If there has been one consolation about Fox News’ ongoing subversion of our political discourse — and even of democracy itself — it has been the near-certainty that 93-year-old Rupert Murdoch does not actually have a pact with the Lord of the Underworld and will at some point depart this vale of tears. His rabidly right-wing son Lachlan Murdoch, who Rupe put in charge a few years ago, is outnumbered by three of his siblings, and they reportedly have more moderate views.
Now that is in danger. On Wednesday, The New York Times published a deep dive (free link) into legal steps Murdoch is taking that are aimed at ensuring Lachlan’s continued reign after Rupert himself has departed the scene. Reporters Jim Rutenberg and Jonathan Mahler write that the old man is seeking to rewrite the terms of a trust that specifies four of his many children will share equal control of his media empire:
The trust currently hands control of the family business to the four oldest children when Mr. Murdoch dies. But he is arguing in court that only by empowering Lachlan to run the company without interference from his more politically moderate siblings can he preserve its conservative editorial bent, and thus protect its commercial value for all his heirs.
The toxic effects of a ruling in Rupert’s favor can’t be exaggerated. We in the media like to focus on how Mark Zuckerberg has profited by allowing Facebook to be weaponized by shadowy, malignant forces and how Elon Musk has transformed the cesspool that was Twitter into a far worse place that indulges far-right extremists and conspiracy theorists like, well, himself.
But Fox News is without question the single most influential player on the right, flagrantly promoting lies of omission and commission, including the Big Lie that the 2020 presidential election was somehow stolen from Donald Trump. Fox had to pay a $787 million settlement to the Dominion voting machine company for deliberately lying that Dominion had switched votes from Trump to Joe Biden. But other than firing its biggest star, Tucker Carlson, for reasons that have never been fully explained, Fox has continued on its lying, hate-mongering way.
It’s disheartening to think that this might continue long after Rupert Murdoch’s departure.
Assert, deny, project. Repeat. Photo (cc) 2016 by Gage Skidmore.
Whenever Donald Trump erupts with rhetoric that is disturbing and offensive, questions are raised as to whether the media should amplify it. My own view: Yes, usually, although it shouldn’t be repeated over and over to the point at which it drowns out all other news. President Biden is struggling to get his own message out, and surely one of the reasons is that Trump is dominating just about every news cycle — not in a good way, of course, but that hardly seems to matter.
Yet how can we ignore the reality that, on Monday, his campaign promoted Nazi rhetoric on Trump’s own Truth Social platform? Among other things, the 30-second video that was posted refers to “the creation of a unified Reich” and says that Trump will reject “globalists,” code for Jews among the far right. The Trump campaign responded with the usual drivel. According to The New York Times (free link), the response was that the video was shared by a campaign staffer who didn’t notice the Nazi content and that Biden, naturally, is “the real extremist.” The post was reportedly left up for many hours, though it was taken down Tuesday morning. Trump himself has not addressed the matter.
What’s interesting is that, far from giving the story too much attention, our major mainstream newspapers have actually paid little attention to it. Our three national papers, the Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, all published stories about it online. But only the Times saw fit to include it in its print edition, relegating it to page A17 of today’s paper, with no tease on the front. By contrast, there’s nothing on page one or inside the print editions of the Post or the Journal, either today or Tuesday.
Locally, The Boston Globe actually has two stories in its print edition today, as it’s the lead item in its political roundup and the subject of a metro-front story on Biden’s speech in Boston. Neither, though, is on page one.
It seems like a classic case of being caught between news cycles — too late for Tuesday print, too old for Wednesday print. The Nazi story certainly dominated the political conversation on Tuesday, but for casual news consumers who aren’t constantly plugged into social media and cable news, that’s scant consolation. Print still matters, if only as a way for editors to communicate what they think are the most important stories of the day.
The Big Three national evening newscasts actually did better on Tuesday. I downloaded the audio and plugged the files into Otter, which uses artificial intelligence to produce reasonably good transcripts. I also watched a few minutes to fill in the gaps. Here’s what I found:
ABC’s “World News Tonight” had a story about 12 minutes into its newscast and stuck with it for almost a minute and a half. It included both the “N”-word (Nazi) and the “H”-word (Hitler) and incorporated Biden’s outraged response. There’s also this straightforward assertion by reporter Mary Bruce: “The Trump campaign is adamant this was not a campaign video, that it was reposted by a staffer who clearly did not see the word while the President was in court. But that video that included three instances of the word Reich remained on Trump’s page for more than 18 hours.”
