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      Pat Robertson obituary

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      Although the concept of separation of church and state is entrenched in the US constitution, the influence of churchmen in political affairs is an American tradition dating back to the colonial era. Indeed, modern media has made the voice of contemporary evangelists every bit as powerful as Cotton Mather’s sermons were to the early Puritans. Pat Robertson, who has died aged 93, rode the growth of cable television, and a shrewd sense of the economics of the business, to become the most overtly political, and arguably the most influential, of them all.When Robertson appeared on the front of Time magazine in 1986, the cover line read Gospel TV: Religion, Politics and Money. The melding of those three strands of his career was not always seamless, though in American fundamentalism, material wealth is usually seen as a visible sign of God’s blessing. Through his Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN), he progressed from televised faith healing to a serious run at the US presidency in 1988, and made a fortune in the process.Robertson started that campaign for the Republican nomination with a petition, and contributions, from 3 million viewers, and finished second in the Iowa caucuses, ahead of the then vice-president George HW Bush. But voters gave him little support in the Republican primaries, and Bush of course went on to the presidency.Robertson, who had handed control of CBN to his son Tim, then founded the Christian Coalition of America. Having failed to take over the Republican party, his “rainbow coalition” of fundamentalists would attempt to steer the party in its ideological direction.The coalition’s lobbying exerted immense influence, helping spearhead the right’s assault on President Bill Clinton, and provided both a fundraising and ideological template for Bush. Although the coalition was censured and fined for coordinating its campaigns directly with the Republican party, and for improper aid delivered to then-House majority leader Newt Gingrich and the Virginia senatorial candidate Oliver North, its success spurred on Robertson’s indulgence in another grand tradition of American evangelical preachers, the hubris that found him courting constant controversy, and frequent financial scandal.Controversy became inevitable with the shift from mainstream politics to the Christian Coalition. Preaching to the converted meant the restraints on expressing his true beliefs were lifted. The framework for those beliefs was set out in his 1991 bestseller The New World Order, an amalgam of historical conspiracy theories, which posited an alliance of Masons and Jewish bankers who controlled the world.Robertson called feminism a “socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practise witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians”. He predicted that the staging of “gay days” at Disney World would result in God’s retribution through earthquakes, tornados, terrorist bombings or meteors.Asked to be “nice” about rival Protestant denominations, such as Episcopalians, Presbyterians or Methodists, he said: “I don’t have to be nice to the spirit of the antichrist.” He described leftwing academics as “racists, murderers, sexual deviants, and supporters of al-Qaida”.In 2005 he called for the assassination of the Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, and explained Ariel Sharon’s 2006 stroke as God’s retribution for giving land back to Palestinians. He later apologised to Sharon’s family and claimed to have been misquoted.That followed Robertson’s standard pattern, of making wild accusations that pleased his core audience, then claiming to have been misquoted by an anti-Christian mainstream media. Most notoriously, on his TV show The 700 Club, he agreed emphatically with his fellow evangelist Jerry Falwell’s theory that the 9/11 attacks were caused by “pagans, abortionists, feminists, gays, lesbians, the American Civil Liberties Union, and [the progressive advocacy group] People for the American Way”. After the ensuing uproar, he claimed that due to a malfunctioning earpiece he had not actually heard what Falwell was saying when he agreed with it.Robertson came by his political ambitions naturally, being related through the family of his mother, Gladys (nee Willis), to two presidents, the Harrisons, William Henry and Benjamin, while his father, Willis Robertson, was a US Senator from Virginia, one of the conservative segregationist southern Democrats dubbed “Dixiecrats”. He was born in Lexington, Virginia, and christened Marion Robertson, but was nicknamed Pat, because his older brother, Willis Jr, would say “pat, pat, pat” while patting baby Marion’s cheeks.Pat was educated at two military