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      From George Floyd to Hunter Biden: Lachlan Murdoch, Fox News and the year that tested America

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      From George Floyd to Hunter Biden: Lachlan Murdoch, Fox News and the year that tested America In an extract from his biography The Successor, Paddy Manning considers how Rupert Murdoch’s favored son dealt with the challenges of 2020, and what might come nextThe murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin on 25 May 2020, captured on video, turned Black Lives Matter into the biggest protest movement in the history of the United States, with more than 15 million people turning out to demonstrations, some of them violent, in 550 towns and cities across the country.Murdoch’s succession: who wins from move to reunite Fox and News Corp?Read moreFox News had a history of antipathetic coverage of BLM, which took off after the police killing of an 18-year-old Black man, Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014. Former primetime host Megyn Kelly subverted the narrative, asserting that Brown’s reported last words, “Hands up, don’t shoot,” were a lie, and that Brown was the aggressor. Twenty-six-year-old Fox Nation host Tomi Lahren described Black Lives Matter as “the new KKK”. Fox commentators had also defended police and rejected claims of systemic racial injustice in America. Nevertheless, the public reaction to Floyd’s murder was on a completely different scale to earlier protests, and it took place amid swirling speculation that Donald Trump would declare martial law.On the Monday morning, Lachlan Murdoch tried to set a conciliatory tone in an internal statement, urging Fox employees to “come together in their grief, work to heal, and coalesce to address injustice and inequity in our country”. After the tragic death of George Floyd, Murdoch continued:.css-lf9l6c{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#866D50;}It is essential that we grieve with the Floyd family, closely listen to the voices of peaceful protest and fundamentally understand that Black Lives matter. The FOX culture embraces and fosters diversity and inclusion. Often we speak of the ‘FOX Family,’ and never has the need to depend on and care for that family been more important. We support our Black colleagues and the Black community, as we all unite to seek equality and understanding … This is an ongoing conversation, and no one has all the answers in this moment.Some of Fox’s highest-profile commentators seemed to miss Lachlan’s memo. That same night, Tucker Carlson bemoaned the protests. “The nation went up in flames this weekend,” he opined. “No one in charge stood up to save America. Our leaders dithered and they cowered, and they openly sided with the destroyers, and in many cases, they egged them on … The worst people in our society have taken control.” Laura Ingraham blamed Antifa and “other radical elements” and said the death of Floyd had nothing to do with the violence, which was “part of a coordinated effort to eventually overthrow the United States government”. Days later, Fox News had to apologize after an episode of Special Report with Bret Baier aired a chart showing how the stock market had rallied in the days immediately after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr in 1968, the bashing of Rodney King in 1991, and the more recent killings of Michael Brown and George Floyd. Fox acknowledged the chart was insensitive and Baier apologized for a “major screw-up”. There followed an internal phone hook-up with many of its Black staffers, led by Scott, to discuss the network’s racist and hostile rhetoric towards the BLM protests. The open forum was unprecedented, but Lachlan wasn’t there and it resolved little.As the protests dragged on, Carlson only grew more strident, attacking the president for failing to re-establish law and order, calling BLM a “terror organization” and Minneapolis “our Wuhan”. In early July, CNN discovered that Carlson’s chief writer, Blake Neff, had for years been using a pseudonym to post a stream of bigoted remarks denigrating African Americans, Asian Americans, and women on an online forum, AutoAdmit, that was a hotbed for racist, sexist and other offensive content. Fox accepted Neff’s resignation within hours of CNN’s inquiry and Suzanne Scott and Jay Wallace condemned his “horrific racist, misogynistic and homophobic behavior”, saying neither the show nor the network had known of the forum and there was zero tolerance for such behavior “at any time in any part of our workforce”.More mainstream advertisers abandoned Carlson and Lachlan personally approved the comments Tucker made about Neff’s resignation in his next show. Carlson refused management requests to pre-tape the comments and struck a defiant tone, suggesting he knew he had Lachlan’s full backing. Dissociating himself from Neff’s posts, Tucker added, “we should also point out to the ghouls beating their chests in triumph of the destruction of a young man that self-righteousness also has its cost … when we pose as blameless in order to hurt other people, we are committing the gravest sin of all, and we will be punished for it, there’s no question.” Tucker announced he was going on a week’s vacation, effective immediately, which he insisted was “long planned”. One staffer told the Daily Beast off the record that Fox News had “created a white supremacist cell inside the top cable network in America, the one that directly influences the president … this is rank racism excused by Murdoch.”It was all too much for James Murdoch, who had been negotiating an exit for some months, hoping to sever his connection to the family business. At the end of July, James sent a two-line letter of resignation to the board of News Corp, effective that day, with only the briefest explanation: “My resignation is due to disagreements over certain editorial content published by the Company’s news outlets and certain other strategic decisions.” In a bland joint statement, Rupert and Lachlan thanked James for his service and wished him well.James continued, of course, as beneficiary of a one-sixth share of the Murdoch Family Trust, which ultimately controlled both Fox and News Corp. In a sit-down interview with the New York Times a few months later, James told Maureen Dowd that he felt he could have little influence as a non-executive director, wanted a cleaner slate and “pulled the ripcord” because:.css-lf9l6c{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#866D50;}I reached the conclusion that you can venerate a contest of ideas, if you will, and we all do and that’s important. But it shouldn’t be in a way that hides agendas. A contest of ideas shouldn’t be used to legitimize disinformation. And I think it’s often taken advantage of. And I think at great news organizations, the mission really should be to introduce fact to disperse doubt – not to sow doubt, to obscure fact, if you will.It was a direct shot at Lachlan, whose mantra was to defend free speech, even that of commentators he did not agree with from time to time, and apparently regardless of whether the speaker was spreading disinformation.Dowd canvassed a scenario which was doubtless briefed by James and which could give Lachlan nightmares. Despite appearances, she wrote, the succession game may not truly be over: “Murdoch watchers across media say James is aligned with his sister