Faux News: Who Says the USA Doesn't Have State TV?

[Howl]

Twitter Nugget o' the Day: 

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Lou Dobbs and Fox News: Trump’s immigration lunatic fringe"

Spoiler

Under previous presidents, White House reporters had certain routines when it came to explaining big changes in Cabinet personnel: Press their sources; seek comments from press officials; check with key lawmakers. Repeat.

Under President Trump, all those tried-and-true methods still prevail, with an additional question: Which Fox News personality had this idea first?

In the case of Sunday’s big news — the resignation of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen — the answer to that question is Lou Dobbs, the Fox Business Network host who doubles as a toady for Trump and triples as one of the country’s hardest-line immigration advocates. “DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen is flailing and her department appears utterly paralyzed under ineffectual leadership,” riffed Dobbs on his March 29 program. As evidence, he cited a memo from Nielsen seeking DHS volunteers to handle certain tasks at the border. Another target of Dobbs’s was Kevin K. McAleenan, the commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection. “Tonight, we’re calling on the president to fire these incompetents and the leadership of the Department of Homeland Security and Customs Border Protection. They can’t act effectively. They can’t create, they can’t innovate. They only react and then only to call on Congress,” said Dobbs, whose wishes about McAleenan haven’t yet come true: He has replaced Nielsen in an acting capacity.

More from Dobbs: “Customs and Border Protection has become a little more than a welcome wagon service for the cartel, sex trafficking its deadly drug running and illegal immigrant smuggling across our southern border with Mexico while tens of thousands of Americans are dying. These border officials should hang their heads in shame and they should be fired for endangering the lives of the American people. Do what it takes — it’s that straightforward."

Forever a denizen of the gray zone where opinion mingles with fact, Dobbs managed to phrase the threat of border inaction this way: “We’re just going to consign tens of thousands, perhaps millions of Americans, to their deaths,” said Dobbs, essentially equating immigration with mass murder.

Given the alleged fecklessness of these officials, you might suppose that Dobbs would have held the president himself responsible for their work. But no: “The president isn’t the one playing the game — the DHS is,” said Dobbs.

That’s in character for Dobbs, a contemporary of Trump’s. The Fox Business personality is up there with Sean Hannity in terms of his loving deference to the president, who appreciates the sentiment:

Within the White House, the driving force of tough immigration policies is 33-year-old policy adviser Stephen Miller, who has been active in urging his peers to clamp down on the border. A “person close to Nielsen,” for instance, tells Politico that Miller is leading a shake-up within the administration to deliver on Trump’s campaign promise to get tough on the southern border.

Dobbs and others in the Fox family are happy to help. Consider the time in early 2018 when Trump wavered a bit on his immigration stance. In a famous, televised session with lawmakers, Trump said he’d show deference to Congress on immigration. “When this group comes back, hopefully, with an agreement, this group and others from the Senate, from the House, comes back with an agreement, I’m signing it. I mean, I will be signing it.”

Compromise? On immigration? Fox News host Tucker Carlson wasn’t allowing it: “President Trump, you’ll remember, ran for office promising to fix immigration, make good deals and, in general, do a better job than the corrupt, incompetent lawmakers, he said, were wrecking the country. And he was right, they were wrecking the country,” said Carlson. “And yet, today, in a remarkable twist, the president held a televised meeting with the very swamp creatures he once denounced. He told them he trusted them to craft immigration policy without his input.”

Immigration policymaking has long been a plaything for conservative media outlets, as journalist Jackie Calmes laid out in a 2015 paper for the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy. Right-wing commentator Laura Ingraham, noted Calmes, used her radio show to boost the candidacy of Dave Brat against House majority leader Eric Cantor. Notes Calmes: “While Republicans quibble over how much Ingraham actually had to do with the result — Cantor had, they agree, neglected his Richmond-area district as his national prominence grew — his defeat left many congressional incumbents further cowed by the power of conservative media, and hardened against immigration. ‘Immigration reform, any hope of it, just basically died,’ said a senior Senate aide.”

Months later, Carlson would attack immigration as making the country “dirtier” — a comment that sparked a wave of advertiser withdrawals from his program.

