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      Deluge of ‘pink slime’ websites threaten to drown out truth with fake news in US election

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      Political groups on the right and left are using fake news websites designed to look like reliable sources of information to fill the void left by the demise of local newspapers, raising fears of the impact that they might have during the United States’ bitterly fought 2024 election.Some media experts are concerned that the so-called pink slime websites, often funded domestically, could prove at least as harmful to political discourse and voters’ faith in media and democracy as foreign disinformation efforts in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections.According to a recent report from NewsGuard, a company that aims to counter misinformation by studying and rating news websites, the websites are so prolific that “the odds are now better than 50-50 that if you see a news website purporting to cover local news, it’s fake.”NewsGuard estimates that there are a staggering 1,265 such fake local news websites in the US – 4% more than the websites of 1,213 daily newspapers left operating in the country.“Actors on both sides of the political spectrum” feel “that what they are doing isn’t bad because all media is really biased against their side or that that they know actors on the other side are using these tactics and so they feel they need to,” said Matt Skibinski, general manager of NewsGuard, which determined that such sites now outnumber legitimate local news organizations. “It’s definitely contributed to partisanship and the erosion of trust in media; it’s also a symptom of those things.”Pink slime websites, named after a meat byproduct, started at least as early as 2004 when Brian Timpone, a former television reporter who described himself as a “biased guy” and a Republican, started funding websites featuring names of cities, towns and regions like the Philly Leader and the South Alabama Times.Timpone’s company, Metric Media, now operates more than 1,000 such websites and his private equity company receives funding from conservative political action committees, according to NewsGuard.The Leader recently ran a story with the headline, “Rep Evans votes to count illegal aliens towards seats in Congress.”In actuality, Representative Dwight Evans, a Democrat, did not vote to start counting undocumented immigrants in the 2030 census but rather against legislation that would have changed the way the country has conducted apportionment since 1790.That sort of story is “standard practice for these outlets”, according to Tim Franklin, who leads Northwestern University’s Local News Initiative, which researches the industry.“They will take something that maybe has just a morsel of truth to it and then twist it with their own partisan or ideological spin,” Franklin said. “They also tend to do it on issues like immigration or hot-button topics that they think will elicit an emotional response.”A story published this month on the NW Arkansas News site had a headline on the front page that reported that the unemployment rate in 2021 in Madison county was 5.1% – even though there is much more recent data available. In April 2024, the local unemployment rate was 2.5%.“Another tactic that we have seen across many of this category of sites is taking a news story that happened at some point and presenting it as if it just happened now, in a way that is misleading,” Skibinski said.The left has also created websites designed to look like legitimate news organizations but actually shaped by Democratic supporters.The liberal Courier Newsroom network operates websites in Arizona, Florida, Iowa, Michigan and Nevada, among other states, that – like the conservative pink slime sites – have innocuous sounding names like the Copper Courier and Up North News. The Courier has runs stories like “Gov Ducey Is Now the Most Unpopular Governor in America,” referring to Doug Ducy, the former Republican Arizona governor.“In contrast, coverage of Democrats, including US President Joe Biden, Democratic Arizona Gov Katie Hobbs, and US Sen Mark Kelly of Arizona, is nearly always laudatory,” NewsGuard stated in a report about Courier coverage.Tara McGowan, a Democratic strategist who founded the Courier Newsroom has received funding from liberal donors like Reid Hoffman and George Soros, as well as groups associated with political action committees, according to NewsGuard.“There are pink slime operations on both the right and the left. To me, the key is disclosure and transparency about ownership,” said Franklin.In a statement, a spokesperson for the Courier said comparisons between its operations and rightwing pink slime groups were unfair and criticized NewsGuard’s methodology in comparing the two.“Courier publishes award-winning, factual local news by talented journalists who live in the communities we cover, and our reporting is often cited by legacy media outlets. This is in stark contrast to the pink slime networks that pretend to have a local presence but crank out low-quality fake news with no bylines and no accountability. Courier is proudly transparent about our pro-democracy values, and we carry on the respected American tradition of advocacy journalism,” the spokesperson said.While both the left and the right have invested in the pink slime websites, there are differences in the owners’ approaches, according to Skibinski.The right-wing networks have created more sites “that are probably getting less attention per site, and on the left, there is a smaller number of sites, but they are more strategic about getting attention to those sites on Facebook and elsewhere”, Skibinski said. “I don’t know that we can quantify whether one is more impactful than the other.”Artificial intelligence could also help site operators quickly generate stories and create fake images.“The technology underlying artificial intelligence is now becoming more accessible to malign actors,” said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a University of Pennsylvania communications professor and director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, which publishes Factcheck.org. “The capacity to create false images is very high, but also there is a capacity to detect the images that is emerging very rapidly. The question is, will it emerge rapidly with enough capacity?”Still, it’s not clear whether these websites are effective. Stanford University reported in a 2023 study that engagement with pink slime websites was “relatively low” and little evidence that living “in a news desert made people more likely to consume pink slime”.The Philly Leader and the NW Arkansas News both only have links to Facebook accounts on their websites and have less than 450 followers on each. Meanwhile, the Copper Courier and Up North News have accounts on all the major platforms and a total of about 150,000 followers on Facebook.Franklin said he thinks that a lot of people don’t actually click links on social media posts to visit the website.“The goal of some of these operators is not to get traffic directly to their site, but it’s to go viral on social media,” he said.Republican lawmakers and leaders of the conservative news sites the Daily Wire and the Federalist have also filed a lawsuit and launched investigations accusing NewsGuard of helping the federal government censor right-leaning media. The defense department hired the company strictly to counter “disinformation efforts by Russian, Chinese and Iranian government-linked operations targeting Americans and our allies”, Gordon Crovitz, the former Wall Street Journal publisher who co-founded NewsGuard, told the Hill in response to a House oversight committee investigation. “We look forward to clarifying the misunderstanding by the committee about our work for the Defense Department.”To counter the flood of misinformation, social media companies must take a more active role in monitoring such content, according to Franklin and Skibinski.“The biggest solution to this kind of site would be for the social media platforms to take more responsibility in terms of showing context to the user about sources that could be their own context. It could be data from third parties, like what we do,” said Skibinski.Franklin would like to see a national media literacy campaign. States around the country have passed laws requiring such education in schools.Franklin also hopes that legitimate local news could rebound. The MacArthur Foundation and other donors last year pledged $500m to help local outlets.“I actually have more optimism now than I had a few years ago,” Franklin said. “We’re in the midst of historic changes in how people consume news and how it’s produced and how it’s distributed and how it’s paid for, but I think there’s still demand for local news, and that’s kind of where it all starts.” More

