Fox7 bak

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

how xian is fox?

see gubmint control tyrant ~ freedumb

see misogyny

escalator gt replacement

bak 2 23

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

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

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...

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.'"

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.

"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."

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 ove her 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.

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

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

ss fact check by WH

"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...

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

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

~ ilhan omar

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 been**bankrolled 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:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}: 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.

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

we just cough all over each other

----

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

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

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

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?

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 theNational 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.

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.

"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.

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.

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.”

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.”

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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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Here are some key takeaways:

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:

Tucker Carlson released a multipart propaganda reel painting the attack as a false flag operation to purge patriots.
Ingraham Angle host Laura Ingraham maligned the House select committee as “bad programming.”
Mark Levin, speaking on his radio show, threatenedstaffers for the House select committee after claiming that Trump’s potential witness tampering could not be a crime.
Network hosts downplayed testimony from key witnesses and those close to Trump and his inner circle.
Major Fox figures repeatedly validated the rioters as patriotic and nonviolent protestors comparable to those from the civil rights movement.

Fox News has also continued to peddle election conspiracy theories -- this time around the November midterms -- and attacks on Dominion during the last year:

In November 2022, Carlson implied that the use of electronic voting machines is a “threat to democracy” as the machines “didn’t allow people to vote apparently” and shook their “faith in the system.”
As early voting began in Georgia’s midterm elections, Fox hosts repeatedly claimed that there was no voter suppression did not exist, while simultaneously ignoring armed voter intimidation in Arizona.
Carlson, along with Mark Levin, primed their Fox viewers in October to doubt the validity of the following month's Pennsylvania Senate election over debunked claims of voter fraud.
Fox News also jumped on the bandwagon of spreading suspicion about the 2022 Arizona gubernatorial election results:
- Fox host Pete Hegseth cast doubt on why ballots were still being counted, mentioned that then-Secretary of State Katie Hobbs “is in charge of the elections there,” and said, “We don’t know whether people are cheating or not.” Hegseth lamented the rate of ballot counting in Arizona, stating, “You want to see a threat to democracy? It’s what we’re watching in Arizona right now.”
- Carlson hosted Republican candidate Kari Lake to sow doubt about why the race had not been called yet, and set her up to join him in validating online insinuations that Hobbs “knew she could sit back, hide in the basement, do nothing and win due to cheating.”
- Fox anchor Maria Bartiromo hosted Lake to discuss election machine tabulation issues and repeatedly asked Lake why Hobbs had not recused herself, suggesting it was inappropriate for her to oversee an election she was running in.
- Carlson insinuated nefarious motives behind the machine issues and suggested Democrats could be intentionally cheating, asking, “Is this fraud? We're not sure. And on some level it doesn't matter what it is. What we know is that the mechanics of our elections are not working, almost exclusively in states and cities run by Democrats. Are they cheating?”
- Hannity claimed that votes “magically appeared” while ballots were being counted in Arizona, saying, “What, they just magically appeared? How do we keep adding hundreds of thousands of votes to the vote count that were not counted?”

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https://www.mediamatters.org/january-6-insurrection/fox-personalities-dismiss-january-6-committees-criminal-referrals-trump

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-barely-covered-house-reports-detailing-problems-donald-trumps-tax-returns

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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.

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.

“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.”

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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:

Fox host Larry Kudlow: Oil and gas companies are “the greatest industry in this country … the greatest industry around the world.” Fox News, *America Reports*, [3/8/22]
American Petroleum Institute President Mike Sommers: “Some of the policies that are being pursued right now by this administration are putting us on a road to more dependence — not independence.”:{ Fox News, :(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:*The Faulkner Focus*:{, :(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:[3/9/22:{]}:
Fox Business host Charles Payne:“It’s unfortunate that the president of the United States would do this, but I’ve seen a whole lot of this kind of stuff.First of all, they get to attack the war. They don't like capitalism. The word profit is a four-letter word to them. And you know, these are companies that hire Americans. Why are you demonizing them? It's nuts. We are blessed to have the oil under our feet.” Fox News, *America Reports*, [3/16/22]
Frequent Fox guest Rick Perry: Criticizing the oil and gas industry is “unpatriotic," and the administration needs to “take the food off of the neck of the oil and gas industry.”:{ Fox News, :(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:*America’s Newsroom*:{, :(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:[3/9/22:{]}:

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:

API President Mike Sommers: “We all know that the real reason for high prices are a consequence of low production because of some of these Biden administration policies, but also some other factors that are going on throughout the world. So — but this is a typical blame game that we see all the time on Capitol Hill. It is pretty outrageous, though, that they're hauling American executives that supply 11 million American jobs up before Congress to blame them for something that they themselves can be blamed for.” Fox News, *America’s Newsroom*, [4/6/22]
Fox correspondent Chad Pergram: “Democrats who control the House, Senate, and White House are struggling to address the price surge, so they need a scapegoat. Oil companies. Attacking big business is good politics for the Democratic base. Democrats tried to focus on profits and turned on the witnesses.” Fox News, *America Reports*, [4/6/22]
Fox anchor Sandra Smith:“That is an incredibly important picture that they are painting because they are being demonized for the billions in profits that they are making in 2021. And that is the case. We ran a brain room research here for all the witnesses, companies that were there, Shell, BP, Chevron, Exxon, and I have in front of me, Joe: BP making $7 billion in 2021 while it lost 20 billion in 2020. You got Shell making 20 billion in 2020; it lost more than that — 21 billion in 2020. This is the environment those oil companies have to navigate.”:{ Fox News, :(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:*America Reports*:{, :(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:[4/6/22:{]}:

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:

Fox guest Wesley Hunt: “He's got his words wrong. It's not about energy transition; it's about energy addition. … The bottom line is this — it's an all-hands-on-deck approach to fulfill the energy needs of this country. … This administration is trying to kill our industry, but we are not going to allow that to happen.”Fox News, *Fox & Friends First*, [5/24/22]
Fox host Brian Kilmeade: “We could be stepping up, an opportunity, as bad as things are, to step up with natural gas. That's what the president should be doing, saying I need my natural gas community to step up and help our allies in the time of war and the time of strife and the time of stress. Instead he said this could be a good thing. We'll all be doing -- we’ll all be having clean burning vehicles, which by the way natural gas is clean burning.:{” Fox News, :(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:*Fox & Friends*:{, :(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:[5/24/22:{]}:
Fox Business correspondent Jackie DeAngelis: “This administration loves to attack Big Oil,” and the fossil fuel industry’s selfless act of producing oil it didn’t have to produce was for “the American people.” Fox News, *America Reports*, [5/31/22]

