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Open in TheBrain

FOX7 922

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SEE EIGHT 6 23

SEE JRNL FAIL: FOX INGRAM TUCKER MURDOCH HAVE A BODY COUNT

merri ok

SEE NEWS CORP ON DOMINION FAIL

how xian is fox?

see bad trinity

see gubmint control tyrant ~ freedumb

see misogyny

escalator gt replacement

NY post feeder fever swamp?

pirro is #1 post tucker?!

see benghazi 2 comer deep state BS

bak 2 23

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2x

mma mg 1 24

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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[Cable companies may force their customers to prop up Fox Nation's unpopular content | Media Matters for AmericaCable companies may force their customers to prop up Fox Nation's unpopular content | Media Matters for AmericaCable companies may force their customers to prop up Fox Nation's unpopular content | Media Matters for AmericaCable companies may force their customers to prop up Fox Nation's unpopular content | Media Matters for AmericaCable companies may force their customers to prop up Fox Nation's unpopular content | Media Matters for America](https://www.mediamatters.org/carriage-fees/cable-companies-may-force-their-customers-prop-fox-nations-unpopular-content)

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10 23 rolled cried

Jenna Ellis, a Republican lawyer who participated in Donald Trump’s scheme to subvert the results of the 2020 election, pleaded guilty on Tuesday in Fulton County, Georgia, District Attorney Fani Willis’ election interference case against the former president and his alleged accomplices. Ellis used the airwaves of Fox News and its sister channel, Fox Business, to push false election claims, even as the network’s stars privately disparaged her — but now Fox has all but ignored her guilty plea in Trump’s case.

Ellis, who had faced charges which included participating in what prosecutors called a “criminal enterprise” to reverse Trump’s defeat in Georgia, pleaded guilty to a felony count of aiding and abetting false statements and writings. She has agreed to cooperate with prosecutors, which could include giving testimony at trial, and said in a statement to the court that she had “failed to do my due diligence” and feels “deep remorse” for her actions.

Fox has kept its viewers in the dark about Ellis’ plea, which received extensive coverage on CNN and MSNBC. Fox News provided only about 3 minutes of coverage across 2 segments while Fox Business had not mentioned it at all, according to a Media Matters review through 3 p.m. ET.

Fox’s lack of coverage around Ellis’ guilty plea is particularly relevant given that she had used the networks’ platforms to promote election falsehoods. Ellis appeared on Fox News and its sister channel, Fox Business, more than 20 times in the weeks following the 2020 election, according to the Nexis database and Media Matters’ internal database. The bulk of Ellis’ interviews came with hardcore Trumpist election deniers like Maria Bartiromo, Jeanine Pirro, and Lou Dobbs, though she was also hosted by “news”-side anchors like Harris Faulkner and Shannon Bream.

Ellis used her Fox interviews to promote election lies — including about Dominion Voting Systems, the technology company that subsequently sued Fox for defamation, eventually reaping a record $787.5 million settlement.

And filings in that lawsuit reveal that inside Fox, the network’s stars knew that Ellis was not a credible voice.

When Ellis appeared on then-Fox prime-time host Tucker Carlson’s show on November 4, 2020, she pushed a viral fake news story that in Michigan, “You have 138,000 votes that magically appear that are all 100% Biden votes.”

“The specific case you are referring to, where 100% of the votes, many votes, were cast for Joe Biden. That doesn’t seem plausible. Will those votes count?” Carlson asked. He later added that “100% of anything ought to make you nervous because it’s probably a crock. And that does not seem believable to me.”

But texts revealed in the Dominion suit show that the next day, Carlson was informed that claim was false.

“Just for heads up jenna ellis she was wrong last night when she said there were a 100k ballots and all for Biden,” he was told.

“Many have said that,” Carlson replied.

Carlson would later criticize Ellis’ claims about Dominion to her directly. On November 21, 2020, he texted her, “Circumstantial won’t work with this story. If there’s no one inside the company willing to talk, or internal Dominion documents or copies of the software showing that they did it, this seems shockingly reckless to me. And as you know there isn’t.”

Carlson and Fox host Laura Ingraham also criticized Ellis in text messages two days later during a discussion about the ineptitude of the Trump legal team.

“Let’s just put it this way, when your WH [White House] counsel has a strong view about the quality of the legal team.… Jenna Ellis…Oy vey. No serious lawyer could believe what they were saying,” Ingraham wrote.

“But they said nothing in public. Pretty disgusting,” Carlson replied.

“That she is even connected in any way to the effort is a fucking joke,” Ingraham added.

But Fox producers happily continued booking that “fucking joke” to push the same election lies to their audience, because Fox is a pro-Trump propaganda network that yoked its own success to that of the former president.

Three years after Trump’s defeat, that means declaring the former president’s myriad prosecutions to be the politically motivated salvos of a Stalinist administration — and paying no mind when the one-time regulars it hosted to defend him now plead guilty to associated crimes.

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https://www.alternet.org/trump-jack-smith-2661312958/

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https://www.alternet.org/send/biden-fox-news/

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an 6 23

fx News host Jesse Watters on Tuesday encouraged his network's predominantly right-wing audience to "stigmatize" unhoused Americans. During his rant, Watters asserted that demonizing human beings is a necessary tactic to end what he suggested was a choice.

[Democratic California Governor Gavin Newsom] "is now maybe midfield, but he has to understand homelessness isn't about lack of affordable housing. It's about drug addicts that wanna wander around and live in tents on the sidewalk. And so you can't coddle antisocial behavior. You can't subsidize antisocial behavior. You have to stigmatize it," Watters declared.

"You can't celebrate people with purple hair, with nose rings, four kids with four different men who are dressed like trash, and make them out to be some sort of cutting-edge heroes," Watters continued. "You have to call them what they are. These are people that have failed in life and they're on their deathbed, and if we're not honest about it, we're never gonna fix this problem."

READ MORE: 'Whatever you want to call them': Jesse Watters ridicules the NAACP’s Florida travel advisory

According to the nonprofit Breaktime, "Homelessness often manifests in a cycle. Without consistent access to well-paid jobs, our associates struggle to save money and build financial stability. Left unable to put money toward savings after first satiating immediate needs, like food or transportation, they in turn struggle to find stable housing. Our associates cannot access the job or financial security necessary to sustain housing, nor can they ensure the housing security necessary to access employment or financial security. This is the cycle of young adult homelessness."

Similarly, The National Alliance to End Homelessness notes that "the solution to homelessness is straightforward: housing. By connecting people experiencing homelessness to housing and services, they have a platform from which they can address other areas that may have contributed to their homelessness — such as employment, health, and substance abuse."

Watch below via Media Matters for America researcher Kat Abughazaleh

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truck burned?

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-host-blames-pete-buttigiegs-obsession-equity-i-95-collapse

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https://www.mediamatters.org**/jesse-watters/**fox-news-welcomes**-swastika-wielding-teacher-**latest-anti-trans-culture-warrior

no lnx vid

Fox News welcomes swastika-wielding teacher as the latest anti-trans culture warrior

Special PROGRAMS

LGBTQ

WRITTEN BY JANE LEE

PUBLISHED 06/13/23

On June 12, Fox News' Jesse Watters hosted Glendale, California, teacher Ray Shelton, who was placed on leave following a school board meeting where he held up a swastika sign and then went on an anti-trans, hate-filled tirade, saying, “Transgender ideology … is antihuman.”

In the segment, Watters painted Shelton as the anti-trans culture war hero du jour, claiming he had been fired for “saying what 70% of the country believes and what 100% of science believes” about trans people.

The interview continued with Watters, Shelton, and his attorney, David Pivtorak depicting Shelton as a victim of censorship and the support of trans students as part of an “authoritarian ideology.” (Pivtorak had previously appeared on Fox News touting his client’s lawsuit against American Express for supposed racism against white employees.)

Video

CitationFrom the June 12, 2023, edition of Fox News' Jesse Watters Primetime

Watters and his guests conveniently forgot to mention that Shelton had brought a swastika sign to a school board meeting.

The omission conveys Watters’ priorities clearly: prop up the latest anti-trans culture warrior, nevermind that he displayed a hate symbol at a public school district event to compare students to Nazis. Watters may not have had the nerve to explicitly defend displays of swastikas (though we know his fellow Fox News co-host doesn’t draw this line), but providing Shelton with a national platform tells us he endorses it all the same.

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mma 6 23

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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an 6 23

no lnx vid

Fox News anchor disregards Fox’s own debunks of a GOP claim that an FBI document shows Biden was paid a bribe

Two Fox reporters said a source told the network that “the document does not say Joe Biden received any payments”

WRITTEN BY ZACHARY PLEAT

PUBLISHED 06/09/23 2:02 PM EDT

Fox News anchor Julie Banderas disregarded a Fox reporter who told her moments before that an FBI document trumpeted by Republican lawmakers “does not say Joe Biden received any payments” and instead pushed GOP claims that the president was paid $5 million by Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company his son Hunter worked for.

Another Fox correspondent had reported the same thing the day before, debunking the GOP’s latest smear of the president.

Fox has long pushed false allegations tying President Joe Biden to his son’s work for Burisma, an effort by former President Donald Trump to bring down Biden’s presidential campaign but which succeeded only in leading to Trump’s first impeachment. The GOP’s latest effort in this smear campaign revolves around an FBI document that Republicans claim shows the president was paid a bribe.

On June 9, Fox reporter Jacqui Heinrich said during a report on this GOP allegation that “a source familiar with this document tells Fox, ‘To be clear, the document does not say Joe Biden received any payments.’”

Video

CitationFrom the June 9, 2023, edition of Fox News' The Faulkner Focus

But just moments later, Banderas ignored Heinrich’s reporting, saying: “Let’s just talk about Marjorie Taylor Greene, Nancy Mace, and Lauren Boebert describing these $5 million payments, which basically were paid to multiple Biden family members, including the current president.”

Video

CitationFrom the June 9, 2023, edition of Fox News' The Faulkner Focus

On June 8, Fox senior congressional correspondent Chad Pergram similarly reported that “a source familiar with the document tells Fox, quote, ‘The document does not say Joe Biden received any payments.’”

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https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/response-wildfire-smoke-choking-new-york-city-fox-news-trots-out-tired-climate-denial

June 7, as smoke from hundreds of wildfires raging across Canada turned New York City into a dystopian climate change movie, MSNBC host Chris Hayes tweeted: “I always thought there would be *some* kind of climate reckoning when it got bad enough but Covid has taught me that, no, people will just step on the gas and happily mow people down so they never have to admit taking a wrong turn."

Too little TV news coverage connected the code red air quality in New York and other impacted U.S. cities to climate change, but Fox News and other right-wing media figures retreated even further from a reckoning, stepping on the climate denial pedal by dismissing the link between global warming and wildfires, attacking those that did, and insisting on alternative explanations for why Canada is having its worst-ever wildfire season.

In fact, at 2 hours and 41 minutes of coverage, Fox News covered the wildfire story more than either CNN (2 hours and 19 minutes) or MSNBC (41 minutes) on June 7 and mentioned climate change (to deny it) more times in its coverage than its counterparts.

Fox News dismisses the link between wildfires and climate change, mocks those that do make the connection

Scientists say wildfires are becoming more severe as “forests around the world increasingly dry out amid the warming climate”, a fact even observed by Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal. Experts further note that Canada’s wildfire season is a “harbinger of our climate future” with the United Nations warning that by 2090, “global wildfires are expected to increase in intensity by up to 57% thanks to climate change.”  But no amount of evidence, either experiential or academic, changes the tone of the reporting at Fox News when it comes to extreme weather and climate-fueled events.

Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade mocks AOC, climate change czar John Kerry, and White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre for connecting the dangerous air quality to climate change: “Every time it’s real hot, climate change. Every time it’s real cold, climate change. When it rains a lot it’s because of climate change. And you guessed it, Canada, with burning forests, 400 separate fires, it’s because of climate change. AOC said it. Of course climate change czar John Kerry said it, and [Karine Jean-Pierre] KJP has one note, listen.” Fox News, Fox & Friends, [6/8/23]

Fox News host Laura Ingraham suggests that coverage of the event is overblown and mocks those reporting the air quality from a climate angle: “Is this really a novel occurrence for our country or is it getting the coverage of the type it’s getting because it's happening along the East Coast where all the elites live?” Ingraham continued: “The apocalyptic coverage in the New York Times today was just absolutely knee-slappingly hilarious. … CNN's Bill Weir, no stranger to hyperbole himself, used the event to call for action to electrify every car in the United States for humanity’s sake." Fox News, The Ingraham Angle, [6/7/23]

Fox News host Sean Hannity accuses Democrats, including AOC, of politicizing the crisis to push their climate agenda: “Tonight, smoke from the Canadian wildfires, they blanketed the entire East Coast of the U.S. creating a scary martian-like scene in New York City especially. And as usual, Democrats, they wasted no time. They went right to politicizing the crisis, AOC using the wildfire and heat wave in Puerto Rico to once again push her radical Green New Deal or the climate alarmist religious cult agenda.” Fox News, Hannity, [6/7/23]

On Jesse Watters Primetime, climate denier and frequent Fox guest Mark Morano dismissed climate change and accused those making the connection of weaponizing the weather while smoking a cigar:“This is exactly what you would expect to happen. This is Canadian natural disaster mismanagement and now they are trying to blame global warming which makes it, what? Our fault. It's our SUVs. It's our gas stoves which, by the way, didn't New York ban them? Shouldn't we have -- shouldn't wildfires be a thing of the past? I thought they were banning them.” Fox News, Jesse Watters Primetime, [6/7/23]

On The Five, Jeanine Pirro accuses AOC and Democrats of “pumping up climate hysteria”: “While Americans choke on the smoke, the far left smells an opportunity. AOC thinks this is a great time to push her Green New Deal. She says that we must, ”Adapt our food systems, energy grids, infrastructure and healthcare to prepare for what's to come". Other Democrats are pumping up climate hysteria and bringing back, you guessed it, mask insanity.” Fox News, The Five, [6/7/23]

On Outnumbered,the panel mocks AOC for connecting the crisis to climate change while Fox contributor Kennedy suggests that because wildfires existed before “we started talking about the climate crisis” then the science is not settled: “There are a lot of reasons for wildfires. Wildfires have been happening for a long time. Before we started talking about the climate crisis. So, I want to make sure that the science is settled before we completely turf our economy and flush any innovation we have down the toilet because of a tweet from AOC.” Fox News, Outnumbered, [6/7/23]

Fox turns to its go-to explanation for catastrophic wildfires: It’s poor forest management. And it’s environmentalists’ fault.

Forest management has played some role in the unprecedented wildfire season in Canada — while the role of climate change is also evident and clear. But from watching Fox’s coverage of the fires, you would probably come away with the idea that it’s been Canada’s forest management policies alone driving the worsening fires.

Fox’s jump to shift blame to poor forest management as a tactic to downplay climate change goes back to at least 2018 when Trump first blamed California’s forestry policies while touring the aftermath of the deadly Camp Fire that destroyed the town of Paradise. Fox revived the tactic in full force during California’s apocalyptic 2020 wildfires.

Helping drive the swift move to blame forest management and environmentalists this time around is News Corps darling, Fox News contributor, and New York Post columnist Miranda Devine who wrote a June 7 column, “Smoky New York isn’t climate change — it’s bad forest management,” which has been cited by Fox News personalities and amplified by right-wing media figures online.

Fox News host Rachel Campos-Duffy on Outnumbered: “The real blame is on the climate cult. … They are an anti-human group and they want to shut our forests and close them off to humans and to industry who know how to manage it. And that's what's happening right now.” Fox News, Outnumbered, [6/8/23]

On the Faulkner Focus, Fox News contributor Jason Chaffetz insists that poor forest management is liberals' fault: I hate to tell it you folks but there have been big forest fires for eons probably since the beginning of time. It's ironic to me because the same people who claim they want the Green New Deal, they fight us every single time on the mitigation efforts to manage the forests, clear out the underbrush, clear out the dead trees and clear out the fuel that makes these things so ignite in such big fashion. They will not do that as Democrats and these left-leaning liberals. Fox News, Faulkner Focus, [6/8/23]

Fox & Friends co-host Steve Doocy dismissed climate change and redirected the blame to “bad forest management”: “Climate change does not start a fire. It can create dry conditions, and they have really bad dry conditions up in Canada right now. In Canada they are blaming bad forest management because of a very dry winter and they did not get a lot of snow. … Apparently behind the scenes they have not been doing the controlled burns that they should have been doing. And back in 2024 environmentalists wrote a paper and said not enough is being done to fund this kind of forest management and there is going to be hell to pay.” Fox News, Fox & Friends, [6/8/23]

Sean Hannity also suggested that forest management is the main culprit:“Here's what nobody talks about. There is a science. You can get an advanced college degree in forestry. There's something called the controlled burns that climate alarmist cult members are all dead set against. And you see, if you have a controlled burn that prevents the bigger fires like the one they're experiencing in little Justin's neighborhood in Canada that's now making it smoke all the way down here.” Fox News, Hannity, [6/7/23]

Host Jesse Watters claims that there are fewer wildfires now than 100 years ago to dismiss the role of climate change and prop up the forest management argument:  “You might be surprised to find out over the last 100 years, there have been less wildfires, not more. The Wall Street Journal says in the early 1900s about 4% of land worldwide burned every year by 2021 that was down to 2.5%. So instead of obsessing over climate change they should take a look at forest management.” Fox News, Jesse Watters Primetime, [6/7/23]

On The Five co-host Dana Perino blames wildfires on forest management and liberal policies: “Canada is experiencing really bad wildfires on their public lands. We have a similar problem, and it has to do with forest management. The Biden administration has policies that are in direct conflict with one another. … Wildfires can occur naturally of course, but if you are actively managing your forest, then you can prevent some of these things. The left has never wanted to do that.”  Fox News, The Five, [6/7/23]

Pirro suggests that since only half of Americans believe in climate change that Democrats shouldn’t be linking it to wildfires: Agreeing that poor forest management is the main cause of severe wildfires, Pirro questions why climate change is even part of the discussion: “We’re at a point when I think 49% of Americans believe climate change is caused mostly by human actions, the lowest reported apparently in many years.So why are Democrats, why do they keep pushing climate change over something that could’ve been prevented?" Fox News, The Five, [6/7/23] HUH?!

Related

National TV news chokes out the climate angle in coverage of Canadian wildfires

06/08/23 2:57 PM EDT

With Canadian wildfires, Fox News follows its COVID playbook

06/08/23

Fox News host Jesse Watters says it’s “normal” for the Northeastern United States to be engulfed in smoke from Canadian wildfires

06/08/23

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cell phones seized

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https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-anchor-disregards-foxs-own-debunks-gop-claim-fbi-document-shows-biden-was-paid

https://www.mediamatters.org/climate-deniers/fox-news-runs-ads-mike-huckabees-climate-denial-book-targeted-children

https://www.mediamatters.org/donald-trump/fox-news-responds-federal-trump-indictment-unhinged-demagoguery

former President Donald Trump has been indicted — again — and Fox News personalities are once more rallying behind him. In the hours after news broke that Trump is facing seven federal criminal charges over his mishandling of federal documents, his loyal propagandists denounced the indictment as a “dark day in America” and an attack on American democracy and the rule of law.

Trump wrote on social media Thursday evening that he had been indicted over his mishandling of classified documents. The New York Times later reported that Trump “was charged with a total of seven counts, including willfully retaining national defense secrets in violation of the Espionage Act, making false statements and an obstruction of justice conspiracy, according to people familiar with the matter.”

Trump had taken government documents with him when he left office and refused to return them, leading to an August search of his Mar-a-Lago resort in which the FBI uncovered a trove of documents bearing classification markings, some at the “top secret” level. Special counsel Jack Smith has been investigating the former president’s conduct for months.

Trump is the first former president ever to face federal criminal charges and is expected to surrender in Miami, Florida, on Tuesday. The charges were not a surprise — even Trump’s own former attorney general Bill Barr had repeatedly acknowledged that the former president’s own conduct put him in serious legal jeopardy.

But on Fox, host Jesse Watters announced the news by saying that “the president, former, calls it the boxes hoax” and suggesting that the indictment was an attempt to distract attention from the House GOP’s investigations of President Joe Biden.

The situation rapidly devolved from there. Over the following hours, Fox’s hosts and the menagerie of Trump cronies and sycophants the network put on the air unleashed unhinged demagoguery.

Trump lawyer Alina Habba called it evidence that we live in a “sick world” with “a two-tier system of justice,” citing the lack of legal punishment for Biden, his son Hunter, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton.

Former Trump aide Stephen Millerclaimed that “history will record today as the day that we ceased to be a democratic republic and we became a people ruled by an unelected government bureaucracy.”

Former Trump acting Attorney General Matt Whitakercalled it “a really sad day for our country” and “the stuff of banana republics.”

For right-wing activist Ned Ryun, it was “late-stage republic behavior. When you use the legal system as a weapon against political opponents, you’ve abandoned the rule of law.”

“What’s going on here is a disgusting disgrace. It is war on Trump, it is war on the Republican Party, and it is a war on the republic,” Fox host Mark Levin screamed. “You have crossed the Rubicon twice, which has never been done, and we will never forgive you — never, ever, and that’s the bottom line,” he added.

“It is a dark day in America,” concluded longtime Trump adviser and Fox host Sean Hannity. “There is no equal justice. There is no equal application of our laws.” He added, “Our system of justice has now been weaponized beyond belief and this country is in serious trouble."

Fox’s furious denunciations may have taken the issue off the table for Trump’s would-be presidential rivals. When Fox’s Harris Faulkner brought on Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC), who is theoretically running for president against Trump, to discuss the indictment, she asked him, “The bottom line is, you’re a Republican, this was a Republican president, and look at what has happened. Your reaction?” Scott took the hint and issued a rambling response that avoided directly criticizing Trump.

Fox’s over-the-top response is familiar. While some have suggested that the network and its Murdoch owners have turned on the former president, Fox always rises to Trump’s defense at his moments of legal peril.

The network’s stars were similarly furious in March, when Trump was indicted on 34 charges of falsifying business records in a New York state court in connection with the $130,000 hush money payment made to an adult film actress in the closing days of the 2016 presidential campaign. They urged viewers to treat the charges as an attack on the U.S. Constitution, American democracy, the rule of law, and themselves, while denouncing the prosecutor and his purported “witch hunt.”

Likewise, when news first broke of the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago, the Trumpists at Fox denounced it as “the worst attack on this republic in modern history” and part of a “preemptive coup” to prevent Trump’s reelection, among other incendiary claims, with hosts urging viewers to believe that “the real target of this investigation is you.”

The throughline is that any legal attack on Trump is inherently corrupt and a signal that America has been lost — and that, if Trump is brought down, Fox’s viewers may be next.

Trump needs the powerful propaganda apparatus of Fox to keep his supporters in line and his primary opponents at bay, and the network’s hosts and executives are happy to oblige. But we’ve seen the disastrous consequences that can come from Fox’s overheated rhetoric in the former president’s service.

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newsmax fox now run by libs

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https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-prime-time-ratings-continue-fall-network-weathers-first-full-month-without-tucker

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As NYC is inundated with wildfire smoke, Rupert Murdoch’s WSJ calmly shows link to climate crisis, while Murdoch's Fox News mocks it

WRITTEN BY JOHN WHITEHOUSE

RESEARCH CONTRIBUTIONS FROM SAGE HODIL

PUBLISHED 06/07/23

New York City is currently inundated with a hazardous level of wildfire smoke, making the skies appear yellowish-orange.

The smoke is from wildfires in Canada, which scientists say are “becoming bigger and more frequent” due to climate change, as reliably explained by Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal:

Wildfires like those ravaging Canada are becoming bigger and more frequent as forests around the world increasingly dry out amid the warming climate, many scientists say.

Some of the biggest fires are breaking out in the boreal forests of the Northern Hemisphere such as most of the ones in Canada. That is because the Arctic region has warmed nearly four times faster than the rest of the world, said Carly Phillips, a Boston-based research scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

In the boreal areas—mostly conifer forests with long winters and short summers—of Canada and Alaska, she said the annual area burned has nearly doubled in the past 60 years, along with an increase in the frequency of large fires. Russia’s vast Siberian forests have been consumed by giant fires too. Phillips said this year’s outbreak, while unprecedented in size, is just following the trend.

“I don’t know if it’s a tipping point, but what this underscores is that the climate crisis is here and now,” Phillips said.

The link is so obvious and uncontroversial that Journal staff members have no problems tweeting it.

And yet, over at Murdoch’s Fox News Channel, this is just another reason for hosts to punch left, this time at frequent target Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), who dared to point out that the country has work to do to adapt to the climate crisis.

Video file

Video CitationFrom the June 7, 2023, edition of of Fox News' Outnumbered

None of this is novel. Fox News (and the Journal’s right-wing editorial board) have for years pushed climate denial on the body politic. Now that the effects of the climate crisis are impossible to miss, the network is still refusing to recalibrate.

Like the Dominion case shows, it’s not clear if Fox’s audience — or whatever is left of it — will allow the network to speak the truth.

Either way, I’d recommend that people working at Fox News headquarters in Manhattan buy some high-quality masks. They might even still have some sitting around.

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Wall Street Journal

Climate deniers

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https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/canadian-wildfires-fox-news-follows-its-covid-playbook

no lnx twit vid

With Canadian wildfires, Fox News follows its COVID playbook

Fox guest on hazardous smoke: “There's no health risk. … Particulate matter is very fine soot. It's just carbon particles — they're innocuous.”

Special PROGRAMS

CLIMATE & ENERGY

WRITTEN BY MATT GERTZ

PUBLISHED 06/08/23

Fox News hosts and guests and other right-wing media figures are minimizing the public health risk of the cloud of particulate matter from Canadian forest fires that descended on much of the United States this week and mocking people for taking steps to protect themselves. 

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The coverage is reminiscent of Fox’s disastrous handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly its early days, when the network downplayed the potential danger posed by the virus.

Smoke from wildfires in Ontario and Quebec inundated the Midwest and East Coast on Wednesday. Major metropolises were under hazardous air quality warnings, and a reddish-orange haze choked New York City, which at one point had the lowest air quality of any major city in the world. On Thursday, the smoke-filled air is expected to spread further into the Midwest and South even as conditions improve in the Northeast.

Scientists say such wildfires are becoming larger and more frequent as “forests around the world increasingly dry out amid the warming climate,” a fact calmly observed by Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal but furiously derided by his Fox employees.

Many major news outlets published reports noting that experts recommend people in affected areas wear high-quality masks to prevent health problems caused by the smoke. Those can include “trouble breathing, burning eyes, dizziness, headache or nausea,” particularly among high-risk populations including children, seniors, and people with respiratory problems including asthma. As Fox medical correspondent Dr. Janette Nesheiwat put it during a Wednesday appearance on Fox News Tonight, “If you do have to go outside, an N-95 can help protect you from that large particulate matter.”

Nesheiwat has a lot of work to do within Fox’s own building if she hopes that message will sink in for its audience. Hosts elsewhere on the network treated the idea of wearing masks in response to the wildfire smoke as a punch line.

On Wednesday afternoon, Jeanine Pirro presented the notion as a left-wing conspiracy, saying, “Democrats are pumping upclimate hysteriaand bringing back, you guessed it, mask insanity.” That night, Sean Hannity mocked “young, healthy people” for putting on masks, Jesse Watters lashed out at government officials for recommending their use, and Laura Ingraham claimed they “seem a little giddy to be back in the masks” and arepromoting “panic porn.”

In fact, Fox’s influential hosts repeatedly downplayed the idea that the wildfire smoke poses any health risk at all.

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“I keep reading and hearing reports and people being interviewed — 'I had a hard time breathing' — and I'm like, I'm walking in the same place you're walking in and I don't feel a thing, and I'm trying to understand, and my -- I work out regularly, so I think I'm relatively in tune with my body,” Hannity said. “I think if it was difficult -- if I was having difficulty breathing, I would notice. But these are young people saying this. Are they all snowflakes?”

“Yes,” OutKick host Charly Arnolt replied. “I think people just like to make a big deal out of nothing.”

“Everybody is saying stay inside, but I didn't listen,” Watters said at the top of his show over the chyron “Jesse Braves ‘Hazardous’ Air Quality.”

“Why? Because I love you,” he continued. “I came into the city for you tonight. I braved the smoke so you could watch your favorite show. The air quality is hazardous. ‘Worse than 9/11.’ But, I said, I don't care. The show must go on.”

Ingraham decided that the perspective her viewers needed to hear about the potential health impacts of smoke on the respiratory system was that of Steve Milloy, a notorious climate denier and former cigarette and coal lobbyist who told them they had nothing to fear.

“Steve, no one's denying it is unpleasant. My eyes are pretty itchy and watery, yesterday and a little bit today, and it might go on for a couple more days,” Ingraham said after introducing her guest. “But is this wholly out of the ordinary?”

“No. This happens anytime there's a wildfire in the West. I mean, it's unusual in the East. Look, the air is ugly, it's unpleasant to breathe, and for a lot of people, they getanxietyover it. But the reality is there's no health risk,” Milloy replied. “We have this kind of air in India and China all the time — no public health emergency.” (Both countries reportedly see more than 1 million premature deaths a year from air pollution.)

“This doesn't kill anybody, this doesn't make anybody cough, this is not a health event,” he further explained.

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“Particulate matter is very fine soot. It's just carbon particles — they’re innocuous,” Milloy later added. “There's nothing in them. They have no effect.”

Video

CitationFrom the June 7, 2023, edition of Fox News' The Ingraham Angle

Meanwhile, at Fox’s cable news competitor Newsmax, host Greg Kelly highlighted the upside of the hazardous levels of smoke blanketing New York City. “I'll tell you, it actually smells like wood smoke. It's not an unpleasant odor, to be honest,” he said. “It is pretty, it actually is pretty. It's a beautiful, interesting aura the city has right now.”

The modern right-wing media ecosystem is defined less by its ideology than its grievances. Popular figures within that milieu,for reasons financial and partisan, despise Democrats, liberals, experts, and the mainstream press, which they consider one and the same, and reflexively oppose whatever those hated entities support.

That reflexive opposition became lethal when COVID-19 spread across the United States. Fox News hosts initially told their viewers, incorrectly, that the virus was no more deadly than the flu and urged them to treat it as a Democratic hoax to damage President Donald Trump. Later, they endorsed untested and ineffective COVID-19 “cures” while downplaying the effectiveness of masks, social distancing, and vaccines.

This irresponsible coverage assuredly led to the deaths of Fox viewers. But virtually no one at the network was held accountable for their actions during a public health crisis, so now they are following the same playbook.

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06/07

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an 6 23

no lnx

fox News' willingness to promote the false claim that the 2020 election was stolen from former President Donald Trump has cost the right-wing cable news outlet a lot of time and money.

In April, Fox News agreed to pay Dominion Voting Systems $787,500 to settle a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit. And Fox News is still facing a separate $2.7 billion defamation lawsuit from Dominion competitor Smartmatic.

On Monday, June 5, Democratic Oregon Ellen Rosenblum announced that she was conducting an investigation of Fox Corp.'s board of directors — which, she alleges, may have failed to live up to its obligations when it promoted the Big Lie. The Oregon Public Employees Retirement Fund, according to the Associated Press, owns over 250,000 shares of Fox stock.

READ MORE: 'Extremely poor judgement': GOP Oregon House minority leader apologizes after her son gives a Nazi salute

Rosenblum is conducting the investigation with Oregon State Treasurer Tobias Read, a fellow Democrat.

Rosenblum announced, "Treasurer Read and I believe that Fox's board of directors breached its fiduciary duties by allowing Fox News to broadcast false claims that Dominion and Smartmatic rigged the 2020 presidential election. We hope to hold the board accountable and protect the long-term value of Oregon's investment in Fox Corp."

Oregon's state attorney general has a track record when it comes to pushing back against MAGA election lies.

In December 2020, 12 Republicans serving in the Oregon State Legislature sent Rosenblum a letter asking her to join far-right Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in his Texas v. Pennsylvania lawsuit — which urged the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the election results in four states that President Joe Biden won: Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin.

READ MORE: Smartmatic vows to 'expose the rest' of Fox News' 'misconduct'

But Rosenblum did the exact opposite. Instead of joining Paxton in Texas v. Pennsylvania, she expressed her total contempt for his lawsuit — which the High Court rejected.

On December 11, 2021, Rosenblum tweeted, "Today I joined 22 AGs in filing a brief opposing Texas' last-minute attempt to have the U.S. Supreme Court take the election from the American people. Texas has no business interfering in other states' elections! The sooner the Court rejects this latest outrage, the better."

READ MORE :'I'm stuck with Fox': Unredacted Tucker Carlson texts highlight post-election turmoil at Fox News

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George Will: Fox News’ $787.5 million Dominion settlement was 'good for the law' ›

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note covid fail

odd for HOST to ref satan? vs guest?

https://www.alternet.org/fox-news-anchor-fabricating-story/

no lnx twt

'Complete lie': Fox News anchor allegedly fabricated story during primetime guest hosting gig

David Badash andThe New Civil Rights Movement June 07, 2023

After firing its star host, Tucker Carlson, Fox News has been scheduling its other anchors to fill in as guest hosts on a week-by-week basis, with some viewers, if not network brass, seeing these as auditions.

This week Harris Faulkner, host of the far-right network’s “The Faulkner Focus” and co-host of “Outnumbered,” filled in during what was once Carlson’s slot.

Reaction online has not been positive.

On Monday, Faulkner claimed she had been kicked out of a restaurant for praying, in what The Wrap called a “blistering, biblical monologue about the ongoing ‘attack’ on the Christian faith in America.”

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“We know who we are. And we know who’s we are,” Faulkner told the dwindling Fox News audience. “For those of us who believe, we must be bold in our faith right now. When you gather in public spaces pray thankfully over your food, even when the server gives you the stink-eye, or tells the manager that your peaceful grace is triggering them. Had it happen to me. I’ve been asked to leave a restaurant for openly bowing my head in prayer hands. In America. It’s all good. They don’t deserve my money anyway.”

Many demanded Faulkner name the restaurant, or provide proof. Among them, The Daily Beast’s senior media reporter Justin Baragona, who tweeted, Monday night, “I’m going to ask Fox News PR if Harris Faulkner can provide the name of the restaurant and date when this happened. Will update if I receive a response.”

READ MORE: Pence Presidential Launch Mocked for Suggesting Drag Queens Are Assaulting ‘American Values’ – With No Mention of Trump

Baragona has yet to state he’s received a response.

Another doubter is Republican former Congressman Adam Kinzinger, who wrote: “We need the name of this restaurant and when it happened. If true that’s awful. IF it’s not true… which seems most likely the case… then there needs to be accountability. Lies are not the tool of the Lord. And the USA isn’t his god.”

During that same monologue, as The Daily Beast noted, Faulkner told Fox News viewers: “Women and children are being redesigned by some sort of mad leftist science experiment.”

“It’s as though people on the left have more free time than anybody else. They want to acronym and pronoun us to death,” she said, apparently taking a swing at the LGBTQ community. “Well know this: the Lord has determined I am a woman, and my pronouns are U.S.A.”

“We are in a spiritual fightfor the soul of America,” she also claimed, “and if you think that’s not true, take a look around at what’s going on.The devil has gotten into some people. The worst part of experiencing our country ripping at the seams is that our enemies are massing, feasting on the tastiness of our weaknesses.”

Baragona pointed out, “In her first night on primetime filling in for Tucker’s old timeslot, Harris Faulkner drew 1.59 million total viewers and just 105,000 in the 25-54 advertising demographic, finishing behind CNN and MSNBC in the demo. Tucker averaged 3.26 million total viewers last quarter.”

READ MORE: ‘Isn’t There a Beach in Mexico Waiting for You?’: Cruz Mocked for Claiming Garland Will Indict Trump Over SCOTUS Seat Loss

Former CNN media reporter Brian Stelter added, “And Jen Psaki was filling in at 8 on MSNBC,” suggesting MSNBC might have had fewer regular viewers during that time slot.

But the real outrage came on Tuesday, when Faulkner delivered what many deemed an outright “lie,” and served up proof of their accusations.

Faulker told Fox News viewers, “You know, we didn’t actually close schools in 1918, during the Spanish flu pandemic.”

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That’s false. Provably false.

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“And sometimes we make dangerously bad decisions, like pandemic lockdowns and keeping our own children home from schools when a virus was hurting them far less often than adults,” she said, ignoring the fact that family transmission often started with children (see below.) “You know, we didn’t actually close schools in 1918 during the Spanish flu pandemic. We didn’t even have penicillin back then. We did sacrifice. We suffered but then we pressed on. Our enemies hate us for surviving, but they would love to be like us.”

“This is blatantly untrue and takes about 3 seconds to fact check,” observed Media Matters for America’s Kat Abu.

And fact check many did.

Some noted that penicillin is an antibiotic, not an antiviral, and would have had no effect on the “Spanish flu,” an erroneous term (the first case identified was in the U.S.) for what is broadly known as the 1918 flu pandemic. The CDC says, “The 1918 H1N1 flu pandemic, sometimes referred to as the “Spanish flu,” killed an estimated 50 million people worldwide, including an estimated 675,000 people in the United States.”

READ MORE: Buttigieg: Republicans Are Targeting LGBTQ People Because They ‘Don’t Want to Talk About’ Their Own ‘Radical Positions’

Attorney Brad Moss, calling Faulkner’s claim a “complete lie,” also tweeted: “Utter and total falsity. You would think these fools would have some shame after paying Dominion hundreds of millions of dollars.”

And he came with receipts, including a screenshot of a New York Times article from October, 1918, noting the entire state of Pennsylvania had “indefinitely” shut down all schools, churches, theaters, and “all places of public assemblage.”

