FOX NEWS CORP.

===

no merri

see rupert murdoch lachlan

SEE PENSION PLAN REV DR FOX FEEDBACK LOOP

neglected see fox 1-3

see foxnc tag is about biz aspect

see ailes hired dubya cuz makes fla call

SEE DENIAL

INCLUDES ATTACKS ON

congrats, a watchdog: http://newscorpwatch.org/

bak4 23 bad format

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MMA

Fox News at 30: Even the pretense of impartiality is all but gone

Fox News at 30: Even the pretense of impartiality is all but gone

Written by Matt Gertz

Published 10/07/26

Fox News’ role as a Republican propaganda machine is clear to anyone who has bothered to peruse its programming — President Donald Trump knows it, Fox co-founder Rupert Murdoch knows it, disgraced network co-founder Roger Ailes knew it, and longtime viewers like me certainly know it. The last holdouts arguing otherwise at this late date are some combination of ignorant, naive, on the Fox payroll, lying to the public, or lying to themselves.

To wit, Fox chief political analyst Brit Hume, touting the 30th anniversary of the network’s launch on Wednesday’s Fox & Friends, offered up a hoary chestnut in praising his employer.

“We program it in such a way that for the times of the day when people are looking for hard news, they can get it,” Hume argued. “And if they’re sitting back in the evening after they watch the news, consume whatever news they like, and we do these opinion shows at night. There’s news in them for sure, but it is a mix and I think it works well and the balance is real.”

Meanwhile, viewers who tuned in to one of those daytime “hard news” hours the day before heard the anchor open her program by effectively urging viewers to vote for Republicans: “Priority No. 1, 28 days out from midterm Election Day, Republicans must maintain their majorities in the House and Senate. I'm Harris Faulkner, you are in The Faulkner Focus.”

Fox executives have attempted to draw Hume’s distinction between “hard news” and “opinion” for decades, pointing to the hours of network programming that resemble typical news shows in order to maintain their ad sales to blue-chip companies while drawing a huge audience thanks to its right-wing personalities pumping out bigotry and propaganda. But that fig leaf has been ripped to shreds since the dawn of the age of Trump, as the network effectively merged with the president’s political operation and administration.

Indeed, the increasingly propagandistic tenor of Fox over the last decade sent a number of network veterans scrambling for the exits — and then denouncing the place they had worked, in many cases for years. Their rhetoric often echoed that of Fox critics like me — Fox was deemed “a destructive propaganda machine” (former contributor Ralph Peters) rife “with partisan misinformation” (former chief political correspondent Carl Cameron), the “arm of a political party” (former political editor Chris Stirewalt), and a network whose stars “question the truth” (former anchor Chris Wallace).

But not everyone at Fox found the network’s shifts excessively distasteful. Some used Trump’s rise to become more influential than ever before.

Hume was notably speaking alongside fellow network veteran Sean Hannity, who is not merely a Fox “opinion” host but a Trump propagandist who moonlights as a presidential confidant, adviser, and political operative. Over the years, Hannity has appeared in a Trump campaign video, drafted a campaign ad, spoken at a presidential rally, employed his lawyer, and served as a back channel to him, among other ethical improprieties no other network would tolerate. Their colleagues include Trump’s daughter-in law (who hosts a weekly program that promotes his administration); two of his former White House press secretaries; and his former campaign manager, secretary of state, and top economic adviser.

That revolving door between Trump’s orbit and his propaganda outlet swings both ways — more than two dozen former Foxers have joined Trump’s administration.The former co-host of Fox’s weekend morning show now runs the Pentagon, a former co-host of its afternoon panel show oversees federal prosecutions in Washington, D.C., and a former Fox Business host (who is married to another Fox & Friends weekend co-host) leads the Department of Transportation.

Over the past decade, any purported guardrails between the “news” and “opinion” sides have been stripped away, and the network’s number of hours that even look like “hard news” shows have dwindled. At best, such programming now occupies 8 of the 19 hours from 5 a.m. to midnight — and calling even those timeslots legitimately “hard news” is a big stretch.

Special Report, the flagship “hard news” show on which Hume often appears, is anchored by a guy who golfs with Trump and has spent his second term burying scandals about the president’s family after previously devoting his program to ripping apart the Bidens over much less egregious behavior.

Amid Trump’s 2020 election subversion plot, anchor Bret Baier privately urged network brass to keep Fox from calling states for Biden, while his on-air coverage led a longtime Fox executive to comment: “It’s remarkable how weak ratings make good journalists do bad things.”

10 26 POD SAVE SHE SPIN PUNDIT?

America’s Newsroom, which provides the first “hard news” hours of the weekday lineup, is co-anchored by a former White House press secretary to President George W. Bush who is also one of the conservative co-hosts of the afternoon “opinion” panel show The Five. Other supposed “hard news” daytime anchors regularly parrot the right-wing narratives of the network’s “opinion” hosts.

Fox’s 4 p.m. and 7 p.m. hours — previously anchored by Neil Cavuto and Shep Smith, who would both often go viral for not following the Trump line — are now hosted by Republican party appendages Will Cain and Laura Ingraham.

And Fox News Digital, the network’s online reporting arm, is helmed by Hannity’s former producer, who hired several Republican political operatives and former Trump administration officials following a purge of more traditional journalists after the 2020 presidential election.

“Brit always understood opinion, which I’ve got to give him credit for — there were some news people that didn’t love the opinion part,” Hannity quipped on Wednesday’s Fox & Friends.

Those who remain at Fox to celebrate its 30th anniversary, like Hannity and Hume, either revel in or are willing to accommodate its core aims of GOP dominance and Trumpian propaganda.

Fox News Turns 20: Two Decades Of Hate, Misogyny, And Smears Disguised As Journalism

10/07/16 12:13 PM EDT

Fox News is the Republican Party. Here are over 400 examples proving it.

05/16/22 10:59 AM EDT

Fox vets keep leaving the network and saying it is propaganda

03/28/22

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TRUMP SPOX

AN 10 26

MAGA piles on Karoline Leavitt as she ditches family for Fox News stint

Former White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s move to Fox News drew mockery Monday from critics who pointed to her continued presence inside President Donald Trump’s political and media orbit just two months after she left the administration to spend time with her family.

Fox News has confirmed that Leavitt, who is 29 years old, will be joining the network as an on-air contributor with her start date being Nov. 1, and she will appear on both its news and opinion programs. Suzanne Scott, CEO of Fox News Media, stated that Leavitt's experience gained during her time in the White House and on the campaign trail gives her a “distinct understanding of today’s political landscape.”

Amy Siskind took notice of the announcement, writing on X that "Karoline Leavitt is going to work at Fox News" and stating that "the cycle of MAGA life and reinforcement loop continues".

Siskind, author of The List: A Week-by-Week Reckoning of Trump’s First Year, has long been a critic of Trump and a political activist.

It also brought back doubts regarding Leavitt's reason for leaving the White House in August. Back then, she had stated that, after the birth of her daughter, she did not think it was possible to give her two young children the things they needed while at the same time spending the time and energy required of a press secretary.

President Trump also announced that Leavitt was resigning so as to spend more time with her children and family, adding that she would still remain one of his top external advisers.

A self-styled "MAGA patriot" on X referred to those statements following the announcement on Monday and claimed that Leavitt had abandoned the reason she had given for her departure.

“Sorry folks, no more integrity left here, someone sold out,” the user wrote, adding, “pray for her children and her family.”

Progressive commentator Jamie Bonkiewicz also hammered Leavitt on the same point, writing on X, "I guess Karoline Leavitt had enough of being a stay-at-home mom and taking care of her grandpa husband."

Greg Gutfeld had already made a joke about exactly this situation the day after Leavitt announced that she was leaving the White House.

“There is a concern that she will join Fox, which would then leave us with three women,” Gutfeld said on The Five in August, when referring to the Fox personalities Dana Perino and Kayleigh McEnany, who had both been White House press secretaries. Co-host Emily Compagno later made the joke that Gutfeld was trying to get her off the show “to make room for Karoline.”

Leavitt has stayed closely linked with Trump ever since she left office. She went back to MAGA Inc., the superPAC that supported Trump and where she had previously worked, and has continued appearing often on Fox.

She said that she intends to bring to her new position at Fox the "unique perspective and candor" gained during her time in the Trump administration.

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mma 9 26

Nick Fuentes: “When I was in high school, I watched Fox News religiously. I liked The Five. I watched O'Reilly Factor, and then my favorite was Red Eye.”

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AN 5 26 HAAKE XLNT ANALYSIS 38% POLL = AUD

Whenever a new poll comes out showing Trump’s abysmal ratings, public reactions follow a pattern. Public comments don’t question Trump’s disapproval rating. Rather, millions of people question the flip side: how does 38% of the nation still support such an obvious charlatan? Are supporters delusional? Suicidal?

Specifically, does MAGA not know that 15 million Americans, mostly their own, have now lost health insurance because of him? Can they not read the Walmart price tags they hold in their own hands? Do they not know he’s weakening the NATO alliance their granddads fought for, or that he single-handedly empowered one of the most dangerous regimes in the world?

The answer is ‘No, no, and no.’ Nearly 40% of the country—38%, to be exact— can’t connect the dots on who’s making their lives harder. We don’t need another study to figure out why, because it couldn’t be more obvious: As of May 12, 2026, 38% of the nation still supports Trump because 38% of the nation watches Fox News, purveyors of pure Trump propaganda. And compared to other consumers, Fox News viewers do not diversify their sources.

After the 2020 election, the Pew Research Center did a deep dive to learn what Americans heard, perceived and knew about it. Researchers found, for example, that 63% of Fox News viewers had given Trump an “excellent” rating on Covid. Trump suggested injecting bleach into unspecified orifices while over 1 million Americans died, yet Fox viewers thought he did an excellent job??

More accurately it was a con job, perpetrated by Fox News.

Fox News propaganda

Coming into the present news cycle, the Pope-Trump conflict illustrates the con in real time. Pope Leo XIV criticized Trump’s war with Iran by condemning leaders who manipulate religion for military gain. Trump, manifestly devoid of impulse control, immediately shot back on Truth Social that the Pope was “weak on crime” and “terrible for Foreign Policy” as if he were a political adversary. In follow up Fox News Digital interviews, Trump doubled down and refused to apologize as Fox hosts clapped like seals.

While most media outlets questioned Trump’s sanity for attacking the spiritual leader of 1.4 billion people, Fox dissembled with headlines like, “60 Minutes accused of using left-leaning Cardinals to bait Trump into feud with Vatican” and “{Pope Leo says remarks about world being ‘ravaged by a }_}_{}__{{handful of tyrants’ were not aimed at Trump}. When Trump dispatched Marco Rubio to patch things up with the Pope last week, most media {reported that it didn’t work}, but Fox called it a big success and applauded {what a great job Rubio did.}

Fox News even tried to accuse other media networks of intentionally ‘baiting’ a response from Trump. They invited Elise Stefanik onto the network to tell Pope Leo XIV to “stay out of politics,” while other guests labelled the Pope’s foreign policy views ‘wrong’ and ‘liberal.’ Sean Hannity questioned whether the Pope fully understood the Iran conflict, and several other Fox commentators questioned whether the Pontiff had “read the Bible” about geocomplexities in Iran. To be clear, not one Fox host questioned whether Trump had “read the map” before he delivered the Strait of Hormuz to the mullahs.

The First Amendment protects political speech but it does not protect fraud

The Pope example alone illustrates how MAGA is being lied to on a daily basis, but it’s just one example. Fox News serves up daily falsehoods about climate change, immigrants, public education, NATO, black crime, ICE, and the war in Iran to craft a pro-Trump narrative, assuming their lies are legally protected by the First Amendment as “political speech.”

Enough damage is now evident to challenge that legal assumption.

In 2010, Supreme Court republicans fast-tracked America’s slide into oligarchy when they ruled in Citizens United that corporate political donations were a form of free speech. Citizens United further clarified that, under the First Amendment, political speech warrants the “highest level of protection against government regulation” following the New York Times Co. v. Sullivan’s restatement, and an earlier ruling that any regulations on political speech must withstand the highest level of strict scrutiny.

But while First Amendment protection for political speech is old news, there’s another long-toothed maxim: The First Amendment does not protect fraud. In 2012, under United States v. Alvarez,the Court confirmed that fraud is a ‘narrowly limited class of speech’ not entitled to First Amendment protection. In Alvarez, the Court struck down the Stolen Valor Act, a law that made lying about military medals a crime, because no one gained a ‘material advantage’ from the lie. Unless someone is profiting from their false speech, the court ruled, there’s no actionable fraud—they’re simply lying. But false speech connected to economic gain on one side and economic harm on the other is fraud, legally unprotected under the First Amendment.

Under this definition, Fox News is engaged in classic consumer fraud. Fox admitted in the Dominion case that they lied to their viewers for profit, and paid out nearly $1 billion in settlement as a result. But their lies didn’t stop after that case, they continue to sell 24/7 Trump propaganda as ‘news.’ They are perpetrating the same fraud, one that hooks viewers, profiting Fox and their corporate backers, while materially harming victims by convincing them to vote against their own economic interests.

Under Supreme Court precedent, Fox News isn’t engaging in protected political speech. It’s engaging in commercial fraud. And the victims aren’t just Fox viewers, even though studies show they are harmed the most: the entire nation is enduring political violence, $_{extreme division and rumblings of civil war}_$ because 38% of the country is being lied to.

Albert Einstein once said, “A people that were to honor falsehood…would be unable, indeed, to subsist for very long.” Is mere national survival a sufficient justification to return to requiring accuracy in the news? Is it legally sufficient to pass strict scrutiny? If it is not, after a Democrat-run Congress returns to the Fairness Doctrine, this high court will have elevated partisan interests to the point of national suicide.

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AN GUK 10 25

Legal filings resulting of a defamation lawsuit reveal Fox News employees were wringing their hands over their company’s fawning support of President Donald Trump and the Republican Party.

The Guardian collected employees’ statements from a 771-page filing released last week, made public as part of a defamation lawsuit filed against the network by voting technology company Smartmatic. The comments came from an anonymous internal survey of 1,040 employees conducted between August 2020 and early September 2020.

According to the Guardian, one employee said Fox should “change the misogynist, racist, rightwing content”, adding: “Fox News is a propaganda machine for the Republican party NOT a news organization and should be acknowledged as such. It is embarrassing to tell people that I work here as even conservatives know [Fox News Channel] and [Fox Business Network] are biased information sources — not news.”

Other employees complained the news content at the company is “hateful and has made the world a more divided and angry place.”

“I sometimes go home fighting back tears,” another employee said. “This network made me question my morals. Have I sold my soul to the devil?”

IFrame Content

Still another employee pointed out that the network should “get out of Trump’s pocket” and realize that its most prominent hosts, Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity, “are a total embarrassment, peddling BS and conspiracy theories.”

“Many days I feel like I am part of the problem and FNC is contributing to hatred in this country,” the anonymous contributor added.

The complaints of rampant bias continued with another employee ranting: “This company aligns itself with the current administration and has lost its integrity.”

A different survey respondent complained, “I wish there was purpose for what we do other than pushing the brand, ideology and political will of [the president].”

Other employees wished management would crack down on “conspiracy theories and hateful rhetoric” spewed by opinion hosts like hosts like Jeanine Pirro and Lou Dobbs, while one asked management for “a commitment from opinion hosts/producers to only tell viewers the truth, and to bolster their arguments with hard, proven facts given in full context, rather than spin or reckless conjecture that causes harm to real people.”

Smartmatic’s lawsuit against Fox claims Fox “lied and knowingly spread falsehoods about Smartmatic’s role in the 2020 U.S. presidential election.” The company told Guardian reporters that it believes the employee criticisms provide evidence that Fox executives were on notice of internal concerns about what the network was airing. The company has also argued that Fox’s board of directors failed to act on the results of the survey, which it said provided a “stark warning” about the network’s programming.

Newsmax has already settled a similar defamation suit with Smartmatic over the 2020 election.

Read the full Guardian report at this link.

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an 9 25

Rupert Murdoch has succeeded in securing his vision for the future of News Corporation, the global media empire he has always thought of as his family business.

To achieve this, he has torn apart his family. He has also ensured his media outlets, especially Fox News, remain committed to his hard right-wing views.

With hindsight, this deal was inevitable. The 94-year-old mogul had just one remaining job to do as chairman emeritus of News Corp: to ensure that when he dies, the company he built and moulded remains in his image.

This announcement says he has found a way, which may give him some comfort but is profoundly disappointing to anyone who cares about public interest journalism.

There’s no longer any prospect of his children from his first and second marriages, Prudence, Elisabeth and James, who are now known as the “departing beneficiaries”, staging a coup after his death to wrest control from Rupert’s chosen successor and elder son Lachlan, who has headed News Corporation and Fox Corporation since Murdoch stepped aside in 2023.

Lachlan has taken a lesson from Rupert’s dealmaking playbook. He has thrown money at the problem by paying his three siblings more than he had previously offered for their respective shares. According to The New York Times, the three siblings will receive US$1.1 billion (A$1.7 billion) each for all their shares in the company.

Their agreement brings an end to the bitter battle the three siblings fought with their father and brother over the latter’s infamous attempt to revoke a seemingly irrevocable trust created at the end of Murdoch’s longest marriage, of 32 years, to Anna Murdoch (now Anna Maria dePeyster).

She had hated how her husband pitted their children against one another in the battle for succession, so she negotiated an agreement that would give each of the four children from the first two marriages a vote in the family trust. It also ensured Rupert retained enough votes in the trust so he could not be outvoted by his four (voting) children.

When Rupert anointed Lachlan his successor, upsetting the others, speculation was aired that when Rupert died, and his votes with him, the three siblings might oust Lachlan as chief executive and take control of the company. Worse, in Rupert’s eyes, they might change the editorial direction of the company, in particular Fox News.

That is what has changed. The family trust has also been re-engineered with an increased lifespan from 2030 to 2050, and folds in Murdoch’s daughters from his third marriage, to Wendi Deng – Grace and Chloe. This shores up the trust so they can’t sell out and dilute Lachlan’s shareholding.

Under the deal, a new company called Holdco, owned by Lachlan, Grace and Chloe, will own all the remaining shares of News Corp and Fox Corporation that previously had been held by the Murdoch family trust. The departing beneficiaries will sell their personal holdings in News Corp and Fox so none of them has any interest in either business. What’s more, they’ve agreed to a standstill clause that prevents them or their affiliates buying back in.

In 2019 alone, the company News Corporation made a reported US$71 billion (A$107 billion) from the sale of its entertainment assets to Disney. After that sale, the children were each given US$2 billion (just over A$3 billion).

Having already been referred to in the litigation as “white, privileged, multi billionaire trust-fund babies”, the three departing siblings have been made even wealthier by this agreement.

It was announced in a company press release on September 8 with an uncharacteristically sedate headline: “News Corp announces resolution of Murdoch family trust matter”.

It appears the decision to settle was in part driven by signals emanating from the probate court in Reno, which last year ruled in favour of Prudence, Elisabeth and James. Recently, however, the presiding appellate judge, Lynne Jones, appeared supportive of Rupert and Lachlan, saying “Who knows better than Rupert Murdoch the strengths and weaknesses of his family and his children?”

This may have weakened the three children’s bargaining power and forced them to accept some sort of buyout.

James may have contributed to this by granting an interview to The Atlantic which was published in February, in which he was highly critical of his father and gave away inside information from the probate hearings. Rupert and Lachlan’s lawyers pushed for James to be punished, a move that appeared to have support from the Reno court.

Clearly it was wishful thinking to believe Prudence, Elisabeth and James would stage a takeover and restore sensible programming to the Murdoch media. But it remains an irony, in a case replete with them, that it was James’ candid comments in an insightful 13,000-word profile casting much-needed light on a notoriously secretive family, which weakened the three siblings’ bargaining position.

Those comments helped ensure Rupert, and ultimately Lachlan, will be able to continue running their media empire as they see fit. Initially, that will mean little change, which is of course the problem. If News mastheads and Fox News continue as they have, we can look forward to more coverage denying the need to urgently act on climate change, more distortion of important issues and more support for assaults on democracy by the Trump administration. This is the kind of content that prompted James, if not all of the departing beneficiaries, to protest in the first place.

At least now we know the answer to this question: What choice would three multi billionaires make if they were offered another billion dollars each or the opportunity to transform a global media business for the better?

Andrew Dodd, Professor of Journalism, Director of the Centre for Advancing Journalism, The University of Melbourne and Matthew Ricketson, Professor of Communication, Deakin University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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AN 5 25

Trump’s ratings continue to slide on most issues. Recent Economist/YouGov polling across the US, completed on May 9-12, shows 51% think the country is on the wrong track, while only 45% have a favourable impression of his job as president. On inflation and prices in the shops, only 35% approve of his handling of this policy.

Trump seems to be scoring particularly badly with young voters. Around 62% of young people (18 to 29s) have an unfavourable opinion of the president, compared with 53% of the over-65s.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration continues to pursue an agenda to close down, or shackle, much of the media it considers not on his side.

Funding for national public service radio NPR and television PBS, as well as the global news service Voice of America, is under threat. Some national news outlets are under investigation by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for their coverage.

In a speech in March, Trump said broadcasters CNN and MSNBC, and some newspapers he didn’t name “literally write 97.6% bad about me”. He added: “It has to stop. It has to be illegal.”

The Trump team clearly see the role of the media as important to establishing and retaining support, and have taken steps to shake up White House coverage – including by changing who can attend the White House press pool.

About seven in ten members of the American public say they are following the news for updates on the Trump administration. It is interesting, therefore, to consider the role of the media in influencing Trump’s popularity, and insights can be found in the massive US Cooperative Election Study, conducted during the presidential contest last year.

That survey showed 57% of Americans had watched TV news in the previous 24 hours. Around 81% had used social media during the same period, but only 20% had used it to comment on politics.

There is a lot of attention being paid to fake news on the internet, which is helping to cause polarisation in the US. But when it comes to news about politics, TV coverage is still very important for most Americans.

The survey asked respondents about the TV news channels they watched, and Fox News came out on top with 47% of the viewers. ABC came second with 37%, and CBS and CNN tied on 35%. Fox News is Trump’s favorite TV station, with its rightwing populist agenda and regular output of Trump-friendly news.

Relationship between Trump voters and Fox News’s audience in 2024 US presidential election:

Source: Author graph based on Cooperative Election Study 2024, CC BY

The Cooperative Election Study had 60,000 respondents, which provides reasonably sized samples in each of the 50 states. The Trump vote varied quite a lot across states, with only 34% of voters in Maryland supporting him, compared with 72% in Wyoming. The electoral college formally decides the results of presidential elections, and this is based on states – so, looking at voting in this way can be quite revealing.

The connection between watching Fox News and Trump’s vote share can be seen in the chart above. It varies from 21% who watched the channel in Vermont to 60% in West Virginia.

Vermont is represented in Congress by Senator Bernie Sanders, a self-described socialist from a radical political tradition, and only 32% voted for Trump there. In contrast, West Virginia is part of the rust belt of impoverished states hit by deindustrialisation and the decline of the coal mining industry, and 71% voted for Trump there.

We can use a regression model (which looks at the relationship between variables) to predict support for Trump using key measures that drive the vote share for Trump in each state. The model uses three variables to predict the results with 95% accuracy, which means while not perfect, it gives a very accurate prediction of Trump’s vote.

Not surprisingly, partisanship – that is, the percentage of registered Republicans in each state – is one of the key metrics. In addition, ideology – the percentage of respondents who say they are conservatives – is another.

Perhaps more surprisingly, the third important predictor is viewership of Fox News. The relationship between watching the channel and voting for Trump is very strong at the state level. Also, the more time people spend watching the channel, the more likely they are to have voted for Trump.

Impact of key factors on Trump voting in 2024 US election:

Source: Author based on Cooperative Election Study , CC BY

This chart calculates the relationship between watching Fox News and other factors and the strength of a state’s support for Trump in 2024. If a variable is a perfect predictor of Trump voting, it would score 1.0 on the scale. If it is a perfect non-predictor, it would score 0.

So, the most important predictor of being a Trump voter was the presence of conservatives in a state, followed by the percentage of registered Republicans, and the third was watching Fox News. A high score on all three meant greater support for Trump.

To illustrate this, 45% of Texans considered themselves conservatives, 33% were registered Republicans, and 51% watched Fox News. Using these measures, the model predicts that 57% would vote for Trump. In fact, 56% voted for him in that state in 2024. So, while the prediction was not perfect, it was very close.

A similar predictive model can be used to forecast former Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris’s vote shares by state. In her case, we need four variables to predict the results with 95% accuracy – the percentage of registered Democrats, liberals and moderates in a state, and also Fox News viewership.

Not surprisingly in Harris’s case, the relationship between Fox News viewing and voting is strongly negative (correlation = -0.64). When viewership was high, the Harris vote was low.

Years ago, the “fairness doctrine” used to mandate US broadcasters to fairly reflect different viewpoints on controversial issues in their coverage. Candidates for public office were entitled to equal air time.

But this rule was removed by the FCC in 1987, and has led to an era of some broadcasters becoming far more partisan. The FCC decision followed a period of debate and challenges to the fairness doctrine. This led to its abolition under Ronald Reagan, the Republican president who inspired Project 2025 – the document that in turn appears to be inspiring the Trump government’s policy agenda.

When the Trump era is over, incumbent Democrats are going to have to repair US institutions that this administration has damaged. If they want to do something about the polarisation of US politics, they may also need to restore the fairness doctrine.

Had it not been removed in the first place, it is possible that Harris would have won the 2024 presidential election, since Fox News would not exist in its present form. Whatever happens next, the US media is likely to play an important role.

Paul Whiteley, Professor, Department of Government, *University of Essex

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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AN GUK 2 25

Why do so many rightwing American women have bottle-blond hair, often worn girlishly long? I’m thinking of Kellyanne Conway, Ann Coulter and almost any woman on Fox News.

*Jonathan, London N16

Excellent question, Jonathan! I was pondering something similar myself recently while looking through Ivanka Trump’s fashion collection on ivankatrump.com, which seems to be one of the only places it is stocked these days. The grimly bland suede pumps, the simpering floral shifts, the just-flirtatious-enough body-skimming little black dresses – welcome, people, to death by mainstream feminine. You know how your mother (or mother-in-law) goes on about how you wear too much black/denim/weird stuff, and you can’t figure out what the hell it is she expects you to wear? Well, allow me to introduce you to Ivanka Trump. What a shame it seems to be sold almost nowhere these days, as these are the clothes your mother (in-law) dreams of. Oh well, looks like she’ll have to put up with you in your awesome Bella Freud jumper and Topshop wide-legged culottes combo for another weekend!

This got me thinking about the look of American rightwing women in general. There is a cliche about how leftwing women look – popular, as it happens, on the right wing – and it can pretty much be summed up as “ugly, jack-booted, feminazi psycho lesbian”. Think any negative stereotype about feminists in the 1970s, or any endorsed by Rod Liddle today, and you have the vision. Even arguing with this cliche feels like a means of giving it credence but, seriously, you only need to look at, say, MSNBC, the American leftwing cable news channel, to see how absurd it is. There’s Andrea Mitchell, whoGawker once described as looking “like all the Golden Girls at once”, which is literally the highest compliment I’ve ever heard; the fabulous Joy-Ann Reid, one of the most prominent female African-American correspondents in the country, who can rock a block-coloured shift dress like nobody’s business; and probably most famously, Rachel Maddow, the no-nonsense evening host who gives Republicans a shrift as short as her hair. (OK, that analogy might need some punching up.) The point is, the diversity is great when it comes to the styles of leftwing media women, and we haven’t even discussed American leftwing political women. I mean, I’ve heard them described as “shrill” (which I think is Republican speak for “female I haven’t paid for”) but no one’s ever going to confuse Nancy Pelosi and Elizabeth Warren.

But then we turn to rightwing women. Kellyanne Conway, Scottie Nell Hughes,Tomi Lahren, Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham, Ivanka Trump, and pretty much every single woman on Fox News: a uniform vision of girlishly long bottle-blond hair. When I see them all lined up as talking heads on the news, I get a rare insight into what it must be like to gaze upon the bar area of one of those private American tennis clubs that don’t allow anyone whose name is “too urban” or ends in -stein or -berg. Welcome, people, to death by Wasp.

Nor is there any of the variety in fashion that you see on the left. Some leftwing women wear pantsuits (remember those?), some wear edgy designers like Proenza Schouler or Balenciaga, some wear no-messing skirt suits and some wear trusty jeans and sweats. But American rightwing women all dress exactly the same, which is to say, mainstream feminine – dresses, not trousers; heels, not flats; no interesting cuts, just body-skimming, cleavage-hinting, not-scaring-the-horses tedium. These are the kind of women who take pride in saying things like “I’m not into fashion – I like style”, and by “style” they mean “clothes that men like me to wear”. They think anyone who criticises Disney’s fetishisation of princesses is just jealous.

The uniformity of this style suggests a political statement which, indeed, it is. Theirs is a look that defiantly embraces the most conservative notions of femininity and firmly rejects any idea of modernity, let alone feminism. The idea of dressing for themselves – to have fun, to experiment with different styles – is as anathema to them as questioning the political, social and moral beliefs they have absorbed since they were 14 years old.

How hard it must be having to operate within such a narrow aesthetic palette. I mean, this is a demographic that considers being brunette a physical deformity (which may be another reason why Melania and Donald Trump never look entirely comfortable around one another: his preference has always been for blondes and, boy, does she know it.) And that’s a reflection of how hard it is to be an American conservative full stop, to reject the existence of modernity when it is all around you: to maintain your insistence that gay people are immoral when you have a gay nephew whom you always adored; to insist that immigrants are dangerous when your grandparents immigrated to the US; to argue that abortions are evil when your daughter has had at least one. And yet, they grip hard on to these beliefs, just as they hold hard on to their curling tongs which they twirl through their long blond locks every morning.

Well, ladies, the tenacity of your dogma is impressive, even if the dogma itself isn’t. I honestly have no idea how you have the patience to blow out your long hair every day and get your roots done every month, but, in the scheme of things, that’s the least of my questions about your daily life. And Ivanka Trump, where you probably bought some of your clothes, is harder to get than ever. Truly, as many of these women tell us on a near daily basis, life is tough when you’re a privileged, blond, white lady.

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The Rupert Murdoch-owned Fox News and its sister channel Fox Business faced their share of challenges during former President Joe Biden's four years in the White House. Fox News agreed to pay Domination Voting Systems $787.5 million to settle a major defamation lawsuit —while facing a separate $2.7 billion defamation lawsuit from Dominion competitor Smartmatic. And there were tensions between Donald Trump and Fox News over Fox News' initial enthusiasm for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' failed presidential run.

But Fox News dominated cable news ratings after Trump's victory in the 2024 presidential election.

News Corp's Rupert Murdoch will be turning 94 on March 11, and the direction the right-wing Murdoch media empire should take in the future is, according to The Guardian, inspiring major infighting among his children.

Journalist/author Jane Martinson, in an article published by The Guardian on February 22, explains, "The mogul's four eldest children — Lachlan, James, Elisabeth and Prudence — were set to inherit the family firm…. But four years ago, just after turning 90, Rupert had tried to cut James, Liz and Prue out of their inheritance and hand the businesses over to Lachlan, his favored heir who also happens to share his increasingly right-wing politics. (A) lawsuit was brought by the three errant offspring, and in December, a Nevada commissioner ruled in their favor, accusing Rupert and Lachlan of acting in 'bad faith.'"

Martinson continues, "The trial took place in secret, but the fallout — thanks to the New York Times investigation and a 13,000-word Atlantic interview with James — has been anything but. Among the highlights — or the lowlights if you’re a Murdoch — were the revelation that Rupert's plan to disinherit three of his four eldest children was dubbed 'Project Family Harmony,' that Rupert's lawyer had accused the three children of being 'white, privileged, multibillionaire trust-fund babies,' and that James now viewed his father as a 'misogynist.'"

A former Murdoch family "adviser" told The Guardian that employees are worried about the effect family infighting will have on the company.

According to that source, "It's hard to overstate how uncertain everyone associated with the company feels right now. You've got some great journalists doing great work while squabbling billionaires fall out over even more money."

Michael Wolff, author of the 2023 book "The Fall: The End of the Murdoch Empire," told The Guardian, "I think that we're clearly heading toward that (collapse)…. Lachlan will be fired, and the rest of the company will be dismantled."

But despite all this turmoil, Martinson notes, the Murdoch media empire still "brings profits and political clout."

"Although the businesses are riding high politically," Martinson observes, "Fox News still faces a $2.7bn defamation claim from Smartmatic after on-air comments suggested the electronic voting systems helped rig the 2020 US presidential election…. Yet Fox News is the most profitable part of the Murdoch empire and likely to be the easiest to sell in the short term. It is separately traded and valued at $25bn, and there will be no shortage of billionaires willing to pay for its access and influence."

*Jane Martinson's full article for The Guardian is available at this link.

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this week may well see a court decide the fate and future of Fox “News” and thus the Republican Party, at least in its current hard-right neofascist form. And odds are Fox viewers are blissfully ignorant about the pitched battle that just played out in a Reno courtroom over the future of their beloved propaganda outlet.

Sir Keith Murdoch was the notoriously racist and misogynist owner of a small newspaper chain in Australia. It was inherited by his son, Rupert, who — using sensationalism and bigotry — turned it into a multi-billion-dollar enterprise that spans three continents.

Former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd called Rupert Murdoch “the greatest cancer on the Australian democracy” in the pages of The Sydney Morning Herald, the New York Times of Australia. Noting that Murdoch owns about “two thirds of the country’s print media,” Rudd wrote:

“In Britain, Murdoch made Brexit possible because of the position taken by his papers. In the United States, Murdoch's Fox News is the political echo chamber of the far right, which enabled the Tea Party and then the Trump party to stage a hostile takeover of the Republican Party. In Australia, as in America, Murdoch has campaigned for decades in support of tax cuts for the wealthy, killing action on climate change and destroying anything approximating multiculturalism.”

When Rupert was divorcing his second wife he put most of the family’s businesses into a trust, apparently to prevent her from grabbing a larger share of his wealth. The terms of that trust stipulate that when Rupert dies, his four children — Lachlan, James, Elisabeth, and Prudence — would share equal votes and power over the business dynasty their father had inherited from his father.

But now Rupert — who’s 93 years old — is having second thoughts, because James, Elisabeth, and Prudence are apparently not all that enthusiastic about Fox “News” and other Murdoch media outlets nakedly lying to and whipping up hatred among their viewers and readers, both here, in Australia, and in the UK. Only Lachlan, Rupert’s oldest son, is loyal to his father’s vision of peddling-hate-for-billions-in-profits.

So, Rupert went to court in Reno — the proceedings are sealed, but the case began last week and wrapped up yesterday (although we don’t yet know the result) — to try to break the trust and hand exclusive or primary control of his fiefdom to Lachlan.

Fox “News” viewers have no idea that they’re being constantly lied to, both by commission (like telling them the 2020 election was stolen by voting machines) and by omission. They think they’re seeing the world “as it is” and getting fair and balanced “truth” and “straight talk,” which is why Fox “News” is so potent.

Without Fox “News” there probably never would have been a January 6th coup attempt, and, given how thin their margins were, likely no 2000 Bush or 2016 Trump presidencies.

The stakes here are enormous. Some media observers believe that a major role in Barack Obama’s 2008 victory was Air America broadcasting my program and others to well over two-thirds of America with big stations in 62 major markets. (That ended when Mitt Romney decided to run for president and had his company buy Clear Channel, then flip all of the stations Air America was leasing from them from progressive talk to sports, killing the network in 2010.)

Similarly, the rise of Fox following Reagan fast-tracking Murdoch’s US citizenship has played a huge role in Republican victories across the nation and the solid hold the GOP has on red state America, where Fox and rightwing hate radio predominate.

Activist investors in the Fox media caliphate have tried to force a vote at the upcoming shareholders’ meeting that would require Fox “News” to label their opinion programming — which constitutes most of their programming — as “opinion.” An attorney for the activist shareholder group, Luke Morgan, told US News & World Report:

“There can hardly be a more significant issue for Fox than its misinformation problem. This is precisely the sort of issue that is appropriate for shareholder input.”

Nonetheless, to Murdoch’s great delight, no doubt, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) ruled last week that Fox doesn’t have to start informing its viewers when their talent crosses the line from reporting to indoctrinating.

Weirdly, this drama within an Australian family may well determine the fate and future of the Republican Party and the conservative and MAGA movements in the US. The future of democracy in America.

It’s a real-life Succession drama and may take months to resolve.

Keep an eye on this story. While it’s probably the most under-reported major news story in America right now, the outcome will have far-reaching consequences for all of us.

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'Bad for the brand': Rupert Murdoch appears to be souring on Trump

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american nationalist: Part 2

How Tucker Carlson Reshaped Fox News — and Became Trump’s Heir

By Nicholas Confessore

Published April 30, 2022

Updated May 16, 2022

Tucker Carlson had a problem.

After years in the cable wilderness, he had made a triumphant return to prime time. And his new show, “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” had leapfrogged to the heart of Fox News’s evening lineup just months after Donald J. Trump’s upset victory shattered the boundaries of conventional politics.

But as Mr. Trump thrashed through his first months in office, Mr. Carlson found himself with an unexpected programming challenge: Fox was too pro-Trump. The new president watched his favorite network religiously, and often tweeted about what he saw there, while Fox broadcasts reliably parroted White House messaging. No one was more on message than Sean Hannity, then Fox’s highest-rated star, who frequently devoted his show to Mr. Trump’s daily battles with Washington Democrats and the media.

Newly planted in Fox’s newly vacated 8 p.m. time slot — previously held by the disgraced star Bill O’Reilly — Mr. Carlson told friends and co-workers that he needed to find a way to reach the Trump faithful, but without imitating Mr. Hannity. He didn’t want to get sucked into apologizing for Mr. Trump every day, he told one colleague, because the fickle, undisciplined new president would constantly need apologizing for.

The solution would not just propel Mr. Carlson toward the summit of cable news. It would ultimately thrust him to the forefront of the nationalist forces reshaping American conservatism. “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” the host and his producers decided, would embrace Trumpism, not Mr. Trump. The show would grasp the emotional core of Mr. Trump’s allure — white panic over the country’s changing ethnic composition — while keeping a carefully measured distance from the president himself. For years, as his television career sputtered, Mr. Carlson had adopted increasingly catastrophic views of immigration and the country’s shifting demographics. Now, as Mr. Trump took unvarnished nativism from the right-wing fringe to the Oval Office, Mr. Carlson made it the centerpiece of “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”

He began seeking out stories, one friend observed, that were sometimes “really weird” and often inaccurate but tapped into viewers’ fears of a trampled-on American culture. He inveighed against Macy’s new line of hijabs, and devoted a segment to “Gypsy” refugees in a Pennsylvania town who Mr. Carlson said had left “streets covered — pardon us now, but it’s true — with human feces.” (It was not true: Local officials ultimately documented a single instance of a refugee child who had pulled down his pants outside because he couldn’t make it back home in time.) He cataloged, and magnified, overlooked instances of what he cast as growing discrimination against white Americans. Stories about the threat of immigration had long been a feature of Fox. But Mr. Carlson dialed up the intensity, expertly weaving tropes borrowed from the far right into a narrative that would come to define “Tucker Carlson Tonight”: falling birthrates among the native-born, big-city crime, lax immigration policies designed to forcibly alter American society — all engineered or encouraged by a “ruling class” desperate to censor public discussion of its own failures.

Inside the Apocalyptic Worldview of ‘Tucker Carlson Tonight’

A Times analysis of 1,150 episodes reveals how Tucker Carlson pushes extremist ideas and conspiracy theories into millions of households, five nights a week.

Mr. Carlson’s darkening arc foreshadowed a transformation beginning to sweep through Fox itself. As Mr. Trump fought to build a border wall and keep Muslims out of the United States, Fox’s journalists and right-wing commentators would clash repeatedly over what many longtime staff members saw as a creeping invasion of the news divisions by allies and functionaries of the higher-rated, pro-Trump prime-time hosts. Mr. Carlson would be both instigator and beneficiary of Fox’s civil war. He forged a relationship with Lachlan Murdoch, the Murdoch family’s heir apparent, who would become his most public supporter at Fox. And while Mr. Murdoch and Fox executives have often couched their defense of “Tucker Carlson Tonight” as a protection of free inquiry and controversial opinions, the reality is less high-minded. From the beginning, Mr. Carlson’s on-air provocations have been part of a painstaking, data-driven campaign to build and hold Fox’s audience, according to former Fox executives and employees — an experiment that has succeeded wildly in bolstering Mr. Murdoch’s profit machine against the long-term decline in cable news subscriptions.

The network’s leadership takes a broader view of Fox’s financial and ratings success. A spokeswoman for the network provided the following statement: “Fox News Media has grown through strategic innovation, redirecting investments in journalism to encompass more than 50 percent of the budget while expanding our footprint beyond one legacy linear network to eight thriving platforms. As a result, we’ve doubled our audience, achieved unrivaled results, and have become the destination that more Democrats and independents choose for their news coverage, while our competitors have lost dramatic levels of viewership. We couldn’t be prouder of our entire team, whose commitment to excellence in journalism and opinion has led Fox News Media to all-time ratings records and delivered the best in class to our viewers.”

Mr. Carlson declined to be interviewed for this article. At Fox, his popularity with viewers has allowed him to fend off external critics and shut down those within, from news anchors to junior employees who objected to his rhetoric. His importance to the Murdochs has grown along with his ratings, giving him unusual power at the network. During the waning months of Mr. Trump’s presidency, Mr. Carlson would harness the tidal wave of white resentment animated by Mr. Trump to draw the largest audience of any show on television.

Today, Mr. Carlson’s influence reaches far beyond the channel he works for, or the audience that tunes in to his show. Mr. Trump is out of office and banned or suspended from the leading social media platforms. But Mr. Carlson remains, both high priest and champion of Mr. Trump’s most ardent followers. Each night, Mr. Carlson channels the passions and grievances that have replaced the Reagan-era conservatism he grew up on, from the tyranny of mask mandates to the grave danger posed by critical race theory in schools. He has aggressively defended the insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 — an attack that Mr. Carlson, borrowing the former president’s “deep state” canards, has portrayed as a false-flag operation masterminded by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Ambitious Republican lawmakers now echo his embrace of the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, once relegated to the far-right fringe, that Western elites are importing immigrants to disempower the native-born.

In some respects, Mr. Carlson has taken Trumpism away from Mr. Trump. While the former president has urged his followers to get vaccinated and sought to claim more credit for his administration’s efforts to fight Covid-19, Mr. Carlson has continued to promote doubt about the vaccines’ efficacy, even likening mandates to Nazi medical experiments. On the Jan. 6 anniversary, Senator Ted Cruz, the Texas Republican, set out to walk back his comments accurately calling the Trump-inspired riot a “violent terrorist attack.” He didn’t apologize to Mr. Trump. He apologized to Mr. Carlson, in a cringing appearance on “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”

Trumpism Without Trump

“Tucker Carlson Tonight” was at first only a slight update on the classic cable shoutfest. The show arrived on Fox a few months after Roger Ailes, the network’s powerful co-founder, was forced out amid a widening sexual harassment scandal. Mr. Ailes had been lukewarm on Mr. Carlson, then paying his dues on the weekend edition of “Fox and Friends.” (According to a Fox colleague at the time, Mr. Ailes had once described Mr. Carlson’s hiring at Fox as “his last chance” in cable news.) But the Murdochs liked him, and Rupert Murdoch, who temporarily took the reins after ousting Mr. Ailes, installed Mr. Carlson in Fox’s 7 p.m. slot.

In segments dubbed “Tucker Takes On,” Mr. Carlson would invite on a liberal foil for combat, an approach Fox executives sometimes referred to as “Twitter for television.” There were lighter segments, like “The Friend Zone,” in which the host would bring on a Fox colleague or friend for a bit of self-promotion, or “King for a Day,” in which viewers would be invited to propose one thing they would do to fix the country.

Less than two months in, Mr. Murdoch promoted Mr. Carlson again, to the higher-profile 9 p.m. slot abruptly vacated by Megyn Kelly. To help write scripts, Mr. Carlson hired one of his old Daily Caller reporters: Blake Neff, a young South Dakotan who would later be let go after CNN outed him for posting racist and sexist jokes online. “Tucker Carlson Tonight” began to dial up coverage of college liberals, both a Fox staple and Mr. Neff’s specialty at The Caller. Sometimes titled “Campus Craziness,” the segments featured conservative professors shunned for criticizing Islam and left-wing professors expressing hatred for white people. One episode mocked students in Mississippi who mistook a stray banana peel for a hate crime. Mr. Carlson’s ratings shot up, and just a few months later, in April 2017, Mr. Murdoch promoted him to succeed Mr. O’Reilly, long Fox’s most prominent and popular host. Mr. Carlson’s agents immediately began shopping a book, with a price tag said to be as high as $15 million.

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Mr. Carlson and other hosts repeatedly called a migrant caravan approaching the southern border in 2018 an “invasion.” They continued even after a man who applauded such language on social media fatally shot 11 people at a Pittsburgh synagogue.Credit...Associated Press

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“Another migrant caravan of people from another country who have not been invited to this country are coming nevertheless and telling us that we’re not allowed to do anything about it. Will that caravan make it to the U.S. border? And what exactly happens if and when it does? That is next.”

To help redesign “Tucker Carlson Tonight” for the 8 p.m. hour, Fox assigned Ron Mitchell, a former O’Reilly producer recently promoted to Fox’s executive ranks, where he would supervise “story development” across prime time. Fox had always excelled not just at attracting more viewers than its rivals but at getting them to stick around longer, giving an added bump to its Nielsen ratings. To maintain its dominance in the post-Ailes era, the teams working on Fox’s evening lineup began to make wider use of expensive ratings data known as “minute-by-minutes.” Unlike the “quarter-hour” ratings more commonly used in cable newsrooms, which show how each 15-minute “block” performed, the minute-by-minutes allow producers to scrutinize an audience’s real-time ebb and flow. Mr. Carlson, determined to avoid his fate at CNN and MSNBC, was among the network’s most avid consumers of minute-by-minutes, according to three former Fox employees.

His new direction — Trumpism without Trump — took shape that summer. The lighter segments faded from view. Notably, Mr. Trump was mentioned less often than on “Hannity,” and Mr. Carlson sometimes even criticized the president, particularly when he deviated from campaign promises like building the border wall and avoiding what he had once called “stupid” wars. In private, Mr. Carlson mocked the president’s habit of calling to head off his on-air attacks. (When Mr. Trump called to pre-empt criticism of one foreign-policy move, Mr. Carlson declined the call, according to a former Fox employee who witnessed it.)

