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      in US Politics

      Sounds about right: why podcasting works for Pence, Bannon and Giuliani

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      What do Steve Bannon, Rudy Giuliani, Michael Cohen, Mike Pence and Anthony Scaramucci all have in common?
      They worked for Donald Trump, obviously, and several have been implicated in alleged crimes connected to the former president, but as of this month, each of these one-time high-profile Trump acolytes also has his own podcast.
      Pence became the most recent to announce his own show this week, with the announcement that the oft-derided former vice-president will launch a podcast to “continue to attract new hearts and minds to the conservative cause”.
      Like his one-time associates, Pence will enjoy the benefits of a regulation-free platform to share his thoughts on any topic of his choosing, and similarly to Bannon et al, Pence will also be able to keep himself in the public sphere – although the dry, mild-mannered Pence is likely to differ in tone from the Bannons and Giulianis of the podcast world.
      On his War Room podcast, Bannon has called for the beheading of Anthony Fauci – something Pence is unlikely to do – while Giuliani’s Common Sense podcast has been used to further often unhinged claims of political fraud, which Pence might leave alone.
      Cohen and Scaramucci’s podcasts, which are critical of Trump, may not fit in with the Trump worshippers’ efforts, but the fact that five of Trump’s most prominent acolytes chose this format for propagating their views – over television, radio or the written word – is pretty remarkable.
      So, why podcasts? One major factor is one of the oldest in politics: money.
      “I think in part it’s because it’s an easier medium to get into than something like radio or television. The overhead costs are much much lower. If you have an avid base, and the Trump base tends to be an avid base, you can make a ton of money doing this,” Nicole Hemmer, author of Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics, said.
      “So there’s a real revenue opportunity for them.”
      Bannon et al will get paid through advertising, the amount varying depending on how many downloads they get.
      “If you have audience of just 35,000 people, you can make a profitable podcast,” Hemmer said. “If you have an audience of 100,000 people, now you’re starting to talk real money, and if you’re getting millions of downloads, you can build kind of an empire.”
      Everyone likes money, but Bannon, Giuliani and Pence will also be pushing their version of conservative politics.
      Meanwhile, the very title of Cohen’s podcast, Mea Culpa, sets out his own, different goal – specifically, an earnest attempt to re-enter polite society. The aims of the notoriously self-promoting Scaramucci – his podcast is co-hosted with his wife and is called Scaramucci and the Mrs – probably include keeping himself famous.
      Podcasts give their hosts the freedom to push all those agendas to a potentially huge audience.
      Bannon, who was pardoned by Donald Trump on the former president’s last day in office, recently claimed that his podcast, Bannon’s War Room, had been streamed 29m times. Bannon is known to lie, but the architect of Trump’s “America first” policies has undoubtedly found an audience, including among those who ransacked the US Capitol on 6 January.
      “It’s all converging, and now we’re on the point of attack tomorrow. It’s going to kick off, it’s going to be very dramatic,” Bannon told his listeners on 5 January. “It’s going to be quite extraordinarily different. And all I can say is strap in. You have made this happen and tomorrow it’s game day.”
      Bannon’s podcast was banned from YouTube after the insurrection, while Giuliani has also had episodes removed, but the power of podcasting is that there is always somewhere for the series to run – both shows are still available on Apple Podcasts, on Bannon’s and Giuliani’s websites, and elsewhere.
      “You have an independence and a freedom if you have a podcast – you’re not going to get de-platformed by social media, you’re not going to get kicked off of Fox News, you’re not going to get kicked off of radio stations,” Hemmer said.
      “You have control and independence, which is a big selling point right now on the right.” More

