Episode 795: Networks, News Apps Skipping Popular 'SAVE Act'

0:00If journalists pose as guardians of the public interest, why do they get on the wrong side of 80-20 issues? It's the NewsBusters podcast. I'm Tim Graham, executive editor with me today, Curtis Houndk, NewsBusters Managing Editor, watching everything at all times, including the briefing. Yes. And our MRC Free Speech America Director, Michael Morris. Yes. Welcome. Thank you for having me on. So I wanted to start with the 80-20 issue of the moment, certainly for us, and that is the Save America Act that would say, let's have some voter ID in all 50 states, not just 32. Right. We have 18 Rig Kelsa Trent Blue states that all voted for Kamala Harris last time, isn't that interesting? Right. Well, we first have to do this set up here to kind of preempt the left's argument, saying, so this is nationalizing elections, okay, we're talking about voter ID, about the entry

1:02to vote, about how you go about voting, or what you have to do to prove you are who you say you are, but then the rules then are then dictated by the states as per the Constitution. Unlike the Democrats, and the liberal media loved this, HR1, under a few Congresses ago at this point, I tried to pass a bill that would actually nationalize the elections about when it came to early voting, the methods that you could vote, the control of polling places, and those sorts of things. This has to do with voter ID, and a Harvard poll. So guys, this is not a poll that we commissioned at NewsBusters, our friends at Newsmax, or Real America's Voice. This is Harvard Harris poll from March 2 that said 81%, hence the 80-20 issue, support voter ID, 74%, believe you should have to prove your citizenship when you register to vote. And 61%, I thought this one was the most surprising, actually, support voter rolls being given to DHS to cross-reference to ensure non-citizens are not on the rolls.

2:09Will they treat that like a scandal? And also, President has thrown in boys and girls' sports to protecting women and those sorts of things, so it's kind of the common sense bill. Yeah. And it's been zeroes across the broadcast networks and the apps, and we can get it into that. But it's been zeroes across the board because it's very simple. It would be the kind of thing that if it was explained in a very clearing and size manner, people would say, I don't understand why. Yeah, I mean- You mean we don't have that? Already? So Jeff Dickens did this from February 11 when the State of America asked to pass the house. Correct. So March 10, there was zero seconds, and Mike, you guys found the same thing. Yes. Except for one. Yeah. So Trump doubled down over the weekend on Sunday, actually. So we looked at March 8th through March 10th. So a little bit shorter time period, obviously. But you know, Curtis is right. The left has been on this issue for a while. They've been trying to nationalize the elections themselves, and it's funny now that all of a sudden, oh no, we're against this-

3:09One aspect of voting. Right. Right. And before, remember, they want a popular vote. To override. I think they- Yeah. Yeah. They wanted an amendment even to override, to completely distort the election. But back to the big four news apps. Apple news, Google news, MSN news, and Yahoo news. That's what we're talking about here. None of them save Yahoo news actually covered the Save Act. Okay. And when Yahoo news covered it, who did they show? They showed NBC news. All right. And then they showed- That's right. That's right. And they showed Yahoo news. You know, Yahoo likes itself some Yahoo. All right. All right. Almost as much as Narcissist likes looking at himself and meerk. All right. You know, actually, look back. I thought, well, how many times has Yahoo linked to itself since the year turned over? All right. So since January, there have been 1400 stories on Yahoo news that we've looked at in the morning editions. All right.

4:1020 a day. And 537 times Yahoo news has cited itself. Oh. Well, it's like the Jim Acosta of News Am. Yeah. Staring itself in the mirror. Huh. So I mean, this is the interesting part where it's like, I think what we would guess is they're not covering it because it's popular. It's a Trump initiative, you know, and yes, this is where he's now saying, I'm not going to sign anything else until we get this done. We send it majority leader. Thune is like, I can't get this done because we can't get enough Democrats to vote for it. Yeah. In the media, I think they've applied two things here, guys. Number one is we laid out. It's not particularly controversial as per the polling because if it were controversial, this is something that they could say. The president is looking to do this. It's illegal under the Constitution. They can use a lot of their doom and gloom language that they like to apply. But when the bill and its contents are very kind of straightforward, it's a yes or no

