Searchable News & Info From Reliable Online Sources.
- CNN Chief Responds To Pete Hegseth’s Broadsides Against Network
CNN’s chief executive Mark Thompson defended his network on Friday after a broadside from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who earlier in the day lashed out over its reporting during a Pentagon briefing on operations in Iran. Speaking alongside the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Dan Caine, Hegseth opened the briefing with an attack on media coverage of the war, singling out CNN’s reporting and accusing the outlet of pushing misleading narratives about the administration’s handling of the conflict. Without naming the defense secretary, Thompson backed his network’s reporting and warned its journalists would not be put off by “political threats or insults.” “We stand by our journalism,” the statement said. “Politicians have an obvious motive for claiming that journalism which raises questions about their decisions is false. At CNN our only interest is in telling the truth to our audiences in the U.S. and around the world and no amount of political threats or insults is going to change that.” pic.twitter.com/jWlAHXQW3i — CNN Communications (@CNNPR) March 13, 2026 During the briefing, Hegseth highlighted CNN and dismissed a report by the network suggesting the Trump administration underestimated the war’s impact on shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, calling it “patently ridiculous” and adding: “It’s a fundamentally unserious report.” He then took a swipe at the network’s leadership and potential sale to Paramount, telling reporters: “The sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better!” His criticism came as part of a wider criticism of media narrative framing he argued overstated the threat posed by Iran. “People look up at the TV and they see banners. They see headlines. I used to be in that business. And I know that everything is written intentionally,” Hegseth told reporters. Watch above via CNN.The post CNN Chief Responds To Pete Hegseth’s Broadsides Against Network first appeared on Mediaite. [TheTopNews] Read More.25 mins ago - Trump Administration Will Reportedly Pocket $10 Billion From TikTok Deal
AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson President Donald Trump’s administration is poised to receive roughly $10 billion from investors involved in the deal that transferred control of TikTok’s U.S. operations from its Chinese parent company, according to a Friday report from The Wall Street Journal. People familiar with the matter told the WSJ that the payment stems from an agreement in which a group of investors aligned with the administration took over TikTok’s American business from ByteDance. The investors backing the new U.S. entity include Oracle Corporation, private-equity firm Silver Lake, and Abu Dhabi investment group MGX. According to the report, the group already paid the Treasury Department about $2.5 billion when the deal closed in January. Additional payments are expected over time until the total reaches about $10 billion. When outlining the framework for the TikTok arrangement last September, Trump signaled that the government would seek compensation for facilitating the deal. “It hasn’t been fully negotiated, but we’ll get something,” Trump said at the time, adding that the government’s role in negotiating the arrangement justified a payment. He remarked a day prior in the Oval Office, “The United States is getting a tremendous fee-plus — I call it a fee-plus — just for making the deal, and I don’t want to throw that out the window.” The size of the payment would be highly unusual for a government helping arrange a corporate transaction, historians told the Journal. For comparison, the WSJ’s Miriam Gottfried and Amrith Ramkumar noted that investment banks advising on major mergers typically earn less than 1% of the total deal value. For broader context, the deal was arranged to comply with legislation requiring TikTok to reduce ByteDance’s ownership stake or face the possibility of being shut down in the U.S. over national security concerns tied to Chinese control of the app. The new U.S. entity now shares profits with ByteDance, which licensed its widely used recommendation algorithm to the venture and retains nearly a 20% stake in the company. While Vice President JD Vance previously said the new TikTok entity running the U.S. business is valued at roughly $14 billion, per the WSJ, some tech analysts argue the platform may be worth significantly more.The post Trump Administration Will Reportedly Pocket $10 Billion From TikTok Deal first appeared on Mediaite. [TheTopNews] Read More.30 mins ago - There Was an Actual Dumpster Fire Happening by CBS