Others pointed to a PBS article from 2020 that reads: “During the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic, when an estimated 675,000 people died in the United States alone, the majority of public schools were closed for weeks to months on end. But three major cities — New York City, Chicago, and New Haven — kept their schools open amid valid questions and concerns about safety.”

So false was Faulkner’s claim, a readers’ note was added to video of it. It points to a study that states: “During the 1918–19 influenza pandemic, many local authorities made the controversial decision to close schools.”

Others on social media pointed to an article published last week by theUniversity of Minnesota: “More than 70% of US household COVID spread started with a child, study suggests.”

As for Faulkner’s claim that, “Our enemies hate us for surviving, but they would love to be like us,” the U.S. ranks 15th worst among all countries around the world in COVID deaths per capita.

Meanwhile, Baragona also weighed in, noting: “Throughout the height of the pandemic, Harris Faulkner would only broadcast her show from the safety of her house.”

Watch the videos above or at this link.

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https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-jesse-watters-claims-fbi-installed-joe-biden-president-intelligence-op-after

omg mm a 6 23

JESSE WATTERS(HOST): Powerful people installed Biden so that he can take orders, not give them. Joe Biden's been groomed his whole career to take orders. And now that he's literally slept his way to the top, they won't let him go anywhere. The FBI put their guy in the White House. "You think we're just going to, like, let voters decide if he should serve four more years? We can't afford to take that risk."

Joe Biden has been an intelligence op since he was vice president. One of the FBI's top informants, a guy with impeccable credentials, a great track record, reported an allegation that Joe Biden took a $5 million bribe -- right under Barack Obama's nose -- from a foreign national in exchange for a policy decision. They've been blackmailing Joe Biden with this for a decade. Well, until a whistleblower came forward. And now, James Comer wants the document released to Congress and the FBI's caught in a cover-up.

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https://www.mediamatters.org/jeanine-pirro/foxs-jeanine-pirro-appears-christian-nationalist-program-flashpoint-warn-takedown

On May 30, Fox News host Jeanine Pirro joined the Christian nationalist show FlashPoint for an interview where she pushed Christian nationalist rhetoric about a supposed “takedown of religion,” framed American Christians as increasingly under attack from “transgender nonsense,” and announced that she will be at the show's in-person “tent revival” event in June.

FlashPoint, a show that Rolling Stone recently described as “a rising media platform for Christian nationalists,” airs twice weekly on The Victory Channel’s TV and streaming channels, including on Rumble. The show is helmed by a panel of regular contributors who are longtime Christian nationalist figures and self-proclaimed “prophets,” including pro-Trump “prophets” Lance Wallnauand Hank Kunneman. Wallnau and Kunneman often push hard-right politics and make apocalyptic predictions about political opponents. In the last few months, Wallnau has called Biden the “antichrist,” referred to opponents of Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill as the “trans taliban,” andwarned that God may soon start killing those who are “persecuting” Trump, while Kunneman said last year that Biden should be in prison for “treason” and a “demonic agenda.”

Christian nationalism, which contends that the U.S. is a fundamentally Christian nation and should be governed by right-wing Christian beliefs, has been on the rise in Republican politics and among right-wing media figures. FlashPoint has seemingly leveraged this wave of Christian nationalism to attract more mainstream conservative media figures as guests, including Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, former President Donald Trump, and now, Fox’s Jeanine Pirro.

Pirro, who currently co-hosts Fox’s top-rated program The Five, appeared on the May 30 edition of FlashPoint, where the host, megapastor Gene Bailey, noted that his audience is “mainly conservative Christians” and that the show is not “fair and balanced,” adding, “We're the — way to the right of center. We’re unabashedly bold about who we are.” (Unlike Fox’s former motto “fair and balanced.”) The host asked Pirro: “When you see the left and what they’re doing, what is it you think … our audience needs to know that you feel like most of America doesn't understand about this current situation?”

Pirro warned the audience of a “takedown of religion” and erosion of “Judeo-Christian ethics” in America, claiming, “America is moving so far from that foundation that we are in a dangerous point that every person who is a person of religion or a person of God understands the inherent dangers of what is happening in America today.” Pirro elaborated that due to moving away from religion, “we are flirting with the kind of destiny that only destroyed nations and fallen empires find themselves in.” During the interview, Pirro also framed Christians as persecuted and warned that “people of faith need to worry about not just what's being taught in schools in terms of transgender nonsense, but what is happening in our society today against religion." [vid]

gENE BAILEY (HOST): When you see the left and what they're doing, what is it that you think — now our audience,Judge, is mainly conservative Christians — we don't say we're fair and balanced. We say we're the — way to the right of center. We're unabashedly bold about who we are. What is it that our audience needs to know that you feel like most of America doesn't understand about this current situation? 

JEANINE PIRRO (GUEST): Well, you know, I think that — look, this country was found on the Judeo-Christian ethics.We, you know, when I was the judge in my courtroom above my bench, it said “In God we trust.” I think that America is moving so far from that foundation that we are in a dangerous point that every person who is a person of religion or a person of God understands the inherent dangers of what is happening in America today.

We are flirting with the kind of destiny that only destroyed nations and fallen empires find themselves in. And so that's why I wrote the book Crimes Against America. What the left is doing to our children in schools and to Americans across the board, and especially to those believers, people who believed in God and are faith-driven, is it is destroying them.

And, you know, we saw it with the Dobbs decision. When our own Department of Justice would not follow its own rules of making an arrest of anyone who is parading or protesting in front of a Supreme Court justice’s home in the hope of getting them to change their opinion. Not one of those people was arrested, but you could rest assured that everyone, everyone who was involved in any way — and some of them who were clearly innocent and found to be not guilty by juries later — who got involved in any kind of pro-choice objection ended up being arrested and ended up being prosecuted.

But any of the pro-life centers or the pregnancy centers, any of the attacks on them were not even — they were not even investigated. And so, when you look at what is happening, the takedown of religion in America, it forebodes a very difficult future.

…

And I think that people of faith need to worry about not just what's being taught in schools in terms of transgender nonsense, but what is happening in our society today against religion.

Pirro was also recently announced as a guest for an in-person FlashPoint Live “tent revival” event next week. Past FlashPoint Live events have made headlines for their overt Christian nationalism and for appearances by high-profile Republican politicians such as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA). One of FlashPoint’s regular guests, right-wing apostle Dutch Sheets, prayed over Greene at one such event and insisted she was “covered in the blood of Jesus.”

In addition to the Christian nationalist figures such as Wallnau and Kunneman appearing at FlashPoint Live’s June 8-9 event in Ohio along with Pirro, the lineup includes actor Jim Caviezel, who recently openly embraced the QAnon conspiracy.

[vid]

pirro’s interview on FlashPoint and upcoming “tent revival” appearance are just two examples of Fox’s apparent connections to the Christian nationalist movement. Fox has regularly hosted Russ Vought, the Christian nationalist figure who is reportedly advising Republicans on how to gut the federal aid programs, and the network has also propped up a harassment campaign against libraries that pushed the movement’s talking points. Additionally, since November, Fox Business has been profiting from weekly sermons from a Christian nationalist pastor airing on the network as paid programming.

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i thot fox corp backed desantis?

https://www.mediamatters.org/sean-hannity/sean-hannity-promises-he-wont-challenge-or-fact-check-donald-trump-during-iowa-town

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https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-miranda-devine-suggests-january-6-pipe-bombs-were-false-flag-operation

https://www.mediamatters.org/climate-deniers/led-fox-right-wing-media-spins-efficiency-standards-war-appliances

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https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-jesse-watters-tells-house-republicans-force-joe-biden-resign-or-were-going-blow up debt limit

https://www.mediamatters.org/sean-hannity/sean-hannity-instructs-republicans-not-be-scared-defaulting-national-debt

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mma 5 23

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right-wing media figures uncritically amplified a now-debunked New York Post story to demonize immigrants and attack Democratic lawmakers.

On May 13, the New York Post published a story alleging that a group of 20 homeless military veterans had been “evicted” from two upstate New York hotels to make room for immigrants who had settled in New York City. The Post claimed the supposed migrants were part of New York City Mayor Eric Adams’ plans to secure temporary housing for immigrants entering the city. 

After the New York Post published its story, local outlet the Mid Hudson News spoke with hotel management and service providers the Post claimed were involved in the removals. On May 18, the paper reported that not only had no homeless veterans been removed, but they were never there to begin with — one hotel manager “had never heard of” the veteran's group supposedly involved, while another said it “had not put any veterans in the hotel for ‘a long time.’” The report also discredited a receipt presented by State Assemblyman Brian Maher as supposed evidence that the group representing the homeless veterans had paid for the rooms. The Post later reported that the group’s longtime advocate had lied to the newspaper about the entire situation, and today the Mid Hudson News uncovered that 15 homeless men were paid to pretend they were veterans who had been staying at the hotel.

[twt]

by the time the story fell apart, right-wing media had already latched onto the now-debunked narrative and immediately weaponized the shoddily reported story as part of their ongoingfear campaign over a so-called “invasion” of migrants coming across the southern border.

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https://www.alternet.org/fox-news-terminates-investigative-unit/

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mma 5 23

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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fail

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/foxs-breathless-promotion-biden-corruption-allegations-was-total-flop

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quiet on proud boy convict

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https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-editor-hannah-grossmans-yearlong-obsession-demonizing-educators-and-chaos

no lnx pix twt?

fox News’ Hannah Grossman has written nearly 100 articles in the last year that target specific teachers, schools, administrators, board members, or other staff, largely regarding the discussion of gender, sexuality, or systemic racism in the classroom. Multiple educators named in her reporting have been doxxed, harassed, fired, hit with lawsuits, or forced to resign.

:{:{}:

}:

Grossman is an associate editor at Fox News who, according to her Fox News webpage, “currently focuses on education” and covers “the U.S. Department of Education, the Pentagon's schools, teachers' unions and K-12 public schools.” She’s previously published articles on a variety of topics, often attacking the Biden administration, mainstream media, and “wokeness,” but shifted to mostly publishing articles about education in May 2022.

In March, The Daily Dot's Claire Goforth reported that after Grossman published five articles attacking one trans teacher in California, both the teacher’s classroom and the school district offices received bomb threats. Media Matters analyzed all of Grossman’s published articles over the last year (from May 1, 2022 through May 1, 2023) and found that Grossman’s attacks on individual teachers and schools go well beyond one California school and one trans teacher.

In fact, Grossman has published 33 articles targeting specific teachers, librarians, or other school staff by name, 52 articles targeting specific schools, districts, administrators, or board members, and 10 articles targeting specific colleges or universities, staff, or professors — accounting for nearly half of all of Grossman’s articles in the last year. Grossman has also published 20 articles targeting federal education officials. Other articles included broader attacks against teachers and teachers unions, public education, state and federal education departments, and education-related organizations. Fox News spread many of these articles across Facebook, where they earned thousands of total interactions.

Grossman’s numerous attacks on teachers are part of Fox News’ growing war on public education — and inclusive education in particular — in which the network has demonized and encouraged violence against educators, LGBTQ people, and those who support or affirm them. Fox hosts have even leveraged their fearmongering to call for the demolition of the public school system.

Jump to section...

Grossman has written 33 articles targeting teachers, librarians, or other school staff by name, several of whom have been doxxed, harassed, threatened, fired, or forced to resign

Over the last year, Grossman wrote 33 articles targeting specific teachers, librarians, or other school staff, largely for discussing gender, sexuality, or systemic racism in the classroom. In fact, 14 of these articles targeted LGBTQ teachers in particular.

Several subjects of Grossman’s attacks have been doxxed, harassed, threatened, fired, or forced to resign:

More than 300 people reportedly attended a school board meeting the month after Grossman published a January 25 article targeting a nonbinary teacher from California, with some attendees calling the teacher “evil” and demanding for them to be fired. Grossman’s article was written in response to a New York Times article about trans students that featured the California teacher, and her piece falsely accused them of boasting about “changing students' genders without parents knowing.”

Grossman Embed 1

In December 2022, Grossman wrote an article attacking two LGBTQ teachers and fearmongering about “social transitioning” — a process that often involves changing one’s pronouns, first name, hairstyle, and/or clothing. The article was the first of at least three that Grossman would write targeting one of the teachers, whom Grossman accused of “hiding students' gender transitions from parents.”

The teacher had reportedly made a TikTok explaining that some students have asked them “not to disclose their [trans] identity” to family or other students, saying, “That’s a promise I always honor.” Grossman attacked the other teacher in multiple articles for using stuffed animals to teach students about gender identity.

Both teachers had reported receiving threats even before Grossman targeted them.

Grossman Embed 2

In September 2022, Grossman wrote an article amplifying Oklahoma Education Secretary Ryan Walters’ calls to revoke a teacher’s license, falsely accusing her of providing students with “access” to “pornographic material.” The teacher told CNN that following the passage of Oklahoma’s HB 1775 she covered the books in her classroom that “could be at issue” with paper as instructed, but labeled them “Books the State Doesn’t Want You to Read,” and placed a QR code linking to the Brooklyn Public Library “Books Unbanned” page on the paper.

The parent of one of her students complained, including on local television, where she said the teacher “should not have access to children now, or in the future. She should be stripped of her certifications. To be perfectly frank with you, she should have criminal charges against her.” The teacher was subsequently placed on leave, and then resigned.

Three days after Grossman's article amplifying calls to revoke this teacher’s license was published, The Daily Beast reported that the teacher had told authorities that since her story went viral, she’d been doxxed and was “worried people may show up to her apartment.” She’d also reported getting messages saying she “should be lynched” or “sterilized” so she can’t “breed.”

Video

CitationFrom an August 26, 2022, KOKH report

Grossman has written 52 articles targeting specific schools, districts, administrators, and board members, and some of the targeted LGBTQ board members have faced death threats and lawsuits

Beyond targeting specific teachers, Grossman has also written 52 articles over the last year targeting specific schools, officials, and school board members. Some have subsequently faced death threats, lawsuits, and calls for their removal. Grossman has written numerous articles highlighting the chaos that has ensued at school board meetings across the country — much of which has been encouraged by Fox News’ dishonest and inflammatory reporting about alleged left-wing indoctrination of children in school.

Grossman Embed 3

She’s also written multiple articles targeting board members, school districts, and their administrators:

Grossman wrote at least 10 articles about specific school board members, 4 of which came in March of this year and targeted an LGBTQ school board member in Arizona.

In February, this Arizona board member suggested the board reconsider extending the district’s longstanding contract with Arizona Christian University, citing concerns about anti-LGBTQ bias, noting that the university’s website claims it seeks to promote “biblically informed values” including “traditional sexual morality and lifelong marriage between one man and one woman.”

On March 3, Grossman wrote her first article targeting the Arizona board member, mocking her for “wearing cat ears during a meeting,” and suggesting that she and the board have a “bias against Christian beliefs.” This board member subsequently received death threats, and dozens of parents reportedly attended the next board meeting, some of whom pushed for her to resign.

Arizona Christian University is now suing the school district and board — which has multiple LGBTQ members — with the help of extreme anti-LGBTQ group Alliance Defending Freedom.

Grossman Embed 4

Grossman has also written 15 articles targeting specific school and district administrators, such as superintendents — seemingly contributing to at least one superintendent facing calls for his removal from state lawmakers.

In March, the Arizona Capitol Times reported that an attempt to remove the superintendent of Scottsdale Unified School District had “spilled over to the Capitol after Fox News reported this year on an interview” he gave “to a progressive Michigan blog in 2019, a year before he was hired in Arizona.”

Grossman had published two articles on the subject targeting the superintendent earlier this year.

Grossman Embed 5

Grossman has also written 20 articles targeting specific school districts and 6 articles targeting specific schools.

Grossman has written 20 articles targeting education officials at the state and federal levels

Over the last year, Grossman wrote 20 articles targeting federal education officials by name, including 15 articles specifically targeting Kelisa Wing, a former diversity, equity, and inclusion chief at the Department of Defense Education Activity. The pieces falsely accused her of anti-white racism and of indoctrinating the children of the nation’s military personnel with Marxism. As Grossman — and right-wing media more broadly — targeted Wing, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) advocated for Wing’s removal.

Grossman Embed 6

Grossman also wrote eight articles that targeted state and local departments of education. For example, she wrote multiple articles targeting New York City’s Department of Education and the Oregon Department of Education, accusing the departments of pushing a “woke agenda” and “transgenderism.” Grossman also wrote five articles attacking the United States DOE, including attacking Education Secretary Miguel Cardona as “equity-obsessed.”

Grossman Embed 7

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https://www.mediamatters.org/climate-deniers/how-tucker-carlson-was-terrible-and-effective-megaphone-climate-misinformation

mma 5 23 see heated/drilled

Prior to his departure from Fox News on April 24, Tucker Carlson was one of the network’s most prolific purveyors of climate change misinformation. Carlson elevated fringe ideas and conspiracy theories from relative obscurity on the internet to become drum beats for right-wing media. He also dishonestly spun major news events and weaponized his viewers’ most deep-seated prejudices about race and power to push climate denial.

His absence will be a blow to the forces aiming to mock environmental justice, derail climate action, and protect polluting industries and their allies in Washington. But the end of Tucker Carlson’s prime-time show is far from the end of climate change denial on Fox News — his project is sure to be carried on by other Fox personalities who will continue the network’s awful history of climate coverage.

Carlson propelled internet misinformation and obscure conspiracy theories into right-wing media narratives against climate action

One thing that set Carlson apart at Fox was his ability to seemingly jump-start a tidal wave of misinformation. His producers seemingly scoured the internet so he could amplify right-wing grievances, as well as any obscure video or article that could be easily decontextualized to sound absurd or inflammatory. He knew his audience, and he knew exactly how to push their buttons.

Carlson’s response to the deadly Texas winter storm that killed hundreds of people in February 2021 triggered a deluge of misinformation from Fox News. He was the first Fox News host to blame the widespread power outages on wind energy. The reality was that Texas still largely relies on natural gas for power, and this infrastructure wasn’t ready for the extreme cold.

Over the last few years, Carlson helped create a misinformation crisis around climate action and even told his audience that climate activists were going to try to shrink children and force everyone to eat bugs, when there is no evidencethat those things are actually happening.

Fittingly, one of the very last things Carlson did in his final Fox segment was to promote Let Them Eat Bugs.Notably, he said that the chocolate-covered cricket was “delicious.”

Misinformation about frozen windmills was just the tip of the iceberg for Carlson’s attacks on clean energy and climate action

Often portraying climate policies as a means to control the population or create a “permanent caste system,” Carlson regularly injected fearmongering about the clean energy transition into his segments. At the core of his argument was the fossil fuel industry talking point claiming the renewable energy technology was insufficient and that transitioning away from fossil fuels would weaken the U.S. and put Americans “under the complete and total control of people who wish us ill.” In October 2021, Carlson even used his newest venture, Tucker Carlson Originals on Fox Nation, to promote wind energy misinformation in the documentary Blown Away: The People vs. Wind Power. 

Carlson continued to push climate denial even during extreme weather events, when the reality of the climate crisis was most evident

As the science connecting extreme weather to our warming planet has become more conclusive— and with other TV news outlets more frequently reporting on these connections in the aftermath of major disasters — Carlson relentlessly misinformed his audience about these connections and claimed that the media making the link between climate change and extreme weather were captured by the radical left or using the occasion to politicize tragedy.

Even beyond these extreme weather events, Carlson regularly promoted climate denial on his Fox show in order to feed doubt and discredit climate science.

Carlson platformed climate change deniers who influenced his coverage

Carlson used any excuse, such as new climate policies, initiatives, or convenings, to platform some of the most notorious climate deniers and controversial climate contrarians. For example, according to Media Matters’ internal database, from 2019 through the end of Carlson’s show in 2023, he hosted failed politician Michael Shellenberger 21 times, climate change denier Marc Morano 14 times, meteorologist Joe Bastardi 8 times, and fossil fuel shill Bjorn Lomborg 4 times. These guests pushed the “Great Reset” conspiracy theory, cherry-picked statistics to downplay the impacts of extreme weather, or suggested climate activism is a “cult” or a “new religion.”

Michael Shellenberger

Carlson has run with the idea that climate change is like a new religion, which Shellenberger has written about at length.

Marc Morano

Joe Bastardi

Bjorn Lomborg 

In the last several years, Carlson had started to merge his climate denial and defense of fossil fuels with overt racism and white grievance

In response to climate justice and environmental justice becoming more mainstream and being incorporated into policy, Carlson seized on the opportunity to apply his increasingly overt racism to climate and environmental issues. Notably, Carlson has insisted that climate policies, not climate change, hurt marginalized communities. He has often claimed that environmental justice has “nothing to do” with the environment — with the exception of the recent train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, which the former Fox host used to stoke more conservative grievances.

Other Fox figures will carry the climate denial torch in Carlson’s absence

Carlson was far from the only Fox News personality to regularly peddle climate change misinformation, and others will continue to carry the torch:

It’s uncertain who will be placed in Carlson’s 8 p.m. slot. But whatever the outcome, one sure thing is that Fox will continue to supplement its climate coverage with racism, bigotry, misogyny, and brain-frying idiocy.

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mma 4 23  plot to make us buy fat pills

on watters

RACHEL CAMPOS-DUFFY (HOST): Pandemic would have been a really great time to scare America back into shape. We learned early on that one of the biggest predictors of COVID-related deaths was obesity.

But what did Democrats do? They shut down the playgrounds, gyms, and they forced you to stay in your house and order takeout. Instead of focusing on our health, America put on the pandemic equivalent of the freshman 15.

...

If her response sounds strange, this might put some of the missing pieces together. Dr. Stanford has taken thousands of dollars from pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk which manufactures the miracle weight loss drug Ozempic. Can you say conflict of interest?

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WAIT WHAT?!

mma 4 23

[part amic, no goodbye]

...Carlson has been a singular force driving Fox News’ extremism to new lows, single-handedly introducing the white supremacist “great replacement” conspiracy theory into mainstream American politics and becoming a kingmaker in the Republican Party as a result. A 2022 New York Times investigation found that Carlson “amplified the idea that Democratic politicians and others want to force demographic change through immigration” in more than 400 episodes.

Since the November 2016 launch of his prime-time show, Tucker Carlson Tonight, he has been a hero to hardcore racists and extremists for repeatedly hosting guests with ties to white supremacy and defending the QAnon conspiracy theory. He has also been the vanguard of January 6 conspiracy theories on the network.

As a result of Carlson’s success, Fox Corp. CEO Lachlan Murdoch made him the face of Fox's streaming service. Murdoch backed Carlson every step of the way, repeatedly defending his bigotry and conspiracy theories, even as advertisers fled.

Media Matters has extensively documented Carlson’s extremism, including examples of white supremacist commentary going back to 2004, and he was named Misinformer of the Year in 2022, which included a non-comprehensive research file featuring over 350 examples of his misinformation. In 2019, Media Matters unearthed racist and misogynist comments by Carlson on the shock jock radio program Bubba the Love Sponge. Media Matters’ years of coverage drove a massive advertiser exodus from his program.

Below is just a small sampling of the worst of Carlson on Fox News over the years.

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"biden all in on ej"

mma 4 23  note victim rev discrim BS

GREG GUTFELD (CO-HOST): What does environmental justice mean? AOC laid out perfectly: the environment is now tied to racism, which is what they did with ESG -- environmental social governance. It's a scorecard, another scorecard that takes measures on how companies act responsibly. So, they marry the environment to race because it couldn't be believed alone, the numbers weren't working. The projections weren't working. But you know what works? Being scared of being called a racist.

So, environmental justice, if you do not agree with it, if you don't swallow the climate agenda, if you don't agree with AOC, you probably don't just hate the planet, you probably hate non-white people as well.

And the consequences of that, we've talked about it before, with every aspect of life being filled with racism or injustice. The roads are racist we found out this week. Pollution is racist, we just found out. Cheap energy, fossil fuels, that's racist because it hurts non-white people. If you don't want to be looted, that's racist, too, because looting is mere redefinition of justice.

Basically, you're telling people that they can -- you're sanctioning crime. You're sanctioning riots. That's why the politicians in Chicagosaid as much and said that this was their way of evening the score. Because when you tell everybody, and you program their brain with this language that the world sucks and it's this group of people behind it, now it's in climate. Now it's in climate. 

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mma 4 23

a the reason cable bills high?

https://www.mediamatters.org/murdoch-family/fox-news-wants-massive-increase-its-cable-fees-which-will-be-paid-all-cable

https://www.mediamatters.org/murdoch-family/fox-news-wants-massive-increase-its-cable-fees-which-will-be-paid-all-cable

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MMA 4 23

Fox News pundits warned its viewers that expanded funding for the Internal Revenue Service passed by Democrats last year would create a dystopian armed force that would be “at war” with Republicans. In reality, the funding enables the agency to hire workers to man its tax preparation hotline phones, dramatically reducing wait times this tax season – but House Speaker Kevin McCarthy still made pulling the funding a priority in the hostage demands he issued on Wednesday for raising the debt ceiling.

Fox retains its audience by keeping them alternately terrified and enraged about the state of U.S. politics. Its propagandists regularly catastrophize over Democratic politicians and the purported impact of their policies, real or imagined. But even by those standards, Fox’s commentary last year about the roughly $80 billion in funding for the IRS that was included in the Inflation Reduction Act was uniquely deranged and irresponsible.

Fox’s star host Tucker Carlson, for example, posited in August that Democrats were “hiring another 87,000armed IRS agents” with the funds “just to make sure that you obey,” a demagogic mash-up of a pair of right-wing falsehoods. Carlson depicted the move as part of President Joe Biden’s “war on his own population” which targets “Trump voters” with “acts of aggression and hostility.”

Carlson’s conspiracy theories were part of a Fox campaign of toxic rhetoric against the IRS, as I noted at the time:

Fox pundits have described the potential wave of IRS hiring as an “economic, financial militiaagainst regular people” deployed by those who “want to control you”; a“new army” that will “hunt down and kill middle class taxpayers”; a “new Gestapo” Biden will use in an “abusive, corrupt manner”; “a Praetorian Guard that will be unleashed again” to “grab all the cash they can by any means necessary”; and “part of an orchestrated campaign to target Americans and have the federal government be at war with those Americans.”

Overheated commentary from right-wing pundits and politicians triggered concerns of potential violence against IRS employees. But the dire predictions of the Fox crew never materialized.  In reality, the increased funding led to an 85% reduction in the time taxpayers waited to speak to a representative this tax season, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday:

The agency answered 2.4 million more taxpayer phone calls with live assistance this year through April 7, compared with the same period last year. And wait times fell to four minutes, down from a sitcom-length 27 minutes a year ago.

“We made a quantum leap this year,” IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel said Monday, on the eve of tax day, citing the $80 billion funding Congress provided last year. One of the first moves to transform the tax agency was hiring thousands of customer-service representatives to answer the phones.

How much has customer service improved? The IRS says its representatives answered nearly nine out of 10 calls, compared with less than two out of 10 calls last year.

The IRS also revealed earlier this month a 150-page plan for using the rest of the funds, which includes additional improvements in customer service and technology as well as additional enforcement targeted at large corporations and taxpayers who make more than $400,000 annually.

Fox’s paranoid IRS conspiracy theories provide the GOP with cover for its bog-standard policy preferences. Republican politicians want to ensure that rich people are able to get away with cheating on their taxes and that everyone else goes through a filing process that is as excruciating as possible to reduce public support for higher taxes and tax enforcement.

After Republicans won control of the House, the first bill they passed repealed the IRS funding boost.That legislation was dead on arrival in the Senate, which Democrats retain, and would be vetoed by Biden. But the GOP hasn’t given up hope on helping tax cheats and hurting normal taxpayers – when McCarthy put forward his demands for what House Republicans required as their price for raising the debt ceiling and avoiding a global financial catastrophe, a sizable IRS funding cut was included.

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https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-networks-fearmonger-over-biden-administrations-new-vehicle-tailpipe-emissions-proposal

on April 12, the Environmental Protection Agency introduced its strictest standards yet to curb planet-warming emissions from American cars and trucks. For automakers to be in compliance, over two-thirds of new vehicles sold in 2032 may have to be electric. Fox’s cable news networks, which for years have both bashed EVs and downplayed or outright denied the climate crisis, are of course not too keen on the proposal.

The EPA’s new standards apply to cars being manufactured in 2027 and beyond. Notably, they do not ban gas-powered vehicles; as NPR reported, the EPA is setting “a standard for emissions, on average, based on the size and type of vehicle being built.” These rules are stringent enough that auto companies will probably “need to produce 67% zero-emission vehicles to meet them.”

The EPA states that the standards would remove billions of tons of carbon emissions from the atmosphere in the coming decades, as well as improve the air quality for communities across the U.S. The standards still need to go through a public comment and review process before being finalized.

Throughout last week, programs on Fox News and Fox Business responded to the proposal by claiming EVs are prohibitively expensive, not popular among the U.S. public, and not environmentally friendly. They also complained about unnecessary federal regulations and blasted any efforts to transition to clean energy because, in their telling, it will only help China and weaken the U.S.

Fox is misleading about the cost and popularity of EVs

A common refrain from Fox is that electric vehicles are too expensive to compete with gas-powered cars, or that consumers in general just don’t want them.

While their upfront costs are currently more expensive than gas-powered cars, EVs are cheaper than gas-powered cars over their entire lifespan. Furthermore, the production costs of EVs continue to fall, and in the next decade EVs are projected to be cheaper to produce than gas cars.

In addition to long-term financial savings, EVs have numerous health benefits, as well. Reporting on the EPA proposal, The Detroit News noted that by 2055, the rules would reduce “fine particulate matter in the air that can have negative health effects and potentially saving up to $1.6 trillion.” Indeed, one recent study estimated that up to 20,000 people in the U.S. die each year due to vehicle pollution.

In terms of popularity, while EVs made up just 6% of total vehicle sales in the U.S. in 2022, this figure is double the amount from 2021 and likely only getting higher. By 2030, EV sales could make up nearly 40% of total passenger car sales in the U.S., according to analysis by S&P Global (without factoring in the proposed EPA standards). Research from Goldman Sachs estimates that EVs will constitute half of global car sales by 2035, and 60% of sales by 2040.

Fox portends that it's strictly government regulations, and not market forces, that are pushing EVs on Americans

Whether Fox wants to admit it or not, major automakers including Ford, GM, Stellantis, Toyota, and Volkswagen already have aggressive goals for EV sales in the next decade. Additionally, climate-focused media outlet Heatmap reports that the EPA “expects that automakers are collectively on track for 44% of vehicle sales to be electric by 2030 without any changes to emissions rules.” Federal regulations will certainly prod automakers to manufacture more EVs, but to say that major automakers focused on the global market are moving to produce more EVs solely because of U.S. regulations is false. As part of this narrative, Fox figures are also claiming that this new rule is an affront to personal liberties. This is straight fearmongering, as the rule does not ban gas-powered cars or force people to give theirs up.

Fox is insinuating that EVs are worse for the environment than gas cars, and that only China benefits from this proposal

An MIT article from October 2022 stated that “although electric cars' batteries make them more carbon-intensive to manufacture than gas cars, they more than make up for it by driving much cleaner under nearly any conditions.” EVs also don’t have the deadly tailpipe emissions associated with gas-powered cars.

Additionally, claims that only China benefits from this proposal are overstated. While China does control much of the supply chain for EV materials, the U.S. is taking steps to develop its own domestic supply chains (thanks in part to the Inflation Reduction Act) to reduce its reliance abroad. Automakers are also rethinking their supply chain strategies and investing in mines to secure the resources needed for scaling up electric vehicle production.

Finally, in addition to the numerous health benefits that come with reducing gas-powered car use, a transition to EVs would mean drivers would be less vulnerable to high gas prices and the whims of the global oil market. Reporting on the EPA proposal, MarketWatch notes that it “would strengthen American energy security by reducing reliance on 20 billion barrels of imported oil.”

Fox is using good old-fashioned climate bashing to advance their anti-EV agenda

As usual, Fox is downplaying the seriousness of climate change by suggesting that these rules won’t do anything to help fight climate change. However, The Washington Post noted that the proposal is “large enough to avert the equivalent of two full years of nationwide carbon emissions, according to EPA estimates.” This proposal would thus go a long way in helping the U.S. — which is the world’s largest historical carbon emitter — to advance its climate goals. Additionally, as climate change requires a global, collective response, the U.S. would also be following in the footsteps of the European Union, which recently proposed even more-stringent requirements for tailpipe emissions.

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abby sex harass tapes not turned over judged PO

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not damming revel?

https://www.mediamatters.org/foxdominion-lawsuit/msnbc-reveals-new-audio-rudy-giuliani-admitting-fox-news-maria-bartiromo-he-has

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odd?

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-buries-texas-ruling-rescinding-fda-approval-abortion-pill

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mma 4 23 note no evidence

INGRAHAM (HOST): It seems like a real run up by the media to push for either more members of the court, more court packing or just changing the subject from the absolutely desperate shape the US economy is in and the desperate numbers, definitely bad numbers for Joe Biden.

...This is total bull, okay? And I put this in the same category as Alvin Bragg's indictment against President Trump.

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https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-demands-retribution-following-trumps-arraignment

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KEVIN CORKE (CORRESPONDENT): And in yet another sign the former president still packs quite a punch, especially when it comes to TV ratings, last night's speech at Mar-a-Lago aired right here on Fox, in its entirety, to 6.6 million viewers -- that's more than double our closest competition and more viewers in the key demo than other news networks combined.

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zuck and edgelord musk bring him back for bucks

https://www.mediamatters.org**/facebook/trump-used-his-reinstated-facebook-page-post-misinformation-**filled-statement-response-his indict

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https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-returns-barricades-indicted-donald-trump

If Donald Trump watched Fox News tonight, after a New York grand jury made him the first former president in history to be indicted, he was surely pleased with what he saw. Trump needs Fox to play its old role — run interference, denounce his foes, and thus keep the Republican Party squarely behind him — and that’s exactly what the network did in the hours after news of the indictment broke.

The indictment, which has not yet been unsealed, was the result of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s probe into the $130,000 hush money payment made in the closing weeks of the 2016 presidential campaign to Stormy Daniels, an adult film actor who has since said that she and Trump had an affair (Trump denies it). The former president responded in a statement calling the indictment “political Persecution and Election Interference at the highest level in history” and denouncing Bragg, the Democratic Party, and President Joe Biden.

Trump needs a powerful propaganda apparatus with a uniquely powerful hold on the GOP to hammer that message home and keep Republican politicians from abandoning him at yet another moment of disgrace.

He’s got one.

Minutes after news of the indictment broke — without seeing the indictment or knowing what Trump has been charged with — a parade of his Fox allies started furiously spinning on his behalf.

On The Five, Jesse Watters reacted to the breaking news by saying, “The country's not going to stand for it,” while Greg Gutfeld said the indictment showed Democrats are “hunting” Republicans.

On Special Report, Fox contributor Jonathan Turleycalled it a “raw political prosecution” while fellow contributor Mollie Hemingway compared it to “the Stalin era” and said that “people who care about the country need to stand up and make sure that they let it be known that they do not support this type of political prosecution.”

On Jesse Watters Primetime, Watters suggested “prosecuting Democrats the way they prosecute Republicans” when the party next gains the White House and said that in light of the Trump indictment, conservatives “can’t live in Democratic-run cities” without fear of political prosecution. Fellow Fox host Dan Bongino said it showed “we’re living in a police state” and Jeanine Pirro declared that the indictment “reeks of Third World country tactics,” adding that Trump “is being persecuted, not just prosecuted, but persecuted.”

Tucker Carlson Tonight brought the network’s biggest star saying that “there’s no coming back from this moment” as a country, describing the indictment as a “political purge” that has suspended the rule of law for his supporters and as “an assault on our system,” and running “Third-World banana republic” chyrons.

Hannity and The Ingraham Angle will surely feature more of the same.

We’ve seen this pattern play out the same way every time Trump’s actions have resulted in scandal since he became the Republican nominee in 2016.

Fox rallied to Trump’s side as he promoted lies and conspiracy theories about election fraud in 2020; amid the cornucopia of scandals involving his bigotry; when he corruptly pressured a foreign power to take action to benefit his political campaign, leading to his first impeachment; as he pardoned political cronies and war criminals; after he expressed support for white nationalists and Proud Boys; when he fired FBI Director James Comey for refusing to end the Russian interference probe; as a series of women came forward reporting he had sexually assaulted or harassed them; when a tape emerged of him discussing his sexual assaults of women; and so many more.

Each time, Fox’s support was crucial to keeping the Republican Party united behind him.

Trump’s indictment marks yet another opportunity for Fox to change course. Trump leads in polls for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, but he’s not the only one in the race or likely to join it. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, the second-place candidate in those polls, has spent years cozying up to Fox hosts and adopting their pet interests — and he’s not under indictment. Rupert Murdoch, the chair of Fox Corp., has an iron grip on the network’s operations and said after the January 6 insurrection that Fox should try to make Trump a “non person” and “certainly don’t support him.”

But that’s not what happened.

Fox continued to protect Trump after the storming of the U.S. Capitol, concocting absurd conspiracy theories to turn the rioters Trump had incited into victims. The network supported him again after the FBI searched Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort and residence and found hundreds of classified documents, offering incendiary claims that any criminal probe into the former president is intrinsically corrupt and part of an attack on his voters. And after Trump claimed earlier this month that he was on the verge of being indicted by Bragg, Fox personalities once again mounted the barricades on his behalf.

What we saw tonight shows that Fox won’t abandon him now either. Fox’s hosts and executives are in too deep, and they know that if he tried, Trump could destroy them with their viewers. They will have his back, no matter what, to the bitter end.