The “NBC Nightly News” actually mentioned the Nazi story three times. Anchor Lester Holt teased it in his opening, and reporter Laura Jarrett referred to it at about the 10-minute mark in beginning her roundup of that day’s Trump-related news before offering a 30-second story at about 11:30. Again, the word “Nazi” is used several times.
On the “CBS Evening News,” anchor Norah O’Donnell teased the story about six minutes into the newscast, straightforwardly asserting that the term “Reich” is associated with Nazi Germany. Reporter Robert Costa then offered up some Trump news that provides the most thorough overview of the three networks, pivoting from the post and Biden’s reaction to this: “It’s not the first time Trump has used rhetoric prompting outrage for its echoes of hateful extremists.” That’s followed by some of Trump’s worst comments over the years, from saying that immigrants “are poisoning the blood of our country” to “radical left thugs that live like vermin.”
All of this matters because the three evening network newscasts are the closest thing we have left to a mass medium, with a combined audience of nearly 20 million. By contrast, Fox News, which attracts by far the largest audience of the three cable news stations, has an average of about 2 million viewers in prime time, generally defined as 8 to 11 p.m.
I harbor no illusions that Trump’s latest dalliance with Nazi and antisemitic rhetoric is going to have a lasting effect. It all played out in a manner that we’ve seen over and over: assert, deny and project — and then quietly remove the offending message after it’s accomplished its purpose of assuring the far right that he’s one of them. Stand back and stand by, everyone. It’s going to get a lot worse.
Robert Mueller. Photo (cc) 2012 by the White House.
Nearly 40 years ago I heard a lawyer tell a jury something in court that has stuck with me: If there’s a rotten fish floating around the top of the barrel, you’re under no obligation to reach in to see if there’s something better underneath. He was more eloquent (if no less graphic) than I, but you get the idea. If someone bolsters their argument with false or distorted facts, then you should feel free to disregard their larger point.
That’s why I want to return one more time to NPR senior business editor Uri Berliner’s long essay in The Free Press about what he regards as his employer’s move to the fringe left. Mainly he seems to be worked up about diversity workshops and a change in NPR’s audience from one that was more or less balanced ideologically to one that is overwhelmingly liberal and progressive — which, as I wrote earlier this week, is more a consequence of the great national sorting-out than of anything NPR itself has done.
But there were also three factual assertions he made. One is flat-out false; one is devoid of crucial context; and one is questionable. So here we go.
• False.Berliner writes that special counsel Robert Mueller found “no credible evidence” that Donald Trump had engaged in collusion with Russia, writing, “Russiagate quietly faded from our programming.”
Berliner has essentially adopted then-Attorney General Bill Barr’s gloss of the Mueller report, which itself was false. When the full report came out, and when Mueller himself finally testified before a congressional committee, we learned that the truth was more complicated. First, “collusion” is not a legal concept. Second, there was massive evidence of ties between Russia and the Trump campaign. Third, there was evidence that Trump had obstructed justice and had attempted to obstruct justice only to be stopped by those around him.
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“In his report, Mueller said his team declined to make a prosecutorial judgment on whether to charge Trump, partly because of a Justice Department legal opinion that said sitting presidents shouldn’t be indicted,” according to this detailed fact-check by The Associated Press, headlined “Trump falsely claims Mueller exonerated him.” The AP added that Mueller “deliberately drew no conclusions about whether he collected sufficient evidence to charge Trump with a crime. He merely said that if prosecutors want to charge Trump once he is out of office, they would have that ability because obstacles to indicting a sitting president would be gone.”
• Lacking crucial context. Berliner blasts NPR for failing to report on Hunter Biden’s laptop in the waning days of the 2020 campaign and for failing to come clean when it was later found to be genuine, writing: “The laptop did belong to Hunter Biden. Its contents revealed his connection to the corrupt world of multimillion-dollar influence peddling and its possible implications for his father.”