Elisabeth and his half-sister, Prudence, even as he is estranged from his father and brother.”Alan Rusbridger: who broke the news?Read moreIt was true that there had been a thawing of the relationship between James and Elisabeth, which had come apart during the phone hacking crisis of 2011, when Murdoch titles were pitched into controversy in the UK. When James bought Tribeca Enterprises, which ran the famous New York Film Festival, Liz soon joined the board. The implied threat from the Dowd piece was clear: once their father was gone, when control of the empire passed to the four elder siblings, each with an equal vote on the Murdoch Family Trust, Lachlan could find himself getting rolled by James, Liz, and Prue, who were generally more liberal than Rupert.In a plausible scenario, after Rupert has died and his shares are dispersed among the four adult children, the three on the other side of Lachlan could choose to manifest control over all of the Murdoch businesses, and to do it in a way that enhances democracies around the world rather than undermines them. In this scenario, the role of Fox News has become so controversial inside the family that control of the trust is no longer just about profit and loss at the Murdoch properties. In one view that has currency among at least some of the Murdoch children, it is in the long-term interests for democracies around the world for there to be four shareholders in the family trust who are active owners in the business. Just such a scenario is freely canvassed by investors: a Wall Street analyst who has covered the Murdoch business for decades and is completely au fait with the breakdown in the relationship between the brothers, volunteers off the record that it would be “fair to assume Lachlan gets fired the day Rupert dies”.It is a formula for instability and intra-family feuds that must weigh on the minds of directors of both Fox and News Corporation as they contemplate the mortality of the 91-year-old founder, although they deny it. A source close to members of the Murdoch family questions the extent of succession planning by the boards of Fox or News Corporation and whether discussions among the directors can be genuinely independent, as corporate governance experts would like.“Rupert has total control over all the companies as long as he is alive,” the source says. “It’s an unrealistic expectation that the boards of those companies are going to use their voices to manifest independence. What is their succession plan? What if something happens to Lachlan? Do they put Viet in charge?”At the same time James announced his resignation from the News Corp board, he and Kathryn were ploughing millions into climate activism, the defeat of Trump, and other political causes. The couple had invested $100m worth of Disney shares into their foundation, Quadrivium, and through 2020 were heavy backers of mostly Democratic-leaning outfits, including $1.2m to the Biden Victory Fund and a handful of anti-Trump Republican organizations such as Defending Democracy Together, led by Bill Kristol. That was only some of the couple’s total political funding. A year later, CNBC obtained a Quadrivium tax return showing donations of $38m toward election organizations, including those dedicated to protecting voting rights.Lachlan’s personal political donations through the 2020 cycle were much smaller and were overwhelmingly directed towards the GOP, according to Federal Election Commission records. The politician he favored most was Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, an establishment Republican who made a calculated decision to become Trump’s “enabler-in-chief ” and was married to Trump’s transportation secretary, Taiwanese-born Elaine Chao, a former director of News Corp. Lachlan contributed $31,000 in four donations in March, including to the Bluegrass Committee for Kentucky Republicans. Ten days after the November election, Lachlan made a much bigger personal donation, of $1m, to the Senate Leadership Fund, which had one goal: protecting the Republican Senate majority. Lachlan did make one small donation on the Democrats’ side in the 2020 cycle, after he attended a fundraiser for Democratic candidate Pete Buttigieg, the gay ex-mayor of South Bend, Indiana, pledging $1,500 to his campaign. Realizing the potential for embarrassment, he asked for it back and was duly refunded.Fox’s profitability fell by more than two-thirds in the June quarter, which would later prove to be the low point of the pandemic, as sports leagues went dark and general ad revenue collapsed. Fox News was the only bright spot, accounting for 90% of operating profit, despite advertiser boycotts of Tucker Carlson Tonight, as the 2020 presidential election campaign intensified.Three weeks out from polling day, on 14 October, the New York Post broke a story that might have influenced the outcome of the 2020 election. It had obtained a trove of messages, documents, photos and videos “purportedly” recovered from a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden, son of the Democratic presidential candidate, which had been taken to a Delaware computer shop for repair in 2019 and never picked up. The computer shop owner was a Trump supporter and handed the water-damaged laptop to the FBI, but also sent a copy of the hard drive to Rudy Giuliani, who had long sought to tarnish Joe Biden with conflict-of-interest allegations concerning his son’s involvement with the Ukrainian oil and gas company Burisma. The Post story zeroed in on a “smoking gun” email sent to Hunter in 2015 by Vadym Pozharskyi, an adviser to Burisma. The email read: “Dear Hunter, thank you for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent [sic] some time together.”According to the Post, the email gave the lie to Joe Biden’s claim that he had “never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings.” However, it was not clear whether Pozharskyi had in fact ever met with Biden, who as vice-president had handled the Ukraine portfolio for President Obama, and the Biden campaign explicitly denied it, after going back over his official schedule.However irresistible the story was to the Post and its warhorse editor Col Allan, the rest of the mainstream media was exceedingly wary. The Post would not provide a copy of the laptop or hard drive to allow other media to verify the contents. The timing was transparently intended to damage the Biden campaign and memories remained fresh of the FBI’s momentous decision to investigate Hillary Clinton in the final days of the 2016 election campaign, after emails stolen by Russian operatives were dumped online by WikiLeaks. Twitter and Facebook intervened dramatically to stop circulation of the Post story. Twitter even temporarily locked White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany’s account, as well as that of the Post itself. More than 50 intelligence experts signed an open letter stating that the story “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation”. The Times reported that at least two Post journalists had refused to put their byline on the laptop story, while the lead reporter, Emma-Jo Morris, had not had a previous byline with the paper. Furthermore, News Corp stablemate the Wall Street Journal had been offered much the same story before the Post but concluded the central claims could not be proved. The whole story failed to gain much traction beyond the Post, Fox News, and