Corporate Corruption Media Articles

Excerpts of Key Corporate Corruption Media Articles in Major Media

Below are key excerpts of revealing news articles on corporate corruption from reliable news media sources. If any link fails to function, a paywall blocks full access, or the article is no longer available, try these digital tools.

Note: Explore our full index to key excerpts of revealing major media news articles on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.

What Americans eat, how they diet and exercise, what nutritional supplements they take, the sugar content of their sodas, the high fructose corn syrup in their processed foods, and the price of their diabetes medication have long been objects of endless gambling on Wall Street. Now, with drugs like Mounjaro, Wegovy, and Ozempic in the mix, new vistas of corporate exploitation have opened up. It's not a conspiracy theory that food addiction is a tool of corporate profiteering. Consider that tobacco companies, upon being regulated out of the business of addictive smoking, turned their sights onto addictive eating. Health columnist Anahad O'Connor wrote, "In America, the steepest increase in the prevalence of hyper-palatable foods occurred between 1988 and 2001–the era when Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds owned the world's leading food companies." Many of these ultra-processed foods are specially marketed to children, which in turn can change their brain chemistry to desire those foods for life. Alongside the aggressive marketing of hyper-palatable foods is a massively profitable weight-loss industry that preys upon individual shame to the tune of more than $60 billion a year. In fact, some of the same companies pushing high-calorie foods are in the business of weight loss. The ultra-processed food industry is becoming symbiotic with the weight-loss drug industry. The former ensures we eat poorly and the latter is there to feed off our shame.

Note: This is strangely comparable to when pharmaceutical giant Purdue Pharma LP secretly pursued a plan to become "an end-to-end pain provider" by selling both opioids and drugs to treat opioid addiction. It is now estimated that 1 in 8 adults in the US have taken Ozempic or another weight-loss drug. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on food system corruption and Big Pharma profiteering from reliable major media sources.

Every five years or so, Congress reauthorizes a comprehensive, multibillion-dollar law that has a major impact not only on farmers and ranchers–who make up less than 2 percent of the US population–but also on the environment, public health, and the economy. Generically called the "farm" bill, it is actually a farm and food bill that supports a wide range of programs, including ones that cover crop insurance, financial credit, and export subsidies for farmers, as well as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as food stamps. SNAP, which eats up 80 percent of the bills' total budget, currently serves 41 million low-income Americans. A major ... reason farm and food bills routinely fail to live up to their original intent is the undue influence the agribusiness sector has over Congress, which it exerts via campaign contributions and lobbying. The sector includes commodity crop traders, meat and poultry processors, fertilizer and pesticide makers, multinational food and beverage companies, giant supermarket chains, and all of their related trade associations. The agribusiness sector spent more than $793 million on lobbying on a range of issues between 2019 and 2023. Top spenders included the American Crystal Sugar Company, the American Farm Bureau Federation, Koch Industries, and the US Chamber of Commerce. Agribusiness's influence peddling is largely overlooked by the mainstream news media.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on corruption in government and in the food system from reliable major media sources.

AstraZeneca is being sued by a woman who claims she was disabled by the company's Covid-19 vaccine. Brianne Dressen said she was "the picture of good health" when getting the AstraZeneca Covid vaccine in 2020 at the age of 39 through a Salt Lake County, Utah, clinical trial. In the hours that followed, her arm began to tingle and the feeling spread up to her shoulder, then to her opposite arm. Later, other symptoms followed, including blurred vision, a headache, ringing ears, and vomiting. In 2021, National Institutes of Health neurologists diagnosed her with "post vaccine neuropathy." Dressen is the co-chair of React19, an interest group for people alleging injury from Covid-19 vaccines. Now, she's suing AstraZeneca over medical expenses and more, arguing she's still disabled and unable to work and carry on with many activities as she once had. The lawsuit, which accuses AstraZeneca of breaching contractual obligations, comes days after AstraZeneca pulled its Covid-19 vaccine off the market. AstraZeneca has said it was doing so due to a lack of demand and not for safety reasons. The vaccine, however, has faced concerns over its efficacy and safety. As of April 1, over 10,000 claims alleging injury or death from a Covid-19 shot have been filed with the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program, according to the HHS. In a separate lawsuit, Dressen's React19 and people alleging vaccine injuries are suing the HHS over the program.

