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      Jan. 6 Hearings Focus on Fox News Call That Made Trump’s Loss Clear

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      At Fox News, there was little drama over the decision to project Joseph R. Biden the winner of Arizona. But the relationship between Trump and the network was never the same.Shortly before 11:20 p.m. on Nov. 3, 2020, Bill Sammon, the managing editor for Fox News in Washington, picked up the phone in the room where he and others had been reviewing election returns. On the other end of the line was the control room.Mr. Sammon informed the producers and executives listening in that the network was calling Arizona for Joseph R. Biden Jr., effectively declaring an end to one of the most contentious presidential elections in modern times. He clicked a box on his computer screen, and Arizona turned blue on the map that viewers saw at home.Inside Fox News, the moment unfolded with little drama despite its enormous implications. To the people in the room with Mr. Sammon, the result was clear. On the outside, it immediately provoked a fury with President Trump and his supporters, who maligned Fox News, the country’s most watched cable news channel and his longtime stalwart defender, as dishonest and disloyal.The relationship between the former president and the network would never be the same.The events of that night were the focus of a congressional hearing on Monday that peeled back the curtain on the decision-making process at Fox News. The hearing, part of the House investigation into the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, featured testimony from a former senior editor at Fox News who explained how there was never any doubt that his team was making the correct call on Arizona — even though most other news outlets would not call the state for days.“We already knew Trump’s chances were very small, and getting smaller based on what we had seen,” Chris Stirewalt, who was the politics editor for Fox News until he was fired two months after the election, told the House committee. Mr. Stirewalt described the cautious, analytical approach they took to determining that Mr. Trump could not come from behind and overtake Mr. Biden in Arizona.At Mr. Sammon’s insistence, he said, they took a vote of the people who worked on Fox News’ so-called decision desk. And only after the group agreed unanimously did Mr. Sammon issue it.“We looked around the room. Everybody says, ‘yea.’ And on we go,” Mr. Stirewalt testified before the committee, adding that they had already moved on to looking at calling other states by the time they heard of the backlash their decision created.Read More on the Jan. 6 House Committee HearingsMaking a Case Against Trump: The committee appears to be laying out a road map for prosecutors to indict former President Donald J. Trump. But the path to any trial is uncertain.The Meaning of the Hearings: While the public sessions aren’t going to unite the country, they could significantly affect public opinion.An Unsettling Narrative: During the first hearing, the panel presented a gripping story with a sprawling cast of characters, but only three main players: Mr. Trump, the Proud Boys and a Capitol Police officer.Trump’s Depiction: Mr. Trump was portrayed as a would-be autocrat willing to shred the Constitution to hang onto power. Liz Cheney: The vice chairwoman of the House committee has been unrepentant in continuing to blame Mr. Trump for stoking the attack on Jan. 6, 2021.Mr. Stirewalt’s testimony was part of the second televised hearing by the committee, which is aiming to refocus the country’s attention on the horrors of that day and to make a compelling case that Mr. Trump continued to lie about voter fraud and “stolen” votes despite being told by the family and aides closest to him that he had lost.On Monday, the hearing centered on people who said they did not believe that any hard evidence or data supported the former president’s contention that he must have won because the early vote returns showed him ahead on Election Day.At issue was what political observers have called the “Red Mirage.” On Election Day, Mr. Trump was widely expected to appear far ahead as polls closed across the country, because the first votes counted are primarily those from people who voted in person that day — the method favored by Republicans. But that, warned political experts, would probably be a “mirage.” Mr. Trump’s lead would shrink, they said, or perhaps evaporate entirely, as states tallied the mail-in ballots, which were favored by Democrats and take longer to count.For several weeks before the election, a group of advisers, including Stephen K. Bannon and Rudolph W. Giuliani, had encouraged Mr. Trump to declare victory on the night of the election, arguing that he could easily dismiss mail-in ballots as riddled with fraud regardless of whether he had any evidence for the claim.Fox’s Arizona call blew a hole in that strategy. A projected loss in traditionally red Arizona — which a Democratic presidential candidate had won only once