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    Fox News and Succession: could the show’s dysfunctional election fantasy become reality?

    The episode is called “America Decides”. But fans of HBO’s widely watched satire, Succession, will not have been shocked to see scions of the eminently dislikable Roy dynasty showing little respect for who Americans elect as president when it collides with the family’s financial and political interests.It’s also no secret that Succession’s story of a domineering father and the cutthroat rivalries of his offspring draws heavily on Rupert Murdoch’s family, his media empire and its ugliest creation, Fox News.In Succession, the Fox News stand-in, ATN, declares the probable loser – the Republican neo-fascist Jeryd Mencken – as the winner of a presidential election in an attempt to overturn the vote. Parts of the storyline mirror the turmoil of several American elections, from what many regard as George W Bush’s daylight robbery of the Florida vote in 2000 to Donald Trump’s refusal to accept defeat two decades later. But Succession veers from history at a crucial juncture.Clearly, the series writers drew inspiration from Fox News’s nightly ventures into what an ATN executive calls its “unique perspective” on the news, not least the recently departed Tucker Carlson’s campaign to paint the 2020 election as rigged against Trump.But what if Fox News starts taking inspiration from Succession? Could the news channel that cared so little for the truth it was forced to pay $787.5m over false accusations of rigged voting machines go all the way and declare Trump the winner of next year’s election – even if he loses – just to keep its viewers happy? And, if it did, what would be the consequences?Succession has yet to reveal whether ATN and Mencken pull off their coup. But Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, is sceptical that reality would prove so straightforward.“I can believe that Fox would cheat. I can believe that Fox would try to miscall an election or insist that these four, five, six states are just too close to call, and that means the election is up in the air when others are saying it’s over. I can see all kinds of things like that. I just don’t think it would produce a crisis as serious as [Succession] is trying to suggest, because we’re on to Fox. We know what they’re up to,” he said.“And while there’s a tiny chance that some weird scenario could develop because we’ve had weird scenarios develop before, it’s difficult to create a crisis of legitimacy unless there are several other factors besides Fox.”In Succession, we see Mencken facing, but not accepting, defeat.“If I lose, I want it correctly characterised as a huge victory,” he tells Roman Roy, the ruthless, snarky chief executive of ATN’s parent company. “I want to be the president.”The tone of ATN’s coverage is already set. In an echo of revelations about Fox News, the character overseeing election night on ATN, Tom Wambsgans, is worried about losing viewers to other rightwing broadcasters. He pushes to report anything that will call into question the legitimacy of votes for Mencken’s Democratic opponent, Daniel Jimenez.“Did you see the viral thing about the woman who voted, like, 40 times for Jimenez under her dead mom’s name?” Wambsgans asks the station’s news manager.The manager says the woman making the claim is “not a well person”.“You’re not a doctor,” Wambsgans responds. “Until you qualify, why don’t you get her on the air?”Shortly afterwards, a report comes in of a fire at a vote-counting centre in a heavily Democratic part of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The 100,000 destroyed ballots look almost certain to decide the election.Roman Roy characterises the blaze as an “antifa firebombing”, even though it advantages Mencken. On air, ATN’s version of Tucker Carlson pushes that line.“Maybe some of the crazies heard they were underperforming, and decided to stop the counting and destroy the evidence,” he says.Roman Roy seizes the chance to declare Wisconsin for Mencken in a move that swings the entire election in his favour.“We’re not waiting for burned votes, so call it,” Roy demands of ATN’s editors.Mencken gives a victory speech in which he declares his win has been called “by an authority of known integrity” and that, in effect, there is no need to wait for the official results.There are reasons to doubt that such a move would be successful in reality. As cumbersome and compromised as the US’s electoral machinery may be at times, it can also prove resilient.Trump’s repeated efforts to pressure Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, governor and other officials to “find” the extra votes to overturn Biden’s victory in 2020 met with a wall of refusal, despite Fox News’s backing. The courts wouldn’t play ball, either. The system held, and the former president may well be on his way to prison for his efforts, along with some of his cronies.In fact, some key events in 2020 played out in a mirror image of the Succession scenario in which ATN calls Wisconsin for Mencken.Fox News’s data team actually played it straight in 2020 and infuriated