FOX3
3/18 thru the trump looking-glass
capt txt 719
see FOX4 919 TIPPING PT?
https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/longtime-fox-news-producer-i-cant-tell-you-how-unpopular-trump-is-here/
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PR shop for treas dept mnuchin
https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-business/democracy-forward-files-official-complaint-coordination-between-fox-business-and
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https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/trump-campaign-video-features-fox-hosts-diamond-and-silk-interviewing-fox-contributor
no lnx
Trump campaign video with Diamond and Silk claims that Democrats “are going to drive us back to the days of slavery”
WRITTEN BY ERIC HANANOKI
PUBLISHED 09/03/19 3:48 PM EDT
Diamond and Silk for the Trump campaign
Fox Nation hosts Diamond and Silk have been guest-hosting a show for President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign. Their work includes a video featuring an interview with Fox News contributor Alveda King and another video where they claim that Democrats “are going to drive us back to the days of slavery.” Despite Fox News claiming that it “does not condone any talent participating in campaign events,” the two have also been appearing in other Trump campaign videos and have been headlining Republican fundraisers.
Diamond and Silk are North Carolina-based sisters whose official biography describes them as “Video Vloggers, Internet Sensations,” and “Influencers” who are known for “their out spoken and loyal support for President Donald J Trump.” Fox Nation began airing a weekly Diamond and Silk program late last year.
The two have repeatedly appeared in campaign videos and events for the Trump reelection campaign while also hosting their Fox program. After Diamond and Silk appeared at an April 27 Trump rally in Green Bay, WI, Fox News celebrated their remarks by airing several minutes of “highlights” from their speech on Watters’ World (on-screen text read: “Diamond & Silk rock Trump rally!”).
Fox News promotes Diamond and Silk in Green Bay]
They have also been fundraising for Republican groups -- the two appeared at a March 30 fundraising dinner for the Bush Legacy Republican Women of Weatherford in Texas, and an August 10 event for the Watauga and Ashe County Republican Parties in North Carolina. They're scheduled to do a September 23 event for Republican Women Federation clubs in San Diego County, CA.
The Fox News personalities can now add Trump campaign hosting duties to their resume. On August 27, the Trump campaign posted two campaign videos starring Diamond and Silk and featuring interviews with right-wing commentators Alveda King (who is also a Fox News contributor) and Stephen Moore. In the videos, the duo stated that they were broadcasting from Trump Tower in New York City, NY, and sitting in for regular host Lara Trump while she’s on maternity leave.
The videos, part of the campaign’s Real News Insightsshow, are meant to organize support for Trump’s reelection campaign and push back against the purported “fake news” in the media.
The Diamond and Silk-hosted videos unsurprisingly include over-the-top praise for Trump. In the King interview, Diamond said Trump has “managed to do more than all of these [Democratic presidential candidates] have done within the past three-hundred and some years -- and I say that because I combined all of their records together.”
In her interview with Moore, Silk said that Trump is “looking out for the best interests of America but we have Democrats that’s looking out for the failure of America. That right there should tell you who you need to vote for.” Diamond later said: “When we listen to these Democrat candidates and the things that they are pushing for, it is going to drive us back to the days of slavery with nothing. These people want to control our very existence. I don’t want the government controlling me.”
In March, after Diamond and Silk appeared in a Trump campaign video, Fox News attempted to distance itself from the two.The network told The Hollywood Reporter’s Jeremy Barr that “the duo are not employees of the network: ‘Diamond & Silk license short weekly videos to Fox Nation – they are not Fox News contributors or employees. When they appear on FNC and FBN, they do so as guests.’” That statement might have been news to Fox News’ own employees, who have described them as “Fox News Channel contributors,” “Fox Nation contributors,” and “Fox Nation hosts.”
Related
Fox News described Diamond and Silk as “hosts” and “contributors” until they appeared in a Trump campaign video
03/20/19 2:10 PM EDT
Fox News gives Diamond and Silk a Fox Nation show
11/26/18 5:09 PM EST
Fox Nation hosts have been campaigning for Republicans in violation of the network's supposed standards
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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, andChris 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 claimed that 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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mma
By the time that Trump tweeted and then told journalists at the White House that Alabama would be hit hard by Hurricane Dorian, it was obvious that he was wrong. Instead of admitting that he was referring to well-out-of-date forecasts, Trump has spent a week insisting he was correct (including changing a map with a marker) and attacking media outlets who point out he was lying. Fox propagandists were the rare allies who leapt to his defense.
Sean Hannity had a full meltdown in defense of Trump, complaining of "psychotic jackasses in the media mob." When his guest - a prominent climate change denier - even said that Trump was wrong, Hannity began speaking over him and said that they were out of time.
Lou Dobbs seemed giddy about Trump continuing to keep pushing the lie, saying of the media: "You mess with the bull, you get the horn.” avoided filming violence from right-wing protesters. Geraldo Rivera said that Trump was "unfairly mugged by the media." Fox News host Howard Kurtz attackedthe media for covering Trump's repeated lies about a natural disaster.
At one point this week, Trump even called Fox News' John Roberts into the Oval Office to talk with him about his statements.
This all raises the question of why Trump was relying on days-old information about a natural disaster. And aside from golfing, Trump spent a significant amount of time in the days that Dorian's trajectory turned away from Alabama livetweeting Fox News.
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mma 919
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
no lnx
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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fake fight / wwf ?
AN 919
https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/why-has-donald-trump-turned-on-fox-news/
no lnx
Why has Donald Trump turned on Fox News?
Written by Heather Digby Parton / Salon September 5, 2019
I wrote on Tuesday about Trump’s allegedly “innovative” strategy to attack the media, pointing out that conservatives have been doing this for decades. They’ve been “working the refs” of the mainstream media since before Richard Nixon’s day. Trump even has an enemies list, although his wrinkle on that authoritarian impulse is to tweet out the names of the people he considers enemies while Nixon had the good grace to keep it secret.
Trump has recently seemed a bit confused about all this. Perhaps the stress is getting to him. But lately he’s been “working the refs” at Fox News, apparently upset that they have had the temerity to interview people, at least once in a while, who express views opposed to Trump’s. He’s been exploding about this on his Twitter feed:
@realDonaldTrump
- Aug 28, 2019
Just watched @FoxNews heavily promoting the Democrats through their DNC Communications Director, spewing out whatever she wanted with zero pushback by anchor, @SandraSmithFox. Terrible considering that Fox couldn’t even land a debate, the Dems give them NOTHING! @CNN & @MSNBC....
Donald J. Trump
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@realDonaldTrump
....are all in for the Open Border Socialists (or beyond). Fox hires “give Hillary the questions” @donnabrazile, Juan Williams and low ratings Shep Smith. HOPELESS & CLUELESS! They should go all the way LEFT and I will still find a way to Win - That’s what I do, Win. Too Bad!....
That’s not how it’s supposed to work. Fox News has always allowed Democrats to come on the air from time to time in order to keep up the pretense that it’s a legitimate news organization. They even used to feature some liberal-leaning pundits just so they could say they were “fair and balanced.”
This was always nonsense, of course. The whole point of the network was to provide a right-wing media outlet to benefit the Republican Party. As Russell Crowe, playing Roger Ailes in the recent Showtime “The Loudest Voice,” put it:
Cable is about one thing: niche. The loyalty of a passionate few. We need to program directly to the viewer who is predisposed to buying what we’re trying to sell. In politics it’s called “turning out the base. “If we can do that, then they will never change the channel. And what is that niche? Well, I think it is conservatives. It’s roughly half the damn country.
The show is based on the book of the same name by Gabriel Sherman about Ailes and Fox News. I don’t know if that quote is taken from that research, but it certainly conveys Ailes’ vision. After years of pummeling the mainstream media for being liberal, conservatives had prepared the ground for a right-wing news network posing as an objective news organization. In order to maintain that fiction, it was important that they at least pay lip service to some objectivity in the news side even as their bombastic opinion stars like Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity fed the audience the red meat that Ailes knew would keep them coming back for more.
Ailes supported the Trump campaign — after resisting it at first —but he was in the middle of his own horrific sexual harassment scandal and in failing health. He was forced out of the network before Trump was elected and was relegated to helping the candidate prep for the debates against Hillary Clinton. (That reportedly didn’t go well, although the parties involved didn’t agree on why. ) But prior to that falling out, there had been talk that Ailes and Trump were planning to start a new TV network if Trump lost the election. Obviously that didn’t happen although if Trump is defeated in 2020 there’s a good chance that plan will be revived in some form. It’s impossible to believe that Trump will be able to let go of the media spotlight. He would certainly have a built-in audience, potentially poached from Fox News.
Trump has openly shared his supposed reasons for being hostile to his favorite network. He is angry at recent Fox News poll which show, as do all the other reputable polls, that a large majority of Americans disapprove of him personally and are opposed to his policies. After a recent survey showing that the top five Democratic candidates would beat him handily if the election were held today, he told reporters:
I don’t believe it. I don’t believe it. Every place I go we have lines outside. Fox has changed. And my worst polls have always been from Fox. There’s something going on at Fox, I’ll tell you right now. And I’m not happy with it.
The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake pointed out that other polling shows that among those who “strongly approve” of Trump, a vast majority trust Fox News more than any other network. He knows that many of his voters see the poll numbers and may wonder why he’s always talking about how successful he is. So he needs to discredit Fox — forcing his fans to take sides and choose who to believe.
But it isn’t just the poll that has him fuming:
Donald J. Trump
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@realDonaldTrump
....I don’t want to Win for myself, I only want to Win for the people. The New @FoxNews is letting millions of GREAT people down! We have to start looking for a new News Outlet. Fox isn’tworking for usanymore!
That even got Trump fanboy Brit Hume’s hackles up and he replied, “Fox News isn’t supposed to work for you.” Trump can be forgiven for making that mistake. Fox has been slavishly devoted to him since Ailes first set the wheels in motion during the 2016 campaign. Neil Cavuto ranted for some minutes about “integrity” and the like. But others began fawning to the point of outright delusion:
Kyle Griffin
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@kylegriffin1
Joe Walsh: "Stuart, do you believe this president lies?"
Fox Biz host Stuart Varney: "No."
Walsh: "You don't believe he's ever lied?"
Varney: "He exaggerates and spins."
Walsh: "Okay, do you believe he's ever told the American people a lie?"
Varney: "No."
[vid]
Rupert Murdoch turned over the running of Fox Corp. to his eldest son, Lachlan, just before the sale of the company’s entertainment division to Disney. It hasn’t gone all that well. Fox News had already lost a step since Ailes departed and it’s been getting worse. It isn’t the slick production it once was, largely abandoning its pretense at being a major network and pretty much simply adopting the crude Breitbart-Trump line. There has been nonstop controversy over the network’s turn to overt white nationalism, with advertisers leaving in droves. Reporters and pundits are at each other’s throats, with the channel’s biggest star, Sean Hannity, in open revolt.
Meanwhile, the younger, supposedly more liberal son, James Murdoch, who was responsible for the embarrassing phone hacking scandal in Britain, is said to be increasingly “troubled” by the direction of the network and is thinking of taking some of his billions and buying a rival network (as well, perhaps, as a comic book publisher.) There have been reports of Rupert possibly coming back to right the ship, despite his age and his health problems.
As in the HBO drama “Succession,” which is clearly based on the Murdoch clan, the saga of Trump and Fox News is really about the extreme ineptitude and weakness of second-generation heirs to great fortunes. As Lucy Prebble, a writer and executive producer of the show, told the BBC, “Everybody is a coward, everybody is an idiot and everybody is trying to cover their back almost all of the time.” That sure does sound familiar.
The writer Hugh Montgomery observed that “Succession” is “part of a reckoning with the particular strain of rich white men who continue to have a grip on the Western political and media establishment — and have, arguably, or very clearly, abused that power to monstrous effect.” I’m afraid that reckoning still has a way to go.
this is the inverse of mueller as savior?
Following the confirmation of William Barr to the position of attorney general in February, Sean Hannity pushed one message: Investigate the president’s political enemies, or suffer the consequences. It appears Hannity got his wish.
This week, Trump’s campaign press secretary Kayleigh McEnany gave up the game. In an interview on his radio show, Hannity stated that Trump is opposed by “pretty much everybody except for like me” and subsequently asked McEnany to assess the impact that“the media mob” would have on the 2020 election. McEnany responded,“Yeah, the work that you do every night, Sean, is going to go a long way. It already has. We now have the Justice Department looking into the misdeeds of the Obama administration."
Hannity and Fox have long shilled for the president, attacking his enemies and shielding him from criticism at every turn. However, attributing a federal investigation to Hannity takes the network’s influence to a new level.
As Media Matters’ Matt Gertz pointed out this week, “It was inevitable for Hannity’s pro-Trump commentary to become the foundation of the president’s reelection campaign. That the campaign acknowledges that messaging might come via a federal investigation is an ominous sign.”
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an 819
President Donald Trump spends most days watching hours of Fox News programming and many nights talking with its stable of pro-Trump hosts. But his recent criticism of the network shows that he doesn’t understand the con at the heart of the network’s model. Fox is a propaganda outlet whose success depends on maintaining just enough trappings of journalism to avoid that label. And if Trump turns his warning shots into a sustained assault, the result could spell disaster for the network.
Fox and Trump have enjoyed a mutually beneficial, symbiotic relationship. The network helped drive Trump’s political rise, all but fused with his administration after his election, and regularly cheerleads for him. Trump, in turn, is obsessed with the network, whose programming and personalities shape his worldview and frequently impact his decision. He regularly promotes Fox’s coverage and has given its hosts unprecedented access, lifting the network’s ratings.
But Trump clearly views the network as part of his messaging operation, and he has publicly aired his grievances when it has failed to live up to that standard by hosting Democrats or publishing unfavorable polls. While watching Fox on Wednesday morning, he again saw something he didn’t like: an interview with the Democratic National Committee’s communications director.
The president quickly responded on Twitter, denouncing the segment for “heavily promoting the Democrats.” After listing other Fox commentators who he claimed had taken Fox too far to the left, Trump declared: “We have to start looking for a new News Outlet. Fox isn’t working for us anymore!”
Trump’s critique was that it is unacceptable for the network to provide anything short of the sycophancy he gets from Fox hosts like Sean Hannity and Lou Dobbs. Its failure to produce such programming around the clock is, in Trump’s telling, an affront to his supporters that should lead them to abandon the outlet for one of its competitors.
That view clashes sharply with Fox’s business model, which depends on creating the impression the network isn’t a 24/7 propaganda outlet.
Fox was founded on a con. The network claimed to be the only outlet providing an honest review of the news of the day without liberal bias, epitomized by its slogan “fair and balanced.” At the same time, it effectively served as an arm of the Republican Party, smearing Democrats while both helping to elect Republicans and pushing them to emulate the cutting, hyperpartisan style of its biggest stars.
In the decades since, Fox executives have consistently pushed back against criticism by arguing that while the network’s “opinion” hosts are conservative, it also features a “news” division which produces objective journalism like other media outlets.
This is largely farcical -- Fox’s purported “news” hours feature much of the same disinformation as its “opinion” hours. But they provide the appearance of similar programming on other networks, with interviews of members from both major parties, reports from correspondents, and panel discussions.
That image is essential to maintaining the network’s business model. Fox draws a sizable audience that comes for its core product of right-wing propaganda undergirded by bigotry and conspiracy theories. But major advertisers are rightfully uncomfortable associating their own brands with such content, and in recent months, dozens of companies have abandoned the network’s most-watched shows, sending Fox’s overall ad inventory into a tailspin. Fox executives have sought to keep advertisers from abandoning the network altogether by stressing the credibility of the network’s “news” division.
There are opposing tensions in this argument. Advertisers must be willing to ignore the unhinged commentary that occurs on the network’s other hours. And Fox’s core viewers, who adore the president and the hard-right prime-time hosts who support him but are turned off by the “news” personalities, need to accept that not every hour on the network can be Hannity.
Now the president himself -- the Fox superfan supreme -- is signaling that he wants to blow up that fragile equilibrium.
In the short term, Fox employees can try to turn the criticism to their benefit by citing the president’s response as evidence that they aren’t really propagandists. But if Trump sustains his criticism, it will trap the network in a vulnerable position with no good options.
If the network tries to push back on Trump’s criticism, the result could be a cycle of escalations that triggers a viewer backlash. Previous altercations have shown that Fox’s audience will side with Trump over the network, and Trump has repeatedly promoted the even more overtly propagandistic One America News Network, suggesting a potential alternative for unhappy Fox viewers.
If Fox responds by shifting its coverage to be even more favorable to Trump, it will be abandoning the argument it has used to pacify its advertisers. More of them will likely flee in response, and it will become ever more difficult for the network to win them back.
And if the network does nothing, the result could be either -- or both.
Fox’s infamously hyperaggressive PR team has been unusually quiet so far, leaving the network’s response to the president’s criticism in the hands of its commentators. “Fox News isn't supposed to work for you,” senior political analyst Brit Hume tweeted in response to the latest salvo.
Fox’s problem is that Trump disagrees, and its audience is likely on his side.
AN 810 c de v
...Many people believe that Ted Turner’s gift to television is 24-hour news. But Turner’s real gift was that he took graphics production technology out of the hands of engineers and put it in the hands of artists. That revolutionized television production on a scale that most people do not realize. It was remarkable. I knew that, so I hired a gentleman from New York who was the godfather of television graphics and he came in and built a graphics production facility that was second to none.
Many of the techniques perfected by Fox News were actually borrowed from CBN, such as the style, tone and obvious bias that is used to frame the narrative.
Ten years before Fox News, there was CBN News. There was “The 700 Club.” CBN had a slogan, “TV Journalism with a Different Spirit.” We pioneered point-of-view journalism for television. In so doing, because Pat Robertson was very conservative politically, he was able to blend Republican Party politics and conservative politics with the Bible, and in so doing he presented a consistent message that if you were for Jesus, then you were for the Republican Party. From a journalistic standpoint, we were presenting a right-wing version of the news.
...
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Huckabee Sanders lands new gig as a Fox News contributor
David Badash / The New Civil Rights MovementAugust 22, 2019
Huckabee Sanders has been weighing a run for governor of Arkansas.
pension plan
no lnx
Fox Business host Lou Dobbs: Man who plowed truck into ICE protesters was ‘well within his rights’
Lou Dobbs speaking at the 2015 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) ]
Written by Igor Derysh / Salon August 16, 2019
Fox Business host Lou Dobbs praised a corrections officer who intentionally plowed his truck into a crowd of protesters outside a Rhode Island ICE facility, saying the attack was justified.
A correctional officer at the Donald W. Wyatt PVT Detention Facility in Central Falls, Rhode Island, intentionally drove his pickup truck into protesters demonstrating against the detention of migrants by ICE on Wednesday, the Providence Journal reported. Capt. Thomas Woodworth was placed on administrative leave after protest organizers said a 64-year-old protester suffered internal bleeding and a broken leg in the attack and another protester was injured as well. Fellow corrections officers sprayed protesters with pepper spray, sending three other people to the hospital.
The protesters were part of the “Never Again” movement, a Jewish protest group that likens ICE detention facilities to the treatment of Jews during the Holocaust. The protesters had been organizing outside the Rhode Island facility since early July.
Video of the protests shows the black pickup truck accelerate toward protesters and stop suddenly just before hitting anyone. After demonstrators began to bang on the hood of his truck, the vehicle pushed forward again.
Several injured after driver plows truck into immigration protesters outside ICE facility in Rhode Island. https://t.co/KlhQXBlEaW pic.twitter.com/tizuWqlLmH
— ABC News (@ABC) August 15, 2019
Dobbs played an edited clip that cut out the part where Woodworth drove at the protesters and praised his actions.
LOL. Lou Dobbs recasts incident at RI immigrant detention facility as attack on truck driver by selectively slo-moing the footage and editing out the part when the ICE guard (now suspended) intentionally ran into/over demonstrators. cc: @NeverAgainActn @mollycrabapple pic.twitter.com/K0XfqLC3oY
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) August 16, 2019
“Protesters in Rhode Island harassing a federal detention worker last night,” said Dobbs, an ally and adviser of President Trump. “These demonstrators blocking an entrance to a facility holding illegal immigrants when the driver tried to pull into the parking lot, the protesters surrounded him, yelling, banging on the hood of the truck, blocking his entrance.”
Dobbs claimed the protesters “committed assault” by banging on the truck after Woodworth drove toward them.
Speaking to former acting ICE director Tom Homan, Dobbs said, “I know that it must just gladden your heart to see a bunch of demonstrators at an Immigration Customs Enforcement facility blocking the path of a guard and then complaining about the fact that he sought to do what is within his rights, which is to proceed to park his vehicle and go to work.”
Homan also attacked the protesters, wondering whether any of them “even got a job.”
Homan previously worked in the Trump administration and Dobbs has frequently consulted with the president. The Daily Beast reported last year thatDobbs has been “involved with some of the administration’s more sensitive discussions.” Trump has even put Dobbs on speakerphone during multiple Oval Office meetings so the Fox host could weigh in, according to the report, which added that Trump will occasionally “cut off an official so the Fox Business host can jump in.”
Dobbs is in some ways the godfather of what is now called Trumpism.
“He was Trump before Trump,” former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon told the Washington Post. “He has always sort of epitomized the intellectual foundation of the Trump movement on trade and immigration, even if he doesn’t get enough attention. He was more Breitbart than Breitbart, going back years.”
A spokesperson for Never Again accused Dobbs of creating “propaganda” to help “distort reality” to help justify the Trump administration’s “inhumanity.”
“Lou Dobbs just justified and promoted the car ramming that that caused one of our peaceful protesters to have serious injuries,” the group said. “This was an attack that could have (and has, as in Charlottesville) killed someone. Fox News is inciting violence.”
vehicles charlottesville, cda and now ICE jewish
Fox Business host Lou Dobbs: Man who plowed truck into ICE protesters was ‘well within his rights’
==
ailes and atwater used tv to get bush41 electd in a way unprecedented? sorta bypass party? here merge of gop and fox:
For years, Sean Hannity has poisoned the well for special counsel Robert Mueller's probe into the investigation of Russian interference with the 2016 presidential election. That effort came to a head when Mueller testified before two House committees, with Hannity effectively dictatingthe GOP’s strategy in handling Mueller. The night before the hearings, he urged congressional Republicans to focus their attention not on the results of the investigation, but on the investigators. And that’s exactly what many of them did, using questions ripped from Hannity’s program to demand Mueller weigh in on the network’s conspiracy theories.
One House Republican cited Gregg Jarrett, the Fox legal analyst who once argued on Hannity’s show that in light of the Mueller probe, “the FBI has become America’s secret police” like “the old KBG.” Another entered into the record an op-ed he had written for Hannity’s website. Others championed Hannity’s feverish focus on tangential topics like former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele’s memos, the research firm Fusion GPS and its founder, Glenn Simpson, and the purported political leanings of Mueller’s staff.
Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee and a Hannity regular, devoted much of his opening statement during the afternoon hearing to the Fox host’s twisted theory that the real collusion during the 2016 presidential campaign was between Russia and the Democrats.
Watch this: We put together a full supercut of Hannity and other Fox figures juxtaposed with Republicans during the hearings, and it is utterly uncanny. There can be no more denying the facts: Fox News and the Republican Party have merged.
==
pirro fired,[nope pa of djt thus access] not tucker yet
https://www.mediamatters.org/research/2019/07/22/comprehensive-review-revolving-door-between-fox-and-trump-administration/224292
Note: This post reworks and adds to our previous report, :{“A comprehensive list of former Fox employees who have joined the Trump administration.”:(style="box-sizing:border-box;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-numeric:normal;text-decoration-skip-ink:none"):}: It will be updated as additional former Fox employees join or leave the Trump administration, and as former Trump administration officials are hired by Fox or its parent company
President Donald Trump’s unprecedented relationship with Fox News has created a revolving door between the network and the White House.
Trump has stocked his administration with former Fox employees. Cabinet secretaries overseeing federal departments, senior White House aides advising the president on crucial issues, and U.S. ambassadors representing the country abroad, among others, all worked for the network before joining Trump’s administration. Those are just the ones who actually made the jump to the Trump administration -- several other current or former Fox employees have been connected to various administration jobs but have not received them.
Meanwhile, several former senior members of the Trump administration have joined Fox or its parent company, either in top executive roles or as on-air commentators.
Nine current Trump administration officials previously worked at Fox as of July 22, while eight more officials worked at Fox before joining the administration but have since left. Five former Trump administration officials subsequently took jobs at the network or its parent company after leaving government.
Current Trump administration officials who used to work at Fox
Former Trump administration officials who used to work at Fox
Current Fox employees who used to work in the Trump administration
While Fox has long served as a comfortable landing spot for Republicans between stints in politics or government, these hires are happening within the context of the network fusing with Trump’s administration. The president’s worldview is shaped by the hours of Fox programming he watches each day -- both his public statements and his major decisions often coming in response to what he sees -- leading him to treat Fox employment as an important credential in hiring.
At the same time, prior employment in the Trump administration is apparently valued by Fox founder Rupert Murdoch and his son Lachlan, whose media empire benefited greatly after becoming a pro-Trump propaganda outlet.
Trump’s affinity for staff with a Fox pedigree extends outside the administration. He hired Jay Sekulow to join his legal team because the president liked the way Sekulow defended him on Fox, and he nearly added the similarly credentialed Joseph diGenova and Victoria Toensing to the group as well. Then there’s Kimberly Guilfoyle, who left her job co-hosting a Fox show and became the vice chairwoman of a pro-Trump super PAC the next week (she is also dating Donald Trump Jr.).
Trump also consults with a “Fox News Cabinet” of current network employees. He reportedly speaks frequently with Rupert Murdoch. And Fox hosts including Sean Hannity, Lou Dobbs, Jeanine Pirro, Tucker Carlson, and Pete Hegseth all reportedly influence Trump not only through their programs, but advise him privately as well.
Current Trump administration officials who used to work at Fox
Ben Carson, secretary of housing and urban development. Carson, formerly a prominent neurosurgeon, became a right-wing media sensation after using a February 2013 speech in front of President Barack Obama to trumpet conservative economics and health care arguments. He joined Fox News as a contributor in October 2013 and left just over a year later to run for president. After Trump’s election, Carson joined his administration as the secretary of housing and urban development. His tenure has been dogged by scandals involving lavish spending for office furniture and other ethics issues, as well as a general failure to carry out his department’s mission.
Elaine Chao, secretary of transportation. After a career in the public, private, and nonprofit sectors capped by serving as labor secretary in President George W. Bush’s Cabinet, Chao became a Fox News contributor. She left the network in 2012 and took a seat on the board of directors of News Corp., at the time Fox’s parent company. In 2016, she stepped down from the board after Trump nominated her as secretary of transportation. Chao is married to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY); former Fox News contributor Erick Erickson has alleged that he was taken off the air because of his criticism of McConnell at Chao’s behest.
John Bolton, national security adviser. Long recognized as one of the most hawkish members of the foreign policy community, Bolton served in the Bush State Department and as ambassador to the United Nations. He joined Fox as a contributor in 2006 and became the network’s go-to voice for national security stories for the next decade, using the platformto push for military options in North Korea and Iran. Those appearances caught the attention of Trump, who said during a 2015 interview, “I watch the shows” for military advice, and that he liked Bolton because “he’s a tough cookie, knows what he’s talking about.” In March 2018, Trump named Bolton as his national security adviser.
Scott Brown, ambassador to New Zealand and Samoa. Glowing Fox News coverage helped power Brownto victory in his 2010 run for the U.S. Senate in Massachusetts. After losing his reelection bid two years later, he joined the network as a contributor, using it as a platform to burnish his profile over the next year while exploring a run for Senate in New Hampshire. He left the network, lost that 2014 race despite the network’s efforts to promote him, and was rehired two weeks later. After Brown endorsed Trump in February 2016, Fox hosts began promoting him for the vice president slot. In August 2016, former Fox host Andrea Tantaros named him in the sexual harassment lawsuit she filed against Fox and several network executives. Trump nonetheless nominated Brown to be ambassador to New Zealand and Samoa in April 2017, and he was confirmed that June. He subsequently faced a State Department inquiry after making inappropriate comments to a female server at an official event.
Georgette Mosbacher, ambassador to Poland. Mosbacher, a Republican businesswoman and donor, longtime Trump friend, and a Fox News contributor, was nominated to be ambassador to Poland in February 2018 and confirmed by the Senate that July.
Richard Grenell, ambassador to Germany. Grenell, a Republican communications professional who spent seven years as spokesperson for the U.S. delegation to the U.N., joined Fox News as a contributor in 2009 and was still in the network’s employ when he was nominated to be ambassador to Germany in September 2017. He was confirmed in April 2018 “despite objections from Democrats that his past epithets about prominent female politicians made him unfit for the job.”
