Media

Subterms

    More stories

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      Meta bans Russian state media outlets over ‘foreign interference activity’

      by

      Facebook owner Meta said on Monday it was banning RT, Rossiya Segodnya and other Russian state media networks, alleging the outlets used deceptive tactics to carry out influence operations while evading detection on the social media company’s platforms.“After careful consideration, we expanded our ongoing enforcement against Russian state media outlets. Rossiya Segodnya, RT and other related entities are now banned from our apps globally for foreign interference activity,” the company said in a written statement.Enforcement of the ban would roll out over the coming days, it said. In addition to Facebook, Meta’s apps include Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads.The Russian embassy did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.The ban marks a sharp escalation in actions by the world’s biggest social media company against Russian state media, after it spent years taking more limited steps such as blocking the outlets from running ads and reducing the reach of their posts.It came after the US filed money-laundering charges earlier this month against two RT employees for what officials said was a scheme to hire a US company to produce online content to influence the 2024 election.On Friday, US secretary of state Antony Blinken announced new sanctions against the Russian state-backed media company, formerly known as Russia Today, after new information gleaned from the outfit’s employees showed it was “functioning like a de facto arm of Russia’s intelligence apparatus”.“Today, we’re exposing how Russia deploys similar tactics around the world,” Blinken said. “Russian weaponization of disinformation to subvert and polarize free and open societies extends to every part of the world.”The Russian government in 2023 established a new unit in RT with “cyber operational capabilities and ties to Russian intelligence”, Blinken claimed, with the goal of spreading Russian influence in countries around the world through information operations, covert influence and military procurement.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBlinken said the US treasury would sanction three entities and two individuals tied to Rossiya Segodnya, the Russian state media company. The decision came after the announcement earlier this month that RT had funneled nearly $10m to conservative US influencers through a local company to produce videos meant to influence the outcome of the US presidential election in November.Speaking to reporters from the state department on Friday, Blinken accused RT of crowdfunding weapons and equipment for Russian soldiers in Ukraine, including sniper rifles, weapon sights, body armor, night-vision equipment, drones, radio equipment and diesel generators. Some of the equipment, including the recon drones, could be sourced from China, he said.Blinken also detailed how the organisation had targeted countries in Europe, Africa and North and South America. In particular, he said that RT leadership had coordinated directly with the Kremlin to target the October 2024 elections in Moldova, a former Soviet state in Europe where Russia has been accused of waging a hybrid war to exert greater influence. In particular, he said, RT’s leadership had “attempted to foment unrest in Moldova, likely with the specific aim of causing protests to turn violent”.“RT is aware of and prepared to assist Russia’s plans to incite protests should the election not result in a Russia-preferred candidate winning the presidency,” Blinken said.Andrew Roth contributed reporting More

    • 163 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      A day in Elon Musk’s mind: 145 tweets with election conspiracies and emojis