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:

Fox host Sean Hannity: “While Biden suffers more blunders abroad, ask yourself, why is Biden so hostile to American oil and gas and domestic production? Why has he been so soft on American adversaries like China because he's given them our Strategic Petroleum Reserves and he's giving them a pipeline to Vladimir Putin. :{Fox News, :(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:*Hannity*:{, :(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:[7/14/22:{]}:
Fox host Katie Pavlich: “Instead of ramping up domestic energy production to combat sky high prices here, Biden left with no choice but to beg Saudi dictators for more oil.” Fox News, *The Five*, [7/14/22]
Oil executives interviewed by Fox correspondent Lauren Simonetti: The oil industry is “demonized” by Biden and American energy is produced in an “environmentally responsible way.” Fox News, *America Reports*, [7/15/22]

Finally, in July, Biden made a major climate announcement in Massachusetts.

Fox contributor Brian Brenberg: “I think most of America wishes the coal plant was still there because … more people could be in a cool environment and be safer.” :{Fox News, :(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:*Your World with Neil Cavuto*:{, :(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:[7/20/22:{]}:

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.”

- Fox anchor Neil Cavuto: “I want to echo again, there is no evidence, there was no evidence, there has been no evidence that gouging was going on of the oil companies, or the gas giants, were, you know, colluding to rig prices or all of a sudden take advantage of a bad situation by doing this sort of thing:{.” Fox News, :(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:*Your World with Neil Cavuto*:{, :(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:[9/29/22:{]}:

In October, OPEC+ cut oil production.

- Fox anchor Martha MacCallum: “There's no reason why we can't be energy independent. As you say, we have been before.” MacCallum continued, “We basically scolded a lot of our energy companies out of expanding and growing their businesses because they have been told by several administrations, not the last one, that they were going to be out of business soon. Fox News, *The Story with Martha MacCallum*, [10/12/22]
- Fox anchor Dagen McDowell: “[Biden] won’t open our spigots wide open and start pumping all that delicious natural resources. … Four years ago, we were a net exporter of petroleum products, first time since 1949. We were the swing producer in the world; we controlled world oil prices. … Joe Biden could do that, but he won’t because he is obviously both a masochist because he likes taking it from Saudi Arabia and also a sadist because he likes inflicting pain on the people of the United States:{.” Fox News, :(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:*The Five*:{, :(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:[10/15/22:{]}:
- Rep. Pat Fallon (R-TX): “Unleash the American energy sector, and oh by the way, don’t declare absolute total war on them, which is what the administration has done over the past two years. … We do it cleaner, so if you care about the environment, you should be rooting for American energy:{.” Fox News, :(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:*Fox Report with Jon Scott*:{, :(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:[10/15/22:{]}:

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.

- Fox contributor Sean Duffy attacked the fund for its lack of focus on fossil fuel usage:“This money isn’t free, right? So, when they offer money from this development fund to these poorer nations there’s going to be strings attached, which means you can’t develop carbon-based energy, and carbon-based energy is the cheapest energy. And If you want your economy to grow, if you want to manufacture and transportation, you need carbon.” Fox News, *The Big Sunday Show*, [11/20/22]
- Fox contributor Marc Thiessen claimed that it’s actually climate policies, and not fossil fuels, that will destroy the world: “If anyone owes poor countries anything, it is the climate extremists.… They would drive billions of people out of the middle class and stop billions more from getting into the middle class. So this would do more damage, the climate activists would do more damage to prosperity, more damage to the GDP of these countries than any of the solutions they offer and so the war on fossil fuels is what is hurting the developing world, not anything else:{.” Fox News, :(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:*America’s Newsroom*:{, :(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:[11/21/22:{]}:
- Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) suggested Biden’s energy policy is like something his dog would do: “President Biden's energy policy looks like something Roger used to keep under my back porch. It is a fact that America has the greatest economy, strongest economy in all of human history. We can't run it without fossil fuels, not today, not tomorrow. It is also a fact that through reserves and technology, America can produce every drop of oil and natural gas that we need and have extra left over to sell to our friends.” Fox News, *Fox & Friends*, [11/30/22]
- Fox Business host Charles Payne: “We've been indoctrinated in this over the last couple of decades to movies. You turn on a faucet and fire comes out instead of water. And you know how fracking became a four-letter word in this country for a long time, even though it created the energy independence that you described, it created an amazing number of jobs, it revitalized small or rural towns, it wasseen as enemy number 1 by folks who don't care.” Fox News, *Hannity*, [11/28/22]
- Fox goes on an anti-climate justice marathon after COP27 reparations agreement
- 11/23/22 1:32 PM EST
- Climate denial abounds on Fox as Hurricane Ian devastates Florida
- 09/30/22 2:52 PM EDT
- Fox News platforms climate denial and the Great Reset conspiracy theory during COP27
- 11/14/22

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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.

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-host-claims-biden-administration-hopes-rescind-title-42-goal-changing-america-forever

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.

https://www.mediamatters.org/jesse-watters/jesse-watters-most-egregious-attacks-against-women-2022

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-rooting-kevin-mccarthys-house-speakership-bid-while-**oan-airs-opposition**

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.

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-host-says-kids-committed-suicide-because-twitter-didnt-amplify-conservative-covid

https://www.alternet.org/2022/11/fox-news-club-q/

mass shooting

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-host-compares-imaginary-war-christmas-d-day-and-american-revolution

1 min on ---?

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-neglected-cover-trump-organizations-multiple-convictions-tax-fraud-0

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-has-given-trumps-call-termination-constitution-one-minute-coverage

// 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.

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"

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.

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.

