TO COMMENT CLICK HERE
Worthless Media
WELCOME TO WORTHLESS MEDIA WHERE THE FAILURE OF REAL JOURNALISM IS
EXPOSED
the white-wing media
may 30, 2020
“The media serve, and propagandize on behalf of, the powerful societal interests that control and finance them. The representatives of these interests have important agendas and principles that they want to advance, and they are well positioned to shape and constrain media policy.”
–Chomsky
Media lo-lites
(source: crooks & liars, raw story, alternet, newshounds)
*Laura Ingraham to Black Americans: Trump understands police brutality because of the Mueller probe
*After labeling white supremacy a "hoax," Carlson calls Minneapolis protests "a form of tyranny"
*Fox News host slurs Obama as ‘intellectually lazy’ — and says he should have ‘worked harder’ on his speech
*Fox News pundit with 9 kids wants schools open because ‘parents are wanting to shoot their heads off’
*Ingraham: Democrats pushing "panic porn"
ROGER SOLLENBERGER
*‘We need Christ’: Fox News host wants Mother’s Day exception to open church in county with 900 deaths
*Kushner butting heads with White House Chief of Staff Meadows over personnel moves: report
*Chris Wallace nails Steve Mnuchin: ‘Are your rosy predictions based on reality or the November election?’
*Hydroxychloroquine truther Laura Ingraham, who is not a doctor, begs Trump to overturn FDA’s warning
*Pete Hegseth Is Leader Of The Fox News Death Cult
Fox News' numero uno presidential fluffer Pete Hegseth called faithful viewers to drink deeply of the "American Spirit" and just open the doors to customers....and the virus.
*Fox News host who never washes hands encourages viewers to go out and get the coronavirus
*ABC News host lets Trump get away with absurd claim that ‘the doctors’ told him coronavirus would just ‘blow over’
Facebook pulled ‘thriving’ white supremacist accounts after being called out in new report
May 23, 2020
By Bob Brigham - raw story
Facebook took down dozens of white supremacist pages after being contacted by the Huffington Post.
“A new study reported that white supremacist groups are “thriving” on Facebook, despite repeated assurances from the company that it doesn’t allow extremists on its platform,” Huffington Post reported. “The watchdog group Tech Transparency Project released a study Thursday that found more than 100 white supremacist groups had a presence on Facebook.”
The report is titled “White Supremacist Groups Are Thriving on Facebook” (PDF).
“Dozens of white supremacist groups are operating freely on Facebook, allowing them to spread their message and recruit new members, according to a Tech Transparency Project (TTP) investigation, which found the activity is continuing despite years of promises by the social network that it bans hate organizations,” the report explained. “TTP recently documented how online extremists, including many with white supremacist views, are using Facebook to plan for a militant uprising dubbed the ‘boogaloo,’ as they stoke fears that coronavirus lockdowns are a sign of rising government repression. But TTP’s latest investigation reveals Facebook’s broader problems with white supremacist groups, which are using the social network’s unmatched reach to build their movement.”
The report explained that TTP “conducted searches on Facebook for the names of 221 white supremacist organizations that have been designated as hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), two leading anti-hate organizations.”
“Of the 221 designated white supremacist organizations, more than half—51%, or 113 groups—had a presence on Facebook,” the report noted. “Those organizations are associated with a total of 153 Facebook Pages and four Facebook Groups. Roughly one third of the organizations (34) had two or more Pages or Groups on Facebook. Some had Pages that have been active on the platform for a decade.”
Some of those pages have since been removed from the social networking platform.
“After HuffPost emailed a Facebook spokesperson about TTP’s report this week, project researchers noticed the company had removed pages for 55 white supremacist groups identified in its report,” the site noted. “Still, many white supremacist organizations identified in TTP’s report remain on Facebook. One user-created page for Arktos Media — the fascist European publishing house with close ties to American white supremacist Richard Spencer — is still active. More than 42,000 people have liked the page. A page for the hate group Fight White Genocide, which has more than 1,000 likes, is still active. A trio of years-old pages or groups called Right Wing Death Squad are also still online.”
“A new study reported that white supremacist groups are “thriving” on Facebook, despite repeated assurances from the company that it doesn’t allow extremists on its platform,” Huffington Post reported. “The watchdog group Tech Transparency Project released a study Thursday that found more than 100 white supremacist groups had a presence on Facebook.”
The report is titled “White Supremacist Groups Are Thriving on Facebook” (PDF).
“Dozens of white supremacist groups are operating freely on Facebook, allowing them to spread their message and recruit new members, according to a Tech Transparency Project (TTP) investigation, which found the activity is continuing despite years of promises by the social network that it bans hate organizations,” the report explained. “TTP recently documented how online extremists, including many with white supremacist views, are using Facebook to plan for a militant uprising dubbed the ‘boogaloo,’ as they stoke fears that coronavirus lockdowns are a sign of rising government repression. But TTP’s latest investigation reveals Facebook’s broader problems with white supremacist groups, which are using the social network’s unmatched reach to build their movement.”
The report explained that TTP “conducted searches on Facebook for the names of 221 white supremacist organizations that have been designated as hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), two leading anti-hate organizations.”
“Of the 221 designated white supremacist organizations, more than half—51%, or 113 groups—had a presence on Facebook,” the report noted. “Those organizations are associated with a total of 153 Facebook Pages and four Facebook Groups. Roughly one third of the organizations (34) had two or more Pages or Groups on Facebook. Some had Pages that have been active on the platform for a decade.”
Some of those pages have since been removed from the social networking platform.
“After HuffPost emailed a Facebook spokesperson about TTP’s report this week, project researchers noticed the company had removed pages for 55 white supremacist groups identified in its report,” the site noted. “Still, many white supremacist organizations identified in TTP’s report remain on Facebook. One user-created page for Arktos Media — the fascist European publishing house with close ties to American white supremacist Richard Spencer — is still active. More than 42,000 people have liked the page. A page for the hate group Fight White Genocide, which has more than 1,000 likes, is still active. A trio of years-old pages or groups called Right Wing Death Squad are also still online.”
Fox And Friends Urges New Yorkers To Disobey COVID19 Lock Down
They said while being safely sequestered in their homes and other isolated locations. Hypocrites!
By John Amato - crooks & liars
5/21/20 9:17am
Fox News and many other Trumpian outlets, worried about Trump's reelection prospects, have been demanding that the public defy all stay-at-home orders.
Everyone should go "back to normal," except those recommending it are definitely not.
This morning Fox News went ballistic over an OpEd in the New York Post because the writer wants NY's stay-at-home orders to end NOW NOW NOW!!!
Andrew Napolitano did a great job during the Trump impeachment, but he is a civil libertarian who hates the government "interfering with our personal lives." His voice against stay-at-home orders agreed with the three-headed sycophants at Fox and Friends.
Co-host Ainsley Earhardt read a portion of the idiotic New York Post OpEd to him.
"‘The Big Apple is dying. Its streets are empty, tens of thousands have been plunged into poverty. Our leaders have no plans, no answers, New Yorkers have already learned to socially distance, businesses can adjust, the elderly and infirm can continue to be isolated.’ And then in bold letters, ‘It needs to end now!'”
Judge Napolitano agreed. "Enough is enough, " he said.
They seem to believe that every person in the United States will be 100% compliant with the CDC guidelines of wearing masks and social distancing in the pandemic.
Oh, yeah, we're in the midst of a pandemic, a**holes.
They attacked Mayor De Blasio and Gov Cuomo (familiar targets for them) as if all they want is to drink the blood of New York City. It's ridiculous.
Brian Kilmeade was ecstatic, “Judge, you’re 100% right." He attacked the NYC mayor again for trying to stop the spread of the virus.
"It nuts what's going on here," he screeched.
Kilmeade was furious that New Yorkers are complying with the stay-at-home order, and said the Post article is "calling for people just to massively open up their businesses throughout the city. They can’t stop everyone.”
But the en masse screaming by Fox News to have all city residents ( except for the sick and elderly because their job is to die already to help the economy) refuse to comply with state and city stay-at-home laws is outrageous and will end up getting more Americans infected -- as we've already seen in the states that have reopened.
An as Tommy Christopher noted, "The denizens of Fox & Friends urged New York businesses to reopen en masse despite lockdown orders and a still-deadly coronavirus pandemic, but they did so from the safety of their own homes and secure locations.
Why aren't Doocy, Kilmeade and Earhardt doing their show with a full audience in their studio?
It's okay for YOU to die for Trump, but not them.
A reminder:
Ted
@trom771
Fox "news" has been downplaying the effects of a virus that's now killing thousands of Americans every day. They just sent a memo to all their employees telling them they should work from home until at least June 15th. Because of the virus.
9:45 AM - May 14, 2020
Everyone should go "back to normal," except those recommending it are definitely not.
This morning Fox News went ballistic over an OpEd in the New York Post because the writer wants NY's stay-at-home orders to end NOW NOW NOW!!!
Andrew Napolitano did a great job during the Trump impeachment, but he is a civil libertarian who hates the government "interfering with our personal lives." His voice against stay-at-home orders agreed with the three-headed sycophants at Fox and Friends.
Co-host Ainsley Earhardt read a portion of the idiotic New York Post OpEd to him.
"‘The Big Apple is dying. Its streets are empty, tens of thousands have been plunged into poverty. Our leaders have no plans, no answers, New Yorkers have already learned to socially distance, businesses can adjust, the elderly and infirm can continue to be isolated.’ And then in bold letters, ‘It needs to end now!'”
Judge Napolitano agreed. "Enough is enough, " he said.
They seem to believe that every person in the United States will be 100% compliant with the CDC guidelines of wearing masks and social distancing in the pandemic.
Oh, yeah, we're in the midst of a pandemic, a**holes.
They attacked Mayor De Blasio and Gov Cuomo (familiar targets for them) as if all they want is to drink the blood of New York City. It's ridiculous.
Brian Kilmeade was ecstatic, “Judge, you’re 100% right." He attacked the NYC mayor again for trying to stop the spread of the virus.
"It nuts what's going on here," he screeched.
Kilmeade was furious that New Yorkers are complying with the stay-at-home order, and said the Post article is "calling for people just to massively open up their businesses throughout the city. They can’t stop everyone.”
But the en masse screaming by Fox News to have all city residents ( except for the sick and elderly because their job is to die already to help the economy) refuse to comply with state and city stay-at-home laws is outrageous and will end up getting more Americans infected -- as we've already seen in the states that have reopened.
An as Tommy Christopher noted, "The denizens of Fox & Friends urged New York businesses to reopen en masse despite lockdown orders and a still-deadly coronavirus pandemic, but they did so from the safety of their own homes and secure locations.
Why aren't Doocy, Kilmeade and Earhardt doing their show with a full audience in their studio?
It's okay for YOU to die for Trump, but not them.
A reminder:
Ted
@trom771
Fox "news" has been downplaying the effects of a virus that's now killing thousands of Americans every day. They just sent a memo to all their employees telling them they should work from home until at least June 15th. Because of the virus.
9:45 AM - May 14, 2020
Fox Biz Host PushesTo 'Open Businesses Up Fast' Despite Pandemic
Stuart Varney told his fellow Fox host Steve Doocy that we need to "open up businesses as fast as possible to avoid economic catastrophe," the lessons from history be damned.
By Heather - crooks & liars
5/12/20 5:17am
Before discussing a report from Moody Analytics examining which cities are most likely to have the strongest economic recoveries from the coronavirus pandemic, Fox Business host Stuart Varney joined this Monday's Fox & Friends, and continued the network's push to get all of the peons back to work (or church) as quickly as possible as they broadcast from the safety of their homes, consequences to their health and safety be damned.
Host Steve Doocy asked Varney about the "jaw-dropping" unemployment numbers, which are probably going to get worse before they get better, and Varney responded by bringing up the very real social costs of forcing people to stay at home, such as increases in domestic abuse and alcoholism, but then proceeded to completely ignore the lessons from history when it comes to economic recovery from a pandemic:
VARNEY: Look there are two reasons why we really need to get back to work and end the lockdown, as much as possible, in the immediate future.
Reason number one, there is an enormous social cost to the lockdown—child abuse, alcoholism, drug abuse, people being stuck and clamped down in their houses in an abusive relationship. There is untold cost, a social cost to continuing the lockdown indefinitely. It's a big cost.
The other point is, we've got to open up our businesses as fast as possible to avoid absolute economic catastrophe. Those number predictions on how high the unemployment rate is going to go are not unrealistic. That's why we have got to get back to work quickly.
Now look, it's not going to be easy, Steve. Point number one, there are some people making more money staying home than if they went back to work. That's disincentive to go back. Secondly, some people will be unwilling to return to work, because they fear infection. And then there is a third reason, some businesses will indeed slim down because of this lockdown and won't require all of their workers back again.
So look, you've got to open up, but it will be an uphill struggle, but we've got to do that struggle to limit the loss—the social damage and the economic damage.
As the Independent reported last month, during the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918, cities that had stronger social distancing measures and longer lockdown measures, actually recovered faster than those that didn't, as discussed in this article comparing the difference in the response in the twin cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul:
The comparison between the twin cities is instructive today not just for what it tells us about the health benefits of social distancing, but also for what it says about any economic costs that come with it.
In 1918, cities that committed earlier and longer to interventions like banning public gatherings and closing schools didn’t fare worse for disrupting their economies for longer. Many of those cities actually had relatively larger gains in manufacturing employment, manufacturing output and bank assets in 1919 and into the next few years, according to a new study from researchers at the Federal Reserve of New York and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). This is particularly clear among Western cities that had more time to prepare for a pandemic that hit the east coast first.
For cities with the most aggressive interventions, there’s no trade-off apparent in this data between saving lives and hurting the economy.
“If anything, these places do better,” said Emil Verner, an economist at MIT, who wrote the paper with Sergio Correia and Stephan Luck of the Federal Reserve.[...]
The outlook today is clearly grimmer. The economy is now global, leaving local communities susceptible to coronavirus effects on the other side of the world. And so much of the modern service-sector economy in the US is contingent on people getting together — on planes, in restaurants, at theatres, in tourism hubs.
But this lesson from 1918 is probably still true today: It’s the pandemic that really hurts the economy, not the things we do to try to contain it.
Opening up too quickly in areas where the number of cases is still on the rise is a recipe for disaster on all levels, and the decision by many states to do it may very well backfire, and quickly.
Host Steve Doocy asked Varney about the "jaw-dropping" unemployment numbers, which are probably going to get worse before they get better, and Varney responded by bringing up the very real social costs of forcing people to stay at home, such as increases in domestic abuse and alcoholism, but then proceeded to completely ignore the lessons from history when it comes to economic recovery from a pandemic:
VARNEY: Look there are two reasons why we really need to get back to work and end the lockdown, as much as possible, in the immediate future.
Reason number one, there is an enormous social cost to the lockdown—child abuse, alcoholism, drug abuse, people being stuck and clamped down in their houses in an abusive relationship. There is untold cost, a social cost to continuing the lockdown indefinitely. It's a big cost.
The other point is, we've got to open up our businesses as fast as possible to avoid absolute economic catastrophe. Those number predictions on how high the unemployment rate is going to go are not unrealistic. That's why we have got to get back to work quickly.
Now look, it's not going to be easy, Steve. Point number one, there are some people making more money staying home than if they went back to work. That's disincentive to go back. Secondly, some people will be unwilling to return to work, because they fear infection. And then there is a third reason, some businesses will indeed slim down because of this lockdown and won't require all of their workers back again.
So look, you've got to open up, but it will be an uphill struggle, but we've got to do that struggle to limit the loss—the social damage and the economic damage.
As the Independent reported last month, during the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918, cities that had stronger social distancing measures and longer lockdown measures, actually recovered faster than those that didn't, as discussed in this article comparing the difference in the response in the twin cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul:
The comparison between the twin cities is instructive today not just for what it tells us about the health benefits of social distancing, but also for what it says about any economic costs that come with it.
In 1918, cities that committed earlier and longer to interventions like banning public gatherings and closing schools didn’t fare worse for disrupting their economies for longer. Many of those cities actually had relatively larger gains in manufacturing employment, manufacturing output and bank assets in 1919 and into the next few years, according to a new study from researchers at the Federal Reserve of New York and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). This is particularly clear among Western cities that had more time to prepare for a pandemic that hit the east coast first.
For cities with the most aggressive interventions, there’s no trade-off apparent in this data between saving lives and hurting the economy.
“If anything, these places do better,” said Emil Verner, an economist at MIT, who wrote the paper with Sergio Correia and Stephan Luck of the Federal Reserve.[...]
The outlook today is clearly grimmer. The economy is now global, leaving local communities susceptible to coronavirus effects on the other side of the world. And so much of the modern service-sector economy in the US is contingent on people getting together — on planes, in restaurants, at theatres, in tourism hubs.
But this lesson from 1918 is probably still true today: It’s the pandemic that really hurts the economy, not the things we do to try to contain it.
Opening up too quickly in areas where the number of cases is still on the rise is a recipe for disaster on all levels, and the decision by many states to do it may very well backfire, and quickly.
Hydroxychloroquine truther Laura Ingraham attempts to discredit promising new coronavirus treatment
After touting a drug studies have found to be ineffective and possibly dangerous, Ingraham dismisses remdesivir
IGOR DERYSH - salon
APRIL 30, 2020 4:09PM (UTC)
Fox News host Laura Ingraham dismissed a study that found promising results in coronavirus patients treated with the Ebola drug remdesivir and once again touted the unproven malaria drug hydroxychloroquine as a potential treatment despite criticism.
Ingraham, who was among the first Fox hosts to promote hydroxychloroquine for coronavirus patients despite questions about its efficacy and even met with President Donald Trump at the White House to discuss the drug, raised questions about remdesivir after Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top infectious disease expert in the country, touted the early results.
Ingraham, who does not have a medical degree, said the drug "certainly sounds encouraging." But she questioned whether it was safe and why Fauci was not as optimistic about the unproven drug treatment she has repeatedly hyped on her opinion program.