5:11question. Are you a citizen or are you not? Do you have a driver's license or don't you, you know, I mean, that kind of thing. Only citizens can vote in these federal elections. And then also it's about if something were passed and signed by the president, it would go against the media narrative that, oh, one side of the aisle is against getting anything done. Yeah. Because it's bogged down in their just kind of these fringe policies when, as per the polling here, we're not talking like 48, 49, 51% of Americans, we're talking again, 80, 20 issues. Yeah. Well, they're usual line and I know this was in the news apps. You're going to disenfranchise voters and just like, you know, they have this habit, the Democrats, they run around and they're saying, you're going to cut people off of food stamps and they won't give you the, the actual point, which is, yes, we're cutting the non-citizens off food stamps. We're cutting people off food stamps who refuse to observe work requirements and they leave

6:12all that stuff. Oh, that's an asterisk. We don't need to go there. And I mean, so yes, disenfranchising illegal immigrant voters, people favor that. And what's wild is, you know, we're all married here. Okay. Yeah. The left actually uses the line in the media tells this that somehow it's going to make it more difficult for women to vote as if they're stupid, we're all married. My wife's not stupid. She's a very smart and intelligent lady. She would know exactly what to do. And somehow minorities also are too stupid to do this sort of thing. Right. Everyone's got an idea that needs an idea. You know, so this is not a, this is not a big deal yet. The left wants to tell you totally different. Well, that's a Rio, to tell that to hispanics in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas that you're too stupid to have identification. Curtis's wife, Ali, they're the, they're the newest couple. Ali didn't have a tough time. No. She's a driver's license. Yeah. The first time she had somebody at the DMV tried to say that you didn't have enough proof. So she just went to a different location and then all our DMV. Yeah. But no, the, so the main one obviously for men out there who don't know that this kind

7:16of process, you have to go first is the Social Security Administration. That's really the first step for her. And, you know, other than maybe the time to get an appointment other than that, like the actual process itself was very easy. And it's not her incompetence that we're talking about here. It's the government. Right. Right. Right. And they say that everybody has their birth certificate. What? And also, if you don't have your birth, there's ways to get another one. Yes. A lot of people have done this on X where it's like Bernie Sanders, like, I don't know how to do it. And they're like, here's how you do it. Dummy. You're a United States Senator. Are you smart enough to vote on the floor if you can't figure out how to vote in real life? I mean, it is embarrassing. But this is where I think I want to drive home this point today, which is the news media could have a bias in favor of the public and the public interests. So for example, the media could be against gerrymandering, no matter which parties doing it. That would be okay. You could be against it in Texas, and they were.

8:17You could be against it in Virginia, and there's silence. Right. And I talked about this that Kevin Kylie from California, who is now an independent. He has gone on CNN many times and made this point, and their retort to him is, well, but the president is doing this and the president is so blatant about it, hey, did you hear what he just said? Yeah. Did you hear what he said that he's against it, the issue writ large. And this is where the elite media and the blue sky brigade just do not want you engage in nuance or substance because a lot of the time, good public servants or on the left or right, ones that are very articulate, I don't think they're being vague about their intentions. A lot of this is a yes or no question. Yeah. And they're confusing, I think. The public interest with their partisan interest, I mean to them everything is, if it benefits the Democrats, it benefits everyone. Right.

9:17And the elite media cheered writ large when Indiana didn't pass their jammer. Yeah. They thought it was statesmen like yes. And they've been, and they've been fighting tooth and nail to pass Virginia at the same time. So, you know, it's, it's truly what they really haven't done much on, on redistricting in Virginia. And then Curtis will come show me that map and we'll both go, this map looks ridiculous. And here again, all they would have to do is put the map up and have people look at it. And they would be like, what on earth are this, this defines, I mean, it might not be as silly as like Illinois, some of the districts they have in some of these states that you, you could do, this is something, community, late night comedians could do. Let's get the funniest looking gerrymandered districts and say, who on earth came up with this? Right. The lobster districts. Yeah. I mean, they could draw, you know, like have little kids draw congressional districts. And mold does that with stuff with little kids all the time. Again, it's not, this, in Godfeld success has blown to this point, I don't know, we're

