Monday, Jan 20th
Last update12:00:45 AM GMT
Journalism Glance
American voters must choose between three sharply divergent visions of the future.
The incumbent president, Donald Trump, is clear about where he is guiding the Republican Party — white nativism at home and America First unilateralism abroad, brazen corruption, escalating culture wars, a judiciary stacked with ideologues and the veneration of a mythological past where the hierarchy in American society was defined and unchallenged.
Fox News’s Chris Wallace on Sunday grilled White House national security adviser Robert O’Brien on President Trump’s claim that the U.S. killed Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani to avert an imminent attack on four U.S. embassies, which lawmakers say was never mentioned in a briefing by representatives of the Trump administration.
“It does seem to be a contradiction. He’s telling Laura Ingraham [about imminent attacks], but in a 75-minute classified briefing, your top national security people never mentioned this to members of Congress. Why not?” Wallace asked O’Brien on “Fox News Sunday.”
“I wasn’t at the briefing, and I don’t know how the Q&A went back and forth. Sometimes it depends on the questions that were asked or how they were phrased,” O’Brien said.
Paul Manafort said he used Fox News host Sean Hannity to receive backchannel messages from President Donald Trump while prosecutors investigated him for financial crimes, according to newly released memos from former special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation.
Among the several hundred pages of memos published by BuzzFeed News on Thursday, which contain summaries of FBI interviews with key Trump administration and campaign officials, the Fox News anchor’s alleged role as an unofficial messenger between the president and his former campaign chairman comes into sharp focus.
A Texas judge ordered conspiracy theorist Alex Jones to pay $100,000 (£76,000) in another court setback over the Infowars host using his show to promote falsehoods that the 2012 Sandy Hook school massacre was a hoax.
Jones is being sued for defamation in Austin, Texas, by the parents of a 6-year-old who was among the 26 people killed in the Newtown, Connecticut, attack.
State district judge Scott Jenkins ruled on 20 December that Jones and his defense team “intentionally disregarded” an earlier order to provide witnesses to attorneys representing a Sandy Hook father who brought the lawsuit, Neil Heslin. Jenkins also denied Jones’ request to dismiss the lawsuit.
Edward Aschoff, an ESPN college football reporter known for his lively blog posts and thoughtfully reported features, died on Tuesday after a brief illness, the network reported. It was his 34th birthday.
Mr. Aschoff had contracted pneumonia about a month ago, according to his social media posts. “I had a virus for two weeks. Fever and cough and the doctors think it turned into this multifocal pneumonia recently,” he tweeted on Dec. 5, noting that he rarely gets sick and had been taking antibiotics.
In a statement, ESPN said the network was “very sorry to have to share the devastating news of the tragic passing of friend and ESPN colleague Edward Aschoff.”
The decision by Christianity Today to publish an editorial describing President Trump as “immoral” and calling for his removal drew immediate rebuke from the president himself, who called the outlet “a far left magazine.” The piece drew nearly 3 million unique visitors to the magazine’s website and became the talk of TV news shows over the weekend.
At the same time, the longtime centrist-right evangelical magazine saw a rush of canceled subscriptions — and an even greater wave of new subscribers, magazine President Timothy Dalrymple said. Both he and the author of the editorial, retiring editor in chief Mark Galli, could also face personal and professional consequences, according to interviews with several other conservative Christian leaders and writers who in the past have spoken out critically about Trump.
News host Chris Wallace on Wednesday said President Trump's continued attacks against the media amounted to the most "direct, sustained assault on the freedom of the press" in U.S. history.
“He has done everything he can to undercut the media, to try and delegitimize us,” Wallace said at a Newseum event in Washington, D.C., honoring the museum’s legacy ahead of its shuttering at the end of the year.
“I think his purpose is clear: to raise doubts when we report critically about him and his administration that we can be trusted. Back in 2017, he tweeted something that said far more about him than it did about us: ‘The fake news media is not my enemy. It is the enemy of the American people.’"
Page 1 of 98
