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      in US Politics

      How Donald Trump's hand-holding led to panicky call home by Theresa May

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      For the former prime minister Theresa May, one of the most pressing matters she confronted during her encounter with Donald Trump a few days after his inauguration went beyond mere diplomacy.May had travelled to Washington in 2017 with the intention of persuading the new US president to make a supportive statement about Nato. Little did she expect that she would be calling her husband, Philip, to warn him that images of the US president of holding her hand as they walked through the White House would soon be flashing around the world.With Trump out of power, those who had ringside seats during four years of dangerous and often chaotic foreign policy are now describing their – often bruising – encounters in a major new documentary series.The three-part BBC series, Trump Takes on the World, by the award-winning documentary maker Norma Percy, reveals extraordinary access to key observers of the president.With testimony from a who’s who of world leaders and senior US officials, it offers an unmediated reflection of Trump shorn of political hypocrisies.It was not just May who found Trump unsettling: to European diplomatic observers, he seemed a “strange creature”. And he also triggered alarm among some American officials in the room with him, with one defence official noting that the president’s notoriously short attention span suggested a “squirrel careening through the traffic”.May’s encounter with Trump, which is described to Percy by British aides as well as Trump insiders, was a taste of what was to come. May was seen as “not strong” by Trump, according to KT McFarland, the former US deputy national security adviser. But the prime minister had gone into the meeting determined to persuade the president to make a statement backing Nato and warn him over his closeness to Vladimir Putin.The meeting took a bizarre twist as they walked through the White House. “He held her hand going through the colonnades, which took us all by surprise, and as it turns out, took Theresa by surprise,” Fiona McLeod Hill, the former joint chief of staff at No 10, told Percy.“She couldn’t really take her hand back, so she was stuck … And the first thing she said [afterwards] was ‘I need to call Philip just to let him know that I’ve been holding hands with another man before it hits the media’.”Before May had the opportunity to call her husband, Trump hosted her for lunch, where another boundary-shattering episode was waiting. First May was treated to the “full bloom” – one of Trump’s stream-of-consciousness rants, described by Thomas Shannon, then US undersecretary for political affairs, as running “the gamut from his own inauguration to his disdain for the press”.Then, keen to raise the issue of Putin, May asked Trump if he had spoken to the Russian leader, which Trump denied. At that point, however, Trump’s chief of staff intervened to tell the president that Putin had actually called, but not been put through.Hill takes up the story of the “toe-curling” outburst. “Trump at this point looks not orange but red. He flipped. Furious.” In front of May, he scolded his advisers in what Shannon recalled as “an unseemly moment”. “He said: ‘You’re telling me that Vladimir Putin called the White House and you’re only telling me now during this lunch?… Vladimir Putin is the only man in the world who can destroy the United States and I didn’t take his call’.”May was far from alone in being exposed to Trump’s flagrant disregard for boundaries. From his unilateral withdrawals from the Iranian nuclear treaty and the Paris climate accord to his dealings with the Palestinians, Russia and China, few – even those close to him – could ever fully grasp the extent of his unpredictability or his disdain for detail.The former Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull was thrown off balance by Trump’s behaviour during an encounter at a G20 meeting in Hamburg also in 2017.Like May, Turnbull had important issues on his mind, in this case steel tariffs. Taking his chance, Turnbull collared Trump, who was obsessing about something else. “Donald said: ‘Malcolm, do you want to see my SCIF? It is so cool.’ I had no idea what he was talking about. I thought he was talking about a boat [a skiff]. We turned around a corner and there was this big steel box about the size of a shipping container.”Trump pulled Turnbull into what turned out to be a “sensitive compartmented information facility”, an ultra-secure communications hub, with the new French president, Emmanuel Macron, also in tow.“He said: ‘This is so cool – when you’re in there, nobody can hear you, not even the Chinese. It’s so secret.”Expectations of Trump from European leaders were not so much low as non-existent. For the former French president François Hollande, who dealt with Trump only briefly, an early red flag was raised when the US leader asked him in all earnestness who he should appoint to his team in the White House. “I thought he was just being courteous; it was pretty outrageous. Imagine I phoned Obama and said: ‘You know France well, who should I appoint as an adviser?’” Later, briefing his successor Macro during the transition, Hollande was clear how he regarded the US leader – sentiments Percy herself regards as a summing up how many foreign leaders viewed the Trump era.“I said to [Macron],” Hollande recalls, “don’t expect anything from Donald Trump. Do not think you’ll be able to change his mind. Don’t think that it’s possible to turn him or seduce him. Don’t imagine that he won’t follow through with his own agenda.”“Some friends asked me why I was doing it,” said Percy, who has made the documentaries The Death of Yugoslavia, End of Empire and Watergate, and who filmed the new series under lockdown. “The view was that we knew what Trump was like. He was on the news every night. But this is the inside story of those who had to deal with him.”Trump Takes on the World begins on Wednesday at 9pm on BBC Two More

