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Italy and Draghi politics: Ambrosetti Discussion board 2021

Italy and Draghi politics: Ambrosetti Forum 2021

Italy’s Prime Minister Mario Draghi.

FILIPPO MONTEFORTE | AFP | Getty Images

LONDON – As Italy experiences an unusual period of political stability, fears grow that a possible departure of Prime Minister Mario Draghi next year could plunge the country back into chaos.

Valerio De Molli, CEO of the European House Ambrosetti Forum, told CNBC on Thursday that Italy is currently in the midst of a “window of stability”.

He added, however, “The political crisis in Italy is always next door, so I can’t bet on my whole family, but you know we have a window of stability, political institutional stability.”

Italy has seen various government formations in recent years, but the political scene has calmed down significantly since Draghi was appointed Prime Minister in February. The former head of the European Central Bank has managed to win support from both the left and the right political spectrum and is a popular figure among the electorate.

“Mario Draghi leads a coalition government, is able to understand and take into account the different sensitivities of the parties, but at the same time set and achieve goals so that the country understands that we are going a way and making progress,” said Gian Maria Gros-Pietro, chairman of the Italian bank Intesa Sanpaolo, told CNBC on Friday.

Italy’s days of stability, however, may be numbered.

“We shouldn’t have a political crisis in the next six to nine months, then we need the election of the President of the Republic,” said De Molli.

Draghi’s name is often mentioned as a potential candidate to replace incumbent President Sergio Mattarella next year. However, if Draghi became president, it would leave a large void at the executive level.

Carlo Cottarelli, former director of the International Monetary Fund, said: “The chances are good” that Draghi will become president.

“At that point this government would collapse and we would have to go to a general election; that is the greatest uncertainty,” Cottarelli told CNBC on Friday at the Ambrosetti Forum. He said it is possible that Draghi will not continue as prime minister beyond early next year.

Ambrosetti’s De Molli said he believed Draghi was best for Italy as prime minister, head of government and in charge of day-to-day operations.

“Honestly, what Draghi is doing is … right for the country,” De Molli told CNBC’s Steve Sedgwick. “He’s not for the left or the right, he does what he’s supposed to do.”

In addition to pushing a reformist agenda, Draghi oversees large investments in the country and its Covid vaccination efforts.

On Thursday, Draghi again urged Italians to get vaccinated against Covid-19 as he wants 80% of the people in the country to be vaccinated by the end of September. According to Our World in Data, 70% of Italians have received at least one dose and 61% are fully vaccinated. The nation was among the worst hit by the pandemic.

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Rachmawati Sukarnoputri, 70, Sibling Rival in Indonesia Politics, Dies

Rachmawati Sukarnoputri, 70, Sibling Rival in Indonesia Politics, Dies

Mrs. Rachmawati entered politics after the fall of Suharto, helping to found the Pioneers’ Party in 2002. But it won only a tiny number of seats in Parliament. She joined the Nasdem Party in 2012 but quickly left it to join the Great Indonesia Movement Party, or Gerindra, the party of Suharto’s son-in-law Prabowo Subianto. At her death she was on its board of trustees.

Updated 

July 8, 2021, 6:10 p.m. ET

“Rachmawati always sided with anyone who opposed her eldest sister, including Prabowo,” said Andreas Harsono, a Human Rights Watch researcher who wrote a book about the early days of Indonesia, “Race, Islam and Power” (2019), and who knows the Sukarno siblings.

“It is a dysfunctional family,” he said.

Mrs. Rachmawati was accused of being involved in a plot in 2016 to rally hard-line Islamists to kidnap the Christian governor of Jakarta. She was one of 11 people arrested on treason charges related to the plot but was released a day later, denying that she had been involved and saying, “How could I be doing treason against the country that my father helped found?”

The Jakarta governor, Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, was a close ally of President Joko Widodo, whose Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle was headed by Mrs. Megawati.

Diah Permana Rachmawati Sukarno was born in Jakarta on Sept. 27, 1950, to Sukarno and his third wife, Fatmawati, who was considered his official consort for ceremonial occasions. Rachmawati was the third of five children of that marriage and had several half-siblings from Sukarno’s eight other marriages.

Like Mrs. Megawati, she took on the patronymic Sukarnoputri, meaning daughter of Sukarno, to emphasize the connection to their father.

When she was 3, her mother left the palace in protest of Sukarno’s plans to take a new wife, and Rachmawati was raised mainly by a foster mother.

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Politics

Tony Podesta Weighs Return to Lobbying and Democratic Politics

Tony Podesta Weighs Return to Lobbying and Democratic Politics

Although Mr Podesta’s law firm had disclosed to clients under less detailed lobbying rules of Congress and retrospectively registered with the Justice Department, this did not prevent the special investigator’s office from accessing the records and staff of his law firm and others who had worked with Mr Manafort, summons Mr. Gates.