Most strikingly, “Tucker Carlson Tonight” began devoting more and more airtime to immigration and to what its host depicted as the looming catastrophe of demographic change. “He is going to double down on the white nationalism because the minute-by-minutes show that the audience eats it up,” said another former Fox employee, who worked frequently with Mr. Carlson.

He covered protesters’ attempts to pull down Confederate monuments with hyperbolic intensity; one such episode, he told his viewers, marked the beginning of “the destruction of America’s delicate social fabric.” His producers scavenged local news for under-covered items about refugees and migrants, which Mr. Carlson blew up into national news. He also began to venture farther afield than other hosts. He mocked Austria as the soon-to-be “caliphate of West Arabia.” The immigration backlash and migrant crimes in countries like Sweden and Germany became forewarnings of America’s future. “The country’s in decline,” he told viewers in the fall of 2017. He added: “Everyone knows that. It’s not racist to note that.”

A Ratings Game

But as America declined on screen, Mr. Carlson ascended behind it.

Fox News was undergoing the most significant changes in its history, a shift that would position Mr. Carlson to seize outsize power within the network. The Murdochs were negotiating to sell most of their television and studio assets to the Walt Disney Company, a transaction that would also resolve the family’s succession battle, leaving Lachlan Murdoch as sole heir to the throne. He was widely viewed as having more conservative politics than his father. In Australia, he had been instrumental in installing a number of hard-right executives and editors at the family’s media properties, while overseeing efforts to transform the little-watched cable channel Sky News into a mini-Fox, with a fiery evening lineup. At Fox, he became friendly with Mr. Carlson, who cultivated a perception within the network that the two men were close.

Mr. Murdoch ran the new Fox enterprises — now a stripped-down company with Fox News at its core — from across the country, in Los Angeles. (Last year, he moved back to Australia.) In mid-2018, he announced the appointment of Suzanne Scott, an Ailes-era network veteran, as the new Fox News chief executive. Though credited with helping revamp the network’s post-O’Reilly lineup, Ms. Scott, who would preside over Fox expansions into weather, books and other new divisions, seemed disinclined to exert Mr. Ailes’s tight rein over Fox’s talent, according to former employees. And where Mr. Ailes had been regarded within Fox — if not always outside it — as protective of the news divisions’ credibility, Ms. Scott, mindful of the cable industry’s long-term headwinds, was focused on preserving the network’s audience. “Suzanne began talking about, ‘We have to do more of what we do best,’” said one former senior employee.

Under Ms. Scott, Fox’s news shows began to more closely mimic its highly rated prime-time opinion shows in both tone and topic. Guests brought on to analyze the day’s stories would instead find themselves asked to respond to clips of provocative comments made by Mr. Carlson and other hosts or guests the night before — a backdoor way for Fox to inject prime-time material into the lower-rated dayside shows. In 2018, after a former Hannity producer took over the network’s widely read website, FoxNews.com, he assembled a team of reporters called Fox News Flash, who were deployed to write news stories built solely around video clips from prime time. Mr. Carlson’s drove the most traffic, according to a former FoxNews.com employee.

One major force behind the news-side changes was a former Megyn Kelly producer named Tom Lowell, a Fox vice president who assumed growing authority over the network’s correspondents and news coverage. He was considered a favorite of the elder Mr. Murdoch, who appreciated his tabloidy approach to news curation. He was less popular among his subordinates, who nicknamed him “the burglar,” on account of his reputation for stealing credit for ideas, and because of a long-ago incident that became Fox lore as he rose: In his 20s, Mr. Lowell and two friends were arrested after breaking into a liquor store in Florida. (Mr. Lowell received three years’ probation, according to public records.) One week, while an executive who typically ran the high-level daily news meeting was on vacation, Mr. Lowell took over the role and never gave it back.

He encouraged shows to focus on the kind of grabby, inflammatory stories that dominated prime time and drove ratings. As the midterm elections approached and Mr. Trump’s unpopularity threatened to sink down-ballot Republicans, Fox began nonstop coverage of a migrant caravan wending its way through Central America to the U.S. border. Mr. Carlson and other prime-time hosts and guests called the caravan — mostly women and children — an “invasion” dozens of times in the weeks before the election, according to tallies by Media Matters and CNN. They continued to do so even after a man walked into a Pittsburgh synagogue in late October and murdered 11 people, leaving behind a trail of social media posts railing against immigrants and Jews and applauding how people were now calling illegal immigrants “invaders.”

Shortly after the attack, the longtime anchor Shepard Smith, a beloved figure in the Fox newsroom, threw a brushback pitch at his own network. “There is no invasion,” he told viewers of his afternoon news show. “No one’s coming to get you.” Whether or not the caravan threatened America, however, it was a boon to Fox: That October, ratings were even higher than they had been right before the 2016 presidential election. Network executives soon began retooling the dayside shows, applying the approach that had worked for Mr. Carlson and his prime-time colleagues. Mr. Mitchell, now promoted to a high-level position running “analytics” across Fox, began sitting in on story meetings to vet topics and guests, a role that discomfited some reporters and producers. He handed out color-coded bar charts detailing the minute-by-minute performance of each show. “They’re all obsessed with the minute-by-minutes,” said a former Fox employee. “Every second that goes on that network now gets scrutinized.”

Mr. Lowell and Mr. Mitchell pitched the initiative as “Moneyball” for television: a data-driven, audience-first approach to deciding what to cover and how to cover it. But journalists on the daytime lineup discerned a pattern to what the audience didn’t like. Segments featuring Fox’s own reporters consistently drew lower ratings, especially if they were covering stories the audience deemed unfavorable to Mr. Trump. So did guests who leaned left, or simply staked out independent viewpoints. Mr. Lowell and Mr. Mitchell, for example, urged shows not to book Chris Stirewalt, a respected, down-the-middle political editor and analyst. But immigration was a hit. Coverage of migrant caravans became a Fox mainstay, with one correspondent even embedded with refugee groups.

Fox executives wanted to focus on “the grievance, the stuff that would get people boiled up,” said one current Fox employee. “They’re coming for you, the Blacks are coming for you, the Mexicans are coming for you.”

Dangers Abroad

In the spring of 2018, Mr. Carlson aired a segment that jolted even his more jaded Fox colleagues. South Africa’s white farmers were “being targeted in a wave of barbaric and horrifying murders,” he told viewers. The Black-led government “just passed a law allowing it to seize their farms without any compensation, based purely on their ethnicity.”

Until Mr. Carlson waded in, few Americans were paying attention to “farm murders” in South Africa. In a country of 60 million people, where violent crime is common but the vast majority of its victims are Black, the police record dozens of murders of whites on farms and other small holdings each year. But the notion that white farmers were being singled out for attack was largely confined to the far-right web, where writers and commenters warned of a burgeoning “white genocide” — itself a neo-Nazi trope dating back to the end of apartheid.

Then the Murdoch empire stepped in. In the winter of 2018, reporters for a Murdoch-owned Australian tabloid, The Daily Telegraph, contacted AfriForum, a self-styled civil rights group for South Africa’s Afrikaner white minority. For months, with little success, the group had been circulating widely contested studies claiming to show that white farmers faced a disproportionate risk of murder and brutalization. After touring white-owned farms in South Africa, the Telegraph team returned with a package of columns and news articles asserting that being a South African farmer was “now the world’s most dangerous job” and demanding that they be granted emergency refugee visas. From there, the story would be picked up by the Fox-inspired nighttime hosts on Sky News. Within days, Australia’s home affairs minister floated the idea of fast-track visas for South African farmers.

The idea went nowhere, but the story soon jumped around the world. In a 2018 meeting of Fox News executives, according to two people with knowledge of the discussions, Mr. Lowell proposed covering farm murders for American audiences, echoing the fevered framing of his Australian colleagues: a country descending into chaos, an impoverished Black majority scheming to kill white farmers and steal their land. Mr. Carlson, it turned out, was also pursuing the story. He had briefly mentioned farm murders in a segment that March, and two months later, when AfriForum officials made a lobbying trip to Washington, an ally put them in touch with him.

“My understanding was, he was interested in the topic already, and someone we had gotten to know over time recommended he speak with us,” said Ernest Roets, AfriForum’s deputy chief executive, who declined to identify the intermediary.

AfriForum formally rejects the far-right idea of a “white genocide.” But when he interviewed Mr. Roets on his show that May, Mr. Carlson bulldozed through the group’s careful caveats, describing “in some sense an intentional campaign,” supported by the government, “to crush a racial minority within your country.”

In an interview with The New York Times, Mr. Roets acknowledged that Mr. Carlson had exaggerated.

“It’s not my job, as a spokesperson, to tell a journalist how he or she should frame a question,” he said. “I would be a bad spokesperson to use what little time I have to say, ‘Well, let’s frame that question a little differently.’”

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In 2018, Mr. Carlson began airing segments on “farm murders” in South Africa, linking the killing of white farmers there to government proposals to seize land without compensation — something that had never come to pass. The coverage echoed far-right narratives about a looming “white genocide.”Credit...The New York Times

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“South Africa is a diverse country, but the South African government would like to make it much less diverse. An embattled minority of farmers, mostly Afrikaans-speaking, is being targeted in a wave of barbaric and horrifying murders,” he said, adding that “the government just passed a law allowing it to seize their farms without any compensation, based purely on their ethnicity.”

:{:{Mr. Carlson’s coverage sparked a rare high-level dispute inside the network. During a subsequent meeting of Fox’s senior executives, Brian Jones, president of Fox Business Network and the highest-ranking Black man in Fox leadership, explained that almost everything Mr. Carlson was saying on the air was wrong.}:

Legislators in South Africa, where whites still own the majority of private farmland, had begun debating a constitutional amendment to allow uncompensated land seizures, but no such measure had been passed. Though intended to reverse apartheid-era land dispossession, the proposed amendment did not target farmers on the basis of their race or ethnicity. Nor had the government backed a campaign of ethnic violence and murder. Mr. Jones told his fellow executives that Mr. Carlson’s coverage had been ripped from far-right sites, including the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer, according to a person with knowledge of the discussions. (Mr. Jones, who left the network in 2019, did not respond to a request for comment.)}:

Mr. Lowell defended the segments, and Mr. Jones was ultimately overruled. A Fox spokeswoman disputed that account, saying that Mr. Lowell had only pushed for the story to be investigated to see if it was accurate. But word of the high-level editorial dispute soon filtered down through the network. Even among the generally right-of-center rank-and-file, discontent was growing over Fox’s nativist tilt and racial scaremongering. Now staff members who had watched the farm-murder story swirl around far-right websites wondered how it had arrived at their network, and why Mr. Lowell and Mr. Carlson had pushed it, especially when Fox was so busy covering Trump-related breaking news and more conventional controversies.

But Mr. Carlson dug in. He covered South African farm murders and land disputes throughout the spring and summer, again claiming that officials there were seizing land that they hadn’t under a constitutional amendment that didn’t exist. That August, after an episode of “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” President Trump tweeted that his administration would “closely study” the seizure of white-owned land and the “large-scale killing of farmers.” Alt-right and neo-Nazi figures in the United States cheered the propaganda coup. Patrick Casey, leader of the group Identity Evropa, exulted that Mr. Trump’s proclamation could help bring white nationalist ideas to a mainstream audience.

“Conservatives becoming aware of the plight of White South Africans has the potential to take them beyond the current limitations of ‘acceptable’ conservative immigration debate toward identitarianism,” Mr. Casey tweeted.

Strange Bedfellows

Fox journalists soon had another reason for concern. Around the same time Mr. Carlson was promoting the notion of a South African ethnic cleansing, Fox was lurching through a post-Ailes rebuilding of its human resources organization. Lines of authority and power had always been mysterious at Fox, and so when a formal organizational chart appeared on the company’s employee portal, some curious employees logged on to see who reported directly to Rupert Murdoch.

Most of Murdoch’s subordinates were unsurprising, according to several people who viewed the chart. But one came as a shock: Peter Brimelow, founder of the website VDare.

The British-born Mr. Brimelow had known Mr. Murdoch for decades and once worked as a columnist for MarketWatch, the Murdoch-owned financial news site. But over the years, he had adopted more pronounced nativist views; VDare, started in 1999, had evolved into a hub of the new, more online-oriented white nationalist movement. Mr. Brimelow once described the Obama administration as a “Minority Occupation Government” and California as “totally overrun by barrios of illegal immigrants.” Shortly after Mr. Trump was elected, he spoke at a conference held by the National Policy Institute, a latter-day white nationalist group. (Mr. Brimelow sued The Times in 2020 for articles in which either he or VDare was described as white nationalist; a judge dismissed the case later that year. A separate lawsuit brought by VDare is still pending.)

Mr. Brimelow’s apparent role at Fox set off a new wave of consternation and gossip. Employees who asked about the relationship were given a variety of explanations. Mr. Brimelow was said to be helping with Mr. Murdoch’s memoirs — a project that, as far as most people understood, their boss had abandoned in the 1990s — or writing speeches, or attached to some other Murdoch initiative. In short order, several former Fox employees recalled, the organizational chart was taken down entirely.

A Fox spokeswoman said Mr. Brimelow did not currently have any relationship with the company. Mr. Brimelow declined to comment, writing in an email that The Times could not be trusted, so “you cannot expect any sane person to talk to you.”

In August 2018, Mr. Brimelow was spotted at a birthday party for the Trump adviser Larry Kudlow, drawing an article in The Washington Post and prompting the White House and Mr. Kudlow to distance themselves from Mr. Brimelow. But at Fox, some took the Brimelow discovery as an indirect explanation for the latitude Fox had extended Mr. Carlson on South Africa. If Mr. Murdoch had someone like Mr. Brimelow working for him, reasoned the former employee, he would have little objection to Mr. Carlson peddling far-right themes. (By coincidence, the same week Mr. Murdoch’s newspapers had begun their emergency-visa campaign in Australia, VDare published a story imploring Mr. Trump to welcome South African farmers to the United States.)

South Africa was not an aberration. In an echo of how Mr. Murdoch’s media empire had spent decades nurturing right-wing populism throughout the English-speaking world, Mr. Carlson had begun to fashion his show as a broader platform for nationalist ideas. From early on, he had promoted right-wing figures from abroad, people who could provide testimony on his themes of immigration and social decay. Now he was forging links with an increasingly globalized movement of populist activists and politicians — some of them eager for influence in Trump-era Washington.

Among those politicians was Hungary’s autocratic prime minister, Viktor Orban, a rising darling of the international far right. In late 2018, the Hungarian embassy hired a lobbyist, William Nixon, with business ties to Mr. Carlson’s father; within weeks, the lobbyist was in touch with Mr. Carlson about arranging an interview with the Hungarian foreign minister, who was planning a trip to Washington. During these talks, according to a person with knowledge of the conversations, Mr. Carlson mentioned that his head writer, Mr. Neff, was headed to Hungary the following year to report on how Mr. Orban was “improving the country.” (At the time, allies of Mr. Orban, a promoter of what he called “illiberal democracy,” had completed a sweeping takeover of the country’s news media, and the government would soon begin efforts to shut down a Budapest university founded by the liberal philanthropist George Soros.) In an email to The Times, Mr. Neff characterized his trip as a vacation.

Mr. Nixon connected Mr. Neff to the embassy to arrange interviews during the trip, according to the person with knowledge of the conversations. He also brought the Hungarian ambassador to Mr. Carlson’s Washington office, where the three men bonded over fly fishing, a popular pastime in Hungary. Mr. Carlson said he had long been interested in Mr. Orban and would welcome the chance to interview him.

That February, Mr. Carlson hosted the Hungarian foreign minister, Peter Szijjarto, who touted Mr. Orban’s hard line against immigration and his efforts to encourage families to have more children. And last summer, Mr. Carlson traveled to Budapest to produce what was in effect an extended infomercial for the Orban government. In a series of segments and a gentle interview with the prime minister himself, Mr. Carlson employed a sanitized version of Mr. Orban’s Hungary to frame his own arguments about an American civilization under attack by alien forces.

Where South Africa was a warning of the hell that America could become, Hungary was a vision of the paradise that could be had by taking America back. “You don’t have to watch your country collapse,” Mr. Carlson told viewers. “You don’t have to have leaders who hate the population or divide their own people against each other.”

Going Farther Afield

The day after the 2018 midterms, as darkness fell over Washington’s leafy Kent neighborhood, members of a local antifa group appeared outside Mr. Carlson’s home to protest his coverage of the migrant caravan. Standing in his driveway, yelling through bullhorns, they chanted, “We know where you sleep at night.” Mr. Carlson was not at home, but his wife, Susie Andrews, was. According to the Carlsons, someone banged on the door. Panicked, she locked herself in the pantry and dialed 911.

Mr. Carlson had lived in Washington for most of his adult life, and loved it. Two longtime friends said he was deeply shaken by the protests outside his home. “All of a sudden, it just became impossible to live there,” Mr. Carlson said in an interview last fall with Dave Rubin, a conservative YouTube personality and occasional guest on “Tucker Carlson Tonight.” He added, “I felt like we were really part of the city and then, next thing you know, people are showing up at the house.” He worried that “you’re going to wind up shooting somebody.” Within a year, he would flee Washington entirely, seeking asylum far beyond the Acela corridor.

In March 2019, Mr. Carlson set out to buy a dilapidated town garage in Bryant Pond, Maine, where his family had owned a vacation getaway for decades. In a letter to town officials, he pledged that Fox would install a state-of-the-art studio there. Mr. Carlson had never been guarded about his home in Bryant Pond, and often told interviewers about his love of Maine living. But when a local newspaper, The Sun Journal, published news of the proposed purchase, he lashed out like a man under siege. “All it does is hurt me,” he told the paper’s reporter, Steve Collins, explaining that Fox would never agree to leave $1 million worth of equipment in an isolated rural location if everyone knew about it. (Mr. Carlson would raise the stakes when The Times later assigned a freelancer to write about his life in Bryant Pond, accusing the paper of seeking to endanger his wife and children. A Maine-based freelance photographer, whom Mr. Carlson named on air, found his own door banged on by strangers after dark.)

In the end, Mr. Carlson proceeded with his plans, and by the following spring, The Sun Journal reported that his new studio was complete. He put his Washington house up for sale and began living in Maine much of the year, taping “Tucker Carlson Tonight” from Bryant Pond. (When not in Maine, Mr. Carlson usually broadcasts from Florida, where he has a second home in the resort town of Boca Grande.)

A different kind of threat was emerging inside Fox itself. In March 2019, the left-leaning watchdog group Media Matters surfaced old recordings of Mr. Carlson defending statutory rape and calling Iraqis “semiliterate primitive monkeys,” comments that had yet more advertisers fleeing and Fox colleagues fuming, especially some younger employees. That same month, the Fox opinion host Jeanine Pirro questioned on air whether Representative Ilhan Omar, a Minnesota Democrat and Somali-born former refugee, might be more loyal to her Muslim faith than to the Constitution. The slur prompted a young Muslim employee named Hufsa Kamal, who worked on Fox’s flagship news show, “Special Report With Bret Baier,” to chastise Ms. Pirro on Twitter — an extraordinary breach of the network’s hermetic culture. Not long after, as Ms. Kamal endured a stream of online abuse and threats from Fox fans, a producer in Fox’s Los Angeles bureau named Dan Gallo wrote to the company’s top human resources executives.

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Mr. Carlson ran a segment in 2017 on a small group of Romani asylum seekers in Pennsylvania town. Local reports of a Romani child going to the bathroom outside became, on Mr. Carlson’s show, a plague of streets covered “with human feces.”

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“I’m merely saying this has been a distinct group for a thousand years. It actually hasn’t assimilated, for the most part, into the cultures in which it has been hosted. And so I wonder why we think they’re going to assimilate in Pennsylvania.”

“When Fox personalities make these sorts of statements, it damages my credibility as a Fox journalist & my ability to effectively cover stories,” wrote Mr. Gallo, who provided copies of his emails to The Times. He argued that Mr. Carlson and Ms. Pirro were creating an unsafe workplace for employees like Ms. Kamal, and asked that Fox take action. “If an employee said those things in the workplace, especially with Muslim colleagues present, I think they would be disciplined,” Mr. Gallo wrote. (While Fox had issued a statement condemning Ms. Pirro’s remarks, she had not apologized.) Before sending his complaint, Mr. Gallo showed a copy to Ms. Kamal to make sure she was comfortable with it.

In a subsequent phone call, the executives, Kevin Lord and Nicolle Campa, seemed receptive, Mr. Gallo said in a statement to The Times. They thanked him for his letter and promised to relay it to Ms. Scott and Jay Wallace, Fox News’s president, so that they could understand the impact the hosts were having on the network’s journalists. Mr. Gallo assumed the complaint would otherwise remain confidential, as with other human resources matters.

A month later, Mr. Carlson landed in Los Angeles for a weeklong West Coast stint. Minutes after arriving in the bureau, he tracked down Mr. Gallo, who was sitting in an office talking to two colleagues. “Are you Dan Gallo?” he interrupted. When Mr. Gallo tried to introduce himself, an indignant Mr. Carlson simply handed him a blue notecard with his cellphone number. The next time Mr. Gallo had a problem with his show, Mr. Carlson said, he should “do the honorable thing” and call. Mr. Gallo offered to talk then and there, he said, but Mr. Carlson wasn’t interested. “I’m busy,” the host said, and walked off.

That night, Mr. Gallo wrote again to the human resources executives, asking who had told Mr. Carlson about his complaint. They promised to talk to Mr. Carlson. But pressed on the leak in a subsequent phone call, Mr. Lord refused to look into the matter. He blamed workplace gossip, and insinuated that Mr. Gallo himself was responsible for the leak. “That was insulting,” Mr. Gallo said. “I stuck to the proper channels and had moved on.” He left Fox that summer, and now works for MSNBC. (The writer of this article is an MSNBC contributor.)

Far from being chastened, Mr. Carlson seemed to be testing his boundaries. In August 2019, days after a 21-year-old white man killed 22 people at an El Paso Walmart to protest what he called the “Hispanic invasion of Texas,” Mr. Carlson declared on the air that white supremacy was largely a “hoax.” Even more advertisers fled; Mr. Carlson embarked on what Fox described as a preplanned vacation. While he was gone, a Fox producer named Cristina Corbin tweeted an indirect rejoinder to the prime-time star. “White supremacy is real, as evidenced by fact,” Ms. Corbin wrote. “Claims that it is a ‘hoax’ do not represent my views.”

She had not mentioned Fox’s star by name, but Mr. Carlson appeared to catch wind of her tweet almost immediately. A few hours later, while still on vacation, he called Ms. Corbin at work from a blocked number, then berated her for airing her disagreement publicly. “Shut your mouth,” he yelled, according to a former Fox executive briefed on the episode. Ms. Corbin did not respond to an email seeking comment for this article; Fox declined to comment, citing confidentiality requirements pertaining to human resources matters.

When Ms. Corbin reported the incident to Fox management, Mr. Carlson denied making such a call, according to the former executive. He was soon back to explaining to his viewers how liberals and Big Tech wanted them to “just shut up.”

The Backlash Pays

It was a frequent refrain on “Tucker Carlson Tonight”— and a calculated one. According to former Fox employees, Mr. Carlson and his team had learned to work the calls for boycotts and cancellation into their programming playbook. Mr. Carlson would grab third rails on race or immigration, then harvest the inevitable backlash, returning the next evening to roast his critics for trying to suppress an obvious truth. The feedback loop didn’t just drive up ratings. It boosted the audience’s loyalty to Fox, while encouraging audiences to identify with Mr. Carlson himself, now playing victim to the same forces he was warning them about. (Liberal-leaning outlets and Twitter influencers also capitalized on Mr. Carlson’s provocations, using clips from “Tucker Carlson Tonight” to attract and provoke his haters rather than his fans.)

In early June 2020, Mr. Carlson told his audience that the Black Lives Matter protests were “definitely not about Black lives” and to “remember that when they come for you.” The next evening, as Fox’s public relations team insisted Mr. Carlson’s comment was being mischaracterized, Mr. Carlson leaned in. “The mob came for us — irony of ironies,” he told Fox viewers. “They spent the last 24 hours trying to force the show off the air for good. They won’t succeed in that, thankfully. We work for one of the last brave companies in America, and they’re not intimidated.”

Off-camera, Mr. Carlson could be less defiant. In a conversation that spring with Eric Owens, one of his former employees at The Daily Caller, he worried that the controversy over his show had made it difficult for his children to get jobs and internships; he worried that his younger children wouldn’t get into college. “It’s not right for this to affect my family, and literally affect my children’s future,” Mr. Carlson said, according to Mr. Owens.

But it’s less clear whether the attacks significantly affected Fox’s bottom line: To compensate for the lost advertising, Fox turned “Tucker Carlson Tonight” into a promotional engine for the network itself. It replaced the fleeing sponsors with a torrent of in-house promos, leveraging Mr. Carlson’s popularity to drive viewers to other, more advertiser-friendly offerings. By early 2019, roughly a fifth of all advertising “impressions” on the show were from in-house ads, according to data from the analytics company iSpot.tv. That summer, as Fox fended off criticism of Mr. Carlson’s “hoax” comments, the proportion climbed to more than a third. (A Fox spokeswoman said the actual proportions were lower, but declined to provide specific figures.) “Fox is basically an enormous loyalty brand,” said Jason Damata, the chief executive officer of Fabric Media, a media consultancy. “He’s the hook.”

Other advertising slots were taken by direct-to-consumer brands that either didn’t care about Mr. Carlson’s bad publicity or saw that they could use his intensity to sell their products. Beginning in January 2019, MyPillow, a Fox advertiser whose chief executive, Mike Lindell, is a major promoter of Mr. Trump’s stolen-election lie, began airing more than $1 million worth of ads on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” each month. Fox appeared to be using MyPillow to cushion Mr. Carlson: As other advertising dried up, the company’s ads spiked. (All told, through December 2021, Mr. Lindell had bought advertising that would have cost $91 million at publicized rates; discounts probably made that sum lower.)

Blue-chip advertisers would never return to the show in force. But thanks in part to the large audiences he could provide for those advertisers who remained, and the premium prices Fox could charge them, Mr. Carlson’s ad revenue began to recover. Every year since 2018, “Tucker Carlson Tonight” has brought more annual ad revenue to Fox than any other show, according to estimates by iSpot. Last May, after promoting the white supremacist “replacement” theory, Mr. Carlson had half as many advertisers as in December 2018 but brought in almost twice as much money.

As “Tucker Carlson Tonight” became more toxic to advertisers, it also began featuring fewer guests who disagreed with the host, and more guests who simply echoed or amplified Mr. Carlson’s own message. It wasn’t just that liberals didn’t want to debate him, though some now refused to appear on the show, as Mr. Carlson complained during a Fox appearance last summer; Fox was learning that its audience didn’t necessarily like hearing from the other side.

“From my discussions with Fox News bookers, my takeaway is that they’ve made the judgment that they just don’t do debate segments anymore,” said Richard Goodstein, a Democratic lobbyist and campaign adviser who appeared regularly on Mr. Carlson’s show until the summer of 2020. Across much of the Fox lineup, former employees said, producers were relying more and more on panels of pro-Trump conservatives competing to see who could denounce Democrats more fervently — a ratings gambit one former Fox employee called “rage inflation.” (One exception, perhaps, is “The Five,” a panel show featuring four conservative co-hosts and one rotating co-host from the left, which has beaten Mr. Carlson in total viewers in some recent months.)}:

And as advertisers fled, Mr. Carlson’s opening monologue grew. Where once he spoke for only a few minutes, sometimes in a neutral just-asking-questions mode, he now often opened the show with a lengthy stemwinder, addressing his audience as “you” and the objects of his fury as a shadowy “they.” Ratings data showed that the monologues were a hit with viewers, according to one former and one current Fox employee, and by 2020, Mr. Carlson regularly spoke directly to the camera for more than quarter of the hourlong show. Instead of less Tucker, the audience got more.

:{:{His critics at Fox found themselves further marginalized: After an on-air feud with Mr. Carlson over the legality of Mr. Trump’s efforts to pressure Ukrainian officials, Shepard Smith was reportedly warned against criticizing his fellow host — something the network denies — and he departed Fox in October 2019. Mr. Carlson’s ratings grew, buoyed by the increasingly heated and apocalyptic presidential campaign.}:

One night in June 2020, after yet another commercial-to-commercial attack on Black Lives Matter protesters, Mr. Carlson addressed the matter directly. Ratings were more than just ammunition in the cable-news wars, Mr. Carlson explained. They were proof that his viewers were not alone, proof that they were right. “Last night, we did something we don’t do very often: We spent the entire first block of the show on a single topic,” he said. More people had watched the previous night’s show, he observed, than any other hour of prime-time television that evening — more than the old evening news broadcasts, more than any sitcoms or sports events. “Millions and millions of Americans agree with you,” he said. “You are not crazy. Your views are not evil.”}:

That month, another Fox employee complained to human resources that Mr. Carlson’s on-air statements contradicted Mr. Murdoch’s public pledge to “support our Black colleagues” in the wake of George Floyd’s killing. In response, an executive cited the company’s need to allow “diverse voices and perspectives,” according to a person familiar with the exchange. At the end of the month, when the Nielsen figures trickled in, Fox sent out a triumphant news release: Mr. Carlson had posted the highest quarterly ratings of any cable news show in history — breaking Mr. Hannity’s old record and helping make Fox the most-watched channel on all of basic cable.

An Upside-Down Nation

In the end, it was Fox’s own political unit, a bastion of traditional news-gathering, that brought the network’s increasingly wobbly balancing act to an end. Just before midnight on Election Day, hours ahead of other networks and news consortiums, Fox announced that Joseph R. Biden Jr. had won the swing state of Arizona. Mr. Trump instantly declared the result a “fraud,” but the following Saturday, as late votes trickled in, Mr. Biden won Pennsylvania, ending the presidential race.

:{:{Mr. Trump’s defeat was the ultimate glitch in Fox’s Trump narrative, one that couldn’t be so easily spun or papered over by its prime-time hosts. Despondent Trump supporters began to look elsewhere for news, encouraged by anti-Fox tweets from Mr. Trump himself.}:

In early December, the upstart conservative network Newsmax, which had positioned itself as even more devotedly pro-Trump, scored its first ratings win over Fox. It was a minor crack in Fox’s cable dominance — fewer than 30,000 viewers in one audience segment on a single December night in the 7 p.m. hour — but it sent shudders through the Fox executive suites. The network might shrug off the complaints of a few advertisers; losing audience to a right-leaning rival was another thing. That month, according to one former Fox executive, Rupert Murdoch delivered a message to the network’s chief executive, Ms. Scott: Clean house. (A Fox spokeswoman disputed this description.)}:

:{:{The purge would not come until early January, as CNN and MSNBC overtook Fox, the cable-news ratings leader for two decades, and as Washington reeled from the violent, Trump-inspired effort to overturn Mr. Biden’s victory}:. In the intervening weeks, Mr. Carlson and other Fox prime-time hosts would pump out a steady stream of attacks on the election results, often drawing on claims of voter fraud from Mr. Trump and his new legal team, led by Rudolph W. Giuliani.

:{:{Fox’s prime-time guns also aimed inward: When a Fox White House correspondent and occasional Carlson guest, Kristin Fisher, told viewers that much of one rambling Giuliani presentation “was simply not true or has already been thrown out in court,” Mr. Carlson went on the air to attack “credentialed reporters, some of whom we know and like,” who were refusing “even to acknowledge” the already discredited claims.}:

He had not mentioned Ms. Fisher by name, but she was warned by superiors to keep her head down, according to two former employees. She did not reappear on air for several days, and her appearances declined significantly in subsequent weeks. (Ms. Fisher later left for CNN.) Around the network, supervisors repeated an Orwellian mantra: “Respect the audience.”}:}:

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Mr. Carlson has fanned doubts about the 2020 election and often cast those who stormed the Capitol as victims: innocent citizens entrapped by scheming Democrats.Credit...The New York Times

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"When a group of sad, disenfranchised people who have been left out of the modern economy show up at your office, you don't have to listen to their complaints. Not for a second. Why would you?"

:{:{Much as Mr. Carlson’s vast cable audience had grown to encompass the white nationalist fringe, it now drew in some of the hundreds who would go on to attack the Capitol.}:

At least eight people now facing criminal charges stemming from the insurrection commented on Mr. Carlson’s official Facebook page in the preceding months, according to an analysis of since-deleted Facebook accounts conducted for The Times by CounterAction, a security firm. They included Graydon Young and Connie Meggs, members of the Oath Keepers militia organization who would be indicted on federal conspiracy charges. Another Carlson fan was Tammy Bronsburg, who on Election Day posted “WE ARE TAKING OUR COUNTRY BACK.”

Two months later, she donned a Trump flag as a cape and joined the crowd breaking into the Capitol. (Mr. Young pleaded guilty and is cooperating with the government against the Oath Keepers; Ms. Meggs and Ms. Bronsburg are fighting the charges against them. Their lawyers did not comment on the Facebook posts.) Later that day, as the Capitol lay stained with blood and broken glass, the Proud Boys posted a defiant message of justification on the Parler social media platform, borrowing a meme from Mr. Carlson’s segments on Black Lives Matter. The lesson of the civil rights protests, Mr. Carlson had claimed, was that “violence works.”}:

:{:{Soon after the Capitol riot, Fox replaced its 7 p.m. host — Martha MacCallum, a news anchor and part of the political reporting team — with another hour of right-wing opinion programming.}:

Mr. Stirewalt, the political editor, who had vanished from the air after defending the Arizona call, was fired; his boss, Fox’s Washington bureau chief, Bill Sammon, retired. More than a dozen reporters for Fox’s digital arm were also laid off, a culling that followed pre-election layoffs in the Brain Room, the in-house research and fact-checking division. Publicly, Fox portrayed these changes as a restructuring, but as with the Moneyball initiative, their impact was felt chiefly in the news ranks, now an expensive and increasingly distracting legacy of the Ailes era.}:

:{:{Trumpism without Trump had begun as a programming strategy. Now, with Mr. Trump gone from the White House and cut off from Twitter and Facebook, it has become a reality. Mr. Carlson, more successfully than any other figure on the right, has filled the vacuum, picking up the banner of Mr. Trump’s movement and the followers who insist he was cheated of victory.}:

Last year, according to The Times’s analysis, nearly half of Mr. Carlson’s shows — more than 100 episodes — included segments playing down the Capitol riot, lurching into ever more fantastical terrain. Much as he once recast the country’s racial hierarchy to make white Americans an oppressed class, Mr. Carlson has inverted the story of Jan. 6 into a modern-day Lost Cause. On “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” the rioters were not aggressors; they were victims. Last June, he floated a conspiracy theory that the riot was an inside job, claiming that an “unindicted co-conspirator” in a government court filing was “almost certainly working for the F.B.I.” In fact, it was Sharon Caldwell, the wife of an insurrectionist with ties to the Oath Keepers; a few months later, Mr. Carlson brought Ms. Caldwell onto the show, now casting her and her husband as the victims of overzealous prosecutors.}:

:{:{This past fall, Mr. Carlson and his team distilled the show’s Jan. 6 fantasia into “Patriot Purge,” a three-part “documentary” for the Fox Nation streaming channel. After a trailer aired in late October, two longtime Fox contributors quit in protest. Mainstream media outlets and fact-checking sites inevitably eviscerated Mr. Carlson’s work for its factual errors and dubious assertions, but that was beside the point.}:

:{:{ After starting the year with the lowest ratings in cable news, Fox ended 2021 back on top. And Mr. Carlson’s inverted, invented narrative of the Jan. 6 insurrection has become a new Republican orthodoxy: This February, members of the Republican National Committee approved a resolution calling investigations into the attack a “persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse,” censuring two Republicans who sit on a congressional panel scrutinizing the riot.}:

“Propaganda tends to bewilder people, to confuse them when they first hear it,” Mr. Carlson observed last fall, in a monologue accusing liberals and mainstream outlets of themselves misleading the public about Covid-19, Jan. 6 and the 2020 elections. “It is so completely and obviously untrue,” he continued. “‘What is this?’ you think. And yet for that very reason, because it’s so ridiculous, so absurd, propaganda tends to be effective.”}:}:

Reporting was contributed by Larry Buchanan, Weiyi Cai, Ben Decker, Alan Feuer, Barbara Harvey, Kenneth P. Vogel, and Karen Yourish. Jack Begg and Julie Tate contributed research.

Nicholas Confessore is New York-based political and investigative reporter for The Times and a staff writer at the Times Magazine, covering power and influence in Washington, tech, media and beyond. He can be reached at nicholas.confessore@nytimes.com. More about Nicholas Confessore

A version of this article appears in print on May 2, 2022, Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: American Nationalist. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

See more on: Republican Party, Donald Trump, U.S. Politics

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tucker fired

intercept

it’s been a lifetime since Fox News offloaded Tucker Carlson, and when I say a lifetime, I mean six days.

It feels like forever thanks to the exhausting velocity of theories that seek to explain the downfall of cable television’s most famous host and racist. Carlson was fired because of the Dominion Voting Systemslawsuit. Carlson was fired becausehe used the C-word. Carlson was fired becausehe prayed too much. Carlson was fired because even his colleagues at Foxdespised him.

That’s just a partial list of the best guesses circulating in the media ether. While Carlson was probably felled by more than a single factor, these guesses are akin to the trees that obscure the proverbial forest. Rupert Murdoch, who founded Fox News, did what he often does at a moment of crisis, swiveling 180 degrees to secure his business empire. The move is famous enough to have an unusual name in Britain, where Murdoch first came to global prominence: the reverse ferret.

In the 1980s, Kelvin MacKenzie was the editor of Murdoch’s London tabloid The Sun, and he loved to describe his spiciest stories as putting a ferret down the pants of whichever celebrity or politician was targeted. But when a story turned out to be wrong or legally actionable, as often happened, MacKenzie burst out of his office and shouted to the newsroom, “Reverse ferret! Reverse ferret!” That meant one thing: The paper had to climb down immediately. After a string of fabricated stories about Elton John in 1988, for instance, The Sun paid the singer 1 million pounds and printed a headline on its front page that said, “SORRY ELTON.”

One of the sharpest Murdoch watchers, the Australian investigative journalist Neil Chenoweth, connected MacKenzie’s antics to his billionaire proprietor. “Rupert Murdoch’s entire business style may be characterized as a reverse ferret,” Chenowethwrote more than 20 years ago. “Time and again when his plans have gone awry and he has found himself facing calamity, his superb survival skills have saved him. Just before he hits the wall, he does a little dummy, he feints this way and that, and then he sets off with undiminished speed in a new direction.” For instance, the right-wing Murdoch unexpectedly threw The Sun’s support to the Labor Party and Tony Blair in 1997, reportedly because then-Prime Minister John Major refused toback policies that Murdoch had pressed him on.

That kind of out-of-the-blue abandonment is basically what happened with Carlson, Fox’s biggest star and the pride and joy of not just Rupert Murdoch but also his sonLachlan, who runs the network on a daily basis. Both Murdochs had unusually close relationships with their favorite host — Carlson evendined with Rupert at the 92-year-old’s estate in Bel Air just a few weeks ago — until, all of a sudden, they didn’t. Carlson learned justa few minutes before the rest of us that his services were no longer required at Fox News.

This occurred a few days after another big reversal: Fox’s decision to pay $787.5 million in damages to Dominion for wrongfully reporting that its machines took votes away from then-President Donald Trump in 2020. The stop-the-steal ferret placed in America’s pants by Carlson and other Fox hosts, such as Maria Bartiromo and Lou Dobbs, was suddenly extracted, and while it was major news across the country, Fox hardly mentioned it, just as the network said almost nothing about Carlson’s exit. The properly executed reverse ferret denies its own existence.

Protesters outside Fox News HQ in the wake of the settlement with Dominion Voting Systems and the firing of Fox’s anchor Tucker Carlson on April 25, 2023.

Photo: Erik McGregor/LightRocket via Getty Images.

The philosophy behind this maneuver helps answer another question: What’s next for Fox? The consensus, expressed by journalist Brian Stelter, is that the Murdochs have learned to never again let a host become as extreme and beyond their control as Carlson. The Murdochs have a line of allowed mendacity, Stelterexplained this week, and Carlson crossed it all the time; whoever replaces him will understand that you do not cross the line. Stelter, who is now working on hissecond book about Fox News, added, “I would like to believe that maybe Rupert Murdoch wants to drag his network back to a more reality-based place.”

That would defy the imperative of the reverse ferret. Glenn Beck got too wild and was reverse ferreted more than a decade ago. As NPRreported in 2011, “At long last, we have an answer to the enduring question: Is it possible for someone to be too incendiary, even for the Fox News channel?” Bill O’Reilly took Beck’s place as the network’s headliner, and when he eventually went too far (by sexually harassing women), he too was gone. Now, it’s Tucker Carlson’s turn. Throughout it all, Fox has made piles of money, billions and billions of dollars, far more than its rivals.

IFrame Content

The lucrative dialectic of the ferret/reverse ferret is the spring mechanism for Murdoch’s business success. That’s because the kind of right-wing propaganda that makes the greatest amount of money is not reality-based; it’s how we got birtherism, the war on Christmas, Seth Rich, ivermectin, the “great replacement theory,” and election denialism. Walking up to the edge of what might destroy them, and doing an about-face that might involve paying off an aggrieved party, is not a mistake but a business strategy.

It is magical thinking to believe that Rupert and Lachlan have any interest in abandoning a strategy that constitutes their DNA. The Murdochs will not save us from the Murdochs.

5 24

fox News and the MAGA media are lining up their shot at American democracy

The bullet is in the chamber

WRITTEN BY MATT GERTZ

PUBLISHED 05/14/24

With the presidential election less than half a year away, evidence is everywhere that the right is planning to end the American experiment in representative government if it fails to legitimately return Donald Trump to the White House.

It was clear just a few months after Trump’s seditious plot to subvert the 2020 presidential election concluded with a violent mob of his supporters storming the U.S. Capitol that the right-wing propaganda apparatus was laying the groundwork to try again in 2024. Fox News and the rest of the MAGA media, which spent the weeks after the 2020 election fabricating and amplifying a host of election fraud lies and conspiracy theories to undermine the results, had begun working to institutionalize Trump’s lie that the 2020 election had been stolen from him and to construct an alternative path to the presidency in which compliant party officials would secure a Republican victory by any means necessary.

Fox had become a loaded gun aimed at American democracy. Three years later, the bullet is in the chamber.

The disinformation ecosystem which revolves around Fox is telegraphing a plan to reject the results of the 2024 election if Trump loses. The former president’s propagandists will once again use baseless allegations of widespread fraud as a pretext to seek to overturn the vote — and GOP leaders are publicly signaling their willingness to comply.

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Ultimately, this preordained coup scheme may not matter. As in 2020, Joe Biden might win by too large a margin in too many states for the plot to succeed. Or, as in 2016, Trump might win outright.

But in the event that Biden triumphs in a close election, the MAGA faithful have developed and road-tested a plan to steal it.

Fox stars aided Trump’s 2020 subversion plot. They were lying. And they’ll do it again.

It is sometimes unclear whether Fox’s falsehoods are deliberate lies. But filings in Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation suit, which the network settled in April 2023 for $787.5 million, demonstrate beyond dispute that Fox’s coverage of the 2020 election results was rooted in malicious fabrication.

Fox’s top executives and biggest stars knew for a fact that Biden was the legitimate winner of the 2020 election, even as the network’s coverage sought to undermine the legitimacy of the vote. The network, filings show, was intentionally peddling conspiracy theories in support of Trump’s stolen-election deception in order to compete with its far-right rivals.

These lies mattered. Communications revealed by the suit show that top Fox executives were aware the network was “uniquely positioned to state the message that the election was not stolen” but did not out of fears of losing viewers. They further show that when then-Fox Corp. Chair Rupert Murdoch asked his employees for evidence Fox had “fed the story that the election was stolen and that January 6 [was] an important chance to have the results overturned,” he received a list of 50 examples in response.

But the only lesson Fox’s executives apparently learned from fueling an attempted coup is that they need better lawyering to keep their damning internal emails and text messages off the front pages and avoid paying a record settlement.

Fox retained and even promoted some of its most unhinged election deniers, while punishing or even firing employees who fought the false narratives. In the years that followed, the network restocked its prime-time lineup with Trump loyalists who parrot whatever the former president says, put Trump allies and even a family member on the payroll, and replaced “news side” veterans with GOP operatives.

It’s no wonder that former employees keep loudly warning that Fox is a dangerous cesspool that produces Trumpian propaganda. The cogs who remain on the job, meanwhile, know without a doubt that they are part of a machine that manufactures lies. The pressure the network faces to hold on to its audience — including by promoting voter fraud conspiracy theories and other right-wing extremism — is stronger than ever. And so if Trump demands that Fox’s propagandists again focus on building him a pretext to overturn an election, they will do it.

The emerging right-wing scheme to overturn the 2024 election

Trumpists in the media and elsewhere have spent the years since Trump’s defeat laying the groundwork to rerun his subversion plot, systematically removing the guardrails that helped stymie the scheme in 2020, and helping him back to the Republican nomination. The result is a turnkey operation prepared to generate false election fraud claims and convert them into a rationale for Republican political leaders to reverse the results of the election and reinstall Trump in the White House.

MAGA propagandists are priming their audiences to disbelieve the election results and take action in response. They keep viewers in a state of terror with incendiary warnings that Biden is a jack-booted dictator who is deliberately trying to endanger their families, ensuring that some fraction would seek his removal by any means necessary. They valorize the January 6 insurrectionists as honorable patriots who did what they thought was right and were smeared by the media and punished by “deep state” malefactors. They flood the right-wing information ecosystem with lies and conspiracy theories about Democrats tainting past election results.

And they have already begun warning that the 2024 election will be rife with election fraud — and that only such cheating could explain a Trump defeat.

Video

CitationFrom the March 25, 2024, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room

STEVE BANNON (HOST): There are no “issues" with the 2020 election — they stole it. Let me repeat that. They stole it. And they hate when we say this. They stole it. And they're on notice. They're not going to be able to steal it again. People are doing a ton of work on this, and that's still not enough, but it's going to get better. The hairy eyeball is going to be on them.

The only way they defeat Trump is to steal it. The only way they defeat Trump is they steal it. The only way they defeat Trump is they steal it. He is unstoppable.

We saw how this played out in 2020: Trump’s coup plan relied on blanketing right-wing media with stolen-election lies in order to provide cover for GOP partisans to reverse the outcome in states Biden won. Under pressure from the Fox-addled rank and file, Republican election officials would refuse to certify results in key areas, GOP state legislators would overturn the results, and GOP members of Congress and Vice President Mike Pence would hand Trump the election.

This scheme failed in part because too many Republican officials were unwilling to aid the effort. But since then, Trumpist propagandists like War Room host Steve Bannon and Fox’s lineup of right-wing stars have helped make election denial a core GOP value, and now, the guardrails are collapsing:

Republicans purged their ranks of the sorts of GOP officials who resisted Trump’s subversion effort at the local, state, and federal level.

