The Propaganda FilesStories that burned bright and then vanished, or never got the national attention their facts deserved. Each file sets out what the record shows and how it was covered.
“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). In the novel, the “memory hole” is the chute where inconvenient records are sent to be destroyed.
An August 2024 report by the Homeland Security inspector general (DHS, not HHS) found ICE could not monitor the location and status of many unaccompanied migrant children released to sponsors. Politicians quickly called these 'missing' or 'lost' children, a label fact-checkers and immigration researchers dispute. Critics say the networks gave the report little attention; no measured count was found.
In the months before the June 27, 2024 debate, reports of President Biden's decline were attacked as partisan or weakly sourced. After the debate forced him from the race, reporters, including CNN's Jake Tapper, conceded the press had not pushed hard enough.
Nursing student Laken Riley was murdered while running at the University of Georgia by Jose Ibarra, a Venezuelan who had entered the U.S. illegally in 2022. Media Research Center counts found the broadcast networks gave his trial a fraction of the time they gave the 'garbage-gate' campaign story, and cable coverage rarely mentioned his immigration status.
After a shooter killed three 9-year-olds and three adults at the Covenant School in Nashville, the shooter's journals were held back through years of litigation while pages leaked. Critics argued the secrecy suppressed an inconvenient motive. Police's final report in 2025 found the main motive was a desire for notoriety.
A Norfolk Southern train carrying hazardous materials derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, and crews later vented and burned vinyl chloride from five tank cars. Two independent media counts found the broadcast networks gave it little time, and almost none once residents went home. The NTSB later found the vent-and-burn decision was botched.
The Russia investigation fueled by the Steele dossier received about 44 hours of evening-news coverage. When special counsel John Durham charged the dossier's main source, the networks gave it nothing, and Durham's 2023 report faulting the FBI got one segment on each evening newscast. The Washington Post corrected over a dozen of its own dossier stories.
The Federal Election Commission fined Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign and the DNC $113,000 for reporting payments that funded the Steele dossier as legal services. The money ran through the law firm Perkins Coie to Fusion GPS, which hired Christopher Steele. The fine drew little attention, and NBC's Chuck Todd interviewed Clinton days later without asking about it.
After 51 former intelligence officials suggested in October 2020 that the New York Post's laptop story had the hallmarks of Russian disinformation, the New York Times, the Washington Post and CBS News each authenticated material from the laptop. Prosecutors later used it as evidence at Hunter Biden's 2024 gun trial. The networks that amplified the disinformation framing gave the authentication almost no airtime.
Darrell Brooks drove an SUV through the Waukesha, Wisconsin Christmas parade, killing six people. He had been freed ten days earlier on $1,000 bail that the Milwaukee County DA's office itself called 'inappropriately low.' Critics say national coverage moved on quickly because the story did not fit the racial-justice framing of the Kenosha and Rittenhouse coverage that dominated the same week.
New York Attorney General Letitia James found the Cuomo administration had undercounted COVID-19 deaths of nursing-home residents by as much as 50%. In 2020, while the March 25 readmission order was in force, CNN had relaxed its own rule so that Chris Cuomo could interview his brother the governor nine times.
Two viable pipe bombs were placed outside the RNC and DNC headquarters on the night of Jan. 5, 2021, and the case went unsolved for nearly five years with little sustained national attention. In December 2025 the FBI arrested Brian Cole Jr., saying he was identified from bank, phone and license-plate records that had been in hand for years. Prosecutors say he confessed and cited belief that the 2020 election was tampered with.
An open letter signed by 1,288 public health, infectious disease and community professionals urged officials not to break up the protests after George Floyd's death on COVID-19 grounds, while saying anti-lockdown protests did not deserve the same support. Critics say the double standard did lasting damage to public health credibility and was rarely revisited.
Former Senate staffer Tara Reade publicly accused Joe Biden of a 1993 sexual assault in March 2020. Major papers waited weeks to report it, and cable coverage outside Fox was thin, in contrast with the near-constant coverage of the 2018 Kavanaugh allegations. Her credibility later collapsed on separate grounds.
Peter Bright, a technology editor at Ars Technica, regularly mocked 'pizzagate' believers on Twitter. In May 2019 he was arrested after arranging to meet what he believed were a 7-year-old girl and a 9-year-old boy, and in March 2020 a federal jury convicted him.
Stormy Daniels' lawyer became a fixture on CNN and MSNBC in 2018, with segments on his possible 2020 presidential run. He was later convicted of trying to extort Nike and of stealing from clients, including Daniels.
Ed Buck, a West Hollywood political donor who gave to Hillary Clinton and California Democrats and served as a 2016 Clinton presidential elector, was convicted in 2021 of supplying the methamphetamine that killed two Black men at his apartment, Gemmel Moore (2017) and Timothy Dean (2019).
After the 2010 Haiti earthquake, Idaho missionary Laura Silsby and nine others were arrested trying to take 33 children across the Dominican border without papers. Most of the children were not orphans. Silsby was convicted only of arranging irregular travel and released with time served.