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mma 4 23

JOHN RATCLIFFE (FORMER DIRECTOR OF NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE): Well, Maria, I mean, the point is this is election interference. We don't know how – no one really knows how this is going to play out. We just know that it is going to be a factor. We have crossed the Rubicon from people saying, you know, on the left, President Trump should be indicted to the discussion is going to be President Trump was indicted. And however long this case takes, and very clearly, it's not going to play out throughout the court system in less than the year that it's going to take to, you know, to, you know, reach a Republican nominee.

And so this action, this political persecution is going to influence our politics every single day for the next year until a Republican nominee is chosen, and that is, by definition, election interference. This is wholly inappropriate, you know, a complete perversion of our political system, and I think people need to, hopefully, understand and see what's going on here through these imposter D.A.s like Alvin Bragg. But this is coast to coast, you know? This is Kim Foxx in Chicago, this is George Gascon in California, this is George Soros funding all of these people where we've put socialists in charge of the American judicial system. We've put people who don't understand or appreciate orstand up for American values in charge of our legal system to distort it intentionally and deliberately and, unfortunately, Donald Trump is the first but won't be the last person to be persecuted under that system.

MARIA BARTIROMO (FOX NEWS HOST): Well, this is a really good point that you're making because George Soros makes no apology for it. In fact, he wrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal just a couple of weeks ago. You're talking about the $40 million that he has donated to get these D.A.s in place. He says I've done it transparently. I've no intention of stopping. The funds I provide enable sensible, reform-minded candidates to receive a hearing from the public. Judging by the results, the public likes what it's hearing. I'm not sure which public he's talking to becausethese D.A.s are using bail reform to put criminals back on the streetexcept if it's Donald Trump.

RATCLIFFE: Maria, they're not D.A.s, they're imposter D.A.s. These are political plants. These are people who are only being supported with, you know, $40 million – in the case of Alvin Bragg a million dollars from George Soros – only because of a promise that you're in this position, you will pursue political prosecution of our opponents, those on the right. And that is, again, happening coast to coast, and that's really what's at stake. This should be a clarion call to Americans who otherwise don't tune in to politics ordon't think that it affects them. It absolutely has, and the bedrock principles of our justice system are clearly under assault where, again, we have socialists who are anathema to, you know, American values in charge largely of our judicial system, you know, through these state D.A.s and prosecutors.

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4 23

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

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mma 4 23

HUNG CAO (FORMER REPUBLICAN CONGRESSIONAL CANDIDATE): No, you're right. Their silence is deafening. I mean, this is like like Xi, this is what what we escaped from, from Vietnam. My maternal grandfather was taken away — was taken away in the middle night. He was a magistrate, and he was just executed in the middle of the night. This is what's going to happen in our country. I grew up in West Africa. I spent seven years over there. And this is how a coup d'etat happens. I mean, this is happening right now in our country. And we're trying to sound the alarm here and now.

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an ah 3 23

the latest developments in Dominion Voting Systems' $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News unfolded in a New York City courtroom on Wednesday. Media Matters for America senior fellow Matthew Gertz obtained copies of slides containing previously unseen conversations between Fox employees about the network's hosts, who despite management's misgivings were permitted to peddle former President Donald Trump's bogus allegations about the 2020 election.

Gertz live-tweeted the drama.

For example, Fox Chief Executive Officer Suzanne Scott reportedly wrote in an email to anchor Eric Shawn in December 2020 that "this has to stop now... this is bad business... the audience is furious and we are just feeding them material." Scott also stated that November that "I can't keep defending these reporters who don't understand our viewers and how to handle stories... We lost 25k subs from FOX NATION."

READ MORE: Jeanine Pirro admits Americans 'voted on issues that weren’t the issues we thought they were voting on'

One personality, "Judge" Jeanine Pirro, was railed against by production staff in November 2020 over her militant defense of Trump's baseless claims that the contest was "rigged and stolen" by President Joe Biden and the Democratic Party.

Pirro's scheduled monologue was "rife w conspiracy theories and bs and is yet another example why this woman should never be on live television," her executive producer complained to Fox's top brass.

Gertz noted that "Fox subsequently promoted Pirro, making her a co-host of the LIVE panel show The Five."

He added that according to Dominion's legal filings, David Clark, Fox's senior vice president of Weekend News, "did not believe Jeanine Pirro was actually a 'credible source of news,' even as he understood that 'viewers rely on' Pirro 'to be a credible source.'"

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https://www.mediamatters.org/angelo-carusone/media-matters-angelo-carusone-not-single-thing-can-ever-get-better-country-until

~ norms democ

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https://www.mediamatters.org/january-6-insurrection/several-january-6-defense-teams-have-cited-fox-news-reason-storming-capitol

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https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/trump-return-fox-they-rekindle-their-mutually-beneficial-relationship

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https://www.mediamatters.org/donald-trump/right-wing-media-scramble-defend-trump-ahead-potential-indictment-and-arrest

mma 3 23

no twt

after former President Donald Trump predicted his own arrest and indictment, right-wing media pundits were quick to provide cover for him and attack an investigation that they claimed would help the 2024 hopeful’s reelection campaign.

On March 18, Trump posted to his Truth Social account that he was expecting the Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office to indict and arrest him the following Tuesday, March 21. The posts came while a Manhattan grand jury heard testimony as part of an ongoing investigation into Trump allegedly paying hush-money to adult film actor Stormy Daniels in 2016 over an alleged affair[trmp twt caps]

in response, right-wing media have continued their pattern of defending Trump from various investigations and smearing Trump’s longtime associate-turned-witness Michael Cohen, who testified in 2019 that Trump had directed Cohen to repeatedly pay off women for their silence about their sexual relationships with him. Right-wing media outlets are claiming Bragg is backed by liberal philanthropist George Soros, accusing Bragg of running a politically motivated investigation that unfairly targets the former president, and claiming that an indictment of Trump would benefit his 2024 presidential campaign.

Right-wing media baselessly claim liberals are “weaponizing” the judicial system to punish political enemies

Right-wing media claim Bragg is a “radical” leftist backed by George Soros who “has to pay his master back”

Right-wing media figures argue Trump arrest would backfire and benefit him politically

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mma 3 23

the right-wing media echo chamber pushed a completely fictional talking point that Silicon Valley Bank had supposedly donated $73 million to Black Lives Matter, based on distortions from a far-right think tank. And in Fox News’ rush to amplify the falsehoods, which fit the network’s preposterous political narrative that SVB was a “woke bank,” purported “news” personnel behaved no differently from the network’s opinion hosts.

As a prime example of Fox’s “news” personalities pushing blatantly partisan falsehoods, on the morning of March 15, Fox News White House correspondent Peter Doocy claimed: “Roughly $73 million went to Black Lives Matter-related causes” from the bank. [vid]

and later that night, Fox host Sean Hannity said that Silicon Valley Bank “diverted a massive amount of money to left-wing causes. Now, get this, this is what we have discovered, that includes a whopping $73 million to BLM-related groups."[vid]

this is the same network that, as recently unearthed text messages and emails have shown, will actively reprimand and penalize its alleged “straight news” reporters for debunking misinformation pushed by its opinion hosts and their guests. As such, nobody in the network would have any incentive to even try to unearth the facts, because Fox News is not in any sense a real news organization.

Actual SVB donations to Black Lives Matter: $0.00

The charge itself that SVB contributed over $70 million to Black Lives Matter or closely aligned organizations is based on a supposed “BLM-funding database” maintained by the Claremont Institute, a right-wing and openly anti-democracy organization that is also closely tied to disgraced former law professor John Eastman, who was closely involved in former President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results.

The Associated Press confirmed that the database does not show any spending to Black Lives Matter, and obtained a comment in which Claremont explained it was including “reparative initiatives,” which it called “race-based, discriminatory hiring programs; race-based, sub-prime lending; partisan voter initiatives; and DEI efforts.” The AP also obtained a comment from the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, which confirmed it did not receive $70 million from the bank, and added: “Even if we did, the idea that this type of contribution would be controversial is rooted in a pathology that Black organizations don’t deserve to be funded.”

In addition, professor Rodney Ramcharan at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business explained to the AP what actual evidence of bank failure due to “woke” business practices might look like, if such a thing existed. “The bank would have suffered loan losses—writing down bad loans made to ‘woke’ firms,” he explained. “So this is not a matter of opinion, but actual data. Instead, there are no unusual loan losses or loan loss provisioning.” (Claremont had cited “sub-prime lending” as a component of such alleged “woke” practices.)

The database labels any donations that support Black people as “BLM”

Writing for the newsletter Popular Information, Judd Legum, Rebecca Crosby, and Tesnim Zekeria reported that the Claremont Institute’s own database shows a total of $0 in donations to any officially branded Black Lives Matter organization. Instead, the organization’s database also includes spending that it describes as being for “organizations and initiatives that advance one or more aspects of BLM’s agenda.”

Under this amorphous criteria, Popular Information found that Claremont had included a pledge that SVB made in 2021 to spend $50 million over the course of five years for the company’s internal initiative to connect women, Black people and Latinos with startup funding and leadership connections in venture capital. Nearly all the rest came from a $20 million pledge to “support additional COVID-19 relief” and establish a “full-ride, needs-based University Scholarship program to students at Arizona State University, Florida A&M University, Tulane University, and Xavier University.” Both Florida A&M and Xavier University of Louisiana are prominent historically black colleges and universities. (It’s unclear why Claremont lumped in funding for Arizona State and Tulane.)

Talking Points Memo editor-in-chief Josh Marshall also examined the rest of the database on supposed BLM-related corporate spending, and found that Claremont’s appraisal of corporate spending throughout the business world essentially boiled down to “it seems adjacent to Black people, so that’s ‘BLM.’” These included any corporate donations to such longstanding organizations as the United Negro College Fund and the NAACP, or minority-focused business groups such as the Executive Leadership Council or the Forum to Advance Minorities in Engineering, the latter of which was founded in 1976 by DuPont. (Also tagged as “BLM” spending in the Claremont’s database were corporate grants to the American Heart Association and U.S. Vaccine Adoption Grants.)

Keep in mind, Popular Information had also pointed out that the database defines the BLM agenda as allegedly being to “undermine capitalism, the nation state, and Western civilization.” By extension, Claremont is essentially accusing any corporate spending on Black education, health outcomes, or business development to be part of a plot to destroy Western civilization. This is the fabulist message that Fox’s reporters and the rest of the right-wing media ecosystem were so eager to spread.

Fox News drove the right-wing echo chamber’s amplification of false SVB claims

Fox’s alarmist coverage of the supposed link between SVB’s corporate giving and the BLM movement clearly spanned both its purported “straight news” side and opinion hosts, with the two camps voicing the exact same line over and over on Fox News, Fox Business, and the network’s digital properties.

Fox was not alone in spreading this falsehood; many right-wing media outlets pushed the same lies. A New York Post headline read: “SVB donated $73M to Black Lives Matter movement, social justice causes.” An article from The Federalist was headlined: “Silicon Valley Bank Pledged Nearly $74 Million To Black Lives Matter Causes.” The Washington Times, citing The Federalist, wrote: “SVB donated more than $73 million to the Black Lives Matter movement and other social justice causes.” A Washington Examiner headline read: “SVB collapse: Bank donated over $70 million to Black Lives Matter groups before closure.” Gateway Pundit declared in its headline: “Woke Silicon Valley Bank Gave Over $73 Million to Black Lives Matter Movement.” A Daily Caller headline stated: “Silicon Valley Bank Committed Over $73 Million To BLM And Social Justice Causes Before It Collapsed.” And it went on and on and on.

In an amazing turn of events, Breitbart actually issued a correction, noting that “the Claremont Institute’s definition of ‘Black Lives Matter’ included a far wider range of organizations,” and giving credit that “left-wing writer Judd Legum appropriately flagged these issues.”

So as of now, Breitbart has exhibited more journalistic responsibility than the entire roster of Fox News, including one of the network’s White House correspondents.

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mma 3 23  matt g

Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s (R-CA) plan to blame President Joe Biden’s economic policies for the Friday collapse of Silicon Valley Bank has hit a snag.

McCarthy wants the Republican message to be that Biden’s spending triggered a rise in inflation, and the Federal Reserve’s subsequent interest rate increases wiped out the bank. But his members have instead been claiming that the bank failed because it was too “woke,” a charge so ludicrous that a caucus leader reportedly urged them to “stop tweeting / going on tv if they don’t understand” the situation.

But McCarthy’s dilemma won’t be as easy to solve as that: It stems from the fact that GOP members of Congress are downstream from the same right-wing misinformation and infotainment apparatus as the party’s base. And that system has spent the Biden administration forcing every policy issue, no matter how complex, through its culture war lens.

SVB failed for banal finance reasons, as Bloomberg’s Matt Levine has detailed. It had a customer base of venture capitalists and the start-ups they fund. Those customers generally don’t require short-term, variable-rate business loans, so SVB instead invested their deposits in long-term, fixed-rate bonds without sufficiently hedging its risk. As interest rates rose, those bonds lost value. Some SVB depositors feared the bank’s finances had become too weak and withdrew their funds; since venture capitalists are panicky and move in a herd, the result was an old-fashioned bank run, and on Friday, regulators took over SVB, saying it lacked liquidity and had become insolvent.

But as the bank collapsed, the right-wing media concocted a very different story that fit neatly into their culture war narratives. In their telling, SVB failed because it was too “woke” and had excessively focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. Digital media outlets, online influencers, right-wing podcasters, powerful Fox hosts, and columnists at the staid Wall Street Journal all converged on the same talking points.[twt]

republican politicians echoed this theme as it spread through the right-wing press, parroting the message that they perceived was popular among their political base. And not just random backbenchers — over the weekend, Rep. James Comer (R-KY), who leads the party’s investigations as chair of the House Oversight committee, went on Fox News to decry SVB as “one of the most woke banks,” while likely presidential candidate and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis argued on the same show that its leaders had been “so concerned with DEI and politics” that it “really diverted from them focusing on their core mission.”

McCarthy had lost control of the GOP message to propagandists who produce political takes that are optimized for ratings and clicks, and now he is desperately trying to get it back.

This isn’t the first time the right has blamed bank failures on excessive support for people of color. In 2008, it became commonplace to blame the financial crisis on the Community Reinvestment Act. As Fox’s Laura Ingraham put it at the time, that law, which was enacted in 1977, “pushed all these institutions to lend to minority communities, many were very risky loans.”

That argument was wrong — only a small percentage of subprime mortgages were issued by depository institutions under the CRA — and it scapegoated borrowers rather than the predatory lenders who in many cases deceived them or the bankers who profited handsomely by selling those subprime mortgages packaged in complicated financial products, even though it dramatically increased their institutions’ risk.

But the CRA charge was at least vaguely related to actual federal economic policies. That reflected the sizable portion of right-wing media attention paid during the Obama administration to developing talking points in favor of deregulation and other conservative economic priorities like cutting taxes, particularly for wealthy Americans and corporations, and slashing the social safety net.

The right’s priorities have shifted since then to increasingly favor the empty calories of the culture war. President Donald Trump signed legislation deregulating banks like SVB, just as he signed into law a huge regressive tax cut and pushed to kick people off health insurance by dismantling Obamacare. But he was largely uninterested in broad areas of federal policy, instead reflexively viewing issues through his own personal grievances. The right-wing press, and the GOP, adjusted to match his focuses.

By the time Biden took office, the right’s policy debate muscles had atrophied. Biden offered a far-reaching economic agenda, but in early 2021, Fox’s coverage instead revolved around the “woke mob” supposedly targeting Mr. Potato Head and Dr. Seuss. Even when the network’s influential commentators discussed Biden proposals like his $1.9 trillion economic stimulus bill, they fixated on the 0.06% of the total supposedly wasted on “social justice stuff.” The rest of the right-wing popular press followed Fox’s lead.

The shift by Republican propagandists has been bad for the party’s electoral prospects. As Fox’s hosts trained their audience to fixate on their own bizarre grievances, Republican politicians followed along. But it turns out that normal people don’t care about the same things as millionaire TV hosts like Tucker Carlson — in the 2022 midterms, Fox-friendly candidates who pushed the network’s obsessions were trounced, helping Democrats retain the U.S. Senate and several governorships while keeping the House closely divided.

To date, McCarthy has shown little interest in creating daylight between his members and the right’s infotainers — he’s fresh off of giving Carlson’s team exclusive access to January 6 security footage so the Fox host could generate revisionist propaganda. And now the House leader is reaping the fruits of his party’s right-wing media grievance addiction.

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https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/att-starts-running-ads-fox-news-amid-dominion-mess-and-directv-newsmax-feud

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// gas stove bs?

https://www.mediamatters.org/climate-deniers/fox-news-freaks-out-over-energy-efficiency-standards-washing-machines

no lnx vid

Fox News freaks out over energy efficiency standards for washing machines

Special PROGRAMS

CLIMATE & ENERGY

WRITTEN BY ILANA BERGER

PUBLISHED 03/16/23

Washing machines have become the latest target of Fox News’ campaign to stoke outrage over efforts to reduce carbon emissions from household appliances by casting newer, more energy-efficient products as dysfunctional, expensive, and intrusive “scams.”

In February, the Department of Energy proposed stricter standards for household washing machines, refrigerators, and freezers to reduce carbon emissions and make these appliances more energy efficient. On March 13, the Washington Free Beacon and later Fox News started a parade of misleading claims about the effectiveness and cost of what several sources say will actually make doing laundry cheaper for many Americans.

Consumer experts and the U.S. Energy Department suggest energy-efficient washing machines would actually make doing laundry easier and cheaper

Firstly, it’s important to note that consumers will still be able to choose between top-loaders and front-loading machines. According to the Appliance Standards Awareness Project, the new standards will actually phase out machines that use older technology called agitators and replace them with ones that use impellers, or wash plates. Consumer Reports says that impellers use less water and more motion to get clothes clean and cut down on time in the dryer, which could save consumers money in the long run. Consumer Reports also found that top-loaders that use impellers have a higher average “washing performance” score than those that use agitators. Even Whirlpool, which spoke out against the new standards, claims on its website that impellers and agitators are “roughly equal” in “cleaning performance, energy efficiency, capacity, innovation and convenience.”

The Department of Energy estimates that the proposed standards could cost manufacturers about $690 million to make the necessary updates. However, the changes would also save U.S. consumers up to $14.5 billion over 30 years, helping reduce utility costs for renters who are typically lower-income, and the new standards are estimated to cut more than 53 million metric tons of carbon emissions over that same time.

Fox personalities misleadingly attack energy-efficient washing machines

Despite the evidence, anchors, hosts, and guests on Fox News and Fox Business have taken the word of an industry trade association, the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers, and repeatedly claimed that the Department of Energy’s new efficiency standards will somehow make Americans “dirtier and stinkier.” They also parroted the industry claim that the standards would make doing laundry more expensive by increasing the cost of detergent or preventing consumers from buying cheaper, older, less efficient models. Some Fox figures even denied the reality of climate change to argue that energy efficiency should not be a priority in the first place:

Fox News Radio host Jimmy Failla said the Biden administration is banning “super-sized water” in washing machines, calling it a “scam” that will leave clothes “dirtier.” “This is the scam here, OK, because your clothes are going to be dirtier. And they’ve said this already. It's going to require possibly a second wash. … Think about this, remember when they banned super-sized fries so all the fat people like me just bought two larges? That’s what this is. They're banning super-sized water. So now you get to wash them twice.” [Fox News, Jesse Watters Primetime, 3/15/23]

Fox & Friends hosts doubled down on the idea that the new standards would leave clothes dirtier. Co-host Steve Doocy reported, “Critics say President Biden's new energy plan would make each washing cycle take longer, make detergent more expensive, and leave clothes dirtier because they use less water.” Co-host Ainsley Earhardt told viewers to “get those dirty clothes clean while you can, cause soon they're all gonna be dirty.” [Fox News, Fox & Friends, 3/15/23]

Video

CitationFrom the March 15, 2023, edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends

Fox Business correspondent Jeff Flock questioned why his washing machine isn’t energy efficient enough, even though the government is not forcing anyone to get rid of their washing machines. “I already have what they call a high-efficiency washing machine. But the Biden administration thinks maybe it's not efficient enough. They want you to use less water and less detergent.” [Fox Business, Mornings with Maria, 3/15/23]

James Coleman, a senior fellow at Koch-funded climate denial front group the American Enterprise Institute,fearmongered that “the standards would, on-net, harm consumers.” “Like many efficiency standards, the government claims that although these standards will raise the cost of appliances, they are justified because they will reduce consumer spending on energy and water even more. Of course, if that were true, consumers would likely buy more efficient appliances anyway, given that studies show consumers consider energy and water costs.” [FoxNews.com, 3/14/23]

Hannity host Sean Hannity called reducing carbon emissions from washers and dryers “idiotic.” “Leave my washing machine alone. But more importantly, leave my gas stove alone. … I mean, this is madness. China is the world's biggest polluter. They're not being held accountable. All these other countries are not being held accountable. And they're looking for U.S. taxpayers to pay for their cleaner air. Why would we bear that responsibility? This is so idiotic, but yet they present this as legitimate policy.” [Fox News, Hannity, 3/14/23]

Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) on The Bottom Line said the Biden administration wants to have people “carrying our clothes back out back and doing an old wringer washing machine.” “My goodness, you know it is not enough to control you from daylight to dark. Now they want to control your oven. I'm not giving up my gas stove. … And to take your washing machine and try to make it to the point that it is going to be less efficient.” Co-host Sean Duffy added, “They’ve ruined our toilets, they’ve ruined our dishwashers. Listen, nothing works in the home. Enough with these liberals, get them out of here.” [Fox Business, The Bottom Line, 3/14/23]

Video From the March 14, 2023, edition of Fox Business' The Bottom Line

Fox Business’ The Big Money Show co-hosts Brian Brenberg and Taylor Riggs said energy-efficient washing machines are ineffective. “I can tell you what is exactly going to happen here, OK?” Brenberg said. “You going to just wash your clothes twice, which means you’re going to use more water than you do right now and more soap than you do right now.” Riggs further claimed that saving water and energy will not have an impact on the climate crisis: “China and India are the world's largest polluters, go after them. The U.N. climate report says anything we do is worth nothing if we don't get them on board. Stop coming after small things like washing machines.” [Fox Business, The Big Money Show, 3/14/23]

Comedian Tom Shillue on America’s Newsroomsaid “no one ends up noticing the benefit” from more energy-efficient washing machines. “They always claim this is going to save the consumer, you should be happy. Well if that’s true, manufacturers would do it on their own and we would be happy to pay more for a machine to see that happen. But we don’t believe that’s what happens.” [Fox News, America’s Newsroom, 3/14/23]

Varney & Co. host Stuart Varney included washing machines in a list of things that people supposedly “can’t have” anymore. “It is nonstop. Lightbulbs, can't have them. You can’t have toilets which flush a lot of water, so now you flush twice of course. What else have we got? Gas stoves, let’s not forget, washing machines, they’ve got to tell you what to do all of the time.” [Fox Business, Varney & Co., 3/14/23]

Fox anchor Maria Bartiromo discussed the new regulation with investor Michael Lee, who called the climate crisis a “lie” because “over the last 100 years, deaths due to climate-related accidents and disasters is down 98%, yet somehow it's an existential threat.” “It is beyond insane, the things that they've done and hearing that you've got to change your washing machine because it might use a little less water for this cycle or for that cycle, it's more of the same insanity that's ruining our country right in front of our eyes.” [Fox Business, Mornings with Maria, 3/14/23]

Failla called the regulations a “scam” the Biden administration is “forcing it on us.” “Nobody is on board with this. Everything this government does is some type of heavy-handed coercion or in this case what they would be calling a mandate. … These clothes aren't going to be cleaner, so you’re going to wind up washing them twice is my guess and probably using more water in the process.” Fox host Steve Doocy suggested the administration only put the regulations in place to placate environmentalists after greenlighting the Willow Project: “You’ve got to figure that his environmentalist base loves this kind of stuff, but at the same time he’s apparently greenlighted the Willow project which is going to open billions of gallons — billions of barrels of oil up north. So they’re furious.” [Fox News, Fox & Friends, 3/14/23]

Video

CitationFrom the March 14, 2023, edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends

Outnumbered co-host Harris Faulkner insisted that more efficient appliances would actually use more energy.“If in fact you're doing it longer, right, and you’re not getting the clothes as clean, if in fact you're cooking on that electric appliance now and also not cooking as quickly because the flame is on and the other element takes time to heat up, you’re already — aren't you breaking regulations for usage? … This is so counter to all the regulations that they’ve put in place, it makes no sense. It is like they are punching each other in the face, only they're hitting us.” [Fox News, Outnumbered, 3/14/23]

Outnumbered guest and former NFL player Jake Bequette said the “green agenda” is making everything worse. “Before long, you’ll have to say your preferred pronouns to get your dishwasher to work. I mean this is ridiculous, like nothing works anymore. I just want the high-pressure shower heads to come back. They don't make them like they used to. I mean, this is all part of the green agenda.” [Fox News, Outnumbered, 3/14/23]

Hannity tweeted, “WON’T WASH: Biden Proposes Washing Machine Regulations, Makes Doing Laundry More Expensive.” [Twitter, 3/14/23]

The attacks on washing machines are just part of right-wing media’s drumbeat against any consumer policy framed as climate-friendly

These attacks are just the latest instance of conservative media fearmongering over various household appliances, goods, and cherished companions — including gas stoves, coffee, gaming consoles, cars, and even pets — being supposedly regulated to fight climate change.

In January, right-wing media essentially tried to convince consumers that the Biden administration was going to come into their homes and rip their gas stoves out of the walls in the name of public health and climate change (in addition to trying to discredit a plethora of studies highlighting the health risks of indoor air pollution). It is only a matter of time before right-wing media finds some new manufactured narrative to whine about. These stories are not about improving the quality of life for Americans — they are purely politically motivated attacks to lambast Biden’s “green agenda.”

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IN THIS ARTICLE

Climate deniers

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09/02/22 11:50 AM EDT

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https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-attacks-la-times-reporting-how-minority-communities-face-disproportionately-high

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in the March 9 edition of the Los Angeles Times weekly newsletter Boiling Point, reporter Sammy Roth wrote about a recent peer-reviewed study which found that minority communities in Los Angeles face higher levels of vehicular pollution than their white counterparts. The study’s abstract sums up the findings as follows:

Commuters from majority-White tracts disproportionately drive through non-White tracts, compared to the inverse. Decades of racially-motivated freeway infrastructure planning and residential segregation shape today’s disparities in who produces vehicular air pollution and who is exposed to it.

These findings are entirely uncontroversial. For example, studies looking at vehicular pollution in other cities have found similar results. There is a vast body of research showing that lower-income and minority communities in the U.S. face disproportionately higher levels of pollution than whiter and more affluent communities. There is also a well-documented history of racism in urban planning, with highways purposefully built through minority communities.

The study received little fanfare when it was published in February. A March 7 LA Times write-up of the study also received “normal levels of engagement,” per the author of the study. It wasn’t until March 9, when Roth offered some of his personal feelings about the topics of the study — noting that he “benefited from the region’s sordid history” and that he contributed “to the inequitable air pollution that Boeing’s study describes” — that Fox launched its attack on both Roth and the paper.

The following day, Fox News devoted at least 5 segments to attacking Roth and the LA Times 

In the early morning hours of March 10, Foxnews.com published an article titled “​​LA Times writer says ‘White’ drivers are ‘polluting the air’ breathed by LA’s ‘people of color.’” The article listed some of Roth’s claims, gave a brief overview of the study, and then linked to some tweets by right-wing media personalities lambasting the article (none of which actually addressed any data or evidence presented in the study).

The Fox News TV segments on March 10 followed similar framing — making Roth or the LA Times the main targets of their vitriol and acting outraged over the mere notion of environmental racism.

On Outnumbered, co-host Emily Compagno began the segment by claiming that “if you are white and a driver in Los Angeles, then the liberal media thinks that you are racist.” A chyron mentioned the L.A. Times and an image included Roth’s name. Fox News’ ​​liberal political commentator Marie Harf mentioned the study and broadly defended some of the points it made, including the fact that city highways are often built in lower-income areas and that many members of these communities don’t have cars and rely on public transport, though she said she “wouldn’t use the r-word; I wouldn’t use the ‘racist’ word about white people driving on highways.” Harf’s points about the study were generally dismissed by other guests, who instead focused on attacking the idea of environmental racism. ​​For example, Jason Chaffetz scoffed at the idea that “driving on a freeway is somehow a racist act.”

Later that evening on The Five, co-host Brian Kilmeade called the L.A. Times piece “ridiculous,” mocking the idea that “driving can be racist.” A chyron and image again mentioned the L.A. Times and Roth by name, and the study was mentioned only in passing. Co-host Dana Perino tried to reframe the issue, stating that if she was ”in a minority community,” she “would say why are you giving subsidies to rich white people for electric vehicles.” Co-host Jesse Watters then dismissed the idea of racism in this story after saying that “the Chinese are the ones polluting everybody. They are the most racist, statistically.”

On Tucker Carlson Tonight, Carlson went into a tirade over the L.A. Times piece and mocked Roth’s own background. Carlson did not mention that Roth was reporting on a study. Carlson took an absurd position on the piece, insinuating that Roth wrote “that just by breathing, white people are hurting others.” Carlson also claimed that white people are victims of “Rwanda-style race hatred” pushed by the media.

on The Ingraham Angle, Laura Ingraham did mention the study, but her opening monologue centered on attacking both Roth and the L.A. Times. She downplayed the very idea of environmental racism in general, saying, “Making people live near landfills? We're making people live next to polluting facilities? Well, that's obviously ridiculous.” She also dismissed the well-established fact that highways were purposefully built through low-income and minority communities, stating that “what this is really all about is control.” A chyron read “This is all about eliminating your freedoms.”

In the very next segment, guest Chris Bedford stated that the money going toward environmental justice initiatives is useless and that it’s a “completely insane thing” to call carbon a pollutant anyway. Meanwhile, guest Vincent Edward Ellison called Democrats “the evilest people that have ever walked the face of this earth,” adding that “they don't care that these people are suffering.”

On *Fox News at Nigh*t (airing during the midnight hour of March 11), Trace Gallagher began a segment by stating, “Driving is racist. Says so right in the LA Times, which ran a headline reading, quoting, ‘How white and affluent drivers are polluting the air breathed by L.A.’s people of color.’” He also dismissed the idea of the disproportionate impacts of minority pollution, claiming, “The study says air quality is worse a few blocks from a freeway and common sense says, it's L.A. Almost everyone lives a few blocks from the freeway.”

For his part in writing about a study and simply expressing his own feelings on racist highway practices, Roth was barraged with right-wing and antisemitic hate mail.

Fox News has a history of attacking environmental justice issues

In the aftermath of 2022’s Hurricane Ian, Vice President Kamala Harris correctly pointed out that it’s typically lower-income communities and communities of color that suffer the most from extreme weather events. Fox News personalities lambasted her over this claim, acting outraged that race was brought up at all. Some also falsely accused the administration of planning to deny hurricane aid to white communities. More recently, Fox attacked environmental justice initiatives and pushed racial grievance narratives in the wake of the Ohio train derailment.

In addition to mocking environmental justice initiatives, right-wing media will also downright ignore them, as they did when covering the Jackson, Mississippi, water crisis in 2022.

In addition to these examples, Fox also worked up a storm over environmental justice initiatives in the 2021 version of Biden’s Build Back Better bill, crying foul over modest attempts to rectify decades of racist building practices. At the time, Media Matters wrote that “Fox’s coverage of these programs has not attempted to describe what they entail or what they would accomplish for hundreds of communities. Rather, they have been used as punchlines or set up for cheap shots that reflect Fox’s racist ethos and climate denial.”

This exactly sums up Fox’s coverage of the vehicular pollution study and the resulting L.A. Times report on it. The network downplayed the facts and data surrounding disproportionate minority pollution, and instead loudly complained that it’s all a hoax or that it's actually white people who are being unfairly treated. Boeing, the author of the study, made the same point: Responding on Twitter to the right-wing anger toward his work, he stated that there wasn’t much for him to comment on because “there was no critical engagement with our data or statistical analysis whatsoever, all of which was peer reviewed.”

Promoting climate denial, protecting the wealthy fossil fuel industry, and downplaying the U.S.’ long and sordid history of racism are key themes of Fox News’ right-wing programming. Inconvenient facts like those pointed out in the study — that decades of racist urban planning have contributed to minority populations breathing in more polluted and dangerous air coming from vehicles driven by more affluent people living in other communities — would run up against Fox’s pro-fossil fuel and racial grievance agenda. It thus works for the network to aggressively deny environmental justice issues and reframe the discussion by attacking and manufacturing a backlash in an attempt to intimidate those who even dare to report on them. In this case, the intimidation did not succeed: Roth’s story ended up appearing in theMarch 13 print edition of the L.A. Times.

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https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/foxs-vaccine-coverage-has-gotten-even-worse

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

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

}:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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crazy like fox woman talks to wind, decapitated, kraken src

https://www.alternet.org/email-ghost-woman-crazy-election/

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mma 3/9 23

CHRIS HAYES (HOST): Jane, I thought of that piece you wrote because in the Dominion filings, what we see is that struggle for control laid bare. Right? Like the people inside Fox know that what Trump is saying are lies, possibly like lies that will expose them to litigation risk, right? Might endanger American democracy. But their audience likes Trump and wants to hear them and so they decide to go along. What do you think the state of that very fraught intense relationship is now?

JANE MAYER (GUEST): I mean, I think it's more tense than ever, but it's actually been tense, if you go back, almost from the start. I mean when you really think of it, it's interesting. Rupert Murdoch and Donald Trump have known each other, by my calculation, for 46 or 47 years. And they've had a kind of a -- sort of -- mutually beneficial, dysfunctional relationship, almost from the start. 

They were introduced by Roy Cohen, who's one the more iniquitous sort of fixers in the world of, you know, history of American politics, who'd worked for Joe McCarthy. And their original sort of deal that they struck up was, at the time, Murdoch-owned The New York Post and he wanted to sell newspapers, and Trump was a rising businessman who wanted to be a celebrity. And so if Trump could get publicity from Murdoch and Murdoch could sell papers by writing up the sort of antics of Donald Trump. And so one got fame, the other got money. One got influence, and the other, sort of you know, media empire. [and political pwr]

And it kept expanding. And it became -- it went from The New York Post to then to Fox. And at that point it started, it widened the audience. And kind of, the business plan, though, for both of them was to drive fear and anger in the working class, class resentment, racial resentment and benefit from it.

And, I think what you've seen, though, is that all the way through there's been some tensions. I mean, basically Murdoch, apparently, for years has wanted to have a president that he was close to. He's known every president since JFK, but he's never really had a close associate in the White House until Trump, someone he could call on the phone and he calls him "Donald" and they've known each other that long. And Trump got, out of Murdoch just an incredibly powerful, useful platform, given to him by the man who's arguably the most powerful media mogul in the world. 

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https://www.alternet.org/brian-sicknick-j6/

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an  3 23

fox News host Sean Hannity interviewed former President Donald Trump on Monday and, apparently, omitted crucial chunks of their conversation about Ukraine when it was broadcast to Hannity's radio audience.

Justin Baragona, the senior media reporter atThe Daily Beast, noticed the discrepancy on Tuesday.

"According to Trump, all he needed to do was let Russia 'take over' parts of Ukraine," Baragona explained. "Saying that Russia was going for the 'whole enchilada' with Joe Biden as president, Trump added that Russia 'took over nothing' while he was in the White House because Russian President Vladimir Putin 'understood' that 'he would have never done it.'"

READ MORE: Donald Trump's CPAC speech overflowed with 'wildly dishonest' claims: fact-checker

Trump added, "that's without even negotiating a deal. I could have negotiated. At worst, I could've made a deal to take over something, there are certain areas that are Russian-speaking areas, frankly, but you could've worked a deal."

But as Baragona pointed out, that is not what Hannity played.

"Instead, shortly after Trump says, 'I could have negotiated,' the audio quickly skips about 30 seconds of speaking time before picking back up where the former president pivots to his complaint that 'China no longer respects the United States,'" Baragona observed.

Baragona also noted that "besides asserting that he would have stopped Russia from invading Ukraine by making a deal to let them 'take over something,' Trump also said in the portion not aired by Fox that 'so many more people are dying than is being reported' while reiterating this 'would have never happened' under his watch."

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amazing they show this in middle of dominion shitstorm (or part of recovery. retain trumpistas?)

BIG LIE CORROLLARY: NO INSURRECTION

no lnx twt vid

https://www.alternet.org/gop-to-tucker-carlson/

Brett Wilkins and Common Dreams March 08, 2023

After Fox News' Tucker Carlson falsely dismissed the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol by supporters of former President Donald Trump as mostly nonviolent, numerous Republican senators including Minority Leader Mitch McConnell on Tuesday blasted the right-wing opinion host's "whitewashing" of the deadly insurrection.

Carlson—who publicly promoted former President Donald Trump's 2020 election lies while privately calling the GOP loser's claims "absurd"—said Monday on his program that "very little about January 6 was organized or violent" and that "surveillance video from inside the Capitol shows mostly peaceful chaos."

Recently deposed as part of Dominion Voting Systems' $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News, Carlson echoed colleagues who said under oath that they didn't actually believe Trump's "Big Lie" that the 2020 presidential contest was stolen by Democrats.

While some of the eight Republican senators (and 135 House members) who voted against certifying President Joe Biden's Electoral College victory have stuck by the Big Lie, numerous others pushed back hard against Carlson's reimagination of the worst attack on the Capitol since Puerto Rican nationalists launched an armed assault on the building in 1954.

