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    Fox News’s interview of Kamala Harris was grievance theater, not political journalism | Margaret Sullivan

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    Bret Baier started off his Wednesday evening interview with Kamala Harris with a barrage of combative questions about immigration, designed less to elicit substantive answers than to prove what a tough guy the Fox host could be.His aggressive approach was understandable, in a way, since Baier had been under pressure for days from the Donald Trump faithful; they were convinced he was going to go easy on the Democratic nominee for president, and maybe even allow her campaign to edit the interview or see the questions in advance.So, Baier came out guns blazing, barely allowing the vice-president to finish a sentence before jumping in with objections and arguments.After 10 minutes of playing immigration “gotcha”, Baier pivoted to the obvious next subject, airing a video clip in which Harris expressed support for transgender people in prisons.Immigrant hatred. Transphobia. And later, Joe Biden’s age. Baier was running through the Fox News greatest hits playlist.This was grievance theater, not political journalism.But Harris got in her licks. She had her moments.Chiming in afterwards in what some saw as corporate damage control, Baier’s colleagues on Fox News gushed their approval. Martha MacCallum termed Baier’s performance “masterful”, while Dana Perino analyzed the interview as “super good”.I can’t imagine that too many viewers agreed. If they came to it expecting to learn more about Harris’s policies or get a true sense of her character, they would have been disappointed. That wasn’t the gameplan, and it wasn’t the result.But Harris accomplished something anyway.Merely by sitting down with a Fox host, she made a few statements.First, that she is unafraid and is willing to speak to all voters. It’s hard to imagine Donald Trump, these days, submitting to an interview with, say, Rachel Maddow of MSNBC; just this week, he turned away from a CNBC interview, and earlier canceled a CBS News 60 Minutes agreement.Second, Harris did manage to introduce a few snippets of reality to dedicated Fox viewers who probably haven’t been exposed to some of the most troubling criticisms of Trump.“That he’s unfit to serve. That he’s unstable. That’s he’s dangerous,” was how she characterized what millions of Americans are feeling. “And that people are exhausted.”She even was able to mention, at some length, the harsh view of the former commander-in-chief from Mark Milley, who served in two top military roles – including chair of the joint chiefs of staff – during the Trump administration.Milley has called Trump “fascist to the core” and has said that no one has ever been as dangerous to the United States.So maybe this was what one leading expert on Fox News, Brian Stelter, called the Harris campaign’s “Google strategy”. On CNN, Stelter speculated that viewers might hear these comments and go searching online for more, thus piercing the information bubble they’ve been living in.No doubt, the vast majority of regular Fox viewers have their minds made up – they’re sticking with Trump. No matter his mental decline. No matter his felony convictions. No matter the threats he makes or the threats he poses.But there may be a small percentage of the millions who tuned in who – despite all the noise and interruptions – managed to hear a reasonable, intelligent and stable alternative to Trump. Maybe some of them live in the key swing state of Pennsylvania, where the interview was recorded, or in Wisconsin or Michigan.In this coin flip of an election, even that tiny adjustment might make all the difference.

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

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

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

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

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      Voting equipment company Smartmatic settles defamation lawsuit with far-right network