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      in US Politics

      White House suspends press aide who reportedly threatened Politico journalist

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      The White House has suspended a press aide over allegations he threatened a reporter who was working on a story about his romantic relationship with another journalist.
      Vanity Fair alleged on Friday that White House deputy press secretary TJ Ducklo had made threats – including saying “I will destroy you” – to a Politico correspondent who was reporting on Ducklo’s recently disclosed relationship with an Axios reporter, Alexi McCammond.
      White House press secretary Jen Psaki wrote on Twitter that Ducklo had been suspended for a week without pay and will not work with Politico reporters again.
      Psaki said Ducklo had apologised to the Politico reporter, Tara Palmeri, “with whom he had a heated conversation about his personal life … He is the first to acknowledge this is not the standard of behavior set out by the president.”
      Ducklo, McCammond and Palmeri did not respond to emails seeking comment. An Axios spokeswoman said McCammond disclosed the relationship to her editors in November and was reassigned from a beat covering the White House.
      In a statement, Politico editor-in-chief Matt Kaminski and editor Carrie Budoff Brown acknowledged raising concerns with the White House about Ducklo’s behavior. “No journalist at Politico – or any other publication or network – should ever be subjected to such unfounded personal attacks while doing their job,” they said. “Politico reporters and editors are committed to forging a professional and transparent relationship with public office holders and their staff and expect the same in return.”
      The week-long suspension appears to fall short of President Joe Biden’s promise to take a hard line on any incivility among members of his administration.
      “If you’re ever working with me and I hear you treat another colleague with disrespect, talk down to someone, I promise you I will fire you on the spot … no ifs, ands or buts,” Biden told political appointees during a virtual swearing-in ceremony. “Everybody is entitled to be treated with decency and dignity.”
      Psaki told reporters during a briefing on Friday that Biden was not involved in the decision to suspend Ducklo and stressed that the White House took the matter seriously.
      Ducklo’s behavior was “completely unacceptable. He knows that,” Psaki said. “We’ve had conversations with him. … This will never happen again.”
      The solution caused anger among some Politico reporters, CNN reported, with one saying “it feels like she [Psaki] is punishing us more than him”, given Politico reporters will lose access to one of the highest-ranking officials in the White House communications department. More

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      in US Politics

      US government appeals UK ruling against Julian Assange's extradition

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      The US government has appealed a UK judge’s ruling against the extradition of the WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange, according to a justice department official.The appeal made clear that Joe Biden intends to have Assange stand trial on espionage- and hacking-related charges over WikiLeaks’ publication of hundreds of thousands of US military and diplomatic documents.The justice department had until Friday to file an appeal against the ruling on 4 January that Assange suffered mental health problems that would raise the risk of suicide were he extradited to the US for trial.“Yes, we filed an appeal and we are continuing to pursue extradition,” a justice department spokesperson, Marc Raimondi, told AFP.Human rights groups had called on Biden to drop the case, which raises sensitive transparency and media freedom issues.After WikiLeaks began publishing US secrets in 2009, the Obama administration – in which Biden was vice-president – declined to pursue the case. Assange said WikiLeaks was no different than other media outlets constitutionally protected to publish such materials.Prosecuting him could mean also prosecuting powerful US news organisations for publishing similar material – legal fights the government would probably lose.But under Donald Trump, whose 2016 election was helped by WikiLeaks publishing Russian-stolen materials damaging to his opponent, Hillary Clinton, the justice department built a national security case against Assange.In 2019, Assange, an Australian national, was charged under the US Espionage Act and computer crimes laws on multiple counts of conspiring with and directing others, from 2009 to 2019, to illegally obtain and release US secrets.In doing so he aided and abetted hacking, illegally exposed confidential US sources to danger and used the information to damage the US, according to the charges. If convicted on all counts, the 49-year-old faces a prison sentence of up to 175 years.John Demers, an assistant attorney general, said at the time: “Julian Assange is no journalist.”Assange has remained under detention by UK authorities pending the appeal.This week 24 organisations, including Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International USA and Reporters Without Borders, urged Biden to drop the case.“Journalists at major news publications regularly speak with sources, ask for clarification or more documentation, and receive and publish documents the government considers secret,” they said in an open letter. “In our view, such a precedent in this case could effectively criminalise these common journalistic practices.” More

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      in US Politics

      To restore trust in democracy, the US should lead a global 'fact fightback' | Timothy Garton Ash

