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see anti-vax

SEE FAIL 3 COVID

SEE GOP 5 CIVIL WAR

SEE CONSERV RIGHTWING MEDIA

see tucker and bad trinity both gt replace, vax

see fauci attacks

bak 5 22 html endit

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

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

matt g

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BBB--> IRA

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-incorrectly-attacks-inflation-reduction-act-claiming-it-will-raise-taxes-individuals

https://www.mediamatters.org/:{mike-lindell/mypillow-ads-have-spiked:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:-fox-news-2022

https://www.mediamatters.org/joe-rogan-experience/right-wing-media-falsely-claim-mark-zuckerberg-admitted-conspiring-against-1

right-wing media are using clips from Joe Rogan’s recent interview with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to revive the Hunter Biden laptop conspiracy theory and to falsely claim that the FBI is conspiring against conservatives.

During an August 25interview for Spotify’sThe Joe Rogan Experiencepodcast, Zuckerberg stated that outside fact-checkers were used to validate the efficacy of the Hunter Biden laptop story in its early days, and allowed information relating to Hunter Biden, the laptop, and related content to be shared while that determination was being made. However, he said that Meta did move the laptop story further down its internal news feed to minimize interactions in the meantime:[pix/vid]

zuckerberg acknowledged during the interview that this tactic ran the risk of suppressing potentially factual information. That said, the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop is still full of holes two years later. 

When the laptop story first leaked just before the 2020 election, information on it was largely suppressed on Twitter due to suspicion surrounding the source of the information less than three weeks out from a presidential election. While some of the data on the laptop is considered legitimate two years later, much of it is still difficult to authenticate to this day due to it changing hands so many times, leaving room for outside interference and misinformation.

However, those facts have not stopped right-wing media from accusing Facebook of directly colluding with the FBI to suppress the story, even though that is not remotely close to Zuckerberg’s admission that Meta somewhat based its guidance on an FBI warning about potential election misinformation.

Accusations have gotten so bad that both Meta and the FBI released statements.Meta clarified that “nothing about the Hunter Biden laptop story is new. … The FBI shared general warnings about foreign interference - nothing specific about Hunter Biden.” The FBI’s statement read similarly, stating that the bureau only shared general threat indicators with Meta.

Neither those statements, nor the actual holes in the laptop story, have stopped right-wing media outlets from continuing to baselessly accuse the FBI of coordinating with Facebook to suppress information on Hunter Biden’s laptop, thereby winning the 2020 election for Joe Biden.

rww

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/right-wing-media-erroneously-claim-biden-facilitated-search-mar-lago

mma 8 22

a recent increase in the number of shark attacks across the U.S. this summer has led Fox News to warn the public about the supposed dangers of protecting marine ecosystems.

On the August 19 edition of Fox News’ America Reports, correspondent Gillian Turner dedicated just under three minutes of coverage to a throwaway piece fearmongering about the risk of shark attacks for beachgoers nationwide following a rise in shark encounters along the northeast of the country. Turner declared “the Summer of the Shark continues with more reports, more sightings, and attacks,” before kicking the segment over to Fox Weather reporter Katie Byrne to explain the increase in shark activity.

“People we're talking to are wondering why sharks are coming closer to the shore,” Byrne claimed, before adding, “Marine experts will say it could be because of water conservation efforts leading to thriving fish populations. So, more fish, more food for the sharks.[aug 19 vid]

while this explanation may be partly true, it would be a sign of positive change. Christopher Paparo, manager of the Marine Science Center at Stony Brook University, told CBS News in July, “If there are sharks in your area, it means it's a healthy ecosystem.” The increase in shark encounters, particularly in the area around New York City, has caused some alarm, but the actual risk sharks present to humans is incredibly small — you’re more than 40 times more likely to die from being struck by lightning than being bitten by a shark — and the benefits of conserving these species and their habitats are enormous.

Ocean conservation is also only part of the story; the Fox Weather correspondent somehow glossed over why sharks are appearing further north.

A recent study from Global Change Biology found that some sharks are venturing further north in the summertime due to rising water temperatures. While tiger sharks typically don’t migrate much further north than Virginia, according to Smithsonian Magazine, “The study found that the northern edges of the tiger shark’s preferred water temperature range — which measurements taken from thermometer-equipped shark tags suggest is between 78 and 82 degrees — has shifted about 186 miles poleward in the cold season and about 248 miles poleward in the warm season over the last 40 years.” This suggests climate change may play an important role in increasing shark encounters with humans. (Ocean conservation efforts are also important to managing the effects of global warming.)

Fox News’ climate change denial has only deepened  as the effects of a warming atmosphere and oceans have become more apparent. The recent global heat wave produced a slew of misinformation from Fox News personalities who continue to deny the dangerous reality of rising temperatures. The rise in shark attacks is just the latest story Fox News has used to distract from climate science and dismiss environmental protections, including another segment just last month blaming conservationists for summer shark attacks.

We need conservation efforts to help deal with climate change since this is not something that we can fix with just abigger boat.

interesting update /case study/ cross section ~ BBB?

coastal elite = hollywood celeb eco-hypocrite gore pvt jet

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on August 16, Joe Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act, the single biggest climate package in history, into law. With its historic investments in clean energy, the IRA is widely considered a surprise win for Democrats ahead of November’s midterm elections, despite major fossil fuel concessions in the bill that will expand drilling and ultimately harm vulnerable communities.

While some oil and gas companies went so far as to publicly celebrate the legislation, Republicans and right-wing media mobilized against it.Now, in an attempt to distract from the realization of one of President Joe Biden’s key campaign promises, right-wing media are capitalizing on a tried and true tactic — trying to discredit the climate movement, and government climate action as a whole, by vilifying certain wealthy advocates for their personal consumption habits.

On August 15, FoxNews.com published emails suggesting that the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation may have helped fund state and local lawsuits against oil and gas companies that seek to hold them accountable for climate change impacts, which occurred as a result of the industry lying about the consequences of burning fossil fuels. This should come as no surprise, given that DiCaprio has long been an advocate for climate action and a donor to climate-related causes.

In 2017, his foundation awarded $20 million in grants to 100 environmental organizations, a small fraction of which went to the Collective Action Fund for Accountability, Resilience and Adaptation. The fund “supports precedent-setting legal actions to hold major corporations accountable for costs associated with the effects on climate of their pollutants,” and was associated with the Resource Legacy Fund, an environmental conservation and grant-making 501(c)(3) organization. Fox alleges that the emails prove the money went through the fund to support Sher Edling, the law firm representing the cities and local governments suing big oil. It’s unclear how much DiCaprio donated to Resource Legacy Fund, but Fox labeled it a “dark money” group in the August 15 piece, suggesting that both DiCaprio and the law firm were unethically forcing taxpayers to cover lawsuits, which would force an industry Fox constantly champions to pay up for decades of deception. The Washington Examiner, Daily Caller, and New York Post all picked up the story.

Fox attempts to tie big oil lawsuits to liberal elitism

Fox News picked up the story, contrasting DiCaprio’s activism, which they framed as deceptive, with his carbon-intensive lifestyle. On Hannity, host Sean Hannity claimed the lawsuits further justified right-wing media’s fixation on DiCaprio: “The climate litigation and Dicaprio's arrangements specifically raises a whole host of legal and ethical concerns, but hypocrisy and bad optics are nothing new for this climate activist.”

On Outnumbered, co-host Kayleigh McEnany recalled DiCaprio’s “apocalyptic quote” from his 2016 Oscars speech on the urgency of climate action while discussing the lawsuits. "He doesn't act” as if climate change is an existential threat, McEnany said, “It has not kept him from traveling across the world on gas-guzzling private jets.”

Jesse Watters Primetime featured Brian Claypool, a lawyer and frequentFox News guest, who told correspondent Christina Coleman that it was “ironic that Leonardo DiCaprio and his foundation is funding a law firm to sue big oil companies for alleged deception when he him very self is deceiving the public on where these charitable contributions are going.”

During the August 16 episode of The Five, co-host Dana Perino even suggested DiCaprio's donation was “behind the collusion and price gouging of increasing gas prices on Americans,” because oil companies pass on the costs of hiring a legal team to consumers. (Meanwhile, these companies have seen record-breaking profits.)

In general, climate activists on the left have not been shy to criticize the use of private jets by the rich. After the release of DiCaprio’s climate change-themed movie Don’t Look Up, climate journalist Molly Taft wrote in Earther:

"Whenever DiCaprio is in the news for his climate charity work, a right-wing outlet always smugly runs a piece about his private jet use. While these critiques are in bad faith, they do point out their own inconvenient truth that DiCaprio is part of the sliver of rich people who could actually make a real carbon dent if they changed up their lifestyles or gave away more of their money … The actions DiCaprio is promoting as part of Don’t Look Up fail to properly confront power. Celebrity activism is inherently a strange, slippery slope."

Right-wing media appoints climate spokespeople and projects fossil fuel corruption onto the climate movement

It is naive to think that those elevating the story are really concerned about taxpayers, especially when extreme weather driven by climate change costs taxpayers billions every year. Similar lawsuits against oil companies have been moving through courts for years now, and many are currently pending, embroiled in disagreements over whether there is state or federal jurisdiction. According to PBS, “some recent federal court decisions show support for state jurisdiction” in similar climate suits. On August 17, a federal appeals court panel said that two of these two lawsuits belong in state courts, which is considered a win for plaintiffs. One of the plaintiffs is being represented by the law firm Sher Edling.

The same people attacking the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation have brazenly supported fossil fuel industry corruption. According to Daily Kos, Chris Horner, the person who gave FoxNews.com the emails, “is better known forgetting paid by fossil fuel companies to target climate scientists with baseless or frivolous and harassing or vexatious FOIA lawsuits demanding they release their emails in an attempt to rerun the Climategate disinfo playbook.”

Michael Krauss, a George Mason University law professor who Fox quoted extensively in the piece on DiCaprio, has previously gone after Steven Donziger, a human rights lawyer who was confined to one thousand days of house arrest after winning a $9.5 billion lawsuit against Chevron after the company deliberately contaminated the Ecuadorian Amazon rainforest and poisoned the Indigenous communities that live there. Krauss called Chevron, which spilled 16 billion gallons of toxic wastewater and 17 million gallons of crude oil into open, unlined pits, “courageous” for its “persistence” in “defending itself against Donziger,” after it launched a massive smear campaign against him. Notably, George Mason University accepted an estimated $50 million from Koch foundations between 2005 and 2015.

Leonardo DiCaprio is not and has never been an accurate representation of who is the most concerned about climate change, and it is deeply misleading to portray him as such. Nonetheless, Fox keeps attempting to appoint politicians like John Kerry and wealthy celebrities like Prince Harry, Thom Yorke, and Arnold Schwarzenegger, as the face of the climate movement, obscuring the role of the activists on the ground who have worked tirelessly to pass legislation like the IRA and the millions of people around the world harmed by climate change and environmental injustice.

According to an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll from June, Black and Hispanic Americans and women are among the groups most likely to be “strongly concerned about the impact of climate change on them personally and about how their personal choices affect the climate.”

When things don’t go your way, blame far-left infiltration or a teenager

Right-wing media’s fixation on “dark money” and celebrity activism is not new. When Republicans face scrutiny, they try to paint Democrats as beholden to radical, hypocritical elites who are out of touch with real Americans. On August 16, FoxNews.com also published an article attempting to frame Special Presidential Envoy for Climate (SPEC) John Kerry's office as radical because some officials who work there have previously worked for other large environmental organizations.

Additionally, the article quotes Myron Ebell, who calls large green groups and those affiliated with them the “climate aristocracy.” Ebell, a noted climate denier who led Trump’s EPA transition team, is the director of the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s (CEI) Center for Energy and Environment. Chris Horner was also a CEI fellow, and the organization has filed briefs and launched campaigns defending the oil companies being targeted by the lawsuits discussed above, and has also received funding from the industry.

related

Fox's attacks on John Kerry shows how specious the network’s argument against climate action really is

02/05/21

In 160 days after Russia invaded Ukraine, Fox networks mentioned the Green New Deal 564 times [ = BBB fox sez]

08/08/22

As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine unfolds, right-wing media is pinning the blame on Greta Thunberg and climate activists

03/08/22

kos ref

for the longest time, the FoxNews website seemed pretty normal on climate change, all things considered. While Fox TV centered _{hatemongers like Tucker Carlson}_ and the website reflects that with ample coverage of what was on TV, the original content produced for the website was generally indistinguishable from any other lazy political "news" that quotes who said what. The site was clearly biased in every conceivable way (choice of stories to cover, who to quote, how to frame stories, etc) but wasn’t necessarily going out of the way to spread climate disinformation.

That appears to be changing.

fox News dot com has, in the last month or so, hired two conservative propagandists in journalist disguises, Thomas Catenacci, _{formerly an energy reporter}_ at the _{Koch-sponsored Daily Caller}_, _{and Haris Alic}_, formerly of _{the}_ _{cult}_-_{founded}_ and _{$1bilion+ sponsored}_ _{Washington}_ _{Times}_ where he _{turned fossil fool press releases into "news”}_. Before that, he was at _{white supremacy-laundering Breitbart}_, and before that, the _{billionaire-backed Free Beacon}_.

Back on June 21st, Thomas Catenacci _{published his first Fox piece}_attacking Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer for calling on Biden to pause the federal gas tax, "just months after declining to pause her own state's gas tax." (Maybe something changed in the months between?)

Since then, he's published one Dem hit piece after another, real hard-hitting stuff like "_{Kamala Harris' office posts video of VP sinking basketball shot, leaves out her first 5 misses}_."

He also covered the _{climate activists slashing SUV tires in NYC}_ (_{twice}_), and somehow suckered a Sierra Club spokesperson into feeding him quotes for a piece about how environmentalists are "_{pushing extreme measures amid global energy crisis,}_" like investing in clean energy sources not controlled by Russia, which is apparently extreme.

This week, _{Catenacci helped propagate the lie}_ that protests in the Netherlands and the _{uprising in Sri Lanka}_ are driven by anti-climate policy sentiments, and yesterday he brought the Daily Caller's trick of "reporting" on a climate advocate's airline emissions to_{Fox with a piece about John Kerry's family's private jet}_ emissions (quoting, of course, a professional denier).

Meanwhile, on July 8th Haris Alic published his first Fox story, advancing the Koch network's organized anti-ESG disinformation with "news" that Sen. Steve Daines(R., Mont.) introduced a go-no-where bill to "_{block Biden from adding 'woke' requirements to US retirement plans.}_" Then he did a puff piece about Republican Gov. Youngkin's "_{speculation of 2024 presidential run}_," followed by a piece about how Nancy Pelosi went on "_{lavish Italian vacation as inflation back home hits 40-year high}_."

You know, Fair And Balanced.

This week, Alic is gassing up former ALEC chair Joe Manchin with an entirely credulous story headlined "_{Manchin denies he opposes Democratic spending bill, says he'll wait until August to decide}_." No surprise, when it comes to the fossil fuel loving Democrat, Fox News has no problem taking him at his word and including zero skeptical quotes pushing back on his claims!

How do you follow "reporting" that is shamelessly tongue-on-boot? With a story about conservative ads, of course, turning your compatriot's paid media spend into some free earned media about how (industry front) groups have paid for a "_{deluge of conservative ads [to] urge Manchin to stand up to Democrats}_."

Not exactly breaking news that Fox is backing fossil fuels over a livable climate, but the fact that its website just hired not one but two up-and-coming climate disinfo spreaders suggests Fox is only ramping up the lies as the midterm election season _{heats}_ up.

msnbc chris hayes pt out skillful realtime edit to keep truth from fox, no ads in 2 hr so no channel surf

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[twt ned ryun]

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

[twt]

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

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

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

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nICOLLE WALLACE (HOST): You know, I had this thought, Tim, that what I thought this signaled was the weakness internally of people like Dana Perino and Brett Baier, I guess Chris Wallace is over at CNN now, and the strength and the almost, you know, abandonment of fighting for anything resembling a news network by -- I guess Martha McCallum sometimes anchors news events. I actually thought that inside Fox, it was an interesting moment that -- where there might have been a path to have been a battle between people like Chris Wallace and Brett Baier and the forces like Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity. It looks -- it's not even clear that battle was waged.

TIM O'BRIEN (GUEST): Well, and you're leaving the most important actor out, Lachlan Murdoch. Rupert Murdoch's son runs that network. The family controls the company. If they wanted that network to do something other than engage in propaganda and to delude people and to serve other goals, he could put anybody he wants in that anchor seat. Tucker Carlson exists because Lachlan Murdoch wants him to exist. So, the Murdochs also have to be held accountable as owners in terms of what they're putting on the air every night. 

WALLACE: Eddie, I also came to the conclusion as this night wore on that we don't need 100 percent of Americans to do anything. And so I'm not -- I think, you know, Adam Kinzinger, a member of the Select Committee, sort of fixated on Fox and gave them a hard time for not carrying it. I don't think that's the point. I think it's about reassembling the coalition, the voting coalition in 2018, the voting coalition in 2020, and reminding them what President Obama reminded them today that nothing less than the state of our democracy is on the line.

EDDIE GLAUDE (GUEST): Right.There are -- there's a segment of the American population that's concerned about government taking away their guns, government taking away their liberty, but there's also a segment of the population who's concerned about folks trying to take away our democracy. And I think this committee has to make not just simply truth claims. It has to appeal at the visceral level, at the level of the passions around our commitment to democracy.

But I should say this to connect it to our first segment, Nicolle. Remember, there are three -- there are four elements to democracy functioning. They are, of course, the legislative branch and we've experienced a gerrymandered House, a dysfunctional Senate. There's the executive branch. We've experienced the distortions of an imperial presidency. We've experienced the politicized judiciary. But there's also the fourth estate. The fourth estate. The role of the press in creating the deliberative space so citizens can engage in the back and forth exchange.

And so we've seen the kind of corruption of the other -- the three other various portions, our institutions of democracy. With Fox News, it's not about the fragmentation of media. It's not about social platforms or social media. With Fox prop, as it were, we're seeing the corruption of an aspect of the fourth estate that contributes to the crises of American democracy. That we began with, with President Obama's remarks, and we need to understand it as such.

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https://www.mediamatters.org/january-6-insurrection/john-eastmans-latest-legal-filing-reveals-dual-role-fox-news-hosts-service

Politico reported Friday that John Eastman, the disgraced ex-law professor who formulated many of former President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, was also apparently in communication with Fox News host Mark Levin.The story gets even more interesting from there, revealing the shell game that right-wing media personalities engage in while doubling as political operatives.

A legal filing by Eastman’s attorneys reveals that, among the messages Eastman is still attempting to conceal from the House January 6 committee are 12 pieces of correspondence with an individual matching Levin’s description as “a radio talk show host, is also an attorney, former long-time President (and current board Chairman) of a public interest law firm, and also a former fellow at The Claremont Institute.” Other details, including a sloppy attempt to redact an email address, also connect to Levin, who did not respond to Politico’s requests for comment.

Eastman’s contention, however, is that he was not communicating with Mark Levin the media personality, which would forfeit attorney-client privilege on those communications. Instead, he was speaking with Mark Levin the attorney, and formulating legal strategies regarding the election.

A quick law lesson: The “dual role”

In their legal filing, Eastman’s attorneys argue that he should not have to turn over certain communications with right-wing media figures, even as other communications with those same people have been submitted. This question turns on a body of case law involving lawyers who serve in a “dual role.”

This area of law normally involves people who both are attorneys and have personal business interests, in which case a court must determine in which capacity they were acting and whether those communications or actions in question retain the legal privileges of secrecy.

The brief acknowledges that Eastman could find no previous instance in law having to do with media figures who were also attorneys, but it argues to extend this doctrine accordingly.

“Many members of the modern ‘media’ have multiple roles,” the filing argues, contending that some of Eastman’s communications with Levin in fact “involved work product communications with attorneys who also wear media ‘hats.’”

Eastman’s legal and media “hats” collide

In the case of Eastman, however, his work as an attorney in conservative causes and his public media presence have been so closely intertwined as to demonstrate that any such ethical separations quite simply do not exist in the right-wing media and political ecosystem.

Most notably, Eastman first came to Trump’s attention via an appearance on Levin’s Fox show back in May 2019, in which Eastman argued that Trump had the power as president to fire people who were investigating him. “The notion that the president can’t determine the course of an investigation is the most basic violation of separation of powers,” Eastman argued — even including an investigation involving the president himself.

The New York Times reported last year that Trump had never met Eastman before watching this episode. “Within two months, Mr. Eastman was sitting in the Oval Office for an hourlong meeting,” the Times reported.

In addition, Eastman’s new filing notes that he has had different sets of communications with an “opinion editor at Newsweek,” who is also affiliated with different conservative legal organizations. That description matches Newsweek editor Josh Hammer, who published Eastman’s disastrous op-ed in 2020 asserting that then-vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris was not a U.S. citizen and thus ineligible to run for office, even though she was in fact born in California. In this instance, clearly, the Venn diagram of the conservative legal and media worlds was simply a perfect circle.

And while Eastman was advising Trump on his theories of reversing the election results, he also advanced those ideas on former Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s show.

Levin uses his media platform to push far-right legal theories

While apparently acting under the privileges of an attorney corresponding with Eastman on their efforts to overturn the election, Levin also used his media platform with Fox News to publicly advocate for the same pseudo-legalistic theories. For example, he and Fox News contributor Ken Starr advocated the weekend after the election for state legislatures to overturn their election results and instead appoint pro-Trump slates to the Electoral College.

During an appearance on the December 10, 2020, edition of Hannity, Levin also advocated for the bizarre lawsuit in which Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton asked the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the election results in four swing states. [vid]

then on January 3, 2021, Levin said on his Fox show that it was Congress’ job to choose who won the presidential election — and he claimed members of Congress would be “shredding the Constitution” if they didn’t reject Biden’s victory.

In the nearly year and a half since the January 6 insurrection, Levin has used his radio show to chastise Congress for investigating the insurrection, spread conspiracy theories about the FBI having “instigated” the riot, defend Eastman’s idea that then-Vice President Mike Pence had the power to reject the election results, and compare riot defendants to "people in the civil rights movement."

Just this past Wednesday, Levin said on his radio show that people should not cooperate with the January 6 committee, “certainly not under these circumstances,” and he further called the entire inquiry a violation of the Constitution. So, are these pronouncements purely an aspect of his role as a media commentator, or do they also connect to the “hat” he wears as an attorney? [[aud]

the dirty secret of right-wing media: They’re all in the “dual role”

In an odd way, however, Eastman’s legal team has delivered a sort of public service through this “dual role” argument, in that it puts all the rest of Fox News and other right-wing media figures, such as Josh Hammer, into their proper perspective. Essentially, all of these conservative media personalities wear different “hats” in both their media jobs and as political operatives — and they will swap labels for whichever one serves them most conveniently in any particular moment.

The examples abound. Most notoriously, there is Sean Hannity’s true role as a Republican operative and Trump’s “shadow” chief of staff, while leveraging his media presence to assist his favored political candidates. Fox Business anchor Maria Bartiromo scripted her TV interview with Trump to aid his effort to overturn the election results, and recently used her show to spread a COVID-19 conspiracy theoryshe apparently picked up from a Republican Senate candidate. And of course, numerous Fox News personalities have a long-running track record of appearing at Republican campaign rallies and fundraisers.

The proper response to this shell game is to simply stop humoring it. Instead of allowing Fox and other right-wing media figures to decide on a moment-to-moment basis whether they are journalists or political operatives, they should be recognized as political operatives at all times, and called out for the manner in which they use media trappings for a partisan front operation.

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Law enforcement may have to intervene to stop Fox News from incited racist terrorism as its primetime hosts push white supremacist conspiracy theories, a longtime network insider warned on Saturday.

Carl Cameron spent two decades at the network reporting on politics and earning the nickname "Campaign Carl" for his extensive travel to cover political races. He was interviewed on Saturday by CNN's Jim Acosta.

Acosta played clips of Tucker Carlson pushing the same white supremacist conspiracy theory that the alleged Buffalo massacre gun said motivated in his manifesto.

"Do you think the Murdock family in charge of Fox will ever pull the plug on Tucker?" Acosta asked.

"There's a point when it becomes difficult for an executive to put up with the help," Cameron replied.

"In this particular case, Tucker has been screaming fire in a crowded movie house for years, and that cliche really comes to the matter of what is free speech, and the fact of the matter is, if you disturb starting a riot in a movie theater, cops are going to arrest you and you might end up in jail or you might end up in something worse," he explained.

"That absolutely has to stop, whether it's the antitrust bill to take down and deplatform people who lie and put out falsehoods that cause damage and violent, violent hate, there ought to be something done about it," he replied.

He said Democrats have to take action.

"Democrats have to kick it in. The president has to be more forceful and sooner or later the law enforcement and the U.S. government is going to have to stop the lying because it's causing people's deaths," Cameron said.

https://www.alternet.org/2022/05/tucker-carlson-2657368365/

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a single incident can't prove anything in terms of social science, but it can certainly serve as a vivid illustration. That was the case with the Buffalo massacre that horrified the nation and the world last weekend, which seemed almost inevitable in light of the new book "Radical American Partisanship: Mapping Violent Hostility, Its Causes, and the Consequences for Democracy" by Nathan Kalmoe and Lilliana Mason.

The Buffalo shooter's so-called manifesto, Kalmoe told me, consists of "partisan Republican media talking points," especially those of Fox News' Tucker Carlson,"along with the most radical elected Republican leaders." I wrote about the history of the "great replacement" theory last year, but "Radical American Partisanship" provides a broader perspective. "Our book talks about the long history of racial-partisan violence and how those two things are linked," Kalmoe said. "We don't know the shooter's media exposure so we can't begin to judge cause and effect, but we can say this is the kind of action you'd expect more people to take as explicit white supremacy, antisemitism and other extreme conspiratorial vilification gets mainstreamed among Republicans."

That mainstreaming creates another causal pathway by way of "norm erosion," as co-author Mason noted in a Twitter conversation with other social scientists: "More people holding radical (in our case, violent) beliefs changes the social norm-enforcement mechanism, by reducing the number of people who will engage in norm-enforcing social sanctions."

Partisan violence is part of our history, as Kalmoe explored in his 2020 book "With Ballots and Bullets: Partisanship and Violence in the American Civil War" (Salon interview here), but when Kalmoe and Mason began their collaboration in 2017 they could hardly find any public-opinion research on the subject. They didn't quite have to invent a new field from scratch, but they did have to weave together a bunch of different strands of academic research that hadn't previously been integrated into how we think about partisan politics. The surveys reported in this book, which basically cover the period of the Trump presidency, from 2017 to early 2021 will reshape our understanding of this long-neglected aspect of American politics. But they're also important right now, for tragic and obvious reasons. I interviewed Kalmoe and Mason recently by email. Their responses have been edited for clarity and length.

The massacre in Buffalo immediately made me think of your book. The shooter's stated rationale wasn't "partisan," in the normal sense, but his worldview surely was. Your book begins by asking why it was so easy for Donald Trump to stoke the insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021. Beyond the immediate answer — his own incitements — you argue that "the bases of each party are divided into nearly warring factions with radically opposed visions for America," and that this is "a battle over the future — and the past — of the United States." So what consequences flow from that?

Mason: One of themain findings of the book is that Republicans who are high in racial resentment and hostile sexism are also the most likely to vilify and dehumanize Democrats. For Democrats, it's the people low in racial resentment who are the most likely to vilify and dehumanize Republicans.These vilifying and dehumanizing attitudes (what we call "moral disengagement") are common precursors to mass violence in other countries. For Republicans in particular, the most powerful predictor of moral disengagement is an opposition to racial and gender equality or a denial that any inequality exists.

This means that one of the biggest divides (and sources of conflict) between Democrats and Republicans is a fundamental disagreement about whether the U.S. has made enough progress toward racial and gender equality, or whether we have gone too far and need to roll back some of the progress we have made. Americans aren't very good at talking about racial and gender equality in a calm and composed way. These conversations often erupt into violence throughout American history.

So what's different right now?

Mason: It's already a volatile topic. But now that we've organized the discussion along partisan lines, it allows our electoral politics to become as violent as racial conflict. The "replacement" theory that Tucker Carlson, Rep. Elise Stefanik and others are pushing is, on its face, a political one. They say that Democrats are trying to replace white voters (who tend to vote for Republicans) with "immigrants" who are "more obedient" and will automatically vote for Democrats. This "sanitized" version of replacement theory allows racial animosity to be papered over with "political" animosity — which is generally more socially acceptable.

All of this comes out of the increasing trend of "social sorting" between the parties, with the Republican Party becoming the party of white Christian rural men, and the Democratic Party representing everyone else. The party divide mirrors the divide between those at the top of the traditional social hierarchy and those who are traditionally marginalized. The Buffalo shooting, however, made clear that even if Tucker Carlson is speaking about a political conflict, the racial message still comes through quite clearly.

Partisan violence is very understudied in political science, so much so that there were very few surveys you could use. But that's not the case with social psychology. Why is there a difference, and what tools does social psychology provide that you built upon?

Kalmoe: Political violence, including violence instigated by parties, is a big research area among political scientists studying other countries, but it has rarely been a focus for scholars of American politics, partly because of our bias toward studying the present and recent past. Many assumed that what's happening "over there" can't happen here, even though it already happened here in the more distant past.

The founding research on American partisanship focused narrowly on the national electoral politics of the 1950s. There was white supremacist political violence in the South targeting civil rights efforts at the time, but that conflict divided Northern and Southern Democrats rather than dividing the two parties. Thus, the account of partisan identities and motives among ordinary people is quite tame.

Social psychology was founded at the same time, but with a heavy focus on explaining the violence of the Holocaust, which followed empowerment of the Nazi Party in Germany and fascists elsewhere. What caused ordinary people to participate in atrocities on an unfathomable scale? They focused on the harms that can emerge from us-vs.-them identity categorization, and the extent to which people are susceptible to following leaders and peers — opinion leadership and social influence.

We identify strength of social identification with a political party as one vital factor distinguishing those who are more likely to endorse radical partisan views, and we test the role of messages for top party leaders in changing the views of their followers and opponents.

You focus on two major concepts: partisan moral disengagement and partisan violence. How are these defined as concepts? How are they related, and how do you measure them?

Kalmoe: Partisan moral disengagement builds on psychological research by Albert Bandura and others showing that people who hurt others tend to hold views that rationalize that harm. For example, we measure views that political opponents are a national threat, that they are evil and that they lack the traits to be fully human. We expected that people who endorse some of all of these views would be more likely to endorse physically harming opponents, and that is what we found in our surveys.

We measured support for partisan violence with more than two dozen different questions, ranging in specificity of the context and severity of harm. Our four most common questions asked about approval of threats against opposing leaders and voters. One question on whether violence by one's own party is justified, and there was a final question on support for violence if the opposing party wins the next presidential election. We also asked specific questions about assassinating opponents, about support for the January 2021 Capitol insurrection, and reactions to the shootings of Rep. Gabby Giffords (a Democrat) and Rep. Steve Scalise (a Republican), for example.

One important thing we found is that people have lots of different things in mind for the term "violence." While psychologists define it as resulting in severe maiming or death, many of the people who endorse partisan violence in our surveys told us in follow-up questions that they had lesser harms in mind, like fistfights, for example. So levels of support for "violence" include a broad range of behaviors, though they're all contentious and worrisome in their own ways.

Historically, you argue, "Americans seem to support political violence in some historical cases and under certain conditions." When do they support it, and when don't they? And what falls in between?

Kalmoe: One of the most important takeaways from our research is that there is no single level of support for political violence to find. Support depends entirely on the details. For example, we found modern support for the political violence of the American Revolution at 80% among partisans, which is about four times higher than our standard measures and orders of magnitude above some of our most severe and contextually specific questions.

We know from historical episodes of political violence in the past that millions of ordinary Americans can be organized into violent conflict, as during the Revolution and the Civil War, along with the organized racial-partisan violence during Reconstruction and Jim Crow.

We argue that the most important factors that shift public support for political violence, and participation in that violence, are the factors identified by social psychologists: influence from trusted leaders and from peer social networks. Both serve to set the norms for attitudes and behaviors regarding violence, and when the group says it's OK, people think and act accordingly. Of course, individual attributes like "trait aggression" still influence who is especially inclined to be an early adopter of those views and behaviors.

How is support for violence calibrated? In the extreme, some people involved in the Jan. 6 insurrection were ready or even eager for civil war. But how many people were willing to go that far?

Kalmoe: Our research speaks most to public attitudes about political violence, which certainly serves as a risk factor for the few who engage in violent acts. We began this project, however, thinking about the broader social environment for contentious partisanship. The prevalence of violent views could serve as a vital accelerant or brake on violent acts when neighbors and friends learn that someone in their social circle is planning violence. Their own views about violence could serve to encourage or discourage actions by others, and it will affect how they respond politically to violent political attacks in general. Our work doesn't directly analyze participation in political violence. That vital question is being answered by others.

How did the measures of partisan moral disengagement and partisan violence change over time? What did those changes reflect or reveal?

Kalmoe: We found steadily rising levels of support for partisan violence from our first survey in 2017 through our last reported in the book, in February 2021. Our vilifying questions for partisan moral disengagement also steadily rose over that time. Support for threats against leaders and citizens were a little more variable, rising at times of greatest contention and then dropping afterward. Those results tell us that, even within our current contentious period, those radical views are becoming more prevalent.

The trends in our survey work generally comport with rising levels of threats against leaders. For example, the Los Angeles Times cataloged steadily rising threats against Congress from 2016, when they numbered just under 1,000, to 2021, when they nearly reached 10,0000 — an order of magnitude more in just four years.

What's the role of "trait aggression," which you mentioned earlier? What role does it play in predicting partisan violence, and how does it interact with partisan moral disengagement?

Kalmoe: Trait aggression is an individual tendency to behave aggressively in everyday interactions with other people, including verbal and physical forms. We found that aggressive tendencies translate into greater support for partisan violence. In fact, trait aggression is the strongest predictor of violent partisan views among the many factors we tested.

But the political component of those views is important too. We found the strongest relationships between trait aggression and support for partisan violence among people who vilified partisan opponents, and likewise, we found that partisan moral disengagement predicted violent partisan views most among people who were interpersonally aggressive.

We can see a similar dynamic in violent political behavior. Those perpetrators almost always seem to have a history of aggressive criminal behavior and often a history of perpetrating domestic violence too.

You write that "the same things that predict conventional political actions like voting can also predict and explain aggressive behavior and violence." How so?

Kalmoe: Strength of social identification with the political party is one of the most important motivating forces for partisan action through voting, volunteering, donating and other nonviolent participatory acts. Our work shows that that same identity-based motivation also leads some partisans to endorse violence against their partisan opponents.

You write that one of your survey results "means [there are] roughly 20 million [Americans] who endorse assassinating U.S. leaders." That would surely be a shocking result to most people. What was the question that produced this result, and why is it so at odds with "common sense" political discourse?

