Believing J6 Myths

Tom Jackman, Scott Clement, Emily Guskin and Spencer S. Hsu at WP:

Twenty-five percent of Americans say it is “probably” or “definitely” true that the FBI instigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, a false concept promoted by right-wing media and repeatedly denied by federal law enforcement, according to a new Washington Post-University of Maryland poll.

The Post-UMD poll finds a smaller 11 percent of the public overall thinks there is “solid evidence” that FBI operatives organized and encouraged the attack, while 13 percent say this is their “suspicion only.”

Among Republicans, 34 percent say the FBI organized and encouraged the insurrection, compared with 30 percent of independents and 13 percent of Democrats.

The results confirm that misinformation about Jan. 6 is widespread as the United States heads into a presidential election year, during a campaign in which the former president and leading 2024 Republican candidate Donald Trump has repeatedly expressed support for those who participated in the insurrection. Despite a detailed congressional investigation and more than 725 completed federal prosecutions of Jan. 6 participants that did not yield evidence of FBI involvement, a substantial minority of Americans still embrace conspiracy theories not unlike the ones that drove many rioters to storm the Capitol three years ago.


“The people that went there to express their views, to support Trump, were peaceful,” said Richard Baum, 61, an independent voter from Odessa, Tex. “The government implants were the violent ones: the FBI, the police people that were put in there, the antifa and BLM hired by George Soros; everybody knows that.”

The Post-UMD poll finds 39 percent of Americans who say Fox News is their primary news source believe the FBI organized and encouraged the Jan. 6 attack, compared with 16 percent of CNN or MSNBC viewers and 13 percent who get most of their news from ABC, CBS or NBC. The poll finds 44 percent of those who voted for Trump say the FBI instigated the attack.

Fox Audience and Economics

 From Pew:

According to Comscore TV Essentials® data, viewership decreased for CNN and MSNBC but increased for Fox News in 2022. The average audience (defined as the average number of TVs tuned to a program throughout a time period) for the prime news time slot (8 to 11 p.m.) decreased by 25% for CNN, from 1.1 million in 2021 to 828,000 in 2022. MSNBC’s audience declined by 6% over this period, from about 881,000 to 827,000. On the other hand, Fox News’ audience increased from 1.9 million in 2021 to 2.1 million in 2022, a 10% increase.

Newsmax, a relatively smaller cable news channel that gained prominence during the 2020 election, had an average audience of 129,000 in 2022, an 18% decline from 2021.

For the daytime news time slot (6 a.m. to 6 p.m.), CNN, MSNBC and Newsmax saw decreases to their average audiences in 2022 while Fox News saw a 12% increase.

...

Total revenue decreased for CNN and MSNBC and increased for Fox News in 2022, according to estimates from Kagan, a media research group in S&P Global Market Intelligence. CNN’s total revenue decreased by 5%, from $1.9 billion in 2021 to $1.8 billion in 2022. Similarly, MSNBC’s revenue fell from $977 million to $903 million, an 8% decrease. Fox News saw a 5% increase, from $3.1 billion in 2021 to $3.3 billion in 2022.

License (affiliate) fees, one of two main sources of revenue for the major cable channels, remained relatively stable for all three. Advertising revenue, these channels’ other main source of revenue, decreased by 13% for CNN and by 11% for MSNBC in 2022, while Fox News saw an 11% increase.

In 2022, Newsmax made $66 million in revenue, a 14% decrease from 2021. Since Newsmax had zero license fee revenue, virtually all of the channel’s revenue came from advertising.

Fox Strikes Again

Many posts have discussed Fox News.

Drew F. Lawrence at Military.com:

The Marine Corps worked behind the scenes last month in an attempt to convince Fox News to retract its false story claiming a Gold Star family was forced to pay $60,000 to ship the remains of a Marine killed in Afghanistan, according to emails obtained by Military.com.

A service spokesman notified the news network that it was pushing an incorrect story and accused it of using the grief of fallen Marine Sgt. Nicole Gee's family to draw in readers, the email exchanges, released through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Request, show. Fox News eventually deleted the story with no correction, and it never reached out to the Gee family with an apology as the Marine Corps requested, the family said.