      by

      It’s just after midnight mountain standard time in the US on 13 August when Elon Musk makes his first post of the day on X, the platform he bought for $44bn when it was known as Twitter. Musk has been tweeting for hours about his interview with Donald Trump, and he will continue into the night before taking a few hours’ break – presumably to sleep – and then logging back on to tweet dozens more times.Over the next 24 hours, Musk will post over 145 times about a range of obsessions, projects and grievances to his 195 million followers. He will share anti-immigrant content, election conspiracies and attacks against the media. He will exchange tweets with far-right politicians, conservative media influencers and sycophantic admirers. He will send a litany of one-word replies that say “yeah”, “interesting” or simply feature a cry-laughing emoji.As a means of showing what Musk promotes online and who he interacts with, the Guardian has taken a granular look at one day of the Tesla and SpaceX CEO’s posts on X. Musk posted a photo of himself at a “friend’s ranch in Wyoming” on the day in question, and as a result all timestamps of his tweets are assumed to have taken place in that state’s timezone, mountain standard time.The 24-hour snapshot of Musk’s posts, which are largely representative of his average daily output, are a revealing look into how the world’s richest man spends a large part of his day, almost every day. Though Musk receives huge amounts of media coverage for his various legal battles and business ventures, it can be easy for people who are not constantly online to miss just how prolific his output is on X and how extreme the content is that he promotes there. He tweets so often that his own bot scanners have flagged his account in the past. He has replaced Donald Trump as the tweeter-in-chief.If billionaires of the past like Richard Branson and Steve Jobs have projected images of yachting in the Caribbean or standing on stage brandishing their latest tech creation, a review of Musk’s tweets paints a contrasting picture: his default status is staring at a screen, posting. Much as Trump’s vindictive speeches must be heard in full to be believed, Musk’s whiplashing mix of aggrieved political trolling, memes and company hype must be read in sequence to understand the world’s most privileged tweeter.Midnight to 1.18am: Friends of ElonMusk’s first post on 13 August is a 12.14am reply to the rightwing activist Charlie Kirk, founder of the conservative group Turning Point USA, who opposes trans rights and advocates for Christian nationalism. Musk wants to clarify a point from the previous day’s interview with Trump, whom he is backing for president, and tells Kirk that he believes the climate crisis is real but that sustainable energy technology is on pace to solve it.The exchange is one of multiple times during the day that Musk will have cozy, public exchanges with Kirk and other figures of the international right wing. The billionaire has in recent years formed a sort of symbiotic relationship with conservative media influencers, basking in their praise and in turn amplifying their talking points. Within 30 minutes of Musk’s first post of the day, he will have replied to three separate posts from Kirk with claims suggesting the media is rewriting Kamala Harris’s political history, the government should deregulate industries and that street crime in the US is out of control.By 1am, Musk will have already tweeted 14 times, mostly in exchanges with these kinds of rightwing activists or deferential media influencers like Mario Nawfal – a serial entrepreneur who left behind a series of aggrieved business associates to gain a following hosting live streams on X. Before apparently logging off at around 1.18am, Musk will also respond to the all-beef diet advocate and anti-trans ex-psychology professor Jordan Peterson, who claimed that the initial streaming failure of Musk’s interview with Trump was the result of “traitors at work”. Musk’s response is that, given the prominence of the interview, there was a “100% probability” of an attack.Though Musk has claimed that X is a place for all politics and viewpoints, the Tesla CEO has little to no interaction with leftwing activists or critical journalists. His replies and reposts reflect both his own personal echo chamber on the platform, as well as the broader rightwing ecosystem that he has cultivated as owner of X.Since Musk took over the company in late 2022, far-right and conservative voices have grown on the platform while advertisers and more mainstream A-list users have fled. Republicans are now far more likely to believe that their views are welcomed on the platform and that it has a positive impact on democracy than Democrats, according to a Pew Research Center study from earlier this year, while Democratic voters report far higher levels of harassment.8am to noon: Attacks on the media and far-right anti-immigration postsMusk is tweeting again by 8am, this time thanking the former UK prime minister Liz Truss for her support. Truss, after being memorably ousted from power in less than the time it took for a head of lettuce to go bad, has recently embarked on the rightwing speaking circuit as a Trump supporter, also aligning with Musk. The X owner has established a history of courting rightwing leaders, and later in the day will reply “Grazie!” to the far-right Italian deputy prime minister Matteo Salvini’s praise of Musk’s opposition to European Union regulations.As the morning begins, it becomes clear that Musk has discovered that news outlets’ coverage of his interview with Trump the night before is largely critical – focusing on the live stream’s technical issues, Trump’s falsehoods and Musk’s generally fawning approach toward the former president. Musk’s reaction throughout the day will be to claim that legacy media outlets are liars and financial failures, referring to them as unthinking “nonplayer characters” – a longstanding meme that grew out of 4chan before becoming mainstream among conservatives.“A wall of negative headlines was so predictable. They’re such NPCs 🤣🤣,” Musk says at 8.36am while quote-tweeting the crypto influencer and political shitpost account “Autism Capital”. Three minutes later he will respond to Autism Capital again, claiming that Google only shows leftwing press in its search results.One particular fixation of Musk’s is promoting misleading claims and conspiracies about election fraud, a common conservative talking point in the Trump era. At 9.26am, Musk makes a demand for paper ballots instead of electronic voting machines, echoing a popular rightwing narrative that such machines are used to perpetrate voting fraud. Musk has made dozens of misleading or debunked claims about voting, which have been viewed hundreds of millions of times on the platform and election officials say have begun to spill over into the real world.Musk will continue tweeting at a rapid rate throughout the morning – 19 times over the next 30 minutes alone. These will include separate attacks on CNBC, CNN and other legacy media outlets he accuses of spreading lies. Musk will meanwhile reply with an exclamation mark to a tweet featuring a blogpost called “Did women in academia cause wokeness?”