More stories

  • in

    Tucker Carlson’s Putin Interview Puts Him Back on Center Stage, for Now

    Mr. Carlson’s interview with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia put him back on center stage for the first time since his Fox News show was canceled.Last spring, it seemed Tucker Carlson might have reached the end of his fiery path through American media and politics.Fox News canceled his top-rated show, depriving Mr. Carlson of his nightly platform in prime time. But it kept him under a contract, worth more than $15 million a year, that prohibited him from taking a job with a rival.Under the old rules of the legacy media, Mr. Carlson would have been off the air and out of sight through the end of the 2024 election, when his contract runs out. But Mr. Carlson is no typical television star. And what was once normal in his industry is increasingly archaic, shattered by the new rules — or lack thereof — of the fractured online media world.In landing an exclusive interview with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia — released on Thursday on the social network X and Mr. Carlson’s own streaming site, Tucker Carlson Network — the host returned, at least for a moment, to the center of American politics.The two-hour interview gave him a bullhorn to an American audience just as many congressional Republicans worked to block a vital lifeline of American military aid to Ukraine.It also accomplished Mr. Carlson’s goal of recapturing the spotlight. For the first time since his defenestration from Fox, his name was once again on the lips of major national and international figures, the kind of buzz on which Mr. Carlson has long thrived.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

  • in

    On Live TV, Guardian Angels Tackle Man Sliwa Misidentified as Migrant

    “We’ve got to take back 42nd Street,” Curtis Sliwa, the founder of the anti-crime group, said on “Hannity” as the Guardian Angels pushed a man to the ground.The Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa was being interviewed live from Times Square on Tuesday night by the Fox News host Sean Hannity when their exchange took a startling turn.The topic was what both men seemed to agree was a migrant-fueled wave of crime and chaos that they claimed had overtaken New York amid a surge of arrivals into the city from the southern border over the past two years.Suddenly, Mr. Sliwa had a prime-time example. As he spoke, the half-dozen red-jacketed Angels flanking him slipped out of the frame.“Our guys have just taken down one of the migrant guys right here on the corner of 42nd and Seventh where all this is taking place,” Mr. Sliwa said, pointing off camera.“Can you pan the camera?” Mr. Hannity asked his cameraman.The cameraman swung around and captured the Angels confronting a slightly built man in a hooded sweatshirt, throwing him to the ground and putting him in a headlock.“He is out of control,” Mr. Sliwa said as the camera turned away and Mr. Hannity shifted to criticizing President Biden over his administration’s border policies.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

  • in

    Biden to Sit Out Super Bowl Interview

    President Biden is sitting out the Super Bowl for the second year in a row.CBS said on Saturday that the White House had turned down a request for Mr. Biden to participate in a televised interview with its news division, which would have aired in the highly rated hours ahead of the big game on Feb. 11.In a tradition dating to 2009, presidents have recorded an interview with the network that broadcasts the Super Bowl, although there have been exceptions. Donald J. Trump did not appear on NBC in 2018. Last year, Mr. Biden declined to appear on Fox, home of cable hosts like Sean Hannity who are sharply hostile toward him.But the White House has been receptive to CBS News in the past. The president was interviewed by the “CBS Evening News” anchor Norah O’Donnell ahead of the 2021 Super Bowl, and he participated in two lengthy “60 Minutes” pieces, in 2022 and 2023, with the correspondent Scott Pelley.“We hope viewers enjoy watching what they tuned in for — the game,” Ben LaBolt, the White House communications director, said in a statement on Saturday.The Super Bowl, typically the most-watched telecast of the year, offers an unusually large audience for a sitting president to address current events and advance his agenda to the public.And there is plenty of news for Mr. Biden to comment on. Starting on Friday, the United States carried out military strikes in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen. Three American soldiers were killed last Sunday in Jordan. The government just released a positive jobs report. And Mr. Biden is ramping up his re-election campaign as Mr. Trump has moved closer to clinching the Republican nomination.In 2021, Mr. Biden’s pregame interview with Ms. O’Donnell was seen live by about 10.2 million viewers; millions more viewed clips that aired on other CBS programs in the days surrounding the game.For this year’s event, CBS offered the White House about 15 minutes for an interview with Mr. Biden, with three to four minutes airing live during the pregame coverage on the network, according to a person familiar with the discussions.Mr. Biden has conducted fewer media interviews than his most recent predecessors. The president’s last major network interview took place in October, with Mr. Pelley of CBS. His State of the Union address is scheduled for March 7.Katie Rogers More

