It was another grim weekend of news. Though there was a bright spot or two. On today's BradCast, we talk about as much of it as we have time for. Including with callers. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

Among our coverage today...

• We begin on a personal note of sorts. I received both my COVID and Flu shots over the weekend. So, as usual, I was pretty laid out for the 24 hours following. That said, I feel great today, happy to feel somewhat protected heading into the holiday season, and ask you to consider doing the same if you haven't already. I would also ask you, once again, not to fall for the deadly lies and disinformation that persists around the very safe and wildly effective COVID vaccines which continue to save billions of lives worldwide, despite the dupes and cretins who would use false "evidence" to hoax you to the contrary. Your life and those of your family are worth protecting. Please do. We're gonna need all hands on deck during next year's critical Presidential election. You will need to be alive to vote. Get your newly formulated COVID shots, now covering additional strains of the deadly virus, ASAP!

• Next up, the death toll from last week's stunning Category 5 Hurricane Otis in Acapulco continues to rise. At least 45 are now confirmed dead as of airtime today, with several dozen still missing. All of that after the resort city of more than a million had little or no time to prepare for a storm of this magnitude which spun up last week from Tropical Storm to deadly Cat 5 in less than 12 hours, thanks to the rapid intensification of such storms in our climate changed era.

• Speaking of disinformation, there is a lot of it out there right now, circulating on social media in particular, regarding the Israel-Hamas conflict. And its coming, frankly, from all sides of the conflict. We run through a few of some of the most viral lies that have been moving quickly across Elon Musk's Twitter/X and TikTok. A falsely misrepresented video purporting to show U.S. Marines arriving at an airport in Israel (it's actually a Defense Dept. video from 2022, showing U.S. troops arriving for NATO drills in Romania); Videos of Russian and North Korean dictators Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un with false English captions, and much more. Moral: Be careful what you "like" and share on social media. If something is too amazing to believe, there's probably a reason for that. Check with the many various fact-check sites and services out there before making things worse by spreading such disinformation. The real news is bad enough.

• Speaking of just some of that horrible real news, both the death toll and the humanitarian crisis in Gaza is worsening by the hour, though Sunday saw nearly three dozen truckloads of desperately needed food, water and medicine make its way into southern Gaza. It's not nearly enough, but it's something. That, after a weekend of communications --- both phone and Internet --- being cut off across the entire enclave during Israel's most intense bombing to date as it began to move ground troops into Gaza. The Biden Administration reportedly pressed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's far-right government to restore communications in Gaza, has been urging them to allow more humanitarian aid in, and to be "surgical" in its response to the horrific Hamas attacks of October 7. They are having some success. But, from virtually all legitimate reporting, not nearly enough. More than 1.4 million Gazans have fled their homes, and the death toll of Palestinians, as reported by the Hamas-run health ministry, is now said to be more than 8,000. Many of the dead are women and children. Roughly 250,000 Israelis have also been evacuated from homes along both the border of Gaza and the northern border with Lebanon amid persistent rocket attacks following Hamas' attack on Southern Israel earlier in the month that left some 1,400 dead.

• In brighter news back home, the United Auto Workers union, over the weekend, sealed deals with both Stellantis and General Motors akin to the one struck days earlier with Ford, to end their six-week walkout. The union was able to achieve substantial pay raises for long-time, new and previously temporary workers, along with other long-sought benefits. UAW President Shawn Fain, over the weekend, called the development "a turning point in the class war that has been raging in this country for the past 40 years." At the White House on Monday, President Biden lauded the "historic" deals, "due to the commitment and solidarity of the UAW workers who exercised their right to collectively bargain. They won a record contract with over a 30% increase in wages, greater retirement security and more paid leave." The union also won victories toward hiring thousands of new workers and unionizing newer Electric Vehicle shops.

Then, we open the phones to our live Southern California listeners here at KPFK in Los Angeles, and, you'll be shocked to hear, they all wanted to discuss Israel-Hamas today. Again. So we do. I'll look forward to your thoughts on those conversations...

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More voices over "the information superhighway" was supposed to make it easier for the public to discern fact from fiction. As discuss on today's BradCast, it seems to have done the exact opposite. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

Two hot wars in both Israel and Ukraine, a still-simmering pandemic, a worsening climate crisis, the takeover of Twitter by a disgruntled rightwing billionaire, and a "master propagandist" running again for President of the United States, have all combined into a "perfect storm" of disinformation, my guest today explains.

We're joined by Boston University research fellow and best-selling author LEE MCINTYRE, author of 2018's Post-Truth, 2021's How to Talk to a Science Denier, and the just-published On Disinformation: How to Fight for Truth and Protect Democracy.

He's here today to help us understand the difference between misinformation and disinformation; to discuss which is worse; and what, if anything, can be done about any of it. In short, as he explains, "Misinformation is an accident. Disinformation is a lie." For example, the New York Times' (and others') coverage of the deadly explosion at a hospital in Gaza City last week, which now appears to have been caused by an errant rocket fired by a Palestinian militant group, was misinformation when the Times reported it as having been caused by an Israeli airstrike in the immediate aftermath. The misleading reportage might have originated, however, as disinformation from Hamas sources, whose allegations the Times --- as they finally conceded today --- was not properly vetted before being used to drive traffic to its website.

McIntyre also focuses on the danger that social media sites like Twitter/X now pose to democracy and the world, particularly since its takeover by Elon Musk, his blowing up of the previously helpful blue-check "verified" system which helped users distinguish legitimate sources from fakes, and his removal of most of the company's trust, safety, and information moderation team.

He details how disinformation also serves the dual purpose of not just forwarding false information on any particular issue --- like the war in the Middle East or denial of the efficacy of COVID vaccines, our climate crisis, or democratic elections --- but also collapses trust in all verified information and news sources. "Through polarization and the raising of mistrust and distrust, one message that comes through with disinformation is, 'Maybe we can't even know the truth. How do we know? Is everybody biased?' Because in that situation, you might give up on the idea of truth. That paves the way for authoritarianism."

Among the other points we discuss with McIntyre today...

• How disinformation is now flourishing under Musk on Twitter/X and at competing sites like Mark Zuckerberg's Threads.
• How we are all victims of whatever algorithms people like Musk and Zuckerberg may wish to put in place to determine what information we see...and don't.
• How to walk the difficult line between content moderation and censorship, whether its via mainstream press outlets or social networking sites.
• How "master propagandist" Donald Trump has created a career and an industry out of disinformation which now threatens the veracity of the 2024 elections.
• How repetition works for both spreading lies and reporting the truth.
• How to fight back against our "perfect storm of more disinformation, less content moderation, and fewer safeguards."

"I wrote my book because I want people to understand there's a way to fight back against this," McIntyre tells me. "You don't just have to believe the first media accounts. There's a way to be critical, a way to be skeptical, but also a way to push back against social media, push back against cable news, and even the government, to try to make them better and more responsible in how they fight disinformation."

ALSO TODAY...

• The latest on the Israel-Hamas war, including the release of two more hostages from Gaza on Monday and the Biden Administration's reported efforts to try and forestall Israel's planned ground invasion of Gaza to allow for the release of hostages and foreign nationals and the delivery of humanitarian aid.
• The latest on the continuing embarrassment of the GOP U.S. House's failure to elect a Speaker and re-open Congress.
• The latest in the Georgia RICO case against Trump and his alleged co-conspirators for trying to steal the 2020 election in the Peach State. Following guilty pleas last week by Trump attorneys Sidney Powell and Ken Chesebro, the New Yorker's Charles Betha and Sue Halpern reported on the 400-page Georgia Bureau of Investigations' probe of Team Trump's Coffee County voting system breach. It appears to confirm our repeated reporting over the past year that GA's Sec. of State Brad Raffensperger was instrumental in delaying, if not obstructing, the GBI's criminal investigation of the theft and distribution of Georgia's statewide voting system software [emphasis mine]...
  
