straight news

not quite sure who fits here yet 519

SEE BRET BAIER

martha mccallum

mma uses term in "" but no tag

jig was up when?

see offshore wind whale BS

note ppl who resign eg shep

john roberts API vxr 2x

see hemmer am's newsroom

see bloviator/ pundit bad trinity

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Right-wing media’s “war on meat” paves the way for Trump administration to blame climate policies for rising beef prices

Special ProgramsClimate & Energy

Written by Ilana Berger

Published 12/18/25

Right-wing media's longstanding claims of a Democratic “war on meat" have given Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins cover to blame rising beef prices on Democrats and climate policy — even as cattle ranchers themselves point to climate-driven drought as one factor contributing to small herd sizes and voice their opposition to the administration’s plans to import Argentine beef.

On December 8, Rollins told Fox Business host Larry Kudlow, “The cost of ground beef is actually coming down, so we’ve started now the trajectory down. But let’s be very clear: To rebuild the lowest beef herd in 75 years … will take a little bit of time. You think about the last administration. They had a war on American agriculture. They thought that cows created climate change. They didn't want big herds, and the cost of inputs were skyrocketing.”

She made similar claims prior to this appearance at least five separate times on Fox Business’ Mornings with Maria, Fox News’ Fox & Friends, and CNN’s The Situation Room.

Right-wing media have long tried to pit ranchers and farmers against environmentalists and those attempting to mitigate the environmental impacts of agriculture, including falsely claiming Democratic leaders and the Inflation Reduction Act (which they often called the “Green New Deal”) would ban meat.

• ## The IRA offered only incentives to reduce methane from ranching, and ranchers and industry experts say prolonged drought, high input costs, and inflation are driving high beef prices

• • The Inflation Reduction Act included a program aimed at reducing methane emissions, but it included only “voluntary, incentive-based approaches” for farmers and ranchers.In 2023, the Biden administration announced the Methane Emissions Reduction Action Plan, which included plans to mitigate methane emissions. The only elements of the action plan targeting agricultural methane emissions were “voluntary, incentive-based approaches,” even though the sector is responsible for an estimated 37% of human-caused emissions globally, and about 10.5% in the U.S. According to Sentient Media, these incentives might have had the potential to “increase emissions from the sector.” Vox, [8/16/22; Reuters, 1/11/22; Sentient Media,9/28/23; The White House, 11/2/21, 12/23; Environmental Protection Agency 12/2/2; U.S. Department of Agriculture, 11/5/24]

• • Severe drought and changing weather patterns have contributed to shrinking U.S. cattle herds. According to Investigate Midwest, climate change-driven weather volatility has “made relying on typical weather patterns and grazing conditions difficult for the nation’s beef producers." That means ranchers must transport feed from farther away, increasing costs. They are also forced to wean calves earlier so heifers expend less energy feeding calves and require fewer nutrients. Some farmers have even had to cull their herds. Bloomberg, [1/31/25; Investigate Midwest, 3/13/24; South Dakota State University Extension, 3/21/25; Grain Journal, 6/12/25]

• • Several ranchers and cattle industry players told Fox News that prolonged drought is tightening livestock supply and hurting their bottom lines.Various cattle ranchers told Fox News and Fox News Digital that drought helped herd sizes hit a historic low and said that it was contributing to “the ongoing decline of the industry.” In 2023, a Florida-based rancher also told Fox News that extreme drought was part of the problem because it was “increasing our production costs” and it would “have a long-term effect on our bottom line.” Fox News Digital, [11/24/25; Fox News,Fox & Friends Weekend, 10/25/25; Fox News, Fox & Friends, 4/12/23]

• • Inflation, high interest rates, and Trump’s tariffs are impacting ranchers. ABC News reported in October that amid rising inflation, beef prices were soaring, noting also that “tariffs modestly contributed to the uptick in overall inflation.” A report from the American Farm Bureau Federation also found that inflation and interest rates were “driving up costs for farmers.” The report noted: “When the Fed increased rates, they dramatically increased the cost of borrowing money across the economy. This has happened at a time when farmers and ranchers rely more heavily on credit due to the growing gap between commodity prices and input costs.” ABC News, [10/24/25; American Farm Bureau Federation, 8/26/25]

• ## For years, right-wing media have labeled climate policies and other Democrat supported initiatives as a “war on meat”

• • In 2019, right-wing media falsely said the Green New Deal would ban meat and that it was “bad news or cows."Fox host Brian Kilmeade said that the Green New Deal would be “bad news for cows,” adding, “Time to slaughter all of them quickly because of their propensity for gas.” Climate skeptic Marc Morano told Kilmeade the same day, “We're told we need to do all of this, from banning meat, to airline getting rid of the combustion, internal combustion engine, all to save from us from a climate emergency.” Fox News, *Fox & Friends*, [2/8/19, 2/8/19; Fox News Primetime, 8/9/21]

• • In 2021, Fox News spread a fake story that then-President Joe Biden wanted to ban hamburgers. The administration did not call for an end to meat consumption. But on Fox News @ Night, anchor Shannon Bream asked viewers, “Could new climate impact plans limit you to just one burger a month?” She later added, “About the burger thing, I'm not going to comply with that.” On Fox News’ America Reports with John Roberts, Fox’s “straight news” program, chyrons included, “Bye-bye burgers under Biden’s climate plan,” as well as “Study: 90% of red meat out with Biden climate plan,” and “Biden’s climate plan burns all-you-can-eat burgers.” Media Matters, [4/26/21]

• • In 2022, right-wing media used farmer protests in the Netherlands over plans to cut nitrogen pollution to fearmonger about a globalist conspiracy to trample freedoms, including eating meat. The Guardian, [11/16/23; Media Matters; 7/8/22, 7/15/22, 11/8/22]

• • Frequent Fox News guest and Tennessee dairy farmer Stephanie Nash has appeared on several segments across right-wing programs, telling hosts that the “Green New Deal” and Biden’s “energy climate change initiative” would lead to “empty shelves” and that the Biden administration was targeting farmers.Nash told hosts that “Americans should be prepared for food shortages” because “the Green New Deal … is an attack on family farmers and ranchers,” and that “climate change has always been a hoax for the agriculture industry, they continue to blame agriculture for global warming and change of our planet. … I think this is just an excuse to continue to blame agriculture, to continue to let our farmers struggle around this country.” She also said that the administration was “trying to push agriculture out of the United States, pushing this plant-based food.” As recently as this October, Nash said on Fox Business, “Everybody knows that we’ve been bringing in more imports than ever the last two years, and that’s thanks to the Green New Deal. … Trump is trying to fix that and bring back American agriculture.” Fox Business, *Varney & Co.*, [8/10/22, 10/3/25; Fox News,Fox & Friends, 8/5/22; Newsmax, Rob Schmit Tonight, 7/6/22; Fox Business, Cavuto: Coast to Coast, 8/10/22;]

• • Fox Business host Jackie DeAngelis said that “what happened to Big Oil … same thing is going to happen to the farmers.”DeAngelis argued that “more regulations make it harder for those companies to increase supply” and that “food costs will continue to rise.” Fox Business, *Cavuto: Coast to Coast*, [8/10/22]

• • A 2024 Fox Business interview with a cattle rancher pushed the narrative that “global sustainability initiatives could cause millions of people to starve.” Host Dagen McDowell told Texas and Colorado-based cattle rancher Shad Sullivan that “the climate crusading wack jobs want to destroy us, our life, and your livelihood." Sullivan told the hosts that “they've all teamed up in this anti-meat rhetoric that you see sweeping across the globe, to get control of the people. And that's all it amounts to, is total control.” [Fox Business,The Bottom Line, 2/15/24]

• • Right-wing media falsely claimed that Kamala Harris wanted to “get rid of” red meat. Fox contributor Jason Chaffetz, for instance, made the claim on three different segments, saying, “She wants to get rid of meat.” Former Fox & Friends Weekend co-host and current Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth also translated Harris’ support for changing the dietary guidelines to “get rid of red meat.” Media Matters, [8/6/24]

• • In an interview with Rollins, Fox News host Brian Kilmeade blamed “craziness around climate change” for “a shortage of shrinking cattle” herd sizes. Kilmeade claimed that this was because of “the methane from the cows they thought was killing the ozone.” Rollins agreed that Democrats have “waged war” against cattle ranchers. Fox News, Fox & Friends, [11/24/25]

mma

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1. ### Right-wing media spun the bad November jobs report as a win for “native-born” workers

12/17/25 4:22 PM EST

2. ### Fox News contributor blames DEI for shooting deaths at Brown University

12/17/25 12:16 PM EST

3. ### Fox found its culprit for high grocery prices following Democratic election victories — Joe Biden

12/17/25

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MMA 10 25

Frequent Fox appearances are central to the Trump administration's climate and energy misinformation strategy

Special ProgramsClimate & Energy

Written by Evlondo Cooper

Research contributions from Harrison Ray

Published 09/29/25

Fox News and Fox Business have not simply covered President Donald Trump’s destructive climate and environmental agenda — they have served as the administration’s preferred vehicles for selling it to the public.

Since late July, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin, Energy Secretary Chris Wright, and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum have made dozens of appearances across Fox News and Fox Business programs to defend the proposed repeal of the EPA’s endangerment finding, shift blame for soaring electricity bills away from fossil fuel volatility, and portray offshore wind projects as both unreliable and dangerous.

By turning to Fox networks, senior Trump officials gain a platform where destructive environmental deregulation is framed as common sense and basic policy questions are never asked. What emerges from these appearances is not legitimate debate or accountability journalism, but a symbiotic relationship that allows the Trump administration to launder harmful misinformation through Fox’s news and opinion programming — leaving viewers with a distorted picture of climate science, energy policy, and the real stakes of the administration’s environmental rollbacks.

Topline findings

• • Doug Burgum, Chris Wright, and Lee Zeldin have appeared a combined 36 times on Fox networks from July 29 through September 21. Zeldin and Burgum are tied for the most appearances during this period, with 13 apiece, followed by Wright with 10.

• • Fox Business’Mornings with Maria Bartiromofeatured the three Trump administration officials the most, with 8 total appearances, followed by the network’sVarney & Co.(7 combined appearances) and Fox News’America Reports(5 appearances). Kudlow, The Ingraham Angle, and Fox & Friends each hosted the Trump officials twice during the studied period.

• ## Trump officials used Fox appearances to push misinformation after the administration proposed repealing the EPA’s landmark endangerment finding

• While Fox networks have spread misleading claims about climate and energy for years, the appearances by administration officials in the weeks following the proposed repeal of the endangerment finding released on July 29 offer a snapshot of how they work hand-in-hand with the Trump White House to downplay the scientific basis for greenhouse gas regulation, distort the causes of rising electricity prices, and attack renewable energy.

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin

Zeldin has leaned on Fox’s coverage to launder claims that climate regulations are illegitimate and that reliance on renewable energy is driving economic pain.

During the August 13 episode of Fox Business’ Kudlow, Zeldin argued that the endangerment finding — a 2009 scientific determination that provided the legal framework for the EPA to regulate greenhouse gas emissions — rested on “a lot of mental leaps” and claimed that “the Clean Air Act doesn’t make any reference to the greenhouse gases.” (In reality, the Supreme Court’s Massachusetts v. EPA ruling explicitly found that greenhouse gases qualify as air pollutants under the Act.) He paired that dismissal with charges that Obama-era scientific findings were exaggerated and “pessimistic,” and closed the segment by promoting natural gas pipelines as the only path to affordable energy and job growth.

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From the August 13, 2025, episode of Fox Business' Kudlow

• During the September 1 episode of Fox News’ One Nation with Brian Kilmeade, Zeldin presented Trump’s deregulatory agenda as the backbone of U.S. “energy dominance,” dismissing offshore wind projects as inefficient and unreliable for consumers. In contrast, he again portrayed fossil fuel expansion — particularly natural gas — as both environmentally superior and essential for national security.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright

Wright has similarly leaned on Fox to attack renewable energy as too costly, unreliable, and an obstacle to America’s economic and technological ambitions. He also used his appearances to make sweeping claims that fossil fuel expansion is the only realistic path forward and to blame renewable energy for electricity price increases.

During a segment about the “importance of unleashing U.S. energy” to meet growing demand from artificial intelligence on the September 4 episode of Fox & Friends, Wright told viewers that artificial intelligence represents “perhaps the highest use of electricity.” Later that day on Fox News’ The Ingraham Angle, Wright described offshore wind projects as a “guaranteed” driver of higher electricity costs, telling host Laura Ingraham that wind and solar are “variable, parasitic sources” that make the power grid less reliable and more expensive. He also claimed that by adopting offshore wind, the United States would be “competing for the most expensive electricity in the world.” Ingraham did raise the issue of higher electricity costs during the Trump administration but allowed Wright to spin, evade, and double down on falsely blaming renewable energy.

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From the September 4, 2025, edition of Fox News’ The Ingraham Angle

• On the September 19 episode of Fox Business’ Mornings with Maria Bartiromo, Wright labeled global investment and uptake of renewables such as wind and solar as a “complete trainwreck” and insisted that climate change is a “slow-moving, gradual phenomenon, nowhere near a crisis or a disaster.”

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum

Burgum has also used Fox appearances to promote the administration’s fossil fuel expansion agenda while attacking renewables as unreliable and costly.

During the August 2 episode of Fox Business' Maria Bartiromo’s Wall Street, Burgum defended the administration’s proposed rollback of the endangerment finding, agreeing with Zeldin and Wright that the EPA had overstepped its authority. He also blamed increased energy costs on Obama- and Biden-era climate regulations, pushed deregulation as a way to unleash economic growth, and attacked offshore wind.

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From the August 2, 2025, episode of Fox Business' Maria Bartiromo’s Wall Street

• On the August 20 episode of Mornings with Maria Bartiromo, Burgum announced a sweeping offshore oil and gas leasing plan while continuing to attack offshore wind. He tied fossil fuel production to U.S. dominance in the race for artificial intelligence, claiming that only coal and gas could deliver the electricity needed for growth, and contrasted this with “blue state” reliance on renewables, which he described as intermittent, subsidized, and responsible for high electricity costs.
• ## The climate and energy realities Fox keeps from its audience
• Fox networks have repeatedly provided Zeldin, Wright, and Burgum with a platform to repeat administration talking points and propaganda without pressing them on the evidence that undercuts their claims. As a result, Fox viewers have been left with a curated narrative that omits the most important facts.

For example, on Kudlow, after Zeldin dismissed the endangerment finding as “a lot of mental leaps,” Fox host and former Trump economic adviser Larry Kudlow never pointed out that it was grounded in the Supreme Court’s 2007 Massachusetts v. EPA decision and decades of scientific consensus. Nor did viewers hear that it has prevented hundreds of thousands of premature deaths and delivered billions in net economic benefits.

And when Wright insisted that renewables drive up electricity prices on The Ingraham Angle, the Fox host did not mention that analysts instead point to fossil fuel volatility, surging demand from AI data centers, and Trump’s own decision to roll back and cancel renewable energy projects as the primary drivers of increased electricity costs.

On Mornings with Maria Bartiromo, as Burgum railed against offshore wind energy and celebrated coal and gas as the foundation of energy dominance, Bartiromo never noted that solar energy combined with battery storage is now the cheapest and fastest-to-build source of new power, or that clinging to coal plants saddles consumers with higher bills while increasing pollution. Instead, the segment cast fossil fuels as the only reliable option, ignoring the economic and health benefits of renewables.

The Trump administration’s reliance on Fox News and Fox Business is not incidental; it is a core communications strategy. By prioritizing their appearances on Fox networks, officials like Zeldin, Wright, and Burgum gain access to a powerful megaphone while shielding themselves from scrutiny or accountability. Fox’s “straight news” programs give their talking points the appearance of neutrality, and its opinion hosts repeat and amplify those same claims until they harden into conventional wisdom.

The result is the laundering of misleading talking points: Administration officials feed misinformation into Fox, the network recycles and legitimizes it, and audiences are left with a propagandistic narrative that obscures the public health costs of climate change and environmental deregulation and dismisses the economic benefits of clean energy.

• ## Methodology...

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MMA

Fox News repeatedly misled viewers about the financial impact of Trump’s latest executive order targeting immigrants

Fox conflated benefits for authorized immigrants and American children with money spent on “illegal migrants”

Written by Torri Lonergan & Emma Mae Weber

Research contributions from Ben Van Bloem

Published 02/21/25

In reporting on President Donald Trump’s executive order aimed at ending aid to so-called “illegal aliens,” Fox News repeatedly touted Congressional Budget Office data estimating that the U.S. government would spend $177 billion by 2034 on immigrants and their children, inaccurately describing it as spending on “illegal migrants.” In reality, that data covers spending on both immigrants with legal status and undocumented immigrants, as well as their American children, and the CBO also estimates a net positive financial impact from immigration.

Trump signed a vague executive order cutting aid to immigrants

• • Trump signed an executive order meant to bar undocumented immigrants from receiving federal benefits, even though they were already mostly ineligible. The order suggested that by providing undocumented immigrants with government benefits, American taxpayers were incentivizing illegal immigration. However, undocumented immigrants have historically been ineligible to receive most federal benefits, especially since the passage of federal welfare laws in 1996. White House, [2/19/25; National Immigration Law Center, 5/1/24]

• • The executive order does not make clear which specific benefits will be cut or for whom. The order instructs states not to use federal funds to carry out “sanctuary policies” and requires federal benefit programs to strengthen their screening procedures to ensure that no undocumented immigrants are approved. The order does not specify whether Trump intends to exclude undocumented immigrant children from public schools, a practice that the Supreme Court deemed illegal in 1982. Politico, [2/20/25; NPR, 2/20/25]

• ## The CBO estimates the US will spend $177 billion on immigrants — both documented and undocumented — from 2024-2034

• • The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the U.S. government would spend $177 billion between 2024 and 2034 on both documented and undocumented immigrants who entered the country between 2021 and 2026 and their U.S.-born children. Immigrants who “have received permission to enter or remain in the country,” as well as the American-born children of these immigrants, are included in the data. Congressional Budget Office, [July 2024]

• • The CBO also estimates the recent immigration surge will boost the gross domestic product by nearly $9 trillion over the 10-year period. A separate and comprehensive 2023 Cato Institute study on the fiscal impact of immigration also found that “immigration will have a large and consistent net positive impact on all government budgets.” Congressional Budget Office, [July 2024; Cato Institute, 3/21/23]

• ## Fox misled viewers by citing the CBO estimate as spending on “illegal aliens” in reporting on Trump’s order

• • While reporting on Trump’s plan to cut spending on undocumented immigrants, Fox News correspondent Griff Jenkins inaccurately characterized the CBO projected costs, saying it “estimates current benefits for illegal migrants over the next 10 years would include over $175 billion.”In another appearance, Jenkins said that “more than $175 billion worth of federal benefits … was set to go to illegal migrants and their children.” He went on to cite this misleading data during at least two other correspondent segments. Fox News, *The Story with Martha MacCallum*, [2/20/24; Special Report with Bret Baier, 2/20/25; America’s Newsroom, 2/20/25; The Faulkner Focus, 2/20/25]

• • Fox News anchor John Roberts inaccurately cited the CBO data, saying “illegal aliens” are costing American taxpayers $174 billion, and citing other debunked data.Fox News, America Reports, [2/20/25; Media Matters, 2/20/25]

• • Fox News host Carley Shimkus inaccurately referenced the figure, saying there’s a “number that the Congressional Budget Office released … says over the next 10 years the federal government was planning on spending $177 billion on benefits for illegal immigrants.”Fox News, *Outnumbered*, [2/20/25]

• • Fox News correspondent Lucas Tomlinson also inaccurately reported that “Trump's executive order bars illegal aliens from receiving federally funded benefits to the total of $177 billion.” Fox News, *Fox & Friends*, [2/20/25]

• • Fox anchor Martha MacCallum described the executive order as a “move to stop taxpayer money from funding hundreds of billions of dollars to provide services for illegal immigrants, which is actually against U.S. law.” Fox News, *The Story with Martha MacCallum*, [2/20/25]

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wiki 1 25 am newsroom

The program is one of FNC's eight current straight news programs, with the others being Fox News Live, Special Report with Bret Baier, America Reports, The Faulkner Focus, Fox Report, Fox & Friends First, The Story with Martha MacCallum and Fox News @ Night.

Substitute hosts include Mike Emanuel, Aishah Hasnie, Gillian Turner, Shannon Bream, Trace Gallagher, Julie Banderas, Martha MacCallum, Jacqui Heinrich and Sandra Smith.

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timing? right after MSG nazi rally and VPH elipse in which she called out

after bret b clip fail apology?

mma

Fox’s John Roberts denies that Trump has talked about deploying the military against Americans

In an interview on Fox, Trump recently suggested using troops against “the enemy within”

Written by Bushra Sultana

Published 10/30/24

On the October 30 edition of America Reports, Fox anchor John Roberts falsely claimed that Donald Trump has never said that he would use the military against the American people, claiming instead, “He said that he would bring in the National Guard to quell demonstrations that turned violent.”

Roberts was seemingly referring to Trump’s comments in an interview from early October in which Fox’s Maria Bartiromo asked the former president about “outside agitators” creating chaos on Election Day. Trump responded, “I think the bigger problem is the enemy from within,” adding, “We have some very bad people. We have some sick people, radical left lunatics. … It should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military.”

Roberts also ignored the larger context of Trump’s comments repeatedly calling Democrats and people who don’t support him “the enemy from within.” In an interview with Fox’s Howard Kurtz, Trump called Reps. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Adam Schiff (D-CA) “an enemy from within,” claiming, “These are bad people. We have a lot of bad people. But when you look at ‘Shifty Schiff’ and some of the others, yeah, they are, to me, the enemy from within.” Trump has also repeatedly called mainstream media “the enemy of the people” since his 2016 election campaign.

Video

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CitationFrom the October 30, 2024, edition of Fox News' America Reports

JOSE ARISTIMUNO (FORMER DNC DEPUTY NATIONAL PRESS SECRETARY): On the disinformation, there's a whole lot of Republicans out there that are saying that Kamala Harris is a socialist when she's not. When you have a former president, on Donald Trump, that wants to militarize the Department of Justice, wants to use the military on the American people. He said it himself —

JOHN ROBERTS (ANCHOR): He never said that.

ARISTIMUNO: And he’s the one who doesn’t recognize elections. He doesn't recognize the 2020 election. That's what Nicolás Maduro does in Venezuela. So I invite my friends that are watching the program today, actually research of what these people are doing. Both Kamala and Donald Trump — look at their policies, look at their actions, not just their words. That's what's going to make a difference come November 5.

ROBERTS: Steve, quick final word to you, with the caveat that Donald Trump never said that he was going to sic the U.S. military on the American people. He said that he would bring in the National Guard to quell demonstrations that turned violent.

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NOTE STRAIGHT NEWS SLING BS WOKE PC BS

MMA

Right-wing media want you to think stopping infectious diseases and feeding the poor is woke

Written by Gideon Taaffe

Research contributions from Jack Wheatley

Published 02/11/25 MMA

Right-wing media are focused on culture war battles as the Trump administration suspends lifesaving work from the U.S. Agency for International Development, cherry-picking USAID programs to dismiss the agency as “woke,” “radical,” and “overwhelmingly hard left.” In reality, USAID is responsible for providing health care and nutritional aid to thousands of the world’s vulnerable people, many living in war-torn regions.

