William Barr told Murdoch to 'muzzle' Fox News
Trump critic, new book says
Judge Andrew Napolitano said Trump should be impeached
Martin
Pengelly
@MartinPengelly
Sat 22 Aug
2020 15.02 BST
The
attorney general, William Barr, told Rupert Murdoch to “muzzle” Andrew
Napolitano, a prominent Fox News personality who became a critic of Donald
Trump, according to a new book about the rightwing TV network.
Barr’s
meeting with Murdoch, at the media mogul’s New York home in October 2019, was
widely reported at the time, with speculation surrounding its subject.
According to Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News and the Dangerous Distortion of
Truth, by CNN media reporter Brian Stelter, subjects covered included media
consolidation and criminal justice reform.
“But it was
also about Judge Andrew Napolitano.”
Stelter’s
in-depth look at Fox News, its fortunes under Trump and its links to his White
House will be published on Tuesday. The Guardian obtained a copy.
In early
2019 it was reported that Napolitano, a New Jersey superior court judge who
joined Fox News in 1998, told friends he had been on Trump’s shortlist for the
supreme court. But he broke ranks later in the year, labeling Trump’s
approaches to Ukraine, seeking political dirt on rivals, “both criminal and
impeachable behavior”.
“The
criminal behavior to which Trump has admitted,” Napolitano wrote, in a column
dated 3 October, “is much more grave than anything alleged or unearthed by
Special Counsel Robert Mueller, and much of what Mueller revealed was
impeachable.”
Citing an
unnamed source, Stelter writes that Trump “was so incensed by the judge’s TV
broadcasts that he had implored Barr to send Rupert a message in person … about
‘muzzling the judge’. [Trump] wanted the nation’s top law enforcement official
to convey just how atrocious Napolitano’s legal analysis had been.”
Barr has
been widely accused of riding roughshod over the rule of law, in service of
Trump and his own authoritarian view of the presidency.
Though
Barr’s words to Murdoch “carried a lot of weight”, Stelter writes, “no one was
explicitly told to take Napolitano off the air”. Instead, Stelter reports,
Napolitano found digital resources allocated elsewhere, saw a slot on a daytime
show disappear, and was not included in coverage of the impeachment process.
In
Stelter’s telling, Napolitano thought he was being kept off air by “25-year-old
producers” who didn’t think viewers could handle his analysis. Stelter,
however, says an unnamed “twentysomething staffer” confirmed that one host,
Maria Bartiromo, would only book Napolitano to discuss non-Trump topics,
because he would upset Bartiromo too much if he criticised the president.
Fox News’
audience, of course, remains loyal to Trump as his campaign for re-election
continues. Some Fox employees, Stelter writes, “justified the benching of the
judge by claiming that viewers hated him: ‘Why are we going to book someone who
kills our ratings?’”
Napolitano
has continued to appear on Fox News and to publish opinion columns. He has
remained critical of Trump, for example slamming the actions of federal
officers sent to confront protesters in Portland, Oregon; opposing attempts to
provide coronavirus relief without congressional involvement; and saying Senate
Republicans should have called new witnesses in the president’s impeachment
trial.
He has also
had harsh words for Barr, for example calling his conduct in the case of Trump
ally Roger Stone “Stalinistic”; blasting his handling of the Mueller report to
Trump’s advantage; and hitting him for “insulting” Congress.
Napolitano
did, however, back Barr’s attempt to drop charges against Michael Flynn,
Trump’s first national security adviser who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI
about contacts with Russian officials.
FOX NEWS
“HANNITY HAS SAID TO ME MORE THAN ONCE, ‘HE’S CRAZY’”:
FOX NEWS STAFFERS FEEL TRAPPED IN THE TRUMP CULT
Inside the network staffers are cringing, and even
Trump’s “shadow chief of staff” has his doubts. “If you were hearing what I’m
hearing, you’d be vaping too,” Sean Hannity told a colleague during Trump’s
early days.
BY BRIAN
STELTER
AUGUST 20,
2020
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/08/sean-hannity-fox-news-staffers-feel-trapped-in-trump-cult
Landing an
interview with a president used to be a big deal. Negotiations between a
network producer and the White House press office could drag on for months. No
detail was too small to haggle over: background, time of day, exact number of
minutes. Presidential sit-downs were the pinnacles of many news anchors’
careers.
No more.
