Corporate Corruption News Stories

Excerpts of Key Corporate Corruption News Stories 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: This comprehensive list of news stories is usually updated once a week. Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key major media news stories on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.

More than a dozen countries require that companies print nutritional labels on the front of food packages – a move that's come as the rate of diet-related diseases, like hypertension, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, stroke and obesity, increases worldwide. So far, the United States does not require any front-of-package nutrition labels. But that could soon change. The US Food and Drug Administration is currently developing front-of-package labels that it could require corporations to begin printing as early as 2027. Despite significant opposition from food companies ... the FDA is evaluating different mandatory label designs to determine which is most effective at informing consumers, but also which is legal under US corporate free speech laws. The labels under consideration by the FDA ... mark only "nutrients of concern", like sugar and sodium – not-ultra processed foods. But many advocates say that should change. UPFs are industrially formulated products made out of substances extracted from foods, like sugars, salts, hydrogenated fats, bulking agents and starches. Today, UPFs make up 73% of the US food supply, according to Northeastern University's Network Science Institute, and provide the average US adult with more than 60% of their daily calories. But research is increasingly linking UPFs to a whole host of health issues: from cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes to colorectal cancer and depression.

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

After receiving more than $3.8 million in 2024 campaign donations from political action committees and individuals associated with the military industry, members of the House committee overseeing Pentagon spending just inserted two provisions into an upcoming bill that would exempt many more private products and services from competitive pricing guidelines and provide contractors far more leeway in what they can charge the Defense Department. Last year's Pentagon spending bill totaled nearly $884 billion. Over the past decade, more than half of that budget has gone to military contractors. Many of the top military contractors – including Boeing, RTX Corporation, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman – have seen sizable stock-value increases since the war in Gaza began in October 2023 while shooting down shareholder efforts at increased transparency. The provisions in the 2025 Pentagon spending bill are part of the 344-page National Defense Authorization Act of 2025 (NDAA). The provisions in question – Sections 811 and 812 – make good on a wishlist of policy changes that many military companies have been lobbying on for years. "As a member of the House Armed Services Committee, I'm disappointed to see provisions in the NDAA that would allow contractors to further obscure pricing data," Rep. Ro Khanna [said]. "This would lead to more inflated costs and waste taxpayer money when we could be investing it instead."

Note: Learn more about unaccountable military spending 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.

The Biden administration suspended federal funding to the scientific nonprofit whose research is at the center of credible theories that the COVID-19 pandemic was started via a lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced that it was immediately suspending three grants provided to the New York-based nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance (EHA) as it starts the process of debarring the organization from receiving any federal funds. For years now, EcoHealth has generated immense controversy for its use of federal grant money to support gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan lab. HHS said that EcoHealth had failed to properly monitor the work it was supporting at Wuhan. It also failed to properly report on the results of experiments showing that the hybrid viruses it was creating there had an improved ability to infect human cells. In testimony to the House's coronavirus subcommittee, [EcoHealth President Peter ] Daszak claimed that EcoHealth attempted to report the results of its gain-of-function experiments on time in 2019, but was frozen out of NIH's reporting system. [An] HHS memo released today says a forensic investigation found no evidence that EcoHealth was locked out of NIH's reporting system. The department also said that EcoHealth had failed to produce requested lab notes and other materials from the Wuhan lab detailing the work being done there.

Note: Watch our 15-min Mindful News Brief video on the strong evidence that bioweapons research created COVID-19. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on COVID and government corruption from reliable major media 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.

Almost six in ten doctors in the US received more than $12 billion in payments from pharma firms in the past decade, an analysis has revealed. A study by researchers at Yale University found that 57 percent of doctors earned the huge sums from manufacturers in relation to medical drugs or devices between 2013 and 2022. Most of the money was for consulting services or fees for things such as serving as a speaker at a venue, but the physicians also received large amounts of money for food and beverages and gifts. Orthopedic surgeons were found to receive the largest total sum of payments, at $1.36bn, and the most common drugs related to payments were blood thinners Xarelto and Eliquis. 'Despite evidence that financial conflicts of interest may influence physician prescribing and may damage patients' trust in medical professionals, such payments remain pervasive,' the researchers wrote. After orthopedic surgeons, the physicians that received the largest total sum of payments were neurologists and psychiatrists, who received $1.32bn, and cardiologists, who got $1.29bn. Although the median payment to doctors was $48, payments to the top 0.1 percent of doctors were far higher and differed depending on specialty. The average amount paid to the top 0.1 percent of orthopedists was $4,826,944. For the top 0.1 percent of cardiologists, it was $3,197,675, and for the top 0.1 percent of neurologists and psychiatrists it was $2,588,819.