Mr Podesta questioned the motives and methods behind the special investigator’s investigation. He referred to one of the lead prosecutors in the investigation, Andrew Weismann, as “Inspector Javert,” the police figure at Les Misérables obsessed with ensuring the arrest and punishment of a probation officer convicted of stealing bread to feed his family.

“I didn’t even steal a loaf of bread,” said Podesta, claiming that it was at least partially targeted because the special investigator “clearly thought it was a good idea to have a Democrat”.

Mr Podesta said his firm’s finances were few and far between, partly because it paid up to $ 5 million in legal fees for employees summoned by prosecutors and partly because the investigation frightened customers who were leaving the company.

Mr. Manafort and Mr. Gates were charged in October 2017 with unregistered foreign lobbying, tax fraud and other crimes. The indictment identified the Podesta Group and a company it worked with on the Ukraine effort, Mercury Public Affairs, but not by name. worked as part of a “scheme” with Mr. Manafort and Mr. Gates to gain support for Mr. Yanukovych while circumventing disclosure requirements for foreign lobbyists.

Within one day, the Podesta Group’s bank terminated its line of credit, citing the special investigator’s investigation and the emptying of the company’s accounts to pay employees’ legal fees, rendering the company illiquid, Podesta said.

He told employees at a staff meeting that he was stepping down from the company and cited attacks by Mr. Trump and his allies in the conservative media who, according to those in attendance, “made it impossible to run a public affairs store.”

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Politics

America Is Present process Seismic Modifications. Its Politics? Hardly.

America Is Undergoing Seismic Changes. Its Politics? Hardly.

In another age, the events of this season would have been nearly certain to produce a major shift in American politics — or at least a meaningful, discernible one.

Over a period of weeks, the coronavirus death rate plunged and the country considerably eased public health restrictions. President Biden announced a bipartisan deal late last month to spend hundreds of billions of dollars rebuilding the country’s worn infrastructure — the most significant aisle-crossing legislative agreement in a generation, if it holds together. The Congressional Budget Office estimated on Thursday that the economy was on track to regain all of the jobs it lost during the pandemic by the middle of 2022.

And in a blow to Mr. Biden’s fractious opposition, Donald J. Trump — the dominant figure in Republican politics — faced an embarrassing legal setback just as he was resuming a schedule of campaign-style events. The Manhattan district attorney’s office charged his company, the Trump Organization, and its chief financial officer with “sweeping and audacious” financial crimes.

Not long ago, such a sequence of developments might have tested the partisan boundaries of American politics, startling voters into reconsidering their assumptions about the current president, his predecessor, the two major parties and what government can do for the American people.

These days, it is hard to imagine that such a political turning point is at hand.

“I think we’re open to small moves; I’m not sure we’re open to big moves,” said Mark Mellman, a Democratic pollster. “Partisanship has made our system so sclerotic that it isn’t very responsive to real changes in the real world.”

Amid the mounting drama of the early summer, a moment of truth appears imminent. It is one that will reveal whether the American electorate is still capable of large-scale shifts in opinion, or whether the country is essentially locked into a schism for the foreseeable future, with roughly 53 percent of Americans on one side and 47 percent on the other.

Mr. Biden’s job approval has been steady in the mid-50s for most of the year, as his administration has pushed a shots-and-checks message about beating the virus and reviving the economy. His numbers are weaker on subjects like immigration and crime; Republicans have focused their criticism on those areas accordingly.

This weekend, the president and his allies have mounted something of a celebratory tour for the Fourth of July: Mr. Biden headed to Michigan, one of the vital swing states that made him president, while Vice President Kamala Harris traveled to Las Vegas to mark a revival of the nation’s communal life.

On Friday, Mr. Biden stopped just short of declaring that happy days are here again, but he eagerly brandished the latest employment report showing that the economy added 850,000 jobs in June.

“The last time the economy grew at this rate was in 1984, and Ronald Reagan was telling us it’s morning in America,” Mr. Biden said. “Well, it’s getting close to afternoon here. The sun is coming out.”

Yet there is little confidence in either party that voters are about to swing behind Mr. Biden and his allies en masse, no matter how many events appear to align in his favor.

Democratic strategists see that as no fault of Mr. Biden’s, but merely the frustrating reality of political competition these days: The president — any president — might be able to chip away at voters’ skepticism of his party or their cynicism about Washington, but he cannot engineer a broad realignment in the public mood.