avowedly rightwing media like Breitbart.Trump seized classified documents – but for Republicans the story is Hunter Biden’s laptop | Lawrence DouglasRead morePost-election, Hunter Biden would reveal that he was under federal investigation for tax offenses and over the following year and a half, the industrial scale of his influence-peddling became clearer, including possible breaches of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, the same legislation that Trump’s 2016 campaign manager, Paul Manafort, had pled guilty to violating. In mid-2021, the Post revealed that Joe Biden had indeed met Pozharskyi in 2015, and in early 2022, both the New York Times and the Washington Post reported that independent experts had examined the files which purported to be from Hunter Biden’s laptop and they appeared genuine. That did not prove Hunter Biden was guilty of anything, of course, only that the laptop was his. But for his part, Lachlan believed that an important news story about the Bidens had been deliberately suppressed by the tech companies and a liberal-leaning media, saying much later:.css-lf9l6c{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#866D50;}… had the laptop belonged to another candidate’s son, it would certainly have been the only story you would have heard in the final weeks of the election. But lies were concocted: ‘the laptop was hacked, or stolen;’ it was not. Or ‘it was Russian disinformation;’ it was not, and the story was completely suppressed. It was censored by EVERYONE.The scene was set for one of the most contentious presidential elections in American history.
      The Successor: The High-Stakes Life of Lachlan Murdoch will be published in the US by Sutherland House on 15 November
      TopicsBooksFox NewsLachlan MurdochRupert MurdochJames MurdochFoxNews CorporationfeaturesReuse this content More

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      in World Politics

      When The Right Goes Wrong

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      The Fair Observer website uses digital cookies so it can collect statistics on how many visitors come to the site, what content is viewed and for how long, and the general location of the computer network of the visitor. These statistics are collected and processed using the Google Analytics service. Fair Observer uses these aggregate statistics from website visits to help improve the content of the website and to provide regular reports to our current and future donors and funding organizations. The type of digital cookie information collected during your visit and any derived data cannot be used or combined with other information to personally identify you. Fair Observer does not use personal data collected from its website for advertising purposes or to market to you.As a convenience to you, Fair Observer provides buttons that link to popular social media sites, called social sharing buttons, to help you share Fair Observer content and your comments and opinions about it on these social media sites. These social sharing buttons are provided by and are part of these social media sites. They may collect and use personal data as described in their respective policies. Fair Observer does not receive personal data from your use of these social sharing buttons. It is not necessary that you use these buttons to read Fair Observer content or to share on social media. More

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      in US Politics

      Maggie Haberman on Trump: ‘He’s become a Charles Foster Kane character’

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      Maggie Haberman on Trump: ‘He’s become a Charles Foster Kane character’ The author of a new book on the former president reflects on his tumultuous tenure, and getting inside his head“The word ‘Rosebud’ is maybe the most significant word in film, and what we all watch. The wealth, the sorrow, the unhappiness, the happiness just struck lots of different notes. Citizen Kane was really about accumulation and, at the end of the accumulation, you see what happens and it’s not necessarily all positive.”Confidence Man review: Maggie Haberman takes down TrumpRead moreThese words were spoken in 2008 by an unlikely film critic named Donald Trump. Perhaps he glimpsed himself as if in a mirror. Like Kane in Orson Welles’s masterpiece, Trump was a swaggering capitalist and media star who forayed into politics, was brought down by hubris, and now rattles around a gilded cage in Florida.“He’s become something of a Charles Foster Kane-like character down in Mar-a-Lago these days,” observes Maggie Haberman, a Pulitzer-winning reporter for the New York Times, political analyst for CNN and author of Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America, which has a black-and-white photo of Trump on its cover.Her analogy raises the question: what is Trump’s Rosebud, the childhood sled that symbolised Kane’s lost innocence? “His father is Rosebud, and I don’t think it’s one particular moment,” Haberman replies. “There’s no single childhood memory that is the key. It’s a series of moments that interlock and they point back to his father.”Fred Trump was a property mogul who had been disappointed by his eldest son Fred Jr’s lack of commitment to the family business. Donald Trump, by contrast, impressed his father by cultivating a brash “killer” persona and became heir apparent. Decades later, in the first weeks of his presidency, Trump had one photo on the credenza behind him in the Oval Office: his father, still watching.Speaking by phone from her car in midtown Manhattan, Haberman reflects: “His father basically created this endless competition between Trump and his older brother Freddie ,and pitted them against each other. Donald Trump spent a lot of time seeking his father’s approval and that became a style of dealing with people, which was certainly better suited for a business than for a household.”“But it became one that Trump recreated in all aspects of his life. It became how he dealt with his own children. It became how he dealt with people who worked for him and then, in the White House, you read a number of stories about these battles that his aides would have. A lot of it was was predetermined by lessons from his father.”But if Trump is Kane, who is Haberman? Is a series of media interviews to promote the book, she has resisted making herself the story. When Trevor Noah of Comedy Central’s the Daily Show likened her relationship with Trump to that between Clarice Starling and Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs, she demurred that the former president is “uniquely focused” on the New York Times “and I’m just the person who has covered him more often than not”.Even so, during Haberman’s three interviews with Trump for the book – two at Mar-a-Lago and one at Bedminster, New Jersey – he remarked to his staff: “I love being with her. She’s like my psychiatrist. I’ve never seen a psychiatrist, but if I did, I’m sure it would not be as good as this, right?”There are echoes of fictional mafia boss Tony Soprano and his psychiatrist Jennifer Melfi, but Haberman again sticks to humility: “I think he just said something that he didn’t really mean, and that was intended to flatter. It’s the kind of thing that he says about his Twitter feed or other interviews. He treats everybody like they’re his psychiatrist.”But is there anything that Haberman can see in person that