TV News LIES

Gaza's Rafah border crossing with Egypt was busy with activity Sunday as Israel said that limited travel to and from the territory is set to resume after years of near-complete isolation. Reopening the border crossing is a key step as the Israel-Hamas ceasefire moves ahead.

Israel announced Sunday that the crossing has opened in a test. COGAT, the Israeli military agency that controls aid to Gaza, said in a statement that the crossing was actively being prepared for fuller operation, adding that residents of Gaza would begin to pass through the crossing once preparations were complete.

Palestinian security officers passed through the crossing's Egyptian gate and headed toward the Palestinian gate to join an EU mission that will be supervising exit and entry, said an Egyptian official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to talk to the media. Ambulances also crossed through the Egyptian gate, the official added.

The head of the new Palestinian administrative committee governing Gaza's daily affairs has said travel in both directions would start Monday.

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The Corporation for Public Broadcasting agreed Monday to fulfill a $36 million, multi-year contract with NPR that it had yanked after pressure from the Trump White House.

The arrangement resolves litigation filed by NPR accusing the corporation of illegally yielding to Trump's demands that the network be financially punished for its news coverage. The argument, part of a broader lawsuit by NPR and several stations against the Trump administration, focused on CPB funding for NPR's operation of a satellite distribution system for local public radio stations. NPR announced Monday it would waive all fees for the stations associated with the satellite service for two years.

The judge in the case had explicitly told CPB's legal team he did not find its defense credible. CPB lawyers had argued that the decision to award a contract instead to Public Media Infrastructure, a new consortium of public media institutions, was driven by a desire to foster digital innovations more swiftly.

"The settlement is a victory for editorial independence and a step toward upholding the First Amendment rights of NPR and the public media system in our legal challenge to [Trump's] Executive Order," Katherine Maher, President and CEO of NPR, said in a statement.

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On Thursday evening, as rumors about the Brown University gunman swirled, CNN’s Kaitlan Collins posted on social media, noting the confusion and directing people to her network’s 9pm newscast.

CNN is certainly not a flawless news source, but her words rang true to me. The network is one of the outlets where you can find reality-based and largely dependable reporting – especially in breaking news situations like the one that was developing near a New Hampshire storage facility.

But CNN, now 45 years old, is in a precarious situation as two huge media conglomerates vie for ownership of its parent company, Warner Bros Discovery.

Whatever the outcome, the fate of CNN has become part of a high-stakes game of corporate ownership, not as a question of what benefits the information-seeking public.

America’s media system isn’t set up for that lofty goal. It’s set up for corporate profitability, for shareholder gain, for ever-increasing size and ever-decreasing competition.

“This is yet another example of the deep structural problems with roots in decades of policy decisions,” said Victor Pickard, author of Democracy Without Journalism? and a University of Pennsylvania media policy professor.

The speculation about who will own Warner Bros Discovery – will it be Netflix or Paramount Skydance? – misses a larger point.

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TikTok has signed a deal to spin-off its U.S. operations to a group controlled by mostly American investors, including software giant Oracle, a company run by billionaire Trump ally Larry Ellison.

TikTok's hyper-engaging algorithm and the massive amount of data the app has collected on millions of Americans is set to be overseen by the new U.S. firm. According to the agreement, TikTok's U.S. algorithm will be retrained with only Americans' data. Content moderation rules around what is permitted and what is not will be set by the new investor-controlled entity.

Yet the underlying algorithm will still be owned by Beijing-based ByteDance, with the blessing of American auditors, according to an internal TikTok memo reviewed by NPR and two sources familiar with the deal who were not authorized to speak publicly.

"With an American majority running the content moderation, concerns about foreign propaganda seem to have been alleviated," said Anupam Chander, a professor of law and technology at Georgetown University who studies the regulation of new technology. "But it is possible that the American TikTok might end up censoring or hiding speech that is permissible on the global TikTok platform. I would hope that the U.S. content moderation team would allow speech that the American owners might dislike."

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Being a member of the Pentagon press corps was once one of the more prestigious assignments in US journalism, a position reserved for heavy hitters from venerable newspapers and news channels, reporters at the peak of their powers.

Almost all credentialed reporters from traditional media companies surrendered their Pentagon press passes in October, rather than sign a 21-page Pentagon document that set restrictions on journalistic activities.

Those constraints include requiring news organizations to pledge they will not obtain unauthorized material – in effect limiting journalists to reporting on officially provided information – and agreeing to limits on journalists entering certain parts of the Pentagon.

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Canadian human rights activists are demanding answers from their government after a former United Nations special rapporteur who investigated Israeli abuses against Palestinians was interrogated at the Canadian border on “national security” grounds.

Richard Falk, 95, was stopped at Toronto Pearson International Airport on Thursday and questioned for several hours. He said a security official told him that Canada had concerns that he and his wife, fellow legal scholar Hilal Elver, posed “a danger to the national security of Canada.

The treatment of the couple has sparked anger and calls for an explanation from Ottawa.

“We need answers – and from the highest levels of government,” said Corey Balsam, national coordinator at Independent Jewish Voices-Canada, a group that supports Palestinian rights.

Despite the outcry, Canadian authorities have not publicly addressed the incident. But the office of Minister of Public Safety Gary Anandasangaree, who oversees the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA), has acknowledged the case in a statement to Al Jazeera, saying he is seeking more information about what happened.

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