Trump by going out on a limb and calling Arizona for Joe Biden on election night before other news organisations. It turned out to be the right call, even if it was based on unreliable exit polls, and the outcome proved to be a lot closer than they suggested.But Succession did capture one consequence of the Fox News call.Once Fox gave Arizona to Biden, the numbers meant the network could not call another state for him without also declaring that he had therefore won the presidency and, more importantly to Fox News viewers, that Trump had lost. When Fox News’s Washington team was ready to call Nevada for Biden, it was blocked by some presenters and the network held off on a result until every other network had declared more than 14 hours later.In Succession, Roman Roy understands that with Wisconsin as a win for Mencken, he can use the result from one of two remaining states in play to declare total victory for the Republican even if the votes aren’t really there.That scenario requires that the election come down to a single state, a rare occurrence. Even if Fox News had called Arizona for Trump in 2020, he would still have had to take two or three of the other closely run states to win the electoral college.But Craig Harrington, research director at Media Matters for America, which tracks misinformation in the conservative media, said the election did come down to a single state two decades ago in Florida and Fox News was instrumental in determining the outcome.“Succession was uncomfortable to watch because we have already lived an entire lifetime in a world where Fox News’s decision to pre-emptively call an election on behalf of their political ally arguably changed the course of history. So “Could this happen again?” is the question rather than “Could this happen at all?” he said.Harrington sees the fictional burning of the ballots in Wisconsin as modeled on the wiping out of thousands of votes in Florida in 2000 which delivered the state and the presidency to George W Bush.On the night, the TV networks, including Fox, initially called Florida for Al Gore. But then Bush’s team began calling. As it happened, the head of Fox News election night decision desk was George W Bush’s cousin, John Ellis.Before long, George W and his brother, Jeb, who was Florida’s governor, were on the phone to Ellis telling him that the election was much tighter than the polls said and urging him to rescind the declaration for Gore. Ellis obliged. Then Fox News called the state for Bush. The other networks rapidly followed. Gore called Bush to concede.Fox News had got it wrong. The vote was still too close to call and the networks reversed themselves a couple of hours later. Gore withdrew his concession. But by then a large number of Americans thought Bush had won the presidency, and it had consequences.Hundreds of Republican party staffers and lawyers led what became known as the Brooks Brothers riot, named after shop selling suits, that shut down a recount of votes and froze Bush’s claim to victory in place until the US supreme court handed him the keys to the White House.“Because of Fox News’s decision to make the call when they did not have the data to back it up, the whole nation was informed that George W Bush had won the presidency,” said Harrington. “He started to become the president in waiting. The government began to transition. It set a tone in public that changed the course of history.”Sabato regards 2000 as a “terrible breakdown in the system” but thinks a repeat remains unlikely.Harrington agrees and said that without other factors at play, Fox News could only get so far in trying to push any particular candidate into the White House.“In order to actually rig an outcome, you have to have processes in place or individuals in place to interdict operations and to slow things down intentionally,” he said.In the Succession story, Harrington said it’s quite likely that ATN’s guns would have been spiked in real life by Milwaukee election officials finding a way to fix the issue of the burned ballots. But he added that might be different if the Trump camp had succeeded in its attempt to place supporters in strategic roles.“We saw this effort in 2022 to get election deniers elected to key roles in local government, state government, county governments all around the country during the midterm elections. We saw election deniers run and overwhelmingly they lost. And so we kind of dodged this attempt to infiltrate the election system,” said Harrington.Still, as Fox News attempts to paint the 2020 election as stolen from Trump showed, its ability to stir up trouble should not be underestimated. The network’s persistent pushing of vote fraud claims played an important part in rallying support for Trump after the election, and in fuelling the myths and anger that drove the 6 January 2021 storming of the Capitol.Sabato said that Fox News may not decide the winner but it can still stir up “small numbers who can cause great tumult in free societies”.“Fox could easily be the match that started a prairie fire, at least in deeply red states or in places where white nationalists or supremacists are prominent,” he said.“I do believe that the democratic process would win out but there are other points in American history where it’s gotten very messy. That’s what I’m worried about.” More