since Harry Truman — coming from a presumably loyal outlet, augured a bad night.But Fox News had good reason to feel confident about a call no other news outlet was prepared to make at that point in the evening, with roughly one-fourth of the vote still uncounted in Arizona, Mr. Stirewalt said. Its decision desk used data that other networks did not have.After the 2016 election, Rupert Murdoch, who oversees Fox News as part of his larger conservative media empire, urged Fox to pull out of the consortium of news organizations that used polls to project results. Those polls had wrongly predicted a Hillary Clinton victory.That paved the way for Fox News and The Associated Press to go their own way in 2020, according to an account of the decision desk’s process that Mr. Stirewalt gave for the book “Insurgency: How Republicans Lost Their Party and Got Everything They Ever Wanted.” In the weeks leading up to the election, they surveyed 100,000 voters across the country who had cast ballots early, giving them a sense of how misleading the “mirage” might be. On the night of the election, the Fox News decision desk compared those surveys with another layer of data: actual precinct-level vote tallies that the A.P. was tracking.On Monday, Mr. Stirewalt testified that the joint A.P.-Fox News project worked remarkably well. “Let me tell you, our poll in Arizona was beautiful,” he said. “And it was doing just what we wanted it to do.”Some of Mr. Trump’s former aides testified that the Fox call shocked them but also undermined their confidence in his chances of victory. Jason Miller, a senior aide on the Trump campaign, said in video testimony played by the committee that he and others were “disappointed with Fox” for making the call but at the same time “concerned that maybe our data or our numbers weren’t accurate.”Mr. Miller had shared none of that concern on election night, when he tweeted that Fox was a “complete outlier” whose call should be ignored by other media. At Mr. Trump’s insistence, he and other aides immediately reached out to Fox executives, producers and on-air talent to demand an explanation. Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, went straight to the top, calling Mr. Murdoch. The scene played out in part on the air as Fox talent commented about the complaints raining down on them from the Trump campaign.“Arnon, we’re getting a lot of incoming here, and we need you to answer some questions,” the network’s chief political anchor, Bret Baier, said at one point, referring to Arnon Mishkin, the person on the decision desk who was responsible for analyzing the data and recommending when Fox issue its calls.On Monday, Mr. Stirewalt did not describe either Mr. Murdoch or Lachlan Murdoch, the Fox Corporation executive chairman, as being part of the decision desk’s process. And network executives have said the Murdochs were not involved.Though Fox News coverage is typically favorable to conservative, pro-Trump points of view, that deference has never been adopted by the decision desk, which is a separate part of the news-gathering operation overseen by Mr. Mishkin, a polling expert who is also a registered Democrat. In the days after the election, Mr. Mishkin was unwavering in his defense of the call as Fox anchors pressed him. Once, as the host Martha MacCallum peppered Mr. Mishkin with a series of “what if” scenarios that could bolster Mr. Trump’s chances of eking out a victory, Mr. Mishkin responded sarcastically, “What if frogs had wings?” (Mr. Mishkin remains a paid consultant for the network, not an employee, and will run the decision desk for the midterm elections in November.)The decision desk was created under the former Fox News chairman and founder Roger Ailes, who relished making controversy and drawing ratings more than he cared about toeing the line for the Republican Party. Its quick calls angered Republicans on more than one occasion, including in 2012, when it was the first to project that President Barack Obama would win Ohio and a second term, and in 2018 when it declared that Republicans would lose the House of Representatives even as votes were still being cast on the West Coast.Though Fox News and the Murdochs stood by the Arizona projection, they paid a price for it.As Mr. Trump’s rally goers took up a new chant, “Fox News sucks,” the former president urged his supporters on Twitter to switch to Fox’s smaller, right-wing competitors instead, Newsmax and One America News Network.With anchors who steadfastly refused to acknowledge Mr. Trump’s loss, Newsmax saw a ratings bump as Fox, the No. 1 cable news network for two decades, showed some rare — if short lived — slippage.Soon, various Fox opinion hosts were giving oxygen to false assertions that the election was stolen, several of which were methodically debunked at Monday’s hearings, including by one former Trump aide, who called them “nuts.”Mr. Stirewalt, who was among the Fox News journalists who defended the Arizona call, was notified of his firing on Jan. 19, 2021. 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      in US Politics

