TV News LIES

A Wall Street Journal reporter was kicked out of Donald Trump’s press pool for his upcoming weekend trip to Scotland. The removal marked increased retaliation after the newspaper published an article alleging the US president sent Jeffrey Epstein a 50th birthday letter that included a drawing of a naked woman. The US president promptly sued the paper for $10bn.

“As the appeals court confirmed, the Wall Street Journal or any other news outlet are not guaranteed special access to cover President Trump in the Oval Office, aboard Air Force One, and in his private workspaces,” said White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, in a statement. “Thirteen diverse outlets will participate in the press pool to cover the President’s trip to Scotland. Due to the Wall Street Journal’s fake and defamatory conduct, they will not be one of the thirteen outlets on board."

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The tangled and tumultuous relationship between President Trump and media mogul Rupert Murdoch has taken a new, dramatic turn.

Trump is suing Murdoch, his company News Corporation and the Wall Street Journal’s parent company. The suit was filed on Friday, following through on earlier social media postings from the president.

Trump being Trump, he had put the earlier threats in colorful terms.

“I’m going to sue his ass off, and that of his third rate newspaper,” Trump warned, regarding Murdoch, in a social media post on Thursday evening.

On Friday morning, he followed up with another post: “I look forward to getting Rupert Murdoch to testify in my lawsuit against him and his “pile of garbage” newspaper, the WSJ. That will be an interesting experience!!!”

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A federal judge on Friday dismissed President Trump’s lawsuit against famed Watergate journalist Bob Woodward for publishing audio tapes of interviews he conducted with Trump for a 2020 book. 

U.S. District Judge Paul Gardephe’s ruling comes a year and a half after Woodward and his publisher asked the judge to dismiss the suit. Trump’s attorneys had long complained about the lack of progress, repeatedly urging Gardephe to rule.An appointee of former President George W. Bush, Gardephe rejected Trump’s arguments that he is a joint author of the tapes and ruled that even if he wasn’t, the interview responses are protected copyright. 

“There is almost no support in the case law for the notion that an interviewee has a copyright interest in his responses to interview questions, and such a conclusion would run counter to animating principles of the Copyright Act,” the judge pushed back.

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President Trump sued The Wall Street Journal for defamation on Friday after the newspaper published a story detailing an alleged letter Trump sent to Jeffrey Epstein for his 50th birthday.

The 18-page complaint says the story has caused “overwhelming financial and reputational harm” for the president, demanding billions of dollars in damages.

“Defendants concocted this shttps://tse4.mm.bing.net/th/id/OIP.5fn3ZAo9cpISNGxiaG4S2gHaE7?pid=Api&P=0&h=220tory to malign President Trump’s character and integrity and deceptively porthttps://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/5409336-trump-lawsuit-wsj-letter-jeffrey-epstein/ray him in a false light,” the lawsuit states.

Trump threatened to sue the outlet in an interview ahead of publication, and he doubled down on the threat after the story was published Thursday evening.

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For a genocide to occur, everything that people think is wrong has to first be turned on its head. There have been endless examples of this gruesome phenomenon in the past 21 months; Monday’s report on the BBC’s scrapped documentary about the plight of children in Gaza is just the latest instance.

Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone was a rare example of the unbearable experiences of Palestinians being properly investigated by Britain’s public broadcaster. But within the media, this documentary has become a bigger scandal than the suffering of Palestinian children.

When a researcher named David Collier, who has written widely in defence of Israel, discovered that the 13-year-old narrator of the film, Abdullah, was the son of the deputy agriculture minister in Hamas’s government, all hell broke loose. After a deafening chorus of condemnation from pro-Israel lobby groups, British newspapers and the government, the documentary was taken off iPlayer.https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jul/15/bbc-alienated-everyone-gaza-bias

Monday’s review states that the failure to disclose this connection violated the BBC’s editorial guidelines, which stipulate that the corporation must “provide full transparency to its audience”. But it concludes that Hoyo Films, the indepehttps://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jul/15/bbc-alienated-everyone-gaza-biasndent production company that made the film, did not intentionally mislead the BBC. It says Hoyo’s view had been – rightly – that Abdullah’s father had a “civilian or technocratic” position wihttps://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jul/15/bbc-alienated-everyone-gaza-biasthin Hamas as opposed to a political or military role, and that it had simply “made a mistake” in not informing the BBC.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jul/15/bbc-alienated-everyone-gaza-biasMore...

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI has issued an apology after its chatbot Grok made a slew of antisemitic and Adolf Hitler-praising comments earlier this week on X.

On Saturday, xAI released a lengthy apology in which it said: “First off, we deeply apologize for the horrific behavior that many experienced.”

The company went on to say: “Our intent for @grok is to provide helpful and truthful responses to users. After careful investigation, we discovered the root cause was an update to a code path upstream of the @grok bot. This is independent of the underlying language model that powers @grok.”

xAI explained that the system update was active for 16 hours and the deprecated code made Grok susceptible to existing X user posts, “including when such posts contained extremist views”.

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