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      Jen Psaki likens Fox News reporters to Russian and Chinese propagandists

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      Joe Biden’s White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, has likened reporters from Fox News and other rightwing outlets to “representatives of the Russian and Chinese media asking questions directed by their government … propaganda pushers” to be treated with extreme caution.Psaki was speaking to CNN’s Reliable Sources in an interview broadcast on Sunday. Her relations with the media have been smoother – and her briefings more frequent – than any predecessor in the Trump administration. But clashes with reporters including Peter Doocy of Fox News have made headlines.Last week, one such interaction involved questions about Anthony Fauci, Biden’s chief medical adviser. Republicans and rightwing reporters have seized on the publication of emails sent by Fauci at the outset of the coronavirus pandemic.Asked by Doocy if Fauci should be “held accountable” for “saying one thing in email and then coming to this microphone and saying something else”, Psaki called Fauci “a renowned public servant” who has “overseen management of multiple global health crises”.“Attacks launched on him are certainly something we wouldn’t stand by,” she said, adding: “I am going to let Dr Fauci speak to his own defence about his emails from 17 months ago before this president even took office.”Doocy asked about US funding for Chinese research laboratories, a key part of Republican attacks on Fauci as the theory that Covid-19 escaped such a lab gains renewed attention.Psaki deflected the question.Doocy asked: “Can you imagine any circumstance where the president would ever fire him?”“No,” said Psaki, turning to another reporter, who she told: “Go ahead.”On CNN, Psaki said: “The things that get under my skin are when the premise of a question is based on inaccurate information, misleading information. That can be frustrating. I try not to show it too much, try not to let people see me sweat too much. But occasionally I have a moment of humanity.”Host Brian Stelter pointed out that most questions “based on falsehoods come from brands like Newsmax, which does sometimes get called on the briefing room. I know a lot of liberals don’t want Fox News to get called on. I think they should be, but … why do you call on Fox News and Newsmax?”Psaki said: “My point of view and more importantly, the president’s point of view, is that the story is not about me or a debate with news outlets. The story is about the plans of the administration and what we’re trying to project to the American people.“And when he pledged to govern for all Americans, that means talking to a range of outlets – liberal, conservative, people who have different areas of interest. So that’s exactly what I try to do every day.”Stelter asked why some viewers celebrate when the press secretary is seen to “shut down” a questioner such as Doocy.“I also have a responsibility not to allow the briefing room to become a forum for propaganda or a forum for pushing forward falsehoods or inaccurate information,” Psaki said.“My best preparation for that was actually serving as the state department spokesperson when there were representatives of the Russian and the Chinese media in the briefing room asking me questions that were directed by their government.“So we see that from time to time in the briefing room, not every single day at all, but I have a responsibility to the public to make sure they’re getting accurate information and the premises of questions that are propaganda-pushing are not giving them inaccurate information.”Psaki also defended the administration against criticism for holding only one presidential press conference – “That may be driven more by the media than it is by the American public” – and suggest some reporters’ “muscles have atrophied a little bit” when it comes to understanding the realities of governance.Fox News gleefully rounded up conservative criticism of the interview. Verdicts included “subservient, obsequious” and “bootlicking”.In his Reliable Sources email, Stelter said his goal had been “to talk big-picture … and to get personal, beyond the news-of-day questions that get asked at the briefings.” More

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      Facebook will end special treatment for politicians after Trump ban – report