Just as he has bulldozed so many political norms, Donald Trump has turned the
presidential TV interview into a joke. Fox News lets him call in for talk
radio-style rant sessions, the length of which are a punch line among
rank-and-file Fox staffers who secretly despise him despite working for his
media machine. “When Trump was booked for 8:10, and we had an assignment for
8:40, we didn’t bother writing it, because we knew he’d talk until the end of
the hour,” a producer for Fox & Friends told me.
He called
the “Friends” and Jeanine Pirro and Sean Hannity and Maria Bartiromo. Every so
often he’d consent to an on-camera chat, but he liked the phone. It made him
seem busy when he wasn’t. The interviews, if they can really be called that,
were subject to his whims, causing no small amount of competition among the
Trump bootlickers at Fox. Stars were known to slip ratings reports to the
president to make their own shows look more impressive than those of their
in-house rivals. Sometimes interviews were suddenly offered to hosts when Trump
heard them say something flattering on TV. One personality rushed to the
airport for a cross-country flight when a sit-down suddenly materialized. Other
times the bookings were simply a product of who had bent Trump’s ear most recently:
There were side deals brokered during stopovers at his golf club and pitches
made during strategy calls.“Why don’t you call in tomorrow?”
More often
than not, he did just that. Trump needed Fox to a degree that almost no one
understood. He depended on propagandists like Hannity to keep the walls of his
alternative reality intact.
That’s why,
on March 26, 2020, the president was scheduled to call into Hannity’s show at 9
p.m. sharp. Nine o’clock couldn’t come soon enough for Trump—his newly
established daily press briefings on the COVID-19 crisis were proving to be a
disaster. That day, he’d gone before the cameras at 5:30 p.m. and told the
public to “relax”; shared his affection for Tom Brady; and attacked the “corrupt”
news media. “I wish the news could be real,” he told the journalists who were
spread out in the briefing room, respecting social-distancing guidelines.
Trump, of course, did no such thing. The country was two weeks into a shutdown
of unprecedented proportions. He complained about it; mused about filling the
church pews on Easter; and stood uncomfortably close to his coronavirus task
force members.
After 39
minutes the president left the briefing early, ordered dinner, and waited for
his turn on Hannity. The power imbalance was something to behold: He had the
joint chiefs and the cabinet and any number of world leaders at his beck and
call. He could talk to any scientist or public health expert he wanted. But
when it came to a Fox interview, he was just another caller waiting to be
patched into the control room.
Hannity
started the show with his usual sermon about Democrats endangering the country.
He ripped into New York governor Andrew Cuomo, whose brother, Chris, not
coincidentally anchored a rival show on CNN in the same time slot, and Mayor
Bill de Blasio. Then, a good 20 minutes into his show, he finally prepared to
welcome his guest.
“Is he
there?” Hannity asked his producers. He heard nothing and momentarily freaked
out, waiting for the control room to tell him what to do.
Then came
the voice of Fox’s very own God: “I am, I’m right here. Hi, Sean.”
“Mr.
President!” Hannity exclaimed. “Thank you…”
And they
were off. Trump began by flattering Hannity, claiming he’d postponed a critical
call with Chinese President Xi Jinping just to get on air. He said, “I am
talking to him at 10:30, right after this call.” He really did keep the Chinese
president waiting, which irked Beijing, a White House source told me. But the
rest of the Hannity interview was a love-in and a lie-fest. Lower-level
staffers could mock the misinformation all they wanted, and they did,
copiously. But they were powerless. The prime-time stars held the power, and
management had no control over prime time.
The day
after their televised chat, the president called Hannity with a question:
“How’d we do?”
Hannity
knew his real meaning was, “How did we rate?”
In the
midst of a crippling pandemic, on a day when another 400-plus Americans would
die, the president wanted to know about his ratings.
Sean
Hannity was the most powerful person at Fox in the Trump age. When people asked
who was in charge of the channel, he said, “Me.” And most people at the channel
agreed with him.
He worked
from home most days, long before it was required due to the pandemic, thanks to
a state-of-the-art studio in the basement of his $10.5 million mansion, 38 long
miles from Manhattan, in a village on the North Shore of Long Island. There was
only one way in and one way out of his village, and a police station that kept
track of every car that drove by. Billy Joel lived half a mile down the road.
Hannity was close to his favorite fishing spots and the airstrip where he kept
his private jet. He had no trouble affording all this; he banks an estimated
$43 million per year.
