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Donald Trump holds a narrow advantage in Ohio, while voters in the three battleground states that put him over the top in 2016 prefer Joe Biden, according to Fox News statewide surveys of likely voters. 

“Lower than expected turnout among young people combined with robust rural turnout could easily put Ohio in Trump’s column again, and possibly Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, too.”

Biden leads by 12 points in Michigan (52-40 percent), 5 points in Pennsylvania (50-45 percent), and 5 points in Wisconsin (49-44 percent).  Biden’s advantage is outside the margin of error in Michigan, but not Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.  Trump carried each of these states by less than a percentage point in 2016. 

In a Monday night monologue targeting the White House and military leaders over the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, Carlson demanded resignations. He also said: “When leaders refuse to hold themselves accountable over time, people revolt. That happens.“We need to change course immediately and start acknowledging our mistakes. The people who made them need to start acknowledging them or else the consequences will be awful.”

Angelo Carusone, president and chief executive of Media Matters for America, a progressive group, said: “When there’s another big violent rightwing flashpoint that captures attention, way too many in media will wonder out loud: ‘How did this happen?’ ‘Were there the signs?’“You don’t need to wade into the online fever-swamps to see the cauldron of extremism simmering. Fox News is ratcheting up heat and legitimising nightly.“Fox News, not Facebook, will be the driver of the next insurrection. Plain and simple.”

Stelter’s is the better book. He delivers a straightforward, grinding, momentum-building account, from an inside-Fox-News perspective, of the conspiracy to steal the 2020 presidential election, the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, the Dominion Voting Systems defamation lawsuit and Tucker Carlson’s defenestration. He does this so deftly that “Network of Lies” reads like one of Bob Woodward’s mightier books.

As the planet gets progressively less innocent, you need a more innocent eye to see it.”

They deliver the kind of shallow and primitive totalitarian propaganda that George Orwell, in “1984,” called prolefeed

A Pew Research Center study found that consistent conservatives — the group that is most conservative in their worldview and voting patterns — are tightly clustered around a single news source, far more than any other: Fox News. Nearly half of the conservatives surveyed named Fox News as their main source for political news. Even if they do get news from other places, consistent conservatives distrust 24 of the 36 news sources (including The Washington Post, the New York Times, NPR and CNN) cited in the survey

Nearly 90 percent of consistent conservatives trust Fox News.

there had been no reporting before now suggesting that the network had killed stories because the most powerful man at the network — chief Rupert Murdoch — wanted Trump to become the most powerful man in the world.