  • in

    Biden Campaign Sharpens Its Post-Roe Message: Abortion Is About Freedom

    In events next week, the president and vice president will argue that abortion access is crucial to personal freedoms, and warn of what is at stake if Donald J. Trump is re-elected.President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris will headline events next week centered around protecting abortion rights, throwing more heft behind an issue that has galvanized voters in the 18 months since the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade.On Monday, Ms. Harris will visit Wisconsin to begin a national tour focused on preserving access to reproductive health care as Republicans call for more restrictions. Then on Tuesday, she will join Mr. Biden at a rally for abortion rights in Virginia, where Democrats recently took control of the state legislature and have proposed to enshrine abortion protections in the state constitution.Ms. Harris offered a preview of the administration’s election-year messaging to Americans when she visited “The View,” the most popular daytime talk show in the country.“We are not asking anyone to abandon their personal beliefs,” she said during an appearance on Wednesday, adding that “the government should not be telling women what to do with their bodies.”The idea that preserving access to abortion is tantamount to preserving personal freedoms has been embraced by Biden administration officials, lawmakers and activists who hope it will energize a flagging base and draw independent voters into the fold. They also want to contrast the administration’s policies with the political peril that the Republican Party faces by embracing hard-line measures.“I start from the place that most Americans believe that women should have the freedom to make their own decisions about health care, including abortion, without government interference,” Senator Tina Smith, Democrat of Minnesota, who traveled to the Iowa caucuses as a surrogate for Mr. Biden, said in an interview. (About 69 percent of voters think abortion should be legal in the first three months of pregnancy, according to a Gallup poll last year.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

  • in

    Ron DeSantis and Fox News, Old Friends, Hit Turbulence

    When the Fox News host Laura Ingraham urged Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida “to step aside and endorse Trump” on Tuesday night, it was the latest sign of a sharp deterioration of relations between the Republican presidential hopeful and the network that made him a star.Ms. Ingraham’s exhortation, in the wake of Mr. DeSantis’s second-place finish in the Iowa caucuses, was met with mockery and derision by two of the governor’s most prominent aides.“Why would DeSantis take advice from the opposing campaign?” Christina Pushaw, the campaign’s rapid response director, wrote on X, to which Mr. DeSantis’s spokesman in the governor’s office, Jeremy Redfern, chimed in.“The Fox News PAC,” he wrote.It was the latest broadside from Mr. DeSantis’s inner circle against the cable network that until recently had been among the loudest advocates of his candidacy.But Mr. DeSantis lashed out last week, accusing Fox News of bias toward his rival, former President Donald J. Trump. Speaking to reporters in Iowa, Mr. DeSantis said that conservative media outlets, including Fox, had acted as “a Praetorian Guard” for Mr. Trump. “They just don’t hold him accountable because they’re worried about losing viewers,” Mr. DeSantis said, “and they don’t want to have the ratings go down.”The governor’s campaign manager denounced Fox as “full blown Trump TV, honesty thrown to the wind.” On caucus night, Ms. Pushaw assailed Fox News for projecting a victory for Mr. Trump only a half-hour after Iowans began to caucus. “Corporate media election interference,” she wrote on X.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