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    CNN’s planned town hall with Donald Trump faces pushback

    The announcement that CNN will host a New Hampshire town hall event for Donald Trump was met with widespread criticism on Monday.Angelo Carusone, chief executive of Media Matters for America, a progressive watchdog, said: “The transparent attempt to goose their ratings does feel at least a little odious. But all the more reason that they need to get this right.”Judd Legum, author of the Popular Information newsletter, said: “First, CNN systematically purged anyone on the network who was deemed too anti-Trump. Now this.”Keith Olbermann, a Trump critic and former MSNBC host, said: “I think we can say Chris Licht’s conversion of CNN into a political and journalistic whorehouse is complete.”Licht took over from Jeff Zucker as CNN’s chief executive last year, with a mission to remodel.Announcing the event to be held at St Anselm College on Wednesday 10 May, CNN said: “The former president and 2024 Republican presidential candidate will take questions from [anchor Kaitlan] Collins and a live audience of New Hampshire Republican and undeclared voters who say they intend to vote in the New Hampshire Republican presidential primary.”Trump and CNN were at odds throughout Trump’s run for the White House and his presidency, over what he deemed its hostile coverage and liberal slant. Collins, a morning show anchor, formerly worked for the Daily Caller, a website cofounded by Tucker Carlson, the far-right anchor fired by Fox News last week.In polling regarding the Republican nomination next year, Trump enjoys commanding leads.He continues to peddle the lie that Joe Biden’s victory in 2020 was the result of electoral fraud. On 6 January 2021, he used that lie to incite an attack on Congress now linked to nine deaths and carried out by supporters seeking to block Biden’s win.More than 1,000 arrests have been made and hundreds of convictions secured, some for seditious conspiracy. Trump was impeached a second time but acquitted when Republican senators stayed loyal to him.He now faces a federal investigation of his election subversion and incitement of the Capitol attack, as well as a state election subversion investigation, in Georgia, in which indictments are expected this summer.In New York, Trump has pleaded not guilty to 34 felony charges over a hush money payment to the porn star Stormy Daniels. In the same state, a civil rape case brought by the writer E Jean Carroll is at trial while a civil lawsuit brought by the state continues, over Trump’s tax and business practices.Jack Smith, a federal special counsel, is also investigating Trump’s retention of classified materials.CNN said it had “a longstanding tradition of hosting leading presidential candidates for town halls and political events as a critical component of the network’s robust campaign coverage”.It also said the Trump event would be “the first of many in the coming months as CNN correspondents travel across the country to hear directly from voters”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionCarusone said: “Donald Trump is the frontrunner for Republican nomination; it benefits no one to pretend otherwise.“But this is risky business and CNN should go into this clear-eyed: Trump will lie and he will attack. Trump has been repeating the same torrent of lies in his speeches and interviews with rightwing media figures for months. Nothing he will say will be new.“So if CNN lets him get away with it unchallenged, they have no excuse. CNN isn’t being graded on a curve here.”Carusone also pointed to cable networks’ struggles since Trump left office.“I can’t help but notice that this comes just as Fox’s ratings are in freefall and CNN’s shift hasn’t born any fruit,” he said.David Rothkopf, a Daily Beast columnist and author of Traitor: A History of American Betrayal from Benedict Arnold to Donald Trump, called CNN’s decision “irresponsible”.The town hall, he said, would be “a sham if it does not lead with the question, ‘You lead an insurrection against the government of the US, why should any American voter support a candidate who sought to undermine the constitution, institutions and values he was sworn to uphold?’”A CNN spokesperson said: “There is certainly a lot of news to cover with him and we’ll do that next Wednesday.” More

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    Trump and Tucker Carlson were codependent. Their venn diagram was one angry white circle

