“My Pillow” guy loses election fraud libel lawsuit, but some conservative media won’t tell you
June 16, 2025 – Mike Lindell, the “My Pillow” guy, lost a $2.3 million libel lawsuit filed by former Dominion Voting Systems executive Eric Coomer. You can learn more about this case on the right-wing news site Brietbart, which used a UPI story that said that “Lindell claimed — without any evidence — that Coomer […]
AI goes out of its way to be wrong, so don’t trust it yet
By Howie Boxley Rachel Pollack, a renowned author, artist, and tarot expert, passed away on April 7, 2023, at the age of 75. Pollack’s death was confirmed by her publisher, Llewellyn Worldwide, who stated that she had died peacefully at her home in the Hudson Valley, New York. Born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1948, […]
What is ‘truth’ in documentaries? Sometimes, it’s a meltdown of a letdown.
By Benton Davis In 2019, HBO released a five-part miniseries about the Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster. In the opening minutes of the first episode, we see a Soviet scientist hang themselves, deliberately doing so two years later to the second from the initial disaster. The scientist, named Valery Legasov and portrayed by Jared Harris, did commit […]
Define your terms, or the propagandists win
Iowa State’s Michael Bugeja makes a strong point in a Poynter Institute column (June 30, 2022) about how some Republican candidates use the term “RINO” — Republican in Name Only” — to describe other Republicans who show “apparent disloyalty to Trump as GOP kingmaker.” His commentary includes Republican Jim Jones, who in 2021 provided a […]
Not an April Fool’s joke in March when Volkswagen lied.
You’re an automaker who lied again and again about your emissions testing. You’ve paid more than $33 billion in fines and to buy back many of the 11 million cars you lied about. Your chief executive officer was forced out, saying he was “deeply sorry that we have broken the trust of our customers and […]
How should news organizations respond to non-responsive responses for comment?
Ethical news organizations follow the tenet in the Society of Professional Journalist’s code of ethics that says good journalists “[d]iligently seek subjects of news coverage to allow them to respond to criticism or allegations of wrongdoing.” More and more of those subjects don’t actually answer the questions, however. Companies, politicians, and others often respond to […]
Why we need journalism: Because PR-focused governments like to hide uncomfortable truth.
Two cities remind us why we need journalism to tell truths that PR-infatuated governments don’t want to tell: * The former mayor of Birmingham, Larry Langford, died Jan. 8. The city’s official web site posted this stirring obituary of Langford.What it neglected to mention was the uncomfortable truth that Langford was a felon, arrested and […]
When ‘fake news’ isn’t fake, and the ethics of a spokesman
It’s been a few months since news organizations caught the criminal lie flung by Melissa Howard, a GOP candidate for the Florida House of Representatives. Short take: She claimed she had a degree from Miami University in Ohio, and she did not. Once caught, and after some lying before acknowledging the truth, she dropped out […]
Today in evil PR: A student loan company invents a guy who talked to journalists
The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that LendEDU invented a guy named Drew Cloud to run The Student Loan Report, which purported to provide fun insight and good information about the burgeoning student loan industry. Cloud was quoted by multiple media organizations, including MSNBC and The Washington Post. There was a picture of Cloud on […]