  On January 7, 2021, the day after a right-wing mob stormed the Capitol building, several people paid a visit to the Coffee County elections office. A year and a half later, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation began formally looking into allegations that “computer trespass” had taken place that day. The delay seems to have been due to resistance from the Georgia secretary of state’s office, which, for months, denied that a breach had occurred.

  Whaddaya know?...

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On today's BradCast: Given the disastrous chaos of The Former Guy's previous term in office and the 91 criminal felony charges he is now facing in four different jurisdictions, it seems impossible to fathom that he'd be, essentially, tied in 2024 polling against one of the most effective President's in U.S. history. There's a number of reasons for that. Few of them are the ones the disinformed MAGA knuckleheads have been hoaxed into buying into. But one of the big reasons, according to our guest today, is years of unrelenting failure by the U.S. media. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

First up today, however, some encouraging news out of special elections held on Tuesday for state legislatures in two critical swing-states, New Hampshire and Pennsylvania. In both cases the Democratic candidate won. In NH, Hal Rafter flipped a seat in the state House previously held by a Republican, putting Dems just one seat shy of evenly splitting control with the GOP in a state where Republicans have held a governing trifecta for several years.

In PA, Democrat Lindsay Powell easily won a safely "blue" seat in Pittsburgh. But, in both cases, Democrats continued to massively outperformed their 2020 numbers in the very same districts, continuing the party's winning streak during special elections since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year.

The outlook may be brighter still for democracy fans in Pennsylvania next year, as newly elected Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro announced, on Tuesday, a program to begin automatic voter registration at the Dept of Transportation offices this week whenever residents show up for a new or renewed drivers license or ID. The battleground state has an estimated 1.6 million eligible but unregistered voters and Shapiro's pro-democracy program, supported by his own, hand-picked Republican Sec. of State, is long overdue in the Keystone State. Anti-democracy, pro-authoritarian Republicans in the state legislature, of course, are furious about it. They believe the more they can restrict access to the polls, the better they will perform.

Increased participation is always a healthy thing for democracy. But, ironically enough, American journalists are likely to be very careful about reporting that fact for fear of being tagged as appearing "partisan". That, even though automatic voter registration is equally applied to potential voters of any (or no) political party. But, as increased turnout is perceived as good for Democrats, many journalists are cowed into pulling punches when covering such issues.

Of course, it's that sort of failure by U.S. corporate media that results in absurdly "tied" pre-election polling for the 2024 Presidential election, and in other polls like the one we covered on yesterday's program finding Americans split 50/50 on whether the evidence-free Republican impeachment inquiry of Joe Biden is based on legitimate evidence or is politically motivated.

We're joined today by longtime journalist and media critic DAN FROOMKIN, who wrote the popular online "White House Watch" column for years at Washington Post before moving to Huff Post and then The Intercept before establishing his nonprofit Press Watch newsletter.

Last last month, Froomkin penned an important piece headlined "A desperate appeal to newsroom leaders on the eve of a chaos election". He explained that he was hoping to reach newsroom execs in advance of "another potentially cataclysmic election in 2024 --- arguably the most perilous in American history." Despite the previously unimaginable events of the last nearly ten years, wrote Froomkin, corporate media outlets "continue to engage in the same business-as-usual that got us here in the first place."

In hopes of reaching some of those newsroom leaders before it's too late, Froomkin spoke with several dozen journalists, media critics, academics and historians on what America's newsrooms can and should change in their approach to political coverage in advance of next year's critical elections.

We discuss a number of those expert responses today on everything from the necessity of picking "the right frame" in reporting on democracy rather than the "horse-race"; on "not the odds but the stakes" in next year's race; the need for journalists, not politicians, to "set the agenda" during interviews; the "importance of context" in reporting on the contest in a way that informs the public beyond a simple "left versus right" lens; "what not to do" and how the press needs to stand up for itself, and for journalism as a whole, against attacks from the increasingly authoritarian right.

None of this, in fact, is a partisan matter. Though the Republican Party, over the years --- even before the rise of Donald Trump --- has successfully cowed American news outlets into behaving as if it is, and subsequently pulling punches to the ultimate benefit of the GOP, even as democracy itself has become increasingly endangered by media dysfunction and disinformation.

Today, Froomkin cites Trump's victory in 2016 as the moment when the corporate media should have realized how dangerous their failures had become. But, he argues, "they didn't really change. Fundamentally, they're still adopting rightwing frames, they're still not rebutting misinformation with the enthusiasm that they should. They're still doing the horse-race journalism which allows them to be gamed by politicians, especially on the right."

"The press has a blind eye towards Biden's successes and is focused instead on whatever the Republicans are talking about, which is impeachment and Hunter Biden these days," he tells me, even as the GOP can't even agree amongst itself on a spending package to keep the entire federal government open and operating past next week. "There's massive dysfunction on the right, and unfortunately the media feels like when it reports that, it's being biased, it's being liberal. And if, God forbid, it should write anything nice about Biden, then it would definitely be accused of being liberal."

Please tune in for our conversation today and --- as importantly --- I hope some in the media (especially in the executive suites) do as well. By the way, Froomkin has a great idea for the misbegotten CNN and how they could, if they were smart under their new CEO, "become the anti-Fox/pro-truth network".

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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Summer of Extremes --- Heat and floods strike simultaneously across the Northern Hemisphere; Corporate media mostly ignores climate change in extreme weather disaster coverage; PLUS: Another major insurer ditches Florida in the middle of hurricane season... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

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Got comments, tips, love letters, hate mail? Drop us a line at GreenNews@BradBlog.com or right here at the comments link below. All GNRs are always archived at GreenNews.BradBlog.com.

IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): For those who live and work outside, there is little escape from deadly heat; Wildfires tear through towns in Greece as thousands flee seaside resorts; In Phoenix, heat becomes a brutal test of endurance; How big is the solar PV waste stream, really?; John Kerry hails China's 'incredible' job on renewables, warns on coal; Scientists concerned over impact of rising Florida water temps on corals; Fossil fuel workers are dying inhaling gases, despite U.S. warnings to Big Oil; 9th Circuit denies bid by greens and tribes to block Nevada lithium mine
... PLUS: A shipping rule backfires, diverting sulfur emissions from the air to the ocean... and much, MUCH more! ...

We're back live on today's BradCast after a much-needed holiday stand down last week, even as the world registered its hottest day on record...four different times on four consecutive days. Other than that, did we miss anything? [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

The globe is broiling, but it's also flooding for the same reason. Our climate is in crisis. From the U.S. to Canada to Spain to India and China, just to name a few of the "hot spots" over just the past 24 to 48 hours or so. And, in case your other news sources forgot to tell you, it's all our fault. Or, at least the fault of the fossil fuel industry and the politicians and dupes they've bought off over the decades to hoax you into believing that our climate crisis itself is a hoax. It isn't. And, based on the mind-warping records being shattered across Planet Earth right now --- with little hope of cooling any time soon --- a case can be made that if we haven't hit a few disastrous, point-of-no-return tipping points by now, we are certainly on the verge.

