#rsbn

S.V. Dáte at HuffPost:

WASHINGTON ― The White House’s favored new reporter, the one who scolded Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy for not wearing a suit, was the primary voice at a “news” outlet that has taken $192,000 from President Donald Trump’s political committees, nearly half of which came while he was program director there. Brian Glenn now works for a pro-Trump streaming platform called Real America’s Voice, but from September 2020 to May 2024, he was the most visible face at Right Side Broadcasting Network. Over those years, the outlet took $92,000 in “broadcast” fees, first from Trump’s Save America committee and then from Trump’s campaign, according to a HuffPost review of Federal Election Commission filings. Glenn acknowledged the payments in a brief interview, describing them as “production” costs, and then pointed to the row of television cameras set up in the back of the White House briefing room. “Who pays for them?” he asked, suggesting that the major networks like NBC, CNN and Fox also accept money from the entities they cover. In fact, taking such payments would be considered a serious ethical breach among reputable news outlets. The television networks covering this and previous White Houses, as well as print and radio outlets, all pay their own expenses when covering political events, as does HuffPost. Indeed, the Trump administration, including the White House, has falsely accused legitimate news organizations of corruption because government agencies, even those in the first Trump term, bought subscriptions from them, including some to expensive, lobbyist-oriented trade publications. Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary who had worked on Trump’s campaign, also acknowledged the payments. “The Trump campaign paid RSBN for the usage of their live stream,” she said. She did not address HuffPost’s question regarding the ethics of an outlet accepting money from the subject it was covering. Those payments continued after Glenn left RSBN to join Real America’s Voice last spring. The campaign gave the online video outlet an additional $100,000 from June 2024 through the end of the year, capped off with a $57,000 payment on Nov. 14, the week following the election.

Royal Watchers via TRG's channel

Watching the Stats

Mar a Lago & MAGNO News

RSBN

President Trump live!

They are on YouTube and told us to download their app. YouTube censors us!

Plz share 🙏🇺🇸🦅

Will Sommer at The Bulwark:

Total Groyper Victory

TUCKER CARLSON INTERVIEWED white nationalist podcaster Nick Fuentes on Monday, sitting politely as Fuentes criticized the power of “organized Jewry in America.” The right-wing internet has been in turmoil ever since. Suddenly, nothing—including the racism, Holocaust denialism, and antisemitism Fuentes has championed—seems to be too hot for MAGA media to embrace.

That amounts to a catastrophe for more traditional conservative media figures. Breitbart’s Joel Pollak declared that the claims Fuentes made that Carlson left unchallenged amounted to “the foundation of Nazism.” The Daily Wire’s Andrew Klavan said that Carlson’s embrace of Fuentes would doom the right. Writer Rod Dreher wrote that Jewish friends had told him Fuentes is “the most dangerous man in America to Jews.” [...]

Fuentes’s journey to these heights reveals a lot about the evolution of conservative media. After his emergence in 2016 as a right-wing provocateur during his abortive freshman year at Boston University, Fuentes was briefly seen as the sort of put-upon campus conservative that Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire loves to embrace. He started a livestreaming show and by early 2017 he had been picked up by the Right Side Broadcasting Network. But his appearance at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in August 2017 and his criticisms of Jews got him booted off RSBN and effectively banished from respectable right-wing media.

After Fuentes relaunched his independent livestream show on YouTube, various factions from the right-wing media universe united to keep him and his growing “groyper” fanbase out. Turning Point USA banished contributor Ashley St. Clair just for being photographed with Fuentes in 2019. Fuentes and his crew were regularly ejected from TPUSA conferences and CPAC, forcing them to hold separate events on the sidelines. But Fuentes also made a few smart strategic decisions to crawl his way back. In the post-Charlottesville world, the far-right was consumed with debates about “optics,” like whether white supremacists should adopt the suit-and-tie look of someone like Richard Spencer to make their arguments more palatable to the mainstream right, or whether they should retain the looks and violent behavior of neo-Nazi skinheads. Fuentes went with the “optics cucks.”

Fuentes also recognized the rising tide of angry young white men early, taking stances on issues like legal immigration that put him out ahead of Trump. And he’s kept a sense of humor that allowed him to go on more mainstream podcasts and build alliances with other far-right figures like Alex Jones. Cracks eventually emerged in the walls keeping him out. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) spoke at one of Fuentes’s parties in 2022, for example. Later that year, Fuentes had dinner with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago—an incident the then-former president brushed off as unplanned and “quick and uneventful.” Yet Carlson’s interview marks Fuentes’s greatest triumph to date. The proof is in the immediate reaction. Whereas St. Clair was banished from a TPUSA event for merely appearing with Fuentes in a photograph, Carlson is likely to remain firmly within TPUSA’s umbrella of acceptability even after platforming Fuentes, a man Kirk once called a “retarded idiot.” Carlson is set to appear at TPUSA’s major AmericaFest conference in Phoenix in December.