Morgan Ortagus, State Department spokesperson. After working in the Bush and Obama administrations, Ortagus became a Fox contributor, then was named State Department spokesperson in April.
Lea Gabrielle, State Department special envoy. In February, the State Department named Gabrielle, a former Fox News reporter, as special envoy and coordinator of the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, an agency that counters foreign propaganda and disinformation.
Monica Crowley, Treasury Department assistant secretary for public affairs. A C-list conservative commentator who spent two decades as a Fox contributor, Crowley was a reliable source of the network’s typical combination of bigotry, right-wing talking points, and attacks on the press. Most notably, she pushed several bigoted conspiracy theories about President Barack Obama’s heritage, including promoting a documentary about his purported “real father.” Trump’s plan to name her to a top National Security Council post was scuttled by revelations that she had plagiarized parts of her 2012 book and Ph.D. thesis, but she was appointed to the Treasury position in July 2019.
Former Trump administration officials who used to work at Fox
Bill Shine, White House communications director. Shine, a close friend of Hannity’s who once produced his show, rose through the executive ranks at Fox News, eventually becoming network founder Roger Ailes’ right-hand man and then Fox co-president. Shine resigned from Fox in May 2017 after his reported role helping to cover up the network’s culture of sexual harassment became too embarrassing, but he landed a plum White House job as assistant to the president and deputy chief of staff for communications. Shine left the White House for a role on Trump’s reelection campaign in March 2019. His exit reportedly came in part because Trump “feels he was sold a bill of goods by Hannity,” who had urged the president to hire Shine to improve his press coverage.
Heather Nauert, acting undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs. Nauert worked at Fox from 1998-2005 and 2007-2017 in a variety of roles. In April 2017, she left her position reading headlines as a news anchor on Fox & Friends, the morning program the president watches religiously, to become spokesperson for the State Department. In March 2018, she was named acting undersecretary for public diplomacy and public affairs, replacing an official close to Rex Tillerson, who had just been ousted as secretary of state. She was nominated as U.S. ambassador to the U.N. in December 2018, triggering stories about her lack of qualifications for the role outside of her Fox News connection. She withdrew from consideration for the post and left the administration in February, reportedly because her nomination was complicated by the fact she had “employed a nanny who was in the United States legally but was not legally allowed to work.”
Anthony Scaramucci, White House communications director. Scaramucci, a hedge fund mogul and a former Fox Business contributor and host, spent 10 days as White House communications director before his proclivity for giving expletive-laced interviews and publicly feuding with other White House staffers triggered his removal.
K.T. McFarland, deputy national security adviser. After serving in the Nixon, Ford, and Reagan administrations and losing a race against then-Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY), McFarland became a Fox national security analyst. She used that position to push for war with Iran, defend the use of torture, and push for the profiling of Muslim Americans. In November 2016, Trump picked her to be deputy national security adviser under Michael Flynn. She served only briefly in that position. Flynn was replaced by H.R. McMaster in February 2017 following the revelation that Flynn had lied to the FBI and Vice President Mike Pence about whether he had discussed sanctions with the Russian ambassador during the presidential transition. McFarland was subsequently offered other opportunities in the administration and nominated to be U.S. ambassador to Singapore, but the nomination stalled over her connection to the Russia investigations -- she had reportedly been in contact with Flynn during his conversations with the Russian ambassador -- and she withdrew in February 2018.
Sebastian Gorka, deputy assistant to the president. A bombastic, self-proclaimed national security “expert” with dubious credentials, a proclivity for anti-Muslim conspiracy theories, and ties to foreign extremist groups, Gorka made frequent appearances on Fox News during the 2016 presidential campaign and was briefly hired by the network before decamping for the Trump White House. His job was ill-defined, and he apparently did little other than go on television to support the president before he was canned in August 2017. He then returned to Fox News as a full-fledged contributor, albeit one who was reportedly banned from appearing on the network’s “hard news” programming. In March, he left Fox for Sinclair Broadcast Group, whose stations now broadcast his bigotry around the country.
John McEntee, personal aide to the president. Fox hired McEntee as a production assistant in 2015. He later served as Trump’s personal aide both during the presidential campaign and in the White House. When McEntee was fired in March 2018, CNN reported that it was “because he is currently under investigation by the Department of Homeland Security for serious financial crimes.”
Tony Sayegh, Treasury Department assistant secretary for public affairs. Sayegh, a former Republican communications consultant and Fox contributor, served as the top spokesperson for the Treasury Department from April 2017 to June 2019.
Mercedes Schlapp, White House director of strategic communications. Before joining the White House in September 2017, Schlapp was a Republican political consultant and a Fox News contributor. In July 2019, she left the White House for Trump’s reelection campaign.
Current Fox employees who used to work in the Trump administration
Hope Hicks, executive vice president and chief communications officer at Fox Corporation. Hicks, who first entered Trump’s orbit as a public relations flack working on Ivanka Trump’s fashion line, is reportedly one of Trump’s close confidates. In January 2015, a few months after she joined the Trump Organization, Donald Trump selected her to be press secretary on his 2016 campaign, one of its earliest hires. After Trump’s election, she served as White House communications director and was promoted to director of strategic communications. Hicks left the White House in April 2018. That October, she was announced as executive vice president and chief communications officer of what became Fox Corporation, Fox News’ parent company.
Raj Shah, senior vice president at Fox Corporation. A former Republican political operative and a senior aide at the Republican National Committee, Shah served as White House principal deputy press secretary before leaving the administration in January 2019. In July 2019, CNN and *The Washington Post* reported he had joined Fox Corporation as a senior vice president.
Abigail Slater, senior vice president for policy and strategy at Fox Corporation. Slater, an attorney who specializes in technology issues, worked for the Federal Trade Commission and a trade association for internet companies before joining the White House in February 2018 as special assistant to the president for technology, telecommunications and cybersecurity. In April 2019, she left the administration to lead Fox Corporation’s federal policy team.
David Bossie, Fox News contributor. A right-wing operative who has a history of employing dirty tricks and smears, Bossie was Trump’s deputy campaign manager in 2016. Fox News hired him as an on-air contributor in February 2017, even though he is reportedly bound by a non-disparagement agreement that prohibits him from publicly criticizing Trump. Indeed, Bossie has used his Fox platform to offer boilerplate defenses of Trump. In December 2018, as Fox personalities recommended him to replace White House chief of staff John Kelly, Bossie made an on-air pitch for the post on Fox & Friends.
Tom Homan, Fox News contributor. Homan served as acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement from January 2017 until his retirement in June 2018, using that post to promote the president’s inhumane policies while spreading fear of and among immigrants, often on Fox. Homan joined the network as a contributor in August 2018. As a Fox employee, he staunchly supported the president’s immigration policies and statements and called for draconian responses to the purported migrant “invasion.” During a June 2019 Fox interview, Trump announced that he had hired Homan for a “border czar” position in the White House -- to the visible shock of the interviewers -- but Homan subsequently said that he had considered taking such a position but had not done so.
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marcotte
https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/fox-news-has-gone-so-deep-into-white-nationalism-that-donald-trump-now-believes-its-how-hell-win-in-2020/
Trump thinks white nationalism is going to win him the 2020 election. This much is clear. Trump’s racist Twitter rant on Sunday — in which he suggested that four nonwhite congresswomen, three of whom were born in the United States, are “originally” from somewhere else and should therefore “go back” — might have seemed at first like a spontaneous eruption of racist rage from the simmering bigot in the White House.
Soon, however, it became clear that this was strategic. Trump thinks it’s a winning move to echo the claims of David Duke and other white nationalists who believe the United States is for white people. He justified his racism by saying that “many people agree with me,” and by continuing to rave on Twitter about how the real purveyors of “racist hatred” are those who look askance at his embracing the rhetoric of Stormfront and the KKK.
As Heather Digby Parton argued for Salon, this is more than an explosion of racist anger. Trump “believes that most Americans are as racist as he is and that he will be rewarded for this indecency with a second term.”
There’s good reason to think Trump and his boosters are wrong about this. As New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie pointed out on Twitter, “Trump’s popularity has taken its sharpest dips whenever he goes full racist,” and that even that seemingly rock-solid level of support that sits right around 42% in opinion polls has dipped into the 30s when Trump openly aligns himself with white nationalist views. Thanks largely to his racism (as well as his stunning lack of competence), Trump has spent his entire term in office with lower overall approval ratings than any president in more than 60 years.
So where does Trump getting this idea that ever more extreme racism is the way to win over voters? One major source is likely his favorite TV network and the only source of information he tends to take seriously: Fox News.
For years now, Fox News has been mainstreaming arguments that used to be the province of fringe websites run by neo-Nazis and other groups who believe the U.S. is meant to be a country of white people and for white people — perhaps with others permitted in small numbers of they stay quiet and keep to themselves. Trump was a major factor in the early rumblings of white nationalism on the network, which gave him considerable airtime during his reality TV days to air conspiracy theories about Barack Obama’s birth certificate. Such “birther” theories rested fairly obviously, in the first place, on the belief that black people cannot be “real” Americans.
Since Trump was elected, the Fox News programming that promotes white nationalist ideas has slowly grown both in airtime and in severity. At Salon, we sounded the alarm in the early months of Trump’s presidency, when prime-time Fox News host Tucker Carlson began to experiment with segments that used euphemisms like “Western civilization” to package the idea that white people are inherently more civilized while people of color are a threat to national stability.
Since then, Carlson and many of other Fox News pundits have only grown bolder. “Replacement theory” — the white nationalist idea that has spurred multiple terrorist attacks, holding that white people will somehow be removed and “replaced” by people of color — used to be confined to fringe neo-Nazi websites with atrocious early-2000s design aesthetics. Now that’s become a regular feature of slick Fox News segments, which suggest that immigrants of color are “invading the country” and can never be “fully American,” and that demographic changes from immigration are “more change than human beings are designed to digest” and inherently a threat to “your neighborhood.”
The network also hypes the idea that nonwhite immigrants are dirty and diseased, as well as inherently criminal. (For about the 400th time: Immigrants, documented or otherwise, are less likely to commit crimes than native-born citizens. There is no serious dispute about this.) Furthermore, because many immigrants speak languages other than English and may eat unfamiliar food or bring cultural practices that appear foreign to some, American society will soon be “tipping over a cliff.” is is the same kind of rhetoric that was used to demonize the Irish and Italian immigrants of the past, who were seen as threats to American culture due to scary foreign practices like putting garlic in food and praying with the Rosary. One hardly needs to mention the bigotry and discrimination directed at Jewish immigrants, who were barred from certain neighborhoods and many commercial establishments well into the 20th century. Unfortunately, most of the Fox News audience for this rhetoric, the president included, doesn’t know anything about that history, or care to learn.
It’s true that Fox News ratings are high, and that is incredibly meaningful to Trump, who has a long-standing obsession with TV ratings dating back to his days as host of “The Apprentice.” More important still, Trump tends to view TV ratings as the single most meaningful metric of public opinion, one that far outweighs more statistically significant measures like political polling.
In looking over Trump’s Twitter obsession with TV ratings, it’s clear that he believes — or at least pretends to believe — that ratings are tied tightly to alliance with his racist agenda. It’s not just that he routinely mocks CNN and MSNBC for supposedly having poor ratings. Any TV product that deviates too far from a racist agenda, he believes, takes a ratings hit for it. When NFL players were protesting racism, Trump gleefully declared it was hurting TV ratings. When the Oscars tried to improve racial diversity and attendees decried Trump’s bigotry, he gloated that it was the “Lowest rated Oscars in HISTORY”. He even repeatedly (and falsely) tried to argue that his inauguration ratings exceeded Barack Obama’s.
The pattern is clear: Trump believes racism is more popular than anti-racism, because, he believes, racism gets TV viewers and anti-racism doesn’t. And getting TV viewers is the only measurement he takes seriously.
By any measure of cable viewership, there is no denying that Fox News has disturbingly high ratings. Its daytime audience is 1.3 million viewers on average and the prime time shows pull 2.4 million people. That doesn’t just outdo other cable news networks, but mainstays like TNT and HGTV. Carlson gets nearly 3 million viewers a night, numbers that far exceed his rabid fan base of open white nationalists. Racism does sell, and the audience for white nationalist rhetoric is not small. Nearly 129 million Americans voted in 2016, meaning that only about 2% of the electorate is tuning into Carlson’s show on any given night. By contrast, the CBS sitcom “The Big Bang Theory” has nearly 19 million viewers. Racism sells, sure — but exponentially less well than unfunny sitcoms with aggressive laugh tracks.
Trump’s racism is wildly popular with his base, in other words, but a large majority of Americans find it repulsive. No amount of the president’s obsessive dissection of cable ratings will change that. That’s not to say Trump’s opponents should become complacent or assume that his unpopularity will automatically translate into a 2020 defeat.Unfortunately, racists are dramatically overrepresented in politics, due to the outdated mechanism of the Electoral College, which is how Trump won the 2016 election while getting nearly 3 million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton. He could certainly pull it off again.
Still, Trump’s apparently adamant belief that white nationalism will pay off in electoral terms doesn’t reflect any reputable political polling. It appears instead to be an artifact of his obsession with TV and with Fox News in particular. It’s a closed loop of awfulness: The more Trump pushes his racist agenda, the more the network amplifies his message, and the more he believes his bigotry is massively popular. Unless and until Trump takes a decisive L in 2020, he’s going to keep believing the majority of Americans are secretly on his side.
==
https://grist.org/article/veteran-fox-news-reporter-now-writes-for-a-climate-conscious-blog/
Fox News has been the most-watched news network for the better part of two decades, amassing millions of viewers every month. And it’s safe to say that regular viewers aren’t getting a clear-eyed view of the state of the planet.
One of the network’s regular guests, Marc Morano, has suggested that carbon dioxide doesn’t contribute to climate change because humans exhale it. When a recent U.N. report found that human activity has put 1 million species at risk of extinction, Fox said that assessment might be an exaggeration. Its chief political anchor, Bret Baier, said in 2009 that the earth is “in a cooling period.” (In an emailed statement to Grist, Baier noted that the past five years have been the warmest on record. “The story has changed and the data has changed and I continue to provide all sides of a very controversial policy issue,” he added.) A recent survey showed Republicans who don’t watch Fox News are twice as likely as other Republicans to accept that human-induced climate change is real.
So it’s probably for the best that the network covered climate change for a grand total of 10 minutes and 20 seconds last year(just a little less than the other major networks).
But Fox’s news division isn’t populated solely by fact-resistant folks. Carl Cameron covered politics at Fox News for two decades:First, as one of the News division’s first reporters in 1995, and then as chief political correspondent and the network’s first chief White House correspondent. He’s always seen climate change as a reality. “For me, climate science is science,” he said. “It’s not science when it’s opinion.”
Cameron recently joined a media initiative called Front Page Live, a three-week-old online news aggregation site started by the journalist Joe Romm. It’s meant to bring readers daily news without an agenda. “Essentially, it’s an antidote to the Drudge Report, which slants right and is often climate-denying,” Cameron said. Front Page’s issue areas include immigration, justice, and the “climate crisis.”
Grist interviewed “Campaign Carl” about his two decades at Fox News, why covering our overheating world is more important now than ever, and what it would take to save Fox News from itself.
Q. Why do you care about the climate?
A. I was into ecology back in the day, in the ‘70s. I went to No Nukes concerts. I protested in a nuclear plant and got billy-clubbed in my calves. I tried to jump a picket fence, and the cops decided not to arrest me, but they left a couple of bruises. I was a subscriber to the Whole Earth Catalog when I was just a kid. I went to the first Earth Day. Being environmentally friendly is neither right nor left, Democrat nor Republican. Hell, if you’ve gotta attach it to somebody who made a difference, how about the Bull Moose Party and Teddy Roosevelt?
Unfortunately, in all my years of covering presidential politics, I can honestly say no television news operation did a serious job on which candidates were serious about climate change. It was a box that got checked off at debates, it was a box that got checked off on policy papers, a couple of speeches here and there. But it was never really a consequential issue other than with Al Gore.
Q. Did you notice Fox clamping down on climate coverage while you were there?
A.In the news? No. I would always put those stories in, I would always cover candidates who would make those speeches. But, in terms of the tone of the network, that was far dominated by the opinion makers who, generally speaking, have been climate deniers. And frankly, President Trump dominates everything because the media has chosen to make tweets worthy of news, notwithstanding the fact that a huge percentage of Trump’s tweets promised threats have never come to fruition. They still cover them as though its news.
My views weren’t important when I was working as a reporter at Fox. I made a concerted effort to align with neither party and made it clear to everybody I was working with that my job is to give the voters accurate information so that they can make their decisions. And that’s what I tried to do. I didn’t have any pressure to share a right or left wing opinion. And I didn’t, not on the air at least and very rarely around the workplace.
Q. You’ve left Fox News now, but I wonder: Can the network be fixed? Can the entertainment side of business ever stop dominating the news?
A. Cable news, whether it’s CNN, Fox, MSNBC, or anything else on cable, is a business. And theNo. 1 priority is ratings, solely because ratings equals revenue. And at every single one of the cable stations, they are trying to put things on the air that will keep your eyeballs not on Wolf Blitzer or Sean Hannity or Rachel Maddow, but on the Geico commercials between them.
The anchors shouldn’t be doing it. Sean Hannity is, to an awful lot of Fox viewers, an anchorman. That’s a problem.
Q. It seems to me that climate change has finally entered the mainstream conversation in a new way this cycle. You’ve covered many presidential elections. Do you see it that way?
A. I think people who thought that this was decades or centuries away, people who followed the debate and were inclined one way or another, were undecided about climate change. I think the extreme weather events, the rising sea levels, the melting ice caps have actually gotten through to people.
It’s amazing to think that this information was out there 20 years ago and only now is it becoming a prevailing [issue]. Instead of it being a climate problem, we have newspapers, television hosts, and politicians talking about a climate crisis. So there’s progress. Way, way too slow.
Q. Fox’s talk shows have been bashing the Green New Deal a lot. What do you think of the way the network has handled that particular progressive proposal?
A. The Green New Deal is a subject of conversation and that’s what we need, more serious conversation. We need to have legislation, we need to have laws. We need to do serious stuff. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has definitely rung everybody’s bell, and that’s a great thing. If Fox chooses to cover the issue, well, science will speak for itself as opposed to opinion. And that’s the way it has got to be.
I don’t think you’re going to hear the news department at Fox report that climate change is fake. I know you’re not. I think that if you watch the talk show stuff, yeah, you’re gonna hear all kinds of propaganda and nonsense.
I joined Front Page Live to help the purveyance of factual news that can move the country forward. Listen, if there’s a great article in the National Review or in a conservative publication, TV station, or web page, if it’s relevant, if it’s important, we’re gonna put that out there, too.
I mean, this is about trying to get back to information that people can use to make decisions about what they want our country and what they want their lives to be like, as opposed to wishful thinking from carnival barkers.
==
https://www.mediamatters.org/research/2018/10/29/these-are-fox-news-leading-advertisers/221904
Fox News in its current incarnation is operationally a propaganda network for Donald Trump, using any amounts of racism, sexism, and bigotry necessary to push his message, whatever the cost. Media Matters has repeatedly documented the network's increasing and dangerous promotion of extremism, its embrace of white nationalism, and more. Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Jeanine Pirro, Tucker Carlson, Lou Dobbs, and Fox & Friends are the tip of the spear, but the entire network is culpable.
Following recent right-wing terrorist events with documented connections to Fox News, the media is starting to catch on. A number of leading commentators called for a boycott of all Fox News advertisers following these terrorist events. “The most effective thing Americans can do is boycott companies that advertise on Fox,” said Edward Luce, the U.S. national editor of the Financial Times. Right-wing columnist Max Boot called for companies to "boycott Fox News until they pull back from the hate."
Media Matters President Angelo Carusone made a prescient warning when he wrote recently that the biggest cause of Fox News’ reported advertiser problem was the channel’s own talent. Today, he urged media buyers and advertisers to strongly reconsider financially supporting what is going on at Fox News until there are some meaningful changes there:
This latest controversy over Lou Dobbs’ Fox program promoting an anti-semitic lie is nothing new. Racism, anti-semitism, and dangerous conspiracy theories aren’t unusual for Fox News; they’re the network at its core. But lately the programming is only getting more extreme and volatile, and this explains why the time in between major controversies at the network just keeps getting shorter.
Fox News’ never-ending focus on demonizing political opponents and front-line communities - echoing Trump and framing the struggle against these groups as an urgent matter of life or death - makes the network an increasingly bad business decision for advertisers.
Given all this, it's not surprising to see more and more brands and media buyers avoid portions of or all of Fox News. But for those brands that still haven't gotten that message: The latest acts of right-wing violence fomented by the bigotry and lies on Fox News and outlets like it are a reminder of what their advertising dollars are supporting.
We urge Fox News advertisers to talk to their media buyers, listen to their customers, and consider suspending their relationship with Fox News until the network makes meaningful changes to curb its propagandistic narratives that intentionally spread disinformation and incentivize violence.
Leading advertisers
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no lnx
Former Fox News reporter delivers brutal fact-check to network’s ‘right-wing hosts’ and ‘partisan misinformation’
written by News Corpse, Daily Kos June 25, 2019
Viewers of Fox News will remember a frequent face on the network during many of the elections for the past couple of decades. He was such a ubiquitous presence he was referred to endearingly as Campaign Carl. However, Carl Cameron retired from Fox News after twenty-two years a couple of years ago. And if anyone is wondering what happened to him since, well, you might be surprised.
Cameron just announced his participation in a new Internet news aggregation site called Front Page Live. He formed it with David Romm of ThinkProgress to be “an antidote to the Drudge Report.” The founders plan to provide a platform for progressive news along with opportunities to take action on causes like climate change and liberal politics. And unlike Drudge, their focus will be on accurate news stories, rather than flagrantly slanted propaganda of shills like Breitbart and Infowars and … Fox News.
Cameron released a video (see below) explaining his new venture, and he didn’t mince words about his former employer and colleagues at Fox:
“What’s a former Fox guy doing here on Front Page Live partnering with progressives? Well, it’s about facts, not partisanship. The idea of fair and balanced news appealed to me.But over the years, the right-wing hosts drowned out straight journalism with partisan misinformation.”
Indeed, the State TV hucksters at Fox News (Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Tucker Carlson, Lou Dobbs, Jeanine Pirro, the “Curvy Couch” potatoes of Fox and Friends, and more) have submerged the network with a deluge of falsehoods. Note that Cameron didn’t merely criticize partisan information, but explicitly called it what it is: Misinformation. He could have gone even further to label it disinformation and would still have been correct. He continued with some biting commentary on Donald Trump saying that:
“I have a unique insight and understanding of how the right operates and literally 30 years of covering Donald Trump. Trump’s a conman. He DID collude, and coordinated with Russia to get elected. He encouraged them to intervene in the 2016 election on live television. We all saw it. And recently he said he’d accept their help again because he sees nothing wrong with it. And yes, he is still helping Russia by refusing to take strong actions again a future cyber attack.
This is a remarkable transformation. Cameron says that he kept his political views to himself while at Fox News because he was interested in being a journalist. Had Fox known that they would have fired him. It will be interesting to see if the new website is able to generate the kind of viral news dissemination that Drudge has managed for the conservative media. At least it’s satisfying to see that someone was able to shed the mantle of the wingnut cult and renounce the professional liars at Fox. There may be hope after all.
aha 619 several fear and scam nodes to disambiguate (this started with sinclair tv weather guy refusing to run red alerts mandated, sponsor support.
but made me realize it's fox's biz model?!
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Fox news segment goes off the rails as anti-gay hate group head promotes ‘health hazards of homosexuality’ book on-air
David Badash / The New Civil Rights Movement
At the end of the six-minute segment Schaper held up and tried to advertise a book titled, "The Health Hazards of Homosexuality," which is authored by MassResistance.
==
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/heres-who-fox-news-considers-prominent-conservative-voices/
Laura Ingraham took to her primetime program on Fox News last night to defend conspiracy theorists, extremists, and an unabashed neo-Nazi as “prominent voices” in the conservative movement that have been supposedly “censored on social media.”
A graphic produced by Fox News featured eight people who have been suspended or claim to have been throttled on social media platforms. The figures featured were dubbed “prominent voices censored on social media."[nice grfx]
Here’s who Fox News considers a “prominent” conservative figures.
The graphic featured first Alex Jones, the creator and leading voice of the conspiracy theory outlet Infowars. Jones is currently facing multiple defamation lawsuits regarding his insistence that the Sandy Hook massacre was a hoax, which resulted in the families of slain children being harassed and traumatized by Jones’ viewers. Jones’ intentional spread of disinformation, harassment, and bullying of victims of tragedies and his regular distribution of offensive content broke enough community guidelines on social media platforms to result in a wide-scale deplatforming of his operation online. Infowars has regularly provided a safe space for extremists to recruit to their efforts.
Next on the graphic was Milo Yiannopoulous, a disgraced right-wing hate monger who stirredharassment and vitriol online and violated the community guidelines of many social media sites, resulting in his accounts being permanently suspended. His comments online after the Christchurch massacre in New Zealand, where a white supremacist slaughtered practicing Muslims in two mosques, resulted in him being banned from entering the country of Australia. Yiannopoulous was once a prominent figure in the right-wing movement, thanks in large part to flush funding from the conservative mega-donor Mercer family. The Mercer family funding and Yiannopoulous’ spotlight was dimmed after BuzzFeed News published leaked emails showing Yiannopoulous’ collaboration with white supremacists and his attempt bring them into the mainstream. After audio surfaced of Yiannopoulous appearing to endorse pedophilia, Yiannopoulous was effectively designated persona non grata among conservatives.
Beside Yiannopoulous is Laura Loomer, an anti-Muslim activist whose targeting of Islamic worshipers (and any random person whose appearance led her to believe they are Muslim) violated social media rules against hateful content and resulted in her removal from major tech platforms. Loomer has had numerous affiliations with members of the white nationalist movement and endorsed:{ Faith Goldy, who recited the white supremacist “}
:{” in her bid to become mayor of Toronto.}::{ Loomer, a former Project Veritas operative, has collaborated with Infowars on disinformation campaigns surrounding shootings in Florida and Las Vegas.}:
Candace Owens,who began her career in conservative media using the moniker “Red Pill Black,” joined Ingraham in-studio for the segment and was also featured on the graphic. She was briefly suspended by Facebook earlier this month after one of her posts had been flagged for violating community standards, but she currently uses the site freely. Owens got an early boost in her career from Alex Jones and has continued to advance in conservative circles despite her early affiliations. Owens was recently filmed saying that the problem with Adolf Hitler was that he was too ambitious and took his plans beyond Germany.
Michelle Malkin, who argued in a 2004 book that the United States was right to displace and intern 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry in America during World War II, was another “prominent” voice Ingraham featured. Malkin frequently parrots white nationalist rhetoric on immigration; at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference, she likened immigration to an “invasion” that “endangers” Americans. She closed that speech by saying, “diversity is not our strength,” and followed her speech by giving an interview to the racist website VDARE.
Actor and ardent Trump supporter James Woods, who is not banned from Twitter, but rather has refused to delete a post on his Twitter profile with the hashtag “#HangThemAll” that would result in his account being unlocked, was also featured as a “prominent” censored conservative voice. Before being locked out of Twitter, Woods also shared a meme of the Christchurch shooter depicted as a clown, part of a push by white supremacists to find a new way to launder their voices into relevance.
Fox News deemed Paul Nehlen as another “prominent” conservative voice. Nehlen is a failed state congressional candidate in Wisconsin who pivoted his campaign message to explicitly target Jews and then funneled the money he made to his wife and neighbor. He was banned from social media for being an explicit Nazi and is so aggressive that even the white supremacist internet haven Gab decided to boot him. Angry White Men recently reported that Nehlen and his likewise-failed neo-Nazi counterpart Patrick Little had been debating the best way to start a race war in the United States. And as Right Wing Watch reported earlier this week, Nehlen has promoted the writings of neo-Nazi James Mason, which advocate terrorism to fulfill a white supremacist agenda.
Dan Scavino, White House social media manager,was also featured on this list because he accused Facebook of censoring him for replying to a comment. Platforms are known to throttle accounts if software suspects an account may be spamming and there is no evidence that Scavino was targeted for restriction otherwise.
It’s for segments like these that Democrat presidential hopeful Sen. Elizabeth Warren rejected an invitation to appear on Fox News for a town hall interview, calling the network a “hate-for-profit” scam and drawing criticisms from conservatives. Figures like Meghan McCain insisted that Warren’s refusal to subsidize Fox News with her appearance were off-base and cut her off from conservatives.