the rest of us cannot on TV? “He uses his personality and he uses his physicality in ways that I’ve just never seen anybody do and so he can be very charming and and disarming when you meet him, particularly at first. But inevitably he shows displeasure or anger.”What is beyond dispute is that Haberman, who turns 49 later this month, was better prepared than almost any other reporter for the Trump presidency. She was born in New York to parents who met while working at the New York Post, a tabloid newspaper that he long courted, and lived most of her adult life in the borough where Trump learned the mechanics of political power.With printers’ ink in her veins, the workaholic Haberman started her own career at the New York Post, moved to the Politico website and then, in 2015, joined the New York Times, where reporting on Trump became her full-time job. She did not follow him to Washington yet, seldom without a phone to her ear, still “owned” the Trump beat from New York.Her book distinguishes itself from the many others in the Trump canon by delving into this shared history and telling his back story. To fully reckon with Trump, his presidency and political future, she writes, people need to know where she comes from. American carnage in embryo.She explains: “Everything about this presidency was foretold. The past is prologue with lots of people, but particularly with him. He ended up having this set of behaviors of his own that were augmented by the world he came from, the climate he came from in New York, the industry he came from and the industries he dealt with in terms of politics, of media.”This was the shady world of Roy Cohn, a mafia lawyer and political fixer best known for his involvement in Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist campaign of the 1950s. Cohn was a mentor and personal lawyer to Trump early in his business career and schooled him in the dark arts of attacking your accuser, playing the victim, never apologising and taking a transactional approach to human relations.Trump was perversely attracted to authoritarianism and violence even then. In 1990, engulfed in personal crises, he praised China for its deadly crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square. His narcissistic fixation on the media was there too. Trump planted stories about himself in New York gossip columns and could be both thick skinned and thin skinned at the same time.Under the influence of his father and of Cohn, Trump’s racism was baked in early. In one anecdote, Haberman writes that, after his second marriage, he dated a model, Kara Young, who had a Black mother and white father. He asked an associate: “Do you think she looks Black?” Weeks after meeting Young’s parents, Trump told her that she got her beauty from her mother and her intelligence “from her dad, the white side”.Trump’s and attitudes towards race have barely shifted since the New York of the 1980s. Haberman comments: “His pop culture references tended to be from the 1980s and certainly his view of racial strife and crime was frozen in time in 1980s New York when the murder rate at various points hovered near near 2,000 [per year].”“New York’s racial politics, not entirely, but to some extent have evolved and certainly the crime rate has gone down. But Trump still describes this apocalyptic life that is clearly resonant with him but doesn’t necessarily reflect where things are. ”Haberman’s long familiarity with Trump meant she was less surprised than many by his political ambitions. She covered his appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2011, noting for Politico that “he was by far the best-received speaker”. He did not run then but took the plunge in 2015, trundling down an escalator at Trump Tower to announce his candidacy.“The timing was right. He was bored with his company. He was much older and he was running out of opportunities but I don’t believe he expected to win. He was very surprised.”Did he actually want to win? “I asked somebody close to him in April 2015, does he actually want to be president or does he just want to win? And their response was, that’s a really good question, which I took as my answer.”Trump shook the political world by beating Democrat Hillary Clinton to become the first person elected to the White House with no previous political or military experience. Step back for a moment and it is still astounding, jaw-dropping. How on earth did it happen?Part of it, Haberman says, was Trump’s ability to capitalise on leftover energy from the Tea Party, a rightwing populist movement with roots in the racial backlash against Obama’s election. Part was Trump’s fame as host of The Apprentice – voters refused to hear facts that contradicted beliefs shaped by the reality TV show.And for a swath of the country that felt alienated from Washington, there was appeal in a political outsider telling them they were right to be mistrustful. She comments: “Our politics are broken. They’ve been broken for a while. I don’t think he created that but he fueled it and exacerbated it and benefited from it.”The 45th president lived down to her expectations. She was on the receiving end of both his insatiable desire for attention and his poison-pen responses to critical coverage. A month after taking office, Trump, while developing a symbiotic relationship with Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News channel, branded the New York Times and other outlets “the enemy of the American people”.Haberman comments: “He has endangered journalists with that language and that language has been used by authoritarians in other countries to legitimise anti-press crackdowns. I don’t think Donald Trump has any sense of what the role of the free press is in a democracy. None.”Was there anything, amid the four-year madness of all caps tweets, hirings and firings, insults and lies that shocked even her? Haberman picks the day that Trump stood on the White House podium floating the idea that coronavirus patients might inject themselves with bleach. “He was feeling competitive with the doctors because he gets competitive with everybody. That was a pretty striking moment.”As Trump mused on the utility of disinfectants as a miracle cure, the then coronavirus response coordinator, Deborah Birx, infamously sat silent. It was one incident among many that shone a light on the White House officials and aides who enabled Trump – or at least failed to make a stand until it was too late.But Haberman takes a more charitable view: “There were a lot of people there who really were trying to do the right thing. There were people who were worried about the country. There were people who realised that this was a guy who didn’t understand government and had no idea what he himself stood for.”Some White House alumni have been condemned for cashing in by writing memoirs. Haberman herself has been accused of holding back pearls of news for her book rather than publishing them in the Times immediately. Critics seized on its revelation that, following his defeat by Joe Biden in the 2020 election, Trump told an aide: “I’m just not going to leave.” His state of denial culminated in a deadly insurrection by a mob of his supporters at the US Capitol on January 6.Political consultant Steve Schmidt tweeted: “Was it important information for the public to know Trump said he wasn’t leaving after losing an election? Yes. Was this information deliberately concealed for an economic reason that took higher precedence than the truth and the public right to know? YES.”Haberman flatly denies the charge, saying that she would have published the story if she could have confirmed it at the time but she only nailed it down long after Trump left office. When, during research for the book, she did land a scoop about Trump apparently trying to flush documents down a White House toilet, she alerted the Times and printed it right away.