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      The voting equipment company Smartmatic has agreed to settle a defamation lawsuit with the far-right One America News Network (OAN) over lies broadcast on the network about the 2020 election.Erik Connolly, a lawyer for Smartmatic, confirmed the case had been settled, but said the details were confidential. Attorneys for Smartmatic and OAN notified a federal judge in Washington on Tuesday that they were agreeing to dismiss the case, which Smartmatic filed in 2021.Smartmatic sued OAN in November 2021, saying the relatively small company was a victim of OAN’s “decision to increase its viewership and influence by spreading disinformation”. Smartmatic was only involved in the 2020 election in a single US county, Los Angeles, but OAN repeatedly broadcast false claims that its equipment had flipped the election for Biden. Trump allies Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell played a key role in advancing the outlandish claims.Defamation cases are difficult to win in the US, with plaintiffs having to clear a high bar of showing that defendants knew the information was false and published it anyway. The settlement comes months after OAN lawyers apparently accidentally turned over documents showing that the network had obtained a spreadsheet with Smartmatic employees’ passwords. It’s not clear if the passwords were authentic, but Smartmatic lawyers said in court filings that the network may have committed a crime.The settlement also means that internal documents from OAN showing how the network weighed and evaluated claims about the 2020 election will not become public. Before the voting equipment company Dominion reached a $787.5m settlement with Fox last year, those kinds of internal documents offered smoking gun evidence that key personnel at Fox knew election claims were false.The settlement is the latest development in a series of defamation cases that have sought to hold media outlets accountable for spreading false information about the 2020 election. In 2022, OAN settled a defamation case brought by Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, two Atlanta election workers it falsely claimed were involved in stealing the election. The network issued an on-air report saying there was “no widespread voter fraud” by Georgia election officials and clarifying that Freeman and Moss “did not engage in ballot fraud or criminal misconduct”.Smartmatic still has a pending $2.7bn defamation lawsuit against Fox.Earlier this month, a Delaware judge set a September trial date for Smartmatic’s defamation case against Newsmax. Both Smartmatic and Dominion also have ongoing defamation cases against Powell, Giuliani and Mike Lindell.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionLegal scholars are carefully watching the cases to see whether defamation law can be an effective tool in curbing misinformation. More

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      ‘Political germ warfare’: rightwing media fervently defend Trump

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      After he was indicted for the third time, Donald Trump reacted with his now-standard, twin-pronged approach: first, expressing outrage and denying the charges, and second, asking his many loyal supporters for money.But the former US president, who faces four charges over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, also found defenders among rightwing media in America which has often fervently defended him, sometimes flying in the face of reality to do so.In the minutes after the Trump indictment was filed in federal district court in Washington, conservative commentators rapidly scrambled to his defense. Rightwing pundits lined up to compare the charges to “criminalizing thoughts” and the dropping of “fifteen dozen” atomic bombs – and that was just on Fox News.Rightwing TV channel Newsmax, which has drained some of Fox News’s audience in recent months, brought on Rudy Giuliani, an unnamed co-conspirator in Tuesday’s indictment, who railed for seven minutes about Hillary Clinton’s emails and Biden being a “crooked president”.In America’s rightwing media ecosystem it was a largely united front. News outlets repeatedly pressed the idea that Trump’s free speech was being criminalized: that the former president had done nothing more than talk about the election being stolen.The effort, perhaps deliberately, ignored prosecutors’ allegations that Trump had convened false slates of electors and attempted to block the certification of the election on January 6.