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

[AmazonGrace]

 

 Somebody votes for these people

[Drala]

‘He chose to blow it’: A rare dissent from the couch of ‘Fox & Friends’ after Trump attacks Ford

I.can't.even.  Trump is even too vile for Fox and Friends.  That's a hell of a bottom.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2018/10/03/he-chose-blow-it-rare-dissent-couch-fox-friends-after-trump-attacks-ford/?utm_term=.a339ff073bbb

[AmazonGrace]

 

[Cartmann99]

3 hours ago, AmazonGrace said:

 

I'm sure Ainsley will talk about this when she does the update for her latest book about how her faith guides her life.

 

[fraurosena]

This is freaking hilarious. Karma is a bitch.

 

[Audrey2]

Oh joy, oh bliss! (sarcasm) Hope Hicks has landed on her feet stilettos.

‘New’ Fox Names Former White House Communications Director Hope Hicks As Chief Comms Officer

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/fox-names-former-white-house-151250645.html

Quote

Fox has named former White House Communications Director Hope Hicks as its chief communications officer, in a move that underscores its closeness with the Trump Administration. Hicks will lead communications for “New” Fox, a media company whose assets include Fox broadcasting and Fox News, following the pending sale of 21st Century Fox to the Walt Disney Co.

This is even more reason for Trump to love FOX, and FOX to love Trump.

[AmazonGrace]

If you've served your country steaming Trump's pants it's only fair that you get a well paid gig afterwards.

That sacrifice has gotta mean something.

[AmazonGrace]

 

In other devastating news, I just watched Titanic and Leonardo di Caprio is dead.

[Cartmann99]

2 hours ago, AmazonGrace said:

In other devastating news, I just watched Titanic and Leonardo di Caprio is dead

That movie is only 21 years old. Haven't you ever heard of using a spoiler tag?

[onekidanddone]

34 minutes ago, Cartmann99 said:

That movie is only 21 years old. Haven't you ever heard of using a spoiler tag?

Vote blue or I’ll tell you the secret in The Crying Game

[Audrey2]

1 hour ago, onekidanddone said:

Vote blue or I’ll tell you the secret in The Crying Game

As long as you don't tell me what Soylent Green is!

[Cartmann99]

1 hour ago, Audrey2 said:

As long as you don't tell me what Soylent Green is!

 

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Uh-oh, trouble in paradise? "Trump, no longer ratings gold, loses his primetime spot on Fox News"

Spoiler

President Donald Trump loves to brag about ratings, but he’s not getting them anymore.

As he’s ramped up his rally schedule ahead of the midterms, viewership numbers for the raucous primetime events have been roughly similar to — sometimes dipping below — Fox News’ regular programming, and the network has recently stopped airing most evening events in full.

During three Trump rallies last week, Fox News showed clips and highlights from his speeches but stuck largely with its normal weekday primetime programming. On Saturday, when “Fox Report Weekend” and “Justice with Judge Jeanine” would ordinarily air, the network showed Trump’s speech from Topeka, Kan., in full. But on Tuesday, a rally in Council Bluffs, Iowa, was particularly hard to find — it was not aired live on any major network, and even C-SPAN cut away for other news. And on Wednesday night, as Trump took the stage in Erie, Pa., at 7 p.m., Fox News stuck with its coverage of Hurricane Michael.

Since Trump took office, CNN and MSNBC have mostly declined to air his campaign rallies, though, like Fox News, they’ll typically carry any presidential speeches or comments to reporters.

Fox still provides livestreams of the campaign events online, but in a crucial period with the midterms less than a month away, some in the White House are worried that the president is losing a prime-time megaphone to his base.

One senior White House official was unsure why the network would decide to cut away from presidential rallies, saying officials planned “to look into that” and wouldn’t be surprised if White House communications director Bill Shine, a former Fox News executive, was in touch with former colleagues about the trend.

The loss of national coverage is equally, if not more, concerning to the candidates on whose behalf Trump is traveling the country.