Climate warming greenhouse gas emissions, mostly from the burning of fossil fuels, continue to increase along with smashed heat records. Is it too late to do anything about it?

Longtime climate and energy reporter ANDREW FREEDMAN of Axios joins us today to discuss the mind-blowing records now being shattered by the day, who should be held accountable for it (including those in the media), and if it is or isn't too late for humanity to take action to reverse course

When I ask Freedman if it's hard to wrap his head around all that now seems to be going on in the climate, even after so many years of warning folks that this would be, he tells me, "It is. While my expectations might have been for some of these records, everything everywhere all at once is how it feels right now. It feels that way as a reporter, it feels that way as just a person on Earth."

"The global records weren't something I was expecting to jump out this early in July. The peak is usually later in July," he explains. "It's pretty much a done deal that July will be the hottest July on record, and most likely the hottest month that we've seen since records began." The news he has for the rest of the year, and for next year, isn't much better.

He's got a lot more to say. He's been writing a lot about this of late for some reason.

Then, with an invitation for a "Reverse BradCast" --- where listeners call in to tell me what they think I need to know, and I get to tell them they are wrong about it --- most of our callers today wanted to talk about the climate instead for some reason. And that's probably a very good thing.

As Freedman notes today, citing climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe, "Her appeal to people is to say, 'The most powerful thing that you can do about climate change is to have a conversation with somebody about it.' We need to be talking about it more. All these things actually have an impact. It's not just 'Oh well, we're screwed.' It's hard not to think that way. It's hard for me and other climate reporters. But there are a ton of solutions. The question is are we going fast enough?"

So far, the answer, according to most scientists?: No. We absolutely aren't. That can still change. But only if we keep talking about it to everyone who will listen...and even those who don't want to...

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There's a reason we don't spend much time discussing the Right's phony "culture war" BS on The BradCast. Today, we talk about why. [Audio link to full show follows below.]

We go into much more detail on the program, but perhaps the biggest reason is likely that most of these so-called "culture wars" aren't any such thing. But talking about it, helps to make them appear to be such a thing. Whether it's outrage over BLM or CRT or, more lately, ESG, the GOP and FNC and all of their various corporate sponsors (mostly from the oil and gas industry), prefer spending time on ginned-up, phony nonsense to keep their readers, listeners and viewers angry, so they don't notice how the Republican Party has absolutely nothing but pain and thievery to offer them.

When the non-wingnut corporate media and Democrats jump in to respond to those ginned-up issues, sadly, the Right has succeeded in creating yet another "partisan" "culture war" out of whole cloth, in which they are able to claim there is a pitched partisan battle between "both sides". They've been mastering this scam for years, and the media and Dems have been falling for it for years as well.

One might think, for example, that the nation is bitterly divided in the "culture war" over abortion rights, one of the GOP's decades-old stand-bys. In fact, it's not much of a partisan or left/right or Republican/Democratic issue at all. The vast majority of Americans, across party lines, support reproductive freedom. And a recently released detailed survey from PRRI (of about 23,000 people in all 50 states!), demonstrates that there is not one single state in the union where a majority of the population supports the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Not one. Not even in the Deep South.

But maybe if you're furious enough about "ESG" you won't notice the Constitutional freedoms the GOP has just stolen from all of us. What's ESG? Well, the folks who watch Fox "News" almost certainly know what it is. It stands for "Environmental Social Governance." And, while the corporate concept has been around for about 20 years, Republicans, with the encouragement (and lots of money) from the fossil fuel industry, have only recently decided to become furious about it. Yup, they're hoping --- and the media are helping --- to turn it into yet another pretend "culture war".

Republican Presidential hopefuls like Florida's Ron DeSantis, Texas' Greg Abbott and former Vice President Mike Pence are all over those "woke" corporations who consider things like the health of the environment when making investments and other business decisions. As discussed today in some detail, Republicans have now decided that sort of thing must stop immediately! Failing to invest as much money as possible, including public funds, in the fossil fuel industry that is helping to wipe out humanity, will almost certainly result in grandma's retirement fund going bankrupt! Or something. And it now appears we're all gonna be dumb enough (again) to help these fake Fox "News" and fossil fuel industry outrages become a real thing.

Just this once --- hopefully, today only --- we're gonna talk about it so you understand exactly what's going on and how you're getting played...so hopefully we'll all stop falling for these scams over and over again.

Also today, a follow-up to a story we covered last week, when Kris Mayes, the new Democratic Attorney General of Arizona, released documents from her office that the previous Attorney General, Republican Mark Brnovich, appears to have forgotten to release before leaving office in January.

Among other things, the documentation reveals that Brnovich's office spent some 10,000 taxpayer-funded hours in 2021 investigating phony claims of election fraud in the state's 2020 Presidential election, assigning everyone in the office to the matter at one point. And though the probe was completed by March 2022, Brnovich never bothered to release the findings, that there was no evidence the election was stolen from Trump in Arizona, to the public. Instead of letting his state and the nation know, during his failed run for the state GOP nomination for U.S. Senate last year, Brnovich lied about the investigation. He told state lawmakers and the public that his office had found "serious vulnerabilities", even while he was ignoring his own staff's recommendations to come clean about the facts.

We covered those disturbing revelations from Mayes last week. And now, the state's new Democratic Governor, former Sec. of State Katie Hobbs, has filed a complaint against Brnovich with the state bar association. Hopefully, that complaint will result in sanctions or even disbarment for the state's corrupt, former top attorney, who was already under sanctions from the state bar association, as it turns out, when he misled the public last year about all of this.

Finally, it's Desi Doyen with our latest woke, ESG, Green News Report! Today, we focus on continuing drought conditions in California, despite the recent series of major storms and continuing, bizarre, climate change-fueled weather across much of the nation; Also, we cover the railroad industry's opposition to new regulations following outrage (phony or otherwise) over the recent toxic train derailment in Ohio...

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Today on The BradCast: The so-called investigations of the Biden Administration by GOP-led Congressional committees are virtually guaranteed to crash and burn for Republicans in the months ahead. But whether they crash and burn the national and global economies in the meantime remains a very real question. It's one about which our guest today has a few very interesting suggestions for Democrats. [Audio link to full show is posted below this summary.]

First up, however, we pick up a bit on yesterday's coverage helping to gird you for the circus of insanity now barreling toward all of us with the GOP's takeover of the U.S. House. Yesterday, we detailed NBC's Chuck Todd (of all people!) calling out the lies of Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan --- the new Chair of both the House Judiciary Committee and the GOP's newly formed Select Subcommittee on "The Weaponization of the Federal Government" --- regarding Jordan's false equivalency between the handful of classified documents discovered and promptly returned by President Biden's aides, and Donald Trump's more than a year-and-a-half long effort to retain hundreds of classified documents he stole from the White House and refused to return.

In a similar vein today, the new Chair of the House Oversight Committee, Kentucky Rep. James Comer, made a yutz of himself on CNN over the weekend, trying to explain why President Joe Biden and his family must be investigated for "influence peddling," despite the lack of evidence to support the charge. That while, he insisted, there is absolutely nothing to look into regarding the mountain of actual known evidence suggesting influence peddling by Donald Trump and his family.

For good measure, we also help Marjorie Taylor Greene embarrass herself today by simply playing some of her very serious questions to the U.S. Comptroller --- about Drag Queen Story Hour and an elementary school she claimed received $5.1 billion in "COVID Cash" to teach Critical Race Theory --- at a House hearing today.