Note: People injured by AstraZeneca's vaccine were censored on social media when they tried to talk about their experiences. While mainstream narratives emphasize how rare these injuries are, the numbers speak for themselves. The Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) is a voluntary government reporting system that only captures a portion of the actual injuries. Vaccine adverse event numbers are made publicly available, and currently show 38,068 COVID Vaccine Reported Deaths and 1,652,230 COVID Vaccine Adverse Event Reports.

Corporations across the food system increasingly have the power, by virtue of their size, market domination, political connections, and deep pockets, to set prices, meddle with science, evade regulation, and write the rules to benefit themselves. "Big Ag" and "Big Food" are shorthand for a sprawling collection of giant, often multinational corporations that wield enormous market power throughout our food system. Some of these companies are household names–for example, Tyson Foods, John Deere, and General Mills–while others are virtually unknown to consumers. Those lesser-known companies tend to operate up the supply chain, and include Bayer and Syngenta, which sell the seeds farmers need and the pesticides they've come to rely on, and Nutrien and CF Industries Holdings, which manufacture synthetic fertilizers. The consequences of extreme agriculture and food industry concentration ... include supply chain instability, unsafe working conditions and downward pressure on wages, and higher food prices for consumers. Some 40% of farmland nationally is owned, in ever-larger tracts, by absentee landlords who don't farm but rent to others (in the Corn Belt bullseye of Iowa, it's more than half). Billionaires, including Microsoft founder Bill Gates, are among the largest private owners of US farmland. And corporations and investment funds like Nuveen and Manulife are buying up farmland at a rate that should alarm you.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on food system corruption from reliable major media sources.

UnHerd, the Britain-based publication I lead, published an investigation on April 17 into a transatlantic organization called the Global Disinformation Index. Having received money from the U.S. State Department, as well as the British, German and European Union governments, the GDI issues what amount to blacklists of news publications, on highly tendentious grounds, that online advertising exchanges then consult and can use to justify turning off ad revenue. What has emerged ... is an opaque network of private and government-supported enterprises that appear intent on censoring political views they find unpalatable. When the [GDI] was originally set up, in 2018, it defined disinformation as "deliberately false content, designed to deceive." On this basis, you could see the argument for having fact-checkers to identify the most egregious offenders. But mission creep has set in at the GDI. It has since come up with a definition of disinformation that encompasses anything that deploys an "adversarial narrative" – stories that might be factually true but pit people against one another by creating "a risk of harm to at-risk individuals, groups or institutions" – with institutions defined as including "the current scientific or medical consensus." The de facto alliance between government and groups working to defund disfavored publications – a sort of state censorship laundering arrangement – is particularly alarming. The 2024 National Defense Authorization Act [bars] the Defense Department from placing military-recruitment advertising in publications utilizing GDI, NewsGuard or "any similar entity." The unaddressed problem with these disinformation referees is how their rulings affect online ad services themselves, not just advertisers, with the power to throttle revenue to publications simply for ideological reasons.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on censorship and media manipulation from reliable sources.