academies: McDonogh, near Baltimore, and McCallie, in Chattanooga, Tennessee. He attended Washington and Lee University in his home town. He was commissioned as a lieutenant in the Marines, but his claims to have seen combat with the First Marine Division in Korea came back to haunt him during his run for the presidential nomination.His Republican rival, Congressman Pete McCloskey, who had served with Robertson, said Robertson’s father had used influence to keep him out of combat, and that his primary responsibility had been to keep the officers’ clubs stocked with liquor. Robertson denounced this, and allegations by fellow Marines that he had consorted with prostitutes, as attempts to discredit him.Robertson returned home to gain a law degree in 1955 from Yale, but failed the bar exam. Soon afterwards, he was converted by the Dutch missionary Cornelius Vanderbreggen. By the time he was ordained by the Southern Baptist Convention in 1961, he had bought his first television station, in Portsmouth, Virginia, and established the Christian Broadcasting Network. He gave Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker their first break, doing a children’s programme, and started the breakfast-time show The 700 Club, its title taken from a fundraising drive for 700 subscribers.Robertson’s early success was based on televised faith healing. Critics pointed out that God seemed to speak through Robertson while taking programme cues from the director. His style, with fixed smile and narrow eyes, could seem almost a caricature of a snake-oil salesman, but its appeal was unquestionable, as CBN eventually claimed an audience in 180 countries. It functioned as a network of affiliated stations subscribing to its programming, but in 1977 Robertson started his own cable channel, CBN Cable, offering mainstream entertainment bookended by The 700 Club.Renamed the Family Channel, its profits eventually threatened CBN’s religious non-profit status, so Robertson set up International Family Entertainment, with himself and Tim as its heads, and sold the Family Channel to it. In 1992 he took IFE public, making $90m on the launch. In 1997, IFE sold the Family Channel to Rupert Murdoch’s Fox network for $1.9bn. Fox has since sold it on to Disney, but as a condition of the original sale, the channel, now called Freeform, is still required to broadcast The 700 Club, hosted by Pat’s son Gordon, president of CBN, twice a day.Evangelists including Oral Roberts and Bob Jones had founded their own colleges, and Robertson’s television success spawned CBN University, now called Regent University, at the CBN headquarters in Virginia Beach, the city where Robertson lived in a hilltop mansion with its own landing strip. On a number of occasions he credited his public prayers for steering hurricanes away from Virginia Beach, though he was unsuccessful with Hurricane Isabel in 2003.More controversial than Regent was his international humanitarian charity Operation Blessing. In 1994, it was claimed in his local newspaper, the Virginian-Pilot, that Robertson’s impassioned fundraising for Operation Blessing’s refugee airlift in Rwanda and Zaire was at least partly a cover for the use of his aircraft to transport diamond-mining equipment for the Robertson-owned African Development Corporation. A long investigation by Virginia’s Office of Consumer Affairs recommended Robertson be prosecuted for fraud, but the state’s attorney general, Mark Earley, brought no charges against him. The George W Bush administration made Operation Blessing the second-largest recipient of federal relief funds in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, which was seen in some quarters as payback for Robertson’s support.In 2003, Robertson used The 700 Club as a platform to argue on behalf of the Liberian president Charles Taylor, who had been indicted by the UN for war crimes. It emerged that Robertson had an investment in a Liberian gold mine, which he claimed was intended to help pay for Operation Blessing’s humanitarian efforts in the country, but which was allowed to go bankrupt after Taylor’s departure from office.Other business enterprises included the Ice Capades, a pyramid sales scheme, and a financial services venture with the Bank of Scotland, which was cancelled after Robertson called Scotland “a dark land overrun by homosexuals”. No matter how outrageous his statements, Robertson never alienated his core audience, and could count on the committed support of born-again Christians who felt the Lord spoke through him, and rewarded him for passing on his message, as did countless politicians hungry for his endorsement.He married Dede (Adelia) Elmer in 1954. She died in 2022 and Robertson is survived by their sons, Tim and Gordon, and daughters, Elizabeth and Ann, 14 grandchildren and 24 great-grandchildren. More