“It exposes us to a national audience that we normally don’t get to,” a Senate Republican campaign staffer said of the coverage of Trump rallies. “We tend to see lots of new sign-ups and small-dollar donations. There’s obviously folks streaming [rallies] online, but being able to be onstage with the president in front of a primetime audience is huge for a campaign trying to reach conservatives across the country who will open up their wallets.”

A source close to Trump described the declining coverage as a “huge loss on the state and local level for Republicans because they’re certainly not going to get any of that on other cable networks.”

“If they stop taking them completely, that might create a problem,” this person said. “Trump is a massive consumer of the media, so he may be disappointed.”

Neither Fox News nor the White House responded to requests for comment.

But from Fox’s perspective, Trump is no longer a sure bet to beat Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity or Laura Ingraham. For instance, on Aug. 30, Fox News’ 8 p.m. hour was mostly consumed by Trump’s rally in Evansville, Ind., earning 2.536 million viewers, according to Nielsen, compared with the 2.8 million viewers Carlson averaged at that time during 2018’s third quarter.

In 2017, when Trump rallied much less frequently, his events at times popped for more than 4 million viewers on Fox News — a number he hasn’t come close to in 2018, according to a POLITICO assessment of Nielsen ratings. This year, numbers have typically ranged from 2.5 to 3.5 million, per Nielsen, depending on a variety of factors, including day, time and whether there’s a big football game on another channel.

The biggest change is the sheer number of rallies. With so many, “they don’t want to give up so much primetime real estate,” said one person familiar with Fox News’ decision making.

Trump’s campaign speeches tend to follow a similar pattern, and this person said network officials’ fear was that too much repetition would lead to lower ratings. That could particularly be a problem during a busy news period like the first week of October, when Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination was still up in the air.

“They’re going with the route they think will give the best ratings performance,” the person said.

Compounding the issue, Fox News can’t take commercial breaks while Trump is speaking — he often goes on for more than an hour — costing the network some of its best advertising slots. With so many rallies and little promise of a ratings boost, there’s not much incentive for the network to clear air time.

It can also be frustrating to plan an hour-long show knowing each block might be swapped for a standard presidential stump speech, said former Fox News host Eric Bolling, who left the network in September 2017 but whose program was often interrupted by rally coverage during his tenure.

Not too long ago, the president’s preferred network was taking jabs at competitors for declining to air the entirety of his remarks. “Trump rally live & only on Fox News, other networks ignore presidential rally,” read a chyron during a June appearance by Trump in Duluth, Minn., as CNN and MSNBC stuck to their standard shows. At least four more times between June and July, Fox News traded its primetime lineup for live coverage of the president’s rallies when other cable news networks chose alternative programming.

But Trump has considerably increased his campaign travel in the final weeks before the midterm elections, leaving Fox News to decide between wall-to-wall coverage of his rallies or more selective airtime for the president. One GOP campaign operative said nightly rallies aired live and in full would probably subject Fox News to even greater scrutiny. The channel has often been described as a “propaganda machine” by Trump’s political opponents, many of whom claim its coverage of his administration has at times been sycophantic.

“If every night Trump does a rally a station carries it, you just become the president’s station,” the GOP operative said.

The president hasn’t faulted the network so far for recent changes to its programming. At his Tuesday-night rally in Iowa — which wasn’t aired — he heaped praise on his “great friends” at Fox News.

“We got a lot of good people. Do we like Tucker?” he asked the crowd. “I like Tucker.”

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Gee, how unsurprising: "Fox swooned over Kanye West at the White House. Here’s how it covered rappers visiting Obama."

Spoiler

Kanye West’s visit to the White House — not as a musical guest, but as a potential policy adviser — was hailed by conservatives and rewarded with glowing coverage on Fox News.

Prime-time anchor Tucker Carlson could barely contain himself, admitting the musical artist came across as a bit scattered but calling West’s comments in the Oval Office on Thursday amazing, poignant and brave.