The Fox News host did not seem to share the same concern when she promoted hydroxychloroquine, which doctors have warned has significant side effects and could even lead to death when combined with the antibiotic azithromycin.
"The hydroxychloroquine and the Z-pack, I think, as a combination, probably, it's looking very, very good," Trump said March 23 during a White House briefing.
"We don't know," Ingraham mused Wednesday night. "It hasn't been approved by the FDA. They might do emergency authorization. Hydroxychloroquine was approved decades ago."
Though hydroxychloroquine was approved as an anti-malarial medication and is also used to treat patients with lupus and rheumatoid arthritis, a large study in New York suggested that it had no benefit for coronavirus patients after a retrospective study found that veterans treated with the drug had a higher rate of death than those who only received routine care. The Food and Drug Administration warned against the widespread use of hydroxychloroquine last week, citing potential side effects. Though Trump has frequently touted the drug, he has largely stopped mentioning it.
Ingraham argued that remdesivir was expensive and difficult to mass-produce while claiming that hydroxychloroquine was "cheap and already widely available." She did not mention that the hype around the drug has led to lupus and arthritis patients facing shortages.
The Fox News host then brought on regular guest Dr. Ramin Oskui, who cited a French researcher whose early study of the drug had been discredited. Oskui claimed that while hydroxychloroquine had a "very favorable safety profile," he was concerned that remdesivir might not be as safe because of "its history with Ebola."
A clinical trial sponsored by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases that included 1,063 patients found that the drug may help reduce recovery time in patients infected with the coronavirus. The average recovery time was 11 days for patients who were given the drug, compared to 15 days among patients who got a placebo.
"The data shows that remdesivir has a clear-cut, significant positive effect in diminishing the time to recover," Fauci told reporters Wednesday, adding that the early results were significant because "what it has proven is that a drug can block this virus."
Trump, who was joined by Fauci in the Oval Office, agreed that the early results were "very positive." The Food and Drug Administration is expected to announce an emergency approval for the drug, a senior administration official told The New York Times.
"Remdesivir is not a magic bullet, but it's as good as we get right now," Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious disease expert at the University of California, San Francisco who participated in the trial, told the outlet. "Patients come to the hospital thinking we have a treatment, and by treatment, they mean a drug. We have been impotent in not having any options."
But remdesivir is not a 100% "knockout," Fauci warned, and other studies have found different results. A separate study published in the medical journal The Lancet found no benefit to the drug when compared to a placebo.
"Unfortunately, our trial found that while safe and adequately tolerated, remdesivir did not provide significant benefits over placebo," Dr. Bin Cao, the study's lead investigator told The Times. "This is not the outcome we hoped for."
Peter Bach, an intensive care unit physician and researcher at Memorial Sloan Kettering said that while the NIH study was promising, the drug's limited efficacy and the fact that it likely works best before symptoms get serious limits how helpful it would be in the fight against the virus.
"Its availability is not going to move the needle on social distancing relaxation," he tweeted.
But as the number of deaths from the virus continued to rise, the FDA said it is working at "lightning speed" to determine whether to issue an emergency approval.
"We're working with the company to emphasize the necessity of speed while at the same time to understand the data," FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn told Bloomberg News. "There will be a lot of factors that go into all the regulatory decisions. We want to look at the totality of data to make sure that remdesivir is targeted to the right patients."
Ingraham, who was among the first Fox hosts to promote hydroxychloroquine for coronavirus patients despite questions about its efficacy and even met with President Donald Trump at the White House to discuss the drug, raised questions about remdesivir after Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top infectious disease expert in the country, touted the early results.
Ingraham, who does not have a medical degree, said the drug "certainly sounds encouraging." But she questioned whether it was safe and why Fauci was not as optimistic about the unproven drug treatment she has repeatedly hyped on her opinion program.
The Fox News host did not seem to share the same concern when she promoted hydroxychloroquine, which doctors have warned has significant side effects and could even lead to death when combined with the antibiotic azithromycin.
"The hydroxychloroquine and the Z-pack, I think, as a combination, probably, it's looking very, very good," Trump said March 23 during a White House briefing.
"We don't know," Ingraham mused Wednesday night. "It hasn't been approved by the FDA. They might do emergency authorization. Hydroxychloroquine was approved decades ago."
Though hydroxychloroquine was approved as an anti-malarial medication and is also used to treat patients with lupus and rheumatoid arthritis, a large study in New York suggested that it had no benefit for coronavirus patients after a retrospective study found that veterans treated with the drug had a higher rate of death than those who only received routine care. The Food and Drug Administration warned against the widespread use of hydroxychloroquine last week, citing potential side effects. Though Trump has frequently touted the drug, he has largely stopped mentioning it.
Ingraham argued that remdesivir was expensive and difficult to mass-produce while claiming that hydroxychloroquine was "cheap and already widely available." She did not mention that the hype around the drug has led to lupus and arthritis patients facing shortages.
The Fox News host then brought on regular guest Dr. Ramin Oskui, who cited a French researcher whose early study of the drug had been discredited. Oskui claimed that while hydroxychloroquine had a "very favorable safety profile," he was concerned that remdesivir might not be as safe because of "its history with Ebola."
A clinical trial sponsored by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases that included 1,063 patients found that the drug may help reduce recovery time in patients infected with the coronavirus. The average recovery time was 11 days for patients who were given the drug, compared to 15 days among patients who got a placebo.
"The data shows that remdesivir has a clear-cut, significant positive effect in diminishing the time to recover," Fauci told reporters Wednesday, adding that the early results were significant because "what it has proven is that a drug can block this virus."
Trump, who was joined by Fauci in the Oval Office, agreed that the early results were "very positive." The Food and Drug Administration is expected to announce an emergency approval for the drug, a senior administration official told The New York Times.
"Remdesivir is not a magic bullet, but it's as good as we get right now," Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious disease expert at the University of California, San Francisco who participated in the trial, told the outlet. "Patients come to the hospital thinking we have a treatment, and by treatment, they mean a drug. We have been impotent in not having any options."
But remdesivir is not a 100% "knockout," Fauci warned, and other studies have found different results. A separate study published in the medical journal The Lancet found no benefit to the drug when compared to a placebo.
"Unfortunately, our trial found that while safe and adequately tolerated, remdesivir did not provide significant benefits over placebo," Dr. Bin Cao, the study's lead investigator told The Times. "This is not the outcome we hoped for."
Peter Bach, an intensive care unit physician and researcher at Memorial Sloan Kettering said that while the NIH study was promising, the drug's limited efficacy and the fact that it likely works best before symptoms get serious limits how helpful it would be in the fight against the virus.
"Its availability is not going to move the needle on social distancing relaxation," he tweeted.
But as the number of deaths from the virus continued to rise, the FDA said it is working at "lightning speed" to determine whether to issue an emergency approval.
"We're working with the company to emphasize the necessity of speed while at the same time to understand the data," FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn told Bloomberg News. "There will be a lot of factors that go into all the regulatory decisions. We want to look at the totality of data to make sure that remdesivir is targeted to the right patients."
Fox News hosts try to discredit study that finds no benefit from unproven drug therapy for COVID-19
After touting a discredited French study to hype the drug, Fox hosts criticize "shockingly irresponsible" research
IGOR DERYSH - salon
APRIL 23, 2020 2:49PM (UTC)
Fox News hosts Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham attempted to discredit a large retrospective study, which found that more COVID-19 patients who took the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine died than those who only received standard care.
Unlike "experiments," where researchers typically study the differences between the experimental group and a control group, retrospective studies look at existing data to find trends. A retrospective study by researchers at the Columbia VA Health Care System in South Carolina, the University of South Carolina and the University of Virginia School of Medicine of 368 veterans in the Veterans Health Administration medical centers found that COVID-19 patients who took the drug died at a higher rate than those who did not.
About 28% of veterans who received hydroxychloroquine and standard care and 22% of veterans who received a combination of hydroxychloroquine and the antibiotic azithromycin died compared to only 11% of patients who received standard care alone, according to the study, which was submitted to the New England Journal of Medicine but has yet to be peer-reviewed.
Though the study looked at actual patients treated in the VA health system, Hannity and Ingraham claimed that it was bogus because it was not a "rigorous experiment" (as noted by the Associated Press). The Fox News hosts, meanwhile, first touted the drug as they cited a tiny French study later discredited by its publisher after researchers omitted patients who died or were taken to an intensive care unit from their results. After repeatedly hyping the drug for weeks, Fox News hosts had largely gone silent on hydroxychloroquine until Wednesday.
"Notice the mob and media, you know, going with this VA study," Hannity said Wednesday on his radio show. "It's even in the write-ups of it by the AP — they're acknowledging it's flawed from the get-go and not a rigorous experiment."
The Fox News host, who has repeatedly touted the drug, focused on that single study even though a panel convened by the National Institutes of Health issued guidelines this week warning doctors against using the drug as a treatment for COVID-19, especially in combination with azithromycin, which President Donald Trump has also urged.
Ingraham, who is not a doctor, went a step further, citing the same French researcher behind the earlier discredited study in an apparent attempt to debunk the latest findings.
"When we use the phrase 'scientific study' in a headline or on TV, it's meant to convey a sense of seriousness — of scientific rigor," she said Wednesday on her show. ". . . The manner in which that data is organized, examined and then reported can determine a lot about whether a study is credible or not."
Ingraham, who repeatedly touted the discredited French study, claimed that the VA study "shockingly irresponsible" and "perhaps even agenda-driven."
The Fox News host, whose tweets promoting the drug ran afoul of Twitter's misinformation policy, mockingly played clips of CNN hosts using the study to criticize Fox News and the president for promoting the unproven drug therapy as she claimed that they had "zero credibility."
"Well, the jackals at Media Matters thought they had their prey trapped. And now, journalism is such a joke that even The Washington Post and tonight the New York Times reflexively joined the pig pile. It's just pathetic," she said. "Now, I'm not a doctor. I don't play one on TV, but renowned French virologist Dr. Didier Raoult released his own study on hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin just a few weeks ago. It demonstrated 91% effectiveness in more than 1,000 patients with zero side effects. There was one outcome that was not good, but in the patients that recovered, there was zero side effects."
While Ingraham touted the research of the doctor behind the earlier discredited study, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently removed guidelines for doctors using the drug, warning that "there are no drugs or other therapeutics approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to prevent or treat COVID-19." Though there has been what Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top infectious disease expert in the country, calls "anecdotal evidence" that the drug can be helpful, there have similarly been reports of patients suffering severe side effects and even death in certain situations.
Even Trump toned down his hype of the drug when asked about the study at a White House news briefing on Tuesday.
"I don't know the report," Trump said. "We're looking at it."
Other cable news networks who did not rush to promote an unproven drug therapy noted that the new findings follow a "drumbeat of studies" showing similar results.
"We're going to get large data studies, so we have to take all these studies with a grain of salt. This one was not peer-reviewed. It was not randomized. Nevertheless . . . the patients who in this study got hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin — that's the Z-Pak, the antibiotic — did worse," CNN medical correspondent Sanjay Gupta said. "They had a 22 % death rate as compared to patients who didn't get those medications, who had an 11.4% death rate. So it doesn't look very promising, you know? This is another study among a drumbeat of studies now — again, all of them pretty small. We're still waiting for the larger studies, but if you look at France, you look at Brazil, you look at Sweden, you're hearing similar things."
MSNBC host Rachel Maddow criticized Fox News for suddenly going quiet about a drug therapy which it had so frequently hyped.
"Beginning in middle of March, hydroxychloroquine was mentioned hundreds, and hundreds and hundreds of times on the Fox News channel — particularly by its primetime hosts and by the president, from the White House podium," she said. "They just stopped bringing it up, and we don't know why it is."
Maddow said it was irresponsible to broadcast misinformation which could harm the public.
"If somebody is repeatedly misinforming the American public about important things having to do with this disease, don't broadcast that," she said. "Don't listen to people who are lying to you about this disease. Don't broadcast their comments. Certainly don't keep doing it day after day, when they've proven themselves to be lying day after day. And honestly, it doesn't matter who it is — show some responsibility, honestly."
Unlike "experiments," where researchers typically study the differences between the experimental group and a control group, retrospective studies look at existing data to find trends. A retrospective study by researchers at the Columbia VA Health Care System in South Carolina, the University of South Carolina and the University of Virginia School of Medicine of 368 veterans in the Veterans Health Administration medical centers found that COVID-19 patients who took the drug died at a higher rate than those who did not.
About 28% of veterans who received hydroxychloroquine and standard care and 22% of veterans who received a combination of hydroxychloroquine and the antibiotic azithromycin died compared to only 11% of patients who received standard care alone, according to the study, which was submitted to the New England Journal of Medicine but has yet to be peer-reviewed.
Though the study looked at actual patients treated in the VA health system, Hannity and Ingraham claimed that it was bogus because it was not a "rigorous experiment" (as noted by the Associated Press). The Fox News hosts, meanwhile, first touted the drug as they cited a tiny French study later discredited by its publisher after researchers omitted patients who died or were taken to an intensive care unit from their results. After repeatedly hyping the drug for weeks, Fox News hosts had largely gone silent on hydroxychloroquine until Wednesday.
"Notice the mob and media, you know, going with this VA study," Hannity said Wednesday on his radio show. "It's even in the write-ups of it by the AP — they're acknowledging it's flawed from the get-go and not a rigorous experiment."
The Fox News host, who has repeatedly touted the drug, focused on that single study even though a panel convened by the National Institutes of Health issued guidelines this week warning doctors against using the drug as a treatment for COVID-19, especially in combination with azithromycin, which President Donald Trump has also urged.
Ingraham, who is not a doctor, went a step further, citing the same French researcher behind the earlier discredited study in an apparent attempt to debunk the latest findings.
"When we use the phrase 'scientific study' in a headline or on TV, it's meant to convey a sense of seriousness — of scientific rigor," she said Wednesday on her show. ". . . The manner in which that data is organized, examined and then reported can determine a lot about whether a study is credible or not."
Ingraham, who repeatedly touted the discredited French study, claimed that the VA study "shockingly irresponsible" and "perhaps even agenda-driven."
The Fox News host, whose tweets promoting the drug ran afoul of Twitter's misinformation policy, mockingly played clips of CNN hosts using the study to criticize Fox News and the president for promoting the unproven drug therapy as she claimed that they had "zero credibility."
"Well, the jackals at Media Matters thought they had their prey trapped. And now, journalism is such a joke that even The Washington Post and tonight the New York Times reflexively joined the pig pile. It's just pathetic," she said. "Now, I'm not a doctor. I don't play one on TV, but renowned French virologist Dr. Didier Raoult released his own study on hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin just a few weeks ago. It demonstrated 91% effectiveness in more than 1,000 patients with zero side effects. There was one outcome that was not good, but in the patients that recovered, there was zero side effects."
While Ingraham touted the research of the doctor behind the earlier discredited study, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently removed guidelines for doctors using the drug, warning that "there are no drugs or other therapeutics approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to prevent or treat COVID-19." Though there has been what Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top infectious disease expert in the country, calls "anecdotal evidence" that the drug can be helpful, there have similarly been reports of patients suffering severe side effects and even death in certain situations.
Even Trump toned down his hype of the drug when asked about the study at a White House news briefing on Tuesday.
"I don't know the report," Trump said. "We're looking at it."
Other cable news networks who did not rush to promote an unproven drug therapy noted that the new findings follow a "drumbeat of studies" showing similar results.
"We're going to get large data studies, so we have to take all these studies with a grain of salt. This one was not peer-reviewed. It was not randomized. Nevertheless . . . the patients who in this study got hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin — that's the Z-Pak, the antibiotic — did worse," CNN medical correspondent Sanjay Gupta said. "They had a 22 % death rate as compared to patients who didn't get those medications, who had an 11.4% death rate. So it doesn't look very promising, you know? This is another study among a drumbeat of studies now — again, all of them pretty small. We're still waiting for the larger studies, but if you look at France, you look at Brazil, you look at Sweden, you're hearing similar things."
MSNBC host Rachel Maddow criticized Fox News for suddenly going quiet about a drug therapy which it had so frequently hyped.
"Beginning in middle of March, hydroxychloroquine was mentioned hundreds, and hundreds and hundreds of times on the Fox News channel — particularly by its primetime hosts and by the president, from the White House podium," she said. "They just stopped bringing it up, and we don't know why it is."
Maddow said it was irresponsible to broadcast misinformation which could harm the public.
"If somebody is repeatedly misinforming the American public about important things having to do with this disease, don't broadcast that," she said. "Don't listen to people who are lying to you about this disease. Don't broadcast their comments. Certainly don't keep doing it day after day, when they've proven themselves to be lying day after day. And honestly, it doesn't matter who it is — show some responsibility, honestly."
Fox News fights coronavirus misinformation lawsuit: First Amendment protects “false” speech
Fox News says it cannot be held liable because the Constitution protects "false" and "outrageous" claims
IGOR DERYSH - salon
APRIL 16, 2020 9:00AM (UTC)
Fox News has moved to dismiss a lawsuit filed by a Washington state group accusing the network of "deceptive" coronavirus coverage by arguing that the First Amendment protects "false" and "outrageous" speech.
The network's lawyers said in a motion seeking to dismiss the lawsuit that the "First Amendment does not permit censoring this type of speech based on the theory that it is 'false' or 'outrageous.' Nor does the law of the State of Washington."
The Washington League for Increased Transparency and Ethics (WASHLITE) filed a lawsuit in King County earlier this month seeking a court order barring the network from "interfering with reasonable and necessary measures to contain the virus by publishing further false and deceptive content."
The suit accused the network of violating the state's Consumer Protection Act by "falsely and deceptively disseminating 'news' via cable news contracts that the coronavirus was a 'hoax' and that it was otherwise not a danger to public health and safety."
