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rupert murdoch 2 bak

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NEG TAG // AILES NEWS CORP

bad format see bak 3 23

see desantis fail

see brimelow

try to  do body count? covid / climate denial

1/20 bak

tucker mainstreams racism white supr gt replacement hungary orban

kid killer pending on covid delta

aus wildfires arson?!  killed carbon tax rudd labor

1/20 villain evil pending ACHIEVED on oz fire BS, mission accomplished on covid?  stop the steal (trying to fend off trump threat to start own network, rise of oann and newsmax

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DID AILES MAKE RM RICH?

The Murdoch family controls 41% of company votes, despite having a 14% stake in the company. The family shares are currently held in a trust controlled by Rupert Murdoch, 93

REUTERS 2023

Sept 22 (Reuters) - Fox Corp's (FOXA.O), opens new tab former chairman Rupert Murdoch's total compensation for 2023 climbed more than 24% to $22.9 million, a regulatory filing showed on Friday.

The media mogul stepped down from his role on Thursday after a career spanning more than seven decades and handed the reins to his son, Lachlan Murdoch, who will become the sole chairman of News Corp and continue as chair and CEO of Fox.

Rupert Murdoch will be chairman emeritus of both companies.

At Fox, his 2023 compensation includes an annual base salary of $5 million and about $7.6 million in stock awards and options. It also includes $4.4 million in incentive pay, the filing showed.

Lachlan's compensation at Fox stands at $21.8 million for 2023, little changed from last year's $21.7 million.

He is set to take over the Murdoch media empire at a time when the industry faces challenges ranging from dwindling traditional television viewership to copyright theft allegations.

Separately on Friday, Fox nominated former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott AC and Magic Leap CEO Peggy Johnson to the company's board.

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an 9 25

Rupert Murdoch has succeeded in securing his vision for the future of News Corporation, the global media empire he has always thought of as his family business.

To achieve this, he has torn apart his family. He has also ensured his media outlets, especially Fox News, remain committed to his hard right-wing views.

With hindsight, this deal was inevitable. The 94-year-old mogul had just one remaining job to do as chairman emeritus of News Corp: to ensure that when he dies, the company he built and moulded remains in his image.

This announcement says he has found a way, which may give him some comfort but is profoundly disappointing to anyone who cares about public interest journalism.

There’s no longer any prospect of his children from his first and second marriages, Prudence, Elisabeth and James, who are now known as the “departing beneficiaries”, staging a coup after his death to wrest control from Rupert’s chosen successor and elder son Lachlan, who has headed News Corporation and Fox Corporation since Murdoch stepped aside in 2023.

Lachlan has taken a lesson from Rupert’s dealmaking playbook. He has thrown money at the problem by paying his three siblings more than he had previously offered for their respective shares. According to The New York Times, the three siblings will receive US$1.1 billion (A$1.7 billion) each for all their shares in the company.

Their agreement brings an end to the bitter battle the three siblings fought with their father and brother over the latter’s infamous attempt to revoke a seemingly irrevocable trust created at the end of Murdoch’s longest marriage, of 32 years, to Anna Murdoch (now Anna Maria dePeyster).IFrame Content

She had hated how her husband pitted their children against one another in the battle for succession, so she negotiated an agreement that would give each of the four children from the first two marriages a vote in the family trust. It also ensured Rupert retained enough votes in the trust so he could not be outvoted by his four (voting) children.

When Rupert anointed Lachlan his successor, upsetting the others, speculation was aired that when Rupert died, and his votes with him, the three siblings might oust Lachlan as chief executive and take control of the company. Worse, in Rupert’s eyes, they might change the editorial direction of the company, in particular Fox News.

That is what has changed. The family trust has also been re-engineered with an increased lifespan from 2030 to 2050, and folds in Murdoch’s daughters from his third marriage, to Wendi Deng – Grace and Chloe. This shores up the trust so they can’t sell out and dilute Lachlan’s shareholding.

Under the deal, a new company called Holdco, owned by Lachlan, Grace and Chloe, will own all the remaining shares of News Corp and Fox Corporation that previously had been held by the Murdoch family trust. The departing beneficiaries will sell their personal holdings in News Corp and Fox so none of them has any interest in either business. What’s more, they’ve agreed to a standstill clause that prevents them or their affiliates buying back in.

In 2019 alone, the company News Corporation made a reported US$71 billion (A$107 billion) from the sale of its entertainment assets to Disney. After that sale, the children were each given US$2 billion (just over A$3 billion).

Having already been referred to in the litigation as “white, privileged, multi billionaire trust-fund babies”, the three departing siblings have been made even wealthier by this agreement.

It was announced in a company press release on September 8 with an uncharacteristically sedate headline: “News Corp announces resolution of Murdoch family trust matter”.

It appears the decision to settle was in part driven by signals emanating from the probate court in Reno, which last year ruled in favour of Prudence, Elisabeth and James. Recently, however, the presiding appellate judge, Lynne Jones, appeared supportive of Rupert and Lachlan, saying “Who knows better than Rupert Murdoch the strengths and weaknesses of his family and his children?”

This may have weakened the three children’s bargaining power and forced them to accept some sort of buyout.IFrame Content

James may have contributed to this by granting an interview to The Atlantic which was published in February, in which he was highly critical of his father and gave away inside information from the probate hearings. Rupert and Lachlan’s lawyers pushed for James to be punished, a move that appeared to have support from the Reno court.

Clearly it was wishful thinking to believe Prudence, Elisabeth and James would stage a takeover and restore sensible programming to the Murdoch media. But it remains an irony, in a case replete with them, that it was James’ candid comments in an insightful 13,000-word profile casting much-needed light on a notoriously secretive family, which weakened the three siblings’ bargaining position.

Those comments helped ensure Rupert, and ultimately Lachlan, will be able to continue running their media empire as they see fit. Initially, that will mean little change, which is of course the problem. If News mastheads and Fox News continue as they have, we can look forward to more coverage denying the need to urgently act on climate change, more distortion of important issues and more support for assaults on democracy by the Trump administration. This is the kind of content that prompted James, if not all of the departing beneficiaries, to protest in the first place.

At least now we know the answer to this question: What choice would three multi billionaires make if they were offered another billion dollars each or the opportunity to transform a global media business for the better?

Andrew Dodd, Professor of Journalism, Director of the Centre for Advancing Journalism, The University of Melbourne and Matthew Ricketson, Professor of Communication, Deakin University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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MMA MSNBC

NO LNX

Aug. 10, 2025, 3:00 AM PDT

By Matt Gertz, senior fellow for Media Matters for America

Fox News hosts elevated Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to help return President Donald Trump to the White House. They then greased the skids for Kennedy’s confirmation as secretary of health and human services. But as he works to demolish American health care research, they are nowhere to be found.

Kennedy, a prominent vaccine skeptic who once described Covid-19 shots as “the deadliest vaccine ever made,” announced on Tuesday that he is terminating nearly $500 million in federal contracts supporting the development of next-generation vaccines and other treatments based on mRNA technology. “After reviewing the science and consulting top experts at NIH and FDA, HHS has determined that mRNA technology poses more risks than benefits for these respiratory viruses,” he said in a video posted online.

Before the pandemic, Kennedy was not a natural fit for the Fox audience.

But Kennedy’s announcement drew harsh criticism from infectious disease experts and other scientists. They warned that the cuts could stall treatments for everything from respiratory illnesses to cancer, leave the nation more exposed to pandemics, undermine public trust in vaccines and threaten U.S. global leadership in medical advances.

While Kennedy’s announcement was widely discussed on MSNBC and CNN, as well as by national broadcast, print and digital outlets, Fox News has almost entirely ignored it. A single 30-second news brief on its “Special Report” program represents the entirety of the Trumpist propaganda network’s coverage through Thursday, according to a Media Matters review.

Fox News may not want to claim credit for Kennedy as he stifles crucial medical research, but it certainly deserves it. You can’t explain the evolution from Trump’s first administration, which fast-tracked the development of mRNA vaccines for Covid-19 through Operation Warp Speed, to the second term’s anti-vax, “Make America Healthy Again” schtick without talking about the network’s role in turning the GOP base against vaccines and toward conspiracy theorists like Kennedy.

'Misinformed' or 'speaking in the wrong terms': Doctor rebukes RFK Jr. over cutting mRNA research

05:03

When pharmaceutical companies began rolling out the vaccines produced under the Trump administration in late 2020 and early 2021, Fox News’ stars could have used the unique influence they have over their viewers to encourage them to get their Covid-19 shots. But Trump had lost his re-election bid, and the network that had worked so hard to keep him in office instead pandered to anti-vaxxers by turning against the vaccination campaign helmed by his successor, President Joe Biden.

Led by its then-prime-time star Tucker Carlson, the network incessantly promoted misleading and false claims about safe, effective vaccines with the potential to save their viewers’ lives — day after day, month after month, year after year. The network uplifted conspiracy theories, gave airtime to conspiracy theorists and culture war vaccine opponents, demagogued against efforts to get more people to receive these lifesaving shots, and propped up ineffective cures as potential substitutes. Fox News continued to broadcast these segments even as more Republican parts of the country, with lower vaccination rates, suffered higher Covid-19 death tolls, as The New York Times’ David Leonhardt detailed.

All of the fawning attention on Kennedy from the right had the impact one would expect.

Before the pandemic, Kennedy, the scion of a Democratic dynasty who once called for a boycott of Fox News host Sean Hannity and described him as a fascist, was not a natural fit for the Fox audience. But with the Covid-19 vaccine campaign underway, his decades of work undermining vaccines and his attacks on the new mRNA vaccines in particular suddenly made him attractive to the right.

When he began his presidential campaign in March 2023 — with Carlson’s show as his launchpad — MAGA media stalwarts saw an opportunity. They treated Kennedy’s bid, first in the Democratic primary and then as an independent candidate, as a potent spoiler candidacy to boost Trump’s return to power. Kennedy became a constant presence on the programs of pro-Trump commentators. Fox provided him with more airtime than many would-be Republican standard-bearers received.

All of the fawning attention on Kennedy from the right — alongside mainstream news coverage of his bizarre history, such as his claim that a parasite in his brain had triggered memory loss — had the impact one would expect: Kennedy became more popular with Republicans than Democrats. As polls increasingly showed that he was pulling support from Trump, though, MAGA media figures like Hannity abruptly turned on Kennedy. After Carlson reportedly helped to facilitate Kennedy’s decision to drop out and endorse the once-and-future president, Fox hosts resumed showering the anti-vax champion with praise.

‘Explosive’ conservative non-doctor turbocharging RFK Jr’s healthcare coup

05:52

As Election Day approached, talk turned to what reward Kennedy could expect in return. Paul Dans, the former head of Project 2025, floated Kennedy’s name for HHS secretary — and that’s precisely the position Trump nominated him for.

Not everyone on the right was willing to accept Kennedy’s ascent. The editorial boards of Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal and New York Post denounced the decision and called for Senate Republicans to vote down his nomination.

Murdoch’s print voices lost out to his cable news shouters.

But Fox News hosts were elated. As Kennedy’s nomination moved through the Senate, they touted him as a “reformer” and “true health care crusader” who had “the skills, knowledge, and experience” needed for the job.” When Kennedy said he wasn’t going to take away anyone’s vaccines, Fox said he wasn’t going to take away anyone’s vaccines.

Murdoch’s print voices lost out to his cable news shouters — the Senate confirmed Kennedy on a near-party-line vote, with Sen. Mitch McConnell, a polio survivor, the sole Republican vote against him.

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And lo and behold, once confirmed, Kennedy continued the anti-vax project to which he had dedicated years of his life. He yanked $2 billion in funding to vaccinate children whose families may not be able to afford immunizations. He downplayed the importance of vaccination for quelling a measles outbreak even as measles cases hit record highs. He replaced the members of a vaccine advisory board with his own picks — some of whom were notorious vaccine critics — who plan to review the childhood vaccination schedule and scrutinize its components. And now he’s terminated federal funding that could have fueled a new wave of cures.

Under Kennedy’s leadership, the Department of Health and Human Services itself has become a grave threat to public health. That is the regrettable but inevitable consequence of Fox News’ cynical exploitation of its viewers. The network’s hosts should take a bow — they earned it.

Matt Gertz is a senior fellow at Media Matters for America, a progressive research center that monitors the U.S. media. His work focuses on the relationship between Fox News and the Republican Party, media ethics and news coverage of politics and elections.

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WOW DEFLECTION ON EPSTEIN IMPLOSION OF MAGA

mma

Trump’s latest attempt to defuse the Epstein revolt: Point supporters at common enemies

Written by Matt Gertz

Published 07/21/25

President Donald Trump is seeking to reunify allies enraged by his administration’s repudiation of MAGA claims about late convicted sex offender and disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein by offering up spurious attacks on common and familiar enemies: the media — in this case Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal — and former President Barack Obama.

Trump brought together an ideologically diverse coalition and a fractured right-wing media ecosystem during his 2024 campaign based largely on their shared hatred for Democrats, liberal institutions like the press, and the left. His administration’s actions have at times sparked criticism from different factions over the handling of issues like the Russia-Ukraine war, tariffs, U.S. strikes on Iran,, and, most of all, disclosures in the Epstein case.

The president spent last week failing to tamp down discussion of the Epstein story that seemed to be fracturing the MAGA movement. He tried claiming that his political enemies had “written” the “Epstein Files,” argued that the Epstein case is “pretty boring stuff,” and even lashed out at supporters who talk about it as “weaklings” and “stupid people.” But while the propagandists at Fox News were willing to play ball, Trump’s statements backfired elsewhere, leaving many right-wing media figures and the base alike in a state of revolt.

On Thursday, however, The Wall Street Journal reported that a “bawdy” letter bearing Trump’s signature had been included in an album created for Epstein’s 50th birthday (before allegations of his sexual abuse of girls became publicly known). The document, according to the Journal, had been reviewed by Justice Department officials who handled Epstein’s case.

The Journal report could have focused the right’s attention on Trump’s voluminous ties to Epstein. But Trump redirected them at a familiar target: journalists. responded that night by calling the letter “FAKE,” denouncing the paper, and claiming that he would sue. The following day, he followed through with a defamation lawsuit seeking $10 billion in damages from the two authors of the article; the Journal’s publisher, Dow Jones & Co.; parent company News Corp and that company’s CEO; and Murdoch himself.

Trump’s lawsuit is both unprecedented and consistent with Trump’s authoritarian treatment of a free press whose criticism he seeks to curtail through corrupt means. The message it sends is straightforward: If you publish reporting that displeases the president — even if, like Murdoch, your support was crucial to his political ascension — he may try to ruin you, so don’t try it.

While the Journal’s corporate cousins at Fox News mostly avoided the story on Friday, the network’s competitors throughout the fractured marketplace of right-wing media responded by sharpening their knives and attacking the paper. Laura Loomer deemed the Journal story “totally fake,” Charlie Kirk accused the Journal of a “terrible drive-by,” and Benny Johnson claimed that the real “scandal is in who wrote the story,” referencing a baroque conspiracy theory that was circulating on the right at the time.

The same day Trump’s lawyers filed their suit, former Fox contributor and current Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard offered even more grist for the right-wing media mill. In a story served up to Fox as an exclusive, Gabbard claimed to have uncovered documents proving “a treasonous conspiracy in 2016 committed by officials at the highest level of our government” which aimed “to subvert the will of the American people and enact what was essentially a years-long coup.” She suggested that figures including Obama “must be investigated and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” and said she was referring the documents to the Justice Department. Leaving nothing to subtext, Trump subsequently posted to Truth Social an AI video featuring Obama beng arrested and imprisoned.

Those documents, however, demonstrate nothing other than Gabbard’s own ignorance and/or malice. They show that Obama received an intelligence report that Russia had not hacked election systems to change vote totals in the 2016 election — which is consistent with what the Obama administration said publicly at the time — then asked for and subsequently received another intelligence report detailing other actions taken by the Russian government in an effort to influence the election. That effort, according to the intelligence community, the Justice Department, and a Senate committee helmed at the time by current Secretary of State Marco Rubio, included hacking and releasing Democratic emails.

Fox News contributor Andrew McCarthy, in a withering piece at National Review, described Gabbard’s argument as a “frivolous” attempt to further Trump’s “foolish stance” that Russia had not tried to influence the 2016 election via “overwrought and misleading” language and “thundering claptrap.”

But her attacks served to reignite years of conspiracy-mongering about the Russia “witch hunt,” and thus were credibly regurgitated elsewhere on the right, including by Fox’s stars, with some echoing Gabbard’s demagogic language about purported “treason.” Trump, meanwhile, repeatedly posted Fox clips and articles from right-wing media hyping the purported scandal.

Much of MAGA media seems eager to target the Journal and Obama on Trump’s behalf. But it remains to be seen whether those influencers — or their audience — will be willing to allow the Epstein story to fade away altogether.

That said, Trump’s best hope of keeping his supporters happy may very well be increasing the scale and tempo of his authoritarian attacks — and that means there will be more to come in the months ahead.

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July 21, 2025, edition of The Benny Show, streamed on YouTube

BENNY JOHNSON (HOST): I mean, you're simply left to assume that all of it's been a lie and that they're 100% authentic, and I think most people in this audience already believe that.

But then if that's the case, then there's a lot of questions that are gonna be asked of Hillary Clinton. Now there's reports that Hillary Clinton and her team were aggressively pushing Barack Obama to launch Russiagate. We'll wait to see those documents — perhaps that's what Tulsi Gabbard is telling us is going to be dropping soon. We're not sure. But Tulsi Gabbard is saying not only are there major whistleblowers from inside the IC, but also that there's a lot more to come. And, you know, at what point do you begin to pull the threads back to Hillary Clinton? Could she potentially be culpable in any of this?

JULIE KELLY (HOST): I doubt it. I mean, you know, let's cut to the chase. No one's gonna indict Hillary Clinton. No one's gonna indict Barack Obama. So we can, I think, disabuse ourselves of that vision or —

JOHNSON: Really? You don't think Obama either?

KELLY: No. No. No. No. No. No. And, you know, of course, you got the issue with Barack Obama. What would you charge him with? We have the immunity ruling from the Supreme Court, really, a year ago that carves out only specific instances where a president in office could be held criminally liable. And I'm sure that Barack Obama, if anything came down, would be smart enough and his lawyers would figure that out. So no.

But look. I really wanna see the henchmen like Lisa Monaco — and I know I keep going back to her. But look, she also ran the Biden DOJ. So she was the one that really ran the first two invest — the two investigations into the president for classified documents and for January 6. She, I'm sure, worked with special counsel Jack Smith, was involved in his appointment. People from the DOJ leaving the Department of Justice, going to the special counsel's office — Chuck Grassley just, last week, I believe, the last several days, releasing emails showing how Tom Windom, another prosecutor who went to the DCUS attorney's office, which was in constant contact with the DOJ, I'm told, specifically Lisa Monaco's office, how he was pushing top-down the FBI to open this January 6 investigation into the president, which of course they did.

So I'm looking for a lot more records related to that as well. And so, those are the people who I think are the most likely to be held responsible, criminally liable, and the ones who should be.

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MMA June 19, 2025, edition of MSNBC's Deadline: White House

ALICIA MENENDEZ (ANCHOR): As Donald Trump flirts with the greater American involvement in the conflict, it's caused deep division in the MAGA movement, upsetting some of his most influential America first figures, the likes of Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon, who was spotted today outside the White House. Bannon has warned against any American involvement in the conflict. Joining the conversation, president of Media Matters for America, Angelo Carusone, Claire McCaskill, is still with us. Angelo, describe this division between the two factions of MAGA here.

ANGELO CARUSONE (PRESIDENT, MEDIA MATTERS FOR AMERICA): Yeah, I think it's so big that it then — it even expands out to the larger sort of right wing media echo chamber because, as you noted, Fox is pretty heavily in the, you go to war with Iran camp. They've been pushing this for a very long time. This they see as an opportunity, and they know know that they have Trump's ear. I mean, even though the last election, there's much to be made about the podcast and the inner, you know, these online shows that Trump deployed and used, that's not his go-to day to day. The lens through which he sees the world, even still as president, is cable news, and Fox News is the main vehicle for that. That's why when he was criticizing Carlson, he said, look, tell him to get a TV network, and then maybe people will listen to what he has to say because that's still the mindset. And so Fox is all in on this, and they are reflective of a part of the MAGA base.

MENENDEZ: But why? Why, Angelo? Why are they all in on this?

CARUSONE: I mean, look. Part of it is straight bigotry. I mean, they really — they have really spun this narrative, we shouldn't forget about that, that Islam is a fundamental problem, that we are in a battle for good and evil. And even though has been a little bit sidelined in terms of his day-to-day involvement in this particular decision, let's not forget that Pete Hegseth, who is very reflective of the Fox News worldview, was somebody that described the great conflict, not as one between the United States and China or other great powers, but as between Christianity and Islam, and that we had to go out there and do everything we can, including using our military, to put that back in check.

So they see this larger geopolitical world through that framework, and that is something that they've been pushing for a very long time aside from just having — that is also part of their their foreign policy. They don't believe that you should democratize other countries. They're just — they're warmongers.

They believe in might makes right. And even though they are repeating Trump's line of peace through strength, they actually don't mean peace through strength. They mean, strength first and then, you know, have peace because you have nothing left after that. I mean, that's honestly what they're actually saying, and it's core to the Fox News base. It also plays really well on TV. Like, we shouldn't lose the sight of that.

Rupert Murdoch cut his teeth in the tabloids, and one of the big things that he always did was find the most horrible, horrific things that he could tell stories about crimes, violent things, and exaggerate them, but also lay them into a demographic fight. That's part of how he came to be. He sees news through that storytelling perspective. And then you have people like Carlson and Bannon who have their own world view, and a lot of it is hyper nationalist, and we shouldn't be celebrating that in that even though they are taking a position here that seems more reasonable, it's coming from a really scary place. It is coming from either straight up bigotry, you know, antisemitism, or a real deep intense nationalism, that is — even if they get to a destination there that seems peaceful, it's because they want to turn their energy internally on what they see as domestic enemy.

That's the part that doesn't get sort of carried through here is that they see the real threat not as foreign entities, not as these foreign entanglements, but as you and me, as members of the media and as advocates and people that are participating in civic spaces. That's who they see as the real target right now as enemy number one. So we shouldn't lose sight of why they're advocating for peace, but the net effect of all of this, though, and this I think Claire McCaskill really illustrated this well in the first segment is that this is the confusion. This is why Trump is on the sidelines.

If Bannon and Tucker were either quiet or were in uniform with this idea that he should be bombing Iran, it would have happened already. And because part of how he sees the world is through these stories, he's trying to see how this particular chronicle plays out a little bit. You know, who wins in this narrative for hearts and minds for audience share. And that's a big part of this, is seeing how the story plays out, because he honestly isn't sure there's something grounding him. And now it's just what's going to end up capturing the imagination of his base, of his audience, and where is he going to get the best ratings for himself.

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Axios

Sep 21, 2023 -Economy

How media mogul Rupert Murdoch made his billions

Sara Fischer

Billionaire Rupert Murdoch announced Thursday he will step down as chairman of Fox Corp. and News Corp., ending his reign as one of the wealthiest media moguls of all time.

Why it matters: Murdoch, 92, built his fortune through a series of pragmatic and ruthless maneuvers that earned him a reputation as one of the most successful dealmakers in the media industry.

The big picture:The Australian native, who later became a U.S. citizen, never considered himself a Hollywood insider, despite owning one of the largest movie studios in America for decades. The news industry is his true passion.

By the time Murdoch acquired 20th Century Fox in 1985, he was worth roughly $300 million, making him one of the richest men in the U.S., according to Forbes.

Between the lines: Murdoch expanded News Corp.'s TV and film portfolio in the U.S. and the U.K. throughout the '80s.

Be smart: Fox News became one of Murdoch's most profitable and influential assets. It has been the leader in cable news ratings for decades.

Zoom in: By 2013, Forbes listed Murdoch as the richest foreign-born person in the U.S., with a net worth of more than $13 billion.

Murdoch sold all of the entertainment assets within Fox Corp. in 2019, including 21st Century Fox, for $71 billion. At 88, that transaction marked Murdoch's largest accrual of wealth in his nearly 70-year career.

What to watch: News Corp. and Fox Corp. have operated separately on the Nasdaq for the past ten years.

What's next: A possible merging of the two firms last year sparked succession chatter.

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2x

jan 6

fox-news-executives-denounce-trump-myth-january-6-riot-rcna73669

march 8

Jane C. Timm

By early January 2021, Fox News hosts and executives were ready to move on from then-President Donald Trump and his insistence that the election was stolen.

"it's been 8 weeks and none of them has produced anything tangible or verifiable. and now he wants thousands of his supporters to go to DC without shelter or food to demonstrate," host Lou Dobbs texted a producer on his show on Jan. 3. "I believe the election was stolen — but without evidence we can do nothing significant."

"We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights," Tucker Carlson wrote in a Jan. 4 text to an unidentified person. "I truly can't wait."

"I hate him passionately," he continued. "I can't handle much more of this."

The revealing private messages were unsealed Tuesday night, part of a massive cache of evidence in the $1.6 billion Dominion defamation suit against Fox News and the Fox Corp. They paint a remarkably frank picture of how key players at Fox News viewed the stolen election lie that motivated a mob to storm the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Fox News argued the voting systems manufacturer was skewing the evidence.

“Dominion has been caught red handed again using more distortions and misinformation in their PR campaign to smear FOX News and trample on free speech and freedom of the press," a Fox News spokesperson said in a statement.

Dominion has said the released documents speak for themselves.

Trump and his lawyers "have so discredited their own case, and the rest of us to some extent, that it's infuriating," Carlson continued in his texts. "Absolutely enrages me."

The next day, Jan. 5, Fox Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch tapped an email out on his iPhone: Maybe our top talent needs to take a stand.

"It's been suggested our primetime three should independently or together say something like 'the election is over and Joe Biden won. We are all disappointed by it happened. We love America and have to turn the page. We will now be the loyal opposition criticizing every liberal mistake the new administration makes,'" Murdoch wrote to Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott.

"Not those words, but a refinement would go a long way to stop the Trump myth that the election stolen," he added. "And the basis of his 2024 campaign."

Scott forwarded the email to Meade Cooper, the executive vice president of prime-time programming.

"I told Rupert that privately they are all there — we need to be careful about using the shows and pissing off the viewers but they know how to navigate."

Trump's troubles multiplying. His businesses now ruined! Who is going to throw a party at one of his golf clubs or hotels?

Rupert Murdoch in an Email on Jan. 12, 2021

But the top talent at Fox News never did take a stand.

Instead, prime-time hosts talked up the Stop the Steal rally taking place in Washington on Jan. 6.

On the night of Jan. 5, prime-time host Sean Hannity put Eric Trump on the air, who ran through a laundry list of exaggerated or debunked fraud claims he suggested cost his father the election.

"The Republic, its future, our futures, are hanging in the balance," Dobbs said on Jan. 5, teeing up Judicial Watch's Tom Fitton, who argued that the outcome of the election could be changed by state legislatures and Congress on Jan. 6.

And next morning, a mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitolin an effort to block the certification of the results of the 2020 election. Rioters smashed windows and doors, looted and ransacked offices andengaged in hours of violent clashes. About 140 officers were assaulted that day, andtwo pipe bombswere also planted nearby, but did not detonate.

The privatetexts and emails included in Dominion's evidence offer a remarkable snapshot of the frustration and discontent at Fox News hours and days after the attack — messages that were far different from what they were putting on air.

"he isn't saying what's actually going on. just beating around the bush," Carlson producer Alex Pfeiffer complained in a text exchange with Carlson senior executive producer Justin Wells and an unnamed individual, dissecting Carlson's show on Jan. 6. "why do people think it was stolen? didn't happen immacutately. trump told them thats what happened."

Inside the Fox companies, the shift was urgent, sometimes frenzied.

"Fox News very busy pivoting. ... We want to make Trump a non person," Murdoch wrote in one email on Jan. 8.

Fox News "is pivoting as fast as possible. We have to lead our viewers which is not as easy as it might seem," he wrote in another days later.

Related coverage

The day after Biden's inauguration, Murdoch was facing heat from Republican senators.

That morning, he met with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and other GOP senators who were opposed to impeaching Trump.

“Still getting mud thrown at us!” Murdoch wrote. “Maybe Sean and Laura went too far,” he continued, referring to Hannity and Laura Ingraham.

He asked Scott whether it was “unarguable that high profile Fox voices fed the story that the election was stolen and that January 6th an important chance to have the result overturned.”

Scott punted the request to a group of executives, noting “please send specifics.”

Six hours later, Irena Briganti, the Fox News executive in charge of communications, responded with more than 15 pages of transcripts of examples.

In a Jan. 12 email exchange with former House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., Murdoch said "everything changed" on the day of the riot.

"Trump's troubles multiplying. His businesses now ruined! Who is going to throw a party at one of his golf clubs or hotels?"

He went on: "Could he still resign and get Pence to pardon, then just disappear? Would Mike Pence agree?"

---

an 2 25

The Rupert Murdoch-owned Fox News and its sister channel Fox Business faced their share of challenges during former President Joe Biden's four years in the White House. Fox News agreed to pay Domination Voting Systems $787.5 million to settle a major defamation lawsuit —while facing a separate $2.7 billion defamation lawsuit from Dominion competitor Smartmatic. And there were tensions between Donald Trump and Fox News over Fox News' initial enthusiasm for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' failed presidential run.

But Fox News dominated cable news ratings after Trump's victory in the 2024 presidential election.

News Corp's Rupert Murdoch will be turning 94 on March 11, and the direction the right-wing Murdoch media empire should take in the future is, according to The Guardian, inspiring major infighting among his children.

READ MORE:'There is going to be hell to pay' as the FBI braces for Kash Patel's retribution: reports

Journalist/author Jane Martinson, in an article published by The Guardian on February 22, explains, "The mogul's four eldest children — Lachlan, James, Elisabeth and Prudence — were set to inherit the family firm…. But four years ago, just after turning 90, Rupert had tried to cut James, Liz and Prue out of their inheritance and hand the businesses over to Lachlan, his favored heir who also happens to share his increasingly right-wing politics. (A) lawsuit was brought by the three errant offspring, and in December, a Nevada commissioner ruled in their favor, accusing Rupert and Lachlan of acting in 'bad faith.'"

Martinson continues, "The trial took place in secret, but the fallout — thanks to the New York Times investigation and a 13,000-word Atlantic interview with James — has been anything but. Among the highlights — or the lowlights if you’re a Murdoch — were the revelation that Rupert's plan to disinherit three of his four eldest children was dubbed 'Project Family Harmony,' that Rupert's lawyer had accused the three children of being 'white, privileged, multibillionaire trust-fund babies,' and that James now viewed his father as a 'misogynist.'"

A former Murdoch family "adviser" told The Guardian that employees are worried about the effect family infighting will have on the company.

According to that source, "It's hard to overstate how uncertain everyone associated with the company feels right now. You've got some great journalists doing great work while squabbling billionaires fall out over even more money."

READ MORE:Revealed: Emboldened terrorists 'quickly rebuilding' as MAGA takes over the DOJ

Michael Wolff, author of the 2023 book "The Fall: The End of the Murdoch Empire," told The Guardian, "I think that we're clearly heading toward that (collapse)…. Lachlan will be fired, and the rest of the company will be dismantled."

But despite all this turmoil, Martinson notes, the Murdoch media empire still "brings profits and political clout."

"Although the businesses are riding high politically," Martinson observes, "Fox News still faces a $2.7bn defamation claim from Smartmatic after on-air comments suggested the electronic voting systems helped rig the 2020 US presidential election…. Yet Fox News is the most profitable part of the Murdoch empire and likely to be the easiest to sell in the short term. It is separately traded and valued at $25bn, and there will be no shortage of billionaires willing to pay for its access and influence."

READ MORE:'False and bigoted conspiracy theory': Behind the language in Trump's presidential orders

*Jane Martinson's full article for The Guardian is available at this link.

---

MMA

Trump’s move to curtail NYC congestion pricing follows lobbying from the Murdoch media empire

Data show that congestion pricing was immediately successful, with reduced travel times and improved subway safety amid higher usage

Written by Zachary Pleat

:{Published 02/21/25

Following widespread criticism of New York City’s traffic congestion pricing policy from the right-wing Murdoch media empire, President Donald Trump moved to halt the program just weeks after it began. Even though data show that the policy had successfully improved travel times and increased public transit usage, Murdoch media outlets celebrated the Trump administration's intervention in New York municipal policies.

Data show that congestion pricing had positive effects, yet Trump acted to halt it anyway

Beginning on January 5, New York City implemented a long-planned toll program to ease congestion by requiring drivers to pay $9 to enter parts of Manhattan. Reuters reported that “transit officials say the program has cut commuting times and that inbound trip times on all Hudson River and East River crossings are now 10-30% faster or more, while bus service has also improved. Subway ridership also has grown since the toll was introduced.”

Manhattan-area newspaper amNewYork Metro also reported on data showing both higher and safer subway ridership since the congestion pricing policy went into effect:

NYC subway crime has dropped significantly so far this year even as ridership increased in the congestion pricing era, according to the newest NYPD data released on Tuesday.

In the first month of 2025, there were 147 reported crimes on the subway down from 231 last year—resulting in 36% fewer crimes committed on the rails this year.

At the same time, subway ridership has increased significantly since the start of congestion pricing on Jan. 5. This means that the drop in crime on the tracks has actually decreased even as more people are using NYC’s busy transit system—one of the largest in the world.

…

Between Jan. 6 and 28, an amNewYork Metro review of MTA data found, ridership was up more than 9.1 million commuters year-over-year (74,680,439 in 2025 vs. 65,569,613 in 2024), a 13.1% increase.

Traffic fatalities across the city are also down, the NYPD’s CompStat 2.0 dashboard shows. Year to date, there were 10 deadly collisions on the roads compared to 18 in 2024—an over 44% drop year over year.

The MTA, the state agency that runs the NYC trains and buses, had long touted that congestion pricing would bring more New Yorkers onto mass transit, thus relieving heavy traffic build up in Midtown and Lower Manhattan. So far, those predictions are being proven true.

On February 19, Trump posted on social media: “CONGESTION PRICING IS DEAD. Manhattan, and all of New York, is SAVED. LONG LIVE THE KING!” That same day, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy sent a letter to Gov. Kathy Hochul asking to “discuss the orderly cessation of toll operations.” For her part, Hochul said that the traffic “cameras are staying on,” and New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority filed a lawsuit to block the Trump administration’s attempt to end the program.

Murdoch media spent months in the lead-up to implementation criticizing NYC congestion pricing
Despite the successes of the NYC policy, Murdoch media celebrated the Trump administration’s move to end congestion pricing

//

Murdoch empire conspires to blame Biden for Trump’s trickle-down tax cuts expiring

:{04/29/24

  1. ### Watch MSNBC's Chris Hayes explain Rupert Murdoch’s role in pushing Hunter Biden claims from informant indicted for lying

:{02/15/24

  1. ### As Rupert Murdoch steps down as the head of Fox, his destructive legacy remains

11/17/23

:{:{===}:

---

ggl 4 25 trump relationship

Trump enters new chapter with Rupert Murdoch

The Hill

https://thehill.com › 5133600-trump-murdoch-relation](https://thehill.com/media/5133600-trump-murdoch-relation/)

Feb 9, 2025 — Trump's playful and public ribbing of one of the world's most prominent media moguls underscored the years-long on-again, off-again relationship.

[### Trump Called Murdoch 'A Piece of S***' After New York ...

Yahoo

https://www.yahoo.com › news › trump-called-murdoc...](https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-called-murdoch-piece-york-135759002.html)

Mar 11, 2025 — Murdoch and Trump have a long relationship, going back decades. Murdoch's Post helped make Trump famous in the 1980s, through coverage of ...

[### 'Self-interested people': Why Murdoch and Trump are back ...

AFR

https://www.afr.com › Companies › Media & Marketing](https://www.afr.com/companies/media-and-marketing/self-interested-people-why-murdoch-and-trump-are-back-in-business-20250204-p5l9d9)

Feb 5, 2025 — Despite their previous feuds, Donald Trump and Rupert Murdoch have embarked on a marriage of mutual convenience.

How Rupert Murdoch helped create a monster

The Conversation

https://theconversation.com › how-rupert-murdoch-hel...](https://theconversation.com/how-rupert-murdoch-helped-create-a-monster-the-era-of-trumpism-and-then-lost-control-of-it-235640)

Aug 11, 2024 — Moreover, Murdoch seemed to have zero influence over Trump's vice presidential choice, and perhaps was even counterproductive. There were ...

You can’t help but feel sorry for Rupert Murdoch.

In Mary Shelley’s famous novel, Dr Frankenstein created a monster that took on a life of its own, and which he could no longer control. Murdoch has outdone Frankenstein and created two monsters over which he has now lost control. They have left him floundering and threaten to inflict great damage on US democracy.

Murdoch’s first monster is the Fox News audience, which after long cultivation into the Fox News fantasy land, refuses to believe any news that does not fit its prejudices. Fox, as a result, feels compelled to reinforce its delusions rather than report accurately.

Murdoch’s second monster grew out of the first – a Donald Trump-dominated Republican Party. Murdoch wanted to make Trump a “non-person”, but the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee last month showed Trump now dominates the party like no one else in living memory.

‘Red meat’ to conservatives

When Fox News began in 1996, the chief executive for its first 20 years, Roger Ailes, said:

Rupert Murdoch and I and, by the way, the vast majority of the American people believe that most of the news tilts to the left.

But Fox News was never just a mainstream news service with a somewhat more conservative centre of gravity. From the beginning, it was more of a propaganda machine, and this became increasingly pronounced over the years. More and more, its prime-time offerings consisted of commentary rather than news programs, designed to feed “red meat” to the Republican base.

News that didn’t fit increasingly didn’t appear. So, when the Iraq war began, there was noisy flag-waving, but as it became militarily messier, the network gave it much less attention, although there were always efforts to find a positive gloss.

During Barack Obama’s first presidential term, Fox News acted as a recruiting and publicity vehicle for the far-right, populist Tea Party. It gave oxygen to Trump’s baseless claim that Obama was not born in the United States, and therefore was not eligible to be president. Fox News host Glenn Beck asserted Obama was a racist with a deep-seated hatred for white people.

During the COVID pandemic, it often denied the severity of the virus, and gave publicity to anti-vaxxer views and quack cures.

Then-President Donald Trump filming a Fox News virtual town hall with members of the coronavirus task force at the White House in March 2020. Evan Vucci/AP

And after Trump’s election defeat in 2020, many Fox News viewers were ready to believe his claims of electoral fraud. Overwhelmingly, however, the key players at Fox News and in the Murdoch stable believed the election was fair.

Fox News’s chief political correspondent Bret Baier saw “no evidence of fraud. None.” Murdoch’s New York Post urged Trump to accept the result. In an editorial, the tabloid said his “baseless” stolen election rhetoric “undermines faith in democracy and faith in the nation”.

A new threat and new strategy

Very soon, a sense of crisis overcame Fox News. Its prime-time ratings had fallen, and by some measures, CNN was now ahead. What most spooked the network’s management, however, was that two small news operations, Newsmax and One America News Network (OAN), which were even more right-wing than Fox, were being publicly praised by Trump and had picked up viewers.

Fox’s sense of crisis led it on a fateful path. It may have been a panicky overreaction.

A post-election decline in viewership – especially among those of the losing party – is not unusual. After Obama’s victory, for example, Fox quickly regained ground, becoming the strongest opposition voice against the new administration. Moreover, even though Newsmax had picked up viewers, its total audience was still minuscule compared to Fox’s, and neither it nor OAN had anything like the resources needed to compete effectively with Fox.

Six days after the election, on November 9 2020, Fox News executives nonetheless committed the network to push “narratives that would entice their audience back”. In the double-talk of Fox News management, they resolved to “respect” their audience, by which they meant reinforce their delusions.

This resulted in a mammoth turnaround. Within two weeks, Fox News had questioned the election result 774 times, according to Media Matters for America.

IFrame Content

The fact this switch of strategy meant the network was deliberately promoting a falsehood seems not to have troubled any of them. Nor did the fact that they were, in the words of their sister publication, the Post, undermining faith in democracy and the nation. The key thing was that the audiences came back.

The truth comes out

Now focused on promoting claims of electoral fraud, the network’s primary targets soon included the two companies that provided electronic voting equipment for the election – Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic.

On the political battleground, there were rarely tangible consequences for running baseless stories. But Fox had wandered into a legal minefield. And it was not tiptoeing.

Trump’s lawyer, Sidney Powell, alleged the companies that had administered the voting machines had committed “the most massive and […] egregious fraud the world has ever seen”. Lou Dobbs was perhaps the most outspoken of the Fox News presenters, calling it “an electoral 9/11” and a “cyber Pearl Harbour”.

Dominion sent 3,600 communications to Fox News denying the various accusations to no effect. Then it mounted a defamation legal action. The case went on for several months, and on the day the trial was about to begin, Fox settled. The result was a massive defamation payout: US$787.5 million (A$1.2 billion).

IFrame Content

But it was not only the expense, it was the embarrassment. As part of the discovery process and the depositions required, Dominion gained access to thousands of internal Fox News documents, demonstrating the stark contrast between what the network’s personalities said in private and what went to air.

Murdoch, in his deposition, said he never believed any of the claims of computer fraud. The internal communications also showed how deeply he detested Trump. After the January 6 2021 riots at the US Capitol, he wrote in an email that he aimed to make Trump a “non-person”.

Trump’s response to these revelations was swift and predictable. On his Truth Social platform, he wrote:

If Rupert Murdoch honestly believes that the Presidential Election of 2020, despite MASSIVE amounts of proof to the contrary, was not Rigged and Stollen [sic], then he and his group of MAGA [Make America Great Again] Hating Globalist RINOS [Republican in name only] should get out of the News Business as soon as possible, because they are aiding and abetting the DESTRUCTION OF AMERICA with FAKE NEWS.

Trump’s resurrection and Murdoch’s isolation

The schism between Trump and Murdoch was deep and bitter. Fox’s subsequent search for an alternative to Trump was most publicly visible in late 2022 and early 2023. In the 2022 US midterm elections, the Democrats did much better than expected, and Trump-endorsed candidates performed poorly. The shining exception for Republicans was the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis.

Murdoch embraced him. Always subtle, a New York Post front page anointed him “DeFuture” and later had a caricature of Trump as Humpty Dumpty, headlined “Trumpty Dumpty”.

DeSantis was a determined cultural warrior, and no doubt Murdoch and others hoped he could represent “Trumpism” without the legal and personal baggage.

However, DeSantis proved to be Trumpism without a hint of charisma. Nor did DeSantis dare question Trump’s narrative of victimhood, endorsing his claims of a stolen election and that the legal cases against him were political witch hunts.

By late 2023, it was clear DeSantis was going to lose the Republican primaries to be the 2024 presidential nominee – and that Trump was going to win again. All business logic pointed towards the need for Fox News to make amends with Trump. And for Trump, political logic pointed towards the need for a détente with the biggest and most influential conservative media organisation.

The rapprochement began in January 2024. Fox staged a town hall event for Trump, the first time he had been live on the network for two years. It not only gave Trump a platform, but it was timed to overshadow the other Republican presidential candidates having a debate on CNN.

DeSantis was angry, saying Trump has “got a Praetorian Guard of the conservative media, Fox News, the websites, all this stuff”.

IFrame Content

As a final act of obeisance, Murdoch attended the Republican National Convention. But it merely underlined his new marginality. Trump, himself,was polite: “I speak with Rupert Murdoch a lot. […] He’s 100% sharp, he’s sharp as a tack.” [vid]

Donald Trump Jr, now the self-proclaimed MAGA enforcer, was less polite. He claimed he had been blacklisted by Fox News, which Fox denied. Then he said:

there was a time where if your wanted to survive in the Republican Party you had to bend the knee to [Murdoch] or to others. […] I don’t think that’s the case any more.

To annoy Murdoch further, one of the stars of the convention was Tucker Carlson, who was fired by Fox 15 months earlier. Carlson sat in Trump’s VIP box next to the ex-president, while Murdoch was some distance away in a separate box.

Moreover, Murdoch seemed to have zero influence over Trump’s vice presidential choice, and perhaps was even counterproductive. There were reports he had lobbied against the selection of JD Vance, while Donald Trump Jr and Carlson were both extremely proactive in pushing Vance.

Carlson reportedly advised Trump: “When your enemies are pushing a running mate at you”, referring to the Murdoch empire, “it’s a pretty good sign you should ignore them.”

IFrame Content

What damage has been done?

All of this serves to underline Trump’s continued dominance. To advance in the Republican Party, it is necessary to pay homage to Trump and his fictions. Ahead of the 2022 midterm elections, The Washington Post looked at nearly 700 Republican candidates for federal office and found that at least a third embraced Trump’s false election fraud claims.

Not only is the party subjected to his worldview, but there is a new group of influential, pro-Trump, mega-donor billionaires, whose influence may be increasing, and whose views could, at best, be called eccentric.

Elon Musk, for example, seemed to promise he would give a pro-Trump political action committee US$45 million (A$68 million) a month, but in true Trumpian fashion, later seemed to backtrack. Musk also believes “the woke mind virus” is “one of the greatest threats to modern civilisation.”

Another tech billionaire, Peter Thiel, Vance’s principal backer, has said, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”

Indeed, he thinks “the 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women – two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians – have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.”

This Republican Party is a very different beast from the one over which Murdoch exercised so much influence in recent decades. Indeed, Peter Wehner, who worked for three Republican presidents, says the party today under Trump is pretty much the opposite of its former self.

Murdoch has never given much hint of being someone who harbours regrets. But America’s political landscape today is one he would abhor: the legitimacy of the electoral system is under assault, conspiracy theories have more potency than in decades past, and the Republican Party is dominated by someone he detests and considers a danger to democracy.

Does he ever acknowledge how his own actions gave momentum to forces that now run against and threaten his own values? He might plead commercial necessity, but surely he knows the disservices to American democracy his media have done.

---

[### Donald Trump has flipped the power relationship with ...

AFR

https://www.afr.com › Companies › Media & Marketing](https://www.afr.com/companies/media-and-marketing/donald-trump-has-flipped-the-power-relationship-with-rupert-murdoch-20240408-p5fi63)

Apr 8, 2024 — Wolff makes Murdoch's disillusion with Trump abundantly clear. At various times, he called Trump an “asshole”, an “idiot”, a “fool”, “plainly ...

[### Trump fumes about Wall Street Journal with Rupert ...

The Independent

https://www.the-independent.com › ... › US politics](https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-rupert-murdoch-wall-street-journal-b2691504.html)

Feb 4, 2025 — President Donald Trump welcomed Rupert Murdoch to the Oval Office on Monday to witness him sign an executive order establishing a sovereign wealth fund.

[### Signs Point to Rupert Murdoch Wanting to Destroy Trump

The New Republic

https://newrepublic.com › breaking-news](https://newrepublic.com/post/184835/signs-point-rupert-murdoch-wants-destroy-trump-wsj-ny-post)

Aug 13, 2024 — The relationship between Murdoch and Trump has been rocky for several years, especially after Murdoch personally greenlit the Fox News call ...

[### Rupert Murdoch Shows Up at Republican Convention

The New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com › business › media › rupert-m...](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/16/business/media/rupert-murdoch-rnc.html)

Jul 16, 2024 — Rupert Murdoch once confided to friends in the fall of 2020 that he thought Donald J. Trump was going “increasingly mad” and would be “a danger” ...

[### Rupert Murdoch often wishes Donald Trump dead, Michael ...

The Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com › books › sep › rupert-m...](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/sep/20/rupert-murdoch-wished-donald-trump-dead-michael-wolff-book)

Sep 20, 2023 — After Trump entered US politics in 2015, winning the White House the following year, he, along with an increasingly extreme Republican party, ...

===

MMA

On January 6, 2021, as a violent mob stormed the U.S. Capitol and halted Congress’ counting of electoral votes, Fox News host Brian Kilmeade dashed off a desperate text to White House chief of staff Mark Meadows.

“Please, get him on TV. Destroying everything you have accomplished,” he wrote of Trump, who had summoned the enraged crowd to Washington, D.C., and incited it with lies that the 2020 election had been stolen as part of a plot to subvert that election.

Kilmeade expressed a drastically different view on Monday, as a new Congress prepared to count the electoral votes that would return Trump to the Oval Office.

In one of Fox & Friends’ few references to the January 6 insurrection that morning, he mocked Democrats who “want to point out how different” today’s events will be “from four years ago” when “democracy was in danger.”

Kilmeade added that the American people think that January 6, “as bad as that day was, it’s a small part of the Donald Trump story” and that it would be “put to bed even further after today happens.”

