Tag: conservative media

‘Carnage,’ ‘radicals,’ ‘overthrow the government’: How Fox and other conservative media cover the protests

Washington Post logoConservative news outlets and pundits covering the protests erupting across the country this week have mostly emphasized images of destruction and chaos, blaming “organized” elements for the mayhem and framing President Trump’s calls for a military response as necessary to gain order.

Echoing Trump, some were quick to attribute the violence, without much evidence, to “antifa,” a loosely knit faction of far-left activists known for physically confronting far-right radicals that Trump tried to designate a domestic terrorist organization on Sunday.

“Unfortunately, far-left radicals unleashed this carnage, this destruction across American cities,” Sean Hannity, Fox News Channel’s most popular prime-time opinion host, said on Monday night. His colleague Laura Ingraham went so far as to call it an attempt to “overthrow” the government. Continue reading.

The darkly cynical reason conservatives insist on calling Covid-19 the ‘Chinese virus’

AlterNet logoAs conservative media figures and Republicans pivot from their failed strategy of downplaying the seriousness of the coronavirus pandemic, they’re adopting a deeply cynical new ploy to help manage perceptions of the growing outbreak.

Along with President Donald Trump, many right-wing personalities are insisting on referring to the pathogen as the “Chinese virus” or the “Wuhan virus,” which refers to the city in China where the first tracked outbreak of the virus occurred.

A reporter pressed Trump on Wednesday for an explanation of this terminology. Continue reading.

Pence secretly meeting with right-wing media personalities on how to spin Trump’s virus crisis: report

AlterNet logoAs part of his duties overseeing the task force in charges of dealing with the coronavirus pandemic, Vice President Mike Pence has been holding secret meetings with prominent right-wing “influencers” on how to spin Donald Trump’s administration’s efforts to contain the growing health crisis.

According to a report from the Daily Beast, the outreach began at the annual CPAC conference long before the administration had any idea what they were dealing with, the report notes.

“The direct outreach occurred on Thursday, Feb. 27—the day after Trump tapped Pence to lead the task force. There, the vice president hosted an informal briefing on COVID-19 and the administration’s latest efforts, with several right-leaning personalities with large followings on Twitter and other social media platforms, according to a source with direct knowledge of the gathering,” the Beast reports, adding, “The following Wednesday, Pence hosted another closed-door meeting with conservative ‘influencers,’ with this one lasting for roughly an hour in the vice president’s office on White House grounds.” Continue reading.

How Health Care Inequities Increase The Pandemic Peril

Right-wing media have lied for years about the American health care system, downplaying the fact that millions of people are either uninsured or lack access to affordable health care.

With a possible pandemic on the horizon, that’s a real problem.

A perfect example of this problem is evident in the Miami Herald’s reporting about Osmel Martinez Azcue. After visiting China, he felt sick. Taking the advice of experts, he went to the hospital, where it turned out that he did not have the novel coronavirus strain known as COVID-19, but rather the common flu. He was then billed $3,270, but he may only have to pay $1,400 for the tests he was given if he can prove to his insurance company that the flu he contracted was not related to a preexisting condition. The Herald noted that so-called “junk plans” that don’t actually cover common medical expenses contribute to this problem, writing that “often the plans aren’t very different from going without insurance altogether.” Continue reading.

Fox News and conservative media are now warning of bloodshed if Democrats win in 2020

AlterNet logoThat’s one way to try halt public debate in this country: by threatening mass violence and a bloody people’s revolt in the streets. That’s what conservative media voices, including those on Fox News, have done in recent days. Specifically, the reckless rhetoric has revolved around proposed new gun laws in the wake of America’s latest string of mass shootings. Those are laws that would likely only be enacted if Democrats won the Senate and the White House in 2020.

If you take “people’s guns away from them, there’s going to be a lot of violence,” The View’s Meghan McCain announced. “What you are calling for is civil war,” warned Fox News’ Tucker Carlson. “What you are calling for is an incitement to violence.” And that was just a sampling of the right-wing media hysteria last week.

These kinds of alerts about looming political violence if the opposition party wins power and passes laws in a democratic fashion represent the worst type of far-right insurrectionism. It’s an ominous and long-held belief among conservatives and conservative media outlets that citizens need to be fully armed in order to one day wage war on the American government, as a kind of second American civil war. In other words, the reason the Second Amendment exists is not for self-defense, or to protect the rights of hunters and gun enthusiasts, but to enable citizens to go to war with the U.S. government, and to fend off a “tyrannical” turn at home.

View the complete September 9 article by Eric Boehlert from Daily Kos on the AlterNet website here.