“Books take time. They’re a process of going back and interviewing people again and revisiting scenes that have happened. I turned to this project in earnest after February 2021 and the second impeachment trial. My goal was to get confirmed, reportable information in print as quick as possible and, if I had known these things in real time, and had them confirmed, I would have published them.”For Confidence Man she spoke to 250 people, some of whom were more willing to speak for a book than a here-today-gone-tomorrow news story. There are two questions she did not ask Trump but now wishes she had. Did he ever consider a White House taping system? (he is a fan of former president Richard Nixon) Did he ever worry for Vice President Mike Pence’s safety? (There were chants of “Hang Mike Pence!” on January 6).She may never get the chance. Haberman and Trump have not spoken since the book’s publication. Does she worry that its deeply reported 508-page narrative, a damning verdict for posterity, has severed the relationship? She says firmly: “It’s not a relationship. He’s someone I cover, and I will cover him whether he’s talking to me or not talking to me.”Or it may prove that he needs her more than she needs him. If Trump can survive an array of federal, state and congressional investigations to run for president again in 2024, Haberman would surely be the lead reporter. “I don’t know. Maybe. Right now I just want to get some sleep.”So it was that Haberman told Politico last month that her work is both her curse and her salvation – a comment that hinted at, if not her own Rosebud, a realisation that she is not yet untethered from the man she understands better than anyone. “I love work and I love what I do, but I also don’t have an off switch. When you’re covering someone who also doesn’t have an off switch, that can be a problem.”TopicsDonald TrumpUS politicsRepublicansnewsReuse this content More

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      in US Politics

      ‘I decided to share my voice’: Estela Juarez on her mother, who Trump deported, and her new book

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      Interview‘I decided to share my voice’: Estela Juarez on her mother, who Trump deported, and her new bookRichard Luscombe Just nine when zero-tolerance policy saw her mother sent to Mexico, now a teen, the Floridian has written a book for childrenFew stories exposed the cruelty of Donald Trump’s zero tolerance immigration policies more than that of Estela Juarez. Just nine, she saw her mother, Alejandra, the wife of a decorated US marine, deported to Mexico, leaving her and her sister Pamela, then 16, to grow up in Florida on their own.‘It’s heartbreaking’: military family shattered as wife of decorated US marine deported to MexicoRead moreNow a teenager, Estela has written a book about her experiences, Until Someone Listens, which also chronicles her years-long effort to reunify her family.From missed birthdays and holidays, the smell of Alejandra’s flautas no longer wafting from their kitchen, to Pamela’s high school graduation ceremony without her mother by her side, the story lays bare the pain of forced separation, even as the family never gives up hope of being whole again.The book is not Estela’s first turn in the spotlight. Her fight included a heartbreaking video played at the 2020 Democratic convention. As images of migrant children in cages filled the screen, she read a letter telling Trump: “You tore our world apart.”Now, with a colorful illustrated book aimed at children, albeit with a powerful plea for immigration reform directed at adults in positions of power, she is bringing her story to a new generation, with the message it is never too early to stand up for what’s right.“I know that if I decided to never share my voice then my mother wouldn’t be here right now next to me, and she wouldn’t be in the US,” Estela said on a Zoom call from her home in central Florida.“And I think that’s very important for other people to share their voice and I hope that they can get inspired by my story, and know that they’re not alone, because I know it’s hard to speak out, especially at such a young age.”Alejandra was able to return to Florida in May 2021 after almost three years in exile in Yucatan, as one of the early beneficiaries of an executive order signed by Joe Biden in his first days in office.The action reversed the Trump policy of deporting undocumented residents without impunity even if, as in Alejandra’s case, they’d lived in the US for decades, paid taxes, were married to US citizens, had US citizen children and stayed out of legal trouble.Biden’s order also directed the Department of Homeland Security to form an interagency taskforce to identify and reunify families separated under Trump. An interim report in July revealed that 2,634 children have been reunified with parents, with more than 1,000 cases pending.“We’re spending as much time as we have together and we try not to think about the fact that in a year or so my mom could be deported again,” Estela told me, referring to the temporary nature of her mother’s immigration “parole”, which will be reviewed in 2023.“Knowing that my story is not finished yet has inspired me to continue to write another book that’s more for teenagers and adults, and to give them a chance to be inspired.“I love writing, it helps me get my emotions out. When it comes to children’s books it has to be brief, and my story is very complicated, so I have to make it in a way where other children would understand.“My mother was never supposed to come back from Mexico. She was told she would be there for life. And knowing that after almost three years of being there she was able to come back shows me basically that anything is possible, so I have a lot of hope for the future.”Estela has grown since the Guardian first met her, Pamela and Alejandra in a playground in Haines City, Florida, in late summer 2018, about a week before their mother was deported.But even then, having only just turned nine, an advanced awareness of her family’s plight and that of others sat comfortably alongside her joyous, playful nature. She spoke eloquently of immigration reform and working with a Florida congressman, Darren Soto, on a bill to protect military families if any member was undocumented.Now 13, Estela is in her final year in middle school. She is studying the naturalization process in civics lessons she says are helping to inspire her career path.“I hope to become an immigration lawyer,” she said. “I know that right now I’m a minor, and with my writing I’m doing all I can to help immigrants. In the future I want to continue to help them.“Seeing how the broken immigration laws hurt my family, and others, seeing how it changed them forever, really gave me the courage to continue to speak out and spend my time helping them.”As Estela says in the book: “My words have power. My voice has power. I won’t stop using my voice until someone listens.”