Pfizer has agreed to settle more than 10,000 lawsuits which alleged that the company failed to warn patients about possible cancer risks caused by the anti-heartburn medication Zantac. The lawsuits were filed in state courts across the country, but the agreements don't completely resolve Pfizer's exposure to the claims linking Zantac and cancer. Zantac was brought to market in 1983 by Glaxo Holdings, a company that is now part of the GlaxoSmithKline company. By 1988, it was the world's best selling drug as patients reported benefits for conditions such as heartburn, ulcers and acid reflux. In 2020, the Food and Drug Administration asked drugmakers to pull Zantac and its generic versions off the market after a cancer-causing substance called NDMA was found in samples of the drug. Thousands of lawsuits began piling up in federal and state courts against Pfizer, GSK, Sanofi and Boehringer Ingelheim. Last month, Sanofi reached an agreement in principle to settle 4,000 lawsuits linking Zantac to cancer. Sanofi did not disclose the financial terms of the deal, but Bloomberg News reported that the company will pay $100 million – or $25,000 to each plaintiff. Sanofi still faces about 20,000 lawsuits over Zantac in Delaware state court. A judge in Delaware Superior Court in Wilmington is weighing the fate of about 70,000 cases filed against Sanofi and other defendants, including GSK, Pfizer and Boehringer Ingelheim.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on Big Pharma corruption from reliable major media sources.

Ethan Zuckerman, a longtime technologist and social media scholar, thought he fully understood Section 230, the 1996 statute that contains the famous "26 words that created the internet." But three years ago, he was reading its full text aloud to his class at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst when suddenly, in his words, "a lightbulb went off in my head." It struck him that the law, widely understood to shield tech companies from being sued for their users' posts, also protects users. In particular, it protects people who build tools to filter or moderate online content. People like Zuckerman's friend Louis Barclay, a developer who in 2021 was permanently banned from Facebook and Instagram for developing a tool called "Unfollow Everything" that lets users, well, unfollow everything and restart their feeds fresh. Three years later, that eureka moment has turned into a lawsuit – one that, if successful, could loosen Big Tech's grip on how people use social media. The suit ... asks a California court to declare that Meta can't ban or sue him for building an unfollowing tool inspired by Barclay's. If the suit succeeds, Zuckerman plans to release the tool, called "Unfollow Everything 2.0," and hopes a wave of other tools to give users more control over their online lives will follow. Such tools are sometimes called "middleware" and have been touted by the Stanford political scientist Francis Fukuyama as a way to break Silicon Valley's chokehold on online speech.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on censorship and corporate corruption from reliable major media sources.

Facebook's inscrutable feed algorithm, which is supposed to calculate which content is most likely to appeal to me and then send it my way ... feels like an obstacle to how I'd like to connect with my friends. British software developer Louis Barclay developed a software ... known as an extension, which can be installed in a Chrome web browser. Christened Unfollow Everything, it would automate the process of unfollowing each of my 1,800 friends, a task that manually would take hours. The result is that I would be able to experience Facebook as it once was, when it contained profiles of my friends, but without the endless updates, photos, videos and the like that Facebook's algorithm generates. If tools like Unfollow Everything were allowed to flourish, and we could have better control over what we see on social media, these tools might create a more civic-minded internet. Unfortunately, Mr. Barclay was forced by Facebook to remove the software. Large social media platforms appear to be increasingly resistant to third-party tools that give users more command over their experiences. After talking with Mr. Barclay, I decided to develop a new version of Unfollow Everything. I – and the lawyers at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia – asked a federal court in California last week to rule on whether users should have a right to use tools like Unfollow Everything that give them increased power over how they use social networks, particularly over algorithms that have been engineered to keep users scrolling on their sites.

Note: The above was written by Ethan Zuckerman, associate professor of public policy and director of the UMass Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. For more along these lines, explore concise summaries of news articles on Big Tech from reliable major media sources.