Kalmoe: In one question, we asked "How much do you feel it is justified for [your own party] to kill opposing political leaders to advance their political goals these days?" Response options ranged from "not at all" to "a great deal." Nearly 90% of respondents chose "not at all," but 11% said assassination was at least "a little" justified.

Many people tend to censor their most extreme views in public for fear of social and legal sanctions, so the extreme rhetoric we hear often lacks that violent specificity. But we've also heard quite a lot of explicitly violent rhetoric stated publicly in recent years. Pundits and researchers have been too quick to dismiss those as merely expressive and fundamentally unserious. Of course, there are ranges of seriousness across people, but it is a mistake to dismiss these expressions as just blowing off steam. Given the rise in political violence and threats, alongside violent rhetoric and violent attitudes, some of the folks who set the conventional wisdom are beginning to wrestle with the degree and prevalence of that extreme hostility.

You report that "Political victimization is prevalent in the U.S.," ranging from insults to physical attacks. While far fewer people report aggression, you wrote that even the small percentages you found "potentially represent the behaviors of hundreds of thousands — even millions — of Americans engaged in extreme political behavior that goes unnoticed in news and scholarship."

Kalmoe: In addition to asking about extremely hostile and violent attitudes, we asked people to report their own aggressive political behavior, and whether they have been on the receiving end of aggression over politics. Nearly half of our respondents said they had been insulted, one in six said they'd been threatened, and 3% said they had been physically assaulted over politics. The numbers were substantially higher among those who said they regularly talk about politics, as you'd expect.

The portion admitting they themselves had behaved aggressively over politics was much lower: about one-quarter for insults, and only 1% for threats and physical altercations.

Both sets of results are novel, as far as we know. Few if any researchers are asking questions like these, even among those now asking about political violence. One reason that people might be so surprised by political violence like the 2021 Capitol attack is that no one has been systematically documenting the prevalence of milder aggressive behaviors that apparently are very common. And of course the people who engage in low-level political aggression are the likeliest to participate in more extreme actions.

After the 2020 election, you found that "about a fifth of American partisans were ready for a full-blown violent rebellion against the newly elected president and his government." What are the implications of that?

Kalmoe: Clearly, several thousand Americans went beyond support for violently overthrowing the newly-elected government to acting on that view in the 2021 Capitol attack. That episode, and the thousands of death threats targeting election administrators and others for upholding their civic duties after the 2020 election, are the clearest implications.

Most people who support political violence won't act on it. Of course, that's true in wars too. A majority of Americans initially supported the Iraq war, for example, even though a tiny fraction actually did the fighting. But their support for violence has important effects on the actions of those few, and helps determine whether the numbers of combatants will grow in spirals of provocation.

What did you find about the potential impact of anti-violence messages? How did this compare with what Donald Trump actually did?

Mason: A piece of good news from the book is that leaders seem to have a powerful ability to pacify violent attitudes among partisans. When we had survey respondents read a message from Biden or Trump denouncing political violence, we found that strong partisans responded by becoming less supportive of violence. We saw this effect even after reading a single sentence from a leader. It follows that sustained anti-violence rhetoric from leaders should be even more powerful. Importantly, Trump did the opposite in the lead-up to the Jan. 6 insurrection. He very likely could have prevented the violence that occurred if he had broadly discouraged it in the first place. But instead Trump stoked violent feelings and behaviors.

In our surveys, we observe similar levels of support for violence among Democrats and Republicans. But observed levels of real violence in the American public are almost entirely from right-wing actors. This is likely due to the difference in rhetoric between Democratic and Republican leaders. Condemning violence is extremely important, even if the original violent message is purported to be "only a joke."

What did your research show about the relative influence of Fox News and MSNBC?

Mason: Americans who consumed partisan media (Fox News and MSNBC) were significantly more radical in their partisan views than those who watched CNN. For Fox News in particular, their viewers were both more morally disengaged from Democrats and more willing to endorse sending threats to Democrats. Those who watched MSNBC were not more morally disengaged than those who watched CNN, but they were more likely to endorse sending threats to Republicans. Overall, Fox News viewers seem to be significantly more likely to dehumanize and vilify Democrats than consumers of any other news source.

The recent wave of attacks on Democrats who support LGBTQ+ rights as "groomers" — by implication, pedophiles — seems like another worrying example of dehumanization. Aren't media elites and politicians who take up such language grooming their followers for violence?

Kalmoe: The "groomer" and "pedo" conspiracy rhetoric accomplishes two things at once for Republicans. It ties into long-standing vilifying tropes of LGBTQ+ people that appeal to the most radical religious base, but it also serves a broader purpose of vilifying Democrats and liberals generally. It's hard to imagine anything more vile than sexually abusing children, so the attempt to invent that political reputation for their opponents is the horrifying logical conclusion of increasing vilification. By going to those vilifying extremes, they make political violence against all those groups more likely because it's easier for people to rationalize violence against people whose evil behaviors define them.

What did you find in terms of prospects for the future? How should we understand the stakes and the risks we face?

Mason: We're in a pivotal moment as a country. Every time we make progress on racial equality and civil rights, we tend to see a backlash. The current political clash is about whether we can continue to improve the country's progress toward a fully multiracial democracy, or whether we go back to a time when white Christian men had full control over society. It's an intense conversation, but also it's one that we need to have. When we can't talk about racism and sexism, that protects racism and sexism. There is no way to have this conversation about the country's past and future in a way that is without conflict, but there is also no guarantee that equality will always win and prejudice will always lose. So it's an intense moment, but it's also a very important one.

Any final thoughts you'd like to leave us with?

Kalmoe: We make very clear in the book that while levels of radical partisanship are sometimes similar between Democrats and Republicans, the roots of that radicalism are not morally equivalent. We also acknowledge that political violence is sometimes a last resort, and that viewing opponents as a threat may be an objective evaluation and not a view to be condemned.

We should also note that while our research focuses on partisan violence, the biggest threats to democracy in the U.S. are from legal channels, not civilians acting out violently — although those sometimes reinforce each other. Legislatures, governors, courts, administrators and presidents all have far more influence over whether the U.S. moves toward or away from democracy than any mob, militia, terror cell or assassin.

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sixteen months into Joe Biden’s presidency, far-right pundit and conspiracy theorist Dinesh D’Souza continues to shamelessly promote theBig Lieand falsely claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from former President Donald Trump — a claim that the 61-year-old D’Souza makes in his new documentary “2000 Mules.” Journalist Anthony L. Fisher critiques “2000 Mules” in a scathing op-ed published by the Daily Beast on May 19, arguing that D’Souza’s documentary is so sloppy and badly done that even Fox News and Newsmax have ignored it.

“The new documentary ‘2000 Mules,’ a Dinesh D’Souza joint,is barely more credible than your average rando conspiracy theory video on YouTube, but its production values attach to it a superficial seriousness,” Fisher explains. “The film’s intended audience will see a rational ‘just asking questions’ kinda guy, D’Souza, talking with some ideological allies — like Charlie Kirk, Dennis Prager, Sebastian Gorka and Larry Elder — who are merely concerned about voter integrity in the America they love.”

Fisher continues, “But the bulk of the film consists of D’Souza’s highly dramatized explainer sessions with a couple of technological ‘experts,’ also credited as executive producers, whose claims that they’ve used geotracking data to uncover thousands of vote-harvesting mules fall apart under the barest of scrutiny. Surveillance footage of people taking selfies after dropping their votes in dropboxes is presented as ‘A-ha!’ evidence — while ignoring the fact that people taking voter selfies was a mundanely common thing to do in 2020, and for quite a few years prior.”

According to Fisher, “2000 Mules” suffers from “relentless repetition of innuendo” and “almost no verifiable facts.”D’Souza, Fisher notes, complains about Republicans who want to move on from the 2020 election and slams them as cowards.

“D’Souza’s whining extends beyond the film itself, and into coverage of the film,” Fisher observes. “Or in the case of Fox News and Newsmax, the lack of coverage around ‘2000 Mules’ — likely because both networks have already been sued for pushing potentially slanderous Big Lie accusations against voting technology companies. D’Souza’s white knight, Donald Trump, came to the film’s defense when he slammed Fox for ignoring ‘the greatest & most impactful documentary of our time.’But even a Trump-supporting right-wing firebreather like Ben Shapiro can’t bring himself to say D’Souza made a persuasive case with ‘2000 Mules,’ because the film’s central thesis simply isn’t backed by any supporting evidence— much less an overwhelming amount of verifiable, unimpeachable data.”

Someone who doesn’t already buy into the Big Lie, Fisher stresses, won’t change their mind because of “2000 Mules.”

“The film isn’t meant to persuade anyone, it’s meant to reinforce the already passionate certainty in people who believe in something that simply does not exist,” Fisher writes. “It is a vile piece of agitprop, pushing a falsehood that could very well tear our country apart. It’s also a very stupid movie, packaged as smart, fearless muckraking. In a sense, it’s a 90-minute safe space for MAGA snowflakes who can’t accept the fact that their hero is a loser.”

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Steve Schmidt calls for 'venomous and dangerous' Rupert Murdoch to be stripped of US citizenship

Rupert Murdoch receiving the 2015 Global Leadership Award, Wikimedia Commons

David Badash and The New Civil Rights Movement May 18, 2022

Lincoln Project co-founder and former GOP strategist Steve Schmidt wants the United States to strip Rupert Murdoch of his U.S. citizenship, calling the 91-year-old Australian-born media titan “the most venomous and dangerous foreigner to ever arrive on American soil.”

Murdoch is the man behind News Corp, a massive multi-national conglomerate that in the U.S. owns Fox News, The New York Post, the Wall Street Journal, book publisher HarperCollins, and even realtor.com.

But it is Fox News that Schmidt is focused on.

“The January 6 Committee will prove a massive conspiracy,” Schmidt tweeted Tuesday night. “That conspiracy will likely involve @foxnews hosts and personalities. @rupertmurdoch is responsible for what happens on @foxnews, which has long claimed in Federal Court that is not news but entertainment.”

Taking a dig at Murdoch and the birther movement which Fox News amplified, Schmidt says Murdoch “is not a Birthright Citizen like @BarackObama. He is a Naturalized Citizen. Though it happens rarely, there is a Denaturalization process that can lead to revocation of US Citizenship and removal from the country.”

Murdoch became a U.S. citizen in 1985 so he could own American television stations.

“There are conditions and requirements for Denaturalization,” Schmidt continues. “This should be studied closely by Attorneys. I believe a strong case could be made that @rupertmurdoch, the most venomous and dangerous foreigner to ever arrive on American soil meets it easily.”

Schmidt in his final tweet tags former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, who over the past few years has accused Murdoch and his media properties of undermining democracy in the U.S. and in Australia.

Last November Schmidt said Murdoch “has been a pancreatic cancer on democracy, pluralism and decency.”

And in February Schmidt suggested Fox News was an enemy of the U.S., calling it “an American Fifth Column that has declared war on American patriotism.”

https://www.mediamatters.org/cable-news/cable-news-discussions-record-high-gas-prices-may-10-failed-hold-fossil-fuel-industr

amid the ongoing war in Ukraine and the world’s response to Russian aggression, energy prices have been understandably top-of-mind for both news media and the general public. Gas prices reached another record high on May 10, setting off a new round of cable news coverage that coincided with President Joe Biden’s speech on the same day about his administration’s attempts to arrest inflation.

Although cable news shows covering these stories performed an adequate job of explaining how the price consumers pay at the pump is determined by a range of different factors in a globalized market, they also allowed the fossil fuel industry to escape accountability for its role in raising prices, despite the fact that oil companies are intentionally restraining oil production in order to return record profits for shareholders.

Cable news rarely connected record fossil fuel industry profits to record gas prices

CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC aired a combined 48 segments about record gas prices on May 10, with CNN (23) and Fox (19) airing the majority. Although MSNBC had the fewest segments (6), anchorKaty Tur was the only person across all 48 cable news segments who connected record gas costs with record fossil fuel industry profits.

On the May 10 episode of Katy Tur Reports, she asked Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm about “price gouging” by the fossil fuel industry, saying: “The president said he'll focus on oil companies taking advantage of the situation. The CEO of a major oil company said they saw record prices. Do you see price gouging as part of the problem here?"

[vid ]

this basic context should be part of the broader cable news coverage of gas prices.

Other cable news segments on May 10 took pains to emphasize how the war in Ukraine, European Union sanctions on Russian oil, demand rebound since 2021, and yearly summer trends have contributed to the steep rise in gas prices and could lead to future, record increases.

However, cable news analysis that day almost entirely left out a key driver of high energy prices: the fossil fuel industry.

Although the specific role the industry played in driving the most recent record gas prices is still being puzzled out by economists, Big Oil has been credibly accused by environmental activists of profiteering from economic instability caused by the war in Ukraine. In fact, multiple outlets published stories about record oil company profits just a few days ahead of the breaking news about record gas prices on May 10, including this from Fortune:

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, subsequent sanctions on Russia and the exit of Western oil and gas companies from the country sent prices soaring, and fossil fuel companies are reaping the rewards.

British petroleum company Shell announced their quarterly profits on Thursday, posting a record $9.1 billion in earnings. That’s compared to $6.4 billion in the fourth quarter of 2021.

Although Shell posted the highest profits, other major oil companies also announced major gains.

BP announced it hit $6.2 billion in first quarter earnings, up from the $4.1 billion reported last quarter. French oil major TotalEnergies also reported a $9 billion profit in the first quarter, up 32% from the last quarter of 2021. U.S.-based Chevron reported $6.3 billion in earnings, up from $5.1 billion last quarter.

A Time magazine article published May 11 was even more stark in describing how oil companies plan to use their windfall profits to line their own pockets, instead of making investments to ease the pain at the pump:

For the most part, major oil companies aren’t going to pour these billions of dollars into climate-mitigation investments like carbon capture technologies. Nor have they signaled any immediate intention to bolster oil production, despite calls from heads of state to do so. Their inaction has spurred U.S. and European countries, which are under pressure to keep fuel affordable, to release oil reserves and replace Russian crude oil and liquid natural gas from other sources. Despite those government efforts, oil prices have stayed above $100 per barrel, sustaining an influx of money to fossil fuel companies that are passing it on to stockholders and investors in the form of increased dividends and share buyback initiatives that drive up companies’ share values.

One analysis from the Wall Street Journal found that the nine largest U.S. oil producers spent 54% more in share repurchases and dividends in the first quarter than they invested in new oil developments. Similarly, a recent report covering the 20 largest U.S. oil companies published by the environmentalist organization Friends Of The Earth and consumer watchdog organizations Public Citizen and BailoutWatch, tallied $56 billion in new share buyback authorizations in the roughly seven months since last October, compared with $11 billion announced in the nine months before that.

Not only is the fossil fuel industry dragging its feet on actions that could potentially alleviate high energy costs for American consumers, but it also continues to profit from the global instability caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In fact, the industry has a long and sordid history of exacerbating geopolitical conflicts for its own profit.

Journalistic accountability demands that Big Oil’s role in this crisis is included in every segment about rising gas prices or increased energy costs – particularly as right-wing media outlets such as Fox News continue running cover for the oil industry while placing blame for high gas prices almost solely on the Biden administration.

Fox is dedicated to carrying the fossil fuel industry’s water, CNN and MSNBC must do better

Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, Fox News has absolved Big Oil of any responsibility for energy price increases while desperately trying to blame the Biden administration.This included Fox figures mentioning the canceled Keystone pipeline approximately 141 times in segments about the Ukraine crisis from February 22-28, and mentioning “energy independence” or “energy security” – industry talking points to promote more domestic drilling for oil and gas – at least 632 times from February 24 through April 24.  

In reality, the factors determining what consumers pay for gas prices are very complicated, and generally, presidents and their related policies have little effect on the price at the pump and little influence over the complex economics of energy markets, absent leading a rapid transition to a clean energy economy. But this hasn’t stopped Fox News from using the situation in Ukraine to bash the Biden administration’s energy policy.

After Biden’s March 8 announcement that the United States was banning Russian fossil fuel imports, Fox News hosts and guests blamed him for instituting the same policy that they had previously demanded– all while praising oil and gas companies as “the greatest industry around the world,” deflecting Biden’s criticism of them as “unpatriotic,” and arguing they are “basically our national defense.”

Meanwhile CNN and MSNBC’s recent coverage has largely failed to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable for exploiting global conflicts and ramping up fuel prices amid their own record profits.

Their last opportunity came during the April 6 House Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee hearing on the fossil industry’s role in driving record high gas prices. Fox News programs devoted 49 minutes of coverage to the hearing, much of which defended Big Oil and blamed the Biden administration, while CNN and MSNBC covered the hearings for only 10 minutes and 4 minutes, respectively. This disparity in coverage effectively allowed Fox to again shape the narrative around climate and energy on cable news. Instead of CNN and MSNBC viewers learning about the myriad factors driving gas prices, including Big Oil profiteering, they were told little, if anything, about the role the fossil fuel industry plays in driving the price at the pump.

Cable news shows must begin holding the fossil fuel industry accountable

Despite the fossil fuel industry’s billion-dollar campaign to erode the public consensus on climate change and its exploitation of the current Russian invasion of Ukraine to agitate for deepened reliance on its products, public polling shows that more than two-thirds of U.S. adults support “developing alternative energy, including wind and solar, over increasing production of fossil fuels like oil, coal and natural gas.” In addition, poll after poll finds that the majority of Americans want the government to take climate action – but they rarely have the opportunity to learn from TV news about the fossil fuel industry’s role in opposing urgently needed climate and environmental policies.

Reporting on consumers facing record-high prices at the gas pump while oil companies enjoy record-high profits presents just one such opportunity for cable news outlets to inform their audiences about these connections and their links to the climate crisis.

Fox News is a key cog in the fossil fuel industry’s disinformation network, so the conservative network will never cover this reality. But CNN and MSNBC can no longer afford to miss key opportunities to bring accountability to the fossil fuel industry, especially as the public demands answers and the window for meaningful climate action rapidly closes.

Methodology

Media Matters searched transcripts in the SnapStream video database for all original programming on CNN, Fox News Channel, and MSNBC for any of the terms “gas,” “fuel,” “pump,” “diesel,” “record,” “price,” “soar,” or “high” on May 10, 2022.

We counted segments, which we defined as instances when record gas prices were the stated topic of discussion or when we found significant discussion that also included discussion of record gas prices. We defined significant discussion as two or more speakers in a multi-topic segment discussing record gas prices with one another. We also counted headline reports, which we defined as instances when the anchor or host read news highlights covering a range of topics. Within those segments, we then determined whether any speaker also mentioned record fossil fuel industry profits.

We did not include teasers for segments about record gas prices coming up later in the broadcast or passing mentions, which we defined as instances when a single speaker spoke without another engaging with the comment.

https://www.mediamatters.org/january-6-insurrection/newly-released-text-messages-reveal-just-how-many-people-trump-white-house

on Friday, CNN reported on a newly unearthed set of text messages between former Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and multiple Fox News hosts, exchanged during the two-and-a-half months between Election Day 2020 and President Joe Biden’s inauguration in January 2021. The texts further reveal the extent to which Fox was integral to Trump’s plot to illegally hold onto power after losing the election. The texts also prove yet again that Fox operates day-to-day as a propaganda arm for the Republican Party, not as a news organization.

Supposed “news” side anchor Maria Bartiromo gave Trump her questions and messaging guidance in advance of an interview

CNN reported that Fox Business anchor Maria Bartiromo gave Meadows the questions in advance of her interview with President Donald Trump on the November 29, 2020, edition of her weekend show on Fox News, Sunday Morning Futures.The texts reveal that Bartiromo also provided Trump with explicit messaging guidance and instructions on how to respond to her softball questions, which she intended to help him better make his case that the election outcome was illegitimate. The segment was Trump’s first TV interview since the election, and it aired roughly three weeks after all the major media outlets, including Fox News, had projected Biden as the winner.

Bartiromo texted Meadows that morning, hours before the interview with Trump, to claim that “the public wants to know he will fight this,” and that people “want to hear a path to victory” and that “he's in control.” (The entire premise of Bartiromo’s line of questioning was false, because a majority of “the public” had just voted for Biden.)

She then laid out the first question she would ask: “1Q You've said MANY TIMES THIS ELECTION IS RIGGED... And the facts are on your side. Let's start there. What are the facts? Characterize what took place here. Then I will drill down on the fraud including the statistical impossibilities of Biden magic (federalist).” (Based on Bartiromo’s word choice, it is possible that she was referring to a piece from a week earlier in the right-wing site The Federalist, titled “5 More Ways Joe Biden Magically Outperformed Election Norms.”)

Surely enough, the interview began exactly with that question: “Mr. President, you have said many times that this election was rigged, that there was much fraud, and the facts are on your side. Let's start there. Please go through the facts, characterize what took place."

throughout the rest of the interview, Bartiromo provided Trump with a platform to air a litany of lies about the election results, going on for 45 minutes, including his outlandish claims about voting machines being used to change the results. Dominion Voting Systems is currently suing Fox News for $1.6 billion for the network’s role in Trump’s defamation campaign against the voting machine company. Another voting technology firm, Smartmatic, is suing Fox News for $2.7 billion and has also named Bartiromo as a defendant for her role in promoting conspiracy theories that the company played a role in altering the election result.

Separately, ABC News’ chief Washington correspondent, Jonathan Karl, reported last year that Bartiromo had called then-Attorney General Bill Barr in mid-November 2020, complaining to him that the Justice Department had not taken action against supposed voter fraud. “She called me up and she was screaming,” Barr told Karl. “I yelled back at her. She’s lost it.” Fox News denied the reports of Bartiromo’s unprofessional conduct — though this wasn’t exactly convincing, because Bartiromo had publicly stated her hopes for Barr to intervene and help reverse the election results.

Sean Hannity was “at war with” Chris Wallace and Fox’s supposed news side

Another Fox News host who is heavily implicated in the latest texts is Sean Hannity, who was already known to have functioned as Trump’s “shadow” chief of staff and as a constant sounding board for the disgraced former president. Previously released texts had shown that Hannity tried to work on damage control after the failed coup attempt on January 6, and that he had urged the White House to have Trump call off his supporters from attacking the Capitol. (In public, Hannity claimed the attackers were left-wing infiltrators.) Other texts show that Hannity took instructions from Meadows on coordinating get-out-the-vote messaging on Election Day in 2020. The latest revelations demonstrate the extent of Hannity’s efforts to keep Fox News from straying away from the administration’s illegal efforts to cling to power.

On December 6, 2020, Meadows sent Hannity a link to an article in The Hill, highlighting a segment from that morning’s edition of Fox News Sunday in which the show’s then-host Chris Wallace pointedly interrupted Trump’s former secretary of Health and Human Services, Alex Azar, after Azar had referred to Joe Biden as “Vice President Biden.”

“He's the president-elect, sir,” Wallace replied, repeating that point again in their conversation.

In texts to Hannity, Meadows castigated Wallace and Fox, writing, “Doing this to try and get ratings will not work in the long run and I am doubtful it is even a short term winning strategy.”

“I've been at war with them all week,” Hannity replied.

Meadows later asked on December 11, 2020, for Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott’s direct phone number — noting that he wished to avoid making a call to the network’s main switchboard. Hannity asked the next day whether Meadows had gotten through to Fox executives, again declaring, “I’ve been at war with them.” (As it turned out, Meadows had not yet called Scott, as he had been too busy working on the Trump administration’s lame-duck pardons.)

Keep in mind that the major news networks had all projected Biden as the winner a month before, on November 7 — and yes, that included Fox. The network, however, undermined its own decision desk’s projections by attempting to subvert the election results nearly 600 times in just the two weeks after the election call.

To the degree that tension existed between the opinion and alleged “straight news” sides at Fox, that conflict has since been resolved by Chris Wallace’s decision a year later to quit the network. Wallace said recently that he had been fine with opinion content on the channel, but he had reached his limit. “When people start to question the truth — Who won the 2020 election? Was Jan. 6 an insurrection? — I found that unsustainable.”

Hannity, of course, is still at Fox, where he is launching smear campaigns, parroting Kremlin spokespeople, and helping Trump to continue pushing the Big Lie.

Sean Hannity wrote one cheesy Trump campaign ad — and he may have written yet another one that never aired

This latest batch of text messages also reveals that Hannity lied last year about the extent of his connections to the Trump campaign — seemingly confirming a story that Hannity had previously described as being “full of shit.”

Last year, Wall Street Journal senior White House reporter Mike Bender published a book about the 2020 election and its aftermath, titled Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost. The book revealed that Hannity had actually written a Trump campaign ad, which insiders even referred to as “the Hannity ad” and “the one Hannity wrote.” The specific ad in question was an attack spot that seemed to deploy every anti-Biden talking point at once, referring to him as a “47-year swamp creature” who had “accomplished nothing,” and tying him to the so-called “radical, socialist Green New Deal.” Trump’s campaign staff reportedly ridiculed it.

“Inside the campaign, the spot was mocked mercilessly, mostly because of the dramatic, over-the-top language and a message that seemed to value quantity over quality,” Bender wrote. The campaign came up with a solution to the problem, by running the ad only during Hannity’s own show on Fox News: “If Trump and Hannity watched the spot on television – and were satisfied enough to stop asking about the commercial – that seemed to be the best result of the ad. The cost of that investment: $1.5m.”

Hannity, however, denied the story in very strong terms. “The world knows that Sean Hannity supports Donald Trump,” he told Bender. “But my involvement specifically in the campaign — no. I was not involved that much. Anybody who said that is full of shit.”

On December 8, 2020, however, as Hannity and Meadows commiserated via text, Hannity bemoaned that the campaign had not done more on the topic of election fraud during the campaign — including regarding an ad he had written for them.

“I was screaming about no ads from Labor Day on,” he wrote. “I made my own they never ran it. I'm not pointing fingers. I'm frustrated.” It is possible here that Hannity may have been referring to yet another campaign ad that he wrote, but which still went unaired.

Hannity’s vulgar denial to Bender of the earlier campaign ad not only reveals that he is a liar, but there’s more. In this instance, he also lied to a news reporter at The Wall Street Journal, the most prominent of the Murdoch media empire’s journalistic front operations and a perpetual doormat for the opinion side. The fact that he would lie to one of his colleagues from another Murdoch publication clearly demonstrates the sense of leverage Hannity has over anyone who thinks they really can report news while working at a Murdoch outlet.

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

05/11/21 12:24 PM EDT

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

Timeline-Tucker-Carlson-white-supremacy.png

Tucker Carlson's descent into white supremacy: A timeline

10/28/18 12:00 PM EDT

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

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

Timeline: Tucker Carlson’s unhinged COVID-19 coverage

12/27/20 11:08 AM EST

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

There are no rules for Sean Hannity at Fox News

04/17/18 11:28 AM EDT

Presidential adviser reportedly scripted campaign ad

06/01/21 10:44 AM EDT

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

01/21/20 4:08 PM EST

an 422 no lmx twet

the New York Times just discovered that Fox News has a Russia problem

Fox News' Tucker Carlson speaking with attendees at the 2020 Student Action Summit hosted by Turning Point USA at the Palm Beach County Convention Center in West Palm Beach, Florida, Gage Skidmore]

Dartagnan and Daily Kos April 17, 2022

You have to credit the Gray Lady: this is really quite the scoop. And I hesitate even to point it out, lest my mild criticism that follows be misinterpreted. So let me be clear, I’m all for American media outlets policing each other. I think it’s perfectly OK for one media outlet to call out another for bias or dissimulation. That’s what makes journalism such an integral part of our democracy, so much that its inherent value is literally enshrined in the Constitution. “Keeping them honest” should be the watchword governing all journalism.

That being said, you may wish to remain seated, because this is guaranteed to make you faint with shock. Hold onto your hats — here it comes.

As reported by the New York Times’ Stuart A. Thompson:

The narratives advanced by the Kremlin and by parts of conservative American media have converged in recent months, reinforcing and feeding each other. Along the way, Russian media has increasingly seized on Fox News’s prime-time segments, its opinion pieces and even the network’s active online comments section — all of which often find fault with the Biden administration — to paint a critical portrait of the United States and depict America’s foreign policy as a threat to Russia’s interests.

When I read that I was stone-cold flummoxed. Who could have possibly imagined? Oh, wait!

And it seems that Tucker Carlson is a Kremlin favorite. Can you believe that? They even cite examples!

“The U.S. baselessly accused Russia of spreading disinformation about biolabs in Ukraine because they later actually confirmed their existence, TV presenter Tucker Carlson told Fox News,” Radio Sputnik wrote in an article summarizing Mr. Tucker’s lengthy segment for a Russian audience.

But there’s more!

Mentions of Fox News in Russian-language media grew 217 percent during the first quarter of this year compared with the final quarter of last year, as news coverage of Ukraine increased, according to an analysis by Zignal Labs, a media tracking company that reviewed social media posts, broadcast media and online websites. CNN, which has about three times the global viewership of Fox News, according to the tracking company Similarweb, was mentioned more often but grew less, by 71 percent.

And the Times really put their nose to the grindstone to break this, having “reviewed nearly 500 Russian-language articles mentioning Fox News between July and late March, sourced from the two largest state news agencies in the country — RIA Novosti and TASS — along with dozens of articles from other Russian-language media.” Talk about due diligence!

The Times has even broken it down by category! They’ve determined that Russia now highlights Fox News stories that tend to “Blame NATO expansion,” “Buttress Conspiracy Theories” (can you imagine???) “Question the West’s goals,” and — get this — “Criticize President Biden.”

I am shocked, shocked, I tell you.

In all seriousness, we didn’t have to wait nearly two months into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to be told they were making use of Fox News for propaganda purposes. That fact has been a staple in the media for well over a month, if not longer.More importantly, as this article, one of literally dozens from Media Matters, gamely points out, the relationship between Fox and Vladimir Putin has long been a two-way street, going back well into the Trump administration, with Fox echoing Putin’s policy on a fairly repeated basis.

But you won’t find a single word about that in the Times article. No, it’s as if Russia just suddenly discovered it had its own propaganda outlet all along.

And probably even more importantly, Mr. Thompson, for all his analytical skill, doesn’t devote a single sentence to asking why that is. Why did Fox News spend the last five years amplifying Putin talking points?

Exploring that question would be serious journalism. Exploring the uncomfortable question of why the Times ignored something this important, and obvious, for so long, letting relatively small, niche outlets like Media Matters do all the heavy lifting, would be even more serious journalism.

But simply reporting the data without context -- which is all the Times article really does — is not.

https://www.mediamatters.org/google/march-tucker-carlson-clips-made-nearly-half-most-viewed-videos-foxs-youtube-channel

https://www.mediamatters.org/climate-deniers/fox-news-dominated-coverage-congressional-hearing-big-oil-and-gas-prices

no lnx vid grf

Fox News dominated coverage of congressional hearing on Big Oil and gas prices

Fox’s Big Oil hearing coverage was more than triple CNN’s and MSNBC’s coverage combined

CLIMATE & ENERGY

WRITTEN BY ALLISON FISHER

PUBLISHED 04/08/22

Since last year, Fox News has been trying to pin the blame of rising fuel costs on President Joe Biden through its relentless coverage. The April 6 congressional hearing — by the House Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee — on the oil industry’s role in driving record high gas prices and earning record profits posed a threat to that right-wing media narrative. 

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In response, Fox News programs devoted 49 minutes of coverage to the hearing, much of which defended Big Oil and insisted that Biden’s policies are responsible for high gas prices. In comparison, CNN and MSNBC covered the hearings for only 10 minutes and 4 minutes, respectively, effectively letting Fox shape the narrative around this moment and failing to use it as a catalyst to inform viewers on the myriad factors that are driving the price at the pump.

Fox covered Big Oil hearing for over three times as long as CNN and MSNBC combined

Fox leveraged the Big Oil hearing to defend the industry and redirect blame at Biden

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On April 6, nearly every hour on Fox News — from 4 a.m. to 7 p.m. EDT — featured coverage of the congressional hearing on the oil industry and gas prices. The vast majority of this coverage ran cover for the industry while shoring up one of the network’s most dominant narratives around gas prices — that Biden is to blame.

The claim is false; presidents and their policies have little effect on the price at the pump in the short term and even less impact on how gas is priced in the global market. It also ignores the fact that prices have been rebounding since economies across the globe began reopening from the COVID-19 lockdowns last year. But that hasn’t stopped Fox News from repeatedly tethering gas price hikes to Biden’s policies.

Fox’s coverage of the hearing started with the network’s early morning program,Fox & Friends First. Fox Business correspondent Cheryl Caseonereported on the hearing and cited “misguided policies from the administration” as the key drivers of inflation and high energy cost. Other segments throughout the day highlighted industry talking points, including the claim that “rhetoric from the Biden administration” has had a “chilling effect” on oil production. Anchor Martha MacCullum began her coverage of the Big Oil hearing on The Story with Martha MacCullum by highlighting the findings of a recent Fox poll (a self-fulfilling prophecy) that “Republicans and 68% of registered voters say that the Biden administration is to blame for high prices at the pump.”

Video From the April 6, 2022, episode of Fox News' The Story with Martha MacCallum

In defense of oil companies, Fox host and guests, which included oil industry executives, suggested they were a scapegoat for Biden’s failed policies. Appearing on America’s Newsroom, American Petroleum Institute CEO Mike Sommers said:

“We all know that the real reasonfor high prices are a consequence of low production because of some of these Biden administration policies, but also some other factors that are going on throughout the world. So — but this is a typical blame game we see all the time on Capitol Hill. It is pretty outrageous, though, that they're hauling American executives that supply 11 million American jobs up before Congress to blame them for something that they themselves can be blamed for.”

Similarly, Dan Eberhart, another oil industry CEO, appeared on America Reports and called the hearing a “big show trial.”[anti-commie]

Earlier in the program congressional correspondent Chad Pergram began his report by saying: “Democrats who control the House, Senate, and White House are struggling to address the price surge, so they need a scapegoat. Oil companies. Attacking big business is good politics for the Democratic base.They tried to focus on profits and turned on the witnesses.”

In reality, the industry’s record profits and related decisions to not increase production at a time consumers are hurting from high energy costs seems to expose something wrong, if not unjust, that should be examined by policymakers.

Some segments went so far as to defend Big Oil’s record profits, including by highlighting the losses the industry faced during the early phases of the pandemic when gas demand plummeted due to nationwide stay-at-home ordinances. Anchor Sandra Smith on America Reports listed all the major oil companies’ losses and profits over the past two years, saying that it was important context to understand the profit loss in 2020 as the companies are being “demonized” for profiting in 2021.

Video From the April 6, 2022, episode of Fox News' America Reports

Notably, while oil industry profits did dip during the pandemic, CEO salaries did not. According to an analysis by BailoutWatch, reported by Gizmodo, oil executives' salaries remained intact in 2020 as the industry was laying off workers while receiving federal handouts:

“The analysis finds that at a dozen oil companies—including big names like Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and Phillips 66—CEO pay in 2020 was more than 100 times that of the median worker’s pay. All of those companies laid people off last year, including thenine companies that collectively got $4.8 billion in federal bailout money.”