. The blog’s author is a former professor who was ousted from Cambridge University in 2019 after more than 500 academics signed an open letter condemning his work as “racist pseudoscience” and a university investigation found he collaborated with far-right extremists.Musk has long described himself as politically independent, but in 2022 announced that he would no longer support the Democratic party. He has framed his conservative shift as the result of Democrats becoming too far left while his positions remain centrist, but his social media feed instead shows that he frequently promotes and interacts with members of the extreme right.At 9.47am and 10.27am, Musk sends replies to Peter Imanuelsen, a far-right influencer whom the Anti-Defamation League has previously described as being “notorious for his extreme racist, anti-Semitic, Christian fundamentalist, homophobic, Islamophobic, anti-feminist and conspiracist commentary”. Although Imanuelsen has in recent years disavowed Holocaust denial, he continues to promote far-right, anti-immigrant views.Musk replied “madness” to both of Imanuelsen’s tweets, which were about two British citizens jailed for violating UK laws against posting offensive or menacing material online. The arrests targeted people posting anti-migrant invectives during Britain’s far-right riots, in which masked rioters tried to set fire to a hotel housing asylum seekers.Sometimes Musk’s interactions with rightwing influencers are banal, but they also have the effect of amplifying their accounts to the billionaire’s nearly 200 million followers. Musk will reply at 9.08am to a post about how Europe doesn’t use air conditioning from Richard Hanania, a conservative thinker popular among tech moguls who wrote for white supremacist publications in the early 2010s under a pseudonym to argue in support of eugenics and the forced sterilization of “low IQ” people.Musk also replies with a cry-laughing emoji to a tweet criticizing the media from the early alt-right influencer Lauren Southern. A Canadian activist who has promoted the “great replacement” white nationalist conspiracy theory, Southern was a member of the “talent team” for Tenet Media until early September. A Department of Justice investigation unsealed around the same time as her exit accused Tenet Media of being a Russian-backed propaganda operation that used $10m in foreign money to bankroll rightwing media influencers. Southern and others on the talent team deny having any knowledge that the money was coming from Russia.All of this is before 1pm, by which time Musk will have tweeted about 89 times.While these interactions represent some of the most extreme people that Musk exchanges tweets with, they are by no means aberrations. His most mainstream interaction of the morning comes in a reply to the author Stephen King, in which Musk claims the Guardian can’t be considered objective because it is “utterly incapable of writing anything positive”. He will attack the Guardian at least two other times in the day, telling the rightwing commentator Ian Miles Cheong that it is a “mouthpiece for the state”.One of the reasons that Musk may gravitate towards the crypto influencers, rightwing activists and Tesla fan accounts that fill his feed is that they are some of the few users who can match his prolific output and time spent on the platform. Most people do not have the desire or time to be extremely online, and those that do are often there to pursue some political or financial gain. Almost everyone that Musk interacts with falls into one of those categories, and their accounts function like remoras on the side of Musk’s 195 million-follower shark.Musk will continue tweeting every few minutes until taking a two-hour break between around noon and 2pm. Then he’s back at it, sending a few more sporadic tweets at Nawfal about his Neuralink plans and responding to a thread from the Utah Republican senator Mike Lee. Two o’clock to 4pm is his least prolific time period for posting.4pm to 10pm: Election conspiracies and cries of ‘censorship’It’s 4.12pm, and Musk has tweeted over 100 times since midnight. His latest is a quote tweet of the cryptocurrency account “Doge Designer”, who claims that “the entire media is running a misinformation campaign against Elon Musk”. Musk replies “It’s wild,” adding a cry-laughing face that has become his go-to emoji.Musk’s content production slows somewhat in the evening, but he is still posting multiple times an hour. His attention turns to Brazil, where he has found a nemesis in a supreme court judge who is threatening to block access to X in the country if the platform does not appoint a local legal representative to deal with disinformation takedown requests. Musk describes the judge’s ruling as an act of censorship in a tweet at 6.17pm, and will call the judge an “evil dictator” in weeks to come. Brazil’s supreme court will uphold a ban on X in early September, blocking access to the platform for millions in the country.The Brazil saga reflects a central part of Musk’s online persona, in which he has cast himself as a warrior for free speech against liberal censorship. While this framing ignores that Musk has suspended journalists who criticized him from the platform, complied with censorship requests from governments such as India and throttled traffic to websites he dislikes, Musk’s narrative pervades his Twitter feed. Throughout the day he will attack regulators and anti-disinformation efforts in Brazil, the UK and the European Union.Interspersed among Musk’s various political posts are retweets of people offering support for his business ventures, like @TeslaBoomerMama, whose profile describes herself as a “fierce Tesla retail shareholder advocate” and “fangirl of Elon”. These retweets and interactions with his fans have the effect of a commercial break, and are some of the only posts that don’t have an explicit political message.10pm to midnight: 😂As Musk begins to wind down his day, the frequency of his posts goes back up and he returns to some of the subjects he tweeted about in the morning. He responds with cry-laughing emojis to online influencers, replies to multiple posts about a Haitian migrant accused of rape and sends more anti-media tweets.Musk revisits not only the same themes, but some of the exact same posts and news items that he tweeted about earlier. At 11.12pm he responds with another cry-laughing emoji to the same picture of negative headlines about his Trump interview that he sent a cry-laughing emoji about at 8.36am.Before the day ends, X debuts a beta version of its new AI image generator. Almost immediately, people begin to discover that it will generate images of public figures or sexualized content, unlike other popular image generators. Musk begins using cry-laughing emojis to egg on supporters creating images using the tool – in one case an image with the prompt “make an image of a half cat half woman with boobs”.Over the next few days Grok will be used to generate a range of political content, sexualized depictions of celebrities and violent images. After rightwing influencer accounts use the tool to create images of Taylor Swift and her fans supporting Trump’s candidacy, Trump will cause a wave of controversy by posting the AI images on his Truth Social account. Swift will later cite the incident in an Instagram post throwing her support behind the Harris presidential campaign.Musk’s last post before midnight is celebrating his new image generator, tweeting “Rate of progress of Grok is 🚀 🚀🚀”. He will continue to post into the night, sending almost 50 more tweets over the next three hours.At 3.11am, Musk responds with heart-eyes emoji to an image of him and a shiba inu dog dressed as ancient Roman soldiers generated by Grok. The flurry of replies and posts then goes silent. At 8.01am, he starts posting again. More