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

Unhealthy foods are becoming a silent epidemic, with one in seven adults and one in eight children globally now effectively addicted to ultra-processed foods. It's time to address this issue at its source: advertising. Consumption of junk food begins not with what goes in our mouths but with the messaging into our brains via advertising. UK junk food advertising is an industry worth tens of millions of pounds working to glamorise unhealthy diets. My own work looks at outdoor advertising, such as on billboards and bus stops. In 2022, among the biggest spenders on outdoor advertising were the likes of Coca-Cola, McDonald's, KFC, Subway and MĂĽller. They spent Ł195m filling public spaces with monuments to fat, salt and sugar. Advertisers will say this is simply a question of choice, and that junk food ads respond to consumer demand. But do any of us feel deprived of choice by the absence of ads touting the supposed health benefits of smoking? Of course not. Society would be better off without ads for junk food on street corners. The good news? We can take action. Local authorities can introduce ethical ad policies that ban junk food ads on council-owned sites. Somerset council recently took this step, following in the footsteps of Bristol and Transport for London, whose junk food ad ban was predicted to save the NHS more than Ł200m. Outdoor advertising offers a poorly regulated platform for big corporations to push unhealthy diets on an unassuming public.

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

For the first time, researchers have pulled together scientific and regulatory data to develop a database of all known chemicals used in plastic production. It's a staggering number: 16,000 plastic chemicals, with at least 4,200 of those considered to be "highly hazardous" to human health and the environment, according to the authors. "Only 980 of those highly hazardous chemicals have been regulated by agencies around the world, leaving us with 3,600 chemicals that are unregulated – and these are only the known chemicals," said Martin Wagner, first author and project lead of the PlastChem Report. The ... report outlines a systematic approach to identify and prioritize chemicals of concern that can be used by agencies and regulators around the world, including those attending the April meeting of the International Negotiating Committee on Plastic Pollution. The committee is part of the United Nations Environment Programme, which has committed to developing a Global Plastics Treaty between 175 nations by the end of 2024. "The most important criterion we used is toxicity," Wagner said. "Many of these chemicals are known to be very toxic for human health or the environment. They are carcinogenic or mutagenic or toxic to reproduction. Some have organ-specific toxicity, typically the liver, as that is where many of the chemicals are absorbed from circulation." The report [also] found that detailed hazard information is missing for more than 10,000 of the 16,000 chemicals.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

There are almost 2 million people locked away in one of the more than 5,000 prisons or jails that dot the American landscape. While they are behind bars, these incarcerated people can be found standing in line at their prison's commissary waiting to buy some extra food or cleaning supplies that are often marked up to prices higher than what one would pay outside of those prison walls. If they want to call a friend or family member, they need to pay for that as well. And almost everyone who works at a job while incarcerated, often for less than a dollar an hour, will find that the prison has taken a portion of their salary to pay for their cost of incarceration. States and local governments spent $82 billion on corrections in 2019. To offset these costs, policymakers have justified legislation authorizing an ever-growing body of fees to be charged to the people (and, as a result, often their families) in prison and jail. Fees for room and board–yes, literally for a thin mattress or even a plastic "boat" bed in a hallway, a toilet that may not flush, and scant, awful tasting food–are typically charged at a "per diem rate for the length of incarceration." It is not uncommon for these fees to reach $20 to $80 a day for the entire period of incarceration. Those who work regular jobs in prisons such as maintaining the grounds, working in the kitchen, and painting the walls of the facilities earn on average between $0.14 and $0.63 an hour.

Note: Read about a woman who only served 10 months in bars, yet now owes $127,000 for her original 7-year prison sentence. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of revealing news articles on prison system corruption from reliable major media sources.

