The "Fox Cabinet" weighed in when it realized that der Trumpenfuhrer was the only person who could rein in the crowd that they had helped to rile up with their steady stream of election fraud BS. How revealing that all of them had Meadows' cell in their contacts list, and that after 4 years of witnessing Trump's vast ignorance and narcissism they still thought someone could reason with him.
Nor is the possibility that Trump would refuse to answer if he saw the call was from Don Jr. There have been multiple reports that Donald thinks Don Jr is stupid, like Michael Cohen’s testimony that Trump thought his namesake was an fool.
We're talking about a man who believes he's intelligent, no he would not have taken a call from either son. He wanted what was happening to over throw the government and kill pence for not being loyal to him. He was waiting for his people to overthrow the government as we know it, so he could declare himself king. Just didn't go the way the con man wanted.
It also explains perfectly why the secret service didn't put trump in the bunker, but instead just allowed him to watch it on TV from the oval office. And cackle.
The cozy relationship between top people at Fox and Republican administration has been going on for decades. Roger Ailes advised the Bush adminstration on how to respond to 9-11. When that was revealed in Woodward’s book “Bush at War” Ailes tried to excuse that blatant violation of the principles of serious journalism by saying he was just speaking out as a human being and a citizen. That excuse makes sense — all of us ordinary citizens have direct lines to presidents so we can give them our advice.
As of yesterday afternoon finding any online coverage of the 'text' story in the msm was difficult. CBS, nope. ABC, way down in the fine print. But Eric and plenty of others are pounding the drum, and it's beginning to show. This is bound to improve when the Committee has enough to hand to the Justice Department, which if I'm not way off base, is where this thing is headed.
I don't watch TV news, but I noticed yesterday than only Huffington Post mentioned the texts in a small story about Donny Jr., and in the evening I saw something in the Post.
People are convicted of murder who were sitting handcuffed in the back of a police car two miles away when the shooting started, but we're still investigating whether Donald Trump had anything to do with Jan. 6. If you ever need to show someone an example of white privilege in action, there you go.
Of course, Trump's entire 75-year fall up the stairs of a life is the perfect example, but that takes a while to explain.
Great piece, Eric. If only the past week would kneecap Faux among all advertisers other than deranged, rock-hard pillow salesmen. That said, any fiction that Faux was ever a "news" outlet is stripped away. Faux should no longer be included in White House press briefings and should be purged from the menu of media services piped into military facilities. Faux is an enemy propaganda psyops operation bent on undermining American democracy. Carrying Faux on military bases is the equivalent of piping in Tokyo Rose to American bases in the Pacific during WWII.
As to Chris Wallace, I have never considered him a serious journalist. He was nothing more than a shill, sellout prostitute to a horrific pustule on American culture. Eff him and eff CNN for taking him on. At least Shep Smith had a moral compass and the guts to tell the truth at that stinking piece of shit. I hope Liz Cheney keeps handing them their lunch "bigly!"
The problem is Fox makes most of its money through every single subscriber to any kind of cable or satellite or streaming TV. That's why there are very limited advertisers during their "opinion" shows but they still make plenty of cash.
Which outrages me every time I have to pay my Comcast bill. What we need to see is a movement to pressure cable providers to allow customers to remove from their accounts any channels that they find objectionable. The idea that one dollar of my cable bill goes to that cesspool has me seriously considering just dropping cable altogether and streaming the services I want. Even worse, AT&T provides a platform for OAN, which is like Faux with syphilis.
Same. I recently cut the cord and went from Xfinity to YouTube TV but you can't escape it with YouTube TV either. Still paying fees for those awful channels.....
That fact was not revealed until Liz Cheney read the tweets and he felt he had to come forward because some of them were from him. So we know for a fact that reporters were at the Capitol, had direct 1:1 communication with Meadows, knew what was going on, and hid that for nearly a year.
The media has a huge credibility problem.
This is a travesty; what kind of journalist would do that?
At first I thought we were going to see Chris Wallace in the Lloyd Bridges role in Airplane: He picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue. Which I think he did a few times. Wallace, that is.