CNN and MSNBC missed an opportunity to hold Big Oil accountable

CNN and MSNBC dedicated only 10 minutes and 4 minutes, respectively, to covering the April 6 hearing — even as the issue of high gas prices remains a mainstay of cable news. One segment on CNN accounted for nearly all of CNN’s coverage — an over 7-minute joint interview on CNN Newsroom with Ana Cabrera withRobert Reich, a public policy professor and former labor secretary, and Daniel Raimi, energy analyst with Resources for the Future.

The segment served, in part, as an example of how CNN and MSNBC could have used the hearing to more robustly cut through reductive and agenda-driven industry and right-wing media talking points to provide a more holistic understanding of why gas prices are high and what tools are available to help alleviate cost to consumers.

Video From the April 6, 2022, episode of CNN Newsroom with Ana Cabrera

The majority of MSNBC’s 4 minutes of hearing coverage was aired in the closing moments of The 11th Hour with Stephanie Ruhle. Host Stephanie Ruhle first laid out the contrasting positions by Democrats and Republicans overseeing the hearing and then told her viewers:   

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“This might be a good time to let you know thatmembers of this very subcommittee received a whopping $383,000 from Big Oil. And according to the FEC, 97% of that money went to Republicans. So, what did the oil executives have to say about the high prices Americans are paying at the pump? They said it's not their fault.”

Video

CitationFrom the April 6, 2022, episode of MSNBC's The 11th Hour With Stephanie Ruhle

While good, both segments only scratched the surface of the information (on gas prices) and accountability (of the oil industry).

In fact, in October, CNN and MSNBC managed to devote a modest amount of coverage to a congressional hearing on Big Oil disinformation, providing a glimmer of what accountability journalism could look like if cable news shows began seriously interrogating the fossil fuel industry. But the sparse coverage of this latest hearing represents a failure on part of the networks to both build on that accountability and, particularly in this moment, provide necessary context around high prices.

Fox News is shaping discussion around climate and energy issues

The April 6 hearing is not the first time Fox News has dominated coverage of key climate and energy actions or newsworthy moments. After the Green New Deal was introduced in 2019, Fox News relentlessly attacked the climate and justice actions and hammered the same messaging — tethering the proposal to radical socialism, climate alarmism, and economic devastation, while vilifying those who champion it. In comparison, other TV news networks made only a cursory attempt to articulate what the Green New Deal is and what it would accomplish. As a result, for Fox viewers, the Green New Deal has become synonymous with extreme socialism manifested by a fake climate crisis.

In the month following candidate Joe Biden unveiling his climate agenda in July 2019, Fox News aired 7 times the number of segments CNN aired and more than 4 times the segments aired on MSNBC. In fact, the network’s coverage of energy and climate issues in the fall months of the 2020 presidential campaign played a role shaping the related presidential debate questions.

After Biden took office on January 27, 2021, Fox spent approximately 1 hour and 50 minutes that day discussing Biden’s day one executive orders (including canceling the Keystone XL pipeline). CNN spent nearly half as much time, at approximately 53 minutes, MSNBC spent 1 hour and 24 minutes discussing the topics. While this data may not be as striking, it doesn’t include the amount of time Fox spent covering, for example, the canceled Keystone XL pipeline long after the other networks had moved on. Even now, Fox News has still repeatedly invoked the scrapped pipeline as one of the reasons contributing to the current energy crisis, even though the pipeline would not have had an impact on gas prices.

It is troubling to see CNN and MSNBC repeatedly yield coverage of major climate and energy stories to Fox News, and it’s time for the networks to step up.

Methodology

chris hayes 3/22 no clash of civs with islam, but there is w/ putin authoritariANISM

hayes regularly crits fox esp tucker

tucker ticks off all the phobes boxes now?

no lnx

Tucker Carlson issues weird warning as he aims to protect Putin

Tucker Carlson's story about the NSA spying on him is filled with holes

Meaghan Ellis March 30, 2022

Fox News host Tucker Carlson recently issued a bizarre warning about the possible adverse effects of removing Russian President Vladimir Putin from office.

On Monday, March 28, Carlson expressed concern about the looming discussions during his recent segment of "Tucker Carlson Tonight."The conservative TV host claims he's concerned about the possibility of Islamic extremists seizing Russia's nuclear weaponry and using it on the United States if Putin is removed from power.

“So, Russia has a large and restive population of Islamic extremists. Do we think it’s possible that with no one running the country ― because of course we have no chosen successor to Putin ― is it possible, if we did that, that one of those 6,000 nuclear weapons might wind up in the hands of some anti-American terror group and be used against our civilian population here?” he asked. “A nuclear weapon! Well, it’s not just possible, it’s likely.”

Carlson's latest remarks follow multiple attempts he's made to defend the Russian authoritarian. Since the beginning of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Carlson has echoed talking points from Russian state media circulating Kremlin propaganda. Like other Russian propagandists, Carlson has also made calls for the 25th Amendment to be invoked so President Joe Biden could be removed from office.

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During the same segment, Carlson said, "The joke is over. Too much is at stake. If there ever was a time — if there was in U.S. history ever a time to invoke the 25th Amendment, it is now. As Joe Biden himself put it, 'For God's sake, this man cannot remain in power.' For all of our sakes."

Carlson’s bizarre remarks were reportedly in response to Biden's speech made while in Poland. Speaking of Putin, Biden called for Putin to be striped of his presidential powers saying, “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”

gR briefly took high road ~ putin?

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Geraldo Rivera lashes out after conservative journalist slams Fox News’ Ukraine commentary

Alex Henderson March 22, 2022

Fox News’ Geraldo Rivera lashed out at Never Trump conservative David Frum after the journalist posted a tweet slamming the Kremlin talking points that have come from some opinion hosts at the right-wing cable news outlet.

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On March 21, Frum tweeted, “I'm trying to recall a single instance of a resignation of conscience at Fox News over the network's support for Putin's war. Marina Ovsyannikova risked life and liberty to tell her viewers the truth. Is there one wealthy Fox director or employee willing to forgo a single check?”

After seeing Frum’s tweet, Rivera angrily posted, “Fuck you. You don’t know me. Do you even have a job?”

Frum, a right-wing conservative who has been a scathing critic of former President Donald Trump, regularly appears in The Atlantic and other major publications.

The disparity between Fox News’ hard news division and far-right opinion host Tucker Carlson has been evident during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. While Carlson has been an apologist for Russian President Vladimir Putin and been more than happy to push Kremlin talking points, Fox News’ hard news division has had plenty of boots-on-the-ground reporting from Ukraine during the conflict — and some Fox correspondents have been killed in Ukraine, including cameraman Pierre Zakrzewski and Ukrainian correspondent Oleksandra Kuvshynova.

Mother Jones’ David Corn recently reported that Carlson’s commentary has been so pro-Putin that a Kremlin memo urged state-owned Russian television to feature him more prominently.

Frum, in his March 21 tweet, obviously wasn’t referring to Zakrzewski or Kuvshynova, but to all the pro-Putin comments that Carlson has drawn so much criticism for.

Mediaite’s Michael Luciano, reporting on Rivera’s anti-Frum tweet, commented that it is false to say that Fox News universally supports Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Luciano wrote, “Numerous Fox News hosts, including Rivera, Jesse Watters, and Sean Hannity, have vocally supported sending military aid to Ukraine.”

// ukraine fail energy dominance gas price drill baby:

the fossil fuel industry has been using the ongoing Russian war against Ukraine as a pretext to call for continued, and deepened, reliance on its dirty and dangerous products. Fox News’ coverage throughout the crisis has largely echoed the industry’s talking points, specifically the idea that America needs to drill and produce more oil. Critiques from President Joe Biden and his administration related to the industry's untapped leases and record profits have also prompted Fox and guests to leap to Big Oil’s defense in recent weeks. 

In the face of another onslaught of fossil fuel talking points from Fox News, other cable news networks have not held the industry accountable by reporting on its role in driving the climate crisis, polluting the environment, and exacerbating geopolitical conflicts. In pivotal moments like this, viewers deserve to learn how our reliance on fossil fuels is leaving us more vulnerable to crises ranging from climate change to foreign wars.

Fox News has absolved Big Oil of any responsibility for energy price increases, while accusing the Biden administration of scapegoating

The fossil fuel industry has waged a billion-dollar campaign to erode the public consensus on climate change, fool the public about its commitment to addressing the climate crisis, and thwart any climate action that could impact its bottom line. The industry’s spin campaign has continued as the crisis in Ukraine escalated, causing economic disruption around the world. Faced with public majorities that are outraged at Russian aggression against Ukraine and “favor developing alternative energy, including wind and solar, over increasing production of fossil fuels like oil, coal and natural gas,” the industry has instead chosen to obfuscate its refusal to produce more oil and gas, pad its record 2021 profits via anti-consumerist practices, and move to deepen the world’s reliance on its products.

And one of its biggest media cheerleaders has been Fox News.

As tensions between Russia and Ukraine ratcheted up, Fox has been nearly unrelenting in pushing a narrative that the Biden administration’s climate policies emboldened Russian President Vladmir Putin to invade. This push includesFox figures mentioning the canceled Keystone pipeline approximately 141 times in segments about the Ukraine crisis from February 22-28 and mentioning “energy independence” or “energy security” – industry talking points to promote more domestic drilling for oil and gas – at least 329 times from February 24 through March 9.

After Biden’s March 8 announcement that the United States was banning Russian fossil fuel imports, Fox News hosts and guests blamed him for instituting the same policy that they had previously demanded – all while praising oil and gas companies as “the greatest industry around the world,” deflecting criticism of them as “unpatriotic,” and arguing they are “basically our national defense.”

On the March 8 episode of :{**America’s Newsroom**:(style="box-sizing:border-box;background-color:#ff6600;"):}:, for example, anchor Sandra Smithparroted the American Petroleum Institute’s (API) debunked talking point about the Biden administration discouraging fossil fuel investment.Fox host and former Trump adviser Larry Kudlowattacked the Biden administration for criticizing the industry’s price gouging and record profits on the March 8 episode of :{**America Reports**:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:. 

Later that evening on Hannity, host Sean Hannity amplified API talking points that the Biden administration is making it hard to produce more oil; allowed fossil fuel shillDaniel Turner to claim that the Biden administration “wants to send a message to the environmental left” by attacking the industry; and gave energy analyst Phil Flynn a platform to claim that “there’s absolutely no gouging” in gas prices and that the Federal Reserve has been “weaponized” against oil and gas companies. [vid 8th]

the drumbeat of Big Oil talking points continued in the ensuing days.

On the March 9 episode of :{**The Faulkner Focus**:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:, anchor Harris Faulkner hosted API President Mike Sommersto blame Biden for high energy prices: “Some of the policies that are being pursued right now by this administration are putting us on a road to more dependence – not independence.”

Similarly, Fox host Jesse Watters hosted oil company CEO Dan Eberhart on the March 10 episode ofJesse Watters Primetimeto push for more domestic drilling and complained that the Biden administration has been treating the industry as “war profiteers.”

The narrative was still being pushed into this new week. On the March 15 episode of :{The Story with Martha MacCallum:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:, Fox News anchor Sandra Smith suggested that the Biden administration should decrease energy prices for “the American family, the American consumer who is suffering right now” in part by taking a “friendlier approach to the oil and gas industry." Smith repeated this and other arguments to “increase and incentivize drilling” on the March 15 episode of :{**The Five**:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:, citing API’s claim that the Biden administration should demonstrate it's not out to “demonize oil companies.” 

Fox personality Charles Payne echoed the idea that the Biden administration was “demonizing” oil companies during the March 16 episode of America Reports. [vid]

there is a desperate need for cable news to ramp up its accountability journalism

Despite not promoting these false narratives during the Ukraine crisis as much as Fox News, CNN and MSNBC have largely failed to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable for exploiting geopolitical conflicts for profit while driving the climate crisis and degrading the environment for billions of people. The networks have also featured very little coverage about the myriad benefits of clean energy, which include economic stability and energy security (clean energy generation is more price stable and politically stable than fossil fuels).

There is a very clear story that needs to be told about the fossil fuel industry, especially in this moment of rising gas prices and wartime sanctions. As explained by the nonprofit environmental law organizationEarthjustice: “Gas prices are not dictated by White House policy, and the industry’s argument that federal leasing and permitting policies are the source of high gas prices is a flat-out lie crafted to deceive the American public.”

Chasing more fossil fuel leases on public lands and waters would increase industry profits but wouldn’t do anything to decrease today’s gas prices at the pump. It also would keep sending us down the same road of fossil fuel production that is the main driver of the worsening climate crisis. The industry gets the profits, and the American people get handed the resulting wildfires, droughts, hurricanes, and coastal flooding caused and exacerbated by climate change. There’s a better road to go down, and it’s the road of clean energy. For as long as we’re addicted to oil for energy, Americans will be subject to big cost increases when a foreign dictator decides to invade another country or there is a change in the world economy.

As a key cog in the fossil fuel industry’sdisinformation network, Fox News will never cover this reality. But CNN and MSNBC can no longer afford to miss opportunities to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable in favor of echoing and **amplifying**Big Oil talking pointswhile the window for meaningful climate action is rapidly closing.

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-heaps-praise-fossil-fuel-industry-russian-war-ukraine-rages

https://www.mediamatters.org/lara-logan/pizzagate-january-6-moron-zelensky-and-aliens-foxs-lara-logan-goes-conspiracy-theory

https://www.mediamatters.org/russias-invasion-ukraine/kremlin-celebrating-fox-nation-host-lara-logans-pro-russian-propaganda

new

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Sean Hannity echoed dangerous Kremlin claim pointing figured about the Russian-Ukrainian war

Fox News' Sean Hannity speaking at the 2015 Conservative Political Action Conference in National Harbor, Maryland, Gage Skidmore

Meaghan Ellis March 19, 2022

Fox News' Sean Hannity added to the conservative misinformation dumpster fire when he attempted to criticize President Joe Biden by echoing claims similar to Russian government officials.

On Friday, March 18, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov spoke to a group of reporters where he appeared to share his reaction Biden describing Russian President Vladamir Putin as a "war criminal." Peskov argued that the description is a "personal insult" to the Russian authoritarian.

"We hear and see statements that are actually personal insults to President Putin," Peskov told reporters.

"Given such irritability from Mr. Biden, his fatigue and sometimes forgetfulness ... fatigue that leads to aggressive statements, we will not make harsh assessments, so as not to cause more aggression,” Peskov added.

Later that evening, Hannity highlighted Peskov's words on the screen as he echoed similar sentiments saying, “Like I’ve been saying, Biden’s weakness on the world stage is emboldening bad actors all across the globe."

Hannity's segment also came hours after Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov actually praised Fox News for echoing Russian propaganda. According to Lavrov, Fox News is the only television network focused on presenting an "alternative point of view."

“We know the manners and the tricks that are being used by the Western countries to manipulate media,” said Lavrov. “If you take the United States, only Fox News is trying to present some alternative point of view."

For months now, far-right Republican lawmakers and conservative Fox News hosts have had what is being described as a "lovefest" with Russia. Despite their opposition, the Democrats and Biden administration have made it a point to push back against Putin as his military continues its invasion of Ukraine.

utter fail on ukraine invasion?  scramble to cover tracks

oil has holy mystical quality?  = strength and prosperity = win = manly (and owning liberal elite hypocrites:

fox is wary/ jealous of putin's energy dominance?

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-mentioned-keystone-pipeline-141-times-one-week-during-networks-coverage-war

bad trinity trifecta?

no lnx many twt

How ‘Kremlin-friendly’ MAGA Republicans — and Tulsi Gabbard — became propaganda for Russia’s Ukraine invasion

Alex Henderson March 14, 2022

Some conservative Republicans have been unwavering in their disdain for Russian President Vladimir Putin, including Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah. But in MAGA World, Putin has a long list of apologists — even as thousands of people die during Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine. And Never Trump conservative Amanda Carpenter, in an article published by The Bulwark on March 14, takes a look at some of the “Kremlin-friendly” talking points coming from America’s far right.

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“During the Cold War,” Carpenter explains, “the Soviet Union invested heavily in its global disinformation and propaganda efforts. And back in 2016, the Russians had to go to the trouble of creating a troll farm to push their divisive messages to the American audience. But today, they needn’t go to such lengths: Plenty of prominent right-wing media figures in the United States are pushing out Vladimir Putin’s propaganda for him.”

The media figures and politicians that Carpenter slams as “Kremlin-friendly” in her article include Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, the Daily Wire’s Candace Owens, former President Donald Trump, “War Room” host Steve Bannon and Rep. Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina. Carpenter notes that these are the sort of MAGA Republicans Cheney has dubbed “the Putin wing of the GOP.”

“It’s all the same people: fringe internet figures, Fox News hosts, Steve Bannon and his acolytes, Marjorie Tayor Greene caucus members, and the millions of people who love them,” Carpenter observes. “Most of these people claim to be free-thinking contrarians, but their accusations, questions, and conclusions about the United States, Russia and Ukraine always seem to go one way: The United States and Ukraine are somehow wrong, and the Russians have their reasons for waging war. If you don’t believe that, it’s only because all the Democrats are lying to you. Well, all the Democrats except for 2022 CPAC special guest Tulsi Gabbard, anyway.”

Carpenter notes that Carlson’s commentary on Fox News has been “so Kremlin-friendly” that according to a Kremlin memo obtained by Mother Jones, Kremlin officials have asked government-run media outlets to feature more clips of him.

:{

}:

Mother Jones’ David Corn reported, “On March 3, as Russian military forces bombed Ukrainian cities as part of Vladimir Putin’s illegal invasion of his neighbor, the Kremlin sent out talking points to state-friendly media outlets with a request: Use more Tucker Carlson.”

Carlson has promoted the conspiracy theory that the Ukrainian government is manufacturing bioweapons in laboratories and that Putin is merely protecting Russia’s safety by invading Ukraine.

Carpenter comments, “One could have guessed that the same people who blamed Dr. Fauci for the coronavirus might try to find some other government bureaucrats to blame for Putin’s war. This time, according to Carlson, ‘Dangerous biological agents remain, thanks to the Biden Administration, unsecured in a chaotic war zone’…. This is the big story in their minds. Not the Russian invasion and the unfolding humanitarian disaster, but the Russian disinformation about bioweapons, which provides a cudgel for whacking the Biden Administration — no matter how bogus the claims.”

no lnx twt

https://www.alternet.org/2022/03/fox-news-invasion-expert-and-far-right-putin-propagandist-believes-russia-is-being-too-gentle-toward-ukraine/

Fox News’ invasion expert and far-right Putin propagandist believes Russia is being 'too gentle' toward Ukraine

Meaghan Ellis March 09, 2022

Since Fox News' Tucker Carlson has offered multiple conflicting reports on the chaos unfolding in Ukraine, he recently brought in Fox News invasion expert Douglas MacGregor to offer insight on what's really transpiring overseas.

On Monday, March 7, MacGregor appeared on "Tucker Carlson Tonight" where he weighed in on the madness Russian President Vladamir Putin has caused as he criticized the sanctions being brought against Russia. MacGregor, former U.S. Army colonel and Trump-appointed Putin propagandist with a racist history, described the sanctions as "useless."

"The sanctions … will do a lot of damage to us,” MacGregor told Carlson. “They’re not going to make much difference to Russia. China will stand with Russia. It knows it has to. Russia has an abundance of food and energy. China will take it all.Russia will not suffer as a result of our sanctions. In fact, it may break down the financial system that we have set up to punish everyone in the world we don’t like.”

MacGregor's discussion with Carlson comes just days after his recent appearance on Fox Business where he expressed to Stuart Varney that he believes the Russian military has been "too gentle" with Ukraine during the initial days of the invasion.

At the time, a seemingly surprised Varney pushed back against MacGregor saying, “I’m inclined to disagree with you, Colonel."

However, Rolling Stone notes that MacGregor's remarks shouldn't come as a surprise. In fact, a few days prior to that discussion, Varney reportedly said "that America needs to stop demonizing Putin and refrain from sending any aid to Ukraine."

When asked if he believes the United States should just step aside and let Russia ascend on Ukraine, Macgregor said “absolutely.” He also dismissed the severity of the invasion arguing that it shouldn't be considered a big deal because “the population there is indistinguishable from their own.”

Despite his disturbing remarks, it does not look like MacGregor will lose air time anytime soon.

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/flashback-sean-hannity-spent-months-aggressively-defending-president-trump-withholding

https://www.mediamatters.org/sean-hannity/hannity-speculates-his-call-assassination-has-had-psychological-impact-vladimir-putin

https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/fox-has-pushed-covid-propaganda-two-years-cost-has-been-staggering

https://www.alternet.org/2022/03/tucker-carlson-2656827634/

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Tucker Carlson tries to gaslight his way out of having pushed Putin’s anti-Ukraine propaganda for a month

David Neiwert and Daily Kos March 02, 2022

Tucker Carlson is utterly baffled that people would think he is rooting for Vladimir Putin and Russia in its war on Ukraine. “You know, it’s such an awful thing to say,” he said on his Fox News show Monday, after playing a clip of Congressman Eric Swalwell saying he and other Republicans were on Putin’s side. “We hesitated to play that, even—it’s very common, you hear it every day. The question is: Why are they saying that? It doesn’t make any sense.”

:{

}:

Gaslighting, of course, has become Carlson’s specialty. In reality, Carlson spent most of the month prior to the invasion praising Putin and echoing Russian propaganda: running down Ukraine, deriding it as a “State Department client state”—not a democracy, but “a tyranny”—and claiming that Russia just wants to keep its borders secure, everything the fault of Joe Biden. So much so that he became the hero of Russian state television, where his rants were translated and replayed, and he was praised as an astute American.

Now that the horror is hitting home, Carlson suddenly has realized that he backed the wrong horse and is scurrying hard to dig his way out. The first step in that, of course, is gaslighting his audience about what he had been saying just the week before, and blaming the war on Putin now—yet somehow it’s still all Joe Biden’s fault. Those clips have yet to appear on Russian TV.

The major tone shift occurred Friday, a day after the invasion: “It’s a tragedy, because war always is a tragedy, and the closer you get to it, the more horrifying it seems,” he said. He also squarely put the onus on Russia and Putin: “He is to blame for what we’re seeing tonight in Ukraine.”

:{

}:

“Vladimir Putin started this war,so whatever the context of the decision that he made, he did it,” [CYA?] he said. “He fired the first shots.”

It’s a sharp and complete reversal of his previous arguments. On Feb. 17, he spouted Russian propaganda in claiming that Ukraine is not a legitimate nation. He also attacked U.S. officials who provided military aid to Ukraine.

:{

}:

“These people are so ghoulish,” Carlson said. “Of course they’re promoting war, not to maintain the democracy that is Ukraine. Ukraine is not a democracy. It has never been a democracy in its history, and it’s not now. It’s a client state of the Biden administration.”

This narrative became a staple of Carlson’s defense of Russia’s war. On his Feb. 22 show, he again spouted Putin’s propaganda: “The point here is to defend democracy. Not that Ukraine is a democracy. It’s not a democracy. Ukraine’s president has arrested his main political opponent, he has shut down newspapers and television stations that have dared to criticize him. So in American terms, you would call Ukraine a tyranny. But Joe Biden likes Ukraine, so Putin bad, war good.”

The next day, he again dismissed Ukraine as “a State Department client state,” claiming that Democrats wanted Americans to “wholeheartedly support jumping with both feet into a highly complicated conflict in a part of Eastern Europe where we have no national interests.”

The most noteworthy part of that Feb. 22 episode, however, washow Carlson defended Putin against his “haters” by comparing him to American liberals, who he clearly saw as far more nefarious:

It might be worth asking yourself, since it is getting pretty serious, ‘What is this really about? Why do I hate Putin so much? Has Putin ever called me a racist? Has he threatened to get me fired for disagreeing with him? Has he shipped every middle class job in my town to Russia? Did he manufacture a worldwide pandemic that wrecked my business and kept me indoors for two years? Is he teaching my kids to embrace racial discrimination? Is he making fentanyl? Is he trying to snuff out Christianity? Does he eat dogs?’ These are fair questions, and the answer to all of them is no. Vladimir Putin didn’t do any of that. So do why does permanent Washington hate him so much?

The day after the invasion began, on Feb. 24, it was more of the same. The invasion, he claimed, demonstrated that Biden was a foreign-policy failure who had promised he would keep it from happening, making Putin’s war a “humiliating defeat for Joe Biden.”

Russian state media promptly began re-airing Carlson’s rants with translated subtitles, particularly the Putin-didn’t-call-me-a-racist episode. His attacks on Ukraine’s legitimacy also received heavy play. They also replayed Carlson’s Feb. 24 interview with ex-CongresswomanTulsi Gabbard, who told him: "Sanctions don't work. This is the whole problem with the Biden administration: They are so focused on how do we punish Putin."

The clips became the topic of Russian TV news talk shows, where Carlson was uniformly praised. “Excellent performance,” the editor of a Russian national defense journal commented. “We can only have solidarity with this view.”

Of course, Carlson is hardly alone in spreading pro-Russian propaganda on Fox News. On Feb. 24, just before bombs began falling on Ukraine, host Laura Ingraham interviewed ex-president Donald Trump by phone, who praised Putin—“I do know him very well. We’ve had many, uh, times together. I got along with him fantastically”—and ranted at length that the invasion was Biden’s fault, and the war never would have happened if the election hadn’t been stolen from him.

Near the end of the interview, Ingraham asked Trump about the speech given earlier that day by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, describing it as “a kind of really pathetic display” and described Ukraine’s United Nations ambassador as “looking like a defeated man.”

And despite the seeming change in tone, Carlson’s “pivot” still found him ardently defending Russian propaganda, and serving as its useful tool. Angry that authorities and platform owners in the U.S., Canada, and in Europe are taking action against the Kremlin-owned American news outlet Russia Today and other agitprop producers like Sputnik—both of whom also heavily replayed his pro-Russia rants—Carlson fumed that it all constituted “moral blackmail,” gaslighting away his previous remarks: “No one in America takes pride at the sight, feels anything but revulsion at the sight, of Russian troops within Ukraine.”

Sure enough, RT promptly retweeted Carlson’s clip: “Tucker Carlson defends media freedom as Senators use their power to shut down free speech on social media—especially so-called ‘Russian propaganda.’”

As Lis Wahl, a former anchor at Russia Today, explained to The Daily Beast, the distinction between a propaganda operation like RT and what’s aired on Fox News has essentially vanished:

While the American voices Russian media uses to influence Western audiences hail from the far-left and the far-right, the poison of disinformation asymmetrically originates on the ideological right. Research has demonstrated that followers of the former president stick to hyper-partisan and conspiracy-laden sources such as Breitbart, Info Wars, and Fox News. During Trump’s election and throughout his presidency, the rightwing ecosystem grew more conspiratorial, extreme, and anti-democratic. It is during this time that Russian media and right-wing media became indistinguishable.

Today, the chief purveyors of pro-Russian disinformation in the U.S. are now on Fox News. I have warned that quite often the pro-Putin claims on Fox and RT essentially mimic each other. But much of the American public, and even many in the mainstream media, fail to realize the extent to which this disinformation has become part of the fabric of the new media landscape, and therefore, American political discourse.

pink pill hype fear conspiracy qanon

https://www.mediamatters.org/**laura-ingraham/fox-news-chyron-liberals-are-sexually-grooming**-elementary-students

3 22

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-abandons-durham-filing-story-shortly-after-clinton-accuses-network-actual-malice

no lnx

https://www.mediamatters.org/russias-invasion-ukraine/one-most-disgraceful-hours-fox-news-history

One of the most disgraceful hours in Fox News history

And that's saying something

WRITTEN BY JOHN WHITEHOUSE

PUBLISHED 02/24/22

trump ingraham invasion 2/23/22

CitationFox News Channel

Late in the night on February 23, nearly an hour after a video of Russian leader Vladimir Putin aired announcing officially that a Russian military “action” would take place, the Ukrainian ambassador to the United Nations, Sergiy Kyslytsya, addressed an emergency session of the Security Council, confronting the Russian representative repeatedly about Putin’s speech and pushing everyone present to stop the invasion. At one point, Kyslytsya even said they could pause the meeting so the Russian representative could call Moscow and get updated talking points, since the war had started during the meeting.

It was an incredibly dramatic speech in English during prime time hours with an extraordinary confrontation and stakes as high as they get.

CitationFrom the February 23, 2022, meeting of the UN Security Council as streamed by The Washington Post

It was also a moment that Fox News viewers missed. The network skipped over most of the speech to instead let host Laura Ingraham gab with former President Donald Trump – fresh off praising Putin’s moves – about trivial nonsense in the face of what is likely to be a very deadly war.

That wasn’t all.

Ingraham also used the hour to mock Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for what she called a “pathetic” display giving a speech urging peace between Ukraine and Russia. She also linked the Mueller investigation to the invasion. This is in addition to all of Tucker Carlson’s well-documented and ongoing propaganda about Russia and Putin.

Fox is so busy trying to blame President Joe Biden for the war and its consequences that they’re skipping right over telling their audience how said war is happening.

Fox cannot be trusted with the news. In just the recent past, we’ve seen the network embrace COVID/vaccine lies, election lies, and now propaganda in the place of covering war.

Even worse, we’re all paying for this – literally. Fox is overwhelmingly funded by cable subscription fees paid by millions of Americans who never watch Fox. And while cable companies can, for now, foist that cost on the American people, they can at least spare us the bullshit of putting Fox in their news category. That’s perhaps the biggest lie of them all.

many fail

https://www.mediamatters.org/russias-invasion-ukraine/right-wing-media-blame-anybody-except-vladimir-putin-russia-invading

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-using-ukrainian-crisis-suggest-biden-administrations-climate-policies-emboldened-putin

https://www.alternet.org/2022/02/fox-news-host-got-way-more-than-he-bargained-for-when-he-defended-trumps-support-of-putin/

ukraine invade

last twt is pix of 2007 ltr trump congtat putin on man of yr you deserve it

Watch: Fox News host got way more than he bargained for when he defended Trump’s support of Putin

Meaghan Ellis February 23, 2022

When Fox News host Pete Hegseth attempted to rationalize former President Donald Trump's support of Russian President Vladamir Putin, Twitter users quickly fired back to correct him for his warped defense.

On Tuesday, February 22, Hegseth weighed in on the circumstances surrounding Trump and Putin as he claimed the former president's actions are an attempt to troll the media.

“No organism, no entity, has done more to spread Russian propaganda and to prop up the strawman that is Vladimir Putin than our very own media,” Hegseth said.

According to Hegseth, Trump's support of Putin is nothing more than a ploy. “Donald Trump was happy to troll them on it as he continues to do to this moment,” Hegseth said. “Because they can’t resist it, and they’ll obsess over it.”

Despite Hegseth's attempt to smooth things over, HuffPost notes that: "Hegseth claimed the media was working to spread Russian propaganda on the same network where fellow Fox News host Tucker Carlson has repeatedly defended Putin, aired Kremlin talking points and touted pro-Russia conspiracy theories."

Reacting to Hegseth's bizarre argument, Twitter users quickly resorted to mocking the clueless conservative host.

"Noted idiot Pete Hegseth (who thinks germs aren't real bc he can't see them) says Putin lives 'rent-free' in the minds of the media," anti-racism educator Tim Wise tweeted. "Imagine if any 'reporter' or commentator had said Breshnev or Kruschev lived rent-free in the minds of the right..."

Another user wrote, "Wow. That's desperate. But how else are they going to explain the insane reaction of #TraitorTrump in a way that doesn't make him look as bad as he really is? Trump has always been on Team Putin. If you can't see this obvious fact, it's because you can't handle the truth."

https://www.alternet.org/2022/02/durham/ dismisses consp

hannity on defam suit: bring it on

https://www.alternet.org/2022/02/sean-hannity-on-hillary-clinton/

https://www.alternet.org/2022/02/fox-news-hillary-clinton/

played sp many x but cut coup plot

wingnuttery

https://www.alternet.org/2022/02/fox-news-wild-wednesday/

an 2 22

no lnx vid

Fox News descended into utter insanity on Wednesday

Maria Bartiromo ignorantly asks Kevin McCarthy to 'look at the 25th Amendment' to remove Biden

Brandon Gage February 16, 2022

Today has been a wild one over in Fox News propaganda land, even by their standards. This morning, anchor Jesse Watters urged the United States to annex Canada to save it from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, whom Watters suggested is a communist. And he was serious.

“We have to finish the wall and build a fresh one in the north if this keeps up. Or we could just liberate the Canadians from their dictatorship,” said Watters. “It’s not like America hasn’t done that before. There’s room for a few more stars on the flag.”

Good luck with that.

The full eight-minute segment is below:

Watters: Trudeau getting his chance to play dictator

youtu.be

Meanwhile, on Mornings with Maria on Fox Business, host Maria Bartiromo accused President Joe Biden of manufacturing the crisis between Russia and Ukraine as a “ruse” to yank attention away from – who else? – Hillary Clinton.

Bartiromo expressed skepticism predicated on what “some Congressmen were telling me over the weekend” that Russian President Vladimir Putin would want to invade Ukraine, given the vast amount of control he has over Europe’s energy resources.

Those conversations, Bartiromo explained, were “why I questioned whether or not the whole thing was a ruse, with Jake Sullivan coming out so hysterical over the weekend telling us to get out of Ukraine, and Russia’s gonna invade today. Obviously, in retrospect, he was trying to change the conversation from Hillary Clinton and her bad behavior and her dirty tricks against Donald Trump.”

Right-wingers have baselessly convinced themselves that Clinton spied on Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and presidency, citing a report from former Special Counsel John Durham in which he made no such allegation and explicitly stated that there was no evidence of that happening.

Bartiromo’s guest, Gristedes and D’Agostino Foods Chairman and Chief Executive Officer John Catsimatidis, insisted that “Putin was never going to invade Ukraine” and that Putin “withdrew the troops” out of fear that Biden “would do something stupider.”

Putin has not withdrawn any of his forces, and Ukraine remains surrounded by 150,000 Russian troops.

Catsimatidis also believes that Biden has overblown the situation with Russia to get “inflation prices” and “Mexico” off the “front page of The New York Times.”

Bartiromo agreed.

“Yeah, it takes off the front page inflation and it takes off the front page Hillary Clinton and Jake Sullivan pushing the Russia collusion hoax for so many years,” she said.

Former Special Counsel Robert Mueller determined in his 2019 report that it was not a hoax.

Watch below:

https://www.alternet.org/2022/02/free-base-pipe/

no lnx vid twt?

Right-wing website made up viral fake claim Republicans like Marco Rubio are now pushing: report

[Marco Rubio embarrasses himself again by doubling down on false attack of defense secretary]

David Badash and The New Civil Rights Movement February 10, 2022

This week Republican lawmakers and voters have had a great time pushing a false claim that the Biden administration is spending tens of millions of dollars to pay for "free crack pipes" for drug abusers. The claim came from a report by the right-wing website Washington Free Beacon, including a quote falsely attributed to an HHS spokesperson, according to The Daily Beast.