Hannity’s
Long Island mansion and his oceanfront Naples, Florida, penthouse were two
über-expensive symbols of how Roger Ailes changed his life. I viewed Hannity as
a living connection to Fox’s past, the only prime-time host who was there on
launch day and is still there nearly 25 years later. But he definitely wasn’t
one to dwell on the past. Every day was a new war.
Hannity
played his part masterfully. But his friends told me he was burnt out for long
stretches of the Trump presidency. Being the president’s “shadow chief of
staff,” as he was known around the White House, could be a thrill, but it was
also a serious burden. Hannity counseled Trump at all hours of the day; one of
his confidants said the president treated Hannity like Melania, a wife in a
sexless marriage. Arguably, he treated Hannity better than Melania. Hannity’s
producers marveled at his influence and access. “It’s a powerful thing to be
someone’s consigliere,” one producer said. “I hear Trump talk at rallies, and I
hear Sean,” a family friend commented.
Hannity
chose this life, so no one felt sorry for him, but the stress took its toll.
“Hannity would tell you, off-off-off the record, that Trump is a batshit crazy
person,” one of his associates said. Another friend concurred: “Hannity has
said to me more than once, ‘he’s crazy.’”
But
Hannity’s commitment to GOP priorities and to his own business model meant he
could never say any of this publicly. If one of his friends went on the record
quoting Hannity questioning Trump’s mental fitness, that would be the end of
the friendship.
Early on in
the Trump age, Hannity gained weight and vaped incessantly, which some members
of his inner circle blamed on Trump-related stress. “If you were hearing what
I’m hearing, you’d be vaping too,” Hannity told a colleague. He was sensitive
to trolls’ comments about the extra weight, especially from his chest up; that’s
all viewers saw of him most nights, when he was live from his palace. He
doubled up on his workouts and slimmed back down.
Hannity
swore that no one knew the truth about his relationship with Trump. He lashed
out at people, like yours truly, who reported on it. And he certainly didn’t
disclose his role in Trumpworld the way a media ethicist would recommend. But
once in a while the curtain slipped and his own colleagues pointed out the
extraordinary position he held. As the coronavirus crisis deepened in March,
Geraldo Rivera said to Hannity on the air, “I want you to tell the president,
when you talk to him tonight, that Geraldo says ‘Mr. President, for the good of
the nation, stop shaking hands.’”
Needless to
say, that’s not how Hannity’s calls with Trump actually went. They were instead
a stream of grievance and gossip. Trump was a run-on sentence, so prone to
rambling that “I barely get a word in,” Hannity told one of his allies. He
sometimes spoke with the president before the show and again afterward, usually
in the 10 p.m. hour, when Trump rated his guests and recommended talking points
and themes for the following day. Trump was just like the rest of Hannity’s
viewers: He wanted more of Gregg Jarrett on the show, more of Dan Bongino, more
of Newt Gingrich—the toadiest toads possible.
In the
Trump age, left-wing blogs filled up with stories about families torn apart by
a loved one’s Hannity addiction. I heard those stories from Fox staffers too:
Some of their relatives resented what they did for a living. They made excuses,
mumbling that they were simply giving the people what they wanted. “I feel like
Fox is being held hostage by its audience,” a veteran staffer said. “The
audience has been RADICALIZED,” a longtime commentator texted me, in all caps,
as he scrolled through his Twitter feed after a live shot on the daytime show
America’s Newsroom. The amount of vitriol shocked him. Any break from Trump was
penalized. Nuanced debates about the role of government and taxation and
immigration were distilled to a single question: Were you with Trump or against
him?
Hannity
deserved a big share of the blame for this state of affairs. But despite that,
and despite the fact that he was rarely at headquarters, Hannity was well-liked
around Fox. Colleagues described him as a big-hearted family guy. He paid
bonuses to his staff out of his own deep pockets. He ordered meals and care packages
to the homes of colleagues who lost loved ones. He even offered to hire a
private investigator when an acquaintance died in a mysterious crash. When the
network descended on New Hampshire for primary election coverage, Hannity
footed the bill for the open bar. A member of Sean’s production crew, a
Democrat, told me, “I want to fucking hate him so bad. But he’s so nice to me.”
I believed
him. But I struggled to square Hannity’s reputation with the man I saw on TV
and occasionally in person. While deep into the research for this book in
December 2019, I ran into Hannity at a holiday party hosted by the TV-news
tracking website Mediaite. We were upstairs at the Lambs Club, a stately
Manhattan restaurant wrapped with red leather banquettes on 44th Street.