The New York Times's "The Argument" had on Jay Rosen with Ross Douthat--a journalism professor who knows the subject with a non-journalist who is nothing but a right-wing propagandist--to discuss how the media should cover politics. Need we say more? In the interest of transparency, which The Times lacks, this is the email I sent in response:
Hello. The press should cover politics so that we know how it affects us, not what Joe Manchin's biorhythms tell us.
To put it another way, I thought of writing to DC political correspondents posing as an expert on that very topic and saying I knew when Biden should approach him. I guarantee you I would have heard back. But if I had written and said I am--and I am--a history professor whom republicans put on the Professor Watchlist for what I did not say in class and received death threats as a result, and that this demonstrated the garbage about "wokeness," I have no doubt I wouldn't hear from anybody, unless John McWhorter did a piece claiming I made up the whole thing.
So I will say to you what I say elsewhere: The gravest threat to our planet is not the republican party or even climate change, but the political media.
By the way, you might check out a former Times executive editor, Turner Catledge, who said that one of his demands of Washington correspondents was that when they wrote about a bill, before they got to who won and lost, he wanted to know how it affected readers--if it was a tax cut, he wanted them to say as fast as possible that this would give everybody a dollar, or whatever it was. No political correspondent for The Times thinks that way now. None.
I wonder will this finally wake up the belt way media to actually report this accordingly now that the texts messages have been revealed? One can only hope. They are still trash in so many ways. All I keep seeing in my head is "her emails" They need to be held accountable and I'm glad the WH is finally looking like they are calling them to the carpet. Thanks Eric!
The NYT this week ran a front page story about Secretary Clinton’s emails. Front page above the fold. If you were looking for information about Mark Meadow’s emails you had to go to page28, below the fold. That and the WSJ allowing a hit piece on VP Harris by Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan is all you need to know about the once venerated news papers.
Good grief what new outsized lie did they create to justify yet another article about Hillary's emails? I think 95% of the Beltway Political Propaganda Complex is every bit as toxic as Fox.
While the texts are revealing and Wallace's departure a huge embarrassment, it won't make a difference to the hardcore Fox News viewer. Thankfully that demographic is shrinking but for those folks who genuflect at the alter of Fox News, they will continue to manufacture whatever excuses are necessary to keep Hannity, Ingraham, and Carlson blabbing away on their TV sets. Confirmation Bias plays a huge role in viewership. People say to me that I have confirmation bias toward MSNBC and other progressive outlets. The difference of course is that progressive viewers are skeptical and don't goose-step to everything said on Morning Joe. In fact I just snarled at my TV when Mika teased a piece on Biden's inflation crisis. Unlike the Fox News viewer, progressive viewers do not rely simply on MSNBC. We verify our facts by reading and viewing from multiple sources. Also we read books by renowned journalists like Jane Mayer and Thom Hartman. Fox News viewers read Bill O'Reilly. But all and all, the revelation of Fox News hosts' texts is ultimately is a good thing and as Eric points out, stay tuned. There is so much more to come. While all this insurrection evidence is a good thing, my fear is of how the Republicans have gamed the system in the states since Jan 6 so that next time, the coup may very well succeed.
I read that Chris Wallace and Brett Baier went to Fox CEO with concerns about the “documentary” Tucker Carlson was producing and promoting. Their complaint was ignored and brushed aside. Certainly not the way to treat a loyal employee of 18 years. Maybe that was the final indignity
"Since everyone at Fox News operates without a moral compass, none of the millionaire hosts will have trouble sleeping despite their insurrection hypocrisy making headlines this week. Still, the network privately hates episodes like this, because it puts them on the defensive and it chips away at the preferred fantasy they push on Madison Avenue and within the Beltway that Fox is merely a conservative media outlet and that it actually employs a 'news' division."
I beg to differ. The reason none of the millionaire hosts at Fox and their billionaire overlords (and their GOP viewers and fully enabled legislators) will have no trouble sleeping despite their gargantuan hypocrisies has precious little to do with them operating "without a moral compass." That's a given, and I would suggest it is far too charitable a description. We have known this all along.
The real reason they do what they do is because they are all sociopaths. They have no conscience whatsoever. None of them. Not a single one of the people who works there, nor any of their viewers or members of the GOP.