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https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2019/05/28/study-right-wing-sources-dominate-abortion-related-news-facebook/223680
In 2019, right-wing media have dominated abortion-related coverage with sensationalized anti-choice rhetoric and harmful misinformation. And on Facebook, anti-abortion misinformation is consistently outperforming all other coverage of abortion-related news.
A Media Matters study of top-engaged U.S. abortion-related coverage on Facebook in the month of April found that 63% of links with the most Facebook interactions came from right-leaning websites, and 72% of the Facebook page posts with the most interactions came from right-leaning pages. Two anti-abortion websites, LifeNews.com and Live Action, made up almost 30% of viral links, and the two main Facebook pages affiliated with these sites made up more than a quarter of the most popular Facebook posts.
Top-engaged content from right-leaning sources often pushed anti-abortion misinformation. Twenty-three percent of links from right-leaning websites reviewed in this study pushed for six-week bans on abortion (also inaccurately referred to as “heartbeat bills”) based on the anti-choice claim that abortion should be banned as soon as fetal cardiac activity is detected, typically by six weeks. Medical experts, however, say "cardiac activity isn't a credible measure of fetal viability." Right-leaning websites and pages also shared false stories about Democrats supporting “infanticide” (they don’t) and anti-conservative censorship by social media platforms (there is none).
Sixty-three percent of the top links related to abortion news on Facebook came from right-leaning websites.
Media Matters reviewed 278 top links related to abortion news which collectively earned 13.6 million interactions on Facebook. Right-leaning websites had 175 links (63%), which earned over 8.6 million interactions (63.6%). Websites that aren’t politically aligned had 80 links (28.8%), which earned 3.8 million interactions (27.8%). And left-leaning websites had just 23 links (8.3%), which earned 1.2 million interactions (8.6%).
...much more, grafs
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mma
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.
contractor direct line to trump brain // whitaker:
https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2019/05/24/how-one-company-used-fox-centric-pr-strategy-try-get-trump-give-it-lucrative-federal-contract/223793
omg
Fox News has unprecedented influence over President Donald Trump’s decision-making. Trump’s worldview is shaped by the hours of propagandistic and sycophantic programming he often watches in a day, as well as his private consultations with many of the network’s stars on a wide variety of topics. As a result, Fox’s commentators have at times dictated the president’s policy agenda and political strategy, harnessed the news cycle by directing his attention to their particular obsessions, provided staffers for his administration, and hand-picked the recipients of his pardons.
And now, the network is emerging as a platform that can determine who could receive hefty federal contracts.
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 claims that his company can build a border wall both faster and cheaper than his competitors thanks to a patent-pending installation system, but the Army Corps of Engineers determined that Fisher’s design “did not meet its requirements and lacked regulatory approvals” and that the firm’s previous work on a barrier project “came in late and over budget,” the Postreported. Rejected through the procurement process, Fisher is trying to go around it through the right-wing media, a method that has allowed him to reach the president. Trump is now trying to sidestep the contracting process because, as Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-ND) explained to the Post, he “had seen [Fisher] on television” -- specifically on Fox -- “advocating for his version of the barrier.”
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 its sister network, Fox Business, since January 2018, according to a Media Matters review. Programs the president regularly watches, including Fox & Friends and The Ingraham Angle, have repeatedly granted Fisher an uncritical platform to shill for his company.
Fisher’s strategy mimics that of K Street lobbyists who pay off TV pundits to promote their messages during on-air appearances and lawyers who put their clients and their relatives on Fox to ask the president for pardons.
The CEO has honed his pitch to appeal to the president in particular, as demonstrated by his March 5 appearance on Fox & Friends, during which co-host Ainsley Earhardt asked him to explain “why should the president, or why should his administration, choose your company?"
[vid]
Fisher first appealed to the president as a businessman, saying Trump should know that his company would do the work for less money than other companies, get it completed faster, and throw in access roads and other additions.
He went on to describe his company as “the first responder” of the industry, appealing to Trump’s well-known obsession with police officers and firefighters.
And he also tried to link the bid to one of Trump’s notable construction successes, the renovation of the Wollman Rink in Central Park in the 1980s. “I think he’ll understand,” Fisher argued, “just like the Central Park deal with the ice skating rink, if you need it done now, nothing against government bureaucracy, but it takes time, so you need an expert to come in there and do it now and do it right.”
Earhardt ended the interview by giving Trump another reason to prefer Fisher: “You might be able to build it just in time for that election, too.”
And Fox’s promotion of Fisher’s bid has not been limited to the network’s supposed “opinion” shows. On April 19, 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."
[vid]
All of this laudatory coverage has had Fisher’s desired effect, with the president reportedly promoting the company’s bid in meetings with senior military and DHS officials and forcing them to explain “that the president could not just pick a company” to get the contract in defiance of the federal procurement process.
Fisher harnessed the incredible power of Fox’s hold on the president to get much closer than he should have to taxpayer dollars. He won’t be the last to try to do so.
==
At this very moment, Trump and allies of his administration are blocking more than 20 Democratic congressional probes. Historians, professors, and legal experts have explained that the administration's actions are unprecedented and that the administration's stonewalling of oversight could quickly set new precedent for unchecked executive power for years after Trump is gone.
Right-wing media have provided extensive cover for the Trump administration. Brian Kilmeade said, "So there are countless investigations. ... And for the most part, the White House looked at all of this and said this is out of control." Jeanine Pirro stated, "The only constitutional crisis is the one created by Obama administration officials of a false collusion." Jesse Watters, simply claimed, "All presidents refuse to hand things over to Congress."
There's a real cost to normalizing this blanket stonewalling. As law professor David Alan Sklansky said, “Our system depends on some commitment by both parties and by all public officials to continuing a constitutional order.”
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519 1st burr then Fox News viewers unleash furious attacks on GOP’s Amash for impeachment talk: ‘This chump is toast’
According to Amash, Trump's actions and behavior meets the "threshold" for impeachment.
Responding to a suprise tweetstorm from Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI) late Saturday, saying President Donald Trump has committed impeachable offenses without directly calling for impeachment, Fox News fans lit up the comments section on the network’s website calling for congressman to step down — along with some racist insults.
According to Amash, Trump’s actions and behavior meets the “threshold” for impeachment. The Michigan Republican also took more than a few shots at Attorney General Bill Barr, by writing, “In comparing Barr’s principal conclusions, congressional testimony, and other statements to Mueller’s report it is clear that Barr intended to mislead the public about Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s analysis and findings.”
Needless to say, Trump’s fans took to the comments to defend their man.
You can see a sampling below:...
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/04/new-report-details-failure-of-cable-and-network-outlets-to-accurately-describe-climate-emergency-call-it-a-crisis/
no lnx twt
Name and shame.
That’s the dual directive from a new report that calls on news organizations to use appropriate language when discussing the climate crisis—even as the report calls them out for inaction.
The report—titled “‘Call It a Crisis’: The Role of U.S. Network News in Communicating the Urency of Climate Change” (pdf)—analyzed the coverage of ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News to determine just how much urgency the influential outlets bring to their reporting.
https://www.citizen.org/wp-content/uploads/public-citizen-call-it-a-crisis-report-april-29-2019.pdf
According to David Arkush, managing director of Public Citizen’s Climate Program, the specific words that journalists and news anchors use—or choose not to use—matters.
“The words we use to characterize an issue make a difference in how it is perceived and prioritized politically,” said Arkush.
When outlets with massive nightly audiences like the ones the report studied “consistently fail to use language that conveys that climate change is a crisis or emergency,” Arkush added, “they unwittingly put a heavy thumb on the scale in favor of complacency and inaction.”
Fox News was the worst offender,with the use of “climate crisis” coming in for only five mentions during the coverage period—all of which, as Public Citizen noted, were efforts to “minimize the issue with false logic, mockery or misinformation.” But other news networks weren’t much better than the conservative channel.
The only network to use the term in double digits was CNN,and only 16 of the 26 mentions were by a host. Van Jones, whose eponymous show ran every other Sunday during the survey period, accounted for six of those mentions.
Public Citizen
?
@Public_Citizen
NEW REPORT: In 2018, only 50 of 1,429 national TV news segments used the word “crisis” or “emergency" when discussing climate change. That's a measly 3.5 percent.
Here's how the networks stack up:
MSNBC: 7%
NBC: 6%
CNN: 3%
CBS: 3%
ABC: 2%
Fox: 2%
http://pubc.it/2XTXQEE
55
12:23 PM - Apr 29, 2019
50 people are talking about this
Twitter Ads info and privacy
Networks should name the problem clearly to avoid confusion, said Allison Fisher, outreach director for Public Citizen’s Energy Program.
“Climate coverage on broadcast and cable television news is still at best spotty and at worst riddled with misinformation,” Fisher said. “Calling it a crisis indicates that the stakes are high and that the issue is urgent. Most of all it signals to viewers that the time to act on climate is now.”
How to report on the climate crisis has long been an issue for news organizations. In July 2018, MSNBC host Chris Hayes said on Twitter that while he was personally invested in the story, the topic was “a palpable ratings killer.”
“So the incentives are not great,” said Hayes.
Chris Hayes
?
@chrislhayes
Replying to @elongreen
almost without exception. every single time we've covered it's been a palpable ratings killer. so the incentives are not great.
526
7:08 AM - Jul 24, 2018
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fox cheerleader venez
https://www.foxnews.com/world/drug-trafficking-maduro-venezuela
no lnx pix [vid?]
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Drug trafficking keeping Maduro in power in Venezuela, analysts say
Hollie McKay [who?]
By Hollie McKay | Fox News
Pence says Venezuela ambassador 'shouldn't be here' while addressing the UN Security CouncilVideo
Pence says Venezuela ambassador 'shouldn't be here' while addressing the UN Security Council]
It has been more than three months since the U.S. accelerated its onslaught of economic sanctions on Venezuela, coupled with the back of a new interim President – heightening official expectation that the Nicolas Maduro-led regime would crumble.
Only the socialist dictatorship has failed to fall. While there an array of factors to blame, analysts are pointing to illicit trafficking rings as a fundamental Maduro lifeline.
:{
“The Venezuelan military forces has become a narco-criminal, armed organization. Most of the top and mid-commanders are deeply involved in corruption, drug operations, and serious human rights abuses,” Johan Obdola, president of Latin America-focused global intelligence and security firm IOSI, told Fox News,}: noting that cartel-led, massive drug operations continue to spawn the country keeping the top echelon well-fed and financed. “Small pro-regime policing agencies and military units across the nation conduct these criminal operations centered on drug trafficking, kidnapping, and robbery to survive the crisis.”
Kevin Ivers, Vice President and Latin America expert at public policy firm DCI Group, pointed out that years ago, the elite of the Venezuelan military was put in charge of the core elements of the domestic economy, such as the importation and distribution of food and consumer goods.
[In this Feb. 14, 2019 file photo, Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro speaks during an interview at Miraflores presidential palace in Caracas, Venezuela. (???????AP Photo/Ariana Cubillos, File)
“This has encouraged corruption and profiteering that has made key elements of the military part of what can be called the regime’s ‘mafia,’ and this has extended beyond consumer goods to drug trafficking,” he explained. “Maduro has also spent years systematically splintering the military into factions and playing them off each other to make it difficult for them to unite against him.”
PENCE CONFRONTS VENEZUELAN AMBASSADOR AT UN: ‘YOU SHOULDN’T BE HERE’
Emanuele Ottolenghi, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, concurred that many in the upper echelons receive a cut from the regime’s illicit trafficking network – from drugs to food and medicine racketeering.
“There aren’t enough incentives(for military leaders) to leave and disincentives to stay to tip the balance, especially at the top,” he noted.
Indeed, military defections – once considered key to Maduro’s expulsion – have dipped from 80 to 100 per day earlier this year to just two or three, according to the Washington Post. And of those, very few have come from the highest ranks and thus failed to generate a game-changing ripple effect.
“There were no key defections, roughly 500 members of the military without any real commanders. In a 110,000 military it had no impact,” explained Carlos Ponce, a senior fellow, and director of Latin America Programs at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. “There was no real analysis of the military structure and the breaking points.”
Ponce said that former leader Hugo Chavez intentionally dismembered the lines of command to avoid a coup d’état while he was in power. He also pointed out that those who did make the leap have been paying the price.
“The commanders and high-ranking officials allegedly caught in anti-Maduro meetings have been tortured and their families isolated from any social or food program,” Ponce noted. “So there is a disincentive for anyone who showed discontent with the regime – jail or torture and abandonment to their families.”
Maduro’s reign is also being held together by external players. The U.S estimates that more than 20,000 Cuban agents alone are now planted within the Venezuelan military and law enforcement, presiding over internal operations and the movements of the top brass.
“Maduro relies heavily on foreigners to prop up his regime – Cuba, Russia, and Iran. They have a vested economic and political interest in ensuring he succeeds. Economically, to ensure that it is they that control the largest proven oil reserves in the world,” said John Wood, analyst and author of 'Russia, the Asymmetric Threat to the United States.' “Politically, to render the U.S. visibly impotent in its own backyard and thereby lay the groundwork forbuilding a viable military threat to the USA in its own hemisphere.”
[Eight-year-old Franyelis feeds her baby brother Joneiber as their mother Francibel Contreras holds a bowl of scrambled eggs and rice, at a soup kitchen in the Petare slum, Caracas, Venezuela. Contreras brings her three malnourished children to the soup kitchen in the dangerous hillside slum where they scoop in spoonfuls of food in what could be their only meal of the day. (AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd)
]
Obdola also underscored that the Cubans have “established an intense regional intelligence and surveillance operation” in bordering areas and in countries that support regime change in Venezuela.
“This operation is intense and mostly in Colombia, Brazil and other nearby nations where a very unique gathering of spies, intelligence and even terrorist operations are very active,” he said.
FIRST SHIPMENT OF RED CROSS AID ARRIVES IN VENEZUELA]
But the U.S., which has vowed to refurbish the rule of law and bring about new leadership in Venezuela, is yet to dramatically change its strategy.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said last week that “all options” are on the table when it comes to Venezuela, insisting that the strategy is “not just an American strategy” but the “Venezuelan’s people’s strategy.”
“Sometimes people think Maduro is winning, and yet he’s handed over all his power to the Cubans, to the Russians,” Pompeo told theVoice of AmericaSpanish. “This is weakness from Maduro. And so this weakness will ultimately lead to his departure, and democracy and prosperity will be restored in Venezuela.”
He has also taken aim at China’s role in standing by Maduro financially, mandating that their role is prolonging the protracted crisis in Venezuela.
[People cross the Tachira River into Colombia near the Simon Bolivar International bridge, which Venezuelan authorities only open to students and the sick, in Cucuta, Colombia, Tuesday, March 12, 2019, on the border with Venezuela. People crossing the river are using makeshift bridges as the water level grows with the approaching rainy season. (AP Photo/Schneyder Mendoza)
]
Once awash will oil wealth and deemed the richest country in Latin America, Venezuela has been beleaguered by an economic crisis since 2015 which has since spiraled into a grave humanitarian catastrophe and prompted the exodus of almost four million into now overburdened neighboring nations. Maduro has consistently blamed the U.S. for purporting to wage "economic war," but has largely denied that there are mass problems.
GET THE FOX NEWS APP
On the ground in the poverty-plagued Venezuela, it’s a mix of exasperation and desperation with the vast majority continuing to push for change and turn to the U.S. for support as time rolls on.
“There is more room for applying sanctions,” Ivers added. “Anything that cuts off the regime’s ability to generate cash, that disrupts its flow ofcontrabandgoods and drug trafficking finances, and increases the pressure of possible prosecution of senior military and regime figures for crimes against humanity or other criminal acts, will bring the regime closer to the negotiating table to seek an end to the conflict.”
Hollie McKay has a been a Fox News Digital staff reporter since 2007. She has extensively reported from war zones including Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Burma, and Latin America investigates global conflicts, war crimes and terrorism around the world. Follow her on Twitter.
BS fox
no lnx vid
Blackwater founder pitches plan to privatize Afghanistan war
Erik Prince makes the case for replacing U.S. troops with private contractors in Afghanistan.
The founder of the private security firm Blackwater is pushing for a plan to deploy a group of mercenaries in Venezuela to support the people’s efforts to topple Socialist dictator Nicholas Maduro, according to a report.
Erik Prince is said to have been advocating for the Venezuelan plan for the last several months, seeking political support and investment from powerful pro-Trump figures and wealthy exiles from the Latin American country.
TATA & PRINCE: PRECEDENT FOR SYRIA, AFGHANISTAN PULLOUT LIES WITH WWII-ERA FLYING TIGERS
According to Reuters, Prince suggested during meetings in the U.S. and Europe that a private army of 5,000 would be deployed in support of Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido.
The State Department didn’t respond to Fox News’s request for comment about the report.
But a person familiar with the Trump administration’s thinking told Reuters it’s unlikely the White House would support Prince’s plan. A spokesman for Prince, meanwhile, insisted that Prince “has no plans to operate or implement an operation in Venezuela.”
Trump warns Moscow over troops in Venezuela, says 'all options are open'Video
The reported push in Venezuela comes following amid a failed attempt to convince Trump to outsource the Afghanistan War to private contractors that Prince said could do more and for a lower cost than the thousands of U.S. military troops currently stationed in the country. Blackwater is now named Academi. Prince's new company is Frontier Services Group.
“History supports presidential authorization for the use of private military contractors during transition operations to help the U.S. and its allies achieve strategic aims. Now is the time to begin the transition, secure our vital interests, and husband our precious resources,” an op-ed co-authorized by Prince read back in January.
DRUG TRAFFICKING KEEPING MADURO IN POWER IN VENEZUELA, ANALYSTS SAY
But Trump reportedly followed the advice of his cabinet members such as former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and decided not to pursue the plan.
Yet when it comes to Venezuela, Prince claims that the private troops would also facilitate the change in the country as it would likely help to cause a so-called “dynamic event” that would end the stalemate that existed for over four months now, with the socialist regime still in place, according to Reuters.
Guaido has largely been recognized as the legitimate leader of the Venezuela, with most Western countries throwing their support behind him, but his rule hasn’t yet been accepted by the military and security agencies, which remain loyal to Maduro.
GET THE FOX NEWS APP
Such situation caused an impasse, with no side having full claim to legitimacy and Maduro continuing to rule the country by force.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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419 mma random
Week In Dumb
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519
| Week In Dumb |
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mma
Following the release of the Mueller report, right-wing media and Republican lawmakers have asserted that now is time for the Department of Justice to investigate those who investigated Russian interference in the 2016 Presidential election. While some just lied that the report exonerated the president and his campaign, others are concerned enough to demand investigations into their political opponents. We've assembled more than two dozen examples. Here are just a few:
- Fox host Sean Hannity: “If any of this started before July 31, the alleged beginning of the FBI's collusion investigation, we need to know when it started. And finally, we need to know this big question: What did he know? What did President Obama know? And when did he know it?”
- Fox Business Host Stuart Varney: “I would simply like to know what did President Obama know about an ongoing spying operation into a competitor's political presidential campaign? … Will we find out what Hillary was doing?”
- Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk on a Fox "straight news" program:“I actually believe you cannot allow the people from the internal, high levels of the FBI to get away with what they did here. ... There’s a lot of information, a lot of questions that still needs to be answered because this should never be allowed to happen to any other president again.”
- Fox News chief political anchor Bret Baier: Baier falsely gave credence to the idea that investigators need to be investigated, saying, “We don't yet know about the origins of the investigation, the [inspector general] may shed some light on this, as other investigations in the early stages.”
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mma
Fox News spent weeks in May 2017 spreading the conspiracy theories trying to link murdered DNC staffer Seth Rich to WikiLeaks. From Sean Hannity to Newt Gingrich to Steve Doocy, the objective was clear: If there were any possibility that Rich was the source of the emails, then it would not have been Russia. And if it were not Russia, Trump would be cleared of any malfeasance. But now, thanks to Robert Mueller's final report, we finally have proof that it was all a lie.
In 2017, following Rich's murder, right-wing conspiracy theories arose, asserting that the staffer had provided DNC emails to Wikileaks for publication. There was never a shred of evidence to support this conspiracy theory. No responsible news organization ran with anything close to this. But Fox News did.
This was a transparent attempt to protect Trump from the U.S. intelligence community's conclusion that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to aid his campaign. After running with the story for days amidst criticism, Fox finally pulled the initial report. Hannity then continued pushing it, stopping only when Rich's family asked him to. Fox News eventually promised an internal investigation into the matter -- and this week marked 700 days since that promise. And still, we've heard nothing.
There is no reason to believe that anyone at Fox will be held accountable for their actions. Fox has never cared about the basic ethical standards accepted at most newsrooms. As Media Matters' Matt Gertz explained, "Fox is a propaganda outlet geared toward ensuring the continued dominance of Trump and his movement. The pain of Rich’s family is simply the cost of doing business."
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/04/fox-news-reporter-chastised-colleagues-for-sounding-like-a-white-supremacist-chat-room-report/
Many reporters and pundits at Fox News haven’t been shy about jumping through hoops to defend President Donald Trump even when he is at his worst. Nonetheless, there are times when Fox News employees show some integrity, and a new report from the Daily Beast indicates that Jon Decker is one of them. Maxwell Tani and Andrew Kirell of the Daily Beast are reporting that Decker (a White House correspondent for Fox News Radio) called out two of his colleagues on Thursday for sounding “like a white supremacist chat room.”
This week, former Vice President Joe Biden officially announced that he was running in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary and released a campaign video that, among other things, criticized Trump for his response to the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017 and his assertion there were “good people on both sides.” According to Tani and Kirell, Doug McKelway (a general assignment reporter at Fox News) set out to discredit Biden’s video and defend Trump.
Tani and Kirell, based on reviews of “internal e-mails,” found that McKelway sent an e-mail to “dozens of network employees” and hoped to “fact-check Biden.” McKelway, according to Tani and Kirell, opened his e-mail with a Winston Churchill quote: “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.” And McKelway highlighted a quote from his own interview with Brian Lambert, who was an armed attendee of the Unite the Right rally.
Lambert had told McKelway, “They’re denying people their right to assemble. They’re denying their right to speak freely, however hateful their views may be.”
Moments later, according to Tani and Kirell, Cody Derespina (a digital senior editor at Fox News) responded to McKelway’s e-mail, agreed with him and added “a snippet of a Fox News interview with Jarrod Kuhn, a Charlottesville marcher who claimed he was not a white supremacist, but simply there to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee.”
Seeing the e-mails from McKelway and Derespina, Decker jumped into the e-mail conservation and wrote, “I really don’t understand the point you are making. Jarrod Kuhn was one of those individuals in Charlottesville holding a tiki torch while the mob chanted, ‘Jews will not replace us.’”
An hour later, McKelway acknowledged that Lambert “revealed himself to be not the squeaky clean 1st Amendment supporter he claimed to be on live TV.” And Decker responded, “So much for your Winston Churchill quote”—adding that “invoking Churchill to what happened in Charlottesville” was “rather offensive.” And Decker, according to Tani and Kirell, went on to write, “Based upon the slew of e-mails that I’ve received today, both of you should send an apology to your Fox News colleagues—many of whom are hurt and infuriated by your respective posts. Your posts read like something you’d read (in) a white supremacist chat room.”
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/04/these-are-the-4-times-fox-news-was-referenced-in-the-mueller-report-and-why-they-make-trump-look-even-worse/
With the release of the redacted version of the Mueller report by Donald Trump’s plant in the Justice Department, Attorney General William Barr, there is going to be a flurry of furious spinning by Trump’s devoted martinets in the right-wing press. Trump himself will continue his frantic robo-rant of “no collusion, no obstruction,” as he has been doing for months.
Naturally, Fox News will assume its predictable role as the main line of defense for Trump. They will focus exclusively on any positive angles among the vague interpretations of Mueller’s report offered by Barr or other Republican partisans. And they will brazenly ignore anything in the report that is remotely detrimental to Trump, of which there is a significant amount. Even Chris Wallace of Fox News noted that “There is a lot of stuff in here that is damaging to the president, politically embarrassing to the president.”
However, Fox News itself had a place in the Mueller report with four references to Trump’s State TV affiliate. The following passages from the report illustrate just how deeply integrated Fox is with Trump and his associates. For instance:
Page 70:
“That night, the White House Press Office called the Department of Justice and said the White House wanted to put out a statement saying that it was Rosenstein’s idea to fire Comey. Rosenstein told other DOJ officials that he would not participate in putting out a ‘false story.’ The President then called Rosenstein directly and said he was watching Fox News, that the coverage had been great, and that he wanted Rosenstein to do a press conference. Rosenstein responded that this was not a good idea because if the press asked him, he would tell the truth that Comey’s firing was not his idea.”
What we have here is Trump keeping tabs on the investigation by watching Fox News, and then trying to get Deputy AG Rosenstein to lie for him about FBI Director James Comey’s firing. That’s obstruction of justice right there. The fact that Rosenstein refused doesn’t make Trump’s attempt any less illegal. And then there’s this:
Page 99:
“[Reince] Priebus recalled learning about the June 9 meeting from Fox News host Sean Hannity in late June 2017. Priebus notified one of the President’s personal attorneys, who told Priebus he was already working on it. By late June, several advisors recalled receiving media inquiries that could relate to the June 9 meeting.”
It’s rather remarkable that Priebus, Trump’s chief of staff, found out about the infamous Trump Tower meeting (with Don Jr, Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort, and some Russian operatives) only by watching Fox News. That’s how out-of-the-loop Trump’s closest White House aide was, but also how integral Fox News is to Trump’s affairs. And that’s not all:
Page 126:
“In a Fox News interview on August 22, 2018, the President said: ‘[Cohen] makes a better deal when he uses me, like everybody else. And one of the reasons l respect Paul Manafort so much is he went through that trial-you know they make up stories. People make up stories. This whole thing about flipping, they call it, I know all about flipping. The President said that flipping was ‘not fair’ and ‘almost ought to be outlawed.'”
In this “interview” with the unabashedly pro-Trump “Curvy Couch” potatoes of Fox and Friends, Trump is laying the groundwork for threats directed at his former personal attorney, Michael Cohen, while simultaneously praising his more loyal campaign chairman, Manafort. This is a fairly clumsy attempt at witness tampering. Which he did some more of here:
Page 151:
“In January 2019, after the media reported that Cohen would provide public testimony in a congressional hearing, the President made additional public comments suggesting that Cohen’s family members had committed crimes. In an interview on Fox on January 12, 2019, the President was asked whether he was worried about Cohen’s testimony and responded:'[I]n order to get his sentence reduced, [Cohen] says “I have an idea, I’ll ah, tell-I’ll give you some information on the president.” Well, there is no information. But he should give information maybe on his father-in-law because that’s the one that people want to look at because where does that money-that’s the money in the family.'”
Trump made these accusations during an interview with his adoring acolyte, Fox News host Jeanine Pirro. They were directed against Cohen’s family as a flagrant attempt to scare him into keeping his mouth shut.
It’s hard to see why Mueller didn’t think he had sufficient evidence to indict Trump, or at least to recommend that Congress take up an inquiry that could lead to impeachment. And as guilty as Trump now appears to be, it’s plain that Fox News was a willing accomplice every step of the way. It is not insignificant that Fox was referenced four times in the report. They were further included in twenty-seven footnotes. No other national news network was referenced in the body of the report even once. What does that tell you?
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https://www.mediamatters.org/research/2018/10/29/these-are-fox-news-leading-advertisers/221904
Fox News in its current incarnation is operationally a propaganda network for Donald Trump, using any amounts of racism, sexism, and bigotry necessary to push his message, whatever the cost. Media Matters has repeatedly documented the network's increasing and dangerous promotion of extremism, its embrace of white nationalism, and more. Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Jeanine Pirro, Tucker Carlson, Lou Dobbs, and Fox & Friends are the tip of the spear, but the entire network is culpable.
Following recent right-wing terrorist events with documented connections to Fox News, the media is starting to catch on. A number of leading commentators called for a boycott of all Fox News advertisers following these terrorist events. “The most effective thing Americans can do is boycott companies that advertise on Fox,” said Edward Luce, the U.S. national editor of the Financial Times. Right-wing columnist Max Boot called for companies to "boycott Fox News until they pull back from the hate."
Media Matters President Angelo Carusone made a prescient warning when he wrote recently that the biggest cause of Fox News’ reported advertiser problem was the channel’s own talent. Today, he urged media buyers and advertisers to strongly reconsider financially supporting what is going on at Fox News until there are some meaningful changes there:
This latest controversy over Lou Dobbs’ Fox program promoting an anti-semitic lie is nothing new. Racism, anti-semitism, and dangerous conspiracy theories aren’t unusual for Fox News; they’re the network at its core. But lately the programming is only getting more extreme and volatile, and this explains why the time in between major controversies at the network just keeps getting shorter.
