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Category: Journalism

Viktor Orbán tells CPAC the path to power is to ‘have your own media’

Viktor Orbán tells CPAC the path to power is to ‘have your own media’

The Guardian reports: The Hungarian leader, Viktor Orbán, has told a conference of US conservatives that the path to power required having their own media outlets, calling for shows like Tucker Carlson’s to be broadcast “24/7”. Orbán, recently elected to a fourth term, laid out a 12-point blueprint to achieving and consolidating power to a special meeting of the US Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), under the slogan of “God, Homeland, Family”, held in Budapest. The Hungarian prime minister said…

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Israeli military commander justifies killing journalists who are ‘armed with cameras’

Israeli military commander justifies killing journalists who are ‘armed with cameras’

The Washington Post reports: The death this week of Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh — who was shot dead during an Israeli raid in the West Bank city of Jenin — has highlighted the dangers reporters face while covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Abu Akleh, a veteran correspondent who worked for the Al Jazeera news network, was wearing protective gear and a vest marked “press” as she covered the morning raid Wednesday. Such gear is standard and meant to distinguish…

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If Fox News’ owner was Russian, there would be no hesitation in applying sanctions

If Fox News’ owner was Russian, there would be no hesitation in applying sanctions

Nick Cohen writes: If the west could find the courage, it would order an immediate freeze of Rupert Murdoch’s assets. His Fox News presenters and Russia’s propagandists are so intermeshed that separating the two is as impossible as unbaking a cake. On Russian state news, as on Fox, bawling ideologues scream threats then whine about their victimhood as they incite anger and self-pity in equal measures. Its arguments range from the appropriation of anti-fascism by Greater Russian imperialists – the…

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American nationalist: How Tucker Carlson stoked white fear to conquer cable news

American nationalist: How Tucker Carlson stoked white fear to conquer cable news

Nicholas Confessore writes: Tucker Carlson burst through the doors of Charlie Palmer Steak, enfolded in an entourage of producers and assistants, cellphone pressed to his ear. On the other end was Lachlan Murdoch, chairman of the Fox empire and his de facto boss. Most of Fox’s Washington bureau, along with the cable network’s top executives, had gathered at the power-class steakhouse, a few blocks from the office, for their annual holiday party. Days earlier, Mr. Carlson had set off an…

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Changes at CNN and New York Times signal less advocacy, more journalism

Changes at CNN and New York Times signal less advocacy, more journalism

The Guardian reports: The highest echelons of the US media were once again in the spotlight this week, after CNN this week abandoned a newly launched streaming service and the New York Times appointed a prominent Bostonian to lead it. CNN+ will shut down on 30 April, about a month after it was launched with a $300m investment. The new owner of the network, Warner Bros Discovery – itself the product of a $43bn merger between AT&T and the Discovery…

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How the narratives from the Kremlin and Fox News have converged in recent months

How the narratives from the Kremlin and Fox News have converged in recent months

The New York Times reports: As Western leaders introduced sanctions against Russia for the invasion of Ukraine, Tucker Carlson, the Fox News host, said seizing personal property from Russian oligarchs went too far. “No American government had ever done anything like that before,” he said. While the segment was aimed at Fox News’s conservative audience, it found another audience in Russia. The argument was parroted beat by beat by RIA Novosti, a Russian state news agency, which wrote that “the…

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Cancel culture does exist

Cancel culture does exist

Katha Pollitt writes: Cancel culture—which I’m loosely defining here as a climate that encourages disproportionate social and/or work-related punishment for speech—doesn’t exist. Well, OK, it exists on the right: Look at what happened to the Dixie Chicks and Colin Kaepernick and that assistant principal in Mississippi who read the picture book I Need a New Butt to his students. Conservatives are always canceling people. But on the left? That’s just people holding you accountable for some awful thing you said….

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What happens when a group of Fox News viewers watch CNN for a month?

What happens when a group of Fox News viewers watch CNN for a month?