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      How Dominion Voting Systems filing proves Fox News was ‘deliberately lying’

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      AnalysisHow Dominion Voting Systems filing proves Fox News was ‘deliberately lying’Charles Kaiser in New York Document makes clear senior Fox News figures knew after 2020 election voter fraud claims were false – and it’s likely a landmark caseThe Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe said Dominion Voting Systems’ brief requesting summary judgment against Fox News for defamation – and $1.6bn – is “likely to succeed and likely to be a landmark” in the history of freedom of speech and freedom of the press.Fox News hosts thought Trump’s election fraud claims were ‘total BS’, court filings showRead more“I have never seen a defamation case with such overwhelming proof that the defendant admitted in writing that it was making up fake information in order to increase its viewership and its revenues,” Tribe told the Guardian. “Fox and its producers and performers were lying as part of their business model.”The case concerns Fox News’s repetition of Donald Trump’s lie that his 2020 defeat by Joe Biden was the result of electoral fraud, including claims about Dominion voting machines.Tribe said the filing “establishes that Fox was not only reckless” but also that producers, owners and personalities were “deliberately lying and knew they were lying about the nature of Dominion’s machines and the supposed way they could be manipulated”.Filed last week, the 192-page document makes it clear that senior figures at Fox News from Rupert Murdoch down knew immediately after the election that claims of voter fraud, in particular those aimed at Dominion, were false.Tucker Carlson called the charges “ludicrous” and “off the rails”. Sean Hannity texted about “F’ing lunatics”. A senior network vice-president called one of the stories “MIND BLOWINGLY NUTS”.But none of this knowledge prevented hosts from repeating lies about everything from imaginary algorithms shaving votes from Dominion machines to non-existent ties between the company and Venezuela.Tribe was one of several first amendment experts to call the filing nearly unprecedented.“This is the most remarkable discovery filing I’ve ever read in a commercial litigation,” said Scott Horton, a Columbia Law School lecturer, Harper’s Magazine contributing editor and litigator with clients including CBS and the Associated Press.“A summary judgment motion by a plaintiff in this kind of case is almost unheard of. These suits usually fail because you can’t prove the company you’re suing knew they were spreading falsehoods. That you would have evidence they knew it was a lie is almost unheard of … in this case the sheer volume of all the email and text messages is staggering.”Horton said Dominion’s case gets “huge benefit” from the way Fox employees “express themselves with a huge measure of hyperbole about absolutely everything”.Tribe agreed: “This is one of the first defamation cases in which it is possible to rule for the plaintiff on summary judgment. This is not a request to go to trial. There is no genuinely disputed fact. The defendants were deliberately lying in a manner that was per se libelous and they clearly knew it.”When the Dominion filing was first reported, Fox News said it “mischaracterized the record, cherry-picked quotes stripped of key context and spilled considerable ink on facts that are irrelevant under black-letter principles of defamation law”.Lawyers for Fox News claim everything their anchors said was protected by the first amendment.Other lawyers are skeptical.“You may have a first amendment right to report on what the president said but you have no right to validate a statement that you know to be false,” said Steven Shapiro, former legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union and counsel or co-counsel on more than 200 supreme court briefs.David Korzenik is a leading libel lawyer whose clients include the Guardian. He said the Dominion case shows it “possible to prove actual malice. If particular people are shown to have believed something to be false, or to have been highly aware of its probable falsehood, and at the same time they made statements endorsing it on air, they are in play.“You’re allowed to be biased … you’re allowed to try to make money. And people should be able to disagree with each other in a newsroom. But if Fox anchors say they don’t believe X and then turn around and endorse X on air after expressing manifest disbelief in it, they have a real problem.“The actual malice standard is very high and it’s supposed to be … it’s a burden that can be overcome in limited but appropriate circumstances.”The biggest irony revealed by the Dominion filing is that Carlson and colleagues quickly decided the greatest threat to their network was one of the only times it reported an accurate scoop: that Arizona had gone for Biden, at 11.20pm on election night.Four days later, another Murdoch property, the New York Post, asked Trump to stop the stolen election claim. Rupert Murdoch thanked the Fox News chief executive, Suzanne Scott, for making sure the editorial got wide distribution, according to the Dominion filing.But later that day, as Fox executives realized they were losing viewers, the tide began to shift.“Getting creamed by CNN!” Murdoch messaged Scott.In a message to his producer, Carlson sounded terrified: “Do the executives understand how much credibility and trust we’ve lost with our audience? We’re playing with fire, for real an alternative like Newsmax could be devastating to us.”And so on 8 November Maria Bartiromo featured the Trump adviser Sidney Powell and said: “I know that there were voting irregularities. Tell me about that.”That alternate reality would be repeated for months. Perhaps most devastating of all is Dominion’s account of what happened on 12 November, after the reporter Jaqui Heinrich “correctly factchecked [a Trump] tweet, pointing out that top election infrastructure officials said that there is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”Carlson was incensed. He messaged Hannity: “Please get her fired. Seriously what the fuck? Actually shocked. It needs to stop immediately, like tonight. It’s measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down.”Hannity complained to Scott, who said Heinrich had “serious nerve doing this and if this gets picked up, viewers are going to be further disgusted”.By the next morning, Heinrich had deleted her tweet.TopicsFox NewsUS elections 2020Donald TrumpUS politicsUS televisionUS television industryTV newsanalysisReuse this content More

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      Survivor winner Nick Wilson secures seat in Kentucky legislature

