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‘Embarrassingly Wrong’: Corporate Media’s Talking Heads Confess Their Biggest Blunders Of 2024

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From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Owen Klinsky

From MSNBC host Rachel Maddow to businessman and television personality Mark Cuban, a slew of media leaders divulged what they got wrong this past year in a Semafor article published Monday.

Media missteps included NBC News President Rebecca Blumenstein underestimating the impact of inflation on politics, Fox News anchor Dana Perino incorrectly predicting Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce would get engaged and CNBC financial journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin not putting “DOGE and the pairing of Elon [Musk] and Vivek [Ramaswamy]” on his 2024 Bingo card, according to the piece. Despite the variety of answers, one topic — Joe Biden’s lack of mental acuity —  seemed to sit at the top of the list for many respondents.

“Like many others, I was completely, utterly, totally, embarrassingly wrong about [President Joe] Biden’s lack of mental competence,” progressive British-American broadcaster Mehdi Hasan told Semafor.

 

 

Biden dropped out of the 2024 presidential election in July following a disastrous June debate performance in which he appeared to lose his train of thought several times and stated he “beat Medicare.” Prior to the decision to exit the race, the White House made various efforts to mask the effects of his age, with the president wearing sneakers rather than dress shoes and taking shorter steps up Air Force One.

The White House actively denied claims Biden’s mental health was declining, with White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre characterizing a video of the President wandering away from world leaders at the G7 Summit as a “cheap fake” and claiming it was orchestrated by Republicans. Much of the corporate media supported the White House’s effort, with panelists on MSNBC’s Morning Joe describing a June article from The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) that detailed the president’s declining mental health as “outrageous,” and CNN’s Bakari Sellers suggesting in July, well after the debate, that there was no reason to believe Biden could not serve for another four years.

Other examples of the media downplaying concerns over Biden’s mental acuity include The View co-host Whoopi Goldberg rushing to the president’s defense after co-host Alyssa Farah Griffin said Biden could have a “senior moment” on stage prior to the debate and MSNBC analyst Mike Barnicle describing members of the Democratic Party as cruel in July for trying to oust the president from the 2024 race.

More recently, former CNN political analyst Chris Cillizza apologized in a YouTube video posted in December for waiting too long to investigate concerns that Biden’s mental acuity was deteriorating, admitting that as a journalist he should have “pushed harder earlier for more information about Joe Biden’s mental and physical well-being.”

American talk show host Brian Lehrer made a similar apology in his response to Semafor: “Many callers to my show said Joe Biden was in no shape to run for re-election. I mostly dismissed it as ageism. Then I watched the debate.”

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conflict

Trump, Putin have begun negotiations to end Russia-Ukraine war

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From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Wallace White

President Donald Trump announced Wednesday that negotiations to end the Ukraine-Russia war are underway following a call with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Trump said Putin agreed to begin negotiations over Ukraine during the call, with the president saying he would inform Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of the negotiations imminently, according to a Truth Social post. Since the war began in February 2022, the U.S. has spent over $130 billion aiding Ukraine.

“We both reflected on the Great History of our Nations, and the fact that we fought so successfully together in World War II, remembering, that Russia lost tens of millions of people, and we, likewise, lost so many!” Trump said on Truth Social. “We each talked about the strengths of our respective Nations, and the great benefit that we will someday have in working together. But first, as we both agreed, we want to stop the millions of deaths taking place in the War with Russia/Ukraine. President Putin even used my very strong Campaign motto of, “COMMON SENSE.” We both believe very strongly in it. We agreed to work together, very closely, including visiting each other’s Nations.”

Zelenskyy said Friday that he was open to a peace deal amid Trump’s request for Ukraine to supply the U.S. with rare earth elements and other minerals in exchange for aid. During his campaign, Trump vowed to bring peace to Ukraine and the world.

Earlier on Wednesday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Ukraine joining NATO and returning to its 2014 borders, when it retained control over Crimea and the currently disputed Donbass and Donetsk regions, was not “realistic.”

The White House did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

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Musk Quietly Inserts DOGE Across Federal Agencies In Move That Could Uproot $162,000,000,000 Govt Industry

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From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Emily Kopp

As federal employees launched protests of entrepreneur Elon Musk’s disruption of federal agencies last week, the Office of Personnel Management quietly released a memo shoring up the formal structure of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

An OPM memo dated Feb. 4 seeks the redesignation of chief information officers across the government from career positions to political appointees. OPM has recommended that every agency send a request to OPM to reclassify its CIO role from career reserved to “general” by Feb. 14.

The new CIO positions will be working with DOGE, a source familiar confirmed to The Daily Caller News Foundation.

