Last month, the North Carolina Board of Elections unanimously refused to certify the election of Republican Congressman-elect Mark Harris, who beat his Democratic opponent, Dan McCready, by about 900 votes. Harris, the only representative not to be seated when the new Congress ...read more
For its 2018 Person of the Year, Time Magazine has selected a group of journalists who have faced prison time, put themselves at great risk, and, in some cases, given their lives for reporting the truth. Billed as "The Guardians and the War on Truth," they include the staff of ...read more
Chuck Schumer was comfortably re-elected as Senate Minority Leader yesterday by the Democratic caucus, but a stunning New York Times exposé of Facebook reveals that he attempted to impede investigations into the tech giant. The story, which runs about 5,000 words and carries ...read more
Donald Trump and his minions will never admit that the nation's most dominant producer of "fake news" is not CNN, and it's certainly not The New York Times or The Washington Post. The traditional press makes its fair share of mistakes, as any sector of every industry does every ...read more
Yesterday, CNN's Jim Acosta had his White House press credentials suspended after he repeatedly questioned president Trump over his use of the migrant caravan to stoke the fears of American xenophobes. While he and Trump were having at it, a young, female, White House intern ...read more
Societies have long known that when inventors don't ask hard questions of themselves, the results can be catastrophic. Mark Zuckerberg learned this the hard way this week when he testified before Congress over two consecutive days concerning Cambridge Analytica's breach of ...read more
While the money is no doubt good at Fox News, it must be a rather humiliating affair going on air day in, day out, knowing that you work for the least trusted cable news network in America. During a segment on Sunday on Media Buzz, Fox News host Howard Kurtz and pollster Frank ...read more
Over the weekend, it was revealed that Sinclair Broadcast Group, the right-wing company that has been buying up local TV stations, filmed a video where they forced all their news anchors, across all affiliates, to read from the same script, which reads in part: "We’re concerned ...read more
Asides from eating up half of the internet, allowing Russian spammers to spread fake news during the most important election in recent US history, and doing its best to punish legitimate websites from reaching their audience (ours included), Facebook has started to really, ...read more
Breitbart.com loudly declared recently that "Americans 'Overwhelmingly' Believe Obama 'Improperly Surveilled' Trump Campaign'. According to the far right outlet, Americans are now ignoring the "disgraced" media that is failing to report on it and are turning to journalistic ...read more
At the Banter, we strive to provide our readers with well sourced, fact checked writing. If we make mistakes, we correct them. Poorly constructed arguments don't make it out of our editorial process (some of them mine), and we take great pride in upholding high standards. Why? ...read more
Last April (which seems like a lifetime ago), President Trump fired missiles at Syria in retaliation against Assad's use of chemical weapons on his people, and the "liberal" media praised him. MSNBC anchor Brian Williams repeatedly called the missile strike "beautiful," and the ...read more
It's telling that this comparison to Stalin was laughed off by commentators on both the far right and far left, once again proving the usefulness of Jean-Pierre Faye's horseshoe theory that political extremists on both sides tend to resemble one another. After the comparison was ...read more
When you combine the organizational skills of Donald Trump and the web expertise of the RNC, you get 2018's “Fake News Awards,” -- an event that crashed quite literally as soon as it was launched (via The Daily Beast): The Republican National Committee on Wednesday night ...read more
Liar in Chief Donald Trump took to Twitter this morning to propagate yet more lies about the women he sexually assaulted by lying about the Democrats and lying about the motivations of the women accusing him who are now demanding a Congressional investigation into his behavior: ...read more
Donald Trump was up early Saturday morning thinking hard about what to say to his 43 million Twitter followers. Tired of being lampooned by the media as being an incompetent idiot with potential brain damage, Trump put on his very best writer's cap and produced a stunningly ...read more
Today, Newsweek revealed that Russian bot accounts were responsible for pushing stories related to the non-scandal Uranium One deal in the run-up to Robert Mueller releasing his first indictments this week. Hamilton 68, a non-partisan organization tracking Russian bot activity, ...read more
Catalan President Carles Puigdemont missed a crucial deadline this morning to formally declare independence from Spain. and the future of his government remains in jeopardy as Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy plans to meet on Saturday to possibly invoke Article 155 of the ...read more
The first time I watched Fox News, I genuinely thought it was satire. Having moved to Los Angeles as a teenager from London, England, I had grown up watching the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 for news. While incredibly dry and often off putting, they all had serious presenters ...read more
The news broke yesterday that Andy Hemming resigned from the Trump administration as the White House communications team’s director of rapid response. Hemming's role in the administration was to find positive stories about Trump and distribute them as widely as possible. ...read more
Trevor Noah's recap of Donald Trump's campaign style rally in Phoenix, Arizona this past weekend is a must watch. Noah expertly skewered the president for doing exactly what he accuses the mainstream media of doing -- selectively quoting himself. “Although Trump’s rally was an ...read more
In an astonishing story broken by NPR today, a lawsuit has been filed alleging that the White House collaborated with Fox News and a wealthy Republican donor push the fake news story about the murder of DNC staffer Seth Rich. Here's what we know thus far (via CNN): The story ...read more
If you have a spare 25 minutes and don't mind the prospect of inducing severe psychosis in yourself, sit down and watch Kellyanne Conway lying through her teeth on CNN for the umpteenth time this year. The 'interview' where Brian Stelter essentially gave Conway unfettered ...read more
After a tumultuous week that included calls for boycotts, advertisers dropping out, and a leaked recording of a pre-interview phone call, Megan Kelly’s 17-minute special on Alex Jones finally aired. Kelly was more than critical during her questioning of the radio host and ...read more
Charles J Sykes in The New York Times summarizes the right's defense of Trump so perfectly it should be engraved in diamonds: As the right doubles down on anti-anti-Trumpism, it will find itself goaded into defending and rationalizing ever more outrageous conduct just as long ...read more
In addition to giving us the unmitigated disaster that is Donald J. Trump, the 2016 election season also introduced a new term into the lexicon: fake news. And since the topic of fake news has entered the conversation, Trump and his allies have routinely used the term to attempt ...read more
So James O'Keefe, whom you may remember from such comical roles as "A$AP Chad, Frat Pimp," "Jail Inmate Behind the Great Mary Landrieu Office Break-In Caper," and "Guy Who Tried and Failed To Lure a Female CNN Reporter Onto a Yacht Filled with Dildos" is in the news again -- ...read more
It would be so easy to dismiss this piece as another snobby college-educated elite east-coast liberal rant against the "common man" but Trump supporters are anything but common. They're so far removed from basic reality and the understanding of how a functioning democracy works ...read more
The proliferation of fake news sites online is one of the greatest threats to democracy we have ever faced. While this might sound like hyperbole, it is worth remembering that the US has just elected a reality television star with a history of sexually assaulting women as ...read more