The Trump administration has sought to put a halt to USAID’s operations

• • On February 4, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that USAID was now under the direct authority of the State Department, and the administration froze U.S. foreign aid.Rubio placed Pete Marocco in charge of USAID; he served in the agency during Trump’s first term and has been accused of attempting to dismantle it during his tenure. CNN, [2/3/25]

• • Following Rubio’s takeover, 10,000 USAID employees were placed on administrative leave, and a couple days later the Trump administration announced plans to leave fewer than 300 workers in place to carry out the organization’s work. A judge put a temporary pause on some of the Trump administration’s job cutting, resulting in 2,200 employees being reinstated but with uncertain futures at the agency. USA Today,[2/4/25; The Associated Press, 2/6/25; NBC News, 2/7/25]

• • USAID workers in high-risk locations have reported being cut off from communication and were left unsure of how to access evacuation protocols. Employees of USAID are also facing interruptions to medical care and housing insecurity. Bluesky, [2/7/25]

• • Rubio claimed he had issued a blanket waiver for lifesaving programs, but workers on the ground have said that operations have come to a halt. While some programs have been granted a waiver to continue under Rubio, many have lost access to supplies, and payments to contractors that are covered by the waiver have not come through. That has affected emergency food aid in Ethiopia, a refugee camp in Syria, a resettlement program for victims of the Islamic State group, and more. One USAID worker told CNN, “That work is grounded to a halt because there’s no staff to manage it, and there’s no staff in DC to answer questions from partners.” The Washington Post, [2/10/25; CNN, 2/8/25]

• ## The Trump administration’s antics have prevented USAID from providing critical aid to some of the world’s most vulnerable people

• • The freeze impacted the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, which has been credited with saving more than 25 million lives and reducing AIDS-related deaths by 68% since 2004.Charles Kenny, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development in Washington, told The Associated Press that even short interruptions in care could have negative outcomes, as “HIV viral loads rebound in about three weeks if you go off antiretrovirals.” The initial freeze to USAID has already sparked confusion among PEPFAR workers and local partners as appointments are canceled. The Associated Press, [2/3/25; AVAC, 2/8/23; The New York Times, 1/27/25]

• • As a result of the USAID freeze, thousands of people in medical trials for dealing with HIV and other illnesses have been left adrift, with their treatments suddenly stopped or with medical equipment in their bodies. The New York Times, [2/6/25]

• • The freeze will also impact millions of dollars in aid that is being used to help those in war zones dealing with infectious diseases.The Associated Press reported that 1.2 million people in Congo could lose lifesaving support and 600,000 people in Sudan will be at risk of catching and spreading cholera, malaria, and measles. The Associated Press, [2/3/25]

• • Defunding USAID also hurts American farms that sell products to the organization for disbursement via its nutrition programs.According to The Washington Post, “Purchases and shipments of U.S. food aid worth over $340 million — including rice, wheat and soybeans — have been paused during Trump’s foreign-aid freeze.” The Post also reports that the aid freeze “disrupted more than 507,000 metric tons of American food aid.” The Washington Post, [2/6/25]

• • The Famine Early Warning Systems Network, a USAID program that helps aid programs determine where to send resources, has also been shut down. An analyst specializing in food insecurity told Reuters, “Famine was disappearing from the world in the 2000s, and now its return will likely accelerate as we become increasingly blind to it, even as it becomes a more common tool of politics and war.” Reuters, [2/6/25]

• ## Right-wing media have dismissed USAID as a “woke” left-wing “slush fund”

• • Fox & Friends Weekendco-host Rachel Campos-Duffy claimed USAID is “not aid like you would imagine,” like “setting up soup kitchens in Africa.”She claimed it’s a “slush fund for Democrat donors, the Clinton Foundation, George Soros, all of the NGOs who have been doing stuff that American people never voted for them to do.” Fox News, *Fox & Friends’ Weekend*, [2/9/25]

• • Fox News contributor Ben Domenech claimed USAID has “not been acting in the interests of the American people or the United States for a very long time” and is instead enacting a “woke agenda.” Fox News, *Sunday Night in America*, [2/9/25]

• • Podcast host Megyn Kelly dismissed USAID as an organization that seems to give money to “woke” projects like “LGBTQ and that kind of promotional stuff.” Kelly also said it “appears” that USAID employees are “overwhelmingly hard left.” iHeartRadio, *The Megyn Kelly Show*, [2/5/25]

• • On Fox, former podcast host Vivek Ramaswamy claimed USAID funds are “not even going to help starving children in Africa,” adding that it was a “smokescreen.” He claimed that instead foreign aid is being used to push “progressive ideas, LGBTQ+ agendas, woke and DEI agendas, onto foreign countries.” Fox News, *Jesse Watters Primetime*, [2/5/25]

• • Newsmax’sFinnertyran a chyron reading “USAID funded some ridiculous causes.”Guest and former Trump deputy press secretary Hogan Gidley criticized USAID’s operations, calling them “crazy, ridiculous programs.” Newsmax, *Finnerty*, [2/5/25]

• • Fox’s Sean Hannity said everything USAID does is “radical DEI, woke, transgender, you know, leftist, Green New Deal madness.”Premiere Radio Networks, *The Sean Hannity Show*, [2/4/25]

• • On Fox News’The Five, Jesse Watters claimed USAID is a “slush fund for social justice warriors and permanent Washington to bribe people, staff people at NGOs, and just create hell.”Fox News, *The Five*, [2/4/25]

• ## Others in right-wing media have bizarrely claimed USAID’s critical work will continue despite the Trump administration’s efforts to gut the agency

• • Jesse Watters claimed saving babies from getting AIDS in Africa is “still going to happen once they look at everything and get this thing streamlined.”Fox News, *Jesse Watters Primetime*, [2/7/25]

• • Fox News anchor Bret Baier claimed that Marco Rubio is not against critical foreign aid, but he is going to “scrub what is real and what is not.”His guest, Republican strategist Matt Whitlock, agreed and said that “so much of what we have seen” is “exporting a social agenda.” Fox News, *Special Report with Bret Baier*, [2/7/25]

• • Fox News anchor John Roberts claimed that Marco Rubio will “continue with the good that USAID does.” Roberts: “The Democrats are literally losing their minds over all of this, saying that Elon Musk is gutting U.S. foreign policy. But Rubio is saying, ‘No no, we’re going to continue with the good stuff that USAID does. We’re just going to get rid of what we think is the wasteful spending that has been engaged in and the insubordination of the entire agency.’” Fox News, *America Reports*, [2/7/25]

• • Fox News anchor Harris Faulkner falsely claimed, “No one is talking about taking the food and taking the things for people who actually need those things away.”She added, “Who doesn't audit? It’s been years. We need to know where that money is going. And some of it is going to terrorist organizations.” Fox News, *The Faulkner Focus*, [2/6/25]

• • OutKick columnist Mary Katherine Ham claimed the frozen funds were just getting “audited.” Ham: “We're told that waste, fraud, and abuse is such a small percentage of the federal government's budget, and should be easy to deal with, given that. And yet we're also told that that small slice of the federal government is the end of democracy if you start auditing it.” Fox News, *The Story with Martha MacCallum*, [2/5/25]

//

1. ### The idiotic meltdown over Politico Pro subscriptions is a perfect case study for the right's broken information ecosystem

02/06/25 2:29 PM EST

2. ### As USAID is dismantled, right-wing media rejoice and spread baseless conspiracy theories about the agency’s work

02/07/25 4:38 PM EST

3. ### Fox host to federal workers: “Get a real job”

02/06/2

---

===

mma

There is no Fox “news side.” Wednesday’s Trump and Harris events prove it.

Written by Matt Gertz

Published 10/17/24

Fox News’ Wednesday programming encapsulated the transformation of the network’s once-vaunted “news side” into an extension of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.

In the morning, Fox aired what it had touted as a town hall with Trump featuring an audience of women voters. In reality, the event was functionally a pep rally for the former president, who was guided by Fox anchor Harris Faulkner through questions from a crowd Fox stocked with his supporters. abortion min 58 of 60?]

Vice President Kamala Harris received a starkly different reception that night when she sat down with Fox anchor Bret Baier, at one point catching him using a deceptive clip to downplay Trump’s rants about “the enemy from within.”

Fox’s “news side” has been in steep decline since Trump took over the Republican Party and the network rebranded as his personal propaganda outlet. But even by those standards, the partisan divide it displayed on Wednesday was striking and would be catastrophically embarrassing to Fox’s employees if any of them were still capable of humiliation.

• ### For Trump, a Fox-branded campaign event

Fox announced last week that it was planning a town hall with Trump that would be taped in Georgia and moderated by Faulkner. The network’s press release stressed that the event would feature an “audience entirely composed of women” and highlighted Faulkner’s journalistic credentials. Politico’s takeaway was that by taking questions from members of “a demographic that has been largely repulsed by his temperament and abortion-rights views,” the former president would be “venturing into more challenging territory.”

In reality, Fox had stocked the audience with Trump’s supporters by inviting local Republican groups, as The Independent’s Eric Garcia reported.

This quickly became apparent when the edited broadcast began airing on the Wednesday edition of Faulkner’s show and Trump entered to a standing ovation from the crowd. The first questioner, who identified herself as “Lisa,” is the president of a local Republican women’s group.

IFrame Content

Over the course of the broadcast, Trump fielded softball questions from people who were clearly voting for him; at least one was wearing branded Trump paraphernalia. He got help along the way from Faulkner, a committed shill for his campaign who has criticized journalists at other outlets for asking tough questions of the former president and avoided pushing back as he spread numerous falsehoods.

Notably, Fox deliberately deceived the public about the audience it hosted for Trump. While Faulkner described the crowd as coming from “every walk of life,” CNN subsequently reported that the network not only stocked the town hall with Trump’s supporters, the version it aired left out two key occurrences that exposed just how in-the-tank for Trump it had been.

A portion of one question “was edited by Fox News to remove her admission that she was voting for Trump,” CNN reported after comparing audio a reporter in the room recorded to the program Fox aired. “During another moment missing from Fox’s broadcast, Trump asked the crowd who they were voting for, leading to a chant of ‘Trump, Trump’ breaking out by the attendees.”

It’s easy to see why Trump might prefer such a supportive environment, even as his campaign reportedly canceled recent interviews with CBS, NBC, and CNBC.

But it is unfathomable that Fox figures would host such an event for Harris — and if they did, Trump would probably threaten that his administration would retaliate against the network.

• ### For Harris, a deceptive clip soft-pedaling Trump’s authoritarian rants

While Baier has long enjoyed a largely unearned reputation as a credible newsman, he lives in palpable fear of his viewers abandoning his network. He spent the day leading up to his Harris interview telling agitated social media followers that he wasn’t going to give her the questions and the interview wouldn’t be edited to make her look good.

His subsequent performance was what you might expect from someone worried primarily about letting down Fox’s pro-Trump audience. Harris faced a barrage of hostile questions and frequent interruptions when she tried to answer them. Baier devoted the first third of the interview to Trump’s preferred topic of immigration. He spent more time trying to grill Harris on surgeries for incarcerated trans people — a focal point of recent Trump ads — than he did abortion, which did not come up at all.

These tactics made for a combative interview, one that probably would have helped Baier with his audience without hurting his reputation.

But at one point, Baier tried to downplay Trump’s recent fascistic comments about “the enemy from within.” He asked Harris to respond to a clip from Trump’s town hall on the subject — but left out the part where he cited “the Pelosis” as an example of who he was talking about, and added, “These people, they are so sick and they are so evil.” Harris caught him red-handed.

IFrame Content

Baier’s attempted clean-up was blatant enough to draw criticism not only from his competitors at MSNBC and CNN, and from media critics like Poynter’s Tom Jones, but even from former Fox colleagues.

It is unfathomable that Fox personalities would do such a thing in an interview with Trump — and if they did, Trump would probably threaten that his administration would retaliate against the network.

• ### For Fox’s “news side,” a years-long slide

Fox’s “news side” always functioned as a cog in the right-wing media machine that laundered its talking points into the mainstream press, and its claim to independence was demolished during Trump's presidency. But at this point the network seems to have all but given up on even pretending to employ a credible news apparatus.

The last few years have seen newsroom stalwarts with decades at the network leave and call their former employer a propaganda outlet.

Fox’s decision desk was neutered after the 2020 election, with top executives overruling and then firing its leaders.

The network has shortened its “news” hours and replaced newsroom staffers with GOP partisans.

Reporters who tried to tell viewers the truth about Trump’s election fraud claims were first chastised by their bosses and then took jobs at other outlets.

What remains are people like Baier and Faulkner who are comfortable with Fox — the whole network, “news” and “opinion” side alike — operating as an extension of Trump’s will.

===

October 18, 2024, edition of Fox News' America Reports

SANDRA SMITH (HOST): It almost sounded silly at first, but this is a very real thing. People are feeling anxious, they're feeling stressed. It's difficult to have cocktail conversations or a chat by the water cooler because so many people are fearing offending someone, right Dr. Siegel?

MARC SIEGEL (GUEST): Absolutely, Sandra. Look, this is a very tense election but it turns out election anxiety has been going on for time in memorial. What's different is more iPhone, more media coverage, more social media and obviously a very contentious election. I spoke to Dr. Kevin Smith, who's the head of -- who's a professor of political science at the University of Nebraska and he said it's like fight or flight reaction, which I wrote about in one of my books, where literally you're stressed and you want to fight or you want to flee but you can't, and you can't really unplug, and you feel the stress hormone release. Very unhealthy. But what's really interesting is Dr. Smith said it's not all created equal. Democrats and people on the left are more anxious than those on the right.

...

Well, there's always exercise and there's always eating right and sleeping right. But what's fascinating here is that young people and, again, people on the left are bringing more anxiety to the table to begin with, according to Dr. Smith. And I would suspect that the answer might be alternate activities, like I said. But I'm sure you remember the movie Clockwork Orange. What about desensitization therapy, Sandra? What about putting up a picture of someone you hate and gradually getting you used to it by playing beautiful music in your ear?

===

mma

How a lie about immigrants and FEMA disaster aid spread across Fox News

Fox’s Jesse Watters and Sean Hannity spread the lie on 5 and 6 straight broadcasts, respectively. Many shows on the network joined in to push similar claims at least once since October 3.

Written by Helena Hind & Alicia Sadowski

Published 10/11/24 mma

Amid the right-wing media onslaught of hurricane-related misinformation, Fox News has latched onto the false claim that the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s relief funds for hurricane victims have been drained by aid to undocumented immigrants. In reality, the funding is separate and unrelated.

Top-rated hosts Jesse Watters and Sean Hannity led the charge in repeating the false claim; Watters’ prime-time show repeated the lie in 5 consecutive broadcasts starting October 3, and Hannity managed 6.

Even though a Fox reporter obtained evidence debunking the lie, the narrative spread to the majority of the network’s opinion and “straight news” programs.

FEMA’s disaster relief fund has nothing to do with immigrant aid — and Fox knows it

• FEMA maintains separate funds for disaster relief and aid for immigrants. As a FEMA spokesperson explained, “The Shelter and Services Program (SSP) is a completely separate, appropriated grant program that was authorized and funded by Congress and is not associated in any way with FEMA's disaster-related authorities or funding streams." Newsweek, [10/4/24]

• • Donald Trump alleged that the Biden administration “stole the FEMA money” for undocumented immigrants during an October 3 campaign rally, prompting a fact check from FEMA. An October 3 entry in FEMA’s “Hurricane Rumor Response” page explained: “FEMA’s disaster response efforts and individual assistance is funded through the Disaster Relief Fund, which is a dedicated fund for disaster efforts. Disaster Relief Fund money has not been diverted to other, non-disaster related efforts.” The Daily Beast, [10/3/24; Federal Emergency Management Agency, 10/3/24]

• • Fox News knows that FEMA disaster money is not going towards aid to undocumented immigrants. On October 8, senior congressional correspondent Chad Pergram posted on X that Fox News obtained a GOP memo saying there is “no funding connection between” the migrant shelter program and the Disaster Relief Fund. When Pergram appeared on the network after posting about the memo, he failed to discuss the part of the document that debunks the lie that the federal government spent disaster relief funds on migrant aid. . Media Matters, [10/10/24, 10/9/24, 10/9/24]

• ### Jesse Watters's Fox show repeated the false claim in 5 consecutive broadcasts

• Watters first repeated the smear on the October 3 edition of his eponymous show, saying “the Biden-Harris administration spent a billion dollars of FEMA money on illegal aliens,” without providing context about the separate funds. Watters continued, “When American citizens, the ones who were born here and pay taxes, deserve help, Biden and Harris are saying, ‘Ah, sorry, we gave it all away to the people who broke into the country.’” Fox News, *Jesse Watters Primetime*, [10/3/24]

• • The next day, after FEMA published a fact-check debunking the claim on its webpage, Watters repeated the lie: “After blowing a billion dollars on migrants and with Mayorkas saying they ran out of money, FEMA clearly has been mismanaged, either through corruption or incompetence.” Watters then called for the immediate firing of FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell. Fox News, *Jesse Watters Primetime*, [10/4/24; FEMA, 10/3/24]

Watters doubled down the next Monday, October 7: “FEMA’s broke. … Where’d the money go? More than a billion dollars went to welcoming Biden's migrants.” Watters also said that White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre “lied” after she debunked the claim on October 4. Fox News, *Jesse Watters Primetime*, [10/7/24]

• • On October 8, during a segment criticizing Vice President Kamala Harris’ approach to Hurricane Milton relief, Watters’ guest Stephen Miller accused Harris of “divert[ing] all the FEMA funds to illegal aliens.” Miller ranted, “Now FEMA is broke, they can't help Americans. Why? Because Kamala cares about illegals more.” Fox News, *Jesse Watters Primetime*, [10/8/24]

* As Hurricane Milton made landfall on October 9, Watters doubled down again: “Mayorkas said FEMA was going to run out of money for hurricane season. And FEMA admitted they wasted a billion on migrants. Now, I'm not great at math… but if you spend too much money on one thing and don't have enough money for another thing, that means you messed up.” Fox News, *Jesse Watters Primetime*, [10/9/24]

* ### Sean Hannity repeated the lie in 6 consecutive broadcasts of his Fox News show

• Hannity began repeating the lie on his prime-time show on October 3, alleging the Biden administration “took over $1 billion of FEMA funds supposed to be available for national emergencies to help you, the American people, … and they spent all of that money on their 11.5 million unvetted illegal immigrants from over 180 other countries.” Hannity falsely claimed disaster money was used for “free food, housing, health care, education, sex change surgeries, debit cards, four-star hotels for illegal immigrants.” Fox News, *Hannity*, [10/3/24]

• • The next day, Hannity lamented that FEMA is “taking money for Americans and giving it to their illegal immigrants that they are obsessed with.” He added, “It is unconscionable. It is soulless,” and maintained that FEMA “should be focused on emergency management, not illegal immigration.” Fox News, *Hannity*, [10/4/24]

• • The following Monday, October 7, Hannity persisted with the smear, saying that FEMA is “bankrupt” because “over a billion dollars went to Harris-Biden unvetted illegal immigrants.” Fox News, *Hannity*, [10/7/24]

• • On October 8, Hannity demanded that the Biden administration “not steal the money from FEMA and give it to your unvetted illegal immigrants from 180 countries, because their illegal immigrants seem to be prioritized that are way more important than the American people.” Fox News, *Hannity*, [10/8/24]

• • On October 9, Hannity complained that “the agency distributed more than a billion dollars to house and feed Harris and Biden unvetted illegal immigrants.” “Secretary of Homeland Security Mayorkas said, ‘Yeah, FEMA is apparently in shambles financially and we probably don't have enough money for hurricane season,’” Hannity ranted. “Then, we discovered on FEMA’s own website that the agency distributed more than a billion dollars to house and feed Harris and Biden unvetted illegal immigrants.” Fox News, *Hannity*, [10/9/24]

• • On October 10, Hannity continued to claim that at FEMA, “over a billion dollars was diverted to help their unvetted illegal immigrants.” Fox News, *Hannity*, [10/10/24]

• ### After Watters and Hannity seeded the lie, the narrative then spread onto Fox’s opinion programming

• On Fox & Friends First, former NFL player and conservative activist Jack Brewer cited “FEMA money going to illegal immigrants” as a reason that the Biden-Harris administration has to change the “way that we deal with natural disasters.” Fox News, *Fox & Friends First*, [10/8/24]

• • While discussing Hurricane Helene relief, Fox & Friends host Steve Doocy attacked Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas for allegedly having “millions and millions and millions of dollars” and choosing to spend the money not on Americans, but on “processing people who are in this country illegally.” Co-host Ainsley Earhardt responded that the money should instead “go toward these American families that have lost everything.” Doocy suggested the Biden administration should remedy the budget crisis by announcing a “pause on all the people coming into the country illegally” and should instead “reprogram that money to take care of the people here in the United States.” Fox News, *Fox & Friends*, [10/3/24]

Outnumbered* co-host Kayleigh McEnany falsely claimed that the “reason why” FEMA was facing a budget shortfall was because the agency spent “almost a billion dollars” on “illegal immigrants in migrant shelters.” Emily Compagno reiterated the sentiment by alleging that the “federal government wasted the taxpayer money that these Americans invested” and that Americans were entitled to the money over undocumented immigrants. “FEMA's funds are their funds that they paid into, that they are now being withheld from to pay for illegal migrants,” she complained. Fox News, *Outnumbered*, [10/4/24]

• • The Five co-host Greg Gutfeld used a false analogy to compare FEMA funding to a bank account to allege aid to undocumented immigrants was taken at the expense of disaster relief aid: “It’s all the same thing. So, if you've got to spend money here, it is going to be taken away from here.” He asked, “Why do Americans have to wait in line for the stuff they pay for?” Fox News, *The Five*, [10/9/24]

* Laura Ingraham stated that “Democrats are prioritizing the needs of noncitizens … ahead of the people that our leaders are supposed to be serving.” Ingraham called the allocation of money for undocumented immigrant aid “disgraceful” and claimed it resulted in Americans facing inflation and debt to “give gobs of money to liberal special interests.” Fox News, *The Ingraham Angle*, [10/3/24]

• • Repeat Gutfeld! guest and antisemitic right-wing media personality Bryan Sharpe complained The New York Times was not addressing “FEMA not having money because they spent it on illegal migrants” Fox News, *Gutfeld!*, [10/8/24; Media Matters, 9/9/22, 10/3/23]

• ### Some of the network’s “straight news” programs spread the narrative or failed to contextualize FEMA appropriations for undocumented aid

• Fox anchor Dana Perino highlighted DHS Secretary Mayorkas’ “warning” that “FEMA does not have the funds to make it through hurricane season” despite “Mayorkas' DHS having $640 million — now that’s designated money — to help communities support illegal migrants.” Fox correspondent Chad Pergram took the blame off Congress: “Congress made sure FEMA had more than $20 billion in last week's emergency spending bill ahead of the storm.” Fox News, *America’s Newsroom*, [10/3/24]

• • Even though the Shelter and Services Program is distinct from FEMA’s disaster response, Fox News contributor Kellyanne Conway said that “they want us to believe that that’s not so and those funds wouldn't be fungible anyway.” Fox News, *The Faulkner Focus*, [10/9/24; Media Matters, 10/9/24]

Fox anchor John Roberts}: asked why the federal government did not use the $66 billion FEMA spent “taking care of the illegal immigration problem” to pay for hurricane relief. Fox News, *America Reports*, [10/3/24]|

• • Former Vivek Ramaswamy communications director Tricia McLaughlin claimed, “We know that $670 million have gone to efforts under FEMA's umbrella to house migrants.” She asked, “Why is the focus on noncitizens in this country and not on the recovery efforts for Americans?” Fox News, *Fox News @ Night*, [10/9/24]

===

thom 3

an 9 24 no lnx

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.

straight news

after debunk?