It was fine with Nielsen, who appeared last week on “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” perhaps in a bid to boost her stock in the eyes of Fox News’s No. 1 viewer. Maybe he was unimpressed. Though Nielsen called the situation at the southern border a “Cat 5 hurricane disaster,” she also talked about how she needed help. “But Congress needs to look at this as a hurricane, too, right? Where is the supplemental? Where are the additional authorities?” she said.

Bolding added to highlight a homeland security secretary who apparently placed a high value on following the law. Compare those values with those of Dobbs, who protested on his show: “We have got the secretary of DHS saying we need to go to Congress, we’ve got a CPB commissioner saying we’ve got to have congressional help. They’re damn fools! The Congress of the United States over successive congresses and successive presidents, Republican and Democrat, have created this mess. It’s time now to deal with it,” he said.

So, there you have Fox in the aggregate: One immigration hard-liner host hammering Trump for inviting a congressional compromise on immigration; another immigration hard-liner host slamming law-abiding appointees for lamenting the absence of congressional compromise on immigration. The result? An increasingly ungovernable country.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Yes, Fox News matters. A lot."

Spoiler

A debate is brewing about just how much influence Fox News exerts over the United States. In a New Yorker piece — “The Making of the Fox News White House” — Jane Mayer examines the intimacy between the White House and figures like Sean Hannity. “If the news on Fox is all about some kind of caravan of immigrants supposedly invading America, whose idea is that? It turns out that it is this continual feedback loop,” Mayer said in a New Yorker podcast. And in a New York Times Magazine piece, Jonathan Mahler and Jim Rutenberg trace the power of Fox News patriarch Rupert Murdoch — and how it “remade the world.”

Not so fast, says Michael J. Socolow, a professor at the University of Maine. The influence of Fox News is exaggerated, he argues — and Politico media critic Jack Shafer agrees. The myth, notes Socolow, starts with the network’s founder: “Like the Wizard of Oz, Roger Ailes inflated the image of his own potency and his network’s power. Recent events, such as the election of Donald Trump, apparently confirm the network’s influence. Yet when we pull back the curtain, the evidence that Fox News, and Rupert Murdoch, created and sustained our current political moment, appears far more circumstantial.”

We’ll take various strands of the argument one by one:

Socolow:

Let’s begin with the idea that Trump’s 2016 victory can be attributed to Fox News.

Such an assertion would be a lot more believable if Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes had wanted Donald Trump to be the 2016 Republican nominee.

But they didn’t.

Rebuttal: Whatever Murdoch and Ailes wanted to happen in the primary doesn’t much matter if key Fox News hosts such as Bill O’Reilly, Hannity and the “Fox & Friends” crew coddled the real estate mogul throughout the primary.

Furthermore, consider that “Fox & Friends” provided a weekly call-in platform for Trump starting in 2011 — a moment that allowed him to test out his various faux-populist talking points, not to mention forge a coziness with a cable news team that shows no signs of strain to this day. Even more important: Fox News projected programming sensibilities — slander immigrants; fearmonger on terrorism; pretend to care about working-class people while favoring economic policies that favor the rich — that Trump packed into his successful campaign. He had a road map provided by the programming that he has watched for years and years.

Socolow:

Despite paying her US$1 million per year, and providing ample airtime on supportive shows, Fox News couldn’t turn Sarah Palin into a respected Republican figure.

Rebuttal: Since when is the elevation of Sarah Palin a criterion for national influence? After all, it is Sarah Palin we’re talking about here.

On a more serious level, the outsize influence of Fox News finds corroboration in the desperation of all the Republican presidential wannabes to secure face time on the network. Recall how Trump, during the presidential primary, read off the cellphone number of Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) at a campaign rally. How did he get the digits? As Trump told the story, Graham was “begging” him to help arrange an appearance on “Fox & Friends.” Who can blame him?

Socolow:

Journalists and scholars underplay the reality of Fox News’ small audience. On an average night in 2018, Fox News attracted about 2.4 million prime-time viewers.

That’s an impressive number. It made Fox News the most-watched cable television programming in 2018.