It's no surprise The Daily Beast is calling "a lie" made its way to the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives and a U.S. Senator's Twitter account.

"The Washington Free Beacon seemed to take a big leap to assert that free crack pipes would be part of a harm reduction package," The Daily Beast's Roger Sollenberg reports, calling it "a lie rocketed around conservative media."

The report, published Monday and titled “Biden Admin To Fund Crack Pipe Distribution To Advance ‘Racial Equity,’” cited an HHS spokesperson as confirming that a sweeping harm reduction package “will provide pipes” to smoke, quote, “any illicit substance.”

The Free Beacon's article reads: “A spokesman for the agency told the Washington Free Beacon that these kits will provide pipes for users to smoke crack cocaine, crystal methamphetamine, and ‘any illicit substance.’”

The Daily Beast reviewed the email chain between the Washington Free Beacon and HHS. It's unclear how the Free Beacon made the "any illicit substance" claim, given the HHS email specifically states no federal laws would be broken.

In fact, The Daily Beast reports the HHS spokesperson says the Free Beacon “omitted the information shared with him about the grantees needing to comply with federal, state, and local laws—the very language that would prohibit crack pipes.”

The damage has already been done. The "free crack pipes" claim is now one more myth in conservatives' false reality.

Arizona far-right Republican U.S. Congresswoman Debbie Lesko made the false claim on the floor of the House of Representatives:

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Florida Republican U.S. Senator Marco Rubio, linking to an article literally titled: "Biden administration denies funding programs that hand out crack pipes to prevent infection and promote 'racial equity'" says in a video posted to his Twitter account, "The Biden administration is going to be sending crack pipes and meth pipes, targeting minority communities," a claim he knows is a lie.

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Fox News entertainers Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity both made the most of the claim, with The Daily Mail reporting: "Tucker Carlson slams policy to hand out free crack pipes and needles warning it 'will result in addicts shooting up on the streets.'"

The genie is out of the bottle, and no one on the right has any intention or desire to put it back.

https://www.alternet.org/2022/02/america-has-surrendered-to-fox/

...Also applying Denmark’s “Let’s treat it like a cold” philosophy to the United States neglects the biggest obstacle to returning to any semblance of normal here: The Danes don’t have Fox.

You can’t find fault with wanting to pretend Fox doesn’t exist. Hopefully, you’ve set the parental controls at your parents’ house.

But what we can’t ignore is that for almost a year, our largest cable “news” channel – and the most durable propaganda machine in human history – has been waging a war against covid vaccinations.

Almost nightly, the channel’s hugely popular primetime hosts have flung every speck of feces they can find at the miracle vaccines that have proven to be so incredible at minimizing the risk of death.

And when Fox adopts a misinformation campaign – like, say, make-believing genuine concern for the Benghazi tragedy – it doesn’t soak millions of viewers in filth. It’s more like a black hole, drawing the entire GOP and its right-wing media complex into the darkness.

(All while the channel appears to have covid vaccination mandate stricter than anything President Joe Biden has proposed.)

Vaccinating this country is the closest thing we’ve come to facing a “Dunkirk Moment,” when average citizens step up in a rescue mission that will give us a chance to prevail over an enemy that’s now killed far more Americans than have died in all our foreign wars.

But Fox has convinced a huge chunk of the Republican Party to turn their boats around and block the rest of us from getting to the beach.

Being a Republican makes you less likely to be vaccinated, no matter what demographic group you are in. This is your nation on Fox:

Charles Gaba found that rates of death from covid soared in red areas compared to blue areas, even adjusted for age, since the president’s inauguration. This trend now continues even while Omicron’s highly contagious nature has led to an explosion of cases in big, blue cities.

And what have the rest of us done about it?

Most of us vaccinated Americans, who are the majority of the county, have just watched in horror as we try to get along with our lives, hoping the tide will turn with the next conservative anti-vax talk radio guy who begs for a vaccination as he faces death on a ventilator.

We largely haven’t adjusted our “vaccinations only” approach to fighting the pandemic, even as anti-vax misinformation floods at a pace and furor that no scientific education campaign could match.

Instead, “normalcy” obsesses Democratic governors after watching Terry MacCullife lose in Virginia. They’ve been urging Biden to “move away” from the pandemic, even if the pandemic won’t go away and continues to kill a 9/11-number of Americans almost every day.

The *Times* reports that New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy led the way. In 2017, he won by a blowout, but in 2021, he won by just a few points.

Arranging a series of focus groups across the state to see what they had missed, Mr. Murphy’s advisers were struck by the findings: Across the board, voters shared frustrations over public health measures, a sense of pessimism about the future and a deep desire to return to some sense of normalcy.

These focus groups sound a lot like David Leonhardt of the Times – who constantly inveighs for “normality” while also recently wondering why there has been no urgency to get America boosted – and “Hotline” Josh Kraushaar of National Journal – a Republican who pretends to care about Joe Biden’s political fate while constantly praising Democratic Governor Jared Polis’ rush to normalcy in Colorado.

Polis has declared the covid emergency “over.” The governor said that “if you haven’t been vaccinated, it’s really your own darn fault.”

These focus groups and reporters are at odds with polls showing that mask mandates are consistently popular even in Texas. Parents of school-aged kids have largely embraced them, but are drowned out by screeching right-wing parents with the time, energy and spittle to rant at school board meetings, even if their kids are homeschooled....

an 222

https://www.alternet.org/2022/02/the-trumpified-gop-has-a-whole-new-generation-of-power-brokers-and-influencers-report/

no lnx

The Trumpified GOP has a whole new generation of power brokers and 'kingmakers': report

Alex Henderson February 04, 2022

The fact that so many well-known right-wing Republicans endorsed Joe Biden during the United States’ 2020 presidential race —from former Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona to former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina to Sen. John McCain’s widow Cindy McCain — speaks volumes about how dramatically former President Donald Trump remade the GOP in his image, and how alienated they fell from the party. The GOP landscape is radically different from what it was during the Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama years, and journalists Jonathan Swan and Lachlan Markay describe that landscape in an article published by Axios on February 4.

“Paths to power and winning elections inside the GOP are changing rapidly and radically, spawning a new generation of kingmakers while diminishing the clout of many who lorded over the party for years,” Swan and Markay explain. “Why it matters: 14 of the Republican Party's top consultants and operatives across the country spoke in detail with Axios about how profoundly primary races have changed since 2014 — the last pre-Donald Trump midterm election and the last midterms in which a Democrat occupied the White House.”

The reporters continue, “What we found: Those sources — whose clients range from as Trumpy as they come to establishment Republicans — described a clear shift in the party's power brokers. They spoke of changes to the ecosystem across four categories: institutional upheaval, endorsements, conservative media and donors.”

Swan and Markay go on to list Republicans who “had the power” in the past — a group that includes the National Review, the National Rifle Association, the Drudge Report, Heritage Action and the “Koch network,” among others.

But their “who has the power now” list is much more MAGA.That list includesTrump and his “family and former aides” as well as Breitbart News,Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, Ben Shapiro’s the Daily Wire, former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon and the Susan B. Anthony List.

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Swan and Markay also mention “online influencers, including Candace Owens, Ben Shapiro, Dan Bongino, Joe Rogan, Jack Posobiec, Charlie Kirk and Marjorie Taylor-Greene.”...

https://www.alternet.org/2022/02/fox-news-dominion/

lawsuit viable?

VAXX 1 22

https://www.mediamatters.org**/tucker-carlson**/fox-guest-demands-covid-vaccines-be-immediately-pulled-market-calls-them-dangerous

https://www.mediamatters.org/one-america-news-network/oan-guest-claims-coronavirus-vaccines-are-effective-if-you-want-kill

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-hosts-rally-behind-ron-desantis-push-provide-covid-drugs-dont-work

cf trms govt stopped shipping 2 do not work omicron (3rd hard to get?)

https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/see-right-wing-diatribes-falsely-comparing-vaccine-mandates-nazis

See the right-wing diatribes falsely comparing vaccine mandates to the Nazis

In fact, the Nazis withheld vaccines from conquered populations — and spread propaganda that vaccines were bad

WRITTEN BY ERIC KLEEFELD & JOHN KERR

PUBLISHED 01/28/22 no lnx vid

Right-wing media personalities have relentlessly pushed a disgusting set of talking points comparing present-day vaccine requirements to the atrocities of Nazi Germany — a comparison that is not only wrong in ethical terms, but also contrary to the actual history of Nazi policies on vaccines.

The commentators spreading this message have included Fox News prime-time host Tucker Carlson, Infowars’ Alex Jones; podcast host Joe Rogan; religious right broadcaster David Brody; YouTuber Steven Crowder and his co-hosts; One America News Network host Dan Ball; and others. (And just to top it off, Fox host Will Cain has compared vaccine requirements to life under East Germany’s post-war communist regime.)

In fact, Nazi Germany overturned the mandatory vaccination laws it had inherited from the earlier Weimar Republic. The regime also deliberately withheld vaccines from conquered peoples, with Adolf Hitler explaining that providing such benefits would “would result only in an enormous increase in local populations.” Furthermore, Hitler told his chief of staff to propagandize against vaccines for this very reason: “No inoculations and other preventative measures for the natives! We must even try to stifle any desire for such things by persuading them that vaccination and the like are really most dangerous.”

Oddly enough, Fox News’ Carlson has pursued a dual-pronged approach: On the one hand, he has fearmongered against “eugenics” and warned that “whites would go last” in line for the vaccines. But at the same time, he has compared universal vaccine requirements to “what the Imperial Japanese Army and the Nazis did in their medical experiments.” And, of course, Fox News is waging a propaganda campaign telling its own viewers that the vaccines are dangerous, while the company also practices a strict vaccine and testing regimen for itself.

And in a truly outrageous comparison, multiple right-wing hosts including Jones and Brody have invoked the Nuremberg Code, a set of medical ethics adopted in the wake of Nazi war crimes including medical experimentation on concentration camp inmates. These claims about vaccines have circulated online since mid-2020, before the COVID-19 vaccines had even become widely available.

In fact, the codes do not declare that medical care such as vaccines “could never be imposed on anyone,” as Carlson claimed— if that were true, it would prohibit all the other vaccine requirements that already exist for schoolchildren. Instead, the Nuremburg Code was formed in response to the gruesome and evil medical experiments the Nazi regime forcibly conducted on concentration camp prisoners, who were often murdered immediately afterward if the experiment itself did not kill them.

As a result, the Nuremberg Code’s text governs the circumstances of any medical experiments on human subjects, and says they must involve only subjects who have consented and be conducted under circumstances that would “avoid all unnecessary physical and mental suffering and injury.” The COVID-19 vaccines are no longer experimental, precisely because they went through vigorous testing on volunteer subjects as required by medical ethics.

And just to make it clear how outrageous this comparison really is — and how people like Carlson, Jones, and Brody are trafficking in sheer historical ignorance — consider exactly the sort of conduct the Nazis committed, to which the Nuremberg Code was written in response:

For the benefit of the German Army, whose frontline soldiers suffered greatly from gas gangrene, a type of progressive gangrene, doctors at the Ravensbruck concentration camp performed studies to test the effectiveness of sulfanilamide and other drugs in curbing such infections. They inflicted battlefield-like wounds in victims, then infected the wounds with bacteria such as streptococcus, tetanus, and gas gangrene. The doctors aggravated the resulting infection by rubbing ground glass and wood shavings into the wound, and they tied off blood vessels on either side of the injury to simulate what would happen to an actual war wound. Victims suffered intense agony and serious injury, and some of them died as a result.

In short, to compare a vaccination campaign providing the public with lifesaving drugs to the genuine war crimes against captive subjects that gave birth to the Nuremberg Code is simply a moral abomination.

an 1 22  https://www.alternet.org/2022/01/gretchen-carlson/

no lnx vid

Watch: Former Fox News anchor explains how network's viewers have been brainwashed into believing conspiracy theories

Meaghan Ellis January 28, 2022

Former Fox News anchor Gretchen Carlson offered a damning assessment of the network as she explained just how bad its spread of conspiracy theories and misinformation has become.

During an appearance on the CNN segment, "Democracy in Peril," Carlson discussed many aspects of Fox News' critical role in the spread of misinformation and falsehoods. Since former President Donald Trump took office, conspiracy theories have been on the rise and Fox News has become a driving force for it.

Conservative primetime news anchor Tucker Carlson has been at the center of misinformation and the power of his opinion has begun to influence Republican members of Congress.

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“This is the result of fake news,” Carlson said. “You know, we're seeing not only the fallout from fake news during the Trump era, but what happened with the insurrection on January 6th. Now it's moving into other areas. Not just news, now it’s hitting science with vaccines, and now it’s into Cold War politics.”

Carlson also touched on another significant topic as she shed light on the actions of herformer Fox News colleagues, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham. While they reportedly sent pleas to the White House for the violence to stop on Jan. 6, they still put up a united front on-air and circulated a completely different narrative about the series of events that unfolded.

“I think the bigger story coming out of that is how disingenuous it was to be sending those texts of warning while then going on the air to the American people and doing a complete injustice and disservice by saying something completely opposite,” Carlson said, “and ginning up this whole reaction that it was just fine and patriotic for people to be there on January 6th.”

She went on to express concern about the journalistic state of her former network since the rise of Trump. Carlson also noted how conspiracy theories have become a fallacious replacement for opinion.

“Slowly but surely, this has morphed into eradicating any other point of view since the Trump era that is not just opinion,” Carlson said. “It's gone from an opinion, which was fine, to completely devolving into non-fact-based conspiracy theories and outright dangerous rhetoric, in my mind, and I think it’s a complete disservice to our country.”

Noting the dangers of biased journalism, Carlson explained how dangerous it is to only get information from one news source. She also stressed how imperative it is for Republican leaders and lawmakers to use their platforms to offer clarity regarding some of the dangerous false narratives perpetuated by Fox News.

“For the safety of the Republican Party and for our democracy, I wish more would, because this is not going to end well, in my mind,” Carlson said. “It's really hard to change people's opinions because they're only watching what they want to hear, you know? And that's the other problem that we have in society with the media right now, is that we're so siloed into only watching what we agree with. And so every day that thought process just gets reinforced time after time.”

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Carlson also conceded that conservative media has changed considerably over the last five years as there is no longer a clear line between opinion and conspiracy theory. “Conservative television news is certainly not the conservative news that was out there even just five years ago,” Carlson said, later adding, “There’s a big difference between having a conservative opinion and having one that supports conspiracy theories.”

aha? rooted i RR road to serfdom BS death panels

an 1 22

Watch: Tucker Carlson compares COVID-19 vaccine mandates to Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan experiments

Meaghan Ellis January 22, 2022

Fox News' Tucker Carlson recently compared COVID vaccine mandates to medical experiments that were conducted during the times of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.

The conservative primetime host made the controversial remarks on Friday, January 21 during his discussion with Dr. Robert Malone, an anti-vaccination virologist and immunologist known for spreading misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccine. Their discussion came just hours after a Texas federal judge struck down President Joe Biden's vaccine mandate.

While discussing the ruling, Carlson criticized the president's vaccine mandate and compared it to the Nazi experiments that were performed on captives held in concentration camps in Germany and the human procedures that were conducted during the period of Imperial Japan.

“After watching what the imperial Japanese army and the Nazis did in their medical experiments, I thought that American physicians agreed that compulsory medical care was unethical, it was immoral, and it could never be imposed on anyone. When did we forget that?”

Malone responded in agreement with Carlson saying, “Apparently, about a year ago was when we must have forgotten that… Thank you for bringing up the Nuremberg Trials, Tucker.”

Carlson's latest remarks align with a history of similar remarks made by Fox News hosts. Back in November, Fox Nation hostLara Logan compared the nation's top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, to Josef Mengele, the Nazi “Angel of Death” who used human beings in Auschwitz for grotesque experiments. Shortly after Logan made the remarks, the network decided to sever ties with her.

an 1 22

gutfeld fox News host accuses Democrats of using public schools to push ‘race warfare’ and ‘revolution’

David Badash

Influential **Fox News** host Greg Gutfeld is accusing Democrats of engaging in "an insidious transfer of power" by using America's public school system to indoctrinate children...

F&F says VACCINE not work AT PEAK WE HOPE OF OMICRON

https://www.alternet.org/2022/01/anti-vaxxers-2656441568/

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https://www.mediamatters.org/lawrence-jones/fox-host-claims-booster-shots-are-plot-hold-your-freedom-hostage-until-you-comply

https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/foxs-gutfeld-we-are-country-fighters-and-we-will-do-it-again-february-1st

1 22 mma

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/msnbc-angelo-carusone-describes-how-fox-news-picking-crazy-things-fever-swamps-and-pushing

ALICIA MENDEZ (HOST): Time, again, to raise the alarm about the danger of selling lies as journalism. We know the 1/6 committee has revealed texts from Fox News hosts sent to members of the Trump administration as the riot unfolded. But now Fox is apparently so powerful that it now has a sitting senator backtracking, and apologizing for calling the Capitol a terrorist attack. Joining us now to discuss, the president of Media Matters, Angelo Carusone. Angelo, thank you so much for being with us. Listen, this is your bread and butter. This is what you do day in, day out. So when I saw this, I needed to know what you thought about why this unfolded the way it did, what it tells us about Fox News, and what it tells us about the state of the Republican Party.

ANGELO CARUSONE (PRESIDENT OF MEDIA MATTERS FOR AMERICA): Well, there's a lot there. And I would just say there's one thing that's really important here, it's thatone of Ted Cruz's penances wasn't just that he had to backtrack. During that same segment, he also endorsed and started to carry water for Tucker Carlson and Fox News’ conspiracy theory that the attack on January 6 was actually a FBI-orchestrated false flag operation. That happened in that exact interview as well, and that was Ted Cruz's way of trying to demonstrate that – to get Tucker and the audience to believe them.

And the reason I start with that example is because it illustrates a few things: One, that it is really here that Fox is really at the nexus of power. Because they weren’t just able to get him to apologize and to backtrack, but actually to start carrying water for Fox News' narrative. And that's where the power really comes from. And if I would describe it, I would say it's unrivaled agenda-setting power at this point. And that was always their purpose. Remember, they were born – I think the way you described it at the beginning was spot-on. They’re not a news operation, they were born as a political operation. That was the entire theory behind Fox News. Sure, they make a bunch of money on the side, but that isn't the goal. The goal really is political power, and the Ted Cruz thing is just an example of it.

MENDEZ: The reason I was so struck by this, and you know, is we always come back to this question of who is a trusted messenger, who could actually be the person to say the election was fair and true and we have to believe this vote count and we have to move on, and what happened on January 6 was an attack on American democracy and here's the path forward. When you see someone who attempts to do that even for a fleeting second, then taken down so quickly, it diminishes hope that there is even a possibility that there can be that messenger. Because the other side is clearly so powerful.

CARUSONE: Yes, it does. It actually does diminish that hope, because we actually need Fox's – I mean, just imagine COVID and the way that the country responded to a public health crisis, not a political question, but a public health crisis, if Fox News didn't begin by calling COVID a hoax. Then promotes – for two months promoting a fantasy treatment of hydroxychloroquine, and then the remaining summer downplaying the threat of the virus, and then now, of course, their antagonism toward vaccinations. It would be a different response, right? I mean, and that just illustrates to your point how depressing it can be sometimes. And that doesn't mean we're stuck with it. I think part of it is, and I think broadly themedia and the public has been slow to react, because, you know, we value free speech and they exploit that. They exploit one of the American values, is that we care about freedom of expression and free ideas. They exploit that, and that means they exploit that to get away with accountability.

And so many have said, well, they get to have their opinions, they get to have their take, but what the result of that is, is that we ignore their destructive influence. And then as a result of that, then the accountability and consequences needed to diminish and dilute what that destructive potential really is. I mean, they have hosted people who don’t – members of Congress that don’t support Joe Biden as president more than 947 times. Ted Cruz is an anomaly on Fox News, not the norm, when it comes to who they host and who they promote. And if you think about that in the context of his political aspirations -- and he's not the only one, he can't run for president if Fox News ices him out. It's a dealbreaker, forget about it. There's no chance.And that then portends the future and it gets to, I think, an important part of this discussion, which is that we're going to have to recognize the threat and then start to take more serious concerted efforts to hold them accountable and force some change.

MENDEZ: Angelo, I only have about 30 seconds left, but I want to loop back to something you said in that first answer, which is that what struck you wasn't just the fact that Ted Cruz came on and apologized, but then he was forced to carry water for this conspiracy theory. What does it tell you that a year out, they are feeling the need to complicate and heighten the lies that they have already put out there?

CARUSONE: Yeah. This is exactly how they're going to retain their power. And it says a lot about what this means for the future. Because I said they were unrivaled. And the reason they are unrivaled is because Limbaugh is not around anymore and the rest of the right-wing media is really fragmented. The way that Fox has responded is by picking up crazy things from the fever swamps, things that wouldn't have made Fox News five years ago, and now they're actively now promoting them on the channel. The FBI false flag thing is one of these examples. And so what does that mean? More stuff coming from what otherwise would have been the fringes that never would have seen the light of day. And so the fact that they're going to turn people like Ted Cruz into validators and messengers for it is quite bad.

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someone said roger ailes ran tight ship had to be in total control thus fired beck when got too big; rupert et all have LOST control so tucker conspir fascist; still spooked by newsmax oann?

mma

Fox News applies old climate denial tactics to a new potential climate impact: severe and unseasonal tornadoes

12/15/21 11:00 AM EST

Fox host criticizes those pointing out the potential link between the deadly Kentucky tornado and climate change

12/13/21 2:09 PM EST

Fox claimed Biden’s policies are responsible for surging gas prices 102 times in 3 days

11/11/21 11:49 AM EST

https://www.mediamatters.org/climate-deniers/dozen-times-right-wing-media-said-something-ridiculous-about-climate-change-2021

no lnx mant vids

A dozen times right-wing media said something ridiculous about climate change in 2021

Special PROGRAMS

CLIMATE & ENERGY

WRITTEN BY TED MACDONALD

PUBLISHED 12/23/21

1. The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro doesn’t think that 4 degrees Celsius of warming is an emergency

On the April 14 edition of The Daily Wire’s The Ben Shapiro Show, host Ben Shapiro stated that “I do not consider it a quote-unquote ‘emergency’ if the climate were to warm 4 degrees Celsius over the course of the next century. … It’s just a way for them to create a certain level of alarmism that is unjustifiable by the facts on the ground."

It’s a good thing that Shapiro, whose publication is backed by fracking billionaires, has no authority or credibility within the climate science community: 4 C of warming would be literally catastrophic for large swaths of the globe. As The Guardian reported in 2019, at 4 C of climate change, we’d have sea levels that would be around 2 meters higher than today (which would render many coastal areas obsolete), destruction of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, oceanic dead zones, temperatures in the equatorial belt so high that would make for impossible living conditions for most of the year, and the beginning of a potential mass extinction for many species. This is not the first time that Shapiro has said something ignorant about the climate crisis; he once theorized that people affected by rising sea levels could just sell their inundated homes and move.

2. Fox’s Dagen McDowell thinks that cold temperatures in certain parts of the U.S. entirely disprove global warming

Fox News personalities regularly conflate climate with weather, and they generally do it to dismiss global warming. On the April 21 edition of The Five, co-host Dagen McDowell mockingly suggested that “they stopped calling it global warming” because of abnormally cold U.S. temperatures.

Video file

CitationFrom the April 21, 2021, edition of Fox News' The Five

In reality, our warming climate has not eradicated cold weather, and in some cases, it has even made cold weather more severe and unpredictable. Nor have abnormally cold temperatures caused a dent in the Earth’s alarming warming trend, in which the past decade was the warmest on record.

3. Ex-coal lobbyist Steve Milloy lies about warming temperatures on One America News: “The June 2021 temperature was actually below the 40-year average”

On the August 2 edition of OAN’s The Tipping Point, former coal lobbyist and Fox News contributor Steve Milloy stated: “The June 2021 temperature was actually below the 40-year average. … There’s just so much bad information going on around, and you know, you’ve just got to be careful with climate alarmists.”

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Video file

CitationFrom the August 2, 2021, edition ofOAN's The Tipping Point

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In reality, the U.S. suffered through its hottest June on record, while it was the fifth-warmest June on record globally (followed by the hottest July ever recorded in earth’s history). Milloy is a longstanding figure in the climate denial community, and viewers have really “got to be careful” with his objectively false information.

4. Fox's Laura Ingraham suggests that climate change is really “about controlling the people” and fearmongers that climate action will lead to pandemic-style lockdowns

On both the May 18 and 19 editions of Fox News’ The Ingraham Angle, host Laura Ingraham theorized that Democrats will use climate change to control Americans’ lives through pandemic-style lockdowns.

Video file

CitationFrom the May 19, 2021, edition of Fox News' The Ingraham Angle

This is a dangerous conspiracy theory being pushed by prominent climate deniers that has taken hold among far-right media figures. To be clear, the way to fight climate change is not via lockdowns (COVID-19 lockdowns “only marginally reduced greenhouse gas emissions”), but by bringing about systemic change in our energy system and reimagining our economy and the way we live.

5. Newsmax’s Chris Salcedo doesn’t believe in “proof” that CO2 emissions are contributing to climate change

There were multiple times this year when Newsmax host Chris Salcedo went on a perplexing rant claiming there’s somehow no proof that rising CO2 emissions affect temperatures in any meaningful way. On the August 18 edition of The Chris Salcedo Show, Salcedo called global warming a “religion” that “has not been proven through science” before going on to say, “There's no mathematical proof out there that states that X amount of man-made CO2 yields Y amount of temperature change.”

Then on the December 14 edition of his show, Salcedo stated: “From experts I have read and interviewed over the years, I can say that there is no proof that man's C02 emissions are destroying the planet.” Salcedo must be interviewing some pretty fringe climate deniers as “experts,” as there is effectively unanimous scientific consensus that “humans are changing Earth's climate, primarily through greenhouse gas emissions.”

6. Fox’s Tucker Carlson rants that climate change is somehow a conspiracy to shrink your children

While Tucker Carlson is no stranger to promoting weird conspiracy theories about climate change, one of his segments from June went completely overboard. On the June 22 edition of Tucker Carlson Tonight, the Fox prime-time host accused climate scientists of wanting to use “human engineering” to “make human children smaller than they are now” and thereby reduce their lifetime greenhouse gas emissions: “All we need to do is experiment on human children and we can solve climate change.”

Tucker Human Engineering

Carlson’s claim was based on a speech given by a bioethicist nearly five years ago. As Gizmodo reported, “The ideas are bad, but they’re utterly fringe. Activists are clamoring for transforming society, not individual humans. You’d never know that from watching the segment, though.” But taking a fringe remark out of context and repurposing it to claim that the government will take over our lives seems pretty on-brand for Fox News.

7. Dennis Prager thinks the simple solution to a warming climate is to just use more air conditioning

Conservative commentator Dennis Prager, who leads a nonprofit online “university” that promotes climate denial, among other conservative talking points, offered his own absurd “solution” to climate change during a talk on September 22: “Did you know that there is a solution to a warm climate? It's called air conditioning. It's very effective.”

Prager’s comments follow a concerning new form of climate denial in right-wing media: acknowledging the climate is changing but claiming there’s nothing we can do to prevent it -- we must learn to live with it instead. In Prager’s case, he suggests that well-off people can just adapt to the warming climate by using air conditioning when it gets hot (which would only increase emissions even further), while those without access to air conditioning will suffer.

8. On Fox News’ The Five, Greg Gutfeld claims that the data to prove climate change is “never there”

On the September 2 edition of Fox News’ The Five, co-host Greg Gutfeld criticized those who connect climate change to extreme weather events -- specifically to the destructive Hurricane Ida. He stated that the data is “never there,” and that “the severity” of such storms “has been on the decline.”

LOMBORGIAN?

Video file

CitationFrom the September 2, 2021, edition of Fox News' The Five

For one, science has shown that climate change is affecting hurricanes in a number of ways as storms are dumping more rain, moving slower, and rapidly intensifying -- all hallmarks of Hurricane Ida. Secondly, the data is indeed “there,” as climate models have been correct over the past 50 years. Additionally, Gutfeld talks about “severity” only in terms of decreasing deaths from natural disasters. However, focusing on this statistic obscures the many other reasons that climate change is a serious and deadly threat. As one scientist puts it, “climate change kills, from poor nutrition status and poor health linked to episodes of drought and harvest failures, the spread of infectious diseases, … increasing violent conflict, … and of course the impact of extreme events like tropical cyclones and flash floods.”

9. On Newsmax, Republican commentator Ford O’Connell claims that “climate change is the ultimate Trojan horse for socialism” before stating that the Earth “may or not be warming”

Newsmax had a wild year of promoting climate denial, and right-wing pundit Ford O’Connell’s claim that the Earth “may or may not be warming” on the October 25 edition of American Agenda is just another sad example.

Video file

CitationFrom the October 25, 2021, edition of Newsmax's American Agenda

The context behind this segment is noteworthy -- Newsmax was attacking its much larger rival Fox News for “going woke” and “making a permanent hard-left turn” by suggesting that the newly launched Fox Weather streaming service is taking climate change too seriously. In actuality, Fox Weather is just ignoring the issue altogether, but it’s funny to see Newsmax melt down over the fact that Fox is apparently not right-wing enough.

10. On Fox Business, Patricia Lee Onwuka of the Independent Women’s Forum claims that climate change is a “fallacy”

Discussing President Biden’s response to Hurricane Ida on the September 3 edition of Fox Business' Mornings With Maria, right-wing commentator Patricia Lee Onwuka suggested that climate change is a “fallacy” that Biden is using to advance his agenda; she also said that “the facts dispute” the idea that extreme weather events like hurricanes are connected to climate change.

Video file

CitationFrom the September 3, 2021, edition of Fox Business' Mornings With Maria

As noted above, we already know the ways in which climate change is affecting hurricanes and worsening their impacts on our warming world. Those facts don’t seem to matter to Onwuka or the Independent Women’s Forum, which has received both Koch and tobacco industry money and has a history of climate denial.

11. On OAN, Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC) says that “we have the cleanest environment anywhere in the world” because of the fossil fuel industry

A lot of stupid things were said by right-wing media regarding this year’s United Nations climate conference, known as COP26. One of the more head-scratching comments came from Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC), who was featured on a November edition of OAN’s In Focus With Stephanie Hamill to downplay the seriousness of climate change. He went on to hype up the U.S. fossil fuel industry by stating that “we have the cleanest environment anywhere in the world” because of “clean energy practices” like fracking.

While Cawthorn was alluding to the fact that natural gas obtained by fracking is cleaner than coal (it emits much less CO2 than coal when burned), it’s important to remember that fracking also releases methane, which is about 80 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2. And like coal, there are numerous water and air pollution problems associated with its use. In any case, the side effects of fossil fuel operations involve literally polluting our air and waterways, so in no way are they responsible for making our environment clean and safe. Additionally, despite Cawthorn’s boast that “I’ll put our air [quality] up against anyone’s,” the U.S. is nowhere near the top of global environmental rankings by any metric.

12. Fossil fuel lobbyist Daniel Turner thinks concern about climate change is “so overblown that it is hyperbolic and silly”

On the November 1 edition of Fox News’ America’s Newsroom, Daniel Turner of the fossil fuel shill group Power the Future tried to throw cold water on COP26 by claiming that “climate change panic is so overblown that it is hyperbolic and silly” and suggesting that the U.N. tries to scare people by publishing “nonsense reports.”

Video file

CitationFrom the November 1, 2021, edition of Fox News' America's Newsroom

We’re not sure what’s so “silly” about being concerned with a planet that’s on track for over 2.5 C of warming, which will have devastating consequences for billions of people around the world. Turner, who has spent almost his entire career working for Koch-backed groups, has made similar ludicrous statements in the past, including claiming that climate activists are somehow thrilled with the COVID-19 pandemic because it’s supposedly accomplishing their goals of implementing a Green New Deal.

no lnx  // https://www.mediamatters.org/lara-logan  benghazi fail

Dr. Fauci 'Astounded' Fox News Has Not Disciplined Lara Logan

BY ISABEL VAN BRUGEN ON 12/3/21

Infectious diseases expert Dr. Anthony Fauci on Thursday night said he was "astounded" that Fox News hadn't taken disciplinary action against Fox Nation host Lara Logan for comparing him to Josef Mengele, a Nazi doctor who performed medical experiments at the Auschwitz concentration camp.

"What I find striking is how she gets no discipline whatsoever from the Fox network," said Fauci during an appearance on MSNBC's All In.

"How they can let her say that with no comment and no disciplinary action. I'm astounded by that," he said.

[READ MORE Fauci to Appear on Fox for First Time in Weeks Amid Conservative Outrage

Fauci told host Chris Hayes when pressed on the issue that Logan's comments were "preposterous," "unconscionable" and "an insult to all of the people who suffered and died under the Nazi regime in the concentration camps."

"Look, Chris, I think the response is with so many people throughout the country and the world are responding to that absolutely preposterous and disgusting comparison that she makes," the chief White House medical adviser said.

Fauci accused Logan of having "no idea what she's talking about," and to be "incorrect in everything she says."

"Forget about the fact that she was being totally slanderous to me and as usual had no idea what she was talking about. Saying that it's as benign as flu. When did influenza kill 770,000 Americans?" he continued.

NEWSWEEK ]

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that there were 24,000 to 62,000 flu deaths in the U.S. during the 2019-2020 flu season, from October 1, 2019, through April 4, 2020.

An estimated 385,343 COVID-19 related deaths recorded in 2020. The CDC notes that in at least 90 percent of those deaths, COVID-19 was listed as the underlying cause of death, while the remaining had it listed as a contributing cause of death.

"So not only is she being slanderous and disrespectful to so many people who were killed in the concentration camps by Dr. Mengele but she absolutely has no idea what she's talking about. She's completely incorrect in everything she says," Fauci added.

Fox Nation host Lara Logan in 2017

Lara Logan, former chief foreign affairs correspondent for CBS News, speaks prior to presenting Father Patrick Desbois with the Lantos Human Rights Prizeduring a ceremony on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, on October 26, 2017. Logan has faced heavy criticism for comparing Dr. Anthony Fauci to Nazi doctor Josef Mengele.

sparked by cdv black flag

aha omg vax is everywherebasically = neg?!

radicalization, polarization --> civil war

fox murdochs burn down the world for money and power (vax and AGW) psychopaths? ; koch gop anti-gubmint erode norms, 

fox briefly forgot trump TV hacks and acted like a news org and reported FACT that trump lost AZ, immediate thrrat from oann newsmax reb mercer soc media play

Tucker Carlson’s 'nakedly fascist propaganda' leads to resignations, internal outrage, public fury — and a silent Murdoch

David Badash and The New Civil Rights Movement November 22, 2021

Two longtime Fox News contributors very publicly quit the far right wing cable channel this weekend over "Patriot Purge," a January 6 revisionism series created by the network's star anchor, Tucker Carlson. But other veteran Fox News anchors internally were so outraged their concerns went all the way to the head of Fox Corporation, the parent company of Fox News, who did nothing to stop its release and is reportedly refusing to comment.

