Reporters like Oliver Darcy and David Folkenflik serve as sounding boards for the radical-left staffers inside liberal media outlets who are furious whenever owners or executives threaten to move any outlet toward the center, or make any move that seems to please President Trump. Vicious bias is equated with the gallant exercise of freedom of speech.
Managing Editor Curtis Houck explains what's been in the media news this week. In his newsletter venture named Status, Darcy freaked out over Eliana Johnson, editor of the Washington Free Beacon, being called in for a meeting at The Washington Post. It was described as “yet another sign of the rightward direction that Will Lewis, along with owner Jeff Bezos, hopes to steer the storied newspaper.”
At CBS News, Darcy was alarmed at how a new executive named Jeff Shell forced them to accommodate Trump over his lawsuit against 60 Minutes intended to force a transcript and video of their Kamala Harris interview. CBS executives "later told associates they were disturbed that Shell was inserting himself into the newsroom’s decision-making, given that Paramount’s merger with Skydance has yet to close and that corporate interference in journalistic matters is traditionally anathema. Even more troubling, Shell seemed to believe CBS News should have simply appeased Trump, despite the dangerous precedent it would set.”
At the Los Angeles Times, Darcy spread the news that an attempt to use A.I. to generate opposing viewpoints ended up with a soft summary of the Ku Klux Klan. This might be what machines do, that lack the human instinct to know how inflammatory that is.
NPR's Folkenflik appeared on All Things Considered on Wednesday night to warn about Trump truncating free speech. He claimed there was a "desire to control the flow of information to the public from kind of a pro-MAGA, pro-Trump point of view, rather than to say that, hey, we welcome the fractious free flow of opinion and information from all sides."
Does anyone believe you could define NPR's broadcasts as a fractious free flow of diverse opinions? Conservatives are either mocked or ignored entirely.
Folkenflik implied Trump was at odds with free speech: "This tension between Trump's desire for kind of a control of the message from the White House, from the Oval Office, colliding with the -- at least the spirit and perhaps even the law as embodied in the Bill of Rights."
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