Hannity greeted me by putting both his hands on my shoulders and exclaiming:
“Humpty!” His nickname for me was Humpty Dumpty. I asked if he ever felt bad
about the name-calling. “No,” he said. He took his hands off my shoulders and
moved toward the bar.
It was
eight o’clock, and Hannity worked the room like a pro, dressed down in a
Fox-branded hoodie. He hugged CNN’s Alisyn Camerota and chatted with media
reporters and even said hi to Trump antagonist George Conway. This room was the
embodiment of the so-called “media mob” he attacked every weeknight—and he
looked like he didn’t want to leave it. I wondered what Hannity’s viewers would
think. At 8:30 his P.R. person pushed him toward the door, insisting he had to
get to the studio for his nine o’clock show. I later realized that the P.R.
person had lied—he had pretaped his show before coming to the party.
Those were
the pre-social distancing days, when Hannity could still fraternize with the
enemy. Months later, Hannity dismissed coronavirus “hysteria” and bashed
Democrats who raised alarms about the virus. In the words of one Kansas City
resident’s FCC complaint, Hannity “has misled his elderly viewers on the risk
of pandemic virus. They are most at risk.” Hannity, of course, insisted that he
always took the virus seriously. But the transcripts proved otherwise.
There are
dozens of reasons why the United States lagged so far behind in preparations
for the pandemic. Some are cultural, some are economic, some are political. But
there is no doubt that one of the reasons is the Trump–Fox feedback loop. When
the virus silently spread, some of Fox’s biggest stars denied and downplayed
the threat.
Trump
echoed them, and they echoed back. “The thing that’s going to end this is the
warmer weather,” Greg Gutfeld said on February 24. “One day—it’s like a
miracle—it will disappear,” Trump said on February 27. Fox’s longest-tenured
medical analyst, Dr. Marc Siegel, told Hannity on March 6, “at worst, at worst,
worst case scenario, it could be the flu.”
This was
shockingly irresponsible stuff—and Fox executives knew it, because by the
beginning of March, they were taking precautions that belied Siegel’s claim,
canceling an event for hundreds of advertisers, instituting deep cleanings of
the office, and putting a work-from-home plan in place. Fox’s most vociferous
critics said the network had blood on its hands. An advocacy group in
Washington State compiled this information and filed suit against Fox. (That
lawsuit was ultimately dismissed.) Some Fox staffers privately admitted that
the don’t-worry tone of the talking heads was harmful. “Hazardous to our
viewers,” “dangerous,” and “unforgivable” are some of the phrases Fox News
staffers used to describe the network’s early coverage of the coronavirus
pandemic.
The
contrast between Fox’s public face and the private “resistance” has existed
ever since Trump upended the presidential race five years ago. It’s the reason
why I decided to write a book about the network and its unprecedented alliance
with the White House. In all I spoke with more than 140 staffers at Fox, plus
180 former staffers and others with direct ties to the network. Their
frustration was palpable. Staffers described a TV network that had gone off the
rails. Some even said the place that they worked, that they cashed paychecks
from, had become dangerous to democracy. They felt like the news division had
been squeezed out in favor of pro-Trump blowhards.
Most of the
insiders acknowledged that Fox News was always, on one level, a political
project, but many said they were shocked by how thoroughly Fox and the GOP had
been merged by Trump, Hannity, and a handful of other power players.
“We
surrendered,” one anchor said with remorse in his voice. “We just surrendered.”
“What does
Trump have on Fox?” another anchor asked, convinced there was a conspiracy at
play.
A lot of
people I spoke to were desperate to talk. Others were terrified. Ailes made
everyone paranoid and punished those he suspected of leaking. That same fear of
retribution was still very real in the post-Ailes years. Employees suspected
their work phones were tapped and assumed their emails were monitored by management.
I cannot overstate the level of paranoia among Fox employees.
Most of the
sources only spoke on condition of anonymity, citing Fox’s nondisclosure
agreements and other rules against speaking with outside members of the media.
This was especially true for on-air talent. I laughed several times when I
heard Fox stars bemoaning the use of anonymous sources on air, knowing those
very same people were confidential sources. After all, that’s how this business
works.
Copyright ©
2020 by Brian Stelter. From the forthcoming book HOAX: Donald Trump, Fox News,
and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth by Brian Stelter to be published by One
Signal Publishers/Atria Books, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Printed
by permission.
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