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      in Elections

      Fox News cancels Lou Dobbs Tonight

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      Fox Business Network has canceled the show of Lou Dobbs, the ardent Donald Trump supporter with a history of espousing misinformation who promoted baseless conspiracy theories of voting fraud after the election.
      Friday evening marked the final airing of Lou Dobbs Tonight, Dobbs’ regular weeknight program. The Fox host was a major contributor to the false narrative that the election was stolen and continued espousing those views on his program even after admitting that they lacked actual proof.
      “Eight weeks from the election and we still don’t have verifiable, tangible support for the crimes that everyone knows were committed,” he said on air in January.
      Dobbs, 75, has hosted the program since 2011. Trump considered it must-see TV and even reportedly patched the host through during key policy meetings.
      Dobbs is still considered the highest-rated host on the Fox Business Network, and he has remained under contract even though he is not expected to reappear on a new show. His show’s slot, which airs twice on weeknights, will now be filled with a show called Fox Business Tonight, which will feature Jackie DeAngelis and David Asman as hosts.
      News of the cancellation came one day after Dobbs, 75, was named as a defendant in a defamation lawsuit filed by Smartmatic, an election technology company and voting machine maker, which accuses Dobbs and other Fox News anchors of promoting unfounded claims that Smartmatic was involved in a scheme to hand the presidency to Joe Biden.
      Citing the fabricated reporting, Smartmatic sued to the tune of $2.7bn. The 285-page lawsuit, filed in New York state supreme court, claims the network launched a “disinformation campaign” against the company, whose voting machines were only used in Los Angeles county. Trump’s former lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell who appeared as guests on the network, were also named in the defamation suit.
      Fox said the move to end Dobbs’ show had been in the works before the lawsuit.
      “As we said in October, Fox News Media regularly considers programming changes and plans have been in place to launch new formats as appropriate post-election, including on Fox Business,” a Fox News spokesperson said. “This is part of those planned changes.”
      On the Smartmatic lawsuit, Fox said on Thursday the network was “proud of our 2020 election coverage and will vigorously defend this meritless lawsuit in court”.
      Dobbs said he had no comment on Friday. More

