| | | BOMBSHELL: WH’s Favored Reporter’s Outlet Took Payments For Covering Trump
yahoo.com
Thu, March 6, 2025 at 10:34 AM MST
WASHINGTON ? The White House’s favored new reporter, the one who scolded Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy for not wearing a suit, was the primary voice at a “news” outlet that has taken $192,000 from President Donald Trump’s political committees, nearly half of which came while he was program director there.
Brian Glenn now works for a pro-Trump streaming platform called Real America’s Voice, but from September 2020 to May 2024, he was the most visible face at Right Side Broadcasting Network. Over those years, the outlet took $92,000 in “broadcast” fees, first from Trump’s Save America committee and then from Trump’s campaign, according to a HuffPost review of Federal Election Commission filings.
Glenn acknowledged the payments in a brief interview, describing them as “production” costs, and then pointed to the row of television cameras set up in the back of the White House briefing room.
“Who pays for them?” he asked, suggesting that the major networks like NBC, CNN and Fox also accept money from the entities they cover.
In fact, taking such payments would be considered a serious ethical breach among reputable news outlets. The television networks covering this and previous White Houses, as well as print and radio outlets, all pay their own expenses when covering political events, as does HuffPost.
Indeed, the Trump administration, including the White House, has falsely accused legitimate news organizations of corruption because government agencies, even those in the first Trump term, bought subscriptions from them, including some to expensive, lobbyist-oriented trade publications.
Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary who had worked on Trump’s campaign, also acknowledged the payments. “The Trump campaign paid RSBN for the usage of their live stream,” she said.
She did not address HuffPost’s question regarding the ethics of an outlet accepting money from the subject it was covering.
Those payments continued after Glenn left RSBN to join Real America’s Voice last spring. The campaign gave the online video outlet an additional $100,000 from June 2024 through the end of the year, capped off with a $57,000 payment on Nov. 14, the week following the election.
Glenn referred further questions about the payments to RSBN founder Joe Seales. In a 2024 Politico profile, Glenn was described as “the star who Seales has largely handed control over to.” |
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