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      in Elections

      Fox News' Laura Ingraham and Tucker Carlson distance themselves from Trump

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      Donald Trump continued to gravitate towards his new rightwing media allies at TV channels One America News Network and Newsmax on Tuesday, even as heavyweight supporters Laura Ingraham, Tucker Carlson and Rush Limbaugh distanced themselves from the president’s attempts to overturn his election defeat by Joe Biden.On Fox News on Monday, Ingraham said: “Unless the legal situation changes in a dramatic and unlikely manner, Joe Biden will be inaugurated on 20 January.”Carlson claimed “the 2020 election was not fair”, but admitted Trump had lost it.On his radio show, Limbaugh attacked Trump’s lawyers in Pennsylvania, led by Rudy Giuliani, for failing to provide any evidence to back claims of voter fraud in the state.“You announce massive bombshells,” he said, “then you better have some bombshells.”On Tuesday morning, Trump pinned Carlson’s monologue to his Twitter page. But he also retweeted a string of messages by Randy Quaid. In one, the actor echoed Carlson’s claims about trust in election infrastructure, demanding “an in-person-only-paper ballot re-vote”.“Are you listening, Republicans?” Trump tweeted.But in another message, shot in extreme close-up and flashing light and spoken in bizarrely hammy tones, Quaid quoted an old Trump tweet: “Fox News daytime ratings have completely collapsed. Weekend daytime, even worse. Very sad to watch this happen.“But they forgot … they forgot what made them successful. What got them there. They forgot the golden goose. The only difference between the 2016 election and 2020 is Fox News.”Trump has made many such claims about Fox News’ failings. Fox News has disputed his claims about ratings. On Tuesday, a spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.One America News and Newsmax are devoted to supporting Trump. With a move into television among Trump’s possible post-White House plans, both are increasingly under the spotlight.Newsmax has enjoyed ratings growth and mainstream attention, including a Wall Street Journal report which said Trump allies had considered a buyout.OAN remains a fringe operator but on Monday, the Daily Beast reported that one host, Christina Bobb, had been working on the Trump team’s legal challenges.“Christina is an attorney and has helped with some legal work in her personal capacity and not on behalf of OAN,” Jenna Ellis, a Trump adviser, told the Beast.Ellis made her own headlines on Monday. Speaking to MSNBC, she said: “President Trump won by a landslide.”“Take a pause,” host Ari Melber interjected. “If you make false statements, you don’t run roughshod. You made a false accusation.”Trump lost Georgia by around 12,000 votes, Pennsylvania by around 80,000 and Michigan by more than 150,000. Biden won the national popular vote by 6m and the electoral college by 306-232. On Monday, Trump allowed the transition to proceed but continued to make baseless claims of fraud and insist he would be proved the winner.Trump is certainly suffering one landslide defeat: in election-related lawsuits. According to the Democratic elections lawyer Marc Elias, the president has won one such case – and lost 35. More

    • 138 Shares129 Views

      in US Politics

      Bernstein names 21 Republican senators who privately expressed contempt for Trump