Fox News’ never-ending focus on demonizing political opponents and front-line communities - echoing Trump and framing the struggle against these groups as an urgent matter of life or death - makes the network an increasingly bad business decision for advertisers.
Given all this, it's not surprising to see more and more brands and media buyers avoid portions of or all of Fox News. But for those brands that still haven't gotten that message: The latest acts of right-wing violence fomented by the bigotry and lies on Fox News and outlets like it are a reminder of what their advertising dollars are supporting.
We urge Fox News advertisers to talk to their media buyers, listen to their customers, and consider suspending their relationship with Fox News until the network makes meaningful changes to curb its propagandistic narratives that intentionally spread disinformation and incentivize violence.
Leading advertisers
This list was originally posted October 29, 2018. It was last updated on March 27, 2019.
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A comprehensive list of former Fox employees who have joined the Trump administration
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If you want to force action on climate change, Fox News needs to be fought -- not engaged with. That's what Media Matters' Evlondo Cooperwrote about this week, pointing to years of its misinformation and bad faith attacks. Even now, the network is leading the charge to attack the Green New Deal. And while it's tempting to argue with them, as an institution it's not going to change unless forced -- and the way to force that change is through sustained pressure, not arguments. The Democratic tactic of engaging with Fox News has failed: Fox News is more vulnerable than it's ever been, but it's not going down without pressure. It's time to fight.
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ref also
see new green deal for lnx vid
In the last week of March, Fox News aired more than twice as many prime-time segments discussing the Green New Deal as MSNBC and CNN combined, Media Matters found. Fox ran 22 segments on the Green New Deal, and only half of them even mentioned climate change. MSNBC and CNN aired 14 and five segments, respectively, but all of those discussed climate change.
Fox aired more Green New Deal segments than CNN and MSNBC combined from March 25 to 31
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Sen. Ed. Markey (D-MA) introduced the Green New Deal on February 7, thrusting the issue of climate change into the national political conversation. On March 26, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) called a procedural vote on the resolution, attempting to embarrass Democrats by forcing them to take a stance on it before senators had a chance to hold hearings and debate the measure. Almost all Senate Democrats banded together to call McConnell's bluff by voting "present" instead of yes or no.
Media Matters analyzed prime-time cable news coverage of the Green New Deal during the week of the Senate vote. From March 25 to 31, Fox News ran 22 segments discussing the Green New Deal on its weekday and weekend prime-time shows airing between 5 p.m. and midnight. Across this same period, MSNBC aired 14 prime-time segments discussing the Green New Deal, and CNN aired five.
Melissa Joskow / Media Matters
Only half of Fox's Green New Deal segments mentioned climate change, 11 out of 22, despite the fact that the plan is designed specifically to address the climate crisis. In contrast, all segments about the Green New Deal on MSNBC and CNN discussed climate change.
Media Matters did a similar analysis in February in the days after the Green New Deal was introduced. It found that Fox covered the Green New Deal more than three times as often as MSNBC and CNN combined from February 7 to 11; Fox aired 34 segments that mentioned the proposal, MSNBC aired eight, and CNN aired three. And during that period, Fox mentioned climate change in 41% of its Green New Deal segments, MSNBC mentioned climate change in 62%, and CNN mentioned it in 67%.
Comparing those earlier findings to our new ones, Fox ran fewer segments on the Green New Deal in the last week of March than it had during that stretch in early February, and a similar proportion of the segments mentioned climate change. MSNBC and CNN, in contrast, both improved their performance, airing more segments on the Green New Deal and discussing climate change in all of them. And in the case of MSNBC in particular, many of the segments were longer and more substantive and informative.
But the overall trend of Fox covering the Green New Deal more than its cable competitors continued, and that's a significant problem because Fox's coverage is so bad.
Fox's coverage of the Green New Deal was rife with misinformation and mockery
In the last week of March, many of Fox’s 22 segments mentioning the Green New Deal contained misinformation. A number of them falsely suggested or stated that the plan would ban airplanes or cars, which it would not. Others claimed that the Green New Deal would cost $93 trillion or $100 trillion, though both figures have been debunked. In four cases, the misinformation came directly from President Donald Trump; he maligned the Green New Deal during a speech in Michigan, and Fox aired footage of that speech without rebutting Trump's false statements. Donald Trump Jr. spread false information too. On the March 25 episode of Tucker Carlson Tonight, he mocked the plan and said, "we don't exactly have $93 trillion to spend to say you're going to take a bus to Hawaii."
Another classic example of a Fox discussion about the Green New Deal came on the March 30 episode of Watters' World, in which Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale was interviewed:
JESSE WATTERS (HOST): Good, now, what is the data telling you about socialism? The Green New Deal, are people responding to that? Or is this a killer at the ballot box?
BRAD PARSCALE: I mean, look, I think it’s a great issue for the president. I think it's just, as he said last -- as he's been trying to say all week, I think it’s incredible how much they just want $100 trillion, destroy the economy, turn us into Venezuela.
WATTERS: He wants to run against the Green New Deal.
PARSCALE: Oh yes. Oh yeah.
WATTERS: He is licking his chops.
PARSCALE: Yeah, it's like a juicy steak. I mean, getting rid cows, airplanes, no more Hawaiian senators --
WATTERS: Right, yes, it's like the Big Mac president running against the vegans. It's not going to fly.
Two of Fox's prime-time Green New Deal segments cast doubt on the scientific consensus around climate change. One came from Tucker Carlson on the March 27 episode of Tucker Carlson Tonight, during which he said, “The climate seems like it is changing. Climate changes a lot, always has, maybe human activity is causing it.” In the same episode, he also made the false claim that “nobody is dying from global warming in this country.” The next night on Hannity, guest Rush Limbaugh was more explicit in his climate denial, claiming, “We don't even have the power to impact the climate. We can't change it for better or worse. But it is constantly changing. All we can do is adapt to it. We're the best in the world at that.”
But both Tucker Carlson Tonight and Hannity, Fox's flagship evening opinion shows, spent less time on the Green New deal in the last week of March than they had in early February, when they both aired rants about its allegedly oppressive nature.
In contrast, Fox News @ Night with host Shannon Bream, which Fox bills as a straight "news" program, aired more segments on the plan in the last week of March than it had in early February. The Fox News @ Night segments also spread misinformation, like the false claim that the plan would cost $100 trillion. Fox News @ Night also gave a platform to Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) on March 27 to continue the ridiculous attack he had made on the Green New Deal on the Senate floor earlier that day; on the show, Lee mocked the plan further, saying, "The Green New Deal is its own punch line."
MSNBC aired strong coverage of the Green New Deal and climate change, thanks in large part to Chris Hayes
MSNBC aired 14 segments on the Green New Deal in the last week of March, and nine of them ran on All In With Chris Hayes. All of MSNBC's segments discussed the plan within the context of climate change.
Hayes produced standout coverage of the Green New Deal, including substantive discussion of what it aims to do and why climate action is critical. After the Senate vote on March 26, Markey appeared on All In With Chris Hayes to explain the reasoning behind the Democrats’ strategy to vote “present”:
SEN. ED MARKEY (D-MA): I voted “present” because Mitch McConnell and the Republicans, who are making a mockery of the legislative process, they gave us no hearings. We could have no expert witnesses. We could have no scientists. We could have no people from the states which have been affected by the massive climate-related damage, which has occurred from forest fires in California to the storms across the Midwest, the hurricanes sweeping through Texas and Florida. None of that was allowed to be presented as part of a hearing process.
…
CHRIS HAYES (HOST): Today illustrated to me the enormous gap -- I mean, I think the Republicans by and large, your fellow colleagues, they see it all as a joke, as a stunt. I mean, the gap between what the actual physics are -- what the science says, what the scale of the challenge is -- and where the Republicans are, it almost seems un-overcomeable to me. Does it to you?
MARKEY: It is pretty big. I mean, the United Nations and their scientists at the end of 2018 said that climate is warming so rapidly that it now poses an existential threat to the planet. The 13 federal agencies with jurisdiction over climate issued their own report at the end of 2018. They came to a conclusion that said this is very serious and we had to do something about it.
On March 29, All In With Chris Hayes aired a special episode in which Hayes interviewed Ocasio-Cortez and a host of others about climate change and the Green New Deal. This episode accounted for four of MSNBC's segments about the Green New Deal in the last week of March. Hayes also aired segments about how Republicans are failing to substantively engage on climate change and how climate change is already affecting residents of the Bronx, among others.
According to a recent Public Citizen analysis, Hayes discussed climate change more than his MSNBC peers over the past 24 months -- even though he called climate change a “palpable ratings killer” last July. He was criticized for that comment, and since then he's aired climate coverage more often. Public Citizen is now calling on Hayes to commit to cover climate change at least once a week.
Other discussions of the Green New Deal on MSNBC came during interviews with politicians, including Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-HI) on MTP Daily, Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) on Politics Nation, and Markey again on The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell.
One MSNBC segment included a guest who argued against taking dramatic steps to combat climate change. On the March 26 episode of MTP Daily, New York Times columnist Bret Stephens warned that we could "bankrupt ourselves in the process of ensuring ourselves against the potential risk." Host Katy Tur and NBC analyst Heather McGhee both pushed back against Stephens' claim that climate change isn't serious enough to warrant bold action.
CNN infrequently mentioned the Green New Deal, but connected it to climate change when it did
CNN aired only five prime-time segments that discussed the Green New Deal in the last week of March. Climate change was brought up in all of them.
Three of these discussions occurred during interviews with Democratic presidential candidates. On the March 26 episode of Erin Burnett Tonight, Julián Castro, former secretary of Housing and Urban Development, said he was a "fan of the Green New Deal." Though he did not say the words "climate change" or "global warming," he spoke about the climate crisis, noting the need to "protect our planet" and the promise of renewable energy. Former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper appeared on CNN Tonight on March 26 and said he does not support the Green New Deal, but he thinks climate change is "one of the defining issues of our times." And during a CNN town hall on March 27, Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) restated his support for the Green New Deal and emphasized the importance of fighting climate change.
Fox is distorting the public conversation about the Green New Deal
It is good news that MSNBC and CNN have been discussing the Green New Deal in the context of climate change, and in some cases examining its policy ideas in-depth.
Unfortunately, Fox News is still talking about the Green New Deal more than its cable competitors, and often in dishonest and destructive ways. By spreading misinformation about the proposal, Fox is distorting the national dialogue about it. Sean McElwee -- co-founder of Data for Progress, a progressive think tank that helped to shape the Green New Deal -- made this point in a March 27 op-ed in The New York Times:
The core challenge the Green New Deal faces is not so much on the merits of the concept or even its political feasibility; it is that many of its Democratic supporters have met an aggressive and one-sided onslaught from the right with very little by way of response.
…
Though many components of the Green New Deal are popular, the Republican propaganda machine has already reshaped the narrative, and it has done so with virtually no coordinated pushback from progressives, or certainly nowhere near enough, a worrying pattern.
Progressive pushback has emerged more often in recent weeks, especially on MSNBC. But Fox, by covering the Green New Deal so aggressively and negatively, is already prejudicing many voters against it before they have a chance to learn what it actually calls for and why. McElwee cited polling by the progressive project Navigator that found Republican Fox viewers were more likely than other voters both to have heard a lot about the Green New Deal and to have seen negative coverage, and a recent poll by Navigator found that Fox News viewers were more inclined than others to deny that human-made climate change is happening.
Fox is unlikely to change its approach, so other media outlets need to step up with more frequent, honest, and probing coverage of the Green New Deal and other proposals for addressing the climate crisis. Failure to do so will distort the overall discourse around climate change and hinder the process of finding solutions.
Methodology
Media Matters conducted Nexis and IQ Media searches for mentions of "green new deal" in programs that aired on CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC between 5 p.m. and midnight from March 25 to 31. We then searched within those transcripts for mentions of “climate” or "global warming." We counted any segments that were devoted to the Green New Deal or made substantial mention of it. We did not count teasers, passing mentions, or rebroadcasts.
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https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2019/04/12/Candidates-who-care-about-climate-change-should-be-wary-of-partnering-with-Fox-News/223427
Fox News is trying to entice Democratic presidential candidates to participate in town halls on the network, as Sen. Bernie Sanders (VT) is scheduled to do on April 15. Though Sanders has explained his reasoning for wanting to do a town hall on Fox, there are plenty of good reasons why other candidates should think carefullyabout whether they want to partner with the network.
Fox is a pernicious propaganda machine for the Trump White House, and it has a long history of both denying and downplaying climate change and helping to block climate action. Fox is currently at the peak of its political influence, but it's also at a precarious point both financially and in the court of public opinion. Many advertisers have fled and others are considering following suit, not wanting to be associated with the network's bigoted and toxic commentary. Fox is now desperately courting advertisers by trying to paint itself as a legitimate news outlet ahead of May 13, when it will host an "upfront" event at which it aims to sell about 60 to 70 percent of its advertising space for 2020. Democratic candidates might want to keep their distance and not enable Fox's attempt at whitewashing its toxicity.
Fox consistently spreads right-wing misinformation, lies, and climate denial
The New Yorker recently exposed how Fox News has developed a symbiotic relationship with the Trump administration and has become a nexus of the right-wing disinformation network. And earlier in April, The New York Times Magazine detailed how Fox founder Rupert Murdoch’s media empire “helped elevate marginal demagogues, mainstream ethnonationalism and politicize the very notion of truth” in the U.S. and beyond, “destabiliz[ing] democracies around the world.”
After the New Yorker published its piece in March, the Democratic National Committee barred Fox News from hosting any of its upcoming presidential primary debates.
Fox News has been especially destructive on the climate change narrative, serving as an echo and amplification chamber for climate denial and environmental deregulation efforts. For years, Fox has played a critical role in undermining the public consensus around climate change by eroding trust in climate scientists and scientific institutions, according to a 2013 study. A separate study by the Union of Concerned Scientists found that 72 percent of Fox News segments about climate science in 2013 "contained misleading statements." In the years since, the network has continued to parade a coterie of network personalities, fringe cranks, and conspiracy theorists to push misinformation about climate change and attack those working to confront the climate crisis.
During the Trump administration, Fox News has also provided a safe haven for disgraced officials like former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt and former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke. Not only did Pruitt and Zinke prefer Fox News over other news networks, they both used their appearances on Fox to question climate science and to advocate for harmful environmental rollbacks, often with little to no pushback from fawning hosts.
Fox's "straight news" anchors are not honest brokers on climate change and other critical issues
Fox News claims that Martha MacCallum and Bret Baier, the Fox hosts who will anchor the town hall with Sanders, are straightforward newscasters. But a closer look at their past comments and reporting reveals that they cannot be trusted to foster good-faith discussions about key issues, including climate change.
MacCallum has denied basic climate science and made ridiculous claims about global warming. In 2014, on Fox News Radio's Kilmeade & Friends, she said:
MARTHA MACCALLUM: I mean the climate has changed over the course of the thousands and thousands of years that the Earth has been in existence. It has changed, you know, by several degrees up and down over the course of it. I just don't think that there is convincing evidence that the presence of man has altered that more dramatically than say the earth being covered with volcanoes emitting, you know, naturally noxious gases.
That same year, MacCallum downplayed the importance of climate change and argued that Democrats in Congress should be concentrating on other issues instead. And in March 2015, after the Obama administration announced a voluntary emission-reduction pledge ahead of the U.N. climate talks in Paris, MacCallum was critical of the move and falsely said that the U.S. was going to the "upper end of the range" with its commitment and "nobody else has to do it." In fact, dozens of other countries had by that point announced targets to cut or curb their greenhouse gas emissions, including the European Union, whose target was more ambitious than the one the U.S. put forth.
Baier has a reputation for not being as bad as some of the more explicit climate deniers on his network, but according to a 2014 analysis by the Union of Concerned Scientists, he has still aired "a number of segments containing inaccurate statements about climate science." He has given climate skeptics a platform to
and climate action, often with very little pushback.
Fox is now desperately trying to convince advertisers that it's not toxic
In March, Fox News executives held an unprecedented meeting with its advertisers to persuade them not to abandon the network after more than 30 companies had dropped their ads since the initial push began in December of last year. Recent calls for companies to pull their ads from Tucker Carlson Tonightand Justice with Judge Jeanine came in response to Media Mattersreleasing audio of Fox host Tucker Carlson's racist and misogynistic rants on the Bubba the Love Sponge Show from 2006 to 2011, and to Fox personality Jeanine Pirro’s anti-Muslim tirade against Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN).
For years, Fox News has let its prime-time hosts spew bigotry, propaganda, and dangerous conspiracy theories on a nightly basis, while using its so-called "news" programming to give the network a veneer of respectability. But the "news" side and the "opinion" side of Fox News are two sides of the same coin. Fox is dangerous and corrupt from top to bottom.
The Fox executive wooing Democratic candidates has actively hampered honest reporting on climate change
Bill Sammon, Fox's senior vice president and Washington managing editor, is courting Democratic candidates for town halls and trying to get the DNC to reconsider its decision not to let Fox host a debate.
Sammon has a notoriously terrible record on climate change. In 2009, he sent a memo to Fox journalists ordering them to curtail honest reporting on climate change:
We should refrain from asserting that the planet has warmed (or cooled) in any given period without IMMEDIATELY pointing out that such theories are based upon data that critics have called into question.
He sent the memo out less than 15 minutes after a Fox correspondent accurately reported that U.N. scientists said the 2000-2009 period was "expected to turn out to be the warmest decade on record." When the correspondent returned to the air a few hours later, he added views from climate "skeptics" into his reporting. Sammon has also tilted Fox's coverage of other issues further to the right.
Four years ago, Sammon played a key role in crafting questions for a Republican presidential primary debate. Do Democratic candidates want to invite Sammon to craft questions for them now?
With Fox on the ropes with advertisers, Democratic candidates should consider if they want to throw Fox News a lifeline this spring.
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| New York man has been arrested and charged with threatening to assault and kill Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN). This is the second personthis year arrested who has been linked to threats on Omar. The New York man shared right-wing content on social media. As others have noted, there is a direct line between the anti-Islam remarks of Fox host Jeanine Pirro and these threats. All of this is happening while white nationalist terrorismis on the rise -- and the current administration is actively downplaying the threat. |
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| Why are leading Democrats giving a lifeline to Fox News? |
Fox News is a propaganda machine feeding its audience bigotry, conspiracy theories, and disinformation. Last month, the New Yorker's Jane Meyer aptly summarized just how much Fox has merged with Trump's administration. This has contributed to growing pressure on Fox, which is now in a crisis trying to secure advertising commitments. So it's very curious to see leading Democrats trying to throw the network a lifeline. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand has said she "would not mind" participating in a presidential debate on Fox; Pete Buttigieg, mayor of South Bend, IN, has criticized other Democrats for not appearing on the network; and other, including Sen. Amy Klobuchar, Govs. John Hickenlooper and Jay Inslee, and Reps. John Delaney and Tulsi Gabbard have sat for Fox interviews. This week, Fox announcedthat the network will host an April 15 town hall with Sen. Bernie Sanders. (The Fox hosts for this town hall are demonstrable propagandists who happen to work on the news side.) Fox anchor Bret Baiertweeted that town halls with other Democratic candidates are "in the works." The DNC put out a weak statementin response all but encouraging the candidates to partner with the network. It may be that many simply do not understand the moment that Fox News is in. Fox has had so many advertisers distance themselves that it had to hold an emergency meeting weeks ago. And we're now in a critical stretch, with many of Fox's advertisements for the coming year being sold at the "upfronts" in May. So now is the worst possible time to go on Fox: the network will leverage Democrats appearing in order to try to get advertisers to come back. Fox News gets a massive win just by having any candidate come on: it legitimizes the network not just in the eyes of advertisers, but with many other news networks as well. Now, Democrats argue that they need to go on Fox to reach voters who might not otherwise hear their message. That's not a particularly persuasive argument. The candidate's time is the most valuable commodity in a campaign, and Fox's propaganda is extremely effective. The network drives increases in Republican voter share and pushes its viewers to the far-rightwith a flow of misinformation and hate. Polling shows that Republican Fox viewers are so firmly committed to Trump that it's a waste of time to try to change their minds. In an age where the media is so fragmented, campaigns can find better uses of their time. Democratic presidential candidates are allowing themselves to be used by the president's propaganda network. Fox's current advertising woes create a key moment of accountability for the network -- a real chance to force change. That requires commitment, and teamwork, something that's admittedly hard in the middle of a presidential campaign. But instead, the Democratic candidates are giving the network cover. And to go one step further, Democrats have been using a strategy to engage with Fox News for well over a decade. By now, it should be clear that the strategy has failed. Fox has only used that legitimacy to grow stronger. Now is the time to fight back against Fox, and to stop enabling it. |
| Sean Hannity's show is what conspiracy theorists crave |
Sean Hannity, one of Trump's loudest supporters and an unofficial presidential adviser, has promoted conspiracy theories to provide cover for or amplify the president's agenda. On many occasions, Hannity's arguments have overlapped with QAnon conspiracy theory narratives. The QAnon conspiracy theory centers around an anonymous account who pretends to be a government official with "Q" security clearance. The account posts cryptic messages on far right internet forum 8chan and followers of the conspiracy theory then decode the post and spin current events believed to be related to the post as evidence of either a plot against Trump or of victories against the "deep state." We've already seen individuals motivated by QAnon start to wreak havoc in the real world, like a man in Arizona who used an armored vehicle to blockade a bridge near the Hoover Dam. The Christchurch shooter also posted his manifesto to 8chan. Last week, the account posting as "Q" urged its followers to watch Hannity on two occasions. The endorsements certainly caught its followers' attention.Media Matters analyzed mentions related to Hannity on 8chan's "/qresearch/" board, and found a major spike after both endorsements. Additionally, many Fox News figures have directly amplified the conspiracy theory. Fox White House correspondent Kevin Corke even tweeted an image of a coffee cup with "Q" written on it. Also: A new report revealed that Sean Hannity worked with Trump and top Republicans on health care policy. |
| Lachlan Murdoch stands by Tucker Carlson's white nationalism |
Tucker Carlson regularly echoes talking points from white nationalists, white supremacists, and neo-Nazis, and leaders of these groups regularly praisehis rhetoric. Just this week, a former white nationalist who is the son of the founder of Stormfront said thathis family watches Tucker Carlson "because they feel that he is making the white nationalist talking points better than they have." But now it's clear that at Fox News, Carlson's white nationalism is looked upon fondly. When Carlson was under intense public pressure and began losing advertisers after saying that immigrants make America "dirtier," Carlson received personal support from the CEO of Fox's parent company, Lachlan Murdoch. The New York Times Magazine reported that Lachlan Murdoch reassured Carlson of his support in a text message to Carlson. In a public appearance in November of 2018, Murdoch explained that viewers should empathize with the Fox hosts that push racism, saying "I'm not embarrassed by what they do at all. ... I frankly feel in this country, we all have to be more tolerant of each other's views." The NYT report on the Murdochs is worth reading in full. It is crystal clear now, if there was ever any doubt, that the Murdochs are happy to encourage and profit from the rise of nationalism globally. In America, that means deliberately stoking nativism and, at least, tolerating racism from within the company and even encouraging it in our politics. |
| Fox News ratchets up the nativism and racism |
Fox's rhetoric on immigration and President Trump's demand for a border wall has regularly included racism, nativism, and other anti-immigrant commentary. Trump frequently takes the advice of Fox personalities over his own advisers, and his tendency to defer to Fox News makes the network's anti-immigration rhetoric particularly problematic. Fox has given airtime to toxic narratives that include the demonization of immigrants, descriptions of people seeking asylum as an "invasion," support for the myth that Democrats want to increase undocumented immigration as a way to secure illegal votes, and concerns that immigrants are "replacing" America's white population -- a common and dangerous white supremacist talking point. And yet in recent days Fox's rhetoric has gotten even worse. Here's what Fox figures and guests have been saying about the border and immigration lately:
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At her March 19 presidential campaign event in Davenport, IA, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) fielded a series of questions from potential voters on a wide range of topics. However, it was a very specific part of her answer to a broadly worded question about immigration that made news.
That night, the Republican National Committee’s “GOP War Room” YouTube channel posted a link to
in which Gillibrand says, “We need comprehensive immigration reform. If you are in this country now, you must have the right to pay into Social Security, to pay your taxes, to pay into the local school system, and to have a pathway to citizenship.”
Gillibrand was pretty clearly saying that she supports a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, noting that these are people who in many cases already make contributions into Social Security and local school districts via taxes. The YouTube clip was deceptively titled “Sen. Gillibrand: Expand Social Security To All Illegal Immigrants,” a distortion of what she said.
The clip was posted to YouTube at 9:33 p.m. EDT. Less than 90 minutes later, Fox News’ Laura Ingraham played the clip for her audience, adopting the RNC’s misleading interpretation.
“A 2020 Dem wants to give illegals, you kidding me, another benefit?” said Ingraham before throwing to a commercial. Upon returning, she played the clip and added, “Anything else, Kirsten? Well, there you have it. She wants to expand Social Security benefits to illegal immigrants.”
That, of course, is untrue and gives the impression that Gillibrand wants to start cutting checks to undocumented immigrants. In reality, what she’s proposing would result in more money being paid in to Social Security, with more people who are currently undocumented being able to do things aboveboard.
On March 20, Hannity covered the story, inviting Trump supporters Mike Huckabee and Larry Elder on to thrash the nonexistent radical policy proposal. Huckabee took things even further when he said that this would be the equivalent of giving undocumented immigrants “grandma’s Social Security,” telling the audience that this policy would result in people currently on Social Security losing out on benefits because “we’re going to be giving it to people who broke into this country illegally.”
SEAN HANNITY (HOST): Doesn't a sanctuary state or city, governor, aren't they aiding and abetting criminal activity? Isn't this a case of rewarding illegal activity? And if we only pay attention to the laws we want, can we have a system of laws?
MIKE HUCKABEE (FOX NEWS CONTRIBUTOR): Sean, you are so outdated. You are going to have to get in the groove, man. Don't you know that if a person comes here illegally, not only should -- well, listen, Sean, let's not only give them grandma's Social Security, let's toss in a car and maybe rent for, you know, a nice home.
I'm just amazed that people are applauding this kind of stuff. And I hope Kirsten Gillibrand has to go out and talk to people in their 70s who can barely afford food and tell them that they're going to get not their Social Security raised because we're going to be giving it to people who broke into this country illegally. I can't wait to see whether she gets applause in a roomful of retirees, living off of Social Security, when she makes that ridiculous proposal.
Up to this point, Fox News had covered the story only on what it bills as its “opinion” shows. That changed when Fox News @ Nightpicked it up.
Fox News @ Night is described as “a live hour of hard news and analysis of the most compelling stories from Washington and across the country.” In a 2017 interview with TVNewser, host Shannon Bream, who is scheduled to headline a conservative group’s fundraiser next month, was clear: “I’m in the news division, so it will be all straight news, not opinion.”
During the March 20 show, Bream delivered the story while a series of chyrons appeared on the screen below her, each hyping the RNC-crafted distortion and with one even including a fabricated quote about Social Security being a right (Gillibrand said people should have the right to pay into Social Security, not that Social Security benefits were a right). The segment was barely distinguishable from the network’s “opinion” side commentary. [
[pix of banners with distor headlines]
The following morning, the story appeared on “news” and “opinion” programs, doing away with the illusion that there’s a line between the two. This could be a big problem for Fox.
*Fox & Friends* and *America’s Newsroom* both covered the story during their March 21 broadcasts (andFox & Friends did again on March 22), both repeating the spin put on it by the RNC.
In an effort to keep advertisers from walking out the door over the white nationalist rhetoric of the likes of Ingraham and Tucker Carlson, the anti-Muslim commentary of Jeanine Pirro, or the conspiracy-mongering of Sean Hannity, Fox has been trying to emphasize the work of its news division. But there’s only so much Shepard Smith and Chris Wallace can do for the channel’s credibility, as others who the network has put forward as able to handle tasks such as debate moderation -- namely Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum -- are either dangerously sloppy or overtly partisan. While the network’s No. 1 fan, who happens to be the president of the United States, would almost certainly love it if Fox were to run even more opinion programming, the news side serves a purpose as a smokescreen.
The truth is that there’s no real distinction between what counts as news and opinion at Fox. The two sides feed into each other, and in this case, both were fed by the RNC. Fox News is a propaganda network, and it’s starting to reflect poorly on the skittish advertisers that remain.
==
Over the years, Fox News anchor Shep Smith has been has been one of few figures at the network to criticize Donald Trump and debunk right-wing lies. And oftentimes, his criticism prompted positive coverage of him and his employer. This sequence is Fox's public relations strategy. As Media Matters'Matt Gertz explained, "Smith doesn't have his job despite his deviations from the Fox lines — he is supremely valuable to the network because of them."