Fox anchor Bill Hemmer falsely stated that Kamala Harris said she met with Vladimir Putin

08/23/24 mma

===

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mma

Fox News misinterprets results of study to blame millions of “excess deaths” on the COVID-19 vaccine

WRITTEN BY HELENA HIND

:{PUBLISHED:{ 06/13/24 }:

A segment from one of Fox News’ daytime “straight news” programs cited a study to claim that the COVID-19 vaccine caused millions of “excess deaths” in the U.S. The journal that published the study had clarified nearly a week earlier that this interpretation was false.

The study, published June 3, 2024, in the British Medical Journal, found that excess mortality rates in Western nations were high from 2020 to 2022 “despite the implementation of containment measures and COVID-19 vaccines.” The researchers also encouraged governments to examine the underlying causes of excess mortality to inform public health policy.

During the June 12 edition of America Reports, Fox anchor John Roberts characterized the findings differently: “A new study suggests COVID vaccines could be at least partially to blame for more than three million excess deaths in the United States and other countries from 2020 to 2022.”

:{Video

CitationFrom the June 12, 2024, edition of Fox News' America Reports

In the report, chief Washington correspondent Mike Emanuel used the study to bolster a series of soundbites from Fox News’ cadre of misinformation-pushing doctors who blamed the excess deaths on the vaccines and lockdowns. “Yet,” Emanuel noted, “the overwhelming message from public health officials was ‘you must get the shot.’"

Last week, multiple other right-wing media outlets (and at least one conservative British outlet) repeated the false narrative blaming the vaccine for excess deaths, prompting the British Medical Journal to issue a statement correcting the misinterpretation of the study’s findings.

Full statement:

Various news outlets have claimed that this research implies a direct causal link between COVID-19 vaccination and mortality. This study does not establish any such link. The researchers looked only at trends in excess mortality over time, not its causes. While the researchers recognise that side effects are reported after vaccination, the research does not support the claim that vaccines are a major contributory factor to excess deaths since the start of the pandemic. Vaccines have, in fact, been instrumental in reducing the severe illness and death associated with COVID-19 infection.

The message of the research is that understanding overall excess mortality since the COVID-19 pandemic is crucial for future health policy, but that identifying specific causes is complex due to varying national data quality and reporting methods.

“Various news outlets have claimed that this research implies a direct causal link between COVID-19 vaccination and mortality. This study does not establish any such link.” The statement continued, “Vaccines have, in fact, been instrumental in reducing the severe illness and death associated with COVID-19 infection.”

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mma 3 24

Fox News wants its viewers to think that one of yesterday’s witnesses at the House GOP’s impeachment hearing is untrustworthy.

But the network isn’t concerned about the one who testified from federal prison after a fraud conviction, or the one who admits to having a grievance with Hunter Biden.

No, the guy Fox wants viewers to disbelieve is the witness who told the committee that he played a key role in concocting the anti-Biden Ukrainian disinformation campaign that played out on Fox’s airwaves.

Fox has long known Lev Parnas lacked credibility, thanks to research by its own staff. But now it’s finally useful to the network’s narratives to say so.

Back in 2019, Parnas was part of a Rudy Giuliani-driven campaign to smear Joe Biden and his son Hunter as corrupt because of actions and positions the senior Biden took regarding Ukraine when he was vice president. Giuliani worked with a motley crew of Fox News staples such as conservative writer John Solomon and Republican attorneys Joe DiGenova and Victoria Toensing to launder Russian-linked disinformation into the right-wing media ecosystem. The goal was to lay the groundwork for attacking then-President Donald Trump’s most likely opponent in the 2020 presidential election.

Parnas, along with fellow Soviet-born con man Igor Fruman, worked closely with Giuliani to feed him an endless supply of lies about Joe Biden and his supposed corruption. This effort ultimately got Trump impeached for attempting to blackmail Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to announce an investigation into Biden, but it’s nonetheless most familiar now for serving as the incredibly shaky foundation of the right’s current efforts to impeach Biden.

Media Matters extensively documented the key role Fox News played in laundering this smear campaign into the media.

Giuliani’s strategy hinged on the network’s active participation. Working with con men like Parnas and other Trump cronies, he pursued an “investigation” into Ukraine that he claimed showed both Ukrainian collusion with Democrats in 2016 and evidence that Biden acted corruptly in Ukraine to benefit his son. He provided his “report” to allies in Congress to exploit while also feeding the story to conservative columnist John Solomon, who at the time worked at The Hill and dutifully reported out Giuliani’s claims in dozens of columns. During that same time period, Solomon appeared on Fox News or Fox Business at least 72 times. Fifty-one of those appearances were on Hannity alone, with host Sean Hannity weaving Solomon’s reporting into his ever-evolving conspiracy theories that “deep state” elements were out to get Trump.

Despite what played on the network’s airwaves, behind the scenes Fox News' researchers warned that Parnas and his allies’ information was not reliable. As The Daily Beast reported, “Fox News’ own research team has warned colleagues not to trust some of the network’s top commentators’ claims about Ukraine.”

According to The Daily Beast, the 162-page brief compiled by researchers for what was then known as Fox’s Brain Room “openly” questioned “Fox News contributor John Solomon’s credibility, accusing him of playing an ‘indispensable role’ in a Ukrainian ‘disinformation campaign.’”

The document also specifically called into question Parnas’ credibility, noting: “Reading the timeline in its entirety—not a small task—makes clear the extensive role played by Rudy Giuliani and his associates, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, in spreading disinformation.”

Indeed, when Parnas was arrested for allegedly making illegal campaign donations to Republican candidates and committees, he was at the airport, preparing to leave the country in order to facilitate an interview with disgraced Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin for none other than Sean Hannity.

Shortly after his arrest, Parnas flipped, and he has since repeatedly sought to expose the misinformation campaign he facilitated and the key players behind it. During Trump’s 2019 impeachment trial, Parnasprovided evidence about the pressure Trump allies were placing on Ukrainian officials to provide information about Biden.

With Parnas’ change in position, Fox suddenly became much more publicly skeptical of the claims he was making. And yesterday, when he testified in the latest of the House Republicans’ doomed efforts to invent a reason to impeach Joe Biden, he specifically called out Fox’s tendency to run with the dubious, unverifiable claims he had given to John Solomon:

REP. JAMIE RASKIN (D-MD): At what point did the campaign to dig up dirt on Biden become a campaign to spread disinformation and lies about Biden?

LEV PARNAS: At some point when we hit a few brick walls, all of a sudden, then I saw the shift between the BLT group, which included John Solomon, the media personality, and Rudy Giuliani and other Trump lawyers, to start trying to push narratives that were — we had no, they were not validated. We had no way to validate them. Basically, a letter would come over from somebody in Ukraine, I'd hand it over to John Solomon. Next thing you knew he was on Fox TV two hours later with Sean Hannity.

Predictably, Fox has sought to discredit Parnas’ testimony by attacking his credibility.

Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade complained that Parnas “went to jail for lying and is talking about Ukraine” (Parnas was convicted of wire fraud and campaign finance violations, not anything related to his work with Giuliani) and said his testimony was nothing but a “head fake” on the part of the Democrats who invited him to testify.

So-called “straight news” anchor John Roberts said of Parnas: “The credibility of a witness clearly depends on which side of the political aisle you sit, because the Democrats were happy to have Lev Parnas testify there in person. He’s been in jail for wire fraud, among other things, but Jason Galanis, who’s currently in jail, oh, he had no credibility. So, I mean, pick and choose your villains here, right?”

It's convenient how Fox suddenly develops journalistic standards when the claims Parnas is making no longer fit the network’s anti-Biden narratives.

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mma 1 24

in January 5, Fox host Jesse Watters attacked AP News’ climate coverage, seemingly in response to a story dispelling offshore wind misinformation. The segment repeated the false claim — debunked by several fact checks from a variety of sources — that offshore wind development is killing whales.

The same false claim appeared on Fox News at least as early as December 2022 and proliferated on the network throughout 2023, with at least 54 segments pushing the misinformation seemingly intended to hurt support for offshore wind.

In early 2023, Fox News helped propel the false narrative into a right-wing media story which has persisted even though no evidence supports the link between the slew of whale deaths along the East Coast and offshore wind development.

An analysis by Media Matters found that:

• Fox News aired at least 54 segments suggesting that offshore wind development is causing whale deaths. At least 15 programs on the network have reported on the false link between offshore wind and whale deaths, including the network’s so-called straight news program Special Report With Bret Baier.

• 12 of the 54 (22%) segments appeared on Fox & Friends (on its daily or weekend program), 11 of the 54 (20%) segments appeared on Jesse Watters Primetime, and 9 (17%) appeared on The Story with Martha MacCullum.

• 26 of 54 segments aired in the first two months of 2023. With 14 segments, coverage peaked in February 2023. At least one segment pushing the false claim appeared on Fox every month of 2023 except May and October.

A December report by the Center for American Progress illustrates how the fossil fuel industry is bankrolling offshore wind misinformation, “with money flowing through interest groups, think tanks, and astroturf groups to achieve its ultimate goal of slowing, if not stopping, the expansion of offshore wind in the United States.”

Fox News has played a key role in the proliferation of offshore wind misinformation by regularly airing false claims about the technology and providing a platform to some of the groups identified in the report, including Protect Our Coast NJ and people associated with the Texas Public Policy Foundation and Environmental Progress, whose founder and president, Michael Shellenberger, has appeared frequently on Fox News to spread offshore wind misinformation.

Methodology...

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Fox News’ Bret Baier says Republicans have created a “debacle” with speaker of the House fiasco | Media Matters for America

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recycle for cred?

fox begged trump to go on?

https://www.mediamatters.org/bret-baier/fox-news-anchors-martha-maccallum-and-bret-baier-are-major-vectors-misinformation

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mma 6 23

Fox News has responded to the indictment of former President Donald Trump for withholding classified documents with a swell of demagoguery suggesting this event signals the end of American democracy. But the network is pushing another ridiculous angle: That the indictment was timed to distract from House Republicans’ latest accusations against President Joe Biden and his son Hunter.

The conspiracy theory is obviously baseless. Special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation of Trump has been going on for months, and Fox itself reported two weeks ago that Smith was going to conclude it soon. In order to buy into Fox’s claim that the indictment is a distraction, you would have to believe that the entire process of Smith’s appointment last November and his 7 month long investigation was timed to produce an indictment in June this year, just in time to spoil yet another House Republican attempt to kick up a manufactured scandal against the Biden family.

Fox News is trying to rehash the anti-Biden smear campaign behind Trump’s first impeachment

Fox News has for weeks been hyping up efforts by congressional Republicans to accuse Biden of having received vast sums of money from Ukraine when his son Hunter was on the board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma. The accusation is a relic of the smear campaign four years ago that led to Trump’s first impeachment, when he attempted to pressure the Ukrainian government into announcing an investigation of Biden in exchange for receiving badly needed military aid to defend itself from Russia. The claims were widely debunked at the time, which did not stop the Murdoch media from ignoring facts their own news desks had reported.

In the latest chapter, members of the House Oversight Committee led by Chairman James Comer (R-KY) on Thursday looked at an FBI document called an FD-1023, containing a tip from a confidential source dating back to 2020, alleging a $5 million payment to Biden during his time as vice president.

Fox’s own reporting describes the tip as coming in June 2020, which was both in the heat of the presidential election and months after Trump’s previous efforts to pin a corruption charge on his opponent via the Ukrainian government. Even then, the source only said that another person claimed they were paying Biden, not that the source had this information directly. (Fox News is now ignoring its own reporting that “the document does not say Joe Biden received any payments,” with hosts speaking of “these $5 million payments” as if they were established facts.)

Trump’s former Attorney General Bill Barr told The Federalist that he sent the information to the U.S. Attorney’s office in Delaware. This would mean the information has been in the possession of the Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney for Delaware, David C. Weiss, whom Biden has not replaced during his term. So, either this Trump-appointed U.S. attorney deemed the tip to not be credible, or Weiss has had the information for up to three years and it could form some component of a probe of Hunter Biden. But either way, House Republicans and right-wing media would have no cause to complain of obstruction by the Biden administration.

NBC News reported that a senior law enforcement official said the FBI and a Trump-appointed U.S. attorney had reviewed the bribery claim in 2020 and determined that it was not substantiated. But on Thursday, House Republicans trumpeted the document as absolute proof that Biden was “100% guilty.”

Biden himself jokingly responded to a reporter Thursday, “Where’s the money?” And indeed, such a scheme would also have to involve some incredible degree of money laundering to hide the funds from his publicly available financial disclosures and decades’ worth of tax returns.

Fox News hosts and “straight news” anchors spread the conspiracy theory

• Just as the story broke Thursday night, Fox host Jesse Watters asked, “What does this tell you on the same day we’re learning that the Bidens took $10 million in bribes, supposedly, from Ukraine?” Fox contributor Charlie Hurt:{ responded that Biden had “been asked about it for the first time. So you see this drop on the exact same day. I think that the two are very related.” Fox News, :(style="background-color:#ffffffff"):}:*Jesse Watters Primetime*:{, :(style="background-color:#ffffffff"):}:[6/8/23:{]}:
• During her guest-hosting spot in the 8 p.m. hour, Fox News anchor Harris Faulkner alleged: “It’s remarkable that just hours after Republicans made this finding, Biden’s own Justice Department would indict Biden’s leading opponent in 2024. It’s unprecedented.” Fox News, *Fox News Tonight*, [6/8/23]
• The theory then got tons of airtime on The Ingraham Angle. New York Post columnist Miranda Devine claimed: “Well, look, Merrick Garland, the attorney general, controls the timing of this and the timing is really outrageous, because it comes right as the FBI has finally been forced by James Comer in the House Oversight Committee to hand over this evidence of Joe Biden receiving a $5 million bribe from Ukraine when he was vice president. This is devastating to the president. It should be devastating. But, of course, they've just brought out this shiny object to make all of the media look over there.” Fox News, *The Ingraham Angle*, [6/8/23]
• Fox News contributor Jason Chaffetz chimed in: “I agree with Miranda. I think the timing is such that here James Comer and all the House Republicans and Democrats can go see what’s going on with the allegation from a credible source about Joe Biden. They just happened, hours later, to drop this indictment on President Trump. Do you think that’s a coincidence?” Fox News, *The Ingraham Angle*, [6/8/23]
• Host Laura Ingraham kicked off an interview with far-right Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) by offering this sardonic remark: “Congresswoman, so, the reporting would be then, if this were true, that the Burisma scheme is confirmed, then Trump is indicted. I’m sure it’s just a coincidence. This all just happened. It’s sheer coinciden:{ce.” Fox News, :(style="background-color:#ffffffff"):}:*The Ingraham Angle*:{, :(style="background-color:#ffffffff"):}:[6/8/23:{]}:
• The conspiracy theories continued into the morning, with former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi :{claiming that the government was “going after Donald Trump, and I don't think it's a coincidence now because of the 1023 that’s out.” (In the same interview, Bondi claimed that the government’s prosecution of Trump was taking resources away from investigating child sex-trafficking.) Fox News, :(style="background-color:#ffffffff"):}:*Fox & Friends*:{, :(style="background-color:#ffffffff"):}:[6/9/23:{]}:
• Later in the program, Fox & Friends co-host Ainsley Earhart also asked then-Trump attorney Jim Trusty: “It happened to be on the exact same day that House Oversight Committee got to look at that 1023 form that basically alleges — it’s being told that that’s proof that there was an exchange of $5 million from this oil company in Ukraine in exchange for policy when Joe Biden was vice president. Is that coincidence that this happened on the same day?” (It was announced later Friday that Trusty resigned as Trump’s attorney.) Fox News, *Fox & Friends*, [6/9/23]
• During the network’s purported “straight news” programming, Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) claimed, “With the indictment last night that came down on Donald Trump on the day that we looked at evidence of corruption, you know, you’re watching the executive branch trying to take out political enemies because of the accusations against the Biden family.” America’s Newsroom co-anchor Bill Hemmer did not challenge Mace or ask her any further questions on this point:{. Fox News, :(style="background-color:#ffffffff"):}:*America’s Newsroom*:{, :(style="background-color:#ffffffff"):}:[6/9/23:{]}:

Fox’s histrionics are ironic on multiple levels, considering the propaganda network previously championed the cause of locking up the right’s political enemies, argued for a president’s supposed authority to directly order the investigation of a political opponent, and served a major public role in Trump’s effort to subvert American democracy following his defeat in the 2020 presidential election.

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mma 5 23

on May 5, The Daily Beast reported on texts between Fox News anchor Bret Baier and the recently fired former face of the network, Tucker Carlson. The texts highlight Baier’s fixation on ratings above honest reporting and illustrate, yet again, that Fox News is a toxic brand for advertisers.

Baier is a supposed “straight news” anchor who is sometimes misleadingly held up as a more earnest, fact-based reporter as compared to his opinion-side counterparts despite his own history of shoddy, partisan hackery. In the texts, Carlson expressed concern over Fox News’ decision to call the 2020 presidential race in Arizona — an accurate call that was controversial only among right-wing election deniers — saying that they “could really fuck up a lot of what we’ve built” and Baier replied, “I totally agree.”

Carlson reached out to Baier to complain that he felt the network wasn’t taking viewer concerns about the call “seriously enough” and said they need to “reassure our core audience. They’re our whole business model.” Baier affirmed Carlson’s concerns and said that he was “pushing for answers” and that he thought “they will slow walk” calling Nevada’s race. Baier and Carlson strategized options for alleviating audience concerns as Baier agreed with Tucker’s claim that he needs “to do whatever I can to keep our numbers up and our viewers happy.” Baier also noted that he was “taking major incoming” regarding the decision.

As The Daily Beast reported, the texts illustrate that while Baier tends to represent the supposedly serious “straight news” side of Fox News, network figures will prioritize ratings over fact-checking no matter when their shows air:

The texts between Carlson and Baier stand in contrast to the respective reputations they cultivated at the network—with the former as the network’s leading right-wing firebrand seemingly at odds with the “hard news” side anchored by the latter.

And though Baier is often viewed as a consummate newsman, his texts here suggest a commitment to preserving a highly partisan, fact-averse audience over responsible newsgathering.

Fox News has long maintained that there is a difference between its “straight news” reporters like Baier and its “opinion side” hosts like Carlson, and the network has leaned on this excuse to maintain credibility with advertisers. Media Matters has long reported on the myth of Fox’s supposed straight news side, and the texts between Baier and Carlson only further illustrate that the entire network has a toxic fixation on prioritizing partisan, damaging lies over legitimate reporting. 

related

Two days after the 2020 election, Fox News chief political anchor Bret Baier privately acknowledged, “There is NO evidence of fraud. None.”

02/16/23

Leading advertising executive: Fox News presents “a moral hazard for advertisers”

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Fox's pitch to advertisers featured network executives and personalities complicit in its 2020 election lies

03/22/23

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mma 4 23

no lnx

fox “straight news” anchor spreads anti-abortion misinformation that FDA-approved medication, mifepristone was rushed to approval and is dangerous

WRITTEN BY MEDIA MATTERS STAFF

PUBLISHED 04/23/23 1:57 PM EDT

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COMMENT

As Maggie Koerth and Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux wrote for 538:

Despite the name, the accelerated approval process was used to subject mifepristone to heavier regulation and more monitoring after it was approved. It certainly did not speed up approval. From start to finish, approving mifepristone took 54 months. The average length of the process for all other drugs approved in 2000 was 15.6 months.

Video

CitationFrom the April 23, 2023, edition of Fox News' Fox News Sunday

SHANNON BREAM (FOX NEWS SUNDAY ANCHOR): Quickly, I want to ask you about the Supreme Court leaving mifepristone, the abortion pill, on the market while the legal fight about it plays out. I want to read you something from apro-life OB-GYN who wrote about this battle and the fact that she says the FDA has ignored safety issues with the pill. She says this: "It fast-tracked the abortion pill using its accelerated drug approval authority, ludicrously designating pregnancy as a quote 'serious or life-threatening illness.'" She says "as many as 7% of women that use abortion pills early in pregnancy need follow-up surgery, up to 15% will hemorrhage and 2% will have an infection." So, why shouldn't that not be part of the conversation, legal and otherwise? Shouldn't the FDA's number one priority be patient safety?

REP. DEBBIE DINGELL (D-MI): The number one priority of the FDA needs to be about patient safety. I don't think the Supreme Court — and I think they made that clear this week — you had conservative justices joining with others that sent it back to the courts and have said let the FDA do their job. You know, I think a lot of people don't understand what they wanted to do was ban a drug that also is used in Cushing's syndrome. I was a woman that suffered from endometriosis and was trying to get pregnant. It helps fibroid urine endometriosis.

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mma 3 23

Fox News anchors Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum argued in the weeks following the 2020 presidential election that the network should consider a “layer” beyond “statistics and numbers” when projecting the election results, and instead take into account how its conservative audience would react to the network’s calls.

The New York Times reviewed a recording of a Zoom meeting held on November 16, 2020, over a week after the network’s decision desk had projected Joe Biden as the winner of the 2020 presidential election. The article details discussions between Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott and the two purported straight news anchors on the continued political fallout over the network’s correct projection on election night that Joe Biden had won the swing state of Arizona. (Fox News later fired two key news executives who had presided over the call, which was factually correct and never reversed by any real-life developments.)

Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum, the two main anchors, suggested it was not enough to call a state based on numerical calculations, the standard by which networks have made such determinations for generations, but that viewer reaction should be considered. “In a Trump environment,” Ms. MacCallum said, “the game is just very, very different.”

…

Ms. Scott invited Mr. Baier and Ms. MacCallum, “the face” of the network, as she called them, to describe the heat they were taking, according to the recording reviewed by The Times.

“We are still getting bombarded,” Mr. Baier said. “It became really hurtful.” He said projections were not enough to call a state when it would be so sensitive. “I know the statistics and the numbers, but there has to be, like, this other layer” so they could “think beyond, about the.”

Ms. MacCallum agreed: “There’s just obviously been a tremendous amount of backlash, which is, I think, more than any of us anticipated. And so there’s that layer between statistics and news judgment about timing that I think is a factor.” For “a loud faction of our viewership,” she said, the call was a blow.

Neither she nor Mr. Baier explained exactly what they meant by another “layer.” A person who was in the meeting and spoke on condition of anonymity to describe internal discussions said on Saturday that Mr. Baier had been talking about process because he was upset the Decision Desk had made the Arizona call without letting the anchors know first.

New York Times chief White House correspondent Peter Baker and The New Yorker staff writer Susan Glasser reported last year in their book The Divider that Baier had attempted to convince the network to retract its call of Arizona for Biden and to “put it back” as Trump winning, even though Trump 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.

By the time of the Zoom meeting on November 16, there could not have been any remaining doubt over the fundamental accuracy of the Arizona call. Baier and MacCallum, however, were still arguing that it had been a political mistake for the network to be first on the air with this truthful story.

This newest reporting further reveals the extent to which Fox does not have a “straight news” side, but instead is just another cog in a right-wing propaganda machine. This story must also be considered in the context of revelations from Dominion Voting Systems’ ongoing defamation lawsuit against Fox, which reveals that Fox Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch and other key executives knew that the Trump campaign’s conspiracy theories about massive electoral fraud were indeed false, but that the network continued to push them in the pursuit of profit.

In the two-week period after the Fox News decision desk had declared Joe Biden the president-elect, the network’s coverage undermined that projection by questioning the results of the election or pushing conspiracy theories at least 774 times.

https://www.mediamatters.org/cnn/cnns-conservative-contributors-still-pushing-false-notion-fox-has-separate-straight-news-and

The latest filing in Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation lawsuit against Fox News further demonstrates that there is no difference between the network’s purported “straight news” and opinion divisions. However, during CNN’s coverage of the filing, conservative commentators, includingDavid Urban,Alyssa Farah Griffin, and Jonah Goldberg, continued to claim otherwise — contradicting CNN’s own journalists. 

