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      Former Fox News politics editor says network stoked ‘paranoia and hatred’

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      Former Fox News politics editor says network stoked ‘paranoia and hatred’Chris Stirewalter, who was forced out after Donald Trump’s electoral defeat, says Fox failed its viewers with 2020 election coverage A former Fox News politics editor who was forced out of the conservative television network shortly after its opinions hosts’ preferred candidate Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential race has said that the channel failed its viewers with its election coverage.In his upcoming memoir, Chris Stirewalt says Fox News resigned its duty to prepare Trump followers for the possibility that he would lose, instead stoking the “black-helicopter-level paranoia and hatred” which fuels white supremacist groups but translates into big ratings.Has the love affair between Trump and Fox News gone sour?Read moreStirewalt’s Broken News: Why the Media Rage Machines Divides America and How to Fight Back also reiterates the belief held by many that Fox fired him because he always defended – even on-air – his team’s decision to declare Joe Biden the winner of Arizona’s 2020 electoral college votes on the same night that polls closed.The call enraged Trump, prompting the incumbent president and his allies to mount a pressure campaign aimed at getting Fox to retract the decision while that camp pushed forth lies that electoral fraudsters in other battleground states were stealing the election for Biden.The New York Times obtained and reported on an advance copy of the book.Fox officials have previously said that Stirewalt’s departure from the network in early 2021 was simply a layoff amid a broader company restructuring, and they have noted that the employee who was actually in charge of the desk that made the Arizona call during that fateful hour remains at the company.A statement from the network Monday also dismissed its former editor’s other recollections about his time at Fox News by saying, “Chris Stirewalt’s endless attempts at regaining relevance know no bounds.”Nonetheless, in his memoir, Stirewalt maintains that Fox News’s alliance with Trump and other Republican political candidates has nothing to do with ideology. Instead it has everything to do with delivering ratings and fattening profits, without caring that its top-rated host, Tucker Carlson, endorses conspiracy theories that radicalize violent, far-right white supremacists, including ones who staged the deadly January 6 Capitol attack.“Even in the four years since the previous presidential election, Fox viewers had become even more accustomed to flattery and less willing to hear news that challenged their expectation,” Stirewalt’s memoir adds.That was even the case when viewers’ expectations amounted to “black-helicopter-level paranoia and hatred”, according to the memoir.Stirewalt says his team’s decision to accurately project on election night that Trump had lost Arizona to Biden in front of an audience who had been thirsting for the Republican incumbent to cruise to victory over his Democratic challenger “came as a terrible shock to their system”. The memoir likens that call to “serving up green beans to viewers who had been spoon-fed ice-cream sundaes for years”.Stirewalt also expresses disbelief that Carlson’s viewers portray him as bravely discussing topics that are taboo to the mainstream when – according to the ousted editor – he is simply regurgitating the things his audience already believes.“Carlson is rich and famous, yet he regularly rails about the ‘big, legacy media outlets’,” the memoir argues. “Somehow, nobody even giggles.“It does not take any kind of journalistic courage to pump out night after night exactly what your audience wants to hear.”Among the conspiracy theories that Carlson has espoused is the racist notion that white Americans, faced with declining birthrates, are being deliberately replaced through immigration. He suddenly went quiet on that idea after a white man who shot 10 Black people to death at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, cited it as his motivation.Stirewalt’s departure from Fox News – where he spent about 11 years – happened less than two weeks after a mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol in a desperate attempt to prevent the congressional certification of his defeat to Biden. A bipartisan Senate report linked at least seven deaths to that attack.Since then, Stirewalt has been vocally critical of Fox News and testified before the congressional committee investigating the Capitol attack, telling that panel he knew the Arizona call would be consequential because it involved a true battleground state on which Trump’s chances for victory depended.TopicsFox NewsTV newsTelevision industryUS television industryUS elections 2020US politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Jared Kushner: I stopped Trump attacking Murdoch in 2015

