Tag: Fox News

Former Playboy Model (And Trump Mistress) Sues Fox News For Defamation

Karen McDougal — a former Playboy model who Donald Trump paid to keep quiet ahead of the 2016 election — filed a lawsuit on Thursday against Fox News, accusing one of its hosts of defamation, the New York Times reported.

McDougal claims the host, Tucker Carlson, defamed her when he said she “approached Donald Trump and threatened to ruin his career and humiliate his family if he doesn’t give them money.”

Carlson accused McDougal of “extortion” and said she demanded “ransom” from Trump. “No matter which version of Trump’s statements one believes, Trump never once claimed that he was extorted” McDougal’s lawsuit reads, according to the Times‘ report.

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While Withholding Aid, Trump Pushed Ukraine Conspiracy On Fox

A senior budget official learned on June 19 that President Donald Trump had inquired about U.S. military aid to Ukraine after seeing a media report, according to his newly released testimony in the House impeachment inquiry.  And in an interview with Fox’s Sean Hannity that same night, the president linked Ukraine to a conspiracy theory involving the Democratic National Committee’s hacked server, demonstrating his state of mind about the country at that time.

Mark Sandy, a career official in the Office of Management and Budget, told the House impeachment inquiry into Trump’s abuses of power that on June 19 he was informed by OMB political appointee Michael Duffey that Trump “had seen a media report” and “had questions” about the military aid package to Ukraine.” Sandy did not recall the specific article, but some have speculated it was a June 19 report on U.S. plans to send $250 million in military equipment to Ukraine.

Other testimonies before the inquiry indicate that OMB illegally froze the aid at the president’s order on July 25, that Ukrainian officials inquired about the hold on the aid the same day, and that the package became conditioned on Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky publicly announcing investigations that would benefit Trump politically. The aid was reportedly released only after Trump became aware of a whistleblower complaint about his dealings with Ukraine.

View the complete November 28 article by Matt Gertz from MediaMatters on the National Memo website here.

Fox News Distorts Justice Dept. Report On Trump Campaign Surveillance

After The Washington Post reported on November 21 that the Justice Department inspector general “found evidence that an FBI employee may have altered a document connected to” the FISA warrant on Trump 2016 campaign adviser Carter Page, some in right-wing media leapt at the chance to declare that their years of theories about illegal surveillance were about to be proven true.

However, both Fox’s “news” and “opinion” sides ignored that the lede of the article also said that DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz “has concluded that the conduct did not affect the overall validity of the surveillance application.”

Representing the network’s so-called “news division,” Fox chief national correspondent Ed Henry said that “this may just be the beginning” of evidence of FISA abuse, suggesting that the report will uncover that the FBI was “concocting a case” against President Donald Trump. Henry also bragged that “the president was laughed at by people in the media and a lot of Democrats said that this was a conspiracy theory and everything else. Now it is coming home to roost that something stinks here.”

View the complete November 24 article by Bobby Lewis from MediaMatters on the National Memo website here.

Trump goes off the rails in Fox News interview spewing Obama conspiracy theory

AlterNet logoPresident Donald Trump went off-the-rails when he called in to “Fox & Friends” Friday morning. For 57 minutes straight with no commercials the fast-talking President spewed conspiracy theory after conspiracy theory, tossed around lies and personal attacks against top Democrats, including coming close to saying once again that President Barack Obama spied on him and his campaign.

“They thought I was going to win and said ‘how can we stop him?’” Trump said of Obama and his administration.

“You’re dealing at the highest levels of government. They were spying on my campaign. This is my opinion,” Trump said.

View the complete November 22 article by David Badash from The New Civil Rights Movement on the AlterNet website here.

Fox News has created an ‘alternative reality’ to spin even damning testimony against Trump: report

AlterNet logoAfter Wednesday’s testimony from Ambassador Gordon Sondland in the impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump, CNN and MSNBC were full of legal and political analysts who found Sondland’s testimony to be terrible for the president. But Fox News, a report by Media Matters’ Matt Gertz demonstrates, generally had very different coverage of Wednesday’s hearing — coverage that was overtly favorable to Trump and his allies.

Not everyone at Fox News has been consistently critical of the impeachment inquiry: Judge Andrew Napolitano (a legal analyst at Fox) and Chris Wallace, despite their conservative leanings, have not hesitated to be critical of Trump at times. But Gertz’ report shows a major contrast between how CNN covered Wednesday’s hearing and how most at Fox News covered it.

The impeachment witnesses on Wednesday, Gertz notes, included not only Sondland, but also, Laura Cooper (a U.S. Defense Department expert on Russia and Ukraine) and the U.S. State Department’s David Hale. Cooper, Gertz points out, testified that as early as July 25, Ukrainian officials were inquiring about a hold being placed on U.S. aid to Ukraine — and Sondland, Gertz explains, testified earlier “that he had, at the president’s behest and with the knowledge of senior members of his administration, pressured the Ukrainians to publicly commit to investigating former Vice President Joe Biden as well as the conspiracy theory that Ukraine had meddled in the 2016 presidential election.”