Election lies seem to have become a benefit in GOP primaries and effectively a job requirement at the Republican National Committee, one enforced by the MAGA chorus.

Prominent election deniers are recruiting their followers to take positions within the election infrastructure.

In the House, Rep. Mike Johnson’s (R-LA) zealous efforts to overturn the election helped garner him the speakership, while in the Senate, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is on his way out of the leadership after voting to certify the electoral votes and criticizing Trump’s role in the insurrection.

Pence is effectively a party outcast after rejecting Trump’s entreaties to overturn the 2020 election results, and the politicians seeking to replace him on the GOP ticket are pushing voter fraud lies and refusing to say they will accept the results of the 2024 election.

Donald Trump will once again stand as the Republican presidential nominee this fall, less than four years after he attempted a coup to remain in office. He still maintains, unbowed by time, notoriety, or criminal charges, that the 2020 election was stolen. At the same time, he has embraced the January 6 offenders, regularly describing them as “hostages,” promising to consider blanket pardons for their actions, and treating their attack on the Capitol as “not a moment of national shame but of celebration,” as NPR described it.

None of this seemed to give right-wing propagandists much pause as Trump romped to the nomination. The Murdochs may have begun the primary season with other plans, but Fox had spent years crafting a political environment in which any criticism of Trump was inherently illegitimate, and its stars ultimately rallied to his side.

As Trump’s victory became inevitable, his vanquished rivals were reduced to complaining — accurately — that Fox and its ilk had taken Trump’s side, while the few right-wing commentators who had criticized Trump and endorsed his primary opponents bent the knee.

If he loses in 2024, Trump will reject the results and seek to overturn them, as he has throughout his political career. Indeed, he began laying the groundwork for such a strategy during the GOP primaries, warning that only Democratic “cheating” could explain such an outcome. And he has no apparent qualms over whether his deliberate radicalization of his supporters leads to right-wing political violence. Indeed, he is signaling that is exactly what he wants.

No one can say they didn’t know what was coming

Here’s part of an interview with Trump that Time magazine published on April 30, six months before Election Day:

Mr. President, in our last conversation you said you weren't worried about political violence in connection with the November election. You said, “I think we're going to win and there won't be violence.” What if you don't win, sir?

Trump: Well, I do think we're gonna win. We're way ahead. I don't think they'll be able to do the things that they did the last time, which were horrible. Absolutely horrible. So many, so many different things they did, which were in total violation of what was supposed to be happening. And you know that and everybody knows that. We can recite them, go down a list that would be an arm’s long. But I don't think we're going to have that. I think we're going to win. And if we don't win, you know, it depends. It always depends on the fairness of an election. I don't believe they'll be able to do the things that they did the last time. I don't think they'll be able to get away with it. And if that's the case, we're gonna win in record-setting fashion.

Polls suggest that the 2024 presidential election will be close. But according to Trump, he’s “way ahead” and on track to win “in record-setting fashion.” The only thing that can prevent that outcome, Trump claims, is “the things that they did the last time,” i.e. the Democratic election fraud conspiracy theories he’s been hocking since before the 2020 vote. And if that happens, Trump says, his supporters might respond to such a result with violence.

None of this is even remotely subtle.

In the lead-up to the 2020 election, some political commentators expressed doubts over whether Trump would really respond to defeat by refusing to accept the election results and taking action to try to remain in office.

But that is precisely what Trump did. Now he is saying quite clearly that he will do it again if given the chance. And his propagandists in the right-wing media will have had four years to lay the groundwork to ensure his plot’s success.

Five days after the Time interview dropped, Semafor founder Ben Smith published a Q-and-A with Joe Kahn, the executive editor of The New York Times. The interview began like this:

Ben Smith: Dan Pfeiffer, who used to work for Barack Obama, recently wrote of the Times: “They do not see their job as saving democracy or stopping an authoritarian from taking power.” Why don’t you see your job as: “We’ve got to stop Trump?” What about your job doesn’t let you think that way?

Joe Kahn: Good media is the Fourth Estate, it’s another pillar of democracy. One of the absolute necessities of democracy is having a free and fair and open election where people can compete for votes, and the role of the news media in that environment is not to skew your coverage towards one candidate or the other, but just to provide very good, hard-hitting, well-rounded coverage of both candidates, and informing voters. If you believe in democracy, I don’t see how we get past the essential role of quality media in informing people about their choice in a presidential election.

To say that the threats of democracy are so great that the media is going to abandon its central role as a source of impartial information to help people vote — that’s essentially saying that the news media should become a propaganda arm for a single candidate, because we prefer that candidate’s agenda. It is true that Biden’s agenda is more in sync with traditional establishment parties and candidates. And we’re reporting on that and making it very clear.

It’s also true that Trump could win this election in a popular vote. Given that Trump’s not in office, it will probably be fair. And there’s a very good chance, based on our polling and other independent polling, that he will win that election in a popular vote. So there are people out there in the world who may decide, based on their democratic rights, to elect Donald Trump as president. It is not the job of the news media to prevent that from happening. It’s the job of Biden and the people around Biden to prevent that from happening.

> It’s our job to cover the full range of issues that people have. At the moment, democracy is one of them. But it’s not the top one — immigration happens to be the top [of polls], and the economy and inflation is the second. Should we stop covering those things because they’re favorable to Trump and minimize them? I don’t even know how it’s supposed to work in the view of Dan Pfeiffer or the White House. We become an instrument of the Biden campaign? We turn ourselves into Xinhua News Agency or Pravda and put out a stream of stuff that’s very, very favorable to them and only write negative stories about the other side? And that would accomplish — what?

That exchange generated a lot of smart responses. Critics pointed out that Smith’s question mischaracterized Pfeiffer’s critique; that Kahn’s response ignores the actual criticisms mounted by his paper’s critics, including Biden himself; that the Times’ business interests lead Kahn to endorse “a kind of performative neutrality in politics coverage”; and that, contra Kahn’s claims, the Times does not generally base its coverage decisions on polling and, if it did, the result should be a greater focus on the impact of Trump’s policy proposals on inflation and immigration than the paper actually provides.

What strikes me most about Kahn’s answer is his apparent lack of urgency. A former president left office after using the lie that the election he lost had been rigged to try to reverse the outcome, culminating in a violent assault by his supporters on the U.S. Capitol. He has all but promised to try again, and after transforming his party into a personality cult which treats the insurrectionists as heroes and his election lie as unvarnished truth, he very well could succeed.

That is the central reality of the 2024 presidential election, one that should be foregrounded to the readers and viewers on news outlets at every opportunity but often fades from the discourse. The former president’s media allies are foreshadowing their eagerness to take every possible opportunity to participate in his scheme. And the leader of the nation’s most powerful mainstream press organ gives no indication that he has considered those implications in any but the shallowest way. We are all in a lot of trouble.

Fox News propagandists and GOP leaders are pushing the country toward the abyss

11/06/20

Fox News is a loaded gun aimed at American democracy

05/14/21

They did it and will do it again – if no one stops them

1 24 REMINDED OF OBSTRUCTION CAT BY

Laura Ingraham demands Republicans reject deal for government funding to deny Joe Biden “a victory lap” | Media Matters for America

RECALL FOX SOP RAISON D’ETRE IS TO ATTACK DEMS

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mma 12 23

Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News star, is launching his own eponymous streaming service. The network “went live on Monday” and “will be home to multiple shows, including interviews, short-form videos and monologues,” The Wall Street Journal reported.

Carlson is the newest member of what I call the “Fox News diaspora” of network stars-turned-competitors. His streaming service is another entrant in an increasingly crowded field of right-wing outlets helmed by former Fox figures, all seeking the approval, money, and time of the same audience traditionally dominated by the right-wing outlet.

Fox has long minted right-wing luminaries, its large audience and credibility on the right converting network hosts and contributors into celebrities and even Republican Party power players. But when those figures leave the network (usually on bad terms), many end up either signing up with Fox’s existing right-wing competitors or launching their own. At this point, there is more talent in the Fox diaspora than at the network proper — and at a cheaper price to boot. The result is an increasingly fractured right-wing ecosystem that leaves Fox’s hegemony in doubt.

Glenn Beck, perhaps the network’s biggest star during Barack Obama’s first term before he was drummed out in 2011, launched TheBlaze. That outlet has waxed and waned in size and influence, but it still provides him and a cohort of ideologically aligned figures a venue through the streaming service BlazeTV.

Ben Shapiro was once a Fox fixture and hosted an ill-fated limited series about elections for the network. His podcast now appears via the outlet he founded, The Daily Wire. His Daily Wire colleagues Matt Walsh, Candace Owens, Michael Knowles, and Andrew Klavan also boosted their personal brands through frequent Fox appearances.

Greta van Susteren left Fox after a contract dispute, while Eric Bolling was fired after reportedly sending unsolicited photos of genitalia to co-workers. Both now host shows at longtime Fox competitor Newsmax, alongside former Foxers Mike Huckabee and Sebastian Gorka.

Then there are the independents. Megyn Kelly left Fox for a disastrous turn at NBC, Bill O’Reilly was fired following the public revelation of numerous sexual harassment settlements, and Lou Dobbs was apparently dropped for being too Dobbs-y. Each now reaches fans through a personal podcast show.

So does Dan Bongino, a Fox weekend host who left the network earlier this year, and Steven Crowder, a former Fox contributor who has achieved notoriety on YouTube and Rumble. Lara Logan, who was banned from Fox for comparing Anthony Fauci to the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele and from Newsmax after going on a QAnon rant, is now in a similar position, publishing a docuseries pushing January 6 conspiracy theories on X.

Right-wingers who wanted a rage fix once had nowhere to turn but Fox. But now they can subscribe to cable and watch Laura Ingraham, Jesse Watters, Sean Hannity, and Greg Gutfeld on the network, or they can cut the cord, sign up for some services, and watch familiar faces like Beck ($10 per month for BlazeTV+), Carlson ($9/month for Tucker Carlson Network), O’Reilly ($6.95/month for The No Spin Zone), and Kelly (free on YouTube) instead. And some members of the diaspora even share a loose alliance — Carlson used to regularly host Beck on his Fox show, and he is promoting his new venture on Kelly’s program.

Fox still has the advantage of audience inertia — many fans have been watching for years and are simply used to keeping their television tuned to the network all day or turning it on for the prime-time shows.

But the business model of the Fox diaspora benefits from lower overhead, since its outlets don’t require the pretense of an expensive newsgathering apparatus. Instead, the former Fox stars can just rant angrily about whatever is reported elsewhere. And one of the things they rant about is Fox: They have a vested interest in tearing down the network, decrying it as insufficiently anti-woke or pro-Trump in an effort to steal away its viewers, which in turn can lead the network to course-correct in their direction.

We saw a version of this play out following the 2020 election, when Fox’s executives and stars, including Carlson, promoted Trumpian conspiracy theories about voter fraud out of fears of losing market share to relatively weak rivals like Newsmax. Since then, competition for Fox’s viewers has only grown.

The new Tucker Carlson Network will doubtlessly allow Carlson and the flunkies who join him to channel the same lies and hate that fueled his Fox show, along with passion projects his old bosses may have opposed airing. If the X show Carlson has hosted in recent months is any indication, that means nodding along with lunatic conspiracy theorists who claim that they had gay sex with Barack Obama and that Joe Biden wanders the White House naked, and producing even more hagiography for international autocrats.

But it will also give Carlson, who has hobnobbed with Donald Trump and drawn attention as a possible running mate for the man he once privately claimed to despise, another platform to weigh in on the 2024 presidential election.

If Trump once again tries to subvert American democracy, and Carlson and other members of the Fox diaspora come to his aid, how will Fox respond? The question answers itself.

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11 23

after airing Sean Hannity's townhall with former President Donald Trump on Tuesday night, December 5, Fox News discussed the event with a panel of six voters the following day on "Fox and Friends." One of the voters was Stamford, Connecticut resident Stephanie Edmonds, who was depicted as the panel's sole Democratic voter.

Fox News' Ainsley Earhardt told Edmonds, "I know you're a Democrat," and a graphic described her as a "Democrat voter." But according to the Daily Beast's Justin Baragona and Media Matters' Eric Kleefeld, Fox News' characterization of Edmonds was misleading — as she's an anti-vax activist who has said that Democratic candidates "are an automatic no-no for me."

Edmonds, Baragona notes, has registered as a Democrat because Stamford is dominated by the Democratic Party. But ideologically, according to Baragona, she is more of a libertarian and calls herself "politically homeless."

"Edmonds, who lost her teaching job in New York City for refusing to get the COVID-19 vaccine, has made several media appearances to discuss her anti-vaccine activism," Baragona observes. "Additionally, she has been very vocal on social media about her overt criticism of the Democratic Party. Tweeting that she only first registered as a Democrat in 2020 in order to support former Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard's unsuccessful presidential primary bid, Edmonds then praised Gabbard for 'joining the Unaffiliated with me' when the ex-congresswoman left the Democratic Party."

Baragona adds, "She's also said she's 'NEVER voted' for a GOP or Democratic presidential candidate, that 'Democrats are an automatic no-no for me,' and that she would be 'voting down ballot Republican' during the 2022 midterm elections."

In Media Matters, Kleefeld writes, "Edmonds has every right to voice her own opinions, of course. But for Fox to present her as a 'Democrat voter' whose pronouncements generally reflect Democratic voters seems disingenuous. Edmonds has, in fact, described herself as 'politically homeless,' and she seems to have registered with the Democratic Party simply in order to vote in local primary elections in a heavily Democratic area."

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as Rupert Murdoch steps down as the head of Fox, his destructive legacy remains

Murdoch’s efforts to inject American homes with right-wing misinformation have torn families apart

WRITTEN BY AUDREY MCCABE

PUBLISHED 11/17/23

During Rupert Murdoch’s 25-year tenure as the head of Fox, he created a right-wing misinformation machine, subsidized by cable customers, that played an essential role in former President Donald Trump’s rise to power and subsequent attempts to stay in power by stealing the 2020 election. The network has divided not just Americans, but also families, with the anger and bigotry stoked by Fox destroying relationships among loved ones.

## Rupert Murdoch announced he was stepping down after over 25 years at the helm of Fox Corp.

- Rupert Murdoch announced in September that he would step down as the chairman of Fox Corp. and News Corp. in November, leaving his son Lachlan Murdoch as chairman and CEO. Rupert Murdoch launched the Fox News cable channel with political strategist Roger Ailes in 1996, creating a hallmark for conservative TV commentary. The Associated Press, [9/21/23; The New York Times, 9/21/23]

## During his tenure, Murdoch created a right-wing misinformation machine that helped bring Trump to power and supported his lies
- Rupert Murdoch amassed a fortune by building Fox News into a right-wing misinformation machine that played an essential role in the rise of former President Donald Trump and his deadly attempts to steal the 2020 election. As Media Matters senior fellow Matt Gertz wrote, “The network’s noxious mix of right-wing propaganda, bigotry, lies and demagoguery attracted the largest audience in cable news while shaping the Republican Party’s base in its image.” Media Matters, [1/6/21; MSNBC, 9/21/23]
- Murdoch admitted that he let Fox News personalities push election conspiracy theories, despite knowing that they were bogus. Dominion Voting Systems’ lawsuit against the network revealed that even though Rupert Murdoch thought Fox was “uniquely positioned to state the message that the election was not stolen,” he agreed the profit motive was the deciding factor: “It is not red or blue, it is green.” Media Matters, [2/27/23]
- The network also pumped coronavirus conspiracy theories out of its airwaves as the country struggled to respond to a deadly pandemic. In just 2020, the first year of the pandemic, the network promoted COVID-19 misinformation over 13,000 times on its weekday programs. Media Matters, [12/30/20, 12/30/20]

## Fox has divided the country, including many family relationships
- Writer Megan Garber explained in The Atlantic in 2020 that Fox had developed its own language, and that “at this point, some Americans speak English; others speak Fox.” She added: “The result is disorientation. The result is mass suspicion. … Fox has helped to create a nation of people who share everything but the ability to talk with one another.” The Atlantic, [9/16/20]
- Journalist Luke O’Neil collected stories, including his own, of “families torn apart by toxic cable news” and published them in The Guardian and New York magazine. The Guardian, [4/12/19; New York magazine, 4/9/19]
  - One person told O’Neil: “I hate what Fox News has done to almost everyone in my family.It’s absolute poison and the only thing I think is worse is that there are people who think that destroying the morals and conscience of multiple generations is worth a few more bucks. I absolutely refuse to believe that people like [Fox host Sean] Hannity don’t know what they are doing.”
  - Another person told O’Neil: “I called at Thanksgiving to say hi, which was when my dad called Obama the N-word during the call, apropos of nothing.” They lamented that they “pretty much don’t go home any more” because their “family and friends all have broken Fox brain,” adding, “I’m not totally sure when it started since I haven’t lived at home since 2002. It slowly built, but the rift probably started around 2008, when I was volunteering for Obama. It got the most heated when my mom went to a Trump rally in Phoenix ahead of the 2016 election.”
  - O’Neil: “Dozens … talked about the sad lonely twilight of their parents’ or grandparents’ lives, having been spurned by, or having disowned much of their families over political disagreements.” O’Neil wrote: “Whatever the actual direction of causality, there are many, many Americans who blame Fox News for changes in their loved ones, and many people out there who feel as though their friends and family members have been lost to a 24/7 stream of right-wing propaganda.”
- Edward Lyngar in Salon: “We’re losing people like my father to the despair of Fox News, and it’s all by design.”Lyngar wrote that his father “is a kind and generous man and a good father, but over the past five or 10 years, he’s become so conservative that I can’t even find a label for it. What has changed? He consumes a daily diet of nothing except Fox News.” Salon, [2/27/14]
- A Boston globe article recounted documentary filmmaker Jen Senko’s story of her dad’s Fox-induced “descent into anger.”Senko told the Globe: “He became a person we hated being around and we didn’t know. … It was a really horrible period of time for us. … It was a nightmare, both my brothers blocked him, I blocked him.” According to the report, “Senko’s stomach clenched every time she thought of visiting. Her dad was angry all the time. And Senko knew exactly what was to blame: The steady drip-feed of outrage he listened to every day.” The Boston Globe, [5/1/19]

## Cable customers are subsidizing Fox’s misinformation, with some objecting because of how it has harmed their families
- Cable companies' customers are being forced to subsidize Fox’s lies.Cable companies pay channels' “carriage fees” to carry their channel, and Fox charges a higher amount than all other networks aside from EPSN, which is then passed on to customers. “These carriage fees are now so valuable to Fox that reporting from Media Matters has found that Fox would still have a profit margin of more than 35% even if it sold no advertising,” The Guardian wrote. The Guardian, [8/15/23]
- Over 165,000 individuals have signed the #NoFoxFee campaign, demanding that their cable providers stop forcing consumers to subsidize Fox News’ lies. Some of them have also left public notes on how consuming Fox News has changed their families. Common Cause, [accessed 11/16/23]
  - A #NoFoxFee petition signer wrote that her brother and sister-in-law have “totally bought into the lies and misinformation” they see on Fox. The signer added: “We can no longer talk about current events” and that their relatives think “all other news sources were lying to them” as a result of watching Fox News, saying that makes them feel “very estranged from them.”
  - Another signer wrote: “I no longer have relationships with my mother or sisters because they have become radicalized to become fascist sympathizers by their viewing of cable Fox ‘News.’”

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down 45% post tucker? watters flat out lies on biden $? legal jeopardy?

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-prime-time-ratings-continue-crater-lachlan-murdoch-downplays-collapse

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

pretty sure i called it, he was clearly auditioning no lnx an 6 23

Fox News has just announced it is revamping its primetime lineup in the wake of firing far-right host Tucker Carlson and as the 2024 presidential election approaches – and it’s handing the 8:00 PM hour to Jesse Watters, current co-host of its show “The Five.”

Variety reports the Watters move, and adds, “Fox News will also move Greg Gutfeld into the primetime block, giving him the 10 p.m. hour, while the current occupant, the conservative firebrand Laura Ingraham. takes up the reins of the early-evening 7 p.m. hour. Sean Hannity will keep his perch at 9 p.m., a slot he has held since 2017.”

Watters is the largely expected choice. A profile from Insider earlier this month revealed, “Jesse Watters likes picking fights. And he is fiercely loyal to Fox News, his professional home of two decades, starting when he was 24.Though best known as [Bill] O’Reilly’s attack dog until O’Reilly was pushed out of the network in 2017,Watters was also key to the launch of the right-wing Fox Nation blog. As cohost of ‘The Five’ and on his own 7 p.m. show, Watters delivers the network’s talking points with a grin and a touch of levity.”

READ MORE: ‘No Dead Bodies’: Fox News Hosts Suggest Trump Indicted for ‘Carelessness’ and ‘Where a Piece of Paper Goes’

Insider added, “Watters has found a far larger pool of libs to trigger” than just his parents, “but he continues to delight in the consternation his politics provoke in his mom. He’s known to occasionally read aloud the texts sent by his mom on ‘The Five.'”

“‘You end up presenting a lack of a moral compass honey,’ Watters quoted her saying in response to a 2018 segment on the Mueller investigation. ‘We all know you are a Trumpet — you need not scream it.'”

The same day as Insider’s profile of Watters ran, Variety reported on Watters’ week.

“Here’s a quick list. (1) He pissed on helping the homeless: ‘You can’t subsidize antisocial behavior you have to stigmatize it. These are people that have failed in life and they’re on their deathbed.’ 2. He casually explained that Donald Trump was just ‘sifting through [documents] and determining which were personal and which were presidential.’ 3. He compared not letting RFK Jr. come on his show to making a girl beg for a date. 4. He misidentified ‘The Five’ panel member Jessica Tarlov as ‘Katie.’ 5. In another episode, Watters cut off Tarlov, aka Katie, and threatened to ‘smack’ her with his copies of the Presidential Records Act.”

READ MORE: ‘Wrong and Dangerous’: Another Republican Former US Attorney General Lays Out the Case Against Trump

Responding to the news of Watters being promoted to the important 8 PM hour, MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan wrote, “Watters gets the Carlson slot. No reduction in racist fearmongering or Trump adulation at 8pm then.”

NPR’s David Gura posted video from 2016 that made Watters famous. It was widely criticized at the time as racist.

Watch the Watters video below or at this link.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

Fox guest: 'Somebody is going to have to pull a trigger' to stop Trump prosecutions ›

'Coulda shoved this down their throats': Jesse Watters scolds Lindsey Graham over timing of abortion ban ›

Fox News’ Jesse Watters boasts about his own reporting after claiming child rape report was actually a hoax ›

OMG NOOTE THIS IS 2ND BATCH OF HEAT BS

https://www.mediamatters.org/climate-deniers/15-nonsensical-comments-made-right-wing-media-during-2023s-summer-climate-fueled

15 nonsensical comments made by right-wing media during 2023’s summer of climate-fueled extreme weather events

Special PROGRAMS

CLIMATE & ENERGY

WRITTEN BY ALLISON FISHER

PUBLISHED 08/07/23

July 2023 was the earth’s hottest month on record, punctuated by record-shattering extreme heat events, catastrophic floods, and historic wildfires. While major media outlets sounded the alarm on the climate crisis, climate denial and downplay reached a fever pitch among right-wing media outlets and influencers.

Many in the right-wing media have downplayed the record heat — suggesting that it’s normal summer weather, despite clear evidence that the intensity of this summer’s heat waves would not have been possible without climate change — or dismissed its lethal impact by arguing that more people die of cold than heat. Others have said those linking July’s extreme weather to climate change are weaponizing these events to push a radical climate agenda or call for climate lockdowns.

Here are 15 other examples that illustrate the lengths to which right-wing media are going — often deploying nonsensical arguments or outright lies that attempt to ignore the fact that there is scientific consensus that carbon emissions are heating our planet— to maintain climate denial in the face of climate-fueled catastrophes:

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response to extreme weather that grounded planes in the Northeast, Fox host Rachel Campos-Duffy said the left is “trying to control the weather” and “trying to be God.” Fox News, :{Fox & Friends:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:, [7/3/23]
Responding to calls for climate action, Newsmax host Eric Bolling denied that human activity is responsible for warming: “Real scientists, meaning those not purchased by the kings of propaganda, well, they’ll tell you there is actually no such thing as climate change.” Newsmax, :{Eric Bolling The Balance:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:, [7/11/23]
Fossil fuel shill Steve Milloy on Newsmax’s Rob Schmitt Tonight: “The Earth is greener than ever before. Have we affected the planet and wildlife? Yeah, sure. But you know, in the end, it's been, I think, positive. The Earth is carrying more life now than ever before thanks to warming, thanks to CO2, thanks to fossil fuel use.” Newsmax, :{Rob Schmitt Tonight:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:, [7/11/23]
Newsmax host Greg Kelly said that “LGBTQ+IA whatever has been kind of pushed so relentlessly. … I think climate change and the whole phony debate about it has something to do with it,” suggesting the goal is to decrease population in order to reduce climate impacts. Newsmax, :{Greg Kelly Reports:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:, [7/11/23]
Fox host Jesse Watters suggested that U.S. special presidential envoy for climateJohn Kerry made it “impossible” to believe in climate change because according to Watters he lied about using a private plane. Fox News, :{Jesse Watters Primetime:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:, [7/13/23]
Conservative radio and Fox News host Mark Levin on his radioshow said climate change is a religion not based on science: “This is a religion. This is an ideology. This isn’t science. ...Don't you see how hot it is in Nevada? In the middle of the damn summer?It's what we have air conditioning for.”Westwood One, :{The Mark Levin Show:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:, [7/13/23]
Far-right media host Steven Crowder claims that carbon dioxide is not pollution because plants use it: “Is carbon dioxide the — basically, you know, the neurotoxin atmospheric poison that people make it out to be? Because you just pointed out plants thrive on it.” Rumble, :{Louder with Crowder:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:, [7/15/23]
Fox host Greg Gutfeld attempted to downplay the record-breaking heat with bizarre logic: “The problem with using weather — like saying, ‘This place broke records’ — how many states,how many countries didn't break records? Nobody ever provides you the context. They’re going, ‘Three countries had record-breaking heat waves.’ It’s like, well, how many countries are there?” Fox News, :{The Five:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:, [7/17/23]
The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh claimed that the record heat is not a result of human activity but the sun: “The sun … that’s what calls the shots on Earth. It determines the temperature. It determines everything in terms of weather. … And until you can figure out a way to literally control the sun, there is basically nothing we can do to intentionally and significantly raise, lower, or otherwise affect the temperature on Earth.” The Daily Wire, :{The Matt Walsh Show:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:, [7/18/23]
The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro: “Thank God we have this thing called air conditioning. … You know what’s a great cure for being super-duper hot outside? Being a first world country.” The Daily Wire, :{The Ben Shapiro Show:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:, [7/20/23]
Fox Business host Larry Kudlow on America Reports: “This is not an overly hot July. ... Hot weather happens in some places; cooler weather happens in other places. We do not have a climate catastrophe.” Fox News, :{America Reports:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:, [7/21/23]
Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk on climate science and why carbon dioxide is not pollution: “The science is not solid. The science is debated. They look at science as if it is religious, irrefutable dogma.” Kirk added, “The built-in premise of the climate hoax is carbon is bad. OK, well, carbon is life, actually. … Don’t plants thrive on carbon dioxide?” :{Real America’s Voice:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:, :{The Charlie Kirk Show:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:, [7/24/23]
On The Ingraham Angle, American Majority founder Ned Ryun called climate change a “hoax”: “It is nothing more than an attempt to manipulate people into a state of fear to have them give more control over to a ruling elitewho would take this hoax and enforce it through a whole host of means.” Fox News, :{The Ingraham Angle:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:, [7/27/23]
On America’s Newsroom, fossil fuel shill Daniel Turner deliberately conflated weather with climate: “And if you look at the weather forecast for this great city, where I’m born and raised, next Friday is mid-70s. So we are in what's called a heat wave.” :{Fox News, :{America’s Newsroom:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}::(style="background-color:#6633ff;"):}:, [7/28/23]
Climate denier Marc Morano on Jesse Watters Primetime blamed global wildfires on arsonists, dismissing the role of climate change: “This is a global problem of people starting this. Now, is it climate change? Well, this would be the equivalent of blowing up a dam or sabotaging a dam and allowing a valley to flood and then saying, oh, look, climate change is causing more floods.” Fox News, :{Jesse Watters Primetime:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:, [7/28/23]

…

Related

Right-wing media deny climate change in face of deadly and record-breaking extreme weather event

07/20/23

Right-wing media downplay the hottest day in modern history with the help of Twitter’s community notes feature

07/11/23

Only 5% of national TV news segments on the record-shattering heat wave that scorched Texas mentioned climate change

07/03/23

7 23 fox not doing x event? but bartiromo will interview trump

an 7 23

man who participated in the January 6th, 2021 insurrection at the United States Capitol and subsequently became the face of a Fox News conspiracy theory is suing the network for defamation, correspondents Alan Feuer and Jeremy W. Peters reported in The New York Times on Wednesday.

Ray Epps is "seeking an unspecified amount in damages" for the character assassination that he allegedly endured from fired Fox News host Tucker Carlson's "'fantastical story' that Mr. Epps was an undercover government agent who instigated the violence at the Capitol as a way to disparage then-President Trump and his supporters," Feuer and Peters wrote.

"Just as Fox had focused on voting machine companies when falsely claiming a rigged election, Fox knew it needed a scapegoat for January 6th," Epps' complaint states, according to Delaware Superior Court documents reviewed by the Times. Fox "settled on Ray Epps and began promoting the lie that Epps was a federal agent who incited the attack on the Capitol."

"After the unfounded accusations about Mr. Epps were aired on Mr. Carlson's show," Feuer and Peters explained, "they quickly spread to online communities of Trump supporters and to the political world as Republican members of Congress tried to link Mr. Epps to a fictitious conspiracy theory that he was involved in planning the Jan. 6 attack. They includedSenator Ted Cruz of Texas and Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky, both of whom made Mr. Epps — a two-time Trump voter — a focus of concern at public hearings."

Fox's false narrative "had damaging consequences for Mr. Epps and his wife, Robyn,who received numerous death threats and were forced to sell their five-acre ranch and wedding business in Arizona and move into a 350-square-foot mobile home parked at a remote trailer park in the mountains of Utah," per the**Times. "Online retailers began selling T-shirts that said 'Arrest Ray Epps.' Some people even recorded songs about him and posted them on YouTube, the complaint states, adding how he had been reduced 'into a character in a cartoonish conspiracy theory.'"

Epps' attorney, Michael Teter, noted that although his client "demanded in March that Fox and Mr. Carlson retract its stories about him and his purported role in the Capitol riot and issue an on-air apology, neither the network nor Mr. Carlson, whose prime-time show has since been canceled, responded."

Despite never being criminally charged for his role in the Capitol attack, the Times added, "Mr. Carlson and Fox settled on Mr. Epps as a 'villain' who could serve as a distraction from the network's own 'culpability for stoking the fire that led to the events of January 6th.' Mr. Carlson, it said, became 'fixated on Epps' and began the promoting the idea that Mr. Epps and the federal government were responsible for the Capitol riots.

https://www.rawstory.com/fox-news-exec-license-revoked/

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

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

Watch: Jake Tapper cannot control his laughter when mentioning Fox News’ 'highest journalistic standards' ›

'They did nothing wrong': Mike Lindell loses it over Fox News’ 'strange' Dominion settlement ›

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

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

Urban said that there’s a difference between “hard news and entertainment” on Fox, calling shows like Hannity or Tucker Carlson Today “the news equivalent of the WWE.” Urban has been a paid contributor at CNN for years, and Media Matters has previously highlighted numerous ethical problems with the arrangement, as the network has repeatedly failed to disclose Urban’s lobbying efforts and role in the Trump campaign. Most recently, Urban participated in discussions about the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, during which the network failed to disclose that Urban lobbied for the train operator Norfolk Southern. On the February 27 edition of CNN's The Lead with Jake Tapper, Urban pushed the false notion that Fox has separate news and opinion divisions.
[ vid]
jaKE TAPPER (HOST): And David, Fox viewers heard these false claims night after night after night, and Murdoch apparently, according to Oliver, said it was damaging. What was it damaging though?

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

Griffin placed blame on Trump for Fox News hosts spreading conspiracy theories in hopes of retaining their viewership, while claiming that “there’s a lot of really good journalists at Fox, dayside programming I don’t have really any major problems with.” CNN formally hired Griffin in December 2021, despite her lengthy history of lies and distortions, including during her tenure as a spokesperson for the Trump administration. In December 2020, Griffin had appeared on Fox News and claimed there had been voter fraud in the election[ vid]

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

Goldberg placed blame on Fox CEO Suzanne Scott for her “lack of leadership,” claiming that, when it comes to Fox’s role in the lawsuit, “the opinion side basically became the dog wagging the tail instead of the other way around, and the news side basically became sort of this cleanup crew.”Goldberg is a former Fox News contributor and founding editor for conservative magazine National Review, who now simultaneously works as a CNN contributor and editor-in-chief of right-wing online magazine The Dispatch[ vid]
jONAH GOLDBERG (CNN CONTRIBUTOR): I know too many people who work in the Fox News division to this day who are serious, honest, and sincere journalists trying to do the job right. There are too many people, including who work at CNN, who got their starts or worked at Fox for a while and have warm things to say about it, to just say that it was always a political operation. I think the problem that happened at Fox was that the opinion side was allowed to run free. Everyone likes to think that this was some grand policy, the transformation of Fox, set from above. It was really the lack of leadership under Suzanne Scott, the CEO, to reign in, curtail, discipline the prime-time people in any way to the point where the opinion side basically became the dog wagging the tail instead of the other way around. And the news side just became sort of this cleanup crew. Even in the Dominion filings, the news division comes out OK in this. Bret Baier and Special Report fact-checked this stuff.

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

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

CNN senior media reporter Oliver Darcy has repeatedly pointed out the lack of distinction between opinion and news at Fox.On Monday, he said, “I think this really actually exposes the fact that Fox is not at its core a news network. News networks -- they deliver the truth as they know it to viewers. They do the best job to attain the truth and sometimes it's not perfect but that's what they do.” CNN, *Anderson Cooper 360*, [2/27/23]
When asked if he would call Fox News a “news organization” on Tuesday’s edition of CNN’s This Morning, Darcy said: “No, and that’s because news networks are supposed to inform viewers with the truth. In this case we know that Fox News knew the truth and refused to not only tell their viewers but they actually fed them lies to keep their audience because of the financial incentive. That's not what news networks do. That's what maybe, you know, propaganda outlets might do, but it's certainly not what a news network would do.” CNN, *This Morning*, [2/28/23]
Darcy also wrote an analysis on some of the biggest revelations from Dominion’s legal filing, saying that Fox “continues to be exposed for the dishonest organization that it is – this time, with the help of its billionaire owner.”He later continued, “In totality, the documents continue to underscore that at its core, Fox News is not a news network. News networks work hard to deliver the truth to their viewers. … The documents lay bare that the channel’s business model is not based on informing its audience, but rather on feeding them content — even dangerous conspiracy theories — that keeps viewers happy and watching.” CNN, [2/28/23]
Darcy said that “the perception that they are a news company is crumbling.” According to Darcy, “To preserve these business relationships they have to at least, have some reputation they're a legitimate news company. And I have been saying obviously that that's not the case. But the perception that they are a news company is crumbling, and this could result in damage to the actual Fox Corp. brand and really result in problems for shareholders.” CNN, *This Morning*, [3/1/23]
On Inside Politics with John King, King claimed that “Fox is not about news, it's about opinion.” King then played clips of Fox hosts airing claims about voter fraud in the 2020 election and said, “It was not just once, it was not twice. It was this over and over and over again.” CNN, :{Inside Politics with John King:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:, [2/28/23]
In response to King, CNN reporter Phil Mattingly said, “These filings are laying bare the fallacy of the idea that there is a separation between opinion and editorial.” CNN, :{Inside Politics with John King:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:, [2/28/23]

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The recently released legal filing in Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News shows the extent to which multiple Fox executives and anchors knew that the network was pushing lies about the 2020 presidential election results on air. The filing also contains a startling statement by Fox Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch: that Fox News executives who knowingly allowed lies to be broadcast should potentially be fired. From the filing (emphasis in original):

Q. What should the consequences be when Fox News executives knowingly allow lies to be broadcast? A. They should be reprimanded – They should be reprimanded, maybe got rid of.Rupert Murdoch, Chairman, Fox Corporation.

The filings also show the extent to which Fox executives knowingly spread the conspiracy theory that Dominion Voting Systems had rigged the election at least in part in order to keep up with its far-right media competitors. These decisions now leave multiple Fox executives implicated as potentially worthy of firing, according to Rupert Murdoch’s own declared standard.

Rupert Murdoch

First off, and most obvious, is Rupert Murdoch himself. As chairman of the Fox Corp., Murdoch could have intervened at any time and stopped the hosts and guests featured on his network from spreading lies about the 2020 election, a fact that he bluntly admitted under questioning by Dominion’s lawyers. From the filing:

Q. And you could have said to Suzanne Scott or to the hosts, “Stop putting Rudy Giuliani on the air”?

A. I could have. But I didn't.

Furthermore, Murdoch did nothing about the entreaties by Fox board member Paul Ryan, a former Republican speaker of the House, who argued according to the filing “that Fox News should not be spreading conspiracy theories.”

Murdoch did, however, take direct action to get rid of a Fox executive who told the truth. On November 20, 2020, Murdoch personally signed off on firing vice president and Washington managing editor Bill Sammon, who had been involved in the network’s projection that President Joe Biden had won Arizona, which assured Biden his Electoral College victory. “Maybe best to let Bill go right away,” Murdoch said, per the filing, adding that this move would “be a big message with Trump people.”

Lachlan Murdoch

Rupert Murdoch’s son and Fox Corp. CEO Lachlan Murdoch is also clearly guilty under the standard that his father enunciated, as he helped tailor the network’s messaging to help promote lies about the election. As just one example,Lachlan instructed the network to give positive coverage to a “Stop the Steal” rally on November 14, 2020,which served as a prelude to the January 6 insurrection, and to brand the violent and far-right event as a “celebration of the president.”

The Dominion filing further alleges that in addition to Lachlan’s close interactions with his other key executives, “specific evidence shows he attended the November 13 afternoon editorial meeting” that preceded an episode ofLou Dobbs Tonight that featured disgraced Trump-allied attorney Sidney Powell.The then-Fox Business host Lou Dobbs repeatedly called Powell a “great American,” while she claimed that Dominion had been “created to produce altered voting results in Venezuela for Hugo Chavez, and then shipped internationally to manipulate votes for purchase in other countries, including this one.”

Suzanne Scott

Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott also played a clear role in spreading lies and suppressing the truth on the network. Under questioning, Scott affirmed that she had always believed, since at least when the network itself had called Arizona and thus the election on November 7, 2020, that in fact Biden had won legitimately.

And yet on multiple occasions, Scott reprimanded on-air talent who called out the lies and conspiracy theories. Examples include her involvement with Lachlan Murdoch in reprimanding then-anchor Leland Vittert’s coverage of the November 14 “Stop the Steal” rally, as well as her reported “screaming” about negative coverage by anchor Dana Perino and then-Fox reporter Kristen Fisher of the infamous November 19 press conference by Trump attorneys and election conspiracy theorists Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell. “The audience feels like we crapped on [them] and we have damaged their trust and belief in us….We can fix this but we cannot smirk at our viewers any longer,” Scott said at the time.

The filing also reveals that Scott worked personally to preserve the network’s relationship with right-wing billionaire conspiracy theoristMike Lindell, CEO of MyPillow, assisting him in spreading dangerous lies about the election and Dominion Voting Systems. In mid-December, after Lindell publicly claimed that Fox was supposedly “in on” stealing the election, the filing details that Scott sent a personal note and a gift to Lindell. She further suggested that shows should book Lindell in order to “get ratings.” (Rupert Murdoch himself admitted that Fox went out of its way to preserve its relationship with Lindell, one of the network’s largest advertisers, to shore up its profits.)

When the network later hosted Lindell on the January 26, 2021, edition of Tucker Carlson Tonight, the star prime-time host depicted his network’s top advertiser as a champion of free speech, rather than challenging him on his false claims about the election or his apparent effort to urge Trump to impose martial law.

Viet Dinh

Fox Corp. chief legal and policy officer Viet Dinh also admitted during his testimony that Fox executives had a duty to “prevent and correct” falsehoods.

Q. But when the executives at Fox News know that hosts of shows are broadcasting allegations that the executives know or believe to be false, in that situation, the executives have an obligation to act, right?

A. If they are within the chain of command and if they -- and if they come to that knowledge, yes.

Q. And by “act,” that means to put a stop to it, right?

Q. They have an obligation under those circumstances, the executives do, in the chain of command, to put a stop to those broadcasts, right, sir?

A. Yes, to prevent and correct known falsehoods.

Dinh confirmed under questioning that he had “pretty easily” been able to look up and debunk the claim that Dominion was owned by a Venezuelan company and founded in order to rig elections for the late dictator Hugo Chavez. But the filing suggests Dinh failed to require Fox News hosts and guests to debunk such easily discredited lies. On the contrary, the network aired that bogus claim over and over again.

Raj Shah

Fox Senior Vice President Raj Shahsent numerous internal communications about the damage to Fox’s reputation among conservative viewers, including the supposed “brand threat” posed by Fox figures who openly debunked Trump’s fake claims of mass election fraud. On November 13, he sent a “Brand Protection Unit Roundup” to Lachlan Murdoch, Dinh, and Scott, stating there was “strong conservative and viewer backlash to Fox that we are working to track and mitigate.” He further explained that “[p]ositive impressions of Fox News among our viewers dropped precipitously after Election Day to the lowest levels we’ve ever seen.”

In order to mitigate this damage, at one point he pitched the idea of “some sort of public mea culpa for the AZ call,” or “some programming that’s focused on hearing our viewers grievances about how we’ve handled the election.” In other words, Shah wanted the network to apologize for actually broadcasting a truthful story.

In another instance, when host Tucker Carlson briefly feuded with Sidney Powell, Shah instructed a producer for Carlson’s show to downplay the extent of her ludicrous claims. At the same time as Shah described Powell’s claims as “so fucking insane,” he also advised Carlson’s team to “pivot to being deferential.”

Shah suggested the phrasing “we hope she is able to provide the evidence in court and we’ll bring it to viewers when they do” — even though he knew no such evidence existed or could ever be offered in court. In another message just the next day, Shah described Powell’s claims as “MIND BLOWINGLY NUTS.”

Jay Wallace

Fox News President and Executive Editor Jay Wallace is also responsible for his inaction on the network’s continued lies about the election, even as a Dominion consultant repeatedly :{reached out to him personall:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:y (citations removed):

The day before the WSJ editorial and article appeared—November 16— Dominion’s Communications Consultant Tony Fratto, former Deputy White House Press Secretary under President George W. Bush, personally brought the false allegations to the attention of the two top executives at FNN—Scott and Wallace— telling them that Dominion, “as you know, has received a great deal of attention on FoxNews [sic] and from the President. An enormous amount of misinformation -- actually, completely and verifiable wrong information—is finding its way on-air.” Fratto offered to provide the two of them a briefing about Dominion and concluded: “I think this situation is crossing dangerous lines.” Scott responded asking Wallace to provide his thoughts, and Wallace and Fratto then spoke over the phone. When Lou Dobbs again broadcast lies about Dominion that very night, Fratto reached out again to Wallace. He forwarded part of the transcript to Wallace and told him: “More fucking out [and out] lies. Honestly. He is a disgrace.”

Irena Briganti

Irena Briganti, Fox News senior executive vice president of corporate communications, also presided over the network’s continued inaction, even as it was clearly brought to her attention via a press inquiry (citations removed):

On December 1, a reporter with The Washington Post emailed FNN stating that Powell had appeared on both Dobbs and Hannity’s programs the day before making claims of voting machine fraud. The reporter asked,

[D]oes Fox News Media management have any concerns about the veracity of the claims that Powell has been making on network shows? Is Sidney Powell welcome to appear on any Fox News Media show? Has Fox News Media encouraged show hosts to fact-check claims about voter fraud?

Irena Briganti forwarded the inquiry to Scott and Wallace, stating “FYI—we spoke with Lauren [Petterson] and Meade [Cooper] and there’s nothing to combat this, so we are not responding.”

David Clark

David Clark, senior vice president for weekend news and programming, was directly responsible for Fox host Maria Bartiromo’s Sunday Morning Futuresprogram, in which she hosted Giuliani and Powell. The filing reveals that he also agreed with the statement that there was “no credible evidence of massive cheating or fraud,” and yet he allowed her to continue spreading conspiracy theories by hosting figures such as Powell and Giuliani, and to not push back on them. Interestingly, the Dominion filing notes the ways in which Clark took active steps to temporarily rein in Fox host Jeanine Pirro, but he seemingly failed to do so with Bartiromo.

Fox Business executives

Fox Business executives Lauren PettersonandGary Schreier spoke of using Fox Business shows to grab viewers who were going away from Fox News proper, by supporting the election lies. (They just couldn’t be as open about it, compared to Fox’s far-right competition at Newsmax.) From the filing (citations removed):

The night of November 7, after Fox called the election, Fox Business Network (“FBN”) President Lauren Petterson wrote FBN executive Gary Schreier that she had turned off Fox’s coverage: “I don’t know how we work here. Honestly. We are going to look back at this week and know this was when we lost a significant part of our audience who won’t come back. As soon as Facebook starts telling people to go to [N]ewsmax.” But Schreier and Petterson saw an opening: “You know though between us. This is a problem for the channel yes. But if we keep doing what we do, fbn will get a bunch of the disenfranchised folks too.” Petterson responded: “100 percent. I was talking about exactly that with my husband last night.It’s actually an opening for us.” Schreier: “Yes. We just can’t play for it openly like newsmax and oan.”

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

Alex Henderson March 02, 2023

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

CNN reporter sheds light on Fox News exec’s grim Dominion lawsuit prediction ›

Dominion just created an 'overwhelming' hurdle for Fox News: legal expert ›

Fox News host 'strongly disagrees' with network banning discussion of Dominion lawsuit on-air ›

:{Amid raging bushfire, Rupert Murdoch's Australian media empire turns a blind eye to climate crisis:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:

:{:(style="box-sizing:border-box;display:flex;height:1.5em;margin-right:1em;width:1.5em"):}:01/06/20 3:32 PM EST

619 several fear and scam nodes to disambiguate (this started with sinclair tv weather guy refusing to run red alerts mandated, sponsor support.

but made me realize it's fox's biz model?!

