Bret Baier Bak

===

straight news

no merri

punked on offshore wind? vol?

jrnl fail biden assassination 5 24

==

tag http://mediamatters.org/people/ed-klein

nat enq

no bak?

---

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AN 11 25

Bret Baier – a veteran primetime host on Fox News — was apoplectic at President Donald Trump's refusal to concede his 2020 election loss, according to recently released text messages.

The Guardian's Jeremy Barr reported Monday on the text messages, which were released as part of voting machine company Smartmatic's lawsuit against the conservative news network. One exchange between Baier and an unnamed recipient was particularly noteworthy in that the broadcaster used profanity to describe his feelings in the wake of then-President-elect Joe Biden's win over Trump.

"I am tired. And p——. And running out of suits in NYC and there are no f—— bars open. Or casinos," Baier wrote several days after the election. "I may just tear some Trump campaign spokesperson's head off tomorrow. That speech tonight was heinous. Totally heinous."

The speech Baier referred to was likely the Nov. 5, 2020 speech Trump delivered at the White House, in which he repeated the debunked claim that millions of votes were cast illegally in an effort to steal the election. He repeatedly alleged "election interference" from "powerful special interests," and said "phony polls" were conducted in an effort to demoralize his base.

"In Georgia, a pipe burst in a faraway location, totally unrelated to the location of what was happening, and they stopped counting for four hours, and a lot of things happened. The election apparatus in Georgia is run by Democrats," Trump said of Georgia's 2020 election, where he narrowly lost by less than 12,000 votes.

Fox settled a separate defamation lawsuit by voting machine manufacturer Dominion Voting Systems in 2023 for $787.5 million. The network has so far failed to settle with Smartmatic, which insists on a public trial. The network's bid to delay the trial — which does not yet have a firm date — due to the Trump administration's indictment against the company was rejected on Monday by the judge overseeing the case, according to Barr.

"Today’s decision is an important victory for Smartmatic as we progress in our efforts to hold Fox accountable for its lies," a company statement read. "The court made clear that Fox’s attempts to delay accountability won’t work, and its day of reckoning is coming."

mma

Bret Baier touts CBS News’ move toward “more balance” and “coverage that’s fair”

In an interview with Sean Hannity, Baier denounced the “Trump Derangement Syndrome” of mainstream reporters

Written by Matt Gertz

Published 10/24/25

Fox News chief political anchor Bret Baier — who is reportedly under consideration to take over CBS Evening News — spent part of Thursday afternoon praising CBS News’ rightward shift and his Trumpist colleague Sean Hannity’s coverage of “Russia, Russia, Russia,” panning mainstream reporters for purportedly demonstrating “Trump derangement syndrome” in an interview on Hannity’s radio show.

Oliver Darcy reported Thursday for his Status newsletter that Bari Weiss, the CBS News editor-in-chief recently installed to move the network to the right, “has spoken to associates about bringing Baier into the CBS News fold, potentially for the ‘CBS Evening News’ anchor chair.” Darcy stressed that Baier is only “one of several names that have been discussed internally” and that he is under contract at Fox through 2028 with a salary of $14 million.

But Darcy noted that “the fact that he has been considered signals where the network is headed under” the new ownership of David Ellison, the son of Trumpy billionaire and Oracle founder Larry Ellison, who took over CBS parent company Paramount in July (after President Donald Trump leveraged regulatory power to extract millions of dollars).

Ellison has since hired a Trump supporter and right-wing think-tanker with no apparent newsroom experience as CBS News’ ombudsman; installed Weiss, whose Free Press outlet fixates on left-wing excesses while ignoring Trumpian abuses of power in an apparent effort to convert centrists to MAGA supporters, as its editor-in-chief; and won praise from the president himself as “a great man” who is going to “do the right thing with” CBS.

Hannity and Baier discussed the changes at CBS News and the broader media landscape during an interview to promote Baier’s new book. Hannity began the conversation by saying, “I believe that legacy media is dead. I think it died in this election. I think that Donald Trump has forever tattooed the words ‘fake’ and ‘news’ into the forehead of CNN, MSDNC, and the three major networks, I think people are more skeptical than ever before.”

Hannity then asked Baier: “Do you have an assessment of where they've gone wrong? I thought it was interesting, Bari Weiss asking the 60 Minutes team, Why does the country think you're all biased? That's an interesting question because most people I know believe they're very biased.”

Baier responded by praising the Trump-directed strong-arming of CBS News currently underway — with an allusion to his own network’s old “fair and balanced” motto, nonetheless. “Yeah, and clearly the Paramount purchase is interested in finding more balance and an effort to get back to some semblance of coverage that's fair,” he said.

Sean Hannity and Bret Baier discuss the media and President Trump

October 23, 2025

Audio

Citation

From the October 23, 2025, edition of Premiere Networks' The Sean Hannity Show

“Listen,” he continued. “We've talked about this, Sean, you and I, and, you know, I'm not where you are as far as giving up. I think that there are still some good reporters out there and some good folks, but I do think that President Trump, in the first term and the second term, broke the minds of some reporters that were normal, straight down the middle guys and women.”

“And the emotion that came with their pushback became Trump derangement syndrome, and it showed in almost every story that they did, and so then we got years of Russia, Russia, Russia.” Baier added.

Baier went on to praise Hannity’s coverage of Trump’s ties to Russia and the Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election that was the subject of special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe.

“To your credit, you, you know, you really pushed back with substance, and were one of the leading people on, you know, pushing back on all the narratives,” Baier said of Hannity’s work. “Eventually, it all came in much like your election night predictions, came to be. And, you know, the coverage of that was not to be seen around the country.”

In fact, Hannity had described Mueller’s probe — which ultimately detailed Russia’s systematic and sophisticated campaign to help Trump win that election and led to the imprisonment of numerous Trump allies for an array of crimes — as a “soft coup,” as well as “the biggest abuse of power corruption case in American history” and “a direct threat to this American republic.” The Fox host’s commentary ultimately helped trigger a four-year Justice Department probe of the origins of the Mueller investigation which provided him with lots of material but garnered three indictments, two acquittals, and a guilty plea that was punished with probation.

Baier concluded by tooting his own horn.

“So I think people got fed up and looked at a lot of this and said, I'm sick of it,” he said. Baier said that on Special Report, “We're trying to do all sides, and we're trying to give it, you know, that people have a sense of what's happening in the U.S. and around the world with some analysis at the end.”

“It's a different animal, you know, than an opinion show, but, I think it's one of the only places left that is kinda trying to do it,” Baier concluded.

Hannity responded by praising his colleague's show, saying: “I'll be honest. I think it's it. I don't see it anywhere else. I just don't, which is a credit to you and Fox in my view.”

It’s difficult to imagine anything more damning to one’s journalistic reputation than being touted by Hannity, the network’s chief MAGA propagandist who has demolished anything resembling ethical standards at Fox in service of Trump.

Baier gets undeserved praise as a “straight news” anchor because his show bears a surface-level resemblance to a traditional news program and he occasionally provides feisty interviews with Republicans. Special Reportwill often provide brief mentions of stories that are damaging to the Trump administration which the majority of the network completely ignores.

But Baier is also the guy who produced a bombshell story in the waning days of the 2016 campaign that Hillary Clinton was on the verge of being indicted; urged network executives to stop Fox from calling states for Joe Biden to forestall viewer outrage after the 2020 election; got caught airing a deceptive clip during an interview with Kamala Harris before the 2024 vote; and reupped his network contract while many of his news-side colleagues left the network as it transformed into a Trumpist propaganda network.

At Weiss’ new MAGA-friendly CBS News, those attributes appear to be features, not bugs.

---}:

NOTE STRAIGHT NEWS SLING BS

MMA

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

Written by Gideon Taaffe

Research contributions from Jack Wheatley

Published 02/11/25 MMA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

//

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

02/06/25 2:29 PM EST

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

02/07/25 4:38 PM EST

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

02/06/2

---

Fox News' Bret Baier downplays Trump's former chief-of-staff saying the former president is a fascist who praised Hitler

10/23/24 mma

ex? fox producers call BS on he was surprised by wrong clip, as cd have fixed in real time? msnbc

// MSNBC’s Chris Hayes catches Fox News red-handed deceiving its audience to 'clean up' for Trump

===

Fox anchor Bret Baier tried to explain away Trump's “enemy within” remark. Trump just proved him wrong — on Fox News.

10/16/24 mma

Fox anchor Bret Baier tried to explain away Trump's “enemy within” remark. Trump just proved him wrong — on Fox News.

Written by Matt Gertz

Published 10/16/24 mma

Former President Donald Trump said during a Fox News town hall which aired Wednesday that when he recently threatened to deploy the military against the “enemy from within,” he was talking about mainstream Democrats like former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and her family. Trump’s damning admission should be humiliating for people who tried to help Trump clean up his initial comments — including Fox chief political anchor Bret Baier.

Trump claimed that “the bigger problem is the enemy from within,” which he described as “radical left lunatics” during a Fox interview that aired Sunday. “I think it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military, because they can’t let that happen,” he told Maria Bartiromo. Later in the interview, Trump returned to the subject of “the enemy from within,” citing as an example Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA).

Trump’s meandering and nonspecific commentary is often difficult to follow. But he constantly uses authoritarian rhetoric, frequently accuses his political opponents of committing crimes including treason, and was recently described by his former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as “fascist to the core.”

As critics pointed out the danger inherent in someone like Trump threatening to use the military against a nebulous domestic group, some of his supporters tried to rewrite the remarks to make them seem more palatable.

Baier took up their cause on Tuesday's Special Report. After saying Trump’s comments about “the enemy from within” were “raising eyebrows,” the Fox anchor aired a portion of the former president’s statement, criticism from MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, and Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s claim that his “belief” is that Trump was referring to undocumented immigrants who commit crimes.

“Gov. Youngkin trying there,” Baier said. “But I think JD Vance more on point where he said that if there is some big protest or something, that that is what the former president is talking about. He later talked about Adam Schiff, about being one of those enemies from within, or crazy left. And so a lot of people jumped on that. It is his words that cause some concern in a lot of corners.”

Video

CitationFrom the October 15, 2024, edition of Fox News' Special Report.

Baier later asked Josh Holmes, a former Republican congressional staffer and co-host of the Ruthless podcast, about the comments. Holmes replied that Trump was “obviously” discussing the possibility of urban unrest after the election, adding, “I think that’s what we’re talking about very clearly here. They can try to make it into something else.”

But at the town hall, which Fox reportedly stocked with Trump’s supporters, Fox’s Harris Faulkner asked Trump to address criticism of the “enemy from within” comment. In his response, Trump cited “the Pelosis” as an example of who he was talking about, adding, “these people, they are so sick and they are so evil.”

Video

CitationFrom the October 16, 2024, edition of Fox News' The Faulkner Focus.

HARRIS FAULKNER: Mr. President, Kamala Harris said you sounded unhinged and unchecked power is in our future. What do you say about that?

DONALD TRUMP: I thought it was a nice presentation. I wasn't unhinged. You know what they are? They're a party of sound bites. Somebody asked me can they be brought together? I never thought — I wasn't thinking like they could because they are very different. It is the enemy from within and they're very dangerous. They are Marxists and communists and fascists. And they say I use a guy like Adam Schiff. They made up the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax. It took two years to solve the problem. Absolutely nothing was done wrong, etc. They are dangerous for our country.

We have China, we have Russia, we have all these countries. If you have a smart president, they can all be handled. The more difficult are the Pelosis, these people, they are so sick and they are so evil. If they would spend their time trying to make America great again we would have — it would be so easy to make this country great. But what I heard about that, they were saying I was like threatening. I'm not threatening anybody. They are the ones doing the threatening.

In October 2022, a right-wing conspiracy theorist broke into the Pelosi home in San Francisco reportedly intending to hold Nancy Pelosi hostage. Finding the then-speaker absent, he assaulted and critically injured her husband Paul with a hammer. The assailant was ultimately found guilty of a slew of federal crimes and sentenced to 30 years in prison. Baier’s Fox colleagues responded by spinning up more conspiracy theories about Paul Pelosi’s assault, while Trump has repeatedly cracked jokes about it on the campaign trail.

Baier regularly downplays Trump’s authoritarian comments and actions on his Special Report program, where he is interviewing Vice President Kamala Harris for tonight’s broadcast.

===

mma

Three damning facts about Fox’s Bret Baier

Kamala Harris is scheduled to sit down with Baier for an interview. People unfamiliar should know about his role in Fox's propaganda machine.

Written by Matt Gertz

Published 10/15/24

Vice President Kamala Harris will sit down for an interview with Fox News chief political anchor Bret Baier on Wednesday, reaching out to viewers of former President Donald Trump’s personal propaganda outlet in the closing weeks of the 2024 campaign.

Baier’s role at Fox is to provide his network with a sheen of credibility by producing a program that largely resembles a traditional newscast. His program prioritizes stories which flatter the right’s biases and soft-pedals or ignores damaging revelations about Trump. But his presentation is sober, a contrast to the enraged grievance-mongering of the colleagues who follow him in the Fox rotation.

As a result, Baier has received an unearned reputation for integrity from some journalists at mainstream outlets — and provoked occasional fits of anger from Trump, who prefers the sort of obsequious propaganda he has gotten from regular Fox interlocutors like Sean Hannity, Maria Bartiromo, and the late Lou Dobbs.

Here are three facts about Baier’s journalism and ethical standards.

The biggest story of Baier’s career was an anti-Clinton hit job that promptly imploded

Baier broke what might have been the biggest story in the history of Fox’s “news” division — if it had been true.

Five days before Election Day 2016, the Fox anchor reported a string of anonymously sourced claims about FBI probes of Hillary Clinton’s email server and foundation and concluded that the investigations “will continue to likely an indictment.” Baier’s bombshell generated hours of coverage on his network as Fox’s pro-Trump partisans cheered its potential to swing the election.

