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    Trump calls for ‘termination’ of 60 Minutes in fresh attack on US media

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    Donald Trump has called for the “termination” of 60 Minutes, a long-established fixture of US journalism, in a fresh onslaught against the media that also included baseless claims that money from the country’s beleaguered foreign aid body had been illicitly funding news organisations.The demand that 60 Minutes be taken off the air came in a post on Trump’s Truth Social platform. It was the latest salvo in his long-running dispute with the CBS program over its editing of an interview with Kamala Harris, last year’s defeated Democratic presidential candidate, over which Trump has lodged a $10m suit alleging “election interference”.“CBS should lose its license, and the cheaters at 60 Minutes should all be thrown out, and this disreputable ‘NEWS’ show should be immediately terminated,” Trump wrote, alleging that the program and the network had “defrauded the public” to an extent “never seen before.”The diatribe followed 60 Minutes’ release of an unedited transcript of Harris’s interview to the Federal Communications Committee in an effort to parry Trump’s accusations. The transcript was also posted on its website.“[The transcripts] show – consistent with 60 Minutes’ repeated assurances to the public – that the 60 Minutes broadcast was not doctored or deceitful,” read an accompanying note on the site.The original controversy arose after the transmitted interview featured a different segment of Harris’s answer to a question about Israel from the version screened as a trailer. Trump’s supporters claimed that the final version was more polished than the original, which was mocked as a “word salad”. Trump followed up by accusing the show of editing Harris’s answer to portray her in a more positive light, thus boosting her election chances.Employees of 60 Minutes have denied claims of bias and say such edits are standard practice. However, CBS’s owner, Paramount Global – which is currently seeking an $8bn merger with Skydance Media – has opened negotiations with Trump’s lawyers over the $10m lawsuit amid reports of pressure from the newly appointed FCC chair, Brendan Carr.In an interview with Fox News, Carr said he shared Trump’s opinion about the 60 Minutes interview with Harris.“This is a rare situation where we have extrinsic evidence that CBS had played one answer or one set of words and then swapped in another set. And CBS’s conduct through this, frankly, has been concerning,” he said.Trump – who frequently branded journalists “the enemy of the people” in his first term – broadened Thursday’s attack to other outlets by amplifying false claims that USAid, the currently shuttered foreign assistance agency, had been funding Politico and other news outlets to the tune of $8m.“With the new Democrat scandal that just arose with respect to USAID illegally paying large sums of money to Politico and other media outlets, the question must be asked, was CBS paid for committing this FRAUD?” he wrote.The accusation – denied by Politico and subsequently debunked – was first made by Trump-supporting social media influencers , who tried to establish a link between a glitch that caused a payment delay to Politico staff and the freezing of USAid’s funding by Elon Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge), whose agents have accessed the federal government’s payments system.It was later repeated by the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt.In fact, payments to Politico’s subscriptions services have been made throughout the vast government bureaucracy – including from staff of Republican members of Congress, the Washington Post reported. Politico said in a statement that just two separate subscription payments totalling less than $43,000 came from subdivisions within USAid in 2023 and 2024.In a statement to staff, Politico’s chief executive officer, Goli Sheikholeslami, and editor-in-chief, John Harris, wrote that the site “has never been a beneficiary of government programs or subsidies – not one cent, ever, in 18 years”. More

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      MSNBC faces uncertain future amid Comcast sale and Trump election win

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      For years, the cable news channel MSNBC has been a reliable liberal voice in the US media landscape, but amid the return of Donald Trump to the White House and its own business upheavals the network is now in crisis.The world’s richest man, and close Trump ally, Elon Musk has even – possibly jokingly – repeatedly publicly touted the idea of buying MSNBC after the parent company of the channel, Comcast, recently revealed that it would spin off the cable news network.Audience fatigue with Trump’s re-election and high-profile MSNBC hosts’ potential missteps in reaction to that event could make it difficult for the new company to boost the channel’s ratings, which were already declining before the election, and continue providing a leftwing perspective on global events, US media analysts told the Guardian.The negative reports about the channel over the last month are just the latest examples of an established US media company struggling to find its footing as people continue to drop cable television packages and instead use streaming services.But the particularly sharp recent ratings decline and reports of Musk perhaps buying the network could make it especially difficult for high-profile programming such as Morning Joe and The Rachel Maddow Show to continue providing a progressive alternative to Fox News, the analysts say.During Trump’s first term, “MSNBC really stood as a center for resisting and critiquing Trump,” said Kathryn Cramer Brownell, associate professor of history at Purdue University and author of 24/7 Politics: Cable Television and the Fragmenting of America from Watergate to Fox News.“It remains to be seen if they are able to forge an identity and a political viewership in opposition to Trump or not,” she added.In 2016, an average of 4.2 million people tuned into CNN, Fox News and MSNBC, according to the Pew Research Center. In 2022, that number decreased to 3.8 million.MSNBC briefly saw a significant ratings increase during the 2020 tumult of the Covid-19 pandemic, Black Lives Matter protests and presidential election, but they later again declined.In October, the Comcast president said the company was considering spinning off its cable networks, including CNBC and MSNBC into a separate company. Then last week, the company made an official announcement.Since election day, MSNBC has averaged about 521,000 viewers each day, a 38% decrease from its 2024 average before 5 November, according to data from Nielsen.Then Morning Joe hosts Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough visited Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort to speak with him about “abortion, mass deportation” and his threats of “retribution against political opponents and media outlets”, Scarborough said on air about the meeting.