      Rough Draft review: Katy Tur’s fascinating – and flawed – story of news and family

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      Rough Draft review: Katy Tur’s fascinating – and flawed – story of news and familyThe MSNBC anchor follows her Trump bestseller with a compelling memoir but her press criticism falls flat Katy Tur spent 500 days covering Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, wrote a bestselling book called Unbelievable, and now hosts a show on MSNBC. She was planning to pitch a memoir about the 2020 election but changed her mind during the Covid pandemic, after a heavy package arrived from her mother.Because Our Fathers Lied review: Robert McNamara, Vietnam and a partial healingRead moreThe package contained a hard drive, which contained every minute of tape her parents, Bob Tur and Marika Gerrard, had taken as sole proprietors of the Los Angeles News Service. The drive contained all the footage shot from helicopters piloted by her father, Bob: from Madonna giving her parents the finger on the day she married Sean Penn to the famous chase of OJ Simpson as he sped through the streets of LA in a white Ford Bronco.As a child, Katy was often a passenger as her mother leaned far out of the cockpit to catch the best possible shot. Her daredevil father once got so close to a forest fire, he was cited for fanning its flames. Sometimes Katy felt the heat on her shins from a blaze barely 500ft below.That hard drive convinced Tur to switch subject. Her second book therefore tells a story she had spent her adult life avoiding: the story of her childhood. The switch was the right choice because even a particularly hard-fought campaign could not compete with the drama of her upbringing.Bob Tur was the kind of journalist who would do anything to get the story, “an oracle” to Katy. When the Northridge earthquake knocked out power to half of Los Angeles, her father used a forklift to rip open a hangar door so he could drag the chopper out and take off.He had such good sources in the fire department that he and his wife once scooped KABC-Los Angeles when its own 11pm anchor was shot outside the station. The Turs then sold the tape to KABC. A few hours later, Katy was born.Years later, she fondly recalled a childhood that “smelled like eucalyptus trees, the Pacific ocean and jet fuel”. But she was resolutely silent about all the ghastly things she experienced.Her father was the son of a gambler who would take him to the racetrack, give him the rent money to keep it from his own father, then beat his own son to get it back. Bob Tur’s “nose was broken by his father’s fist”, his “hand stabbed with his father’s fork”, his “face slashed by his father’s key”. He was “missing a piece of his ear because his father sliced it off”. In his mid-teens, Bob ran away.But according to Katy Tur, her father was unable to unlearn the worst lessons of his childhood and repeated the pattern of violence in his adult life, striking his wife, whipping Katy and her brother, punching holes in the living room walls.When Tur was covering the Boston Marathon bombing, she got the most startling call of her life. Her father told her he had “decided to become a woman. It’s why I’ve been so angry.”After the transition, Zoey Tur attacked Katy Tur for allegedly being transphobic. She insists she has always been supportive of such a courageous decision. But what she could not forgive was Zoey’s refusal to discuss or acknowledge the violence Bob Tur inflicted on his family, because the man who committed it no longer existed.Tur writes: “It felt like my dad was playing a get-out-of-gender-free card I didn’t know existed … I was dumbfounded by the idea that a person could change their gender … and think that in the process the deeds of the past would no longer be relevant.”It was “like a bank robber pleading not guilty on account of gender misalignment. But that’s how my father saw it.”“Bob Tur is dead,” Zoey Tur said. But, Katy Tur replied, “The stuff Bob Tur did isn’t dead.”The family story gives Katy Tur’s book its spine and its power. But interspersed with personal history are occasional attempts at press criticism which reveal uneven judgement.On the one hand, Tur acknowledges that her parents’ hugely successful focus on sensationalism is often blamed for the downfall of local TV news, and “some would say the downfall of national TV news too”.“They don’t dispute it,” she writes. “Neither do I.”But when she complains that too many people bemoan the decline of her profession in the decades since Walter Cronkite practiced it, she goes completely off the rails.Quoting a biography of Cronkite by Douglas Brinkley, another pundit of uneven judgement, she endorses the absurd idea that CBS Evening News covered the civil rights movement of the 1960s too sympathetically – citing as evidence the fact that bigoted southern affiliates derided their New York parent as the “Colored Broadcasting Station.”Tur also thinks it was wrong for the CBS Evening News to devote two thirds of its broadcast to Watergate two days before the 1972 election, when the New York Times and every major organization except the Washington Post was ignoring the scandal.The Great Stewardess Rebellion review: stirring study of what Roe v Wade helped vanquishRead moreShe disputes Cronkite’s 1968 description of Chicago police under Mayor Richard Daley as a “bunch of thugs”, a description delivered when the Connecticut senator Abraham Ribicoff was accurately accusing Daley of using “Gestapo tactics” against leftwing protesters.Tur even questions Cronkite’s single finest moment, also in ’68, when he accurately identified Vietnam as a “stalemate” after the Tet offensive.Tur is a better than average network news correspondent. I admired her work when she covered Trump. But judgements like the ones she passes on Cronkite are the very reason so many long for the days when networks employed correspondents of the caliber of Roger Mudd, Richard Threlkeld, Charles Kuralt, Elie Abel, Bob Simon, Charles Collingwood, Ed Bradley, Edwin Newman, Jim Wooten and more – all of whom were vastly superior to their current counterparts.
      Rough Draft: Motherhood and Journalism in a World Gone Mad is published in the US by Atria/One Signal
      TopicsBooksUS press and publishingUS television industryMSNBCUS televisionTelevisionUS politicsreviewsReuse this content More