Trump walks back sanctions against Russia, contradicting Nikki Haley

President Trump is walking back plans to impose new economic sanctions against Russia announced Sunday by U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley. The planned sanctions were an attempt to punish Russia for its support of Syrian President Bashar Assad after a chemical weapons attack earlier this month. {"1222314563954":{"mpxId":"1222314563954","canonical_url":"https://www.today.com/video/how-author-allison-pataki-s-life-was-changed-by-her-husband-s-stroke-1222314563954","canonicalUrl":"https://www.today.com/video/how-author-allison-pataki-s-life-was-changed-by-her-husband-s-stroke-1222314563954","legacy_url":"https://www.today.com/video/how-author-allison-pataki-s-life-was-changed-by-her-husband-s-stroke-1222314563954","playerUrl":"https://www.today.com/offsite/how-author-allison-pataki-s-life-was-changed-by-her-husband-s-stroke-1222314563954","ampPlayerUrl":"https://player.today.com/offsite/how-author-allison-pataki-s-life-was-changed-by-her-husband-s-stroke-1222314563954","relatedLink":"","sentiment":"Positive","shortUrl":"https://www.today.com/video/how-author-allison-pataki-s-life-was-changed-by-her-husband-s-stroke-1222314563954","description":"Daughter of former New York Gov. 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five years after her escape from the Cleveland home of Ariel Castro, who held her and two others captive for over a decade, Michelle Knight (now known as Lily Rose Lee) joins Megyn Kelly TODAY to talk about her ordeal and her new memoir, “Life After Darkness.” She talks about her recent marriage and her prospects for having a child.","title":"Cleveland kidnapping survivor Michelle Knight talks about new life, marriage","thumbnail":"https://media2.s-nbcnews.com/j/MSNBC/Components/Video/201804/tdy_mk_news_michelle_knight_180430.today-vid-rail.jpg","socialTitle":"Cleveland kidnapping survivor Michelle Knight talks about new life, marriage","seoHeadline":"Cleveland kidnapping survivor Michelle Knight talks about new life, 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Amid the historic developments formally ending the Korean War, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has promised to close down a nuclear test site in May. NBC’s Keir Simmons reports for TODAY from London. {"1222314563954":{"mpxId":"1222314563954","canonical_url":"https://www.today.com/video/how-author-allison-pataki-s-life-was-changed-by-her-husband-s-stroke-1222314563954","canonicalUrl":"https://www.today.com/video/how-author-allison-pataki-s-life-was-changed-by-her-husband-s-stroke-1222314563954","legacy_url":"https://www.today.com/video/how-author-allison-pataki-s-life-was-changed-by-her-husband-s-stroke-1222314563954","playerUrl":"https://www.today.com/offsite/how-author-allison-pataki-s-life-was-changed-by-her-husband-s-stroke-1222314563954","ampPlayerUrl":"https://player.today.com/offsite/how-author-allison-pataki-s-life-was-changed-by-her-husband-s-stroke-1222314563954","relatedLink":"","sentiment":"Positive","shortUrl":"https://www.today.com/video/how-author-allison-pataki-s-life-was-changed-by-her-husband-s-stroke-1222314563954","description":"Daughter of former New York Gov. 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The victims of some of the most pernicious conspiracy theories of 2020 are fighting back in court. Voting equipment companies have filed a series of massive defamation lawsuits against allies of former President Trump in an effort to exert accountability over falsehoods about the companies' role in the election and repair damage to their brands.

On Friday, Fox News became the latest target and was served with a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit by Denver-based Dominion Voting Systems after several of the network's hosts entertained on air conspiracy theories pushed by former President Trump that the company had rigged the results of the November election against him in key states.

Dominion has also sued Trump associates Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell and Mike Lindell for billions in damages. The company is one of the top providers of voting equipment to states and counties around the country and typically relies on procurement decisions made by elected officials from both political parties.

By Thursday, amid a flurry of White House resignations and a rising chorus of Republicans declaring that it was time for Mr. Trump to go, there were cracks in the firmament. “To put up a Trump flag and take down the American flag is not patriotic — it was one of the worst things I’ve ever seen,” Brian Kilmeade said on “Fox & Friends.” The false rumors about antifa involvement were dialed back, and hosts criticized the Washington violence.

Still, no Fox News prime-time star has yet blamed Mr. Trump for his role in inciting the riot at the Capitol. And rather than reckon with years of backing Mr. Trump and giving comfort to his supporters, the network’s commentators have simply swiveled, finding new ways to take on old targets.

In the Fox News universe, Mr. Biden is now a socialist prepared to upend the American way of life. And many hosts have drawn a direct equivalence between the storming of the Capitol by an anti-democratic mob and the Black Lives Matters protests over the summer in support of racial justice.

They are also, in the process, undermining the “news” element of Fox News. Martha MacCallum and Bret Baier, the news-side anchors who have been leading much of the network’s election coverage this week, have spent much of their own airtime pushing back against daytime guests who have echoed the Trump campaign’s baseless claims of fraud.

They have repeated the need for evidence when it comes to validating those claims; they have emphasized, as well, how absent that evidence has been. This has been, in part, why some observers of the network have been wondering whether this week marks a new relationship between Fox News and reality.

But those most basic efforts at checking the president’s lies mean little when, on the same network, powerful members of the United States government, encouraged by Fox’s opinion hosts, are talking openly about arresting poll workers and staging coups

On Wednesday, Fox News announced that Bill O'Reilly is fired.