“We didn’t see eye-to-eye on a lot of issues, and we told him so,” Scarborough said, but they agreed to continue a dialogue.Afterwards, the hosts faced a significant backlash and ratings decrease.“They made a fundamental business error,” Jeff Jarvis, a journalism professor and author, said. “There is now a large new ecosystem of independent media, and people left the Washington Post and they are leaving MSNBC, and that worries me.”Brownell said she was not surprised by the morning show hosts meeting with the president-elect.“Media businesses frequently rely on cultivating relationships with political leaders and presidential administrations. It’s part of how they remain relevant,” she said. “But you can see the backlash with a show that kind of leans left and relies on those critics of Trump as their audience members.”The future of such shows is also uncertain because of Comcast’s decision to spin off the cable news networks along with channels such E!, USA and the Golf Channel into a separate company.“When you look at our assets, talented management team and balance-sheet strength, we are able to set these businesses up for future growth,” said Brian L Roberts, chairman and CEO of Comcast.After the announcement, Donald Trump Jr, joked on X that Musk should buy MSNBC, to which Musk replied: “How much does it cost?”A spinoff does not mean the company is for sale. Musk, who owns X, was one of Trump’s biggest backers this election and is now reportedly part of his inner circle, had previously described MSNBC as the “utter scum of the Earth”.CNN reported that billionaires with “liberal bona fides” have also expressed interest in buying MSNBC.“I fear that [Musk] could try to buy MSNBC, and I fear that Comcast could be immoral enough to sell it to him,” Jarvis said.Even if one of the liberal billionaires buys the network, its ability to be profitable in the long-term while providing left-leaning news and commentary is uncertain as people stop subscribing to cable.But after the 2016 election and the victor’s constant attacks on the media, many news organizations, including MSNBC, got a so-called “Trump bump”.Could that happen again once he takes office?“If there is a Trump bump, I suspect it will be delayed,” said Marty Kaplan, who holds the Norman Lear Chair in entertainment, media and society at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. “It may take a few beats for doomscrollers to get past the nausea. On the other hand, a media fast may be a popular new year’s resolution.”Even if the cord-cutting and recent events do lead to MSNBC’s demise, Brownell said she sees podcasts doing great journalism and thinks “the diversifying media landscape opens up a lot of possibilities”.“The challenge is the economic issue. How do you fund and sustain some of these other alternative journalistic projects?” she said. “You can have nonprofit organizations step in, foundations. It’s an opportunity to be creative … [and rethink] economic approaches to funding really good and hard-hitting and necessary journalism.” More

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      Alexi Lalas keeps tweeting Maga propaganda. Does it matter?

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      As the US men’s national team prepared to kick off against Panama earlier this month, Soccer Twitter warmed up for the first game of the Mauricio Pochettino era.Amid his routine match analysis, America’s most prominent soccer pundit retweeted old footage of Barack Obama discussing immigration policy that surfaced in an attempt to make the former president appear hypocritical and discredit Kamala Harris by association.The jarring mix of sports and politics is normal for Alexi Lalas, who stands out among soccer broadcasters for his open engagement with the imminent American presidential election and for his party affiliation.Lalas gave an interview on the Fox Business channel in July from the Republican National Convention which careened from how the event is “a cool place to be” to a discussion of the Barcelona prodigy Lamine Yamal. Speaking on Fox News radio from the convention, Lalas said he wants to challenge “the stereotype that exists when it comes to Republicans and certainly the right side of the political spectrum … I live in California, I work in soccer, I’m like a unicorn when it comes to politics out there and yet there are a lot of things that can unite us.”To judge by the volume of online abuse he attracts and airs on X – and to which he often responds with wit and generosity – his political output is having the opposite effect. That’s not surprising when his feed amplifies right-wing talking points, such as Lalas’ recent rehashing of video of a publicity stunt in which Donald Trump served fries to fawning supporters at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s in a specious attempt to taunt Harris.The ginger-bearded face of American soccer in the 1990s, a defender and rock musician who played in Serie A and won 96 caps for the USMNT, Lalas played every minute of the host nation’s four matches at the 1994 World Cup and became, wrote The Los Angeles Times, “the cult figure of America’s high summer”. After retirement he worked as an MLS executive, including for the Los Angeles Galaxy when they signed David Beckham.The mellow, mumbling kid who let David Letterman trim his pumpkin-hued goatee after USA ’94 is now a 54-year-old greying purveyor of indignant tirades for Fox Sports, proudly repping a segment of society who equate the profundity of their patriotism with the prominence of their Stars and Stripes flags and the decibel level of their bellowing about American greatness.With viral clips often attracting more views than live broadcasts on traditional TV channels, there is clear value in being the blowtorch of hot-take merchants. Given the sonic vanilla that is the corporate agenda-driven coverage of MLS on Apple TV, there may be a market for a celebrated American personality who provides and provokes trenchant opinions. But does that hold true when the talk moves from Pochettino’s right-wing to that of the GOP?