The suit specifically cited Fox News host Sean Hannity and former Fox Business host Trish Regan for having "acted in bad faith to willfully and maliciously disseminate false information denying and minimizing the danger posed by the spread of the novel coronavirus."
Hannity downplayed the threat of the coronavirus and argued it was less dangerous than the flu. Regan was fired shortly after accusing Democrats of pushing a "coronavirus impeachment scam."
Though there are numerous examples of Fox opinion hosts downplaying the threat posed by the virus, many legal experts have dismissed the idea that the network could be sued for its coverage of the pandemic. One of the lawyers involved in the lawsuit has since withdrawn from the case.
"It's Constitutional Law 101: the First Amendment protects our right to speak openly and freely on matters of public concern," Fox News Media general counsel Lily Fu Claffee said in a statement. "If WASHLITE doesn't like what we said, it can criticize us, but it can't silence us with a lawsuit."
The network's 76-page filing, which includes dozens of pages of show transcripts and examples of other media outlets purportedly downplaying the risk of the virus early this year, argues that the hosts "never described the Coronavirus as a 'hoax' or a 'conspiracy,' but instead used those terms to comment on efforts to exploit the pandemic for political points."
The network's lawyers argued that Hannity and Regan simply took part in an "intense public debate" over "how serious of a threat" the virus posed, noting that Hannity, in March, urged the elderly and people with compromised immune systems to take "extra, extra, extra caution."
The motion also noted that when Regan wrongly argued that the "flu … can be even more deadly" than the coronavirus, she emphasized that she was "not saying that people should not take [the coronavirus] seriously."
"Under the First Amendment and state law, the truth or falsity of this type of speech must be resolved through free and open debate in the marketplace of ideas — not through burdensome litigation seeking to impose legal penalties on political statements that a jury might deem 'false' or 'outrageous,'" the motion said. "In addition, the Complaint also fails because the statements are constitutionally protected opinions. Again, even accepting the Complaint's characterization of the speech at issue, the Fox commentators were expressing their view on the scientific question of how dangerous the Coronavirus is and how society should respond to it — including what type of governmental action should be taken."
The motion went on to cite CNN and New York Times coverage that compared the coronavirus to the flu, arguing that "If this type of allegedly 'false' speech can be censored, then free and open debate on matters of public concern is a dead letter."
The network added that WASHLITE's bid to get an injunction preventing Fox News from expressing similar opinions in the future is an example of unlawful "extraordinary prior restraint." The Washington CPA also "does not regulate political commentary … nor is such commentary the type of 'extreme and outrageous conduct' covered by the tort of 'outrage,'" the motion said.
Legal experts largely agreed with the network's position that the lawsuit was unlikely to succeed.
Catherine Clark, an attorney for WASHLITE, vowed to respond to the motion and told Variety that the suit "was not about prohibiting free speech, but making sure that news organizations convey accurate information."
Legal culpability aside, media analysts have widely criticized Fox News for putting their viewers at risk by downplaying the threat posed by the virus, which has now killed 26,000 people in the United States.
"Fox failed its viewers and the broader public in ways both revealing and potentially lethal," wrote New York Times columnist Ben Smith.
A letter signed by more than 70 journalism professors around the country criticized Fox News for spreading "misinformation" about the virus.
"Viewers of Fox News, including the president of the United States, have been regularly subjected to misinformation relayed by the network — false statements downplaying the prevalence of COVID-19 and its harms; misleading recommendations of activities that people should undertake to protect themselves and others, including casual recommendations of untested drugs; false assessments of the value of measures urged upon the public by their elected political leadership and public health authorities," the letter said, pointing to a recent poll that found that 79% of Fox News viewers believed the media had overstated the danger posed by the virus.
The network's competitors have seized on the criticism.
"There are surveys on this, showing a majority of people who get information from Fox still think the virus threat is overblown," MSNBC host Ari Melber said last week:
They're more likely to downplay it even compared to other Republicans. If you don't get your information from Fox News or online conspiracy theories, you're less likely to think it's overblown because it's not overblown. For Fox viewers, it's especially perilous. The median age there is 67. That mostly older audience, especially vulnerable if they contract this virus. And as we just showed you, they've been told to basically downplay it.
The network's lawyers said in a motion seeking to dismiss the lawsuit that the "First Amendment does not permit censoring this type of speech based on the theory that it is 'false' or 'outrageous.' Nor does the law of the State of Washington."
The Washington League for Increased Transparency and Ethics (WASHLITE) filed a lawsuit in King County earlier this month seeking a court order barring the network from "interfering with reasonable and necessary measures to contain the virus by publishing further false and deceptive content."
The suit accused the network of violating the state's Consumer Protection Act by "falsely and deceptively disseminating 'news' via cable news contracts that the coronavirus was a 'hoax' and that it was otherwise not a danger to public health and safety."
The suit specifically cited Fox News host Sean Hannity and former Fox Business host Trish Regan for having "acted in bad faith to willfully and maliciously disseminate false information denying and minimizing the danger posed by the spread of the novel coronavirus."
Hannity downplayed the threat of the coronavirus and argued it was less dangerous than the flu. Regan was fired shortly after accusing Democrats of pushing a "coronavirus impeachment scam."
Though there are numerous examples of Fox opinion hosts downplaying the threat posed by the virus, many legal experts have dismissed the idea that the network could be sued for its coverage of the pandemic. One of the lawyers involved in the lawsuit has since withdrawn from the case.
"It's Constitutional Law 101: the First Amendment protects our right to speak openly and freely on matters of public concern," Fox News Media general counsel Lily Fu Claffee said in a statement. "If WASHLITE doesn't like what we said, it can criticize us, but it can't silence us with a lawsuit."
The network's 76-page filing, which includes dozens of pages of show transcripts and examples of other media outlets purportedly downplaying the risk of the virus early this year, argues that the hosts "never described the Coronavirus as a 'hoax' or a 'conspiracy,' but instead used those terms to comment on efforts to exploit the pandemic for political points."
The network's lawyers argued that Hannity and Regan simply took part in an "intense public debate" over "how serious of a threat" the virus posed, noting that Hannity, in March, urged the elderly and people with compromised immune systems to take "extra, extra, extra caution."
The motion also noted that when Regan wrongly argued that the "flu … can be even more deadly" than the coronavirus, she emphasized that she was "not saying that people should not take [the coronavirus] seriously."
"Under the First Amendment and state law, the truth or falsity of this type of speech must be resolved through free and open debate in the marketplace of ideas — not through burdensome litigation seeking to impose legal penalties on political statements that a jury might deem 'false' or 'outrageous,'" the motion said. "In addition, the Complaint also fails because the statements are constitutionally protected opinions. Again, even accepting the Complaint's characterization of the speech at issue, the Fox commentators were expressing their view on the scientific question of how dangerous the Coronavirus is and how society should respond to it — including what type of governmental action should be taken."
The motion went on to cite CNN and New York Times coverage that compared the coronavirus to the flu, arguing that "If this type of allegedly 'false' speech can be censored, then free and open debate on matters of public concern is a dead letter."
The network added that WASHLITE's bid to get an injunction preventing Fox News from expressing similar opinions in the future is an example of unlawful "extraordinary prior restraint." The Washington CPA also "does not regulate political commentary … nor is such commentary the type of 'extreme and outrageous conduct' covered by the tort of 'outrage,'" the motion said.
Legal experts largely agreed with the network's position that the lawsuit was unlikely to succeed.
Catherine Clark, an attorney for WASHLITE, vowed to respond to the motion and told Variety that the suit "was not about prohibiting free speech, but making sure that news organizations convey accurate information."
Legal culpability aside, media analysts have widely criticized Fox News for putting their viewers at risk by downplaying the threat posed by the virus, which has now killed 26,000 people in the United States.
"Fox failed its viewers and the broader public in ways both revealing and potentially lethal," wrote New York Times columnist Ben Smith.
A letter signed by more than 70 journalism professors around the country criticized Fox News for spreading "misinformation" about the virus.
"Viewers of Fox News, including the president of the United States, have been regularly subjected to misinformation relayed by the network — false statements downplaying the prevalence of COVID-19 and its harms; misleading recommendations of activities that people should undertake to protect themselves and others, including casual recommendations of untested drugs; false assessments of the value of measures urged upon the public by their elected political leadership and public health authorities," the letter said, pointing to a recent poll that found that 79% of Fox News viewers believed the media had overstated the danger posed by the virus.
The network's competitors have seized on the criticism.
"There are surveys on this, showing a majority of people who get information from Fox still think the virus threat is overblown," MSNBC host Ari Melber said last week:
They're more likely to downplay it even compared to other Republicans. If you don't get your information from Fox News or online conspiracy theories, you're less likely to think it's overblown because it's not overblown. For Fox viewers, it's especially perilous. The median age there is 67. That mostly older audience, especially vulnerable if they contract this virus. And as we just showed you, they've been told to basically downplay it.
how stupid are his viewers???
Brian Kilmeade Whines About Payroll Loans; 'People Don't Want Those Jobs Back'
The not-too-bright Fox and Friends host says a stupid thing, again.
By Frances Langum - crooks & liars
4/09/20 8:06am
"Brian Kilmeade is an idiot. But you knew that." part infinity, transcript via Media Matters:
BRIAN KILMEADE (CO-HOST): The other thing is, if you're trying to help out small business, which restaurants are, don't make them take 75% of that grant money and put it towards employees, many of which don't want those jobs back because they're better off on unemployment. Let them pay their rent, let them somehow survive and keep the lights on and maintain their equipment. So they've got to be flexible when they go into these banks and get these grants, the money that we set aside as taxpayers to keep these restaurants alive when they come back.
Brian Kilmeade doesn't know that unemployment doesn't pay 100% of wages and that being re-hired back to your old job is better and may make the difference between a small business staying in business or failing.
BRIAN KILMEADE (CO-HOST): The other thing is, if you're trying to help out small business, which restaurants are, don't make them take 75% of that grant money and put it towards employees, many of which don't want those jobs back because they're better off on unemployment. Let them pay their rent, let them somehow survive and keep the lights on and maintain their equipment. So they've got to be flexible when they go into these banks and get these grants, the money that we set aside as taxpayers to keep these restaurants alive when they come back.
Brian Kilmeade doesn't know that unemployment doesn't pay 100% of wages and that being re-hired back to your old job is better and may make the difference between a small business staying in business or failing.
Fox News Has Been Lying Its Aging Viewers Into Early Graves
BY William Rivers Pitt, Truthout
PUBLISHED April 2, 2020
That moment when you step back from yourself and realize every cell and fiber in your body is a gusting scream of fury and fear so encompassing that you are thrumming on a subharmonic level, yet simultaneously you are so quiescent that the purring cat asleep on your chest has no idea of your condition — that is my personal resting face today.
There are cruise ships stacked up off the coast of Florida filled with sick people and corpses: 808 guests and 583 crew on the good ship Rotterdam, 442 guests and 603 crew on the Zaandam. Neither Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, nor the Republican president of the United States, Donald Trump, seem to know what to do about it.
“Trump on Tuesday night said he had planned to discuss the situation with DeSantis,” reported CNN. “‘People are dying on the ship, or at least very sick, but they are dying on the ship,’ Trump said. ‘So, I’m going to do what is right.’” As of this morning, those ships remain outside U.S. waters, waiting for the word.
Those ships, and those trapped people, are a metaphor for what the entire state of Florida — indeed, whole swaths of “Red State America” — are on the verge of experiencing, thanks entirely to an expeditious virus and the Republican hucksters who helped it spread. Thus far, COVID-19 has spent its wrath in places like New York, Seattle and Detroit. The storm is now coming to the farther reaches, to Fox News, to the doorstep of Trump’s most devout adherents, and it will be a horror when it happens.
“A review of hundreds of hours of programming and social media traffic from Jan. 1 through mid-March, when the White House started urging people to stay home and limit their exposure to others — shows that doubt, cynicism and misinformation about the virus took root among many of Mr. Trump’s boosters in the right-wing media as the number of confirmed cases in the United States grew,” reports The New York Times.
Here is the present truth: A doctor can go on Fox News, speak basic and elemental facts about the coronavirus pandemic and become an immediate folk hero not for what he said, but for where he said it. Rishi Desai went on the mothership of right-wing folderol — live, no less — and lit into the Trump administration’s ongoing failure to get COVID-19 testing up and running on a national level. It was a moment of pure astonishment, a shard of light cracking the clouds.
Meanwhile, the core personality of that pestiferous network — Sean Hannity — can almost simultaneously spend an entire broadcast melting down at critics who correctly point out that he and his co-workers have been lying their own loyal viewers into early graves because protecting Trump is more important than protecting people in Florida, or anywhere else.
I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know, of course, but if I don’t say it out loud, my head will become a pillar of fire and that purring cat will run screaming. Never in history have two organizations — Fox and the GOP — been more utterly devoted to destroying their own foundations, and it is a dismal thing to encompass.
Fox News and the Republican Party exist today because of older white people who live in rural and suburban places. If you had sat down last December and hatched a plan specifically calculated to damage that sector of the populace, you could not have done better than Fox and the GOP have through their defense of Trump and their simple greedy negligence. COVID-19 is almost perfectly designed to attack older Americans, and still the Republican governor of Florida balks at protecting his aged population, because doing so might make Trump look bad.
We are told by the minute and the hour that ours is a divided nation, that conservatives hate liberals and vice versa, and that nary the twain shall meet unless it is at the point of bayonets. Yet my shoulders today are so tense you could use them as a whetstone because — just as I am terrified for older and immunosuppressed people everywhere — I am terrified for Florida, for “Red State America,” for the millions of people who are going to suffer and die because they trusted this president.
My heart is shattered at the thought of what is to come. I wish most devoutly that it was going to be different than it is, but that is futility. All of us — Red States and Blue States — are on the verge of bearing witness to a bloodletting that will leave us on our knees. It did not have to be this way, and I can’t stop weeping.
There are cruise ships stacked up off the coast of Florida filled with sick people and corpses: 808 guests and 583 crew on the good ship Rotterdam, 442 guests and 603 crew on the Zaandam. Neither Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, nor the Republican president of the United States, Donald Trump, seem to know what to do about it.
“Trump on Tuesday night said he had planned to discuss the situation with DeSantis,” reported CNN. “‘People are dying on the ship, or at least very sick, but they are dying on the ship,’ Trump said. ‘So, I’m going to do what is right.’” As of this morning, those ships remain outside U.S. waters, waiting for the word.
Those ships, and those trapped people, are a metaphor for what the entire state of Florida — indeed, whole swaths of “Red State America” — are on the verge of experiencing, thanks entirely to an expeditious virus and the Republican hucksters who helped it spread. Thus far, COVID-19 has spent its wrath in places like New York, Seattle and Detroit. The storm is now coming to the farther reaches, to Fox News, to the doorstep of Trump’s most devout adherents, and it will be a horror when it happens.
“A review of hundreds of hours of programming and social media traffic from Jan. 1 through mid-March, when the White House started urging people to stay home and limit their exposure to others — shows that doubt, cynicism and misinformation about the virus took root among many of Mr. Trump’s boosters in the right-wing media as the number of confirmed cases in the United States grew,” reports The New York Times.
Here is the present truth: A doctor can go on Fox News, speak basic and elemental facts about the coronavirus pandemic and become an immediate folk hero not for what he said, but for where he said it. Rishi Desai went on the mothership of right-wing folderol — live, no less — and lit into the Trump administration’s ongoing failure to get COVID-19 testing up and running on a national level. It was a moment of pure astonishment, a shard of light cracking the clouds.
Meanwhile, the core personality of that pestiferous network — Sean Hannity — can almost simultaneously spend an entire broadcast melting down at critics who correctly point out that he and his co-workers have been lying their own loyal viewers into early graves because protecting Trump is more important than protecting people in Florida, or anywhere else.
I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know, of course, but if I don’t say it out loud, my head will become a pillar of fire and that purring cat will run screaming. Never in history have two organizations — Fox and the GOP — been more utterly devoted to destroying their own foundations, and it is a dismal thing to encompass.
Fox News and the Republican Party exist today because of older white people who live in rural and suburban places. If you had sat down last December and hatched a plan specifically calculated to damage that sector of the populace, you could not have done better than Fox and the GOP have through their defense of Trump and their simple greedy negligence. COVID-19 is almost perfectly designed to attack older Americans, and still the Republican governor of Florida balks at protecting his aged population, because doing so might make Trump look bad.
We are told by the minute and the hour that ours is a divided nation, that conservatives hate liberals and vice versa, and that nary the twain shall meet unless it is at the point of bayonets. Yet my shoulders today are so tense you could use them as a whetstone because — just as I am terrified for older and immunosuppressed people everywhere — I am terrified for Florida, for “Red State America,” for the millions of people who are going to suffer and die because they trusted this president.
My heart is shattered at the thought of what is to come. I wish most devoutly that it was going to be different than it is, but that is futility. All of us — Red States and Blue States — are on the verge of bearing witness to a bloodletting that will leave us on our knees. It did not have to be this way, and I can’t stop weeping.
the network for the stupid!!!
Fox 'News' Panel Doubts Shortage Of Beds In Hospitals, Because Twitter Says So
Steve Hilton and his panel have all kinds of wackadoo excuses to question the dire warnings coming from hospital workers on the ground.
By Aliza Worthington -crooks & liars
3/31/20 4:22am
For a TV station whose mission seems to be to keep their viewers as uneducated and uninformed as possible, Fox "News" is doing a stellar job. For a media outlet whose stance on valuing "life" seems to end once the "life" exits the birth canal, Fox is as consistent as the rising and setting of the sun.
Steve Hilton, host of Fox "News" show, "The Next Revolution" spent this segment with his panel not only complaining about the fact that his version of "reality" wasn't being accommodated by the serious press, but that there were all kinds of reasons to question the legitimacy of claims that hospitals are and will be overwhelmed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Here's Lisa Boothe claiming we're not hearing from enough professors who challenge the mainstream thought.