The violent crackdown carried out on Columbia University students protesting Israel's genocidal assault on the Gaza Strip was led by a member of the school's own faculty, New York City Mayor Eric Adams has declared. During a May 1 press conference, just hours after the New York Police Department arrested nearly 300 people on university grounds, Adams praised adjunct Columbia professor Rebecca Weiner, who moonlights as the head of the NYPD counter-terrorism bureau, for giving police the green light to clear out anti-genocide students by force. Weiner maintained an office at Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA). Her SIPA bio describes her as an "Adjunct Associate Professor of International and Public Affairs" who simultaneously serves as the "civilian executive in charge of the New York City Police Department's Intelligence & Counterterrorism Bureau." In that role ... Weiner "develops policy and strategic priorities for the Intelligence & Counterterrorism Bureau and publicly represents the NYPD in matters involving counterterrorism and intelligence." A 2011 AP investigation revealed that a so-called "Demographics Unit" operated secretly within the NYPD's Counterterrorism and Intelligence Bureau. This shadowy outfit spied on Muslims around the New York City area. The unit was developed in tandem with the CIA. As a former police official told the AP, the unit attempted to "map the city's human terrain" through a program "modeled in part on how Israeli authorities operate in the West Bank."

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on police corruption and the erosion of civil liberties from reliable major media sources.

Google and Amazon are both loath to discuss security aspects of the cloud services they provide through their joint contract with the Israeli government, known as Project Nimbus. Both the Ministry of Defense and Israel Defense Forces are Nimbus customers. According to a 63-page Israeli government procurement document ... two of Israel's leading state-owned weapons manufacturers are required to use Amazon and Google for cloud computing needs. Though details of Google and Amazon's contractual work with the Israeli arms industry aren't laid out in the tender document, which outlines how Israeli agencies will obtain software services through Nimbus, the firms are responsible for manufacturing drones, missiles, and other weapons Israel has used to bombard Gaza. Project Nimbus ... has already created a public uproar. Google and Amazon have faced backlash ranging from street protests to employee revolts. Following anti-Nimbus sit-ins organized at the company's New York and Sunnyvale, California, offices, Google fired 50 employees. Emaan Haseem, [was] a cloud computing engineer at Google until she was fired after participating in the Sunnyvale protest. "A lot of us signed up or applied to work at Google because we were trying to avoid working at terrible unethical companies," she said. "Why are we pretending that because my logo is colorful and has round letters that I'm any better than Raytheon?"

Note: When Google employees protested Project Maven, a DoD drone program that used Google technology, the Big Tech giant dropped the contract with the Pentagon in 2018. Read about how Silicon Valley has been infiltrated by intelligence agencies.

The Department of Defense has used taxpayer money to send elite military officers to work for some of the Pentagon's top private contractors. From 1995 to 2021, more than 315 military officers with elite ranks as high as colonel and rear admiral have been placed at top weapons manufacturers such as Boeing, Raytheon, and Lockheed Martin, as well as other companies with billion-dollar government contracts. The arrangement has also coincided with a dramatic rise in Defense Department spending on private contractors valued in the trillions of dollars. The arrangement, called the Secretary of Defense Executive Fellows (SDEF) program, sends officers with promising military careers to work for top corporations in the defense, tech, finance, and other industries for one year. These fellows then report on how the Defense Department could incorporate some of these companies' business practices and policies. The program has helped place corporate interests at the very heart of US military strategy. [A] report from Quincy Institute, a nonprofit think tank, is the first detailed examination of the SDEF program. The report casts doubt on the integrity of the fellowship program, calling it a "de facto lobbying tool" for private companies and a "taxpayer-funded revolving door" where more than 40 percent of the fellows have gone on to work for government contractors at some point in their postmilitary careers.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on corruption in the military and in the corporate world from reliable major media sources.