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      Facebook is reportedly planning to end a policy that effectively exempts politicians from content moderation rules.The Verge reported on Thursday that the social media company is expected to announce its new policy on Friday. The change comes as Facebook faces increased criticism, from journalists, lawmakers and its own employees, for allowing world leaders and politicians to use its platform to spread misinformation, quash criticism and harass opponents.The company is also expected to announce a response to its independent oversight board, which recently advised that Donald Trump’s Facebook account should not be reinstated. The platform had suspended Trump’s account after the former president shared posts in which he seemed to praise the rioters who stormed the US capitol in the deadly 6 January riots.As part of its non-binding recommendations, the board said the same rules should apply to all users and that Facebook’s existing policies, such as deciding when material is too newsworthy to remove or when to take actions on an influential account, need to be more clearly communicated to users. The board also said that heads of state and government officials can have a greater power to cause harm.Facebook declined to comment.Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter have long contended that companies shouldn’t censor what politicians share. Although it has taken some steps to curb misinformation shared by certain leaders in the US, amid increased scrutiny, a Guardian investigation revealed that it allowed major abuses of its platform in small, non-western countries.The Guardian reported in April that the platform “has repeatedly failed to take timely action when presented with evidence of rampant manipulation and abuse of its tools by political leaders around the world”.The policy Facebook is expected to announce this week will stop short of subjecting posts by politicians to the same independent fact-checking that other sources share. However, the new policy will broaden the moderator’s ability to enforce harassment rules against politicians, according to the Verge.Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, has long argued that the company should not police politicians’ speech. The company currently exempts politicians’ posts and ads from its third-party factchecking program and its “newsworthiness exemption” allows politicians’ rule-breaking posts on the site if the public interest outweighs the harm – though Facebook said it did not apply its newsworthiness allowance in the Trump case.In the board’s recommendations it stressed that considerations of “newsworthiness” should not take priority when urgent action is needed on the platform to prevent “significant harm”.The board gave Facebook six months to decide on a “proportionate response” in the Trump case, which could see the former president’s account restored, permanently blocked or suspended for a definite period of time.Facebook has not yet announced a decision on whether the former president will be restored to its platforms. More

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      Trump justice department secretly obtained New York Times reporters’ phone records, paper says

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      The justice department under Donald Trump secretly obtained the phone records of four New York Times reporters as part of a leak investigation, the newspaper has reported.The case announced on Wednesday is the third instance in the past month in which a news media organisation has disclosed that federal authorities seized the records of its journalists in an effort to identify sources for national security stories published during Trump’s administration.President Joe Biden has said he would not allow the department to continue the practice of obtaining reporters’ records, calling it “simply, simply wrong”.A department spokesman, Anthony Coley, said it notified the four reporters on Wednesday that it had obtained their phone toll records last year and that it had sought to obtain non-content email records as part of “a criminal investigation into the unauthorised disclosure of classified information”.The newspaper said the records that were seized covered a nearly four-month period in 2017 and belonged to reporters Matt Apuzzo, Adam Goldman, Eric Lichtblau and Michael S Schmidt. Lichtblau has since left the newspaper.The journalists are neither the subjects nor the targets of the investigation, Coley said.Coley added: “Forthcoming annual public reports from the department covering 2019 and 2020 will indicate that members of the news media have now been notified in every instance in this period in which their records were sought or obtained in such circumstances.”The department did not disclose which article it was investigating, according to the newspaper.The period covered by the phone record seizure encompasses an April 2017 story from the four journalists that described the decision-making of then-FBI director James Comey during the conclusion of the Hillary Clinton email investigation, and that referenced a classified document obtained by Russian hackers.Dean Baquet, the executive editor of the New York Times, said in a statement published by the newspaper that seizing reporters’ phone records “profoundly undermines press freedom”.“It threatens to silence the sources we depend on to provide the public with essential information about what the government is doing,” Baquet said.The Washington Post disclosed last month that the justice department had last year obtained phone records belonging to three of its journalists who covered the investigation into 2016 Russian election interference. CNN later revealed that the department had seized phone records of its Pentagon correspondent, Barbara Starr.After those disclosures, Biden told a reporter he would not allow the department to persist in obtaining reporter phone records. That would mark a break from Democratic and Republican predecessors alike, whose administrations have seized reporter call logs in an effort to identify sources of classified information.The justice department under former attorney-general Eric Holder announced revised guidelines for leak investigations, requiring additional levels of review before a journalist could be subpoenaed – though it did not end the practice.Jeff Sessions, who served as Trump’s first attorney-general, announced in 2017 an aggressive government crackdown on leaks. More