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      in US Politics

      Fox lurches further to the right to win back ‘hard-edge’ Trump supporters

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      For two decades, Fox News has reigned supreme as America’s number one cable news channel. Until January, that is, when the network dropped to a once unthinkable third place in the ratings.The response from Fox News has not been a period of sombre self-reflection. Instead, the network seems to have made a chaotic lunge towards the right wing in recent weeks as hosts have dabbled in conspiracy theories and aggressively attacked the Joe Biden administration.Adding to the sense of crisis, Fox News laid off multiple staff in January – including the political editor who backed the network’s early decision that Biden had won Arizona – while on Thursday Smartmatic, an election technology company, filed a $2.7bn lawsuit against Fox News’ parent company, over allegations it participated in election fraud.As CNN and MSNBC, with their more liberal audiences rose to the top spots in January’s ratings, Americans who believe in the nonsensical QAnon conspiracy theory, or who harbor white nationalist beliefs, or who don’t trust vaccines, have all found themselves pandered to by Fox News, as it attempts to shore up its viewership.Nielsen numbers, published this week, found that Fox News ranked third out of the three main cable news channels in January. It was the first time since 2001 that Fox News found itself in third place, and continued a pattern from the end of 2020, when Donald Trump urged his supporters to abandon Fox News in favor of even more rightwing rivals like NewsMax and One America News.“Fox News has led in the ratings for two decades. They have historically been unrivaled in attracting an audience,” said Matthew Gertz, a senior fellow at the progressive media watchdog Media Matters.Gertz said he had detected a shift at Fox as the network attempts to win back “the most hard-edge” Trump supporters.“The network really needs to win them back. It’s of great concern for Fox if they’re no longer in first place. It’s not going to be possible for them to command the same ad rates, it’s not going to be possible for them to demand the same fees from cable carriers,” he said.Gertz added: “Their business model really rests on them being number one, in a big way, and it appears they’re going to do anything they can to win that status back.”The plan to boost viewership so far seems to be based on an extremist push, led by its most prominent opinion hosts.Tucker Carlson, whose show is the most watched in cable news, is among those leading the charge. After Democrats called for a crackdown on white nationalists and domestic terrorism following a wave of extremist attacks, Carson had an interesting, and revealing, take for his audience.“They’re talking about you,” Carson told his viewers on 26 January.A day earlier, Carlson had defended QAnon, a racist and antisemitic conspiracy theory linked to multiple violent acts, including alleged kidnappings, the derailing of a train and arrests over threats to politicians.Carlson played a series of clips from left-leaning networks, in which analysts described QAnon as a dangerous, “frightening” conspiracy theory. The FBI has agreed with that sentiment, and warned of its dangers.Carlson, however, was having none of it. He proceeded to stand up for QAnon supporters, as he claimed that believing in and espousing QAnon ideas is an issue of free speech.“No democratic government can ever tell you what to think. Your mind belongs to you. It is yours and yours alone,” Carlson said.Carlson’s colleagues Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, Fox News’s two other biggest stars, have waded into similar waters.Ingraham noted that the government was looking into radicalization of some members of the military. She played a clip from a rival news channel where a commentator noted: “We can’t stand by idly and see people in uniform whether its law enforcement or military have QAnon patches on.”Ingraham’s take? “This is absolutely poisonous for the country,” she said.It’s not just white nationalism and QAnon that are getting airtime on Fox News. Hannity has been accused of dabbling in anti-vaxx ideas, after he hemmed and hawed over whether he would get vaccinated – citing skeptical friends of his in what seemed like an effort to appeal to anti-vaxxers watching.