On February 27, the latest filing in Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation lawsuit was released to the public and revealed that Rupert Murdoch, the chairman of Fox News’ parent company Fox Corp., and other executives knew that claims about Dominion and election fraud during the 2020 presidential election were false, but allowed hosts and guests to continue to push them.

The filing also included new details about how decisions around reporting were made to appease the network's pro-Trump viewers, rather than on the basis of facts. In one instance, the filing revealed that Murdoch instructed Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott to fire then-Managing Editor Bill Sammon, who oversaw the network’s call of Arizona for now-President Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election and drew ire from former President Donald Trump, his supporters, and hosts such as Tucker Carlson. The filing also showed that Fox Corp. CEO Lachlan Murdoch complained that coverage of a Trump rally was too critical, telling Scott, “News guys have to be careful how they cover this rally. So far some of the side comments are slightly anti, and they shouldn’t be. … The narrative should be this is a huge celebration of the president.”

Since the release of the filing, which clearly laid out how Fox personalities on both the “straight news’ and opinion sides were influenced to deprioritize factual information, some mainstream media figures, including a CNN host and some reporters, acknowledged that Fox News does not truly have separate “straight news” and “opinion” divisions. Yet, some of CNN’s paid contributors, who have ties to the Trump administration, Fox News, or conservative circles, have continued to push the fiction that Fox distinguishes between real reporting and opinion.

CNN pundits are still pushing Fox talking points, saying that there is a distinction between “straight news” and opinion at the network 

Conservative CNN contributors Urban, Griffin, and Goldberg continued to defend Fox’s reputation as a news outlet during CNN’s coverage of the latest filing.

• Urban said that there’s a difference between “hard news and entertainment” on Fox, calling shows like Hannity or Tucker Carlson Today “the news equivalent of the WWE.” Urban has been a paid contributor at CNN for years, and Media Matters has previously highlighted numerous ethical problems with the arrangement, as the network has repeatedly failed to disclose Urban’s lobbying efforts and role in the Trump campaign. Most recently, Urban participated in discussions about the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, during which the network failed to disclose that Urban lobbied for the train operator Norfolk Southern. On the February 27 edition of CNN's The Lead with Jake Tapper, Urban pushed the false notion that Fox has separate news and opinion divisions.
• [ vid]
• jaKE TAPPER (HOST): And David, Fox viewers heard these false claims night after night after night, and Murdoch apparently, according to Oliver, said it was damaging. What was it damaging though?

DAVID URBAN (CNN CONTRIBUTOR): You know what it was damaging? Their brand. Their price. How much the company — how much Fox was valued at, right? That’s what it was damaging. They weren't concerned about damaging the body republic. They were concerned about damaging corporate profits and that's what I think is the most troubling. And what Fox viewers, and what people don't understand is there's a difference between hard news and the entertainment it is, you know, 7 p.m. on, on Fox News, right. Hannity, Tucker, and those shows, which are purely — they’re the news equivalent of the WWE.

• Griffin placed blame on Trump for Fox News hosts spreading conspiracy theories in hopes of retaining their viewership, while claiming that “there’s a lot of really good journalists at Fox, dayside programming I don’t have really any major problems with.” CNN formally hired Griffin in December 2021, despite her lengthy history of lies and distortions, including during her tenure as a spokesperson for the Trump administration. In December 2020, Griffin had appeared on Fox News and claimed there had been voter fraud in the election[ vid]

aLYSSA FARAH GRIFFIN (CNN CONTRIBUTOR): Donald Trump is a big part of this by the way, because he started to create the narrative after he spread the election lies that, you know, Newsmax is where we should go, One America News Network is where true believers are going. So there was a sense of fear within Fox that they were going to lose market share to the outlets. The reality is that they never even picked up enough that it in a major way affected the very high viewership that Fox News had. But you can just see sort of the fear he instilled in the big-time hosts, the prime-time hosts. And I just want to say, like there’s a lot of really good journalists at Fox. Dayside programming I don't have really any major problems with. But prime-time is where they make their money and it has descended into conspiracy-mongering. It is basically anything to get people to tune in and drive viewership and not risk losing to the fringier outlets.

• Goldberg placed blame on Fox CEO Suzanne Scott for her “lack of leadership,” claiming that, when it comes to Fox’s role in the lawsuit, “the opinion side basically became the dog wagging the tail instead of the other way around, and the news side basically became sort of this cleanup crew.”Goldberg is a former Fox News contributor and founding editor for conservative magazine National Review, who now simultaneously works as a CNN contributor and editor-in-chief of right-wing online magazine The Dispatch[ vid]
• jONAH GOLDBERG (CNN CONTRIBUTOR): I know too many people who work in the Fox News division to this day who are serious, honest, and sincere journalists trying to do the job right. There are too many people, including who work at CNN, who got their starts or worked at Fox for a while and have warm things to say about it, to just say that it was always a political operation. I think the problem that happened at Fox was that the opinion side was allowed to run free. Everyone likes to think that this was some grand policy, the transformation of Fox, set from above. It was really the lack of leadership under Suzanne Scott, the CEO, to reign in, curtail, discipline the prime-time people in any way to the point where the opinion side basically became the dog wagging the tail instead of the other way around. And the news side just became sort of this cleanup crew. Even in the Dominion filings, the news division comes out OK in this. Bret Baier and Special Report fact-checked this stuff.

CNN’s own journalists point out that there is little difference between Fox’s opinion and news branches 

Others at CNN, such as host John King and reporters Oliver Darcy and Phil Mattingly, have emphasized that the most recent Dominion filing shows Fox’s lack of news credibility because “news networks are supposed to inform viewers what's the truth.”

• CNN senior media reporter Oliver Darcy has repeatedly pointed out the lack of distinction between opinion and news at Fox.On Monday, he said, “I think this really actually exposes the fact that Fox is not at its core a news network. News networks -- they deliver the truth as they know it to viewers. They do the best job to attain the truth and sometimes it's not perfect but that's what they do.” CNN, *Anderson Cooper 360*, [2/27/23]
• When asked if he would call Fox News a “news organization” on Tuesday’s edition of CNN’s This Morning, Darcy said: “No, and that’s because news networks are supposed to inform viewers with the truth. In this case we know that Fox News knew the truth and refused to not only tell their viewers but they actually fed them lies to keep their audience because of the financial incentive. That's not what news networks do. That's what maybe, you know, propaganda outlets might do, but it's certainly not what a news network would do.” CNN, *This Morning*, [2/28/23]
• Darcy also wrote an analysis on some of the biggest revelations from Dominion’s legal filing, saying that Fox “continues to be exposed for the dishonest organization that it is – this time, with the help of its billionaire owner.”He later continued, “In totality, the documents continue to underscore that at its core, Fox News is not a news network. News networks work hard to deliver the truth to their viewers. … The documents lay bare that the channel’s business model is not based on informing its audience, but rather on feeding them content — even dangerous conspiracy theories — that keeps viewers happy and watching.” CNN, [2/28/23]
• Darcy said that “the perception that they are a news company is crumbling.” According to Darcy, “To preserve these business relationships they have to at least, have some reputation they're a legitimate news company. And I have been saying obviously that that's not the case. But the perception that they are a news company is crumbling, and this could result in damage to the actual Fox Corp. brand and really result in problems for shareholders.” CNN, *This Morning*, [3/1/23]
• On Inside Politics with John King, King claimed that “Fox is not about news, it's about opinion.” King then played clips of Fox hosts airing claims about voter fraud in the 2020 election and said, “It was not just once, it was not twice. It was this over and over and over again.” CNN, :{Inside Politics with John King:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:, [2/28/23]
• In response to King, CNN reporter Phil Mattingly said, “These filings are laying bare the fallacy of the idea that there is a separation between opinion and editorial.” CNN, :{Inside Politics with John King:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:, [2/28/23]

THE END OF?

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.

not 1st fox (strait) brk w/ trump jan 6 hearings?

https://www.alternet.org/2022/07/bret-baier-donald-trump-horrific/

While CNN and MSNBC have been offering in-depth, comprehensive coverage of the bipartisan January 6 select committee’s series of hearings, many of the far-right opinion hosts at Fox News and Fox Business have either ignored the hearings or outright attacked them. But on Sunday, July 24, Fox News’ Bret Baier spoke candidly about the hearing that had been held during prime-time viewing hours on Thursday, July 21 — and acknowledged that the evidence presented made former President Donald Trump “look horrific.”

That night, members of the select committee took a close look at Trump’s actions when the U.S. Capitol Building was being attacked on January 6, 2021. The participants during the hearing included its chairman, Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, and the co-chair, Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, as well as Rep. Elaine Luria of Virginia and Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois. Although most members of the committee are Democrats, Cheney and Kinzinger are conservative Republicans chosen by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Baier, discussing the 187-minute period the committee examined on July 21, told his colleagues, “Laying out all these 187 minutes makes him look horrific, it really does…. To hear it and see it in that chronological order can be very powerful.”

READ MORE: Eighth January 6th hearing provided the 'starkest illustration' yet against Donald Trump: journalists

The 51-year-old Baier, who has been with Fox News since the late 1990s, found the July 21 testimony of former Deputy National Security Advisor Matthew Pottinger and former Deputy White House Press Secretary Sarah Matthews especially compelling.

"All of these people who have been testifying at one point or another wanted Trump to win," Baier noted. “They served under his leadership. They wanted him to be a success.”

Business Insider’s Mia Jankowicz, reporting on Baier’s comments, stressed that others at Fox News have a very different view of the hearings — one that is much more negative.

“Baier's criticisms of Trump on the Rupert Murdoch-owned network were not unexpected, despite Fox's strongly conservative leanings,” Jankowicz explains. “But they by no means reflect the network's mainstream view. Fox News' most watched opinion host, Tucker Carlson, invited the Trump strategist Steve Bannon onto his show Friday just hours after Bannon had been found guilty of contempt of Congress for not complying with a subpoena by the House select committee. Bannon called for a ‘real’ hearing, baselessly saying the bipartisan committee was presenting ‘lies and misrepresentations.’”

READ MORE: Meadows allegedly behind possible attempt at witness intimidation of Cassidy Hutchinson: reports

1st break from big lie?!

https://www.alternet.org/2022/06/fox-news-2657552945/

mccallum martha day 4 jan 6 hearing rusty bowers

stunning lack of evid big lie

fox called az early? brain room?

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/humiliation-bret-baier-and-fox-news-side

thursday was a night of humiliation for Bret Baier and his “news side” colleagues. It was also a perfect encapsulation of the total lack of respect the Fox brass has for its “news” division, whose staff have endured waves of layoffs, reduced hours of programming, and constant signals from network leaders that they are imminently replaceable cogs with no influence compared to Fox’s right-wing propagandists. Fox is Tucker Carlson’s network, and now everyone at the network knows it.

Baier, per the bio on Fox News’ website, is his network’s “chief political anchor.” But at 8 p.m. ET on Thursday night, Baier wasn’t on Fox preempting its regular programming to introduce coverage of the first hearing of the House select committee investigating the January 6 insurrection, unlike his theoretical peers with similarly lofty titles. Instead, he and fellow anchor Martha MacCallum had been relegated to Fox Business, its lightly watched sister channel.

Meanwhile, Carlson was airing his Fox show in its usual prime-time timeslot. “This is the only hour on an American news channel that will not be carrying their propaganda live,” he said in an opening monologue. “They are lying and we are not going to help them do it. What we will do instead is try to tell you the truth.”

Carlson was using the royal “we,” laying down the network’s editorial line that its own right-wing agitprop was of greater value than honest coverage of the congressional investigation into the sacking of the U.S. Capitol by violent Trumpists bent on suborning the 2020 presidential election. Then he spent an hour regurgitating debunked lies about that coup attempt.

Baier reportedly protested to top network executives seven months ago when Carlson explored paranoid, “false flag” conspiracy theories about January 6 in Patriot Purge, a three-part special for Fox’s streaming service. He and Chris Wallace, another longtime “news side” stalwart, “shared their objections with Fox News Media CEO Suzanne Scott and its president of news, Jay Wallace,” NPR reported, and “those objections rose to Lachlan Murdoch, the chairman and CEO of the network's parent company, Fox Corp.” At the time, those complaints had no apparent impact.

Thursday’s programming shows that Carlson's victory over Baier, Wallace, and their “news side” colleagues was total.

Fox provided Carlson a platform to endorse the motives of the rioters and push the same baseless and obscene conspiracy theories that had drawn criticism from Baier. The network aired his program and Sean Hannity’s during the following hour commercial-free, sacrificing advertising dollars in apparent effort to keep the audience from channel-surfing during breaks and discovering any of the chilling revelations the committee provided — even on Baier’s Fox Business coverage.

Baier, meanwhile, was relegated to Fox’s B-channel to cover the prime-time hearing. At 10 p.m. ET, while CNN and MSNBC were still providing analysis of the hearing, he signed off, and Fox Business aired a docudrama about Ben Franklin. Only at 11 p.m. ET, when it was time for viewers to nod off, did Baier get access to Fox’s airwaves.

The message about the relative positions of Carlson and Baier in the network hierarchy sent by these programming decisions was obvious to all. On Twitter, a Carlson guest with an accurate read on the situation dunked on Baier’s tweet promoting his hearing coverage.

[twt ned ryun]

baier was left impotently touting what little access the network was giving him to its airwaves.

[twt]

meanwhile, Chris Wallace was a fixture during live coverage of the hearing – but on CNN. He decamped to that network last year, ending his nearly two-decade career at Fox after Carlson’s Patriot Purge conspiracy theories reportedly proved the final straw. Wallace has since become the latest former Fox employee to criticize its programming as right-wing propaganda. “I’m fine with opinion: conservative opinion, liberal opinion,” he told The New York Times in March. “But when people start to question the truth — Who won the 2020 election? Was Jan. 6 an insurrection? — I found that unsustainable.” 

Baier, to this point, apparently finds it eminently sustainable for Carlson and his cronies to question whether January 6 was an insurrection — in prime time, on the network where he putatively serves as “chief political anchor.”

The declining influence of Fox’s “news side” has been underway for some time. But on Thursday, it was on display in prime time, obvious for anyone interested in seeing it. Fox’s brass may occasionally tout the “news” division as a talking point for advertisers, but they will yield to Carlson and his conspiracy theories every time.

straight new lie list

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-lie-0

Fox News viewers are subjected to a constant torrent of lies, misleading statements, and half-truths as the network's hosts, guests, and on-air personalities weave a comprehensive web of misinformation imbuing virtually all aspects of the outlet's supposed “news” operations.Media Matters has compiled a list of lies and false statements told and retold every single weekday during Fox's purported “straight news” programming throughout the first four full months of 2022.

hyperlinks in the PDF above may not work on all browsers. If so, you can also find the PDF here. 57 pp

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Timeline: The decimation of Fox's “news side”

05/11/21 12:24 PM EDT

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/timeline-decimation-foxs-news-side

Tucker Carlson's descent into white supremacy: A timeline

10/28/18 12:00 PM EDT

https://www.mediamatters.org/tucker-carlson/tucker-carlsons-descent-white-supremacy-timeline

Tucker Carlson on COVID vaccine: “How are the rest of us supposed to respond to a marketing campaign like this? Well, nervously”

Timeline: Tucker Carlson’s unhinged COVID-19 coverage

12/27/20 11:08 AM EST

https://www.mediamatters.org/tucker-carlson/timeline-tucker-carlsons-unhinged-covid-19-coverage

There are no rules for Sean Hannity at Fox News

04/17/18 11:28 AM EDT

Presidential adviser reportedly scripted campaign ad

06/01/21 10:44 AM EDT

Sean Hannity is a Trump political operative and Fox News doesn’t care

01/21/20 4:08 PM EST

2 standup guys well 4

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."

died of covid tho vaccinated, fox tried to use for disinfo vaxx pulled twt

no lnx twt

Fox News reporter deletes tweet after being blasted for using Colin Powell’s death to promote vaccine disinformation

David Badash and The New Civil Rights Movement October 18, 2021

John Roberts, Fox News' co-anchor of "America Reports," and the right wing network's former White House correspondent under Presidents Trump, Bush, and Clinton, came under intense fire Monday morning for using the COVID-19 related death of former U.S. Secretary of State and Joint Chiefs Chairman Colin Powell to promote the network's position of vaccine disinformation.

Fox News has long suggested there was a wall between its daytime "straight news" reporters and their coverage, and its nighttime opinion hosts, but that wall over the past few months has largely disappeared. It is now common for Fox News daytime viewers to be served "reporting" on the opinions of Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham.

For that to happen Fox News reporters have had to become mirrors of the disinformation campaigns the network's nighttime personalities promote.

Like vaccine disinformation.

Vaccine disinformation is "a big reason behind low inoculation rates," the L.A. Times recently reported.

"Fox News aired claims that undermine COVID-19 vaccines on 99% of days in the last six months, according to research by progressive media watchdog group Media Matters for America," HuffPost reported earlier this month. "Only two days from April through September didn't feature the sowing of doubt about the safe and effective shots."

The news of the death of former U.S. Secretary of State and Joint Chiefs Chairman Colin Powell has hit many across the nation hard. Secretary Powell was 84 years old and died of complications from COVID-19, with his family noting he was fully vaccinated.

Powell was also battling "multiple myeloma, a type of blood cancer that impacts the body's ability to fight infections," and Parkinson's.

But according to Fox News' John Roberts, Secretary Powell's death "raises new concerns about how effective vaccines are long-term," which is both manipulative and false, given the facts surrounding his health – namely that he was 84 and battling a cancer that impacts the body's ability to fight infections.

Journalists and many others are blasting Roberts so mercilessly that he ultimately deleted the tweet with no apology or explanation, but here's a screenshot:...

https://www.mediamatters.org/bret-baier/foxs-flagship-straight-news-show-has-troubling-record-climate-crisis

no lnx many vid

Fox’s flagship “straight news” show has a troubling record on the climate crisis

Nearly 88% of Special Report’s climate segments since 2009 either spread misinformation or perpetuated false or misleading narratives

Special PROGRAMS

CLIMATE & ENERGY

WRITTEN BY ALICIA SADOWSKI

RESEARCH CONTRIBUTIONS FROM ALLISON FISHER, REBECCA MARTIN, NIKKI MCCANN RAMIREZ & JANE LEE

PUBLISHED 06/16/21 12:01 PM EDT

Fox News Channel’s Special Report with Bret Baier is heralded as the network’s flagship “straight news” program that firmly embodies the show’s motto of “fair, balanced, and unafraid.” Under Fox chief political anchor Bret Baier’s direction, however, Special Report has failed to meet its own standards in covering the climate crisis and environmental protection, instead providing a platform for many of the same climate denier guests and fossil fuel industry talking points featured on the network’s opinion side. 

Media Matters examined Special Report with Bret Baier’s coverage related to climate change and the environment between January 1, 2009, and May 3, 2021. We counted and analyzed segments devoted to climate change or the environment and those in which a network figure discussed the issue or engaged with a guest who brought it up. We then broadly categorized the show’s misinformation and misleading narratives into five different angles of attack -- regarding climate science, the economy, the efficacy and public demand for domestic climate action, global cooperation, and the urgency of the crisis. These narratives undermined, doubted, misrepresented, or otherwise dismissed climate science and/or drives for climate action or environmental protection. We counted each angle once per segment even if it arose multiple times; segments often included more than one angle.

Jump to a section

KEY FINDINGS

SPECIAL REPORT IS PART OF THE DECADESLONG AND ONGOING CAMPAIGN TO DELAY CLIMATE ACTION

BAIER’S “STRAIGHT NEWS” COVERAGE OF THE CLIMATE AND ENVIRONMENT ECHOES THE LIES OF FOX’S OPINION PERSONALITIES

SPECIAL REPORT UNDERMINES CLIMATE SCIENCE

SPECIAL REPORT SETS UP A FALSE CONFLICT BETWEEN A HEALTHY PLANET AND A THRIVING ECONOMY OR MISREPRESENTS THE EFFICACY AND PUBLIC DEMAND FOR CLIMATE ACTION AND ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTIONS

SPECIAL REPORT FUELS NATIONALISTIC AND MISLEADING NARRATIVES OPPOSING GLOBAL CLIMATE EFFORTS

SPECIAL REPORT UNDERMINES THE SERIOUSNESS AND URGENCY OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

CONCLUSION

METHODOLOGY

Key Findings

From January 1, 2009, to May 3, 2021, Special Report aired at least 972 segments covering stories related to climate change or the environment.

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At least 851 of those segments -- more than 87% -- featured false or misleading narratives and misinformation. 

Since 2009, Fox chief political anchor Bret Baier, guest anchors, correspondents, and guests on Special Report have undermined, doubted, misrepresented, or otherwise dismissed climate science and the urgency of climate action at least 1,333 times.

Of the 851 Special Report segments that attacked or misrepresented climate change or environmental protection:

14% undermined climate science.

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29% set up a false conflict between a healthy planet and a thriving economy.

43% misrepresented the efficacy of climate action or the public demand for environmental protections.

8% fueled nationalistic defenses of climate inaction and/or misled viewers about global climate efforts.

more than 5% undermined the seriousness and urgency of the climate crisis.

Special Report’s specific attacks undermining climate science were most frequent at the start of Baier’s run as anchor, which began in January 2009. The show spread nearly four times as much misinformation or false or misleading narratives attacking climate science during President Barack Obama’s first year in office (when climate legislation was being considered in Congress) than during President Donald Trump’s first year.

During President Joe Biden’s first four months in office, Special Report was already spreading climate-related misinformation and false or misleading climate narratives at more than three times its weekly rate of 2020.[SO BS SIDE EFFECT COLLATERAL DAMAGE TO FOX RAISON D'ETRE ATTACK DEMONIZE LIBS/DEMS?!

Special Report is part of the decades-long and ongoing campaign to delay climate action

In reviewing over a decade of Special Report’s climate coverage, Media Matters found at least 851 segments that featured misinformation or false or misleading narratives that undermine efforts to address the climate crisis or environmental degradation. Many of these same attacks are also heavily promoted by Fox’s opinion shows, which points to the shared talking points of the network’s “news” division and some of its most toxic prime-time personalities.

These attacks on science are not isolated incidents -- they can be contextualized within the clear template of industry-funded science denial. As early as 1977, Exxon scientists were aware of the climate’s sensitivity to carbon dioxide released by burning fossil fuels, but the company spent the next two decades leading misinformation campaigns to question the scientific basis of climate change, lobbying congressional representatives to reject domestic environmental regulations and international climate treaties, and spreading narratives to falsely pit the health of the economy against the need for environmental protections.

More than four decades after Exxon’s initial discovery, Fox News has scrupulously parrotted its successful misinformation campaigns, despite international and domestic studies overwhelmingly warning of the dire consequences of fossil fuels’ contributions to climate change.Special Report’s complicity in promoting these industry narratives is part of the larger, systemic failure of the U.S. to grapple with the climate crisis, which also includes denying communities equitable access to healthy environments, often at the expense of people of color, as well as the failure to pass meaningful climate and environmental legislation in the last decade. And the same science-denial talking points featured on Special Report have even been recycled by Fox News opinion shows and other bad actors (following a similar blueprint to the fossil fuel industry’s strategy to undermine climate science) to deny the existence and seriousness of the coronavirus pandemic and to dismiss the urgency of finding solutions for this public health crisis.

Baier’s “straight news” coverage of the climate and environment echoes the lies of Fox’s opinion personalities

Media Matters’ extensive review of Special Report’s coverage of the climate crisis and environmental protections since 2009 found a persistent theme of the program sowing doubt about the existence of climate change and the efficacy of climate solutions.