You may have noticed that Clinton was not, in fact, indicted.

In fact, reporters at other outlets quickly assessed and debunked Baier’s story. The Fox anchor, who had sourced his report to two unnamed “sources with intimate knowledge of the FBI investigations,” turned out to have seemingly been serving as the witting or unwitting mouthpiece for an anti-Clinton faction within the bureau. Baier ended up apologizing and all but retracting the story.

At another network, Baier’s debacle might have resulted in some sort of repercussions. But there’s rarely a penalty at Fox for being wrong if your falsehoods help Republicans.

• ### Baier urged network executives to keep Fox from calling states for Biden

While Baier would like to move past Fox’s history of lying to bolster Trump’s 2020 subversion campaign, the Fox anchor is personally implicated in shocking breeches of journalistic standards with obvious ramifications for the coming election.

After Fox’s decision desk called Arizona for Joe Biden on election night — infuriating the Trump campaign and many Fox viewers — Baier urged network executives to overrule the decision desk in order to make amends.

Baier emailed Fox President Jay Wallace on November 5, 2020, to say that the decision desk’s Arizona call was “hurting us” and should be rescinded. He texted Tucker Carlson, who worried that the network could lose its audience to right-wing rivals, the same day, writing, “I have pressed them to slow. And I think they will slow walk Nevada.”

Fox did not retract its Arizona call, which was subsequently vindicated. But Wallace reportedly “overruled the Decision Desk team” soon after, “refusing to let them call Nevada for Biden even after other networks did.”

The Fox anchor continued working behind the scenes to prevent the decision desk from making accurate calls that might displease viewers.

“I know the statistics and the numbers, but there has to be, like, this other layer,” Baier argued at a November 16, 2020, Zoom meeting with Fox’s top executives as well as decision desk leaders, adding that the network should “think beyond, about the implications” of election calls.

Fox doubled and tripled down on Trumpian election fraud lies over the following weeks, eventually resulting in a massive defamation payout to Dominion Voting Systems. Filings in the lawsuit revealed that Baier knew that there was “NO evidence of fraud” in the election — and that his colleagues sharply criticized him privately for suggesting otherwise.

“More than 20 minutes into our flagship evening news broadcast and we’re still focused solely on supposed election fraud,” longtime Fox executive Bill Sammon wrote to politics editor Chris Stirewalt during Baier’s hour on December 2, 2020. “It’s remarkable how weak ratings make good journalists do bad things.”

“It’s a real mess,” Stirewalt replied. “But sadly no surprise based on the man I saw revealed on election night.”

But Baier got the last laugh — he’s still at Fox interviewing presidential candidates, while Sammon and Stirewalt were fired to appease the network’s Trumpist viewers.

• ### While his “news” side colleagues left Fox, Baier reupped his contract

Fox’s PR team used to regularly highlight Baier alongside longtime network stalwarts Shep Smith and Chris Wallace to claim that the network had a credible news division. It is telling that Baier is the only member of that troika still employed by the network following what his former colleagues describe as its yearslong transformation into a Trumpist propaganda outlet.

After Smith abruptly resigned in 2019, he said “that his presence on Fox became untenable as opinion shows on the network spread falsehoods that hosts knew were lies.”

After Wallace left in 2021, he said it had become “unsustainable” to work at a network where people questioned who won the 2020 election and whether pro-Trump rioters storming the U.S. Capitol constituted an insurrection.

They aren’t alone.

Stirewalt said after his 2021 firing that during the Trump years, Fox became “an arm of a political party.” In March 2018, Fox strategic analyst Ralph Peters told colleagues that he would not renew his contract because Fox had become “a mere propaganda machine for a destructive and ethically ruinous administration.”

After longtime political correspondent Carl Cameron left in 2017, he explained that “over the years, the right-wing hosts drowned out straight journalism with partisan misinformation” and said the network’s stars were “allied” with Trump.

But for Baier, working for a Trumpist propaganda network that lies to its viewers isn’t untenable or unsustainable — it is simply lucrative. While Wallace and Smith left, Baier signed a new contract and traded up to a $37 million Palm Beach estate.

---

Fox's “news” team is an essential cog in a corrupt propaganda machine

03/07/19 10:27 AM EST

2. ### Bret Baier wants to move “past” the Dominion revelations. They should follow him the rest of his career.

08/22/23 8:40 AM EDT

3. ### Fox News anchors argued for viewers’ feelings to override “statistics and the numbers” on the network’s 2020 presidential election calls

03/05/23

---

an 10 24

he read a bunch of vile lie quotes from trump?

The right wing freakout is in full force after Fox News announced Vice President Kamala Harris will sit down for an interview with then network’s chief political anchor Bret Baier on Wednesday in the critical battleground state of Pennsylvania.

It will be the Democratic presidential nominee’s first official Fox News interview, after entering the race in July, less than three months ago.

“While Trump became the first major presidential nominee to back out of the traditional pre-election ’60 Minutes’ interview, Kamala Harris has agreed to sit down with Fox News for an interview this week,” noted Zeteo News’ Justin Baragona.

“Harris has upped her media appearances recently, having sat down with Stephen Colbert, 60 Minutes‘ Bill Whitaker and Howard Stern, among other personalities,” Deadline reports. “But she’s also been urged by some supportersto make an appearance on Fox News, populated by voices on the right, even though Baier is on the network’s news side. With an average of 2.3 million viewers, Special Report has ranked among the most watched cable news programs.”

READ MORE: ‘Is He OK?’: Trump’s Dark of Night Rage Posting Backfires

Trump recently did pull out of a previously agreed-to interview with CBS News’ “60 Minutes,” and has refused to do any more debates with Harris after losing the first one on ABC News. Before that debate Trump had suggested a condition of him participating in the ABC debate would be Harris had to agree to two others, which she did. Next week she will appear in a CNN town hall, which originally was to be a debate until Trump pulled out.

“As of today, it has been **one month** since Trump’s been interviewed by a mainstream media outlet,” noted Harris campaign spokesperson Ian Sams, “as he has backed out of 60 Minutes and refuses to debate again.”

“Meanwhile Harris is willing to even go on Fox,” he added.

During the 2024 campaign Trump has done virtually no interviews with mainstream media outlets, avoiding The New York Times, ABC News, CBS News, CNN, and MSNBC. He did sit down with NBC News’s “Meet the Press” for Kristen Welker’s first interview as the show’s new moderator last year in September.

READ MORE: ‘Fascist to the Core’: Trump’s Top General Slams Ex-President as ‘Most Dangerous Person’

The Nation’s John Nichols commented that Trump is “running scared.”

IFrame Content

Trump supporters “swarmed all over Fox’s Bret Baier today like he was a Capitol Police Officer on J6 after he posted on Twitter that he will be interviewing Kamala Harris this Wednesday,” MeidasTouch News reports. “Baier received 2,200 comments on his tweet announcing the interview in just the first hour after he posted it.”

“Most of the MAGA comments to Baier follow a consistent theme – that they lost all faith in Baier after his tough interview embarrassed Trump last year, and that they expect him to go into this interview with guns blazing to win back their favor. They also mentioned some of the previous Harris interview conspiracies – that her earrings were airpods where she was getting the answers, that she was given the questions ahead of time, that Baier and Fox called the 2020 election too early for Biden, etc.,” MeidasTouch editor-in-chief Ron Filipkowski reported.

Journalist Mike Rothschild, who has written books on right wing conspiracy theories, observed: “This is smart from the VP. She has nothing to lose by appearing on the news arm of Fox News (as opposed to the screeching infotainment arm) and if she breaks through to a fraction of their viewership, it’s worth it. It’s almost like the Harris campaign knows what it’s doing.”

The news Harris will appear on Fox News comes on the heels of one of that outlet’s former top hosts, Geraldo Rivera, denouncing Donald Trump and endorsing the Vice President’s run for President.

===

Fox knows it’s lying about immigrants and disaster aid

Written by Matt Gertz

Published 10/10/24 mma

Fox News hosts and anchors have in hand evidence that their network obtained from a Republican source debunking a falsehood the network has repeatedly promoted about the Hurricane Helene response. They do not care — and are in many cases continuing to push the same lie — because they work for a propaganda outlet whose primary objective is helping former President Donald Trump return to the White House.

Fox chief congressional correspondent Chad Pergram landed a big scoop on Tuesday night, posting to X about how he had “obtained a fact sheet assembled by the majority side of [the] House Appropriations Committee about disaster aid” for Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton.

He keyed in on the fact sheet’s statements about aid to immigrants, writing: “It also declares there is ‘no funding connection between’ the migrant shelter program and the Disaster Relief Fund. It adds there is ‘no intermingling of funding between these two programs.’ It adds that ‘the only connection is that both programs are administered by FEMA.’”

This is important because Trump had repeatedly tried to link the programs for his own political gain, claiming that there was no money for hurricane disaster aid because President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris had spent it all on helping immigrants — and Fox’s propagandists and the rest of the Trumpist media chimed in. The Biden administration and mainstream news outlets had debunked these lies, but Pergram’s scoop revealed that House Republicans — a source Fox viewers would be more likely to trust — knew they were false.

Fox’s response over the 24 hours after Pergram posted about the fact sheet provides an instructive case study about how the network functions:

1. On Wednesday morning, Fox News continued to push the falsehood on Fox & Friends, with contributor Miranda Devine claiming that “FEMA was handing out money to illegal migrants instead of keeping it for hurricane victims.”

3. At around the same time on Fox Business, anchor Maria Bartiromo appeared to reference the House Republican memo Pergram obtained — but only to attack it, asking House Appropriations Committee member Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-GA) whether his colleagues were “lying” (“It’s all FEMA money,” he replied in part).

5. Pergram did not appear on either network until the lower-rated midday programs — and his packaged report did not address the immigrant funding misinformation that Fox had spread.

7. On The Five, Jessica Tarlov and Jeanine Pirro sparred inconclusively without mentioning the GOP fact sheet over whether Trump’s claims about disaster aid money going to immigrants was a lie. Jesse Watters ended the discussion by telling Tarlov, “Americans are dying and you're talking about Donald Trump.”

9. That evening on Fox’s flagship “news” show, Special Report anchor Bret Baier did not reference the GOP fact sheet but mentioned in passing that there has been a “back and forth about FEMA money going to immigrants, there is a pot, it’s just different than the disaster pot where the money comes from.”

11. The network’s high-rated evening Trumpist propagandists all continued to claim money that should have gone to disaster aid went instead to migrants on Wednesday night. Laura Ingraham claimed FEMA money had gone to “sheltering migrants” that “should be spent and allocated to shoring up disaster management for Americans, not on illegal aliens.” Watters claimed that “FEMA admitted they wasted a billion on migrants” and that the agency had been “leaving Americans hanging, but bending over backwards to help foreigners who broke into the country.” And Sean Hannity **said the Biden administration claimed to be running out of funds for disaster aid after FEMA “distributed more than a billion dollars to house and feed Harris and Biden unvetted illegal immigrants.”

A real news outlet would want to get that information out to ensure that its audience knew the facts. But Fox is a Trumpist propaganda outlet, and they acted instead to reinforce the right-wing media bubble that keeps their viewers from the truth.

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Fox's chief political anchor interviewed the architect of Project 2025. Here are some of the details he failed to mention.

Written by Jane Lee

Published 09/19/24 11:26 mma

On September 18, Fox News chief political anchor Bret Baier hosted Heritage Foundation president and architect of Project 2025 Kevin Roberts for a seven-minute softball interview.

Baier teed up questions for Roberts to communicate his preferred talking points, chiefly that Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has no direct connection to the agenda and that Democrats are lying about its contents.

Here are some details of Project 2025 that Bret Baier failed to address in his interview with Kevin Roberts.

• ### Fox News chief political anchor Bret Baier interviews Heritage Foundation president and architect of Project 2025 Kevin Roberts

Video

CitationFrom the September 18, 2024, edition of Fox News' Special Report with Bret Baier

• ### Trump is inextricably linked to Project 2025 and Roberts

* Baier teed Roberts up to repeatedly deny that there were any links between Project 2025 and Trump, not covering the full extent of the widely reported connections Trump has to the agenda. Baier did ask about Trump previously embracing much of Heritage’s manifesto in his first term and how that would project onto a second term but didn’t go much further. Fox News, *Special Report with Bret Baier*, [9/18/24]

• • Project 2025 was developed by former Trump administration officials, and Trump encouraged the development of the agenda two years ago, stating, “They are going to lay the groundwork in detailed plans for exactly what our movement will do.” CBS, *Evening News*, [7/12/24]

• • Roberts has said that Project 2025 and the Trump campaign’s policy plans overlap on “all of the priority issues.” Roberts has also stated that Trump’s attempts to create distance from Project 2025 are a “political tactical decision” and that Heritage still has a “very good” relationship with Trump and his team. The Daily Signal, *The Daily Signal Podcast*, [7/12/24; Media Matters, 9/4/24]

• • Baier asked Roberts if Trump vice presidential pick JD Vance’s authorship of the forward to Roberts’ book indicated “linkage” between the campaign and Project 2025, and Roberts downplayed the connection as one of “friendship.”But “friendship” doesn’t quite convey the extent to which Vance and Roberts are in political lockstep. As The New Republic explains, Vance’s forward “describes Roberts’s ideas as an ‘essential weapon’ in the ‘fights that lay [sic] ahead.’” Vance also wrote the introduction to a 2017 Heritage Foundation report that promoted a national abortion ban and attacked IVF and surrogacy. Fox News, *Special Report with Bret Baier*, [9/18/24; The New Republic, 7/30/24; Mother Jones, 9/3/24]

• • Trump praised Kevin Roberts in a 2022 speech: “He’s going to be so incredible.” The Washington Post also reported about Trump and Roberts flying on a private plane together in 2022. Media Matters, [7/8/24; Washington Post, 8/7/24]