The Fox News story came from Republican Rep. Cory Mills, a freshman congressman from Florida, who claimed Gee's next of kin were strapped with the $60,000 charge after a meeting with the families of Abbey Gate bombing victims, a suicide attack where 13 service members were killed outside of the Kabul airport in 2021.

Gee's family never paid a dollar to transport her remains, and the Marine Corps let Fox News know -- in no uncertain terms -- that the July 25 story was false in a series of emails over the following days.

"This headline correction is still misleading and your story is still false," Maj. James Stenger, the lead spokesperson for the Marine Corps, wrote to Fox News in an email after the publication changed the headline and body of the story in an attempt to soften the accusation.

"Using the grief of a family member of a fallen Marine to score cheap clickbait points is disgusting," Stenger wrote. The spokesman was one of several military officials frustrated with the story, according to the documents.

Oliver Darcy at CNN:

Fox News apologized Saturday to a Gold Star family for publishing a false story last month claiming that the family had to pay $60,000 to ship the remains of their fallen relative back from Afghanistan because the Pentagon refused to pay.

“The now unpublished story has been addressed internally and we sincerely apologize to the Gee family,” a Fox News spokesperson said in a statement, referencing the family of fallen Marine Sgt. Nicole Gee, who was one of 13 service members killed in a terror attack at the Kabul airport in 2021 while assisting with US withdrawal efforts.

...

Deleting an entire story is exceedingly rare in news media and is seen as a last-ditch measure if the entire premise of the article is incorrect. Deleting a story without offering readers an explanation or correction is widely considered to be unethical.

Trying to Get Fox to Do the Right Thing

 Former Fox executive Preston Padden at The Daily Beast:

In a months-long series of email exchanges, I tried to get Rupert to stop the false news on Fox News Channel. Without my knowledge, Fox produced those emails as part of discovery in the Dominion case. I would not otherwise share them here.

On Jan. 5, without a clue what would happen the next day, I sent Rupert the following email

It would be a great service to the Country that I know you love, and to the party, to record and saturate a spot with Sean, Tucker, Laura, etc. saying something like: ‘We will never stop fighting for Freedom and the American way of life and against extreme liberal policies. While we are frustrated just like you are, the facts are that President Trump and his lawyers have not produced any evidence of widespread voter fraud that would change the fact that Joe Biden was elected President on November 3. All of us at Fox will work tirelessly for you and to serve as a watchdog on the Biden Administration. Meanwhile, please wear a mask and get vaccinated so that we can crush the virus.’

I knew from earlier email exchanges that Rupert did not believe that the election had been stolen. This was his response:

“I’ll think about it. Perhaps something like that in a few days!”

From the finding below in Judge Davis’ Order we know that Rupert followed up on my suggestion on the same day:

On January 5, 2021, Rupert Murdoch emailed Ms. Scott [CEO of FNC] that it was suggested the ‘prime time three should independently or together say something like “the election is over and Joe Biden won.”’ Ms. Scott forwarded it to Ms. Cooper and said, ‘I told Rupert privately they are all there—we need to be careful about using the shows and pissing off the viewers but they know how to navigate.’

To my knowledge, no such statement ever was telecast.

Fox Settles

Sara Fischer at Axios:

Fox News' $787 million defamation settlement with Dominion Voting Systems ends one lawsuit over the airing of election lies, but there are plenty more to come.

Why it matters: In dodging a trial, Fox was able to spare its executives and hosts further embarrassment on the witness stand. But the agreement also set a new benchmark for how much Fox is willing to pay to make such suits go away....

State of play: Fox News and other networks face several other defamation lawsuits related to airing 2020 election lies.Most notably, Fox News faces a $2.7 billion case brought by election technology company Smartmatic. It also faces a lawsuit from former producer Abby Grossberg, who claims Fox News tried to manipulate her testimony during pre-trial discovery for the Dominion case.

...

In a statement responding to the settlement, Smartmatic lawyer Erik Connolly said, “Dominion’s litigation exposed some of the misconduct and damage caused by Fox’s disinformation campaign. Smartmatic will expose the rest."