"I think it's bullshit," Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) told reporters Tuesday when asked what he thought of Carlson's narrative. "When you see police officers assaulted, all of that... if you were just a tourist, you should've probably lined up at the visitors' center and came in on an orderly basis."

Also speaking Tuesday, McConnell (R-Ky.) said that Fox News "made a mistake" by airing Carlson's spurious revision of the deadly insurrection.

"With regard to the presentation on Fox News last night, I want to associate myself entirely with the opinion of the chief of the Capitol Police about what happened on January 6," McConnell declared.

As he spoke, McConnell held up a printout of remarks from U.S. Capitol Police Chief Tom Manger, who called Carlson's account "filled with offensive and misleading conclusions" and "conveniently cherry-picked from the calmer moments of our 41,000 hours of video."

\u201cSenate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell says Tucker Carlson's whitewashing of the Capitol insurrection was a \u201cmistake.\u201d\n\n"My concern is how it was a depicted ... Clearly, the chief of the Capitol Police ... correctly describes what most of us witnessed firsthand on January 6th."\u201d

— The Recount (@The Recount) 1678218192]

Asked whether he thought U.S. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) erred in giving Carlson exclusive access to the footage—a move that prompted watchdogs on Tuesday to call for an Office of Congressional Ethics probe—McConnell said that "my concern is how it was depicted."

:{:{}:

}:

"Clearly," he added, "the chief of the Capitol Police correctly described what most of us witnessed on January 6."

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, joined in the criticism of Carlson, saying, "We don't want to whitewash January the 6th."

:{:{}:

}:

"I think the January 6 committee had a partisan view of things, and I'd like to know more about what happened that day and the day before," Graham added. "But I'm not interested in whitewashing the Covid lab theory, and I'm not interested in whitewashing January 6."

:{:{}:

}:

Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) accused Carlson of "feeding falsehoods" to his viewers.

"It's really sad to see Tucker Carlson go off the rails like that," the 2012 Republican presidential nominee told reporters. "The American people saw what happened on January 6. They've seen the people that got injured, they saw the damage to the building."

"You can't hide the truth by selectively picking a few minutes out of tapes and saying this is what went on," he added. "It's so absurd. It's nonsense. And people saw that it was violent and destructive and should never happen again. But trying to normalize that behavior is dangerous and disgusting."

Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) condemned Carlson's framing of the attack as "some rowdy peaceful protest of Boy Scouts."

"I think that breaking through glass windows and doors to get into the United States Capitol... is a crime," Cramer argued. "I think... when you start opening the members' desks, when you stand up in their balcony—to somehow put that in the same category as, you know, permitted peaceful protest is just a lie."

Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) got straight to his point: "I thought it was an insurrection at that time. I still think it was an insurrection today."

:{:{}:

}:

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), meanwhile, called on Fox to keep Carlson off the air this evening.

"To say January 6 was not violent is a lie. A lie, pure and simple," Schumer said on the Senate floor.

:{:{}:

}:

"I don't think I have ever seen a prime-time cable news anchor manipulate his viewers the way Mr. Carlson did last night," he added. "I don't think I've ever seen an anchor treat the American people and American democracy with such disdain. And he is going to come back tonight with another segment. Fox News should tell him not to."

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mma 3 23

https://www.mediamatters.org/rudy-giuliani/rudy-giuliani-tells-his-audience-not-trust-fox-news-i-happen-find-what-fox-doing

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an 3 23

veterans group is appealing to the U.S. Pentagon to implement a ban that would prohibit Fox News from being accessible on military bases.

According to HuffPost, the progressive political action committee (PAC) VoteVets on Monday posted a video to highlight concerns about the right-wing news network and its anchors who have knowingly circulated baseless, unfounded claims of widespread voter fraud following the 2020 presidential election.

“The most valuable weapon to the enemy is disinformation,” the narrator began. “That’s why the Pentagon spends hundreds of millions training our troops to resist it."

READ MORE: Fox News’ Pete Hegseth has been lobbying Trump to pardon accused war criminals: report

"Yet, at the same time, the U.S. military uses taxpayer-funded facilities to broadcast disinformation on military bases, knowingly letting false propaganda infiltrate the ranks," the narrator added.

At one point during the clip, the narrator also noted that Fox News' Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, and Sean Hannity have “open access to spread their conspiracy theories to U.S. troops."

The push for a Fox News ban on military bases comes as Fox News' Tucker Carlson faces criticism for his latest attempt to spread misleading information about the Jan. 6 insurrection.

During his broadcast on Monday night, Carlson featured subtle clips of Capitol surveillance footage in an effort to support his argument suggesting what transpired on Jan. 6 was not an insurrection.

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fox back desantis bigly

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

mark levin?

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

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

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mma 3 23

Fox News is not content with knowingly lying to its audience and spreading dangerous claims in the pursuit of profit. The network is also seeking to further destabilize the country along partisan lines, as its hosts and guests are increasingly promoting various schemes like a “national divorce” to break up parts of the United States.

Last month, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) issued an absurd call for a “national divorce.” But Fox’s obsession with finding some way to split the country internally goes back a long way, since at least President Barack Obama’s reelection in 2012, when both Fox prime-time host Sean Hannity and the cast of Fox’s The Five responded sympathetically to fruitless secession petitions from aggrieved Republicans in states Obama did not carry.

Later, in December 2020, the network gave a friendly interview to the Texas state GOP chair who called for red states to “form a Union of states” and to push back in some unspecified manner after the Supreme Court had upheld Joe Biden’s victory and rejected the defeated President Donald Trump’s legal challenges.

More recently, the network’s on-air talent have supported efforts to split off conservative counties in California into a new state called “Jefferson.” (Fox has previously been very interested in the so-called “Calexit” movement, an ostensibly left-wing call for Californian independence, which was ironically supported by right-wing Russian dictatorVladimir Putin.)

The “national divorce”

The network is now defending Greene’s impossible proposal for what she called a “national divorce.” Last week, Fox prime-time host Sean Hannity endorsed her idea that people who move from blue states to red states should be barred from voting for five years to avoid altering the partisanship of their new home states. (It’s possible Hannity hadn’t considered the implications of such a policy, which would bar someone like himself — a New Yorker — from voting if he were to move to a Republican-controlled state.)

So far just this week, the network has supported two different internal separatist movements in the United States, in addition to Greene’s proposed “national divorce.”

“Greater Idaho”

To start with, on Monday morning one of the network’s purported “straight news” personalities openly approved of a push for Republican-voting counties in Oregon to join the Republican-dominated state of Idaho instead. After quoting an op-ed saying the plan would free “rural, conservative communities from progressive blue-state law," Fox News correspondent and overnight anchor Ashley Strohmier stated simply, “I would be OK with it.” Later that night, FoxNews.com published an article further promoting the so-called “Greater Idaho” plan.

Two days later, the Wednesday edition of Fox & Friends aired a credulous segment on the plan, interviewing Republican Idaho state Rep. Barbara Ehardt, a proponent.

Co-host Ainsley Earhardt concluded the interview by pining for such right-wing separatist movements to sprout up elsewhere: “There are people in New York that would love to do this, too. Because New York City’s so liberal, but the fringe area is not at all. So, it does affect elections."

[vid]

in 2022, the “Greater Idaho” movement was given the level of attention and analysis it actually deserves from legitimate news outlets: *The Daily Showdismantled the scheme, which an expert estimated could cost the state of Idaho $10-15 billion.

“Buckhead City”

Fox has also taken up the cause of so-called “Buckhead City,” a wealthy district in Atlanta where some activists have sought for years to separate from the city and form their own municipality. On Monday, a committee in the Republican-controlled state Senate advanced a bill that would allow Buckhead to separate. The bill must still pass through a full vote in the state Senate, separate passage in the state House, and be signed by Republican Gov. Brian Kemp.

Greene appeared again with Hannity on Tuesday night’s show, during which the two further discussed her “national divorce” proposals, and Greene declared that conservatives “want our own safe space, and we deserve it.” Hannity then brought up the Buckhead case, which Greene of course supported.

[vid]

 HANNITY (HOST): What would you say about cases like we see counties in Oregon wanting to join Idaho? We see Buckhead — I used to live in Georgia for four years, where you are — and Buckhead wants to separate, for example, from Atlanta, have their own police department, their own government. So you have these examples where people want to join up with another state or another county or another town. Should they have the right to do that?

REP. MARJORIE TAYLOR GREENE (R-GA): Absolutely. Don’t we believe in freedom in America? Isn’t that what America is all about? It’s the -- it’s the people and their choices, and the freedom to do so. I’m a huge supporter of Buckhead City.

Then on Wednesday’s edition of Tucker Carlson Tonight, the host interviewed the volunteer CEO of the Buckhead secession committee. Carlson declared that the neighborhood’s push for separation “really is a test of democracy,” rhetorically asking, “Since when did democracy become so unfashionable? I thought everyone was in favor of democracy. What happened?” (Carlson has a prolific record of spreading conspiracy theories about the January 6 insurrection, recently questioned the legitimacy of American democracy, and has made various pronouncements about which groups of people shouldn’t be allowed to vote.)

Carlson concluded the interview by wishing the group success and calling for more such separatist movements: “So if you win this, I think it will be a sign for towns across the country: You don’t have to be managed into the ground by criminals who hate you. You can run your own affairs. It’s democracy."

[vid]

fox gave the Buckhead push more promotion Thursday morning, with Fox & Friends hosting local talk radio host MalaniKai Massey, who is also a Buckhead resident.

Co-host Ainsley Earhardt mentioned briefly at the start of the segment that Kemp was “throwing cold water on the proposal, questioning its legality,” a topic that she did not revisit in any major detail.

Massey briefly addressed the topic, sounding a cautiously optimistic note: “Is everything on paper always going to go as planned? Absolutely not. However, you’ve got to talk to the bond people. You’ve got to talk to the attorneys, have addressed all of Gov. Kemp’s concerns that he put out yesterday.”

Earhardt concluded the interview: “I’m sure some government officials don’t like this because they’re worried other neighborhoods, your surrounding neighborhoods, will do the same thing and they’ll lose more and more money."

[vid]

the Buckhead proposal actually presents major legal and financial difficulties, with a coalition of area business groups warning on Monday that the proposal would “choke off economic development” in Buckhead itself. Then on Tuesday, Kemp’s executive counsel warned that the proposal was potentially unconstitutional for the manner in which it would seek to apportion the city of Atlanta’s public debt, and that the specter of further city break-ups could trigger the “possible widespread default” of local government bonds in Georgia. Fox’s own online reporting Thursday depicted this letter as a sign that Kemp himself had “delivered a blow” to the Buckhead City cause.

Rather than addressing the numerous problems that these Balkanization proposals would actually pose, Fox’s hosts have instead extolled the desire of conservative voters to have “their own government” in the name of “democracy,” in an attempt to declare that they shouldn’t have to live under a political system when they don’t like the majority results.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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an 3 23

no lnx

More Democrats are declaring an all-out 'information war' against 'lying' Fox News: columnist

Alex Henderson March 02, 2023

Over the years, many Democrats have complained about Fox News and its sister channel Fox Business but nonetheless been willing to be interviewed by some Fox hosts. Fox News has long had a hard news division and an opinion division, and even if Democrats avoided bombastic opinion hosts like Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham, they were willing to be interviewed by people who worked in the hard news division in the past — including Chris Wallace (now with CNN) and Shepard Smith (who spent 23 years at Fox News before a two-year stint at CNBC).

Democratic candidates who made Fox News and Fox Business appearances reasoned that if they were going to increase their chances of winning, it made sense to talk to Wallace, Smith and others who had a lot of Republican viewers. Now-President Joe Biden was interviewed by Wallace during his 2020 campaign, and Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont (an independent who caucuses with Democrats) appeared at a Fox News townhall moderated by Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum that year. Wallace moderated one of the two Biden/Donald Trump debates of 2020.

But in a March 2 column,liberal Washington Post opinion writer Greg Sargent emphasizes that in light of the damning evidence in Dominion Voting Systems' $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News, Democrats are more aggressively calling out the right-wing cable news outlet.

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

Dominion is suing Fox News for promoting the false, totally debunked claim that the company's voting equipment was used to help Biden steal the 2020 election from Donald Trump. E-mails and text messages presented as evidence by Dominion show Carlson, Hannity and others privately acknowledging that claims of a stolen election were lies — yet they wouldn't say that on the air.

"For years," Sargent observes, "Democrats have been deeply conflicted about Fox News. At times, they've shunned the network as an irredeemable source of disinformation, boycotting it or banning it from covering Democratic presidential primary debates. But such efforts have been temporary: They have tended to resume appearing on the network and have reverted to treating it as more or less a news channel, albeit a hostile one."

The columnist continues, "Now, however, it's becoming clear that interacting with Fox News as a news outlet in any sense is no longer an option for Democrats. In light of the news that network personalities knowingly deceived viewers about the 2020 election for cynical pecuniary purposes, Democrats plainly have to take on Fox News in a new way. And some of them know it."

Sargent goes on to note that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-New York) took an "aggressive posture" when they sent a letter to Fox News' Rupert Murdoch demanding that Carlson and others recant, on the air, the election lies they promoted.The columnist argues that Democrats are fighting an "information war" against the far right and need to act like it.

READ MORE: Dominion filing is 'absolute nightmare fuel' for Fox News' lawyers: legal expert

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut) is encouraging fellow Democrats to forcefully call out Fox News for its "deliberate lying as a means to get ratings."

Murphy told Sargent, "I don’t think we’ve ever had a moment like this, where a major news network has been exposed as deliberately deluding its viewers or readers. This is a seminal moment in the history of mass media. And we need to treat it that way."

READ MORE: 'They certainly deserve it': GOP strategist hopes Fox News defamation suit ends in favor of Dominion

Read Greg Sargent’s full Washington Post column at this link (subscription required)

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~ election coverage

https://www.alternet.org/toxic-sludge-paul-ryan-fox/

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huh?? some fox cponsor, some big FF funders?!

mma 3 23

Fox News published an article Feb. 27, titled “These 51 big businesses target conservatives. Here’s what you can do to stop them,” that calls out several of its own advertisers as being “at war with conservatives” and suggests readers boycott as well.

The February 27 article by Justin Haskins, director of The Heartland Institute’s Socialism Research Center, complains that “over the past decade, hundreds of large U.S. corporations have adopted woke policies, regularly injecting left-wing ideals into their products, services and employment practices.” The article cites a “new project launched by the 1792 Exchange, a nonprofit organization,” that “assesses more than 1,000 companies’ ‘policies, practices, and other relevant criteria to determine the likelihood a company will cancel a contract or client, or boycott, divest, or deny services based on views or beliefs,’” sorting them into “lower risk,” “medium risk,” and “high risk” categories. (Media Matters has written extensively about the Heartland Institute, particularly around its climate denial.)

The list includes 147 companies that the 1792 Exchange has identified as “high risk.” The author chose to spotlight “51 of the most impactful for this article” and suggested that readers should “switch” away from these companies “whenever possible.” He also suggested conservatives should “send a letter to businesses that are engaging in discrimination to tell them that you’re considering leaving because of their actions.”

The 51 companies listed are: Ally Financial, Amalgamated Bank, Bank of America, Berkshire Bank, BMO Harris, Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, Eastern Bank, Fifth Third Bank, First Republic Bank,JPMorgan Chase,Morgan Stanley, PNC, Royal Bank of Canada, Scotiabank, TD Bank, Bancorp, Trillium Asset Management, Truist, US Bank,Wells Fargo, Alaska Airlines, American Airlines, Southwest Airlines, United Airlines, XPO Logistics, Best Buy, Home Depot,Kohl’s, Lululemon, Macy’s, Madewell, Target, Walmart. Alibaba, Amazon, Chewy, eBay, Etsy, Shopify, Warby Parker. Altria, Ben & Jerry’s, Cargill, Coca-Cola,HelloFresh, Kellogg’s, McDonald’s, PepsiCo, Starbucks,and the JM Smucker Company.

Here are some of these companies which have advertised on Fox News over the past year, according to Media Matters’ internal database.

Amazon

Amazon and its subsidiaries have advertised on Fox News over 100 times in the past year.

Bank of America

Bank of America and its subsidiaries have advertised on Fox News over 800 times in the past year.

Chewy 

Chewy has advertised on Fox News over 100 times in the past year.

Citigroup

Citigroup has advertised on Fox News over 100 times in the past year.

JPMorgan Chase

JPMorgan Chase and its subsidiaries have advertised on Fox News over 900 times over the past year.

PNC Financial Services

PNC has advertised on Fox News over 300 times over the past year.

Walmart

Walmart has advertised on Fox News over 200 times in the past year.

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ref no lnx vid

These 51 big businesses target conservatives. Here’s what you can do to stop them

Banks, transportation firms, retail giants and food companies make up 51 businesses at war with conservatives

Justin Haskins By Justin Haskins | Fox News

Fox News Flash top headlines for February 24

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com.

NEW

You can now listen to Fox News articles!

It is not a secret that over the past decade, hundreds of large U.S. corporations have adopted woke policies, regularly injecting left-wing ideals into their products, services and employment practices. But some of these businesses have recently gone much further than merely promoting social justice causes; they have chosen to target conservative customers and employees, coercing or forcing Americans to abandon their deeply held beliefs in order to receive important goods or services or to stay employed.

Although many conservatives have heard stories about corporate discrimination in recent years, they have often struggled to keep track of which businesses have been part of this movement, and which have largely stayed on the sidelines. A new project launched by the 1792 Exchange, a nonprofit organization, seeks to shed light on this important problem.

The 1792 Exchange recently launched its Spotlight Report, which assesses more than 1,000 companies’ "policies, practices, and other relevant criteria to determine the likelihood a company will cancel a contract or client, or boycott, divest, or deny services based on views or beliefs."

HOUSE GOP VOTES NEXT WEEK TO KILL BIDEN’S ‘WOKE’ ESG INVESTING RULE

The 1792 Exchange team then used those assessments to assign businesses to three categories — "Lower Risk," "Medium Risk," and "High Risk."

According to the group's website, "‘High Risk’ companies have generally canceled or denied business relationships based on viewpoint disagreements or pose a high risk of canceling people and businesses who do not share their views." Out of the more than 1,000 companies evaluated, 147 are currently classified as "High Risk," which means they are much more likely than other businesses to engage in direct discrimination.

I have carefully reviewed the assessments produced by the 1792 Exchange and have selected 51 of the most impactful for this article. Those companies are grouped by category and listed below.

  1. Banks

Perhaps the most influential groups of woke companies in the report are banks. Numerous large banks are using their financial might to effectively force business customers into adopting climate change policies, even when it will require that those customers dramatically change their business practices.

Many of these banks have also weaponized their operations to promote social and ideological views favored by the left. For example, Bank of America vets its vendors based on their commitment to LGBTQ views, and it has ceased lending with some gun manufacturers. It has also provided funding to Planned Parenthood, as well as the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has a long track record of targeting conservative groups.

Report rates companies based on likelihood they will go 'woke'Video

Bank of America and its CEO, Brian Moynihan, as well as many of the other banks that have been assigned a "High Risk" score by the 1792 Exchange have been some of the biggest supporters of the radical environmental, social, and governance (ESG) movement. ESG is a kind of social credit scoring model that aims to fundamentally transform the global economy so that it’s more in line with the United Nations’ left-wing Sustainable Development Goals.

The 1792 Exchange identified 21 "High Risk" banks: Ally Financial, Amalgamated Bank, Bank of America, Berkshire Bank, BMO Harris, Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, Eastern Bank, Fifth Third Bank, First Republic Bank, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, PNC, Royal Bank of Canada, Scotiabank, TD Bank, Bancorp, Trillium Asset Management, Truist, US Bank, and Wells Fargo.

  1. Transportation

The 1792 Exchange determined that five large transportation companies fall into its "High Risk" category — Alaska Airlines, American Airlines, Southwest Airlines, United Airlines, and XPO Logistics.

Although the transportation companies listed in the 1792 Exchange report do not regularly refuse to do business based on ideological or religious considerations, they have engaged in left-wing activism and even promoted partisan legislation.

American Airlines is one of five airlines on the ‘High Risk’ list. It fought against the Florida Parental Rights in Education Act.

For instance, American Airlines publicly fought against the Florida Parental Rights in Education Act — commonly and falsely labeled the "Don’t Say Gay Bill" by liberals. The legislation prevents public schools from teaching young children, kindergarten through third grade, about topics related to sex and gender identity.

Similarly, Southwest Airlines fought against state laws that sought to enhance election integrity by limiting questionable practices like mail-in balloting.

  1. Retail Giants

The 1792 Exchange labeled 15 large businesses in the "Retailing" industry as "High Risk" companies, including popular brick-and-mortar stores Best Buy, Home Depot, Kohl’s, Lululemon, Macy’s, Madewell, Target and Walmart. The online retailers included in the report as "High Risk" are Alibaba, Amazon, Chewy, eBay, Etsy, Shopify and Warby Parker.

The reasons behind the decision to identify these companies as "High Risk" varied, but in every case, the 1792 Exchange provided significant evidence showing that these businesses have actively promoted left-wing ideological views.

Disney+ criticized for reparations-themed rap song in kids showVideo

For example, 1792 Exchange notes Home Depot "advertised flyers to its employees about confronting their ‘white privilege, Christian privilege, heterosexual privilege, able-bodied privilege,’ etc."

Target has removed books from its stores at the request of liberal activists, and it has fought against numerous legislative proposals backed by conservative lawmakers, including election integrity legislation in Georgia.

  1. Food and Beverage Companies

Ten large food and beverage companies were given "High Risk" ratings in the 1792 Exchange report: Altria, Ben & Jerry’s, Cargill, Coca-Cola, HelloFresh, Kellogg’s, McDonald’s, PepsiCo, Starbucks and the JM Smucker Company.

Although all of these businesses engaged in troubling activities, the company with the most radical practices is, by far, Ben & Jerry’s. The famous Vermont-based ice cream company has promoted "Defund the Police" campaigns, opposed legislation meant to limit election fraud, said that the criminal justice system "must be dismantled," and openly advocated for pro-abortion policies, among many other actions.

Home Depot is one of the 15 retail giants on the ‘High Risk’ list. The woke company confronted workers about ‘white privilege, Christian privilege, heterosexual privilege, able-bodied privilege.'

Fighting Back

Unfortunately, the 51 companies mentioned throughout this article are just the tip of the iceberg. Numerous other important corporations are also actively undermining conservatives and/or discriminating against families or businesses who do not share their radical views.

The 1792 Exchange outlined nearly 100 additional "High Risk" companies in its report, including some of the most powerful in the world, like Alphabet (the owners of Google), Disney, and Apple.

How can conservatives push back against these businesses?

CLICK HERE TO GET THE OPINION NEWSLETTER

The first step is to share instances of discrimination and reports like the one produced by the 1792 Exchange with like-minded friends and family.

Bank of America and its CEO, Brian Moynihan, as well as many of the other banks that have been assigned a "High Risk" score by the 1792 Exchange have been some of the biggest supporters of the radical environmental, social, and governance (ESG) movement.

Conservatives should identify companies that offer similar products and services to those offered by businesses that discriminate and switch, whenever possible. If you can switch products or services, be sure to tell both the business you’re leaving and the new, non-discriminatory business why you’re making the change.

If there aren’t any good alternatives, then send a letter to businesses that are engaging in discrimination to tell them that you’re considering leaving because of their actions. Companies don’t often receive letters like these, so they do have an impact.

CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP

Finally, conservative lawmakers need to prioritize policies that reject ESG social credit scores and other systematic attempts meant to coerce companies into embracing leftist causes. The legislation proposed by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis earlier this month that would limit the use of ESG scores in banking is a great place to start.

If conservatives don’t soon make a concerted effort to fight back against woke corporations, America could soon be transformed beyond repair. We simply cannot afford to wait any longer.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM JUSTIN HASKINS

Justin Haskins is the director of the Socialism Research Center at The Heartland Institute and a New York Times bestselling author.

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https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-producers-thought-jeanine-pirro-was-nuts-then-network-promoted-her-its-top-rated-show

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sammon canned for correct az call, needed a scapegoat?

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3 23 prolly somewhat neglected but see indiv nodes; note dominion discovery revelations on lying , profit motive, fire fact checker Tucker

cf Cruz ~ Gigi state TV proved

//

https://www.mediamatters.org/laura-ingraham/foxs-laura:{-ingraham-participated-ron-desantis-donor-event:(style="background-color:#ffff66ff"):}:-ahead-his-expected

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mma 2 23 several related

matt g

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-republican-propaganda-according-rupert-murdoch

the bombshell filings recently released in Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News tell two stories. The first, which is front and center in the documents and in the newspaper headlines reporting on their contents, is that Fox’s top executives and stars knew that the claims that were being made on the network about the company’s purported role in stealing the 2020 election were false, but they continued to push them because they feared that angry viewers would abandon it for its competitors. Experts say that the voluminous evidence the filings reveal from internal documents and depositions leaves Fox and its parent company in grave legal jeopardy.

But the second story, buried within the filings, may prove even more devastating to Fox. Dominion, in documenting Fox Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch’s direct oversight of the network, revealed numerous cases in which the Fox News co-founder brazenly used its resources to aid the Republican Party. These include a report that Murdoch shared ads then-Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s campaign planned to run on the network with then-President Donald Trump’s White House, as well as his repeated and explicit instructions to Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott to use the network to help GOP Senate candidates win their elections.

It’s not exactly news that Fox is a GOP propaganda outlet devoted to the party’s political success. Media Matters and other critics have made that case for years based on its programming and previous documents and reporting that provided glimpses inside its operations.

But Fox’s business model requires the network to deny that obvious point: It needs to prop up its reputation as a credible journalistic organization in order to retain advertisers and other business partners, and to book guests who might not want to be associated with an openly partisan outfit. The Dominion filings, which show Murdoch himself treating Fox as an extension of the GOP’s political machine, shred the plausibility of those denials.

Murdoch shared Biden ads with Trump adviser Jared Kushner

Perhaps the single most damaging new allegation about Fox’s politicized operations is the claim in Dominion’s second filing that Murdoch shared Biden’s campaign ads with the Trump team. That’s an astounding ethical breach that should give pause to Democratic candidates who seek to run ads on Murdoch’s media properties in the future.

“During Trump’s campaign, Rupert provided Trump’s son-in-law and senior advisor, Jared Kushner, with Fox confidential information about Biden’s ads, along with debate strategy … (providing Kushner a preview of Biden’s ads before they were public),” the filing alleges, citing Murdoch’s sworn deposition.

Murdoch has a long personal relationship with Kushnerand was speaking with him weekly during his tenure in the Trump White House, The New York Times reported in December 2017. The Fox honcho also regularly advised Trump as president. These relationships paid off for Murdoch, with federal regulators repeatedly acting in his benefit over the course of the Trump administration.

Future Democratic candidates should be aware that if they seek to run campaign ads on Fox News, Fox Business, or one of the numerous owned-and-operated Fox broadcast stations, the network’s executives may turn them over to their Republican opponents.

Murdoch demanded Fox intervene to help Republicans win Senate races

The filings also repeatedly show Murdoch directing Fox News’ CEO to use the network to help other Republican candidates.

The first filing reports that in an email Murdoch sent on November 16, 2020, he told Scott, “we should concentrate on Georgia, helping any way we can.” At the time, both of the state’s U.S. Senate races were in runoffs whose results would determine which party controlled the body.

Ultimately, Fox did not pursue this strategy. Instead, chasing viewers who were fleeing to Newsmax, the network doubled down on election fraud conspiracy theories – including in Georgia, where Trump baselessly alleged Democrats had rigged the election for Biden. Notably, the network’s stars suggested that the state’s Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, both Republicans, were corruptly refusing to aid Trump’s effort to change the results. With GOP turnout depressed in the runoff – perhaps linked to Trump’s claims that the state’s elections were rigged – Democrats won both seats and thus the Senate.

This wasn’t the only time Murdoch told Scott to use the network to help Republicans hold the Senate. “Rupert had conversations with Scott about the ‘importance of giving exposure to Republicans in close Senate races,’” the second filing states, citing Murdoch’s deposition and an exhibit. It’s unclear when those conversations took place, but Republican Senate nominees made at least 47 weekday appearances on the network between October 2020 and Election Day, according to the Media Matters database, and similarly flooded the network in the run-up to the 2022 midterms.

Murdoch was particularly worried about the 2020 reelection fight of Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who accounted for 12 of those interviews. The filing states (citation removed):

When Lindsey Graham was running for the Senate in October 2020, Rupert wrote to Scott, “‘You probably know about the Lou Dobbs outburst against Lindsey Graham. Could Sean [Hannity] say something supportive?’ Meaning of Lindsey Graham. ‘We cannot lose the Senate if at all possible.’” Scott followed up to confirm that she indeed “addressed the Dobbs outburst” as Rupert requested.

Murdoch’s comment that “we cannot lose the Senate if at all possible” is an explicit statement that he views Fox as inextricably linked to the GOP and its coverage as serving a partisan goal.

The filing does not give more detail about “the Dobbs outburst.” But on his Fox Business show on October 23, 2020, Dobbs urged his viewers not to support Graham’s campaign.

“Just to be clear, I don’t know why anyone in the great state of South Carolina would ever vote for Lindsey Graham,” Dobbs said. “Graham has betrayed President Trump at almost every turn. He has betrayed the American people and his oath of office.”

How did Scott “address” the situation? It’s unclear, but on October 26, 2020, Graham did afriendly interview on Sean Hannity’s prime-time Fox show. Graham used the opportunity to plug his campaign website and ask for support from Hannity’s audience. Hannity, meanwhile, told his viewers that Graham’s reelection was critical to stopping the Democratic agenda.

“Conservatives need to understand what court-packing would mean, what D.C., Puerto Rico statehood would mean,” the Fox host warned. “But all of this, higher taxes, amnesty. When I say this is the tipping point of all tipping point elections, you're right. It's your race.”

Murdoch urged Fox to take sides in a GOP Senate primary

Murdoch encouraged Fox attacks on coal mogul Don Blankenship during the 2018 Republican Senate primary in West Virginia.

Blankenship feuded with the Senate’s Republican leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) during that campaign, calling him “Cocaine Mitch” and attacking his “China family,” a bigoted reference to McConnell’s Taiwan-born wife Elaine Chao, then Trump’s transportation secretary. Chao is a former Fox contributor and board member of its parent company.

According to the Dominion filing, Murdoch “told Scott and [Fox News President Jay] Wallace when Donald Trump appealed for help defeating Don Blankenship in the West Virginia Senate race, ‘Anything during day helpful but Sean and Laura dumping on him hard might save the day,’” apparently referencing Hannity and his fellow prime-time host Laura Ingraham.

Blankenship later filed an unsuccessful defamation lawsuit against Fox and the parent companies of several other media outlets, alleging that they had improperly described him as a “felon” when he in fact served a year in prison on a misdemeanor count of conspiring to willfully violate mine safety standards in connection with “the worst U.S. coal mining disaster in 40 years.”

Murdoch’s email to Scott and Wallace also appears in the judge’s order dismissing Blankenship’s complaint, with the judge finding that Blankenship had not proved that it constituted “an explicit instruction from Mr. Murdoch to others at Fox News to defame Mr. Blankenship by falsely referring to him as a felon.”

The Murdochs explain how Fox should cover Biden, Trump

Murdoch instructed Scott to ensure that Fox’s coverage of the 2020 elections focused on an issue that he thought would damage Biden’s campaign. From the filing (citation removed):

When New York Post editor Col Allan told Rupert that Biden’s only hope for election was “to stay in his basement and not face serious questions,” Rupert responded, “Just made sure Fox banging on about these issues. If the audience talks the theme will spread.” Rupert explained at his deposition that to make sure Fox was “banging on about these issues” he “must have been talking to Ms. Scott.”

Murdoch wanted Fox to cover Trump in a very different way – he sought to use the network as a promotional vehicle for Trump’s policy agenda, the filings reveal.

“When Trump presented a new tax bill, Rupert told Scott ‘we must tell our viewers again and again what they will get,’” the second filing stated.

Lachlan Murdoch, Rupert’s son and Fox Corporation’s executive chairman and CEO, similarly weighed in following the election on Fox coverage of Trump that he considered insufficiently supportive. According to the filing (citations removed):

He told Scott on November 14 during Fox’s coverage of a rally in support of Donald Trump that “News guys have to be careful how they cover this rally. So far some of the side comments are slightly anti, and they shouldn’t be. The narrative should be this is a huge celebration of the president.”Scott responded: “Yes thanks”; and when Lachlan then criticized Leland Vittert’s coverage as “[s]mug and obnoxious,” Scott said she was “calling now” to direct Vittert’s producer to fix the issue.

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rupert and lachlan approve big lie bs to recover from az call vs oan newsmax

an 2 23

A new court filing in connection with Dominion Voting Systems' lawsuit has revealed on Fox News analyst was lambasted and ousted for his “smug” coverage that was described as being consistently too “anti-Trump.”

According to Mediaite, the incriminating behind-the-scenes remarks madeby former Fox News anchor Leland Vittert are now coming to light.

At the time, Vittert became a target of criticism for his coverage following the 2020 presidential election as former President Donald Trump continued to spin conspiracy theories to explain his election loss.

READ MORE: 'Shockingly reckless': Fox News hosts spread Donald Trump’s election claims knowing they were 'total BS'

Per Mediaite:

One section details the way then-Fox anchor Leland Vittert — who has since moved on to an anchor role at NewsNation— was targeted for criticism in a pipeline that went from Fox Corp CEO Lachlan Murdoch to Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott right to the control room because his 'anti-Trump' coverage was deemed 'smug and condescending.'

Excerpts from the filing have also been highlighted:

... Lachlan continued to advise on how Fox should cover the news related to the 2020 Presidential Election. For instance, he told Scott on November 14 during Fox’s coverage of a rally in support of Donald Trump that 'News guys have to be careful how they cover this rally. So far some of the side comments are slightly anti, and they shouldn’t be. The narrative should be this is a huge celebration of the 25 president.' Ex.627; see Ex.130, L.Murdoch 116:4-119:11.

The excerpt also noted: "Scott responded: 'Yes thanks'; and when Lachlan then criticized Leland Vittert’s coverage as '[s]mug and obnoxious,' Scott said she was 'calling now' to direct Vittert’s producer to fix the issue. Ex.627; Ex.130, L.Murdoch, 122:1-15. And indeed she did. Executive David Clark reported: 'Also got called by Jay who heard from SS that Leland was being smug and condescending. I texted him and told him to cut it out and DC EP spoke to him.' Ex.628."

READ MORE: Donald Trump accuses Fox News of hiding poll showing him 'crushing' Ron 'DeSanctimonious'

"Lachlan even gave his input on the chyron that appeared at the bottom of broadcasts, telling Scott that 'the ticker at bottom of screen is all wrong. Way too wordy and long. And anti trump whenever possible.' Ex.629," it also reads.

Responding to the latest filing, a public relations representative for Fox News released a statement addressing the situation.

"Dominion’s lawsuit has always been more about what will generate headlines than what can withstand legal and factual scrutiny, as illustrated by them now being forced to slash their fanciful damages demand by more than half a billion dollars after their own expert debunked its implausible claims," the statement reads. "Their summary judgment motion took an extreme, unsupported view of defamation law that would prevent journalists from basic reporting and their efforts to publicly smear FOX for covering and commenting on allegations by a sitting President of the United States should be recognized for what it is: a blatant violation of the First Amendment."

READ MORE: Watch: Mike Pence tells Fox News that prosecuting Donald Trump would be 'terribly divisive for the country'

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cruz outrage at gigi comment fox state tv

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

David Badash The New Civil Rights Movement

February 27, 2023

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

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an 2 23

Fox News will air a selectively edited "documentary" about the Jan. 6 attacks based on the 44,000 hours of footage delivered to the network's prime-time personality, Tucker Carlson. Carlson will not post all 44,000 hours for the public to view. Instead, he will make his own edits.

The move comes after Carlson spent months arguing that there was no insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021.

"Of all the things Jan. 6 was, it was not a violent terrorist attack," Carlson said on his show on Sept. 22, 2021. "It wasn't an insurrection."

"What are they gonna admit there was no insurrection?" Carlson asked two days later on Sept. 24. He chuckled: "never."

"So, FBI operatives were organizing the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, according to government documents," Carlson falsely claimed during a June 16, 2021, show.

Speaking about the show, MSNBC's Katy Tur aired the teaser aired on Fox to promote the episode that showed footage of the attack and former President Donald Trump's speech.

The voiceover says: "False flags have happened in this country. One of which may have been Jan. 6."

On the screen appears insurrectionists, footage from the Capitol, and Trump, but then it shows footage of Osama bin Laden, the mastermind behind the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.It isn't clear why Carlson would choose bin Laden's image, while the voiceover claims there have been false flags in the U.S. in the past.

Carlson isn't the only conservative to claim conspiracies around Sept. 11, 2001. Donald Trump falsely said that he witnessed Muslims cheering on a rooftop in New Jersey. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) falsely claimed that a plane never hit the Pentagon.

See the clip of the promo in the video below or at the link here.