But the U.S. population in 2018 was approximately 327 million, which means that 99.3% of Americans weren’t watching Fox News on any given night.

About 26% of registered voters are either registered Republicans or identify as Republican, and in 2018 there were an estimated 158 million registered voters.

Thus, on a typical night in 2018, even if every Fox News viewer were a registered Republican (and they’re not), 94.2% of Republicans in the United States still wouldn’t be tuning in.

How few people actually watch Fox News? The lowest-rated broadcast network news program — the “CBS Evening News” — averaged more than double the number of Fox News viewers in 2018.

Rebuttal: The U.S. population figure cited by Socolow includes infants and children, which rather inflates the number not watching Fox. Here’s a more relevant figure: Forty percent of Trump voters cited Fox News as their “main source” of news about the 2016 campaign, according to the Pew Research Center. Next in line was CNN, which a mere 8 percent of Trump voters cited as their “main source.”

That same survey drives at why Fox News deserves special consideration in the pantheon of influential media organizations. Voters for Hillary Clinton showed no corresponding devotion in terms of their news sources, as 18 percent cited CNN, 9 percent cited MSNBC, 8 percent cited Facebook, and so on. There’s simply no outlet that dominates any other part of the political spectrum in the way Fox News dominates the right.

With that dominance, Fox News has done great damage. It’s not as if Fox News’s influence extends only however millions may be viewing in prime time. There’s what experts call a “media ecosystem” out there, where people take nonsense uttered on Fox News, then share it on Twitter, on Facebook, with their neighbor. Nonsense has a high pass-around rate.

Just take the whole “deep state” conspiracy theory, which holds that President Trump fell victim to a plot by national security establishment figures who felt threatened by his outsider policies. In their book “Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics,” Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris and Hal Roberts examine how the phrase “deep state” morphed from a nonpartisan description of dark forces to a highly partisan attack on Trump detractors. They found that Fox News played a key role, though not a solitary one:

As we look at the reshaping of the new “deep state” frame from its original, nonpartisan concern into a distinct narrative about a partisan attack on Donald Trump, we can certainly find critical moments at which Breitbart played a central reframing role. And we certainly find plenty of the craziest conspiracy theories hovering at the margins. But as we move now to analyze how this broad frame was translated over the course of 2017 into repeated concerted efforts to defend the president from the Russia suspicion, we see Fox News taking center stage in a much clearer and more distinctive way by deflecting attention and blame, interpreting the investigation in deeply partisan terms, and sowing confusion and doubt. And it is here too that the broad and loose gestalt frame takes on distinct falsifiable forms whose pattern fits that of a sustained disinformation campaign by a propaganda outlet, rather than as episodic errors by a journalistic outlet.

Another topic addressed in the book is Fox News’s May 2017 story fanning the conspiracy theory that Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich, who was slain in D.C. in summer 2016, was the source of the WikiLeaks emails, and not Russian hacking. The authors argue that their data “shows the central role that the Fox DC affiliate and Fox News played in developing and propagating the story to other media, and how central YouTube was to disseminating Fox News network programming online, particularly Hannity.”

Benkler told the Erik Wemple Blog in an interview: “The right-wing media ecosystem has developed into a completely distinct and insular ecosystem that operates purely on identity-confirming narratives,” he says. “Fox News is the leading node in the right-wing ecosystem: It’s the primary source of stories, the primary source of accreditation, the primary source of attention.”

Socolow:

Then there’s the idea that the real power of Fox News originates in its uniquely close relationship to the Trump administration.

Specifically, former Fox News executive Bill Shine’s appointment to a supervisory role for White House communications — while he was still being paid by Fox News — indicates identical and shared communication goals between the White House and cable channel.

But there’s a long history of tight entanglement between broadcast corporations and the White House, with numerous examples of the same kinds of backroom deals that are likely occurring now.

Rebuttal: To advance his case about this “long history,” Socolow cites infractions during the administrations of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson. That Socolow has to reach back that far into history doesn’t debunk the case that there’s something special about the Fox News-White House relationship; rather it advances the case that there is something special about the Fox News-White House relationship.

