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      Tucker Carlson tried to use Hunter Biden to get his son into Georgetown

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      Tucker Carlson tried to use Hunter Biden to get his son into GeorgetownEmails reveal the ‘extent’ which Carlson was willing to turn on Biden’s son since the 2020 election, Washington Post says As Tucker Carlson asked Hunter Biden for help getting his son into an elite Washington university in 2014, the Fox News host’s wife, Susie, reportedly wrote in an email: “Tucker and I have the greatest respect and admiration for you. Always!”Since the 2020 election, however, Carlson has fueled rightwing attacks on Joe Biden’s son, particularly over business affairs in which he allegedly benefited from his father’s position.The existence of emails about getting Buckley Carlson into Georgetown has been known for some time, thanks to a laptop once owned by Hunter Biden that was obtained by Donald Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, and pushed to media in 2020.On Thursday the Washington Post revealed new emails and said analysis by security experts confirmed their authenticity.The emails, the Post said, “reveal the extent to which Carlson was willing to turn on a former associate as he thrives in a hyper-partisan media world in which conservatives have made Biden a prime target for attack.”“They also show how Carlson once sought to benefit from the elite political circles in Washington that he now regularly rails against as the ‘ruling class’.”Carlson told the Post that in 2014, when Joe Biden was vice-president, “Hunter Biden was my neighbor. Our wives were friends. I knew him well.“I talked to him many times about addiction, something I know a lot about. And I’ve said that. I think that Hunter Biden is an addict and that’s why his life is falling apart, and I feel bad for him. I’ve said that many times, and I mean it.”He also said he would not comment on the emails, as they “were described by our [intelligence] community as Russian disinformation. So why would I? And I read that in the Washington Post”.The Post said Carlson was “speaking with apparent irony”. He and others on the right charge that mainstream media willfully overlooked the Biden laptop in 2020, amid reports it could contain disinformation planted by Russia or other malign actors.The Post also said emails showed Carlson helping Biden in 2015, amid reports about the state of Biden’s marriage. Carlson has confirmed doing so.But the Post focused on Carlson’s apparent hypocrisy.Quoting Carlson accusing Hunter Biden of getting “lucrative jobs … because he had an important father”, the Post said the Fox News host did so without “disclosing that he had once enlisted Biden to help get his son into a prestigious private university”.On the same January 2020 show, Carlson said: “In America today, there’s nothing illegal about paying de facto bribes by handing fake jobs to the unqualified family members of powerful people. And since it is perfectly legal, naturally, Hunter Biden isn’t the only one shamelessly cashing in on his family name.”In another email reported by the Post, Susie Carlson wrote: “Tucker and I would be so grateful if you could write a letter or speak to someone in the Georgetown Admission’s [sic] Office about Buckley.”Biden reportedly agreed to write to the university president and said: “I will do anything you would like me to do.”According to the Post, Tucker Carlson wrote: “I can’t thank you enough for writing that letter to Georgetown on Bucky’s behalf. So nice of you. I know it’ll help. Hope you’re great and we can all get dinner soon.”Buckley Carlson went to the University of Virginia. Now communications director for Jim Banks, a House Republican from Indiana, he did not comment on the Post report.Amid reaction online, the author Radley Balko wrote: “The story here is that Tucker Carlson is the living embodiment of the unearned, privileged elitism that Tucker Carlson derides on his show every night. The Hunter Biden part is just gravy.”Rightwing accounts pointed to an NBC report which said Biden’s laptop and other sources showed that between 2013 and 2018, he and his company brought in about $11m from work linked to Ukraine and China.TopicsHunter BidenFox NewsJoe BidenUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Fox News suddenly goes quiet on ‘great replacement’ theory after Buffalo shooting

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      Fox News suddenly goes quiet on ‘great replacement’ theory after Buffalo shooting Suspect was allegedly motivated by the theory, but network has barely mentioned gunman’s reasoning, even after Tucker Carlson pushed the concept in more than 400 of his shows As details of the Buffalo mass shooting emerged over the weekend, much of the media focussed on the shooter’s self-stated motivation: his racist belief that white Americans are being deliberately replaced through immigration in a “great replacement” theory.Over at Fox News, however, there was barely any mention of the white gunman’s alleged reasoning for opening fire at a supermarket, killing 10 people and wounding three more, in a predominantly Black area.The absence of coverage of the motive was revealing, given Fox News’s most popular host, Tucker Carlson, has pushed the concept of replacement theory in more than 400 of his shows – and has arguably done more than anyone in the US to popularize the racist conspiracy.Fox News, according to Oliver Darcy, a media correspondent for CNN, “largely ignored” the fact that the shooter had been inspired by replacement theory. Darcy searched transcripts from Fox News’s shows, and found one brief mention, by Fox News anchor Eric Shawn.As Americans absorbed news of the shooting and struggled to understand why it had happened, it seemed a glaring thing for the network to disregard. But given Carlson and his colleagues’ promotion of the theory, which has been unchecked by Fox News’s top executives, experts see the network as being left in a bind.