      Until Someone Listens: A Story About Borders, Family and One Girl’s Mission is published in the US by Macmillan
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      Newsroom Confidential review: Margaret Sullivan’s timely tale of the Times and the Post

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      Newsroom Confidential review: Margaret Sullivan’s timely tale of the Times and the PostThe public editor and media columnist is fascinating and unsparing, particularly about the Times’ Trump-Clinton fiasco Margaret Sullivan has written a beguiling memoir which shares many of the virtues of the work that brought her national attention as public editor of the New York Times and then as a media columnist for the Washington Post. The virtues of her columns, excellent news judgment and old-fashioned common sense, are again on display.Unchecked review: how Trump dodged two impeachments … and the January 6 committee?Read moreEspecially in the early part of the book, Sullivan pats herself on the back quite a bit for breaking a glass ceiling by becoming one of the first woman editors of an important regional paper, the Buffalo News. But she is capable of self-criticism, especially for a painful mistake when her paper decided to publish the criminal backgrounds of the victims of a mass shooting. “The Black community was furious” because the paper had deepened “the pain of family and friends who were mourning their loved ones” – and “they were right”. Too often victims of police violence in Buffalo had been described as “no angel”.She quotes Goethe on the benefits of such a mistake: “By seeking and blundering, we learn.”The next phase of her career, when she identified the blunders of editors and reporters at the New York Times, then publicized them in her columns, is the most interesting part of the book.Sullivan quickly learned what I discovered many years ago, when I switched from writing about politicians and prosecutors for the Times to critiquing journalists for Newsweek: reporters have by far the thinnest skins of any public figures. It’s not surprising: a big reason many choose to become journalists is to give themselves a feeling of being in control, so they often feel discombobulated when they are the subject of an interview instead of its progenitor.To her credit, Sullivan offended the sports editor and the politics editor of the Times equally. She showed she had the right instincts with her first blogpost, calling for “rigorous adherence not just to the facts but to the truth, and away from the defensive performative neutrality that some were beginning to call false balance or false equivalence (‘Some say the earth is round; others insist it is flat’ or, more pertinently ‘Some say climate change is real and caused partly by human behavior; others insist it doesn’t exist’.)”She almost never had “a completely comfortable day” as public editor, which means she did a good job: “If the people I worked next to were happy with me, I felt guilty for being too soft on the institution … If they were upset with me – sometimes even furious” she worried she had been too harsh.One of her worthiest crusades was against the vast use of anonymous sources, especially in Washington stories. When Eric Schmitt, a national security reporter, was appointed to a committee on reporting practices, he was astonished to learn that readers’ “number one complaint, far and away, was anonymous sources”. A reader wrote to Sullivan: “I beseech the Times not to facilitate government acting like the Wizard of Oz – behind a curtain.”Although Sullivan was at the paper a decade after its worst modern anonymous sources fiasco – dozens of stories promoting the idea that Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction were real – she found practically nobody had learned any lessons.The practice was still “vastly overused … not just for ultra-sensitive reporting on the national security beat but also for all kinds of frivolous purposes – in gossipy entertainment pieces, in personality profiles, in real estate stories”. Sullivan inaugurated “AnonyWatch”, asking readers to send examples of anonymous sourcing.Some of the very worst journalism practiced by the Times during Sullivan’s tenure was its coverage of the 2016 election. The paper’s first woman executive editor, Jill Abramson, assigned Amy Chozick to report on Hillary Clinton full-time in 2013. Another press critic, Tom Rosenstiel, pointed out it was probably a pretty bad idea to “perpetuate the permanent campaign” three years before the first primary.Chozick’s first big feature for the Sunday magazine was called Planet Hillary, illustrated by an image of Clinton’s face as “a fleshy globe”. Sullivan agreed with the reader who wrote, “The now-viral image is hideously ugly, demeaning, sexist and completely premature.”Times editors up to Abramson, who approved the image, “couldn’t understand the fuss”. To Sullivan it was an early warning that “when it came to covering Hillary Clinton, Times journalists often took things too far”.Things went steeply downhill in 2015 when the Times – and the Washington Post and Fox News – promoted a book by the Breitbart contributor Peter Schweizer, Clinton Cash: the Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich.How Chozick chose to write about this crude propaganda? “Already the Republican Rand Paul has called its findings ‘big news’ that will ‘shock people’ and make voters ‘question’ the candidacy of Hillary Rodham Clinton”.Things got dramatically worse with the paper’s obsession with Clinton’s emails, and FBI director James Comey’s decision to put them back in the news a few days before the election. By then Dean Baquet was Times editor. He vastly overplayed Comey’s announcement with three big stories, including one by Chozick and Patrick Healey headlined “With 11 Days to Go, Trump Says Revelation ‘Changes Everything’”.Confidence Man review: Maggie Haberman takes down TrumpRead moreSullivan observes that framing must have caused “rejoicing in the GOP camp”. It did.The Columbia Journalism Review reported that in six days, the Times “ran as many cover stories” about Clinton’s emails as they did about all policy issues combined in the 69 days leading up the election.Comey shut down his investigation again. But the damage was done.The Times editorial page compensated a little bit for its news coverage by giving Clinton an enthusiastic endorsement. But as Sullivan points out, editorials rarely sway elections while “relentless front-page political coverage can, especially when it’s in the hugely influential New York Times”.“In this case,” she writes, “I believe it did.”