Socolow:

Criticism from The New Yorker and The New York Times only helps Fox News gain credibility with its constituents — the viewers at home, and the Republican Party in Washington. Such attention proves that Fox News continues to frighten its enemies.

Roger Ailes never feared criticism from respectable media.

Rebuttal: Oh yeah? Did you ever have a run-in with the Fox News PR shop?

Sean Hannity cannot snap his fingers and generate a federal indictment of Peter Strzok, nor can Steve Doocy snap his fingers and stifle President Trump’s most embittered critics. Media personalities aren’t omnipotent. Sure, Barack Obama secured two terms as president despite Fox News. Certain favored politicians of Fox nation may not have made it as far as they would have liked. These benchmarks, however, miss the bane of Fox News, which lies in its central mission of misinforming its Trumpite audience. The network is influential because it has banished a common set of facts for American political discussions.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"What Tucker Carlson didn’t tell Fox viewers"

Spoiler

I can always tell when Tucker Carlson has attacked me — something that he does with monotonous and mysterious regularity. And it’s not because I watch his antics. All I have to do is read my emails.

Sure enough, out of the blue on Tuesday night, I received this ungrammatical missive from some Carlson fan: “Max you stupid piece of s---t why are bald people so f---ing stupid?” Followed by this from another viewer: “Do you want to feed these uneducated illegal wet backs?” And then this from a third savant: “My Prayer is that when your Disgusting Liberal Ignorant A-- passes away that u Burn in Hell for Eternity.” And so on.

Intrigued, I went to the Fox News website to see what Carlson had said. What I found was a typical farrago of lies, half-truths, distortions and omissions. I’m not offended; I consider it an honor to be attacked by this hatemonger. But it’s worth breaking down a few of his assertions to show how Fox brainwashes its audience.

Much of his monologue consisted of over-the-top ad hominem insults that aren’t fact-checkable – e.g., “Going to [Boot] for foreign policy advice is like giving Jeffrey Dahmer a cooking show.” Really? He’s comparing me to a serial killer. Still, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan would say, Carlson is entitled to his own opinion. He’s not entitled to his own facts.

He claimed: “In the years since 9/11, Max Boot has demanded military intervention in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Iran and North Korea and likely many other places. He has called for the U.S. to topple the Saudi monarchy.” I have never called for the United States to topple the Saudi monarchy or to attack North Korea — I have, in fact, warned against a strike on North Korea. I did in the past advocate some kind of military action in a few other countries (e.g., a no-fly zone over Syria), but more recently I have supported the Iran nuclear deal and argued that we need to accept a Bashar al-Assad victory in Syria. What Carlson did not mention was that, just like me, he supported the Iraq War before turning against it. A big omission, that.

“When Donald Trump pledged to pull Americans out of Syria,” Carlson continued, “Max Boot went crazy, just on principle. ... He never explained how keeping Americans in Syria would help the United States. Why didn’t he mention it? Because he doesn’t care.” His viewers would never know I’ve written that leaving Syria would be bad for us because it “risks a revival of the Islamic State and an expansion of Iranian power.” Instead they hear his nasty insinuation that I’m unpatriotic.

Carlson complained that U.S. military forces are “overextended”: “As of Tuesday night, we have nearly 175,000 active-duty personnel serving overseas. American troops are posted in 158 different countries.” He alleged that people like me don’t care about our borders but are “really concerned about medical care in Morocco. That’s a problem we must solve immediately. Luckily, we have Exercise African Lion. Never heard of it? You’re paying for it. In the last year, 1,100 US military personnel have participated in that exercise, all of them working to make Morocco healthier.”

Carlson didn’t inform his viewers that only 13 percent of active-duty troops are deployed abroad, the smallest number in 60 years. And almost all of them are in just three countries — Japan, Germany and South Korea — that are of great economic and strategic significance. We have all of 15 military personnel stationed in Morocco. African Lion wasn’t a do-gooder effort to improve health care. According to U.S. Africa Command, it’s an annual military exercise with regional allies designed “to improve interoperability and mutual understanding of each nation’s tactics, techniques and procedures.” That’s an important national security objective given how many terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda and the Islamic State operate in North Africa.

