In Forbes https://www.forbes.com/sites/markjoyella/2025/11/29/white-house-ramps-up-war-on-journalists-by-naming-media-offender-of-the-week/ ByMark Joyella, Senior Contributor. Mark Joyella is a former broadcast journalist who covers media. Nov 29, 2025, 06:08pm EST
The Trump Administration is intensifying its war on the “fake news media” by launching a “Media Offender of the Week” page on the official White House website. The page, which names journalists from CBS News, The Boston Globe and The Independent, carries the subtitle “Misleading. Biased. Exposed.”
Named as “media offenders” are Boston Globe politics producer Alyssa Vega, Independent White House correspondent Andrew Feinberg and senior Washington correspondent Eric Garcia, and CBS News chief White House correspondent Nancy Cordes.
The journalists are accused of misrepresenting and exaggerating “President Trump’s calls for Democrat accountability,” the page claims. “The media misrepresented President Trump’s call for Members of Congress to be held accountable for inciting sedition by saying that he called for their “execution.”
The reporters singled out by the White House had reported on six Democratic senators who featured in a video released last week reminding members of the armed forces that they don’t have to follow illegal orders–even if those orders come directly from the president.
“The threats to our Constitution aren’t just coming from abroad, but from right here right at home. Our laws are clear. You can refuse illegal orders,” the senators said in the video. “No one has to carry out orders that violate the law or our Constitution.”
President Trump blasted the video, suggesting that the lawmakers were guilty of sedition and saying they should face consequences. One of the six senators in the video, Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona, told ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Tuesday that the administration’s reaction to the video–including calls from the Pentagon to investigate Kelly–was intended to sow fear and shut down criticism.
“It is right out of the playbook, you know, the playbook of authoritarianism. That’s what they do. They try to suppress speech,” Kelly said. “Every one of us has First Amendment speech rights, and I think the president is infringing on those and he is sending, he is sending a pretty strong message. You do not want to cross him, and your loyalty should be to him. It should not. It should always be to the Constitution.”
‘President Trump called for them to be held accountable’
On the White House “media offenders” page, the administration suggested that “the Democrats and Fake News Media subversively implied that President Trump had issued illegal orders to service members. Every order President Trump has issued has been lawful. It is dangerous for sitting Members of Congress to incite insubordination in the United States’ military, and President Trump called for them to be held accountable.”
While the White House claimed the senators in the video were “calling for service members to disobey their chain of command,” the actual content of the video said that federal law does not allow members of the military to break the law, even if they’ve been ordered to do so by a superior officer–or the commander-in-chief.
“Don’t give up the ship,” said Sen. Elissa Slotkin in the video.
