Attention to the Unseen

Peter Hamby writes: Palin’s stardom continued unabated all the way through late 2011, a full three years after her arrival on the national scene. Her flirtation with running for the 2012 Republican nomination—never ruling out a bid and allowing supporters to build an operation for her in Iowa—kept her in the headlines. While dancing around a bid of her own, Palin threw carefree darts at declared candidates Mitt Romney and Rick Perry. Her newest adviser, a filmmaker named Steve Bannon,…

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The Daily Beast reports: Fox News on Tuesday fired the political editor who was tasked with defending the network’s election night decisions that especially angered President Donald Trump and his allies. Politics editor Chris Stirewalt’s exit from the network coincided with the sacking of at least 16 digital editorial staffers, including senior editors. People familiar with the situation said the layoffs—a “blood bath,” as multiple Fox News insiders described it—were perpetrated by Porter Berry, the Sean Hannity crony now in…

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Ben Smith writes: On Oct. 12, 2020, Fox News agreed to pay millions of dollars to the family of a murdered Democratic National Committee staff member, implicitly acknowledging what saner minds knew long ago: that the network had repeatedly hyped a false claim that the young staff member, Seth Rich, was involved in leaking D.N.C. emails during the 2016 presidential campaign. (Russian intelligence officers, in fact, had hacked and leaked the emails.) Fox’s decision to settle with the Rich family…

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The New York Times reports: CNN and MSNBC thrived during the Trump years, reaching new heights in ratings and revenue while devoting countless prime-time hours to criticizing a White House antagonist their viewers just could not quit. Now faced with a Trump-less future, top executives at the rival cable news networks have summoned star anchors and producers to private meetings in recent weeks, seeking answers to a pressing question: What’s next? People at both networks know that viewers who abhorred…

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The New York Times reports: Flanked by aides in the Oval Office on Wednesday, President Trump dialed up a friend in the news media with a message: Keep up the good work. “He said that it’s just incredible, the ratings you’re getting, and everyone’s talking about it,” recalled Christopher Ruddy, the owner of Newsmax, a niche conservative cable network that has yet to declare a winner in the 2020 presidential election. Based in Boca Raton, Fla., the network features lo-fi…

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The New York Times reports: Presidents come and go. Rupert Murdoch remains. For those who wondered how Mr. Murdoch, the octogenarian media magnate with a conservative streak, would react to the electoral defeat of President Trump, the past few days have brought a complicated answer, well-suited to the mercurial nature of Mr. Murdoch’s world. The New York Post, the Murdoch tabloid that attacked Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his son Hunter before the election, splashed a beaming Mr. Biden on…

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The Daily Beast reports: For Fox News, breaking up with Donald Trump will be hard to do. Their sometimes stormy (not Daniels) marriage began nine years ago, when the right-leaning cable channel’s founding chairman, the late Roger Ailes, gave Trump a weekly segment on the popular morning show Fox & Friends, thus launching the reality television star’s improbable trip to the White House. However, since Tuesday night—when the top-rated outlet’s Decision Desk, all alone among the nation’s major cable and…

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The New York Times reports: It was just after 12:30 a.m. on election night, and Fox News was under fire. “Arnon, we’re getting a lot of incoming here, and we need you to answer some questions,” the network’s chief political anchor, Bret Baier, said pointedly. “Shoot!” Arnon Mishkin replied, his face breaking into a smile. Roughly an hour earlier, Mr. Mishkin’s decision desk team at Fox News had made a bold call that instantly changed the tenor of the night:…

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Vivian Schiller and Garrett M. Graff write: Americans think about elections wrong; they aren’t only about tallying votes to declare a winner. Elections in a democracy are just as much about convincing the loser that he or she actually lost—and that the process was free, fair, and secure enough that the loser can accept the result as legitimate. Now, only weeks before Election Day, there’s a growing realization that the complexity of this year’s electoral landscape—from pandemic-related social distancing and…

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Margaret Sullivan writes: You might think that 2000 would have adequately prepared the media — and the American public — for the complete unpredictability of what may happen in November 2020 as a nation votes in the midst of a pandemic with a sitting president who is busy creating mistrust in the system and threatening not to accept a defeat. But there’s not much reason for confidence. Recall the 2018 midterms when some media figures rushed to judgment again. “It’s…

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