There's a reason Rupert Morduch’s brand of "news" is no longer welcome in Canada or the UK. As I saw someone on Twitter put it, "We are going to 1st amendment ourselves to death." Propaganda like Fox News should be permanently banned from our country.
I disagree. I will never consent to having anyone, especially the government, decide what we watch, read, listen to or see. I caution you to please be careful what you wish for.
Propaganda that destroys our country and our democracy (from any political ideology) should not be allowed. Period. Fox News does public harm 24/7 and it should be dealt with as any other public harm. OANN and Newsmax as well. Goodbye, so long. GTF off our airwaves. Do you think we'd have over 800,000 of our fellow Americans dead from covid if those entities did not exist? News & opinion is fine. Differences on policy positions also fine. Outright hypocrisy and propaganda. No!
Sorry, but the problem is our society that spews angry racist people, not the news. Propaganda translated means "information." Fox and its ilk would not exist except that it found a market, and now it feeds it. I have seen the utter wrongness of governments deciding what is "suitable" for public consumption. We have the First Amendment to keep censorship and the government's own propaganda from poisoning our minds, or at least we did before Trump tapped Fox as his propaganda arm. The problem is Trump and his lingering stink. And the democratic way to counter it is not by shutting it down, but by delivering a better message.
For Christ's sake, can't you see that rabid, anti-democratic propagandists like Faux, OAN and Newsmax are actually fomenting the takedown of our democracy? This started with Limbaugh and the ending of the Fairness Doctrine. Yes, the scum has always been out there, but with crapholes like Faux and the poison happily disseminated by the cancers of social media our democracy has not got a chance. We'd better start getting ready for what's coming or be rolled over by it.
Best of luck to you Pollyanna. I prefer a world where our airways are posted with propaganda. I don't care what the word translates to, you know exactly what it means.
If we don't find that line then we have to agree that the First Amendment is indeed a suicide pact. Seriously. We are on the brink. The only question in my mind is this. Once the fascists succeed in installing minority rule with an iron fist, how far are the rest of us willing to go to resist?
Apparently Canada and the UK didn't have too much issue deciding that Fox wasn't the right message. This has nothing to do with what offends me and everything to do with what harms our country. Have a good day. I'm done conversing with someone who thinks we can overcome the damage done by Fox by simply putting out a "better" message.
Guess Chris Wallace finally got tired of being a living prop that got bought out anytime Faux was criticized for being a right-wing propaganda outet promoting hatred & bigotry, anti-intellectualism, anti-science, and general stupidity.
Maybe after years of taking a paycheck from Murdoch, did he finally realize Faux wasn't the news outlet that it supposedly was since many of the "serious journalists" were being sidelined by the unhinged opinion show hosts because getting the viewers outraged was more profitable than informing them?
The "Fox Cabinet" weighed in when it realized that der Trumpenfuhrer was the only person who could rein in the crowd that they had helped to rile up with their steady stream of election fraud BS. How revealing that all of them had Meadows' cell in their contacts list, and that after 4 years of witnessing Trump's vast ignorance and narcissism they still thought someone could reason with him.
the idea they thought Trump could physically do the right thing is the most telling
That they all knew only Trump could stop the coup indicates they also knew that Trump started the coup in the first place.
the texts really give away the whole game
The fact that Don Jr. texted Meadows instead of calling his dad directly is telling.
The joke is that he doesn't have his father cell phone number. It might not be a joke.
Nor is the possibility that Trump would refuse to answer if he saw the call was from Don Jr. There have been multiple reports that Donald thinks Don Jr is stupid, like Michael Cohen’s testimony that Trump thought his namesake was an fool.
We're talking about a man who believes he's intelligent, no he would not have taken a call from either son. He wanted what was happening to over throw the government and kill pence for not being loyal to him. He was waiting for his people to overthrow the government as we know it, so he could declare himself king. Just didn't go the way the con man wanted.
It was always rumored that Donny isn't his favorite son, so I assume that's why he called Meadows instead of Dad.
He texted Meadows. You're right that he could have called his father, and maybe he tried, but would daddy have answered?
To be fair, TFG doesn't text or email.