“What can they say?” said Matt Gertz, senior fellow at Media Matters for America, a watchdog of rightwing media. “There’s no way for anyone at Fox News to really issue a convincing and compelling, forthright denunciation of great replacement theory, because it’s being discussed on the network’s primetime hour on a near constant basis.”Great replacement theory, or white replacement theory, states that a range of liberals, Democrats and Jewish people are working to replace white voters in western countries with non-white people, in an effort to achieve political aims.It is not a new concept. But Carlson has led the charge in reintroducing it to mainstream rightwing thought. In April a New York Times investigation found that in more than 400 hundred of his shows Carlson had advanced the idea that a “cabal of elites want to force demographic change through immigration”.In a monologue on his Monday night show, Carlson did not directly address replacement theory. He claimed the Buffalo shooter’s manifesto was “not recognizably left wing or right-wing: it’s not really political at all”, despite the rambling document referencing a number of right-wing conspiracy theories.Carlson referred to the gunman as “mentally ill” and launched an attack on “professional Democrats” who had “begun a campaign to blame those murders on their political opponents.”In April 2021, after Carlson claimed on his show that Democrats were “diluting” his vote by “importing a brand-new electorate”, the Anti-Defamation League wrote to Fox News to sound the alarm.“Make no mistake: this is dangerous stuff. The ‘great replacement theory’ is a classic white supremacist trope that undergirds the modern white supremacist movement in America,” wrote Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO and national director of the ADL.“It is a concept that is discussed almost daily in online racist fever swamps. It is a notion that fueled the hateful chants of ‘Jews will not replace us!’ in Charlottesville in 2017. And it has lit the fuse in explosive hate crimes, most notably the hate-motivated mass shooting attacks in Pittsburgh, Poway and El Paso, as well as in Christchurch, New Zealand.”The ADL called for Carlson to be fired for his comments, but instead the rightwing host – whose show is the most-watched on cable news – has thrived, and his passion for the topic of replacement has spread to his colleagues.But Carlson is not alone on Fox.Laura Ingraham, who hosts an hour-long show at 10pm, has told her viewers that Democrats “want to replace you, the American voters, with newly amnestied citizens and an ever increasing number of chain migrants”, while Jeanine Pirro claimed on a radio show that liberals were engaged in “a plot to remake America, to replace American citizens with illegals who will vote for the Democrats”.“​​To be clear, Fox News is far from the only place where you might hear such dangerous rhetoric,” wrote Tom Jones, a senior media writer at the Poynter institute.“[But] the size of Fox News’s audience is what is notable. Fox News is the most-watched cable news network, and Carlson’s show is the most-watched on cable news, routinely drawing more than 3 million viewers a night.”Fox News declined to comment when asked if it planned to condemn the idea of white replacement or take action against Carlson. A spokeswoman pointed to examples of Carlson denouncing violence on his show. Fox News was one of six media organizations which the gunman claimed, in his manifesto, were disproportionately influenced by Jewish people.The network’s popularity has given it an outsized influence over the Republican party, an influence and relationship which was revealed recently when leaked text messages from the phone of Mark Meadows, Donald Trump’s former White House chief-of-staff, showed Meadows in frequent communication with Fox News hosts as supporters of Trump besieged the US Capitol on 6 January.It should perhaps be little surprise, then, that Trump-supporting Republican politicians like Elise Stefanik and JD Vance have also embraced replacement theory.“It’s been gradually moving from the fringes into the mainstream,” Philip Gorski, a professor of sociology at Yale, told the Washington Post. “First it was the entertainment wing of the GOP. Now it’s the political wing as well.”The Buffalo shooter did not mention Fox News as an influence on his political beliefs, but said he had been radicalized through the extremist online forum 4chan, where he had found “infographics, shitposts, and memes that the White race is dying out”. From there, the gunman said, he had discovered sources including the neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer.Curiously, the founder of the Daily Stormer has called Tucker Carlson “literally our greatest ally”, and praised the Fox News host in 2021, in the wake of his replacement theory comments.