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      Survivor winner Nick Wilson secures seat in Kentucky legislatureRepublican, who ran unopposed, will represent home town in state house of representatives Not every Republican television personality who ran for political office during Tuesday’s US elections lost.The winner of the TV competition Survivor: David v Goliath in 2018, Nick Wilson, secured a seat as a Republican in Kentucky’s state house of representatives. Wilson’s path to victory wasn’t particularly fraught, as he ran unopposed for a seat that was left empty when the prior officeholder, Regina Huff, retired.Some viewers may remember Wilson competed on Survivor: David v Goliath, which pitted contestants regarded as underdogs with those labeled overachievers. He emerged at the top of a field that included the creator of the HBO show The White Lotus, Mike White.US midterm elections 2022: focus on Nevada after Democrat Mark Kelly wins key Senate seat – liveRead moreWilson appeared again on Survivor in the show’s Winners of War season in 2020, but he finished seventh.He will represent Laurel county – which has a population of more than 60,000 people – and his home town, Williamsburg, in Kentucky’s legislative house beginning on 1 January.Wilson graduated from the University of Kentucky and worked as a public defender after obtaining a law degree from the University of Alabama. He has spoken about how he lost his mother to drug addiction while in law school, and he said his role as a public defender let him help those struggling with the nationwide opioid epidemic.“That is an issue I will always hold close to my heart,” Wilson told the Louisville Courier-Journal in Kentucky after declaring his candidacy. “These mountains [in Kentucky] have been hard hit by it.”Wilson on Tuesday afternoon issued a statement describing himself as “thankful to so many for the support”.“I’m excited to serve and hope to represent the community well,” said the statement, accompanied by photos of him and his wife, Grisel Vilchez, casting their ballots.Wilson fared better than another Republican television personality, the talkshow host Dr Mehmet Oz, who lost a Pennsylvania US Senate seat to his Democratic rival, John Fetterman. The Democrats will retain control of the Senate if they win either the unresolved race in Nevada, which had not been called as of Saturday afternoon, or the 6 December runoff in Georgia.TopicsUS midterm elections 2022US politicsKentuckyTelevisionRepublicansnewsReuse this content More

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      Sexy khakis and giant graphics: how US TV pundits spent election night

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      Sexy khakis and giant graphics: how US TV pundits spent election nightThe midterms brought less drama than expected, but anchors had to fill the airwaves with something

      US midterm election results 2022: live
      US midterm elections 2022 – latest live news updates
      Before the first polls closed in Virginia and Georgia, CNN’s John King stood in front of his infamous magic board to plead with viewers to avoid unconfirmed news: “Stay off social media, folks.”Jake Tapper, who took over Wolf Blitzer’s usual duties after a last-minute switch up, let out an uneasy laugh. Then King made a case for CNN’s frantic coverage of 2022’s midterm season: “If you’re trying to figure out ‘are there really issues with voting’, trust your local officials and trust us here,” he said. It was a line that conservative pundits would jump on as fear-mongering. (“CNN in Panic mode,” Turning Point USA’s Benny Johnson tweeted.)‘No Republican blowout’: our panel reacts to the initial US midterm results | PanelRead moreMoments later, Tapper stood in front of a gigantic countdown screen, the much-less-fun cousin of Times Square’s New Year’s Eve clock. A bold number 1 blazed across the screen in red. It represented the only seat Republicans needed to pick up to win back power in the Senate. The screaming, Super Bowl-esque graphic reminded us that cable news coverage of midterm results was back in all its frenetic excess.Such breathless, wall-to-wall coverage is enough to give anyone election stress. The New York Times suggested to its readers “evidence-based strategies that can help you cope” with the effects of doom-scrolling. It was helpful, if a bit unsettling, advice.“Breathe like a baby,” said one step. “Focus on expanding your belly when you breathe, which can send more oxygen to the brain.” Another tip skewed more Wim Hof: “Plunge your face into a bowl with ice water for 10 to 30 seconds.”Readers who came up for air would be rewarded with MSNBC’s “Kornacki Cam”, a loop that played in the corner of TV screens during commercials. It showed live, behind-the-scenes shots of the fan-favorite national reporter Steve Kornacki, only partially aware that he was being filmed. Kornacki took water breaks, had one-way conversations with his interactive district map, and gave viewers the perfect shot of his geek-chic brown khakis. Those pants, his beloved trademark, earned him a spot on People’s Sexiest Men list in 2020.They remained a rare highlight of our fractured democratic process. “Happy Steve Kornacki day for those who celebrate,” read one tweet. As the reporter rifled through his notes on screen, another fan wrote, “Steve Kornacki finding his documents during this stressful race is extremely relatable.”Kornacki’s data-driven approach represented to some a bastion of stability on otherwise crazed election nights. But head over to the rightwing outlet Newsmax, and things were a little more unpredictable: especially when Donald Trump took a moment to call in.The former president teased a “big announcement” he plans to make at Mar-a-Lago on 15 November. This appears to be a thinly veiled promise of a 2024 election run. But why wait a week? Trump said he didn’t want to “take away” from the significance of election night – specifically, JD Vance’s Ohio Senate race – but he seemed to be doing just that by opening his mouth.On Fox News, Tucker Carlson repeated conservative concerns about voter fraud and election integrity. “We’re not really serious about democracy if we’re using electronic voting machines,” he said.Cable news producers have to fill their seven-hour-long slots with something, even if it’s a whole lot of nothing. At about 9pm on Tuesday, as some polls were closing but results were not yet in, Savannah Guthrie and Lester Holt tried to stay cheery as they talked through a list of tight gubernatorial races. “Stop me if you’ve heard this before: too early to call,” Guthrie said.Pundits also found humor in the triumph of Maxwell Frost, the night’s youngest winner and the first Gen Z member of Congress. Frost, who will represent Florida, is 25 years old. “That means he was born in 1997,” MSNBC host Rachel Maddow said as her fellow anchors laughed in disbelief. “I literally have liquor older than him.”When the Republican surge some had predicted failed to materialize, MSNBC hosts started patting each other on the back. “I looked at you weird earlier when you said Joe Biden was going to be one of the most successful presidents ever as measured by the midterm performance of his party,” Rachel Maddow said to her colleague Lawrence O’Donnell. “I owe you not an apology, but a tepid climb-back.”On Fox News, Karl Rove was wistfully talking about the hinterlands of Georgia with votes still to report, but there was a clear sense that things weren’t quite going to plan any more.TopicsUS politicsUS televisionCNNFox NewsMSNBCThe news on TVTV newsfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Oprah Winfrey spurns Dr Oz to endorse Fetterman in Pennsylvania Senate race

