TV News LIES

Jeremy Scahill, Murtaza Hussain, and Sharif Abdel Kouddous discuss the latest developments in the U.S.-Israel war on Iran with Karim Makdisi, an associate professor at the American University of Beirut and a co-host, with his brothers, of the Makdisi Street podcast. With Hezbollah entering the war and Israel slowly moving troops into Lebanon, they discuss the spreading conflict in the context of Israel’s broader agenda in the region.

“If you go back to the question of resistance, if you go to the question of Hezbollah, I think their calculation now is to say, look, if Iran falls, we’re doomed, Hezbollah’s doomed, Lebanon is doomed,” Makdisi said. “So this is a situation where we need to enter in whatever capacity possible and support this particular attack or do whatever they can do in order to support this larger regional war, because otherwise the Israelis with the Americas are going to just pick off each of these entities one at a time in Gaza, in Lebanon, in Iran, etc.... This is for them an existential situation, as it is in Iran.”

Attempting to weaken or overthrow Iran, they note, is a means to support Israel’s campaign of annihilation in Palestine and beyond.

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Just hours after Netflix ceded the fight for Warner Bros. to Paramount, CNN‘s CEO Mark Thompson tried to alleviate anxieties over the pending new owners in a staff memo: “Despite all the speculation you’ve read during this process, I’d suggest that you don’t jump to conclusions about the future until we know more.”

Newsrooms, though, are notoriously made up of skeptics, for good reason in an environment of layoffs and buyouts, and, more recently, corporate efforts to woo President Donald Trump. Despite Thompson’s message, the mood among many at the cable news network on Friday was “beyond bleak,” per one source.

Paramount has yet to comment on its specific plans for the network after emerging as the winner for WBD, but in the months since Warner Bros Discovery put itself up for sale, there has been rampant speculation about what life will look like if the David Ellison-led company owned CNN.

Fears only accelerated after the Wall Street Journal reported in December that Ellison made assurances to Trump that he would make major changes to the network, long a target of the president’s. Ellison’s appearance at Trump’s State of the Union address, as a guest of one of his most stalwart congressional supporters, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), probably didn’t help soothe fears of the network’s future editorial direction.

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Almost 60 Palestinian journalists detained in Israeli prisons since the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack have been beaten, starved and subjected to sexual violence, including rape, a report alleges.

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) reviewed dozens of testimonies, photographs and medical records documenting what it describes as serious abuses by Israeli soldiers and prison guards against Palestinian reporters. The report draws on in-depth interviews from 59 Palestinian journalists. Of those interviewed, 58 reported being subjected to what they described as torture while in Israeli custody.

“While conditions varied at different facilities, the methods those interviewed recounted – physical assaults, forced stress positions, sensory deprivation, sexual violence, and medical neglect – were strikingly consistent,” the report states.

The Israeli prison service and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have both strongly rejected the allegations.

Journalist Sami al-Sai, who has reported for the Qatari broadcaster Al Jazeera Mubasher and the local broadcaster Al-Fajer TV, said he was taken to a small cell in Megiddo prison, and soldiers removed his trousers and underwear, and penetrated him with batons and other objects.

“I did not speak to anyone inside the prison about what happened, except for two senior detainees who have been imprisoned for 25 years,” Sai said.

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A record 129 journalists and media workers were killed in the course of their work in 2025, two-thirds of them by Israeli forces, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ).

It was the second consecutive year in which killings of members of the press reached unprecedented levels, and the second year running in which Israel was responsible for roughly two-thirds of the total, the New York-based independent organisation, which documents attacks on journalists worldwide, said in its annual report published on Wednesday.

sraeli fire killed 86 journalists last year, the CPJ said, the majority of them Palestinians reporting from Gaza. The toll also included 31 media workers killed in a strike on a Houthi media centre in Yemen, described by the group as the second deadliest attack on journalists it had ever recorded.

Israel was responsible for 81% of the 47 killings that the CPJ classified as intentionally targeted, or “murder”. It said the actual figure was probably higher, owing to access restrictions that made verification difficult in Gaza.

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Anderson Cooper decides to walk away from broadcast TV’s most prestigious news show, 60 Minutes. Stephen Colbert takes his interview with a rising Democratic politician to YouTube instead of his own late-night show. The CBS Evening News anchor presents a misleading version of the network’s own exclusive reporting on Ice arrests. And a news producer writes a farewell note to her CBS News colleagues blaming the loss of editorial independence.

If you connect the dots, the picture of what’s happening at CBS becomes all too clear. That picture comes into even sharper focus once you recall an underlying factor: the network’s parent company is trying to get a big commercial deal done and needs the help of the Trump administration to bring it over the finish line.

“Media capture” is the name that University of Pennsylvania scholar Victor Pickard gives to what we’re seeing unfold before our eyes.

What’s happening at CBS and elsewhere “isn’t a singular breakdown”, Pickard writes in a new analysis.

It’s a whole cascade of layers – media ownership, control and market structure – that “endanger our information and communication systems, our First Amendment freedoms, and our democracy”.

In the CBS situation, the immediate motivation is easy to understand. The network’s parent company, Paramount Skydance, wants to buy Warner Brothers Discovery, which also owns CNN – one of Donald Trump’s favorite punching bags and a news organization he would love to see take the same rightward turn as CBS.

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President Donald Trump escalated his push to raise tariffs without the Supreme Court's backing on Feb. 21, announcing he would up the 10% worldwide tariff he announced after the nation's highest court ruled against him to 15%.

"Based on a thorough, detailed, and complete review of the ridiculous, poorly written, and extraordinarily anti-American decision on Tariffs issued yesterday, after MANY months of contemplation, by the United States Supreme Court," Trump wrote in a Truth Social post, the worldwide tariff would be raised to 15%, "effective immediately."

It came after Trump lashed out at the Supreme Court on Feb. 20 over what he called its "deeply disappointing" decision to overturn the emergency tariffs that he imposed on countries around the world.

At a press conference after the ruling, Trump said he was "ashamed" of some Supreme Court justices "for not having the courage to do what’s right for our country.”

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