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      Newsmax accused of deleting evidence that it was spreading 2020 election lies

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      The chief executive of Newsmax deleted text messages and the company allowed key employees to delete emails as part of an effort to conceal evidence the outlet knew it was broadcasting falsehoods about the 2020 election, lawyers for the voting machine company Smartmatic said in an acerbic court filing last week obtained by the Guardian.The allegations were made as part of a motion for sanctions in an ongoing defamation case Smartmatic filed against Newsmax for making false and outlandish claims about the company after the last presidential election. The case is planned to go to trial in September in Delaware superior court.The motion, which contains significant redactions, says Newsmax’s chief executive, Christopher Ruddy, deleted text messages after the company was asked to preserve documents and communications as part of a lawsuit. Smartmatic also alleges that Newsmax allowed emails from Gary Kanofsky, its news director, who tried to warn other Newsmax staffers against broadcasting false claims about Smartmatic, to be deleted.Smartmatic attorneys also claim that Newsmax allowed messages from the editorial director, David Perel, to be deleted even though he warned Ruddy about the credibility of a source and was responsible for drafting Newsmax’s journalistic practices.Newsmax, which denies publishing libelous claims, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. NBC News first reported the court filing.The messages are relevant to the case because Smartmatic needs to prove that Newsmax had “actual malice” and knew the statements were false or acted with reckless disregard to the truth and published them anyway.“Newsmax destroyed the text messages and emails of key executives responsible for its defamatory campaign against Smartmatic. This was not a mistake,” Smartmatic lawyers wrote in the court papers. “Newsmax’s cover-up worked. Critical documents, including text messages and emails going directly to Newsmax’s actual malice and motive, were permanently deleted.”Among the text messages allegedly deleted was one in which Ruddy refers to Sidney Powell, Trump’s lawyer who was one of the most prominent purveyors of false allegations of voter fraud after the 2020 election. While the content is redacted in the filing, Smartmatic described the message as Ruddy’s “unvarnished view of Ms Powell’s credibility” and “direct evidence of actual malice”.Ruddy claimed that the messages on his phone were set to automatically delete every 30 days, a setting lawyers said he did not change after Smartmatic instructed him to preserve communications. Despite that claim, Ruddy turned over an additional 1,106 text messages on 2 May, which Smartmatic lawyers say is evidence that his text messages did not really auto-delete during the period he claimed.The filing also describes Kanofsky, the news director, as “the closest thing Newsmax had to a whistleblower”. Starting in November 2020, Kanofsky allegedly sent emails to other Newsmax employees with a fact-check about Smartmatic and warning them about broadcasting false claims. Newsmax allegedly did not tell Kanofsky to preserve his emails and they were deleted. Smartmatic lawyers said when they pressed Newsmax on why they weren’t turning over Kanofsky’s emails, Newsmax attorneys revealed that Kanofsky had a practice of regularly deleting all of his work emails and saving them in his personal email.David Perel, the editorial director, also was not instructed to preserve emails, even though he sent relevant messages warning against publishing false claims. Smartmatic claimed. Perel was terminated in 2021 and Smartmatic said Newsmax wiped the messages on his company laptop.Lastly, Smartmatic claims that Newsmax tried to conceal the existence of a document outlining its journalistic and ethical practices. While the content of the guidelines is redacted in the filing, Smartmatic says Newsmax violated them by broadcasting false information.“Newsmax’s misconduct goes beyond falsely accusing Smartmatic of rigging the US election; it also attempted to conceal evidence of its actions and failed to follow its own journalistic standards,” J Erik Connolly, a lawyer for Smartmatic said in a statement.Smartmatic asked the superior court judge Eric Davis, who is overseeing the case, to order the company to pay legal fees it spent obtaining the concealed messages. It also asked Davis to alert the future jury to the concealment and instruct them to make an “adverse inference” about Newsmax’s motives.The lawsuit is one of several defamation actions that have been filed against conservative media as part of an effort to hold them accountable for spreading lies. Smartmatic and the voting machine company Dominion also have ongoing defamation lawsuits against Powell, Rudy Giuliani and Mike Lindell.Smarmatic settled a libel suit against the far-right network OAN last month for undisclosed terms. Last year, Fox News agreed to pay Dominion $787.5m to settle a defamation suit the company filed against it for false election claims. More