The crux of Carlson’s isolationist and nativist case is that foreign deployments mean that troops “are not on our southern border protecting us” from illegal immigrants. While hyping the supposed crisis on the U.S.-Mexico border, he showed alarming footage of people removing metal barriers — taken at the Mexico-Guatemala border. “Over time, this is how countries collapse,” he warned, darkly. But I can’t think of a single country that collapsed because of excessive immigration. (The Huns weren’t seeking green cards.) This is the stuff of white-supremacist fiction — it’s not reality. The United States, like other advanced industrialized economies, could actually use more workers.

Carlson neglected to mention that the number of Border Patrol agents deployed along the southern border has tripled since 1996, to 18,600, even as the number of undocumented arrivals has plummeted. To the extent that there’s a crisis on the border, it has been caused by a recent increase in families seeking asylum. There is nothing that troops can do about that — they can’t shoot unarmed refugees who are surrendering at ports of entry.

While denouncing me for seven minutes and nine seconds — an eternity in TV time — Carlson omitted some important background information: A month ago I wrote that he should be fired for his racist, sexist and homophobic remarks, such as calling Iraqis “semiliterate primitive monkeys.” (He and I also had a heated exchange on the air in 2017.) He thereby hid from viewers a personal motive for trying to discredit me.

Sadly, Carlson’s monologue is typical of Fox’s propagandistic ways. What is truly disturbing is that so many of its viewers never question what they are told. Instead they mindlessly echo Fox’s mendacious invective. Orwell’s “1984” had the “Two Minutes Hate.” Fox’s hate lasts for hours.

The author of this op-ed is conservative writer Max Boot.

[Howl]

Tone deaf faux news just got an earful.  This is so delicious: 

 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[Howl]

Ooooh, this is just icing on the cake of Faux hypocricy:

 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"This is how the Fox News universe diverges from what Mueller found"

Spoiler

Over the course of the report summarizing the findings of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III are a number of mentions and citations of news organizations. At times, those relate directly to reporting that informed Mueller’s probe, such as The Washington Post’s revelations about conversations between then-national security adviser Michael Flynn and the Russian ambassador or the New York Times’s scoop about a June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower. At other times, the citations are used to bolster points being made by Mueller’s team, as when they note a statement by President Trump about the June meeting by pointing to a Post report.

The Post and the Times are the most commonly cited news organizations in the report, but a number of television networks are also mentioned, including CNN, NBC News and Fox News.

The Fox News mentions are interesting, though. They tend to be qualitatively different from The Post or Times citations. Five of the eight citations are interviews of Trump or Donald Trump Jr. included because Mueller’s team wanted to assess claims the two made. One is included as the Mueller team notes a conspiracy theory pushed by WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange, which Fox News had reported on. One is because Trump mentioned to someone else that he was watching Fox News. The eighth is used to identify Sean Hannity as a network guest when revealing that he reportedly knew about the Trump Tower meeting well before the Times did.

Over the course of Mueller’s investigation, Fox News consistently presented a much more skeptical view of the investigation than did other networks. Its friendliness to the Trump administration was manifested in its coverage of the Mueller probe. It wasn’t cited as much as the Times or The Post in part because it didn’t spend much energy on digging into what was alleged to have happened during the 2016 campaign.

President Trump noticed. On Tuesday morning, he praised the network’s morning show “Fox and Friends” — a show on which he made weekly appearances until he decided to run for president — and disparaged those on CNN and MSNBC. He also renewed his attacks on the Times, calling the paper “the Enemy of the People” and insisting that it would need to “beg for forgiveness” for its coverage.

The effects of Fox News’s approach to the Mueller probe are apparent in a poll released on Monday from HuffPost and YouGov. Aiding this conversation, the pollsters asked respondents which cable news network, if any, was the largest source of their news about Mueller’s probe. Among Republicans, 4 in 5 said Fox was their biggest source; two-thirds of the network’s audience in the poll identified as Republican. About 6 in 10 of those who identified CNN were Democrats.

We’re used to seeing partisan divides on the question of what Mueller found, but the HuffPost-YouGov poll adds another layer. For example, Fox News viewers were much more likely than Republicans overall to say that they understood Mueller’s findings “very well.”