Of the 851 climate or environment-related segments on Special Report that included such instances, 477 occurred during correspondent segments, 174 occurred during guest segments, and 200 were perpetuated by Baier or guest anchors. Excluding segments featuring guest anchors, Baier himself espoused or allowed 1,116 instances of climate misinformation and false or misleading narratives during the studied time period.

Week after week, year after year, Special Report viewers -- who are promised an objective and unbiased analysis of the issues -- have been inundated with misleading statements that reflect Fox’s opinion-side rhetoric: denying climate science, shirking responsibility for environmental degradation, downplaying the severity of climate change, and recklessly casting solutions as too costly or leading toward a slippery slope of tyranny. Here are the types of attacks we found.

Special Report undermines climate science

The overwhelming consensus from scientists, both domestic and abroad, is clear: Warming trends over the past century are extremely likely to be caused by human activities emitting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

In 2007, just two years before Bret Baier took the helm of Fox's flagship news program, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an international coalition of scientists who assess peer-reviewed scientific papers to summarize knowledge of the causes of climate change, released a report stating that the “warming of the climate system is unequivocal” and that oceans and other ecosystems were “being affected by regional climate changes, particularly temperature increases.” The report said anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions were “very likely” the cause of global average temperature rise, and it also urged policymakers to consider “a wide variety of policies and instruments” to “create the incentives for mitigation action.” These findings were strengthened in the IPCC's next six-year review in 2013, emphasizing that changes in the climate since the 1950s were “unprecedented over decades to millennia.”

Despite these direct warnings from the world’s scientific experts, Baier’s viewers have heard a different story: Special Report’s coverage of climate change and environmental degradation has flatly denied science, focused on debunked, concocted controversies that attempted to dismantle scientific consensus, and selectively reported cool weather events to dismiss warnings of dire climate change consequences. 

Overall, 14% of the misinformation and misleading or false narratives about climate change spread by Special Report since 2009 have undermined the consensus and conclusions of climate science, with nearly half of that misinformation -- 46% -- occurring within the first three years of Baier's run. In fact, throughout Obama’s first term, Special Report spread two and a half times as many instances of misinformation and false or misleading narratives undermining climate science as it did during Trump’s term.

Within just his first month as anchor, Baier ran a misleading climate segment on January 28, 2009, which cited David Kreutzer of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank funded in part by the fossil fuel industry.Kreutzer suggested that scientists were moving to use the term “climate change” instead of “global warming” to distract from cooling trends and make it “easier” to blame humans for natural environmental variation. In February 2010, Baier himself even claimed that “‘global warming,’ the phrase, has been changed really to ‘climate change’ by supporters,” and he hosted current Fox prime-time star Tucker Carlson to lament that “there’s nothing that can’t be explained by the phrase ‘climate change.’” (While Fox News is still undermining climate science by conflating weather patterns with long-term climate disruption, the term “climate change” was actually championed by longtime Republican strategist Frank Luntz in an infamous 2002 memo advising the GOP on how to cast doubt on the scientific consensus that human activity was warming the planet.)

Baier has continued to attack the science of climate change by giving climate skeptics’ opinions equal weight to peer-reviewed scientific consensus. In February 2015, Baier ran a segment that cited a “retired accountant, blogger, and self-described climate historian” who baselessly claimed that climate data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration had been modified to be “more supportive of those who say the planet is warming and that man is directly responsible.” The segment also cited another Heritage Foundation representative, Nick Loris, who cast doubt on the human-made drivers of climate change and falsely suggested that scientists do not believe policies restricting greenhouse gas emissions would be effective. 

In October 2018, the next IPCC report estimated that human activities have caused approximately 1 degree Celsius of global warming above preindustrial levels, which is already wreaking havoc on communities, causing more extreme weather events and rising oceans. The report also gave a more dire warning of the urgency of climate change, telling policymakers they had as little as 12 years to limit warming to 1.5 C before climate change and the ensuing environmental degradation reach an irreversible tipping point. The report gave special note to a change in the “frequency, intensity, spatial extent, duration, and timing of weather and climate extremes,” yet Baier’s reporting has failed to note the potential impact of climate change on extreme weather events. The program even flatly denied the existence of climate change as recently as February 2019.

Special Report dismissed the IPCC’s warnings once again, and Baier ran a segment in May 2019 that quoted Marc Morano, a fossil fuel industry-funded climate skeptic who has been described as “a central cell of the climate-denial machine.” In the segment, Morano dismissed another U.N. report warning of mass species extinction as “politics, not science.” 

Video file

CitationFrom the May 6, 2019, edition of Fox News' Special Report with Bret Baier

Between 2009 and 2021, Morano’s climate denial was highlighted in at least 10 segments on Special Report, similar to his frequent visits on Fox opinion shows such as Tucker Carlson Tonight.

Morano appeared on Tucker Carlson Tonight in April of this year, responding to Carlson’s opening question on the Biden infrastructure bill: “How much of this bill is geared not toward cleaning up the environment, which we could badly use, but toward this global warming theory that they have? How much of it is climate-based?” Morano again argued that a focus on climate change was not due to necessity or scientific consensus, but claimed that it was simply a maneuver to accrue political power.

Video file

CitationFrom the April 1, 2021, edition of Fox News' Tucker Carlson Tonight

Special Report's undermining of climate science wasn’t just left to his guests or correspondent segments -- Baier himself recently engaged in the same rhetoric to doubt climate science as a figure from Fox’s opinion side, The Five’s Jesse Watters. On May 3, Watters complained that “the worst part about the whole story” is that “Biden isn’t certain schools are gonna be open this fall, because, you know, he does not have a crystal ball. But at the same breath he says if we don't spend a trillion dollars on green energy, he knows the Earth's temperature, to a degree, in a hundred years. It’s hard to square those.”

Video file

CitationFrom the May 3, 2021, edition of Fox News' The Five

Baier attempted to make the same point in the next hour, asking why the Biden administration was being cautious in making predictions about school openings while citing scientific unknowns, but “they don’t have that same phrasing when talking about climate change.”

Video file

Citation From the May 3, 2021, edition of Fox News' Special Report with Bret Baier

Special Report sets up a false conflict between a healthy planet and a thriving economy or misrepresents the efficacy and public demand for climate action and environmental protections

Fox News figures and other right-wing media personalities have often falsely pitted the economy against the environment, demonizing climate solutions as either too expensive or a waste of money that will not bring adequate returns in the green economy, in an effort to justify a lack of congressional action. Special Report’s coverage was no different throughout the last decade, with 29% of the misinformation or misleading narratives that it spread perpetuating that false dichotomy or failing to consider the cost of climate inaction, and 43% misrepresenting the efficacy and public demand for climate action.

Special Report often emphasized the immediate cost of climate solutions while also pushing narratives that depicted environmental regulations as ineffective or decried the supposedly “socialist” implications of climate legislation. Almost one in three of the problematic segments identified by Media Matters -- around 273 -- both undermined the efficacy of climate action and portrayed potential environmental protections as hurting the economy.

Scientists and policy experts have repeatedly warned that transitioning to a clean energy economy -- often incentivized through legislation -- is not only necessary to ensure a livable planet, but will also reduce the price of mitigation after irreversible climate impacts take hold. In 2018, the Fourth National Climate Assessment warned that the “continued warming that is projected to occur without substantial and sustained reductions in global greenhouse gas emissions is expected to cause substantial net damage to the U.S. economy throughout this century, especially in the absence of increased adaptation efforts.” Another recently published study in Scientific Reports estimated that the cost of failure to keep warming to a 1.5 C threshold rose “from 1.3 trillion dollars per year of inaction in 2010 to over 5 trillion dollars per year in 2020.”

Yet despite the long-term economic suffering promised by increasingly extreme weather and climate disasters, regional temperature changes reducing crop yields, and environmental degradation reducing tourism and recreation, much of Special Report’s climate coverage since 2009 has been fed by fossil fuel industry talking points emphasizing short-term -- and often biased -- economic costs.

Beginning during the Obama administration, Special Report relentlessly attacked the Environmental Protection Agency, framing its mitigation efforts as executive overreach without regard to the economy. 

In April 2009, then-chief Washington correspondent Jim Angle declared on Special Report that the EPA’s finding that carbon dioxide could be restricted under the Clean Air Act “could hardly be more sweeping because it could affect everything from airliners to lawnmowers and almost every corner of the U.S. economy,” fearmongering that it “has the potential for shutting down or slowing down virtually all economic activity” without mentioning the environmental benefits of the proposed regulations. 

In a June 2011 segment on Special Report, disgraced former Fox correspondent Doug McKelway cited the Heritage Foundation's Nick Loris, who argued that President Obama and then-Commerce Secretary nominee John Bryson's carbon emission reduction policies “are intended to raise energy prices, and lower-income families pay a disproportionately higher percent of their income on energy prices,” resulting in the policies “hurting those people more than helping them.” In reality, Loris was pushing an oversimplified view of carbon pricing legislation. A study by the World Resources Institute found that legislation addressing either a carbon tax or cap-and-trade program does not “inherently help or hurt lower-income households.” Its impact depends on how the policy is designed; for example, a small portion of the revenue raised from carbon pricing could be offered as rebates to protect low-income households from increasing energy prices.

A month later, Angle appeared in another segment quoting both Loris, who claimed that the Obama administration’s plan to increase fuel efficiency standards would “be a significant ramp-up,” and the former chairman of the National Automobile Dealers Association, who fearmongered that the change would be costly to business and result in hundreds of thousands of job losses. In April 2014, Baier himself responded to the announcement that a federal appeals court upheld stricter emission standards from the EPA by citing complaints from anonymous “state and industry groups'' that the “new limits on toxins” would “cost billions of dollars annually to comply.”

In March 2016, current Fox prime-time host Laura Ingraham appeared on Special Report and mocked people “losing sleep over the environment every night,” declaring that the Obama administration’s environmental regulations were actually “about redistributing wealth and making America poorer.” Baier failed to push back on this absurd framing.

During the Trump administration, however, it became clear that Special Report was complicit in the demise of the network’s “news side,” serving as an echo chamber of misinformation to advance the GOP agenda. In Obama’s first term, Special Report worked to oppose the administration’s efforts to curb climate change, spreading one and a half times more misinformation and false or misleading narratives about than it did during the Trump presidency, when the show championed positive coverage of the short-term economic benefits of rolling back Obama-era regulations. During Trump’s final year in office, Special Report -- seemingly sympathetic to the president’s apathetic stance on the climate -- spread the least amount of misinformation or misleading narratives about climate change during the studied time period, with only 52 instances.

One segment from December 2016 demonstrates how the show used misinformation and dubious claims to pave the way for Trump’s deregulatory agenda. Correspondent James Rosen cited the conservative American Action Forum’s claim that “recent EPA rules on heavy trucks pushed the total regulatory price tag over the next 10 years over the $1 trillion mark,” requiring “every man, woman, and child in our regulation nation to cough up $3,080 a piece to satisfy it.” The heavy trucks regulation in question -- an increase in the fuel efficiency standards -- would ultimately have reduced global warming emissions by 1.1 billion tonnes and saved the trucking industry $170 billion per year. Despite AAF Director of Regulatory Policy Sam Batkins admitting that the group does little research to check whether cost estimates fit reality, Rosen assured viewers that “Mr. Trump has vowed to carry a war of attrition to the regulatory beast.”

Special Report’s focus on the perceived economic disruption and “socialist” implications of climate legislation has dogged Democratic efforts at climate mitigation, demonizing all legislation -- from Obama’s cap-and-trade proposal to the Green New Deal to Biden’s more moderate 2021 climate plan -- as radical attempts to wreak havoc on the American economy and livelihoods. 

Attacking and spreading misinformation about the Green New Deal has been Fox News’ priority for the past two years; when it was first introduced, the network aired far more segments than its cable network counterparts on the proposal. As the flagship program of Fox’s “news” division, Special Report made no effort to differentiate itself from the network’s opinion coverage, with Baier characterizing the deal as “one of the most controversial political manifestos” and suggesting that the expensive price tag would lead to wasteful spending as part of “the Democrats' campaign against the prosperous.” 

In February 2019, Baier hosted Federalist senior editor Mollie Hemmingway to complain that “there is not really a case being made for why you would need to upend your lives, destroy life as you know it, destroy wealth, destroy job opportunities, get rid of massive industries that employ thousands and millions of people, and for what?” Hemingway concluded that polls showing American support for the deal could only be attributed to pollsters asking people if they “want free things,” referring to the Green New Deal’s proposed guaranteed “economic security." Washington Examiner chief political correspondent Byron York dismissed public support for funding the deal, claiming that “the idea that most Americans would think that climate change is a World War II-like crisis is really unlikely.”

Video file

Citation From the February 7, 2019, edition of Fox News' Special Report with Bret Baier

These pointed attacks on the Green New Deal reflect the rhetoric often espoused on Fox opinion shows, such as by Sean Hannity, who referenced the Green New Deal in relation to Biden on April 20, 2020, claiming that “there are no moderates in today's radical, extreme Democratic socialist party.” In July 2020, Hannity lambasted Biden for “taking his cues from the most radical, the most extreme socialist extremist that this party has ever embraced, the Democratic modern socialist party.” Hannity then complained about the price tag of the climate proposal, exclaiming that it would “turn America into a socialist, bankrupt hellhole.”

Baier did not push back in January after Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel used language similar to Hannity’s rants to attack the incoming Biden administration and the climate bill, stating that she would not “cede our country to the far left who want to turn toward socialism, institute the Green New Deal, and remake America as we know it.”

Video file

Citation From the July 14, 2020, edition of Hannity

Special Report fuels nationalistic and misleading narratives opposing global climate efforts

Efforts to prevent and counter the worst consequences of global climate change have to be negotiated at the international level and require unprecedented cooperation between countries in order to succeed. But in covering those efforts, such as the U.S. signing on to the Paris climate agreement under Obama, Baier and his guests on Special Report insteadechoed isolationist narratives to undermine global mitigation efforts. Like Fox opinion-side personalities, they suggested that international mitigation efforts are detrimental to the U.S. economy, that they favor China and India over America, and that global cooperation would fail to stave off the worst effects of climate change. Statements that fueled these nationalistic and misleading narratives opposed to global climate efforts constituted 8% of the total misinformation and false narratives spread on Special Report during the studied time period.

In an appearance on Special Report in December 2009, the late conservative pundit Charles Krauthammer repeated one of the most prevalent talking points used to oppose climate action, suggesting that an international climate agreement would “mean a serious constriction of the U.S. economy, a lowering of our standard of living.” This claim is false and driven by a flailing fossil fuel industry attempting to distract from its own “terminal decline” by scapegoating climate mitigation efforts. 

This line of attack was echoed on the network’s opinion side as recently as this year, when climate denier Marc Morano appeared on the January 21 episode of Fox & Friends First to claim that rejoining the Paris agreement is “climate virtue signaling” that will “hammer middle America, blue-collar America, [and] Americans on middle class and lower income.” In reality, committing to Paris emission reductions and building a 100% clean energy economy would create up to 25 million well-paid American jobs, and clean energy jobs are “more likely to be unionized and come with health care and retirement benefits than the rest of the private sector.”

In a May 2014 appearance on Special Report, Krauthammer pushed the idea that international agreements, specifically the Paris climate accord, would benefit China at the expense of American prosperity because China lacked a legally binding commitment to emissions reductions. Krauthammer stated, “As we dismantle the coal plants in our country, China and India together are adding one coal fire plant every other week. The net effect is to shift the U.S. coal energy generating industry from here to India and China. It will have zero effect.”

This argument was repeated on the May 31, 2017, edition of Fox & Friends, when Fox Business host Stuart Varney denigrated the Paris climate accord as an “unequal” agreement meant to “take money and resources off Europe and America” to “give it to other countries,” including China. More recently, Fox opinion host Laura Ingraham expanded upon this argument in April, characterizing global cooperation on climate as tentative at best, with each nation pursuing “what’s in its best interest.” Ingraham then dismissed Biden’s “grand” climate plans as ineffective for failing to reduce global temperatures “at all.”

These are bad-faith arguments and they do not account for the fact that not only has the U.S. caused more global warming than any other country and maintains the higher per capita emissions rates, but it also lags behind China on substantive commitments to renewable energy and technology. Furthermore, climate change and its disruptions transcend national borders and are intrinsically linked to the public health, socioeconomic well-being, and growth of every nation.

In yet another appearance on Special Report in May 2017 dismissing the impact of Trump’s promise to pull out of the Paris accord, Krauthammer advanced the argument that U.S. participation in the “extremely weak” agreement was inconsequential, and he claimed it only made a “marginal difference” if “we are in it or out of it.” This sentiment on climate policy efficacy was also echoed this year on Fox’s opinion side by Danish political scientist Bjorn Lomborg on the January 21 edition of Fox & Friends. He argued that rejoining the Paris agreement would “cost a fortune and cut almost nothing, so basically achieve almost nothing to fix climate change.”

These arguments exploit legitimate concerns of the Paris agreement --that measures agreed to at the accord will not be enough to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius -- not to garner support for the strengthening of global commitments, but to gripe about the inherent complexities of any global treaty and ultimately erode support for addressing the climate crisis on any level. Despite Paris’ shortcomings, the U.S.’s participation in the agreement — as the second biggest greenhouse gas emitter — represented a critical step toward global climate mitigation. As international markets transition toward clean energy, it is imperative that the United States can advocate for American jobs and workers. Moreover, global emissions reductions work -- in 2016, global emissions flat-lined for the third year in a row even as the global economy grew, partly because the U.S. and China cut their emissions.

Special Report undermines the seriousness and urgency of the climate crisis

Baier and his guests made statements that undermined the seriousness and urgency of the climate crisis in more than 5% of Special Report’s misinformation and false or misleading narratives around climate change.

These bad-faith arguments have also come from Fox’s opinion side, which has framed the idea of addressing climate change as requiring personal sacrifice from individual viewers. Special Report suggested climate-conscious consumers should not own pets, should limit their hamburger intake, should accept rougher toilet paper, and should feel guilt for using water at hotels or pumping gas for their car. These segments’ reckless linking of personal consumer choices to environmental protection lets the real culprits -- the 100 companies responsible for 71% of global emissions -- escape responsibility for the worst impacts of climate change, while discouraging popular support for climate action.

Special Report also followed Fox’s signature strategy of focusing on some prominent people’s actions to deflect from those individuals’ concerns about the climate, using charges of hypocrisy as a smokescreen for climate inaction. Baier dedicated segments to personal carbon footprints, pointing to Obama traveling to an Earth Day rally; first lady Michelle Obama flying to Copenhagen to advocate for Chicago to host the Olympics; Prince Charles encouraging environmental awareness; Hillary Clinton traveling during her presidential campaign; and, most recently, Biden administration climate envoy John Kerry using a private jet. 

On the February 4 edition of Special Report, correspondent Kristin Fisher noted that Kerry was “not necessarily leading by example by taking a private plane to Iceland to accept an environmental award.” Later in the episode, Fox contributor Byron York said that “he's got a government plane now, and you don't marry into a billionaire family if you want to fly commercial.”

This coverage on Fox’s flagship “straight news” show echoed a line of attacks on Kerry from Fox’s opinion hosts, such as Sean Hannity’s January 28 statement that “it’s almost as if John Kerry isn’t that concerned about the environment after all” and Tucker Carlson’s February 3 accusation that Kerry was being “hypocritical.” These personal attacks and red herring arguments serve dual roles -- to villainize and discredit specific activists while trivializing the urgency of the climate crisis. It is a well-worn tactic, as demonstrated by Special Report, that is used across the network’s opinion and “straight news” programming.]GORE TENN HOUSE]

Video file

CitationFrom the January 28, 2021, edition of Fox News' Hannity

Video file

CitationFrom the February 3, 2021, edition of Fox News' Tucker Carlson Tonight

Conclusion

Climate scientists have overwhelmingly warned for years that unless immediate action is taken to address the climate crisis, irreversible environmental consequences will impact every aspect of our daily lives -- ranging from an exacerbated refugee crisis to devastating economic impacts to irreversible environmental degradation.

The stakes for news media to cover this issue seriously and responsibly could not be higher as Biden attempts to simultaneously reestablish United States' leadership in global mitigation and advocate for bold climate legislation, while the deadline to limit global warming to 1.5 C draws closer.

Yet climate coverage on Special Report with Bret Baier has been characterized by blatantly false, biased, and desperate attempts to undermine climate change action and environmental protections. Ultimately, Special Report is another extension of Fox News’ climate denial machine, serving to sow misinformation and doubt to defend the politicians who actively prevent any climate mitigation.

Methodology

Media Matters searched transcripts in the Nexis database for Fox News Channel’s Special Report with Bret Baier for any of the terms and any derivations of the terms climate change, global warming, climate, global temperatures, climate science, climate scientist, Paris climate, climate accord, Paris accord, climate agreement, Paris agreement, climate deal, climate crisis, environment, Environmental Protection Agency, green new deal, climate conference, climate plan, carbon emissions, greenhouse gases, green, Keystone Pipeline, Dakota Pipeline, or energy from January 1, 2009, through May 3, 2021.

We included any segment when climate change or environmental protection was the stated topic of discussion...

121 mma

1. Fox News has a two-track business model. Its audience watches the network to see its opinion hosts spew right-wing propaganda, while its advertisers pay for access to that audience, and cable providers pay to sell that audience a package that includes the network. The unhinged rhetoric of the network’s opinion hosts has scared many advertisers away; Fox executives in turn have pointed their business partners toward the network’s “news side” to maintain plausible credibility (that credibility never holds up under any scrutiny, but the lie is useful, as people say). 

The news division turns into opinion programming: Fox News’ unprecedented ratings losses in recent weeks have led the network to turn its "news division" into advertisements for its opinion hosts. When some Fox viewers defected for fringe-right competitors like Newsmax and One America News, Fox frequently began promoting its opinion hosts during “news” segments, directly airing clips of its prime-time hosts during “news” segments, casting doubts on the election results hundreds of times, and actively supporting the president’s efforts to overturn election results.

Fox increases opinion programming:Additionally, Fox announced this week that they're reducing the number of "news" hours entirely, by replacing Martha MacCallum’s high-profile 7 p.m. show with one hosted by a rotating cast of Fox’s right-wing commentators.

By the numbers: Fox News built the lie that fueled the January 6 putsch; in thetwo weeks after the network itself called the election, Fox News cast doubt on election results nearly 800 times -- and that doesn't count Fox Business, which has its own stable of pro-Trump liars.

Lies upon lies: Fox News has spent months promoting and entertaining Trump's Big Lie that the election was stolen. And now it is lying to advertisers that it has a "straight news" division separate from its opinion programming.

Fox before the attack: Fox News host Jesse Watters, days before Capitol putsch: “We used to storm the castle … In 2021, let's relight that great American spirit.”

https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/watch-fox-news-host-expertly-debunks-trumps-baseless-and-false-claims-of-widespread-voter-fraud/

alexh

according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, "the November 3 election was the most secure in American history." Regardless, many of President Donald Trump's boosters in right-wing media continue to promote his baseless claims of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election. A great deal of debunking has come from MSNBC and CNN, but on November 15, it also came from a more unlikely source: a Fox News anchor.

The far-right opinion hosts at Fox News and Fox Business — from Sean Hannity to Lou Dobbs to Laura Ingraham — haven't hesitated to promote Trump's bogus voter fraud claims. But the hard news divisions at Fox News and Fox Business, despite having a conservative slant, are less likely to traffic in nonsense conspiracy theories than the opinion hosts. AndFox News' Eric Shawn, who is part of Fox News' hard news division, offered a no-nonsense debunking after Maria Bartiromo devoted an entire show to promoting Trump's conspiracy theory.

Bartiromo featured two of Trump's attorneys: Sidney Powell and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, both of whom claimed that the election had been stolen from Trump.