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      Fox News host Sean Hannity wrote Trump 2020 campaign ad, book claims

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      The Fox News host Sean Hannity was criticised for appearing at a Trump rally in 2018 but according to a new book he was involved again with Trump’s campaign in 2020, helping write an ad that aired on his primetime show.Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost, by Mike Bender, senior White House reporter for the Wall Street Journal, will be published in August.News of its contents, including “some amazingly hilarious revelations” about Mike Pence, Rudy Giuliani, Roger Stone, Tucker Carlson, Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump “and the rest of the Trump posse”, was reported by Punchbowl News.According to the news site, the ad known to Trump insiders as “the Hannity ad” and “the one Hannity wrote” ran only during Hannity’s show.An anonymous Trump aide is reported as saying “Hannity said this is our best spot yet” but Bender reports: “Inside the campaign, the spot was mocked mercilessly – mostly because of the dramatic, over-the-top language and a message that seemed to value quantity over quality.“Donald Trump himself, in a post-election interview with Bender, did not dispute that Hannity wrote the ad, which called [Joe] Biden a ‘47-year swamp creature’ who had ‘accomplished nothing’ and supported a ‘radical, socialist Green New Deal’.”Such language attacking Biden’s long career in the Senate and as vice-president to Barack Obama was used by Trump advisers.In October, for example, senior adviser Jason Miller told reporters: “The contrast between a 47-year swamp creature in Joe Biden and a businessman in President Trump has been a major theme of this campaign and I would expect it to be so through election day.”Bender reports that the Trump campaign thought the Hannity ad “so useless that they limited it to exactly one show: Hannity … If Trump and Hannity watched the spot on television – and were satisfied enough to stop asking about the commercial – that seemed to be the best result of the ad. The cost of that investment: $1.5m.”Hannity denied writing the ad, telling Bender: “The world knows that Sean Hannity supports Donald Trump. But my involvement specifically in the campaign – no. I was not involved that much. Anybody who said that is full of shit.”But Hannity has form. In 2016, he was reprimanded by Fox News after he endorsed Trump in a campaign video. In 2018, he appeared with Trump at a rally in Missouri – and was reprimanded again.Before the event, shortly before the November midterm elections, Hannity tweeted: “To be clear, I will not be on stage campaigning with the president. I am covering the final rally for the show.” He then presented his show from the venue, telling viewers to vote Republican and echoing party slogans.On stage, Trump praised his allies at Fox News, saying: “They’re very special. They’ve done an incredible job for us. They’ve been with us from the beginning.”He then called Hannity up to join him. As reported by the Associated Press, Hannity “hugged the president … and, after echoing Trump’s traditional epithets about the media, recited some economic statistics”.Another host, Jeanine Pirro, also appeared on stage.Amid a storm of criticism, Angelo Carusone, president of Media Matters for America, a liberal watchdog, said Hannity’s behaviour was “dangerous for democracy and a threat to a free press”.Hannity said he had been surprised to be invited on stage.Fox News said it did not “condone any talent participating in campaign events … This was an unfortunate distraction and has been addressed.” More

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      Rick Santorum axed by CNN over racist remarks on Native Americans