While Fox's ability to maintain viewership relies on stoking the fears of its audience, its public relations strategy relies on the network's ability to demonstrate some level objective reporting. Consequently, as advertisers become increasingly cautious about advertising on Fox because of its fearmongering, network executives rely ever more on "news" team anchors like Smith to maintain credibility.
So, on Sunday, March 17th, when Donald Trump tweeted that Shep Smith is Fox's "lowest rated anchor" and "should be working" at CNN, Fox's public relations strategy took full effect. The president's criticism spurred significantcoverage and praiseof Smith, and provided network executives with the semblance of credibility it needed.
Shep Smith cannot undo the damage that others at Fox News do on a daily basis. At Fox News, Smith is nothing more than the Washington Generals, destined to lose again and again to the propagandists at the network. As The Washington Post's, Erik Wemple explained, "Nothing that Smith says during his Fox news program — no matter how sick his burns on Trump might be — neutralizes the impact of Dobbs or Sean Hannity or Tucker Carlson or dozens of other Fox talking heads. Nothing. Episodic truth-telling about Trump doesn't excuse fulsome conspiracy-theorizing about Trump."
Smith's value to Fox News is singular: He provides an illusion of credibility that the network uses to lure advertisers back to the network.
Also: Fox "news side" anchor Shannon Bream was scheduled to keynote a fundraiser for a Koch linked group alongside the Republican governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis. After Media Matters reported on her appearance, Bream suddenly "had to cancel." She was replaced by a Wall Street Journalcolumnist.
Finally: The Republican National Committee, Fox News opinion, and Fox News "news side" teamed up to push a distortion of a Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) quote about immigrants and Social Security. As Parker Molloy details, this is the perfect distillation of how all three elements work as cogs in the right-wing propaganda machine.
==
mma
new Navigator Research poll reports that "the Fox News echo-chamber" has created "an alternative reality in American politics," with Republicans who watch Fox News a few times a month or more showing significantly more radical views than those who don't watch the network.
79% of GOP Fox viewers say that "people within the FBI and U.S. intelligence agencies are trying to sabotage President Trump." That's compared to 49% of Republicans who don't watch Fox, 24% of non-Republicans who watch Fox, and 8% of non-Republicans who don't watch Fox.
That's an astonishing divide between Republicans who watch Fox and the rest of the public on the question of whether or not Trump is the victim of a massive "deep state" conspiracy to remove him from office.
Fox has been feeding this conspiracy to its audience for years. Sean Hannity has led the charge, but many of his colleagues have adopted the same rhetoric.
As the Mueller investigation moves toward its conclusion, the overwhelming support among Fox viewers for the idea that the president is being sabotaged by the FBI and intelligence agencies is seriously concerning. The Fox-GOP infrastructure is already priming the pump for another investigation into the Obama administration and Hillary Clinton's email server.
==
https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/03/14/advertisers-ditch-carlsons-pirros-fox-news-shows-as-protesters-urge-companies-to-join-them/
...[vid montage anti-mus by pirro]
Beginning Sunday, Media Matters for America, a watchdog group that monitors conservative media outlets, released several audio clips of Carlson’s appearances on the “Bubba the Love Sponge Show,” a Tampa, Florida-based radio show, from 2006 to 2011.
In one set of recordings, Carlson made controversial statements about child rape and comments that some have called misogynistic.
“If you’re talking to a feminist and she’s giving you, ‘Well, you know men really need to be more sensitive,’ no actually, men don’t need to be more sensitive. You just need to be quiet and do what you’re told,” he is heard saying in one recording.
In another segment, Carlson is heard calling Iraq a “crappy place filled with a bunch of, you know, semiliterate primitive monkeys” and jokingly using a homophobic slur.
After the recordings were published, some companies decided to pull their advertisements from Carlson’s show.
Debby Jennings, a spokeswoman for SHEEX, a bedding company, told The Post on Tuesday that “due to the inappropriate statements of Tucker Carlson that have recently come to light, SHEEX has made the decision to cease advertising on his television program, ‘Tucker Carlson Tonight.’”
Pharmaceutical company Astra Zeneca tweeted Monday that it had ceased advertising on Carlson’s show and would not resume in the future.
In a statement to The Washington Post this week, Carlson was defiant. “Media Matters caught me saying something naughtyon a radio show more than a decade ago,” he said. “Rather than express the usual ritual contrition, how about this: I’m on television every weeknight live for an hour. If you want to know what I think, you can watch. Anyone who disagrees with my views is welcome to come on and explain why.”
Fox News Channel spokeswoman Carly Shanahan responded to a request for comment by resending a December statement on boycott efforts against Carlson’s show.
“We cannot and will not allow voices like Tucker Carlson to be censored by agenda-driven intimidation efforts from the likes of Moveon.org, Media Matters and Sleeping Giants,” the December statement said.
Pirro also faced wide condemnation – including a rebuke from Fox News Channel – for suggesting on her Saturday show that Omar, who has criticized pro-Israel lobbyists, did not support the Constitution because she was Muslim and wore a hijab.
“Omar wears a hijab, which, according to the Koran 33:59, tells women to cover so they won’t get molested,” Pirro said Saturday. “Is her adherence to this Islamic doctrine indicative of her adherence to sharia law, which in itself is antithetical to the United States Constitution?”
Novo Nordisk, another pharmaceutical company, told The Post it was “reevaluating” its ads on Pirro’s show. Spokesman Ken Inchausti confirmed that Novo Nordisk will continue to advertise elsewhere on Fox News.
“We absolutely condemn Ms. Pirro’s comments, which are offensive and completely contrary to our values,” a spokesperson for Letgo, a website for buying and selling used goods, told the Hollywood Reporter. “We are in the process of ensuring our ads will no longer run during her show.”
NerdWallet also told the Hollywood Reporter that “we’re no longer advertising on this show and don’t have plans to in the future.”
ThinkProgress reported that Botox manufacturer Allerganand GreatCall, a health technology company, would not advertise their products on Pirro’s show going forward.
Representatives for Letgo, Allergan, GreatCall and NerdWallet did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment.
Pirro later denied saying Omar was “un-American.”
“I’ve seen a lot of comments about my opening statement from Saturday night’s show and I did not call Rep. Omar un-American,” she said. “My intention was to ask a question and start a debate, but of course because one is Muslim does not mean you don’t support the Constitution.”
Fox News Channel’s hosts have previously faced companies pulling advertisements from their shows over controversial comments.
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Companies withdrew their ads from Laura Ingraham’s show last year after she mocked one of the young Parkland gun control advocates for being rejected from colleges. In December, more than a dozen companies pulled ads from “Tucker Carlson Tonight” after Carlson implied immigration “makes our own country poorer and dirtier and more divided.”
But as The Post’s media reporter Paul Farhi noted in December after Carlson’s immigration comments, these advertiser decisions don’t tend to affect the company’s bottom line and the commercials can be aired at other times.
However, that did not stop activists from trying the tactic again on Wednesday.
A small crowd of about 150 turned out on Wednesday morning at Fox headquarters in Midtown Manhattan to pressure the network’s advertisers. The gathering, which was organized by Media Matters, was designed to coincide with the network’s first-ever upfront presentation, which featured over 100 advertisers. The network was “extremely proud to open our doors,” Fox News Channel’s Marianne Gambelli said in a statement.
Some members of the crowd carried signs with slogans like “Fox News is Bad for Business,” before dispersing at about noon.
mma
no lnx
There are many reasons that Fox News’ false dichotomy between the network’s so-called “news” and “opinion” divisions is laughable, but there is perhaps no clearer indication than the sheer amount of anti-abortion misinformation spread by both "opinion" and “straight news” personalities alike.
After the Democratic National Committee announced that Fox News would not be hosting any of this year’s Democratic presidential primary debates, backlash from Fox’s senior leadership was swift, with officials imploring the DNC to “reconsider its decision” on account of the “ultimate journalistic integrity and professionalism” reportedly shown by some of the network’s hosts. As Variety previously reported, the network had already rolled out a messaging campaign to reassure wary advertisers about the outlet’s legitimacy, extolling the virtues of the network’s news hosts. This messaging campaign is merely a repackaging of the same inaccurate story Fox has been telling for years: Viewers and critics shouldn’t hold the blatant xenophobia, sexism, racism, and lies of the opinion side against the allegedly objective news team. But this recycled talking point further falls apart when it comes to anti-abortion misinformation spread by the network’s hosts.
In January, abortion rights measures in New York and Virginia sent Fox News and broader conservative media into a frenzy. Although both measures were attempts to protect abortion access should the Supreme Court overturn or weaken Roe v. Wade, Fox News hosts across the network’s news and opinion programs seized on the opportunity to spread sensationalized misinformation and attack Democrats for allegedly supporting “infanticide” or so-called abortions “up until birth.” Despite these inaccurate characterizations, Fox News devoted over six and half hours of coverage before the 2019 State of the Union address to falsely claiming that these state measures allowed “infanticide” -- a talking point that ultimately appeared in President Donald Trump’s remarks. In fact, Trump and Republican lawmakers are reportedly banking on using anti-abortion extremism to rally voters for the 2020 elections -- a strategy that was on full display during the most recent Conservative Political Action Conference.
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It’s no secret that Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, and Sean Hannity -- each a part of Fox’s volatile and increasingly bad-for-business prime-time lineup -- are all frequent anti-abortion misinformers.Although Fox has attempted to distinguish the work of Bret Baier, Martha MacCallum, Shannon Bream, and Chris Wallace from their colleagues, these "news"-side hosts have all pushed their share of lies, distortions, and misinformation about abortion and reproductive rights.
Bret Baier
Although Fox clearly has a profit motive in portraying Baier as a straight news host, there is little to distinguish him from his colleagues on the opinion side when it comes to his abortion-related reporting. In Media Matters’ annual study of abortion-related coverage on evening prime-time cable news programs, Baier and his program Special Report have consistently been dominated by anti-choice talking points and inaccurate statements about abortion and reproductive rights.
Notably, Baier hosted a 2016 town hall with Democratic presidential candidates and used the platform to recycle misleading right-wing anti-abortion talking points. On his program, in the same year, Baier inaccurately described a common abortion procedure as “dismemberment abortion” and misled viewers that a Supreme Court case involving access to contraceptives was actually about abortion rights. Baier previously invoked a longstanding right-wing media talking point comparing legally operating abortion providers to convicted murderer Kermit Gosnell. In 2009, Baier even went so far as to falsely assert that the Obama administration would allow doctors to be jailed for refusing to perform abortions.
Martha MacCallum
Beyond frequently hosting anti-choice guests such as Live Action founder Lila Rose and Students for Life of America President Kristan Hawkins, MacCallum seemingly makes little secret of her personal views on abortion and will often use sensationalized rhetoric when discussing the topic.
Even before MacCallum became a staple of Fox’s evening lineup, she was already a serial anti-abortion misinformer. In 2015, MacCallum attacked Planned Parenthood for allegedly using taxpayer money to support abortion care (the organization does not, as the Hyde Amendment bars the use of federal funds for abortion services). Like Baier, MacCallum also used a 2016 presidential primary forum as an opportunity to spread anti-abortion misinformation sourced from the anti-choice group Center for Medical Progress’ (CMP) deceptive videos attacking Planned Parenthood. Since MacCallum began hosting her own program, she has consistently promoted anti-abortion talking points about later abortion and Planned Parenthood. In 2017, MacCallum pushed several myths about the existence of so-called “sex-selective” abortion practices, even demanding a guest on her program explain whether it was acceptable “for someone to decide because they don’t like the sex of their baby to abort it at eight months.”
Shannon Bream
Whether appearing as a correspondent on Special Report or hosting her own program, Fox News @ Night, Bream has been a frequent source of anti-abortion misinformation on Fox. Despite representing the network’s so-called “straight news” contingent, Bream’s promotion to host her own program was celebrated by anti-abortion leaders.
Bream was a frequent promoter of CMP’s deceptive videos, even hosting the Fox News “special” promoting the group’s claims in 2015. In 2016, Bream touted “exclusively obtained” copies of letters from a House investigation based on CMP’s allegations -- letters received a full day before they were publicly released or shared with Democratic members of the investigative panel, in direct violation of congressional rules. Since then, Bream has repeatedly signal-boosted anti-abortion talking points and myths by spreading misinformation about abortion safety, letting guests make inaccurate allegations about Planned Parenthood without pushback, and citing polls commissioned by anti-abortion groups without necessary context to suggest a lack of public support for abortion. If there’s a talking point circulating around anti-abortion media and personalities online, it’s more likely than not that it will eventually surface on Bream’s program.
Chris Wallace
Although Chris Wallace does not discuss abortion as frequently as some of his Fox colleagues, his invocation of so-called “partial-birth” abortion during the final debate of the 2016 presidential election is more than enough to disqualify the anchor from consideration as a fair and balanced voice on abortion-related issues. Wallace’s inaccurate and sensationalized question was then picked up by other right-wing media outlets and has since re-emerged in Trump’s current talking points about abortion. Wallace has also shown a propensity for repeating right-wing smears against Planned Parenthood, citing anti-choice videos attacking the organization well before CMP’s campaign of deception began.
It doesn’t matter whether viewers watch so-called "news" or "opinion" programming: Both are likely to contain sensationalism, outright lies, and harmful characterizations about abortion patients, providers, and procedures -- seemingly no matter the potential consequences.
Fox downplays report that Trump ordered officials to give son-in-law Kushner a security clearance
mma
https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2019/03/18/Dont-believe-right-wing-media-when-they-say-the-Green-New-Deal-would-cost-93-trillion/223140
no lnx twt
Don’t believe right-wing media when they say the Green New Deal would cost $93 trillion
Politico calls the analysis "bogus," and even its lead author won't defend it
Blog ››› March 18, 2019 9:44 AM EDT ››› EVLONDO COOPER
Melissa Joskow / Media Matters
Right-wing media outlets have repeatedly asserted that the Green New Deal would come with the absurd price tag of "$93 trillion" or "$94 trillion," uncritically repeating claims from a back-of-the-envelope, deeply flawed analysis produced by the American Action Forum, a conservative think tank. Politico recently determined that the $93 trillion figure was "bogus," and quoted the lead author of the AAF analysis, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, admitting that he had no idea how much it would cost to implement the Green New Deal.
American Action Forum has ties to the fossil fuel industry
The American Action Forum, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, and its 501(c)(4) “sister organization,” the American Action Network (AAN), have been funded by a who’s who of the polluter syndicate.
AAN has received at least $250,000 from the American Petroleum Institute, a trade association for the oil industry that has donated to groups in the Koch network. And AAN has received at least $35,000 from the American Natural Gas Alliance, a pro-fracking gas industry trade group. Dow Chemical has given at least $250,000. AAN has also been funded by other Koch-connected groups such as Americans for Job Security, Donors Trust, and the Wellspring Committee. It's gotten money from Karl Rove's Crossroads GPS too. AAN has in turn donated millions to AAF.
Though some information about its funding has been made public, AAN has generally refused to disclose its donors. In 2014, MSNBC called AAN a "dark money power player," noting that it had been running numerous attack ads against Democratic candidates. FactCheck.org noted that same year that AAN has spent tens of millions of dollars supporting Republican candidates. In 2018, a watchdog group filed suit against AAN for violating campaign finance laws and abusing its nonprofit status.
AAF's Green New Deal cost analysis is problematic from top to bottom
Considering the think tank’s connections to the fossil fuel industry, it’s not surprising that the American Action Forum’s report found the Green New Deal untenable. What is surprising is how flippant Holtz-Eakin, president of AAF and former head of the Congressional Budget Office, was about the rigor of the analysis he co-authored. When challenged about the accuracy of the report’s claim that the Green New Deal would cost some $93 trillion over 10 years, Holtz-Eakin told Politico, “Is it billions or trillions? Any precision past that is illusory.”
The Green New Deal resolution introduced by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) on February 7 is just a broad, 14-page outline of goals with no policy specifics, so determining a price tag was a fanciful exercise. AAF's claims of a $92.9 trillion total cost, or $653,000 per household, have no basis in reality. As Politico reporter Zack Colman put it:
When they set out to put a price tag on the Green New Deal last month, Holtz-Eakin and his associates had no real policy or plan to evaluate, so they made one up to perform back-of-the-envelope calculations.
…
And the AAF study does not distinguish between government and private-sector spending, nor does it attempt to quantify the benefits of reducing pollution or other policies. For example, Stanford University civil and environmental engineering professor Mark Jacobson estimated that eliminating the electricity sector’s carbon emissions would avoid $265 billion in annual U.S. damages beginning in 2050.
Colman also pointed out that more than $80 trillion of the alleged $93 trillion total cost would come from implementing a jobs guarantee and universal health care -- policy ideas that have no direct relation to greening the economy, even though they are in the Green New Deal resolution.
Politico declared that the $93 trillion figure is "bogus" -- or, in an earlier version of the article published behind a firewall, "essentially vapor."
The fact-checking project PolitiFact also found the $93 trillion figure to be untrustworthy, calling it "only about as strong as a clothespin in high wind." It noted that "the [AAF] report itself is full of assumptions, qualifiers and caveats," and when a fact-checker reached out to Holtz-Eakin, the AAF president "made it clear to us that the report aims to provide very rough estimates on a plan that’s only partially developed." PolitiFact rated as "false" this claim from Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA): "At $93 trillion, the Green New Deal would cost more than the entire recorded spending of the U.S. since the Constitution went into effect in 1789."
Other journalists have also pointed out major problems with the AAF analysis. Paul Blest at Splinter noted that AAF used cost estimates for a universal jobs program ("$6.8 trillion to $44.6 trillion") and universal health care ("$36 trillion") that are vastly higher than estimates produced by other think tanks. AAF also failed to account for how much money programs like universal health care could save. According to Blest:
[AAF's] ballpark estimate on a federal jobs guarantee has a range of $38 trillion. The centrist Brookings Institution’s estimate last year, by the way, put the high end on a job guarantee at $543 billion a year, or $5.4 trillion over 10 years.
On Medicare for All, too, the AAF’s number is substantially higher than previous estimates. The libertarian Mercatus Center’s estimate set out to prove last year that Medicare for All would bankrupt the country, and inadvertently found that Medicare for All would eventually save about $2 trillion in national health expenditures. Even Mercatus, however, put the cost of Medicare for All at $32.6 trillion over 10 years.
The ClimateDenierRoundup column at Daily Kos pointed out another problem with AAF's jobs-program estimates:
The jobs price tag is wrong because it’s double counting: many of those jobs would be created by the other parts of the GND. Improving energy efficiency and building a clean energy economy will create a lot of jobs, which are counted in the GND’s green policy price tag tally. But then AAF simply counts those jobs again in the jobs guarantee portion, as though none of those promised jobs would be used to put the green in the Green New Deal.
Green New Deal sponsor Markey called out major flaws in the report too, starting with the basic premise: "Putting a price on a resolution of principles, not policies, is just Big Oil misinformation." Markey pointed out that AAF calculated the cost of "policies that aren't even in the resolution," such as eliminating air travel:
Ed Markey
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@SenMarkey
The AAF analysis of the #GreenNewDeal spends some time doing basic multiplication on the impact of making all air travel unnecessary, a concept mentioned nowhere in the resolution text.
Ed Markey
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@SenMarkey
Any so-called "analysis" of the #GreenNewDeal that includes artificially inflated numbers that rely on lazy assumptions, incl. about policies that aren’t even in the resolution is bogus. Putting a price on a resolution of principles, not policies, is just Big Oil misinformation.
Markey also noted that AAF did not provide any support for its cost estimate for a low-carbon electricity grid.
Ed Markey
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@SenMarkey
Another example, the $5.4 trillion it estimates to transition our electric grid comes seemingly from thin air, as NO SOURCES are documented for their generation cost assumptions.
Ed Markey
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@SenMarkey
The AAF analysis of the #GreenNewDeal spends some time doing basic multiplication on the impact of making all air travel unnecessary, a concept mentioned nowhere in the resolution text. https://twitter.com/SenMarkey/status/1100099740316942336 …
As The New York Times recently put it, "For now it’s impossible to pin down dollar figures on the plan." FactCheck.org agreed, writing that "the experts we spoke to said it’s not possible to put a specific price tag on the Green New Deal."
Perhaps most egregiously, AAF’s analysis of the Green New Deal completely ignored the enormous cost of not fighting climate change. Just last year, climate disasters and extreme weather events cost the U.S. an estimated $91 billion. According to the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a 1.5 C rise in the global average temperature would cost $54 trillion. Things only get more expensive (and catastrophic) from there. According to Axios:
You think $54 trillion is a lot? That number comes from research that also says that a 2.0°C increase will cause $69 trillion of damage, and a 3.7°C increase will cause a stunning $551 trillion in damage.
$551 trillion is more than all the wealth currently existing in the world, which gives an indication of just how much richer humanity could become if we don't first destroy our planet.
Current policies in place around the world have us on track for about 3.3 C of warming by 2100 if we don't dramatically change course.
AAF's analysis also ignored the significant economic benefits that would come from taking addressing climate change. "Bold climate action could deliver at least US$26 trillion in economic benefits through to 2030, compared with business-as-usual," according to a recent report from the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate.
Fox News and other right-wing outlets have been hyping the $93 trillion figure
Right-wing media have been heavily citing the AAF report since its release on February 25 -- and they have often used the $93 trillion figure without noting that it's at the top end of a range AAF provided. Fox News has been particularly eager to amplify the huge estimate. Hosts and guests have cited price tags between $91 trillion and $94 trillion on Fox News shows including Fox & Friends, The Greg Gutfeld Show, and Watters’ World, and on Fox Business Network shows including Varney & Co., Trish Regan Primetime, Making Money with Charles Payne, and Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo. Sean Hannity has cited the AAF report at least three times on his Fox News show. He typified Fox's incurious reporting on AAF’s analysis during the March 5 episode of Hannity:
SEAN HANNITY (HOST): They are going to eliminate fossil fuels, gas, and oil. They're going to destroy the lifeblood of our economy. They're going to get rid of planes, mandate you rebuild your home. Who's paying for that? The estimates now are as high as $94 trillion in 10 years --that's their proposal.
Many other right-wing media outlets have also uncritically amplified AAF's enormous estimate, including The Daily Caller, The Daily Wire, and the Washington Free Beacon.
Some Republican politicians such as Wyoming Sen. John Barrasso have also latched onto the $93 trillion estimate and publicized it through mainstream and right-wing media. Barrasso issued a press release with the figure, wrote an opinion piece about it for USA Today, and made an appearance on Fox News to promote it. During Barrasso’s interview on Fox's America's Newsroom, co-host Sandra Smith falsely claimed that “the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office” was behind the $93 trillion figure and Barrasso failed to correct her error. (Fox & Friends co-host Ainsley Earhardt also falsely credited the report to the CBO.) From the February 28 episode of America’s Newsroom:
SANDRA SMITH (HOST): The Green New Deal, all the rage on the left. But a new study finds that it comes with a staggering price tag: the plan estimated to cost is as much as $93 trillion. That breaks down to $600,000 per household. Those are some big numbers. Joining us now, Sen. John Barrasso, a Republican from Wyoming who chairs the Committee on the Environment and Public Works. Been hearing you talk a lot about this, sir, and this price tag. It is a lofty one. This is the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office that did a study on this and came up with those numbers: $93 trillion, $600,000 per household. What do you think?
SEN. JOHN BARRASSO:Well, this Green New Deal is a big green bomb that will blow a hole in our strong economy. It will destroy the energy independence we now have from foreign countries. It will destroy what we’ve been doing to actually lower emissions. The cost to families -- electricity alone would go up by about $3,600 per family, per year. This is something, Sandra, that we cannot as a nation afford. The economy can't afford it. Our nation can’t survive it.
Some Fox News personalities and Republican politicians, including President Donald Trump, have cited an even larger unsubstantiated figure for Green New Deal costs: $100 trillion. As Dave Anderson recently reported for the Energy and Policy Institute, that number originated from a flippant Twitter thread by a Manhattan Institute senior fellow. The Manhattan Institute has been funded by ExxonMobil, and the chair of its board is also the CEO of a hedge fund that is the top shareholder in Peabody Energy, a major coal company. The $100 trillion figure was mentioned by Fox host Charles Payne during an interview with EPA chief Andrew Wheeler on March 4 on Your World with Neil Cavuto, and it was also cited on other Fox programs and right-wing sites like Townhall.
Right-wing echo chamber amplifies misinformation by design
The spread of the $93 trillion figure is a textbook example of how the right-wing media sphere disseminates misinformation to stymie climate action (and the spread of the $100 trillion figure too, for that matter). Conservative media outlets have been freaking out about the Green New Deal since even before the resolution was unveiled. AAF rushed out a quickie estimate of its potential costs that even its lead author won't robustly defend. Surely the think tank knew that its ready-made, sky-high number would be quickly picked up and regurgitated by conservative commentators, writers, and politicians -- and it was. It is not likely to matter that AAF's report has been called out as “bogus” and poked full of holes. You can expect right-wing media to keep on promoting it.
Short Link
http://mm4a.org/4Br
Posted In
Environment & Science, Climate Change
Network/Outlet
Fox News, Fox Business
Person
Donald Trump, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, Ed Markey, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Sean Hannity, John Barrasso, Sandra Smith
Show/Publication
Hannity, Politico, Daily Kos, Splinter, FOX & Friends, The Five, Your World with Neil Cavuto, Greg Gutfeld Show, Watters' World, Varney & Co., Trish Regan Primetime, Making Money with Charles Payne, Sunday Morning Futures, The Daily Caller, The Daily Signal, The Washington Free Beacon, Townhall
Stories/Interests
Climate Change
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https://www.mediamatters.org/research/2018/10/29/these-are-fox-news-leading-advertisers/221904
Fox News in its current incarnation is operationally a propaganda network for Donald Trump, using any amounts of racism, sexism, and bigotry necessary to push his message, whatever the cost. Media Matters has repeatedly documented the network's increasing and dangerous promotion of extremism, its embrace of white nationalism, and more. Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Jeanine Pirro, Tucker Carlson, Lou Dobbs, and Fox & Friends are the tip of the spear, but the entire network is culpable.
Following recent right-wing terrorist events with documented connections to Fox News, the media is starting to catch on. A number of leading commentators called for a boycott of all Fox News advertisers following these terrorist events. “The most effective thing Americans can do is boycott companies that advertise on Fox,” said Edward Luce, the U.S. national editor of the Financial Times. Right-wing columnist Max Boot called for companies to "boycott Fox News until they pull back from the hate."
Media Matters President Angelo Carusone made a prescient warning when he wrote recently that the biggest cause of Fox News’ reported advertiser problem was the channel’s own talent. Today, he urged media buyers and advertisers to strongly reconsider financially supporting what is going on at Fox News until there are some meaningful changes there:
This latest controversy over Lou Dobbs’ Fox program promoting an anti-semitic lie is nothing new. Racism, anti-semitism, and dangerous conspiracy theories aren’t unusual for Fox News; they’re the network at its core. But lately the programming is only getting more extreme and volatile, and this explains why the time in between major controversies at the network just keeps getting shorter.
Fox News’ never-ending focus on demonizing political opponents and front-line communities - echoing Trump and framing the struggle against these groups as an urgent matter of life or death - makes the network an increasingly bad business decision for advertisers.
Given all this, it's not surprising to see more and more brands and media buyers avoid portions of or all of Fox News. But for those brands that still haven't gotten that message: The latest acts of right-wing violence fomented by the bigotry and lies on Fox News and outlets like it are a reminder of what their advertising dollars are supporting.
We urge Fox News advertisers to talk to their media buyers, listen to their customers, and consider suspending their relationship with Fox News until the network makes meaningful changes to curb its propagandistic narratives that intentionally spread disinformation and incentivize violence.
Below is a list that represents the majority of Fox News’ top advertisers as well some major brands that recently increased advertising on Fox News.
- Liberty Mutual
- Capital One
- Geico
- Sandals Hotel/Resort
- Nutrisystem
- Novo Nordisk
- Progressive
- NewDay USA
- Sheex
- Qunol
- Allstate
- Autograph Collection Hotel/Resort
- Publishers Clearing House
- Sleep Number
- Ensure
- Carvana Local Dealer
- Homeadvisor
- Lear Capital
- SharkNinja
- Celgene
- Jewelry Exchange Store
- USAA
- Aleve
- Hulu
- Omaha Steaks
- HomeToGo.com
- Esurance
- Lincoln
- 23andMe
- Ancestry.com
- IHOP
- Land Rover
- Smile Direct Club
- Proctor & Gamble
- Bayer
This list was originally posted October 29, 2018. It was last updated on February 4, 2019.