Shawn, in contrast, aired video of Ben Hovland, a Trump appointee who chairs the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, saying, "The reality is, this the most secure election we ever had, and it was one of the most well-run elections we've ever had…. The American people made their voice heard, and when we spread conspiracy theories and we don't back that up with facts, it has an impact."[twt vid]

shawn addressed Trump's claim that his campaign was not allowed to observe the vote-counting process in Philadelphia, airing part of his November 12 interview with Philadelphia City Commissioner Al Schmidt — a Republican in a predominantly Democratic city. Schmidt told Shawn it was "totally untrue" that Trump's campaign was shut out of the vote-counting rooms at the Pennsylvania Convention Center in Center City Philadelphia, and when Shawn asked Schmidt if he's seen any evidence of voter fraud in Philly, the Republican responded, "I have not."

Shawn also addressed claims that the Denver-based company Dominion switched votes for Trump to votes for President-elect Biden, noting that Dominion has no affiliation with the Democratic Party.And the Fox anchor went on to say, "election officials across the country insist, as of today: there is no evidence of any widespread fraud affecting the outcome of the presidential election — that our precious democracy was not tampered with, and that such baseless and false claims are an insult to the thousands of elections officials and workers across the country who we have seen dedicating themselves, 24/7, to insure a fair and free election for all of us."

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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? ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Report_(TV_program)

https://www.mediamatters.org/qanon-conspiracy-theory/foxs-whitewash-trumps-qanon-endorsement-helps-explain-how-it-happened-first

Trump’s Wednesday endorsement of the deranged and dangerous QAnon movement as people who “love this country” thrilled its supporters while horrifying observers, who pointed out that his validation of an extremist ideology linked to violent acts would swell its ranks. But during his first interview following those remarks on Thursday night, the president faced no questions about his praise for unhinged pro-Trump conspiracy theorists who claim that he is on the verge of unraveling a global pedophile ring of Satan-worshipping Democrats and celebrities. As Fox News host Sean Hannity provided the president with his typical mix of sycophancy and softballs over the course of the half-hour phoner, Trump’s embrace of QAnon never came up.

Hannity’s decision to ignore the story put a capstone on Fox’s lackadaisical response to the president’s praise for advocates of a bizarre conspiracy theory that the FBI has termed a domestic terror threat. Fox News political analyst Karl Rove garnered press attention on Wednesday for calling QAnon supporters “nuts and kooks” and saying the president “ought to disavow them” on Special Report, and that program ran a segment on the “conspiracy theory” the following day. But none of the network’s highly rated prime-time hosts have mentioned Trump’s remarks at all, and by Thursday morning, Fox & Friends was decontextualizing part of the president’s comment as an anodyne reference to his administration “saving the world.”

Trump backing the QAnon movement seems like a natural fit -- the president is a notorious conspiracy theorist who finds it nearly impossible to disavow even his most reprehensible supporters. But his praise for the group can’t be separated from Fox’s unwillingness to try to establish guard rails for the Republican Party by denouncing it. Trump relies on Fox for news and information, and its coverage constantly shapes his worldview. If Fox’s hosts had condemned the QAnon movement in the years since it first emerged, it’s hard to imagine that the president would be praising it today -- or that it would have metastasized through the GOP to the extent that it has.

But Fox has largely kept discussions of the QAnon movement and its violent and unhinged ideology off its airwaves, even as its spread within the Republican Party has ensured that the network has repeatedly ended up promoting its supporters. I noted last week, after one of its adherents received the GOP congressional nod for a blood-red district, that QAnon has been referenced on only eight broadcasts on the network’s weekday evening programming over the previous two years -- almost all passing references that failed to describe the conspiracy theory’s dangers. The network’s on-air talent have alternately denied knowing anything about the movement and played footsie with it, engaging with its followers on social media, downplaying its extremism, and even praising aspects of it on Fox shows. Meanwhile, the network’s executives hired a prominent QAnon-supporting influencer to host a cooking show on Fox’s streaming service.

We know what it looks like when Fox tries to destroy the credibility of a movement with its audience, and that isn’t it. Fox hosts and personalities highlighted the Black Lives Matter movement during 288 weekday evening broadcasts over the same two-year span, building on racist and unhinged smears the network has deployed against its supporters since its founding.

In recent months, as the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor drove new attention to Black Lives Matter’s campaign against racial injustice and police brutality, Fox hosts redoubled their efforts to delegitimize it. Network star Tucker Carlson, perhaps the Fox host with the most influence on Trump right now, turned his program into a nightly assault on the group. He called it a “totalitarian political movement” and denounced Republican leaders who expressed support for it.

Trump got the message. He repeatedly lashed out at Black Lives Matter this summer, at times in direct response to segments he was watching about it on Fox. The president was particularly aggrieved by an anti-police chant that members of a Minnesota-based Black Lives Matter group used during a march in 2015 -- one that Fox has highlighted dozens of times in the years since.

If Fox had devoted even a fraction of the venomous demonization it launched at Black Lives Matter activists to QAnon conspiracy theorists, the network could have warned off its millions of viewers -- including the president -- from the movement. But Fox has not chosen that path, which would require trying to curb the excesses of the radicalized Republicans whose anti-Democratic fervor powers the network’s ratings.

Instead, Fox sold out its viewers to a cult. The longer the network held its fire, the more vulnerable its audience was to the movement’s entreaties, and the harder it became to pry Trump supporters away from its conspiracy theories. Now QAnon’s ranks have swelled, its supporters have effectively become a key GOP constituency, dozens are running for Congress, and at least one will likely be elected to the House in the fall. With the president himself signing on as a validator, it may be too late to keep QAnon away from the levers of power.

QAnon may garner criticism here and there from some at Fox who, like Rove, find the spectacle of the president cozying up to “kooks” too much to bear. But I doubt very much that the network as a whole will engage in the full-spectrum denunciation needed to curtail QAnon’s growth. Instead, the days to come will likely bring a range of responses from Fox personalities, from ignoring the movement, to downplaying its importance and extremism, to condemning its critics for attacking Trump supporters. The press will be hammered for covering the story. Some network figures will claim that the QAnon movement makes some good points, perhaps even outing themselves as full-fledged supporters. Others will rely on whataboutism, with the president’s defenders pushing back against reporting on QAnon by demanding to know why the media isn’t asking Democrats to condemn antifa or Black Lives Matter.

Fox is a Republican propaganda outlet that is deeply devoted to Trump. As long as that party and its leader are standing by the QAnon cult, the network won’t dare to stand up to it.

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/foxs-martha-maccallum-having-differences-opinion-science-surrounding-covid-19-something-we

wrongshow?

https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/trumps-new-coronavirus-adviser-right-wing-media-talking-head-who-consistently

Donald Trump announced this week that Dr. Scott Atlas, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, will serve as a new “adviser” to the president on COVID-19. Atlas, whose background is in diagnostic radiology, is not an expert in infectious disease but rather a pundit and frequent Fox guest who has been repeatedly wrong about the pandemic.

Atlas, who has appeared 20 times on Fox News since the end of April, predicted in March that there would only be 10,000 deaths from COVID in America, said in April that the pandemic “appears to be entering the containment phase,” and claimed in May that “the curves have been flattened.” More recently, he has taken to making unproven claims downplaying the risk of COVID-19 in considering whether to reopen schools for in-person learning.

But Fox News and other right-wing outlets have elevated his politically convenient though dubious commentary; and on August 12 he gave brief remarks during a White House press briefing after Trump asked him to come up to the podium.

Here is a noncomprehensive list of Atlas’ false claims, incorrect predictions, and pro-Trump sycophancy that preceded his new role at the White House.

• Atlas claimed in a March 16 tweet, “Virus infections typically have seasons. This is temporary.”
• In a March 26 op-ed in The Washington Times, Atlas wrote, “This virus could cause about 10,000 deaths in the United States overall.”
• In a March 26 “:{Hoover:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}: Virtual Policy Briefing,” Atlas claimed, “All reasonable numbers point to the fact that our number of severe outcomes will be peaking around three weeks or so.”
• In an April 1:{ op-ed in The Hill:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:, Atlas wrote that “Americans should not panic. The United States has the most advanced medical care in the world for situations like this.”
• As the national curve of daily deaths continued to rise, Atlas wrote in an April 13 op-ed in The Hill that “we now need to reenter normal life” and that “continuing full-population isolation and waiting for a vaccine would be doubling down and yielding to panic.”
• Atlas opened his April 22 op-ed in The Hill by declaring, “The tragedy of the COVID-19 pandemic appears to be entering the containment phase.”
• In an April 26 appearance on Fox News' The Next Revolution with Steve Hilton, Atlas told the host, “Young people under 18 have virtually no risk of serious illness or death, so it's logical to open most schools. It's logical to open most businesses.”
• Atlas claimed on the :{April 27 edition of Fox News’ *Tucker Carlson Tonight*:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:, “It’s actually good news that the virus spreads widely and without high risk to the vast majority of people … because that means we have a better chance of developing population immunity.” The Mayo clinic describes “major problems” with the idea that herd immunity can be achieved through natural infection as it is unknown to what extent an individual is immune to further infection after exposure. Also, according to the Mayo clinic, even if it was possible for herd immunity to be achieved this way, it “could also lead to serious complications and millions of deaths, especially among older people and those who have chronic conditions.”
• On the May 11 edition of Fox News':{ *The Story with Martha MacCallum*:(style="background-color:#ff9900;"):}:, Atlas referenced the social distancing measures and claimed that “the cure is bigger than the disease at this point.” He also told the audience that “the curves have been flattened.”
• On the June 8 edition of *The Story with Martha MacCallum*, Atlas falsely claimed “there is really no risk to young people” when it comes to COVID-19.
• On the June 22 edition of *The Story with Martha MacCallum*, host Martha MacCallum mentioned to Atlas former Food and Drug Adminstration Commissioner Scott Gottlieb’s claim that 25% of hospitalizations in Texas are among people aged 20 to 29. Atlas responded that he didn’t believe the number, saying, “I question if those people who are positive for COVID-19 and being hospitalized for something else are classified as COVID-19 hospitalizations. That's a big difference.”
• On the June 29 edition of Fox News' :{Tucker Carlson Tonight:(style="box-sizing:border-box;background-color:#ffff66;"):}:, Atlas falsely claimed young people “do not have a significant problem, they do not have the serious complications, they do not die” from COVID-19. (The data showed at the time of this appearance and continues to show that young people do in fact die or suffer serious complications from the virus.) He also said it’s “fantastic news that we have a lot of cases,” which common sense and real-time data show to be false.
• On the July 6 edition of *The Story with Martha MacCallum*, Atlas repeated the falsehood that “it doesn’t really matter how many cases, it only matters who gets the cases” because young people die at a lower rate than older people. But increased caseloads lead to an increased strain on the capacity of health systems and may spread the virus to people who are more vulnerable to serious complications from the disease, even if the vast majority of young people who make up the increased number of cases do not.
• Atlas downplayed the potential risks that COVID-19 poses to people under 70 on the July 7 edition of Fox News' *The Ingraham Angle*, claiming, “The risk of this has been grossly overblown.”
• On the July 15 edition of *America's Newsroom*, Atlas falsely claimed, “It doesn’t matter if children get the disease. ... The data shows that they do not significantly transmit to adults.”
• On the July 25 edition of Fox News’ *Watters World*, Atlas uncritically shilled for the Trump’s disastrous COVID-19 response, saying, “I think the president’s briefings that were done this week were excellent, and I think it’s obvious to everyone that there’s a focus on the data, that they’re closely monitoring the situation.” He also falsely claimed that it’s been “established” that “ children are not significant spreaders,” when in fact the science on this issue remains unsettled.

==

7/19/20

https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/fox-news-peddled-misinformation-about-the-coronavirus-253-times-in-five-days-study/

A new study finds that Fox News peddled misinformation about the coronavirus pandemic 253 times in only five days. The documented instances included claims which undermined science and faith in experts, as well as demands that schools and businesses reopen at the risk of public health.

Primetime host Laura Ingraham, who has no medical or scientific background whatsoever, led the pack with about a quarter of the claims — 63 total, or just more than 12 per show. Additionally, the network’s “straight news” programs contributed about 35% of the misinformation.

The study, published Thursday by media watchdog Media Matters for America, was conducted from July 6 to 10 — the week after a Yahoo News report proclaimed that Fox’s coronavirus coverage had taken a “remarkable turn” for the better:

However haltingly and incompletely, the president’s favorite news outlet has started to acknowledge, across various programs and its news site, that the coronavirus is a far graver threat than even [President Donald] Trump himself will acknowledge.

That report cited two articles on the network’s website and two instances of Fox News personalities Sean Hannity and Steve Doocy making remarks about masks that, while stopping short of endorsements, did not mock them outright.

The article also pointed out that Fox News requires its employees to wear masks at work most of the time. Additionally, the network appears to have canceled a Fox Nation show about the pandemic hosted by coronavirus conspiracy theorist Alex Berenson, though extant episodes remain available.

new study finds that Fox News peddled misinformation about the coronavirus pandemic 253 times in only five days. The documented instances included claims which undermined science and faith in experts, as well as demands that schools and businesses reopen at the risk of public health.

Primetime host Laura Ingraham, who has no medical or scientific background whatsoever, led the pack with about a quarter of the claims — 63 total, or just more than 12 per show. Additionally, the network’s “straight news” programs contributed about 35% of the misinformation.

The data in the Media Matters study flatly contradicts the isolated examples from the Yahoo report. Here is a quick breakdown:

• About half the incidents — 115 claims — challenged scientific consensus and undermined official government recommendations, such as social distancing and masking guidelines.
• “The Ingraham Angle” was the clear leader of the pack, pushing misinformation 63 times, more than half of which came from Ingraham herself, who undermined science a staggering 21 times in five days.
• “Fox & Friends” took second place with 45 instances; “Hannity” and “Tucker Carlson Tonight” finished in a dead heat for third, clocking 21 and 20 instances, respectively.
• Straight news programs delivered more than a third of the misinformation, led by Martha MacCallum’s “The Story” with 20 claims.
• Eight claims defended or endorsed unproven remedies such as hydroxychloroquine, days after the FDA told people not to take it outside of hospitals or clinical trials.
• The network politicized the pandemic 63 times, including 51 claims that regulations requiring masks and closing businesses were rooted in politics and 10 false claims linking recent racial justice protests to a surge in new infections.
• Hosts advocated 34 times to disregard public health concerns in favor of reopening the country’s more than 100,000 K-12 schools.

The misinformation and the seeming coordination with official White House talking points has raised alarm among experts.

For instance, in a “Hannity” interview July 10, the last day covered in the study, Trump responded to a question about the nation’s top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, by saying “he’s made a lot of mistakes.”

That interview fed an ongoing White House effort to discredit Fauci, who pushed back by calling such efforts “bizarre.”

“Ultimately, it hurts the president,” he said.

Then there is the matter of schools. The network and the administration, including Trump and Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, for weeks trumpeted an American Academy of Pediatrics statement advising a measured reopening of schools.

The misinformation’s momentum eventually compelled the academy — together with with the two largest educators’ unions in the country and the School Superintendents Association — to clarify its statement. It now says that reopening “will clearly require substantial new investments in our schools and campuses,” and calls on Congress and the administration “to provide the federal resources needed” to safely educate and care for students.

In an earlier Media Matters audit of the cable network, Fox News posted a 20% decline in its coronavirus coverage between March and May.

But this unrelenting misinformation campaign comes amid a massive surge in COVID-19 infections, which has ravaged healthcare resources in Sun Belt states such as Arizona, California, Florida and Texas. In recent weeks, the U.S. has set seven records for daily new cases, topping 68,000 on July 10, the same day which Trump, who said on numerous occasions that the virus would “miraculously” disappear in April, told Hannity that Fauci had “made a lot of mistakes.”

Now, many states are walking back reopening measures. California closed restaurants, movie theaters and bars. Arizona also shuttered movie theaters and bars, plus gyms and water parks.

On July 13, Fox Business host Lou Dobbs wondered “what in hell is going on” as closures increased. Dr. Marc Siegel, a Fox medical expert, criticized the policies as “not consistent,” “punitive” and “draconian.”

However, there are some fractures within the network. A study from April showed that viewers of Hannity were more likely to die of COVID-19 than Carlson’s viewers. Now, the two seem neck-and-neck in misinformation.

Carlson, who in June broke Hannity’s all-time ratings record, recently claimed there was “no evidence” that masks help constrain the pandemic, in contradiction of guidance from the World Health Organization and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Hannity, meanwhile, took the opposite view.

“I went to my grocery store every week. Guess what?” the host recently asked. “They wore masks. Nobody at my grocery store, thank God, got coronavirus.”

“I think they work,” he added.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/chris-wallace-rips-into-kayleigh-mcenany-for-questioning-faith-of-white-house-reporters-i-never-saw-a-white-house-press-secretary-act-like-that/

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5/20  wallace

fox News host masterfully debunks Trump’s baseless claims about mail-in voting

Alex Henderson

This week, President Donald Trump doubled down on his rhetoric opposing voting by mail — insisting that the practice encourage voter fraud, even while he claims he personally should be…

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Here are just some of the most notable examples of conservative media pushing this negligent narrative:

• America’s Newsroomco-anchor Ed Henry said that “you don’t want to minimize any lives,” but then noted a “best estimate” of the mortality rate is less than 1%, and asked “what is the balance?”

• Fox primetime host Tucker Carlson argued that “you can't just let epidemiologists run a country.”
• Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick appeared on Carlson’s show to suggest that many grandparents, like himself, would be willing to die if it meant saving the economy.
• Right-wing radio host Buck Sexton tweeted, then deleted, a comment saying that “America is going to have to go back to work very soon, even if that means there are more casualties from Covid-19 than would occur under this continued extreme shutdown.” Sexton added that, “it’s a hard thing to say, but it is reality and we need to accept and act on it.”
• Fox News host Steve Hilton said: “You know that famous phrase ‘the cure is worse than the disease’? That is exactly the territory we are hurtling towards"
• [pix]
• Fox News’Bill Hemmer Reports, Heritage Foundation fellow Stephen Moore, a former Trump adviser, said that “we have reached the point where maybe the cure is worse than the disease.”

• A panel on Fox Business’ Mornings with Maria agreed that the economic shutdown is worse then the deadly virus itself, expressing support for the U.K.’s strategy of “encouraging people to go out, pretty much expecting that everybody will get it, and that's the point.”
• The Federalist published an article asking the “harsh” question of “whether the nation might be better off letting a few hundred thousand people die.” The article argues that social distancing policies restrict “freedom” and are giving Americans “a dress rehearsal for tyranny."

• Another article published in The Federalist asked, “Will the costs of a Great Depression outweigh the risks of coronavirus?”
• The Wall Street Journal published an op-ed titled “Rethinking the Coronavirus Shutdown: No society can safeguard public health for long at the cost of its economic health.”
• Fox Nation host Tomi Lahren tweeted, “these Democratic governors and mayors are LOVING all this power. Every day they take away a little more and a little more.” In another tweet, Lahren attacked California Governor Gavin Newsom for closing hiking trails and state parks.

• Top Trump economic adviser Larry Kudlow appeared on America’s Newsroom, where he told co-anchor Ed Henry that he agrees with the president that “the cure can’t be worse than the disease, and we’re gonna have to make some difficult trade-offs.”
• The Gateway Pundit published an article cheering Trump's tweets for suggesting “the destruction of the US economy over [the] Chinese Flu is not in his plans.”
• Right-wing commentator Bill Mitchell theorized that the virus was a bioweapon designed to hurt the economy, tweeting, “The difference between a #BioWeapon and a #BioEconomicWeapon? A #BioWeapon is designed to destroy the enemy's fighting and working age population. A #BioEconomicWeapon is designed to destroy an enemy's economy through fear. #BioEconomicWeapons require #Media allies to work.”

• Fox News host Mark Levin said that “we cannot have medical experts and scientists making economic policy. We just can’t. So there needs to be a more sober look at this.”
• Right-wing radio host Jesse Kelly tweeted: “You do not destroy your economy for any reason. ... The show must go on.”

• On The Next Revolution, Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk argued that Americans are panicked about the “economic catastrophe” and therefore must go back to work, saying that “you cannot cage the American entrepreneur.”
• The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh published an article saying that “no government” has ever “willfully plunged itself into a depression, obliterating its own economy on purpose, in order to prevent some other potential calamity."
• Fox News host Laura Ingraham tweeted that “doctors provide medical treatment and cures—they should not be the determinative voices in policy making now or at the end of 15 days."

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mma 220

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120

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/sean-hannity-trump-political-operative-and-fox-news-doesnt-care

you’d be forgiven if, amid the lead-up to President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial in the U.S. Senate and the ongoing Democratic presidential primary, you missed BuzzFeed News’ story last week detailing how Fox News host Sean Hannity served “as a central point of contact” between the president and his associates under investigation during special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe of Russian interference in the 2016 election. But the report -- and Fox News’ lack of interest in addressing it -- marks new terrain for Hannity’s unpaid position in the Trump White House and his network’s effective merger with the administration.

Hannity has spent the last few years finding new and original ways to set afire the journalism ethics rules enforced elsewhere, from endorsing the then-Republican nominee in a campaign ad to failing to disclose that he shared a lawyer with the president to speaking at one of Trump’s rallies. Each of these instances underscored Hannity’s unconscionable role as a political operative whose first loyalty is to Trump, someone who simultaneously hosts a propaganda show enforcing the president’s positions while shaping Trump’s views as a powerful adviser.

The details BuzzFeed News revealed after combing through summaries of Mueller team interviews with key witnesses show that the Fox host hasn’t just been advising the president. Former Trump campaign chief Paul Manafort and longtime Trump lawyer Michael Cohen each revealed to the special counsel’s office that Hannity had also counseled them on how to respond to probes from Mueller and the House of Representatives, respectively, even as he reported on their cases on his Fox show.

BuzzFeed News quotes from a particularly instructive summary of an October 2018 interview, in which Manafort describes Hannity as acting as a “back channel” to the president between the time FBI raided Manafort’s residence in July 2017 and when he was indicted in October 2017. “Manafort knew Hannity was speaking to Trump around then because Hannity would tell Manafort to hang in there, that he had been talking to Trump, that Trump had his back, and things like that,” the summary states. “Manafort understood his conversations with Hannity to be a message from Trump.”

The summary provides new context for text messages Hannity sent Manafort during that period urging the former Trump campaign chair to “stay strong,” suggesting that Manafort at least believed the remarks to be from the president to influence him not to cooperate with the Mueller probe. And it shows Hannity privately and egregiously engaged with the subjects of his putative reporting.

These revelations would be completely unacceptable at any other network. But the most important line of BuzzFeed News’ story is the one that indicates that for Hannity’s network, they aren’t even worth publicly addressing: “Fox News declined to answer a series of questions BuzzFeed News sent the network about Hannity’s appearance in the documents.”

This passivity marks a change for Fox, which has previously responded to new revelations about its star host’s second life as an unpaid Trump aide first by pledging tough action and later by at least pretending to care with empty statements.Hannity’s 2016 appearance in the Trump ad led to a swift statement from a Fox spokesperson promising that it would not happen again. After news broke that Cohen had at one point represented Hannity -- a fact the Fox host never mentioned on-air while discussing Cohen’s own legal troubles -- Fox issued a statement saying that the host had been “spoken to.” And Hannity’s appearance on stage at the November 2018 Trump rally led to Fox statement that the network did not “condone” the appearance and that it “has been addressed.”

These were all woefully insufficient responses to what would likely have been, at any other news outlet, firing offenses.But they at least indicated that Fox felt it had to say something about its employee’s casual disregard for basic precepts of journalistic integrity. That no longer appears to be the case.