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

:{On Twitter, Fox host Laura Ingraham called for Big Tech to be reined in, comparing Twitter blocking the unconfirmed story about Hunter Biden to Russian interference in U.S. elections. In a December 2 tweet, Ingraham said, “Russian interference & meddling? Tonight we expose Twitter interference & meddling in the 2020 campaign. Sleazier than we thought—it’s time to rein in Big Tech. GOP better do it.” :(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:Twitter, [12/2/22]
Students for Trump founder Ryan Fournier claimed that Joe Biden won the 2020 election because Twitter helped him, calling the report “damning.”Fournier tweeted on December 2, “The Twitter Files release is damning. Everything we believed is being confirmed true. Twitter colluded in the 2020 election and helped Biden win.” Twitter, [12/2/22]
Far-right conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec asserted that Twitter’s decision to suppress the New York Post story amounted to a “digital insurrection.” Twitter, [12/2/22]
----
judicial Watch President Tom Fitton, who helped Trump devise a strategy to claim that the 2020 election was stolen, claimed the Twitter Files proved that Democrats and Big Tech worked together to get Biden elected. In a series of tweets, Fitton said that the “Democratic Party (DNC) colluded with @Twitter to censor opponents just before 2020 election. #ElectionInterference,” and claimed, “Assault on democratic gov't and more election interference CONFIRMED in @ElonMusk's @Twitter files.” Twitter, [12/2/22; 12/2/22]
Conservative comedian Terrence K. Williams insinuated that the suppression of the Hunter Biden story was the reason Trump lost the 2020 election. On December 2, Williams tweeted, “Twitter interfered with the 2020 Election and those involved should be held accountable. President Trump should be in the White House right now.” Twitter, [12/2/22]
On Fox & Friends, co-host Pete Hegseth chalked up Twitter’s actions to election interference while acting as “an arm of the Democratic National Committee.” Co-host Steve Doocy admitted that “there is no smoking gun per se,” but Hegseth erroneously claimed that voters didn’t “get to read about” the heavily covered Hunter Biden story, “which means they're not factored in when they vote, which is the definition of election interference.” Fox News, :{Fox & Friends:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:, [12/5/22]

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

- Jack Posobiec attempted to paint Taibbi’s report as evidence to impeach Biden. On Twitter, Posobiec called for an impeachment inquiry into Biden because “the Twitter Files show Twitter was Censoring [users based] on Direct Requests from the Biden Team in October 2020.” Twitter, [12/2/22]
- Conservative commentator Buck Sexton claimed that the story constituted a “massive scandal, and Biden should rightly be IMPEACHED for it.” Twitter, [12/2/22]
- ---
  - fox News host Jesse Watters wrongly characterized Biden as the sitting president in 2020 to assert collusion between Twitter and the White House. He incorrectly asserted, “The Biden White House had a direct line to challenge and take down content they didn't like.” Fox News, *Jesse Watters Primetime*, [12/2/22]
  - On Fox’s Hannity, guest Tammy Bruce claimed that Twitter and Facebook were acting as “agents of the state” in suppressing the story.Bruce ended her appearance by bizarrely asserting that Twitter had single handedly “abolished” the First Amendment. Fox News,*Hannity*, [12/2/22]

Right-wing figures demanded that Twitter employees involved in blocking the New York Post story face prosecution or jail time

- - Terrence K. Williams called for “every Twitter employee who interfered in the 2020 Election” to be arrested. Twitter, [12/2/22]

[twt]

Fox host Jeanine Pirro said on Fox & Friends Weekend that the Twitter Files story “amounts to election interference, and when have you the suppression of the First Amendment – free speech – that results in election interference [but not hush money to hookers], there’s got to be a prosecution.”She also insisted that “we already know” Trump would have won the election if Twitter did not suppress the Hunter Biden story. Fox News, *Fox & Friends Weekend*, [12/4/22]

Right-wing pundits expressed disappointment that Musk and Taibbi didn’t reveal a “smoking gun” but insisted that Twitter violated the First Amendment

- - Conservative radio host Sebastian Gorka admitted to being “deeply underwhelmed” by Taibbi’s thread, saying: “We know the Dems in DC collude with the Dems in Palo Alto. Big Whop. Need a paper trail of felonies. Elon better have that.”Gorka went on to explain during a Twitter Spaces Q&A with Musk on December 3 that what Taibbi cites in his thread doesn’t show government suppression, isn’t a First Amendment violation, and therefore isn’t “a smoking gun.” Twitter, [12/2/22; 12/5/22]
  - Washington Free Beacon reporter Andrew Kerr tweeted that none of the photos referenced by Taibbi “appear to show Hunter engaged in illegal activities.” He went on to call it “newsworthy that team Biden was asking Twitter to remove any tweets period.” Twitter, [12/2/22]
  - Washington Free Beacon reporter Chuck Ross tweeted that “there has to be an interesting story on how Twitter decided to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story, but we didn’t see it tonight.” He added, “FBI was meeting with Twitter on a weekly basis in 2020. Let’s see the docs about that.” Twitter, [12/2/22]
  - Right-wing personalities the Hodgetwins tweeted, “It % is, collusion between govt. and big tech to violate the First Amendment.” The tweet was in reply to one from Musk saying, “If this isn’t a violation of the Constitution’s First Amendment, what is?” Twitter, [12/2/22]
  - Tom Fitton said that the Twitter files “further confirm” the Democratic Party’s “opposition to the First Amendment.” Twitter, [12/2/22]

[twt]
- - miranda Devine, a New York Post columnist who writes frequently about Hunter Biden and Big Tech, confessed on Fox’s Tucker Carlson Tonight that the Twitter Files were “not really the smoking gun we'd hoped for.” She went on to accuse Musk of withholding documents that “law enforcement specifically warned off Twitter from our story.” Fox News, *Tucker Carlson Tonight*, [12/2/22]
  - Fox News legal analyst Gregg Jarrett claimed that “Musk deserves a medal for revealing how the Biden campaign, FBI and media censored the Hunter Biden scandal.” In an opinion piece published at FoxNews.com, Jarrett alleged that “the Biden campaign team and Democratic operatives —with a key assist from partisans at the FBI— applied pressure on the social media giant Twitter to block the story.” He later wrote that “it is a violation of the First Amendment for the government to engage in censorship either overtly or covertly,” which “includes the FBI manipulating or coercing companies to behave as proxies to accomplish otherwise prohibited censorship.” Fox News, [12/6/22]

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.

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.”