Conservatives Stephen Hayes and Jonah Goldberg, the latter a staple on other news outlets as well, resigned in protest Sunday night. NPR reports the pair "pointed to a breaking point earlier this month: network star Tucker Carlson's three-part series on the Jan. 6 siege of the U.S. Capitol that relied on fabrications and conspiracy theories to exonerate the Trump supporters who participated in the attack."

"It's basically saying that the Biden regime is coming after half the country and this is the War on Terror 2.0," Goldberg tells NPR. "It traffics in all manner of innuendo and conspiracy theories that I think legitimately could lead to violence. That for me, and for Steve, was the last straw."

Goldberg's and Hayes' "resignations reflect larger tumult within Fox News over Carlson's series 'Patriot Purge' and his increasingly strident stances, and over the network's willingness to let its opinion stars make false, paranoid claims against President Biden, his administration and his supporters."

But NPR also reports that Chris Wallace, the top anchor at Fox News for nearly two decades, and Bret Baier, another top Fox News anchor and the network's chief political correspondent, were so outraged they "shared their objections with Fox News Media CEO Suzanne Scott and its president of news, Jay Wallace. Those objections rose to Lachlan Murdoch, the chairman and CEO of the network's parent company, Fox Corporation. Through a senior spokeswoman, Scott and Wallace declined comment. Murdoch did not return a request for comment through a spokesman."

At HuffPost senior reporter Christopher Mathias says "Patriot Purge" is "the most nakedly fascist piece of propaganda Carlson has ever produced. And it comes at adangerous moment: The insurrection is on its way to becoming as noble an enterprise as the Boston Tea Party for large parts of the American right."

"Carlson's insurrection agitprop sparked a similar wave of warnings from many experts on fascism and misinformation," Mathias adds. "Propaganda like this, they argued, could one day render the shocking events of Jan. 6 as amere preview of the right-wing violence to come."

Nicole Hemmer, author of “Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics," described “Patriot Purge" as “an overarching fantasy about the insurrection that goes like this: It was not an insurrection," she wrote for CNN. “To the extent there was violence, it was stirred up by members of the government and left-wing agitators.All of it was orchestrated so that the full force of federal law enforcement could be unleashed against Trump supporters, marking them as enemies of the state." FALSE FLAG

Goldberg and Hayes at their conservative website The Dispatch describe Carlson's "Patriot Purge" as "a collection of incoherent conspiracy-mongering, riddled with factual inaccuracies, half-truths, deceptive imagery, and damning omissions. And its message is clear: The U.S. government is targeting patriotic Americans in the same manner —and with the same tools—that it used to target al Qaeda."

Earlier this month Rolling Stonesaid "Patriot Purge" is both "profoundly dishonest" and "profoundly dangerous."

11 21 an

at Fox News, far-right opinion host Tucker Carlson has not only been a supporter of Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán and promoted the racist, anti-Semitic Great Replacement theory — he has also been an apologist for the insurrectionists who violently assaulted the U.S. Capitol Building on January 6 in the hope of stopping Congress from certifying now-President Joe Biden's Electoral College victory over then-President Donald Trump. And Carlson's coverage of January 6 is so beyond the pale that two conservative journalists, according to National Public Radio, have left Fox News because of it.

Those conservatives, NPR's David Folkenflik reports, are Jonah Goldberg and Stephen Hayes. Goldberg is known his years as a National Review editor.And Hayes was with the now-defunct Weekly Standard, whose Bill Kristol started The Bulwark with fellow Never Trump conservative Charlie Sykes following the Standard's demise.

"Two long-time conservative Fox News commentators have resigned in protest of what they call a pattern of incendiary and fabricated claims by the network's opinion hosts in support of former President Donald Trump. In separate interviews with NPR, Stephen Hayes and Jonah Goldberg pointed to a breaking point earlier this month: network star Tucker Carlson's three-part series on the January 6 siege of the U.S. Capitol that relied on fabrications and conspiracy theories to exonerate the Trump supporters who participated in the attack."

Goldberg and Hayes, Folkenflik notes, became "mainstays" of Bret Baier's "Special Report" when Fox News hired them in 2009. And together, Goldberg and Hayes started the conservative website The Dispatch.

Goldberg, interviewed by NPR, said of "Patriot Purge," Carlson's three-part series, "It's basically saying that the Biden regime is coming after half the country, and this is the War on Terror 2.0. It traffics in all manner of innuendo and conspiracy theories that I think legitimately could lead to violence. That, for me and for Steve, was the last straw."

Speaking to NPR, Hayes was vehemently critical of Fox News for airing promotional videos for Carlson's "Patriot Purge" series.

"I thought it was irresponsible to put that out into the public airwaves," Hayes told NPR. "The trailer (for the series) basically gave people the impression that the U.S. government was coming after all patriots — half of the country, in the word of one of the protagonists in the piece. And that the federal government was going to be using the tools and tactics that it used to go after Al-Qaida. And that's not happening. That's not true."

Hayes continued, "It's a narrative that's contradicted by certainly the vast collection of legal documents charging those who participated in January 6, the broad reporting by a wide variety of news outlets on what happened on January 6 then and in the time since — andcontradicted in part by Fox News' own news site and the reporting that people on the news side have done."

READ:Trump lawyer who tried to overturn the 2020 election gets named to US Election Assistance Commission cleta

Goldberg also told NPR,"Being a Fox contributor is kind of a brass ring in conservative and right-wing circles, and I was well-compensated. I'm not looking to be a martyr or ask for pity or any of that kind of stuff. But it's a significant financial hit, for sure.And it's also cutting yourself off from a very large audience. We don't regret the decision, but we found it regrettable that we had to make the decision."

  1. ### :{Fox News host compares trial of Kenosha shooter to murder of George Floyd:(style="box-sizing:border-box;font-weight:normal;fill:#ffffff;"):}:

11/11/21 7:35 PM EST

  1. ### :{Fox News' Gutfeld praises Kenosha shooter for killing protesters and doing “what the government should have done”:(style="box-sizing:border-box;font-weight:normal;fill:#ffffff;"):}:

11/11/21 5:52 PM EST

  2. random
  4. THE LATEST
  5. Fox furiously denies that anchor Maria Bartiromo told Trump AG Bill Barr the same election lies she pushed on air
  6. 11/15/21 10:07 AM EST
  7. Tucker Carlson gives warm welcome to Michael Flynn, who recently called for a military coup to overturn the 2020 election
  8. 11/15/21 9:58 AM EST
  9. Fox & Friends uses extreme weather and supply chain issues to promote food buckets
  10. 11/14/21 11:39 AM EST
  11. Sean Hannity: “The unequal standard of justice is still on full display tonight after former Trump advisor Steve Bannon was indicted”
  12. 11/12/21 10:28 PM EST
  13. Tucker Carlson characterizes Bannon indictment as an “armed political instrument” that’s “punishing critics of the Democratic Party”
  14. 11/12/21 9:14 PM EST
  15. Fox News lies about Joe Biden speech to imply a racial slur
  16. 11/12/21 5:09 PM EST
  17. Daily Wire host: “Shooting people is not against the law”
  18. 11/12/21 4:25 PM EST
  19. Steve Bannon: “We're taking over all the elections”
  20. 11/12/21 3:05 PM EST
  21. Fox News isn’t covering Trump’s defense of the rioters who chanted, “Hang Mike Pence”
  22. 11/12/21 2:58 PM EST
  23. Spotify’s Joe Rogan baselessly claims the Biden administration is limiting monoclonal antibodies because the treatment “discourages people from getting vaccinated”
  24. 11/12/21 1:11 PM EST
  25. Alex Jones praises Tucker Carlson's false flag series on January 6: “They have surpassed Infowars' greatest exploits”
  26. 11/12/21 12:45 PM EST
  27. Steve Bannon defends Marjorie Taylor Greene after she says that the Capitol is “like a glass castle just waiting to be shattered by the American people”
  28. 11/12/21 12:45 PM EST
  29. “Stop the Steal” organizer Ali Alexander says “self-defense is always allowed” against “demonic members of the press”
  30. 11/12/21 11:50 AM EST
  31. Unmasking Moms for Liberty
  32. 11/12/21 10:17 AM EST
  33. Cable news coverage of the Rust shooting proves networks can cover gun violence substantively
  34. 11/12/21 10:02 AM EST
  35. Fox News hostMark Levin defends the Eastman memo: It’s “not a completely crackpot theory”
  36. 11/11/21 10:18 PM EST
  37. Tucker Carlson says inflation “always” leads to “revolution”
  38. 11/11/21 8:53 PM EST
  39. Fox News host compares trial of Kenosha shooter to murder of George Floyd
  40. 11/11/21 7:35 PM EST
  41. Fox News' Gutfeld praises Kenosha shooter for killing protesters and doing “what the government should have done”
  42. 11/11/21 5:52 PM EST
  43. How Politico insists on getting Larry Summers wrong — in order to undermine the Biden agenda
  44. 11/11/21 4:51 PM EST

variety fox weather

...Fox Weather is part of a growing assortment of broadband products launched by Fox News Media under CEO Suzanne Scott. Fox Nation serves as a sort of “Netflix for conservatives,” offering a regular show from Tucker Carlson, true crime stories from Nancy Grace and, at times, movies from Clint Eastwood. A streaming service launched in 2020 makes Fox News programming available to overseas subscribers. There are other media ventures, too, including a publishing partnership with HarperCollins for books from Fox News personnel. If successful, Berg says, Fox Weather will “expand our ecosystem.”

There is hope Fox Weather will also broaden the roster of advertisers using a Fox News Media outlet. Candy manufacturers and soda marketers, not the typical buyers of ads in news and opinion content, are reserving inventory on Fox Weather, says Jeff Collins, executive vice president of ad sales at Fox News Media, in an interview. But the company is selling ad time to new advertisers as well as packages to pre-existing Fox News sponsors, he says, including four charter sponsors he declined to name. Advertisers can plan ideas around specific weather developments, he says, like storm coverage. Part of the appeal, he says, is that weather is “brand safe” and not likely to align advertisers with controversial content....

https://www.mediamatters.org/tucker-carlson/tucker-carlson-vaccinated-spread-covid-just-unvaccinated-theres-no-difference

an 1021 ...Hasan went on to say that with the Iraq War, "Fox was at the center of that Republican administration propaganda campaign. A few years ago, there was a poll that came out that showed that even in 2015, 52% of Fox News viewers believed that we had found WMDs in Iraq — in 2015! — compared to 14% of MSNBC viewers, I would just point out."

Hasan continued, "So, it's very important to point out that the same lies that were told about Iraq — that were believed on a completely different level by Fox viewers compared to everyone else — the same thing on COVID. You see it with the studies done on Sean Hannity's viewers at the start of the pandemic. Again and again, Fox News is this misinformation machine. We go, 'Ha ha ha, look how silly they are. Ha ha ha, look how eccentric they are.' No, people actually die as a result of watching Fox News, whether it's going to war in Iraq or the pandemic."

bad trinity vaxxer:

https://www.mediamatters.org/sean-hannity/sean-hannity-warns-government-going-tie-you-down-and-put-jab-you

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-laura-ingraham-attacks-small-minded-control-freaks-implementing-vaccine-mandates

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

no lnx twt

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

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

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

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

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

Like vaccine disinformation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

1021 an

...The United States homicide rate has reached an unprecedented 100-year record high, and while many news outlets have shed light on the disturbing statistic, New York Times opinion columnist Paul Krugman is exposing the real problem with Fox News' reporting of it.

On Wednesday, October 6, Krugman took to Twitter with his take on Fox News' presentation of those statistics. Fox News noted that the homicide rate spiked by a whopping 30% from 2019 to 2020. While the statistic is based on accurate data, Krugman pointed out that Fox News left out one glaring detail: the murder rate spiked during former President Donald Trump's time in office, long before President Joe Biden took office.

Krugman tweeted, "To be clear: Fox News isn't stupid. It thinks its viewers are stupid — that they won't notice that Trump was president in 2020, that they'll blame Biden for bad things that happened *before he took office* And Fox News is probably right."...kaylee spox deleted

25th anniv --> crit

timeline BS eg

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/400-moments-defined-fox-news

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-host-says-chinese-values-have-infiltrated-nba-really-dangerous-way

:{https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/:(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:fox-has-undermined-vaccines-nearly-every-day-last-six-months

https://www.mediamatters.org/tucker-carlson/tucker-carlson-guest-pfizer-vaccine-available-us-not-fda-approved

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-keeps-turning-vaccine-resisters-culture-war-heroes

// ingraham

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-smears-doj-effort-stop-criminal-threats-against-educators-war-its-viewers

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-trump-feedback-loop-generated-eastmans-presidential-coup-memo

no lnx vids

John Eastman’s coup memo was the result of the Fox-Trump feedback loop

WRITTEN BY MATT GERTZ

PUBLISHED 10/04/21 1:59 PM EDT

The prominent conservative lawyer behind a memo explaining how to subvert the 2020 election for President Donald Trump reportedly first caught Trump’s attention while shilling on the president’s behalf during an interview on Fox News.

Trump’s obsession with Fox programming is well-documented. Throughout his presidency, he regularly tweeted in response to shows he was watching; staffed his administration and legal defense teams with Fox regulars; and shaped his decision-making around advice he received from its personalities, both in person and on the air. On issues as diverse as border wall contracting, pandemic response, and pardons, federal policy responded to what the president was seeing on the right-wing propaganda network.

John Eastman, a Claremont Institute senior fellow who spoke to the pro-Trump mob in the hours before the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, apparently put himself on Trump’s radar in similar fashion.

“Trump, who had never met Mr. Eastman, saw him on the Fox News talk show of the far-right commentator Mark Levin railing against the Russia investigation” in mid-2019, The New York Times reported Saturday. “Within two months, Mr. Eastman was sitting in the Oval Office for an hourlong meeting.”

Eastman remained in Trump’s orbit over the next year and a half, according to the Times, and, after Trump lost the 2020 election, the right-wing attorney created a plan by which Vice President Mike Pence and congressional Republicans could use bogus claims of voter fraud to keep Trump in power. Eastman’s six-step scheme to end American democracy, revealed last month by The Washington Post and CNN, was foiled largely because Pence was ultimately unwilling to go through with it.

“Mr. Eastman’s appeal to Mr. Trump,” the Times reported, “rested in large part on his expansive views of presidential power — and his willingness to tell Mr. Trump what he wanted to hear.”

That description matches Eastman’s performance during the Fox interview that initially captured Trump’s attention. That appearance, for the May 12, 2019, edition of Life, Liberty, and Levin, followed the release of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report detailing his investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election. Trump and his supporters tried to spin that document as vindicating him. But it was actually incredibly damning, documenting, among other things, a variety of ways Trump had sought to obstruct the probe.

Over the course of his hour-long sitdown withLevin, who introduced him as a “brilliant” legal scholar, Eastman explained how the Constitution and federal law supported all of Trump’s most corrupt and bigoted impulses, while decrying Mueller’s team as biased political partisans whose probe was itself illegal and perhaps deliberately “set up to create a media frenzy.”

According to Eastman, it is impossible for a president to violate the law by interfering with a federal investigation, even if that investigation’s purpose was to review his activities or those of his associates. “The notion that the president can’t determine the course of an investigation is the most basic violation of separation of powers,” he claimed. Even if Trump had successfully fired Mueller himself it would be legal, according to Eastman, because “the entire executive branch is headed by one guy and the only constitutional check on that is through an impeachment power, not through statutes and not through regulations internal to the Department of Justice, because the president has the authority to change those whenever he wants.”

After Levin described one such incident mentioned in the report, when Trump allegedly ordered White House counsel Don McGahn to fire Mueller, Eastman said that “directing McGahn to fire him is no different than him picking up the phone himself, and even that would not have been obstruction.”

Video file

Citation From the May 12, 2019, edition of Fox News' Life, Liberty, and Levin.

Eastman went on to agree with Levin’s claim that the Mueller investigation was itself “fundamentally illegal” because “nobody in the administration itself [was] accused with any evidence of a crime,” which is required under the special counsel statute. In reality, Trump’s 2016 campaign chair and his first White House national security adviser were among the litany of presidential associates who were ultimately convicted or entered guilty pleas through the probe.

When Levin asked later in the program, “This is really a rejection by the Democrat Party and the media and the rest of them, a rejection of the 2016 election, isn't it?” Eastman replied, “I think so. They still can't believe that they lost that election and they're trying to rationalize that there must've been something nefarious in order to produce it.”

He went on to say that “this is really a challenge to the results of the last election, which means it is a challenge to the American people and the very notion that we govern ourselves,” and that the intent is to create a “tyranny of the majority.”

Video file

Citation From the May 12, 2019, edition of Fox News' Life, Liberty, and Levin.

Eastman also expressed support for Trump on a variety of other legal issues. He rejected the notion that payments foreign countries make to Trump through his hotel are violations of the emoluments clause of the Constitution, and decried federal judges who blocked versions of Trump’s Muslim travel ban as “part of a resistance movement to undo the results of the 2016 election.”

At the conclusion of the interview, Eastman said that nothing Trump has done rises to the level of “high crimes and misdemeanors” required for impeachment under the Constitution.

“I've been stunned at how scrupulous Trump and his team have been in staying within the legal lines that they had,” he said, contrasting to how President Barack Obama “blew through the lines on executive power and constitutional authority on numerous occasions."

Video file

Citation From the May 12, 2019, edition of Fox News' Life, Liberty, and Levin.

Eastman was able to turn an interview on a Sunday night Fox show into a position of real political power because the president himself had been glued to the set. And after Trump and his propagandists at Fox created a web of lies about a “rigged” election, he was there to concoct a legal pretext to keep Trump in office. The coup plot failed -- but it did result in deadly violence when a crowd incited by speeches from Trump, Eastman, and others stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6 in hopes of preventing the peaceful transition of power.

Since then, the situation has only grown more dire, as the Republican Party and right-wing disinformation apparatus have institutionalized Trump’s lie that the election was stolen, laying the groundwork to rig future elections in favor of the GOP, through Eastman’s strategy or another one. And Fox was at the root of it all.

Related

Trump lawyer John Eastman touted his plan to overturn the 2020 election in interviews with right-wing media

09/21/21 1:25 PM EDT

Broadcast news shows ignore Trump coup memo

09/22/21 4:32 PM EDT

CNN’s Brian Stelter highlights failure of news broadcasts to cover the Trump coup memo

09/26/21 2:44 PM EDT

https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/foxs-antivax-programming-moral-abomination-least-its-great-ratings

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/wake-hurricane-ida-fox-doubling-down-climate-denial-order-attack-bidens-infrastructure

Fox News is using Hurricane Ida to downplay the seriousness of climate change and attack President Joe Biden’s climate agenda, including the infrastructure bill which contains measures to make us more resilient in the face of extreme weather.

The fingerprints of climate change on the recent Hurricane Ida, which caused extensive damage from the Southeast to the Northeast U.S., were clear. One was its rapid intensification over very warm Gulf waters before pummeling Louisiana. Another was the amount of heavy rainfall that the storm brought in the Northeast that broke records in New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania, and caused major flash flooding. Beyond clearly showing that climate change is happening now,Ida’s devastating impacts, particularly in the Northeast, exposed how ill-prepared we are for it. And much of the coverage of Hurricane Ida was permeated with the theme that “​​the infrastructure in place today was built for a climate that no longer exists.”

In fact, with increased media coverage of events such as Ida, the public is beginning to increasingly understand the dangers of climate change and the need for actions that not only reduce climate-causing emissions, but make our communities less vulnerable to the climate impacts that are already happening. But as the public and more media outlets are starting to connect extreme weather to the need for climate action, Fox News coverage seeks to break those links.

Fox networks downplayed climate change and accused Biden of politicizing Hurricane Ida to push a climate agenda

Since September 2, the day after Ida’s remnants ravaged the Northeast, Fox News and Fox Business have aired at least a dozen segments, combined, that claimed that the Democrats are using Ida as a pretext to implement a massive climate agenda including through the infrastructure bill [W/ CORP Tax increase]. These attacks, coupled with instances of climate denial, show the network’s ultimate goal is to stop the implementation of Biden’s climate agenda by all means necessary.

Fox’s favorite new climate contrarian Michael Shellenberger appeared on two Fox programs to downplay climate’s impact on Ida and to argue that the climate crisis is actually overblown, first on the September 2 edition of Tucker Carlson Tonight, and later on the September 7 edition of The Ingraham Angle. In both segments, Shellenberger accused Democrats of using climate change only as a cover to make the economy more dependent on renewable energy sources like solar power, which he has a history of attacking. (Shellenberger is useful for Fox News because he doesn’t outright deny that climate change is happening; he only -- and falsely -- suggests that it’s not a major problem. In this sense, he provides the perfect cover for the fossil fuel industry to keep polluting the planet.)

Perhaps one of the more egregious examples came during a discussion of Biden’s response to Hurricane Ida during the September 3 edition of Fox Business’ Mornings With Maria. Guest Patrice Lee Onwuka of the Koch-funded Independent Women's Forum accused Biden of using the “fallacy” of climate change to get his agenda passed:

[vid]

paTRICE LEE ONWUKA (INDEPENDENT WOMEN’S FORUM): I think President Biden is absolutely looking out for what kind of a legacy he wants to leave behind, and he will try his best to get his agenda passed, using whatever fallacy that he can find. I mean, it’s remarkable that we're talking about, you know, a hurricane, and people who’ve lost livelihoods, some who’ve lost their lives, and we’re still pivoting to this idea that it’sall driven by climate change, when frankly, the facts dispute that. So it is unfortunate that the American people are subjected to this every single day, but this is going to continue.

There is no “fallacy” here and she is wrong on the facts -- climate scientists know that climate change has an impact on hurricanes, from things like rainfall to intensity level to how slow they move, and these impacts will only get worse in the future unless carbon emissions are rapidly cut.

There were many other examples that attacked Democrats for politicizing extreme weather events and threw cold water on the infrastructure bill. On the September 3 edition of Fox News’ Your World With Neil Cavuto, correspondent Chad Pergam began a segment on the infrastructure bill by stating, “Democrats are using the storm to justify their push for the infrastructure bill and the $3.5 trillion bill. It's loaded with environmental provisions.”[which are obviously inherently bad?!]

During the September 4 edition of Bongino Unfiltered, host Dan Bongino began a segment on Ida by also claiming, “Democrats wasted no time demanding action against climate change.” The segment which displayed chyrons like “Democrats’ Climate Power Play” and “Dems Push Climate Alarmism After Deadly Storms” also featured a Democratic strategist squaring off against longtime climate denier Marc Morano. Morano used his time to argue that the climate crisis is overblown. Although climate “both-sides” debates should be a relic of the past as they were promoted solely by polluting interests wanting to advance the narrative that climate change is “debatable,” Fox had no qualms in reviving it here despite overwhelming evidence of climate’s impact on Ida.

In addition, Fox invited climate-denying meteorologist Joe Bastardi on the September 8 edition of Tucker Carlson Tonight.The segment began with guest host Brian Kilmeadeclaiming that Joe Biden is “using these disasters for political purposes” in order to pass the infrastructure bill. Bastardi then backed up Kilmeade’s claim by dismissing the climate impacts of Ida, simply noting that other bad storms have happened in the past. He also falsely claimed, “The sun, the oceans, the events, the very design of the system, always try to fight back, and at the very least you can't tell what CO2 is doing.”

During an interview withU.S. Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY) on the September 4 edition of Fox News Live, co-anchor Anita Vogel referenced Biden’s and Sen. Chuck Schumer’s (D-NY) comments on Ida and climate change, and asked Malliotakis if “it's appropriate to blame this on climate change. … Should he be bringing politics into this when people are suffering?” Malliotakis responded, “We all need to do our part to be more environmentally friendly and reduce our footprint, but at the end of the day, you know, they're using this to push their radical-left agenda to try to pass a $3.5 trillion socialist wish list.”

Some Fox hosts also made similar comments in the wake of Ida. On the September 2 edition of Fox News’ Hannity, host Sean Hannity began a segment that ultimately downplayed the climate impacts of Ida by stating, “The left is blaming climate change for the heavy rainfall, severe weather and using it as another pretext to push their Green New Deal socialist agenda.” On the September 5 edition of Fox News’ The Next Revolution With Steve Hilton, hostSteve Hiltondid a short segment on Democrats using Ida to implement the Green New Deal.

Although the infrastructure bill is not the Green New Deal, that hasn’t stopped congressional Republicans, Fox News, and other right-wing media outlets from trying to compare the two. Fox is utterly obsessed with the**Green New Dea**l and is using it to undermine basically every climate action that is proposed, however modest.This time, it’s the infrastructure bill the costs of which would pale in comparison to what unchecked climate change would do to the global economy.

Ida hit the U.S. against the backdrop of the recent report from U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that conclusively linked climate change “to an increased frequency and/or intensity of some weather and climate extremes since pre-industrial times.” It also followed a summer of harrowing extreme weather events that also had climate fingerprints all over them, including Western U.S. wildfires and drought, and a brutal Pacific Northwest heat wave. The fact that, despite all these events, Fox continued to diminish climate’s impact on Ida and argued for continued delayed action on climate change shows how much of a dangerous threat the network is to the discourse on climate change.

https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/fox-news-2653517083/

gen milley vs gaetz "take their budget" [grn beret?]

officially authoritarian?

yikes omg

https://www.alternet.org/2021/08/josh-hawley-love-america/

Sen. Hawley's Orwellian 'Love America Act' is part of the fascist campaign to rewrite history

no lx

Chauncey DeVega and Salon August 06, 2021

Donald Trump may no longer be president, but the American people are still stuck in a state of malignant normality that his presidency brought into being.

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Psychologist John Gartner describes such a state of being this way:

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Malignant normality is when a malignantly narcissistic leader takes control of society and gradually changes reality for everyone else. So their crazy internal reality becomes enacted in the lived true external reality of that society. This is how a leader can come in and change the mores of their society.

In his role as national cheerleader and secular priest, President Biden is trying to provide moral leadership and healing for a traumatized nation, still shell-shocked by the Trump movement's continuing assault on democracy and society.

Biden's efforts have provided only short-term relief. The neofascist threat is escalating;Biden and the Democrats have shown themselves largely impotent against it. The coronavirus pandemic is now resurgent because of a new variant and Trump's followers' refusal to be vaccinated.

For these and many other reasons — most notably, extreme wealth and income inequality and the global climate crisis — America is becoming a dystopia.

The collective emotional state of many Americans, or at least those who are paying attention and still care, is frustration and unease.

Malignant normality creates a playground for fascism and other forms of right-wing maleficence. The Jim Crow Republicans and other elements of the white right are taking advantage of this broken America to escalate their attacks on free speech, reason, truth, reality, human and civil rights and multiracial democracy by weaponizing the nearly meaningless term "critical race theory." (Yes, the term has a real meaning in academic discourse, but not as bandied about by Republicans in 2021.)

For the likes of Sen. Josh Hawley, the notorious Missouri Republican, such a crisis is a dream opportunity. Last week, Hawley proposed a bill called the Love America Act of 2021, which would deny federal funding to schools that teach the real history of America and the centrality of racism and white supremacy to the country's origins. The key text of this document reads:

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RESTRICTION ON FEDERAL FUNDS FOR TEACHING THAT CERTAIN DOCUMENTS ARE PRODUCTS OF WHITE SUPREMACY OR RACISM — … [N]o Federal funds shall be provided to an educational agency or school that teaches that thePledge of Allegiance, the Declaration of Independence, or the Constitution of the United States is a product of white supremacy or racism.

Hawley's "Love America" bill is not a joke. It is a statement of shared principles and loyalty to an anti-democratic, racial-authoritarian movement that is winning victories all over the United States.

For example, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is now mandating thoughtcrime surveys to determine the political beliefs of teachers and students in public colleges and universities.

Florida has also "banned" the teaching of "critical race theory" in public schools, and will permit — in practice, this may mean encourage — students to record classes without the knowledge or consent of their teachers. This potentialsurveillance is an obvious form of intimidation or threat against intellectual freedom, and specifically targeting teachers and other education professionals who are perceived as "liberal" and therefore "unfair" to conservatives.

The Republican-controlled Texas Senate has passed legislation overturning a requirement that the history of the civil rights movement be taught in public schools. That legislation would also remove a course requirement that the Ku Klux Klan should be condemned. As I wrote recently for Salon:

... the requirements removed from the state's curriculum include two speeches by Martin Luther King Jr., any mention of Latino labor organizers Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, and any mention of Thomas Jefferson's long-term relationship with Sally Hemings, an enslaved teenage child who bore six of his children. The bill bars any use of the New York Times' 1619 Project and "prohibits teaching that slavery was part of the 'true' founding of the United States" and removes the requirement to study the "history of white supremacy, including but not limited to the institution of slavery, the eugenics movement, and the Ku Klux Klan, and the ways in which it is morally wrong."

Tennessee has proposed fining school districts at least $1 million if a teacher "willingly violates" state laws against discussing racism, white privilege or sexism in class. Education Week reports, "Teachers could also be disciplined or lose their licenses for teaching that the United States is inherently racist or sexist or making a student feel 'guilt or anguish' because of past actions committed by their race or sex." Similar forms of censorship will be imposed in Oklahoma, where "educators could have their teaching licenses suspended or revoked and schools could lose accreditation if an investigation finds evidence that they taught about racism and sexism in ways that violated the law." Parents in that state will be allowed "to inspect curriculum, instructional materials, classroom assignments, and lesson plans to 'ensure compliance.'"

These attacks on the teaching of actual history are an Orwellian attempt to control both the present and the future in order to remake America as an apartheid regime. Realpolitik is also in play here: Facing changing demographics and political unpopularity, Republicans seek to use a larger culture-war strategy to win elections and hold onto power by any means possible.

White supremacists and other right-wing ideologues, in the longer view, want to destroy public education and replace it with their own propaganda indoctrination program. One important element is "racial erasure," in which the truth about American history is replaced with fantasies of white innocence, white nobility and white supremacy.

As Clint Smith writes in the Atlantic, for many so-called conservatives, "history isn't the story of what actually happened; it is just the story they want to believe. It is not a public story we all share, but an intimate one, passed down like an heirloom, that shapes their sense of who they are. Confederate history is family history, history as eulogy, in which loyalty takes precedence over truth."

Perhaps most important, the right-wing moral panic over "critical race theory" is a way of to erase from public memory the struggle waged by Black Americans for centuries to defeat white supremacy in its various forms. To that point, chattel slavery and theJim Crow regime were America's native forms of fascism. Black people defeated those forces and in doing so saved American democracy from its own worst impulses. To erase the Black Freedom Struggle is to make the case that American fascism will be victorious and that resistance is futile.

It is also crucial to understand that America's state of malignant normality is not isolated or unique, but is part of a neofascist attack by the global right on multiracial and multiethnic democracy around the world. As de facto spokesman for the American white right, Fox News host Tucker Carlson has taken a pilgrimage to Hungary, now under the one-party rule of Viktor Orbán, who has become a role model for the Jim Crow Republican Party and the American neofascist movement.

Orbán has created a fake democracy in Hungary, where elections still occur and tepid opposition is permitted, but in practice he can remain in power indefinitely. He has silenced the free press, crushed any serious democratic opposition, encouraged political violence against his regime's "enemies" and attacked colleges, universities and other centers of learning. The obvious goal is to silence dissent and produce obedient and compliant citizens who do not seek to exercise critical thinking or speak back to power.

In an essay for Vox this week, Zack Beauchamp discusses the larger significance of Carlson's pilgrimage to Budapest:

In his Monday monologue, Carlson told his listeners that they should pay attention to Hungary "if you care about Western civilization, and democracy, and family — and the ferocious assault on all three of those things by leaders of our global institutions." He tweeted out a friendly photo with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and is confirmed to speak at a government-supported conference in Budapest on Saturday. ...

[R]ight-wing observers, typically social conservatives and nationalists, see Orbán's willingness to use state power against the LGBT community, academics, the press, and immigrants as an example of how conservatives can fight back against left-wing cultural power. They either deny Fidesz's authoritarian streak or, more chillingly, argue that it's necessary to defeat the left — a chilling move at a time when the GOP is waging war on American democracy, using tactics eerily reminiscent of the ones Fidesz successfully deployed against Hungary's democratic institutions.

Beauchamp observes that the "Republican turn against democracy" and the American right's growing interest in Orbán's Hungary, expressed with unusual frankness and eloquence by Rod Dreher of the American Conservative, "is in significant part fueled by the right's sense of leftist ascendancy — heightened by electoral defeats in 2008 and 2020 and strengthened by defeat in culture war battles like same-sex marriage":

This, ultimately, is what makes Carlson's pilgrimage to Budapest so worrying. The Fox host's massive following gives him unusual power to set the terms of the conversation on the right; when he talks, Republicans from Trump on down listen. His bear hug embrace of Orbán could not only bring the Dreher view out into the open but also strengthen its influence over the GOP.

Republicans today aren't directly imitating Orbán; they have their own anti-democratic playbook, drawn from all-American sources. Carlson's active embrace of Hungary's strongman risks making that connection more direct, giving Republicans more ideas for how to seize control and a more powerful sense of justification in doing so.

For those who believed that Biden's election could clear the haze and wake the American people up from the living nightmare of the Trump regime, these last seven months have been increasingly painful. And now the pandemic's third wave arrives as a gut punch to them as well. Biden and other Democratic leaders still appear obsessed with "bipartisanship" and to this point have refused to act with the "urgency of now" to fight back against Republican attacks on Black and brown people's right to vote. Even under Attorney General Merrick Garland, the Department of Justice seems to be protecting Donald Trump instead of investigating and prosecuting him for his crimes against democracy. The overall effect is like being smothered.

Conditions are likely to get worse — perhaps much worse, with Republicans likely to recapture one or both houses of Congress in 2022 and Trump likely to return as a presidential candidate in 2024 — before they get better.

To survive and triumph over American neofascism Americans' well of endless optimism must be fortified with something more durable and realistic, such as the formula suggested by Italian philosopher and activistAntonio Gramsci: "optimism of the will and pessimism of the intellect." In Gramsci's "Prison Notebooks,"he wrote: "The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear."

That is precisely where Americans find themselves now: The waking nightmare of the Age of Trump, from which we have not escaped, is one such "morbid symptom." Recognizing that truth may make it possible to return to full political and social consciousness, and begin the real work of repairing and rebuilding American democracy.

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BS trifecta:

an 721

Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) suggested on Sunday that Joe Biden's administration may use "computer-generated graphics" to fake the president's speeches.

Nunes made the remarks during an appearance on Fox News after he was asked about Biden's performance at a recent CNN town hall event.