10:19getting our topic slightly, but it is, goes to show that comedy is possible, you know, on the left or right. They just say, well, Trump just makes it so easy and you're like, no, it makes it so easy for you just to say your nasty things, you know, and think it's funny. Curtis says CBS News again showed you that you could do a good government story. This, but it was about fraud in California. Uh oh. Uh oh. Yeah. And so this is a stunning statistic in 2023, the last year there's been data on this nationwide Medicare hospice fraud because hospice care is often paid out using Medicare dollars because people print it out differently or elderly at the end of their lives, $200 million lost. And that's just an estimate in fraud. This is absolutely remarkable in Adam Yamiguchi, a correspondent out there in LA, went to every, I analyzed every hospice in LA County.

11:22So not just the city of Los Angeles, more than 1,700 of them. And in one area of LA in just a three mile stretch, there was 500 hospice company hospitals. So let me say that again into the camera right here, 500 hospices in a three mile stretch. Yeah. That's crazy. Even in high density areas of the country, that is unbelievable. And this is not, again, a left or right issue. It just so happens that this is a hard left state. But this is something guys that the news media should be interested in. It's a public interest. It's something everyone deals with unfortunately. And so and it's our tax dollars and it involves a state and the federal government because while it is federal dollars, it is states that administer these programs as well. And even on camera spoke to a California attorney general, Ron Bonnetta, and he said, how can a fraudulent company go for a full year and still not have their license revoked?

12:22And he gave this boilerplate like, we're working really hard on this and it's still a work in progress. Well clearly it is. Yeah. But again, this is not, I think this is just such good government stuff. You and I talked this morning too. You could do defense spending. You could do defense contract. Absolutely. You could do things right that liberals would like. But it's still good government because we're all, we should all be against government fraud. You know. And just like the CBS reporter in Minnesota was doing all the. Yeah, Jonah Kaplan, yeah. You know, it's like this is what everybody can be for this kind of journalism because it's on behalf of everyone, you know, not just in favor of one party or the other. And you, you don't have to always calculate your news by, ooh, who does it affect? But I mean, obviously everything we see is like that. And we see this too, probably like on the apps too. I mean, some folks may say this is born, these kinds of stories may come across as boring, but again, like in this particular example, like end of life care, that is something that

13:24all of us deal with at a certain point. That's right. And those people can be really professional. In the case of my father, they, boy, they knew exactly what to do. And they, not only were good at it, but they were good at comfort, you know. So yes, there's nothing controversial about hospices as long as you're not defrauding the taxpayer. So Michael, in the month of February, once again, you, you have these numbers, like Google News, 314 to 11, in terms of using left wing sources and right wing sources. MSN was 68 to 2. And it's like, it's not just when we say leftist sources, they're like, well, that's just you guys the way you categorize the Washington Post and the New York Times and PR. But it's, you know, you're, like your graphs will say, Huff Post, Huff Post, that's a news site. Yeah. So Curtis, you brought up the big four news apps with regard to the hospice care. We're actually looking into that just to tease the story, don't want to let the cat of the bag. We're going to look at that for them as well. So that story should be coming up. Yeah. You mentioned Google News.

14:25We just put that out. 314 to 11. Okay. And the 11 is almost a misnomer because that doesn't even tell you how few of the right-leaning outlets there actually are that just gives you the number of stories, all right. Most of the time, they're only linking to or promoting Fox outlets. Okay. So Fox News or Fox Business, they're completely discounting most of the time. Some of your other top 50 outlets, like the gateway, Gateway Pundit, believe it or not, bright barred news. Daily mile. Or Daily Mail. Sorry. A Daily Mail. Yeah. New York Post. Okay. Where are these guys being elevated in the big news apps? They almost are never being elevated. You had the free speech America account on X had two stories from the New York Post they did and they were both utterly non-political, like angry guy in Florida yells at an alligator or something. Well, to that point, when we look at MSN, okay, we actually noticed that MSN does something a little different than what the other ones do. So Apple News has an editorial staff, okay, and they will pick and choose which left