“Listen carefully to what he said,” Carlson said Thursday night. “Sprinkled throughout his ramblings are flashes of truth, real insights into the way the world actually is rather than the way they tell us it is. Nobody else is allowed to talk this way. Go ahead and try it at work, you’ll get fired. West doesn’t care. And that makes him dangerous to a system that is based almost entirely on piety and lying. If you’re benefiting from a system like that, Kanye West must be crushed.”

It wasn’t always this way.

For years, Fox News hosts, contributors and anchors have used rap artists as a foil to make political points. Here’s a brief list of some of the ways the network talked about hip-hop and rappers during the Barack Obama years.

The Common controversy

The kerfuffle began in the world of conservative media when words of a poem that hip-hop artist Common had performed at a Def Poetry Slam were dredged up and posted online. Common, long lionized by lovers of so-called conscious rap for his sophisticated wordplay and R&B-inflected beats, had spoken critically of President George W. Bush and bemoaned police conduct, rapping that he had a “black strap to make the cops run" and “Burn a Bush cause for peace he no push no button.”

Sites like the Daily Caller, which Carlson co-founded, ran the lyrics in full and sneered at the content.

“You’ll get extra credit for counting the death threats,” the writer wrote. “There is no extra credit for identifying spelling errors.”

Fox ran headlines online that called Common “vile” and “cop-killer rapper.” Sarah Palin weighed in on Twitter, and Sean Hannity devoted a large portion of his show to it.

“It baffles me that this is the person the White House chooses to set as an example for our kids,” Hannity said. “This is not a guy we want our kids to listen to.”

But the White House was not swayed.

“The noise of outside outrage didn’t penetrate the relaxed, melodic atmosphere of the East Room, where Common was just another member of a varied cast of poets,” The Washington Post’s Dan Zak wrote of the event.

[Which artists have made the most visits to the Obama White House?]

Jay-Z

Jay-Z is one of the most successful rappers of his generation, with a career spanning more than two decades and business interests across the worlds of fashion, music streaming, clubs and restaurants. But he is also an avowed supporter of Democrats such as Obama, and in the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton.

Fox has noticed.

After Obama visited Jay-Z’s 40/40 club for a fundraiser in the months before the 2012 election, Sean Hannity honed in on the rapper’s rough-and-tumble upbringing.

“For only 40,000 bucks,” he said of the fundraiser, “you could have rubbed shoulders with a president and a rapper who has admitted to selling crack and shooting his own brother."

Beyoncé, too, has been a target of anchors on the network for the social messages she has embedded in her work — like her homage to the Black Panthers during the halftime show of the 2016 Super Bowl — and also, at least in the mind of former anchor Bill O’Reilly, for being too racy. (Jay-Z and Beyoncé are married.)

In the Trump era, Fox has also continued to run negative coverage of Jay-Z, who has been outspoken in his criticism of President Trump.

Rick Ross

In 2016, a Fox News anchor questioned the rapper Rick Ross’s presence at the White House after TMZ reported his court-mandated ankle monitor went off at the event. Ross had been charged with misdemeanor kidnapping and assault after he and a bodyguard allegedly assaulted two service workers who threw a party at his house without permission in 2015.

“Is this the kind of role model that our president thinks our kids need?” The host asked. “Ironically, Ross was invited there to support a program meant to keep young black people out of trouble.”

Ross and bodyguard Nadrian Lateef James were later sentenced to five years of probation after pleading no contest to the charges.

Kendrick Lamar

The Los Angeles-reared rapper, who, like Common, is known for the sophistication of his lyrics and beats, fell into the network’s sights after a politically charged appearance at the BET Awards in 2015. Lamar performed his song “Alright” from the top of a police car that was marred with graffiti. Fox ran a clip of the performance afterward, and host Eric Bolling noted that the song lyrics were critical of the police.

“Uh, I don’t like it,” Fox personality Kimberly Guilfoyle said.

“Not helpful at all,” Geraldo Rivera chimed in. “This is why I say that hip-hop has done more damage to young African Americans than racism in recent years. This is exactly the wrong message.”