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      Oprah Winfrey spurns Dr Oz to endorse Fetterman in Pennsylvania Senate raceTV host who launched Republican’s career on her daytime talkshow had previously said election was up to Pennsylvanians Oprah Winfrey sprang a November surprise for Democrats in the midterm elections as the US TV host endorsed their candidate John Fetterman in Pennsylvania’s hotly contested Senate race, snubbing his Republican rival Mehmet Oz whom she originally made famous on her daytime talkshow.Until now, Winfrey had said she would leave the election to Pennsylvanians, but on Thursday evening she changed that position in an online discussion on voting in next Tuesday’s election.‘A lens of empathy’: disability advocates on John Fetterman and leadershipRead more“I said it was up to the citizens of Pennsylvania … but I will tell you all this, if I lived in Pennsylvania, I would have already cast my vote for John Fetterman for many reasons,” Winfrey said, before going on to urge listeners to vote for Democrats running for governor and Senate in various states.The Pennsylvania seat has for months been seen as the most likely pickup opportunity for Democrats in the evenly divided Senate.Polls show a close race between Fetterman, the state’s lieutenant governor, and Oz, a celebrity heart surgeon who is endorsed by former president Donald Trump.In a sign of how high the stakes are, Trump will return to Pennsylvania on Saturday to campaign for Oz, while Joe Biden and the former two-term Democratic president Barack Obama will campaign for Fetterman that same day.Oz left Oprah’s show after five years and 55 episodes to start his own daytime TV program, The Dr Oz Show, which ran for 13 seasons before he moved from New Jersey to Pennsylvania to run for the Senate.The Senate seat is being vacated by the retiring Republican Pat Toomey.Fetterman’s race is among those that have grown tighter in recent weeks as polls showed rising support for Oz, who has made much of the fact that Fetterman had a stroke this spring during the campaign and spent much of the summer convalescing.Fetterman has been declared fit for work by his medical experts but has needed some adjustments to accommodate auditory processing.At a recent debate, in order to accommodate Fetterman’s condition, which he said was improving daily, two 70-inch monitors were placed above the heads of the moderators, which showed the transcribed text of their questions, and the text of Oz’s responses.The candidates fiercely clashed over abortion rights, with Fetterman strongly pro-choice.His endorsement by Winfrey – an icon to many Americans, particularly women and African Americans – is seen as a useful boost to Democrats’ chances in that race.Fetterman celebrated with the kind of witty burn on social media he has become well-known for, especially over the summer when he was physically absent from the campaign trail but repeatedly taunted Oz’s New Jersey connections.#NewProfilePic pic.twitter.com/mla50A5HWa— John Fetterman (@JohnFetterman) November 4, 2022
      TopicsOprah WinfreyPennsylvaniaUS midterm elections 2022US politicsDemocratsRepublicansnewsReuse this content More

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      Can you ignore your family’s politics? Jennifer Lawrence and Sydney Sweeney disagree

