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    Any line of separation between Fox News and the US government is about to vanish | Margaret Sullivan

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    When Donald Trump tapped a Fox News host this week to run the mighty US defense department, even Pete Hegseth’s colleagues at the rightwing media outlet were taken aback.“What the heck – can you believe it?” wondered Jesse Watters on his primetime show on Tuesday.“Taken right from this very couch!” exclaimed Hegseth’s fellow Fox & Friends talker Brian Kilmeade on Wednesday.This bemused enthusiasm was for public, on-air consumption.But in private, some had a dimmer view, according to Brian Stelter, author of two books about the Murdoch-controlled network.“You’re telling me Pete is going to oversee 2 million employees?” clucked one Fox host to Stelter; as the CNN media analyst noted, it’s actually almost three.In Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News, and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth, Stelter reported that Hegseth – a decorated veteran who served with the Minnesota national guard in Iraq and Afghanistan – consistently played to a singularly important viewer, checking his phone during commercial breaks in case Trump had commented on the show.And while Hegseth has directed a non-profit veterans’ advocacy group, nothing suggests he’s ready to run the world’s largest military. More alarmingly, he has encouraged Trump to pardon military personnel accused of war crimes, argued against women serving in the armed forces, and expressed the merit in a “preemptive strike” against North Korea.Although extreme, this development isn’t exactly breaking new ground.The Fox-to-Trump revolving door has been spinning for years. During his first term, Trump hired at least 20 officials who had previously worked at or contributed to Fox, making some of them cabinet secretaries and high-ranking White House aides.Remember, for instance, Richard Grenell, who joined Fox in 2009 and was still working there when he was nominated to be Trump’s ambassador to Germany in 2017? A few years later, Grenell was named Trump’s acting director of national intelligence. Or Ben Carson, a Fox contributor for years before becoming Trump’s secretary of housing and urban development?One particularly memorable case was Bill Shine, a high-ranking Fox executive, who left the network after allegedly helping to cover up the company’s culture of sexual harassment that brought down his buddy, co-founder Roger Ailes.No problem, though. Shine got a soft landing at the Trump White House as deputy chief of staff for communications, and later moved to Trump’s re-election campaign.It’s hard to jump from Fox to a job at a serious news organization. But, if you want to work at the Trump White House, there are few better résumé-builders.“The president’s worldview is shaped by the hours of Fox programming he watches each day, leading him to treat Fox employment as an important credential in hiring,” Matt Gertz, senior fellow at Media Matters for America, wrote in 2019.In the past few days, he also tapped the Fox News contributor Tom Honan as his “border czar”. Honan joined Fox shortly after his retirement as acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement director in 2018, during Trump’s first term.The door spins and spins again.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionGoing for the trifecta, Trump named Mike Huckabee, former governor of Arkansas and former host of a weekly Fox show, as his preferred ambassador to Israel.Can a glorified perch for Sean Hannity – long the Trump whisperer – be far behind? And what about Tucker Carlson, despite being fired by the network last year?The Trump/Fox fit is a natural; one thing they share is a truth problem. Trump, of course, lies with fluid impunity.And Fox – though it insists on calling itself a news organization – has helped to spread lies and disinformation, including about the supposedly “rigged” 2020 election that Trump still insists he won. No matter that Fox had to pay Dominion Voting Systems nearly $800m in a court settlement after they sued for defamation.“Instead of promoting lies and conspiracy theories from outlets like Fox News and the online fever swamps,” wrote Oliver Darcy in his Status newsletter, “these media personalities will now be doing so with the US government’s resources and backing.”There could be no Trump as president without Fox. And Fox’s market capitalization is now approaching $20bn.Whatever they’re doing is working for mutual benefit, if not for US democracy.With this week’s developments, any line of separation – if it ever existed – is being erased. The two are nearly a single organism.