Lamar got the last word, however, taking the sound bites from the Fox hosts and weaving them into the song “BLOOD” from his next album, “DAMN.”

[Here’s what happened at Kanye West’s incredibly bizarre meeting with Donald Trump]

Kanye West

Of course, before he became beloved by the pro-Trump crowd, West had earned some of the conservative world’s ire for his many high-profile antics, including going off script to skewer Bush during a fundraiser for Hurricane Katrina and cutting off Taylor Swift at the VMAs. (Obama called him a jackass in a famous hot mic incident.) Jill Dobson, then a Fox News correspondent, grouped Kanye West with other “gangsta” rappers like Lil Wayne and Jay-Z, calling him sarcastically “the ultimate gentleman, as Taylor Swift knows” to refute a statement Common made about how Obama was helping elevate rap music.

“I believe it’s Kenyay,” host Greg Gutfeld said, making an incomprehensible joke about Kanye’s name.

Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified the Kendrick Lamar song from the album “DAMN.” that featured a clip from Fox News. It was “BLOOD,” not “DNA.”

 

[JMarie]

Spoiler

Kanye West’s visit to the White House — not as a musical guest, but as a potential policy adviser — was hailed by conservatives and rewarded with glowing coverage on Fox News.

Forget ipecac.  That first line is a vomit inducer.

[fraurosena]

Whoah, Faux News is FACT-CHECKING the presidunce!

 

[Cartmann99]

54 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

Whoah, Faux News is FACT-CHECKING the presidunce!

 

Does this mean that Yeti Pubes will start attacking Fox?!? I'd laugh my ass off if he abandoned them for One America News.

Liz Wheeler took over Tomi Lahren's old show after Tomi left OAN to go work for Glenn Beck:

 

[JMarie]

7 hours ago, Cartmann99 said:

Does this mean that Yeti Pubes will start attacking Fox?!? I'd laugh my ass off if he abandoned them for One America News.

Liz Wheeler took over Tomi Lahren's old show after Tomi left OAN to go work for Glenn Beck:

 

Oh yay, another conservative blond young woman.

[onekidanddone]

40 minutes ago, JMarie said:

Oh yay, another conservative blond young woman.

Are they cloned and gestated in tanks?  

[GreyhoundFan]

"A ‘Fox & Friends’ voter panel rebels when asked about the migrant caravan"

Spoiler

Steve Doocy was about 30 seconds into Monday’s episode of “Fox & Friends” when he announced a Fox News alert.

“We’ve got a Fox News alert!” he said.

“FOX NEWS ALERT” blared a big red graphic on the screen.

It turned out to be pretty much the same alert “Fox & Friends” issued on Sunday, Saturday, Friday — and very possibly other episodes going back to mid-October: A caravan of migrants was slowly walking across Central America toward the U.S. border.

“The migrant caravan in Central America is growing,” Doocy said when the alert graphic stopped obscuring his face.

“Seven thousand strong!” said his co-host Ainsley Earhardt.

They cut to live footage of a Texas border city — approximately a 400-hour walk from the caravan’s position in southern Mexico — where a Fox News correspondent was stationed on the ground.

“Is he going to be seeing 5,000 people storm the border soon?” asked Brian Kilmeade, the other co-host.

You might think so, to take a spin through the big conservative news sites.

The caravan was front and center on Breitbart and the Drudge Report on Monday, as it has been often since several hundred people formed it in Honduras around Oct. 12 and started walking north.

Meanwhile, President Trump — “Fox & Friends” watcher-in-chief — just called the caravan a “National Emergy” on Twitter. Trump said the caravan has “Criminals and unknown Middle Easterners mixed in,” and the Mexican military can’t stop it, and also that it was organized by Democrats to hurt Republicans in the U.S. midterm elections.

The Washington Post, CNN, the Associated Press and many other mainstream outlets have covered the migrants' journey with considerably less foreboding, just as they did a smaller caravan that petered out before it reached the U.S. border earlier this year.