===

no lnx

https://www.mediamatters.org/research/2016/07/19/roger-ailes-legacy-building-gops-communications-arm-under-guise-news-network/211722#door

7/16

Roger Ailes is reportedly exiting Fox News, the cable network where he has served as CEO since its founding in 1996, amid controversy over his alleged years-long pattern of sexual harassment. Despite its "Fair and Balanced" slogan, Fox News under Ailes' leadership has embraced its role as the communications arm of the Republican Party. During the Obama administration, this partisanship accelerated as the network openly campaigned for Republican candidates, launched the tea party movement, became a farm system for Republican politicians, and served as the stage for Republican presidential primaries, among other egregious ethical issues.

Fox News “Took A Hard Right Turn” And Became “The Alamo” After President Obama’s Election

The Revolving Door Between Fox News And Republican Officials

Fox News On The Campaign Trail: Employees Fundraised, Stumped For Dozens Of Republican Candidates

Fox Aggressively Helped Launch And Support The Anti-Obama Tea Party Movement

The Fox News Primary: The 2012 And 2016 Republican Primaries Played Out On Fox Airwaves

Fox News Executive Bill Sammon Admitted To Lying On-Air About Obama, Kept Job

Report Ailes Is Reportedly On His Way Out Due To Fallout From Numerous Sexual Harassment Allegations

NY Times: “Roger Ailes Is Negotiating His Departure As Chairman Of Fox News.” From a July 19 article:

Roger Ailes’s tenure as the head of Fox News appears to be over.

Mr. Ailes and 21st Century Fox, Fox News’s parent company, are in the advanced stages of discussions that would lead to his departure as chairman, Susan Estrich, one of Mr. Ailes’s lawyers, said in an interview on Tuesday.

The development follows a sexual harassment suit filed July 6 against Mr. Ailes by a former anchor, Gretchen Carlson. The suit prompted 21st Century Fox to conduct an internal review.

Since then, Mr. Ailes’s future at Fox News has been the subject of intense speculation, which increased on Monday with a report from New York magazine that the executives leading 21st Century Fox — Rupert Murdoch and his sons, James and Lachlan — had determined that Mr. Ailes must go. [The New York Times, 7/19/16]

Fox News “Took A Hard Right Turn” And Became “The Alamo” After President Obama’s Election

Roger Ailes On Obama's Election: "I See This As The Alamo." A March 6, 2009, Los Angeles Times article reported that, in a meeting with former Fox News host Glenn Beck, Ailes declared that his network would challenge the Obama administration, reportedly saying, "I see this as the Alamo." Bill Shine, Fox News' senior vice president for programming, also reportedly described the network as "the voice of the opposition on some issues" to "this particular group of people in power right now." [Media Matters, 9/2/12]

Fox News Executives Admitted To Howard Kurtz That “The Entire Network Took A Hard Right Turn After Obama's Election." In an article for Newsweek, Howard Kurtz, who now works as a media reporter for Fox News, reported, "Fox executives say the entire network took a hard right turn after Obama's election, but, as the Tea Party's popularity fades, is edging back toward the mainstream." [Newsweek, 9/25/11]

The Revolving Door Between Fox News And Republican Party

Numerous Republicans Have Left Fox News To Run For Office. Numerous Fox News personalities have left the network to run for office (several returned to Fox after losing). In many instances, Fox News helped launch those Republicans’ political careers while on the network’s payroll. Those Republicans include: Ben Carson, Mike Huckabee, Newt Gingrich, Ohio Gov. John Kasich, Rick Santorum, Liz Cheney, Angela McGlowan, Pete Snyder, Rep. Mark Sanford, and Scott Brown. [Media Matters, 12/22/13; 11/20/14; 8/5/15]

Numerous Fox News Contributors Were Republican Candidates. Fox News has employed numerous contributors over the years who previously ran for office (successfully and unsuccessfully) as a Republican. They include Herman Cain, Al D'Amato, John LeBoutillier, KT McFarland, Oliver North, Jeanine Pirro, and Allen West. Fox News infamously hired Sarah Palin (twice); she has since left the network. [Media Matters, 4/7/14]

Fox News Hired Numerous Former Bush Administration Officials. Fox News has hired numerous former Bush administration officials over the years. Current contributors Karl Rove, Dana Perino, Richard Grenell, and John Bolton worked in the Bush administration. Fox News also hired former Bush officials Elaine Chao and Liz Cheney; both are no longer with the network. [Media Matters, 10/26/09, 9/10/12, 6/3/14; LinkedIn.com, accessed 7/19/16]

Fox News On The Campaign Trail: Employees Fundraised, Stumped For Dozens Of Republican Candidates

30-Plus Fox Hosts And Contributors Supported GOP In 600-Plus Instances During 2009-2010 Midterms.A Media Matters report found that during the 2009-2010 election cycle, more than 30 Fox News personalities endorsed, raised money, or campaigned for Republican candidates or organizations in more than 600 instances. The Republican support was given to more than 300 different races or party organizations in at least 47 states. [Media Matters, 10/27/10]

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30-Plus Fox Hosts And Contributors Campaigned For Republicans In 2011-2012 Election Cycle. According to a Media Matters review, at least 32 Fox News figures backed Republican efforts in more than 300 instances during the 2011-2012 election cycle. The Fox News personalities campaigned for Republicans nationally and in more than 40 states. [Media Matters, 11/1/12]

12 Fox News Contributors Took Part In Romney's Campaign.During the 2012 presidential campaign, 12 Fox News contributors took part in Romney's campaign by being featured in a campaign event (such as a fundraiser or speech), advising his campaign, or both. They were: Fred Barnes, John Bolton, Liz Cheney, Alfonse D'Amato, Mike Huckabee, William Kristol, Thomas McInerney, Dennis Miller, Chuck Nash, Walid Phares, Karl Rove, and Pete Snyder. [Media Matters, 11/1/12]

Fox News Continued Employing Karl Rove Despite Massive Ethical Conflict. Rove has worked for Fox News while serving as a major adviser and fundraiser for American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS. Those organizations have spent hundreds of millions of dollars attempting to elect Republicans over the years. Fox News regularly failed to disclose Rove's involvement in races he discussed on the air. Fox News has also promoted Crossroads content without disclosing Rove’s ties. [Media Matters, 9/2/12; 2/4/14]

Fox Aggressively Helped Launch And Support The Anti-Obama Tea Party Movement

Tea Party Express Founder: "There Would Not Have Been A Tea Party Without Fox." A 2011 New York magazine profile on Ailes, headlined, "The Elephant in the Green Room," featured a quote from Tea Party Express founder Sal Russo proclaiming: "There would not have been a tea party without Fox." [New York, 5/22/11]

Media Matters Report Found Fox Aired At Least 20 Segments And 73 Promos On Tea Party Protests In Lead Up To 2009 Tax Day Protests. In April 2009, Media Matters reported that Fox News had frequently aired segments not only covering tea party protests but encouraging viewers to get involved. An April 15, 2009, study found that from April 6-13, Fox had aired 20 segments and 73 in-show and commercial promotions on the tea party protests scheduled for April 15. [Media Matters, 4/8/09, 4/15/09]

Fox News Hosts Attended "FNC Tax Day Tea Parties." In the days leading up to the "Tax Day" protests, Fox repeatedly aired on-screen text describing protests Fox news hosts would be attending as "FNC Tax Day Tea Parties." [Media Matters, 4/9/09]

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Fox's Tax Day Coverage Promoted Protesters' Cause, Urged Viewer Involvement. Fox News and Fox Business also hyped the tea party during its coverage of the "Tax Day" protests on April 15, 2009. Hosts and guests on several shows promoted the protesters' cause and urged viewers to join the protests and visit tea party websites. [Media Matters, 4/16/09]

Fox News Hosts Participated In More Than A Dozen Tea Party Events In 2010. Fox News hosts participated in more than a dozen tea party events during the week of April 15, 2010. [Media Matters, 4/15/10]

For more about Fox News’ heavily involvement in the tea party movement, go here.

The Fox News Primary: The 2012 And 2016 Republican Primaries Played Out On Fox Airwaves

2016

During 2016 Election, Fox Devoted More Than 200 Hours To Airing Interviews With Republican Primary Candidates. Between May 1, 2015, and May 3, 2016, Fox News devoted 202 hours and 2 minutes to airing 1,481 original and reaired interviews with the 17 Republican candidates. [Media Matters, 5/5/16]

Network Aired Over 49 Hours Of Interviews With Eventual Nominee Donald Trump, More Than Twice As Much As Any Other Candidate. [Media Matters, 5/5/16]

Sen. Ted Cruz: Murdoch And Ailes “Have Turned Fox News Into The Donald Trump Network.” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), the runner-up for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, lamented that “network executives have made a decision to get behind Donald Trump. Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes at Fox News have turned Fox News into the Donald Trump network, 24/7.” [Media Matters, 5/3/16]

Four 2016 Candidates Worked For Fox News. Rick Santorum, John Kasich, Ben Carson, and Mike Huckabee all worked for the network for various periods of time before launching their bids. [Media Matters, 8/5/15]

Huckabee: Fox News Job Put Me In “People’s Homes Every Week.” During a visit to Iowa before he launched his presidential bid, Mike Huckabee reportedly credited his platform hosting a show at the network with boosting his name recognition in the crucial primary state of Iowa. [Media Matters, 10/24/15]

CNN Host Brian Stelter: "There Really Is No Disputing Fox's Power In Influencing The GOP." Reliable Sources host Stelter noted that Fox News has been a frequent stop for presidential candidates announcing their candidacies. [CNN, Reliable Sources, 4/19/15]

Politico's Hadas Gold: Fox News Is The "Central Place Where All The Conservatives Are Going ... They Have A Huge Influence." [CNN, Reliable Sources, 4/19/15]

LA Times' Doyle McManus: Fox News Is The "Gatekeeper" Of The Republican Primary. McManus, a Times Washington columnist, wrote that Ailes "will decide which candidates can compete in Republican presidential primaries next year" and "One side effect, GOP strategists say, is that during the next two months, those candidates will be even more desperate to boost their name recognition -- by appearing on Fox News." He added, "Fox won't exactly be judge, jury and executioner, but it will be rule-maker, gatekeeper and moderator." [Los Angeles Times, 5/30/15]

2012

Fox News And Fox Business Devoted More Than 77 Hours Of Interview Airtime To 12 Republican Candidates During 2012 Race. [Media Matters, 2/27/12]

Newt Gingrich And Rick Santorum Worked For Fox Before Launching 2012 Bids. [Media Matters, 2/27/12]

Santorum Boasted That Fox News Employment Had “Helped Folks Remember Who I Am” As He Prepped Run. [Media Matters, 11/3/10]

New York Times In 2011: “Fox News Practically Owns And Operates” Republican Primary. The New York Times’ Alessandra Stanley reported in 2011 of Fox News’ coverage of the Republican primary campaign:

There’s a reason Fox News is beginning to look like a meet-the-candidate pancake breakfast in Council Bluffs, Iowa.

“You don’t win Iowa in Iowa, you win it on this couch,” is how the Republican commentator Dick Morris put it on “Fox & Friends” on Wednesday. Mr. Morris said that the Republican debates and Fox News had forged a national primary that “imposes itself on Iowa.”

It’s certainly obvious in Iowa that candidates are investing a lot more time in television interviews than they are on the campaign trail. It’s a safe bet: a recent New York Times/CBS News poll of likely Iowa Republican caucus participants showed that 37 percent said they get most of their information from Fox News, that’s compared with 27 percent who cited broadcast news and a mere 2 percent who said they relied on MSNBC.

Accordingly, caucus and primary voters have a voice on Fox News. All the networks, broadcast and cable, are closely covering the campaign, but Fox News practically owns and operates it: its viewers are seeing the world through the eyes of a Tea Party activist in Davenport, or a small business leader in Ames — my own private Iowa. [New York Times, 12/10/11]

Fox News Executive Bill Sammon Admitted To Lying On-Air About Obama, Kept Job

Bill Sammon: Engaged In "Mischievous SpeculationAbout Whether Barack Obama Really Advocated Socialism" Even Though He "Privately" Thought That Was "Far-Fetched." During a speech on a high-priced cruise, Fox News executive Sammon admitted he promoted the idea that Barack Obama "really advocated socialism" on Fox News prior to the 2008 election, even though he "privately" found the concept "far-fetched":

Speaking in 2009 onboard a pricey Mediterranean cruise sponsored by a right-wing college, Fox Washington managing editor Bill Sammon described his attempts the previous year to link Obama to "socialism" as "mischievous speculation." Sammon, who is also a Fox News vice president, acknowledged that "privately" he had believed that the socialism allegation was "rather far-fetched."

"Last year, candidate Barack Obama stood on a sidewalk in Toledo, Ohio, and first let it slip to Joe the Plumber that he wanted to quote, 'spread the wealth around,' " said Sammon. "At that time, I have to admit, that I went on TV on Fox News and publicly engaged in what I guess was some rather mischievous speculation about whether Barack Obama really advocated socialism, a premise that privately I found rather far-fetched." [Media Matters,3/29/11]

Ailes Gave Sammon A Reprieve After "Fox Critics" Reportedly Called For His Firing In Response To Smear."Fox critics" criticized Sammon when the speech became public and called for his removal as Washington managing editor, but Ailes "reprimanded Sammon but he also let it be known he didn't consider it a firing offense," according to Ailes' authorized biographer. From Zev Chafets' Roger Ailes: Off Camera:

In 2009, on a Mediterranean cruise, Bill Sammon regaled his conservative audience with a tale of inside news making. During the 2008 campaign, Barack Obama had famously told 'Joe the Plumber,' an Ohio blue-collar voter, that there was nothing wrong with spreading the wealth around. "I have to admit that I went on TV on Fox News and publicly engaged in what I guess was some rather mischievous speculation about whether Barack Obama really advocated socialism, a premise that privately I found rather far-fetched," Sammon boasted. Fox critics learned about the speech and castigated Sammon for this obvious misuse of his position. There were rumblings in the Fox Washington bureau that Sammon should be replaced as bureau chief. Ailes reprimanded Sammon but also let it be known that he didn't consider it a firing offense. [Zev Chafets, Roger Ailes: Off Camera, via Google Books]

https://www.alternet.org/2019/03/fox-news-could-being-trumps-personal-propaganda-network-and-hannity-is-losing-it-report/

Fox News has served as a full-blown propaganda network for President Donald Trump for the first two years of his presidency, but a revolt within the network’s news department is spurring talk of change.

*Vanity Fair’s* Gabriel Sherman reports that Lachlan Murdoch, the son of Fox-owning media mogul Rupert Murdoch, is not a big Trump fan and is wary of having his network seen as the president’s personal Soviet-style Pravda.

Although the editorial changes that Murdoch is considering making aren’t expected to be too drastic — the network will continue to be a right-wing news network — they’re reportedly still enough to scare Fox News host Sean Hannity into believing it will hurt Trump politically.

“Hannity told Trump last year that the Murdochs hate Trump, and Hannity is the only one holding Fox together,” one source tells Sherman.

Additionally, some sources within Fox believe that the Murdochs will try to create some distance between Fox News and the president as part of a larger strategy to sell the network off to another buyer.

“Everyone thinks they’re going to sell it,” one Fox News anchor tells Sherman. “It’s too small to be independent.”

Read the whole report here.

Fox Corp. board member Paul Ryan has been the subject of fawning praise from Fox News

Fox Corp., the parent company of Fox News, announced on March 19 that former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R-WI) will serve on its board of directors. Ryan had been the recipient of fawning praise from Fox News personalities in the past for his right-wing budget proposals and his selection by Mitt Romney as his vice presidential pick for the 2012 presidential election.

https://www.alternet.org/right-wing/here-are-10-incredibly-fake-facts-trump-supporters-think-are-true

10 incredibly fake facts that Trump supporters believe are true.

1. Trump is a devoted Christian.

The thrice-married, pu$$y-grabbing Trump is actually quite the exemplary Christian, at least in the minds of his supporters. They are so convinced of this fake fact that they welcomed Trump at Jerry Fallwell's Liberty University this past weekend, where the president was given an honorary doctorate.

2. The economy is improving because of Trump.

If there's anything Trump does better than filing for Chapter 11, it's taking credit for things other people have done. Part-time First Lady Melania Trump stole a speech from Michelle Obama, so it only seems fitting that the Donald do it as well. Now, even though he hasn't signed a single piece of economic legislation and all economic data is just a continuation of President Obama's efforts, Trump seems to have no issue taking credit for all of the positive economic news. And despite the fact that Trump had been in office for a whopping two weeks, Fox News gave Trump full credit for a positive jobs report in January.

3. 'Millions voted illegally' (without a single shred of proof).

Not too long ago, a poll found that 55 percent of Trump supporters believe his daft conspiracy theory that the only reason he lost the popular vote is because “millions voted illegally” for Hillary Clinton. Ignorance is bliss, right?

4. Immigration is off the rails and illegal immigrants are all violentcriminals.

Trump played to the racist tendencies of working-class whites when he declared that Mexicans were criminals and rapists, except for some. He also took a page from Richard Nixon's handbook and touted law and order for the silent majority. But here's the thing for folks who reside in Realitytown, USA: net migration from Mexico is basically zero and stats show that undocumented immigrants are actually less likely to commit crimes than American citizens. But facts are not how you Make America Great Again!

5. Trump should have the power to overturn judicial rulings.

Utterly clueless when it comes to the U.S. Constitution (except for the Second Amendment), 51 percent of Trump supporters think the Executive Branch should have the power to overrule the Judicial Branch. This came after Trump was overruled in his efforts to impose a Muslim travel ban.

6. Trumpcare is great while Obamacare is awful.

Okay, this one is especially heinous. During Trump's presidential campaign, he talked constantly about how easy it would be to gut Obamacare and impose a version of his own that would cover everyone. Here are the facts:

Around 24 million people will lose their health insurance—many of them his most vocal supporters
Premiums, especially for Americans 50 and older, will increase dramatically.
States can opt-out of protecting people with pre-existing conditions.
Coverage will get worse.
Medicaid will be gutted.

Trumpcare is stealing from the poor to give to the rich, but his supporters don't mind being screwed by their dear leader.

7. Barack Obama was not born in the United States.

Ah yes, the birther question. The very thing that catapulted a washed-up reality TV host to political fame and fortune. Trump had been accusing President Obama of not being born in America for years, which seems to have resonated with his supporters: 59 percent of Trump supporters didn’t think Obama was born in the United States, while just a mere 23 percent said he was.

8. There's a war on gun owners.

Despite the fact that gun ownership ballooned under President Obama and his sensible gun legislation failed miserably in the NRA-owned Republican Congress, Trump supporters believed there was a major "war" on guns. The biggest (and stupidest) conspiracy was the one involving Jade Helm, when right-wingers thought a military exercise was actually a secret ploy by Obama to declare martial law and seize all the guns.

9. All the investigations into Trump's ties to Russia are bogus.

Despite the overwhelming amount of evidence that continues to pile up regarding Trump's ties to Putin during the 2016 presidential campaign and beyond, his supporters will hear nothing of it. They love Russia and think CNN and every other major news outlet is fake news that hates America. Bear in mind, all of this seems to be leading up to impeachment. But yeah, nothing to see here.

10. Trump is honest and trustworthy.

This may be the greatest fake fact of fake facts: Trump is honest and trustworthy. Despite the fact that nearly everything that comes out of his mouth is a brazen lie that can be disproved in a New York minute, his supporters think he's honest. That's just a special kind of ignorance you can't fix. While some of his supporters have since seen the light of day, a majority of them still trust him despite all the explanations of his lies the media makes.

: Fox News.

Since it launched in 1996, Fox News Channel has been one of the most popular cable news networks in the United States. On a given day that approximately 3 million people -- mostly older and almost exclusively white --watch Fox programming. That's more than CNN and MSNBC combined.

These viewers are being fed a steady diet of lies and disinformation in the service of an alternate reality where the facts are rejected in favor of right-wing talking points. Media scholars and other researchers have shown that people who watch Fox News actually know less correct information about current events and other important public matters than people who watch other news networks -- or who do not watch cable news at all.

Fox News also has real political power at the polls: social scientists have concluded that the network helps to mobilize Republican and right-leaning voters.

But Fox News was never about honoring the obligation of the free press to speak truth to power or help the American people make informed decisions about political and social matters. Fox was explicitly designed to parrot the style and narrative of sports talk radio where entertainment and profit-seeking are more important than the truth and the world is divided up between right-wing conservatives (the "good guys" and "the home team") and Democrats, liberals and progressives (the "bad guys" and "the enemy")

In the age of Trump, Fox News has only become more bold and transparent in its partisanship. Although the network initially favored other Republicans in 2016 and was at times openly opposed to Trump, it has become his de facto state-sponsored media, an American Pravda where Trump's war on democracy is cheered on, his leadership is endlessly praised, and white supremacist or eliminationist rhetoric is mainstreamed.

At present, America is highly polarized. We're in the midst of a "cold" civil war that threatens to turn "hot." Fox News is one of the country's primary political arsonists.

Is it possible to free Fox News' viewers and public from its grip? Why are conservatives and so many other Americans enraptured by the network's alternate reality it creates? How are violence and fear-mongering central themes of Fox News? What are some strategies for communicating with relatives, friends and other people -- for example, at holiday gatherings -- who are willingly stuck in the Fox News echo chamber?

In an effort to answer these questions I recently spoke with Jen Senko, the writer, producer and director of the documentary "The Brainwashing of My Dad." This film explores how Senko's father became a Fox News true believer -- and how she got him back. It was originally released in the spring of 2016, as Donald Trump was surging toward the Republican nomination, and is now available on Amazon Prime, Google Play, iTunes, YouTube and other streaming services. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

In your documentary "The Brainwashing of My Dad," you warn about the power of Fox News to create an alternate reality which in turn encourages right-wing violence. How do you feel given all that has happened in America since the rise of Trump?

I feel really frustrated. I’m just an ordinary person. Why was I able to see this, the writing on the wall, and people a lot smarter than me and more able to do something were not able to see what was going on? This problem began at least 20 years ago. I am a little disheartened. We are akin to the proverbial frog in the water. I think some people are finally starting to see and understand the dangerous effects of Fox News. Honestly, I don’t know if it’s too late or not.

There is a man in my neighborhood who drives a pickup truck with Donald Trump stickers all over it and huge flags with Trump's name. Since I'm writing a book about Donald Trump and this political moment I decided I was going to go to this man's house to introduce myself politely and ask if he would be willing to chat. His neighbors were outside. I decided to talk to them first because I don't want to be the black guy who got shot because I knocked on a white man's door. His neighbors were also black. They looked at me and said quietly that he didn't like people like us and it wouldn't be a good idea. How would you have approached this Donald Trump superfan?

I would have been afraid as well. If I were black I would have been even more afraid. There is cause for being afraid because these people are taught year after year that Democrats, black people, anyone who is not a white male, women, feminists -- who they call "FemiNazis" -- are not just people that they disagree with but instead are evil. In addition to Fox News, which they watch like zombies 24/7 whenever they’re home, or Rush Limbaugh on radio, there are also the emails. There’s an avalanche of them. The emails from right-wing websites and groups are even worse than Fox News or right-wing radio.

Why is Fox News so dangerously effective?

Fox News operates through fear. It operates through emotion. I remember when my parents used to listen to Walter Cronkite. When I was little I thought, "What a snooze! Why are people interested in the news? It’s so boring." It wasn’t trying to make any money. It didn’t need to run a profit. It was a half hour in the evening and a half hour at night. It was boring. It strove for objectivity. What happened was Rupert Murdoch gets American citizenship. and hires Roger Ailes to create Fox News. It was a perfect storm. Roger Ailes was a genius at television. He understood it. He was a television producer. Ailes knew what hooks viewers: emotion, simple sentences, repetition, fear, interrupting the guests and using high-impact visuals.

Exactly. There is that ticker at the bottom: Everything, however mundane, is "breaking news" or some type of "alert."

This is exciting for older people and it can actually become addictive. Young people are watching Fox News too of course, but it really is targeted at older people. Just think about it. You are an older person, you don’t have that much of a social life and you’re at home. Fox News provides excitement. It provides a purpose. Fox News viewers are on a team. They feel special. There’s like an in-group. Fox News is also like a cult because it’s exclusive and the other side isn’t just wrong, they’re evil. That’s what they have going for them.

If a Fox News viewer or someone else who is entombed in the right-wing echo chamber were to approach you seeking advice -- because they know something is wrong and want to get out so to speak -- how would you help them?

First of all, you can’t immediately just debunk their way of thinking and what they believe in. You have to deactivate their amygdala -- this is the fear center of the brain. Science shows it’s actually larger in the brains of authoritarians and other conservatives than in other people. You have to find some sort of common ground with them. Ask something basic such as “You have kids in school? Oh, I do too. You want the best for them? Yes, so do I. Gee, too bad this news is so divisive." Then pivot to trying to share some new information they may not have been exposed to.

But the most important thing is to focus on deactivating the fear center of the brains of these Fox News viewers and listeners. Find common ground. Once you get them to trust you and you share some actual facts then maybe you can try to get them to think for themselves.

Are they even capable of thinking for themselves? Trump's supporters are in a de facto cult where he is the leader. We also know from psychology that a phenomenon called "information backfire" will also make conservatives and other Fox News types even more resistant to new information and real facts when they are confronted by them.

Unfortunately, for the most part, you are likely correct. It’s almost impossible because they are in a type of right-wing Fox News bubble. In practice it will require a longer deprogramming process, which is what I had to do with my dad. That didn’t happen overnight. It took me about two years. But you may be able to reach one out of 10 Fox News people and those others stuck in the right-wing echo chamber.

AN c de v 11/18

mid-May, President Trump encouraged Fox News to publish a false story about slain Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich in order to distract attention from the ongoing investigation of ties between his campaign and Russia, according to a lawsuit filed in New York federal court on Monday.

The 33-page lawsuit provides a glimpse into the extraordinary duplicity that fueled Fox News’ reporting on the Seth Rich story. Rich, a voter data analyst in DNC, was murdered on a Washington street last April in what D.C. police believe was a botched robbery.

The allegations in the lawsuit may have legal consequences for Trump and Fox News.

The lawsuit was filed by Rod Wheeler, a former police detective and longtime paid Fox News commentator hired by Rich’s family to investigate the crime. Wheeler claims Fox News commentator Ed Butowsky and correspondent Malia Zimmerman collaborated with the White House to spread the story that Rich, not the Russians, had provided DNC emails to WikiLeaks.

'Pressure'

Trump was personally involved, says Wheeler. Butowsky, he alleges, sent him a text May 14, two days before the story ran, saying, "Not to add any more pressure but the president just read the article. He wants the article out immediately. It’s now all up to you. But don’t feel the pressure."

Butowsky told Wheeler he hoped the story would rebut allegations of Russian support for Trump during the 2016 campaign, according to Wheeler.

“Everyone, there’s so many people throughout Trump’s four years and maybe eight years are always going to fall back on the idea that he is not legitimate and the Russians got him elected," Butowsky said, according to the lawsuit. “This [information about Seth Rich providing emails to WikiLeaks] changes all of that.”

On May 16, the day the story ran, Butowsky told Wheeler in a voice mail:

“A couple minutes ago I got a note that we have the full, uh, attention of the White House, on this. And, tomorrow, let’s close this deal, whatever we’ve got to do. But you can feel free to say that the White House is onto this now.”

The suit also alleges that Butowsky maintained “regular contact with Trump administration officials,” including Sean Spicer, Steve Bannon and Sarah Flores, the public affairs director at the Department of Justice, regarding “his efforts relating to Seth Rich.”

The Fox News story, promoted as a "bombshell," quoted Wheeler as saying that Rich had been in touch with WikiLeaks and someone in the government was blocking the investigation. Wheeler says both quotes were fabricated. ...When the story was denounced by Wheeler and the Rich family, Butowsky proposed blackmailing investigative reporter Seymour Hersh to “save” the story. Wheeler says Butowsky disclosed the plan to “extort” Hersh in a phone conversation May 19. He says Butowsky said he planned to send Hersh a five-second tape recording of his voice and a demand that he disclose one of his FBI sources on the story.

“You have three hours to write back who at the FBI you spoke to, with his name, that read you the Seth Rich report,” Butowsky allegedly said. “If you don’t give us that in three hours, a full recording of everything we have will be at every news agency tonight with your name and phone number on it. If you give it to us, you will never hear from us again." The lawsuit does not say why the tape recording would have been so threatening to Hersh.&n On May 23, Fox News retracted the story, saying it did not adhere to the agency's standards.

On Monday, Sean Spicer confirmed to NPR that he had met twice with Butowsky about the story, but denied Trump was involved. Butowsky told NPR he was "joking" about the president's involvement.

Asked to comment on the allegations, Hersh replied, via email, "Hey, I live in the real world."

Consequences

Trump’s role in the story has two possible implications, one for the Russia investigation, the other for Fox News.

Trump’s involvement in promoting a false story would only be significant for the ongoing Russia investigation if other solid evidence of obstruction of justice emerges. Jonathan Turley, law professor at George Washington University, says such evidence is lacking.

"While [Trump’s involvement] can be cited as part of a pattern,” Turley said in an email, “there is still not a compelling mosaic of a crime. This is a particularly small tile in any mosaic theory. There is a danger when otherwise lawful acts are assembled to create a criminal claim.”

Trump’s involvement is also relevant to the bid of 21st Century Fox, the parent company of Fox News, to buy the Sky, a European satellite TV network.

In June, British authorities delayed approval of the $15 billion transaction and asked regulators to further examine whether the deal would give the Rupert Murdoch family too much control over the country’s media.

“The transaction may increase members of the Murdoch Family Trust’s ability to influence the overall news agenda and their ability to influence the political process,” British culture minister Karen Bradley said in a statement.

The bogus Seth Rich story provides British regulators a glimpse into how Fox seeks to influence the news agenda and the political process: with fabricated quotes, blackmail threats and the encouragement of the president of the United States....Fox News's senior judicial analyst Andrew Napolitano, a former New Jersey Superior Court judge, may face ethics violations for claiming without proof that President Barack Obama had ordered surveillance of Donald Trump during the 2016 election, according to a new report.

According to a report in the New Jersey Law Journal, Napolitano could face censure for making the claims -- which have been

The FBI and NSA have denied there is any information that supports Napolitano's claims, and the GCHQ issued a statement saying that "recent allegations made by media commentator Judge Andrew Napolitano about GCHQ being asked to conduct 'wiretapping' against the then President-Elect are nonsense. They are utterly ridiculous and should be ignored."

**Fox removed Napolitano from its air, and issued its own statement that termed Napolitano's claims "commentary" rather than reporting.**

...

The network was a conservative dream made real

To understand Fox News today, you have to place it in the context of the growth of right-wing media over the past half-century. When the network went live 20 years ago, it was the fulfillment of a decades-long dream for conservatives, who had been eyeing television for decades, believing it was key to changing both the political and media landscape.

But TV continually confounded them. In the 1960s, a few conservative radio programs, like the ***Manion Forum* and *The Dan Smoot Report***– hosted by Clarence Manion and Dan Smoot — had complementary television shows, but they reached tiny audiences and were short-lived.

Why was television so hard to crack? Bias was the pet theory of many conservatives, including D.B. Lewis, a dog food manufacturer who sponsored the Manion and Smoot shows in California. He believed the main barrier to conservative programming was the networks’ unwillingness to syndicate controversial right-wing shows. There was something to the idea — or, at least, local station owners believed the same thing. They refused to sell Lewis time for Smoot and Manion’s programs, fearing they would alienate their established audiences and drive away advertisers.

The right’s frustration over this blackout led to the first attempt to establish a conservative television network. The project, undertaken in 1965, was the brainchild of David Dye, a businessman from Lubbock, Texas. Believing that all media was "dominated by liberal and internationalist managements," Dye founded Medias Unlimited, whose main purpose was to organize conservative shareholders to take over a major network....

**Ailes, however, was all in; from the start, his interest was in advancing the Republican Party.** After TVN failed, Ailes wandered through a number of Republican administrations. Then in 1992 he crossed the politics-media barrier one last time. With talk radio host Rush Limbaugh’s star rising and George H.W. Bush’s reelection campaign flailing, Ailes swapped Bush for Rush, becoming executive producer of Limbaugh’s new television show. Before he did, however, he used the radio star to try to rescue the embattled president**. In the summer of 1992, Ailes and Limbaugh were Bush’s guests at the White House, a move that led to far more favorable coverage on Rush’s program.**

Ailes backed the right horse. Bush lost, but Rush kept accruing power. Over the next few years, he was hailed as the voice of the Republican revolution, an honorary member of the GOP. The merger of conservatism and Republicanism was complete. It was in this political setting that Ailes, partnered with Rupert Murdoch, launched his new cable venture. Murdoch provided the money, Ailes the vision, and on October 7, 1996, the Fox News Channel went live.

That the first conservative network was a *news*network mattered. The denizens of talk radio seldom positioned themselves as the opposite of journalists: They were brash, opinionated, ideological. Fox News blended that talk radio aggressiveness with a hard news persona —with the sort of pro-Republican reporting that Ailes sought while working for Nixon.

Under the winking tagline "Fair and Balanced," Ailes and Murdoch created a new media model more reminiscent of 19th-century party papers than 20th-century journalism. Those papers had delivered the news with a partisan spin, and sometimes even had overt ties to parties. They functioned as the campaign surrogates of the day, before they were crowded out first by the penny press and then by the rise of objective reporting.

What Fox News had that those papers didn’t was a sharp-eyed auteur with an entertainment background. Ailes’s vision informed most decisions at the network, where politics blended with entertainment, just as news mixed with opinion.

And it wasn’t just the glossy sets and flashy chyrons. Women hired as on-air talent had to meet his standards for beauty, which gave rise to the "Fox News blonde" — blonde being Ailes’s preference. He installed glass-topped desks and a leg cam to make sure audiences got an eyeful of the women’s legs, always on display thanks to requisite knee-length dresses. He passed it off as a part of entertaining audiences; in 2016, as more and more accusers came forward, it started to look like a pathology.

FOX NEWS WAS IN A NEW AND DANGEROUS POSITION. IT HAD BECOME PART OF THE CONSERVATIVE ESTABLISHMENT — JUST AS THE GRASSROOTS RIGHT WAS TURNING ON THAT ESTABLISHMENT.

But that was after the fall. At the time, it was a winning formula. By 2001, the station was in a prime position, with the best ratings in cable news and the best-case scenario in Washington: a Republican president and Congress.

The Bush years were good for Fox News, which had become the go-to channel of the GOP right. Nor was Bush’s defeat much of a problem. Just as Limbaugh had thrived in the Clinton years, so too was Fox set to stay on top during the Obama years. The channel became the media arm of the government in exile. The Tea Party may have been born on CNBC – with a rant by correspondent Rick Santelli — but it was raised at the News Corp. building, where Fox News personalities nurtured the movement, appearing at rallies and offering wall-to-wall coverage of the raucous 2009 "town hall" meetings.

With the White House in Democratic hands, Fox News took on a new role: an incubator for presidential hopefuls. Sarah Palin transitioned easily from the campaign trail to the news studio. After she resigned as governor, her spot at Fox scored her a million-dollar paycheck and a chance to keep her face front and center.

Nor was she the only one using the tactic. Mike Huckabee, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum: These out-of-office 2012 hopefuls all had contracts with Fox in the runup to the primaries. And if their membership in the pundit class led them to say impolitic things from time to time — well, maybe the base, filled with Fox News watchers, had developed a taste for the impolitic.

They weren’t the only ones eyeing 2012. With a wide-open primary, Ailes wanted to be kingmaker. As Gabe Sherman recounts in *The Loudest Voice in the Room*, Ailes told Fox executives, "We’re making a lot of money — that’s fine. But I want to elect the next president." And with GOP presidential hopefuls scrambling to reach Fox’s audience, it seemed like he would get his wish. Home of the Tea Party as well as the GOP’s presidential bench, Fox had achieved Ailes’s vision. The Republican Party had its media voice, and conservatives had their network.

The unraveling of Fox News

The trouble began, counterintuitively enough, with the Tea Party. Fox News had blanketed the airwaves with early coverage of the movement, and the Tea Party’s figureheads, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, were stars at the network. Beck in particular was a ratings juggernaut. But Palin and Beck were independent operators who increasingly pushed back against Ailes’s advice; Ailes was reportedly uncomfortable with Beck’s gold-bug politics and apocalyptic worldview. Moreover, untested Tea Party candidates seemed to be hurting the GOP as much as helping it.

Reticence toward the Tea Party began to open up an establishment-grassroots divide — with Fox News on the establishment side. In 2012, both Gingrich and Santorum took public swipes at the network, arguing it was biased toward establishment favorite Mitt Romney. Shortly thereafter, with their interests increasingly diverging from those of Fox, Palin and Beck both parted ways with the network. Soon, both started new media enterprises of their own.

More trouble came in 2013. As Marco Rubio began to push for immigration reform, so too did a number of Fox News personalities, including Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity. For conservatives opposed to reform, this seemed like too much of a coincidence, and they were right. In early 2016 the New York Times broke the story that Rubio and Chuck Schumer had met with Ailes and Murdoch in January 2013 to get the channel to back reform. The network executives agreed, not anticipating the scale of the backlash against the Senate reform efforts.

Fox News was in a new and dangerous position. It had become part of the conservative establishment — just as the grassroots right was turning on that establishment.

Other threats appeared as well, driven by new technologies. The conservative web exploded during the 2000s. New digital cable and internet news networks popped up: Glenn Beck’s the Blaze (which is now struggling), the One America News Network, Newsmax TV. They had a brasher style and wore their ideology even more openly than Fox. Fox News might interview Peter Schweizer, author of Clinton Cash. One America News aired the documentary based on his book.

There was also a heavier dose of conspiracy on the new networks. Newsmax TV has aired "Roswell Top Secret," and it features Dick Morris, author of the 2012 book Here Comes the Black Helicopters!. Fox was no longer the only place for the grassroots right to turn, nor the only channel where would-be conservative personalities could go to make a name for themselves.

But the conservative media world didn’t just expand. It fragmented. There was no longer any reason to stick with conservative media sources that didn’t quite match your politics. If National Review was insufficiently anti-Muslim, there was Pamela Geller’s blog Atlas Shrugs. If the neoconservative Weekly Standard was too hawkish, there was the relatively non-interventionist American Conservative. And if Fox News shows were pushing immigration reform, there was Breitbart.

Breitbart News started off as the Fox News of the internet: a news-ish site guided by conservative politics. That changed when, following the death of Andrew Breitbart, Stephen Bannon took over. Bannon’s politics were right-wing, but not strictly conservative. They were decidedly more populist, with far more tolerance for the political fringes.

Bannon brought aboard Milo Yiannopoulus, the spokesperson of the alt-right. Yiannopoulos described himself and the alt-right as free speech fundamentalists, whose willingness to offend was an expression of their freedom. But that language provided cover for anti-Semites, white nationalists, misogynists, and other fringe groups long banished from American politics. They now have a home on Breitbart.

Breitbart now rejects the label of conservative, opting instead to call itself populist-nationalist. The site calls for conservatives to give up their ideological commitments to free trade and become populists on immigration, trade, and foreign policy — in other words, to transform from the base of the party of Reagan to that of the party of Trump.

Is Bannon the new Ailes? Both men moved over to the Trump campaign from their respective organizations — Bannon as campaign manager, Ailes as a consultant (now reportedly at odds with his client, who is apparently less coachable than Nixon). Both come from entertainment backgrounds. But Bannon is the younger man, and seems temperamentally to be more in touch with Trump and his more avid supporters. And unlike Ailes, he’s no acolyte of the Republican Party. Unless the next Republican nominee is a Trump-like candidate, Bannon may want to challenge the GOP rather than shore it up.

The fragmenting of the right-wing media mirrors the fracturing of the American right. The conservatism forged in the postwar era still exists, but it now shares space with populist nationalists, unreconstructed libertarians, and the alt-right. The Republican Party has not yet figured out how to accommodate this contentious coalition of interests.

Except for a few establishment types and a sprinkling of foreign policy experts, most of these factions are doing their best to give an impression of unity, but that will fall away after November 8 – especially if Trump loses. Party leaders need the grassroots right, the source of the party’s energy. And they have no real way to purge the Trumpists from their ranks.

But how do these factions square their incompatible preferences? How do free traders coexist with protectionists? How do reformicons, keen to build a broader, more inclusive party, make peace with the decidedly non-inclusive supporters of the Trump campaign? Coalition building is not out of the question, but civil war seems far more likely.

And Fox News? As it marks its 20th anniversary, it too is in flux. Without Ailes at the helm, it may be easier for the organization to adapt to this new American right. Sean Hannity, a Trump booster from the start, could be the entering wedge, along with Eric Bolling, Trump’s defender on the panel show The Five.

Or, equally likely, it will be a casualty of the anti-establishment war, a sacrifice to the gods of populism. Either way, it is unlikely to retain its singular place in the conservative media landscape. Having benefited from the labors of the first generation of conservative media, Fox News is well on its way to being eclipsed by the third.

Nicole Hemmer is author of:{Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics:(style="box-sizing:border-box;vertical-align:inherit;font-style:inherit;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}:. She is an assistant professor at the University of Virginia’s*:{Miller Center:(style="box-sizing:border-box;vertical-align:inherit;font-style:inherit;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}:*and co-host of the:{Past Present:(style="box-sizing:border-box;vertical-align:inherit;font-style:inherit;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}: podcast.

http://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2016/11/4/13518350/republican-party-turmoil-fox-news-ailes

11/16

http://www.alternet.org/environment/broadcast-networks-climate-coverage-was-utterly-miserable-during-election-year

Secretary of State John Kerry, in Marrakesh this week for international climate talks, recently said it “pissed him off” that there wasn’t a single question asked about climate change during the six hours of televised presidential and vice presidential debates prior to the election.

Kerry’s annoyance is justified. Given rapidly rising global temperatures, dramatic extreme weather events, the global agreement to curb carbon emissions, and stark divisions among the major party candidates, climate change deserved to be one of the most talked-about issues of the campaign. And yet, outside of a passing reference during the “town hall” presidential debate, the candidates were not asked about it, despite the fact that queries about climate change were the fourth most-popular question category submitted by the public for the town hall debate, demonstrating that voters wanted to hear about it.

But it wasn’t only the debates.

Since January, the broadcast television networks barely reported on climate, even though this year is on pace to be the hottest one in the books, setting a record for the third year in a row. Out of more than 1,700 evening, morning, weekly and Sunday public affairs news programs aired between January 1 and October 31, the four commercial broadcast networks that provided moderators for the debates — ABC, Fox, CBS and NBC — collectively aired only 32 segments and 24 briefs on the topic, a total of56 pieces. And most of the evening news segments ran less than two and a half minutes in length, while each brief was no more than three or four sentences long.

By contrast, the commercial broadcast networks found time for considerably less important topics. Take the coverage of New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady and the fallout over his “Deflategate” football tampering scandal. During the first nine months of this year, ABC, CBS and NBC aired 33 segments and 40 briefs on Brady, for a total of 73 pieces. (Fox’s lone national news show somehow missed the story.) Nearly half of the pieces — 34 — were on Deflategate and Brady’s four-game suspension. The rest reported on such riveting topics as Brady’s haircut, his new $200 cook book, and his new family dog, Fluffy.

Rating the Networks

Fox Broadcasting Company — not to be confused with 21st Century Fox’s cable channel Fox News — was by far the worst offender. The network doesn’t have a nightly news program, but it does air Fox News Sunday, a public affairs show hosted by Chris Wallace, the moderator of the third and final presidential debate. Since the beginning of the year, Fox News Sunday only broached the topic of climate change once, during an interview Wallace did with Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein on September 4. Stein mentioned it in one sentence, and Wallace changed the subject. But Fox News Sunday was not alone. The topic didn’t come up on the other Sunday morning political gabfests either unless a guest mentioned it in passing. More often than not that guest was Bernie Sanders. (Given the incidental nature of these remarks, they aren’t included in the segment or brief totals.)

http://www.newscorpse.com/ncWP/?p=6469

The Fox Effect: The Book That Terrifies Roger Ailes And Fox News

Posted by Mark NC on February 27, 2012 at 9:55 am. 4 Comments :

A new book from Media Matters was just released that chronicles the history of Fox News and explains how a small group of wealthy, politically connected conservative partisans conspired to build a pseudo-news network with the intent of advancing the right-wing agenda of the Republican Party. And that network, known for its drooling anti-liberalism, is scared spitless.

The Fox Effect: How Roger Ailes Turned a Network into a Propaganda Machine, was written by David Brock and Ari Rabin-Havt (and others) of Media Matters. It begins by looking back at the early career of Fox News CEO Roger Ailes and his role as a media consultant for Republican politicians, including former president Richard Nixon. From the start Ailes was a brash, creative proponent of the power of television to influence a mass audience. He guided the media-challenged Nixon through a treacherous new era of news and political PR, and his experiences formed the basis for what would become his life’s grand achievement: a “news” network devoted to a political party, its candidates, and its platform.

When Ailes partnered with international newspaper mogul Rupert Murdoch to launch a new 24 hour cable news channel, he was given an unprecedented measure of control to shape the network’s business and ideology. The Fox Effect examines the underpinnings of the philosophy that Ailes brought to the venture. His earliest observations exhibit an appreciation for the tabloid-style sensationalism that would become a hallmark of Fox’s reporting. Ailes summed it up in an interview in 1988 as something he called his “orchestra pit theory” of politics:

“If you have two guys on stage and one guy says ‘I have a solution to the Middle East problem,’ and the other guy falls into the orchestra pit, who do you think is going to be on the evening news?”

That’s the sort of thinking that produced Fox’s promotion of hollering town hall protesters during the health care debate and their focus on lurid but phony issues like death panels. It is a flavor of journalism that elevates melodrama over factual discourse.

This article also appears on Alternet.org.

The book exposes how Fox was more of a participant in the news than a reporter of it. Through interviews with Fox insiders and leaked internal communications, The Fox Effect documents the depths to which the network collaborated with political partisans to invent stories with the intent of manipulating public opinion. The authors reveal memos from the Washington managing editor of Fox News, Bill Sammon, directing anchors and reporters on how to present certain subjects. For instance, he ordered them never to use the term “public option” when referring to health insurance reform. Focus group testing by Fox pollster Frank Luntz had found that the phrase “government option” left a more negative impression, and they were instructed to use that instead.

There is a chapter on the Tea Party that describes how integral Fox was to its inception and development. The network literally branded the fledgling movement as FNC Tea Parties and dispatched its top anchors to host live broadcasts from rallies. The Fox Effect also details the extensive coverage devoted to the deceitfully edited videos that brought down ACORN. Fox was instrumental in promoting the story and stirring up a public backlash that resulted in congressional investigations and loss of funding. The book followed the story from Andrew Breitbart’s new and little known BigGovernment blog to Glenn Beck’s conspiracy factory to the wall-to-wall coverage it enjoyed on Fox’s primetime. This chapter is where the authors introduce what they call “The Six Steps” that Fox employs to create national controversies:

STEP 1: Conservative activists introduce the lie.
STEP 2: Fox News devotes massive coverage to the story.
STEP 3: Fox attacks other outlets for ignoring the controversy.
STEP 4: Mainstream outlets begin reporting on the story.
STEP 5: Media critics, pundits praise Fox News’s coverage.
STEP 6: The story falls apart once the damage has been done.

