TV News LIES

A federal judge on Tuesday found the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle Voice of America (VOA) and affiliated news services likely were unlawful, indefinitely blocking the shuttering of the government-funded news outlet and affiliated news services.

U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth ordered VOA’s parent agency, the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), to restore VOA and other outlets under the USAGM’s umbrella and barred the agency from preventing them from serving as “consistently reliable and authoritative” news sources, as is required by law.

Bill Owens, the longtime executive producer of CBS News' "60 Minutes," is stepping down over concerns about editorial independence, according to an internal memo seen by Reuters on April 22.

Owens' departure follows a monthslong legal battle with President Donald Trump, who sued CBS in October 2024 over a "60 Minutes" interview with his Democratic rival for the White House, former Vice President Kamala Harris. Earlier this month, the case entered mediation.

"Over the past months, it has also become clear that I would not be allowed to run the show as I have always run it. To make independent decisions based on what was right for '60 Minutes,' right for the audience," Owens wrote in a note to the "60 Minutes" staff. After defending the show "from every angle, over time with everything I could," he has elected to step aside.

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You’ve seen in the past what happens when our two hosts, Mehdi and Owen Jones, are outspoken in front of a camera, but what happens when they’re let loose in front of a live audience of hundreds? Zeteo kicked off our one-year anniversary multi-city tour by taping this episode of ‘Two Outspoken’ with a fantastic crowd of our subscribers in London!

“It's our first event of our five-city tour… It's amazing to be starting the tour in London with you. And I would say this: in the UK, we have built up a presence, slowly but surely, challenging a lot of what's going on,” Mehdi tells the lively audience in Notting Hill, in the video above.

The head of a U.S.-funded Arabic-language television and online news outlet that claims a 30 million-strong audience in the Middle East and North Africa terminated most staff and curtailed TV programming Saturday, accusing the Trump administration and Elon Musk of having “irresponsibly and unlawfully” cut off funding.

In notices to Al Hurra news staffers about their dismissals, chief Jeffrey Gedmin said he had given up on the U.S. administration’s freeze lifting anytime soon for the congressionally approved money for Al Hurra and its U.S.-funded Arabic language sister organizations.

Gedmin accused Kari Lake, President Donald Trump’s appointee to the American government agency overseeing Al Hurra, Voice of America and other U.S.-funded news programming abroad, of dodging his efforts to speak with her about the funding cutoff.

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Abed Shaat drifted off to sleep on Sunday night, exhausted after covering Israeli air strikes all day.

The 33-year-old freelance photographer had returned to a tent in front of Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis in southern Gaza where he’d been based along with other journalists since the start of Israel’s war on Gaza.

Then, they were jolted awake.

“I woke up to the sound of a huge explosion nearby,” Shaat said. “My colleagues and I immediately rushed out of the tent. [I had] my mobile phone to film.

“The strike had directly hit the journalists’ tent nt across from us. I was horrified – to target journalists like this!”

The tent belonged to the TV station Palestine Today.

“I started taking pictures from a distance, but as I got closer to the burning tent, I saw one of my colleagues on fire,” Shaat said.

TVNL Comment: Israel will get way with this, as always. Where is the outrage?

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The Russian security council deputy head, Dmitry Medvedev, has described the editors of the Times newspaper in Britain as “legitimate military targets” in response to the newspaper’s coverage of the assassination of a Russian general.

Medvedev’s vitriolic comments on Wednesday followed a Times editorial in which the newspaper described the assassination of Lt Gen Igor Kirillov as “a legitimate act of defence” by Ukraine, which has claimed responsibility for the killing.

Kirillov, head of the military’s chemical, biological and radiological weapons unit, was killed along with his assistant when a device attached to an escooter exploded as the two men left a building in a residential area in south-east Moscow on Tuesday morning. Kirillov is the most senior Russian military official to be killed in an assassination away from the frontlines since the start of the Kremlin’s offensive in Ukraine nearly three years ago.

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