Faux 4: A News Channel That Shows No News

[GreyhoundFan]

Faux is tripling down on fealty to TFG. They have pushed out those pesky people who actually report some news.

 

Continued from here:

 

[AlmostSavedAtTacoBell]

I had Fucker Carlson slobbering over Kyle Rittenhouse on my BINGO card!!!!

(Rittenhouse is in for a big fall when the loonies find another hero.  He's too young to really process that right now he is their prop but once he outlives his usefulness, he's going to be dropped into the void where he originated.  He'll be sitting in some bar in ten years, broke because he's blown through all the money he's received, and trying to get people to listen to him talk about how he's a "hero".  His lead defense attorney actually had the balls to say that he hoped Rittenhouse would avoid doing all these tours, etc. because he's just being used by them all until his usefulness wears out but that he doubts Rittenhouse or Mama R. would listen.  He said Rittenhouse should change his name, go somewhere quiet and rural, and try to live out a normal life.  I give the attorney credit for being the one person willing to try to give the guy some good life advice.)  

[Cartmann99]

Tucker Carlson at TPUSA:

 

[Ozlsn]

I really wonder what Murdoch's long game is, and/or what Putin etc have on him.

[GreyhoundFan]

A good one from the Washington Post: "A year ago, Fox News considered a breakup with Trump. 2021 changed those plans."

Quote

In the weeks before the 2020 election, as Fox News executives and luminaries came to terms with its possible outcome, some began to see in it a long-awaited opportunity — a chance to break up with Donald Trump.

Even the president sensed a growing distance from the network that was once so closely aligned with him. “What’s the biggest difference between this and four years ago?” he asked rhetorically during an Election Day appearance on “Fox & Friends,” skipping over obvious choices such as U.S. foreign relations, immigration policy or the makeup of the federal courts. “I say Fox,” he answered. “It’s much different now.”

The sentiment was held most fervently on Fox’s news side and in its Washington bureau, according to current and former Fox News personalities familiar with the dynamic who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal conversations. Many felt the network’s identity had become too tightly bound up with its opinion hosts — some of whom had become not just on-air cheerleaders but behind-the-scenes advisers for a president adored by their viewers — at the expense of the organization’s old self-forged image as a “fair and balanced” news operation.

Yet the post-Trump era opened for Fox with a ratings drop that quickly prompted a recalibration of those 2021 visions.

Now, one year later, the dream some harbored of distancing from Trump is long over. The biggest threat Fox now faces is a pair of looming lawsuits from two voting technology companies that claim the network, far from turning away from Trump, allowed Trump-allied personalities — including on-air hosts as well as guests — to falsely malign them with bogus conspiracy theories about widespread election fraud in 2020.

Over the course of the year, Fox managed to reassert itself as the No. 1 ranked cable programmer — and wholeheartedly realigned itself with the former president and his supporters.

It’s a hard-fought triumph that has allowed Fox executives to shrug off two other recent developments that, at least to outsiders, further undermined its credentials as a news broker — the departure of veteran anchor Chris Wallace and the revelation of panicked text messages that three of its hosts sent to Trump’s chief of staff, urging him to get the president to calm the Jan. 6 rioters at the U.S. Capitol.

And it highlights a dynamic affecting the entire cable news industry at a time when the era’s polarized politics increasingly steer viewers’ decisions about what to watch.

“The universe of cable news viewers is declining, so you need to get more out of the existing viewers,” said Chris Stirewalt, a former politics editor for Fox News who compares cable news to “the tobacco industry circa 1988, where you have addiction as your path to profit” — and a strong motivation for channels to give their most loyal audiences the worldviews they desire. “A lot of Fox’s decisions [suggest] that they are following that route.”

Fox News spokeswoman Irena Briganti attributed the network’s ratings dominance to its staff — “not just our news and opinion talent, but the many enterprising members of the team who work behind the scenes to put a top-notch product on the air,” she said. “It’s because of our great people that we consistently have more Americans watching Fox News each day than our competitors combined.”

Stirewalt’s career at Fox reflects some of the network’s pivots in its fight to stay on top. He was once part of a team that had won respect throughout the media business: Fox’s nonpartisan “decision desk,” known for its sharp and clearheaded analysis of election returns.

But the decision desk’s performance on election night 2020 set in motion some of the drama Fox would confront in early 2021. The network was the first media outlet to project that Joe Biden would win the traditional red state of Arizona, an announcement that enraged the Trump camp and prompted an angry phone call from the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner to Rupert Murdoch, whose family controls Fox News’s parent company.

Murdoch declined to overrule the decision desk, whose projection proved to be accurate. But when Trump lost, he declared war on Fox, railing against the network for its Arizona call and avidly promoting two far smaller news channels, Newsmax and One America News, that were beginning to carve out their own niches among the Trump faithful.