This is a pattern that has played out with varying degrees of success. Fox used this blueprint to engineer the career-ending slander of presidential adviser Van Jones and Department of Agriculture official Shirley Sherrod. But the strategy was less effective when used against Attorney General Eric Holder and Planned Parenthood, although not for lack of effort.

These, and other examples of deliberate bias, illustrate why most neutral observers regard Fox News as the PR arm of the Republican Party. The Fox Effect makes a convincing case to affirm that view and even offers admissions to that effect by Fox insiders. It is a damning exposé of how a political operative and a right-wing billionaire built a propaganda machine thinly disguised as a news network. The research and documentation are extensive and compelling.

For that reason, Fox News has mounted an unprecedented attack on Media Matters in advance of the book’s release. **Note:** Actually it’s not so unprecedented. [Fox set the precedent itself last year with a sustained campaign to do tangible harm by tacking an article to the top of the Fox Nation web site with a headline that read “Want to File an IRS Complaint Against Media Matters? Click Here…”] In the week prior to publication of The Fox Effect, Fox News broadcast no fewer than a dozen derogatory segments across all dayparts and on their most popular programs, including The O’Reilly Factor, Hannity, Fox & Friends, etc. It was the sort of blanket coverage usually reserved for a natural disaster, a declaration of war, or a lewd TwitPic of a politician. The attacks never contained any substantive argument or even example of error on the part of Media Matters. However, they are brimming with the most nasty form of personal invective imaginable.

The basis for the Fox News broadcasts was a series of articles by the Daily Caller (TDC), the conservative web site of Tucker Carlson, who just happens to also be on the Fox News payroll. The gist of the story, as described by TDC, is that Media Matters is manipulating news organizations, coordinating messaging with the White House, and struggling to cope with the “volatile and erratic behavior” of Brock, whom TDC alleges is mentally ill. TDC never reveals from where they got their psychiatric credentials, nor when they had an opportunity to examine and diagnose Brock. Likewise, they never reveal where they got any of the other information for the allegations they make against Media Matters as every source is anonymous.

Media analysts have universally condemned TDC’s reporting. Howard Kurtz interviewed author Vince Coglianese on CNN’s Reliable Sources and assailed the absence of any evidence to corroborate the allegations of his anonymous sources. Coglianese could not even confirm that events alleged in the article ever occurred. He laughably argued that the absence of a denial from Brock was evidence of guilt, rather than a simple disinclination to raise the profile of a poorly written article. Jack Shafer wrote for Reuters that “the Daily Caller is attacking Media Matters with bad journalism and lame propaganda.”

Media Matters was created to document conservative media bias and work to implement reforms that would produce more balanced reporting. Yet, Fox is confused by the fact that Media Matters’ research is cited by progressive organizations and publishers. The grunt work of aggregating video and other reporting is appreciated by those who use Media Matters materials. Much of it is provided without any editorializing. The right has always been fearful of any entity that would simply record their disinformation, nonsense, and hostility, and then hold them accountable for it. But they have yet to criticize NewsBusters or their parent organization, the Media Research Center, despite the cozy relationship they have with Fox News. Brit Hume, the former managing editor of Fox News, however, was abundantly grateful:

Hume: I want to say a word, however, of thanks to Brent [Bozell] and the team at the Media Research Center […] for the tremendous amount of material that the Media Research Center provided me for so many years when I was anchoring Special Report, I don’t know what we would’ve done without them. It was a daily buffet of material to work from, and we certainly made tremendous use of it.

Joining in on the assault is the Fox Nation web site that is engaged in a relentless barrage of critical articles with disturbingly insulting and hyperbolic headlines. For instance:

Is Media Matters’ David Brock A ‘Dangerous’ Man?
Were Media Matters Donors Duped?
Inside Media Matters: Founder Believed to be Regularly Using Illegal Drugs, Including Cocaine.

But even those paled in comparison to what Fox News was posting on the screen graphics that accompanied their broadcasts:

MEDIA MATTERS’ MONEY: David Brock is an admitted drug user
THE MONEY BEHIND THE MACHINE: David Brock committed to a quiet room
A LIBERAL INFLUENCE: Brock spent time in a mental ward

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Note that the subjects of the broadcasts were financial in nature. Fox was reporting on TDC’s discovery that Media Matters donors were largely progressive individuals and foundations (not exactly what one would call a scoop). However, Fox News appended assertions as to the mental stability of Brock, which had nothing to do with their topic. It was merely an opportunity for them to take swipes at a perceived enemy. And this mud-slinging occurred during what Fox regards as their “news” programming, not the evening hours that they designate as the opinion portion of their schedule.

In order to cement the impression that David Brock is a mental defective, unfit to lead any organization or to be given serious consideration, Fox News brought in their resident psycho analyst, “Dr” Keith Ablow. As a part of the Fox News Medical “A” Team, Ablow appeared on the air in a segment that painted Brock as seriously disturbed and even dangerous:

“If you are filled with self-loathing you will see demons on every street corner because you project that self-hatred. […] He’s a dangerous man because having followers and waging war, as he says, or previously being a right-wing hitman, this isn’t accidental language. It’s about violence, destruction, and he feels destroyed in himself.”

This diagnosis was an invention by Ablow who has never examined Brock, or even met him. That in itself is a violation of the American Psychiatric Association’s Principles of Medical Ethics, something Ablow does not need to concern himself with because last year he was compelled to separate himself from the APA due to ethical “differences.”

This is actually the second time Ablow has appeared on Fox News with his absurd fantasies (or projections) about Brock. And Brock isn’t his only pretend patient. A few weeks ago he published an op-ed on FoxNews.com that praised Newt Gingrich’s serial infidelity as evidence of traits that would help him to make America stronger were he president. Seriously! And who could forget his deranged psycho analysis of President Obama?

If Fox News wants to engage in “remote” psychiatry they ought to at least be fair and balanced about it. However they pointedly make no mention of the reported paranoia of Fox News CEO Roger Ailes. No mention that he was cited as the reason that the NYPD provided police protection for the Fox headquarters at a cost of $500,000 a year to the people of New York. No mention of the obsessive fears described by Tim Dickinson in a Rolling Stone profile:

“Ailes is also deeply paranoid. Convinced that he has personally been targeted by Al Qaeda for assassination, he surrounds himself with an aggressive security detail and is licensed to carry a concealed handgun. […] Murdoch installed Ailes in the corner office on Fox’s second floor at 1211 Avenue of the Americas in Manhattan. The location made Ailes queasy: It was close to the street, and he lived in fear that gay activists would try to attack him in retaliation over his hostility to gay rights. (In 1989, Ailes had broken up a protest of a Rudy Giuliani speech by gay activists, grabbing demonstrator by the throat and shoving him out the door.) Barricading himself behind a massive mahogany desk, Ailes insisted on having ‘bombproof glass’ installed in the windows – even going so far as to personally inspect samples of high-tech plexiglass, as though he were picking out new carpet.”

I really have to wonder if even the Fox News audience is so intellectually comatose that they wouldn’t recognize the feverish anxiety gushing from Fox in advance of the Media Matters book. A tree stump would notice that they are laying it on awfully thick. So the obvious question is what are they so afraid of? And the answer is that Fox News can no longer hide from their reputation as a dishonest purveyor of slanted propaganda and tabloid trash on behalf of a right-wing agenda and the political operatives who advance it and benefit from it.

The Fox Effect is a thoroughly documented investigation into the inner workings of both the organization and its principle managers and backers. It peels away the layers of the conservative cabal that has so effectively poisoned the public discourse on many significant issues. And like the fraudulent Wizard in the city of Oz, Fox wants us all to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain (Roger Ailes), or to the curtain (Fox News), or the corporation that controls it all (News Corp). And to that end Fox has embarked on a massive smear campaign to destroy the credibility of the book, its authors, and the organization that produced it. But Media Matters has already succeeded. As noted in the book’s epilogue:

“Fox News will no longer be able to conduct its campaign under the false pretense that the network is a journalistic institution. There is heightened awareness in the progressive community and in the general public of the damage Fox causes.”

new books on ailes:

The Roger Ailes biography written by Zev Chafets was released on Tuesday and New York Times book reviewer Michiko Kakutani had some harsh things to say about it.

Chafets, who also penned a biography on talk radio giant Rush Limbaugh in 2010, was given what he called unprecedented access to Ailes and Fox News after the network's chief agreed to let him write a biography. Some thought that Ailes agreed to the Chafets biography as an attempt to combat the forthcoming book on him by New York Magazine contributing editor Gabe Sherman, tentatively titledThe Loudest Voice in the Room: Fox News and the Making of America.

News’ paranoid P.R. machine

Paranoid culture of secrecy includes a political campaign-style P.R. apparatus that plants smears against critics

BY ALEX PAREENE

Fox News fired its head of P.R. recently, an act that would’ve been a dry bit of news of interest only to cable news junkies and media reporters were it not for Fox News’ scorched-earth style of P.R. Thanks to Fox’s own efforts, the story of the firing of a guy you’ve never heard of became proper news, discussed and analyzed by people who’d never notice if CNN fired some random suit. At Fox News, the conspiratorial paranoia on the screen often seems like a reflection of the conspiratorial paranoia in the offices.

Brian Lewis had been with Fox News for 17 years, with his final title being executive vice president of corporate communications. On July 25, he was “terminated for cause,” according to Fox News corporate communications, and escorted from the building. Fox cited “financial issues” and did not elaborate. New York magazine’s Gabriel Sherman, whose forthcoming biography of Roger Ailes has caused the already nutty Ailes to act nuttier than usual, said the firing would further isolate Ailes from dissenting viewpoints.Sherman referred to Lewis as a “moderating influence” on Ailes, and one of his most trusted advisers since Fox News was first launched.

Sherman’s short piece led to the sort of coordinated “push-back” effort that Lewis pioneered in his years at Fox, with multiple Fox personalities insisting that Lewis had never been important to anyone, least of all Ailes. “Lewis and Gabriel Sherman are the only two who believe that Lewis was actually the right-hand man to Roger Ailes,” someone told Mediaite. (In fact, “right-hand man” was how the Hollywood Reporter referred to Lewis, before Sherman’s piece even was published. Similar language was used by the L.A. Times, the New York Times, and … a bunch of other places. Good zing, though, Fox P.R.!) Ailes even asked Donald Trump to trash Sherman’s piece on Twitter, and Trump complied.

he story of Lewis’ firing seems to have something to do with Sherman’s forthcoming book,and Ailes’ suspicion that Lewis was one of Sherman’s sources. “Brian was operating outside the culture of the company, and thus violated his contract, so Roger let him go,” an executive told Mike Allen, who has published Fox News executive rebuttals (and prebuttals) to other journalists’ reporting on Fox in the past. “The culture of the company,” at Fox News, is basically paranoia, omerta and vicious retribution.

The person now solely in charge of public relations for Fox News is Irena Briganti, aperson whose relationship with journalists has been described as “vindictive” and“ruthless.” Most reporters who’ve had to deal with her have horror stories of threats, accusations and blacklisting. Briganti and the Fox P.R. shop have been known to perform campaign-style “opposition research” on journalists they perceive as unfriendly.

We all know that Fox is deeply worried about the demographics of its viewers — they’rereally old — and that Roger Ailes is “shaking up” the network in order to appeal to a newer, more diverse generation of Americans. (His moves so far: putting Megyn “The New Black Panther Party are coming to get you” Kelly in prime time and putting Elisabeth “Great AmerMcCain Hero” Hasselbeck on in the mornings.)

The problem isn’t Sean Hannity, though. Or Bill O’Reilly. The problem is Ailes. As long as he’s running the network — and he’ll be running the network as long as Rupert Murdoch is alive — the network will fail to appeal to most people under 40. As Jordan Chariton wrote at Salon earlier this month, Fox’s demographics problem is simple: Ailes is committed to creating conservative content, and young people are getting more and more liberal. But it’s not just that the content is conservative, it’s that it reflects the mind-set of the post-’60s white backlash, something people born after the 1960s can’t relate to at all.

Part of Ailes’ great success is simply great timing. He got in the game, alongside Richard Nixon, at the start of the great conservative backlash. He is a master at appealing to and manipulating the pissed-off American white man. He began his career selling Nixon to worried white people and now he’s selling older, even more worried white people reverse mortgages and #BENGHAZI. But that generational tantrum is currently in its rampaging hysterical death throes. The next generation is not quite as panicky about the endangered state of white supremacy.

So the Fox problem isn’t just partisanship. It’s in the culture of the company. Fox will continue to have trouble appealing to a wider variety of people as long as its leader, the person who embodies everything Fox News, is a paranoid, angry old man who handles staff issues like a Stalinist, erasing disfavored former deputies from history and ordering all who seek to remain in his good graces to denounce their former comrade as a traitor.

My question, and this question is basically directed at the people above Ailes in the News Corp corporate hierarchy, is this: Does Fox actually need a culture of secrecy, or a political campaign-style P.R. apparatus that regularly plants smears against its critics? Is this a cable television news channel or Scientology? What is even the point of going to great lengths to discredit a forthcoming biography of Ailes by planting stories in the conservative blogosphere? How many Breitbart.com readers were going to read Sherman’s biography? How many of them would’ve turned against Ailes were it not for the constant, ridiculous anti-Sherman smears Ailes is planting?

It’s not just that Fox’s war on enemy journalists is unethical and unprofessional, it’s that it’s frequently embarrassing for Fox. Every time they go to war against someone who wrote something they don’t like, they simply create more stores about unhinged Ailes and his strange and petty retributions. If Roger Ailes wants people to stop claiming he’s paranoid and crazy, he needs to stop acting paranoid and crazy. If Fox wants journalists to stop treating their channel like a cult run by a madman, well, maybe someone should consider convincing the madman to retire. salon

sherman

News this morning that Fox News fired Roger Ailes's longtime PR chief Brian Lewis represents a massive shake-up at the network. Although Ailes's recent programming moves — shuffling Shep Smith and Megyn Kelly to prime time — have generated headlines, Lewis's departure is far more consequential to the long-term direction of the channel.

While little known outside the clubby cable news industry, Lewis was one of the most powerful executives at Fox News — and a moderating influence on Ailes. Lewis was one of the few senior executives who would vocally challenge Ailes (although he was smart enough to do it privately). A frequent joke around Fox was that while everyone is scared of Roger Ailes, the only person Roger Ailes is scared of is Brian Lewis.

Lewis knows many of Ailes's secrets. A longtime loyalist, Lewis met Ailes in the mid-nineties. Ailes was then running CNBC and a fledgling cable channel called America's Talking. Lewis was CNBC's ambitious PR representative. When Ailes launched Fox News in 1996, Lewis was one of the 80-plus employees who jumped ship to join him.

At Fox, Lewis presided over a ruthless PR operation famed for its ability to control leaks. Lewis's grip on power was such that many Fox producers and anchors worked in a papable state of fear of being monitored.

Over the years, Lewis's brief expanded far beyond mere public relations. He became Ailes's strategic-communications guru, tasked with handling strategy for some of Fox's most sensitive matters. He kept a lid on potentially disastrous scandals, such as the 2004 sexual-harassment lawsuit filed against Bill O'Reilly.

Though Lewis demonstrated his immense value to Ailes's operation, cracks in their relationship developed a decade ago. Lewis came close to walking away once before during a thorny contract dispute around 2004.

The terms of Lewis's departure remain murky, with talk of vague "financial issues." But signs of tension have been evident in recent months. Ailes, for whatever reason, had begun to rely less on Lewis's strategic advice, instead consulting others such as his personal lawyer Peter Johnson Jr. and Fox contributor Jim Pinkerton, both of whom, sources said, were more likely to indulge Ailes rather than challenge him.

In April 2012, I bumped into Lewis in North Carolina at a cocktail reception before Ailes delivered a speech to UNC Journalism students. Ailes had traveled down to Chapel Hill on News Corp.'s private jet with his handpicked biographer, Zev Chafets, and Lewis. It was a few days after the Fox mole story broke on Gawker.

“So, we’re gonna sue Gawker, and we might try and have him arrested,” Lewis said, referring to Joe Muto, the mole.

“Why are you guys making such a big deal about this?” I said. “You’re a television network valued at $14 billion. Isn’t this punching down?”

“Dude, I know. I was overruled,” Lewis said. “I told them, but I was told that legal would be handling this from here forward. I’m like, Okay.”

As Lewis saw it, tracking down Muto and firing him were the important things. Muto's leaks, embarrassing as they were, were inconsequential.

“So he puts up a picture of O’Reilly posing with a naked girl? O’Reilly deserves to get whacked for that. Chucklehead,” Lewis said. “And he writes that Sean Hannity has trouble with TelePrompTers and coddles Republicans? Geesh, really?”

Ailes made his way toward the auditorium to deliver his speech.

“I gotta go,” Lewis said.

Lewis's departure means Ailes is more isolated than ever before. Lewis did not respond to calls for comment.

One of Fox News honcho Roger Ailes' closest associates was fired from the cable network last month after the discovery of undisclosed "financial issues," the Hollywood Reporter revealed on Tuesday.

Brian Lewis, executive vice president of communications at Fox News and longtime Ailes deputy, was fired on July 25, a network spokesman confirmed in a statement to journalists. "An extensive internal investigation" discovered "issues relating to financial irregularities," the spokesman said.

The full network statement:

After an extensive internal investigation of Brian Lewis' conduct by Fox News, it was determined that he should be terminated for cause, specifically for issues relating to financial irregularities, as well as for multiple, material and significant breaches of his employment contract. He was terminated for cause on July 25.

Lewis was one of the original executives brought on by Ailes to launch Fox News in 1996. The two had crossed paths earlier at CNBC, which Ailes was at the time running. In subsequent years, Lewis would assume an increasingly prominent role in the News Corp. network's complex organizational hierarchy.

"Not only did Lewis oversee the take-no-prisoners approach Fox News brought to dealing with the press and rival news outlets," writes Joe Flint of the Los Angeles Times, "he was also something of a consigliere to Ailes." Politico's Dylan Byers described Lewis on Tuesday as Ailes' "right-hand man."

New York magazine's Gabriel Sherman -- who has penned a widely anticipated book on Roger Ailes scheduled for release early next year -- described Lewis's role at Fox News as such:

While little known outside the clubby cable news industry, Lewis was one of the most powerful executives at Fox News — and a moderating influence on Ailes. Lewis was one of the few senior executives who would vocally challenge Ailes (although he was smart enough to do it privately). A frequent joke around Fox was that while everyone is scared of Roger Ailes, the only person Roger Ailes is scared of is Brian Lewis.

While the specifics of Lewis's termination remain cloudy, "witnesses say they amounted to a serious enough breach that it was necessary he be escorted from his office at Fox News headquarters in New York," the THR report explains.

fox effect includes beck. breitbart, okeefe

brock http://www.scribd.com/doc/93030859/The-Fox-Effect-How-Roger-Ailes-Turned-a-Network-into-a-Propaganda-Machine#.UiEAWhvVDmg

In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, Fox News refused to believe the facts - that climate change has contributed to a rise in extreme weather. Fox's Liz McDonald even speculated that while climate change is real, it might be caused by "Mars wobbles." http://mm4a.org/WbaFJ6

Thirty-two Fox News figures have campaignedfor Republicans this election cycle. They've campaigned in 42 states and have been featured in 105 campaign fundraisers. If you have a friend or relative who still thinks Fox News is fair and balanced, this is the report to show them: http://mm4a.org/PJf6rS

Fox News has spent years deriding federal government spending. But following the devastation of Hurricane Sandy, host Steve Doocy wished that the federal government would have spent the stimulus on infrastructure investments. But if Fox had honestly investigated the stimulus instead of only trying to gin up scandals, it would have known that the stimulus did exactly that: http://mm4a.org/Rw4V6M

vouchers:

Moe has worked for almost fifteen years at converting the K-12 education system into a cash cow for Wall Street. A veteran of Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch, he now leads an investment group that specializes in raising money for businesses looking to tap into more than $1 trillion in taxpayer money spent annually on primary education. His consortium of wealth management and consulting firms, called Global Silicon Valley Partners, helped K12 Inc. go public and has advised a number of other education companies in finding capital.

Moe’s conference marked a watershed moment in school privatization. His first “Education Innovation Summit,” held last year, attracted about 370 people and fifty-five presenting companies. This year, his conference hosted more than 560 people and 100 companies, and featured luminaries like former DC Mayor Adrian Fenty and former New York City schools chancellor Joel Klein, now an education executive at News Corporation, a recent high-powered entrant into the for-profit education field. Klein is just one of many former school officials to cash out. Fenty now consults for Rosetta Stone, a language company seeking to expand into the growing K-12 market.

http://www.npr.org/2012/09/28/161987243/scientist-cleared-in-polar-bear-controversy

September 28, 2012

A long, controversial investigation of a polar bear scientist has ended with his government employer saying it does not look like he engaged in any scientific misconduct.

Charles Monnett is a wildlife researcher with the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, part of the Department of the Interior. He and a colleague, Jeffrey Gleason, wrote an influential 2006 report describing apparently drowned polar bears floating in the Arctic, which they saw during a routine aerial survey of whales.

Those dead bears became a symbol of the threat of climate change and melting ice, and Al Gore mentioned them in his movie, An Inconvenient Truth.

But the sightings were called into question in March 2010, after officials with Interior's Office of Inspector General received allegations of scientific misconduct.

Monnett spent more than two years under investigation, and agents repeatedly asked him detailed questions about the dead-polar-bear paper.

Cleared Of Misconduct

The final report on that investigation was delivered to BOEM about three months ago. On Friday, the agency told Monnett that no action would be taken against him — except for an official reprimand for an unrelated matter, the improper release of internal government documents back in 2007 and 2008.

npr

vs fox headline: http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/lifestyle/2012/09/29/polar-bear-scientist-reprimanded-for-releasing-government-documents/

Polar Bear Scientist Reprimanded for Releasing Government Documents

Published September 29, 2012

Fox News Latino

cleared not event mentioned?!

===

Media Matters previously documented that the Journal regularly fails to disclose columnist Karl Rove's ties to the super PAC American Crossroads and its related organization Crossroads GPS, which are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to defeat President Obama and other Democratic candidates. The paper's lack of disclosure on Rove has drawn criticism from some of America's top editorial page editors as well as Trevor Potter, who served as general counsel to Sen. John McCain's presidential campaigns.

Fox News, which, like The Wall Street Journal, is owned by News Corp., has had similar problems. There have been numerous instances in which the network has hosted Romney advisers John Bolton, Elaine Chao, Jay Sekulow, and Walid Phares without disclosing their ties.

===

News Corp. Climate Change Coverage Is Misleading, Analysis Claims

Posted: 09/25/2012 1:48 pm EDT Updated: 09/25/2012 2:14 pm EDT

93 percent of Fox News' and 80 percent of the Wall Street Journal opinion pages' climate coverage is inaccurate and misleading according to an analysis titled "Is News Corp. Failing Science," from The Union of Concerned Scientists. The report examined how various media outlets fare in their coverage of climate related news.

Scientific American explains that, according to the analysis, in 37 out of 40 occurrences, Fox's staff made dismissive and inaccurate comments regarding climate change, misleading audiences of its importance and relevance, and that from August 2011 to July 2012 only nine out of the Wall Street Journal's 48 mentions of climate were accurate.

Many scientists are coming out in defense of the "Is News Corp. Failing Science" report. According to Media Matters, at least 10 scientists have gone as far as calling the Fox News and the Wall Street Journal's coverage "Utter Nonsense."

NASA climatologist Gavin Schmidt told Media Matters for Fox to present Joe Bastardi, their weather forecaster, as a climate expert is "about as credible as someone claiming to be an expert on the Greenland ice sheet because they eat ice cream."

Whether accurate or not, according to the peer-reviewed, scientific journal EMBO reports, most Americans turn to the mass media for scientific coverage, including climate issues, placing a greater burden on media outlets to be impeccably exact in their reporting.

The inaccuracy on climate reporting in the U.S. is increasingly prevalent, and has challenged many to ask how media personnel can become experts in the topics they cover rather than a jack of all trades. Media Matters provides a guide for reporters covering climate change in what they call a "post truth world."

A recent:{ "PBS NewsHour":(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}: segment has drawn sharp criticism from climate groups for its interview with a climate skeptic with known ties to the controversial Heartland Institute. PBS Ombudsman Michael Getler later wrote, "the program stumbled badly."

TPremake

31/Aug/2012

The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism

Theda Skocpol (Author), Vanessa Williamson oxford 2012 david mcbride ed

http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0199832633/ref=sib_dp_ptu#reader-link

santelli rant viral; headlined on drudge; press sec robt gibbs ~ 24 hrs

perfect symbolism [lucky break?] p7

2/27 crowds small, but post Fox 100 of K? 8

aug rx town hall; 9/12/09 60-70K DC p 8

ef AFP had Or for newbie congress ( gave populist cover ) esp TP Express

FW --> TPP p10 TP is recycled old ideas , lots of misinfo 12

lots of ppl ID as TP but very tiny fracion active; many older w/ no roots where now live so way to connect to ppl

differ from gop ~ enviro and educ 28 far right,goldwaterites, ron paul or birchers self ID, pessimistic

not so much economic bust but BO policy response that set them off 31

perrielo (bro by mistake) gas line cut

Oath Keepers vow to disobey any unConst order (coips and mil, some in militias 33

split libertarian and xian 36

sci new relig, envir trying to convert kids 38 twirst Bible from help poor to shall not steal (tax?) 39

55-60% male but women know how from civic assocs

idols F Fathers, but don't know how Const got made, think xian; o see // nullifiers, seccestionist and ~CRM

schizo on Const: revere but/and want amends 50; like to use gov't force to achieve their ends 56 eg make planned parenthood clinic have same facil as hosp 58 eg ken c AG

5K leap Skousen (afer Beck?)

122 congr start w/ reading const (left out slave bits)

US ideol conserv and functionally/operationally liberal 54

press wrong that TP see corruption in biz; only gov and unions 56

TP overest cost of eg welfare; think minor less honest and industr; worry about neonazi infil, but really ~ muslim. 69

BO has brought criminal into govt; credentials/expertise not needed for office GW hoax 80

TPE provides entertainment (spkr dick morris etc santorum)

meetup, movie night

northern rocky mtn (Mo Colo, ozarks and appalch 91 map

hacker and pierson Winner take all Pol, off ctr

Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer--and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class [Paperback]

}::{

Jacob S. Hacker (Author), Paul Pierson

http://www.amazon.com/Winner-Take-All-Politics-Washington-Richer---Turned/dp/1416588701/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1346456557&sr=1-1-fkmr0&keywords=hacker+and+pierson+Winner+take+all+Pol%2C+off+ctr#reader_1416588701

http://www.amazon.com/Off-Center-Republican-Revolution-Democracy/dp/0300119755/ref=sr_1_6?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1346456612&sr=1-6#reader_0300119755

until 2008 some GOP into cap and trade, extend Rx, immigr reform 101 and compromise to get done

top 1% have 1/3 wealth, increase even after 2008 crash; gates can altr rx and educ policy 102

Koch did not have all the clout they wanted w/ CTT, so use TP, push gop to right and make sure it stys there 103

day after santelli rant FW sent out staff (no cite) kibbe and armey wrote TP manual 104

CSE got 13mil$; shifted to AFP after breakup (cause not given) 104 FW town halls

afp maillist 270K 2008 to 1.5 mil 2011, coord ppl in 32 states 105 eg WI scott ~ unions 2008 ryan award

PACs sell services to recip eg Russo Our Cty Deserves Better (lied in ~ BO ads 08 (axis of evil dict laughing about BO meet w/o precond; rev jere etc; w/ kaloogian and radio mark wms [later booted for racist remarks 112]--> TPP; supportd scott brown ted seat

flank mods: lugar, castle, o'donnell, angle v reid; joe miller v murkowski, olympia snowe 107

TPP supp by FW, boosted net neitral which TP care/now nothing about; webinars; $ to trad gop consultant 109 note 71

TPP vaugue aims (no tax incrase) but never lists pgms to cut

TP more link to to Heritage than cato

agenda 21 talk

afp etc do not so much control TP as get them made and give a simplistic worldview 116

loose ties work well enough (and allows distance from failures) and scandals

rx town halls hyped by press; CNN called FW a "leading grassroots org" tho armey insider lobbyist

Have to keep ppl on TV and inject into all sorts of issues to preserve momentum 123

Fox, blogs and radio kept up coverage 123

hist of press Discovering the News

}::{

http://www.amazon.com/Discovering-News-History-American-Newspapers/dp/0465016669/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1346458235&sr=1-1&keywords=Discovering+the+News

}::{

when fox breaks from gop it's to the right, so pulls it

fox has more viewers than cnn and msnbc combined; 2 mil in prime time;fox has all top 10 able news shows 125

}::{

1/4 of US watch fox regularly note 11; avg age FNC 65; rw talk 67; less 2% fox A-A 125

scandal of day rather than anwers/policy; other channels then compete 126

media makes up lame poll, then runs story --> polls 127

once only 3 neworks on a dinnertime; now sep realities 127; 19 T

watch 3; 1/4 of US does 135

http://www.amazon.com/Discovering-News-History-American-Newspapers/dp/0465016669/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1346458235&sr=1-1&keywords=Discovering+the+News

santelli and TP cd not have hit critical mass w/o FNC (incl ecosys of blogs etc); local radio guys MC and serve on committess 128

trust email goes back to The PPl's Choice bk 1944 Paul Lazefeld 129

Drudge flashing siren; Malkin connected santelli to stimulus, twitter w/ TP 129

Hannity "our TP show" [ambig?] Art Laffer congrtat Beck for TP 131

Beck, Hann, von S and cavuto all did TP shows 131

CNN covered, but FNC antic/hypes rallies 131

beck 9/12 project worked w/ TP and FW 9/12/09

beck lang/ideas permeate TP talk consc or not 134

FNC absorbed TP narratives; softball questions, let them ask for $

Discovering The News: A Social History Of American Newspapers by Michael Schudson (Feb 13, 1981)

FNC says TP authentic, mainstream, indep, spont,; next big thing Murdoch said not extremeist 136

fnc warned of disunity (thus support gop and not split off0 136

rmn coopted liberal populism (perelstein) 137

fnc frames attacks on TP as one on audience ; us vs them, emballted 137

fnc takes out full page ad chide others, so cnn upped coveraged eg Odom interv, sent on TPE bus tour

Rx covered but not backstory 139

fnc alter news 140 note 72

coverage at 1st called extremeist, but flipped 140

nyer said lost ted k seat b/c of TP; story du jour // soccer mom

press got rt at 1st; anti-tax, ~ BO,(crackpots) then called indep full movement //CRM142

}::{

made FW etc sem more legit

TP became focus, not Wall st 143

in polls ppl overstate their TP activism; poll also got wrong that 40% demo or indep 147

state of union resp by paul ryan, then CNN TPE had 2nd TP one w/ Bachmann

Meckler called leader, tho TP fragm

MB and demint formed caucus (self declared leaders?)

2011 rallies smaller , but still covered, but became backdrop broll for interviews of leaders"

kochs want to remake and discipline gop ; TP "go nuclear" if compromise

effect on 2010 exxag: most gps less than 50, no budget, did not endorse, not much GOTV

TPE and FW rode TP wave, not cause 159

but helped in that end run around damaged gop brand; funneled $ to cands not thru party; media coverage 160

2010 40% turnout

2008 65 older split 8% McC; 2010 21% 162-3 death panel BS

not witch got palin and demint endorse, xian; hannity noted castle pro bailout, pro cap and trade, pro choice and gun control 164 rove did not endorse, caved 165 7/5mil$ 90% outside delaware 165

xian coalit collapse after rreed gone, came back via TP?

rino: mike lee utah v bennett, rand paul; rubio v crist;

gov lepage in Me took down labor murals, francis perkins

77% gop frosh to the rt of typical guy in 111th

survive mods susan collins Me ben nelson nebr

no tax incr, despite gop credted the deficit 171 debt rduction really 2ndary to shrink gov't 171

club for growth and norquist want tax cuts for rich but lacked ground game before TP 172

armey did orientation , no compromise (no problem biz as usual lobbying etc) 173 maj leader under newt, did complex deals

david koch smchmmozed; TP hird longtime lobbyists p 174 note 55 eg matt canham SL trib 11/11/10 eggen pompeo koch wapo

ryan budget draws on Heritage , gop unuanimous after 1 week, no hearings ; called radical by newt 175 (old RR bombthrower who pushed gop to rt

FW tech support TP

TP think ecomomic collapse coming, so govt shutdown/crisis no big deal

TP liked gop primary visits, felt important 181

tp has taken over commit gop; nexus allows for coord pressure 183

we "hire" pols so they shd do what we want, nit what they think right

CoC wanted stim $; coc and nam didn't want credit rating wrecked 186

TP now seen mas more neg than pos (flip?)

FW etc want to convert soc programs into market subsidies 191 (obamacare sorta does that?]

[swing voters] are uninformed and no ideol moorings], so ez to BS w ad blitz 193

fnc makes ppl more conserv and less informed 201, led to gop uptick

dems want to make ppl more dependent on their power

FW has more connections/strings into TP/grasroots?

fox fail mitt debunk: CNN, MSNBC Debunked Romney's Welfare Claim In Most Segments; Fox News Did Not. Media Matters examined how CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC, and the print outlets discussed below treated Romney's false claim about Obama removing the work requirementfrom welfare between the day Romney's ad was released, August 6, and August 26. CNN debunked the claim in 69 percent of its segments that mentioned it, and MSNBC debunked the claim in 87 percent of such segments. Fox News, however, debunked the claim in only 17 percent of such segments.

---

media matters:

Limbaugh: "Ryan Was Right" About Janesville Plant Despite "Bogus Fact-Checkers" Declaring Him Wrong

http://mediamatters.org/video/2012/08/30/limbaugh-ryan-was-right-about-janesville-plant/189682

newsweek fail: http://action.mediamatters.org/r?u=http%3A%2F%2Fmm4a.org%2FRAlguR&utm_campaign=weekly_823_2&n=9&e=2fd18ded548fce9ef66e074aaf01da3d5df1923b&utm_source=mediamatters&utm_medium=email

Niall Ferguson's Newsweek cover story on President Obama exemplifies a deficiency in today's media. As criticism of Ferguson's shoddy work mounted -- both from outside and inside of Newsweek/The Daily Beast -- Newsweek explained to Politico's Dylan Byers that Newsweek "rel[ies] on our writers to submit factually accurate material." Indeed, Byers also noted that Newsweek does not even have a fact-checking department.

This admission is disturbing on face. Newsweek wants to sell you stories and news about the world but can't even be bothered to check the claims it publishes. Even worse, they didn't seem all that uncomfortable with the admission. Newsweek's defense is that others are this lackadaisical at journalism, which is to say Newsweek has no defense. In a media environment without fact-checkers, it's no wonder we have fabulists and problems with facts and the media. But there's a more pernicious ramification of Newsweek's abdication of journalistic practices: This is what the predatory conservative echo-chamber and Fox News count on.

Fox and the right-wing echo chamber exploit these vulnerabilities in the media. When the media process seems shoddy (regardless of whether it actually is) and the result produces news that is inconsistent with conservative ideology, right-wing media pounce and attack the outlet as part of some left-wing media cabal. We've seen Fox do this from Dan Rather to Politico to ABC News to MSNBC and more. On the other hand, when they find the argument useful, the right-wing echo chamber can herald the piece and ignore inaccuracies within.

foxdan rather std: http://mediamatters.org/blog/2009/09/16/will-fox-news-hold-beck-to-its-dan-rather-stand/154643

---

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Beckel on The Five sometimes calls ppl on BS eg headstart not effective, basic science?

===

ALEC member and support

Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. Is an ALEC Member

by Rebekah Wilce [1] — May 25, 2012 - 8:32am

Topics: Corporations [2], Education [3]

Projects: ALEC Exposed [4]

With Fox personalities defending the American Legislative Exchange Council [5] (ALEC) and the Wall Street Journal publishing editorials criticizing its detractors (including the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), by name), some have wondered whether or not Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation [6], which owns Fox News [7], the Wall Street Journal [8], and many broadcast licenses, is an ALEC member [9].

Yes, News Corp. is an ALEC member. It has funded ALEC operations.

Documents obtained and released by Common Cause show that News Corp. was a member [10] of ALEC's Telecommunications and Information Technology Task Force [11] as of April 2010. Adam Peshek, who staffs ALEC's Education Task Force [12], told [13] Education Week that News Corp. has been a member of both ALEC's Education Task Force and Communications and Technology Task Force [14] since January 2012. However, the public does not have complete records indicating when News Corp. first started supporting ALEC or the duration of its involvement on these two task forces or other ALEC task forces, if any, in 2011 and prior years. (The Common Cause documents begin in 2010, and ALEC has stopped circulating its task force member list even to other task force members.)

News Corp.'s News of the World Phone-Hacking Scandal

News Corp. also owned News of the World, the tabloid that closed its doors in the wake of the UK phone-hacking scandal. Rebekah Brooks, the former chief executive of News International, the British newspaper subsidiary of News Corp., has been charged with attempting to conceal evidence [15] in the case. Her husband and four close associates have also been charged.

Rupert Murdoch and his son James, the former executive chairman of News International, have not been charged but testified together before a UK Parliamentary committee. James Murdoch stepped down from his position as chairman of News International in February 2012 before it folded, and in April 2012 he also resigned as chairman of the board of broadcaster BSkyB. James Murdoch has testified three times before Parliamentary committees, most recently in April 2012, when he again "blamed his subordinates for keeping him ill-informed about the extent of hacking at newspapers then under his control," according to [16] the New York Times.

Emails released in April 2012 also indicate collaboration [17] between a News Corp. lobbyist and the office of Culture Minister Jeremy Hunt, who would have made the decision on News Corp.'s bid for BSkyB. This expanded the focus of the investigation to the political influence of News Corp. UK Prime Minister James Cameron has been a close friend of Rebekah and Charlie Brooks. James Murdoch attended Christmas Dinner with Cameron and the Brookses in 2010 [18].

In July 2011, the US Department of Justice said it had spoken to the UK's Serious Fraud Office about how to investigate claims that News Corp.'s News of the World title had paid police for information. According to [19] the BBC, "The US Department of Justice's interest in News Corp. stems from the fact that its headquarters are in New York, but its shares are listed in both the US and Australia. It is illegal for any US company to pay bribes to overseas officials, under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act."

The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977 was introduced in the U.S. Senate by Senator William Proxmire from Wisconsin and prohibits bribing any foreign official for business gain. Multinational corporations involved in ALEC and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce [20] are working to carve out major exceptions in the law to make it harder to enforce [21].

News Corp.'s New Interest in Privatizing Education

When News Corp. acquired Wireless Generation, a for-profit online education, software, and testing corporation, for $360 million in cash [22] in 2010, Rupert Murdoch called the for-profit K-12 education industry [23] "a $500 billion sector in the US alone that is waiting desperately to be transformed." A few weeks before the closing of the deal, News Corp. hired Joel Klein, then the chancellor of New York City schools, to run its education division.

University of Arizona education professor Kenneth Goodman suspects that Murdoch is bringing his conservative ideology to his education ventures: "They'd like everything to be privatized," he told [24] Mother Jones last year.

Notably, in the summer of 2011, New York state considered a $27 million contract with Wireless Generation to track student performance. The New York teachers' unions objected to this outsourcing. "It is especially troubling that Wireless Generation will be tasked with creating a centralized database for personal student information even as its parent company, News Corporation, stands accused of engaging in illegal news-gathering tactics," representatives from the state and New York City teachers' unions wrote [25]. The state decided against the contract, citing "vendor responsibility issues involving the parent company of Wireless Generation."

About a year after the purchase of Wireless Generation, in September 2011, Murdoch was the keynote speaker [26] at former Florida governor Jeb Bush's education "reform" summit. Jeb Bush is the Chairman of the Foundation for Excellence in Education [27], an ALEC member organization that hosted the summit.

According to [25] Mother Jones, Murdoch's "speech to a collection of conservative ed reformers, state legislators, and educators is just the latest step in Murdoch's quiet march into the business of education, which has been somewhat eclipsed by the phone-hacking scandal besieging his media empire." MoJo reported that his agenda in the "business of education" seems to be to divert taxpayer dollars away from public schools into for-profit education outfits, including online schools, private charter schools, and homeschooling services.

In the months following that gathering, Murdoch also donated to ex-DC school chancellor Michelle Rhee's new group, StudentsFirst, which according to The Nation "has pledged to spend more than $1 billion to bring for-profit schools, including virtual education, to the entire country by electing reform-friendly candidates and hiring top-notch state lobbyists." At an earlier Media Institute [28] awards dinner in Washington shortly before he bought a financial stake in privatizing education through purchasing Wireless Generation, Murdoch called Rhee [29] a "bona fide reformer."

News Corp. and the ALEC Education Agenda

Although ALEC's new staffer for its Education Task Force [12] told the press that News Corp. became a private sector member of that task force just four months ago, the prior task force staffer, David Myslinski, told [13] Education Week that the fact that News Corp.'s new subsidiary, Wireless Generation, had previously been an ALEC member (from 2007 to 2009, according to a Wireless Generation spokesperson) could have led the subsidiary to being listed mistakenly on the Education Task Force meeting agenda as a new member in place of its parent, News Corp.

As CMD has reported [30], ALEC's education agenda encompasses a more than 20-year effort to privatize public education through an ever-expanding network of school voucher systems, which divert taxpayer dollars away from public schools to private schools. ALEC bills also divert public funds into private charter schools or for-profit internet school corporations. ALEC bills also allow public and for-profit schools to loosen standards for teachers and administrators, change the education plans for students with physical disabilities and special educational needs, escape the protections of collective bargaining agreements, and aid other pet causes such as diverting tax dollars to subsidize schools focused on the right-wing political and religious indoctrination of students. Learn more about ALEC's education agenda in The Nation here [31].

News Corp. and the ALEC Communications Agenda

ALEC's news education staffer, Peshek, said that News Corp. also joined the Communications and Technology Task Force [14] in January 2012. However, records obtained by Common Cause show that News Corp.'s Senior Vice President, Bill Guidera, attended ALEC's April 2010 Spring Task Force Summit [10] in St. Louis, Missouri, as a member of what was then called the Telecommunications and Information Technology Task Force [11]. The reason for this discrepancy between documentary evidence and ALEC's recent public statements about this is not known.

At the meeting April 2010 meeting attended by Guidera, the task force hosted a panel on the Federal Communications Commission's National Broadband Plan. The Reason Foundation [32]'s Steve Titch, the National Cable and Telecommunications Association [33]'s (NCTA's) Rick Cimerman, and AT&T [34]'s Hank Hultquist discussed the National Broadband Plan. Intuit [35]'s Jim Ruda presented on and introduced a proposed "Resolution on Government Tax Preparation & Electronic Filing." The resolution was approved by the legislative and private sector members of the task force. (Intuit subsequently dropped ALEC this spring in the wake of the Trayvon Martin shooting and other controversial information about ALECs agenda and operations, as documented by CMD/ALECexposed.)

Additionally, NetChoice [36]'s Braden Cox discussed the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which relates to requirements for law enforcement access to internet and other online or stored records. And Rep. John Evans (R-PA) discussed legal penalties and approaches to the problem of "sexting," sexually explicit communications on cell phones by teens. NetChoice also introduced a proposed "Resolution Opposing the Expansion of the Federal Trade Commission's Rulemaking Authority." The resolution was approved by the task force's private sector and public sector members.

News Corp. is a multinational, multi-platform media conglomerate. The ALEC Communications and Technology Task Force [14], on which News Corp. has a seat, has long had a far-reaching agenda to deregulate the communications industry and has opposed key protections of the public's airwaves for ordinary citizens, such as "net neutrality" and the "Fairness Doctrine." However, News Corp.'s particular business interests in the jurisdiction of this ALEC task force are not fully known.

The Rush to Dump ALEC

16 corporations have announced they have cut ties to ALEC [37] in recent weeks, including Amazon.com, Scantron Corporation, Kaplan Higher Education, Procter & Gamble, YUM! Brands, Blue Cross Blue Shield, American Traffic Solutions, Reed Elsevier, Arizona Public Service, Mars, Wendy's, McDonald's, Intuit, Kraft Foods, PepsiCo, and Coca-Cola. Four non-profits -- including Lumina Foundation for Education, the National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA), the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS), and the Gates Foundation -- have cut ties to ALEC, bringing the total number of ALEC private sector members who have left to 19. In addition, 54 state legislators [38] have also left ALEC in the past two months.

Color of Change, along with CMD, Common Cause, People for the American Way, and others are now asking Amazon, State Farm, AT&T, and Johnson & Johnson to cut ties with ALEC [39].

Center for Media and Democracy • 520 University Avenue, Suite 260 • Madison, Wisconsin 53703

Phone: 608-260-9713 • Fax: 608-260-9714

Source URL: http://www.prwatch.org/news/2012/05/11531/rupert-murdochs-news-corp-alec-member

Links:

[1] http://www.prwatch.org/users/35294/rebekah-wilce

[2] http://www.prwatch.org/topics/corporations

[3] http://www.prwatch.org/topics/education

[4] http://www.prwatch.org/projects/alec-exposed

[5] http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=American_Legislative_Exchange_Council

[6] http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=News_Corporation

[7] http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Fox_News

[8] http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Wall_Street_Journal

[9] http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=ALEC_Corporations

[10] http://www.commoncause.org/atf/cf/%7BFB3C17E2-CDD1-4DF6-92BE-BD4429893665%7D/telecommunications_&_information_technology_35-day_mailing%20San%20Diego.pdf

[11] http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Telecommunications_and_Information_Technology_Task_Force

[12] http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Education_Task_Force

[13] http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/marketplacek12/2012/05/news%20corp_wireless_alec.html

[14] http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Communications_and_Technology_Task_Force

[15] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/16/world/europe/rebekah-brooks-to-learn-if-she-will-face-charges.html

[16] http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/m/james_r_murdoch/index.html?8qa

[17] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/25/world/europe/murdoch-case-shifts-its-focus-to-jeremy-hunt.html?hp

[18] http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/davidhughes/100152840/that-christmas-dinner-with-the-brookses-may-come-back-to-haunt-david-cameron/

[19] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-14181119

[20] http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=U.S._Chamber_of_Commerce

[21] http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jul/14/hacking-murdoch-paid-us-lobbyists

[22] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/24/nyregion/24newscorp.html

[23] http://www.thenation.com/article/164651/how-online-learning-companies-bought-americas-schools?page=full

[24] http://www.alternet.org/education/152516/what_does_rupert_murdoch_want_with_america's_schools/?page=2

[25] http://www.alternet.org/education/152516/what_does_rupert_murdoch_want_with_america's_schools/

[26] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/rupert-murdoch-giving-keynote-at-jeb-bushs-ed-reform-summit/2011/09/20/gIQAry9cjK_blog.html

[27] http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Foundation_for_Excellence_in_Education

[28] http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Media_Institute

[29] http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2010/10/06/murdoch-urges-overhaul-of-big-city-public-schools/

[30] http://www.prwatch.org/news/2012/02/11272/alec-education-academy-launches-island-resort

[31] http://www.thenation.com/article/161971/starving-public-schools

[32] http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Reason_Foundation

[33] http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=National_Cable_and_Telecommunications_Association

[34] http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=AT%26T

[35] http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Intuit

[36] http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=NetChoice

[37] http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Corporations_Who_Have_Cut_Ties_to_ALEC

[38] http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Legislators_Who_Have_Cut_Ties_to_ALEC

[39] http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/632/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=10002

http://www.prwatch.org/node/11531

FACT: Comcast owns NBC; Disney owns ABC; and News Corporation owns Fox Broadcasting Company.