“When you’re in the entertainment sector, going political tends to have very little upside because this country seems to be perpetually split, 49 to 48, and just in general it’s not going to make one side love you more because they’re just looking at what you’re doing on the field and in the announcer booth. But it will set off the other side,” says Mike Lewis, professor of marketing at Emory University and author of Fandom Analytics, a data-driven analysis of sports supporters.Lalas, a Ron DeSantis fan whose soccer podcast is called State of the Union in a nod to the president’s annual address, has more than 400,000 followers on X. “It’s my channel. I program it with what I like and what I find interesting. If it offends your sensibilities, there are millions of other channels for you to choose from. Go in peace,” Lalas wrote this month to a reader baffled by his divisive posts, which are typically retweets without additional commentary – an unusually coy style for him.That’s true for social media. But given his centrality to Fox’s coverage and the exclusivity of their rights, viewers will find it harder to swerve Lalas if they want to watch some of the biggest matches in the sport. And given how polarised and piqued the nation is and how intertwined party affiliation has become with personal identity, if viewers are aware of his political leanings, can they divorce that from his on-screen presence, even when he’s purely talking soccer? Do liberals want to hear a verdict on Christian Pulisic from Lalas any more than they want to buy a Tesla from the Trump super-booster Elon Musk?View image in fullscreen“It’s almost like a reflexive thing,” Lewis says, “that that’s an enemy now, and I don’t want to listen to an enemy while I watch the US men’s soccer team.” The risk of alienating roughly half your consumer base may be partially offset by the appeal of being perceived as bucking the liberal consensus as an unafraid and unfiltered Republican ambassador from deep blue Los Angeles in a progressive-leaning sport historically disparaged by conservatives.Like Trump, Lalas suggested the US were too woke after they went out of last year’s Women’s World Cup, and did not deviate from Republican orthodoxy in 2020 with a critical tweet when NWSL players took the knee for the national anthem. The Republican Party’s widespread antipathy towards diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging initiatives conflicts with the mission statement of the US Soccer Federation, which declares, “we integrate DEIB into everything we do”.There is a balancing act in playing a high-profile role in a mainstream channel – Fox, after all, has the rights to the 2026 World Cup – then sliding into the right-wing media ecosystem, where many conservatives have found audiences by stoking grievances and trolling the libs. One recent Lalas repost reads: “I check X for two reasons. Elon’s latest meme and seeing who Alexi ticked off today”.Fox Sports and Lalas declined to comment for this article. Like Fox News, Fox Sports is part of the Fox Corporation, which is controlled by Rupert Murdoch and family. So is the conservative-leaning sports news site, Outkick, which vows to question “the consensus and [expose] the destructive nature of ‘woke’ activism” and often cites Lalas.Politics and soccer are far from strangers. Two of the UK’s leading soccer broadcasters, Gary Lineker and Gary Neville, drew ire from British right-wingers for their criticism of the last Conservative government, with Lineker briefly removed from the BBC’s flagship football programme in 2023 for tweets about asylum policy that the broadcaster said breached impartiality rules.The American landscape, however, has changed since Jemele Hill was suspended by ESPN in 2017 for calling Trump a “white supremacist” on X and the network introduced a social media policy discouraging employees from openly taking sides and offering commentary beyond sports. Sticking to sports now seems blinkered. The ESPN star, Stephen A Smith, frequently opines on politics on other platforms and recently sparred with Fox News’ Sean Hannity. Fox Sports’ Colin Cowherd also talks politics, as does Dan LeBatard, who started his own podcast after criticisms of Trump contributed to his departure from ESPN.“There’s a price to pay for it. That’s why it is so hard to figure out the right policy, it’s very challenging to sort through what is a restriction on someone’s free speech” versus protecting the employer’s brand and reputation, says Patrick Crakes, a media consultant and former Fox Sports executive.“One of the reasons a lot of major sports personalities don’t [talk politics] is because you are a very general market, and do you really want to have to take 50% of the people that see you and fight them, or alienate them or make them uncomfortable with you? Sports, traditionally, I feel it was neutral ground. That’s increasingly changed.”Though political talk remains rare during game broadcasts and few commentators have overtly revealed political stances, perceptions of partisanship have become ingrained. “Republican-identifying sports media consumers find NBC Sports to be the most biased sports media outlet; Democratic-identifying sports media consumers find Fox Sports to be the most biased sports media outlet,” according to a survey for the University of Texas’ annual Politics in Sports Media report. “This suggests that the sports networks are reputationally connected to their parent news organizations.” The poll also found that 80% of Republicans do not want athletes to share their political beliefs compared with only 42% of Democrats.The line has also blurred between voters and spectators. “In the Trump era, we’ve started to see these political rallies that look like sporting events where you can have guys essentially face-painted up, they’ve got the red hats, the matching uniforms,” Lewis says. “I think there’s really powerful similarities between sports and politics in the way fandom works, particularly in the way fandom is so closely related to people’s identities.”The subordination of issues to identity and policies to personality means affiliations are ossified and compromise impossible, with Democrats no more likely to switch to supporting Republicans than would a Liverpool fan change allegiance to Manchester United. “If I’m teaching a class on sports marketing and I’m talking about fandom and I ask someone a question, ‘who are you a fan of,’ if they start to tell me two teams, there’s almost a reaction: ‘well, you’re not really a fan. You can’t like the Yankees and the Mets!’” Lewis says.