[...]

Since Kirk’s assassination, Fuentes has seen his standing rise in conservative media, as millions of young conservatives became increasingly radicalized in his direction, led to believe that the ways of doing politics that Kirk represented and Fuentes opposed were insufficient.

[...] No one would be less happy about Fuentes’s rising profile than Kirk himself. In the aftermath of the Carlson interview, longtime conservative pundit Dinesh D’Souza released text messages from the summer, in which Kirk chastised D’Souza for debating Fuentes in an InfoWars appearance. “You are the first main steam [sic] voice to debate and give him a compliment,” Kirk wrote to D’Souza. “Which then makes him bigger and more powerful.” But Carlson, ultimately, may have just accelerated an outcome that was bound to happen. White nationalism is clearly on the rise. And Nazi-curious figures are gaining more prominence. Trump nominee Paul Ingrassia recently withdrew from his Senate confirmation after Politico reported last month on text messages where he said he had a “Nazi streak.” The right has no immune system against hatemongers and grifters. 

Adam Wren at Politico Magazine:

NEW YORK CITY — Brian Glenn was about to go live. Amid the hundreds of reporters crowded outside a Manhattan courthouse on the first morning of Donald Trump’s criminal trial last week, Glenn, the director of programming for Right Side Broadcasting Network, would be delivering the news from the circus straight to hundreds of thousands of faithful MAGA viewers. Glenn looked like a typical television newscaster, but a bright blue and white pin he wore on the lapel of his suit set him apart from others in the press corral: It featured a big, bold “47” — a nod to Trump’s possible return to the presidency, which was gifted to him by the Trump campaign. Surrounded by Trump fans, Glenn cut the figure of a former homecoming king navigating the crowd at the big game. People wearing red caps kept coming up asking to be interviewed, a request he repeatedly obliged. In between, he pulled out his iPhone and flashed me photos from when he had shown up at this same spot to cover Trump’s arraignment last April. Pointing to one image, he singled out his girlfriend, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. (He calls himself the other half of “MAGA America’s favorite couple.”) He recounted how his crew had to cut their coverage short that day after Greene was mobbed by press and onlookers. “I probably physically bulldozed a dozen people getting her out of there,” Glenn said.

As Glenn spoke, he stopped mid-sentence, a voice breaking through his AirPods. “30 seconds?” I heard him say. He quickly returned to his mark and began to broadcast to an audience of what would soon blossom into more than 200,000 RSBN viewers spread across YouTube and Rumble, the right-coded video service. “This is Biden’s witch hunt,” Glenn told his viewers. “This is what this is. This is Biden’s trial. This is his ability, or effort right now, to take President Trump off the campaign trail.” Right Side Broadcasting Network dates back to 2016, when stay-at-home dad Joe Seales launched the online channel in order to live stream Trump rallies. Eight years later, RSBN has grown into a full outlet that employs roughly a dozen people and features a website full of stories. RSBN is like NFL RedZone for Trump rallies, covering them hours before any speakers approach the dais. Now, as Trump’s general election campaign kicks into high gear, it has also cemented itself as the pro-Trump media outlet of record for the MAGA base. The network boasts 1.64 million subscribers on YouTube (a larger subscribership than One America News Network) and another half a million on Rumble.

Glenn is the star who Seales has largely handed control over to. He is the Trump rally gameday host who plumbs the depths of MAGA America in the crowds wherever Trump goes. Glenn is fast becoming one of Trump’s favorite reporters, likely racking up more one-on-one interviews with Trump in the last year than any other journalist. During gaggles, Trump often singles him out for positive-slanted questions after entertaining a series of hardballs from other reporters. Christina Bobb, one of Trump’s revolving cast of attorneys, is a regular guest alongside Glenn on RSBN’s coverage of the trials.

[...]

RSBN has developed a reputation for going nearly everywhere that Trump ends up. Thanks to that flood-the-zone mentality of documenting Trump’s every move, it’s likely your favorite mainstream media reporter’s go-to method for keeping tabs on Trump on days that they’re off the campaign trail. Filipkowski and Glenn have formed an unlikely friendship online over direct messages that have spanned years, something I did not expect when I reached out to Filipkowski, a prominent X personality who made his name by spending almost every waking moment dunking on Trump and the MAGA movement. “I actually have found them to be the most valuable resource over the last four years to understanding MAGA — more than any other source,” Filipkowski told me. “I’ve probably posted 50 or 100 Brian Glenn interview clips of Trump, probably even 200. I find those clips incredibly valuable, because you’re getting it unvarnished. That’s when [Trump] lets his guard down a little, when he’s got a friendly face.”