They were also more likely than Republicans overall to say that no one associated with Trump’s campaign committed any crimes — a statement that seems to be at odds with several of the indictments obtained by Mueller’s team.

Broadly, Fox News viewers had a more generous view of what Mueller found than Republicans overall. They were, for example, far more likely to say that the Trump’s campaign’s relationship with Russia wasn’t a problem at all.

They were about as likely as Republicans overall to say that Trump didn’t try to obstruct Mueller’s probe and to say that the report broadly clears Trump of wrongdoing.

It remains unclear how broadly self-reinforcing is the Fox News-Trump supporter feedback loop. To what extent do those who strongly back the president resort to Fox News simply because they are agitated by the coverage elsewhere and to what extent does Fox News drive their loyalty to Trump? The HuffPost-YouGov poll suggests that, on certain key points, being a Fox News viewer is a more dependable predictor of loyalty to Trump’s point of view than is being a member of the Republican Party.

What’s interesting about that, of course, is that Trump himself falls into that category, as his tweets on Tuesday morning show. His loyalty to and support for Fox News is probably more robust than his loyalty to and support of the Republican Party. That’s certainly true among many of his supporters.

It’s been clear for months that Fox News was operating on another track in the context of the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. The report itself makes clear that Fox’s primary utility in that investigation was in providing an on-the-record source for commentary from the president and his team. And the poll released Monday shows the results: self-confident Fox News viewers who breezily dismiss the questions raised by Mueller’s report.

Which itself possibly relates to Fox News’s coverage.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Hannity to Leave Fox News Partially Due to Lack of Trump Support, According to New Report"

Spoiler

Donald Trump has been very unhappy with Fox News lately. First the president lamented that the network hosted a town hall for Bernie Sanders. Last week, he tore into the liberal leanings of hosts, Arthel Neville, Leland Vittert and Shepard Smith.

It seems that Trump is not the only prominent conservative who is having issues with Fox’s oversight. Host Sean Hannity has reportedly told friends that he plans to leave the network in 2021 due in part to the Murdochs’ lack of support for the president.  The Murdoch family owns the network.

A Fox News staffer told Vanity Fair, “Sean doesn’t feel supported. He has no relationship with Lachlan [Murdoch]. Sean thinks, Wait a second, I was hired to get ratings and I get ratings, but now people are embarrassed about me? He feels Fox spends a lot of time supporting Shepard Smith but his show makes no money. That’s annoying to him.”

The relationship with Rupert Murdoch’s sons seems to be a tipping point for Hannity. He has also lost some significant allies in former network president’s Roger Ailes and Bill Shine.  In fact, a second source told Vanity Fair that Hannity  “told Trump last year that the Murdochs hate Trump, and Hannity is the only one holding Fox together.”

While not on the level of Laura Ingraham or Tucker Carlson, Hannity has lost some significant sponsors. His support for Roy Moore during a 2017 special election cost him advertising spots from companies like Peloton and Cars.com.

But the main problems between Hannity and the network goes back to Lachlan and James Murdoch. James is reportedly looking to invest in some media outlets that lean more liberal than conservative. Those kind of investments could spell the end of the relationship between Hannity and Fox News.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[JMarie]

8 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

"Hannity to Leave Fox News Partially Due to Lack of Trump Support, According to New Report"

  Hide contents

Donald Trump has been very unhappy with Fox News lately. First the president lamented that the network hosted a town hall for Bernie Sanders. Last week, he tore into the liberal leanings of hosts, Arthel Neville, Leland Vittert and Shepard Smith.

It seems that Trump is not the only prominent conservative who is having issues with Fox’s oversight. Host Sean Hannity has reportedly told friends that he plans to leave the network in 2021 due in part to the Murdochs’ lack of support for the president.  The Murdoch family owns the network.

A Fox News staffer told Vanity Fair, “Sean doesn’t feel supported. He has no relationship with Lachlan [Murdoch]. Sean thinks, Wait a second, I was hired to get ratings and I get ratings, but now people are embarrassed about me? He feels Fox spends a lot of time supporting Shepard Smith but his show makes no money. That’s annoying to him.”