“I think of it all as culture at this point. There’s almost this seamless connection across all these categories, entertainment to sports to politics,” he adds. “They are the culture, they are all happening simultaneously and all affecting each other.” Strangely, when everything is linked it feels like everything is fractured.Last year, Lalas wrote of the USWNT: “Politics, causes, stances, & behavior have made this team unlikeable to a portion of America.” Well, they could respond: right back at ya. And left-leaning observers might doubt the analytical prowess of a professional critic who, to apply a football metaphor to the politics on his X feed, focuses on one team’s shirt-pulling while ignoring the two-footed tackles flying in from the other side, and hails the “authenticity” of a serial liar and flip-flopper.More broadly, though, in a climate where it’s standard that politicians speak out on sports and countless celebrities issue political opinions and endorsements, why shouldn’t sports personalities enjoy the same freedom of expression? If we feel Lalas should keep quiet, shouldn’t we also feel that way about Bruce Springsteen and Taylor Swift?One difference: other forms of artistic expression, such as music, drama and writing, are often conceived and performed as explicit political statements while sports have been treated as a break from reality, not a reflection of it. That’s no longer sustainable as social media entangles news and opinion, the public and the personal. Wisely or not, Lalas isn’t only opposing a liberal consensus, he’s contributing to the erasure of a naive illusion. 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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      Can NBC News recover from its damaging decision to hire Ronna McDaniel? | Margaret Sullivan

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      As boneheaded corporate decisions go, the one by NBC News to bring on Ronna McDaniel as a paid contributor is right up there.Whatever twisted purpose hiring the former Republican National Committee (RNC) chairperson was meant to accomplish has been lost. That may have been gaining access to Republican bigwigs, sending a cynical message of ideological diversity or boosting ratings.Instead, the network has badly damaged its reputation and credibility. The hire makes a statement that, for this major US news organization, there are no consequences – rather, a juicy reward – for public figures who continually lie to the press and citizens. Her contract is reportedly worth $300,000.Hiring McDaniel – a powerful election denialist who joined then president Donald Trump in pressuring voting officials not to certify the 2020 election – was like putting a standing chyron on the NBC Nightly News: “Lying is rewarded here.”Of course, some commentators defended it, like Republican pollster Frank Luntz, who praised McDaniel’s “insider’s perspective”. He was shot down on Twitter/X by the scholar Norman Ornstein: “This is not about somebody with alternative views. It’s about a serial liar who intimidated election workers, tried to alter the election results in 2020 and has behaved in an utterly despicable fashion.”Social media memes also rose to the moment: Ronna McDaniel as politics commentator? Why not bring in OJ Simpson to host a show on preventing domestic violence, or hire Vladimir Putin as a Ukraine war commentator? How about a regular show for Ginni Thomas, the insurrection cheerleader married to a corrupt US supreme court justice?After four days of embarrassing news stories about the hire and its backlash, and some feeble efforts at damage control, it’s clear that the network should reverse course and ditch McDaniel or – depending on the terms of her contract – keep her entirely off the air. And that goes not just for the left-leaning MSNBC cable channel, but for the mainstream NBC News shows as well.And that’s not enough.The brass at NBC News needs to take stronger action in a statement – and a brief televised appearance by a top network executive or news leader – that affirms the commitment to covering politics truthfully and rigorously. It could appear once at the top of the nightly news and once on, let’s say, Morning Joe and Meet the Press.Then, go further. Prove that commitment in the network’s presidential campaign coverage. How? By using extreme care in giving a platform and a megaphone to proven liars, including the former president, and by providing sustained coverage about the stakes of the election, not just the horserace.Kristen Welker made a good start on Sunday’s Meet the Press, which she hosts. In a news interview recorded weeks before McDaniels’ hire, Welker respectfully but tenaciously grilled the former RNC chair.Insisting that she hasn’t really changed, McDaniel told Welker that she now acknowledges that Joe Biden won the election fair and square. Welker – perhaps channelling one of her predecessors, Tim Russert – wisely went to the tape, specifically McDaniel’s words to Chris Wallace in 2023: “I don’t think he won it fair.”McDaniel infamously joined Trump in a phone call pressuring two Michigan canvassers not to certify the election results; and her RNC led the charge to censure Republican members of Congress Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for participating in the House of Representatives January 6 investigation. All while disparaging the media.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAs Chuck Todd of NBC put it: “Many of our professional dealings with the RNC over the last six years have been met with gaslighting, have been met with character assassination.”Todd, on Sunday’s Meet the Press, said he thought NBC owed Welker an apology for putting her in an impossible position. And Mark Jacob, a former Chicago Tribune editor, called in his newsletter, Stop the Presses, for the network to apologize to the public.These apologies would be welcome, but the main thing is to acknowledge the error in judgment and make sure that no habitual liars or enemies of democracy – whether paid or unpaid – get to blather their way to November’s election.Truth-telling in the media always matters. It matters intensely right now, as American democracy teeters on the brink.NBC should affirm that core mission. In so doing, the network could earn itself a lot of goodwill and recover from this blunder. All while doing the right thing.After all, it’s one thing to screw up. It’s another to dig your heels in.
      Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture More

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      ‘Pretty bad’: NBC condemned by top US historian over role for Ronna McDaniel

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      The Republican National Committee chair turned NBC politics analyst Ronna McDaniel “tried to disassemble our democracy” by supporting Donald Trump’s electoral fraud lies and should not be given such a media role, a leading historian said amid uproar over the appointment.“What NBC has done is they’ve invited into what should be a normal framework someone who doesn’t believe that framework should exist at all,” Timothy Snyder, a Yale professor and author of On Tyranny, told MSNBC, part of the network now employing McDaniel.On Friday, NBC announced it had hired the former RNC chair and the network’s senior vice-president for politics, Carrie Budoff Brown, said that McDaniel would contribute her analysis “across all NBC News platforms”.“What NBC has done of its own volition is bring into a very important conversation about democracy, one which is going to take place for the next seven months or so, someone who … tried to disassemble our democracy. Who personally took part in an attempt to undo the American system,” Synder said.“And so … what NBC is doing is saying, ‘Well, [it] could be that in ‘24 our entire system will break down. Could be we’ll have an authoritarian leader. Oh, but look, we’ve made this adjustment in advance because we’ve brought into the middle of NBC somebody who has already taken part in an attempt to take our system down.’“So, yeah, I think this is pretty bad.”On Sunday, days after joining the network, McDaniel said on the Meet the Press that Biden won “fair and square” and said she did “not think violence should be in our political discourse”.But McDaniel also claimed it was “fair to say there were problems [elections in battleground states] in 2020” and said she had supported Trump’s election fraud lies as a way of “taking one for the whole team” .That stoked an on-air protest from Chuck Todd, a former Meet the Press host. On Monday, MSNBC hosts including Joe Scarborough, Mika Brzezinski and Nicole Wallace, to whom Snyder spoke, also condemned the McDaniel hire. The day also saw a protest from a union group representing NBC News staff.McDaniel and NBC did not comment.Snyder, who has written for the Guardian, said: “If you are going to be on American media, you should be somebody who believes there is something called truth, there are things called facts and you can pursue them. You shouldn’t be someone who has over and over and over again pushed the idea of fake news, educated Americans away from the facts, away from belief in the facts.”Describing such work by McDaniel, the anti-Trump conservative ex-congresswoman Liz Cheney said that as RNC chair, McDaniel “facilitated Trump’s corrupt fake elector plot and his effort to pressure Michigan officials not to certify the legitimate election outcome. She spread his lies and called January 6 ‘legitimate political discourse’. That’s not ‘taking one for the team’. It’s enabling criminality and depravity.”McDaniel became RNC chair in January 2017. In that role, she defended Trump through his scandal-ridden presidency; his refusal to accept his 2020 defeat by Joe Biden, culminating in his incitement of the deadly January 6 attack on Congress; and through his surge to another presidential nomination despite facing 88 criminal charges and multimillion-dollar civil penalties and regularly admitting to authoritarian ambitions.Despite such support, Trump last month pushed McDaniel out of the RNC, to be replaced by his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump.Snyder said: “If we’re going to be putting people on the news who have participated in an attempt to overthrow the system, then we have to ask at the very beginning, ‘Why did you do that? Why is that legitimate?’ And we have to ask ourselves, ‘Why is it that we are taking this step to bring people into the middle of our discussion?’“So my two red lines are, you should be somebody who’s at least trying for the facts, and you shouldn’t be somebody who has taken part in an attempt to undo the system, which is what we’re talking about here. We shouldn’t mince words about it.” More

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      John Avlon targets New York Republicans in US House campaign: ‘They’re scared’

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      To John Avlon’s knowledge, “the National Republican Congressional Committee didn’t feel compelled to weigh in when any of the other candidates in the Democratic primary got in the race. But they did for me. And I think that’s because they’re scared.”The race is in New York’s first congressional district, a US House seat represented by a Republican, Nick LaLota, in an area that trended towards Joe Biden in 2020 and is thus one of many Democratic targets in the state this year. Avlon announced his run on Wednesday.