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      CNN has dropped former Republican US senator Rick Santorum as a senior political commentator after racist remarks he made about Native Americans at an event in April.News of Santorum’s termination was first reported by HuffPost. A CNN spokesperson confirmed to the Guardian that the network has parted ways with Santorum. No further comment on the firing was provided, though an anonymous CNN executive told HuffPost that “leadership wasn’t particularly satisfied with that appearance. None of the anchors wanted to book him.”Speaking at an event for the Young Americans Foundation, a conservative youth group, Santorum said that there was “nothing” in the US before Europeans colonizers arrived.“We came here and created a blank slate,” he said. “We birthed a nation from nothing. I mean, there was nothing here. I mean, yes we have Native Americans, but candidly there isn’t much Native American culture in American culture.”The comments sparked outrage among indigenous groups, including the National Congress of American Indians, which specifically called on CNN to fire Santorum over the remarks.“Televising someone with [Santorum’s] views on Native American genocide is fundamentally no different than putting an outright Nazi on television to justify the Holocaust,” said Fawn Sharp, the group’s president, in a statement from last month. “Any mainstream media organization should fire him or face a boycott from more than 500 Tribal Nations and our allies from across the country and worldwide.”Following the backlash, Santorum was invited to speak to Chris Cuomo to explain his comments. Santorum said he “misspoke” and denied that he was “trying to dismiss what happened to Native Americans”.“Far from it. The way we treated Native Americans was horrific. It goes against every bone and everything I’ve ever fought for as a leader in the Congress,” he told Cuomo.CNN anchor Don Lemon, who follows Cuomo’s show on the network’s primetime schedule, said Santorum’s non-apology was infuriating.“I can’t believe the first words out of his mouth weren’t ‘I’m sorry, I said something ignorant, I need to learn about the history of this country,” he said. “Did he actually think it was a good idea for him to come on television and try to whitewash the whitewash that he whitewashed?”Santorum has not publicly commented. More

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      in US Politics

      The Guardian’s history in the US: Politics Weekly Extra

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      As celebrations marking the Guardian’s 200th year continue, Jonathan Freedland and David Smith explore the paper’s rocky road through covering the biggest stories in US political history

      How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know

      This week, to celebrate the Guardian’s 200th birthday, David Smith takes Jonathan Freedland on a historical journey through the paper’s centuries of US coverage, from its constant criticism of Abraham Lincoln, to its show of force against the Iraq war, which went against most in the US media at the time. They discuss the fascinating transition from being a sort of outsider looking in, to being a go-to guide for millions of Americans. Read David Smith’s piece on 200 years of Guardian US coverage Send us your questions and feedback to podcasts@theguardian.com Help support the Guardian by going to gu.com/supportpodcasts More

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      in Elections

      Fox News Files to Dismiss Dominion's Lawsuit Over 2020 Election Coverage

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      Fox News Media, the Rupert Murdoch-controlled cable group, filed a motion on Tuesday to dismiss a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit brought against it in March by Dominion Voting Systems, an election technology company that accused Fox News of propagating lies that ruined its reputation after the 2020 presidential election.The Dominion lawsuit and a similar defamation claim brought in February by another election company, Smartmatic, have been widely viewed as test cases in a growing legal effort to battle disinformation in the news media. And it is another byproduct of former President Donald J. Trump’s baseless attempts to undermine President Biden’s clear victory.In a 61-page response filed in Delaware Superior Court, the Fox legal team argues that Dominion’s suit threatened the First Amendment powers of a news organization to chronicle and assess newsworthy claims in a high-stakes political contest.“A free press must be able to report both sides of a story involving claims striking at the core of our democracy,” Fox says in the motion, “especially when those claims prompt numerous lawsuits, government investigations and election recounts.” The motion adds: “The American people deserved to know why President Trump refused to concede despite his apparent loss.”Dominion’s lawsuit against Fox News presented the circumstances in a different light.Dominion is among the largest manufacturers of voting machine equipment and its technology was used by more than two dozen states last year. Its lawsuit described the Fox News and Fox Business cable networks as active participants in spreading a false claim, pushed by Mr. Trump’s allies, that the company had covertly modified vote counts to manipulate results in favor of Mr. Biden. Lawyers for Mr. Trump shared those claims during televised interviews on Fox programs.“Lies have consequences,” Dominion’s lawyers wrote in their initial complaint. “Fox sold a false story of election fraud in order to serve its own commercial purposes, severely injuring Dominion in the process.” The lawsuit cites instances where Fox hosts, including Lou Dobbs and Maria Bartiromo, uncritically repeated false claims about Dominion made by Mr. Trump’s lawyers Rudolph W. Giuliani and Sidney Powell.A representative for Dominion, whose founder and employees received threatening messages after the negative coverage, did not respond to a request for comment on Tuesday night.Fox News Media has retained two prominent lawyers to lead its defense: Charles Babcock, who has a background in media law, and Scott Keller, a former chief counsel to Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas. Fox has also filed to dismiss the Smartmatic suit; that defense is being led by Paul D. Clement, a former solicitor general under President George W. Bush.“There are two sides to every story,” Mr. Babcock and Mr. Keller wrote in a statement on Tuesday. “The press must remain free to cover both sides, or there will be a free press no more.”The Fox motion on Tuesday argues that its networks “had a free-speech right to interview the president’s lawyers and surrogates even if their claims eventually turned out to be unsubstantiated.” It argues that the security of Dominion’s technology had been debated in prior legal claims and media coverage, and that the lawsuit did not meet the high legal standard of “actual malice,” a reckless disregard for the truth, on the part of Fox News and its hosts.Media organizations, in general, enjoy strong protections under the First Amendment. Defamation suits are a novel tactic in the battle over disinformation, but proponents say the strategy has shown some early results. The conservative news outlet Newsmax apologized last month after a Dominion employee, in a separate legal case, accused the network of spreading baseless rumors about his role in the election. Fox Business canceled “Lou Dobbs Tonight” a day after Smartmatic sued Fox in February and named Mr. Dobbs as a co-defendant.Jonah E. Bromwich More