Comcastowns NBC, Telemundo, E Entertainment, Versus, 14 television stations, Universal Pictures, and Hulu. Disney holdings include 10 television stations, 277 radio stations, ABC, ESPN, A&E, the History Channel, Lifetime, Discover magazine, Bassmaster magazine, Hyperion publishing, Touchstone Pictures, Pixar Animation, and Miramax Film Corp. Viacom owns 10 television stations, The Movie Channel, Comedy Central, BET, Nickelodeon, TV Land, MTV, VH1, and Paramount Pictures. CBS owns 30 TV stations, Smithsonian Channel, Showtime, The Movie Channel and Paramount Network Television. News Corp. owns 27 television stations, the Fox Network and Fox News Channel, FX, National Geographic Channel, The Wall Street Journal, TV Guide, the New York Post, DirecTV, the publisher HarperCollins, film production company Twentieth Century Fox and the social networking website MySpace. Time Warnerowns HBO, CNN, the Cartoon Network, Warner Bros. Time magazine, Turner Broadcasting and DC Comics.

Currently, six major companies control most of the media in our country. The FCC could decide to relax media ownership rules, which would allow further consolidation and put decisions about what kinds of programming and news Americans receive in even fewer hands.

===

Media Matters Chairman David Brock and Vice President Ari Rabin-Havt, utilizing the extensive research of Media Matters, have authored our ultimate indictment of the network.

Their new book, The Fox Effect: How Roger Ailes Turned a Network into a Propaganda Machine,

THE FOX EFFECT david Brock and ARH media matters anchor NY 2012

on rw cruise, aug 09 sammon admits his mischevious speculation" on obama as socialist was put

MM paid more attn fom 1/3 to 1/2 when fox became #1 cablke news p11

GB acted out giving poisom wine to pelosi

fox viewers 30% less likely to believe AGW 13

METHOD: 1 activist lie, 2 massive coverage 3) attack other mdia for not covering 4) mainstream media picks up 5 media critics praise fox 60 story falls apart after damage donr 168-9

AGW: fox touted false claims for CTT eg heritage.

House Clean Energy and Security Act, SHanity said util bill upo 3K and lise 2.5 mil jobs. 3k from MIT study that some of its own authors walked back from 170. CBO said 80 to 175/family

boosted climategate

12/08/09 bill s memo , 4 days before 29 sci open ltr to congress

2007 Murdoch said news corp carbon neutral by 2010 (son too?] b/c of 10 yr Aus drought, and hottest year

News corp hired Luntz on msg (sustainablebusiness.org jan 20) clear maj want gov't action, bo and mccain voters

Fox Ingraham manipulated video to maker it seem like Gore profiting from GW action, leaving out bit where he said all profit going to ngo to fight 174

3 weeks later Bo'R flogs segment 177

Murdoch at times appalled, but gives Ailes complete control (only one)

2007 Qterly jrn of econ said fox had small effect, but enough to shift 2000 election 17

Frum said fox used to work for gop, now v v

made compromise on budget impossible 18 [big stock mkt hit?]

Ailes (RA) pitched fox concept to RMN admin, coors $ for Ur TVN 28 mlk red, epa alarmist

had to keep firing staff and mgmt b/c they were actually trying to be prof jrnlists 31

RA brought lee atwater into b1

RA mge guiliani, then worked for rush

Ellis, bush cousin told RA b2 had lost, but then fox made opposite call? 55

Brit Hume said swift boat had big effect

same play by Wa Times affiliate www that siad BO went to madrassa 65

graphic claimed castro had endorsed HC and BO 70

Corsi flogged book on Fox 74

Dick Morris worked for Trent lott and jesse helm, then BC but quit b/ c of prost scandal, 180 on

BC, paid contrib on fox DM said bo was gen'l counsel for acorn, and voter fraud, and akked

fox viewers to go to a PC that paid him 77 Nat'l Rep Trust

his book fleeced predicted stock mkt crash after bo elected. Fox blamed BO for recession, and

"forgot" that bailout started under b2 80

Fox started w/ conserv POV then went to GOP pov

Hannity lost UCSB radio gig after promoting book that said AIDS came from kiss or mosquito

[why?]

hume quit (b/c he's a jrnlist), replaced by sammon (several 4 fluff books on b2, as wll as Wa

Times 1st book on how gore tried to steal electon

Luntz advised hanity on health care vocab

nbo BO honeymoon, day 3 Ingraham said cty less safe

fox started releasing gop press releases verbatim w/o citation

Doocy siad bill had 4 billion for acorn(actually had none) 97

CNBC financial reporter rant chicago even tho stock mkt benefitting from B2 bailouts policies

2/19/09 104 he was PO'd b/c govt was going to help ppl in trouble on mortgagecnbc shut down

santelli activism, picked up by fox ,

fox said anti war protesters stupid and unAm, but small TP rallies got pos coverage, invited

to"celebrate w/ fox news" apr 6-15th 107 promos for TP day coverage 110 health care and AGW

bills pending, shifted sit

doocy said 90% am had health coverage, and bill wd ruin system; hannity said bill wd outlaw

pvt health insure 117

Tobcco strat used to beat BC health care 118 McCaughey

RA tired to beat anti tob bill in CA, tob ~ BC health bill b/c tax cigs 118

RA joined cnbc but did not disclose he was still consulting on tobacco etc, issue thn current

McCaughey said HC bill req consult on how to end life --> palin to 41% beli3ve death panel

122

House pased helth care and climate, so dems had to be rolled 123 Pelosi distorted

Wm Kristol (fox ) sent memo to gop on how to beat bc HC

rove said premuiums up tho CBO said ~

Dick M death panels 135

RA called NPR nazis for firing juan cole

Color of change boycott GB when he said BO racist (van jones fdr)

GB--> BO'R, Cornyn, bond, mike pense

Several GB listners killed cops, went after pols 152- aclu and Tides targeted

asked for dirt on sunstein, mark lloyd and carol browner

ACORN hist 1970, to broaden efforts beyond welfare recip, created housing unit that helped 45k

ppl, rehab 750 homes [//habit6at??]

fdr bro embellzzled, ret $ but not reported to law.

1992 BO worked w.

no real fraud; sometimes canvassers made up fake reg for $, but law some places requires ALL

to be turned in.

Fox news blamed acorn for subprime 161

BREIBART started at E!Entertinament News, then drudge; used okeefe vids to launch Big Gov't,

said it wd change dir of politics in US

may 8 tp sept 18, 09 beck and hanity referred to acorn 1502x 163 (vs ney and JA 62 x) 163

halliburton 43, Blackwater 4x

GB 1Kx seqmwents on acorn

one acorn staffer spotted put on, so she told okeefe she'd killed husband, picked up by fox

(not checked)

demo led house defunded acorn 345-75, sen 85-15

METHOD: 1 activist lie, 2 massive coverage 3) attack other mdia for not covering 4) mainstream

media picks up 5 media critics praise fox 60 story falls apart after damage donr 168-9

AGW: fox touted false claims for CTT eg heritage.

House Clean Energy and Security Act, SHanity said util bill upo 3K and lise 2.5 mil jobs. 3k

from MIT study that some of its own authors walked back from 170. CBO said 80 to 175/family

boosted climategate

12/08/09 bill s memo , 4 days before 29 sci open ltr to congress

2007 Murdoch said news corp carbon neutral by 2010 (son too?] b/c of 10 yr Aus drought, and

hottest year

News corp hired Luntz on msg (sustainablebusiness.org jan 20) clear maj want gov't action, bo

and mccain voters

Fox Ingraham manipulated video to maker it seem like Gore profiting from GW action, leaving out

bit where he said all profit going to ngo to fight 174 3 weeks later Bo'R flogs segment 177

jennings

backpedaling on Sherrod, claimed to not aired (till she quit?)

Morris suggest BO is sleeper agent // Rev Wright

GB said new blk panthers want a race war

Fox boosted scott brown, helped him raise $ (unprecented by news org?) also huckabee and

morris!

vs cnbc suspended KO and Joe Scarborough for MAKING pol contrib?

fox distorted brown oppoent on afganistan and catholic health care workers (sh's catholoc)

fox biz guy said 401k would go up if brown elected

link to vid: "a vote for scott brown is a vote for libery" vs tyanny day before election!

Greta Van S got start as OJ trial witness? hubby started sarahPAC 211

w/ palin, all main GOP except mitt on payroll; SO said ppl tired of biased jrnl so turned to

fox

2010 30 fox empl worked for 300 gop cands

GM aksed m bachmann how hw could help. beck?

gingrich gop comms raise 14m; his pac 25 m$ also palin. huch and santorum

rove 50M, 27k ads 216

News corp gave $1m to RNC,(#1 corp donor, publically traded co's give to both sides) // david

koch

fox unapolegetic b/c rnc supports free mkts, and nayway really b/c of pal Kasich (fox pundit

--> ohio gov)218

aslo 1m to Coc, in middle of 72 m attack ads , incl distorting of gabby g recd

in face of CoC charge for $m GB donated and urged listners to, 300K best day ever

GB MLK day rally, said he picked up struggle of, AFP and NRA sponsored FWorks (leveraged event

to train ppl), chaffetz, , hatch bachman

SH boosted Odonnell witch, Firoina, Angle, said Reid supported viagra for pedophiles

GB demint, bachmann, chaffetz

BO used gop putch car in ditch metaphor for mos, but twisted to be ~rosa parks a week before

election

cavuto boosted tancredo

pot pres cands got 85 free hrs or air coming up in 2010 incl Bolton

after GG shooting RA told ppl to tone down, but 3 days latr BG said ban guns, symbols and talk

radio 248-9

GB down 1 mil viewers, 300 sponsors bailed

RA interviewed gop ppl to run for pres (burned by palin?)

BOR called MMatters char assassins right afer est'b, and GB had several segments.

sev fox shows called for ira audit, led by CG Gray of FW, ex fox contrib 258 col in Wa Times

-> gray interview and 35 segs on MM link to online petition

new corp phone scandal targeted thousands, fox media show did not cover during big week? 11

employees arrested , top cops quit

GB 3 hrs radio 1 TV /day and wrote7 books in 2.5 yrs at fox 269 online univ

Mcginnis longtime pAl said every cand RA ever worked for has harmed the cty283 asl ohurt gop

with Mike castle and orrin hatch loses

admits overstep, --> crs correction post 2010

===

Feldman

In sum, the content analysis results suggest that, in 2007 and 2008, Fox News

painted a very different picture of climate change than CNN and MSNBC, thereby

supporting Hypotheses 1 through 3. :{Although Fox discussed climate change most

often, the tone of its coverage was disproportionately dismissive. Fox broadcasts were

more likely to include statements that challenged the scientific agreement on climate

change, undermined the reality of climate change, and questioned its human causes.

Conversely, MSNBC and especially CNN were more likely to affirm the scientific

agreement on climate change, claim that climate change is real, and that it results from

human activities. Fox also featured a higher ratio of climate change doubters to

believers as interview guests than MSNBC and CNN; MSNBC and CNN featured a}:

higher ratio of believers to doubters. These findings are suggestive of how cable news

audiences come to understand climate change as a result of the coverage to which they

are exposed and, as such, provide a critical foundation for our survey analysis, to

which we turn next....

The former finding, taken in isolation,

is consistent with biased processing. However, when considered along with

the latter finding, it suggests a direct persuasion effect, in which the views of

Republicans on global warming reflected the cable news outlet they watched,

regardless of how well that news outlet aligned with their political predispositions.

:{The views of Democrats, on the other hand, did not vary as a function of their cable

news consumption.}:

Differences in the strength of political ideology among Republicans who watched

Fox News versus CNN/MSNBC were explored as a possible explanation for this finding.

Although ideology was related to partisans’ cable news viewing, this could not fully

account for Republicans’ disproportionate susceptibility to CNN/MSNBC and Fox

News. Rather, Republicans’ greater willingness to accept the different views promulgated

by these news sources could be a function of their high “need for closure” (Jost

et al. 2003). Kruglanski (2004) argues that certain individuals possess a dispositional

trait that makes them more likely to come to closure on an attitude object. Because of

their lower tolerance for ambivalence, individuals who are high in need for closure are

more affected by persuasive messages. At the same time, if Republicans are less attentive

to or knowledgeable about climate change relative to Democrats, exposure to any

specific message—and, in particular, to the distinct points of view offered on cable

news—is likely to shape their opinions. Future studies will want to explore these explanations

for the stronger relationships seen here among Republicans. In any case, the

good news for climate change advocates is that at least some Republicans, who as a

group tend to be predisposed toward global warming skepticism, are less skeptical when

exposed to information on the reality and urgency of climate change.

The implications of the findings presented herein are significant. While follow-up

longitudinal or experimental research is needed to confirm the directionality of the

relationship between cable news use and global warming acceptance, :{the results are

strongly suggestive of the power of cable news to shape and polarize public opinion.}:

However, contrary to models of motivated reasoning, this study provides only inconsistent

evidence that the attitudes of opposing partisans who view the same cable news

program polarize as a function of exposure; this was true of Fox News viewers but not

CNN/MSNBC viewers. The most convincing evidence for polarization occurs across

cable outlets (Fox vs. CNN/MSNBC), with viewers of the former emerging with different

beliefs about climate change than viewers of the latter. When taken in concert

with other, experimental research (Feldman 2011), this suggests that opinion polarization

in the cable news environment occurs most clearly as a function of exposure, as

opposed to biased processing of ideological news content. Thus, to the extent that the

cable news networks continue to provide partisan content in the quest for a lucrative

niche audience, the opportunity for consensus-building and cooperation on global

warming—as well as on other critical issues of the day—diminishes.

The International Journal of Press/Politics XX(X)

Lauren Feldman1, Edward W. Maibach2, Connie

Roser-Renouf2, and Anthony Leiserowitz3

Climate on Cable: The

Nature and Impact of Global

Warming Coverage on Fox

News, CNN, and MSNBC

http://climateshiftproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/FeldmanStudy.pdf

Chris Mooney [1]

21 November 11

Fox News Viewers are the Most Misinformed: A Seventh Study Arrives to Prove It (and to Vindicate Jon Stewart!) [2]

Two of my most popular posts here at DeSmogBlog were a pair of items documenting 1)just how many surveys have found Fox News viewers to be more misinformed about factual reality [7] and 2) taking PolitiFact to task [8] for giving Jon Stewart a “false” rating [9] when he pointed this out.

Stewart wasn’t wrong, PolitiFact was.

In these pieces, I identified 6 separate studies showing Fox News viewers to be the most misinformed, and in a right wing direction—studies on global warming [10], health care [11], health care a second time [12], the Ground Zero mosque [13], the Iraq war [14], and the 2010 election [15].

I also asked if anyone was aware of any counterevidence, and none was forthcoming. There might very well be a survey out there showing that Fox viewers aren't the most misinformed cable news consumers on some topic (presumably it would be a topic where Democrats have some sort of ideological blind spot), but I haven’t seen it. And I have looked.

There really does seem to be a “Fox News effect," then, and one that is playing a central role in driving our political divide over reality in the U.S. And now comes a true tour-de-force *seventh*study [16] showing that Fox News viewers are the most misinformed, this time once again about global warming.

The**new paper** [16],**already flagged here** [17]by Farron Cousins, is just out in theInternational Journal of Press/Politics, by communication scholar Lauren Feldman of American University and her colleagues. The paper is quite sophisticated, and performs several powerful analyses. But for our purposes, here’s what matters.

Feldman and her colleagues reported on their analysis of a 2008 national survey, which found that “Fox News viewing manifests a significant, negative association with global warming acceptance.” Viewers of the station were less likely to agree that “most scientists think global warming is happening” and less likely to think global warming is mostly caused by human activities, among other measures. Viewers ofCNNandMSNBCwere the opposite.

And no wonder: Through a content analysis of Fox coverage in 2007 and 2008, Feldman and her colleagues also demonstrated that Fox coverage is more dismissive about climate science, and features more climate skeptics. That's no shocker, but the paper does a very good job of linking up the coverage itself with the reality denial that results in Fox viewers.

There is also a fascinating finding that those Republicans whodowatchCNN/MSNBCare more persuaded than Democratic viewers are toaccept global warming. In other words, Republicans in the study seem much more easily swayed by media framing than Democrats. Put them in the Fox information stream, just add water, and watch denialism sprout. Put them in another information stream, though, and something very different might happen.

I noted in my prior posts that the studies documenting the “Fox News effect” do not necessarily show causation. In other words, watching Fox may make you more misinformed, but people who believe lots of political misinformation may also gravitate towards Fox.

I actually think both things are going on simultaneously—but the new Feldman studydoesmake a strong causal case that Fox is actively driving a lot of the problem.

In other words, why are Americans so divided today over reality and what is factually true? There are surely many causes—but one is that a news network with a powerful sway is constantly sowing right wing misinformation, and an army of followers are watching and believing it.

Source URL: http://www.desmogblog.com/fox-news-viewers-are-most-misinformed-seventh-study-arrives-prove-it-and-vindicate-jon-stewart

Links:

[1] http://www.desmogblog.com/bio/chris-mooney

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[3] http://twitter.com/share

[4] http://www.desmogblog.com/print/5859

[5] http://www.desmogblog.com/printmail/5859

[6] http://www.desmogblog.com/sites/beta.desmogblog.com/files/blogimages/cavuto-20070117-global-2.jpg

[7] http://www.desmogblog.com/fox-news-effect-few-references

[8] http://www.desmogblog.com/jon-stewart-1-politifact-0-fox-news-viewers-are-most-misinformed

[9] http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/jun/20/jon-stewart/jon-stewart-says-those-who-watch-fox-news-are-most/

[10] http://woods.stanford.edu/docs/surveys/Global-Warming-Fox-News.pdf

[11] http://www.kff.org/healthreform/upload/8148.pdf

[12] http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2009/08/19/4431138-first-thoughts-obamas-good-bad-news

[13] http://www.comm.ohio-state.edu/kgarrett/MediaMosqueRumors.pdf

[14] http://www.pipa.org/OnlineReports/Iraq/IraqMedia_Oct03/IraqMedia_Oct03_rpt.pdf

[15] http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/pdf/dec10/Misinformation_Dec10_rpt.pdf

[16] http://climateshiftproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/FeldmanStudy.pdf

[17] http://www.desmogblog.com/climate-change-spin-growing-problem-fox-news

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Fox News' Top 10 Lies About Climate Science

February 01, 2011 1:44 pm ET — 34 Comments

Rolling Stone recently included News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch in its list of politicians and executives it contends are "blocking progress on global warming," writing that "Murdoch's entire media empire, it would seem, is set up to deny, deny, deny." Indeed, for years, Fox News has done more than any other major news outlet in the United States to sow confusion about climate change, as this list of Fox News' top 10 climate science distortions demonstrates.

http://mediamatters.org/research/201102010025

Rolling Stone: At Fox News, "Manufacturing Doubt About Global Warming Remains Official Policy"

Rolling Stone: "No One Does More To Spread Dangerous Disinformation About Global Warming Than Murdoch." In a recent article, Rolling Stone magazine put Murdoch at the top of its list of "12 politicians and execs blocking progress on global warming," writing that "[n]o one does more to spread dangerous disinformation about global warming than Murdoch." From the article:

No one does more to spread dangerous disinformation about global warming than Murdoch. In a year of record heat waves in Africa, freak snowstorms in America and epic flooding in Pakistan, the Fox network continued to dismiss climate change as nothing but a conspiracy by liberal scientists and Big Government. Glenn Beck told viewers the Earth experienced no warming in the past decade -- the hottest on record. Sean Hannity declared that "global warming doesn't exist" and speculated about "the true agenda of global-warming hysterics." Even Brian Kilmeade, co-host of the chatty Fox & Friends, laughed off the threat of climate change, joking that the real problem was "too many polar bears."

Murdoch's entire media empire, it would seem, is set up to deny, deny, deny. The Wall Street Journal routinely dismisses climate change as "an apocalyptic scare," and Fox News helped gin up a fake controversy by relentlessly hyping the "climategate" scandal -- even though independent investigations showed that nothing in the e-mails stolen from British climate researchers undercut scientific conclusions about global warming.

Murdoch knows better. In 2007, he warned that climate change "poses clear, catastrophic threats" and promised to turn News Corp. into a model of carbon neutrality. But at his media outlets, manufacturing doubt about global warming remains official policy. During the 2009 climate summit in Copenhagen, the Washington editor of Fox News ordered the network's journalists to never mention global warming "without immediately pointing out that such theories are based upon data that critics have called into question." Murdoch may be striving to go green in his office buildings, but on air, the only thing he's recycling are the lies of Big Coal and Big Oil. *Rolling Stone*, [2/3/11]

Fox News' Top 10 Climate Science Distortions And Fabrications

Fox: Global Warming "Doesn't Exist"

Hannity: "The Debate's Over. There's No Global Warming." In October 2009, Sean Hannity said on his Fox News program that former Vice President Al Gore "doesn't think there's room for debate on climate change. I do. The debate's over. There's no global warming." Fox News, *Hannity*, [10/12/09]

Hannity: "Global Warming ... Doesn't Exist." In November 2010, Hannity similarly stated: "Today is the one-year anniversary of 'Climate-gate,' when we discovered that they artificially altered the science to hype global warming, which I say, and others, doesn't exist." Fox News, *Hannity*, [11/19/10]

REALITY: Recent Warming Trend Is Established By Temperature Measurements, Other Observations. The National Climatic Data Center explains that the "warming trend that is apparent in all of the independent methods of calculating global temperature change is also confirmed by other independent observations":

Thousands of land and ocean temperature measurements are recorded each day around the globe. This includes measurements from climate reference stations, weather stations, ships, buoys and autonomous gliders in the oceans. These surface measurements are also supplemented with satellite measurements. These measurements are processed, examined for random and systematic errors, and then finally combined to produce a time series of global average temperature change. A number of agencies around the world have produced datasets of global-scale changes in surface temperature using different techniques to process the data and remove measurement errors that could lead to false interpretations of temperature trends. The warming trend that is apparent in all of the independent methods of calculating global temperature change is also confirmed by other independent observations, such as the melting of mountain glaciers on every continent, reductions in the extent of snow cover, earlier blooming of plants in spring, a shorter ice season on lakes and rivers, ocean heat content, reduced arctic sea ice, and rising sea levels. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Climatic Data Center, accessed [1/14/11]

From the Met Office Hadley Centre for Climate Change:

Met Office Hadley Centre for Climate Change, accessed [1/14/11]

IPCC: Most Of Recent Warming Is Very Likely Due To Increase In Greenhouse Gas Emissions. The Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change -- a scientific body compiling research from thousands of scientists -- concluded in 2007 that "warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice and rising global average sea level" and that "most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely[defined in the report as a '>90%' chance] due to the observed increase in anthropogenic [human-caused] GHG [greenhouse gas] concentrations." Pages 8 and 17, Synthesis Report, Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change, [2007]

Fox: 2009 Was "The Coldest Year On Record"

Hannity: "This Is One Of The Coldest Years On Record. ... I Don't Believe Climate Change Is Real." Hannity stated on his Fox News program, "Here's what I don't understand. This is one of the coldest years on record, ladies and gentlemen. There is no -- I don't believe climate change is real. I think this is global warming hysteria and alarmism." Fox News, *Hannity*, [11/10/09]

Hannity: "We Have The Coldest Year On Record. It's 40 Degrees In Miami, For Crying Out Loud." Hannity stated: "We have an Energy secretary that wants to paint every roof in America and every black pavement white. And I'm thinking, how -- we have the coldest year on record. It's 40 degrees in Miami, for crying out loud. China and Russia are freezing. The rest of the country is freezing. There's snow everywhere. The coldest year on record and -- what? Why? Why are they involved in our lives in this way?" Fox News, *Hannity*, [1/5/10]

REALITY: 2009 Was Among Warmest Years On Record For The Globe. By the time Hannity first made this claim in November 2009, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration had determined that "[f]or the year to date, the global combined land and ocean surface temperature of 14.7 °C (58.4 °F) tied with 2007 as the fifth-warmest January-through-October period on record." National Climatic Data Center, accessed [11/25/09]

With 2010 taken into account, NOAA lists 2009 as tied with 2006 as the sixth-warmest year on record. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Climatic Data Center, [January 2011]

NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies ranks 2009 as "the third warmest year" on record. NASA, Goddard Institute for Space Studies, accessed [1/13/11]

The UK Met Office ranks 2009 as the sixth-warmest year on record. Met Office, [12/2/10]

Fox: "Nearly All Of The [Arctic] Ice Has Returned"

Beck: "[N]early All Of The Ice Has Returned." On his Fox News program, Glenn Beck referred to the "discredited global warming scam," and claimed: "In September of 2007, there was a 25 percent reduction in the usual minimum ice cover. This, my friend, is the truth: 25 percent. In the two years since, nearly all of the ice has returned." Fox News, *Glenn Beck*, [12/14/09]

REALITY: Arctic Ice Remained Far Below Average in 2008, 2009, 2010. The National Snow and Ice Data Center reported in October 2007: "At the end of the melt season, September 2007 sea ice was 39 percent below the long-term average from 1979 to 2000." The center stated that these were "the lowest levels since satellite measurements began in 1979." The National Snow and Ice Data Center, [10/1/07]

In October 2009, the NSIDC reported that 2009 saw the "third-lowest mark" for Arctic sea ice extent, after the record low in 2007 and the second-lowest in 2008. The report stated that the ice extent was "1.68 million square kilometers (649,000 square miles) below the 1979 to 2000 September average" and "Arctic sea ice is now declining at a rate of 11.2 percent per decade, relative to the 1979 to 2000 average." The National Snow and Ice Data Center, [10/6/09]

The NSIDC reported in October 2010 that 2010 has replaced 2009 as the year with the third-lowest Arctic sea ice extent in September on record. NSIDC director Mark Serreze stated: "All indications are that sea ice will continue to decline over the next several decades." From the report:

The National Snow and Ice Data Center, [10/4/10]

Fox: "How Can There Be Global Warming If It's Snowing And It's Bitterly Cold?"

Bolling: Snow "Breaking Al Gore's Heart Because" It's "Burying His Global Warming Theory." On Fox News' Your World, Eric Bolling stated: "The mid-Atlantic region on the verge of breaking all-time records for snowfall, up to 16 inches already falling in parts of Maryland, and it's not just the Northeast. Sixty-three percent of the country is now covered in snow and it's breaking Al Gore's heart because the snow is also burying his global warming theory." Fox News, *Your World with Neil Cavuto*, [2/10/10]

Doocy: "[H]ow Can There Be Global Warming If It's Snowing And It's Bitterly Cold?" On Fox News' Fox & Friends, co-host Gretchen Carlson said she wanted to talk about the "dichotomy" created by "big snowstorms" occurring while "the Obama administration [is] talking about creating a new federal office to study global warming." Co-host Steve Doocy added: "It's interesting, though, given the fact that the weather is so rotten right now that people are going, 'how can there be global warming if it's snowing and it's bitterly cold?' " Fox News, *Fox & Friends*, [2/9/10]

Cavuto: "It Is Freezing Across The Entire Globe." Neil Cavuto stated on his Fox News show, "This is our Fox News global warming alert for you. It is freezing across the entire globe. We've got frost in Florida, it's 50 below in the Midwest. You got deadly snow in London." Guest Ben Stein added, "At some point maybe somebody in the government will wake up and say, 'Hey, it's colder. It's not hotter.' Maybe all this talk about global warming needs to be rethought." Fox News, *Your World with Neil Cavuto*, [1/9/10]

Doocy: "Man, Is It Cold. That Global Warming Thing Is Really Kicking Into High Gear, Isn't It?" On Fox & Friends, Doocy stated, "Man, is it cold. Right now in Minneapolis, the air temperature is nine below zero. International Falls in Minnesota yesterday had a recorded temperature of 37 degrees below zero. That is the coldest temperature that town has had since 1911. Yeah, that global warming thing is really kicking into high gear, isn't it?" Fox News, *Fox & Friends*, [1/5/10]

Citing Winter Storm in Europe, Palkot Stated: "Forget About All That Global Warming Talk." On America's Newsroom, Fox News foreign correspondent Greg Palkot reported on how the "worst winter that Europe has seen in 15 years" had shut down train travel in Europe, and added: "All over Europe, a pre-winter, into winter storm like Europe hasn't seen in years -- forget about all that global warming talk -- disrupting air travel, airports all across Europe shut down. Fox News, *America's Newsroom*, [12/21/09]

REALITY: Scientists Stress That Winter Storms Do Not Disprove Global Warming. The New York Times reported in March 2008 that climate scientists -- including at least one who has disputed aspects of the scientific consensus on climate change -- completely reject the notion that short-term changes in weather, let alone individual storms can undermine climate observations or global warming theory. The article further stated:

Michael E. Schlesinger, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, said that any focus on the last few months or years as evidence undermining the established theory that accumulating greenhouse gases are making the world warmer was, at best, a waste of time and, at worst, a harmful distraction.

Discerning a human influence on climate, he said, ''involves finding a signal in a noisy background.'' He added, ''The only way to do this within our noisy climate system is to average over a sufficient number of years that the noise is greatly diminished, thereby revealing the signal. This means that one cannot look at any single year and know whether what one is seeing is the signal or the noise or both the signal and the noise.'' *The New York Times*, [2/2/08]

Met Office: Regional Weather Variations Don't "Tell Us Anything About Climate Change."The Met Office stated in January 2010: "The current cold weather in the UK is part of the normal regional variations that take place in the winter season. It doesn't tell us anything about climate change, which has to be looked at in a global context and over longer periods of time." Met Office, [1/6/10]

ABC News: Scientists "Are Quick To Repudiate Claims" That Snowstorms Disprove Global Warming.ABC News reported in February 2010:

As Washington, D.C., and much of the rest of the East Coast dig out from another blizzard, some politicians are using the frigid temperatures and snow-covered streets to support their claims that global warming does not exist.

Scientists, however, are quick to repudiate those comments, firing back that a few days, or even a few weeks, of inclement or cold weather in one part of the country does not disprove climate change -- a phenomenon, they say, that affects the entire planet over the course of decades.

[...]

Climate scientists say there is ample evidence that the planet is warming, and that occasional cold snaps or blizzards are blips that do not affect that overall trend.

"You cannot use a system or systems over a short period of time to describe if there is global warming. It's measured over a long, long period of time. This is a little speck in that duration," said Brian Korty, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service. ABC News, [2/10/10]

NASA: Cold Winter Does Not "Go Against The Grain Of Basic Global Warming Theory."In a February 2010 article on its GISS website, NASA wrote: "It's been very cold so far this winter in most of the U.S. and many places at middle latitudes in the Northern Hemisphere. ... But scientists stress this weather does not mean that those gases are no longer exerting a warming influence. Nor does it go against the grain of basic global warming theory. Cold snaps and bouts of natural cooling that could last years are expected naturally even as the climate continues on a long-term warming trend, forced by man-made emissions." NASA, Goddard Institute for Space Studies, [2/23/10]

Fox: "The Earth Is Actually Cooling Now"

Beck: "We're In A Cooling Period." On his Fox News show, Beck stated: "When we're talking about CO2, the idea is the more CO2, the warmer it gets. ... But, it's -- we're in a cooling period." Fox News, *Glenn Beck*, [10/30/09]

Baier: "Several Scientists Have Detailed A Recent Cooling Trend." On Special Report, anchor Baier reported that "Al Gore is comparing the fight against climate change to the struggle against Nazis in World War II." Baier added: "We've reported several scientists have detailed a recent global cooling trend." Fox News, *Special Report with Bret Baier*, [7/7/09]

Baier: "The Earth Has Actually Cooled Over The Last Decade." On Special Report, Baier stated: "Scientists have cut in half their prediction of how much sea levels could rise if Antarctica's Western ice sheets melt due to global warming. ... The change underlines just how much uncertainty there is about the entire issue. We've told you that the Earth has actually cooled over the last decade." Fox News, *Special Report with Bret Baier*, [5/15/09]

Baier Cites Unnamed Studies Showing "The Earth Is Actually Cooling Now." On Special Report, Baier stated that "with a number of studies now showing there has been no global warming over at least the last 10 years, and that the Earth is actually cooling now, environmentalists are looking to rebrand their message." Fox News, *Special Report with Bret Baier*, [5/8/09]

Baier Promotes Claim That "The Earth Has Been Cooling For The Last Six Years." On Special Report, Baier stated that "former nuclear scientist and energy expert Michael Fox writes in the Hawaii Reporter that 2008 was, quote, 'another grim year for the global warmers. 2008 marked the tenth consecutive year of no global warming. The Earth has been cooling for the last six years.' " Fox News, *Special Report with Bret Baier*, [1/5/09]

REALITY: 2000-2009 Was By Far Warmest Decade On Record. In a January 2010 article on its GISS website, NASA reported that its analysis of global surface temperature showed that "January 2000 to December 2009 was the warmest decade on record. Throughout the last three decades, the GISS surface temperature record shows an upward trend of about 0.2°C (0.36°F) per decade." NASA, Goddard Institute for Space Studies, [1/21/10]

NOAA: "The 2000-2009 decade will be the warmest on record, with its average global surface temperature about 0.54 °C (0.96 °F) above the 20^th Century average. This will easily surpass the 1990s value of 0.36 °C (0.65 °F)." National Climatic Data Center, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, [December 2009]

Met Office: "The first decade of this century has been, by far, the warmest decade on the instrumental record. New figures released today in Copenhagen show that -- despite 1998 being the warmest individual year -- the last ten years have clearly been the warmest period in the 160-year record of global surface temperature, maintained jointly by the Met Office Hadley Centre and the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia." From the report:

Met Office, [12/8/09]

Statisticians Debunked Global Cooling Claim. The Associated Press "gave temperature data to four independent statisticians and asked them to look for trends, without telling them what the numbers represented." They concluded:

Statisticians who analyzed the data found a distinct decades-long upward trend in the numbers, but could not find a significant drop in the past 10 years in either data set. The ups and downs during the last decade repeat random variability in data as far back as 1880.

Saying there's a downward trend since 1998 is not scientifically legitimate, said David Peterson, a retired Duke University statistics professor and one of those analyzing the numbers. Associated Press, [10/25/09]

WMO Secretary-General: "It Is A Misinterpretation Of The Data And Of Scientific Knowledge." Michel Jarraud, secretary-general of the United Nations' World Meteorological Organization, wrote in March 2009 that "[i]t is a misinterpretation of the data and of scientific knowledge to point to one year as the warmest on record ... and then to extrapolate that cooler subsequent years invalidate the reality of global warming and its effects." Jarraud further wrote:

The difference between climate variability and climate change is critical, not just for scientists or those engaging in policy debates about warming. Just as one cold snap does not change the global warming trend, one heat wave does not reinforce it. Since the beginning of the 20th century, the global average surface temperature has risen 1.33 degrees Fahrenheit.

Evidence of global warming has been documented in widespread decreases in snow cover, sea ice and glaciers. The 11 warmest years on record occurred in the past 13 years. *The Washington Post*, [3/21/09]

NASA: "Global Warming Theory Does Not Posit A Linear, Year-To-Year Increase In Temperatures." From a February 2010 article on NASA's GISS website:

Even as man-made greenhouse gases exert a consistent pressure on the climate, trapping more heat close to the surface of our planet, surface temperatures from year to year will fluctuate depending on the naturally variable forces at work around the globe. In the early 1990s, the mass of sulfates blasted into the atmosphere by the eruption of the Mt. Pinatubo volcano reflected sunlight and counteracted much of the man-made warming effect for several years. In 1998 El Niño combined with the man-made effect to give us one of the warmest years ever.

Allowing for this variability, global warming theory does not posit a linear, year-to-year increase in temperatures. Nor does it say that harsh winter weather will simply end. What it does say is that increasing concentrations of gases such as carbon dioxide and methane, with unchecked growth, will contribute a greater and greater warming influence on the world's climate. NASA, Goddard Institute for Space Studies, [2/23/10]

Fox: Hacked Emails Show Scientists Are "Fudging Data To Make Their Case For Global Warming"

Varney: Hacked Emails "Suggest Scientists Are Fudging Data To Make Their Case For Global Warming." On Fox News' Your World, Stuart Varney stated, " 'Climategate' set to break wide open today. ... Hacked emails from Britain suggesting scientists are fudging data to make their case for global warming." Fox News, *Your World with Neil Cavuto*, [11/24/09]

Kilmeade: Hackers "Found Out" That Scientists "Are Fudging The Numbers And Massaging The Statistics To Get Conclusions." On Fox & Friends, co-host Brian Kilmeade said: "This is huge. They hacked into some accounts -- I don't know how they did it -- but they found out that those people who say that we're in the middle of global warming, climate change, it's cataclysmic if we don't act soon, well, are fudging the numbers and massaging the statistics to get conclusions that would alert the whole world that we have to quickly act." Fox News, *Fox & Friends*, [12/2/09]

Hemmer: "Leaked Emails Reveal That Scientists Use, Quote, 'Tricks' To Hide Evidence Of A Decline In Global Temperatures." On America's Newsroom, co-host Bill Hemmer falsely claimed that "recently leaked emails reveal that scientists use, quote, 'tricks' to hide evidence of a decline in global temperatures over the past, say, few decades." Fox News, *America's Newsroom,*[12/3/09]

Doocy: Emails Prove Academics, Scientists "Have Been Doctoring" Data To Prove Global Warming. On Fox & Friends, co-host Steve Doocy said: "[I]t's interesting, so these email were -- apparently they got them -- somebody hacked into that university's thing. And essentially it proves that over the last number of years, members of academia, the science community who say global warming is caused by man, have been doctoring the figures and facts and stuff like that." Fox News, *Fox & Friends*, [12/3/09]

Kilmeade: "They Actually Say The Word 'Trickery.' " Kilmeade said: "I understand that people don't have their whole lives to dedicate to climate change, but if you read these emails, you don't need to be a scientist to understand. They actually say the word 'trickery' when it comes to numbers and to reach conclusions." Fox News, *Fox & Friends*, [12/3/09]

Hannity Cites Emails To Claim Scientists "Were Certainly Fudging" Data. On his Fox News show, Hannity stated of the emails, "If they weren't dumping data, well, they were certainly fudging it. Another email between these colleagues from nine years prior shows the dishonesty was long in the works. It reads, quote, 'I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps for each series for the last 20 years, i.e., from 1981 onwards, you know, to hide the decline.' Well, that would be the decline in global temperatures. So could it be any more clear that the so-called climate scientists are hoodwinking the entire world community?" Fox News, *Hannity*, [12/3/10]

Kellogg: Emails Suggested Scientists "Were Trying To Manipulate The Data." On Fox News' America's Newsroom, Hemmer said that the stolen emails "suggested researchers manipulated some of that data that support the theory of manmade warming." Later during the segment, Fox News' Amy Kellogg stated that "the story is widely being called 'Climategate' " and that the stolen emails suggested that scientists "were trying to manipulate the data." Fox News, *America's Newsroom*, [12/10/09]

REALITY: Numerous Inquiries Found No Evidence That Scientists Falsified Data. The AP reported on March 31, 2010, that "[t]he House of Commons' Science and Technology Committee said Wednesday that they'd seen no evidence to support charges that the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit or its director, Phil Jones, had tampered with data or perverted the peer review process to exaggerate the threat of global warming of two of the most serious criticisms levied against the climatologist and his colleagues." CBS/Associated Press, [3/31/10]

An independent panel led by Lord Oxburgh similarly found "no evidence of any deliberate scientific malpractice in any of the work of the Climatic Research Unit and had it been there we believe that it is likely that we would have detected it. Rather we found a small group of dedicated if slightly disorganised researchers who were ill-prepared for being the focus of public attention." CBS News, [4/14/10]

CNN reported that a seven-month review conducted by Muir Russell "found no evidence to question the 'rigor and honesty' of scientists involved" and concluded that "scientists at the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU) did not unduly influence reports detailing the scale of the threat of global warming produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)." CNN.com, [7/7/10]

Email Referencing A "Trick" To "Hide The Decline" Was Misrepresented By Fox. As FactCheck.org explained:

Claims that the e-mails are evidence of fraud or deceit, however, misrepresent what they actually say. A prime example is a 1999 e-mail from [CRU director Phil] Jones, who wrote: "I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e., from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline." Skeptics claim the words "trick" and "decline" show Jones is using sneaky manipulations to mask a decline in global temperatures. But that's not the case. Actual temperatures, as measured by scientific instruments such as thermometers, were rising at the time of the writing of this decade-old e-mail, and (as we've noted) have continued to rise since then. Jones was referring to the decline in temperatures implied by measurements of the width and density of tree rings. In recent decades, these measures indicate a dip, while more accurate instrument-measured temperatures continue to rise.

Scientists at CRU use tree-ring data and other "proxy" measurements to estimate temperatures from times before instrumental temperature data began to be collected. However, since about 1960, tree-ring data have diverged from actual measured temperatures. Far from covering it up, CRU scientists and others have published reports of this divergence many times. The "trick" that Jones was writing about in his 1999 e-mail was simply adding the actual, measured instrumental data into a graph of historic temperatures. Jones says it's a "trick" in the colloquial sense of an adroit feat -- "a clever thing to do," as he put it -- not a deception. What's hidden is the fact that tree-ring data in recent decades doesn't track with thermometer measurements. FactCheck.org, [12/10/09]

Fox: El Nino Is The Cause For Warming Of Past 30 Years

FoxNews.com Forwards Claim That El Nino Explains Warming Of Past 30 Years.From a January 24 FoxNews.com article:

Of course temperatures are up, said Joe Bastardi, a meteorologist with Accuweather: It's El Niño, stupid.

"El Niños cause spikes up. La Niñas drop it down," Bastardi told FoxNews.com. "Why have we gone up overall in the past 30 years? Because we've been in a warm cycle in the Pacific," he said. "But the tropical Pacific has cooled dramatically, and it's like turning down your thermostat -- it takes a while, but the house will cool." FoxNews.com, [1/24/11]

REALITY: Scientists Say El Nino Can't Explain Long-Term Warming Trend.David Pierce, a climate scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography responded to the question, "How do climate scientists know that the warming in the past 30 years is not due to El Ninos?" by writing that "the main way we know that El Nino is not responsible for the "global warming" in recent decades is that the up-and-down temperature sequence of the El Ninos and La Ninas does not match the long-term, secular rise in temperatures":

This question reminds me of when I was young, and my grandfather took me and my 5-year old cousin on an elevator ride. My grandfather told her that if she jumped up and down, she could jump to the top of the building. So she energetically jumped up and down, and after a minute the elevator doors opened, and there we were at the top of the building! My cousin was mighty impressed.

Of course, she was only 5, so we can forgive her for not understanding that it's perfectly possible for two things to be happening at the same time. She was jumping up and down, but the elevator car was going up at the same time. El Nino and the warming we have seen over the last 30 years are like that. We have had El Ninos (warm events) and La Ninas (cold events), which push the Earth up and down in temperature. (By the National Center for Environmental Predictions's count -- they are part of NOAA, who also runs the National Weather Service -- we have had about 11 El Nino (warm) events since 1970, and about 10 La Nina (cold) events). At the same time, there has been a long-term, systematic warming of the planet. So the main way we know that El Nino is not responsible for the "global warming" in recent decades is that the up-and-down temperature sequence of the El Ninos and La Ninas does not match the long-term, secular rise in temperatures.

Another way you can check if El Nino/La Nina are responsible for he planetary warming is by examining the regions that they tend to influence, and see if there is a match. The planetary warming can be seen across broad swaths of the globe, but is concentrated in the polar regions. El Nino warming is concentrated in the tropics. So the spatial signature of El Nino warming does not match the spatial pattern of global warming either. [Email to Media Matters, 1/26/11]

Kevin Trenberth Of NCAR: "The Statements Are Utter Nonsense." Kevin Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), told Media Matters via email:

The heat has to come from somewhere. In El Nino: or really the ENSO cycle of El Nino and then La Nina, the heat builds up during La Nina, and then is redistributed and comes out of the ocean during and following El Nino.

This is well documented (I can point you to papers). So there is a mini global warming (increase in temperature) in the latter part of El Nino.

The heat has to come from somewhere and so if the climate is warming because of a warm cycle in the Pacific, where did the heat come from? If it just comes from the ocean then the ocean must be cooling down. It isn't. Of course it is global warming from increased greenhouse gases that warms the ocean!

The statements are utter nonsense. [Email to Media Matters, 1/26/11]

RealClimate: Scientists Have "Known For Decades" That El Nino Correlates With Global Temperatures.From a July 2009 post on Real Climate, a science blog written by working climate scientists:

First, there is an atrocious paper that has just been published in JGR by McLean, de Freitas and Carter that is doing the rounds of the denialosphere. These authors make the completely unsurprising point that that there is a correlation between ENSO indices and global mean temperature - something that has been well known for decades - and then go on to claim that that all trends are explained by this correlation as well. This is somewhat surprising since their method of analysis (which involves taking the first derivative of any changes) eliminates the influence of any trends in the correlation. RealClimate.org, [7/24/09]

Scientists Seek To Account For El Nino Effects When Evaluating Climate Change.Physicist John Cook wrote on his website that "[t]here have been various attempts to filter out the ENSO signal from the temperature record," adding that analyses have confirmed that El Ninos have a "strong short term effect on global temperature but cannot explain the long term trend." From the post:

An examination of the temperature record from 1880 to 2007 finds internal variability such as El Nino has relatively small impact on the long term trend (Hoerling 2008). Instead, they find long term trends in sea surface temperatures are driven predominantly by the planet's energy imbalance.

