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    How to Watch the Republican Debate Taking Place in Iowa

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    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

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      How to Watch Donald Trump’s Fox News Town Hall

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      Former President Donald J. Trump will join the Fox anchors Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum at 9 p.m. Eastern time on Wednesday for a live town-hall event. It will be broadcast on Fox News and can be streamed at Foxnews.com with a cable login.Mr. Trump will take the stage in Des Moines at the same time that the fifth Republican presidential primary debate is set to begin just two miles away. He has snubbed all of the presidential debates so far, often scheduling his own counterprogramming.That hasn’t hurt him much in Iowa, where recent polls show him leading his competitors by more than 30 points ahead of the caucuses on Monday.This will be Mr. Trump’s first live appearance on Fox News in nearly two years. The network hosted similar town halls this week with Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis. More

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      First Republican Presidential Debate Draws 12.8 Million Viewers

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      The figure exceeded the expectations of some television executives, who believed that Mr. Trump’s absence would lead to far fewer viewers.The first Republican debate on Wednesday night drew an audience of 12.8 million viewers, according to Nielsen, indicating robust interest despite the absence of former President Donald J. Trump, the front-runner in the race.The viewership figure, which includes totals from both Fox News (11.1 million viewers) and the Fox Business Network (1.7 million), was significantly higher than anything else on television on Wednesday night, and outperformed the broadcast network totals combined. It was also the most-watched cable telecast of the year outside of sports, surpassing an episode of Paramount’s “Yellowstone,” which had 8.2 million viewers, according to Nielsen.The audience total, however, is a far cry from the record 24 million viewers who tuned in to Fox News for the opening Republican debate in the 2016 election cycle, which featured Mr. Trump on a debate stage for the first time. Nor did it reach the 18.1 million who watched one of the early Democratic debates in June 2019.But the figure still exceeded expectations of some television executives, who had believed that the numbers could be low given Mr. Trump’s absence as well as cable television’s reduced presence in American homes compared with just a few years ago.Mr. Trump, leading by a wide margin in the polls and engaged in a running feud with Fox, skipped the debate. Instead, he appeared for an interview with Tucker Carlson — the former prime-time star, who was ousted by Fox News this year — on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. The interview was posted shortly before the debate began on Wednesday evening.Mr. Trump declared his X interview a “blockbuster” on Thursday morning. It is not clear, however, how many people watched the interview. Anytime users on X scroll past a post with the video in their feed, it counts as a “view” — one of the few metrics the social network makes public — whether they watched the video or not. Nielsen’s television ratings more rigorously track the number of people who watched a program.The Fox News debate featured eight candidates, who often sparred aggressively with one another. They were Ron DeSantis, Mike Pence, Vivek Ramaswamy, Nikki Haley, Chris Christie, Tim Scott, Asa Hutchinson and Doug Burgum.The Fox News debate moderators, Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum, spent about 10 minutes of questions on Mr. Trump and his four criminal indictments, with Mr. Baier saying he had to acknowledge the “elephant not in the room.”The next Republican debate will be on Sept. 27 on Fox Business. More

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      Who Are Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum, the Debate Moderators?

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      The role of debate moderator carries prestige, but it also brings exacting demands and inherent risks: personal attacks by candidates, grievances about perceived biases and, for the two moderators of Wednesday’s Republican primary debate, a tempestuous cable news network’s reputation.Enter Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum, the Fox News Channel mainstays who drew that assignment and will pose questions to the eight G.O.P. presidential candidates squaring off for the first time, absent former President Donald J. Trump.The party’s front-runner, Mr. Trump will bypass the debate in favor of an online interview with Tucker Carlson, who was fired from Fox News in April.But that doesn’t mean the debate’s moderators will be under any less of a microscope.Here’s a closer look at who they are:Bret BaierHe is the chief political anchor for Fox News and the host of “Special Report With Bret Baier” at 6 p.m. on weeknights. Mr. Baier, 53, joined the network in 1998, two years after the network debuted, according to his biography.Mr. Baier, like Ms. MacCallum, is no stranger to the debate spotlight.In 2016, he moderated three G.O.P. primary debates for Fox, alongside Megyn Kelly and Chris Wallace, who have since left the network. He was present when Ms. Kelly grilled Mr. Trump about his treatment of women during a 2015 debate, an exchange that drew Mr. Trump’s ire and led him to boycott the network’s next debate nearly six months later.During the 2012 presidential race, Mr. Baier moderated five Republican primary debates.At a network dominated by conservative commentators like Sean Hannity and the departed Mr. Carlson and Bill O’Reilly, Mr. Baier has generally avoided controversy — but not entirely.After Fox News called Arizona for Joseph R. Biden Jr. on election night in 2020, becoming the first major news network to do so and enraging Mr. Trump and his supporters, Mr. Baier suggested in an email to network executives the next morning that the outlet should reverse its projection.“It’s hurting us,” he wrote in the email, which was obtained by The New York Times.Mr. Baier was also part of a witness list in the defamation lawsuit that Dominion Voting Systems brought against Fox News over the network’s role in spreading disinformation about the company’s voting equipment. Fox settled the case for $787.5 million before it went to trial.Martha MacCallumShe is the anchor and executive editor of “The Story With Martha MacCallum” at 3 p.m. on weekdays. Ms. MacCallum, 59, joined the network in 2004, according to her biography.During the 2016 election, Ms. MacCallum moderated a Fox News forum for the bottom seven Republican presidential contenders who had not qualified for the party’s first debate in August 2015. She reprised that role in January 2016, just days before the Iowa caucuses.She and Mr. Baier also moderated a series of town halls with individual Democratic candidates during the 2020 election, including one that featured Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont.Before joining Fox, she worked for NBC and CNBC.When Fox projected Mr. Biden’s victory over Mr. Trump in Arizona, effectively indicating that Mr. Biden had clinched the presidency, Ms. MacCallum was similarly drawn into the maelstrom at the network.During a Zoom meeting with network executives and Mr. Baier, she suggested it was not enough to call states based on numerical calculations — the standard by which networks have made such determinations for generations — but that viewers’ reactions should be considered.“In a Trump environment,” Ms. MacCallum said, according to a review of the phone call by The Times, “the game is just very, very different.” More