The Fox & Friends host is one of an array of right-wing media figures who said at the time that the January 6 insurrection was a calamity, that the rioters were criminals, and that Trump himself bore responsibility for their actions. But over the past four years, they have participated in the right’s Great Forgetting, making their peace with Trump’s attempted coup and supporting his return to the presidency.

“Remember what yesterday’s attempted coup at the U.S. Capitol was like. Very soon, someone might try to convince you that it was different,” The Atlantic’s David Graham wrote the next day. “The health of the republic depends both on what swift consequences come—for Trump and for others—and also on how people remember the participants’ actions later on.”

Graham’s warning proved prescient. As the attack unfolded and in its immediate aftermath, many media figures on the right joined those on center and left in condemning the attack — and Trump’s work to incite it — in the strongest possible terms. But they did not sustain their initial response.

“Shoot the protestors,” influential commentator Erick Erickson wrote that afternoon. He added that Trump should receive immediate consequences that would end his political career: “Waive the rules, impeach. Waive the rules, convict. Waive the rules, deny the ability to run for election again.”

Four years later, Erickson offered this take: “First, Happy January 6th to all who celebrate. Note to the media: The exit polling in November showed that most voters do not care. That you will try to make them care today is another reason trust in the media is beneath that of Congress itself.”

Fox chief political analyst Brit Hume likewise denounced Trump at the time for having “fueled the worst suspicions of his supporters with wild claims that the election was stolen. And now we see the result.” But on Election Day 2024, he declared this “a BS issue” because “the thing was over in a matter of hours.”

Erickson and Hume are among a long list of right-wing media notables who condemned January 6 — and even Trump for bringing it about — but came around to implicitly or explicitly support his return to the presidency, even as he showed no remorse for his own actions and valorized the rioters.

Rupert Murdoch, whose right-wing media empire is one of the most potent forces in Republican politics, wrote in an email to Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott on Inauguration Day 2021 that Trump’s election lies had been “pretty much a crime” that made January 6 “inevitable.” He added: “Best we don't mention his name unless essential and certainly don't support him."

On Fox, numerous hosts condemned the criminal acts of the mob and said its members deserved punishment, with some even describing such denunciations as morally necessary.

“Those who truly support President Trump, those that believe they are part of the conservative movement in this country, you do not — we do not support those that commit acts of violence,” offered Fox host and Trump adviser Sean Hannity. “Every good and decent American, we know, will and must condemn what happened at the Capitol.”

“The actions at the United States Capitol three days ago were deplorable, reprehensible, outright criminal,” Jeanine Pirro likewise declared. “Anyone watching this must condemn it.”

Fox contributor Mark Thiessen was among the few to single out Trump on the network’s airwaves, saying the then-president had been “responsible for what happened,” and he went much further in a Washington Post column.

“It was one of the darkest moments in the history of our democracy. And Trump is responsible for it,” he wrote. “Trump formed and incited the mob. He stoked their anger with self-serving lies. He betrayed his followers. He betrayed his office. And now he has blood on his hands.”

The organs of the upper-crust right were united in blaming Trump for the attack.

Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal wrote in a January 7, 2021, editorial that Trump should resign the presidency after committing “an assault on the constitutional process of transferring power after an election.” The New York Post editorial board wrote that “while the roots of this madness were many, with some blame across the spectrum, it’s fundamentally on President Trump.” And the editors of National Review said Trump “found a new low” by having “whipped up and urged on a mob toward the U.S. Capitol, where it breached the building and forced his vice president and lawmakers to flee.”

The hosts of the All-In podcast, which became a key venue of the MAGA tech right, were even more scathing at the time, describing Trump as “a complete piece-of-shit fucking scumbag” who had engaged in “insane, deranged, criminal, lunatic behavior” and had “disqualified himself from being a candidate at a national level.”

These comments reflected the widespread initial consensus that January 6 had been horrific — and that Trump had been responsible for it. In the first days following the attack, politicians of both parties, corporate leaders, and the public at large responded with revulsion and demands for consequences.

But that unity ultimately proved fragile. A coterie of Trumpists, led by former Fox host Tucker Carlson, worked diligently to unwind it, reframing the sacking of the U.S. Capitol as either unimportant — or a conspiracy driven by Democrats and the media in which the assailants were the real victims of a crackdown on “political dissidents,” as Fox’s Rachel Campos-Duffy put it last week.

As this fraudulent counternarrative became increasingly widespread, most other conservative media figures eventually chose to join the right’s Great Forgetting. They pretended that a president who they knew had tried to overturn the republic was fit to return to that office. And in so doing, they helped power Trump from his post-January 6 position of disgrace back to the GOP nomination and the presidency.

Trump’s return to office sets the stage for more authoritarian acts. He never repudiated his election lies or the attack they incited, instead valorizing the January 6 “hostages” and promising they will receive pardons as one of his first acts in office. And he is assembling a team to carry out the “retribution” he has promised to inflict on his political foes, including an FBI director who proposed legal action against the conspirators, “not just in government but in the media,” who he claimed “helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections.”

Trump’s authoritarian impulses may ultimately come to nothing. But with their actions after January 6, the leading lights of the right have already signaled their willingness to accept whatever he does.

//

The Fox News coup

01/06/21

They did it and will do it again – if no one stops them

07/22/22

  1. ### Fox personalities now claim that January 6 prosecutions are political. At the time, many condemned the attack: “Deplorable, reprehensible, outright criminal”

05/21/24 MMA

===

kids fight for control an 12 24

Rupert Murdoch's loss in court leaves the future of his media empire in the balance

:{---

an 11 24

rupert Murdoch's conservative New York Post took a swipe at President-elect Donald Trump's pick for the Department of Health and Human Services on Thursday night, joking that Mar-a-Lago must be seeing an outbreak of brain-eating worms.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has said that in 2010, a worm got into his brain, “ate a portion of it and then died.” At the time, he said he was suffering from cognitive difficulties. Doctors found it was a parasitic infection: A pork tapeworm larva.

The New York Post on Thursday night ripped Trump's selection for HHS secretary, noting that the "overriding rule of medicine" is "First, do no harm" — and that appointing Kennedy to the role "breaks this rule."

The Post pointed to their sit-down interview last year in which he espoused a "head-scratching spaghetti of what we can only call warped conspiracy theories, and not just on vaccines."

ALSO READ:Why Trump voters should be held accountable for their choice

"'Neocons' are responsible for America’s policy ills. 'Pesticides, cellphones, ultrasound' could be driving an upswing in Tourette syndrome and peanut allergies," the Post recalled he said, adding: "He told us with full conviction that all America’s chronic health problems began in one year in the 1980s when a dozen bad things happened."

While social media users might be "gullible" and "hungry" for conspiracy theories, the Post came away thinking "he's nuts on a lot of fronts." People could be harmed or die, the publication warned. Furthermore, it warned Kennedy could send the industry into a disastrous "tailspin."

"We fear the worm that he claims ate some of his brain some years ago is contagious and there’s been an outbreak at Mar-a-Lago," the Post concluded.

Kennedy has called vaccines into question, broadly questioning their safety and efficacy, including claiming, "There's no vaccine that is safe and effective" — and promoting the debunked theory that vaccines cause autism.

===

an 10 24

Mark Robinson, the GOP gubernatorial candidate in North Carolina and current lieutenant governor, is in trouble again.

Not just because Robinson has referred to himself as a “black NAZI” and a “perv,” expressed support for reinstating slavery, said he watched transgender pornography, called homosexuality “filth” and the Holocaust “hogwash,” and has asserted that “some folks need killing.”

He’s in trouble now because he blew off a vote on a declaration that would have granted Governor Roy Cooper key emergency powers ahead of Hurricane Helene’s landfall. Robinson was the only member on the Council of State — a board of nine — who didn’t vote in favor of the declaration. Cooper got the power he needed, but Robinson is now criticizing him for not doing more in the wake of the storm.

Yet Robinson still commands the support of 63 percent of Republicans in North Carolina, according to an East Carolina University poll released Wednesday.

Something seriously troubling has happened to the Republican Party. It’s become filled with wacko candidates for office who are being supported by large percentages of Republican voters.

The trend started in the 1980s with Rush Limbaugh’s radio program, which attracted a wide audience with a toxic mixture of lies, conspiracy theories, fear-mongering, and thinly veiled racism.

It accelerated in 1996 when Rupert Murdoch hired Roger Ailes to emulate Limbaugh with a new TV channel, Fox News. Additional media imitators followed.

The growing supply of this poison offered the (predominantly) white working-class an easy explanation for why the wages and status of many blue-collar men had hit the skids: They could blame immigrants, Black people, Latinos, “coastal elites,” government bureaucrats, pedophiles, women, secularists, Muslims, liberals, Democrats, and Satan.

In the 1990s, Newt Gingrich saw an opportunity to build the Republican Party around similar lies and conspiracy theories. Gingrich’s efforts attracted the first group of modern crackpot candidates into the GOP.

Starting in 2016, Trump attracted another group, even wackier than the previous one.

It’s become a doom loop. As both the demand and the supply of these lies, conspiracy theories, fear-mongering, and racism have grown, the Republican Party’s base has ventured farther from reality. Meanwhile, sane Republicans have left, reasonable people have drifted away, and normal Republican officials have been purged or voted out.

If Trump loses the 2024 election, the Republican Party won’t change, because its base is filled with this poison. So it will continue to attract more crackpot candidates loaded with even more venom; it will nominate them, and some of them will win.

In the current election cycle, the poison doesn’t begin or end with Trump. It includes a Republican vice presidential candidate who calls women who choose not to have children “childless cat ladies,” claims Haitian immigrants are eating people’s pets, won’t concede that Trump lost the 2020 election, and won’t commit to be bound by the outcome of the 2024 election.

It’s produced a slew of Republican candidates for Congress saying similar things. In Ohio, Senator Sherrod Brown’s Republican opponent, Bernie Moreno, is parroting the same racist lies about Haitian immigrants.

In Arizona, the Republican candidate for Senate, Kari Lake, has denied the outcome of the 2020 election, tried to overturn the governor’s race she lost in 2022, appeared at QAnon and white nationalist-tied events, and has a history of violent rhetoric.

Republican Rep. Jen Kiggans of Virginia has called abortion “elective surgery” and compared it to a “Hollywood nose job.”

Wisconsin Republican Rep. Derrick Van Orden, who was at Trump’s January 6 rally and appears to have been among the insurrectionists who breached police barricades at the Capitol, calls abortion “genocide.”

Arizona Republican Rep. Eli Crane is promoting conspiracy theories about the assassination attempts on Trump — blaming a mole within Trump’s Secret Service detail and saying that the FBI can’t be trusted to “give us the truth”; that the shooter in Butler, Pennsylvania, didn’t act alone; and that the gunman behind the second attempt is an “asset” of a foreign adversary — despite evidence contradicting all these theories.

Back in North Carolina, Michele Morrow, the current Republican candidate for superintendent of public instruction, has been warning voters about a network of child traffickers and pedophiles that, she says, torture and kill children to harvest their blood for an anti-aging elixir known as adrenochrome.

Morrow says the plus sign in LGBTQ+ “includes PEDOPH*L*A!!” She claims that transgender therapy is “a disgusting plan of Big Pharma to make our children unable to reproduce” and that the World Health Organization has been using vaccines to sterilize people and kill children. She says Satan is “in cahoots” with Democrats, globalists, the “one world order,” the United Nations, China, and Russia “to take down the United States of America.”

Morrow discourages parents from sending their kids to public schools, which she refers to as “indoctrination centers” and “socialism centers.” She was on the Capitol grounds on January 6, 2021, and proposed then that Trump invoke the Insurrection Act, which, she said, “completely puts the Constitution to the side and says, ‘Now the military rules all.’”

Despite all this, Morrow has an even chance to become the state’s top educator. A poll by Raleigh-based WRAL last month found that she is in a statistical tie with her Democratic opponent.

You see the problem. When the base of one of our two political parties both fuels and is fueled by crackpots, some of those crackpots get elected.

The only way forward is with an entirely new Republican Party that rejects and detoxifies the old one and puts an end to this doom loop. Will Liz Cheney, Mitt Romney, and some as yet unknown young politicians lead the way?

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this week may well see a court decide the fate and future of Fox “News” and thus the Republican Party, at least in its current hard-right neofascist form. And odds are Fox viewers are blissfully ignorant about the pitched battle that just played out in a Reno courtroom over the future of their beloved propaganda outlet.

Sir Keith Murdoch was the notoriously racist and misogynist owner of a small newspaper chain in Australia. It was inherited by his son, Rupert, who — using sensationalism and bigotry — turned it into a multi-billion-dollar enterprise that spans three continents.

Former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd called Rupert Murdoch “the greatest cancer on the Australian democracy” in the pages of The Sydney Morning Herald, the New York Times of Australia. Noting that Murdoch owns about “two thirds of the country’s print media,” Rudd wrote:

“In Britain, Murdoch made Brexit possible because of the position taken by his papers. In the United States, Murdoch's Fox News is the political echo chamber of the far right, which enabled the Tea Party and then the Trump party to stage a hostile takeover of the Republican Party. In Australia, as in America, Murdoch has campaigned for decades in support of tax cuts for the wealthy, killing action on climate change and destroying anything approximating multiculturalism.”

When Rupert was divorcing his second wife he put most of the family’s businesses into a trust, apparently to prevent her from grabbing a larger share of his wealth. The terms of that trust stipulate that when Rupert dies, his four children — Lachlan, James, Elisabeth, and Prudence — would share equal votes and power over the business dynasty their father had inherited from his father.

But now Rupert — who’s 93 years old — is having second thoughts, because James, Elisabeth, and Prudence are apparently not all that enthusiastic about Fox “News” and other Murdoch media outlets nakedly lying to and whipping up hatred among their viewers and readers, both here, in Australia, and in the UK. Only Lachlan, Rupert’s oldest son, is loyal to his father’s vision of peddling-hate-for-billions-in-profits.

So, Rupert went to court in Reno — the proceedings are sealed, but the case began last week and wrapped up yesterday (although we don’t yet know the result) — to try to break the trust and hand exclusive or primary control of his fiefdom to Lachlan.

Fox “News” viewers have no idea that they’re being constantly lied to, both by commission (like telling them the 2020 election was stolen by voting machines) and by omission. They think they’re seeing the world “as it is” and getting fair and balanced “truth” and “straight talk,” which is why Fox “News” is so potent.

Without Fox “News” there probably never would have been a January 6th coup attempt, and, given how thin their margins were, likely no 2000 Bush or 2016 Trump presidencies.

The stakes here are enormous. Some media observers believe that a major role in Barack Obama’s 2008 victory was Air America broadcasting my program and others to well over two-thirds of America with big stations in 62 major markets. (That ended when Mitt Romney decided to run for president and had his company buy Clear Channel, then flip all of the stations Air America was leasing from them from progressive talk to sports, killing the network in 2010.)

Similarly, the rise of Fox following Reagan fast-tracking Murdoch’s US citizenship has played a huge role in Republican victories across the nation and the solid hold the GOP has on red state America, where Fox and rightwing hate radio predominate.

Activist investors in the Fox media caliphate have tried to force a vote at the upcoming shareholders’ meeting that would require Fox “News” to label their opinion programming — which constitutes most of their programming — as “opinion.” An attorney for the activist shareholder group, Luke Morgan, told US News & World Report:

“There can hardly be a more significant issue for Fox than its misinformation problem. This is precisely the sort of issue that is appropriate for shareholder input.”

Nonetheless, to Murdoch’s great delight, no doubt, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) ruled last week that Fox doesn’t have to start informing its viewers when their talent crosses the line from reporting to indoctrinating.

Weirdly, this drama within an Australian family may well determine the fate and future of the Republican Party and the conservative and MAGA movements in the US. The future of democracy in America.

It’s a real-life Succession drama and may take months to resolve.

Keep an eye on this story. While it’s probably the most under-reported major news story in America right now, the outcome will have far-reaching consequences for all of us.

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'Bad for the brand': Rupert Murdoch appears to be souring on Trump

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american nationalist: Part 2

How Tucker Carlson Reshaped Fox News — and Became Trump’s Heir

By Nicholas Confessore

Published April 30, 2022

Updated May 16, 2022

Tucker Carlson had a problem.

After years in the cable wilderness, he had made a triumphant return to prime time. And his new show, “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” had leapfrogged to the heart of Fox News’s evening lineup just months after Donald J. Trump’s upset victory shattered the boundaries of conventional politics.

But as Mr. Trump thrashed through his first months in office, Mr. Carlson found himself with an unexpected programming challenge: Fox was too pro-Trump. The new president watched his favorite network religiously, and often tweeted about what he saw there, while Fox broadcasts reliably parroted White House messaging. No one was more on message than Sean Hannity, then Fox’s highest-rated star, who frequently devoted his show to Mr. Trump’s daily battles with Washington Democrats and the media.

Newly planted in Fox’s newly vacated 8 p.m. time slot — previously held by the disgraced star Bill O’Reilly — Mr. Carlson told friends and co-workers that he needed to find a way to reach the Trump faithful, but without imitating Mr. Hannity. He didn’t want to get sucked into apologizing for Mr. Trump every day, he told one colleague, because the fickle, undisciplined new president would constantly need apologizing for.

The solution would not just propel Mr. Carlson toward the summit of cable news. It would ultimately thrust him to the forefront of the nationalist forces reshaping American conservatism. “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” the host and his producers decided, would embrace Trumpism, not Mr. Trump. The show would grasp the emotional core of Mr. Trump’s allure — white panic over the country’s changing ethnic composition — while keeping a carefully measured distance from the president himself. For years, as his television career sputtered, Mr. Carlson had adopted increasingly catastrophic views of immigration and the country’s shifting demographics. Now, as Mr. Trump took unvarnished nativism from the right-wing fringe to the Oval Office, Mr. Carlson made it the centerpiece of “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”

He began seeking out stories, one friend observed, that were sometimes “really weird” and often inaccurate but tapped into viewers’ fears of a trampled-on American culture. He inveighed against Macy’s new line of hijabs, and devoted a segment to “Gypsy” refugees in a Pennsylvania town who Mr. Carlson said had left “streets covered — pardon us now, but it’s true — with human feces.” (It was not true: Local officials ultimately documented a single instance of a refugee child who had pulled down his pants outside because he couldn’t make it back home in time.) He cataloged, and magnified, overlooked instances of what he cast as growing discrimination against white Americans. Stories about the threat of immigration had long been a feature of Fox. But Mr. Carlson dialed up the intensity, expertly weaving tropes borrowed from the far right into a narrative that would come to define “Tucker Carlson Tonight”: falling birthrates among the native-born, big-city crime, lax immigration policies designed to forcibly alter American society — all engineered or encouraged by a “ruling class” desperate to censor public discussion of its own failures.

Inside the Apocalyptic Worldview of ‘Tucker Carlson Tonight’

:

A Times analysis of 1,150 episodes reveals how Tucker Carlson pushes extremist ideas and conspiracy theories into millions of households, five nights a week.

Mr. Carlson’s darkening arc foreshadowed a transformation beginning to sweep through Fox itself. As Mr. Trump fought to build a border wall and keep Muslims out of the United States, Fox’s journalists and right-wing commentators would clash repeatedly over what many longtime staff members saw as a creeping invasion of the news divisions by allies and functionaries of the higher-rated, pro-Trump prime-time hosts. Mr. Carlson would be both instigator and beneficiary of Fox’s civil war. He forged a relationship with Lachlan Murdoch, the Murdoch family’s heir apparent, who would become his most public supporter at Fox. And while Mr. Murdoch and Fox executives have often couched their defense of “Tucker Carlson Tonight” as a protection of free inquiry and controversial opinions, the reality is less high-minded. From the beginning, Mr. Carlson’s on-air provocations have been part of a painstaking, data-driven campaign to build and hold Fox’s audience, according to former Fox executives and employees — an experiment that has succeeded wildly in bolstering Mr. Murdoch’s profit machine against the long-term decline in cable news subscriptions.

The network’s leadership takes a broader view of Fox’s financial and ratings success. A spokeswoman for the network provided the following statement: “Fox News Media has grown through strategic innovation, redirecting investments in journalism to encompass more than 50 percent of the budget while expanding our footprint beyond one legacy linear network to eight thriving platforms. As a result, we’ve doubled our audience, achieved unrivaled results, and have become the destination that more Democrats and independents choose for their news coverage, while our competitors have lost dramatic levels of viewership. We couldn’t be prouder of our entire team, whose commitment to excellence in journalism and opinion has led Fox News Media to all-time ratings records and delivered the best in class to our viewers.”

Mr. Carlson declined to be interviewed for this article. At Fox, his popularity with viewers has allowed him to fend off external critics and shut down those within, from news anchors to junior employees who objected to his rhetoric. His importance to the Murdochs has grown along with his ratings, giving him unusual power at the network. During the waning months of Mr. Trump’s presidency, Mr. Carlson would harness the tidal wave of white resentment animated by Mr. Trump to draw the largest audience of any show on television.

Today, Mr. Carlson’s influence reaches far beyond the channel he works for, or the audience that tunes in to his show. Mr. Trump is out of office and banned or suspended from the leading social media platforms. But Mr. Carlson remains, both high priest and champion of Mr. Trump’s most ardent followers. Each night, Mr. Carlson channels the passions and grievances that have replaced the Reagan-era conservatism he grew up on, from the tyranny of mask mandates to the grave danger posed by critical race theory in schools. He has aggressively defended the insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 — an attack that Mr. Carlson, borrowing the former president’s “deep state” canards, has portrayed as a false-flag operation masterminded by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Ambitious Republican lawmakers now echo his embrace of the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, once relegated to the far-right fringe, that Western elites are importing immigrants to disempower the native-born.

In some respects, Mr. Carlson has taken Trumpism away from Mr. Trump. While the former president has urged his followers to get vaccinated and sought to claim more credit for his administration’s efforts to fight Covid-19, Mr. Carlson has continued to promote doubt about the vaccines’ efficacy, even likening mandates to Nazi medical experiments. On the Jan. 6 anniversary, Senator Ted Cruz, the Texas Republican, set out to walk back his comments accurately calling the Trump-inspired riot a “violent terrorist attack.” He didn’t apologize to Mr. Trump. He apologized to Mr. Carlson, in a cringing appearance on “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”

Trumpism Without Trump

“Tucker Carlson Tonight” was at first only a slight update on the classic cable shoutfest. The show arrived on Fox a few months after Roger Ailes, the network’s powerful co-founder, was forced out amid a widening sexual harassment scandal. Mr. Ailes had been lukewarm on Mr. Carlson, then paying his dues on the weekend edition of “Fox and Friends.” (According to a Fox colleague at the time, Mr. Ailes had once described Mr. Carlson’s hiring at Fox as “his last chance” in cable news.) But the Murdochs liked him, and Rupert Murdoch, who temporarily took the reins after ousting Mr. Ailes, installed Mr. Carlson in Fox’s 7 p.m. slot.

In segments dubbed “Tucker Takes On,” Mr. Carlson would invite on a liberal foil for combat, an approach Fox executives sometimes referred to as “Twitter for television.” There were lighter segments, like “The Friend Zone,” in which the host would bring on a Fox colleague or friend for a bit of self-promotion, or “King for a Day,” in which viewers would be invited to propose one thing they would do to fix the country.

Less than two months in, Mr. Murdoch promoted Mr. Carlson again, to the higher-profile 9 p.m. slot abruptly vacated by Megyn Kelly. To help write scripts, Mr. Carlson hired one of his old Daily Caller reporters: Blake Neff, a young South Dakotan who would later be let go after CNN outed him for posting racist and sexist jokes online. “Tucker Carlson Tonight” began to dial up coverage of college liberals, both a Fox staple and Mr. Neff’s specialty at The Caller. Sometimes titled “Campus Craziness,” the segments featured conservative professors shunned for criticizing Islam and left-wing professors expressing hatred for white people. One episode mocked students in Mississippi who mistook a stray banana peel for a hate crime. Mr. Carlson’s ratings shot up, and just a few months later, in April 2017, Mr. Murdoch promoted him to succeed Mr. O’Reilly, long Fox’s most prominent and popular host. Mr. Carlson’s agents immediately began shopping a book, with a price tag said to be as high as $15 million.

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Mr. Carlson and other hosts repeatedly called a migrant caravan approaching the southern border in 2018 an “invasion.” They continued even after a man who applauded such language on social media fatally shot 11 people at a Pittsburgh synagogue.Credit...Associated Press

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“Another migrant caravan of people from another country who have not been invited to this country are coming nevertheless and telling us that we’re not allowed to do anything about it. Will that caravan make it to the U.S. border? And what exactly happens if and when it does? That is next.”

To help redesign “Tucker Carlson Tonight” for the 8 p.m. hour, Fox assigned Ron Mitchell, a former O’Reilly producer recently promoted to Fox’s executive ranks, where he would supervise “story development” across prime time. Fox had always excelled not just at attracting more viewers than its rivals but at getting them to stick around longer, giving an added bump to its Nielsen ratings. To maintain its dominance in the post-Ailes era, the teams working on Fox’s evening lineup began to make wider use of expensive ratings data known as “minute-by-minutes.” Unlike the “quarter-hour” ratings more commonly used in cable newsrooms, which show how each 15-minute “block” performed, the minute-by-minutes allow producers to scrutinize an audience’s real-time ebb and flow. Mr. Carlson, determined to avoid his fate at CNN and MSNBC, was among the network’s most avid consumers of minute-by-minutes, according to three former Fox employees.

His new direction — Trumpism without Trump — took shape that summer. The lighter segments faded from view. Notably, Mr. Trump was mentioned less often than on “Hannity,” and Mr. Carlson sometimes even criticized the president, particularly when he deviated from campaign promises like building the border wall and avoiding what he had once called “stupid” wars. In private, Mr. Carlson mocked the president’s habit of calling to head off his on-air attacks. (When Mr. Trump called to pre-empt criticism of one foreign-policy move, Mr. Carlson declined the call, according to a former Fox employee who witnessed it.)

Most strikingly, “Tucker Carlson Tonight” began devoting more and more airtime to immigration and to what its host depicted as the looming catastrophe of demographic change. “He is going to double down on the white nationalism because the minute-by-minutes show that the audience eats it up,” said another former Fox employee, who worked frequently with Mr. Carlson.

He covered protesters’ attempts to pull down Confederate monuments with hyperbolic intensity; one such episode, he told his viewers, marked the beginning of “the destruction of America’s delicate social fabric.” His producers scavenged local news for under-covered items about refugees and migrants, which Mr. Carlson blew up into national news. He also began to venture farther afield than other hosts. He mocked Austria as the soon-to-be “caliphate of West Arabia.” The immigration backlash and migrant crimes in countries like Sweden and Germany became forewarnings of America’s future. “The country’s in decline,” he told viewers in the fall of 2017. He added: “Everyone knows that. It’s not racist to note that.”

A Ratings Game

But as America declined on screen, Mr. Carlson ascended behind it.

Fox News was undergoing the most significant changes in its history, a shift that would position Mr. Carlson to seize outsize power within the network. The Murdochs were negotiating to sell most of their television and studio assets to the Walt Disney Company, a transaction that would also resolve the family’s succession battle, leaving Lachlan Murdoch as sole heir to the throne. He was widely viewed as having more conservative politics than his father. In Australia, he had been instrumental in installing a number of hard-right executives and editors at the family’s media properties, while overseeing efforts to transform the little-watched cable channel Sky News into a mini-Fox, with a fiery evening lineup. At Fox, he became friendly with Mr. Carlson, who cultivated a perception within the network that the two men were close.

Mr. Murdoch ran the new Fox enterprises — now a stripped-down company with Fox News at its core — from across the country, in Los Angeles. (Last year, he moved back to Australia.) In mid-2018, he announced the appointment of Suzanne Scott, an Ailes-era network veteran, as the new Fox News chief executive. Though credited with helping revamp the network’s post-O’Reilly lineup, Ms. Scott, who would preside over Fox expansions into weather, books and other new divisions, seemed disinclined to exert Mr. Ailes’s tight rein over Fox’s talent, according to former employees. And where Mr. Ailes had been regarded within Fox — if not always outside it — as protective of the news divisions’ credibility, Ms. Scott, mindful of the cable industry’s long-term headwinds, was focused on preserving the network’s audience. “Suzanne began talking about, ‘We have to do more of what we do best,’” said one former senior employee.

Under Ms. Scott, Fox’s news shows began to more closely mimic its highly rated prime-time opinion shows in both tone and topic. Guests brought on to analyze the day’s stories would instead find themselves asked to respond to clips of provocative comments made by Mr. Carlson and other hosts or guests the night before — a backdoor way for Fox to inject prime-time material into the lower-rated dayside shows. In 2018, after a former Hannity producer took over the network’s widely read website, FoxNews.com, he assembled a team of reporters called Fox News Flash, who were deployed to write news stories built solely around video clips from prime time. Mr. Carlson’s drove the most traffic, according to a former FoxNews.com employee.

One major force behind the news-side changes was a former Megyn Kelly producer named Tom Lowell, a Fox vice president who assumed growing authority over the network’s correspondents and news coverage. He was considered a favorite of the elder Mr. Murdoch, who appreciated his tabloidy approach to news curation. He was less popular among his subordinates, who nicknamed him “the burglar,” on account of his reputation for stealing credit for ideas, and because of a long-ago incident that became Fox lore as he rose: In his 20s, Mr. Lowell and two friends were arrested after breaking into a liquor store in Florida. (Mr. Lowell received three years’ probation, according to public records.) One week, while an executive who typically ran the high-level daily news meeting was on vacation, Mr. Lowell took over the role and never gave it back.

He encouraged shows to focus on the kind of grabby, inflammatory stories that dominated prime time and drove ratings. As the midterm elections approached and Mr. Trump’s unpopularity threatened to sink down-ballot Republicans, Fox began nonstop coverage of a migrant caravan wending its way through Central America to the U.S. border. Mr. Carlson and other prime-time hosts and guests called the caravan — mostly women and children — an “invasion” dozens of times in the weeks before the election, according to tallies by Media Matters and CNN. They continued to do so even after a man walked into a Pittsburgh synagogue in late October and murdered 11 people, leaving behind a trail of social media posts railing against immigrants and Jews and applauding how people were now calling illegal immigrants “invaders.”

:{:{Shortly after the attack, the longtime anchor Shepard Smith, a beloved figure in the Fox newsroom, threw a brushback pitch at his own network. “There is no invasion,}:” he told viewers of his afternoon news show. “No one’s coming to get you.” Whether or not the caravan threatened America, however, it was a boon to Fox:

That October, ratings were even higher than they had been right before the 2016 presidential election. Network executives soon began retooling the dayside shows, applying the approach that had worked for Mr. Carlson and his prime-time colleagues. Mr. Mitchell, now promoted to a high-level position running “analytics” across Fox, began sitting in on story meetings to vet topics and guests, a role that discomfited some reporters and producers. He handed out color-coded bar charts detailing the minute-by-minute performance of each show. “They’re all obsessed with the minute-by-minutes,” said a former Fox employee. “Every second that goes on that network now gets scrutinized.”}:

Mr. Lowell and Mr. Mitchell pitched the initiative as “Moneyball” for television: a data-driven, audience-first approach to deciding what to cover and how to cover it. But journalists on the daytime lineup discerned a pattern to what the audience didn’t like. Segments featuring Fox’s own reporters consistently drew lower ratings, especially if they were covering stories the audience deemed unfavorable to Mr. Trump. So did guests who leaned left, or simply staked out independent viewpoints. Mr. Lowell and Mr. Mitchell, for example, urged shows not to book Chris Stirewalt, a respected, down-the-middle political editor and analyst. But immigration was a hit. Coverage of migrant caravans became a Fox mainstay, with one correspondent even embedded with refugee groups.

Fox executives wanted to focus on “the grievance, the stuff that would get people boiled up,” said one current Fox employee. “They’re coming for you, the Blacks are coming for you, the Mexicans are coming for you.”

Dangers Abroad

In the spring of 2018, Mr. Carlson aired a segment that jolted even his more jaded Fox colleagues. South Africa’s white farmers were “being targeted in a wave of barbaric and horrifying murders,” he told viewers. The Black-led government “just passed a law allowing it to seize their farms without any compensation, based purely on their ethnicity.”

Until Mr. Carlson waded in, few Americans were paying attention to “farm murders” in South Africa. In a country of 60 million people, where violent crime is common but the vast majority of its victims are Black, the police record dozens of murders of whites on farms and other small holdings each year. But the notion that white farmers were being singled out for attack was largely confined to the far-right web, where writers and commenters warned of a burgeoning “white genocide” — itself a neo-Nazi trope dating back to the end of apartheid.

Then the Murdoch empire stepped in. In the winter of 2018, reporters for a Murdoch-owned Australian tabloid, The Daily Telegraph, contacted AfriForum, a self-styled civil rights group for South Africa’s Afrikaner white minority. For months, with little success, the group had been circulating widely contested studies claiming to show that white farmers faced a disproportionate risk of murder and brutalization. After touring white-owned farms in South Africa, the Telegraph team returned with a package of columns and news articles asserting that being a South African farmer was “now the world’s most dangerous job” and demanding that they be granted emergency refugee visas. From there, the story would be picked up by the Fox-inspired nighttime hosts on Sky News. Within days, Australia’s home affairs minister floated the idea of fast-track visas for South African farmers.

The idea went nowhere, but the story soon jumped around the world. In a 2018 meeting of Fox News executives, according to two people with knowledge of the discussions, Mr. Lowell proposed covering farm murders for American audiences, echoing the fevered framing of his Australian colleagues: a country descending into chaos, an impoverished Black majority scheming to kill white farmers and steal their land. Mr. Carlson, it turned out, was also pursuing the story. He had briefly mentioned farm murders in a segment that March, and two months later, when AfriForum officials made a lobbying trip to Washington, an ally put them in touch with him.

“My understanding was, he was interested in the topic already, and someone we had gotten to know over time recommended he speak with us,” said Ernest Roets, AfriForum’s deputy chief executive, who declined to identify the intermediary.

AfriForum formally rejects the far-right idea of a “white genocide.” But when he interviewed Mr. Roets on his show that May, Mr. Carlson bulldozed through the group’s careful caveats, describing “in some sense an intentional campaign,” supported by the government, “to crush a racial minority within your country.”

In an interview with The New York Times, Mr. Roets acknowledged that Mr. Carlson had exaggerated.

“It’s not my job, as a spokesperson, to tell a journalist how he or she should frame a question,” he said. “I would be a bad spokesperson to use what little time I have to say, ‘Well, let’s frame that question a little differently.’”

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In 2018, Mr. Carlson began airing segments on “farm murders” in South Africa, linking the killing of white farmers there to government proposals to seize land without compensation — something that had never come to pass. The coverage echoed far-right narratives about a looming “white genocide.”Credit...The New York Times

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“South Africa is a diverse country, but the South African government would like to make it much less diverse. An embattled minority of farmers, mostly Afrikaans-speaking, is being targeted in a wave of barbaric and horrifying murders,” he said, adding that “the government just passed a law allowing it to seize their farms without any compensation, based purely on their ethnicity.”

:{:{Mr. Carlson’s coverage sparked a rare high-level dispute inside the network. During a subsequent meeting of Fox’s senior executives, Brian Jones, president of Fox Business Network and the highest-ranking Black man in Fox leadership, explained that almost everything Mr. Carlson was saying on the air was wrong.}:

Legislators in South Africa, where whites still own the majority of private farmland, had begun debating a constitutional amendment to allow uncompensated land seizures, but no such measure had been passed. Though intended to reverse apartheid-era land dispossession, the proposed amendment did not target farmers on the basis of their race or ethnicity. Nor had the government backed a campaign of ethnic violence and murder. Mr. Jones told his fellow executives that Mr. Carlson’s coverage had been ripped from far-right sites, including the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer, according to a person with knowledge of the discussions. (Mr. Jones, who left the network in 2019, did not respond to a request for comment.)}:

Mr. Lowell defended the segments, and Mr. Jones was ultimately overruled. A Fox spokeswoman disputed that account, saying that Mr. Lowell had only pushed for the story to be investigated to see if it was accurate. But word of the high-level editorial dispute soon filtered down through the network. Even among the generally right-of-center rank-and-file, discontent was growing over Fox’s nativist tilt and racial scaremongering. Now staff members who had watched the farm-murder story swirl around far-right websites wondered how it had arrived at their network, and why Mr. Lowell and Mr. Carlson had pushed it, especially when Fox was so busy covering Trump-related breaking news and more conventional controversies.

But Mr. Carlson dug in. He covered South African farm murders and land disputes throughout the spring and summer, again claiming that officials there were seizing land that they hadn’t under a constitutional amendment that didn’t exist. That August, after an episode of “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” President Trump tweeted that his administration would “closely study” the seizure of white-owned land and the “large-scale killing of farmers.” Alt-right and neo-Nazi figures in the United States cheered the propaganda coup. Patrick Casey, leader of the group Identity Evropa, exulted that Mr. Trump’s proclamation could help bring white nationalist ideas to a mainstream audience.

“Conservatives becoming aware of the plight of White South Africans has the potential to take them beyond the current limitations of ‘acceptable’ conservative immigration debate toward identitarianism,” Mr. Casey tweeted.

Strange Bedfellows

Fox journalists soon had another reason for concern. Around the same time Mr. Carlson was promoting the notion of a South African ethnic cleansing, Fox was lurching through a post-Ailes rebuilding of its human resources organization. Lines of authority and power had always been mysterious at Fox, and so when a formal organizational chart appeared on the company’s employee portal, some curious employees logged on to see who reported directly to Rupert Murdoch.

Most of Murdoch’s subordinates were unsurprising, according to several people who viewed the chart. But one came as a shock: Peter Brimelow, founder of the website VDare.

The British-born Mr. Brimelow had known Mr. Murdoch for decades and once worked as a columnist for MarketWatch, the Murdoch-owned financial news site. But over the years, he had adopted more pronounced nativist views; VDare, started in 1999, had evolved into a hub of the new, more online-oriented white nationalist movement. Mr. Brimelow once described the Obama administration as a “Minority Occupation Government” and California as “totally overrun by barrios of illegal immigrants.” Shortly after Mr. Trump was elected, he spoke at a conference held by the National Policy Institute, a latter-day white nationalist group. (Mr. Brimelow sued The Times in 2020 for articles in which either he or VDare was described as white nationalist; a judge dismissed the case later that year. A separate lawsuit brought by VDare is still pending.)

Mr. Brimelow’s apparent role at Fox set off a new wave of consternation and gossip. Employees who asked about the relationship were given a variety of explanations. Mr. Brimelow was said to be helping with Mr. Murdoch’s memoirs — a project that, as far as most people understood, their boss had abandoned in the 1990s — or writing speeches, or attached to some other Murdoch initiative. In short order, several former Fox employees recalled, the organizational chart was taken down entirely.

A Fox spokeswoman said Mr. Brimelow did not currently have any relationship with the company. Mr. Brimelow declined to comment, writing in an email that The Times could not be trusted, so “you cannot expect any sane person to talk to you.”

In August 2018, Mr. Brimelow was spotted at a birthday party for the Trump adviser Larry Kudlow, drawing an article in The Washington Post and prompting the White House and Mr. Kudlow to distance themselves from Mr. Brimelow. But at Fox, some took the Brimelow discovery as an indirect explanation for the latitude Fox had extended Mr. Carlson on South Africa. If Mr. Murdoch had someone like Mr. Brimelow working for him, reasoned the former employee, he would have little objection to Mr. Carlson peddling far-right themes. (By coincidence, the same week Mr. Murdoch’s newspapers had begun their emergency-visa campaign in Australia, VDare published a story imploring Mr. Trump to welcome South African farmers to the United States.)

South Africa was not an aberration. In an echo of how Mr. Murdoch’s media empire had spent decades nurturing right-wing populism throughout the English-speaking world, Mr. Carlson had begun to fashion his show as a broader platform for nationalist ideas. From early on, he had promoted right-wing figures from abroad, people who could provide testimony on his themes of immigration and social decay. Now he was forging links with an increasingly globalized movement of populist activists and politicians — some of them eager for influence in Trump-era Washington.

Among those politicians was Hungary’s autocratic prime minister, Viktor Orban, a rising darling of the international far right. In late 2018, the Hungarian embassy hired a lobbyist, William Nixon, with business ties to Mr. Carlson’s father; within weeks, the lobbyist was in touch with Mr. Carlson about arranging an interview with the Hungarian foreign minister, who was planning a trip to Washington. During these talks, according to a person with knowledge of the conversations, Mr. Carlson mentioned that his head writer, Mr. Neff, was headed to Hungary the following year to report on how Mr. Orban was “improving the country.” (At the time, allies of Mr. Orban, a promoter of what he called “illiberal democracy,” had completed a sweeping takeover of the country’s news media, and the government would soon begin efforts to shut down a Budapest university founded by the liberal philanthropist George Soros.) In an email to The Times, Mr. Neff characterized his trip as a vacation.

Mr. Nixon connected Mr. Neff to the embassy to arrange interviews during the trip, according to the person with knowledge of the conversations. He also brought the Hungarian ambassador to Mr. Carlson’s Washington office, where the three men bonded over fly fishing, a popular pastime in Hungary. Mr. Carlson said he had long been interested in Mr. Orban and would welcome the chance to interview him.

That February, Mr. Carlson hosted the Hungarian foreign minister, Peter Szijjarto, who touted Mr. Orban’s hard line against immigration and his efforts to encourage families to have more children. And last summer, Mr. Carlson traveled to Budapest to produce what was in effect an extended infomercial for the Orban government. In a series of segments and a gentle interview with the prime minister himself, Mr. Carlson employed a sanitized version of Mr. Orban’s Hungary to frame his own arguments about an American civilization under attack by alien forces.

Where South Africa was a warning of the hell that America could become, Hungary was a vision of the paradise that could be had by taking America back. “You don’t have to watch your country collapse,” Mr. Carlson told viewers. “You don’t have to have leaders who hate the population or divide their own people against each other.”

Going Farther Afield

The day after the 2018 midterms, as darkness fell over Washington’s leafy Kent neighborhood, members of a local antifa group appeared outside Mr. Carlson’s home to protest his coverage of the migrant caravan. Standing in his driveway, yelling through bullhorns, they chanted, “We know where you sleep at night.” Mr. Carlson was not at home, but his wife, Susie Andrews, was. According to the Carlsons, someone banged on the door. Panicked, she locked herself in the pantry and dialed 911.

Mr. Carlson had lived in Washington for most of his adult life, and loved it. Two longtime friends said he was deeply shaken by the protests outside his home. “All of a sudden, it just became impossible to live there,” Mr. Carlson said in an interview last fall with Dave Rubin, a conservative YouTube personality and occasional guest on “Tucker Carlson Tonight.” He added, “I felt like we were really part of the city and then, next thing you know, people are showing up at the house.” He worried that “you’re going to wind up shooting somebody.” Within a year, he would flee Washington entirely, seeking asylum far beyond the Acela corridor.

In March 2019, Mr. Carlson set out to buy a dilapidated town garage in Bryant Pond, Maine, where his family had owned a vacation getaway for decades. In a letter to town officials, he pledged that Fox would install a state-of-the-art studio there. Mr. Carlson had never been guarded about his home in Bryant Pond, and often told interviewers about his love of Maine living. But when a local newspaper, The Sun Journal, published news of the proposed purchase, he lashed out like a man under siege. “All it does is hurt me,” he told the paper’s reporter, Steve Collins, explaining that Fox would never agree to leave $1 million worth of equipment in an isolated rural location if everyone knew about it. (Mr. Carlson would raise the stakes when The Times later assigned a freelancer to write about his life in Bryant Pond, accusing the paper of seeking to endanger his wife and children. A Maine-based freelance photographer, whom Mr. Carlson named on air, found his own door banged on by strangers after dark.)

In the end, Mr. Carlson proceeded with his plans, and by the following spring, The Sun Journal reported that his new studio was complete. He put his Washington house up for sale and began living in Maine much of the year, taping “Tucker Carlson Tonight” from Bryant Pond. (When not in Maine, Mr. Carlson usually broadcasts from Florida, where he has a second home in the resort town of Boca Grande.)

A different kind of threat was emerging inside Fox itself. In March 2019, the left-leaning watchdog group Media Matters surfaced old recordings of Mr. Carlson defending statutory rape and calling Iraqis “semiliterate primitive monkeys,” comments that had yet more advertisers fleeing and Fox colleagues fuming, especially some younger employees. That same month, the Fox opinion host Jeanine Pirro questioned on air whether Representative Ilhan Omar, a Minnesota Democrat and Somali-born former refugee, might be more loyal to her Muslim faith than to the Constitution. The slur prompted a young Muslim employee named Hufsa Kamal, who worked on Fox’s flagship news show, “Special Report With Bret Baier,” to chastise Ms. Pirro on Twitter — an extraordinary breach of the network’s hermetic culture. Not long after, as Ms. Kamal endured a stream of online abuse and threats from Fox fans, a producer in Fox’s Los Angeles bureau named Dan Gallo wrote to the company’s top human resources executives.

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Mr. Carlson ran a segment in 2017 on a small group of Romani asylum seekers in Pennsylvania town. Local reports of a Romani child going to the bathroom outside became, on Mr. Carlson’s show, a plague of streets covered “with human feces.”

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“I’m merely saying this has been a distinct group for a thousand years. It actually hasn’t assimilated, for the most part, into the cultures in which it has been hosted. And so I wonder why we think they’re going to assimilate in Pennsylvania.”

“When Fox personalities make these sorts of statements, it damages my credibility as a Fox journalist & my ability to effectively cover stories,” wrote Mr. Gallo, who provided copies of his emails to The Times. He argued that Mr. Carlson and Ms. Pirro were creating an unsafe workplace for employees like Ms. Kamal, and asked that Fox take action. “If an employee said those things in the workplace, especially with Muslim colleagues present, I think they would be disciplined,” Mr. Gallo wrote. (While Fox had issued a statement condemning Ms. Pirro’s remarks, she had not apologized.) Before sending his complaint, Mr. Gallo showed a copy to Ms. Kamal to make sure she was comfortable with it.

In a subsequent phone call, the executives, Kevin Lord and Nicolle Campa, seemed receptive, Mr. Gallo said in a statement to The Times. They thanked him for his letter and promised to relay it to Ms. Scott and Jay Wallace, Fox News’s president, so that they could understand the impact the hosts were having on the network’s journalists. Mr. Gallo assumed the complaint would otherwise remain confidential, as with other human resources matters.

A month later, Mr. Carlson landed in Los Angeles for a weeklong West Coast stint. Minutes after arriving in the bureau, he tracked down Mr. Gallo, who was sitting in an office talking to two colleagues. “Are you Dan Gallo?” he interrupted. When Mr. Gallo tried to introduce himself, an indignant Mr. Carlson simply handed him a blue notecard with his cellphone number. The next time Mr. Gallo had a problem with his show, Mr. Carlson said, he should “do the honorable thing” and call. Mr. Gallo offered to talk then and there, he said, but Mr. Carlson wasn’t interested. “I’m busy,” the host said, and walked off.

That night, Mr. Gallo wrote again to the human resources executives, asking who had told Mr. Carlson about his complaint. They promised to talk to Mr. Carlson. But pressed on the leak in a subsequent phone call, Mr. Lord refused to look into the matter. He blamed workplace gossip, and insinuated that Mr. Gallo himself was responsible for the leak. “That was insulting,” Mr. Gallo said. “I stuck to the proper channels and had moved on.” He left Fox that summer, and now works for MSNBC. (The writer of this article is an MSNBC contributor.)

Far from being chastened, Mr. Carlson seemed to be testing his boundaries. In August 2019, days after a 21-year-old white man killed 22 people at an El Paso Walmart to protest what he called the “Hispanic invasion of Texas,” Mr. Carlson declared on the air that white supremacy was largely a “hoax.” Even more advertisers fled; Mr. Carlson embarked on what Fox described as a preplanned vacation. While he was gone, a Fox producer named Cristina Corbin tweeted an indirect rejoinder to the prime-time star. “White supremacy is real, as evidenced by fact,” Ms. Corbin wrote. “Claims that it is a ‘hoax’ do not represent my views.”

She had not mentioned Fox’s star by name, but Mr. Carlson appeared to catch wind of her tweet almost immediately. A few hours later, while still on vacation, he called Ms. Corbin at work from a blocked number, then berated her for airing her disagreement publicly. “Shut your mouth,” he yelled, according to a former Fox executive briefed on the episode. Ms. Corbin did not respond to an email seeking comment for this article; Fox declined to comment, citing confidentiality requirements pertaining to human resources matters.

When Ms. Corbin reported the incident to Fox management, Mr. Carlson denied making such a call, according to the former executive. He was soon back to explaining to his viewers how liberals and Big Tech wanted them to “just shut up.”

