The Media

’Tis the season for year for the media to look back and write about old news. The lists tell more about the compiler than the stories themselves.

2025 marked a year of arguably unparalleled success for the NewsBusters team seeing as how, along with chronicling the best and worst in daily and long-term liberal media bias, we helped see to a successful conclusion a decades-long fight to defund National Public Radio (NPR) and PBS.

In addition to President Trump’s successful media lawsuits and changes inside CBS News, the NewsBusters team was proud to take credit for the suspension of ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel plus the May 2026 cancellation of CBS’s The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.

It was a challenging task, but an esteemed panel of NewsBusters editors, led by MRC President David Bozell and MRC’s Vice President for Research and Publications Brent Baker, boiled down all the biased outbursts from lefty hack hosts, anchors, reporters and pundits in 2025 and on December 17 announced The Media Research Center Award for Worst Quote of the Year.

Of course, every year, there is way too much bias for just one category. So we broke down the Worst of 2025 into five additional categories (The Craziest Analysis Award; The Trashing Trump Award; The Damn Those Conservatives Award; The ICE Breakers Award for Hating Trump’s Deportation Policy; and the Celebrity Freak-Outs Award).

CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss has offered more insight about her last-minute decision to shelve a segment on the ‘brutal and tortuous conditions’ at a prison in El Salvador where the Trump administration has deported illegal immigrants.

Weiss, 41, told colleagues that she spiked the segment simply because it ‘did not advance the ball’ during the network’s typical 9am editorial call on Monday, The New York Times reported.

She pointed out how the the Times and other publications have ‘previously done similar work’ while maintaining that fresh, through-provoking content was her ‘north star.’

Trust in the legacy news media today is so low than only one in 25 U.S. adult citizens place a great deal of trust in what they’re being told by television and newspaper reports, results of a new national survey reveal.

In the latest poll by The Economist/YouGov, conducted October 24-27, Americans were asked to rate the level of confidence they have in various institutions.

The Wall Street Journal gets it.

In Friday’s edition, Journal columnist Holman Jenkins Jr. closed his column by saying, more than accurately, this, with bold print for emphasis supplied:

I’m guessing many flyover Democrats have long seen the party’s blunder in associating itself too closely with the national media. The self-defeating Russia hoax, the shameless, unnecessary politicization of Covid—both helped Mr. Trump. Most damning was the conniving of Team Biden to push a senile, unpopular incumbent past voters a second time even at the highly probable risk of returning Mr. Trump to the White House…

CBS News staffers are coming to terms with the news that controversial commentator Bari Weiss is their new editor-in-chief, as the storied network’s owner Paramount Skydance acquires her Substack-based publication the Free Press in a reported $150m deal.

In conversations with the Guardian, six current network employees expressed a mixture of apprehension, skepticism and frustration over the appointment, though several stressed they wanted to wait to see what it would really mean for their network – and themselves.

“A throwing up emoji is not enough of a reflection of the feelings in here,” one particularly incensed CBS News employee said in a text message.

h/t DS

Puck’s Dylan Byers dropped the bombshell Wednesday night that the rumored deal was “on the 1-yard-line” for CBS News’s parent company SkyDance to acquire former New York Times writer Bari Weiss’s indefatigable site The Free Press and grant Weiss a senior role inside CBS News.

Predictably, this has and will continue to send liberal journalists both inside the network and outside it into hissy fits that will dwarf one-time CNN boss Chris Licht’s failed desires (and orders from his superiors at Warner Bros. Discovery) to return the network to a serious news outlet and not a Trump hate factory.

Howard Stern didn’t just have a radio show. He had a revolution. He was brash, vulgar, and fearless. He gave voice to the silenced, told dirty jokes with conviction, and turned a microphone into a battering ram against establishment sanctimony. But somewhere along the line, the rebel became the regime.

In the 1980s, Stern made his mark as a shock jock icon, captivating millions with raw, uncensored radio that thumbed its nose at polite society. He was a champion of free speech, someone who understood that everyday Americans—especially working-class listeners—wanted truth, not scripted politeness. He gave it to them, and they gave him their loyalty.

Between July 14 and July 20, the name “Epstein” was uttered 160 times on Fox News, which seems a little excessive for a one-week period. It comes to roughly 23 mentions/stories a day, and an “Epstein” each hour.

The controversial departure of Travis Dhanraj from the CBC might have, according to his former employers’ spokesperson, “saddened” their top brass. But it was treated with great delight by Conservatives who have long doubted whether the Crown Corporation’s slavish adherence to diversity in terms of colour, gender, sexuality, and ethic origin extended to the realms of intellectual and ideological debate.