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      The veteran Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein has publicly named 21 Republican senators he says have “repeatedly expressed extreme contempt for [Donald] Trump and his fitness” for office.
      As Trump continued to try to subvert the results of a presidential election he clearly lost to Joe Biden, Bernstein said on Twitter he was “not violating any pledge of journalistic confidentially [sic]”.
      His information, he said, came from “colleagues, staff members, lobbyists [and] White House aides”.
      Then he named names.
      They were: Rob Portman (Ohio), Lamar Alexander (Tennessee), Ben Sasse (Nebraska), Roy Blunt (Missouri), Susan Collins (Maine), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), John Cornyn (Texas), John Thune (South Dakota), Mitt Romney (Utah), Mike Braun and Todd Young (Indiana), Tim Scott (South Carolina), Rick Scott and Marco Rubio (Florida), Chuck Grassley (Iowa), Richard Burr (North Carolina), Pat Toomey (Pennsylvania), Martha McSally (Arizona), Jerry Moran and Pat Roberts (Kansas) and Richard Shelby (Alabama).
      The list contained senior Republican figures such as Thune, the majority whip; Rubio, acting chair of the intelligence committee; and Grassley, a former judiciary committee chair.
      Some on Bernstein’s list, Sasse, Cornyn, Collins and Murkowski among them, have criticized Trump publicly. Romney, Rubio, Murkowski, Toomey and Collins have recognized Biden as president-elect.
      Bernstein, 76, worked with Bob Woodward on the Washington Post’s coverage of the Watergate scandal, which led to the resignation of Richard Nixon in 1974.
      Woodward’s coverage of Trump has produced two bestselling books, Fear and Rage, which have relied on unnamed sources highly critical of Trump – and, in the latter case, the president’s own on-record and highly damaging thoughts.
      Speaking to CNN on Friday, Bernstein said: “Many, if not most, of these individuals, from what I have been told, were happy to see Donald Trump defeated in this election as long as the Senate could be controlled by the Republicans.”
      That outcome now hinges on two run-off elections in Georgia, on 5 January.
      A spokesman for Rick Scott told Forbes the list was “dumb and doesn’t warrant a real response. Needless to say, Carl Bernstein has no idea what he’s talking about.”
      But Bernstein wrote that “with few exceptions”, the senators’ “craven public silence has helped enable Trump’s most grievous conduct – including undermining and discrediting the US the electoral system”. More

    • 163 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      ‘Walked a fine line’: how Fox News found itself in an existential crisis

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      It was about 11.20pm on election night when Fox News made the call. The Democratic candidate had clinched a key swing state, a win that could set them on a path to be president of the United States.In the Fox News studio, Karl Rove, conservative panelist and longtime Republican strategist, was apoplectic. Around the country, Republican supporters were bereft. Fox News launched an immediate inquisition into its own decision, but the network stood by the call.Barack Obama had won Ohio, defeating Mitt Romney. Obama would be sworn in as president, for the second time, on 20 January 2013.Fast forward eight years, and Fox News found itself in a strikingly similar position on 3 November 2020. The rightwing news channel was the first to call Arizona, which has gone blue once in the past 72 years, for Joe Biden.Donald Trump and his campaign were furious, barraging the network with a series of phone calls in an attempt to get the decision overturned. The president’s supporters were upset too.At protests outside a vote counting center in Phoenix, Arizona, a crowd chanted: “Fox News sucks!”, turning their ire on a channel whose hosts Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity have spent the past four years praising Trump’s almost every move or utterance.Now, in the tumultuous week following that Arizona call, Fox News, the most-watched cable news channel in America, has found itself in a sort of existential crisis. More

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      in US Politics

      'Can we have America back?' Fox News video echoes Trump election claims

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      Fox News has come in for criticism over a promotional video in which opinion hosts echo Donald Trump’s baseless claims about the presidential election, which he lost to Joe Biden but which he refuses to concede.
      “Oh my god,” Andrew Laurence of Media Matters for America, a liberal media watchdog, wrote on Twitter. “Fox is running a promo of their ‘opinion’ hosts casting doubt on the election results and I guess trying to keep their rabid viewers sated.”
      Oliver Darcy, a media reporter for CNN, said the video showed executives at the Rupert Murdoch-owned channel “really have no shame”.
      In the short video, an announcer introduces a montage of “the voices America trusts”. Laura Ingraham is shown first, saying: “These legal efforts are critical.”
      That is a reference to cases Trump has mounted in key battleground states, alleging without evidence that voter fraud and ballot irregularities occurred, and seeking to overturn results via recounts.