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      Jared Kushner: I stopped Trump attacking Murdoch in 2015In forthcoming memoir, obtained by the Guardian, former adviser claims to have made hugely consequential intervention In a forthcoming memoir, Jared Kushner says he personally intervened to stop Donald Trump attacking Rupert Murdoch in response to the media mogul’s criticism, at the outset of Trump’s move into politics in 2015.Trump said sorry to Cruz for 2016 insults, Paul Manafort says in new bookRead moreIn the book, Breaking History, Kushner writes: “Trump called me. He’d clearly had enough. ‘This guy’s no good. And I’m going to tweet it.’“‘Please, you’re in a Republican primary,’ I said, hoping he wasn’t about to post a negative tweet aimed at the most powerful man in conservative media. ‘You don’t need to get on the wrong side of Rupert. Give me a couple of hours to fix it.’”Kushner says he fixed it. If his claim is true, he could be seen to have made a hugely consequential intervention in modern US history.Murdoch’s support, chiefly through Fox News, did much to boost Trump to victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016. Despite persistent reports of friction between the two men, Murdoch supported Trump through four tumultuous years in power which culminated in Trump’s refusal to admit defeat and the deadly attack on Congress.The Guardian obtained a copy of Kushner’s book, which will be published next month.The book lands at a time when Murdoch’s newspapers and to some extent Fox News are widely seen to be pulling away from Trump, amid congressional hearings into his election subversion and the January 6 attack, speculation about criminal charges and as he prepares another White House run.In his book, Trump’s son-in-law, who became a senior White House adviser, describes a friendship with Murdoch built on time on Murdoch’s yacht and at Bono’s house in France, watching the U2 frontman sing with Bob Geldof and Billy Joel. Kushner also describes how Wendi Murdoch, Rupert Murdoch’s third wife, helped get him back with Ivanka Trump after a breakup.Kushner claims to have convinced Murdoch to support Trump in 2015.Trump and Murdoch were not close before Trump entered politics. But in July 2015, after Trump launched his explosive campaign for the Republican presidential nomination with a racist rant about Mexicans, the Fox News owner tweeted: “When is Donald Trump going to stop embarrassing the whole country?”A week later, the New York Times described Murdoch disparaging Trump. Trump was furious and threatened to tweet. Kushner was not then an official adviser to his father-in-law but he writes: “I called Rupert and told him I had to see him.“‘Rupert, I think he could win,’ I said, as we sat in his office. ‘You guys agree on a lot of the issues. You want smaller government. You want lower taxes. You want stronger borders.’“Rupert listened quizzically, like he couldn’t imagine that Trump was actually serious about running. The next day, he called me and said, ‘I’ve looked at this and maybe I was misjudging it. He actually does have a real following. It does seem like he’s very popular, like he can really be a kingmaker in the Republican primary with the way he is playing it. What does Donald want?’“‘He wants to be president,’ I responded.“‘No, what does he really want?’ he asked again.“‘Look, he doesn’t need a nicer plane,’ I said. ‘He’s got a beautiful plane. He doesn’t need a nicer house. He doesn’t need anything. He’s tired of watching politicians screw up the country, and he thinks he could do a better job.’“‘Interesting,’ Rupert said.“We had a truce, for the time being.”Kushner also writes about Trump’s clashes with Fox News during the 2016 campaign, including a clash with the anchor Megyn Kelly. Kushner says he agreed a deal with Roger Ailes, then in charge of Fox News, for a donation of $5m to a veterans’ organisation of Trump’s choice, in return for Trump choosing not to skip a debate.Murdoch rejected the deal, Kushner writes, saying if he took it he would have to “pay everyone to show up to debates”.Kushner also describes how Murdoch helped shape his view of why the US needed Trump. At a rally in Springfield, Illinois in November 2015, Kushner was reminded “of a book that Rupert Murdoch had given me months earlier: Charles Murray’s Coming Apart, which makes a case that over the last 50 years America has divided into upper and lower classes that live apart from each other, geographically and culturally”.Trump, Kushner writes, appealed to the “forgotten and disenfranchised”. For his son-in-law rally in Illinois “was a wake-up call”.Is Murdoch tiring of Trump? Mogul’s print titles dump the ex-presidentRead moreKushner’s version of another call with Murdoch, on election night 2020, has been widely reported. He says Murdoch told him Fox News’s call of Trump’s defeat by Joe Biden in Arizona, a decision which infuriated the president and his advisers, was “ironclad – not even close”.Arizona played a central role in Trump’s attempt to overturn the election through lies about voter fraud. Fox News is now the subject of a $1.6bn defamation suit from a maker of voting machines, over conspiracy theories pushed by Trump and his allies and repeated on the network.Fox News has said it is “confident we will prevail as 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”.TopicsBooksJared KushnerDonald TrumpRupert MurdochRepublicansUS politicsPolitics booksnewsReuse this content More