:{Fox & Friends First:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}: co-host Todd Piro asked, “Have we learned no lessons from the … failure of masks?” He added, “These people, Barbara Ferrer, that you saw there, the entireestablishmentthat is pushing more masking, more lockdowns, they are power hungry. And they refuse to acknowledge that COVID is something we cannot prevent at this point, but something we have to deal with.”
:{Fox & Friends:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}: co-host:{ Brian Kilmeade:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}: said: “Masks don’t work. … What is wrong with these people?”
Later in the program, Kilmeade portrayed a masking mandate as intentional sabotage on people’s lives and children’s schooling, saying: “The problem is too many people enjoying their lives going back to normal. Let's try to screw them up again.”
Fox’s :{America’s Newsroom:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}: interviewed **Fox contributor Caitlyn Jenner** for her inexpert opinion on the efficacy of face masks. During the interview, Jenner said: “I don’t think they work very well.” She later added: “I think our public health director is kind of like a little mini [NIAID Director Dr. Anthony] Fauci, wanting the control that they have.”
Fox Business host Steve Hilton claimed that masks “make practically no differencein the preventing of the transmission of this virus,” then ranted: “Can you believe we're back here again, yet again? You have these lunatics, these bureaucrats, totally unaccountable – Barbara Ferrer, the half a million dollar a year woman who runs public health in Los Angeles – not a medical doctor, parading these totally bogus metrics, right, about cases and whatever. How does she know what the cases are? People are testing on their own at home privately. It's not reported. It's complete BS. The whole thing is total BS, and I hope nobody pays any attention to it at all.”
On Twitter, Hilton also urged LA residents to “rise up and say enough is enough.”

fox stepford mat'l

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-keeps-booking-pharmaceutical-heir-whose-mom-paid-specialist-deprogram-her-wokism

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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.

VideoCitationFrom the November 29, 2022, edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends

“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.

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.

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/despite-fox-news-claims-contrary-voters-are-concerned-about-climate-change

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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.

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.

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.

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

11/14/22 4:05 PM EST

Fox election

Fox News lost the 2022 midterms. The only question is by how much.

11/09/22 12:35 PM EST

Tucker Carlson in the hot dog meme costume

Tucker Carlson is trying to find the guy who did this

11/10/22 11:43 AM EST

Musk GOP

The GOP’s corrupt bargain with Elon Musk

11/07/22 12:53 PM EST

The Twitter logo in red with blue check marks in the background

Elon Musk's Twitter gave blue check marks to right-wing extremists and conspiracy theorists. They are already spreading hate.

11/10/22 6:05 PM EST

An image of Elon Musk wearing sunglasses with the Twitter logo taking up his forehead

Twitter CEO Elon Musk is catering to far-right accounts promoting bigotry, extremism, and misinformation

11/07/22 6:34 PM EST

Featured:

Voting Arizona

Election deniers turn Maricopa County, Arizona into conspiracy theory flashpoint

11/08/22 6:42 PM EST

steve bannon

Steve Bannon lost

11/10/22 10:16 AM EST

tiktok election

TikTok fails to detect election misinformation, doesn’t penalize repeat distributors

11/08/22 5:12 PM EST

Fox News host says “we need these ladies to get married” following Republicans weak performance with single women

11/09/22 7:49 PM EST

Spotify's Joe Rogan falsely claims being trans is a “cult-like” mental illness

11/09/22 12:17 PM EST

Right-wing media spread misinformation about Maricopa County voting machines

11/08/22 12:34 PM EST

Tucker Carlson election fraud

Tucker Carlson primes his audience to suspect fraud if the GOP doesn't sweep the midterms

11/04/22 12:18 PM EDT

Mike Lindell: “I don’t think there’s a judge in this country that can’t say we need a new election down there in Arizona”

11/15/22 12:34 PM EST

Tucker Carlson’s Arizona face-plant

11/15/22 11:54 AM EST

iHeart’s Jesse Kelly bemoans the US team's use of a rainbow crest in the World Cup: “I do not serve a nation of degeneracy”

11/15/22 11:33 AM EST

Fox News correspondent mocks Katie Hobbs after the network calls her win in AZ gubernatorial race

11/15/22 10:21 AM EST

Charlie Kirk and guests discuss recalling Arizona's Governor-elect Katie Hobbs

11/15/22 9:20 AM EST

Fox News hosts Adam Carolla to analyze Arizona gubernatorial election results

11/14/22 10:23 PM EST

Watch Rachel Maddow connect Steve Bannon to potential election denialism in Arizona

11/14/22 9:53 PM EST

Elon Musk amplified conspiracy theories about FTX’s collapse as he faces scrutiny over his tenure as Twitter’s CEO

11/14/22 6:32 PM EST

Right-wing media figures turn on RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel

11/14/22 5:28 PM EST

Sean Hannity casts doubt on “integrity” of elections in Arizona

11/14/22 5:16 PM EST

Tucker Carlson scrapes the bottom of the barrel in friendly interview with Steve King, one of the most racist Republicans in recent memory

11/14/22 4:30 PM EST

Echoing his pre-January 6 rhetoric, Steve Bannon now demands Arizona refuse to certify midterm election results

11/14/22

A Fox News report about Paul Pelosi’s attacker, briefly annotated

10/28/22 7:55 PM EDT

Paul Pelosi

The right-wing ecosystem that created the Paul Pelosi conspiracy theory

10/31/22 12:47 PM EDT

Fox host on the Paul Pelosi attack: “Doesn't add up”

10/30/22 12:15 PM EDT

Fox News advertisers:

Fox-News-Advertisers-03.png

These are Fox News' leading advertisers

07/26/19 1:37 PM EDT

tucker-carlson-diversity.jpg

These are Tucker Carlson’s leading advertisers

12/19/18 12:00 PM EST

Ingraham.png

These are Laura Ingraham's leading advertisers

10/29/19 12:15 PM EDT

Special

PROGRAMS

Dedicated teams focusing on core progressive issues.