“I don’t know when my number gets called, I’m actually beginning to have doubts,” Hannity told his audience on 26 January. “I’ve been telling my friends I’m gonna get the vaccine,” he said. “Half of them agree and the other half think I’m absolutely nuts. They wouldn’t take it in a million years.”Hannity added: “I don’t know who to listen to.”Fox News has been floundering since earning the animus of many viewers on election night. It was the first news outlet to announce Biden had won Arizona – it would be days before most TV channels and newspapers made that call – and Trump was furious.So were his supporters. “Fox News Sucks!” Trump voters chanted at a vote-counting center in Arizona, and conservative social media were rife with people saying they were turning off Fox News. Trump even demanded on his now defunct Twitter account that people ditch Fox News and instead watch NewsMax and OAN.The trend to the hard right hasn’t just come from the primetime stars. In January, CNN’s media correspondent, Brian Stelter, noted: “Tucker Carlson Tonight essentially expanded to Tucker Carlson Day and Night.”“Part of their strategy in the wake of losing parts of audience has been to de-emphasise the news side and really start bringing opinion side voices into the news hours,” Gertz said. “You see Fox opinion hosts being guests on those news programs as well.”Some of the moves Fox News has made in recent weeks seem to illustrate a de-emphasis on “straight news”. On 19 January, the day before Biden’s inauguration, the network fired Chris Stirewalt, the Fox News political editor who was the public face of the Arizona call. A Fox News spokesperson declined to comment on the Stirewalt decision, citing employee confidentiality.The same day, Fox News laid off more than a dozen digital reporters – seen as relatively non-partisan journalists. A spokesperson for the network said it had “realigned its business and reporting structure to meet the demands of this new era”.Even Fox News’s less firebrand, daytime news anchors have courted controversy.After it emerged that Marjorie Taylor Greene, the extremist Republican congresswoman who has expressed QAnon beliefs, had also suggested the Parkland, Florida, school shooting was a false flag and claimed that California forest fires had been started by Jewish space lasers, she found a defender in the Fox News anchor Bill Hemmer, who claimed a false equivalence between Greene and the Democrat Ilhan Omar.In the long term, Fox News isn’t likely to go anywhere – even despite the Smartmatic lawsuit.“Fox News Media is committed to providing the full context of every story with in-depth reporting and clear opinion. We are proud of our 2020 election coverage and will vigorously defend this meritless lawsuit in court,” a spokesperson said.In terms of viewers, Newsmax, Fox News’s most ideologically similar competitor, averaged 247,000 daily viewers in January, far lower than its bigger rival. Fox News has also experienced dips in viewership following previous inaugurations – although during those dips it never fell behind CNN or MSNBC.Still, a Fox News spokesperson pointed to Nielsen ratings which showed Fox News outperformed CNN and MSNBC during primetime hours in the last week of January, while internal research conducted by Fox News, which was shared with the Guardian, suggests viewers seemed to be taking a break from news altogether in January – although several programs on CNN and MSNBC experienced their best ratings ever during the same time period.Overall, there’s a sense that it didn’t have to be this way.After Trump lost the election, media experts predicted Fox News could do well “financially and politically”, as a sea of agitated viewers seek a network that will mirror, and augment, their anger at Biden. CNN, MSNBC and other leftwing or centrist news organizations made huge audience gains during Trump’s presidency, but the same isn’t yet working for Fox News.Ultimately, the struggles at Fox News to represent radical elements of the right wing mirrors a problem facing the Republican party itself – where Trumpist politicians like Greene and more establishment figures like Liz Cheney or Mitch McConnell wrestle for its future.“Rupert Murdoch and Fox News generally sees itself as mouthpiece of Republican party. They were moving away from conspiracy theorists, they were moving away from Trump and hoping to turn the page,” Jonathan Kaufman, professor and director of the school of journalism at Northeastern University, said.“But like the Republican party, Fox is discovering that Trumpism, and conspiracy theories, have taken deep root in the Republican party and in their viewers.” More