Be smart: Smaller cable networks such as Newsmax and One America News (OAN) also face defamation lawsuits from Dominion, as do individuals including Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, Mike Lindell and Patrick Byrne.

Twenty Fox broadcasts and tweets Dominion says were defamatory

Fox hosts, producers, and executives privately disparate the election lies that the network was airing.

Fox and Election 2020

 Peter Baker at NYT reports that Fox News faced Trumpist criticism for correctly calling Arizona for Biden.

Typically, it is a point of pride for a news network to be the first to project election winners. But Fox is no typical news network, and in the days following the 2020 vote, it was besieged with angry protests not only from President Donald J. Trump’s camp but from its own viewers because it had called the battleground state of Arizona for Mr. Biden. Never mind that the call was correct; Fox executives worried that they would lose viewers to hard-right competitors like Newsmax.

And so, on Monday, Nov. 16, 2020, Suzanne Scott, the chief executive of Fox News Media, and Jay Wallace, the network’s president, convened a Zoom meeting for an extraordinary discussion with an unusual goal, according to a recording of the call reviewed by The New York Times: How to keep from angering the network’s conservative audience again by calling an election for a Democrat before the competition.

Maybe, the Fox executives mused, they should abandon the sophisticated new election-projecting system in which Fox had invested millions of dollars and revert to the slower, less accurate model. Or maybe they should base calls not solely on numbers but on how viewers might react. Or maybe they should delay calls, even if they were right, to keep the audience in suspense and boost viewership.

“Listen, it’s one of the sad realities: If we hadn’t called Arizona, those three or four days following Election Day, our ratings would have been bigger,” Ms. Scott said. “The mystery would have been still hanging out there.”

Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum, the two main anchors, suggested it was not enough to call a state based on numerical calculations, the standard by which networks have made such determinations for generations, but that viewer reaction should be considered. “In a Trump environment,” Ms. MacCallum said, “the game is just very, very different.”

Normals

 Axios Finish Line:

Three stats we find reassuring:

1. 75% of people in the U.S. never tweet.
2. On an average weeknight in January, just 1% of U.S. adults watched primetime Fox News (2.2 million). 0.5% tuned into MSNBC (1.15 million).
3. Nearly three times more Americans (56%) donated to charities during the pandemic than typically give money to politicians and parties (21%).

The bottom line: Every current trend suggests politics will get more toxic before it normalizes. But the silent majority gives us hope beyond the nuttiness.

Accepting COVID Misinformation, Rejecting Science

From the COVID States Project:

We asked respondents to mark four popular vaccine misinformation claims as true or false. When in doubt, they could also select “Not sure.” Here are some of the patterns we found:

• While we observe a decline in believing misinformation since the early days of COVID-19 vaccination efforts in 2021, 16% of Americans still hold vaccine misperceptions. Close to half (46%) are uncertain about the veracity of at least one vaccine misinformation statement.

• People aged 25 to 44, parents with children under 18, Americans who did not go to college, and Republicans are most likely to hold vaccine misperceptions, with over 20% of the respondents in each group marking at least one misinformation statement as true.

• Early in the pandemic, people with high socioeconomic status were amongst the most likely to hold vaccine misperceptions. Over time,people with graduate degrees and those with high income made large shifts towards rejecting misinformation. The groups least likely to espouse false claims now include graduate degree holders, Democrats, Asian Americans, and those over 65 years of age.

•  A third of the people who believe vaccine misinformation statements are aware that scientific and medical experts reject those claims as false.  Additionally, over a fifth of Americans (21%) are aware that science considers a particular claim to be false, but still say they are not sure whether to believe it or not. 

• People who think they know a lot about COVID-19 vaccines are more likely to hold vaccine misperceptions. Among those who claimed to have expert knowledge, 48% believed false claims compared to only 16% of those who said they knew almost nothing about vaccines. 

• Compared to those with no vaccine misperceptions, Americans who believe misinformation claims are less likely to trust the government, news media, science, and medicine. That pattern is reversed with regard to trust in Fox News and Donald Trump.

