Subterms
BooksMichael Wolff: Murdoch hates Trump but loves Fox News money moreIn book, Wolff says that Murdoch personally approved network’s early call of Arizona, which signalled Trump’s defeat Martin Pengelly in New York@ More
BooksRupert Murdoch approved Fox News Arizona call that signaled Trump defeat, book says
Loss of Arizona signalled Donald Trump’s 2020 election defeat
Murdoch reportedly said: ‘Fuck him’
US politics – live coverage
Martin Pengelly in Washington@ More
In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s second acquittal in an impeachment trial, his supporters celebrated confirmed dominance of the Republican party. But as they did so an influential voice warned: “Mr Trump may run again, but he won’t win another national election.”The Wall Street Journal also said moves by Trump other than a run for the presidential nomination in 2024, including a “revenge campaign tour” or third-party run, would only “divide the centre-right and elect Democrats”.No one so much as Democrats wishes for that analysis to be true: that if Trump insists on remaining a loud voice in US politics, he will succeed only in electing more Democrats.But the fantasy of Trump’s summary departure from the national political stage is to be guarded against, many warn – and the notion that he cannot win the White House again in 2024 has been rejected on both the left and the right.“Trump could win again because it is always a choice between two” candidates, tweeted the conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, in reply to the Journal editorial.Trump lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden, by 306-232 in the electoral college and by more than 7m votes nationwide. But Biden is the oldest president ever inaugurated and though he has said he may seek a second term, on election day 2024 he will be 81. Trump could yet face Vice-President Kamala Harris or another relatively untested Democrat.About half of Republicans want Trump to stay head of their party. That said, half of American voters want him banished from politics altogether, according to a CNBC poll this month that echoed other surveys. There are a lot more Americans than there are Republicans. Furthermore, tens of thousands have left the party since the Capitol Hill attack on 6 January.On Saturday, seven Senate Republicans joined Democrats in voting to convict Trump on a charge of insurrection arising from the Capitol riot. The defections were significant, the most against a president of their own party in any impeachment, but the vote still fell 10 short of the two-thirds majority needed.Many Republicans, most notably minority leader Mitch McConnell, excoriated Trump’s behaviour but said they voted to acquit because the trial was unconstitutional. Scholars dispute that, and the Senate voted twice to proceed.Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, as the 2012 Republican presidential nominee and a former governor of Massachusetts one of the most known quantities in politics, was among the Republicans to vote to convict. For that decision, he was attacked by Utah Republicans with a petition to censure him including the line, “Whereas, Senator Williard [sic] Mitt Romney appears to be an agent for the Establishment Deep State.” The petition, which misspelled Romney’s first name, “Willard”, was reported by The Atlantic’s McKay Coppins. The “deep state” conspiracy theory holds that a permanent government of bureaucrats and intelligence agents thwarted Trump’s agenda. Steve Bannon, a key propagator and former Trump strategist, has said it is “for nut cases”.Right now, for Trump 2024, the political math looks bad. But the factors on his side, including fundraising muscle and a rabidly devoted base, are plain to see. Trump raised more than $250m after the election on the back of his lie that it was stolen – and he has promised to stick around.“We have so much work ahead of us,” he said following his acquittal on Saturday, “and soon we will emerge with a vision for a bright, radiant, and limitless American future.”State Republican parties back him. At least four senators who voted to convict were on the receiving end of sharp rebukes. Such skirmishes could be further signs of how Trump threatens to pull the party apart.“It’s hard to imagine Republicans winning national elections without Trump supporters anytime soon,” the GOP strategist Alex Conant told Reuters. “The party is facing a real catch-22: it can’t win with Trump but it’s obvious it can’t win without him either.”Even more troubling for those concerned for the strength of US democracy, the continuation of Trumpian politics by a younger conservative – Senator Josh Hawley or Fox News host Tucker Carlson, perhaps – could render moot the question of whether Trump himself is onstage. In this thinking, a candidate as indifferent to democracy but better at organizing his party could succeed in a power grab where Trump failed.Monday’s editorial casting doubt on Trump’s prospects came from a paper owned by Rupert Murdoch, a dominant voice on the right. It echoed moves by the New York Post, the Journal and Fox News last November, after an election Trump still refuses to concede.On its news pages on Monday, under the headline Pro-Trump Candidates Launch Early Senate, Governor Bids, the Journal looked at early moves in key states including Ohio, Virginia and Arkansas, ahead of the 2022 midterms.But on the opinion page, under the headline Trump’s Non-Vindication, the Journal’s editors added their voice to warnings from senior Republicans that Trump’s hold on the rank-and-file may not translate to another successful White House run – even though Democrats in Congress could not bar him from future office.