The Backlash Pays

It was a frequent refrain on “Tucker Carlson Tonight”— and a calculated one. According to former Fox employees, Mr. Carlson and his team had learned to work the calls for boycotts and cancellation into their programming playbook. Mr. Carlson would grab third rails on race or immigration, then harvest the inevitable backlash, returning the next evening to roast his critics for trying to suppress an obvious truth. The feedback loop didn’t just drive up ratings. It boosted the audience’s loyalty to Fox, while encouraging audiences to identify with Mr. Carlson himself, now playing victim to the same forces he was warning them about. (Liberal-leaning outlets and Twitter influencers also capitalized on Mr. Carlson’s provocations, using clips from “Tucker Carlson Tonight” to attract and provoke his haters rather than his fans.)

In early June 2020, Mr. Carlson told his audience that the Black Lives Matter protests were “definitely not about Black lives” and to “remember that when they come for you.” The next evening, as Fox’s public relations team insisted Mr. Carlson’s comment was being mischaracterized, Mr. Carlson leaned in. “The mob came for us — irony of ironies,” he told Fox viewers. “They spent the last 24 hours trying to force the show off the air for good. They won’t succeed in that, thankfully. We work for one of the last brave companies in America, and they’re not intimidated.”

Off-camera, Mr. Carlson could be less defiant. In a conversation that spring with Eric Owens, one of his former employees at The Daily Caller, he worried that the controversy over his show had made it difficult for his children to get jobs and internships; he worried that his younger children wouldn’t get into college. “It’s not right for this to affect my family, and literally affect my children’s future,” Mr. Carlson said, according to Mr. Owens.

But it’s less clear whether the attacks significantly affected Fox’s bottom line: To compensate for the lost advertising, Fox turned “Tucker Carlson Tonight” into a promotional engine for the network itself. It replaced the fleeing sponsors with a torrent of in-house promos, leveraging Mr. Carlson’s popularity to drive viewers to other, more advertiser-friendly offerings. By early 2019, roughly a fifth of all advertising “impressions” on the show were from in-house ads, according to data from the analytics company iSpot.tv. That summer, as Fox fended off criticism of Mr. Carlson’s “hoax” comments, the proportion climbed to more than a third. (A Fox spokeswoman said the actual proportions were lower, but declined to provide specific figures.) “Fox is basically an enormous loyalty brand,” said Jason Damata, the chief executive officer of Fabric Media, a media consultancy. “He’s the hook.”

Other advertising slots were taken by direct-to-consumer brands that either didn’t care about Mr. Carlson’s bad publicity or saw that they could use his intensity to sell their products. Beginning in January 2019, MyPillow, a Fox advertiser whose chief executive, Mike Lindell, is a major promoter of Mr. Trump’s stolen-election lie, began airing more than $1 million worth of ads on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” each month. Fox appeared to be using MyPillow to cushion Mr. Carlson: As other advertising dried up, the company’s ads spiked. (All told, through December 2021, Mr. Lindell had bought advertising that would have cost $91 million at publicized rates; discounts probably made that sum lower.)

Blue-chip advertisers would never return to the show in force. But thanks in part to the large audiences he could provide for those advertisers who remained, and the premium prices Fox could charge them, Mr. Carlson’s ad revenue began to recover. Every year since 2018, “Tucker Carlson Tonight” has brought more annual ad revenue to Fox than any other show, according to estimates by iSpot. Last May, after promoting the white supremacist “replacement” theory, Mr. Carlson had half as many advertisers as in December 2018 but brought in almost twice as much money.

As “Tucker Carlson Tonight” became more toxic to advertisers, it also began featuring fewer guests who disagreed with the host, and more guests who simply echoed or amplified Mr. Carlson’s own message. It wasn’t just that liberals didn’t want to debate him, though some now refused to appear on the show, as Mr. Carlson complained during a Fox appearance last summer; Fox was learning that its audience didn’t necessarily like hearing from the other side.

“From my discussions with Fox News bookers, my takeaway is that they’ve made the judgment that they just don’t do debate segments anymore,” said Richard Goodstein, a Democratic lobbyist and campaign adviser who appeared regularly on Mr. Carlson’s show until the summer of 2020. Across much of the Fox lineup, former employees said, producers were relying more and more on panels of pro-Trump conservatives competing to see who could denounce Democrats more fervently — a ratings gambit one former Fox employee called “rage inflation.” (One exception, perhaps, is “The Five,” a panel show featuring four conservative co-hosts and one rotating co-host from the left, which has beaten Mr. Carlson in total viewers in some recent months.)}:

And as advertisers fled, Mr. Carlson’s opening monologue grew. Where once he spoke for only a few minutes, sometimes in a neutral just-asking-questions mode, he now often opened the show with a lengthy stemwinder, addressing his audience as “you” and the objects of his fury as a shadowy “they.” Ratings data showed that the monologues were a hit with viewers, according to one former and one current Fox employee, and by 2020, Mr. Carlson regularly spoke directly to the camera for more than quarter of the hourlong show. Instead of less Tucker, the audience got more.

:{:{His critics at Fox found themselves further marginalized: After an on-air feud with Mr. Carlson over the legality of Mr. Trump’s efforts to pressure Ukrainian officials, Shepard Smith was reportedly warned against criticizing his fellow host — something the network denies — and he departed Fox in October 2019. Mr. Carlson’s ratings grew, buoyed by the increasingly heated and apocalyptic presidential campaign.}:

One night in June 2020, after yet another commercial-to-commercial attack on Black Lives Matter protesters, Mr. Carlson addressed the matter directly. Ratings were more than just ammunition in the cable-news wars, Mr. Carlson explained. They were proof that his viewers were not alone, proof that they were right. “Last night, we did something we don’t do very often: We spent the entire first block of the show on a single topic,” he said. More people had watched the previous night’s show, he observed, than any other hour of prime-time television that evening — more than the old evening news broadcasts, more than any sitcoms or sports events. “Millions and millions of Americans agree with you,” he said. “You are not crazy. Your views are not evil.”}:

That month, another Fox employee complained to human resources that Mr. Carlson’s on-air statements contradicted Mr. Murdoch’s public pledge to “support our Black colleagues” in the wake of George Floyd’s killing. In response, an executive cited the company’s need to allow “diverse voices and perspectives,” according to a person familiar with the exchange. At the end of the month, when the Nielsen figures trickled in, Fox sent out a triumphant news release: Mr. Carlson had posted the highest quarterly ratings of any cable news show in history — breaking Mr. Hannity’s old record and helping make Fox the most-watched channel on all of basic cable.

An Upside-Down Nation

In the end, it was Fox’s own political unit, a bastion of traditional news-gathering, that brought the network’s increasingly wobbly balancing act to an end. Just before midnight on Election Day, hours ahead of other networks and news consortiums, Fox announced that Joseph R. Biden Jr. had won the swing state of Arizona. Mr. Trump instantly declared the result a “fraud,” but the following Saturday, as late votes trickled in, Mr. Biden won Pennsylvania, ending the presidential race.

:{:{Mr. Trump’s defeat was the ultimate glitch in Fox’s Trump narrative, one that couldn’t be so easily spun or papered over by its prime-time hosts. Despondent Trump supporters began to look elsewhere for news, encouraged by anti-Fox tweets from Mr. Trump himself.}:

In early December, the upstart conservative network Newsmax, which had positioned itself as even more devotedly pro-Trump, scored its first ratings win over Fox. It was a minor crack in Fox’s cable dominance — fewer than 30,000 viewers in one audience segment on a single December night in the 7 p.m. hour — but it sent shudders through the Fox executive suites. The network might shrug off the complaints of a few advertisers; losing audience to a right-leaning rival was another thing. That month, according to one former Fox executive, Rupert Murdoch delivered a message to the network’s chief executive, Ms. Scott: Clean house. (A Fox spokeswoman disputed this description.)}:

:{:{The purge would not come until early January, as CNN and MSNBC overtook Fox, the cable-news ratings leader for two decades, and as Washington reeled from the violent, Trump-inspired effort to overturn Mr. Biden’s victory}:. In the intervening weeks, Mr. Carlson and other Fox prime-time hosts would pump out a steady stream of attacks on the election results, often drawing on claims of voter fraud from Mr. Trump and his new legal team, led by Rudolph W. Giuliani.

:{:{Fox’s prime-time guns also aimed inward: When a Fox White House correspondent and occasional Carlson guest, Kristin Fisher, told viewers that much of one rambling Giuliani presentation “was simply not true or has already been thrown out in court,” Mr. Carlson went on the air to attack “credentialed reporters, some of whom we know and like,” who were refusing “even to acknowledge” the already discredited claims.}:

He had not mentioned Ms. Fisher by name, but she was warned by superiors to keep her head down, according to two former employees. She did not reappear on air for several days, and her appearances declined significantly in subsequent weeks. (Ms. Fisher later left for CNN.) Around the network, supervisors repeated an Orwellian mantra: “Respect the audience.”}:}:

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Mr. Carlson has fanned doubts about the 2020 election and often cast those who stormed the Capitol as victims: innocent citizens entrapped by scheming Democrats.Credit...The New York Times

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"When a group of sad, disenfranchised people who have been left out of the modern economy show up at your office, you don't have to listen to their complaints. Not for a second. Why would you?"

:{:{Much as Mr. Carlson’s vast cable audience had grown to encompass the white nationalist fringe, it now drew in some of the hundreds who would go on to attack the Capitol.}:

At least eight people now facing criminal charges stemming from the insurrection commented on Mr. Carlson’s official Facebook page in the preceding months, according to an analysis of since-deleted Facebook accounts conducted for The Times by CounterAction, a security firm. They included Graydon Young and Connie Meggs, members of the Oath Keepers militia organization who would be indicted on federal conspiracy charges. Another Carlson fan was Tammy Bronsburg, who on Election Day posted “WE ARE TAKING OUR COUNTRY BACK.”

Two months later, she donned a Trump flag as a cape and joined the crowd breaking into the Capitol. (Mr. Young pleaded guilty and is cooperating with the government against the Oath Keepers; Ms. Meggs and Ms. Bronsburg are fighting the charges against them. Their lawyers did not comment on the Facebook posts.) Later that day, as the Capitol lay stained with blood and broken glass, the Proud Boys posted a defiant message of justification on the Parler social media platform, borrowing a meme from Mr. Carlson’s segments on Black Lives Matter. The lesson of the civil rights protests, Mr. Carlson had claimed, was that “violence works.”}:

:{:{Soon after the Capitol riot, Fox replaced its 7 p.m. host — Martha MacCallum, a news anchor and part of the political reporting team — with another hour of right-wing opinion programming.}:

Mr. Stirewalt, the political editor, who had vanished from the air after defending the Arizona call, was fired; his boss, Fox’s Washington bureau chief, Bill Sammon, retired. More than a dozen reporters for Fox’s digital arm were also laid off, a culling that followed pre-election layoffs in the Brain Room, the in-house research and fact-checking division. Publicly, Fox portrayed these changes as a restructuring, but as with the Moneyball initiative, their impact was felt chiefly in the news ranks, now an expensive and increasingly distracting legacy of the Ailes era.}:

:{:{Trumpism without Trump had begun as a programming strategy. Now, with Mr. Trump gone from the White House and cut off from Twitter and Facebook, it has become a reality. Mr. Carlson, more successfully than any other figure on the right, has filled the vacuum, picking up the banner of Mr. Trump’s movement and the followers who insist he was cheated of victory.}:

Last year, according to The Times’s analysis, nearly half of Mr. Carlson’s shows — more than 100 episodes — included segments playing down the Capitol riot, lurching into ever more fantastical terrain. Much as he once recast the country’s racial hierarchy to make white Americans an oppressed class, Mr. Carlson has inverted the story of Jan. 6 into a modern-day Lost Cause. On “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” the rioters were not aggressors; they were victims. Last June, he floated a conspiracy theory that the riot was an inside job, claiming that an “unindicted co-conspirator” in a government court filing was “almost certainly working for the F.B.I.” In fact, it was Sharon Caldwell, the wife of an insurrectionist with ties to the Oath Keepers; a few months later, Mr. Carlson brought Ms. Caldwell onto the show, now casting her and her husband as the victims of overzealous prosecutors.}:

:{:{This past fall, Mr. Carlson and his team distilled the show’s Jan. 6 fantasia into “Patriot Purge,” a three-part “documentary” for the Fox Nation streaming channel. After a trailer aired in late October, two longtime Fox contributors quit in protest. Mainstream media outlets and fact-checking sites inevitably eviscerated Mr. Carlson’s work for its factual errors and dubious assertions, but that was beside the point.}:

:{:{ After starting the year with the lowest ratings in cable news, Fox ended 2021 back on top. And Mr. Carlson’s inverted, invented narrative of the Jan. 6 insurrection has become a new Republican orthodoxy:}: This February, members of the Republican National Committee approved a resolution calling investigations into the attack a “persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse,” censuring two Republicans who sit on a congressional panel scrutinizing the riot.

“Propaganda tends to bewilder people, to confuse them when they first hear it,” Mr. Carlson observed last fall, in a monologue accusing liberals and mainstream outlets of themselves misleading the public about Covid-19, Jan. 6 and the 2020 elections. “It is so completely and obviously untrue,” he continued. “‘What is this?’ you think. And yet for that very reason, because it’s so ridiculous, so absurd, propaganda tends to be effective.”}:}:

Reporting was contributed by Larry Buchanan, Weiyi Cai, Ben Decker, Alan Feuer, Barbara Harvey, Kenneth P. Vogel, and Karen Yourish. Jack Begg and Julie Tate contributed research.

Nicholas Confessore is New York-based political and investigative reporter for The Times and a staff writer at the Times Magazine, covering power and influence in Washington, tech, media and beyond. He can be reached at nicholas.confessore@nytimes.com. More about Nicholas Confessore

A version of this article appears in print on May 2, 2022, Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: American Nationalist. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

See more on: Republican Party, Donald Trump, U.S. Politics

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tucker fired

intercept

it’s been a lifetime since Fox News offloaded Tucker Carlson, and when I say a lifetime, I mean six days.

It feels like forever thanks to the exhausting velocity of theories that seek to explain the downfall of cable television’s most famous host and racist. Carlson was fired because of the Dominion Voting Systemslawsuit. Carlson was fired becausehe used the C-word. Carlson was fired becausehe prayed too much. Carlson was fired because even his colleagues at Foxdespised him.

That’s just a partial list of the best guesses circulating in the media ether. While Carlson was probably felled by more than a single factor, these guesses are akin to the trees that obscure the proverbial forest. Rupert Murdoch, who founded Fox News, did what he often does at a moment of crisis, swiveling 180 degrees to secure his business empire. The move is famous enough to have an unusual name in Britain, where Murdoch first came to global prominence: the reverse ferret.

In the 1980s, Kelvin MacKenzie was the editor of Murdoch’s London tabloid The Sun, and he loved to describe his spiciest stories as putting a ferret down the pants of whichever celebrity or politician was targeted. But when a story turned out to be wrong or legally actionable, as often happened, MacKenzie burst out of his office and shouted to the newsroom, “Reverse ferret! Reverse ferret!” That meant one thing: The paper had to climb down immediately. After a string of fabricated stories about Elton John in 1988, for instance, The Sun paid the singer 1 million pounds and printed a headline on its front page that said, “SORRY ELTON.”

One of the sharpest Murdoch watchers, the Australian investigative journalist Neil Chenoweth, connected MacKenzie’s antics to his billionaire proprietor. “Rupert Murdoch’s entire business style may be characterized as a reverse ferret,” Chenowethwrote more than 20 years ago. “Time and again when his plans have gone awry and he has found himself facing calamity, his superb survival skills have saved him. Just before he hits the wall, he does a little dummy, he feints this way and that, and then he sets off with undiminished speed in a new direction.” For instance, the right-wing Murdoch unexpectedly threw The Sun’s support to the Labor Party and Tony Blair in 1997, reportedly because then-Prime Minister John Major refused toback policies that Murdoch had pressed him on.

That kind of out-of-the-blue abandonment is basically what happened with Carlson, Fox’s biggest star and the pride and joy of not just Rupert Murdoch but also his sonLachlan, who runs the network on a daily basis. Both Murdochs had unusually close relationships with their favorite host — Carlson evendined with Rupert at the 92-year-old’s estate in Bel Air just a few weeks ago — until, all of a sudden, they didn’t. Carlson learned justa few minutes before the rest of us that his services were no longer required at Fox News.

This occurred a few days after another big reversal: Fox’s decision to pay $787.5 million in damages to Dominion for wrongfully reporting that its machines took votes away from then-President Donald Trump in 2020. The stop-the-steal ferret placed in America’s pants by Carlson and other Fox hosts, such as Maria Bartiromo and Lou Dobbs, was suddenly extracted, and while it was major news across the country, Fox hardly mentioned it, just as the network said almost nothing about Carlson’s exit. The properly executed reverse ferret denies its own existence.

Protesters outside Fox News HQ in the wake of the settlement with Dominion Voting Systems and the firing of Fox’s anchor Tucker Carlson on April 25, 2023.

Photo: Erik McGregor/LightRocket via Getty Images.

The philosophy behind this maneuver helps answer another question: What’s next for Fox? The consensus, expressed by journalist Brian Stelter, is that the Murdochs have learned to never again let a host become as extreme and beyond their control as Carlson. The Murdochs have a line of allowed mendacity, Stelterexplained this week, and Carlson crossed it all the time; whoever replaces him will understand that you do not cross the line. Stelter, who is now working on hissecond book about Fox News, added, “I would like to believe that maybe Rupert Murdoch wants to drag his network back to a more reality-based place.”

That would defy the imperative of the reverse ferret. Glenn Beck got too wild and was reverse ferreted more than a decade ago. As NPRreported in 2011, “At long last, we have an answer to the enduring question: Is it possible for someone to be too incendiary, even for the Fox News channel?” Bill O’Reilly took Beck’s place as the network’s headliner, and when he eventually went too far (by sexually harassing women), he too was gone. Now, it’s Tucker Carlson’s turn. Throughout it all, Fox has made piles of money, billions and billions of dollars, far more than its rivals.

IFrame Content

The lucrative dialectic of the ferret/reverse ferret is the spring mechanism for Murdoch’s business success. That’s because the kind of right-wing propaganda that makes the greatest amount of money is not reality-based; it’s how we got birtherism, the war on Christmas, Seth Rich, ivermectin, the “great replacement theory,” and election denialism. Walking up to the edge of what might destroy them, and doing an about-face that might involve paying off an aggrieved party, is not a mistake but a business strategy.

It is magical thinking to believe that Rupert and Lachlan have any interest in abandoning a strategy that constitutes their DNA. The Murdochs will not save us from the Murdochs.

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5 24

fox News and the MAGA media are lining up their shot at American democracy

The bullet is in the chamber

WRITTEN BY MATT GERTZ

PUBLISHED 05/14/24

With the presidential election less than half a year away, evidence is everywhere that the right is planning to end the American experiment in representative government if it fails to legitimately return Donald Trump to the White House.

It was clear just a few months after Trump’s seditious plot to subvert the 2020 presidential election concluded with a violent mob of his supporters storming the U.S. Capitol that the right-wing propaganda apparatus was laying the groundwork to try again in 2024. Fox News and the rest of the MAGA media, which spent the weeks after the 2020 election fabricating and amplifying a host of election fraud lies and conspiracy theories to undermine the results, had begun working to institutionalize Trump’s lie that the 2020 election had been stolen from him and to construct an alternative path to the presidency in which compliant party officials would secure a Republican victory by any means necessary.

Fox had become a loaded gun aimed at American democracy. Three years later, the bullet is in the chamber.

The disinformation ecosystem which revolves around Fox is telegraphing a plan to reject the results of the 2024 election if Trump loses. The former president’s propagandists will once again use baseless allegations of widespread fraud as a pretext to seek to overturn the vote — and GOP leaders are publicly signaling their willingness to comply.

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Ultimately, this preordained coup scheme may not matter. As in 2020, Joe Biden might win by too large a margin in too many states for the plot to succeed. Or, as in 2016, Trump might win outright.

But in the event that Biden triumphs in a close election, the MAGA faithful have developed and road-tested a plan to steal it.

Fox stars aided Trump’s 2020 subversion plot. They were lying. And they’ll do it again.

It is sometimes unclear whether Fox’s falsehoods are deliberate lies. But filings in Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation suit, which the network settled in April 2023 for $787.5 million, demonstrate beyond dispute that Fox’s coverage of the 2020 election results was rooted in malicious fabrication.

Fox’s top executives and biggest stars knew for a fact that Biden was the legitimate winner of the 2020 election, even as the network’s coverage sought to undermine the legitimacy of the vote. The network, filings show, was intentionally peddling conspiracy theories in support of Trump’s stolen-election deception in order to compete with its far-right rivals.

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These lies mattered. Communications revealed by the suit show that top Fox executives were aware the network was “uniquely positioned to state the message that the election was not stolen” but did not out of fears of losing viewers. They further show that when then-Fox Corp. Chair Rupert Murdoch asked his employees for evidence Fox had “fed the story that the election was stolen and that January 6 [was] an important chance to have the results overturned,” he received a list of 50 examples in response.

But the only lesson Fox’s executives apparently learned from fueling an attempted coup is that they need better lawyering to keep their damning internal emails and text messages off the front pages and avoid paying a record settlement.

Fox retained and even promoted some of its most unhinged election deniers, while punishing or even firing employees who fought the false narratives. In the years that followed, the network restocked its prime-time lineup with Trump loyalists who parrot whatever the former president says, put Trump allies and even a family member on the payroll, and replaced “news side” veterans with GOP operatives.

It’s no wonder that former employees keep loudly warning that Fox is a dangerous cesspool that produces Trumpian propaganda. The cogs who remain on the job, meanwhile, know without a doubt that they are part of a machine that manufactures lies. The pressure the network faces to hold on to its audience — including by promoting voter fraud conspiracy theories and other right-wing extremism — is stronger than ever. And so if Trump demands that Fox’s propagandists again focus on building him a pretext to overturn an election, they will do it.

The emerging right-wing scheme to overturn the 2024 election

Trumpists in the media and elsewhere have spent the years since Trump’s defeat laying the groundwork to rerun his subversion plot, systematically removing the guardrails that helped stymie the scheme in 2020, and helping him back to the Republican nomination. The result is a turnkey operation prepared to generate false election fraud claims and convert them into a rationale for Republican political leaders to reverse the results of the election and reinstall Trump in the White House.

MAGA propagandists are priming their audiences to disbelieve the election results and take action in response. They keep viewers in a state of terror with incendiary warnings that Biden is a jack-booted dictator who is deliberately trying to endanger their families, ensuring that some fraction would seek his removal by any means necessary. They valorize the January 6 insurrectionists as honorable patriots who did what they thought was right and were smeared by the media and punished by “deep state” malefactors. They flood the right-wing information ecosystem with lies and conspiracy theories about Democrats tainting past election results.

And they have already begun warning that the 2024 election will be rife with election fraud — and that only such cheating could explain a Trump defeat.

Video

CitationFrom the March 25, 2024, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room

STEVE BANNON (HOST): There are no “issues" with the 2020 election — they stole it. Let me repeat that. They stole it. And they hate when we say this. They stole it. And they're on notice. They're not going to be able to steal it again. People are doing a ton of work on this, and that's still not enough, but it's going to get better. The hairy eyeball is going to be on them.

The only way they defeat Trump is to steal it. The only way they defeat Trump is they steal it. The only way they defeat Trump is they steal it. He is unstoppable.

We saw how this played out in 2020: Trump’s coup plan relied on blanketing right-wing media with stolen-election lies in order to provide cover for GOP partisans to reverse the outcome in states Biden won. Under pressure from the Fox-addled rank and file, Republican election officials would refuse to certify results in key areas, GOP state legislators would overturn the results, and GOP members of Congress and Vice President Mike Pence would hand Trump the election.

This scheme failed in part because too many Republican officials were unwilling to aid the effort. But since then, Trumpist propagandists like War Room host Steve Bannon and Fox’s lineup of right-wing stars have helped make election denial a core GOP value, and now, the guardrails are collapsing:

Donald Trump will once again stand as the Republican presidential nominee this fall, less than four years after he attempted a coup to remain in office. He still maintains, unbowed by time, notoriety, or criminal charges, that the 2020 election was stolen. At the same time, he has embraced the January 6 offenders, regularly describing them as “hostages,” promising to consider blanket pardons for their actions, and treating their attack on the Capitol as “not a moment of national shame but of celebration,” as NPR described it.

None of this seemed to give right-wing propagandists much pause as Trump romped to the nomination. The Murdochs may have begun the primary season with other plans, but Fox had spent years crafting a political environment in which any criticism of Trump was inherently illegitimate, and its stars ultimately rallied to his side.

As Trump’s victory became inevitable, his vanquished rivals were reduced to complaining — accurately — that Fox and its ilk had taken Trump’s side, while the few right-wing commentators who had criticized Trump and endorsed his primary opponents bent the knee.

If he loses in 2024, Trump will reject the results and seek to overturn them, as he has throughout his political career. Indeed, he began laying the groundwork for such a strategy during the GOP primaries, warning that only Democratic “cheating” could explain such an outcome. And he has no apparent qualms over whether his deliberate radicalization of his supporters leads to right-wing political violence. Indeed, he is signaling that is exactly what he wants.

No one can say they didn’t know what was coming

Here’s part of an interview with Trump that Time magazine published on April 30, six months before Election Day:

Mr. President, in our last conversation you said you weren't worried about political violence in connection with the November election. You said, “I think we're going to win and there won't be violence.” What if you don't win, sir?

Trump: Well, I do think we're gonna win. We're way ahead. I don't think they'll be able to do the things that they did the last time, which were horrible. Absolutely horrible. So many, so many different things they did, which were in total violation of what was supposed to be happening. And you know that and everybody knows that. We can recite them, go down a list that would be an arm’s long. But I don't think we're going to have that. I think we're going to win. And if we don't win, you know, it depends. It always depends on the fairness of an election. I don't believe they'll be able to do the things that they did the last time. I don't think they'll be able to get away with it. And if that's the case, we're gonna win in record-setting fashion.

Polls suggest that the 2024 presidential election will be close. But according to Trump, he’s “way ahead” and on track to win “in record-setting fashion.” The only thing that can prevent that outcome, Trump claims, is “the things that they did the last time,” i.e. the Democratic election fraud conspiracy theories he’s been hocking since before the 2020 vote. And if that happens, Trump says, his supporters might respond to such a result with violence.

None of this is even remotely subtle.

In the lead-up to the 2020 election, some political commentators expressed doubts over whether Trump would really respond to defeat by refusing to accept the election results and taking action to try to remain in office.

But that is precisely what Trump did. Now he is saying quite clearly that he will do it again if given the chance. And his propagandists in the right-wing media will have had four years to lay the groundwork to ensure his plot’s success.

Five days after the Time interview dropped, Semafor founder Ben Smith published a Q-and-A with Joe Kahn, the executive editor of The New York Times. The interview began like this:

Ben Smith: Dan Pfeiffer, who used to work for Barack Obama, recently wrote of the Times: “They do not see their job as saving democracy or stopping an authoritarian from taking power.” Why don’t you see your job as: “We’ve got to stop Trump?” What about your job doesn’t let you think that way?

Joe Kahn: Good media is the Fourth Estate, it’s another pillar of democracy. One of the absolute necessities of democracy is having a free and fair and open election where people can compete for votes, and the role of the news media in that environment is not to skew your coverage towards one candidate or the other, but just to provide very good, hard-hitting, well-rounded coverage of both candidates, and informing voters. If you believe in democracy, I don’t see how we get past the essential role of quality media in informing people about their choice in a presidential election.

To say that the threats of democracy are so great that the media is going to abandon its central role as a source of impartial information to help people vote — that’s essentially saying that the news media should become a propaganda arm for a single candidate, because we prefer that candidate’s agenda. It is true that Biden’s agenda is more in sync with traditional establishment parties and candidates. And we’re reporting on that and making it very clear.

It’s also true that Trump could win this election in a popular vote. Given that Trump’s not in office, it will probably be fair. And there’s a very good chance, based on our polling and other independent polling, that he will win that election in a popular vote. So there are people out there in the world who may decide, based on their democratic rights, to elect Donald Trump as president. It is not the job of the news media to prevent that from happening. It’s the job of Biden and the people around Biden to prevent that from happening.

> It’s our job to cover the full range of issues that people have. At the moment, democracy is one of them. But it’s not the top one — immigration happens to be the top [of polls], and the economy and inflation is the second. Should we stop covering those things because they’re favorable to Trump and minimize them? I don’t even know how it’s supposed to work in the view of Dan Pfeiffer or the White House. We become an instrument of the Biden campaign? We turn ourselves into Xinhua News Agency or Pravda and put out a stream of stuff that’s very, very favorable to them and only write negative stories about the other side? And that would accomplish — what?

That exchange generated a lot of smart responses. Critics pointed out that Smith’s question mischaracterized Pfeiffer’s critique; that Kahn’s response ignores the actual criticisms mounted by his paper’s critics, including Biden himself; that the Times’ business interests lead Kahn to endorse “a kind of performative neutrality in politics coverage”; and that, contra Kahn’s claims, the Times does not generally base its coverage decisions on polling and, if it did, the result should be a greater focus on the impact of Trump’s policy proposals on inflation and immigration than the paper actually provides.

What strikes me most about Kahn’s answer is his apparent lack of urgency. A former president left office after using the lie that the election he lost had been rigged to try to reverse the outcome, culminating in a violent assault by his supporters on the U.S. Capitol. He has all but promised to try again, and after transforming his party into a personality cult which treats the insurrectionists as heroes and his election lie as unvarnished truth, he very well could succeed.

That is the central reality of the 2024 presidential election, one that should be foregrounded to the readers and viewers on news outlets at every opportunity but often fades from the discourse. The former president’s media allies are foreshadowing their eagerness to take every possible opportunity to participate in his scheme. And the leader of the nation’s most powerful mainstream press organ gives no indication that he has considered those implications in any but the shallowest way. We are all in a lot of trouble.

//

Fox News propagandists and GOP leaders are pushing the country toward the abyss

11/06/20

Fox News is a loaded gun aimed at American democracy

05/14/21

They did it and will do it again – if no one stops them

mma 4 24

Murdoch-owned media outlets are pushing a smear campaign to undermine President Joe Biden’s middle-out economic agenda, falsely claiming he is “going to raise taxes on the middle class” if re-elected this year. In fact, Biden has repeatedly promised to maintain lower and middle-class tax rates and to let scheduled expirations of Trump's 2017 trickle-down tax cut scheme go into effect only for individuals with incomes above $400,000.

Trump's tax plan — a giveaway that overwhelmingly benefitted wealthy individuals and highly profitable and powerful corporations — was passed by the Republican-controlled Congress on a party-line vote in both the House and Senate in 2017 as the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Trump and the Republican Party own all of the effects of the legislation, including the scheduled expiration of the income tax cuts at the end of 2025, which Republicans wrote into the law. (The GOP-controlled Senate failed to pass a permanent extension of the Trump tax cuts for individuals in 2018.)

*Trump wants media to blame Biden for his own signature legislation

In an April 15 post on Truth Social, former president and presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump misleadingly claimed that under Biden, “you will soon be facing colossal tax HIKES” due to the expiration of Trump’s 2017 tax cut legislation. FactCheck.org explained, however: “As he has since the 2020 campaign, Biden’s FY 2025 budget vows not to increase taxes on people earning less than $400,000.”

“In order to keep that pledge, Biden would have to extend most of the individual income tax provisions enacted in the [2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act] that are set to expire at the end of 2025,” FactCheck.org further explained. “And that’s what Biden says he would do — but only for individual filers earning less than $400,000 and married couples making less than $450,000.” (As of 2022, an income of $400,000 was more than five times the median household income of nearly $75,000, according to the most recent figures from the U.S. Census Bureau.)

This isn’t the first time Trump and his right-wing allies have run this playbook against Biden. In 2021, just a few months into his term, President Biden produced a budget proposal that did not include permanent extensions of Trump’s fiscally disastrous tax policies. In response, a chorus of right-wing media figures falsely claimed that Biden had broken his promise not to raise taxes on the middle class and framed the looming sunset of Trump's tax policies as “a Biden tax hike.”

The situation is reminiscent of a right-wing smear campaign directed at then-President Barack Obama in 2010 and 2012, when former President George W. Bush’s 2001 and 2003 tax cuts were set to expire. At the time, Fox News warned viewers that the Obama administration would enact the “largest tax hike ever,” ignoring Obama’s promise (which is similar to the one Biden makes now) to preserve income tax cuts for all but the top 2% of earners. The resulting deal between Obama and a Republican-controlled House of Representatives in January 2013 preserved most of the Bush Era tax cuts, with the exception of those benefiting just the top 1% of incomes.

These outlets are also relying heavily on a blog post from March by the right-leaning Tax Foundation, which generally supports reducing taxes and government spending. That post, however, simply analyzed what would happen if all the tax cuts expired, as they were designed to do by the Republicans who drafted and enacted them, and did not include context about Biden’s proposals to allow them to expire only for the highest tax brackets. In another analysis posted this week, the Tax Foundation also noted as precedent that after the Obama Era fight over Bush's lingering tax policies in 2010 and 2012, “Ultimately, most of the tax cuts were made permanent, with the exception of the reduction in the top marginal tax rate.”

related

Fox falsely claims Trump’s trickle-down tax cuts for the wealthy were directed at the middle class 04/16/24

  1. ### Fox continues to mislead about grocery inflation

04/11/24

  1. ### Misinformation has Americans depressed about the economy

04/04/24

as Rupert Murdoch steps down as the head of Fox, his destructive legacy remains

Murdoch’s efforts to inject American homes with right-wing misinformation have torn families apart

WRITTEN BY AUDREY MCCABE

PUBLISHED 11/17/23

During Rupert Murdoch’s 25-year tenure as the head of Fox, he created a right-wing misinformation machine, subsidized by cable customers, that played an essential role in former President Donald Trump’s rise to power and subsequent attempts to stay in power by stealing the 2020 election. The network has divided not just Americans, but also families, with the anger and bigotry stoked by Fox destroying relationships among loved ones.

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mma mg 1 24

Several Republican governors responded to the campaign by Donald Trump and his right-wing media allies to undermine the credibility of the 2020 election by signing bills making it more difficult to vote. But Florida’s Ron DeSantis stood out from the pack thanks to the unique venue for his May 2021 signing ceremony: a live, exclusive appearance in front of a cheering crowd of supporters on Fox & Friends, the Fox News morning show beloved by the former president.

DeSantis’ rise to political prominence shows how a canny politician attuned to the right-wing press can use its power to become a plausible presidential contender. But the collapse of his presidential campaign, which came to an end when he endorsed Trump on Sunday before the New Hampshire primary, demonstrates the limitations of such a strategy given the right-wing media imperative to support Trump.

DeSantis first won the governorship in 2018 by running a “Fox first campaign.” When he announced his candidacy — on Fox & Friends, naturally —- he was an undistinguished House backbencher in his third term facing an uphill climb in the GOP primary against a candidate who already held statewide office and had locked up the support of the state’s party establishment. DeSantis countered those advantages by staying in front of Florida’s GOP voters on their favorite right-wing TV channels. He made more than 100 appearances on Fox News and Fox Business — winning Trump’s endorsement with his on-air defenses of the then-president from the Russia probe — and touted his support from Fox hosts Mark Levin and Sean Hannity, the latter of whom appeared with him on the campaign trail.

As governor, DeSantis became a star in the right-wing media by fixating on its obsessions and using state power to cudgel its foes. He first drew plaudits for his lax handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, which mimicked the response from Fox hosts and other influential figures downplaying the danger posed by the virus. And after the right responded to Trump’s defeat by refocusing its ire on “critical race theory” and other examples of “wokeness,” DeSantis made those topics the linchpin of his policy agenda. While Fox hosts bemoaned “groomer” public school educators and “woke” universities and entertainment companies, DeSantis signed laws weaponizing his base against the state’s teachers, put right-wing ideologues in command of one of its colleges, and went to war with Disney.

DeSantis’ popularity with Fox hosts and other influential figures in right-wing media made him seem like a plausible contender for president, particularly after his 2022 reelection. He benefited from the support of Rupert Murdoch, who hoped to move past Trump after the horrors of January 6, and anti-anti-Trump figures at outlets like The Daily Wire and National Review, who preferred that Trump not return as the GOP’s presidential nominee. DeSantis sought to stoke that support by giving privileged access to right-wing influencers while freezing out the mainstream press.

But DeSantis’ disastrous presidential announcement — an interview with Elon Musk in a glitchy Twitter Spaces, followed by a Q&A with the right-wing media influencers in attendance that focused on their picayune concerns — was somehow the campaign’s high-water mark. The various accounts of his campaign’s demise point to a slew of reasons he never caught on with Republican voters, but two factors point to the limitations of his right-wing media-focused strategy.

First, DeSantis garnered support from the right-wing press and their audiences by focusing on their grievances and obsessions. But those focuses did not help him grow national support, either because they were no longer major forward-looking political issues, like pandemic response, or because they were niche concerns that were alien to normal people, like his self-identification as a general in the “war on woke.”

Second, Fox’s stars — the most influential in the right-wing media constellation — might like DeSantis, but they are dependent on Trump and his supporters, who make up their audiences. They never broke with the former president; the cult of personality they built for him made it virtually impossible for his rivals to gain traction; and once federal and state prosecutors began indicting Trump on various charges, their ongoing support was crucial in securing his unassailable position. And they did not come to DeSantis’ aid when he came under fire from Trump — even on ludicrous claims, such as Trump’s attempt to brand DeSantis as a “groomer.” Before the first GOP primary votes had been cast, Fox hosts were already preparing a return to their role as Trump’s personal propaganda outlet.

DeSantis spent the final days of his campaign complaining that Fox hadn’t been willing to take on Trump, and drawing attention to one of the few avenues for criticizing him the network hadn’t preempted — the former president’s role in ensuring the development of COVID-19 vaccines. It was a fitting conclusion for a presidential bid that rose and fell on its relationship with the right-wing media.

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aha doh i did not include fox in jrnl fail or corp bad actor bc i just assumed they wd be, thus not worth noting?!

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an 8 23 no lnx

in his determination to choose a 2024 GOP nominee other than ex-President Donald Trump, right-wing media magnate Rupert Murdoch is interested in selecting Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin,The Washington Post reports.

According to a November 2022 report from The Guardian, "Rupert Murdoch has reportedly warned Donald Trump his media empire will not back any attempt to return to the White House, as former supporters turn to the youthful Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. After the Republican Party's disappointing performance in the U.S. midterm elections, in particular the poor showing by candidates backed by Trump, Murdoch's right-wing media empire appears to be seeking a clean break from the former president's damaged reputation and perceived waning political power."

However, last month the right-wing media mogul, according to five anonymous sources interviewed byRolling Stone, expressed "doubts and frustrations," regarding the DeSantis' 2024 campaign, "in private discussions and calls, at times wondering if a 'comeback'" from the governor "is possible at this point."

According to The Post, The New York Times reports "in a story on how Fox's coverage of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis turned tougher as his presidential campaign began struggling — that Murdoch had privately told people that he would like Youngkin to enter the race."

Furthermore, the newspaper notes, "It was not known until now that" Murdoch "had personally encouraged Youngkin to jump in— although the Virginia governor is thought to be waiting for whether his party prevails in the state's November elections before making a decision on whether to run" for president.

"If no alternative to Mr. Trump breaks through, nervous Republican donors and voters will start looking for a lifeboat, and Glenn Youngkin just may prove seaworthy," Wall Street Journal editorial board member Kate Bachelder Odell wrote earlier this month, according to The Post.

However, The Post reports "some donors who've soured on DeSantis are not ready to turn to Youngkin, including top Republican donor Andrew Sabin," who "backed Trump in 2016 and 2020, planned to support DeSantis this time, soured on him in the spring and next turned next to Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina."

READ MORE: Why Glenn Youngkin’s 'political brand' is in jeopardy in Virginia: report

Sabin said, "I like him a lot, but I really would like to see him finish out his term in Virginia. Show the people of the country he's a great governor and he deserves to be president in '28."

The Postnotes:

Murdoch's support could be a great asset to any White House hopeful given his media empire's reach with conservative audiences, but it is no golden ticket. In addition, Murdoch is ultimately a pragmatist and the people familiar with the Youngkin discussions said that Murdoch could once again throw his support behind Trump. But given Fox's settlement with Dominion, the media mogul is more tentative than ever about the former president, these people said.

Still, according tot he report, despite Youngkin's "ties to the donor class and a personal fortune that Forbes put at $470 million at the time of his election, appeal to evangelicals as someone who started a church in his basement, and ability to wage MAGA culture wars in the style of the friendly dad next door," he still faces "tremendous logistical hurdles if he sticks with his plan to stay out of the race until after Virginia’s Nov. 7 General Assembly races."

Per The Post, "Filing deadlines to get on the presidential ballot will have passed in some key states by that date or soon after."

READ MORE: 'Fail': Critics blast Glenn Youngkin over claim Trump is victim just like 'parents in Virginia'

The Washington Post's full report is available at this link (subscription required).

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down 45% in demo, 30% overall?  post tucker?  watters flat out lies on biden $? legal jeopardy?

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-prime-time-ratings-continue-crater-lachlan-murdoch-downplays-collapse

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https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/**how-fox-paved-way-desantis-anti-vax-hit-trump

Thanks to Fox News, the Republican Party is embroiled in a furious debate over whether it was a good idea to save millions of American lives.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ nascent campaign for the Republican presidential nomination is floundering in the early going. He entered the race last month with a sizable polling deficit behind former President Donald Trump, his Twitter Spaces announcement event was a disaster, and his initial rollout hasn’t produced a bump in his support. DeSantis has seemed reluctant to go after his chief opponent, and when he has the results have been lackluster.

But on Thursday afternoon, his campaign opened a new line of attack, targeting the former president for his role in the development of the COVID-19 vaccines. The “DeSantis War Room” posted a video on Twitter of an Iowa town hall attendee telling Trump “we have lost people because you supported the jab.” The DeSantis account reported that Trump responded “by praising the COVID mRNA shots, doesn't acknowledge any of the adverse effects" [twit vid]

the DeSantis camp’s anti-vax attack on Trump speaks to the influence of right-wing media outlets like Fox in shaping the battlefield for the 2024 primary campaign.Their reflexive support for Trump over the years on issues like his role in the January 6 insurrection, his noxious racism, and his various alleged crimes put those topics off-limits for his opponents. But while some at Foxinitially credited Trump with ensuring the development of the vaccines, the network paved the way for the DeSantis campaign’s salvo by spending much of the last two-plus years stoking fears among its viewers about the shots.

Fox emerged as the most ferocious opponent of the COVID-19 vaccines, which provide crucial protection with a minimal risk profile and have prevented millions of American deaths from the virus since their initial U.S. deployment in December 2020. The network’s most popular figures regularly denounced the shots as dangerous and ineffective and the vaccination campaign as a nefarious plot to control Americans. Fox’s coverage worsened over time, and by the early weeks of 2023 a whopping 78% of the network’s vaccine segments included claims undermining vaccinations. The results have been devastating, with Republicans getting vaccinated against COVID-19 at lower rates than other Americans and dying from it at higher ones.

Fox’s lethal coverage of COVID-19 vaccines presented an opportunity for ambitious politicians like DeSantis, who is particularly attuned to what happens on the network and in the broader right-wing press. DeSantis once touted his own efforts to distribute the vaccines, which he credited with “saving lives.” But as the right’s discourse changed, he changed with it.

DeSantis cozied up to the GOP’s anti-vax wing — and used his power as governor on their behalf.DeSantis’ Florida is the only state that does not recommend the COVID-19 vaccine for children, and it “recommends against males aged 18 to 39 receiving mRNA COVID-19 vaccines” after a flawed study that was politically tainted by the vaccine skeptic DeSantis appointed as the state’s top medical officer found the shots were harmful for that group. DeSantis even called for a grand jury to investigate “any and all wrongdoing” related to the vaccines and “bring legal accountability to those who committed misconduct.” 

Now DeSantis’ campaign is deploying the vaccines as a wedge issue,trying to make the case that the GOP electorate should oppose Trump due to his involvement in their development. The conservative reaction has been diverse, with Never Trumpers criticizing DeSantis for promoting “anti-vax nonsense,” anti-anti-Trumpersmaking excuses, and right-wing anti-vaxxers denouncing Trump.

One person who hasn’t weighed in is Rupert Murdoch, the Fox head and reported DeSantis supporter who was among the first to get the shot — then abandoned his viewers to the virus.

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92 yo has made big decisions recently, some reversed?

an 4 23

no lnx

fox News is in possession of potentially damaging information about Tucker Carlson in a dossier its executives compiled in case the conservative cable host ever sought to attack the network, Rolling Stone reports.

That threat is no longer hypothetical after Fox News’ announcement on Monday that it has cut ties with Carlson, and split sources told the outlet that it was “the worst” and on “the messiest possible terms,” descriptions that are at odds with the network’s characterization of a mutual and amicable decision to depart with its highest-rated host.

The existence of an “oppo file” on Carlson was confirmed to the outlet by eight sources. A network spokesperson denied that such a dossier exists.

The file contains allegations Carlson created a toxic work environment and includes claims that he made disparaging comments about management and colleagues, as well as complaints about his workplace conduct.

Carlson has so far remained mum about the circumstances behind his dismissal.

“But if Carlson attempts to torch the network he’s leaving, Fox is prepared, the sources say,” Rolling Stone’s Diana Falzone writes.

The effort to compile a Carlson dossier was led by the “notoriously aggressive” Irena Briganti, who heads the network’s communications department, the report said.

“Irena will never be shy about using these things,” a network source familiar with complaints about Carlson told Rolling Stone.

A former Fox host told the outlet “[Briganti] keeps files on everybody to screw with them.”

“It’s classic Fox.”

Falzone writes: “Over the years, Briganti and Fox PR’s notoriously aggressive tactics have been turned against its own most prominent talent. For instance, The Daily Beast reported in 2018 that 'emails reviewed and verified’ by the outlet show that Fox’s communications brass have planted negative stories about some of their own top stars, including hosts like Bill O’Reilly and Stuart Varney — the latter of whom is still a Fox employee."

“Those methods for keeping personnel in line are an open secret among current and former Fox News staff. Four former Fox News personalities confirmed Briganti likes to keep ‘dirt files’ on Fox News talent, including one on Carlson.”

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As Rupert Murdoch steps down as the head of Fox, his destructive legacy remains | Media Matters for America

as Rupert Murdoch steps down as the head of Fox, his destructive legacy remains

Murdoch’s efforts to inject American homes with right-wing misinformation have torn families apart

WRITTEN BY AUDREY MCCABE

PUBLISHED 11/17/23

During Rupert Murdoch’s 25-year tenure as the head of Fox, he created a right-wing misinformation machine, subsidized by cable customers, that played an essential role in former President Donald Trump’s rise to power and subsequent attempts to stay in power by stealing the 2020 election. The network has divided not just Americans, but also families, with the anger and bigotry stoked by Fox destroying relationships among loved ones.

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https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/foxs-handling-jeanine-pirros-election-conspiracy-theories-reveals-full-extent-its fuckery

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an 3 23

although former President Barack Obama has often been critical of Fox News, he hasn't avoided the right-wing cable news channel altogether. Obama, over the years, has been interviewed by Fox News hosts ranging from Chris Wallace (now with CNN) to Bret Baier to Bill O’Reilly (who Fox News fired in 2017).

Those appearances underscore Obama's belief that it is important for Democrats to have a dialogue with conservatives, disagreements and all — a belief he shares with President Joe Biden, who has bragged about the productive relationships he had in the past with President Ronald Reagan, Sen. John McCain (R-Arizona) and other conservative Republicans.

But when Obama, according to The Guardian, GUK made a late March appearance in Sydney, Australia, he called out Fox News' Rupert Murdoch as a divisive figure whose business model is designed to "make people angry and resentful."

READ MORE:Dominion’s damning revelations underscore the 'full corruption of Fox News': former Reagan speechwriter

Speaking at Sydney’s Aware Super Theater on Tuesday night, March 28, Obama told a crowd of around 9000 people, "Here's the good news about the U.S., though: We're not quite as polarized as we seem. Sixty to 65 percent of the country — let's call it 70 percent — does occupy a reality-based world. And that's true within the Republicans."

Obama continued, "There's one other factor that's led to this polarization — this is global, this is not unique to the United States — and that is the shifts in the media and the story that is told to people. And there's a guy you may be familiar with, first name Rupert, who was responsible for a lot of this."

Murdoch, according to Obama, "perfected" a "broader trend" with "the advent of cable (television), talk radio and then social media."

Obama told the Australian crowd, "It's now a wild west and a splintering of media. And if all you're doing is — in America, it's Fox News, here I guess it's Sky, whatever it is — if all you're doing is watching one source of news…. we're going to have our own news and our own perspective…. You no longer have a joint conversation and a shared story….And if you throw in some good old-fashioned racism and xenophobia and sexism and homophobia…. it's very difficult to compromise around identity politics."