What Filipkowski and many reporters most appreciate about Glenn’s coverage is a simple open-ended question he asks MAGA stans: What is it that you love most about Donald Trump? “If you say ‘I’m from the New York Times,’ his fans at rallies say ‘you’re fake news’ and don’t talk to you,” Dave Weigel, a Semafor politics reporter who relies on the site, told me. “That’s obviously less interesting than somebody saying, ‘We love you guys. Let me explain to you all my views in an interesting way,’ which is what Right Side Broadcasting does.” RSBN has “replaced mainstream media in the needs of your average Trump supporter: Why would you turn on Fox where they’re going to cut away when you can watch this website, and they’ve also got more access,” Weigel said.

RICHARD LARDNER AND BILL BARROW at AP:

OPELIKA, Ala. (AP) — On the second floor of a single-family home in a sprawling suburban development, a three-member production crew sat behind banks of computer monitors and guided the conservative Right Side Broadcasting Network’s coverage of a recent Donald Trump rally. RSBN’s show director, whispering into a microphoned headset, instructed the camera operators and on-air correspondent how to shoot the scenes as Trump basked in the crowd’s adoration. Otherwise, the room was quiet. The screens, all muted, were playing live footage of Trump pointing, waving and gesticulating. There was no need for sound — the director and producers have covered so many Trump rallies they seem to instinctively know what he’s going to say.

“If you’ve heard Trump’s speeches as often as we have, he does not need to be blaring,” said Joe Seales, RSBN’s founder and CEO. In less than a decade, RSBN has gone from an upstart internet broadcaster to a major player in Trump’s MAGA universe, amassing more than 2 million subscribers on its YouTube channel and on Rumble, an alternative video-sharing platform. As Trump’s loyal herald, carrying his message like a marathoner, live and unfiltered, RSBN has allowed the former Republican president to bypass traditional media and inject his vision for America directly into the veins of his diehard supporters. The positive coverage has made RSBN a Trump favorite and a destination for his MAGA movement, a reference to the ex-president’s “Make America Great Again” slogan. Out of all the conservative news outlets Trump had to choose from, he picked RSBN to host a special in March from his Mar-a-Lago estate on the day before Super Tuesday, when presidential primary voters in 16 states cast their ballots.

[...]

A BRAINSTORM

Seales was a stay-at-home father in 2015 and was growing annoyed with the coverage of Trump’s first run for the White House. The big news networks, he said, refused Trump’s pleas to show the size of the crowds he was pulling in. He became convinced there was a sizable audience hungry for a steady diet of Trump’s rallies, town halls and other events. Seales and his wife, a former Navy physician’s assistant who co-owns RSBN, started small, with a single camera at a Trump rally in Phoenix. Over the years, they turned a shoestring operation into one with 10 full-time employees and a house full of sophisticated computer and video gear. Like other broadcasters, most of RSBN’s revenue comes from selling ads. The commercials that run on Seales’ channel skew to attract consumers of a conservative political inclination.

[...]

A PROPAGANDA VIBE

RSBN’s broadcasts have the vibe of a state-run propaganda program. But Seales denied the channel acts as a surrogate for Trump or his presidential campaign. “We aren’t affiliated with them,” Seales said. “We just cover Donald Trump. Our goal has never been to be an extension or a cheerleader for the Trump campaign. I just saw a void that I thought needed to be filled in coverage for him as a candidate. And we try to cover him as fairly and accurately as possible.” RSBN is also not going to challenge the former president. The channel’s mantra is to let Trump be Trump. If he mangles the facts or ignores them altogether, which he does often, Seales said there are other news sites and sources where viewers can fact-check him. “I don’t really feel it’s our place to call anyone out,” he said. “I like to let people make that decision on their own and to research the facts.”

[...]

HOME AWAY FROM HOME

The Opelika house hasn’t always been RSBN’s headquarters. Seales moved there for safety and privacy. He asked the AP not to disclose its precise location or to record video of the home. [...]

Seales has embraced the new location. In recent months, he has turned a bedroom into a studio to record podcasts. A news anchor’s desk, teleprompter and professional lighting have been installed in another bedroom. But Seales said he isn’t sure how much longer he’ll run RSBN. He’s considering selling the company. Politics, he said, has become too vitriolic and has “taken enough of our life and our time.” RSBN also faces an uncertain future. If Trump’s comeback bid for the White House fails, the channel’s main attraction will no longer be running for office. Should he win, RSBN’s status as the hub for wall-to-wall Trump coverage will be diminished as a global press corps tracks his every move. “We have based our entire business model,” he said, “around one man doing one thing.”