President Biden on Monday honored the deaths of 500,000 Americans from COVID-19. It is a very large number, and commentator Sanjay Gupta at CNN had tears in his eyes because, he said, “they didn’t have to die.”
Joe Biden is very good at. He held a somber ceremony at the White House which was carried live on the mainstream news networks and observed with appropriate gravity by nearly all who commented —except Fox News.
Fox News has joined the latest round of the right-wing online campaign seeking to fire Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. At the heart of this campaign is really an ongoing rebellion against health measures during the COVID-19 pandemic, whether in requirements for the public or even precautions by individuals.
During Friday’s edition of Fox News’ Outnumbered, the panelists repeated a number of false claims about the ongoing blackouts in Texas, both in an attempt to cover up negligence by the state government and private power utilities and to deny the role of climate change in severe weather events. Fox has been waging a sustained propaganda campaign attempting to blame renewable energy sources for the state’s crisis. By contrast, local media outlets in Texas have done a much better job at explaining how the breakdowns across all energy sources — including from fossil fuels, which still normally provide a majority of the state’s electricity — are the result of the state’s failure to adequately winterize its infrastructure, even after prior blackout events. But these facts were entirely left out of the conversation on Outnumbered.
Donald Trump and other fans are expressing support for Lou Dobbs after the sudden cancellation of his “number one news program” on Fox News, but liberals are so giddy they want other conservatives like Sean Hannity pulled.
Bill Sammon, senior vice president and managing editor at Fox’s Washington bureau, announced his retirement to staff members on Monday. On Tuesday, as part of a restructuring of Fox’s digital operations, politics editor Chris Stirewalt was let go.
Fox News wrecked the U.S. pandemic response, used protests for racial justice to spread white supremacist propaganda, and waged an assault on democracy
That’s what Fox News did this year. The right-wing network has promoted coronavirus misinformation an estimated 13,551 times on its weekday programs over the course of the pandemic. And its lies had a deadly impact.
Right-wing media have championed Sweden’s “low-scale” approach to the coronavirus pandemic as an alternative to stricter government mandates deployed in the United States. On Fox News, pundits argued that Sweden’s policies would allow its population to swiftly reach “herd immunity” and questioned why the U.S. was “locking down” instead. Now that country is rushing to tighten restrictions following rapid increases in cases, hospitalizations, and deaths that are far in excess of those of its neighbors.
That feedback loop is likely to accelerate in the days leading up to and perhaps following the election, as Trump and his propagandists try to turn normal election difficulties into a scandal, potentially delegitimize millions of ballots, and bring to bear the GOP advantage in the courts. Here are 17 times this has happened so far this year.
Martha MacCallum, Fox News executive editor and anchor of The Story with Martha MacCallum, pushes right-wing narratives, pro-Trump talking points, and Republican spin during her on air appearances on Fox News. Part of the so-called “straight news” division, MacCallum has featured heavily in the network’s election coverage, as well as its promotional material, alongside anchor Bret Baier. Network executives have relied on the “straight news” operation to deflect criticism of the extreme racism and propaganda spewed nightly by opinion hosts like Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham in an effort to deter advertisers from fleeing their toxic programming.
Fox News made him sick. For months, Fox has pumped poisonous, anti-science rhetoric into the airwaves, ensuring a sizeable portion of the population, including Trump, will refuse to do its part to help America heal. Fox has worked hard to divide the country and make it impossible to have a common sense conversation in times of crisis.
The new bombshell report from The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, reporting that President Donald Trump had repeatedly disparaged fallen U.S. troops as “losers” and “suckers,” has now been confirmed by a rather unexpected media voice: Fox News national security correspondent Jennifer Griffin. This latest confirmation comes after Fox’s previous coverage of the story continually backed Trump’s denials.
Some of Trump’s responses were so out of bounds that Ingraham appeared to subtly help him rephrase his comments to avoid any controversy that might hurt him in the election.
Distortion of reality in the English speaking world is a formula and formula built on size no information and the power to be able to Just Do It (ODT
For all his paens to the middle class, Carlson’s show is propped up by its symbiotic relationships with a handful of extremely wealthy men. Fox honchos Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch have his back because they agree with his toxic rhetoric. Mike Lindell, the CEO of My Pillow, subsidizes the program with ads in order to build his own right-wing brand. And President Donald Trump turns to Carlson for advice while receiving political support from him. The Murdochs oversee a global media empire that has an outsized impact on the political dealings on three continents. The family made billions by selling parts of Fox’s parent company to Disney last year. Fox founder Rupert has owned an array of mansions along with a private plane and luxury yacht, while heir to the company Lachlan recently purchased a 25,000-square-foot Los Angeles estate for a record-breaking $150 million. Carlson is the Murdochs’ biggest star, garnering the largest audience in the history of cable news. And he does it by pushing the sort of hard-edged white nationalist messages they want. Rupert hand-picked Carlson, who had failed as a host on several other networks, for a prime-time Fox slot. And Lachlan reportedly wants Fox to be “unabashedly nationalist.” He also believes “Carlson’s overarching message on immigration [is] worth protecting,” according to CNN’s Brian Stelter’s new book Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News, and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth.
Mass shooting have increased over 300% since Trump took office the majority by right wing Trumpsters
When Tucker Carlson set off a firestorm of criticism on Wednesday — by describing a 17-year-old Trump supporter who opened fire on protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin on Tuesday, killing two, as a well-meaning kid who decided he “had to maintain order” in the Democrat-run state because “no one else would” — the Fox News host was surfacing an idea that had already spread widely on the far-right.
President Donald Trump tweeted in response to television programs he was watching nearly 300 times in the first six months of 2020, according to a Media Matters review. More than nine in 10 of those tweets came in response to Fox News or its sister network, Fox Business, as the right-wing channels maintained their unprecedented influence over the federal government.
Esteemed medical journal The Lancet on Friday took an unusual step towards calling on American voters to remove President Donald Trump from office in November, condemning the Trump administration’s “incoherent” response to the coronavirus pandemic and expressing shock at the CDC’s inability to cope with the public health crisis.
The journal’s frustration with Trump centered on the president’s downplaying of the pandemic and his refusal to coordinate a robust national effort of social distancing, lockdown orders, and a testing regime to stem the Covid-19 outbreak.
Fox News has fired a Fox Business contributor and now a couple of FoxNation contributors, but the real sources of misinformation remain: The entire primetime lineup. Every single one of them from Tucker Carlson to Sean Hannity is guilty of spreading misinformation about Donald Trump, COVID-19, Republicans and more. Maybe the only honest person left there is Chris Wallace, whom Trump is desperate for Fox to fire.
Until Fox News cleans up their primetime act, firings like this are just intended to pretend they actually give a damn about misinformation
All Andrew Bolt does is spin the Fox Head Office line and he calls that work. He tried to convince us he works a 60 hour week plus, plus. Nothing he says rings of truth. (ODT)
During his 60th rally as president, Donald Trump said, “Our radical Democrat opponents are driven by hatred, prejudice, and rage. They want to destroy you, and they want to destroy our country as we know it.” This rhetoric directly mirrors what Fox News personalities regularly say.
On the one hand, I’m glad Ms. Mayer’s story — rich with telling details as it is — exists in the world. And that fact that it was printed in The New Yorker has given it social media rocket fuel.
On the other hand, this feels so much like reading a weather report from 20 years ago that I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.