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

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      Fox News’s interview of Kamala Harris was grievance theater, not political journalism | Margaret Sullivan

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      Bret Baier started off his Wednesday evening interview with Kamala Harris with a barrage of combative questions about immigration, designed less to elicit substantive answers than to prove what a tough guy the Fox host could be.His aggressive approach was understandable, in a way, since Baier had been under pressure for days from the Donald Trump faithful; they were convinced he was going to go easy on the Democratic nominee for president, and maybe even allow her campaign to edit the interview or see the questions in advance.So, Baier came out guns blazing, barely allowing the vice-president to finish a sentence before jumping in with objections and arguments.After 10 minutes of playing immigration “gotcha”, Baier pivoted to the obvious next subject, airing a video clip in which Harris expressed support for transgender people in prisons.Immigrant hatred. Transphobia. And later, Joe Biden’s age. Baier was running through the Fox News greatest hits playlist.This was grievance theater, not political journalism.But Harris got in her licks. She had her moments.Chiming in afterwards in what some saw as corporate damage control, Baier’s colleagues on Fox News gushed their approval. Martha MacCallum termed Baier’s performance “masterful”, while Dana Perino analyzed the interview as “super good”.I can’t imagine that too many viewers agreed. If they came to it expecting to learn more about Harris’s policies or get a true sense of her character, they would have been disappointed. That wasn’t the gameplan, and it wasn’t the result.But Harris accomplished something anyway.Merely by sitting down with a Fox host, she made a few statements.First, that she is unafraid and is willing to speak to all voters. It’s hard to imagine Donald Trump, these days, submitting to an interview with, say, Rachel Maddow of MSNBC; just this week, he turned away from a CNBC interview, and earlier canceled a CBS News 60 Minutes agreement.Second, Harris did manage to introduce a few snippets of reality to dedicated Fox viewers who probably haven’t been exposed to some of the most troubling criticisms of Trump.“That he’s unfit to serve. That he’s unstable. That’s he’s dangerous,” was how she characterized what millions of Americans are feeling. “And that people are exhausted.”She even was able to mention, at some length, the harsh view of the former commander-in-chief from Mark Milley, who served in two top military roles – including chair of the joint chiefs of staff – during the Trump administration.Milley has called Trump “fascist to the core” and has said that no one has ever been as dangerous to the United States.So maybe this was what one leading expert on Fox News, Brian Stelter, called the Harris campaign’s “Google strategy”. On CNN, Stelter speculated that viewers might hear these comments and go searching online for more, thus piercing the information bubble they’ve been living in.No doubt, the vast majority of regular Fox viewers have their minds made up – they’re sticking with Trump. No matter his mental decline. No matter his felony convictions. No matter the threats he makes or the threats he poses.But there may be a small percentage of the millions who tuned in who – despite all the noise and interruptions – managed to hear a reasonable, intelligent and stable alternative to Trump. Maybe some of them live in the key swing state of Pennsylvania, where the interview was recorded, or in Wisconsin or Michigan.In this coin flip of an election, even that tiny adjustment might make all the difference.

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

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      Kamala Harris pledges break from Biden presidency in testy Fox News interview