• Vaccine misinformation beliefs, uncertainty about false claims, trust in government and science remain among the most important predictors of getting vaccinated, even after accounting for demographic and other factors

people with

graduate degrees and those with high income made large shifts towards

rejecting misinformation. The groups least likely to espouse false claims now

include graduate degree holders, Democrats, Asian Americans, and those

over 65 years of age.

Misleading Graphs on Labor Force Participation

Philip Bump at WP:

Earlier this month, [Tucker] Carlson ran a segment focused on the decline of men in the workforce. To bolster his point, part of his broader effort to cast American men as endlessly embattled — “The thing about men is they kind of need to work,” he said in the segment — he showed graphs of the labor force participation rate by gender. (That’s the percentage of working-age Americans who are working or looking for work.)

Here, as reported by the Daily Beast, is what Carlson showed.

Man line go down; woman line go up. Done and done. Cable news success.

Yet there are two big problems here. The more immediate is that the vertical axis on the female participation rate graph is mislabeled. It doesn’t range from 65 to 90 since the labor force participation rate for women has never been higher than 60.3 percent. It’s not really clear what happened here. Notice that the grid lines don’t actually line up with the axis labels anyway. It’s just a mess.

But that leads to the bigger problem. The labor force participation rate for men has always been higher than that of women. Here are the same data, with two changes: a vertical axis that runs from 0 to 100 and both measures shown at once. There is still a long-term decline in the participation rate for men — but also for women over the past decade or so.

Stirewalt on Self-Validating Coverage

AT Fox News, Chris Stirewalt called Arizona for Biden on election night.  Fox recently fired him. He writes at LAT:

Whatever the platform, the competitive advantage belongs to those who can best habituate consumers, which in the stunted, data-obsessed thinking of our time, means avoiding at almost any cost impinging on the reality so painstakingly built around them. As outlets have increasingly prioritized habituation over information, consumers have unsurprisingly become ever more sensitive to any interruption of their daily diet.

The rebellion on the populist right against the results of the 2020 election was partly a cynical, knowing effort by political operators and their hype men in the media to steal an election or at least get rich trying. But it was also the tragic consequence of the informational malnourishment so badly afflicting the nation.

When I defended the call for Biden in the Arizona election, I became a target of murderous rage from consumers who were furious at not having their views confirmed.

Having been cosseted by self-validating coverage for so long, many Americans now consider any news that might suggest that they are in error or that their side has been defeated as an attack on them personally. The lie that Trump won the 2020 election wasn’t nearly as much aimed at the opposing party as it was at the news outlets that stated the obvious, incontrovertible fact.

Right-Wing Media 2021

Sara Fischer at Axios:

Driving the news: Fox News said Monday it will replace its 7 p.m. evening news hour hosted by Martha MacCallum with a right-wing opinion show.

• The move was made in response to ratings pressure, CNN reports.
• Fox has faced growing competition from fringe-right cable news networks like Newsmax and OANN — networks that look more like Fox's opinion programming than its news shows.On the other side, Cumulus Media, home to many right-wing radio personalities, has told hosts to stop suggesting the election was stolen, the Washington Post reports.

Brian Philips, EVP of content for Cumulus, wrote in an internal memo obtained by Inside Music Media that the company “will not tolerate any suggestion that the election has not ended. The election has been resolved and there are no alternate acceptable ‘paths.’ ”Be smart: Fox News' update is notable given that other right-wing entities owned by Rupert Murdoch have decided to publicly disavow the president.
...

What to watch: The increase of political money being poured into media will also impact whether and how this split evolves.

• Epoch Times ... saw its revenues double over the past two years despite efforts by Tech platforms to limit its distribution, Axios' Lachlan Markay reports.

Scrolling Alone

Derek Thompson at The Atlantic:

Like Putnam’s beloved bowling alleys, cinemas are an example of the decline of semiweekly gatherings in the United States—even if they’re less chatty establishments. In the 1940s, the average American bought more than 30 movie tickets a year, regularly packing into theaters with scores of strangers. In the past few years, that figure fell below four. In 2020, movie tickets sold per-person will fall below one—possibly for the first time since the late 1800s. The decision by Warner Bros. will likely encourage other entertainment companies, such as Disney, to funnel more of their marquee content to streaming services in the next few years. And the result could be a death spiral for movie theaters as we know them, as the film industry continues its shift from a public, ticketed affair to a private, living-room experience.

