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    Fox Corp chief told Sean Hannity that Trump could not go on air in 2020 if he attacked network

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    New revelations about the tense relationship between Fox News and Donald Trump in the fall of 2020 have emerged in a trove of thousands of court documents released on Sunday as part of a massive defamation lawsuit filed against the network by voting technology company Smartmatic.One exchange showed that Lachlan Murdoch, the chief executive of Fox News parent company Fox Corp, told star anchor Sean Hannity in a 1 October 2020 text chain that Trump could not appear on Fox again if he attacked the network.“Sean, sorry, but the president is not coming back on air if he uses it to attack us,” Murdoch wrote to a group that also included his father, Rupert, and Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott. “It is the same rule we have with the other side. This is a golden rule,” signing the message with “Thx L.” (In a 1 October 2020 interview with Hannity, Trump said Fox was “a much different place than it used to be”.)Hannity’s response to Murdoch’s message was redacted. The situation got worse in the wake of the 2020 presidential election, when many Fox News supporters turned against the network, including Trump himself, leading to something of an existential crisis at the long-dominant channel.In a separate correspondence after the November 2020 presidential election, after many Trump supporters had grown angry at Fox News over its call of the state of Arizona for Joe Biden, Hannity acknowledged the anger from the president’s side. “Trump people hate Fox,” he wrote to a producer. “Hate hate hate.”While Fox publicly stood behind its Arizona call in the face of internal and external blowback, according to a 6 November 2020 email from Scott, Lachlan Murdoch said that Fox should consider reversing its call of the state of Arizona for Biden if his margin fell below 1% of the vote. “I’m not recommending we do that at this time,” Scott said.The documents released on Sunday are copies of the exhibits that were cited in previous filings between the parties. They include both longer versions of previously cited conversations and many new internal text messages and email exchanges that have not previously been made public.In a previously unreported 23 November 2020 email to his son, Rupert Murdoch suggested they chat about the viewer backlash against Fox News. “Getting killed in audience numbers,” he wrote. “All day long. We have to keep our nerve but worth a discussion. Won’t hurt subscriber revenue, but will soon cut into [advertisements].” Lachlan Murdoch wrote that he would call his father the following morning. “Agree re FNC,” he wrote. “Keeping me awake at night.”In another previously unreported 21 January 2021 email to his son Lachlan, Rupert wrote that he was “still getting criticism for [Fox News Channel]. Saying leading voices encouraged stolen election bullshit and pushed Jan 6 rally.” In the same thread, Murdoch talked about ousting business network host Lou Dobbs. “Just take him off the air and negotiate later,” he wrote. Dobbs’s show was cancelled the following month.The elder Murdoch also talked about hiring former Democratic National Committee chair Donna Brazile, saying that it’s “hard to attack a Black woman”.The documents released on Sunday also included a version of Smartmatic’s deposition of Rupert Murdoch. When asked by a Smartmatic lawyer whether he took any steps “to make sure that hosts with shows on Fox News Media did not endorse claims about the 2020 election being stolen,” Rupert Murdoch responded: “No. No.”“I was very happy [with] the way Fox News was handling it,” Rupert Murdoch said of the network’s post-election coverage.Rupert Murdoch also acknowledged that Fox News made a decision to “pivot” after the election by “moving away from our support of Trump”. But he said it was difficult to do so. “Our very large audience tended to be Trump supporters,” he said. “We didn’t want to upset them totally. That, we did before. They’d been attacking us.”Murdoch also affirmed that he believed Trump’s claims of a stolen election contributed to the January 6 US Capitol attack – though he denied it was a “riot” and said it was “intended to be just be a rally outside the Capitol”.In his own deposition, Lachlan Murdoch said he didn’t think Fox News did anything to “endorse” claims of election fraud made by Trump’s supporters. He also re-affirmed the journalistic value of covering the president’s election fraud claims. “I can’t imagine a more newsworthy story than the sitting president of the United States calling into question the election results,” he said, according a transcript of his deposition.“We did not make the allegations against Smartmatic. The president and his lawyers and associates made the allegations against Smartmatic,” Lachlan Murdoch said. “We reported those allegations, which I believe were incredibly newsworthy. So we did not make an apology for reporting the sitting president’s allegations about a voting system.”Smartmatic was indicted by the Department of Justice last month as part of an investigation into bribery in the Philippines. The company denies the charges, calling the indictment “targeted, political, and unjust”.Fox News has strenuously denied Smartmatic’s claims and said the company has vastly overstated its value.“The evidence shows that Smartmatic’s business and reputation were badly suffering long before any claims by President Trump’s lawyers on Fox News and that Smartmatic grossly inflated its damage claims to generate headlines and chill free speech,” a Fox News spokesperson said. “Now, in the aftermath of Smartmatic being criminally charged with bribery in the Philippines and the Government’s motion to include evidence of Smartmatic’s business dealings in Venezuela and Los Angeles County, we are eager and ready to continue defending our press freedoms.”Fox had petitioned the judge in the case to delay the trial, pending the criminal case against Smartmatic, but on Monday that effort was denied.“Today’s decision is an important victory for Smartmatic as we progress in our efforts to hold Fox accountable for its lies,” a Smartmatic spokesperson said. “The court made clear that Fox’s attempts to delay accountability won’t work, and its day of reckoning is coming.”Both parties are tentatively scheduled to argue their case for summary judgement next month. 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      As military is deployed to LA, rightwing media decry protesters as ‘invaders’