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      Kamala Harris said her presidency “would not be a continuation of Joe Biden’s presidency” in a testy interview with the rightwing Fox News channel on Wednesday night as she criticized Donald Trump over his continuing threats against “the enemy within”.The 25-minute interview, conducted after Harris held a rally with more than 100 Republican officials in Pennsylvania, was the first time Harris had sat for a conversation with Fox News, which has been a consistent supporter of Trump.Bret Baier, Fox News’s chief political anchor, is seen as a straight news counterbalance to the vitriol of Fox News’s evening shows, but still came with a laundry list of rightwing topics, including immigration, the rights of transgender people and Joe Biden’s performance, as Harris attempted to sell herself to the channel’s older, largely Republican, audience.Harris was asked if there was anything she “would do differently” from Joe Biden, as Baier played a clip of the vice-president, in a previous interview, saying there is “not a thing that comes to mind” that she would have changed. That response has become an attack point among Republicans as they seek to tie Harris to the unpopular Biden administration.“Let me be very clear. My presidency will not be a continuation of Joe Biden’s presidency, and like every new president that comes into office, I will bring my life experiences, my professional experiences, and fresh new ideas. I represent a new generation of leadership,” Harris said.“For example, as someone who has not spent the majority of my career in Washington DC, I invite ideas: whether it be from the Republicans who are supporting me, who were just on stage with me minutes ago, and the business sector and others, who can contribute to the decisions that I make.”Baier pointed to polling which shows a majority of Americans believe the country is “on the wrong track”, and asked Harris why they were saying that when she has been vice-president since January 2021. Harris suggested the polls show a fatigue with Biden and Trump, given the latter has “been running for office” since 2016.Harris noted that several high-profile former members of the Trump administration now believe “that he is unfit to serve, that he is unstable, that he is dangerous, and that people are exhausted with someone who professes to be a leader, who spends full time demeaning and engaging in personal grievances”.Baier asked why, given those criticisms, Trump has support of “half the country”. He added: “Are they stupid?”“I would never say that about the American people. And in fact, if you listen to Donald Trump, if you watch any of his rallies, he’s the one who tends to demean, and belittle, and diminish the American people,” Harris said.“He’s the one who talks about an enemy within. An enemy within, talking about the American people, suggesting he would turn the American military on the American people.”Trump had appeared on a Fox News town hall episode which aired earlier on Wednesday, where he doubled down on his comments about “the enemy from within”. He characterized this alleged internal enemy, which he has said should be “handled by” the military, as “the Pelosis” and his other political opponents.The former president had reacted furiously to the news that Baier would be interviewing Harris, posting on social media that the anchor was “often very soft to those on the ‘cocktail circuit’ left” and falsely claiming that Fox News “has grown so weak and soft on the Democrats”.But Baier, while being an alternative from the more radical nighttime hosts such as Sean Hannity and Jesse Watters, largely stuck to rightwing issues.He played a Trump campaign ad, which he suggested was among the few political ads to “break through” this year. The ad quoted an interview with Harris in 2019, when she said she supported “surgical care” for trans prisoners.Trump has spent tens of millions on anti-transgender advertising, but Harris brushed off the issue, pointing out that “under Donald Trump’s administration, these surgeries were available on a medical necessity basis, to people in the federal prison system”.“And I think, frankly, that ad from the Trump campaign is a little bit of like throwing, you know, stones when you’re living in the glass house,” she said.Polls show Harris and Trump effectively tied in most swing states, as both campaigns seek to convince voters before 5 November. Harris’s appearance on Fox News came amid a raft of interviews over the past week. She was interviewed on CBS’s prestigious 60 Minutes news show, sat down with the crowd from The View talkshow, appeared on the Call Her Daddy podcast, and on Tuesday spoke with radio host Charlamagne tha God.Harris is also reportedly in negotiations to appear on Joe Rogan’s podcast – the most popular podcast in the US, which has a large following among young men. Trump, who refused to take part in a second debate on CNN with Harris, has said he will appear on Rogan’s podcast.This was Harris’ first sit-down interview with Fox News, although her running mate, Tim Walz, has appeared on the network multiple times. Pete Buttigieg, the transportation secretary, has been a regular presence on Fox News screens, with his calm responses to sometimes hostile questions frequently going viral and delighting Democrats. More

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      Kamala Harris agrees to interview with Fox News

