Fox news

What Chris Wallace does next

Chris Wallace stunned the world of news media this weekend by announcing his resignation from Fox News and its staple show, Fox News Sunday. What he did next shocked some further and didn’t surprise others at all: he joined CNN+, a new streaming service coming next year from Jeff Zucker’s dramatic infotainment network. The move is hardly a bombshell given Wallace’s recent run-ins with the MAGA faithful, both on and off the network. It comes on the heels of a contentious election where Wallace lost control in the first presidential debate. Some see Wallace’s departure as an indictment of the direction in which Fox News is heading editorially.

chris wallace

Comparing Fauci to Josef Mengele seems ill-advised

Cockburn always thought Thanksgiving was the holiday designated for sharing madcap political views that one day you'll regret saying aloud. So kudos to Fox Nation's Lara Logan for extending the tradition into advent, by offering a comparison between Anthony Fauci and Nazi doctor Josef Mengele on Monday's edition of Fox News Primetime. Logan, a former war correspondent, was invited on to discuss the Omicron variant. Presumably the logic behind the booking was that the variant emerged from her home country, South Africa. Here's the expertise she chose to provide: On Dr. Fauci, this is what people say to me. He doesn't represent science to them, he represents Josef Mengele. Dr. Josef-the Nazi doctor who did experiments on Jews in the second world war and in the concentration camps.

lara logan

How cable news ruined Thanksgiving

Jim Acosta is an edgy, edgy man. You can tell because he uses the word "bullshit" on live TV, which in this year of our edgelord 2021 still retains a good 1 percent of its taboo. So it was that Acosta on CNN last week honored Tucker Carlson with his "Bullshit Factory Employee of the Year" award, which sounds like a throwaway joke Jon Stewart scribbled on a steno pad while off on an Ambien sleepwalk. The entire Acosta segment was unspeakably sad — and not just because he's supposed to be one of the more respected reporters at The Most Trusted Name in News™®©. It's because CNN's relationship to Fox has become one of clinically committable obsession. Its personalities are forever playing Fox clips and trashing them. And they're not the only ones.

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Chris Cuomo is a symptom of CNN’s disease

Chris Cuomo won’t give CNN, or his very concerned social justice warrior colleagues, a break. Cuomo is arguably the face of the network. That’s a serious problem for Jim Acosta’s anti-Fox News jihad, Brian Stelter and Oliver Darcy’s Media Matters rip-off gig, Jake Tapper’s 'last honest man in Washington' act and Wolf Blitzer still trying to pretend he’s just the straight news guy. Cuomo has eclipsed them all. Hence his magical COVID basement Lazarus miracle last year. Hence also the circus act with his now-humiliated brother and all the special favors that come from that kind of family connection.

chris cuomo

The tragedy of Andrew Cuomo is not over yet

I’m not going to lie, the past few weeks seeing the spectacular fall of former disgraced governor Andrew Cuomo after being the toast of the town last year has been somewhat satisfying. This time last year, he was writing his acceptance speech to receive his Emmy Award for his amazing performance playing a leader in the middle of a once in a lifetime pandemic. Celebrities like Billy Crystal, Robert De Niro, Whoopi Goldberg and Rosie Perez fawned over their MVP: ‘Most Valuable Politician’. It is quite something to revisit some of their revolting speeches.

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Has Mike Lindell lost it?

What is it about Donald Trump that his closest associates seem to all go irredeemably insane? On Thursday, the CEO and chief priest of MyPillow Mike Lindell announced that he is suspending his advertising on Fox, 'immediately and indefinitely'. This is no minor boycott or tiff. MyPillow and Fox News are tethered together like no sponsor and sponsee since Michael Jordan spiritually merged his consciousness with Nike. Lindell claims his firm bought $50 million in ads on Fox in 2020, meaning he supplies almost two percent of Fox’s revenue. Fox doesn’t just market Lindell’s cushions, but also his life: the channel has aired the ad for his self-published memoir, What Are The Odds?