“For four years,” the editorial board claimed, “Mr Trump’s conduct stayed largely within constitutional bounds … but Mr Trump’s dishonest challenge to the 2020 election, even after multiple defeats in court, clearly broke those bounds and culminated in the 6 January riot. “Mr Trump may run again, but he won’t win another national election. He lost re-election before the events of 6 January, and as president his job approval never rose above 50%.“He may go on a revenge campaign tour, or run as a third-party candidate, but all he will accomplish is to divide the centre-right and elect Democrats. The GOP’s defeats in the two 5 January Georgia Senate races proved that.“The country is moving past the Trump Presidency, and the GOP will remain in the wilderness until it does too.” More
The big difference between the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections is that this time, mainstream media outlets are mostly not taking the bait on a dubiously sourced set of digital materials associated with the Democratic candidate.Outside the rightwing bubble, the exceptions are disproportionately connected with Australia: Australian writers, Australian outlets, and/or outlets associated with News Corporation, who, like its founder, has Australian origins.The New York Post, a News Corp tabloid, has been leading the pursuit of the story of a data cache which is purportedly a copy of the hard drive of a computer belonging to Hunter Biden. They’ve not had much support from other established newspapers, but News Corp’s Fox News and a flotilla of lesser conservative media outlets have been dutifully amplifying and even adding their own touches to the tale.On Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show on Wednesday night US time, for example, the host implied that documents associated with the story, which his editorial team had shipped across the country, may have been stolen by people trying to shut down reporting on the cache.The Daily Beast reported on Thursday, however, that freight company UPS had simply misdirected the package, which has been recovered.The original New York Post Biden piece had huge problems on arrival, so much so that a journalist there reportedly refused to add their byline to it.The chain of custody was one of the issues. The data supposedly came from a computer, dropped off by an unidentified person, who was presumed but not positively determined to be Hunter Biden by the owner of a computer store in Delaware.That man’s story of how he retrieved the data from the machine and how he came to give it to the authorities and Rudy Giuliani has shifted. The FBI subpoenaed a computer from the store, which is reportedly connected to a money-laundering investigation, but it’s impossible to compare that machine with the supposed copy.Anyone who reports on leaked digital materials, as I have, knows that it is trivially easy to fake, modify, subtract from or add to, and otherwise mess around with any documents in any cache. Some documents carry indelible marks, such as any emails that are signed with DKIM security signatures, but everything else can be messed with.In this case, we haven’t seen the originals, just PDF printouts, and the New York Post has not been forthcoming with any detailed or satisfactory account of its own authentication process. It hasn’t said how it determined the authenticity of the cache as a whole, or individual items it has reported on, and has continued handwaving about the FBI subpoena, and the lack of denials from the Biden camp.If it does know for sure that the material is a genuine copy of Biden’s laptop, it isn’t letting on how. At least some of the material appears to be authentic. A sex tape released last week, for example, appears to really feature Hunter Biden. But that doesn’t mean that Giuliani has it because Hunter Biden took all that data to the computer shop. We still don’t really know who put them together, how, and for what purpose.This explains the queasiness of most mainstream outlets – of whom Giuliani told the New York Times that “either nobody else would take it, or if they took it, they would spend all the time they could to try to contradict it before they put it out.” The Wall Street Journal and Fox News were both reportedly offered elements of the story, and each refused.