A 30-second commercial seems harmless. However, new research from my lab shows that food marketing to kids is more than a nuisance: it's a key driver of poor diets. Food marketing impacts what kids like, buy and eat – increasing the risk of dental caries, obesity and type 2 diabetes. Like tobacco, tighter regulation of junk food marketing to children is needed to protect their health. This week, a bill introduced in the Senate, the Childhood Diabetes Reduction Act, proposes a crucial step forward by proposing limits on the types of techniques used to target kids ... as well as limits on where such ads can appear. The bill would cut kids' exposure to the most harmful types of food marketing. Companies spend $14 billion each year on marketing to children, over 80 percent of which is for fast food and other ultraprocessed foods like snacks, candy and sodas. In 2016, Chile restricted child-directed appeals and placement of ads on children's programming for unhealthy products and banned their sale and promotion in schools. In 2018, the country began prohibiting unhealthy food ads on any television program between 6am – 10pm. These regulations cut kids' exposure to unhealthy food marketing by over two-thirds. While the Chilean regulation is much more comprehensive than what is being proposed in the U.S., the Senate bill would still achieve important progress by reducing kids' exposure to the types of targeted marketing most likely to hook them on products.

Note: Big Food profits immensely as American youth face a growing health crisis, with close to 30% prediabetic, one in six youth obese, and over half of children facing a chronic illness. Nearly 40% of conventional baby food contains toxic pesticides. For more along these lines, explore concise summaries of news articles on food system corruption from reliable major media sources.

The center of the U.S. military-industrial complex has been shifting over the past decade from the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area to Northern California–a shift that is accelerating with the rise of artificial intelligence-based systems, according to a report published Wednesday. "Although much of the Pentagon's $886 billion budget is spent on conventional weapon systems and goes to well-established defense giants such as Lockheed Martin, RTX, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, Boeing, and BAE Systems, a new political economy is emerging, driven by the imperatives of big tech companies, venture capital (VC), and private equity firms," [report author Roberto J.] González wrote. "Defense Department officials have ... awarded large multibillion-dollar contracts to Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Oracle." González found that the five largest military contracts to major tech firms between 2018 and 2022 "had contract ceilings totaling at least $53 billion combined." There's also the danger of a "revolving door" between Silicon Valley and the Pentagon as many senior government officials "are now gravitating towards defense-related VC or private equity firms as executives or advisers after they retire from public service." "Members of the armed services and civilians are in danger of being harmed by inadequately tested–or algorithmically flawed–AI-enabled technologies. By nature, VC firms seek rapid returns on investment by quickly bringing a product to market, and then 'cashing out' by either selling the startup or going public. This means that VC-funded defense tech companies are under pressure to produce prototypes quickly and then move to production before adequate testing has occurred."

Note: Learn more about emerging warfare technology in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. For more, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on military corruption from reliable major media sources.

On an October morning, a small army arrived to evict Rudy Ortega from his home in the Crash Zone, an encampment located near the end of the airport runway in San Jose, California. The camp, one of the largest in California, was cleared between 2021 and 2023 in part by a private company named Tucker Construction. Public spending on private sweep contractors is soaring across California. In total, private firms have been paid at least $100m to clear homeless camps, an investigation by the Guardian and Type Investigations has found. Pete White, the founder of the Los Angeles Community Action Network ... says he's observed a steady increase in the privatization of sweeps in recent years. "The growth of a private industry geared towards removing and dismantling informal settlements and houseless encampments has grown steadily in Los Angeles and across the country," said White. "Not only are we seeing a growth in the loss of property, but also the loss of rights." Firms vying for contracts to sweep encampments in California include mid-size construction companies that also do home renovations, as well as large environmental services firms that specialize in cleaning up hazardous waste and responding to public emergencies. A study of the health impacts of sweeps where the Crash Zone is located found that unhoused residents often lost medicines and other "health necessities" and that sweeps "drove unhoused people into hazardous, isolated, less visible spaces". As well as the loss of their homes, they allege the destruction of belongings that rules are meant to protect.

Note: Read more about the unprecedented rise in food costs that are leaving millions of Americans facing higher prices and growing food insecurity. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on corruption in government and in the corporate world from reliable major media sources.