“I think they thought they were going to have a relatively easy race, maybe facing the candidate who had been defeated before. But I think when they saw me getting in the race, they recognised that changes the calculus.”Avlon, 51, is no unknown quantity: he has written four books on politics and history, was for five years editor-in-chief of the Daily Beast and, until this month, was a contributor and anchor at CNN.The primary comes first. Nancy Goroff contested the seat on the eastern end of Long Island in 2020 and is in again. So is James Gaughran, a former state senator. There’s plenty of time for things to get testy but Gaughran welcomed Avlon to the race, telling Politico: “I’ve watched him a lot on CNN, and I’ve actually become a big fan. His advocacy – particularly pointing to the issues we have in this country of trying to save this country from Donald Trump, is spot on.”Avlon laughs. “That was very kind of Jimmy. And by the way … don’t we want to see more of that? Don’t we want to see more, ‘Let’s have a civil conversation, disagree where we disagree, find the areas where we agree, and be civil and constructive and not tear each other down in primaries, because it distracts the focus from the real work to be done, which is winning a general election.’”Republicans have not been quite so welcoming to Avlon. The NRCC said it looked forward “to litigating this smug, liberal hack’s past so voters can see just how left he and the rest of the modern Democrat [sic] party have become”.A LaLota spokesperson piled in, calling Avlon “a Manhattan elitist without any attachments to Long Island other than his summer home in the Hamptons” and claiming NY-1 “has a history of rejecting out-of-state and Manhattan elitists, from both sides of the aisle, who parachute into the district”.Avlon has homes in Sag Harbor and Manhattan. LaLota, a graduate of the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, lives in Amityville – outside his district.Avlon says: “I don’t think it’s remotely credible to attack me as radical far left. That’s the kind of cut-and-paste political attack that people realise is just fundamentally false. And I think the reality is that Nick LaLota has been a Donald Trump flunky, doing whatever he says rather than solving problems on behalf of people in Suffolk county. You know, he’s far too far right for this swing district.”Twice, Avlon mentions as a model the centrist Tom Suozzi’s Democratic win this month in NY-3, the seat formerly held by the notorious George Santos, the sixth House member ever expelled. Twice, Avlon cites as motivation farcical scenes in Washington DC in which Senate Republicans sank their own border and immigration deal, Trump having made clear he wants to campaign for president against the backdrop of a “border crisis”, real or confected.House Republicans have since refused to consider a foreign aid package without attendant border reform.Avlon says: “When LaLota attacked Senator James Lankford [of Oklahoma, the Republican negotiator] for trying to solve the border crisis with a bipartisan solution, he just revealed himself as part of the problem, not part of the solution of our politics. I want to be part of the solution.”To some Democrats, “centrist” has become a dirty word. Not to Avlon. He has distanced himself from No Labels, the group he co-founded in 2010, left a decade ago and now accuses of a “reckless gamble with democracy” in its flirtation with a presidential campaign. But the political centre is still where he wants to be, “particularly in swing districts [like NY-01] as a matter of practicality but I think also on principle.“If the larger goal is to win elections, we still need to find a way to reunite America. That’s a lofty goal. I’m not saying that’s why I’m running. But once we break this fever, we need to find a way to come together again. I do believe in the power of unifying leaders in divided times and the best American politics is that which focuses on what unites us, not what divides us.”Avlon’s third book, from 2017, was Washington’s Farewell: The Founding Father’s Warning to Future Generations. The historian Richard Norton Smith called it “a stake through the heart of political extremism”, a subject Avlon knows well, also having written Wingnuts: How the Lunatic Fringe is Hijacking America (2010) and presented Reality Check with John Avlon: Extremist Beat for CNN.“There’s a fundamental importance in building broader community and building a big tent,” he says. “The Democratic party is the last big tent party. The Democratic party, unfortunately, is the only functioning political party in America, because the other party is set to re-nominate a guy who tried to destroy our democracy, and is using election lies as a litmus test for loyalty. I don’t think you can underscore that enough.“But in the larger sense, democracy depends upon reasoning together. That requires common facts and identifying common ground and focusing on how you solve common problems. And that’s about putting country over party.”Avlon’s own marriage is bipartisan. His wife, Margaret Hoover, is a TV host and political commentator whose great-grandfather, Herbert Hoover, was the unlucky president hit by the Great Depression.Avlon is “proud of her and her family and the work she does to defend and extend his legacy. When Margaret and I are on air together or doing something onstage together, I hope it serves as a reminder that people can disagree agreeably – again, that partisan politics shouldn’t define every aspect of our lives, especially our personal lives. We can have honest disagreements, as long as it’s accompanied by an assumption of goodwill.”Avlon also started out working for a Republican: Rudy Giuliani, when he was mayor of New York City, long before he became Trump’s attack dog. As speechwriter and policy director, Avlon was there on 11 September 2001, when the towers fell.