“[Carlson was] dropping the ultimate truth bomb on his audience: Jews aggressively lobby for the same demographic policies in America that they openly declare would destroy their own country,” Anglin wrote.Since the shooting Carlson and his fellow Fox News hosts have justifiably drawn criticism for their promotion of replacement theory. But Gertz said the issue ultimately runs deeper, all the way to the Murdoch family which controls the channel.“Everyone knows the score here,” Gertz said.“Tucker Carlson is doing his job. He is providing the content that the Fox News brass, the Murdochs, want out of their 8pm slot.“If they didn’t want him to do this, they could make him stop – but they’ve decided not to. And they have decided not to do that because he is still profitable for them.”TopicsBuffalo shootingFox NewsUS television industryUS politicsRaceThe far rightfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Meadows texts reveal just how tight the Fox News-Trump embrace is

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      Meadows texts reveal just how tight the Fox News-Trump embrace is Messages show a staggering level of coordination between hosts such as Sean Hannity and Maria Bartiromo with the White House after the 2020 electionThrough the end of 2020 and the early part of 2021, as Donald Trump’s political world fell apart in the wake of his election loss, the former US president was receiving advice and aid from a range of sources.As Trump raged against non-existent election fraud, he took counsel from his actual staff. He also had help from acquaintances and associates like Rudy Giuliani.Chris Wallace: working at Fox News became ‘unsustainable’ after electionRead moreBut, less conventionally, Trump’s White House was also getting guidance from some of Fox News’ best-known personalities, in a level of coordination rarely, if ever, seen in top-level politics.The direct interactions between Trump’s administration and the Fox hosts Sean Hannity and Maria Bartiromo were revealed in leaked text messages from the phone of Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff during the November election and the January 6 insurrection.The texts, revealed by CNN, show how the lines between Fox News and the Trump White House had become jarringly blurred in Trump’s final months. On election day 2021 Hannity, the second-most watched host on Fox News, was texting Meadows asking which states he particularly needed to “push” – to encourage people to vote.On 29 November, an hour before Trump was to sit down for a first interview since losing the election, the president received a bit of help with his preparation; from Bartiromo, who sent her list of questions to Meadows, along with a suggestion.“Pls make sure he doesn’t go off on tangents,” Bartiromo wrote, a request that ultimately would go unheeded.In total, Meadows exchanged more than 80 text messages with Hannity between 3 November and 20 January, when Joe Biden was inaugurated. CNN obtained 2,319 of Meadows’s texts, which the former chief of staff had provided to the House select committee investigating the attack on the Capitol.They show Hannity variously giving and asking for advice from the White House. After seeking direction on where he should help get out the vote, Hannity would later give Meadows suggestions on how Trump could fight the election results.The implications of a Fox News-Trump White House alignment are “scary”, said Angelo Carusone, president and CEO of Media Matters for America, a media watchdog.“Because you cannot have any kind of functional authoritarian or anti-democratic environment unless you have some really powerful propaganda tools. And once you have this kind of synchronization, then basically what you have is a pretty important ingredient in order to drive a whole range of policies,” Carusone said.Fox News’ Laura Ingraham, Tucker Carlson and Brian Kilmeade were also in contact, to varying degrees, with Meadows over the three-month period, meaning a slew of Fox News personalities had their own lines into the White House. The select committee had previously released texts which showed Ingraham and Kilmeade pleading with Trump to intervene as his supporters swarmed the Capitol.“Hey Mark, the president needs to tell people in the Capitol to go home. This is hurting all of us. He is destroying his legacy,” Ingraham wrote.In the wake of the texts being published Hannity, who was lightly reprimanded by Fox News in 2018 after he appeared on stage at a Trump rally, obliquely addressed the texts on his nightly show.“Yes, I’m a member of the press,” Hannity said.“I’m on the Fox News Channel – which is a news channel – but I don’t claim to be a journalist. I claim to be a talkshow host.” (“I’m a journalist,” Hannity said in an interview with the New York Times in 2017. “But I’m an advocacy journalist, or an opinion journalist.”)Coordination between rightwing media and Republican administrations is not necessarily new. Scott McClellan, press secretary under George W Bush, admitted working with Fox News on “talking points” during the 2004 presidential campaign, while Rolling Stone reported that John Moody, a top Fox News executive during the Roger Ailes era, wrote a memo to staff that Bush’s “political courage and tactical cunning are worth noting in our reporting throughout the day”.What’s different this time, Carusone said, is that even though the network and Bush’s team “were in close alignment” in 2004, “they still felt independent”. As chairman and CEO of Fox News, Ailes had close control over the network’s editorial policy, and he alone would make decisions on direction. As Trump flailed in the dying days of his presidency, there was no Ailes-like figure to steer the coverage.