BOOTHE: There was also two other professors from Stanford who recently wrote in The Wall Street Journal, saying that millions of people probably already have been infected in the United States, and we don't really hear from those people as much, and I think that's a challenge.
Forgive me, but how does that contradict the notion that hospitals and medical personnel are and will be overrun with COVID-19 patients across the nation?
Hilton then suggested that maybe people in Italy are dying from infections they caught IN THE HOSPITAL rather than from COVID-19.
Next we have good ole former Rep. Jason Chaffetz whining that people don't like it when he suggests there needs to be budget cuts to pay for the $2 trillion CARES bill. Well, sure, if the budget cuts you're proposing are to Medicare and Social Security...why not make up for it by eliminating corporate tax breaks, or maybe eliminate tax exemptions for religious organizations?
Finally, Sara Carter took the cake with this fauxnalysis: that it really may not be that bad because hospital parking lots are empty.
CARTER: People are saying, “Film your hospital," people are driving by their hospitals and they're not seeing -- in the ones that I'm seeing -- they're not seeing anybody in the parking lots. They're not seeing anybody drive up. So, people are wondering what's going inside the hospital.
Alright, friends, here are some reasons people might not be milling about in hospital parking lots.
Now, they all make sure to pepper in concerned phrases and sentiments, praising the heroism of doctors and nurses, saying they don't want to downplay the seriousness of what's happening. Yet they have just finished, or are about to do that very thing: downplay it. Question it. Cite bizarro Twitter seeds of conspiracies, like "Is your hospital parking lot empty? HOAX!"
Fox knows better than anyone else: they cannot manipulate you if you're informed.
Steve Hilton, host of Fox "News" show, "The Next Revolution" spent this segment with his panel not only complaining about the fact that his version of "reality" wasn't being accommodated by the serious press, but that there were all kinds of reasons to question the legitimacy of claims that hospitals are and will be overwhelmed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Here's Lisa Boothe claiming we're not hearing from enough professors who challenge the mainstream thought.
BOOTHE: There was also two other professors from Stanford who recently wrote in The Wall Street Journal, saying that millions of people probably already have been infected in the United States, and we don't really hear from those people as much, and I think that's a challenge.
Forgive me, but how does that contradict the notion that hospitals and medical personnel are and will be overrun with COVID-19 patients across the nation?
Hilton then suggested that maybe people in Italy are dying from infections they caught IN THE HOSPITAL rather than from COVID-19.
Next we have good ole former Rep. Jason Chaffetz whining that people don't like it when he suggests there needs to be budget cuts to pay for the $2 trillion CARES bill. Well, sure, if the budget cuts you're proposing are to Medicare and Social Security...why not make up for it by eliminating corporate tax breaks, or maybe eliminate tax exemptions for religious organizations?
Finally, Sara Carter took the cake with this fauxnalysis: that it really may not be that bad because hospital parking lots are empty.
CARTER: People are saying, “Film your hospital," people are driving by their hospitals and they're not seeing -- in the ones that I'm seeing -- they're not seeing anybody in the parking lots. They're not seeing anybody drive up. So, people are wondering what's going inside the hospital.
Alright, friends, here are some reasons people might not be milling about in hospital parking lots.
- No one who is not a patient is permitted in the hospital, so they are dropping off patients and going home.
- Patients may be arriving in ambulances.
- Staff of the hospital are inside the building. Doing their jobs.
Now, they all make sure to pepper in concerned phrases and sentiments, praising the heroism of doctors and nurses, saying they don't want to downplay the seriousness of what's happening. Yet they have just finished, or are about to do that very thing: downplay it. Question it. Cite bizarro Twitter seeds of conspiracies, like "Is your hospital parking lot empty? HOAX!"
Fox knows better than anyone else: they cannot manipulate you if you're informed.
Murdoch family took serious precautions against coronavirus as Fox News downplayed risk to public
Lachlan Murdoch reportedly knew about the virus since January, but the news network downplayed the risk for weeks
IGOR DERYSH - salon
MARCH 25, 2020 11:06PM (UTC)
The Murdoch family, which owns Fox News, took precautions against the new coronavirus as the network's hosts downplayed the risk posed by the pandemic on TV.
The family abruptly canceled Fox News Chairman Rupert Murdoch's 89th birthday party at his California estate on March 8 "out of concern for the patriarch's health," according to The New York Times' Ben Smith.
Smith previously reported that Lachlan Murdoch, who runs the news network, "knew the virus was coming" in January, because he was "getting regular updates from the family's political allies and journalists in his father's native Australia."
Around the same time, Fox News executives issued an internal memo instructing staffers to work from home and take precautions to deal with a "crisis of this magnitude."
Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott said in a memo this week that six of the network's staffers have tested positive for COVID-19.
"We expect to continue receiving reports of more positive tests given New York is now at the epicenter," the memo said, according to Deadline. "The vast majority of our workforce is now telecommuting so they have not had to weather the issues around each positive case."
But as Fox News executives worried about the impact of the virus, the network assured viewers, who could be at risk of severe illness from the virus because they are are disproportionately elderly, that the outbreak was no worse than the common flu.
Echoing President Donald Trump's attempts to downplay the threat of the virus, the network's hosts assured the audience the problem was not serious.
Some Fox News hosts seized on Trump's claim that the media coverage of the virus was a "hoax" to bring down his presidency. When the market began to collapse in late February, Fox pundits attempted to blame the rise of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., in the Democratic primary race for scaring investors.
Fox hosts accused the media of pushing "false, fear-based narratives" are "driv[ing] coronavirus panic."
Fox News medical contributor Marc Siegel declared that the "worst-case scenario" for coronavirus was "it could be the flu" on March 6.
Host Jeanine Pirro argued one day later that the virus was less serious than the flu.
"All the talk about coronavirus being so much more deadly doesn't reflect reality," she claimed. "Without a vaccine, the flu would be far more deadly."
"The more I learn about [coronavirus], the less there is to worry about," Fox host Pete Hegseth said on March 8.
A day after Murdoch canceled his party, Fox Business host Trish Regan made the wild claim that concerns over the virus were "yet another attempt to impeach" Trump.
Regan's rant prompted the network to pivot, leading to a widely-shared montage of Fox hosts raising alarm over the same virus they had attempted to downplay just days earlier. Trump also appeared to stop trying to downplay the virus around the same time.
But just as Trump went on to pivot again to arguing that economic pain caused by the virus was worse than the virus itself, so did Fox News.
"You know that famous phrase, 'The cure is worse than the disease?'" Fox host Steve Hilton said Sunday before his remarks were echoed in Trump's tweets. "That is exactly the territory we are hurtling towards. You think it is just the coronavirus that kills people? This total economic shutdown will kill people . . . Flatten the curve but not the economy, and do it before it's too late."
Host Laura Ingraham also argued that within the next week "we need to be heading back to work, school, stores, restaurants and churches with new protocols in place."
"The risk if we don't is that we lose far more in terms of death, pain and suffering than this pandemic will bring," she said.
The network's coverage put its audience at risk, Smith argued in The Times.
"Fox failed its viewers and the broader public in ways both revealing and potentially lethal," he wrote. "In particular, Lachlan Murdoch failed to pry its most important voices away from their embrace of the president's early line: that the virus was not a big threat in the United States."
Ashish Jha, the director of the Harvard Global Public Health Institute, told Smith he believed some viewers would die because of the network's coverage.
"Yes, some commentators in the right-wing media," he said, "spread a very specific type of misinformation that I think has been very harmful."
The family abruptly canceled Fox News Chairman Rupert Murdoch's 89th birthday party at his California estate on March 8 "out of concern for the patriarch's health," according to The New York Times' Ben Smith.
Smith previously reported that Lachlan Murdoch, who runs the news network, "knew the virus was coming" in January, because he was "getting regular updates from the family's political allies and journalists in his father's native Australia."
Around the same time, Fox News executives issued an internal memo instructing staffers to work from home and take precautions to deal with a "crisis of this magnitude."
Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott said in a memo this week that six of the network's staffers have tested positive for COVID-19.
"We expect to continue receiving reports of more positive tests given New York is now at the epicenter," the memo said, according to Deadline. "The vast majority of our workforce is now telecommuting so they have not had to weather the issues around each positive case."
But as Fox News executives worried about the impact of the virus, the network assured viewers, who could be at risk of severe illness from the virus because they are are disproportionately elderly, that the outbreak was no worse than the common flu.
Echoing President Donald Trump's attempts to downplay the threat of the virus, the network's hosts assured the audience the problem was not serious.
Some Fox News hosts seized on Trump's claim that the media coverage of the virus was a "hoax" to bring down his presidency. When the market began to collapse in late February, Fox pundits attempted to blame the rise of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., in the Democratic primary race for scaring investors.
Fox hosts accused the media of pushing "false, fear-based narratives" are "driv[ing] coronavirus panic."
Fox News medical contributor Marc Siegel declared that the "worst-case scenario" for coronavirus was "it could be the flu" on March 6.
Host Jeanine Pirro argued one day later that the virus was less serious than the flu.
"All the talk about coronavirus being so much more deadly doesn't reflect reality," she claimed. "Without a vaccine, the flu would be far more deadly."
"The more I learn about [coronavirus], the less there is to worry about," Fox host Pete Hegseth said on March 8.
A day after Murdoch canceled his party, Fox Business host Trish Regan made the wild claim that concerns over the virus were "yet another attempt to impeach" Trump.
Regan's rant prompted the network to pivot, leading to a widely-shared montage of Fox hosts raising alarm over the same virus they had attempted to downplay just days earlier. Trump also appeared to stop trying to downplay the virus around the same time.
But just as Trump went on to pivot again to arguing that economic pain caused by the virus was worse than the virus itself, so did Fox News.
"You know that famous phrase, 'The cure is worse than the disease?'" Fox host Steve Hilton said Sunday before his remarks were echoed in Trump's tweets. "That is exactly the territory we are hurtling towards. You think it is just the coronavirus that kills people? This total economic shutdown will kill people . . . Flatten the curve but not the economy, and do it before it's too late."
Host Laura Ingraham also argued that within the next week "we need to be heading back to work, school, stores, restaurants and churches with new protocols in place."
"The risk if we don't is that we lose far more in terms of death, pain and suffering than this pandemic will bring," she said.
The network's coverage put its audience at risk, Smith argued in The Times.
"Fox failed its viewers and the broader public in ways both revealing and potentially lethal," he wrote. "In particular, Lachlan Murdoch failed to pry its most important voices away from their embrace of the president's early line: that the virus was not a big threat in the United States."
Ashish Jha, the director of the Harvard Global Public Health Institute, told Smith he believed some viewers would die because of the network's coverage.
"Yes, some commentators in the right-wing media," he said, "spread a very specific type of misinformation that I think has been very harmful."
Republican Operative in Press Corps Helps Trump Use Briefing on Pandemic to Attack Critics
Robert Mackey - the intercept
March 19 2020, 3:59 p.m
DEPRIVED OF RALLIES, Donald Trump has turned the daily White House briefings on the novel coronavirus pandemic sharply political in recent days, seizing the podium from health experts to air grievances, make false promises about drug treatments, and rile up his base.
On Thursday, he was aided in this effort by a bizarre question from Chanel Rion, a Republican political operative who has been granted a White House press pass to represent One America News, a far-right cable channel dedicated to praising Trump.
When the president chose Rion to ask the final question of the briefing, he made it clear that he was expecting a softball, commenting, “OAN. Very good. Thank you very much. They treat me very nicely.”
Rion, who recently accompanied the president’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, to Ukraine to publicize conspiracy theories about former Vice President Joe Biden, first asked Trump if he considered the term “Chinese food” to be racist. When he said that he did not, she asked if the president agreed with her assessment that “major left-wing news media, even in this room, have teamed up with Chinese Communist Party narratives” by asking if Trump had incited a racist backlash by labelling the pathogen “the Chinese virus.”
“Is it alarming,” Rion continued, “that major media players, just to oppose you, are consistently siding with foreign state propaganda, Islamic radicals, and Latin gangs and cartels — and they work right here at the White House with direct access to you and your team?”
As the health professionals behind him shifted uneasily, Trump singled out the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and the New York Times for criticism — just as the Chinese Communist Party had two days earlier, when it expelled correspondents from those newspapers for reporting aggressively on China’s handling of the outbreak. After ranting about reports from the newspapers that laid bare his administration’s failure to adequately prepare for the pandemic, or even test for the virus at levels reached by less wealthy countries like South Korea, Trump concluded, “the press is very dishonest.”
“But more than dishonest,” Rion interjected, “they are siding with state propaganda overseas.”
“Well, I think they do,” Trump agreed. “They are siding with China.”
On Wednesday, Rion had appeared on OAN to accuse “CNN and other partisan networks of corrupting the reliability of unnamed sources in the name of anti-Trump political activism.”
After Trump’s performance on Thursday, which also included making the false claim that chloroquine had been approved by the FDA to treat Covid-19, former NPR host Michele Norris suggested on Twitter that she had seen enough.
James Fallows, a journalist who once worked in the White House as President Jimmy Carter’s chief speechwriter, agreed with Norris. “Yes. And cable outlets should stop covering them live,” he wrote. “They’re actively *lowering* level of public knowledge by doing so — and repeating the mistake they made [with] wall-to-wall coverage of rallies in 2015 and 2016.” Without live coverage, Fallows added, “Trump will stop showing up; scientists can speak.”
The president’s bizarre exchange with Rion left many watching reporters aghast, but was likely no surprise to Trump, who was seen embracing the OAN host at Mar-a-Lago earlier this month, an image she proudly shared on Instagram.
Like the channel she works for, Rion makes little attempt to disguise her political support for Trump. Her social media accounts are filled with pro-Trump posts and photographs of herself with the president’s family, including his daughter Ivanka and daughter-in-law Lara, captioned with fawning remarks.
Before being hired by OAN, Rion tried to help her fiance, Courtland Sykes, secure the 2018 Republican nomination for Senate in Missouri, running on a far-right, pro-Trump platform. Sykes fell short, but not before drawing national attention by denouncing feminists as “she devils” and saying that he expected his future wife to have dinner ready for him every night at 6 p.m.
On Thursday, he was aided in this effort by a bizarre question from Chanel Rion, a Republican political operative who has been granted a White House press pass to represent One America News, a far-right cable channel dedicated to praising Trump.
When the president chose Rion to ask the final question of the briefing, he made it clear that he was expecting a softball, commenting, “OAN. Very good. Thank you very much. They treat me very nicely.”
Rion, who recently accompanied the president’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, to Ukraine to publicize conspiracy theories about former Vice President Joe Biden, first asked Trump if he considered the term “Chinese food” to be racist. When he said that he did not, she asked if the president agreed with her assessment that “major left-wing news media, even in this room, have teamed up with Chinese Communist Party narratives” by asking if Trump had incited a racist backlash by labelling the pathogen “the Chinese virus.”
“Is it alarming,” Rion continued, “that major media players, just to oppose you, are consistently siding with foreign state propaganda, Islamic radicals, and Latin gangs and cartels — and they work right here at the White House with direct access to you and your team?”
As the health professionals behind him shifted uneasily, Trump singled out the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and the New York Times for criticism — just as the Chinese Communist Party had two days earlier, when it expelled correspondents from those newspapers for reporting aggressively on China’s handling of the outbreak. After ranting about reports from the newspapers that laid bare his administration’s failure to adequately prepare for the pandemic, or even test for the virus at levels reached by less wealthy countries like South Korea, Trump concluded, “the press is very dishonest.”
“But more than dishonest,” Rion interjected, “they are siding with state propaganda overseas.”
“Well, I think they do,” Trump agreed. “They are siding with China.”
On Wednesday, Rion had appeared on OAN to accuse “CNN and other partisan networks of corrupting the reliability of unnamed sources in the name of anti-Trump political activism.”
After Trump’s performance on Thursday, which also included making the false claim that chloroquine had been approved by the FDA to treat Covid-19, former NPR host Michele Norris suggested on Twitter that she had seen enough.
James Fallows, a journalist who once worked in the White House as President Jimmy Carter’s chief speechwriter, agreed with Norris. “Yes. And cable outlets should stop covering them live,” he wrote. “They’re actively *lowering* level of public knowledge by doing so — and repeating the mistake they made [with] wall-to-wall coverage of rallies in 2015 and 2016.” Without live coverage, Fallows added, “Trump will stop showing up; scientists can speak.”
The president’s bizarre exchange with Rion left many watching reporters aghast, but was likely no surprise to Trump, who was seen embracing the OAN host at Mar-a-Lago earlier this month, an image she proudly shared on Instagram.
Like the channel she works for, Rion makes little attempt to disguise her political support for Trump. Her social media accounts are filled with pro-Trump posts and photographs of herself with the president’s family, including his daughter Ivanka and daughter-in-law Lara, captioned with fawning remarks.
Before being hired by OAN, Rion tried to help her fiance, Courtland Sykes, secure the 2018 Republican nomination for Senate in Missouri, running on a far-right, pro-Trump platform. Sykes fell short, but not before drawing national attention by denouncing feminists as “she devils” and saying that he expected his future wife to have dinner ready for him every night at 6 p.m.
Fox News is a fascist network propping up an incompetent buffoon of a leader. Coronavirus proved it
Hunter / Daily Kos - alternet
March 17, 2020
Only hours after Donald Trump on Friday gave a press conference begrudgingly admitting the scope of the COVID-19 pandemic he had been insisting was “under control” for nearly a month, Fox News’ most toxic hosts revised their own previously denial-heavy rhetoric to match. Once again, it demonstrates the status of the network as “state news” operation devoted near-exclusively to the needs of conservative propaganda.
If the line from Dear Leader is that alarm over the virus is a “hoax” intended to damage him, that is what Sean Hannity will also say--even knowing that his words will kill some of the network’s own viewers. If the line from Dear Leader is that alarm over the virus is now warranted, Sean Hannity is himself freed to declare that alarm is warranted. But this, too, will be used primarily as a launching point for further praise of the self-promoting, incompetent Dear Leader.
