Media

Subterms

    More stories

    • 138 Shares139 Views

      in US Politics

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

      by

      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

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Biden: Republicans’ Disney law shows ‘far right has taken over party’

      by

      Biden: Republicans’ Disney law shows ‘far right has taken over party’Florida strips company of self-governing power for opposing Governor Ron DeSantis’s ‘don’t say gay’ law For Joe Biden, the vote by Florida Republicans on Thursday to strip Disney of its self-governing powers was a step too far.“Christ, they’re going after Mickey Mouse,” the president exclaimed at a fundraiser in Oregon, in apparent disbelief that state governor Ron DeSantis’s culture wars had reached the gates of the Magic Kingdom.The move, Biden asserted, reflected his belief that the “far right has taken over the party”.By voting to penalize Florida’s largest private employer, lawmakers followed DeSantis’s wishes in securing revenge on a company he brands as “woke” for its opposition to his “don’t say gay” law.DeSantis is a likely candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024. He has pushed his legislature on several rightwing laws in recent weeks, including a 15-week abortion ban, stripping Black voters of congressional representation and preventing discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity issues in schools.On Friday, the governor signed the anti-Disney law as well as a measure banning critical race theory in schools and the controversial new electoral map. Voting rights groups including the League of Women Voters of Florida, the Black Voters Matter Capacity Building Institute and the Equal Ground Education Fund filed suit against the new electoral map, in state court in Tallahassee.“This is not your father’s Republican party,” Biden said at the fundraiser in Oregon.“It’s not even conservative in a traditional sense of conservatism. It’s mean, it’s ugly. Look at what’s happening in Florida: Christ, they’re going after Mickey Mouse.”Analysts are still grappling with the likely effects of the Disney law, which will disband an entity officially known as the Reedy Creek improvement district.The body, which was approved by Florida legislators in 1967, gives Disney autonomous powers, including generating its own tax revenue and self-governance as it built its hugely popular theme parks.Ending the 55-year agreement, Democrats says, will leave local residents on the hook for the functions Reedy Creek was responsible for paying for, including police and fire services, and road construction and maintenance.The state senator Gary Farmer, a vocal opponent of DeSantis, said families in Orange and Osceola counties that straddle the 25,000-acre Disney World resort could each face property tax raises of $2,200 annually to cover the shortfall. His claim is so far unsubstantiated.Republicans have been unable to point to any financial advantage to the state, and appear to be relying instead on the political argument that the concept of the “special taxing district” was outdated and in need of reform.“Aside from maybe taking away the company’s ability to build a nuclear plant, we have yet to hear how this benefits Florida, and especially the local residents in any way,” Nick Papantonis, a reporter who covers Disney for Orlando’s WFTV, said in a Twitter analysis.“The residents, by the way, had no say in this vote, no say in their property taxes going through the roof, and no desire to have their communities staring at financial ruin.”If in practice DeSantis’s goal is to punish Disney, some say the move could backfire, at least financially. Reedy Creek’s abolition on 1 June next year would give it an immediate tax break. The $163m it taxes itself annually to pay for service and pay off debt becomes the responsibility of the county taxpayers.“The moment that Reedy Creek doesn’t exist is the moment that those taxes don’t exist,” the Orange county tax collector Scott Randolph, a Democrat, told WFTV. “[And] Orange county can’t just slap a new taxing district on to that area and recoup the money that was lost.”Most of Disney’s estimated 77,000 cast members, as its workers are known, live in those two counties, so would effectively end up paying their employer’s taxes as well as their own, critics say.Disney has remained silent, its most recent comment on the entire affair being the hard-hitting statement that upset DeSantis in the first place. The company, which has a notably diverse cast, promised to work to overturn the “don’t say gay” law, and added it was halting all political donations.Disney contributed almost $1m to the Republican party of Florida in 2020, and $50,000 directly to DeSantis, records show.Whatever it decides to do, Disney has options. In a probably tongue-in-cheek offer, the Colorado governor, Jared Polis, is offering “asylum” to Mickey Mouse in his state. But he was critical of DeSantis’s stance.“Florida’s authoritarian socialist attacks on the private sector are driving businesses away. In CO, we don’t meddle in affairs of companies like Disney or Twitter. Hey @Disney we’re ready for Mountain Disneyland,” he said in a tweet.Legal challenges are expected once DeSantis signs the Reedy Creek abolition into law, and Republicans point out they could revisit the issue next year before it takes effect.Democrats are dismissive: “Let’s call this what it is, it’s the punitive, petulant political payback to a corporation who dared to say the emperor has no clothes, but if they behave this way next election cycle, maybe we’ll put it back together,” Farmer, the state senator, said.Some political analysts, meanwhile, believe DeSantis is walking a tightrope.“The base is demanding of the Republican party these culture war elements, at least that’s what these politicians are thinking, so they’re using these attacks on ‘woke’ corporations as a way of energizing their base so they can win in 2022 and 2024,” Charles Zelden, professor of humanities and politics at Nova Southeastern University and a longtime Florida Disney watcher, told the Guardian.“The downside is it’s bringing them into conflict with corporations they had a very comfortable relationship with for a lot of years, who have donated a lot of money to their campaigns.”TopicsFloridaRon DeSantisRepublicansJoe BidenLGBT rightsUS politicsThe far rightnewsReuse this content More