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      There were unsavory scenes in Los Angeles over the weekend, as police used teargas and “less-lethal munitions” on thousands of people gathered to protest against the arrest of undocumented immigrants.The events playing out on rightwing TV channels and in the conservative podcasting realm were almost as miserable, as excitable media figures decried protesters as “invaders”, called for both the mass arrest of elected officials and the invocation of a two-century old laws and used the chaos to push racist conspiracy theories.It came as the Trump administration said the military will remain on the ground in LA for two months, after Donald Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act. About 700 US marines deployed to the US’s second largest city on Tuesday, after LA’s police chief effectively said their presence would complicate law enforcement’s efforts.The clamor for arrests mainly focused on Gavin Newsom, California’s Democratic governor, as rightwing media followed the lead of the US president, who first made the suggestion over the weekend. Trump didn’t seem to know under what law Newsom should be arrested, and the conservative commentariat wasn’t sure either. Still, it didn’t stop them crying for the California governor to be placed in handcuffs.Sean Hannity, the Fox News host, claimed Newsom “should be arrested for obstructing US immigration law”, even as Tom Homan, the border czar, said Newsom hadn’t done anything to warrant detention. Wayne Root, a host on the rightwing channel Real America TV, suggested Newsom should be charged with “treason” and be detained at Guantánamo Bay while he awaits trial. “Be sure he showers with MS-13,” Root added, a take that, even for the rightwing media cesspool, was particularly macabre.But the right wasn’t just calling for the caging of Newsom. Some wanted Karen Bass, the mayor of Los Angeles, to be arrested too, including Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist adviser-turned-podcast host.“Right there, LAPD,” Bannon announced on Monday, apparently under the impression that the entire LA police force was listening to his War Room show.“The mayor is involved in this and having the stand down [sic]. She ought to be arrested today. Immediately.”Bannon went on to call for “hard actions,” whatever they are, adding: “Not even question we’re on the side of the righteous.”The bad takes were everywhere. Chris Plante, a host at rightwing TV channel Newsmax, said on air: “The Democrats are just – I mean, at what point are they declared to be a terrorist organization – with all of the affiliations and all the violence and the shootings and the fire-bombings and the targeting Jews and on and on?”Laura Ingraham, who often seems to be trying just a bit too hard to be offensive, went further. On her Fox News show she accused Joe Biden and Alejandro Mayorkas, the former secretary of homeland security, of having “opened the border” and given “benefits to 10 million illegal aliens”.“The goal was to resettle America with new people in order to transform it completely in ways that you really can’t do at the ballot box, at least when you’re that radical,” Ingraham said.She was referring, not very subtly, to the concept of “great replacement”, a racist conspiracy theory that falsely claims there is an ongoing effort by liberals to replace white populations in current white-majority countries. It’s a concept that started on fringe websites before making its way to Fox News.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionOthers were upset by more prosaic matters, including the sight of people at the protests flying flags other than the stars and stripes. It really set off Charlie Kirk, with the influential rightwing declaring that the US has “a parasitic relationship with Mexico, and we have for quite some time”.He added: “If you loved the promise of America, you wouldn’t wave a Mexican flag when American police tried to remove criminals. This should be a wake-up call. If you did not realize it before, guess what? Pat Buchanan and President Trump were right. We are a conquered country that has been invaded by a force in certain areas.”Kirk is uniquely placed to comment on such matters. His Turning Point USA organization sent 80 busloads of people to Washington on the day that hundreds of Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol, and Kirk has celebrated Trump’s mass pardon of people who attacked police officers that day.When it came to the treatment of people protesting in LA, however, Kirk was of a different mind, as he called for US troops to be used in policing US civilians.“Los Angeles does not feel like a protest, what’s happening there. It’s an entire city that’s declaring open rebellion to American sovereignty and authority,” he said. “We must be unafraid to declare the Insurrection Act of 1807.” More