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testimony given by Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo in Dominion Voting System's $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit could punch a hole in the reported lawyers defense strategy for Fox News are using to stave off what one legal analyst called the possibility of a "financial death penalty."

:{:{According to a report from the Los Angeles Times, attorneys for the embattled conservative news network are trying to dismiss private emails and text messages exchanged by on-air personalities and executives where they admitted they were trafficking in lies about 2020 election fraud with Dominion singled out.}:

}:

Attorneys for Fox have suggested that the Fox hosts were just offering opinions, not making statements of fact, when spreading the election lies, but Bartiromo is presenting them with a major problem as they try to make their case.

As the Times is reporting, "In released court documents and deposition testimony connected to the case, Bartiromo is cited throughout for allowing former President Trump's false claims about 2020 election fraud to air on the network in an effort to stop angry viewers from abandoning the network," before adding, "Court testimony shows that in the days leading up to and following the 2020 election, colleagues and executives raised questions about Bartiromo's online activity and expressed concerns that she was influenced by right-wing conspiracy theorists."

With the report adding, "Bartiromo is one of four Fox News and Fox Business Network personalities cited in the suit along with Sean Hannity, Jeanine Pirro and Lou Dobbs, who is no longer part of the company. Fox Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch admitted under oath that they all promoted false claims about the 2020 election, which he believed was fair," the Times is reporting that Bartiromo stated in testimony that she is a journalist and not an on-air personality providing commentary -- and that is a problem for Fox.

"The difference with Bartiromo is she identifies as a news anchor, as she indicated in her testimony," The Times is reporting. "Hannity, Dobbs and Pirro are considered opinion hosts, and executives at Fox News testified that they are not held to the same journalistic standards as straight news programs."

Even worse for the embattled news network, the Times notes, "Bartiromo testified that no one in management did anything to stop her or force her to correct the record."

"Bartiromo herself made misstatements, such as repeating inaccurate claims that Dominion was owned by voting software company Smartmatic, which is also suing Fox News and other conservative networks for defamation," the report states before adding, "... several Fox News executives in their testimony concurred with Dominion's assertions that Bartiromo did not challenge any of [Sidney] Powell's false statements when she appeared on 'Sunday Morning Futures.' Bartiromo also admitted that she never presented any evidence to counter Powell's claims, even though she was provided with correct information provided by Dominion and other Fox News journalists."

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fox back desantis bigly

https://www.mediamatters.org/steve-bannon/steve-bannon-says-murdoch-family-trying-destroy-united-states-america

mark levin?

https://www.alternet.org/fox-host-slams-bannon-criticism/

https://www.alternet.org/bannon-cpac-fox-news-murdoch/

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dom filing shows rupert and lachlan allowed big lie to recover post az call vs wannabees oan newzmax

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dominion discovery --> mma 3 23

The recently released legal filing in Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News shows the extent to which multiple Fox executives and anchors knew that the network was pushing lies about the 2020 presidential election results on air. The filing also contains a startling statement by Fox Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch: that Fox News executives who knowingly allowed lies to be broadcast should potentially be fired. From the filing (emphasis in original):

Q. What should the consequences be when Fox News executives knowingly allow lies to be broadcast? A.  They should be reprimanded – They should be reprimanded, maybe got rid of.Rupert Murdoch, Chairman, Fox Corporation.

The filings also show the extent to which Fox executives knowingly spread the conspiracy theory that Dominion Voting Systems had rigged the election at least in part in order to keep up with its far-right media competitors. These decisions now leave multiple Fox executives implicated as potentially worthy of firing, according to Rupert Murdoch’s own declared standard.

Rupert Murdoch

First off, and most obvious, is Rupert Murdoch himself. As chairman of the Fox Corp., Murdoch could have intervened at any time and stopped the hosts and guests featured on his network from spreading lies about the 2020 election, a fact that he bluntly admitted under questioning by Dominion’s lawyers. From the filing:

Q. And you could have said to Suzanne Scott or to the hosts, “Stop putting Rudy Giuliani on the air”?

A. I could have. But I didn't.

Furthermore, Murdoch did nothing about the entreaties by Fox board member Paul Ryan, a former Republican speaker of the House, who argued according to the filing “that Fox News should not be spreading conspiracy theories.”

Murdoch did, however, take direct action to get rid of a Fox executive who told the truth. On November 20, 2020, Murdoch personally signed off on firing vice president and Washington managing editor Bill Sammon, who had been involved in the network’s projection that President Joe Biden had won Arizona, which assured Biden his Electoral College victory. “Maybe best to let Bill go right away,” Murdoch said, per the filing, adding that this move would “be a big message with Trump people.”

Lachlan Murdoch

Rupert Murdoch’s son and Fox Corp. CEO Lachlan Murdoch is also clearly guilty under the standard that his father enunciated, as he helped tailor the network’s messaging to help promote lies about the election. As just one example,Lachlan instructed the network to give positive coverage to a “Stop the Steal” rally on November 14, 2020,which served as a prelude to the January 6 insurrection, and to brand the violent and far-right event as a “celebration of the president.”

The Dominion filing further alleges that in addition to Lachlan’s close interactions with his other key executives, “specific evidence shows he attended the November 13 afternoon editorial meeting” that preceded an episode ofLou Dobbs Tonight that featured disgraced Trump-allied attorney Sidney Powell.The then-Fox Business host Lou Dobbs repeatedly called Powell a “great American,” while she claimed that Dominion had been “created to produce altered voting results in Venezuela for Hugo Chavez, and then shipped internationally to manipulate votes for purchase in other countries, including this one.”

Suzanne Scott

Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott also played a clear role in spreading lies and suppressing the truth on the network. Under questioning, Scott affirmed that she had always believed, since at least when the network itself had called Arizona and thus the election on November 7, 2020, that in fact Biden had won legitimately.

And yet on multiple occasions, Scott reprimanded on-air talent who called out the lies and conspiracy theories. Examples include her involvement with Lachlan Murdoch in reprimanding then-anchor Leland Vittert’s coverage of the November 14 “Stop the Steal” rally, as well as her reported “screaming” about negative coverage by anchor Dana Perino and then-Fox reporter Kristen Fisher of the infamous November 19 press conference by Trump attorneys and election conspiracy theorists Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell. “The audience feels like we crapped on [them] and we have damaged their trust and belief in us….We can fix this but we cannot smirk at our viewers any longer,” Scott said at the time.

The filing also reveals that Scott worked personally to preserve the network’s relationship with right-wing billionaire conspiracy theoristMike Lindell, CEO of MyPillow, assisting him in spreading dangerous lies about the election and Dominion Voting Systems. In mid-December, after Lindell publicly claimed that Fox was supposedly “in on” stealing the election, the filing details that Scott sent a personal note and a gift to Lindell. She further suggested that shows should book Lindell in order to “get ratings.” (Rupert Murdoch himself admitted that Fox went out of its way to preserve its relationship with Lindell, one of the network’s largest advertisers, to shore up its profits.)

When the network later hosted Lindell on the January 26, 2021, edition of Tucker Carlson Tonight, the star prime-time host depicted his network’s top advertiser as a champion of free speech, rather than challenging him on his false claims about the election or his apparent effort to urge Trump to impose martial law.

Viet Dinh

Fox Corp. chief legal and policy officer Viet Dinh also admitted during his testimony that Fox executives had a duty to “prevent and correct” falsehoods.

Q. But when the executives at Fox News know that hosts of shows are broadcasting allegations that the executives know or believe to be false, in that situation, the executives have an obligation to act, right?

A. If they are within the chain of command and if they -- and if they come to that knowledge, yes.

Q. And by “act,” that means to put a stop to it, right?

Q. They have an obligation under those circumstances, the executives do, in the chain of command, to put a stop to those broadcasts, right, sir?

A. Yes, to prevent and correct known falsehoods.

Dinh confirmed under questioning that he had “pretty easily” been able to look up and debunk the claim that Dominion was owned by a Venezuelan company and founded in order to rig elections for the late dictator Hugo Chavez. But the filing suggests Dinh failed to require Fox News hosts and guests to debunk such easily discredited lies. On the contrary, the network aired that bogus claim over and over again.

Raj Shah

Fox Senior Vice President Raj Shahsent numerous internal communications about the damage to Fox’s reputation among conservative viewers, including the supposed “brand threat” posed by Fox figures who openly debunked Trump’s fake claims of mass election fraud. On November 13, he sent a “Brand Protection Unit Roundup” to Lachlan Murdoch, Dinh, and Scott, stating there was “strong conservative and viewer backlash to Fox that we are working to track and mitigate.” He further explained that “[p]ositive impressions of Fox News among our viewers dropped precipitously after Election Day to the lowest levels we’ve ever seen.”

In order to mitigate this damage, at one point he pitched the idea of “some sort of public mea culpa for the AZ call,” or “some programming that’s focused on hearing our viewers grievances about how we’ve handled the election.” In other words, Shah wanted the network to apologize for actually broadcasting a truthful story.

In another instance, when host Tucker Carlson briefly feuded with Sidney Powell, Shah instructed a producer for Carlson’s show to downplay the extent of her ludicrous claims. At the same time as Shah described Powell’s claims as “so fucking insane,” he also advised Carlson’s team to “pivot to being deferential.”

Shah suggested the phrasing “we hope she is able to provide the evidence in court and we’ll bring it to viewers when they do” — even though he knew no such evidence existed or could ever be offered in court. In another message just the next day, Shah described Powell’s claims as “MIND BLOWINGLY NUTS.”

Jay Wallace

Fox News President and Executive Editor Jay Wallace is also responsible for his inaction on the network’s continued lies about the election, even as a Dominion consultant repeatedly :{reached out to him personall:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:y (citations removed):

The day before the WSJ editorial and article appeared—November 16— Dominion’s Communications Consultant Tony Fratto, former Deputy White House Press Secretary under President George W. Bush, personally brought the false allegations to the attention of the two top executives at FNN—Scott and Wallace— telling them that Dominion, “as you know, has received a great deal of attention on FoxNews [sic] and from the President. An enormous amount of misinformation -- actually, completely and verifiable wrong information—is finding its way on-air.” Fratto offered to provide the two of them a briefing about Dominion and concluded: “I think this situation is crossing dangerous lines.” Scott responded asking Wallace to provide his thoughts, and Wallace and Fratto then spoke over the phone. When Lou Dobbs again broadcast lies about Dominion that very night, Fratto reached out again to Wallace. He forwarded part of the transcript to Wallace and told him: “More fucking out [and out] lies. Honestly. He is a disgrace.”

Irena Briganti

Irena Briganti, Fox News senior executive vice president of corporate communications, also presided over the network’s continued inaction, even as it was clearly brought to her attention via a press inquiry (citations removed):

On December 1, a reporter with The Washington Post emailed FNN stating that Powell had appeared on both Dobbs and Hannity’s programs the day before making claims of voting machine fraud. The reporter asked,

[D]oes Fox News Media management have any concerns about the veracity of the claims that Powell has been making on network shows? Is Sidney Powell welcome to appear on any Fox News Media show? Has Fox News Media encouraged show hosts to fact-check claims about voter fraud?

Irena Briganti forwarded the inquiry to Scott and Wallace, stating “FYI—we spoke with Lauren [Petterson] and Meade [Cooper] and there’s nothing to combat this, so we are not responding.”

David Clark

David Clark, senior vice president for weekend news and programming, was directly responsible for Fox host Maria Bartiromo’s Sunday Morning Futuresprogram, in which she hosted Giuliani and Powell. The filing reveals that he also agreed with the statement that there was “no credible evidence of massive cheating or fraud,” and yet he allowed her to continue spreading conspiracy theories by hosting figures such as Powell and Giuliani, and to not push back on them. Interestingly, the Dominion filing notes the ways in which Clark took active steps to temporarily rein in Fox host Jeanine Pirro, but he seemingly failed to do so with Bartiromo.

Fox Business executives

Fox Business executives Lauren PettersonandGary Schreier spoke of using Fox Business shows to grab viewers who were going away from Fox News proper, by supporting the election lies. (They just couldn’t be as open about it, compared to Fox’s far-right competition at Newsmax.) From the filing (citations removed):

The night of November 7, after Fox called the election, Fox Business Network (“FBN”) President Lauren Petterson wrote FBN executive Gary Schreier that she had turned off Fox’s coverage: “I don’t know how we work here. Honestly. We are going to look back at this week and know this was when we lost a significant part of our audience who won’t come back. As soon as Facebook starts telling people to go to [N]ewsmax.” But Schreier and Petterson saw an opening: “You know though between us. This is a problem for the channel yes. But if we keep doing what we do, fbn will get a bunch of the disenfranchised folks too.” Petterson responded: “100 percent. I was talking about exactly that with my husband last night.It’s actually an opening for us.” Schreier: “Yes. We just can’t play for it openly like newsmax and oan.”

cruz outrage at gigi comment fox state tv

Murdoch gave Jared Kushner 'confidential information' about Joe Biden’s campaign ads: court filing

David Badash The New Civil Rights Movement

February 27, 2023

Dominion Voting Systems has filed another bombshell court document, this time also around 200 pages, which provides additional damning evidence of how the company believes Fox News operated during the...

https://www.mediamatters.org/rupert-murdoch/according-court-filings-rupert-murdoch-banned-steve-bannon-being-fringe-embraced

many msg show bad trinity knew lying

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/they-knew-it-was-lie-behind-scenes-happenings-fox-while-network-pushed-false-claims-about

https://www.mediamatters.org/angelo-carusone/msnbc-angelo-carusone-says-dominion-filings-show-keyhole-view-what-fox-inside

https://www.mediamatters.org/2020-election-lawsuits/two-days-after-2020-election-fox-news-chief-political-anchor-bret-baier

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/abc-susan-glasser-details-how-fox-executives-lied-about-their-panic-over-ratings-amidst

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/cnn-contributor-breaks-down-how-fox-news-dominion-lawsuit-shows-fox-promoted-lies-led

https://www.mediamatters.org/angelo-carusone/angelo-carusone-there-will-be-serious-business-consequences-fox-news-because

https://www.mediamatters.org/2020-election-lawsuits/fox-news-lied-about-dominion-and-2020-election-compete-far-right-newsmax

https://www.mediamatters.org/:{rupert-murdoch/rupert-murdoch-told-fox-ceo-suzanne-scott-fox-news-would-concentrate-helping-any-way:(style="background-color:#ff9900;"):}:

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/new-filing-shows:{-tucker-carlson-tried-get-fox-reporter-fired-correctly-fact-checking:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:

https://www.mediamatters.org/angelo-carusone/msnbc-angelo-carusone-explains-how-dominions-new-filing-shows-fox-news

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/angelo-carusone-explosive-new-court-filings-prove-crystal-clarity-fox-knew-it-was-pushing

https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7byqw/rupert-murdoch-climate-change-fox-news-news-corp

vice no lnx

Rupert Murdoch Has Known We’ve Been in a Climate Emergency Since 2006, Documents Show

Murdoch’s News Corp has spent the past 15 years mitigating its own climate risk while giving media outlets like Fox News carte blanche to deny climate change altogether.

By Geoff Dembicki

September 23, 2021

When Kevin Rudd was prime minister of Australia, he lived in fear of Rupert Murdoch. The Labor Party leader came to power in 2007 promising to address the climate emergency, but attacks from Murdoch-owned outlets were relentless to the point where Rudd said he’d “wake up every morning and wonder how they would seek to crucify us that day, with rusty nails.”

Papers such as the Australian, the country’s equivalent of the New York Times, ran high-profile pieces attacking Rudd’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, an attempt to force companies to pay for the climate-warming carbon they release into the atmosphere, including a front-page story about an industry report claiming the policy would cost 23,000 resource sector jobs. And it worked: Australian Parliament eventually voted against Rudd’s carbon-reduction effort, his public opinion rating tanked, his own Labor Party led a coup against him, and he resigned in 2010. 

“If there was no Murdoch media here, or if, say, they only owned half the media instead of two-thirds of the media,” Rudd told VICE News, “we would have a carbon price today.”

What few people knew during all this is that the parent company of these Australian news outlets, Murdoch’s News Corporation, actually thought carbon pricing was a good idea. News Corp has meticulously documented its own carbon footprint since 2006 and sought to “take a leadership role on the issue of climate change” by reducing it, according to hundreds of pages of publicly available documents reviewed by VICE News.

Even as Murdoch-owned outlets tore down Rudd in 2010, News Corp was advocating “market-based mechanisms to support carbon reductions” in the U.S. and other places. This is according to documents submitted to the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), a nonprofit group that has for two decades catalogued and rated environmental reporting from more than 300 companies including Apple, Coca-Cola, and Ford Motors.

No one forced News Corp to make disclosures to the CDP, which the group publishes in a database on its website. And far from altruism, News Corp’s disclosures are cast as corporate self-interest. In 2010, for example, a filing explained that doing so would give the company “valuable expertise when responding to mandated reporting requirements” under a potential carbon pricing system, should any country implement one.

News Corp also modeled the potential financial damage it faced due to extreme weather, wildfires, and other physical dangers intensified by climate change. “The company believes it is in a better position than others to mitigate those risks,” the documents read.

News Corp has submitted yearly reports on its environmental progress to CDP since 2006, often receiving “A” grades for its efforts from the organization. Ateli Iyalla, North American managing director of the CDP, said News Corp’s disclosures place it among the world’s more responsible media corporations. “They have a strong understanding of climate issues and climate risk,” he told VICE News.

VICE News reviewed more than a decade’s worth of those submissions, and the documents show a company that’s taking steps to protect its operations and thousands of employees from a climate emergency it knows is getting worse, while giving a massive media platform to people who say the emergency isn’t real.

The documents show that News Corp privately acknowledged climate change is making hurricanes worse, even as a Wall Street Journal Europe editorial writer claimed in 2012 that “‘climate change’ shouldn’t be blamed for Hurricane Sandy.” The company in 2019 briefed employees on the dangers they could face from Australia’s “climate-related” bushfires as the Australian ran an editorial saying, “Experts keep telling us there is no direct link between climate change and bushfires; we know many fires are lit by arsonists.”

Murdoch’s company in its 2020 disclosure cited severe droughts in California that lead to wildfires as a potential example of the “physical aspects of climate change.” But his top-rated Fox News host, Tucker Carlson, attacked Democrats for “insisting without evidence that climate change is causing California wildfires.”

[News

Trump and Fox News Are Ripping Off Australia's Climate Denial Playbook

GEOFF DEMBICKI

09.16.20 ]

In its 2020 disclosure to CDP, News Corp said it carefully evaluates the risk of sea-level rise and flooding when deciding to acquire new facilities. That disclosure states that “members of the board are periodically updated” about the company’s sustainability initiatives and the risks it faces from climate disasters. The board of directors includes Murdoch himself. It also includes his eldest son, Lachlan, who is co-chairman of News Corp as well as CEO of Fox Corporation, the current corporate owner of Fox News. Meanwhile, one of Fox News’ rising stars, Greg Gutfeld, said this May the climate crisis “does not exist.”

VICE News presented a detailed list of questions asking about these events to News Corp, Fox News, Dow Jones (which publishes the Wall Street Journal), Fox Corporation, and the Australian, but none of these outlets and companies responded.

“If there’s a buck to be made, he’ll make a buck.”

Taking serious measures to reduce corporate emissions while spreading climate denial might seem like a huge contradiction. But there may be a simple, coherent strategy at work. Murdoch is saving tens of millions of dollars due to the green initiatives, and at the same time earning record profits by feeding his global audience rage-inducing content attacking “out-of-control” liberals and downplaying the crisis.

“If there’s a buck to be made,” Rudd said of Murdoch, “he’ll make a buck.”

Rupert Murdoch, now 90, seemed to abruptly decide in 2006 that the climate emergency was real.“Until recently, I was somewhat wary of the warming debate,” he said that year during a speech in Tokyo outlining political and economic challenges facing Asia and the world in the decades to come. But he had become convinced that “the planet deserves the benefit of the doubt.” Murdoch had also made a financial calculation. “Being environmentally sound is not sentimentality,” he said. “It is a sound business strategy.”

The following year, Murdoch held an event in midtown Manhattan that was webcast to all News Corp employees. The company would be launching a Global Energy Initiative, he said, whereby it would use renewable energy and energy efficiency to become carbon-neutral by 2010. Murdoch wanted to shrink his audience’s emissions, too.

“We can set an example, and we can reach our audiences. Our audience’s carbon footprint is 10,000 times bigger than ours. That’s the carbon footprint we want to conquer,” he said. News Corp’s vast array of newspapers, TV stations, and movie studios could make the case for aggressive environmental change. “The challenge is to revolutionize the message. For too long, the threats of climate change have been presented as doom and gloom—because the consequences are so serious,” Murdoch explained.

He wanted to make the issue “dramatic, make it vivid, even sometimes make it fun. We want to inspire people to change their behavior.”

Some of News Corp’s papers seemed eager to follow their boss’s lead. “Go green with the Sun,” declared a weeklong series in 2006 on eco-friendly living run by the London-based media outlet,which had previously run stories skeptical of climate change. Australia’s Daily Telegraph that same year published multiple editorials criticizing the government for not taking climate change seriously enough. The New York Post during this period ran articles promoting New York’s Go Green Expo.

[News Fox News Totally Lost It Over Biden’s Vaccine Mandate

PAUL BLEST 09.10.21 ]

This was an era when awareness of climate change was reaching unprecedented highs, and even prominent Republicans like Sen. John McCain of Arizona were calling for a price on carbon. But there may have been a personal reason for Murdoch’s newfound enthusiasm. “The primary mover behind it was James—Murdoch’s son,” said David Folkenflik, NPR media correspondent and author of Murdoch’s World, echoing an argument that other observers of the family have made. James at the time was chief executive of British Sky Broadcasting. “I don’t think it happens without him,” Folkenflik said.

(James Murdoch has an ownership stake in VICE Media Group through his holding company, Lupa Systems.) “James is traveling and not participating in interviews right now,” spokesperson Juleanna Glover wrote to VICE News.

During this period, Lachlan Murdoch was distancing himself from the company due to personal feuds with company executives in which Rupert sided against him.That gave James, a political moderate whose wife, Kathryn, was becoming increasingly involved in climate issues, more influence over his father, Folkenflik said. In 2006, James helped arrange to have Al Gore present his film An Inconvenient Truth at a five-day gathering of News Corp executives and employees entitled “Imagining the Future” at the Pebble Beach resort in California.

But even at that early stage, tensions were visible. After the screening, Andrew Bolt, then a columnist for News Corp’s Herald Sun paper in Australia who frequently questions the science of climate change, got up to speak, according to an account in the Bulletin:

“Bolt opened his comments by congratulating Gore on his performance, then began to attack claims made by Gore in his film. Soon, according to one onlooker, the pair were involved in ‘a full-on barney.’ Gore ended up shouting at Bolt. ‘It was brilliant,’ says one onlooker. ‘Embarrassing,’ recalls another.”

In an email to VICE News, Bolt said, “I most certainly did not congratulate him on feeding the audience fake news.” He went on, “Nor was there a ‘full-on barney.’ I calmly and politely asked him to explain three misrepresentations in his presentation, and he then went red and started shouting. This is more properly described as a meltdown.”

Editors at the Australian were apparently not in agreement with Murdoch’s climate ambitions either. Asa Wahlquist, a former environmental reporter at the paper, said during an academic conference in 2010 that she had frequent fights with editors over her climate change coverage, calling it “torture” and “unbearable.” The paper’s then-editor-in-chief Chris Mitchell said at that time that “any reading of the (Australian’s) editorials on climate change would make it clear that for several years the paper has accepted man-made climate change as fact.”

In the U.S., however, Murdoch was confident he could get Fox News anchors such as Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly interested in doing more climate coverage. “Probably Sean’s first reaction will be that this is some liberal cause or something, you know? But he’s a very reasonable, very intelligent man,” Murdoch said in 2007 in a rare sit-down interview with the environmental media outlet Grist. “He’ll see, he’ll understand it. As will Bill—he just likes to get debate going between people. And that has its benefits—someone says, ‘No there isn’t,’ someone says, ‘Yes there is,’ and they have it out for 10 minutes and it’s entertaining and creates more consciousness.”

Around this time, as Murdoch’s World recounts, Fox Studios created a public service announcement featuring the head of Fox News, Roger Ailes, as well as Kiefer Sutherland, star of the studio’s hit show 24. But while Sutherland proclaimed that “global warming is a crime for which we are all guilty,” Ailes’ contribution was much more muted. “I was very clear,” he says in the video, “that energy was gonna be one of the things that was going to determine leadership for countries in the future.”

“Ailes’ line is fascinating,” Folkenflik said. “He came up with something that sounded supportive but committed him to nothing. The real question is, what was Murdoch committing himself to?”

By some measures, News Corp was doing a lot. “The company has made 24 the first major television production to be carbon-neutral, helped to pioneer the use of lighter-weight eco-friendly DVD cases in the home entertainment industry, launched a global tree planting campaign tied to the DVD release of the film Avatar, built the world’s largest and most energy-efficient print plant in the U.K., commissioned a study on the most effective way to communicate to the public on climate change policy, and committed to build the largest commercial solar PV installation at a single site in the U.S.,” reads its 2010 filing to CDP.

“These are just a few examples of ways in which the company is taking action on the issue of climate change,” it explained, “and avoiding the risks faced by those companies that are slow to do the same.”

But viewers of Fox News were receiving a much different message. President Barack Obama’s election in 2008 caused a backlash among grassroots conservatives, culminating in the far-right Tea Party movement, many of whose adherents were hardcore climate change deniers. One of the movement’s targets was a major piece of U.S. carbon-pricing legislation proposed by Democrats called cap and trade. “Stopping cap and trade is a key priority for the Tea Party activists,” reads a 2010 Fox News opinion piece, referring to legislation somewhat similar to what Prime Minister Rudd had proposed in Australia.

Several months later, with Republicans and some conservative Democrats declining to support the policy, cap and trade died in the Senate.

Fox News hosts like Hannity, Glenn Beck, and Neil Cavuto cheered the Tea Party movement on, in some cases broadcasting live from Tea Party events and encouraging viewers to join the protests. This was much different than the approach to coverage taken by outlets like CNN and the New York Times. “The mainstream media hates the Tea Party,” claimed Fox News VP of News Bill Sammon in 2010.

Around that time, Sammon sent an email to Fox News staffers telling them to stress scientific uncertainty in the network’s coverage of climate change. “Given the controversy over the veracity of climate change data,” Sammon wrote in the email, which was later leaked, “we should refrain from asserting that the planet has warmed (or cooled) in any given period without IMMEDIATELY pointing out that such theories are based upon data that critics have called into question. It is not our place as journalists to assert such notions as facts, especially as this debate intensifies.”

As Fox News became more successful at denying climate change, Murdoch’s views also appeared to shift—at least in public. “Climate change has been going on as long as the planet is here, and there will always be a little bit of it. At the moment, the North Pole is melting, but the South Pole is getting bigger,” he said in a 2014 interview with Sky News. The following year, Murdoch tweeted an aerial photo of Arctic ice. “Just flying over N Atlantic 300 miles of ice,” he wrote. “Global warming!”

Internally News Corp continued to take climate change seriously. By 2011 it had achieved its goal of becoming carbon-neutral across its global operations. To celebrate the occasion, James Murdoch gave a speech that was broadcast to the company’s employees.“Almost four years ago, our chairman, my father, asked us to ‘imagine the future’ for News Corp,” he said. “The goal was not superficial change, but to embed the principles of efficiency and sustainability in the core of our business.”

James Murdoch claimed that the company’s investments in green technologies—including a 4.1-megawatt solar power system in New Jersey—resulted in $180 of savings for every ton of carbon reduced. A project to more efficiently integrate News Corp’s data centers would reduce costs by $20 million per year, he said. And even smaller initiatives, such as putting heat-reflective coatings on the roofs of some facilities, could save $1.5 million annually.

“Our company continues to grow—yet, for the first time, our absolute carbon footprint is shrinking.”

“Really, the results speak for themselves,” he said. “Our company continues to grow—yet, for the first time, our absolute carbon footprint is shrinking. Imagine a future in which every company is on this same path.”

A year and a half after James’ 2011 speech, Hurricane Sandy slammed into New York City, killing 44 people, displacing thousands, and causing more than $19 billion in damage. The Wall Street Journal ran an opinion piece by two climate experts making the link to climate change. But its other opinion coverage of the intense and unprecedented storm was dismissive of the connection. “The idea that you can take one weather event, any given weather event, and attribute this cause to it, is from the standpoint of the research, it’s sort of a nonsense question,” Wall Street Journal Europe editorial writer Anne Jolis stated in 2012.

“There are no signs that human-caused climate change has increased the toll of recent disasters, as even the most recent extreme-event report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change finds,” read a separate 2012 opinion piece in the paper by University of Colorado at Boulder professor Roger Pielke Jr.

But that’s not how News Corp saw it. “In 2012, News Corporation was affected by Superstorm Sandy through filming interruptions, plant shutdowns, and box office closings in the Northeast U.S.,” its 2013 disclosure to CDP reads. “The storm indicated that News Corporation can be negatively impacted by climate-related weather impacts.”

The Wall Street Journal’s opinion coverage of Sandy wasn’t an isolated occurrence. When researchers with the advocacy organization Climate Nexus later analyzed 20 years of opinion pieces in the paper about climate change, they found a “consistent pattern that overwhelmingly ignores the science, champions doubt and denial of both the science and effectiveness of action, and leaves readers misinformed about the consensus of science and of the risks of the threat.”

[News Fox News’ Bret Baier Has Been Spreading Climate Misinformation Since 2009: Report

GEOFF DEMBICKI 06.16.21]

There was a similar disconnect during the horrific Australian bushfires in early 2020, which razed an area larger than all of South Korea, resulted in at least 34 deaths, and killed millions of wild animals. It was obvious to scientists the fires wouldn’t have become so extreme without dry conditions brought on by global temperature rise, yet Murdoch-owned papers instead pushed a narrative that environmentalists and arsonists were to blame.

“Bushfires: Firebugs fuelling crisis as national arson arrest toll hits 183,” read a headline in the Australian at the height of the fires. After receiving complaints, the Australian Press Council later investigated the reporting that went into the story, and while it found that the article was not misleading, it “accepts that the publication’s initial representation of the data may have led readers to consider that an unusually high number of ‘arsonists’ had been arrested since the beginning of the 2019-20 fire season.” In reality, most of the major fires were sparked by lightning.

“Our coverage has recognized Australia is having a conversation about climate change and how to respond to it,” the company said in a 2020 email to the New York Times. “The role of arsonists and policies that may have contributed to the spread of fire are, however, legitimate stories to report in the public interest.”

The story on arsonists was the top-read item on the Australian’s website that day and was given an international platform by people like Donald Trump Jr., who tweeted to his more than 6 million followers: “Truly disgusting that people would do this! God Bless Australia.”

As with Hurricane Sandy, the Australian’s parent company, News Corp, knew full well there was a strong link between the disaster and climate change. “Climate-related events such as floods, cyclones (for example, those that regularly occur in Northern Queensland), and bushfires also have an impact on News Corp Australia's ability to operate efficiently,” reads its CDP filing for 2020. “The 2019-2020 Australian wildfires added additional strain on our logistics and on our effectiveness to deliver our products to our customers.”

News Corp explained in that same document that for years it has taken measures to protect its own employees from climate-related dangers. “Prior to each bushfire and cyclone season, the Workplace Health and Safety (WHS) team works with the business units in properties that may be exposed to these weather conditions to ensure safety for staff such as editors, photographers, and journalists while they are out in the field,” it reads. “The WHS team brief staff on risks and ensure protocols are in place to secure their safety.”

News Corp also fretted about the climate risks faced by employees in the U.S. “Climate projection models make it difficult to know exactly which businesses or locations are most prone to the physical aspects of climate change,” it wrote in its 2020 CDP filing. “However, it is clear from past severe weather events that some of News Corp’s businesses are susceptible to such extreme events. Extended and severe droughts in California and Colorado that lead to an increased frequency and intensity of wildfires are a concern, and could impact employees, facilities, and productions in the region.”

You wouldn’t know about the connection between climate change and disasters from watching Fox News’ coverage of the record-smashing 2020 wildfire season on the U.S. West Coast.

“Massive wildfires unprecedented in their scope continue to sweep across huge portions of the West tonight,” Tucker Carlson said in a September 2020 broadcast. “How did climate change do that? They didn't tell us, but they just kept saying it. In the hands of Democratic politicians, climate change is like systemic racism in the sky: You can't see it, but rest assured it's everywhere and it's deadly.”

The top executive at Fox knew that there was in fact a connection between climate change and extreme weather. As co-chairman of News Corp and member of its board of directors, Lachlan Murdoch was “periodically updated” about the company’s climate and sustainability reporting to the CDP, as News Corp’s 2020 disclosure states. And as CEO of Fox News’ parent company, Fox Corporation, he wrote in the 2020 Corporate Social Responsibility report: “We believe our main climate risk is related to business continuity in the event of more extreme weather events.”

In the summer of 2020, James Murdoch decided to step back for good from the Murdoch media empire.“My resignation is due to disagreements over certain editorial content published by the company’s news outlets and certain other strategic decisions,” he said at the time. Earlier that year, James and Kathryn had released a statement criticizing News Corp and Fox’s “ongoing denial” of climate change “given obvious evidence to the contrary.”

JAMES MURDOCH WITH HIS WIFE, KATHRYN, IN 2015 WHEN HE WAS CEO OF 21ST CENTURY FOX. OBSERVERS OF THE FAMILY SAY JAMES IS A PRIMARY REASON WHY NEWS CORP STARTED TAKING CLIMATE CHANGE SERIOUSLY. PHOTO BY DAVID PAUL MORRIS/BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY IMAGES

But James Murdoch’s climate change legacy lives on at News Corp. His father said in 2019 during a shareholders meeting in New York that “there are no climate deniers around, I can assure you.”

The company’s 2020 disclosure to CDP explains that “our News Corp global real estate team reviews climate change risks when deciding where to purchase or lease new facilities around the world. These risks include hurricane/storm potential, water-stressed areas, and flooding risks.”

The company is attempting to reduce its emissions in line with meeting the 1.5 degrees Celsius warming threshold that scientists say is our best shot at keeping the emergency under control. Meeting previous climate goals has saved the company at least $18 million, Murdoch said during the 2019 New York meeting.

These days, even News Corp’s stridently climate-change–denying Australian media outlets may be changing their tune. According to the New York Times, several Murdoch-owned papers as well as the 24-hour Sky News channel will next month publish “features and editorials” that promote net-zero emissions by 2050. The new editorial position “could be a breakthrough that provides political cover for Australia’s conservative government to end its refusal to set ambitious emission targets,” the Times said.

Rudd, the former Australian prime minister, is skeptical, tweeting that the apparent rebrand is “Murdoch’s attempt to ‘greenwash’ themselves in the lead-up to the Glasgow climate conference. It’s all politics.”

It’s clear that Murdoch’s empire isn’t earning huge profits by making earnest statements about climate change to its viewers. In Fox Corp’s third quarter financial update for 2021, Lachlan Murdoch told investors, “Fox News channel finished this last quarter as the most-watched cable network in primetime and finished March as the most-watched cable news network overall.”

Lachlan Murdoch attributed some of this success to the launch of Gutfeld!, a new late-night program hosted by longtime Fox host and panelist Greg Gutfeld, which Lachlan said is currently drawing an audience larger than NBC’s The Tonight Show.

In May, Gutfeld did a segment attacking President Biden’s climate policies. “By the way, if you want to make electric cars the choice for Americans, you don’t try to hit them with guilt and virtue-signaling and tying it to a climate crisis that does not exist,” he said.

Gutfeld assured his viewers that extreme weather in their communities has nothing to do with global temperature rise. “Because our own data says that is not actually happening,” he said. “That is not due to the climate crisis.”

Follow Geoff Dembicki on Twitter.

TAGGED:

MEDIACLIMATE CHANGEWORLDNEWSRUPERT MURDOCHNEWS CORPMURDOCHFOX NEWSCLIMATE DENIALKEVIN RUDDAUSTRALIAJAMES MURDOCH

mma 2 23

like Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes leading his team to a fourth-quarter Super Bowl comeback, this is a show we've seen before.

Billionaire Twitter owner Elon Musk offered a scornful dismissal of the news media on Saturday,tweeting, “Some of the smartest people I know actively believe the press … amazing.” But the following night, TV cameras captured him hanging out in a Super Bowl box with Rupert Murdoch, perhaps the single most powerful media mogul on the planet. The latter’s empire includes a slew of major newspapers and TV news networks on three continents; his U.S. assets include the New York Post and The Wall Street Journal, Fox News — the nation’s most-watched cable news network — numerous Fox-owned and -operated broadcast stations, and the Fox broadcast network that aired Sunday’s game.

Musk’s actions may seem like hypocrisy or oversight, but they actually fit into a consistent strategy — one Murdoch himself knows well.

Musk regularly undermines and delegitimizes the mainstream press, along with his predecessors at Twitter, by accusing them of putting a liberal thumb on the scale. While he promises to instead favor free speech at the platform, he actually uses his power to promote right-wing propaganda. Musk’s high-profile meeting with Murdoch, who has relied on a similar playbook for decades, serves as a neon flashing sign that points to what he’s doing.

When Murdoch and Roger Ailes launched Fox News in 1996 with the slogan “Fair and Balanced,” they were implicitly castigating the rest of the press as unfair and promising that their network would be a corrective to the purported liberal bias of their competitors. Under Ailes, a former Republican political consultant, Nixon operative, and racist sexual predator, Fox made right-wing attacks on the press a central focus of its coverage, alongside hagiographic promotion of GOP leaders and vicious denunciations of Democrats.

The Ailes-Murdoch strategy expanded the ranks of conservative viewers while concentrating them as the audience of a single network. This had three effects: It made Fox wildly profitable, helped Republican politicians win elections, and spawned a wide array of competitors and imitators who together created the right’s echo chamber. The network ultimately became a powerful force within the GOP, with Murdoch and the network’s stars serving as party advisers and kingmakers who generate its communications strategy and policy agenda. In turn, Murdoch cashed in during the Trump administration thanks to a string of suspiciously favorable regulatory decisions.

There are clear echoes of Fox’s grand design in what Musk is doing today at Twitter. Since he began making moves toward buying Twitter in early 2022, he’s regularly claimed to be acting to promote “free speech.” He declared a month after taking control of the company, “This is a battle for the future of civilization. If free speech is lost even in America, tyranny is all that lies ahead.” He subsequently turned over internal documents generated under the company’s previous leadership to friendly writers and championed their work as proof that Twitter had been “acting by itself to suppress free speech” in potential violation of the First Amendment.

But while Musk portrayed himself as a nonpartisan “free speech absolutist,” his record shows him to be anything but. Since taking over Twitter, he has urged “independent-minded voters” to vote for Republicans in the 2022 midterms and endorsed Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for president in 2024. And he’s put the company’s muscle behind his personal views, reinstating right-wing accounts that had previously been banned for spreading bigotry or conspiracy theories, including former President Donald Trump; taking advice from the site’s worst far-right trolls; pushing right-wing conspiracy theories on his own account; and presenting himself and his site as promoting “citizen journalism” as a foil to the mainstream journalists the right despises.

Musk’s unhinged antics have driven away the site’s top advertisers, leading to a drop in revenue that he has blamed on critics who are “trying to destroy free speech in America.”

Republican officials and right-wing propagandists know they have a lot to gain from Musk’s control of Twitter, which is a key communications hub for journalists, and are responding accordingly. Their relentless praise for his stewardship of Twitter is interrupted only by occasional complaints about how much engagement their posts get. GOP leaders threatened Twitter’s board last spring with the prospect of repercussions if the company did not accept Musk’s initial bid; they issued more threats at major companies that dropped their Twitter ads in the fall.

Like Murdoch, Musk is lashing out at the press. Like Murdoch, Musk is presenting himself as engaged in producing trustworthy journalism. Like Murdoch, Musk is actually promoting right-wing propaganda. And like Murdoch, Musk is now reaping the benefits of his disingenuous media strategy from the Republican Party.

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/ron-desantis-and-triumph-anti-vax-right

no lnx vid

fox News founder Rupert Murdoch became one of the first people on Earth to be vaccinated against COVID-19 when he received his first jab in December 2020. He thanked “the amazing scientists who have made this vaccine possible,” in a statement at the time, adding, “I strongly encourage people around the world to get the vaccine as it becomes available.”

Two years later, such unqualified gratitude and support for the miraculous medicines are scarce among American conservatives, even as a new study found that COVID-19 vaccines have saved the lives of more than 3.2 million Americans and prevented more than 18.5 million hospitalizations. Instead, thanks in no small part to the paranoid rants of Murdoch’s employees, Republican anti-vaccine sentiment has spiraled to the point that former President Donald Trump’s role in their development may hurt his chances of gaining the party’s nomination in 2024.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis was on Murdoch’s Fox on Tuesday night talking up his call for the state’s supreme court to impanel a grand jury to investigate “any and all wrongdoing” related to the vaccines and “bring legal accountability to those who committed misconduct.” It’s unclear precisely what such a grand jury would target or the impact it might have. As a signaling effort, however, DeSantis’ announcement put him squarely on the side of the anti-vax kooks at Fox and the faction of the GOP they influence.

DeSantis fielded softball questions from primetime hostLaura Ingraham, who praised him for having “fought relentlessly against [the] medical cartel’s silencing campaign.” As the governor spoke, on-screen text touted him as “still leading on COVID” and drawing mainstream press outrage for “challenging Covidians.”

Video

CitationFrom the December 13, 2022, edition of Fox News' The Ingraham Angle.

DeSantis is likely to challenge Trump for the GOP presidential nomination. He enjoys broad support in recent primary polls and across the right-wing media spectrum, from Fox primetime hosts to anti-anti-Trumpers at publications like National Review to, reportedly, Murdoch himself. And it is clear to everyone – including Trump’s advisers – that in preparation for that run, he is staking out ground as the vaccine-skeptical candidate.

DeSantis is following the path blazed by Fox hosts like Ingraham and Tucker Carlson. Anti-vaccine sentiment would likely have become a problem for the vaccination campaign under any circumstances. But it took the network’s patented ability to manufacture grievances to turn it into a compelling primary issue for Republican politicians.

Fox spent the last two years sabotaging the U.S. vaccination effort. The network had a unique moral responsibility to try to convince their viewers to get vaccinated. Instead, its most prominent and trusted figures waged a nightly battle against the shots, stoking fears that they were useless or dangerous and that their distribution was part of a sinister plot to control Americans. The discourse was “great for ratings” – but deadly for Republicans, who were vaccinated against COVID-19 at lower rates and died from it at higher ones.

Some right-wing commentators, even at Fox, tried to push back against that narrative and encourage vaccination. But ultimately, they lost the argument within the movement.

DeSantis followed the shift in right-wing public opinion, choosing to preserve his political viability rather than the lives of his constituents.DeSantis once touted his own efforts to distribute the vaccines, which he credited with “saving lives.” But once he saw which way the wind was blowing on the right, he started trying to appeal to the anti-vaccine right. Meanwhile, Trump himself has been flummoxed, getting booed by a crowd for saying he got his booster and eschewing the word “vaccine” on the stump.

It is a testament to the power of Fox’s propaganda that the network was able to turn life-saving drugs into a poisoned chalice for Trump – and that perhaps his greatest rival adjusted his views on them to appeal to its viewers.

more bodies

morano control BS?

Fox News is returning to its pro-COVID-19 stance by attacking Los Angeles, California, for considering an indoor mask mandate as infections in the county skyrocket. The right-wing propaganda channel, which has long spewed pandemic-related misinformation, is again lying about the efficacy of masks for slowing the spread of the disease.

The Los Angeles Times reported that LA County’s case rate “has been increasing since late October and is now triple what it was in the autumn low,” and is currently 188 weekly cases per 100,000 residents, with a case rate of 100 or more being considered high. The LA Times also reported that the county is suffering about 60 deaths from COVID-19 each week. According to City News Service, the county’s COVID-19 hospitalization rate already exceeds one of the two thresholds that County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer said would trigger a universal indoor masking mandate.

Fox’s response to this news is to return to its history of killing its viewers by spreading medical misinformation that has contributed to the staggering national COVID-19 death toll exceeding 1 million people. In particular, Fox has spread lies about the usefulness of face masks in slowing the spread of COVID-19. Some Fox personalities have bizarrely claimed that wearing masks makes people crazy, while others simply told lies about their effectiveness. Fox as a whole worked very hard to incorporate masking into their deranged culture war, even though at least one Fox prime time host early in the pandemic repeatedly gushed about their potential in keeping people safe. (Fox also for a time required staffers to wear masks at the workplace.) Besides attacking face masks during a respiratory disease pandemic, Fox has also urged its viewers to **distrust public health officials**.

And with the possibility of a mask mandate coming back to LA, Fox personalities reacted with incredulity, pretending that masking is ineffective and attacking the county public health director as “power hungry.”

murdoch fuckery

12/22 demand progress

Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Corporation has cooked up a new fee to charge TV provider DirecTV — and if it goes into effect, DirecTV, DirecTV Stream, and U-Verse customers nationwide are likely to get stuck with higher prices for their cable service.1 Tell DirecTV: say NO to Fox’s new carriage fee!

we need DirecTV to stand up to Fox to save consumers from exorbitant fees because the Supreme Court has ruled cable networks like Fox fall outside of the Federal Communications Commission’s jurisdiction.2 In cases like these, smaller corporations can be our ally in fighting price gouging.

But the fact that Fox is largely insulated from the FCC hasn’t stopped Rupert Murdoch from fighting tooth and nail to sabotage this critical institution. We haven’t had a functioning FCC for the entirety of Biden’s presidency because the Senate — pressured by Fox and Comcast — has refused to confirm Biden’s nominee for FCC Chair, Gigi Sohn. Comcast and Fox News have paid for lobbyists to actively court swing votes in the Senate against Sohn.2

Fox News has been pushingfalse narrativesthat Gigi Sohn would harm rural America, that she wants to censor conservatives, and that she’s bad for media diversity. As telecoms reporter Karl Bode put it, “None of these are supported by any facts that you can find if you spend 30 minutes objectively researching her record.”2

Fox’s smear campaign makes clear: cable news will stop at nothing to clear the way for profiteering. We need TV providers to resist, and we demand the Senate get in gear!

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/lachlan-murdoch-architect-fox-news-extremist-turn-may-soon-gain-even-more-power

https://www.alternet.org/2022/09/trump-accused-of-extortion-over-attempt-to-force-cnn-sale-to-rupert-murdoch-new-book-2658253590/

watershed? THE END OF strait? origin of greg g? and WATTERS?

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/blockbuster-report-fox-executives-and-top-anchor-bret-baier-tried-subvert-decision-desk

matt g

Top Fox News executives interfered with the election projections of the network’s vaunted “decision desk” due to blowback from then-President Donald Trump, according to a new book. The reports — and the actions Fox took with regard to its decision desk following the 2020 election — demolish the network’s argument that its “news side” is a credible journalistic operation walled off from the “opinion side’s” Republican Party propaganda machine.

InThe Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021, Peter Baker and Susan Glasser report that while Fox’s decision desk had been comfortable with its election night call that Joe Biden had won Arizona, “Fox executives were freaking out” that week as the network came “under tremendous pressure from Trump and his allies.” Fox’s call made it more difficult for Trump to subvert the election after declaring victory on election night, and he responded by successfully encouraging Fox viewers to switch to its competitors.

Jay Wallace, Fox’s president and executive editor, took a direct action overriding the decision desk in hopes of avoiding further criticism from Trump supporters on the Friday after election day, according to Baker and Glasser.

Wallace “overruled the Decision Desk team including Bill Sammon,Arnon Miskin, and Chris Stirewalt, refusing to let them call Nevada for Biden even after other networks did, a level of interference that had been unheard of in past elections,” they write. “The reason had little to do with Nevada. Because of the Arizona projection, calling Nevada would give Biden enough electoral votes for victory. Wallace did not want Fox to be the first to call the election and declare Biden president-elect.”

Wallace’s act followed two other proposals from senior Fox employees to interfere with the decision desk for Trump’s benefit, according to the book.

First, “at 8:30 the morning after the election, Suzanne Scott, the chief executive officer, even suggested that Fox should not call any more states until they were officially certified,” they reported. As Baker and Glasser noted, “official state certifications typically took days or even weeks and no network had ever waited until then before telling their viewers who had won.”

“A couple other top executives backed up Scott,” while Sammon, the Washington managing editor who directed the decision desk, advised against the move, according to the book. (That Sammon, who slanted Fox’s reporting to the right and bragged about falsely portraying Barack Obama as a socialist during the 2008 election,was the voice of reason here shows how far the network had gone.)

But two days later, they report that Fox chief political anchor Bret Baier sent Wallace an email arguing that Fox should reverse its Arizona call and instead project that Trump had won the state — even though he trailed at the time by more than 10,000 votes.