Stirewalt says that weeks later, he was fired, and another executive involved with the Arizona call abruptly retired. Fox says that Stirewalt’s job was simply eliminated in a larger staff restructuring and notes that the network recently renewed the contract of Arnon Mishkin, the consultant who has run its decision desk for years.

The next test for Fox — and those on-air personalities who had publicly championed Trump for so long — came on Jan. 6. Some of the network’s opinion hosts spent the subsequent weeks and months playing down the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol by hordes of Trump supporters or implying that the assault had been started by left-wing agitators. But in the moment, text messages would later show, Fox hosts Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity and Brian Kilmeade beseeched the president to calm the mob and enforce the peace.

“This is hurting all of us,” Ingraham wrote to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, in a text message revealed last week by the House select committee investigating the attack, echoing some concerns she shared on air that night. “He is destroying his legacy.”

In January 2021, for the first time in twenty years, Fox reported monthly ratings that fell behind both of its main cable news competitors, CNN and MSNBC.

Now Fox is back on top, announcing that it was on track to complete its sixth year as the highest-ranking channel in all of cable, not just cable news. But that recovery comes after a year of high-profile defections, criticism and lawsuits challenging the claims it allowed to be disseminated.

And Fox’s resurgence tracks with the growing influence within the company of Tucker Carlson, prime-time host of the network’s most-watched show.

In November, Carlson produced a documentary series — released on the network’s streaming service, Fox Nation, but promoted on Fox News — that floated unfounded theories that the Jan. 6 attack was an inside job by the government to target Trump supporters. (“They’ve begun to fight a new enemy in a new war on terror,” Carlson intoned in the first episode. “ … an actual war, soldiers and paramilitary agencies hunting down American citizens.”)

The Carlson series drew howls of condemnation from critics outside Fox, but also some whispers of dissent within the network, including from anchors Bret Baier and Chris Wallace. In November, two longtime Fox News contributors, Jonah Goldberg and Stephen Hayes, cited Carlson’s special — “a collection of incoherent conspiracy-mongering, riddled with factual inaccuracies, half-truths, deceptive imagery, and damning omissions” — as their primary rationale for resigning from the network.

Even Lachlan Murdoch, the chief executive of the network’s parent company, Fox Corp., was troubled by the incendiary trailer for the series, according to people who spoke with him. Yet the series continued to air on Fox Nation, which further lent Carlson an air of untouchability inside Fox. (Asked for comment, Brian Nick, a spokesman for Lachlan Murdoch, said, “When Lachlan has a concern, he addresses it internally with the team, not through the media.”)

A larger concern for Fox executives appears to be a pair of billion-dollar lawsuits filed by Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic Corp. alleging defamation by the network for allowing Trump allies such as Rudolph W. Giuliani and Sidney Powell to air false claims of election fraud.

Last week, a judge rejected Fox’s motion to dismiss the Dominion case, allowing it to move forward. Fox has called the suit “baseless” and an “all-out assault on the First Amendment,” arguing that the network “vigorously covered the breaking news surrounding the unprecedented 2020 election, providing full context of every story with in-depth reporting and clear-cut analysis.”

The departure of Wallace drew far more attention as the veteran anchor announced last week that he is leaving Fox to host a show for rival CNN’s forthcoming streaming service. Over his 18 years at the network, executives had repeatedly hailed Wallace’s nonpartisan credentials as a tough, skeptical questioner as proof of Fox’s commitment to news.

But Fox insiders were quick to play down his move, arguing that it will mean little to a core Fox audience that gravitates to the network’s highly charged opinion hours. And they crowed over the coup achieved one week later by Baier, who scored the must-see interview of the day while temporarily holding down Wallace’s old “Fox News Sunday” seat, when Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) announced on the show that he would vote against President Biden’s domestic spending plan.

It was proof, in Fox’s view, that the show’s powers lay not in who sat in the interviewer’s chair but in the substantial number of loyal viewers guaranteed to tune in to Fox at any hour.

“Fox’s programming decisions are a reflection of their audience,” said Rob Horowitz, a communications consultant who teaches a course on politics and media at the University of Rhode Island. “That’s where the audience is, but the audience is there in part because that’s where Fox leads them.”

 

[Ozlsn]

Independent media is offering anti-Murdoch items.

My favourite is this (in spoiler because NSFW):

Spoiler

I need more beach towels...

[Cartmann99]

More under the spoiler:

Spoiler

 

[47of74]

 

Yeah that doesn't surprise me at all.

[Cartmann99]

"We're going to expose the truth along the way that shows that Nancy Pelosi and democrats were involved in the negligence that led to the disaster that happened a year ago on January 6th."

 

[GreyhoundFan]

LOL, I"m sure AOC has no desire to sleep with Candy either.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

[GreyhoundFan]

D'Souza needs to sit down and STFU:

 

[Cartmann99]

I despise Rand Paul.