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| Fox News won't run an anti-Nazi ad, but will compare Planned Parenthood to Hitler |
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On February 13, The Hollywood Reporter wrote that Fox News executives had “rejected a national advertising buy” promoting A Night at the Garden, an Oscar-nominated documentary short recounting a 1939 Nazi rally in New York City. The ad was reportedly intended to warn Sean Hannity's viewers about the potential dangers of Trump's brand of populism. A Fox News executive subsequently explainedthat “regardless of the film’s message,” the ad was rejected for being “full of disgraceful Nazi imagery” which “did not meet our guidelines.” However, Fox News has no problems using Nazi imagery itself. Just this week, Fox host Laura Ingraham likened Planned Parenthood to Adolf Hitler. Network personalities have made similar Nazi comparisons about the Black Lives Matter movement, gun violence activists, and progressives in general.Fox & Friends was also very sympatheticto the Nazis who marched in Charlottesville in 2017. This is why Fox News is in a crisis. Advertisers are increasingly aware of the extreme rhetoric that the network regularly uses; dozens of advertisers have fled Ingraham's show in the past year alone. Activists are forcing companies to realize the obvious: This style of extremism is simply bad for business. Also: Parker Molloy broke down the rhetorical misdirection that Tucker Carlson uses to obscure his white nationalism. |
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/03/here-are-5-of-the-craziest-revelations-from-the-new-yorkers-expose-of-fox-news-influence-on-trump/
Monday, The New Yorker published Jane Mayer’s stunning exposé into how Fox News, always a right-wing network, has morphed into an overt propaganda instrument of President Donald Trump’s White House, and how the symbiotic relationship between the president and Fox’s billionaire international news mogul owner Rupert Murdoch has effectively created something that has never before existed in American politics.
To some degree, the article covers ground that has long been known or suspected — the way that Trump’s policy decisions on everything from the federal government shutdown to the transgender military ban are informed by his daily binge-watching of Fox talk shows; how former Fox executive Bill Shine has blurred the Fox and White House payrolls since being hired as Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff; and how Fox itself has discarded the few journalistic guardrails it had during President Barack Obama’s years, with hosts like Sean Hannity and Lou Dobbs now free to openly join political rallies and offer advice to the president.
But there are some new, mind-blowing revelations in Mayer’s article. Here are five of the most significant:
- Trump ranks reporters on a scale of 1 to 10 for their “loyalty” to him — and Steve Doocy is a 12.
Trump is well known for assigning numbers to women based on how attractive he thinks they are. But according to Mayer’s reporting, he does the same thing for reporters based on how loyal he thinks they are to him. “Bret Baier, Fox News’ chief political anchor, is a 6; Hannity a solid 10. Steve Doocy, the co-host of ‘Fox & Friends,’ is so adoring that Trump gives him a 12.”
Needless to say, this is a dangerous development. Trump has a track record of rewarding and punishing reporters based on his whims. During the presidential transition, he reserved a seat at a press conference for a Breitbart reporter. And last year, Trump suspended the press pass of CNN’s Jim Acosta after he challenged the president’s claims on special counsel Robert Mueller and the Honduran migrant caravan. He later relented after one of his own judicial appointees ordered him to restore Acosta’s credentials.
- Jared Kushner is effectively Rupert Murdoch’s direct pipeline to the White House.
Despite having essentially no qualifications for any of it, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner has worn numerous hats in the administration, from meeting with foreign heads of state to working on the Middle East peace plan to fixing the opioid epidemic — and Trump trusts him enough to have overridden intelligence officials to give him a top-secret security clearance.
One other person who trusts him, according to Mayer’s article, is Murdoch. In fact, Kushner may be Murdoch’s most direct liaison with the Trump administration.
Sources told The New Yorker that Kushner routinely asks Murdoch for advice, has “assured Murdoch that the White House is a smooth-running operation, despite many reports suggesting that it is chaotic,” and that the two of them communicate “Like, every day.” Given that the White House has given Kushner such a massive portfolio of responsibility and trust, Murdoch’s relationship with Kushner is likely one of the biggest influences he has on the executive branch.
- Roger Ailes allegedly fed Trump questions before the GOP debates.
During the presidential election, it was reported that former Fox News host Megyn Kelly — who famously tried to question Trump on his treatment of women at the GOP debates only to have Trump dismiss her as on her period — asserted that Trump had help with the debate questions ahead of time. She later denied saying or believing this — but Mayer’s reporting now backs up this idea:
A pair of Fox insiders and a source close to Trump believe that Ailes informed the Trump campaign about Kelly’s question. Two of those sources say that they know of the tipoff from a purported eyewitness. In addition, a former Trump campaign aide says that a Fox contact gave him advance notice of a different debate question, which asked the candidates whether they would support the Republican nominee, regardless of who won.
It is hard to know whether this claim is accurate, as Ailes is deceased and contemporary reporting suggested that Fox was not yet in Trump’s orbit at that point of the Republican cycle. But if true, this would be highly damning — especially considering Trump asserted that the incident where former Democratic National Committee Chief Donna Brazile gave Hillary Clinton CNN questions ahead of time proved the network was “a total fake.”
- Fox News uncovered the Stormy Daniels scandal during the election — but buried the story and retaliated against the reporter who found it.
The revelation that Trump’s former personal attorney Michael Cohen made an illegal hush payment to silence an affair between Trump and porn star Stormy Daniels, first reported in January 2018 by the Wall Street Journal, was a huge story that led to a massive federal investigation, jail time, and congressional investigations.
But all of it could have come out much sooner — because as Mayer reports, Fox News had the story during the 2016 presidential election, killed it, and may have retaliated against Diana Falzone, the reporter who uncovered it:
Falzone had worked on the story since March, and by October she had confirmed it with Daniels through her manager at the time, Gina Rodriguez, and with Daniels’s former husband, Mike Moz, who described multiple calls from Trump. Falzone had also amassed e-mails between Daniels’s attorney and Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen, detailing a proposed cash settlement, accompanied by a nondisclosure agreement. Falzone had even seen the contract.
But Falzone’s story didn’t run—it kept being passed off from one editor to the next. After getting one noncommittal answer after another from her editors, Falzone at last heard from LaCorte, who was then the head of FoxNews.com. Falzone told colleagues that LaCorte said to her, “Good reporting, kiddo. But Rupert wants Donald Trump to win. So just let it go.” LaCorte denies telling Falzone this, but one of Falzone’s colleagues confirms having heard her account at the time.
According to The New Yorker, Fox then proceeded to demote Falzone, without explaining why. She later sued Fox, which settled the case and made her sign a nondisclosure agreement that prohibits her from discussing the details of her employment.
- Trump personally ordered an economic adviser to use antitrust lawsuits to attack Fox News’ competitors.
The Justice Department’s opposition to the AT&T-Time Warner merger, which is cleared to go through after federal courts demolished the antitrust lawsuit, has always seemed legally suspicious — indeed, one of the reasons judges rejected it is that AT&T put forward compelling evidence that Trump personally wanted to kill the deal to harm CNN.
According to Mayer’s reporting, that’s exactly what was going on.Trump ordered his then-economic adviser Gary Cohn to pressure the Justice Department to block the merger — something Cohn refused to do, but which the department eventually followed through with. Trump showed no such anti-corporate sentiment with Disney’s acquisition of 21st Century Fox, a deal of similar scope but which would benefit Murdoch financially.
This development also puts the Federal Communications Commission’s unexpected decision last year to kill the Sinclair Broadcast Group’s merger with Tribune Media, which was arguably good for the local news market, in a more sinister light: that merger could have strengthened Fox’s biggest competitor in conservative television broadcasting.
Antitrust law is a powerful pro-consumer tool when applied fairly and equitably, but in the hands of someone like Trump, it can also be used to chill freedom of the press by rewarding and punishing news organizations.
https://www.alternet.org/2019/02/here-are-4-political-wild-cards-on-fox-news-who-have-actually-stood-up-to-gop-propaganda/
One of the most Orwellian mottos in the history of cable news is undoubtedly “fair and balanced,” which was Fox News’ motto until 2017 (when it was replaced with “most watched, most trusted”). Clearly slanted to the far right, Fox News was never known for its fairness or its balance. A more honest motto for Fox News would be “all conservative all the time.” But in one sense, Fox News has been as unfair to conservatives as it has been to liberals and progressives: it tends to dictate how they should think.
Realistically, no one expects Fox News to treat liberals and progressives—or even centrists—fairly. That isn’t their market or their audience. But the most frustrating thing of all is Fox News’ expectation that conservatives think a certain way. During the George W. Bush years, right-wingers who were critical of the Bush administration were routinely demonized at Fox News (former Rep. Ron Paul, for example). And in the Donald Trump era, the vast majority of coverage at Fox News is overtly pro-Trump.
Nonetheless, Fox News will, on occasion, feature some people on the right who are genuinely analytical and don’t simply recite official Republican Party talking points. Here are some of the less dogmatic right-wing voices at the cable news outlet.
1. Chris Wallace
Republicans who appear on Fox News typically receive softball questions from most of the employees, but a major exception is Chris Wallace (the 71-year-old son of the late Mike Wallace). Wallace can be a combative interviewer, and Stephen Miller (a Trump senior advisor) got a first-hand demonstration of that this month when Wallace grilled him unmercifully about Trump’s emergency declaration on the U.S./Mexico border. And Wallace was no less combative with AM talk radio host Rush Limbaugh, calling him out on Feb. 17 for giving Trump a pass on executive orders despite having repeatedly lambasted President Barack Obama for executive overreach.
Wallace told Limbaugh, “I understand that you like what President Trump is doing, and you didn’t like what President Obama was doing. And that’s the concern here, is that to the degree you give the president more and more powers—yes, you’re going to get things from one president you like, but you’re going to get executive powers from another president that you don’t like.”
2. Judge Andrew Napolitano
During George W. Bush’s years as president, Fox News’ coverage was overtly favorable to the Patriot Act and other post-9/11 legislation. But unlike Fox News’ Sean Hannity, Judge Andrew Napolitano was never a robotic mouthpiece for the Bush Administration. Napolitano, alibertarian, considered the Patriot Act unconstitutional, and philosophically, he had a lot more in common with Ron Paul or 2012/2016 Libertarian Party presidential nominee Gary Johnson than he did with former Vice President Dick Cheney.
In the Trump era, Napolitano has continued to serve as a legal analyst for Fox News, and the contrast between Hannity and Napolitano can be shocking. Hannity, a Trump sycophant, has jumped through hoops to defend Trump’s decision to make an emergency declaration to force funding of a U.S./Mexico border wall. But Napolitano, in contrast, considers the move unconstitutional.
When the judge appeared on “Fox and Friends” on January 8, he explained that an “emergency declaration allows him to mobilize assets, but it doesn’t allow him to take or occupy property. And it doesn’t allow him to spend money that Congress hasn’t authorized.” Napolitano has also asserted that bypassing Congress to fund a border wall is not the action of a president, but a “prince.”
3. Lisa Kennedy Montgomery
Gen-Xers still think of Lisa Kennedy Montgomery as “Kennedy from MTV”: back in the 1990s, she was an MTV veejay. But these days, the 46-year-old Montgomery is primarily focused on politics—and she is more likely to comment on Robert Mueller’s Russia probe or GOP tax policy than on Pearl Jam, Courtney Love or the Stone Temple Pilots. Politically, Montgomery is definitely right of center. But despite being a registered Republican, Montgomery has a lot more in common with the Libertarian Party than she does with Hannity. Montgomery is pro-choice on the abortion issue, supports same-sex marriage, dislikes the Christian Right and opposes the War on Drugs. But Montgomery (who hosts “Kennedy Nation” on the Fox Business Channel and often appears on Fox News’ “Outnumbered”) is also a hardcore fiscal conservative who opposes universal health care, calls Seattle a “socialist hellhole” and favors privatizing Social Security and Medicare—or, as liberals and progressives accurately call it, letting banksters bleed those programs dry.
4. Shepard Smith
Shepard Smith infuriated his most buffoonish colleague at Fox News, Sean Hannity, when, in 2017, he debunked the Uranium One/Hillary Clinton conspiracy theory that Hannity and President Trump were happy to promote. According to the theory, Clinton was bribed to approve the merger of the mining company, Uranium One, and the Russian nuclear energy organization Rosatom when she was secretary of state under President Barack Obama. The bribes, conspiracy theorists claimed, included $145 millionto the Clinton Foundation. But Smith totally tore apart this conspiracizing — noting that the FBI, after an extensive investigation, found that there was no evidence of bribery. Further, Smith noted, Clinton didn’t personally approve the merger herself.
“The Clinton State Department had no power to approve or veto that transaction,” Smith noted. “It could do neither.”
The backlash against Smith was swift, with some Fox News viewers asserting that he belonged at MSNBC or CNN instead. And in an interview with Time Magazine’s Daniel D’Addario, Smith distanced himself from Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Tucker Carlson and other “opinion programming” at Fox News.
Smith told D’Addario, “I get it that some of our opinion programming is there strictly to be entertaining. I get that. I don’t work there.” And Hannity was furious, describing Smith as “clueless” and “anti-Trump.”
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/02/fox-news-host-laura-ingrahams-guest-says-the-country-is-in-a-civil-war-and-people-should-buy-guns/
On a disturbing episode of Fox News host Laura Ingraham’s “The Laura Ingraham Show Podcast” Thursday, guest Joe diGenova echoed the calls of some of the darkest parts of the far-right movement in the United States.
“We are in a civil war in this country,” diGenova, as first pointed out by Media Matters for America. “There’s two standards of justice, one for Democrats one for Republicans. The press is all Democrat, all liberal, all progressive, all left — they hate Republicans, they hate Trump. So the suggestion that there’s ever going to be civil discourse in this country for the foreseeable future in this country is over. It’s not going to be. It’s going to be total war. And as I say to my friends, I do two things-- I vote and i buy guns [video]
One particularly odd fact about his claims is that they seemed to come out of nowhere. Ingraham had just ended a diatribe about how liberals supposedly shifted attention away from discussions about the imperiled Democratic leadership in Virginia government to allegations of a hate crime made by actor Jussie Smollett, who has since been arrested on charges of filing a false police report. It was a bizarre and twisted theory, completely out of line with reality. but it had nothing to do with a supposed “civil war.”
But for many on the fringes of the far right, casual talk about political divisions in the United States easily slips into discussions of open warfare and violence.
President Donald Trump, it should be noted, once announced that he was hiring diGenova for his legal team, but he never came on board.
MSNBC’s Chris Hayes noted on Twitter that a man prosecutors say was a domestic terrorist, Chris Hasson, had, according to a court filing, googled “civil war if Trump impeached.”
“Where could he possibly get such an insane idea?” Hayes asked — and then he linked to diGenova’s comments. “Oh.”
Hasson was also found with an apparent “hit list” of Democratic politicians and media figures, according to prosecutors — a list that included Hayes.
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Here are some of the less dogmatic right-ring voices at Fox News
One of the most Orwellian mottos in the history of cable news is undoubtedly “fair and balanced,” which was Fox News’ motto until 2017 (when it was replaced with “most…
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mma
| The 2020 presidential campaign is already starting up, and Fox News is wasting no time lying about it. More on that below. It's also worth thinking about how the media writ large deals with having such a diverse field of candidates. Margaret Sullivan has written an essay about the media's sexism for The Washington Post, and it's worth a read. There will be plenty more thought given to the topic over the coming months, that's for sure. |
In a rambling address on Friday morning, Trump declared a national emergency to obtain additional funding for a wall on the southern border. In doing so, Trump was doing exactly what Sean Hannity had told him to do on his show just days earlier. Hannity, Lou Dobbs, and other right-wing media figures spent most of 2019 urging Trump to do exactly this. Matt Gertz writes: "Right-wing infotainers can bend the ear of the president of the United States and drastically shift federal government policy according to their whims. They have this outsized influence because Trump consumes hours of television each day and is desperate to receive constant validation from the people he watches. We've reached a point where Fox is all but running the country." During this address, Trump found time to thank Rush Limbaugh, Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, and of course Sean Hannity. Some observersfound Trump's address to be a "disgrace" or a "shitshow." A Fox News anchor concluded that it was a "tour de force." What comes next: Sean Hannity has made clear that he wants William Barr, Trump's new attorney general, to prioritize investigating Trump's enemies, including Hillary Clinton and a slew of people from the Obama administration. And that's not all. Lou Dobbs demanded that Barr investigate Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts. Debunking a lie: Trump's national emergency is not like any emergency declared by previous presidents. Right-wing media have claimed in recent days that Trump's declaration is just like what previous presidents did. That is not true. As NY Times reporter Charlie Savage noted, the actions of previous presidents "were about invoking statutes to sanction various bad actors on the [international] stage; none were about reprograming funds to finance a disputed policy goal Congress had declined to fund." Lastly: Some conservatives admit that Trump's emergency declaration opens the door for a future president to take action on gun violence or climate change. |
| The national emergency is based on a lie -- and Fox News figures admit it. |
Right-wing media and Donald Trump have made various claims to justify the need for a border wall. They're usually lies. Fox News personalities are remarkably open about the real reason Trump need a wall right now (after not funding it at all for the two years that Republicans were in control of the government): Politics. Fox & Friends co-host Steve Doocy claimed Trump needs a wall "because he needs to start running for re-election." Fox contributor Dan Bongino was even more explicit, saying that Trump's insistence on building a wall is about giving him a "political victory," stating, "This is not about immigration. I think everybody at this table knows this. This is about a political victory that has to happen." |
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February 7, Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) introduced a Green New Deal resolution. The resolution outlines what they plan to include in formal legislation down the line.
Over the following five days, primetime cable news coverage of the Green New Deal was dominated by Fox News. Fox News aired a total of 34 segments on the resolution, more than three times the combined total of MSNBC (8 segments) and CNN (3 segments).
Obviously, the Fox News coverage of the legislation was terrible. Many segments did not even mention climate change.
This is not the only example of cable news discussion of a policy issue being dominated by the right. In the weeks leading up to the State of the Union, Fox News aired nearly seven hours of coverage of state abortion measures, while CNN and MSNBC covered the same stories for less than 15 minutes combined.
Fox News dominating policy discussions of progressive initiatives has real consequences: They are immediately caricatured, with outright lies getting a massive head start. A large number of people get their first impressions through this distorted coverage, including many in the media.
When one of these issues does eventually jump to mainstream media, myths and lies often make the jump alongside. At minimum, the mainstream debate is partially about debunking the lies that have already happened.
Sunday shows fail again: America is in desperate need of an adult conversation about how to address climate change. Instead of that, the Sunday shows talked about climate change and the Green New Deal only through the narrow lens of the political horse race. Maybe we can prioritize fending off a massive destabilizing rise in sea level instead of worrying about whose poll numbers go up or down as a result of endorsing a resolution.
Meanwhile: Right-wing media are somehow worse than useless on the Green New Deal, as they've repeatedly invoked murderous dictators to complain about the initiative. Michael Savage, who has partied with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, even said of Ocasio-Cortez, "“This is a Stalinist in a skirt; this is a Hitler in high heels.”
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/02/fox-news-ceo-bizarrely-rejects-ad-for-anti-nazi-documentary-not-appropriate-for-our-air/
hannity
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January 25th, the FBI arrested Roger Stone and executed search warrants of his residences in Florida and New York. Stone was charged on seven counts of obstruction, giving false statements, and witness tampering as part of the special counsel's investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.
Fox News immediately worked to minimize the importance of Stone's indictment.
The network utilized three forms of defense for Trump's longtime adviser:
- Declare the indictments reveal nothing and assert that there's no evidence of collusion.
- Criticize the manner in which Stone was arrested. As Chris Hayes, Elliot Williams, and others pointed out, Fox News suddenly cared about potential civil rights violations and a growing police state only when Roger Stone was arrested.
- Deflecting by bringing up other officials, like Eric Holder, James Comey, Hillary Clinton, and more.
As Matt Gertz wrote of the role that Fox News plays in the Russia probe,"Hannity has primed his audience to reject any conclusions from the Mueller investigation and to support Trump if he fires the special counsel or demands the Justice Department take action against his political foes. If Trump decides toundermine the rule of law by taking such steps, he will have the fervent support of the Fox Host and his viewers."
And we know that Trump was watching the coverage on Fox. Speaking of that, Trump told Face The Nation in an interview airing today, "You have to get rid of the Russia witch hunt."
Also:Jerome Corsi said in an interview this week that Stone is "pressuring me to change my testimony." Meanwhile, Stone's explanation for his witness tampering charge was that he was trying to help Randy Credico.
Finally: Stone during the campaign repeatedly bragged about talking with Trump and senior campaign officials.
==
We've gone over Fox's obsession with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. For months, the network has been obsessed with attacking her, even though the attacks keep backfiring and instead make her look better.
Now we have some numbers to show how deep it goes. During the month of January, Fox's prime time shows spent nearly an hour and a half on Ocasio-Cortez in January, while barely mentioning Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell at all. In fact, the person on Fox prime time who mentioned him the most was Ocasio-Cortez -- in clips of her trying to confront McConnell over the government shutdown.
And there is plenty about McConnell to discuss, starting with how he singlehandedly kept the shutdown going by categorically refusing to vote on any legislation that might override Trump's veto. McConnell also derided a bill by House Democrats that would make voting easier, and complained that making Election Day a federal holiday would be a "power grab" by Democrats.
==
AN 119
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What kind of reporting does the Fox News viewership receive through prime-time reporting and commentary? Consider the lessons viewers learned on Thursday, December 20, 2018, an extraordinary day of troubles for Trump’s presidency. Leading print and television journalists outside of Fox expressed shock that Trump suddenly announced plans to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria and quickly draw down half of U.S. troops in Afghanistan. They warned that an American exodus in Syria could benefit the Russians, Syrians, Iranians, and Turks at the expense of Kurds who fought bravely against ISIS. Military leaders and foreign policy experts blasted Trump’s decision as ill-advised and dangerous.
General Jim Mattis’s decision to resign as Secretary of Defense, also received abundant commentary on December 20. Mattis’s letter of resignation communicated strong disagreement with the direction of U.S. foreign policy. Mattis, in a clear rebuke of the president, noted that during his four decades of “immersion in the issues” he had learned the importance of treating allies with respect and “being clear-eyed about malign actors and strategic competitors.” Both American and international leaders were alarmed that the last general who seemed capable of taming the erratic president planned to leave his post.
On the home front, President Trump led congressional leaders to believe that a compromise was workable on temporarily funding the government. But Trump suddenly reversed his position, insisting there would be no settlement unless Congress provided $5 billion for a border wall. On December 20 the stock market tanked on this news and other developments. The next day Wall Street closed with its worst week since the financial crisis of 2008.
Mainstream journalists focused on the chaos associated with these developments. Several Republican leaders joined them in expressing concern, including Senators Lindsay Graham and Bob Corker. Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell backed compromises aimed at averting a shutdown, but Trump and his backers in the Freedom Caucus made compromise unworkable.
Fox News television viewers got almost no sense of this mounting crisis when watching prime-time programing on the night of December 20. Shows hosted by Martha MacCallum, Tucker Carlson, Dan Bongino (sitting in for Sean Hannity) and Laura Ingraham directed viewers’ attention to other matters. The programs focused on a subject that had already received extensive coverage on Fox in previous months and years: undocumented immigrants. Hosts and guests warned repeatedly that dangerous foreigners threatened to overrun American society.
Even though the real “news” on December 20 was about struggles in Congress to keep the government running, Fox’s prime-time programming highlighted stories about an immigrant invasion. Commentators asserted falsely that Democrats advocated “open borders.” They accentuated a report about a violent undocumented immigrant in California. In each program hosts and commentators left viewers with an impression that the big news of the day concerned security threats from aliens. Speakers praised President Trump for his determination to build a wall.
What other topics dominated the night’s discussions on Fox, essentially eclipsing any discussion of the big stories of the day about blow-back from the president’s controversial actions?
Martha MacCallum’s program featured a lengthy interview with Susan Collins. The senator from Maine talked at length about some extremist critics of Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court (individuals who harassed her in disgusting ways).
Tucker Carlson drew attention to the work of Robert Shibley, who maintained that America’s universities have been pushing aggressively against free speech. Carlson also took shots at a “Climate Tax” and made fun of claims about Russian interference. He maintained that China was the real threat.
Dan Bongino and his guests blasted Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s defense of the “so-called Russia investigation.” Bongino praised a “terrific book” by Gregg Jarrett called The Russia Hoax: The Illicit Scheme to Clear Hillary Clinton and Frame Donald Trump.
Laura Ingraham, like all the other prime-time hosts, devoted considerable time to immigration, but she encountered difficulty when a sheriff objected to some of her arguments. The officer acknowledged the difficulty of holding a violent undocumented man in California because of laws pertaining to sanctuary cities, but he noted that many immigrants in his community were good citizens and sought help from law enforcement when troubled by criminals. “That’s a lie!” Ingraham responded. She ended the interview quickly by mentioning “violence, rape, burglary, robbery and other offenses against property and people.”
A pattern in the reporting and commentary on Fox was evident in these four prime-time programs. By focusing on old news stories that had been red meat in right-oriented media commentary for years, there was little time left for an analysis of stunning developments in the previous 24-hours. General Mattis’s resignation letter hardly got a nod. The outcry by national and international leaders regarding President Trump’s plan to withdraw from Syria and Afghanistan received little or no attention. The impact of a government shutdown on the American economy and the American people was almost completely ignored. There was hardly a word about the stock markets’ plummet that day or the huge slide of recent weeks. Instead, viewers heard about scary threats from immigrants, Democrats, university administrators, and Chinese hackers. They were reminded often that President Trump fights tenaciously for ordinary Americans.
Much of the discussion did not reflect what used to be identified as mainstream Republican stands on economic and political affairs. Instead, viewers got an earful of analysis from individuals who spoke from the margins of political debates. Hosts and commentators seemed eager to please their most important viewer, the President of the United States. Most of them endorsed and celebrated Donald Trump’s statements and actions, despite their sharply controversial nature. Dan Bongino, substituting as host for Sean Hannity, provided an example of the slant by promoting his co-authored book, Spygate: The Attempted Sabotage of Donald J. Trump.
Endorsing controversial and often questionable ideas, has, of course, been evident in Fox’s broadcasting over many years. A decade and a half ago, the channel sounded a drumbeat for war in program after program, convincing many viewers that Saddam Hussein had been responsible for the 9/11 tragedy, threatened the world with WMDs, including nukes, and needed to be removed. On the same channel host Bill O’Reilly devoted considerable time to warning viewers about a “war on Christmas.” Anti-religious forces were trying to replace “Merry Christmas” with “Happy Holidays,” O’Reilly cautioned. During those years, Roger Ailes, then Chairman and CEO at Fox News, designed the channel’s modus operandi, applying a heavy-handed slant on the news.
Complaints about Donald Trump’s enthusiasts are often misplaced. Many citizens who are regular patrons of Fox News and other right-oriented programming want to be well-informed about current events. They take civic engagement seriously. Those listeners and viewers should be more discerning, of course, but they are not fully to blame for making judgments about national and international affairs that raise the eyebrows of Trump’s critics. Fox News, and other opinion sources on television and radio are primarily responsible for the base’s narrow and skewed viewpoints. Millions of Americans have turned to the Fox News Channel and other sources, seeking knowledge about current events. They have been let down by the manipulators of “news.”
Robert Brent Toplin has published several books about history, politics, and film. He is Professor Emeritus at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington
5 dumb wk 1/19 AN
- Tucker Carlson warns women being paid more than men will destroy society.
Fox News’ Tucker Carlson is by now well-known for his on-air appeals to white nationalism. Last month, his remarks that immigrants make America “poorer and dirtier” have caused him to lose a raft of advertisers in recent weeks. But he also has a serious problem with women — and according to his broadcast on Wednesday, rising pay for women will lead to “men in decline.”
Carlson claimed that because “male-dominated” industries like manufacturing are in decline in some parts of the country, but schools, hospitals, and other places that employ large numbers of women are in as high demand as ever, “in many areas, women suddenly made more than men … Study after study shows that when men make less than women, women generally no longer want to marry them.”
“Over big populations this causes a drop in marriage, a spike in out-of-wedlock births and all the familiar disasters that inevitably follow. More drug and alcohol abuse, higher incarceration rates, fewer families formed in the next generation,” Carlson warned.
Watch below:
Tucker Carlson says women making more money than men leads to “more drug and alcohol abuse, higher incarceration rates, fewer families formed for the next generation” pic.twitter.com/gpAKgy0snV
— Andrew Lawrence (@ndrew_lawrence) January 3, 2019
Naturally, Carlson doesn’t provide any sourcing for these claims. Nor does he seem to have noticed that women in fact earn less than men on average, not more.
- Lou Dobbs calls Mitt Romney “treasonous” for his op-ed mildly criticizing Trump.