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mma random

  1. ### Charlie Kirk uses air quotes to describe Sec. Pete Buttigieg’s marriage to Chasten Buttigieg

02/23/23 3:47 PM EST

  1. ### Ben Shapiro: “If there is a racial bias broadly speaking on a cultural level right now, it mostly applies to what we would call white people”

02/23/23 2:58 PM EST

  1. ### Charlie Kirk: Trump's 2024 campaign needs “to produce a television show, because that's what politics is”

02/23/23 2:41 PM EST

  1. ### After East Palestine train derailment, Fox News discovers the purpose of industry regulations after years of vilifying them

02/23/23 1:27 PM EST

  1. ### NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen: Fox is “the commercial wing of the MAGA movement that has overtaken the Republican party”

02/23/23 1:03 PM EST

  1. ### Mike Lindell says he's suing Speaker Kevin McCarthy for giving Tucker Carlson and Fox the exclusive on the January 6th footage

02/23/23 12:48 PM EST

  1. ### “Incredibly damning”: A new report shows legal experts stunned at revelations in Fox/Dominion case

02/23/23 10:31 AM EST

  1. ### The 10 most important things we learned about Fox News from the Dominion case

02/23/23 9:56 AM EST

  1. ### Fox’s Outkick hires Curt Schilling, a QAnon and Parkland shooting conspiracy theorist

02/23/23 9:16 AM EST

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mma 2 23

fox News’ Brian Kilmeade acknowledged on Thursday that federal regulations may be necessary to protect people and the environment, a rare admission on a network that has pushed for mass deregulation for decades. Kilmeade, who co-hosts Fox & Friends, made the comments while discussing the East Palestine, Ohio, train derailment and its aftermath.

“I knew nothing about these derailment numbers,” Kilmeade said. “I'm stunned by it – that we have thousands of derailments all the time and how costly it is, and how they're not kept up and maybe the regulation needs to be there"

fox News has long vilified federal regulations as governmental overreach, and needless red tape that eats into corporate profits. In 2011, the network launched Regulation Nation, a series that would “expose how excessive laws are drowning American businesses.” The series was the brainchild of then-Fox News President Roger Ailes, who said at the time that bureaucrats “draw up regulations totry to ruin your life.” [vid]

That same year, Fox News also waged a full-on war against the Environmental Protection Agency, and continues to argue against environmental regulations, including in its so-called straight news programs.

More recently, Fox News personalities and their guests have railed against federal regulations for the oil industry, argued that federal regulations are a way to divide families, blamed regulations that purport to limit police violence for resulting in the police killing of Tyre Nichols, and pushed for further deregulation of the cryptocurrency market, just to name a few examples. Fox News and other cable networks also largely ignored the Trump administration’s broad deregulatory agenda to benefit massive polluters in the early weeks of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Television coverage of East Palestine was scant and decontextualized, including on Fox News, immediately after the derailment, with only3% of coverage mentioning the decadeslong deregulatory push by the rail industry. The Obama administration attempted to make more effective train brakes mandatory following a series of derailments in 2014, which the industry fought against, effectively hollowing out the proposed rules. In 2018, the Trump administration completely repealed the regulations.

related

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-friends/fox-host-ohio-train-derailment-regulations-regarding-train-safety-were-changed-during

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https://www.alternet.org/judges-deny-fox-news-voting/

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many msg show bad trinity knew lying

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

https://www.mediamatters.org/:{rupert-murdoch/rupert-murdoch-told-fox-ceo-suzanne-scott-fox-news-would-concentrate-helping-any-way}:

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/new-filing-shows**-tucker-carlson-tried-get-fox-reporter-fired-correctly-fact-checking

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

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

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/boston-globes-jackie-kucinich-dominion-filing-showed-fox-news-internal-workings-are

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an 2 23

fox News lawsuits will expose the 'dishonest' network and threaten 'alt-reality media': conservative

Sarah K. Burris Raw Story

February 15, 2023

Fox News was denied their motion to dismiss the case by Smartmatic voting systems this week, meaning the case is going to trial and the network can't stop it.

Only one county in the U.S., Los Angeles County, use...

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recall cruz vs gigi on fox propaganda

2 23 badash an

As the nation last week was focused on bombshell revelations allegedly exposing Fox News as "a propaganda network" that is "void of the most basic journalistic ethics," Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy was handing over to that network's top propagandist, Tucker Carlson, 41,000 hours of footage from the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol.

"Now his shows — 'Tucker Carlson Tonight' on Fox News, and 'Tucker Carlson Today' and 'Tucker Carlson Originals' on the streaming service Fox Nation — have a massive trove of raw material," Axios' Mike Allen notes in an exclusive report.

"Carlson TV producers were on Capitol Hill last week to begin digging through the trove, which includes multiple camera angles from all over Capitol grounds. Excerpts will begin airing in the coming weeks," Axios adds, noting that "Carlson has repeatedly questioned official accounts of 1/6, downplaying the insurrection as 'vandalism.'"

READ MORE: 'Treasonous': Marjorie Taylor Greene Slammed for Celebrating President's Day by Calling for a 'National Divorce'

Indeed, on the same night last year in June as the U.S. House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack was presenting its evidence on national TV, Tucker Carlson declared, "it tells you a lot about the priorities of aruling class that the rest of us are gettingyet another lecture about January 6th tonight from our moral inferiors, no less. An outbreak of mob violence, a forgettably minor outbreak by recent standards, that took place more than a year and a half ago, but they've never stopped talking about it."

Carlson on his Fox News primetime show that night called the Committee’s hearing "deranged," and bragged, "we're not playing along. This is the only hour on an American news channel that will not be carrying their propaganda live. They are lying, and we are not going to help them do it. What we will do instead is to try to tell you the truth. We've attempted to do that since the day this happened."

He did not stop there.

Carlson called it "vandalism" and flat-out denied it was an insurrection.

READ MORE: ‘Propaganda Network’: Media Reporter Says Dominion Filing Exposes Fox News as ‘Void of the Most Basic Journalistic Ethics’

"We hated seeing vandalism at the U.S. Capitol a year and a half ago, and we said so at the time, but we did not think it was an insurrection because it was not an insurrection. It was not even close to an insurrection. Not a single person in the crowd that day was found to be carrying a firearm – some insurrection."

Last week a legal court filing from Dominion Voting Systems alleged that Fox News' top brass, from Rupert Murdoch on down – including Carlson – knew Donald Trump was lying about the election being stolen.

In an opinion piece at MSNBC, senior fellow for Media Matters for America Matt Gertz writes: "Out of fear that Fox News's audience was leaving for its competitors, the brief alleges, the network chose to buttress President Donald Trump's lie that the election had been stolen from him, helping to set the stage for the Jan. 6 insurrection."

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an 2 23

There were fireworks on Tuesday at the Senate Commerce Committee hearing as Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) grilled Gigi Sohn, a nominee for a commissioner position on the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

Sohn is no stranger to the Senate Commerce Committee as this is herthird hearing for the position, since her initial nomination in October 2021 by President Joe Biden.

Cruz took that familiarity as an opportunity to blast Sohn oveher past social media posts on Twitter.:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"/maxresdefault.jpg)

Sohn agreed with Cruz that the FCC has an obligation to “defend democracy,” then he used that opportunity to bring up Sohn’s past vocal opposition to Fox News.

Cruz read a past tweet from Sohn from September 2019 that stated, “I agree with the scrutiny of big tech is essential as scrutiny of big telecom, cable and media,” Sohn’s tweet continued. “And trust me, the latter have played their own role in destroying democracy and electing autocrats. Like, say Fox News?”

Cruz then pounced on Sohn for showing partisan scrutiny in her communications.

“You see why millions of people don’t think you are fair and impartial to regulate communications?” Cruz asked.

Cruz then featured a social media post from October 2020 where Sohn described Fox News as being “state-sponsored.”

Sohn quickly acknowledged her wrongdoing after the post was presented.

“I regretted the tone of that,” Sohn said.

However, Sohn acknowledged the close positioning the conservative news network had with former President Donald Trump.

“They were very, very, very, close to the Trump administration,” said Sohn.

Cruz countered her response by asking if MSNBC is close to the Biden Administration.

Sohn responded, “I listen to National Public Radio, I do not watch CNN or MSNBC.”

Watch video below or at this link.

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random 2 23

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-host-says-expect-vigilante-justice-because-das-dont-do-anything-anymore

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-host-encourages-viewers-financially-support-man-charged-migrants-murder

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-host-says-we-are-living-fascist-state-because-media-wont-cover-hunter-bidens

https://www.mediamatters.org/lisa-kennedy-montgomery/fox-news-host-calls-pete-buttigieg-cracker-who-only-wants-racially-divide

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https://www.alternet.org/white-house-ron-johnson/

ss fact check by WH

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"They can't do it': Dominion Voting Systems slams Fox News for failure to produce evidence of fraud

Meaghan Ellis

February 08, 2023

Dominion Voting Systems is calling out the Fox News network and its parent company for failure to produce substantial evidence to support their claims of voter fraud during the 2020 presidential election...

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https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-host-defends-republican-sen-rick-scotts-plan-would-sunset-medicare-and-social

https://www.mediamatters.org/jesse-watters/fox-news-host-says-people-who-financed-it-deserve-credit-american-infrastructure

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/gop-rebuttal-bidens-state-union-address-was-indistinguishable-fox-news-monologue

MG

arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ Tuesday night rebuttal to President Joe Biden’s State of the Union Address shows that Republican politicians seem completely unable to deliver a message aimed at audiences beyond the party’s Fox News base.

Sanders opened and closed her speech with personal anecdotes, and peppered it throughout with the sort of false and misleading claims about the Biden administration’s record and policy agenda that typify GOP State of the Union rebuttals. But she devoted the spine of her speech to themes that might be incomprehensible to those not steeped in the narratives of the right-wing press.

In Sanders’ telling, Biden’s surrender to the “woke mob” is the greatest threat the country faces. She criticized the president for “weakness” and declared him “unfit to serve as commander in chief.”

“While you reap the consequences of their failures, the Biden administration seems more interested in woke fantasies than the hard reality Americans face every day,” she said. “Most Americans simply want to live their lives in freedom and peace, but we are under attack in a left-wing culture war we didn’t start and never wanted to fight. Every day, we are told that we must partake in their rituals, salute their flags, and worship their false idols.”

Unhinged denunciations of Biden and depictions of the nation — and conservatives in particular — as under siege by all-powerful leftists are familiar fodder for fans of Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham. Fox hosts loved the speech for reflecting back their own talking points, and viewers watching on the right-wing network might have been nodding along.

But Republican politicians can speak to them anytime via a friendly interview with one of the network’s prime-time stars. This was a chance for the party to reach beyond its base to people who do not reflexively support GOP candidates, and Sanders fumbled it.

Biden, meanwhile, used his address to speak to the whole country. He opened by congratulating the Republican leaders of the House and Senate and highlighting his administration’s past bipartisan successes with the help of his “Republican friends.” Biden pointed to potential areas of common ground over the next two years, even as he vowed to oppose the Republican Party’s most extreme positions. “We have to see each other not as enemies, but as fellow Americans,” he said toward the end of the speech. “We’re good people, the only nation in the world built on an idea.”

Given what will likely be his biggest audience of the year, Biden tried to reach people outside his base. The Republicans didn’t respond in kind.

It is perhaps unsurprising that, offered the opportunity to reach the entire country, Sanders instead seemed focused on stroking the pleasure centers of Fox viewers. She was a fixture on the network as Donald Trump’s White House press secretary, then provided the same pro-Trump analysis from the network’s payroll as a Fox contributor. Following the example of her father, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, who worked as a Fox contributor in between GOP presidential runs, Sanders built her profile at the network, then ran successfully for his old job.

But Sanders’ address is part of a broader sickness in the Republican Party. Its leadership has become increasingly subjugated by Fox hosts and other right-wing propagandists who win ratings and money with crude demagoguery aimed at keeping viewers from dropping off during commercial breaks.

Trump honed his political brand with a regular weekly segment on Fox & Friends, then relied on Fox hosts as his White House kitchen cabinet. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, his most prominent likely challenger for the 2024 presidential nomination, owes his political ascension to the network and has courted its hosts and viewers.

Every Republican politician, from the Republican National Committee chair to congressional leaders to would-be candidates, needs to manage their relationship with the network. Republican congressional investigations are aimed at Fox-friendly topics like Hunter Biden,while its members use hearings to parrot the white supremacist conspiracy theories frequently heard on the network.

It is not good for the Republican Party that Fox’s stars are presidential advisers and party kingmakers with international influence. Its focus on keeping the party’s most vitriolic elements happy keeps it from making appeals to the rest of the country. That’s fine if you govern a red state like Arkansas, where the greatest threat to your political future likely comes from a challenger who’s even further to the right. But it’s why the party keeps losing winnable elections in swing states.

related of course fox hired sarah

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~ ilhan omar

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mma 2 23

Over the past several days Fox networks have aired numerous segments insinuating that the recent deaths of whales across New York and New Jersey beaches are due to the development of offshore wind turbines.

There is no evidence to back up these claims.

NOAA Fisheries, the office within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration responsible for the management of marine life, specifically addressed the question on January 24. NOAA stated that the recent whale deaths are “not related to offshore wind development.” The agency further wrote, “Of the whales examined, about 40 percent had evidence of human interaction, either ship strike or entanglement. Vessel strikes and entanglement in fishing gear are the greatest human threats to large whales.” Indeed, nearly 3,000 ships passed through the Port of New York and New Jersey, near where whale deaths are occurring, in the last year — “a figure that vastly undercounts all the ocean traffic in the region and dwarfs the number of vessels that have anything to do with offshore wind.”

Importantly, NOAA Fisheries noted climate change as a contributing factor in the whale deaths. The world’s oceans are rapidly warming, with temperatures reaching a record high in 2022. This is forcing a change in the migration patterns of marine life, including whales, and “can lead to increased interactions with humans as some whales move closer to near shore habitats,” the agency writes.

Additionally, there aren’t even any wind turbines off of the coast of New Jersey. The whale deaths have also been happening at an increased rate since at least 2016, the NOAA reports, which long predates any offshore wind development in the region.

This is not stopping Fox from promulgating claims that offshore wind is killing these whales

On the January 30 edition of Tucker Carlson Tonight, Tucker Carlson sarcastically mocked a Politico article which stated that “there is no evidence the wind work and whale deaths are linked.”

“We have no idea why a dozen whales just turned up dead on the beaches of New Jersey,” Carlson said. “Does it have anything to do with the construction of wind turbines off the coast? ‘That's speculation,’ Politico reported. ‘Probably climate change.’ So the story was ridiculous, but what we didn’t get at first was that Politico was paid to run it.”

Carlson took issue with the fact that the article was featured in a newsletter sponsored by the Natural Resources Defense Council, later calling Politico “prostitutes” for publishing another article sponsored by offshore wind turbine manufacturers. In reality, Politico’s energy newsletters are typically sponsored by energy companies, not environmental groups — with the vast majority of these sponsorships coming from fossil fuel companies.

The next night, Carlson stated that “so-called green NGOs, supported of course by the people they give money to in the Biden administration, are backing the construction of massive offshore wind turbines that appear to bekilling large numbers of whales.” Carlson then hosted a local Republican politician from Nassau County, New York, who called “going all-electric” a “danger to our America,” and stated that “there will always be fossil fuels, at least in my lifetime.”

Carlson’s two recent segments follow a January 13 segment detailing “The Biden whale extinction.” (Another chyron during that episode read “Green New Deal wind farms are killing whales.”)

Questions about offshore wind development were also raised on Fox during the January 31 editions of both America’s Newsroom, with reporter Alexis McAdams stating, “As the whale deaths continue, some lawmakers and activists are calling for a hold on the preparations for offshore wind projects,” and The Story, with guest anchor Trace Gallagher stating, “It's the eighth whale to die along the shore of New Jersey and New York in the last two months, fueling the debate about whether the deaths are natural or maybe related to nearby offshore wind projects and the push to go green.”

Several more such segments covering the whale deaths ran on February 1. On Fox Business’ Varney & Co., correspondent Madison Alworth discussed the costs of offshore wind development without noting the massive economic benefits to local and state communities before stating, “All of this is the cost of this clean energy, but as you heard these conservationists saying it's costing our environment even more, and we're already seeing that expense.”

“Not in my backyard,” concluded host Stuart Varney.

Another segment on The Story began with Gallagher stating that, “The mayors of a dozen New Jersey towns [are] now calling for an immediate halt on plans to build thousands of offshore wind turbines as coastal communities raise concerns about the number of whales washing up dead on nearby beaches and soaring financial costs threaten the push to go green.”

Later, Alworth began a segment on Special Report with Bret Baier by claiming “conservationists say that offshore wind turbines are far from clean and may be doing more harm than good for the environment.” She ended the report by again mentioning the economic costs associated with wind turbines and none of the financial benefits.

Finally, Jesse Watters Primetime ran two segments linking offshore wind development to the whale deaths. In one, Alworth cited “conservationists” concerned with whale deaths saying “this clean energy might not be clean at all,” and she again brought up the economic costs of wind turbines without mentioning their benefits. In the second, host Jesse Watters interviewed ex-Greenpeace Canada member Patrick Moore to rail against renewable energy and complain that Greenpeace has been compromised by wind companies. Watters ended the segment by stating that wind turbines are “not good for the Jersey shore, for the Atlantic Ocean, and, as you said, it's not great for consumers either.”

Fox’s guests are not scientists — they have fossil fuel connections and an interest in blocking renewable energy development

Moore is a climate science denier who has consulted for polluting companies. He also (falsely) claims that he is a founder of Greenpeace, which allows Fox to paint him as a credible guest on climate, energy, and environmental issues.

Watters also tried this trick — obfuscating the credibility of an environmental advocate — in an earlier segment on offshore wind and whale deaths. On January 11, Mike Dean of Protect Our Coast NJ was labeled as an “ocean advocate,” and Dean went on to baselessly blame wind development for whale deaths, declaring, “The harms with these projects and the costs are limitless, and it’s really hard to find any benefits at all.” Fox did not note that Dean’s group appears to be backed by the Caesar Rodney Institute, a libertarian think tank with a history of hostility toward climate and environmental policies. The institute has also received funding from the fossil fuel industry, which has a long history of blocking renewable energy projects.

On the January 13 edition of Tucker Carlson Tonight, Carlson hosted Meghan Lapp, a fisheries liaison for the fishing company Seafreeze. Lapp claimed, without evidence, thatoffshore wind development means “essentially carpet bombing the ocean floor with intense sound.” In fact, Lapp has been appearing on Fox News since at least 2019 insinuating that offshore wind development is killing whales. She even appeared in Carlson’s 2021 anti-wind documentary which was chock full of misinformation and debunked talking points.

What has not been mentioned on Fox, and what has been excellently reported on by climate writer Michael Thomas, is that Lapp is a fossil fuel industry ally. Her campaign to stop offshore wind development has beenbankrolled by Texas Public Policy Foundatio**n, a fossil fuel-funded think tank that has fought climate policies tooth and nail. TPPF, of course, has spent decades advocating for offshore oil drilling — choosing to downplay the horrific environmental impacts of that practice while embellishing the impacts of offshore wind development.

Finally, Bonnie Brady of the Long Island Commercial Fishing Association appeared on the aforementioned Varney & Co., The Story, and Special Report segments on February 1. Brady, like Lapp, is being :{backed by TPPF in her campaign to stop offshore wind development. Last year, both Lapp and Brady appeared in a TPPF film entitled “A Heavy Wind: The Threat to an American Heritage,” which detailed commercial fishermen fighting offshore wind projects.}:

One recent Fox segment interspersed with their offshore wind coverage illustrates the complete hypocrisy of Fox’s climate-related programming

During Fox’s fearmongering about offshore wind development on February 1, America Reports ran a segment with Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-AK) that sang the praises of the Willow Project, a major oil and gas drilling project in Alaska’s national petroleum reserve. Sullivan called the project “actually really good for our environment,” while Fox anchor John Roberts noted some benefits of the project, including billions in revenue and hundreds of jobs created.

While Roberts did ask a question about climate advocates not wanting to lock the U.S. into more fossil fuel extraction, this segment did not mention the massive environmental costs associated with the project. Environmental advocate and journalist Bill McKibben noted in a recent article on the project that Alaska is “already warming faster than almost any place on the planet.Warming so fast that taxpayers are already having to pony up huge sums of money to relocate coastal villages inland. Emissions from the Willow project’s oil would cause $19.8 billion in climate damages; it would generate $3.4 billion in federal tax revenue, which is…a lot less.”

McKibben also cited a Center for American Progress analysis of the project which found that “allowing the Willow project to proceed would result in double the carbon pollution that all renewable progress on public lands and waters would save by 2030.”

Contrast Fox’s fawning coverage of an oil drilling project with its dismissive, conspiracy theory-laden, and climate denial-infused coverage of offshore wind, and you get a perfect sense of why Fox cannot be trusted on climate and environmental issues. While it’s true that there are valid concerns with offshore wind’s impacts on the environment and local marine life — something that has been taken into consideration by government authorities in reviewing previous offshore wind projects —the reality is that fossil fuel projects are significantly more detrimental to the environment and climate than renewable projects.

You will rarely if ever hear these facts reported on Fox, as the network has time and again proved to be nothing more than a mouthpiece for the fossil fuel industry, and its offshore wind coverage cannot be taken seriously.

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https://www.alternet.org/fox-news-bogus-sick-days/

we just cough all over each other

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:{:{https://www.mediamatters.org/outnumbered/katrina-campins-says-government-dividing-family-unit-order-control-us}:

}:

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https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-guest-sheriff-mark-dannels-address-judiciary-committee

~ immigrant

Sheriff Mark Daniels uses frequent right-wing media appearances to demonize immigrants and push falsehoods about the border

01/31/23

Fox News fearmongered about riots following footage release of Tyre Nichols’ killing. Protests were mostly peaceful.

01/31/23

Right-wing media are using the death of Tyre Nichols to push their pro-policing agenda

01/31/23

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5 blk cops elite all fired 150 lb superhuman energy

brutal video near house called mom

Newsmax guest reacts to Tyre Nichols videos: “It's Black on Black crime”

01/28/23 10:31 AM EST

Fox News guest blames Black single mothers for the killing of Tyre Nichols

01/27/23 9:11 PM EST

Tucker Carlson says white people are victims of “racial hatred” amid coverage of Tyre Nichols killing

01/27/23 8:53 PM EST

Fox News host Jesse Watters says Tyre Nichols was killed because “police tactics have been hamstrung”

01/27/23 8:00 PM EST

Fox News host demands representation of “the cops’ perspective” on the killing of Tyre Nichols

01/27/23 5:53 PM EST

Facebook caved to right-wing media demands to reinstate Trump. They keep attacking the platform anyway

01/27/23 2:13 PM EST

Fox News guest suggests societal “treatment of police” contributed to Tyre Nichols' killing

01/27/23

mma

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all one day

https://www.mediamatters.org/five/fox-news-demands-representation-cops-perspective-killing-tyre-nichols

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-host-justified-conspiracies-about-attack-paul-pelosi-because-democrats-have-tendency

https://www.mediamatters.org/harris-faulkner/fox-news-guest-blames-treatment-police-tyre-nichols-killing

https://www.mediamatters.org/donald-trump/fox-distorts-facts-surrounding-classified-document-recovery-attack-biden-and-defend

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/sean-hannity-served-trump-dojs-kool-aid

deep state fbi BS?

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mma 1 23 no vid

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/meta-fox-news-and-collapse-anti-january-6-consensus

Meta’s Wednesday announcement that it plans to let former President Donald Trump back on the Facebook account he used to encourage the January 6 insurrection is perhaps the final sign that the right’s propagandists have demolished the consensus that the Trumpist riot at the U.S. Capitol was a horrific event and that there should be accountability to prevent it from happening again.

It seemed for a brief period after the smoke cleared from the Capitol on January 6, 2021, that America’s sclerotic and oft-maligned institutions might bestir themselves to rise to the defense of the nation’s democratic principles. 

In government, Republican leaders like Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) — even Trumpist lickspittles like Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) — vocally denounced the former president’s actions, with some of the party’s governors going so far as to call for him to leave office. 

In corporate America, a flood of blue-chip companies announced that they would terminate or suspend donations to the Republican members of Congress who voted against certifying the electoral votes of one or more states. Even staid trade groups like the National Manufacturers Association condemned the mob and Trump’s role in fomenting it. 

In the press, journalists contemplated whether it might be appropriate to refuse TV airtime to Republican members of Congress who had encouraged the insurrectionists by denying the election results.

And in social media, platforms like Facebook and Twitter recognized the role they had played in helping Trump stoke his supporters’ ire and the devastating consequences thereof, and cut the former president and some of his most incendiary allies off from their accounts.

But Fox News and its allies on the right quickly went to work unraveling that fragile consensus. They successfully convinced the GOP to adopt the narrative that criticisms of Trump’s plot to overturn the 2020 election through lies, subversion, and finally mob violence had been overblown, and in fact that Republicans had been the real victims of Democratic overreach. 

The very night of the mob attack, Fox’s stars began validating the actions of the Trumpist mob, minimizing the violence and suggesting that leftist infiltrators might have been to blame. In the weeks that followed, they downplayed the former president’s responsibility for the mob’s actions; concocted an alternate reality in which the actions of a relatively sedate crowd were being used by sinister Democrats as a pretext to punish average Republicans; and mocked the law enforcement officials who were assaulted during the attack and denounced the Democrats and Republicans who took their reports seriously. 

In service of their duplicitous narrative, they lifted up from kooks and internet fever swamps false-flag conspiracy theories that the federal government was behind the attack; valorized the “patriots” jailed for their alleged participation; and shielded their viewers from contrary evidence.

This treatment of the attack by Fox and other right-wing media outlets helped create a sea change within the Republican Party. As the GOP’s volatile commentators whipped up its base, party leaders swiftly determined that there was no political future in standing firmly against Trump and the mob he had encouraged. Some backed off their prior condemnations while others who remained vocally against Trump’s attempt to unlawfully retain power were purged. The House GOP swelled its ranks in the 2022 midterms with even more election deniers; they are a power center that its leadership courts and rewards with slots on key committees.

With only one of the nation’s two major political parties willing to forthrightly oppose the attempted coup, insurrection became a partisan issue and the national consensus collapsed. Major companies abandoned their promises not to fund the campaigns of election deniers, who also found themselves invited back to major national TV news programs. And after right-wing billionaire Elon Musk took control of Twitter, he lifted Trump’s ban. 

And now Trump will be back on Facebook, too. This is a manifestly terrible idea with dire potential consequences – Trump used Facebook to fuel the bigotry and violence of his hardcore supporters and channel support for the insurrection; he has shown no remorse whatsoever for his actions and in fact still claims the election was rigged against him; and he has spent his suspension from mainstream platforms using his own Truth Social to push virulent election denial and violent QAnon conspiracy theories. In allowing him back on their platform, Meta executives are making themselves responsible for any effort Trump makes to generate another January 6.

But without a national consensus that there is a public interest in preventing a recurrence of Trumpist violence, Meta’s pecuniary and political interests returned to the fore. Facebook’s user growth has stalled out, helping to send its parent company into a spiral. Trump’s return to the platform might give it a boost; so might the return of his campaign’s massive ad spending as the 2024 presidential election heats up (Trump’s personal page is the largest buyer of Facebook political ads since 2018, spending more than $113 million). And Meta’s leadership likely hoped to avoid a contentious public hearing about why the former president was not welcome on Facebook, since “we don’t want him to use it to promote a coup” was apparently no longer an effective response with insurrectionist Republicans running the House. 

Fox and the broader right-wing information ecosystem manufactured dissent, helping to keep the GOP on the side of Trump and his insurrectionists and grinding away at the political consensus against the storming of the Capitol. As long as the Republican Party remains trapped within its bubble, the American public will have to reckon with the influence of these bomb-throwing propagandists.

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1 23 an

Conservative pundit Sean Hannity claimed without evidence on Thursday that President Joe Biden and his son Hunter have "hired" Special Weapons and Tactics units to hunt down and destroy their political detractors.

:{:{First, Hannity and his guest alleged that the Bidens conducted nefarious business with China. They agreed that there were secret recordings of the two men kanoodling with foreign nationals, and determined that the Bidens acted illegally based on what was left "unsaid" in the supposed clandestine phone calls. LACK OF EVIDENCE IS EVIDENCE}:

}:

Next, Hannity stated in a fake Russian accent that Libya may have "real compromising materials" about Hunter.He then transitioned into the Biden-SWAT conspiracy theory.

READ MORE: 'Is this a game show?' :{Hannity, Boebert clash :(style="background-color:#ffff66ff"):}:in heated debate amid House lawmakers’ House speaker feud

"The amount of money, the sheer amount of money, and a number of countries, andJoe's outright lie about never having discussed this with Hunterare now coming to light. Now there's going to be pushback because they have nowhired, you know, SWAT teams and are creating a war room to slander and smear and attack every single solitary person that either reports it or is investigating it," Hannity said.

He also accused Biden and Democrats of weaponizing investigations, which is what House Republicans are doing through their congressional committees.

"That's, you know, that's Democratic politics 101. That's who they are. That's what they do. So we have to know this, understand this fully," Hannity continued. "And, you know, I think it's pretty obvious what's going on."

Listen below viaMedia Matters for America or at this link.

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an ah 1 23

When Donald Trump was competing with Jeb Bush in the 2016 GOP presidential primary, Trump chastised the former Florida governor for speaking Spanish on the campaign trail. Trump argued that Bush, a fluent Spanish speaker, was encouraging Latino immigrants to avoid learning English.

But when Trump ran for reelection in 2020, outreach to Spanish-language media was a fundamental part of his game plan — especially in Florida. To a degree, it worked. While Trump lost the 2020 election, Florida was one of the states in which his victory was only possible thanks to conservative Latino voters.

When one of Trump’s former White House press secretaries, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, was sworn in as Arkansas governor in early January, she banned the use of the term “Latinx” in government communications and criticized the term for being grammatically awkward in Spanish. Many Spanish speakers find that term offensive (including Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego of Arizona), and Sanders’ executive order seemed to be an attempt at Latino outreach.

READ MORE: Democrats and Republicans have a serious problem with Latino voters

English-only initiatives have been common among MAGA Republicans. But a new right-wing media outlet, Americano Media, is using Spanish to enamor Latino voters.

Reporting for Politico on January 23, journalist Natalie Allison explains that “Republicans have made notable inroads among Hispanic voters in recent election cycles. Now, a conservative media network is looking to cement and further those gains by trying to become the Fox News of Spanish-speaking America. Americano Media, which launched in March, is embarking on an aggressive expansion plan to shape center-right Hispanic opinion during the upcoming election cycle.”

According to Allison, Americano Media “has hired more than 80 Latino journalists and producers, are expanding their radio presence to television, and by the end of the year, will have studios in Miami, Las Vegas and D.C. with reporters covering the White House, Congress and embedding in 2024 presidential campaigns.”

“This month, Americano is launching a $20 million marketing campaign to draw in new viewers,” Allison reports. “It’s the latest development in an arms race to reach and win over the nation’s second-largest demographic group, one playing an increasingly critical role in election outcomes.”

READ MORE:Historian: Latinos aren’t a monolithic voting bloc — and politicians need to realize that

This is a big departure from 2015, when Trump, interviewed by Breitbart News, said of Jeb Bush, “I like Jeb. He’s a nice man. But he should really set the example by speaking English while in the United States.”

Ivan Garcia-Hidalgo, Americano’s founder and CEO, told Politico that Americano’s goal is to be a “Fox News in Spanish.” And some Democrats are taking notice.

Tara McGowan, founder and publisher of the Democrat-friendly Courier Newsroom network, told Politico, “There is an information war in Latino and bilingual communities in this country. It’s a very smart and very alarming move by conservatives to double down on their investment in Americano Media.”

READ MORE:Arizona congressman compares Republican Trump devotees to Hugo Chavez’s Chavistas: 'It’s not a party of ideas'

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mma 1 23

After a historic week of messy party infighting, the Republican-led House of Representatives has finally selected a speaker, passed a rules package, and gotten to work on its agenda of making the country safer for wealthy tax cheats. There are important lessons to learn from the chaos given the likelihood of future interparty rifts over the next two years — and the centrality of the right-wing media to the GOP. 

Here are some key takeaways:

The GOP’s leaders are fueled by right-wing media.Gaining prominence in the modern Republican Party virtually requires a willingness to rub elbows with the right-wing press. New House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA)spent the last several years cozying up to Fox hosts, and two of his “key” supporters “helped corral surrogates – especially in the conservative media space – to act as validators” for his bid. He also benefited from the backing of Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), the congresswoman from QAnon and an ally of Steve Bannon, and Jim Jordan (R-OH), whose regular Fox appearances helped him ascend from back-bencher to incoming House Judiciary chair. Meanwhile, McCarthy’s most prominent opponents included Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), who has gained prominence entirely on the basis of his courting of the right-wing media and reportedly sought jobs at Fox and its competitors, and Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO), another favorite of the fringe-right press. The right-wing media will be the key battleground for future fights between those sides.

Fox is now the GOP establishment. While Fox once aligned with the insurgent wing of the Republican Party, Donald Trump’s presidency had the effect of merging the network with the GOP’s establishment wing, and almost all of its prominent personalities lined up behind McCarthy’s bid and sought to stifle the revolt against him. Several of the pro-McCarthy network hosts have since sought to minimize the extent of the divide within the party by praising the concessions the rebels extracted during the fight. But the fracas sets a precedent for which side the party’s powerful propaganda arm will back the next time its insiders and outsiders face off.

The narratives of the right-wing press will form the core of the GOP agenda. With Democrats in control of the Senate and the White House, House Republicans are unlikely to see many of their priorities become law — but they plan to make noise, and to do so in step with their propagandists’ priorities. The initial bills proposed in the House Republican rules package were “centered on issues and themes important largely in the conservative media world,” as The Washington Post’s Philip Bump pointed out. The rules package also included not just the Tucker Carlson-sought “weaponization” panel but also a coronavirus committeewhich promises to put investigative muscle behind various right-wing pandemic narratives. And the first bill the House passed rolled back last year’s increased funding for the Internal Revenue Service, which became a target of right-wing conspiracy theories.

Fox’s competitors will use party fights to gun for the network’s market share.As Fox rallied behind McCarthy, its rivals in TV and digital media saw an opening. They became the propaganda support for the anti-McCarthy campaign, savaging the would-be speaker and championing his critics. They also went after Fox, denouncing the network and its top hosts for purportedly selling out in an offensive more extensive than any from the right since late 2020, when Fox declared Joe Biden the president-elect and Trump urged his supporters to switch to its competitors. Expect more of this in the future as right-wing outlets try to use internal GOP fights to build their audiences at Fox’s expense.

Tucker Carlson is the most influential right-wing media figure.Carlson’s show is a festival of white nationalism, far-right conspiracy theories, and violent rhetoric that seeks to work his viewers into a frenzy. It is also a guiding force in the modern GOP. While his colleagues were foursquare behind McCarthy, Carlson was playing all sides of the debate, criticizing the would-be speaker one moment, praising him the next, and, above all else, seeking specific concessions. It worked — Carlson got the House inquiry into the purported “weaponization” of federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies that he’s been building up to for years. Now he’ll be able to spend the next two years cheering on the Republican efforts to spread his conspiracy theories about the January 6 insurrection and whatever else the panel tries to push.

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mma 1 23

After a historic week of messy party infighting, the Republican-led House of Representatives has finally selected a speaker, passed a rules package, and gotten to work on its agenda of making the country safer for wealthy tax cheats. There are important lessons to learn from the chaos given the likelihood of future interparty rifts over the next two years — and the centrality of the right-wing media to the GOP. 

Here are some key takeaways:

The GOP’s leaders are fueled by right-wing media.Gaining prominence in the modern Republican Party virtually requires a willingness to rub elbows with the right-wing press. New House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA)spent the last several years cozying up to Fox hosts, and two of his “key” supporters “helped corral surrogates – especially in the conservative media space – to act as validators” for his bid. He also benefited from the backing of Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), the congresswoman from QAnon and an ally of Steve Bannon, and Jim Jordan (R-OH), whose regular Fox appearances helped him ascend from back-bencher to incoming House Judiciary chair. Meanwhile, McCarthy’s most prominent opponents included Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), who has gained prominence entirely on the basis of his courting of the right-wing media and reportedly sought jobs at Fox and its competitors, and Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO), another favorite of the fringe-right press. The right-wing media will be the key battleground for future fights between those sides.

Fox is now the GOP establishment. While Fox once aligned with the insurgent wing of the Republican Party, Donald Trump’s presidency had the effect of merging the network with the GOP’s establishment wing, and almost all of its prominent personalities lined up behind McCarthy’s bid and sought to stifle the revolt against him. Several of the pro-McCarthy network hosts have since sought to minimize the extent of the divide within the party by praising the concessions the rebels extracted during the fight. But the fracas sets a precedent for which side the party’s powerful propaganda arm will back the next time its insiders and outsiders face off.

The narratives of the right-wing press will form the core of the GOP agenda. With Democrats in control of the Senate and the White House, House Republicans are unlikely to see many of their priorities become law — but they plan to make noise, and to do so in step with their propagandists’ priorities. The initial bills proposed in the House Republican rules package were “centered on issues and themes important largely in the conservative media world,” as The Washington Post’s Philip Bump pointed out. The rules package also included not just the Tucker Carlson-sought “weaponization” panel but also a coronavirus committeewhich promises to put investigative muscle behind various right-wing pandemic narratives. And the first bill the House passed rolled back last year’s increased funding for the Internal Revenue Service, which became a target of right-wing conspiracy theories.

Fox’s competitors will use party fights to gun for the network’s market share.As Fox rallied behind McCarthy, its rivals in TV and digital media saw an opening. They became the propaganda support for the anti-McCarthy campaign, savaging the would-be speaker and championing his critics. They also went after Fox, denouncing the network and its top hosts for purportedly selling out in an offensive more extensive than any from the right since late 2020, when Fox declared Joe Biden the president-elect and Trump urged his supporters to switch to its competitors. Expect more of this in the future as right-wing outlets try to use internal GOP fights to build their audiences at Fox’s expense.