    • 175 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

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

      by

      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

    • 138 Shares119 Views

      in US Politics

      Psaki swaps White House for MSNBC as politics-to-TV pipeline chugs along

      by

      Psaki swaps White House for MSNBC as politics-to-TV pipeline chugs along Summer switch to cable news likely to sharpen perception in America that both sides are just really in it for the moneyThe routine trafficking of political personnel in America to the nation’s television networks hit a road bump last week after staffers at NBC News complained about White House press secretary Jen Psaki’s rumor-as-fact plans to join the liberal news outlet MSNBC when she leaves her West Wing post this summer.The clumsily handled move, previewed in a leak to Axios, triggered anger among journalists who said they feared Psaki’s hiring would “taint” the NBC brand and reinforce the impression, already well-established in opinion polls, that the news business in the US works hand-in-glove with political factions.Capitol attack investigators zero in on far-right Oath Keepers and Proud BoysRead moreThe Psaki saga is hardly new. If the deal goes through, Psaki will join a long line of White House staff who have moved to media roles. In January, Symone Sanders, a former adviser and senior spokesperson for Kamala Harris, signed a deal with MSNBC to host a show.But the deals are unexceptional to either side of the political divide. Trump press secretary Kayleigh McEnany joined Fox News last year; Sean Spicer has his own show on Newsmax; and CBS News hired Mick Mulvaney as a paid on-air contributor – also triggering an internal revolt that even prompted late-night host Stephen Colbert to condemn it on his show.The anger is easy to explain. The pipeline between politics and lucrative gigs in the media in America is one that appears to sully the public view of both professions, creating a feeling that both sides are really in it for the money. It also encourages a sense that politics in the US is seen by the media in the same veins as sports – where hiring ex-players as commentators is common – where winning races is everything and actual policy means very little.“The pipeline from the White House to news organizations makes it more difficult for news organizations to have sufficient distance or be perceived to be credibly scrutinizing government,” said Ryan Thomas, an associate professor in the Missouri School of Journalism.“Partisans argue that people won’t care or won’t notice, but it is wrong irrespective of awareness. It’s like they are moving from formal to informal public relations apparatus that is unhealthy in its own terms, irrespective of its potential effects on press accountability.”Psaki’s hire comes at a time of press frustration that Joe Biden has given just eight open-access press conferences during his term, leading to an impression of scripted, artificial performances. Psaki’s tour of duty, transposed to a cable news with a more generous salary, is likely to increase perceptions that political spin and news coverage at cable news networks are so close as to be indistinguishable.The outgoing press secretary has said that she is undergoing “rigorous ethics training” as it relates “to future employment” before her move, adding that she hoped the press corps “would judge me for my record and how I treat you and I try to answer questions from everybody across the board”.Yet the transfer of Psaki to MSNBC seemed so natural that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) went so far as to launch a fundraiser. “She’s fought to restore trust in the free press after the Trump administration’s horrific attacks on the media,” it said in a statement. “And now, she’s planning to join MSNBC’s intrepid team of journalists to hold dangerous, far-right Republicans accountable.”Journalism ethics professors express concern that this type of high-profile hiring to a high-profile cable news network, publicized while Psaki is still in a political role, risks becoming the default image for what the public holds as standard practice for journalism at large.“There’s a trickle-down effect from the irresponsibility of cable news organizations to local news journalists who get tarred with the same brush,” Thomas said.Americans of opposing political parties are sharply divided on how much they trust the news reported by national media organizations, according to new research.A YouGov/Economist poll published last week found that while Americans are more likely to trust than distrust many prominent news sources, there are few organizations that are trusted by more than a small proportion of Americans on both sides of the political aisle.At the top of the list was the Weather Channel at 52%, followed by the BBC (39%), the national public broadcaster PBS (41%), and the Wall Street Journal (37%). At the bottom of the list, in descending order, came CNN, OAN, MSNBC, Fox News and Breitbart.A Gallup poll published last October found that trust in the media to report the news fully, accurately and fairly had edged down to 36%, making last year’s reading the second lowest on record. Only 7% of those polled said they had “a great deal” of trust and confidence in newspapers, television and radio news reporting. Thirty-four per cent said they had “none at all”.The issue of reporting bias, never far from the lips of ideological adversaries, comes as cable news ratings has experienced sharp post-Trump declines that helped expose arrangements that had long been in place but never fully acknowledged. One was the information pipeline between CNN’s Jeff Zucker, his top colleague Allison Gollust, and CNN anchor Chris Cuomo and his brother Andrew. The exposure of Chris Cuomo’s advice to his brother during the sexual harassment scandal that brought the New York governor down eventually helped cost the younger sibling his job, too.But it does not seem like media executives are learning the lessons of fraught ties and allegiances between their top hosts and the political establishment. According to the news outlet Puck, CNN and MSNBC programming executives were in Washington early in the year, courting potential on-air talent to fill holes in primetime slots exposed by the exit of Cuomo and soon-to-exit MSNBC host Rachel Maddow, whose support for Democratic causes is worn openly.One of the potential talents, of course, was Psaki who, Puck opined, had “achieved veritable celebrity status for her daily press briefings”.Wooing Psaki, Thomas said, presents an ethical issue that Psaki was negotiating a new job while determining access to reporters or responding to questions from staff at her future employer.In the longer term, he said, are questions over professional distance between political institutions and news organizations. “These press conferences are a performance of scrutiny rather than actual scrutiny. They become an audition process for a cable news gig,” he said.Not only does the rotation of seats damage the material ability of the press to hold government to account, he adds, but also raises issues of access. “The White House press corps is pretty addicted to access, so they’re easily tamed and shy away from asking tougher questions,” Thomas added.TopicsUS politicsUS television industryMSNBCTelevision industryTV newsJoe BidennewsReuse this content More