The Guardian reports: Watching Fox News can be like entering an alternative universe. It’s a world where Vladimir Putin isn’t actually that bad, but vaccines may be, and where some unhinged rightwing figures are celebrated as heroes, but Anthony Fauci, America’s top public health official, is an unrivaled villain. Given the steady stream of misinformation an avid Fox News consumer is subjected to, the viewers – predominantly elderly, white and Donald Trump-supporting – are sometimes written off as lost causes…

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Journalism’s Twitter problem is the journalists

Journalism’s Twitter problem is the journalists

Choire Sicha writes: Today, New York Times honcho Dean Baquet ordered a company-wide “reset” in how his staff should think about Twitter. Mostly, he’d like them to never look at it again. You can see why. Most of the people who work for him are very bad at being on Twitter, and their tweets truly are just not good. And then their bosses are so obsessed with Twitter too, and on edge about it. A cycle of humiliation ensues. They…

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Zelenskyy: Ukraine ready to discuss neutral status to reach Russia peace deal

Zelenskyy: Ukraine ready to discuss neutral status to reach Russia peace deal

Politico reports: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is open to a neutral status for his country and a “compromise” on the contested Donbas region as part of peace negotiations with Russia, he said in an interview with several Russian outlets on Sunday. “Security guarantees and neutrality, non-nuclear status of our state. We are prepared to go through with it,” Zelenskyy told Russian news organizations Meduza, Kommersant, Novaya Gazeta and TV Rain, speaking in Russian throughout the interview. For Ukraine, neutrality would…

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War-zone collaboration becomes essential for journalists from rival news organization

War-zone collaboration becomes essential for journalists from rival news organization

The Wall Street Journal reports: In the hours after three journalists working for Fox News in Ukraine took fire on March 14, staffers from rival news organization CNN stepped up to assist the cable network. Clarissa Ward, chief international correspondent for CNN, and Trey Yingst, a foreign correspondent for Fox News, worked in CNN’s makeshift newsroom in a Kyiv hotel suite, calling morgues and hospitals to track down Fox News cameraman Pierre Zakrzewski and Oleksandra “Sasha” Kuvshynova, a consultant for…

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Russian foreign minister praises Fox News coverage of war in Ukraine

Russian foreign minister praises Fox News coverage of war in Ukraine

The Guardian reports: Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, has praised Fox News for its coverage, appearing on the Russian state-controlled RT network to hail the right-leaning US cable channel, whose primetime host Tucker Carlson has played down the invasion. “We know the manners and the tricks that are being used by the western countries to manipulate media, we understood long ago that there is no such thing as an independent western media,” said Lavrov, speaking in English in a studio…

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Tucker Carlson’s favorite anti-Semite

Tucker Carlson’s favorite anti-Semite

Yair Rosenberg writes: Douglas Macgregor is a retired U.S. Army colonel who has become Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s go-to foreign policy expert. In recent appearances on the channel, he has argued that the U.S. should not sanction Russia and that Vladimir Putin should be allowed to annex as much of Ukraine as he wants, which is why many today consider Macgregor to be less a neutral observer than a Russia apologist. What they may not know is that he’s…

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Kremlin views Tucker Carlson as ‘essential’ propaganda asset

Kremlin views Tucker Carlson as ‘essential’ propaganda asset

Mother Jones reports: On March 3, as Russian military forces bombed Ukrainian cities as part of Vladimir Putin’s illegal invasion of his neighbor, the Kremlin sent out talking points to state-friendly media outlets with a request: Use more Tucker Carlson. “It is essential to use as much as possible fragments of broadcasts of the popular Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who sharply criticizes the actions of the United States [and] NATO, their negative role in unleashing the conflict in Ukraine,…

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Journalists are pulled out of Russia after Putin makes it illegal to call the war a ‘war’

Journalists are pulled out of Russia after Putin makes it illegal to call the war a ‘war’

The New York Times reports: The New York Times said on Tuesday that it was temporarily removing its journalists from Russia in the wake of harsh new legislation that effectively outlaws independent reporting on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. “Russia’s new legislation seeks to criminalize independent, accurate news reporting about the war against Ukraine. For the safety and security of our editorial staff working in the region, we are moving them out of the country for now,” a spokeswoman for…

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Russia silences its last independent television channel

Russia silences its last independent television channel

Masha Gessen writes: Whenever TV Rain, Russia’s last independent television channel, was broadcasting live, the lights in its vast loft were dimmed and conversations were hushed, because its studio was cordoned off from the rest of the space only by partial-height glass partitions. When I got to the loft just before ten on Tuesday night, the lights were low, as usual, but the noise level was veering into risky territory. Mikhail Fishman, who hosts a Friday-night news-analysis program, was in…

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