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      Can you ignore your family’s politics? Jennifer Lawrence and Sydney Sweeney disagreeArwa MahdawiThe Euphoria actor wants to keep things apolitical – but treating politics as abstract has always been a privilege Jennifer Lawrence says she “can’t fuck with people who aren’t political”. In a cover interview with Vogue, the actor revealed that she no longer has any patience for people who are passive about politics because things are now “too dire … Politics are killing people.”Politics have been killing people for a very long time, of course. Military spending decisions kill people. Austerity, and a lack of social welfare spending, kills people. Climate crisis and gun control policies, or a lack thereof, kill people. Treating politics as something abstract, something that doesn’t significantly impact your day-to-day life, has always been a privilege.I’m not here to scold Lawrence for not being woke straight out of the womb, though (this isn’t Twitter). She grew up in a conservative household in Kentucky and, as many people do, adopted her parents’ politics. Since then, however, she has evolved and been very frank about how and why she gradually moved away from Republican policies. Travelling for work expanded her worldview, Lawrence has said, and made her realize that wherever she went, wealth never seemed to trickle down but was always concentrated at the top. She wasn’t exactly radicalized but she became firmly liberal and now, she tells Vogue, she has nightmares about Tucker Carlson.Lawrence’s views may have evolved but her family’s don’t seem to have, which has caused a painful rift. The 2016 election fractured her relationship with some relatives, including her dad, she told Vogue. The reversal of Roe v Wade dealt it another blow. “I don’t want to disparage my family, but I know that a lot of people are in a similar position with their families. How could you raise a daughter from birth and believe that she doesn’t deserve equality? How?” Brett Kavanaugh, dad to two daughters, might be able to tell her.Lawrence isn’t the only celebrity whose family’s political leanings are making life hard for them. The Euphoria star Sydney Sweeney recently caught flak because her mother threw a hoedown-themed 60th birthday that looked a little Trumpy. Photos of party guests wearing Maga-style red baseball caps with the phrase “Make Sixty Great Again”, and one unidentified guest wearing a “Blue Lives Matter” T-shirt (a pro-police backlash to Black Lives Matter), went viral.Twitter detectives went to work and found a picture on Sweeney’s brother’s Instagram account of a baby with a Maga hat on outside the White House. Rumours started swirling that Sweeney’s family were Trump-loving Republicans and a lot of fans got very upset and started questioning the actor’s politics. Sweeney, it should be noted, has never said much about her political leanings but her roles in shows like Euphoria – and the fact that her breakout role was in The Handmaid’s Tale – seem to have led a lot of her young, progressive fans to assume she’s liberal.“You guys this is wild,” Sweeney tweeted in response to the furore. “An innocent celebration for my moms milestone 60th birthday has turned into an absurd political statement, which was not the intention. Please stop making assumptions.”The anger directed towards Sweeney did feel a little over the top. After all, nobody chooses their family. However, her response to the outrage also felt disingenuous. When you wear a Blue Lives Matter shirt, you’re not making a fashion statement, you’re making a political statement. As a lot of commentators pointed out, Sweeney ignoring the political nature of some of the photos and accusing people of politicizing an innocent event felt a lot like gaslighting.‘I was absolutely terrified of Olivia’: Sydney Sweeney on her White Lotus characterRead moreAgain, nobody chooses their family. But when you’re an adult, you choose how you react to your family’s politics. Lawrence told Vogue that she has she has tried to “forgive my dad and my family and try to understand: it’s different. The information they are getting is different. Their life is different.” Still, she admitted, she can’t pretend their politics don’t matter. “I’ve tried to get over it and I really can’t. I can’t.”Sweeney, meanwhile, seems to have chosen to act as if politics don’t really matter, that civility is more important than civil rights. And she’s not alone in this approach. After Trump won the presidency in 2016, a lot of outlets published advice on how to survive Thanksgiving with a politically divided family. Much of that advice was along the lines of “agree to disagree!” Vogue even suggested a game where anyone who brought up politics was fined $20.You can acknowledge the fact that your parents supporting radically different ideas to you about a woman’s right to choose, for example, is not the same as them supporting a different sports team. You don’t have to disown your parents for their views, but if you don’t confront them in some way, then you are complicit.Maybe Lawrence should take young Sweeney aside at the next Hollywood award show and talk to her a bit about how it’s no longer possible to be passive about politics.TopicsFilmJennifer LawrenceTelevisionUS televisionUS politicscommentReuse this content More

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      Big Oil V the World review – how can these climate crisis deniers sleep at night?

