New top story from Time: Fox News and Donald Trump Have a Dysfunctional Relationship, But It Works For Them

https://ift.tt/3biWlrJ

This article is part of the The DC Brief, TIME’s politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox every weekday.

All the signs of codependency were there. The irrational desire to make the other party happy. Manifestly low self-esteem. Abandonment issues. A compulsive desire to know what the other is doing.

Seldom has such an amateur armchair diagnosis been so easy as when ex-President Donald Trump and the Fox News switchboard reconnected on Wednesday for a conversation about the death of conservative media personality Rush Limbaugh. It was a two-way manipulation of the moment. Trump had a message to get out and Twitter is no longer available to him. Fox is a ratings machine and getting the still-popular Trump to talk about the passing of the combatively conservative host was going to be a cultural moment for its viewers.

So it became mutually beneficial to set aside years of bad blood between the network and the New Yorker-cum-Floridian. (“Blood,” it must be said, is a word that turned many a head after then-candidate Trump in 2015 said a Fox News anchor had “blood coming out of her wherever” when Megyn Kelly dared ask him tough questions about his sexist language during the 2016 field’s first debate and spent the next year and a half stalked by Trump’s tweets.)

Before he started running for President and then as a candidate, Trump was a regular fixture on Fox programs, especially its morning show. He’d call in from his Trump Tower perch nine blocks north of Fox HQ and haul off on the topic of the day. As much as his reality show, The Apprentice, the Fox open-invite kept Trump in the zeitgeist. After all, Trump didn’t have room to promote the baseless conspiracy theories about former President Barack Obama’s birthplace on his own show. Fox—and Limbaugh, whose radio show had the highest ratings in the country—gave Trump the outlet he needed to spread those lies.

As a candidate, Trump continued using Fox as a crutch, infuriating his primary rivals who were told they had to be in a studio if they wanted to appear on a show while Trump literally phoned it in. Trump didn’t need to get out to Iowa or up to New Hampshire every week; his voters were glued to Fox, top consultants to Trump’s rivals bemoaned. But there was nothing they could do to stop it; Trump had great ratings and his rivals did not.

As President, Trump tried to have it both ways with Fox, both using it as a bullhorn and punching bag, saying it had drifted too far from what he saw as its core identity as a safe space for center-right news consumers, aggrieved conservatives and QAnon-heeding conspiracy theorists. You can’t ignore the fact that Fox’s ratings are at their lowest point in 20 years, trailing CNN and MSNBC simultaneously for the first time ever. Trump was openly campaigning for Fox alternatives until Twitter told him his tweets were too toxic to exist at all. (I’d link to the pro-OANN and -Newsmax promotional material that the President sent, but they’re now deleted.)

Eventually, it became too much for the network. It’s embarrassing to be seen as a de facto defensive tackle for the Trump White House while getting taken down by your own captain. In the run-up to last year’s elections, when Trump seemed to indicate that he had landed a deal to do a weekly appearance by phone on the network’s morning show — something the network tried to quash. While the primetime, opinion-based hosts still count themselves members of the Make America Great Again legion, the daytime anchors try to keep in the realm of facts. Sean Hannity will forever carry buckets of Trump’s talking points, while the likes of Bill Hemmer and Harris Faulkner keep the partisan jousting at least rooted in defensible truths.

It was Hemmer and Faulkner, anchoring that stretch of coverage of Limbaugh’s death, who had to navigate the moment truly no producer could have prepared for. Limbaugh’s death at age 70 after a public battle with cancer was a seismic and sincere event on the conservative media landscape, but not surprising.

What was out of the ordinary was that Trump’s appearance on Fox was also his first interview since leaving Washington and skipping the Inauguration of his successor, Joe Biden. The first network to get the interview with the newly-relieved President is a big deal, and that is even with ex-Presidents who didn’t fire up a crowd to stop Congress from accepting his loss, watch as a mob stages an insurrection at the Capitol and then almost immediately face impeachment for inspiring an insurrection. This was one for the history books.

