TV News LIES

One of the nation’s largest broadcasters is accusing the Trump administration of retaliation, alleging the Federal Communications Commission is unfairly policing ABC and ABC-owned stations by conducting an unprecedented early review of its broadcast licenses because the president personally dislikes its programming.

“The retaliation against ABC is a signal to every media company in the country: accommodate the Administration’s view of what news coverage should look like or pay the price,” lawyers for the network said in a Wednesday filing.

Disney-owned ABC has found itself a target of the administration’s attacks on the press as President Donald Trump tests his power to weaponize government agencies in an effort to intimidate and deter the media from covering him in a negative light.

During his second term, the president has repeatedly demanded the network have its licenses revoked and called for the firing of late-night host Jimmy Kimmel over political remarks he made. The FCC announced the early review of ABC’s broadcast licenses earlier this year, along with a number of other investigations into the network.

Most recently, the president demanded ABC — and any other network that refused to air his July 16 primetime speech — have its licenses revoked.

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Progressive Abdul El-Sayed is leading Rep. Haley Stevens (D-Mich.) by 15 points ahead of next week’s Democratic primary for Michigan’s open Senate seat, according to a new poll.

An Emerson College Polling/WLNS/WOODTV survey released Thursday showed El-Sayed handily defeating Stevens in the primary with 54 percent support to Stevens’s 39 percent. A separate 6 percent of respondents said they were undecided while about 2 percent backed state Sen. Mallory McMorrow (D), who dropped out of the race earlier this summer.

When factoring in undecided Democratic voters who were asked who they lean toward, El-Sayed rose to 57 percent support while Stevens sat at 41 percent. A separate 2 percent of respondents supported McMorrow.

El-Sayed and Stevens are running for the Democratic Senate nomination next Tuesday to take on former Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) to succeed retiring Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.). Although Peters, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and former Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) have backed Stevens, El-Sayed, a former Wayne County public health official, has held is own in the toss-up race.

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Only a day after Quinnipiac’s poll, an AP-NORC poll showed similar numbers, as only 33% of respondents approved of Trump’s performance, a drop of 4 percentage points from the last AP-NORC poll. Trump’s approval rating in the July 30 AP-NORC poll is the lowest recorded by the pollster since his return to the White House in 2025.

Quinnipiac University’s poll was conducted from July 23 to July 27 with 963 responses and a margin of error of plus or minus 4.1 percentage points. AP-NORC’s poll was also taken from July 23 to 27, but with 1,165 responses and a margin of error of plus or minus 3.7 percentage points.

This week has been historic for the president, but for all the wrong reasons.

Apart from reaching record lows in both Quinnipiac University and AP-NORC’s polls, the president has hit similar lows in two other surveys released earlier this week.

On July 28, a new Economist/YouGov poll found that 34% of Americans approved of Trump’s job performance, marking the president's lowest approval rating in YouGov’s tracking since he returned to the White House.

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Since October, former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale has been quietly overseeing an operation posting hundreds of blog posts on behalf of Israel. One article, titled “The Reality Behind Gaza’s ‘Journalists’: Terror Ties, Propaganda, and the Laws of War,” asserts that a majority of journalists in Gaza were linked to terrorist organizations. Another casts doubt on the killing of Hind Rajab, a five-year-old Palestinian girl killed by the Israeli military in 2024.

The key intended audience of these sites is not concerned Americans, it’s not even humans—most of the sites average a few hundred unique visitors each month. Instead, Parscale and his firm, Clock Tower X, created them as part of a $46.5 million contract with the Israeli government to try and influence artificial intelligence-powered chatbots, tools like Claude or ChatGPT.

Parscale has made his goal of influencing artificial intelligence—often referred to as “LLM poisoning”—explicit. In his initial agreement with Israel, Parscale said that he would deploy “websites and content to deliver GPT framing results on GPT conversations” as part of the contract. More recently, his team even told Axios they are “seeing success” at getting popular AI systems to incorporate information from their sites, though they declined thttps://www.dropsitenews.com/p/israel-brad-parscale-ai-chatbots-gazao provide data.

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The fallout from the Hamas-led attacks of 7 October 2023, Israel's military campaigns across the Middle East and the contentious issue of conscripting ultra-Orthodox Jewish men have reshaped the country's political landscape, eroding support for Netanyahu and his governing coalition.

At the centre of that shift is Gadi Eisenkot, the former army chief who has emerged as the prime minister's strongest challenger.

With Israelis due to vote on 27 October, opinion polls consistently suggest that Netanyahu's Likud party and its allies are struggling to secure the 61-seat parliamentary majority needed to form a government.

Eisenkot now leads a broad opposition bloc spanning right-wing, centrist, left-wing Jewish and Palestinian parties, with recent polling suggesting he has the strongest chance yet of ending Netanyahu's long grip on power.

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Zelensky met Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk in Lublin on Wednesday, following weeks of heightened friction over historical memory, bilateral political disputes and the treatment of Ukrainians in Poland.

Their talks covered defense cooperation, historical grievances and the security of Ukrainian refugees, but the broader message was unmistakable: Poland and Ukraine cannot afford to let disputes over the past weaken their ability to confront the Russian threat they face today.

For Fried, who served as US ambassador to Poland from 1997 to 2000 and later as assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, the meeting marked an important shift back toward strategic realism.

“It was an excellent step,” Fried said. “This was a first-rate, wise move by President Zelensky, and I suspect that there have been productive contacts between Poles and Ukrainians.”

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The US Senate on Wednesday unanimously passed a resolution declaring its opposition to any presidential pardon for Ghislaine Maxwell, the longtime Jeffrey Epstein associate who is currently serving a 20-year prison sentence for sex-trafficking crimes.

Introduced by Senator Jacky Rosen, a Democrat of Nevada, the resolution states that Maxwell “should not be granted a Presidential pardon or any form of clemency for her crimes with Jeffrey Epstein relating to the sexual exploitation and abuse of minors”.

Although Senate resolutions like these are non-binding and symbolic, Rosen’s office noted in a news release in February when she introduced the measure that the resolution was “designed to put the Senate on record opposing the prospect” of Donald Trump of granting a pardon or clemency to Maxwell.

“It’s frankly horrifying that Trump would entertain the idea of clemency for even a second for a convicted sex trafficker,” Rosen said in a floor speech on Wednesday.

The resolution was brought on Wednesday, as the Senate weighed Trump’s nomination of Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, to stay in the role permanently. Rosen said its unanimous passage sent a clear message to the White House and Blanche that “there should be NO special treatment for Ghislaine Maxwell”.

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A pause in fighting between the U.S. and Iran came to a screeching halt after Tehran launched what the Trump administration is calling a "surprise attack" that American forces in the Middle East had only minutes to shoot down.

The July 28 ballistic missile assault threatened to reinvigorate a conflict that President Donald Trump has aimed to wind down after months of negotiations. Trump vowed the U.S. would "beat the f------ s--- out of them," he told Fox News. The latest attacks raised fears of a wider war as Saudi Arabia joined the conflict and Iran seeks to test Trump's resolve with the midterm elections looming.

Trump's promised retaliatory strikes on Iran began at about 8 p.m. ET on July 29. Central Command, the arm of the military overseeing operations in the Middle East, announced the attacks, calling them "powerful response to yesterday’s attempted Iranian attacks on U.S. forces."

"We're going to be hitting them very hard because it's our turn to hit them. They know it's coming," Trump had told reporters earlier at the White House.

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