Mr. Mellman said the country’s political divide currently favored Mr. Biden and his party, with a small but stable majority of voters positively disposed toward the president. But even significant governing achievements — containing the coronavirus, passing a major infrastructure bill — may yield only minute adjustments in the electorate, he said.

Updated 

July 2, 2021, 3:38 p.m. ET

“Getting a bipartisan bill passed, in the past, would have been a game changer,” Mr. Mellman said. “Will it be in this environment? I have my doubts.”

Russ Schriefer, a Republican strategist, offered an even blunter assessment of the chances for real movement in the electorate. He said that the receding of the pandemic had helped voters feel better about the direction the country is moving in — “the Covid reopening certainly helps with the right-track numbers” — but that he saw no evidence that it was changing the way they thought about their preferences between the parties.

“I don’t think anything has particularly changed,” Mr. Schriefer said. “If anything, since November people have retreated further and further back into their own corners.”

American voters’ stubborn resistance to external events is no great surprise, of course, to anyone who lived through the 2020 election. Last year, Mr. Trump presided over an out-of-control pandemic that killed hundreds of thousands of people and caused the American economy to collapse. He humiliated the nation’s top public health officials and ridiculed basic safety measures like mask wearing; threatened to crush mass demonstrations with military force; outlined no agenda for his second term; and delivered one of the most self-destructive debate performances of any presidential candidate in modern history.

Mr. Trump still won 47 percent of the vote and carried 25 states. The trench lines of identity-based grievance he spent five years digging and deepening — pitting rural voters against urban ones, working-class voters against voters with college degrees, white voters against everybody else — saved him from an overwhelming repudiation.

A Pew Research Center study of the 2020 election results released this past week showed exactly what scale of voter movement is possible in the political climate of the Trump era and its immediate aftermath.

The electorate is not entirely frozen, but each little shift in one party’s favor seems offset by another small one in the opposite direction. Mr. Trump improved his performance with women and Hispanic voters compared with the 2016 election, while Mr. Biden expanded his party’s support among moderate constituencies like male voters and military veterans.

The forces that made Mr. Trump a resilient foe in 2020 may now shield him from the kind of exile that might normally be inflicted on a toppled former president enveloped in criminal investigations and facing the prospect of financial ruin. Polls show that Mr. Trump has persuaded most of his party’s base to believe a catalog of outlandish lies about the 2020 election; encouraging his admirers to ignore his legal problems is an old trick by comparison.

The divisions Mr. Trump carved into the electoral map are still apparent in other ways, too: Even as the country reopens and approaches the point of declaring victory over the coronavirus, the states lagging furthest behind in their vaccination campaigns are nearly all strongholds of the G.O.P. While Mr. Trump has encouraged his supporters to get vaccinated, his contempt for public health authorities and the culture of vaccine skepticism in the right-wing media has hindered easy progress.

Yet the social fissures that have made Mr. Trump such a durable figure have also cemented Mr. Biden as the head of a majority coalition with broad dominance of the country’s most populous areas. The Democrats do not have an overwhelming electoral majority — and certainly not a majority that can count on overcoming congressional gerrymandering, the red-state bias of the Senate and the traditional advantage for the opposition party in midterm elections — but they have a majority all the same.

And if Mr. Biden’s approach up to this point has been good enough to keep roughly 53 percent of the country solidly with him, it might not take a major political breakthrough — let alone a season of them — to reinforce that coalition by winning over just a small slice of doubters or critics. There are strategists in Mr. Biden’s coalition who hope to do considerably more than that, either by maneuvering the Democratic Party more decisively toward the political center or by competing more assertively with Republicans on themes of economic populism (or perhaps through some combination of the two).

Mr. Biden’s aides have already briefed congressional Democrats several times on their plans to lean hard into promoting the economic recovery as the governing party’s signature achievement — one they hope to reinforce further with a victory on infrastructure.

Faiz Shakir, who managed Senator Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign, said Democrats did not need to worry about making deep inroads into Mr. Trump’s base. But if Mr. Biden and his party managed to reclaim a sliver of the working-class community that had recently shifted right, he said, it would make them markedly stronger for 2022 and beyond.

“All you need to focus on is a 5 percent strategy,” Mr. Shakir said. “What 5 percent of this base do you think you can attract back?”

But Mr. Shakir warned that Democrats should not underestimate the passion that Mr. Trump’s party would bring to that fight, or the endurance of the fault lines that he had used to reorganize American politics.

“He has animated people around those social and racial, cultural, cleavages,” Mr. Shakir said of Mr. Trump. “That keeps people enthused. It’s sad but it is the case that that is going on.”