...

This media shift—from the scarce and communal, to the abundant and privatized—also describes the evolution of the news industry. In the past 20 years, newspaper circulation, advertising revenue, and employment has cratered. But overall, news—that is, sources of new information, of varying truthiness—didn’t decline; it exploded. The web created a phalanx of news publishers, not just websites but also Facebook pages, Instagram personalities, newsletters, podcasts, and so on; at the same time, Google and Facebook duopolized digital advertising, creating a situation where publishers were multiplying as advertising declined.

In ecology, the term niche partitioning describes the way that competing species become hyper-specialized in an attempt to co-exist in an environment with scarce resources. I think that’s what’s happening in the news industry. As the number of competing publishers increases, it makes sense for each of them to carve out an ecological niche. This niches-get-riches race leads logically to a set of more outlets that embrace a more unabashedly partisan perspective—just as they did in the late 1800s.

One might assume that polarization is what happens to people cut off from information. But the truth is closer to the opposite: More information means more polarization. Research shows that access to broadband internet in the U.S. has in many cases increased various measures of polarization, as the web introduces voters to a bigger menu of partisan news from which voters select the sites that match their political tastes.

We’ve seen this phenomenon accelerate in 2020. Four years ago, most people would have said there were three major cable news networks: the center-left one (CNN), the liberal alternative (MSNBC), and the conservative juggernaut (Fox News). But in the past few months, the conservative-news monolith has shattered. Since the election, Newsmax TV and the One America News Network have stepped up ... And behold, niche partitioning works: Last week, Newsmax rode the election-conspiracy story to its first-ever ratings win over Fox

Russian Efforts to Divide Americans

Craig Timberg and  Isaac Stanley-Becker at WP:

Four years after Russian operatives used social media in a bid to exacerbate racial divisions in the United States and suppress Black voter turnout, such tactics have spread across a wide range of deceptive online campaigns operated from numerous nations — including from within the United States itself.

The potency and persistence of the racial playbook was highlighted this week when Twitter deleted an account featuring a profile photo of a young Black man claiming to be a former Black Lives Matter protester who switched his allegiance to the Republican Party.

The account, @WentDemtoRep, offered an online testimonial Sunday — the eve of a Republican convention featuring prominent African Americans challenging allegations of racism against President Trump — and was retweeted 22,000 times. Disinformation researcher Marc Owen Jones, of Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Qatar, found the tweet had 39,000 likes just 19 hours after it was posted.

On June 18, Jeff Seldin reported at VOA:

Russia appears to be intensifying its focus on police enforcement issues in the United States, using popular reactions to protests that have gripped the nation as part of a larger propaganda campaign to divide Americans ahead of the U.S. presidential election in November.

The death of African American George Floyd in police custody and the ensuing U.S. protests have for weeks dominated media coverage from Russian state-sponsored outlets like RT and Sputnik.

Only now, it seems that Russia, through the English-language RT in particular, is reaching out to U.S. police officers and union officials, in what some U.S. officials and lawmakers say is an effort to further inflame tensions.

...
Law enforcement officers and organizations who spoke with VOA about their interactions with RT described being caught off guard.

“We had no idea about the ties they have,” a representative for lawofficer.com, a website catering to law enforcement officers, told VOA about being approached by the Russian television news channel. “They actually told us they were out of Britain.”

RT contacted lawofficer.com seeking permission to republish an essay by Tulsa, Oklahoma Police Major Travis Yates about the frustration he and many of his police colleagues have been feeling as a result of the protests of police practices, titled, “America, We Are Leaving.”

RT also booked Yates for an on-air interview through its London bureau.

“If I had any idea whatsoever, I obviously never would have done it,” Yates told VOA when asked if he knew about RT’s Russian connection.

Since Yates’ essay was first published, it has been shared thousands of times on social media and even helped get him an appearance on Fox News’
"Tucker Carlson Tonight."