    • 113 Shares179 Views

      in US Politics

      Blinken accuses RT of being worldwide Kremlin intelligence network

      by

      The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, has announced new sanctions against the Russian state-backed media company RT, formerly known as Russia Today, after new information gleaned from the outfit’s employees showed it was “functioning like a de facto arm of Russia’s intelligence apparatus”.The Russian government in 2023 established a new unit in RT with “cyber operational capabilities and ties to Russian intelligence”, Blinken claimed, with the goal of spreading Russian influence in countries around the world through information operations, covert influence and military procurement.“Today, we’re exposing how Russia deploys similar tactics around the world,” Blinken said. “Russian weaponization of disinformation to subvert and polarize free and open societies extends to every part of the world.”The US treasury would sanction three entities and two individuals tied to Rossiya Segodnya, the Russian state media company, Blinken said. The decision came after the announcement earlier this month that RT had funneled nearly $10m to conservative US influencers through a local company to produce videos meant to influence the outcome of the American presidential election in November.Speaking to reporters from the state department on Friday, Blinken accused RT of crowdfunding weapons and equipment for Russian soldiers in Ukraine, including sniper rifles, weapon sights, body armor, night-vision equipment, drones, radio equipment and diesel generators. Some of the equipment, including the recon drones, could be sourced from China, he said.“While the crowdfunding campaign is out in the open, what’s hidden is that this program is administered by the leaders of RT,” Blinken said. They included the RT head, Margarita Simonyan, who was among nine employees of the company targeted with a visa ban earlier this month.Blinken also detailed how the organisation had targeted countries in Europe, Africa and North and South America. In particular, he said that RT leadership had coordinated directly with the Kremlin to target the October 2024 elections in Moldova, a former-Soviet state in Europe where Russia has been accused of waging a hybrid war to exert greater influence. In particular, he said, RT’s leadership had “attempted to foment unrest in Moldova, likely with the specific aim of causing protests to turn violent”.“RT is aware of and prepared to assist Russia’s plans to incite protests should the election not result in a Russia-preferred candidate winning the presidency,” Blinken said.As a result of RT’s efforts to “weaponise disinformation”, Blinken said, the US, UK and Canada would launch a “joint diplomatic campaign … to rally allies and partners around the world to join us in addressing the threat posed by RT and other machinery of Russian disinformation and covert influence”. More

    • 163 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      Why is our so-called democratic society suppressing freedom of speech? | Laura Flanders