• • In an interview with The New York Times, Trump adviser Steve Bannon cited “Project 2025 and others” in response to what a second Trump administration would look like in the first weeks and months. When asked about “the inner circle” and chief of staff, Bannon said, “You’re going to have somebody that knows what’s going on,” and mentioned Roberts. The New York Times, [7/1/24]

• ### Roberts said the country is in the midst of a “bloodless” revolution

• Roberts appeared on Steve Bannon’s podcast to declare that the country is “in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless, if the left allows it to be.” Baier didn’t mention this comment. Real America’s Voice, *War Room*, [7/2/24; Fox News, Special Report with Bret Baier, 9/18/24]

• ### Project 2025 would target reproductive rights from several angles

• When Baier asked about Project 2025’s suggestion to reinstate the Comstock Act to criminalize the mailing of abortion pills, Roberts denied that Project 2025 calls for a national abortion ban and claimed the project’s playbook merely discusses the history of the law.The New Republic explains that the playbook says the president should enforce the and that right-wing groups see it“as a way to ban abortion nationally because it outlaws the use of the mail for the purposes of sending or receiving any object that could be used for an abortion.” Real America’s Voice, War Room, [7/2/24; The New Republic, 2/8/24]

• • Project 2025 aims for the next conservative administration to attack reproductive rights from several angles, including by removing the term “abortion” from all federal laws and regulations, reversing abortion pill approval, punishing providers by withdrawing federal health funding, and restricting clinics that provide contraception and STD testing. Media Matters, [3/20/24]

• • Many Project 2025 partner organizations have also leveled other attacks on reproductive rights. These groups have called for massive restrictions on access to contraception, in vitro fertilization, surrogacy, and abortion drugs such as mifepristone — which are now used in 63% of abortions in the United States. Media Matters, [6/24/24; Guttmacher, March 2024]
  • Project 2025 levels a fundamental attack on abortion access.The 19th reports (emphasis added):

In Project 2025, a fundamental premise is that abortion is not health care — and the CDC would be banned from promoting it as such. The document’s authors want the renamed Department of Life to collect data on people who have abortions, using “every available tool, including the cutting of funds, to ensure that every state reports exactly how many abortions take place within its borders, at what gestational age of the child, for what reason, the mother’s state of residence, and by what method.” They urge the agency to rescind Biden administration guidance that EMTALA, a decades-old emergency medicine law, requires that hospitals provide abortion care in emergency situations. They also call to eliminate the agency’s Reproductive Healthcare Access Task Force and replace it with an anti-abortion task force. The 19th, [7/16/24]

• ### Project 2025 would replace civil servants with MAGA loyalists and let Trump use the Justice Department to carry out his personal agenda

• When Baier asked if Project 2025 suggests “a scouring of the bureaucracy” to replace civil servants with pro-Trump acolytes, Roberts dodged the question, accusing “the left” of having done so for 50 years and declaring that “Project 2025 is the corrective.” Fox News, *Special Report with Bret Baier*, [9/18/24]

• • One of the key elements of Project 2025’s administrative goals is to reinstate an executive order known as Schedule F, which would reclassify thousands of federal employees as “at-will” workers and give the administration the ability to fire employees who don’t agree with or follow the extremist policies suggested by Project 2025.To replace the civil servants, Project 2025 has created a training “academy” for potential employees of the next administration, which “provides aspiring appointees with the insight, background knowledge, and expertise in governance to immediately begin rolling back destructive policy and advancing conservative ideas in the federal government.” Media Matters, [3/20/24]

• • Project 2025 makes it clear the Department of Justice is not independent from the executive branch and implies the agency will be used to take legal retribution against whomever Trump decides to investigate. Media Matters, [3/20/24; The Nation, 2/8/24]

• • Then-Project 2025 Director Paul Dans appeared on Steve Bannon’s podcast and explained how they plan to staff the federal bureaucracy with Trump loyalists, telling listeners how to apply for jobs and sign up for trainings. Real America’s Voice, *War Room*, [2/29/24]

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accident day after hush monet def implodes after fox pushed fail guy?

over a handful of hours on Tuesday, the right’s conspiracy theory ecosystem concocted a sinister plot by President Joe Biden to assassinate his predecessor out of the banal fact that FBI agents received standard instructions on the use of force before conducting a court-ordered search of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in 2022.

Hundreds of pages of filings were unsealed on Tuesday in Trump’s classified documents case, revealing that the former president — who is charged with 40 federal criminal counts related to his alleged willful retention of documents after leaving the White House — had multiple documents marked “classified” in his bedroom that were discovered months after the 2022 search.

Credible outlets reviewed the documents and produced a wave of news stories detailing what a judge described as “strong evidence” of Trump’s allegedly criminal acts. Meanwhile, Trump’s MAGA media supporters ginned up a counternarrative based on a credulous reading of a deceptive argument from Trump’s lawyers that was included in the unsealed documents.

The story that emerged from the right-wing media echo chamber posits that pro forma language provided to FBI agents before the 2022 search which stated that “law enforcement officers of the Department of Justice may use deadly force when necessary” was actually part of a Biden scheme to assassinate Trump. This is both a horrific accusation to make without evidence and facially absurd for any number of reasons. (Why would the Biden administration issue assassination orders in writing and then conduct the Mar-a-Lago search on a date specifically selected because Trump would be in New York instead?) But it spread quickly from its initiation by a key figure in the right’s January 6 disinformation community, through the ranks of MAGA influencers, to Trump himself, and then to the Fox News airwaves.

By Tuesday night, Trump’s campaign had issued a fundraising email in which the presumptive Republican presidential nominee alleged of the Biden administration, “You know they’re just itching to do the unthinkable … Joe Biden was locked & loaded ready to take me out & put my family in danger.”

The startlingly quick adoption of an unhinged conspiracy theory shows how the right-wing media apparatus operates, dreaming up convoluted but inflammatory nonsense and bombarding their audience with it. Here’s how it happened.

Right-wing fabulist turns standard FBI policy into “mind-blowing” story

The right-wing writer Julie Kelly, in a series of Tuesday afternoon posts on X (formerly Twitter), purported to reveal the “bombshells” she had uncovered by scouring the unsealed documents.

“Tons of new unsealed filings on classified docs case--I will try to post as much as I can (there goes the workout) but this is mind-blowing,” she posted at 1:21 p.m. ET. “FBI authorized the use of deadly force at Mar-a-Lago.”

She included a screenshot of a filing from Trump’s lawyers which stated that the FBI’s “Operations Order” for the Mar-a-Lago search “contained a ‘Policy Statement’ regarding ‘Use of Deadly Force,’ which stated, for example, ‘Law enforcement officers of the Department of Justice may use deadly force when necessary.’”

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Kelly went on to post the “Policy Statement” and claim that the instructions show that “the FBI risked the lives of Donald Trump, his family, his staff, and MAL guests for a publicity stunt to make it look like Trump stole national security files.” She added, “People need to be arrested for this.”

In reality — and as more credible journalists pointed out — those instructions are standard for FBI searches.

“These are the rules that apply to FBI agents whenever they do anything,” Reuters reporter Brad Heath wrote in response to Kelly’s initial claim on X. He added, “Agents - like all cops - can use deadly force when met with a sufficiently serious threat. The policy the FBI followed here applies all the time; they are the same rules agents follow when walking down a sidewalk.”

“One clue that this is the generic DOJ use of force policy — not something cooked up for Mar-a-Lago, let alone ordered by the president — is that it talks about the use of warning shots in prison,” Heath noted in response to Kelly’s post with the “Policy Statement.”

The FBI would later issue a statement confirming that the bureau had “followed standard protocol in this search as we do for all search warrants, which includes a standard policy statement limiting the use of deadly force.”

IFrame Content

Kelly is among the foremost proponents of the right’s January 6 counternarrative. She has argued that the violent rioting at the U.S. Capitol by Trumpists who assaulted scores of law enforcement officers “was probably the biggest instance of police brutality that this country has seen since the Civil Rights movement,” described a police officer who testified before the January 6 select committee as a “crisis actor,” and suggested that the FBI fabricated the pipe bombs discovered at the Republican and Democratic national headquarters that day because it is “an enforcement arm, a surveillance arm of the Democratic Party.” And her interpretation of the filings made no sense and was quickly debunked.

None of that slowed down the ranks of MAGA influencers, who quickly seized on her story.

MAGA influencers run with “assassination” nonsense

Within minutes, influential figures in the MAGA movement adopted Kelly’s interpretation and effectively began competing for the most overwrought response as they furiously posted on X. Many alleged that the document showed a Biden-directed assassination plot against Trump.

“The FBI authorized the use of **deadly force** when they raided Mar-a-Lago,” Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk commented. “You read that right. They were authorized to kill Trump employees, possibly even assassinate Trump himself, to exact their political revenge.”

“The FBI authorized the use of deadly force when they raided Mar-a-Lago?” wrote podcaster and former One America News host Liz Wheeler. “Were they hoping to assassinate Trump or his family or employees? This is insane.”

“So that was the real reason for the FBI raiding a president’s home: an excuse to use deadly force against Donald Trump,” offered The Federalist’s Sean Davis. “The court case was just plan B for the corrupt DOJ and FBI.” He added, “The FBI is a domestic terrorist organization.”

Trump ally Laura Loomer similarly argued that the document shows “a possible assassination attempt of President Trump by the Biden regime and FBI!”

Trump and the GOP lie that this shows Biden is “A SERIOUS THREAT TO DEMOCRACY”

Trump and his campaign are very attuned to the nonsense his online supporters generate, and within hours they adopted their bogus narrative.

At 5:21 p.m. ET — just four hours after Kelly’s initial post — Trump posted on his Truth Social account: “WOW! I just came out of the Biden Witch Hunt Trial in Manhattan, the ‘Icebox,’ and was shown Reports that Crooked Joe Biden’s DOJ, in their Illegal and UnConstitutional Raid of Mar-a-Lago, AUTHORIZED THE FBI TO USE DEADLY (LETHAL) FORCE. NOW WE KNOW, FOR SURE, THAT JOE BIDEN IS A SERIOUS THREAT TO DEMOCRACY. HE IS MENTALLY UNFIT TO HOLD OFFICE — 25TH AMENDMENT!”

Trump’s campaign posted his comment to X, where it was quickly reposted by an arm of the Republican National Committee.

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The former president’s most unhinged congressional supporters chimed in.

“The Biden DOJ and FBI were planning to assassinate Pres Trump and gave the green light. Does everyone get it yet???!!!!” commented Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA).

His biggest media supporters were not far behind.

Fox “news” and “opinion” sides parrot the MAGA spin

Right-wing commentators have spent the last nine years figuring out how to respond to Trump’s massive lies. At this point, everyone who retains a major platform knows their role is to, at the least, soft-pedal his unhinged claims, and at most, to prove they are on board with the MAGA movement by treating them as truth.

That’s what played out on Fox’s airwaves after Trump declared that the FBI’s use of standard orders for the Mar-a-Lago search showed that Biden is “A SERIOUS THREAT TO DEMOCRACY.”

Fox could have provide credible reporting tamping down on the lies circulating online. The network employs people who report on the Justice Department and FBI and even has Kerri Kupec Urbahn, a former top aide in the Trump DOJ, on the payroll. If the network wanted to find out if the FBI orders were standard, it would be really easy to do so.

But Fox’s business model and its political agenda both depend on propagandizing for Trump, so that’s not what happened. Instead, around an hour after Trump’s Truth Social post, FoxNews.com sent the following push alert: “BREAKING NEWS New docs reveal Biden DOJ authorized ‘deadly force’ in Mar-a-Lago raid.’” Here’s how the story’s promotion looked on the website’s front page:

From FoxNews.com at approximately 6:23 p.m. on May 21, 2024.

When the network first discussed the story later that hour on the flagship “news” show Special Report, the segment focused on the same “deadly force” language Kelly had flagged.

Bret Baier, the network’s chief political anchor, opened by highlighting that “former President Trump's attorneys argue the Biden administration Justice Department authorized the use of deadly force if necessary” during the Mar-a-Lago search. Correspondent Kevin Corke responded that the order is “quite shocking.”

Baier went on to downplay the notion that the FBI instructions were standard.

“There may be some people, Kevin, who say that this is just a policy statement of standard operating procedures put inside this operations order for this specific raid,” he said. “But obviously it's not standard operating procedure when you're going into the house of the former president, who happens to be protected by Secret Service.”

Video file

CitationFrom the May 21, 2024, edition of Fox News' Special Report.

When Baier offered a similar comment later in the hour during a panel segment, contributor Byron York described the situation as “kind of worrisome” because the FBI was supposedly “loaded for bear and prepared for the possibility of some sort of violent confrontation with the Secret Service. … The idea that it was prepared for this way, as opposed to, say, worked out in advance, is really troubling.” (In fact, the FBI ensured that “the Secret Service would receive a heads-up a few hours before FBI agents arrived to avoid any law enforcement conflict,” The Washington Post has reported.)

Fox’s “opinion” hosts have been running with the story ever since.

CitationFox News screenshots, 5/21/24 and 5/22/24

“They were actually thinking of using deadly force, or it's on the table that might be necessary at Mar-a-Lago?” Laura Ingraham asked Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO). “Deadly force? OK. It’s really lawfare, it’s not funny. Something actually could have gone down I guess at Mar-a-Lago, beyond just looking for the documents.”

Jesse Watters and Jeanine Pirro went even further on Watters’ show, with the host declaring, “Authorized armed agents to use deadly force in the Mar-a-Lago raid. That is insane. Is there any justification for that?”

“Absolutely not,” Pirro replied, adding that “my mind as a prosecutor goes to maybe they wanted the engagement of physical force. Maybe they wanted to come in without FBI, without DOJ, without all of that identifying so that they could engage in deadly physical force.”

Sean Hannity called the “deadly force” language a “shocking new revelation.” He acknowledged it was “boilerplate language” but nonetheless asked, “Why was Merrick Garland prepping for a possible, what, shootout?”