  • in

    DeSantis, Once a Darling of Conservative News Media, Now Rails Against It

    As the Iowa caucuses draw near, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has increasingly focused on a peculiar target as he looks to win the Republican nomination: the conservative news media ecosystem that supports former President Donald J. Trump.Desperate to make his case that he is a better candidate than Mr. Trump — while trailing by wide margins in recent polls — Mr. DeSantis seems to have turned on many of the news outlets that once promoted his candidacy, for being unfair in their coverage.“He’s got basically a Praetorian Guard of the conservative media — Fox News, the websites, all this stuff,” Mr. DeSantis told reporters outside his campaign headquarters in Urbandale, Iowa. “They just don’t hold him accountable because they’re worried about losing viewers. And they don’t want to have the ratings go down.”He added: “That’s just the reality. That’s just the truth, and I’m not complaining about it. I’d rather that not be the case. But that’s just, I think, an objective reality.”It was the most animated version of a message that Mr. DeSantis, despite saying he is not complaining, has delivered repeatedly over the last several days. While the former governor’s own criticisms of Mr. Trump are relatively muted, he has urged conservative news media to be more critical.Calling on the conservative news media to hold Mr. Trump more to account allows Mr. DeSantis to appear to be doing so himself, if not directly. But he and his team have also taken to attacking Fox News, which was glowing in its coverage of Mr. DeSantis until it circled the wagons for Mr. Trump once the former president was first indicted in March 2023.When Mr. DeSantis was a House member, he became a star among conservatives through appearances on Fox News. He soon built a supportive network with other conservative news outlets.The New York Post, which, like Fox News, is owned by Rupert Murdoch, declared him “DeFuture” after his successful re-election effort in 2022, making him a target for some Trump allies who portrayed him as the conservative news media’s establishment pick. He had grown used to being defended by conservative news media in his culture war fights, and by an army of online allies who would defend him on social media.But that was then. Mr. DeSantis’s standing in the race for the Republican nomination eroded over many months. Fox News hosted Mr. Trump just this week for a live town hall from Iowa.Mr. DeSantis, who once constantly criticized the mainstream news media, has shifted gears and gives interviews to mainstream outlets like CNN and even left-leaning networks like MSNBC.He now finds himself floating attack lines against onetime allies as he fights for second place in the caucuses before bringing them on the trail. To that end, Mr. DeSantis used his line about Mr. Trump’s Praetorian Guard during an interview with MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” before deploying it again on Friday. More

  • in

    Trump’s Press Conference Aired as His Civil Fraud Trial Comes to a Close

    CNN, Fox News and MSNBC all carried a live news conference by Donald J. Trump on Thursday on the final day of his civil fraud trial, a stark reminder that the former president’s legal troubles offer a uniquely outsize media platform as he pursues the Republican nomination.His appearance lasted only a few minutes, but viewers were treated to an unfiltered fusillade of incendiary and misleading comments, with Mr. Trump assailing President Biden as a “crooked” politician who “could not string two sentences together.”Fraud charges against a former president are undoubtedly newsworthy, but Mr. Trump has seized on the legal proceedings as a chance to hog the media spotlight — a notable advantage over rivals like Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida and Nikki Haley, who can struggle for similar airtime.Trump campaign aides took particular pleasure that CNN carried Mr. Trump live and allowed him to deliver his talking points, unmediated, to the American public. This framing — on Mr. Trump’s own terms, with TV cameras capturing his every word without real-time fact-checking — is exactly how Mr. Trump and his allies envisage they can exploit any criminal trials that might be held during the election season.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

  • in

    How to Watch the Republican Debate Taking Place in Iowa

    Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis will meet on Wednesday night in Des Moines for the last Republican presidential debate before the Iowa caucuses on Monday.CNN will host the debate starting at 9 p.m. Eastern time.Where can I watch?CNN is broadcasting the debate on cable and will stream it free on CNN.com. Subscribers to the streaming service Max can watch via CNN Max.Which candidates will be there?Only three candidates — Mr. DeSantis, Ms. Haley and Donald J. Trump — met CNN’s qualification requirements. To make it onto the debate stage, candidates had to have at least 10 percent support in a minimum of three distinct polls of national Republican primary voters or Iowa Republican caucusgoers.Mr. Trump, the front-runner, has not attended any of the four previous Republican primary debates. He won’t attend this one either, leaving Mr. DeSantis, Florida’s governor, and Ms. Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, to face off one on one. Instead, Mr. Trump will join the Fox News anchors Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum for a live town hall at the same time as the debate.In a departure from the four previous debates, the Republican National Committee is not a sponsor of the one on Wednesday. In December, the party decided it would stop participating in future debates, giving the hosting TV networks freedom to set their own qualification rules.Who are the moderators?Dana Bash and Jack Tapper, co-hosts of CNN’s Sunday show “State of the Union,” will moderate the debate.Is this the last primary debate?No. ABC News and WMUR, a Hearst television station in New Hampshire, will host a debate in that state on Jan. 18. And CNN plans to host another debate, also in New Hampshire, on Jan. 21. More