There have been various attempts to filter out the ENSO signal from the temperature record. We've examined one such paper by Fawcett 2007 when addressing the global warming stopped in 1998 argument. Similarly, Thompson 2008 filters out the ENSO signal from the temperature record. What remains is a warming trend with less variability. SkepticalScience.com, [9/3/10]

Fox: Climate Science Warned Of Global Cooling In The 1970s

FoxNews.com: In 1970 "One Researcher Predicted That The Planet Would Be 11 Degrees Colder By The Year 2000."One of the five reasons FoxNews.com gave to be skeptical of global warming science is that "Forecasts are often wrong." The article further stated that "in 1970 at the first Earth Day event, one researcher predicted that the planet would be 11 degrees colder by the year 2000." FoxNews.com, [1/24/11]
Bolling: "30 Years Ago, We Worried About Global Cooling. Now We're Worried About Global Warming."During an interview with Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), Eric Bolling read headlines from 1974 about cooling temperatures and stated, "30 years ago, we worried about global cooling. Now we`re worried about global warming. Is this not just the global cooling and warming over the course of 30-year periods?" [Fox News,Your World With Neil Cavuto, 2/11/10, accessed via Nexis]
Hoenig: "The Greens" Always Like To Push "These Doomsday Scenarios."Fox Business analyst Jonathin Hoenig stated, "the horror pictures, these doomsday scenarios -- that is what the greens always like to portray, right? It was population growth in the 1960s. It was global cooling in the 1970s. And now it is climate change, which of course is the new world word for global warming, because you can't say global warming when it's record low temperatures in Copenhagen." [Fox Business Network, Cavuto, 12/18/09, accessed via Nexis]
Beck: In 1975, Newsweek Warned Of "Coming Planetary Ice age."Glenn Beck claimed that "The Earth and the environment are the progressive replacement for God." He added that "in 1975, Newsweek carried this story of the coming planetary ice age due to global cooling. Remember that? Now, because of our bad SUVs, according to Al Gore, the earth has a temperature -- uh-oh." [Fox News, Glenn Beck, 9/2/09]

REALITY: There Was No Consensus Among Climate Scientists On Global Cooling In The 1970s.A September 2008 article in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, a peer-reviewed publication, investigated the "pervasive myth" that "there was a consensus among climate scientists of the 1970s that either global cooling or a full-fledged ice age was imminent." The article found:

A review of the climate science literature from 1965 to 1979 shows this myth to be false. The myth's basis lies in a selective misreading of the texts both by some members of the media at the time and by some observers today. In fact, emphasis on greenhouse warming dominated the scientific literature even then. *Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society*, [September 2008]

Survey: 97% of 77 Active Climate Scientists Said "Human Activity Is A Significant Contributing Factor" In Changing Global Temperatures. A survey conducted by Peter Doran and Maggie Kendall Zimmerman of the University of Illinois asked Earth scientists:

When compared with pre-1800s levels, do you think that mean global temperatures have generally risen, fallen, or remained relatively constant?

Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures?

With 3146 individuals completing the survey, the participant response rate for the survey was 30.7%. This is a typical response rate for Web-based surveys.

[...]

Results show that overall, 90% of participants answered "risen" to question 1 and 82% answered yes to question 2. In general, as the level of active research and specialization in climate science increases, so does agreement with the two primary questions. In our survey, the most specialized and knowledgable respondents (with regard to climate change) are those who listed climate science as their area of expertise and who also have published more than 50% of their recent peer-reviewed papers on the subject of climate change (79 individuals in total). Of these specialists, 96.2% (76 of 79) answered "risen" to question 1 and 97.4% (75 of 77) answered yes to question 2. *Eos, Transactions, American Geophysical Union*, [1/20/09]

Study: 97-98% Of The Most Active Climate Researchers Support Tenets Of Human-Caused Climate Change. From a study led by William Anderegg of Stanford University:

Although preliminary estimates from published literature and expert surveys suggest striking agreement among climate scientists on the tenets of anthropogenic climate change (ACC), the American public expresses substantial doubt about both the anthropogenic cause and the level of scientific agreement underpinning ACC. A broad analysis of the climate scientist community itself, the distribution of credibility of dissenting researchers relative to agreeing researchers, and the level of agreement among top climate experts has not been conducted and would inform future ACC discussions. Here, we use an extensive dataset of 1,372 climate researchers and their publication and citation data to show that (i) 97-98% of the climate researchers most actively publishing in the field support the tenets of ACC outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and (ii) the relative climate expertise and scientific prominence of the researchers unconvinced of ACC are substantially below that of the convinced researchers. *Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences*, [6/21/10]

Fox: "NASA Acknowledges Solar Cycle, Not Man, Responsible For Global Warming"

Napolitano Mischaracterized NASA Report To Deny Humans Cause Global Warming. Fox News' Andrew Napolitano stated, "NASA's Goddard Space Center made a remarkable discovery. The headline from the DailyTech is -- you're not going to believe this -- quote: 'NASA acknowledges solar cycle, not man, responsible for global warming.'" Napolitano then asked if James Hansen, head of GISS "will give up on trying to say people heat the Earth and people cause global warming, or if the man who produced the report will get fired for going against the green -- I mean, against the grain." Fox News, *Glenn Beck*, [6/8/09]

REALITY: NASA Report Said "Greenhouse Gases Have Been The Dominant Influence On Recent Climate Change." The NASA report to which Napolitano referred explained that the sun has influenced Earth's climate "since life began" and that "before the Industrial Age, the sun and volcanic eruptions were the major influences on Earth's climate change." NASA went on to state: "Since the Industrial Revolution, however, new forces have begun to exert significant influence on Earth's climate," namely, "greenhouse gases we put into the atmosphere." From the report:

The sun has powered almost everything on Earth since life began, including its climate. The sun also delivers an annual and seasonal impact, changing the character of each hemisphere as Earth's orientation shifts through the year. Since the Industrial Revolution, however, new forces have begun to exert significant influence on Earth's climate.

"For the last 20 to 30 years, we believe greenhouse gases have been the dominant influence on recent climate change," said Robert Cahalan, climatologist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

[...]

Before the Industrial Age, the sun and volcanic eruptions were the major influences on Earth's climate change. Earth warmed and cooled in cycles. Major cool periods were ice ages, with the most recent ending about 11,000 years ago.

"Right now, we are in between major ice ages, in a period that has been called the Holocene," said Cahalan. "Over recent decades, however, we have moved into a human-dominated climate that some have termed the Anthropocene. The major change in Earth's climate is now really dominated by human activity, which has never happened before."

[...]

Unless we find a way to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases we put into the atmosphere, such as carbon dioxide from fossil fuel burning, the solar influence is not expected to dominate climate change. But the solar variations are expected to continue to modulate both warming and cooling trends at the level of 0.1 to 0.2 degrees Celsius (0.18 to 0.26 Fahrenheit) over many years. NASA, Goddard Space Flight Center, [5/7/08]

Napolitano Misquoted Headline From His Source. Citing a DailyTech blog post, Napolitano stated: "The headline from the DailyTech is -- you're not going to believe this -- quote: 'NASA acknowledges solar cycle, not man, responsible for global warming.' " In fact, the headline of the blog post is: "NASA study acknowledges solar cycle, not man, responsible for past warming" [emphasis added]. DailyTech, [6/4/09]

Fox: CRU's Jones Told BBC That "The Middle Ages Were Warmer Than ... The Climate Now"

Varney: Jones Said "The Middle Ages Were Warmer Than ... The Climate Now." Distorting a BBC interview with Phil Jones, Varney claimed that Jones "now says that the middle ages were warmer than the climate now, the temperature now. How did that happen way before industrialization?" Fox News, *America's Newsroom*, [2/16/10]

Hannity: Jones Said "The World May Have Been Warmer In Medieval Times. On his Fox News show, Hannity stated: "In an interview with the BBC over the weekend, Jones admitted that there has been no statistically significant warming since 1995, that the world may have been warmer in Medieval Times, that is to say up until now, which would undermine the theory of this manmade global warming all together. And that warming in recent times mirrors warming patterns from pre-industrial periods." Fox News, *Hannity*, [2/15/10]

Beck: Jones Said "To Quote, Obviously, The Late 20th Century Was Not Unprecedented." Beck stated on his Fox News show: "Phil Jones admits, yes, no real consensus on this one. Too much debate on whether an event known as the medieval warming period, yes, was global in nature and hotter than it is like right now. So, to quote, obviously, the late 20th century was not unprecedented. Oh, good." Fox News, *Glenn Beck*, [2/15/10]

Fox & Friends Claimed Jones "Hints 'Warming' May Not Be Man Made." During a segment on Jones' interview with the BBC, Fox & Friends aired on-screen text claiming, "PROFESSOR HINTS 'WARMING' MAY NOT BE MAN MADE." Fox News, *Fox & Friends*, [[2/16/10]

REALITY: Jones Said We Don't Know "Whether The Medieval Warm Period Was Global In Extent." From the BBC Q&A with Jones:

[BBC:] G -- There is a debate over whether the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) was global or not. If it were to be conclusively shown that it was a global phenomenon, would you accept that this would undermine the premise that mean surface atmospheric temperatures during the latter part of the 20th Century were unprecedented?

[JONES:] There is much debate over whether the Medieval Warm Period was global in extent or not. The MWP is most clearly expressed in parts of North America, the North Atlantic and Europe and parts of Asia. For it to be global in extent the MWP would need to be seen clearly in more records from the tropical regions and the Southern Hemisphere. There are very few palaeoclimatic records for these latter two regions.

Of course, if the MWP was shown to be global in extent and as warm or warmer than today (based on an equivalent coverage over the NH and SH) then obviously the late-20th century warmth would not be unprecedented. On the other hand, if the MWP was global, but was less warm that today, then current warmth would be unprecedented.

We know from the instrumental temperature record that the two hemispheres do not always follow one another. We cannot, therefore, make the assumption that temperatures in the global average will be similar to those in the northern hemisphere. BBC News, [2/13/10]

Jones: Cause Of Previous Warming Periods Differs From "Recent Warming," Which Is "Predominantly Manmade." During his Q&A with the BBC, Jones stated that "the warming rates" of previous warming periods after 1860 are "similar and not statistically significantly different" from the most recent warming period. Jones was later asked, "If you agree that there were similar periods of warming since 1850 to the current period, and that the MWP [Medieval warm Period] is under debate, what factors convince you that recent warming has been largely man-made?" Jones responded, "The fact that we can't explain the warming from the 1950s by solar and volcanic forcing." He further stated that it would notbe reasonable to conclude that "recent warming is not predominately manmade" from the evidence that there have been previous periods of warming since 1850. BBC News, [2/13/10]

Jones: "There's Evidence That Most Of The Warming Since The 1950s Is Due To Human Activity."Jones was asked by the BBC, "How confident are you that warming has taken place and that humans are mainly responsible?" Jones stated that "I'm 100% confident that the climate has warmed" and that "I would go along with IPCC Chapter 9 -- there's evidence that most of the warming since the 1950s is due to human activity." As noted above, Jones also stated that "[t]he fact that we can't explain the warming from the 1950s by solar and volcanic forcing" indicates that recent warming is manmade. BBC News, [2/13/10]

Commie muppets: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/05/fox-news-the-muppets-are-communist_n_1129173.html?ref=mostpopular

also capt planet

Last week, on the network's "Follow the Money" program, host Eric Bollingwent McCarthy on the new, Disney-released film, "The Muppets," insisting that its storyline featuring an evil oil baron made it the latest example of Hollywood's so-called liberal agenda.

Bolling, who took issue with the baron's name, Tex Richman, wasjoined by Dan Gainor of the conservative Media Research Center, who was uninhibited with his criticism.

"It's amazing how far the left will go just to manipulate your kids, to convince them, give the anti-corporate message," he said.

"They've been doing it for decades. Hollywood, the left, the media, they hate the oil industry," Gainor continued. "They hate corporate America. And so you'll see all these movies attacking it, whether it was 'Cars 2,' which was another kids' movie, the George Clooney movie 'Syriana,' 'There Will Be Blood,' all these movies attacking the oil industry, none of them reminding people what oil means for most people: fuel to light a hospital, heat your home, fuel an ambulance to get you to the hospital if you need that. And they don't want to tell that story."

Indeed, there was no mention of the benefits of oil drilling in the Muppets, but there was also no discussion of any other aspect of the industry. Richman, played by Chris Cooper, was out to destroy the Muppets theater. Kermit and his friends, then, were not committed environmentalists (though one must imagine the frog is concerned with his swampy homeland) but simply puppets looking to save a place they once loved.

Still, Gainor blamed the film, and its predecessors, for Occupy Wall Street and the environmental movement.

"This is what they're teaching our kids. You wonder why we've got a bunch of Occupy Wall Street people walking around all around the country, they've been indoctrinated, literally, for years by this kind of stuff," Gainor said. "Whether it was 'Captain Planet' or Nickelodeon's 'Big Green Help,' or 'The Day After Tomorrow,' the Al Gore-influenced movie, all of that is what they're teaching, is that corporations is bad, the oil industry is bad, and ultimately what they're telling kids is what they told you in the movie 'The Matrix': that mankind is a virus on poor old mother Earth."

The Teletubbies were unavailable for comment. Mahna-Mahna.

related;

7. Cartoon penguins: Biggest threat to children since SpongeBob

By Jess Zimmerman

5 Dec 2011 2:05 PM

I'm sorry, I will never get sick of right-wing wig-flipping over children's entertainment. Apparently anything but VeggieTales is Marxist indoctrination to some people -- and what with Big Government pushing healthy eating, it's not long before a wholesome Christian message isn't enough to keep talking vegetables conservative-friendly.

You'll remember, of course, the "Fox & Friends" hosts flipping a nutty over SpongeBob SquarePants. Millionth verse, same as the first: Kyle Smith at the right-leaning New York Postis calling Happy Feet 2, that no doubt heartwarming tale about dancing cartoon penguins, "Kiddie Karl Marx." Like "Fox & Friends," he's worried about the environmental take-home message:...

tracking smears: http://mediamattersaction.org/smears/

.......2008

Just kidding. But this is the sort of “logic” that you frequently find on the Fox Special Report “Grapevine” where reality is condensed into short sound bites based on whatever right wing talking points are being communicated. Since I’ve started reviewing Special Report, I’ve noticed that “the Grapevine” has cited a number of “studies” hereand here) which purport to show that global warming is no big deal. These studies turn out to be funded by right wing groups with ties to right wing “think tanks” (to use the words “right wing” and “think” all in one sentence is a bit of a stretch!) who are, in turn, beholden to groups with a vested interest in the “conclusions” of said studies. And to those who don’t realize that not all studies are created equal, this information has the aura of academic respectability when nothing could be further from the truth. At any rate, last night’s (June 2nd) “Grapevine had polling data which was just plain bizarre.

...The “same survey in the Washington Examiner” (a tabloid paper) is merely the Schweizer article (Did Hume just misspeak, confusing the Washington Examiner with the right of center San Francisco Examiner or was his copy editor asleep at the switch?) . And let’s talk about the “Culture and Media Institute” which is, according to Source Watch, (drum roll please) a project connected with none other than right wing culture and morality guru, Brent Bozell whose latest tiradewas about the degeneracy of “30 Rock’s” “MILF Island” episode

watchdog:

http://www.newshounds.us/

http://www.newshounds.us/2008/06/03/studies_say_that_the_grapevine_is_less_filling_and_tastes_putrid.php

David Frum Claims He Was Blacklisted From Fox “News” For Criticizing Rush Limbaugh

Reported by Aunty Em - Mon 7:22 PM

David Frum, who has been a Republican all his adult life, as he says in a recent New York Magazine article, called “When Did the GOP Lose Touch With Reality?” answers the titular question by laying much of the blame for that at the feet of Fox “News.”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/21/fox-news-viewers-less-informed-people-fairleigh-dickinson_n_1106305.html?view=print&comm_ref=false

Fox News viewers are less informed than people who don't watch any news, according to a new poll from Fairleigh Dickinson University. http://publicmind.fdu.edu/2011/knowless/

The poll surveyed New Jersey residents about the uprisings in Egypt and the Middle East, and where they get their news sources. The study, which controlled for demographic factors like education and partisanship, found that "people who watch Fox News are 18-points less likely to know that Egyptians overthrew their government" and "6-points less likely to know that Syrians have not yet overthrown their government" compared to those who watch no news.

Overall, 53% of all respondents knew that Egyptians successfully overthrew Hosni Mubarak and 48% knew that Syrians have yet to overthrow their government.

Dan Cassino, a political science professor at Fairleigh Dickinson, explained in a statement, "Because of the controls for partisanship, we know these results are not just driven by Republicans or other groups being more likely to watch Fox News. Rather, the results show us that there is something about watching Fox News that leads people to do worse on these questions than those who don’t watch any news at all."

This isn't the first study that has found that Fox News viewers more misinformed in comparison to others. Last year,a study from the University of Maryland found that Fox News viewers were more likely to believe false information about politics.

"Sunday morning news shows tend to spend a lot more time on a single issue than other

news broadcasts, and they are less likely to degenerate into people shouting at each

other," said Cassino. "Viewers pick up more information from this sort of calm discussion

than from other formats. Unfortunately, these shows have a much smaller audience than

the shouters."

Fairleigh Dickinson University’s PublicMind

Fairleigh Dickinson University’s PublicMind Poll TM home 2

New Jerseyans are not necessarily more likely to be knowledgeable about domestic

politics than international events. Just 47% are able to identify the Occupy Wall Street

protesters as predominantly Democratic: 11 % think they are Republicans. Viewers of

cable news on MSNBC are the most likely to think the protestors are Republicans.

Watching the left-leaning MSNBC news channel is associated with a 10-point increase

in the likelihood of misidentifying the protesters.

Exposure to Sunday morning news shows helps respondents on this question: seeing

these programs leads to an 11-point increase in the likelihood of getting the answer

right. Listening to NPR also helps, but the biggest aid to answering correctly is The Daily

Show with Jon Stewart, which leads to a 6-point decrease in identifying the protestors

as Republicans, and a 12-point increase in the likelihood of giving the correct answer.

"Jon Stewart has not spent a lot of time on some of these issues," said Cassino. "But

the results show that when he does talk about something, his viewers pick up a lot more

information than they would from other news sources."

Only 55% of New Jerseyans are able to name correctly either ...: from fairleigh study

maryland:

UPDATE: Fox News senior vice president for news Michael Clemente has responded to the study which found that his network's viewers are more misinformed about American political issues than any other channel. In a statement to the New York Times' Brian Stelter, Clemente disparaged the University of Maryland, where the study was done.

"The latest Princeton Review ranked the University of Maryland among the top schools for having ‘Students Who Study The Least’ and being the ‘Best Party School’ – given these fine academic distinctions, we’ll regard the study with the same level of veracity it was ‘researched’ with," Clemente said.

"For the record, the Princeton Review says the University of Maryland ranks among the 'Best Northeastern Colleges," Stelter notes. "It was No. 19 on the Review’s list of 'Best Party Schools.'"

ORIGINAL POST: Fox News viewers are much more likely than others to believe false information about American politics, a new study concludes.

The study, conducted by the University of Maryland, judged how likely consumers of various news outlets and publications were to believe misinformation about a wide range of political issues. Overall, 90% of respondents said they felt they had heard false information being given to them during the 2010 election campaign. However, while consumers of just about every news outlet believed some information that was false, the study found that Fox News viewers, regardless of political information, were "significantly more likely" to believe that:

--Most economists estimate the stimulus caused job losses (12 points more likely)

--Most economists have estimated the health care law will worsen the deficit (31 points)

--The economy is getting worse (26 points)

--Most scientists do not agree that climate change is occurring (30 points)

--The stimulus legislation did not include any tax cuts (14 points)

--Their own income taxes have gone up (14 points)

--The auto bailout only occurred under Obama (13 points)

--When TARP came up for a vote most Republicans opposed it (12 points)

--And that it is not clear that Obama was born in the United States (31 points)

In addition, the study said, increased viewership of Fox News led to increased belief in these false stories.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/12/17/fox-news-viewers-are-the-_n_798146.html

For the most part, yes. So what was all that barking that woke America up in the middle of the night?

It was the right-wing media, and its echoes, that you heard.

When historians look back on the surge and decline of the Tea Party Movement in America, and they will, I believe the focus will be how something that was real -- anger and fear among a segment of the middle class that has been decimated by the decline of the U.S. economy -- was hijacked by a band of high-def hucksters, starting with media stars and their bosses seeking ratings, attention and cash, not necessarily in that order. The behind-the-scene billionaires eager to save their oligarchy, and the craven politicians that they own, piled on later.

I've been thinking a lot about the Tea Party recently. It's been just over a year since my book on the birth of the movement -- The Backlash: Right-Wing Radicals, High-Def Hucksters, and Paranoid Politics in the Age of Obama-- was published (and it's just been released in more affordable paperback and e-bookeditions.) When I reported and wrote the book in 2009 and 2010, it was undoubtedly a current event, but now already it has the feel of history -- a moment in American politics that was both remarkable and alarming in nature.

How has the main premise of The Backlash -- that a cauldron of fear among the denizens of the American heartland over their grim economic fortunes and the rise of a non-white majority, punctuated by the election of a black president, was then stirred up by cynical manipulators like Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin -- held up over a year's time?

So well that the president of Fox News, Roger Ailes, just essentially pleaded guilty to that central argument. This week, Ailes told Newsweek's Howard Kurtz, in a much discussed article, that his FNC has undergone....

....a "course correction," quietly adopted at Fox over the last year. Glenn Beck's inflammatory rhetoric--his ranting about Obama being a racist -- "became a bit of a branding issue for us" before the hot-button host left in July, Ailes says. So too did Sarah Palin's being widely promoted as the GOP's potential savior -- in large measure through her lucrative platform at Fox. Privately, Fox executives say the entire network took a hard right turn after Obama's election, but, as the Tea Party's popularity fades, is edging back toward the mainstream.

Fascinating, but there's also a part of the tale here that's more than a tad disingenuous. One reason that the Tea Party is fading is that Fox is no longer promoting it aggressively, especially not since Beck departed at the start of this summer. And more importantly, the Tea Party would not have burst onto the scene in the first place without Ailes' Rupert Murdoch-owned network playing such a large part in creating it.

Remember, the concept of the Tea Party itself came not from the masses but from -- not on Fox, surprisingly, but by CNBC's Rick Santelli surrounded by affluent traders on the floor of the Chicago financial exchange. To be sure, there was genuine public rage about the 2008 economic crisis and the bailout of the big banks, but the right-wing media -- which has remarkable influence in the top-down, narrowcasted "Dittohead" world of American conservatives -- steered anger away from Wall Street before Jan. 20. 2009, and toward 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue after that date.

Credit that above mentioned "hard right turn" on Fox -- which incessantly promoted Tax Day rallies on April 15, 2009 to drive up turnout and then covered them as major news events, a self-fulfilling prophecy. Helping to pay for some of the events was the Americans for Prosperity, the front group for the Koch Brothers who had every incentive to tap the public's raw energies for its pet issues, including low taxes for billionaires and climate-change denial. Republican pols desperate for "the next new thing" in those early Obama days took their cue from Fox, instead of the other way around. None more so than a certain Sunbelt governor who attended three rallies that day and who said at one that secession from the Union wasn't such a bad idea. You see...Fox didn't just create the Tea Party, but the network -- with a huge hand from Glenn Beck -- also created Rick Perry.

Do you still doubt that the froth of the Tea Party was whipped up by the media? Think about this: The zenith for Glenn Beck (whose show launched on the day before Obama took the oath of office) came on Friday the 13th of March, 2009, when in an emotional rant ("I just love my country," he wept, "and I fear for it") he invoked the spirit of post-9/11 America and even announced a companion movement to the Tea Party called the 9/12 Project. Like magic, this 9/12 Project attracted thousands of enthusiastic joiners who posted anti-Obama rants online (in the post-9/11 spirit?). formed local chapters and turned out in decent numbers on the National Mall on Sept. 12, 2009, in an event that of course got considerable coverage on Fox.

Then Glenn Beck got bored with the 9/12 Project that he had created from thin airwaves. Then he went off the TV altogether. And the 9/12 Project also disappeared completely off the face of the American political map.

In The Backlash, I wrote about the fulfillment of the mid-1980s prophecies of the late media critic Neil Postman, who worried in his landmark book Amusing Ourselves to Death that entertainment values would subsume political discourse, that the powers-that-be would not resort to Orwellian censorship because we could be so easily and happily be manipulated instead. This is what exactly what we saw in the Glenn Beck and the Tea Party, which not uncoincidentally pretty much rose and fell the same time.

Even at its peak in 2009-10, the Tea Party Movement had the political juice to do one thing, which was turn out an energized army of Fox-watching zombies to win low-turnout primaries, as they did in Alaska with Joe Miller, in Nevada with Sharron Angle, and most famously in Delaware with Christine O'Donnell in Delaware. None of these extremists were able to win the general election, even in a throw-the-bums-out GOP tidal wave election.

And so suddenly it's 2011, and Roger Ailes and Fox News decide to pull a "course correction." And just like that, the Tea Party is barely anywhere to be found.

But here's the funny -- OK, actually not that funny -- thing. The chaos unleashed by Fox and friends on the American political system during those two years of the Obama backlash is going to be with us for a long, long time. Some of that is in the extremists like Kentucky's Rand Paul and Utah's Mike Lee who did zig-zag through the electoral maze of 2010 and we are now stuck with for the next six years, at least. But mainly it's in the fear that forces of nature like radio's Limbaugh and the brief surge of the Tea Party has created in the mainstream GOP, its members so afraid now of losing a primary like Delaware's Mike Castle did to O'Donnell at this time last year. That smell of fear moved once-compromise-minded Republicans like Arizona's John McCain to the extreme right, and scuttled what in 2008 had been bright hopes that Washington would take action on climate change and real immigration reform. It's what inspired so many GOPers to sign a no-tax-increase-ever pledge that will hamper America's efforts to dig from the current hole, even as the very real problem of unemployment is ignored.

And now comes Roger Ailes to essentially tell us that the whole thing was a politically motivated ratings gimmick. And yet the Beltway pundits and the politicians still can't realize or admit that the Tea Party was at its brief peak just a 26 percent tail wagging the American dog... or that the dog stopped barking months ago.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/will-bunch/tea-party-right-wing-media_b_984395.html?utm_source=DailyBrief&utm_campaign=092811&utm_medium=email&utm_content=BlogEntry&utm_term=Daily%20Brief

new weatherman nonsense:

:{http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-chameides/global-warming-fox-news-s_b_924878.html:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:

===

Fox Pox

Andrew Napolitano, 59

In a recent Washington Post article, a media analyst contended that Fox News was at a crossroads. He said the network was in danger of losing its credibility as a newsgathering operation because of far-right conspiracy-mongers like host Glenn Beck.

But Beck is not the only one weakening Fox's credibility. Another hot contender in the far right-wing advocacy department is Fox's "senior judicial analyst" â Judge Andrew Napolitano.

Napolitano, a former state judge in New Jersey, appears on several Fox shows and is broadcast on any given day over the television, radio and the Internet. He was scheduled to be the keynote speaker this past February at the first annual Tenth Amendment Summit in Atlanta, but was snowed in and never made it. He missed out on rubbing elbows with neo-Confederates, conspiracy theorists and antigovernment Patriot activists.

It seems the TV judge is vying to become a fixture on the far-right lecture circuit. He was also scheduled to address the 2010 New Hampshire Liberty Forum, a gathering of self-described "pro-liberty activists" who are striving to "cut the size and scope of government by about two-thirds or more."

Napolitano has joined other conspiracy theorists in falsely claiming that efforts to expand affordable housing through the Community Reinvestment Act were responsible for the crash of the economy in 2008. He called Sarah Palin's baseless accusation that Obama was trying to set up "death panels" a "legitimate concern." He falsely suggested that Obama bribed a congressman to change his vote on health care by appointing his brother to an appeals court.

Napolitano joined Fox in 1998. He appears daily on "The Big Story with John Gibson," co-hosts "Fox & Friends" once a week and is a regular on "The O'Reilly Factor." Napolitano taught constitutional law and jurisprudence at Seton Hall Law School for 11 years. He was the youngest life-tenured Superior Court judge in the history of New Jersey and served on the bench from 1987 to 1995. He returned to private practice in 1995 and began his career in broadcasting that same year.

huffpo

Today's (August 3) edition of Fox News'Fox & Friends included a remarkable exchange on the issue of SpongeBob Squarepants, climate change science, and the state of science education in the U.S. Apparently, using cartoons to teach children about important science issues of the day raises hackles at Fox, especially when those issues are at odds with their political perspectives. In particular, Fox & Friends attacked SpongeBob for an episode in which the role of human emissions (or at least SpongeBob and Mr. Krab's emissions) of carbon dioxide in global warming is made clear -- a scientific fact well understood for over a century.

Fox's Steve Doocy acknowledges that the planet is warming; but doesn't understand why. He says "the big question is, 'is it manmade, or is it just one of those gigantic climatic phases that we're going through.'" A colleague says "It's unproven science."

Phone hack

n the light of the News Corp phone-hacking scandal, it is clear that Murdoch's outfit had means, motive, and opportunity for the Climategate email hacking. News Corp certainly has a history of defaming climate scientists and a penchant for hacking.

Indeed, in this country, a division of News Corp had a federal case brought against it for "hacking its way into Floorgraphics's password protected computer system." The complaint said News America had "illegally accessed plaintiff's computer system and obtained proprietary information" and "disseminated false, misleading and malicious information about the plaintiff." Sounds familiar, no?

http://www.grist.org/climate-energy/2011-07-19-could-murdochs-news-corp-be-behind-climategate-too

Fox News host Eric Bolling pulled a Rudy Giuliani on Wednesday, asserting that there were no terrorist attacks on "American soil" during President Bush's term in office.

Giuliani famously made a similar assertion in early 2010, saying, "we had no domestic attacks under Bush." Of course, the 9/11 attacks happened under Bush.

Bolling's misstatement came during a discussion on the network's Glenn Beck replacement show, "The Five." He and a panelâwhich included former Bush spokeswoman Dana Perinoâwere arguing about whether Bush had been guilty of "fear-mongering" during his tenure. Panelist Bob Beckel said that the former president had used fear-mongering around the non-existent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. As he attempted to continue his point, Bolling cut him off and started to move on to the next segment.

"America was certainly safe between 2000 and 2008," he said. "I don't remember any attacks on American soil during that period of time." Nobody on the panel challenged this comment.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/14/eric-bolling-terrorist-attacks-bush_n_898135.html

in wake of UK scandal: (possible ny cops phone hacks in US 911?

Murdoch had help from brilliant, cynical aides on both sides of the pond. In England, it was the massively ethically challenged, wild-eyed redhead Rebekah Brooks; in America, it is the frumpy and grumpy Roger Ailes, the only man to run the Fox News Channel since it was launched in the mid-1990s. As recent documents have shown, Ailes -- who learned the American conservative politics of middle-class resentment at the foot of the master, Richard Nixon -- waslong involved in a scheme for a conservative TV counterweight to the so-called "liberal media." But it took the arrival of Murdoch years later to execute the plan with the vision that a conservative cable news network could make millions in profits while wielding influence on a scale that a "Headless Body in Topless Bar" newspaper could only dream of.

But Ailes and Murdoch -- with a typical disregard for the consequences -- created a monster as their FNC grew in popularity over the course of the 2000s. They held onto to their millions of viewers by playing to their emotions, and to what they felt was true about America -- regardless of whether it was actually true. Over the years, misinformed Fox viewers wielded more and more clout over a directionless Republican Party that in turn drove the U.S. body politic, with disastrous consequences.

You want examples?

Iraq and the war on terrorism: America's misguided "pre-emptive war" in the oil-rich Persian Gulf would not have been possible unless the 9/11 attacks and a response to terrorism became conflated with Saddam Hussein's Iraq, which for all its horrors had nothing to do with the assault on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The Fox News Channel, and its parade of GOP-talking-point infused hosts and military "experts," helped to make sure that wrongful conflation took place, as later evidence proved.

A 2003 poll by the Program on International Policy (PIPA) at the University of Maryland and Knowledge Networks found that regular Fox News viewers were significantly more likely than other news consumers to believe one of three significant falsehoods about the Iraq war -- that Iraq was somehow connected to 9/11, that weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq, or that global opinion was in favor of the war. These jingoistic myths -- most heavily adopted by Fox viewers -- fueled years of continued fighting in a war in which thousands of Americans and Iraqi civilians died needlessly.

Climate change: It's hard to believe in 2011, but there was a time a few years ago when a majority of Republicans, just like a majority of all Americans, believed that man-made global warming was real and needed to be addressed in some fashion. That was before a parade of global warming skeptics and outright deniers on Fox News Channel -- a development that was actually encouraged by FNC top management. Most famously,FNC's Washington bureau chief wrote in a December 2009 memo" 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."

In recent years, Fox News Channel has found a variety of ways to spread misinformation and outright lies about the state of the world's climate-- claiming, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, that the world is actually cooling -- and the plan has worked. A majority of Republicans now believe that climate change theories endorsed by 90 percent of the world's leading climatologists are a hoax, and more importantly, so do the political leaders they elect. Fox-fueled opposition scuttled what appeared to be momentum for climate change legislation in Washington, even as the planet records its hottest years on record and predictions of future food shortages and natural disasters grow more dire.

The 2010 elections: The right-wing tide that changed the direction of Congress last November was powered by a large turnout of conservative voters, who once again -- as research showed -- were misinformed on the issues if their primary source of information was Fox News. It started with what the Pulitzer Prize-winning fact-checking outfit Politifact called its Lie of the Year for 2010-- the reporting on Fox News that President Obama's health care plan was "a government takeover" of the system.

But that was just one area where Fox News viewers had bad info, according to a new report (PDF) by the Program on International Policy Attitudes; this study found that FNC watchers were much more likely to think that their taxes went up (they were cut in 2009 for most Americans) or that health care reform increases the deficit (it lowers it) or that Obama was possibly not born in the United States.

There's more, but I think you get the idea. Meanwhile, misinformed Fox viewers are the tail wagging the dog of American politics;just ask the now former South Carolina congressman who had the nerve to criticize the then-popular, now-departed FNC host Glenn Beck before his 2010 primary defeat. Increasingly, it's impossible to tell where Fox News stops and the Republican Party begins, which is whyit wasn't surprising to hear that FNC's Ailes even lobbied a would-be candidate, New Jersey's Chris Christie, to enter the 2012 White House race. Did Ailes think that would be good for the country or good for ratings?

That's the kind of ethical question that doesn't get asked any more at Murdoch's Fox News Channel than it was asked at Murdoch's News of the World. But the stakes in this country -- endless wars, looming environmental disasters, lousy policies that are leaving America mired in economic despair -- are far greater. So if you are outraged tonight by what the Murdoch empire was up to in Great Britain all these years -- and you should be -- than you should be doubly outraged by what they've pulled off here.

The only real question for America is what are we going to do about Rupert Murdoch now?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/will-bunch/murdochs-american-sins-le_b_892938.html?view=print

http://www.truth-out.org/all-publishers-men/1310135909?q=14-propaganda-techniques-fox-news-uses-brainwash-americans/1309612678

McKibben:

Whatâs become clear is that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, an organization formed in 1912, more than a century after the first local chamber came into being, is anything but a benign umbrella for American small businesses. Quite the opposite: itâs a hard-edged ideological shop. It was Glenn Beck, after all, who said of the chamber that âthey are us,â and urged his viewers to send them money. (Beck personally contributed $10,000 of the $32 million he earned in 2009.) The chamberâs chief lobbyist even called in to offer his personal thanks. It shouldnât have come as a great surprise: Beckâs Fox News parent, Rupert Murdochâs News Corporation, had given its own million-dollar donation to the chamber.

...

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175358/tomgram%3A_bill_mckibben%2C_chamber_of_carbon/

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0311/50505.html

Fox News has suspended contributors Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum until they decide whether to run for president.

Anchor Bret Baier announced on air late Wednesday morning that the network âhas suspended its contributor arrangementsâ with Gingrich and Santorum for the next 60 days.

Both, Baier said, âhave signaled possible runs for the presidencyâ and it âis Fox policyâ for them to be suspended.

With the suspensions, the network has taken its first big step to address mounting concerns that it could run afoul of campaign finance laws and journalistic ethics by continuing to keep on its payroll people who are maneuvering to run for president. But the suspensions of two contributors also leads to questions about three others on the Fox payroll â Mike Huckabee, Sarah Palin and John Bolton â who are also weighing White House bids.

THE FOX NEWS EFFECT: MEDIA BIAS AND VOTING*

STEFANO DELLAVIGNA AND ETHAN KAPLAN

Does media bias affect voting? We analyze the entry of Fox News in cable

markets and its impact on voting. Between October 1996 and November 2000, the

conservative Fox News Channel was introduced in the cable programming of 20

percent of U. S. towns. Fox News availability in 2000 appears to be largely

idiosyncratic, conditional on a set of controls. Using a data set of voting data for

9,256 towns, we investigate if Republicans gained vote share in towns where Fox

News entered the cable market by the year 2000. We find a significant effect of the

introduction of Fox News on the vote share in Presidential elections between 1996

and 2000. Republicans gained 0.4 to 0.7 percentage points in the towns that

broadcast Fox News. Fox News also affected voter turnout and the Republican

vote share in the Senate. Our estimates imply that Fox News convinced 3 to 28

percent of its viewers to vote Republican, depending on the audience measure. The

Fox News effect could be a temporary learning effect for rational voters, or a

permanent effect for nonrational voters subject to persuasion.

...The decentralized nature of the cable industry induced substantial

geographical variation in access to Fox News. Cable

companies in neighboring towns adopted Fox News in different

years, creating idiosyncratic differences in access. Since Fox

News is significantly to the right of all the other mainstream

television networks [Groseclose and Milyo 2005], the introduction

of Fox News into a cable market is likely to have had a significant

effect on the available political information in that cable market.

This is true whether Fox News represents the political center and

the rest of the media the liberal wing, or Fox News...A

third explanation is that viewers do not sufficiently account for

media bias and are subject to nonrational persuasion. In this

case, exposure to media slant systematically alters beliefs and

voting behavior. In the working paper version [DellaVigna and

Kaplan 2006] we model the latter two explanations.

The latter interpretation relates to behavioral literature on

nonrational persuasion [DeMarzo, Vayanos, and Zwiebel 2003].

Cain, Loewenstein, and Moore [2005] show in an experiment that

evaluators of information do not take sufficiently into account the

(known) incentives of the advisors and are thus persuaded by

their advice. Malmendier and Shanthikumar [forthcoming] show

that small investors follow the recommendations of affiliated

analysts, despite the conflict of interest of the analysts....concl:

We find a significant effect of exposure to Fox News on voting.

Towns with Fox News have a 0.4 to 0.7 percentage point higher

Republican vote share in the 2000 presidential elections, compared

to the 1996 elections. A vote shift of this magnitude is likely

to have been decisive in the 2000 elections. We also find an effect

on vote share in Senate elections, which Fox News did not cover,

suggesting that the Fox News impact extends to general political

beliefs. Finally, we find evidence that Fox News increased turnout

to the polls.

Based on this evidence and on microlevel audience data, we

estimate that exposure to Fox News induced a substantial percentage

of the non-Republican viewers to vote for the Republican

party, 3 to 8 percent according to the more inclusive audience

measure, and 11 to 28 percent according to the more restrictive

measure.

Groseclose, Timothy, and Jeff Milyo, âA Measure of Media Bias,â Quarterly Journal

of Economics, CXX (2005), 1191â1237.

Hamilton, James T., All the News Thatâs Fit to Sell (Princeton: Princeton University

Press, 2004).

Herman, Edward, and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political

Economy of the Mass Media (Pantheon Books, 1998).

Lakoff, George, Women, Fire and Dangerous Things (Chicago, IL: University of

Chicago Press,

http://www.econ.berkeley.edu/~sdellavi/wp/FoxVoteQJEAug07.pdf

2007 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of

Technology.

The Quarterly Journal of Economics, August 2007

fox as trimtab: http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2011/01/power-fox

Memo show fox news ordered coverage of climate gate

Sammon formerly of WA times

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Bill_Sammon

http://www.grist.org/article/2010-12-15-memo-fox-news-reporters-ordered-to-promote-climategate-conspirac

News Corporation, the Rupert Murdoch-owned media giant and parent company to the Fox News Channel, The Wall Street Journal, New York Post and the Fox television network, has given $1 million to the Republican Governors Association (RGA).

Brit Hume credits fox for 2000 victory

Fairness Doctrine abolished in '87, ownership regs steadily loosened Gt Unravel 281-

dark

Jim Moody does memo of day 68

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies

excerpt;

Carl Cameron, chief political correspondent of Fox News, authored a bogus "news article" on the Fox News website during October 2004. It contained three fabricated quotes attributed to Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry. The quotes included: "Women should like me! I do manicures," "Didn't my nails and cuticles look great?" and "I'm metrosexual [Bush's] a cowboy."^[citation ^needed] Fox News retracted the story and apologized, calling it a "jest" that became published through "fatigue and bad judgement, not malice."^{[^^128]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-127)

Accusations of bias

[edit] Political figures

Former Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean has referred to Fox News as a "right-wing propaganda machine,"^{[^^3]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-2) and several Democratic Party politicians have boycotted events hosted or sponsored by the network.^{[^^4]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-autogenerated4-3)^{[^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-autogenerated5-4)^{5]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-autogenerated5-4) In 2007, several major Democratic Party presidential candidates (Hillary Rodham Clinton, John Edwards, Barack Obama, and Bill Richardson) boycotted or dropped out of Fox News-sponsored or hosted debates,^{[^^4]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-autogenerated4-3)^{[^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-autogenerated5-4)^{5]^^[^^5]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-autogenerated5-4)^{[^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-5)^{6]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-5) forcing their cancellation. The Nevada State Democratic Party had originally agreed to co-host a Democratic debate with Fox News Channel in Reno, Nevada. Despite the opposition of groups like MoveOn.org, the party agreed to bring in Fox News in an effort to find "new ways to talk to new people." However, after Fox News chairman Roger Ailes was quoted making a joke involving the similarity of Barack Obama's name to that of the terrorist Osama bin Laden,^{[^^7]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-6) a firestorm of opposition arose in Democratic circles against the debate. On March 12, 2007, the party announced it had pulled out of the debate, effectively canceling it.^{[^^8]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-7)

Similar accusations have been levied against Fox News in response to its decision to exclude Republican Texas Representative Ron Paul, who differs from many in the Republican Party on social issues and holds a strong opposition to foreign intervention, and California Representative Duncan Hunter from the January 5, 2008, Republican candidate debate.^{[^^9]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-8) In response, many individuals and organizations petitioned Fox News to reconsider its decision. When Fox refused to change its position and continued to exclude Paul and Hunter, the New Hampshire Republican Party officially announced it would withdraw as a Fox partner in the forum.^{[^^10]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-9)

[edit] Media figures

CNN's Larry King said in a January 17, 2007, interview with the Chicago Sun-Times, "They're a Republican brand. They're an extension of the Republican Party with some exceptions, [like] Greta van Susteren. But I don't begrudge them that. [Fox CEO] Roger Ailes is an old friend. They've been nice to me. They've said some very nice things about me. Not [Bill] O'Reilly, but I don't watch him."^{[^^11]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-10)

Writing for the *Los Angeles Times*, Republican and conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg indicated his belief that Fox News was rightward-leaning: "Look, I think liberals have reasonable gripes with Fox News. It does lean to the right, primarily in its opinion programming but also in its story selection (which is fine by me) and elsewhere. But it's worth remembering that Fox is less a bastion of ideological conservatism and more a populist, tabloidy network."^{[^^12]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-11)

Fox News host Bill O'Reilly has stated that "Fox does tilt right," (although he states this in specific reference to the coverage of the Iraq war, not FNC's coverage in general), but that the network does not "actively campaign or try to help Bush-Cheney."^{[^^13]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-12)^{[^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-13)^{14]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-13)

[edit] Media watchdogs

Progressive media watch groups such as the Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR)^{[^^15]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-14) and Media Matters for America^{[^^16]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-15) have argued that Fox News reporting contains conservative editorializing within news stories. Others have referred to the network as "Faux News",^{[^^17]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-16) "GOP-TV",^{[^^18]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-17) "Fox Noise Channel",^{[^^19]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-18) "Fox Nothing Channel", "Fixed News"^{[^^20]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-19) and "Cluster Fox."^{[^^21]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-20) FAIR also asserted that in a study of a 19 week period from January 2001 to May 2001 the ratio of conservative guests to liberals on *Special Report with Brit Hume* was 50:6, and obtained similar data from other Fox shows.^{[^^22]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-21)

Accuracy in Media has claimed that there was a conflict of interest in Fox News' co-sponsorship of the May 15, 2007, Republican presidential candidates debate, pointing out that candidate and former New York city mayor Rudolph Giuliani's law firm had tackled copyright protection and legislation on the purchase of cable TV lineups for News Corporation, the parent company of Fox News, and suggesting that Fox might be biased in favor of Giuliani's candidacy for the Republican Party presidential nomination.^{[^^23]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-22)

[edit] Other networks

This section does not cite any references or sources.

Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (June 2010)

This section's factual accuracy is disputed. Please see the relevant discussion on the talk page. (August 2010)

Probably one of Fox News Channel's biggest critics is actually its main competitor: MSNBC. Starting in 2005, Keith Olbermann (host of *Countdown with Keith Olbermann*) began putting Bill O'Reilly on his "Worst Person in the World" segment over his "War on Christmas". Olbermann continued to list him in the segments, as well as other Fox News personalities, like John Gibson, for various actions.

Soon after, other MSNBC personalities (including Tucker Carlson, who was at MSNBC for many years before moving to Fox News) began doing the same. This, coupled with Olbermann's rising ratings after his comment about Hurricane Katrina, began MSNBC's shift towards being a more left-leaning news channel. As the addition of several liberal personalities like Rachel Maddow and Ed Shultz increased, so did the criticisms of Fox News, with even MSNBC's conservative pundit Joe Scarborough criticizing O'Reilly for saying that MSNBC was going to the left and challenging him to debate Joe. Chris Matthews, a long time host on MSNBC, has also criticized Fox News on several occasions following the Olbermann mention. This has been, by far, the one critic that has had the most public exposure, as the network reaches most homes in the US.

Though O'Reilly does not mention him by name, many of the Fox News personalities criticize Olbermann, with the Fox News show *Red Eye*, Gibson, and Glenn Beck being the most vocal.

O'Reilly believes that calling out the particular individual that he is focusing on would make people want to watch the show, thus giving the show attention that O'Reilly felt shouldn't be given. However, this move was criticized by Olbermann, as well, as Olbermann cited that the reason for him attacking MSNBC was actually due to The O'Reilly Factor losing viewership to Countdown, mostly in 2006 due to the increased criticism that Olbermann was giving then President George W. Bush.