Fox was still carrying Trump’s water on Wednesday morning:...

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Fox anchor Bret Baier compares Biden’s vaccine mandates and student loan relief to Trump’s attempted coup | Media Matters for America:

Moments after his show reports that Republicans intentionally stalled a border deal to protect Trump, Fox anchor Bret Baier shifts blame to Biden | Media Matters for America

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mma 1 24

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

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

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

An analysis by Media Matters found that:

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

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

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

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

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

Methodology...

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Fox spent only 4 minutes on Trump’s “vermin” rant, repeatedly downplaying the remarks | Media Matters for America

Fox News anchor Bret Baier called former President Donald Trump's promise to “root out” his political enemies, whom he described as “vermin,” the weekend’s “biggest political news” during a Monday segment on Special Report. But not on Fox, where the story has received only 4 minutes of coverage — including repeated criticisms of other news outlets for supposedly covering it too much and too harshly.

“We pledge to you that we will root out the communist, Marxist, fascist and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country,” Trump said in a Saturday speech and post on Truth Social. He added that his foes want “to destroy America and to destroy the American dream” and that “the threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave than the threat from within.”

Experts on authoritarianism warned that Trump’s rhetoric compares to that of fascist dictators like Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. But Fox’s zealous support for Trump requires ignoring or downplaying the increasingly unhinged remarks and authoritarian vision of the runaway leader for the Republican presidential nomination.

Fox devoted only 4 minutes to Trump’s “vermin” remarks, according to a Media Matters review. The coverage, all on Monday, consisted of a brief mention on the “news side” program America Reports, a correspondent report and panel discussion on Special Report, and discussion during “opinion side” host Laura Ingraham’s interview with right-wing pundit Tulsi Gabbard on The Ingraham Angle.

:{Video

CitationFrom the November 13, 2023, edition of Fox News' Special Report.

During the Special Reportpanel segment, Baier highlighted a Washington Post report on the comments that, in Baier’s words, “goes on to talk to historians and effectively using the language of Hitler and Mussolini” and added that the remarks had received “a lot of coverage.”

In reality, while CNN and MSNBC both devoted extensive time to the story, Baier’s network, which before his Monday evening program had dedicated only a single brief mention to Trump’s Saturday remarks, was among many major news outlets providing relatively scant coverage of Trump’s “vermin” remarks.

Baier then asked Fox political analyst Brit Hume, “What's your thoughts on that and the framing of it?” Hume replied in part by downplaying Trump’s remarks, saying, “Well, I don't see Hitler and Mussolini. We had four years of Trump; we didn't get Hitler or Mussolini out of it.”

Ingraham’s subsequent broadcast provided nearly half of Fox’s coverage of Trump’s “vermin” remarks. She and her guest criticized CNN and MSNBC personalities for noting that Trump’s rhetoric echoed that of Hitler before engaging in whataboutism regarding “antisemitic loons on college campuses.”

:{Video

CitationFrom the November 13, 2023, edition of Fox News' The Ingraham Angle.

Newsmax, Fox’s primary cable news rival, has likewise minimized Trump’s remarks and lashed out at news outlets for treating them critically.

“You're allowed to talk about draining the swamp,” prime-time host Greg Kelly said on Monday. “They say that Donald Trump is like Hitler, he's using the same words that Hitler used. Well, Hitler used the word chair, OK? I sit in a chair. That doesn't make me – right? You see? But they don't stop, do they?”

Methodology...

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

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you lost 2020

said hire best ppl but now ~ you

bad incriminating interviews

https://www.alternet.org/bret-baier-trump/

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https://www.mediamatters.org/bret-baier/bret-baier-wants-move-past-dominion-revelations-they-should-follow-him-rest-his-career}:

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fox begged trump to go?

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

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mma 6 23

after former President Donald Trump was indicted for his alleged mishandling of highly classified documents, right-wing media has gone into a tailspin to defend Trump from the charges while accusing Democrats of committing similar offenses.

With this indictment, Trump has become “the most high-profile person to ever face criminal charges under the Espionage Act.” The post-World War 1 legislation makes the mishandling of sensitive government documents that concern national defense illegal, and has been used to prosecute whistleblowers such as Reality Winner and Daniel Ellsberg since its passing.

Special Counsel Jack Smith has charged Trump under the section of the law that prohibits unauthorized possession of top-secret national defense information and makes it a crime to “wilfully [retain]” that information or fail to “deliver it on demand to the officer or employee of the United States entitled to receive it.”

The former president’s allies have attempted to divert attention from the severity of his charges by comparing alleged violations of the Espionage Act by Democrats, including former Secretary of State Hilary Clinton and President Joe Biden.

The FBI, however, determined that by using her private email, Clinton did not intend to break the law and therefore did not act with “wilful retention or obstruction.”

After another investigation into classified documents at Biden’s Wilmington, Delaware, residence, the FBI found that “no evidence has emerged to suggest that anyone intentionally moved classified documents or tried to impede the FBI from recovering them.” Although there are many fair criticisms of the Espionage Act and its constitutionality, Trump was not acting as a reporter or whistleblower by allegedly showing top-secret documents to civilians like Kid Rock.

In the days since his indictment was released, right-wing media have attempted to cast doubt on what charges Trump should face, citing the Presidential Records Act as a more applicable framework and claiming that the suit against the former president should therefore be a civil one.

Following his presidential defeat, Trump took 15 boxes of documents that fell under the Presidential Records Act and belonged to the national archivist with him to Mar-a-Lago. The 1978 act states that “any records created or received by the President as part of his constitutional, statutory, or ceremonial duties are the property of the United States government and will be managed by NARA at the end of the administration.” However, Trump also had 11 tranches of documents with varying classification markings, and did not return all these records, thus raising concerns related to the Espionage Act and prompting the search of Mar-a-Lago.

In a Reuters article about the indictment, lawyer Bradley Moss was cited arguing that the Presidential Records Act argument does not hold water because “the question of whether the documents were personal or presidential records is beside the point." Moss was also quoted pointing out that “the records at issue in this indictment still have classification markings and contain information relating to the national defense” and are therefore being rightfully examined under the framework of the Espionage Act.

Right-wing figures argue that the Espionage Act is the wrong framework under which to charge Trump, suggest the Presidential Records Act instead:

• As a guest on Fox News’ Special Report with Bret Baier, Trump attorney Jesse Binnall argued that “Congress has decided to make presidents and former presidents specifically subject to [the Presidential Records Act] rather than Espionage Act” and that “Jack Smith's team has it completely legally wrong by charging crimes that quite frankly don't apply.”
• On Fox News’ The Five, Jeanine Pirro called Jack Smith a “loser prosecutor,Jack Smith, who has been slapped down by the United States Supreme Court” and accused him of having a “political agenda” and said the case is “all over the Presidential Records Act, which is a civil suit.” She later whined that “what they do is they put out this narrative indictment, ‘This is astory of wrongdoing, national defense, and let's put an espionage, we’ve got to tie it into the Russia collusion.’”
• Fox News legal analyst Greg Jarrett joined Fox News’ Hannity to insist that there are  “two systems of justice. … One for Donald Trump and one for everybody else,” claiming that “Garland chose to bastardize the law [ by raiding Trump's home and then seeking an indictment.”
• As a guest on Fox News’ Jesse Watters Primetime, Article III Project founder Mike Davisalso suggested that “the Presidential Records Act, not the Espionage Act, applies.” Davis later said, “You know, I doubt a uniparty judge is going to go along with that, and so this will probably have to get resolved by the Supreme Court,” calling the potential charge a “bogus conviction.”

Right-wing figures allege that Democrats have committed comparable offenses without being criminally prosecuted:

• Fox News host Mark Levin said Biden, former Vice President Mike Pence, and Hillary Clinton “clearly violated the Espionage Act,” bemoaning the fact that “None of them were criminally charged.”
• Freshly-resigned Trump lawyer Jim Trusty argued on Fox News’ The Ingraham Angle that the Espionage Act was “not in play when Hillary bleached 30,000 emails that were under subpoena,” also claiming that the prosecution has a “whole bunch of rotating theories because they can’t find the facts they want.”
• An op-ed for The Federalist claimed that if “taking documents home from the White House is a crime,” there would have been a DOJ investigation of “Biden and his classified documents.” The piece went on, claiming that the case is an example of the “deep state” targeting “dissenters” like Trump and a universal, presumably conservative, “you.”

Several right-wing personalities claimed ill intent or misguided thinking motivated Trump’s indictment:

• Turning Point USA’s Danny De Urbina tweeted, “The DOJ indicting Trump under the Espionage Act after they literally spied on him as a private citizen is the ultimate gaslight.”
• The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board published an op-ed questioning the indictment, saying that the “charges are a destructive intervention into the 2024 election” and that “the Justice Department has taken a perilous path” by indicting Trump. The board also wrote that while Trump may have been “cavalier with classified documents, Mr. Trump did not accept a bribe or betray secrets to Russia.”
• Rogan O'Handley (who operates the right-wing social media account DC Draino) argued that the initial DOJ and FBI aid of Mar-a-Lago was “so they could steal back evidence of their spying on President Trump in the Crossfire Hurricane documents,” also alleging that the indictment is “all a coverup.”
• A Washington Post op-ed by right-wing columnist Gary Abernathy pushed back on the indictment, saying that while there was not a “good excuse” for Trump to keep sensitive documents, “bringing charges related to the possession of classified documents against a current or former president for anything short of colluding with our enemies or selling them on the black market is unnecessary, unwise and destructive to democracy.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

related

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

02/16/23

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

03/14/23

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

03/22/23

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https://www.mediamatters.org/bret-baier/fox-anchor-bret-baier-called-trumps-election-night-speech-totally-heinous

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

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

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

…

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

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

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

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

New York Times chief White House correspondent Peter Baker and The New Yorker staff writer Susan Glasser reported last year in their book The Divider that Baier had attempted to convince the network to retract its call of Arizona for Biden and to “put it back” as Trump winning, even though Trump trailed at the time by more than 10,000 votes.

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

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

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

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

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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 hostedMeghan 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 T:(style="background-color:#ff9900;"):}::{exas Public Policy Foundatio:(style="background-color:#ff6600;"):}:**:{n:(style="background-color:#ff6600;"):}:, 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 TPPFin 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.

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

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

matt g

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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**Trey Gowdy**, the former top Republican U.S. Congressman from South Carolina, head of the powerful Oversight Committee who chaired the House Select Committee investigating Hillary Clinton and the attack in Benghazi, is under fire this week for what some see as normalizing fascism.

Gowdy appeared on a **Fox News**‘ “hard news” program Monday, hosted by anchor Bret Baier, and decried how some media outlets described Italy’s election of Giorgia Meloni, a neo-fascist, who will be their new prime minister.

Meloni is also a Christian nationalistwho has praised the founder of Italian fascism, dictator Benito Mussolini. She holds far right views, including opposition to abortion, any legal rights for LGBTQ people including marriage and adoption, and is seen as xenophobic and opposed to the European Union.

During the campaign Meloni at a rally “thundered,” as the AP reported, “Yes to the natural family. No to the LGBT lobby. Yes to sexual identity. No to gender ideology.”

READ MORE: Critics Blast Top US Conservative Think Tank President for Applauding Italy’s Election of ‘Neo-Fascist’ Prime Minister

The Fox News panel denounced the U.S. media labeling Meloni as “far right.”

“I guess what I’m wondering is,” Gowdy, an attorney and former federal prosecutor said, “if you’re winning elections, if you are what the people want, at what point does that become the center? Who gets to say what is far right, or what is hard right?”

What Gowdy neglected to note is Italy does not have a two-party system like the U.S., so Meloni won with just a quarter of the vote. And regardless of popularity, political positions are categorized by positions on a scale, including far and center.

On social media Gowdy was highly criticized.

“How could the Nazis do the things they did? How could rational decent Germans just stand by and watch as fascism rose to power to began to murder millions? How? This is how,” retired U.S. military intelligence officer Jim Wright, who runs a popular Twitter account, wrote in response to the clip.

READ MORE: Embattled Trump-Appointed DHS Inspector Was Given Phones of Secret Service Agents in July, Raising ‘New Questions’: Report

Quoting Gowdy questioning “who gets to say?” Wright added, “Who gets to say what’s wrong? Who gets to condemn the rise of fascism?”

“Who gets to condemn hate and intolerance and the violence of these goddamn goons? I DO. YOU DO. WE ALL DO. That’s who,” he continued.

Yale University professor of philosophy Jason Stanley slammed the media’s lackluster response to the election of a neo-fascist while the American right applauded the news.

“The burst of incredible enthusiasm for an Italian fascist leader on the American right is being ignored by the liberal media, which as usual is missing the forest and reporting on some trees,” he tweeted, in response to the clip of Gowdy’s remarks.

(NCRM did report on the right’s response to the election of the neo-fascist prime minister on Monday, highlighting criticism of the praise of the neo-fascist by the head of The Heritage Foundation, which is ranked the third most influential think tank in America.)

Media Matters for America’s Kat Abu, who posted the video, commented, “Think of any far-right or fascist regime. Now think of how many of its citizens justified these beliefs during the regime’s rise to power. This tweet is a bright-red, ear-splitting alarm bell and I am begging everyone to listen to it.”

READ MORE: Fox News Host Claims ‘Whites Are a Minority in California’ So Dems Want ‘On-Ramp’ for Undocumented Immigrants to Vote

Willamette University Professor of History Seth Cotlar observed: “This might be an appropriate time to recall that the 2nd KKK in the 1920s had around 4 million members nationwide. In some localities the majority of white men joined the organization. They described themselves as ‘patriotic Christian Americans’ who supported law and order.”

Esquire’ Jack Holmes, pointing to the clip said, “these are the same people who blast Joe Biden, who won 7 million more citizens’ votes than his opponent, as an out-of-touch far-left extremist.”

