It was progressive buzzword bingo night on PBS during Monday’s Amanpour and Company as host Bianna Golodryga welcomed environmental activist and director Josh Fox to promote his new HBO documentary. According to Fox, it is fascist to oppose the mass admittance of “climate refugees” into the U.S. and the developed world should pay reparations for colonialism, which is also to blame for climate change. Unfortunately for PBS, a lot of what Fox said was simply wrong. Golodryga set Fox up by wondering, “You go to South America, you go to Brazil, you go to Europe and Italy, where your family originally hails from. But you start the piece with a family who was impacted by the Paradise fires in California. They were displaced in 2018. Why open with their story, and what did you learn from them?”   Director Josh Fox stopped by PBS to promote his new climate change documentary and play some Liberal Buzzword Bingo, "What's home going to be on a planet that is ravaged by climate change? With, you know, a third of the planet on the move, what does the future look like? How do… pic.twitter.com/OG5YYIwSUt — Alex Christy (@alexchristy17) June 23, 2026   Fox lamented that, “American cities are being destroyed by climate change faster than they can be rebuilt. There is very little stability in the future when we think about climate change. So, the American dream is burning at people's feet. And that was one of the first interviews that I did. And I wanted to redefine what it meant to be a climate refugee, to be a climate survivor. A lot of people don't think of those Californian Americans with children who have lost everything as climate refugees. But we have to redefine everyone.” He added, “I mean, right now we're talking about some estimates saying one out of every three people will lose their homes due to climate change, which means that either we're going to be on the move ourselves or we're going to be tasked with welcoming those who are.” That’s not quite accurate. Some studies claim that many Americans are at risk, which is very different than saying they will definitely lose their homes. Of course, when you redefine every wildfire, hurricane, flood, and other natural disaster as being the result of climate change, it is easy to get an eyebrow-raising number. Nevertheless, Fox continued, “So, the question became, where is home? What's home going to be on a planet that is ravaged by climate change? With, you know, a third of the planet on the move, what does the future look like? How do we start to redefine what it is to be human?” Answering his own question, he claimed: And certainly, the response of these fascist governments is to wall people out or to incarcerate them, to abuse them, to detain them, to torture them. And that can't be the answer for billions of people. So, when we look to the future, we have to ask, what future do we want, a future of that kind of hatred and violence or a future of generosity and sharing and togetherness and collaboration, which can often be the answer to a crisis, right?... And we have to start to think about what will we do to counteract this, to stem this tide of hatred that is coming at migrants. I mean, there's an age-old relationship between fascists and the hatred of immigrants.” He further asserted, “I wanted to do with this film is show the stories of people who are normally portrayed as being wrestled to the ground by ICE. We don't hear those stories. We don't see those stories. But these are the people in this film. Any one of us could be subject to those conditions. And, you know, our human reaction has to be to come together and work together or else the future is madness. So, that's what this film is about.” Later, Fox turned his ire on the West more broadly, “And certainly, when we think about the broader global picture, right, it's the countries of the Global South who are not responsible for climate change, right? They're not burning a lot of coal, oil, or gas. They are the victims of centuries of colonialism and empire. And it is the Global North which is doing all the damage to the climate.”   Later, Fox endorses climate reparations, although he doesn't use that word, "And certainly, when we think about the broader global picture, right, it's the countries of the Global South who are not responsible for climate change, right? They're not burning a lot of coal, oil, or… pic.twitter.com/r7AB09AKBD — Alex Christy (@alexchristy17) June 23, 2026   That is simply not true. There is no correlation between a countries CO2 emissions and it being in “the Global North” or “Global South.” The Middle East is considered the Global South, and they produce all sorts of oil. Furthermore, developing countries aren’t going to refuse to power their economies just so Fox can feel good about himself. Then there are China and India, two large CO2 emitters that are also considered part of the Global South. Using a euphemistic term for reparations, Fox added, “So, a big question in this film and what we advocate in the film is for a loss and damage fund, for responsibility coming from the Global North, which certainly would mean to welcome the victims of this crisis, you know, rather than treat them inhumanely. But it was so important to me to find those human moments as a documentarian that are cinema, that are telling that human story.” It is not credible to claim that the reason why people are in the U.S. illegally is because they are escaping climate change. PBS can’t simply use buzzwords like “fascist,” “colonialism,” and “climate refugees” as a substitute for substance. Here is a transcript for the June 22 show: PBS Amanpour and Company 6/22/2026 BIANNA GOLODRYGA: And in filming this piece, you travel around the world. You go to South America, you go to Brazil, you go to Europe and Italy, where your family originally hails from. But you start the piece with a family who was impacted by the Paradise fires in California. They were displaced in 2018. Why open with their story, and what did you learn from them? JOSH FOX: Well, there's a very, very long arc of this movie across six or seven years. Of course, we had to take a break during COVID. But, you know, a lot of Americans are losing their homes. American cities are being destroyed by climate change faster than they can be rebuilt. There is very little stability in the future when we think about climate change. So, the American dream is burning at people's feet. And that was one of the first interviews that I did. And I wanted to redefine what it meant to be a climate refugee, to be a climate survivor. A lot of people don't think of those Californian Americans with children who have lost everything as climate refugees. But we have to redefine everyone. I mean, right now we're talking about some estimates saying one out of every three people will lose their homes due to climate change, which means that either we're going to be on the move ourselves or we're going to be tasked with welcoming those who are. So, in terms of the fires in California, I mean, the hurricanes in the South, certainly the things that we're seeing in the Northeast in terms of incredible climate impacts, there is no geographical answer to where will I be safe? So, the question became, where is home? What's home going to be on a planet that is ravaged by climate change? With, you know, a third of the planet on the move, what does the future look like? How do we start to redefine what it is to be human? And certainly, the response of these fascist governments is to wall people out or to incarcerate them, to abuse them, to detain them, to torture them. And that can't be the answer for billions of people. So, when we look to the future, we have to ask, what future do we want, a future of that kind of hatred and violence or a future of generosity and sharing and togetherness and collaboration, which can often be the answer to a crisis, right? The climate crisis is here. It's here now. This movie is documenting it all across the world, whether it's fires or floods or famine or extreme weather or landslides. These impacts are happening to us now. They're happening in real time, and people are being displaced everywhere across the planet, whether that's Australia or that's Europe or it's the United States. And we have to start to think about what will we do to counteract this, to stem this tide of hatred that is coming at migrants. I mean, there's an age-old relationship between fascists and the hatred of immigrants. GOLODRYGA: Yeah. FOX: And, you know, what I wanted to do with this film is show the stories of people who are normally portrayed as being wrestled to the ground by ICE. We don't hear those stories. We don't see those stories. But these are the people in this film. Any one of us could be subject to those conditions. And, you know, our human reaction has to be to come together and work together or else the future is madness. So, that's what this film is about. … FOX: And certainly, when we think about the broader global picture, right, it's the countries of the Global South who are not responsible for climate change, right? They're not burning a lot of coal, oil, or gas. They are the victims of centuries of colonialism and empire. And it is the Global North which is doing all the damage to the climate. So, a big question in this film and what we advocate in the film is for a loss and damage fund, for responsibility coming from the Global North, which certainly would mean to welcome the victims of this crisis, you know, rather than treat them inhumanely. But it was so important to me to find those human moments as a documentarian that are cinema, that are telling that human story.

It is fortunate that the 12th Congressional District of New York has among the highest number of mental health professionals per capita in the USA. Their services will be sorely needed as revealed by New Yorker editorial staffer Naaman Zhou on Monday in "The NY-12 Primary Is Awash with Money but Short on Belief." Short on belief? After reading what Zhou has to say about two of the better known congressional candidates, the eternally TDS George Conway and social media goofball Jack Kennedy Schlossberg, it is more than obvious that the race is also short on mental health. First Zhou attended what sounds like a therapy session with Conway who appears to be completely obsessed by You-Know-Who 24/7. I recently went to a dive bar on the Upper West Side to attend a happy-hour event with Conway, the former Republican. Staffers handed out bright-blue drink tickets as the candidate, wearing a blue business shirt tucked into jeans, walked in with his dog, a corgi named Clyde. Conway is sixty-two and has brought a kind of sniper’s focus to the race: he has vowed to serve only one term, impeach Trump, and then retire. Conway tried to come up with an issue other than Trump but quickly relapsed back to obsessing about his personal White Whale. When asked about the most important issue facing New York City today, he said, “Affordability,” yet this, too, was connected to Trump. “How do you spend a billion dollars on a ballroom?” Conway asked. “It’s insane. We spent all this money to refurbish this 747 he got from Qatar.” However, as far gone as Conway appears in mental stability he seems to have strong competition in the lack of sanity department from JFK's grandson, Jack