Widespread sexual abuse of children in the entertainment industry must be urgently stamped out, an independent UN expert told the Human Rights Council on Tuesday, presenting hard-hitting findings and recommendations on how to end the scourge. "The sexual abuse and the exploitation of children within the entertainment industry resulting from unethical systems, structures, practices or abuse of power and authority is widespread," said Mama Fatima Singhateh, the UN Special Rapporteur on sale and sexual exploitation of children. Child performers in the entertainment industry are exposed to sexualized, violent and aggressive environments that are unsafe for their integral development and in which they can be exposed to the consumption of addictive substances, she said the report. The Special Rapporteur found that predatory sexual behaviour, including grooming, was accepted as the norm in the entertainment industry. Moreover, perpetrators often faced no repercussions for unlawfully exercising power and authority over young and aspiring child performers. "Abusive work conditions and portrayal of sexual abuse and exploitation of children in various entertainment platforms ... objectify and instrumentalise children," Ms. Singhateh said. "Victims and survivors have been met with silence, non-acknowledgement, lack of investigation, duress, intimidation or non-availability of reparation measures."

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

In the 1960s, 15-year-old Olivia Hussey and 16-year-old Leonard Whiting secured career-making roles in a film that retells the iconic love story of "Romeo and Juliet," the first film to use actors that were similar in age to the characters in the play. They were legally children when they were filmed in the nude together; the performance can now be found on sites meant for pornography. Fifty-five years later, Hussey, now 71, and Whiting, now 72, are suing Paramount Pictures for child abuse. They claim that "Romeo and Juliet" director Franco Zefirelli assured the actors that they would be wearing flesh colored garments and would not be physically nude in the scene. This allegedly changed in the last days of filming when Zefirelli asked the actors to do the scene fully nude with makeup, according to the lawsuit. [Judy] Garland was forced to take barbiturates and other drugs and live on a death-defying diet while working with the studio. Garland wrote in an unpublished autobiography that she was constantly molested behind the scenes by older men, including Louis B. Mayer, the producer and cofounder of MGM. Alyson Stoner was made to act out a rape scene when she was only 6 years old. "At 6 years old, I enter a sterile white room where a stranger stands apathetically behind a camcorder on a tripod. On cue, I perform the scene. This morning, I'm being kidnapped and raped," Stoner wrote. She developed eating disorders – among other health problems – due to stress.

Note: Read more about the disturbing history of child sex abuse in Hollywood from the courageous voices of actor Corey Feldman and Lord of the Rings star Elijah Wood. Explore our archive of revealing reports from reliable media sources on high-level pedophilia and sexual abuse.

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.

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.

It prides itself on offering an "assortment of family-friendly programming." For Alexa Nikolas, however, Nickelodeon's claims concealed a darker truth. She says young stars were exploited into taking part in sexually suggestive scenes. "Kids are groomed into thinking that the lines that they're doing are pretend, that it's not real life," the star, who played Nicole Bristow on the Nickelodeon TV series Zoey 101, [said]. Nikolas spoke out in the wake of docuseries Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV, which aired on the Investigation Discovery channel ... and exposed the "toxic culture" and alleged abuse on the set of some of Nickelodeon's biggest shows. In addition to Nikolas, several former child stars have spoken out, claiming sexual assault and harassment while working for the channel. Drake & Josh star Drake Bell speaks publicly for the first time about being repeatedly molested by his dialogue coach, Peck, when he was 15. "I was sleeping on the couch where I usually sleep and I woke up to him... I opened my eyes and I woke up and he was...he was sexually assaulting me." Bell claimed the abuse occurred more than once and said he was scared to report it. He explained: "And it just got worse, and worse, and worse, and worse, and I was just trapped. I had no way out. The abuse was extensive and it got pretty brutal." The four-part docuseries documents the child sexual abuse committed by assistant Jason Handy, dialogue coach Brian Peck, and studio freelancer Ezel Channel, as well as the alleged abusive and misogynistic behavior of showrunner Dan Schneider.

Note: Read more about the disturbing history of child sex abuse in Hollywood from the courageous voices of actor Corey Feldman and Lord of the Rings star Elijah Wood. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on corporate corruption and sexual abuse scandals 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 revealing excerpts of key major media news stories on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.