reality of urban governance: It is much easier to leave a city than it is to leave a state or a country, so the tax base is more constrained, and the scope for punitive business regulations much smaller. Common sense and socialist utopianism make very strange bedfellows, to say the least. The reason why socialism was a much easier sell in the early-to-mid 20th century, per McArdle, was a “practically virgin tax base” that “was ripe for the plucking.” Now that the U.S. boasts the most punitively progressive tax system in the developed world and with a boatload of feckless government programs and extremely lackluster results to boot, modern-day leftists are hard-pressed to make their old bag of talking points stick in the long-run, despite all the “freebie” bluster. As McArdle concluded: Those [government] services are often absurdly expensive for what they deliver. American infrastructure costs, for example, are a scandal. But every excessive cost is someone else’s income, and that someone will fight like a cornered tiger if you try to reduce their income by one thin dime. This eats up fiscal capacity that might otherwise be used to fund new services. New York, D.C., Seattle and Chicago are wrestling with major structural budget gaps. In the end, economics is economics. And no amount of political pandering will change the way money works or how it operates in real time.  Shoutout to Bezos for making The Post opinion section somewhat readable again. 

“I am not OK with any deportation. I think all deportation is wrong,” Democratic Socialist Darializa Avila Chevalier declared in an interview last Thursday, hoping to become the Democratic Party’s candidate in New York’s 13th congressional district. “I think that we just should not have a system that allows deportation to happen at all,” Chevalier, who is endorsed by Democratic Socialist New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, said in an interview with The New York Editorial Board, in which she attributed all deportation to racism: “I have yet to come up with a reason for why deportation has been used in a way that isn’t rooted in deeply racist ideology.” Chevalier claimed that borders are nothing more than a “social system”: “And, you know, when we talk about the border, a lot of people think about it as like a hard line in the sand, but really it is a system. It is like a social system that we’re engaging in, and more and more, it’s a militarized project. It’s one that is deeply dehumanizing to so many people.” What’s more, deporting criminal illegal aliens is actually a form of “double jeopardy,” she argued when asked if “an individual who arrived here under the Biden open-borders policy and went on to commit a violent crime or series of nonviolent crimes” should “have a right to stay in the U.S. indefinitely”: “To subject non-citizens to both the criminal system and then the deportation system is inherently double jeopardy on the basis of where someone was born, right?” Chevalier, a self-vowed “prison abolitionist,” made the same “double jeopardy” claim last Tuesday during a primary debate as part of a broader condemnation of the nation’s justice system: “It's an imperfect system. It's an imperfect criminal system that I've been critical of, but we have one. And if we truly believe in a system where we don't have double jeopardy on the basis of where someone was born, then we cannot also have a system of punishment that is unique to people who were born elsewhere.” “And so what I have said time again is we have a system that is uh we're supposed to use to handle these issues of criminality and we cannot then add on top of that another system on the basis of where someone was born,” Chevalier added.

The opening of the brutalist Barack Obama Presidential Center in Chicago was cause for reflecting on his supposedly golden two terms of tolerance and “reaching across the aisle” on Friday’s PBS News Hour. Reporter Ali Rogin: Mr. Obama did not mention President Donald Trump, who was not invited, but he did talk about the political divisiveness that's been a hallmark of Trump's two terms. And Obama urged people not to give in to cynicism and despair. For more on what the former president is seeking to communicate through this new institution, I'm joined by Yale University historian Beverly Gage.... Suddenly, the old complaints about how "Republican obstructionism" constrained Obama were gone, as Rogin teed Gage up to praise Obama’s dignified bipartisanship. PBS reporter Ali Rogin: "...the former president mentioned his former rivals for the White House. He mentioned John McCain and Mitt Romney..." Historian Beverly Gage: "[Obama] tried his very best to stand for a kind of reaching across the aisle...." pic.twitter.com/KO9I8ZwIgr — Clay Waters