"You know it's getting bad when the propaganda machine that the Democratic socialists control in this country -- they control 95% of the media or so," he opined. "And then you take the big tech oligarchs that control and censor what we receive via social media. When that poison gets to the average independent American, that propaganda, you know it's bad when they can't even find a 15- or 30-second soundbite out of a full-hour town hall that they can plug into their own propaganda machine."

Nunes added: "I mean, it's getting really bad. It's not just the president. They can't get any soundbites from the vice president either."

The Republican lawmaker claimed that deep state actors are "almost to the point where they're going to have to start using computer-generated graphics in order to give to the propaganda machine because they can't get good clips to sell what they're trying to sell here in Washington, which are policies that are running the country into the ground."

Watch the video below from Fox News.

721 badash ncrm

for weeks **Fox News** has been ramping up its anti-vaxx attacks on the U.S. public, even using medical doctors and its own hosts to spread false claims, disinformation, and doubt about the COVID-19 vaccines.

On Monday morning in a surprise move one Fox News host actually urged Americans to get vaccinated – to the anger of another, **Brian Kilmeade**.

"If you didn't get a vaccination, that's your choice," Kilmeade told "Fox & Friends" viewers Monday morning. "And if you did, like I did, and they did," he added, revealing the vaccination status of his two co-hosts, "and maybe you did, then you should not wear a mask."

"And if you didn't" get the coronavirus vaccine, "and you want to go cliff diving this weekend, you don't have to check with me. It's a little dangerous, but I'm not going to judge you."

"And if you go and put yourself in danger, if you feel that this is not something for you," Kilmeade said of getting vaccinated, "don't do it, but don't affect my life."

Kilmeade revealed to Fox News viewers that he has yet to understand that anyone who is not vaccinated poises a potential threat to not only those who have yet to get vaccinated, but to those who have – as breakthrough cases are being seen given that the vaccine is close to but not 100% effective. They also create a greater likelihood of new and potentially even more deadly coronavirus variants will develop.

"99% of the people who are dying from COVID are unvaccinated," co-host Steve Doocy interjected, as Kilmeade appeared to roll his eyes.

"That's their choice," Kilmeade, a 57-year old father of three insisted.

"They don't want to die," retorted Doocy, in a rare smack-down of his colleague. "So they are, the administration and the government are saying, we need the mask mandate to protect the unvaccinated."

Kilmeade, who has written five books on the Founders and American history, almost prayerfully clasped his hands together and declared falsely, "That's not their job, it's not their job to protect anybody!"

--==

https://www.alternet.org/2021/07/fox-news-vaccines/

Fox News is moving even further toward being fully anti-vaxx.

Tuesday night on the conservative channel's "Ingraham Angle" host **Laura Ingraham** booked **Dr. Peter McCullough**, who falsely told America, "There's no reason right now, no clinical reason to go get vaccinated."

That's just plain false, according to the CDC and credible medical professionals.

"Virtually all Covid-19 hospitalizations and deaths in United States are now occurring among unvaccinated individuals," White House coronavirus response coordinator Jeff Zients said last week. Almost no fully vaccinated patients have been admitted to hospitals.

Ingraham herself wrongly claimed – or creatively framed – her response.

"Deaths and hospitalizations in almost everywhere is down. Way down."

That too is just plain false – hospitalizations are up.

Just look at these headlines over the past 24 hours:

Spike in hospitalizations due to Delta variant underscores need for COVID-19 vaccination, experts say

**Young, unvaccinated people are being hospitalized with Covid-19 as delta variant spreads, officials warn**

**Covid-19 cases are surging in 46 states. In one hot spot, hospitalized patients are younger than ever, doctor says**

Notice she left out the rise in coronavirus cases. The daily average of coronavirus cases has more than doubled over the past two weeks, and hospitalizations are also on the rise.

Dr. McCullough on Wednesday wrongly claimed, "the Delta variant really is not responsive at all, or protected by the vaccines."

That is a curious construction. Vaccines protect people, not viruses. And vaccine manufacturers have said the current slate of US vaccines do protect against the Delta variant.

McCullough is a cardiologist and an affiliate professor at Texas A&M College of Medicine.

He also claims "42% of 90,000 Delta cases in the UK have been vaccinated."

NCRM could find nothing that accurately substantiates that claim.

The vaccine is well over 90% effective in preventing infection, but for those who are infected after being fully inoculated, symptoms are almost always mild and do not require hospitalization. The number of fully vaccinated Americans who have died from coronavirus is infinitesimally small.

The Associated Press late last month reported "only about 150 of the more than 18,000 COVID-19 deaths in May were in fully vaccinated people. That translates to about 0.8%, or five deaths per day on average."

Dr. McCullough acknowledges to Fox News viewers there will be a "mild rise" in coronavirus Delta variant cases for vaccinated people, says those cases are "easily treatable in high risk patients," but then says, falsely: "There's no reason right now, no clinical reason to go get vaccinated."

NCRM has reached out to Dr. McCullough but did not immediately receive a response.

Watch: [TWT VID]

atch: Republicans exposed for flip-flopping on vaccines as soon ... ›

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

bad code

disaster cap'lism:

https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2021/07/climate-supervillain-creating-new-tv-channel-to-report-on-weather-he-helped-fuck-up/

we’ve reached the final boss level of climate irony. The New York Times reported Tuesday that Rupert Murdoch, the media tycoon whose News Corp. owns Fox News, plans to launch a full-time channel focused on the weather called Fox Weather.

Apparently, viewers are hungry for weather content — the Weather Channel’s viewership was up 7% in the first half of this year, while viewership fell for big cable networks. And looking at the historic heat waves gripping much of the country this summer — caused partially by stalled climate action aided by Fox News working in tandem with oil companies and the Republican Party to spread climate misinformation — it’s not hard to see why.

The irony of Fox creating a weather channel, of all things, is as deep as the rapidly heating ocean and as wide as our swiftly overheating country. As much of the rest of the world ponders how to dig ourselves out of this mess we’ve made, Fox News is still clinging desperately to denial.

Last month, star Tucker Carlson used his show to allege that climate activists want to “experiment to make children smaller” to fix global warming (spoiler alert: that is, uh, not true), while in May, climate denier Steve Koonin was invited to not one, but two Fox News programs to promote his book claiming that other scientists are getting too worked up about this global warming thing....Even the supposedly nonpartisan evening news show hosted by Brett Baier has a distinct denier slant: A Media Matters analysis of Baier’s climate coverage from 2009 to 2021 found that a whopping 88% of it ran the gamut from misleading to promoting bad-faith narratives to flat-out lies.

“It’s not just the bigger climate denial,” said Allison Fisher, the director of the climate and energy program at Media Matters. Fox News, Fisher said, “specifically use[s] weather to push climate denial. That is a long-worn tactic of Fox News, even before Trump was tweeting out, like, ‘where’s your global warming now?’ during a snowstorm. That’s a very classic Fox move.”

Fisher pointed out that as recently as this year, Fox News contributors used an April cold snap to claim climate change was a hoax. “They’re emphatic about dismissing the relationship between climate change and weather, whether it’s during a megastorm or the wildfires last year or the record-shattering heat this week, and then also mocking the idea of global warming during moments of abnormally cold weather,” she said. “They’re the ones who have made weather political.”...News Corp owns the denier-friendly Wall Street Journal and New York Post, as well as several right-wing outlets in Murdoch’s home country of Australia. While Murdoch...;released last year found that News Corp’s coverage of the devastating 2020 Australian wildfires drove a “viral misinformation campaign” intended to spread misinformation on the causes of the fire and protect the coal industry in Australia. The company’s explicit and implicit endorsement of climate denial has even led to a fracture in the Murdoch family: during the wildfires, Murdoch’s younger son, James,...issued a rebuke of the company on its handling of climate, and he...According to Fisher, Fox News has meteorologists on staff who report on the weather, but they mostly do “straight reporting” of what is going on. “They’re not contextualising” that weather, she said — despite the fact that other networks are ...tting their meteorologists discuss how extreme weather is shaped by climate change. “That contextualisation of these events as climate is what makes Fox’s entry into this space really suspect and troubling.”

All of this raises the question of how, exactly, Fox is planning to go about reporting the weather when it keeps getting more extreme thanks, in part, to a mess they helped create. As Deadline reported a few weeks ago, Fox has tapped at least six meteorologists from different local markets — Britta Merwin, Jason Frazer, Craig Herrera, Bridgit Mahoney, Stephen Morgan, and Nick Kosir — to flesh out the basis of its news team. Earther was able to find just a few tweets from three of them that mentioned climate change.

“Climate change is real and it is a fact,” Merwin, a future Fox morning host and formerly of KPRC-TV in Houston, responded in February to a Twitter user using Merwin’s report of snow on the beach to claim climate change was a hoax. “It is about science,” she wrote. Her future morning cohost, Frazer of WKYC-TV in Cleveland, thanked a meteorologist in 2017 for “sharing … expertise on climate change” and mentioned climate change in 2018 when discussing the size of a tropical storm. (“You could argue Climate Change but I am not touching that hot potato,” he wrote.) Meanwhile, Herrera, who covered weather for Seattle’s KING-TV and will serve as another coanchor, tweeted about climate in 2013 and 2014, when he covered an IPCC report and did a piece on California’s drought. “We have a long way to go but education and facts are key,” he responded to one user thanking him for his coverage. “Can’t dispute the science or numbers.”

Gizmodo reached out Frazer, Merwin, and Herrera, along with another of their future coworkers, to ask how they planned to handle climate coverage. We will update when we receive any responses.

According to the Times, Fox is dipping a toe into this space because it’s so profitable; it quotes a TV executive saying that “climate change and the environment will be the story of the next decade,” while a spokesperson for Fox told the Times the network will offer “in-depth reporting surrounding all weather conditions, and we are excited to showcase to viewers what a full-service comprehensive weather platform can deliver beginning this [spring].”

Some of Fox’s future competitors making hay out of the climate crisis could goad the network into figuring out ways to cover it: The Weather Channel, the Times reported, has a whole host of climate change programming planned, including a show about miners looking for minerals in Greenland exposed by newly melted ice (sorry, what?).

But Fisher sees a darker possibility for the new weather service.

“It’s the content they’re producing that’s going to get amplified,” she said. “If they bring on a denier like Marc Morano, if he starts to get a platform there — that content is going to go on his website, it’s going to go into other right-wing media infosphere, it’s going to bounce back on Fox, it’s going to go on social media, and they’re going to push that out in moments when everybody else is saying, ‘this is climate change’–they’re going to be able to tell this right-wing media bubble, it’s not.”

More From Gizmodo Australia

Why Can’t We Call It an Emergency?

Joe Biden Is Not Coming for Your Poorly Cooked Hamburger

The Social Cost of Methane Is Much Higher in the U.S. Than Current Government Estimates

What’s the Most Climate-Safe Place in the World?

an 621 coverup 1/6 leak cnn

https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/fox-news-capitol/

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

no lnx many vid

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

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

Special PROGRAMS

CLIMATE & ENERGY

WRITTEN BY ALICIA SADOWSKI

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

PUBLISHED 06/16/21 12:01 PM EDT

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

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

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KEY FINDINGS

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

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

SPECIAL REPORT UNDERMINES CLIMATE SCIENCE

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

SPECIAL REPORT FUELS NATIONALISTIC AND MISLEADING NARRATIVES OPPOSING GLOBAL CLIMATE EFFORTS

SPECIAL REPORT UNDERMINES THE SERIOUSNESS AND URGENCY OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

CONCLUSION

METHODOLOGY

Key Findings

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

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

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

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

14% undermined climate science.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Special Report undermines climate science

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Citation From the July 14, 2020, edition of Hannity

Special Report fuels nationalistic and misleading narratives opposing global climate efforts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Special Report undermines the seriousness and urgency of the climate crisis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

Methodology

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

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

https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/fox-news/

david n kos

Fox News surprised everyone—including their own Donald Trump-loving viewers—on Election Night last November by calling the race in Arizona for Joe Biden before the other networks, who waited several days to do the same. It seemed the longtime wellspring of right-wing disinformation might actually be displaying some journalistic integrity, at last.

It didn't last long. The Trump White House erupted in fury, as did millions of Trump fans, who popularized a #BoycottFoxNews hashtag on social media. Its ratings briefly plummeted. In the months since, the executives behind the decision were given the boot.

Moreover, as Brian Stelter reveals in an excerpt from his new book on the Trump-Fox connection, Fox has subsequently completed its utter radicalization as a Trumpian right-wing disinformation outlet, embracing and broadcasting a nonstop parade of outright lies, as well as the authoritarian and racist politics that have now similarly subsumed the Republican Party: "We turned so far right we went crazy," one anonymous source told him.

The slide from being a partisan news source into an outright font of extremist disinformation came about, as Stelter suggests, as a result of pressure from the same authoritarian, fake-news-loving audience that Fox had created during Trump's tenure. The beast that they had created turned out to have an insatiable appetite for extremism.

"Fox is a really different place than it was pre-election," one of Stelter's Fox insiders told him after Biden was inaugurated.

"Fox News has always walked a fine line between trying to look like an independent news organization and supporting conservative politics," observed TV critic Eric Deggans to *The Guardian*."There have to be moments where they act like an actual news organization in order to maintain their veneer of being an independent news organization."

The wrath of Trump's followers descended on Fox immediately after its election-night call. Trump himself went on Fox and Friends and complained about the network: "What's the biggest difference between this and four years ago," he asked rhetorically. "I say Fox. It's much different now."

Outside Arizona's main election-counting center in Phoenix the day after the election, pro-Trump "Stop the Steal" protesters chanted, "Fox News sucks!"

Fox's main problem, as Stelter recounts, was that it now had competition to its right in the form of the far-right Newsmax and One America News networks, which unabashedly feature right-wing conspiracy theories and false information about the election and other political topics.

Newsmax refused to initially call Biden the president-elect. One of its hosts, Greg Kelly, repeatedly claimed that Trump could remain in office another four years. "IT ISN'T OVER YET," Newsmax's website banners read.

"We're bleeding eyeballs," one Fox producer told him in December. "And we're scared."

On Facebook, the dismay among longtime Fox fans was furious. "Time to switch to Newsmax or One America News," one post read. "Fox News has officially joined the corrupt media."

Another declared simply: "F FOX News," adding: "They have sold their souls and lost the respect of millions of loyal viewers , [thinking emoji] [crying emoji].Boycott and show them the power of the almighty [money bag emoji] dollar."

Fox executives decided to fix the problem, as Stelter says, by running "even further to the right." News Media CEO Suzanne Scott decided to lure viewers back by giving them, as he notes, what they wanted: "False hope."

On Fox, Trump was treated as a political genius, not a lame duck who failed to win reelection. Some of the network's key shows waded deeper into the voter fraud depths, eventually spurring massive defamation lawsuits by voting machine companies Dominion and Smartmatic.

"It's really emotionally taxing," a dissident Fox contributor told me as the Covid-19 case count exploded and Trump's legal challenges imploded. "We denied the pandemic and now we're denying the election outcome."

Media Matters' Matt Gertz assembled a laundry list of Fox News' post-election embrace of Trumpian disinformation:

:{Fox and its associates did everything they could to support Trump's autocratic maneuvers. In the two weeks after media outlets called the race for Biden, Fox personalities questioned the results of the election or pushed conspiracy theories about it nearly 800 times. They put the credibility of the network behind deranged lies about fraud plucked from the internet fever swamps, beaming batshit fantasies out to a huge national audience. It worked—polls following the election showed a majority of Republicans believed that the election was stolen from Trump.

But hosts, contributors, and guests went further than simply lying to their viewers—they pushed for action. They attacked Republican state officials for being insufficiently committed to Trump's scheme; called for the arrests of election workers; suggested that Republican state legislators in states Trump lost should "appoint a clean slate of electors" who support him; promoted fake Trump electoral slates for supposedly keeping Trump's "legal options open"; suggested a "do-over" election as "the only remedy"; called for congressional investigations; endorsed a lawsuit by Republican state attorneys general asking the Supreme Court to throw out results in four states Biden won; urged Republican governors not to certify unfavorable results; and denounced Republican members of Congress for "destroying the Constitution" by voting to count the electoral votes.}:

Recently, Fox has gone so far as to embrace right-wing extremist ideology, particularly the strange flavor of white nationalism that has been getting airtime on Tucker Carlson's evening program, which is Fox's top-rated program. Carlson has promoted eco-fascist themes related to immigration; endorsed the idea that Republicans are being forced to abandon democracy and eventually embrace fascism because of liberal hegemony; defended the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrectionists as being ordinary conservatives and decried their prosecutions; and spouted white-nationalist "replacement theory" in claiming that immigration is an attack on democracy itself.

Carlson's most disturbing recent episode, however, came last week when he attacked Biden's speech in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Massacre. Biden had decried the continuing existence of violent racist hatred, saying:

I didn't realize hate is never defeated; it only hides. It hides. And given a little bit of oxygen—just a little bit oxygen—by its leaders, it comes out of there from under the rock like it was happening again, as if it never went away.

And so, folks, we can't—we must not give hate a safe harbor.

As I said in my address to the joint session of Congress: According to the intelligence community, terrorism from white supremacy is the most lethal threat to the homeland today. Not ISIS, not al Qaeda — white supremacists. (Applause.) That's not me; that's the intelligence community under both Trump and under my administration.

This set off Carlson, who insisted on his program that evening that this meant Biden intended to target ordinary Republicans:

Yeah, you're not surprised. It's always the same people, isn't it? Those white Republican men—the very ones that just today Joe Biden warned us are more dangerous than ISIS.These are the people who have been beating up elderly Asian women in our cities, you've seen that plague unfold. These are the ones who don't believe in science, who have no decency, they're the problem.

The next night, he insisted—despite abundant evidence to the contrary—that white nationalist violence is not the most lethal threat to the American public: "There is no credible way to argue that white supremacy is the most lethal threat that we face. That's not an argument. It's its own form of racial attack."

Carlson has been diving headfirst into this abyss, as Gertz has reported, with the blessing of Fox CEO Lachlan Murdoch, who even tried to claim that a review of Carlson's remarks show "that Mr. Carlson decried and rejected replacement theory."

However, Carlson also let the curtain slip a bit this week in an interview with right-wing pundit Mollie Hemingway about election misinformation. While introducing Hemingway—whose new book, titled Fixed,offers a wholly Trumpian take—the Fox host asserted that "so many people are lying at such high volume about the 2020 election, it's hard to know exactly what happened."

That, in fact, is the point of how the right now deals with reality: Just throw so much misinformation out there that the public becomes unable to discern fact from fiction—at which point right-wing authoritarians will naturally embrace their lying propaganda.

As Deggans told the Guardian,GUK Fox encouraged this kind of extremism for many years while working to maintain a veneer of journalistic credibility—and has now been finally dragged into the abyss, forced to abandon any such pretenses, by the monster it created.

"What's happening now is the Republican party is getting more strained, and there's more and more of a sense among Fox News viewership that anything that contradicts a worldview that is supportive of conservatives is wrong," Deggans said. "I think it's getting harder and harder for Fox News to ride that balance."

At this point, it's clear they no longer are even trying.

From Your Site Articles

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/fox-news-was-forced-to-make-a-damning-admission-in-a-tucker-carlson-lawsuit/

cody f

fox News got to claim victory on Thursday after a new ruling in a lawsuit brought against the company came out in its favor, but the win arrived at a steep cost. To deflect an allegation of defamation, the network was forced to claim that one of its highest-profile personalities can't reasonably be expected to consistently provide accurate information to viewers.

Here's the background. Karen McDougal, a former Playboy model, was paid for her silence about an affair she said she had with Donald Trump during the 2016 election by America Media, Inc., the parent company of the National Enquirer, on the Republican campaign's behalf these details were exposed and confirmed in the case against former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, who pleaded guilty to participating in the illegal campaign finance scheme. The story became national news, so leading Fox News host Tucker Carlson discussed the case.

But he didn't present it accurately. Discussing the McDougal case alongside the similar story of Stormy Daniels, Carlson said:

Remember the facts of the story. These are undisputed. Two women approached Donald Trump and threatened to ruin his career and humiliate his family if he doesn’t give them money. Now, that sounds like a classic case of extortion.

McDougal decided to sue Fox News because these facts are not correct. She did not approach Trump, threaten him, or extort him for money. She sold her story to AMI, which promptly buried it. Carlson grossly misrepresented the facts, a point that Fox News did not dispute in the case. McDougal said since Carlson willfully distorted the factual record, he defamed her.

To defend Carlson, however, Fox News had to make a damning claim. The host with the highest-rated show on cable news cannot be trusted, his own network said.

In fact, it's even worse than that. Federal Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil found:

This “general tenor” of the show should then inform a viewer that he is not “stating actual facts” about the topics he discusses and is instead engaging in “exaggeration” and “non-literal commentary.” ... . Fox persuasively argues ... that given Mr. Carlson’s reputation, any reasonable viewer “arrive[s] with an appropriate amount of skepticism” about the statements he makes.

So the top-rated program on a news station cannot be reasonably expected to be taken seriously and "reasonable" viewers will be skeptical that his claims are not "actual facts." Perhaps this is a good legal argument to make, but it's a dreadful position to be in as a news organization.

The judge argued that Carlson's defense is bolstered because he started out saying: "We’re going to start by stipulating that everything Michael Cohen has told the feds is absolutely true. Now, assuming honesty isn’t usually a wise idea with Michael Cohen, but for the sake of argument, let’s do it in this case, everything he says is true[.]”

But this actually should cut against Carlson's defense. His point is that the account he's giving is based off the claims in the Cohen case. That's a perfectly reasonable stance to take in an argument. But then he goes on to misrepresent those claims — claims which are a matter of the factual record. So this isn't a part of his show where he's clearly being non-literal — it's a part when he's explicitly said he's trying to convey the facts as the Cohen case presents them. And he patently failed to do that. This failure arguably, from McDougal's point of view, arose out of actual malice. Given that Carlson's show doubtless has the resources to do basic fact-checking and that his commentary displayed open contempt for McDougal, her legal claim seems eminently plausible.

And in the portion of the monologue that McDougal alleged is defamatory, Carlson explicitly said: "Remember the facts of the story. These are undisputed." Again, the remarks were clearly couched to make it clear they were not opinion, but facts.

Carlson even repeated his remarks about the extortion later in the show, but the judge found these considerations unpersuasive:

It is true that Mr. Carlson repeatedly asserted that the conduct was extortion during a debate with a guest commentator in which Mr. Carlson also described the payment from Cohen to McDougal as “paying off someone who is extorting you, threatening to make public details of your personal life, if she doesn’t get paid.” See Episode Transcript. But there can be no doubt that Mr. Carlson did so as hyperbole to promote debate on a matter of public concern.

Putting aside the merits of the lawsuit, however, it's worth dwelling on the fact that Fox News' official position is that its lead commentator cannot be counted on to be accurate when discussing the news of the day, even when he says he's simply stating the facts of a case.

The fact is, Carlson is a liar, and from all appearances, he often intentionally lies to his audience to get them to buy into his warped ideological view of the world. For example, he recently misrepresented a government report suggesting it helped cast doubt on climate change, when in fact it reached precisely the opposite conclusion. But of course, people like me are always accusing Carlson of being a liar, and his viewers surely don't care what I think. How would his viewers feel, though, if they knew Carlson's own network thought he couldn't reasonably be trusted?

Perhaps the worst thing for the outlet is that not only did it have to make this damning admission in a legal case, but a judge agreed.

From Your Site Articles

https://www.mediamatters.org/liz-cheney/obscuring-what-liz-cheney-debate-about-fox-news-choosing-trumpian-authoritarianism-over

soc med bias BS

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/trump-used-facebook-amplify-fox-news-and-its-personalities-course-network-wants-him back on

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-primetime-launches-unhinged-attack-comparing-democrats-nazis

mirror?

fox lies

https://www.mediamatters.org/voter-fraud-and-suppression/how-fox-news-lying-about-texas-voter-suppression-bill

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-white-nationalist-tucker-carlson-hosts-white-nationalist-stephen-miller-discuss

systematic rev racism?

fox in on AP hit w/ wfb the thefed

https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/black-lives-matter/

hamas

dark history behind a revealing Fox News chyron

Magdi Semrau

May 26, 2021

For decades, the GOP claimed the mantle of an economically conservative party and exploited societal issues such as racism and abortion to bolster their electoral support. Yet over the past few years, a reversal

"CRT replaces economy as #1 issue"

iou read

right-wing media is fracturing — and Fox News could lose its grip on the religious right

The Conversation

by Ryan Burge, Eastern Illinois University

Fox News possesses an “outsized influence" on the American public, especially among religious viewers....

https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/fox-news-2653092281/?rs=182

no graf

Fox News possesses an “outsized influence" on the American public, especially among religious viewers.

That was the conclusion of the nonprofit Public Religion Research Institute in a report released just after the 2020 presidential election. It noted that 15% of Americans cited Fox News as the most trusted source – around the same as NBC, ABC and CBS combined, and four percentage points above rival network CNN. The survey of more than 2,500 American adults also suggested that Fox News viewers trend religious, especially among Republicans watching the show. Just 5% of Republican viewers of the channel identified as being “religiously unaffiliated" – compared to 15% of Republicans who do not watch Fox News and 25% of the wider American public.

To further explore the relationship between different faiths and the TV news they associate with as part of my research on religion data, I analyzed the result of another survey, the Cooperative Election Survey.

The annual survey, which was fielded just before the November 2020 election, with the results released in March, polled a total of 61,000 Americans over a number of topics. One question was on their news consumption habits. It asked what television news networks respondents had watched in the prior 24 hours.

Percentage of respondents who saw TV news in past 24 hours

Ryan Burge/CES

Some very interesting patterns emerged across religious traditions – and the nonreligious – and the type of media being consumed. For instance, of the the big three legacy news operations – ABC, CBS and NBC – there was no strong base of viewership in any tradition.

In most cases, about a third of people from each religious tradition said that they watched one of those legacy networks in the last 24 hours. PBS scored very low among every tradition. In most cases fewer than 15% of respondents reported watching PBS in the time frame.

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however, the numbers for the three major cable news networks – CNN, Fox News and MSNBC – were much higher across the board. In eight of the 16 religious and nonreligious traditions categorized in the poll, CNN viewership was at least 50% of the sample. This was led by 71% of Hindus who watched CNN and 63% of Muslims.

The least likely group to watch CNN was clearly white evangelicals, at just 23%. In comparison, MSNBC scored lower nearly across the board. In fact, in none of the 16 classification groups was viewership of MSNBC greater than it was for CNN.

Fox News viewership was higher than that of MSNBC, but was not as widely dispersed as it is for CNN. It's no surprise, given its reputation as a conservative news outlet, that 61% of white evangelicals say that they watch Fox News – in the last election, around 80% of white evangelicals voted for Republican candidate Donald Trump. The other three traditions where viewership was at least 50% are white Catholics, Mormons and members of the Eastern Orthodox Church. It should come as no surprise, as those are three groups that consistently vote for the Republican Party. Just 14% of atheists watched Fox, which is just about in line with the share of white evangelicals who watch MSNBC.

Fracturing right-wing media

But with the fracturing of conservative media sources seeing more competitors vying for viewers among the right, Fox News could see a drop in viewership from the religious right.

In the wake of the 2020 presidential election, Fox News viewership plunged as many Trump supporters believed that the network was not being loyal to their standard-bearer of the GOP.

Given the vast number of news options that people of faith have and the increase in political polarization in the United States, the pressure for networks to deliver the news that people want to hear will only increase as time passes.

Ryan Burge, Assistant Professor of Political Science, Eastern Illinois University

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

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

rw talking heads seem to go to over it/boring well when they have no ctr to legit issue? RHET

521

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/national-republican-congressional-committee-has-featured-fox-news-least-18-fundraising

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/2021-fox-news-still-spreading-dangerous-climate-denial

no vids

on a near-daily basis, Fox News hosts, anchors, and guests spew misinformation and false narratives aimed at tanking efforts to address the climate crisis. These tactics to delay climate action or downplay the seriousness of our warming planet have often been referred to as the new climate denial -- since the actual denial of the scientific consensus that climate change is happening has mostly been pushed to the fringes of both politics and the traditional media landscape.

Fox deploys the new denial so often, it’s easy to forget that the network is one of the few highly influential media outlets that still promote one of the most dangerous lies of our time: Human activity is not overheating our climate.

This lie has existed for over five decades and for five decades has been repeatedly debunked. Its origins and merchants have been exposed; those who have continued to perpetuate it have been discredited; and our own experience during each unprecedented storm, historical heat wave, and apocalyptic wildfire has proven again and again what science has told us to expect from a warming world.

But in 2021, you can turn on Fox News and watch prime-time host Tucker Carlson quip that “not even climate experts understand the climate” or watchFox contributor Dagen MacDowell suggest that climate change is a hoax because it is cold in April.

And in 2021, there is still no federal response to the climate crisis on the books, despite decades of warnings from scientists and with mounting support for climate action even among the largest companies and businesses in the U.S.

Fox is still fueling the lie that our planet is not warming

From insisting the science on climate change is not settled to deliberately misconstruing weather with climate, Fox News is still pushing the idea that human-made climate change is not real, despite overwhelming evidence and consensus in the scientific community.

In a segment on the April 28 edition of Tucker Carlson Tonight, host Tucker Carlson and Fox News contributor Sean Duffy discussed how the “critical environmental movement has infiltrated” schools and colleges, is scaring children about the climate crisis, and is convincing them to not have children. At the end of the segment, Duffy claimed that climate change is a “political movement, not a scientific movement” and that it is wrong to assume “the science is settled in climate”.

the segment aired just a week after Carlson and ultra-conservative political commentator and Fox contributor Mark Steyn mocked comments made by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) linking climate change and racism. (For the record, experts say the two are “inexorably” linked.) Steyn, not satisfied with mocking the relationship between climate and racism, went on to attack the scientific consensus that warming is human-made, by invoking a defamation suit filed against him by climate scientist Michael Mann:

MARK STEYN (GUEST): This is supposed to be science. I've been in a 10-year lawsuit in Washington, D.C., up against the guy who invented the climate change hockey stick, and he is a scientist and his position is that in the last millennium -- nothing happened for nine centuries and then you, Tucker, got into your SUV and fried the planet. And that is a completely idiotic theory. But at least he's not trying to sell the world on the idea that somehow climate change correlates to racism.

[vid]

not to be outdone, the following night, prime-time hostLaura Ingraham focused her April 22 monologue on “the big climate con.” Ingraham’s “climate con” list included misleading arguments against the benefits of climate action like job creation; attempts to discredit the role of -- and the need for -- global cooperation in dealing with the crisis; and false claims that the scientific warnings on climate are not sound or well understood. For good measure, Ingraham closed her monologue by mocking and attacking young climate activists.

in back-to-back shows on April 29 and April 30, Ingraham suggested that the climate crisis along with other pressing issues have been manufactured to “justify the left’s brazen efforts to take more of our money and more of our liberty” and they “only exist in the minds of leftists ideologues who hate America anyway.”

Denial paired with fear-mongering about the “left’s radical agenda” exemplifies the brand of climate denial Fox has peddled for years, and some network figures disingenuously equate weather with climate to push that narrative.

On the April 21 edition ofThe Five, Fox News contributor Dagen McDowell ended a rant against the Paris Climate Agreement by suggesting that abnormally cold April weather from Texas to the Great Lakes somehow disproves that global warming is occurring.

DAGEN MCDOWELL (CO-HOST): Here is your forecast today and why they stopped calling it global warming. April 21, 2021: Freeze warnings from Texas to the Great Lakes. Record low temperatures engulfing the heartland. Oh, and Indians/White Sox game in Cleveland had to be postponed for snow and cold.

This bit by MacDowell is both painfully stupid and reminiscent of a body of tweets by then-President Donald Trump, who conflated weather with global warming while suggesting that the term “climate change” was adopted by scientists and advocates to hide the incongruity between major winter storms and the idea of warming.

Interestingly, the term “climate change” was promoted by the Republican strategist Frank Luntz as part of the infamous 2002 memo advising the GOP on how to cast doubt on the scientific consensus that human activity was warming the planet.

Fox Nation host Lara Logan made the same inane claim on the February 19 edition of :{Outnumbered:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:, in a segment about the winter storm that caused the deadly power failure in Texas:

“It's time for us to have an honest conversation about renewable energy and about global warming, climate change, whatever you want to call it,” said Logan. “This is the first time in Texas’ history that it has had a winter storm warning. So this is — this means that it is not getting warmer and warmer and warmer, simply.”

Fox has long been a platform for climate deniers

Fox News hosts and contributors not only push climate denial but regularly feature discredited deniers on their programs. Notorious climate denier Marc Morano -- who has no scientific background -- and Bjorn Lomborg -- whose spiel is dangerously claiming that climate change is happening, but not a big deal -- have both appeared on Fox for more than a decade. Just this year, both have appeared across Fox programming at least six times from January through April. Notably, Fox hosted both the day after President Joe Biden took office to attack his agenda on climate change.

Larry Kudlow, a long-time climate denier who formerly served as economic adviser to Trump and now hosts a show on Fox Business, has also been one of Fox’s go-to commentators on policies related to climate change across both the network’s so-called “news” and “opinion” programs.

But Morano, Lomborg, and Kudlow are far from the only climate deniers and contrarians on Fox’s roster. Over the past several yearsRush Limbaugh, Joe Bastardi, Steve Milloy, and Patrick Moore all appeared regularly on Fox to push climate denial and misinformation. (In 2019, Moore said on Fox & Friends that “the climate crisis ... is not only fake news, it’s fake science”, and the line was picked up by Trump and tweeted to his millions of followers.)

Importantly, like Morano and Lomborg, none of these commentators are climate scientists, many have strong financial ties to the fossil fuel industry, and all have made a living out of obstructing efforts to address the climate crisis. With the exception of the late Rush Limbaugh, none would have had a megaphone to spread their lies absent Fox News.

Supported by advertisers, Fox runs cover for climate inaction

Climate scientists have repeatedly warned that if immediate and bold actions are not taken, then we will face dire climate disruption -- ever-increasing extreme and abnormal weather that threatens our homes, our food, our livelihoods, our economy, and our lives.

The stakes could not be higher.

The purpose of Fox hosts’ and contributors’ climate denial is to maintain an air of doubt about the existence and reality of our dangerously changing climate to provide cover for Republicans, who actively work to do nothing to stop the climate crisis, and the Big Polluters that bankroll their campaigns. This climate denial is also the foundation of the network’s persistent attacks -- across “opinion” and “straight news” programming -- on any proposed actions to reduce our carbon emissions and transition to a clean-energy economy. By extension, companies that advertise on Fox are party to climate inaction.

