By: Cliff Kincaid
This is a column about how “business journalism” has gone bad.
Media bias is a tired old subject, but this time it involves a channel, CNBC, that features movers and shakers in the business and financial community. Its descent into far-left agitation and TDS has led to demands that it be renamed the “Commie News Broadcasting Center.”
CNBC’s Steve Liesman is always full of gloom and doom about the Trump economy, especially his tariffs. “What Trump is doing is insane,” he said about the tariffs.
For CNBC left-wingers hoping for bad news and a massive rate hike by the Federal Reserve at their next meeting, sabotaging the Trump economy, Tuesday was a big disappointment.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released the Consumer Price Index (CPI) report for June 2026 on Tuesday, finding it decreased 0.4 percent on a seasonally adjusted basis in June, the largest 1-month decrease since April 2020 when it fell 0.8 percent.
CNBC’s Jeff Cox emphasized something else, noting that consumer prices rose 3.5% on an annual basis.
CNBC’s Rick Santelli, a conservative, highlighted the six-year low and noted the 3.5 percent was also lower than expected.
The Truth About Tariffs
John Roberts was nominated to the Supreme Court by President George W. Bush and received widespread backing from conservative organizations and the political establishment, including the Federalist Society and the Chamber of Commerce, which clearly recognized Roberts as a free trader who would vote to ignore the consequences of the trade wars being waged against America.
In putting forward tariffs, Trump had proposed funding the federal government through a tariff-based revenue system (the kind in use at our founding), but that vision was party-shredded by Roberts and his ilk.
To be clear, the U.S. Constitution grants the power to regulate foreign commerce and impose tariffs to Congress, though Congress passed a law, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), giving some of that power to the President.
There are and were serious disagreements among constitutional conservatives about whether Congress could delegate this power to the President. But it was given to Trump, and he used it.
Indeed, Trump used that power, and Trump identified the majority in the 6-3 decision against his IEEPA tariffs — including three appointed by Republicans — as traitors to the Constitution and the USA. The six were:
- Chief Justice John Roberts (author of the majority opinion)
- Neil Gorsuch
- Amy Coney Barrett
- Sonia Sotomayor
- Elena Kagan
- Ketanji Brown Jackson
Those voting with Trump were Brett Kavanaugh, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito.
How CNBC Slants the News
Whether you watch CNBC, MS Now, or any other cable or broadcast outlet, or read any newspaper or publication, you get “advocacy” journalism, mostly in an anti-Trump direction. This is the nature of “journalism” today.
I took journalism in college, through a textbook called “Interpretative Reporting,” by leftist Curtis MacDougall, a journalism “educator” who had been investigated by the FBI because of his role as a fellow traveler of the Communist Party. He loved Castro and the old Soviet Union.
His son, Kent, was a closet Marxist at the Wall Street Journal.
Following their lead, anchors and reporters give their opinions to influence the audience and make themselves feel important. It is boring and tiresome. President Trump calls it fake news.
The result: the Gallup Poll finds that trust in the media is at a new low of 28% in the U.S., while Republicans’ confidence in mass media to report news “fully, accurately and fairly” is now at 8%.
Despite an occasional newsworthy interview, including conservative CNBC anchor Joe Kernen’s interviews with President Trump, CNBC has become another fake news outlet, with the latest example being a phony survey finding Republican pro-Trump states to have a low quality of life. The author of the survey, Scott Cohn, a Special Correspondent for CNBC, has become the butt of jokes for using a “survey” to make a political point for DEI, gay rights, transgenderism, and abortion.
Those who watch the channel for business news should beware. It is now part of “Versant Media” and a sister of MS Now.
Democrat Operative Carl Quintanilla
Anti-Trump CNBC anchor Carl Quintanilla, who posts on the Democrat site Bluesky, tried to blame Trump for the pest known as the screwworm affecting cattle production, saying that DOGE cuts were responsible for an outbreak. It was rebutted by Zoetis CEO Kristin Peck on CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” program. She gave credit, not blame, to the Trump Administration and said it was preventable and treatable.