Lawrence O’Donnell told Rachel M he didn’t call his dad because of caller ID. She almost lost it.
Maybe golden boy Eric should have called. Trump prefers that dimwit over his brother.
He could have called him.
He could have tweeted...at least for a couple more days.
It also explains perfectly why the secret service didn't put trump in the bunker, but instead just allowed him to watch it on TV from the oval office. And cackle.
Real world example of the Frankenstein monster escaping the Laboratory.
The cozy relationship between top people at Fox and Republican administration has been going on for decades. Roger Ailes advised the Bush adminstration on how to respond to 9-11. When that was revealed in Woodward’s book “Bush at War” Ailes tried to excuse that blatant violation of the principles of serious journalism by saying he was just speaking out as a human being and a citizen. That excuse makes sense — all of us ordinary citizens have direct lines to presidents so we can give them our advice.
https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2002/fncs-ailes-confirms-sending-note-to-wh-after-911/
You looked and sounded fantastic last night. More MSNBC appearances, please.
oh thanks! appreciate it. looks like I'll be on Jonathan Capehart's Sunday show this weekend
As of yesterday afternoon finding any online coverage of the 'text' story in the msm was difficult. CBS, nope. ABC, way down in the fine print. But Eric and plenty of others are pounding the drum, and it's beginning to show. This is bound to improve when the Committee has enough to hand to the Justice Department, which if I'm not way off base, is where this thing is headed.
I do think the press underestimates what the impact of the headings will be. they’re sitting on a ton of damning info, is my guess
It has definitely been covered on MSNBC — a lot.
Hayes, Maddow and Lawrence all did a great job last night - they were in lock-step.
I don't watch TV news, but I noticed yesterday than only Huffington Post mentioned the texts in a small story about Donny Jr., and in the evening I saw something in the Post.
People are convicted of murder who were sitting handcuffed in the back of a police car two miles away when the shooting started, but we're still investigating whether Donald Trump had anything to do with Jan. 6. If you ever need to show someone an example of white privilege in action, there you go.
Of course, Trump's entire 75-year fall up the stairs of a life is the perfect example, but that takes a while to explain.
One has to be pretty stupid to lose money on not one, but two casinos.
... and Manhattan real estate.
Great piece, Eric. If only the past week would kneecap Faux among all advertisers other than deranged, rock-hard pillow salesmen. That said, any fiction that Faux was ever a "news" outlet is stripped away. Faux should no longer be included in White House press briefings and should be purged from the menu of media services piped into military facilities. Faux is an enemy propaganda psyops operation bent on undermining American democracy. Carrying Faux on military bases is the equivalent of piping in Tokyo Rose to American bases in the Pacific during WWII.
As to Chris Wallace, I have never considered him a serious journalist. He was nothing more than a shill, sellout prostitute to a horrific pustule on American culture. Eff him and eff CNN for taking him on. At least Shep Smith had a moral compass and the guts to tell the truth at that stinking piece of shit. I hope Liz Cheney keeps handing them their lunch "bigly!"
agreed re: Wallace. he gladly cashed Murdoch paychecks while Fox did damage to the country
The problem is Fox makes most of its money through every single subscriber to any kind of cable or satellite or streaming TV. That's why there are very limited advertisers during their "opinion" shows but they still make plenty of cash.
Which outrages me every time I have to pay my Comcast bill. What we need to see is a movement to pressure cable providers to allow customers to remove from their accounts any channels that they find objectionable. The idea that one dollar of my cable bill goes to that cesspool has me seriously considering just dropping cable altogether and streaming the services I want. Even worse, AT&T provides a platform for OAN, which is like Faux with syphilis.
Same. I recently cut the cord and went from Xfinity to YouTube TV but you can't escape it with YouTube TV either. Still paying fees for those awful channels.....
It get’s worse: Jake Sherman, a reporter from Politico (at the time and now elsewhere) was at the Capitol:
https://twitter.com/JakeSherman/status/1470753707688136706
That fact was not revealed until Liz Cheney read the tweets and he felt he had to come forward because some of them were from him. So we know for a fact that reporters were at the Capitol, had direct 1:1 communication with Meadows, knew what was going on, and hid that for nearly a year.