“The Trump campaign was really pissed,” he wrote in an email to Jay Wallace, the president and executive editor at Fox. “This situation is getting uncomfortable. Really uncomfortable. I keep having to defend this on air.” He accused the Decision Desk of “holding on for pride” and added: “It’s hurting us. The sooner we pull it—even if it gives us major egg [on our faces]—and we put it back in his column the better we are in my opinion.

Fox executives sell ads by touting the purported firewall between the network’s right-wing “opinion side” and its respectable “news side.” But here we have the network’s top “news side” anchor imploring the head of “news side” programming to make the “news side” decision desk fraudulently award a state to Trump because his campaign was demanding it. That says more about Fox’s role as GOP propaganda than any “opinion side” monologue. (In a statement, Baier denied writing that the Trump campaign “was really pissed,” claiming that the quote was “from an external email that I referenced,” but complained only of the “context” of the remainder of the quotes.)

Wallace didn’t follow through on Baier’s proposal, but according to Baker and Glasser he blocked the decision desk’s Nevada call the following day.The day after that, Fox saw the writing on the wall and followed CNN, ABC, CBS, and The Associated Press in declaring that Biden had won the election.

But that wasn’t the end of it. The network’s brass subsequently established an incentive structure that would dissuade similar “news side” threats to Fox’s bottom line.

Baker and Glasser report that Sammon and Stirewalt were then “summarily fired,” with the announcement delayed until January and described as a “retirement” and part of a “restructuring,” respectively.

Over the months that followed, “opinion side” hosts Greg Gutfeld and Jesse Watters, who had both questioned the network’s Arizona call, were given their own weeknight shows. They each took over time slots that had previously been occupied by “news side” programs. Other prominent election deniers were also promoted and given increased prominence at the network.

Everyone who works at Fox now knows that if they help Republicans try to steal an election, they’ll be richly rewarded. If they try to interfere with that effort by accurately stating that the Democrats won, the network’s top executives may overrule them and they will find themselves looking for a new job.

Fox’s decision desk is now just another piece of the right’s election subversion machine— one its executives can deploy at will — and its projections should be treated as such. Any future Fox election calls that diverge from other networks to the benefit of the GOP should be treated with extreme skepticism.

unclear if break from trump? 822

nope

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/narrative-fox-had-turned-trump-was-always-underbaked-now-its-totally-collapsed

circle wagons maralago

an 8 22

On Election Night 2020, Fox News seriously scooped the competition when its decision desk, under Chris Stirewalt, called Arizona for Democratic now-President Joe Biden — a bombshell that confirmed how much of a swing state Arizona, once a deep red hotbed of Barry Goldwater/John McCain conservatism, has evolved into. And other media outlets subsequently confirmed Fox News’ reporting.

Fox News’ decision desk was ahead of other major media outlets when it came to Arizona and the 2020 presidential election results, and Political Editor Stirewalt was the person who, more than anyone, Fox News had to thank.But instead of giving Stirewalt a promotion, they fired him.

Former President Donald Trump and many other MAGA Republicans angrily railed against Fox News for calling Arizona for Biden, claiming that Arizona was stolen from him because of widespread voter fraud — a false claim that has been debunked time and time again. And Fox competitor Newsmax TV promoted itself as the cable news channel that was more pro-Trump and more right-wing than Fox News and Fox Business.

READ MORE: [George Will: 'Infant' Josh Hawley feeds the 'degradation' of politics and journalism

Stirewalt candidly addresses his termination in his new book, “Broken News: Why the Media Rage Machine Divides America and How to Fight Back,” which has an August 23 release date on Amazon. And according to a book excerpt discussed by journalists Blake Hounshell and Jeremy W. Peters in the New York Times on August 19 and by Tom Porter in Business Insider on August 22, Stirewalt is vehemently critical of Fox News for promoting nonsense conspiracy theories in the weeks following the 2020 election.

Hounshell and Peters report, “After a decade at Fox News, Chris Stirewalt was suddenly shown the door in January 2021, becoming a casualty of restructuring — or, at least, that was how Fox described his and other layoffs that swept out longtime journalists who were part of the network’s news division. Stirewalt, who was part of the team at Fox News that projects election results and whotestified before the House January 6 committee this summer, suspects there was a bigger reason behind his firing, which he explains in his new book, ‘Broken News: Why the Media Rage Machine Divides America and How to Fight Back.’”

Fox News has denied that Stirewalt was fired for offending Trump and his supporters; they have characterized the termination as simply a matter of corporate restructuring. But Stirewalt has his doubts.

Porter reports, “A network representative told Insider, in January 2021, that Stirewalt had parted company with them as part of a restructuring process. In his memoir, said the Times, Stirewalt alleged the network is playing a key role in the radicalization of the U.S. right, accusing it of spreading ‘black-helicopter-level paranoia and hatred.’ In the book, he says that during Trump's term in office, the network fed viewers what they wanted to hear, provoking the firestorm of criticism he encountered from Republicans after the Arizona call.”

READ MORE: Ex-Fox News political editor breaks down the 'red mirage' — and explains how Trump tried 'to exploit this anomaly'

In an excerpt from “Broken News,” Stirewalt accuses his former employer of telling far-right viewers what they want to hear — regardless of whether or not it is factual.

Fox News’ former political editor writes, "Even in the four years since the previous presidential election, Fox viewers had become even more accustomed to flattery and less willing to hear news that challenged their expectations. Me serving up green beans to viewers who had been spoon-fed ice cream sundaes for years came as a terrible shock to their systems.”

In recent years, opinion host Tucker Carlson has had some of the highest ratings at Fox News — even higher than long-time Fox host Sean Hannity.

Stirewalt, in “Broken News,” writes, “Carlson is rich and famous. Yet he regularly rails about the 'big, legacy media outlets.' Guests denounce the 'corporate media' on his show, and Fox's CEO calls Carlson 'brave' for discussing controversial topics. Yet somehow, nobody even giggles. It does not take any kind of journalistic courage to pump out night after night exactly what your audience wants to hear.”

READ MORE: [Chris Wallace trashes Fox News: 'I wanted to put all of that behind me'

mofo

https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/foxs-flagship-straight-news-show-promotes-bogus-covid-study-boost-republican

fox’s flagship “straight news” show promotes bogus COVID study to boost Republican policies

Right-wing apparatchiks want you to believe red states outperformed blue states during the pandemic — after they literally rewrote the death statistics

WRITTEN BY ERIC KLEEFELD

PUBLISHED 04/13/22

murdoch media outlets are promoting an economic report declaring that Republican-led states did better than their Democratic-led counterparts in the COVID-19 pandemic. But the supposed “study” is simply an engineered conclusion produced by a political front group, which gives extra credit to Republican policies to not implement public health guidance or restrict normal life. And on top of that, it manipulates the typically higher death rates in red states by artificially adjusting them downward, while dishonestly fabricating higher death statistics in blue states.

The report, with the grandiose title “A Final Report Card on the States’ Response to COVID-19,” is the brainchild of right-wing pundit Stephen Moore, along with conservative political organizer Phil Kerpen and libertarian University of Chicago economist Casey Mulligan. (Both Moore and Mulligan served as political appointees in the Trump administration.) The report was released through theCommittee to Unleash Prosperity, a conservative group advocating the discredited principles of “supply-side” economics that has also promoted “pro-growth and liberty-based responses to COVID-19.”

The report, which is not peer-reviewed, also includes a note on the first page thanking Dr. Jay Bhattacharya “for his review of this study and his instructive advice.” Bhattacharya is a Stanford medical professor associated with the right-wing Hoover Institution, who has also informally advised Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) — a potential GOP presidential candidate in 2024 — and has appeared multiple times on Fox News and undermined the COVID-19 vaccines and public vaccination campaigns.Bhattacharya also co-authored the “Great Barrington Declaration,” a reckless libertarian proposal for loosening public health measures in the midst of the pandemic to achieve global “herd immunity.”

Fox’s Special Report covered this rigged “study” as if it were straight news

The study was touted on Monday’s edition of Fox’s flagship “straight” news program, Special Report with Bret Baier. A chyron on screen claimed, “Red states fare better on economic and health outcomes.” But as a close examination of the study reveals — briefly alluded to by Fox News correspondent Jonathan Serrie — this conclusion exists only after the authors made some creative adjustments “for age, obesity, and diabetes.”

Video Citation From the April 11, 2022, edition of Fox News’ Special Report with Bret Baier

Thestudy was also promoted in stories on Fox’s website, as well as in the editorial pages of the network’s corporate cousins: the New York Post and The Wall Street Journal. FoxNews.com and the New York Post both mentioned the metric of “age-adjusted death rates,” while the Journal was a bit more forthcoming in noting that the study also made adjustments for “the prevalence of obesity and diabetes (leading co-morbidities for Covid deaths).”

The reports in these three Murdoch publications all pointed to the report’s praise of Florida as supposedly one of the best-performing states — a possible sign of Bhattacharya’s influence on both Florida’s policies and this report’s verdict. By contrast, Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank has run through numbers from health care analyst Charles Gaba, which found that Florida is actually one of the worst-performing states in COVID-19 death statistics, even accounting for the state’s older population.

Moore also appeared on Monday morning’s edition of Fox Business’ *Varney & Co.*, during which he claimed, “The big takeaway is that the lockdown strategy was pretty much a total failure. … States that remained open did not have higher death rates from the virus than states that completely shut down.” Serrie later mentioned Moore’s study again, on Tuesday morning’s edition of :{America’s Newsroom:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:.

Moore has built a career as possibly the worst economist in the media, making serially wrong pronouncements and false calculations in service of his political agendas.In March 2019, then-President Donald Trump announced his nomination of Moore to the Federal Reserve Board, only for Moore to eventually withdraw from consideration due to multiple controversies over his past political comments.

Committee to Unleash Prosperity rewrites death numbers in red states with a fake statistic: “Metabolic-health adjustment”

In order to arrive at the favored conclusion, the Committee to Unleash Prosperity report actually looked at more than just health outcomes. The group’s press release explains that it used three metrics for its findings  — COVID-19 deaths, economic performance, and school openings — and declared they were “equally weighted” in the analysis. The result is that the question of saving lives accounts for only one-third of the calculation. The study also essentially just rehashes in pseudo-scientific form Moore’s long-standing contention that saving lives in the pandemic might not be “worth trillions of dollars of losses” and that simply allowing the virus to spread was “a better strategy” than enduring the economic costs of lockdowns.

The concept of age-adjusted deaths across populations is a tricky issue. While it is a legitimate line of inquiry, Fox News has exploited it ever since the start of the pandemic to create a nonchalant response to COVID-19 deaths among the elderly. Looking at this metric from a neutral source does show some interesting effects, but the ranks of worst-performing states would still be Republican-led ones such as Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Texas.

Moore and his compatriots at the Committee to Unleash Prosperity have gone even further, however,by setting up a new metric in the fine print of their supposed study. They call it an adjustment for “metabolic health” in different populations — “the pre-pandemic prevalence of obesity and diabetes.” But what it really amounts to is a manipulation of the statistics to declare that higher death tolls should be discounted in populations that were less healthy to begin with, and toact as if public health responses can be separated from the overall health of the public.

Much of the discourse around the role of obesity in COVID-19 deaths has framed it as “another ongoing pandemic,” and the role of diabetes has been addressed in media as a “public health train wreck” and evidence of “America’s diabetes crisis.” But the Committee to Unleash Prosperity instead treats these deaths as somehow a mitigating factor in the public health responses of the states most affected. It’s almost as if, by the standards of Moore and his co-authors, the deaths of unhealthy people are not a problem at all.

As a result of this statistical chicanery, death rates in the South and some other Republican-led states were magically revised downward, while deaths were “adjusted” drastically higher in many Democratic states — skewing the data to make blue states look like the worst offenders.

“NV, NY, NJ, and DC were the four states with the highest metabolic-adjusted mortality, even though none is in the top four without the adjustment,” the report says — as if that were a good thing for the authors’ credibility — because those four places all have obesity and diabetes rates that are below the national average. By contrast, in the real-world statistics they began with, the worst contenders were all red states.

Fox News has waged a two-year propaganda campaign against public health, in which it has lied about COVID-19 vaccines, promoted fake cures, encouraged the spread of the virus, and turned people defying public health measures into culture war heroes even as their actions have gotten them killed. Fox also clearly does not believe any of what it preaches — see its own corporate vaccination and testing policies — but the network nevertheless pursues this framing because it is “great for ratings.”

Who knows, perhaps the network will be able to come up with a study showing that watching Fox News is good for surviving the COVID-19 pandemic, once the analysts can adjust for the comorbidities associated with watching Fox News.

brain room?

an 7 22

although Fox News is facing a major defamation lawsuit from Dominion Voting Systems for promoting the false and totally debunked claim that Dominion’s equipment was used to help steal the 2020 presidential election from Donald Trump, some members of Fox News’ hard news division did some accurate reporting on Election Night. Fox News’ decision desk, in fact, accurately called Arizona for now-President Joe Biden on Election Night 2020, and according to former White House Senior Adviser Jared Kushner’s new book, “Breaking History: A White House Memoir,” Rupert Murdoch had no doubt that Biden was the legitimate winner in Arizona.

After Fox News called Arizona for Biden, Murdoch, according to the book, told Kushner, “The numbers are ironclad. It’s not even close.” Subsequent vote recounts in Arizona demonstrated that Murdoch, in that case, was absolutely right: Biden, not Trump, was the clear winner in Arizona....

an 7 22

Donald Trump has lost the confidence of both of the major newspapers owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation.

Under the headline, "The President Who Stood Still on Jan. 6,"The Wall Street Journaleditorial board harshly criticized the former president.

"No matter your views of the Jan. 6 special committee, the facts it is laying out in hearings are sobering. The most horrifying to date came Thursday in a hearing on President Trump’s conduct as the riot raged and he sat watching TV, posting inflammatory tweets and refusing to send help," the editorial board wrote.

"The committee’s critics are right that it lacks political balance," the newspaper wrote. "Still, the brute facts remain: Mr. Trump took an oath to defend the Constitution, and he had a duty as Commander in Chief to protect the Capitol from a mob attacking it in his name. He refused. He didn’t call the military to send help. He didn’t call Mr. Pence to check on the safety of his loyal VP. Instead he fed the mob’s anger and let the riot play out."

The editorial concluded, "Character is revealed in a crisis, and Mr. Pence passed his Jan. 6 trial. Mr. Trump utterly failed his."

Trump was also criticized by the NY Post editorial board under the headline, "Trump's silence on Jan. 6 is damning."

"As his followers stormed the Capitol, calling on his vice president to be hanged, President Donald Trump sat in his private dining room, watching TV, doing nothing. For three hours, seven minutes," the editorial board wrote.

"There has been much debate over whether Trump’s rally speech on Jan. 6, 2021, constituted “incitement.” That’s somewhat of a red herring. What matters more — and has become crystal clear in recent days — is that Trump didn’t lift a finger to stop the violence that followed," the NY Post wrote. "And he was the only person who could stop what was happening. He was the only one the crowd was listening to. It was incitement by silence."

The tabloid concluded he is unfit for office.

"His only focus was to find any means — damn the consequences — to block the peaceful transfer of power.

There is no other explanation, just as there is no defense, for his refusal to stop the violence," the newspaper wrote. "It’s up to the Justice Department to decide if this is a crime. But as a matter of principle, as a matter of character, Trump has proven himself unworthy to be this country’s chief executive again."

===

**london protests 7 22 break glass in emergency so they did**

wow omg ingraham?

an 7 22

**with thousands dying from extreme global heat in recent days, and as President Joe Biden**announced new executive actions to address the climate crisis, right-wing media figures and climate deniers are downplaying the heat wave and the threat from human-caused climate change.

In Europe, extreme “red” heat warnings were issued in the United Kingdom for the first time, and Wales recorded its highest-ever temperature. Railroad lines, major highways, and airport runways in the U.K. buckled under the extreme heat. Multiple regions of Germany also set all-time highs, as did at least part of Denmark. Over 2,000people have died in Spain and Portugal due to the extreme heat, which has fueled wildfires there and in parts of France. These record-setting events are not contained to Europe. Parts of the U.S. and Central Asia are suffering from extreme heat as well.

Even though the extreme heat event in Europe is truly exceptional, and its connections to the climate crisis are unquestionable, multiple right-wing media figures used the extreme heat event to downplay and criticize any possible action to address the climate crisis.

Right-wing media also attacked Biden for considering declaring a climate emergency during this deadly heat wave. Instead Biden unveiled much more modest steps to address climate impacts, such as putting $2.3 billion toward community resilience and infrastructure and bolstering offshore wind development. The Federalist falsely declared that “Biden has no right to declare a ‘national climate emergency,’' though The Washington Post explained that such a move would “tap a variety of long-standing emergency authorities under the National Emergencies Act and other laws.” LifeSiteNews fearmongered thatthe emergency powers would result in “climate lockdowns.” And other right-wing media suggested that there is no crisis at all.

Right-wing media denied the existence of the climate emergency

Fox News host Dan Bongino questioned whether the planet is getting warmer and whether humanity played a role in it, asking: “What kind of a dunce believes that? Come on. Is it [the planet] getting warmer? The answer is maybe. … The question isn’t is it getting warmer; the question is what’s human beings' role in it.” Fox News, *Hannity*, [7/19/22]

Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton wrote on Twitter: “There is obviously no ‘climate emergency'.” Twitter, [7/19/22]

Fox host Tucker Carlson devoted a monologue to undermining the existence of climate change, reducing climate predictions to: “It’s gonna be hot and then it’s gonna rain hard.” “No one really believes in global warming,” he continued, “and that’s why all of the liberals in the United States live on the coasts – because they don’t believe it… The entire theory is absurd and they know it. … The whole thing is a joke.” Fox News, *Tucker Carlson Tonight*, [7/20/22]

On Fox, conservative British political commentator Douglas Murray dismissed the urgency of the climate crisis, saying, “Whenever there is not an absolutely vital recent emergency, we can always fall back on – oh and the climate emergency.” Fox News, *Fox & Friends*, [7/20/22]

Fox anchor Dana Perino asked: “What has changed with the science that would lead a president to need to declare an emergency?” Fox News, *America’s Newsroom*[, 7/20/22]

Fox host Todd Piro said that climate impacts, particularly the ones affecting the most vulnerable communities, did not meet his criteria for an emergency: “While we all love clean air and clean water — I, in fact, use both … this is not an emergency that we need to focus on today. We got a lot of other problems in the world.” Fox News, *Outnumbered*, [7/20/22]

Fox host Sean Hannity responded to new actions by the Biden administration to address climate change by dismissing the role of human influence over global warming saying, “I think these might be acts of nature, and God, and way out of the realm of something that human beings can prevent.” Fox News, *Hannity*, [7/20/22]

Conservatives also downplayed the deadly extreme heat

Climate change denying author Bjorn Lomborg dismissed the dangerous extreme heat event, writing on Twitter: “Standard climate scare.” Twitter, [7/17/22]

Climate denier Steven Milloy on Twitter dismissed a Washington Post article linking the Europe heat wave to climate change, writing: “Hot in some places. Cool in others. Just weather. Not climate.” Twitter, [7/19/22]

Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade dismissed the dangers extreme heat poses to human health, saying: “Don’t panic. It is summer. If it was December and this was happening, then I would say, this is a little weird. But it's just a little bit hotter than usual.” Fox News, *Fox & Friends*, [7/20/22]

Daily Wire founder Ben Shapiro said on his radio show that the heat wave and wildfires were being reported so fervently because “you always know that it’s the slow season newswise when you start getting weather reports from Europe. … The thing that they will never tell you, the media, is that more people die of cold every year than die of heat every year, but the cold narrative doesn’t tend to play into the climate change narrative that they wish to progmulate.” The Daily Wire, *The Ben Shapiro Show*,[7/19/22]

Fox host Jesse Watters dismissed the extreme heat event as regular seasonal weather, saying: “Joe Biden has seen more seasons than a lot of us. He knows that it gets cold in January and hot in July.” Fox News, *Jesse Watters Primetime*, [7/20/22

Watters followed this up with an interview during which an on-screen graphic read: “Dems worried about weather, not real problems.” Fox News, *Jesse Watters Primetime*, [7/20/22]

Fox host Greg Gutfeld said: “We are in a full-blown heat wave hysteria.” He said that while he does believe “it’s getting warmer,” climate advocates should “think about the opportunity cost of all the zealotry. You know? Panic didn’t work.” Fox News, *The Five*, [7/20/22]

Right-wing media also attacked the Biden administration for considering a climate emergency declaration

Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones claimed on his Infowars show that a climate emergency would be orchestrated by a “scientific global dictatorship whose aim is 90% world depopulation,” and that it would lead to a “dystopia”: “You’re gonna live in a 200-square-foot coffin apartment, you’re gonna be given forced inoculations five, six times a year, you’re gonna be sterilized, you’re gonna be killed.” Infowars, *The Alex Jones Show*,[7/20/22]

The Wall Street Journal editorial board called a possible emergency declaration “a serious abuse of power.” The Wall Street Journal, [7/19/22]

Kilmeade called Biden’s executive orders tone-deaf and “agenda-driven,” insisting that they “will do nothing but hurt the price of oil and gas.” Fox News, *Fox & Friends*,[7/19/22]

Hannity quoted climate denier Joe Bastardi, saying on his radio show that Democrats’ response to climate change is the “systemic dismantling of the American way of life. It’s not a rational response to a climate crisis.” Premiere Radio Networks, *The Sean Hannity Show*, [7/19/22]

Hosts of Fox’s Outnumbered claimed a possible climate emergency declaration from Biden “could cause a global depression,” is “suicide,” and is “going to kill the economy.” Fox News, *Outnumbered*, [7/19/22]

related: Tucker Carlson tells idiotic lie that “no one really believes in global warming”

07/20/22

Fox contributor calls for more coal plants as a solution to extreme heat

07/20/22

National TV networks mention climate change in 32% of segments on global extreme heat

07/19/22

mutual parasitism?  trumpista flip bird to libs by buying goods of patriot?  do his ads run next to him as gust? do host every ackn him as sponsor?

#8

an 7 22

the House Select Committee to investigate the January 6 attack on the Capitol held its**final hearing** of the summer yesterday, focusing on choices Donald Trump made between concluding his speech on the ellipse at the “Save America” rally and when he finally told the mob to go home in a video posted on Twitter, 187 minutes later.

The July 21 hearing featured several explosive new pieces of information about Trump’s “complete dereliction” of his duty as president of the United States, resisting his entire inner circle’s efforts advice to him that he tell the insurrectionists to stop and go home -- instead, he spent much of his time stewing in the White House dining room, watching Fox News and making calls to GOP senators and Rudy Giuliani telling them to delay the counting of the electoral vote.

Fox News did not carry Thursday’s hearing. Instead, the right-wing network ran its regular prime-time programming, as it did during the first prime-time hearing the committee put on in June.

[twt]

during the hearing, Fox hosts decried women making their own health care choices, undocumented immigrants, a canceled Dave Chappelle show, and the committee that they refused to cover. They also played a Hillary Clinton interview from 2018 and sold some t-shirts.

Between 8 p.m. and 11 p.m. ET, MyPillow -- the pillow company run by coup plotter Mike Lindell -- ran 6 advertisements for its products on Fox. Here’s some of the other companies that decided to advertise on Fox News prime time while it refused to air the January 6 hearing.

Tucker Carlson Tonight

On July 21, 2022, Tucker Carlson Tonight featured advertisements from MyPillow, Boll & Branch, Balance of Nature, Freshpet, and WeatherTech.

Hannity

On July 21, 2022, Hannity featured advertisements from MyPillow, Bayer,**T**rivago, Nutrisystem, and ReputationDefender.

The Ingraham Angle

On July 21, 2022, The Ingraham Angle featured advertisements from MyPillow, ADT, Bausch & Lomb, America’s Best Contacts & Eyeglasses, and Vitrazza.

an 7 22

a judge ruling in favor of a billion-dollar defamation lawsuit moving forward signals the possibility of looming financial woes for Rupert Murdoch's Fox News. According to The Guardian, Delaware Supreme Court Judge Eric David in June ruled that Dominion Voting Systems could proceed with its defamation lawsuit against Fox News and its parent company, Fox Corporation.

The lawsuit is a legal pushback against Fox News' reporting and perpetuation of voter fraud and election misinformation following the 2020 presidential election.

Per The Guardian, David determined "that it was a reasonable inference that Murdoch and son Lachlan either knew outright that Dominion had not manipulated the election or 'recklessly disregarded the truth' guk when Fox disseminated lies initially launched by Donald Trump."

Speaking to The Guardian, a number of legal experts have offered their perspective on the case and why it suggests trouble ahead of Fox News. Ciara Torres-Spelliscy, a Stetson University constitutional law professor and fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice, weighed in on Dominion's case as she noted that the voting technology company appears to have a substantial argument.

“Dominion has a very strong case against Fox News,” Torres-Spelliscy said to the news outlet, adding that "all of the 'conspiracy theories about Dominion’s machines were just pure bunk,'" She also noted that "Fox as a news organization should have known that and not given this aspect of [Trump’s] ‘big lie’ a megaphone.”

“I think once you start to pull the discovery material, what you’re going to find is there was a lot of communication between the Trump people both internally and externally about pushing very specific lies and narratives,” said Media Matters for America chief executive, Angelo Carusone.

However, Fox News is confident that it will survive this legal battle.

A Fox spokesman told also released a brief statement to the news outlet on behalf of the network. “We are confident we will prevail in this case, as the First Amendment is the foundation of our democracy and freedom of the press must be protected,” the spokesman said.

In addition to the lawsuit against Fox News, Dominion also has a $1.6 billion lawsuit against conservative news networks One America News Network (OAN) and Newsmax.

an raw story 5 22

Law enforcement may have to intervene to stop Fox News from incited racist terrorism as its primetime hosts push white supremacist conspiracy theories, a longtime network insider warned on Saturday.

Carl Cameron spent two decades at the network reporting on politics and earning the nickname "Campaign Carl" for his extensive travel to cover political races. He was interviewed on Saturday by CNN's Jim Acosta.

Acosta played clips of Tucker Carlson pushing the same white supremacist conspiracy theory that the alleged Buffalo massacre gun said motivated in his manifesto.

"Do you think the Murdock family in charge of Fox will ever pull the plug on Tucker?" Acosta asked.

"There's a point when it becomes difficult for an executive to put up with the help," Cameron replied.

"In this particular case, Tucker has been screaming fire in a crowded movie house for years, and that cliche really comes to the matter of what is free speech, and the fact of the matter is, if you disturb starting a riot in a movie theater, cops are going to arrest you and you might end up in jail or you might end up in something worse," he explained.

"That absolutely has to stop, whether it's the antitrust bill to take down and deplatform people who lie and put out falsehoods that cause damage and violent, violent hate, there ought to be something done about it," he replied.

He said Democrats have to take action.

"Democrats have to kick it in. The president has to be more forceful and sooner or later the law enforcement and the U.S. government is going to have to stop the lying because it's causing people's deaths," Cameron said.

Watch:

5 22 no lnx twt

Steve Schmidt calls for 'venomous and dangerous' Rupert Murdoch to be stripped of US citizenship

Rupert Murdoch receiving the 2015 Global Leadership Award, Wikimedia Commons

David Badash and The New Civil Rights Movement May 18, 2022

Lincoln Project co-founder and former GOP strategist Steve Schmidt wants the United States to strip Rupert Murdoch of his U.S. citizenship, calling the 91-year-old Australian-born media titan “the most venomous and dangerous foreigner to ever arrive on American soil.”

Murdoch is the man behind News Corp, a massive multi-national conglomerate that in the U.S. owns Fox News, The New York Post, the Wall Street Journal, book publisher HarperCollins, and even realtor.com.

But it is Fox News that Schmidt is focused on.

“The January 6 Committee will prove a massive conspiracy,” Schmidt tweeted Tuesday night. “That conspiracy will likely involve @foxnews hosts and personalities. @rupertmurdoch is responsible for what happens on @foxnews, which has long claimed in Federal Court that is not news but entertainment.”

Taking a dig at Murdoch and the birther movement which Fox News amplified, Schmidt says Murdoch “is not a Birthright Citizen like @BarackObama. He is a Naturalized Citizen. Though it happens rarely, there is a Denaturalization process that can lead to revocation of US Citizenship and removal from the country.”

Murdoch became a U.S. citizen in 1985 so he could own American television stations.

“There are conditions and requirements for Denaturalization,” Schmidt continues. “This should be studied closely by Attorneys. I believe a strong case could be made that @rupertmurdoch, the most venomous and dangerous foreigner to ever arrive on American soil meets it easily.”

Schmidt in his final tweet tags former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, who over the past few years has accused Murdoch and his media properties of undermining democracy in the U.S. and in Australia.

Last November Schmidt said Murdoch “has been a pancreatic cancer on democracy, pluralism and decency.”

And in February Schmidt suggested Fox News was an enemy of the U.S., calling it “an American Fifth Column that has declared war on American patriotism.”

no lnx many twt

How ‘Kremlin-friendly’ MAGA Republicans — and Tulsi Gabbard — became propaganda for Russia’s Ukraine invasion

Alex Henderson March 14, 2022

Some conservative Republicans have been unwavering in their disdain for Russian President Vladimir Putin, including Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah. But in MAGA World, Putin has a long list of apologists — even as thousands of people die during Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine. And Never Trump conservative Amanda Carpenter, in an article published by The Bulwark on March 14, takes a look at some of the “Kremlin-friendly” talking points coming from America’s far right.

:{

}:

“During the Cold War,” Carpenter explains, “the Soviet Union invested heavily in its global disinformation and propaganda efforts. And back in 2016, the Russians had to go to the trouble of creating a troll farm to push their divisive messages to the American audience. But today, they needn’t go to such lengths: Plenty of prominent right-wing media figures in the United States are pushing out Vladimir Putin’s propaganda for him.”

The media figures and politicians that Carpenter slams as “Kremlin-friendly” in her article include Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, the Daily Wire’s Candace Owens, former President Donald Trump, “War Room” host Steve Bannon and Rep. Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina. Carpenter notes that these are the sort of MAGA Republicans Cheney has dubbed “the Putin wing of the GOP.”

“It’s all the same people: fringe internet figures, Fox News hosts, Steve Bannon and his acolytes, Marjorie Tayor Greene caucus members, and the millions of people who love them,” Carpenter observes. “Most of these people claim to be free-thinking contrarians, but their accusations, questions, and conclusions about the United States, Russia and Ukraine always seem to go one way: The United States and Ukraine are somehow wrong, and the Russians have their reasons for waging war. If you don’t believe that, it’s only because all the Democrats are lying to you. Well, all the Democrats except for 2022 CPAC special guest Tulsi Gabbard, anyway.”

Carpenter notes that Carlson’s commentary on Fox News has been “so Kremlin-friendly” that according to a Kremlin memo obtained by Mother Jones, Kremlin officials have asked government-run media outlets to feature more clips of him.

:{

}:

Mother Jones’ David Corn reported, “On March 3, as Russian military forces bombed Ukrainian cities as part of Vladimir Putin’s illegal invasion of his neighbor, the Kremlin sent out talking points to state-friendly media outlets with a request: Use more Tucker Carlson.”

Carlson has promoted the conspiracy theory that the Ukrainian government is manufacturing bioweapons in laboratories and that Putin is merely protecting Russia’s safety by invading Ukraine.

Carpenter comments, “One could have guessed that the same people who blamed Dr. Fauci for the coronavirus might try to find some other government bureaucrats to blame for Putin’s war. This time, according to Carlson, ‘Dangerous biological agents remain, thanks to the Biden Administration, unsecured in a chaotic war zone’…. This is the big story in their minds. Not the Russian invasion and the unfolding humanitarian disaster, but the Russian disinformation about bioweapons, which provides a cudgel for whacking the Biden Administration — no matter how bogus the claims.”

MURDOCH TABLOD BS

there are no lnx, refs

bad photoshop pix of wave over city]

How climate change alarmists are actually endangering the planet

By Bjorn Lomborg

July 11, 2020Updated

Politicians, like AOC, stoke our fears with grandiose claims about climate change, but the climate is a real problem that can be combatted with common-sense investments in renewable energies.

Bloomberg via Getty Images

[MORE ON:

CLIMATE CHANGE

Top speechwriter's departure caps off year of Kamala Harris gaffes

Olympic ice rinks put spotlight on potent greenhouse gases

Scientists race to gather winter data on warming Great Lakes

Penguins offer varied clues to Antarctic climate change]

“You’ll die of old age, I’ll die of climate change,” reads a typical poster held by teenagers in climate rallies across the world. The media, activists and even politicians are unabashedly indulging in climate alarmism, stoking the fears of millions.

Books on the impending implosion of civilization due to climate change line shelves in bookstores across the world. Media outlets have changed the name of climate change, calling it the “climate emergency” or even “climate breakdown.” The cover of Time magazine tells us: “Be worried. Be very worried.”

Unsurprisingly, this causes most of us to brood about a future that we’re being told will be calamitous. Children are growing up terrified, with six in ten American teenagers now afraid of climate change. The scaremongering has reached such a crescendo that now half the world’s population really believes climate change will likely end the human race.

This alarmism is not only false but morally unjust. It leads us to make poor decisions based on fear, when the world not only has gotten better, but will be even better over the century.

Remember that the world today is much better in almost every measurable way. In 1900, the average life expectancy was 32. Today, it has more than doubled to 72. [but declined in US LAST YEAR FOR 1ST TIME EVER, DESPAIR BUT NOT BY GREENIES]

The disparity in health between the rich and poor has reduced,the world is much more literate, child labor has been dropping and we are living in one of the most peaceful times in history. Indoor air pollution, previously the biggest environmental killer, has halved since 1990. [NO THANK TO TRUMP ADMIN CUT $] Four out of five people were extremely poor in 1900 and today — despite the intense impact of the coronavirus — less than one in five is.

Alarmist is not only fake, it's unjust. Rising sea levels is a trumped up charge.

Last year, a sensational paper claimed that future sea-level rise would flood 187 million people — without assuming that we would adapt over the next 80 years. This scary predictive number was 600 times too large.

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[NY Post photo composite/Mike Guillen WAVE]

The UN Climate Panel’s middle-of-the-road estimate for the end of the century is that we will be even better off.There will be virtually no one left in extreme poverty, everyone will be much better educated, and the average income per person in the world will be 450 percent of what it is today. Yet, because climate is a real challenge, it will leave us less well off. Based on three decades of studies, the UN and theworld’s only Nobel climate economist [UNNAMED NORDHAUS?] estimate global warming will reduce the 21st century welfare increase from 450 percent to “only” 434 percent of today’s income.

Clearly, this is a problem. But a 3.6 percent reduction by the end of the century is not an existential threat. Resorting to panic and hysteria is unlikely to help. Indeed, one of the UN Climate Panel authors warned against this: “We risk turning off the public with extremist talk that is not carefully supported by the science.”[AND SO HERE'S THE SCIENCE?]

How is it possible that themedia’s portrayalof the impacts of climate change are so vastly removed from reality? Because simple, moderating factors are left out. Last year, a paper generated lots of headlines and clicks claiming that future sea-level rise would flood 187 million people.

But it was spectacularly misleading. It had to assume no one would adapt over the next 80 years. Actually, the research showed that as people obviously adapt, just 0.3 million people will have to move. The scary number is 600 times too large.

This trumped-up rhetoric leads us to make unrealistic promises. We have mostly failed our climate promises for the last thirty years, and we are poised to fail our Paris climate promises by 2030 as well. It also leads nations to make exorbitantly expensive promises of carbon neutrality by 2050,something that will be more costly than permanent coronavirus shutdowns. Only New Zealand has asked for an independent assessment of the cost of its climate policy. It will cost 16 percent of its GDPeach and every year by 2050, making it more costly than the entire New Zealand public expenditures for education, health, environment, police, defense, social protection, etc.

Rhetoric from the left inflates non-threatening issues. Here, Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg attends a committee on the environment.

Swedish activist Greta Thunberg has helped fuel the belief among young people that they will die of climate change.

EPA

Spending 16 percent of a nation’s income to solve a smaller part of a 3.6 percent problem is bad policy. Moreover, it is unlikely to happen. We need smarter solutions.

Climate economic studies convincingly show that one of the best investments to fix climate in the medium run is to invest heavily in green R&D.Because research is cheap, we can explore many avenues, from better renewables and battery storage, to carbon capture and fusion, fission, carbon-neutral oil-producing algae, and more. If we can innovate on the price of green energy down below that of fossil fuels, everyone will switch — not just well-meaning rich people, but also most Chinese, Indians and Africans. The models show that each dollar invested in green energy R&D will avoid eleven dollars of climate damage. WHAT SPECIFIC R7D HAS HE SUPPORTED?  TRASHED?]

It’s imperative that we shift our focus to such smart efforts — efforts that have been shown throughout history to work. We should tackle climate smartly, and also make sure that a monomaniacal focus on climate change doesn’t crowd out urgent investments in the many other, crucially important issues of health, education, jobs and nutrition.

Adapted from Bjorn Lomborg’s book, “False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet” (Basic Books),

https://nypost.com/2020/07/11/how-climate-change-alarmists-are-actually-damaging-the-planet/

mma 122  https://www.mediamatters.org/tucker-carlson/alex-berensons-antivax-commentary-killing-fox-viewers-because-thats-what-network

Pandemic conspiracy theorist Alex Berenson’s latest turn on Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s show, in which he called for the withdrawal of the mRNA vaccines for COVID-19 and said that “no one should get them” or “get boosted,” based on the false premises that the vaccines do not work and are “dangerous,” has rightly spurred a wave of revulsion.

As everyone from progressive MSNBC hosts to conservative National Review writers has noted, programming like this is killing Fox’s viewersby discouraging them from taking shots that are incredibly effective in preventing hospitalizations and deaths from the virus.

And that’s apparently how the Fox brass likes it.

Berenson’s pattern of spreading coronavirus misinformation is well-documented – he’s been described as “the pandemic’s wrongest man” and banned from Twitter over his constant falsehoods. But his “contrarian” willingness to denounce any and all measures to contain the pandemic, from masks to vaccines, has made him a fixture on Fox: Tuesday marked his 105th appearance since January 2020, 47 of which have come on Carlson’s show.

While Carlson himself is a constant font of anti-vaccine talking points and doubtlessly wants to host people who agree with his lies, the responsibility for Berenson’s ongoing presence on the network’s most-watched programs ultimately rests with Fox’s executives, like Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch and Suzanne Scott. Even if they aren’t willing to part with Carlson for the sake of their viewers, they could dispense with Berenson in a second if they wanted to. Over the years, they have repeatedly – and effectively – banned particular guests from the airwaves based on their off-air behavior or on-air commentary. Carlson has obeyed those diktats when they have come down, just like his fellow prime-time stars.

Fox hosted Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) hundreds of times from August 2017 to March 2021, including at least three dozen hits with Carlson, according to the Media Matters guest database. But on March 30 of the latter year, The New York Times reported that he was under federal investigation for alleged sex trafficking. After one last bizarre appearance on Carlson’s show to respond to the story that night, the network apparently left him for dead.

Fox’s executives were responsible for Gaetz’s disappearance from the network, with The Daily Beast reporting a few weeks later that Fox’s executives had put the congressman “on an informal blacklist” for trying “to rope the Fox News star into the congressman’s scandal.” Gaetz regularly appears on other right-wing networks like Newsmax, but he has not returned to Fox. Carlson, who was reportedly initially “livid” with Gaetz but subsequently suggested on-air that the congressman had been treated unfairly, has not defied that corporate mandate.

Something similar appears to have happened to Republican lawyers Joseph diGenova and Victoria Toensing,both longtime fixtures at Fox who were apparently banished from its airwaves in fall 2019. Both of them stopped appearing on Fox News amid reporting that they were deeply involved in the genesis of the Ukrainian dirt about Joe Biden that they were often called upon to opine about. The pair continued to appear on Fox Business, vanishing from that outlet as well after diGenova was widely criticized for an odious antisemitic rant about progressive philanthropist George Soros.

Fox refused to respond to reporters’ queries about whether the pair had been formally banned in the months after they disappeared, but they have not returned in the years since – including to Carlson’s show, which had hosted diGenova at least 27 times, according to the Media Matters guest database.

Similarly, in October 2018 a top Fox executive publicly condemned the rhetoric of Judicial Watch’s Chris Farrell, and a spokesperson said he would not be allowed to return to Fox News or Fox Business, following an uproar caused by the conservative political operative using an appearance on the latter network to falsely accuse Soros of masterminding a caravan of migrants headed toward the U.S. border from Central America.

Fox does not have anything resembling a consistent standard for this type of despicable commentary – indeed, Carlson just did an odious anti-Soros special for Fox Nation – but what matters for this discussion is that the ban stuck and Farrell has not been allowed back in subsequent years. Likewise, no Fox program has violated the network’s public bans of Harlan Hill (who tweeted in 2020 that Kamala Harris “comes off as an insufferable lying bitch,” or retired Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney (who said on-air in 2018 that torture “worked” on then-Sen. John McCain (R-AZ).

Fox’s executives have proved themselves to be capable of keeping unsavory guests off the air when they chose to do so. But with Berenson, they haven’t bothered trying. The network has made the calculation that keeping its viewers from needlessly dying isn’t worth it. As one Fox insider explained, the network is running anti-vaccine commentary because it is “great for ratings.”

The more than 3 million people who tuned into Carlson’s show on Tuesday heard a kook denounce lifesaving vaccines and urge them not to take them. If they listen to him, they could die. And Fox’s leadership is entirely uninterested in preventing that dire outcome.

someone said roger ailes ran tight ship had to be in total control thus fired beck when got too big; rupert et all have LOST control so tucker conspir fascist

Tucker Carlson’s 'nakedly fascist propaganda' leads to resignations, internal outrage, public fury — and a silent Murdoch

David Badash and The New Civil Rights Movement November 22, 2021

Two longtime Fox News contributors very publicly quit the far right wing cable channel this weekend over "Patriot Purge," a January 6 revisionism series created by the network's star anchor, Tucker Carlson. But other veteran Fox News anchors internally were so outraged their concerns went all the way to the head of Fox Corporation, the parent company of Fox News, who did nothing to stop its release and is reportedly refusing to comment.

Conservatives Stephen Hayes and Jonah Goldberg, the latter a staple on other news outlets as well, resigned in protest Sunday night. NPR reports the pair "pointed to a breaking point earlier this month: network star Tucker Carlson's three-part series on the Jan. 6 siege of the U.S. Capitol that relied on fabrications and conspiracy theories to exonerate the Trump supporters who participated in the attack."

"It's basically saying that the Biden regime is coming after half the country and this is the War on Terror 2.0," Goldberg tells NPR. "It traffics in all manner of innuendo and conspiracy theories that I think legitimately could lead to violence. That for me, and for Steve, was the last straw."

Goldberg's and Hayes' "resignations reflect larger tumult within Fox News over Carlson's series 'Patriot Purge' and his increasingly strident stances, and over the network's willingness to let its opinion stars make false, paranoid claims against President Biden, his administration and his supporters."

But NPR also reports that Chris Wallace, the top anchor at Fox News for nearly two decades, and Bret Baier, another top Fox News anchor and the network's chief political correspondent, were so outraged they "shared their objections with Fox News Media CEO Suzanne Scott and its president of news, Jay Wallace. Those objections rose to Lachlan Murdoch, the chairman and CEO of the network's parent company, Fox Corporation. Through a senior spokeswoman, Scott and Wallace declined comment. Murdoch did not return a request for comment through a spokesman."

At HuffPost senior reporter Christopher Mathias says "Patriot Purge" is "the most nakedly fascist piece of propaganda Carlson has ever produced. And it comes at adangerous moment: The insurrection is on its way to becoming as noble an enterprise as the Boston Tea Party for large parts of the American right."

"Carlson's insurrection agitprop sparked a similar wave of warnings from many experts on fascism and misinformation," Mathias adds. "Propaganda like this, they argued, could one day render the shocking events of Jan. 6 as amere preview of the right-wing violence to come."

Nicole Hemmer, author of “Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics," described “Patriot Purge" as “an overarching fantasy about the insurrection that goes like this: It was not an insurrection," she wrote for CNN. “To the extent there was violence, it was stirred up by members of the government and left-wing agitators.All of it was orchestrated so that the full force of federal law enforcement could be unleashed against Trump supporters, marking them as enemies of the state." FALSE FLAG

Goldberg and Hayes at their conservative website The Dispatch describe Carlson's "Patriot Purge" as "a collection of incoherent conspiracy-mongering, riddled with factual inaccuracies, half-truths, deceptive imagery, and damning omissions. And its message is clear: The U.S. government is targeting patriotic Americans in the same manner —and with the same tools—that it used to target al Qaeda."

Earlier this month Rolling Stonesaid "Patriot Purge" is both "profoundly dishonest" and "profoundly dangerous."

vax everywhere = neg?

gw denal eroded faith in sci for decades and made us vuln to vaxxer BS --> civil war?!

fox murdochs burn down the world for money and power (vax and AGW) ; koch gop anti-gubmint erode norms, 

fox briefly forgot trump TV hacks and acted like a news org and reported FACT that trump lost AZ, immediate threat from oann newsmax reb mercer soc media play

no lnx

Black flag:Understanding the Trumpists' latest threatening symbol

Chauncey DeVega and Salon October 12, 2021

It's an old truism that the "real bad men" (and bad women) "move in silence and violence." That's certainly true for the most dangerous and most effective of Donald Trump's allies, henchmen, henchwomen, and other followers. But for Donald Trump himself, and most of his political cult, that rule does not apply.

Trump and his followers were loud, exuberant and enthusiastic on Jan. 6. The lethal attack on the Capitol had been publicly announced weeks in advance, and should have come as no surprise. Trump's rallies and gatherings continue to celebrate violence and the prospect of revenge — and specifically of "getting even" with Trump's "enemies."

Steve Bannon, Trump's former campaign chairman and White House strategist, has now threatened to recruit Republican-fascist "shock troops" with the apparent goal of undermining the U.S. government, and by implication multiracial democracy, if and when Trump and the Republicans regain control of both Congress and the White House.

On a daily basis Fox News and other elements of the right-wing disinformation propaganda machine use stochastic terrorism and other techniques to radicalize their audience into committing acts of political violence. To this point, the Democratic Party and the political and news media class in general have remained in denial, and largely passive in response.

In one troubling new development, Trump supporters have begun flying all-black American flags, in an implicit threat to harm or kill their opponents — meaning nonwhite people,"socialist liberals," Muslims, vaccinated people and others deemed to be "enemies" of "real America." As media critic Eric Boehlert recently noted, the liberal opinion site Living Blue in Texas is sounding the alarm about the specific meaning of the black flag and the Republican-fascists support for terrorism and other political violence. That post, "Are Your Republican Neighbors Planning on Killing You?", merits lengthy quotation:

It didn't take long to find hundreds of videos where these Trumpers and so-called patriots were hanging black American flags. ...

Black American flags are the flags that mean "no quarter shall be given." They are the opposite of the white flag of surrender.

According to the people on TikTok and the Sun (British tabloid), the black American flag originated in the civil war and was flown by the Confederates.

It means that they will not surrender, will not take prisoners, and are willing to die for their cause. It means they will execute their enemies.

Who are their enemies? Pretty much any non-Conservative. You know, Democrats, Liberals, LGBTQ, BIPOC, and the vaccinated. ...

So, we're the enemy, and they're openly professing to want to execute us. … So, why are they doing this

Covid vaccinations, mostly. They believe that Joe Biden has declared a civil war on them by mandating that employers with over 100 employees and the military have vaccinations.

Yes, they say civil war, and they say it's already started. But, unfortunately, many of them also live in states where masks and vaccines are required by state governments, healthcare, and law enforcement.

An alarming number of military members have been making Tik Toks talking about how they are being discharged because they refuse the vaccine. It's alarming because there is probably an equal number of guys on there talking about the civil war plans and actively using Tik Tok to recruit these military and ex-military members.

The biggest message they have been sending out is, "it's time" or "the time is now." ...

Although showing guns on Tik Tok is supposed to be against community guidelines, they show lots of videos of their guns, shooting them, wearing them, or sitting on their bed.

They primarily use Tik Tok as a recruiting tool and let others know their willingness to commit violence. Then they tell people to message them or where to find them on Telegram.

However you interpret these videos posted by Trump followers and other neofascists — which could be mainly performative — it is clearly true that the American right is increasingly willing to accept or condone violence as a means of expanding and protecting their social and political power. (Salon did not find licensed news photographs of these flags, and has made the editorial decision not to reproduce the images mentioned above, which are easy to find on social media.)

Public opinion polls and other research have repeatedly shown that millions of Republican voters and Trump followers would support the use of violence to remove Joe Biden from office because of the "Big Lie" and their belief that that he is not a legitimate president. Similarly, a large proportion of Republicans believe that the rioters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 were "patriots" whose use of violence was justified.