    • 163 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

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

      by

      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

    • 163 Shares189 Views

      in UK Politics

      Ministers accused of ‘cultural vandalism’ as government announces plans to privatise Channel 4

      by

      Ministers have been accused of “cultural vandalism” after the government announced it is to press ahead with plans to privatise Channel 4.The contentious decision to sell off the broadcaster, which was founded in 1982, follows a consultation on its future, a government source told The Independent.It is expected to form part of a draft Media Bill to be unveiled at the Queen’s speech – setting out the forthcoming agenda for Boris Johnson’s government – next month.The source said the sale would form part of reforms “to modernise and sustain the UK’s public service broadcasting sector”, but the move was met with dismay by Channel 4 and television production companies.“Ministers have decided that, although C4 as a business is currently performing well, government ownership is holding it back in the face of a rapidly changing and competitive media landscape,” the source added.“A change of ownership will remove its straitjacket, giving C4 the freedom to innovate and grow so it can flourish and thrive long into the future and support the whole of the UK creative industries.”A spokesperson for the broadcaster said it was “disappointed” with the decision but would “continue to engage” with the government on the process to “ensure that Channel 4 continues to play its unique part in Britain’s creative ecology and national life”.It said “significant public interest concerns” had been raised during the consultation, launched by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport last year.The move – unveiled during a Commons recess – was condemned by Westminster’s opposition parties, including Labour, who described it as “cultural vandalism” and warned it would cost jobs in the north.“Nothing screams a rudderless government like announcements on Channel 4 while people’s energy bills are through the roof,” the party’s shadow culture secretary Lucy Powell said.Damian Green, the former Conservative cabinet minister, added: “The sale of Channel 4 is politicians and civil servants thinking they know more about how to run a business than the people who run it. Very unconservative. Mrs Thatcher, who created it, never made that mistake.”Channel 4 has previously said there was a lack of evidence to justify its sale and warned privatisation may result in “reduced diversity and quality of content for UK viewers”.In an internal email on Monday informing staff of ministers’ decision, the broadcaster’s chief executive, Alex Mahon, said her priority was to “look after all of you and the wonderful Channel 4 spirit”.She said: “In our engagement with government during its extended period of reflection, we have proposed a vision for the next 40 years which we are confident would allow us to build on the successes of the first 40.“That vision was rooted in continued public ownership, and was built upon the huge amount of public value this model has delivered to date and the opportunity to deliver so much more in the future.“But ultimately the ownership of C4 is for government to propose and parliament to decide.“Our job is to deliver what parliament tasks us to do, and if or when that changes, then I am confident that this incredible organisation will respond with the relentless energy it has always displayed in pursuit of its goals and the remit.”The government source said ministers planned to use money generated by the sale to fund “independent production and levelling up wider creative skills in priority parts of the country”.They said Channel 4 would remain a public service broadcaster with a commitment to primetime news.But Pact, the trade body representing UK independent production companies, urged the government to rethink the sale.John McVay, Pact’s chief executive, said: “Privatising Channel 4 is unnecessary and risks damaging the UK’s world-beating independent TV and film production industry. Channel 4 is crucial to our sector, both as a commissioner of programmes and because of its role in helping new businesses get their first break, especially businesses outside the M25.