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Business

Fox Information Intensifies Its Professional-Trump Politics as Dissenters Depart

Fox News Intensifies Its Pro-Trump Politics as Dissenters Depart

Fox News once devoted its 7 p.m. and 11 p.m. time slots to relatively straightforward newscasts. Now those hours are filled by opinion shows led by hosts who denounce Democrats and defend the worldview of former President Donald J. Trump.

For seven years, Juan Williams was the lone liberal voice on “The Five,” the network’s popular afternoon chat show. On Wednesday, he announced that he was leaving the program, after months of harsh on-air blowback from his conservative co-hosts. Many Fox News viewers cheered his exit on social media.

Donna Brazile, the former Democratic Party chairwoman, was hired by Fox News with great fanfare in 2019 as a dissenting voice for its political coverage. She criticized Mr. Trump and spoke passionately about the Black Lives Matter movement, which other hosts on the network often demonized. Ms. Brazile has now left Fox News; last week, she quietly started a new job at ABC.

Onscreen and off, in ways subtle and overt, Fox News has adapted to the post-Trump era by moving in a single direction: Trumpward.

The network has rewarded pro-Trump pundits like Greg Gutfeld and Dan Bongino with prize time slots. Some opinion hosts who ventured on-air criticism of the former president have been replaced. And within the Fox News reporting ranks, journalists have privately expressed concern that the network is less committed to straight-ahead news coverage than it was in the past.

The shifts at Fox News, which is controlled by the father-and-son moguls Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch, have come in the wake of what amounted to an existential moment for a cable channel that is home to Trump cheerleaders like Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham: the 2020 election.

Fox News’s ratings fell sharply after the network made an early call on election night that Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Democratic presidential nominee, would carry Arizona and later declared him the winner, even as Mr. Trump advanced lies about fraud. With viewers in revolt, the network moved out dissenting voices and put a new emphasis on right-wing commentary.

In January, the network fired its veteran politics editor, Chris Stirewalt, who had been an onscreen face of the early call in Arizona for Mr. Biden. This month, it brought on a new editor in the Washington bureau: Kerri Kupec, a former spokeswoman for Mr. Trump’s attorney general William P. Barr. She had no journalistic experience.

Financially, the Murdochs’ formula has produced results: After a rare loss to archrivals CNN and MSNBC in January, Fox News’s ratings strength has recovered; the channel is again the Nielsen leader in cable news. In May, Fox News is on track to more than double CNN’s prime-time viewership.

Its new opinion shows at 7 and 11 — with segments that lament “cancel culture” and attack Mr. Biden — are attracting bigger audiences than the newscasts they replaced. And the niche right-wing network Newsmax has failed to sustain its postelection audience gains.

Partisanship plays well on cable news, an insight not lost on programmers at other networks who are chasing fatigued viewers. Liberal-leaning MSNBC has expanded the show hosted by the anti-Trump commentator Nicolle Wallace; it also replaced the moderate Chris Matthews at 7 p.m. with the partisan commentator Joy Reid. Last week, CNN dropped one of its chief conservative commentators, Rick Santorum, after he was criticized for remarks about Native Americans.

“Conservatives have a long-held suspicion of the mainstream media being in the tank for Democrats and for the left,” said Ryan Williams, a Republican strategist and longtime aide to Mitt Romney who has occasionally appeared on the network as a guest. “Fox News for many years was viewed as the only outlet that wasn’t shilling for the other side. Liberals may doubt the power of Fox News, but it still draws a considerable audience for a reason.”

Fox News says its news coverage remains robust. And in some ways, the Murdochs are making a rational business decision by following the conservatives who have made up the heart of the Fox News audience; recent surveys show that more than three-quarters of Republicans want Mr. Trump to run in 2024.

But under Roger Ailes, the network’s founder, who shaped its look and feel, Fox News elevated liberal foils like Alan Colmes, a Democrat who shared equal billing in prime time with Mr. Hannity until the end of 2008, and moderates like Mr. Williams.

Credit…Andrew Toth/FilmMagic

“Roger’s view was you had to have some unpredictability and you had to challenge the audience; you couldn’t just be reading Republican talking points every night,” said Susan R. Estrich, a Democratic lawyer and former commentator on Fox News who negotiated Mr. Ailes’s exit from the network amid his sexual misconduct scandal.

Ms. Estrich recalled that Mr. Ailes had defended Megyn Kelly, the former Fox News host, when Mr. Trump, then a presidential candidate, attacked her in misogynist terms. Now, she said, “instead of trying to broaden their audience, Fox News is narrowing it and digging in.”

Today in Business

Updated 

May 28, 2021, 12:54 p.m. ET

Ms. Brazile said she had left Fox News of her own accord.