What Trump’s USDA did was announce a change in strategy for the screwworm program, shifting toward releasing sterile flies in specific areas of Mexico to “push the pest back” further south. This strategy worked before.
His latest post on Bluesky was about a “federal judge” claiming that President Donald Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS over his leaked tax returns was filed for an “improper purpose.”
The judge, Kathleen Williams, was appointed by Obama, Quintanilla forgot to note. It was an omission by CNBC White House reporter Pippa Stevens as well.
Quintanilla is clearly a cheerleader for the Democratic Party who has TDS. His bias shows.
In the case of the phony survey, CNBC said, “To score the states for quality of life, we use hard data on factors like crime rates, air quality and healthcare. We also consider the cost and availability of childcare, inclusiveness of state laws, and reproductive rights.”
Hard data?
The latter are references to DEI policies, gay rights, transgenderism, and abortion on demand.
As noted by Fox News, in a story picked up by the New York Post, the bottom ten states in the CNBC survey were Arkansas, Oklahoma, Alabama, Missouri, Utah, Georgia, Louisiana, Indiana, Texas, and Tennessee.
Fox adds, “All 10 states are Republican-led and voted for President Donald Trump in 2024.”
But don’t think Fox News is any better on DEI matters.
In 2016, Scott Cohn contributed to a CNBC report about former Olympic athlete Bruce Jenner coming out as “Caitlyn Jenner” and transgender. “The Republican Party needs to understand. They need to know people who are trans,” Jenner said.
“Caitlyn Jenner” became a FOX News contributor in 2022.
Back in 2020, CNBC announced a one-hour show, “The News with Shepard Smith,” featuring one of the major homosexual power players in the media, the former Fox News anchor who had left Fox News in a controversy as the audience rejected his heavy-handed approach. Described as “often” critical of President Donald Trump, he had completely dropped any pretense of objectivity on his Fox show.
The CNBC reboot was canceled in November 2022.
Smearing the Pro-Family States
To cite one example, CNBC claims in its survey that “Tennessee Republicans, led by Gov. Bill Lee, make no apologies for a rash of state laws targeting the LGBTQ+ community, including a so-called ‘bathroom law’ requiring transgender people to use the facilities designated for their sex at birth” and that, ‘To underscore the point, Lee signed a resolution earlier this year designating June ‘Nuclear Family Month.’”
CNBC is offended by the traditional family.
CNBC quoted the resolution as saying, “The nuclear family, consisting of one husband, one wife, and any biological, adopted, or fostered children, is God’s design for familial structure and has been the bedrock of society since the creation of the world.”
CNBC was aghast, declaring that “Its sponsors deliberately timed the observance to coincide with the month when Tennessee’s more than 300,000 LGBTQ+ people celebrate Pride.”
Where did that figure come from? No one knows. But CNBC regards respect for traditional and Biblical values as sub-human.
What we do know is that Scott Cohn uses the homosexual Human Rights Campaign as a source in his “journalism,” such as when he hailed the defeat of a Republican candidate opposed to gay rights in North Carolina.
Cohn Defends the Fake News
Back in 2018, he asserted, “The press is not the enemy of the people. Most patriotic Americans know that. The more the media engage in a debate over that fallacy, the more we give it life. Let’s just do our jobs. The truth, in the end, will always win.”
Cohn’s “truth” is the left-wing agenda that he managed to insinuate into the work of CNBC. He is the personification of fake news. His study is designed as cannon fodder for the Democratic Party and the states it controls.
His fraudulent “journalism” is not a big surprise, although when CNBC packages it as “news,” it takes on a more important tone.
In the category of “Awards and Recognition,” he claims two Edward R. Murrow Awards; Three national Emmy nominations; Two Gerald R. Loeb Awards; IRE Certificate.
On this basis, it’s sad to see his career crash and burn with an obviously biased and politically-slanted list of states to live in, and he’s taking CNBC down with him.
Reputable reporters on the channel like Joe Kernen, Sara Eisen and Rick Santelli have to speak out before their credibility goes down the drain with Cohn’s ridiculous study.
- Cliff Kincaid is president of America’s Survival, Inc. www.usasurvival.org