      Such quixotic efforts have met with little success and experts say they are almost guaranteed to fail. More than 5m votes down in the popular vote, Trump lost the electoral college to Biden by 306-232, the score by which he beat Hillary Clinton in 2016 in what he claimed was a landslide.
      On the Fox News video, Tucker Carlson appears next, saying: “There are apparent irregularities.”
      “The media mob, and the Democrats, they lie,” says Sean Hannity.
      “Speaking up for you, and the issues that matter most to the people,” says the announcer.
      “They thought there would be a blue wave, not the case,” says Steve Doocy of Fox & Friends, a morning show favoured by Trump. In fact Doocy’s comment points to an electoral truth: that Trump attracted the most votes of any sitting president, staving off an expected landslide defeat, and that Republicans made gains at state level and in the US House and look set to retain control of the Senate.
      “You’re gonna see something even bigger than Trump in 2022 and 2024,” says Greg Gutfeld, referring to the next two election years.
      “The truth does need to come out,” says Ingraham.
      “Can we speak freely, again, can we have America back?” asks Carlson.
      “We the people deserve better,” says Hannity.
      “Fox News,” the announcer says. “America is watching.”
      Trump has attacked Fox News since the election, in which it was quick to call Arizona, a key state, for Biden, then joined other media organisations in calling the whole race for the Democrat last Saturday.
      “Fox News daytime ratings have completely collapsed,” Trump tweeted on Thursday. “Weekend daytime even WORSE. Very sad to watch this happen, but they forgot what made them successful, what got them there. They forgot the Golden Goose. The biggest difference between the 2016 Election, and 2020, was Fox News!”
      Darcy, of CNN, wrote that the Fox News video “appears to be part of a bid to hold on to its bleeding audience – an audience that refuses to believe reality, in large part because Fox has primed millions to distrust credible news sources”.
      Fox News has countered that its ratings remain strong, saying in a recent release it “finished the month of October as the most-watched cable network in both total day and primetime total viewers … notching 52 months in a row in the top spot”.
      According to Media Matters, Trump’s conspiracy theories have crossed into Fox News’ “straight” news operation.
      In the four days after the result was called, the watchdog said, Fox News “cast doubt on or pushed conspiracy theories about the election results at least 255 times. A review by Media Matters found 111 such claims on Fox’s ‘straight news’ shows and 144 claims on the network’s opinion shows”.
      “Where are the adults at Fox?” Darcy asked. “Why aren’t they getting their talent under control? Well, this ad makes it clear: The executives approve their talent behaving the way they have. In fact, they’re so proud of the undemocratic commentary, they’re happy to showcase it in an ad. They really have no shame.”
      Fox News did not offer comment on its promotional video. More

    • 125 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Donald Trump attacks Fox News: 'They forgot the golden goose'

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      Donald Trump has unleashed a torrent of tweets denouncing Fox News, accusing the network of having forgotten “what made them successful, what got them there”.
      “They forgot the Golden Goose,” Trump wrote in a tweet posted at midday on Thursday:

      Donald J. Trump
      (@realDonaldTrump)
      .@FoxNews daytime ratings have completely collapsed. Weekend daytime even WORSE. Very sad to watch this happen, but they forgot what made them successful, what got them there. They forgot the Golden Goose. The biggest difference between the 2016 Election, and 2020, was @FoxNews!