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      Kamala Harris will do a sit-down interview with the rightwing broadcaster Fox News on Wednesday, the news channel announced on Monday, in the most dramatic moment yet in a recent media blitz by the Democratic presidential nominee.The interview with Fox News’s chief political anchor, Bret Baier, comes as Democrats have increased their presence on Fox News, part of an outreach to undecided voters and after CBS News’s 60 Minutes became embroiled in a controversy when rightwing critics have said they edited an interview to make Harris appear more succinct.In a press release, Fox said the interview with the vice-president would take place on Wednesday 16 October and hit the airwaves on Special Report with Bret Baier and be broadcast at 6.00pm.Harris’s appearance comes after weeks of criticism that she was avoiding all but the softest of sit-downs, including with Oprah Winfrey, ABC’s morning talk-in The View, with the former shock jock Howard Stern and with Late Night’s Stephen Colbert.Harris has also appeared on the podcast Call Me Daddy. Meanwhile, Donald Trump is reported to be going on Joe Rogan’s Full Send before election day.The Fox announcement comes after the Time magazine owner, Marc Benioff, complained on Sunday that Harris had denied multiple interview requests. Benioff said the denial was “unlike every other presidential candidate”, including Biden and Trump.“We believe in transparency and publish each interview in full,” Benioff wrote on X. Why isn’t the Vice President engaging with the public on the same level?”Harris’s sit-down with Fox News will be her first formal interview with the network – but not the first for Democratic campaign surrogates. With at least three times the viewership of CNN and MSNBC, candidates looking for votes often make Fox a pragmatic choice.Nielsen Media Research shows Fox News is the highest-rated network in all swing states. According to a recent YouGov poll – 54% of Republicans, 22% of Democrats and 28% of independent voters had watched the cable station in the past month.Jessica Loker, vice-president of politics at the network, told Bloomberg that the network saw ratings go up when Democrats are on. Baier told Axios: “If you build it, they will come.”It’s also well-worn path for Democrats in this election cycle. The Transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, has been on the network so often he introduced himself at the Democratic party convention in August with: “I’m Pete Buttigieg and you might recognize me from Fox News.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionButtigieg said he was proud to go on conservative outlets to speak on behalf of the Democrats because their arguments and facts might not otherwise be aired to a Fox audience.So too have the Democratic governors Gavin Newsom, Josh Shapiro, Wes Moore and Gretchen Whitmer, and the senators Amy Klobuchar, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, John Fetterman and Chris Coons also dropped in on the network.Harris appearance points to an effort to escape Democrats’ ideologically aligned media bubbles in the effort for votes.“We have so many hyper-close elections in swing states that even if you only get a point or two that you take away from Republicans and put in your column can be the 10,000 votes that give you that swing state,” the University of Virginia political analyst Larry Sabato told the Guardian last month. 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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      Why are so many Democratic politicians appearing on Fox News?