Tucker Carlson is the most influential right-wing media figure.Carlson’s show is a festival of white nationalism, far-right conspiracy theories, and violent rhetoric that seeks to work his viewers into a frenzy. It is also a guiding force in the modern GOP. While his colleagues were foursquare behind McCarthy, Carlson was playing all sides of the debate, criticizing the would-be speaker one moment, praising him the next, and, above all else, seeking specific concessions. It worked — Carlson got the House inquiry into the purported “weaponization” of federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies that he’s been building up to for years. Now he’ll be able to spend the next two years cheering on the Republican efforts to spread his conspiracy theories about the January 6 insurrection and whatever else the panel tries to push.

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https://www.mediamatters.org/january-6-insurrection/almost-two-years-after-january-6-capitol-attack-fox-news-continues

in the two years since the January 6 attack on the Capitol, Fox News has persisted in pushing conspiracy theories about both the 2020 and 2022 midterm elections and downplaying, excusing, and outright justifying the actions of former President Donald Trump and his supporters.

After the 2020 election cycle, right-wing figures frequently targeted Dominion Voting Systems -- which supplied voting equipment to 28 states -- with conspiracy theories, claiming that the company’s machines had switched or otherwise tampered with votes to sway the election. Many of those theories were central to Fox’s post-election commentary, which amplified the narrative that the election was stolen from Trump, even though reporting suggests that the network’s prominent figures knew that was not true. Dominion filed a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News in March 2021.

Recent reporting on the lawsuit shows that testimony obtained from Sean Hannity last month contains the Fox host’s admission that he “did not believe it for one second” that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump by Dominion. However, as Media Matters’ Matt Gertz has detailed, “Hannity discussed Dominion in eight Fox broadcasts between Election Day 2020 and the end of that year. Each time, he tried to inculcate doubt in his audience regarding the credibility of the company’s voting machines.”

Additionally, evidence and testimony received by the House select committee investigating the January 6 attack have undermined several of Fox’s on-air falsehoods. A series of text messages released by the committee between Fox News’ Ingraham Angle host Laura Ingraham and former chief of staff Mark Meadows showed that Ingraham pleaded with Meadows to get Trump to tell the crowd to disperse. On her show, however, Ingraham consistently claimed that Trump and his supporters did no wrong. Hannity also exchanged similar texts with Meadows. Even Hannity’s oft-repeated lie that Trump had ordered thousands of National Guard troops to the Capitol was dispelled by testimony given by then-acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller.

As official inquiries into the attack made headway, many Fox figures bent over backward to malign the House select committee, often relying on the same dismissive and whitewashed approach to the violence and hatred displayed on January 6. Here are some of the major lies and distortions that Fox pushed during the committee hearings:

Fox News has also continued to peddle election conspiracy theories -- this time around the November midterms -- and attacks on Dominion during the last year:

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mma homeless you do not get to live w/ us

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https://www.mediamatters.org/january-6-insurrection/fox-personalities-dismiss-january-6-committees-criminal-referrals-trump

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https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-barely-covered-house-reports-detailing-problems-donald-trumps-tax-returns

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an 12 22

When the U.S. Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren handed down its unanimous decision in New York Times v. Sullivan back in 1964, it established a tough standard that plaintiffs have to meet in defamation lawsuits. Plaintiffs, according to the Warren Court, have to prove “actual malice.” And that is what Dominion Voting Systems is trying to prove in the defamation lawsuits it filed against Fox News, Newsmax TV, One America News (OAN) and others in response to the false claims they promoted about the 2020 presidential election.

After Donald Trump lost the 2020 election to now-President Joe Biden by more than 7 million votes, many far-right MAGA Republicans at Fox News, Newsmax and OAN promoted the false claim that Dominion’s voting equipment was used to help Democrats steal the election — a conspiracy theory that has been repeatedly debunked. Fox News, in response to Dominion’s defamation lawsuit, has maintained that its hosts weren’t saying the claims about Dominion were true, and that they were just asking questions.

Dominion, meanwhile, is trying to show, in its $1.6 billion lawsuit, that hosts at Fox News acted with actual malice and promoted claims they knew were nonsense. And on Wednesday, December 21, attorneys for Dominion pointed to Fox News host Sean Hannity as an example of someone who knew that the Big Lie was a lie but promoted the claims of Trump attorney Sidney Powell anyway. Powell, who is also facing a defamation lawsuit from Dominion, falsely accused Dominion of helping Democrats steal the election from Trump. Another MAGA Republican who made that false claim and is being sued by Dominion is MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell. Dominion has sued former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani as well.

READ MORE: Supreme Court allows Dominion’s $1.3 billion defamation suit against Mike Lindell to go forward

Reporting for the New York Times on December 21, journalist Jeremy Peters explains, “On November 30, 2020, Sean Hannity hosted Sidney Powell on his prime-time Fox News program. As she had in many other interviews around that time — on Fox and elsewhere in right-wing media — Ms. Powell, a former federal prosecutor, spun wild conspiracy theories about what she said was ‘corruption all across the country, in countless districts,’ in a plot to steal reelection from the president, Donald J. Trump. At the center of this imagined plot were machines from Dominion Voting Systems, which Ms. Powell claimed ran an algorithm that switched votes for Mr. Trump to votes for Joseph R. Biden Jr. Dominion machines, she insisted, were being used ‘to trash large batches of votes.’”

But when Hannity gave a deposition two years later on Wednesday, December 21, 2022 and was under oath, he admitted, “I did not believe it for one second.”

According to Peters, “The hearing was called to address several issues that need to be resolved before the case heads for a jury trial, which the judge has scheduled to begin in April. Mr. Hannity’s disclosure — along with others that emerged from court on Wednesday about what Fox News executives and hosts really believed as their network became one of the loudest megaphones for lies about the 2020 election — is among the strongest evidence yet to emerge publicly that some Fox employees knew that what they were broadcasting was false.”

Under the New York Times v. Sullivan standard established by the Warren Court 58 years ago, defamation is very difficult to prove. An honest mistake doesn’t fit the definition of defamation — the plaintiff has to show actual malice. Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin filed a defamation lawsuit against the Times and lost because Palin and her attorneys couldn’t prove actual malice.

READ MORE:Fox News chief Lachlan Murdoch to be deposed in $1.6 billion dominion defamation case

“The high legal standard of proof in defamation cases makes it difficult for a company like Dominion to prevail against a media organization like Fox News,” Peters notes. “Dominion has to persuade a jury that people at Fox were, in effect, saying one thing in private while telling their audience exactly the opposite.And that requires showing a jury convincing evidence that speaks to the state of mind of those who were making the decisions at the network. In Delaware Superior Court on Wednesday, Dominion’s lawyers argued that they had obtained ample evidence to make that case.”

Peters adds, “One lawyer for Dominion said that ‘not a single Fox witness’ so far had produced anything supporting the various false claims about the company that were uttered repeatedly on the network. And in some cases, other high-profile hosts and senior executives echoed Mr. Hannity’s doubts about what Mr. Trump and his allies like Ms. Powell were saying, according to theDominion lawyer, Stephen Shackelford. This included Meade Cooper, who oversees prime-time programming for Fox News, and the prime-time star Tucker Carlson, Mr. Shackelford said.”

Citing Cooper and Carlson as examples, Shackleford told the court, “Many of the highest-ranking Fox people have admitted under oath that they never believed the Dominion lies.”

READ MORE:Right-wing media outlets continue to rage against Dominion’s defamation lawsuits: report

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mma 12 22 ted mcd

2022 was a banner year for the fossil fuel industry. Fueled by the rise in energy costs due in part to the war in Ukraine, major oil and gas companies brought in massive profits. By the end of 2022, the net income of the seven largest oil corporations is projected to hit a record high of $4 trillion.

Yet Fox News used major events in 2022 to claim that the industry is suffering under a vicious “war” on energy waged by the Biden administration.

Fox defended the industry’s profits and ran cover for its role in limiting oil production, on many occasions advancing the idea that the world needs to invest more heavily in oil and gas. This latter point flies in the face of what the global climate scientific community is saying about climate change: Emissions from fossil fuels are rapidly altering the Earth’s temperature, and the only way to stop this from worsening is to rapidly reduce our dependence on these fossil fuels. And it advances the wrong takeaway from the energy crisis resulting from Russia’s aggression. Rather, moving toward clean energy is the only way to shield the U.S. from the vagaries of the global oil and gas market.

Throughout the year, Fox used the same debunked narratives to both defend and promote the fossil fuel industry

One of Fox’s main narratives in 2022 has been that the Biden administration is crippling or trying to destroy the fossil fuel industry through burdensome climate regulations. This talking point does not reflect reality. Just last year, the U.S. set a record for natural gas production. Meanwhile, U.S. crude oil production has steadily risen under Biden, and there is expected record oil production in 2023. And instead of the administration telling companies not to drill, oil producers are holding back from even more drilling primarily due to Wall Street pressure.

As part of this contrived “war on fossil fuels” narrative, Fox has been pushing the Biden administration to allow companies to drill more in the U.S. to help alleviate high domestic energy prices. But since oil prices are set on the global market, the Biden administration’s energy policies make little impact on what we pay at the pump.

With each major climate and energy-related event this year, these narratives got recycled as Fox doubled down on its longstanding defense of the fossil fuel industry.

A timeline of major 2022 events which saw Fox defend the powerful fossil fuel industry

The Russian invasion of Ukraine

Fox News was quick to blame the Biden administration’s climate policies for emboldening Putin in his decision to invade Ukraine. As the invasion roiled global energy markets, the network launched a full-throttled defense of the fossil fuel industry and attacked the administration for its supposed crippling regulations on the industry. 

In March, the administration banned Russian energy imports to the U.S., and Biden critiqued the industry for not drilling enough after finding out that companies are sitting on thousands of untapped oil leases. In response, Fox defended the industry and gave a platform to its biggest boosters:

Gas price spikes and efforts to reduce the pain at the pump dominated energy news during the spring and summer

Month after month, Fox hammered Biden’s policies as supposedly the primary reason gas prices were increasing. A number of events during this time period saw Fox trot out such claims as that the fossil fuel industry is being unfairly maligned and that increased production would help alleviate high energy prices.

In April, the House Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee held a hearing on Big Oil’s record profits and its role in driving high gas prices. In response, Fox carried the industry’s water:

In May, Biden suggested that high gas prices, which had reached a record high, are part of “an incredible transition that … when it's over, we'll be stronger and the world will be stronger and less reliant on fossil fuels.” In response, Fox came out firmly on the side of fossil fuels:

In July, in an effort to stabilize global oil supplies, the administration conducted an entirely noncontroversial sale of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, a move that actually helped temporarily alleviate gas prices. Additionally, Biden visited top oil producer Saudi Arabia in order to strengthen diplomatic ties. Fox responded with attacks:

Finally, in July, Biden made a major climate announcement in Massachusetts.

Extreme weather and OPEC+ oil cuts pushed gas prices back into the headlines in early fall

Punishing extreme heat, fires, and drought affected vast swaths of the globe during the summer, with climate scientists saying that these events were made worse by the burning of fossil fuels, and a major hurricane hit the U.S. in September. Additionally, a major OPEC oil decision roiled gas prices again. Fox once again defended and promoted the fossil fuel industry.

In September, as Hurricane Ian hit Florida, Biden warned oil companies not to use the storm “as an excuse to raise gasoline prices or gouge the American people.”

In October, OPEC+ cut oil production.

The COP27 climate negotiations and oil sales to Venezuela in November provided fodder for Fox to boost the fossil fuel industry

The United Nations Climate Change Conference, known as COP 27, yielded an agreement for a global fund in which richer nations, which are vastly responsible for climate change, would contribute money to poorer nations to help the latter rebuild from climate-fueled extreme weather disasters. Fox heavily criticized the plan, instead claiming that more fossil fuel usage is the way to move forward. Additionally, the Biden administration allowed Chevron to resume drilling operations in Venezuela.

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https://www.mediamatters.org/vdare/white-nationalists-embrace-fox-news-bill-melugin

White nationalists embrace Fox News’ Bill Melugin

The network’s top reporter at the US southern border has been promoted and celebrated by anti-immigrant racists

WRITTEN BY JOHN KNEFEL

PUBLISHED 12/20/22

White nationalists and other far-right extremists have embraced and celebrated Fox News’ Bill Melugin, the network’s primary correspondent at the US southern border. His reporting is regularly mentioned and praised on racist, anti-immigrant websites including VDARE, Infowars, and other extremist outlets, highlighting the ideological overlap between so-called mainstream conservatism and its more openly racist fringes.

Melugin is a fixture on Fox News, regularly appearing both in supposed straight news programming and during primetime opinion shows. He has been on Fox at least 427 times in 2022, including at least 30 segments on the network’s flagship program, Tucker Carlson Tonight. (Data on Melugin's appearances is current through December 19, 2022, at 12:40pm.)

Drawing clear distinctions between mainstream conservatism and white nationalist extremism is not easy. Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, for example, has fully embraced the racist “great replacement” conspiracy theory, once a fringe position only pushed by overt racists. Melugin has played a key role in much of Carlson’s mainstreaming of that xenophobic idea, so it is not a surprise that his coverage would also appear in far-right media venues.

Bill Melugin / Tucker Carlson / caravan

CitationFox News

One of the racist sites that has embraced Melugin is VDare, a white nationalist outlet founded by Peter Brimelow,a reclusive conservative publisher who straddles the line between the conservative establishment and overt white supremacy. Brimelow endorsed “racial nationalism” at CPAC in 2018, and one year later argued that when it came to immigration policy, “Western elites” were only interested in “repressing the white host nations,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. In a column for VDare in 2012, white nationalist John Derbyshire argued that, “White supremacy, in the sense of a society in which key decisions are made by white Europeans, is one of the better arrangements History has come up with,” also as reported by the SPLC.

Brimelow recently attended the New York Young Republican Club’s annual gala in Manhattan.He was photographed next to former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, host of the War Room podcast, further illustrating the porous boundaries between supposedly respectable conservatism and its explicitly racist fellow travelers.

Over the last year and a half, VDare has used Melugin’s reporting as the basis for at least 31 blogs or videos on their site. While it’s true that an individual reporter can’t control what happens to their journalism once it’s out in the world, the pattern that emerges from VDare’s commentary on, and aggregation of, Melugin’s work is clear. The stories Melugin tells, and the way he frames them, fully align with VDare’s white nationalist agenda.

VDare celebrates Melugin’s reporting

On December 12, conservativeedgelordand Twitter owner Elon Musk approvingly responded to a typically sensationalistic tweet from Melugin. “Wow,” Musk replied to a video purporting to show over 1,000 migrants crossing the Rio Grande river without authorization. Musk’s interaction with Melugin’s post amplified its reach significantly. Later that morning,VDare’s official twitter account retweeted Melugin’s original tweet, again signaling the close proximity between conservative provocateurs like Musk and more overtly racist outlets.

BREAKING: A huge migrant caravan of over 1,000 people crossed illegally into El Paso, TX last night, making it the largest single group we have ever seen. The city of El Paso reports Border Patrol now has over 5,000 in custody & has released hundreds to city streets.

CitationFrom the Twitter account of VDare, posted December 12.

VDare’s account promoted Melugin two other times that morning as well, in both cases by retweeting comments added by white nationalist and Infowars contributor Dan Lyman. The account also retweeted Melugin or amplified his work at least nine other times in December, including one instance in which white nationalist and former Trump advisor Stephen Miller used his footage to argue against a spending bill Congress was debating. And in August, VDare celebrated after Musk had responded positively to another Melguin tweet.

Looks like a scene out of World War Z or Elysium  The US as we’ve known it is finished. Just a matter of how / when it dies and what comes next.

CitationFrom the Twitter account of VDare.

Not a serious country anymore

CitationFrom the Twitter account of VDare

He's noticed!-- @elonmusk  on  @BillFOXLA 's daily reports on the Biden Rush at the southern border. #IMPEACHBIDENHARRIS

CitationFrom the Twitter account of VDare

VDare amplifies Melugin’s work even more frequently on their website.In October, VDare published a story based on a tweet of Melugin’s that incorrectly reported a Border Patrol agent had shot and killed a detained migrant after he had gone for the agent’s gun. In fact, as an FBI investigation found just days later, the man, Manuel Gonzalez-Moran, had apparently grabbed an unspecified “edged weapon” off an office desk, after which point a Border Patrol agent shot and killed him.

In July, VDare published a story under the same byline praising Melugin as an “intrepid” reporter “who documents The Great Replacement almost daily on his Twitter feed.” The same credited writer used similar language in February, again referencing “Fox News’s intrepid Bill Melugin, who keeps an eagle eye of Biden’s planned invasion of replacement citizens.” Also in February, a post under a pseudonymous byline said Melugin “has been doing excellent coverage along the border.”

Both Melugin and VDare have repeatedly covered the controversy over a photo that initially appeared to show Border Patrol agents whipping a Haitian migrant named Mirard Joseph in September 2021. Melugin has consistently claimed that Border Patrol didn’t do anything wrong. In October, he revisited the allegations, tweeting out an email obtained by conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation sent to Department of Homeland Security head Alejandro Mayorkas that quoted the photojournalist who took the shot. The email appeared to undercut the whipping allegations, and cast Mayorkas in an unfavorable light. VDare embedded Melugin's tweet in a blog that also included criticism of Mayorkas from the Border Patrol Union and Texas Senator Ted Cruz.

The stories Melugin tells, and the way he frames them, fully align with VDare’s white nationalist agenda.

The reality of the story is far more nuanced than either Melugin or VDare want to admit. Melugin’s supposed smoking gun email included a write-up of an interview of Paul Ratje, the photographer, in which said he hadn't witnessed agents whipping any migrants, but later said his comments had been misconstrued as giving Border Patrol “a pass.” Joseph and other migrants mistreated by Border Patrol agents that day filed a lawsuit against the government, claiming agents had “lashed” him. Joseph described his treatment while in U.S. custody as “​​the worst humiliation I have endured in my life.” An official investigation by Customs and Border Protection didn’t find evidence that whipping took place, but did uncover “unprofessional and dangerous behavior by several individual Agents.” But both Melugin and VDare saw an opportunity to demonize migrants and took it.

Conspiracy theorists at Infowars rely on Melugin's work

Melugin’s support from Infowars extends beyond the recent tweets from Lyman, the white nationalist who VDare retweeted. In September, Alex Jones’ co-host Owen Shroyer repeatedly praised Melugin after Politico reported that the Biden White House had “become increasingly irritated” with the Fox News correspondent. Shroyer claimed, without evidence, that the story was an attempt to “get Melugin shut down and banned and censored from the Internet” to punish him for his journalism.

Video CitationFrom the September 21, 2022, edition of Infowars'The Alex Jones Show, streamed on Rumble

“Now, who’s down there reporting at the border, probably more-so and better than anyone else, that’s Bill Melugin,” Shroyer said to introduce the topic. (Shroyer, never one to sweat the details, pronounced Melugin’s name wrong until a producer appeared to correct him midway through the segment.)

“And so why are they mad at Bill Melugin?” Shroyer asked. “Because he’s down at the border every day with a Fox News crew, with cameras, and they’re showing the tens of thousands of illegal immigrants that come across the border every day. And talking to Border Patrol about the terrorists, and the child rapists that they arrest.”

Like VDare, the Infowars website regularly writes articles based on Melugin’s work. A review of Infowars’ archives show at least 37 posts that include his reporting, typically as the piece’s primary or exclusive source. These stories adopt his anti-migrant framing, treating irregular border crossings as a rolling catastrophe – the frontline in a war zone – that must be addressed with militarized responses.

In many cases, Melugin is mentioned without additional comment, but there are several instances in which Infowars bloggers express their admiration for him. Writer Steve Watson recently celebrated Melugin as a reporter “who has been at the front lines on the border crisis for years now.” Last month, on the day of the 2022 midterms, Lyman characterized Melugin as “documenting the invasion of Maverick County,” in Texas. One month earlier, writer Kelen McBreen praised a tweet of Melugin’s that supposedly “accurately pointed out” the hypocrisy of New York city’s immigration policy compared with Texas’. Watson, weeks earlier, again cheered on Melugin for being “ever present at the border.”

Racists, other far-right extremists praise Melugin’s Del Rio bridge story

Arguably Melugin’s breakthrough story came in August and September, 2021, when he covered an influx of mostly Haitian migrants who had sought refuge under the Del Rio bridge in Texas. Infowars covered the issue by cross-posting a blog from far-right conspiracy site ZeroHedge, written by pseudonymous blogger Tyler Durden. “Melugin has been reporting from the bridge for more than a month,” Durden wrote approvingly that September, also referring to the “stunning drone footage” Melugin had captured.

When the FAA issued a two-week flight restriction over the bridge, Durden accused the Biden administration of trying to kill the story, and praised Melugin for persevering. “The Biden administration’s attempt to cover up the border disaster by blocking drones didn’t stop Melugin and his team who hitched a ride on a Texas Department of Public Safety’s helicopter to capture an aerial view of the migrant crisis,” Durden gushed. In fact, shortly after issuing the restriction, the FAA provided clearance for Melugin about a day later.

The Del Rio bridge story became a national sensation, with Melugin’s implicitly xenophobic coverage leading the way. The story spread to some of the worst parts of the Internet, where the implicit bigotry was abandoned for explicit racism. Neo-Nazi site The Daily Stormer referred to the migrants as “invaders,” claiming the United States’ refugee policy was “about making America nonwhite. There’s no other goal.”

The racist site Occidental Dissentalso covered the story. It was “another scene of imperial decline,” according to the site’s founder, Brad Griffin, who uses the pen name Hunter Wallace. “This has been going on ever since Joe Biden was inaugurated in January,” he added. “The only difference now is seeing so many black faces joining the flood.”

What’s most notable about this explicitly racist commentary is how closely it matched Fox News’ own coverage at the time. As Media Matters and others noted, Tucker Carlson – using Melugin’s reporting – fully embraced the racist great replacement conspiracy theorywhile discussing the Del Rio bridge story. Biden’s immigration policy was designed "to change the racial mix of the country,” Carlson said. “In political terms, this policy is called ‘the great replacement,’ the replacement of legacy Americans with more obedient people from far-away countries.”

Melugin frames himself as a straightforward reporter, just covering the facts as he sees them. But his body of work has been wholeheartedly embraced by far-right extremists and conspiracy theorists, Carlson very much among them. That’s not intrepid reporting – it’s laying the foundation for racist propaganda.

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https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-host-claims-biden-administration-hopes-rescind-title-42-goal-changing-america-forever

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JEANINE PIRRO (CO-HOST): The amazing thing is, they're saying, “Oh, no, Title 42 is keeping people out. And -- but even if -- when Title 42 goes away, because it's no longer a pandemic, the truth is that we're still going to keep it closed.”

Are you kidding me? You're fighting in the Supreme Court to get Title 42 out so that they can come in. We're seeing people in foil there, those foil blankets, tens of thousands of people, half a million in one sector since October. This country is being invaded.

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https://www.mediamatters.org/jesse-watters/jesse-watters-most-egregious-attacks-against-women-2022

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https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-rooting-kevin-mccarthys-house-speakership-bid-while-**oan-airs-opposition

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JRNL FAIL: FOX INGRAM TUCKER MURDOCH HAVE A BODY COUNT

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

no lnx vid

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

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

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

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

Video

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-host-says-kids-committed-suicide-because-twitter-didnt-amplify-conservative-covid

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/11/fox-news-club-q/

mass shooting

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https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-host-compares-imaginary-war-christmas-d-day-and-american-revolution

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1 min on ---?

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-neglected-cover-trump-organizations-multiple-convictions-tax-fraud-0

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https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-has-given-trumps-call-termination-constitution-one-minute-coverage

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// https://boingboing.net/2022/12/09/sean-hannity-has-no-idea-why-republicans-didnt-vote-early-so-heres-a-video-to-help-him-remember.html

huh?

A new montage is highlighting the irony of Fox News hosts' puzzlement over Republican voters' apprehension about early voting and mail-in voting following Georgia Republican Senate hopeful Herschel Walker's runoff defeat.

According to HuffPost, the montage was featured on "The Daily Show" with Trevor Noah. In the clip, Fox News hosts Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham and Brian Kilmeade expressed frustration and concern as they discussed Walker, who was backed by former President Donald Trump.

So, why were Republicans so reluctant? The montage also included contradictory clips that showed the hosts echoing Trump's remarks condemning mail-in voting amid his claims of widespread voter fraud.

READ MORE: Ex-Fox News editor explains how and why he spiked the Stormy Daniels story weeks before Trump's election

The clip began with a current remark from Hannity who said, "I think Republicans have been unwilling, for whatever reason, reluctant, resistant to voting early and voting by mail."

He continued, "We're going to bring you a critical warning that the rest of the media mob won't tell you about and that is mail-in voter fraud. It is real."

Then the clip shifted to Ingraham highlighting how her remarks have shifted in wake of the Georgia Senate runoff upset.

"We just have to do better in terms of ballot harvesting and early voting to match the Democrat efforts," Ingraham said. "They want early voting because they want everyone to mail, mail and vote because I think that's going to help Democrats has nothing to do with this virus"

READ MORE: 'Reefer madness': Fox News freaks out after Joe Biden pardons thousands of federal cannabis convictions

Lastly, the clip featured Kilmeade who recently said, "I think people are going to have to reevaluate the whole approach to early voting, the whole approach to the dropboxes and everything else."

However, the montage highlighted that he previously had a completely different perspective. "Putting dropboxes everywhere, being very loose with unrequested ballots, absentee ballots," Kilmeade previously said. The President tweeting that mail drop boxes used for the upcoming election could lead to fraud. Republicans in many states are reluctant."

He added, "They are related, resistant to early voting or voting by mail. Republicans warning about the dangers of mass mail and ballots being sent to here, there everywhere warning about how it would inject more division chaos and opportunity for fraud in our elections."

Watch the video below or at this link.

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https://www.mediamatters.org/sean-hannity/herschel-walkers-runoff-defeat-its-time-point-and-laugh-sean-hannity

no lnx

fox News host Sean Hannity pulled former NFL star Herschel Walker into the race for U.S. Senate in Georgia, served as his campaign’s biggest asset, and bears responsibility for Republicans ultimately failing to oust Sen. Raphael Warnock, who beat Walker in Tuesday’s runoff.

Walker’s loss is another embarrassing defeat for Fox. The network’s influential prime-time hosts heavily promoted four unorthodox first-time candidates for U.S. Senate in the midterm elections — Walker, Blake Masters in Arizona, Dr. Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania, and J.D. Vance in Ohio — helping them secure the Republican nominations for those races. Vance, the sole victor of the group, ran well behind the rest of his party’s slate in a red state; the other three lost winnable races in swing states, ensuring historic Democratic victories rather than a GOP “red tsunami.”

Hannity is a GOP kingmaker with the ear of top party leaders who spent Donald Trump’s presidency advising the White House. He is a relentless propagandist whose singular goal is electing Republican candidates. But when Hannity gets to pick those candidates, the results can be disastrous for his party.

For the last month, Hannity has been laser-focused on helping Walker to victory in the Georgia runoff. The Fox host has preached the importance of the race to his viewers, shielded the candidate from criticism, promoted his political ads, bolstered his fundraising, and savaged his opponent.

Walker has been a fixture on Hannity’s program even as he has hidden from credible journalists.Of Walker’s 12 weekday appearances on Fox since Election Day, 5 came on the host’s show — often, bizarrely, accompanied by Hannity regular Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC). The odd couple returned to the program on the eve of the runoff, with Graham using the opportunity to thank Hannity’s audience for their donations and promising them “a return on investment tomorrow.”

It didn’t turn out that way. And Hannity, who was Walker’s most important press supporter throughout the race, is a big part of the reason why Democrats will have 51 seats in the Senate rather than 50 when it convenes in 2023.

Walker’s introduction to Republican politics came as a regular on Hannity’s show during the 2020 election cycle, when his pro-Trump takes made him a MAGA sensation. Then, after Trump lost and Hannity turned his attention to the 2022 midterms, the Fox host recruited Walker to run against Warnock. In a series of interviews, Hannity urged Walker to seek the Senate seat and pushed other Republicans to support his candidacy.

GOP leaders knew from the start that Walker was a terrible candidate whose nomination would make it harder to win the seat. As I noted on the day he announced his candidacy:

Republicans have plenty of reasons to worry about Walker’s chances of winning a general election in a swing state: He’s a first-time candidate who is moving to the state for the race, he’s a conspiracy theorist, and his wife is currently under investigation by state authorities for allegedly illegally voting in Georgia while living in Texas.

And last month, The Associated Press revealed that the candidate has “repeatedly threatened his ex-wife’s life, exaggerated claims of financial success and alarmed business associates with unpredictable behavior.”

Hannity endorsed Walker on-air that very night, and his show became ground zero for the campaign. The candidate made 38 weekday Fox News appearances between his August 25, 2021, launch date and Election Day; 19 of them came on Hannity, including a purported town hall that was functionally a televised rally for Walker. With Trump and Fox both behind Walker, the Georgia primary field cleared for him.

But as Hannity was propping up Walker’s candidacy, GOP fears that he hadn’t been fully vetted were being proved correct. Journalists detailed Walker’s history of domestic violence, his previously unrevealed children, reports that he had paid for abortions, his involvement in scams, and his false claims about his academic, business, and military background.

On Election Day, Republicans won every statewide election in Georgia with at least 51% of the vote — except for the Senate race. There, Warnock secured a narrow lead that threw the race into a runoff, which he ultimately won.

Walker’s defeat makes his campaign the latest case study to demonstrate the limits of Fox’s influence.Its hosts can get their chosen candidates through the party’s primaries. But the toxic extremists who attract Fox stars' interest are often deeply alienating to normal people, and that is making it harder for the GOP to win elections. Meanwhile, the Fox personalities who wield the most influence over the party are pointing fingers at everyone but themselves.

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https://www.mediamatters.org/twitter/right-wing-media-use-musk-and-taibbis-twitter-files-baselessly-allege-election-interference

many lnx twt

Right-wing media use Musk and Taibbi’s “Twitter Files” to baselessly allege election interference and call for Twitter employees to be jailed

Even conservative radio host Sebastian Gorka was “underwhelmed,” saying that there “wasn’t government suppression”

WRITTEN BY NATALIE MATHES, RUBY SEAVEY & JACK WINSTANLEY

RESEARCH CONTRIBUTIONS FROM PAYTON ARMSTRONG & ZACHARY PLEAT

PUBLISHED 12/06/22

right-wing media are using Twitter CEO Elon Musk and journalist Matt Taibbi’s release of “The Twitter Files” to baselessly portray the company’s decision to suppress a story about Hunter Biden as having influenced the results of the 2020 presidential election. Going further, some right-wing pundits have even called for those Twitter employees responsible for the decision to be prosecuted and imprisoned.

On December 2, Taibbi posted a supposed first installment of “The Twitter Files” in a lengthy tweet thread. Musk claimed that the report would document “free speech suppression” regarding Twitter’s decision to block links to an October 2020 New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop. However, the files revealed very little information that was not already public and largely showed what many analysts noted as healthy internal debate rather than sinister collusion to suppress free speech.

Taibbi pointed to several discussions within the files as evidence of collusion between Democrat officials and Twitter employees to suppress potentially damaging information about the Biden family in the weeks before the 2020 presidential election. One of these exchanges included an email from Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) questioning the logic behind Twitter's actions. Another thread showed that Twitter executives, at the supposed request of a Democratic official, “handled” a number of tweets containing stolen pictures of Hunter Biden’s genitals. (Twitter removed those tweets under its non-consensual nudity policy.) 

“The Twitter Files” failed to reveal meaningful evidence of collusion and represent another stumble in Musk's Twitter takeover

Twitter founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey had previously acknowledged that Twitter made mistakes in its decision to suppress the story, a sentiment which other now-former executives have echoed. Dorsey had even testified before Congress to explain the same claims that Musk, Taibbi, and right-wing media have incorrectly framed as being hidden from the public,” and an analysis by Washington Post columnist Philip Bump determined that Twitter’s actions around the Hunter Biden story did not cost Donald Trump the 2020 election. As Bump explained, “there’s no evidence that the restriction imposed by Twitter (or Facebook) actually kept interested people from learning about the story.”

Continuing their insatiable appetite for the Hunter Biden laptop story, however, right-wing media figures cited Taibbi’s reporting as clear evidence that Big Tech meddled in the 2020 election, while others claimed Joe Biden was involved in blocking the unconfirmed New York Post story, baselessly asserting that the White House colluded with Twitter on this decision. (Biden had yet to be elected in October 2020 and was still on the campaign trail when Twitter decided to suppress the story.) Additionally, some right-wing media figures conceded that the Twitter Files were “not the smoking gun we’d hoped for,” yet still insisted that Taibbi’s report showed a clear “violation of the First Amendment.” 

Right-wing figures used Taibbi’s report to baselessly claim that Twitter “colluded” in the 2020 election by suppressing the New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop

Right-wing figures attacked Biden for Twitter’s actions, with some alleging collusion between the White House and Twitter even though Biden wasn’t president yet

Right-wing figures demanded that Twitter employees involved in blocking the New York Post story face prosecution or jail time

[twt]

Right-wing pundits expressed disappointment that Musk and Taibbi didn’t reveal a “smoking gun” but insisted that Twitter violated the First Amendment

The hollow revelations of the Twitter Files come amid Musk’s supposed free speech crusade since taking control of the social media platform, marked by the CEO giving special attention to extremists, conspiracy theories, and misinformation. Twitter’s internal algorithms have already demonstrated a bias in favor of right-leaning accounts, and Musk’s high-profile actions have only further mainstreamed fringe narratives on the platform.

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morano control BS?

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

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

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

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

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fox stepford mat'l

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-keeps-booking-pharmaceutical-heir-whose-mom-paid-specialist-deprogram-her-wokism

no lnx vid

Fox News keeps booking a pharmaceutical heir whose mom paid a specialist to “deprogram” her from “wokeism”

Mount Holyoke alum Annabella Rockwell works for conservative edutainment organization PragerU, which she credits with freeing her from liberal indoctrination

WRITTEN BY JOHN KNEFEL

PUBLISHED 11/29/22

A spectre is haunting college campuses — the spectre of wokeism. It is an ideology and a cult that separates children from parents, rendering each unknowable to the other. Misery and alienation: This is the goal of these indoctrination centers. But all is not lost. A small band of rebels stand in their way. They are the ragtag freedom fighters at PragerU.

That, at least, is the story the producers and talent at Fox News are telling their viewers.

Leading the charge for liberation is pharmaceutical heir and PragerU director of development for Palm Beach Annabella Rockwell, who can trace her lineage back to the Mayflower, thank you very much. Rockwell fell victim to the siren song of wokeism her first year at Mount Holyoke, a historically women’s college in Massachusetts.

“I studied history and politics at Mount Holyoke,” Rockwell said in a November 15 interview with her boss, Dennis Prager. “Every class was, you know, history, but history with race, history with gender.”

By the time Rockwell graduated in 2015, she was “totally indoctrinated,” she said in a recent interview with the New York Post. Her mom, Melinda, “enlisted the help of a deprogrammer who charged $300 a day as well as Annabella’s old tennis coach, Scott Williams,” to overcome her daughter’s “brainwashing.”

Rockwell had the support of her family’s personal fortune, but she needed something else: a light in the darkness. As she told Fox News’ top star and white nationalist Tucker Carlson on Monday evening, her salvation came at the hands of PragerU, where she now works, when one of its videos came up on a social media feed. This heartwarming story shows how PragerU funnels young people into reactionary politics – and just so happens to be a great branding opportunity to further spread that organization’s propaganda.

“I had to unlearn my four years of wokeism by watching five-minute PragerU videos online for free,” she said.

“Amazing,” Carlson responded. “It is a cult. Its aim is to separate you from the people who love you most.”

Video CitationFrom the November 28, 2022, edition of Fox News' Tucker Carlson Tonight

Teaching history without race or gender is obviously better, which is exactly the type of top-notch scholarship you can get from Prager and his absolutely real university.

Fox News’ Outnumbered analyzed Rockwell's hero’s journey on Monday afternoon, prior to her debut on Tucker Carlson Tonight. Co-host Emily Compagno, a paragon of intellectual rigor — who also knows more than a little about learning history without regard to race or gender — weighed in with the insight and precision that’s become her trademark.

College students are “being taught to hate their country; they’re also being taught to hate their families,” Compagno argued. “And that is step one of true indoctrination.”

Video CitationFrom the November 28, 2022, edition of Fox News' Outnumbered

But, like the totalitarian cult of wokeness itself, Rockwell wasn’t yet satisfied with her conquest. She pushed forward, appearing Tuesday morning on Fox & Friendsto share her tale of woe and redemption, explaining how she finally broke free of her ideological prison.

In 2020, at the height of what has been referred to as the largest protest movement in the history of the United States, Rockwell saw the light.

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VideoCitationFrom the November 29, 2022, edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends

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“It wasn't until seeing the riots happening that I realized, OK, this is so hypocritical. Like, why are we fighting for equality and empowerment by burning down people's [PVT PROPERTY = > HU RIGHTS] businesses?” Rockwell explained. “It just doesn't make sense to me.” (One way to make sense of the George Floyd uprisings is to study “history with race.”)

Rockwell closed out the interview with another plug for PragerU. Whatever else the organization’s shortcomings, it appears that marketing is not one of them.

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mma 12 22

Fox News’ near-total silence on former President Donald Trump’s meeting with Nick Fuentes and the rapper Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, points to the inroads that white nationalism and virulent antisemitism have made at the network — and the difficulty the Republican Party would have in trying to remove that faction from its coalition.

The news that Fuentes and Ye had dined with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago home and resort last Tuesday triggered a stream of denunciations from civil rights groups and calls for Republicans to speak out. The friendly sitdown came in spite of a weekslong firestorm surrounding Ye’s increasingly open anti-Jewish rhetoric. Fuentes, meanwhile, is a white supremacist leader who attended the deadly 2017 Unite the Right white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, called for a “white uprising” to install Trump as a dictator, and has generated a lengthy list of bigoted statements, including his recent exhortation for Jews to “get the fuck out of America.”