Among the 5,000 or so people who crossed the Guatemalan border into southern Mexico this weekend, Kevin Sieff reported for The Post, are a call center worker who grew up in the United States and wants to return; a wood-flooring installer who was deported from Phoenix six months ago and still has a 6-year-old son there; and uncounted families fleeing poverty or organized violence in their home countries.

They travel together for safety as they cross regions controlled by gangs and drug cartels. Most of them hope to seek asylum at the border or — more likely — to try to cross into the United States illegally.

So despite the caravan’s size, it’s no different in purpose than smaller mass migrations that routinely cross Central America.

The last one passed through last spring, drawing its own entourage of reporters and outraged tweets from Trump. It grew to about 1,000 people, which, it turned out, was too large for purposes of logistics, and so the caravan disbanded in Mexico City long before it reached the U.S. border.

It’s unclear how a group at least five times larger — apparently reliant on food and water from passersby — hopes to make it any farther.

That context was not in Monday’s Fox News alert.

Some of it came across later in the episode — perhaps unintentionally — when Doocy brought out a panel of four people identified as independent voters and asked about the caravan.

“It’s north of apparently 7,000 people strong,” Doocy told the first independent voter, Michael Willner. “How big a problem is that, that the United States has uneven immigration laws?”

“I think uneven immigration laws are a problem for any country, and I think our immigration laws need to be modernized and updated,” Willner said.

“But this country is founded on immigration,” he continued. “And all of us come from immigrants.”

Doocy tried again.

“By the time it gets here, it could be 10,000. It could be 20,000,” he said. “What should the United States do?”

“This is the mightiest country on the planet,” Willner replied. “I think we can handle a caravan of people, unarmed, coming to this country.”

“Okay,” Doocy said, pointing to the second independent voter. “Cathy: real quick.”

“I think the immigration crisis we’re seeing is a result of the failure of the two democratic parties to actually engage the issue,” said Cathy Stewart, with the New York Independence Party.

“Mm-hmm,” said Doocy.

“Instead, they use it like a partisan football,” she continued.

“Sure,” said Doocy. And, moving on: “John, real quick.”

But John Opdyke continued the previous independent voters' line of thought.

“There’s a humanitarian crisis taking place in Central America, and yet this issue gets turned into a complete political football,” he said. “There’s very little honest discussion about what’s actually happening.”

“And Aaron?” Doocy said. His voice had fallen to something like a raspy whisper.

“Treating this as an ‘invasion’ is a bad idea, and it’s going to end horribly if it is treated such as that way,” said Aaron Commey, a libertarian and the final independent voter on the panel.

Doocy collected his notes and sat up on his stool.

“Sure, but the backdrop is the midterms, so it all becomes political,” he told the voters. “So let’s see what happens!”

And with that, Fox & Friends dispensed with Monday’s migrant news alert and moved on to the subject of Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s DNA.

The next episode airs Tuesday morning. Perhaps another Fox News alert will pop up then, too.

 

[WiseGirl]

Oh Rufus! Stuck at Urgent Care and all they have on is Fox News. This is more painful than the injury.

[GreyhoundFan]

"A ‘Fox & Friends’ host donated to Trump. He said he just wanted tiny gold MAGA hats."

Spoiler

The Hill has discovered that Brian Kilmeade, who co-hosts President Trump’s favorite morning program, “Fox & Friends,” is funding the president’s campaign to the tune of a cool $601.71.

This might not be shocking, as the hosts of “Fox & Friends” often sound as impressed by Trump as Trump sounds impressed by them.

But wait, says Kilmeade — there is a simple explanation: He did not realize he was making an official campaign contribution when he innocently purchased hundreds of dollars’ worth of Trump MAGA hat Christmas ornaments in the heady days after the 2016 election.

“There’s no secret, there’s no ‘ah ha’ moment,” Kilmeade told the Hill on Tuesday. “I had no idea that this would be considered a donation. I’m looking for something cool and unique for Christmas for adults after this historic election.”