    At an 18 February 2017 rally, Donald Trump railed against immigrants and violence. He was unusually focused on Sweden, warning the crowd about recent terrorist attacks in the country: “You look at what’s happening last night in Sweden. Sweden, who would believe this?” If a terrorist attack in Sweden seemed unbelievable, it’s because it was. There had been no attack by immigrants the night before Trump spoke. The most recent attacks on Sweden, at the time, were a series of bombings between November 2016 and January 2017 that were allegedly connected to the neo-Nazi group the Nordic Resistance.People in Sweden shared photographs of their very un-bombed houses. Reporters did their due diligence and wrote stories about how nothing at all had happened in Sweden the previous night. It was a news cycle of nothing. But all that nothing could not persuade the president he was wrong. Trump repeated the story over and over. He was right, he insisted in multiple interviews: Sweden had been bombed by immigrant terrorists and he knew because he’d seen it on Tucker Carlson Tonight.Trump and Carlson were locked in a folie à deux that made each other’s careers. As Trump demanded a wall between Mexico and the United States, Carlson aired show after show cherry-picking stories to inflate the dangers of immigration. As Trump railed against Muslims, Carlson aired aggrieved segments about Macy’s selling hijabs. Together, they tapped into a nativist anger in America. Trump’s audience was Carlson’s audience. The Venn diagram was one big white angry circle. And Carlson even went further than Trump. While Trump encouraged his supporters to get vaccinated, Carlson likened the vaccine to Nazi experiments.There are still questions about exactly why Fox fired Carlson on Monday morning. But it’s clear that in his wake, he leaves wreckage. Not just from advising his elderly viewers that they didn’t need the vaccine. Not just from downplaying the insurrection as “mostly peaceful” and “embarrassingly tepid”. Not just for normalizing racist and neo-Nazi ideology or for the way he demonized individuals he disagreed with even if they weren’t public figures. But in the way he redefined truth and helped define the Trump presidency. He certainly wasn’t the first, or even the most eloquent, but Carlson was the loudest John the Baptist leading the way of the Trump era, evangelizing for a politics built on petty grievances and outrage.And the connection between Trump and Carlson wasn’t accidental. They often texted and conversed. Trump sought Carlson’s advice on his presidential run. And while past presidents have had close relationships with media figures, theirs was more transactional. Carlson’s disinformation informed Trump’s approach to his presidency and Trump capitalized on the anger Carlson incited.Richard West, professor of communications studies at Emerson College and author of a forthcoming book on the media, told me that Carlson elevated “factitis” to an art. Factitis, as West defines it, is “[an]irrational fear and avoidance of reporting facts”.“He ushered in this perception that whatever you think is OK, whatever you feel can be viewed as real and factual,” West says. “And it has to be because I’m on TV reading a teleprompter. Years ago, we used to call this blogging. Now it’s called TV anchorship on Fox.”West described the symbiosis of Carlson’s influence, which peaked under the Trump administration, as the “Tucker-Trump transactional threat”. He describes it as a feedback loop, “where one person reports something that’s not a fact. The other says, ‘That’s true.’ And the other one says, ‘Yes, I told you it was true.’ It’s just kind of an odd transactional aversion to truth.”The journalist Brian Stelter, former host of CNN’s Reliable Sources, described the cratering legacy of Carlson more succinctly. “Tucker Carlson made cable news cruder, uglier, more toxic. And as much as he turned on some fans, he also turned off a lot of people.”Trump and Carlson knew that one of the most powerful tools at their disposal was scapegoating individuals, often those not used to the media spotlight. The researcher Nina Jankowicz was targeted by Carlson after she was appointed to head the newly formed Disinformation Governance Board of the US Department of Homeland Security. The board was disbanded after it became the target of disinformation, and Jankowicz is still dealing with harassment. She told me in an interview that she could always tell when she’d been mentioned on Carlson’s show, by the fresh new wave of harassment. She doesn’t hold out hope that whoever replaces Carlson will be better: “And even if they replace Tucker with somebody who is more palatable, that legacy is one of lying for profit, lying for sport and lying without regard to the consequence of your lies. And that has really engendered this kind of normalization of political violence in America.”Jankowicz wasn’t the only woman Carlson targeted; it was regular feature on his show. The reporters Kim Kelly, Taylor Lorenz, and Lauren Duca all experienced Carlson’s ire. Sometimes they lost their jobs as a result, but they always received harassment from his fans, an army of angry viewers, ready to focus their vitriol on any target. The Trump-Carlson legacy is to transform both the right and the left into a nation of shitposters, a republic of dunk tweeters. A place where cruelty and disinformation is a bankable business model.I interviewed Carlson for a profile in the Columbia Journalism Reviewin 2018. I asked him if he felt responsible for the words he spoke, and the impact he had. I’d seen loved ones echo Carlson’s language about Black people and