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      Is Murdoch tiring of Trump? Mogul’s print titles dump the ex-president

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      Is Murdoch tiring of Trump? Mogul’s print titles dump the ex-president Tabloid with long relationship with former president blasts him over Capitol attack, saying he is unworthy to be elected againRupert Murdoch, hitherto one of Donald Trump’s most loyal media messengers, appears to have turned on the former president.‘US democracy will not survive for long’: how January 6 hearings plot a roadmap to autocracyRead moreUS media circles were rocked this weekend after the New York Post issued an excoriating editorial indictment of Trump’s failure to stop the attack on the US Capitol on 6 January 2021.The editorial, in a tabloid owned by Murdoch since 1976, began: “As his followers stormed the Capitol, calling for his vice-president to be hanged, President Donald Trump sat in his private dining room, watching TV, doing nothing. For three hours, seven minutes.”Trump’s only focus, the Post said, was to block the peaceful transfer of power.“As a matter of principle, as a matter of character, Trump has proven himself unworthy to be this country’s chief executive again.”The Wall Street Journal, another Murdoch paper, issued a similar critique in which it said evidence before the House January 6 committee was a reminder that “Trump betrayed his supporters”.Trump, the Journal said, took an oath to defend the constitution and had an obligation to protect the Capitol from the mob he told to march there, knowing it was armed.“He refused. He didn’t call the military to send help. He didn’t call [Mike] Pence to check on the safety of his loyal [vice-president]. Instead he fed the mob’s anger and let the riot play out.”Trump had “shown not an iota of regret”, the Journal said, adding: “Character is revealed in a crisis, and Mr Pence passed his January 6 trial. Mr Trump utterly failed his.”The editorials were only the latest salvos from the big guns of Murdochian conservatism.“The person who owns January 6 is Donald Trump,” the Journal said in June.“Look forward!” it urged readers. “The 2024 field is rich. You have Florida governor Ron DeSantis, former secretary of state Mike Pompeo, former UN ambassador Nikki Haley … the list goes on. All candidates who embrace conservative policies … Unsubscribe from Trump’s daily emails begging for money. Then pick your favorite from a new crop of conservatives. Look to 2022, and 2024, and a new era. Let’s make America sane again.”Columnists issued similar calls.“Let go of the anvil that, in the most buoyant waters imaginable, will sink you to the bottom of the sea,” Peggy Noonan wrote in the Journal.In the Post, Michael Goodwin said Trump’s “old feuds and grievances already sound stale and by 2024 they are not likely to inspire the hope and confidence America desperately needs”.Last year, Murdoch himself said conservatives must play an active role in political debate, “but that will not happen if President Trump stays focused on the past”.There are also signs that Murdoch’s most powerful media property, Fox News, is beginning to change its stance. On Friday, Fox News elected not to broadcast a Trump rally in Arizona during which a state endorsement met with boos. Instead, Fox News broadcast an interview with DeSantis.Observers believe Murdoch, 91, may be tiring of Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen, which has both kept Trump in the spotlight and denied him the ceremonial status usually extended to ex-presidents.Murdoch outlets have faced legal repercussions for repeating Trump’s lie. A judge in Delaware recently said Fox Corp could be sued by Dominion Voting Systems for broadcasting conspiracy theories related to the 2020 election.Rupert Murdoch and his son Lachlan are named in the $1.6bn suit, for allegedly acting with “actual malice” in allowing Fox News to broadcast claims the election was rigged. The judge, Eric Davis, cited reports that the elder Murdoch privately said Trump lost the election.Fox News says it is “confident we will prevail as 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.”A friendship of convenienceThe relationship between Murdoch and Trump has long been regarded as one of convenience. Thirty years ago, Trump often used the New York Post in his divorce battle with Ivana Trump, his first wife who died this month. As described by the Trump ally Roger Stone, to the New York Times, Trump considered the Page Six column “very important to his rising stature in New York City and branding efforts”.But a year before Trump was elected, in 2015, the Times reported that Murdoch thought him a “phony”.After Trump mocked the senator and former Republican presidential nominee John McCain, Murdoch wrote on Twitter: “When is Donald Trump going to stop embarrassing his friends, let alone the whole country?”The Journal called Trump a “catastrophe” and declared: “Trump is toast.” But by the time Trump was elected in 2016, he and Murdoch had cemented a friendship of convenience.Trump’s attempted coup continues – even after January 6 hearings are over for now | Robert ReichRead moreMurdoch was able to bypass White House aides to reach the president. Trump reportedly called Murdoch for reassurance Fox News would not be affected by a deal to sell 21st Century Fox to Disney.Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump holidayed on Murdoch’s 184ft yacht. Ivanka became a trustee for Murdoch and Wendi Deng’s twin daughters.The latest editorials may not change the views of Fox News primetime hosts. Sean Hannity, for one, has described the House January 6 hearings as an “obsessive partisan anti-Trump smear” and claimed they have not “establish[ed] a criminal case or reveal[ed] new damning evidence … as they have promised”.But the print titles seem to be moving on. Quoting “someone in the Murdoch orbit”, Vanity Fair said last month the media baron was “a pragmatic guy”.“He knows better than anybody how to read political tea leaves. It’s fairly self-evident that quite a few people in the firmament have begun to challenge the previously supported collective viewpoint about Trump. It’s understood now that the gloves are off. As [Trump] lashes out, it just makes it easier for people to hit back.”TopicsRupert MurdochDonald TrumpUS politicsRepublicansUS press and publishingWall Street JournalNew York PostfeaturesReuse this content More