The new memo gives the greatest detail about how DOGE will operate within the federal government since a Jan. 20 executive order. Yet it has been entirely overlooked by the legacy press, which has relied largely on career officials within the government who characterize DOGE’s actions as extra-governmental. Democrats like New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have sought to portray the effort as a “coup.”

However, the memo shows that DOGE is attempting to regularize its operations within the federal government.

“It is a focus of President Trump’s administration to improve the government’s digital policy to make government more responsive, transparent, efficient, and accessible to the public, and to make using and understanding government programs easier,” the memo reads.

Unlike most major institutions, the federal government has no central IT department. InsteadIT responsibilities are dispersed across federal agencies which in turn spend billions on contractors and disparate artificial intelligence technologies. Musk’s housecleaning could reshape this $163 billion industry.

DOGE is the renamed U.S. Digital Service. The U.S. Digital Service is a small office within the White House created to build the health care exchanges under the Affordable Care Act and advises on technical strategy. How the DOGE office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building will liaison with CIOs throughout the government is not yet clear.

Washington Post report revealed Monday that Edward Coristine, the 19-year-old DOGE team member known online as “Big Balls,” has been stationed at the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Technology. The Bureau of Diplomatic Technology provides IT services.

The memo states that the new DOGE-aligned CIOs will take on a major role in public policy on technology.

The memo gives some insight into what they will prioritize, like improving government procurement policies and privacy, and deprioritize, namely diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.

“Poor technology-procurement policies can endanger property and privacy rights. Inadequate security policies can lead to vulnerabilities and hacks,” it states. “Emphasis on policies like [Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility] siphons labor and resources from other core government objectives.”

The Biden administration helped lay the groundwork for the change. Two earlier OPM memos cited in the Feb. 4 memo broadened the authority of government appointees to look outside of government for highly technical roles, including one released in the final months of the last administration.

2018 OPM memo under the first Trump administration noted “severe shortages of candidates and/or critical hiring needs” for STEM and cybersecurity. A September 2024 memo released under the Biden administration noted that “severe shortage of talent” in cybersecurity and other high-tech sectors persisted.

The new memo states that moving certain CIO positions away from career positions could help to alleviate it by dramatically increasing the number of candidates available to fill these important roles.

The move is in keeping with public statements about DOGE made by Musk and former DOGE co-lead and potential Ohio gubernatorial hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy about improving the federal government’s tech infrastructure, including examining the vendors the U.S. government works with and the fact that these systems don’t communicate across agencies.

Musk’s biography on his website X reads “White House Tech support.”

“My preferred title in the new administration is Volunteer IT Consultant,” Musk wrote on X on Dec. 9. “We can’t make government efficient & fix the deficit if the computers don’t work.”

“The federal government is the world’s largest IT customer… In theory, this *should* give us great buying power to negotiate good deals for taxpayers, but of course that’s not what happens,” Ramaswamy said on Dec. 5. “If the federal government were serious about reducing costs, it would procure government-wide licenses.”

Despite the intense focus on DOGE, there has been little discussion of the federal government’s existing methods for managing data and records.

The top five contractors on IT together took in $45 billion in 2024, according to Washington Technology, a trade publication that uses federal procurement data, USASpending.gov and company Security and Exchange Commission filings.

Musk’s SpaceX was the 39th largest federal contractor in government technology at approximately $1 billion. That represents about one third of Musk’s reported $3 billion in contracts with the U.S. government. Musk’s contracts in IT include the delivery of Starlink satellite internet units and services to national and state parks and the State Department, and the provision of a satellite network called Starshield to the U.S. Space Force.

While Musk’s potential conflicts have been in the spotlight, all of the top five current contractors on government IT have either a former government official or member of Congress on their boards of directors, and sometimes multiple government officials. They include a former admiral, a former Pentagon acquisitions officialjoint chiefs of staff leadership, a former deputy secretary of defense, and a former chair of the Armed Services Committee.

In addition, all of these companies use various artificial intelligence technologies across all of their federal contracts, many of them non-open source.

Musk and DOGE were dealt a setback on Saturday when District Judge Paul Engelmayer ordered a temporary stop on DOGE’s work with U.S. Treasury data, citing cybersecurity concerns. The suit was filed by New York Attorney General Letitia James and 18 other state attorneys general.

A Washington Post story reported Friday night that Booz Allen Hamilton had described the DOGE team’s access to Treasury data — reportedly “read only” access that doesn’t allow for data manipulation — as “the single greatest insider threat risk the Bureau of Fiscal Services has ever faced.”

The company put out a statement hours after the assessment became public.

“Booz Allen did not conduct a threat assessment or make recommendations regarding DOGE,” a statement read. “Commentary provided in a draft document by a subcontractor contained unsubstantiated personal opinions. … Booz Allen has terminated the subcontractor.”

Booz Allen Hamilton is the government’s fourth largest contractor on IT issues, taking in $8.2 billion in 2024.

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