Tag: Fox News

Fox News personalities rebuke Trump after he demands loyalty

AlterNet logoSeveral Fox News personalities publicly rebuked President Donald Trump after he escalated his attacks on the right-leaning network over its occasional criticisms of his administration.

“Fox News isn’t supposed to work for you,” Fox News senior political analyst Brit Hume said.

“We don’t work for you,” Fox News contributor Guy Benson tweeted, adding: “My job isn’t to reinforce exactly what partisans want to hear.”

Brit Hume

✔@brithume

Fox News isn’t supposed to work for you. https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/1166712943196680193 …

Donald J. Trump

✔@realDonaldTrump

….I don’t want to Win for myself, I only want to Win for the people. The New @FoxNews is letting millions of GREAT people down! We have to start looking for a new News Outlet. Fox isn’t working for us anymore!

30.5K

Twitter Ads info and privacy
14.7K people are talking about this

View the complete August 29 article by Shira Tarlo from Salon on the AlterNet website here.

Trump accuses Fox News of ‘heavily promoting the Democrats,’ urges followers to look for another news outlet

Washington Post logoPresident Trump on Wednesday lashed out at Fox News, accusing the conservative network of “heavily promoting the Democrats” and urging his nearly 64 million Twitter followers to “start looking for a new News Outlet.”

“The New @FoxNews is letting millions of GREAT people down!” Trump wrote in a series of tweets. “We have to start looking for a new News Outlet. Fox isn’t working for us anymore!”

His tweets followed an interview of Xochitl Hinojosa, the communications director for the Democratic National Committee, in which she discussed next month’s Democratic presidential debate, among other things.

View the complete August 28 article by John Wagner on The Washington Post website here.

Trump And Fox Blame ‘Fake Media’ For Looming Recession

President Donald Trump and his allies at Fox News have settled on a strategy to deal with the possibility of an oncoming economic recession: Blame the media.

The United States is currently experiencing the longest economic expansion on record, growing every quarter since the early days of President Barack Obama’s tenure. But no boom lasts forever, and key economic indicators suggest that the economy is now weakening and that a recession may be on the horizon. A recent survey found nearly three in four economists expect one by 2021, reflecting “growing skepticism among economists and investors that the U.S. economy will be able to withstand a protracted trade war with China without serious harm amid a weakening global outlook.”

Trump is reportedly worried about the impact that might have on his reelection campaign, and rightfully so, as sitting presidents who face recessions as Election Day approaches typically lose. His response — along with talking up the economy while lashing out at the response of his handpicked Federal Reserve chairman — has been to push the paranoid conspiracy theory that the press is deliberately trying to tank the economy to stop his re-election. This plays into Trump’s years-long campaign to delegitimize the press as the “enemy of the people.”

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

Trump launches maniacal tweetstorm after devastating Fox News poll shows his numbers near all-time worst

AlterNet logoPresident Donald Trump launched a massive, nonsensical tweetstorm Thursday morning, after a Wednesday evening Fox News poll revealed both his approval and disapproval numbers are almost the worst they’ve ever been, and as his China trade war is destroying markets worldwide. The DOW dropped 800 points Wednesday, and DOW futures are swinging “wildly.” Reports from inside the White House say aides are terrified that the economic numbers will be the end of his presidency.

Fox News attempted to minimize the bad polling news for Trump by wrapping it inside the public’s response to recent mass shootings, but those numbers are also bad for the President – with public opinion on policy directly contradicting the White House narrative.

Trump’s disapproval is now at 56% – a five point jump from just one month ago.  Just 43% approve, down from 46%. Notice Fox News tucks this key fact into its analysis: “Record numbers of men (53 percent), white men (46 percent), and independents (64 percent) disapprove.“

View the complete August 15 article by David Badash from The New Civil Rights Movement on the AlterNet website here.

Former Fox News correspondent warns the network ‘foments fear and anger’ as analysis shows El Paso terrorist echoed the toxic rhetoric of right-wing media stars

AlterNet logoThere was a time when right-wing media, apart from Patrick Buchanan, were much more forgiving of undocumented immigrants and praised President Ronald Reagan for granting so many of them amnesty during the 1980s. But in recent years, right-wing media have found that fear-mongering over illegal immigration can be great for ratings or online traffic — and a report for the New York Times finds that the El Paso shooter used much of the same inflammatory language and rhetoric that right-wing media stars have been espousing.

According to Carl Cameron, former chief political correspondent for Fox News, the language of the extreme fringe is now common in right-wing media. Cameron told the Times that right-wing media are now “putting that into the zeitgeist…. Fox goes out and looks for stuff that is inherently on fire and foments fear and anger.”

Shortly before the terrorist mass shooting in El Paso that left 22 people dead, the killer (according to law enforcement) posted a 2300-word manifesto on 4Chan asserting that he was acting in order to fight an “Hispanic invasion of Texas.” And the Times report (written by Jeremy W. Peters, Michael M. Grynbaum, Keith Collins, Rich Harris and Rumsey Taylor and published on August 11) notes that right-wing media stars like Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and Fox News’ Tucker Carlson have been using the same type of rhetoric.

View the complete August 12 article by Alex Henderson on the AlterNet website here.

