Rep. McBride: “I assume you’re aware that Greenland is indeed part of Denmark.” Rubio: “For now.”

Trump Faked His Assassination Attempt, His Supporters Say open.substack.com/pub/alternet... Duh

Turns out you don't need state media if you can just buy the media. It’s cheaper, cleaner, and you still get to call it a free press.

The same systematic transformation of American media brought you a gutted Washington Post, a Fox News that functions as state media, and a cable landscape indistinguishable from the people it’s supposed to cover.

If you can push out a journalist with nearly 4 decades at the same network, you don’t need to kill a news division. Everyone else gets the message.

What happened to Pelley isn’t a cautionary tale about a difficult personality or an anchor who couldn’t read the room. None of this came during a ratings slump — 60 Minutes posted a 9% jump in viewers at the end of its 58th season, growth Pelley called “unheard-of.”

Pelley revealed that politicians had been invited to select which correspondents would conduct their interviews, and that mismanagement had nearly caused an episode to not air at all, coming within 19 minutes of missing its broadcast.

Exactly. Especially libraries.

“New management has instructed me to inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story,” Pelley wrote in a formal statement. “I’ve been told to include assertions that are unverified. To date, in every case, I have managed to ignore these instructions or refuse them.”

Scott Pelley, a veteran CBS News correspondent with 37 years at the network and anchor of 60 Minutes, is out. CBS fired him “for cause” after he stood up in a staff meeting and accused network leadership of destroying the most successful program in television history.

BREAKING: CBS Fires Scott Pelley For Refusing to Lie open.substack.com/pub/alternet...

By firing Scott Pelley, editor-in-chief of CBS News Bari Weiss has single-handedly destroyed the most brilliant investigative newsmagazine in network history, 60 Minutes. Weiss exemplifies everything MAGA is about: ego, incompetence, and blithering idiocy.

Is Ellison’s acquisition spree — Paramount, the reach for Warner Bros. Discovery, the floated designs on CNN — really the modernization story it’s sold as? Or is it something closer to the methodical acquisition of the instruments that decide what Americans are allowed to find alarming?

so the questions hang there, unanswered because no one with the answers will speak: Was Weiss chosen, in part, because she could be trusted not to flinch — not to let CBS’s investigative reflexes point inward, at the class of people the network’s new owners belong to?

CBS News is being remade by people whose tolerance for proximity to Epstein runs conspicuously high — high enough that “fire the guy in the sex-trafficker’s inbox” became a judgment call instead of a reflex.

And above it all, a stated mission, reported in the Times, that Larry Ellison “assured” Trump he’d turn CBS News “into a more conservative outlet.”

A media owner who moves in the world Epstein worked. An editor-in-chief whose wife is in the files. A flagship hire who is in the files — and whom the editor-in-chief chose to shield rather than cut loose.

Reporting on the correspondence reads “like an A-list Silicon Valley Rolodex” w/Larry Ellison’s name alongside Thiel, Karp & Bezos. Epstein’s genius was never the crimes alone; it was the embedding, the way he made himself a fixture in the rooms where money, tech & pro-Israel politics converged.

the broader network Epstein cultivated — the Silicon Valley billionaires he courted, often on behalf of Israeli interests — is the same world the Ellisons inhabit at the center of.

Weiss reports directly to David Ellison, who runs Paramount Skydance & behind David stands his father Larry Ellison — Oracle founder, one of the richest men alive, a Trump ally & in the words of his own former relation, “an ardent Zionist” who hosted Netanyahu on his private Hawaiian island.

CBS News has spent a generation building credibility on the premise that it holds the powerful accountable. Its new editor-in-chief was handed a contributor w/a documented, self-described, indefensible relationship w/the most notorious sex trafficker of the century & her instinct was to protect him.

At a normal news organization, that’s a firing — fast, clean, before lunch. CBS staffers across the company reportedly expected exactly that. Instead, Paramount made clear the call belonged to Weiss alone. And Weiss, reportedly, refused to fire him.

This was not a reporter taking a meeting. This was a friendship, voluntarily entered and privately treasured, years after everyone knew exactly what Epstein was.

In one, he told Epstein he’d go into “withdrawal when I don’t see him.” In another, he confided that the “biggest problem with becoming friends” with Epstein was that the man’s life was “so outrageous” he couldn’t “tell a soul.”

Then the DOJ released its files, and Attia was in them — not glancingly, but as one of Epstein’s chummy correspondents across dozens of emails. Attia himself called some of them “embarrassing, tasteless, and indefensible.”