“Fox never censored my views in any way,” she wrote in an email. “Everyone treated me courteously as a colleague.” Ms. Brazile added: “I believe it’s important for all media to expose their audiences to both progressive and conservative viewpoints. With the election and President Biden’s first 100 days behind us, I’ve accomplished what I wanted at Fox News.”

Mr. Williams will remain at Fox News as a senior political analyst; the network said in a statement that he had requested to be closer to his family in Washington rather than commute to New York, where “The Five” is taped. Fox News said another liberal host would replace him. Among those in contention is a newly hired contributor to the Fox stable, the former Democratic congressman Harold Ford Jr.

Mr. Williams departed after a harder edge had crept into his exchanges with colleagues like Mr. Gutfeld and Jesse Watters. “The Five” had long been a venue for heated, if friendly debate, but Mr. Williams was repeatedly mocked and shouted down when he accused Mr. Trump of lying about the election and fueling the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6.

Mr. Williams also noted, on-air, a Fox News report about Mr. Biden that falsely claimed he wanted to restrict Americans’ consumption of hamburgers. (Fox News later issued a correction.)

Credit…Fox News

His prime antagonist, Mr. Gutfeld, started an 11 p.m. show last month that is meant to compete with late-night fare like “The Daily Show.” “Gutfeld!” has attracted a bigger viewership than the previous 11 p.m. offering, a newscast anchored by Shannon Bream that was shifted to midnight.

Fox News is still determining a permanent host for its new 7 p.m. opinion hour, which is now a reliable venue for pro-Trump commentary. It was where Tucker Carlson, the network’s 8 p.m. host, made his remarks about white replacement theory that prompted an outcry from the Anti-Defamation League.

A pro-Trump drift at Fox News is not new: George Will, a traditional conservative who opposed Mr. Trump’s candidacy, lost his contributor contract in 2017. Shepard Smith, a news anchor who was tough on Mr. Trump, left in 2019.

Some Fox News journalists, though, say privately that they are increasingly concerned with the network’s direction. Kristin Fisher, one of the network’s rising stars in Washington and a White House correspondent, left Fox News earlier this month despite the network’s effort to keep her. She had faced criticism from viewers in November after a segment in which she aggressively debunked lies about election fraud advanced by Mr. Trump’s lawyers.

The longtime Washington bureau chief, Bill Sammon, resigned in January after internal criticism over his handling of election coverage, around the time that Mr. Stirewalt was fired. (Mr. Stirewalt was let go along with roughly 20 digital journalists at Fox News, which the network attributed to a realignment of “business and reporting structure to meet the demands of this new era.”)

Mr. Sammon has effectively been replaced by Doug Rohrbeck, a producer with extensive news experience on Bret Baier’s newscast and Chris Wallace’s Sunday show. Still, some Fox journalists were surprised when the network hired Ms. Kupec, the former Barr spokeswoman, to work under Mr. Rohrbeck.

A Fox News spokesperson said the network was proud of the journalism from its reporting ranks, listing examples including the foreign correspondent Trey Yingst’s coverage of Israel, Jennifer Griffin’s coverage of the Pentagon, and reporting on the crisis at the Mexican border by Bill Melugin and Aishah Hasnie.

Mr. Baier, the network’s chief political anchor, announced in May that he had extended his contract through 2025. Along with Mr. Wallace of “Fox News Sunday,” he regularly lands newsy interviews; a recent conversation with Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming grew testy when she faulted Fox News for perpetuating Mr. Trump’s lies about the election and Mr. Baier responded that he had made clear to viewers that Mr. Biden was the legitimate victor.

Fox News has a smaller international footprint than rivals like CNN, but it maintains several foreign bureaus and has had reporters in Israel covering the recent violence there. On Wednesday, the network announced an expansion of Fox News International, a streaming service available in 37 countries in Asia and Europe.

Despite continuing criticism from liberals, Fox News remains a financial juggernaut for the Murdoch empire; it is expected to earn record advertising revenues this year, the network said.

Even as its programming decisions seem aimed at attracting Trump supporters, Fox News does face one roadblock: Mr. Trump. The former president has maintained his stinging criticism of Fox News, which, he has claimed, betrayed him by calling the election for Mr. Biden.

On Friday, Mr. Trump renewed his criticism in a statement that he issued in response to a critical speech by the former House speaker Paul D. Ryan, a member of the Fox Corporation board since 2019.

“Fox totally lost its way and became a much different place” after Mr. Ryan joined the board, the former president wrote. Mr. Trump added: “Fox will never be the same!”

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Health

WHO says Covid origin investigation is being ‘poisoned by politics’

WHO says Covid origin investigation is being 'poisoned by politics'

Executive Director of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) emergencies program Mike Ryan speaks at a news conference on the novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) in Geneva, Switzerland.