Carlson was not the only right-wing anchor eager to share his opinion this week. Also in the spotlight was Fox Business’ Lou Dobbs, a psychotically pro-Trump anchor who
over the Washington Post op-ed by incoming Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT), rebuking Trump’s failure of leadership and moral character.
“We have Romney,” said Dobbs, “who is basically saying to all of the great Americans in Utah, ‘Go to hell, please! You were a bunch of suckers! And I accepted the Trump endorsement. And now I’m telling Trump what I really think of him.’ What an ignorant — his character?! He’s talking about character?! He’s a traitor, he is treasonous, and betrayed the people of Utah!”
Contrary to Dobbs’ assertion, it is not “treasonous” for a member of a co-equal branch of government to criticize the presidency. And in reality, 64 percent of Utah voters wantRomney to stand up to Trump in office. The good news for Dobbs, though, is that Romney is unlikely to follow through on his anti-Trump posturing beyond empty words. He noted in his op-ed that he supports Trump’s policy agenda, and clarified he intends to vote for Trump’s border wall.
- Trump supporter tells Fox News he wants Trump to fire Democrats like contestants on “The Apprentice.”
Dobbs is not alone in confusion over the right of politicians to challenge the president. With Nancy Pelosi ascending to the Speakership once again, some Trump supporters seem to think the president ought to just fire the Democrats from the House as if they’re contestants on Trump’s old NBC show, “The Apprentice” — as one man identified only as “Phil” told “Fox & Friends” host Pete Hegseth at Grandma’s Pancake House in Shelbyville, Indiana on Thursday.
“I’m expecting to wake up some morning and find Fox News — Trump on there, pointing his finger, ‘You’re fired, Democrats,'” said Phil. After everyone laughed, Hegseth had to awkwardly explain to Phil that the president doesn’t have the constitutional authority to oust members of Congress.
Watch below:
...
- Rick Santorum says Black Lives Matter is a “racist” group that “promotes a lot of hateful things.”
After years of police shootings of unarmed black suspects, the Black Lives Matter movement is still an issue conservatives struggle to empathize with or even talk about. Look no further than CNN commentator and former GOP Senator Rick Santorum.
On Thursday, during a discussion with Anderson Cooper, after fellow commentator Kirsten Powers noted that the GOP has failed to grasp how Trump’s racist rhetoric is hurting their party, Santorum tried to make a whataboutist dodge, saying that Black Lives Matter “promotes a lot of hateful things.” After Powers demanded he provide an example, Santorum started to babble. “There are all sorts of clips and posters of folks in these marches that are as racist on the other way as the white racists are to blacks. You just can’t wipe away all of the things that are said and written and done at these marches as a fringe element any more than you would wipe those away from a group of whites doing the same thing.”
At no point did Santorum provide a specific example, or explain how such examples would reflect on an entire movement of activists whose singular goal is to make communities safe for people of color.
- Trump supporters attack Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s high school nickname and dancing skills.
Few political attacks have fallen so hopelessly flat as Trump supporters’ attempts to discredit Democratic Socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), which reached a new level of absurdity this week.
On Wednesday, right-wing blogger Jim Hoft — who Media Matters for America once memorably dubbed the “dumbest man on the Internet” — published what he apparently thought was a blistering exposé of Ocasio-Cortez’s hidden past. The revelations: that she sometimes went by the nickname “Sandy” in high school and that some of her classmates were wealthier than her.
But even this pales in comparison to the misfire of Trump supporter Dan Jordan, who tried to humiliate her by posting this clip of a school-aged Ocasio-Cortez dancing with her friends, only to have her own supporters take it viral and praise her:
==
https://www.alternet.org/2019/01/watch-fox-news-guest-claims-food-stamp-recipients-are-too-busy-watching-porn-to-work/
Fox News guest **Star Parker** is applauding Trump administration requirements that make it harder for some Americans to use **food stamps**. On “Fox & Friends” Parker accused people on food stamps of being too busy “watching porn” to go out and get a job.
“These guys are not working, they’re watching,” Parker said. “They’re watching porn, they’re watching women, they’re watching TV, they’re watching everything, but they’re not working,” she claimed. That’s mostly false, according to US News & World Report.
Parker, a far right wing pundit who espouses anti-LGBTQ and pro-white racist positions on Wednesday lamented that under **President Barack Obama** the stigma of public assistance programs was eliminated. She claims embarrassing people who need to use welfare programs is helpful.
She also claimed that the federal government’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) program use of a debit-type card instead of “food stamps,” as the program is still often called, turns welfare programs from short-term assistance into a “generational” tool.
Parker touted the strong economy, which includes a low unemployment rate, which makes it harder for those without a job to find one.
The Trump administration is working to allow states to reduce access to food stamps by increasing work requirements, despite the fact that a large portion of food stamp users are single parents with children and no access to affordable day care, along with the elderly, and those who are unable to work.
But low-income workers also rely on food stamps.
SNAP “helps millions of low-wage workers put food on the table. That’s right – workers,” Stone writes at US News.
“Close to 70 percent of SNAP participants are in families with children; more than one-quarter are in households with seniors or people with disabilities,” Stone says. “SNAP provides only a modest benefit (on average, less than $1.40 per person per meal), but research shows that SNAP reduces poverty and food insecurity and, over the long-term, that means better health and economic outcomes for SNAP recipients, especially those who receive it as children.”
Here’s Parker on national television advancing the idea that’s it’s good to embarrass low-income workers and others who need federal government assistance Parker has written books with titles including, “Pimps, Whores and Welfare Brats: From Welfare Cheat to Conservative Messenger,” and “Uncle Sam’s Plantation: How Big Government Enslaves America’s Poor and What We Can Do About It.
===
Fox News finished the week of Dec. 17 in second place in the cable news ratings race — the week the conservative network, which is known for its relentless support of President Donald Trump, spent significant airtime and webspace criticizing the nation’s leader.
MSNBC topped Fox News for the first time in that time period since 2000, according to a press release, which cited data from Nielsen. Olympic programming was excluded in the research.
Over the week of Dec. 17, Fox News turned from serving as a refuge for the president into one he came to slam as “Fake News!” Trump last week was criticized on “Fox & Friends,”his favorite morning show— though it’s possible the president’s soft spot for the show has sunk — as well as on FoxNews.com and on-air by Judge Andrew Napolitano, a longtime friend of the president and a Fox News personality.
On “Fox & Friends,” host Brian Kilmeade ripped into the president over his abrupt announcement that he wants to withdraw all 2,000 U.S. troops from Syria— a decision Kilmeade warned would allow the Islamic State group, also known as ISIS, to re-establish its reduced power. Kilmeade, who often defends Trump on television, compared Trump’s announcement to Obama’s attempts to get troops out of Iraq: “He is doing exactly, if not worse, than what President Obama did.”
The president appeared to be tuning in as he expressed his frustration on Twitter not long after Kilmeade’s outburst. He said, “I’ve done more damage to ISIS than all recent presidents….not even close!"
Over on FoxNews.com, a headline read: “Trump is about to repeat Obama’s mistake in the Middle East.”
“When your enemies are cheering,” wrote former George W. Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen, “you have made a mistake.”
During an appearance on “Shepard Smith Reporting” with Fox News host Shepard Smith, Judge Andrew Napolitano, a longtime friend of Trump and a Fox News contributor, told anchor Smith that the White House occupant could already be under secret indictment for allegedly conspiring with Michael Cohen, the attorney who spent many years working as Trump’s personal “fixer,” to break campaign finance law during the 2016 presidential campaign in order to hush up women with whom Trump may have had affairs.
“There’s ample evidence — this doesn’t require too much analysis — to indict the president,” Napolitano told Smith. “The question is, do they want to do it? The DOJ has three opinions on this: Two say you can’t indict a sitting president, one says you can. But all three address the problem of, what do you do when the statute of limitations is about to expire? All three agree in that circumstance you indict in secret, keep the indictment sealed and release it the day he gets out of office. You can’t let a person go scot-free because they happen to be in the White House.”
When Smith asked whether Napolitano was saying that the president had already been indicted, the judge responded: “that I don’t know about, but he could be, because we don’t know what’s been sealed.”
The news about Fox News declining ratings also come in the same week that hostTucker Carlson faced an advertiser exodus in response to the controversial remarks he recently made about immigration— specifically, that it makes the U.S. “poorer and dirtier.” Carlson’s comments were widely criticized, and several people threatened to boycott his advertisers. More than a dozen removed their ads from Carlson’s show in response. As of this writing, at least 16 companies have pulled advertising from “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” according to The Hollywood Reporter.
FoxNews.com op-ed attacking former Attorney General Eric Holder uncritically relied on, and linked to, a piece by white supremacist Jared Taylor that accused Democrats of subjecting “whites to outright racial plunder.” Fox News changed the link after Media Matters contacted the network.
Jeremy Carl, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, wrote a May 23 FoxNews.com op-ed complaining about a Starbucks policy allowing “anyone to spend time in its stores and use restrooms regardless of whether they make a purchase.” He also criticized the company for having engaged "Eric Holder as an adviser on diversity issues,” claiming he “has a long history of making accusations of racial discrimination, often unjustified.”
As one piece of evidence against Holder, Carl linked to a January 2015 opinion piece by Jared Taylor on the white supremacist website American Renaissance. Media Matters found the May op-ed while examining media outlets that have uncritically promoted or cited research by white supremacist media.
The Southern Poverty Law Center wrote that American Renaissance “has been one of the vilest white nationalist publications, often promoting eugenics and blatant anti-black and anti-Latino racists. In 2005 for example, after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, Taylor wrote, ‘When blacks are left entirely to their own devices, Western Civilization—any kind of civilization—disappears.’” The Anti-Defamation League wrote that Taylor “upholds racial homogeneity as the key to fostering peaceful coexistence.”
Taylor’s piece was a review of conservative commentators John Fund and Hans von Spakovsky’s book Obama’s Enforcer: Eric Holder’s Justice Department. The review began by attacking Holder as “a devious, power-hungry, racial zealot” who is “probably the most racially committed black ever to hold a cabinet job” and concluded that while the Republican and Democratic parties are similar, Republicans “are less likely to subject whites to outright racial plunder.”
[scrensht]
Media Matters contacted Fox News about the op-ed and asked if the network thought the research citation was appropriate. The company did not reply but changed the link so it now directs to the Amazon page for Obama’s Enforcer. The site has not noted the change or posted an editor’s note (the op-ed’s timestamp reflects the update).
Media Matterslater contacted Carl, who stated: “Obviously I would not have intentionally cited American Renaissance in any article I wrote — I wrote this article on a very fast same-day deadline at Fox News’ request and simply missed the sourcing. I suspect I missed it because the article was discussing work by Hans Von Spakovsky from Heritage, whom I do know and whose work I trust. I likely simply erred in assuming it was by Von Spakovsky.”
Carl, who agreed with Fox's decision to change the citation, also claimed “Holder has a history of numerous racist statements and actions is beyond doubt. I don’t apologize for saying that — then or now. One doesn’t need to link to American Renaissance to make that point, and obviously I would not have intentionally done so.” He additionally suggested that because Media Matters chose to contact Fox directly first rather than the author, it was evidence we are engaging in the “harassment of a critic of leftism" instead of a "pursuit of truth.”
==
==
At some point, Trump was going to ignore all reason and listen to the loudest voices on Fox News, who demanded he petulantly shut down the government. That time is now.
Fox News spent the week gearing up for a government shutdown, even cheering on Trump when he said he would be “proud to shut down the government.”
But as the shutdown neared, Trump and the White House began signalling that they would find other ways to fund Trump's border wall.
Pro-Trump media threw a fit. Far right figures like Ann Coulter led the way, demanding that Trump shut the government down. Fox News joined in, with Fox & Friends and figures on Fox primetime shows urging Trump to change course and shut the government down.
Trump caved, and now the government is shut down.
Also: Don't let mainstream pundits blame "both sides." Trump sat in the White House and said he would own the shutdown. He is the one who rejected the deal at the last minute. This is the Fox News / Trump shutdown, and anyone who says otherwise is lying to you.
ref
https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2018/12/20/Right-wing-media-figures-goad-Trump-into-vetoing-any-spending-bill-that-doesnt-include-bor/222372
no pix vid lnx
Right-wing media figures goad Trump into vetoing any spending bill that doesn’t include border wall funding
Blog ››› December 20, 2018 4:39 PM EST ››› COURTNEY HAGLE
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Melissa Joskow / Media Matters
After criticism from right-wing figures who usually push pro-Trump propaganda, President Donald Trump has backed away from previous plans and instead set up a potential government shutdown by demanding money for a border wall be included in any stopgap government funding bill.
Fox News spent last week pushing for a government shutdown, cheering on Trump when he firmly declared that he would be “proud to shut down the government.” But after the White House signaled earlier this week that it would back off its $5 billion demand to fund a wall at the U.S.-Mexico border in a resolution to keep the federal government funded until next year, right-wing media figures began criticizing Trump and goading him into shutting down the government. Many of his most ardent supporters began to perceive his decision to sign the bill as weak, calling on the president to change his mind and refuse to sign any proposed spending bill that does not include funding for the wall.
Responding to these criticisms, Trump sent a flurry of tweets adamantly defending his position just one day after CNN reported that the president “has become increasingly sensitive to criticism” from his base over the border wall. Trump then renewed his call for funding, telling lawmakers that he will not sign any bill that does not include funding for the border wall in an apparent nod to his supporters.
Here is a timeline of some of that recent criticism:
December 19
Fox Nation host Tomi Lahren, who has previously made it clear where she stands on the border wall, said on Fox & Friends that “if we need a government shutdown” to build a wall, “then a shutdown is exactly what we need.”
Fox & Friends co-host Steve Doocy declare that “effectively, the Democrats win because they didn’t want any money for wall. And the swamp wins because runaway spending, which is in the current budget, continues.”
Embedded video
Bobby Lewis
@revrrlewis
Replying to @revrrlewis
Steve Doocy: “It looks as if he’s not going to get any wall money. … effectively, the Democrats win. Because they didn't want any money for wall. And the swamp wins, because runaway spending, which is in the current budget, continues.”
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5:12 AM - Dec 19, 2018
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Doocy later in the show said that Trump will “look like a loser” to his supporters who “drew that line in the sand and said, ‘This is worth shutting down.’”
Fox & Friends guest Michelle Malkin said that she’s “not going to sugarcoat it” and “not going to spin it” if Trump backs down, describing his decision as “a cave” and “a blink.”
Embedded video
Bobby Lewis
@revrrlewis
Replying to @revrrlewis
2000s has-been and Fox & Friends mainstay Michelle Malkin: “I’m not going to sugarcoat it and I’m not going to spin it. I wish I could but I can’t. This was a cave. This was a blink. … because [Mitch McConnell’s] afraid of a shutdown”
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6:08 AM - Dec 19, 2018
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On Fox’s Outnumbered, Fox Business host David Asman emphasized the importance of the wall to Trump’s supporters, saying that “if [Trump] is viewed by his base as caving on the issue, no matter how they try to spin at the White House, already some of the base is beginning to fray a little bit.” Referring to the White House’s pledge to find funding for the wall elsewhere, Fox host Lisa Kennedy Montgomery claimed that “if this were the Obama administration … we would all be up in arms.”
Rush Limbaugh attacked the Senate-passed resolution, saying, “Trump’s gonna get less than nothing because this compromise strips out the $1.6 billion for the wall that the Senate Appropriations Committee had already approved weeks ago.” He added, “You can’t say for four years, 'Well, I gotta do this and this and this and this and this before I can accomplish this ... He doesn’t have limitless time to do this."
Ann Coulter unloaded on Trump in a podcast with The Daily Caller, accusing him of being “a joke presidency who scammed the American people.” Coulter said that she will not vote for Trump in 2020 without a border wall, adding, “nor will, I think, most of his supporters.” (Coulter had also vowed earlier in the week to not support Trump in 2020 if the wall was not built.) Within hours of these comments, the president unfollowed Coulter on Twitter.
Fox regular and former NRATV host Dan Bongino filled in as guest host for Sean Hannity’s prime-time Fox News show on Wednesday, discussing the spending bill and the border wall, which he described as “essentially the Trump-MAGA agenda.” Matt Schlapp, chair of the American Conservative Union, claimed that “the fact is is this: The president should veto this bill. This breaks the promise with his supporters.” Though Schlapp admitted that a shutdown “doesn’t mean you get all you want, but you send a message to the liberals” and “that’s why it’s critical for the president to not sign a bill which is a white flag.”
Erick Erickson criticized the negotiating skills of Trump and Republicans:
Erick Erickson
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@EWErickson
No wall.
Central America gets $10.6 billion.
Planned Parenthood still funded.
ISIS gets a reprieve in Syria.
Well done, Republicans.
975
6:28 PM - Dec 19, 2018
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On her Fox News show, Laura Ingraham chastised Trump for not getting the funding, declaring that “not funding the wall is going to go down as one of the worst, worst things to have happened to this administration. … It’s a scandal that it hasn’t been built.” Fox regular and Trump legal adviser Joe diGenova agreed with Ingraham, saying: “I hope that when this thing runs out in February, the president says, ‘That’s it, no more. A wall or I’m shutting it down.’”
Breitbart's Joel Pollak said that he would prefer a shutdown:
Joel B. Pollak
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@joelpollak
Replying to @joelpollak
On the wall: first, I've stated I prefer Trump to follow through on his threat of a shutdown over it because he made a threat and must follow through on threats if they are to be credible again -- as they will have to be when he tries to wield his veto against a Democratic House.
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7:31 PM - Dec 19, 2018
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December 20
Fox News contributor Mike Huckabee said on Fox & Friends that Trump “has got to look in the mirror and remind himself he ran … on the idea of we’re going to secure the border.” Huckabee also downplayed the impact of a shutdown, saying that “the things that really matter to most Americans day-by-day will be funded.” Guest co-host Jedediah Bila responded by saying that “this is his signature issue, this is what arguably he won on,” claiming that she doesn’t “understand how he survives this personally, for his own legacy.”
Fox host Pete Hegseth, who is known to speak directly to Trump, called for Trump to shut down the government.
Pete Hegseth
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@PeteHegseth
(2 of 3) ...Don’t listen to squish advisors. Your instincts are right. Dig in and fight. Veto a crap CR bill w/ no WALL funding. Make Dems own “open borders”. Disrupt Washington, DC. Make them all squirm. The American People are behind you.
No WALL = SHUT IT DOWN...
5,371
4:33 AM - Dec 20, 2018
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On Fox & Friends, NRA spokesperson Dana Loesch called on Trump to shut down both the government and the border until he receives funding, saying that she “would love to see the president … just go ahead and shut down the border, and then shut down the government.”
On Fox’s America’s Newsroom, James Freeman of The Wall Street Journal downplayed the significance of a government shutdown, claiming that “if you look at recent history, shutdowns don’t actually do that much political damage.”
On Fox’s America’s Newsroom, Fox contributor and former acting Director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement Thomas Homan said that Trump “needs to veto any sort of continuing resolution” so that “he can stand up and say, ‘I have done everything I can to protect our border.’”
Ben Shapiro said Trump should veto "any funding that doesn't include the wall."
Ben Shapiro
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@benshapiro
BTW, I'm in favor of Trump vetoing any funding that doesn't include the wall. I'm also in favor of Trump vetoing any funding for Planned Parenthood. He should have done this over the past two years. https://www.dailywire.com/news/39557/shutdown-showdown-trump-refuses-sign-senate-ben-shapiro …
3,975
10:48 AM - Dec 20, 2018
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SHUTDOWN SHOWDOWN: Trump Refuses To Sign Senate Continuing Resolution, Demands Border Security...
On Thursday, President Trump announced that he would not sign a short-term continuing resolution approved by the Senate – a bill that did not include funding for a border wall. Speaker of the House...
dailywire.com
1,206 people are talking about this
Shortly after it was announced that Trump would refuse to sign the bill to keep the government open, Limbaugh said that "the president has gotten word to me that he is either getting funding to the border or he’s shutting the whole thing down." Earlier in the show, Limbaugh had told him to do exactly that in order to be "a hero" to the far right.
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OMFG khj cdv
..President Trump is better at commanding the agenda than he is at any other single thing that he as a communicator does. The press has been an accomplice in the process of ceding agenda control to him by virtue of his tweeting -- and having the press respond immediately, as if every tweet is presumed to be newsworthy. Donald Trump has thecapacity to get whatever he wants the public to focus on by directing the cable news agenda.We really should ask: Aren't there other things we ought to be paying more attention to? How often are we being distracted from something that Trump does not want us to pay attention to? Being distracted by his effective use of tweets to set an alternative agenda.
Fox News is de facto Trump's state-sponsored media. How does this impact American political culture?
We are increasingly going into ideological enclaves to get our news. To the extent that people find the news compatible with what they already believe, that means they are not being exposed to alternative interpretations of reality and alternative points of view. What is unprecedented about the relationship between Fox News and the president of the United States is the extent to which what is said and shown on Fox News appears to influence what is said and featured by the president of the United States. The traditional model of agenda-setting is that the president sets the agenda and the news media follows. This _{reversal }_with Donald Trump and Fox News is something new.
....
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https://www.alternet.org/tucker-carlson-losing-advertisers-fox-news-response
Fox News host Tucker Carlson is facing an advertiser boycott in response to his racist attacks on immigrants. As of Tuesday afternoon, 11 companies have pulled advertising from Carlson's program, including Pacific Life, Indeed, SmileDirectClub, Minted, IHOP, Ancestry.com, ScotteVest, Nerdwallet, Zenni, TD Ameritrade, and Nautilus.[many just switch show? kpfa]
But the response from Fox News [lnx lost] is not to take any responsibility for his hateful rhetoric. Rather, they are attacking Sleeping Giants and Media Matters for America, two of the groups spearheading the boycott on social media: ...Fox News is referring to an incident in November in which protestors surrounded Carlson's house, called him a racist, and spray-painted his driveway. The event drew condemnation from both sides of the aisle, although some reports now suggest the unruliness of the demonstrators was somewhat exaggerated. Ironically, given they now claim they "do not advocate boycotts," Fox News responded to that incident by boycotting Twitter.
In recent months, Carlson has been engaging in increasingly racist bile on his show, with his rhetoric sometimes bordering on outright white nationalism to the point where neo-Nazi Richard Spencer and KKK grand wizard David Duke have praised him for mainstreaming their beliefs. Carlson has claimed that white people aren't "designed" to live around immigrants, that the original motto of the United States proves diversity is bad, and promoted a white nationalist conspiracy theory that South Africa is trying to push white farmers off their land and kill them (which President Donald Trump then tweeted about and caused an international incident).
But the remark that prompted the advertiser boycott was a segment on Thursday in which Carlson openly disdained immigrants as unclean."Our leaders demand that you shut up and accept this. We have a moral obligation to admit the world's poor, they tell us, even if it makes our country poorer and dirtier and more divided," he said. On Monday, he doubled down on this attack.
Fox News has reason to be jittery about advertiser boycotts. In April 2017, Bill O'Reilly, the longtime right-wing host who previously held Carlson's time slot, was forced out after revelations about his multimillion-dollar settlements to female colleagues he sexually harassed prompted advertisers to flee. Another boycott this March targeted Fox News commentator Laura Ingraham after she mocked Parkland shooting survivor David Hogg for not getting into his top choice of college, although she managed to weather the firestorm.
If Fox News wants to prevent advertiser boycotts, they should stop giving legitimacy on air to morally reprehensible people.
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filter bubble fail?
Once again proving they probably don't realize just how popular such ideas have become, Fox News on Tuesday tried to ridicule and discredit key platform planks that progressive Democrats successfully ran on this election cycle but ended up just reminding people that these ideas actually make a lot of sense.
In a segment titled "Freshman Insurrection" on Tuesday night, right-wing host Laura Ingraham presented newly-elected House members—namely Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota—as a cabal of nutty radicals hell-bent on upending Nancy Pelosi's leadership as they advocate for "wacky" ideas like providing every, single person in the United States access to healthcare and saving the planet's natural systems from destruction while providing quality, high-paying jobs to millions of people as the country makes a rapid transition to a renewable energy system.
As the left-leaning group People for Bernie [Sanders] pointed out:
This is the best agenda Fox News has promoted all week. pic.twitter.com/p8FXqMCtTu
— People For Bernie (@People4Bernie) November 14, 2018
Weird how the right says "nothing is free" but then give the Left wonderful free advertising like this.
— Giovanni Torre (@GiovanniTorre) November 14, 2018
"Fox really makes the best pro-progressives graphics," said another as screenshots of Ingraham's segment began to make the rounds on social media. The outlet has been caught doing the same multiple times in the last year (here, here, and here).
As it turns out, an increasing number of Americans support bold climate action, a Medicare for All plan, student loan forgiveness and tuition-free higher education, and a more humane immigration system.
Meanwhile, Parker Malloy, editor-at-large for Media Matters for America, offered Fox News her graphic design skills so "wacky" Republicans in the House (albeit less of them in the coming Congress) do not feel left out:...
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random mma 11/18
Sean Hannity attacks Michelle Obama because she criticized Trump’s racist birther lies
Video November 9, 2018 10:35 PM EST
Fox guest accuses Democrats of "manufacturing voters" in Florida
Video November 9, 2018 8:41 PM EST
Sean Hannity says efforts to count all Florida votes “purposefully violated the federal law and Florida state law"
Video November 9, 2018 4:13 PM EST
Just days after Democrats retake the House, conservative commentators insist that they’re doing it all wrong
Blog November 9, 2018 2:57 PM EST
Liberty Counsel's podcast compares same-sex marriage to pedophilia and adultery
Video November 9, 2018 1:49 PM EST
NRATV host Dan Bongino used doctored Infowars video of Jim Acosta in White House press briefing
Blog November 9, 2018 1:40 PM EST
Leading members of Trump’s Fox cabinet support Jim Jordan’s House GOP leader bid
Blog November 9, 2018 12:57 PM EST
Anti-abortion ballot measures based on right-wing misinformation are a threat to reproductive health
Blog November 9, 2018 12:51 PM EST
NRATV's Grant Stinchfield on the Thousand Oaks mass shooting: Californians are "sheep" because guns are prohibited in bars
Video November 9, 2018 11:42 AM EST
NRATV host: Sen. Dianne Feinstein empowers mass shooters
Video November 9, 2018 11:03 AM EST
Fox's Jeanine Pirro suggests both that there were "more votes than people" in Florida and that a "truckload" of ballots were destroyed
Video November 9, 2018 10:54 AM EST
Matt Schlapp: Gillum's call to "count every vote" means "count the votes of people who are not legally allowed to vote"
Video November 9, 2018 10:35 AM EST
Fox & Friends contradicts itself on Florida vote count
Blog November 9, 2018 9:23 AM EST
Fox regular says Stacey Abrams "should be gracious in ... defeat," even though votes are still being counted in Georgia
Video November 9, 2018 9:01 AM EST
Fox guest: There is a "moral hazard of turning Election Day into election season" with things like early voting and mail-in ballots
Video November 9, 2018 8:59 AM EST
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Fox News commentator claims migrants in caravan have ‘leprosy’ and ‘small pox’
Dominique Jackson DOMINIQUE JACKSON
29 OCT 2018 AT 17:25 ET
Charles Payne and David Ward [Photo: Screengrab from video
DON'T MISS STORIES. FOLLOW RAW STORY!
Follow @rawstory
As the migrant caravan crisis grows, Fox News is peddling fear tactics to their viewers. On Monday, a former ICE agent David Ward told Fox News host Charles Payne that some of the migrants have leprosy.
“We have three tenants of problems, national security, public safety, and public health issues with these caravans coming to the United States,” Ward said.
“In the national security realm, we have all sorts of people, not only from Central America but they are coming in from Africa and the Middle East and other places in this caravan,” he said.
He added, “They are going to come between the ports of entry where we have the paths of least resistance. Then [we have] public health. Individuals [are] coming from all over the world that has the most extreme medical care in the world.”
“They are coming in with diseases such as smallpox and leprosy and T.B. [and this is] going to affect our people in the United States,” he said.
Watch the video below via Fox News.
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Fox News Was Just Humiliated When Sean Hannity Spoke at a Trump Rally — Contradicting the Network's Promises
ipcc report 10/8/18 check coverage 12 yrs
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new report issued by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change this week warned that if immediate and unprecedented action is not taken, the dire consequences of global warming will start to take effect within the next 20 years.
The landmark report dominated the environmental news beat this week, but its impact was not reflected in mainstream media coverage.
Unsurprisingly, Fox Newsdid not cover the report until late Monday afternoon, when Shep Smith spent a few minutes on the topic, saying, “climate change is real, the situation is urgent, and time is running out. That's the new warning from a landmark United Nations report." Smith’s reporting was quickly watered down with correspondent Trace Gallagher describing the goals laid out in the U.N. report as “really unreasonable” and “draconian.”