immigrants, in ways so nasty it left me devastated.My life and my community were cratered by Carlson’s rhetoric. He was dismissive and accused me of promoting censorship. But since the profile was published, it’s become clear that the lives of his viewers and the people he targeted where just rhetorical strategy to him. There was no care or concern over the damage he caused or the lives he ruined. And until his recent firing, there were very few consequences.At the time, people I talked to for the story insisted that Carlson didn’t believe what he said because it was just entertainment. And as his texts from the Dominion lawsuit show, he didn’t believe some of what he was claiming every night. But anyone who has read Hamlet knows that you become what you pretend you are. People die; a kingdom was ruined.Trump is running for re-election now without Carlson’s platform. What that does to his political power remains to be seen.But there’s no doubt that another of Murdoch’s apostles will take his place on Fox’s nightly lineup, just as Carlson replaced Bill O’Reilly. Maybe his replacement will be even more extreme, more willing to spin conspiracy theories for the Maga right. From O’Reilly to Glenn Beck to Carlson – that has tended to be the direction of travel.Like John the Baptist, despite having his head severed and delivered to Rupert Murdoch on a platter, Carlson’s gospel of hate will endure. It’s too embedded in the nature of American politics – both its tone and its language – to divest ourselves of it. And it’s too profitable. Carlson’s legacy is very real and we’re living in its ruins. More

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    AOC: ‘Better for country’ if Dominion had secured Fox News apology

    Dominion Voting Systems would have better served the US public had it refused to settle its $1.6bn defamation suit against Fox News until the network agreed to apologise on air for spreading Donald Trump’s lie about voter fraud in the 2020 election, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said.“What would have been best for the country, would have been to demand that and to not settle until we got that,” the New York congresswoman said.Dominion and Fox this week reached a $787.5m settlement, shortly before trial was scheduled to begin in a Delaware court.Legal filings laid out how in the aftermath of Joe Biden’s election win and the run-up to the January 6 attack on Congress, Fox News hosts repeated claims they knew to be untrue, as executives feared viewers would desert the network for rightwing competitors One America News and Newsmax.Rupert Murdoch, the 92-year-old media mogul and Fox News owner, was among witnesses due to testify.Fox faces other legal challenges but its avoidance of an apology to Dominion caused widespread comment, with some late-night hosts moved to construct their own on-air mea culpas.Ocasio-Cortez, popularly known as AOC, acknowledged Dominion was not beholden to public opinion.“This was a corporation suing another corporation for material damages,” she told the former White House press secretary Jen Psaki, now an MSNBC host, on Sunday. “Their job is to go in and get the most money that they can. And I think that they did that. They are not lawyers for the American public.”The congresswoman continued: “I think what is best for the country, what would have been best for the country, would have been to demand that and to not settle until we got that. But that is not their role.“And so for us, I think this really raises much larger questions. Very often, I believe that we leave to the courts to solve issues that politics is really supposed to solve, that our legislating is supposed to solve.“We have very real issues with what is permissible on air. And we saw that with January 6. And we saw that in the lead-up to January 6, and how we navigate questions not just of freedom of speech but also accountability for incitement of violence.”Nine deaths have been linked to the January 6 Capitol attack, including law enforcement suicides. More than a thousand arrests have been made and hundreds of convictions secured. Trump was impeached a second time for inciting the attack. Acquitted by Senate Republicans, he is the leading contender for the Republican presidential nomination.Asked if media platforms should be held accountable for incitement, Ocasio-Cortez said: “When it comes to broadcast television, like Fox News, these are subject to federal law, federal regulation, in terms of what’s allowed on air and what isn’t.“And when you look at what [the primetime host] Tucker Carlson and some of these other folks on Fox do, it is very, very clearly incitement of violence. And that is the line that I think we have to be willing to contend with.” More

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    A culture of truth denial is wilting US democracy and Britain is following fast | Will Hutton