“September 11 is one of the defining moments in my life,” he says. “And I don’t think that’s unusual. I think New Yorkers understand how it defined our collective character. And I think some folks have slipped into a certain 9/11 amnesia. And I’ve warned against the wisdom of that, in a lot of segments, on air and written.“I’ll always be proud of the work we did in those days. My team and I were responsible for writing the eulogies for 343 firefighters, for police officers and Port Authority workers. And I think that memory, and the example they set by running into the fire, and the way we were briefly able to unite as a nation, in the aftermath, those are all core parts of my character and my experience.“And I think folks in Suffolk county will understand that, because they’ve experienced it themselves or they’ve been touched by it themselves. You don’t have to be retired police officer or firefighter to understand the importance of that day and its aftermath to our communities. It’s just part of who I am.” More

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      Dismay as Mehdi Hasan’s MSNBC and Peacock news show cancelled

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      The cable TV channel MSNBC and its sister network NBC’s Peacock streaming service is cancelling the weekend news show The Mehdi Hasan Show, with its eponymous outspoken host, people familiar with the decision have told the news website Semafor.The host and journalist Mehdi Hasan will instead become an on-camera analyst and guest host, the outlet reported on Thursday. The Peacock original show will be replaced by an additional hour of Ayman, the news program hosted by Ayman Mohyeldin.Staff were made aware of the news on Thursday morning, according to Semafor.The show, which was broadcast live on Sundays at 8pm US eastern time, covered national politics, current affairs and global news.The show’s reported cancellation sent shockwaves through his fanbase.The prominent human rights attorney Noura Erakat called the show “an oasis on air and more needed than ever”.Hasan was known for inviting guests on to his show and engaging with them in a fierce debate, often fact-checking and correcting them in real time. His line of questioning was often direct and unrelenting, refusing to let his guest avoid giving an answer.Some of his past guests included the former national security adviser John Bolton, whom he questioned about his vehement support for the Iraq war, launched by then president George W Bush in 2003, despite it resulting in an overwhelming number of civilian deaths.In September, Hasan interviewed the 2024 Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, whom he questioned about his position against affirmative action in US higher education, despite being a recipient of a scholarship for immigrants and their children.More recently, Hasan has been an outspoken critic of Israel’s bombardment and military assault of Gaza after the state declared war on the Palestinian territory’s controlling militant group, following Hamas’s mass murder attack on southern Israel on 7 October. Earlier in November, he interviewed Mark Regev, senior adviser to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel’s former ambassador to the UK, questioning Regev firmly on the high Palestinian civilian death toll, the Palestinian children that were killed by the Israeli military and and related matters.Hasan asked: “They’re people your government has killed. You’ve killed children. You accept that, right? Or do you deny that?”To which Regev replied: “No, I do not.”Along with Mohyeldin and NBC’s Ali Velshi, Hasan was among the few Muslim anchors in American television.Before what is reportedly the official cancellation of the Mehdi Hasan show, NBC faced criticism for temporarily taking these Muslim anchors off of the air in the midst of the war in Gaza. Although one of Hasan’s scheduled Thursday night episodes did not air, plans were scrapped for Ayman Mohyeldin to fill in for the host Joy Reid on her show, and Alicia Menendez filled in for Ali Velshi, NBC denied reports it was sidelining Muslim voices and that the move was purely coincidence.Hasan, a Briton of Indian-descent, moved to the US in 2015. He became a US citizen in 2020. Previously, Hasan was a senior columnist at the Intercept, a regular contributor to the Guardian and a presenter for Al Jazeera English.Hasan is a graduate of the University of Oxford, where he studied philosophy, politics and economics. There, he memorably debated the subject of Islam and defended that it was a peaceful religion. The video, posted on the Oxford Union YouTube channel has over 10m views.Neither Hasan nor NBC immediately responded to a request for comment. More

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      Network of Lies review: Brian Stelter on Fox News, Trump and Dominion

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      This week, Rupert Murdoch formally stepped down as the chairman of News Corp. At the annual shareholder’s meeting, the 92-year-old media mogul inveighed against the “suppression of debate by an intolerant elite who regard differing opinions as anathema”. He also passed the baton to Lachlan Murdoch, his 52-year-old son, “a believer in the social purpose of journalism”.Murdoch also told those assembled that “humanity has a high destiny”. Unmentioned: how Fox News’s coverage of the 2020 election led to its shelling out of hundreds of millions to settle a defamation lawsuit from Dominion Voting Systems, or how other suits continue.Five days after the election, insisting Donald Trump could not have lost to Joe Biden – as he clearly did – Maria Bartiromo defied management to become “the first Fox host to utter the name ‘Dominion’”, writes Brian Stelter, a veteran Fox-watcher and former CNN host. “All gassed up on rage and righteousness, [Bartiromo] heaped shame onto the network and spurred a $787.5m settlement payment.”Bartiromo popularized the Trump aide Sidney Powell and her special brand of insanity. Their enthusiasm became fatally contagious. January 6 and the insurrection followed. Two and a half years later, Bartiromo is still on the air. Powell is a professional defendant. Last month, she pleaded guilty in Fulton county, Georgia, to six counts of misdemeanor election interference and agreed to six years of probation. She still faces potential civil liability and legal sanction.“What Bartiromo began on a Sunday morning in November … destroyed America’s sense of a shared reality about the 2020 election,” Stelter laments. “The consequences will be felt for years to come.”In the political sphere, Trump shrugs off 91 criminal charges and assorted civil threats to dominate the Republican primary, focusing on retribution and weaponizing the justice department and FBI should he return to power.With less than a year before the 2024 election, Stelter once again focuses on the Murdochs’ flagship operation. Like his previous book from 2020, Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth, Network of Lies offers a readable and engrossing deep dive into the rightwing juggernaut paid for by the Murdochs and built by the late, disgraced Roger Ailes.Now a podcast host and consulting producer to The Morning Show, an Apple TV drama, Stelter also has journalistic chops earned at the New York Times. He wades through court filings and paperwork from the Dominion litigation, talks to sources close to Fox and the Murdochs, and offers insight into the firing of Tucker Carlson, the dominant, far-right prime-time host who was suddenly ditched in April. Stelter’s book is subtitled The Epic Saga of Fox News, Donald Trump, and the Battle for American Democracy. He overstates, but not by much.Unlike Bartiromo, Carlson didn’t drink the Kool-Aid. He was sly and calculated, not crazy.“Carlson privately thought Powell’s ‘software shit’ was ‘absurd’,” Stelter writes about the idea that voting machines were outlandishly rigged. “He worriedly speculated that ‘half our viewers have seen the Maria clip’, and he wanted to push back on it.” But Carlson didn’t push back hard enough. He went with the flow.He now peddles his wares on what used to be Twitter, broadcasts from a basement, and hangs out with Trump at UFC. For a guy once known for wearing bow ties, it’s a transformation. Then again, Carlson also prided himself on his knowledge of how white guys ought to fight, an admission in a text message, revealed by the Dominion suit, that earned the ire of the Fox board and the Murdochs.In Stelter’s telling, Fox “A-listers” received a heads-up on what discovery in the Dominion case would reveal.“‘They’re going to call us hypocrites,’ an exec warned.” Plaintiffs would juxtapose Fox’s public message against its internal doubts about voter fraud claims. “It was likened to ‘a seven-layer cake of shit’,” Stelter writes.The miscalculation by Fox’s legal team is now legend. It led Murdoch to believe Dominion would cost him $50m. But even Murdoch came close to concluding it was “unarguable that high-profile Fox voices” fed the “big lie”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionStelter captures the Murdochs’ struggle to make money, keep their audience happy and avoid liability. It is a near-impossible task. The beast must be fed. There is always someone or something out there waiting to cater to Trump’s base if Fox won’t. After the 2020 election, Trump forced Fox to compete with One America News and Newsmax for his attention and his followers’ devotion.The Murdochs’ pivot toward Ron DeSantis as their Republican candidate of choice won’t be forgotten soon, at least not by voters during the GOP primary. Despite being assiduously courted by Fox to appear at the first debate, which it sponsored, Trump smirkingly and wisely declined to show. Fox still covers Trump’s events – until he plugs Carlson, the defenestrated star.Judging by the polls, none of this has hurt Trump’s hopes. He laps the pack while DeSantis stagnates, Nikki Haley threatening to take second place. At the same time, some polling shows Trump ahead of Joe Biden or competitive in battleground states and leading in the electoral college. For now, Fox needs him more than he needs Fox.In that spirit of “social purpose” reporting lauded by his dad, Lachlan Murdoch will be left to navigate a defamation action brought by Smartmatic, another voting machine company, and, among other cases, a suit filed by Ray Epps, an ex-marine who pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges for his role in the January 6 insurrection but became the focus of conspiracy theorists. Sating the appetites of the 45th president and his rightwing base never comes cheap.In the Smartmatic litigation, Fox tried to subpoena George Soros, the bete noire of the right. It lost, but conspiracy theories die hard. US democracy remains fragile, the national divide seemingly unbridgeable. Expect little to change at Fox. The show must go on.
      Network of Lies is published in the US by Simon & Schuster More