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      Pete Buttigieg, Joe Biden’s transport secretary, introduced himself to Democrats at their convention earlier last month in unusual fashion. “I’m Pete Buttigieg and you might recognize me from Fox News,” he told the crowd in Chicago.The comment drew laughter, but beneath it was a certain truth: in the final two months of the 2024 election, politicians and campaign aides are less siloed in their ideologically aligned media bubbles in an effort to poach potentially persuadable voters.Buttigieg said he is proud to go on conservative outlets to speak on behalf of the Harris-Walz campaign because their arguments and facts might not otherwise be aired to that audience. So too have the Democratic governors Gavin Newsom, Josh Shapiro, Wes Moore and Gretchen Whitmer, and senators Amy Klobuchar, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, John Fetterman and Chris Coons also dropped in on the network.Meanwhile, Trump campaign adviser Corey Lewandowski has been on MSNBC’s The Beat with Ari Melber, and JD Vance on CNN. Presidential hopeful Kamala Harris told CNN she would find a place in her cabinet for a Republican if elected.In an election that is likely to turn on a small number of undecided voters in a handful of swing states, and considering that the Harris-Walz campaign has been on a bus tour of heavily Republican, mainly pro-Trump rural Georgia where there aren’t many votes to get, the cross-border forays into enemy TV territory makes sense.“We have so many hyper-close elections in swing states that even if you only get a point or two that you take away from Republicans and put in your column can be the 10,000 votes that give you that swing state,” said the University of Virginia political analyst Larry Sabato.The same is true for going on a cable news station holding perceived political biases. When Buttigieg goes on Fox News, Sabato says, he is “not just addressing Republicans, but also getting Democrats indebted to him for the unpleasant task he’s performing”.But the media too likes to play the game – albeit for different reasons. The issue of the media, and its perceived political biases, has become a central campaign issue in the US and there is a deep public hostility to journalists. For the more partisan television networks like Fox and MSNBC, there is an advantage to having people from the other side on – as it may somewhat defuse accusations of one-sidedness.It is also a long tradition. Fox News used to have a now-distant show called Hannity & Colmes that was presented by conservative Sean Hannity and liberal Alan Colmes. Typically, Colmes would come off worse – and indeed was often the subject of much mockery.“Both play a game here,” said Sabato. “Fox News chooses people who are quote-unquote Democrats who haven’t been in the game for sometime or who are out of sync with the party, and the same is true with Republicans on CNN. They feel an obligation – if not balanced, then at least a voice to the other side.”The passage of Democrats to Fox may also be entirely pragmatic given the power of the channel. Nielsen Media Research shows Fox News is the highest-rated network in all swing states. According to a recent YouGov poll –54% of Republicans, 22% of Democrats and 28% of independent voters had watched the cable station in the past month.An Axios/Harris 100 Poll also found that Fox News has gained ground this year with more independents and Democrats in terms of trust. Jessica Loker, vice-president of politics at the network, told Bloomberg that the network sees ratings go up when Democrats are on. The Fox News anchor Bret Baier told Axios: “If you build it, they will come.”A Fox News spokesperson confirmed that the outlet has seen, even before the Democratic convention in Chicago, a 41% increase in Democrat guests, excluding strategists, in the year to August.But that comes as politicians are fighting daily battles over media representation, most recently over whether microphones at the ABC-hosted Harris-Trump debate on 10 September would be muted when it is the other person’s turn to speak. Before that, the campaigns were locked in disputes over which network would host and when.“The inner workings of the political process are so much the subject matter, and that includes how the political process interacts with the media,” said Robert Thompson, director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture. “If they’re talking about microphones, or if it’s a fair place, then they’re not talking about the issues that they should be talking about in a debate, which they may or may not actually talk about that debate.”Moreover, Thompson points out, “the whole debate over doing a presidential debate on ABC or Fox demonstrates how much everyone assumes that each one of these operations are part of a set of established political ideologies.”“The things being debated are newly self-generated parts of how journalism has become so intimately part of the story as opposed to being the medium by which we communicate these two people,” said Thompson.And it is apt to go wrong. Last week, MSNBC’s Ari Melber threatened to sue Lewandowski for lying about him over comments he made over the attempted Trump assassination. Trump is suing ABC News and George Stephanopoulos over the anchor’s assertion that a jury concluded Trump had raped magazine writer E Jean Carroll. So, it seems, even if Democrats are venturing on to hostile territory more and more, the terrain still remains thoroughly part of a battlefield. More

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      Tactical ad breaks and lies: rightwing coverage of DNC is exactly as expected