Kennedy Schlossberg whose bloated narcissism could be more inflated than Conway's TDS: Schlossberg was the hardest candidate to get a hold of. Perhaps in a nod to the demographics of the district, the candidate, who is thirty-three, has said that he has “the soul of an eighty-five-year-old man, who loves to read and listen to music and hang out with his parents.” In a speech at an assisted-living facility in March, Schlossberg summed up his campaign as being about “past, present, and future.” In the past, he said, people “believed in the federal government, and Congress was competent.” He was the future. His main strength, Schlossberg argues, is not his family but his wit. Before launching his bid for Congress, he made popular social-media videos that were edgy, attention-grabbing, and deeply ironic, with a somewhat himbo persona. (On the way to one campaign event, I looked at my phone to see that Schlossberg had tweeted, with no apparent context, “Men are becoming less physically attractive according to recent studies . . . Do you agree ?”) He has framed this as a form of pro-Democratic political communication, seizing the airwaves from Republicans and Trump. Late in the campaign, I spoke with Schlossberg for a few minutes before he kicked off a rally at Terminal 5, a cavernous venue in Hell’s Kitchen. He told me that he was perhaps unique in the ability to distill information with humor. “In a way,” he said, “other people can’t do both of those things.” I asked him, did he mean the other people in the primary? He told me, “In the whole world.” (He later clarified that he was only being “half serious.”) Apparently Schlossberg thinks so highly of himself that he expects the nomination to be handed to him on a silver platter without even having to work much for it as Zhou explains about an event that the other candidates including Schlossberg planned to attend: A few weeks before Election Day, I was invited by the Schlossberg team to join him as he campaigned at a local park on Roosevelt Island, the easternmost point of the district. It was Roosevelt Island Day—an annual celebration of the island—and around me children screamed and jumped in a bounce house shaped like the Roosevelt Island tram. A little while later... Schlossberg, a campaign staffer told me eventually, had been held up and wasn’t going to make it. The good news is that George Conway, along with other candidates, were able to make it to the event with Conway gleefully engaging in his favorite obsession: One stall at the festival, run by a local Democratic club, featured an “Impeach-O-Wheel”—a gag pinwheel with the faces of Trump officials who should be impeached. A volunteer at the stall told me that Conway had stood at the table and spun it “twenty to thirty times.” Mental health cleanup in NY CD-12! Thank you, Naaman Zhou, for shining a light on the insanity whether you meant to or not.

In a letter to Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO), Major League Baseball (MLB) Commissioner Robert D. Manfred, Jr. blamed a warning issued to three San Francisco Giants players who wrote Bible verses on their Pride Night caps on a “lapse in communication.” In letter dated June 19 posted by Hawley to social media Monday, Manfred responded to a formal letter of inquiry issued by the senator three days earlier regarding the MLB’s warning sent to the players the day after a Pride Night game on June 12. The warning rebuked them for writing “Gen 9:12-16,” a reference to the Bible verse Genesis 9:12-16, on their Pride caps. Players actually had the option to wear their regular caps, but that option was not clearly communicated, Manfred claimed in his letter to Hawley: “Unfortunately, this year the Giants communication with players was inadequate and not clear. Some players apparently did not understand that they had the option to wear their normal uniform and elected to add messages to their hats bearing the pride logo as the result.” The Giants’ “lapse in communication” to players wasn’t discovered by the league until after the warning was issued, Manfred claims in his letter: “After the game had concluded, my office issued a routine oral warning about the uniform policy violation – unfortunately it was issued before we became aware of the Giants’ lapse in communication.” “The players were neither fined nor disciplined, nor will they ever be,” the MLB commissioner promised. Manfred also claimed that the league’s uniform policy is enforced uniformly – but, that’s clearly not the case, Sen. Hawley explained in a June 16 post of his letter to the league: “The league’s claim that it merely forbids ‘writings of any kind’ on its uniforms does not survive a cursory review of the league’s recent history. In 2020, MLB itself turned its uniforms and its fields into a billboard for political and social messages.” Hawley’s letter recalled how MLB allowed jerseys, pitching mounds and other equipment to be altered to broadcast social and political messages: “The league went beyond tolerating speech – it designed speech, promoted speech, and shoehorned social and political messages into the game broadcast to millions of Americans. Yet when three players added a handful of characters citing the Book of Genesis to the caps, the leagued reached for its rulebook.” “This does not appear to be an isolated incident,” Sen. Hawley wrote, citing alleged retribution against a Catholic player on the Washington Nationals team and noting that MLB’s exemption from federal antitrust laws carries with it “a corresponding measure of accountability” and the “closest scrutiny when it appears to wield its market power to punish Americans for their beliefs.”