O'Reilly and the network have paid out about $13 million to settle claims of "sexual harassment or other inappropriate behavior"

It's far too late to salvage the network's reputation by removing "The O'Reilly Factor" host now

Mr. Ailes would pick one or two “hot” stories, add numerous live guests and stick to that story throughout the day.

Many cable viewers, it turned out, were not interested in television news’s bread and butter — a diverse newscast of multiple dispassionate stories — no matter how important. Despite what they might tell pollsters, viewers were clearly looking for a great yarn, and Mr. Ailes knew how to spin one.

Mr. Ailes was equally adept at knowing what not to cover. It was around this time that the American public was becoming increasingly disillusioned, even despondent over the war in Iraq. So while MSNBC and CNN were focusing on the challenges and failures of the war, Fox covered the story far less often, and when they did so, in a far more sanguine way, highlighting successes from the field.

It was nice to hear from Mark Zuckerberg, who grandly announced he’d blocked Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts. This is not so much a case of shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted as doping the horse, whipping it into a frenzy, encouraging it to bolt, fostering a world in which humans are subjugated by horses, monetising every snort and whinny, allowing the very existence of “humans” and “horses” to become just one of a bunch of competing opinions, and then – only when that one particular horse has outlived its usefulness and seems destined for the glue factory – gently closing the stable door with a self-satisfied little “click”.

there would never have been a Trump presidency without Fox News, with the channel spending years before his election pushing his birtherism, boomer-bait and belief that the news is really just another TV show whose ratings were his primary obsession. Doubling down on all its worst instincts from the moment Barack Obama was elected, Fox News terrified and radicalised with wild disinformation, creating a post-fact black hole so powerful that even previously mild-mannered rivals got sucked into it.

The man at the centre of that maelstrom is as mercurial and interesting as any in the media world, Sherman says. Ailes is “a world-historical figure” whose harsh perspective came to define American conservatism in his 20 years running the most-viewed cable news network in America. “I think he’s kind of a historical icon, very much on the level of a J Edgar Hoover; someone who will define their age,” Sherman says. “He transcends the medium of television.”

in many ways Trump himself is the avatar of Ailes’s philosophy, and now Ailes is his advisor. Trump swept the US Republican primaries not by virtue of his political acumen or even basic competence, but on a wave of populist rage beloved of Fox News viewers but anathema to moneyed conservatives.

that’s really one of Roger Ailes’s legacies: reshaping the Republican party as a populist, blue-collar, white nativist party. The Washington elites and the conservative intellectuals, because of Ailes’s power, had to kind of hold their noses and graft themselves onto it.

A number of years ago, staying overnight in a hotel, I flipped through TV channels and came across Fox. A cartoon was playing, so I watched for a few minutes. I soon saw it was a political satire making fun of a Democratic leader whom Fox disagreed with.

1. Fox “News” consistently gives a right-wing political slant to the news.

2. Fox “News” is intentionally dishonest.

For a while now it’s been clear that Fox News’s relationship with the conservative movement is a little bit like the one between the American economy and the Federal Reserve. So just as the Federal Reserve is charged with maintaining a precise balance  between low inflation and low unemployment, Fox News is expected to weigh a dual mandate of its own. The network must uphold its position as a money-making juggernaut while simultaneously (and unofficially) working to put Republican politicians in office. There are times when these two goals are one in the same; but there are times when they’re not.

Fox can’t be the bullhorn of Real Americans in the morning while trying to be the shadowy puppet-master of conservatism at night. It can have 24 million viewers for a political debate in August like it did on Thursday; or it can have a Republican candidate for president with a better-than-even chance of winning. It can only choose one.

“What Powell was describing would amount to the single greatest crime in American history,” Mr. Carlson said on Thursday night, his voice ringing with incredulity in a 10-minute monologue at the top of his show. “Millions of votes stolen in a day. Democracy destroyed. The end of our centuries-old system of government.” But, he said, when he invited Ms. Powell on his show to share her evidence, she became “angry and told us to stop contacting her.”