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      in World Politics

      Thought Crimes: the Shameful Undemocratic Wilding of Contrary Opinion

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      The Fair Observer website uses digital cookies so it can collect statistics on how many visitors come to the site, what content is viewed and for how long, and the general location of the computer network of the visitor. These statistics are collected and processed using the Google Analytics service. Fair Observer uses these aggregate statistics from website visits to help improve the content of the website and to provide regular reports to our current and future donors and funding organizations. The type of digital cookie information collected during your visit and any derived data cannot be used or combined with other information to personally identify you. Fair Observer does not use personal data collected from its website for advertising purposes or to market to you.As a convenience to you, Fair Observer provides buttons that link to popular social media sites, called social sharing buttons, to help you share Fair Observer content and your comments and opinions about it on these social media sites. These social sharing buttons are provided by and are part of these social media sites. They may collect and use personal data as described in their respective policies. Fair Observer does not receive personal data from your use of these social sharing buttons. It is not necessary that you use these buttons to read Fair Observer content or to share on social media. More

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      in US Politics

      As America watched Capitol attack testimony, Fox News gave an alternate reality

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      As America watched Capitol attack testimony, Fox News gave an alternate realityTucker Carlson leads January 6 counter-programming, petulantly refusing to show the hearing: ‘We’re not playing along’ The millions of people who tuned into America’s main television channels on Thursday heard how the January 6 insurrection was “the culmination of an attempted coup”, a “siege” where violent Trump supporters mercilessly attacked police, causing politicians and staffers to run for their lives.On the Fox News channel, however, there was a different take on the historic congressional hearings exploring the attack on the Capitol in Washington DC.The deadly riot was, according to the channel’s primetime host Tucker Carlson, “an outbreak of mob violence, a forgettably minor outbreak by recent standards, that took place more than a year and a half ago”.January 6 hearing: Trump was at heart of plot that led to ‘attempted coup’Read moreThis was the alternate reality that Carlson, Fox News’ most-watched host, presented as he opened his hour-long show. He followed it up with a boast: the rightwing network would not be covering one of the most consequential political hearings in recent American history.“The whole thing is insulting,” Carlson said of the primetime House subcommittee hearing on the insurrection, which revealed devastating new details on how Donald Trump appeared to support the assassination of his vice-president and how Trump’s supporters created a “war zone” outside the Capitol.“In fact, it’s deranged. And we’re not playing along. This is the only hour on an American news channel that will not be carrying their propaganda live.“They are lying and we are not going to help them do it.”What followed instead was an hour of obfuscation, misdirection and what-about-ism, as Carlson, aided by a selection of guests that included one man who was fired from the Trump administration after he spoke at a conference attended by white nationalists.Carlson’s first guest was Jason Whitlock, host of Fearless. Whitlock immediately parroted what was to become the line of the night.“There was no insurrection,” Whitlock said. “There was a riot, a small one, that got a little bit out of hand.”The scenes broadcast on other TV channels made this claim laughable. Non-Fox News viewers were watching previously unseen footage which showed police officers being kicked and beaten, and people carrying Trump 2020 flags breaking into the Capitol building.Fox News viewers weren’t seeing those.