The relationship with Rupert Murdoch’s sons seems to be a tipping point for Hannity. He has also lost some significant allies in former network president’s Roger Ailes and Bill Shine.  In fact, a second source told Vanity Fair that Hannity  “told Trump last year that the Murdochs hate Trump, and Hannity is the only one holding Fox together.”

While not on the level of Laura Ingraham or Tucker Carlson, Hannity has lost some significant sponsors. His support for Roy Moore during a 2017 special election cost him advertising spots from companies like Peloton and Cars.com.

But the main problems between Hannity and the network goes back to Lachlan and James Murdoch. James is reportedly looking to invest in some media outlets that lean more liberal than conservative. Those kind of investments could spell the end of the relationship between Hannity and Fox News.

 

Does Hell now feature a skating pond???

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

There are many words that could be used to describe Robert Mueller; diva is not one of them.

[GreyhoundFan]

"Babbel Pulls Ad From Tucker Carlson’s Fox News Show Because It’s ‘So Repugnant’"

Spoiler

Language-instruction app Babbel said it was “deeply sorry” after one of its ads was broadcast this week during an episode of Tucker Carlson’s controversial Fox News show.

In a statement shared on Twitter Tuesday, the online language learning company acknowledged placing an ad “with Fox.” But the company said it “did not know” the ad would air during the prime time “Tucker Carlson Tonight” program, which it called “so repugnant and at odds with our mission and values.”

Carlson, who has a history of repeating white nationalist talking points, sparked outrage in December when he claimed on air that immigrants were making the U.S. “poorer and dirtier and more divided.” Numerous companies, including Pacific Life, IHOP, Bowflex and Ancestry.com, pulled their advertisements in response.

Carlson faced another advertiser backlash in March following the resurfacing of previous radio show recordings in which he made sexist, homophobic, racist and misogynistic comments, including a sexually explicit joke about a Miss Teen USA contestant.

Not all advertisers decided to cut ties with the show, however, which Deadline reported was the second most-watched cable news program in April with more than 2.8 million viewers.

It’s not clear whether Babbel has pulled its ads from all Fox shows.

Fox News pushed back on Babbel’s comments in a statement from a spokesperson:

he millions of unduplicated viewers watching Tucker Carlson Tonight are extremely valuable to our advertisers. Our audience is not only deeply loyal to the brand, but to our top tier partners as well, of which Babbel is not one. We will not allow voices like Tucker Carlson’s to be censored by agenda-driven intimidation efforts from the intolerant partisan activists Media Matters, Sleeping Giants and Moveon.org whose only goal is to silence conservative thought they don’t agree with.

 

[AmazonGrace]

TBH, any advertising on Fox is problematic...

Quote

Our audience is not only deeply loyal to the brand, but to our top tier partners as well, of which Babbel is not one.

, this makes perfect sense. What on earth would the Fox audience do with an app that encourages LEARNING?

[JMarie]

1 hour ago, AmazonGrace said:

TBH, any advertising on Fox is problematic...

, this makes perfect sense. What on earth would the Fox audience do with an app that encourages LEARNING?

Let alone a foreign language, because that might mean (clutching pearls) BROWN PEOPLE!

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[JMarie]

https://www.msn.com/en-us/tv/celebrity/sean-duffy-and-rachel-campos-duffy-47-expecting-ninth-child-dont-tell-us-were-crazy/ar-AAB5CpY?ocid=spartanntp

Quote

Rachel Campos-Duffy is going to be a mom again.

The Fox News contributor, 47, announced on Instagram Monday alongside a sonogram video that she and her fellow Real World alum and husband of 20 years, Congressman Sean Duffy, are expecting their ninth child together.

Quote

As to how the new addition on the way came to be? “It was a very long, cold winter, I have a very cute husband, it was bound to happen, and here we are,” joked the Fox Nation host.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

It's rare that I agree with anything Brit Hume writes or says, but this is a good retort to Dumbass Donnie:

 

[GreyhoundFan]

I guess Faux doesn't care about spelling:

 

[AmazonGrace]