(One of Fox’s news anchors, Chris Wallace, commented that “I can understand the concern about this story. It is completely unverified and frankly, Rudy Giuliani is not the most reliable source anymore. I hate to say that, but it’s just true.”)None of this appears to have been a concern for the leadership at the New York Post, which once again now includes Col Allan, its Australian-born one-time editor in chief, and an outspoken Trump supporter. Allan retired in 2016 but is now back there as a special adviser, and was reportedly leading the charge to publish the material quickly.Once they pushed it out, Fox News started running with the pack that the Post had whistled up.So too, at crucial moments, did Australia’s News Corp outlets. On Sunday 18 October, Sharri Markson hosted Steve Bannon on her Sunday evening program. Bannon crowed about an email from Hunter Biden’s lawyer which supposedly showed him asking for the computer back.Bannon told Markson that the lawyer called the shop owner, “and when the guy said I can’t remember, I’m going back to my shop, he sent a couple of emails in a panic saying ‘I’ve got to get my hands on this right away’”.That email was subsequently released by a Fox reporter, and merely contained a request that the proprietor “review your records” on the matter. The lawyer, meanwhile, is on record saying that the Bidens “have no idea” where the email came from.Markson’s show, like most of Sky’s fare, is not widely watched. But she’s willing to have Bannon on. One might say that he couldn’t get arrested in the US, except that he recently was, and charged with fraud in connection with a border wall crowdfunding scheme, aboard the mega-yacht of his reported employer, Guo Wengui, whose bitter fight with the Chinese government has driven him into exile.Giuliani’s material was good enough for News Corp’s post; Bannon’s record apparently posed no concerns to News Corp’s Markson. News Corp’s Australian commentariat, and expatriate New York Post columnist Miranda Devine, have all assisted in pushing the story, and pushing back on criticism.While most media outlets had a reckoning after 2016, it didn’t extend to crucial parts of News Corporation, including the most prominent faces of its Australian operation. More
A former Republican congressman has blamed Rupert Murdoch’s media outlets for fuelling “climate rejectionism” among conservatives, suggesting they could be part of the reason why the United States is failing to lead the world to tackle global heating.Bob Inglis, a former South Carolina congressman who has renounced his previous climate denialism and now leads a group seeking to rally conservatives to act, questioned the role of News Corp and Fox Corporation during an event hosted by the Australia Institute.Inglis told the progressive thinktank that Australia and the US shared a form of “climate rejectionism that comes in conservative clothing”.He said both countries also shared “a particular news organisation that has a great deal to do with that” – and pointed the finger at Murdoch’s Fox News and the Wall Street Journal in particular.“If you look at Fox viewers in America – that’s where you find the climate disputation,” Inglis said.Inglis said his group, RepublicEn, which campaigns for conservative leadership on climate action, believed that a change in the way the issue was covered by those outlets would be “the holy grail” in unlocking greater ambition in US policy.“If Fox would just change or if the Wall Street Journal editorial page would just change – either one of those and this would be finished, we’d be done with climate, we’d be acting,” he said. “It really is that important – so if anybody can get to the Murdochs please let me know.”Business leader and former Sydney lord mayor Lucy Turnbull also sheeted home some responsibility to large media businesses such as News Corp during the same webinar event on Wednesday.Turnbull’s husband, the former Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, was ousted as leader of the centre-right Liberal party in 2009, and again in 2018, in part because of internal battles over climate policy.“There are a lot of people who have a huge level of conviction about the fact that climate change is with us, that we have to act,” she said. “The problem is that the polarisation makes it hard to do that because you have the people [who believe] that it isn’t a problem despite the overwhelming scientific evidence that it is.”In a clear reference to News Corp, Turnbull added: “They have a very loud voice in a lot of political debate aided by very large media organisations, especially one which crosses both the US and Australia and other countries besides.”She said this had resulted in a “fragmented, deeply polarised conversation”, which could be a symptom of the fragmentation of politics around the world.The comments come as another former prime minister, Kevin Rudd, campaigns for a royal commission to be launched into the Murdoch empire in Australia.The petition, launched on the Australian parliament’s website on Saturday, has so far attracted more than 236,000 signatures.The focus on the company comes after Rupert Murdoch’s youngest son, James Murdoch, said one of the reasons he had stepped away from his father’s media empire was because it legitimised disinformation and sowed doubts about facts.He told the New York Times climate change and coronavirus were both public health crises and “political spin” should not get “in the way of delivering crucial public health information”.James Murdoch and his wife, Kathryn, also issued a joint statement in January – midway through Australia’s summer bushfire crisis – to say they were “particularly disappointed with the ongoing denial among the news outlets in Australia given obvious