His search led him to the iconic “Make America Great Again” baseball hat ornament, which the Trump campaign was selling for $149 a pop in November 2016.

The baubles were certainly unique. Commemorating “Trump’s commitment to the Christmas spirit,” they were molded from brass and finished in either 14-karat or 24-karat gold (the description on Trump’s website was inconsistent).

Some people assumed the ornaments were a hoax and deluged an Amazon.com page for the ornaments with one-star joke reviews. (“It tried to put my nativity figures in an internment camp. Would not buy again.”)

The price was slashed to $99 by the end of the year, and you can now buy one on DonaldJTrump.com for a mere $45.

If you do so today, a disclaimer will inform you that your money is going to Trump’s campaign. Kilmeade told the Hill that he didn’t see anything like that, and a Fox News representative said Kilmeade purchased the trinkets off a now-defunct website that may not have informed him.

They were “a little expensive in retrospect, but that was it,” Kilmeade told the Hill. “I had no idea that would go to a campaign contribution."

Federal Election Commission records show that the campaign logged Kilmeade’s $601.71 on the day of Trump’s inauguration in January 2017 and simultaneously rolled the donation forward to the 2020 primary campaign.

A Fox News spokesman did not directly respond when The Washington Post asked whether the network has any rules against campaign donations. The Hill reported that the network sent a statement to the effect that it “does not prohibit talent from buying holiday ornaments.”

While some news outlets do prohibit donations (Keith Olbermann was suspended from MSNBC after donating to Democratic candidates in 2010, for example), Fox News has tolerated the practice in the past. One of the network’s biggest starts, Sean Hannity, donated nearly $10,000 to Republicans in 2010 and advised Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016.

For his part, Trump is a fan of Fox News. He routinely praises the network’s right-leaning coverage while dismissing other major outlets as “fake news.”

That said, Kilmeade is occasionally critical of Trump — at least more so than his “Fox & Friends” co-hosts, one of whom has literally called Trump his friend. Kilmeade scolded the president this month, for example, after Trump mocked a woman who accused Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh of sexual assault.

On Wednesday’s episode of “Fox & Friends,” Kilmeade made no mention of his Christmas ornaments. It was a fairly typical episode, devoting half its airtime to ominous coverage of a migrant caravan in southern Mexico that Trump has been worried about lately.

 

[Howl]

On 10/16/2018 at 12:28 PM, Cartmann99 said:

Does this mean that Yeti Pubes will start attacking Fox

OK, BRAIN BLEACH STAT.

And on that note,  ex-Fox, überblondbahnfuhrer NBC immigrant Megyn Kelly may possibly get the boot from her 9 am time slot at NBC over her blackface comments.  She's apologized, but who knows if that's enough.  Megyn, you little twit, this is what happens when you try to migrate tone deaf, racist, toxic crap from the Fox bubble into the real world of decent humans. The blow-back is fierce.  I hope she is shown the door and ends up in the gutter, swilling Clairol's Nice n Easy Blond and trying to sell her eggs on Craigslist. I know, I know, that's harsh, but she made a fortune selling hate and lies at Faux and she'll never apologize for THAT. 

[fraurosena]

23 minutes ago, Howl said:

And on that note,  ex-Fox, überblondbahnfuhrer NBC immigrant Megyn Kelly may possibly get the boot from her 9 am time slot at NBC over her blackface comments.  She's apologized, but who knows if that's enough.  Megyn, you little twit, this is what happens when you try to migrate tone deaf, racist, toxic crap from the Fox bubble into the real world of decent humans. The blow-back is fierce.  I hope she is shown the door and ends up in the gutter, swilling Clairol's Nice n Easy Blond and trying to sell her eggs on Craigslist. I know, I know, that's harsh, but she made a fortune selling hate and lies at Faux and she'll never apologize for THAT. 

It looks like she really is out. Good.

 

[Howl]

Excellent!  Wonder what her next stop will be?  Hired onto Trump's 2020 campaign?