ABORTION RIGHTS & REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH

Fox News’ strategy for abortion messaging in the 2022 midterms is denying there’s an issue at all

10/25/22 11:28 AM EDT

Mainstream outlets downplay Mehmet Oz’s comment that local politicians should be involved in abortion decisions

10/26/22 6:02 PM EDT

After years of decrying abortion, right-wing media now look the other way on bombshell reporting that Herschel Walker paid for one

10/06/22 12:25 PM EDT

CLIMATE & ENERGY

carlson_diesel

There is no truth to the right-wing myth of a catastrophic diesel shortage

11/04/22 10:55 AM EDT

What to expect: Climate disinformation ahead of COP27

11/04/22 10:14 AM EDT

In discussing the Pennsylvania Senate debate, cable TV news almost entirely ignores Mehmet Oz’s past comments on fracking

10/28/22 11:03 AM EDT

GUNS & PUBLIC SAFETY

Assault style rifle

The media’s guide to covering gun violence

06/09/22 1:50 PM EDT

Far-right media trumpet conspiracy theory that the Buffalo and Uvalde mass shootings were “false flag” operations

06/03/22 10:14 AM EDT

Here are 50 solutions Fox News offered after the Uvalde massacre. None of them address easy access to guns.

05/25/22 5:59 PM EDT

LGBTQ

Matt Walsh

Matt Walsh’s sordid history as a radio host, exposed

10/04/22 2:26 PM EDT

After Twitter lifted Libs of TikTok’s suspension, the viral anti-LGBTQ account immediately returned to targeting educators and a children's hospital

10/03/22 7:21 PM EDT

Right-wing media spread doctored footage of a drag queen to concoct fear of Pride events sexualizing children

09/29/22 12:09 PM EDT

John Solomon is a representative for Trump to the National Archives. Many of his claims about the case are false.

08/25/22 8:17 AM EDT

solomon-maralago

Right-wing media claim Trump can declassify documents with a “magic wand”

08/24/22 5:14 PM EDT

Right-wing media erroneously claim Biden “facilitated” search of Mar-a-Lago

08/25/22 2:05 PM EDT

Media Matters for America

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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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.

“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.”

hannity

https://www.mediamatters.org/social-security/fox-lying-about-gop-plans-cut-social-security-and-medicare

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.

In the nine weeks after Labor Day, Fox weekday hosts and anchors interviewed Republican nominees in eight competitive U.S. Senate races more than twice as frequently as MSNBC and CNN hosted their Democratic opponents — combined. A single Fox host, Sean Hannity, aired more interviews with the Republican candidates over that period than CNN and MSNBC's prime-time blocks combined aired interviews with all candidates.

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

[grf]
republican nominees have been particularly frequent guests on Fox’s popular prime-time shows, Tucker Carlson Tonight, Hannity, and The Ingraham Angle. The hosts of those programs are seasoned Republican propagandists who in some cases endorsed the candidates and helped them win their primaries. Republican politicians can expect that those interviews will feature pillow-soft questioning aimed at ensuring their victory.
The eight Republican candidates we reviewed totaled 48 appearances on Fox prime time over the period of the study.

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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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

Fox News’ David Lee Miller uncritically cited the discredited report in his coverage of Krasner’s impeachment, saying, “A portion of their interim report says violent crime in Philadelphia increased to unprecedented and unacceptable levels during DA Krasner's watch.”
During an interview with Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), Fox anchor Harris Faulkner misleadingly cited total murder numbers as opposed to per capita numbers, saying, “The numbers don't lie. More than 380 murders in Philadelphia this year. New York and Los Angeles nearly as bad. The people want change. Those are blue cities. The people want change. Recall efforts are now underway to try to boot Krasner from his position.”
On October 25, Faulkner again promoted the attempt to oust Krasner: “Outrage in Philadelphia over liberal District Attorney Larry Krasner. A scathing nw report details his dismal failure to keep crime under control. He has been under pressure before. Now it's really on.”
Fox News host Jeanine Pirro attacked Krasner as “inept” and a “liar” before adding, “He should not be DA. He should be the public defender.”
Right-wing Pennsylvania radio host Chris Stigall called for arresting Krasner for not complying with a subpoena from the state legislature: “If we had a Republican governor like DeSantis in Florida you know what we'd do? At bare minimum suspend Larry Krasner if not outright arrest him today for not complying with the subpoena.”

Blaming Krasner for high crime rates

Fox News correspondent Bryan Llenas parroted GOP talking points, saying, “Republicans insist it has everything to do with Krasner. Since he was elected DA in 2017, the city's murder rate is up 70% while retail theft, armed robbery, property, and violent crime all continue to surge.”
Fox News anchor Julie Banderas claimed Krasner’s policies have failed, citing one example: “The latest example of Philadelphia's progressive district attorney Larry Krasner and his soft-on-crime policies are not working out. This is horrendous. A Philadelphia man — here’s just one example — who was exonerated for a 2012 murder in Philadelphia is now the suspect in a recent deadly shooting.”
Former GOP Senate candidate George Bochetto attacked Krasner on Fox & Friends, saying, “Larry Krasner, our district attorney, refuses to carry out his responsibilities. Refuses to enforce bail. Refuses to violate parole violators and put them back in jail.”
Fox News correspondent Nate Foy said: “Krasner is often blamed for the murder of Philadelphia police officer James O'Connor in 2020” because “Krasner's office let him [the shooter] walk free without bail.”

Linking Krasner to George Soros

Fox News host Tucker Carlson claimed there is “an attempt, of course, to destroy the middle class” with crime, adding, “So in Philadelphia a lot of these crimes can be traced to one man, Soros-backed DA Larry Krasner. He’s decided not to charge many robbers with crimes. … If you stop charging people with certain crimes, they commit more of them. That seems like an obvious observation. And again, it's more evidence this is not an accident.”
While discussing crime in Philadelphia, Fox News contributor Leo Terrell said: “The Democrats have abandoned the victims and for some crazy, perverted reason are backing the criminals. I can mention two words, George Soros, George Soros, George Soros, because his money is allowing these prosecutors to stay in office.”
Along with displaying a photo of Krasner, Fox host Laura Ingraham said: “So, as the bodies keep piling up needlessly in districts run by Soros-picked DAs, is it not worth asking, ‘What would save more lives today? Gun control, or recalling every DA that George Soros funded?’”
Fox & Friends Weekend co-host Will Cain fearmongered about Soros spending “$40 million in the past 10 years, to electing DAs like Alvin Bragg, Kim Fox in Chicago, Larry Krasner in Philadelphia. And by the way, that's only a sampling. Fifty percent of your district attorneys in the biggest cities across the country are elected with the backing of George Soros.”
Fox News host Jesse Watters said Krasner was “funded with big bucks by George Soros,” adding, “In Philly, where under Larry Krasner — they call him Uncle Larry — the city has seen a surge in violence.”