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      To survive, democracy needs a minimum of shared truth. With the storming of the Capitol in Washington on 6 January, the US showed us just how dangerous it is when millions of citizens are led to deny an important, carefully verified fact – namely, who won the election.
      To prosper, democracy needs a certain kind of public sphere, one in which citizens and their representatives engage in vigorous argument on the basis of shared facts. Restoring that kind of public sphere is now a central task for the renewal of liberal democracy. Call it the fact fightback.
      The basic idea comes to us from the very beginnings of democracy, 2,500 years ago. The citizens of ancient Athens gathered in an open air debating place known as the Pnyx – the original “public square”. “Who will address the assembly?” asked the herald, and any citizen could get up on a stone platform to speak. After facts and arguments had been presented and debated, a policy was put to a vote. It was through this deliberative process that the ancient Athenians decided to fight the invading Persians at sea, in the Battle of Salamis, and saved the world’s first democracy.
      To be sure, ancient Athens never entirely measured up to its own revolutionary ideal of equal, free speech for the public good; nor did the US “public square”, even before the arrival of Fox News and Facebook. Beware the myth of a pre-Zuckerberg golden age, when only the purest waters of Truth flowed from the mouths of supremely principled newspapermen, and all citizens were rational, informed and respectfully open-minded. But most democracies have in recent years moved further away from the Athenian ideal: some rapidly (the US, Poland), others more slowly (Germany, Britain).
      To address this challenge, we need a twin-track strategy. On the first track, individual democracies must tackle the particular problems of their own national information environments. In Britain, for example, the battle to defend and improve the BBC is more important than anything the UK government does about Facebook or Twitter.
      A public service broadcaster such as the BBC gives us not just verified facts but a curated diversity of arguments in one place: a digital Pnyx. Any democracy that has a decent public service broadcaster should double its budget, strengthen its independence from government and task it with enhancing the digital public square for tomorrow’s citizens.
      In Poland, where public service broadcasting has been destroyed by a populist ruling party, it is now crucial to defend independent private media such as the TVN television channel and the onet.pl internet platform. They and others are coming under sharp attack, with measures straight out of the playbook of Viktor Orbán in Hungary.
      In the US there is no shortage of diverse, free, privately owned media, including some of the best in the world. The problem there is that Americans have largely separated out into two divorced media worlds – with different television channels, radio stations, YouTube channels, Facebook pages and Twitter feeds (such as the currently deleted @realDonaldTrump) giving them incompatible versions of reality.
      It is as if half the citizens of ancient Athens had assembled on the old Pnyx, where they were addressed by Pericles, while the other half gathered on a counter-Pnyx, where the would-be tyrant Hippias (Donald J) held them enthralled. How do you bring Americans back together so they listen to each other again?
      Yet no single nation is big enough to take on the private superpowers of the digital world – Facebook, Google, Amazon, Twitter, Apple, Netflix. Here, on this second track, we need the co-ordinated action of a critical mass of democracies, starting with the US and those of the European Union.
      Outside China, the US is the world’s leading digital trendsetter while the EU is its leading norm-setter. Put together the trendsetter and the norm-setter, add a bunch of other leading democracies, and you have a combination of market and regulatory power to which even His Digital Highness Mark Zuckerberg must bow.
      When I hear politicians confidently pontificating about Facebook or Google, I am reminded of HL Mencken’s remark: “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong.” Make them pay for news links on their platforms! (The Australian solution.) Put the former Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre on to them as head of the UK media regulator Ofcom! Treat platforms as publishers!
      The US’s giant for-profit platforms are neither “dumb pipes” nor publishers, but a new creation somewhere in-between. They are algorithmic selectors, distributors and promoters of content provided by others and, at the same time, mass collectors and commercial exploiters of our data.
      At best, they are important aids to truth-seeking. (We Google the sharpest criticism of Google.) At worst, they are unprecedentedly powerful amplifiers of lies. The profit motive pushes them towards the dark side, via algorithmic maximisation of the currency of attention. In a 2016 internal report, Facebook itself found that 64% of those who joined one extremist group on Facebook did so only because the company’s algorithm recommended it to them. (“We’ve changed, you know!” protests Facebook, like a reformed alcoholic. But has he really stopped drinking?)
      What we need now is a process, led by the US and EU, to distil some coherent policies from what is already a large body of good research. Some, such as amending the US Communications Decency Act to make platforms more directly responsible for curbing harmful content, will depend on the new US Congress. Others, such as breaking what are clearly monopolies or near-monopolies, will require a strategic combination of EU competition policy and revised US anti-trust legislation.
      For content moderation, we should build on the hybrid regulation model pioneered in Facebook’s new oversight board, which has just issued its first rulings. (Next challenge: should Facebook, and by implication Twitter, continue to ban ex-president Trump?) Serious solutions will involve technological innovation, business practice, fact-checking and digital education, as well as democratically mandated law and regulation.
      Ideally, this would result in a set of proposals being put before the “summit of democracies” planned by the US president, Joe Biden. Of course, 80 different countries are not going to adopt identical measures. But there must be some coherence in the underlying principles and basic approaches, otherwise the internet of the free, which has already lost China, will become even more of a splinternet. Moreover, the private superpowers will be the only ones who can afford the cost of complying with 80 different sets of regulations, thus unintentionally strengthening the fateful trend to monopoly. Since these are US companies, a special responsibility falls on Washington. Here is a unique opportunity for Biden’s US to show that it can listen as well as lead.
      Timothy Garton Ash is the author of Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World More

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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