“This is like lawfare, they call it,” Jesse Watters, Fox News’s newly-installed prime-time host, railed in the moments after the indictment was announced. “Legal warfare. If this was political, this would be, like, a political war crime. This is overkill. This is political germ warfare. These are political war crimes. It’s an atrocity. It’s, like, not just dropping one atomic bomb, you drop 15 dozen.”Those claims were made on Fox News’s The Five show, which Watters co-hosts. By the time he got to his 8pm show, he hadn’t calmed down.Watters assembled a panel of experts, which included Alina Habba, a former Trump attorney who now works for Trump’s political action committee and Lara Trump, Trump’s daughter-in-law.In the wake of the 2020 election Trump “did exactly what you would want a president to do”, Lara Trump said.“He upheld and defended the constitution of the United States by trying to ensure that we indeed had a free and fair election. That was his whole goal, that’s what he wanted to ensure was going on,” she said.“[And] what about his first amendment freedom of speech.”Sean Hannity, a friend of Trump who was disciplined by Fox News in 2018 for appearing on stage at a Trump campaign rally, brought John Lauro, a Trump attorney, on to his 9pm show.“This is the first time, in the history of the United States, that the Justice Department has weaponized and politicized political speech,” Lauro claimed.Newsmax, meanwhile, went where Fox News – the channel recently settled a lawsuit after repeating the kind of claims that Giuliani lobs out incessantly – apparently feared to tread. The right-wing channel hauled on an emotional Giuliani, who referenced his own book as he criticized Jack Smith, the special counsel who brought the indictment.“You don’t get to violate people’s first amendment rights, Smith,” Giuliani said. “No matter who the hell you are, no matter how sick you are with Trump derangement syndrome.”There were some calmer voices of dissent in conservative media. One anyway: the Wall Street Journal.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn an op-ed the editorial board of the Journal, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch, criticized Trump’s behavior in the aftermath of the 2020 election, but worried that the indictment “potentially criminalizes many kinds of actions and statements by a president”.“You don’t have to be a defender of Donald Trump to worry about where this will lead,” the editorial board wrote.“It makes any future election challenges, however valid, legally vulnerable to a partisan prosecutor.”Away from the non-rightwing media, the interpretation was largely covered in a sober fashion in the US. The mainstream newspapers New York Times and the Washington Post stuck to a undramatic descriptions of the charges, while ABC News reported on the “sweeping indictment” Trump faces – noting it was his third in the last four months.None of that mattered among conservatives.One America News Network pivoted to Hunter Biden – always a source of interest among right-wing news – with an OANN correspondent pushing an emerging conspiracy theory that the Trump indictment was timed to coincide with Biden Jr’s tax charges trial.Elsewhere, a senior editor of the Blaze website suggested that the Republican-led House should force a government shutdown – which could see about 800,000 federal employees furloughed or forced to work without pay – in the hope that the case against Trump would collapse.Perhaps the most berserk take, however, was the one pushed by Trump’s own campaign.“The lawlessness of these persecutions of President Trump and his supporters is reminiscent of Nazi Germany in the 1930s, the former Soviet Union, and other authoritarian, dictatorial regimes,” the campaign posted to Truth Social.On a day when the rightwing media seemed willing to do and say anything to defend their man, none of them was willing to go as far as that. More