15:27this outlets they want to promote because they're trying their best not to elevate right leading outlets. Yeah. Google, meanwhile, will hide behind its algorithm. Okay. So what it does is it says, oh, we don't have an editorial staff. Instead, what we're going to do is we're just going to say it was the algorithm. Well, guess what? Someone created the algorithm. Yeah. Okay. So their imprimatur is on the algorithm that's used to put forward these stories. MSN, however, okay, they do a little bit of both. Okay. And they'll kind of syndicate columns in their website, okay. And then there's some algorithm base as well. But what they're doing is they're giving the semblance of balance by including Fox News stories. But the stories that they're including, we found 20 out of 57 of them, and we're being generous here, folks. 20 of the 57 were on top of local stories. The other 37 were about public interest. What do I mean by public interest? Oh, there's a failing cruise line. Yeah. Oh, look, the fees on this vacation island spot went up. Right. Or, you know, elderly actress from Hollywood wearing a bikini.

16:27Okay. I'm sorry. I don't care. Yeah. Yeah. So it's a page. So like in the case of the New York Post, it's like page six content. Yeah. It is. So what you're telling me is these are the kinds of stories that probably there are versions of in a lot of different places, whether it's like one of the other ones that you found was big in Google's variety. That variety probably had their own version of that story, but they just chose to use the Fox one. So not only you check the box of covering the celebrity news, but you also then are able to say, well, we did it. We're including these people when obviously what you're talking about is the cut. It's not just, I think, yes, we have the numbers here, but I think what you drive home, I think, too, is also what the stories are, too. So it's both quantity and quality. Correct. That's what we're talking about. The quantity, at least with Google, was three, 14 to 11 stories. With MSN, it was 68 to two outlets. Okay.

17:28So 70 outlets total, 68 were left in center, other, and then two of them were right leaning. And then MSN, in particular, is pulling in these public interest stories. The same thing that you would see on your grocery store aisle when you're going to check out. I mean, that's the sort of thing we're talking about a lot of the time when they are actually using it right now. I think this one point, if people don't go to Variety, which is a Hollywood trade paper, but I mean, usually when we go see items on the media or whatever, or on entertainment on Variety, I mean, they're horrible. They're horrible lefties. They're very biased. They hate Trump's guts. So again, you're choosing that even though you'd say, well, that doesn't sound quite like a news outlet. Oh, it's not. It's an opinion outlet. Absolutely. So let's turn to CNN, who's considered an objective news outlet by somebody. But we've had this whole trend of them mangling what happened outside, Mayor Mom Donney's house, when these two youngsters from Pennsylvania occurred as two teams.

18:32Your home state? Well, not really. Yes, yes. Not entirely. Arrived with some homemade bombs, and we had Abby Philip and others suggesting, and a Navarro, suggesting that this was somehow a threat to Mom Donney. Yeah, that in Edward Isaac D'Ovray was one of them, hyphenated first names, first sign that's not a normal thing. A big Clinton and Kamala suck up over the years. I should point out. No, I mean, the tweet is absolutely amazing. I mean, the folks, if you haven't seen it, it was saying that two teenagers crossed in the Council of New York City Saturday morning for what could have been a normal day enjoying the city's, the city during abnormally warm weather. But in less than an hour, their lives would change, drastically change, as the pair would be arrested for throwing homemade bombs during an anti-Muslim protest outside of Mayor Zoron, Mom Donney's home. Here's what we know so far.