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      Fox’s new game show makes people guess what Trump’s been up to. Somehow I can’t see the joy in that | Dave Schilling

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      The classic television gameshow is one of the simplest pleasures available to the sedentary, socially maladjusted people we used to call “couch potatoes”. An average Joe is required to perform a task – ranging from answering a trivia question or spinning a large, colorful wheel to keeping a hand on a Toyota Land Cruiser for as long as possible – in exchange for the possibility of winning a cash prize (or a truck). For the viewer, there is the satisfaction of believing, perhaps falsely, that you could win the prize if you were in the contestant’s place. Maybe you identify with that contestant and actively root for their success. Or perhaps you just want to see some poor bastard shot out of a cannon, like on TBS’s dearly departed series Wipeout. Whatever your pleasure might be, it’s not an uncommon or esoteric one.We watch gameshows because they are basic human drama distilled into an easily repeatable format. TV development executives have tried to modernize it with the fancy graphics of something like NBC’s The Wall or the gratuitous flesh-baring of the 2000s disasterpiece Are You Hot, in which a panel of “celebrity” judges such as Lorenzo Lamas critiqued people on the number of visible abs on their bodies. The simpler a gameshow premise – guessing the cost of basic household items, answering multiple choice questions in a spooky room, or doing menial tasks for a man who combs his hair forward – the better. Perhaps this is why my initial reaction to the press release for the forthcoming mini-series Greg Gutfeld’s What Did I Miss?, on the Fox Nation streaming service, was so immediately negative.In the new series, Gutfeld (who made an entire career out of sporting a perpetually self-satisfied smirk that turns liberals into feral animals running around in circles and urinating on the floor) quizzes contestants on the headlines. The unusual part: these contestants have been sequestered in upstate New York for three months, “with no contact to the outside world – no phones, internet, television, or social media” – not unlike the short-lived BBC series The Bubble. Some of the headlines Gutfeld offers are real. Some are fabricated. It is up to the sad group of media-starved test subjects to ferret out what’s real from what isn’t.Imagine, a blissful 90 days of not knowing what is happening outside your window. A three-month vacation of regular meals, uninterrupted sleep and zero temptation to spend hours scrolling TikTok for videos of people marinating chicken in NyQuil. Doesn’t that sound lovely? Jared Leto spent 12 days in blissful meditative isolation at the start of the Covid pandemic and when he came back into civilization, someone had to tell him he couldn’t eat inside at Nobu any more. I feel bad for the guy, but he probably reminisces about those 12 days constantly.The blessed contestants of What Did I Miss? were afforded not just 12 days of peace, but 90 of them. That’s almost eight times what Jared Leto got! And on the other side, there’s the chance to win $50,000. Hopefully the inflation rate doesn’t spike again and that money keeps its value. They’re gonna need it when they hear about those tariffs.I suppose What Did I Miss? is more of a stunt than a traditional gameshow premise. Something closer to Joe Millionaire, a dating show where women vie for the attention of a man they think is rich but is actually not. How many times can you do something like that before the novelty wears off? You can only sequester so many people for three months before it starts to feel even cheaper than it is.Of course, beyond the show being crass, it trivializes everything in our current moment of social upheaval and angst. “Isn’t that Donald Trump a wacky guy? He’s so wild, you’ll never guess the nutso stuff he got up to last week!” Being that this is a Fox Nation production starring Fox News’s favorite bobblehead doll, it stands to reason that the audience for the show is people who still find something funny about news headlines. We are far beyond the days when someone could riff for hours on the image of George HW Bush puking on the prime minister of Japan. That was, in fact, quite amusing. I mean, man, just look at him hurl! That’s something else, isn’t it, folks?Donald Trump has yet to vomit on a world leader, but we can certainly say he has soiled the basic functions of democracy. This is not speculating on what your crazy uncle got up to after he raided the liquor cabinet. Are these contestants expected to suss out the fake headline from choices like “sent an innocent man to a supermax prison that looks like it was ripped off from Judge Dredd comics” or “threatened to tank the world economy just to see what would happen”? Call me a stick-in-the-mud if you like, but I’m just not seeing the breezy joy of the standard gameshow in a series in which people must guess whose human rights have been denied and why.The Fox Nation president, Lauren Petterson, said in the press release: “Truth can be stranger than fiction and who better to help isolated Americans catch up on the headlines they missed during an unprecedented news cycle than Greg Gutfeld.” The word I’m thinking of for all of this is not “strange”. “Grim”? Yes. “Dispiriting”? Sure. “Morally reprehensible”? Bingo.Instead of calling what we are witnessing a series of preventable calamities, we refer to it as a “news cycle”. Life is reduced to the whims of the media machine. It is, itself, a gameshow played for big money, where the object is to do or say the worst thing possible so people pay attention to you. That seems like the aim of the entire endeavor – to use cheeky TV smarm to make all of this palatable. It flattens that which we should be outraged about into a sickly sweet pancake of gameshow pablum. I hope the winner of this farce refuses the money in exchange for being sent back to the little house in upstate New York, free of the knowledge that human suffering is now government policy.