And a new poll from the University of Virginia's Center for Politics even suggests that more than 50 percent of Trump supporters want "red states" to secede from the Union. Republican elected officials and other right-wing opinion leaders have continued to escalate their threats of political violence against Democrats and other targeted groups.

In a recent speech to the North Carolina Faith and Freedom Coalition's "Salt & Light" conference, Rep. Madison Cawthorn, R-N.C., issued what sounded like a declaration of war:

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It is time for the American Christian church to come out of the shadows to say, "No longer are we going to allow our culture to be determined by people who hate the things that we believe in…. We are going to stand valiantly for God's incredible inherent truths that predate any version of government. Because, my friends, if we lose this country today, if we bend the knee to the Democrats today, our country will be lost forever, our children will never know what freedom is. It's our duty to stand up, Let us stand united as men and women of faith to fight for our country.

During an interview with MSNBC's Joy Reid, terrorism and national security expert Malcolm Nance said that Cawthorn's video "picks up on the themes that are not just coming from the Steve Bannon level and Donald Trump level, they are coming from the Republican street — and that Republican street is armed. They're angry. They have been fed an entire line which makes them believe that America is no longer America and that they no longer want the America that the rest of us, the 60 percent of the country, live in. And they`re willing to take up arms for it."

Nance also noted that Cawthorn's propaganda video is thematically similar to the type of propaganda used by Islamic terrorist groups such as ISIS and al-Qaida to radicalize and recruit members.

During an interview with Scientific American magazine, Dr. Bandy Lee, the principal editor of the 2017 bestseller "The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump," explained how a mentally pathological leader can "infect" his followers and perhaps even an entire nation:

I have outlined two major emotional drives: narcissistic symbiosis and shared psychosis. Narcissistic symbiosis refers to the developmental wounds that make the leader-follower relationship magnetically attractive. The leader, hungry for adulation to compensate for an inner lack of self-worth, projects grandiose omnipotence — while the followers, rendered needy by societal stress or developmental injury, yearn for a parental figure. When such wounded individuals are given positions of power, they arouse similar pathology in the population that creates a "lock and key" relationship….

"Shared psychosis" — which is also called "folie à millions" ["madness for millions"] when occurring at the national level or "induced delusions" — refers to the infectiousness of severe symptoms that goes beyond ordinary group psychology. When a highly symptomatic individual is placed in an influential position, the person's symptoms can spread through the population through emotional bonds, heightening existing pathologies and inducing delusions, paranoia andpropensity for violence — even in previously healthy individuals. The treatment is removal of exposure.

Trump and his regime gave permission and encouragement to his followers and other supporters to engage in antisocial and other anti-human behavior on a national scale. Once such a process has begun, and those forces are unleashed, it is not easy to stop. Fascism is not a simple machine with an on-and-off switch. In practice, fascism is given life and takes corporeal form through its followers, with each one being a potential carrier of the pathology.

As Hussein Ibish warned in a recent article in the Atlantic, "The cancer of political violence is not an endemic American disease. At the moment, it is a Republican disease. No one but Republicans themselves can cure it. Until they do, the violence of the right is only going to keep swelling and crashing. From a Middle Eastern perspective, this is all appallingly familiar."

Fascism is a highly virulent social disease that usually destroys the host body – but not before spreading the disease to many other people. In fact, if the original host dies, he or she can be elevated to the status of martyr for "the cause," serving to inspire existing followers and lure in new ones.

Ultimately, Donald Trump, like other fascist and authoritarian leaders, is the symptom of a sick society. Trumpism is not actually the core disease. For America to counteract the deep underlying illness that has made Trumpism possible will require a long-term cultural and moral reckoning. Anything less, and the disease of American fascism will only go dormant until it is resurrected again — perhaps in a more dangerous and virulent form.

https://www.mediamatters.org/tucker-carlson/tucker-carlson-guest-pfizer-vaccine-available-us-not-fda-approved

lachlan and rupert

https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/fox-has-undermined-vaccines-nearly-every-day-last-six-months

no lnx vid

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/murdochs-want-tucker-carlsons-blood-soaked-conspiracy-theories

The Murdochs want Tucker Carlson’s blood-soaked conspiracy theories

WRITTEN BY MATT GERTZ

PUBLISHED 09/23/21

Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show is a toxic combination of Infowars-style conspiracy theories and Stormfront-esque xenophobia because that’s what network founder Rupert Murdoch, parent company CEO Lachlan Murdoch, and network CEO Suzanne Scott want in their 8 p.m. hour. Fox executives keep making excuses for Carlson’s malignant commentary, he correctly interprets their defenses as a green light to be ever more extreme, and all the other stakeholders in the network are willing to go along with it. 

Amid a gleefully dishonest Wednesday night screed, Carlson accused Democrats of wanting “to change the racial mix of the country” through immigration, adding, “This policy is called ‘the great replacement,’ the replacement of legacy Americans with more obedient people from far-away countries.” That is, in fact, what white supremacists call that conspiracy theory.

Video file

CitationFrom the September 22, 2021, edition of Fox News' Tucker Carlson Tonight

When Carlson similarly claimed in April that Democrats want to “replace the current electorate” with “more obedient voters from the Third World,” the Anti-Defamation League called for his firing, with ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt noting in a letter to Scott that Carlson was invoking a “classic white supremacist trope” that has “lit the fuse in explosive hate crimes.” But Lachlan Murdoch sent a letter in response claiming that Carlson had actually “decried and rejected replacement theory” and been simply talking about voting rights. Carlson responded by putting the “great replacement” theory at the center of his show, creeping closer and closer to the line until last night’s broadcast, which definitively destroyed Murdoch’s defense.

Fox’s response thus far has been to promote Carlson’s latest invocation of the bigoted conspiracy theory his boss had previously claimed he rejected.

Also on Wednesday, Carlson hosted a guest, Navy Cmdr J.H. Furman, who suggested that the vaccines for COVID-19 might be more dangerous than the virus that causes it. Furman has written a memo arguing that mandating the COVID-19 vaccines “may compromise U.S. national security due to the unknown extent of serious vaccine complications,” which was picked up by right-wing media outlets. During his appearance, he told Carlson’s audience that the coronavirus “has a harm rate, or a mortality rate of 0.001%. Compare that with the VAERS harm rate where COVID vaccination harm over the last 20 months has taken almost half of the total harm's totals in the VAERS database, the 20-years long VAERS database.”

Video file

CitationFrom the September 22, 2021, edition of Fox News' Tucker Carlson Tonight

In May, Carlson began promoting the lie that thousands of Americans have died in the “single deadliest mass vaccination event in modern history,” citing data from VAERS, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System. When journalists debunked his claim, noting that VAERS data is publicly sourced without verification,Lachlan Murdochstood by him, falsely claiming that Carlson was saying “nothing the CDC itself isn’t saying.” Carlson’s program has continued peddling the VAERS falsehood ever since as part of what seems like his single-minded devotion to limit vaccinations. His campaign, and that of his right-wing media colleagues, has had devastating consequences.

The Murdochs or Scott could have stepped in after Carlson started parroting blood-soaked white supremacist conspiracy theories or lying to his viewers about the safety and effectiveness of a safe, effective vaccine that Rupert Murdoch and more than 90% of Fox full-time employees have apparently taken. But this is the kind of network that they want to run, so they’ve made him its face.

There’s no signal from the Fox Corp. board, including former House Speaker Paul Ryan, that the network should change course. And chief political anchor Bret Baier and the rest of Fox’s “news” division seem content to look the other way and continue cashing their paychecks.

no lnx

https://www.alternet.org/2021/09/rupert-murdoch-privately-acknowledged-the-realities-of-climate-change-while-fox-news-hosts-were-publicly-denying-it-report/

Rupert Murdoch 'privately acknowledged' the realities of climate change — while Fox News hosts were publicly denying it

Rupert Murdoch receiving the 2015 Global Leadership Award, Wikimedia Commons

Alex Henderson September 23, 2021

Fox News and Fox Business, both created by Rupert Murdoch, have never been shy about promoting extreme or ludicrous ideas in the hope of driving ratings. But what far-right opinion hosts like Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity claim and what Fox News executives actually believe can be two different things, and an article published by Vice on September 23 stresses that Murdoch's actions show that he takes climate change seriously.

It's important to pay close attention to what Fox News does as well as what it says. Fox News has been full of anti-vaxxer hysteria; yet more than 90% of Fox Corporation employees, according to The Guardian, have been vaccinated for COVID-19. Fox Corporation, CNN reports, has "quietly implemented the concept of a vaccine passport."

Many of Fox News' opinion hosts have been relentlessly supportive of former President Donald Trump. But according to author Michael Wolff, the 90-year-old Murdoch detests Trump.

Fox News has been full of climate change denial. But Vice's Geoff Dembicki emphasizes that Murdoch's actions certainly aren't those of a climate change denier.

Fox News spends most of its time portraying a reality its executives and journalists know doesn't actually exist https://t.co/XpSEfnZMmu

— Jason Koebler (@Jason Koebler) 1632407319.0

In 2006, Dembicki reports, "Murdoch's News Corporation actually thought carbon pricing was a good idea. News Corp has meticulously documented its own carbon footprint since 2006 and sought to 'take a leadership role on the issue of climate change' by reducing it, according to hundreds of pages of publicly available documents reviewed by Vice News."

Dembicki goes on to say that in 2010, "News Corp was advocating 'market-based mechanisms to support carbon reductions' in the U.S. and other places."

"This is according to documents submitted to the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), a nonprofit group that has, for two decades, catalogued and rated environmental reporting from more than 300 companies, including Apple, Coca-Cola and Ford Motors," Dembicki explains. "No one forced News Corp to make disclosures to the CDP, which the group publishes in a database on its website. And far from altruism, News Corp's disclosures are cast ascorporate self-interest. In 2010, for example, a filing explained that doing so would give the company 'valuable expertise when responding to mandated reporting requirements' under a potential carbon pricing system, should any country implement one."

Dembicki goes on to say that "News Corp has submitted yearly reports on its environmental progress to CDP since 2006, often receiving 'A' grades for its efforts from the organization." Ateli Iyalla, North American managing director of the CDP, told Vice that News Corp has "strong understanding of climate issues and climate risk."

"Vice News reviewed more than a decade's worth of those submissions, and the documents show a company that's taking steps to protect its operations and thousands of employees from a climate emergency it knows is getting worse, while giving a massive media platform to people who say the emergency isn't real," Dembicki reports. "The documents show that News Corp privately acknowledged climate change is making hurricanes worse."

bad code

disaster cap'lism:

https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2021/07/climate-supervillain-creating-new-tv-channel-to-report-on-weather-he-helped-fuck-up/

we’ve reached the final boss level of climate irony. The New York Times reported Tuesday that Rupert Murdoch, the media tycoon whose News Corp. owns Fox News, plans to launch a full-time channel focused on the weather called Fox Weather.

Apparently, viewers are hungry for weather content — the Weather Channel’s viewership was up 7% in the first half of this year, while viewership fell for big cable networks. And looking at the historic heat waves gripping much of the country this summer — caused partially by stalled climate action aided by Fox News working in tandem with oil companies and the Republican Party to spread climate misinformation — it’s not hard to see why.

The irony of Fox creating a weather channel, of all things, is as deep as the rapidly heating ocean and as wide as our swiftly overheating country. As much of the rest of the world ponders how to dig ourselves out of this mess we’ve made, Fox News is still clinging desperately to denial.

Last month, star Tucker Carlson used his show to allege that climate activists want to “experiment to make children smaller” to fix global warming (spoiler alert: that is, uh, not true), while in May, climate denier Steve Koonin was invited to not one, but two Fox News programs to promote his book claiming that other scientists are getting too worked up about this global warming thing....Even the supposedly nonpartisan evening news show hosted by Brett Baier has a distinct denier slant: A Media Matters analysis of Baier’s climate coverage from 2009 to 2021 found that a whopping 88% of it ran the gamut from misleading to promoting bad-faith narratives to flat-out lies.

“It’s not just the bigger climate denial,” said Allison Fisher, the director of the climate and energy program at Media Matters. Fox News, Fisher said, “specifically use[s] weather to push climate denial. That is a long-worn tactic of Fox News, even before Trump was tweeting out, like, ‘where’s your global warming now?’ during a snowstorm. That’s a very classic Fox move.”

Fisher pointed out that as recently as this year, Fox News contributors used an April cold snap to claim climate change was a hoax. “They’re emphatic about dismissing the relationship between climate change and weather, whether it’s during a megastorm or the wildfires last year or the record-shattering heat this week, and then also mocking the idea of global warming during moments of abnormally cold weather,” she said. “They’re the ones who have made weather political.”...News Corp owns the denier-friendly Wall Street Journal and New York Post, as well as several right-wing outlets in Murdoch’s home country of Australia. While Murdoch...;released last year found that News Corp’s coverage of the devastating 2020 Australian wildfires drove a “viral misinformation campaign” intended to spread misinformation on the causes of the fire and protect the coal industry in Australia. The company’s explicit and implicit endorsement of climate denial has even led to a fracture in the Murdoch family: during the wildfires, Murdoch’s younger son, James,...issued a rebuke of the company on its handling of climate, and he...According to Fisher, Fox News has meteorologists on staff who report on the weather, but they mostly do “straight reporting” of what is going on. “They’re not contextualising” that weather, she said — despite the fact that other networks are ...tting their meteorologists discuss how extreme weather is shaped by climate change. “That contextualisation of these events as climate is what makes Fox’s entry into this space really suspect and troubling.”

All of this raises the question of how, exactly, Fox is planning to go about reporting the weather when it keeps getting more extreme thanks, in part, to a mess they helped create. As Deadline reported a few weeks ago, Fox has tapped at least six meteorologists from different local markets — Britta Merwin, Jason Frazer, Craig Herrera, Bridgit Mahoney, Stephen Morgan, and Nick Kosir — to flesh out the basis of its news team. Earther was able to find just a few tweets from three of them that mentioned climate change.

“Climate change is real and it is a fact,” Merwin, a future Fox morning host and formerly of KPRC-TV in Houston, responded in February to a Twitter user using Merwin’s report of snow on the beach to claim climate change was a hoax. “It is about science,” she wrote. Her future morning cohost, Frazer of WKYC-TV in Cleveland, thanked a meteorologist in 2017 for “sharing … expertise on climate change” and mentioned climate change in 2018 when discussing the size of a tropical storm. (“You could argue Climate Change but I am not touching that hot potato,” he wrote.) Meanwhile, Herrera, who covered weather for Seattle’s KING-TV and will serve as another coanchor, tweeted about climate in 2013 and 2014, when he covered an IPCC report and did a piece on California’s drought. “We have a long way to go but education and facts are key,” he responded to one user thanking him for his coverage. “Can’t dispute the science or numbers.”

Gizmodo reached out Frazer, Merwin, and Herrera, along with another of their future coworkers, to ask how they planned to handle climate coverage. We will update when we receive any responses.

According to the Times, Fox is dipping a toe into this space because it’s so profitable; it quotes a TV executive saying that “climate change and the environment will be the story of the next decade,” while a spokesperson for Fox told the Times the network will offer “in-depth reporting surrounding all weather conditions, and we are excited to showcase to viewers what a full-service comprehensive weather platform can deliver beginning this [spring].”

Some of Fox’s future competitors making hay out of the climate crisis could goad the network into figuring out ways to cover it: The Weather Channel, the Times reported, has a whole host of climate change programming planned, including a show about miners looking for minerals in Greenland exposed by newly melted ice (sorry, what?).

But Fisher sees a darker possibility for the new weather service.

“It’s the content they’re producing that’s going to get amplified,” she said. “If they bring on a denier like Marc Morano, if he starts to get a platform there — that content is going to go on his website, it’s going to go into other right-wing media infosphere, it’s going to bounce back on Fox, it’s going to go on social media, and they’re going to push that out in moments when everybody else is saying, ‘this is climate change’–they’re going to be able to tell this right-wing media bubble, it’s not.”

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thom H

https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/gop-war-on-democracy/

Former Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney being booed in his own home state raise an urgent question: Are the Redcoats back?

The Republican party has now introduced over 300 pieces of legislation designed to make it more difficult for American citizens to participate in the process of selecting their representatives, the core function of a democratic republic.

They've also proposed or passed numerous laws criminalizing protest and dissent, primary American values written into the First Amendment, and given a "get out of jail free" card to people who kill protesters.

Today's Republican party does not believe in democracy or the core idea on which this nation was founded:

"That all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights" and "that to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…"

As we see with their support of Trump's Big Lie, they have a serious problem with that "consent of the governed" part of the Declaration of Independence. And they're pretty sketchy about that whole human "rights" thing.

If it seems like America is re-fighting the Revolutionary War or the Civil War, it's because there's a sizeable group of rightwing Americans who say that's what they think they're doing.

In both of those past wars, one group of Americans believed in the ideal of democracy and a republic deriving its authority from the will and consent of its people. On the other side, there were people who believed that democracy was a dangerous experiment and a grave mistake.

During the Revolutionary War the anti-democracy folks were called Tories or Loyalists, because they were loyal to the British king and believed that the best form of government was a kingdom, and that letting average people participate in democratic governance would lead to disaster.

That was solidly a third, perhaps even half, of the white people then living in North America: they were willing to fight and die to keep America part of the United Kingdom.

Those who opposed democracy on this continent had a lot of history on their side.

For most of the 7,000 years of recorded human history at that point, governments had been run either by kings who seized power through violence, or priestly theocrats who claimed that their authority to rule came from God. (In most cases, regardless of who ended up on top, there was an unholy alliance between the two.)

The British United Kingdom was just the latest, in 1776, in a long series of kingdoms that ruled every part of Europe; the Greek experiment with democracy was 3000 years old at that time, and the Roman experiment with a republican form of government had failed almost 2000 years earlier.

There were a lot of reasons back then to think that a democratic republic would be a terrible mistake.

The main one was that it hadn't worked in thousands of years, and the ancient Greek and Roman experiments were considered by many — most, actually — to have been failed experiments.

People believed so strongly either in the Loyalist necessity of a royal family, or the Founders' hope of a people engaged in self-rule, that families were literally torn apart, brother killing brother, neighbors turning firearms against each other.

By the time of the Civil War, 80 years later, there was still a debate about whether democracy was anything more than some kind of liberal, airy-fairy idea that really didn't work out all that well.

But this time, those Americans who took up arms against democracy were not fighting on behalf of a church or a king. They were fighting to support the rich, the oligarchs of the deep South.

As I lay out in detail in my new book The Hidden History of American Oligarchy, between 1820 and 1860 the South underwent a radical consolidation of wealth and property.

The invention of the Cotton Gin and its adoption in the early 1820s allowed the few plantations wealthy enough to buy one to effectively wipe out their smaller competitors and buy up their land.

As a result, by 1860 virtually all of the most productive land, wealth and political power of the South was consolidated in the hands of just a few thousand families.

They did not believe in democracy either; they declared war on America specifically to end democracy and establish a continent-wide oligarchy: rule by the rich in an oligarchic police state as the South had become.

The North won and democracy prevailed, but the idea of oligarchy survived and has been persistent throughout American history.

This is what the Republican party now represents: Oligarchy.

Rule by the rich and ignoring "the consent of the governed."

The suppression of dissent, the oppression of minorities, and replacing the ballot box with the iron fist of a police state run of, by and for the wealthy few.

And they're pushing us there really hard and really fast:

A political network run by a group of right-wing billionaires has a larger budget and more employees than the entire Republican party.

A family of billionaire oligarchs from Australia crank democracy-hating propaganda into the American political bloodstream nearly every day on cable television and in print.

Voices openly denigrating democracy and promoting hate and intolerance — the hallmarks of oligarchy — are on local radio and television in every American city every single day, and dominate the Internet.

The single largest source of threats and murders by terrorists in America are today committed by white-supremacist right-wingers who hate and fear the idea of a pluralistic, democratic society.

Tragically, for the third time in our history, Americans who believe in democracy find themselves again having to defend themselves against Americans who don't.

Several of these hard-right groups have openly declared their intention to start a second American Civil War.

They say they want to see Americans killing each other in the name of white supremacy and rule by the rich, and some have followed their suggestion.

They declare their loyalty to a white-supremacist real estate oligarch from New York, get their news from Australian and Ukrainian oligarchs, and have embraced an ideology championed by Germans in the 1930s.

They even adorn themselves in red and wear funny hats like the British loyalists did in revolutionary times.

The Biden presidency represents America's third, and perhaps final, chance to prove democracy is not merely an idealistic fantasy.

If his administration and the Democrats in Congress can succeed in conquering the coronavirus, putting the American economy back on track, and rebuilding the civil society that 40 years of Reaganism has so devastated, American democracy — and, indeed, democracy around the world — may well endure and even grow.

But Republicans are doing everything they can to keep that from happening, from discouraging vaccination and public health measures, to sabotaging our election systems, to amplifying their rhetoric of hate and terror across multiple media platforms.

When "moderate" voices within their ranks, like Mitt Romney and Liz Cheney, dare pop their heads up, the majority of the Republican Party viciously attacks them.

Dissent is no longer allowed in the GOP.

Authoritarianism has prevailed.

Oligarchy has completely seized the party.

These, as Thomas Paine (a fervent believer in democracy) said, "are the times that try men's souls."

Long before actual conflict broke out, Paine wrote: "The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered…"

We must not let the right-wingRedcoat/Redhat terrorists, who have openly proclaimed their goal of Americans killing Americans in an ideological and racial war, prevail.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/tucker-carlson-2652858483

travis raw

Fox News staffers called on the network to fire Tucker Carlson over his call to harass parents and children for wearing masks, but the highly rated host is "invincible."

Current and former employees were embarrassed and outraged when Carlson urged viewers to call child protection services on parents whose children wear masks in public, but they told The Daily Beast the top-rated prime-time host is "untouchable" and will never "suffer any repercussions" for his openly white nationalist comments or other statements that might lead to violence.

"He's a good example of how much you can get away with at Fox if your ratings are high," one current network staffer said. "Aside from that, he just perpetuates the right's catastrophe platform. They cannot win with their supposed limited government, fiscal conservatism, because not even they really believe in it. So all they do is fear monger."

The Anti-Defamation League had called on Carlson to be fired and advertisers to boycott his show after he endorsed the white-supremacist "Great Replacement" theory on air, but Fox Corp CEO Lachlan Murdoch defended the network's biggest star -- much to the chagrin of staffers.

"The Murdochs love him," one former Fox News personality said. "Like them, he is a rich, prep school kid born with a silver spoon who traffics in populism while living in an expensive ivory tower and never meeting in real life the people he gins up for ratings."

Even advertiser boycotts won't dent the Murdochs' support for Carlson, because Fox doesn't need them thanks to their loyal viewers -- and other cable customers -- who pay carriers to make sure the conservative network remains on their service.

"He's the new Bill O'Reilly," another ex-Fox News employee stated. "The dirty little secret is that FNC doesn't care about losing advertisers. They make their money via cable conglomerates that pay them much money so that dumb f*cks who worship FNC can continue being told what, in their heart of hearts, they want to believe -- and that's a lot of people."

Fox News staffers are frustrated their concerns aren't taken seriously, and one current staffer says his ability to skate away from consequences remind them of someone else Fox News helped turn into a political star.

"If Tucker left, his fans would follow him wherever he went and would turn Fox off for scorning their leader," the current staffer said. "If Trump is the most dangerous person in the country, Tucker is a close second behind him."

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

HE BROKE AMERICA? DEMOC?

common dr 421

...Oh, for a simpler, saner time – and I don't mean that white American idyll that never was, a rightwing fever dream in which all is falsely remembered as sunshine, jellybeans and petroleum products burnt without a care. Rather, as columnist Frida Ghitis notes, "It wasn't very long ago that the country had two reality-based, generally centrist parties. Democrats and Republicans, with different philosophies, debated the merits of their ideas, in search of a workable compromise.

But then, bit by bit, the GOP started veering in a different direction. By the time Trump became president, the maximalist, nativist, conspiracy-driven, scandal-manufacturing, hate-stoking wing was already ascendant, propelled by the engines of Fox News and other far-right provocateurs. Trump's victory was the coup that toppled the old GOP and turned it into the extremist MAGA machine.

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And now, what's left? A handful of old-fashioned, conservative Republicans in Congress and their supporters who apparently still believe in some semblance of democracy and the republic that gave their party its name. But they're overwhelmed by a crowd of fanatics and sycophants: men and women, in Frida Ghitis' words, busily "promoting the delegitimization of America's duly elected president, people who are endorsing or refusing to rectify dangerous lies."

You know who they are: Cruz, Hawley, Graham, Jordan, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, et al. They include, of course, Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, "rewarded by recklessness," to use campaign strategist Rick Wilson's phrase, and as of this moment still standing, despite more and more evidence of his misogyny and possible abusive behavior, sexual and otherwise.

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Like so many among these ranks, Trump fanboy Gaetz is one of the smarmy, privileged, attenuated frat boys who refuse to believe that rules and norms apply to them – much like the man who was their president and would be forever more if the rest of us become indifferent and lower our guard. Gaetz cares about his job title only as far as it gets him booked on talk shows and the lecture circuit – so far, he has failed to sponsor a single piece of significant legislation.

In his new memoir, former Republican House Speaker John Boehner describes these types of Republican rabblerousers as "the chaos caucus," not caring about the country but only about their power base and appearances on Fox News and right wing talk radio: "They didn't really want legislative victories," Boehner writes. "They wanted wedge issues and conspiracies and crusades."

Not that Boehner is blameless. He and so many Republican colleagues let themselves be bullied, then acquiesced to our current dilemma, yielding to those pledged to lunacy and a lemming-like fealty to a president as bereft of thought and feeling as they are. You see the results: a shattered party not of ideas and programs, but only insults and bogus intrigues. No wonder the Biden infrastructure proposals infuriate them; they have nothing to offer in return.(Remember Trump's Infrastructure Week, always imminent but never occurring over the whole four years of his presidency?)

They fear any and all success during Biden's first term. Think back to 1993, when now anti-Trumpist conservative Bill Kristol advised Republicans to shun any healthcare plan from Bill and Hillary Clinton. In a memo—Kristol was then head of the Project for the Republican Future—he warned his colleagues, "It will revive the reputation of the party that spends and regulates, the Democrats, as the generous protector of middle-class interests. And it will at the same time strike a punishing blow against Republican claims to defend the middle class by restraining government."...

CF BTB on roy cohn ny post early trump booster?

aha we think of trump as reality TV, but rooted in tabloid?

https://www.smh.com.au/world/rupert-murdoch-and-donald-trump-a-friendship-of-convenience-20171224-h09sc2.html

no lnx many pix

Rupert Murdoch and Donald Trump: A friendship of convenience

By Amy Chozick sid morn news

Updated December 24, 2017 — 8.06amfirst published at

The calls to the White House come at least once a week. "Murdoch here," the blunt, accented voice on the other end of the line says.

For decades, Rupert Murdoch has used his media properties to establish a direct line to Australian and British leaders. But in the 44 years since he bought his first newspaper in the US, he has largely failed to cultivate close ties to an American president. Until now.

Disney buys US$52.4 billion of Murdoch empire

Play video]

Murdoch and President Donald Trump - both forged in New York's tabloid culture, one as the owner of The New York Post, the other as its perfect subject - have travelled in the same circles since the 1970s, but they did not become close until recently, when their interests began to align more than ever before.

Since Inauguration Day, Murdoch has talked regularly with Trump, often bypassing the White House chief of staff, General John F. Kelly, who screens incoming calls. Murdoch has felt comfortable enough to offer counsel that others may shy away from, such as urging the president to stop tweeting and advising him to improve his relationship with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. Murdoch also has weekly conversations with Trump's son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner.

Rupert Murdoch embraces President Trump.

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Before the news broke that Murdoch had agreed to sell vast parts of his 21st Century Fox to the Walt Disney Co. for US$52.4 billion ($67.8 billion), Trump called him to get his assurance that the Fox News Channel, the highly rated cable network and frequent bullhorn of the Trump agenda, would not be affected.

On December 14, the day the agreement was announced, Trump let the world know that he had made a congratulatory call to Murdoch. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, also passed along the president's belief that the deal would be "a great thing" for jobs - a claim disputed by Wall Street analysts.

After decades of ups and downs, Trump now counts Murdoch as one of his closest confidants. The two titans made a show of their improved relationship in June 2016, when Murdoch visited Trump at the Trump International Golf Links Scotland before a group of reporters. They appeared together again at a black-tie dinner in May in honour of American and Australian veterans who fought side by side in World War II. Murdoch introduced the president as "my friend Donald J. Trump" before they engaged in a brief hug.

They are opposites in personal style, with Murdoch gruff and low-key, preferring schlubby newsrooms to Trump's gilded towers and glitz. But they have much in common.

After buying The New York Observer, Kushner sought out Murdoch.

Both were born to wealth, but at a distance from the centres of power. Trump grew up in Jamaica, Queens, the son of a real estate developer content to earn his fortune in the boroughs outside Manhattan - so close but so far from glittering Midtown, where the son would make his name and his home. Murdoch, the son of a journalist who became the owner of a newspaper chain, spent his childhood in Melbourne. Murdoch, 86, and Trump, 71, are also alike in that they were both sent to exclusive schools as boys before going on to outdo their fathers in the family businesses.

Although both men parlayed their inheritances into global power, they have stubbornly viewed themselves as outsiders at odds with the establishment. When Murdoch entered the British newspaper market in 1968, London society shunned him and his vulgar tabloids, The Sun and The News of the World, which he used to wound his enemies and advance his political interests. Trump withstood a similar wariness among the elite after he made himself a Manhattan player through his brazen deal making and hucksterism.

Media baron Rupert Murdoch (left) has longstanding ties with President Donald Trump, and his daughter, Ivanka (right)]

To make their way upward in New York, both men relied on a powerful friend, lawyer Roy M. Cohn, a ruthless fixer who made his name in the 1950s as the chief counsel to Joseph McCarthy, the Red-baiting senator, before representing some of the city's most powerful figures, including the mobster John Gotti and the New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner.

Cohn connected Trump to Murdoch and the tabloid he bought in 1976, The New York Post. The upstart developer saw that he could benefit from the brash daily - especially its Page Six gossip column, which started a year after Murdoch became the paper's owner.

Wendi Murdoch and Ivanka Trump on holiday in Croatia.]

"Trump was interested in specifically Rupert's ownership of The Post, because Page Six is very important to his rising stature in New York City and branding efforts," said Roger Stone, a Republican operative who has known both men for decades.

Trump seemed to revel in the tabloid's saucy coverage of his personal life. In 1989 and 1990, The Post turned out a series of front pages on Trump's split from his first wife, Ivana Trump, and his affair with Marla Maples. The stream of headlines in bold block letters culminated in a quote attributed to Maples: "Best Sex I've Ever Had."

Trump's enthusiastic response to the planned Disney-Fox megadeal may have been lost in the swirl of Washington news had it not been for his vehement opposition to another recent attempt at media consolidation - AT&T's proposed US$85.4 billion ($110 billion) acquisition of Time Warner, the parent company of CNN, a frequent target of the president's "fake news" complaints. While so far making no move on the Disney-Fox plan, the Justice Department has sued to block the AT&T-Time Warner deal on antitrust grounds in a rare instance of governmental interference in a merger of two companies that do not directly compete with each other.

Murdoch, whose ideology is more malleable than his critics realise, has long gained from his knack for placing himself close to power. In the 1980s, when he was cosy with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, his London tabloids took a pro-Tory stance. In 1997, his newspapers endorsed the Labor Party leader Tony Blair for prime minister.

Donald Trump is the first US president to establish close ties with Murdoch

Lance Price, a former Blair spokesman, referred to Murdoch as "effectively a member of Blair's Cabinet." In turn, Murdoch faced little government scrutiny as he expanded his media empire to reach 40 percent of British newspaper readers and millions of television viewers through his stake in Sky, a pay TV service. But after a 2011 phone hacking scandal at the now-shuttered News of the World put a spotlight on his remarkable political influence, he found himself facing regulatory hurdles, and his $15 billion bid for a 61 percent stake of Sky came to nothing.

Even as Murdoch enjoyed an open invitation to 10 Downing Street, he found that his overtures to U.S. presidents mostly fell short. And before making their alliance, Murdoch and Trump had to put their old spats behind them.

Before the recent rapprochement, Murdoch privately called Trump "phony," and accused him of exaggerating his net worth. For his part, Trump once threatened to sue Murdoch for libel after The Post reported that the storied Maidstone Club in East Hampton, New York, had denied him membership.

During much of the 2016 presidential campaign, Murdoch - who initially swooned over Jeb Bush - stood against Trump, declaring on Twitter that he was "embarrassing his friends" and "the whole country." The Wall Street Journal, Murdoch's crown jewel, ran an editorial calling the candidate a "catastrophe".The Post led with the headline "Don Voyage" and declared, "Trump is toast".

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Trump shot back on Twitter: "Wow, I have always liked the @nypost but they have really lied when they covered me in Iowa." He also went after the Journal: "Look how small the pages have become @WSJ," he wrote. "Looks like a tabloid ??? saving money I assume!"

The Post ended up endorsing Trump, with reservations, in the New York primary, but refrained from endorsing either him or Hillary Clinton in the general election.

More recently, Murdoch expressed exasperation with Trump's immigration policies.In response to the White House ban on travel of people from majority-Muslim nations, his company, 21st Century Fox, released a memo offering assistance to any employees hurt by the executive order and reminding them that "21CF is a global company, proudly headquartered in the U.S., founded by - and comprising at all levels of the business - immigrants." In August, James Murdoch, the younger son of Murdoch and the chief executive of 21st Century Fox, condemned the president's response to the riots in Charlottesville, Virginia.

The man partly responsible for the detente was another moneyed outsider who craved status and respect: Jared Kushner.

When Kushner bought The New York Observer in 2006, he wasted little time reaching out to Murdoch. "He wanted to be Murdoch," said one person close to both men at the time. In early 2016, after a presidential debate during which Trump faced aggressive questioning from Megyn Kelly, then a Fox News anchor, the candidate sent Kushner to Murdoch on a media diplomacy mission.

Kushner's wife, Ivanka Trump, is close friends with Murdoch's third wife, Wendi Deng. Murdoch and Deng attended the Kushner-Trump wedding in 2009 at the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey, and the Murdoch daughters, Grace and Chloe, served as flower girls.

Before Murdoch and Deng divorced in 2013, Kushner and Ivanka Trump vacationed on Rosehearty, Murdoch's 184-foot sailing yacht. In a further sign of the two families' closeness, Ivanka Trump took on the job of Murdoch trustee responsible for overseeing the two girls' $300 million fortune - a role she gave up a month before her father took office.

In June 2016, when Donald Trump appeared to be the inevitable Republican nominee, Murdoch made the visit to Trump International Golf Links Scotland. Completed in 2012 over the objections of nearby residents, the course lies 35 miles from the herring-fishing port of Rosehearty, the town left behind by the Murdoch clan when it emigrated to Australia in 1884.

Murdoch arrived with former model Jerry Hall, his fourth wife, whom he married in March. Under cloudy skies, the newlyweds toured the property in a golf cart large enough for four. Trump was at the wheel, with Hall seated beside him. Murdoch, wearing sunglasses, sat on a backward-facing rumble seat as they made their way to the Trump-refurbished Macleod House, a 15th-century mansion, where they had dinner.

Trump's mended relationship with Murdoch has not gone unnoticed by Time Warner executives, who wonder why AT&T's attempt to buy the company has run into regulatory trouble at a time when the president has smiled on the Disney-Fox deal.

"If you look at the facts of our case, even before you heard the administration's endorsement of the Disney-Fox deal, it was hard to understand how the Justice Department could reach a decision to block our deal," Jeffrey L. Bewkes, the chief executive of Time Warner, said.

A spokesman for the White House, Raj Shah, said that Trump hadn't spoken to Attorney General Jeff Sessions about the AT&T-Time Warner deal and that "no White House official was authorised to speak with the Department of Justice on this matter."

The way CNN's parent company views it, Fox News has adopted a role similar to the one played by Murdoch's British tabloids when they helped advance the agendas of British leaders. As Blair learned, however, even a special relationship with the media baron can sour quickly. He and Murdoch - once so close that Blair was the godfather to Grace Murdoch - are no longer on speaking terms.

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Billionaire bromance: President Trump and Rupert Murdoch embrace at a dinner honouring war veterans in May.

Media & marketing

Trump praises $68b Disney deal, with Fox News staying in Murdoch's hands

During the British government's 2012 inquiry into the mogul's political influence, the former prime minister described what it was like when a story subject falls out of favor with a Murdoch-controlled tabloid.

"Once they're against you, that's it," Blair said. "It's full on, full frontal, day in, day out, basically a lifetime commitment."

...https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-has-undermined-public-health-measures-over-1000-coronavirus-segments-september-1

fox has undermined public health measures in over 1,000 coronavirus segments since September 1

https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/malcolm-turnbull-slams-news-corp-reporter-to-his-face-for-aiding-rupert-murdoch-it-is-a-shocking-legacy/

"'A shocking legacy’: Malcolm Turnbull slams News Corp reporter to his face for aiding Murdoch's 'enormous damage to western democracy'"

Alex Henderson

Former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, during a panel discussion on climate change, slammed Australian journalist and News Corps employee Paul Kelly for refusing to stand up to Rupert Murdoch's climate change denial.

Turnbull argued, "The company that you work for and its...

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/youre-not-supposed-to-understand-the-hunter-biden-smear-chaos-is-the-point

kos

Acclaimed journalist and historianAnne Applebaumunderstands the universe of propaganda as well as anyone alive today. Winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, she has devoted the past three decades to studying Russia and Eastern and Central Europe, with an emphasis on disinformation and propaganda so acute that she washerself targeted—by a Russian-originated smear campaign in retaliation for her writings about Vladimir Putin's annexation of Crimea. She now contributes her cache of knowledge toThe Atlantic, among other publications.

For someone so well-versed, analyzing the blatant behavior of propagandist right-wing media outlets such as Fox News is something akin to a chess master analyzing the strategy of Tic-Tac-Toe—simple, and even relaxing. So after watching the antics of Donald Trump during his final debate with Joe Biden, she wrote a piece for *The Atlantic*on Friday that explains what millions of Americans are still shaking their heads in bewilderment about today: the source—and more importantly, the purpose—of Trump's bizarre accusations about Hunter Biden and his allegedly nefarious dealings with certain obscure individuals.

Of course the direct conduits of this nonsense are what we in the sane world regard as the fever swamps of paranoiac right-wing conspiracy thinking, most visibly manifested on the Fox News channel. As Applebaum notes, the actual storyline, spun out of whole cloth, is purposefully designed to be opaque, leading someone trying to divine the actual facts to become frustrated and give up trying to make sense of them. In fact, as her article's title suggests, "You're not supposed to understand the rumors about Biden."

Because the story is not intended to make sense, but to create a fog of doubt.

Just like the fictional legend these same people wove around "Hillary's emails," the Hunter Biden fiction also concerns emails—these ones allegedly kept by a former business partner of Hunter Biden, and miraculously disclosed to a peripheral former and supposed "investigative journalist" named Matthew Tyrmand. Tyrmand, notably, was formerly (and peripherally) associated with the right-wing fraudster and provocateur James O'Keefe.

That piece of critical information would lead most knowledgeable people to immediately shelve the unfounded Hunter Biden scheme in that mental compartment where bad ideas go to eventually die. But the Fox News audience is by definition anything but "knowledgeable people." On that network, the Hunter Biden nonsense is not something analogous to the disappointingly empty caverns of "Al Capone's vault," but rather an ever-opening flower, chock full of conspiracy-thinking goodness.

In releasing the 26,000 emails, Tyrmand and his collaborator, the Breitbart News contributor Peter Schweizer, are not bringing forth any evidence of actual lawbreaking, or an actual security threat, by either Hunter or Joe Biden. They are instead creating a miasma, an atmosphere, a foggy world in which misdeeds might have taken place, and in which corruption might have happened. They are alsoproviding the raw material from which more elaborate stories can be constructed. The otherwise incomprehensible reference in last night's debate to "the mayor of Moscow's wife," from whom Joe Biden somehow got rich, was an excellent example of how this works.A name surfaces in a large collection of data; it is detached from its context; it is then used to make an insinuation or accusation that cannot be proved; it is then forgotten, unless it gains some traction, in which case it is repeated again.

Applebaum provides some basic background for the uninformed and uninitiated (i.e., normal Americans).

Those who live outside the Fox News bubble and intend to remain there do not, of course, need to learn any of this stuff. Judging by what has been published, the very worst thing that Tyrmand's email cache could reveal (if it is authentic) is that some unattractive people sought to use Hunter Biden's surname and connections to get business deals or score a visit to the White House for their clients. But we already know about Hunter Biden's involvement with unattractive people, and his struggles with addiction; we also know that, under normal circumstances, dozens of people visit the White House every day. On the grand scale of misdeeds committed by politicians and their relatives, this kind of thing barely registers.

Applebaum then helpfully includes a laundry list of Trump's corruption that puts to shame whatever the right hopes to spin out of this email concoction. As readers of Daily Kos, you're more than familiar with these.

But there is a purpose lurking here in the mind of Fox News mogul Rupert Murdoch. The first and most obvious? To assist Trump in deflecting attention—for these final 10 days—from his horrific malfeasance in the face of a pandemic whose vicious resurgence is soon likely to be the sole focus of the nightly newscasts. The second reason is to provide a ready well of sludge to draw upon in the seemingly likely event (as Murdoch himself has acknowledged) that the polls turn out to be correct, and Trump loses the election.

They will continue to serve a function after the election as well. If Biden wins, Foxworld will need some way to keep its audience focused on something other than the Cabinet he appoints, the new legislation he passes, and all the other events, decisions, and changes that used to constitute "news." Instead of all that real-life stuff—laws and regulations, statistics and investigations, debates about the economy and health care—the leading figures of the right-wing conspiracy bubble will,over the next months and years, dip into the email caches to keep their followers focused on an alternate reality in which Joe Biden is a secret oligarch, his son is an important figure in the Chinese mafia, and LOL nothing matters. Just as you need to know the backstories of the stars in the DC Comics universe in order to understand the nuances of a Batman movie, six months from now you might also need to know all about Cooney and Archer and the wife of the mayor of Moscow if you want to understand Ingraham's monologues.

Applebaum, a rapt student of propaganda, knows that outside of hosting the inevitable guest appearances (between court dates) that Donald Trump will insist on during the next four years—assuming he loses—the Fox News yappers need something to talk and talk about, and it certainly isn't going to be Republican policies. So this fictional narrative serves the interests both of Fox News—whose main concern is keeping its soon-to-be demoralized audience content and soporific—and also helps to deflect the inevitable horror stories that will be uncovered by a Democratic-controlled Congress investigating the Trump crime family's vast trail of detritus throughout our government.

By talking about Hunter Biden, the Trump family, especially the Trump children, also hopes to deflect attention from their own greatest weakness, namely the amoral, kleptocratic nepotism that they embody like no family ever before in American history...

[...]

None of them can win using ideas anymore, because they don't have any. All they can do is seek attention: gesticulate, wave their arms in the air, shout at the crowd, invent things, and try to attract the fame and attention they feel they deserve, even though they can no longer explain why they deserve it.

Put simply, assuming Joe Biden wins this election, we should all gear up for four long years of Fox News-inspired fantasy programming.

Of course, there's always the mute button.

aha: fox is a corp, and like all psychopathic robots, its function is maximize profit which means max ratings [instant quant fdbk]  which means max activation of trumpistas via red meat; this is in conflict w/ mission/function of jrnlism, straight news provides cover/fig leaf; successful red meat hypes fear and anger, and includes energizes the RW trump story/schemas of victimization. murdoch war crimes on AGW amd covid? was UK Aus coverage better? fires?

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/media-critic-fox-news-is-bigger-than-trump-if-he-fights-the-network-hell-lose

do executives at Fox News secretly hope that Donald Trump loses this November because that would be good for the network’s ratings? Before you dismiss that as crazy talk, given the record ratings Fox News has seen during Trump’s presidency, realize that Fox could see even higher ratings when it no longer has to defend Trump’s unpredictable words and deeds and can solely focus on what Brian Stelter calls its “secret sauce”: attacking Democrats and liberals.

Stelter, the host of CNN’s “Reliable Sources” and author of the new book, “Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News, and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth,” raised that very scenario during our “Salon Talks” conversation. As he explains it, Fox News has always been more comfortable attacking Democratic administrations, which traditionally has yielded a ratings boon for the network. “The network in a Biden presidency is almost a situation where tails you win and heads you win,” he said. Fox News might face other problems with Trump as a former president, however. Stelter describes Trump as the Frankenstein monster that Fox News helped create, and as in the tale of Frankenstein, he could end up turning against his creator and starting a competing right-wing network.

In our recent conversation, Stelter also addressed Trump’s nonstop attacks on the media, which Stelter says have taken a toll on the credibility of the Fourth Estate: “He has said ‘fake news’ and ‘hoax’ so many times that it has poisoned the public discourse. It’s like a slow-acting poison that kind of gradually moves to the veins of the American body. And we can’t fully know what the impacts are of that yet.”

Watch my “Salon Talks” interview with Brian Stelter below or read the following transcript of our conversation — lightly edited for length and clarity — to learn more about “Hoax,” his harsh words on the Fox News obsession with ratings and his blunt advice for how larger media outlets can rehabilitate their credibility in a post-Trump America.

Your book “Hoax” is like a feedback loop. Does Trump drive Fox News, does Fox News drive Trump, or does it move back and forth all the time?

It is hard to tell where Fox ends and Trump begins. But if I had to choose one side of this, I would say Fox drives Trump more than Trump drives Fox. Fox has more of an agenda setting role than the President does,which is an astonishing thing to say. But when you look at the power of “Fox & Friends,” when you look at the power of Sean Hannity and recently Tucker Carlson, who is achieving policy goals based on segments he produces on his show. I think it’s clear that Trump is usually in a reactive mode, reacting to what he sees and hears on Fox.

Just this morning Trump was tweeting again about what was going on on “Fox & Friends.” It really is his morning briefing. You mention in the book that Fox News does not have a traditional standards-and-practices department like other news organizations do. Even I have encountered this as a columnist for CNN Opinion. Just this past weekend, the standards department made me rework an op-ed. I was like, “But it’s an opinion piece!” They still had issues because they had our common best interests in mind. Could you share with people what standards and practices do traditionally? And by contrast what is going on at Fox News?

Fox is described as a news operation, a news network, but it’s also a political operation. And right now the propaganda is winning and the news is losing. I had staffers at the network say to me that it’s like working at a place that’s anti-journalism. So you’re trying to produce journalism at a place that’s anti-journalism. I’m wearing my CNN hoodie right now. It says “The World Needs Journalists.” The sense that the world needs journalists, that should be a pretty basic concept. It’s hard to disagree with that idea. However, at Fox, there is disagreement. So Sean Hannity says journalism is dead. You’ve got all these folks on Fox denigrating the media every single day and saying the world doesn’t need these journalists.

That creates a real hostile environment for the actual reporters who do still work at Fox. I point out in “Hoax” that many have left. And I have a lot of stories about people that have left for various reasons, including Shep Smith, but a lot of other names you might not know. For the journalists who remain there, it’s this really awkward, tough, sometimes hostile environment. I think the lack of standards and practices speaks to this problem. There is not a unit, a desk or a division that’s charged with vetting news before it gets onto the air. There are some informal processes, but there’s not that official checks and balances system that CNN has. And every other outlet has — forget about CNN — at the New York Times or Washington Post, there are reasons why there are editors and vetters and researchers. That structure just doesn’t exist at Fox.

You make the point that at Fox, ratings are everything. Everyone is profoundly afraid of losing the audience. Does that then mean that the people bringing in a lot of money, Hannity or Tucker Carlson or Laura Ingraham, can literally say anything they want on air, as long as it feeds the audience? Is there no one at Fox News who will say, hey, that’s beyond the pale of what’s acceptable?

There are some exceptions, but what you just said is broadly correct, broadly true and really problematic. There is not this kind of follow-through or accountability that I know happens at other networks and should happen everywhere. This is really most clear in primetime with Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham. When something really bad happens, when something really outrageous or racist happens on the air, there’s finger-pointing that goes on inside Fox. Some people will point the finger at the head of the network, Suzanne Scott. Others will point at a woman named Meade Cooper, who’s the executive vice president of primetime. Others will point at the executive producers for those specific shows, right? So they’ll shift the blame, no one agrees on who’s responsible or who’s at fault. And then there’s an attempt to move on and pretend that these embarrassing episodes didn’t happen.

That’s when they go on vacation, right. All of a sudden Tucker Carlson is on a pre-planned vacation?