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      America’s ‘news deserts’ and what it means for democracy – podcast

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      In the run-up to this year’s election, President Joe Biden has warned that American democracy is at stake. But when it comes to the democratic process of an entire nation, might the solution be local?
      In an age of declining print media, losses of local newspapers and journalists are creating ‘news deserts’: areas bereft of a local paper. But does this matter, or is local news just a collection of obituaries and classifieds? Especially when rolling news coverage can be found online?
      This week, Joan Greve speaks to the journalist and local news campaigner Steven Waldman, who argues that in an election year of increasing polarisation, we need local news more than ever. They will discuss why local journalism is a fundamental part of building communication, scrutiny and trust – and what can be done to save it

      How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know More

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      With democracy on the ballot, the mainstream press must change its ways | Margaret Sullivan

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      Christiane Amanpour has reported all over the world, so she recognizes a democracy on the brink when she sees one.Last week, as she celebrated her 40 years at CNN, she issued a challenge to her fellow journalists in the US by describing how she would cover US politics as a foreign correspondent.“We have to be truthful, not neutral,” she urged. “I would make sure that you don’t just give a platform … to those who want to crash down the constitution and democracy.”It’s an important call to action. But so far, the American press is failing to meet its responsibility to adequately emphasize the stakes of the coming election. Here’s some of what is going wrong:
      News organizations have turned Biden’s age (granted, a legitimate concern) into the equivalent of a scandal. In story after story, headline after headline, they emphasize not his administration’s accomplishments, but the fact that he’s 80. A New York Times headline during his recent diplomatic mission to Asia epitomized this, turning the president’s joke about jet lag into an impression of a doddering fool: “‘It is evening, isn’t it?’ An 80-Year-Old President’s Whirlwind Trip.” Ian Millhiser of Vox nailed the problem: “I worry the ‘Biden is old’ coverage is starting to take on the same character as the 2016 But Her Emails coverage – find something that is genuinely suboptimal about the Democratic candidate and dwell on it endlessly to ‘balance’ coverage of the criminal in charge of the GOP.”

      The evidence-free Biden impeachment efforts in the House of Representatives are presented to news consumers without sufficient context. In the first round of headlines last week, most news outlets simply reported what speaker Kevin McCarthy was doing as if it were completely legitimate – the result of his likely high crimes and misdemeanors. The Washington Post presented it seriously: “Kevin McCarthy directs House committees to open formal Biden impeachment inquiries,” adding in a credulous line: “The inquiry will center on whether President Biden benefited from his son’s business dealings … ” No hint of what is really happening here. In this case, the New York Times was a welcome exception: “McCarthy, Facing an Ouster and a Shutdown, Orders an Impeachment Inquiry.” That’s more like it.