And yet the 24-minute conversation failed to adhere to the most basic expectations of journalism. Trump was not asked about his second impeachment trial, or the charge at the heart of it: that he had incited a deadly riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.

Any number of theories can explain it. Knowing the intense following Limbaugh has among his fans, it’s tough to see any questions about a violent insurrection inserted into what was essentially a televised memorial service. Dittoheads, as Limbaugh’s fans were known, would react none too kindly with their remotes and ad dollars.

Trump himself professed to have been friendly with Limbaugh, an early endorser of the 2016 bid, and awarded him with a Presidential Medal of Freedom last year. Anything that nudged Trump toward anger would not end well. Fox News — like any network — wants the first interview with Trump. A question inserted into a phone interview with Trump about Limbaugh mightn’t have been worth the risk.

Hemmer and Faulkner made a half-hearted attempt to get Trump to discuss what advice Limbaugh had given him during the race and after his loss. “Mr. President, we probably have a hundred questions for you, but so many of them are not appropriate for this venue, so we’ll keep it on this topic for now and we appreciate your time today,” Hemmer said.

But neither journalist interrupted Trump when he claimed he had actually won the election and his loss was the result of problems with “voter tabulation.”

“Rush thought we won — and so do I, by the way. I think we won substantially,” Trump said. “I don’t think that could have happened to a Democrat. You would have had riots going all over the place if that happened to a Democrat.”

And neither stepped in to correct Trump that there were skirmishes at state capitols across the country and an actual riot on Capitol Hill, egged on by his pleas to “fight like hell” to “stop the steal.”

Those questions will have to wait for a sequel.

Make sense of what matters in Washington. Sign up for the daily D.C. Brief newsletter.

Comments

Mumbai rains: Heavy waterlogging in Dadar, low-lying areas; route at Hindmata, Parel diverted https://ift.tt/30TQ9RI

Parts of Mumbai continued to receive downpour since early Monday. According to the details, transport and buses in several low-lying areas in the city were diverted, as some areas witnessed heavy waterlogging due to rains. Routes at Hindmata and Parel were also diverted. The BMC authorities had put barricades on roads and had blocked commuters due to heavy rains and waterlogging. Market areas in Dadar were waterlogged which posed a challenge for the locals.

Delhi: 27-year-old doctor dies of COVID-19 after month-long struggle https://ift.tt/39s6hOe

After a month-long struggle, a 27-year-old doctor has succumbed to the deadly novel coronavirus at the Sir Ganga Ram Hospital (SGRH) in New Delhi. Joginder Chaudhary had been battling the infection since June 28 after he was tested positive a day earlier.

New top story from Time: Caster Semenya Is Barred From Her Best Race. But She Won’t Give Up On Tokyo.

https://ift.tt/2R9s9c0 Caster Semenya’s fight continues. In February, the South African runner filed an appeal to the European Court of Human Rights, for the right to run in the Tokyo Olympics in her preferred event: the 800-m, a race in which Semenya is the two-time defending Olympic champ. In 2018 World Athletics, the global governing body for track and field, ruled that female athletes with differences of sex development, competing in races from 400 m to the mile, must reduce natural testosterone levels through medical intervention in order to run in those races. Semenya, who was born a woman and is legally recognized as a woman, has said that from around 2010 to 2015 she took birth control pills to lower her testosterone: she said she suffered from side effects like fevers and experience abdominal pain, among other symptoms. She has since refused to take any more medication to comply with the World Athletics rules. Semenya took her case to the Court of Arbitration for...

New top story from Time: As COVID-19 Surges in South Dakota, Medical Groups Urge Masks Despite Gov. Kristi Noem’s Skepticism

https://ift.tt/2JadCcd (SIOUX FALLS, S.D.) — South Dakota’s largest medical organizations on Tuesday launched a joint effort to promote mask-wearing to prevent the spread of the coronavirus as the state suffers through one of the nation’s worst outbreaks, a move that countered Gov. Kristi Noem’s position of casting doubt on the efficacy of wearing face coverings in public. As the number of cases, hospitalizations and deaths from COVID-19 have multiplied in recent weeks, the Republican governor has tried to downplay the severity of the virus , highlighting that most people don’t die from COVID-19. Noem, who has staked out a reputation on refusing to issue any mandates to stem the virus’ spread, has repeatedly countered recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to wear masks in public settings. Shortly after the Department of Health reported that the number of hospitalizations from COVID-19 broke records for the third straight day on Tuesday, peop...