Reuters Global News Desk editor Gerry Doyle mocked Gowdy, asking, “truly, whomst among us can say whether fascism is bad or good.”

Novelist Jason Miller, appearing to mock Gowdy’s famous hairstyles, tweeted, “Fascist Supercuts here is really giving away the game.”

Journalist Tim Mullaney corrected Gowdy: “Call me crazy, former Congressman. Six million Jews later, we can confidently say the German People got it wrong.”

Lincoln Project senior advisor Jeff Timmer, paraphrasing Gowdy, tweeted: “‘If the people want Nazis, we should give them Nazis. And be happy about it.’ – Trey Gowdy, sort of.”

Monique Camarra, a researcher/analyst on Russian capture, influence and information warfare in Italy and Europe, and co-host of the Kremlin File warned the clip is “Normalisation.”

Scholar of fascism, authoritarians, and propaganda, NYU professor of history Ruth Ben-Ghiat, possibly stunned, responded with merely one word: “what.”

Watch Trey Gowdy below or at this link.

not 1st fox (strait) brk w/ trump jan 6 hearings? but he goes further (a bit); note that this // WSJ edit ~ trump

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1st break from big lie?!

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

mccallum martha day 4 jan 6 hearing rusty bowers

stunning lack of evid big lie

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[twt ned ryun]

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

[twt]

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

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

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

mofo

https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/foxs-flagship-straight-news-show-promotes-bogus-covid-study-boost-republican

fox’s flagship “straight news” show promotes bogus COVID study to boost Republican policies

Right-wing apparatchiks want you to believe red states outperformed blue states during the pandemic — after they literally rewrote the death statistics

WRITTEN BY ERIC KLEEFELD

PUBLISHED 04/13/22

murdoch media outlets are promoting an economic report declaring that Republican-led states did better than their Democratic-led counterparts in the COVID-19 pandemic. But the supposed “study” is simply an engineered conclusion produced by a political front group, which gives extra credit to Republican policies to not implement public health guidance or restrict normal life. And on top of that, it manipulates the typically higher death rates in red states by artificially adjusting them downward, while dishonestly fabricating higher death statistics in blue states.

The report, with the grandiose title “A Final Report Card on the States’ Response to COVID-19,” is the brainchild of right-wing pundit Stephen Moore, along with conservative political organizer Phil Kerpen and libertarian University of Chicago economist Casey Mulligan. (Both Moore and Mulligan served as political appointees in the Trump administration.) The report was released through theCommittee to Unleash Prosperity, a conservative group advocating the discredited principles of “supply-side” economics that has also promoted “pro-growth and liberty-based responses to COVID-19.”

The report, which is not peer-reviewed, also includes a note on the first page thanking Dr. Jay Bhattacharya “for his review of this study and his instructive advice.” Bhattacharya is a Stanford medical professor associated with the right-wing Hoover Institution, who has also informally advised Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) — a potential GOP presidential candidate in 2024 — and has appeared multiple times on Fox News and undermined the COVID-19 vaccines and public vaccination campaigns.Bhattacharya also co-authored the “Great Barrington Declaration,” a reckless libertarian proposal for loosening public health measures in the midst of the pandemic to achieve global “herd immunity.”

Fox’s Special Report covered this rigged “study” as if it were straight news

The study was touted on Monday’s edition of Fox’s flagship “straight” news program, Special Report with Bret Baier.A chyron on screen claimed, “Red states fare better on economic and health outcomes.” But as a close examination of the study reveals — briefly alluded to by Fox News correspondent Jonathan Serrie — this conclusion exists only after the authors made some creative adjustments “for age, obesity, and diabetes.”

Video Citation From the April 11, 2022, edition of Fox News’ Special Report with Bret Baier

Thestudy was also promoted in stories on Fox’s website, as well as in the editorial pages of the network’s corporate cousins: the New York Post and The Wall Street Journal. FoxNews.com and the New York Post both mentioned the metric of “age-adjusted death rates,” while the Journal was a bit more forthcoming in noting that the study also made adjustments for “the prevalence of obesity and diabetes (leading co-morbidities for Covid deaths).”

The reports in these three Murdoch publications all pointed to the report’s praise of Florida as supposedly one of the best-performing states — a possible sign of Bhattacharya’s influence on both Florida’s policies and this report’s verdict. By contrast, Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank has run through numbers from health care analyst Charles Gaba, which found that Florida is actually one of the worst-performing states in COVID-19 death statistics, even accounting for the state’s older population.

Moore also appeared on Monday morning’s edition of Fox Business’ *Varney & Co.*, during which he claimed, “The big takeaway is that the lockdown strategy was pretty much a total failure. … States that remained open did not have higher death rates from the virus than states that completely shut down.” Serrie later mentioned Moore’s study again, on Tuesday morning’s edition of :{America’s Newsroom:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:.

Moore has built a career as possibly the worst economist in the media, making serially wrong pronouncements and false calculations in service of his political agendas.In March 2019, then-President Donald Trump announced his nomination of Moore to the Federal Reserve Board, only for Moore to eventually withdraw from consideration due to multiple controversies over his past political comments.

Committee to Unleash Prosperity rewrites death numbers in red states with a fake statistic: “Metabolic-health adjustment”

In order to arrive at the favored conclusion, the Committee to Unleash Prosperity report actually looked at more than just health outcomes. The group’s press release explains that it used three metrics for its findings  — COVID-19 deaths, economic performance, and school openings — and declared they were “equally weighted” in the analysis. The result is that the question of saving lives accounts for only one-third of the calculation. The study also essentially just rehashes in pseudo-scientific form Moore’s long-standing contention that saving lives in the pandemic might not be “worth trillions of dollars of losses” and that simply allowing the virus to spread was “a better strategy” than enduring the economic costs of lockdowns.

The concept of age-adjusted deaths across populations is a tricky issue. While it is a legitimate line of inquiry, Fox News has exploited it ever since the start of the pandemic to create a nonchalant response to COVID-19 deaths among the elderly. Looking at this metric from a neutral source does show some interesting effects, but the ranks of worst-performing states would still be Republican-led ones such as Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Texas.

Moore and his compatriots at the Committee to Unleash Prosperity have gone even further, however,by setting up a new metric in the fine print of their supposed study. They call it an adjustment for “metabolic health” in different populations — “the pre-pandemic prevalence of obesity and diabetes.” But what it really amounts to is a manipulation of the statistics to declare that higher death tolls should be discounted in populations that were less healthy to begin with, and toact as if public health responses can be separated from the overall health of the public.

Much of the discourse around the role of obesity in COVID-19 deaths has framed it as “another ongoing pandemic,” and the role of diabetes has been addressed in media as a “public health train wreck” and evidence of “America’s diabetes crisis.” But the Committee to Unleash Prosperity instead treats these deaths as somehow a mitigating factor in the public health responses of the states most affected. It’s almost as if, by the standards of Moore and his co-authors, the deaths of unhealthy people are not a problem at all.

As a result of this statistical chicanery, death rates in the South and some other Republican-led states were magically revised downward, while deaths were “adjusted” drastically higher in many Democratic states — skewing the data to make blue states look like the worst offenders.

“NV, NY, NJ, and DC were the four states with the highest metabolic-adjusted mortality, even though none is in the top four without the adjustment,” the report says — as if that were a good thing for the authors’ credibility — because those four places all have obesity and diabetes rates that are below the national average. By contrast, in the real-world statistics they began with, the worst contenders were all red states.

Fox News has waged a two-year propaganda campaign against public health, in which it has lied about COVID-19 vaccines, promoted fake cures, encouraged the spread of the virus, and turned people defying public health measures into culture war heroes even as their actions have gotten them killed. Fox also clearly does not believe any of what it preaches — see its own corporate vaccination and testing policies — but the network nevertheless pursues this framing because it is “great for ratings.”

Who knows, perhaps the network will be able to come up with a study showing that watching Fox News is good for surviving the COVID-19 pandemic, once the analysts can adjust for the comorbidities associated with watching Fox News.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

disaster cap'lism:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More From Gizmodo Australia

Why Can’t We Call It an Emergency?

Joe Biden Is Not Coming for Your Poorly Cooked Hamburger

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

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

-===

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

no lnx many vid

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

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

Special PROGRAMS

CLIMATE & ENERGY

WRITTEN BY ALICIA SADOWSKI

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

PUBLISHED 06/16/21 12:01 PM EDT

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

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

Jump to a section

KEY FINDINGS

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

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

SPECIAL REPORT UNDERMINES CLIMATE SCIENCE

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

SPECIAL REPORT FUELS NATIONALISTIC AND MISLEADING NARRATIVES OPPOSING GLOBAL CLIMATE EFFORTS

SPECIAL REPORT UNDERMINES THE SERIOUSNESS AND URGENCY OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

CONCLUSION

METHODOLOGY

Key Findings

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

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

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

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

14% undermined climate science.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Special Report undermines climate science

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Citation From the July 14, 2020, edition of Hannity

Special Report fuels nationalistic and misleading narratives opposing global climate efforts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Special Report undermines the seriousness and urgency of the climate crisis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

Methodology

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

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

cya insurrection

https://www.mediamatters.org/bret-baier/fox-news-anchor-bret-baier-covered-networks-role-and-his-own-spreading-trumps-lies-about

PROP 22

https://www.mediamatters.org/bret-baier/foxs-special-report-airs-biased-segment-shill-californias-prop-22

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/media-critic-fox-news-is-bigger-than-trump-if-he-fights-the-network-hell-lose

do executives at Fox News secretly hope that Donald Trump loses this November because that would be good for the network’s ratings? Before you dismiss that as crazy talk, given the record ratings Fox News has seen during Trump’s presidency, realize that Fox could see even higher ratings when it no longer has to defend Trump’s unpredictable words and deeds and can solely focus on what Brian Stelter calls its “secret sauce”: attacking Democrats and liberals.

Stelter, the host of CNN’s “Reliable Sources” and author of the new book, “Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News, and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth,” raised that very scenario during our “Salon Talks” conversation. As he explains it, Fox News has always been more comfortable attacking Democratic administrations, which traditionally has yielded a ratings boon for the network. “The network in a Biden presidency is almost a situation where tails you win and heads you win,” he said. Fox News might face other problems with Trump as a former president, however. Stelter describes Trump as the Frankenstein monster that Fox News helped create, and as in the tale of Frankenstein, he could end up turning against his creator and starting a competing right-wing network.

In our recent conversation, Stelter also addressed Trump’s nonstop attacks on the media, which Stelter says have taken a toll on the credibility of the Fourth Estate: “He has said ‘fake news’ and ‘hoax’ so many times that it has poisoned the public discourse. It’s like a slow-acting poison that kind of gradually moves to the veins of the American body. And we can’t fully know what the impacts are of that yet.”

Watch my “Salon Talks” interview with Brian Stelter below or read the following transcript of our conversation — lightly edited for length and clarity — to learn more about “Hoax,” his harsh words on the Fox News obsession with ratings and his blunt advice for how larger media outlets can rehabilitate their credibility in a post-Trump America.

Your book “Hoax” is like a feedback loop. Does Trump drive Fox News, does Fox News drive Trump, or does it move back and forth all the time?

It is hard to tell where Fox ends and Trump begins. But if I had to choose one side of this, I would say Fox drives Trump more than Trump drives Fox. Fox has more of an agenda setting role than the President does,which is an astonishing thing to say. But when you look at the power of “Fox & Friends,” when you look at the power of Sean Hannity and recently Tucker Carlson, who is achieving policy goals based on segments he produces on his show. I think it’s clear that Trump is usually in a reactive mode, reacting to what he sees and hears on Fox.

Just this morning Trump was tweeting again about what was going on on “Fox & Friends.” It really is his morning briefing. You mention in the book that Fox News does not have a traditional standards-and-practices department like other news organizations do. Even I have encountered this as a columnist for CNN Opinion. Just this past weekend, the standards department made me rework an op-ed. I was like, “But it’s an opinion piece!” They still had issues because they had our common best interests in mind. Could you share with people what standards and practices do traditionally? And by contrast what is going on at Fox News?

Fox is described as a news operation, a news network, but it’s also a political operation. And right now the propaganda is winning and the news is losing. I had staffers at the network say to me that it’s like working at a place that’s anti-journalism. So you’re trying to produce journalism at a place that’s anti-journalism. I’m wearing my CNN hoodie right now. It says “The World Needs Journalists.” The sense that the world needs journalists, that should be a pretty basic concept. It’s hard to disagree with that idea. However, at Fox, there is disagreement. So Sean Hannity says journalism is dead. You’ve got all these folks on Fox denigrating the media every single day and saying the world doesn’t need these journalists.

That creates a real hostile environment for the actual reporters who do still work at Fox. I point out in “Hoax” that many have left. And I have a lot of stories about people that have left for various reasons, including Shep Smith, but a lot of other names you might not know. For the journalists who remain there, it’s this really awkward, tough, sometimes hostile environment. I think the lack of standards and practices speaks to this problem. There is not a unit, a desk or a division that’s charged with vetting news before it gets onto the air. There are some informal processes, but there’s not that official checks and balances system that CNN has. And every other outlet has — forget about CNN — at the New York Times or Washington Post, there are reasons why there are editors and vetters and researchers. That structure just doesn’t exist at Fox.

You make the point that at Fox, ratings are everything. Everyone is profoundly afraid of losing the audience. Does that then mean that the people bringing in a lot of money, Hannity or Tucker Carlson or Laura Ingraham, can literally say anything they want on air, as long as it feeds the audience? Is there no one at Fox News who will say, hey, that’s beyond the pale of what’s acceptable?