[Cartmann99]

Spoiler

 

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump’s cable cabinet: New texts reveal the influence of Fox hosts on previous White House"

Quote

Stephanie Grisham, former press secretary to President Donald Trump, remembers the challenges that came from so many Fox News hosts having the direct number to reach Trump in the White House residence.

“There were times the president would come down the next morning and say, ‘Well, Sean thinks we should do this,’ or, ‘Judge Jeanine thinks we should do this,’ ” said Grisham, referring to Sean Hannity and Jeanine Pirro, both of whom host prime-time Fox News shows.

Grisham — who resigned from the White House amid the Jan. 6 attacks and has since written a book critical of Trump — said West Wing staffers would simply roll their eyes in frustration as they scrambled to respond to the influence of the network’s hosts, who weighed in on everything from personnel to messaging strategy.

Trump’s staff, allies and even adversaries were long accustomed to playing to an “Audience of One” — a commander in chief with a twitchy TiVo finger and obsessed with cable news.

But text messages — newly released by the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection — between Fox News hosts and former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows, crystallize with new specificity just how tightly Fox News and the White House were entwined during the Trump years, with many of the network’s top hosts serving as a cable cabinet of unofficial advisers.

As the Jan. 6 attacks on the U.S. Capitol unfolded, Meadows received texts from Fox News hosts Laura Ingraham and Brian Kilmeade, as well as Hannity, according to the newly released communications.

“Mark, the president needs to tell people in the Capitol to go home,” Ingraham wrote. “This is hurting all of us. He is destroying his legacy.” Ingraham’s private missives, however, differed starkly from what she said on her show later that evening, when she began whitewashing the violence of the day and claiming the attacks were “antithetical” to the Trump movement.

Kilmeade urged Meadows to get Trump “on TV” to call off the rioters, writing, “Destroying everything you have accomplished.”

And Hannity asked Meadows, “Can he make a statement? Ask people to leave the Capitol.”

Other texts released by the committee reveal that Hannity also offered the White House advice in the run-up and aftermath to the attacks that resulted in five deaths. On Dec. 31, 2020, Hannity texted Meadows to warn, “I do NOT see January 6 happening the way he is being told.” And on Jan. 10, 2021 — referring to a conversation he had with Trump himself — Hannity texted Meadows and Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), a close Trump ally, to try to discuss strategies to rein in Trump.

“Guys, we have a clear path to land the plane in 9 days,” Hannity wrote. “He can’t mention the election again. Ever. I did not have a good call with him today. And worse, I’m not sure what is left to do or say, and I don’t like not knowing if it’s truly understood. Ideas?”

A former senior administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share candid details of private discussions, said Trump would also sometimes dial Hannity and Lou Dobbs — whose Fox Business show was canceled in February — into Oval Office staff meetings.

“A lot of it was PR — what he should be saying and how he should be saying it; he should be going harder against wearing masks or whatever,” Grisham said. “And they all have different opinions, too.”

A Trump spokesman did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for Fox News declined to comment.

Michael Pillsbury, an informal Trump adviser, said he realized how powerful Fox News was in Trump’s orbit when the former president began embracing Sidney Powell — an attorney promoting Trump’s false claims of widespread voter fraud — and other election fabulists after seeing them on Dobbs’s show. Pillsbury added that while it seemed obvious that many of the claims were patently false, Trump was inclined to believe them, in part because he was watching them on TV and had affection for Dobbs in particular.

“It taught me the power of the young producers at Fox, and Fox Business especially,” Pillsbury said. “These young producers who are in their mid-20s. They come out of the conservative movement, they‘ve never been in the government. They are presented with these reckless, fantastical accounts. And they believe them and put them on for ratings.”

Alyssa Farah, a former White House communications director, said the four most influential Fox hosts were Dobbs, Hannity, Igraham, and Pirro — and in the final year of the Trump administration, Hannity was the most influential. Other former top administration officials also mentioned Mark Levin, another Fox News host, and Maria Bartiromo, a Fox Business host, as two other network stars in regular touch with the White House.

From the point of view of the staff, Farah said, the goal was simply to “try to get ahead of what advice you thought he was going to be given by these people” because their unofficial counsel “could completely change his mind on something.”

But the relationship was also symbiotic, with White House aides actively trying to influence the network, especially on issues such as spending deals and averting government shutdowns. They knew if they could get Fox hosts to echo their goals on air, that would help sway the president.

Jeff Cohen, author of “Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media,” said the recent text messages represent a “smoking gun.”

“If you watch Fox News as much as I do, and I watch a few hours a night, they’re always signaling their close contact with the White House,” Cohen said referring to the Trump era. “But these texts are just the hard evidence. This is just how deeply intertwined the Fox News leadership is with Trump and the Trump White House.”