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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.

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-host-launches-vicious-attacks-gisele-fetterman-has-bisexual-brazilian-immigrant

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.”

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

https://www.mediamatters.org/climate-deniers/right-wing-media-used-opec-oil-cuts-blame-biden-domestic-gas-price-volatility

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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.

Former Secretary of State under Trump and Fox News contributor Mike Pompeo: “Energy independence doesn't just mean lower costs for Americans. It means not having to beg Venezuelan dictators or the Iranian regime for more oil.” Twitter, [10/9/22]
Host columnist for the conservative The Washington Times and Newsmax contributor Kelly Sadler on Newsmax’s Wake Up America: “They [Democrats] want to put the fossil fuel industry out of business…as a result, we are not — we are no longer energy independent.”Newsmax, *Wake Up America*, [10/10/22]
Martha MacCallum, host of Fox News’ The Story: “There's no reason why we can't be energy independent. We have before.” MacCallum continued, “We scolded a lot of our energy companies out of expanding and growing their businesses because they have been told by several administrations, not the last one, that they were going to be out of business soon. Fox News, *The Story with Martha MacCallum*, [10/12/22]

Right-wing comedian and radio host Tim Young: “I'm so old, I remember when America was energy independent.” Twitter, [10/12/22]

Founder of dark money group Power the Future Daniel Turner said, “Americans could use energy independence right about now.”Turner: “Gas prices are near $4.00. Core inflation has hit a new 40-year high. Average winter heating costs will rise by 28%. Americans could use energy independence right about now.” Twitter, [10/13/22]

Fox News contributor Joe Concha: “We backed ourselves into this corner.” Concha: “The fact that we have to depend on Venezuela and OPEC+ which is basically Russia and Saudi Arabia instead of energy independence that we had here at home — gas and oil leases off of the Gulf Coast, off of the Alaska coast, ANWR, obviously XL pipeline. Now we’re dependent on all these other countries, we backed ourselves into this corner.” Fox News, *Hannity*, [10/13/22]

Former Trump economic advisor Stephen Moore on America’s Newsroom suggested that Biden’s plan to reduce oil and gas production in the future is responsible for rising energy costs. Moore: “We didn't talk a lot about OPEC when Trump was president because we were the number one producer of oil and gas. This administration has come in with a radical climate change agenda, which — he even admits he wants to take our oil and gas production down to zero in the next 12 years. That's the leading factor for why the price of gasoline has gone from 2.50 a gallon under Trump to now in many places it’s like $5 a gallon.” Fox News, *America’s Newsroom*, [10/14/22]

Fox News anchor Dagen McDowell onThe Five suggests that Biden is blocking the US from controlling world oil prices:“[Biden] won’t open our spigots wide open and start pumping all that delicious natural resources. … Four years ago, we were a net exporter of petroleum products, first time since 1949, we were the swing producer in the world, we controlled world oil prices. … Joe Biden could do that, but he won’t because he is obviously both a masochist because he likes taking it from Saudi Arabia and also a sadist because he likes inflicting pain on the people of the United States.” Fox News, *The Five*, [10/15/22]

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.

Fox Business contributor Phil Flynn: “The Biden administration has made it a very toxic country to invest in when it comes to fossil fuels.”Flynn continued, “Because already, they have canceled the Keystone Pipeline, they have slowed down the permitting process.” Fox News, *America Reports*, [10/5/22]

Podcaster and author of “The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels” Alex Epstein blamed Biden for making the U.S. “vulnerable.”Epstein said, “The Biden Administration is calling an OPEC production cut a “hostile act.” But if it hadn’t been for the hundred+ ‘hostile acts’ toward the US oil industry of President Joe ‘I guarantee you, we’re going to end fossil fuel’ Biden we wouldn’t be so vulnerable to OPEC.” Twitter, [10/5/22]

New York Post Editorial: “Rather than White House whining about OPEC, America needs to drill, baby, drill — but Biden refuses.” New York Post, [10/5/22]

Fox Business anchor Maria Bartiromo onAmerica’s Newsroom: “It's not just about the leases — it is about all the rules, the regulations, the bureaucracy that this administration has put in place to stop, lessen and kill the fossil fuel industry.” Fox News, *America’s Newsroom*, [10/6/22]

Fox News host Harris Faulkner claimed Biden is “suffocating” domestic oil production. “Saudi Arabia leads OPEC+ and the Biden White House has been pressuring them to do more to help us while President Biden's policies have suffocated our own oil production at home.” Fox News, *The Falkner Focus*, [10/6/22]

Fox Business anchor Larry Kudlow: “What the Bidens have done with their very extreme climate radicalism, is they’ve taken the power of energy away from the United States and given it back to the Saudis and OPEC and Russia.”Fox News,*America Reports*, [10/6/22]

Former Fox Nation host Lara Logan on Newsmax: “The Biden administration is at war with fossil fuels.” Logan continued, “You're going to go to war on fossil fuels. You're going to have idiots like that person that they have in California who bans combustion engines and that the oil producing countries are just gonna take it.” Newsmax, *Eric Bolling the Balance*, [10/6/22]

Wall Street Journal: “The White House blames the industry for high gas prices while it does everything it can to make drilling more difficult and financially risky.” Wall Street Journal, [10/6/22]

Climate contrarian and frequent Fox News guest Michael Shellenberger: “By working against domestic oil production, it’s Biden who has allowed the Russians & Saudis to raise gas prices.”Shellenberger: “Biden just now said gas prices are ‘inching up because of what the Russians & the Saudis just did’ and ‘there's nothing beyond the capacity if we work together.’ But by working against domestic oil production, it's Biden who has allowed the Russians & Saudis to raise gas prices.” Twitter, [10/7/22]

Foxnews.com: “Joe Biden has hampered domestic energy industry while pleading for more foreign oil.”Foxnews.com, [10/7/22]

One America Newsroom host Addison Smith: “[Biden] cut the Keystone XL pipeline on day one.”He went on, saying, “He's campaigned on Green New Deal policies. He eliminated American energy independence byhalting drilling on federal lands. He's always groaning about how the sun monster is going to destroy us all if we don't buy electric vehicles and stop using fossil fuels.” OAN, *In Focus*, [10/7/22]