As to real damage that Republicans are capable of causing, the Treasury Department is currently taking "extraordinary measures" to avoid defaulting on our national debt for the first time in U.S. history as House Republicans figure out how to best hold the nation's (and world's) economy hostage to demands of cuts to federal spending before they are willing to raise the statutory debt limit. Unless they do so very soon, giving authority to the U.S. Treasury to borrow the money needed to pay for stuff that Congress and Presidents of both parties long ago authorized and/or purchased, the global economy could come crashing down on everyone. The White House refuses to negotiate on whether our bills must be paid. But House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, on behalf of his far-right caucus, is holding out for...something...though he has yet to make clear precisely what they want.

We're joined today by KEVIN DRUM, longtime blogger formerly of Washington Monthly and Mother Jones, now back on the indie blogging beat at his site, Jabberwocking, for insight on this dangerous mess.

In addition to thoughts on how he sees all of this ultimately shaking out; whether Republicans will really pull the trigger on the hostage this time; how it played out the last time they tried the same gambit when they had control of Congress while a Democrat occupied the White House in 2011; and the history of why the U.S. stands nearly alone among developed democracies in even having such a dumb statutory limit on paying our bills, Drum recently wrote about a couple of ways that Dems may consider moving forward without a vote from Republicans at all.

One idea long discussed by many on the Internet is that the President has the authority to simply order the minting of a $1 trillion platinum coin. Drum explains that well-worn --- if never invoked --- theory, what makes it lawful, and if it would actually work to allow our bills to continue to be paid without Congress voting to raise the debt ceiling.

Another idea he prefers, however, involves calling the GOP's bluff by citing Section 4 of the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution which plainly states "The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law ... shall not be questioned" and telling Republicans to "pound sand." Just continue writing checks as usual and let Republicans go to court to get a ruling that the U.S. Government must immediately stop sending Social Security checks to grandma, stop issuing food stamps to hungry families, stop paying for medical care for the poor and elderly, stop all military spending, and stop all interest payments on U.S. treasury bonds, etc.

"If this goes to court for one reason or another, that's actually pretty useful," Drum argues. "It makes Republicans really take a stand. It makes it clear that Republicans are the ones who are trying to cut off food stamps or Social Security or whatever it is."

But, while Drum explains why he believes it's a "low-risk" option, it could still be a dangerous one nonetheless. A favorable decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in days of yore might have been a no-brainer. But, with an entirely corrupted, far-right extremist super-majority now at SCOTUS, it's anyone's guess as to whether they would vote to uphold the clear text of the Constitution or not.

There's a lot to discuss with Drum today! I hope you'll tune in!...

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Some tea leaf reading was necessary on today's BradCast, but it's our consensus that the news out of a hearing today at the Fulton County, Georgia Superior Court is encouraging. [Audio link to full show is posted below this summary.]

BUT FIRST TODAY, maddeningly, we've got to run through the litany of mass shooting over just the past 24 hours or so, following the horrific massacre over the weekend at a dance hall in Monterey Park, near Los Angeles. Since covering that shooting which resulted in 11 dead and 9 injured on yesterday's program, the massacres --- most apparently carried out with semi-automatic weapons and extended magazines that allow at least 30 rounds to be fired in seconds --- have continued. Two more in California. Another in Iowa. Another in Washington state. Republicans continue to send their thoughts and prayers. Democrats continue to try and actually do something about the epidemic.

AND SPEAKING OF EPIDEMICS, apparently the mishandling of classified documents by former Vice Presidents is a bit of an epidemic. Today, it was Mike Pence's turn to announce that his attorneys found "a small number of documents bearing classified markings" stored at his new palatial home in Indiana. While CNN's report compares the situation to Joe Biden's in paragraph 3, one must read all the way to paragraph 13 before the former President is mentioned.

You may remember him. He's the one who, literally, stole hundreds of classified documents comprising thousands of pages, on purpose, when he left the White House. He then repeatedly refused to return them to federal government officials (to whom he lied) for more than a year, despite the government begging him to return them and being forced to subpoena them, before finally taking them by force via a federal search warrant finding probable cause that multiple crimes were under way by the former President.

Once again, we've got to provide appropriate context to the story today since corporate media continues to fail to do so. In brief, the Pence and Biden cases are ones in which they discovered they had several documents they shouldn't have had in their possession, likely stored there by aides without their knowledge. After discovering them, the former Veeps then notified authorities and returned the documents. That, of course, is nothing like the felony crimes that Donald Trump pulled off and, apparently, continues to pull off even today, with dozens of classified documents still known to be missing.

Our friend Marcy Wheeler, investigative national security journalist, provided a handy chart today to help a few of our failed corporate media friends out when attempting to report on these apparently totally confusing matters...

NEXT, we move to the fascinating --- and encouraging, we think --- hearing at Fulton County Superior Court today. Two weeks ago, a Special Process Grand Jury convened by Fulton County D.A. Fani Willis completed its work and was dissolved. After eight months of investigation and some 75 interviews with subpoenaed witness, the panel completed a report and submitted it to Willis and Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney. While Special Process Grand Juries in GA, unlike regular Grand Juries, are not empaneled to issue indictments, they may recommend such indictments in their final report.

The panel has been investigating efforts by Trump and his supporters after the 2020 Presidential election to strong-arm state officials into stealing results on his behalf after he narrowly lost in the Peach State. The probe was kicked off by Willis shortly after the release of Trump's infamous, January 2, 2021 phone call to GA Sec. of State Brad Raffensperger, asking him to "find" 11,870 votes "one more than we have" to steal the election for Trump and threatening the Secretary with legal action if he failed to do so.

In addition to that, the Special Grand Jury is believed to have been investigating calls made by other Trump allies to state officials; false allegations of election fraud proffered to state legislators; attempts to threaten and pressure poll workers into falsely confessing to fraud; the 16 Georgia Republicans who falsely claimed to be "duly elected and qualified" electors; the abrupt resignation of Trump's U.S. Attorney in Atlanta; and the unlawful breach and duplication of voting system software and data in rural Coffee County (as originally reported in detail on this program.)

Nobody other than Willis and McBurney (and the Special Grand Jurors) know what is in their report, but the panel requested that it be made public. Today's hearing in Atlanta was convened to determine if that would happen in full immediately, in part immediately, or not at all until sometime in the future. Willis and her office argued against immediate public disclosure of report, offering some tasty morsels as to why.

"We think, for future defendants to be treated fairly, it's not appropriate at this time to have this report released," Willis told the Judge. "At this time, in the interest of justice and the rights of, not the state, but others, we are asking that the report not be released because you, having seeing that report... [pause]...decisions are imminent."

What does that mean exactly? We discuss. Along with the counter arguments from an attorney representing media outlets such as the Atlanta Journal Constitution, New York Times and Wall Street Journal who argued today for the immediate public disclosure of the Special Grand Jury report. "We believe the report should be released now and in its entirety," argued the media intervenors' attorney, Tom Clyde. The question is difficult, given the rarity of Special Process Grand Juries in GA and the extraordinary circumstances of what they've been investigation. Judge McBurney is now considering his options. Willis is free to move ahead with indictments at any time, no matter what is ultimately decided about the report.

FINALLY TODAY, Desi Doyen has our latest Green News Report, with news on California's recently disastrous string of punishing storms; a new report on whether off-shore wind power is killing whales off the U.S. northeast coast; the high cost of weather disasters in the U.S. in 2022; and some good news for manatees off the coast of Florida...