View the complete November 21 article by Alex Henderson on the AlterNet website here.

The Brutal Impeachment Propaganda Of Fox News

“As a reporter,” Fox News anchor Chris Wallace said of Ambassador Gordon Sondland’s bombshell testimony before the House impeachment inquiry on Wednesday afternoon, “it seems to me, we have to go to what the headline is today.” And that headline, Wallace explained, was that Sondland had directly implicated President Donald Trump in a quid pro quo in which an Oval Office meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and potentially U.S. military aid to Ukraine were conditioned on Zelensky’s public announcement of investigations intended to benefit Trump politically.

On the websites of many national news outlets, journalists had indeed determined that the headline coming out of the hearing was Sondland’s acknowledgement of the quid pro quo and his declaration that senior officials, including Trump, were engaged in its formulation.

But that sentiment was not universal. Shortly after Wallace’s remark, I checked FoxNews.com, the website associated with his own network. There, the top headline was “President Trump declares ‘it’s all over’ for impeachment inquiry after Sondland testimony.”

View the complete November 20 article by Matt Gertz from Media Matters on the National Memo website here.

Fox News commentator Sean Hannity appears to be knee-deep in Trump’s Ukraine scandal — despite his profuse denials

AlterNet logoFox News host Sean Hannity raved that he never spoke with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo about ousted Ukrainian Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch after a third witness confirmed the alleged call to impeachment investigators.

David Hale, the undersecretary of State for political affairs, testified under oath that Yovanovitch was the victim of a baseless smear campaign led by Rudy Giuliani, the personal attorney of President Donald Trump, which led to her ouster. According to a transcript of the closed-door deposition released Monday, the smears originally stemmed from the conservative columnist John Solomon, who wrote in The Hill that former Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko had claimed that Yovanovitch gave him a “do not prosecute list.” Lutsenko later retracted that claim.

Hale, the third-ranking official at the department, claimed to impeachment investigators that Hannity had pushed the same narrative on Fox News and that Pompeo had reached out to Trump’s favorite host.

View the complete November 20 article by Igor Derysh from Salon on the AlterNet website here.

Fox News Host Hits Trump for Attacking Chris Wallace: You’re ‘Not Entitled to Praise’

Neil Cavuto said Trump “doesn’t distinguish” between “fake news” and stories he doesn’t like.

Fox News aired a rare bit of “Common Sense” on Monday afternoon when host Neil Cavuto ended his show with a strong defense of his colleague Chris Wallace, who earned the wrath of President Trump for daring to challenge House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-LA).

Trump tweeted on Sunday that Scalise “blew the nasty & obnoxious Chris Wallace (will never be his father, Mike!) away on Chris’s lowest rated (unless I’m on) morning show,” adding, “This kind of dumb and unfair interview would never have happened in the @FoxNews past.”

Zooming out, Cavuto asked his viewers, “What makes something ‘fake news?’” before explaining that the president “doesn’t distinguish” between false reporting and journalism that reflects poorly on him.

View the complete November 18 Matt Wilstein on the Daily Beast website here.

Fox & Friends hosts visibly deflate after legal analyst drops the hammer on Trump: ‘The law is not on the president’s side’

AlterNet logoFox News legal analyst Andrew Napolitano on Thursday delivered some sobering news to the hosts of “Fox & Friends,” who did their best to spin Wednesday’s impeachment hearings as a win for President Donald Trump.

During an interview, co-host Ainsley Earhardt argued that much of the testimony given by witnesses Bill Taylor and George Kent revolved around merely their opinions of the president’s actions in withholding aid from Ukraine.

“Everybody does have their own opinion,” he acknowledged. “But… there doesn’t seem to be any dispute that the president wanted dirt on Biden and the president was willing to hold up military aid in order to get it.”

View the complete November 14 article by Brad Reed from Raw Story on the AlterNet website here.

Fox News Exists To Protect A Crooked Republican President

NOTE:  We posted this earlier this year. With the current situation, it’s important we keep this in mind.

Forty-five years ago, President Richard Nixon resigned. His impeachment at the time seemed almost certain, as key Republican senators had signaled they would no longer support him. But Nixon’s acolytes did not blame their president for his gross corruption and mind-boggling criminality. Instead, they blamed the press — the “enemy,” as Nixon had described it — for hounding him out of office.

Over two decades later, Roger Ailes, one of those Nixon retainers, founded Fox News. As the network has gained power and influence, it has played many roles — an attack dog that savages progressive policies and individuals, a counterweight to a media that conservatives consider unbearably liberal, a radicalization engine that brings a bigoted ideology from the fringes into the homes of millions of Americans, and a propaganda machine that champions conservative politicians.

Over the past week, we’ve seen another one of Fox’s roles. As it has become clear that President Donald Trump used the office of the presidency to suborn a foreign government to investigate one of his political opponents — triggering a formal impeachment inquiry — Fox has been serving as a bulwark against the repetition of Nixon’s fall.

View the complete September 26 article by Matt Gertz from Media Matters on the National Memo website here.