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      in US Politics

      Claim of anti-conservative bias by social media firms is baseless, report finds

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      Republicans including Donald Trump have raged against Twitter and Facebook in recent months, alleging anti-conservative bias, censorship and a silencing of free speech. According to a new report from New York University, none of that is true.Disinformation expert Paul Barrett and researcher J Grant Sims found that far from suppressing conservatives, social media platforms have, through algorithms, amplified rightwing voices, “often affording conservatives greater reach than liberal or nonpartisan content creators”.Barrett and Sims’s report comes as Republicans up their campaign against social media companies. Conservatives have long complained that platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube show bias against the right, laments which intensified when Trump was banned from all three platforms for inciting the attack on the US Capitol which left five people dead.The NYU study, released by the Stern Center for Business and Human Rights, found that a claim of anti-conservative bias “is itself a form of disinformation: a falsehood with no reliable evidence to support it”.“There is no evidence to support the claim that the major social media companies are suppressing, censoring or otherwise discriminating against conservatives on their platforms,” Barrett said. “In fact, it is often conservatives who gain the most in terms of engagement and online attention, thanks to the platforms’ systems of algorithmic promotion of content.”The report found that Twitter, Facebook and other companies did not show bias when deleting incendiary tweets around the Capitol attack, as some on the right have claimed.Prominent conservatives including Ted Cruz, the Texas senator, have sought to crack down on big tech companies as they claim to be victims of suppression – which Barrett and Sims found does not exist.The researchers did outline problems social media companies face when accused of bias, and recommended a series of measures.“What is needed is a robust reform agenda that addresses the very real problems of social media content regulation as it currently exists,” Barrett said. “Only by moving forward from these false claims can we begin to pursue that agenda in earnest.”A 2020 study by the Pew Research Center reported that a majority of Americans believe social media companies censor political views. Pew found that 90% of Republicans believed views were being censored, and 69% of Republicans or people who leant Republican believed social media companies “generally support the views of liberals over conservatives”.Republicans including Trump have pushed to repeal section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects social media companies from legal liability, claiming it allows platforms to suppress conservative voices.The NYU report suggests section 230 should be amended, with companies persuaded to “accept a range of new responsibilities related to policing content”, or risk losing liability protections. More