Publicly, many of these companies that run ads on Fox, including big insurers Allstate and Liberty Mutual have acknowledged the severe threat of the climate crisis. While others like General Motors, which is also among the network’s biggest advertisers, are actively calling for significant reduction in climate pollution. On the same day Dagen McDowell mocked global warming because it was cold in Texas, General Motors, along with 407 other corporations and businesses, issued a press release for an open letter to Biden supporting his goal of reducing carbon emissions by 50% by 2030. By continuing to sponsor Fox, these brands expose the cavern between their words and actions and associate themselves with a dangerous hostility to facts and science.

To be sure, Fox News is an accomplice to the impending climate emergency we face as a country and as part of the global community -- and so are those that support its programming with ads.

mma

  1. ### :{Fox’s “news” side spreads fake story that Biden wants to ban hamburgers:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:

04/26/21 1:43 PM EDT

  1. ### Fox’s “War on Earth Day”

04/23/21 3:11 PM EDT

  1. ### Fox rehashes old bad-faith arguments and misinformation in covering Green New Deal reintroduction

04/22/21 4:34 PM EDT

How broadcast TV news covered environmental justice over the past four years

05/06/21 11:10 AM EDT

Buoyed by Biden’s climate summit, broadcast and cable TV networks provided strong Earth Day coverage

04/28/21 12:24 PM EDT

How broadcast TV networks covered climate change in 2020

https://www.mediamatters.org/climate-deniers/right-wing-media-are-having-field-day-physicist-steve-koonins-new-book-climate

on May 6, theoretical physicist and former Obama administration energy official Steve Koonin appeared on two Fox programs to discuss his recently released book Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters.

In a nearly 13-minute appearance on Fox Business’ Kudlow, Koonin pushed a number of claims from his book that contradict the established scientific consensus on climate change. Among other things, he stated that “we've seen hardly any change in most severe weather events”; that “in the U.S., the highest temperatures haven't gone up in 60 years and are the same as they were in 1900”; and that there’s been “no detectable human influences on hurricanes over the last many decades.” He also questioned why “somehow people don’t want to use” fracking and said the current situation around climate change is “misleading panic.”

Later that evening on Fox News’ Tucker Carlson Tonight,Koonin repeated the same statement on humans and hurricanes, and on hotter temperatures, he stated that “the incidence of heat waves across the 48 states is no greater now than it was in 1900, and the highest temperatures haven’t gone up in 60 years.” He also called climate models uncertain and claimed that climate science has become “immoral,” as “it's being used as a tool to scare young people, create depression.”

Koonin, who is not a climate scientist, has a controversial history within the scientific and political climate change community. He formerly served as chief scientist for BP (a company that has played an outsized role in both worsening climate change and delaying climate action). In 2017, he advocated for a “red team-blue team” approach to climate science, which would “put the ‘consensus’ to a test” and illuminate “differing perceptions of climate science.” This idea apparently caught the attention of then-EPA Administrator (and notorious climate change denier) Scott Pruitt. And in 2019, he reportedly tried to help former President Donald Trump create a “climate contrarians” panel with longtime climate denier Will Happer.

Given the content of his new book, it’s no surprise that Koonin appeared on Fox to discuss its key points. While those points are wrong and easily debunkable, they have been spreading across the vast right-wing media ecosystem.

Real climate scientists and experts have lambasted Koonin’s book

Some of the major claims Koonin made in his May 6 Fox appearances came directly from his book, which was reviewed in an April 25 Wall Street Journal piece that repeated a number of its claims. Climate Feedback, a website featuring climate scientists who review dubious climate pieces in the media, reviewed the article and estimated “its overall scientific credibility to be very low.”

Regarding Koonin’s misleading statement on human impacts on hurricanes, MIT atmospheric scientist Kerry Emanuel said the “most up-to-date research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences demonstrates an increase in the proportion of hurricanes that become major hurricanes (Category 3-5) globally, supporting theoretical predictions that date back to 1987.” University of California, Los Angeles climate scientist Daniel Swain echoed this point, noting that “the most intense tropical cyclones are indeed becoming stronger in terms of maximum wind speeds and minimum central pressure and are producing more extreme rainfall.”

In his Kudlow interview, Koonin also downplayed the threat of melting ice and rising sea levels, stating that “people worry about the melting of the ice sheets, but that’s gonna take hundreds of years, if it happens.” This statement is remarkably wrong. Twila Moon of the University of Colorado stated that “over the last 20 years, ice loss has been rapid and large, creating measurable sea level rise.” Postdoctoral researcher Thomas Frederikse agreed, saying that “tide-gauge observations show that sea levels are persistently accelerating since the 1960s, and overall, the observed sea-level rise during the 20th century is higher than during any other century over the last 3000 years.”

Koonin’s claims downplaying the effectiveness of climate models are also wrong. Climate scientist Zeke Hausfather states that Koonin’s criticism “ignores the fact that climate models published since the 1970s were quite accurate in projecting the warming that actually occurred in the years after they were published, as we discuss in our recent paper.” (In fact, climate models have been so correct that even fossil-fuel giant Exxon’s own scientists accurately predicted the rate of global warming in the 1980s.)

The Climate Feedback piece also addressed other misleading claims from Koonin’s book that he did not repeat in his Fox interviews, including misleading statements on global wildfires, the severity of droughts, global crop yields, and the economic impact of climate change. Overall, says Twila Moon, “many conclusions highlighted in this article are examples of cherry-picking information and failing to provide the context of change. In other instances, statements are fully wrong and unsupported by scientific research.”

Marianna Lavelle of Inside Climate News also addressed some of the claims Koonin made in his new book, including rebutting the statement he made on his Fox appearances about hot temperatures and heat waves in the U.S.:

The average annual temperature in the contiguous U.S. has increased from 0.7 degrees to 1.0 degrees Celsius (1.2 to 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) since the start of the 20th century. The year 2020 was the fifth-warmest year in the 126-year record for the contiguous U.S. And the five warmest years on record have occurred since 2012, NOAA reports. There is a more marked increase in nighttime lows than in daytime highs (the “warmest” temperatures) because of factors like the cooling effect of daytime aerosol pollution and soil moisture evaporation.

She also countered his claim about a future minimal economic impact of climate change by noting 2019 research that found that “global warming has very likely exacerbated global economic inequality, including ∼25% increase in population-weighted between-country inequality over the past half century.”Multiple scientific studies have showed that the cost of climate inaction far outweighs the cost of climate action. Indeed, one analysis finds that climate change could cost nearly $70 trillion by 2100.

In the past several weeks, Koonin has been featured in numerous right-wing media outlets

In addition to his May 6 appearances on Kudlow and Tucker Carlson Tonight, Koonin has made a number of other television appearances, written op-eds, and given interviews promoting his book. The vast majority of these have been with right-wing media outlets, including sources that are climate deniers.

He appeared on Bill O’Reilly’s The First on May 6, Andrew Bolt’s show on Australia’s Sky News on May 5, CNBC’s *Squawk Box* on May 4, and Kudlow on March 19. O’Reilly, Bolt, Kudlow, and Squawk Box’s Joe Kernan are all climate deniers. He also appeared on the Outsiders* program on Sky News Australia on May 8. Here, he claimed that “modest” global warming will be beneficial for the planet, without noting that the negative impacts of climate change will far outweigh any positive ones. Sky News Australia, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch, has a history of climate denial.

He has written pieces promoting his book for The National Review and the New York Post, given a print interview to The Wall Street Journal’s Holman Jenkins (who has a history of being wrong about climate issues), given interviews to conservative radio personalities John Gormley and Ross Kaminsky, and spoken to fossil fuel industry shill Alex Epstein, climate misinformer Rich Lowry of The National Review, and conservative Daily Beast writer Matt Lewis. His book and its climate misinformation have also been the basis of articles in Townhall and The Federalist. And along the way, he’s been promoted by notorious climate deniers Marc Morano and Steve Milloy.

Right-wing media propping up books that are skeptical of climate change is an all-too-familiar occurrence

If this all sounds familiar, that’s because it is -- this sort of thing happened just last summer, when climate contrarians Bjorn Lomborg and Michael Shellenberger both released books downplaying the seriousness of climate change within a month of each other. Like Koonin, they both appeared across the right-wing media ecosystem to promote their books. There are other similarities between these individuals as well -- all are highly controversial within the climate science community, while their major works have been fact-checked and discredited by actual climate scientists and experts. Additionally, none of them are climate scientists.

As the realities of worsening climate change become more and more apparent, it’s become more difficult for right-wing media outlets to continue unequivocally denying that climate change is even happening. This new type of climate denial espoused by people like Koonin -- who say climate change is happening but it’s not that big of a problem -- provides perfect cover for right-wing media outlets to act like they care about the issue while they continue helping polluting companies kick climate action down the road.

Koonin’s misinformation-filled book won’t be the last one to downplay the threat of climate change, but it’s becoming easier to spot books like these when right-wing media take an exclusive interest in promoting their false claims.

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

matt g

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In March 2019, Fox News pitched major ad-buyers on the importance and credibility of its “news side” operations in an unprecedented meeting at its studios. Public outcry to Fox’s near-complete fusion with President Donald Trump’s administration and the bigoted commentary of its stars had the network reeling. So Fox’s brass touted their commitment to the network’s newscasts and showcased its top anchors. They tried to make the case that it was safe to buy spots on those programs because an ironclad wall separated them from the incendiary right-wing opinion hosts who garner the bulk of the ratings and headlines.

But as Fox executives prepare to present to ad buyers again later this month, it’s clearer than ever that their supposed dedication to journalism is meaningless spin. The network spent the last two years decimating its “news” side, elevating its “opinion” side, and tearing holes in the supposed barrier between the two -- and the deterioration is only accelerating.

Fox’s “news” division had long functioned as a cog in a right-wing misinformation machine. Anchors and correspondents echoed the talking points of the prime-time “opinion” hosts and focused reporting on their obsessions; even Fox’s most responsible “news”-side figures were valued by the network for burnishing its otherwise toxic brand with advertisers and the press. But the more journalistic presentation of their shows made that programming palatable to advertisers who abandoned Fox’s prime-time shows, recognizable to colleagues at other networks, and, perhaps, bearable to the “news” staffers who produced it.

That illusion of journalistic standards collapsed during Donald Trump’s presidency when Fox reinvented itself as a propaganda outlet. By the time of the 2019 presentation, Fox’s biggest stars had descended into the fever swamps and showed that Fox had no real rules limiting their pro-Trump advocacy; its “news” employees were giving anonymous, impotent statements to other outlets expressing their dismay or were leaving the company altogether; and the president and network were intertwined in a Fox-Trump feedback loop that was fueling federal policy.

The two years that followed have been even worse. Fox’s “news side” endured waves of layoffs; high-profile resignations; the hiring of discredited right-wing hacks; the injection of “opinion” content into purportedly sacrosanct “news” hours; lineup shake-ups that replaced “news” hours with “opinion” shows; and obvious signals from the brass that they are not holding prominent “opinion”-side personalities to any coherent standards (don’t feel too bad for them -- the “news side” also promoted plenty of right-wing misinformation in its own right, even on stories its own correspondents had debunked).

What remains of the “news” division has spent Joe Biden’s presidency fixated on right-wing culture war bugaboos like trans athletes, the “canceling” of cultural artifacts like Dr. Seuss books and Mr. Potato Head, and**“critical race theory.**” At this point, the two figures who do the most to shape Fox’s “news” coverage are likely Tucker Carlson, the Fox “opinion” host recently provided unprecedented resources to pursue whatever stories he desires, and Porter Berry, the longtime producer for Fox host Sean Hannity who heads the network’s digital operation.

If one could ever fairly say that there was a real struggle between Fox’s “news” and “opinion” sides, that time has long passed, leaving the “opinion” side the unquestioned victor. Fox executives trying to argue otherwise to sell advertisements are simply not credible.

Advertisers shouldn’t be fooled -- if they buy ads on any Fox program, they are subsidizing the network’s right-wing propaganda.

Here’s a timeline of the ways Fox denigrated its “news” division over the past two years -- and its “news” division’s worst right-wing propaganda during that period.

2019

July: “News”-side correspondent Griff Jenkins guest-hosts “opinion” show Fox & Friends.While the network purports to have a wall between its “news” and “opinion” sides, it regularly allows “news”-side correspondent Jenkins to guest-host Fox & Friends. During his turn in Steve Doocy’s seat over the July 4 weekend, he pushed White House talking points and cheered on pro-Trump propagandists.

July: Report finds Fox editors suspect the network’s Seth Rich source may have never existed.Fox “news”-side editors “came to have doubts” about whether the network’s sole source for its subsequently retracted bombshell report that murdered Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich had delivered tens of thousands of DNC emails to WikiLeaks “actually existed,” Yahoo News reported. Fox had promoted Greg Wilson, who edited the original story, to managing editor of FoxNews.com the month following its publication.

August: Fox hires former Trump press secretary and notorious liar Sarah Huckabee Sanders. Fox hired Sanders, the daughter of longtime network commentator Mike Huckabee, following a White House tenure marked by her abject contempt for and lies to reporters and her termination of White House briefings in favor of Fox interviews. She was one of seven Trump administration employees to join the network or its parent company during his presidency; her principal deputy, Raj Shah, joined Fox Corporation as a senior vice president earlier in 2019. In 2021, Sanders left Fox to run for governor of Arkansas.

October: Shep Smith resigns following confrontation with Carlson.Smith, who had garnered mainstream credibility for his willingness to debunk Trump’s misinformation on Fox, shocked his “news side” colleagues when he abruptly announced his resignation at the end of his 3 p.m. show after more than two decades at the network. He left in the middle of his contract without another job lined up after Fox executives refused to support him during an on-air feud with prime-time star Tucker Carlson. Smith was replaced in the lineup by the far more pliant “news”-side veteran Bill Hemmer.

October: Another high-profile departure from embattled Fox “news side.” A few weeks after Smith’s resignation, CBS News announced that it had hired away Catherine Herridge, Fox’s chief intelligence correspondent who had spent more than two decades at the network.

October: Fox hires John Solomon, Giuliani collaborator on Ukraine plot.Solomon got a Fox contract after serving as the conduit for Rudy Giuliani’s scheme to use Ukraine disinformation to defend Trump for the help his campaign received from the Russian government and to damage Joe Biden’s presidential run. Solomon wrote 12 columns in The Hill about Ukraine, often relying on sources and claims fed to him by Giuliani, and made dozens of appearances on Fox, particularly on Sean Hannity’s program. Several witnesses testified that Solomon's reporting was inaccurate during Trump’s 2019 impeachment hearings. The Hill subsequently produced an extensive though incomplete review of Solomon’s work, rebutting many of his most incendiary claims and noting that he had failed to disclose that his personal lawyers, Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing, were involved in the stories.

November: Fox violates its edict not to name the Ukraine whistleblower.While Fox hosts and personalities were reportedly ordered by the network brass not to identify the whistleblower whose complaint was at the heart of the impeachment inquiry into Trump’s abuse of power, a conservative guest violated that edict on-air without pushback from the network’s anchor.

November: Fox hires discredited Benghazi fabulist Lara Logan. Logan, at the time a CBS News correspondent, based a 2013 60 Minutes report on the claims of a purported “eyewitness” to the Benghazi attacks. When it turned out that person had fabricated his story, CBS retracted the report and suspended Logan. Her career never recovered, and years later she tried to reboot it by blaming Media Matters for her failure and lashing out at the “mostly liberal” press. It worked -- after Hannity called for Fox to hire her, the network gave her a show on its streaming network, Fox Nation. At Fox, Logan garnered headlines for repeatedly falling for hoaxes about anti-fascist activists.

Yearlong: The Fox “news” side’s disastrous coverage of the coronavirus pandemic.Fox’s calamitous, deadly response to the pandemic was not limited to its “opinion”-side talkers. Fox “news”-side personalities pushed much of the same dangerous misinformation, promoted the same untested antimalarial drugs as COVID-19 miracle cures, similarly prioritized complaining about health measures over reporting on the death toll, and gave a platform to the same charlatans, like COVID crank Alex Berenson and Drs. Scott Atlas and Mehmet Oz (the latter even participated in a Fox “news”-side coronavirus town hall broadcast, using the opportunity to ask then-Vice President Mike Pence about hydroxychloroquine). Because Trump appreciated their Fox hits, Oz ended up briefly advising the administration on the virus, while Atlas became an official member of the White House coronavirus task force, with staggering consequences.

January: Fox’s Uranium One story collapses. U.S. attorney John Huber ended his two-year review of the U.S. government's decision not to block the sale of the company known as Uranium One without bringing charges. Huber’s investigation began after Fox programs on both the “news” and “opinion” sides obsessed over the sale as a scandal aimed at former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, garnering attention from Trump and his congressional allies.

February: Hannity gets a Super Bowl interview with Trump.When Fox’s turn in the Super Bowl rotation came up, the network could have used the traditional opportunity to interview the president beforehand to showcase its “news”-side talent on a massive stage. Instead, Fox sent Hannity, a Trump adviser and sycophant.

February: Fox document reveals network relied on sources its “Brain Room” believed were not credible. An internal document from Fox’s “Brain Room” research department obtained by The Daily Beast reveals that the network knew that Hannity, Giuliani, Toensing, diGenova, and Solomon were peddling “disinformation” about Ukraine but took no apparent action.

June: Fox does disgusting propaganda in support of Trump tear-gassing peaceful protesters. After federal law enforcement officials violently dispersed peaceful crowds protesting police brutality and racism outside the White House so that Trump could walk to a nearby church for a photo-op, Fox personalities -- from the “news” and “opinion” sides alike -- used a series of false, shifting defenses to furiously spin what happened in his favor. This incident came as Fox’s “news” side repeatedly pushed hoaxes and misinformation about the protests going on nationwide.

July: Fox “news” correspondent asks Biden whether he has been tested for “cognitive decline.”At a press conference, Fox News correspondent Douglas McKelway told Joe Biden that “some have speculated” he is experiencing “cognitive decline” and asked if the former vice president had been tested for it. That baseless allegation had been on constant refrain on Fox’s prime-time “opinion” show, and at least seven different Fox programs covered the “cognitive decline” exchange at the presser.

July: Fox insiders say Fox is pushing white supremacy and hurting Black Americans.The Daily Beast reported that Fox News insiders say the network has a culture of impunity for racist commentary from its biggest stars, citing conversations with more than a dozen staffers. Fox’s executives have “created a white supremacist cell inside the top cable network in America, the one that directly influences the president,” according to a network employee quoted in the piece.

September: Fox buries network’s confirmation of story damaging to Trump. After The Atlantic reported that Trump had denigrated U.S. service members who died in wars as “losers” and “suckers,” longtime Fox correspondent Jennifer Griffin confirmed that her own sources were backing up what she described as “key details.” But Fox’s “news side” subsequently downplayed her reporting, while its “opinion”-side hosts ignored her reporting and denounced The Atlantic’s story as a “hoax.”

September: Fox lays off “news”-side reporters as insiders call it a pro-Trump propaganda outlet.The Daily Beast reported that recent Fox layoffs were concentrated in the network’s “straight news” ranks, with its fact-checking and research division hit particularly hard. Fox staffers told the Beast that the cuts show the network operates “more like an extension of” the Trump’s administration than a typical news outlet and behaves “like state media.”

October: Fox pushes Hunter Biden smear even after its own reporters debunk it.Fox’s “news” side devoted more than 11 hours of coverage to Giuliani’s effort to use emails and text messages obtained from Hunter Biden’s laptop to derail Joe Biden’s presidential campaign in the nine days after the smear first broke -- even though the “news side” reportedly passed on the story when Guliani first brought it to them, and its reporters debunked aspects of the story afterward.

November: Fox “news side” aids Trump’s attempt to steal the election.In the nine days after Fox declared Joe Biden the president-elect and as Trump insisted the presidency had been stolen from him, the network cast doubt on or pushed conspiracy theories about the election results at least 574 times -- 208 times on Fox’s “straight news” shows and 366 times on its opinion shows.

November: As Trump turns on network, Fox begins pumping “opinion side” content into “news” shows.After Trump attacked Fox after the election for being insufficiently supportive, some of its viewers defected for fringe-right competitors like Newsmax TV and One America News. In response, Fox tried to win those viewers back by heavily touting its right-wing stars during its “news” hours. Anchors built “news” segments around clips from prime-time monologues and asked guests to weigh in on the views of Carlson, Hannity, and Ingraham, while the network ran promos for their shows in heavy rotation.

November: Fox settles with Seth Rich’s family.Fox settled a lawsuit the Rich family filed in response to the network’s debunked reporting for a reported seven-figure sum. The settlement forestalled depositions with key Fox stars and executives, including Hannity and network President Jay Wallace, and prevented hundreds of internal Fox documents about the story from becoming public.

January: Fox replaces 7 p.m. “news” hour with another right-wing commentary show. Suzanne Scott, Fox News’ CEO, announced in a statement that Fox News Primetime, a new program featuring a rotating cast of right-wing “opinion” hosts, was taking over the 7 p.m. ET slot previously held by The Story, a “news”-side program. That program’s anchor, Martha MacCallum, who has been heavily touted by the network as a credible news source but regularly parrots right-wing propaganda, moved to the 3 p.m. time slot once held by Shep Smith. Smith’s replacement, Bill Hemmer, returned to hosting Fox’s 9 a.m. and 10 a.m. hours alongside former George W. Bush press secretary Dana Perino.

January: Fox conducts “purge” of network’s “real journalists.” Fox laid off 16 digital editorial staffers including Chris Stirewalt, the longtime politics editor who had defended the network’s decision to call the election for Biden, in what Fox insiders called a “purge” of the network’s “real journalists.” It was a triumph of the network’s “opinion” side, reportedly masterminded by Berry, the Hannity crony who leads the network’s digital operation. The day before the layoffs, Fox senior vice president and D.C. managing editor Bill Sammon announced his retirement.

March: Trump press secretary Kayleigh McEnany becomes latest part of Fox’s Trump administration hiring binge.McEnany joined Fox as a contributor in early March and was announced as a co-host of the panel show Outnumbered before the end of the month. She was previously a fixture on the network as a Trump White House press secretary and former Trump 2020 senior adviser who “lies the way that most people breathe.” Fox and its parent company currently employ at least 10 former members of the Trump orbit. After Trump left office, the network hired his daughter-in-law Lara Trump, his former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and his former top economics adviser Larry Kudlow, among others.

March: Fox launches streaming show Tucker Carlson Today, makes host the face of the network.Carlson became ubiquitous on Fox following the election and his thrice-weekly streaming show, which launched March 29, made him the linchpin of its streaming platform, Fox Nation. The week the show premiered, Fox gave Carlson more than nine and a half hours of promotion on other network programs. During his tour of other Fox programs to flack for the new show, Carlson pushed the white supremacist “replacement theory,” leading the Anti-Defamation League to call for his firing and Fox Corp. CEO Lachlan Murdoch to come to his defense.

April: Fox’s 11 p.m. hour shifts from “news” to a right-wing commentator’s “comedy” show.Fox replaced anchor Shannon Bream’s Fox News @ Night at 11 p.m. ET with a program starring right-wing commentator Greg Gutfeld, as Fox continued to “expand opinion programming on [its] schedule.” Gutfeld!, which debuted April 5, is allegedly a comedy hour intended to compete with the late-night shows, while Bream’s “straight news” show moved to midnight.

echo escal: hype/ fear wedge

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/how-right-wing-lies-move-through-fox-cycle-biden-administration

matt g

fhe relentlessly dishonest right-wing press is spending the Biden administration whipping itself into a frenzy over its own lies, fabrications, and distortions. Every day seems to bring a new hysteria: Joe Biden wants to take your hamburger! The left has canceled Dr. Seuss! The stories -- often total nonsense but touching on potent culture war fights -- burn through right-wing social and news media, turn into conservative canon, and are quickly replaced with fresh outrage.

Our late colleague Simon Maloy developed a concept during the Obama years to explain how these sorts of bogus right-wing stories kept turning into national news. He called it “the Fox Cycle”: The right-wing fever-swamps would generate a story; Fox News would give it copious, aggrieved coverage; the network would pressure mainstream news outlets to pick up the story; they would do so, even crediting Fox for being ahead of the curve; and the story would eventually be proved false or misleading -- but only long after the damage had been done. A few years ago, I pointed out that then-President Donald Trump’s habit of live-tweeting Fox supercharged that process: News outlets reporting on his angry responses to TV segments were bringing his Fox-fueled falsehoods to their own audiences.

With a new Democratic administration in office a decade after Simon’s posts, right-wing media are still furiously churning out bullshit that gets amplified by Fox. But the contours of the Fox cycle have shifted due to changes in the mainstream press, the right-wing media, and the Republican Party over the intervening years.

The Fox Cycle in the Biden years follows a pattern that is becoming increasingly familiar:

  1. A right-wing outlet manufactures a bogus story.
  2. The bogus story goes viral.
  3. Fox News picks up the bogus story, reports on it incessantly.
  4. Republican politicians promote the bogus story to attack Democrats.
  5. Responsible news outlets debunk the bogus story.
  6. Repeat.

What’s changed?

The distinction between right-wing media personality and Republican politician has increasingly dissolved. [eg gaetz] The right-wing press celebrated particularly simpatico GOP politicians throughout the Obama years -- none more so than Trump himself. But now, prominent GOP legislators seem driven to build their brands and their power within the party by spending their days trying to create viral content on Twitter and then going on Fox to talk about their posts. Some even have their own podcasts, or openly aspire to right-wing TV gigs. They are incentivized to comment on whatever is stirring up the right-wing press that day, which in turn gives the story more velocity.

Responsible news outlets are now more wary of falling for these bogus stories, and they produce reports debunking them far more quickly than they did a decade ago. Reporters used to interpret incessant Fox coverage as a signal that they were missing out on an important story; now, they seem more likely to correctly view that coverage as a sign to look deeper and figure out how the right-wing press is misleading its audiences.

But thanks to the increasingly impermeable bubble that the right-wing press has created for those audiences, they are unlikely to see those mainstream media debunks. Right-wing outlets may be shamed into pulling down their false stories or offering half-hearted corrections, but by then misinformation has already become conservative canon.

And as my colleague Parker Molloypointed out yesterday, the more responsible news outlets seem unable or unwilling to impose real consequences on the perpetrators. No one is losing their seat on a Sunday show for repeatedly promoting lies or conspiracy theories. Everyone just moves on, and the cycle continues.

Here are three case studies from the last week where this pattern played out over a matter of days.

The lie about Biden banning burgers

a right-wing outlet manufactures a bogus story.The right-wing British outlet the Daily Mail reported on April 22 that “Americans may have to cut their red meat consumption by a whopping 90 percent” under “Biden's climate plan,” which “could limit you to eat just one burger a MONTH.” The story cited “a study by Michigan University's Center for Sustainable Systems.”

The bogus story goes viral.The Daily Mail story received more than 10,000 Facebook interactions, according to CrowdTangle. A host of other right-wing websites picked up the story, including Louder with Crowder, The Western Journal, The Blaze, Conservative Brief, The Gateway Pundit, and PJ Media, and each of those stories received thousands or even tens of thousands of Facebook engagements of their own, according to BuzzSumo.

Fox News picks up the bogus story, reports on it incessantly.Fox ran at least seven reports highlighting what hosts claimed the Michigan University study said about Biden’s climate plan. “Say goodbye to your burgers if you want to sign up for the climate agenda,” claimed anchor John Roberts. “Could new climate impact plans limit you to just one burger a month?” asked Shannon Bream, later claiming she would not “comply with that.” Jeanine Pirro told viewers who might enjoy a burger that “the left with their Green New Deal wants to make sure you don’t.” Larry Kudlow, Ainsley Earhardt, Jesse Watters, and Charles Payne were among the other Fox personalities to push the claim.

Republican politicians promote the bogus story to attack Democrats. Several GOP politicians picked up the claim that Biden was trying to force Americans to eat less meat. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott tweeted a screengrab of a Fox segment on the supposed burger dictate, commenting, “Not gonna happen in Texas!” Idaho Gov. Brad Little quote-tweeted him, adding, “Idahoans also have beef with this agenda and for dinner!” Reps. Madison Cawthorn (NC), Lauren Boebert (CO), and Marjorie Taylor Greene (GA) were among the members of Congress who criticized Biden’s supposed attack on meat.

Responsible news outlets debunk the bogus story. It was all a lie, several news outlets subsequently revealed. As CNN’s Daniel Dale explained: “Biden has not proposed any limit on Americans' red meat consumption. In fact, he has not proposed any limit on Americans' consumption of any food. The false claim about Biden trying to restrict people to four pounds of red meat per year appears to have originated with a deceptive Thursday article by the British tabloid The Daily Mail. The article baselessly connected Biden's climate proposals to an academic paper from 2020 that is not about Biden and says nothing about the government imposing dietary limits.” Roberts subsequently issued a short but deceptive correction.

The Virginia math lie

a right-wing outlet manufactures a bogus story. FoxNews.com reported on April 23 that Virginia’s Department of Education “is moving to eliminate all accelerated math options prior to 11th grade, effectively keeping higher-achieving students from advancing as they usually would in the school system.” The story was based on a Facebook post from Loudon County school board member Ian Serotkin, included criticism of the supposed move from regular Fox guest and former Trump official Ian Prior, and described the purported changes as “the latest of many to prompt concern from parents in the state, which has seen in-fighting over controversial ideas surrounding equity and race.” The story also included quotes from a department official casting doubt on Fox’s framing.

The bogus story goes viral.The FoxNews.com story received more than 250,000 Facebook interactions, according to CrowdTangle. Other right-wing websites picked up the story, including TheBlaze, MRCTV, The Federalist, Breitbart.com, the Washington Examiner, The Daily Caller, and The National Pulse, and each of those stories received thousands or even tens of thousands of Facebook engagements of their own, according to BuzzSumo.

Fox News picks up the bogus story, reports on it incessantly.Beginning April 26, Fox ran a series of segments on the story on programs including America’s Newsroom, America Reports, The Story, and Special Report. One America Reports segment, for example, featured the chyron “Virginia’s ‘Woke’ Move To Eliminate Advanced Math.” On American’s Newsroom, Fox contributor Newt Gingrich claimed that “the disaster in Virginia where they have announced they are going to eliminate advanced math” is “madness,” adding, “If I were the Chinese communists, I would love watching American wokeness because it undermines the whole society.”

Republican politicians promote the bogus story to attack Democrats.The Republican Party of Virginia shared the FoxNews.com story on social media. So did GOP gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin, who called it “the dumbest thing I have ever heard.” National Republicans also weighed in, with Sen. Marsha Blackburn (TN) saying the story showed that “the woke liberal mob is now CANCELING MATH.”

Responsible news outlets debunk the bogus story.The Washington Post reported April 26 based on an interview with Superintendent James Lane that Virginia “is not eliminating advanced high school mathematics courses.” The department is in the early stages of a regularly scheduled revision of the state’s math standards, Lane told the Post, and one proposal involves “rejiggering eighth-, ninth- and 10th-grade math courses to place a greater emphasis on fields including data science and data analytics.” But Lane “said the initiative does not propose eliminating accelerated math classes, nor does it require all students in a grade to take the same math class no matter their level of ability,” and he also “noted that those kinds of decisions — how an advanced student should best progress through middle and high school math classes — would be made by local school officials, not the Virginia Department of Education, as has always been the case.” In a subsequent report, Fox claimed this showed Virginia “backpedaling now after rolling out plans to overhaul the state’s high school math curriculum.”

The lie about Harris’ children's book

a right-wing outlet manufactures a bogus story.The New York Post reported on April 23 for a story that ran on the cover the following day that “Unaccompanied migrant kids brought from the U.S.-Mexico border to a new shelter in Long Beach, Calif., will be given a copy of [Vice President Kamala Harris’] 2019 children’s book, ‘Superheroes are Everywhere,’ in their welcome kits.” The Post based that conclusion on a Reuters photo from the shelter which showed a single copy of the book on a table next to a child’s backpack.

The bogus story goes viral. The Post story received more than 20,000 Facebook interactions, according to CrowdTangle. Numerous other right-wing outlets picked up the story, including IJR, Louder with Crowder, Breitbart.com, TownHall.com, and PJ Media, and each of those stories received thousands or even tens of thousands of Facebook engagements of their own, according to BuzzSumo.

Fox News picks up the bogus story, reports on it incessantly.Fox’s website reported on April 24 that Harris’ book is included in welcome packs for migrant children arriving at the center, pointing to multiple photos which all showed the same copy of Harris’ book. The network also covered the story on at least six different shows on April 26. Star host Tucker Carlson repeatedly compared the situation to the treatment North Korea gives its dictators, even as he acknowledged that the Department of Health and Human Services had said it wasn’t providing the books. the story. Network White House correspondent Peter Doocy also asked press secretary Jen Psaki during a press briefing to explain why “every migrant child being brought to the shelter" was receiving the book.

Republican politicians promote the bogus story to attack Democrats. Leading Republicans pointed to the story as evidence of Democratic corruption. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (CA) demanded to know whether “taxpayers [are] paying for copies of the Vice President's book to be handed out at migrant shelters.” Linking to the Post report, Sen. Tom Cotton (AR) questioned whether the Biden administration is “forcing taxpayers to buy Kamala Harris’ book to give to those illegal immigrants.” Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel similarly questioned whether Harris was “paid for these books” and is thus “profiting from Biden’s border crisis.”

Responsible news outlets debunk the bogus story. The Washington Post reported on April 27: “Long Beach city officials told The Washington Post that Harris’s book is not being handed out in welcome kits. A single copy of the book was donated during a citywide donation drive, officials said.” The New York Post subsequently pulled down the online version of its initial report and republished it without the central charge; one of the story’s authors subsequently resigned, saying she had been “ordered” to write a story she knew was wrong. Fox & Friends acknowledged the Washington Post’s reporting even as it defended Peter Doocy’s White House briefing question and continued to push the debunked narrative. FoxNews.com and some of the other outlets that initially passed along the lie also added updates of varying quality to their pieces.

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/foxs-war-earth-day

It’s that time of year when for one day, network TV news outlets commemorate the birth of the modern environmental movement by airing climate and environment focused programming.

On and around April 22, designated as Earth Day, cable and broadcast news programs leveraged the day and the many related events -- including Biden’s two-day Climate Leadership Summit -- to articulate the scope and scale of the climate crisis, showcase solutions to this mounting global threat and feature some of the movement’s most prominent thought leaders, scientists, and activists.

But not Fox News.

Fox used this moment to, what can best be described in Fox terms, wage an all-out war on Earth Day.

Fox attacks any effort to act on the climate crisis

Coverage across Fox programming on and around Earth Day was rife with climate deniers pushing climate misformation and bad-faith arguments against efforts to decarbonize our economy and work collectively with world leaders to address the global climate crisis. The vast majority of coverage specifically focused on Biden’s summit -- which involved 40 world leaders and aimed at discussing stronger climate action -- was centered not on the need for climate action or good-faith critiques about how to achieve Biden’s ambitious goal to reduce U.S. carbon emissions by 50% by 2030. Instead, it focused on the well-worn myths that climate action will hurt the U.S. economy and its workers.