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      As the US watched the January 6 hearing, Fox News showed outrage – at Biden getting Covid

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      As the US watched the January 6 hearing, Fox News showed outrage – at Biden getting CovidFox News’ primetime stars chided Biden for contracting the virus they say he alleged couldn’t be caught with a vaccine On Thursday night as the Congressional hearings into the January 6 Capitol riot drew to a close, Tucker Carlson directed his outrage at a president he felt had lied and was not being held accountable for falsehoods that shook popular faith in the American democratic system. But he wasn’t talking about Donald Trump inciting rioters to storm the Capitol. He was talking about Joe Biden getting Covid.Whilemillions of people last night tuned into America’s other TV news channels and heard testimony about what Trump did, or rather did not do, during the hours when the rioters stormed the Capitol, Fox News viewers saw the network’s primetime stars Carlson and Sean Hannity chide the “twice jabbed, double-boosted” president for contracting the virus they say he alleged couldn’t be caught with a vaccine.Carlson opened his hour-long show with a spirited takedown of Biden, scolding him for spreading the virus during his Middle East trip and White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre for dismissing the question of where the president might have contracted the virus. Carson joked about the possibility of him losing his sense of smell, a much-discussed Covid symptom, denying the president the pleasure of sniffing the heads of women and girls – suspect past behavior that Biden had been singled out for in the wake of the #MeToo movement.Carson further took issue with the “proof of life” pictures and video the White House posted of Biden in isolation at work, and delighted in pointing out how the president wasn’t wearing a mask in any of them. He had Yale School of Public Health epidemiologist Harvey Risch on the show to tout ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine as far more effective defenses against Covid – despite considerable medical assertions to the contrary. “Doctors are more afraid of what happens if they go outside the permitted messaging,” Risch said.“Oh man, I feel like we’re losing a lot right now,” Carlson replied. “Thank you for your bravery and your commitment to actual science.”Science, and the left’s supposed efforts to monopolize it, was a consistent theme on both Carlson’s and Hannity’s shows. Next he questioned NBC News’ decision to air a report about women who chose to sterilize themselves in reaction to the reversal of Roe. And while it was clear that these women were making that decision as to bypass more conventional contraception options that the supreme court ruling has rendered illegal, Carson nonetheless saw this as the left pivoting from defending abortion to attacking fertility – a rebellion against family values that was of a piece with a larger corporate agenda. “Civilizational suicide” was the phrase he used to sum it all up.Still, the radio host Dana Loesch was quick to dismiss the decision of these women as no great loss. “Republicans will go out and have more babies,” she said, “How about that.”It wasn’t until about halfway through the show that Carson acknowledged that a significant portion of the country might be watching something else – not that he felt they especially needed to. “You all know what happened,” he said. “Some guy in Viking horns on mushrooms wandered around and made weird noises, and that was kind of it.” He put down the hearings as “more lifestyle liberal narcissism. That’s really the key to everything”.The show reached peak irony when Missouri Senator Josh Hawley appeared to discuss a Fox News story about undocumented Americans gaining access to free flights by presenting their arrest warrants as identification. Of course at around the same time Hawley was grandstanding on Fox News, the January 6 committee was presenting footage of him running from a pro-Trump mob he also egged on – footage that quickly made him a social media meme.“So much for Joe Biden and Doctor Fauci’s science,” snarled Hannity, who underscored Biden’s Covid reveal with an embarrassing picture of the president shrouding his whole face behind a mask. But unlike Carson, he actually spent quite a bit of airtime acknowledging the January 6 hearings – and debunking them as a complete waste of time. “Unsurprisingly, they did not establish a criminal case or reveal new, damning or incriminating evidence of President Trump as they promised they would,” said Hannity – who, of course, is extremely friendly with and a fierce defender of the former president. “A perfect example of people overpromising and not delivering. Kind of like the Trump-Russia collusion.”He skewered the committee for not calling the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, or Washington DC Mayor Muriel Bowser to testify about the lack of security at the Capitol while suggesting a slew of crude reinforcements that might’ve kept the mob at bay. Hannity raged at the committee for bringing in “hearsay witnesses” and presenting evidence that fit a predetermined, anti-Trump narrative. And then heasked why no Secret Service agents were called to testify, conveniently leaving out the part where they submitted a single text message to the committee after deleting all their exchanges from that day.But Hannity’s main takeaway was that the Capitol riots, while bad, paled in comparison to the Black Lives Matter protests that overwhelmed American cities during “the summer of 2020”. He argued that more needed to be done to avoid a repeat of the fiery violence that “peaceful protestors” had inflicted on police, businesses and civic institutions while showing clips of Schumer, Cory Booker, Kamala Harris and other prominent Democrats stoking that rage as Trump stands accused of doing. “Equal justice is dead in this country right now,” fumed former Trump aide Stephen Miller. “What we have is third-world justice.” TopicsJanuary 6 hearingsUS Capitol attackUS politicsFox NewsUS television industryanalysisReuse this content More