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      in US Politics

      Godfrey Hodgson obituary

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      The journalist and historian Godfrey Hodgson, who has died aged 86, was among the most perceptive and industrious observers of his generation, particularly in the field of American society and politics.His reputation was founded on his landmark study, America in Our Time: From World War II to Nixon (1976), acknowledged by the Cambridge historian Gary Gerstle as “one of the great works of political and social history written in the past half century”. At 600 pages long and in continuous print since its first publication, it was but one item in a prolific output that ran to more than 15 books, extensive university teaching and a lifetime of newspaper and television reporting (as well as numerous Guardian obituaries). As a journalist, Hodgson reckoned he had worked in 48 of the 50 US states.The central thesis of America in Our Time was that, from the end of the second world war until the mid-1960s, what Hodgson called a “liberal consensus” defined American politics. Conservatives accepted most of the New Deal domestic philosophy espoused by Democrats, and liberals mostly accepted the aggressive foreign policy advocated by Republicans to contain and defeat communism. In theory, the free enterprise system would create abundance at home, leaving America free to civilise the world. The term “liberal consensus” had been used before, but Hodgson was responsible for its entry into the lexicon of American history.Viewed from an age thrown into turmoil by Donald Trump, this analysis appears sadly optimistic. But it held sway as a key tenet in American academia for many years – a considerable achievement for a British writer in US scholarship. It was a measure of Hodgson’s intellectual honesty that in 2017 he could contribute to a collection of essays, The Liberal Consensus Reconsidered (edited by Robert Mason and Iwan Morgan), reflecting on the inadequacies of his earlier theory and analysing why the period had come to an end; the answers were mainly to do with race, Vietnam and the failure of US capitalism.Born in Horsham, now in West Sussex, Godfrey returned to the Yorkshire of his family roots at the age of three when his father, Arthur Hodgson, was appointed headteacher of Archbishop Holgate’s grammar school, York. Two tragedies overshadowed his childhood. At the age of two, he contracted osteomyelitis, a bone infection; when he was seven, it became clear that his mother, Jessica (nee Hill), was suffering from untreatable multiple sclerosis.The former left him with a disfigured right arm and an iron determination to succeed: one of his proudest achievements was later to bowl for the Winchester college first XI. The latter resulted in his being packed off to the Dragon school in Oxford at the age of nine, to shield him from his mother’s illness. He learned of her death in 1947 as a lonely 13-year-old far from home. Perhaps in part to compensate, he poured his considerable intellectual energies into study, winning scholarships to both Winchester and Magdalen College, Oxford, where he gained a first in history in 1954.Hodgson’s introduction to the US came in the form of a copy of John Gunther’s classic study Inside USA, a gift from his father on his 14th birthday. He first encountered the real thing in 1955, when, aged 21, he sailed on the Queen Mary to take up a postgraduate scholarship at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. There he worked in the college library, and wrote his MA thesis on the civil war – not the American one of Lincoln but the English one of Cromwell. He also discovered jazz, and the American south, a region for which he developed a special affection.Back in Britain, he learned his reporting skills on the Times before joining the Observer in 1960, initially to write the paper’s Mammon column. His great opportunity came two years later, when, aged 28, he returned to Washington as the Observer’s correspondent (1962-65), appointed by the editor, David Astor, as one of the gifted young men who would elevate his paper’s foreign coverage. This was a golden time to be a reporter in America and Hodgson loved it.He covered the push for civil rights in the south, witnessing the tense confrontations as the first black students were escorted into the universities of Mississippi and Alabama, and he was at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington to hear Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech. Events just kept on coming: the Cuban missile crisis, the Kennedy assassination and the complex presidency of Lyndon Johnson, who, even then, Hodgson rated more highly than the liberal commentariat of the day.Returning to London, he developed his coverage of America as a reporter on the ITV current affairs programme This Week (1965-67) and as editor of the Sunday Times Insight team (1967-71), during which time he co-wrote An American Melodrama (1969) with Bruce Page and Lewis Chester, the story of the 1968 election that brought Richard Nixon to the White House. He anchored LWT’s The London Programme (1976-81), was one of the four founding presenters of Channel 4 News (with Peter Sissons, Trevor McDonald and Sarah Hogg) from 1982 until 1985, and for two years from 1990 was foreign editor of the Independent. He was also a stalwart of Granada’s late-night What the Papers Say.He enjoyed showing that the first Thanksgiving was not celebrated with turkey and cranberry sauce – because there wasn’t anyFriends observed in the younger Hodgson a rumbling tension between his yearning for academic recognition and his enjoyment of the more material pleasures of journalism, a trade that suited his gregarious personality well. He was fortunate in being able to reconcile these conflicting needs as director of the Reuters Foundation (1992-2001), a post that combined mentoring bright young foreign reporters with a fellowship at Green Templeton College, Oxford. The move opened up a world of graduate teaching, both in Britain and the US, which he continued into his 80s.His Oxford appointment chimed well with the generosity he showed towards aspiring young colleagues. I experienced this personally as we travelled through the American south together in the summer of 1967, researching a television documentary on the civil rights movement. Each day would begin with a reading from the appropriate state guide of the Federal Writers’ Project, an inspiration of FDR’s New Deal, and continue as a free-flowing lecture often late into the evening.The same spirit inspired his involvement in starting up, with the journalist Ben Bradlee and the literary agent Felicity Bryan, the Laurence Stern fellowship. Since 1980 it has funded a three-month summer programme on the Washington Post for a young British reporter (Guardian beneficiaries of the scheme have included David Leigh, Gary Younge, Audrey Gillan, Jonathan Freedland and Ian Black); after the Covid-19 pandemic it will return as the Stern-Bryan fellowship.Hodgson’s later books ranged from biographies of the US statesmen Henry Stimson (The Colonel, 1990) and Edward House (Woodrow Wilson’s Right Hand, 2006) to critical studies of the rise of conservatism, including The World Turned Right Side Up (1996) and More Equal Than Others (2004). Always at his best when challenging conventional wisdoms, as in The Myth of American Exceptionalism (2009), he enjoyed particularly showing in A Great and Godly Adventure (2006) that the first Thanksgiving was not celebrated with turkey and cranberry sauce – because there wasn’t any – and that the early American settlers did not see themselves as revolutionaries against the British crown.Following a serious fall in 2007, he nursed himself back to health by writing a delightful history of the local river near his West Oxfordshire home, Sweet Evenlode (2008). Above all, Hodgson could tell a good story.In 1958 he married Alice Vidal, and they had two sons, Pierre and Francis. They divorced in 1969, and the following year he married Hilary Lamb, with whom he had two daughters, Jessica and Laura. Hilary died in 2015, and he is survived by his children.• Godfrey Michael Talbot Hodgson, journalist and historian, born 1 February 1934; died 27 January 2021• John Shirley died in 2018 More