      Trump continues to be covered mostly as an entertaining sideshow – his mugshot! His latest insults! – not a perilous threat to democracy, despite four indictments and 91 charges against him, and despite his own clear statements that his re-election would bring extreme anti-democratic results; he would replace public servants with the cronies who’ll do his bidding. “We will look back on this and wish more people had understood that Biden is our bulwark of democratic freedoms and the alternative is worse than most Americans can imagine,” commented Ruth Ben-Ghiat, author of Strongmen, and an expert in authoritarian regimes.
      So, how can the press do better as the election approaches?Earlier this month, I got the opportunity to speak to the staff of Guardian US about this in their Manhattan headquarters, with the top US editor Betsy Reed leading the discussion and with the Guardian’s London-based editor-in-chef, Katharine Viner, sitting in the first row.I identified what I called the big problem and the big solution.The big problem is that the mainstream media wants to be seen as non-partisan – a reasonable goal – and bends over backwards to accomplish this. If this means equalizing an anti-democratic candidate with a pro-democracy candidate, then so be it.Add to this the obsession with the “horse race” aspect of the campaign, and the profit-driven desire to increase the potential news audience to include Trump voters, and you’ve got the kind of problematic coverage discussed above.It’s fearful, it’s defensive, it’s entertainment – and click-focused, and it’s mired in the washed-up practices of an earlier era.The big solution? Remember at all times what our core mission is: to communicate truthfully, keeping top of mind that we have a public service mission to inform the electorate and hold powerful people to account. If that’s our north star, as it should be, every editorial judgment will reflect that.Headlines will include context, not just deliver political messaging. Overall politics coverage will reflect “not the odds, but the stakes”, as NYU’s Jay Rosen elegantly put it. Lies and liars won’t get a platform and a megaphone.And media leaders will think hard about the big picture of what they are getting across to the public, and whether it is fair and truthful. Imagine if the New York Times, among others, had stopped and done a course correction on their over-the-top coverage of Clinton’s emails during the 2016 campaign. We might be living in a different world.The Nobel-winning economist Paul Krugman pointed out last week that the media apparently has failed to communicate something that should be a huge asset for Biden: the US’s current “Goldilocks economy”. Inflation is low, unemployment is low and there’s virtually no hint of a recession. But many Americans, according to surveys, are convinced the economy is terrible.Two-thirds of Americans are unhappy about the economy despite reports that inflation is easing and unemployment is close to a 50-year low, according to a new Harris poll for the Guardian. Many are unaware of, or – because of mistrust in the government or in the media – simply don’t believe the positive economic news.“There’s a really profound and peculiar disconnect going on,” Krugman said on CNN.Media coverage surely is partly to blame. When gas prices spike, it’s the end of the world. When they steady or fall, it’s the shrug heard ‘round the world. It illustrates one of journalism’s forever flaws – its bias for negative news and for conflict.Can the mainstream press rise to the challenge over the next year?“When one of our two political parties has become so extremist and anti-democratic”, the old ways of reporting don’t cut it, wrote the journalist Dan Froomkin in his excellent list of suggestions culled from respected historians and observers.In fact, such both-sides-equal reporting “actively misinforms the public about the stakes of the coming election”.The stakes really are enormously high. It’s our job to make sure that those potential consequences – not the horse race, not Biden’s age, not a scam impeachment – are front and center for US citizens before they go to the polls.As Amanpour so aptly put it, be truthful, not neutral.
      Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture
      This article was amended on 15 September 2023 to correct a misspelled name. More

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      Daniel Ellsberg, Pentagon Papers whistleblower, dies aged 92