Screenshot via X (@jeremymbarr) According to an X post from The Guardian’s Jeremy Barr, an actual dumpster fire erupted near New York City’s CBS Broadcast Center on Friday. Barr posted the image at around 3 PM EST, showing a large green dumpster near the W 57th St. production hub engulfed in flames, with one onlooker watching. There apparently was a literal dumpster fire near the CBS Broadcast Center in NYC today… pic.twitter.com/lFyyG7ptzr — Jeremy Barr (@jeremymbarr) March 13, 2026 In the comments, former CBS executive producer Alturo Rhymes offered some clarification, writing, “This is across the street at an apartment complex lot.” For some, the fire may serve as an unintentional metaphor for the network as a whole under editor-in-chief Bari Weiss. According to weekly reporting from ADWEEK, CBS Evening News finished in third place — behind ABC and NBC — for total viewers during the week of March 2. The show, hosted by Tony Dokoupil, drew 4.117 million total viewers last week and 507,000 viewers in the key demographic. Compared with the prior week, the broadcast slipped 1% in total viewers but edged up 1% in the demo, making it the only evening newscast to post a week-to-week decline in any measured category. Additionally, since last year, total viewership fell 6% while demo viewership dropped 19%. Notably, neither NBC nor ABC experienced declines in the same timeframe. Not to mention, per reporting from Vanity Fair‘s (and formerly Mediaite’s) Aidan McLaughlin, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani dropped out of talks to appear for an interview on the network due to concerns over a recent X post from Weiss. In the post, the editor-in-chief promoted CBS commentary from Iranian dissident and journalist Masih Alinejad, who slammed the mayor’s late Feb. statement in which he argued that engaging in military activity with Iran “mark[s] a catastrophic escalation in an illegal war of aggression.” Mamdani is “more than welcome to come to one of my safe houses,” said Alinejad in the clip, which Weiss reposted with a fire emoji. Last but certainly not least, this week, CBS News correspondent Scott MacFarlane announced his departure after becoming “disillusioned” and “appalled” with the publication under Weiss — the latest in a string of exits from the network. Just last month, both 60 Minutes correspondent Anderson Cooper and CBS Evening News producer Alicia Hastey left as well.The post There Was an Actual Dumpster Fire… [TheTopNews] Read More.1 hour ago - Conservative Radio Host Warns Trump: MAGA ‘Isolationists’ May Be Trying to S...
President Donald Trump stands with Tulsi Gabbard and her husband Abraham Williams after she was sworn in as the Director of National Intelligence in the Oval Office at the White House, Wednesday, Feb. 12, 2025, in Washington. (Photo/Alex Brandon) Conservative radio host Erick Erickson warned on Friday that Republican “isolationists” in President Donald Trump’s own administration may be trying to “sabotage” Operation Epic Fury against Iran. “I think the president is being undermined by his own team, by the isolationists. They’re tired of Marco Rubio winning. Rubio won on the engagement with Venezuela, which people in the White House didn’t want to do,” Erickson argued in a clip he released on social media, adding: Remember, Tulsi Gabbard wasn’t even admitted to the meetings. You’ve got Marco Rubio winning on Cuba. The Cuban regime is collapsing. They’ve entered negotiations with the United States. And you’ve got Marco Rubio winning on Iran. I suspect there are people in this administration who think Marco Rubio is flying a little bit too close to the sun, and they want to melt his wings. There’s no way this administration was caught off guard by Iran wanting to close the Strait of Hormuz. It’s going to take some time. Desert Storm, Operation Iraqi Freedom, the air war campaigns took 40 and 50 days, respectively, I think. We are 13 days in and people are already freaking out. I think the freakout is by design by Democrats who loathe the president and wish us to lose so he has a black eye going into the midterms. And by Republican isolationists who never wanted to be there in the first place—who are desperate for us to get out of Iran because they do not like the United States being the leader of the world. The fact of the matter is, however, we have kicked this nest of hornets and we have to get rid of the hornets or they’re going to keep stinging us now. So the president got us in there, we dropped the bombs, we killed the Ayatollah. The second Ayatollah is already incapacitated. We need to see this through. And the idea that it would take three weeks—a country the size of Alaska—has always been nonsense. The idea that we’re caught off guard by what Iran is doing is absolute nonsense. This is an internal struggle within the Trump administration by the isolationists and Democrats… [TheTopNews] Read More.1 hour ago - Tucker Carlson Echoes MAGA Voters ‘Upset’ With Trump: ‘I Can’t Believe H...Tucker Carlson warned that President Donald Trump’s decision to launch strikes on Iran has left many of the president’s own supporters “mad” and feeling deeply betrayed as he defended his own criticism of the intervention while dismissing those attacking him. The conservative pundit made the remarks during a wide-ranging interview on Friday’s Piers Morgan Uncensored, where he defended his criticism of the operation but also of the extent of Israel’s involvement amid mounting backlash from prominent figures on the right. Carlson’s opposition to the strikes in recent weeks has drawn attacks from Fox News host Mark Levin, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) and conservative commentator Ben Shapiro – all of whom he has feuded with for a long time. This week, however, Cruz has branded Carlson “the most dangerous demagogue” in America and implied Carlson’s commentary on Israel was antisemitic. Speaking to host Piers Morgan, Carlson argued that enthusiasm for the strikes is largely confined to an older slice of the Republican electorate. “The only people who support this war are those born between 1946 and 1964 who watch a lot of Fox News. That’s it,” he said. He continued: “I’m not attacking them, by the way. They’re Americans. They’re my equals as Americans. I love a lot of them. But their perspective on the U.S. and the world is very different from everyone else’s. Very, very different. And so, they’re not the ones who got Donald Trump elected.” Carlson, in turn, insisted the coalition that propelled Trump to the presidency in 2024 looks very different – far less supportive of another Middle East conflict and much more in line with his own skepticism. “Actually, the people who got Donald Trump elected are the people who hadn’t voted for Republicans before or even voted at all before,” he said, describing voters including “Joe Rogan listeners,” younger voters, and non-traditional Republican constituencies. “They’re Hispanic voters. They’re young Black men. They’re non-traditional Republican voters who voted for Trump because he promised not to keep doing the same thing,” he said, adding: “And one of the things he promised not to do again was to hand operational authority over to [Israeli Prime Minister] Benjamin Netanyahu as other presidents have. We don’t want any more of that. Why would we?” Namedropping his critics he continued: “We’re not going to, like, make Mark Levin or Ben Shapiro who have almost no organic support in the… [TheTopNews] Read More.1 hour ago
- Republican Candidate Paid Accused Forger to Collect Signatures To Get Name on Ba...
Facebook Screenshot The Republican running to replace Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) in Congress allegedly paid an accused forger to collect ballot signatures for him, according to Politico. Anthony Constantino, who runs The Sticker Mule printing company, told Politico’s New York Playbook PM that he “had to enlist paid canvassers to circulate petitions door-to-door to get him on the ballot.” That’s because he said the local GOP hasn’t endorsed his candidacy against GOP Assemblyman Robert Smullen. According to the report, Constantino hired a man named Christopher Bernstein, who was arrested in 2014 for allegedly forging signatures on a different candidate’s ballot petition. In 2012, Bernstein pleaded guilty to “possession of a forged instrument” involving a fake drug prescription. On Thursday, Constantino said he has a paid “petition manager” who contracts the signature gatherers, but said he didn’t know who Bernstein was. “A video reviewed by Playbook shows Bernstein collecting signatures in Fort Edward, Washington County, for Constantino without saying the candidate’s name,” the report said. “Bernstein identifies himself as door knocking ‘on behalf of the Republican Party’ — despite the fact that the Washington County GOP unanimously endorsed Smullen over Constantino.” Constantino told Playbook that he fired Bernstein when he learned of his background. In a statement, Constantino said, “We were not aware of this person’s background and have decided to terminate them effective immediately. All petitions they acquired have been set aside and will be reviewed by my legal team. Thank you for bringing this to my attention.” Stefanik announced in December that she was dropping out of the New York gubernatorial race and would not seek re-election to her House seat. Stefanik posted a statement on X saying, “While we would have overwhelmingly won this primary, it is not an effective use of our time or your generous resources to spend the first half of next year in an unnecessary and protracted Republican primary, especially in a challenging state like New York.” President Donald Trump initially chose Stefanik to be the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, but later pulled the nomination to protect the narrow Republican majority in the House.The post Republican Candidate Paid Accused Forger to Collect Signatures To Get Name on Ballot first appeared on Mediaite. [TheTopNews] Read More.2 hours ago
The Searchable USWebDaily.com and TheTopNews NewsBank Helps You Be Better Informed, Faster! Spread The Word.