Tucker blames Trump for 2020 election loss

Tucker Carlson has never shied from diverging with the GOP orthodoxy. In a recent interview with the prestigious Swiss magazine Die Weltwoche, the Fox News host blamed Donald Trump for the ‘unfair’ 2020 election and doubts he can make a comeback in 2024. Carlson told Die Weltwoche that Trump inflamed the political left during his four years in office but allowed them to join forces and ‘change the system’. Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, both Republican and Democratic states passed measures to ensure people could vote by mail instead of in-person before election day. 'He made them self-consciously his opponents, and then he didn't neutralize them,’ Carlson said. 'There's no question that Trump inflamed his enemies. He's allowed them to coalesce, to organize.

tucker carlson

The New York Times has caused more vaccine hesitancy than Fox News

During the Trump years, Fox News was notorious for carrying advertisements with a target audience of one. Dueling ads would denigrate or praise the nation of Qatar. Julián Castro bought time in Bedminster, New Jersey during a presidential visit to blame the president for a mass shooting in El Paso. The Lincoln Project spent millions airing its ads on Fox mostly in the hope that the president would be enraged when he saw them. Now, the New York Times is borrowing the tactic. This time, however, the one-man target is the aged-yet-apparently-immortal head of the Fox Corporation, Rupert Murdoch. For half a decade, multiple NGOs and dozens of journalists have made the destruction of Fox News, or at least the cancellation of its most high-profile jobs, a virtual full-time profession.

vaccine

How cable news will inevitably politicize the Surfside building tragedy

Nothing could be more predictable than media coverage of the catastrophic building collapse in Surfside, Florida. Cable news will feature it because the story is both shocking and eye-catching. Their obvious problem is that the cable channels have hours of air-time to fill and precious little real information, beyond dreadful pictures and interviews with bereaved friends and family and others who escaped the tragedy. To save hours of watching this low-information disaster footage, the best thing is to read the story on your favorite website and watch very little TV. That is true of every breaking-news news story where real information is scarce at first.

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James and Kathryn Murdoch exposed as left-wing mega-donors

It is no secret that James Murdoch, the son of media mogul Rupert Murdoch, and his wife Kathryn have supported Democratic causes. But a new report from CNBC reveals that the couple launched a massive spending effort ahead of the 2020 election that rivaled left-wing billionaire George Soros. Data released last spring indicated that James and Kathryn gave $11 million to political causes, including $2.5 million to Democrats. However, they also quietly gave a stunning $100 million to James's nonprofit foundation, Quadrivium, in 2019, a 'large chunk' of which went to political groups. 'The 2019 tax document shows that of the $100 million given to the foundation, over $25 million went toward grants, including for several political causes,' CNBC reported.

James Murdoch and Kathryn murdoch Hufschmid (Photo by Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images)

The curious case of Matt Gaetz

From the moment Matt Gaetz blitzed into Washington in 2016 as a 34-year-old Trump ally, it was clear that the representative from Florida liked to live dangerously. He invited Holocaust doubter and general crazy person Charles Johnson to the State of the Union. He hired canceled Trump speechwriter Darren Beattie, then, because that wasn’t risky enough, he potentially fudged House ethics rules to pay him. As a Florida state representative, Gaetz allegedly concocted a scoring system for sexual conquests in Tallahassee: lobbyists were one point, aides two, legislators three, married legislators six. (Gaetz denies any knowledge of the game.) In fall 2019, Gaetz white-knighted for Democrat Katie Hill after her bisexual menage à trois forced her out of Congress.

matt gaetz

Tucker Carlson is the new Trump — because there is nobody else

'Tucker Carlson is the new Donald Trump.' So said CNN’s Brian Stelter on his Sunday program, Reliable Sources. Stelter was apparently handed his own TV show based on the principle that at least one CNN host ought to resemble the network’s target audience. Nevertheless, he is correct. Progressivism needs Tucker to be Trump, and so for the moment, he is. To work in cable in the age of Donald Trump was to live life on easy mode. For years, channels tried desperately to hook viewers with endless updates on missing white women, murdered white women or murdering white women. Suddenly, with Trump, none of that was needed. Every day brought a fresh outrage, a new ridiculous statement or tweet or national policy. The news cycle shrank from a week to a day to mere hours in some cases.

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Steve Bannon’s army of lookalikes

Stephen K. Bannon positioned himself as the godfather of a new American political movement. Now he’s cultivated the aesthetic of a true guru. Bannon appeared on Fox News's Sunday Morning Futures sporting a new, more laid-back summer look, with flowing gray locks and a Mediterranean tan, as if he'd wandered off the set of a mid-Nineties Coen Brothers movie. https://twitter.com/maggieserota/status/1295035966344830984 Cockburn knows it's rather unfair to judge political figures by their physical appearances — particularly someone like Steve Bannon, who has been scrutinized for wearing two collared shirts at once by podcasters and described as looking like 'if Nick Offerman drowned' by comedians.

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Kimberly Guilfoyle: devout Catholic?

Kimberly Guilfoyle has a surprising message for Catholics come November: vote for Donald J. Trump. The former Fox News host, now senior adviser to the President’s reelection campaign and girlfriend of Don Jr, spoke Monday about the role her Catholic faith plays in supporting Trump.While Guilfoyle makes some convincing arguments, Cockburn has a feeling her checkered past may scare some Catholics away.West Coasters certainly remember Guilfoyle for when she was married to then-San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom, who of course is now the governor of the Golden State. At the time, Guilfoyle was known to be a charming figure, with her media nickname being ‘the babe of the San Francisco bar’. She was quite open about her sex life too.

kimberly guilfoyle

The crumbling lawsuit against Fox News

The new lawsuit filed by two women against Fox News and several of its personalities is riddled with inaccuracies. This raises questions about the veracity of its claims. Jennifer Eckhart and Cathy Areu, a former Fox Business producer and frequent network guest, respectively, claim that they suffered sexual misconduct, harassment, and even rape at the hands of Ed Henry, Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, and Howard Kurtz. The lawsuit immediately made waves in the mainstream media, where it was picked up by the New York Times, CNN, the Washington Post, CBS News, and other major outlets. It has been a top trending topic on Twitter since its filing. However, a review of several claims made in the suit reveals many basic inaccuracies.

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Finally: Diamond and Silk are releasing a book

Whenever Cockburn has watched Diamond and Silk, whether they’re getting a heroes’ welcome at CPAC or sassing a left-wing celebrity in one of their viral videos, the same thought has always crossed his mind: when will this dynamic duo claim their rightful mantle in the literary pantheon? When can he sit down and peruse 256 pages of their incisive political commentary, as they follow in the footsteps of William F. Buckley Jr. and Ayn Rand and advance American conservative thought? Mercifully, the wait is over. The African American Trump-loving duo, real names Lynnette Hardaway and Rochelle Richardson, who sailed to notoriety throughout the 2016 campaign, release their debut book Uprising: Who the Hell Said You Can't Ditch and Switch?

diamond and silk

The twilight of Diamond and Silk

Disheartening news from the world of punditry this week, as it emerged that dynamic MAGA duo Diamond and Silk have been cut loose by Fox News. The pair rose to prominence in the lead-up to the 2016 election, with their snappy and boisterous Facebook videos in support of Candidate Trump. That spirit seems to have been their undoing: As CNN put it: 'Over the last few weeks, the duo has advanced all sorts of misinformation and conspiracy theories about the coronavirus. They've questioned the death toll. They've questioned whether the virus is being "deliberately spread." They've suggested the "Deep State" is working "behind the scenes" and that it is "engineered." On and on and on it goes. 'On Wednesday, "Diamond & Silk" posted a tweet.

diamond and silk

Trump isn’t the only one to blame for our slack response to COVID-19

One of the mantras for interpreting the nature of Donald Trump has always been to take him ‘seriously, but not literally’. When this maxim was first introduced in September 2016, the advice was clearly useful. Journalists and pundits were in a constant state of outrage over his every utterance. The daily deluge of Trump jokes, wisecracks, obviously figurative exaggerations, and ALL CAPS tweets were incessantly ‘fact-checked’ in the most tedious fashion by members of the media who hated Trump. One illustrative example would be when Trump accused Barack Obama of being the ‘founder’ of Isis. In short order, the fact-checking brigades sprung into action to clarify that Obama had not in fact literally founded Isis.

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How media outlets are coping with coronavirus

Welcome to the age of coronavirus, where lines snake around the aisles of supermarkets, millennials beg their boomer parents to stop going outside and the best sporting event on television is 10-pin bowling. America almost feels like a different country. Cockburn has seen a heartening amount of concern for loved ones over the last few days, especially among fellow journalists. To put minds at rest, therefore, he's been asking around to see what measures right-leaning outlets are taking to protect their employees from the virus. Across Rupert Murdoch's titles, the response has been robust. Workers at the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post had the option to work from home last week, with a lot of editorial staff deciding to do so.

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A hostile media helps Donald Trump

The news media of the late 1700s and early 1800s consisted almost entirely of partisan political operations. Ron Chernow, the biographer of Washington and Hamilton, describes the newspapers of that era as 'avowedly partisan’, with 'no pretense of objectivity'. It was, Chernow, writes, a 'golden age for wielding words as rapier-sharp political weapons’. Some two centuries later, we are returning to a media landscape in which the majority of sources are 'avowedly partisan' with little pretense of the objectivity that only a few decades ago was a hallmark of American journalism.

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