The problem, he explained, is that even though many of these hosts are opinion journalists, they are still violating public trust by not disclosing the full extent of their relationships with the Trump administration.

“Journalists and media are supposed to be public checks on power, not private advisers to power,” Cohen said. “A commentator is still a journalist, and even if the commentator doesn’t consider him or herself to be a journalist, they still have to tell the public when they played a role in something they’re commenting on.”

One former top White House official said that the hosts often had more influence with Trump based on what they said on air rather than in their various backchannels to him and his team, in part because the former president was obsessed with the following — and ratings — of their shows.

Former Trump chief of staff John F. Kelly told others in the White House that Dobbs’s show was critical to understanding the president and that Trump’s ideas and feelings about people often originated from that program. Kelly also told colleagues that if Dobbs went after a White House senior staffer, they risked their status falling quickly in the eyes of the former president.

When Kelly could not watch the prime-time Fox shows himself, he would ask other staffers to monitor them, and he would scour the White House call logs for the names of Fox News personalities.

Pirro, several Trump aides said, often became irate if the former president did not appear on her show frequently enough in her view, especially if he had been on Hannity’s show several times prior.

Fox shows were so important to the president that White House staffers were determined to get guests booked on them, even forcing staffers to take weekend shifts appearing on Pirro’s show after Pirro complained she couldn’t get a guest — and the former president also called in himself.

During the 2020 presidential campaign, Hannity called Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel and other Trump allies on a number of occasions to voice his months-long concern that the campaign was heading in the wrong direction and Trump would lose unless he turned around his operation, according to a Republican with direct knowledge of the campaign’s operations, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share details of private discussions. They added that Hannity was much more bullish on his show than in private about Trump’s electoral prospects.

As the coronavirus pandemic ramped up in early 2020, a range of Fox News hosts again mobilized to offer backchannel advice to the Trump White House. In March, Tucker Carlson flew to Trump’s private Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Fla., to warn of the seriousness of the virus. Carlson told Trump he might lose the election because of covid-19, while Trump told the prime-time host that the virus wasn’t as deadly as people were claiming.

In April, Ingraham arrived at the White House with two on-air regulars who are part of what she describes as her “medicine cabinet” for a private meeting with Trump. There, she talked up hydroxychloroquine, a controversial anti-malarial drug which public health experts have concluded is not effective as a covid-19 treatment.

An internal Trump coronavirus response team led by Jared Kushner, the former president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, also prioritized the requests of certain VIPs, including Kilmeade and Pirro. Kilmeade had called two administration officials, for instance, to pass along tips about where to obtain personal protective equipment. And Pirro had repeatedly urged administration officials to send a large quantity of masks to a specific New York hospital.

At the time, a Fox News spokeswoman said neither host had been aware that their tips were receiving preferential treatment.

Since leaving office, Trump has vociferously complained about Fox, particularly its coverage of the election and what he views as increasingly negative coverage about him. But he has kept in close touch with many of the hosts and even sees some of them at his Florida resort.

The Jan. 6 committee has asked Hannity to cooperate with its investigation, and he has hired Jay Sekulow, a longtime Trump attorney, to represent him. “We are evaluating the letter from the committee. We remain very concerned about the constitutional implications especially as it relates to the First Amendment. We will respond as appropriate,” Sekulow said in a statement last week.

But some former senior White House officials said the texts make the role of Hannity and others seem more outsize than it was. The former president appreciated that the Fox crew was fighting on his behalf on a daily basis, this person said, “but he would not be like, ‘Let me call Larry Kudlow and change our economic plan because Laura Ingraham said that.’ ”

Of course, Kudlow, who now hosts a show on Fox Business, came to Trump’s attention as a top economic adviser in part because of the business show he previously hosted on CNBC.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Um, Tuckums, Justice I Like Beer is not a liberal. Not now, not ever.

 

[Audrey2]

Please remember that for Tucker a liberal is anyone who doesn't agree with him and anyone who isn't absolutely draconian.

[Cartmann99]

[GreyhoundFan]

Laura is a fucking monster:

 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[fraurosena]

How much evidence does one need to realize Tuckums is a Russian agent?

 

[GreyhoundFan]

I saw this today. I'm still laughing:

[Cartmann99]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Russian propaganda front and center on Faux:

 

[Audrey2]

1 hour ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Russian propaganda front and center on Faux:

 

This is one thing whose potential implications scare me for the US. If we do separate into two countries, and at the rate we're going I wouldn't be surprised if we do at some point, I can see the red gun loving States realizing after a few years, "oh crap! We really have lost a lot of money that the blue states were subsidizing us with. We've also lost technologies and other things that only come from Blue States so it's time for us to go to war with the blue States and try to take what we want back."