Donald Trump Jr. goes on Fox to talk media objectivity — and to compare a Democrat to a mass shooter

Washington Post logoPerhaps there is some cosmic almanac in which the universe’s greatest ironies are recorded, a heavy tome that the angels can skim, marveling at man’s ability to demonstrate his own insincerity. If there is, the celestial scribes have had a busy morning thanks to Donald Trump Jr.’s appearance on Fox News in which he lambasted the New York Times for kowtowing to its audience.

The subject at hand was the newspaper’s decision to change its planned front-page headline summarizing President Trump’s speech on Monday following twin mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton, Ohio. The paper originally ran with a headline of “Trump urges unity vs. racism,” a summary of Trump’s comments that manages to misrepresent both Trump’s vision of unity and his relationship with racism. It’s technically true, in the way that saying Babe Ruth hasn’t hit any home runs this century is true. It’s just … not the entire story.

The paper’s executive editor explained that the social-media outcry that the headline spurred caused the Times’s senior leadership to take a closer look at and, later, to change it. Fox, in its presentation of the scenario, suggested that the paper was actually responding to criticism from prominent Democrats.

View the complete August 7 article by Philip Bump on The Washington Post website here.

Trump accuses Google of anti-conservative bias without providing evidence

Washington Post logoThe president’s tweets on Tuesday morning came after a Fox News interview with an ex-Google engineer that aired on Monday.

President Trump accused Google on Tuesday of favoring negative news stories about him in the 2016 presidential election, apparently in response to a report on Fox News.

In a series of three tweets Tuesday morning, Trump said he had met in the Oval Office with Google chief executive Sundar Pichai, who told him the company didn’t boost Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential election, wouldn’t interfere with the 2020 election and wasn’t involved with the Chinese military.

“We are watching Google very closely!” Trump said in a tweet on Tuesday.

View the complete August 6 article by Hannah Denham on The Washington Post website here.

Trump seeks cover from Fox News as criticism mounts

President quotes ‘Fox & Friends’ to criticize Obama on mass shootings after warning about political division

ANALYSIS | One day after he warned the country about political division and the “perils” of social media, President Donald Trump contradicted himself with a series of tweets criticizing his predecessor and a perceived big-tech nuisance. And he again turned to his favorite cable network for an assist.

The president addressed the country Monday morning in a speech meant to console the families of the victims of two deadly weekend mass murders in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio. Gunmen opened fire in a WalMart in the former and an entertainment district in the latter. The violence has prompted calls for Trump to call on Congress to interrupt its August recess to send him gun-control legislation.

But Trump did not call for any legislative action that would get a bill on his desk to make it harder for would-be mass shooters to buy firearms. He did, however, denounce white supremacy amid criticism about his rhetoric about an “invasion” of the U.S. by Central and South American migrants — something echoed in an online manifesto penned by the El Paso shooting suspect.

View the complete August 6 article by John T, Bennett on The Roll Call website here.

‘That isn’t what he said!’ Fox News host laughs in Mick Mulvaney’s face as he brazenly lies about Mueller’s testimony

AlterNet logoWhen former Special Counsel Robert Mueller testified before Congress on Wednesday, Democrats had him thoroughly debunk President Donald Trump’s lies about his investigation. The president wasn’t exonerated, the special counsel didn’t conclude there was “no obstruction,” it wasn’t “witch hunt,” and Russia interference in the 2016 election wasn’t a “hoax,” Mueller confirmed.

So when White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney appeared on Fox News Sunday morning in an interview with Chris Wallace, he decided to invent new lies to tell about Mueller.

“Mueller answered the single, one oustanding question,” Mulvaney said. “They asked him: Would you have indicted the president if he were not the president, and Mueller said, ‘absolutely not.’ He would not do that.”

View the complete July 28 article by Cody Fenwick on the AlterNet website here.

The GOP’s questions to Mueller seemed bizarre — unless you watch Fox News

Washington Post logoTreating right-wing conspiracy theories as smoking guns shows that Republicans are mostly speaking to their base.

When Rep. Steve Chabot (R-Ohio) had his turn to quiz former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III during the hearing Wednesday morning, he came armed with what he seemed to think was a smoking gun: that neither Glenn Simpson nor Fusion GPS were mentioned in Mueller’s report.

Most Americans no doubt shared Mueller’s apparent confusion about the line of questioning. He said he was not familiar with Fusion GPS, a private strategic-intelligence firm, and that Simpson, the organization’s founder, was outside the scope of his investigation. Yet as the hearings wore on, Republican lawmakers returned again and again to Simpson and Fusion GPS, treating them like household names. And for conservatives on a steady diet of right-wing media, they are: the linchpins of a conspiratorial witch hunt to impeach President Trump.

The GOP’s laserlike focus on Simpson, Fusion GPS, former FBI agent Peter Strzok and other bits of right-wing lore probably played well in conservative media (and, as a consequence, in the Oval Office). But it was almost certainly inscrutable to any American who is not dialed into Fox News, right-wing talk radio or conservative-leaning Facebook feeds. That has real consequences for a party that, in learning to speak to its siloed-off base, has forgotten how to reach a wider audience.

View the complete July 24 article by Nicole Hemmer on The Washington Post website here.