“There was no gatekeeper. It’s not like the White House was coordinating with all the hosts back in the day,” Carusone said.“They were coordinating with Roger Ailes, who was doing the editorial meetings. He was functioning as the conduit for coordination. In this case, it was like a free-for-all.”The interaction between Fox News and Trump’s White House appears to have flowed both ways. Under Bush’s administration, it seemed to be the politicians leading the line, with Fox News supporting the president’s policies.Under Trump, it wasn’t so clear who was in charge of policy. According to Media Matters, Trump “tweeted in response to Fox News or Fox Business programs he was watching” 1,146 times from September 2018 through August 2020.To journalists, Bartiromo’s handing of questions to Trump’s team might seem to be the most egregious action.“1Q You’ve said MANY TIMES THIS ELECTION IS RIGGED… And the facts are on your side. Let’s start there. What are the facts? Characterize what took place here. Then I will drill down on the fraud including the statistical impossibilities of Biden magic (federalist). Pls make sure he doesn’t go off on tangents. We want to know he is strong he is a fighter & he will win. This is no longer about him. This is about ????. I will ask him about big tech & media influencing ejection as well Toward end I’ll get to GA runoffs & then vaccines,” Bartiromo texted to Meadows an hour before the November interview.The interview, as CNN reported, mirrored the questions in Bartiromo’s message.Heather Hendershot, a professor of film and media at MIT who studies TV news and conservative media, said the advent of cable TV news, which began in the 1980s and accelerated through the 1990s – the Fox News channel was launched in 1996 – had prompted a change in acceptable, or permitted, journalistic standards.“In the pre-cable, network era, an anchorperson or reporter would obviously be fired – with no room for discussion – if it was found that he or she had provided questions in advance of an interview with a politician,” said Hendershot, who is writing a book about how coverage of protests at the 1968 Democratic convention contributed to a shattering of faith in US media.“This would be seen not simply as a political gaffe but perhaps even more strongly as a professional gaffe. The norms of journalistic practice dictated against this sort of behavior.“In 1963, Walter Cronkite of CBS interviewed JFK. Immediately following the interview, the president said he was unhappy with the interview and wanted a ‘do-over’. Cronkite did not hesitate: that was out of the question. They would run the interview as it had happened.”Today, Hendershot said, one can easily imagine the same scenario, where a president or politician was unhappy with an interview question, and requests another go at answering.“Would a network correspondent allow this?” Hendershot said.“Probably not. Would Fox News allow it? Definitely yes, but only for a Republican politician.”TopicsFox NewsDonald TrumpTrump administrationUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More

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      What happens when a group of Fox News viewers watch CNN for a month?

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      What happens when a group of Fox News viewers watch CNN for a month?A study that paid viewers of the rightwing cable network to switch shed light on the media’s influence on people’s views Watching Fox News can be like entering an alternative universe. It’s a world where Vladimir Putin isn’t actually that bad, but vaccines may be, and where some unhinged rightwing figures are celebrated as heroes, but Anthony Fauci, America’s top public health official, is an unrivaled villain.Given the steady stream of misinformation an avid Fox News consumer is subjected to, the viewers – predominantly elderly, white and Donald Trump-supporting – are sometimes written off as lost causes by Democrats and progressives, but according to a new study, there is still hope.Biden finds Murdoch ‘most dangerous man in the world’, new book saysRead moreIn an unusual, and labor intensive, project, two political scientists paid a group of regular Fox News viewers to instead watch CNN for a month. At the end of the period, the researchers found surprising results; some of the Fox News watchers had changed their minds on a range of key issues, including the US response to coronavirus and Democrats’ attitude to police.The findings suggest that political perspectives can be changed – but also reveals the influence partisan media has on viewers’ ideology.Polls have previously shown that viewers of Fox News, the most-watched cable news channel in the US, are far more likely to believe the false claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen than the average American, and are more likely to believe falsehoods about Covid-19.The extent of the network’s influence on American politics was highlighted this week, with a report that Joe Biden has privately referred to Rupert Murdoch, the owner of Fox News, as “the most dangerous