[edit] Ownership and management

Australian born media mogul Rupert Murdoch is the Chairman and CEO of News Corporation, the owner of Fox News Channel. He has been a subject of controversy and criticism as a result of his substantial influence in both the print and broadcast media. In the United States, he is the publisher of the *New York Post* newspaper and the magazine of opinion, *The Weekly Standard*. Accusations against him include the "dumbing down" of news and introducing "mindless vulgarity" in place of genuine journalism, and having his own outlets produce news that serve his own political and financial agendas. According to the BBC website: "To some he is little less than the devil incarnate, to others, the most progressive mover-and-shaker in the media business."^{[^^24]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-23)

Then-presidential candidate George W. Bush's cousin, John Prescott Ellis, was Fox News' projection team manager during the general election of 2000. After speaking numerous times on election night with his cousins George and Jeb,^{[^^25]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-24) Ellis, at 2:16 AM, reversed Fox News' call for Florida as a state won by Al Gore. Critics allege this was a premature decision, given the impossibly razor-thin margin (officially 537 of 5.9 million votes^{[^^26]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-25)), which created the "lasting impression that Bush 'won' the White House â and all the legal wrangling down in Florida is just a case of Democratic 'snippiness'."^{[^^27]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-26) Others, such as researcher John Lott, have responded that, by this reasoning, Fox News and the other networks were even more premature in initially calling the state for Gore, a call made while polls were still open, and which may have depressed voter turnout for Bush.^{[^^28]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-27)

On January 9, 2010, the son-in-law of News Corporation CEO Rupert Murdoch and the husband of Murdoch's daughter Elisabeth, Matthew Freud, stated he and other members of the media mogul's family are "ashamed and sickened" by the right leaning tendencies of Fox News in the opening salvo in a bid to displace Roger Ailes, the founder and CEO of Fox News.^{[^^29]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-28) In the previous Sunday New York Times news story featuring a profile on Roger Ailes, Freud was quoted saying "I am by no means alone within the family or the company in being ashamed and sickened by Roger Ailes' horrendous and sustained disregard of the journalist standards that News Corporation, its founder and every other global media business aspires to, what you heard was a declaration of war, There are, practically speaking, now two factions inside of News Corp.: Ailes and Fox News, and the Murdoch children â with Rupert caught between them." Although Rupert Murdoch did not respond to the remark directly, a spokesperson for News Corporation put a statement after a Financial Times inquiry claiming âMatthew Freudâs opinions are his own and in no way reflect the views of Rupert Murdoch, who is proud of Roger Ailes and Fox News.â^{[^^30]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-29) Tim Arango also claims in Murdoch's 2008 biography that he voiced concerns privately to Ailes about his conduct claiming he was purportedly "embarrassed" by Fox News. Murdoch denied that claim.^{[^^31]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-30)

In June 2010, News Corporation donated $1 million to the Republican Governors Association.^{[^^32]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-31)^{[^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-32)^{33]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-32)^{[^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-33)^{34]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-33)

[edit] Reports, polls, surveys and studies

For more details on this topic, see Media bias.

[edit] Polls and surveys

A poll conducted by Rasmussen Reports during September 2004 found that Fox News was second to CBS as the most politically biased network in the public view. 37% of respondents thought CBS, in the wake of the memogate scandal, was trying to help elect John Kerry, while 34% of respondents said they believed that Fox's goal was to "help elect Bush."^{[^^35]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-34) However, a poll conducted by Public Policy Polling in January 2010 found Fox News to be the only US television news network to receive a positive rating by the public for trustworthiness.^{[^^36]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-35)

A survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press showed "a striking rise in the politicization of cable TV news audiences . . . This pattern is most apparent with the fast-growing Fox News Channel."^{[^^37]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-36) Another Pew survey of news consumption found that Fox News has not suffered a decline in credibility with its audience, with one in four (25%) saying they believe all or most of what they see on Fox News Channel, virtually unchanged since Fox was first tested in 2000.^{[^^38]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-37)

According to the results of a 2006 study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism a survey of 547 journalists, found that Fox was most frequently cited by surveyed journalists as an outlet taking an ideological stance in its coverage, and most identified as advocating conservative political positions,^{[^^39]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-autogenerated6-38) with 56% of national journalists citing Fox News as being especially conservative in its coverage of news. Additionally Fox was viewed as having the highest profile as a conservative news organization; it was cited unprompted by 69% of national journalists.^{[^^40]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-39)

[edit] Studies and reports

In a 2006 academic content analysis of election news, Rasmussen Reports showed that coverage at ABC, CBS, and NBC was more favorable toward Kerry than Bush, while coverage at Fox News Channel were more favorable toward Bush.^{[^^41]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-Farnsworth-40)

The Project on Excellence in Journalism report in 2006^{[^^39]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-autogenerated6-38) showed that 68 percent of Fox cable stories contained personal opinions, as compared to MSNBC at 27 percent and CNN at 4 percent. The "content analysis" portion of their 2005 report also concluded that "Fox was measurably more one-sided than the other networks, and Fox journalists were more opinionated on the air."^{[^^42]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-41)

A 2007 Pew Research Center poll of viewer political knowledge indicated that Fox News Channel viewers scored 35% in the high-knowledge area, the same as the national average. This was not significantly different than local news, network news and morning news, and was slightly lower than CNN (41%). Viewers of The O'Reilly Factor (51%) scored in the high category along with *Rush Limbaugh* (50%), NPR (51%), major newspapers (54%), *Newshour with Jim Lehrer* (53%) *The Daily Show* (54%) and *The Colbert Report* (54%).^{[^^43]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-42)

Research has shown that there is a correlation between the presence of the Fox News Channel in cable markets and increases in Republican votes in those markets.^{[^^44]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-43)

The documentary *Outfoxed* claims that Fox reporters and anchors use the traditional journalistic phrase "some people say" in a very clever way; instead of citing an anonymous source in order to advance a storyline, Fox personalities allegedly use the phrase to inject conservative opinion and commentary into reports. In the film, Media Matters for America president David Brock noted that some shows, like Fox's evening news program, *Special Report with Brit Hume*, tend to exhibit editorializing attitudes and behavior when on the air.

A study by the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA),^{[^^45]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-44) in the Winter 03-04 issue of Political Science Quarterly, reported that viewers of Fox News, the Fox Broadcasting Company, and local Fox affiliates were more likely than viewers of other news networks to hold three misperceptions:^{[^^46]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-45)

67% of Fox viewers believed that the "U.S. has found clear evidence in Iraq that Saddam Hussein was working closely with the al Qaeda terrorist organization" (Compared with 56% for CBS, 49% for NBC, 48% for CNN, 45% for ABC, 16% for NPR/PBS).

The belief that "The U.S. has found Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq" was held by 33% of Fox viewers and only 23% of CBS viewers, 19% for ABC, 20% for NBC, 20% for CNN and 11% for NPR/PBS

35% of Fox viewers believed that "the majority of people [in the world] favor the U.S. having gone to war" with Iraq. (Compared with 28% for CBS, 27% for ABC, 24% for CNN, 20% for NBC, 5% for NPR/PBS)

In response, Fox News contributor Ann Coulter characterized the PIPA findings as "misperceptions of pointless liberal factoids" and called it a "hoax poll."^{[^^47]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-46) Bill O'Reilly called the study "absolute crap."^{[^^48]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-47) Roger Ailes referred to the study as "an old push poll."^{[^^49]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-48) James Taranto, editor of OpinionJournal.com, the Wall Street Journal's online editorial page, called the poll "pure propaganda."^{[^^50]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-49) PIPA issued a clarification on October 17, 2003, stating that "The findings were not meant to and cannot be used as a basis for making broad judgments about the general accuracy of the reporting of various networks or the general accuracy of the beliefs of those who get their news from those networks. Only a substantially more comprehensive study could undertake such broad research questions," and that the results of the poll show correlation, but do not prove causation.^{[^^51]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-50)^{[^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-51)^{52]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-51)

A study published in November 2005 by Tim Groseclose, a professor of political science at UCLA, comparing political bias from such news outlets as the New York Times, USA Today, the Drudge Report, the Los Angeles Times, and Fox Newsâ Special Report, concluded "all of the news outlets we examine, except Fox Newsâ Special Report and the Washington Times, received scores to the left of the average member of Congress." In particular, Fox News' *Special Report with Brit Hume* had an Americans for Democratic Action rating that was right of the political center. Groseclose used the number of times a host cited a particular think tank on his or her program and compared it with the number of times a member of the U.S. Congress cited a think tank, correlating that with the politician's Americans for Democratic Action rating.^{[^^53]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-52)^{[^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-53)^{54]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-53)

Geoff Nunberg, a professor of linguistics at UC Berkeley and a National Public Radio commentator, criticized the methodology of the study and labeled its conclusions invalid.^{[^^55]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-54) He pointed to what he saw as a Groseclose's reliance on interpretations of facts and data that were taken from sources that were not, in his view, credible. Groseclose and Professor Jeff Milyo rebutted, saying Nunberg "shows a gross misunderstanding [of] our statistical method and the actual assumptions upon which it relies."^{[^^56]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-55) Mark Liberman (a professor of Computer Science and the Director of Linguistic Data Consortium at the University of Pennsylvania), who helped post Groseclose and Milyo's rebuttal, later posted how the statistical methods used to calculate this bias pose faults.^{[^^57]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-Language_Log-56)^{[^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-Language_Log.-57)^{58]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-Language_Log.-57) Mark concluded "that many if not most of the complaints directed against G&M are motivated in part by ideological disagreement â just as much of the praise for their work is motivated by ideological agreement. It would be nice if there were a less politically fraught body of data on which such modeling exercises could be explored."^{[^^57]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-Language_Log-56)

A December 2007 study/examination by Robert Lichter of the nonpartisan media watchdog group, the Center for Media and Public Affairs found that Fox News's evaluations of all of the 2008 Democratic presidential candidates combined was 51% positive and 49% negative, while the network's evaluations of the Republican presidential candidates 51% negative and 49% positive. The study, however, did find that Fox's coverage was less negative toward Republican candidates than the coverage of broadcast networks.^{[^^59]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-58) In addition, FAIR has noted that Lichter himself is a Fox News contributor. Also, on the January 10, 2008, edition of The O'Reilly Factor, Lichter stated that he only examined the first half of the *Special Report with Brit Hume*.^[citation ^needed]

The â2010 State of the News Mediaâ Report by the Pew Center on Excellence in Journalism found that in 2009, Fox News Channel had average daytime audience of 1.2 million and nighttime viewership of 2.13 million, higher than its cable competitors. For 2009, CNN continued to lead Fox online, as CNN.com had more than 20.7 million unique visitors daily, compared to 12.7 million unique visitors daily at Fox.com. The report added that Fox spends $674 million on its news programs in 2009, and that 72 percent of this amount was for âproducing its host-driven programs including multimillion-dollar salaries.â The remaining 28 percent ($188 million) went to administrative and overhead costs, including news staffing and bureaus. That figure is less than half of what is spent by CNN and HLN on its administrative and overhead costs.^{[^^60]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-59) ^{[^^61]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-60)

[edit] Internal memos

Fox News executives exert a degree of editorial control over the content of their daily reporting. In the case of Fox News, some of this control comes in the form of daily memos issued by Fox News' Vice President of News, John Moody. In the documentary *Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism*, former Fox News employees are interviewed to better understand the inner workings of Fox News. In memos from the documentary, Moody instructs employees on the approach to be taken on particular stories. Critics of Fox News claim that the instructions on many of the memos indicate a conservative bias. The Washington Post quoted Larry Johnson, a former part-time Fox News commentator, describing the Moody memos as "talking points instructing us what the themes are supposed to be, and God help you if you stray."^{[^^62]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-61)

Former Fox News producer Charlie Reina explained, "The roots of Fox News Channel's day-to-day on-air bias are actual and direct. They come in the form of an executive memo distributed electronically each morning, addressing what stories will be covered and, often, suggesting how they should be covered. To the newsroom personnel responsible for the channel's daytime programming, The Memo is the Bible. If, on any given day, you notice that the Fox anchors seem to be trying to drive a particular point home, you can bet The Memo is behind it."^{[^^63]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-62)^{[^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-63)^{64]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-63)

Photocopied memos from Fox News executive John Moody instructed the network's on-air anchors and reporters to use positive language when discussing pro-life viewpoints, the Iraq war, and tax cuts, as well as requesting that the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal be put in context with the other violence in the area.^{[^^65]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-64) Such memos were reproduced for the film *Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism*, which included Moody quotes such as, "The soldiers seen on Fox in [Iraq] in the foreground should be identified as 'sharpshooters,' not 'snipers,' which carries a negative connotation."

Two days after the 2006 election, The Huffington Post reported they had acquired a copy of a leaked internal memo from Mr. Moody that recommended: "â¦[L]et's be on the lookout for any statements from the Iraqi insurgents, who must be thrilled at the prospect of a Dem-controlled congress." Within hours of the memo's publication, Fox News anchor Martha McCallum, went on-air on the program *The Live Desk* with reports of Iraqi insurgents cheering the firing of Donald Rumsfeld and the results of the 2006 congressional election.^{[^^66]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-65)^{[^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-66)^{67]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-66)

[edit] Talking points from Bush White House

While promoting his memoir, *What Happened*, Scott McClellan, former White House Press Secretary (2003â2006) for President George W. Bush stated on the July 25, 2008, edition of MSNBC's *Hardball with Chris Matthews* that the Bush White House routinely gave talking points to Fox News commentators â but not journalists â in order to influence discourse and content.^{[^^68]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-talkingpoints1-67) McClellan stated that these talking points were not issued to provide the public with news, but were issued to provide Fox News commentators with issues and perspectives favorable to the White House and Republican Party.^{[^^68]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-talkingpoints1-67)

McClellan later apologized to Fox News commentator Bill O'Reilly for not responding to Matthews' suggestion that "Bill" or "Sean" received the talking points; McClellan said he had no personal knowledge that O'Reilly ever received the talking points. Furthermore he pointed out "the way a couple of questions were phrased in that interview along with my response left things open to interpretation and I should not have let that happen."^{[^^69]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-68)

[edit] Wikipedia edits

In August 2007, a new utility, Wikipedia Scanner, revealed that Wikipedia articles relating to Fox News had been edited from IP addresses owned by Fox News,^{[^^70]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-69) though it was not possible to determine exactly who the editors were. The tool showed that self-referential edits from IP ranges owned by corporations and news agencies were not uncommon.^{[^^71]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-70) Fox edits received attention in the blogosphere and on some online news sites. Wikipedia articles edited from Fox computers from 2005 through 2007 included Al Franken, Keith Olbermann, Chris Wallace and Brit Hume.^{[^^72]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-71)^{[^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-72)^{73]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-72)

[edit] Photo manipulation

...

Criticisms of pundits

[edit] Notable pundits

Glenn Beck, the host of an eponymous afternoon commentary show, has used rhetoric on his program that critics claim is extremist. In early 2009, Beck â who had previously hosted a show on the CNN-affiliated Headline News â stated on his program that the economic policies of President Barack Obama were "communist", "socialist", and later, "fascist." Beck also outlined various doomsday scenarios for guests to analyze in the segment called "War Room." After the 2009 Pittsburgh police shootings, MSNBC host Keith Olbermann and Media Matters for America claimed that Beck's inflammatory commentaries were a factor in the murders, after it was revealed that the killerâwho held far-right views^{[^^88]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-87) â posted a clip from Beck's show on the neo-Nazi Stormfront website.^{[^^89]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-88) Beck denied that he had any influence on the killer.^{[^^90]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-89) In late 2009, Beck declared that President Obama was "racist" and had "a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture" despite Obama's white mother and upbringing.^{[^^91]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-ObamaCBS-90) These remarks drew criticism, and resulted in a boycott promulgated by Color of Change.^{[^^92]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-Ariens-91) The boycott resulted in 80 advertisers requesting their ads be removed from his programming, to avoid associating their brands with content that could be considered offensive by potential customers.^{[^^92]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-Ariens-91)^{[^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-92)^{93]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-92)^{[^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-93)^{94]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-93)^{[^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-94)^{95]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-94)^{[^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-95)^{96]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-95)^{[^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-96)^{97]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-96)^{[^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-97)^{98]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-97)

Business anchor Neil Cavuto, who is also Fox News' vice president of business news and a current member of the network's executive committee, has been described as a "Bush apologist" by critics^{[^^99]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-98) after conducting an allegedly deferential interview with President George W. Bush. Democratic strategists and politicians boycotted Cavuto's show in 2004 after he claimed, on air, that Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was rooting for Senator John Kerry in the presidential election, critics contend, in an attempt to create a backlash among voters casting ballots for Bush, against Bin Laden's alleged pick.^{[^^100]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-99) Cavuto has also received criticism for gratuitous footage and photos of scantily clad supermodels and adult film stars on his show, *Your World with Neil Cavuto*.^{[^^101]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-100)^{[^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-101)^{102]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-101)

Alan Colmes is touted by Fox as "a hard-hitting liberal",^{[^^103]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-102) who was used to counter the conservative opinions of his co-host, talk radio personality Sean Hannity, on the political debate program *Hannity & Colmes*. However, he had admitted to *USA Today* that "I'm quite moderate." He has been characterized by several newspapers as being Sean Hannity's "sidekick" and "butt ugly."^{[^^104]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-fair_aggressive_conservative-103) Liberal commentator Al Franken lambasted Colmes in his book, *Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them*. In the book, Colmes' name is printed in smaller type than all other words. Franken accuses him of refusing to ask tough questions during debates and neglecting to challenge erroneous claims made by Hannity or his guests.^{[^^104]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-fair_aggressive_conservative-103) In 2008, Colmes announced that he would be leaving the program in January 2009, which led to Hannity becoming the sole host of the show that replaced Hannity & Colmes, simply titled *Hannity*. This caused critics to further question Fox News' objectivity, given that Colmes was widely cited by Fox News personalities and management as an example of the network's neutrality (though the move came some months following MSNBC hiring liberal pundit Rachel Maddow for the slot opposite Hannity, which could've also been a deciding factor), and that Hannity's new weeknight show would now more closely resemble his weekend opinion program, *Hannity's America*.^{[^^105]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-104)

John Gibson, the former host of an afternoon hour of news coverage called *The Big Story*, was cited as an example of Fox News blurring the lines between objective reporting and opinion/editorial programming. Gibson angered some people immediately after the 2000 presidential election controversy when, during the opinion segment of his show, Gibson said: "Is this a case where knowing the facts actually would be worse than not knowing? I mean, should we burn these ballots, preserve them in amber, or shred them?" and "George Bush is going to be president. And who needs to know that he's not a legitimate president?"^{[^^106]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-105) In an opinion piece on the Hutton Inquiry decision, Gibson said the BBC had "a frothing-at-the-mouth anti-Americanism that was obsessive, irrational and dishonest" and that the BBC reporter, Andrew Gilligan, "insisted on air that the Iraqi Army was heroically repulsing an incompetent American Military."^{[^^107]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-106) In reviewing viewer complaints, Ofcom (the United Kingdom's statutory broadcasting regulator) ruled that Fox News had breached the program code in three areas: "respect for truth", "opportunity to take part", and "personal opinions expressed (in an opinion slot) must not rest upon false evidence." Fox News admitted that Gilligan had not actually said the words that John Gibson appeared to attribute to him; Ofcom rejected the claim that it was intended to be a paraphrase. (See^{[^^108]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-107)). Gibson has also called Joe Wilson a "liar", claimed that "the far left" is working for Al Qaeda^{[^^109]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-108) and stated that he wished that Paris had been host to the 2012 Olympic Games, because it would have subjected the city to the threat of terrorism instead of London.^{[^^110]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-109) Gibson ran a segment on the exchange between Ron Paul and Rudy Giuliani at the Republican primary debate on the motives of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The majority of the segment was centered around the 9/11 Truth movement; Gibson said that the movement has "infected" many people "including Ron Paul", though Ron Paul has never subscribed to 9/11 conspiracy theories, and believes that Al-Qaeda perpetrated the attacks. Gibson was also harshly criticized when, on his radio program, he repeatedly mocked Jon Stewart's reaction to 9/11 on *The Daily Show*. Some allege that this incident lead to his dismissal at Fox.

Steven Milloy, the commentator for FoxNews.com, has been critical of the science behind global warming and secondhand smoke as a carcinogen. In a February 6, 2006, article in *The New Republic*, Paul D. Thacker revealed that ExxonMobil had donated $90,000 to two non-profit organizations run out of Milloy's house.^{[^^111]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-tnr-110) In addition, Milloy received almost $100,000 a year from Philip Morris during the time he was arguing that secondhand smoke was not carcinogenic.^{[^^112]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-pmbudget-111) Milloy's website, junkscience.com, was reviewed and revised by a public relations firm hired by RJR Tobacco.^{[^^113]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-rjrmemo-112) In response to Thacker's disclosure of this conflict of interest, Paul Schur, director of media relations for Fox News, stated that "...Fox News was unaware of Milloy's connection with Philip Morris. Any affiliation he had should have been disclosed."^{[^^111]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-tnr-110)

[edit] Discredited military & counterterrorism editor

*The New York Times* ran an article entitled "At Fox News, the Colonel Who Wasn't" by Jim Rutenberg,^{[^^114]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-113) revealing that Joseph A. Cafasso, whom Fox had employed for four months as a Military and Counterterrorism Editor, had bogus military credentials. Cafasso makes a 15 second appearance making pronouncements about the religious biases behind the Fox News reporting in *Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism*.

[edit] Other criticisms

[edit] Criticism of media coverage

*Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism*, a documentary film on Fox News by liberal activist Robert Greenwald, makes allegations of bias in Fox News by interviewing a number of former employees who discuss the network's practices. For example, Frank O'Donnell, identified as a "Fox News producer", says: "We were stunned, because up until that point, we were allowed to do legitimate news. Suddenly, we were ordered from the top to carry [...] Republican, right-wing propaganda", including being told what to say about Ronald Reagan. The network made an official response^{[^^115]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-foxnews_outfoxed_statement-114) and claimed that four of the individuals identified as employees of Fox News either were not employees (O'Donnell, e.g., worked for an affiliate over which Fox News claims to have no editorial authority) or had their titles inflated.^{[^^116]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-115)
CNN founder Ted Turner accused Fox News of being "dumbed down" and "propaganda" and equated the network's popularity to Adolf Hitler's rise to power in 1930's Germany, during a speech to the National Association of Television Program Executives.^{[^^117]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-116) In response, a Fox News spokesperson said "Ted is understandably bitter having lost his ratings, his network, and now his mind. We wish him well." The Anti-Defamation League, to whom Turner had apologized in the past for a similar comparison, said Turner is "a recidivist who hasn't learned from his past mistakes."^{[^^118]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-117)
Progressive media watchdog group Media Matters criticized *Your World with Neil Cavuto* for its focus on soft news stories. The show is targeted for its coverage of missing women, troubled celebrities, and gratuitous footage and photos of scantily clad supermodels and porn stars.^{[^^119]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-118)

[edit] Criticism of ethics

The **neutrality**of this section is disputed. Please see the discussion on the talk page. Please do not remove this message until the dispute is resolved. (October 2009)

During the Terri Schiavo case in early 2005, most of the major personalities on Fox News â Sean Hannity (who camped outside of the hospital where Schiavo lay dying after her feeding tube was removed), Brit Hume, Bill O'Reilly, Neil Cavuto, and John Gibson â called for her feeding tube to be reinserted. Progressive media watchdog Media Matters for America (MMFA) criticized Fox for its coverage of the affair,^{[^^120]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-119) saying that Fox took sides by referring to the affair as "Terri's Fight."^{[^^121]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-120) It also complained that Fox generally failed to disclose Schindler family spokesman Randall Terry's anti-abortion activism as the head of Operation Rescue. When O'Reilly's stated that "the battle over Terri Schiavo's life came down pretty much along secular-religious lines. Roman Catholics and other right-to-life-based religions generally wanted Ms. Schiavo to live", Media Matters noted that although evangelical Christians had been closely divided on the issue of removing Mrs. Schiavo's feeding tube, both Catholics and non-Evangelical Protestants were overwhelmingly in favor of doing so.^{[^^122]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-mediamatters_falsely_painted-121)^{[^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-122)^{123]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-122) When Gibson's offering the suggestion that the "political divide" was "Republicans stand for parents' right and life, and Democrats have sided for [a] questionable husband and dying", MMFA noted that in fact, a majority of Republicans also supported removal of the feeding tube.^{[^^122]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-mediamatters_falsely_painted-121)^{[^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-123)^{124]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-123) When Democrats provided the media with a memo written by staffers of Republican Senator Mel Martinez suggesting ways in which the Republicans could use the issue for political gain, Fox News personalities suggested that Democrats might have forged the memo. Senator Martinez later admitted that someone on his staff had written it,^{[^^125]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-124) and MMFA complained that Hume did not later mention that he had suggested an alternative possibility.^{[^^126]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-125)^{[^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-126)^{127]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-126)

Carl Cameron, chief political correspondent of Fox News, authored a bogus "news article" on the Fox News website during October 2004. It contained three fabricated quotes attributed to Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry. The quotes included: "Women should like me! I do manicures," "Didn't my nails and cuticles look great?" and "I'm metrosexual [Bush's] a cowboy."^[citation ^needed] Fox News retracted the story and apologized, calling it a "jest" that became published through "fatigue and bad judgement, not malice."^{[^^128]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-127)

[edit] Criticism of individuals

Critics of the network contend that Fox specializes in "political sabotage" by putting up moderate-to-conservative "Democrats" as token liberals against more staunchly conservative Republicans. Critics cite the following people as examples of this:

- Pat Caddell^{[^^129]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-128)- Who has called the Democratic party a "confederacy of gangsters" and defended conservative writer Ann Coulter when she said she could not talk about former Senator and presidential candidate John Edwards if a homophobic epithet she used was off-limits.^{[^^130]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-129)
- Susan Estrich^{[^^131]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-130)- Known for her opposition to liberal Democrats and support for the Democratic Leadership Council, and who once told Sean Hannity that she was his "biggest liberal friend."
- Zell Miller^{[^^132]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-131) Miller was a frequent guest on Fox News, a major critic of the Democratic Party. Miller spoke at the 2004 Republican National Convention.

Another allegation of Fox's critics is that it sometimes ridicules protesters, especially ones for liberal causes. For example, during the 2004 Republican National Convention, Bill O'Reilly referred to some of the protesters as "terrorists" (though he added, "most protesters are peaceful").^{[^^133]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-132)^{[^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-133)^{134]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-133) Fox News online columnist Mike Straka referred to anti-war protesters at the September 24, 2005, march in Washington, D.C. as "jobless, anti-American, clueless, smelly, stupid traitors" and "protesters from hell."^{[^^135]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-134)^{[^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-135)^{136]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-135)^{[^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-136)^{137]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-136)' This is in sharp contrast to the laudatory treatment the network gave to conservative and libertarian protesters of the Tea Party protests mentioned above.

Iranian-Swedish newspaper commentator Behrang Kianzad wrote in the Expressen newspaper that "there are lies, damned lies and Fox News",^{[^^138]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-revirosengard-137) in response to a Fox News story about allegedly Muslim violence in the city of MalmÃ¶, Sweden. The report focused on the borough of RosengÃ¥rd where two out of 1000 school students were ethnic Swedes.^{[^^139]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-breakpoint-138) Kianzad wrote that rock throwing against police, firefighters and ambulance personnel happened "not just in RosengÃ¥rd and not as a Muslim custom."^{[^^138]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-revirosengard-137)
In August 2006, two Jordanian-Arab freelancers who were working for Fox News as producers, resigned from the network, citing its coverage that month of the Israel's conflict with the militant group Hezbollah in Lebanon. Their resignation letter read in part: "We can no longer work with a news organization that claims to be fair and balanced when you are so far from that...Not only are you [Fox News] an instrument of the Bush White House, and Israeli propaganda, you are war mongers with no sense of decency, nor professionalism."^{[^^140]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-139)

On January 19, 2007, reports and commentary by Fox News personalities featured an anonymously sourced article in the conservative web magazine *Insight* that claimed that associates of Democratic Senator Hillary Clinton had discovered that Senator Barack Obama had attended a "Muslim seminary" as a child in Indonesia. The term "Muslim seminary" refers to a specifically-religious form of madrassa (school). It was determined within days that Obama had instead, as he had said in his memoirs, attended first a Catholic and then a modern public elementary school. The latter was, as Obama had written, "predominantly Muslim" (as Indonesia is predominantly Muslim), and not a seminary of any kind.^{[^^141]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-140)^{[^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-141)^{142]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-141) On January 31, 2007, the *Washington Post* suggested that because of FNC's reporting of the Insight article, Obama had "frozen out" the network's reporters and producers while giving interviews to every other major network. After the incident John Moody, a vice president at Fox, wrote to staff: "For the record: seeing an item on a website does not mean it is right. Nor does it mean it is ready for air on FNC. The urgent queue is our way of communicating information that is air-worthy. Please adhere to this."^{[^^143]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-142)

In March 2007, the Democratic Party in Nevada pulled out of a planned debate to be hosted by Fox. Its spokesmen cited a joke by Fox News CEO Roger Ailes, which hinged on President George W. Bush confusing the names of Barack Obama and Osama bin Laden, as evidence that Fox News is biased against the party. Fox News chairman David Rhodes responded to the cancellation by saying that the Democratic Party is "owned by MoveOn.org" (which had created a petition against the debate).^{[^^144]^^[^^144]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-autogenerated3-143)
On May 25, 2008, Fox News political contributor Liz Trotta stated on the air, while talking about the presidential election, "And now we have what some are reading as a suggestion that somebody knock off Osama, uh Obama. Well, both, if we could."; she then laughed. She apologized for the remark on-air on Fox News the next day, saying, "I am so sorry about what happened yesterday and the lame attempt at humor."^{[^^145]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-144) Trotta and Fox News were criticized for the remark by *The New York Times* editorial board and others.^{[^^146]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-145)
In June 2007, when Louisiana Democratic Congressman William J. Jefferson was indicted on corruption, racketeering and bribery charges Fox News ran a video of Michigan Democratic Congressman John Conyers, also black. Conyers criticized the network for "a history of inappropriate on-air mistakes" and the network's "lackluster" apology (which did not name him),^{[^^147]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-146) and a second, more specific apology was issued.^{[^^148]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-147) In November 2006 Fox News had aired footage of then-Rep. Harold Ford Jr. (also black) while talking about Sen. Barack Obama.^{[^^149]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-148)
On August 13, 2008, Fox News interviewed^{[^^150]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-149) a 12-year-old girl from San Francisco, and her aunt both of whom had just returned from South Ossetia. Fox began the interview by emphasising the terrors faced by the 12-year-old "when bombs started falling." Invited to tell about the Georgian bombings of South Ossetia, the young girl and her aunt said they were saved by Russians from the bombings. After the girl's aunt spoke about South Ossetians killed by Georgians, Fox News cut from the interview to a commercial break. After the commercial interruption, Fox allowed the aunt an additional 40 seconds to finish her thoughts at which time she started to blame the Georgian government but explicitly distinguished it from the Georgian people^{[^^151]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-PK-150). Immediately thereafter, in the last minutes of *Studio B*, the news anchor stated "as we know, there are gray areas in war."^{[^^151]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-PK-150)^{[^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-151)^{152]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-151) CBS also had an interview with this girl before.^{[^^153]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#cite_note-152)

Media Matters: The real story of the 2010 election

By most accounts, the Democrats stand to lose seats in both the House and Senate this coming Tuesday. There are, of course, a wide range of explanations for why this is the case.

However, in endeavoring to explain how the GOP has seemingly managed to reverse its political fortunes in such a short amount of time, media outlets would be remiss not to mention one of the most important factors. In fact, we don't need to wait for Tuesday's results to pinpoint perhaps the most significant development in the country's political landscape over the past two years.

One of the two major political parties in the country is run by a "news" network.

Since President Obama's inauguration, Fox News has transformed from simply the mouthpiece and oppo research shop of the Republican Party into its headquarters. For the GOP, Fox fundraises, campaigns, gives strategic advice, picks candidates (and then provides them a comfortable platform to reach millions of voters, free of charge), throws and promotes rallies, gets out the vote, and, perhaps most importantly, sets the narrative.

They do all of this while continuing their time-honored tradition of tearing down liberal initiatives and politicians with shameless smears, lies, misrepresentations, and fabricated stories. But before we get to Fox's massive influence over the coming elections, some back-story is necessary.

Less than two months after Obama's inauguration, Fox News senior vice president Bill Shine gave an interview with NPR about how the network's ratings were soaring at the time. During the interview, Shine noted that some people were "rooting for [Fox] to go away" after the election, but "[w]ith this particular group of people in power right now and the honeymoon they've had from other members of the media, does it make it a little bit easier for us to be the voice of opposition on some issues?"

Fox's programming has effectively answered Shine's rhetorical question with a forceful "yes."

Right out of the gate, Fox led the charge against the stimulus, eschewing the views of economists to attack deficit spending and rewriting history to attack FDR and the New Deal.

The network was certainly "the voice of the opposition" on health care reform, spewing countless falsehoods about both our broken health care system and the proposals to fix it while promoting disruptions of health care town halls and GOP initiatives to kill reform.

And of course, Fox operates as a perpetual dishonesty machine, trotting out a steady stream of overhyped scandals and faux-outrages to dent the administration and Democrats (mustard on Obama's "fancy" hamburger, anyone?)

The network was integral to fostering discontent with Democrats and the administration through their relentless promotion of the Tea Party movement. Fox gave the Tea Party a huge assist last year in the run-up to the original protests, which Fox took ownership of by sending several of their top hosts to throw "FNC Tax Day Tea Parties."

Since then, Fox has shown that there is no Tea Party gathering too small to treat as a news event, and their personalities continue to regularly appear at Tea Party events around the country.

But Fox has done far more this cycle than foster an environment conducive to a GOP electoral victory, having assumed a more hands-on role in Republican electioneering. In addition to Fox's parent company donating $1.25 million to the Republican Governors Association and another million to the GOP-aligned Chamber of Commerce, more than thirty Fox Newsers have supported GOP candidates or organizations in more than 600 instances in at least 47 states, as we detailed in a report this week.

While it would be nearly impossible to run through Fox's influence in all of the individual races this year, their "coverage" of a select few races is indicative of the network's complete transformation into GOP headquarters.

The network tipped its hand for how it would handle covering elections in the "voice of the opposition" era during the run-up to January's senate election in Massachusetts. Not only did Fox portray Scott Brown as a heroic Founding Father-like figure while smearing his opponent, it also actively aided Brown's campaign by hosting him repeatedly in the days leading up the election and allowing him to direct viewers to his website so they could find out how to "help with donating and volunteering." After Brown's victory, the network was jubilant.

With the successful trial run out of the way, Fox copied the Brown blueprint in several other races around the country.

In the Nevada Senate race, Fox has spent months promoting Sharron Angle and attacking Harry Reid. While Angle has mostly refused to grant interviews to news outlets, she has made an exception for Fox. In fact, their welcoming atmosphere led Angle to brag about how "friendly" outlets like Fox help her with fundraising.

Fox personalities have also worked overtime to aid her race. Fox contributor Sarah Palin endorsed Angle and her PAC gave $2,500 to the campaign. Fox contributor Karl Rove's GOP slush fund (aka American Crossroads) has indicated it will invest in GOTV efforts to aid Angle. It is also aired an ad targeting Reid. Fox's Dennis Miller appeared at an October fundraiser for Angle.

And then there's Dick Morris. Fox's human ethics scandal has repeatedly fundraised on Angle's behalf while also touting on-air the anti-Harry Reid group that he's advising.

And as Election Day rapidly approaches, Fox kicked off this week by launching an evidence-free smear of Reid. After Reid's office responded to Fox's desperate attempts to create a new "political scandal," Fox's flagship news program, Special Report, deceptively quoted a statement from Reid's office in order to continue to push the story.

And, just in case their blatant efforts to get Angle elected fail, Fox already has their backup plan in place. This week, Fox News has been hyping comically flimsy allegations of "voter fraud" in Nevada. As top Nevada political reporter Jon Ralston explained to a confused Bill Hemmer, the fraud allegations are merely a "preemptive" strike so the GOP can "cry fraud" in the event Angle loses.

But a candidate doesn't even need to be in a close race in order to receive the benefits of FoxPAC support. In Delaware, Fox News has thrown their full weight behind Republican Senate candidate Christine O'Donnell, Karl Rove's short-lived detour questioning O'Donnell's qualifications for office notwithstanding.

Rove quickly got with the program and endorsed O'Donnell. He was joined by fellow Fox personalities Sarah Palin and Michelle Malkin. The network's hosts have heaped praise on O'Donnell while playing dumb in order to claim her opponent has admitted to being a "bearded Marxist." While it would be difficult to list all of the effusive O'Donnell praise, one characteristic outpouring of affection came from Fox Business host Stuart Varney, who labeled her precisely the kind of "new face, new blood that we need to get in there."

Following in Angle's footsteps by bragging about the love she gets from Fox, Christine O'Donnell told GOP insiders at a strategy meeting that she has "got Sean Hannity in my back pocket, and I can go on his show and raise money by attacking you guys." A host who was concerned about maintaining any credibility may have bristled at being portrayed this way, but Sean Hannity has long-since demonstrated his lack of concern for ethics. Far from being upset, Hannity is still welcoming O'Donnell on his show.

The Ohio gubernatorial race features Republican candidate John Kasich, who just so happens to be a former Fox News host. Kasich repeatedly used his platform as a Fox host to position himself for a run, and continued to appear regularly as a Fox contributor and host from the time he announced that he was paving the way for a gubernatorial run in March 2008 until he officially declared his candidacy on June 1, 2009. Since declaring his candidacy, Kasich has continued to reap benefits from his cozy relationship with the network. Several Fox News personalities campaigned for him and openly root for him.

Two Fox hosts - Glenn Beck and Mike Huckabee -- have told Kasich that they "love" him. Hannity has appeared at a fundraiser for Kasich, invited Kasich onto his show to plug his website, and reportedly "pledged to give $10,000 to Kasich's campaign should he run, as well as have his wife give another $10,000."

Rupert Murdoch and his wife also donated $10,000 each to Kasich, and Murdoch initially explained News Corp.'s donation to the RGA as resulting from his "friendship" with Kasich. After Kasich's opponent(accurately) criticized Fox as a "propaganda network" that is "committed to getting Republicans elected," Bill O'Reilly responded by attacking him for "whining."

Those are just three races. I haven't even detailed Fox's love for "rock star" Marco Rubio, or the fact that Glenn Beck (along with the rest of the network) has transformed his show into a GOTV operation for the GOP.

So when reporters sit down to explain the results of next Tuesday's election, it's important that they include the role of Fox News in shaping the outcome.

And if you think the last few months were bad, just wait until Tuesday's election wraps up and attention shifts to 2012 and the GOP's presidential primary. Fox currently employs no fewer than five potential contenders for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination, and things could get awkward as they try to figure out which of their friends they want to help elect.

It looks like FoxPAC is just getting started.

This weekly wrap-up was compiled by Ben Dimiero, a research fellow at Media Matters for America.

Media Matters: The real story of the 2010 election

Friday, October 29, 2010 5:47 PM email

bogus pollster?

Poll results from Rasmussen Reports consistently overstated Republican performance in the midterm elections, according to The New York Times'Nate Silver. Rasmussen polls and analysis have been criticized by polling experts who note that they often harmonize with narratives favored by conservatives and Republicans. Indeed, the polling company is a favorite of Fox News, which has cited Rasmussen polls at least 94 times in the past three months.

http://mediamatters.org/research/201011050013

Boards of JP Morgan Chase, GEICO, Zurich Financial, Chrysler, Direct Holdings Americas, GlaxoSmithKline, AstraZeneca, Lilly Corporate Center, BP, and The Hartford Financial Services Group, Inc.

On Monday's edition of Fox & Friends, the crew hosted former Republican congressman and current NewsMax columnist John LeBoutillier to promote his book, The Obama Identity. During the segment, LeBoutillier pushed the idea that Obama was actually born in Kenya, without any forceful rebuttal by hosts Steve Doocy or Brian Kilmeade. Both LeBoutillier and the Fox & Friends crew tried to suggest that his "fiction" book may actually have basis in reality. The chyron during the segment was "Fact or Fiction? 'Obama Identity' a fictional tale of reality."

So what is this "fictional tale of reality" about? Well, it promotes numerous conspiracy theories about Obama, and, in the words of Media Matters' Oliver Willis, it not only reads like it was written "in the language of a hormonal teenager," but also apparently features President Obama's foreskin as a major plot device.

And who is John LeBoutillier? Well, before his current occupation as a professional peddler of insane and discredited conspiracy theories about President Obama, LeBoutillier spent the 90s pushing outlandish conspiracies about then-President Clinton and his family -- including suggesting Clinton killed Deputy White House Counsel Vince Foster and had an account "in the Cayman Islands, which is a refuge for drug money."

As we documented, Fox's promotion of LeBoutillier's book and Napolitano's trutherism are in character for the network, which has increasingly become a welcoming place for conspiracy theorists.

Earlier this week, discussing Napolitano, Hot Air's Allahpundit asked, "Precisely how many of these people does Fox have on staff? Am I going to open a newspaper tomorrow and find out that Megyn Kelly or Julie Banderas thinks the Pentagon was hit by a missile?" Based on the network's steadfast refusal to comment on the story, it's impossible to answer that question -- to the serious detriment of people at Fox who care about their credibility.

What does it say about Fox hosts like Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, Glenn Beck, Greta Van Susteren and Mike Huckabee -- many of whom have repeatedly and explicitly condemned truthers in the past -- that they are unwilling to speak out now that their coworker has revealed himself as one?

Are Fox's "news" anchors -- people like Chris Wallace, Bret Baier, and Megyn Kelly -- okay with the fact that their bosses refuse to condemn someone who promotes 9-11 conspiracy theories?

And how about Fox personalities like Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, Dick Morris, Michelle Malkin, and Laura Ingraham? Are they comfortable being employed by a network that refuses to condemn a truther employee and hosts people like John LeBoutillier to suggest the president was born in Kenya?

mediamatters 13/3

Eric Bolling

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Eric Bolling (born March 2, 1963) is an American television personality who specializes in financial news and political commentary. He has occupied numerous roles as a commentator on financial issues for television. Bolling was involved in developing CNBC's Fast Money. Bolling left CNBC in August 2007 and moved to the new Fox Business Network as one of the network's financial analysts. He hosted the business show Happy Hour, which ran opposite Fast Money in the 5 pm time slot. Bolling also appears on Fox News Channel as a panelist on their show Bulls and Bears airing Saturday mornings, as the host of the business hour on Foxnews.com Strategy Room at 3 pm, and as a panelist on the weekday show The Five. He also now hosts Follow The Money, formerly titled Money Rocks. Political issues are also prominent in his broadcasts. He is a contributor to the Foxnews.com opinion blog Fox Forum.^[1] and is a regular fill-in host on The Glenn Beck Program, The O'Reilly Factor and Fox and Friends.

[edit] Personal life

Bolling was formerly a commodities trader on the New York Mercantile Exchange. He specialized in trading natural gas, crude oil, gold, and other commodities.

After spending five years on the Board Of Directors at the NYMEX (now CME Group), Bolling became a strategic adviser to the Exchange's Board of Directors. He has been included in Trader Monthly Top 100 in 2005 and 2006. Bolling was the recipient of the Maybach Man of the Year Award at the Trader Monthly Awards, January 17, 2007.^[2]

Bolling graduated from Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida. He attended Duke University after graduating from Rollins. Bolling was drafted in the 22nd round of the 1984 draft by the Pittsburgh Pirates. His playing career was cut short due to a torn rotator cuff.

[edit] References

^ "Bowling For Eric (With Lawyers)". Mediabistro. August 27, 2007.
^ "Eric Bolling – Maybach Man of the Year". Trader Daily. January 17, 2007

[edit] External links

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Contributors

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FOX NEWS CORP.

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

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

Rupert Murdoch

Lachlan Murdoch

Suzanne Scott

Viet Dinh

Raj Shah

Jay Wallace

Irena Briganti

David Clark

Fox Business executives

:{Amid raging bushfire, Rupert Murdoch's Australian media empire turns a blind eye to climate crisis:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:

Fox Corp. board member Paul Ryan has been the subject of fawning praise from Fox News

The network was a conservative dream made real

The unraveling of Fox News

The Fox Effect: The Book That Terrifies Roger Ailes And Fox News

News’ paranoid P.R. machine

Paranoid culture of secrecy includes a political campaign-style P.R. apparatus that plants smears against critics

Polar Bear Scientist Reprimanded for Releasing Government Documents

News Corp. Climate Change Coverage Is Misleading, Analysis Claims

Limbaugh: "Ryan Was Right" About Janesville Plant Despite "Bogus Fact-Checkers" Declaring Him Wrong

Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. Is an ALEC Member

News Corp.'s News of the World Phone-Hacking Scandal

News Corp.'s New Interest in Privatizing Education

News Corp. and the ALEC Education Agenda

News Corp. and the ALEC Communications Agenda

The Rush to Dump ALEC

===

Fox News Viewers are the Most Misinformed: A Seventh Study Arrives to Prove It (and to Vindicate Jon Stewart!) [2]

Fox News' Top 10 Lies About Climate Science

Rolling Stone: At Fox News, "Manufacturing Doubt About Global Warming Remains Official Policy"

Fox News' Top 10 Climate Science Distortions And Fabrications

Fox: Global Warming "Doesn't Exist"

Fox: 2009 Was "The Coldest Year On Record"

Fox: "Nearly All Of The [Arctic] Ice Has Returned"

Fox: "How Can There Be Global Warming If It's Snowing And It's Bitterly Cold?"

Fox: "The Earth Is Actually Cooling Now"

Fox: Hacked Emails Show Scientists Are "Fudging Data To Make Their Case For Global Warming"

Fox: El Nino Is The Cause For Warming Of Past 30 Years

Fox: Climate Science Warned Of Global Cooling In The 1970s

Fox: "NASA Acknowledges Solar Cycle, Not Man, Responsible For Global Warming"

Fox: CRU's Jones Told BBC That "The Middle Ages Were Warmer Than ... The Climate Now"

7. Cartoon penguins: Biggest threat to children since SpongeBob

David Frum Claims He Was Blacklisted From Fox “News” For Criticizing Rush Limbaugh

Reported by Aunty Em - Mon 7:22 PM

Accusations of bias

[edit] Political figures

[edit] Media figures

[edit] Media watchdogs

[edit] Other networks

[edit] Ownership and management

[edit] Reports, polls, surveys and studies

[edit] Polls and surveys

[edit] Studies and reports

[edit] Internal memos

[edit] Talking points from Bush White House

[edit] Wikipedia edits

[edit] Photo manipulation

Criticisms of pundits

[edit] Notable pundits

[edit] Discredited military & counterterrorism editor

[edit] Other criticisms

[edit] Criticism of media coverage

[edit] Criticism of ethics

[edit] Criticism of individuals

Media Matters: The real story of the 2010 election

Eric Bolling

[edit] Personal life

[edit] References

[edit] External links

Attachments