While most TV networks are notoriously terrible when it comes to covering the real-life causes and impacts of climate change, Fox News stands out among the worst offenders. The network has spent years telling its viewers that global warming is a hoax. They have devoted coverage to undermining climate science across its platforms -- in 2012, the Union of Concerned Scientists found that 93% of Fox News' representations of climate science were misleading.
Fox was not alone in ignoring the climate report: 28 of the top 50 U.S. newspapers made no mention of it on their homepages, including 10 that serve cities listed among the "25 U.S. Cities Most Affected by Climate Change."
The predictions offered in the report would likely affect every American, but the media is largely unwilling or unable to dedicate substantive coverage to climate change and related environmental news. While there is clearly a hunger for climate change reporting--particularly on the responses and solutions to this global crisis--coverage is lacking, if not downright misleading, across every network.
Watch this: Fox News has spent years telling viewers that climate change is not real. We juxtaposed those lies with the dire warnings from the new climate report.
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se mma on tucker c pal with proud boys, NYC beatings
see proud boys update
While the Proud Boys are beating people on the streets of New York, right-wing media figures have instead fearmongered about peaceful protesters on the left. Right-wing media figures likened anti-Kavanaugh protesters to deranged monsters, compared them to children, claimed that they are on drugs, called for punitive measures against them, and more. The attacks are out of control.
This is all part of a larger tactic on the right. As Matt Gertz explained, the right-wing midterm engagement strategy is telling viewers that Democrats are coming to kill them: “With the midterm elections only four weeks away, a slew of Fox News commentators are warning their conservative viewers that they are physically imperiled by a ‘violent’ leftist ‘mob’ and must vote to keep Republicans in power in order to protect themselves. Their argument is an effort to turn out the GOP base by weaponizing conservative criticism of the protestors who opposed Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court.”
Also: It's not just Fox News. CNN's right-wing pundits are running with this same talking point.
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https://www.alternet.org/white-house-promises-look-fox-news-decision-stop-airing-trump-rallies-after-ratings-plummet
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Trump has described himself as a self-made man who turned a small million dollar loan into a vast multi-billion dollar empire. This week’s damning *New York Times*report proved the opposite -- that Trump’s fortune was built upon extensive tax fraud and considerable other fraudulent behavior. In theory, the Times report exposing Trump’s past is important enough to should dominate the new cycle.
But right-wing media has made little of this bombshell report, instead choosing to either ignore it or laud him for his ability to skirt the law.
Matt Gertz described Fox News’ coverage well: “Several commentators at the Trump-friendly network have explained away the Times’ damning reporting, arguing that the story was a hatchet job from a biased outlet that shows no wrongdoing and in fact proves the president both savvy and virtuous. And those were the commentators who actually bothered to tell their viewers the story existed. Most Fox programs ... including its entire prime-time lineup -- completely ignored the report. Only Shep Smith, whose reporting frequently contradicts the commentary of others at his network, discussed what he termed an 'exhaustive' story in detail without dismissing it during that period.”
At this point it’s worth noting the right-wing media’s prior stance on vetting presidents and presidential candidates, specifically President Obama. Simon Maloy recounted the right-wing media’s efforts to misconstrue President Obama’s past this week: “This notion that Obama was hiding his true self found countless avenues of expression -- obsessions over his college transcripts; fine-toothed parsing of personal anecdotes related in his books; sinister insinuations about the childhood years he spent in Indonesia; dimwitted conspiracies about who actually wrote his autobiography; equally stupid conspiracies about his biological father; still dumber conspiracies about the famous black men who could be his ‘real’ father; and bad-faith efforts to impute to Obama the politics of every controversial figure he encountered in his public life. The current president’s ascent in Republican politics began with a bigoted smear campaign to demonstrate that Obama had covered up his true place of birth.”
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How Fox News Is Turning Brett Kavanaugh Into a Symbol of White Grievance
By Amanda Marcotte, Salon
Fox News exploiting Kavanaugh conflict to tell white people they’re the real victims of racist oppression READ MORE»
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Thursday morning, as the Carolinas and Virginia were preparing to be battered by Hurricane Florence, President Trump tweeted that he did not believe the official death count released by the Puerto Rican government after Hurricanes Irma and Maria hit the island last year.
A study commissioned by the Puerto Rican government concluded that nearly 3,000 deaths were directly related to the storms, but apparently after watching a CNN segment on the death toll, Trump pushed a conspiracy theory that the number was just "bad politics" by Democrats who raised the death toll in order to make him "look as bad as possible." Trump also declared earlier in the week that the federal government's response to the crisis in Puerto Rico was an "incredible untold success."
Right-wing media quickly spun up a range of excuses for the president:
- Fox's Geraldo Rivera responded to news of Trump's tweets by arguing that it is "grotesquely unfair" to blame Trump for the federal government's response to the hurricanes and claiming that the problem with Hurricane Maria coverage is that "intense politically motivated hatred of President Trump deflects attention from what's really needed."
- Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton tweeted, "The dramatic increase in death toll due to hurricane in Puerto Rico is result of statistical guess work. … we should be suspicious of a guess that moves it up to nearly 3,000."
- NRATV's Grant Stinchfield said, "I'm there with Donald Trump -- I call bogus on the 3,000 deaths."
- Erick Erickson tweeted, "The President would be more willing to accept the truth about the thousands dead in Puerto Rico if news outlet in the country weren't trying to blame him for the deaths."
- Moral Majority founder Jerry Falwell claimed, "Dems learned how to politicize natural disasters when Katrina hit New Orleans. It worked against Bush 43 so now they're trying it against @realDonaldTrump with his response to Maria in Puerto Rico last year."
- Breitbart.com insisted that Trump was "correct" to argue that Democrats had created a fake death count to smear him, pointing out that earlier estimates put the death toll at around 1,000. Breitbart complained that "the media reported the new estimate as if it were an actual confirmed death toll," even though the Puerto Rican government revised the official death toll to align with that estimate.
- Lou Dobbs praised the president on his Fox Business show for having "the guts to call out the Dems and national left wing media types, who have blindly accepted an amazing tortured inflation of the death toll." Dobbs later tweeted out a video of the segment, which earned a retweet from the president.
Trump’s abject dismissal of almost 3,000 dead Americans and his media allies’ immediate and supportive reaction offers more proof that there is no low to which they will not sink.
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random grab 918 mma
Sean Hannity: "Secret Service now must do everything within their power" to find anonymous op-ed author
Video September 7, 2018 10:19 PM EDT
Sean Hannity calls for "the guy that appointed Mueller," Deputy AG Rosenstein, to be "investigated and prosecuted"
Video September 7, 2018 9:53 PM EDT
Tucker Carlson attacks American diversity
Video September 7, 2018 9:29 PM EDT
Sean Hannity falsely claims George Papadopolous wasn't part of Trump campaign following his sentencing
Video September 7, 2018 6:05 PM EDT
Abortion opponents were reassured by Kavanaugh's comments on Roe v. Wade
Blog September 7, 2018 5:36 PM EDT
Sean Hannity claims the Beto O'Rourke campaign asked for volunteers to transport undocumented immigrants to polling booths. It didn't happen.
Video September 7, 2018 4:45 PM EDT
AN
increasingly clear that President Donald Trump is marching to the drumbeat of Fox News. And people at the network know it.
In an interesting moment of candor, Fox News Host Greg Gutfeld laid out just what role his network has played in enabling and bolstering Trump's behavior.
"You know what it is? Trump was radicalized by something, okay?" said Gutfeld on "The Five" on Tuesday. "Because he was a Democrat for a long time, he was pro-choice, liberal in many things. He was radicalized. What was he radicalized by? Us. Fox News. When Fox News happened — he watches Fox, and the world starts to make sense to him, and then — so all he's doing, Juan, is what we do, which is, we bash the media!"
"So he's just doing — he's turned the White House into kind of, like, an alternative Fox show where he sits there and he rips the media," Gutfeld continued, roaring with laughter. "It's kind of refreshing.'
[vid]
Gutfeld, as a Fox commentator, may find that "refreshing," but it is in fact deeply disturbing. Fox News has long operated as an echo chamber for right-wing ideologues who want to promote themselves free from fact-checking — at least one study has found Fox News viewers are less informed on politics than people who don't watch any news at all.
Trump, moreover, has gotten numerous toxic falsehoods from Fox, from the idea that South African farm attacks are a conspiracy to expropriate land from white people, to the idea that Google is censoring conservative search results. He has endorsed Republican candidates after seeing them promoted on Fox News, including Virginia gubernatorial nominee Ed Gillespie. He may even be using Fox News segments to steer policy, such as when he tried to ban transgender troops shortly after Tucker Carlson called gender reassignment surgery "child abuse."
None of this is healthy for democracy or discourse. But it seems to be one of the few ways Trump knows how to govern.
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ggl conspiracy
https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/what-he-talking-about-fox-news-shep-smith-baffled-trumps-nonsensical-attacks
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| Fox News Disables Comments on YouTube Videos About John McCain's Death As Its Supporters Viciously Attack Deceased Senator |
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https://www.alternet.org/new-cnn-contributor-slammed-contract-legally-forbidding-any-criticism-trump
black sept
https://www.alternet.org/fox-news-draws-anger-calling-democratic-candidate-grandson-terrorist
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AN
Adam Housley announced he was leaving Fox, which he joined in 2001, because the network's focus on President Donald Trump and panel discussions had crowded out hard news reporting, reported Politico.
“He’s not doing the type of journalism he wants to be doing,” a former employee told the website. “And he is unhappy with the tone of the conversation of the channel.”
The Los Angeles-based Housley plans to move to San Fransisco to spend more time with his two young children and wife, Tamera Mowry-Housley, the actress and co-host of the daytime talk show "The Real."
Housley's discomfort with the pro-Trump tone at Fox News is widely shared among the network's reporters, according to current and former employees.
"People are losing their minds," one current Fox News personality told Politico.
Conor Powell stepped down as Jerusalem bureau reporter earlier this month over similar concerns, according to a person close to him.
Retired Lt. Col. Ralph Peters quit working as a contributor for the network in March because he believed its pro-Trump "propaganda" was harmful to American democracy.
“Four decades ago, I took an oath as a newly commissioned officer," Peters said in an email to colleagues. "I swore to ‘support and defend the Constitution,’ and that oath did not expire when I took off my uniform."
"Today, I feel that Fox News is assaulting our constitutional order and the rule of law, while fostering corrosive and unjustified paranoia among viewers,” he added.
https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2018/08/14/hundreds-newspapers-plan-editorials-denounce-trump-s-war-press-fox-hosts-attack-newspapers/220991
Fox News and Fox Business hosts are slamming hundreds of newspapers as “anti-Trump” and “fake news” for coordinating to publish editorials on August 16 denouncing President Donald Trump’s war on the press.
Trump and his administration publicly attacked news organizations and specific journalists hundreds of times in just his first year in office. Though he routinely attacked news organizations during his presidential campaign and the transition period between his election and inauguration, Trump’s anti-press rhetoric reached a new low in February 2017, when he began calling news organizations “the enemy of the American people”: ... more than 100 newspaper editorial boards around the country are reportedly planning to publish editorials on August 16 “on the dangers of the administration’s assault on the press.” Each newspaper will be writing its own editorial in this coordinated effort.
Fox, which has both served as a platform for Trump’s attacks on the press and promoted his attacks on its own, is now criticizing the newspapers participating in this effort as anti-Trump and “fake news.” On August 13, five Fox News and Fox Business hosts took offense to the coordinated editorial release protesting Trump’s anti-press rhetoric. Fox & Friends Firstco-host Rob Schmitt said these newspapers are releasing editorials “attacking the president” and that “there is just kind of a mainstream, somewhat leftist bias coming from a lot of our media companies.” Fox & Friends co-host Steve Doocy commented that The Boston Globe “said essentially they’re going after the president.” Varney & Co. guest host Ashley Webster and Wall Street Journaleditorial board member James Freeman both defended Trump’s rhetoric that the media are “the enemy of the people,” pushing Trump’s ridiculous claim that his critique applies only to “fake news.” Fox Business host Lou Dobbs referred to the planned editorials as “anti-Trump screeds” by “coordinated national left-wing fake news.” And Fox host Laura Ingraham, while criticizing media coverage of antifa actions against reporters, mocked the newspapers’ coordinated effort as “not collusion or anything.”
...
Government, The Presidency & White House, Justice & Civil Liberties
Network/OutletFox News Channel, Fox Business
PersonDonald Trump, Laura Ingraham, Steve Doocy, Lou Dobbs, James Freeman, Ashley Webster
Show/PublicationFox & Friends First, FOX & Friends, Varney & Co., Lou Dobbs Tonight, The Ingraham Angle
Stories/InterestsTrump's War on the Press
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https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/when-will-real-journalists-fox-news-step-denounce-trump-propaganda-machine
rantt
...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:
- On Friday, Fox straight news anchor Bill Hemmer told White House aide Mercedes Schlapp that she should “go on offense” against the media.
- 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.
- In April, Fox straight news anchor Eric Shawn lent his platform toJudicial 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:
- The GOP.
- Evangelical Christian leaders.
- The NRA.
- Fox News.
- 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.
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https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2018/07/30/report-donald-trump-relies-fox-news-programming-set-white-house-agenda/
Politico is reporting that White House chief of staff John Kelly’s relationship with President Donald Trump is withering and that as they “have proven increasingly incompatible,” Fox News shows and personalities seem to be filling the void in the White House.
Media Matters has documented the Trump-Fox News feedback loop since the early days of the Trump administration, but as Trump continues to bring on former Fox News employees for White House positions, Fox’s influence over the administration is becoming more stark. Less than one month ago, Trump hired disgraced former Fox News executive Bill Shine as White House communications director (a move Trump sycophant and “unofficial chief of staff” Sean Hannity staunchly endorsed). And now Politico reports that Kelly, who was ostensibly hired to “impose order on a chaotic” White House, has been unable to prevent the president from soliciting advice from a “coterie of outside advisers, including Fox News host Sean Hannity.” Trump is even reportedly setting his daily agenda by simply tuning into his favorite show, Fox & Friends, as a former White House official told Politico that Trump “comes down for the day, and whatever he saw on 'Fox and Friends,' he schedules meetings based on that.”
From Politico’s July 30 article, by Eliana Johnson:
Kelly has done away with “meeting crashers,” the West Wing aides who showed up for meetings uninvited, according to a White House aide, but he has not been able to curb Trump’s practice of adding and subtracting advisers to meetings throughout the day or of turning scheduled gatherings into freewheeling discussions of subjects that suit his interests — including those suggested to him by his coterie of outside advisers, including Fox News host Sean Hannity.
“He comes down for the day, and whatever he saw on 'Fox and Friends,' he schedules meetings based on that,” said one former White House official. “If it’s Iran, it’s ‘Get John Bolton down here!’ … If he’s seen something on TV or [was] talking to Hannity the night before, he’s got lots of flexibility to do whatever he wants to do.”
…
With closer contact, Trump and Kelly have proven increasingly incompatible. The president makes decisions in part based on the blurts emitted from a media world of his own creation, his television tuned to Fox News and his cellphone at the ready to dial up any number of its on-air talent. Kelly, by contrast, rarely watches television and doesn’t follow Twitter, the forum on which the president announces many of his decisions.
Twelve Russian military officers were indicted for hacking into Democrats' computers and disseminating the stolen information to disrupt the 2016 election. The indictment also has references of Infowars host and a then-Breitbart columnist.
But perhaps the most immediately notable part of the indictment from special counsel Robert Mueller's probe is that it directly rebuts the long-simmering right-wing media conspiracy theory about murdered DNC staffer Seth Rich. While the indictment alleges that Russians were behind the hacking (something that intelligence had reportedly concluded long ago), right-wing media have for years -- without any evidence -- pressed the idea that it was actually Rich who did it.
Sean Hannity became the ringleader of this effort, relentlessly dedicating his show in May 2016 to the conspiracy theory until pressure from dropped advertisers forced him to stop covering it, even though he promised he was "closer to the TRUTH than ever." Neither Fox News nor Hannity have ever apologized or even explained their botched reports.
Now that the office of special counsel Robert Mueller has laid out the actual facts (that Russian hacking came very shortly after then-candidate Donald Trump publicly asked for their assistance), it's time for Hannity to come clean.
But we all know he won't. And neither will Fox News. Newt Gingrich has already refused to apologize. And that's why it's more important than ever for people like you to take action and force Hannity's hand.
That's the only thing that works.
Also: An Infowars host reacted to news of the indictments by screaming out "Thank you Russia." Fox host Lou Dobbs downplayed them, saying they were just based on hearsay. And Hannity said that the indictments were suspicious because of the timing; Hannity, while absurdly and bizarrely claiming that we still don't know who leaked the emails, said that it could be any other country.
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https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/why-does-fox-news-steve-doocy-still-have-job-after-gretchen-carlson-lawsuit
Two years ago today, Fox News host Gretchen Carlson filed a civil lawsuit against then-Fox News chairman and CEO Roger Ailes, detailing serial sexual harassment and retaliation by Ailes and persistent gender-based harassment from her former co-host Steve Doocy. Two years later, the toxic culture for women at Fox has been exposed and Ailes and his deputy have both left the network in disgrace, but Doocy continues to co-host “the most powerful TV show in America.”
Carlson held several on-air roles at Fox News from 2005 to the day she was fired from the network in 2016, about two weeks before she filed the lawsuit against Ailes. Her suit detailed pervasive harassment by Ailes and retaliation when she rejected his propositions. This included repeated sexual comments about Carlson’s body and several instances in which Ailes told Carlson that she should engage in a sexual relationship with him in order to improve her job standing.
Carlson’s lawsuit further detailed allegations of harassment by her former Fox & Friends co-host Steve Doocy, also dismissed by Ailes:
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https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/critics-roast-fox-news-fawning-trump-interview-bartiromo-rubberstamps-outrageous
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https://www.alternet.org/movement-abolish-ice-gains-mainstream-support-fox-news-goes-attack-mode
no lnx
As the Movement to Abolish ICE Gains Mainstream Support, Fox News Goes into Attack Mode
Fox has long led the media charge to defend ICE and its actions, frequently using the violent gang MS-13to demonize all immigrants.
By Bobby Lewis / Media Matters June 30, 2018, 5:41 AM GMT
Fox News is scrambling in response to the grass-roots movement to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which has begun seeping into mainstream progressive and Democratic politics. On the evening of June 28, all three of the network’s prime-time shows aired segments attacking the Abolish ICE movement, as did Fox & Friends the next morning.
As the Trump administration is stepping up mass deportations, separating families at the U.S.-Mexico border, and interning immigrant children in cages, calls to abolish ICE have spread from a grass-roots Twitter phenomenon to the political mainstream. Multiple candidates for prominent elected positions have endorsed the movement, including New York congressional nominee Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democratic Socialist who ran on the issue leading up to her upset primary win over Rep. Joe Crowley (D-NY). Elected Democrats are also beginning to endorse the movement. In the House, three Democrats support abolishing ICE and a fourth, Rep. Mark Pocan (WI), introduced legislation to abolish ICE and investigate possibilities for “a humane immigration enforcement system.” And in the Senate, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) endorsed abolishing ICE, and Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) said, “We need to probably think about starting from scratch.” Even some ICE agents themselves have called for the agency to be dissolved.
Meanwhile, on Fox, the network’s stars were allied in their defense of ICE. After a brief update on the June 28 mass shooting at an Annapolis, MD, newspaper, Tucker Carlson -- who uses his platform to promote white nationalism -- opened his show by denouncing #AbolishICE as an “ideological revolution on the left” and fearmongering about the criminals and drugs that he claimed would flood the country without ICE.
Sean Hannity suggested that members of “the left” are attacking ICE because special counsel Robert Mueller has produced “literally zero evidence that the president ever did anything wrong” in his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, causing progressives to “unravel.”
Laura Ingraham complained that “Occupy ICE protesters want to, again, make it impossible for our immigration investigators to do their jobs.” And she ridiculed protesters in Washington, D.C., who were calling for abolishment of ICE as “Jiffy Pop” on account of the “tin foil robes” they wore, which were intended to resemblethe foil blankets ICE is giving detained children.
And Acting ICE Director Tom Homan appeared on Fox & Friends, his favorite safe space, using the Annapolis shooting to argue that anti-ICE protesters “should be respecting law enforcement across the board,” including ICE agents. Homan also said the protesters “need to educate themselves” about ICE’s activities and that they are seeking “better rules for illegal alien families than we have for U.S. citizen families.”
Fox has long led the media charge to defend ICE and its actions, frequently using the violent gang MS-13to demonize all immigrants. (ICE also mislabels some immigrants as gang members in order to deport them.) Along with the hosts’ efforts, guests on the network lie and mislead about immigration issues to defend the agency’s critical role in President Donald Trump’s agenda of implementing mass deportations.
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...Tomi Lahren is back. The conservative Fox News commentator known for her racist remarks last month earned the nickname "Xenophobic Rage Barbie" after defending Trump Chief of Staff John Kelly's anti-immigrant remarks.
Now she is attacking all those on the left, asking why they aren't "loving and tolerant" – something conservatives claim liberals should be forced to be, even in the face of their own intolerance. And after detailing a litany of insults she feels best represent liberals, while wholly ignoring the extraordinary attacks on America from the right, Lahren demands to know why we can't all just get along (video below).
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...
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...Trump bringing in Fox News people is now just a regular thing. It’s commonplace to see Fox host Jeanine Pirro in the Oval Office one day, and hear about host Lou Dobbs phoning in White House meetings the next. Fox & Friends weekend host Pete Hegseth is rumored to be the next Secretary of Veterans Affairs one week and is being considered for a communications job a few weeks later. Former Fox & Friends anchor Heather Nauert was installed at a top position in the Department of State. Former Fox contributor John Bolton became the national security adviser. Former Fox commentator Mercedes Schlapp is the director of strategic communications at the White House. Former Fox commentator Tony Sayegh is a Treasury Department’s spokesperson. Former Fox commentator Richard Grenell is now ambassador to Germany.So yeah, Bill Shine is a perfect fit for the Trump White House.
There are also those who didn’t make it: former contributor K.T. McFarland resigned as deputy national security adviser and later withdrew her nomination to become ambassador to Singapore due to controversy over work for disgraced former national security adviser Michael Flynn; and contributor Monica Crowley was never hired after it was reported that she plagiarized parts of her Ph.D. dissertation. And there’ve been rumors at various times that Trump is considering hiring Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity.
AN
omg
https://www.alternet.org/trump-mulls-hiring-former-fox-news-executive-who-covered-sexual-harassment-gets-bill-oreilly-stamp
...uring the Trump administration, the position was also held by Sean Spicer twice, Mike Dubke and for ten days, by Anthony Scaramucci.
SCOOP: Former @FoxNews co-president Bill Shine is in final talks with @realDonaldTrump about becoming @WhiteHouseCommunications Director. Announcement could be soon.
— John Roberts (@johnrobertsFox) June 27, 2018
The move was confirmed by The New York Times, which reported, “the move has not been finalized, but two people familiar with the decision said it was likely to be announced and that the president had offered him the job.”
Shine left Fox News in May of 2017 after women at the network reportedly circulated a petition demanding he be fired.
Shine reportedly told a female executive that the network’s pattern of sexual harassment was a “necessary evil.”
“Officials at the White House are aware that they will face blowback for appointing someone so closely tied to Mr. Ailes and the culture of harassment toward women at Fox News,” The Timesnoted. “But they said Wednesday that they believe they can weather it.”It was also reported at the time that Shine had attempted to have a female executive institutionalized against her will at a psychiatric hospital to prevent her going public with about sexual harassment by former Fox News boss Roger Ailes.
According to The Times, Kellyanne Conway declined the position and Mercedes Schlapp was not offered the job.
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Fox News is reportedly having trouble selling ads for Sean Hannity's and Laura Ingraham's shows. One Fox News staffer told Vanity Fair's Gabriel Sherman that "The pro-Trump thing isn't working. We can't monetize DACA and the wall and that right-wing shit."
This follows an October 2017 report that Fox News' ad revenue had dropped 17 percent, while revenue for its competitors had remained virtually unchanged.
The toxic conspiracy theories, the pro-Trump propaganda, the racism and sexism and bigotry, and the extreme measures to defend anything that comes out of the White House (including conspiracy theories, racism, sexism, and bigotry) make Fox News unsafe for most advertisers. And whether it's Sean Hannity or Laura Ingraham's show, the core issue is that Fox News management, from the Murdochs on down, is not interested in fixing the problem.
Also: Once again, Fox News anchor Shep Smith has debunked a pro-Trump lie spread by Hannity. This same thing keeps happening.
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https://www.alternet.org/fox-news-judge-jeanine-claims-trump-fulfilling-biblical-prophecy-moving-israeli-embassy-jerusalem
pirro
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trump, dobbs, rudy
https://www.alternet.org/fox-news-and-white-house-created-massive-toxic-bubble-its-about-pop
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Right-wing media furious at Comey for the wrong reasons, Zuckerberg goes before Congress, Fox & Friends ignoring Michael Cohen raid, and more...
Friend,
Here are some things that caught my eye this week: Marcy Wheeler on Trump's pardon of Scooter Libby, Ed Burmila on how pundits were wrong to dismiss Trump's corruption, Hilary Hanson on how two black men were arrested for walking into a Starbucks, Emma Grey Ellis and Louise Matsakis on Facebook's role as content moderator, and Sam Ratner's interview with Jon Greene about the relationship between racism and militarism.
John Whitehouse
**Right-wing media furious at Comey for all the wrong reasons** James Comey's book comes out this week, and right-wing media is in full attack mode.
These attacks aren't new either. Pro-Trump media has attacked Comey ever since Trump fired him, with the sole aim of discrediting anything anti-Trump that Comey might say. Here's some examples from the past year:
But there's been one person leading the charge to discredit anything Comey may say: Sean Hannity. Hannity has repeatedly used Comey as a means to attack Robert Mueller. On multiple occasions, he discussed threatening Comey with criminal charges, and then celebrated after Sarah Huckabee Sanders repeated the line from the White House press room. But this week, Hannity went above and beyond. After Trump told people to watch Hannity's show, Hannity had a complete meltdown, talking about a "Comey crime family" and more. Hannity furiously denied that he colluded with Trump for the segment, but as Simon Maloy notes, Hannity is also a liar. *Also*: The right-wing argument against Comey collapses when you take into consideration the 2016 election. The argument, both from right-wing media and a Trump tweet this morning, is that Comey announced that the Clinton email investigation was re-opened in the final days of the election in order to help or curry favor with Clinton. This idea is *completely* ridiculous. Conservatives at the time, even Jeff Sessions, ran to Fox News to praise Comey's actions. There are plenty of valid things to criticize James Comey for. As *The Atlantic's* Adam Serwer points out, the Clinton investigation was handled very publicly while the counter-intelligence investigation into Trump and Russia was completely under wraps before the election. The FBI's record under Comey, particularly on issues of race and surveillance, calls for scrutiny and criticism. And that is to say nothing of Comey's extremely problematic record under George W. Bush. But these well-founded criticisms of Comey are not what right-wing media are saying. |
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robt r:
What’s worrying isn’t that Trump is now getting advice about policy from fanatics like John Bolton and Lawrence Kudlow. Trump has never cared about policy.
The real worry is that – with Robert Mueller breathing down his neck, and several special elections suggesting a giant “blue wave” in November – Trump is getting ready to do whatever it takes to maintain his power, even if that requires fanatical policies.
Trump is preparing for an epic war over the future of his presidency. This has required purging naysayers from his Cabinet and White House staff, and replacing them with bomb-throwing advocates like Bolton and Kudlow.
Fox News is preparing for the same war, and has made a parallel purge – removing Trump critics like George Will, Megyn Kelly, and Rich Lowry, and installing Trump marketers like Laura Ingraham, Mark Levin, and Sebastian Gorka.
Trump and Fox News are also approaching the war with the same story.
Some of it is by now familiar: Liberals have opened America to hostile forces – unauthorized immigrants, Muslims, Chinese traders, criminal gangs, drug dealers, government bureaucrats, coastal elites (Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi), North Korea, Iran, and “political correctness” in all its forms.
Trump intends to protect America from these forces.
The new twist to the story– requiring the recent purges and a united front – is that these forces are conspiring with the FBI to oust Trump from the presidency.
We all know Trump watches an inordinate amount of Fox News, beginning in the wee hours with “Fox and Friends,” which provides much of the fodder for his morning tweets.The membrane separating Trump’s brain from Fox News has always been thin, but in coming months it’s likely to disappear entirely.
joe digenova hired b/c good fighter on fox