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      Daniel Ellsberg, a US government analyst who became one of the most famous whistleblowers in world politics when he leaked the Pentagon Papers, exposing US government knowledge of the futility of the Vietnam war, has died. He was 92. His death was confirmed by his family on Friday.In March, Ellsberg announced that he had inoperable pancreatic cancer. Saying he had been given three to six months to live, he said he had chosen not to undergo chemotherapy and had been assured of hospice care.“I am not in any physical pain,” he wrote, adding: “My cardiologist has given me license to abandon my salt-free diet of the last six years. This has improved my life dramatically: the pleasure of eating my favourite foods!”On Friday, the family said Ellsberg “was not in pain” when he died. He spent his final months eating “hot chocolate, croissants, cake, poppyseed bagels and lox” and enjoying “several viewings of his all-time favourite [movie], Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”, the family statement added.“In his final days, surrounded by so much love from so many people, Daniel joked, ‘If I had known dying would be like this, I would have done it sooner …’“Thank you, everyone, for your outpouring of love, appreciation and well-wishes. It all warmed his heart at the end of his life.”Tributes were swift and many.Alan Rusbridger, the former editor-in-chief of the Guardian, said Ellsberg “was widely, and rightly, acclaimed as a great and significant figure. But not by Richard Nixon, who wanted him locked up. He’s why the national interest should never be confused with the interest of whoever’s in power.”The Pulitzer-winning journalist Wesley Lowery wrote: “It was an honor knowing Daniel … I’ll remain inspired by his commitment to a mission bigger than himself.”The writer and political commentator Molly Jong-Fast said: “One of the few really brave people on this earth has left it.”The MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan said: “Huge loss for this country. An inspiring, brave, and patriotic American. Rest in power, Dan, rest in power.”The Pentagon Papers covered US policy in Vietnam between 1945 and 1967 and showed that successive administrations were aware the US could not win.By the end of the war in 1975, more than 58,000 Americans were dead and 304,000 were wounded. Nearly 250,000 South Vietnamese soldiers were killed, as were about 1 million North Vietnamese soldiers and Viet Cong guerillas and more than 2 million civilians in North and South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.The Pentagon Papers caused a sensation in 1971, when they were published – first by the New York Times and then by the Washington Post and other papers – after the supreme court overruled the Nixon administration on whether publication threatened national security.In 2017, the story was retold in The Post, an Oscar-nominated film directed by Steven Spielberg in which Ellsberg was played by the British actor Matthew Rhys.Ellsberg served in the US Marine Corps in the 1950s but went to Vietnam in the mid-60s as a civilian analyst for the defense department, conducting a study of counter-insurgency tactics. When he leaked the Pentagon Papers, he was working for the Rand Corporation.In 2021, a half-century after he blew the whistle, he told the Guardian: “By two years in Vietnam, I was reporting very strongly that there was no prospect of progress of any kind so the war should not be continued. And that came to be the majority view of the American people before the Pentagon Papers came out.“By ’68 with the Tet offensive, by ’69, most Americans already thought it was immoral to continue but that had no effect on Nixon. He thought he was going to try to win it and they would be happy once he’d won it, however long it took.”In 1973, Ellsberg was put on trial. Charges of espionage, conspiracy and stealing government property adding up to a possible 115-year sentence were dismissed due to gross governmental misconduct, including a break-in at the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, part of the gathering scandal which led to Nixon’s resignation in 1974.Born in Chicago on 7 April 1931, Ellsberg was educated at Harvard and Cambridge, completing his PhD after serving as a marine. He was married twice and had two sons and a daughter.After the end of the Vietnam war he became by his own description “a lecturer, scholar, writer and activist on the dangers of the nuclear era, wrongful US interventions and the urgent need for patriotic whistleblowing”.Ellsberg contributed to publications including the Guardian and published four books, among them an autobiography, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, and most recently The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner.In recent years, he publicly supported Chelsea Manning, the US soldier who leaked records of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, who published Manning’s leaks, and Edward Snowden, who leaked records concerning surveillance by the National Security Agency.On Friday, the journalist Glenn Greenwald, one of the Guardian team which published the Snowden leaks in 2013, winning a Pulitzer prize, called Ellsberg “a true American hero” and “the most vocal defender” of Assange, Snowden, Manning and “others who followed in his brave footsteps”.Steven Donziger, an attorney who represented Indigenous people in the Amazon rainforest against the oil giant Chevron, a case that led to his own house arrest, said: “Today the world lost a singularly brave voice who spoke truth about the US military machine in Vietnam and risked his life in the process. I drew deep inspiration from the courage of Daniel Ellsberg and was deeply honored to have his support.”In 2018, in a joint Guardian interview with Snowden, Ellsberg paid tribute to those who refused to be drafted to fight in Vietnam.“I would not have thought of doing what I did,” he said, “which I knew would risk prison for life, without the public example of young Americans going to prison to make a strong statement that the Vietnam war was wrong and they would not participate, even at the cost of their own freedom.“Without them, there would have been no Pentagon Papers. Courage is contagious.”Three years later, in an interview to mark 50 years since the publication of the Pentagon Papers, he said he “never regretted for a moment” his decision to leak.His one regret, he said, was “that I didn’t release those documents much earlier when I think they would have been much more effective.“I’ve often said to whistleblowers, ‘Don’t do what I did, don’t wait years till the bombs are falling and people have been dying.’” More

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      What can the White House do to free Evan Gershkovich? – podcast

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      At the end of March, Russian authorities arrested Evan Gershkovich, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, on espionage charges. He is still in a Moscow prison more than a month later, and at the weekend President Biden promised he was ‘working like hell’ to bring Gershkovich, and others detained in Russia, home.
      This week Jonathan Freedland speaks to Polina Ivanova, a reporter for the Financial Times and friend of Gershkovich’s, who breaks down the politics behind his detention

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      Will the January 6 report bring a second Christmas for US publishers?