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      Fox News Fires a Key Player in Its Election Night Coverage

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }Capitol Riot FalloutLatest UpdatesInside the SiegeVisual TimelineNotable ArrestsCapitol Police in CrisisAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyFox News Fires a Key Player in Its Election Night CoverageThe politics editor who defended the network’s accurate projection that Biden had won Arizona is out after a backlash from viewers, including President Trump.Fox News is making staffing changes and emphasizing its right-wing opinion programming after a ratings slump that has lasted two months.Credit…Dina Litovsky for The New York TimesRachel Abrams and Jan. 19, 2021, 8:21 p.m. ETTwo senior leaders of Fox News’s reporting division are exiting the network as the cable channel replaces some news programming with right-wing opinion shows and tries to lure back viewers who balked at its coverage of the 2020 election and its aftermath.On Tuesday morning, Fox News fired Chris Stirewalt, the veteran politics editor who was an onscreen face of the network’s election night projection that Joseph R. Biden Jr. had defeated President Trump in Arizona, according to three people with knowledge of the matter.Fox News was the first news outlet to call Arizona for Mr. Biden, a move that infuriated many of its regular viewers — including Mr. Trump, who denounced the network as insufficiently loyal and urged fans to watch Newsmax and One America News instead.On Monday, Bill Sammon, Fox News’s longtime Washington bureau chief, told staff members that he would retire at the end of January. Three people with knowledge of internal discussions said that Mr. Sammon, who had editorial oversight of the network’s Decision Desk, had faced criticism from network executives over his handling of election coverage, despite the Arizona call ultimately being accurate.Fox News declined to comment on the departures; Mr. Sammon’s retirement was previously reported by The Hill. In addition to their exits, roughly 20 Fox News digital journalists were laid off on Tuesday. The network attributed the layoffs in a statement to a realignment of “business and reporting structure to meet the demands of this new era.”Executives at Fox News — the profit center of Rupert Murdoch’s American media empire — have been concerned by a postelection drop in ratings, a slump that has persisted for two months as upstart rivals like Newsmax gained viewers by featuring fringier fare that embraced Mr. Trump’s baseless theories about electoral fraud.Prominent conservative pundits at Fox News who supported Mr. Trump, like Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity, remain popular and are tied to the network under long-term contracts.Fox’s corporate leadership has been scrutinizing the news division, which is led by Jay Wallace, the president and executive editor of Fox News Media, according to a person with knowledge of internal discussions. Fox News’s daytime news programs, which often feature conservative guests but are helmed by anchors who do not report to the network’s opinion side, have experienced a sharp loss in viewership.Mr. Stirewalt appeared on Fox News several times on election night and the days afterward. He vigorously defended the network’s early call of Arizona, even as anchors like Martha MacCallum grilled him about the decision; other TV networks did not call Arizona for Mr. Biden until days later. On Nov. 4, asked on-air about the Trump campaign’s baseless claims of fraud, Mr. Stirewalt memorably replied, “Lawsuits, schmawsuits. We haven’t seen any evidence yet that there’s anything wrong.”Mr. Stirewalt’s analysis bore out: Mr. Trump did not win Arizona and his team produced no credible findings of fraud. But Mr. Stirewalt’s defense of the Arizona call drew condemnation from Trump fans, and he soon disappeared from the network’s coverage; his last on-air appearance at Fox News was Nov. 16. (Mr. Stirewalt continued to co-host a Fox News politics podcast with the anchor Dana Perino, an episode of which was published on Sunday.)Election coverage on Fox News on Nov. 3, 2020. Joseph R. Biden Jr. won the race in Arizona.Credit…Fox NewsExecutives at Fox News believe Mr. Stirewalt’s appearances turned off viewers who were dismayed to see Fox News, like every other mainstream media outlet, eventually declare Mr. Biden the president-elect on Nov. 7, said three people with knowledge of the network’s inner workings. On Monday, Fox News moved Ms. MacCallum, one of its lead news anchors, out of the early evening and into the less desirable 3 p.m. time slot. Ms. MacCallum’s previous 7 p.m. hour has shifted to an opinion-focused program with an anchor to be announced; Brian Kilmeade of the morning show “Fox & Friends” is temporarily in the role.One contender for the 7 p.m. slot is Maria Bartiromo, the veteran business journalist who is a prominent face of Fox Business and has been a loyal on-air ally to Mr. Trump. On her Tuesday show on Fox Business, Ms. Bartiromo stated that left-wing protesters had impersonated Trump supporters during the riot at the United States Capitol — a claim that has been thoroughly debunked.The network is also considering a late-night slot for the conservative pundit Greg Gutfeld, a co-host of “The Five” who also helms a popular Saturday night talk show for the network, according to two people familiar with the discussions.Emily Flitter and Ben Smith contributed reporting.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More