“Unlike other broadcasters, it makes none of its programmes in-house – but a private owner could shift production away from independent producers to cut costs, with a knock-on impact on the wider industry.” More

    • 125 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

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

      by

      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

    • 100 Shares119 Views

      in US Politics

      Marina Ovsyannikova, Russian TV protester, decries Putin propaganda

      by

      Marina Ovsyannikova, Russian TV protester, decries Putin propaganda‘I could see security dragging people away,’ says editor fined for walking into shot with sign saying ‘No War’

      Ukraine: live coverage
      00:17The Russian TV editor who interrupted a news broadcast to protest the Ukraine war said on Sunday she acted out of dissatisfaction at propaganda disseminated by Vladimir Putin’s government, and said she had turned down an offer of asylum in France despite fearing further retaliation.‘Tucker the Untouchable’ goes soft on Putin but remains Fox News’s biggest powerRead moreMarina Ovsyannikova, who describes herself as “a patriot”, was fined 30,000 roubles ($280) by a court in Moscow last week for the “spontaneous” act of rebellion in which she appeared during the live newscast with a sign saying “No War”.On Sunday, she told ABC’s This Week she needed to speak out after watching her employer, Channel One, spread “lies” about the Ukraine war.“After a week of coverage of this situation, the atmosphere on the channel was so unpleasant that I realised that I could not go back there,” she said. “I could see what in reality was happening in Ukraine. And what we showed on our programmes was very different from what was going on in reality.”She said the knowledge the channel was imparting false information ate away at her.“I could not believe that such a thing could happen, that this gruesome war could take place. And as soon as the war began, I could not eat. I could not sleep,” she said, adding that she had considered joining public protests in Moscow.“I could see security dragging people away … and I decided that this was going to be a rather useless action on my part. Maybe I could do something more meaningful, with more impact, where I could show to the rest of the world that Russians are against the war.“And I could show to the Russian people that this is just propaganda, expose this propaganda for what it is and maybe stimulate some people to speak up against the war.”Marina Ovsyannikova broke the state propaganda machine – others will follow | Denis KataevRead moreOvsyannikova, who could face further action after the Kremlin suggested she breached rules on “hooliganism”, said the French president Emmanuel Macron offered her asylum but she turned it down.“I am very worried for the safety of my children, first and foremost. And I’m very grateful to Mr Macron for his offer, but I have publicly refused to take political asylum in France because I am a patriot,” she said.“I want to live in Russia. My children want to live in Russia. We had a very comfortable life in Russia. And I don’t want to immigrate and lose another 10 years of my life to assimilate in some other country.“And now I believe in the history of my country. The times are very dark and very difficult, and every person who has a civil position who wants to make that civil position known must speak up.”TopicsUkraineRussiaEuropeUS politicsnewsReuse this content More