The response was immediate, and hostile. The president’s allies in conservative media and their legions of devoted Trump fans quickly closed ranks behind Ms. Powell and her case on behalf of the president, accusing the Fox host of betrayal.

“How quickly we turn on our own,” said Bo Snerdley, Mr. Limbaugh’s producer, in a Twitter post that was indicative of the backlash against Mr. Carlson. “Where is the ‘evidence’ the election was fair?”

The talented staff that remain still produce memorable journalism. But when it comes to covering Trump – according to interviews with 18 current and former Journal staffers, some of whom have provided the Guardian with previously unpublished emails from Baker – many say this is no thanks to management.

“The Journal has done a lot of good work in covering the Trump administration, but not nearly as much as it should have,” another recent departee said. “I lay almost all of that at Gerry’s doorstep. Political editors and reporters find themselves either directly stymied by Gerry’s interference or shave the edges off their stories in advance to try to please him (and, by extension, Murdoch).”

“This is the most access he has had to a sitting president ever – that is something he’s tried to do and has done in other countries particularly with British prime ministers,” Ellison said. “He’s choosing his own personal access over having any journalistic clout.

The group most dependent on Fox News as a source of information is Republican men. Pew Research Center measured America’s media consumption habits last year and found that a third of Republican men cited Fox News as a major source of post-election news, with another 40 percent identifying the network as a minor source of information. That 72 percent was higher than other sources of information like CNN (37 percent), network television (62 percent, mostly as a minor source)

Why is Tucker Carlson so hostile to a plan to distribute a vaccine that, on Friday morning, his colleagues on “Fox & Friends” were complaining that Biden didn’t sufficiently credit to Donald Trump? Why are so many Republicans similarly skeptical?

It seems hard to extricate those views from Carlson’s obvious hostility to the idea that something presented as important by the government should therefore necessarily be treated as dubious.

Away from Fox News, Pearson Sharp, a host on the hard-right One America News Network (OANN), has been attempting to carve out his own niche of extremism. In late June, Sharp raised the unhinged and untrue theory that “tens of thousands” of people meddled in the election to prevent Trump winning, and went even further than Carlson in his comments.

“In the past, America had a very good solution for dealing with such traitors: execution,” Sharp said.

Robert Herring, the CEO of OANN, said: “He was only telling what [sic] could happen if you try to over throw America ... He gave the laws that would apply.”

Fox has long reinterpreted manifest destiny as a media product, treating the American mind as a vacant space upon which any dream, or any delusion, might be constructed

America deployed as an easy branding exercise is not new. What is new, though, is the insistent ahistoricism of this version of America. Also new—and given the way propaganda has worked in the 20th century, this should serve as a dire warning—is the notion that the facts of the past should be sources only of national pride.

“People on the right seem to be sort of sacrificing the Confederacy, to some extent, because it doesn’t do the work they want it to do,” Karp told Slate’s Rebecca Onion. “What does work is laying claim to the nation at the heart of the idea of America. Not in the old-school ‘the founders were geniuses and set aside universal freedom from everyone’ Lynne Cheney kind of a way, but in a new school way that just says, ‘America, fuck yes!’”

n a statement sent to the Guardian, the White House deputy press secretary, Andrew Bates, called Watters’ remarks “unacceptable” and said: “Fox News owes an apology to every single viewer for this sickening attack on the rights and dignity of their fellow Americans.”

Watters also said: “I want to say something about Arab Americans and about the Muslim world. We – and when I say we I mean the west and western technology – have created the Middle East. We made them rich. We got that oil out of the ground, our military protects all of these oil shipments flying around the world, making them rich. We fund their military. We respect their kings. We kill their terrorists. OK? But we’ve had it. We’ve had it with them!”

Bates said: “These hateful lies about ‘Arab Americans and … the Muslim world’ highlight the urgency of President Biden’s work to ensure hate has no safe harbor in America, and why he committed to the first national anti-Islamophobia strategy in our history.”