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      Geraldo Rivera quits Fox News after being fired from panel show The Five

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      Fox News mainstay Geraldo Rivera has parted ways with the network as staffing shake-ups at the conservative institution continue.Rivera first shared word of his departure from the channel on Thursday, posting a video on Twitter showing him on a boat off the coast of Long Island while saying that he had been dismissed from a panel show which Fox airs weekdays at 5pm ET.“I’ve been fired from The Five, and as a result of that I quit Fox,” Rivera said in the video.When asked for comment on Rivera’s remarks, a Fox spokesperson provided a statement which said that the network had “reached an amicable conclusion with Geraldo over the past few weeks”. The statement, written on Thursday, added that Rivera’s appearance on the Friday morning edition of the Fox & Friends show would be his last appearance on the channel. Rivera notably joined the show a few months after the September 11 terrorist attacks in 2001.Rivera, 79, was magnanimous when he appeared on Fox & Friends for his farewell segment on Friday, saying: “I’m deeply touched – I’m honored.“I love Fox, I love the people at Fox, I always will,” Rivera said. “I’ll never let anyone separate us, but I am beyond grateful for this. This is so deeply affecting. I love you for it – thank you.”Fox has not said that Rivera’s departure was at all related to the $787.5m settlement that the Rupert Murdoch-owned channel reached with Dominion Voting Systems in April to end a defamation suit over the broadcast of Donald Trump’s lies about voter fraud when he lost his 2020 presidential re-election campaign. But it is among a handful of changes at the network since the settlement was announced.The most notable of those was the firing of host Tucker Carlson within days of the settlement. Fox has maintained that Carlson’s dismissal was unrelated to the settlement, and it has replaced him with Jesse Watters. The network’s ex-star has not commented.Meanwhile, Carlson’s former managing editor Alexander McCaskill resigned in mid-June after a banner headline which he was thought to be behind described Joe Biden as a “wannabe dictator” during a broadcast.The banner – or chyron – also said that the president had “his political rival arrested”, referring to a federal indictment filed against Trump which charged him with improperly storing government secrets at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.McCaskill had also been accused of having “habitually belittled female employees” – among other things – in a lawsuit brought by the ex-Fox talent booker Abby Grossberg which accused the channel, its owners, and its workers, including Carlson, of fostering an abusive workplace environment.Rivera embarked on his career in broadcast journalism in 1970. He hosted a daytime talkshow for 11 years beginning in 1987. And, among other gigs, he was a CNBC news host from 1994 to 2001 before joining Fox, where he worked as a war correspondent, weekend anchor and host of the Cops: All Access series.Generally known to have a flair for controversy and self-promotion, Rivera stood out in recent years for his outspoken criticism of Israel over its attacks on Gaza and other Palestinian targets. With his participation, The Five would often outperform Fox’s other prime-time shows in terms of ratings.In some quarters, one of the most memorable episodes of Rivera’s run at Fox saw the US military boot him out of Iraq in 2003 for broadcasting details about American troop movements there.Two years before that, in an on-air flub he blamed on “the fog of war”, he claimed to have been at the scene when three American military members had been slain by friendly fire in Afghanistan before the Baltimore Sun later established that he had been more than 300 miles away. More