      by

      Claud Cockburn, my grandfather, knew when it was time to leave Berlin.A young British journalist, he’d worked as a correspondent for The [London] Times in that city in the 1920s before transferring to New York and Washington DC. Returning to Germany in July 1932, he saw “storm Troopers slashing and smashing up and down the Kurfürstendamm”, and war propaganda: “huge exhibitions of ‘the Front’, soldier figures standing in a real-life size trench playing with a dummy machine gun”, he wrote.In a letter to my grandmother, Hope Hale, a US-based journalist just then pregnant with my mother, he described how fascism on the horizon felt: “It’s hard to imagine that this is something one is really seeing.”Until it wasn’t hard. As Cockburn wrote: “Hitler. He came to power. I was high on the Nazi blacklist. I fled to Vienna.”Cockburn’s story is retold in a forthcoming book by his son, journalist Patrick Cockburn, due out this fall from Verso. It’s a timely intervention, inviting us to consider how different what Claud called the “Devil’s Decade”, is from our own.The 1930s saw the press in fascist countries co-opted or suppressed. In Nazi Germany, Joseph Goebbels’ ministry of propaganda saw to it that only state-approved stories were told. Independent journalism was not just discouraged – it was dangerous. Writers were shot. Books were burned. To facilitate the Fuhrer’s dominance, the Third Reich subsidized the production of cheap radio receivers called Volksempfänger, which not only made money for friendly manufacturers but also channeled distraction and Nazi communication directly into people’s homes. In Italy, Mussolini’s regime did much the same, using media as a tool to consolidate power and propagate fascist ideology.Today, Elon Musk is no Joseph Goebbels. Still, as I write, the billionaire entrepreneur known for co-founding Tesla and SpaceX (his privately owned rocket-and-satellite company), and now owning X (formerly Twitter), has been accused of stoking bigotry and hate. Controlling content and its moderation (or lack of it), Musk is seeing to it that his powerful, free, social media platform pumps out pro-Maga propaganda, while joining with other tech billionaires to invest in the Trump-Vance campaign.That campaign has made calling journalists “enemies of the people” so central to its message that future generations will have to be reminded that Adolf Hitler did it first.Goebbels operated in a dictatorship where the media was entirely controlled by the state with the explicit goal of suppressing freedom of speech and promoting genocidal thinking. We operate within a supposedly democratic framework in which no minister of propaganda is forcing the newspaper of record to instruct its journalists covering Israel’s war on Gaza to restrict the use of the terms “genocide”, “ethnic cleansing”, “refugee camps” and “Palestine”. Some newspapers, like the New York Times, do it unforced.Homogenous, even in an age of media proliferation, the most influential media spent June in lock-step, disparaging one elderly candidate’s fitness for office after a stumbling performance in a debate. This August that same media devoted precious time to carefully “fact-checking” the drivel of the other elderly candidate after an entirely unhinged press conference. The same candidate has promised to suspend the constitution and be a dictator “on day one”.One is reminded of the headline over the New York Times report on Hitler becoming Chancellor: Hitler Puts Aside Aim to be Dictator. “There is no warrant for immediate alarm,” the editors wrote on 31 January 1933. “The more violent parts of his alleged program he has himself in recent months been softening down or abandoning.”Quitting the Times to found the Week, a newsletter that became famous for its scoops and takedowns of those in power, Claud’s work was not risk-free. His opposition to fascism and the complicity of western democracies in enabling its rise made him a target for enraged rulers and rightwingers in the UK and overseas. Too impecunious to sue, the Week was often threatened and finally banned, in January 1941.We like to think our media landscape today is shaped by subtler forms of control: media monopolies, mass-market pressure, extreme commercialism and digital surveillance. And then there’s Julian Assange. Assange, through Wikileaks, published classified documents that exposed US government killings in Afghanistan and Iraq. For that, Assange wasn’t shot, but he was locked up and charged under the Espionage Act, the first person to be so charged for an act of journalism since that act’s passage in 1917.This June, after five years in London’s grim Belmarsh prison, Assange agreed to plead guilty to one Espionage Act charge of conspiring to obtain and disclose classified US national defense documents. In exchange, Assange got his freedom, and so did that old word “treason”, dusted off for new, 21st-century use.Methods of information control evolve, but one phenomenon seems to remain: timidity. Living in Vienna, where loquacious diplomats, lawyers and refugees circulated stories and suspicions from all over Europe, Claud read the English daily papers and was struck “by the fact that what informed people were really saying – and equally importantly, the tone of voice they were saying it in – were scarcely reflected at all in the newspapers”.It is hard to imagine that one is really seeing what one is seeing until it isn’t.

      Laura Flanders is the host and executive producer of Laura Flanders & Friends, a nationally-syndicated TV and radio program. More