      Newsroom Confidential: Lessons (and Worries) from an Ink-Stained Life is published in the US by St Martin’s Press
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      ‘Devoid of shame’: January 6 cop Michael Fanone on Trump’s Republican party

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      Interview‘Devoid of shame’: January 6 cop Michael Fanone on Trump’s Republican partyJ Oliver Conroy A pro-Trump mob almost killed him – and some politicians want to pretend it never happened Almost a year after pro-Trump rioters at the US Capitol beat and electrocuted Michael Fanone nearly to death – causing him to go into cardiac arrest, lose consciousness for four minutes and become one of the most famous police officers in America – he decided to end his 20-year law enforcement career with a resignation letter written on a paper napkin.Capitol attack officer Fanone hits out at ‘weasel’ McCarthy in startling interviewRead more“I wrote, ‘Go fuck yourselves,’” Fanone recalled, neck tattoos peeking from under a dark sport coat and grey-streaked beard, as he dined in one of the quieter corners of a steakhouse in Manhattan.A friend, he said, translated his resignation into more formal English: “You know, ‘I’m grateful for the time and memories here …’ Blah, blah, blah, blah.”While months of medical treatment had helped Fanone mostly recover from his injuries, his fury at politicians who wanted to erase January 6 from memory remained – and his desire to name and shame “sniveling weasel bitches” such as the Republican House leader, Kevin McCarthy, often and with an irreverence that was making his police career untenable.“What continues to boil my blood,” said Fanone, a one-time Trump voter, is how the Capitol attack “has become so politicized. It’s to the point where I have this adversarial relationship with most Republicans, who I see as either indifferent to what happened or on the side of the insurrectionists.”What also hadn’t gone away were the fellow cops who whispered behind his back or exited a room when he entered – because they were Trump supporters who resented his criticisms of the former president, or because they thought he was a showboat exaggerating his experience at the Capitol for money or attention.Fanone, a vice-officer who became one of the star witnesses of the January 6 hearings, could no longer do undercover work and was a political hot potato. After his superiors re-assigned him to IT (“I have no background in it. I type with one finger”) and he arrived to find a desk draped in plastic with no chair or computer, he decided, five years short of his pension, to quit.Now Fanone is adjusting to a strange new life. He declined an offer to pose for Playgirl but accepted a CNN contract as a law enforcement analyst. Learning not to curse on air has been hard – “I did get in a lot of trouble,” he has said, “for saying I thought history was going to shit on Mike Pence’s head” – so, on the infrequent occasions he actually joins a segment, he’ll bring a notecard: DON’T SAY FUCK.He has published a memoir, Hold the Line: The Insurrection and One Cop’s Battle for America’s Soul, written with John Shiffman, an investigative reporter for Reuters. He has friends in surprisingly high places – Sean Penn once took him to dinner, and Nancy Pelosi is known to check in at 3am.Yet his financial situation, he said, isn’t what everyone assumes. His medical and insurance bills are high. He lives in a one-bedroom outfitted with lawn furniture and he’s embarrassed he doesn’t have more space for his four daughters when they visit.He spends as much time as possible with them. When he’s not doing that, he does quiet, solitary things. He lifts weights and most days runs six to eight miles; hangs out with his “failed hunting dog”, Buddy; takes to the woods to stalk deer and turkey; ruminates about the future of the country.“I’m not looking to fucking make money off my experiences on January 6, outside of feeding my family,” he said. “If people have a problem with me writing a book, they can kiss my ass.”He chewed on a steak salad and added, very deliberately: “All I want is to talk about my experience, educate a few people, maybe engage in constructive conversation about police reform. After there’s accountability for January 6, I hope to ride off into the sunset of obscurity, never to be heard from again.”Fanone speaks in a south Maryland drawl, redolent of a crab fisherman or a character on The Wire. The grandson of a steel mill worker and the son of an attorney and a social worker, he briefly attended Georgetown Prep, one of the nation’s elite schools, but it didn’t stick – after a year he was asked “not to return”.His parents separated when he was young, so he split time between his father’s white-shoe world and his mother’s more middle-class or blue-collar one. After dropping out of high school, he worked construction and eventually earned a GED.He started his law enforcement career with the US Capitol police but guard duty bored him. After a very public exchange of views with a colleague – “two Capitol cops in uniform brawling in broad daylight on Independence Avenue” – he quit to join the larger Metropolitan police department.Fanone was full of “piss and vinegar”. A vice posting suited him fine. He spent much of his time undercover or hiding in dumpsters or trees (locals called him Spider-mMan). Over the years he grew less hotheaded and more focused on meticulous operations that would hold up in court – and nail traffickers.On the grey morning of 6 January 2021, as Trump supporters converged on Congress, Fanone was supposed to be working a drug op with his partner, Jimmy Albright, and his most trusted informant, Leslie Perkins, a transgender black sex worker who has since died of illness.The drug op never happened. Fanone had assumed the Capitol protest was under control but he began hearing unsettling radio calls. An order to don “hard gear”. A plea for munitions. An ominous request for the FBI hostage rescue team.He drove 70mph to his station, arriving as a commander called an “officer down” on behalf of his entire unit – something Fanone had never heard in two decades as a cop. He changed into a uniform and grabbed a helmet, a decision he believes may have saved his life.At the Capitol, he and Albright descended to the Lower West Tunnel, where they had heard the situation was dire. Fanone’s bodycam recorded footage that will probably go down as one of the most visceral documents of January 6.Inside the tunnel, 40 exhausted officers, formed into something resembling a huge rugby scrum, were trying to stop a crowd of thousands forcing its way through a door.Many of the rioters had come prepared, with gas masks, body armor, helmets, bear spray. Some wielded stolen riot shields. In contrast, many of the cops, like Fanone, had “self-deployed” without gas masks or other gear. There was vomit on the floor.