Kelly Sadler: “They want to put the fossil fuel industry out of business.”Sadler continued, “Joe Biden campaigned on that. As a result, we are not — we're no longer energy independent. Newsmax, *Wake Up America*, [10/10/22]

Chief National Initiatives Officer at the industry-funded Texas Public Policy Institute, Chuck DeVore: “Biden’s anti-domestic energy policies have caused oil and natural gas producers to be wary of spending money to boost production. While big banks’ woke capital restrictions are gradually starving the oil and gas sector of the money needed to drill new wells.” Foxnews.com, [10/11/22],

On Fox News, Chuck Devore said: “They can’t have it both ways. Either they have policies that make it more difficult to produce American energy and push up energy prices, and, you know, hasten the transition to electric vehicles, or they don’t. … Let’s change the policy so that people can benefit from lower energy prices today.” Fox News, *Fox News at Night*, [10/13/22]

Fox Business reporter Ed Lawrence on The Faulkner Focus: “The first day President Biden was in office canceling the Keystone Pipeline. The war on fossil fuels. No change in policy from this White House.” Fox News, *The Faulkner Focus*, [10/12/22]
Right-wing radio and Fox News host Sean Hannity suggests that in order to stop climate alarmists Republicans need to stop Democrats from controlling the House and Senate:“Could you imagine if we don't stop the madness that is the climate alarmists, cultists New Green Deal, socialist movement? Can you imagine even a worst-case scenario where the Democrats get to control the House and Senate and they get a bigger majority in the Senate and they end the legislative filibuster? ” Hannity Radio, [10/14/22]
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) on his podcast, Verdict with Ted Cruz: “If Joe Biden and Schumer and Pelosi get their way, gasoline…. is going to be $10 [per gallon] and then it’s going to be $12 then it’s going to be $20.” *Verdict with Ted Cruz*, [10/14/22]
Fox anchor Sandra Smith on America’s Newsroomsuggests that Biden is blaming oil companies instead of taking responsibility for high gas prices: “It's been OPEC, it's been now the Saudis, it's been Vladimir Putin, and most recently it's also been pinning a lot of blame on the oil companies themselves. … The president has been putting the onus on the oil companies that he told he would bring the end of the fossil fuel industry to ramp up their production.” Fox News, *America’s Newsroom*, [10/14/22]
Right-wing TV personality and former advisor to Trump Kimberly Guilfoyle said: “Gas prices are $1.44 higher under Joe Biden. The Strategic Petroleum Reserve is at a 40-year low. Home heating costs will soar by 28% this winter. Brought to you by Joe Biden's war on American energy.” Twitter, [10/20/22]

American Petroleum Institute president Mike Sommers said on Mornings With Maria that the administration is being contradictory on oil production: “This is a very precarious position we're in today at a time of dramatic geopolitical upheaval… The one thing this administration has done from the very beginning is they’ve tried to do everything they could to prevent production in the United States… This administration continues to talk out of both sides of its mouth, saying they want more production but not putting more policies in place that would actually encourage more production.” Fox News, *Mornings with Maria*, [10/20/22]

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.

Former Trump advisor and frequent Fox News guest Stephen Miller: “You are watching an act of national sabotage, in real-time, carried out by President Biden. If a global emergency cut-off our access to foreign oil we would no longer have the strategic reserves to keep going.” Twitter, [10/5/22]

Conservative radio host Clay Travis: “Joe Biden’s administration is begging the totalitarian [Venezuelan President Nicolás] Maduro regime to produce more oil — unlocking tens of billions of dollars for them in Venezuela — instead of producing more oil here.” The tweet continued, “Aside from rewarding dictators, how is it better for the environment? Of course it isn’t.” Twitter, [10/6/22]

Donald Trump Jr.: “The Wall Street Journal says Biden will ease sanctions on Venezuela to pump more oil but he won’t do anything to bring back American energy independence. … He will deal with the dictatorial regime but not Americans!” Twitter, [10/6/22]

Newsmax host Eric Bolling on Eric Bolling the Balance: “This Strategic Petroleum Reserve is supposed to be for emergencies, for wartime. Biden is using it to try and ease some of the pain at the pump. And it's not working. Prices are still going up…we're way back to Carter years.” Newsmax, *Eric Bolling the Balance*, [10/13/22]

Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin on Eric Bolling the Balance: “Our Strategic Petroleum Reserve that is supposed to be for legit emergencies, not these economic political games that Biden's playing. … It's that newfangled, weird, bogus green energy policy that they want to cram down our throats.” Newsmax, *Eric Bolling: The Balance*, [10/13/22]

Fox host Steve Hilton on The Faulkner Focus: Democrats are “acting to prop up the Venezuelan regime.” Hilton continued, “The total basket case authoritarian regime of Maduro by trying to do an oil deal” and that this was another result of “their own stupid policies.” Fox News, *The* *Falkner Focus*, [10/14/22]

Rep. Pat Fallon (R-TX) on Fox Report with Jon Scott: “We do it cleaner so if you care about the environment, you should be rooting for American energy.” Fox News,*Fox Report with Jon Scott*, [10/15/22]

Stephen Miller suggested Biden has jeopardized U.S. security through domestic energy policy. On Twitter, Miller said, “If every POTUS who wanted lower gas prices at election time raided our emergency stockpile there would be no emergency stockpile. Biden stands alone in his corruption & dereliction. We are now sitting ducks if an adversary disrupts our supply. And Biden still won’t drill in USA.” Twitter, [10/19/22]

Fox’s White House correspondent Jacqui Heinrich said critics doubt the efficacy of Biden’s strategy: “The president's critics worry that draining the country's emergency stockpile could leave the U.S. vulnerable in the event of a major military conflict or natural disaster. …The White House has repeatedly claimed [gas prices] in the past are out of the president's control because of external factors like Putin's war in Ukraine and more alarming to the critics the White House is prepared to draw down the reserves even lower.” Fox News, *America’s Newsroom*,[10/19/22]
Fox contributor Katie Pavlich on The Story: “The continued depletion of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve by this president is outrageous and it is a scandal. It is a supply that is supposed to be reserved for the United States, not for Ukraine, but for the United States or in times of natural disasters. Let's not forget this administration sold millions of barrels of U.S. Reserve oil to China over the summer, so he is putting us in a crisis situation.” Fox News, *The Story with Martha MacCallum*, [10/19/22]

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.