“If something noteworthy happens we will bring it to you immediately,” Carlson had said during his opening monologue.It turned out that Carlson has an unusual definition of noteworthy, given that as the committee was detailing how Trump, on hearing that his supporters were chanting that Mike Pence should be hung, said: “Maybe our supporters have the right idea. Mike Pence deserves it,” Carlson was merrily chatting with Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democratic representative who was railing against Congress passing a $40bn aid bill for Ukraine.Gabbard – who has kept a relatively low profile since she gave a spirited defense of Vladimir Putin days before the Russian leader ordered the invasion of Ukraine – seemed happy to join Carlson in downplaying what was taking place, insisting that Congress should be focussing on other matters.Carlson happily took up that theme. Several times he opined on why Congress was holding this two-hour hearing when gas prices have gone up, there are drug deaths, and, most memorably: “this country has never in its history been closer to a nuclear war”.Through the first half of Carlson’s show, two tactics emerged: downplay the insurrection, and complain that the House wanted to investigate it. As he entered the home stretch, Carlson came up with a new, conspiracy-minded, trope.“The point is not to get to the truth,” he said of the hearing. “It’s to hide the truth.”According to the Fox News host, the purpose of the commission is to provide a pretext “for the Democratic party to declare war against millions of American citizens who oppose their agenda”.To support his point, such as it was, Carlson – finally – showed some of the hearing.“Liz Cheney is helping them,” he said. “Here she is just moments ago screeching about disinformation.”Fox News cut to a clip of Cheney speaking in an extremely measured tone about how Trump attempted to overturn the result of the 2020 election through a misinformation campaign – a campaign that Cheney said “provoked the violence on January 6”.“She is off on another planet,” Carlson said. “Why is Liz Cheney abetting the destruction of America’s civil liberties, and our sacred norms?”Fox News typically has more than 3m viewers in the 8pm hour, but announced earlier this week that it would not air the hearing, instead relegating coverage to the Fox Business channel, which averages fewer than 100,000 viewers.The channel stuck true to its boycott promise. Occasionally while Carlson talked a video stream of the committee would appear in a little soundless box, floating off to the right of the host’s head, but that was largely it.While the hearing rolled on, Carlson rattled through his guests. A man running as a Republican for Congress said people at the Capitol had legitimate grievances over election fraud, before conceding that things became “a little bit dicey”. Another guest made vague claims about the entire insurrection being cooked up by the FBI.Carlson’s final interviewee was Darren Beattie, a rightwing activist who was fired as a Trump speechwriter after it emerged he had attended a conference in 2016 alongside a prominent white nationalist.Beattie’s take – nodded along to by Carlson – was that “the feds” were responsible for the riot on January 6.“It’s a clear hoax, we know it happened.”Carlson might well have nodded. Last year he hosted a documentary, Patriot Purge, about the January 6 attack which floated the conspiracy theory that violence that day was instigated by leftwing activists. Carlson has also suggested FBI operatives organized the attack on the Capitol.As Carlson praised Beattie’s reporting, courage and general standing as a person, it brought to mind something Carlson had said earlier, after he had spent several minutes criticizing the hearing with Charlie Hurt, a writer for the right-wing Washington Times newspaper.“You and I entered journalism about the same time, about 30 years ago,” Carlson told Hurt.“It seemed honorable then. It seems really shameful now.”TopicsFox NewsUS Capitol attackUS politicsUS television industrynewsReuse this content More

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      in Elections

      Trump’s bid to cling to power ‘beyond even Nixon’s imagination’, Watergate duo say