Republican leaders are divided over whether bigots like Ye and Fuentes should be shunned and the former president condemned for meeting with them. Ultimately, this argument is a proxy fight over the question of whether the white supremacists, Proud Boys, antisemites, and other deplorables who made common cause with Trump should be ushered out of the party. Some, like former Vice President Mike Pence, have spoken out. Others have criticized Fuentes while letting Trump off the hook, like potential House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), or remained silent, like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

Fox’s propagandists have joined the side of the silent. The network devoted a mere seven minutes to the dinner from the time the story broke on Friday through the weekend, and ignored it altogether on Monday. Notably, influential prime-time hosts Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham have not mentioned the story at all. Fox is signaling to the viewers who trust it above all other news sources that the story is not important.

Fox’s quiet acquiescence points to a quandary for the network. It would apparently be a step too far for Fox to support Trump meeting with such despicable bigots – that could threaten its relations with advertisers and cable carriers. But the network is also too tightly intertwined with that world to criticize him for it. It has a Tucker Carlson problem.

Fox personalities condemning Trump for meeting with Ye would amount to a hairpin turn for the network. They were touting Ye’s bravery just weeks ago after Ye talked up Trump in Carlson’s fawning interview with him. But as they lavished praise on the rapper, the network was keeping under wraps some of the the anti-Jewish comments West made in the same discussion. When Ye started making similarly antisemitic remarks on social media, some at Fox criticized him – though not Carlson, who pretended that outburst hadn’t happened and continued to laud him.

Fuentes’ noxious racism and antisemitism are more explicit than what is typically found on Fox, and the network would seem to face less risk in condemning him. But Carlson in particular has made his show a clearinghouse for antisemitic tropes, white nationalist talking points, and fringe-right bigots. All the while, he has denied the existence of the white supremacists who praise him for mainstreaming their worldview. How could Carlson plausibly berate Trump for meeting with a white supremacist when he’s spent years telling his viewers that white supremacists don’t exist? And how could anyone else at the network convincingly draw a line between Fuentes’ commentary and what viewers see in its 8 p.m. hour?

Fox’s problem mirrors that of the GOP. Republican leaders believe that it needs the extremists Trump ushered into the party in order to win elections. Fox hosts and executives likewise recognize that if they aim at such deplorables, they may hit their own viewers. The result is that rank and file Republicans may not hear that the meeting ever happened – and if they do, the source will be a mainstream outlet that Fox has relentlessly trained them to ignore. If Fox creates the context through which its viewers interpret news, the message it is sending is that Trump dining with bigots is not important.

The Fox mantra is to “respect the audience.” In practice, that means keeping them cosseted from information that may displease them, no matter how extreme they become or what conspiracy theories they end up believing.

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https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/despite-fox-news-claims-contrary-voters-are-concerned-about-climate-change

no lnx many no vid

Despite Fox News' claims to the contrary, voters are concerned about climate change

Special PROGRAMS

CLIMATE & ENERGY

WRITTEN BY EVLONDO COOPER

RESEARCH CONTRIBUTIONS FROM ALLISON FISHER & ILANA BERGER

PUBLISHED 11/17/22

Despite Fox News’ claims to the contrary, climate change was among top voter concerns during the recent 2022 midterm elections. 

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The issue of climate change took center stage during the general election for the first time in 2020. Since then, poll after poll has found that climate change is top of mind for many voters, and exit polls found that it was a key issue for 2022 midterm voters. Even Fox had to briefly acknowledge this reality, though it won’t likely have any material impact on the network’s climate coverage.

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CNN’s exit poll found that 71% of voters stated that climate change is a “very serious” or “somewhat serious” problem, while 61% of voters in Fox News’ voter analysis survey were “very/somewhat concerned” about climate change. Regarding whether climate has become a viable election issue, InsideClimateNews suggested that “the political dynamics around climate in the 2022 midterms could stand out as a milestone.” Or as The New Republic summarized:

This year, more “climate voters,” people whose top issue is the climate crisis, showed up to cast ballots than in any other election in U.S. history. Exit polls show that, contrary to conventional Democratic consultant-class wisdom, climate was the top issue for 8 percent of voters, a share surpassed only by “inflation/economy,” immigration, and abortion (the latter two are tied at second place). You’d never guess it from media coverage, but climate and crime were tied for third place. The percentage of voters prioritizing climate had jumped by four points from 2020, the first year that voters were even asked at the polls about “climate” as opposed to “environment.” There are probably several factors behind this impressive showing.

Climate could play an important role in the Georgia Senate runoff election, especially among socially marginalized communities that have been bearing the brunt of climate-driven extreme weather events and environmental pollution. In addition to grassroots organizing efforts, Climate Monitor noted that “LCV [League of Conservation Voters] has already launched a new video ad supporting Sen. Raphael Warnock in his runoff election on December 6th. Environmental Voter Project is also already spending in Georgia’s Senate runoff.”

This belies Fox News’ attempts to downplay climate change as a concern for voters. This summer, the network, among other right-wing media outlets, cherry-picked data from a Siena College and New York Times pollto claim that Americans did not care about climate change. For example, the July 20 episode of America's Newsroom featured Kellyanne Conway, former White House counselor under President Donald Trump, claiming that President Joe Biden is focusing on climate and the poll shows voters “don't think that he's connected to them in a way that he is listening to them and hearing their concerns.”

Video file

Video CitationFrom the July 20, 2022, edition of Fox News' America's Newsroom

During the July 24 episode of Fox & Friends Weekend, co-host Pete Hegseth claimed, “They're using the blue checkmark woke brigade to attempt to cudgel the White House to declare a crisis based on 1% of Americans who believe it’s their religion, which could change all of our lives, and change it rapidly, if he caves to groups like this.”

VideoCitationFrom the July 24, 2022, edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends Weekend

In the months and weeks leading up to the November 8 midterm elections, Fox News continued to downplay voter concerns about climate change. For example, during the September 14 episode of The Story With Martha MacCallum, Fox News correspondent Jacqui Heinrich led off a segment that attacked the climate provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act by using a Gallup poll to claim that “voters are far more concerned with the economy than they are with climate.” Fox News hosted commentator Angela Morabito on the September 27 episode of Fox News at Night, where she claimed that climate change was a “luxury problem” above a chyron that read “Midterm Motivators.”

VideoCitationFrom the September 27, 2022, episode of Fox News at Night

During the September 30 episode of Hannity, Fox News host Sean Hannity claimed that if the midterms are a “referendum onJoe Biden, the failed climate cult, and their failed policies, and how they’ve wrecked all the progress that we made in the four years under Donald Trump,then they lose.”

Video Citation  From the September 30, 2022, episode of Fox News' Hannity

After rattling off key provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act, Fox News host Sandra Smith asked her guests during the October 6 episode of America Reports if “Democrats may live to regret the day they pushed clean energy so hard in this moment when we’re not ready for the transition.”

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

However, after the midterm elections, Fox News had to acknowledge that climate was an important issue for voters. During the November 9 episode of America Reports, Smith briefly bowed to reality when confronted with the results of Fox News’ own survey: “When asked how concerned about climate change voters were, 61% said very or somewhat concerned, 39% not too concerned or not at all concerned,” she said. “Climate change was up there, and it was on the mind of voters when they head to the ballot box. So, is this a missed opportunity for Republicans to have some sort of messaging there for voters who care about this issue?”

Video CitationFrom the November 9, 2022, episode of Fox News' America Reports

Despite years of climate science denial and obfuscation, Fox News had to face the fact that voters care about climate change. The network will likely continue running interference for the fossil fuel industry, denying or downplaying how climate is driving extreme weather, and undermining the Biden administration's climate and energy policies, because it is less a news outlet and more a key cog in the fossil fuel industry’sdisinformation network. Even though the veil of reality may slip on Fox News occasionally, it never stays down for long.

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random but AZ grab

Echoing his pre-January 6 rhetoric, Steve Bannon now demands Arizona refuse to certify midterm election results

Fox News platforms climate denial and the Great Reset conspiracy theory during COP27

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Watch Rachel Maddow connect Steve Bannon to potential election denialism in Arizona

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A Fox News report about Paul Pelosi’s attacker, briefly annotated

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Fox News advertisers:

Fox-News-Advertisers-03.png

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CLIMATE & ENERGY

carlson_diesel

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GUNS & PUBLIC SAFETY

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LGBTQ

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Media Matters for America

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mma 11 22

Fox News star Tucker Carlson used Wednesday night’s broadcast to demand accountability over the GOP’s lackluster showing in the midterm elections.

“Republicans swore they were going to sweep a red tsunami. That's what they told us and we, to be honest, cautiously believed them, but they did not sweep, not even close to sweeping,” he complained. “The people whose job it was to win but did not win should go do something else now. We're speaking specifically of the Republican leadership of the House and the Senate and of the RNC.”

The problem with Carlson’s analysis is that Carlson, himself, is an influential GOP leader who bears responsibility for the party’s failings. He remains a key adviser to former President Donald Trump. He endorsed Republican candidates in the midterms and helped them win the party’s nomination. He suggested the midterms communications strategy that the GOP ultimately adopted. He can get top Republicans on the phone with ease and the party’s political operatives fear the prospect of him attacking their clients. By his own account, he and his colleagues provided a platform during the elections where “Republicans can communicate their message unencumbered.” Tonight, he will give the keynote address at an event for a faction that constitutes the majority of House Republicans.

He is the party establishment.

Carlson’s outsized influence in the GOP is a problem for the party. Any TV political talking head is likely to be out-of-touch with the concerns of the median American voter. But even by that standard, Carlson is a weirdo.

The Fox host is a millionaire raised by a former ambassador and an heiress who does TV commentary for a living because billionaires like his takes. He is a blood-and-soil nationalist who rejects America’s credal inheritance of liberty, equality, and democracy. He is steeped in white nationalist conspiracy theories about global elites importing brown foreigners to replace “legacy Americans” and is deeply invested in the success of foreign authoritarians.

Carlson spends a lot of time on his show talking about children’s genitals; blames wokeness for everything from the U.S. retreat from Afghanistan to the green and brown M&Ms becoming insufficiently “sexy”; and capes for both the insurrectionists who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, and the violent QAnon conspiracy theory movement.

Most Americans aren’t like this! There are clearly people who are interested in this sort of commentary – Carlson’s show averaged nearly 3.3 million viewers in October, making it the second-highest-rated cable news program. But audience tallies that are extremely impressive for cable news ultimately represent a drop in the bucket for the American electorate.

It is dangerous for a major party to move closer to Tucker Carlson’s views. But those views are also likely to alienate normal American voters and make it more difficult for that party to win elections.

The types of candidates who Carlson likes and tries to elect mimic his bizarre fixations and blindspots. They describe their political opponents as “childless cat ladies,” pay consultant fees to a virulent antisemite and hang out with a “prophet,” run ads featuring themselves “smashing television sets playing newscasts with a sledgehammer,” and distribute lawn signs promising not to “ask your pronouns in the U.S. Senate.”

This behavior may be attractive to Carlson, and to a Republican base that has been trained to want candidates who act like a Fox host. But it seems likely to turn off people who don’t spend their free time immersed in the right-wing media fever swamps, and makes those candidates a harder sell with voters. They can still triumph when the electorate is favorable enough, or if their opponent is weak enough – but it makes the party’s fight more difficult.

And while Carlson may be Fox’s oddest duck, he isn’t the only one in the pond. The network’s roster is stocked with commentators who have an outsized influence on Republican politics and use their platforms to engage in bizarre conspiracy theories about murder victims and raped 10-year-old abortion patients, pick fights with NBA stars and high school students, and rant about everything from lifesaving vaccines to children’s schoolbooks.

The GOP has a Fox News problem. The network’s propaganda megaphone is a valuable asset that strengthens the party’s ability to quickly generate a unified message in response to any news event, and keeps its base from straying out of the right-wing information bubble. But the network’s employees are toxic extremists who are deeply out of touch with the concerns of average Americans, so are the candidates it directly or indirectly supports, and in a close election, that matters.

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an 11 22

To those who really are hard-left in their politics — for example, author Noam Chomsky or U.K. politician George Galloway — the notion that the United States’ mainstream news media are overwhelmingly to the left is laughable. Chomsky, for decades, has argued that mainstream news outlets have a corporate bias, not a leftist bias.

MSNBC has been described by some reporters as a left-wing version of Fox News, but MSNBC’s focus is really center-left rather than hard-left. The cable news outlet has its share of liberal hosts, from Rachel Maddow to Joy Reid to Lawrence O’Donnell. But some well-known Never Trump conservatives are also MSNBC hosts, including Joe Scarborough (a former GOP congressman) and Nicolle Wallace (who was in the George W. Bush Administration). And Never Trumpers like Charlie Sykes, attorney George Conway, Michael Steele (former chairman of the Republican National Committee) and former GOP strategist Rick Wilson have been frequent MSNBC guests.

Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple, in his November 7 column, lays out some reasons why he believes it is inaccurate to describe MSNBC as the Fox News of the left.

READ MORE:Tucker Carlson spins new race-baiting conspiracy theory about white women

“While Fox News remains a talking-point-promotion outlet for Republican candidates,” Wemple argues, “its liberal counterpart on the cable box does something vastly different for Democratic candidates. It covers them, that is.”

Wemple illustrates his point by noting how Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman’s campaign has been covered on MSNBC compared to far-right Sean Hannity’s show on Fox News.

“Many critics over the years have posited that MSNBC is the lefty mirror image of Fox News,” Wemple writes. “If so, it needs to pick up its game in the propaganda department. There’s no question that it can be more hospitable to Fetterman and his Democratic peers than Fox News and some other outlets. Following Fetterman’s debate troubles, for example, MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell compared him to Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill….Yet MSNBC has no analogue to Hannity, a guy with the message discipline of a coxswain. Nor does it relish forking over its airwaves to promotional interviews with like-minded candidates.”

Wemple goes on to say that “mainstream outlets writ large simply don’t do for Democrats what Fox News does for Republicans, an argument recently advanced by Media Matters senior fellow Matthew Gertz.”

READ MORE:Why reviews of Fetterman’s debate performance were 'oddly disconnected' from Americans’ experience with illness in office

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hannity

https://www.mediamatters.org/social-security/fox-lying-about-gop-plans-cut-social-security-and-medicare

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mma 11 22

fox News, the right-wing propaganda network that functions as a GOP Super PAC, has handed over its airwaves to Republican Senate candidates in the closing weeks of the midterm election campaign.

Fox is perhaps the single most powerful force in GOP politics. The network effectively merged with Donald Trump’s administration after he gained the presidency, and following the 2020 presidential election, its top executive openly described the network as the “opposition” to President Joe Biden. Fox’s stars used the network’s platform during the current election cycle to develop messaging for GOP candidates to run on, quash discussions of the party’s least popular issues, and help their preferred Republican candidates win the party’s nomination.

Fox hosts are doing their best to pull the party’s candidates over the finish line as the midterm elections approach, lavishing them with airtime they can use to shill for votes and donations.

Media Matters reviewed our database of weekday cable news guest appearances from September 6 through October 31 for interviews with the Republican and Democratic nominees for Senate in the eight states FiveThirtyEight identifies as most competitive: Georgia, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Arizona, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Wisconsin, and Ohio.

The Republican nominees appeared on Fox’s weekday programming at least 79 times during that period, an average of more than 8 such interviews per week. By contrast, MSNBC interviewed the Democratic Senate nominees 36 times. CNN, meanwhile, interviewed just one candidate, Ohio Democratic nominee Rep. Tim Ryan, a single time. (Neither Fox nor MSNBC interviewed a candidate from the other party during the period of this study).

Dr. Mehmet Oz, the Republican nominee in Pennsylvania, made the most appearances on Fox, with 21. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), had the second-most appearances, with 14, while Ohio’s J.D. Vance had the third-most, with 10. Nevada’s Adam Laxalt (9), Arizona’s Blake Masters (9), and Georgia’s Herschel Walker (8) followed.

Among the Senate candidates, North Carolina’s Cheri Beasley and Ohio’s Tim Ryan had the most MSNBC appearances, with 8 apiece

Hannity hosted the most Republican candidate interviews, with 31. A notorious GOP shill, he produced a series of town hall events — essentially glorified campaign rallies — to prop up Republican nominees in the closing weeks of the election. Laura Ingraham hosted 10 interviews, while Tucker Carlson provided 7. Carlson’s team also produced a hagiographic documentary about Masters for Fox’s streaming service.

CNN and MSNBC prime time, which have beengenerally less engaged with the Senate races than Fox has, interviewed the Democratic nominees a combined total of 20 times over the period of the study.

And Fox isn’t propping up just the GOP’s Senate candidates; the party’s gubernatorial nominees have also been fixtures on the network. New York nominee Rep. Lee Zeldin made 21 weekday Fox appearances during this period, Michigan’s Tudor Dixon made 11, and Arizona’s Kari Lake made 10.

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mma 11 22

Fox Business anchor Maria Bartiromo will provide live commentary during Fox News’ election night coverage, giving one of the network’s biggest conspiracy theorists an opportunity to once again spread misinformation about voter fraud and other debunked ideas.

In the 2020 election cycle and its aftermath, Bartiromo repeatedly and baselessly questioned the reliability of Dominion voting machines and software, part of a pattern of coverage at Fox that led to the company bringing a defamation lawsuit against the network. . That litigation is ongoing, and Bartiromo has reportedly been called to be deposed in the case.

As Media Matters previously documented, Bartiromo amplified numerous conspiracy theories following the 2020 election, including providing a platform for Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Syndey Powell to spread bad information about Dominion Voting Systems. On November 8, 2020, Powell told Bartiromo that “there had been a massive and coordinated effort to steal this election from we the people of the United States of America,” including “an algorithm to calculate the votes they would need to flip, and they used the computers to flip those votes.” Bartiromo didn’t challenge the assertion. “If this is true, this appears systemic,” she responded.

Dominion’s lawyers noted in their lawsuit that Bartiromo knew Powell’s comments were “false, or recklessly disregarded the truth,” as she had previously discussed with former President Donald Trump that any perceived lead he had in voting could lessen as mail-in and absentee ballots were cast.

On November 12, 2020, Bartiromo interviewed Giuliani about Dominion, suggesting that the company had financial ties to foreign countries perceived to be hostile to the United States. “Are you seeing money coming from places like Venezuela and Cuba?” Bartiromo asked. In his halting, rambling response, Giuliani claimed Dominion is “a foreign company — that raises questions immediately, why are we having a foreign company do our elections? It is Canada — maybe.” He later characterized it as “a Venezuelan company that has Chinese parts in it.”

Three days later, on November 15, 2020, Bartiromo interviewed Powell again. During that interview, Powell claimed that there had been massive voter fraud, and that public officials in states that used Dominion systems were getting “kickbacks” for stealing the election for Biden. “President Trump won by not just hundreds of thousands of votes, but by millions of votes, that were shifted by this software that was designed expressly for that purpose,” Powell said. The officials who supposedly stole the election got “substantial sums of money” laundered to them through family members, she said. Bartiromo didn’t challenge these preposterous allegations either.

In addition to amplifying Trump’s lawyers’ claims, Bartiromo also gave oxygen to a host of additional absurd conspiracy theories. On November 4, 2020, she claimed that “there were tons of ballots found under a rock in Arizona.” In fact, there were 18. On November 6, 2020, she promoted the so-called Sharpiegate conspiracy theory, which had already been repeatedly debunked by fact-checkers. On November 9, 2020, Bartiromo’s guests suggested that dead people were voting in large numbers. They were not. Later that month, Bartiromo allowed Trump to push his election denialist claims on her show, a programming decision Trump referred to as “brave.”

This pattern continued into December, when former Speaker of the House NewtGingrich appeared on her show to lay out a number of already discredited conspiracy theories, including false claims of a trucker delivering ballots from New York to Pennsylvania and a rehash of the claim that voting machines were somehow controlled by foreign governments. The same month, she and Herschel Walker, now a Senate candidate in Georgia, spread lies about the 2020 election.

Bartiromo also played a direct role in questioning the results of the election. On November 9, 2020, she appeared as a guest on fellow Fox star Sean Hannity’s radio show. “I have not given up on [Attorney General] Bill Barr,” she said. “I am expecting a full-on investigation of these irregularities that we're seeing in terms of voting and the ballots.” On November 30, 2020, she said that Trump’s lawyers “say they have a stack of affidavits of people, sworn testimony that say that they saw the Dominion machines change votes."

On the day the Electoral College was scheduled to vote to confirm Joe Biden as the next president, Bartiromo claimed to have spoken “with one source high up in the intel community."

“He said, ‘Trump did win,” Bartiromo continued. “‘There was election fraud, but to prove it requires the FBI and the DOJ to drill down on all of the election fraud issues related to voter and ballot issues. They're not doing it because the wrong people run the place, and they didn't want Trump to win. Now they've run out the clock with the Electoral College here.’”

Bartiromo’s false claims continued after the fascist insurrection on January 6, 2021. She alleged, without evidence, that “Democrats” in “MAGA clothing” were partiallybehind the attack. In interviews with Republican lawmakers after the attempted coup, she repeatedly claimed that “70% of Trump voters” believed the election was stolen, thereby offering a circular self-justification for continuing to push that incorrect information and excuse the riot. On Biden’s Inauguration Day, she failed to push back on numerous false claims put forward by Goya CEO Bob Unanue, including inflating the number of people who voted for Trump.

She continued pushing election denialist conspiracy theories throughout 2021. On March 16, 2021, she gave Trump another friendly interview filled with falsehoods about the election and Trump’s attempts to overturn it, including his pressure campaign against election officials in Georgia. Trump was back on her show in April of that year, repeating the lie that he won the election. In May 2021, she implied that Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) was wrong to keep “talking and pushing back on President Trump, who says the election was stolen” and that she “has not acknowledged the issue around mail-in ballots.” In July 2021, she encouraged Trump to lie about the number of votes he’d received and the states he claimed to have won.

Bartiromo's recent coverage of the midterms has been no different. In October, she pushed a conspiracy theory that Pennsylvania Senate candidate John Fetterman, who is recovering from a stroke and requires auditory assistance, was being fed answers through a closed caption system he used during an NBC interview. Fox viewers can likely expect more of the same this election night.

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Fox News personalities and guests have long attacked Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, and now Pennsylvania lawmakers are trying to impeach him.

Earlier in September, the Pennsylvania House of Representatives sent Krasner a subpoena to hand over documents that pertain to the way he prosecutes crime, and Krasner refused to comply. Conservatives have attacked him over this and ultimately the state House voted to hold him in contempt. Krasner did partially comply with the subpoena despite calling it “undemocratic,” but he refused to hand over documents that might violate grand jury secrecy laws.

Now part of the push to impeach Krasner, who was overwhelmingly reelected in 2021, is a report that argues his policies contributed to a rise in Philadelphia’s crime rate. But criminology experts have taken issue with the report’s methodology, saying its conclusions are shaky. Texas A&M economics professor Jennifer Doleac wrote, “The errors are so egregious that publishing this article in this journal feels like malpractice.”

In reality, there does *not* seem to be a correlation between high crime rates and progressive prosecutors. In fact, one study shows that cities with progressive DAs actually saw slower growth in homicides and no correlation to high crime.

These discussions are lost in the right-wing echo chamber, where pundits relentlessly criticize progressive prosecutors. Right-wing media have singled out crime as a wedge issue to push conservative candidates onto voters, and their attacks have included district attorneys. Earlier this year, right-wing media successfully pushed for the recall vote of San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin, and now they are looking to Philadelphia as their next target.

Many Fox News personalities argued Krasner was failing in his role in prosecuting criminals, decontextualizing Philadelphia’s crime rate from national crime rates and citing total numbers of murders rather than per capita rates. This makes Philadelphia’s crime appear higher than it actually is since the city has a large population.

Right-wing media are calling for or justifying Krasner’s removal, blaming him for crime rates, and engaging in antisemitic fearmongering about a link to Jewish billionaire philanthropist George Soros:

Justifying and calling for Krasner’s removal

Blaming Krasner for high crime rates

Linking Krasner to George Soros

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JESSE WATTERS (HOST): Parents already have to deal withhigh crime and inflation and now they have to worry about demonic teachers turning their classroom into a drag show? You would think Biden, who is almost 80, would know better. But he doesn't. Maybe that's why they call him creepy Joe. The president, who is already in over his head, wasted his day chatting with a transsexual activist Dillon in the Oval Office about why children should be getting sex changes without their parents' permission.

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https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-host-launches-vicious-attacks-gisele-fetterman-has-bisexual-brazilian-immigrant

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Fox News continues to face billion-dollar lawsuits from two companies that specialize in voting equipment, Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic, for promoting the false claim that their equipment was used to help now-President Joe Biden steal the 2020 election from Donald Trump — a claim that has been repeatedly and thoroughly debunked. On Sunday, October 23, according to Vanity Fair, Fox Corp’s “legal woes” may have “become even more complicated by the fact, first reported by Semafor, thatFox Corp.'s top lawyer Viet Dinh only became licensed to practice law in California in June — despite becoming the company’s chief legal officer in September 2018.”

Vanity Fair’s Charlotte Klein, reporting on October 24, explains, “Dinh, Fox Corp.’s chief legal and policy officer, is licensed to practice law in Washington, D.C., but when the issue of his law license in California — where he is based — first came to Fox’s attention internally, in 2018, the lawyer dismissed the concern, according to Semafor…. An anonymous Fox News spokesperson claimed that Dinh’s application had been delayed first by the State Bar of California losing Dinh’s application and then by COVID-19; however, the State Bar of California’s executive director rejected both of those claims.”

According to Klein, “The licensing issue only adds to the headache Fox is facing with these cases. Fox claims it is protected by the First Amendment and that the outlet was covering newsworthy allegations. The $1.6 billion Dominion case is in discovery, and some of Fox’s biggest stars, like Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson are being deposed.”

READ MORE: Fox News CEO to be deposed in Dominion defamation lawsuit for pushing election lies: report

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fox News CEO to be deposed in Dominion defamation lawsuit for pushing election lies: report

Brandon Gage

October 19, 2022

Fox News Chief Executive Officer Suzanne Scott is expected to be deposed in the $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit filed against the media giant by Dominion Voting Systems, The New York Timesreported

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https://www.mediamatters.org/climate-deniers/right-wing-media-used-opec-oil-cuts-blame-biden-domestic-gas-price-volatility

mma 10 22

On October 5, OPEC [saudi?] and non-OPEC allies decided to impose cuts on oil production despite the fact that they were cautioned against doing so by the United States. The cartel will cut 2 million barrels, a move that could further elevate gas prices in the lead-up to midterm elections. To help ease the impact of the cuts, President Joe Biden, during remarks on gas prices and energy security delivered on October 19, announced a 3 point plan to address rising costs and global oil supplies, including the release of 15 million barrels of oilfrom the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Biden also called for oil companies to increase production instead of buying back stocks and paying dividends to their shareholders, and warned these companies not to gouge gas prices as the cost of oil comes down. 

Fox has painted Biden as chiefly responsible for rising gas prices in a ploy to hurt Democratic candidates in the final weeks of midterm campaigning. Other right-wing media outlets and personalities have followed suit, and criticism has been magnified by a claim made on October 12 by Saudi Arabia’s ministry of foreign affairs saying that Biden asked OPEC to postpone the oil cuts for a month.

In response, right-wing media is using the same playbook and the same series of debunked arguments and disinformationfrom earlier in the year when Russia first invaded Ukraine and global energy security became a concern.

Right-wing media is once again misleading voters about how the global energy market works to push a pro-fossil fuel agenda.

Conservative media outlets are pushing the idea that drastically increasing oil production in the U.S. is a quick and common-sense solution to the problem of high gas prices because it would allow the U.S. to be “energy independent," a term experts have pointed out is widely misunderstood. The U.S. has imported oil for decades and will continue to do so for economic reasons. Importing and exporting some energy is necessary to meet the needs of the market. In that sense, we will probably never be truly energy independent in a fossil fuel economy. If we understand energy independence to mean the U.S. exports more energy than we import, that is still the case. In fact, by this standard, U.S. energy independence reached its peak in 2021 when Biden was president. 

Right-wing media push pro-industry talking points claiming that U.S. oil producers are hindered from drilling, blame elevated gas prices solely on decisions made by Biden

Gas prices have been elevated by increased demand following the easing of pandemic restriction and by oil supply disruptions created by Russia’s war on Ukraine. Prices dipped slightly toward the end of the summer, only to rise in late September, but are currently on the downtrend once again. Aside from OPEC’s recent decision to cut supply, a refinery fire in the Midwest and facility maintenance on the West Coast have reduced inventories to record lows, and a looming European ban on Russian oil, which will take effect in December, is also contributing to price increases. 

The U.S. oil industry is not being hampered by the Biden administration, as it has claimed to evade blame.In March, CEOs of major oil producers stated that they were not planning on investing in any new drilling due to pressure from investors for bigger shareholder returns. To be sure, the current climate of increased demand and global supply disruptions caused by Russia’s war on Ukraine has increased the price of oil, lavishing these companies with record profits while U.S. and global consumers have been hurt by high energy costs.In fact, U.S. oil producers are sitting on 9,000 unused drilling leases for public lands, and while right-wing media push the industry claim that Biden is suppressing domestic production, U.S. oil production on public lands is near all-time highs and is on track for record output in 2023.

Right-wing media attack Biden for Strategic Petroleum Reserve use, foreign oil imports, and efforts to stabilize global oil supply

To help manage global oil prices, Biden began releasing oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserves in March. The latest release of 15 million barrels, announced on October 19, is the last of those planned releases. Right-wing media have suggested that drawing down the reserve makes the U.S. vulnerable to other disasters where the reserve would be needed to shore up supplies while doing nothing to address gas prices. As it stands, the reserves are still more than half full. The move has modestly lowered gas prices, however, experts agree it is not a long-term solution. Biden is also considering easing sanctions on Venezuela for Chevron to resume pumping oil there, allowing the country to export to U.S. and European markets.

Right-wing media has disingenuously argued that getting oil from Venezuela would be more environmentally damaging than producing more oil in the U.S., thus, increasing production domestically would be the more ethical choice. This is a common fossil fuel industry talking point that bad actors use to encourage long-term investments in expanding domestic production, meant to delay an economy-wide transition to renewable energy and ensure that we are reliant on fossil fuels for decades to come. This would be the worst possible outcome for the environment. The same individuals who praise the U.S. for having such “clean” energy production compared to other countries are also fighting against regulations implemented by the Biden administration that are meant toprotect vulnerable communities and hold the industry accountable for the extensive damage it will inevitably cause to ecosystems, the climate, and public health.

Right-wing media claims Biden’s negotiations to keep OPEC+ from cutting oil supply are politically motivated and even impeachable

Despite negotiations with Biden to keep oil supplies stable, OPEC+ announced on October 5 that it would cut its oil supply by 2 million barrels a day in an attempt to push the price to $100 a barrel. The White House has called the move shortsighted, while analysts have noted that it benefits Russia and could push the global economy closer to recession. Some early right-wing reactions suggested that Biden — who in response to OPEC’s decision signaled thepossibility of more releases from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve — only cared about gas prices rising because of the looming midterms elections.

On October 12, in a rare statement to U.S. media, the Saudi government echoed these sentiments by claiming that Biden asked them to delay the cuts by one month – creating a feedback loop between right-wing media and the Saudi royal family. The White House has disputed these claims.

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https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-friends-first-guest-wildly-inflates-frackings-economic-footprint-pennsylvania-lies-0

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

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/10/fox-news-mike-lee-advantage/

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/10/fox-news-ceo-deposed-dominion/

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leaked full tape

https://www.alternet.org/2022/10/kanye-west-2658467170/

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https://www.mediamatters.org/climate-deniers/hurricane-ian-pummeled-florida-facebook-allowed-anti-science-content-thrive

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/how-fox-news-weaponized-hurricane-ian-push-its-agenda-discredit-climate-science-trash

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Fox News’ repugnant smears about John Fetterman’s stroke

WRITTEN BY MATT GERTZ

PUBLISHED 10/13/22

John Fetterman, Pennsylvania’s lieutenant governor and its Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate, suffered a stroke in May. Five months into his recovery, he still faces lingering difficulties processing spoken words. Specialists say this side effect does not “indicate any cognitive impairment” or impact his ability to be a senator, and there is recent precedent for stroke survivors serving in that body. Fetterman has adapted to his condition, like tens of millions of Americans, through a common workplace accommodation — in his case, he often communicates with staffers through text messages and has used closed captioning to conduct numerous press interviews.

Fox News hosts have leveraged an NBC News interview which aired on Tuesday and fixated on that accommodation to stoke fears about Fetterman’s condition. To bolster the campaign of Fetterman’s opponent, celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz, they’ve spent the last few days pushing conspiracy theories about the Democrat’s accommodation, claiming that he had been hiding his condition from voters, and suggesting that he is mentally incompetent.

Tucker Carlson, for example, speculated on Wednesday that Fetterman’s brain may have been taken over by computers. 

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“Where exactly does the software end and John Fetterman's consciousness begin?” the Fox host asked. “We don't know. We can't know.”

Carlson also postulated that Fetterman was “reading answers” — not questions — off the screen he used as an accommodation during his NBC interview.

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Maria Bartiromo offered a similar conspiracy theory on her Fox Business show on Thursday morning, asking Oz, “There’s Fetterman in an interview reading the questions that she’s saying. Is somebody typing in the answers? What’s that all about?”

Sean Hannity said on Tuesday that Fetterman is “severely disabled” and “not mentally capable of debating.” The following night, talk radio host Clay Travis told Hannity’s audience that Fetterman lacks “the health status to be able to be a United States senator” because he “cannot speak.”

Fox correspondent Kevin Corke, meanwhile,falsely suggested on Thursday’s Fox & Friends that Fetterman had been dishonestly concealing his use of an accommodation from voters until the NBC News interview. In reality, “The Tribune-Review found 10 published stories, including ones from Pittsburgh publications and national outlets, that mention Fetterman informing reporters he needed closed captioning to help him understand their questions, including his first post-stroke interview on July 20.”

“A few months ago, he said, ‘Yeah, I'm fine, and good,’" Corke alleged. “OK, but we didn't know you needed electronic assistance to sort of make it through conversations, and I think that's really eye-opening for a number of folks in the commonwealth. And clearly questions about Fetterman’s health continued to swirl as concerns over his cognition also continue to grow.”

Fox hosts have frequently misrepresented Fetterman’s condition in recent months. Carlson claimed the candidate “is completely incapable of representing Pennsylvania in the United States Senate” because he is now an “incompetent husk,” while Hannity as described Fetterman’s stroke as “crippling.”

Fox chyrons have branded Fetterman a “giant walking vegetable” who “can barely utter a sentence.”

This dishonesty is part and parcel of Fox’s broader campaign against Fetterman: The network’s stars will say anything to tear him down and elect Oz, a Fox regular who owes his nomination to Hannity’s support and claims to have an identical ideology. 

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no lnx vid mma 10 22

Fox News pushes midterm election message with a panel of “Virginia parents” who are really Republican activists

The network is back to its usual tricks; as one of its supposed news anchors warns, “Don’t mess with parents”

WRITTEN BY ERIC KLEEFELD

RESEARCH CONTRIBUTIONS FROM TYLER MONROE

PUBLISHED 10/14/22

In its latest propaganda push ahead of the midterm elections, Fox News hosted a focus group billed as a “panel of Virginia parents” to deride progressive and Democratic policies that was, in fact, largely made up of conservative activists, including a former Trump administration official.

This is not the first time Fox has presented a handpicked gallery of right-wing activists as an ordinary sample of concerned Virginia voters. The network employed the same strategy repeatedly throughout 2021 in the run-up to the Virginia gubernatorial race that year, during which the network actively promoted the successful campaign of Republican nominee Glenn Youngkin.

The six programming blocks on Friday’s edition of Fox & Friends totaled roughly 35 minutes of airtime. All the panelists delivered messages that went against progressive politics, with sales pitches ranging from a quasi-nonpartisan appeal to urging viewers to defeat every single Democratic candidate, and even warning against the supposedly looming threat of communism in America today.

The show opened with a brief look at co-host Ainsley Earhardtwith the panel, as she asked them to raise their hands on which issues mattered to them in the midterm elections. The panelists indicated their concerns over inflation and crime, as well as other Fox-promoted scare campaigns such as “gender ideology,” while literally laughing at a question about climate change. The one panelist who said abortion was an “important” issue expressed his strong support for the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade. (He is also a former official in the Trump administration, a fact that was not disclosed during the program.)

Video

CitationFrom the October 14, 2022, edition of Fox News’ Fox & Friends

The rest of the panel discussions, which aired throughout the morning on Fox & Friends, can be viewed here, here, here, here, and here.

Later during Fox’s purported “straight news” coverage on America’s Newsroom, Fox News anchor Sandra Smith presented a clips reel of the panel.

Video

CitationFrom the October 14, 2022, edition of Fox News’ America’s Newsroom

SANDRA SMITH (CO-ANCHOR): Polls showing education will be and is top of the mind for American voters come Election Day. And it will be, could be, the deciding factor in some of the nation's key races. A panel of Virginia voters spoke with [i]Fox & Friends[/i] earlier, and here is what they had to say.

…

SMITH: Don’t mess with parents. They want control over what their kids are learning in the classroom.

The panelists were in fact dedicated political activists, with nearly all of them having ties to various conservative organizations and Republican politics.