Here is Sean Hannity on Friday, the evening after Trump shifted tone from sneering at administration critics to declaring a national emergency, while still sneering at administration critics. “Tonight, we are witnessing what will be a massive paradigm shift in the future of disease control and prevention. A bold, new precedent is being set, the world will once again benefit greatly from America’s leadership. It will give us reason to be proud as a country. The federal government, state governments, private businesses, top hospitals all coming together, under the president’s leadership, to stem the tide of the coronavirus.”
Note the use of the word “bold,” one of the otherwise near-illiterate president’s favorite adjectives. It is Dear Leader’s “leadership” that has allowed the United States to finally do what it has done in every similar crisis; declaring a national emergency is now not a longstanding designation allowing our or any government to take specific, defined steps to combat a new threat but a “bold new precedent” from Dear Leader, for the “benefit” of the world.
Sean Hannity spent weeks lying about the virus, downplaying its dangerousness and its spread. Now that the game is up and members of his audience will, with near-certainty, be dying in large part due to Dear Leader’s inaction and Sean Hannity’s teleprompter, Sean Hannity will now spend weeks praising Dear Leader’s “boldness” with a North Korean polish and a distinctly Fox News sneer. The Washington Post notes that Hannity was matched in this new revision of state propaganda by Laura Ingraham, among others. Go only so far as Dear Leader himself is willing to; follow Dear Leader as Dear Leader meanders his mental way through each new moment of revelation. No further.
Devil-among-us Jerry Falwell Jr., a frequent Fox guest, was on the network Friday morning telling the Fox & Friends couch that his Liberty University would not be shuttering during the crisis, displaying the trademark Fox sneer while downplaying virus scares as “hype,” and saying “maybe now this is their next attempt to get Trump.” After Trump’s Friday declaration, Falwell changed his own tune to acknowledge the severity of the crisis—sort of. In practice, he defended his original decision but said that the Virginia governor’s ban on gatherings of 100 or more people “left us no practical choice.”
This week, after a “somber” Trump once again bowed to realities his advisers had never before been able to drill into his skull, Fox News hosts matched his new rhetoric as well. Useful network idiot Jesse Watters changed his tune over the weekend. Not because of the presidential about-face, certainly not. It was “mom.”
“She is suspicious that I might have coronavirus. I wore the gloves all afternoon in the house. That’s what it is. I didn’t take the social distancing that seriously Friday, Saturday, and Sunday night, I went out to dinner here in the city. And I woke up this morning I realized that was not the right move.”
Do we really believe that Watters had not noticed that the world outside the Fox News studio was incongruent with the reports from inside until a morning revelation? Or was Monday morning the first moment in which it was safe to note it without penalty?
I am tired of this. I am very, very tired of the pretense that anything this scabby sore of a network does revolves around anything but propping up the most narrow and most radical of agendas; demonization of Dear Leader’s enemies and maudlin praise for Dear Leader’s boldness. It is a fascist network using the bog-standard rhetorical tools of fascism to prop up a fascist, incompetent buffoon of a leader. They will attack anyone on Dear Leader’s behalf. They will let their audience die—they will provide the crematory, if needed—if Dear Leader needs to just one more evening of adulation to get him through the next day without full-on emotional collapse.
Sean Hannity goads his viewers into support for ignoring even a pandemic until the moment it can no longer be ignored. He will goad his viewers again, this time into believing it was Dear Leader who limited the deaths to whatever horrific number they may rise to. Very, very rich men who want just a bit more money than they already have will watch him do it, and allow him to do it, and will pay him to do it.
They will, if anything, order that more flags be added to the network graphics.
If the line from Dear Leader is that alarm over the virus is a “hoax” intended to damage him, that is what Sean Hannity will also say--even knowing that his words will kill some of the network’s own viewers. If the line from Dear Leader is that alarm over the virus is now warranted, Sean Hannity is himself freed to declare that alarm is warranted. But this, too, will be used primarily as a launching point for further praise of the self-promoting, incompetent Dear Leader.
Here is Sean Hannity on Friday, the evening after Trump shifted tone from sneering at administration critics to declaring a national emergency, while still sneering at administration critics. “Tonight, we are witnessing what will be a massive paradigm shift in the future of disease control and prevention. A bold, new precedent is being set, the world will once again benefit greatly from America’s leadership. It will give us reason to be proud as a country. The federal government, state governments, private businesses, top hospitals all coming together, under the president’s leadership, to stem the tide of the coronavirus.”
Note the use of the word “bold,” one of the otherwise near-illiterate president’s favorite adjectives. It is Dear Leader’s “leadership” that has allowed the United States to finally do what it has done in every similar crisis; declaring a national emergency is now not a longstanding designation allowing our or any government to take specific, defined steps to combat a new threat but a “bold new precedent” from Dear Leader, for the “benefit” of the world.
Sean Hannity spent weeks lying about the virus, downplaying its dangerousness and its spread. Now that the game is up and members of his audience will, with near-certainty, be dying in large part due to Dear Leader’s inaction and Sean Hannity’s teleprompter, Sean Hannity will now spend weeks praising Dear Leader’s “boldness” with a North Korean polish and a distinctly Fox News sneer. The Washington Post notes that Hannity was matched in this new revision of state propaganda by Laura Ingraham, among others. Go only so far as Dear Leader himself is willing to; follow Dear Leader as Dear Leader meanders his mental way through each new moment of revelation. No further.
Devil-among-us Jerry Falwell Jr., a frequent Fox guest, was on the network Friday morning telling the Fox & Friends couch that his Liberty University would not be shuttering during the crisis, displaying the trademark Fox sneer while downplaying virus scares as “hype,” and saying “maybe now this is their next attempt to get Trump.” After Trump’s Friday declaration, Falwell changed his own tune to acknowledge the severity of the crisis—sort of. In practice, he defended his original decision but said that the Virginia governor’s ban on gatherings of 100 or more people “left us no practical choice.”
This week, after a “somber” Trump once again bowed to realities his advisers had never before been able to drill into his skull, Fox News hosts matched his new rhetoric as well. Useful network idiot Jesse Watters changed his tune over the weekend. Not because of the presidential about-face, certainly not. It was “mom.”
“She is suspicious that I might have coronavirus. I wore the gloves all afternoon in the house. That’s what it is. I didn’t take the social distancing that seriously Friday, Saturday, and Sunday night, I went out to dinner here in the city. And I woke up this morning I realized that was not the right move.”
Do we really believe that Watters had not noticed that the world outside the Fox News studio was incongruent with the reports from inside until a morning revelation? Or was Monday morning the first moment in which it was safe to note it without penalty?
I am tired of this. I am very, very tired of the pretense that anything this scabby sore of a network does revolves around anything but propping up the most narrow and most radical of agendas; demonization of Dear Leader’s enemies and maudlin praise for Dear Leader’s boldness. It is a fascist network using the bog-standard rhetorical tools of fascism to prop up a fascist, incompetent buffoon of a leader. They will attack anyone on Dear Leader’s behalf. They will let their audience die—they will provide the crematory, if needed—if Dear Leader needs to just one more evening of adulation to get him through the next day without full-on emotional collapse.
Sean Hannity goads his viewers into support for ignoring even a pandemic until the moment it can no longer be ignored. He will goad his viewers again, this time into believing it was Dear Leader who limited the deaths to whatever horrific number they may rise to. Very, very rich men who want just a bit more money than they already have will watch him do it, and allow him to do it, and will pay him to do it.
They will, if anything, order that more flags be added to the network graphics.
maybe we need to raise the intellectual requirements to be a first responder!!!
Inside the Pro-Trump Facebook Group Where First Responders Call Coronavirus a Hoax
In a private Facebook group, firefighters and paramedics shared memes and conspiracy theories doubting the pandemic, raising concerns that they aren’t taking precautions to protect themselves and others.
by Isaac Arnsdorf - propublica
March 17, 12:41 p.m. EDT
In a 27,000-member private Facebook group for first responders who support President Donald Trump, firefighters and paramedics have posted thousands of comments in recent weeks downplaying the coronavirus pandemic that they are responsible for helping to handle.
Posts in the group, which is called IAFF Union Firefighters for Trump and has been endorsed by Trump, scoffed at the seriousness of the virus, echoing false assertions by Trump and his allies comparing it to the seasonal flu. “Every election year has a disease,” read one meme, purporting to be written on a doctor’s office whiteboard. “This is a viral-pneumonia being hyped as The Black Plague before an election.”
As of Monday, there were 4,464 cases and 78 deaths in the U.S., according to researchers at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.
As confirmed cases and deaths expanded and officials began shutting down mass gatherings and public places, the posts intensified their attacks on Democrats and the media. “I believe this is all by design,” wrote a Texas firefighter whose identity was corroborated by ProPublica. “Democrats have wanted to slow down and even kill the economy. It’s the only hope they have of beating Trump. Sad and disgusting the depths of shit the Democrats will descend to in order to gain power.”
Posts containing factual information or firsthand experiences with the virus were met with more accusations of plots to harm Trump’s reelection. When a Florida firefighter said action was required now to prevent a crisis like is currently underway in Italy, where 27,980 have been infected and 2,158 have died, because the virus spreads at an exponential rate, the first reply was poop emojis and “Trump2020.”
Some comments promoted a baseless conspiracy theory that the virus is a biological weapon developed by the Chinese in collaboration with Democrats.
“By the Chinese to stop the riots in Hong Kong,” one member wrote.
“[Y]ou are absolutely correct,” another replied. “I said that in the beginning. Democrats saw an opportunity to use it against Trump and get rid of older people which they have been trying to do for a while.”
Commenters contacted by ProPublica declined to answer questions or didn’t respond to messages. ProPublica reviewed hundreds of screenshots provided by co-workers of members of the group who asked to be anonymous, fearing retaliation. Those people said the social media posts are not idle online venting — they reflect real-world attitudes that are leading some first responders to potentially shun special plans and protective equipment. That dismissiveness, the people said, could put first responders and others at risk as they attend to emergency calls with potentially infected people.
Leaders at the International Association of Fire Fighters are also concerned. “I’ve read the social media. I know there are going to be accusations that this is all hype,” Jim Brinkley, IAFF assistant to the general president for technical and information resources, said in a video that the union posted online. “If we ignore it, if we take it lightly, we will set a new standard in the wrong direction for infectious disease in this country.”
Firefighters and paramedics, who jointly respond to 911 calls in most places, are among those at the greatest risk of encountering the coronavirus, and their exposure could endanger others if they have to be quarantined and are no longer available to work. Dozens of firefighters who responded to the nursing home in Kirkland, Washington, that was a hot spot of the outbreak had to be quarantined for weeks.
The private Facebook group was formed last year to protest the IAFF’s official endorsement of Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden. Trump encouraged his followers to join the Facebook group in May 2019.
The group’s founder, Kelly Hallman, told ProPublica he doesn’t speak for everyone who posts, but he can understand why many emergency professionals share his skepticism about the coronavirus. He said previous outbreaks such as SARS, the H1N1 “swine flu” and Ebola didn’t prompt such a big response, and he thinks the reason is politics.
“There’s never been this much hoopla given to the other things,” Hallman said. “They’re doing it to crash the economy and make Trump look bad.”
Hallman’s view hasn’t changed as Trump went from calling concerns over the coronavirus a “hoax” on Feb. 28 to declaring a national emergency on Friday. Hallman said Trump has had to address fears stirred up by the media.
“If you had to point a finger at why the leftist media and the left in general has a smile on their face about this whole thing, it’s the Dow,” Hallman said, referring to the historic decline in stock prices. “My wife and kids are scared, they’re believing what they’re seeing on TV. And I’m trying to tell them it’s not as bad as the media makes it out.”
Public health experts are unified in calling for drastic measures to contain and mitigate the spread in the U.S. “When you’re dealing with an emerging infectious diseases outbreak, you are always behind where you think you are,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said at a White House press conference on Monday. “It will always seem that the best way to address it would be doing something that looks like it might be an overreaction. It’s not an overreaction. It’s a reaction that we feel is commensurate with what is actually going on in reality.”
The government’s guidelines, Fauci said, “will fail if people don’t adhere to them.”
IAFF spokesman Doug Stern said views like those expressed in the Facebook group reflect the minority of first responders, citing conversations with local leaders who are eager for more information about how to prepare for the coronavirus.
“Our leadership is aware of this issue, and we are taking it seriously because we know how important it is,” Stern said of COVID-19. Most important, Stern said, is for 911 callers to tell the dispatcher if anyone is experiencing flu-like symptoms so responders can wear protective gear and send a smaller team.
Posts in the group, which is called IAFF Union Firefighters for Trump and has been endorsed by Trump, scoffed at the seriousness of the virus, echoing false assertions by Trump and his allies comparing it to the seasonal flu. “Every election year has a disease,” read one meme, purporting to be written on a doctor’s office whiteboard. “This is a viral-pneumonia being hyped as The Black Plague before an election.”
As of Monday, there were 4,464 cases and 78 deaths in the U.S., according to researchers at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.
As confirmed cases and deaths expanded and officials began shutting down mass gatherings and public places, the posts intensified their attacks on Democrats and the media. “I believe this is all by design,” wrote a Texas firefighter whose identity was corroborated by ProPublica. “Democrats have wanted to slow down and even kill the economy. It’s the only hope they have of beating Trump. Sad and disgusting the depths of shit the Democrats will descend to in order to gain power.”
Posts containing factual information or firsthand experiences with the virus were met with more accusations of plots to harm Trump’s reelection. When a Florida firefighter said action was required now to prevent a crisis like is currently underway in Italy, where 27,980 have been infected and 2,158 have died, because the virus spreads at an exponential rate, the first reply was poop emojis and “Trump2020.”
Some comments promoted a baseless conspiracy theory that the virus is a biological weapon developed by the Chinese in collaboration with Democrats.
“By the Chinese to stop the riots in Hong Kong,” one member wrote.
“[Y]ou are absolutely correct,” another replied. “I said that in the beginning. Democrats saw an opportunity to use it against Trump and get rid of older people which they have been trying to do for a while.”
Commenters contacted by ProPublica declined to answer questions or didn’t respond to messages. ProPublica reviewed hundreds of screenshots provided by co-workers of members of the group who asked to be anonymous, fearing retaliation. Those people said the social media posts are not idle online venting — they reflect real-world attitudes that are leading some first responders to potentially shun special plans and protective equipment. That dismissiveness, the people said, could put first responders and others at risk as they attend to emergency calls with potentially infected people.
Leaders at the International Association of Fire Fighters are also concerned. “I’ve read the social media. I know there are going to be accusations that this is all hype,” Jim Brinkley, IAFF assistant to the general president for technical and information resources, said in a video that the union posted online. “If we ignore it, if we take it lightly, we will set a new standard in the wrong direction for infectious disease in this country.”
Firefighters and paramedics, who jointly respond to 911 calls in most places, are among those at the greatest risk of encountering the coronavirus, and their exposure could endanger others if they have to be quarantined and are no longer available to work. Dozens of firefighters who responded to the nursing home in Kirkland, Washington, that was a hot spot of the outbreak had to be quarantined for weeks.
The private Facebook group was formed last year to protest the IAFF’s official endorsement of Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden. Trump encouraged his followers to join the Facebook group in May 2019.
The group’s founder, Kelly Hallman, told ProPublica he doesn’t speak for everyone who posts, but he can understand why many emergency professionals share his skepticism about the coronavirus. He said previous outbreaks such as SARS, the H1N1 “swine flu” and Ebola didn’t prompt such a big response, and he thinks the reason is politics.
“There’s never been this much hoopla given to the other things,” Hallman said. “They’re doing it to crash the economy and make Trump look bad.”
Hallman’s view hasn’t changed as Trump went from calling concerns over the coronavirus a “hoax” on Feb. 28 to declaring a national emergency on Friday. Hallman said Trump has had to address fears stirred up by the media.
“If you had to point a finger at why the leftist media and the left in general has a smile on their face about this whole thing, it’s the Dow,” Hallman said, referring to the historic decline in stock prices. “My wife and kids are scared, they’re believing what they’re seeing on TV. And I’m trying to tell them it’s not as bad as the media makes it out.”
Public health experts are unified in calling for drastic measures to contain and mitigate the spread in the U.S. “When you’re dealing with an emerging infectious diseases outbreak, you are always behind where you think you are,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said at a White House press conference on Monday. “It will always seem that the best way to address it would be doing something that looks like it might be an overreaction. It’s not an overreaction. It’s a reaction that we feel is commensurate with what is actually going on in reality.”
The government’s guidelines, Fauci said, “will fail if people don’t adhere to them.”
IAFF spokesman Doug Stern said views like those expressed in the Facebook group reflect the minority of first responders, citing conversations with local leaders who are eager for more information about how to prepare for the coronavirus.
“Our leadership is aware of this issue, and we are taking it seriously because we know how important it is,” Stern said of COVID-19. Most important, Stern said, is for 911 callers to tell the dispatcher if anyone is experiencing flu-like symptoms so responders can wear protective gear and send a smaller team.
Over 300 cases of child exploitation went unnoticed by Facebook – study
A report suggests the tech giant is not fully enforcing its own standards banning content that exploits or endangers children
Kari Paul - the guardian
Wed 4 Mar 2020 06.00 EST
Facebook failed to catch hundreds of cases of child exploitation on its platform over the past six years, a study published on Wednesday found.
The site was used as a medium to sexually exploit children in at least 366 cases between January 2013 and December 2019, a report from the not-for-profit investigative group Tech Transparency Project (TPP) analyzing Department of Justice news releases found.
Only 9% of the 366 cases were investigated because Facebook alerted authorities, while the rest of the investigations were initiated by authorities without prompting from the social media giant.
This suggests Facebook is not doing all it can to enforce its community standards, which bans “content that sexually exploits or endangers children,” said TPP executive director Daniel Stevens.