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Today's BradCast --- from questions about classified Presidential documents to this week's hand-count of 2020 ballots in a swing-state county --- is ultimately about transparency and sunshine as the best disinfectants when it comes to politics and the necessity of public oversight for the health of American democracy. Even when it may seem annoying to some at first blush.

Much of the corporate media has been doing a fairly lousy job of allowing disingenuous rightwing opportunists to turn the recent reported discoveries of some classified documents said to have been found in old boxes at a Joe Biden office and one of residents into the very same thing that Donald Trump is facing potential felony charges for. In his case, any charges will most likely come in response to blatant disregard for the rule of law and the continuing-to-this-day obstruction of justice in his case of thousands of pages of stolen classified documents.

There is little comparison between the two matters, but the comparisons are being made anyway. Sometimes helpfully, sometimes lazily and destructively. In any event, Robert Hur, a former U.S. Attorney appointed by Donald Trump was designated on Thursday by Biden's Attorney General Merrick Garland to serve as Special Counsel in the matter of the Biden documents. That is a good thing, as it will ultimately serve to either expose crimes (unlikely, based on the currently known evidence, but always a good thing if there are any actual crimes) or end with a report from the Special Counsel finding no violations of the law by the President. A normal, non-Special Counsel probe by DoJ would end in either indictments or no comment, allowing false claims to be made forever.

I suspect many Dems will be annoyed by the appointment of a Special Counsel in the Biden case. But it is ultimately be better than the alternative. Transparency, sunshine and independent oversight are always good things.

In a similar vein, the second major story we focus on today involves a hand-count of hand-marked paper ballots from the 2020 Presidential election taking place this week in Lycoming County, Pennsylvania. It's a county where Trump won by more than 40 points in both 2016 and 2020, but where many Republicans have been conned into believing there was some sort of fraud that decreased Trump's win from 44.2 points over Hillary Clinton in 2016 to "only" 41.4 points over Biden in 2020.

There is zero evidence of fraud or programming error or mistally of any kind, but local Republicans --- hoaxed by opportunistic national liars --- have collected thousands of signatures to demand a public hand count. The County's of Board of Supervisors ultimately agreed late last year to allow one.

Some of the few covering the count at all in the national media this week have been snarky, snide or dismissive (MSNBC's Alex Wagner, for example, and the very computer voting and tabulation friendly media outlet VoteBeat). But, as it turns out, the count appears to be going smoothly, is reportedly confirming the original results, and was largely completed in just three days rather than the three weeks VoteBeat had suggested it might take, as they offered readers false and misleading claims about hand-counting. (They believe computers are more reliable for that sort of thing, even though the only way to know if computers have tallied paper ballots accurately is to...hand count them.)

But whether there is legitimate cause to be concerned about the results of a Presidential election two years ago in a far-right leaning swing-state county, and while even a hand-count is unlikely to persuade the most brain-poisoned of Republicans, public oversight of vote counting is ultimately a very good thing for democracy. In fact, in all of my years on this beat, I am convinced it is the only thing that can keep it viable and continuing here in the U.S. As you may have noticed, for good reasons and bad, confidence in democracy and election results have taken quite a beating in this country in recent years. That is good for nobody other than the charlatans and autocrats. Public oversight of election results, on the other hand, particularly if they confirm the original counts, can only help to shore up confidence by the electorate. Democracy needs that to thrive and survive

Once again, sunshine, transparency and oversight to the rescue...whether some may be annoyed by it or not.

Finally, we finish out today with Desi Doyen and our latest Green News Report, including some disturbing new climate data from NOAA and the latest dumb pretend freak-out by Fox "News"...

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Of course, just as COVID and other respiratory viruses are surging in L.A. (and California, and much of the rest of the country), we have our first in-studio guest on The BradCast since the pandemic. Oh, well. Wish us luck! [Audio link to full show is posted below this summary.]

We're joined today by the great STEVE HERMAN of Voice of America who spent some 26 years covering various regions in Asia and serving as VOA correspondent and Bureau Chief in India, Korea, Thailand. In 2016, he returned stateside to serve as VOA's Senior Diplomatic Correspondent, for a brief stint, before becoming the eight decade-old, U.S. funded media outlet's White House Bureau Chief. After serving 4 totally easy-peasy years at the White House during the Trump Administration and several months during Biden's, Herman is now on the road as VOA's Chief National Correspondent covering the 2024 campaign. (I know, I know...we're not even done with 2022 around here!)

In a broad, in-studio conversation today --- including questions from listener callers --- we cover, among many other things...

• Herman's initial visit to the Fukushima nuclear plant just after the 2011 meltdown disaster...without any sort of physical protection! (That was when he first appeared as a guest on our program.)

• How VOA stands virtually alone as a state-funded news outlet given its special charter, a "firewall" enshrined by federal statute that prevents the government from meddling in its coverage. "The White House, or even the head of our parent agency, the U.S. Agency for Global Media, cannot tell me or my editors what we have to report or cannot report. They cannot be involved editorially," says Herman.

• How and why that makes VOA different from state-funded propaganda outlets in Russia, China, Iran and elsewhere. "I like to say VOA is probably the only news organization in the world that is mandated by law to be fair and effective," Herman explains. "In that charter it says we must reflect the different views of what's going on in the United States."

• "Facts are facts," he tells me, regarding so much mis- and disinformation by both the Right and Left. "What they are reporting at RT [Russia Today] and Sputnik is not factual, especially about the war in Ukraine. ... It's a situation that we see from Chinese state media and Iranian state media. And this goes back all the way to why VOA was created after the start of World War II, because you had Nazi Germany on the airwaves, uncontested to a great degree, spitting out anti-American and pro-Nazi propaganda. What VOA was set up to do was to tell the audiences, initially in German and also in Japanese, what's going on with the war, whether it's good or bad."

• The efforts by the Trump Administration, while Herman served as VOA's WH Bureau Chief, to affect the agency's news coverage and attempts to pressure Herman himself. "When these things have happened over the decades in various administrations, it also demonstrates that VOA is not a propaganda service," he argues. "If it were a propaganda service, we would not be getting complaints from within the United States government on some of the stories we've been doing."

• - Herman's thoughts on the insane response by Donald Trump over the weekend to Matt Taibbi's "Twitter Files" thread detailing internal discussion/debate among Twitter executives in the run-up to the 2020 election when deciding whether or not to suppress questionably sourced reporting on Hunter Biden's laptop.

• All of that and much more, including praise for sushi in Los Angeles from a guy who worked for decades in Asia!

Also covered today, a few news headlines at the top of the show...

• Flu, COVID and other respiratory illness is "off the charts" in California, Los Angeles County and elsewhere around the country.
• Russia's latest missile assault on civilian infrastructure in Ukraine, and the nearly 600 documented cases of apparent war crimes by the aggressor nation since Putin's invasion in February.
• The apparent coordinated domestic terror attacks on electric substations in Moore County, North Carolina that has knocked out power and water to tens of thousands of residents.
• Early voting is over and Election Day now awaits on Tuesday in Georgia's U.S. Senate runoff between Democratic incumbent Sen. Raphael Warnock and Trump-backed sociopathic liar Hershel Walker.
• The weekend's aforementioned insane (and largely pointless) Twitter thread by Matt Taibbi, how it has been misreported by MAGA Republicans including Donald Trump, who dishonestly represented the reporting in order to call for "termination" of the U.S. Constitution (seriously!) in its wake...

