Ross Rosenfeld at The New Republic:

While Donald Trump attempts to bypass Congress in cutting funding to NPR and PBS, his senior advisor to the U.S. Agency for Global Media, perennial election loser Kari Lake, announced on X earlier this week that she’s struck a deal with One America News to “provide” the right-wing outlet’s “newsfeed services” to the government-funded outlets her agency oversees—Voice of America being the most prominent among them. Lake touted the deal as “an enormous benefit to the American taxpayer,” since OAN, which has a TV channel and website, agreed to provide their newsfeed “free-of-charge.” “We are grateful for their generosity,” she wrote. Yet the generosity might actually be flowing in the other direction, as Lake’s move will allow OAN to tap into VOA’s weekly audience of 360 million people around the world—and turn a once unbiased global beacon of American journalism into a Pravda for the Trump regime.

VOA was first created in 1942 to help combat fascism and Nazi disinformation. As it notes in its mission statement, “An essential guarantee of the journalistic credibility of Voice of America content is the ‘firewall’ enshrined in the 1994 U.S. International Broadcasting Act. The firewall prohibits interference by any U.S. government official in the objective, independent reporting of news, thereby safeguarding the ability of our journalists to develop content that reflects the highest professional standards of journalism, free of political interference.” That’s not exactly OAN’s approach to journalism. Scour its content (if you dare), and you’ll find stories that seem engineered for the White House’s new Drudge Report–style propaganda feed. Some merely put a MAGA spin on the news (“Trump April Jobs Report Shatters Expectations As Native-Born Workers Win Big”) or heap laughable praise on Dear Leader (“Trump is just as much of a lion as Churchill”), while others are pure fiction (“DOGE Team Exposes Millions Of Illegal Aliens Voting In Elections”). Worshipful coverage of the GOP has always been part of OAN’s DNA, but the network, which launched in 2013, hitched its wagon to MAGA as the movement descended (further) into conspiracy theories in the wake of the 2020 election. Founder Robert Herring insisted that anchors promote Trump’s claims of election fraud and barred them from referring to Biden as “president.” It was a poor business decision. YouTube suspended it for misinformation in 2020 (read all about it at VOA!), and in 2022 DirecTV dropped it entirely. Over the past two years, OAN has settled two defamation lawsuits related to its election denialism.

But perhaps nothing better explains OAN’s values these days than the fact that they gave a weeknight show to former Florida Representative Matt Gaetz, who is so detestable that even many Republicans have distanced themselves from him. Trump nominated Gaetz for attorney general late last year, but Gaetz was forced to withdraw after a House ethics report—led by Republicans, mind you—found “substantial evidence” that during his time in Congress he had sex with a seventeen-year-old, paid women for sex, and accepted gifts exceeding congressional limits.

[...] Another host, the oft-mendacious Dan Ball, frequently espouses conspiracy theories and has a regular “This Week in Woke America” segment that makes misleading charges against liberals like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whom he calls “champagne liberals.” He’s brought on disgraced doctor Robert Malone to defend Robert F. Kennedy’s unfounded claim that vaccines may be causing autism. He’s also welcomed Steven Friend, a former FBI agent who, before becoming an advisor to FBI Director Kash Patel, had his security clearance revoked after he refused to arrest anyone involved in the January 6 attack. In a segment on “Biden’s scheme to spy on Americans,” Friend claimed that the former president’s spying “laid the groundwork for them to debank people,” “coordinate with universities to repress free speech,” and alert the military that “pro-lifers were potentially terrorists.” Ball called it a form of “tyranny”—the kind, he said, that Democrats accuse Trump of doing, but “he’s not.”

It’s not just what you’ll find on OAN that’s the problem, though. It’s also what you won’t find: criticism of the president.

The Voice of America will be rife with right-wing propaganda, as unabashedly pro-Trump propaganda outlet One America “News” Network content will be supplied to the VOA feed.

See Also:

Neath! interview

A few things:

YES. I KNEW IT. I FREAKING KNEW THAT STUPES' LYRICS FELT LIKE LIN'S. I LOVE CONFIRMATION OF THINGS THAT I THOUGHT MIGHT BE TRUE.

Matt Gertz at MMFA:

The right-wing propaganda machine’s opportunistic and unhinged response to the wildfires sweeping the Los Angeles area provide an instructive but foreboding look at what the next four years could look like.