As proof, Berliner links to a Washington Post story that was published in March 2022 — that is, a year and a half after the New York Post published its initial story. That’s how long it took for The Washington to verify at least part of the hard drive’s content as genuine. The story notes: “The vast majority of the data — and most of the nearly 129,000 emails it contained — could not be verified by either of the two security experts who reviewed the data for The Post.” There’s also this:
Some other emails on the drive that have been the foundation for previous news reports could not be verified because the messages lacked verifiable cryptographic signatures. One such email was widely described as referring to Joe Biden as “the big guy” and suggesting the elder Biden would receive a cut of a business deal. One of the recipients of that email has vouched publicly for its authenticity but President Biden has denied being involved in any business arrangements.
In other words, The Washington Post was not able to find a single verified email tying President Biden to his son’s business dealings, leaving anything beyond that to the he-said/he-said that we already knew about.
In addition, Berliner makes it sounded like NPR was unique in holding back on the laptop story in October 2020. But as The New York Times reported, even the New York Post — which, after all, is part of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire — had trouble getting it out there. The reporter who wrote most of it refused to let the paper put his byline on it “because he had concerns over the article’s credibility.” Another staff member whose byline did appear did little work on the story and didn’t realize her name would be on it until after it was published.
Even worse, Fox News, Murdoch’s 800-pound gorilla, reportedly took a pass on it, according to Mediaite, because the Trump operative who brought it to them, Rudy Giuliani, could not provide “sourcing and veracity” for the emails.
Contrary to Berliner’s complaint, the restraint that NPR showed was no different from that of any other news organization — including Fox News. No more than a small portion of the emails on hard drive have ever been verified, and none of those emails suggest any wrongdoing on the part of President Biden.
• Questionable. Berliner takes NPR to task for accepting without reservation the theory that COVID-19’s origins were most likely from a wild animal market in Wuhan, China, rather than from a leak at a nearby lab, complaining that “politics were blotting out the curiosity and independence that ought to have been driving our work.”
Admittedly, this complaint by Berliner is more legitimate than his other two examples. More than four years after the virus was discovered, we still don’t fully understand its origins, and it’s a fact that the story got caught up in our toxic political environment. As I wrote for GBH News in June 2021, the media — in their haste to dismiss a right-wing conspiracy theory that COVID was created as part of a Chinese bioweapons program — leaned too hard in the other direction, rejecting any possibility that COVID had come from anywhere other than the Wuhan market.
That said, deep dives by the media over the past several years have turned up nothing definitive, and it still seems more likely than not that COVID sprang up from the market rather than from a lab experiment gone awry. Once again, I think Berliner is being too hard on his employer.
Which appears to be the point. By going public with his complaints about the culture inside NPR, Berliner may have accomplished the impossible: He’s made it so that his continued tenure at NPR is untenable while at the same time rendering himself unfirable. I detect a resignation and a fat contract with Fox News in Berliner’s immediate future.
A federal judge reminded us all this week that journalists have no First Amendment right to protect their confidential sources. What is disturbing about the case at issue, though, is that it involves a civil case brought against the government rather than an alleged crime.
According to Alanna Durkin Richer and Eric Tucker of The Associated Press, investigative reporter Catherine Herridge must pay a fine of $800 a day, although that fine will not be imposed until she has an opportunity to appeal. The case involves a Chinese American scientist who was investigated by the FBI but not charged with any wrongdoing. That scientist, Yanping Chen, is suing the government and demanding to know who leaked damaging information about her to Herridge.
Herridge reported a series of articles about Chen for Fox News in 2017 and was recently laid off by CBS News.
Journalists in 49 states enjoy some level of protection in being required to give up their confidential sources. The two exceptions are Wyoming and the federal system. But even federal judges generally weigh the importance of the information sought against the chilling effect created by forcing reporters to break promises they made to their sources. A breach of national security resulting in criminal charges, for instance, would be considered a much higher priority than Chen’s civil lawsuit under the Privacy Act
Nevertheless, U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper, according to the AP account, ruled that though he “recognizes the paramount importance of a free press in our society,” the legal system “also has its own role to play in upholding the law and safeguarding judicial authority.”
Earlier this year, the U.S. House passed a bill on a bipartisan basis that would create a strong federal shield law called the PRESS Act. The bill awaits an uncertain fate in the Senate, according to Gabe Rottman, writing for the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.
In any case, it strikes me that demanding that a reporter give up her confidential sources so a plaintiff can advance her breach-of-privacy lawsuit against the government is an abuse of the idea that the press ought to be free and independent, even if it doesn’t specifically violate the First Amendment.
Authorities say it will be some time before we know exactly what happened in a fatal one-car accident on Wednesday at the Rainbow Bridge connecting the U.S. and Canada at Niagara Falls. But it’s certainly not too soon to call out Fox News’ characteristically loathsome behavior.
First, here’s what we know. Aaron Besecker of The Buffalo News reported on Thursday that there were no explosives and no signs of terrorist activity. A couple was heading across the bridge after stopping at a casino. They had tickets to a concert in Toronto that night. Suddenly the car started moving at a high rate of speed, flew over an eight-foot bridge, and burst into flames, killing both occupants. By all credible accounts, it appears to be a personal tragedy, not an attack of any kind.
But that’s not what Fox News told its viewers. Throughout Wednesday, the right-wing network’s hosts told viewers that the car was packed with explosives and may have been occupied by Islamist terrorists. As CNN media reporter Oliver Darcy wrote in his daily newsletter, “Fox News recklessly smashed the panic button and stoked fear from coast-to-coast.” Darcy added:
Fox News had made a massive error. The type of error that should have given network brass and the reporters involved a giant pit in their stomach. But unlike respected news organizations that acknowledge when mistakes are made, Fox News has refused to issue a correction. Instead, the network stealth edited its online story, with no editors’ note of any sort.
Earlier this year, Fox paid $787.5 million to settle a libel suit brought by the Dominion voting machine company after Fox’s hosts had repeatedly promoted the lies of Trump associates that the machines were programmed to steal the 2020 election from Donald Trump and hand it to Joe Biden. It’s clear that Fox executives have learned their lesson — that is, if you’re going to make things up, make sure there are no identifiable plaintiffs who can sue you.
Does Fox News lead or follow its audience? I’ve long thought it was both.
During the 2015-’16 presidential campaign, Fox tried to take out Donald Trump, as when then-Fox host Megyn Kelly confronted Trump with his misogynistic remarks at the first Republican debate. It didn’t work, and eventually Fox got with the program. Then, after Joe Biden defeated Trump in 2020, Fox tried to play it straight, more or less. Famously, it was the first media outlet to call Arizona for Biden, a state that ensured his victory. But when Fox’s audience started stampeding to farther-right cable channels like Newsmax and OAN, Fox reversed itself and embraced Trump’s lies so tightly that it cost them $787 million in a libel settlement.
Brian Stelter makes that argument in an interview with Tom Jones of Poynter. Stelter, who’s written a new book about Fox called “Network of Lies,” tells Jones that most Fox employees don’t much care about politics. Instead, they are motivated by the usual: making a living. Here’s an excerpt:
For most, it’s just a job, not a calling. Some producer and director types truly believe in the Trump agenda and will stop at nothing to see him reelected. But most are just trying to make good TV. They definitely aren’t losing sleep about Fox’s coarsening of the culture or Trump’s brainwashing of the base.
I write in the book that rank-and-file staffers like to gossip about hookups between hosts and ratings rivalries between shows. On the occasions when I steered my source chats in a more serious direction, toward the impact of Fox-fueled disinformation on society and democracy, staffers turned cagey or dismissive. I heard some predictable whataboutism and rants about the flaws of other networks.
Bottom line: I think introspection and accountability are in short supply at Fox, a tone that’s set at the top, by Rupert, who advised Fox News Media CEO Suzanne Scott years ago to “ignore the noise.”
You should read the whole thing. And by the way, although Stelter probably isn’t interested, I wonder if it might be possible for new CNN head Mark Thompson to lure Stelter back now that the brief, unlamented Chris Licht era is over. Stelter appeared on CNN last week to plug his book, so who knows? I wouldn’t expect to see Stelter return to his old job, which is being ably filled by Oliver Darcy. But Stelter is among the very best media reporters in the business, and it would be great to see him return in some capacity.
I started out writing a much longer post about Tim Alberta’s astonishing 15,000-word takedown of CNN’s now officially embattled CEO, Chris Licht. But I decided there’s really no need. You can read Alberta’s story for yourself along with Jon Allsop’s analysis for the Columbia Journalism Review of what it all means, Brian Stelter’s article at New York magazine on the chaotic aftermath inside CNN, and Benjamin Mullin’s story in The New York Times on Jeff Zucker, Licht’s bitter and scheming predecessor.
Rather than add to that, I want to focus instead on one small point that shows Licht sort of/kind of had the right idea. While speaking to a student group, Alberta writes, “Licht sought to differentiate CNN from both networks — slamming Fox News for being a duplicitous propaganda outfit, and rebuking MSNBC for trafficking in hysteria.”
Licht has been talking this way from the moment he ascended to the top of CNN, and it’s why I was willing to cut him some slack despite misguided decisions such as firing Stelter, the network’s excellent media reporter. The problem, it seems, is that he understood CNN’s problems correctly but superficially and thus wasn’t really able to execute.
CNN didn’t need to move from the left back toward the center or to be more polite to authoritarian right-wingers, as Licht seems to think. Rather, it needed to readjust the balance between opinion and reporting.
Of course, it’s fair to ask who is really calling the shots at CNN — Licht or his overlords, David Zaslav, the head of Warner Bros Discovery, and right-wing billionaire John Malone, who owns a significant chunk of the company. It all fell apart when CNN’s town hall event with Donald Trump turned into a disaster in exactly the ways in which everyone had predicted — with Trump simply yelling lies in the face of his well-prepared but overwhelmed host, Kaitlan Collins, while the Trumper crowd hooted and hollered off stage.
You may have heard that another media executive, David Leavy, has been brought in as CNN’s chief operating officer, a significant wing-clipping for Licht, who has presided over a steep decline in ratings, revenue and morale. It seems hard to believe that Licht can survive the humiliation, much of it self-inflicted, that he endured in Alberta’s piece.
It’s equally hard to know where CNN should go from here. A return to Zucker’s clown show (Chris and Andrew Cuomo, anyone?) would hardly restore the reputation of a still-great news organization whose on-air product often fails to match the excellence of its journalists.
CNN is just as much in need of a reset today as it was when Licht took over.
Who could have imagined that Tucker Carlson, a white supremacist in public, is also a white supremacist in private? The New York Times has unearthed what it claims is the text message that got Carlson fired from Fox News. It’s from Jan. 7, 2021, the day after the insurrection. Here it is in full:
A couple of weeks ago, I was watching video of people fighting on the street in Washington. A group of Trump guys surrounded an Antifa kid and started pounding the living shit out of him. It was three against one, at least. Jumping a guy like that is dishonorable obviously. It’s not how white men fight. Yet suddenly I found myself rooting for the mob against the man, hoping they’d hit him harder, kill him. I really wanted them to hurt the kid. I could taste it. Then somewhere deep in my brain, an alarm went off: this isn’t good for me. I’m becoming something I don’t want to be. The Antifa creep is a human being. Much as I despise what he says and does, much as I’m sure I’d hate him personally if I knew him, I shouldn’t gloat over his suffering. I should be bothered by it. I should remember that somewhere somebody probably loves this kid, and would be crushed if he was killed. If I don’t care about those things, if I reduce people to their politics, how am I better than he is?
Fox executives were terrified that the message, which Carlson had sent to one of his producers, would be introduced at trial by Dominion Voting Systems as part of the company’s libel case against Fox. That fear contributed to Fox’s decision to settle the case for nearly $800 million.
In other words, Carlson had to go because he cost Rupert Murdoch money.
It’s going to be a while — if ever — before we know why the loathsome white nationalist Tucker Carlson and his ratings-obsessed enablers at Fox News parted company.
Carlson was far from the biggest on-air liar in claiming that Dominion Voting Systems had rigged the 2020 presidential election for Joe Biden. As Josh Marshall puts it, “If you looked at the material Dominion had assembled the most damning stuff was about Bartiromo, Pirro, Dobbs. Very much the B Team. As odious as he may be, Carlson is quite good at the ‘just asking questions’ shtick.”
Carlson’s internal emails, though, were incredibly embarrassing and damaging, proving beyond a doubt that no one inside Fox believed claims by Donald Trump and his hangers-on about voting-machine fraud. My insta-theory is that Rupert Murdoch fired Carlson in a blind rage after Dominion extracted a nearly $800 billion million settlement.
Fox News and Tucker Carlson have agreed to "part ways," according to a Fox News release. This step comes less than a week after a momentous settlement in the Dominion v. Fox News case. 1/
For those of you who are hoping for a kinder, gentler Fox, you may recall that the firings of Roger Ailes and Bill O’Reilly a few years ago led to similar dreams. Instead, Fox took a sharp turn from the right toward the far right. I’m not sure a similar move now is even possible unless Carlson is replaced by, say, Alex Jones or Steve Bannon.
Carlson is the big media news of the day, but let’s not overlook Don Lemon, the hapless CNN host who was fired today. Lemon has been on thin ice since making some cringe-worthy sexist remarks on air, but he deserved better than (as he claims) to be cut loose without any communication from CNN management.
For Carlson, it’s been a long, strange devolution from principled conservative to openly racist hate-monger. In 2019, I wrote a piece for GBH News detailing my own experience with Carlson, including a convivial lunch at The Palm in Washington more than 20 years ago. I’ve occasionally wondered what happened to that guy. Maybe he does, too.
Rupert Murdoch. Photo (cc) 2015 by the Hudson Institute.
For those of us who had hoped that Fox News would be publicly humiliated in the courtroom, Tuesday’s announcement that a settlement had been reached was disappointing but not surprising. The purpose of lawsuits is to resolve disputes, not to provide justice.
And what a settlement Dominion Voting Systems got: $787.5 million, or about 19% of the cash or “cash equivalents” held by Fox Corp. at the end of 2022, according to The New York Times. No, not even Rupert Murdoch has that kind of money sloshing around in a spare pants pocket. It also amounts to half the $1.6 billion in damages Dominion said it had suffered as a result of on-air lies that the company’s machines had switched votes from Donald Trump to Joe Biden in the 2020 election.
Still, it would have been lovely to watch the 92-year-old mogul take the stand and be confronted with internal communications that showed he and other Fox executives and talk-show hosts knew Donald Trump and his supporters were lying about the election being stolen by Dominion and other dark forces but promoted those lies anyway. I also wish that Fox were being forced to apologize for its lies, over and over again, but that was probably never in the cards.
On the other hand, Fox News faces more legal troubles, including a $2.7 billion lawsuit brought by yet another voting technology company, Smartmatic. So unless Fox settles that case as well, this saga is a long way from being resolved. Good.
Some media observers were breathing a sigh of relief that the First Amendment protections for libel would not be put to the test. I’m not among them. As I wrote earlier, this was really a textbook example of “actual malice” — that is, publishing or broadcasting false information despite knowing that it’s false, or demonstrating reckless disregard for the truth. It was not a “landmark case.” I talked about that before the settlement was announced with WBZ-TV (Channel 4) political analyst Jon Keller, who provides a good overview of Tuesday’s events and what they mean.
I’ll close with a post on Mastodon by M.S. Bellows Jr., a lawyer and commentator who gets to the heart of it in a way that’s both illuminating and entertaining:
I’m a former trial lawyer, former prosecutor, and current mediator. I have both represented and sued some of the largest companies in the world. I am very experienced, and VERY good, at what I do.
At trial, Dominion would not and could not have received an apology. Period. The vanishingly rare circumstances in which a court could order a retraction do not exist here.
At trial, Dominion would not have received $787.5 million, which is 45x its highest annual earnings. If a jury awarded it that much, the court almost certainly would have reduced it on remittitur.
This is a superb and stunning settlement. Dominion has hurt Fox badly, exposed Fox’s lies, and done the American public a massive service. If you feel otherwise, fine – but that’s all it is: a feeling. Factually, you are incorrect, and to soothe your feelings you should take recourse to bourbon or cannabis, not social media.
Thank you.
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