‘Maybe I didn’t return her phone call’: Trump ridicules Ann Coulter, slams Fox News in fallout over wall

Conservative outlets and commentators had many thoughts on the end of the longest government shutdown in history. (Adriana Usero /The Washington Post)

Macbeth suffered from hubris. Hamlet from self-doubt. The fatal flaw that some conservative pundits fear could lead President Trump, otherwise their macho hero, to his downfall is his failure to keep his promise to build the wall. But is this winter’s tale about the southern border a tragedy or a farce? “The course of true love never did run smooth,” observes a thwarted lover in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

The love affair binding Trump to right-wing media and the conservative commentariat entered its roughest patch yet over the weekend, following attacks within his own ranks over his capitulation to Democratic demands that he reopen the government without $5.7 billion for his shape-shifting barrier along the U.S.-Mexico border.

In a Wall Street Journal interview published Sunday, Trump hit back at Ann Coulter, a conservative author whose threats about the defection of the president’s base were credited with pushing him to his once-uncompromising stance. When he backed down on Friday, she called him a “wimp.”

View the complete January 28 article by Isaac Stanley-Becker on The Washington Post website here.

Conservative media want you to believe Trump has been “tough” on Russia. They’re not telling the full story.

The following article by Nick Fernandez was posted on the Media Matters website July 26, 2018:

Secretary of State Pompeo echoed right-wing media talking points on Trump’s toughness. In reality, Trump has undercut a number of actions Congress and his administration have tried to take against Russia.

Credit: Melissa Joskow, Media Matters

Following President Donald Trump’s disastrous bilateral meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, Finland, the president’s administration flacks and conservative media lackeys quickly scrambled to his defense, arguing that Trump has been “tough” in his “actions against Russia” and rattling off a series of actions he has taken since 2017 that supposedly support such a claim. The president himself and administration officials have also parroted the talking points in an attempt to dispel the idea that he is somehow in the pocket of the Russian government. But a closer look at the actions Trump shills have pointed to reveals a foreign policy that is more concerned with posturing for media than being “tough” in the face of Russian aggression.

On July 16, Trump met with Putin for a meeting behind closed doors in which no other American — except an interpreter — was present, and they emerged more than two hours later to give a wide-ranging press conference. When asked whether he holds the Russian government accountable for its multifaceted interference campaign during the 2016 elections, Trump repeatedly denied Russia’s involvement, saying, “I don’t see any reason why it would be” Russia. (The president would later claim to have gotten “would” and “wouldn’t” confused.)

To counter the deluge of negative press in the wake of the meeting, right-wing media and administration officials pointed to various foreign policy and military responses to Russian aggression that the United States and its allies have undertaken during Trump’s presidency to argue that the president’s “actions” actually “have been tough.” About a week after the bilateral meeting, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo echoed Trump’s conservative media defenders as he faced senators on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, insisting Trump “has taken a truckload of punitive actions against Moscow” and that he has been “tough on Russia” as president. White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders repeated the meme, as did the president himself.

View the complete article here.

Hillary Clinton on the conservative media: ‘It appears they don’t know I’m not president’

The following article by Kristine Phillips was posted on the Washington Post website October 31, 2017:

Three Trump campaign officials were indicted on charges as it relates to Russian meddling on Oct. 30, but the President focused on diverting negative attention to Hillary Clinton. (Joyce Koh/The Washington Post)

Hillary Clinton was nowhere near Washington the day charges against President Trump’s former campaign chairman were announced and news broke that a former Trump campaign volunteer had pleaded guilty to lying to federal agents about meeting with Russian officials.

She was in Chicago where she promoted her book (“I have a great chapter about Russia”), thought about her Halloween costume (“I think I will maybe come as the president”) and quipped about conservative media outlets’ preoccupation with a vanquished presidential candidate while big news surrounded the one who won. Continue reading “Hillary Clinton on the conservative media: ‘It appears they don’t know I’m not president’”

‘This is a nothing burger’: How conservative media reacted to the Mueller indictments

The following article by Eli Rosenberg was posted on the Washington Post website October 31, 2017:

The revelation Monday of charges against three former Trump campaign officials in special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s probe into possible Russian influence in American politics delivered a sharp jolt to the news cycle.

Anticipation over the arrests had been high for days after news that the first charges in Mueller’s investigation were imminent had seeped out over the weekend. And the documents outlining allegations against former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, business partner Rick Gates and former Trump foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos, laid out what investigators had found in unvarnished detail. Continue reading “‘This is a nothing burger’: How conservative media reacted to the Mueller indictments”

Conservatives need to cut the bullshit and stop exploiting a tragedy to blame the left

The following article by Cristina Lopez G. was posted on the Media Matters website June 15, 2017:

Right-wing media show no self-awareness of their role in influencing violent incidents

Credit: AP

James T. Hodgkinson, a man with a record of domestic violence, a legally purchased assault rifle, and a valid concealed carry permit, on June 14 opened fire on Republican congressmen and staffers practicing for the congressional baseball game.

The FBI is still investigating the incident, but one thing is already clear about this latest example of unhinged gun violence. The overwhelming evidence of conservative media’s influence on a significant number of deadly incidents makes their attempt to deflect attention from their role in creating a toxic political culture both cynical and exploitative. Continue reading “Conservatives need to cut the bullshit and stop exploiting a tragedy to blame the left”