It’s possible that Fox executives have simply given up trying to deny the reality that Hannity’s top priority is the president, not their network or their audience. But this shift in public relations strategy may also speak to a shift in the power dynamic between Fox’s “news” and “opinion” side. In the past, Hannity’s ethical misdeeds would lead to an angry backlash from his “news”-side colleagues, sometimes spilling out into public view in the form of enraged anonymous comments to other outlets.

But over the past year, Fox’s “news” side has been completely routed in this internal battle. Longtime lead anchor Shepard Smith, who was willing to push back against the disinformation rampant elsewhere on the network and even feud with his prime-time colleagues, left the channel in October. His replacement, Bill Hemmer, is more comfortable hewing to the pro-Trump line and has used the media rollout for his new gig carefully avoiding ruffling the feathers of either Fox’s “opinion” hosts or the White House. Hemmer’s own replacement, Ed Henry, has spent the last few years cozily ensconced on Fox & Friends’ curvy couch as a co-host of its weekend edition. With Smith gone, voices of criticism within Fox seem to have been muted.

With the “news” side either replaced by shills or cowed by the changing of the guard, Fox executives no longer face internal pressure to rein in the likes of Hannity. That may leave them with no reason to restrain their opinion hosts other than their own regard for journalistic ethics. And as the ongoing silence on the Manafort connection shows, that doesn’t amount to much.

cf

1. ### :{Sean Hannity and the end of the Fox News standards charade:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:

11/06/18 10:25 AM EST

2. ### Sean Hannity is Trump lawyer Michael Cohen’s secret client

04/16/18 3:55 PM EDT

3. ### Shep Smith's departure is a disaster for Fox News

10/11/19 4:59 PM EDT

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For decades, Fox News executives have responded to the critique that the network serves as a mouthpiece for the Republican Party by pointing to the work of its “news side” journalists. But Trump’s election and his administration’s effective mergerwith Fox has created a new problem for the rebuttal: Many of Fox’s longest-serving “news side” staffers have headed for the exits.

Last month, it was Shep Smith who left.

Now, Catherine Herridge, Fox’s chief intelligence correspondent and a veteran of more than two decades there, is the latest to leave the network. CBS News announced that she had been hired as a senior investigative correspondent. Herridge said that "I feel privileged to join a team where facts and storytelling will always matter.”

Herridge’s reporting at Fox often aligned with Republican talking points and fed the conspiracy theories of the network’s prime-time stars. But she had inexplicably won the respect of journalists outside Fox, and as such her departure is another blow to Fox’s embattled “news side.”

Fox staffers speaking anonymously to reporters have over the last few years given quotes like Fox “feels like an extension of the Trump White House,” “We have a chance to turn the corner at Fox, and perpetuating this conspiracy theory damages our integrity,” “ARE WE STILL AIRING THAT SHIT?!” and “People throughout the company think a new line was crossed.”

To the extent that there has been a battle of values between Fox’s “news” and “opinion” sides, it is clear who is winning. Fox News is a Trump propaganda operation, through and through.

Here's what Fox's "news side" really is: Fox "news side" anchor Shannon Bream bragged about Fox and challenged people to watch one of its news programs for a week and to find any unfairness. We watched her own show for a week and found the same propaganda that you'd find from the opinion side on Fox.

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https://www.mediamatters.org/shannon-bream/shannon-breams-1-week-challenge-proves-foxs-straight-news-just-more-pro-trump-lies

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Shannon Bream's “1 week challenge” proves that Fox's “straight news” is just more pro-Trump propaganda

Shep Smith reportedly resigned because of Fox's pro-Trump lies. Shannon Bream's “news” program exemplifies the problem.

WRITTEN BY ERIC KLEEFELD

PUBLISHED 10/29/19 11:35 AM EDT

Fox “news side” anchor Shannon Bream bragged about the network's news division. A week long review of her show Fox News @ Night revealed the same pro-Trump lies that you'd expect from any of Fox's opinion shows.

After Shep Smith recently resigned from the network (reportedly due to its pro-Trump bend), Bream publicly claimed that the network’s “straight news” side — as distinct from its opinion commentary — is still thriving. “If anything, I’d say our news division is growing, and I’d welcome people to check us out for themselves and make their own decisions,” she told Forbes last week. “I’ll give you an experiment: watch us for an hour, pick one of the news shows: 6, 7, 11,” Bream said. “There are any number of products you can choose. Watch it for a week and get back to me. I would love to hear what you have to say.”

Bream posted a “1 week challenge”:

We decided to take Bream up on this challenge: This writer watched her show for all of last week. Every episode featured a mix of the usual Republican talking points from guests, such as complaints about the alleged unfairness of the House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry processes, alongside pro-Trump obfuscations, and outright falsehoods presented without pushback — making the show indistinguishable from any of Fox News’ purported “opinion” shows.

Bream’s show serves to actively misinform her viewers

On the October 21 edition of the show, Fox News correspondent Garrett Tenney merely repeated that in an interview with Fox host Sean Hannity, President Donald Trump talked about issues “such as that [Democratic National Committee] server which the FBI says was hacked by Russians, but the president suspects Ukrainian involvement”:

CitationFrom the October 21, 2019, edition of Fox News' Fox News @ Night with Shannon Bream

GARRETT TENNEY (FOX NEWS CORRESPONDENT): The president tonight is defending that phone call which is at the heart of the impeachment inquiry by focusing on the issues he raised with President Zelensky, such as that DNC server which the FBI says was hacked by Russians, but the president suspects Ukrainian involvement. Watch.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: There was a server, the DNC server, that never went to the FBI. The FBI didn't take it. It was taken by somebody that, I guess, it's CrowdStrike. That's what I've heard. And referring to that, that's not for an election that's going into the future. That's for a past election that was a catastrophe.

Neither Tenney nor Bream offered any pushback on the president’s false claim about the DNC server. In fact, not only is there no evidence that Ukraine is involved in the DNC email hack, the server doesn’t even exist as a single physical object. The DNC emails were constructed across multiple cloud computing servers, and the security firm CrowdStrike turned over complete forensic replicas of those virtual disk images to the FBI.

These facts make Trump’s search for “the DNC server” in Ukraine disconnected from reality. But a Fox News viewer might never know that from watching the network’s “news”-side coverage.

On that same Monday episode, Bream presented what seemed like a straightforward overview of Trump’s boast that he’s “bringing troops home” from Syria, reporting, “Critics are pointing to the latest U.S. troop deployments elsewhere in the region asking, what about those troops?”

CitationFrom the October 21, 2019, edition of Fox News' Fox News @ Night with Shannon Bream

But the next night, Bream uncritically presented the administration’s talking points about the controversial U.S. withdrawal:

CitationFrom the October 22, 2019, edition of Fox News Fox News @ Night with Shannon Bream

SHANNON BREAM (ANCHOR): Tonight, Vice President Mike Pence says he's optimistic because negotiations for a permanent end to the Turkish offensive are ongoing. Also saying that President Trump is keeping his word to the American people by bringing our troops home.

On the October 23 edition of the show, Bream presented a segment about Democrats’ impeachment strategy using rhetoric almost identical to that of the Trump campaign, warning: “As the possibility of impeachment picks up steam, elitistsnationwide appear to be seizing the opportunity to offend the half of the country that actually supports President Trump.”

Video file

CitationFrom the October 23, 2019, edition of Fox News' Fox News @ Night with Shannon Bream

That same day, Fox News had itself reported on the new Quinnipiac poll, which showed Trump’s approval rating at only 38% compared to 55% approval for the impeachment inquiry and 48% support for outright impeachment and removal. But viewers watching Bream’s Wednesday segment would not know that the majority of Americans support the impeachment inquiry.

Then on October 24, Bream hosted renowned journalist Ronan Farrow, whose reporting and new book Catch and Kill on media cover-ups of sexual harassment and assault reports have made enormous waves in the industry. During the interview, Bream stepped out of her supposedly “straight news” anchor role to play partisan defense: She tried to deny Farrow’s reporting that the National Enquirer’s catch-and-kills on Trump included reports of sexual assault and not just consensual affairs.

Video file

CitationFrom the October 24, 2019, edition of Fox News' Fox News @ Night with Shannon Bream

Bream was out on Friday, but guest anchor Mike Emanuel still played host to more far-out, right-wing conspiracy theories. In a discussion about Attorney General Bill Barr’s ongoing attempts to discredit the previous investigations of the Trump campaign and Russian involvement in the 2016 election, criminal defense attorney David Bruno raised an allegation about Joseph Mifsud, the Maltese professor suspected of being a connection between the Russian government and former Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos. (Mifsud’s current whereabouts are unknown.)

“Mifsud is the one that fed George Papadopoulos the original information that Russians had dirt,” Bruno stated. “Now, can you imagine if that came from the United States government internally? I don't know that speculation, but that is the most interesting part about the Italy connection is Joseph Mifsud.”

Video file

CitationFrom the October 25, 2019, edition of Fox News' Fox News @ Night with Shannon Bream

There was no pushback from Emanuel against Bruno’s reference to a baseless pro-Trump conspiracy theory that the then-presidential candidate was somehow the victim of an elaborate frame-up by the U.S. government.

And as a special bonus to the “1 week challenge,” this past Monday night’s episode featured among other things a discussion with Trump-supporting Fox News contributor Robert Jeffress, an extremist religious right figure who has been criticized for religious bigotry, and estranged Democratic pollster Doug Schoen — both of whom agreed that Trump is not a racist.

“Look, I've known President Trump for four years, there's not one scintilla of evidence that he's a racist,” Jeffress said. “In fact, anybody who knows the president knows that if you support him, he embraces you, regardless of your race. And if you oppose him, he attacks you, regardless of your race. That's the essence of what it means to be colorblind."

Video file

CitationFrom the October 28, 2019, edition of Fox News' Fox News @ Night with Shannon Bream

Jeffresscontinued: “But Shannon, I'm not sure the Democrats want to be the ones talking about racism, when in their history, they're the ones who supported the Ku Klux Klan, they opposed the abolition of slavery, and they continue to worship at the shrine of Planned Parenthood.”

In response, neither Bream not Schoen mentioned Trump’s documented history of racial discrimination in housing and hiring, as well as the fact that he built his political following by spreading the racist conspiracy theory that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States. There are plenty more examples.

As Media Matters previously documented, Bream has also been a reliable mouthpiece for anti-abortion talking points, such as repeating misinformation from the anti-choice group Center for Medical Progress, which engaged in a 2015 smear campaign against Planned Parenthood by releasing deceptive videos. In addition, she has frequently misgendered trans people or referred to them as a gender with which they do not identify. It is a stigmatizing form of harassment that goes against journalistic best practices.

Bottom line: You’re not going to find unfiltered news coverage on Fox News — not even from the “news” side, because there really isn’t a news side at all.

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As the last credible journalist to have a daily show on Fox News, Shep Smith probably should have resigned a long time ago. The network has been a right-wing propaganda network for years, and under Trump has turned into regime TV. On Friday, he finally did resign, and initial reports have indicated that his actions were driven by how bad the network has gotten.

Smith's resignation comes shortly after Fox News executives reportedly sided against him in an on-air feud with Fox News host Tucker Carlson over the seriousness of Trump's behavior in regards to Ukraine. In the end, Carlson said thatSmith was giving partisan opinion and not news. The entire episode was extremely telling: Tucker Carlson portrayed Smith's show -- at first implicitly and then explicitly -- as leftist fake news, much the same way he does nightly with CNN and MSNBC, even teaming up with close Trump ally Joseph diGenova. And Fox News executives were fine with it.

Smith's departure is a disaster for Fox News. As Media Matters' Matt Gertz wrote in the wake of Smith's announcement, "Smith’s willingness to push back against the misinformation rampant elsewhere on the network had made him extremely valuable to Fox. It provided the network’s executives with a fig leaf they could wave whenever critics argued that Fox was nothing more than a propaganda apparatus on behalf of the president and his allies. That fig leaf is gone. Fox belongs to the Seans Hannity and Lous Dobbs. And now, everyone knows it."

Gird your loins: Fox News is about to get even worse.

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/longtime-fox-news-producer-i-cant-tell-you-how-unpopular-trump-is-here/

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Longtime Fox News producer: ‘I can’t tell you how unpopular Trump is here’

Written by Dana Kennedy / DC Report September 12, 2019

Does Fox News need President Donald Trump? Or does President Trump need Fox News? If former Fox News strongman and Trump supporter, the late Roger Ailes, were still running the network, those questions might never come up.

But as Trump himself tweeted in June after Fox reported that Trump was trailing five presidential candidates in the polls, “Something weird is going on at Fox News.”

True enough – and Trump seems unable to stop it. And it’s not just that his longtime ally Rupert Murdoch turned the leadership of Fox over to his son Lachlan last year. “I can’t tell you how unpopular Trump is here,” a longtime Fox News producer told DCReport, “and people are getting bolder about saying so.”

The soap opera within a soap opera at Fox News isn’t hurting ratings. Far from it. Even though Trump began criticizing Fox back in January, which in turn kicked up bitter in-fighting between Fox’s on-air talent and producers,FNC was the most-watched basic cable network in America for the 34th week in a row the week of Aug. 26, TVNewser reported.

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Compared with the same week one year ago, Fox was up 6% but MSNBC and CNN were down 24% and 21%, respectively.

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“Trump’s base has been with Fox News longer than they’ve been with Trump,” veteran TV critic Bruce Fretts (TV Guide, Entertainment Weekly), told DCReport.

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‘Loyal to Fox, Not Trump’

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“They’re still probably going to vote for Trump but their real loyalty is to Fox. Trump still needs Fox to speak to his base. So he’s got to either bite the bullet and say these are my guys—or totally shoot himself in the foot.”

But for now, Trump’s strategy is to increase the potshots at his once-favorite network.

“Sharpiegate,” the inane media storm over an actual hurricane that Trump furiously insisted all week could have hit Alabama, is the latest presidential debacle to further divide not just the country–but the once-faithful at Fox.

In recent months, longtime FNC anchors Shepard Smith and Neil Cavutohave broken rank spectacularly with what Smith calls “Trumplandia” while Fox’s pro-Trump (and prime-time) stalwarts, Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson, the network’s biggest moneymakers, along with Jeanine Pirro and Lou Dobbs, have defiantly backed him.

At the end of August, even Fox’s longtime political analyst and frequent Trump supporter Brit Hume fired back at Trump after Trump ripped the network for hiring left-wing panelists like former DNC chair Donna Brazile and Juan Williams.

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“The New Fox News is letting millions of GREAT people down!” Trump tweeted. “We have to start looking for a new News Outlet. Fox isn’t working for us anymore!”

Tweeted Hume in response, “Fox News isn’t supposed to work for you.”

Last week, Fox’s White House correspondent John Roberts got dragged into the middle when he was summoned to the Oval Office after his afternoon live shot. According to an internal Fox email from Roberts that was obtained by CNN, Trump wanted Roberts to acknowledge that the original forecasts for Hurricane Dorian “had Alabama in the warning cone.” CNN also quoted a White House aide privy to the meeting saying that Trump called Roberts in to “hit back at Shepard Smith.”

Doctored Hurricane Map

Earlier that same day, a visibly disgusted Smith lit into Trump over both his refusal to admit he was wrong about Alabama being in the path of Dorian–and for whipping out a clearly doctored hurricane map during a White House briefing Tuesday.

“Why would the president of the United States do this?” Smith said. “He decries fake news that isn’t and disseminates fake news that is. Think China pays the tariffs. The wall is going up. Historic inauguration crowds. The Russia probe was a witch hunt. You need an ID to buy cereal. Noise from windmills causes cancer. It’s endless!”

Smith may not be Fox News’ highest-rated personality but he is among the most respected at the network and his relentless fact-checking of Trump carries considerable weight.

“There’s a real downside to being in the tank for Trump,” said Fretts. “Fox News went all-in on him at first. They thought hey, this guy we propped up got elected—and we can exploit this power. Then Ailes, Bill O’Reilly and Bill Shine were brought down but it was too late. They had created a monster. And now those with some integrity at the network, like Shep and Cavuto, are distancing themselves bigtime and calling Trump out.”

Last spring, Trump began threatening to look for “another network” and repeatedly cited One America News Network, a relatively tiny right-wing news network based out of San Diego possibly best-known for hiring a young Tomi Lahren to host a talk show right out of college.

OANN, launched in 2013, has been relentless in their favorable coverage of Trump.The Washington Post reported in 2017 that “On One America newscasts, the Trump administration is a juggernaut of progress, a shining success with a daily drumbeat of achievements.”

Oddly, Charles Herring, president of OANN, was less than effusive when discussing Trump in both a telephone conversation and email with DCReport.

“Since 2015, before Mr. Trump announced that he was running for President, the network has been aware that Mr. Trump is an avid viewer,” Herring said.

“Our mission has not changed since the inception of the network and has not been influenced by our Presidents since launch. One America News Network appreciates the support from all of our viewers.”

Editor’s Note: Dana Kennedy is a former Fox News anchor, as well as a former reporter for MSNBC, CNN and ABC News.

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https://www.mediamatters.org/jeanine-pirro/fox-host-jeanine-pirro-will-financially-help-trump-keynoting-jexit-fundraiser-his

Jeanine Pirro doesn’t just support President Donald Trump on her Fox News program -- she’s also padding his bank account by headlining an upcoming “Jexit” event supporting Trump at his Washington, D.C., hotel.

Jexit is a Florida non-profit corporation which aims “to educate and encourage American Jews that are currently members of the Democratic Party to exit the Democratic Party and join President Trump who is the greatest friend to Israel and the Jewish people.” The group also claims that there’s “anti-Semitism in the Democratic Party.” Trump recently pushed the anti-Semitic smear that Jewish Democrats are “very disloyal to Israel” and has encouraged Jewish people to leave the Democratic Party.

Pirro is scheduled to keynote an October 20 fundraiser for Jexit at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C. Tickets to the event range in price from $165 to $250 for VIP guests (the VIP level includes a “private Lincoln Room meet and Champagne toast with Judge Jeanine”). All attendees receive a signed copy of Pirro’s new book Radicals, Resistance & Revenge: The Left’s Plot to Remake America -- which presumably means that Pirro also stands to financially benefit from the event. Fox News regular and Trump campaign adviser Steve Rogers will also appear at the event. 

Pirro has repeatedly boosted the president's bottom line by appearing at events at Trump properties. In February, for instance, she headlined a pro-Trump party at the president’s Mar-a-Lago hotel in Florida for which the proceeds went to his club. That Republican financial support is a two-way street: GOP organizations have paid Pirro more than $230,000 for speeches since Trump’s inauguration.

Trump and members of his administration have frequently appeared at events at or stayed at Trump properties. The Washington Post has reported that “the federal government and GOP campaigns have spent at least $1.6 million at his properties since he entered office, according to a Post analysis, though the actual figure is likely to be higher because of the difficulty of obtaining up-to-date records.” And numerous people and groups looking to influence the Trump administration, such as lobbyists, businesses, and foreign governments, have also spent big money at Trump properties.

Other Fox News personalities, including Greg Gutfeld, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and Chris Stirewalt (who is a member of Fox’s “news” division), have also appeared at events at Trump properties.

Pirro is also scheduled to do at least three events connected with the group Trump Team 2020 Florida, an organization which is not actually affiliated with Trump’s reelection campaign but which is nonetheless dedicated to helping him win next November. Pirro will appear at Florida events and give out her book to paid attendees on September 18, September 19, and September 22.

In November, after Pirro and Hannity appeared at a rally with Trump, Fox News claimedthat it “does not condone any talent participating in campaign events” -- an assertion has been proved false over and over again.

Pirro recently complained during a commercial break on Sebastian Gorka’s radio program that Fox News has restricted her book tour schedule, stating that the network “reviews everything. They’re unbelievable.” She also confirmed that the network “suspended” her over her bigoted remarks about Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and said, “I'm not going to get fired. You know? I'm worried that that suspension was the basis to tee up for anything I do wrong, they'll fire me.”

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Fox's Geraldo Rivera: Trump is being “unfairly mugged by the media” for repeatedly lying about Alabama and Hurricane Dorian

09/05/19 9:14 AM EDT

During coverage of Hurricane Dorian, Fox “hard news” show hosts climate denier

09/03/19 5:14 PM EDT

https://www.mediamatters.org/martha-maccallum/during-coverage-hurricane-dorian-fox-hard-news-show-hosts-climate-denier

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During coverage of Hurricane Dorian, Fox “hard news” show hosts climate denier

Roy Spencer uses his Fox News appearance to deny the documented link between climate change and hurricanes

Special PROGRAMS

CLIMATE & ENERGY

WRITTEN BY JOHN WHITEHOUSE

PUBLISHED 09/03/19 5:14 PM EDT

During coverage of Hurricane Dorian, Fox “hard news” anchor Martha MacCallum hosted climate denier Roy Spencer who denied the proven link between hurricanes and climate change. Spencer also laughably asserted that climate change was occurring slowly; MacCallum did not provide any substantive pushback to his statements.

Video file

CitationFrom September 2 edition of Fox News' coverage of Hurricane Dorian

MARTHA MACCALLUM (ANCHOR): Special breaking coverage tonight of Hurricane Dorian. Dorian is an extremely powerful storm, and we are sure to hear people blame its strength on global climate change. So, should we? Is that correct?Roy Spencer is a meteorologist, principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, and author of the book Inevitable Disaster: Why Hurricanes Can't Be Blamed on Global Warming. So we know where you're coming from on this, Roy. It's good to have you with us tonight. You know, a lot of people look at this and they say that global warming has heated the surface of the ocean and that over time, those trapped gases continue to make that hotter and that that warm water is what leads to the fact that we've had five [Category] 5s in just the last few years. What do you say to them?

ROY SPENCER (METEOROLOGIST): Well, there's all kinds of statistics, Martha, that you could look at. The ones I look at are the long-term, because that's climate. Climate is long-term. And since 1900, out of all of the major hurricanes that have hit Florida, there has been no long-term trend in either their intensity or in the number of major hurricanes -- that is Cat. 3 or stronger -- that have hit Florida. Even if Dorian were to hit Florida as a Category 4, which it looks like now is not going to happen, there still would be no long-term trend. Now yes, we do expect, theoretically, that warmer waters should lead to stronger hurricanes. And the waters out around the Bahamas, where Dorian really intensified, are unusually warm. But if you go back, again, through the last hundred or more years, and look at the sea surface temperatures in that area and the hurricanes that have hit Florida, it turns out that the seven hurricanes -- since 1871 -- the seven hurricanes that went over the most unusually warm water for that time of year, and then hit Florida -- all of them occurred before 1950.

MACCALLUM: That's very interesting. Another statistic out there, and you tell me what you think about it, is that since 1970, you've had a one-tenths of a percent celsius increase every decade. So it's this slow but steady climb, and according to those numbers, that show that over time, the oceans are warming up. What do you say about that?

SPENCER: That's right. The oceans are warming up.

MACCALLUM: What do you say about that?

SPENCER: The oceans are warming up. The atmosphere is warming up. I think, probably based on the theory, over 50% of that is due to humans. But the warming is very slow. And warm waters is only one part of hurricane formation, OK? In order to have a hurricane, most of the tropics -- most of the tropics all the time, during the summer, are capable of producing or supporting a major hurricane. What's usually missing is a preexisting disturbance. For instance, most of the hurricanes we get started out as African easterly waves that come off of Africa, south of the Sahara Desert. That's where most of them come from, the disturbances. So you need that. But you -- even more important, you need low wind shear. So you've got these different ingredients you have to have. It's kind of like tornadoes. You have to have a special mixture of certain ingredients. It's not just sea surface temperature. Otherwise we'd be having major hurricanes all over the tropics, and we don't. They are a relatively rare phenomenon. So, yeah sea surface temperatures are important but statistically, like I said, if you look at the data going back over 100 years, you really can't support increasing hurricane activity with the increasing sea surface temperatures that we actually are seeing.