In a ruling released on Monday, two weeks after oral argument, Florida’s First District Court of Appeal affirmed a ruling from Florida’s 14th Judicial Circuit that threw out a defamation case brought against the Associated Press by Navy Veteran Zachary Young. The ruling means the case will not proceed. As NewsBusters previously reported, the AP’s use of the term “smuggling” was a key part of Young’s case against the newswire, which saw many outlets parrot its allegedly defamatory words. The hearing was part of Young’s hope to get his defamation lawsuits against AP and Puck News back on track after they were tossed out in August 2025. In a Facebook post from February 6 2019, the AP Stylebook wrote this about human smuggling: “Human smuggling or people smuggling typically involves transporting people across an international border illegally, with their consent, in exchange for a fee.” “Well, smuggling can be used in a rhetorical sense where it doesn't imply illegality, but that's not the way it was used in this article,” argued Young’s counsel Lisa Glass to the panel. Glass pointed directly to the definition in the AP’s own stylebook to make her case: So the article says, "Young's business helped smuggle people out of Afghanistan," and then talks about the funding for that. So, those are the definitional elements of the crime of human smuggling as recognized by federal and international law and also as recognized in the AP Stylebook, which says, which talks about smuggling as being cross-border illegal transport -- illegal movement of people across the border in exchange for money. And that’s exactly what AP reported, so they didn't report it in a rhetorical sense. In their rebuttal, AP’s counsel Charles Tobin, who also was part of the team who defended CNN during Young’s successful defamation case, completely dismissed the AP’s own published work as an appropriate citation of how the newswire should be mindful of definitions. Judge L. Clayton Roberts pressed him on it: ROBERTS: The AP publishes something called the AP Style Manual, correct? TOBIN: Correct. ROBERTS: And it defines “smuggling,” and the definition that the AP publishes for their reporters to use, and lots of other people use it, it says “smuggling” is an illegal activity. TOBIN: It says, “human smuggling” is an illegal activity, or “people smuggling,” the whole point of defining a term, Your Honor, we do this in our briefs every day, is to use the term consistently from case-to-case moment-to-moment within it as you're walking through a brief.   In a defamation hearing today, AP's lawyer argues to a panel of judges that their style guide doesn't matter. He argues that it's okay the AP didn't follow their own guidelines when they used a word their book gives a negative meaning that implied illegality to describe the… pic.twitter.com/vmVbu0ijtk — Nicholas Fondacaro (@NickFondacaro) June 9, 2026   Things seemed promising for Young given that two of the judges who would hear the appeal, Judges Roberts and Thomas D. Winokur sided with him to reaffirm that he could seek punitive damages in his successful defamation case against CNN. Both also seemed to put heavy emphasis on definitions and the language used in reports by the media. As of publication, Florida’s First District Court of Appeal had not issued a ruling on Young’s case against Puck News.

ABC’s The View has been under fire for apparent violations of broadcast regulations, and the Media Research Center just handed the Federal Communications Commission the receipts. MRC submitted a public comment to the FCC on Monday detailing just how concerning The View’s partisanship has become. For years, the hosts of The View have engaged in blatant bias, on-air electioneering and the show has not given equal time to opposing candidates running for office. Although broadcast networks are bound by certain rules, especially with regard to coverage in the lead-up to elections, Disney’s ABC has argued that The View is a bona fide news interview program—one of the rare exceptions to the FCC’s Equal Opportunities requirement—and is therefore exempt from fair and equal coverage. However, MRC’s 2,473 pieces, including eight studies submitted as exhibits, would suggest otherwise. “While The View may once have qualified for an exemption, the evidence shows that it has for years operated for political purposes and is therefore not entitled to an exemption to the law,” MRC President David Bozell wrote in the comment. “MRC has the documentation to demonstrate that The View is a partisan political operation that advocates for Democrats and their party, against President Donald Trump and Congressional Republicans, and for the political priorities of the left.” MRC cited examples of electioneering like cohost Ana Navarro explicitly telling viewers, “if Americans want [President Trump’s presidency] to end, want the abuses of power checked, they have got to vote Democrats in November, period.” Cohost Sunny Hostin similarly disparaged Republicans to the benefit of Democrats. “Get rid of Republicans, get rid of the party. The party as it stands now – because it’s the party of white supremacy, it’s the party of insurrectionists, it’s the party of massacres, at this point. It’s the party that you just – you can’t trust it,” she said. Media Research Center also highlighted that The View’s executive producer Brian Teta, who, prior to the presidential election in 2024, said that the show would not be asking then-candidate Donald Trump for an interview. Conversely, he expected that the show would soon host then-President Joe Biden. Meanwhile, MRC studies have repeatedly shown that the number of Democrat-aligned guests far exceeds the number of Republican-aligned guests. Between January and April this year, an MRC study showed that The View interviewed twenty-seven Democrat-aligned guests, including eight elected officials, but had only one Republican-aligned guest. A similar MRC study showed that in 2025, “The View hosted 128 Democrat-aligned guests, including eight sitting Democrat Senators, but featured only a single Republican.” In the comment, MRC emphasized that the FCC must enforce the law, referencing the federal government’s defunding of public funds for National Public Radio (NPR) and Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) via the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB). “Until now, the Commission has turned a blind eye to ABC’s violation of federal equal opportunity law,” wrote the MRC. “By defunding CPB, Congress and President Trump have sent a clear message that this type of noncompliance is no longer tolerated. Agencies that let public resources be steered to partisan political activities do so at their own peril.” [Emphasis added]. The last day to comment on this issue taken up by the FCC was July 22, 2026.