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      in US Politics

      Fox hosts accuse media of ‘gushing’ over Biden – after four years of fawning over Trump

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      The hosts at Fox News have been furious in recent days. The mainstream media, they say, has been “gushing” over Joe Biden, offering “nauseating” coverage of the new president and “not hiding their excitement”.Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham are some of the rightwing commentators at the conservative channel getting good mileage from the alleged Biden-fawning – but their accusations have raised eyebrows among those who watched Fox News’s hosts spend four years largely functioning as an extension of Donald Trump’s White House.Fox News, however, is not known as a place for self-reflection, or irony, which meant Hannity – who has literally campaigned with Trump – was able to chide other journalists’ coverage of Biden.“The tingling sensation up and down the media mobs’ legs,” Hannity noted last week, “Well they are throbbing like never before.”Hannity’s comments will have struck many observers as hypocritical, given Hannity’s own unbridled passion for the previous president.“Promises made, promises kept,” Hannity told the crowd at a Trump rally in 2018. “Mr President, thank you.”The sight of a journalist campaigning for a political candidate would have been strange, had it not been for Hannity’s long-running fascination with the twice-impeached president. The host has spent years lauding Trump, and has repeatedly contorted himself to support the ex-president when praise barely seemed possible.“You were very strong at the end of that press conference,” Hannity assured Trump during a Fox News interview in July 2018. The press conference Hannity was referring to was the infamous, widely condemned, Helsinki joint press conference by Trump and the Russia president, Vladimir Putin, where Trump sided with the Kremlin over its denial of election meddling.A couple of months earlier, Hannity had kicked off a segment on his show with the words: “President Trump has already accumulated an amazing record of accomplishments.” According to Hannity, those accomplishments included Trump’s approval ratings. At the time, 42% of Americans approved of Trump, and 52% disapproved.More recently, Hannity approvingly compared Trump – then stricken by coronavirus – to Winston Churchill. Hannity, however, was far from alone in his fawning attitude towards Trump – as a “Then and now” video montage by the Daily Show illustrated on Tuesday.“Well get ready, it’s gonna be four years of nauseating, gauzy coverage,” thundered Laura Ingraham on Fox News this week. “The watchdogs? Well, they’re just lapdogs.”Ingraham, host of the Ingraham Angle Fox News show, is something of an expert in this field.“I don’t see anybody else on the horizon that’s fighting for the American people like he is,” Ingraham said of Trump in 2017, while she has also suggested Trump will be viewed similarly to Ronald Reagan, which in Republican circles is considered a compliment. In December 2020, Ingraham even dedicated a segment to Trump’s “triumphs”, while when granted an interview with Trump, in 2017, she posed questions that brought a new meaning to the term softball.“Are you having fun in this job?” Ingraham asked Trump, later asking the president: “Look at the economy. Are you getting credit for this economic revival?”Two years later, Ingraham used an interview with Trump to praise his “incredible trip” to France and to criticize Nancy Pelosi, asking Trump: “How do you work with someone like that?”Another Daily Show clip captured Jesse Watters as he used his show on Fox News to lay out accusations of media bias. “They continue to fawn over this guy like he’s Jesus Christ!” said Watters, who outside the rightwing media world is mostly known for presenting a segment in New York City’s Chinatown which was widely condemned as racist.Like his hosts, Watters has done his fair share of fawning, including over Trump’s botched coronavirus response and the ex-president’s warmth towards North Korea.Tucker Carlson, whose professionally enraged shtick – and closeness to Trump – has made his show the highest-rated cable news program in the US, was also upset at the treatment of Biden, as the TV host laid out in a heavily sarcastic segment on 20 January.“He will fill the yawning void where our empathy should be. He is medicine,” was Carlson’s recap of inauguration day, after he played a selection of clips of people on TV suggesting Biden might be a healing presence in the White House.In recent days Steve Doocy, a host on the show Fox and Friends, also got in on the act and proclaimed “the mainstream media loves him!” of Biden. Doocy had previously used an interview with Trump to praise the then president’s “beautiful hotel”.Doocy’s colleague Jeanine Pirro was also upset with Biden’s treatment, in contrast to her own interactions with Trump. “Given your ability, your successes,” Pirro told Trump in an interview during his presidency that functioned more as a campaign huddle, “How are we going to get that across to the American people?” More

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      in US Politics

      Giuliani attacks 'censorship' but made threat to sue paper over unflattering story

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      On Monday, Rudy Giuliani called a $1.3bn lawsuit brought against him by Dominion Voting Systems “another act of intimidation by the hate-filled left wing to wipe out and censor the exercise of free speech”. But Giuliani has himself previously threatened to censor the exercise of free speech with legal action.
      The former New York mayor turned Trump attorney was invoking current rightwing complaints against so-called “cancel culture”, in which freedom of speech is supposedly curtailed.
      But in June 2001, the New York Post ran a story about an extra-marital affair. Giuliani told reporters: “I will consider suing them for libel – defamation. What the New York Post did is scurrilous, I believe it’s malicious and I’m prepared to prove that in court if I have to.”
      First amendment protection of freedom of the press makes it difficult for US public officials to mount libel lawsuits, even if reports are proved to be wrong. Giuliani did not take the Post to court.
      On Monday, Dominion sued Giuliani in federal court in Washington, over his claims about supposed electoral fraud, made as part of Donald Trump’s baseless attempts to overturn defeat by Joe Biden, efforts which culminated in the deadly attack on the US Capitol on 6 January.
      “Dominion brings this action to set the record straight,” the complaint said, “to vindicate the company’s rights under civil law, to recover compensatory and punitive damages, and to stand up for itself, its employees, and the electoral process.”
      Dominion’s lawyer, Thomas Clare, told the New York Times the company could sue others, including Trump.
      “We’re not ruling anybody out,” he said. “Obviously, this lawsuit against the president’s lawyer moves one step closer to the former president and understanding what his role was and wasn’t.”
      Some experts said Dominion might itself count as a public figure, and thus have a hard time winning its case.
      Giuliani said he might counter-sue Dominion.
      “The amount being asked for is, quite obviously, intended to frighten people of faint heart. It is another act of intimidation by the hate-filled left wing to wipe out and censor the exercise of free speech, as well as the ability of lawyers to defend their clients vigorously. As such, we will investigate a countersuit against them for violating these constitutional rights,” he said.
      It remains to be seen if Giuliani will follow through. Nearly 20 years ago, he did not.
      Giuliani threatened to sue the Post over its story about how, as the New York Daily News described it, the mayor and his “girlfriend Judith Nathan [were] using the posh St Regis Hotel as a ‘secret love nest’”.
      Negotiations between Giuliani and the Post followed but nearly six weeks later, on 18 July, the Daily News reported that Giuliani had not made good on his threat.
      “When I’m ready to decide, you’ll be the first to know,” he said. “But I don’t get rushed into anything.” More