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      in Elections

      Fox News made me do it: Capitol attack suspect pulls ‘Foxitis’ defense

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      The lawyer for a Delaware man charged over the Capitol attack in January is floating a unique defense: Fox News made him do it.Anthony Antonio, who is facing five charges including violent entry, and disorderly conduct and impeding law enforcement during civil disorder, fell prey to the persistent lies about the so-called “stolen election” being spread daily by Donald Trump and the rightwing network that served him, his attorney Joseph Hurley said during a video hearing on Thursday. Antonio spent the six months before the riots mainlining Fox News while unemployed, Hurley said, likening the side effects of such a steady diet of misinformation to a mental health syndrome.“Fox television played constantly,” he said. “He became hooked with what I call ‘Foxitis’ or ‘Foxmania’, and became interested in the political aspect and started believing what was being fed to him.”Antonio’s segment was somehow only the second most notable part of the hearing. Another defendant shouted obscenities, sending the proceedings into near chaos at one point.Hurley’s argument calls to mind the infamous “the devil made me do it” defense, although you might argue the devil has nothing on the prolific manipulators at Fox News. And while there is certainly an element of believability to the harmful nature of persistent rightwing propaganda effectively manipulating a person’s ability to distinguish fact from reality – I’ve written here and in my newsletter about something I only half-jokingly refer to as “Fox News brain cancer”, something like a shared psychotic disorder that slowly sucks the life out of people and ruins their ability to connect with their families – it remains to be seen whether or not there is any legal merit to such a claim. Legal experts I’ve talked to certainly don’t think so.Multiple videos obtained by the FBI from the day of the riot appear to show Antonio as especially active in the chaos. He is seen wearing a bulletproof vest featuring a patch of the anti-government extremist group the Three Percenters. At one point in video footage he can be seen shouting at officers: “You want war? We got war. 1776 all over again.” It was a revolutionary sentiment spread by radical rightwing congresswoman Lauren Boebert and others on the day.Elsewhere, Antonio is seen with a riot shield that appeared to be stolen from law enforcement, squirting water on an officer being dragged into a crowd, stealing one’s gas mask, and jumping through a broken window into the Capitol.Fox News has continued to spread misinformation about what happened that day.The network is being sued for billions of dollars for by two voting machine companies, Smartmatic and Dominion, for spreading lies about their role in the “theft” of the election. More