    The United States is a grim warning of what happens when a society dispenses with the idea of truth. Fragmentation, paranoia, division and myth rule – democracy wilts. Fox News, we now know from emails flushed out by a lawsuit from the voting machine company Dominion, feared it would lose audiences if it told the truth about the 2020 presidential election result. Instead, it knowingly broadcast and fed Donald Trump’s lie that the election had been stolen – in particular the known unfounded allegation that Dominion had programmed its voting machines to throw millions of votes to the Democrats. Fox could have been instructed to tell the truth by its owner, as this month’s Prospect magazine details, but as Rupert Murdoch acknowledged under oath: “I could have. But I didn’t.” There was no penalty for lying, except being on the wrong side of a $1.6bn lawsuit.But the culture of truth denial is no accident; it was a key stratagem of the US right as it fought to build a counter-establishment in the 1970s, 80s and 90s that would challenge and even supplant what it considered an over-dominant liberal establishment. Unalloyed facts, truthful evidence and balanced reporting on everything from guns to climate change tended to support liberals and their worldview. But if all facts could be framed as the contingent result of opinions, the right could fight on level terms. Indeed, because the right is richer, it could even so dominantly frame facts from its well-funded media that truth and misinformation would become so jumbled no one could tell the difference. “Stop the steal” is such a fact-denying strategy. Ally it with voter suppression and getting your people into key roles in pivotal institutions and there are the bones of an anti-democratic coup.For years, the right had a target in its sights, rather as the British right today has the BBC – the 1949 Fairness Doctrine. This required American broadcasters to ensure that contentious issues were presented fairly; that both sides to any argument had access to the airwaves and presented their case factually. Like the BBC, it enraged the right and, over his period of office, Ronald Reagan ensured the Federal Communications Council, which enforced it, was chaired and increasingly staffed by anti-Fairness Doctrine people. Finally, in 1987 the doctrine was ruled unnecessary because it obstructed free speech. Within months, The Rush Limbaugh Show, the ultra-rightwing talkshow platform, was being nationally syndicated as the scourge of the liberal elite – anti-immigrant, anti-tax, anti-feminist, anti-LGBT, anti climate change and later denying Covid vaccines – and always rejecting the evidence that smoking caused cancer. No need any longer for countervailing views. A lifelong smoker, Limbaugh died in 2021 of the very lung cancer he denied.Through the 1990s, many rightwing TV stations were launched following suit, including the “fair and balanced” Fox News – although in 2017 it replaced the logo with “most watched, most trusted”. Donald Trump’s ascent would have been impossible without it, even as the US grew more ungovernable. Tens of millions believe the lies. And anyone who calls out the process is quickly dismissed as an elitist: out of step with the real opinions of real voters in neglected America, opinions that have been forged by the Republican media.In this respect, the next general election is the most important in Britain’s democratic life. The Tory party has learned from the rise of the Republicans. Voter suppression is one part of the toolkit – the new UK requirement to show photographic ID to vote is borrowed straight from the Republican playbook, as is the weakening of the Electoral Commission. Ensuring appointments to key roles are only available to Tories or known Tory sympathisers – from chairing the BBC and Ofcom to membership of any regulatory or cultural body – is another building block in achieving ascendancy. What remains is to control the commanding heights of the broadcast media, given the right already possesses the majority of the print media. Freezing the BBC licence fee in a period of double-digit inflation helps to enfeeble it – but better still would be to consign it and conceptions of fairness and impartiality to history. Thus the promised end of the licence fee before the current charter expires in 2027. This will open the prospect of overtly rightwing broadcaster GB News trying to reproduce the scale and success of Fox News, as its Dubai-based backer the Legatum Ventures Ltd together with hedge fund owner Sir Paul Marshall – stomaching £31m of losses this year – anticipate.GB News in important respects goes further than Fox; Fox gives few presentation slots to active rightwing politicians. But from the married Tory MPs Esther McVey and Philip Davies via Jacob Rees-Mogg to the deputy chair of the Tory party, Lee Anderson, GB News has become the broadcasting arm of Conservative central office. There is little pretence of journalism, which ceases altogether if a programme can be branded as current affairs. Ofcom raps its knuckles over some of the more egregious examples of bias, but it has no real power. Ofcom chair Michael Grade knows from his spells at ITV, Channel 4 and the BBC what good TV journalism looks like – it’s not on GB News – but equally he knows his role in the Tory scheme of things.Lastly, the coup needs useful intellectuals to draw the sting from any critics. Step up last week