man in the world” and “one of the most destructive forces in the United States”.David Broockman and Joshua Kalla, political scientists at the University of California, Berkeley and Yale university, respectively, paid 304 regular Fox News viewers $15 an hour to instead watch up to seven hours of CNN a week during the month of September 2020. The switchers were given regular news quizzes to make sure they were indeed watching CNN, while a control group of Fox News viewers continued with their regular media diet.Much of the news cycle in September 2020 focused on policing and protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin, which began after Jacob Blake, a Black man, was shot and seriously injured by police in late August. During the protests Kyle Rittenhouse, a teenager from Illinois, shot and killed two men and wounded another. The events became a political tool for Republicans, including Donald Trump, who later announced he would send federal law enforcement agents to Kenosha.By the end of September, the CNN watchers were less likely to agree that: “It is an overreaction to go out and protest in response to the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin” and less likely to believe that: “If Joe Biden is elected President, we’ll see many police get shot by Black Lives Matter activists”, when compared with their peers who continued watching Fox News.The CNN switchers were also, as Bloomberg’s Matthew Yglesias reported, 10 points less likely to believe that Joe Biden supporters were happy when police officers get shot, and 11 points less likely to believe that it is “more important for the President to focus on violent protests than the coronavirus pandemic”.In addition the CNN viewers were 13 points less likely than the Fox News viewers to agree that: “If Joe Biden is elected President, we’ll see many more police get shot by Black Lives Matter activists.”In an email interview, Kalla said he and Broockman had not necessarily expected people’s opinions to change.“I think the most surprising finding is that shifting people’s media diets from Fox News to CNN for a month had any effect,” Kalla said. “People who watch cable news tend to be very politically engaged and have strong opinions about politics, limiting the impact of the media. Similarly, they also tend to be strong partisans who might not trust any source not associated with their party.”The people in the experiment, Kalla said, were “overwhelmingly pro-Trump Republicans”. Given Trump had spent much of his presidency bashing CNN – a regular chant at his rallies was “CNN sucks!” – the results are particularly surprising.“A lot of people might expect this audience to completely resist what CNN had to say, but we see people learning what CNN was reporting and changing their attitudes, too. It is therefore surprising that watching CNN had any impact at all in this experiment,” Kalla said.Fox News, and liberal networks, can influence their viewers through “agenda-setting” – covering a certain topic relentlessly – and “framing”, Kalla said – by emphasizing certain aspects of an issue.Kalla and Broockman were particularly interested in a third method of influencing: “partisan coverage filtering” – which they defined in the study as the process where “partisan outlets selectively report information, leading viewers to learn a biased set of facts”.They gave a hypothetical example of how news channels might cover a war. In the example, CNN might cover the cost of the war and the number of military personnel and civilians who died. Fox News, on the other hand, could focus on the severity of the threat that Trump’s military campaign had countered, and feature stories of liberated civilians welcoming American soldiers.“This leaves viewers of each network with different factual understandings of the conflict, and subsequently different levels of support for the conflict and the president,” Broockman and Kalla wrote.Most of the CNN switchers stuck to the length of the task, according to the study. But once it was over, and the $15 an hour was taken away, “viewers returned to watching Fox News”, Kalla said.While the study proved that people are susceptible – at least under the right conditions – to different political opinions, in the longer-term the skewing of media has had a broader, and negative, impact on the way the US functions, Kalla said.“When politicians do something bad, we hope that voters will punish them, irregardless of their party – otherwise, politicians won’t have to work hard to make our lives better in order to keep their jobs,” Kalla said.“However, this type of behavior becomes less possible if the media engages in partisan coverage filtering. If CNN doesn’t cover bad things Democrats do or good things Republicans do, and if Fox News doesn’t cover bad things Republicans do or good things Democrats do, then voters become less likely to learn this information and less able to hold their elected officials accountable.“This is troubling for the functioning of a healthy democracy.”TopicsMediaFox NewsCNNUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Lara Logan, who compared Fauci to Mengele, says Fox News pushed her out