    • 125 Shares129 Views

      in US Politics

      Harris-Trump debate watched by 67m people, beating pivotal Biden showdown

      by

      An estimated 67.1 million people watched the presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, a 31% increase from the June debate between Trump and President Joe Biden that eventually led to the president dropping out of the 2024 race.The debate was run by ABC News but shown on 17 different networks, the Nielsen company said. The Trump-Biden debate in June was seen by 51.3 million people.Tuesday’s count was short of the record viewership for a presidential debate, when 84 million people saw Trump’s and Hillary Clinton’s first face-off in 2016. The first debate between Biden and Trump in 2020 reached 73.1 million people.There was a marked increase in younger and middle-aged viewers, with 53% more adults aged 18-49 tuning in to see Harris debate Trump than watched Biden do the same, according to Nielsen data.Of the viewers who watched on cable networks, the highest number of viewers were on Fox News, with 9.1 million people tuning in on the channel known for its positive coverage of Trump.Harris was widely seen to have won the debate. A CNN flash poll of debate watchers showed 63% to 37% that Harris had performed better. Prior to the debate, those voters were split 50-50 on who would win. Of the Harris-supporting viewers polled by CNN, 96% said she had done a better job, while 69% of Trump supporting viewers said so.Trump’s campaign publicly claimed victory, but some of his aides privately conceded it was unlikely that he persuaded any undecided voters to break for him, people familiar with the matter told the Guardian.The viewership puts the debate roughly between the Seinfeld (76.3 million) and Friends (52.5 million) series finales.Minutes after it ended, Taylor swift endorsed the Harris-Walz ticket to her 283 million Instagram followers in a post that included a link to the government voter registration website Vote.gov. The site saw almost 338,000 new visitors in the hours that followed, a General Services Administration spokesperson told MSNBC.Swift’s endorsement is likely to be most influential among Americans under 35, since about 30% of that group say they are more likely to vote for someone Swift supports, according to polling conducted for Newsweek. The polling found that 18% of voters say they are “more likely” or “significantly more likely” to vote for a Swift-backed candidate, while 17% say they are less likely.No other debates are currently scheduled between the two presidential candidates, although the Harris campaign have asked for one, and the Fox News Channel has publicly offered alternatives. CBS will host a vice-presidential debate between Tim Walz and JD Vance on 1 October.Tuesday’s debate stakes were high to begin with, not only because of the impending election itself but because the last presidential debate set off a series of events that resulted in Biden’s withdrawal from the race.While CNN chose not to correct any misstatements by the candidates during Trump’s debate with Biden in June, ABC instead challenged statements that Trump made about abortion, immigration, the 2020 election and violent crime. More

    • 175 Shares179 Views

      in US Politics

      ABC’s debate moderators did what they said was impossible: fact-checking Trump | Margaret Sullivan

      by

      They said it couldn’t be done. For years, we’ve heard all the reasons – excuses, really – that presidential debates cannot and should not be fact-checked in real time.Countering lies is not the job of the moderators, we were told; it is strictly the role of the candidates themselves. Fact-checking would take up too much time and interrupt the flow of the debate, we were told. And what about impartiality? How could moderators be expected to decide whom to challenge with fact checks?Fact-checking, we were told, was impractical and inappropriate, and simply a very, very bad idea. Yes, even in the age of Donald Trump, who wakes up each day and immediately begins lying about his dreams.But then came Tuesday night’s debate between Trump and Kamala Harris – and that memorable moment when the moderator Linsey Davis of ABC News piped up with just a few words after Trump went into one of his evidence-free rants about babies being executed.“There is no state in this country where it is legal to kill a baby after it’s born,” Davis said in an even tone. It didn’t take a lot of time, it did correct an oft-repeated lie and it did establish something important: the most egregious falsehoods might well be challenged by these moderators. The candidates were put on notice.Davis wasn’t alone in this. Her co-moderator, David Muir – in much the same neutral, polite tone and with much the same admirable brevity – did the same. After Trump made a wild claim about migrants in Ohio eating pets, Muir calmly stated that ABC had pre-checked this one and determined that it wasn’t true. And in another instance, Muir countered Trump’s charges of uncontrolled and rising crime, especially involving migrants, with this: “As you know, the FBI says overall violent crime is coming down in this country.”It was noticed. And largely, though not universally, praised. The moderators also did a good job of returning to questions that had not been answered, and in some cases, pressing for a clear yes or no.Trump’s allies were outraged, naturally, that he wasn’t allowed to fib at will. How terribly unfair, they charged. Why weren’t there equal numbers of fact checks and challenges for Harris, they demanded, never stopping to acknowledge that she had mostly stuck to that crazy little thing called the truth. (A lengthy New York Times listing of questionable statements by both candidates, published after the debate, identified a couple of times that Harris has strayed from reality or misled; but, as expected, there was really no comparison with Trump’s litany of lies.)Trump later posted on social media calling the moderator “hacks”. The debate, he charged, was “THREE ON ONE!”But, as CNN’s Abby Phillip drily observed: “When there is asymmetrical lying, there will be asymmetrical fact-checking.”The post-debate media coverage, in general, was up to its usual tricks of giving Trump the benefit of the doubt. Overall, it too often failed to convey with clarity what had happened in a debate dominated by the cool strength of Harris and the angry, incomprehensible ravings of Trump. Headlines tended to lapse into neutralizing, conventional language like this one in the Washington Post: “Harris crisply attacks Trump, prompting retorts with fiery language.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionNPR, to its credit, noted: “The spotlight should now be on Trump’s incoherence and general lack of any serious grasp on policy.”And even over on Fox News, there were some abnormal glimmers of reality, as when Brit Hume allowed that Trump had “had a bad night”.No doubt, the debate was a win for Harris.And, with the help of ABC’s moderators, a better-than-usual night for the truth.

      Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture More

    • 188 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      The Kamala Harris campaign has Fox News grasping at straws – literally | Margaret Sullivan

      by

      Watching Fox News these days is like being at open-mic night at a marginal comedy club.Rightwing pundits, like a lineup of amateur comics, are trying out their new material and hoping it kills. So far, not so much.Take Jesse Watters (please). The primetime successor to Tucker Carlson was grasping at straws – yes, literal straws – the other day as he looked for a way to put down Tim Walz. How best to mock the popular Minnesota governor who is Kamala Harris’s running mate?“Women love masculinity and women do not like Tim Walz, so that should just tell you about how masculine Tim Walz is,” Watters said on the roundtable talk show he co-hosts, The Five.With that setup, he tried to prove his point.“The other day you saw him with a vanilla ice-cream shake. Had a straw in it. Again, that tells you everything.”The joke, or whatever it was, didn’t really land. Most people know that Walz is the opposite of a wimp. He’s a famously regular guy – America’s dad – who will use his newfound power to demand that all Americans own jumper cables and know how to use them.The straw-grasping is getting a little desperate these days as Harris and Walz spread their forward-looking message, and as their rivals – the felon and adjudicated sex offender Donald Trump and his running mate, JD Vance – prove themselves less appealing by the day.“Fox is really feeling the loss of Tucker Carlson right now,” theorized Matt Gertz, a senior fellow at Media Matters, the progressive media-watchdog non-profit, who watches a lot of rightwing cable news as part of his job.“He was very effective at lifting something from the rightwing fever swamp and making it into a coherent message” that could spread through the conservative ecosystem.Failing Tucker’s contributions to the commonweal, Fox and its pundits are floundering. They keep trying new approaches to replace their well-honed attacks on Biden – his family’s supposed corruption (“Biden crime family”) and his age (“senile”).Over the past week, Fox tried to gin up controversy over Harris’s “code-switching” – the use of a different accent or speaking style when speaking to Black audiences. Fox’s White House correspondent Peter Doocy pressed the question at an official press briefing.“Since when does the vice-president have what sounds like a southern accent?” Doocy demanded. The press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, dismissed him and moved on after posing a query of her own: “Do you think Americans seriously think this is an important question?”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMaria Bartiromo focused on this “southern accent” scandal on her Fox Business show, using a clip of Harris speaking to an audience in Detroit about how unions have helped win benefits for all Americans, like paid sick leave and a five-day work week, by repeating the phrase: “You’d better thank a union member.”The pro-Trump cable network didn’t help its own cause with that one. “The funny thing about Fox News being mad at Harris for code-switching,” one observer noted on X, “is they had to play the clip of her talking about how great unions are over and over again.” You can’t buy that kind of media exposure.The well-circulated photograph of Tim Walz’s family members wearing pro-Trump T-shirts fizzled, too, though it got a good ride on Fox for a day or two. Soon enough, it became clear that these were mostly distant cousins, a Nebraska branch of the family. Walz’s sister told the Associated Press she didn’t even recognize them. Walz does have an older brother who favors Trump, but most Americans are familiar with family disputes over politics.Gertz told me that Fox pundits were sent reeling by Harris’s ascension and are “very shook by the ‘weird’ narrative” that Tim Walz has popularized. That’s the idea that Trump, Vance and their ilk are deeply strange people – way out of the mainstream with their nasty putdowns of “childless cat ladies” and their outlandish conspiracy theories. It applies all too well to the Fox personalities as well as the politicians they promote.There’s time, of course, for Fox to come up with an effective message. Until something hits, we’re going to see a lot of painful tryouts.The alternative, of course, is obvious: just don’t turn it on.

      Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture More

    • 188 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      The mainstream press is failing America – and people are understandably upset | Rebecca Solnit

