Conservative media, a giant fog machine

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Or just dumb TV..

Does watching television make people stupid? Are stupid people more likely to vote for populist parties? And can these effects linger for years, or even decades? If you had asked me a few days ago, I would have been highly skeptical of these claims. They sound far too much like the sort of thing educated people want to believe. But a meticulous new paper published in the American Economic Review, one of the world’s most prestigious social-science journals, suggests that there might be truth to these clichés. In the study, three economists, Ruben Durante, Paolo Pinotti, and Andrea Tesei, were able to provide strong evidence for a shocking set of conclusions: Watching a lot of entertainment TV does seem to have an adverse impact on your intelligence. And it also makes you more likely to vote for populist parties.

Does TV Makes You Dumber and More Populist? - The Atlantic

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Tuesday was an especially ugly day for Fox News. It began with revelations that host Sean Hannity helped spread Russian propaganda about Seth Rich’s murder. It ended with an astoundingly racist attack on Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) by host Tucker Carlson. In between, hosts slut-shamed sexual assault accusers and spread misinformation about former President Barack Obama. Put everything together and it encapsulated all the channel’s worst impulses. Take Carlson’s increasingly aggressive attacks against Trump administration adversaries, which culminated with his xenophobic indictment of Omar, a Somali refugee and one of the first Muslim women to serve in Congress: He attacked her as “living proof that the way we practice immigration has become dangerous to this country.” And yet through it all, President Donald Trump continued to amplify the network’s content on Twitter, illustrating how far off the rails both the president and the cable news network he can’t stop watching — the top-rated one in the country — have gone. 

Hannity got played by Russian propagandists Early Tuesday, Yahoo News published Michael Isikoff’s in-depth report on the origins of the conspiracy theory about Seth Rich, a Democratic National Committee staffer who was killed on the streets of Washington, DC, in July 2016. Three years later, Rich’s killing remains unsolved, though police investigators believe it was a robbery gone wrong. But shortly after it happened, Rich’s demise became subject of a right-wing conspiracy theory that held he was murdered because he had leaked DNC emails to WikiLeaks — a claim that, if true, would indicate that the US intelligence community’s conclusions about Russia being behind the hacks of Democratic targets in 2016 were mistaken. According to Isikoff’s account, this conspiracy theory originated from a baseless intelligence “bulletin” put together and disseminated by Russia’s foreign intelligence service, which is known as the SVR. Details from the bulletin were posted on an obscure website that often spreads Russian propaganda, WhatDoesItMean.com, and eventually made their way onto the airwaves of Sean Hannity’s Fox News show.

One day encapsulated everything that’s wrong with Fox News - Vox

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Fantastic article by Media Matters (see here) detailing all the ways Fox news is spinning the impeachment process..

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A new study out this week shows that Americans’ views of President Trump’s dealings with Ukraine are largely varied based on the media outlets they listen to or read to get their news. A study from Pew that was conducted in November and released Friday found that 65 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning voters who got their political news only from media outlets with right-leaning audiences said Trump withheld military aid to Kyiv to reduce corruption in Ukraine. Only 10 percent of these respondents said Trump withheld the aid to help his reelection campaign. However, among Republicans who get their political news from a combination of outlet types with a wider range of audiences, only 46 percent said the hold was to advance U.S. policy against corruption and 24 percent cited political gains.

Pew study: Views about Trump's Ukraine actions vary based on news diet | TheHill

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Back in November, Fox News spun the House impeachment hearings by featuring short, out-of-context clips of Republicans defending President Trump that portrayed things in the best possible light for them. But that option wasn’t available on Wednesday, as the entirety of the day was allotted to Democratic impeachment managers. Starting with The Five, the network’s early evening roundtable commentary show, and continuing throughout the evening, Fox News broadcast portions of screen-in-screen video of the trial. But instead of playing the audio, network hosts provided the normal Trumpian spin. So while someone who just looked at the screen may have concluded Fox News was covering the trial, in fact it wasn’t covering it at all.

Fox impeachment trial coverage features video without audio - Vox

Faced with the news that President Trump’s former National Security Adviser John Bolton’s new book includes an account that undercuts one of Trump’s central impeachment defenses, Fox News and the Trump-supporting Republicans who regularly appear on it went all-in on smearing him as a greedy and disgruntled former aide who only wants sell more copies. Take host Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), who joined Monday’s edition of Fox & Friends and said, “The timing is a little interesting, isn’t it?” This particularly talking point was utterly foreseeable — I predicted on Sunday night that it would get heavy play on Fox News. But it illustrates the extent to which Trumpworld is relying on ad hominem attacks and misleading deflection instead of trying to justify the president’s actions on the merits.

Fox News’s John Bolton impeachment spin is amazingly predictable - Vox

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Fox News has a credibility problem. Most critics of the cable news network will be well aware of that, but in this case the admission is coming from Fox News itself. An internal research briefing obtained by the Daily Beast names four regular contributors to the network for peddling “disinformation”, particularly when it comes to the Ukraine scandal which lead to Donald Trump’s impeachment. Among those named in the lengthy document titled Ukraine, Disinformation, & the Trump Administration, put together by Fox News senior political affairs specialist Bryan S Murphy, are frequent guests Rudy Giuliani, John Solomon, Victoria Toensing and Joe diGenova.