      November 12, 2020

      The tirade was posted after the president, who has refused to acknowledge his election loss to Democratic nominee Joe Biden, retweeted multiple comments from supporters, many of which expressed the view that they would instead be relying on right-wing cable channel and website Newsmax.
      Late on Thursday, the top story on Newsmax.com was headlined “Sen. Ted Cruz to Newsmax TV: ‘Media Don’t Get to Decide Presidency’.”
      Among Trump’s retweets was one by a user called “Appalachian Christian”, who said: “Suit yourself Left Fox 4 NewsMaxxxxx.”
      Fox was one of the first news organisations to call the state of Arizona for Biden and has warned its readers that Trump’s claims of victory are false.
      On Monday night, Fox host Neil Cavuto cut away from a campaign event hosted by the White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany at the Republican National Committee headquarters when McEnany said that Trump’s campaign team “wanted every legal vote to be counted”.
      “Whoa, whoa, whoa – I just think we have to be very clear. She’s charging the other side as welcoming fraud and welcoming illegal voting. Unless she has more details to back that up, I can’t in good countenance continue to show you this,” Cavuto said from the studio.
      Trump on Monday claimed without evidence that the network’s “ratings have completely collapsed.”
      Trump’s embrace of Newsmax has however translated into a ratings boost, with viewership jumping from an average of 65,000 people before the election to 800,000 viewers of its prime time shows this week, according to Nielsen data quoted in the New York Times, which reports that the NewsMax app was the fourth most popular on the Apple App Store on Thursday.
      Later on Thursday, however, Trump tweeted his praise for two Fox hosts, both long-time Trump loyalists, touting a “must see” segment by commentator Sean Hannity and a “confirming and powerful piece” by Fox Business Network anchor Lou Dobbs. More

    • 188 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      Is this the death of Fox News's love affair with Donald Trump? | Arwa Mahdawi

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      Poor Donald Trump. Not only has he lost the election, it looks as if he has lost the love of his life. I’m not talking about Melania – although some rumours have it that she is “counting the minutes” until she can get a divorce (which she has denied). I’m talking about Fox News.For years, Trump and Fox News have been in a committed, loving relationship. Recently, however, there has been trouble in paradise, with Trump complaining the network is a “much different place than it used to be”. The relationship might have been salvaged, but then Fox News did something unforgivable: it flirted with real journalism. On election day, it was the first major outlet to declare Joe Biden would win Arizona, sending the Trump administration into a meltdown. Since then, Fox News has continued to infuriate the White House by refusing to encourage Trump’s delusion that he won the election. On Monday, for example, it cut away from the White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, when she claimed that the Democrats had encouraged voter fraud. “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” the Fox News anchor said to the viewers. “I can’t in good countenance continue showing you this.”Trump’s supporters are outraged their leader’s once-beloved network is treating him this way. Some believe Fox News has gone “full lefty” and have started labelling it “fake news”. Which begs the question: where’s the real news? If you can’t even trust Fox News to fuel your deranged conspiracy theories these days, who can you trust? The internet, obviously. Parler, a rightwing version of Twitter, was downloaded almost 1m times between 3 November (election day) and 8 November – making it the most downloaded free app in the US over the weekend. While Parler, a safe space for those who don’t want their hate speech heavily moderated or their unfounded ideas factchecked, may be experiencing a spike in popularity, I’m not sure it will be long-lived. The interface feels as though it was designed by an extremely angry three-year-old and is difficult to navigate. Parler is not going to take down Fox News any time soon.You know what might replace Fox News, though? Trump News. According to one school of thought, Trump never intended on winning the 2016 election; the campaign was just a publicity stunt to kickstart his own media network. Now that he has been relieved of his political duties, it’s widely expected he will launch Trump TV. But who knows, perhaps Trump will surprise us all and actually follow through on his campaign promises. “If I lose to [Biden] … I will never speak to you again,” Trump said at a rally in North Carolina rally in September. “You’ll never see me again.” I really hope that is not fake news.• Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist More

    • 100 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      The misinformation media machine amplifying Trump's election lies