evidence to the contrary”.Last year, however, Rupert Murdoch told shareholders “there are no climate change deniers” around his company and said his business was early to commit to “science-based targets to limit climate change” and was working to reduce its climate emissions.Inglis and Turnbull discussed media coverage as part of the wide-ranging webinar on Wednesday, which also canvassed the forthcoming US presidential election.Inglis contended that Republicans would undergo a “reappraisal” of their position on climate policy in coming years, although that reassessment would come faster if Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump for the presidency. Trump’s withdrawal of the US from the Paris climate accord is due to take effect the day after the November election.Inglis, who previously visited Australia in 2017 as a guest of the Australia Institute, recounted how he had once insisted that climate change was “nonsense”.“I didn’t know anything about it except that Al Gore was for it and, in as much as I represented probably one of the most conservative districts in America, that was the end of the inquiry,” he said.But Inglis said he had a “three-step metamorphosis”, based on his children pressing him to take environmental issues seriously, his own visit to Antarctica to see ice core drilling evidence and his snorkelling trip to the Great Barrier Reef.He spoke of the importance of bridging divides, saying he was grateful to have been “extended grace by people who knew it was real before I did”.Inglis urged people on the left of politics to accept new entrants to the conversation “without saying you’re the dumb kid in the class, the last one to get it” because “if you welcome them in we can solve this thing”. More
On Saturday night, the Washington Post reported that Mary Trump Barry had been caught on tape accusing her brother, the president, of being an all-purpose piece of work who even cheated his way into college. As framed by Trump’s older sister, a federal judge who retired under an ethics cloud of her own, the president has “no principles. None.”As for his relationship to truth: “The lying. Holy shit.”Barry did not, however, have the media to herself. As the Post’s scoop was breaking, Jeanine Pirro was extolling Trump’s virtues in a primetime flight into fantasy.According to Pirro, “Trump made his own money and he hasn’t asked the government for it and he doesn’t cut deals while he’s in the government for his son and his family.”According to Barry, Trump was incredulous to be told she read books and didn’t watch Fox News.Welcome to the parallel universe, where reality can take a backseat to ratings and resentments. Into the morass dives Brian Stelter with his latest book, Hoax. Under the subtitle Donald Trump, Fox News and the Dangerous Distortion of the Truth, the CNN media critic chronicles the symbiotic relationship between the 45th president and Rupert Murdoch’s most famous product.Fox News has access and influence, Trump a megaphone, both enjoy a devoted followingIt has been win-win. Fox News has access and influence, Trump a megaphone, both enjoy a devoted following.To illustrate: in the fall of 2019, Attorney General William Barr reportedly traveled to New York to ask Murdoch to “muzzle” Andrew Napolitano, an in-house critic of Trump. But according to Stelter, Barr was also there to discuss “media consolidation”, at a time when the industry was rife with merger mania.In other words, the attorney general went to the mogul privately rather than having him come to the justice department, where people could see him and notetakers could be present.Yes, Fox News has given voice to those voters Barack Obama derided for clinging to their guns and religion and Hillary Clinton branded as irredeemably deplorable. But Fox News has also promoted baseless conspiracy theories and unhesitatingly stoked racial and cultural animus – as Stelter makes clear.Although Fox News did not embrace Obama and “birtherism”, it did not discourage it, offering Trump a platform to trash a sitting president. Stelter captures Steve Doocy, a host of morning show Fox & Friends, egging the one-time reality host on, describing him as someone “who we all know was born in this country”.More recently, host Jesse Watters has credited the QAnon conspiracy movement with uncovering “great stuff”. Tucker Carlson, meanwhile, singled out Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s WAP for its vulgarity but a few years ago voiced his approval of an email sent by his brother, Buckley Carlson, to a woman he labeled “LabiaFace” while referring to “dick fright”, “spooge neck” and “pearl necklacing”.In Carlson’s words, “I just talked to my brother about his response, and he assures me he meant it in the nicest way.” Then again, Blake Neff, a Carlson writer, was recently dismissed for posting racist and misogynist messages online.As narrated by Stelter, Fox News has deliberately and repeatedly downplayed the threat posed by Covid-19As narrated by Stelter, Fox News has deliberately and repeatedly downplayed the threat posed by Covid-19 for the sake of making Trump look good, even as the pandemic took hold in Arizona, Florida, Georgia and Texas, ie: Trump’s base. Hoax describes in granular detail internal