There are some exceptions, but what you just said is broadly correct, broadly true and really problematic. There is not this kind of follow-through or accountability that I know happens at other networks and should happen everywhere. This is really most clear in primetime with Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham. When something really bad happens, when something really outrageous or racist happens on the air, there’s finger-pointing that goes on inside Fox. Some people will point the finger at the head of the network, Suzanne Scott. Others will point at a woman named Meade Cooper, who’s the executive vice president of primetime. Others will point at the executive producers for those specific shows, right? So they’ll shift the blame, no one agrees on who’s responsible or who’s at fault. And then there’s an attempt to move on and pretend that these embarrassing episodes didn’t happen.

That’s when they go on vacation, right. All of a sudden Tucker Carlson is on a pre-planned vacation?

Sometimes. Although I promise some of these vacations are actually scheduled, they’re just at bad times. Bill O’Reilly truly was always going to go to Italy when the scandal erupted about his secret settlements with women that accused him of harassment. So he decided to go on the vacation that he already scheduled, and then of course, he never came back. He was forced out when he was in Italy. But there are other times, yes, where Fox uses this vacation illusion where they’ll say someone’s going on vacation to let the noise subside around their program and try to preserve their advertisers.

One of the really interesting things in the book are the little details. You mention Bill O’Reilly going to Italy and meeting with the pope. It seemed like, at least the way you were shaping it, that perhaps the pope could save his job. Even that didn’t work out.

I think there’s so many stories about the last five years, these big stars at Fox, who thought they were kings of the world, who thought they were bigger than the network. And it turns out no, Fox is the star, not these individuals. No matter who’s on at 8 p.m. or 9 p.m., Fox’s ratings are going to remain really high. It speaks to the fact that Fox has a monopoly position in this area of the media.

You write about how Fox got sued because of what some people viewed as misinformation regarding COVID-19 by some of the hosts. When it comes to Fox News and the misinformation that it has shared about COVID, do you feel that the network has responsibility for misleading Americans?

I think there’s a lot of blame and a lot of responsibility to go around about the pandemic, but Fox had the biggest platform on cable and President Trump had the biggest platform in the country. He has the loudest megaphone and he knows how to use it. So the failures of Trump and his media allies to warn the country and prepare the country for what was coming were absolutely shameful. That’s why we called the book “Hoax.” We were originally going to call it “Wingman.” But when Trump came out and said, “These Democrats, they tried to impeach me, now they’re hyping coronavirus, they’re politicizing the virus. It’s their new hoax.” And Sean Hannity said something very similar a week and a half later. They were viewing this as politics, not as a medical emergency. That was the fundamental problem.

And they were always two or three weeks too late, meaning that when Trump finally took action involving flights from Europe, the virus had already gotten in and it was spreading silently across New York City and several other states. And of course, when he announced the European restrictions, there were these long lines of people all shoved together at airports. Fox, to its credit, had a reporter who called that out and criticized the government for it. There were these moments on Fox where there was great reporting, excellent medical advice, excellent segments with doctors. But I think those segments were drowned out by the downplaying of the disease, by the attempts to politicize this and downplay it.

I’ve never seen a president make life and death a partisan issue. And it’s not over. In North Carolina, he and his supporters were not wearing masks. Donald Trump Jr. has been out there attacking the media saying that it’s a lie, that people were wearing masks. Last week, Trump made fun of Joe Biden for wearing a mask. If you take a step back and look at this is, does it feel surreal that you have a president dealing with a life-and-death pandemic in this way, where it’s all about him? Everyone’s doing things to hurt him as opposed to wanting to simply save lives.

It’s embarrassing. And sometimes you need a little bit of perspective, you need to zoom out a little bit. You need to think back six months — it’s been about exactly six months since all our lives changed and these lockdowns began. Now we’re slowly coming out of it and looking around and seeing what the world is like. And the words from the president six months ago sound even worse now, right? We had a sense when he was contradicting his science experts and health experts that he was doing damage. We had a sense when he was downplaying the disease that it was dangerous. We know now, much more clearly, how dangerous and damaging it was.

This is true for his media allies as well. His pro-Trump propagandists. Trump was calling up Hannity at the end of March and saying, “How are my ratings? How do we rate? I called into your show, Sean, how did I rate?” A good friend would have said to him, “Donald, don’t ever ask about that again, we’re in the middle of a crisis. We’ve got hospitals overwhelmed by the surge, we’re trying to order body bags. Don’t ask about your ratings. Please don’t tweet about your ratings again. Please don’t do it, it’s bad for you.” But instead, his so-called friends feed his ego rather than trying to actually help him. I would argue that they actually hurt him when they claim to help him by telling him about his ratings.

The book could have been called “Ratings, Ratings, Ratings” because that’s what Fox News is moved by. It’s a profit machine. When your only touchstone as a news outlet is ratings, what compromises do you end up seeing on screen?

Let me be clear, I’m in television, I’m on CNN. I care about ratings. I care about my show doing well. I look at the ratings every day. But there’s much more of a fixation at Fox on winning because this network’s been No. 1 for 18 years. Everybody knows what’s at stake and what’s on the line, and there’s this intense desire to feed the audience what it wants and keep the audience at all costs. I had producers at Fox describe this as a really unhealthy relationship, where sometimes they fear the audience. Sometimes they don’t respect the audience, but they’re desperate to keep the audience’s attention. What that leads to is Trumpier and Trumpier segments. Segments that are unhinged from reality, that are based in conspiracy theory, that are feeding the audience’s wants and desires and not what they need. And again, this is the problem across television. It is much more severe at Fox.

As you mentioned, at CNN, MSNBC and all the big media outlets, ratings are important. They are connected to profits. But when your only goal is ratings, it’s going to cause massive compromises. Shep Smith and others behind the scenes at Fox News understood that they were putting their careers on the line given that ratings are everything.

Well, also, the ratings also tell you what the audience wants, what the audience expects. Shep Smith’s show at 3 p.m. was the lowest-rated show in daytime, the lowest-rated hour of the day on Fox. It meant that viewers were turning the channel actively when he came on. They did not want to hear him with his corrections to what was aired earlier in the day and his fact checks of the president’s lies.

In the ratings for notable Democratic events, like Joe Biden’s speech or the funeral of John Lewis, you see dramatic declines in Fox’s ratings. Viewers turn it off when the Democrats are speaking and they turn it back on when the rebuttal from the Republicans is starting. So you end up thinking that the audience has been radicalized. What else can you say?

They’ve been served a diet of red meat. Fox News should come with a warning: It serves so much red meat that it’s not healthy. I mean, look, Chris Wallace, Bret Baier, they’re more news journalists. On some level, though, they’re part of the Fox News machine. Is it fair to say they’re also complicit in what is going on?

Well, that’s certainly what some of their friends say, or their former friends. The Trump era has done damage to those kind of gentlemanly, old-fashioned, courteous relationships that you see between television anchors and rivals and all that. And certainly throughout my reporting, talking to dozens of people that were complicit that came up a lot, this sense that the news anchors there are like fig leaves of respectability. One person once said to Chris Wallace at a Columbia event, “Do you think you are there to truth-wash primetime?” That was an interesting term, “truth-wash.” Wallace is on one hour a week, Sean Hannity’s on one hour, five nights a week, in a much, much higher-rated program. You’ve got to look at Fox and say that the identity of Fox is Hannity and “Fox & Friends,” these bigger shows.

But I still think the journalists there do serve important purposes. I understand why they stay. They want to be there for big events. They want to provide a reality check, a fact check to the rest of the programming. But let’s say Bret Baier’s show, for example, is on at 6 p.m. “The Five” is much higher rated at 5 p.m., and then the ratings drop at 6. Not everybody wants to see a newscast, but even his newscast is tilted to the right toward Trump. His panels, for example, in the back half of the show, are tilted to the right. Sometimes the lefty will be a journalist and then he’ll have a pro-Trump person and another right-wing figure.

He tells people that he does this because he wants to have left, right and Trump. And I get it that sometimes “right” and “Trump” are not the same thing, but those panels are not balanced. Those panels are not representative of where the country is, right? If you want to have a panel that represented the country, that’s not how it would look. My point is, even on the newscasts, these programs are tilted in Trump’s favor.

Clearly, Trump has had an impact on Fox News. You’ve mentioned that Trump is their Frankenstein monster, but I want to get a sense from you on how the rest of the media is doing. Do you think the media is better at covering Trump this time, in terms of using the right language? For a long time, people didn’t want to call him a liar, you probably remember that. Now we’re beyond that. We’re two months out from 2020, using terms like “white supremacist” about Donald Trump, using the term “fascist” in an academic sense, not a hyperbolic sense. Are we at the point where the media can speak bluntly about it?

The answer is always yes and no to something like this, because some outlets are using the L-word all the time and others are not. And no matter what NBC and CNN and the New York Times do, there will always be this megaphone at Fox, which is what’s believed by a sizable minority of the population, and will always tread very lightly, be very cautious. What I find frustrating is that when I talk to folks at Fox on background, meaning anonymously — more than 140 current staffers and 180 former staffers and others around Fox World — some of those folks said they had the same concerns about Trump that the rest of the media folks did. You hear on CNN about Trump’s mental fitness, about his fitness for office. There are people at Fox asking those same questions, but they’re only asking them off the air. They’re not asking them on the air.

That’s the fundamental part of the problem. You’re always going to have this pro-Trump universe of media that is not going to call them out on the serial lying and fabricating, and not going to call them out on the racist rhetoric. But I do think the other major outlets have more of a — I don’t want to say a willingness to call it what it is, but you do see that happening more often in the news coverage.

Trump is a unique person, we get it. He understands the media, he was a household name before he ran, he has a lot of money. At some point, Trump will no longer be president. Do you think Fox News finds their new Trump? Because he has been really obviously great for ratings. They’ve set records.

There will be others that try to pull a Trump and use the same entertaining techniques and use the same rally techniques, and Fox may well glom onto that and give that a lot of attention. But Fox’s true secret sauce is that it’s more anti-Democrat than it is pro-Trump, it’s more anti-Democrat than it is pro-Republican. That’s what is preferred by a lot of the staffers there, a lot of the stars there. It’s easier to be against something than for something in the Fox universe, sad though tat may be. So actually, the network in a Biden presidency is almost a situation where it’s tails you win and heads you win. They win either way because the audience is so loyal and so committed to these shows that whether it’s Biden or Trump, the network stands to gain either way.

You make the point that if Trump loses he might not go on Fox as much. He might even start his own competitive network.

Right, he might become a rival. And in that case, I think Fox is bigger than Trump. I do. I may be proven wrong. Now I’m on the record saying this, but I think that Fox is bigger than Trump. He would have a hard time launching a Fox rival. It would be one thing to start what he’s doing for his campaign, which is web video shows. But for him to launch a widely distributed television network in 80 million homes and get a Nielsen rating on it, I think would be very, very difficult. It’s possible, but I think it’d be very difficult.

Big picture, do you think Trump has done lasting damage to the credibility of the media overall?

I don’t know if lasting means 10 years or 50 years. I think for the 10-year horizon, yes, he has done damage. He has said “fake news” and “hoax” so many times that it has poisoned the public discourse. It’s like a slow-acting poison that kind of gradually moves to the veins of the American body. And we can’t fully know what the impacts are yet. I’d like to think that in a longer time horizon, let’s say a 50-year time horizon, hopefully his attacks on the media will be viewed as an aberration, not the new normal. Hopefully other politicians will not follow this same shameless path, but I don’t know what Donald Trump Jr. will do, for example.

You’re a media critic. What can the major media do to bolster credibility in a post-Trump world, to try to get people, at least a big swath of this country, to have confidence in them again?There are people on the left who have issues with the media the same way people on the right do, but from different points of view, like they’re not tough enough on Trump. While people on the right go, “You’re too tough on Trump.” Is there anything we can do, or is this now a world where everyone gets their own cable channel and you can watch whatever you want any time.

Well, I think everybody trusts some form of media. It’s just that everybody trusts different outlets and different forms of media. There’s a sense of media distrust when, in fact, everybody has their own silos that they do trust. I think what big mainstream brands that try to appeal to everybody can do is to take on these issues and these concerns head-on. Don’t be afraid of them. Talk about why we do what we do. Be accessible and transparent. Show that we are human beings and not robots reading the news and reading our columns. Show that we have reasons for why we do what we do and let people find the primary sources for themselves.

When we say the president is lying about something — it’s one thing for me to say it, and another thing for me to show it. During his inauguration, he said the sun came out at the end of his speech, when in fact it was raining. It doesn’t take me to say that. All I have to do is show you the video of the speech and then show the lie. Primary source material, letting people find it for themselves and being transparent with the audience — I hope that gradually helps. with these. It’s not a full solution. These are all partial solutions.

mma 920

==

sci am 2008

In recent years disciplines not traditionally interested in media have turned their attention to them. In 2005 the Quarterly Journal of Economics invigorated the debate with a provocative study by Tim Groseclose, a political scientist at U.C.L.A., and Jeffrey Milyo, an economist at the University of Missouri–Columbia. Groseclose and Milyo created a scale and assigned 20 major news outlets and legislators in Washington, D.C., positions based on their citations of think tanks and policy groups labeled liberal or conservative. They also factored in the voting records of House and Senate members. Their measure determined that most of the major media were left of center of the average legislator—even the news pages of the Wall Street Journal were slightly left of the “average Democrat.” The exceptions were the Washington Times and Fox News's Special Report.