“The data shows Facebook is not doing as much as it should to address this very serious problem affecting many lives in this country,” Stevens said.
The reports analyzed by the TPP include a Rhode Island man who allegedly posed as a teenage girl to lure boys into live streaming sexual activity on Facebook Messenger, a Kentucky man accused of sending thousands of messages to more than one child target over Facebook, and a convicted Missouri sex offender who authorities said used Facebook Messenger to communicate with a 13-year-old girl.
As users on Facebook have increased, so has the number of child exploitation cases. There were as many as 23 cases per quarter in 2019 compared to just 10 per quarter in 2013.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has repeatedly noted the company’s efforts to address child exploitation on the platform. Facebook did not respond to a request for comment.
“Child exploitation is one of the most serious threats that we focus on,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg told lawmakers in October 2019. “We build sophisticated systems to find this behavior.”
The company also appears to have taken on more enforcement responsibility since the passage of FOSTA-SESTA, which allows law enforcement to hold companies liable for what occurs on their platforms. Though the legislation has been criticized for its adverse affects on sex workers and other professions, it has forced Facebook to address online sexual exploitation of children, the report showed.
One month after FOSTA-SESTA was passed, Facebook was sued by an alleged victim of sexual abuse who said that at age 15 she was targeted and groomed by sex traffickers using Facebook.
In the five years before the controversial bill’s passage, Facebook averaged less than one cyber tip per quarter, according to TTP analysis. Since the bill was passed in March 2018, it has averaged more than three reports per quarter. Facebook and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children have made more reports in the last two years since the passage of FOSTA-SESTA than in the prior five years combined.
Facebook has been criticized in the past for inaction in the face of reports regarding the exploitation of children on the platform. In February 2016 the BBC discovered Facebook groups where pedophiles swapped stolen images of children and reported 20 inappropriate images to Facebook as part of the investigation. The company took down only four. Following its report, the TPP alerted Facebook to a public page hosting an inappropriate picture of a young girl aimed at pedophiles, but the company did not remove it.
Facebook has said it has “zero tolerance” for such images and uses a technology called PhotoDNA to scan each image and flagged known child exploitative material to stop uploads of such imagery on the platform.
The TPP report comes as US regulators are set to introduce legislation to force tech giants to crack down on child exploitation on their platforms. A bipartisan bill from senators Lindsey Graham and Richard Blumenthal, called the Earn It Act, is expected to be introduced as early as Wednesday. Under the new act, platforms would be required to more aggressively address child sexual exploitation or risk losing protections under Section 230, a measure that prevents platforms from being held responsible for content posted on them.
While bipartisan support grows for holding tech giants accountable for exploitative content, the digital rights not-for-profit the Electronic Frontier Foundation has called Section 230 “the most important law protecting internet speech”. Facebook has expressed concerns the Earn It Act would weaken those free speech protections and roll back privacy efforts like encryption.
“We share the Earn It Act sponsors’ commitment to child safety and have made keeping children safe online a top priority by developing and deploying technology to thwart the sharing of child abuse material,” Facebook spokesman Thomas Richards said in a statement. “We’re concerned the Earn It Act may be used to roll back encryption, which protects everyone’s safety from hackers and criminals, and may limit the ability of American companies to provide the private and secure services that people expect.”
The justice department will unveil its own action against child exploitation on Thursday, with a proposal of 11 “voluntary principles” for tech platforms to target the issue. It was co-authored with members of the tech industry and is already backed by leaders of five countries, the Washington Post reported.
The site was used as a medium to sexually exploit children in at least 366 cases between January 2013 and December 2019, a report from the not-for-profit investigative group Tech Transparency Project (TPP) analyzing Department of Justice news releases found.
Only 9% of the 366 cases were investigated because Facebook alerted authorities, while the rest of the investigations were initiated by authorities without prompting from the social media giant.
This suggests Facebook is not doing all it can to enforce its community standards, which bans “content that sexually exploits or endangers children,” said TPP executive director Daniel Stevens.
“The data shows Facebook is not doing as much as it should to address this very serious problem affecting many lives in this country,” Stevens said.
The reports analyzed by the TPP include a Rhode Island man who allegedly posed as a teenage girl to lure boys into live streaming sexual activity on Facebook Messenger, a Kentucky man accused of sending thousands of messages to more than one child target over Facebook, and a convicted Missouri sex offender who authorities said used Facebook Messenger to communicate with a 13-year-old girl.
As users on Facebook have increased, so has the number of child exploitation cases. There were as many as 23 cases per quarter in 2019 compared to just 10 per quarter in 2013.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has repeatedly noted the company’s efforts to address child exploitation on the platform. Facebook did not respond to a request for comment.
“Child exploitation is one of the most serious threats that we focus on,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg told lawmakers in October 2019. “We build sophisticated systems to find this behavior.”
The company also appears to have taken on more enforcement responsibility since the passage of FOSTA-SESTA, which allows law enforcement to hold companies liable for what occurs on their platforms. Though the legislation has been criticized for its adverse affects on sex workers and other professions, it has forced Facebook to address online sexual exploitation of children, the report showed.
One month after FOSTA-SESTA was passed, Facebook was sued by an alleged victim of sexual abuse who said that at age 15 she was targeted and groomed by sex traffickers using Facebook.
In the five years before the controversial bill’s passage, Facebook averaged less than one cyber tip per quarter, according to TTP analysis. Since the bill was passed in March 2018, it has averaged more than three reports per quarter. Facebook and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children have made more reports in the last two years since the passage of FOSTA-SESTA than in the prior five years combined.
Facebook has been criticized in the past for inaction in the face of reports regarding the exploitation of children on the platform. In February 2016 the BBC discovered Facebook groups where pedophiles swapped stolen images of children and reported 20 inappropriate images to Facebook as part of the investigation. The company took down only four. Following its report, the TPP alerted Facebook to a public page hosting an inappropriate picture of a young girl aimed at pedophiles, but the company did not remove it.
Facebook has said it has “zero tolerance” for such images and uses a technology called PhotoDNA to scan each image and flagged known child exploitative material to stop uploads of such imagery on the platform.
The TPP report comes as US regulators are set to introduce legislation to force tech giants to crack down on child exploitation on their platforms. A bipartisan bill from senators Lindsey Graham and Richard Blumenthal, called the Earn It Act, is expected to be introduced as early as Wednesday. Under the new act, platforms would be required to more aggressively address child sexual exploitation or risk losing protections under Section 230, a measure that prevents platforms from being held responsible for content posted on them.
While bipartisan support grows for holding tech giants accountable for exploitative content, the digital rights not-for-profit the Electronic Frontier Foundation has called Section 230 “the most important law protecting internet speech”. Facebook has expressed concerns the Earn It Act would weaken those free speech protections and roll back privacy efforts like encryption.
“We share the Earn It Act sponsors’ commitment to child safety and have made keeping children safe online a top priority by developing and deploying technology to thwart the sharing of child abuse material,” Facebook spokesman Thomas Richards said in a statement. “We’re concerned the Earn It Act may be used to roll back encryption, which protects everyone’s safety from hackers and criminals, and may limit the ability of American companies to provide the private and secure services that people expect.”
The justice department will unveil its own action against child exploitation on Thursday, with a proposal of 11 “voluntary principles” for tech platforms to target the issue. It was co-authored with members of the tech industry and is already backed by leaders of five countries, the Washington Post reported.
Tucker Carlson Defends His Coronavirus Racism: 'Wokeness Is A Cult'
On his White Power Hour, bigot Tucker Carlson pretended to be the truthteller as he blamed “diversity” and "wokeness" for any coronavirus in the U.S. but only obliquely referred to Donald Trump’s sabotage of our public health system.
By NewsHound Ellen - crooks & liars
2/26/20 8:00am
Tucker Carlson pretended to be the truthteller last night as he blamed “diversity” and "wokeness" for any coronavirus in the U.S. but only obliquely referred to Donald Trump’s sabotage of our public health system. With the explicit approval of Fox News.
In a previous post, I noted how Fox News has been misleading viewers into thinking that Trump is doing a great job protecting Americans from the coronavirus (COVID-19) when, in reality, he has systematically dismantled the infrastructure for any pandemic response.
Monday night, Carlson took a different route. He weaponized the potential health emergency in order to ratchet up fear and loathing of “diversity” and “wokeness.”
We know that Fox News approved this bigoted deceit because Carlson’s commentary was obviously pre-scripted and thus pre-approved. It was also published on FoxNews.com.
Carlson’s commentary began with a dishonest dog whistle designed to arouse and legitimize a white nationalist response to the coronavirus:
CARLSON: For weeks the media told you it was wrong to worry about the coronavirus, a mysterious, highly communicable, lethal disease spreading rapidly around the world. If that concerns you in any way, if you think maybe we ought to take some steps to protect ourselves from it, then you're a bigot.This “it’s legit to be racist” messaging is despicable enough (albeit predictable from this guy) but Carlson is also dissembling about how his own employer has been messaging that there’s nothing to worry about. Just a few hours before Carlson went on the air, the anchor of Fox’s evening newscast, Special Report, introduced a happy-talk report on COVID-19 with a credulous, “President Trump says the coronavirus is very much under control in the U.S.”
Carlson was there to frighten you into thinking that it’s very much out of control – and that we all might die at any moment – because diversity is trumping public health. Rather than provide facts, Carlson seems to have figured that name calling and race baiting would give him all the credibility needed. Apparently, Fox is fine with that, too:
CARLSON: "Coronavirus panic is racist profiling against Asians" lectured some arrogant moron at Slate.com. A writer for The Seattle Times warned that, quote, "yellow peril racism was the real epidemic fear," and so on.
Countless publications wagged their fingers in the face of readers, and told them it was irrational, probably immoral in fact to worry about the coronavirus than the annual flu.
Identity politics trumped public health and not for the first time. Wokeness is a cult that lets you die before they admitted that diversity is not our strength.
Not surprisingly, what really seems to have caught Carlson’s concern and his dog whistle is the fact that COVID-19 spread from (yellow) Asians to (white) Europeans.
CARLSON: Fast forward to today. What began as a regional outbreak in the city of Wuhan, China, is now spreading across Europe. Parts of Italy are shut down tonight. Catholic services and, in some places, funerals have been suspended indefinitely.Carlson went on to note that South Korea, Japan and Iran have also confirmed cases of the virus. “It’s moving fast,” he warned.
As Carlson talked about the virus spreading in Asia, a helpful producer called it the “Wuhan virus” and described it as "spreading across Europe" in a lower-third banner.
Then, after repeatedly suggesting it's people of color and those who embrace them who are the real culprits, Carlson got around to hinting that the U.S. is not properly equipped to deal with a public health emergency. But, of course, he never said a word about Trump’s cardinal role in the failure.
CARLSON: On Friday, the Centers for Disease Control warned that it is quote, possible, even likely that America will have a general coronavirus outbreak as well. That shouldn’t surprise you. China is the world’s most sophisticated authoritarian government. Its leaders have shut down entire cities, dragged people from their homes in an effort to curb coronavirus. But it hasn’t worked.
Officials in our country have reported about three dozen cases of the virus in the U.S. so far, but that's a misleading number. The truth is, we have no real idea how many Americans are infected.
Why? Here's why: As of yesterday, only three public health labs in the entire country were properly equipped to detect the virus. Fewer than 500 people in America have even been tested for coronavirus out of a population of 327 million -- for real. Keep in mind that five and a half million people ride the New York City subway every day.
Worried yet? This could be serious. How likely is an epidemic in the United States? Are we ready for it if it comes? How many could die?
It's time for real answers to the most basic questions about coronavirus.
Carlson is right that it’s time for real answers to basic questions about coronavirus. But don’t expect them to come from Fox News – unless they can be weaponized against the left and/or the media and on behalf of Dear Leader Trump.
I have long suspected that Carlson is not the biggest Trumper and that his bigotry, while genuine, is played up to appeal to Trump fans without having to actually cheerlead the way others at Fox do. You almost have to be an archaeologist to find Carlson’s implied, indirect barb about the Trump administration underneath all the overt malice toward everyone else. But it’s there and it’s another piece that fits my theory.
You may see what I mean above, from the February 24, 2020 Tucker Carlson Tonight.
In a previous post, I noted how Fox News has been misleading viewers into thinking that Trump is doing a great job protecting Americans from the coronavirus (COVID-19) when, in reality, he has systematically dismantled the infrastructure for any pandemic response.
Monday night, Carlson took a different route. He weaponized the potential health emergency in order to ratchet up fear and loathing of “diversity” and “wokeness.”
We know that Fox News approved this bigoted deceit because Carlson’s commentary was obviously pre-scripted and thus pre-approved. It was also published on FoxNews.com.
Carlson’s commentary began with a dishonest dog whistle designed to arouse and legitimize a white nationalist response to the coronavirus:
CARLSON: For weeks the media told you it was wrong to worry about the coronavirus, a mysterious, highly communicable, lethal disease spreading rapidly around the world. If that concerns you in any way, if you think maybe we ought to take some steps to protect ourselves from it, then you're a bigot.This “it’s legit to be racist” messaging is despicable enough (albeit predictable from this guy) but Carlson is also dissembling about how his own employer has been messaging that there’s nothing to worry about. Just a few hours before Carlson went on the air, the anchor of Fox’s evening newscast, Special Report, introduced a happy-talk report on COVID-19 with a credulous, “President Trump says the coronavirus is very much under control in the U.S.”
Carlson was there to frighten you into thinking that it’s very much out of control – and that we all might die at any moment – because diversity is trumping public health. Rather than provide facts, Carlson seems to have figured that name calling and race baiting would give him all the credibility needed. Apparently, Fox is fine with that, too:
CARLSON: "Coronavirus panic is racist profiling against Asians" lectured some arrogant moron at Slate.com. A writer for The Seattle Times warned that, quote, "yellow peril racism was the real epidemic fear," and so on.
Countless publications wagged their fingers in the face of readers, and told them it was irrational, probably immoral in fact to worry about the coronavirus than the annual flu.
Identity politics trumped public health and not for the first time. Wokeness is a cult that lets you die before they admitted that diversity is not our strength.
Not surprisingly, what really seems to have caught Carlson’s concern and his dog whistle is the fact that COVID-19 spread from (yellow) Asians to (white) Europeans.
CARLSON: Fast forward to today. What began as a regional outbreak in the city of Wuhan, China, is now spreading across Europe. Parts of Italy are shut down tonight. Catholic services and, in some places, funerals have been suspended indefinitely.Carlson went on to note that South Korea, Japan and Iran have also confirmed cases of the virus. “It’s moving fast,” he warned.
As Carlson talked about the virus spreading in Asia, a helpful producer called it the “Wuhan virus” and described it as "spreading across Europe" in a lower-third banner.
Then, after repeatedly suggesting it's people of color and those who embrace them who are the real culprits, Carlson got around to hinting that the U.S. is not properly equipped to deal with a public health emergency. But, of course, he never said a word about Trump’s cardinal role in the failure.
CARLSON: On Friday, the Centers for Disease Control warned that it is quote, possible, even likely that America will have a general coronavirus outbreak as well. That shouldn’t surprise you. China is the world’s most sophisticated authoritarian government. Its leaders have shut down entire cities, dragged people from their homes in an effort to curb coronavirus. But it hasn’t worked.
Officials in our country have reported about three dozen cases of the virus in the U.S. so far, but that's a misleading number. The truth is, we have no real idea how many Americans are infected.
Why? Here's why: As of yesterday, only three public health labs in the entire country were properly equipped to detect the virus. Fewer than 500 people in America have even been tested for coronavirus out of a population of 327 million -- for real. Keep in mind that five and a half million people ride the New York City subway every day.
Worried yet? This could be serious. How likely is an epidemic in the United States? Are we ready for it if it comes? How many could die?
It's time for real answers to the most basic questions about coronavirus.
Carlson is right that it’s time for real answers to basic questions about coronavirus. But don’t expect them to come from Fox News – unless they can be weaponized against the left and/or the media and on behalf of Dear Leader Trump.
I have long suspected that Carlson is not the biggest Trumper and that his bigotry, while genuine, is played up to appeal to Trump fans without having to actually cheerlead the way others at Fox do. You almost have to be an archaeologist to find Carlson’s implied, indirect barb about the Trump administration underneath all the overt malice toward everyone else. But it’s there and it’s another piece that fits my theory.
You may see what I mean above, from the February 24, 2020 Tucker Carlson Tonight.
NPR’s attempted takedown of Bernie Sanders wasn’t just biased — it was driven by startlingly poor research
FAIR
February 23, 2020
The Iowa caucuses officially began the Democratic primary, and even in this ongoing, extended battle for the White House, Iowa remains an important marker for candidates and the media. A close look at a piece by two of NPR’s leading political reporters, which aired just before the caucuses, provides a view of how journalists speak with authority on issues they seem to know very little about. The conversation between Mary Louise Kelly and her partner Mara Liasson, headlined “Where Iowa Falls in the Big Picture of the 2020 Election” (“All Things Considered,” 2/3/20), began with Kelly introducing the importance of Iowa for Democrats, but, she observed, it’s been on the “back burner” after days of constant impeachment coverage.
Liasson agreed, then spent most of her introductory remarks on Trump, presenting him as legitimate as any past president:
Tomorrow night President Trump appears in the well of the House before he speaks to both houses of Congress for the big curtain-raiser for him, the State of the Union address. It’s the biggest audience he’ll have all year. It’s — every president gets to kind of kick off his re-election campaign with the State of the Union address, and we can expect to hear a campaign message from him tomorrow.
No mention was made that Trump had flouted the Constitution by refusing to cooperate with an impeachment hearing, or that Republican senators would fail to uphold the Constitution by voting to dismiss impeachment charges after a sham trial with no witnesses. Liasson’s critical remarks were reserved for the Democratic Party, both voters and candidates.