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      The networks have made their calls, world leaders have begun paying their respects, and even Fox News and Rupert Murdoch’s other media outlets appear to have given up on a second term for Donald Trump. But in a video posted on Facebook on 7 November and viewed more than 16.5m times since, NewsMax host and former Trump administration official Carl Higbie spends three minutes spewing a laundry list of false and debunked claims casting doubt on the outcome of the presidential election.
      “I believe it’s time to hold the line,” said Higbie, who resigned from his government post over an extensive track record of racist, homophobic and bigoted remarks, to the Trump faithful. “I’m highly skeptical and you should be too.”
      [embedded content]
      The video, which has been shared more than 350,000 times on Facebook, is just one star in a constellation of pro-Trump misinformation that is leading millions of Americans to doubt or reject the results of the presidential election. Fully 70% of Republicans believe that the election was not “free and fair”, according to a Politico/Morning Consult poll conducted since election day. Among those doubters, large majorities believe two of Trump’s most brazen lies: that mail-in voting leads to fraud and that ballots were tampered with.
      Trump himself is the largest source of election misinformation; the president has barely addressed the public since Tuesday except to share lies and misinformation about the election. But his message attacking the electoral process is being amplified by a host of rightwing media outlets and pundits who appear to be jockeying to replace Fox News as the outlet of choice for Trumpists – and metastasizing on platforms such as Facebook and YouTube.
      Since election day, 16 of the top 20 public Facebook posts that include the word “election” feature false or misleading information casting doubt on the election in favor of Trump, according to a Guardian analysis of posts with the most interactions using CrowdTangle, a Facebook-owned analytics tool. Of those, 13 are posts by the president’s own page, one is a direct quote from Trump published by Fox News, one is by the rightwing evangelical Christian Franklin Graham, and the last is the Newsmax Higbie video.
      The four posts that do not include misinformation are congratulatory messages by Barack Obama and Michelle Obama for Biden and Kamala Harris and two posts by Graham, including a request for prayers for Trump and a remembrance by Graham of his father, the televangelist Billy Graham.
      On YouTube, hosts such as Steven Crowder, a conservative YouTuber with more than 5 million followers, have also been pushing out content questioning the election results. A video from Crowder called Live Updates: Democrats Try to Steal the Election was viewed 5m times, and a nearly two-hour video headlined Fox News is NOT your friend has already racked up more than a million views. More

    • 150 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      'Whoa' – Fox News cuts off Kayleigh McEnany for 'illegal votes' spiel

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      Fox News has cut away from a briefing held by the White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, during which she repeated Donald Trump’s refusal to accept defeat in the presidential election and doubled down on allegations of voter fraud, for which there is scant if any evidence.
      Speaking to media on Monday night in her “personal capacity” during what she said was a campaign event at the Republican National Committee headquarters, McEnany said Republicans want “every legal vote to be counted, and every illegal vote to be discarded”, prompting the conservative Fox News network to stop broadcasting the briefing.
      From the studio, host Neil Cavuto said: “Whoa, whoa, whoa – I just think we have to be very clear. She’s charging the other side as welcoming fraud and welcoming illegal voting. Unless she has more details to back that up, I can’t in good countenance continue to show you this.”
      He added: “I want to make sure that maybe they do have something to back that up, but that’s an explosive charge to make, that the other side is effectively rigging and cheating. If she does bring proof of that, of course we’ll take you back. So far she has started saying, right at the outset – ‘welcoming fraud, welcoming illegal voting’. Not so fast.”
      The decision to cut away was Cavuto’s, the Washington Post reported, citing people familiar with the show.
      Rupert Murdoch-owned Fox News has shifted away from its loyalty to Trump over the past week, instead seeming in what appears to be closely co-ordinated messaging to warn its readers that Trump has lost the election despite his claims to the contrary.
      Fox was one of the first news organisations to call the state of Arizona for Joe Biden.
      Some senior Republican lawmakers have continued to refuse to recognise Biden as the election winner. The Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, said on Monday that Trump was fully within his rights to look into alleged voting irregularities, and in a Senate speech did not acknowledge Biden as president-elect.

      Trump’s campaign filed a lawsuit in federal court alleging Pennsylvania’s mail-in voting system lacked the oversight and verification applied to in-person voting and seeking an emergency injunction to stop state officials from certifying Biden’s victory in the state.
      The Trump campaign and Republicans have brought numerous lawsuits alleging election irregularities. Judges have already tossed out cases in Georgia and Michigan. More