      Dave Schilling is a Los Angeles-based writer and humorist More

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      Alexi Lalas keeps tweeting Maga propaganda. Does it matter?

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      As the US men’s national team prepared to kick off against Panama earlier this month, Soccer Twitter warmed up for the first game of the Mauricio Pochettino era.Amid his routine match analysis, America’s most prominent soccer pundit retweeted old footage of Barack Obama discussing immigration policy that surfaced in an attempt to make the former president appear hypocritical and discredit Kamala Harris by association.The jarring mix of sports and politics is normal for Alexi Lalas, who stands out among soccer broadcasters for his open engagement with the imminent American presidential election and for his party affiliation.Lalas gave an interview on the Fox Business channel in July from the Republican National Convention which careened from how the event is “a cool place to be” to a discussion of the Barcelona prodigy Lamine Yamal. Speaking on Fox News radio from the convention, Lalas said he wants to challenge “the stereotype that exists when it comes to Republicans and certainly the right side of the political spectrum … I live in California, I work in soccer, I’m like a unicorn when it comes to politics out there and yet there are a lot of things that can unite us.”To judge by the volume of online abuse he attracts and airs on X – and to which he often responds with wit and generosity – his political output is having the opposite effect. That’s not surprising when his feed amplifies right-wing talking points, such as Lalas’ recent rehashing of video of a publicity stunt in which Donald Trump served fries to fawning supporters at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s in a specious attempt to taunt Harris.The ginger-bearded face of American soccer in the 1990s, a defender and rock musician who played in Serie A and won 96 caps for the USMNT, Lalas played every minute of the host nation’s four matches at the 1994 World Cup and became, wrote The Los Angeles Times, “the cult figure of America’s high summer”. After retirement he worked as an MLS executive, including for the Los Angeles Galaxy when they signed David Beckham.The mellow, mumbling kid who let David Letterman trim his pumpkin-hued goatee after USA ’94 is now a 54-year-old greying purveyor of indignant tirades for Fox Sports, proudly repping a segment of society who equate the profundity of their patriotism with the prominence of their Stars and Stripes flags and the decibel level of their bellowing about American greatness.With viral clips often attracting more views than live broadcasts on traditional TV channels, there is clear value in being the blowtorch of hot-take merchants. Given the sonic vanilla that is the corporate agenda-driven coverage of MLS on Apple TV, there may be a market for a celebrated American personality who provides and provokes trenchant opinions. But does that hold true when the talk moves from Pochettino’s right-wing to that of the GOP?“When you’re in the entertainment sector, going political tends to have very little upside because this country seems to be perpetually split, 49 to 48, and just in general it’s not going to make one side love you more because they’re just looking at what you’re doing on the field and in the announcer booth. But it will set off the other side,” says Mike Lewis, professor of marketing at Emory University and author of Fandom Analytics, a data-driven analysis of sports supporters.Lalas, a Ron DeSantis fan whose soccer podcast is called State of the Union in a nod to the president’s annual address, has more than 400,000 followers on X. “It’s my channel. I program it with what I like and what I find interesting. If it offends your sensibilities, there are millions of other channels for you to choose from. Go in peace,” Lalas wrote this month to a reader baffled by his divisive posts, which are typically retweets without additional commentary – an unusually coy style for him.That’s true for social media. But given his centrality to Fox’s coverage and the exclusivity of their rights, viewers will find it harder to swerve Lalas if they want to watch some of the biggest matches in the sport. And given how polarised and piqued the nation is and how intertwined party affiliation has become with personal identity, if viewers are aware of his political leanings, can they divorce that from his on-screen presence, even when he’s purely talking soccer? Do liberals want to hear a verdict on Christian Pulisic from Lalas any more than they want to buy a Tesla from the Trump super-booster Elon Musk?View image in fullscreen“It’s almost like a reflexive thing,” Lewis says, “that that’s an enemy now, and I don’t want to listen to an enemy while I watch the US men’s soccer team.” The risk of alienating roughly half your consumer base may be partially offset by the appeal of being perceived as bucking the liberal consensus as an unafraid and unfiltered Republican ambassador from deep blue Los Angeles in a progressive-leaning sport historically disparaged by conservatives.Like Trump, Lalas suggested the US were too woke after they went out of last year’s Women’s World Cup, and did not deviate from Republican orthodoxy in 2020 with a critical tweet when NWSL players took the knee for the national anthem. The Republican Party’s widespread antipathy towards diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging initiatives conflicts with the mission statement of the US Soccer Federation, which declares, “we integrate DEIB into everything we do”.There is a balancing act in playing a high-profile role in a mainstream channel – Fox, after all, has the rights to the 2026 World Cup – then sliding into the right-wing media ecosystem, where many conservatives have found audiences by stoking grievances and trolling the libs. One recent Lalas repost reads: “I check X for two reasons. Elon’s latest meme and seeing who Alexi ticked off today”.Fox Sports and Lalas declined to comment for this article. Like Fox News, Fox Sports is part of the Fox Corporation, which is controlled by Rupert Murdoch and family. So is the conservative-leaning sports news site, Outkick, which vows to question “the consensus and [expose] the destructive nature of ‘woke’ activism” and often cites Lalas.Politics and soccer are far from strangers. Two of the UK’s leading soccer broadcasters, Gary Lineker and Gary Neville, drew ire from British right-wingers for their criticism of the last Conservative government, with Lineker briefly removed from the BBC’s flagship football programme in 2023 for tweets about asylum policy that the broadcaster said breached impartiality rules.The American landscape, however, has changed since Jemele Hill was suspended by ESPN in 2017 for calling Trump a “white supremacist” on X and the network introduced a social media policy discouraging employees from openly taking sides and offering commentary beyond sports. Sticking to sports now seems blinkered. The ESPN star, Stephen A Smith, frequently opines on politics on other platforms and recently sparred with Fox News’ Sean Hannity. Fox Sports’ Colin Cowherd also talks politics, as does Dan LeBatard, who started his own podcast after criticisms of Trump contributed to his departure from ESPN.“There’s a price to pay for it. That’s why it is so hard to figure out the right policy, it’s very challenging to sort through what is a restriction on someone’s free speech” versus protecting the employer’s brand and reputation, says Patrick Crakes, a media consultant and former Fox Sports executive.“One of the reasons a lot of major sports personalities don’t [talk politics] is because you are a very general market, and do you really want to have to take 50% of the people that see you and fight them, or alienate them or make them uncomfortable with you? Sports, traditionally, I feel it was neutral ground. That’s increasingly changed.”Though political talk remains rare during game broadcasts and few commentators have overtly revealed political stances, perceptions of partisanship have become ingrained. “Republican-identifying sports media consumers find NBC Sports to be the most biased sports media outlet; Democratic-identifying sports media consumers find Fox Sports to be the most biased sports media outlet,” according to a survey for the University of Texas’ annual Politics in Sports Media report. “This suggests that the sports networks are reputationally connected to their parent news organizations.” The poll also found that 80% of Republicans do not want athletes to share their political beliefs compared with only 42% of Democrats.The line has also blurred between voters and spectators. “In the Trump era, we’ve started to see these political rallies that look like sporting events where you can have guys essentially face-painted up, they’ve got the red hats, the matching uniforms,” Lewis says. “I think there’s really powerful similarities between sports and politics in the way fandom works, particularly in the way fandom is so closely related to people’s identities.”The subordination of issues to identity and policies to personality means affiliations are ossified and compromise impossible, with Democrats no more likely to switch to supporting Republicans than would a Liverpool fan change allegiance to Manchester United. “If I’m teaching a class on sports marketing and I’m talking about fandom and I ask someone a question, ‘who are you a fan of,’ if they start to tell me two teams, there’s almost a reaction: ‘well, you’re not really a fan. You can’t like the Yankees and the Mets!’” Lewis says.“I think of it all as culture at this point. There’s almost this seamless connection across all these categories, entertainment to sports to politics,” he adds. “They are the culture, they are all happening simultaneously and all affecting each other.” Strangely, when everything is linked it feels like everything is fractured.Last year, Lalas wrote of the USWNT: “Politics, causes, stances, & behavior have made this team unlikeable to a portion of America.” Well, they could respond: right back at ya. And left-leaning observers might doubt the analytical prowess of a professional critic who, to apply a football metaphor to the politics on his X feed, focuses on one team’s shirt-pulling while ignoring the two-footed tackles flying in from the other side, and hails the “authenticity” of a serial liar and flip-flopper.More broadly, though, in a climate where it’s standard that politicians speak out on sports and countless celebrities issue political opinions and endorsements, why shouldn’t sports personalities enjoy the same freedom of expression? If we feel Lalas should keep quiet, shouldn’t we also feel that way about Bruce Springsteen and Taylor Swift?One difference: other forms of artistic expression, such as music, drama and writing, are often conceived and performed as explicit political statements while sports have been treated as a break from reality, not a reflection of it. That’s no longer sustainable as social media entangles news and opinion, the public and the personal. Wisely or not, Lalas isn’t only opposing a liberal consensus, he’s contributing to the erasure of a naive illusion. More