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      Fox and friends confront billion-dollar US lawsuits over election fraud claims

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      Fox and friends confront billion-dollar US lawsuits over election fraud claims Rightwing networks Fox News, OAN and Newsmax could be found liable in cases brought by voting machine company DominionIn the months following the 2020 US presidential election, rightwing TV news in America was a wild west, an apparently lawless free-for-all where conspiracy theories about voting machines, ballot-stuffed suitcases and dead Venezuelan leaders were repeated to viewers around the clock.There seemed to be little consequence for peddling the most outrageous ideas on primetime.But now, unfortunately for Fox News, One America News Network (OAN), and Newsmax, it turns out that this brave, new world wasn’t free from legal jurisdiction – with the three networks now facing billion-dollar lawsuits as a result of their baseless accusations.Group aims to strip Fox News of ad revenue over ‘fueling next insurrection’Read moreIn June, Dominion Voting Systems, which provided voting machines to 28 states, was given the go-ahead to sue Fox Corp, the parent company of Fox News, in a case that could draw Rupert Murdoch and his son, Lachlan, into the spotlight.In the $1.6bn lawsuit, Dominion accuses Fox Corp, and the Murdochs specifically, of allowing Fox News to amplify false claims that the voting company had rigged the election for Joe Biden.Fox Corp had attempted to have the suit dismissed, but a Delaware judge said Dominion had shown adequate evidence for the suit to proceed. Dominion is already suing Fox News, as well as OAN and Newsmax.“These allegations support a reasonable inference that Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch either knew Dominion had not manipulated the election or at least recklessly disregarded the truth when they allegedly caused Fox News to propagate its claims about Dominion,” Judge Eric Davis said.Davis’s ruling is not a guarantee that Fox will be found liable. But the judge made it clear that this isn’t some frivolous attempt by Dominion – and media and legal experts think Fox could be in real trouble.“Dominion has a very strong case against Fox News – and against OAN for that matter,” said Ciara Torres-Spelliscy, a professor who teaches constitutional law at Stetson University and a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan law and policy institute.“The reason Dominion is suing is because Fox and other rightwing news outlets repeated vicious lies that Dominion’s voting machines stole the 2020 election from Trump for Biden. But all of these conspiracy theories about Dominion’s machines were just pure bunk, and Fox as a news organization should have known that and not given this aspect of the big lie a megaphone.”“What’s particularly bad for Fox is [that] Dominion asked them to stop and correct the record in real time, and Fox persisted in spreading misrepresentations about the voting machine company.”Indeed, in his ruling, Davis noted that “other newspapers under Rupert Murdoch’s control, including the Wall Street Journal and New York Post, condemned President Trump’s claims and urged him to concede defeat”.In a statement, a Fox News spokesperson said: “Limiting the ability of the press to report freely on the American election process stands in stark contrast to the liberties on which this nation was founded, and we are confident we will prevail in this case, as the first amendment is the foundation of our democracy and freedom of the press must be protected.”A potential precedent in the Dominion v Fox case could be found in a recent case involving Sarah Palin, who sued the New York Times. Palin claimed the newspaper maliciously damaged her reputation by erroneously linking her campaign rhetoric to a mass shooting. In February a jury sided with the Times, finding that a Times employee had not acted with “actual malice” against a public figure or with “reckless disregard” for the truth – the criteria necessary to prove defamation.But the Times victory shouldn’t give Fox too much hope, said Torres-Spelliscy.“In the Palin case, the New York Times quickly corrected the mistake about Palin that had been added while an article was edited,” Torres-Spelliscy said.“By contrast Fox News kept up the bad behavior and repeatedly told myths about Dominion’s voting machines. This is likely why judges in several of these Dominion defamation cases have not dismissed them.”Dominion isn’t the only company seeking damages from Fox and its contemporaries.Smartmatic, an election software company which provided voting software to precisely one county in the 2020 election but found itself subjected to claims that it was founded “for the specific purpose of fixing elections” by associates of Hugo Chavez, the former president of Venezuela who died in 2013, is suing Fox Corp, Fox News and associates for $2.7bn.Still, Fox News is the most-watched and arguably most influential cable news channel in the US, and is probably too big to fail.But that isn’t the case for the smaller rightwing networks OAN and Newsmax, which are also both being sued by Dominion and Smartmatic – in June, a Delaware judge refused Newsmax’s motion to have the Dominion case dismissed, but did not weigh on whether Newsmax was innocent or guilty.“I think OAN is going to be wiped out from the litigation costs. Forget about any judgment,” said Angelo Carusone, president and chief executive of Media Matters for America, which monitors rightwing media.Carusone pointed out that OAN is already struggling to survive, after it was dropped by the DirecTV cable company – which was reportedly responsible for 90% of OAN’s revenue – in April.“We’ve started seeing, already, them scaling back programming, they’ve been laying off staff, they’ve been cutting back the number of programs. So it’s pretty clear that they don’t have sufficient resources to weather a protracted litigation.”Newsmax, which is still carried by DirecTV, is “relatively cash flush” in comparison to OAN, Carusone said – enough to survive a trial, if not to pay the billions of dollars Dominion and Smartmatic are seeking.In a statement, Newsmax said it had “reported on allegations made by President Trump and his surrogates and at no time did we report these allegations were true. We also reported on critics of the Trump claims”.It added: “The Dominion suit is an assault on a free press and endangers all press outlets if it were to prevail.”OAN did not respond to a request for comment.As for Fox, the most significant thing could be if the Murdochs are subjected to discovery – where they and Fox could be forced to hand over documents potentially including communications data – as part of the legal process, Carusone said.Text messages obtained by the January 6 commission have already revealed that there was communication between Fox News hosts and White House officials regarding the insurrection – and it seems unlikely that is the only thing that was discussed.“I think once you start to pull the discovery material, what you’re going to find is there was a lot of communication between the Trump people both internally and externally about pushing very specific lies and narratives,” Carusone said.While Fox is more financially comfortable than OAN and NewsMax, it is not invulnerable. Fox News is due to renegotiate its contracts with cable providers at the end of this year, and Carusone said cable companies could use the lawsuit to drive down prices.The Dominion and Smartmatic cases are likely to drag on for some time, and it remains to be seen how Fox News, OAN and NewsMax will react.As for the news channels’ conspiratorial claims of election fraud, at least that is one thing that has already been settled.The courts, the Department of justice, election officials have investigated and dismissed the accusations, as has the US Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.“The November 3 election was the most secure in American history,” the agency said in a statement in 2020.“While we know there are many unfounded claims and opportunities for misinformation about the process of our elections, we can assure you we have the utmost confidence in the security and integrity of our elections, and you should too.”William Barr, Trump’s attorney general, put it in rather less sophisticated terms.The claims of election interference, Barr told the January 6 committee, were “bullshit”.TopicsFox NewsUS politicsRepublicans21st Century FoxUS television industryTelevision industryUS press and publishingnewsReuse this content More

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

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

      As America watched Capitol attack testimony, Fox News gave an alternate reality

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      As America watched Capitol attack testimony, Fox News gave an alternate realityTucker Carlson leads January 6 counter-programming, petulantly refusing to show the hearing: ‘We’re not playing along’ The millions of people who tuned into America’s main television channels on Thursday heard how the January 6 insurrection was “the culmination of an attempted coup”, a “siege” where violent Trump supporters mercilessly attacked police, causing politicians and staffers to run for their lives.On the Fox News channel, however, there was a different take on the historic congressional hearings exploring the attack on the Capitol in Washington DC.The deadly riot was, according to the channel’s primetime host Tucker Carlson, “an outbreak of mob violence, a forgettably minor outbreak by recent standards, that took place more than a year and a half ago”.January 6 hearing: Trump was at heart of plot that led to ‘attempted coup’Read moreThis was the alternate reality that Carlson, Fox News’ most-watched host, presented as he opened his hour-long show. He followed it up with a boast: the rightwing network would not be covering one of the most consequential political hearings in recent American history.“The whole thing is insulting,” Carlson said of the primetime House subcommittee hearing on the insurrection, which revealed devastating new details on how Donald Trump appeared to support the assassination of his vice-president and how Trump’s supporters created a “war zone” outside the Capitol.“In fact, it’s deranged. And we’re not playing along. This is the only hour on an American news channel that will not be carrying their propaganda live.“They are lying and we are not going to help them do it.”What followed instead was an hour of obfuscation, misdirection and what-about-ism, as Carlson, aided by a selection of guests that included one man who was fired from the Trump administration after he spoke at a conference attended by white nationalists.Carlson’s first guest was Jason Whitlock, host of Fearless. Whitlock immediately parroted what was to become the line of the night.“There was no insurrection,” Whitlock said. “There was a riot, a small one, that got a little bit out of hand.”The scenes broadcast on other TV channels made this claim laughable. Non-Fox News viewers were watching previously unseen footage which showed police officers being kicked and beaten, and people carrying Trump 2020 flags breaking into the Capitol building.Fox News viewers weren’t seeing those.“If something noteworthy happens we will bring it to you immediately,” Carlson had said during his opening monologue.It turned out that Carlson has an unusual definition of noteworthy, given that as the committee was detailing how Trump, on hearing that his supporters were chanting that Mike Pence should be hung, said: “Maybe our supporters have the right idea. Mike Pence deserves it,” Carlson was merrily chatting with Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democratic representative who was railing against Congress passing a $40bn aid bill for Ukraine.Gabbard – who has kept a relatively low profile since she gave a spirited defense of Vladimir Putin days before the Russian leader ordered the invasion of Ukraine – seemed happy to join Carlson in downplaying what was taking place, insisting that Congress should be focussing on other matters.Carlson happily took up that theme. Several times he opined on why Congress was holding this two-hour hearing when gas prices have gone up, there are drug deaths, and, most memorably: “this country has never in its history been closer to a nuclear war”.Through the first half of Carlson’s show, two tactics emerged: downplay the insurrection, and complain that the House wanted to investigate it. As he entered the home stretch, Carlson came up with a new, conspiracy-minded, trope.“The point is not to get to the truth,” he said of the hearing. “It’s to hide the truth.”According to the Fox News host, the purpose of the commission is to provide a pretext “for the Democratic party to declare war against millions of American citizens who oppose their agenda”.To support his point, such as it was, Carlson – finally – showed some of the hearing.“Liz Cheney is helping them,” he said. “Here she is just moments ago screeching about disinformation.”Fox News cut to a clip of Cheney speaking in an extremely measured tone about how Trump attempted to overturn the result of the 2020 election through a misinformation campaign – a campaign that Cheney said “provoked the violence on January 6”.“She is off on another planet,” Carlson said. “Why is Liz Cheney abetting the destruction of America’s civil liberties, and our sacred norms?”Fox News typically has more than 3m viewers in the 8pm hour, but announced earlier this week that it would not air the hearing, instead relegating coverage to the Fox Business channel, which averages fewer than 100,000 viewers.The channel stuck true to its boycott promise. Occasionally while Carlson talked a video stream of the committee would appear in a little soundless box, floating off to the right of the host’s head, but that was largely it.While the hearing rolled on, Carlson rattled through his guests. A man running as a Republican for Congress said people at the Capitol had legitimate grievances over election fraud, before conceding that things became “a little bit dicey”. Another guest made vague claims about the entire insurrection being cooked up by the FBI.Carlson’s final interviewee was Darren Beattie, a rightwing activist who was fired as a Trump speechwriter after it emerged he had attended a conference in 2016 alongside a prominent white nationalist.Beattie’s take – nodded along to by Carlson – was that “the feds” were responsible for the riot on January 6.“It’s a clear hoax, we know it happened.”Carlson might well have nodded. Last year he hosted a documentary, Patriot Purge, about the January 6 attack which floated the conspiracy theory that violence that day was instigated by leftwing activists. Carlson has also suggested FBI operatives organized the attack on the Capitol.As Carlson praised Beattie’s reporting, courage and general standing as a person, it brought to mind something Carlson had said earlier, after he had spent several minutes criticizing the hearing with Charlie Hurt, a writer for the right-wing Washington Times newspaper.“You and I entered journalism about the same time, about 30 years ago,” Carlson told Hurt.“It seemed honorable then. It seems really shameful now.”TopicsFox NewsUS Capitol attackUS politicsUS television industrynewsReuse this content More

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      in Elections

      US networks to air January 6 hearings – but Fox News sticks with Tucker Carlson

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      US networks to air January 6 hearings – but Fox News sticks with Tucker CarlsonPublic hearings by House committee investigating Capitol attack will be broadcast live on all main TV networks except Fox News The public hearings by the House committee investigation into the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol, which start on Thursday, will be broadcast live by all main TV networks and cable channels in America bar one – Fox News.The historic proceedings kick off at 8pm New York time, and in Watergate style will attract near-blanket live coverage on ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC and more. By contrast, the most-watched TV news channel, Fox News, will stick with its primetime show, Tucker Carlson Tonight.The decision pits Carlson’s introductory monologue against the opening remarks of the January 6 committee’s chairman, Bennie Thompson, as the latter outlines how Donald Trump tried to undermine the 2020 election in order to hang on to power. Carlson has used his platform consistently to belittle the investigation and to downplay the significance of the Capitol attack that led to the deaths of seven people and forced the then vice-president, Mike Pence, to flee a violent mob.On the anniversary of the attacks, Carlson said on air that the insurrection “barely rates as a footnote”. He has championed false conspiracy theories about it, including the claim that the attack was a “false flag” operation spearheaded by federal officials to discredit conservatives.News coverage of the hearings will be relegated from Fox News to its sister channel, Fox Business Network. As CNN’s Brian Stelter pointed out, Fox News is the leading cable news network at prime time with more than 3 million viewers while Fox Business on average attracts fewer than 100,000.The scheduling plan drew fire from members of the January 6 committee. Adam Kinzinger, one of two Republican members of the committee who are participating in the hearings in defiance of their party, accused Fox News of hiding the truth “if it disagrees with your narrative”.Kinzinger, a representative from Illinois, made a direct appeal to Fox News staff: “If you work for Fox News and want to maintain your credibility as a journalist, now is a good time to speak out, or quit. Enough is enough.”The relentless efforts of Fox News stars to diminish the significance of January 6 stands in contrast to what some of them said on the day itself. As hundreds of Trump supporters were storming the Capitol building, Laura Ingraham sent a text to the then White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, saying “the president needs to tell people in the Capitol to go home. This is hurting all of us. He is destroying his legacy.”Later that night, Ingraham used her show, The Ingraham Angle, to blame the violence on antifa.Brian Kilmeade, co-host of the morning show Fox & Friends, and primetime star Sean Hannity, privately made similarly frantic appeals to Meadows as January 6 unfolded.Fox News’s response to the congressional hearings forms part of wider counter-programming against the proceedings being waged by the right. Top Republicans including the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, are planning aggressive pushback, including a rapid response unit and talking points that describe the proceedings as “rigged”.Republican leaders and others who remain loyal to Trump are also hoping that “January 6 fatigue” will have set in, and that large sections of the American public will fail to tune in.TopicsFox NewsUS Capitol attackTV newsUS television industryTelevision industryUS politicsnewsReuse this content More