The contributor: When Weiss took over CBS she remade it in her image, and one of her proud early hires was Dr. Peter Attia, the longevity influencer with the YouTube following and the 60 Minutes segment.

But hold onto the texture of it — the easy familiarity, the personal-life chit-chat a month later — because it turns out to be the least damning Epstein thread running through the people who now run CBS News.

Bowles has an answer for this, and it’s not a bad one: she went as a journalist, chasing a profile, and she later used the reporting. “So secret that I wrote about the meeting,” she posted, “and used the reporting from it … twice … for the NYT.”

In September '08, a decade after Epstein’s first conviction for sex crimes, Bowles, then a NYT reporter, accepted an invitation to his Manhattan townhouse. The correspondence is in the files: an asst writing on Epstein’s behalf, Bowles replying “Wednesday at 11am is perfect! I’ll be there then!”

Bari Weiss is the editor-in-chief of CBS News. Her wife and Free Press co-founder, Nellie Bowles, appears by name in the DOJ Epstein files — not as a passing mention, but as a confirmed guest.

The Company They Keep: Bari Weiss And Her Wife (Who is Also in The Epstein Files) Work For Men Who Are All Over The Epstein Files open.substack.com/pub/deanblun...

yikes

He looks very sick.

it’s how we ended up with a bourbon-saturated podcast bro as head of the FBI. it’s how we ended up with one of Donny’s personal ambulance chasers as Attorney General. and, to repeat myself, it’s how we ended up with a Fox News dunk-take clown as Secretary of Death.

it’s how we ended up with the whale-head-chainsawing Marvelous Mister Measles in charge of our nation’s healthcare. it’s how we ended up with a plumber’s apprentice with anger management issues in charge of homeland security.

that’s why, instead of a competent administration, we have Donny’s Confederacy of Sewer Clowns, who, from dawn til dusk, fuck shit up. loyalty is all that matters, and it’s how we ended up with a reality show never-was in charge of making sure airplanes don’t fall out of the sky.

‘Bill Pulte has no fucking clue what he’s doing’ shit matters. what matters is that Pulte is 100% loyal to Dear Leader, and he’ll do whatever he’s told, without question. that’s it. loyalty — that’s the bottom line.

Bill Pulte, you’ll be shocked to hear, has absolutely zero experience in the field of intel. what he is, is one of Donny’s real estate cronies from back in the day.

gather ’round, ladies and gents. it’s time to meet your new Acting Director of National Intelligence, replacing the shitcanned Tulsi Gabbard.

letting Oz cosplay as press officer makes about as much sense as putting a piss-drunk Fox News weekend chat show host in charge of the military —or putting a slumlord in charge of national intelligence. which brings us quite smoothly to the other atrocity of the day www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fGI...

for fuck’s sake, it’s been two years since the debate, and the press is still sniffing around Joe’s pant leg. look at this. it’s not a screen shot from July 2024. it’s from yesterday.

how do you think the press would have reacted? oh wait, you don’t have to imagine. after Joe Biden’s one disastrous debate performance, the press had a fucking field day, demanding Biden resign immediately, for the good of the country.

it’s infuriating how willing the worthless scribblers are to take ‘Donny loves going to the doctor’ as ‘he’s got remarkable strength’ as acceptable answers. imagine that Joe Biden had appeared lost and befuddled in public, and then disappeared from view for days on end.

and now, he hasn’t been seen in public for a week. We the People deserve an answer. oh, wait, what am I saying? this is the Donnyverse we’re talking about. we don’t deserve shit — and if you need us, We the People will be over here, fucking ourselves.

he can no longer stay awake during the day. he can’t walk a straight line. both of his hands are rotting away. his bloated cankles resemble moldy eggplants, and his brain went fuckity-bye ages ago.

Dear Leader wasn’t sleeping. he was just resting his eyes for 20 minutes, while filling the Oval Bordello with the piquant scent of ass music. let’s get real. Donny is a mess.

“that amount of energy & mental acuity does not exist in a vacuum. you have to have a vessel to carry it & Trump has a unique ability to just keep going at all hours of the day & with remarkable strength” Oz. say hi to Lindsay while up there in Dear Leader’s ass. www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLII...

<Trump is deliberately humiliating Cabinet members by making them rotate as press secretary. It's relentless imposed humiliation on those who report to him.>

it’s a ginormous ‘fuck you’ to the press to trot out Oz as a stand-in for the on-maternity-leave Karoline Leavitt, and make everyone in the room pretend he’s a serious person.

and Donny loves the experience so much that he volunteers to go back for more? why, does the nice doctor give him a lollipop at the end of the checkup?