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      Trump’s bid to cling to power ‘beyond Nixon’s imagination’, Watergate duo sayBob Woodward and Carl Bernstein write in new book foreword that bid to overturn election made Trump ‘our first seditious president’ Donald Trump was the first seditious president in US history, surpassing in his efforts to hang on to power beyond even the criminal imagination of Richard Nixon, according to the two political reporters who were instrumental in securing Nixon’s downfall.In a new foreword to their celebrated 1974 book on the Watergate scandal, All the President’s Men, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein accuse Trump of pursuing his “diabolical instincts” by zeroing in on the certification of Joe Biden’s presidential victory by Congress on January 6 last year. In the authors’ assessment, Trump’s unleashing of the mob that day, culminating in the violent attack on the US Capitol, amounted to “a deception that exceeded even Nixon’s imagination”.Capitol attack panel to unveil new evidence against Trump at public hearingsRead moreThey write in their foreword, published by the Washington Post, they write: “By legal definition this is clearly sedition … thus Trump became the first seditious president in our history.”Woodward and Bernstein’s comparison of Trump and Nixon carries singular weight, given that as young Washington Post reporters they helped to uncover Nixon’s campaign of political spying and cover-up that led in 1974 to the only resignation of a president in American history. In separate capacities, the two journalists have also reported extensively on the Trump presidency, with Woodward doing so in a series of three books: Fear, Rage and Peril.The timing of their analysis is also potent. It comes just days before the House select committee investigating the January 6 insurrection stages the first of at least six televised hearings in which they will attempt to show the American people that Trump acted corruptly in his efforts to stop Biden’s certification.Woodward and Bernstein suggest that the two presidents had much in common, despite the almost half a century that stands between them. Nixon’s belief that it was for the greater good that he stayed in power whatever the means was “embraced by Trump”, they write.“A man is not finished when he is defeated. He is finished when he quits,” Nixon told himself in 1969. That informed Trump’s campaign to hold on to power through falsehoods even in the face of defeat.Misinformation also unites the diabolical pair. “Both Nixon and Trump created a conspiratorial world in which the US constitution, laws and fragile democratic traditions were to be manipulated or ignored, political opponents and the media were ‘enemies,’ and there were few or no restraints on the powers entrusted to presidents,” Woodward and Bernstein say in their new foreword.The reporters also explore the differences between the two men, notably that Trump attempted his electoral subversion in public. Pulling no punches, they call the January 6 insurrection “a Trump operation” and predict that the House committee has an abundance of evidence to prove that point in the upcoming hearings.Though Nixon’s criminal misdeeds tend to be remembered through the lens of the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate Hotel on 17 June 1972, and the cover-up that followed, the authors remind their readers that his core purpose was to subvert that year’s presidential election. They rehearse some of the extreme measures that Nixon’s team of operatives took to derail the presidential campaign of his main Democratic rival, Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine.Those measures included writing fake letters on Muskie stationery alleging sexual misconduct by other Democratic candidates and stealing Muskie’s shoes from outside his hotel room where he had left them for polishing in order to spook him out. Muskie ultimately lost the Democratic nomination to the liberal senator George McGovern of South Dakota.Trump, the reporters argue, pursued equally ruthless tactics designed to undermine credibility in the 2020 presidential election. They reached a pitch on January 6 with the violent mob breaking into the Capitol chanting “Hang Mike Pence” against Trump’s vice-president who was proceeding with certification of the election results.In the last analysis, Woodward and Bernstein ask themselves why two such powerful men would embark on parallel efforts to destroy democracy. They have one overriding answer.“Fear of losing and being considered a loser was a common thread for Nixon and Trump,” they write.TopicsDonald TrumpBob WoodwardCarl BernsteinUS Capitol attackUS politicsRichard NixonWatergatenewsReuse this content More

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      in US Politics

      Biden gives far fewer interviews than his predecessors – could his caution backfire?