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      The Kamala Harris campaign has Fox News grasping at straws – literally | Margaret Sullivan

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      Watching Fox News these days is like being at open-mic night at a marginal comedy club.Rightwing pundits, like a lineup of amateur comics, are trying out their new material and hoping it kills. So far, not so much.Take Jesse Watters (please). The primetime successor to Tucker Carlson was grasping at straws – yes, literal straws – the other day as he looked for a way to put down Tim Walz. How best to mock the popular Minnesota governor who is Kamala Harris’s running mate?“Women love masculinity and women do not like Tim Walz, so that should just tell you about how masculine Tim Walz is,” Watters said on the roundtable talk show he co-hosts, The Five.With that setup, he tried to prove his point.“The other day you saw him with a vanilla ice-cream shake. Had a straw in it. Again, that tells you everything.”The joke, or whatever it was, didn’t really land. Most people know that Walz is the opposite of a wimp. He’s a famously regular guy – America’s dad – who will use his newfound power to demand that all Americans own jumper cables and know how to use them.The straw-grasping is getting a little desperate these days as Harris and Walz spread their forward-looking message, and as their rivals – the felon and adjudicated sex offender Donald Trump and his running mate, JD Vance – prove themselves less appealing by the day.“Fox is really feeling the loss of Tucker Carlson right now,” theorized Matt Gertz, a senior fellow at Media Matters, the progressive media-watchdog non-profit, who watches a lot of rightwing cable news as part of his job.“He was very effective at lifting something from the rightwing fever swamp and making it into a coherent message” that could spread through the conservative ecosystem.Failing Tucker’s contributions to the commonweal, Fox and its pundits are floundering. They keep trying new approaches to replace their well-honed attacks on Biden – his family’s supposed corruption (“Biden crime family”) and his age (“senile”).Over the past week, Fox tried to gin up controversy over Harris’s “code-switching” – the use of a different accent or speaking style when speaking to Black audiences. Fox’s White House correspondent Peter Doocy pressed the question at an official press briefing.“Since when does the vice-president have what sounds like a southern accent?” Doocy demanded. The press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, dismissed him and moved on after posing a query of her own: “Do you think Americans seriously think this is an important question?”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMaria Bartiromo focused on this “southern accent” scandal on her Fox Business show, using a clip of Harris speaking to an audience in Detroit about how unions have helped win benefits for all Americans, like paid sick leave and a five-day work week, by repeating the phrase: “You’d better thank a union member.”The pro-Trump cable network didn’t help its own cause with that one. “The funny thing about Fox News being mad at Harris for code-switching,” one observer noted on X, “is they had to play the clip of her talking about how great unions are over and over again.” You can’t buy that kind of media exposure.The well-circulated photograph of Tim Walz’s family members wearing pro-Trump T-shirts fizzled, too, though it got a good ride on Fox for a day or two. Soon enough, it became clear that these were mostly distant cousins, a Nebraska branch of the family. Walz’s sister told the Associated Press she didn’t even recognize them. Walz does have an older brother who favors Trump, but most Americans are familiar with family disputes over politics.Gertz told me that Fox pundits were sent reeling by Harris’s ascension and are “very shook by the ‘weird’ narrative” that Tim Walz has popularized. That’s the idea that Trump, Vance and their ilk are deeply strange people – way out of the mainstream with their nasty putdowns of “childless cat ladies” and their outlandish conspiracy theories. It applies all too well to the Fox personalities as well as the politicians they promote.There’s time, of course, for Fox to come up with an effective message. Until something hits, we’re going to see a lot of painful tryouts.The alternative, of course, is obvious: just don’t turn it on.

      Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture More

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      Potential VP pick says he was vetted on questions that would disqualify Trump

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      JD Vance, a rightwing senator vying to be Donald Trump’s running mate, has inadvertently revealed that as part of his vetting for the role, he was asked questions that might disqualify Trump himself.Talking to Fox & Friends, the Republican senator for Ohio told co-host Steve Doocy that his team had been asked “for a number of things” as part of a traditional background check for the vice-president role, adding that “a number of people have been asked to submit this and that”.Doocy interjected: “Like your taxes or something?” before raising the ante: “Your criminal background?”Vance replied: “I don’t know everything they’ve been asked, yeah, but certainly like: ‘Have you ever committed a crime?’ ‘Have you ever lied about this?’”The exchange elicited an immediate response on social media. Jen Psaki, the former Biden White House spokesperson – and now an anchor on MSNBC, posted that Trump “could not pass his own vetting materials for Vice President”. Others suggested that committing a crime or lying may be a requirement for a place on the ticket.Trump himself was given a criminal record last month after he was convicted on 34 counts of document falsification relating to hush money paid to an adult film actor in an effort to win the 2016 presidential election.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHe has also bucked a long-standing convention that presidential candidates release their tax returns, and earlier this year was ordered to pay a $464m penalty for fraudulently inflating property values. More

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      US news organizations urge Biden and Trump to agree to TV election debates

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      Twelve US news organizations are urging Joe Biden and Donald Trump to agree to TV debates ahead of the November presidential vote, a typical feature of an election year and one that can sometimes play a crucial role.“If there is one thing Americans can agree on during this polarized time, it is that the stakes of this election are exceptionally high,” the organizations including ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News, PBS, NBC, NPR and the Associated Press said in a statement.“Amidst that backdrop, there is simply no substitute for the candidates debating with each other, and before the American people, their visions for the future of our nation,” they added.But the two major candidates have so far resisted debating rival candidates from their own parties, with Trump refusing to participate against the former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley and others, and Biden resisting calls to set foot on a TV stage with rival Democratic candidates, who have since abandoned their electoral efforts to challenge him in the party.The news organizations said it was not too early for each campaign to say publicly that it will participate in the three presidential and one vice-presidential TV showdowns set by the nonpartisan Commission on Presidential Debates.In 2020, Biden and Trump debated twice, with a third debate canceled after then-president Trump tested positive for Covid-19.Last week, the Trump campaign called for presidential debates to be held earlier and more frequently so voters “have a full chance” to see the candidates in action. Trump campaign managers have argued that by the time of the first scheduled debate, on 16 September, more than 1 million Americans will likely have already voted, with more than 8.7 million voting by the third debate, penciled in for 9 October.Trump has said he is willing to go head-to-head with Biden “anytime, anyplace and anywhere”, starting “now”. But Biden has been uncommitted to any debate so far, saying last month: “it depends on [Trump’s] behavior.” More

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      in US Politics

      David Cameron: the Boy’s Own robot made of ham was nearly out-Foxed

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      How much have you really engaged with David Cameron, since he became foreign secretary in November? I always get a discombobulating strobe effect, all the alternative futures that could have been: the not-Brexit, the not-Boris Johnson, the not-austerity and social fracturing, if it hadn’t been for this rosy-face Duff Cooper in 21st-century fancy dress, and the incomprehensible number of people who didn’t take one look at that face and run a mile. So I find him quite hard to look at.As he does the American media rounds, talking Ukraine and Gaza to wingnuts (Fox News) and sensible centrists (CNN), the look he’s going for is somewhat changed. You know what they say about America, that it went from barbarism to decadence without the intervening period of civilisation (no offence, Fox News!)Cameron went from floppy young man in a hurry to elder statesman without the intervening period of regular, middle-aged statesman; did he ever really govern? Was he ever really real? Well, he must have been. Because all that stuff happened.He was fresh from meeting Donald Trump in Mar-a-Lago, which he couldn’t say much about because it was a private meeting – the US anchors of every channel nodded delightedly when he said that. I think it sounds saucy yet quaint when a posh person says it, but he said this much to This Morning on CNN: “The point I’m making is …” (ah, memories … Cameron saying, “Let me be clear on this point that I am making,” piping busy words, the catchphrase of a man who’s never once wondered whether he’s interesting) “is that I think profoundly in Britain’s interest, but also to America’s interests, that Trump doesn’t get to win in Ukraine.”We can come to why not if you really think it’s necessary, but what a profoundly weird thing to say. Get to win what? The US election? Because, if he doesn’t win that, it’s hard to see how he wins anything in Ukraine. But if he does win the US election, then he, rather than the British foreign secretary, does sadly “get to” decide what their interests are.Trump, you’ll remember, wants the Ukrainians to cede Crimea and the Donbas border regions to Vladimir Putin in return for no longer getting shot at. Cameron is probably right, it “wouldn’t just be bad for our European security, our adversaries around the world, whether it’s Iran or China or whoever, would draw lessons that we don’t stand by our allies”. And, OK, this next bit is a little flabby, but odds on, there will be “risk of further aggression and further danger in our world”.Yet I worry that Cameron really thinks this is what geopolitics are – a nice, rule-based game where you might get the odd leader who huffs and puffs, but all the other players, nice chaps, will step in and say, as one: “No, you don’t get to do that.”His language is pure Boy’s Own adventure – “the bravery of the Ukrainians”, “Europe and America sticking together and standing up against bullies”. Sure, he’s not swimming in very complicated waters (Trump, for comparison, said that Russia should do “whatever the hell they want to Nato countries who do not spend enough on defence”), but you don’t, from Cameron, get the deep sense of security that settles upon one while listening to a sensible adult, with a full complement of faculties, rooted in reality.He was introduced as “Britain’s top diplomat”, which made him sound kind of cute, like he’d won his title in a Britain’s Got Diplomats quizshow. I’m not sure they take us tremendously seriously, as a nation. Conceivably, because of all that stuff that happened.Fox News went a different way, as they say, with a question you’d call dumb, except that’s what they want you to think, so you’re playing into their hands, except what are you going to do, not call it dumb? It remains dumb. What did Cameron think about London, our London, where “streets are taken over by pro-Hamas folks” and the “Jewish community is describing a country that’s become almost unrecognisable, in terms of the toleration of this”.Cameron’s face is famously hard to read. Caitlin Moran once said he looked like a robot made of ham. But this must surely have ruffled him on the inside: this is what half his party says, round the clock.This is the means by which they threaten the right to protest, and the tactic they use to deflect any serious consideration of the situation in Gaza; that it can’t be a massacre because Hamas and any right-thinking person disputing that slaughter must love Hamas, and that British Jews are terrified of their own country, because the streets are lined with Hamas-lovers. Everyone knows that’s not true but, for as long as it’s useful, that’s what a lot of Conservatives will claim to think.Did it give the foreign secretary, who himself mourns the bloodshed, a second’s pause, to be confronted with this live on air? Did it make him think how far the Tory party had moved, how obliterated the one-nation lot, his lot, were? Did he stop and wonder about his part in all that?Really hard to say – see robots, ham – but he deflected it quite well, stressing all the freedoms, stressing the rule of law, stressing that Benjamin Netanyahu ought to observe laws, too, particularly with regards to civilians.“The Brits and the Americans didn’t provide aid to Germans, in World War Two,” the anchor replied.Britain’s top diplomat didn’t dignify that. More