The media has a huge credibility problem.
This is a travesty; what kind of journalist would do that?
A journalist wouldn't do that...and then we have Jake Sherman. He is what my mother would call a "putz." I cringed when I read that tweet.
At first I thought we were going to see Chris Wallace in the Lloyd Bridges role in Airplane: He picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue. Which I think he did a few times. Wallace, that is.
The New York Times's "The Argument" had on Jay Rosen with Ross Douthat--a journalism professor who knows the subject with a non-journalist who is nothing but a right-wing propagandist--to discuss how the media should cover politics. Need we say more? In the interest of transparency, which The Times lacks, this is the email I sent in response:
Hello. The press should cover politics so that we know how it affects us, not what Joe Manchin's biorhythms tell us.
To put it another way, I thought of writing to DC political correspondents posing as an expert on that very topic and saying I knew when Biden should approach him. I guarantee you I would have heard back. But if I had written and said I am--and I am--a history professor whom republicans put on the Professor Watchlist for what I did not say in class and received death threats as a result, and that this demonstrated the garbage about "wokeness," I have no doubt I wouldn't hear from anybody, unless John McWhorter did a piece claiming I made up the whole thing.
So I will say to you what I say elsewhere: The gravest threat to our planet is not the republican party or even climate change, but the political media.
By the way, you might check out a former Times executive editor, Turner Catledge, who said that one of his demands of Washington correspondents was that when they wrote about a bill, before they got to who won and lost, he wanted to know how it affected readers--if it was a tax cut, he wanted them to say as fast as possible that this would give everybody a dollar, or whatever it was. No political correspondent for The Times thinks that way now. None.
Perfect response! You are absolutely right about the danger posed by political media.
"I wonder if he knew the release of the Insurrection Day texts from his colleagues was imminent..." That is the $64 M question.
bingo
I wonder will this finally wake up the belt way media to actually report this accordingly now that the texts messages have been revealed? One can only hope. They are still trash in so many ways. All I keep seeing in my head is "her emails" They need to be held accountable and I'm glad the WH is finally looking like they are calling them to the carpet. Thanks Eric!
The NYT this week ran a front page story about Secretary Clinton’s emails. Front page above the fold. If you were looking for information about Mark Meadow’s emails you had to go to page28, below the fold. That and the WSJ allowing a hit piece on VP Harris by Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan is all you need to know about the once venerated news papers.
True. Ugh...they all are just trash. And then want to act like it's the Dems fault. smh
Good grief what new outsized lie did they create to justify yet another article about Hillary's emails? I think 95% of the Beltway Political Propaganda Complex is every bit as toxic as Fox.
There is no aggression by the right wing that will not be normalized. There is no aggression against the left wing that will not be normalized.
It isn't about partisanship, it is about the reason for partisanship.
While the texts are revealing and Wallace's departure a huge embarrassment, it won't make a difference to the hardcore Fox News viewer. Thankfully that demographic is shrinking but for those folks who genuflect at the alter of Fox News, they will continue to manufacture whatever excuses are necessary to keep Hannity, Ingraham, and Carlson blabbing away on their TV sets. Confirmation Bias plays a huge role in viewership. People say to me that I have confirmation bias toward MSNBC and other progressive outlets. The difference of course is that progressive viewers are skeptical and don't goose-step to everything said on Morning Joe. In fact I just snarled at my TV when Mika teased a piece on Biden's inflation crisis. Unlike the Fox News viewer, progressive viewers do not rely simply on MSNBC. We verify our facts by reading and viewing from multiple sources. Also we read books by renowned journalists like Jane Mayer and Thom Hartman. Fox News viewers read Bill O'Reilly. But all and all, the revelation of Fox News hosts' texts is ultimately is a good thing and as Eric points out, stay tuned. There is so much more to come. While all this insurrection evidence is a good thing, my fear is of how the Republicans have gamed the system in the states since Jan 6 so that next time, the coup may very well succeed.
Oh speaking of Bill-0 the Clown looks like his rallies with Orange Foolius got a problem with ticket sales!
Right! The MSM's hype of Trump does not match the reality. Another chunk of evidence of how the media keeps Trumpism going.