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      Biden gives far fewer interviews than his predecessors – could his caution backfire? With op-eds and speeches but no one-on-ones, observers say the president risks losing the public’s trust and reporters’ good will He delivered a primetime address to the nation. He wrote two columns in leading newspapers. And he took some off-the-cuff questions from reporters. But once again Joe Biden did not this week sit down for an interview with a broadcaster or newspaper. Nor did he hold a press conference.The US president, who promised to rebuild trust and transparency after Donald Trump’s adversarial tenure, is facing criticism as Sunday marks 116 days since his last press interview.“Biden’s refusal to address the American people about the many crises they are facing under his failed administration is inexcusable,” said Emma Vaughn, a spokesperson for the Republican National Committee.As he approaches 18 months in office, a president eager to get his message out has settled into certain rhythms and comfort zones while sidestepping, to the frustration of the White House press corps, some traditional forums.This week he wrote a column for the Wall Street Journal about his plan for fighting inflation and another for the New York Times about US strategy for supporting Ukraine in its fight against Russia.Biden delivered a speech about gun violence from the White House on Thursday evening in the hope of reaching a wide TV audience. He made further remarks from Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, on Friday about the latest jobs figures and fielded a few questions from journalists.Like Trump, Biden frequently pauses to talk to reporters who shout questions over Marine One’s whirring propellers as he comes and goes from the White House – but such exchanges lack the depth or opportunities for follow-ups afforded by substantial one-on-ones.Biden’s last such interview – and his only one so far in 2022 – was with Lester Holt of NBC News back on 10 February. To put that in context, his interview rate is trailing far behind his recent predecessors at the same stage of their presidency.From taking office on 20 January 2021 up to 29 April 2022, Biden gave 23 interviews. Between 20 January 2017 and 29 April 2018, by contrast, Trump gave 95 interviews, according to the White House Transition Project, a non-partisan group that chronicles presidential communications.Over their equivalent periods, Barack Obama gave 187 interviews, George W Bush gave 60, Bill Clinton gave 64, George HW Bush gave 70 and Ronald Reagan gave 78, the Project found. Biden has also held fewer solo press conferences than other recent presidents.Bill Whalen, a former media consultant for politicians including former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, said: “We’ve gone from a flood with Donald Trump, who could not go a day without talking to the press – which would create a different set of problems for the Trump White House – to now a drought where this president has, for the better part of four months, not sat down one-on-one with a reporter.”Biden has earned a reputation for gaffes during half a century as a senator, vice-president and president. He recently caught his own staff by surprise with a blunt commitment to defend Taiwan militarily and a candid admission that he was not aware of the severity of the baby formula shortage until April.Such incidents, observers say, help explain why White House officials want to keep Biden away from grillings by the nation’s toughest interviewers.Whalen, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, added: “The strategy is pretty obvious. The White House does not trust the president to go out unscripted and doesn’t want to leave the president to his own devices. They just don’t trust him to get out the story clean without a problem.”But the cautious approach could backfire on 79-year-old Biden, he warned. “It could potentially in the back of voters’ minds question his competency, his energy, his ability to handle the job. It raises questions as to why are you secluding the president, why are you hiding the president, why won’t you let him talk to reporters?“Are you afraid he’s going to say something bad or is going to come across poorly? Secondly, slowly you build up resentment in the press corps so that with all this added pressure, by the time he finally sits down one-on-one, it might not be as friendly as they would like.”Biden’s media interviews so far have included the main TV networks, three CNN town halls, an appearance on MSNBC and three regional television interviews via Zoom, as well as conversations with the late-night host Jimmy Fallon and ESPN’S Sage Steele. He has given only three print interviews.Last month he hosted Thomas Friedman, a columnist at the New York Times, for a lunch of tuna salad sandwich with tomato, a bowl of mixed fruit and a chocolate milkshake. “But it was all off the record – so I can’t tell you anything he said,” Friedman wrote.Meanwhile media reports suggest that White House staff are divided over Biden’s communication strategy as his approval rating sinks, midterm elections loom and his set-piece speeches often fail to break through.CNN wrote this week: “Aides regularly talk about how little traction they’re getting from one-off Biden appearances or events and then – whether on inflation, the baby formula shortage or mass shootings or the other crises landing on Biden’s desk – he’s often left looking like he’s in a reactive crouch on the issues that matter most to voters rather than setting the agenda.”Biden has earned praise for restoring the daily White House briefing with the press secretary, Jen Psaki, and her successor, Karine Jean-Pierre. His chief of staff, Ron Klain, has emerged as an indefatigable champion of the administration on Twitter. And the president has maintained the tradition of holding joint press conferences with foreign leaders, most recently in Japan.Frank Luntz, a political consultant and pollster, said: “The average voter can’t tell whether Biden is doing a press conference or an interview or a speech. It all blurs together to them. But when the midterm election comes closer, that will be problematic. Biden is still a drag on the Democrats. The more that he shifts focus on to anything else, the better off Democrats will be.”The White House did not respond to a request for comment.TopicsJoe BidenNewspapers & magazinesUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      in US Politics

      Seen and Unseen review: George Floyd, Black Twitter and the fight for racial justice