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      CNN’s Trump debacle suggests TV media set to repeat mistakes of 2016

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      Donald Trump and CNN were in rare agreement: the former president’s hour of free prime-time television on Wednesday evening, dressed up as a “town hall” with Republican voters, was a triumph.“America was served very well by what we did last night,” CNN’s chief executive, Chris Licht, told skeptical members of his own staff at the network’s daily news conference the following morning.“You do not have to like the former president’s answers, but you can’t say that we didn’t get them.”As it happens, quite a lot of people said that not only did CNN fail to get answers but it was repeating the terrible mistake of 2016 when it treated Trump as an entertainer not a hostile politician by giving him hours of airtime to spout freely because he was good for ratings, and therefore profits.One of CNN’s own reporters, Oliver Darcy, was less enthused than his boss.“It’s hard to see how America was served by the spectacle of lies that aired on CNN Wednesday evening,” he said in his daily newsletter, Reliable Sources.Darcy then listed all that was wrong. The same old “professional lie machine” that is Trump ignoring the question, talking over the moderator, unleashing “a firehose of disinformation upon the country”.“And CNN aired it all. On and on it went. It felt like 2016 all over again,” he wrote.More than a few Republicans shared that view. Matthew Dowd, former chief strategist for the George W Bush’s 2004 presidential campaign, condemned the news network.“CNN was completely unprepared to hold Trump accountable. CNN has done a complete disservice to our democracy,” he wrote. “CNN, you failed journalism and our country.”The New York Times said Trump’s advisers were delighted: “They can’t believe he is getting an hour on CNN with an audience that cheers his every line and laughs at his every joke.”Which raises the question of how television, in particular, should cover Trump as the next election comes into focus. It’s a question even Fox News, which has fallen out with the former president, is now grappling with.Ted Koppel, former anchor of ABC News’s Nightline, asked what the alternative is to television time for a leading contender for a return to the White House.“So no more live political events, because politicians can be nasty? Because politicians can tell lies?” he told the New York Times. “I’m not sure that news organisations should necessarily be in the business of making ideological judgments. Is he a legitimate object of news attention? You bet.”Bob Schieffer, the former CBS news anchor who moderated presidential debates, took much the same position.“We’re in the business of telling people who’s running for what and what they stand for,” he said.But many Americans wondered if it had to be in front of a supportive, jeering audience that evidently included a fair number of his “Make America great again” supporters with little to restrain his torrent of lies, distractions and evasions.Mark Lukasiewicz, former vice-president at NBC News, said of the programme that the mistake was to do it live: “Proving again: Live lying works. A friendly Maga crowd consistently laughs, claps at Trump’s punch lines – including re sex assault and January 6 – and the moderator cannot begin to keep up with the AR-15 pace of lies.”Even Fox News recorded its most recent interviews with Trump.Writing in the Washington Post, Perry Bacon said CNN’s mistake was to say, in the words of its political director, David Chalian, that is it going to “treat Trump like any other presidential candidate”.“CNN should, of course, treat Trump differently from other candidates. His record of anti-democratic behavior makes him a much more dangerous potential president than other candidates,” wrote Bacon.“In 2016, the media not only played down Trump’s chances of winning, but also suggested Trump would not pursue the outlandish and far-right ideas that he was running on if he won. This attitude was summed up by an Atlantic article titled ‘Taking Trump Seriously, Not Literally’. This perspective was entirely wrongheaded.”Part of the problem is that few journalists in the US, striving for ill-defined objectivity and almost invariably deferential to present and former presidents, are a match for a man who views the established norms of interviewing and discussion as a provocation. As Kaitlan Collins proved, as she tried, and failed, to contain Trump, even as he called her a “nasty woman” on her own air.Bacon is not alone in worrying that Trump will continue to exploit CNN’s desperation to win back at least some of the Maga voters it lost when the former president led chants of “CNN sucks” at his rallies.That’s certainly how Trump saw it, writing on his Truth Social site shortly before the programme that CNN was “rightfully desperate to get those fantastic (TRUMP!) ratings once again.“Could be the beginning of a New & Vibrant CNN, with no more Fake News, or it could turn into a disaster for all, including me. Let’s see what happens?” he added.As it turned out, what was good for CNN and Trump was viewed by a large part of the rest of America as another disaster in the making. More