Sometimes. Although I promise some of these vacations are actually scheduled, they’re just at bad times. Bill O’Reilly truly was always going to go to Italy when the scandal erupted about his secret settlements with women that accused him of harassment. So he decided to go on the vacation that he already scheduled, and then of course, he never came back. He was forced out when he was in Italy. But there are other times, yes, where Fox uses this vacation illusion where they’ll say someone’s going on vacation to let the noise subside around their program and try to preserve their advertisers.

One of the really interesting things in the book are the little details. You mention Bill O’Reilly going to Italy and meeting with the pope. It seemed like, at least the way you were shaping it, that perhaps the pope could save his job. Even that didn’t work out.

I think there’s so many stories about the last five years, these big stars at Fox, who thought they were kings of the world, who thought they were bigger than the network. And it turns out no, Fox is the star, not these individuals. No matter who’s on at 8 p.m. or 9 p.m., Fox’s ratings are going to remain really high. It speaks to the fact that Fox has a monopoly position in this area of the media.

You write about how Fox got sued because of what some people viewed as misinformation regarding COVID-19 by some of the hosts. When it comes to Fox News and the misinformation that it has shared about COVID, do you feel that the network has responsibility for misleading Americans?

I think there’s a lot of blame and a lot of responsibility to go around about the pandemic, but Fox had the biggest platform on cable and President Trump had the biggest platform in the country. He has the loudest megaphone and he knows how to use it. So the failures of Trump and his media allies to warn the country and prepare the country for what was coming were absolutely shameful. That’s why we called the book “Hoax.” We were originally going to call it “Wingman.” But when Trump came out and said, “These Democrats, they tried to impeach me, now they’re hyping coronavirus, they’re politicizing the virus. It’s their new hoax.” And Sean Hannity said something very similar a week and a half later. They were viewing this as politics, not as a medical emergency. That was the fundamental problem.

And they were always two or three weeks too late, meaning that when Trump finally took action involving flights from Europe, the virus had already gotten in and it was spreading silently across New York City and several other states. And of course, when he announced the European restrictions, there were these long lines of people all shoved together at airports. Fox, to its credit, had a reporter who called that out and criticized the government for it. There were these moments on Fox where there was great reporting, excellent medical advice, excellent segments with doctors. But I think those segments were drowned out by the downplaying of the disease, by the attempts to politicize this and downplay it.

I’ve never seen a president make life and death a partisan issue. And it’s not over. In North Carolina, he and his supporters were not wearing masks. Donald Trump Jr. has been out there attacking the media saying that it’s a lie, that people were wearing masks. Last week, Trump made fun of Joe Biden for wearing a mask. If you take a step back and look at this is, does it feel surreal that you have a president dealing with a life-and-death pandemic in this way, where it’s all about him? Everyone’s doing things to hurt him as opposed to wanting to simply save lives.

It’s embarrassing. And sometimes you need a little bit of perspective, you need to zoom out a little bit. You need to think back six months — it’s been about exactly six months since all our lives changed and these lockdowns began. Now we’re slowly coming out of it and looking around and seeing what the world is like. And the words from the president six months ago sound even worse now, right? We had a sense when he was contradicting his science experts and health experts that he was doing damage. We had a sense when he was downplaying the disease that it was dangerous. We know now, much more clearly, how dangerous and damaging it was.

This is true for his media allies as well. His pro-Trump propagandists. Trump was calling up Hannity at the end of March and saying, “How are my ratings? How do we rate? I called into your show, Sean, how did I rate?” A good friend would have said to him, “Donald, don’t ever ask about that again, we’re in the middle of a crisis. We’ve got hospitals overwhelmed by the surge, we’re trying to order body bags. Don’t ask about your ratings. Please don’t tweet about your ratings again. Please don’t do it, it’s bad for you.” But instead, his so-called friends feed his ego rather than trying to actually help him. I would argue that they actually hurt him when they claim to help him by telling him about his ratings.

The book could have been called “Ratings, Ratings, Ratings” because that’s what Fox News is moved by. It’s a profit machine. When your only touchstone as a news outlet is ratings, what compromises do you end up seeing on screen?

Let me be clear, I’m in television, I’m on CNN. I care about ratings. I care about my show doing well. I look at the ratings every day. But there’s much more of a fixation at Fox on winning because this network’s been No. 1 for 18 years. Everybody knows what’s at stake and what’s on the line, and there’s this intense desire to feed the audience what it wants and keep the audience at all costs. I had producers at Fox describe this as a really unhealthy relationship, where sometimes they fear the audience. Sometimes they don’t respect the audience, but they’re desperate to keep the audience’s attention. What that leads to is Trumpier and Trumpier segments. Segments that are unhinged from reality, that are based in conspiracy theory, that are feeding the audience’s wants and desires and not what they need. And again, this is the problem across television. It is much more severe at Fox.

As you mentioned, at CNN, MSNBC and all the big media outlets, ratings are important. They are connected to profits. But when your only goal is ratings, it’s going to cause massive compromises. Shep Smith and others behind the scenes at Fox News understood that they were putting their careers on the line given that ratings are everything.

Well, also, the ratings also tell you what the audience wants, what the audience expects. Shep Smith’s show at 3 p.m. was the lowest-rated show in daytime, the lowest-rated hour of the day on Fox. It meant that viewers were turning the channel actively when he came on. They did not want to hear him with his corrections to what was aired earlier in the day and his fact checks of the president’s lies.

In the ratings for notable Democratic events, like Joe Biden’s speech or the funeral of John Lewis, you see dramatic declines in Fox’s ratings. Viewers turn it off when the Democrats are speaking and they turn it back on when the rebuttal from the Republicans is starting. So you end up thinking that the audience has been radicalized. What else can you say?

They’ve been served a diet of red meat. Fox News should come with a warning: It serves so much red meat that it’s not healthy. I mean, look, Chris Wallace, Bret Baier, they’re more news journalists. On some level, though, they’re part of the Fox News machine. Is it fair to say they’re also complicit in what is going on?

Well, that’s certainly what some of their friends say, or their former friends. The Trump era has done damage to those kind of gentlemanly, old-fashioned, courteous relationships that you see between television anchors and rivals and all that. And certainly throughout my reporting, talking to dozens of people that were complicit that came up a lot, this sense that the news anchors there are like fig leaves of respectability. One person once said to Chris Wallace at a Columbia event, “Do you think you are there to truth-wash primetime?” That was an interesting term, “truth-wash.” Wallace is on one hour a week, Sean Hannity’s on one hour, five nights a week, in a much, much higher-rated program. You’ve got to look at Fox and say that the identity of Fox is Hannity and “Fox & Friends,” these bigger shows.

But I still think the journalists there do serve important purposes. I understand why they stay. They want to be there for big events. They want to provide a reality check, a fact check to the rest of the programming. But let’s say Bret Baier’s show, for example, is on at 6 p.m. “The Five” is much higher rated at 5 p.m., and then the ratings drop at 6. Not everybody wants to see a newscast, but even his newscast is tilted to the right toward Trump. His panels, for example, in the back half of the show, are tilted to the right. Sometimes the lefty will be a journalist and then he’ll have a pro-Trump person and another right-wing figure.

He tells people that he does this because he wants to have left, right and Trump. And I get it that sometimes “right” and “Trump” are not the same thing, but those panels are not balanced. Those panels are not representative of where the country is, right? If you want to have a panel that represented the country, that’s not how it would look. My point is, even on the newscasts, these programs are tilted in Trump’s favor.

Clearly, Trump has had an impact on Fox News. You’ve mentioned that Trump is their Frankenstein monster, but I want to get a sense from you on how the rest of the media is doing. Do you think the media is better at covering Trump this time, in terms of using the right language? For a long time, people didn’t want to call him a liar, you probably remember that. Now we’re beyond that. We’re two months out from 2020, using terms like “white supremacist” about Donald Trump, using the term “fascist” in an academic sense, not a hyperbolic sense. Are we at the point where the media can speak bluntly about it? ...[much more]

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/trump-fears-that-fox-news-doesnt-have-his-back-as-election-day-draws-closer-and-had-a-humongous-blowup-with-rupert-murdoch/

Fox News is full of Trump sycophants, from Sean Hannity to Tucker Carlson to Laura Ingraham to Jeanine Pirro —and the right-wing cable news outlet is stridently pro-Trump more often than not. But for President Donald Trump, any criticism at all from Fox News or Fox Business is way too much. And journalist Gabriel Sherman, in Vanity Fair, addressesTrump’s fears that Fox News will be insufficiently supportive of him as Election Day draws closer.

Two of the people at Fox News who haven’t been shy about criticizing Trump at times are Andrew Napolitano, a libertarian, and Chris Wallace — who, on September 29 in Cleveland, will be hosting the first of three presidential debates.

Sherman explains, “Perhaps anticipating a grilling by Wallace, Trump has been ratcheting up his anger at Fox. Last week, Trump called on Fox to fire national security correspondent Jennifer Griffin after she appeared on air and confirmed parts of Jeffrey Goldberg’s explosive Atlantic story detailing Trump allegedly making disparaging comments about America’s war dead. Trump has also taken to promoting fringe Fox competitor One America News, which has provided glowing coverage of the president and amplified pro-Trump conspiracy theories.”

Trump, according to Sherman’s sources, is even complaining about Fox News’ Rupert Murdoch. An anonymous source described by Sherman as a “Republican close to the White House” told Vanity Fair, “Trump definitely thinks Rupert is not in his corner.” And another source told Vanity Fair that Trump screamed at Murdoch during a phone conservation earlier this summer.

"They had a humongous blowup,” according to that source. “Trump yelled that Fox’s coverage is unfair and the polling is fake. Rupert defended the network’s standards and polling.”

Some of Trump’s sycophants at Fox News, Sherman reports, wish that Wallace weren’t moderating the first Trump/Biden debate. A source described by Sherman as a “pro-Trump Fox personality” told Vanity Fair, “Chris hates Trump. He’s a passionate Democrat” — which is misleading. Although Wallace is a registered Democrat, he leans conservative and has said that he has a long history of voting for Republicans. But Wallace registered as a Democrat in order to vote in primary elections in Washington, D.C., where Democrats dominate the city government.

“The Trump campaign had hoped that the Commission on Presidential Debates would choose Bret Baier or Martha MacCallum — Fox anchors who are seen as less aggressive than Wallace,” Sherman reports. “Sources close to Trump are worried that Trump is unprepared to handle what Wallace could throw at him.”

A source described by Sherman as a “former West Wing official” told Vanity Fair, “Any Republican who thinks Wallace will go easy on Trump is badly mistaken. He’s no joke.”

==

==

rupert Murdoch’s son resigns from News Corp — citing ‘disagreements’ over editorial content

Roger Sollenberger

James Murdoch, the former CEO of 21st Century Fox and the youngest son of Fox News founder Rupert Murdoch, has resigned from the board of the family’s News Corp media empire, according to…

==

james defects

https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/rupert-murdochs-son-and-daughter-in-law-drop-more-than-2-million-to-help-elect-biden-and-democrats/

fox News founder Rupert Murdoch’s son and daughter-in-law are two of the biggest backers of presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s campaign, federal filings show.James Murdoch and his wife Kathryn Murdoch each contributed $615,000 to the Biden Victory Fund in June, according to Federal Election Commission filings.

The Biden Victory Fund splits donations between Biden’s campaign, the Democratic National Committee and 26 state parties. The couple has also contributed to other candidates aiming to unseat Republicans. Kathryn Murdoch is “increasingly giving to Democrats this cycle, including $1 million to help Senate Democrats,” The Washington Post reported.

James Murdoch has long been the more liberal of the conservative media mogul’s sons, backing Democrats like former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper and former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigiegin the Democratic primary. He and his wife also issued a statement earlier this year criticizing his father’s outlets over climate change denial.

James Murdoch told The New Yorker last year that “there are views I really disagree with on Fox.” He also discussed internal family tension, revealing that there are “periods” of time when he and his father do not talk.

The couple are not the only Murdochs to back Biden. Rupert Murdoch’s wife Jerry Hall sent a $500 check to Biden’s campaign in May after previously donating $1,000 to Buttigieg in the primary.

Rupert Murdoch himself has been fairly quiet this campaign cycle, though he has made several donations to Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.

The media mogul has reportedly soured on Trump’s chances of winning re-election as polls show Biden surging ahead.

“Rupert thinks Trump is going to crash and burn,” a person who spoke to Murdoch about the election told Vanity Fair’s Gabe Sherman. “It’s a clear-eyed assessment, just based on just looking at the news.”

The newly-released FEC filings show that numerous wealthy donors powered the Biden Victory Fund to an $86.4 million haul in its first 68 days. The fund can receive donations up to $620,600, with Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskowitz and Twilio co-founder Jeff Lawson among the maximum donors.

Several Republicans contributed to Biden’s fundraising operation, including former California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman, who donated $500,000.

Prominent Democratic donor George Soros also contributed $500,000, while Walt Disney Chairman Bob Iger and filmmaker Steven Spielberg each gave $250,000. Former Democratic presidential rival Tom Steyer donated $360,000, and former Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker gave another $300,000.

The fund was launched after Biden officially clinched enough delegates to secure the nomination. The fund, Biden’s campaign and the DNC raised a total of $282 million between April and June compared to a $262 million haul by Trump’s operation.

Anti-Trump super PACs also raised plenty of money in the second quarter. The Lincoln Project, a group co-founded by George Conway, the husband of Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway, raised $16.8 million, up from $2 million in the first quarter. The AB PAC, part of the American Bridge 20th Century Foundation, which was founded by former conservative David Brock, raised another $10 million.

Hedge fund manager Stephen Mandel contributed $2.5 million between the two PACs, while Bain Capital co-chairman Joshua Bekenstein and his wife each gave $375,000 to AB PAC, Bloomberg reported.

The biggest contributors to the Trump Victory Fund included Marvel Entertainment CEO Isaac Perlmutter and his wife Laura, who gave $1.15 million, and Jet Support Services CEO Robert Book and his wife Amy, who gave $1.16 million, according to The Washington Post.

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-reportedly-launches-covert-anti-media-matters-effort

Fox News reportedly launches covert anti-Media Matters effort

From a business perspective, Rupert Murdoch has cause for concern

WRITTEN BY ANGELO CARUSONE

PUBLISHED 06/01/20 9:20 AM EDT

The New York Times reported that Rupert Murdoch has secretly hired  a conservative operative and two former conservative bloggers to  fight back against the work of Media Matters and advertiser education campaigners Sleeping Giants.

Under the direction of former Trump White House official Raj Shah, the group will attempt to discredit the work of Fox’s critics and save the few remaining advertisers the network has left.

From Ben Smith’s May 31 report:

Quietly, Mr. Murdoch and his main deputy Viet Dinh, a former Bush administration official, have begun taking a more aggressive approach. Last summer, they hired Raj Shah, a former Trump White House official who led opposition research against Hillary Clinton at the Republican National Committee. And this year, I recently learned, Mr. Shah has begun to build a secret operation, hiring two former reporters for the conservative Washington Free Beacon, Elliott Schwartz and Alex Griswold.(Mr. Schwartz had also run Jeb Bush’s campaign “war room.”) Their job is to defend Fox from criticism from progressive outlets like Media Matters and Sleeping Giants on social media, protect advertising dollars and discredit critics, three people familiar with the work said. (The two former reporters have conspicuously omitted Fox from their Twitter bios.)

The team has also pushed the narrative that the rest of the media played down the threat of coronavirus as egregiously as Fox did, two journalists who have spoken to them said. A Fox spokeswoman, Megan Klein, declined to comment on the new operation. Mr. Griswold said “no comment” and hung up on me before I could ask him a question, and Mr. Schwartz didn’t respond to a request for comment. A spokeswoman for Fox News, Irena Briganti, said the chief executive, Suzanne Scott, wouldn’t be available for an interview.

From a business perspective, Murdoch has cause for concern.

Fox News is actually suffering quite severely on the advertising front (due in large part to the efforts of Media Matters, Sleeping Giants, advocacy organizations, and online activists). Over the past few years, the network has actually lost hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising revenue.

To illustrate the kinds of advertising issues that Fox News is experiencing, here’s a snapshot showing the average number of paid commercials per show for host Tucker Carlson over a 22-month period. The number of paid commercials dropped off in late 2018 and then quite severely in early 2019. The show has still not recovered.

According to approximated advertising revenue obtained and analyzed by Media Matters, Carlson’s show generated about $100 million in advertising revenue for Fox News in 2017. Carlson’s revenue plummeted following the advertiser exodus in 2018. The effect was so significant that if you combined the total advertising revenue his show generated in 2018 and 2019, the combined amount is still less than what Carlson’s show earned in 2017. The loss is anywhere between $70 million and $80 million.

Carlson’s show is not the only Fox News program that experienced big dips in the number of paid commercials and revenue either.

Bottom line: Fox News has lost a significant amount of advertising revenue.

Much more than advertising revenue is at stake for Fox News this year, though. Fox also has to worry about its contract negotiations with cable providers. This year, Fox News is renegotiating cable contracts that account for about 65% of its subscriber fee revenue.

Fox News actually gets the majority of its revenue from subscriber fees, not advertising revenue.

Every TV channel charges cable providers a fee for carrying the channel that is determined during contract negotiations. It’s called a subscriber fee.  Providers pay this fee for each customer they have, regardless of whether that person ever watches the channel. Providers then bundle channels into packages and pass costs to subscribers.

Fox News is notoriously recognized as the most aggressive negotiator. To be clear, it’s not just that the network is good at negotiating. It lies, bullies, and -- in my opinion -- cheats. For example, during these negotiations, Fox doesn’t tell viewers it is trying to charge them more. Instead, it threatens the provider with access to Fox News. Then it turns around and tells Fox News viewers that their cable company is trying to silence Fox News for ideological reasons; the network enlists hosts to spread misinformation too.

So what’s the effect of all this? Subscriber fees for news and information channels are normally pretty small. MSNBC gets about 33 cents, CNN gets about 70 cents to 90 cents (and that includes CNN and CNN Headline News). In contrast, Fox News gets more than $2 per month from every cable customer in the country. This is wildly out of step with industry averages.

During this round of renegotiation, Fox News is trying to inflate those fees even more. The network is looking at increases as high as 75% in some cases. If it's successful, that would mean Fox News could be getting as much as $3 per month in some circumstances per customer.

Much like advertisers have been increasingly rejecting Fox News, a backlash among cable providers has been brewing as well. The recognition of Fox News’ toxicity and extremism only compounds the headwinds the network faces heading into negotiations.

In part because of all the advertising revenue the network has lost, Fox News needs this current round of negotiations to succeed. It can’t merely hold the line; it needs big increases to offset the lost advertising revenue.

To fully understand Murdoch’s cause for concern, it’s important to recognize that it’s not just about advertising revenue, but also the revenue earned from these contract negotiations.

For more, here’s a Twitter thread that delves a bit deeper into Fox News' trouble with advertisers as well as the importance of these subscriber fee renegotiations:

In case you’re curious, these are Fox News’ leading advertisers. You can also tell your cable or satellite provider you don’t want to pay for the network by getting in touch with them here.

openDemocracy

an ->

Why the Murdochs backed Donald Trump’s COVID-19 denialism

2020/4/17 01:00 (BST)

©openDemocracy

Table of Contents

Hammy contrition

Murdoch’s miscalculation

Sean Hannity, one of Fox News's biggest stars, said that the coronavirus was a "new hoax" in March. | Fox News

Earlier this month, Fox News aired a one-hour special, ‘America Together’, that featured some of its biggest stars. In a radical departure for the fiercely partisan network, the show ostensibly marked the launch of a new “editorial initiative” aimed at promoting national unity. The content of the special, however, remained typically Fox. “As we face this COVID-19 crisis, you, me, our kids, our parents and our grandparents: We can and should turn to one place for comfort – the Holy Bible,” host Peter Hegseth advised viewers with a commendably straight face.

This was the same Peter Hegseth who alleged on air on 28 February that Democrats were “rooting” for the infection. “They have yet to find a reason to drag down the presidency of Donald Trump,” he said. Sean Hannity, one of Fox’s most famous names and a close ally of Trump similarly told viewers, “If you are over the mass hysteria, if you're over politicizing and weaponizing the coronavirus, you are not alone.” With only one exception – the extreme right-wing host Tucker Carlson– Fox News repeated the line that COVID-19 was nothing to worry about, no more dangerous than the flu, or “a hoax” that was being used to “bludgeon Trump”, in Hannity’s words.

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This was not simply a matter of a big media outlet getting the story wrong. This was the biggest, most consequential mistake of Fox News chairman Rupert Murdoch’s career, including the Hitler Diaries farce and the UK phone hacking scandal, which cost his companies well over £300 million. Fox’s support for Trump’s line, from January to mid-March, that the threat from the virus was negligible and that the spread was, in any event, under control may have cost lives among its devoted viewers who, with a median age of 65, are most at risk from the often fatal outcome of the disease.

Fox not only failed to report the chaos and missteps in the White house, it also cheered the president’s denial and delay, the effects of which are writ large in the United States coronavirus figures. At the time of writing, the US has had 609, 516 reported cases of COVID-19 and 26,057 deaths from the virus, a third of which have occurred in New York State. The disease is spreading rapidly from big conurbations, which are largely Democrat to the Midwest and South, which tend to be Republican.

This week, Trump clashed with state governors, including those in his own party, over who has the ultimate authority to reopen states and when. Meanwhile, protests have erupted in some conservative and rural counties demanding an end to stay-at-home measures.Fox News's Laura Ingraham was among those heaping praise on protesters, tweeting that it was "time to get your freedom back".

Hammy contrition

Fox’s lets-bring-America-together-again response is reminiscent of the hammy contrition displayed by Murdoch’s News International after the phone hacking scandal, but it is unlikely to silence the anger over Fox’s coverage. MSNBC, CNN, the New York Times, Boston Globe and the Washington Post regularly remind their audiences of how Trump and Fox News supported each other’s denialism. Trevor Noah’s ‘Daily Show’ on Comedy Central gathered all the clips from Fox and other corona-sceptics in one item, which they called the “Heroes of the Pandumbic”.More seriously, an open letter signed by 74 journalism professors criticised the company for spreading misinformation that endangered the public. In addition, Washington non-profit WASHLITE has filed a suit against the company alleging it “wilfully and maliciously deceived the public.”

Fox viewers were far less likely to take the crisis seriously... 90% said that they were not staying at home.

Since its founding under the former Nixon aide Roger Ailes, Fox News has been seen as a damaging and divisive force in journalism. But now, there seems to be striking evidence that actual, physical harm may have been caused by Fox’s editorial line on COVID-19 before its mid-March volte face. A poll by Survey 160 and Gradients Metrics carried out between 13-16 March shows that Fox viewers were far less likely to stay at home, or take the crisis seriously, which is important given that its viewership is particularly at risk from the virus. Of those who identified as Republican and who had watched Fox News in the past 24 hours, 90% said that they were not staying at home. That fell to 70% among those Republicans who had not watched Fox News.

The link between cause and effect will never be conclusive. Nonetheless, it is significant that when asked whether the threat from COVID–19 had been exaggerated, 60% of Republicans who had watched Fox New said “yes”, while only 40% of those Republicans who hadn’t watched agreed. The difference between the two may be a measure of Fox News’s influence.

Murdoch has promised a robust defence of the case brought by WASHLITE and this, too, is reminiscent of the company’s initial response to the phone-hacking allegations, when it threw everything at the Guardian newspaper, which published the allegations over several years, and its then editor Alan Rusbridger. “They went round the lobby (in Parliament) saying it was all lies,” he recalls, “issued a statement that it was all lies, published pieces in the Sunday Times and Times saying it was all lies. Let’s not forget this was a public company making dishonest statements.”

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Fox Corp, which owns Fox News, is also a public company, although the Murdoch family have 39% of the voting power. Rupert Murdoch, 89, executive co-chair of Fox News and his eldest son Lachlan, 48, co-chair and chief executive, have clearly decided that the only way to deal with this disaster is to pretend it never happened. That is why Fox now promotes uplifting stories of Americans helping each other. They are counting on mass forgetfulness and hope Sean Hannity, its biggest star, will be believed when he said of the journalism professors, “It’s the same Democrats, media mob and liberal professors who are so lazy they won’t even look at what I’ve said about the virus… I never called it a ‘hoax’. I said it was a hoax for them to be using it as a bludgeon on Trump.”

Hannity’s contortions are a footnote to the national tragedy. The bigger story is about Fox’s journalism and Murdoch’s credibility as a media owner. While every other established outlet can point to Trump’s record and hold him to account in the run up to the election on 3 November, Fox must abjure because of its past support for the president’s calamitous policy failings.

Murdoch’s miscalculation

Even though those who, like me, regard Rupert Murdoch and his interests as an international menace, still credit him with a sure judgment when it comes to using politicians to further the interests of his company. In the past, he has never had a problem shedding long-standing allies to catch a new political wind. He famously deserted the British Conservative Party in the mid 90s to support Tony Blair’s New Labour, despite the Tories’ support for him through his fight with the print unions. In 2016, he quickly discarded Jeb Bush in favour of Trump in the run up to the primaries, but not before tweeting in 2015, “When is Donald Trump going to stop embarrassing his friends, let alone the whole country?” Trump is more than an embarrassment now. The economy is tanking, a depression is threatened, thousands of Americans are dying and record numbers of them are filing for unemployment, but Fox can’t apply itself to the job of scrutiny without questioning its own role.

When Murdoch plumped for Trump in 2016, it seemed a sensible business decision. No obstacles were placed by the Trump administration in the way of the $71 billion sale of Twenty-First Century Fox’s film and TV assets to Disney, although Trump was revealed to have tried to block a very similar merger between AT&T; and Time Warner which also went through a year ago. The new Fox Corp which runs Fox News and is headed by Lachlan Murdoch is doing well financially, reporting total quarterly revenues of $3.78 billion, a 5% increase from the $3.58 billion of revenues in the prior year quarter.

Being shackled to a lunatic is all very well if it serves your purposes – until that lunatic drags you into the path of an oncoming train. For Fox, it’s too late to escape: Lachlan Murdoch has failed to create a distance between his company and Trump. In an article in the New York Times that pulled no punches, the media correspondent Ben Smith blamed Lachlan Murdoch. “Fox failed its viewers and the broader public in ways both revealing and potentially lethal. In particular, Lachlan Murdoch failed to pry its most important voices away from their embrace of the president’s early line: that the virus was not a big threat in the United States.”

How could Rupert Murdoch and his son make such a catastrophic error of judgment? Why are they still chained to Trump as he loses support and, in the face of the daily death toll, can only react with a repellent display of narcissism and self-interest? The answer is surprisingly simple. Supporting Trump wasn’t just a strategic choice, but Rupert Murdoch’s personal political conviction. It has all the hallmarks of the same crude conservatism evident in the editorial line pushed by his Australian media outletswhich heaped blame for last year’s bushfires on environmentalists.

As with climate change, Rupert Murdoch put his politics ahead of business interests by pushing coronavirus skepticism. It’s bad for him and Fox, but much, much worse for humanity.

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https://www.mediamatters.org/murdoch-family/fox-news-prime-time-avoided-covering-australian-bushfires-until-murdoch-paper

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Fox News prime-time avoided covering Australian bushfires until a Murdoch paper minimized the role of climate change

Instead of engaging with the reality of climate change, Fox hosts latched on to a false narrative about arson

Special PROGRAMS

CLIMATE & ENERGY

WRITTEN BY ALLISON FISHER & MADELINE PELTZ

PUBLISHED 01/21/20

According to a Media Matters review Fox News prime-time hosts completely ignored the devastating bushfires raging across Australia during the first three months of the crisis It was only after a Rupert Murdoch-owned Australian newspaper started pushing a misleading talking point about arson that Fox’s Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham picked up the story to distract from the role of climate change in accelerating the crisis.

Carlson has hosted one segment about the fires, referring to arson in Australia as “beyond” disgusting without mentioning the climate connection. Sean Hannity has not discussed the fires on air, but he tweeted a link to his own website pushing the false claim that nearly 200 people had been arrested for arson. And Laura Ingraham hosted two separate segments on arson in Australia.

The bushfires have taken the lives of at least 30 people, are threatening to push certain endangered species of animals into extinction, and have destroyed millions of acres of forest and residential areas. The link between climate change and the severity of the bushfires has been described as “scientifically undisputable.” In response, climate deniers have perpetuated a counter-narrative, casting arson as the primary culprit of the catastrophic fires. In reality, experts say “arson alone cannot explain the unprecedented blazes,” with one estimating “that only a handful of the hundreds of massive fires that have broken out in Australia since September were due to arson,” as NBC reported. That handful of fires were likely deliberately lit by a few dozen people -- 24 people are currently facing criminal charges -- and not a result of widespread arson, the red herring that climate deniers have intentionally spread.

Dale Dominey-Howes, a professor of hazard and disaster risk sciences at the University of Sydney, told HuffPost, “The majority of these bushfires have been generated by lightning strikes associated with weather and climate effects.” The fires then spread and burn more intensely due to conditions made possible by climate change.

Despite the evidence, Carlson, Hannity, and Ingraham have intentionally misled their audiences and Twitter followers by ignoring the climate connections and hyping the anecdotes about arson. This effort fits with the broader pattern of climate denial that has been prolific across Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, and it bolsters recent criticism about climate change coverage lobbed by his son James.

Tucker Carlson

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Citation From the January 8, 2020, edition of Tucker Carlson Tonight:

On January 8, Tucker Carlson hosted former Fox personality Anna Kooiman, reporting from the Taronga Zoo in Sydney, Australia, to discuss the impact of the bushfires on wildlife in the country. The segment irresponsibly did not mention climate change, but Kooiman did highlight arson arrests in New South Wales, which Carlson referred to as “beyond” disgusting.

Sean Hannity

Sean Hannity has not covered the fires in Australia on his show. However, he did tweet an article published to his own website titled “AUSTRALIA BURNING: Officials Charge Nearly 200 with Arson, Looting as Wildfires Rage.”

Laura Ingraham

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CitationFrom the January 6, 2020, edition of The Ingraham Angle:

Laura Ingraham has repeatedly pushed the arson talking point on her show. On January 6, she closed the program by claiming of the fires: “It was arson, perhaps not climate change.” Earlier in the program, frequent Ingraham guest Raymond Arroyo was upset about celebrities at the Golden Globes talking about climate change and the fires, and he noted that police had “arrested 12 people in Australia for those fires; they were blaming it on climate change -- wrong again.”

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CitationFrom the January 8, 2020, edition of The Ingraham Angle:

On January 8, Arroyo again misled viewers when he called commentary on the role of climate change in accelerating fires “incomplete reporting,” saying, “It’s not correct to say climate change caused these wildfires. The New [South] Wales Police Force in Australia report they’ve taken legal action against 180 people who lit fires or discarded a match on land. There’s a complicated story here -- the media only wants to report one half of it.”

Methodology

Media Matters searched the Nexis database for television transcripts with any of the terms “bushfires,” “blaze,” or “fires” within transcripts that contained the term “Australia” from September 1 through January 20 on Fox News. We analyzed Fox News’ prime-time programming (8 p.m. to 11 p.m. Eastern time), which includes The Ingraham Angle, Tucker Carlson Tonight, and Hannity.

We reviewed transcripts for any mention of “arson” or arrests for arson. We counted a segment as discussion of the Australia fires if it included significant discussion of the topic, weather reports that mention the fires, or news briefs that reported on the fires. We excluded topic teasers, defined as a short blip from the host that mentions a segment coming later in the broadcast.

Related

From the sidelines, James Murdoch slams climate denial in Murdoch properties. The problem is even worse than he lets on.

01/14/20 3:10 PM EST

Amid raging bushfire, Rupert Murdoch's Australian media empire turns a blind eye to climate crisis

01/06/20 3:32 PM EST

Murdoch's flagship Australian newspaper pushes climate denial as devastating bushfires rage

01/17/20 11:57 AM EST

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https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/08/world/australia/fires-murdoch-disinformation.html

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News analysis

How Rupert Murdoch Is Influencing Australia’s Bushfire Debate

Critics see a concerted effort to shift blame, protect conservative leaders and divert attention from climate change.

By Damien Cave

Published Jan. 8, 2020

Updated Jan. 13, 2020

WOMBEYAN CAVES, Australia — Deep in the burning forests south of Sydney this week, volunteer firefighters were clearing a track through the woods, hoping to hold back a nearby blaze, when one of them shouted over the crunching of bulldozers.

“Don’t take photos of any trees coming down,” he said. “The greenies will get a hold of it, and it’ll all be over.”

The idea that “greenies” or environmentalists would oppose measures to prevent fires from ravaging homes and lives is simply false. But the comment reflects a narrative that’s been promoted for months by conservative Australian media outlets, especially the influential newspapers and television stations owned by Rupert Murdoch.

And it’s far from the only Murdoch-fueled claim making the rounds. His standard-bearing national newspaper, The Australian, has also repeatedly argued that this year’s fires are no worse than those of the past — not true, scientists say, noting that 12 million acres have burned so far, with 2019 alone scorching more of New South Wales than the previous 15 years combined.

And on Wednesday, Mr. Murdoch’s News Corp, the largest media company in Australia, was found to be part of another wave of misinformation. An independent study found online bots and trolls exaggerating the role of arson in the fires, at the same time that an article in The Australian making similar assertions became the most popular offering on the newspaper’s website.

It’s all part of what critics see as a relentless effort led by the powerful media outlet to do what it has also done in the United States and Britain — shift blame to the left, protect conservative leaders and divert attention from climate change.

“It’s really reckless and extremely harmful,” said Joëlle Gergis, an award-winning climate scientist at the Australian National University. “It’s insidious because it grows. Once you plant those seeds of doubt, it stops an important conversation from taking place.”

News Corp denied playing such a role. “Our coverage has recognized Australia is having a conversation about climate change and how to respond to it,” the company said in an email. “The role of arsonists and policies that may have contributed to the spread of fire are, however, legitimate stories to report in the public interest.”

Yet, for many critics, the Murdoch approach suddenly looks dangerous. They are increasingly connecting News Corp to the spread of misinformation and the government’s lackluster response to the fires. They argue that the company and the coalition led by Prime Minister Scott Morrison are responsible — together, as a team — for the failure to protect a country that scientists say is more vulnerable to climate change than any other developed nation.

Editors and columnists for News Corp were among the loudest defenders of Mr. Morrison after he faced blowback for vacationing in Hawaii as the worst of the fire season kicked off in December.

In late December, the Oz, as the News Corp-owned paper is known here, heavily promoted an interview with the government’s energy minister, Angus Taylor, warning that “top-down” pressure from the United Nations to address climate change would fail — followed by an opinion piece from Mr. Taylor on New Year’s Eve.

Other News Corp outlets followed a similar playbook. Melbourne’s Herald Sun, for example, pushed news of the bushfires to Page 4 on New Year’s Eve, even as they threatened to devastate towns nearby and push thick smoke into the city.

Days later, residents in a town nearly flattened by the fires heckled and snubbed Mr. Morrison during a visit to assess the damage. A new hire for Mr. Murdoch’s Sky News channel, Chris Smith, branded them “ferals” — slang for unkempt country hobos.

[The Daily Poster

Listen to ‘The Daily’: Why Australia Is Burning

As firefighters battle flames across the country, Australia’s prime minister is fighting to keep climate change out of the conversation.

transcript

0:00/28:11

Listen to ‘The Daily’: Why Australia Is Burning

Hosted by Michael Barbaro; produced by Michael Simon Johnson, Annie Brown, Adizah Eghan, Eric Krupke, Neena Pathak and Sydney Harper; with help from Daniel Guillemette; edited by M.J. Davis Lin and Theo Balcomb

As firefighters battle flames across the country, Australia’s prime minister is fighting to keep climate change out of the conversation.

michael barbaro

From The New York Times, I’m Michael Barbaro. This is “The Daily.”

Today: The prime minister of Australia is calling for a high-level investigation into how the country’s government has responded to the devastating wildfires there. My colleague Livia Albeck-Ripka on the events that led up to this moment. It’s Monday, January 13.

...

That’s it for “The Daily.” I’m Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.

As is often the case at Murdoch outlets around the world, there have been exceptions to the company line — an article about the Australian golfer Greg Norman’s declaration that “there is climate change taking place”; an interview with an international expert who explained why this year’s fires are unique.

But a search for “climate change” in the main Murdoch outlets mostly yields stories condemning protesters who demand more aggressive action from the government; editorials arguing against “radical climate change policy”; and opinion columns emphasizing the need for more backburning to control fires — if only the left-wing greenies would allow it to happen.

The Australian Greens party has made clear that it supports such hazard-reduction burns, issuing a statement online saying so.

Climate scientists do acknowledge that there is room for improvement when it comes to burning the branches and dead trees on the ground that can fuel fires. But they also say that no amount of preventive burning will offset the impact of rising temperatures that accelerate evaporation, dry out land and make already-arid Australia a tinderbox.

Even fire officials report that most of the off-season burns they want to do are hindered not by land-use laws but by weather — including the lengthier fire season and more extreme precipitation in winter that scientists attribute to climate change.

Still, the Murdoch outlets continue to resist. “On a dry continent prone to deadly bushfires for centuries, fuel reduction through controlled burning is vital,” said an editorial published Thursday in The Australian. It went on to add: “Changes to climate change policy, however, would have no immediate impact on bushfires” — a stance that fits hand in glove with government officials’ frequent dismissals of the “bogey man of climate change.”

It’s that echoing between officialdom and Murdoch media that has many people so concerned.

“Leaders should be held to account and they should be held to account by the media,” said Penny D. Sackett, a physicist, astronomer and former chief scientist for Australia.

Timothy Graham, a lecturer at Queensland University of Technology who conducted the study of Twitter accounts exaggerating the role of arson in Australia’s fires, said media companies also needed to be cognizant of the disinformation ecosystem and stop contributing to the problem. That includes mainstream outlets, like ABC News, sharing inaccurate maps that exaggerate the reach of the fires.

But in the case of the arson issue, he said, scores of bots and trolls — many of which previously posted support for President Trump — have joined conservative media like the Murdoch outlets in promoting the idea that Australia’s fires are not a “climate emergency” but an “arson emergency.”

“Maybe 3 to 5 percent of fires could be attributed to arson, that’s what scientists tell us — nevertheless, media outlets, especially those that tend to be partisan, jump on that,” Dr. Graham said.

Of course, it is often hard to know just how much influence any media company has. Gerard Henderson, a columnist for The Australian, said he didn’t think there was much need to address climate change because it was already a focal point across the rest of the media.

“It’s hard to distract from climate change because it’s spoken about constantly,” he said.

But there are signs that the Murdoch message is making headway — at least in terms of what people make a priority. Many firefighters working the smoky hills south of Sydney hesitated to state their views on climate change this week (some said senior leaders had told them to avoid the issue). But they were quick to argue for more backburning.

Similarly, in Bairnsdale, Tina Moon, whose farm was devastated by the fires, said she was mostly furious about the government’s failure to clear the land around her property.

“I don’t think it’s climate change,” she said.

Livia Albeck-Ripka contributed reporting from Bairnsdale, Australia.

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https://www.desmogblog.com/2020/01/09/these-climate-science-deniers-are-spreading-misinformation-about-australian-bushfires

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has doubled down on his refusal to strengthen his administration’s approach to climate policy as his country burns. While Morrison acknowledges that climate change is one factor driving the fires, he is unwilling to consider reversing his government’s poor record on climate action to help prevent similar disasters happening again.

In recent days, Morrison’s position has been bolstered by a group of fringe climate science deniers pushing conspiracy theories and misinformation about the relationship between the fires and climate change.

Alex Jones’ NewsWars

An article on the alt-right website NewsWars makes the false claim that “authorities in Australia are working on the premise that arsonists and lightning strikes are to blame for bushfires that have devastated numerous areas of the country, not ‘climate change’ as many global warming alarmists have claimed.” Independent factcheckers from Climate Feedback judged the article to be “misleading”, saying the claim's “flawed reasoning misunderstands that fires are exacerbated by hot and dry conditions and Australia is currently facing a severe drought amidst increasing temperatures.”

NewsWars is published by Alex Jones, who has been described as “the most prolific conspiracy theorist in contemporary America” by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit which tracks hate groups.

Jones has interviewed numerous climate change deniers on his InfoWarsradio show including Lord Christopher Monckton, Marc Morano, John Coleman, and James Delingpole. Jones has promoted the idea that the United Nations seek a “global government” and has described the UN as “the founders of the global tyranny” when criticizing the 2009 Copenhagen climate change negotiations.

Jones’ material has been variously banned or suspended from Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube for violating the sites’ respective guidelines around abusive behaviour and hate speech.

Myron Ebell and Patrick Michaels

Two stalwart climate science deniers and fossil fuel industry promoters published an article in the Washington Examiner arguing that, “it’s very convenient for alarmist greens to blame the fires of Australia and California on global warming. In reality, the policies they themselves advocate are the culprits.” In other words, they claim that only poor land management is to blame — not decades of rising emissions and global temperatures.

Myron Ebell is the Director of Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI). In 1998, Ebell was a member of the “Global Climate Science Communications Team” (GCSCT) assembled by the American Petroleum Institute (API), which worked on a plan to convince the public that climate change was uncertain. In September of 2016, Myron Ebell was selectedto lead Donald Trump's  U.S. Environmental Protection Agency transition team, though he later admitted he had never actually directly spoken to the President.

CEI has received over $1.5 million from the oil giant ExxonMobil. It has also received a combined total of over $6 million from the secretive DonorsTrustand Donors Capital Fund, groups used by organisations including the industrialist billionaires the Koch family to funnel funds to conservative causes.

Patrick Michaels is a relatively recent recruit to the CEI, having previously been director of the Center for the Study of Science at the Cato Institute. He has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the energy industry to spread misinformation on climate change.

Tony Abbott

In an interview about the fires, Australia’s former Prime Minister Tony Abbott told radio in Israel that human-caused greenhouse gas emissions were “not the only, or even main factor” in driving climate change, the Guardian reports. In the same interview, he said the world was “in the grip of a climate cult”.

Abbott gave the annual lecture for the UK’s principal climate science denial campaign group, the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), in 2017. In the speech he said rising carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel burning could be “beneficial” and compared acceptance of human-caused climate change to religion. University of Melbourne climate scientist Dr Benjamin Henley said at the time that the lecture was “full of falsehoods, miscomprehension, and basic untruths.”

The GWPF has recently promoted at least seven articles trying to play down or counter the message that the fires were related to climate change.

Christopher Monckton

Not to be outdone, Viscount Christopher Monckton, a man who once rode into the annual UN climate talks on a camel felt the need to “nail the childish myth that global warming caused the bushfires in Australia” in a long blog post.

A journalist by trade and former advisor to the Thatcher government, Monckton’s assertions on the causes of climate change have been widely discredited. He has also been reprimanded by the House of Lords for falsely claiming to be a sitting peer and warned not to use official imagery on his presentations.

Roy Spencer

Another fringe blogger arguing that climate change has less to do with the fires than credible scientists suggest is Roy Spencer, a research scientist at the University of Alabama, Huntsville. On his blog, he argues that population rises and natural variability can explain the raging fires.

Spencer is an advisor to the Cornwall Alliance, formerly the Interfaith Steward Alliance (ISA), an evangelical Christian group that claims environmentalism is “one of the greatest threats to society and the church today.” He has done work with other religious groups denying climate change including the Evangelical Climate Initiative.

Murdoch media

Australia is home to one of the world’s most influential media moguls, Rupert Murdoch. Yet his outlets “continue to spread climate denial, attack other outlets providing lifesaving coverage, and ignore local fire threats,” according to a report from nonprofit watchdog Media Matters for America (MMFA).

MMFA points to multiple commentators on Sky News Australia who refer to those saying climate change is driving the fires as having “joined a cult” and “been brainwashed.” One commentator, Andrew Bolt, reportedly called the “big global warming scare” a “con” when discussing the fires. Bolt is one of many conservative-leaning commentators to attack youth activist Greta Thunberg, calling her “deeply disturbed”.

The Murdoch-owned The Australian has also published multiple opinion pieces attacking the Australian Broadcasting Corporation for its comprehensive coverage of the fires, the Guardian reports, including its reports linking them to climate change.

Bots

Multiple reports have also pointed to the role of social media bots helping to spread conspiracy theories to counter the claim that climate change is driving the fires.

Analysis by Queensland University of Technology senior lecturer Dr Timothy Graham found a “current disinformation campaign” on Twitter’s #arsonemergency hashtag due to the “suspiciously high number of bot-like and troll-like accounts”, the Guardian reported.

Analysis by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation found “some of the suspicious accounts were amplifying unproven suggestions arson had been the overwhelming cause of Australia's disastrous bushfire season.” These claims have been contradicted by official statements from Australian police.

Reputable sources

In contrast to the misinformation, a large number of climate scientists have been busy talking to the mainstream media to explain the links between climate change and the bushfires.

Stefan Rahmstorf, a lead author of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fourth Assessment Report, told Time that Australia’s record high temperatures and droughts have both driven the fires, and that both have “well-established” links to climate change.

Likewise, Australian National University climate scientist Dr Imran Ahmed, University of Sydney ecologist Glenda Wardle, and Richard Thornton, the chief executive of the Bushfires & Natural Hazards Co-operative Research Centre, all told the BBC that climate change was “exacerbating” conditions that drive the fires.

So contrary to what climate science deniers, unqualified commentators and bots would have people believe, there is a large body of research showing the bushfires are “undeniably” linked to climate change.

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https://www.desmogblog.com/2020/01/08/australian-fire-conspiracy-theories-alex-jones-murdoch

desmog 120 1/8

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Debunked Australian Bushfire Conspiracy Theories Were Pushed by Alex Jones, Murdoch Media

By Justin Mikulka • Wednesday, January 8, 2020 - 18:29

As unusually intense and widespread bushfires have ravaged a drought-ridden Australia, bots and trolls have begun pushing climate science denial across the internet in the form of conspiracy theories about the fires. Thanks to climate change, exceptionally hot, dry drought conditions have worsened and lengthened Australia's typical fire season.

Two of the main conspiracies about the fires are based on the false ideas that they are caused by a spate of arson and they have been worsened by the Green Party's supposed efforts to stop controlled burns as a fire management and reduction measure.

Dr. Timothy Graham from the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) did an analysis of the online activity and concluded there was a high level of bots involved in spreading these conspiracies. As ZDnet reported, Graham is “at least confident” that that this was some type of disinformation campaign.

Sites like NewsWars — which was founded by the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones who falsely claimed the Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax — are already pushing these conspiracies.

Notorious climate deniers Patrick Michaels and Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute promoted the same conspiracies in the Washington Examiner. And the discredited extremist science denier Lord Monckton also weighed in.

However, it isn’t just fringe sites pushing these ideas.The New York Times reports that Rupert Murdoch’s media empire has also been instrumental in publishing these debunked claims (and others claiming that these fires are no worse than normal).

Despite multiple sources clearly discrediting these myths, CNN’s top story in its World News section today, which is also featured in its website's top stories banner this morning, included the misleading headline, “Police in Australia are accusing 24 people of deliberately setting bushfires” — reinforcing the work of conspiracy theorists' messaging.

Police and Firefighters Debunk the Myths

A common theme in these myths is that the Australian police and firefighters are the source of these purported claims about the wildfires, which has been strongly refuted by none other than the police and firefighters.

The Guardian reported that a spokeswoman for the Victoria police said, “There is currently no intelligence to indicate that the fires in East Gippsland and the North East have been caused by arson or any other suspicious behaviour.”

That same article notes that according to a Rural Fire Service spokesman, “The majority of the larger fires in the state [of New South Wales] were caused by lightning, and that arson was a relatively small source of ignition.”

Members of the New South Wales fire brigade have also dismissed the idea that the fires are due to efforts by the Green Party to stop fire management practices.

==

:{Amid raging bushfire, Rupert Murdoch's Australian media empire turns a blind eye to climate crisis:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:

:{:(style="box-sizing:border-box;display:flex;height:1.5em;margin-right:1em;width:1.5em"):}:01/06/20 3:32 PM EST

==

https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/william-barrs-corruption-tour-continues-with-secret-rupert-murdoch-meeting/

...Trump’s top cop, Attorney General William Barr, had a private meeting in New York with none other than the ogre of media, Rupert Murdoch.According to *The New York Times*, Murdoch and Barr met Wednesday at Murdoch’s residence. Whether or not there were any others in attendance is not clear, and what the two men discussed over eye of newt and goblets of blood is also unknown. What is known is that Murdoch is powerful and he represents a lot of right-wing propaganda outlets, and Barr is suspected of having involved himself in high crimes and treason.

Fox News has been a poisonous beacon of Trump’s misinformation campaign against the world and reality for the past few years but in recent months, the cable network’s unwavering support of the president has shown some cracks. This has been coupled with random attacks from the sputtering orange white supremacist himself, unhappy at the network for what he has seemingly perceived as a betrayal...