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      in US Politics

      New York Times fires editor targeted by rightwing critics over Biden tweet

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      A row has broken out over accusations that a New York Times journalist was fired after being targeted by rightwing critics for tweeting she had “chills” at seeing Joe Biden’s plane land at Joint Base Andrews.Lauren Wolfe, who had been working as an editor at the Times, posted the message on 19 January, as Biden arrived ahead of his inauguration as president the next day.Two days later, Wolfe was let go by the Times, after her tweet was picked up by rightwing social media users and news outlets, who used Wolfe’s tweet to allege claims of media bias.Wolfe, a seasoned journalist who has written for the Guardian, said she has since been subjected to a torrent of abuse in the wake of the incident, including being followed by a photographer as she walked her dog.The New York Times responded to criticism on Sunday, after many members of the media rallied to Wolfe’s defense.“There’s a lot of inaccurate information circulating on Twitter,” Danielle Rhoades Ha, a spokeswoman for the Times, told the Washington Post.“For privacy reasons we don’t get into the details of personnel matters, but we can say that we didn’t end someone’s employment over a single tweet. Out of respect for the individuals involved, we don’t plan to comment further.”The Times added that Wolfe was not a full-time employee but was instead working on a contract basis. On Sunday, The Times workers’ union, however, said it was “investigating the situation”.“We believe all our members deserve due process and just cause protections, the very rights that are fundamental to independent, objective journalism,” the TimesGuild said.CNN host Jake Tapper was among those to share details of Wolfe’s situation, while journalists Kirsten Powers and Jeremy Scahill also criticized the Times.Late to this–I can’t believe the @nyt FIRED @Wolfe321 for a few tweets! This is not a proportionate response. There’s a middle ground that doesn’t involve revoking someone’s employment. To all those who worked to get her fired: don’t ever complain about ‘cancel culture’ again.— Kirsten Powers (@KirstenPowers) January 24, 2021
      I think it’s absurd and wrong that the NYT fired Lauren Wolfe. Also, does anyone remember how MSNBC’s Chris Matthews literally cried over an Obama speech, compared him to Jesus and said he “felt this thrill going up my leg” when Obama spoke? https://t.co/ZA6iZ6892t— jeremy scahill (@jeremyscahill) January 24, 2021
      The attention from the right did not stop once it emerged Wolfe was no longer working at the Times. Wolfe shared some of the abusive messages she had been sent, one of which called for her to develop cancer, while the conservative New York Post ran a series of paparazzi-style photos of Wolfe walking her dog in New York City,The Daily Mail, a rightwing British newspaper with a popular website, extrapolated from Wolfe’s tweet that there had been a “huge amount of gushing” towards Biden in the media, something the Mail said will “do nothing to restore any kind of trust in the media”.Many of Wolfe’s defenders noted that the Times did not fire reporter Glenn Thrush after multiple women accused him of sexually inappropriate behavior in 2017. The Times suspended Thrush for two months, and executive editor Dean Baquet said the journalist had “behaved in ways that we do not condone”, but Thrush kept his job. More