measures taken in early March, as Covid’s blight was descending, and contrasts them with the wisdom fed to viewers.Hand sanitizer stations were “added to every door at Fox”, in-person meetings were scaled back, travel was curbed. Yet Sean Hannity and other hosts were talking out of “both sides of their mouth” – this being the same Hannity who in moments of candor reported by Stelter would label Trump “batshit crazy” or ask: “What the fuck is wrong with him?”In Stelter’s telling, “one minute Hannity was saying the virus was ‘serious’” and in the next breath he was “accusing other media outlets of ‘sowing fear’”. Hannity also attacked Andrew Cuomo, New York’s governor, and Bill de Blasio, New York City’s mayor, for “politicizing this national emergency”, admonishing them to “stop”.Pete Hegseth, another host, announced that the more he learned about Covid, the “less” there was to “worry about”.Now, the US death toll is approaching 180,000. Contrary to the president’s assurances, the virus shows no signs of disappearing.Viewers have argued to the Federal Communications Commission that “the network had blood on its hands”. In its successful defense of a Covid-induced lawsuit, Fox rightly argued that first amendment free speech protections can also shield misinformation. More
The attorney general, William Barr, told Rupert Murdoch to “muzzle” Andrew Napolitano, a prominent Fox News personality who became a critic of Donald Trump, according to a new book about the rightwing TV network.Barr’s meeting with Murdoch, at the media mogul’s New York home in October 2019, was widely reported at the time, with speculation surrounding its subject. According to Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth, by CNN media reporter Brian Stelter, subjects covered included media consolidation and criminal justice reform.“But it was also about Judge Andrew Napolitano.”Stelter’s in-depth look at Fox News, its fortunes under Trump and its links to his White House will be published on Tuesday. The Guardian obtained a copy.In early 2019 it was reported that Napolitano, a New Jersey superior court judge who joined Fox News in 1998, told friends he had been on Trump’s shortlist for the supreme court. But he broke ranks later in the year, labeling Trump’s approaches to Ukraine, seeking political dirt on rivals, “both criminal and impeachable behavior”.“The criminal behavior to which Trump has admitted,” Napolitano wrote, in a column dated 3 October, “is much more grave than anything alleged or unearthed by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, and much of what Mueller revealed was impeachable.”Citing an unnamed source, Stelter writes that Trump “was so incensed by the judge’s TV broadcasts that he had implored Barr to send Rupert a message in person … about ‘muzzling the judge’. [Trump] wanted the nation’s top law enforcement official to convey just how atrocious Napolitano’s legal analysis had been.”Barr has been widely accused of riding roughshod over the rule of law, in service of Trump and his own authoritarian view of the presidency.Though Barr’s words to Murdoch “carried a lot of weight”, Stelter writes, “no one was explicitly told to take Napolitano off the air”. Instead, Stelter reports, Napolitano found digital resources allocated elsewhere, saw a slot on a daytime show disappear, and was not included in coverage of the impeachment process.In Stelter’s telling, Napolitano thought he was being kept off air by “25-year-old producers” who didn’t think viewers could handle his analysis. Stelter, however, says an unnamed “twentysomething staffer” confirmed that one host, Maria Bartiromo, would only book Napolitano to discuss non-Trump topics, because he would upset Bartiromo too much if he criticised the president.Fox News’ audience remains loyal to Trump as his campaign for re-election continues. Some Fox employees, Stelter writes, “justified the benching of the judge by claiming that viewers hated him: ‘Why are we going to book someone who kills our ratings?’”Napolitano has continued to appear on Fox News and to publish opinion columns. He has remained critical of Trump, for example slamming the actions of federal officers sent to confront protesters in Portland, Oregon; opposing attempts to provide coronavirus relief without congressional involvement; and saying Senate Republicans should have called new witnesses in the president’s impeachment trial.He has also had harsh words for Barr, for example calling his conduct in the case of Trump ally Roger Stone “Stalinistic”; blasting his handling of the Mueller report to Trump’s advantage; and hitting him for “insulting” Congress.Napolitano did, however, back Barr’s attempt to drop charges against Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national security adviser who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about contacts with Russian officials. More
News Corporation The Murdoch media’s China coronavirus conspiracy has one aim: get Trump re-elected Kevin Rudd News Corp is campaigning full-bore for the US president, with reports of a Wuhan lab ‘intelligence’ dossier being seeded across its empire On the China coronavirus lab conspiracy, ‘let’s be clear: Murdoch is campaigning full-bore for Trump,’ the former […] More