the academic Matthew Goodwin, who has morphed from studying the right to becoming an active rightwing advocate, arguing that a liberal elite constituting Emily Maitlis, Gary Lineker and Emma Watson (some elite!) has the country in its thrall, out of step with virtuous mainstream working-class opinion who it haughtily disparages. Yes, it is possible to understand why many in the working class in “red wall” seats want strong defence and immigration policies and think climate change is only a middle-class preoccupation – but that does not mean that objectively the “stop the boats” policy is not cruel and inhumane, that climate change is bogus or that Brexit has nothing to do with queues at Dover. What should matter surely is the truth – not whether the answer is closer to the view of some member of an elite or red-wall voter. Goodwin’s function is to throw a smokescreen around what is actually happening.There is endless commentary about how technocratic, charisma-light Keir Starmer lacks definition against proved technocratic Rishi Sunak. Wrong. His election would bring this coup to a halt; Britain would strike out on a different, more democratic course. You may shake your head at the shenanigans in the US, but the Conservative ambition is to go at least as far, if not further in a country with none of the US’s checks and balances. The issue is whether you want that. More

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    Fox News braces for more turbulence as second defamation lawsuit advances

    Fox News braces for more turbulence as second defamation lawsuit advancesNew York court greenlights $2.7bn suit against news channel by election company Smartmatic over 2020 presidential election liesAs Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Corporation battles to contain the Dominion lawsuit scandal that has engulfed its top executives and stars, another crisis is building in the wings that has the potential to cause further turbulence for the media empire.‘Lachlan’s in the mire’: Fox News case spells trouble for Murdoch heirRead moreSmartmatic’s lawsuit against Fox News has attracted only a fraction of the attention garnered by the legal action of Dominion Voting Systems. Yet both firms are suing Fox for defamation related to its coverage of Donald Trump’s stolen-election lie, and both pose a serious threat to Fox’s finances and reputation.In fact, on paper Smartmatic’s suit appears to be the more dangerous. It’s demanding damages of $2.7bn, compared with Dominion’s $1.6bn.So far, attempts by Fox lawyers to have the Smartmatic case dismissed have fallen on stony ground. Last week the New York state supreme court in Manhattan gave the green light for the case to proceed against Fox News, the Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo, the former business anchor Lou Dobbs and Trump’s former lawyer Rudy Giuliani.Smartmatic, a global election technology company headquartered in London, lodged its defamation suit in February 2021. “The Earth is round,” was the complaint’s striking opening sentence. “Two plus two equals four. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won the 2020 election … ”The complaint goes on to argue that, contrary to these indisputable facts, Fox News broadcast a series of blatant lies in support of Trump’s stolen election conspiracy theory. “Defendants did not want Biden to win the election. They wanted President Trump to win re-election … They also saw an opportunity to capitalize on President Trump’s popularity by inventing a story.”To prop up that story, the lawsuit claims, Fox needed a villain. That villain was Smartmatic.Smartmatic claims that more than 100 false statements were broadcast by Fox News hosts and guests. Smartmatic was falsely said to have been involved in 2020 election counts in six battleground states – in fact, it was present only at the count in Los Angeles county.Fox broadcast that Smartmatic shared its technology with Dominion, when in fact the two companies had no communication and regarded each other as rivals. Smartmatic was in cahoots with foreign governments in a conspiracy to rig the vote for Biden, Giuliani said on Bartiromo’s show – a claim that the company disputes as false and defamatory.Fox also described Smartmatic as having been founded in Venezuela at the behest of corrupt dictators. In fact, it was founded by Antonio Mugica and Roger Piñate in 2000 in Boca Raton, Florida, in the wake of the “hanging chad” fiasco, with the aim of using technology to restore people’s faith in election results.The business has since grown around the world. The firm claims that it has lost clients as a result of what it calls Fox’s “disinformation campaign”.Fox News has disputed Smartmatic’s multibillion estimate of its losses, calling it vastly inflated.A spokesperson for the broadcaster told the Guardian: “Freedom of the press is foundational to our democracy and must be protected, in addition to the damages claims being outrageous, unsupported and not rooted in sound financial analysis, serving as nothing more than a flagrant attempt to deter our journalists from doing their jobs. There is nothing more newsworthy than covering the president of the US and his lawyers making allegations.”Smartmatic has a very high bar to meet if it is to win the defamation suit at trial. New York state law has a rigorous approach to the first amendment of the US constitution which preserves press freedom.Under it, plaintiffs have to be able to convince a jury that not only did the media outlet put out false information, it did so with “actual malice”. That means that it either knew it was peddling a lie and went ahead anyway, or showed a reckless disregard for the truth.