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      in Elections

      Former Fox News reporter sues after he was allegedly fired for protesting January 6 coverage

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      Fox News is being sued by a former Capitol Hill reporter who accuses the network of discriminating and retaliating against him because he refused to appease Donald Trump and the former president’s supporters by propagating lies about the “stolen” 2020 election.Jason Donner, who worked for Fox News for 12 years as a Capitol Hill reporter and producer, accuses the network of firing him because he spoke out against the coverage of Trump’s stolen election lie and the storming of the Capitol building on 6 January 2021. He was the victim of a wider purge of the newsroom, the lawsuit claims, designed to hold up the network’s ratings by playing along with election denial.The suit, which is being heard by a federal court in Washington DC, gives a vivid account of Donner’s experiences during the January 6 insurrection. Once rioters had entered the Capitol building, he sheltered along with other reporters in the news booths connected to the Senate.As they were hiding, and while reports were coming in of shots fired outside the House chamber, Fox news was broadcasting that the event was “peaceful”. Donner called the newsroom, the suit says, and exclaimed: “I don’t want to hear any of this fucking shit on our air ever again because you’re gonna get us all killed.”The suit claims that after Fox News became the first media outlet to call Arizona for Joe Biden shortly before midnight on election night in 2020, the network faced a furious backlash from Trump and his supporters. Ratings suffered.“To win back viewership and pledge its loyalty to President Trump, Fox’s corporate leadership purged the news division and those reporters who spoke out against claims of election fraud,” it states.Donner also objected to the conspiracy theories being touted by Fox’s star host at the time, Tucker Carlson, who has since been fired. Donner particularly objected to Carlson’s Fox Nation program, Patriot Purge, but was told by a manager, the suit says, that there was “nothing they could do because Tucker has gotten bigger than the network”.The former Fox News reporter claims that retaliation against him began in the spring of 2022. “It became evident to Donner he was now being targeted for speaking out against the false reporting on the election and the January 6 insurrection,” the lawsuit contends.Donner was fired on 28 September 2022 on what he claims were pretextual grounds related to the sick day he had taken two days previously having fallen ill after a Covid-19 vaccination.The new suit is one of a spate of litigation that Fox is fielding relating to its handling of the stolen election lie. In April, the company settled with the voting equipment company Dominion for $787.5m in a defamation suit over false allegations about the firm’s involvement in “rigging” the 2020 election.A similar $2.7bn suit from another voting machine company, Smartmatic, is ongoing. More