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      Big Oil V the World review – how can these climate crisis deniers sleep at night?This shocking documentary series reveals the lies oil lobbyists told to undercut democracy, prevent action against global heating – and bring our planet to the brink Al Gore described it as “in many ways the most serious crime of the post-world war two era, whose consequences are almost unimaginable”. Can you guess which one the former vice-president meant? Genocide in the former Yugoslavia? Genocide in Rwanda? The attack on the twin towers? The oxymoronic “war on terror” that produced – rather than eliminated – terrorism? The nuclear arms race? The invasion of Ukraine? The crimes of Stalin, Mao, or Pol Pot? Or other ones I haven’t the space to cite?Gore is in fact referring to a very specific moment that occurred on 25 July 1997. That day, the US Senate voted by 95-0 for the Byrd-Hagel Resolution, ruling that the US should not sign a climate treaty that would become known as the Kyoto protocol – despite the Clinton administration’s desire for the US to be a world leader in the fight to cut greenhouse gas emissions. It meant that Clinton would only be allowed to take action when developing countries – particularly India and China – were bound by the same strictures.‘What we now know … they lied’: how big oil companies betrayed us allRead moreThe worry, touted by purported experts (many of whom were briefed and funded by US oil companies), was that Kyoto would be a disaster for the US. Imposing strict emission controls on the US – while industrialising nations such as India and China were not similarly constrained – would cost the US upwards of 5,000 jobs, put more than 50 cents on a tank of gas, whack up electricity bills 25% to 50% and put the struggling US economy at a competitive disadvantage in international markets. Or so it was claimed.Jane McMullen’s excellent and shocking first instalment of a three-part series, Big Oil V The World (BBC Two) reveals another reason for senators Robert Byrd and Chuck Hagel’s resolution. For many years, the big oil lobby had poured scorn on the growing scientific orthodoxy that humanity is hurtling towards a climate catastrophe and that the leading reason is the rise in emissions of greenhouse gases.What I didn’t know, and this documentary helpfully explains, is that the US’s largest oil company, Exxon, had labs filled with researchers who had produced detailed reports showing the reality of the climate crisis. That research, though, was suppressed.The bitter irony, clinched by one of the company’s former climate scientists, Ed Garvey, was that Exxon could have been part of the solution rather than the problem. Garvey worked on Exxon’s carbon dioxide research programme from 1978 to 1983, when it was closed because falling gas prices made it seem an expendable luxury.Garvey also recalls that there were scientists at Exxon developing alternatives to fossil fuels such as solar power and lithium batteries. But their work was shelved. The future of the planet, Garvey suggests, was deemed less important than Exxon’s short-term profit.Although the Clinton administration in which Gore served had from the outset committed itself to reducing greenhouse gas emissions to their 1990 levels by 2000, and leaders of industrial nations such as the British prime minister, John Major, called for even deeper cuts, the Senate resolution effectively destroyed the president and his vice-president’s hopes of the US leading the world. Instead, the US, through its inaction, helped hasten the climate catastrophe we now live in.To clinch this rhetorical point, the programme repeatedly cuts from talking heads to scenes more hellish than those imagined by Dante or Milton. Floods in China, a fiery hellscape in California, storms lashing Louisiana and, in one shot, battering an Exxon gas station.After seeing such images, I wonder how Hagel, who sponsored that 1997 Senate resolution and went on to become defence secretary, sleeps at night. He was among the climate crisis deniers this documentary catches up with to hear them repent. Off-screen, the excellent interviewer asks Hagel if he feels he was misled, given that Exxon, whose execs lobbied him before the Senate vote, was making a concerted effort throughout the 1990s to cast doubt on the reality of the climate emergency and the role of human activity in increasing global temperatures – even though their own scientists were telling them that the science was sound.“We now know about some of these large oil companies … they lied,” says Hagel. “Yes I was misled. Others were misled. When they had evidence in their own institutions that countered what they were saying publicly – they lied.” If the truth had been told to Hagel and other climate crisis-denying senators, would the situation be different? “Oh absolutely,” says Hagel. “I think it would have changed the average citizen’s appreciation of climate change and mine. It would have put the United States and the world on a different track. It has cost this country and it’s cost the world.”Last August, the UN secretary general António Guterres said the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) working group’s report confirming the link between human activity and rising greenhouse emissions is “a code red for humanity”. That Senate resolution, McMullen’s film argues, contributed to our climate emergency.No one in this programme explores the hideous political ramifications of this terrible state of affairs, namely that the virus of capitalism (in the form of big oil) undercut democracy through a sustained campaign of disinformation. How easy it proved for corporations to sucker politicians such as Hagel to subvert not just the will of the people but the wellbeing of the planet. If McMullen’s film has a moral, it’s that democracy must be healthy enough to resist commercial lobbying, so that we don’t get fooled again. In 2022, that seems an unlikely scenario.TopicsTelevision & radioTV reviewTelevisionDocumentaryClimate crisisFactual TVOilOil and gas companiesreviewsReuse this content More

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      Rough Draft review: Katy Tur’s fascinating – and flawed – story of news and family