Denis Balibouse | Reuters

A top World Health Organization official said Friday that investigations into the origins of Covid-19 are being “poisoned by politics.”

U.S. President Joe Biden announced Wednesday that he’s ordered intelligence agencies to conduct “a report on their most up-to-date analysis of the origins of Covid-19, including whether it emerged from human contact with an infected animal or from a laboratory accident.”

The WHO has come under increasing pressure in recent days from U.S. and European officials to take another look at whether the coronavirus could have escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China, after a previously undisclosed U.S. intelligence report came to light, revealing that three researchers sought hospital care after falling ill with Covid-like symptoms in November 2019.

Dr. Mike Ryan, executive director of WHO’s Health Emergencies Program, asked if countries could separate the politics from the science.

“Putting WHO in a position like it has been put in is very unfair to the science we’re trying to carry out, and it puts us as an organization, frankly, in an impossible position to deliver the answers that the world wants,” Ryan said at a news briefing.

The WHO has been repeatedly accused of allowing the Chinese government to avoid a thorough investigation into the origins of Covid-19, which was first discovered in Wuhan in late 2019. At a Senate hearing earlier this week Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., pressed White House chief medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci on the WHO’s close ties to China.

“Can we agree that if you took (Chinese) President Xi Jinping and turned him upside down and shook him, the World Health Organization would fall out of his pocket?” Fauci responded by saying that he has no way of knowing China’s influence on the agency.

The hypothesis that Covid-19 came from a Wuhan virology lab was initially dismissed as a right-wing conspiracy theory, but it’s been gaining traction in recent weeks.

The majority of the intelligence community believes that it is equally plausible that the virus originated in a lab and in an animal. Federal health officials continue to maintain their position that it is more likely that the virus has zoonotic origins. The CDC’s website still states “we know that it originally came from an animal, likely a bat.”

Categories
Business

Fox Information Intensifies Its Professional-Trump Politics as Dissenters Depart

Fox News Intensifies Its Pro-Trump Politics as Dissenters Depart

Fox News once devoted its 7 p.m. and 11 p.m. time slots to relatively straightforward newscasts. Now those hours are filled by opinion shows led by hosts who denounce Democrats and defend the worldview of former President Donald J. Trump.

For seven years, Juan Williams was the lone liberal voice on “The Five,” the network’s popular afternoon chat show. On Wednesday, he announced he was leaving the program, after months of harsh on-air blowback from his conservative co-hosts. Many Fox News viewers cheered his exit on social media.

Donna Brazile, the former Democratic Party chairwoman, was hired by Fox News with great fanfare in 2019 as a dissenting voice for its political coverage. She criticized Mr. Trump and spoke passionately about the Black Lives Matter movement, which other hosts on the network often demonized. Ms. Brazile has now left Fox News; last week, she quietly started a new job at ABC.

Onscreen and off, in ways subtle and overt, Fox News has adapted to the post-Trump era by moving in a single direction: Trumpward.

The network has rewarded pro-Trump pundits like Greg Gutfeld and Dan Bongino with prize time slots. Some opinion hosts who ventured on-air criticism of the former president have been replaced. And within the Fox News reporting ranks, journalists have privately expressed concern that the network is less committed to straight-ahead news coverage than it was in the past.

The shifts at Fox News, which is controlled by father-and-son moguls Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch, have come in the wake of what amounted to an existential moment for a cable channel that is home to Trump cheerleaders like Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham: the 2020 election.

Fox News’s ratings fell sharply after the network made an early call on election night that Mr. Biden would carry Arizona and later declared him the winner, even as Mr. Trump advanced lies about fraud. With viewers in revolt, the network moved out dissenting voices and put a new emphasis on hard-line right-wing commentary.

In January, the network fired its veteran politics editor, Chris Stirewalt, who had been an onscreen face of the early call in Arizona for Mr. Biden. Earlier this month, it brought on a new editor in the Washington bureau: Kerri Kupec, a former spokeswoman for Mr. Trump’s former attorney general, William P. Barr. She had no prior journalistic experience.

Financially, the Murdochs’ formula has produced results: after a rare loss to archrivals CNN and MSNBC in January, Fox News’s ratings strength has recovered; the channel is now once again the Nielsen leader in cable news. In May, Fox News is on track to more than double CNN’s prime-time viewership.

Its new 7 p.m. and 11 p.m. opinion shows — with segments that lament “cancel culture” and attack Mr. Biden — are attracting bigger audiences than the newscasts they replaced. And the niche right-wing network Newsmax has failed to sustain its postelection audience gains.