Amie Bowman is treasurer of the Fauquier County chapter of the right-wing group Moms for Liberty, a right-wing group with ties to the Republican Party and which has received extensive promotion in right-wing media. Bowman’s own personal activities have included pushing to ban books from her local high school library.

Will Estrada is a former Trump administration official, who worked for over three years in the Department of Health and Human Services. He is also a long-time figure in the Christian home-schooling movement, and is now the full-time president of Parentalrights.org. Earhardt noted Estrada’s foundation when she introduced him, but never once mentioned his prior role in the Trump administration.

Christy Hudson and Bonnie Myshrall are members of Fairfax County Parents Association, which Myshrall initially founded under the name Open Fairfax County Public Schools “to lobby for a return to in-person learning” amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Cheryl Onderchain is a member of theMoms for Liberty chapter in Loudoun County.

Fred Rege has been featured on Fox News before as a member of Fight for Schools, a political action committee led by Ian Prior, another former Trump administration official who has appeared frequently on Fox News.

Xi Van Fleet is activist affiliated with the conservative groupIndependent Women’s Forum, which spreads the claim that America today resembles Maoist China under the Cultural Revolution, an argument she repeated throughout the Fox & Friends panel,and which the network replayed during the America’s Newsroom segment. (For some important context, the Cultural Revolution was a violent period of political and economic turmoil that resulted in the deaths of up to two million people over the course of 10 years, according to estimates by some historians.)

Ram Venkatachalam was a rare exception to the dishonest presentation of the panel, as he and Earhardt openly stated that he’d previously run for school board and intended to do so again next year.

Smith’s introduction of the clips reel also demonstrated a pattern in which a Fox anchor announces what the election issues would be, then presents a Fox panel’s take on what to think about those issues. This was exactly what Fox did last year, too, as part of its saturation coverage of handpicked issues in the Virginia elections, and which the network is looking to repeat nationwide.

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In April Vox reported that “while he hasn’t been hired by Fox, former Trump adviser Stephen Miller — known for helping to develop Trump’s nativist immigration policy — has become a fixture as a guest on Sean Hannity’s and Laura Ingraham’s shows.”

“Since the start of President Joe Biden’s term,” Media Matters reported in February, “Fox News has hired at least nine editors who previously worked for former President Donald Trump’s administration, Republican campaign offices, or Republican politicians. Many of those editors now cover politics for FoxNews.com.”

On Tuesday Conway appeared on Fox News and attacked Democrats, saying Hispanic voters “see a Democratic Party that’s openly hostile to religion. They can’t even give their thoughts and prayers when there’s a tragedy. It’s only thoughts now.”

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an 10 22

Former Trump 2016 campaign manager and Senior Counselor to the President Kellyanne Conway has remade herself multiple times. A pollster who once had as a client Todd Akin – the GOP lawmaker who made the phrase, “if it’s a legitimate rape” infamous – Conway also did polling for Donald Trump when he was considering a run for New York governor.

Once inside the White House Conway was one of the newsiest officials, often appearing before the Fox News cameras almost daily.

Fox News viewers will once again get to see the former top Trump aide almost daily – this time as a paid Fox News contributor who is using her Christian faith as a sword to attack Democrats.

Conway is the latest Trump White House official to be hired by Fox News, and while she’s not Trump’s spokesperson any longer, she may wrangle the gig into getting her old one back. Puck reports she is being considered to helm Trump’s expected 2024 presidential run.

READ MORE: [Watch: Herschel Walker Says if Georgia Voters Don’t Elect Him They Won’t Even ‘Have a Chance to Be Redeemed’

In fact, the two have something in common.

“I will tell you why he wants to run for president,” Conway told CBS News on Friday. “Donald Trump wants his old job back.”

Conway joins a long list of her former colleagues at what has become a far right wing media outlet catering to promoting anything Trump, while downplaying any negative news about the former president who is currently being investigated by prosecutors in Georgia and the U.S. Dept. of Justice for an array of possible felonies, reportedly including ones under the Espionage Act.

Conway will be right at home working alongside Kayleigh McEnany, Mike Pompeo, Larry Kudlow, and Trump’s daughter-in-law and former Trump campaign official Lara Trump.

READ MORE: [‘Everything Has Been a Lie’: Christian Walker Drops Damning New Video Blasting His Father’s ‘Lies’ Over Abortion

In April Vox reported that “while he hasn’t been hired by Fox, former Trump adviser Stephen Miller — known for helping to develop Trump’s nativist immigration policy — has become a fixture as a guest on Sean Hannity’s and Laura Ingraham’s shows.”

“Since the start of President Joe Biden’s term,” Media Matters reported in February, “Fox News has hired at least nine editors who previously worked for former President Donald Trump’s administration, Republican campaign offices, or Republican politicians. Many of those editors now cover politics for FoxNews.com.”

On Tuesday Conway appeared on Fox News and attacked Democrats, saying Hispanic voters “see a Democratic Party that’s openly hostile to religion. They can’t even give their thoughts and prayers when there’s a tragedy. It’s only thoughts now.”

[twt]

the Washington Post‘s Philip Bump calls Conway’s analysis “overly simple and, in part, … explicitly dishonest.”

“Kellyanne Conway claimed that Democrats are hostile religion, something that will surprise the vast majority of Democrats, who are religious,” he adds on Twitter. “There’s a reason that ‘religious’ doesn’t automatically mean ‘Republican.'”

One day earlier, in a segment with a chyron that reads, “The Importance of Religion,” Conway told her former and now current colleague, Larry Kudlow on Fox Business, “People are afraid to make the sign of a cross before a meal in public,they’re afraid to express their — they actually think their religion could get them canceled now, not just their politics, and think about that.”

Conway, perhaps best known for her “alternative facts” flub, offered no proof of her claim.

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Army general investigated for defending female soldiers against Tucker Carlson’s insults

Daniel Villarreal and The New Civil Rights Movement October 10, 2022

An Army investigation criticized the Army’s top enlisted leader for using Twitter to defend female soldiers after Fox News host Tucker Carlson said they were weakening the military.

The investigation’s outcome has at least one Army general worried that “The Army has gone full MAGA,” a reference to former President Donald Trump’s campaign slogan, Make America Great Again.

In March 2021, Maj. Gen. Patrick Donahoe defended female soldiers after Carlson criticized new military policies providing maternity uniforms, “making it easier for women to pump breast milk on duty, and relaxing grooming standards to allow them to have ponytails and braids,” Insider reported.

In a segment that month, Carlson said, “While China’s military becomes more masculine as it assembles the world’s largest Navy, our military needs to become, as Joe Biden says, more feminine — whatever feminine means anymore, since men and women no longer exist.”

The statement likely referred to comments that President Joe Biden said referencing women in key military positions. Biden never said the military need to become “more feminine.”

In response to Carlson’s comment, Donahoe published a video on Twitter of him honoring a female officer. Donahoe wrote, “just as a reminder that Tucker Carlson couldn’t be more wrong.”

Donahoe’s response received “national media coverage” from Fox News personalities like Carlson and Laura Ingraham, as well as RepublicWorld.com and OpIndia.com, two right-wing Indian news outlets, Task and Purpose reported.

“While potentially admirable,” the Inspector General report said of Donahoe’s response to Carlson, “his post brought a measurable amount of negative publicity to the Army, enough that [the Office of the Chief of Public Affairs] warned [the Secretary of the Army] of the fallout…. [His tweets] exhibited poor judgment… [and the] subsequent media coverage drew national attention … and it cast the Army in a negative light.”

An Army general who anonymously spoke to Military.com to avoid retaliation said, “Why would any women want to serve now? The Army gave a hunting permit to radical partisans. … The Army has gone full MAGA.”

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https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/right-wing-media-weaponized-vice-president-kamala-harris-climate-equity-comments-push

Right-wing media weaponized Vice President Kamala Harris' climate equity comments to push a white grievance narrative

Special PROGRAMS

CLIMATE & ENERGY

WRITTEN BY EVLONDO COOPER

RESEARCH CONTRIBUTIONS FROM ALLISON FISHER, ALICIA SADOWSKI & KATHERINE ABUGHAZALEH

PUBLISHED 10/03/22

Update (10/4/22): This piece has been updated with additional segments from Fox News’ evening and prime-time programming.

On September 30, as public officials assessed the catastrophic devastation Hurricane Ian caused to large swaths of southwest Florida, Vice President Kamala Harris was asked to discuss global socioeconomic disparities in climate change impact during theDemocratic National Committee’s Women’s Leadership Forum. As part of her response, Harris remarked: “It is our lowest income communities and our communities of color that are most impacted by these extreme conditions and impacted by issues that are not of their own making.”

Since then, right-wing politicians and media figures have been lying about the context of her remarks to falsely imply that the Biden administration planned to deny disaster relief to white victims of Hurricane Ian.

This white grievance narrative is inherently divisive and denies the reality that low-income communities and communities of color are on the frontlines of the climate crisis and have far fewer resources to adapt, evacuate, and rebuild before and after devastating disasters. These inequities are often compounded by discriminatory practices in receiving federal aid.

This narrative also denies the reality that a large number of poor, white Americans stand to benefit from an equity-focused approach to disaster relief. As NewsOne succinctly stated:

In the aftermath of Hurricane Ian, communities across Florida were slammed by the fierce storm. And without the express commitment to equity in the recovery process, flooded communities like an Orange County low-income housing complex that flooded or a North Fort Meyers trailer park might not actually get the support they need.

Everyone who suffered losses due to Hurricane Ian must be provided with the resources they need to rebuild and recover. Although Harris’ remarks were not specifically about the federal response to Hurricane Ian, her response cuts to the core of what equity is designed to achieve: Equity is not about exclusion; it's about ensuring that the most vulnerable populations are fully included in disaster relief and future climate adaptation and mitigation planning.

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But the right doesn’t do nuance. And weaponizing the vice president’s anodyne comments about climate equity allows right-wing media to downplay or deny the role global warming is playing in extreme weather events, while running interference on behalf of the fossil fuel industry, the primary driver of the climate crisis. It also allows the network and its media allies to further rile up their viewership with culture war narratives ahead of the upcoming midterm election.

And both of those moves fit into Fox News' larger playbook. For much of 2022, the network has led the right-wing mediasphere in pushing a series of unrelenting narratives that sought to undermine the Biden administration’s climate actions, while absolving the fossil fuel industry from any wrongdoing.

Below is a non-exhaustive catalog of Fox News personalities and guests and other right-wing media figures advancing this false and cynical narrative:

Fox News contributor Charlie Hurt: “It's pretty disgusting.” Appearing on The Ingraham Angle, Fox News contributor Charlie Hurt attacked Harris’ equity comments, asserting, “I think it's completely transparent and people see right through it. And when you have Democrats trying to politicize a natural disaster like this, whether it's by trying to justify their crazy power scam that they want global warming to provide them, or in their effort to try to trash their political opponents, using a tragedy like this, it's pretty disgusting.” [Fox News, The Ingraham Angle, 10/3/22]

Fox host Tucker Carlson:“She has a new plan to distribute relief, of course, on the basis of race. … So this is immoral.” Fox host Tucker Carlson claimed that Harris planned to “distribute relief, of course, on the basis of race,” before continuing, “So this is immoral. Not one thing ever in American life should be distributed on the basis of race. Ever. However, as long as we’re becoming a two-tiered society with a privileged class and an underclass, how about rewarding good behavior? Why not give priority to Americans who pay their taxes? Follow the law? Raise decent children who don’t join gangs or sell drugs or spray paint things or shoot people?” [Fox News, Tucker Carlson Tonight, 10/3/22]

Fox host Bret Baier:“President Biden and his team are trying to clean up – at least rhetorically – from a self-inflicted wound by Vice President Kamala Harris.” Fox host Bret Baier accused the White House of trying to spin the vice president’s “self-inflicted wound” before adding, “She made a comment that most interpreted as her saying that federal aid to hurricane victims should be distributed through the prism of race and equity to make up for injustices in years past.” [Fox News, Special Report, 10/3/22]

Fox host Jesse Watters:“Kamala Harris picking the wrong time to go woke after Hurricane Ian wreaked havoc on Florida. … Is the vice president saying white Floridians should get their hurricane relief last?” During October 3, 2022, episode of The Five, co-host Jesse Watters accused the vice president of “using this tragedy to push her radical ideology'' and later claimed that “the White House is trying to clean up her mess.” The discourse further devolved into a panel discussion that featured co-host Greg Gutfeld waxing philosophical about equity. [Fox News, The Five, 10/3/22]

Fox host Kayleigh McEnany: “At a time when America came together — perhaps one of the most unifying times in our country is after a natural disaster, when the whole country comes together — she chooses to invoke such hateful, divisive, race-based rhetoric.” During the intro to Outnumbered, host McEnany attacked Harris for her comments on equity and falsely claimed she “invok[ed] such hateful, divisive, race-based rhetoric.” Later, during a panel discussion, co-host Harris Faulkner added, “Because what she’s doing is she is following Biden's footsteps in terms of dividing us along a racial line for votes.” [Fox News, Outnumbered, 10/3/22]

Fox host Harris Faulkner: “Vice president Kamala Harris willing to do the unthinkable, divide Hurricane Ian victims by race. Was she trying to say she would prefer to help the ones she chooses first?” Before running down the damage Hurricane Ian did to Florida, Faulkner falsely claimed that Harris “was willing to do the unthinkable, divide Hurricane Ian victims by race.” This led to a longer segment that collected right-wing reaction to Harris’ statement about equity, which correspondent Peter Doocy described as “race-based relief.” [Fox News, The Faulkner Focus, 10/3/22]

Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC): “It is incredibly racist. Can you imagine someone saying the exact opposite, that only whites and men should get hurricane resources first? I mean, that’s crazy town.” Appearing on Sunday Night in America, Republican South Carolina Rep. Nancy Mace responded to a loaded question about Harris’ equity comments by calling her statement, “incredibly racist” and added, “The fact that the vice president of the United States is making those kinds of comments shows a lack of leadership. … We shouldn’t see it through the lens of color like the vice president does.” [Fox News, Sunday Night in America, 10/2/22]

Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL): “Now is not the time to be talking about who gets what based upon where you started. It's about helping people, making sure they get the resources they need to them as quickly as possible, helping them recover as quickly as possible. That's what matters. That other stuff can wait for another day.” In response to a question about Harris’ equity comments from Sunday Morning Futures host Maria Bartiromo, Republican Florida Rep. Byron Donalds claimed that now was the wrong time to discuss who has access to disaster recovery. “That other stuff can wait for another day. Obviously, we're going to have elections about that stuff in about a month or so,” he said. [Fox News, Sunday Morning Futures, 10/2/22]

Fox host Will Cain: “Unfortunately, for many of those in power, relief isn’t going to be something equally distributed, because of course now our focus is not on equality but is on equity. In other words: racism.” During the October 1 episode of Fox & Friends Saturday, host Will Cain claimed that “equity” is another word for “racism.” Later he expounded upon his understanding of equity: “What she went on to say is we want to distribute funds essentially according to — I don’t know exactly how she defined equity, underprivileged communities. In essence, what she would say — what she is saying — is Brown and Black. What she is saying is hurricane relief needs to be distributed according to the color of your skin.” [Fox News, Fox & Friends Saturday, 10/1/22]

:{:{}:

}:

Daily Caller: “Kamala Harris Says Disaster Relief Should Be ‘Based On Equity.’”

The Daily Wire: “Kamala Harris Blasted For Pushing ‘Racist’ Policy In Response To Hurricane Damage.”

FoxNews.com: “VP Kamala Harris says hurricane recovery should take 'equity' into account.”

The New York Post:“VP Harris slammed for saying Hurricane Ian aid will be ‘based on equity.’”

Newsmax.com: “VP Harris: Hurricane Ian Aid 'Based on Equity' and Race.”

One America News’ Caitlin Sinclair:

Conservative media figure Sadanand Dhume:

Right-wing commentator Ian Miles Cheong:

Right-wing personality Ryan Fournier:

Entrepreneur Elon Musk:

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Climate denial abounds on Fox as Hurricane Ian devastates Florida

On back-to-back nights during Florida’s Hurricane Ian nightmare, Fox hosts Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham cast doubt on climate science

Special PROGRAMS

CLIMATE & ENERGY

WRITTEN BY ILANA BERGER

PUBLISHED 09/30/22

In response to Hurricane Ian, Fox News primetime shows sought to mislead viewers about how climate change is affecting hurricanes, using bad faith and often-repeated climate denier talking points.

More than 2.6 million people were without power across the state on Thursday morning, as extreme flooding left many residents trapped in their homes and on top of cars. At a press briefing, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis called Ian a “500-year flooding event” and added, “The impacts of this storm are historic and the damage that has been done is historic. … We've never seen a flood event like this, we've never seen a storm surge of this magnitude.” There were at least 21 confirmed deaths as of Friday morning, but that number is expected to rise as recovery efforts continue.

Fox primetime shows recycle debunked or irrelevant talking points on climate

Meanwhile, Fox personalities attempted to gaslight viewers into complacency by describing any hurricane coverage that mentioned climate change as “alarmist.” Fox also cherry-picked information about the relationship between climate change and hurricanes to imply that the two are not related. Climate scientists and media outlets have acknowledged that there is not enough evidence to support the theory that climate change will increase the frequency of hurricanes. However, there is evidence suggesting that higher ocean and air temperatures are causing hurricanes and storms to intensify more rapidly instead of weakening as they approach landfall, as happened with Ian. Hurricanes are also absorbing more moisture and dumping more rain on affected areas. Fox ignored this crucial connection or refuted it all together.

On September 27, Tucker Carlson called severity warnings leading up to the storm a “scam” on Tucker Carlson Tonight. But the next day, he called Hurricane Ian “a catastrophe” and a “national disaster,” adding, “People will certainly be killed.” Carlson then tried to use an exchange between CNN’s Don Lemon and Jamie Rhome, the deputy director of the National Hurricane Center, to push his agenda. Carlson used Rhome’s reluctance to link climate change to specific events to suggest that for political reasons, the media is more concerned about climate change than actual climate scientists are. However, Rhome clearly agreed that climate change is having an impact on storms, which is consistent with mainstream reporting on the issue. In fact, on September 28, CNN meteorologist Tom Sater reiterated Rhome’s point and added, “Since 1950 there have been seven landfall hurricanes in Florida that were a category 4 or 5 … the first 4 were each in a different decade. The last three — all in the last 5 years.”

:{:{}:

}:

On September 29, Carlson devoted a good chunk of his show to ranting about climate change as well.He was obsessively focused on hurricane frequency, arguing that somehow, a decrease in the numbers of storms would cancel out the plethora of other evidence indicating that the storm events themselves are intensifying. After citing a NOAA research overview highlighting that hurricanes are predicted to become more intense, Carlson went on to insist that “the claim is never proven,” and that “there’s no science behind these claims.” Later in the segment, he implied that humans cannot influence weather events because “they’re called natural disasters. … they’re products of nature, God is in charge.”

He then discussed Hurricane Ian with Candace Owens, who has a long history of climate change denial.Owens reiterated that climate change does not exist because “if there was no human beings that walked the face of the planet, there would continue to be hurricanes, like there would continue to be blizzards, and like there would continue to be tornadoes.” She also used several other environmental concerns such as the hole in the ozone layer, which has diminished because of the Montreal Protocol, and ocean acidification, which remains a concern due to climate change, to try and argue that “they’ve been wrong over and over and over again.”

Video

CitationFrom the September 29, 2022, edition of Fox News' Tucker Carlson Tonight

On September 28 edition of The Ingraham Angle, frequent Fox News guest and climate contrarian Michael Shellenberger and host Laura Ingraham told viewers that their personal experiences with extreme weather were untrustworthy and invalid. Ingraham implied that concerns about climate change only exist because people “feel that the ocean is warmer … but a feeling is not fact.” Shellenberger falsely claimed that hurricanes are “not intensifying right now, so any perception that hurricanes are more intense is just a perception fed by that relentless alarmist media.” Guest Mollie Hemmingway, editor-in-chief of The Federalist, later claimed that “the left” is pushing a “conspiracy theory” that “man-made climate change is the cause of hurricanes. … There’s just no evidence for this theory that people keep holding.” Hemmingway said this despite the fact that no one is claiming that climate change is the primary cause of hurricanes, rather it is one factor making them more dangerous.

Video file

Video CitationFrom the September 28, 2022, edition of Fox News' The Ingraham Angle

Hemmingway and Shellenberger also latched onto the idea that hurricane frequency is apparently the only metric that should concern the public, glossing over the very real dangers of threats like higher rainfall rates, which is the main factor that drives deaths and damage during a hurricane. They were fixated on the number of hurricanes that have occurred over different periods of time, using various irrelevant data points to unsuccessfully support their climate denial. They also downplayed damage caused by storms by saying that nowadays more people live in the areas most affected by hurricanes. Shellenberger first said that damage caused by hurricanes “has not increased at all” but then claimed that the increase in damage is due to the fact that “there’s more wealth in harm’s way,” going on to claim that the extreme weather events of the last several decades represent “an incredible success story for America,” because, in his telling, they could have been worse. 

Before Ian made landfall, Sean Hannity hosted his favorite climate denier Joe Bastardi to emphasize that hurricane frequency in Florida has not increased. On September 28, Hannity said that the media should not discuss climate change because “this is hurricane season and during hurricane season, you usually have hurricanes like we did a hundred years ago.” Fox News contributor Lara Trump insisted that the Democrats' “marketing arm, the mainstream media” is “now trying to claim that one of the quietest hurricane seasons in 30 years is somehow due to climate change.” Finally, former governor of Arkansas Mike Huckabee, who was a guest on the show, said that people should reject the established science of climate change and instead of “worshipping that which is created rather than the creator … get back to the simple things of science and real faith and trust in God.”

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.

THE LATEST...

Fox News host: “Americans are going to have to start strapping up and exercising their Second Amendment rights”

09/30/22 5:30 PM EDT

Climate denial abounds on Fox as Hurricane Ian devastates Florida

09/30/22 2:52 PM EDT

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Climate deniers

Related

Climate denial and near climate silence has marred national TV news coverage of Hurricane Ian

09/30/22 1:48 PM EDT

Right-wing media manufacture outrage over CNN host Don Lemon discussing relationship between climate change and strengthened hurricanes

09/29/22 1:53 PM EDT

As Hurricane Ian hits Florida, Fox News undermines climate change

09/27/22 11:15 PM EDT

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lnx

In response to Hurricane Ian, Fox News primetime shows sought to mislead viewers about how climate change is affecting hurricanes, using bad faith and often-repeated climate denier talking points.

More than 2.6 million people were without power across the state on Thursday morning, as extreme flooding left many residents trapped in their homes and on top of cars. At a press briefing, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis called Ian a “500-year flooding event” and added, “The impacts of this storm are historic and the damage that has been done is historic. … We've never seen a flood event like this, we've never seen a storm surge of this magnitude.” There were at least 21 confirmed deaths as of Friday morning, but that number is expected to rise as recovery efforts continue.

Fox primetime shows recycle debunked or irrelevant talking points on climate

Meanwhile, Fox personalities attempted to gaslight viewers into complacency by describing any hurricane coverage that mentioned climate change as “alarmist.” Fox also cherry-picked information about the relationship between climate change and hurricanes to imply that the two are not related. Climate scientistsand media outlets have acknowledged that there is not enough evidence to support the theory that climate change will increase the frequency of hurricanes. However, there is evidence suggesting that higher ocean and air temperatures are causing hurricanes and storms tointensify more rapidly instead of weakening as they approach landfall, as happened with Ian. Hurricanes are also absorbing more moisture and dumping more rain on affected areas. Fox ignored this crucial connection or refuted it all together.

On September 27, Tucker Carlson called severity warnings leading up to the storm a “scam” on Tucker Carlson Tonight. But the next day, he called Hurricane Ian “a catastrophe” and a “national disaster,” adding, “People will certainly be killed.” Carlson then tried to use an exchange between CNN’s Don Lemon and Jamie Rhome, the deputy director of the National Hurricane Center, to push his agenda. Carlson used Rhome’s reluctance to link climate change to specific events to suggest that for political reasons, the media is more concerned about climate change than actual climate scientists are. However, Rhome clearly agreed that climate change is having an impact on storms, which is consistent with mainstream reporting on the issue. In fact, on September 28, CNN meteorologist Tom Sater reiterated Rhome’s point and added, “Since 1950 there have been seven landfall hurricanes in Florida that were a category 4 or 5 … the first 4 were each in a different decade. The last three — all in the last 5 years.”

On September 29, Carlson devoted a good chunk of his show to ranting about climate change as well. He was obsessively focused on hurricane frequency, arguing that somehow, a decrease in the numbers of storms would cancel out the plethora of other evidence indicating that the storm events themselves are intensifying. After citing a NOAA research overview highlighting that hurricanes are predicted to become more intense, Carlson went on to insist that “the claim is never proven,” and that “there’s no science behind these claims.” Later in the segment, he implied that humans cannot influence weather events because “they’re called natural disasters. … they’re products of nature, God is in charge.” He then discussed Hurricane Ian with Candace Owens, who has a long history of climate change denial. Owens reiterated that climate change does not exist because “if there was no human beings that walked the face of the planet, there would continue to be hurricanes, like there would continue to be blizzards, and like there would continue to be tornadoes.” She also used several other environmental concerns such as the hole in the ozone layer, which has diminished because of the Montreal Protocol, and ocean acidification, which remains a concern due to climate change, to try and argue that “they’ve been wrong over and over and over again."

[vid]

in September 28 edition of The Ingraham Angle, frequent Fox News guest and climate contrarian Michael Shellenberger and host Laura Ingraham told viewers that their personal experiences with extreme weather were untrustworthy and invalid. Ingraham implied that concerns about climate change only exist because people “feel that the ocean is warmer … but a feeling is not fact.” Shellenberger falsely claimed that hurricanes are “not intensifying right now, so any perception that hurricanes are more intense is just a perception fed by that relentless alarmist media.” Guest Mollie Hemmingway, editor-in-chief of The Federalist, later claimed that “the left” is pushing a “conspiracy theory” that “man-made climate change is the cause of hurricanes. … There’s just no evidence for this theory that people keep holding.” Hemmingway said this despite the fact that no one is claiming that climate change is the primary cause of hurricanes, rather it is one factor making them more dangerous,

hemmingway and Shellenberger also latched onto the idea that hurricane frequency is apparently the only metric that should concern the public, glossing over the very real dangers of threats like higher rainfall rates, which is the main factor that drives deaths and damage during a hurricane. They were fixated on the number of hurricanes that have occurred over different periods of time, using various irrelevant data points to unsuccessfully support their climate denial. They also downplayed damage caused by storms by saying that nowadays more people live in the areas most affected by hurricanes. Shellenberger first said that damage caused by hurricanes “has not increased at all” but then claimed that the increase in damage is due to the fact that “there’s more wealth in harm’s way,” going on to claim that the extreme weather events of the last several decades represent “an incredible success story for America,” because, in his telling, they could have been worse.

Before Ian made landfall, Sean Hannity hosted his favorite climate denier Joe Bastardi to emphasize that hurricane frequency in Florida has not increased. On September 28, Hannity said that the media should not discuss climate change because “this is hurricane season and during hurricane season, you usually have hurricanes like we did a hundred years ago.” Fox News contributor Lara Trump insisted that the Democrats' “marketing arm, the mainstream media” is “now trying to claim that one of the quietest hurricane seasons in 30 years is somehow due to climate change.” Finally, former governor of Arkansas Mike Huckabee, who was a guest on the show, said that people should reject the established science of climate change and instead of “worshipping that which is created rather than the creator … get back to the simple things of science and real faith and trust in God.”

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.

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tucker and watters assholes

https://www.mediamatters.org/martha-maccallum/fox-news-anchors-covering-hurricane-ian-dont-realize-puerto-rico-part-united

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// hayes

Fox News’ prime-time shows are fixated on Pennsylvania’s Senate race as the post-Labor Day sprint to the midterm elections gets underway. The programs mentioned Democratic nominee John Fetterman more frequently during that period than the Democratic nominees in six other competitive Senate races combined, andRepublican nominee Mehmet Oz was referenced more than twice as many times as any of the other GOP candidates, according to a Media Matters review.

Fetterman appears to be the Democratic nominee Fox prime time hosts fear most. With their dramatic, ongoing fixation on Pennsylvania’s lieutenant governor, they are trying to bail out Republicans after Sean Hannity’s zealous promotion of Oz stuck the party with an unpopular nominee (Fox support was also crucial for the Republican nominees in Arizona, Georgia, and Ohio). The hosts’ deceptive attacks on Fetterman’s health and his record on crime have often aligned squarely with Oz’s campaign message.

Media Matters reviewed Tucker Carlson Tonight, Hannity, and The Ingraham Angle* from September 6 through September 27 for mentions of the names of the Republican and Democratic nominees for Senate in the seven states FiveThirtyEight identified as most competitive: Nevada, Georgia, Wisconsin, North Carolina,** Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Arizona.

Fox personalities and guests uttered Fetterman’s name at least 120 times on Tucker Carlson Tonight, Hannity, and The Ingraham Angle, Media Matters found. The Democratic nominees in the other six states combined for only 96 mentions on those programs; Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) was referenced the next most frequently, with 34.

Oz’s 48 mentions led the field among GOP candidates, with Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) mentioned the next most with 19. Oz himself appeared on the programs 5 times over the period, more than any of the other Republican Senate nominees Media Matters examined.

The Pennsylvania race is the most discussed Senate election on all three programs, by sizable margins in each case. Sean Hannity, the sometime GOP political operative and adviser to Donald Trump, has given the midterm races significantly more attention than his prime-time colleagues. His broadcast has mentioned the Democratic and Republican Senate nominees a combined 171 times, compared to 79 for Laura Ingraham’s program and 73 for Tucker Carlson’s show. [grf]

the network’s stars are seemingly more interested in tearing down Democratic nominees than promoting Republican ones, with their programs referencing the former more often than the latter in every Senate race except for Wisconsin.

*Jesse Watters’ show, Jesse Watters Primetime, was not included in the study because it does not air in primetime; regardless, he devoted substantially less attention to the Senate races compared to his colleagues.

**None of the three Fox prime-time shows has mentioned the Senate nominees in North Carolina.

---

https://www.mediamatters.org/chris-hayes/chris-hayes-fox-news-particular-just-monomaniacally-obsessed-attacking-john-fetterman

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400x BS

https://www.mediamatters.org/critical-race-theory/fox-promoted-false-talking-point-protesting-parents-were-labeled-terrorists

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violent crime big in gop midterm eg mccarthy contract w am reboot

fox hellscapes

mma 9 22

JEANINE PIRRO (CO-HOST): The first thing that you've got to do is recognize that, not just McDonald's -- Caterpillar, Boeing, Citadel -- they're all leaving Chicago. I love Chicago, I lived in Chicago, it is one of my all time favorite cities, it's beautiful. And it's been destroyed.

...

This city is -- Chicago is descending into anarchy. And there's pain, and there's loss, and there's suffering. Instead of playing these nonsense political back and forth, why don't you go out into the community and find out what you can do for the people who are suffering? And by the way, part of your job, Mayor, is to make sure that the economy is good. And the one thing you don't do is trash employers, especially big employers, in your city.

So you're not worried about crime because you're making great progress and, you know, you want to fight with the business leaders. I mean, Chicago is a mess right now. And it's because we've got people and politicians like this woman who have no idea how to run a city, no idea how to stop crime.

LISA KENNEDY MONTGOMERY (CO-HOST): I actually -- I disagree with you there. She runs the city into the ground.

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https://www.mediamatters.org/climate-deniers/right-wing-media-are-outraged-biden-spent-tenth-his-un-speech-climate-change

Right-wing media are expressing outrage that President Joe Biden mentioned climate change during his September 21 speech at the United Nations General Assembly.

Biden’snearly-30 minute speech, which focused mainly on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, also included calls for global cooperation on important issues including food insecurity, human rights, and climate change. The climate part of his speech lasted roughly 3 minutes and included celebrating the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act. He also touched on recent climate disasters and the need for global emissions reductions, as well as promising billions of dollars in international climate finance.

Despite the relatively modest amount of time he spent on climate change, many in right-wing media were outraged that he even mentioned climate at all. Their comments included climate denial and falsehoods about the importance of climate change to the global community.

Right-wing media falsely claimed that the global population doesn’t care about climate change

Climate change is a serious concern around the world. For example, a January 2021 survey found that a majority of people around the globe want greater climate action. And a September 2021 Pew poll found that the world’s population increasingly views climate change as a personal threat. In August of this year, another Pew survey found that a “​​median of 75% across 19 countries in North America, Europe and the Asia-Pacific region label global climate change as a major threat.”

Additionally, people from the global south — those who have contributed the least to the climate crisis but disproportionately suffer its effects — are often some of the loudest voices for climate action. Around the same time that Biden gave his UN speech, indigenous peoples from around the world were protesting in New York for climate justice. The president of Kenya made climate change a key part of his UN speech, and the prime minister of Pakistan, a country that has seen over 30 million displaced due to climate-fueled monsoon flooding, thanked Biden for “highlighting the plight of the flood victims.”

Climate change and poverty, meanwhile, are inextricably linked, as are climate change and global hunger. These facts, however, were still not enough to convince right-wing commentators in the U.S. that climate change is a significant threat to the global population.

For example, on the September 22 edition of Newsmax’s Wake Up America, host Rob Finnerty stated that “there's 193 sovereign nations in that room right there. … And nobody cared about that part of the speech. They needed a lot more from the American president, with everything going on in the world right now, and they get climate change.”

On Fox News’ Fox & Friends, co-host Steve Doocy insinuated that people living in poverty don’t care about climate change, stating, “Suddenly he’s talking about climate change. And, you know, there are 675 million people living in poverty around the world. And for the president of the United States to be talking about climate change rather than trying to figure out a way to feed them.”

Doocy also entirely missed the fact that Biden did discuss food in his speech; he mentioned the term “food insecurity” 6 times, while also mentioning “feeding the world.”

The editorial board of the right-wing New York Post also claimed that the world's poor don’t care about climate change. They referred to climate change as part of a “laundry list of left-liberal shout-outs,” before writing that the speech focused “on climate change, which Biden claimed lists first among the ‘challenges that matter most to people’s lives.’ The planet’s 674 million people living in abject poverty don’t agree, Joe.”

Right-wing media also dipped into one of their favorite overused talking points when it comes to climate change: U.S. action is worthless because China is the biggest polluter

There were also criticisms claiming China does not care about climate change. Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade remarked about Biden’s climate comments that “climate change is unbelievable. The fact is that China could not care less.” On Wake Up America, The Daily Caller’s Briana Lyman took this China criticism a step further, stating that if “you want to talk about climate change, then you need to talk about China because China is responsible for more than double the emissions of the United States. … I think it's a dereliction of duty when he doesn't tie China and climate change together.”

Kilmeade’s comments ignore the fact that China is by far the largest market for clean energy in the world, and that its pledge to become carbon neutral by 2060 came about a year before the U.S. passed major climate legislation. Yes, its coal plants (and emissions) are a huge problem, but to say that the country doesn’t care about climate change (especially when an unprecedented heat wave just hit the country) is absurd.

Regarding Lyman’s comments, Biden did mention that the United States “will work with every nation, including our competitors, to solve global problems like climate change.” Immediately after this, he referenced China and said the U.S. will not seek out conflict with them.

Lyman also touched on a longtime right-wing trope about climate change: that countries like China are the problem because they currently emit the most carbon, and because of this, it’s foolish to think that the U.S. should act on climate change. But the United States is the largest historical emitter; per capita emissions in the U.S. vastly outweigh those of China; and many of our products are manufactured in China.

Solely blaming China while absolving the U.S. for its own pollution problems and its outsized role in spreading climate denial does nothing for solving climate change in the long run.

Right-wing media also exaggerated the time Biden spent talking about climate change, and they threw in some good-old-fashioned climate denial

Three minutes out of 30 is arguably not enough time to devote to a problem that has led to a summer of destructive extreme weather across the globe. But it was still enough to annoy right-wing media figures.

Again on Wake Up America, host Rob Finnerty stated that “the president spent a lot of time talking about climate change during his speech. … This, of course, coming at a crucially important time. We’re seven months into the worst war in Europe that we've seen since World War II, and the president took the opportunity to campaign for Democrats and talk about climate change.” Additionally, on the September 21 edition of Kudlow, guest Steve Moore falsely claimed that “he spent half the time talking about climate change.”

Perhaps the worst reaction came from Newsmax host Eric Bolling, who went on a climate denial rant on the September 21 edition of Eric Bolling The Balance. He called climate change “another made-up crisis lurking just around the corner,” adding, “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” He then blamed Al Gore for supposedly inaccurate predictions about climate change and chastised former President Barack Obama for buying a house near the sea despite being concerned about rising sea levels.

The right-wing blow-up over Biden’s climate comments is not surprising. To these figures and outlets, any action on climate, big or small, is akin to a radical socialist takeover of the U.S. economy. In particular, the right has increased its climate denial and criticism of climate policies in recent months. As climate change worsens and global citizens come together to clamor for climate action, right-wing media will continue todouble down on denial and lies to protect their polluting interests.

Related

Fox News’ vicious response to the California heat wave is a harbinger of things to come

09/16/22

As a climate-fueled heat wave stresses California's electric grid, right-wing media are disingenuously attacking electric vehicles

09/02/22

The Inflation Reduction Act is not the Green New Deal no matter what Fox News says

08/19/22

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timing? Lula up in polls

https://www.mediamatters.org/tucker-carlson/coup-shaped-hole-tucker-carlsons-new-film-about-brazil

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Fox News host on the homeless: “It was more civilized when we banished them to asylums and put them in strait jackets”

09/22/22

Fox News host calls the homeless “an invasive species”

09/22/22

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