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      Will the January 6 report bring a second Christmas for US publishers? Major imprints are racing to sell the committee’s work to the reading public, with help from reporters, panel members, David Remnick and even a former speechwriter to TrumpThe release of the final report of the House January 6 committee has sparked a deluge of publishing activity: seven editions of the 200,000 word document from six imprints, featuring contributions from the New Yorker editor, David Remnick, the House intelligence chair, Adam Schiff, plus six other journalists, another committee member, a former congresswoman and a former speechwriter to Donald Trump.January 6 report review: 845 pages, countless crimes, one simple truth – Trump did itRead moreThere are two reasons for this hyperactivity: the belief that the completion of the report is a significant historical event, and the conviction that here is a big chance to do well by doing good.The Mueller report sold 475,000 copies in various editions, according to NPD BookScan, so the book business is hoping it can do at least that well with the latest copy provided for free by the federal government.Harper Perennial says it is printing 250,000 copies of its version, which features a powerful introduction by Ari Melber, an MSNBC host, that reads like a smart prosecutor’s multi-part indictment. It helps that Melber’s marketing power is at least as great as his brain power. Pushing it on his nightly show, he has already gotten the book to the top of one Amazon bestseller list, long before it has reached any store.The lawyer turned TV personality does the best job of delineating the eight plots Trump and his allies pursued to try to overthrow the election, seven of which were clearly illegal or unconstitutional.“They attempted a coup,” Melber declares. “That is the most important fact about what happened.”Remnick and Jamie Raskin, like Schiff a committee member, teamed up to write an introduction and an afterword for the version being published by an imprint of Macmillan.Remnick gets straight to the heart of the matter: “Trump does little to conceal his most distinctive characteristics: his racism, misogyny, dishonesty, narcissism, incompetence, cruelty, instability, and corruption. And yet what has kept Trump afloat for so long, what has helped him evade ruin and prosecution, is perhaps his most salient quality: he is shameless.”Because so many of us have nearly lost our “ability to experience outrage”, Remnick concedes that “the prospect of engaging with this congressional inquiry … is sometimes a challenge to the spirit … And yet a citizenry that can no longer bring itself to pay attention to such an investigation or to absorb its astonishing findings risks moving even farther toward a disturbing ‘new normal’: a post-truth, post-democratic America.”Raskin sees the assault on the Capitol as the latest in a series of “systematic threats” to US democracy, including “massive voter suppression, gerrymandering of state and federal legislative districts, the use of the filibuster to block protection of voting rights, and right-wing judicial activism to undermine the Voting Rights Act”.His biggest goal is the elimination of electoral college, without any amendment to the constitution. That can be done through “the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, an agreement among participating states that gives electoral votes to whichever presidential candidate wins the nationwide popular vote, and which has already been adopted by 15 states and the District of Columbia with 195 electoral votes, or 72% of the 270 votes needed” to put it into effect.Writing for Random House, Schiff excoriates Republicans for trying so hard to block certification of Biden’s victory even after the Capitol invasion – 147 Republicans including eight senators lodged objections early on the morning of January 7. But he is also careful to give credit to Republican witnesses who did so much to burnish the committee’s credibility.“These officials, Republicans all, not only held fast against enormous pressure from a president of their party but were willing to stand before the country and testify under oath,” Schiff writes.Schiff argues that the report is an undeniable brief for prosecution of Trump: “Bringing to justice a former president who, even now, advocates the suspension of our constitution is a perilous endeavor. Not doing so is far more dangerous.”For Skyhorse, the former congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman, the only contributor old enough to have voted to impeach Richard Nixon, echoes Schiff on this point.