==

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

==

// liz c

https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/fox-news-host-calls-out-conservative-hypocrisy-for-ignoring-trumps-claim-of-total-authority/

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:{fox ‘straight news' anchor uncritically recites debunked Trump administration talking point:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:

01/10/20 9:14 PM EST

==

1119 with chris wallace some integrity on impeach?

mma 519

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

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

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

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

==

==

Following the release of the Mueller report, right-wing media and Republican lawmakers have asserted that now is time for the Department of Justice to investigate those who investigated Russian interference in the 2016 Presidential election. While some just lied that the report exonerated the president and his campaign, others are concerned enough to demand investigations into their political opponents. We've assembled more than two dozen examples. Here are just a few:

• Fox host Sean Hannity: “If any of this started before July 31, the alleged beginning of the FBI's collusion investigation, we need to know when it started. And finally, we need to know this big question: What did he know? What did President Obama know? And when did he know it?”
• Fox Business Host Stuart Varney: “I would simply like to know what did President Obama know about an ongoing spying operation into a competitor's political presidential campaign? … Will we find out what Hillary was doing?”
• Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk on a Fox "straight news" program:“I actually believe you cannot allow the people from the internal, high levels of the FBI to get away with what they did here. ... There’s a lot of information, a lot of questions that still needs to be answered because this should never be allowed to happen to any other president again.”
• Fox News chief political anchor Bret Baier: Baier falsely gave credence to the idea that investigators need to be investigated, saying, “We don't yet know about the origins of the investigation, the [inspector general] may shed some light on this, as other investigations in the early stages.”

William Bret Baier (born August 4, 1970) is the host of Special Report with Bret Baier on the Fox News Channel and serves as the chief political anchor for Fox.^[1] He previously worked as the network's Chief White House Correspondent and Pentagon correspondent.

• 1 Early life and education
• 2 Career
• 3 Accolades
  • 3.1 Retracted reporting

• 4 Personal life
• 5 See also
• 6 References
• 7 External links

Early life and education

Baier was born in Rumson, New Jersey.^[2] Raised Catholic, he attended Marist High School, a private Roman Catholic high school in Atlanta, Georgia, graduating in 1988. Baier then attended DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, graduating in 1992 with a BA degree in political science and English.^[3] At DePauw, he became a member of the Xi Chapter of the Sigma Chi Fraternity.^[4]

Career

Baier began his television career with a local station in Rockford, Illinois, before joining WRAL-TV, then CBS now NBC affiliate (As of February 29, 2016) affiliate in Raleigh, North Carolina. He sent an audition tape to Fox News in 1998, and was hired as the network's Atlanta bureau chief. On September 11, 2001, he drove from Georgia to Arlington, Virginia, to cover the attack on the Pentagon. He never returned to the Atlanta bureau and was instead tapped as the network's Pentagon correspondent, remaining at the post for five years and taking 11 trips to Afghanistan and 13 trips to Iraq.

He was named Fox News's White House correspondent in 2007, covering the administration of George W. Bush. In the fall of 2007, he began substituting for Brit Hume, then the anchor of Special Report, on Fridays.^[1]

On December 23, 2008, Brit Hume anchored his final show and announced Baier would replace him as anchor of Special Report.^[5] He hosted his first show as permanent anchor on January 5, 2009.^[1]

A Freedom of Information Act request filed to investigate anti-Fox News bias in the Barack Obama administration revealed an internal email written by Deputy White House Communications Director, Jennifer Psaki, dated October 23, 2009, that referred to Baier as a "lunatic."^[6] Psaki, who sent the email, later apologized to Baier.^[7]

Accolades

• 2016 Kenneth Y. Tomlinson Award for Outstanding Journalism,Robert Novak Journalism Fellowship Program^[8]
• 2017 Sol Taishoff Award for Excellence in Broadcast Journalism, National Press Foundation^[9]
• 2018 Urbino Press Award, Municipality of Urbino^[10]

Retracted reporting

On November 2, 2016, six days before the election, Baier led off his news show with a report that multiple FBI sources told him that it was 99% likely that Hillary Clinton's email server had been hacked by “five foreign intelligence agencies.” The next day, Baier reported there would "likely be an indictment" in the investigation of Hillary Clinton's role in the Clinton Foundation and State Department.^[11] One day later, on November 4, Baier retracted and apologized for both stories, now saying there was no evidence at this time for either allegation.^[12] No explanation was given as to how his originally-claimed multiple informants had all given him the same unverified story.

Personal life

Baier, who served as an altar boy in his youth, is a practicing Roman Catholic and attends Holy Trinity Catholic Church in Georgetown.^[13][14]

Baier and his wife Amy have two sons, Daniel and Paul.^[15] One of their sons was born with cardiac problems and before the child's open-heart surgery in 2008, President George W. Bush invited Baier and his wife and son to the Oval Office for a visit and had the White House physician update him on Paul's progress.^[1] In 2009, Baier was named a "Significant Sig" by the Sigma Chi Fraternity.^[16]

On January 21, 2019, Baier and his family were involved in an automobile accident in Montana, where the family was on a skiing weekend.^[17]

==

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

special Report with Bret Baier (formerly Special Report with Brit Hume) is an American television news and political commentary program, hosted by Bret Baier since 2009, that airs on Fox News Channel. It is broadcast live each Monday through Friday at 6:00 p.m. ET. The program focuses on both reporting and analysis of the day's events, with a primary focus on national American political news. The show has been a part of the Fox News program lineup since 1998 and is the number one cable news broadcast in its time slot.^[1]

• :{1:(style="display:table-cell;padding-left:0px;padding-right:0.5em"):}::{Format:(style="display:table-cell"):}:
• :{2:(style="display:table-cell;padding-left:0px;padding-right:0.5em"):}::{"Fox All-Star" Panel members:(style="display:table-cell"):}:
• :{3:(style="display:table-cell;padding-left:0px;padding-right:0.5em"):}::{Program Origins & Changes/Announcements:(style="display:table-cell"):}:
• :{4:(style="display:table-cell;padding-left:0px;padding-right:0.5em"):}::{References:(style="display:table-cell"):}:
• :{5:(style="display:table-cell;padding-left:0px;padding-right:0.5em"):}::{External links:(style="display:table-cell"):}:

Format

The program reports on the day's events, usually focusing on political stories out of the nation's capitol, particularly on the President, Congress, and the Supreme Court.

A typical show begins with news stories featuring various Fox News correspondents, followed by an interview conducted by Baier with political newsmakers or pundits. After the halfway point in the program, and after a short break for current headlines, Baier presents a segment referred to as "the Political Grapevine" — a collection of short items, sometimes humorous, about minor political happenings. Baier sometimes uses this segment to point out oddities in coverage of a story by competing news media. (In the early days of the Iraq War, this segment was referred to by Brit Hume as "the Wartime Grapevine.")

The best-known part of Special Report is Baier's discussion with "The Fox All-Stars", a two-segment roundtable with a panel of three political reporters and columnists.

The program ends with a comedic clip, known as "the kicker", usually taken from the preceding night's shows by David Letterman, Jay Leno, Jimmy Kimmel, or sometimes Saturday Night Live. Brit Hume would usually sign off with, "That's Special Report for this time, please tune us in next time, and in the meantime, more news is on the way — fair, balanced and unafraid." When Bret Baier became host, he signed off with, "Your source for news, tonight and every night,"^[2] which he later changed to, "Straightforward news in uncertain times." As of May 2020, Baier uses Hume's classic "fair, balanced and unafraid" sign-off.

"Fox All-Star" Panel members

• George Will - Washington Post columnist
• Fred Barnes - Editor of the Weekly Standard
• Nina Easton - Washington Bureau Chief for Fortune Magazine
• Stephen F. Hayes - Weekly Standard columnist
• Bill Kristol - Editor of the Weekly Standard
• Mara Liasson - NPR national political correspondent
• Tom Rogan - Washington Examiner columnist
• Judith Miller - Journalist for the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research
• Kirsten Powers - Democratic political analyst and New York Post/Daily Beast columnist
• Bill Sammon - Fox News' Vice President of News and Washington Managing Editor
• A. B. Stoddard - Associate Editor of The Hill
• Juan Williams - Fox News senior correspondent
• ElliottAbrams - senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations
• K. T. McFarland - Fox News national security analyst
• Michael E. O'Hanlon - senior fellow at The Brookings Institution
• PaulWolfowitz - visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute
• Karen Tumulty - Washington Post national political correspondent
• Jonah Goldberg - National Review contributing editor
• Charles Lane - Washington Post Staff Writer
• Lisa Boothe - Washington Times contributor
• Charles Krauthammer - Washington Post political columnist

Program Origins & Changes/Announcements

The show originated in 1996 and was originally hosted by Brit Hume, who was, at the time, Washington, D.C. managing editor for the network. Hume hosted the program through December 23, 2008, when he hosted his final show before officially stepping down as anchor. The last fifteen minutes of Hume's final program served as a tribute to Hume, including kind words from former President George H.W. Bush, then-President George W. Bush, then-Vice President Dick Cheney, and then-ABC News anchor Charles Gibson, as well as several Fox News reporters, and allowed him some final thoughts. Hume announced Bret Baier, who substituted for Hume on Fridays beginning in fall 2007,^[2] would become the full-time host after the holidays,^[3] while Hume moved to a new role as senior political analyst for the network. Chris Wallace and Shannon Bream are occasional substitute anchors.

Brit Hume hosted the show from its debut in 1996 until his retirement in December 2008. He has since appeared on the program as a panelist commentator.

On June 15, 2009, the show launched in high definition with new music and graphics.^[4]

From its inception, Special Report has broadcast live from the network's Capitol Hill studio in Washington. However, on some occasions, such as the night of a significant election, the program will broadcast from the network's New York studios.

The program is among the top five of all ad-supported news shows on cable, and draws more than two million viewers per evening.^[5]

On January 13, 2020, the show launched new graphics and a new logo.

References

1. ^ on YouTube
2. ^ :{Jump up to::(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^a ^b(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Report_%28TV_program%29#cite_ref-washingtonpost_2-1) Respectfully, Hume Torch Is Passed - washingtonpost.com
3. ^ Bret Baier to be Named Host of "Special Report" TVNewser. Retrieved on December 23, 2008. Archived January 24, 2009, at the Wayback Machine
4. ^ Taxes, reform, protests and…freedom - FoxNews.com
5. ^ Fox News' Audience Doubles Down on MSNBC, CNN in August Multichannel. Retrieved on September 23,2012.

External links

• Official website
• The Daily Bret on FoxNews.com
• About *Special Report with Bret Baier* on FoxNews.com
• *Special Report with Bret Baier* on IMDb
• Fox News Live Stream

Categories: 

• Fox News original programming
• 1998 American television series debuts
• 1990s American television talk shows
• 2000s American television talk shows
• 2010s American television talk shows
• 2020s American television talk shows
• 1990s American television news shows
• 2000s American television news shows
• 2010s American television news shows
• 2020s American television news shows
• English-language television shows

==

If you want to force action on climate change, Fox News needs to be fought -- not engaged with. That's what Media Matters' Evlondo Cooperwrote about this week, pointing to years of its misinformation and bad faith attacks. Even now, the network is leading the charge to attack the Green New Deal. And while it's tempting to argue with them, as an institution it's not going to change unless forced -- and the way to force that change is through sustained pressure, not arguments. The Democratic tactic of engaging with Fox News has failed: Fox News is more vulnerable than it's ever been, but it's not going down without pressure. It's time to fight.

==

ref

https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2019/04/12/Candidates-who-care-about-climate-change-should-be-wary-of-partnering-with-Fox-News/223427

Fox News is trying to entice Democratic presidential candidates to participate in town halls on the network, as Sen. Bernie Sanders (VT) is scheduled to do on April 15. Though Sanders has explained his reasoning for wanting to do a town hall on Fox, there are plenty of good reasons why other candidates should think carefullyabout whether they want to partner with the network.

Fox is a pernicious propaganda machine for the Trump White House, and it has a long history of both denying and downplaying climate change and helping to block climate action. Fox is currently at the peak of its political influence, but it's also at a precarious point both financially and in the court of public opinion. Many advertisers have fled and others are considering following suit, not wanting to be associated with the network's bigoted and toxic commentary. Fox is now desperately courting advertisers by trying to paint itself as a legitimate news outlet ahead of May 13, when it will host an "upfront" event at which it aims to sell about 60 to 70 percent of its advertising space for 2020. Democratic candidates might want to keep their distance and not enable Fox's attempt at whitewashing its toxicity.

Fox consistently spreads right-wing misinformation, lies, and climate denial

The New Yorker recently exposed how Fox News has developed a symbiotic relationship with the Trump administration and has become a nexus of the right-wing disinformation network. And earlier in April, The New York Times Magazine detailed how Fox founder Rupert Murdoch’s media empire “helped elevate marginal demagogues, mainstream ethnonationalism and politicize the very notion of truth” in the U.S. and beyond, “destabiliz[ing] democracies around the world.”

After the New Yorker published its piece in March, the Democratic National Committee barred Fox News from hosting any of its upcoming presidential primary debates.

Fox News has been especially destructive on the climate change narrative, serving as an echo and amplification chamber for climate denial and environmental deregulation efforts. For years, Fox has played a critical role in undermining the public consensus around climate change by eroding trust in climate scientists and scientific institutions, according to a 2013 study. A separate study by the Union of Concerned Scientists found that 72 percent of Fox News segments about climate science in 2013 "contained misleading statements." In the years since, the network has continued to parade a coterie of network personalities, fringe cranks, and conspiracy theorists to push misinformation about climate change and attack those working to confront the climate crisis.

During the Trump administration, Fox News has also provided a safe haven for disgraced officials like former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt and former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke. Not only did Pruitt and Zinke prefer Fox News over other news networks, they both used their appearances on Fox to question climate science and to advocate for harmful environmental rollbacks, often with little to no pushback from fawning hosts.

Fox's "straight news" anchors are not honest brokers on climate change and other critical issues

Fox News claims that Martha MacCallum and Bret Baier, the Fox hosts who will anchor the town hall with Sanders, are straightforward newscasters. But a closer look at their past comments and reporting reveals that they cannot be trusted to foster good-faith discussions about key issues, including climate change.

MacCallum has denied basic climate science and made ridiculous claims about global warming. In 2014, on Fox News Radio's Kilmeade & Friends, she said:

MARTHA MACCALLUM: I mean the climate has changed over the course of the thousands and thousands of years that the Earth has been in existence. It has changed, you know, by several degrees up and down over the course of it. I just don't think that there is convincing evidence that the presence of man has altered that more dramatically than say the earth being covered with volcanoes emitting, you know, naturally noxious gases.