GOP strategist and influencer Alex Bruesewitz: “Joe Biden is emptying our strategic oil reserves ahead of the midterm elections to temporarily lower gas prices in an attempt to trick voters.” Bruesewitz also claimed this was ”another impeachable offense.” Twitter, [10/5/22]

Former Trump appointee and right-wing media commentator Monica Crowley wrote on Twitter said that “Biden deliberately crippled our energy sector” and drove up inflation, calling these “impeachable offenses." Twitter, [10/5/22]

On Facebook, right-wing outlet Breitbart pushed this message: “Of course, the Biden regime won't give a damn AFTER the election if gas prices soar, but heaven forbid they do so again BEFORE the midterm elections.” Facebook, [10/5/22]

On Facebook, Fox News promoted the idea that, “The president is attempting to circumvent a possible global spike in gas prices just before the midterm elections.” Facebook, [10/5/22]

Fox & Friends co-host Ainsely Earhardt: “He knows if price goes up again Democrats stand to lose in the elections. … Now he’s going to release these 10 million more in November when the elections are.” Fox News, *Fox & Friends*, [10/6/22]

Larry Kudlow on America Reports: “For election year political price-fixing reasons they have depleted our Strategic Petroleum Reserve.” Kudlow continued, “That is a pathetic response and it is a response that damages our national security because we are going to need that thing over time.” Fox News, *America Reports*, [10/6/22]

Sean Hannity: “[Biden’s] decision to drain our Strategic Petroleum Reserves to salvage a few votes is putting our country's national security at risk.” Hannity continued, “It is not, Joe, a national emergency when Democrats believe they are going to lose midterm elections. Fox News, *Hannity*, [10/6/22]

The Gateway Pundit:“BREAKING: Saudi Arabia Foreign Ministry Confirms Joe Biden Attempted to Coerce Kingdom to Cut Oil Prices Until After Midterm Election.” Gateway Pundit, [10/12/22]

Alt-right commentator Jack Posobiec: “BREAKING: The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia confirms Biden attempted to coerce them to postpone oil cuts until after the midterms, announce they have rejected his quid pro quo.” Twitter, [10/12/22]

Trump shill and president of conservative organization Judicial Watch Tom Fitton: “So the Biden ‘October surprise’ was to get Saudi Arabia and OPEC to put off announcement of negative oil price news until after our elections.” Twitter, [10/12/22]

Daily Wire founder Ben Shapiro also suggested Biden was engaged in shady negotiations with Saudi Arabia for political benefit:“So Joe Biden refuses to say whether he would support cutting off arms supplies to Saudi Arabia after the Saudis rejected his request to increase oil supply in a slowing economy — a request made for a specified period of time, until right after the election.” Twitter, [10/13/22]

RedState: “It Sure Looks Like Joe Biden Is Trying to Blackmail Saudi Arabia to Interfere in the 2022 Election.” RedState, [10/13/22]

Daily Wire: “Saudi Arabia Torches Biden For Trying To Pressure OPEC Into Not Cutting Oil Production Before Midterms.” Daily Wire, [10/13/22]

:{Maria Bartiromo: “Saudi Arabia has confirmed in a statement overnight that Biden did attempt to coerce the kingdom to postpone the OPEC
oil production cuts until after the midterm elections.” }:Fox News, Morning with Maria, [10/14/22]
Fox Business’ Stuart Varney on Fox & Friends:“We suffer the embarrassment of watching our president beg for oil or beg the Saudis, ‘Don't cut oil yet but wait until after the November elections.’” Fox News, *Fox & Friends*, [10/14/22]

Fox News host Laura Ingraham on The Ingraham Angle: “Now with the Biden administration attempting to pressure a foreign government to influence the outcome of the U.S. election, do you think that might be a big story?” Fox News, :{The Ingraham Angle:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:, [10/14/22]

Fox News correspondent Kevin Corke on the Fox & Friends First: “The diplomatic chill coming after the Saudis say, ‘Yeah, we rebuffed a White House request to delay our oil reduction plan until after the midterms.’ …The allegation has people thinking, this White House pretty much did what they accused former President Trump of doing.” Fox News, :{Fox & Friends First:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:, [10/14/22]

Mike Pompeo on America’s Newsroom: “This is pure politics. … Three weeks out from the election. … The point that was made earlier, we now have the Strategic Petroleum Reserve at a 40-year low.” Fox News, :{America’s Newsroom:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:, [10/18/22]

Harris Faulkner on Outnumbered: “Less than three weeks ahead of the midterm election. His critics are calling it a desperate attempt to drive down the gas prices as the economy and inflation have emerged as a concern for voters.” Fox News,*Outnumbered*, [10/19/22]

The Federalist’s Margot Cleveland: “Joe Biden can’t stop spending other people’s money. Even at $72 a barrel, it will cost taxpayers over $21 billion to replace the oil he’s robbed from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve for his midterm election slush fund.” Twitter, [10/20/22]

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) Press Secretary Abigail Marone: “Saying the quiet part out loud: Biden is draining our strategic oil reserves to try and win an election.” Twitter, [10/20/22]

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-friends-first-guest-wildly-inflates-frackings-economic-footprint-pennsylvania-lies-0

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

https://www.alternet.org/2022/10/fox-news-mike-lee-advantage/

https://www.alternet.org/2022/10/fox-news-ceo-deposed-dominion/

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/10/kanye-west-2658467170/

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.

“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.

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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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.

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.”

all

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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.

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.

[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.

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:

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.”

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

Pagination

Current page1

…

IN THIS ARTICLE

Climate deniers

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

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.

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.”

tucker and watters assholes

https://www.mediamatters.org/martha-maccallum/fox-news-anchors-covering-hurricane-ian-dont-realize-puerto-rico-part-united

// 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

400x BS

https://www.mediamatters.org/critical-race-theory/fox-promoted-false-talking-point-protesting-parents-were-labeled-terrorists

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.

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’s, 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.

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

timing? Lula up in polls

https://www.mediamatters.org/tucker-carlson/coup-shaped-hole-tucker-carlsons-new-film-about-brazil

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