Solomon, a disgraced former writer for the Hill and a regular guest of Sean Hannity’s, comes under particular scrutiny. “John Solomon played an indispensable role in the collection and domestic publication of elements of this disinformation campaign,” the document explains. Much of Solomon’s “reporting” on Ukraine formed the basis of Giuliani and other Trump officials’ efforts to smear and oust the former US ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, a figure seen as standing in the way of the president and former Ukraine officials’ shadowy machinations in the country. Among the allegations against Solomon noted are “non-disclosure of conflicts, use of unreliable sources, publishing false and misleading stories, misrepresentation of sources, and opaque coordination with involved parties”.

Elsewhere in the file obtained by the Beast are details of Giuliani and his back-channel dealings to investigate former vice-president Joe Biden and his son Hunter, as well as his connections to now indicted figures Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman. Giuliani has a “high susceptibility to disinformation”, Murphy writes.
The credibility of Toensing and diGenova, a married couple of hyperpartisan Trump loyalists who were secretly working for the indicted Ukrainian oligarch Dmytro Firtash during the period of their regular appearances on Fox News, is also called into question as they did not disclose that relationship. “Notable are the roles of Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing in spreading disinformation and their parroting of beneficial narratives while employed by Firtash,” it explains.

Hannity, the popular primetime host and Trump confidant, is also criticized for laundering the reputations and trumpeting the trustworthiness of the guests in question. According to Media Matters, the four individuals have made 348 appearances on Fox News weekday programs since 2018. About 203 of them were on Hannity’s program alone.

Fox News guests spread 'disinformation' – says leaked internal memo | Media | The Guardian

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How could Rupert Murdoch and his son make such a catastrophic error of judgment? Why are they still chained to Trump as he loses support and, in the face of the daily death toll, can only react with a repellent display of narcissism and self-interest? The answer is surprisingly simple. Supporting Trump wasn’t just a strategic choice, but Rupert Murdoch’s personal political conviction. It has all the hallmarks of the same crude conservatism evident in the editorial line pushed by his Australian media outlets which heaped blame for last year’s bushfires on environmentalists. As with climate change, Rupert Murdoch put his politics ahead of business interests by pushing coronavirus skepticism. It’s bad for him and Fox, but much, much worse for humanity..

Why the Murdochs backed Donald Trump’s COVID-19 denialism – Alternet.org

• Fox and Covid-19 denialism, not a business decision but one of political conviction..
  

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If you thought having one in eight Australians believing stupid conspiracy theories such as 5G and Bill Gates being involved in the transmission and creation of coronavirus was bad, just wait until you meet the American public. In response to a Yahoo News/YouGov poll conducted on Wednesday and Thursday of last week, sentiment blaming Gates sat in a range between 12% and 50% depending on the cohort chosen.

Most likely to answer positively to the question "Bill Gates wants to use a mass vaccination campaign against COVID-19 to implant microchips in people that would be used to track people with a digital ID" were those that watched Fox News for their TV news at 50%, followed by Republicans and those who voted for Trump on 44%. Given the choice of true, not sure, and false, only 26% of Fox News watchers and Republicans said the question was false, with Trump voters stating it was false 27% of the time.

The only cohorts to respond with false to the question were Democrats on 52%, MSNBC viewers at 61%, and voters for Hillary Clinton at 63%. However, each of those groups responded positively 19%, 15%, and 12% of the time..

US poll says only 1 in 4 Republican voters disbelieve Bill Gates coronavirus conspiracy | ZDNet

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Fox News created and shared a graphic showing gains in the S&P 500 following the deaths of high-profile black men in the US. Democratic Rep. Bobby L. Rush said the graphic was “outrageous and disgusting” and “makes it clear that @FoxNews does not care about black lives.” Fox News pointed to gains following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr, after the police shooting of teenager Michael Brown, when the police that beat Rodney King were acquitted, and after the recent death of George Floyd.

Fox News graphic that shows markets rising after black men, including George Floyd, were killed is 'disgusting' says Congressman

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Fox News published digitally altered and misleading images on its website's homepage Friday that made a demonstration in Seattle, in which a group of largely peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters have occupied six city blocks, appear violent and dangerous. The deceitful tactic was called out by The Seattle Times. The local newspaper reported that when it asked Fox News about the images, the network removed them.

Fox News' depiction of the demonstration mirrors much of right-wing media's attempt to portray it as menacing. Protesters have declared a small slice of Seattle an "autonomous zone" after clashes with authorities led police to evacuate a precinct. While there have been some sightings of armed individuals, the area has remained largely peaceful with people gathering for food, speeches, and movie screenings..

Fox News publishes digitally altered and misleading images of Seattle demonstrations - CNN