One ALS drug made $400 million in sales for its maker. It doesn't work. A cancer treatment brought in $500 million. That one turned out to have no effect on survival. A blood cancer medication made nearly $850 million before being withdrawn for two of its uses. That drug had been linked to patient deaths years prior. All of them were allowed to be sold to Americans because of the US Food and Drug Administration's drive to get new drugs to patients quickly – sometimes even before they're done testing. Drug companies are profiting, though. Since 2014, they've made at least $3.6 billion in global sales of medications that have either later been shown to be ineffective or had most or all of their uses withdrawn in the US. There are a number of ways a drug company can get its treatment to patients faster: There's the "priority review" pathway, then "fast track," "accelerated approval" and "breakthrough therapy." The majority of new drugs in the US are approved through one or more of these sped-up pathways. Last year two thirds of all new drugs reached the market this way. One of the problems is that sometimes drugmakers resist pulling a drug off the market, even after it's obvious it doesn't work. Makena, a drug to reduce the risk of premature birth, received a sped-up approval in 2011. Eight years later, a large trial found it didn't work. Yet it took another four years for the FDA to force it off the market. Makena ... generated over $1.6 billion in sales.

Note: The US spends the most on health care but has the worst health outcomes among high-income countries. More than half of children now have chronic health conditions. What is behind this? For more along these lines, see concise summaries of important news articles on Big Pharma corruption and health from reliable media sources.

According to the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, more than 75 percent of America's leading newspapers, magazines, and journals are behind online paywalls. And how do American news consumers react to that? Almost 80 percent of Americans steer around those paywalls and seek out a free option. Paywalls create a two-tiered system: credible, fact-based information for people who are willing to pay for it, and murkier, less-reliable information for everyone else. Simply put, paywalls get in the way of informing the public, which is the mission of journalism. And they get in the way of the public being informed, which is the foundation of democracy. It is a terrible time for the press to be failing at reaching people, during an election in which democracy is on the line. There's a simple, temporary solution: Publications should suspend their paywalls for all 2024 election coverage and all information that is beneficial to voters. Democracy does not die in darkness–it dies behind paywalls. Less than a third of Americans in a recent Gallup poll say they have "a fair amount" or a "a great deal" of trust that the news is fair and accurate. Part of the problem ... is that the platform companies, which are the largest distributors of free news, have deprioritized news. Meta has long had an uncomfortable relationship with news on Facebook. In the past year ... Meta has changed its algorithm in a way that has cost some news outlets 30 to 40 percent of their traffic.

Note: It's ironic that this story is behind a paywall. Read the complete article here using Textise, an excellent tool that converts most webpages into text-only versions. For a powerful reflection on the rise of paywalls and online ads in news outlets, read this Substack piece written by our news editor Mark Bailey. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on media corruption from reliable sources.

Last week, the nation's largest prison and jail telecom corporation, Securus, effectively defaulted on more than a billion dollars of debt. After decades of preying on incarcerated people and their loved ones with exploitative call rates and other predatory practices that have driven millions of families into debt, Securus is being crushed under the weight of its own. Securus is one of two corporations that dominate roughly 80 percent of the U.S. prison telecom industry. Both companies are owned by private-equity firms: Securus, by Platinum Equity, and ViaPath (previously Global Tel Link), by American Securities. Together, Securus and ViaPath contract with 43 state prison systems and over 800 county jails. Their dominance of the market allows them to routinely charge incarcerated people and their families egregious rates for rudimentary communications services: A 15-minute phone call can run as high as $8.25; a 25-minute video call up to $15; and basic emails as much as $0.50, or more with attachments. The nature of agreements between these telecom providers and correctional agencies often further incentivizes the financial exploitation of the incarcerated, creating profit-sharing kickback schemes that provide prisons and jails with a portion of sales revenue. The ... tactics that brought Securus down–narrative change, policy campaigns, regulatory efforts, and investor activism–offer a roadmap for tackling exploitative corporate profiteers across the prison industry.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on prison system corruption from reliable major media sources.