Representative of the false narrative that climate action will destroy our economy was Fox host Larry Kudlow’scomments on the April 22 edition of America’s Newsroom:

LARRY KUDLOW (FOX BUSINESS HOST): The so-called climate summit, which is today and tomorrow, is going to set strict, strict limits on carbon emissions within 10 years basically going to blow up the fossil fuel sector.This is going to cost a lot of jobs just as the business tax hikes are going to cost a lot of jobs, just as the capital gains tax hike is going to cost a lot of jobs -- because it’s all going to damage investment.

Kudlow, who formerly served as economic adviser to then-President Donald Trump, is a long-time climate denier who has often been Fox’s go-to commentator on policies related to climate change. His stock (bogus) response is climate action is bad for the economy.

In fact, Biden’s American Jobs Plan, which is at the core of his strategy to transition to a decarbonized economy, is lauded by labor leaders and economists who predict it will create 2.3 million jobs by 2024, injecting $5.7 trillion into the economy and raising per capita income by $2,400. Alternatively, not acting on climate change will devastate our economy and way of life.

Fox’s prime-time stars also used Earth Day as an opportunity to advance their own personal wars.

Tucker Carlson mocks the relationship between race and climate change

On the eve of Earth Day, Tucker Carslon on his prime-time show attacked and mocked comments made by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) linking climate change and racism. Carlson and ultra-conservative political commentator Mark Steyn claimed it’s ridiculous to correlate climate change and racism -- even though experts say the two are “inexorably” linked. In fact, the bit between Carlson and Steyn never attempted to explore the wealth of information on the clear interconnectivity between these two issues; instead, the two made it a punchline in a joke tailored for Carlson’s burgeoning right-wing extremist fans.

The segment comes just weeks after Carlson used his nightly monologue to unfurl a racist rant targeted at the environmental justice elements of Biden’s infrastructure plan. What Carlson is attempting to push back on is not just the growing public understanding that racial justice, economic equity, and climate change are interwoven, but the political manifestation of those ideas in policy proposals like the Green New Deal and Biden’s infrastructure plan. vid]

hannity continues his obsession with private jets

On the April 22 edition of his program, host Sean Hannity leaned into one of Fox’s oldest chestnuts --climate advocates who use private jets to travel are hypocrites -- and targeted one of the network’s favorite climate villains, John Kerry. In the segment, Fox News correspondent Trace Gallagher detailed the travel habits and calculated the carbon output of both Kerry and billionaire Michael Bloomberg’s private jet use. vid]

the segment calls back to a scandal Fox manufactured in February around Kerry’s private jet travel and falls in line with the network’s history of using private jet travel to pivot any discussion on the climate crisis to the “hypocrisy” of “elites” and “liberals” who advocate climate solutions. While attempting to falsely portray politicians and wealthy celebrities as the face of the climate movement, the attack ignores the millions of people around the world harmed by climate change and environmental injustice.

To be clear, use of private jets by those advocating for climate action should be critiqued. But whether or not using private transportation is hypocrisy by climate advocates is not the point. In reality, individual action is wholly inadequate for addressing the scale of the climate crisis when 100 companies are responsible for 71% of global emissions. The crisis requires, above all, systemic policy responses that can be implemented only by governments.

Laura Ingraham mocks young climate activists

On the April 22 edition of The Ingraham Angle, host Laura Ingraham focused her monologue on “the big climate con.” Ingraham’s “con” list included misleading arguments against the benefits of climate action like job creation; attempts to discredit the role of -- and the need for -- global cooperation in dealing with the crisis; and false claims that the scientific warnings on climate are not sound or well understood. Her final point was targeted at young activists who are calling for urgent and bold action -- and she took specific aim at Greta Thunberg and a Mexican climate justice activist named Xiye Bastida.

Ingraham suggested that today’s youths are being “indoctrinated into critical climate theory just like critical race theory.” Not to be outdone by Carlson, Ingraham introduced the clip of Bastida talking about the role of justice in developing climate solutions like this: “What happens when you mix open-borders madness, critical race theory, and climate paranoia all together in one big bowl? You get this." vid]

ingraham’s callous attacks on climate and youth activists are not new. She received significant blowback in 2019 for comments she made about Thunberg and in 2018 for mocking Parkland shooting survivor David Hogg.

The biggest problem with Fox’s “War on Earth Day'' is that it is not limited to once a year. Daily Fox assaults erode public acceptance of climate science and the need for urgent and bold action on climate change. Far from being a news outlet, the outlet is a key cog in the right-wing disinformation machine and climate obstruction is one of its main goals.

related

Fox rehashes old bad-faith arguments and misinformation in covering Green New Deal reintroduction

04/22/21 4:34 PM EDT

Right-wing media cook up fake scandal about Biden’s energy secretary after the president virtually tours an electric bus company

04/23/21 12:00 PM EDT

Tucker Carlson makes a compelling case against Biden's infrastructure plan for climate deniers and white supremacists

04/02/21 6:31 PM EDT

https://www.mediamatters.org/voter-fraud-and-suppression/myths-and-facts-around-people-act

Democrats are working to revise election law across the country, introducing the For the People Act to strengthen and expand voting rights protections and promote increased campaign finance transparency. But right-wing media are falsely painting the legislation as a corrupt attempt to seize power from Republicans and state legislatures.

The Brennan Center for Justice explains that the bills -- recently reintroduced in the House (H.R. 1) and soon to be brought to the Senate (S.B. 1) -- will bolster the right to vote for all Americans:

The Act incorporates key measures that are urgently needed, including automatic voter registration and other steps to modernize our elections; a national guarantee of free and fair elections without voter suppression, coupled with a commitment to restore the full protections of the Voting Rights Act; small donor public financing to empower ordinary Americans instead of big donors (at no cost to taxpayers) and other critical campaign finance reforms; an end to partisan gerrymandering; and a much-needed overhaul of federal ethics rules.

Here are some myths currently circulating about the For the People Act and corresponding facts:

Myths and facts on the For the People Act

FALSE: Fox News’ Sean Hannity alleged that the bill is the “Democratic guaranteed election strategy,” and “it's so obvious that they, they want, they don't care” about voter fraud “as long as they think it's going to work in their favor.”

FALSE: Fox News contributor Leo Terrell claimed the bill “is a power grab for the Democrats.”

FALSE: Newsmax’s Charles Faddis wrote that measures state legislatures adopted to enable voting during the pandemic were put in place not because of safety and access issues but because Democrats “could not defeat Donald Trump” otherwise. Faddis continued, “Now they want to force the entire nation to accept in perpetuity the same no-excuses mail-in voting measures that just gave Joe Biden the White House” through the For the People Act. In a dramatic conclusion, Faddis alleged that “this is about fraud forever. This is the next step in the destruction of American democracy” and claimed it shows that “our constitutional republic is living on borrowed time.”

FALSE: The Gateway Pundit’s Joe Hoft wrote, “In their first act, this Congress led by true communists apparently, is ready to pass a bill allowing all future elections in the USA to be run exactly the same as any communist regime in history.” He claimed the act “will eliminate free and fair elections forever. Fraud will be the mandate and Democrats, the kings of fraud, will win every election henceforth.”

REALITY: The For the People Act would protect voting rights of all voters, regardless of political affiliation, as explained by the League of Women Voters, which described how the expansion of voter registration during the pandemic led to “increased voter turnout that benefitted both parties” during the 2020 election. In fact, as The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent pointed out, “some commentators have suggested the relatively successful GOP down-ballot performance in 2020 shows the party needn’t fear high-turnout elections and should try running on a conservative populist agenda rather than banking on voter suppression.”

Furthermore, the bill also addresses structural flaws exploited by both parties. As the Campaign Legal Center (CLC) explained, this bill addresses issues of “extreme partisan gerrymandering in states controlled by Democrats and Republicans alike” and “record-breaking amounts of campaign spending and difficult-to-trace dark money supporting both Democrats and Republicans.” In another piece, CLC wrote, “The For the People Act would address problematic practices employed by both Democrats and Republicans.”

The Brennan Center for Justice explained: “These reforms respond directly to Americans’ desire for real solutions that ensure that each of us can have a voice in the decisions that govern our lives, as evidenced by their passage in many states, often by lopsided bipartisan margins.” After the passage of automatic voter registration in 2015 in two states, “17 more states and the District of Columbia followed—many with strong bipartisan support. In Illinois, for example, the state legislature passed AVR unanimously, and a Republican governor signed it into law,” it continued. Even voting rights restoration for those previously convicted of felonies “is immensely popular regardless of political views. In November 2018, 65 percent of Florida voters passed a ballot initiative restoring voting rights to 1.4 million of their fellow residents, with a massive groundswell of bipartisan support.”

FALSE: On Premiere Radio Networks' The Sean Hannity Show, host Sean Hannity put forward a conspiracy theory that Democrats want the bill to “reward” undocumented immigrants “with citizenship” so they’ll “vote for us for generations to come.” Hannity listed a number of protections for voter registration and against voter suppression in the bill, claiming that Democrats “don't want free and fair elections.”

FALSE: On Outnumbered, Fox News contributor Emily Compagno alleged that the bill “solidifies all of the questionable voting practices that … called into question so much doubt about vote validity in the last election and ultimately led to an erosion of faith in the entire voting system.” Fox News contributor Leo Terrell said that the bill “is an attempt by the Democrats to allow anyone to vote without verification” and would allow “ballot harvesting.”

FALSE: Conservative website PJ Media wrote, “HR-1 would take nearly every process that created skepticism about the outcome in 2020 and make it the law nationally—and then some.”

FALSE: Townhall opinion columnist Chris Talgo alleged that although House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said the bill “is intended to curb election fraud, it would do the opposite,” including by increasing mail-in voting which “would be a boon for election fraud.” Ultimately, Talgo wrote, “The ill-named For the People Act would erode election integrity, invite voter fraud, and further divide the country along partisan lines.”

FALSE: In an opinion piece for The Washington Times, columnist Robert Knight wrote, “As the New Year is dawning, Americans are facing either a divided government or a unified socialist left controlling all major federal branches.” Knight pointed to the For the People Act as “a brazen destruction of what’s left of election integrity safeguards.”

REALITY: Whereas the type of voter fraud right-wing media fearmonger about is virtually nonexistent, the U.S. intelligence community and congressional investigations have confirmed that our election system is vulnerable to attacks of the sort Russia engineered in the 2016 election cycle. Accordingly, the For the People Act has multiple sections dedicated to election security, ensuring “that American elections are decided by American voters, without interference, by enhancing federal support for voting system security, particularly with paper ballots and also by increasing oversight of election system vendors and by requiring the development of a national strategy to protect U.S. democratic institutions.”

The claim that “motor voter” registration will lead to noncitizens voting is a tired right-wing media myth. As NPR wrote, “Claims of massive illegal voting by noncitizens have routinely been disproved,” though “some noncitizens have ended up on the rolls, usually by accident” when asked about registering to vote when they go to state motor vehicle offices.

In addition to regularly debunked myths about systemic voter registration fraud and alleged noncitizen voter fraud, during the 2020 election, some in right-wing media accused Democrats of trying to “harvest” ballots in order to steal the election. This pejorative use of “ballot harvesting” lumps together absentee ballot fraud with this legitimate method of ballot collection, which is legal in more than half the country. Twenty-six states allow ballot collection because it helps voters who have a difficult time with mobility or otherwise cannot physically reach a polling place; for instance, the Native American Rights Fund wrote in 2019 that “native voters, especially tribal elders, often lack reliable transportation and reside in geographically remote areas in which they rely upon friends and neighbors to pick up and return their mail.”

Both political parties and some nonpartisan groups participate in the practice where it is legal, and absentee ballot fraud cases that utilize fraudulent ballot collection schemes are few and far between. Additionally, the Brennan Center for Justice notes that “ballot tampering is illegal everywhere. That includes practices like stealing ballots from mailboxes, filling out other people’s ballots without their consent and direction, and changing or throwing out other people’s ballots.”

FALSE: Populist Press claimed the bill would ensure a “complete Congressional takeover of redistricting.”

FALSE: On Fox News’ Outnumbered, contributor Emily Compagno said, “On federalism, we know that the founders specifically with the 10th Amendment left to the state a reserved power of running the elections. So, with this, it would nationalize it.” Fox News contributor Leo Terrell claimed, “States have the obligation to set forth qualifications for voters within their states. This is a hijack. This is to nationalize it. That's wrong. It's the right of the states to set the qualifications.”

FALSE: Chris Talgo wrote for Townhall: “HR 1 is a massive bill, more than 800 pages long, that would supersede state legislatures’ constitutional right to set election procedures.”

FALSE: Newmax’s Charles Faddis called it “a complete federal takeover of our election system.”

REALITY: As PolitiFact wrote about misinformation spread about the bill:

The legislation has faced pushback from conservatives who see it as overstepping states’ rights. In the past, states have set most details of election laws.

While the legislation overall is seen as Democrats’ wishlist to expand access to the ballot, the Campaign Legal Center found that it includes several policies that have been supported by state officials in red states or backed by Republicans in Congress.

For example, the legislation includes provisions to require states to enact automatic registration and same-day registration, which is already the policy in many states.

In terms of the redistricting portion of the bill, PolitiFact explained:

The bill states that Congress can establish the conditions states must follow in carrying out congressional redistricting including to create independent redistricting commissions. Some states already use commissions to carry out redistricting or advise state legislatures.

“It’s a congressional directive in how states would conduct redistricting,” but Congress itself would not take over draw the lines, said Jeffrey Wice, adjunct professor at New York Law School and long-time counsel to the New York State Legislature.

Rebutting critics who “portray the legislation as unprecedented and unduly intruding on the scope of state authority over elections,” Franita Tolson, law professor at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law, argued:

These concerns are unfounded because Congress has broad authority to regulate federal elections under the Elections Clause of Article I, Section 4 of the Constitution. This authority sometimes permits Congress to reach voter-qualification standards and state elections long considered to be the domain of the states. Congress has rarely used its power under the Clause, contributing to its underenforcement and also to misconceptions about the Clause’s reach. But when utilized, the Clause has supported legislation, both enacted and proposed, that was much broader and more intrusive of state authority than H.R. 1.

In an article about the redistricting portion of the 2019 For the People Act, which would eliminate partisan gerrymandering by requiring states to establish independent redistricting commissions, the Harvard Law Review wrote that “evidence suggests that the Elections Clause, much like the Supremacy Clause and the Full Faith and Credit Clause, immunizes certain exercises of federal power from the anticommandeering doctrine,” which dictates that the federal government cannot “commandeer” state governments to adopt or enforce federal laws. In other words, “text, case law, and constitutional history support the proposition that Congress is within its authority under the Elections Clause to require states to adopt” the redistricting provisions in the bill.

The Supreme Court has also affirmed the constitutional authority of Congress to enact legislation like the For the People Act. In the Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Arizona (2013) decision, conservative Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the Supreme Court, reiterated this precedent (citations omitted):

The [Elections] Clause’s substantive scope is broad. “Times, Places, and Manner,” we have written, are “comprehensive words,” which “embrace authority to provide a complete code for congressional elections,” including, as relevant here and as petitioners do not contest, regulations relating to “registration.” In practice, the Clause functions as “a default provision; it invests the States with responsibility for the mechanics of congressional elections, but only so far as Congress declines to pre-empt state legislative choices.” The power of Congress over the “Times, Places and Manner” of congressional elections “is paramount, and may be exercised at any time, and to any extent which it deems expedient; and so far as it is exercised, and no farther, the regulations effected supersede those of the State which are inconsistent therewith.”

FALSE: Fox host Brian Kilmeade claimed that the For the People Act “restores voting rights for convicted felons -- who wants people in jumpsuits voting?”

FALSE: Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo argued that the bill would legalize “voting for, potentially, inmates and people as young as 16 years old.”

REALITY: The For the People Act would not restore voting rights for incarcerated individuals. The text of the bill specifically states that it would not apply to anyone “serving a felony sentence in a correctional institution or facility at the time of the election.”

Instead, the bill would automatically restore federal voting rights to people only once they have been released from prison, which is already the law in 18 states. This provision is designed to address felony disenfranchisement laws that disproportionately impact African Americans.

According to The Sentencing Project, nearly 5.2 million Americans are disenfranchised due to a felony conviction, yet only 25% of those people are currently incarcerated. More than 6% of the adult African American population is currently disenfranchised under these laws, many of which originated during the Jim Crow era.

===

jeez note date 521

https://www.mediamatters.org/sean-hannity/sean-hannity-doubles-down-vaccine-efficacy-conspiracy-theory-citing-masks-and-social

smartmatic ~ dobbs, pirro and bartir

pension plan

https://www.alternet.org/2021/04/mike-pompeo/ 2024

an 421

no twt eg nikki h "disgusting"

A Fox News host is displeased with his network's publishing of false reports over the last several days.

According to The Huff Post, Juan Williams admitted that he is skeptical of the allegations being leveled against former Secretary of State John Kerry due to the number of inaccurate reports his network has released.

During the Fox News broadcast of "The Five" on Tuesday, April 27, Williams weighed in on the details surrounding Kerry's alleged discussion Iran's foreign minister regarding Israeli intelligence. However, Williams made it clear he was not sure if he could believe allegations due to the onslaught of falsehoods reported by his network over the last several days.

He also expressed concern about right-wing news outlets that echo scathing stories simply because the report attacks a member of the opposing party.

"It just worries me, like last week we had the hamburger story, 'Oh, Biden is going to take your hamburger.' Kamala Harris' book is being given to immigrants," said Williams. "These stories are false, but the right-wing echo chamber starts going crazy because you can go after a Democrat."

As reports about the allegations began circulating on right-wing news outlets, Kerry who now serves as the first United States Special Presidential Envoy for Climate, tweeted to set the record straight.

According to the former lawmaker, the allegations are "unequivocally false." With John Hudson's tweet detailing the truth about the allegations, Kerry tweeted, "I can tell you that this story and these allegations are unequivocally false. This never happened - either when I was Secretary of State or since."

Williams' remarks come just days after Fox News addressed the criticism of its inaccurate report about President Joe Biden's so-called push to limit Americans' beef consumption. On Monday, Fox News' John Roberts addressed the issue as he corrected the story.

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/04/fox-news-host-admits-his-show-reportedly-inaccurately-about-biden-limiting-red-meat-consumption

... Fox News host admitted that his broadcast included inaccurate reporting about President Joe Biden's nonexistent plan to sharply reduce the amount of red meat Americans can consume

On Monday, April 26, John Roberts the host of "America Reports" conceded that his Friday reporting was inaccurate after a number of media outlets released their own fact-checking reports. At the time, Roberts reported details about a study that has no connection to any of Biden's real policies. That study warned that people should be prepared to "say goodbye to your burgers if you want to sign up to the Biden climate agenda."...

HE BROKE AMERICA? DEMOC?

common dr 421

...Oh, for a simpler, saner time – and I don't mean that white American idyll that never was, a rightwing fever dream in which all is falsely remembered as sunshine, jellybeans and petroleum products burnt without a care. Rather, as columnist Frida Ghitis notes, "It wasn't very long ago that the country had two reality-based, generally centrist parties. Democrats and Republicans, with different philosophies, debated the merits of their ideas, in search of a workable compromise.

But then, bit by bit, the GOP started veering in a different direction. By the time Trump became president, the maximalist, nativist, conspiracy-driven, scandal-manufacturing, hate-stoking wing was already ascendant, propelled by the engines of Fox News and other far-right provocateurs. Trump's victory was the coup that toppled the old GOP and turned it into the extremist MAGA machine.

:{

}:

And now, what's left? A handful of old-fashioned, conservative Republicans in Congress and their supporters who apparently still believe in some semblance of democracy and the republic that gave their party its name. But they're overwhelmed by a crowd of fanatics and sycophants: men and women, in Frida Ghitis' words, busily "promoting the delegitimization of America's duly elected president, people who are endorsing or refusing to rectify dangerous lies."

You know who they are: Cruz, Hawley, Graham, Jordan, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, et al. They include, of course, Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, "rewarded by recklessness," to use campaign strategist Rick Wilson's phrase, and as of this moment still standing, despite more and more evidence of his misogyny and possible abusive behavior, sexual and otherwise.

:{

}:

Like so many among these ranks, Trump fanboy Gaetz is one of the smarmy, privileged, attenuated frat boys who refuse to believe that rules and norms apply to them – much like the man who was their president and would be forever more if the rest of us become indifferent and lower our guard. Gaetz cares about his job title only as far as it gets him booked on talk shows and the lecture circuit – so far, he has failed to sponsor a single piece of significant legislation.

In his new memoir, former Republican House Speaker John Boehner describes these types of Republican rabblerousers as "the chaos caucus," not caring about the country but only about their power base and appearances on Fox News and right wing talk radio: "They didn't really want legislative victories," Boehner writes. "They wanted wedge issues and conspiracies and crusades."

Not that Boehner is blameless. He and so many Republican colleagues let themselves be bullied, then acquiesced to our current dilemma, yielding to those pledged to lunacy and a lemming-like fealty to a president as bereft of thought and feeling as they are. You see the results: a shattered party not of ideas and programs, but only insults and bogus intrigues. No wonder the Biden infrastructure proposals infuriate them; they have nothing to offer in return.(Remember Trump's Infrastructure Week, always imminent but never occurring over the whole four years of his presidency?)

They fear any and all success during Biden's first term. Think back to 1993, when now anti-Trumpist conservative Bill Kristol advised Republicans to shun any healthcare plan from Bill and Hillary Clinton. In a memo—Kristol was then head of the Project for the Republican Future—he warned his colleagues, "It will revive the reputation of the party that spends and regulates, the Democrats, as the generous protector of middle-class interests. And it will at the same time strike a punishing blow against Republican claims to defend the middle class by restraining government."...

https://www.alternet.org/2021/04/fox-news/ comedy fail? gutfeld

321 just wondering what pension plan (rich husb)

no lnx twt

Ex-Trump attorney furious DOJ investigating Matt Gaetz but not Hunter Biden

David Badash and The New Civil Rights Movement March 31, 2021

Former Trump campaign and personal attorney Jenna Ellis is furious about the Dept. of Justice's investigation into Congressman Matt Gaetz (R-FL) for possible sex trafficking of an underaged girl, demanding to know why Hunter Biden has not been charged with wrongdoing – while just hours later lamenting the death of the "presumption of innocence."

"Okay so wait," Ellis, who professes to be a "Constitutional Law Attorney," said on Twitter, "the DOJ has time to investigate Matt Gaetz, but the whole Hunter Biden situation is just fine now?? And where's Durham??? This is why the American people are so over all of it."

"Durham" is now-former U.S. Attorney John Durham, who former Attorney General Bill Barr set up as a special counsel to investigate the origins of the FBI's Russia probe. So far, after two years, he reportedly has found no problems with the FBI's decision to investigate Trump and the Trump campaign for possible Russia ties.

It's unclear who Ellis is referring to when lamenting that "the American people are so over all of it," given that it appears Hunter Biden's actions do not warrant prosecution, but she also went on to lament, ironically, the death of the "presumption of innocence," just seven hours later:

[some crack about twitter annd PC]

Ellis, a devout Christian who has suggested the left is trying to "cancel Christianity," has compared same-sex marriage to pedophilia and bestiality and supports criminalizing homosexuality.

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/03/fox-news-white-nationalist/

no lnx twt

How Fox News became the beating heart of the white nationalist movement

Heather Digby Parton and Salon March 29, 2021

Political analysts are still trying to figure out just what has caused the Republican Party in this country to move so far to the right in recent years, and there are many theories. Much has been made of the Trump-loving white working class's perceived loss of economic success due to outsourcing and international trade and we've endlessly discussed their various grievances about losing the status and privileges they believe they are entitled to. We try to understand their confusion about changing cultural norms and the cascading disinformation that permeates social media. In the end, all we really know is that they are very upset and Donald Trump gave voice to their overwhelming anger and disdain for their fellow Americans.

:{

}:

Last week there was yet another congressional hearing with the top social media executives, this one focusing on the role of their companies in promoting extremism, misinformation, and cyberbullying. Republicans were most concerned about the companies censoring right-wing voices (although interestingly, they didn't complain much about Donald Trump's expulsion from all the platforms) and Democrats complained about disinformation and extremism being allowed to flourish on the platforms.

:{

}:

We don't really know at this point how much of that affected the 2020 election. As Kevin Drum pointed out, we are still awaiting data to tell us just how much people relied on social media for their political information during the election but judging by past analysis of election campaigns, it really isn't as influential as we might assume. There's no doubt that Facebook and Youtube and to some extent Twitter can lead people down the conspiracy rabbit hole, and there's little doubt that right-wing extremism has had a very comfortable home on all those sites. But according to the analysis that Drum cites, TV and talk radio are still where the action is. Fox and OAN and Newsmax may pick up ideas that percolate up through the fever swamps to social media. But really, it mostly goes the other direction.

Journalist Peter Slevin spent some months in Iowa before and after the election to get a sense of what the mostly rural, Republican voters were thinking. He reports in this piece in the New Yorker that basically, they are awash in disinformation and as a result have come to believe that Democratic voters are hardly even Americans anymore. Their own form of "identity politics" has been distilled down to "I am a Republican" in opposition to their enemies.

They believed that Donald Trump was the only person who could control the violent, socialist mob that was threatening their way of life. And they believed everything he said:

I met Kimberly Pont, the vice-chair of the Fayette County G.O.P., at a Mexican restaurant in the small city of Oelwein, and asked her what drove local residents to vote Republican. She said,"People could see the news. They could watch for themselves what was going on, when you have a party that's not going to denounce rioting." Pont believes covid-19 death figures are inflated, mail-in voting is dangerous, Biden is a "figurehead," and Harris is unqualified. "I'm terrified," she told me. "She is the most left-leaning of all the senators." When I caught up with Pont this month, she told me that the failure by the courts to identify widespread election fraud left her "disappointed and disillusioned."

Slevin noticed that in every house and business, right-wing talk radio was on in the background and thelikes of the late Rush Limbaugh were saying things like this:

Obama's been running the Democrats' show since 2016. He ran the operation against Trump. He ran the Russia sting. He ran the Russian coup. He ran everything, and he's running this."

None of that is QAnon weirdness or Alex Jones and Infowars. It is standard issue mainstream conservative media, which millions of Republicans listen to every day and watch on Fox News and the lesser cable channels at night.

Throughout the Trump administration, there was an ongoing question about whether Fox News was the president's brain or vice versa. I came to believe that it was a feedback loop with disinformation coming from both sides. There were numerous examples of Trump tweeting out some outlandish insult or idea just seconds after it had aired on the network. And the Fox News universe was dedicated to ensuring their audience saw Trump as their savior, often cleaning up his misstatements and amplifying his most effective messages to the faithful. They were a team.

Trump has begun to call into the shows again, clearly unable to keep out of the spotlight any longer. He checked in with Laura Ingraham a few days ago and made this stunning comment about January 6th:

Let's go to the video tape.https://t.co/oaT0nMllf1

— Ernest wilson (@Ernest wilson)1616794972.0

You will note that at the end he said of "the left": "they truly hate our country." That is the message those people in Iowa hear from him and all the talkers on the radio and right-wing cable news.

The question is where they go from here. It's unknown if Trump will maintain his influence. He intends to, of course, and unless he fades, these blatant lies will continue to be believed by tens of millions of people. He can draw an audience. But he can't last forever and there's little reason to believe that his offspring have whatever it is he has that appeals so much to these folks. But one Fox News celebrity is laying out a roadmap:

the right has become very honest about this https://t.co/XGFmce8Btq

— Devin (@Devin)1616982685.0

You'll note that this is all predicated on the notion that the liberals are making them do it. Carlson is the most flagrant white nationalist of the big-name Fox News celebrities and he gets the biggest ratings, which I suspect is not a coincidence. Before this guest joined Carlson, the host was nearly hysterical about the migrants at the border. He said:

You'd think that if you'd caused a crisis of this magnitude that was going to change your country forever, possibly for the worse, you'd feel a moral obligation to learn a lot about it because it's your crisis. You own it, you did it. But Biden hasn't."

A moral obligation to learn about a crisis? This is the same person who backed Trump's COVID response to the hilt and has been recently pushing anti-vax propaganda.

If you want to know what's fuelling right-wing extremism, you don't have to dig deeply into obscure corners of the dark web. Look no further than Fox News. It isn't just a ratings game for them and it isn't all about money. Fox News is the beating heart of the white nationalist movement in the United States and they are indoctrinating millions of people day in and day out. In fact, Donald Trump himself is one of those people, he just doesn't know it.

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fox News hires 'unofficial member of the team' Lara Trump despite her 'absolutely' considering US Senate run

https://www.alternet.org/2021/03/dominion-lawsuit-fox-news

Fox News

Hans von Spakovsky: HR1/For the People Act imperils free and fair elections. Here are the worst 8 parts

H.R. 1, the deceptively entitled "For the People Act," has arrived in the U.S. Senate after a party-line vote in the House of Representatives.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/whoa-whoa-fox-news-abruptly-cuts-off-kayleigh-mcenany-because/

fox replaces huckabee run for governor

https://www.alternet.org/2021/03/kayleigh-mcenany-fox-news/

tucker mypillow

This Week In Dumb
  • Rudy Giuliani was furious at his employer WABC for adding a legal disclaimer to the start of his radio show.
  • QAnon supporters looked at the coup in Myanmar/Burma and wanted it to happen in the United States.
  • Mainstream outlets too often are falling for Republican senators' demands to shrink the pandemic rescue package making its way through Congress in the name of "unity."
  • Fox guest Matt Schlapp called criticism of Marjorie Taylor Greene “part of this cancel culture.”
  • Tucker Carlson warned that fighting domestic extremism will only create more extremists.
  • Laura Ingraham warned that Republicans will oppose funding the military if extremists in the ranks are removed.
  • Sean Hannityclaimed that Democrats “are far more guilty of insurrection than Donald Trump.”
  • Tucker Carlson declared that Democrats want “a new war against our own population.”
  • A Newsmax host and contributor denied that white nationalists exist in America.
  • Fox guest: Chicago teachers too happy in their “second homes” in Florida and California to teach in-person.
  • Laura Ingraham said that “the left perversely loves the pandemic.” Meanwhile, Ingraham is still elevating vaccine conspiracy theorists.
  • Sean Hannity claimed pipe bombs planted the night before Capitol riots exonerate Trump from impeachment charges.
  • Fox guest Peter Navarro claimed that Biden's executive orders are part of a "deep state coup."

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after spending months pushing conspiracy theories about voter fraud, Lou Dobbs is reportedly out of a job.

"Fox News has canceled 'Lou Dobbs Tonight,' the program hosted by television's staunchest supporter of Donald Trump and of his assertions of voter fraud in the 2020 election, The Times has learned. Dobbs' program, which airs twice nightly at 5 and 7 p.m. Eastern on the Fox Business Network, will have its final airing Friday, according to a Fox News representative who confirmed the cancellation," the Los Angeles Times reported Friday.

"Dobbs, 75, remains under contract at Fox News but he will in all likelihood not appear on the company's networks again. In addition to his Fox Business Network program, he occasionally turned up on the Fox News Channel as a commentator," the LA Times reported. "The cancellation comes a day after voting software company Smartmatic filed a $2.7 billion defamation suit against Fox News and three of its hosts — Dobbs, Maria Bartiromo and Jeanine Pirro. The company claims the hosts perpetuated lies and disinformation about Smartmatic's role in the election, damaging its business and reputation."

Read the full report.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

insurr fail cop funeral

https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/fox-news/

1/21 mma

As Biden takes climate action. Fox News and Sinclair respond with lies

Some of President Joe Biden's first actions were in response to climate change -- like rejoining the Paris accords and canceling the Keystone XL Pipeline once and for all. Fox News responded to Biden's executive actions by hosting climate deniers and climate "contrarians." One Fox host declaredthat climate activists just want to "fight the weather." Contrary to claims aired on Fox, taking action on climate change will create jobs.

It wasn't just Fox. Sinclair Broadcasting also aired claims on local news stations across the country that canceling the Keystone XL Pipeline would destroy jobs. Longtime readers will remember these accusations being debunked repeatedly, but they've again gained steam on the right in the early days of the Biden administration, with some inflating the number to tens of thousands of jobs. The actual number is a few hundred jobs to construct the pipeline, and a few dozen to maintain it after that; the number is dwarfed by the number of clean energy jobs that already exist, much less ones that could exist with further investment. Additionally, the jobs number doesn't take into account the risks of oil spills or threats to drinking water. For instance, the already-existing Keystone Pipeline (that is, the non-XL version) has already seen at least 21 oil spills and leaks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

fox News demanded Seth Rich family keep court settlement over bogus story quiet until after the election: NYT

Sarah K. Burris Raw Story

January 18, 2021

Fox News settled a lawsuit with Seth Rich's family in the fall that was large enough that they weren't required to apologize publicly for lying about the family's son for years. But one provision that New York Times reporter Ben Smith discovered, was that they asked that the settlement news not be announced until after the November election.

"Why did Fox care about keeping the Rich settlement...

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/2-weeks-after-it-called-election-fox-news-cast-doubt-results-nearly-800-times

https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/martial-law-2649638050/

In a preview of the next four years, right-wing media refuse to admit that Joe Biden is the president-elect

Fox News has been Donald Trump’s personal propaganda outlet throughout his presidency, however he’s recently increased his criticism of the network. Trump has urged his followers to instead watch OAN and Newsmax, who in his mind, are more willing to promote delusional conspiracy theories and aid his efforts to undermine election results. 

OAN and Newsmax, Fox’s right-wing competitors, refusal to refer to Joe Biden as president-elect proved to be an early point of contention between the networks, and a preview of how they will interact in the years to come. Since the early discrepancy, Fox has aggressively course-corrected in hopes of maintaining its audience.

For example, OAN’s Pearson Sharp highlighted that his network “will officially not be calling Joe Biden the president-elect.” Further, Newsmax’s highest-rated host, Greg Kelly, said that “Joe Biden is pretending that he is the president-elect” and that “at least on this opinion show” he “is not the president-elect.” Though the network has said that “as a result of the Electoral College vote Joe Biden is the president-elect and will be referred to as such on Newsmax.”

While several of Fox’s “news-side” programs have correctly referred to Biden as the president-elect, several other personalities have expressed an unwillingness to do so, in an effort to retain viewers loyal to the president. This week, Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade described Biden as “the former vice president who is, according to some, president-elect,” while his co-host Ainsley Earhart referenced “what they’re calling the President-elect Biden.” Lou Dobbs mentioned the “so-called president-elect” on Wednesday, while Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson both avoided the issue by simply calling him “Joe Biden” without any title at all.

Media Matters’ Matt Gertz explained the absurd nature of Fox’s efforts: “But Fox’s fear of crossing its competitors and its viewers over something this patently ridiculous bodes ill for how it will react when Newsmax and OAN push deranged conspiracy theories during the Biden presidency.”

Also: Fox News has already started poisoning the well for climate action under the Biden administration.

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