19:34You know, this kind of jives with Ramesh Ponyuru, an after-view said, you could apply this to say, a teenager in Belgrade crossed into Sarajevo for what should have been a normal day enjoying the warm weather instead he started World War I. Yeah. There's several of these, Pearl Harbor, so Japanese teenagers were flying over when they lost control of their planes. Like, John Loss Booth trying to enjoy the theater when a gun in his hand went off and killed the president. It's so ridiculous. And the idea, the folks need to know too, is that wasn't just a tweet or the headline. It was in the article. Yeah. It was the text of the article. And they updated, they got rid of that once, they rejiggered the lead, and then they rejiggered it again. And only after the second time did they put an editor's note in that all of this did not match their editorial standards. They took down the tweet and conceded and tried to cry, Uncle. And then Abby Phillips said that the IEDs were intended for Zoran Mamdani, and then

20:34Edward Isaac Tufrey did the same thing, saying Josh Shapiro, Zoran Mamdani, these are Democrats who've been recent victims or attempted victims of political violence. And all of this to say, what in the world is going on at CNN? Yeah. And where you come in is these people, this is again, another trusted outlet that is in good standing with Google and all the rest. Yeah. So the Big Four News apps promote many of the leftists outlets, the elitist media outlets that we talk about, including the broadcast networks, ABC, CBS, and ABC. So yeah, this is the sort of news that you would get from the Big Four News apps, instead of your Fox News stories, your Washington Times, your New York Post, your Daily Mail, your Daily Wire, your Federalist. So yeah, absolutely right. The thing we were all looking for was, now, let's, when they are these two guys who have a homemade bomb, do they use the M word?

21:36Because they really didn't want to do that. First story out of CBS was like, they told you Mamdani was Muslim. They did not tell you the guys with the bombs were Muslim. And that's where it's like, why are we just like two teenagers who are enjoying the sun? I mean, we know what you're doing, you know, it's what I call the Evan Thomas effect. We had one of these terrorist attacks, and Evan Thomas went on one of, I think it was on MSNBC. He was like, I was heartbroken when I learned it was a Muslim. You know, I wanted it to be a white supremacist. And also, of course, to be clear, one of the two writers on here, gender studies got major at Cal Berkeley. Yeah. And is it they then? Yeah, they certainly does not look like a they then. That was my favorite in your piece, Curtis, where you actually pointed out Bulldog winner Eric Erickson's tweet. I mean, that was great. I mean, he says, this is the lead reporter of that ridiculous scene in story. You'll not be surprised to learn. She uses they them pronouns and graduate from Columbia's journalism program.

22:38Oh, that's right. Yeah. So we got Columbia or Berkeley, Cal Berkeley and Columbia journalism. Just. No. It's not a surprise when you majored in gender studies and you mangle your pronouns. It's not a surprise. It's all that you need to know, really. Yeah. Exactly. I mean, you try the Babylon B. Comparity themselves, but at certain point, that's why there's a whole thing called not the B. Yeah. That section of their site because life imitates art. Yes. And so nobody loves transgender issues like PBS. They're incredibly one-sided on that. But Clay Waters had a new study basically looking back at how they covered Minneapolis and ICE and Operation Metro Surge. Let's guess. Did they like it? No, they did not like it. So this was, the study period was from January 7th, the day running good was shot through February 13th when Tom Homan announced that he was going to withdraw some forces. During that time, PBS was 85% negative, 15% positive.

23:44This was with the guests. This is the way they are with the guests, 28 of 34 guests, negative on ICE, three neutral, three rated positive, and then the questions asked to guests. It was 63 to 4, I mean, and this is what you get, and again, the negativity doesn't really reflect just how negative the questions were, for example. They talked to Cardinal Tobin of Newark, and it was all like, tell us again, you said this policy is on the authoritarianism on the rise. Tell us more about that, you know what I mean? It's just like, that's one of the oldest tricks in the book. You take their radical position, and then you say, what do you mean by that? Or tell us more about it, instead of reading a policy back to them and saying, don't you think that there's probably people out there that think this is nuts, you know, that they think this is kind of insane? And again, I mean, it's, they established a narrative about Minnesota, and this showed