“I see a very unsettled race,” Liasson told Kelly, and continued, “Democrats are paralyzed by indecision.” One wonders which race she is looking at, as both state and national polls show that Democratic voters are anything but “paralyzed,” and for months have been anticipating the primary with “an incredible degree of excitement” (Vox, 2/3/20). One national Quinnipiac University poll (1/28/20) found a whopping 85% of Democratic voters were either “extremely” or “very” motivated to vote in the primary contests, characterizing their enthusiasm as “sky high.”
Liasson claimed that the main issue for the Democratic Party is “electability” — a fraught term often used to signal ideological orthodoxy rather than empirical chances of winning elections (FAIR.org, 10/25/19). She asserted that Democrats are “confused,” and “for good reason,” because Trump remains an “existential threat,” and not only are none of the candidates “a sure thing,” none even “seem likely to defeat” Trump.
Such handwringing is, again, not founded in facts or data. An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll published the day before this broadcast — one day ahead of the Iowa caucuses — found that Trump was trailing all the leading 2020 Democratic candidates, with the top four candidates ahead of Trump in theoretical head-to-head matchups. Looking more broadly at polling, the two candidates then leading the Democratic field, former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders, had beaten Trump in 69 of 73 and 63 of 68 matchups, respectively.
The supposed lack of “electability” was solidified as a media obsession in mid-April of last year, when Obama’s former campaign manager, Jim Messina, now a political strategist for corporate Democrats (Common Dreams, 2/13/20), announced on the Powerhouse Politics podcast (ABC, 4/17/19) that “Sanders couldn’t beat Trump.” Messina went on to predict that the Democratic field would be honed down to Sen. Kamala Harris and former Rep. Beto O’Rourke, along with Joe Biden, who had not yet entered the race.
Both Harris and O’Rourke, of course, dropped out of the race before the first vote was cast, while Biden’s polling numbers were in free fall after poor showings in both Iowa and New Hampshire. (More recently, he appears to have finished a distant second in the Nevada caucuses.) But despite Messina’s foggy crystal ball, his unelectability trope was adopted by pundits as a platitude. Vox (4/24/19) was one of the few to point out a few days later that Sanders actually had a strong electability record, having “consistently run ahead of Democratic Party presidential campaigns in Vermont” when he ran for re-election as a U.S. representative. But “unelectable” is now an overworked spin pushed by centrist Democrats and their corporate media allies.
Liasson went on to worry about the “huge vulnerabilities” all the Democratic candidates have “for the president to exploit.” No mention is made of Trump’s mammoth negatives that present Democrats with enough ammunition to send him running, if they were so inclined. Indeed, corporate media have been incapable of imagining powerfully pointed, rhetorically effective, authentically truthful critical campaigns against Trump.
Liasson agreed, then spent most of her introductory remarks on Trump, presenting him as legitimate as any past president:
Tomorrow night President Trump appears in the well of the House before he speaks to both houses of Congress for the big curtain-raiser for him, the State of the Union address. It’s the biggest audience he’ll have all year. It’s — every president gets to kind of kick off his re-election campaign with the State of the Union address, and we can expect to hear a campaign message from him tomorrow.
No mention was made that Trump had flouted the Constitution by refusing to cooperate with an impeachment hearing, or that Republican senators would fail to uphold the Constitution by voting to dismiss impeachment charges after a sham trial with no witnesses. Liasson’s critical remarks were reserved for the Democratic Party, both voters and candidates.
“I see a very unsettled race,” Liasson told Kelly, and continued, “Democrats are paralyzed by indecision.” One wonders which race she is looking at, as both state and national polls show that Democratic voters are anything but “paralyzed,” and for months have been anticipating the primary with “an incredible degree of excitement” (Vox, 2/3/20). One national Quinnipiac University poll (1/28/20) found a whopping 85% of Democratic voters were either “extremely” or “very” motivated to vote in the primary contests, characterizing their enthusiasm as “sky high.”
Liasson claimed that the main issue for the Democratic Party is “electability” — a fraught term often used to signal ideological orthodoxy rather than empirical chances of winning elections (FAIR.org, 10/25/19). She asserted that Democrats are “confused,” and “for good reason,” because Trump remains an “existential threat,” and not only are none of the candidates “a sure thing,” none even “seem likely to defeat” Trump.
Such handwringing is, again, not founded in facts or data. An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll published the day before this broadcast — one day ahead of the Iowa caucuses — found that Trump was trailing all the leading 2020 Democratic candidates, with the top four candidates ahead of Trump in theoretical head-to-head matchups. Looking more broadly at polling, the two candidates then leading the Democratic field, former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders, had beaten Trump in 69 of 73 and 63 of 68 matchups, respectively.
The supposed lack of “electability” was solidified as a media obsession in mid-April of last year, when Obama’s former campaign manager, Jim Messina, now a political strategist for corporate Democrats (Common Dreams, 2/13/20), announced on the Powerhouse Politics podcast (ABC, 4/17/19) that “Sanders couldn’t beat Trump.” Messina went on to predict that the Democratic field would be honed down to Sen. Kamala Harris and former Rep. Beto O’Rourke, along with Joe Biden, who had not yet entered the race.
Both Harris and O’Rourke, of course, dropped out of the race before the first vote was cast, while Biden’s polling numbers were in free fall after poor showings in both Iowa and New Hampshire. (More recently, he appears to have finished a distant second in the Nevada caucuses.) But despite Messina’s foggy crystal ball, his unelectability trope was adopted by pundits as a platitude. Vox (4/24/19) was one of the few to point out a few days later that Sanders actually had a strong electability record, having “consistently run ahead of Democratic Party presidential campaigns in Vermont” when he ran for re-election as a U.S. representative. But “unelectable” is now an overworked spin pushed by centrist Democrats and their corporate media allies.
Liasson went on to worry about the “huge vulnerabilities” all the Democratic candidates have “for the president to exploit.” No mention is made of Trump’s mammoth negatives that present Democrats with enough ammunition to send him running, if they were so inclined. Indeed, corporate media have been incapable of imagining powerfully pointed, rhetorically effective, authentically truthful critical campaigns against Trump.
Fox Distorts Objections To Barr Over Roger Stone Sentencing
FoxNews.com would have its readers believe that the objections to William Barr’s interference in the Roger Stone case were merely a matter of disagreement over the length of his sentence.
By NewsHound Ellen - crooks &liars
2/21/20 5:29am
FoxNews.com would have its readers believe that the objections to William Barr’s interference in the Roger Stone case were merely a matter of disagreement over the length of his sentence.
Attorney General William Barr has come under fire because he interfered with what should have been a matter for his federal prosecutors to handle and brought the case in line with what Donald Trump was demanding for his crony, Roger Stone
The New York Times explains what Fox did not (my emphases added):
[Trump] intensified those attacks [on the guilty verdict] after the prosecutors recommended that Mr. Stone be sentenced to up to nine years in prison, in accordance with advisory sentencing guidelines. Their request, Mr. Trump said, was “horrible and very unfair” and constituted a “miscarriage of justice.”
Almost simultaneously, Mr. Barr overruled the prosecutors’ sentencing recommendation and a new one was filed in court. It recommended a more lenient sentence but left the specific length of a prison term up to the judge. The reversal, more aligned with Mr. Trump’s preference, led all four prosecutors to withdraw from the case. One resigned from the Justice Department entirely.
[…]
The case ignited a broader controversy as former and current government lawyers accused Mr. Barr of failing to protect the department from improper political influence from the White House. In an open letter, more than 2,000 former Justice Department employees have called for Mr. Barr to resign, claiming “interference in the fair administration of justice” by both the attorney general and the president.
But to Fox News, the uproar was all about Democrats and deep staters hating Dear Leader. Its article about Stone’s sentence said nothing about Trump’s attempt to interfere in the case on behalf of Stone. From its article:
The judge presiding over Roger Stone’s case agreed with senior Justice Department leadership on Thursday that the original sentence proposal for the GOP operative was excessive -- amid a clash inside the DOJ over his sentencing.
U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson, who sentenced Stone to 40 months in federal prison on Thursday, said the original sentence proposed last week by federal prosecutors of 87 to 108 months was steep given the charges.
…
Last week, after prosecutors made their sentence recommendation, senior Justice Department officials, including Attorney General Bill Barr, intervened, overruling and scaling back the proposed prison sentence.
…
The mass withdrawal caused Democrats to accuse President Trump of interfering in the process, with many even calling for Barr’s resignation. The intervention also prompted thousands of former Justice Department officials to sign an online petition calling for Barr’s resignation.
I think we can safely predict that Fox’s prime time Trumpers will declare victory, use the ruling to attack Democrats and blithely ignore Dear Leader’s blatant attempts to undermine law and democracy.
Stay tuned.
Attorney General William Barr has come under fire because he interfered with what should have been a matter for his federal prosecutors to handle and brought the case in line with what Donald Trump was demanding for his crony, Roger Stone
The New York Times explains what Fox did not (my emphases added):
[Trump] intensified those attacks [on the guilty verdict] after the prosecutors recommended that Mr. Stone be sentenced to up to nine years in prison, in accordance with advisory sentencing guidelines. Their request, Mr. Trump said, was “horrible and very unfair” and constituted a “miscarriage of justice.”
Almost simultaneously, Mr. Barr overruled the prosecutors’ sentencing recommendation and a new one was filed in court. It recommended a more lenient sentence but left the specific length of a prison term up to the judge. The reversal, more aligned with Mr. Trump’s preference, led all four prosecutors to withdraw from the case. One resigned from the Justice Department entirely.
[…]
The case ignited a broader controversy as former and current government lawyers accused Mr. Barr of failing to protect the department from improper political influence from the White House. In an open letter, more than 2,000 former Justice Department employees have called for Mr. Barr to resign, claiming “interference in the fair administration of justice” by both the attorney general and the president.
But to Fox News, the uproar was all about Democrats and deep staters hating Dear Leader. Its article about Stone’s sentence said nothing about Trump’s attempt to interfere in the case on behalf of Stone. From its article:
The judge presiding over Roger Stone’s case agreed with senior Justice Department leadership on Thursday that the original sentence proposal for the GOP operative was excessive -- amid a clash inside the DOJ over his sentencing.
U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson, who sentenced Stone to 40 months in federal prison on Thursday, said the original sentence proposed last week by federal prosecutors of 87 to 108 months was steep given the charges.
…
Last week, after prosecutors made their sentence recommendation, senior Justice Department officials, including Attorney General Bill Barr, intervened, overruling and scaling back the proposed prison sentence.
…
The mass withdrawal caused Democrats to accuse President Trump of interfering in the process, with many even calling for Barr’s resignation. The intervention also prompted thousands of former Justice Department officials to sign an online petition calling for Barr’s resignation.
I think we can safely predict that Fox’s prime time Trumpers will declare victory, use the ruling to attack Democrats and blithely ignore Dear Leader’s blatant attempts to undermine law and democracy.
Stay tuned.
Fox News reporter and right-wing conspiracy theorists planned to wiretap family of slain DNC staffer Seth Rich: report
Bob Brigham - alternet
February 18, 2020
The Daily Beast on Monday evening broke a bombshell report on a secret 2017 meeting in Texas on a right-wing conspiracy theory where espionage was discussed.
“One of their topics was responding to online critics of wealthy Texas businessman Ed Butowsky, who had recently been outed as a driving force behind a retracted Fox News story about murdered Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich,” The Beast reported. “The group that gathered at Butowsky’s home included a conspiracy theorist, a Fox reporter fighting for her career, a former private intelligence contractor married to star journalist Lara Logan, and a Democratic PR operative who lost his business in the face of sexual assault allegations.”
The group also included Thomas Schoenberger and Manuel “Defango” Chavez, two notorious internet provocateurs who had recently launched a self-proclaimed ‘elite’ company that promised to use bots and sow ‘targeted chaos’ to defend its clients online,” the publication noted.
“According to some attendees, the solutions discussed at the September get-together went to extremes,” The Beast reported. “Three people who attended the gathering said the group even discussed the possibility of wiretapping and surveilling Rich’s grieving parents.”
“One of their topics was responding to online critics of wealthy Texas businessman Ed Butowsky, who had recently been outed as a driving force behind a retracted Fox News story about murdered Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich,” The Beast reported. “The group that gathered at Butowsky’s home included a conspiracy theorist, a Fox reporter fighting for her career, a former private intelligence contractor married to star journalist Lara Logan, and a Democratic PR operative who lost his business in the face of sexual assault allegations.”
The group also included Thomas Schoenberger and Manuel “Defango” Chavez, two notorious internet provocateurs who had recently launched a self-proclaimed ‘elite’ company that promised to use bots and sow ‘targeted chaos’ to defend its clients online,” the publication noted.
“According to some attendees, the solutions discussed at the September get-together went to extremes,” The Beast reported. “Three people who attended the gathering said the group even discussed the possibility of wiretapping and surveilling Rich’s grieving parents.”
broadcasting lies for profit!!!
TV EXECUTIVES CELEBRATE UNPRECEDENTED FLOOD OF BLOOMBERG CAMPAIGN SPENDING
Lee Fang - the intercept
February 15 2020, 2:00 a.m.
FOX NEWS HOSTS regularly bash former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg as a globalist demagogue intent on seizing Americans’ firearms and big gulp sodas. High-level executives at the company, however, are much more enthusiastic about the billionaire politician and Democratic presidential candidate.
Lachlan Murdoch, the chief executive of Fox Corp., the parent company of Fox News, is one of several media executives to welcome Bloomberg’s unprecedented spending spree on television advertisements. In a February 5 briefing for investors, Murdoch noted that he had heard “the Bloomberg campaign has expected to sort of double its advertising spend earlier this week.” The billionaire’s campaign, Murdoch noted, makes purchases on a week-to-week basis, making it difficult to project the ultimate benefit for his company.
“But obviously,” he added, “we expect it to be very strong and particularly, as I mentioned, in the markets of our local TV stations.”
Bloomberg, the ninth wealthiest person in the world, with a fortune estimated at almost $62 billion, has upended the Democratic presidential primary with an infusion of cash that has smashed through historical records in a matter of weeks. Advertising Analytics, which tracks campaign spending, reported Thursday that Bloomberg has already spent $363 million on cable, broadcast, and radio advertisements alone.
The 2020 campaign is shaping up to be an incredible financial opportunity for media companies, with one market research firm recently estimating that nearly $7 billion of paid advertising be spent this year, up over 60 percent since the 2016 presidential race.
Bloomberg alone has enticed media executives to see the race as a golden opportunity.
“The political is going to be huge this year,” boasted Christopher Ripley, president and chief executive of Sinclair Broadcast Group, one of the largest owners of television stations in the country, speaking last month at the Citi 2020 Global TMT West conference in Las Vegas. “The amount of fundraising that’s happened through this year has broken all records. And the good news about politicians is they never return the money, they spend it,” Ripley quipped.
Sinclair, said Ripley, is “already benefiting tremendously from that and the entrance of players like Bloomberg.”
Meredith Corporation — which owns television stations in several states, including Oregon, Alabama, Georgia, Missouri, and Arizona — also reported its quarterly results this month. “Bloomberg is certainly having an impact across most of our footprint,” beamed Patrick McCreery, an executive with Meredith, during the call with investors.
“If the headlines are to be believed,” said McCreery, “he’s going to double the spending, and that will be beneficial certainly.”
Since Bloomberg’s announcement last November, shares of publicly traded media conglomerates, including Nexstar Media Group and Gray Television, have been on the rise.
“When politicians go to war, own the arms dealers,” Steven Cahall, an analyst with Wells Fargo, wrote in a recent report cited by CNBC. Broadcasting corporations, Cahall noted, “are jazzed to have Bloomberg in the fray.” The billionaire mogul has already caused “a meaningful uptick in Q4 political revenue vs. company plans.”
The use of private funds for campaign spending — a practice banned or sharply restricted in most industrialized countries — creates an inherent tension with the private, for-profit U.S. media market. The same media companies voters turn to for help to make thoughtful decisions about the candidates rely heavily on campaign advertisements designed to manipulate viewers with provocative, low-information emotional appeals and other forms of deceptive electioneering.
The National Association of Broadcasters, a trade group that lobbies for broadcasters, has long fought to maintain the status quo, opposing efforts over the years to require television and radio stations to provide free air time to candidates. The group successfully lobbied to block both the Federal Communications Commission and Congress from enacting rules that would have provided even two hours of public air time to candidates.
In recent months, the NAB has pushed back against FCC efforts to increase enforcement of relatively minor disclosure requirements for television broadcasters to publish invoices from groups or candidates spending money on political advertisements.
The frenzy for presidential campaign cycle profits likely shaped the media environment for Donald Trump’s election.
In the early days of Trump’s candidacy, media executives openly celebrated his entry, hoping for a bonanza in ratings and political ad-buying. “The more they spend, the better it is for us and: Go Donald! Keep getting out there,” said Les Moonves, the former chief executive of the CBS Corporation, which is now known as ViacomCBS.
Moonves, who later stepped down over numerous allegations of sexual harassment, summed up his thoughts about Trump at a meeting in San Francisco’s Palace Hotel during the 2016 campaign. Trump’s campaign “circus” he said, “may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS, that’s all I got to say.”
Lachlan Murdoch, the chief executive of Fox Corp., the parent company of Fox News, is one of several media executives to welcome Bloomberg’s unprecedented spending spree on television advertisements. In a February 5 briefing for investors, Murdoch noted that he had heard “the Bloomberg campaign has expected to sort of double its advertising spend earlier this week.” The billionaire’s campaign, Murdoch noted, makes purchases on a week-to-week basis, making it difficult to project the ultimate benefit for his company.
“But obviously,” he added, “we expect it to be very strong and particularly, as I mentioned, in the markets of our local TV stations.”
Bloomberg, the ninth wealthiest person in the world, with a fortune estimated at almost $62 billion, has upended the Democratic presidential primary with an infusion of cash that has smashed through historical records in a matter of weeks. Advertising Analytics, which tracks campaign spending, reported Thursday that Bloomberg has already spent $363 million on cable, broadcast, and radio advertisements alone.