Firestorms have swept parts of Los Angeles Country and its environs since Tuesday, as a “perfect storm” of dry conditions (spurred in part by human-caused climate change) and winds gusting over 80 miles per hour sparked apocalyptic conflagrations and severely hampered firefighters’ response.  While the fires are not uniquely large, the fact that they are burning in a densely populated area has resulted in staggering costs — at least ten people are reported dead as of Friday morning, tens of thousands have fled their homes, and more than 9,000 structures are damaged or destroyed, with economic loss estimates in the tens of billions of dollars.  Political leaders would ideally respond to such horrific circumstances by putting aside partisan differences and standing together to help the victims rebuild. But something very different is happening this week in right-wing spaces.

President-elect Donald Trump is lying a lot in order to blame his political opponents for the fire. The president-elect's Truth Social feed this week is alternating between memes highlighting his purported plans to take over Canada and Greenland and falsehood-heavy rants about how “the gross incompetence and mismanagement” of President Joe Biden and California Gov. Gavin Newsom are responsible for the fire.  Trump’s MAGA media allies are aiding his effort by turning the right-wing information ecosystem into an unrelenting wave of bogus attacks related to the fires. When any major story breaks, the top priority for the hosts on Fox News, Trumpist social media influencers, and the rest of the echo chamber is to identify scapegoats for their audiences to rage against. 

[...]

As SoCal burns, the right finds false scapegoats

Responding to natural disasters is a core function of government, and leaders’ response to such tragedies deserves careful scrutiny. But the evidence Trump and his allies are pointing to in order to claim that California’s fires stem from liberal mismanagement don’t hold up. The main avenue the right has seized upon — blaming California Democrats and environmentalists for supposedly limiting the water supply used to fight the fire — is entirely false. Trump alleged on Truth Social that there was “no water for fire hydrants” to fight the fire because “Newscum refused to sign the water restoration declaration put before him that would have allowed millions of gallons of water to flow” from northern to southern California because he wanted to protect populations of the delta smelt, a rare fish.  His right-wing propagandists quickly parroted his argument to their audiences. On OAN, Dan Ball claimed that “You liberal Democrats running that city, county, and the state have blood on your hands tonight,” before reading Trump’s post. On Fox, Jesse Watters claimed of Newsom that “there is no water coming out of the fire hydrant because this man mismanages the water there.” And Larry Kudlow said on his Fox Business show that the governor “cut the water flow that never got to Southern California, in defense of this obscure fish.” But none of this is true. 

It’s not a water shortage that is impeding the firefighting effort — Southern California’s reservoirs are full, and LA County officials say they filled “all available water storage facility tanks” before the fires started. Some water hydrants ran dry in the Palisades because the extraordinary high demand on the area’s tanks (“four times the normal demand of water was seen for 15 hours straight in the area of the fires”) depleted them faster and reduced the water pressure needed to replenish them.  The long-running dispute over protecting the smelt has nothing to do with the firefighting effort — beyond the fact that there wasn’t a water shortage, that dispute hinges on whether water resources should be used instead for farm irrigation in the South and Central Valley.

And the “water restoration declaration” doesn’t exist, according to Newsom’s staff.  The right regularly responds to disasters by fixating on efforts to hire a diverse workforce, and this case has proved no different. On social media, right-wing influencers targeted Los Angeles Fire Department Chief Kristin Crowley, the first woman and first openly LGBTQ person to serve in the role, claiming her leadership of the department shows that “DEI is quite literally getting people killed,” “DEI = DIE,” and “DEI has deadly consequences.”  Such attacks moved swiftly up the right-wing food chain. “This is the leadership of the LA Fire Department — I sure hope they know what they’re doing,” Fox star Jesse Watters said on Wednesday while shaking his head. He later claimed that “California is committing suicide before our very eyes. DEI is deadly.” 

[...]

The right uses the same playbook after every disaster

The right treats every disaster as an opportunity to attack the left, with talking points bubbling up from the fever swamps or filtering down from Trump, then spreading swiftly through the ecosystem thanks to the all-encompassing nature of its propaganda machine.  We’ve seen the same pattern repeatedly over the last few years, following deadly natural disasters in North Carolina and Puerto Rico and California, among others.