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On today's BradCast: It's no surprise that Fox 'News' deluded itself for months and even years about a "red wave" or "tsunami" coming for the 2022 midterm elections. It shouldn't be a surprise that the theoretically legitimate media got it wrong as well, given that they seem to make the same errors election after election. And yet, it's both surprising and disappointing, given that the data to counter their erroneous narrative was right there in front of their face the whole time...if they simply bothered to, or had the courage to, listen to it. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

"There was nothing magical about what I did," our guest today, TOM BONIER of the Democratic data research firm, TargetSmart, explains. "It was, as you say, seeing the numbers and reporting the numbers and, in the end, trying to stay away from predictions or projections, but to say, 'Look, this is what we're seeing'."

Bonier's well-documented Twitter threads on the data over the past many months spelled out what shouldn't have been a surprise to anyone. In the face of extremism from the right and, in particular, the Supreme Court, there was a backlash against Republicans which served to boost Democrats across the board.

Prior to today, Bonier joined us twice in recent months to discuss his analysis of data and what he was seeing and tweeting about to anyone who might have wanted to listen. In late August, after voters in deep red Kansas decisively rejected a ballot initiative that would have rewritten the state constitution to allow abortion to be banned, he joined us to explain what he saw as a "jaw-dropping" spike in new voter registrations for young, Democratic women following the Supreme Court's Dobbs decision in late June, overturning Roe v. Wade. Bonier saw similar spikes in new registrations all over the map, in "red" and "blue" states alike, but particularly where reproductive rights were most threatened.

In late September he joined us again after analyzing specific voter data from that failed Kansas referendum. Hard evidence of an incredible spike in women voters that, he told us at the time, "just doesn't happen in elections." He posited that any suggestion that Democrats would be swamped in November, as the so-called Conventional Wisdom offered by pundits would have it, was simply ignoring the available data. He argued the election would be very close and almost certainly not a "wave" for the GOP.

He was right. Even though, over the past month in the run-up to Election Day, the corporate media were, largely in lock step, warning that Dems were done for, soon to be swamped by a red wave or even tsunami! How much of that erroneous punditry "blunted" the final results, Bonier laments, citing races like Mandela Barnes' in Wisconsin, where the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate fell just shy of unseating incumbent Republican Ron Johnson by a single point.

"I like to think of myself as an optimist, but it was difficult over the last few weeks and months," he tells me. "In reality, what we do at TargetSmart is we listen to the data. That's all we were doing. Along the way I was looking at the voter registration data, looking at the early vote data, looking at it in the context of the polls and trying to draw some conclusions. But mostly providing context and questioning the hard-set assumptions that were really leading everyone."

We discuss, among other things, the "flood of Republican polling" in the last few weeks of the campaign and how it warped forecasts from poll aggregation sites like FiveThirtyEight, and how his fellow traveler, Simon Rosenberg, who also had it right, was "mocked" when he highlighted how forecasts were being swamped by those bad GOP polls.

By itself, the media failure "doesn't happen. It took some level of complicit behavior from those who should be guards against it," Bonier insists. "People are mocking Fox News at this point. We know it is a very biased Republican media platform. But the bottom line is most of cable and these other outlets had a level of certainty about this outcome in a very similar way. I have to say, as I spoke with reporters in the closing weeks, I would be telling them 'Look, this is going to be a close election. I don't see a Republican wave. I don't see that in the numbers.' And I was just short of mocked by reporters."

But, why? Is it a lack of courage to stray from the pack journalism and group think? Or, as media critic Dan Froomkin argued today, a symptom of systemic "rot" in the political media? Bonier offers his frank thoughts on that and much more as we dig deep in today's discussion. I strongly urge you to tune in for it in full.

Also today, in addition to our own mocking of Fox "News", we've got plenty left over to mock folks like HBO's Bill Maher and Spotify's Joe Rogan and CNN's Fareed Zakaria and NYTimes' Maggie Haberman who all got it wrong as well --- and misled the American electorate in the bargain --- for many of the reasons discussed on today's program. And, we've also got the latest reported results out of still uncalled critical races for U.S. Senate, Governor, Sec. of State and Attorney General in Arizona and Nevada...

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On today's BradCast: With less than two weeks to go before this year's critical midterm Election Day, can the corporate media be convinced to take America's side in helping to save democracy itself? [Audio link to full show follows below this summary.]

We've devoted nearly two decades to calling out corporate media for their seemingly never-ending failures, the worst of which we may now be smack dab in the middle of, as they seem to have little to no appreciation for our endangered democracy and their no-small-part in helping bring us to this point.

Over the past two years, we've noted (among other failures) how the corporate media just can't seem to simply and clearly call out Donald Trump for having attempted to steal a Presidential election before our very eyes. Instead, as they report even now, he was simply trying to "overturn" or "undermine" or "challenge" or "question" the results, hoping to "roll them back" in order to "remain in the White House". But because they have failed to accurately and directly inform the American electorate that Trump and his minions attempted, repeatedly, to steal a Presidential election, a huge chunk of the citizenry continue to falsely believe the 2020 election was actually stolen from him, despite any evidence to support the false claim. Shamefully, hundreds of Republican candidates on this year's ballot continue to spread that lie and often go entirely unchallenged by the press.

"There's a journalism crisis in this country," charges our guest today, BRIAN HANSBURY, co-founder of the grassroots Media and Democracy Project. The media, he tells me, are "marching us towards fascism and a potential future where we're not able to have votes that have any meaning moving forward."

Hansbury's group recently penned an open letter to "American journalists, editors, producers and publishers" detailing the "urgent need for pro-democracy 2022 election coverage." In an op-ed this week at Salon, he warns that "Journalists who know the 2020 presidential election was free and fair still frequently describe those who lie about it as mere 'skeptics' who 'dispute the results.'" They are not "deniers," he insists. They are liars and should be described as such. He calls on "news media to urgently communicate" to the American public that the November 8 midterm is "not an ordinary election, but rather a contest between would-be authoritarians and candidates who defend the rule of law and the electoral system."

Hansbury's op-ed cites his group's open letter for more details in order to plead: "For the next two weeks, journalists must 1) make threats to democracy clear, 2) protect Americans against disinformation and 3) treat elections as if they are more important than the sports page."

We discuss what all of the above actually means and much more today, as Hansbury makes the case for the American media to, in fact, "take sides" at this point. "Media should be a partisan for democracy," he argues. "Ahead of the 2022 midterms, they should be picking a side, and that should be the side of democracy."

"When elected officials are lying to the public, that's a time when journalists and newsrooms should be taking the side of those who aren't lying to the public about something so fundamental to our rights, freedoms and democracy as elections."

"The 'both sides' thing," Hansbury asserts, is a "false equivalence that is constantly maintained in our national media between normal candidates --- and by 'normal' I mean those that don't lie to us about elections --- and these anti-democracy Republicans. And that normalizes the election lies. It allows for there to be this permission to continue to lie about elections."

The ability for so many candidates to continue to tell so many lies without being held accountable in the press, one can reasonably argue, is no small part of why so many races across the country are now believed to be so close this year. That, despite independently verifiable facts which contradict the candidates' lies...if only our media bothered tell the truth as clearly and relentlessly as the liars lie. It's only the future of American democracy at stake after all. Or, as Hansbury charges the media see it, just another way to "maximize profit, maximize engagement and deliver to advertisers."

Also today, in very related news...