I read that Chris Wallace and Brett Baier went to Fox CEO with concerns about the “documentary” Tucker Carlson was producing and promoting. Their complaint was ignored and brushed aside. Certainly not the way to treat a loyal employee of 18 years. Maybe that was the final indignity
From your article, Eric:
"Since everyone at Fox News operates without a moral compass, none of the millionaire hosts will have trouble sleeping despite their insurrection hypocrisy making headlines this week. Still, the network privately hates episodes like this, because it puts them on the defensive and it chips away at the preferred fantasy they push on Madison Avenue and within the Beltway that Fox is merely a conservative media outlet and that it actually employs a 'news' division."
I beg to differ. The reason none of the millionaire hosts at Fox and their billionaire overlords (and their GOP viewers and fully enabled legislators) will have no trouble sleeping despite their gargantuan hypocrisies has precious little to do with them operating "without a moral compass." That's a given, and I would suggest it is far too charitable a description. We have known this all along.
The real reason they do what they do is because they are all sociopaths. They have no conscience whatsoever. None of them. Not a single one of the people who works there, nor any of their viewers or members of the GOP.
There's a reason Rupert Morduch’s brand of "news" is no longer welcome in Canada or the UK. As I saw someone on Twitter put it, "We are going to 1st amendment ourselves to death." Propaganda like Fox News should be permanently banned from our country.
I disagree. I will never consent to having anyone, especially the government, decide what we watch, read, listen to or see. I caution you to please be careful what you wish for.
Propaganda that destroys our country and our democracy (from any political ideology) should not be allowed. Period. Fox News does public harm 24/7 and it should be dealt with as any other public harm. OANN and Newsmax as well. Goodbye, so long. GTF off our airwaves. Do you think we'd have over 800,000 of our fellow Americans dead from covid if those entities did not exist? News & opinion is fine. Differences on policy positions also fine. Outright hypocrisy and propaganda. No!
Sorry, but the problem is our society that spews angry racist people, not the news. Propaganda translated means "information." Fox and its ilk would not exist except that it found a market, and now it feeds it. I have seen the utter wrongness of governments deciding what is "suitable" for public consumption. We have the First Amendment to keep censorship and the government's own propaganda from poisoning our minds, or at least we did before Trump tapped Fox as his propaganda arm. The problem is Trump and his lingering stink. And the democratic way to counter it is not by shutting it down, but by delivering a better message.
For Christ's sake, can't you see that rabid, anti-democratic propagandists like Faux, OAN and Newsmax are actually fomenting the takedown of our democracy? This started with Limbaugh and the ending of the Fairness Doctrine. Yes, the scum has always been out there, but with crapholes like Faux and the poison happily disseminated by the cancers of social media our democracy has not got a chance. We'd better start getting ready for what's coming or be rolled over by it.
Best of luck to you Pollyanna. I prefer a world where our airways are posted with propaganda. I don't care what the word translates to, you know exactly what it means.
*aren't polluted
If we don't find that line then we have to agree that the First Amendment is indeed a suicide pact. Seriously. We are on the brink. The only question in my mind is this. Once the fascists succeed in installing minority rule with an iron fist, how far are the rest of us willing to go to resist?
And who decides what is the "correct" message? A single political party or ideology? Is that really what you want? To silence what offends you?
Apparently Canada and the UK didn't have too much issue deciding that Fox wasn't the right message. This has nothing to do with what offends me and everything to do with what harms our country. Have a good day. I'm done conversing with someone who thinks we can overcome the damage done by Fox by simply putting out a "better" message.
Holy moly, I missed this news! Good for him!
I love Rod Stewart’s “Great American Classics” collection.
Guess Chris Wallace finally got tired of being a living prop that got bought out anytime Faux was criticized for being a right-wing propaganda outet promoting hatred & bigotry, anti-intellectualism, anti-science, and general stupidity.
Maybe after years of taking a paycheck from Murdoch, did he finally realize Faux wasn't the news outlet that it supposedly was since many of the "serious journalists" were being sidelined by the unhinged opinion show hosts because getting the viewers outraged was more profitable than informing them?