“Having had to vote to impeach a president when I was in Congress, I am certain that [the January 6 committee] did not make its criminal referrals to the justice department lightly. In the same vein, the DoJ should not treat it lightly – and I hope and believe the American people will not let that happen.”The Hachette book has the largest amount of additional material, including a first-person account of the Capitol attack by a New York Times reporter, Luke Broadwater. After making it to a secure area, Broadwater found he was “much more angry” than “afraid”. So were other more conservative reporters, disgusted by senators who encouraged the myth of election theft. Broadwater recalls “one shouting to a Republican as he passed by, ‘Are you proud of yourself, Senator?’”All of these books are serious efforts to put the committee’s exhaustive findings in a larger political and historical context, including the one published by Skyhorse with an introduction by Holtzman. But Skyhorse also maintains its maverick reputation as a publisher famous for picking up books others have spurned (Woody Allen’s memoir, for example) by publishing two versions of the new report, one with Holtzman’s foreword and another featuring Darren Beattie, a former speechwriter for Trump and Steven Miller.Tony Lyons, the US publisher who picks up books ‘cancelled’ by other pressesRead moreBeattie was fired by the Trump White House after it was reported that he attended a conference with Peter Brimelow, founder of the anti-immigrant website VDare, a “white nationalist” who “regularly publishes works by white supremacists, antisemites, and others on the radical right”, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.Beattie is horrified that the January 6 committee describes the assault on the Capitol as an outgrowth of white supremacy.“Far from serving as an objective fact-finding body, the January 6 committee functioned as such an egregiously performative, partisan kangaroo display as to make propagandists in North Korea blush,” he writes – with characteristic understatement.Beattie provides more comic relief with his approach to the alleged election fraud which is one of the main subjects of the report.“It would take us too far afield to consider the election fraud allegations in detail on the merits,” Beattie writes.Then he gives a long explanation of why no one should think Trump really believed he lost the election, just because that’s what his attorney general and so many others told him.“For all of the committee’s fixation on the term ‘Big Lie’, the committee presents precious little if any evidence that Donald Trump didn’t genuinely believe that election fraud ultimately tipped the balance against him.“… The committee’s first televised hearing repeated ad nauseam a video clip of Trump’s former attorney general Bill Barr referring to Trump’s election fraud theories as ‘bullshit’.“Apart from Barr, the committee referenced numerous Trump associates who claim to have told the former president his election fraud theories were wrong. The simple fact that some of Trump’s senior staffers may have disagreed with Trump on the election issue is hardly proof that Trump was persuaded by them, and that therefore Trump’s efforts to ‘stop the steal’ amounted to a deliberate lie and malicious attempt to prevent the legitimate and peaceful transition of power.Republican senator called Giuliani ‘walking malpractice’, January 6 report saysRead more“Barr’s additional remark that Trump was ‘completely detached from reality’ when it came to the 2020 election unwittingly undermines the committee’s suggestion that Trump was lying about the matter.”Primetime hearings sometimes reached as many 18 million viewers, a number Remnick notes was “comparable to Sunday Night Football on NBC”. In the midterm elections, many exit polls found that the preservation of democracy was a key factor in the decision of many swing voters to vote against Republicans. It seems clear the investigation bolstered American democracy in more ways than one.While a hearty minority obviously remain as far down a rabbit hole as Trump’s former speechwriter, the results of the recent election bolster my conviction that sane Americans still constitute a small majority of American voters.So, like most of the contributors to these volumes, I think there is much to be grateful for in the work of the most successful congressional investigators since the Senate Watergate committee of 50 years ago. Or, as Remnick puts it, “If you are reaching for optimism – and despair is not an option – the existence and the depth of the committee’s project represents a kind of hope. It represents an insistence on truth and democratic principle.”TopicsBooksJanuary 6 hearingsUS Capitol attackUS politicsUS CongressHouse of RepresentativesPolitics booksfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Is Murdoch tiring of Trump? Mogul’s print titles dump the ex-president