Catherine Herridge – the acclaimed CBS News investigative journalist known for her reporting on the Hunter Biden laptop scandal – accused the network of "journalistic rape" for seizing her files after she was fired during a House Judiciary Committee hearing. "CBS News' decision to seize my reporting records crossed a red line that I believe should never be crossed by any media organization," Herridge said. "Multiple sources said they were concerned that by working with me to expose government corruption and misconduct they would be identified and exposed." Herridge, who had spent nearly five years at the network after being hired away from Fox News, was among 20 CBS News staffers let go as part of a larger purge of 800 employees by Paramount. Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-OH) asked Herridge if she wrote critical stories about Hunter Biden, the laptop, the Biden family, the business operation and the Biden brand. Herridge replied: "I reported out the facts of the story." "You sure did," Jordan said. "You reported the facts and then CBS fired you!" The House Judiciary Committee also heard testimony from former CBS News reporter Sharyl Attkisson, who quit the network in 2014 over claims that CBS killed stories that put then-President Barack Obama in a bad light. Attkisson's told the committee that her critical reporting of the government resulted in her phone being tapped.

Note: While Hunter Biden was indicted for three felony gun charges and nine counts of tax-related crimes, his laptop also revealed suspicious business dealings with corrupt overseas firms. For more, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on corporate corruption and media manipulation from reliable sources.

A debate about media bias has broken out at National Public Radio after a longtime employee published a scathing letter accusing the broadcaster of a "distilled worldview of a very small segment of the US population". In the letter published on Free Press, NPR's senior business editor Uri Berliner claimed Americans no longer trust NPR – which is partly publicly funded – because of its lack of "viewpoint diversity." Berliner wrote that "an open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR, and now, predictably, we don't have an audience that reflects America". Berliner noted that in 2011 the public broadcaster's audience identified as 26% conservative, 23% as middle of the road and 37% liberal. Last year it identified as 11% very or somewhat conservative, 21% as middle of the road, and 67% very or somewhat liberal. "We weren't just losing conservatives; we were also losing moderates and traditional liberals," Berliner wrote. Berliner identified the station's coverage of the Covid-19 lab leak theory, Hunter Biden's laptop and allegations that Donald Trump colluded with Russia in the 2016 election as all examples of how "politics were blotting out the curiosity and independence that ought to have been driving our work". When he brought up [a] survey of newsroom political voter registration at a 2021 all-staff meeting, showing there were no Republicans, he claimed he was met with "profound indifference".

Note: Read Berliner's full article about how NPR misled the public on the most important issues making front page news. For more, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on corporate corruption and media manipulation from reliable sources.

A veteran National Public Radio journalist slammed the left-leaning broadcaster for ignoring the Hunter Biden laptop scandal because it could have helped Donald Trump get re-elected. Uri Berliner, an award-winning business editor and reporter at NPR, penned a lengthy essay ... in which he called out his bosses for turning the public radio broadcaster into "an openly polemical news outlet serving a niche audience." "The laptop was newsworthy," Berliner wrote. "But the timeless journalistic instinct of following a hot story lead was being squelched." The Post was the first to reveal the existence of the laptop that Hunter Biden left at a Delaware computer shop. The Post published the contents of emails taken from the laptop, which shed light on Hunter Biden's business dealings in Ukraine and China while his father, Joe Biden, was vice president during the Obama administration. Initially, national security experts and former intelligence officials declared the laptop a hoax and was the product of a Russian disinformation campaign. Social media sites like Twitter even barred its users from sharing links to The Post's reporting. The authenticity of the emails were later confirmed. According to Berliner, NPR's managing editor for news at the time said that the outlet had no interest in "[wasting] our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don't want to waste the listeners' and readers' time on stories that are just pure distractions."

Note: While Hunter Biden was indicted for three felony gun charges and nine counts of tax-related crimes, his laptop also revealed suspicious business dealings with corrupt overseas firms. For more, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on corporate corruption and media manipulation from reliable sources.

Important Note: Explore our full index to key excerpts of revealing major media news articles on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.