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      Lara Logan, who compared Fauci to Mengele, says Fox News pushed her outLogan says network ‘does not want independent thinkers’ as Fox stays quiet on reports it dropped her after November remark The former CBS reporter Lara Logan, who compared Dr Anthony Fauci to the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, has claimed she was “pushed out” at Fox News because the conservative network does not want “independent thinkers”.“I was definitely pushed out,” Logan told Eric Metaxas, a conservative radio host, this week. “I mean, there is no doubt about that. They don’t want independent thinkers. They don’t want people who follow the facts regardless of the politics.”Fox News has not commented on reports that it “quietly benched” Logan over her remark about Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser. On Friday, a spokesperson for Fox News said the network would not comment.Logan has not appeared as a guest on Fox News since making the comment about Fauci. There have been no new episodes of her show on the Fox Nation streaming service, Lara Logan Has No Agenda, which is still available.Logan made the comment about Mengele, the “Angel of Death” who conducted medical experiments at the Auschwitz concentration camp, in November, during a discussion of the Covid pandemic on Fox News Primetime.Logan said: “Dr Fauci, this is what people say to me, that he doesn’t represent science to them.“He represents Josef Mengele, Dr Josef Mengele, the Nazi doctor who did experiments on Jews during the second world war and in the concentration camps, and I am talking about people all across the world are saying this.”The show’s host, Pete Hegseth, and another guest, the Fox News host Will Cain, did not respond.The Auschwitz Memorial said: “Exploiting the tragedy of people who became victims of criminal pseudo-medical experiments in Auschwitz in a debate about vaccines, pandemic and people who fight for saving human lives is shameful. It is disrespectful to victims and a sad symptom of moral and intellectual decline.”Kremlin memos urged Russian media to use Tucker Carlson clips – reportRead moreJonathan Greenblatt, chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League, said: “There’s absolutely no comparison between mask mandates, vaccine requirements and other Covid-19 mitigation efforts to what happened to Jews during the Holocaust.”Fauci, whose work has generated threats to his safety and that of his family, told MSNBC Logan’s remark was “unconscionable” and “absolutely preposterous and disgusting … an insult to all of the people who suffered and died under the Nazi regime in the concentration camps”.Fauci also said he found it “striking … how she gets no discipline whatsoever from the Fox network – how they can let her say that with no comment and no disciplinary action?”Logan rose to fame with CBS during the Iraq war and the Arab spring. After leaving CBS in 2013 over errors in a report about the Benghazi attack, she moved into conservative media.In March, Logan told a rightwing online show she was “dumped by Fox” and added: “I was taken off the air at Fox just before they went into a whole marathon of war porn in Ukraine.”She also repeated Russian talking points about “Nazis” in Ukraine and said Fox News had “a few people like Jesse Watters and Tucker Carlson who are doing their best to add some context and to show what this war is really about”.Speaking to Metaxas, Logan also said she did not like being called a “darling of the right wing”.TopicsFox NewsUS politicsUS television industryTelevision industrynewsReuse this content More

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      Chris Wallace: working at Fox News became ‘unsustainable’ after election

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      Chris Wallace: working at Fox News became ‘unsustainable’ after electionJournalist’s new show begins on archrival CNN’s streaming service after nearly 20 years with the right-leaning cable channel Chris Wallace has said working at Fox News became “increasingly unsustainable” before he jumped ship to CNN last December after almost 20 years with the right-leaning cable channel.His departure dealt a blow to Fox’s news operation at a time when its opinion side had become preeminent. The veteran journalist’s new show begins on archrival CNN’s streaming service this week and the 74-year-old spoke to the New York Times.‘Tucker the Untouchable’ goes soft on Putin but remains Fox News’s biggest powerRead more“I’m fine with opinion: conservative opinion, liberal opinion. But when people start to question the truth – ‘Who won the 2020 election? Was January 6 an insurrection?’ – I found that unsustainable,” he told the newspaper.He added: “Before, I found it was an environment in which I could do my job and feel good about my involvement at Fox. And since November of 2020, that just became unsustainable, increasingly unsustainable as time went on.”When asked why he didn’t leave Fox News earlier, he said: “I spent a lot of 2021 looking to see if there was a different place for me to do my job.”And he acknowledged: “Some people might have drawn the line earlier, or at a different point…I think Fox has changed over the course of the last year and a half. But I can certainly understand where somebody would say, ‘Gee, you were a slow learner, Chris’.”After Donald Trump lost the November 2020 election to Joe Biden, Fox skewed further from news to comment, ending its 7pm nightly broadcast, firing the political editor who had been part of Fox accurately projecting on election night that Trump had lost the crucial state of Arizona and promoting Tucker Carlson, the populist commentator and host who has consistently downplayed the insurrection at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021, by extremist Trump supporters, the New York Times noted.Carlson and other voices aired by Fox have spent the past four weeks playing down Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, going soft on Putin, and undermining the messages of the invaded country’s sovereignty and the Biden administration and Nato in supporting Ukraine.