The 2020 campaign is shaping up to be an incredible financial opportunity for media companies, with one market research firm recently estimating that nearly $7 billion of paid advertising be spent this year, up over 60 percent since the 2016 presidential race.
Bloomberg alone has enticed media executives to see the race as a golden opportunity.
“The political is going to be huge this year,” boasted Christopher Ripley, president and chief executive of Sinclair Broadcast Group, one of the largest owners of television stations in the country, speaking last month at the Citi 2020 Global TMT West conference in Las Vegas. “The amount of fundraising that’s happened through this year has broken all records. And the good news about politicians is they never return the money, they spend it,” Ripley quipped.
Sinclair, said Ripley, is “already benefiting tremendously from that and the entrance of players like Bloomberg.”
Meredith Corporation — which owns television stations in several states, including Oregon, Alabama, Georgia, Missouri, and Arizona — also reported its quarterly results this month. “Bloomberg is certainly having an impact across most of our footprint,” beamed Patrick McCreery, an executive with Meredith, during the call with investors.
“If the headlines are to be believed,” said McCreery, “he’s going to double the spending, and that will be beneficial certainly.”
Since Bloomberg’s announcement last November, shares of publicly traded media conglomerates, including Nexstar Media Group and Gray Television, have been on the rise.
“When politicians go to war, own the arms dealers,” Steven Cahall, an analyst with Wells Fargo, wrote in a recent report cited by CNBC. Broadcasting corporations, Cahall noted, “are jazzed to have Bloomberg in the fray.” The billionaire mogul has already caused “a meaningful uptick in Q4 political revenue vs. company plans.”
The use of private funds for campaign spending — a practice banned or sharply restricted in most industrialized countries — creates an inherent tension with the private, for-profit U.S. media market. The same media companies voters turn to for help to make thoughtful decisions about the candidates rely heavily on campaign advertisements designed to manipulate viewers with provocative, low-information emotional appeals and other forms of deceptive electioneering.
The National Association of Broadcasters, a trade group that lobbies for broadcasters, has long fought to maintain the status quo, opposing efforts over the years to require television and radio stations to provide free air time to candidates. The group successfully lobbied to block both the Federal Communications Commission and Congress from enacting rules that would have provided even two hours of public air time to candidates.
In recent months, the NAB has pushed back against FCC efforts to increase enforcement of relatively minor disclosure requirements for television broadcasters to publish invoices from groups or candidates spending money on political advertisements.
The frenzy for presidential campaign cycle profits likely shaped the media environment for Donald Trump’s election.
In the early days of Trump’s candidacy, media executives openly celebrated his entry, hoping for a bonanza in ratings and political ad-buying. “The more they spend, the better it is for us and: Go Donald! Keep getting out there,” said Les Moonves, the former chief executive of the CBS Corporation, which is now known as ViacomCBS.
Moonves, who later stepped down over numerous allegations of sexual harassment, summed up his thoughts about Trump at a meeting in San Francisco’s Palace Hotel during the 2016 campaign. Trump’s campaign “circus” he said, “may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS, that’s all I got to say.”
The Empty Piety of the American Press
Chris Hedges - truthdig
3/12/18
The press, giddy with its newfound sense of mission and purpose, is carrying out a moral crusade against Donald Trump. The airwaves and print have shed their traditional claims of “impartiality” and “objectivity.” They fulminate against Trump, charging—falsely—that he was elected because of Russian interference and calling him a liar, ignorant and incompetent. They give airtime to his bitterest critics and bizarre associates, such as Omarosa Manigault-Newman, a onetime star of “The Apprentice” and now a fired White House aide, and Stormy Daniels, the porn actress who says she had a sexual relationship with Trump. It is great entertainment. It is great for ratings. It is great for profits. But it is not moral, and it is not journalism.
The empty piety is a mask for self-interest. It is accompanied by the veneration of the establishment politicians, generals, intelligence chiefs, corporate heads and hired apologists who carried out the corporate coup d’état that created our system of “inverted totalitarianism.” The corporate structures that have a stranglehold on the country and have overseen deindustrialization and the evisceration of democratic institutions, plunging over half the country into chronic poverty and misery, are unassailable. They are portrayed as forces of progress. The criminals on Wall Street, including the heads of financial firms such as Goldman Sachs, are treated with reverence. Free trade is equated with freedom. Democratic politicians such as Barack Obama—who assaulted civil liberties, transferred trillions of dollars upward to reigning oligarchs, expanded the drone wars to include targeted assassinations of American citizens, and used the Espionage Act to silence investigative journalism—are hailed as champions of democracy. Deference is paid to democratic processes, liberties, electoral politics and rights enshrined in our Constitution, from due process to privacy, that no longer exist. It is a vast game of deception under the cover of a vacuous morality.
Those cast aside by corporate capitalism—Noam Chomsky calls them “unpeople”—are rendered invisible and reviled at the same time. The “experts” whose opinions are amplified on every issue, from economics to empire and politics, are drawn from corporate-funded think tanks, such as the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute, or are former military and intelligence officials or politicians who are responsible for the failure of our democracy and usually in the employ of corporations. Cable news also has the incestuous habit of interviewing its own news celebrities. Former CIA Director John Brennan, one of many former officials now on the airwaves, has morphed into a senior national security and intelligence analyst for NBC and MSNBC. Brennan was the architect of the disastrous attempt to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to arm “moderate” rebels in Syria, oversaw the huge expansion of our drone wars and instigated the canard that Russia stole the last U.S. presidential election. The most astute critics of empire, including Andrew Bacevich, are banished, as are critics of corporate power, including Ralph Nader and Chomsky. Those who decry the waste within the military, such as MIT Professor Emeritus Ted Postol, who has exposed the useless $13 billion anti-ballistic missile program, are unheard. Advocates of universal health care, such as Dr. Margaret Flowers, are locked out of national health care debates. There is a long list of the censored. The acceptable range of opinion is so narrow it is almost nonexistent.
Where is the flood of stories about families being evicted or losing their homes because of foreclosures and bank repossessions? Where are the stories about the banks and lending agencies that prey on recent college graduates burdened with crippling loans and unable to find work? Where are the stories about families going into bankruptcy because they cannot pay medical bills and the soaring premiums of for-profit health care? Where are the stories about the despair that drives middle-aged white men to suicide and millions of Americans into the deadly embrace of opioid addiction? Where are the stories on the cruelty of mass incarceration, the collapse of our court system and the reign of terror by police in marginal communities? Where are the investigative pieces on the fraud and the tax boycott that have been legalized for Wall Street, the poisoning of the ecosystem by the fossil fuel and animal agriculture industries? Why is climate change a forbidden subject, even as extreme weather devastates the nation and much of the rest of the planet? Why are the atrocities we commit or abet in Iraq, Afghanistan and Yemen ignored? Why are the war crimes carried out by Israel against the Palestinians erased from news coverage?
The relentless pillorying of Trump is news-as-reality-television. Trump fills in for Richard Hatch of the old “Survivor” show. Trump’s imbecility, dishonesty, narcissism and incompetence are at once revolting and riveting. The press, ostensibly seeking a more polished brand to improve the public presentation of empire and corporate capitalism, is in fact further empowering the lunatics who will dominate the political landscape.
“America is ceasing to be a nation,” reporter and author Matt Taibbi writes in his book “Insane Clown President: Dispatches From the 2016 Circus,” “and turning into a giant television show.”
The stunts pulled during the last presidential election—Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul wearing goggles as he chain-sawed the tax code in half, Trump inviting women who accused Bill Clinton of sexual assault to a presidential debate and Ben Carson having to defend himself against allegations he lied when he wrote that as a child he attempted to stab another boy—will become staples of political campaigning. Voters, stripped of all meaningful power or control over their own destiny, used only as stage props in rallies and at party conventions, are permitted to vote only for a system they hate. And the winners are those who can give the best and most entertaining expression of that hatred. “Trump found the flaw in the American Death Star,” Taibbi writes. “It doesn’t know how to turn the cameras off, even when it’s filming its own demise.”
If the press sided with citizens and exposed the corporate systems of power that hold them captive, its advertising income would dwindle and it would be treated as an enemy of the state. Since corporations own the airwaves and declining city newspapers, this will not happen. Journalism will remain burlesque. The Public Broadcasting System, along with National Public Radio dependent on corporate money, including the Koch brothers, is as loath to take on the corporate establishment as its for-profit competitors. Dissenters and critics exist only on the margins of the internet, and the abolition of net neutrality will see them silenced.
CNN’s Jake Tapper, one of the high priests in the Trump Inquisition, was quite open about the narrowness of the assault. Being interviewed on “The Axe Files” podcast, hosted by former Obama White House aide David Axelrod, Tapper addressed charges that he opposes Trump’s policies by saying, “Whenever anybody says that to me, I say, you can’t find any evidence about what I think about his tax plan or repealing Obamacare or DACA or immigration or trade or any of these issues—terrorism or ISIS or Syria. I’m agnostic on that. I want to have full and interesting and provocative debates and call balls and strikes. But I’m not putting out there an immigration proposal.”
The corporate airwaves have a depressing habit of taking political hacks like Axelrod or the former Clinton strategist George Stephanopoulos and transforming them into journalists. Even Chelsea Clinton got a shot at journalism, being paid $600,000 a year to do fluff pieces for NBC. The fusion of news and celebrity, with figures like Tapper appearing on late night talk shows, fits with the reality-television presidency the corporate press empowers.
The press, like the Democratic Party, is playing a very dangerous game. It is banking, as Hillary Clinton did, on Trump being so repugnant he and those who support him will be replaced with Democrats. It relies on polls to guide its tactics and strategy, forgetting that every national poll offered assurance that Trump would lose in 2016. This gamble may work. But it may not. Policy issues accounted for only 10 percent of the media coverage during the 2016 presidential race. News reports concentrated on the latest polls, scandals, publicity stunts, campaign tactics and strategy as well as Trump’s bombastic remarks, according to a report issued by the Shorenstein Center at Harvard University. In short, there was little substance to the coverage. This will only get worse. The gossip, trivia and invective masquerading as news are not only irrelevant to most of the electorate but reinforce the image of liberal elites being out of touch with the pain and rage rippling across the nation.
Corporations that own the press look at news as a revenue stream. The news division competes against other revenue streams. If news does not produce comparable profits, its managers are replaced and its content is altered and distorted to draw in more viewers. Journalism is irrelevant. The disease of celebrity and greed, which warps and deforms the personality of Trump, warps and deforms celebrities in the media. They share Trump’s most distasteful characteristics. The consequences are ominous. An ignored, impoverished and frustrated underclass will turn to increasingly bizarre politicians and more outlandish con artists and purveyors of hate. Trump is only the beginning. The grotesque mutations to come, ones that will make Trump look reasonable, are being spawned in newsrooms across the country.
The empty piety is a mask for self-interest. It is accompanied by the veneration of the establishment politicians, generals, intelligence chiefs, corporate heads and hired apologists who carried out the corporate coup d’état that created our system of “inverted totalitarianism.” The corporate structures that have a stranglehold on the country and have overseen deindustrialization and the evisceration of democratic institutions, plunging over half the country into chronic poverty and misery, are unassailable. They are portrayed as forces of progress. The criminals on Wall Street, including the heads of financial firms such as Goldman Sachs, are treated with reverence. Free trade is equated with freedom. Democratic politicians such as Barack Obama—who assaulted civil liberties, transferred trillions of dollars upward to reigning oligarchs, expanded the drone wars to include targeted assassinations of American citizens, and used the Espionage Act to silence investigative journalism—are hailed as champions of democracy. Deference is paid to democratic processes, liberties, electoral politics and rights enshrined in our Constitution, from due process to privacy, that no longer exist. It is a vast game of deception under the cover of a vacuous morality.
Those cast aside by corporate capitalism—Noam Chomsky calls them “unpeople”—are rendered invisible and reviled at the same time. The “experts” whose opinions are amplified on every issue, from economics to empire and politics, are drawn from corporate-funded think tanks, such as the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute, or are former military and intelligence officials or politicians who are responsible for the failure of our democracy and usually in the employ of corporations. Cable news also has the incestuous habit of interviewing its own news celebrities. Former CIA Director John Brennan, one of many former officials now on the airwaves, has morphed into a senior national security and intelligence analyst for NBC and MSNBC. Brennan was the architect of the disastrous attempt to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to arm “moderate” rebels in Syria, oversaw the huge expansion of our drone wars and instigated the canard that Russia stole the last U.S. presidential election. The most astute critics of empire, including Andrew Bacevich, are banished, as are critics of corporate power, including Ralph Nader and Chomsky. Those who decry the waste within the military, such as MIT Professor Emeritus Ted Postol, who has exposed the useless $13 billion anti-ballistic missile program, are unheard. Advocates of universal health care, such as Dr. Margaret Flowers, are locked out of national health care debates. There is a long list of the censored. The acceptable range of opinion is so narrow it is almost nonexistent.
Where is the flood of stories about families being evicted or losing their homes because of foreclosures and bank repossessions? Where are the stories about the banks and lending agencies that prey on recent college graduates burdened with crippling loans and unable to find work? Where are the stories about families going into bankruptcy because they cannot pay medical bills and the soaring premiums of for-profit health care? Where are the stories about the despair that drives middle-aged white men to suicide and millions of Americans into the deadly embrace of opioid addiction? Where are the stories on the cruelty of mass incarceration, the collapse of our court system and the reign of terror by police in marginal communities? Where are the investigative pieces on the fraud and the tax boycott that have been legalized for Wall Street, the poisoning of the ecosystem by the fossil fuel and animal agriculture industries? Why is climate change a forbidden subject, even as extreme weather devastates the nation and much of the rest of the planet? Why are the atrocities we commit or abet in Iraq, Afghanistan and Yemen ignored? Why are the war crimes carried out by Israel against the Palestinians erased from news coverage?
The relentless pillorying of Trump is news-as-reality-television. Trump fills in for Richard Hatch of the old “Survivor” show. Trump’s imbecility, dishonesty, narcissism and incompetence are at once revolting and riveting. The press, ostensibly seeking a more polished brand to improve the public presentation of empire and corporate capitalism, is in fact further empowering the lunatics who will dominate the political landscape.
“America is ceasing to be a nation,” reporter and author Matt Taibbi writes in his book “Insane Clown President: Dispatches From the 2016 Circus,” “and turning into a giant television show.”
The stunts pulled during the last presidential election—Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul wearing goggles as he chain-sawed the tax code in half, Trump inviting women who accused Bill Clinton of sexual assault to a presidential debate and Ben Carson having to defend himself against allegations he lied when he wrote that as a child he attempted to stab another boy—will become staples of political campaigning. Voters, stripped of all meaningful power or control over their own destiny, used only as stage props in rallies and at party conventions, are permitted to vote only for a system they hate. And the winners are those who can give the best and most entertaining expression of that hatred. “Trump found the flaw in the American Death Star,” Taibbi writes. “It doesn’t know how to turn the cameras off, even when it’s filming its own demise.”
If the press sided with citizens and exposed the corporate systems of power that hold them captive, its advertising income would dwindle and it would be treated as an enemy of the state. Since corporations own the airwaves and declining city newspapers, this will not happen. Journalism will remain burlesque. The Public Broadcasting System, along with National Public Radio dependent on corporate money, including the Koch brothers, is as loath to take on the corporate establishment as its for-profit competitors. Dissenters and critics exist only on the margins of the internet, and the abolition of net neutrality will see them silenced.
CNN’s Jake Tapper, one of the high priests in the Trump Inquisition, was quite open about the narrowness of the assault. Being interviewed on “The Axe Files” podcast, hosted by former Obama White House aide David Axelrod, Tapper addressed charges that he opposes Trump’s policies by saying, “Whenever anybody says that to me, I say, you can’t find any evidence about what I think about his tax plan or repealing Obamacare or DACA or immigration or trade or any of these issues—terrorism or ISIS or Syria. I’m agnostic on that. I want to have full and interesting and provocative debates and call balls and strikes. But I’m not putting out there an immigration proposal.”
The corporate airwaves have a depressing habit of taking political hacks like Axelrod or the former Clinton strategist George Stephanopoulos and transforming them into journalists. Even Chelsea Clinton got a shot at journalism, being paid $600,000 a year to do fluff pieces for NBC. The fusion of news and celebrity, with figures like Tapper appearing on late night talk shows, fits with the reality-television presidency the corporate press empowers.
The press, like the Democratic Party, is playing a very dangerous game. It is banking, as Hillary Clinton did, on Trump being so repugnant he and those who support him will be replaced with Democrats. It relies on polls to guide its tactics and strategy, forgetting that every national poll offered assurance that Trump would lose in 2016. This gamble may work. But it may not. Policy issues accounted for only 10 percent of the media coverage during the 2016 presidential race. News reports concentrated on the latest polls, scandals, publicity stunts, campaign tactics and strategy as well as Trump’s bombastic remarks, according to a report issued by the Shorenstein Center at Harvard University. In short, there was little substance to the coverage. This will only get worse. The gossip, trivia and invective masquerading as news are not only irrelevant to most of the electorate but reinforce the image of liberal elites being out of touch with the pain and rage rippling across the nation.
Corporations that own the press look at news as a revenue stream. The news division competes against other revenue streams. If news does not produce comparable profits, its managers are replaced and its content is altered and distorted to draw in more viewers. Journalism is irrelevant. The disease of celebrity and greed, which warps and deforms the personality of Trump, warps and deforms celebrities in the media. They share Trump’s most distasteful characteristics. The consequences are ominous. An ignored, impoverished and frustrated underclass will turn to increasingly bizarre politicians and more outlandish con artists and purveyors of hate. Trump is only the beginning. The grotesque mutations to come, ones that will make Trump look reasonable, are being spawned in newsrooms across the country.
worthless media funnies
|
|
https://teespring.com/fox-news-toilet-2#pid=369&cid=6513&sid=front
|
|