Virus News

Mark Jurkowitz and Amy Mitchell at Pew:

Coverage of COVID-19 has dominated the news and resulted in skyrocketing ratings for the nation’s cable news networks. And according to a survey conducted March 10-16, 2020, as a part of Pew Research Center’s Election News Pathways project, responses to that coverage and the pandemic itself vary notably among Americans who identify Fox News, MSNBC or CNN (the three major cable news networks featured in the analysis) as their main source of political news.

In particular, the responses to COVID-19 news from those whose main source for political news is MSNBC or Fox News are strikingly different. The views of those who identify CNN as their main news source most often fit somewhere between the two.

One such difference emerges around knowledge and understanding of the pandemic. The group who names MSNBC as their main news source is far more likely than the Fox News group to answer correctly that the coronavirus originated in nature rather than a laboratory and that it will take a year or more for a vaccine to become available. On both questions, the portion in the CNN group to answer correctly falls between the MSNBC and Fox News numbers. This analysis comes from a survey of 8,914 U.S. adults who are members of the Center’s American Trends Panel.

Media Trust and Distrust

From Pew:

As the U.S. enters a heated 2020 presidential election year, a new Pew Research Center report finds that Republicans and Democrats place their trust in two nearly inverse news media environments.

Overall, Republicans and Republican-leaning independents view many heavily relied on sources across a range of platforms as untrustworthy. At the same time, Democrats and independents who lean Democratic see most of those sources as credible and rely on them to a far greater degree, according to the survey of 12,043 U.S. adults conducted Oct. 29–Nov. 11, 2019, on Pew Research Center’s American Trends Panel.

These divides are even more pronounced between conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats.

Moreover, evidence suggests that partisan polarization in the use and trust of media sources has widened in the past five years. A comparison to a similar study by the Center of web-using U.S. adults in 2014 finds that Republicans have grown increasingly alienated from most of the more established sources, while Democrats’ confidence in them remains stable, and in some cases, has strengthened.

The study asked about use of, trust in, and distrust of 30 different news sources for political and election news. While it is impossible to represent the entire crowded media space, the outlets, which range from network television news to Rush Limbaugh to the New York Times to the Washington Examiner to HuffPost, were selected to represent popular media brands across a range of platforms.

Greater portions of Republicans express distrust than express trust of 20 of the 30 sources asked about. Only seven outlets generate more trust than distrust among Republicans – including Fox News and the talk radio programs of hosts Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh.

For Democrats, the numbers are almost reversed. Greater portions of Democrats express trust than express distrust in 22 of the 30 sources asked about. Only eight generate more distrust than trust – including Fox News, Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh.

Quitting Fox

Lt. Col. Ralph Peters (ret.) on quitting Fox News:

On March 1st, I informed Fox that I would not renew my contract. The purpose of this message to all of you is twofold:

First, I must thank each of you for the cooperation and support you've shown me over the years. Those working off-camera, the bookers and producers, don't often get the recognition you deserve, but I want you to know that I have always appreciated the challenges you face and the skill with which you master them.

Second, I feel compelled to explain why I have to leave. Four decades ago, I took an oath as a newly commissioned officer. I swore to "support and defend the Constitution," and that oath did not expire when I took off my uniform. Today, I feel that Fox News is assaulting our constitutional order and the rule of law, while fostering corrosive and unjustified paranoia among viewers. Over my decade with Fox, I long was proud of the association. Now I am ashamed.

In my view, Fox has degenerated from providing a legitimate and much-needed outlet for conservative voices to a mere propaganda machine for a destructive and ethically ruinous administration. When prime-time hosts--who have never served our country in any capacity--dismiss facts and empirical reality to launch profoundly dishonest assaults on the FBI, the Justice Department, the courts, the intelligence community (in which I served) and, not least, a model public servant and genuine war hero such as Robert Mueller--all the while scaremongering with lurid warnings of "deep-state" machinations-- I cannot be part of the same organization, even at a remove. To me, Fox News is now wittingly harming our system of government for profit.