      by

      The first thing to say about the hate and scorn currently directed at the mainstream US media is that they worked hard to earn it. They’ve done so by failing, repeatedly, determinedly, spectacularly to do their job, which is to maintain their independence, inform the electorate, and speak truth to power. While the left has long had reasons to dismiss centrist media, and the right has loathed it most when it did do its job well, the moderates who are furious at it now seem to be something new – and a host of former editors, media experts and independent journalists have been going after them hard this summer.Longtime journalist James Fallows declares that three institutions – the Republican party, the supreme court, and the mainstream political press – “have catastrophically failed to ‘meet the moment’ under pressure of [the] Trump era”. Centrist political reformer and columnist Norm Ornstein states that these news institutions “have had no reflection, no willingness to think through how irresponsible and reckless so much of our mainstream press and so many of our journalists have been and continue to be”.Most voters, he says, “have no clue what a second Trump term would actually be like. Instead, we get the same insipid focus on the horse race and the polls, while normalizing abnormal behavior and treating this like a typical presidential election, not one that is an existential threat to democracy.”Lamenting the state of the media recently on X, Jeff Jarvis, another former editor and newspaper columnist, said: “What ‘press’? The broken and vindictive Times? The newly Murdochian Post? Hedge-fund newspaper husks? Rudderless CNN or NPR? Murdoch’s fascist media?”These critics are responding to how the behemoths of the industry seem intent on bending the facts to fit their frameworks and agendas. In pursuit of clickbait content centered on conflicts and personalities, they follow each other into informational stampedes and confirmation bubbles.They pursue the appearance of fairness and balance by treating the true and the false, the normal and the outrageous, as equally valid and by normalizing Republicans, especially Donald Trump, whose gibberish gets translated into English and whose past crimes and present-day lies and threats get glossed over. They neglect, again and again, important stories with real consequences. This is not entirely new – in a scathing analysis of 2016 election coverage, the Columbia Journalism Review noted that “in just six days, The New York Times ran as many cover stories about Hillary Clinton’s emails as they did about all policy issues combined in the 69 days leading up to the election” – but it’s gotten worse, and a lot of insiders have gotten sick of it.In July, ordinary people on social media decided to share information about the rightwing Project 2025 and did a superb job of raising public awareness about it, while the press obsessed about Joe Biden’s age and health. NBC did report on this grassroots education effort, but did so using the “both sides are equally valid” framework often deployed by mainstream media, saying the agenda is “championed by some creators as a guide to less government oversight and slammed by others as a road map to an authoritarian takeover of America”. There is no valid case it brings less government oversight.In an even more outrageous case, the New York Times ran a story comparing the Democratic and Republican plans to increase the housing supply – which treated Trump’s plans for mass deportation of undocumented immigrants as just another housing-supply strategy that might work or might not. (That it would create massive human rights violations and likely lead to huge civil disturbances was one overlooked factor, though the fact that some of these immigrants are key to the building trades was mentioned.)Other stories of pressing concern are either picked up and dropped or just neglected overall, as with Trump’s threats to dismantle a huge portion of the climate legislation that is both the Biden administration’s signal achievement and crucial for the fate of the planet. The Washington Post editorial board did offer this risibly feeble critique on 17 August: “It would no doubt be better for the climate if the US president acknowledged the reality of global warming – rather than calling it a scam, as Mr Trump has.”While the press blamed Biden for failing to communicate his achievements, which is part of his job, it’s their whole job to do so. The Climate Jobs National Resource Center reports that the Inflation Reduction Act has created “a combined potential of over $2tn in investment, 1,091,966 megawatts of clean power, and approximately 3,947,670 jobs”, but few Americans have any sense of what the bill has achieved or even that the economy is by many measures strong.Last winter, the New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who has a Nobel prize in economics, told Greg Sargent on the latter’s Daily Blast podcast that when he writes positive pieces about the Biden economy, his editor asks “don’t you want to qualify” it; “aren’t people upset by X, Y and Z and shouldn’t you be acknowledging that?”Meanwhile in an accusatory piece about Kamala Harris headlined When your opponent calls you ‘communist,’ maybe don’t propose price controls?, a Washington Post columnist declares in another case of bothsiderism: “Voters want to blame someone for high grocery bills, and the presidential candidates have apparently decided the choices are either the Biden administration or corporate greed. Harris has chosen the latter.” The evidence that corporations have jacked up prices and are reaping huge profits is easy to find, but facts don’t matter much in this kind of opining.It’s hard to gloat over the decline of these dinosaurs of American media, when a free press and a well-informed electorate are both crucial to democracy. The alternatives to the major news outlets simply don’t reach enough readers and listeners, though the non-profit investigative outfit ProPublica and progressive magazines such as the New Republic and Mother Jones, are doing a lot of the best reporting and commentary.Earlier this year, when Alabama senator Katie Britt gave her loopy rebuttal to Biden’s State of the Union address, it was an independent journalist, Jonathan Katz, who broke the story on TikTok that her claims about a victim of sex trafficking contained significant falsehoods. The big news outlets picked up the scoop from him, making me wonder what their staffs of hundreds were doing that night.A host of brilliant journalists young and old, have started independent newsletters, covering tech, the state of the media, politics, climate, reproductive rights and virtually everything else, but their reach is too modest to make them a replacement for the big newspapers and networks. The great exception might be historian Heather Cox Richardson, whose newsletter and Facebook followers give her a readership not much smaller than that of the Washington Post. The tremendous success of her sober, historically grounded (and footnoted!) news summaries and reflections bespeaks a hunger for real news.

      Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. She is the author of Orwell’s Roses and co-editor with Thelma Young Lutunatabua of the climate anthology Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility More