Attention to the Unseen

Michelle Goldberg writes: It’s nice to know that Fox News, which has so deranged America while making Rupert Murdoch ungodly sums of money, has in the end made Murdoch miserable, at least if the journalist Michael Wolff is to be believed. But the consolation is a small one. Murdoch’s unhappiness and befuddlement is the throughline of Wolff’s amusingly vicious and very well-timed book, “The Fall: The End of Fox News and the Murdoch Dynasty,” which is to hit shelves next…

Read More Read More

Michael Wolff writes: After Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, Fox News — to the surprise of many, including founder Rupert Murdoch, who loathed Trump — became more successful than it had ever been in its already very profitable history. It had survived not only the loss of its longtime boss Roger Ailes, ousted the same year in a sexual-harassment scandal, but that of its former ratings leader Bill O’Reilly in another harassment scandal and that of Megyn Kelly,…

Read More Read More

Margaret Sullivan writes: Christiane Amanpour has reported all over the world, so she recognizes a democracy on the brink when she sees one. Last week, as she celebrated her 40 years at CNN, she issued a challenge to her fellow journalists in the US by describing how she would cover US politics as a foreign correspondent. “We have to be truthful, not neutral,” she urged. “I would make sure that you don’t just give a platform … to those who…

Read More Read More

The Washington Post reports: The U.S. Marine Corps went up to the highest levels of Fox News last month to challenge a story that falsely claimed a fallen Marine’s family had to cover the cost of transporting her remains, emails obtained by The Washington Post show. Fox quietly amended the digital story and then removed it from its website following more complaints from the Marines but still has not apologized or corrected the erroneous report, which had been based on…

Read More Read More

William Bredderman reports: A slick online media machine has recruited a slew of characters from Russian state-affiliated outlets—and joined a sprawling multinational network of pro-Moscow, pro-Beijing content creators backed by a U.S. businessman reportedly probed in India for ties to the Chinese Communist Party. Since it started posting to Instagram and Youtube in early 2020, nearly all BreakThrough News’ camera-facing personalities have been veterans of Kremlin-backed outfits: former Radio Sputnik host Eugene Puryear; pundit Rania Khalek of video generator ‘In the Now;’ Kei Pritsker, Abby Martin, and Brian…

Read More Read More

Oliver Darcy writes: It has been one week since CNN’s town hall with Donald Trump — and the fierce fallout stemming from the event is still reverberating. While accepting the prestigious Columbia Journalism Award and serving as the school’s 2023 commencement speaker, Christiane Amanpour on Wednesday became the first network anchor to publicly voice dissent with management over the town hall, which has spawned a storm of fierce backlash. Amanpour, CNN’s chief international anchor, disclosed that she had met with…

Read More Read More

Variety reports: The mystery surrounding Tucker Carlson’s ouster from the airwaves at Fox News — and his future plans in media — are coming into sharper focus. On April 26, Carlson spoke by phone with one of Fox Corp.’s eight board members, who told the host that his recent benching was a condition of Fox News’ settlement with Dominion Voting Systems, according to multiple sources with knowledge of the conversation. The unnamed board member told Carlson that the condition does…

Read More Read More

Megan Garber writes: In the 1960s, when television was the revolutionary technology reshaping American life, the historian Daniel Boorstin published The Image, his seminal criticism of the media in the age of the screen. In it, Boorstin coined the term pseudo-event to describe the spectacle that exists merely to be documented: the press conference, the news release, the campaign rally. The coinage informs today’s idea of the media event: the thing that occurs primarily so that journalists can tell their…

Read More Read More

Philip Bump writes: The morning after the channel’s widely pilloried “town hall” with former president Donald Trump, CNN chairman and CEO Chris Licht defended the program in a call with staffers. “While we all may have been uncomfortable hearing people clapping, that was also an important part of the story,” Licht said, according to journalist Brian Stelter, adding that Trump’s supporters are “a large swath of America.” On his own show Thursday night, CNN host Anderson Cooper made a similar…

Read More Read More

The New York Times reports: A text message sent by Tucker Carlson that set off a panic at the highest levels of Fox on the eve of its billion-dollar defamation trial showed its most popular host sharing his private, inflammatory views about violence and race. The discovery of the message contributed to a chain of events that ultimately led to Mr. Carlson’s firing. In the message, sent to one of his producers in the hours after violent Trump supporters stormed…

Read More Read More

Julia Davis reports: The explosive news of Tucker Carlson’s firing from Fox News came as a surprise to many, including some of his biggest fans: propagandists who are shilling for the Kremlin on Russian state TV. During Monday’s broadcast of The Evening With Vladimir Solovyov, state TV propagandists discussed the best ways for Russia to attack America on its own turf, citing internal divisions and conflicts as an opening that should be continually probed and exploited. This conversation naturally led…

Read More Read More