“One of the reasons that I left Fox was because I wanted to put all of that behind me,” Wallace said, adding that: “There has not been a moment when I have second-guessed myself about that decision.”Fox has won praise from the Kremlin earlier this month.TopicsFox NewsTV newsTelevision industryCNNDonald TrumpUS elections 2020US politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Kremlin memos urged Russian media to use Tucker Carlson clips – report

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      Kremlin memos urged Russian media to use Tucker Carlson clips – reportRussian government document instructed outlets to show Fox News host ‘as much as possible’, Mother Jones says The Fox News primetime host Tucker Carlson has been widely accused of echoing Russian propaganda about the invasion of Ukraine. According to a report on Sunday, earlier this month the Putin regime in Moscow sent out an instruction to friendly media outlets: use more clips of Carlson.‘Cynical, craven’ Republicans out to bash Biden, not Putin, over gas pricesRead moreMother Jones, a progressive magazine, said it had obtained memos produced by the Russian Department of Information and Telecommunications Support.One document, it said, was entitled “For Media and Commentators (recommendations for coverage of events as of 03.03)”, or 3 March. The magazine published pictures of the memo, which it said it was given by “a contributor to a national Russian media outlet who asked not to be identified”.It said the memo included an instruction: “It is essential to use as much as possible fragments of broadcasts of the popular Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who sharply criticises the actions of the United States [and] Nato, their negative role in unleashing the conflict in Ukraine, [and] the defiantly provocative behavior from the leadership of the eastern countries and Nato towards the Russian Federation and towards President Putin, personally.”The document, Mother Jones said, summed up Carlson’s position on the Ukraine war as “Russia is only protecting its interests and security” and included a quote: “And how would the US behave if such a situation developed in neighbouring Mexico or Canada?”Carlson and Fox News did not comment to Mother Jones. Fox News did not respond to a Guardian request for comment.On air last Wednesday, 9 March, Carlson said testimony by Victoria Nuland, a US undersecretary of state, about Ukrainian “biological research facilities” had shown Russian claims of US involvement were “totally and completely true”.Fact checkers said they were not.“Russian state TV featured Carlson’s take the next day,” the Washington Post said, adding that the Russian claim about US participation in biological laboratories in Ukraine was “straight out of the old Soviet playbook. But that doesn’t mean prominent commentators like Carlson should be so quick to fall for it”.Citing another Russian “recommendations for coverage” memo, dated 10 March, Mother Jones said the text advised Russian hosts to relay the message that “activities of military biological laboratories with American participation on the territory of Ukraine carried global threats to Russia and Europe”.On Sunday Joe Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, told NBC Russian claims about biological warfare facilities in Ukraine could indicate Russian willingness to use such weapons.“When Russia starts accusing other countries of potentially doing something, it’s a good tell that they may be on the cusp of doing it themselves,” he said.The Fox News journalist fact-checking channel’s pundits on air over UkraineRead moreMother Jones said no other western journalist was named in the memos it obtained, which it said also included advice on how to cite Carlson about how “Biden’s sanctions policy” was actually an economic “punishment for the American middle class”. That memo, the magazine said, also cited the New York Post, like Fox News owned by Rupert Murdoch.On Sunday afternoon, Julia Davis, an analyst of Russian media, tweeted a still from “Russia’s state TV” showing “none other than Tucker Carlson” on a screen above a discussion panel.“They always follow the Kremlin’s directives,” Davis wrote, “namely to use Tuckyo Rose clips as often as possible.”“Tokyo Rose” was a nickname given by Americans to several women who broadcast Japanese propaganda during the second world war.TopicsFox NewsUS television industryVladimir PutinRussiaUkraineUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Tucker Carlson leads rightwing charge to blame everyone but Putin