• Jon Stewart --- yes, a comedian, rather than a journalist --- calls out Arizona's Republican Attorney General Mark Brnovich during an interview for refusing to clearly say, even two years later, that Joe Biden won the battleground state fair and square in 2020...even though the A.G. clearly knows that to be the case.

• In Pennsylvania, Everett Stern, a little known Republican running as an independent write-in candidate in the state's critical U.S. Senate election, dropped out on Wednesday to endorse the Democratic candidate, John Fetterman. He cited the need to place "country over party," in the race against Trump-endorsed Republican nominee Mehmet Oz, which is considered to largely be a dead heat at this point. In leaving the race, Stern announced: "I am polling around 3% which places Democracy at risk. In the interest of protecting the United States I am dropping out of the U.S Senate Race in PA. I fully endorse John Fetterman. The Democrats must win. PA must be Blue."

Good for him! Nice that there are still some Republicans who appreciate the danger American democracy now faces and the importance of saving it...

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Today on The BradCast: Our U.S. corporate media are still cowed by the radical Right and still failing in their Constitutional mandate to inform and educate the electorate; a few quick items from the UNconventional Times files in advance of the 2022 midterms; and a much-needed new tune to leave you whistling on the way out. [Audio link to full show is posted below this summary.]

First up, as I've long argued on this program, it's a mistake to buy into the political punditry of Conventional Wisdom that Dems will taking a beating this November. While the climb is still an uphill one for them this year --- particularly in the House --- polling is now bearing out my warning from months ago to ignore Conventional Wisdom in these decidedly UNconventional times. Some brief new exhibits for that case today: Maryland's popular, termed-out Republican Gov. Larry Hogan is describing Dan Cox, the state's Trump-endorsed GOP nominee for Hogan's job, as "not mentally stable", and "a nut" who has "no chance whatsoever" of winning the Governorship.

Further harming GOP odds this year, Trump's ever-worsening legal woes. As CNN reported last night, there are now 18 former top Trump Administration officials --- from two Chiefs of Staff to key military and intel officials --- who tell the news net that the disgraced former President's claim to have had a "standing order" that any documents he left the Oval Office with were immediately declassified is "ludicrous," "ridiculous," "a complete fiction" and worse.

CNN's exclusive reporting, however, never makes clear to readers that, whether or not the highly sensitive national security documents were declassified or not, doesn't actually matter. It was still unlawful for Trump to have stolen them when leaving the White House. That is a fact no matter the classification status of those documents or any other material that he stole upon leaving office last year.

Why are they so afraid to use a 100% accurate description like "stole" when describing what Trump stole from the White House? Or, as we've discussed on many previous shows, simply using plain language to describe Trump's many failed attempts to steal the 2020 Presidential election? (He wasn't trying to "undermine" or "reverse" or "overturn" the results, he was trying to STEAL the election!) Our guest today has some thoughts on all of that and more. He joins us the day after news broke that new management at CNN is cancelling Reliable Sources, the only legitimate media criticism program on cable or broadcast TV news, as hosted by Brian Stelter for 9 years at the end of its 30-year run.

We're delighted to welcome today longtime media critic and former corporate media "insider", DAN FROOMKIN, who served 12 years heading up Washington Post's popular "White House Watch" blog during the George W. Bush era (before he was unceremoniously let go for being too good at it), after which he moved to Huff Post and then The Intercept and is now the editor and creator of the Press Watch newsletter and website.

Our conversation follows on CNN's axing of Reliable Sources, as well as recent headlines from major media outlets that horrifically mislead the public or pull punches in order to "both sides" facts that they clearly see as as politically controversial, no matter how true they happen to be. One example, as cited by NYU media critic Jay Rosen last week, Washington Post's "Garland vowed to depoliticize Justice. Then the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago." And another deconstructed this week by media critic James Fallows on the New York Times' "Even on Biden's Big Day, He's Still in Trump's Long Shadow."

We cover a lot of ground on all of the above and more with Froomkin today. But, a few key quotes...

On Stelter and CNN: "It's a terrible indicator about what CNN is doing and where it's going. ....It's a huge loss for CNN and a huge win for Fox because Stelter was really one of the few in mainstream media who was willing to say that Fox News was all about spreading malicious lies and poisoning the politics of our country. ... I think the reason he was canned was because he was basically the number one target of the rightwing media." Froomkin describes the move as "clearly a sacrifice on the altar of rightwing media," likely at the behest of a major stockholder ("John Malone, the cable company monopolist") of CNN's new owner following the recent merger and reorganization of Warner Bros. and Discovery.

On the lack of Public Editors/Ombudsmen at major corporate outlets like NYT and WaPo: "Public Editors were an incredibly valuable thing...then they were all ditched. The excuse was hysterically funny. The excuse from the New York Times publisher was, 'We don't need a public editor anymore, because we have social media.' That has a certain sense to it, except you look at what they've been doing the last ten years. They've been scrupulously ignoring social media, mocking social media criticism of themselves. They've been incredibly defensive about anything anyone tweets about them. And they've now passed all of these rules telling reporters what they're allowed to tweet and not allowed to tweet, and one of the things they're not allowed to tweet is any criticism of the Times or any other journalists. Same rules at the Washington Post. ... I've always hoped that there would be a sort of critical mass of media critics out there who would cumulatively have the heft of one of these Public Editors, but it's never happened. And, as you pointed out, we're becoming fewer and further between."

On other ongoing corporate media failures in the Age of Trump: "The worst example, by far, is the coverage of the January 6 Committee and what's happened since. The singular achievement of that Committee was that it had established, to the satisfaction of pretty much everybody, except for the willfully ignorant, that prosecuting Trump was not a political necessity --- it was a moral necessity. I think that really helped inoculate [Attorney General Merrick] Garland against the perception that what he would be doing would be political. Instead, the FBI does a search warrant on Mar-a-Lago because of documents that [Trump] stole and didn't give back and then lied about giving back, and the press sees this as some sort of a political fight?!"

As to why the bulk of the mainstream media won't use the word "stole" or "steal" as in the indisputable facts regarding the documents Trump stole from the White House or his many attempts to steal the 2020 election: "Unfortunately, the truth has become so politicized in this day and age that simply asserting the truth is seen as political by these people. And they don't want to do that. ... Five years ago, I think everybody in the country would have agreed that trying to steal the Presidential election was a bad thing and whoever did it ought to be held accountable. But it's a little bit like the frog in the pot --- the media has, day after day, normalized what Trump does."

Much more in my fascinating conversation with Froomkin today.

Finally, as promised, we leave you with a long-overdue and much-needed new Randy Rainbow ditty to end yet another impossible week. Enjoy!...

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Very shortly before airtime today, we learned that our friend, longtime progressive media critic and frequent guest on The BradCast, ERIC BOEHLERT, was killed earlier this week at the age of 57, in a tragic bicycling accident when he was hit by a commuter train in Montclair, New Jersey. [Audio link to full show is posted below this summary.]

We were, and are, a bit shook up today. We had a very different program planned, but decided, at the very last minute, with the wind knocked out of us by the news, to change today's show into a tribute to Eric. He last appeared on this show on January 19th of this year, to discuss the one-year anniversary of President Biden's inauguration and the disturbing difference in the way the corporate media covers his Presidency, versus the guy in office before him. We decided to share that interview again on today's program.

Eric's influence, fighting spirit and sense of fair play has long echoed on both this program and at The BRAD BLOG over many years. He was an indefatigable champion for the truth and frequently supportive of our work, particularly during as we revealed the truth about Breitbart/O'Keefe "ACORN Pimp" hoax and called on the duped mainstream media to issue corrections to dozens of inaccurate stories. In the nearly two decades we've known, worked with, and admired him, he has never stopped holding feet to the fire, particularly those of liars on the right and the supposedly non-right corporate media which, as he long documented, have consistently failed in their critical mission over those critical decades.