In some ways, the Murdochs are making a rational business decision by following the conservatives who have made up the heart of the Fox News audience; recent surveys show that more than three-quarters of Republicans want Mr. Trump to run in 2024.

But under Roger Ailes, the network’s founder who shaped its look and feel, Fox News elevated liberal foils like Alan Colmes, a Democrat who shared equal billing in prime-time with Mr. Hannity until the end of 2008, and moderates like Mr. Williams.

Credit…Andrew Toth/FilmMagic

“Roger’s view was you had to have some unpredictability and you had to challenge the audience; you couldn’t just be reading Republican talking points every night,” said Susan R. Estrich, a Democratic lawyer and former commentator on Fox News who negotiated Mr. Ailes’s exit from the network amid his sexual misconduct scandal.

Today in Business

Updated 

May 28, 2021, 12:54 p.m. ET

Ms. Estrich recalled that Mr. Ailes had defended Megyn Kelly, the former Fox News host, when Mr. Trump, then a presidential candidate, attacked her in misogynist terms. Now, she said, “instead of trying to broaden their audience, Fox News is narrowing it and digging in.”

Partisanship plays well on cable news, an insight not lost on programmers at other networks who are chasing fatigued viewers. Liberal-leaning MSNBC expanded the show hosted by the anti-Trump commentator Nicolle Wallace; it also replaced the moderate Chris Matthews at 7 p.m. with the partisan commentator Joy Reid. Last week, CNN dropped one of its chief conservative commentators, Rick Santorum, after he was criticized for remarks about Native Americans.

Ms. Brazile said she had left Fox News of her own accord.

“Fox never censored my views in any way,” she wrote in an email. “Everyone treated me courteously as a colleague.” Ms. Brazile added: “I believe it’s important for all media to expose their audiences to both progressive and conservative viewpoints. With the election and President Biden’s first 100 days behind us, I’ve accomplished what I wanted at Fox News.”

Mr. Williams will remain at Fox News as a senior political analyst; the network said in a statement that he had requested to be closer to his family in Washington rather than commute to New York, where “The Five” is taped. Fox News said he will be replaced by another liberal host; among those in contention is a newly hired contributor to the Fox stable, the former Democratic congressman Harold Ford Jr.

Mr. Williams’s departure came after a harder edge had crept into his exchanges with colleagues like Mr. Gutfeld and Jesse Watters. “The Five” had long been a venue for heated, if friendly debate, but Mr. Williams was repeatedly mocked and shouted down when he accused Mr. Trump of lying about the election and fueling the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6.

Mr. Williams also noted, on-air, an erroneous Fox News report about Mr. Biden that falsely claimed he wanted to restrict Americans’ consumption of hamburgers. (Fox News later issued a correction.)

Credit…Fox News

His prime antagonist, Mr. Gutfeld, started an 11 p.m. show last month that is meant to compete with late-night fare like “The Daily Show.” “Gutfeld!” has attracted a bigger viewership than the previous 11 p.m. offering, a newscast anchored by Shannon Bream that was shifted to midnight.

Fox News is still determining a permanent host for its new 7 p.m. opinion hour, which is now a reliable venue for pro-Trump commentary. It was where Tucker Carlson, the network’s 8 p.m. host, made his remarks about white replacement theory that prompted an outcry from the Anti-Defamation League.

A pro-Trump drift at Fox News is not new: George Will, a traditional conservative who opposed Mr. Trump’s candidacy, lost his contributor contract in 2017. Shepard Smith, a news anchor who was tough on Mr. Trump, left in 2019.

Some Fox News journalists, though, say privately they are increasingly concerned with the network’s direction. Kristin Fisher, one of the network’s rising stars in Washington and a White House correspondent, left Fox News last month despite the network’s effort to keep her. She had faced criticism from viewers in November after a segment in which she aggressively debunked lies about election fraud advanced by Mr. Trump’s lawyers.

The longtime Washington bureau chief, Bill Sammon, resigned in January after internal criticism over his handling of election coverage, around the time that Mr. Stirewalt was fired. (Mr. Stirewalt was let go along with roughly 20 digital journalists at Fox News, which the network attributed to a realignment of “business and reporting structure to meet the demands of this new era.”)

Mr. Sammon has effectively been replaced by Doug Rohrbeck, a producer with extensive news experience on Bret Baier’s newscast and Chris Wallace’s Sunday show. Still, some Fox journalists were surprised when the network hired Ms. Kupec, the former Barr spokeswoman, to work under Mr. Rohrbeck. (In 2019, CNN hired Sarah Isgur, the spokeswoman for former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, as a political editor. After protests from staff, she was shifted to an on-air role and later left the network.)