24:44how consistent they are in rolling with it, and to our point about last year about defunding these people, it was totally worth it, and they have not changed, they have, they have not changed. And let's have this. Then they go out with their PBSNPR, Marist Poll and say, did Trump go too far? We want you to say yes. Our news coverage is all designed for you to say yes, you know, and then this is again, where you, this is government was, government funded broadcasting, and it's just against the government. It's against the enforcement of laws, you know, but they call ICE lawless, that's part of their attack. I find that really mind-boggling. Lawless is the illegal immigrants. Yeah, we did a similar study, didn't focus specifically on PBS NewsR though. I would say Google seems to like PBS NewsHour just as much as the latest media, like talking about Biden's ice cream fetish. Yeah, yeah. We'll say that. But, you know, we covered the big four, and it mirrored the PBS NewsHour starting, 86%

25:47negative on ICE, falling their naked shooting. So that would have been January 7th, and we covered through January 21st. So it mirrors what you guys found. So what that means is that they're, they're elevating some of the same leftist dribble that PBS NewsHour is bringing to the table, and that's missing context and negative content. So when we looked at the headlines, and what do I mean by missing context? Well, they would say that Renee Good got killed by an ICE agent or by a federal agent, but they would leave off that Renee Good hit the ICE or federal agent with her car. Right. Okay, I mean, that's key. Right. You know, it's extremely important, both on the legal side, and from a news perspective, and that's the sort of thing that you're not going to get on the big four news app. Well, PBS had this, their reporter Minneapolis, as a guy named Fred de Sam Lazaro. He's been there many, many years. And yeah, I mean, their coverage of Renee Good was like, she's Christian evangelist and a poet and a mother of three. And you know, I mean, it's the most romantic picture you can possibly imagine.

26:50And they can't really say, guess what else she was? She was a radical activist who was going to drive her car and run over this guy. And this is where, again, there's a bias against the government, which is like, they don't care when people run over ICE agents. That is not considered outrageous. This guy who shot her had previously been run over when trying to enforce these laws. And it's like this happened in Chicago. They would try to say this, this poor unfortunate legal alien was shot dead in Chicago. Yeah, the guy, the ICE agent was shooting from underneath the car after he was run over. Right. We're missing context. There's some missing content. No, no, no, no. Right. I mean, I think this comes down to the psychology number one to your point about the headlines and the news apps. Like it or not, we psychologically, a lot of people may not go below the headline is the headline that draws people in and based on people scrolling, specifically on the news

27:52apps. People are scrolling to see what's going on in the news. So they can monitor the situation. They think they're being good consumers of news. And you're only going to the first step. You're only starting to seek out news, but you're not really going any further than that. And by leaving those headlines out, by making it so nebulous, you are creating a narrative that then is difficult to undo. Whereas if you actually had then read the story, you would find, oh my gosh, there's a lot more circumstances to this as well. And it goes against good government as well or media coverage because it's the postman, the Neil Postman kind of amusing ourselves to death. It's the dumbing down of news that I think that's a golden holding that I think is crushing us. I'll just add one last thing here, the island packet, the paper in Hilton Head, Beaufort. There was a woman that was killed in a car accident by an illegal immigrant fleeing

28:57ice down in Savannah. This is one of the headlines they had. Savannah says goodbye to woman killed in ice-related crash. Wow. I mean, they should laugh at this. Another one, family remembers Beaufort Ray's teacher killed by car fleeing ice. Yeah. You're like, this is a game. Missing context. Yeah. Where are the fact checkers? Yeah. It's almost subliminal and just to remind the news of us just out in real quick, Apple phones, iPhones have Apple news pre-downloaded on them. Google, Android phones, have Google news pre-downloaded on them. If you're using a Windows computer, it has MSN pre-downloaded on it. So Curtis is exactly right. It's subliminal almost what's happening here. People have this edge to the edge, yeah, your web browser. Well this is where we have to underline. Because all be for media literacy, even though that becomes a left wing term, read beyond the headline. Yeah, please. Let's try to read beyond the headline. I love to make this whole point where it's like the New York Times admitted the Hunter

30:01Biden laptop was real in paragraph 20 on page a 20. So yes, you have to sometimes they hide the nuggets in paragraph 20. So yeah, you do need to read beyond the headline. But yes, they all know what they're doing when they write the headlines this way. And that's where we have to say, you've got to go deeper. And one way to do that is you've got to come to newsbusters once, twice, 24 times a day. Thanks for checking in.