“Hold the line!” a commander, Ray Kyle, was shouting. “Do not give up that door! We are not going to lose that door!”Fanone and Albright pushed forward. At the front, Fanone confronted what he describes in his memoir as a “human battering ram” – in his bodycam footage you can hear him grunting and gasping as hundreds of pounds of force presses down. Yet for a moment, despite everything, the police actually seemed to be gaining ground.Then someone shouted: “Knife!”As Fanone glanced to see what was happening, a rioter seized him by the neck and dragged him into the crowd, yelling: “I got one!”A news photograph captured the moment Fanone was enveloped by the mob. He is surrounded by heaving bodies, his face grimacing in fear. A rioter is beating him with the pole of a “Blue Lives Matter” flag – meant to signify support for law enforcement.Blows landed from every direction. Hands fumbled at his gun. Soon Fanone was 50ft from the tunnel. He tried to turn back. A Three Percenter militiaman blocked his path.Someone pressed a taser to Fanone’s neck and repeatedly electrocuted him. He heard someone say: “Kill him with his own gun!”“I’ve got kids!” Fanone screamed. “I’ve got kids!”At that point some of the rioters intervened. Someone shouted: “We’re better than this!” People grabbed Fanone and bore him back to the police line.Fanone stumbled into the tunnel and lost consciousness. He came to as his partner prepared to drive him to hospital.“No dreams,” Fanone told me. “No flashbacks.” In fact, he can’t remember anything that happened between the time he shouted he had children and when he woke up in the tunnel. The hospital diagnosed cardiac arrest and traumatic brain injury. The rioters had bestowed the sixth concussion of Fanone’s life and seared the flesh of his neck. He was in agony but, with a narcotics officer’s wariness, refused most pain medication.Only while recovering did Fanone learn of the full mendacity of January 6: Trump’s dying Roman emperor routine; Pence’s tepid decision to do the right thing; the Missouri senator Josh Hawley’s choice to stoke the mob then flee “like a bitch”.Later, angered by news that 21 House Republicans had voted against awarding a medal to the cops who defended the Capitol, Fanone forced a meeting with McCarthy. He was joined by a fellow officer, Harry Dunn, and Gladys Sicknick, whose son, officer Brian Sicknick, died the day after the attack.Fanone asked McCarthy “about certain members of the GOP I call the ‘tinfoil hat brigade’ – Marjorie Taylor Greene, Paul Gosar, Louie Gohmert. These people have risen to the level of not just an embarrassment within the Republican party, but to humanity.”After some “verbal masturbation”, Fanone said, McCarthy effectively admitted that he was unwilling, or unable, to control radicals in his party. Fanone secretly recorded the entire conversation – and leaked it.It had little to no effect. Nor did Fanone’s testimony at the January 6 hearings.“These people are devoid of shame,” he said. “There’s no way to shame them into doing what’s right. And that has a lot to do with Trump as the ultimate ‘ends-justify-means’ guy.”The conspiracy sphere even painted Fanone as part of a false-flag operation, “like a love child of Nancy Pelosi that’s grown in a petri dish and has been quietly part of some sleeper cell that was awakened for this event”, as he put it to Rolling Stone.A self-described redneck, Fanone said he understands Trump’s appeal, even if it’s a fraud. He voted for Trump in 2016 because he seemed more pro-police than Hillary Clinton. He came to regret it. Fanone’s ex-wife and three of his daughters are Asian American. During Covid, he was angered by Trump’s insinuating references to the “China virus”.Fanone exudes discipline. Early in our meal he carefully removed an onion ring garnish from his salad, and did not touch the fries I ordered for the table. But his foot fluttered with nervous energy under the table.Several cops who defended the Capitol later took their own lives. Fanone has described dark moments of his own, sitting and staring at his gun.“There are a lot of officers suffering in silence or self-medicating with alcohol. It’s probably going to lead to more tragedies down the line.”Unchecked review: how Trump dodged two impeachments … and the January 6 committee?Read moreA waiter recognized Fanone and thanked him for what he did at the Capitol. Several diners did the same. It happens daily, he said.“I try to always talk to them. I don’t see that as a chore. It’s part of why I’m speaking out. Unfortunately, it doesn’t make me feel better. I wish it did.”Fanone doesn’t know what the future holds. He might return to construction. He’d also be interested in serving on a policing commission, as an intermediary, pro-cop and pro-reform. He rejects calls to defund the police – training is the first thing cut, he said – but is sympathetic to Black Lives Matter. He’s fond of saying that overthrowing a CVS drugstore is different from overthrowing the government.That’s the only office he’d be interested in holding. Look at George Washington, he said. “When it came to the presidency, they had to drag that motherfucker – all 6ft 4in – kicking and screaming. After his term was done, he couldn’t get home fast enough.”He added: “And don’t volunteer me. I don’t want it.”TopicsBooksUS Capitol attackUS politicsUS policingRepublicansUS CongressPolitics booksinterviewsReuse this content More