As a Russia analyst for many years, it also has appalled me that hosts who made their reputations as super-patriots and who, justifiably, savaged President Obama for his duplicitous folly with Putin, now advance Putin's agenda by making light of Russian penetration of our elections and the Trump campaign. Despite increasingly pathetic denials, it turns out that the "nothing-burger" has been covered with Russian dressing all along. And by the way: As an intelligence professional, I can tell you that the Steele dossier rings true--that's how the Russians do things.. The result is that we have an American president who is terrified of his counterpart in Moscow.

I do not apply the above criticisms in full to Fox Business, where numerous hosts retain a respect for facts and maintain a measure of integrity (nor is every host at Fox News a propaganda mouthpiece--some have shown courage). I have enjoyed and valued my relationship with Fox Business, and I will miss a number of hosts and staff members. You're the grown-ups.

Also, I deeply respect the hard-news reporters at Fox, who continue to do their best as talented professionals in a poisoned environment. These are some of the best men and women in the business..

So, to all of you: Thanks, and, as our president's favorite world leader would say, "Das vidanya."

Fake News Conveyor Belt

Many posts have dealt with fake news.

The New  York Times offers a case study of how fake news from Russia makes it into the American mass media:

Cable is Doing Okay

Pew reports that cable news has been doing well, especially amid the 2016 campaign.

News Sources in Campaign 2016

Pew reports:

In the coming days, Americans will follow a single event across a variety of media channels: the inauguration of Donald Trump as the 45th president of the United States. If the public’s media habits during the campaign are any indicator, it is likely that Trump and Hillary Clinton voters will be learning about the inauguration from very different media outlets. According to a new Pew Research Center survey, Americans who say they voted for Trump in the general election relied heavily on Fox News as their main source of election news leading up to the 2016 election, whereas Clinton voters named an array of different sources, with no one source named by more than one-in-five of her supporters. The survey was conducted Nov. 29-Dec. 12, 2016, among 4,183 adults who are members of Pew Research Center’s nationally representative American Trends Panel.

When voters were asked to write in their “main source” for election news, four-in-ten Trump voters named Fox News.1 The next most-common main source among Trump voters, CNN, was named by only 8% of his voters.

Clinton voters, however, did not coalesce around any one source. CNN was named more than any other, but at 18% had nowhere near the dominance that Fox News had among Trump voters. Instead, the choices of Clinton voters were more spread out. MSNBC, Facebook, local television news, NPR, ABC, The New York Times and CBS were all named by between 5% and 9% of her voters.

Conservative Media Complex

Oliver Darcy writes at Business Insider:

The roots of the conservative news media industrial complex came in the 1990s with the rise of three key forces: Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and Matt Drudge.

All broke ground and revolutionized their respective platforms: Fox News opinion programming on TV, Limbaugh on radio, and Drudge on the web.

In the years that followed, many emulated their successes. What Limbaugh did with talk radio paved the way for hosts like Hannity, Glenn Beck, Michael Savage, Laura Ingraham, Mark Levin, and more. And what Drudge did with the internet helped spawn a slew of conservative websites. Breitbart, TheBlaze, The Daily Caller, Hot Air, and Townhall came online to serve a right-leaning audience with an insatiable appetite for news told through a conservative lens.

Republican pols went along at first.

"What it became, essentially, was they were preaching this is the only place you can get news. This is the only place you can trust. All other media outlets are lying to you. So you need to come to us," said Ted Newton, president of Gravity Strategic Communications and former communications adviser to 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney.

"And so in an attempt to capture an audience, they almost made them slaves to those news outlets. So there is a whole group of people who will only watch Fox, who will only read Breitbart. And they are living in a bubble," he added.

Toward the end of President George W. Bush's second term, the symbiotic relationship showed signs of souring. Establishment figures inside the GOP supported immigration reform and a bailout at the height of the 2008 recession. Conservative talkers didn't.

As the years progressed, it became increasingly clear the entertainment wing of the party had seized control. Republicans tried to play friendly with them, giving credence to the industry by lavishing praise, submitting editorials, and granting access, but more and more they were whipped by media figures on the right for supposedly not being conservative enough.