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      Dear CNN, giving Trump a town-hall platform is the height of irresponsibility | Siva Vaidhyanathan

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      With 18 months to go before the next US presidential election, it’s already clear that – barring a physical collapse or two – Joe Biden will represent the Democrats and Donald Trump will carry the hopes of Republicans.This will be the first presidential election after one of the candidates, the president at the time, tried to foment a violent insurrection to overturn the last election. It will be the first election since 1912 in which a former president (in that case Theodore Roosevelt) challenges a sitting president (in that case William Howard Taft). It will be the first election in American history in which one candidate has already been impeached – twice, in fact. It will be the first election since 1800 in which one of the major candidates can reasonably be called a threat to or disloyal to the United States of America (Aaron Burr in 1800 was the first). And Burr had not yet revealed his propensity for treachery in 1800. It will be the first election in which one of the candidates has been indicted on state criminal charges (and possibly federal charges by the time of the election).In other words, it will be a weird election in every way. Yet, despite staring at a growing, violent, nativist, fascist-like movement that doggedly supports Trump, the mainstream American news media seems poised to treat both candidates as if they are viable, reasonable representatives of the traditions their political parties have grown to symbolize.It’s as if they have learned nothing.CNN, the leading 24-hour news network, will host Trump for a “town hall” forum in New Hampshire on Wednesday, as if he were a regular candidate leading the race for the nomination of a regular party. Of course, CNN will probably do the same for the three or four others who are likely to challenge him for the Republican nomination (so far, the former UN ambassador Nikki Haley and former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson are the only viable non-crank candidates).A few more might jump in, but the more challenges Trump faces, the more likely he will lock up the nomination on the first primary day, rather than a month later.Putting a microphone and three cameras on Trump as if he were just another candidate and not an instigator of the violent disruption of American democracy and leader of a conspiracy to overthrow the results of a national election is the height of journalistic irresponsibility.The conservative columnist Alyssa Farah Griffin defended CNN by saying that the host, Kaitlan Collins, is “tough” and won’t let Trump “get away with lying without being called out”. That’s exactly the problem. CNN is in the business of performing toughness and balance, not primarily producing journalism that serves to enlighten citizens and enhance democracy. CNN seems to exist to create tweetable moments of anchor “toughness”, through which the celebrities who appear on air make events and interviews all about them. The CNN faces are tough enough to stand in the wind and rain of a hurricane, and tough enough to call out a politician – even a bully like Trump – for lying. But that’s easy and shallow. Ultimately, it hurts democracy.The issue is not whether Trump gets caught in a lie or “gets away” with something. Trump doesn’t care when that happens and neither do Republican supporters. We have 40 years of Trump shamelessness to demonstrate that – seven years of Trump as a political figure. He has been “called out” time and time again. It makes no difference to his support or to his habits. Exposing Trump as a liar changes no minds about anything.But he will receive the imprimatur of respectability for warranting this platform in the first place. CNN and all journalists must concede that they perform that work, despite wishing and pretending they did not. They have just been too lazy to question doing things the way they had always done things. Every major news organization has done the same. No one has wanted to admit it is a dangerous moment or new environment.So how should mainstream journalistic organizations like CNN cover Trump – or any candidate – through the election? All plans and policies should be based on the realization that democracy is under direct threat from many small factions in the United States, supported by at least one foreign power (Russia), and that they all support the return of Donald Trump to power. Trump himself is immune to shaming and exposure. So that 20th-century assumption about shining a light or exposing or embarrassing a wrongdoer is not appropriate now. The situation is more dire and the political climate in the United States is beyond such tepid, genteel moves.News organizations should do everything differently. No more “town halls” for any candidate, not just Trump. No more interviews in comfortable chairs and good lighting intended to demonstrate both access to power and a certain toughness in approach. No more unfiltered coverage of rallies and speeches as if they constitute “news” before they are ever broadcast or rendered in text.Coverage should be driven by clear editorial choices. Journalists should decide what the candidates will respond to. They should approach each story based on an issue at hand, in the country, in the world, rather than whatever the candidate chooses to say that day. Every report should be couched in deep context, with every quote encased in statements and reminders of the candidate’s record, the facts about the issue, and what the choice is for voters.Reports should be delivered as multimedia packages, accompanied by deep research just a click away from the video, audio or text that invites the citizen into the story. Organizations should begin planning such coverage now so that nothing they do gets hijacked by shenanigans or games by any candidate – with full knowledge that hijacking the normal practices of 20th-century political journalism was precisely Trump’s strategy from 2015 through today. Steve Bannon told us so. Editors and reporters chose not to take it seriously.If a potential story does not serve to inform voters about what is at stake, it should never make it to publication or broadcast. That’s a simple test: does this story enlighten and enable the electorate? Or does this story merely serve to enrage and entertain the electorate? The moment when news organizations began gathering deep and sophisticated data about audience engagement, they began competing for attention against games and pornography and sitcoms and YouTube clips. That’s a fact of the business and a fact of life. But pandering to that fact instead of resisting it is rendering journalism incapable of functioning because journalism can never win the entertainment game.News organizations must accept that they make news by virtue of their choices. They don’t cover things that already exist as “news”. They are political actors. They must choose democracy or risk being used for free by the forces that oppose democracy. The stakes are too high to continue doing business as usual. The stakes are high in a business sense, of course. But they are higher in the sense of our survival as a democratic republic in a world in which democracy is in danger. More

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      Tucker Carlson said Fox Nation streaming service ‘sucks’, leaked video shows