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      Is Murdoch tiring of Trump? Mogul’s print titles dump the ex-president Tabloid with long relationship with former president blasts him over Capitol attack, saying he is unworthy to be elected againRupert Murdoch, hitherto one of Donald Trump’s most loyal media messengers, appears to have turned on the former president.‘US democracy will not survive for long’: how January 6 hearings plot a roadmap to autocracyRead moreUS media circles were rocked this weekend after the New York Post issued an excoriating editorial indictment of Trump’s failure to stop the attack on the US Capitol on 6 January 2021.The editorial, in a tabloid owned by Murdoch since 1976, began: “As his followers stormed the Capitol, calling for his vice-president to be hanged, President Donald Trump sat in his private dining room, watching TV, doing nothing. For three hours, seven minutes.”Trump’s only focus, the Post said, was to block the peaceful transfer of power.“As a matter of principle, as a matter of character, Trump has proven himself unworthy to be this country’s chief executive again.”The Wall Street Journal, another Murdoch paper, issued a similar critique in which it said evidence before the House January 6 committee was a reminder that “Trump betrayed his supporters”.Trump, the Journal said, took an oath to defend the constitution and had an obligation to protect the Capitol from the mob he told to march there, knowing it was armed.“He refused. He didn’t call the military to send help. He didn’t call [Mike] Pence to check on the safety of his loyal [vice-president]. Instead he fed the mob’s anger and let the riot play out.”Trump had “shown not an iota of regret”, the Journal said, adding: “Character is revealed in a crisis, and Mr Pence passed his January 6 trial. Mr Trump utterly failed his.”The editorials were only the latest salvos from the big guns of Murdochian conservatism.“The person who owns January 6 is Donald Trump,” the Journal said in June.“Look forward!” it urged readers. “The 2024 field is rich. You have Florida governor Ron DeSantis, former secretary of state Mike Pompeo, former UN ambassador Nikki Haley … the list goes on. All candidates who embrace conservative policies … Unsubscribe from Trump’s daily emails begging for money. Then pick your favorite from a new crop of conservatives. Look to 2022, and 2024, and a new era. Let’s make America sane again.”Columnists issued similar calls.“Let go of the anvil that, in the most buoyant waters imaginable, will sink you to the bottom of the sea,” Peggy Noonan wrote in the Journal.In the Post, Michael Goodwin said Trump’s “old feuds and grievances already sound stale and by 2024 they are not likely to inspire the hope and confidence America desperately needs”.Last year, Murdoch himself said conservatives must play an active role in political debate, “but that will not happen if President Trump stays focused on the past”.There are also signs that Murdoch’s most powerful media property, Fox News, is beginning to change its stance. On Friday, Fox News elected not to broadcast a Trump rally in Arizona during which a state endorsement met with boos. Instead, Fox News broadcast an interview with DeSantis.Observers believe Murdoch, 91, may be tiring of Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen, which has both kept Trump in the spotlight and denied him the ceremonial status usually extended to ex-presidents.Murdoch outlets have faced legal repercussions for repeating Trump’s lie. A judge in Delaware recently said Fox Corp could be sued by Dominion Voting Systems for broadcasting conspiracy theories related to the 2020 election.Rupert Murdoch and his son Lachlan are named in the $1.6bn suit, for allegedly acting with “actual malice” in allowing Fox News to broadcast claims the election was rigged. The judge, Eric Davis, cited reports that the elder Murdoch privately said Trump lost the election.Fox News says it is “confident we will prevail as freedom of the press is foundational to our democracy and must be protected, in addition to the damages claims being outrageous, unsupported and not rooted in sound financial analysis, serving as nothing more than a flagrant attempt to deter our journalists from doing their jobs.”A friendship of convenienceThe relationship between Murdoch and Trump has long been regarded as one of convenience. Thirty years ago, Trump often used the New York Post in his divorce battle with Ivana Trump, his first wife who died this month. As described by the Trump ally Roger Stone, to the New York Times, Trump considered the Page Six column “very important to his rising stature in New York City and branding efforts”.But a year before Trump was elected, in 2015, the Times reported that Murdoch thought him a “phony”.After Trump mocked the senator and former Republican presidential nominee John McCain, Murdoch wrote on Twitter: “When is Donald Trump going to stop embarrassing his friends, let alone the whole country?”The Journal called Trump a “catastrophe” and declared: “Trump is toast.” But by the time Trump was elected in 2016, he and Murdoch had cemented a friendship of convenience.Trump’s attempted coup continues – even after January 6 hearings are over for now | Robert ReichRead moreMurdoch was able to bypass White House aides to reach the president. Trump reportedly called Murdoch for reassurance Fox News would not be affected by a deal to sell 21st Century Fox to Disney.Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump holidayed on Murdoch’s 184ft yacht. Ivanka became a trustee for Murdoch and Wendi Deng’s twin daughters.The latest editorials may not change the views of Fox News primetime hosts. Sean Hannity, for one, has described the House January 6 hearings as an “obsessive partisan anti-Trump smear” and claimed they have not “establish[ed] a criminal case or reveal[ed] new damning evidence … as they have promised”.But the print titles seem to be moving on. Quoting “someone in the Murdoch orbit”, Vanity Fair said last month the media baron was “a pragmatic guy”.“He knows better than anybody how to read political tea leaves. It’s fairly self-evident that quite a few people in the firmament have begun to challenge the previously supported collective viewpoint about Trump. It’s understood now that the gloves are off. As [Trump] lashes out, it just makes it easier for people to hit back.”TopicsRupert MurdochDonald TrumpUS politicsRepublicansUS press and publishingWall Street JournalNew York PostfeaturesReuse this content More