That same year, MacCallum downplayed the importance of climate change and argued that Democrats in Congress should be concentrating on other issues instead. And in March 2015, after the Obama administration announced a voluntary emission-reduction pledge ahead of the U.N. climate talks in Paris, MacCallum was critical of the move and falsely said that the U.S. was going to the "upper end of the range" with its commitment and "nobody else has to do it." In fact, dozens of other countries had by that point announced targets to cut or curb their greenhouse gas emissions, including the European Union, whose target was more ambitious than the one the U.S. put forth.

Baier has a reputation for not being as bad as some of the more explicit climate deniers on his network, but according to a 2014 analysis by the Union of Concerned Scientists, he has still aired "a number of segments containing inaccurate statements about climate science." He has given climate skeptics a platform to and climate action, often with very little pushback.

Fox is now desperately trying to convince advertisers that it's not toxic

In March, Fox News executives held an unprecedented meeting with its advertisers to persuade them not to abandon the network after more than 30 companies had dropped their ads since the initial push began in December of last year. Recent calls for companies to pull their ads from Tucker Carlson Tonightand Justice with Judge Jeanine came in response to Media Mattersreleasing audio of Fox host Tucker Carlson's racist and misogynistic rants on the Bubba the Love Sponge Show from 2006 to 2011, and to Fox personality Jeanine Pirro’s anti-Muslim tirade against Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN).

For years, Fox News has let its prime-time hosts spew bigotry, propaganda, and dangerous conspiracy theories on a nightly basis, while using its so-called "news" programming to give the network a veneer of respectability. But the "news" side and the "opinion" side of Fox News are two sides of the same coin. Fox is dangerous and corrupt from top to bottom.

The Fox executive wooing Democratic candidates has actively hampered honest reporting on climate change

Bill Sammon, Fox's senior vice president and Washington managing editor, is courting Democratic candidates for town halls and trying to get the DNC to reconsider its decision not to let Fox host a debate.

Sammon has a notoriously terrible record on climate change. In 2009, he sent a memo to Fox journalists ordering them to curtail honest reporting on climate change:

We should refrain from asserting that the planet has warmed (or cooled) in any given period without IMMEDIATELY pointing out that such theories are based upon data that critics have called into question.

He sent the memo out less than 15 minutes after a Fox correspondent accurately reported that U.N. scientists said the 2000-2009 period was "expected to turn out to be the warmest decade on record." When the correspondent returned to the air a few hours later, he added views from climate "skeptics" into his reporting. Sammon has also tilted Fox's coverage of other issues further to the right.

Four years ago, Sammon played a key role in crafting questions for a Republican presidential primary debate. Do Democratic candidates want to invite Sammon to craft questions for them now?

With Fox on the ropes with advertisers, Democratic candidates should consider if they want to throw Fox News a lifeline this spring.

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There are many reasons that Fox News’ false dichotomy between the network’s so-called “news” and “opinion” divisions is laughable, but there is perhaps no clearer indication than the sheer amount of anti-abortion misinformation spread by both "opinion" and “straight news” personalities alike.

After the Democratic National Committee announced that Fox News would not be hosting any of this year’s Democratic presidential primary debates, backlash from Fox’s senior leadership was swift, with officials imploring the DNC to “reconsider its decision” on account of the “ultimate journalistic integrity and professionalism” reportedly shown by some of the network’s hosts. As Variety previously reported, the network had already rolled out a messaging campaign to reassure wary advertisers about the outlet’s legitimacy, extolling the virtues of the network’s news hosts. This messaging campaign is merely a repackaging of the same inaccurate story Fox has been telling for years: Viewers and critics shouldn’t hold the blatant xenophobia, sexism, racism, and lies of the opinion side against the allegedly objective news team. But this recycled talking point further falls apart when it comes to anti-abortion misinformation spread by the network’s hosts.

In January, abortion rights measures in New York and Virginia sent Fox News and broader conservative media into a frenzy. Although both measures were attempts to protect abortion access should the Supreme Court overturn or weaken Roe v. Wade, Fox News hosts across the network’s news and opinion programs seized on the opportunity to spread sensationalized misinformation and attack Democrats for allegedly supporting “infanticide” or so-called abortions “up until birth.” Despite these inaccurate characterizations, Fox News devoted over six and half hours of coverage before the 2019 State of the Union address to falsely claiming that these state measures allowed “infanticide” -- a talking point that ultimately appeared in President Donald Trump’s remarks. In fact, Trump and Republican lawmakers are reportedly banking on using anti-abortion extremism to rally voters for the 2020 elections -- a strategy that was on full display during the most recent Conservative Political Action Conference.

It’s no secret that Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, and Sean Hannity -- each a part of Fox’s volatile and increasingly bad-for-business prime-time lineup -- are all frequent anti-abortion misinformers. Although Fox has attempted to distinguish the work of Bret Baier, Martha MacCallum, Shannon Bream, and Chris Wallace from their colleagues, these "news"-side hosts have all pushed their share of lies, distortions, and misinformation about abortion and reproductive rights.

Bret Baier

Although Fox clearly has a profit motive in portraying Baier as a straight news host, there is little to distinguish him from his colleagues on the opinion side when it comes to his abortion-related reporting. In Media Matters’ annual study of abortion-related coverage on evening prime-time cable news programs, Baier and his program Special Report have consistently been dominated by anti-choice talking points and inaccurate statements about abortion and reproductive rights.

Notably, Baier hosted a 2016 town hall with Democratic presidential candidates and used the platform to recycle misleading right-wing anti-abortion talking points. On his program, in the same year, Baier inaccurately described a common abortion procedure as “dismemberment abortion” and misled viewers that a Supreme Court case involving access to contraceptives was actually about abortion rights. Baier previously invoked a longstanding right-wing media talking point comparing legally operating abortion providers to convicted murderer Kermit Gosnell. In 2009, Baier even went so far as to falsely assert that the Obama administration would allow doctors to be jailed for refusing to perform abortions.

Martha MacCallum

Beyond frequently hosting anti-choice guests such as Live Action founder Lila Rose and Students for Life of America President Kristan Hawkins, MacCallum seemingly makes little secret of her personal views on abortion and will often use sensationalized rhetoric when discussing the topic.

Even before MacCallum became a staple of Fox’s evening lineup, she was already a serial anti-abortion misinformer. In 2015, MacCallum attacked Planned Parenthood for allegedly using taxpayer money to support abortion care (the organization does not, as the Hyde Amendment bars the use of federal funds for abortion services). Like Baier, MacCallum also used a 2016 presidential primary forum as an opportunity to spread anti-abortion misinformation sourced from the anti-choice group Center for Medical Progress’ (CMP) deceptive videos attacking Planned Parenthood. Since MacCallum began hosting her own program, she has consistently promoted anti-abortion talking points about later abortion and Planned Parenthood. In 2017, MacCallum pushed several myths about the existence of so-called “sex-selective” abortion practices, even demanding a guest on her program explain whether it was acceptable “for someone to decide because they don’t like the sex of their baby to abort it at eight months.”

Shannon Bream

Whether appearing as a correspondent on Special Report or hosting her own program, Fox News @ Night, Bream has been a frequent source of anti-abortion misinformation on Fox. Despite representing the network’s so-called “straight news” contingent, Bream’s promotion to host her own program was celebrated by anti-abortion leaders.

Bream was a frequent promoter of CMP’s deceptive videos, even hosting the Fox News “special” promoting the group’s claims in 2015. In 2016, Bream touted “exclusively obtained” copies of letters from a House investigation based on CMP’s allegations -- letters received a full day before they were publicly released or shared with Democratic members of the investigative panel, in direct violation of congressional rules. Since then, Bream has repeatedly signal-boosted anti-abortion talking points and myths by spreading misinformation about abortion safety, letting guests make inaccurate allegations about Planned Parenthood without pushback, and citing polls commissioned by anti-abortion groups without necessary context to suggest a lack of public support for abortion. If there’s a talking point circulating around anti-abortion media and personalities online, it’s more likely than not that it will eventually surface on Bream’s program.

Chris Wallace

Although Chris Wallace does not discuss abortion as frequently as some of his Fox colleagues, his invocation of so-called “partial-birth” abortion during the final debate of the 2016 presidential election is more than enough to disqualify the anchor from consideration as a fair and balanced voice on abortion-related issues. Wallace’s inaccurate and sensationalized question was then picked up by other right-wing media outlets and has since re-emerged in Trump’s current talking points about abortion. Wallace has also shown a propensity for repeating right-wing smears against Planned Parenthood, citing anti-choice videos attacking the organization well before CMP’s campaign of deception began.

It doesn’t matter whether viewers watch so-called "news" or "opinion" programming: Both are likely to contain sensationalism, outright lies, and harmful characterizations about abortion patients, providers, and procedures -- seemingly no matter the potential consequences.

Fox downplays report that Trump ordered officials to give son-in-law Kushner a security clearance

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Fox News Pushes Clinton Indictment Reporting Less Than A Day After Baier Apology

Blog ››› November 5, 2016 11:47 AM EDT ››› ERIC HANANOKI

Fox News returned to pushing reporting that Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton is likely to face an indictment less than 24 hours after the network apologized for making the claim.

On November 2, Special Report anchor Bret Baier claimed that according to anonymous sources, FBI investigations into Clinton would “continue,” that “there is a lot of evidence,” and that “barring some obstruction in some way, they believe they will continue to likely an indictment.” Fox heavily hyped Baier’s reporting in the following days. Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and his campaign also picked up Baier’s reporting and used it to attack Clinton. However, non-Fox media outlets soon debunked Baier’s reporting, saying it was “wrong” and “just not true.”

Baer subsequently issued an apology for his reporting on November 4, saying that his reference to a “likely” indictment was “a mistake” because “no one knows if there would or would not be an indictment no matter how strong investigators feel their evidence is. It is obviously a prosecutor who has to agree to take the case and make that case to a grand jury.”

However, Fox News is now back to touting dubious reporting that Clinton will likely face an indictment if she’s elected president.

Discredited conservative journalist Ed Klein appeared on the November 5 edition of Fox & Friends Saturday and claimed that his “sources are telling” him that “there’s a very good chance that if she’s elected president on November 8th, by the time inauguration comes around, [FBI Director James] Comey will have recommended an indictment.” Klein continued that there would be a “constitutional crisis” because the attorney general would not “accept his recommendation for indictment.” Taking Klein’s claims seriously, co-host Clayton Morris wondered if vice presidential nominee Tim Kaine would then become president when Clinton is indicted, and co-host Abby Huntsman told Klein they “learned a lot from you this morning.”

Klein has a long history of sloppy and inaccurate reporting about the Clintons. Reporters from across the political spectrum have called his work "junk journalism," "devoid of credibility," "suspect," "fan fiction," "lazy, cut-and-paste recycling," "strewn with serious factual errors, truncated and distorted quotes," "thoroughly discredited," "smut," "sordid," "poorly written, poorly thought, poorly sourced," and "bullshit." Klein had lunch with Donald Trump in May and said that he’s known him for 35 years and has "met with him on numerous occasions, talked to him on the phone countless times, traveled with him, andwritten two lengthy magazine cover stories about him."

From Klein’s segment (h/t New York’s Gabriel Sherman):

ED KLEIN: Here’s what my sources are telling me. They’re saying that there’s a very good chance that if she’s elected president on November 8th, by the time inauguration comes around, Comey will have recommended an indictment of the president-to-be.

CLAYTON MORRIS (CO-HOST): That’s what your sources are telling you?

ABBY HUNTSMAN (CO-HOST): Wow.

KLEIN: Yeah. And it would be a constitutional crisis of enormous proportion --

HUNTSMAN: -- [inaudible] we’ve never experienced before.

KLEIN: -- because the attorney general with, of course, the president’s backing, is not going to accept his recommendation for indictment. So there’ll be this titanic battle between the FBI on the one hand, the attorney general and the White House on the other hand, just before the inauguration.

MORRIS: You play this all out historically. She becomes president. She actually takes the -- puts her hand on the Bible, becomes president. The vice president then, maybe, Tim Kaine becomes, takes over? This would be remarkable.

KLEIN: I was thinking, she becomes president and what if she becomes debilitated for reasons of health? That’s the other aspect of this nobody ever discusses. Are we going to get the goofy Tim Kaine as our vice president moving in or will we have Bill Clinton behind the scenes being a kind of Edith Wilson-like when Woodrow Wilson had his stroke?

Fox & Friends Hosts Discredited Author Ed Klein To Discuss Hillary Clinton Possibly Being On Drugs

Video ››› October 25, 2016 9:18 AM EDT ››› MEDIA MATTERS STAFF

Bret Baier went full Hannity. Never go full Hannity.

It took less than 24 hours for Fox News' explosive anti-Clinton report to completely collapse, but the damage may be done. Fox News anchor Bret Baier reportedWednesday night about a "likely" indictment regarding Clinton's email server, based entirely on unknown sources. By midday on Thursday, Baier had already walked that back, admitting that his original reporting was wrong. Even more of his reporting collapsed later on Thursday, when NBC News and ABC News reported that Baier got other details in his report wrong and that there was not even any recent developments regarding the Clinton Foundation. NBC's Pete Williams elaborated later, saying that what Baier reported on Fox News "is just not true." As Brian Stelter explainedFriday morning, what Baier got wrong went beyond "inartful language" -- it was just plain wrong. And, in fact, Baier had completely abandoned his own reporting by midday on Friday. But Fox News spent a bunch of time on the report in the meantime, and it's out there. In fact, Trump's campaign manager Kellyanne Conway even admitted that it was false -- but she bragged about the effect of it on the polls anyway, saying "The damage is done." And by the way, let's also stop calling Baier a "real journalist." He peddles propaganda regularly, perfectly embodyingthe ethos at Fox.

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