==

intercept

https://theintercept.com/2019/07/10/the-problem-at-fox-news-is-not-just-tucker-carlson-its-the-murdoch-family-that-owns-and-controls-the-network/

:{The Problem at Fox News Is Not Just Tucker Carlson — It’s the Murdoch Family Who Owns and Controls the Network:(style="box-sizing:border-box;font-weight:normal"):}:

:{:{Peter Maass:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}::(style="box-sizing:border-box;-webkit-font-smoothing:subpixel-antialiased"):}:

==

Harper Collins, a publishing company owned by Rupert Murdoch, who also owns the Fox TV

==

“We made no bones about it,” Stone recently said. “We wanted money. And it came pouring in.” **Stone and Manafort** charged hefty fees to introduce blue-chip corporations—such as Ronald Perelman’s MacAndrews & Forbes and**Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.**—to their former campaign colleagues, some of whom were now running the Reagan White House. It was all cozy and connected—and reminiscent of Roy Cohn.

==

Fox News has always lied. But during the Trump administration, the network has managed to hit new lows. Fox is full of white nationalism, Trump propaganda, casual bigotry, and a lack of any ethical standards.

This is not happenstance. This is a choice. And it is ultimately the choice of one man, executive chairman for 21st Century Fox Executive Chairman Lachlan Murdoch, the Misinformer of the Year for 2018.

Media Matters senior fellow Matt Gertzelaborates: "Lachlan Murdoch has consistently lied about what his network does and what it is, even as the people who work for him have breached the norms of their profession in increasingly flagrant ways and become ever more entangled with the Trump administration. ... Lachlan Murdoch is ultimately accountable for Fox’s programming. If he wanted the network to operate as a responsible media outlet, he could make that happen. Instead, he suggests that any attempt to rein in his network’s stars would constitute unacceptable censorship of their opinions. ... Lachlan Murdoch is gaslighting America about the damage Fox News is doing to the country."

Media Matters president Angelo Carusone adds: "Lachlan Murdoch is steering the ship at 21st Century Fox and shaping the strategic direction of the company. It’s Lachlan who is ultimately responsible for Fox News now and in the future. Under Lachlan, Fox News has actually gotten worse -- more bigoted, more extreme, and more deceitful, and morphing into a full-fledged propaganda operation."

Fox News wants it both ways: They want to push bigotry while being accepted as just another media outlet. Murdoch is emblematic of that. When questioned recently, Murdoch compared Fox News to other media outlets and said that he was not embarrassed by the propaganda and bigotry of its personalities.

But it is not sustainable. At a normal media company, leadership would step in to address this level of bigotry and extremism. But at Fox News, such things are only encouraged. In response, advertisers have fled Fox News this year.

As long as Lachlan Murdoch is in charge, it's only going to get worse.

==

hmmn

https://www.c-span.org/video/?283933-1/man-owns-news

JANUARY 13, 2009

Man Who Owns the News Michael Wolfftalked about The Man Who Owns the News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch (Publisher: Broadway; December 2, 2008). The book is a look inside the building of Rupert Murdoch’s media conglomerate and the intra-family fight over who will inherit it. The focal point is Mr. Murdoch’s acquisition of the Wall Street Journal, claimed to be his most personally satisfying takeover. Mr. Wolff’s research included several interviews with Mr. Murdoch and his family members. Following his remarks, the author responded to audience members' questions.

Michael Wolffis a Vanity Fair columnist and two-time National Magazine Award winner. He’s also a commentator for CNBC and founder of www.newser.com. Wolff is a former columnist for New York Magazine, as well as the Guardian and Spectator, published in the United Kingdom. He’s the author of Autumn of the Moguls and Burn Rate

:{Murdoch's Trump support pays off

}:

Rupert Murdoch agreed to sell his entertainment and international television assets to Disney. But, thanks to Trump's FCC, Murdoch is now poised to expand his local TV empire. Analysts suggest that Murdoch could fill these stations with Fox News programming, creating another right-wing local television conglomerate (in addition to Sinclair).

Paul Krugman on the Movie that Big Money Doesn't Want You to See

Why learn the lessons of history when you can just rewrite it.

By Janet Allon / AlterNet December 18, 2015

Paul Krugman has not quite become a film critic, but he does give “The Big Short," the new movie about the financial crisis of 2008, a thumbs up in Friday's column. His over-arching point is that some powerful interests want to spin the history of the crisis into something it was not, namely a problem of too much government regulation, when in fact the opposite is the case. And they are doing their best to make sure that "we don’t remember what happened, or that we remember it wrong."

That brings Krugman to the "new movie the enemies of financial regulation really, really don’t want you to see:"

“The Big Short” is based on the Michael Lewis book of the same name, one of the few real best-sellers to emerge from the financial crisis. I saw an early screening, and I think it does a terrific job of making Wall Street skulduggery entertaining, of exploiting the inherent black humor of how it went down.

The film achieves this feat mainly by personalizing the tale, focusing not on abstractions but on colorful individuals who saw the rot in the system and tried to make money off that realization. Of course, this still requires explaining what it was all about. Yet even the necessary expository set pieces work amazingly well. For example, we learn how dubious loans were repackaged into supposedly safe “collateralized debt obligations” via a segment in which the chef Anthony Bourdain explains how last week’s fish can be disguised as seafood stew.

Krugman does not go too far down the path of film critic; his message is that the movie gets the basic underlying story right:

I could quibble over a few points: The group of people who recognized that we were experiencing the mother of all housing bubbles, and that this posed big dangers to the real economy, was bigger than the film might lead you to believe. It even included a few (cough) mainstream economists. But it is true that many influential, seemingly authoritative players, from Alan Greenspan on down, insisted not only that there was no bubble but that no bubble was even possible.

And the bubble whose existence they denied really was inflated largely via opaque financial schemes that in many cases amounted to outright fraud — and it is an outrage that basically nobody ended up being punished for those sins aside from innocent bystanders, namely the millions of workers who lost their jobs and the millions of families that lost their homes.

The story is not one that the rich and powerful want disseminated, and they are doing everything in their power to spread the Big Lie that too much government was to blame because it pushed too many loans on the poor. This despite that view being thoroughly debunked, according to Krugman.

Murdoch-owned papers are going after the movie big-time, but their agenda is obvious."The attackers obviously worry that the film is entertaining enough that it will expose a large audience to the truth,"  Krugman writes. "Let’s hope that their fears are justified."

==

alternet 7/15

Rupert Murdoch’s Donald Trump Nightmare: He Can’t Control the Monster Fox News Created

Even the powerful mogul can’t stop his biggest media asset from acting as Trump’s biggest booster.

By Sophia Tesfaye / Salon July 22, 2015

Print

36 COMMENTS

If there seems to be a split in the way Rupert Murdoch-owned media outlets are covering the presidential campaign of Donald Trump that’s because one of Murdoch’s holdings is reportedly out of control — Murdoch can’t get Fox News to stop positively covering The Donald.

According to New York Magazine’s Gabriel Sherman, the conservative media mogul has been unsuccessful in his attempt to wield influence over the editorial decisions of Fox News CEO Roger Ailes. Sherman reports that Ailes has pushed Fox’s on-air personalities to defend Trump’s controversial comments in recent weeks, boasting that the conservative network was covering the Trump campaign to his personal specifications. For his part, Murdoch appears to be dead set against a Trump candidacy, publicly blasting the Republican’s incendiary rhetoric:

Trump, who has a longstanding relationship with Fox News, met with Ailes for an extended lunch around the time of his announcement and has called the cable news executive “one of the great geniuses in television history.” During the month of June, Trump appeared on Fox 10 times, amounting to 1 hour and 48 minutes of free airtime from the network and it’s become evident that there is little Murdoch can do to stop it. According to Sherman, Murdoch, whose 21st Century Fox is the parent company of Fox News, recently called Ailes to ask him to “back off the Trump coverage.” Trump was back on “Fox & Friends“, a show where he held weekly appearances before entering the presidential race, this morning to push-back against all of the negative scrutiny his stunt giving out Lindsey Graham’s personal cell number generated. Per usual, the host provided Trump his softball interview. And as Sherman points out, “yesterday, at a campaign event in South Carolina where he gave out Lindsey Graham’s personal cell-phone number, Trump heaped praise on Fox & Friends’ Doocy, Brian Kilmeade, and Elisabeth and Hasselbeck, ‘They’re great people.’” Sherman, a veteran Fox News observer, describes “Fox & Friends” as “a show that is used by Ailes to inject his point of view into debates.”

And as the New York Times explains, there is little Murdoch can do to wrangle editorial control over the network from Ailes: “As the creator of the highest-rated cable news channel in the country (even surpassing ESPN in total viewers on some nights) and one of the most profitable assets in Mr. Murdoch’s film and television company, 21st Century Fox, Mr. Ailes has been given the freedom to operate largely outside the purview of Mr. Murdoch.”

So, for now, Murdoch’s control is relegated to the front page of the NY Post, the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal and his personal Twitter account. But the head of one of the most powerful media conglomerates in the world can’t stop his biggest media asset from acting as Trump’s biggest booster, as the carnival barker marches his campaign to the first Republican debate stage — on Fox News

http://www.alternet.org/media/rupert-murdochs-donald-trump-nightmare-he-cant-control-monster-fox-news-created

time warner

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/17/business/media/in-modern-media-realm-big-mergers-are-a-bulwark-against-rivals.html?ref=todayspaper&_r=0

==

cato: powerbase

Media Industry Links

Rupert Murdoch, President and CEO of News Corporation joined the Cato Institute board of directors in 1997, he was welcomed as ‘one of the most successful entrepreneurs in the world, a strong advocate of the free market and a committed civil libertarian’.[16]

Rupert Murdoch worked closely with fellow board member John C Malone (then president and CEO of Tele-Communications Inc, the largest U.S. Cable operator) to ‘actively promote the deregulation of the television and telephone industries’.[17] The Cato institute advocates the privatization of the Internet and communications systems.[18]Despite Murdoch and Malone’s place on the board of a libertarian think tank both profit from government subsidies. Murdoch’s News Corporation profits from licences issued by the state which are worth millions of dollars.[19]Similarly, cable TV corporations such as TCI (Fronted by Malone) are able to expand their services, and in turn their profits, under the protection of federal regulations which limits the power of license fees to be set at a local level.[20]

==

FilmTwentieth Century FoxTwentieth Century Fox EspanolTwentieth Century Fox Home EntertainmentTwentieth Century Fox International20th Century Fox TelevisionFox 2000 PicturesFox MusicFox Searchlight PicturesFox Studios AustraliaFox Studios LAFox Television StudiosBlue Sky StudiosShine GroupTwentieth TelevisionFox Consumer ProductsPremium Movie Partnership (Australia and New Zealand - 50%)Newspapers (U.S.)New York PostThe Wall Street JournalThe Wall Street Journal Digital NetworkFSI (SmartSource Magazine)Newspapers (International)The Advertiser and Sunday Mail (Australia)The Australian (Australia)The Courier-Mail and The Sunday Mail (Australia)The Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Telegraph (Australia)Gold Coast Bulletin (Australia)Herald Sun and Sunday Herald Sun (Australia)mX (Australia)The Mercury and Sunday Tasmanian (Australia)Northern Territory News and Sunday Territorian (Australia)Perth Now (Australia)Post-Courier (Papua New Guinea)The Sun (U.K.)Sunday Times (Australia)The Times and The Sunday Times (U.K.)Weekly Times (Australia)Dow JonesThe Wall Street JournalThe Wall Street Journal AsiaThe Wall Street Journal EuropeThe Wall Street Journal RadioThe Wall Street Journal Digital NetworkThe Wall STreet Journal ClassroomBarron'sDow Jones Local Media Group (Ottaway):Cape Cod Media Group (MA)Cape Cod TimesCape Cod ViewBarnstable PatriotHudson Valley Media Group (NY)Times Herald-Record (Middletown)Orange Magazine (Orange County)Nantucket Island Media Group (MA)The Inquirer and Mirror (Nantucket)Nantucket TodayPocono Mountains Media Group (PA)Pocono Record (Stroudsburg)San Joaquin Media Group (CA)The Record (Stockton)Seacoast Media Group (NH)The Portsmouth HeraldThe Exeter News-LetterThe Hampton UnionThe York WeeklyYork County Coast StarSouth Coast Media Group (MA)The Standard-Times (New Bedford)The Advocate (Fairhaven)The Chronicle (Westport and Dartmouth)Middleboro GazetteThe Spectator (Somerset and Swansea)The Fall RIver SpiritNew England Business BulletinSouthern Oregon Media Group (OR)Medford Mail TribuneThe Nickel (Medford)Ashland Daily TidingsAllThingsD.comBigCharts.comeFinancialNewsFactivaDow Jones Averages

Dow Jones Client Solutions

Dow Jones Companies & ExecutivesDow Jones EventsDow Jones IndexesDow Jones InsightDow Jones Investment BankerDow Jones LP SourceDow Jones NewswiresDow Jones Private MarketsDow Jones Reprint PortalDow Jones WatchlistDow Jones VentureSourceFINS.comMarketwatch.comSmartMoney.comVedomosti (with Pearson and Independent Media)Virtual Stock ExchangeMagazinesAlpha (Australia)Big League (Australia)Inside Out (Australia)Donna Hay (Australia)Other News PropertiesNews Corp. Digital MediaNews InternationalPublishingHarperCollins PublishersAmistadAvonAvon AAvon InspireAvon RedCaedmonHarper DesignEccoHarperHarper BusinessHarperLuxeHarper PaperbacksHarper PerennialHarper Perennial Modern ClassicsHarper VoyagerHarperAudioHarperBiblesHarperCollins e-BooksHarperOneItBooksRayoWilliam MorrowHarperCollins Children's BooksAmistadBalzer + BrayCollinsGreenwillow BooksHarperCollins Children's AudioHarperCollins Children's BooksHarperCollins e-booksHarperFestivalHarperTeenKatherine Tegen BooksRayoWalden Pond PressHarperCollins AustraliaHarperCollins CanadaHarperCollins IndiaHarperCollins New ZealandHarperCollins USHarperCollins UKZondervanOnline PropertiesAmericanIdol.comAskMenBrandAlley UK (49%)careerone.com.auCARSguide.com.auFox.comFoxSports.comFoxSports.com.auFox Audience Networkhulu.com (32%)kSoloMilkaroundNews.com.auNews Digital MediaScouttruelocal.com.auWhatIfSportsOtherNDS (49%)News America Marketinglast updated 2/14/2013

http://www.kqed.org/a/forum/R201311040900

NPR's media correspondent David Folkenflik writes about the billionaire businessman in his new book, "Murdoch's World: The Last of the Old Media Empires."

PR sock puppets, trap reporter w/ fake email; outed one for detox

==

Media mogul Rupert Murdoch could rake in up to $28.3 million next year after News Corp. splits into two companies this summer, according to an SEC filing Friday.

Murdoch’s base salary for fiscal 2014 will be $8.1 million, with a target bonus of $12.5 million and a long-term incentive opportunity of $7.7 million. That’s 15 percent more than the $24.6 million he’ll report for fiscal year 2013, which ends in June, the company noted. And following the News Corp. split into separate publishing and entertainment businesses later this year, a “significant portion” of Murdoch’s total compensation will be “at-risk and linked to performance,” the company added.

==

It was a memorable week in which the conservative media's highest profile newspaper, Rupert Murdoch's New York Post, seemed committed to getting as many stories wrong about the Boston attack as possible.

The hapless Post somehow managed to  completely botch the simplest Journalism 101 fact of how many people were killed in the Patriot's Day attack. But hey,  according to beleaguered Post editor Col Allan thePost tried its best and that's all that really matters. (It would've taken a "crystal ball" to get the story right, Allan now complains.) So no, there doesn't appear to be much introspection unfolding inside Murdoch's daily; a big-city tabloid that managed to get wrong, for days, a breaking crime story.[m defended in holywood reporter]

boelert, mma:

As CMD previously reported [59], News Corp. has been a member of both ALEC's Education Task Force and Communications and Technology Task Force. Wall Street Journal editorial board member Stephen Moore, is an ALEC "scholar" and both the Wall Street Journal and Fox News have gone to bat for ALEC as member corporations began to flee earlier this year. What is less well known is that News Corp. owns Wireless Generation, a for-profit online education, software, and testing corporation, acquiring it in 2010 for $360 million. Wireless Generation is also an ALEC member. Apparently, Murdoch was anxious to get a piece of the nation's education system, which he describes [60] as a "500 billion sector in the U.S. alone that is waiting desperately to be transformed." News Corp's senior Vice President in charge of its education division is none other than former Chancellor of New York City Schools, Joel Klein, who promoted a corporatist model of education reform.

Lubienski, for one is skeptical of "self-proclaimed experts on the topic of education" like Murdoch who "aren't accountable to the public" and who have a profit motive coupled with a political agenda of widespread privatization.

Michelle Rhee, Former D.C. Chancellor of Schools, Pushes Parent Trigger

The film is being promoted by former Washington, D.C., public schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee. Rhee spoke at both the RNC and DNC screenings of "Won't Back Down," and her involvement underscores what is often the bipartisan nature of the modern "school reform" movement.

Her tenure as the head of the D.C. school system was so controversial, she is widely credited with losing D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty's reelection campaign. She was credited with greatly improving test scores in Washington, D.C. schools, but this accomplishment was cast into doubt by a USA Today [61] investigation that suggested that test score gains during her term may have been the result of cheating on the part of school officials. The report found extremely high erasure rates that were statistically anomalous.

After resigning from her position in 2010, Rhee went on to start StudentsFirst [62], a 501(c)4 non-profit organization planning to engage in "direct and grassroots lobbying" on education issues including Parent Trigger. [63] Derrell Bradford, a state director for StudentsFirst, [64] spoke on "Enacting a Comprehensive K-12 Education Reform Agenda" at the 2011 ALEC annual meeting.

Rhee's group receives funding from Murdoch, who "has pledged to spend more than $1 billion to bring for-profit schools, including virtual education, to the entire country by electing reform-friendly candidates and hiring top-notch state lobbyists." News Corp's Joel Klein serves [65] on her organization's board. Other supporters include New Jersey hedge funder manager David Tepper [66], and Alan Fournier (reportedly [64] big backers of Romney).

Rhee was alsofeatured [55] in Anschutz's film "Waiting for 'Superman'."

http://mediamatters.org/blog/2012/07/24/his-reputation-shattered-in-uk-murdoch-embraced/187294

His reputation in the UK may lay in tatters, but Murdoch remains without a doubt the most powerful media player in Republican circles today simply because of the right-wing megaphone Fox News has become as it completely overshadows the Republican National Committee and other traditional political power bases and serves as the de facto headquarters of the GOP in America.

Murdoch's American role is considered so important that when he tweeted a couple passing critiques about Mitt Romney's campaign and how it was being managed, the online comments were quickly seized upon as being newsworthy.  They were just as quickly echoed by many conservative commentators, especially Murdoch's employees. The mini-echo chamber highlighted again how Murdoch sets the right-wing agenda in America and how his words take on an oversized meaning.

At this point it's almost impossible to overstate the degree to which Fox News has dedicated its entire programming enterprise to defeating Obama and playing defense for Romney. You can almost pick recent examples at random, since Fox's campaign for Romey/against Obama has become a full-time obsession.

The churning is endless:

Fox & Friends Echoes GOP Spin On Welfare Rule, Leaves Out The Facts

*Fox & Friends*Drops The Veil, Produces Four-Minute Anti-Obama Attack Ad

Fox Criticizes Networks For Not Jumping On Its Manufactured Obama Controversy

*Fox & Friends*Deceptively Edits Obama's Comments On Small Business

REPORT: Fox News Spends Two-Plus Hours Distorting Obama's Small Business Comments

And yes, Murdoch himself even got into the Fox-fed attacks last week, tweeting misinformation about the bogus controversy his channel had ginned up regarding comments the president made about business.

So here in America Murdoch is mixing things up, setting the right-wing media agenda, and forever on the attack.

It's the same role Murdoch played, and relished, in Britain for decades. With the revelation he was overseeing a criminal enterprise disguised as a newspaper business, where employees allegedly hacked phones and emails when not paying off police sources for information, Murdoch's public role there has been reduced to almost nothing, except that of villain.

http://www.k12newsnetwork.com/2011/12/occupybiged/

For example, in November of 2010, after purchasing an education technology company, Rupert Murdoch of News Corp announced that “When it comes to K through 12 education, we see a $500 billion sector in the US alone that is waiting desperately to be transformed by big breakthroughs that extend the reach of great teaching.” (Mind you, Murdoch’s FOX News is the only infotainment network that leaves its viewers demonstrably less informed — negatively intelligent — about current events than if they’d watched no tv at all.)

So I’m borrowing “Big Ed” to describe those moneyed interests and point out how we parents, educators, and students of all ages through college can fight back. Because the promise of an excellent, free public education through high school (or an affordable and very good public university education) is something that’s essential as DNA to our country in order for it to work the way it’s supposed to. We need people who can understand and solve complex problems, and come up with intelligent, creative solutions. We need to treasure — and nurture — the incredibly varied humanity  in our country, and grasp that similar to a healthy eco-system that’s biodiverse, our society and our economy flourish best when everyone is given the opportunity to shoot for the highest reaches of his or her own unique potential.

---

Fox in the Schoolhouse: Rupert Murdoch Wants to Teach Your Kids!

News Corp.'s major move into the education business.

By Stephanie Mencimer | Fri Sep. 23, 2011 2:00 AM PDT

Rupert Murdoch's reputation precedes him—but one thing he's not well known for is his education reform advocacy. But that could soon change. Next month, Murdoch will make an unusual public appearance in San Francisco, delivering the keynote address at an education summit hosted by former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush [1], who has lately been crisscrossing the country promoting his own version of education reform.

The high-profile speech to a collection of conservative ed reformers, state legislators, and educators is just the latest step in Murdoch's quiet march into the business of education, which has been somewhat eclipsed by the phone-hacking scandal besieging his media empire. (On Tuesday, word of Murdoch's appearance at Bush's conference came just hours after reports that News Corp. had agreed to pay more than $4 million[2]to the family of a 13-year-old British murder victim, Milly Dowler, whose voicemail was hacked [3] by reporters for Murdoch's News of the World. ) But Murdoch has made it very clear that he views America's public schools as a potential gold mine.

"In every other part of life, someone who woke up after a 50-year nap would not recognize the world around him…But not in education," he remarked in May during a speech at the "e-G8 forum" that preceded the G8 summit in France. "Our schools remain the last holdout from the digital revolution."

Last November, News Corp. dropped $360 million to buy Wireless Generation, [4] a Brooklyn-based education technology company that provides software, assessment tools, and data services. "When it comes to K through 12 education, we see a $500 billion sector in the US alone that is waiting desperately to be transformed by big breakthroughs that extend the reach of great teaching," Murdoch said at the time.

A few weeks before the deal, News Corp. had hired one of the nation's most prominent education figures, Joel Klein, away from his job as New York City schools chancellor. As it happens, Klein was already familiar with Wireless Generation, which began working with the New York City school system during his tenure.

While Murdoch's arrival to the education business is being cheered by Jeb Bush and other conservatives, the idea of the parent company of News of the World and Fox getting into the school biz hasn't gone over well with the education establishment. Murdoch's new venture has stirred controversy in New York, where this summer the state sought to enter into a $27 million contract with Wireless Generation to track student performance. Given Klein's hiring, the deal prompted an outcry by teachers' unions and other critics who saw the public school system becoming just another example of revolving-door politics and crony capitalism. ("They chose us because we're good," and not due to any connection to Klein, says Wireless Generation's spokeswoman, Joan Lebow.)

In early August, New York teachers' unions demanded the state rescind its plans to contract with Wireless Generation. "It is especially troubling that Wireless Generation will be tasked with creating a centralized database for personal student information even as its parent company, News Corporation, stands accused of engaging in illegal news-gathering tactics," representatives from the state and New York City teachers' unions wrote.

Wireless Generation had caused controversy even before Murdoch purchased the company. Last year, when New Jersey lost out on millions of federal education funding due to a screw-up on its grant application, the company landed at the center of the debacle [5]. The state, after all, had reportedly paid the firm $500,000 to ensure the accuracy of its application, among other things.

News Corp.'s entrance into the education sector raises broader education policy questions, says University of Arizona education professor Kenneth Goodman. Having a multinational corporation in charge of assessing kids' reading skills, he notes, shows that "decision making in education is so far removed from people who have anything to do with kids." And like many educators, he is suspicious that Murdoch will bring his conservative ideology to his education ventures: "They'd like everything to be privatized."

Already, Murdoch's phone-hacking baggage is hurting his bottom line. In late August, New York rejected its plans to contract with Wireless Generation [6]. The reason, according to the state's comptroller: "vendor responsibility issues involving the parent company of Wireless Generation."

Source URL: http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/09/rupert-murdoch-news-corp-wireless-generation-education

Links:

[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/rupert-murdoch-giving-keynote-at-jeb-bushs-ed-reform-summit/2011/09/20/gIQAry9cjK_blog.html

[2] http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/sep/19/phone-hacking-milly-dowler-family

[3] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2011182/News-World-phone-hacking-Rebekah-Brooks-linked-Milly-Dowler-private-eye.html

[4] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/24/nyregion/24newscorp.html

[5] http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2010/09/nj_attorney_general_to_review.html

[6] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/30/education/30wireless.html

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair is the godfather of one of Rupert Murdoch's daughters, according to an interview with Murdoch's wife Wendi Deng in Vogue UK.

Blair, along with Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman, was present when Murdoch's daughters, Grace and Chloe, were baptized on the banks of the Jordan river in 2010. The Vogue article says that he is Grace's godfather. She was born while he was still in office. The piece also describes him as "one of Murdoch's closest friends."

The admission is one of the clearest signs yet of the deeply close ties that Blair's Labour party cultivated with Murdoch after decades of poisonous relations. Top members in the party were convinced that Murdoch held the key to their electoral success, especially after 1992, when The Sun famously proclaimedthat it had played a crucial role in Labour's shock loss to John Major. As Blair turned the party rightward, he also began a campaign to woo Murdoch. In the most infamous incident, he even flew to Australia in 1995 to attend a News Corp. conference. Blair's plan paid off when the Murdoch press endorsed Labour in 1997.

Even with all of that history, the news of the depth of Blair's relationship with Murdoch is still sure to cause controversy in the midst of the phone hacking scandal. The scandal first broke in 2006, while Blair was still the Prime Minister. Allies of Blair's successor, Gordon Brown, have claimed that he told Brown to back off any real investigation into phone hacking. (The current Labour leader, Ed Miliband, has sought to firmly distance himself from the Murdoch press.)

Blair himself was a reported victim of hacking. In June, he called the scandal "despicable."

The scandal shows no signs of slowing up. On Tuesday, top former staffers and executives at News International are set to testify to Parliament about new evidencesurrounding the News of the World, the now-shuttered paper at the heart of the crisis.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/05/tony-blair-murdoch-godfather-daughter_n_949072.html?utm_source=DailyBrief&utm_campaign=090511&utm_medium=email&utm_content=NewsEntry&utm_term=Daily%20Brief

Murdoch also controls several news outlets in the United States, including Fox News Channel and the Wall Street Journal. Here’s a look at how Murdoch, his company, and its affiliates influence politics here in the U.S.

James "converted" his dad to the climate cause a few years ago, Rupert told Grist in 2007. Papa Murdoch then launched a company-wide climate plan in 2007, aiming to cut News Corp.'s emissions and spread climate messages through its programming and publishing. Earlier this year, the company announced that it had achieved its goal of carbon neutrality by upping energy efficiency and buying carbon offsets, but the editorial component of the climate plan seems to have gotten lost along the way. Fox Newsand the *Wall Street Journal* editorial page continue to spew out pernicious bombast designed to stop all climate action -- to such an extent that Rolling Stone this year made Rupert No. 1 on its list of 12 Politicians and Execs Blocking Progress on Global Warming. grist 7/11

RS

No one does more to spread dangerous disinformation about global warming than Murdoch. In a year of rec­ord heat waves in Africa, freak snowstorms in America and epic flooding in Pakistan, the Fox network continued to dismiss climate change as nothing but a conspiracy by liberal scientists and Big Government. Glenn Beck told viewers the Earth experienced no warming in the past decade — the hottest on record. Sean Hannity declared that "global warming doesn't exist" and speculated about "the true agenda of global-warming hysterics." Even Brian Kilmeade, co-host of the chatty Fox & Friends, laughed off the threat of climate change, joking that the real problem was "too many polar bears."

Murdoch's entire media empire, it would seem, is set up to deny, deny, deny. The Wall Street Journal routinely dismisses climate change as "an apocalyptic scare," and Fox News helped gin up a fake controversy by relentlessly hyping the "climategate" scandal — even though independent investigations showed that nothing in the e-mails stolen from British climate researchers undercut scientific conclusions about global warming.

Murdoch knows better. In 2007, he warned that climate change "poses clear, catastrophic threats" and promised to turn News Corp. into a model of carbon neutrality. But at his media outlets, manufacturing doubt about global warming remains official policy. During the 2009 climate summit in Copenhagen, the Washington editor of Fox News ordered the network's journalists to never mention global warming "without immediately pointing out that such theories are based upon data that critics have called into question." Murdoch may be striving to go green in his ­office buildings, but on air, the only thing he's recycling are the lies of Big Coal and Big Oil.

As the World Burns: How Big Oil and Big Coal mounted one of the most agressive lobbying campaigns in history to block progress on global warming

SW

Milloy, an 'Adjunk' Scholar at Cato Institute[9] encountered Rupert Murdoch during Murdock's term as Cato Director -- thus leading to Milloy's Junk Science columns on Fox News website and newspapers. For many years, including Murdoch's term, a Philip Morris V.P. sat on Cato's board, which probably sufficiently explains Milloy's appearance on Cato's payroll.

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Rupert_Murdoch

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excerpt:

Media website kaputa cites Richard Stott's criticism of Bruce Page's depiction of Murdoch, who he said "is shown to be manipulative, devious, bullying, ruthless and unscrupulous. But that just makes him a newspaper proprietor. What makes him special is that he isn't interested in the usual playthings of newspaper owners such as Beaverbrook, Northcliffe and William Randolph Hearst, namely political power for mischievous personal ends. For him it is the currency to secure a bigger and better deal or to consolidate current ones." [5]

James Fallows, writing in The Atlantic Monthly, adopts a similar view. “The real difference between Murdoch and an activist like Scaife is that Murdoch seems to be most interested in the political connections that will help his business … In short, some aspects of News Corp's programming, positions, and alliances serve conservative political ends, and others do not. But all are consistent with the use of political influence for corporate advantage.

K. Rupert Murdoch

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K. Rupert Murdoch (Keith Rupert Murdoch) is chairman and chief executive officer of News Corporation and the Fox News. He is also a patron of the American Australian Association. His mother is Elizabeth Murdoch.

Contents[hide]

History

Murdoch was born in Australia on 11th of March, 1931. Murdoch studied at Oxford and working in Fleet Street paper, the Daily Express. After his father’s death in 1952, Murdoch returned to Australia. While many of the newspapers in the family business were sold, Murdoch took over the running of the Adelaide News in 1954. In 1960 Murdoch bought a network of 24 suburban newspapers in New South Wales as well as the Sydney Daily Mirror and the Truth in Melbourne and Brisbane. Two years later he bought a major shareholding in the Nine Network TV stations and launched a national newspaper, The Australian in 1964. At that time he began his international expansion, buying a network of newspapers in New Zealand (sold earlier this year to the rival Australian newspaper company, Fairfax Limited) and in 1969 bought the UK titles the News of the World and The Sun.

His expansion into the US newspaper industry commenced with the purchase of the San Antonio Express and News in 1973 and in 1976 the New York Post. His global expansion continued with the purchase of the UK publications The Times and the London *Sunday Times* in 1976. In the 1980’s Murdoch’s News Corporation moved into television news in the US forming the Fox Network, the purchase of 20th Century Fox and in the 1990’s the development of satellite television in the UK and Asian markets.

By 2002 News Corporation revenues was about $17 billion. Ketupa.net cites comments by Murdoch explaining the rationale for the development of News Corporation in a June 2002 interview with a Financial Times journalist: "We start with the written word. Then we get to TV, originally with the idea that it will protect the advertising base and it then progresses into a medium of its own with news, programmes and ideas. You then look at TV and you say: 'Look, we don't want to just buy programmes from a Hollywood studio, we'd better have one.' Then comes the issue of people who are going to deliver your programmes. Cable is consolidating ... Instead of having 20 gatekeepers, you are going to have three or four. For content providers, that is very bad news. So, you try to protect yourself in having some distribution power." [1]^(http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Rupert_Murdoch#cite_note-0)

^]^

On December 22, 2003 News Corporation finalised a $US6billion bid to take a controlling stake in Hughes Electronics and its US pay TV operation, DirecTV. "Now, with the addition of DirecTV, Murdoch has the last piece in a global distribution system that is unparalleled - and he will be rolling out a swag of new channels to run on that system. If you are a content company like Viacom, Disney or Time Warner, at some point in the future you will depend upon Murdoch to run your programs around the world," Neil Chenoweth and Sean Aylmer wrote. [2]

While Murdoch was negotiating the deal, US investor John Malone's Liberty Media Corporation began selling its non-voting shares in News Corporation and buying voting shares. By early January, Liberty had acquired a 9.15% share in the company’s voting shares while Murdoch holds 29.8 per cent of the voting stock. Writing in the Australian Financial Review, Neil Chenoweth and Sean Aylmer commented that "the move cements Mr Malone's key position at News as the man who can confirm or deny Mr Murdoch's plan eventually to pass control of the media group to one of his sons, Lachlan or James." [2]

In March 2005 Chenoweth reported in the Australian Financial Review that Rupert Murdoch "sidestepped stamp duty of $A53 million [U.S.$41.3m] and capital gains tax of up to $A1.2 billion [U.S.$936m] by moving control of his ultimate family company, Kayarem, to the Caribbean and listing it on the Bermuda Stock Exchange (BSE) a week before News Corporation was reincorporated in the United States last November. Documents filed with the BSE show that listing Kayarem in the tax haven allowed the Murdoch family to obtain a tax benefit when it sold its controlling interest in the Queensland Press group to News Corp." [1]

Ties to tobacco

Media magnate Rupert Murdoch joined the Board of Directors of Philip Morris in August 1989 and he continued to serve on their board into the 1990s. [2][3] The relationship appeared to serve PM well. A 1985 PM internal report shows that information that could negatively affect the tobacco industry was routinely withheld from Murdoch-owned newspapers worldwide:

As regards the media, we plan to build similar relationships to those we now have with Murdoch's News Limited with other newspaper proprietors. Murdoch's papers rarely publish anti-smoking articles these days. To sum up, then, on using our natural allies. We have made a start; we have proved that it can be done; we have found that they can be a very effective force; and we intend to do more in the future. at Bates Page 2023268390

This document appears to confirm a bias in reporting on tobacco issues by media outlets owned by Rupert Murdoch.

Politics

Murdoch told William Shawcross, who authored a biography of Murdoch, that he considers himself a libertarian. “What does libertarian mean? As much individual responsibility as possible, as little government as possible, as few rules as possible. But I'm not saying it should be taken to the absolute limit.”

Murdoch rejects any suggestion that doing business with the Chinese communist regime contradicts his conservative political views. Communist values to ingratiate himself with Beijing, he said: "I don't think there are many communists left in China. There's a one-party state and there's a communist economy, which they are desperately trying to get out of and change. The real story there is an economic story, tied to the democratic story," he told Shawcross.

Murdoch believes the criticism of him in the UK is attributable to his success in breaking the print unions and his success in establishing satellite broadcasting. "I'm a catalyst for change … You can't be an outsider and be successful over 30 years without leaving a certain amount of scar tissue around the place," he told Shawcross. [4]

While many attribute Murdoch with the conservative political views of his news organisations, some writers argue this is a misunderstanding of Murdoch.

Media website kaputa cites Richard Stott's criticism of Bruce Page's depiction of Murdoch, who he said "is shown to be manipulative, devious, bullying, ruthless and unscrupulous. But that just makes him a newspaper proprietor. What makes him special is that he isn't interested in the usual playthings of newspaper owners such as Beaverbrook, Northcliffe and William Randolph Hearst, namely political power for mischievous personal ends. For him it is the currency to secure a bigger and better deal or to consolidate current ones." [5]

James Fallows, writing in The Atlantic Monthly, adopts a similar view. “The real difference between Murdoch and an activist like Scaife is that Murdoch seems to be most interested in the political connections that will help his business … In short, some aspects of News Corp's programming, positions, and alliances serve conservative political ends, and others do not. But all are consistent with the use of political influence for corporate advantage. In the books I read and interviews I conducted, I found only one illustration of Murdoch's using his money and power for blatantly political ends: his funding of The Weekly Standard. The rest of the time he makes his political points when convenient as an adjunct to making money,” Fallows wrote.

Fallows points out that while Murdoch’s US news outlets were attacking Clinton in the late 1990’s they were backing the UK Labour Party leader, Tony Blair against the incumbent conservatives. One person interviewed complained about Murdoch’s use of his media outlets to advance his business interests which led Fallows to surmise “In this view, The Weekly Standard and the New York Post, neither of them profitable, are more means than ends”. [6]

In April 2004 Murdoch claimed in an interview with Australian conservative talk show host, Alan Jones, that the ability of individuals and organisations to cheaply publish on the Internet made concerns about the concentration of media ownership obsolete. “There is so much media now with the Internet and people … and so easy and so cheap to start a newspaper or start a magazine, there’s just millions of voices, and people want to be heard. And we don’t really have to worry … you know, the old ideas of it being too concentrated … I think that’s fading away,” he said.

Asked what he considered the major issues that government and others should address Murdoch identified education. “Well, we’re not spending enough money (on education), but probably … you know, we let the teachers unions set curriculas which … you know, don’t teach them the right things. There’s not emphasis on the … really the basic learning that you need if you’re going to go on in a college and into post-graduate work,” he told Jones. [7]

Murdoch and the British Labour Party

When polling indicated that the then Labour Party leader, Neil Kinnock, could lead the UK Labour Party to an election win, Murdoch's’ The Sun campaigned strongly against him. The front page on polling day proclaimed "If Neil Kinnock wins today, would the last person to leave Britain please turn out the lights". Kinnock was narrowly defeated which prompted a self-congratulatory headline from The Sun: "It's the Sun wot won it".

In 1997, Murdochs UK newspapers – The Sun and The Times – backed Tony Blair’s “New Labour” against the Conservative Party which had been widely discredited after a string of scandals.

While Murdoch’s papers supported Blair in the last two elections, in November 2003 he signaled to Blair that his continued support can’t be counted on. In an interview with the *BBC*, Murdoch discussed his opposition to a proposed constitution for the European Union and a meeting he initiated with the new leader of the Conservative Party, Michael Howard.

'Let's just say we have a friendly relationship as I do with Mr Howard, and the jury's out … We'll have to see how the Tory front bench looks, [if] it looked like a viable alternative government, which it hasn't so far. And we will not quickly forget the courage of Tony Blair in the international sphere in the last several months, so we may be torn in our decision. So let's wait and see. It's a long way away, let's see what the Government is doing with Europe, let's see how Mr Howard performs, how the Government performs.'

Murdoch – a US citizen – claimed the proposed EU constitution would erode Britain’s economic sovereignty: “I don't like the idea of any more abdication of our sovereignty in economic affairs or anything else. We'll have to see what's in the final constitution, if it's anything like the draft then certainly we'll oppose it.” [8]

In an interview with Australian conservative talk show host, Alan Jones, Murdoch agreed that red tape was limiting business productivity. “If you want to see how bad things are go to Europe. I mean, that is just crazy there. You have your own national government to go through and quangos – and whatever you call them – and boards and then when they're finished with you you've got to go to Brussels and do it all again,” Murdoch said.

Murdoch went on to criticise Blair’s support for further integration with the European Union. “It can only be personal ego. You know, he's … oh, he's a friend of mine. We've supported him very strongly on Iraq. We think he's been very brave. He came in at a time when the conservative party had collapsed. But on this he just doesn't make any sense,” he said.

Asked about how governments could be prevented from passing more laws affecting individuals and corporations, Murdoch explained that his papers in the UK were campaigning to block further integration with the EU. “Well, I guess when it gets too bad, you do everything you can to change them. We're campaigning … what we're doing in Britain today, we're campaigning every day in our newspapers to get a referendum so it actually gets put to the people before they sign onto Europe or sign in any deeper and we're certain what the result would be,” he said.[9]

In late April 2004 in a major policy U-turn, Blair announced that a referendum would be held on the proposed EU constitution. Why Blair changed his mind, contrary to his strong recent opposition to a referendum, was the source of much speculation.

Some argued that the ongoing controversy was a major political liability for the EU elections in June and the general election, likely to be called in 2005. In a twist on the theme, some claimed that at a meeting in March with one of Murdoch's senior executives, Irwin Stelzer, that Blair was told that unless there was a referendum Murdoch would campaign against the Labour Party in the general election. It is a claim rejected by Blair's office. [10]

A few days later Murdoch told an audience of business people attending a Milken Institute business conference of his concerns about immigration in Europe. "The Muslim populations in France and Germany are much bigger proportionately to what they are in this country [the US] and they have made a very bad job of assimilating them," he said. According to the report he said that in the US most of the Muslim population had been assimilated though there were "pockets of trouble here and there".

"They [Europe] have major centres of problems that are just boiling up. Paris is surrounded by vast blocks of tens of thousands of apartments - all Muslim, all no-go areas for police and totally lawless," he complained.

The European Union, he said, was an "awful French socialist bureaucracy stuck in Brussels, which is deterring investment in Europe, which is over-regulating every business and everybody." [11]

Lance Price, who worked as a media adviser to Tony Blair between 1998 and 2001, writes that Rupert Murdoch "seemed like the 24th member of the cabinet. His voice was rarely heard ... but his presence was always felt." Price was required to submit his manuscript for his recently-released book, The Spin Doctor's Diary, to the Cabinet Office for vetting. He was surprised to discover that a third of the objections by Blair's staff related to Murdoch, reflecting the close relationship between the two. "All discussions ... with Rupert Murdoch and with Irwin Stelzer, his representative on earth, were handled at the very highest level ... The Sun and the Times, in particular, received innumerable 'scoops' and favours. In return, New Labour got very sympathetic coverage from newspapers that are bought and read by classic swing voters - on the face of it, too good a deal to pass up," he wrote. [12]

On the Iraq war

In March 2003, Speaking at the Milken Institute Global Conference, Murdoch backed Bush government plans to invade Iraq. "We worry about what people think about us too much in this country. We have an inferiority complex, it seems," he said.

"I think what's important is that the world respects us, much more important than they love us ... There is going to be collateral damage. And if you really want to be brutal about it, better we get it done now than spread it over months," he said. [13].

In April 2004, days after major military clashes in Iraq, Murdoch wholeheartedly backed the U.S. government policy and dismissed the magnitude of the ongoing guerrilla war against coalition military forces. “We have got to see the job through. And I think it is being misrepresented. There’s tremendous progress in Iraq. All the kids are back at school – ten per cent more than when Saddam Hussein was there. There is one per cent more fresh water. There’s … most of Iraq is doing extremely well,” Murdoch said.

“There is one small part where the Sunnis are, which were the people who supported Saddam Hussein, who are giving trouble, and more by, I think, giving cover to international terrorists and people from the Taliban and from Afghanistan coming in. And it’s not - this is notable - they’re not really trying to kill Americans even, they’re trying to kill people, like, from the United Nations. Anyone who is trying to come in and help get their country going properly,” he said.

Murdoch had no doubt that the war in Iraq would have no impact on Bush’s election prospects. “They’re with him on that, completely. He’s going to walk it in. The economy is doing extremely well and, you know, there is an international crisis,” he said. [14]

In November 2006, on the eve of the U.S. mid-term elections, Murdoch downplayed the number of deaths in Iraq. "The death toll, certainly of Americans there, by the terms of any previous war are quite minute," he said. "Of course no one likes any death toll, but the war now, at the moment, it's certainly trying to prevent a civil war and to prevent Iraqis killing each other."

"I believe it was right to go in there. I believe that certainly the execution that has followed that has included many mistakes," Murdoch said. "But that's easy to say after the event. It's much easier to criticize the conduct of the war today in the media than it was in previous wars. I'm sure there were great mistakes made in the past, too." [15]

On January 26, 2007 Murdoch participated in a panel discussion on "Who Will Shape the Agenda?" at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. In response to the moderator asking if "News Corp. managed to shape the agenda on the war in Iraq, Murdoch said: 'No, I don't think so. We tried.' Asked by Rose for further comment, he said: 'We basically supported the Bush policy in the Middle East...but we have been very critical of his execution.'" [16]

On the Fox Business Network

News Corp. announces that it will launch the Fox Business Network on October 15, 2007. Roger Ailes, chairman and CEO of Fox News, will also oversee FBN. Neil Cavuto will be the managing editor. [17]

On February 8, 2007, Murdoch promised guests at the McGraw-Hill Media Summit that, "a Fox channel would be 'more business-friendly than CNBC. That channel leap[s] on every scandal, or what they think is a scandal,' he said." [18]

U.S. political contributions

Books on Murdoch

There are numerous books on Rupert Murdoch with those considered to be amongst the best being:

A comprehensive listing of all the main books on Murdoch is available at http://www.ketupa.net/murdoch.htm

A comprehensive timeline on the rise of Rupert Murdoch and News Corporation is available at http://www.ketupa.net/murdoch2.htm

Affiliations

Resources

Related SourceWatch articles

References

  1. ↑ "Murdoch & News", Ketupa.net, April 2007.
  2. ↑ 2.0^(http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Rupert_Murdoch#cite_ref-Chenoweth_and_Aylmer_1-0) 2.1^(http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Rupert_Murdoch#cite_ref-Chenoweth_and_Aylmer_1-1) Neil Chenoweth and Sean Aylmer, "Malone, Murdoch's new best friend", Australian Financial Review, January 27, 2004. (Not available online)
  3. ↑ Board of Directors, Partnership for New York City, accessed December 28, 2007.

External links

Articles and Speeches by Murdoch

2003

2004

2005

2006

2007

2008

This article may include information from Tobacco Documents Online.

http://www.rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/Murdoch_Rupert

Rupert Murdoch heads one of the world's largest media empires, the News Corporation, which in 2008 had some $33 billion in total revenue from a diverse range of media products, including Fox News, Twentieth Century Fox, Dow Jones (publisher of the Wall Street Journal), HarperCollins, MySpace, the New York Post, and hundreds of other newspapers and television stations.[1]

Considered a close ally of neoconservative activists, Murdoch has helped bankroll neoconservatism’s more important media outlets, including the William Kristol-edited*Weekly Standard*, the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, and Fox News. A sign of Murdoch’s commitment to this rightwing faction’s causes was his willingness to support the Standard in spite of yearly losses in the millions; the magazine is widely credited as a pivotal force in building support for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. According to a report by Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting, “With a circulation of about 65,000 and annual losses estimated from $1 million … to $5 million … the Standardrepresented only a tiny fraction of Murdoch's vast media empire.”[2]

In 1983, a plan, hatched by CIA Director William J. Casey, called for raising private money to sell the administration’s Central American policies to the American public through an outreach program designed to look independent but which was secretly managed by Reagan-Bush officials.

The project was implemented by a CIA propaganda veteran, Walter Raymond Jr., who had been moved to the National Security Council staff and put in charge of a “perception management” campaign that had both international and domestic objectives.

In one initiative, Raymond arranged to have Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch chip in money for ostensibly private groups that would back Reagan-Bush policies. According to a memo dated Aug. 9, 1983, Raymond reported that “via Murdock [sic], may be able to draw down added funds.” For details, see Parry’s *[Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq*.]

Here is yet another chronicle of the life and times of Rupert Murdoch (Thomas Kiernan's Citizen Murdoch , LJ 10/15/86; Michael Leapman's Arrogant Aussie , LJ 6/15/86; Jerome Tuccille's Rupert Murdoch , LJ 11/1/89)

From Publishers Weekly

For this unauthorized biography of media baron Rupert Murdoch, a "uniquely important" information broker whose life has been "an unending assault upon the world," Shawcross ( Sideshow ) had privileged access to Murdoch, to his colleagues and family. The result is a mostly nonjudgmental, flat profile of a driven, often ruthless, lonely man of "invincible energy and ambition" who put together a communications empire stretching from Australia to London to New York, Chicago and Hollywood. Shawcross perceives "a certain dour puritanism" in the king of sensationalist tabloid journalism. Murdoch's life was a series of takeovers, wins and losses that included the acquisitions of the New York Post, the London Times , Fox film and television, and HarperCollins publishers. Murdoch, an ardent supporter of Reaganism and Thatcherism, viewed himself as "totally internationalist" and saw his media empire as instrumental in promoting the Americanization of the world, but Shawcross fails to explore the implications of that prospect. Photos. Author tour.

Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal