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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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      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

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      Fox News suddenly goes quiet on ‘great replacement’ theory after Buffalo shooting

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      Fox News suddenly goes quiet on ‘great replacement’ theory after Buffalo shooting Suspect was allegedly motivated by the theory, but network has barely mentioned gunman’s reasoning, even after Tucker Carlson pushed the concept in more than 400 of his shows As details of the Buffalo mass shooting emerged over the weekend, much of the media focussed on the shooter’s self-stated motivation: his racist belief that white Americans are being deliberately replaced through immigration in a “great replacement” theory.Over at Fox News, however, there was barely any mention of the white gunman’s alleged reasoning for opening fire at a supermarket, killing 10 people and wounding three more, in a predominantly Black area.The absence of coverage of the motive was revealing, given Fox News’s most popular host, Tucker Carlson, has pushed the concept of replacement theory in more than 400 of his shows – and has arguably done more than anyone in the US to popularize the racist conspiracy.Fox News, according to Oliver Darcy, a media correspondent for CNN, “largely ignored” the fact that the shooter had been inspired by replacement theory. Darcy searched transcripts from Fox News’s shows, and found one brief mention, by Fox News anchor Eric Shawn.As Americans absorbed news of the shooting and struggled to understand why it had happened, it seemed a glaring thing for the network to disregard. But given Carlson and his colleagues’ promotion of the theory, which has been unchecked by Fox News’s top executives, experts see the network as being left in a bind.“What can they say?” said Matt Gertz, senior fellow at Media Matters for America, a watchdog of rightwing media. “There’s no way for anyone at Fox News to really issue a convincing and compelling, forthright denunciation of great replacement theory, because it’s being discussed on the network’s primetime hour on a near constant basis.”Great replacement theory, or white replacement theory, states that a range of liberals, Democrats and Jewish people are working to replace white voters in western countries with non-white people, in an effort to achieve political aims.It is not a new concept. But Carlson has led the charge in reintroducing it to mainstream rightwing thought. In April a New York Times investigation found that in more than 400 hundred of his shows Carlson had advanced the idea that a “cabal of elites want to force demographic change through immigration”.In a monologue on his Monday night show, Carlson did not directly address replacement theory. He claimed the Buffalo shooter’s manifesto was “not recognizably left wing or right-wing: it’s not really political at all”, despite the rambling document referencing a number of right-wing conspiracy theories.Carlson referred to the gunman as “mentally ill” and launched an attack on “professional Democrats” who had “begun a campaign to blame those murders on their political opponents.”In April 2021, after Carlson claimed on his show that Democrats were “diluting” his vote by “importing a brand-new electorate”, the Anti-Defamation League wrote to Fox News to sound the alarm.“Make no mistake: this is dangerous stuff. The ‘great replacement theory’ is a classic white supremacist trope that undergirds the modern white supremacist movement in America,” wrote Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO and national director of the ADL.“It is a concept that is discussed almost daily in online racist fever swamps. It is a notion that fueled the hateful chants of ‘Jews will not replace us!’ in Charlottesville in 2017. And it has lit the fuse in explosive hate crimes, most notably the hate-motivated mass shooting attacks in Pittsburgh, Poway and El Paso, as well as in Christchurch, New Zealand.”The ADL called for Carlson to be fired for his comments, but instead the rightwing host – whose show is the most-watched on cable news – has thrived, and his passion for the topic of replacement has spread to his colleagues.But Carlson is not alone on Fox.Laura Ingraham, who hosts an hour-long show at 10pm, has told her viewers that Democrats “want to replace you, the American voters, with newly amnestied citizens and an ever increasing number of chain migrants”, while Jeanine Pirro claimed on a radio show that liberals were engaged in “a plot to remake America, to replace American citizens with illegals who will vote for the Democrats”.“​​To be clear, Fox News is far from the only place where you might hear such dangerous rhetoric,” wrote Tom Jones, a senior media writer at the Poynter institute.“[But] the size of Fox News’s audience is what is notable. Fox News is the most-watched cable news network, and Carlson’s show is the most-watched on cable news, routinely drawing more than 3 million viewers a night.”Fox News declined to comment when asked if it planned to condemn the idea of white replacement or take action against Carlson. A spokeswoman pointed to examples of Carlson denouncing violence on his show. Fox News was one of six media organizations which the gunman claimed, in his manifesto, were disproportionately influenced by Jewish people.The network’s popularity has given it an outsized influence over the Republican party, an influence and relationship which was revealed recently when leaked text messages from the phone of Mark Meadows, Donald Trump’s former White House chief-of-staff, showed Meadows in frequent communication with Fox News hosts as supporters of Trump besieged the US Capitol on 6 January.It should perhaps be little surprise, then, that Trump-supporting Republican politicians like Elise Stefanik and JD Vance have also embraced replacement theory.“It’s been gradually moving from the fringes into the mainstream,” Philip Gorski, a professor of sociology at Yale, told the Washington Post. “First it was the entertainment wing of the GOP. Now it’s the political wing as well.”The Buffalo shooter did not mention Fox News as an influence on his political beliefs, but said he had been radicalized through the extremist online forum 4chan, where he had found “infographics, shitposts, and memes that the White race is dying out”. From there, the gunman said, he had discovered sources including the neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer.Curiously, the founder of the Daily Stormer has called Tucker Carlson “literally our greatest ally”, and praised the Fox News host in 2021, in the wake of his replacement theory comments.“[Carlson was] dropping the ultimate truth bomb on his audience: Jews aggressively lobby for the same demographic policies in America that they openly declare would destroy their own country,” Anglin wrote.Since the shooting Carlson and his fellow Fox News hosts have justifiably drawn criticism for their promotion of replacement theory. But Gertz said the issue ultimately runs deeper, all the way to the Murdoch family which controls the channel.“Everyone knows the score here,” Gertz said.“Tucker Carlson is doing his job. He is providing the content that the Fox News brass, the Murdochs, want out of their 8pm slot.“If they didn’t want him to do this, they could make him stop – but they’ve decided not to. And they have decided not to do that because he is still profitable for them.”TopicsBuffalo shootingFox NewsUS television industryUS politicsRaceThe far rightfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Psaki swaps White House for MSNBC as politics-to-TV pipeline chugs along

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      Psaki swaps White House for MSNBC as politics-to-TV pipeline chugs along Summer switch to cable news likely to sharpen perception in America that both sides are just really in it for the moneyThe routine trafficking of political personnel in America to the nation’s television networks hit a road bump last week after staffers at NBC News complained about White House press secretary Jen Psaki’s rumor-as-fact plans to join the liberal news outlet MSNBC when she leaves her West Wing post this summer.The clumsily handled move, previewed in a leak to Axios, triggered anger among journalists who said they feared Psaki’s hiring would “taint” the NBC brand and reinforce the impression, already well-established in opinion polls, that the news business in the US works hand-in-glove with political factions.Capitol attack investigators zero in on far-right Oath Keepers and Proud BoysRead moreThe Psaki saga is hardly new. If the deal goes through, Psaki will join a long line of White House staff who have moved to media roles. In January, Symone Sanders, a former adviser and senior spokesperson for Kamala Harris, signed a deal with MSNBC to host a show.But the deals are unexceptional to either side of the political divide. Trump press secretary Kayleigh McEnany joined Fox News last year; Sean Spicer has his own show on Newsmax; and CBS News hired Mick Mulvaney as a paid on-air contributor – also triggering an internal revolt that even prompted late-night host Stephen Colbert to condemn it on his show.The anger is easy to explain. The pipeline between politics and lucrative gigs in the media in America is one that appears to sully the public view of both professions, creating a feeling that both sides are really in it for the money. It also encourages a sense that politics in the US is seen by the media in the same veins as sports – where hiring ex-players as commentators is common – where winning races is everything and actual policy means very little.“The pipeline from the White House to news organizations makes it more difficult for news organizations to have sufficient distance or be perceived to be credibly scrutinizing government,” said Ryan Thomas, an associate professor in the Missouri School of Journalism.“Partisans argue that people won’t care or won’t notice, but it is wrong irrespective of awareness. It’s like they are moving from formal to informal public relations apparatus that is unhealthy in its own terms, irrespective of its potential effects on press accountability.”Psaki’s hire comes at a time of press frustration that Joe Biden has given just eight open-access press conferences during his term, leading to an impression of scripted, artificial performances. Psaki’s tour of duty, transposed to a cable news with a more generous salary, is likely to increase perceptions that political spin and news coverage at cable news networks are so close as to be indistinguishable.The outgoing press secretary has said that she is undergoing “rigorous ethics training” as it relates “to future employment” before her move, adding that she hoped the press corps “would judge me for my record and how I treat you and I try to answer questions from everybody across the board”.Yet the transfer of Psaki to MSNBC seemed so natural that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) went so far as to launch a fundraiser. “She’s fought to restore trust in the free press after the Trump administration’s horrific attacks on the media,” it said in a statement. “And now, she’s planning to join MSNBC’s intrepid team of journalists to hold dangerous, far-right Republicans accountable.”Journalism ethics professors express concern that this type of high-profile hiring to a high-profile cable news network, publicized while Psaki is still in a political role, risks becoming the default image for what the public holds as standard practice for journalism at large.“There’s a trickle-down effect from the irresponsibility of cable news organizations to local news journalists who get tarred with the same brush,” Thomas said.Americans of opposing political parties are sharply divided on how much they trust the news reported by national media organizations, according to new research.A YouGov/Economist poll published last week found that while Americans are more likely to trust than distrust many prominent news sources, there are few organizations that are trusted by more than a small proportion of Americans on both sides of the political aisle.At the top of the list was the Weather Channel at 52%, followed by the BBC (39%), the national public broadcaster PBS (41%), and the Wall Street Journal (37%). At the bottom of the list, in descending order, came CNN, OAN, MSNBC, Fox News and Breitbart.A Gallup poll published last October found that trust in the media to report the news fully, accurately and fairly had edged down to 36%, making last year’s reading the second lowest on record. Only 7% of those polled said they had “a great deal” of trust and confidence in newspapers, television and radio news reporting. Thirty-four per cent said they had “none at all”.The issue of reporting bias, never far from the lips of ideological adversaries, comes as cable news ratings has experienced sharp post-Trump declines that helped expose arrangements that had long been in place but never fully acknowledged. One was the information pipeline between CNN’s Jeff Zucker, his top colleague Allison Gollust, and CNN anchor Chris Cuomo and his brother Andrew. The exposure of Chris Cuomo’s advice to his brother during the sexual harassment scandal that brought the New York governor down eventually helped cost the younger sibling his job, too.But it does not seem like media executives are learning the lessons of fraught ties and allegiances between their top hosts and the political establishment. According to the news outlet Puck, CNN and MSNBC programming executives were in Washington early in the year, courting potential on-air talent to fill holes in primetime slots exposed by the exit of Cuomo and soon-to-exit MSNBC host Rachel Maddow, whose support for Democratic causes is worn openly.One of the potential talents, of course, was Psaki who, Puck opined, had “achieved veritable celebrity status for her daily press briefings”.Wooing Psaki, Thomas said, presents an ethical issue that Psaki was negotiating a new job while determining access to reporters or responding to questions from staff at her future employer.In the longer term, he said, are questions over professional distance between political institutions and news organizations. “These press conferences are a performance of scrutiny rather than actual scrutiny. They become an audition process for a cable news gig,” he said.Not only does the rotation of seats damage the material ability of the press to hold government to account, he adds, but also raises issues of access. “The White House press corps is pretty addicted to access, so they’re easily tamed and shy away from asking tougher questions,” Thomas added.TopicsUS politicsUS television industryMSNBCTelevision industryTV newsJoe BidennewsReuse this content More

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      Lara Logan, who compared Fauci to Mengele, says Fox News pushed her out

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      Lara Logan, who compared Fauci to Mengele, says Fox News pushed her outLogan says network ‘does not want independent thinkers’ as Fox stays quiet on reports it dropped her after November remark The former CBS reporter Lara Logan, who compared Dr Anthony Fauci to the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, has claimed she was “pushed out” at Fox News because the conservative network does not want “independent thinkers”.“I was definitely pushed out,” Logan told Eric Metaxas, a conservative radio host, this week. “I mean, there is no doubt about that. They don’t want independent thinkers. They don’t want people who follow the facts regardless of the politics.”Fox News has not commented on reports that it “quietly benched” Logan over her remark about Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser. On Friday, a spokesperson for Fox News said the network would not comment.Logan has not appeared as a guest on Fox News since making the comment about Fauci. There have been no new episodes of her show on the Fox Nation streaming service, Lara Logan Has No Agenda, which is still available.Logan made the comment about Mengele, the “Angel of Death” who conducted medical experiments at the Auschwitz concentration camp, in November, during a discussion of the Covid pandemic on Fox News Primetime.Logan said: “Dr Fauci, this is what people say to me, that he doesn’t represent science to them.“He represents Josef Mengele, Dr Josef Mengele, the Nazi doctor who did experiments on Jews during the second world war and in the concentration camps, and I am talking about people all across the world are saying this.”The show’s host, Pete Hegseth, and another guest, the Fox News host Will Cain, did not respond.The Auschwitz Memorial said: “Exploiting the tragedy of people who became victims of criminal pseudo-medical experiments in Auschwitz in a debate about vaccines, pandemic and people who fight for saving human lives is shameful. It is disrespectful to victims and a sad symptom of moral and intellectual decline.”Kremlin memos urged Russian media to use Tucker Carlson clips – reportRead moreJonathan Greenblatt, chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League, said: “There’s absolutely no comparison between mask mandates, vaccine requirements and other Covid-19 mitigation efforts to what happened to Jews during the Holocaust.”Fauci, whose work has generated threats to his safety and that of his family, told MSNBC Logan’s remark was “unconscionable” and “absolutely preposterous and disgusting … an insult to all of the people who suffered and died under the Nazi regime in the concentration camps”.Fauci also said he found it “striking … how she gets no discipline whatsoever from the Fox network – how they can let her say that with no comment and no disciplinary action?”Logan rose to fame with CBS during the Iraq war and the Arab spring. After leaving CBS in 2013 over errors in a report about the Benghazi attack, she moved into conservative media.In March, Logan told a rightwing online show she was “dumped by Fox” and added: “I was taken off the air at Fox just before they went into a whole marathon of war porn in Ukraine.”She also repeated Russian talking points about “Nazis” in Ukraine and said Fox News had “a few people like Jesse Watters and Tucker Carlson who are doing their best to add some context and to show what this war is really about”.Speaking to Metaxas, Logan also said she did not like being called a “darling of the right wing”.TopicsFox NewsUS politicsUS television industryTelevision industrynewsReuse this content More

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      Kremlin memos urged Russian media to use Tucker Carlson clips – report

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      Kremlin memos urged Russian media to use Tucker Carlson clips – reportRussian government document instructed outlets to show Fox News host ‘as much as possible’, Mother Jones says The Fox News primetime host Tucker Carlson has been widely accused of echoing Russian propaganda about the invasion of Ukraine. According to a report on Sunday, earlier this month the Putin regime in Moscow sent out an instruction to friendly media outlets: use more clips of Carlson.‘Cynical, craven’ Republicans out to bash Biden, not Putin, over gas pricesRead moreMother Jones, a progressive magazine, said it had obtained memos produced by the Russian Department of Information and Telecommunications Support.One document, it said, was entitled “For Media and Commentators (recommendations for coverage of events as of 03.03)”, or 3 March. The magazine published pictures of the memo, which it said it was given by “a contributor to a national Russian media outlet who asked not to be identified”.It said the memo included an instruction: “It is essential to use as much as possible fragments of broadcasts of the popular Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who sharply criticises the actions of the United States [and] Nato, their negative role in unleashing the conflict in Ukraine, [and] the defiantly provocative behavior from the leadership of the eastern countries and Nato towards the Russian Federation and towards President Putin, personally.”The document, Mother Jones said, summed up Carlson’s position on the Ukraine war as “Russia is only protecting its interests and security” and included a quote: “And how would the US behave if such a situation developed in neighbouring Mexico or Canada?”Carlson and Fox News did not comment to Mother Jones. Fox News did not respond to a Guardian request for comment.On air last Wednesday, 9 March, Carlson said testimony by Victoria Nuland, a US undersecretary of state, about Ukrainian “biological research facilities” had shown Russian claims of US involvement were “totally and completely true”.Fact checkers said they were not.“Russian state TV featured Carlson’s take the next day,” the Washington Post said, adding that the Russian claim about US participation in biological laboratories in Ukraine was “straight out of the old Soviet playbook. But that doesn’t mean prominent commentators like Carlson should be so quick to fall for it”.Citing another Russian “recommendations for coverage” memo, dated 10 March, Mother Jones said the text advised Russian hosts to relay the message that “activities of military biological laboratories with American participation on the territory of Ukraine carried global threats to Russia and Europe”.On Sunday Joe Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, told NBC Russian claims about biological warfare facilities in Ukraine could indicate Russian willingness to use such weapons.“When Russia starts accusing other countries of potentially doing something, it’s a good tell that they may be on the cusp of doing it themselves,” he said.The Fox News journalist fact-checking channel’s pundits on air over UkraineRead moreMother Jones said no other western journalist was named in the memos it obtained, which it said also included advice on how to cite Carlson about how “Biden’s sanctions policy” was actually an economic “punishment for the American middle class”. That memo, the magazine said, also cited the New York Post, like Fox News owned by Rupert Murdoch.On Sunday afternoon, Julia Davis, an analyst of Russian media, tweeted a still from “Russia’s state TV” showing “none other than Tucker Carlson” on a screen above a discussion panel.“They always follow the Kremlin’s directives,” Davis wrote, “namely to use Tuckyo Rose clips as often as possible.”“Tokyo Rose” was a nickname given by Americans to several women who broadcast Japanese propaganda during the second world war.TopicsFox NewsUS television industryVladimir PutinRussiaUkraineUS politicsnewsReuse this content More