His legacy will largely speak for itself --- at Salon, Media Matters, Daily Kos and his latest venture, the Press Run newsletter, "an unfiltered, passionate, and proudly progressive critique of the political press in the age of Trump," and, of course, in his many media appearances, including the dozens of times he's joined us on air over the years. His Twitter feed, I'd be remiss without mentioning, was always a must-follow, particularly as he took on the horrible Andrew Breitbart back in the day.

Eric began as a music critic at Billboard and Rolling Stone before turning to media analysis. He also published two books, Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush and Bloggers On the Bus: How The Internet Changed Politics and the Press.

We discuss what happened --- and the outpouring of warm thoughts shared in his memory this afternoon by many in the media, and even folks like Hillary Clinton and Jon Stewart --- on today's show, along with his most recent and, sadly, final appearance on this program.

We also cover a few other things, including some accountability for a very Trumpy attorney who is (or was) representing a whole bunch of January 6th conspirators until he was disbarred late last week, and the 8-hour appearance on Tuesday by Ivanka Trump before the House Select Committee investigating Donald Trump's attempt to steal the 2020 election. But really, today's show is mostly in tribute and in memory of Eric, who, in addition to a much better informed public, leaves behind his wife Tracy Breslin and two children, Jane and Ben.

As Eric always noted at the top of his Press Run newsletters: "Stay Healthy. Be Kind."

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In what would be a dream world for our previous President, who declared the media to be "the enemy of the people" just before his infamous 2018 meeting with Russia's Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, Russia has now criminalized pretty much any and all independent media. But our guests on today's BradCast have a really cool and, yes, retro idea about how to help counter Russia's media blackout. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

Among other restrictions, Putin's new censorship law, adopted just after his invasion of Ukraine, mandates harsh penalties, including jail time, for the crime of reporting on the invasion as an "invasion" or "war". Independent outlets have been forced to shutter or have stopped covering the war at all. Western media outlets have pulled their reporters and Russia has closed Internet access to websites of foreign state-run media outlets such as Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, the BBC and Deutsche Welle.

Kremlin-approved propaganda is now all that many Russians have access to, where they are being told that Russia's barbaric military assault on its sovereign neighbor --- including its civilian population --- is little more than a minor, "special military operation" meant to "demilitarize and denazify" Ukraine. Civilians are not being harmed, and anyone who says otherwise is reporting "fake news," the Kremlin insists.

Of late, however, as Julia Davis reported yesterday at The Daily Beast, some cracks are beginning to appear, even on Kremlin-approved television, including one of Moscow's most popular evening news programs, whose Putin-friendly host has been sanctioned by the EU and where nightly broadcasts frequently end with clips of monologues by Fox 'News' star Tucker Carlson.

For most Russians, however, there is very little access to independent, outside reporting to counter the official state media narrative. Our guests today, attorney KATE NEISWENDER and former longtime Voice of America employee and shortwave radio enthusiast KIM ANDREW ELLIOTT are part of a small, grassroots effort aiming to revive a Cold War technology in hopes of helping counter the information desert inside of Putin's new Iron Curtain.

Dubbed #ShortwavesForFreedom on social media, the new project has begun raising money to fund re-broadcasts of Voice of America (VOA) programming into Ukraine and Russia via shortwave frequencies. While the BBC World Service announced this week they were reviving their old shortwave broadcasts into the former Soviet Union, the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty --- both managed by the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM) --- have declined to do so, at least so far.

Neiswender, Elliott and a number of other VOA veterans and supporters aim to fill that gap with a crowd-funded effort. The group has already raised enough over just the past week or so to get up and running --- rebroadcasting some of VOA's programming (which is all public domain) --- into Europe via shortwave transmission from Florida station, WRMI Radio Miami International.

They both join us today to explain, among other things: How this effort came together in just over a week's time; how they hope to expand from English-language programming to broadcasts in both Ukrainian and Russian; why they believe VOA (actually, USAGM) has yet to take this step themselves; and how a very small amount of money can go a very long way in this project, as they seek additional broadcasters to help transmit shortwave programming from both the U.S. and Europe.

Does anyone in Russia still even have access to the equipment needed to listen to the broadcasts? "Well, nowadays for sure, fewer people will be listening to shortwave and fewer people have shortwave radios," Elliott explains. "But, when the Internet is cut, squeezed, blocked, and at some point maybe even with lines into the country cut off, radio will be the only way to get in to the country. And then, the people in those countries will have to try to find their old Soviet-era shortwave radios." He believes "that audience can pass the information on to the larger audience in those countries."

Will Russian audiences have any more confidence that what they are hearing from Western state-run outlets like VOA is any more reliable than what their own state-approved outlets are telling them? "VOA and RFE (Radio Free Europe) have a government-imposed, in-the-code-written-by-Congress, can't-get-around-it mandate to be fair," Neiswender argues. She's referring to USAGM's Charter, adopted during the Ford Administration, which one VOA journalist has explained to me, means that, "We're probably the only news organization in the world that is mandated to be fair, objective and unbiased."

Whether VOA and RFE's reports are perceived as such by listeners inside of Russia and Ukraine is another matter, but their broadcasts did serve as an information lifeline to many behind the old Iron Curtain for many decades of the Cold War.

For now, the effort is already working. Elliott, who spent more than 30 years as a broadcaster and audience analyst at VOA tells us that "the signal is getting through to a very large extent, and sometimes with really good reception quality. Direct feedback from the audience, that will take some days and weeks as the word gets around that these transmissions are available. Already, WRMI received a note from a diplomat in Egypt who heard the Russian transmission. It is getting through."

Neiswender says that the project's success is only a matter of raising funds to keep going and expand their reach. The effort is crowdsourced with a fund raiser at Fundrazr.com/RadioWaves. A very small amount of money goes a long way here, she insists. They are already up and broadcasting after raising just over $6,000.

All of the money, "goes directly to the stations. No one is getting a dime from this that is organizing it or running it. Every cent of the money that is coming in is going directly back out to fund these transmissions," she notes.

It's a fascinating conversation about a fascinating project that I believe is well worth your time today, even as these are very strange days indeed.

Finally, we close with one more fascinating story, and a song. The story comes, ironically enough, courtesy of Fox "News", regarding Marina Baronova, the now-former Managing Editor of Russia's state-owned media outlet Russia Today (RT). She resigned her post last week in protest of Putin's invasion of Ukraine. She now fears for her life, though not necessarily for the reasons you may assume. And her interview with Fox concludes with this message: "Russians love their children, too."

As it happens, Grammy-winner Sting, last weekend, posted an Instagram video singing his 1985 tune called "Russians" which, he says, he has rarely sung since the end of the Cold War. Now, as you'll hear, it has new relevance. Apparently even for Baronova...

CLICK TO LISTEN OR DOWNLOAD SHOW!...

MONTHLY BRAD BLOG SUBSCRIPTION	ONE-TIME DONATION
Choose monthly amount... $10 : $10.00 USD - monthly$20 : $20.00 USD - monthly$50 : $50.00 USD - monthly$100 : $100.00 USD - monthly	(Snail mail support to "Brad Friedman, 7095 Hollywood Blvd., #594 Los Angeles, CA 90028" always welcome too!)