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      Before he was fired by Fox News, rightwing TV host Tucker Carlson said the Fox Nation streaming service for which he produced content “sucks”, leaked video showed on Monday.The news follows widespread reporting that comments about his employer, including “highly offensive” remarks about executives, contributed to Carlson’s shock firing last week.In the new footage published by Media Matters for America, a progressive watchdog, Carlson discussed an interview with the controversial rightwing social media star Andrew Tate.Carlson spoke to Tate in August 2022. Some of the footage was shown on Fox News, trailing a longer broadcast on Fox Nation.In December 2022, Tate was arrested in Romania over allegations of rape, people trafficking and organised crime, which he denies.In the leaked video, Carlson sat on his Fox News set, talking by phone to an unidentified male Briton and gave an unflattering opinion of the Fox Nation website and the size of its audience.“I don’t want to be a slave to Fox Nation, which I don’t think that people watch anyway,” Carlson said.Discussing what he would wear for the interview, Carlson said: “I want it to look official. I don’t want it to be like bro talk … But nobody’s going to watch it on Fox Nation. Nobody watches Fox Nation because the site sucks. So I’d really like to just … dump the whole thing on YouTube.“But anyway, that’s just my view. OK. I’m just frustrated with it. It’s hard to use that site. I don’t know why they’re not fixing it. It’s driving me insane. And they’re like making, like, Lifetime movies but they don’t … work on the infrastructure of the site.“Like what? It’s crazy. And it drives me crazy because it’s like we’re doing all this extra work and no one can find it. It’s unbelievable, actually.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionContent produced by Carlson for Fox Nation included Patriot Purge, a conspiracy-laced documentary series about the deadly January 6 attack on the US Capitol by Donald Trump’s supporters, and The End of Men, which included a discussion of testicle tanning.On the footage leaked to Media Matters, Carlson said: “We’re like working like animals to produce all this content, and the people in charge of [Fox Nation] … like, they’re ignoring the fact that the site doesn’t work. And I think it’s like a betrayal of our efforts. That’s how I feel. So I, of course, I resent it.”Fox News declined to comment. It has been bullish about its streaming service.The New York Times has also said it obtained video of Carlson speaking off-air.In its footage, the paper said, Carlson discusses “‘postmenopausal fans’ and whether they will approve of how he looks on the air. In another video, he is overheard describing a woman he finds ‘yummy’.” More

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      Don Lemon says he has been fired by CNN: ‘I am stunned’

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      The TV news anchor Don Lemon said on Monday he had been fired from CNN – the news breaking shortly after word of another major US media departure, that of Tucker Carlson from Fox News.“I was informed this morning by my agent that I have been terminated by CNN,” Lemon, 57, wrote on Twitter not long after appearing on CNN This Morning, the revamped show he co-hosted with Poppy Harlow and Kaitlan Collins.“I am stunned. After 17 years at CNN I would have thought that someone in management would have had the decency to tell me directly.“At no time was I ever given any indication that I would not be able to continue to do the work I have loved at the network.”CNN did not say why Lemon had left but it did dispute his version of events.It said: “Don Lemon’s statement about this morning’s events is inaccurate. He was offered an opportunity to meet with management but instead released a statement on Twitter.”In a separate statement, the chairman of CNN, Chris Licht, said: “CNN and Don have parted ways. Don will forever be a part of the CNN family, and we thank him for his contributions over the past 17 years. We wish him well and will be cheering him on in his future endeavors.”Licht also said CNN This Morning, which has struggled for ratings, “has been on air for nearly six months and we are committed to its success”.In February, Lemon was rebuked by Licht and briefly taken off-air over televised remarks about Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor now running for the Republican presidential nomination.Speaking to Harlow and Collins about Haley’s call for mental competency tests for ageing politicians, Lemon said Haley “isn’t in her prime, sorry”, adding: “A woman is considered to be in her prime in her 20s and 30s and maybe 40s.”Haley is 51.In a recording obtained by the New York Times, Licht told staffers that Lemon’s remarks were “upsetting, unacceptable and unfair to his co-hosts, and ultimately a huge distraction to the great work of this organisation”.Lemon apologised, saying, according to CNN: “I’m sorry that I said it. And I certainly see why people found it completely misguided.”He added: “The people I’m closest to in this organization are women.”Haley told Fox News: “I have always made the liberals’ heads explode. They can’t stand the fact that a minority, conservative, female would not be on the Democratic side.“He made that comment. I wasn’t sitting there saying sexist middle-aged CNN anchors need to have mental competency tests, although he may have just proven that point.”Announcing his firing on Monday, Lemon said: “It is clear that there are some larger issues at play.“With that said, I want to thank my colleagues and the many teams I have worked with for an incredible run. They are the most talented journalists in the business and I wish them all the best.” More