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      Seen and Unseen review: George Floyd, Black Twitter and the fight for racial justiceMarc Lamont Hill and Todd Brewster’s brilliant book considers the history of communications technology in a racist society Nearly all the books I have read about the internet have deepened my fears about the net effect of social media on the health of our body politic. For example, I thought three facts from the congressman Ro Khanna’s recent book, Dignity in a Digital Age, were enough to scare anyone concerned about the future of democracy.Dignity in a Digital Age review: a congressman takes big tech to taskRead moreKhanna reported that an internal discussion at Facebook revealed that “64% of all extremist group joins are due to our recommendations”; he revealed that before 2020, “QAnon groups developed millions of followers as Facebook’s algorithm encouraged people to join based on their profiles”; and he pointed to a United Nations report that Facebook played a “determining role” in events in Myanmar that led to the murder of at least 25,000 Rohingya Muslims and the displacement of 700,000 others.Seen and Unseen, a brilliant new book by Marc Lamont Hill, a Black professor, and Todd Brewster, a white journalist, certainly doesn’t ignore those dangers. But the authors’ focus is overwhelmingly on the positive effects of Twitter and Black Twitter, which they argue have democratized access to information, and the power of the smartphone to provide the incontrovertible video evidence needed to prosecute the murderers of men like George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery.The book is a brisk, smart, short history of the effects of new communication technologies, from the photographs of the 19th century to the movies and television of the 20th and the internet of our own time.It includes terrific mini-portraits of many of the heroes and several of the villains of the Black-and-white battle which has dominated so much of American history, including the great Black abolitionist, Frederick Douglass, who turns out to be the most photographed American of the 19th century, and the white supremacist Thomas Dixon Jr, whose novel The Clansman was the basis for the 1915 film The Birth of a Nation.There is a great section about the impact of The Birth of the Nation, which single-handedly revived the Ku Klux Klan and did more to rewrite the history of Reconstruction than any other book or movie. Its director, DW Griffith, was frank about wanting to give white southerners “a way of striking back”.“One could not find the sufferings of our family and our friends – the dreadful poverty and hardships during the war and for many years after – in the Yankee-written histories we read in school,” Griffith wrote. “From all this was born a burning determination to tell … our side of the story to the world.”As the authors note: “His movie did that spectacularly.”The book also reminds us that this was the first movie shown in the White House and the host, Woodrow Wilson, was a friend and Johns Hopkins classmate of Thomas Dixon Jr. Wilson, of course, was also the president who allowed the segregation of the federal government.But what makes this volume especially valuable is the authors’ capacity to see the good and the bad in almost everything.WEB Du Bois said The Birth of the Nation represented “the Negro” either “as an ignorant fool, a vicious rapist, a venal or unscrupulous politician, or a faithful but doddering idiot”. James Baldwin called it “an elaborate justification of mass murder”.And yet the film was so egregious it also had a tremendous positive effect – it “did more to advance the NAACP”, which had been founded six years earlier, “than anything else to that date. In essence it jump-started the movement for civil rights.” At that time, that term did not yet have any meaning.Du Bois and the NAACP hoped to hit back “in kind” with a movie called Lincoln’s Dream but were stymied by “the lack of enthusiasm” of white capital.In our own time, Hill and Brewster identify the unique power of the video of the murder of George Floyd, which “resonated with whites because the cruelty inflicted on him was so undeniable, so elemental … and so protracted (nine minutes 29 seconds) that it could be neither ignored nor dismissed”.For Black people of course it was much more personal: as they watched “the last breaths being squeezed from Floyd’s body, they could see themselves in his suffering; or an uncle, or a sister, or even a long-departed ancestor”.A beautiful mini-biography of James Baldwin includes many of his most pungent observations, including, “Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” And, “To be a Negro in this country, and to be relatively conscious, is to be in a rage almost all the time”.A Lynching at Port Jervis review: timely history of New York race hateRead moreIt turns out that “one of the most frequently cited BLM counterpublic voices is Baldwin’s”. He is “the movement’s literary touchstone, conscience, and pinup” as well as its “most tweeted literary authority”.That is the most positive contribution of Twitter – and particularly Black Twitter – I have ever heard of.The authors write that Baldwin “was impatient with America because he saw it as trapped in its own history”, and wanted America to admit “that it owed its very existence to an ideology of white supremacy”.There was a time in my life when I considered that an exaggeration. But once you have acknowledged that ours is a nation that was literally founded on genocide and slavery, Baldwin’s judgment becomes an indisputable truth.
      Seen and Unseen: Technology, Social Media, and the Fight for Racial Justice is published in the US by Atria Books
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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