“New York is pretty protective of media rights,” said Roy Gutterman, a media law professor at Syracuse University who was a consultant early on in the Smartmatic case advising a non-party entity. “Every year I read a lot of cases from New York, and it’s hard to be successful in this state.”Despite this tough challenge, so far the wind is in Smartmatic’s sails. David Cohen, the New York supreme court justice presiding over the litigation, has indicated that the company has a strong enough case to go to trial.In last week’s ruling, Cohen found that “at a minimum, Fox News turned a blind eye to a litany of outrageous claims” about Smartmatic. “Plaintiffs have pleaded facts sufficient to allow a jury to infer that Fox News acted with actual malice.”TopicsFox NewsUS elections 2020News CorporationRudy GiulianiMedia businessTV newsnewsReuse this content More

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    McCarthy: January 6 tapes to be ‘slowly’ rolled out to networks besides Fox News

    McCarthy: January 6 tapes to be ‘slowly’ rolled out to networks besides Fox NewsRepublican House speaker has only let Fox News see the tapes so far, giving access to the primetime host Tucker CarlsonThe Republican speaker of the US House, Kevin McCarthy, said on Sunday he would “slowly roll out” to networks other than Fox News more than 40,000 hours of security footage from the January 6 attack on Congress.Mike Pence: history will hold Donald Trump accountable over Capitol attackRead more“We will slowly roll out to every individual news agency,” McCarthy told Sunday Morning Futures, a show broadcast by Fox News. “They can come see the tapes as well. Let everyone see them to bring their own judgment.”McCarthy has only let Fox News see the tapes so far, giving access to the primetime host Tucker Carlson.The move was blasted by Democrats in Congress and Republican critics of Donald Trump – who incited the Capitol attack in an attempt to overturn his election defeat – even before Carlson showed his first excerpts this week.Carlson claimed the tapes showed “mostly peaceful chaos”, Trump supporters acting like tourists, and that many of more than 1,000 people arrested, some convicted of crimes including seditious conspiracy, had been unjustly targeted.Carlson continued to show the footage even as filings in a $1.6bn defamation lawsuit against Fox News by a voting machine company showed that in private messages, Fox News hosts said Trump was lying about voter fraud in the 2020 election and Carlson himself professed to “passionately hate” the former president.On Sunday, McCarthy claimed he did not “give” the tapes to Carlson.“I didn’t give the tapes,” he said. “I allowed [him] to come see them, just like an exclusive with anybody else. My goal here is transparency.”McCarthy also wielded a common rightwing talking point, likening January 6 – a violent assault linked to nine deaths including law enforcement suicides – to protests for racial justice after the police murder of George Floyd in summer 2020 which sometimes turned violent.McCarthy said: “Why did I watch federal courts, why did I watch cities burn, federal agencies or something, and nobody arrested there? I think we should have equal justice across this country.”Nancy Mace, a relatively moderate Republican from South Carolina, tried to make the same point on CNN’s State of the Union.Though she said the tapes should have been given to “every media outlet”, Mace added: “We saw very few arrests when there were attacks by … members of Antifa and Black Lives Matter. I had my house spray-painted two summers ago and no one’s been held to account for that.”Mace was not pressed by her host. But other Republicans spoke unfavourably of McCarthy’s decision to give the Capitol tapes to Carlson, and how Carlson used them.At a Washington dinner on Saturday night, former vice-president Mike Pence, who the mob targeted on January 6, said: “Make no mistake about it, what happened that day was a disgrace. And it mocks decency to portray it any other way.”On Sunday, speaking to CBS’s Face the Nation, Michael McCaul, the Republican chair of the House homeland security committee, said: “I think the American people deserve to see all the footage from that day, and all the footage is not going to be, you know, tourism at the Capitol.“It’s going to show a very dark, tragic day that I witnessed firsthand, that included our Capitol police being assaulted, 140 of them injured, two pipe bombs. One Capitol police officer killed, and a protester killed. That’s not a good day.”TopicsUS Capitol attackKevin McCarthyFox NewsTV newsnewsReuse this content More