5 things that make Perseverance NASA's strongest and smartest Mars rover yet https://ift.tt/3hIkHN6

After eight successful Mars landings, NASA is all set for another mission with its newest rover. The spacecraft Perseverance — set for liftoff this week — is NASA’s brawniest and brainiest Martian rover yet. It sports the latest landing tech, plus the most cameras and microphones ever assembled to capture the sights and sounds of Mars. Its super-sanitized sample return tubes — for rocks that could hold evidence of past Martian life — are the cleanest items ever bound for space. A helicopter is even tagging along for an otherworldly test flight.

FOX NEWS: Crossword Puzzle of the Week: July 28 Take Fox News' Crossword Puzzle of the Week and test your knowledge of the Olympics.

Crossword Puzzle of the Week: July 28 Take Fox News' Crossword Puzzle of the Week and test your knowledge of the Olympics. via FOX NEWS https://ift.tt/3zJBKaB

New top story from Time: A Woman of Color Cannot Save Your Workplace Culture

https://ift.tt/39GFaQC “The ideal candidate would be a woman of color.” I’ve been hearing this from several hiring managers lately, and something about it wasn’t sitting well. On the one hand, workplaces are finally confronting the lack of diversity in their ranks and getting explicit and intentional about what they need to do. On the other: WTF? For decades, white managers ascended, wrote mission statements without centering equity, built teams off existing networks—and now they are ready to be inclusive? The phenomenon isn’t new. Researchers call the expectations on women of color, specifically Black women, “ superwoman schema ”; others dub it an extension of “ strong Black woman syndrome .” We cheer and tweet the heroics of women of color (from caregiving within their families to the loftier, say, saving of democracy by getting out the vote) without mentioning the toll this burden takes. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] The idea of women of color now saving the modern...

New top story from Time: Why India’s Most Populous State Just Passed a Law Inspired by an Anti-Muslim Conspiracy Theory

https://ift.tt/3pZtgYR India’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh , introduced a law outlawing so-called “Love Jihad” on Tuesday, the first of at least five states led by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) that are considering new legislation targeting interfaith relationships in the world’s largest democracy. Love Jihad is a baseless conspiracy theory that Muslim men are attempting to surreptitiously shift India’s demographic balance by converting Hindu women to Islam through marriage. The narrative has been pushed by Hindu nationalist groups close to India’s ruling BJP since Prime Minister Narendra Modi was first elected in 2014. Since Modi came to power, his government has introduced several other measures that target India’s minority Muslim community. The conspiracy has received renewed attention after a Hindu woman in Haryana was murdered in October by a Muslim man who, her family said, had pressured her to convert and marry him. The new law was ...

21-year-old student jumps to death from 22nd floor of Ghaziabad highrise https://ift.tt/302bKs6

A 21-year-old man died after allegedly jumping from the 22nd floor of a residential condominium in Indirapuram locality in Ghaziabad on Monday, police said. According to police, the victim was under depression. However, no suicide note was recovered from the spot. Police said that the incident happened at one of the residential towers of Saya Zenith, a high-rise society in Ahinsa Khand II of Indirapuram. The family of the man was present at home when the incident occurred.

Covid-19 stressing you out? 8 ways you can sleep better https://ift.tt/2CNNFN2

No matter who and where you are, your circadian rhythm (the basic sleep-wake cycle or body clock) is the internal process that determines your physical, mental and behavioral changes throughout the day and night. Sleep is a critical part of this circadian rhythm and any disruption in the sleep cycle can affect your overall health. While getting sufficient sleep every night is important, many have reported difficulty in achieving it during the pandemic. A study published in 'Current Biology' in June 2020 revealed that even though people working from home during the pandemic are likely to be getting more sleep time, their sleep quality is often poor and disrupted.

My precise view

Search This Blog