Contrary to Spencer’s assertions, the link between hurricanes and climate change is a well-known fact. The Union of Concerned Scientists broke the science down into three parts: Warmer water gives more fuel to hurricanes; rising seas worsen storm surges; and warmer air holds more water for rainfall.

The link between hurricanes and climate change

CitationThe Union of Concerned Scientists

Inside Climate News also points to a study linking slow-moving hurricanes like Dorian and Harvey to climate change.

Beyond that, Spencer’s assertion that climate change-driven “warming is very slow” is preposterous. Scientists are warning that the planet is reaching a tipping point beyond which the Earth could be pushed into “into a spiral of runaway climate change.”

Lastly, it’s ridiculous for Fox News to book Spencer at all. Spencer is a longtime climate-denying gadfly who is the “official climatologist” of Rush Limbaugh, someone else who frequently lies about climate change. Spencer has previously argued that climate activists “are supporting policies that will kill far more people than the Nazis ever did.”

In 2011, an editor of the journal Remote Sensing resigned after concluding that it should never have published a study by Spencer denying climate change due to “fundamental methodological errors or false claims.” The editor also harshly criticized Fox News for running with and exaggerating the study. Spencer had also released a study in 2003 that used faulty calculations to purportedly show that temperatures in the troposphere had remained constant over the previous two decades.

Fox News anchor Shep Smith has acknowledged that climate change is real. MacCallum’s decision to host Spencer on her “news”-side program goes to show how little the facts actually matter at Fox.

As Hurricane Dorian wreaks havoc, Fox casts doubt on climate change science

09/05/19 12:42 PM EDT

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:{Fox News' “hard news” program The Story is taking Donald Trump's idea to buy Greenland seriously:(style="box-sizing:border-box;fill:#ffffff;"):}:

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https://thinkprogress.org/fox-news-host-decimates-trump-aide-stephen-miller-racism-hypocricy-8a8b7b4b5db3/

Stephen Miller, a top White House adviser said to be the architect of the administration’s cruel anti-immigrant policies, went on Fox News Sunday to defend President Donald Trump’s latest round of racist and hypocritical attacks on congresswomen of color. The interview went rather poorly for him.

Host Chris Wallace began the interview by asking Miller about Trump’s recent tweets attacking Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) and demanding that they go back to their home countries (Omar was born in Somalia and came to the United States as a child, the other three are natural-born citizens). Miller responded that the president isn’t a racist because the jobless rate has been falling for racial minorities.

“I think the term ‘racist,’ Chris, has become a label that is too often deployed by left/Democrats in this country simply to try to silence and punish and suppress people they disagree with, speech that they don’t want to hear,” Miller began, asserting that Trump “has been a president for all Americans” because of “historically low black unemployment rates, historically low Hispanic unemployment rates,” and his crackdown on immigration “to protect safety, security, rising wages for all American citizens.”

Wallace responded that Trump’s claims that Mexican immigrants are mostly rapists and drug dealers and his proposed total ban on Muslims were “not protecting the American people” but “playing the race card.”

After Miller tried to change the subject to criminal gang members, Wallace shut him down, reminding him that Trump had pushed racist “birther” attacks on Barack Obama. Miller likened those efforts to undermine the legitimacy of the former president to questions that were once raised about John McCain. Wallace quickly fact-checked him, noting that concerns surrounding the late Arizona senator were not racial, but based on the 2008 nominee’s birth in the Panama Canal Zone.

Miller then argued that questioning people’s Americanism is okay as long as you don’t intend it to be racist.

Wallace also fact-checked Miller when he attempted to claim Trump had been “clear” that he disagreed with his supporters’ racist chant — repeating his own attacks on Omar and demanding she be sent back to Somalia.

“No, he was clear after the fact,” he responded. “He let it go on for 13 seconds and [it] was only when it diminished that he started talking again.” Wallace noted that Trump “said nothing there or in his tweet after that rally that indicated any concern about the chant.”

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https://www.mediamatters.org/research/2019/05/13/fox-news-lie/223683

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We know that Fox News has unprecedented influence on Trump's decision-making. One example this week shows just how pervasive Fox's influence is-- and how much taxpayer money could be at risk.

The Washington Post reported Thursday that Trump has “alarmed” military commanders and Department of Homeland Security officials by aggressively lobbying them to grant a border wall contract to Fisher Industries, a North Dakota-based construction company whose CEO, Tommy Fisher, has regularly appeared on Fox and other conservative outlets to promote his company’s bid.

Fisher has used a Fox-centric PR strategy to directly pitch the president in hopes of obtaining a federal contract, making at least 10 appearances on Fox News and Fox Business since January 2018.

And Fox’s promotion of Fisher’s bid has not been limited to the network’s supposed “opinion” shows. The network’s flagship “news” broadcast, Special Report, ran a packaged report that essentially served as an infomercial for Fisher’s proposal. Introduced by anchor Bret Baier and reported by national correspondent William La Jeunesse, the segment featured an interview with Fisher and credulously repeated his claims that he could construct the wall “faster, better, and cheaper.”

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For years, Media Matters has documented how Fox News operates as the communications are of the Republican Party. Among other examples, party officials cycle in and out of the network like a revolving door and Fox employees fundraise and even stump for Republican candidates.

However, on many occasions Fox employees went even further, using their close relationships to party officials for personally benefit. This week, Media Matters compiled a comprehensive list of examples of Fox figures using their proximity to Republican officials for personal gain and celebrity to benefit the party.

Here are some of the most egregious examples:

• Fox hosts Tucker Carlson, Lou Dobbs, Greg Gutfeld, Sean Hannity, Pete Hegseth, Laura Ingraham, and Jeanine Pirro have received over $500,000 combined in speaking fees from Republican groups while working at the network.
• Members of Fox's purported "news" division, such as anchor Shannon Bream and Fox News Senior Vice President of business news Neil Cavuto, have also headlined conservative events, including alongside Republican officials. In one instance, Bream spoke at a conference that also featured then-Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke (whom she later interviewed on her program).
• Fox News employees have spoken at events that have financially benefited President Donald Trump. For instance, Chris Stirewalt -- a member of Fox’s “news” division -- spoke at an event for the petroleum industry at Trump International Hotel Washington, D.C. And Jeanine Pirro has done events in which the proceeds went to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Florida.
• Three Fox News hosts -- Brian Kilmeade, Pete Hegseth, and Shannon Bream -- have cancelled speeches at conservative events this year following Media Matters reporting.

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Fox News likes to tout the “hard news” side of its operation, setting up a false distinction between its right-wing prime-time hosts and its news anchors. A number of powerful people buy into this notion as well, touting the "vaunted" news division at Fox.

The notion is complete and utter nonsense. It's a total lie, propagated just to normalize Fox's lies. How bad is it? We reviewed Fox News and Fox Business for four months, and found that the news side pushed misinformation and lies every single day.

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https://www.alternet.org/2018/08/when-will-real-journalists-fox-news-step-denounce-trump-propaganda-machine/

 article originally appeared on rantt.com.

Early Sunday morning, President Trump again recklessly dubbed the media “enemy of the people.” This time, he suggested journalists could spark war.

Trump tweeted:

The Fake News hates me saying that they are the Enemy of the People only because they know it’s TRUE. I am providing a great service by explaining this to the American People. They purposely cause great division & distrust. They can also cause War! They are very dangerous & sick!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 5, 2018

“‘Enemy of the people’ is an incendiary phrase,” reported Scott Simon on *Weekend Edition Saturday* on NPR. “It’s been uttered by some of history’s most vicious thugs — Robespierre, Goebbels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao — to vilify their opponents…who were often murdered."

At Trump’s rally in Tampa on Tuesday night, CNN senior White House correspondent Jim Acosta was assailed by an angry mob of Trump supporters. In a video Acosta tweeted, one rally-goer showed off his “F*** the Media” t-shirt, while others spewed venom and waved middle fingers.

Just a sample of the sad scene we faced at the Trump rally in Tampa. I’m very worried that the hostility whipped up by Trump and some in conservative media will result in somebody getting hurt. We should not treat our fellow Americans this way. The press is not the enemy. pic.twitter.com/IhSRw5Ui3R

— Jim Acosta (@Acosta) August 1, 2018

On Thursday, Acosta implored White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders to disavow Trump’s refrain that the media is the “enemy of the people.” She refused to accede. Instead, Sanders told Acosta, “I appreciate your passion,” and proceeded to list the ways in which she has felt threatened.

In a conversation with HLN’s S.E. Cupp, Acosta said, “My sense of it is that these opinions that these folks have at these rallies ― they’re shaped by what they see in the prime time hours of Fox News…”

Over at Fox, prime-time host, Sean Hannity validated Acosta’s hunch. In his opening monologue on Tuesday night, Hannity effectively blamed Acosta: “The people of this country, they’re screaming at you for a reason.” The following day, the two locked horns on Twitter.

Hannity is a propagandist for profit, peddling lies every night. He says he’s just a talk show host, not a journalist. But he’s injecting poison into the nation’s political bloodstream warping public attitudes about the press. I’m confident in the long run the truth will prevail.

— Jim Acosta (@Acosta) August 2, 2018

In response, Hannity unleashed vitriol and vulgarity: “Jimmy @Acosta sorry your precious feelings are hurt & that people see through your lying bullshit for what it is. FAKE NEWS. #CNNSUCKS.”

Whipping his audience into a foaming frenzy isn’t new for Hannity. He took to the airwaves in June after the horrific shooting at the Capital Gazette newspaper in Annapolis where five journalists were killed.

Blaming African-American Congresswoman Maxine Waters for the murder spree, Hannity said, “I’ve been saying now for days that something horrible was going to happen because of the rhetoric. Really Maxine?”

At the time, Hannity was roundly criticized on social media. Ben Collins, a reporter for NBC News, tweeted:

“When is it enough for the real people in the daytime news division at Fox News to step in and denounce this guy?”

Who are these real people in the daytime news division at Fox?

“Straight news” journalists at Fox include Shepard Smith, Bill Hemmer, Bret Baier, Chris Wallace, Ed Henry, John Roberts, and Eric Shawn. Enough is enough. When will these real journalists step up and denounce Hannity and the Fox propaganda machine?

Fox has long claimed there’s a firewall between its hard news journalists and opinion hosts like Hannity, Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, Jeanine Pirro, etc.

“They are analogous, Fox suggested, to the editorial and op-ed opinion pages of newspapers, which ought not be confused with the straight news coverage,” reported the Columbia Journalism Review in 2010.

But the firewall between Fox’s straight news and opinion hosts is now more like a sieve. For example:

1. On Friday, Fox straight news anchor Bill Hemmer told White House aide Mercedes Schlapp that she should “go on offense” against the media.
   1. Fox journalist, chief national correspondent Ed Henry does double duty as co-host of Sunday’s Fox & Friends. The show is Trump’s favorite partner in the well-documented propaganda feedback loop.
   2. In April, Fox straight news anchor Eric Shawn lent his platform to Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton. The JW leader is also a frequent guest on Fox opinion shows.

Trump has lauded Fitton for working to end the Mueller investigation. As reported by The Washington Post:

“In his tweets, Trump also cited comments by Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, during an appearance Monday on Fox News’s ‘Fox & Friends.’ Trump went on Twitter early Monday to promote Fitton’s interview shortly before it began.”

Fitton appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show in July. Straight news anchor Shawn mirrored his Fox opinion colleagues who are doing Trump’s bidding.

Fox hosts are not simply Trump fanboys and fangirls. They are propagating Trump’s blatant and damaging lies.

On Wednesday, The Washington Post revealed a recent spike in the number of “false and misleading claims” made by Trump. In his first year as President, Trump made 2,140 false claims, according to the Post. In just the last six months, he has nearly doubled that total to 4,229. Pulitzer Prize winner PolitiFact has cataloged 10 pages of Trump false statements (not including “mostly false” statement and “half-truths.”)

Fox hosts wreak arguably the greatest destruction by echoing Trump’s lies about the Russia investigation, and his meritless attacks on Special Counsel Robert Mueller, the Justice Department, the Intelligence Community, and the FBI. By doing so, Fox propagandists are accomplishing Putin’s goal of undermining Americans’ faith in their institutions.

What’s more, Fox uses its hard news journalists as human shields to deflect criticism about the network’s raison d’être: propaganda arm for the Trump administration.

In April, Bill Maher asked Fox commentator Geraldo Rivera in his interview on Real Timeon HBO, “Why Fox News?”

Rivera defended the network, citing the “straight news guys,” Smith, Hemmer, and Baier.

This ruse is known to every three-card monte hustler on the street. Fox News journalists are paid shills. They’re plants whose purpose is to create the illusion of journalistic legitimacy. They’re role players in the Fox-Trump con job.

And by sprinkling a little real news into the Fox propaganda machine, journalists there are only lubricating its gears.

To his credit, Shep Smith isn’t shy about railing against Trump, or debunking Hannity’s lies. But Smith is still funneling cash into Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News family coffers.

In Fox’s ratings report from the first quarter of 2018, Smith delivered an average of 1,437,000 in total viewers — nearly on par with ratings forFox & Friends(Smith’s audience was only about 6% fewer viewers).

Smith is also collecting a hefty paycheck — $10 million a year, reported by the Observer in 2016. He’s paid with revenues generated by ratings winners Hannity and the Fox propagandists.

Even if he is a fine journalist with noble intentions, what if Smith were fattening revenues of and payrolled by the NRA or the KKK? Working for Fox News is equally indefensible.

Smith and the other real journalists at Fox may think they’re doing a service. But as Mother Jones editor in chief Clara Jeffery tweeted:

I don't understand why Chris Wallace or Shep Smith or John Roberts or anybody who's arguably an actual journalist stays with Fox. It's pretty much become the same as working for RT or any regime's propaganda outlet.

— Clara Jeffery (@ClaraJeffery) July 17, 2018

Fox journalists have reportedly grumbled about Hannity and the network’s treatment of him — but mum’s the word.

Back in April, when Hannity revealed he had a business relationship with former Trump attorney Michael Cohen, Fox doubled down on Hannity, announcing that he had the network’s “full support.”

Washington Post media reporter Paul Farhi wrote at the time that journalists at Fox were “angry and disappointed” about the network’s handling of the Hannity-Cohen matter. But Fox journalists insisted on remaining nameless — they talked to Farhi on condition of being background.

I emailed Farhi, asking why Fox journalists wouldn’t go on-the-record. Farhi responded: “They like their jobs and don’t feel like losing them… Do you go around publicly criticizing your employer?”

But Fox News is an employer like no other.

The Trump-Fox symbiosis has been well-documented. As Vanity Fair reporter Gabriel Sherman told Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air in July: “So there is this really bizarre and surreal dynamic that the president of the United States is the executive producer, the head of one of the three cable news networks, which exists to promote his agenda. … I think it’s more than a feedback loop, I think it’s basically one organization.”

Understandably, Fox journalists don’t want to risk their livelihoods by dissing their employer. But Fox straight news anchors are serving as enablers for the network’s purveyors of propaganda.

At Trump’s rally Saturday night in Ohio, the president lambasted the media as “fake news” and said journalists “were terrible people.” He then saluted Fox propagandists by name: Tucker, Hannity, Ingraham, Doocy, Kilmeade, Earhardt, Dobbs, and Bartiromo. He called them “the people that love us.”

Silence is an act of complicity. Those who don’t speak out against wrongdoing are culpable. As philosopher Abraham Joshua Heschel said, “Indifference to evil is worse than evil itself…in a free society, some are guilty, but all are responsible.”

Given the stakes, the enormity of lethal danger posed by Trump and Fox News, real journalists at the network must go on-the-record with their anger and disappointment at their co-workers and bosses.

With the exception of an occasional mild joust from Smith, Fox journalists have avoided criticizing their opinion colleagues. Smith said in a TIME magazine interview in March, “They don’t really have rules on the opinion side. They can say whatever they want.”

Jimmy Kimmel hosted Fox journalist Bret Baier on his show last week. Kimmel asked Baier about getting “lumped” in with Hannity and Carlson.

Kimmel said, “I would imagine that Shepard Smith and Chris Wallace and yourself, that sometimes you’re not crazy about, perception-wise, being a part of that.”

Baier responded, “We’re one team, we’re one company.” Then he contradicted himself, saying of his opinion teammates: “We’re two different businesses entirely.”

Fact check: Fox straight news and opinion are not two different businesses. Fox News is one business entity, one profit center, and part of a larger one.

After the Disney acquisition, Variety reports that “Rupert Murdoch and his family, the founders of Fox, will then spin off Fox Broadcasting Co., Fox Sports, Fox News, Fox Television Stations, and a handful of other assets into a new company that will have revenue of $10 billion and earnings of about $2.8 billion.”

Here’s the real bottom line: Real journalists who work for Fox News are complicit.

John Stoehr, editor in chief of the Editorial Board newsletter and fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative, tweeted:

1. The GOP.
2. Evangelical Christian leaders.
3. The NRA.
4. Fox News.
5. Every legit reporter who refuses to denounce Fox News. https://t.co/ERKJH41Yvu

— John Stoehr (@johnastoehr) July 26, 2018

While Fox journalists choose not to ruffle feathers at their workplace, other headliners and former Fox News on-air commentators have been speaking out.

Producer/director Judd Apatow mounted an online activist effort, encouraging Fox entertainment talent to speak out. Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane joined the row, saying he’s embarrassed to work for Fox. Steve Levitan, creator of Modern Family, said he won’t renew his contract with Fox. (Upon Disney’s acquisition, entertainment talent will no longer face the moral dilemma of working for the Murdoch family enterprise.)

I haven’t worked with Fox since 2002. That family promotes evil ideas and greed and corruption. We all choose who to work with. I understand why that is easier for some than others but many powerful people are powerful enough to speak up to their bosses at a moment like this. https://t.co/8NtsqsR8Xj

— Judd Apatow (@JuddApatow) June 18, 2018

In June, Fox frequent commentator Bruce Turkel announced the end of his relationship with the network, writing in an open letter:

“I quit. Quite simply, the position Fox has taken on our government’s policy of separating children from their parents is too heinous for me to accept.”

In March, former Fox News analyst Ralph Peters said Fox anchors “understand that they are doing propaganda” for Trump. In an email to colleagues, as he resigned, Peters wrote: “Fox News is assaulting our constitutional order and the rule of law,” saying Fox has degenerated into “a mere propaganda machine for a destructive and ethically ruinous administration.”

Fox journalists are not exempt from accountability. Real journalists there must denounce Fox propagandists and resign. Otherwise, they may keep collecting fat paychecks from Fox, but they are ethically bankrupt. They’re selling their moral backbones — like body parts for cash.

Dan Gillmor, professor of practice at the Cronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State University, tweeted:

Fox "News" serving in its chosen role as propaganda arm of the Trump regime. By definition at this point, no journalists of integrity work there. https://t.co/v3lIWNqCc3

— Dan Gillmor (@dangillmor) July 18, 2018

On Thursday, after Sanders refused to squash Trump’s claims that the media is “the enemy of the people,” Acosta walked out of the White House press briefing. No other reporters followed him. Maybe next time, they will.

And perhaps real journalists at Fox News will do the right thing — join their colleagues in solidarity, denounce the Fox propaganda machine, and walk away.

No one from Fox News responded to my inquiries. Ed Henry blocked me on Twitter.

In memory of my journalism mentor, Steve Buttry.

This article originally appeared on RanttMedia.

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SANDRA SMITH (ANCHOR): Laura Ingraham joins us now over the phone. Laura, we see images of William Barr leaving his home this morning en route to Capitol Hill. This is all set to begin shortly. I'm sure you have a lot to say on this. But it is really setting up to be quite a morning. What do you expect?

LAURA INGRAHAM (FOX NEWS HOST) Sandra, the meltdown on the other cable channels last night as we were broadcasting The Ingraham Angle was something really for the ages. We have in special counsel Mueller someone who has worked in law enforcement at the highest levels for decades. We have someone in Bill Barr who has worked at the highest levels of the legal profession both as a CEO and former attorney general and so forth for decades, OK?

Both men have enormous experience in dealing with really complex matters. But the idea that Bill Barr set about to fundamentally distort and misrepresent a 448 page report that he knew would be almost in its entirety released except for redactions that were agreed upon -- the idea he would set about to do that to what, ruin his entire career and be roundly ridiculed, is preposterous.

And so for this frothy frenzy on the other cables last night and in the pages of the Amazon Post, I say this. Focus on the two lines that make this such relatively a non-story. When Barr pressed him whether he thought Barr's letter was inaccurate, Mueller said he did not. But felt that the media coverage of the letter was misinterpreting the investigation according to officials.

Now, I know Chris Wallace at the top of your hour was indicating that I guess that he kind of agrees with these other cable networks that this was an attempt by the DOJ to spin what the conversation was between Barr and Mueller. So I don't know if Chris Wallace has information that I don't have. But that he is saying that Barr is perpetuating a lie about this conversation between him and Mueller?

I mean, I think if Mueller thought that this investigation was being distorted in its synopsis by Barr, Bob Mueller is a big boy. He could have come out and issued a very terse public statement. He did not do that, Sandra.

SMITH: Well, certainly what we're hearing from you, what we heard from --

INGRAHAM: Instead, one of the other members of the merry band of investigators decided to leak this letter right before Barr comes up to testify. Now, isn't that curious?

SMITH: Obviously, and we'll hear -- by the way, we'll --

INGRAHAM: So as somebody who happens to have known Bill Barr for decades and myself worked at pretty high levels in the legal profession, I find the reporting on this and much of the commentary on this to be harmful and frankly very disturbing. And I'm watching this in real time and this is not spin by the way, this is analysis of the current situation as it stands.

SMITH: By the way, we'll hear more from Bret Baier and Chris Wallace themselves in a bit, before William Barr begins a short time from now. We've got everybody on deck. But meanwhile Laura, also what is being decided now, there's gonna be a vote in the House, a committee vote, on whether or not the House Judiciary will be allowed to have staff ask questions of William Barr at their hearing tomorrow. Should that be allowed?

INGRAHAM: I mean, I don't think it really matters. If there was some conversation about that -- I mean I frankly think a lot of the congressmen themselves don't do a very good job of questioning. I mean we've seen this over the years where there is this big build-up in these hearings and then you have people who are not really used to cross-examining people or getting information flailing about for the cameras trying to get relevant information and questions asked and instead they just end up grandstanding.

What the American people have to understand that this really isn't about the quest for the truth, OK? This is about the 2020 election, scoring political points, and trying somehow to tar the reputation of a man who has served with dignity and the utmost ethical understanding of the American legal system for decades. This is what Washington, D.C. -- I lived here way too long Sandra. This is what Washington, D.C., has become: a smear machine of good people. If you're connected to Donald Trump in any way, they not only want to smear you, they want to make sure you never work again. That's how bad it is.

So people out there claiming that Barr is spinning or misrepresenting, we got to take a breath here and look at this situation in its entirety where a president was targeted early on erroneously by a fake dossier and a phony dossier funded by Hillary to begin this entire investigation. People lose sight of how disturbing that initial fact is and we end up today with all the histrionics surrounding this hearing.

SMITH: I know everybody's got a lot to say on this. And Laura, we appreciate your time this morning. You set up what is going to be quite a heated moment on Capitol Hill, just a few moments from now. Laura Ingraham, thank you.

• Fox "news" anchor Martha MacCallum absurdly claimed that Democrats are not really upset with Barr for lying to Congress, saying that they are really upset at Mueller. How ridiculous was this spin? It was word-for-wordthe same spin that Rush Limbaugh used. Nevertheless, MacCallum hosted the presidential town hall with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and is scheduled to host another this week with Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN).