(Natural News)—A lengthy expose by journalist Sharyl Attkisson has shed light on the widespread practice in journalism wherein reporters collaborate covertly with political interests, from politicians’ campaigns to the CIA, to promote their causes and narratives. Not surprisingly, it is largely reporters with Democrat ties participating in transactional journalism.
She prefaced her expose by pointing out that she’s not referring to “viewpoint journalism” and those who work for ideological news groups; instead, she takes aim at those who claim to be independent journalists but actually work to push certain narratives on behalf of others.
Attkisson shared some accounts of journalists who have been engaging in this behavior. It’s interesting to note that many of these questionable reporters have worked for multiple national news organizations even after they’ve had individual scandals, leading her to believe that they are being hired to provide coverage with a particular slant.
One example is Los Angeles Times writer Ken Dilanian, who covered the CIA for the outlet. He promised the agency positive news coverage and even sent story drafts to the CIA press office so they could review them before they were published. This fact was exposed by internal CIA emails obtained by The Intercept in which Dilanian was referred to as “the CIA’s mop-up man.”
He managed to go on to land roles with other outlets, such as the AP, NBC News and USA Today, thanks to this collaboration; he currently serves as a Justice and Intelligence Correspondent for NBC News. Not surprisingly, much of his work props up the intelligence community and disparages Donald Trump.
Widespread collaboration with DNC and Clinton campaign officials
In another incident, Scott Shane, a reporter for the New York Times, privately supplied the State Department Public Affairs Office with an advance story publication schedule pertaining to a major controversy at Hillary Clinton’s State Department, providing her with as much as a week to spin the revelations in the stories in her favor or create other diversions.
Another reporter for the Times, Mark Leibovich, gave Clinton the chance to veto or approve her quotes, and the publication also published negative stories about Jeb Bush that were reportedly placed there by a pro-Hillary super PAC known as American Bridge.
On another occasion, the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank or an associate reached out to the Democratic National Committee for negative research related to then-presidential candidate Donald Trump in 2016. In a letter to colleagues, a DNC official wrote: “research request: top 10 worst Trump quotes? Milbank doing a Passover-themed 10 plagues of Trump. Off top of my head, I’m thinking: · Punish women · Mexicans as rapists · Ban Muslims · Shoot someone in middle of 5th ave · Rough up BLM protestor · Anchor baby · Do a lot worse than waterboarding · Blood coming out of her wherever · Spill beans on ted’s wife · Talked about penis on stage at debate. Any other big things I’m missing? And can you pull bullets for these?”
Eight of these suggestions ultimately appeared in the resulting article by Milbank that was published in the Washington Post under the title “The Ten Plagues of Trump.”
Chief political correspondent for Politico Glenn Thrush sent a Clinton campaign official part of an article he was working on seeking approval prior to publication. He clearly knew he was doing something wrong, writing “Please don’t share or tell anyone I did this, Because I have become a hack I will send u the whole section that pertains to u…Tell me if I fuc*ed up anything.”
The article was ultimately approved by the Clinton campaign and published by Politico. He was also caught up in other similar controversies, yet his reporting was enough to get him hired by the New York Times to provide negative coverage of President Trump.
Sources for this article include:
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.