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      Tucker Carlson leads rightwing charge to blame everyone but PutinThe Fox News host has defended the Russian leader’s invasion of Ukraine, saying ‘Has Putin ever called me a racist?’ As Russian troops encircled Ukraine, politicians and media pundits in the US were largely united in their condemnation of Vladimir Putin’s imminent attack.Tucker Carlson, however, took a different approach. Hours before Putin ordered his forces into Ukraine, Fox News’ biggest star was still praising the Russian president.Putin’s bellicose threats towards Ukraine and assembling of up to 190,000 troops on the country’s border, was, Carlson said, a mere “border dispute”. Carlson, who played into Kremlin talking points by declaring that Ukraine was “not a democracy”, launched an apparent attempt to humanize Putin.“Has Putin ever called me a racist? Has he threatened to get me fired for disagreeing with him? Has he shipped every middle-class job in my town to Russia?” Carlson said as he then recited a right-wing tip sheet of pet causes.Tucker Carlson film on George Soros is his latest antisemitic dog-whistleRead more“Did he manufacture a worldwide pandemic that wrecked my business and kept me indoors for two years? Is he teaching my children to embrace racial discrimination? Is he making fentanyl? Is he trying to snuff out Christianity?”Just over 24 hours later, Putin effectively declared war on Ukraine.Carlson was roundly condemned, but he wasn’t alone. Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s sometime-advisor turned podcast host, has praised Putin for being “anti-woke”, for not flying pride flags, and for his hostility to trans people.Charlie Kirk, a right-wing media personality and the founder of Turning Points USA, suggested Putin felt emboldened by “energy policies that Joe Biden put forward”.“Could it be that Greta Thunberg and Leonardo DiCaprio actually might be to blame for what Vladimir Putin is doing?” Kirk asked on his eponymous internet show.“That’s a take you will not hear anywhere else,” he added.By the end of the week Carlson’s colorful defense of Putin was being played on Russia 1 and the Kremlin-backed RT television network.“As Russia prepared to invade Ukraine, the biggest star on Fox News was busy doing what he does best: being thoroughly and appallingly wrong,” Margaret Sullivan, a media columnist for the Washington Post, wrote.By Thursday night, after Putin’s forces had begun bombing Ukraine, and after widespread US and global outrage at the carnage, Carlson had changed his tune.“I don’t think anybody approves of what Putin did yesterday. I certainly don’t,” he said on his show.Carlson added: “Vladimir Putin started this war.” He continued: “He is to blame tonight for what we’re seeing tonight in the Ukraine.”But those expecting a mea culpa from Carlson, who has recently also become enamored with the authoritarian regime of Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, were disappointed.The overt praise for Putin may have receded, but Carlson and his Fox News co-hosts and pundits have continued to blame others for the Russian invasion of Ukraine.“Well, I think we all know if Donald Trump was president, this would not have happened,” Lara Trump, Fox News contributor and daughter-in-law of the former president, told Fox and Friends on Thursday.“We exuded strength on the world stage when Donald Trump was there. Now you see Joe Biden in office. And gosh, how many times have we all talked about how weak America has looked since the day that Joe Biden was inaugurated?”Fox News Twitter feed on Friday essentially served as a tribute to the same viewpoint, lavishly quoting almost identical statements from Republican senators Lindsey Graham and Marsha Blackburn.“Rather than blame the actual aggressor for attacking his weaker neighbor, right-wing media pinned the blame on Biden for supposedly projecting weakness and vulnerability to Putin,” Media Matters, a non-profit which monitors conservative media, wrote.“In the right-wing media echo chamber […] the fault for this invasion lies with a mind-boggling variety of scapegoats, including President Joe Biden, Rep Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, American environmentalists, the LGBTQ community, and even the team here at Media Matters for America – anybody, that is, other than Putin.”The narrative has received some pushback from journalists at Fox News itself, particularly Jennifer Griffin, the network’s national security correspondent, who has spent weeks painstakingly correcting her opinion-host colleagues as Russia surrounded Ukraine.On Thursday morning, the anchors on the morning show Fox and Friends were opining about how sanctions against Russia “have not worked”. Steve Doocy asked Griffin if “the people at the Pentagon” were frustrated given American troops were not involved.“No I wouldn’t say that Steve. In fact they know that they had limited options going into this because Russia of course is a nuclear power, and Nato and the US are not go to war with Russia over Ukraine, their goal is to contain this and keep this from spilling over into an Article 5 nation,” Griffin said.“You talk about how the sanctions haven’t worked, I don’t know that we can say that yet. Overnight, the stock market in Russia fell by half, 50%.“This is just the beginning of what is being described as a ‘shock and awe,’ if you will, of rolling sanctions that have not even begun to be felt yet by Putin, by his oligarchs, by the cronies there.”The talk and tone among the hosts of Fox News and others in the right-wing media ecosystem is unlikely to change any time soon. But in some corners there are journalists willing to drag those hosts back to reality.TopicsFox NewsUS politicsRussiaUkrainefeaturesReuse this content More