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      As the Democratic party enjoys the afterglow of an exuberant national convention, the rightwing media has settled on consistent counter-programming: complaining about “joy”, hyping up pro-Palestinian protests and expressing a newfound concern for the treatment of Joe Biden.The coverage, which has at times avoided the more pointed Democratic criticisms of Trump by cutting to ad breaks, has also including the criticism of women both for smiling too much and not smiling enough, and the coining of a new name for Barack Obama: “Barack-Stabber”.There has also been the bizarre revival of the racist Obama birther conspiracy theory by a Fox News host, as well as the straight-faced claim by a Republican-supporting news host that it is “all vengeance at this year’s DNC [Democratic national convention]”.In short, it’s been days of coverage that will be unfamiliar to anyone lucky enough to be outside the rightwing media bubble, and depressingly recognizable to those who dip into conservative coverage.“The words that we hear on the ground over and over is [sic]: ‘Trump, Trump, Trump’, and that Harris and Walz are full of joy,” Daniel Baldwin, a reporter on the hard-right OANN news channel, reported on Tuesday.Baldwin, who seemed quite upset, added: “Guess what: vibes and joy don’t put fool … food on the table. They don’t bring prices down, they don’t clean up the streets, they don’t do any of that.”Others in the rightwing media complained that the joy was insincere. Sean Hannity, a staunch Trump supporter and one of Fox News’s most celebrated hosts, told his audience on Tuesday: “The convention has been full of a lot of hate, instead of the politics of joy, which you’ve been promised.”Laura Ingraham, another Fox News stalwart, sang from the same hymn sheet as she claimed that Kamala Harris’s “joyful branding is a cover for something far more sinister”.“I like to call it socialism with a smile. It’s a seething disdain for tens of millions of Americans who still support Donald Trump,” Ingraham said, adding that the DNC is not about “love or optimism: it’s about hatred and retribution”.“There’s not much joy in this convention hall, certainly not compared to what we say at the RNC,” Ingraham added.Ingraham’s analysis was apparently unironic, but the idea that the Republican national convention was happy and joyful will come as a surprise to anyone who was there.The Republican event saw Ted Cruz, the Texas senator, claim that Americans were being “murdered, assaulted, raped by illegal immigrants that the Democrats have released”, while Mike Johnson, the Republican House speaker, warned that “millions of illegal aliens” should not be allowed to “harm our country”, as attendees waved signs reading: “Mass deportation now.”When it came to joy, at times it seemed like conservative media didn’t quite know what line of attack they were supposed to be using.“Hillary Clinton, she’s the most joyless person I think who has ever walked on this earth,” Matt Schlapp, a Republican political operative, told Newsmax on Monday.But minutes later, Schlapp performed an about turn on how much happiness women should express.“Kamala Harris came out on the stage … all the laughing, it’s like she got into the sherry or something,” Schlapp complained, in comments highlighted by Desi Lydic on The Daily Show.As well as questioning joyfulness and levity, the right wing has focused on protests rather than what was going on in the convention hall. That caused problems for the likes of Fox News and Newsmax at the start of the week, when a smaller than expected group of people congregated peacefully in Chicago. Fox News still tried valiantly to make the protests seem more of a thing, but the channel was outshone by One America News Network.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionOn OANN, the host Kara McKinney claimed: “DNC protests are spiraling out of control” over footage of pro-Palestinian activists calmly holding a flag and a crowd standing quietly behind a fence.Away from the protests, a common feature was anguish at Democrats’ treatment of Joe Biden – a man who rightwing media has spent years accusing of ill-defined crimes and senility.On Newsmax, one guest complained that Biden was mentioned “maybe twice”, “as they shoved him out in the dark of the night on the first night”, while an OANN host claimed Biden had been “buried at the end of the night”.Fox News’s The Five took a similar angle, portraying senior Democrats as nefarious plotters. A chyron on the show dubbed Obama “Barack-Stabber Obama”, as the host Jeanine Pirro lamented that Biden spoke on the first day of the convention and then “was exiled to California”.Michelle Obama didn’t escape unscathed either. A chyron under one discussion of the former first lady: “Michelle Obama snubs Biden in her DNC speech”, while Nancy Pelosi was also criticized, just for good measure.As the week wore on, it became clear that one tactic for news channels was just to ignore certain things happening at the convention. When a video was aired at the DNC about about the January 6 insurrection, Fox News cut to an advert for a landline telephone.When three women, including one who had been raped as a child, took the stage to discuss their experiences with pregnancies, miscarriages and abortions, Fox News skipped the segment entirely, Media Matters reported. Instead, the network had its male chief political analyst, Brit Hume, pontificate on the issue, and offer more faux Biden outrage, on air.“What does it say about the modern state of the Democratic party that it could not ask these abortion speakers to stand aside to make room for the president of the United States to speak at a reasonable hour tonight?” was Hume’s take.Among the critical analysis of the term “joy”, the wailing over Biden’s speaking spot and the ongoing female smiling debate, at least Fox News offered something more familiar to its viewers: the revival of the more-than-a-decade-old Obama birth certificate conspiracy theory. The idea, which Trump pushed even before he was a presidential candidate, posits that Obama was not born in the US, and therefore should not have been US president.Ignoring the fact that Obama has published his birth certificate, and that he has not been president for eight years, Jesse Watters, a primetime Fox News host, declared on the channel that he was going to send someone called Johnny to investigate.Obama is “definitely going to interfere in this election”, Watters said.“That’s why we’ll be sending Johnny to Hawaii to get the truth about the birth certificate – this time we will dig deep and find out what really happened.” More