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      Rough Draft review: Katy Tur’s fascinating – and flawed – story of news and familyThe MSNBC anchor follows her Trump bestseller with a compelling memoir but her press criticism falls flat Katy Tur spent 500 days covering Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, wrote a bestselling book called Unbelievable, and now hosts a show on MSNBC. She was planning to pitch a memoir about the 2020 election but changed her mind during the Covid pandemic, after a heavy package arrived from her mother.Because Our Fathers Lied review: Robert McNamara, Vietnam and a partial healingRead moreThe package contained a hard drive, which contained every minute of tape her parents, Bob Tur and Marika Gerrard, had taken as sole proprietors of the Los Angeles News Service. The drive contained all the footage shot from helicopters piloted by her father, Bob: from Madonna giving her parents the finger on the day she married Sean Penn to the famous chase of OJ Simpson as he sped through the streets of LA in a white Ford Bronco.As a child, Katy was often a passenger as her mother leaned far out of the cockpit to catch the best possible shot. Her daredevil father once got so close to a forest fire, he was cited for fanning its flames. Sometimes Katy felt the heat on her shins from a blaze barely 500ft below.That hard drive convinced Tur to switch subject. Her second book therefore tells a story she had spent her adult life avoiding: the story of her childhood. The switch was the right choice because even a particularly hard-fought campaign could not compete with the drama of her upbringing.Bob Tur was the kind of journalist who would do anything to get the story, “an oracle” to Katy. When the Northridge earthquake knocked out power to half of Los Angeles, her father used a forklift to rip open a hangar door so he could drag the chopper out and take off.He had such good sources in the fire department that he and his wife once scooped KABC-Los Angeles when its own 11pm anchor was shot outside the station. The Turs then sold the tape to KABC. A few hours later, Katy was born.Years later, she fondly recalled a childhood that “smelled like eucalyptus trees, the Pacific ocean and jet fuel”. But she was resolutely silent about all the ghastly things she experienced.Her father was the son of a gambler who would take him to the racetrack, give him the rent money to keep it from his own father, then beat his own son to get it back. Bob Tur’s “nose was broken by his father’s fist”, his “hand stabbed with his father’s fork”, his “face slashed by his father’s key”. He was “missing a piece of his ear because his father sliced it off”. In his mid-teens, Bob ran away.But according to Katy Tur, her father was unable to unlearn the worst lessons of his childhood and repeated the pattern of violence in his adult life, striking his wife, whipping Katy and her brother, punching holes in the living room walls.When Tur was covering the Boston Marathon bombing, she got the most startling call of her life. Her father told her he had “decided to become a woman. It’s why I’ve been so angry.”After the transition, Zoey Tur attacked Katy Tur for allegedly being transphobic. She insists she has always been supportive of such a courageous decision. But what she could not forgive was Zoey’s refusal to discuss or acknowledge the violence Bob Tur inflicted on his family, because the man who committed it no longer existed.Tur writes: “It felt like my dad was playing a get-out-of-gender-free card I didn’t know existed … I was dumbfounded by the idea that a person could change their gender … and think that in the process the deeds of the past would no longer be relevant.”It was “like a bank robber pleading not guilty on account of gender misalignment. But that’s how my father saw it.”“Bob Tur is dead,” Zoey Tur said. But, Katy Tur replied, “The stuff Bob Tur did isn’t dead.”The family story gives Katy Tur’s book its spine and its power. But interspersed with personal history are occasional attempts at press criticism which reveal uneven judgement.On the one hand, Tur acknowledges that her parents’ hugely successful focus on sensationalism is often blamed for the downfall of local TV news, and “some would say the downfall of national TV news too”.“They don’t dispute it,” she writes. “Neither do I.”But when she complains that too many people bemoan the decline of her profession in the decades since Walter Cronkite practiced it, she goes completely off the rails.Quoting a biography of Cronkite by Douglas Brinkley, another pundit of uneven judgement, she endorses the absurd idea that CBS Evening News covered the civil rights movement of the 1960s too sympathetically – citing as evidence the fact that bigoted southern affiliates derided their New York parent as the “Colored Broadcasting Station.”Tur also thinks it was wrong for the CBS Evening News to devote two thirds of its broadcast to Watergate two days before the 1972 election, when the New York Times and every major organization except the Washington Post was ignoring the scandal.The Great Stewardess Rebellion review: stirring study of what Roe v Wade helped vanquishRead moreShe disputes Cronkite’s 1968 description of Chicago police under Mayor Richard Daley as a “bunch of thugs”, a description delivered when the Connecticut senator Abraham Ribicoff was accurately accusing Daley of using “Gestapo tactics” against leftwing protesters.Tur even questions Cronkite’s single finest moment, also in ’68, when he accurately identified Vietnam as a “stalemate” after the Tet offensive.Tur is a better than average network news correspondent. I admired her work when she covered Trump. But judgements like the ones she passes on Cronkite are the very reason so many long for the days when networks employed correspondents of the caliber of Roger Mudd, Richard Threlkeld, Charles Kuralt, Elie Abel, Bob Simon, Charles Collingwood, Ed Bradley, Edwin Newman, Jim Wooten and more – all of whom were vastly superior to their current counterparts.
      Rough Draft: Motherhood and Journalism in a World Gone Mad is published in the US by Atria/One Signal
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