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      Trump says he would debate on Fox News – but Harris insists on ABC

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      Donald Trump says he would be willing to debate Kamala Harris on the friendly environs of Fox News in September – but the vice-president has not signed on to what would be a switch-up.Trump had previously agreed to appear on ABC News and debate Joe Biden a second time this year before the president ended his re-election campaign.In a statement on his Truth Social platform, Trump said the debate would be held on 4 September in Pennsylvania. The former president said that there was a conflict of interest at play after filing a defamation lawsuit against ABC and network host George Stephanopoulos over the anchor’s assertion that Trump had been “found liable for rape” in the E Jean Carroll case.Trump earlier this year was ordered to pay $83m for defamatory statements he had made about the magazine columnist after an earlier case found him liable for defamation and sexual abuse.“The Debate was previously scheduled against … Biden on ABC, but has been terminated in that Biden will no longer be a participant, and I am in litigation against ABC Network and George Slopadopoulos, thereby creating a conflict of interest,” Trump wrote.The former Republican president added that the site of the debate on Fox News – which is generally welcoming to the GOP – had not been determined. But he said the moderators would be Fox News’ Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum, and the rules would be similar to his 27 June debate with Biden – except that this time there would be a studio audience.But on Saturday, in a statement that invoked Trump’s previous challenge to debate Biden at any time or place, Harris’s campaign made clear she did not agree to the terms of the proposed Fox News debate. And she particularly rejected using that debate to replace the ABC one.“Donald Trump is running scared and trying to back out of the debate he already agreed to and running straight to Fox News to bail him out,” Harris campaign spokesperson Michael Tyler said in a statement shared on X by NBC News political correspondent Yamiche Alcindor.“He needs to stop playing games and show up to the debate he already committed to on [10 September]. The vice-president will be there one way or the other to take the opportunity to speak to a prime-time national audience. We’re happy to discuss further debates after the one both campaigns have already agreed to.“Mr Anytime, anywhere, any place should have no problem with that unless he’s too scared to show up on the 10th.”In a post on X, Harris herself added: “It’s interesting how any time, any place’ becomes ‘one specific time, one specific safe space.’”The vice-president said in July that she was “ready” to debate Trump and accused him of stepping back from the previous agreement involving ABC.In a post on Saturday, Trump alleged that Harris was “afraid” to “do a REAL debate” against him. He added: “I’ll see [Harris] on September 4th or I won’t see her at all.”Democratic party alarm at Biden’s June debate performance on CNN set in motion his dramatic withdrawal from the race, with polls indicating he was likely headed for a blowout electoral defeat.Trump and Harris are now polling neck-and-neck.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe political dance over presidential debates is now set to escalate. Earlier this year, Biden and Trump agreed to sidestep the typical arrangement of three debates, typically held in the fall and organized by the bipartisan Commission on Presidential Debates.Democrats said reducing the number to two and moving them up to June and September reflected changes in the “structure of our elections and the interests of voters”.Biden said he had won two debates with Trump in 2020 and challenged him to two this year. “I hear you’re free on Wednesdays,” Biden said, referring to a weekly off-day during the New York criminal trial that saw Trump convicted of falsifying business records in connections with hush-money payments to the adult film actor Stormy Daniels.But that decision ultimately backfired for Biden.The latest twist in the 2024 debate drama comes after Trump said he would not face Harris because she was not the party’s official candidate. On Friday, Harris secured enough Biden delegates to officially become her party’s nominee.At a rally in Atlanta on Tuesday, Harris said she welcomed a debate against Trump, who days earlier had called her a “bum”.“As the saying goes, you got something to say, say it to my face,” Harris said. More