Fox News says its news coverage remains robust. Mr. Baier, its chief political anchor, announced in May that he had extended his contract through 2025. He regularly lands newsy interviews; a recent conversation with Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming grew testy when she faulted Fox News for perpetuating Mr. Trump’s lies about the election and Mr. Baier responded that he had made clear to viewers that Mr. Biden was the legitimate victor.

Fox News has a smaller international footprint than rivals like CNN, but it maintains several foreign bureaus and has had multiple reporters on the ground in Israel covering the recent violence there. On Wednesday, the network announced an expansion of Fox News International, a streaming service available in 37 countries in Asia and Europe.

Despite ongoing criticism from liberals, Fox News remains a financial juggernaut for the Murdoch empire; it is expected to earn record advertising revenues this year, the network said.

Even as its programming decisions seem aimed at attracting Trump supporters, Fox News does face one roadblock: Mr. Trump. The former president has maintained his stinging criticism of Fox News, which, he has claimed, betrayed him by calling the election for Mr. Biden.

On Friday, after criticism from the former House Speaker Paul Ryan, Mr. Trump wrote that “Fox totally lost its way and became a much different place” after the Murdochs appointed Mr. Ryan to the Fox Corporation board.

“Fox will never be the same!” Mr. Trump wrote.

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Business

A 3rd of Basecamp’s staff resign after a ban on speaking politics.

A third of Basecamp’s workers resign after a ban on talking politics.

About a third of Basecamp employees said they were stepping down after the company that makes productivity software announced new guidelines banning discussions in the workplace about politics.

Jason Fried, CEO of Basecamp, explained the guidelines in a blog post on Monday, describing “social and political discussions” about corporate messaging tools as a “major distraction”. He wrote that the company also prohibits committees, cutting benefits such as a fitness allowance (giving employees cash value) and stopping “dwelling on previous decisions and thinking about them.”

Basecamp had 57 employees, including Mr Fried when the announcement was made, according to a staff list on its website. Since then, at least 20 of them have publicly announced that they want to resign or have already resigned, according to a New York Times tally. Basecamp did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Mr Fried and David Hansson, two of Basecamp’s founders, have published several books on work culture, and news about their latest management philosophy has received a mixture of applause and criticism on social media.

After the Platformer newsletter published details of a dispute within the company that contributed to the decision to ban political talks, Hansson wrote in another blog post that Basecamp employees who disagreed with the founders would receive a severance payment of up to six Month salary offered me choice.

“We are committed to a deeply controversial stance,” wrote Hansson, Basecamp’s chief technology officer. “Some employees are relieved, others are angry, and that describes the public debate about it pretty well.”

Coinbase, a start-up that enables people to buy and sell cryptocurrencies, announced a similar ban last year, with a similar offer to provide severance pay to employees who disagreed. The company said 60 of its employees had resigned, about 5 percent of its workforce.

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Health

Sluggish rollout offers lesson in EU politics

Slow rollout gives lesson in EU politics

Ursula von der Leyen, European Commission president.

Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images

LONDON – European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said it herself: “It was a difficult start.”

The European Union has had a bumpy introduction of Covid-19 vaccines. The campaign has sparked complaints that regulators were too slow to approve the shots and sparked a simmering argument with AstraZeneca as the pharmaceutical company repeatedly cut its delivery obligations.

More recently, several countries have temporarily stopped using the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine for safety reasons. This has baffled health professionals and raised questions about future intake.

The World Health Organization earlier this week expressed concern that the ongoing coronavirus crisis in the region now appears “more worrying” than it has for several months. The warning comes as many countries introduce new measures to contain a third wave of infections.

The health department also described the vaccination campaign in Europe as “unacceptably slow” and said it was crucial to accelerate the rollout, as new infections are currently emerging in every age group except those over 80 years of age.

It is a chaotic picture, made even more complicated by the uniqueness of European politics.

“There were several problems with the system, and it is a complex system. I think it is important not to point the finger at a certain defect, but to realize that it is very complex,” said Linda Bauld, professor for public health at the University of Edinburgh, said CNBC.

The European Commission, the EU’s executive branch, was responsible for negotiating contracts with pharmaceutical companies on behalf of the 27 member states. The institution is also responsible for overseeing the exports of the shots produced in the block.

However, health policy matters are the responsibility of the Member States, which means that the 27 capitals can organize the vaccinations in their own countries and ultimately decide to buy Covid shots, for example outside of the agreements made by the Commission.

This juxtaposition between national and EU institutions has often damaged the bloc’s reputation in broader vaccination efforts.

“There are problems that have to do with both (national and EU institutions). There is clearly politics in it and we have all heard about it in the media, but there are also problems with decision-making and attitudes the commissions have to do and the priorities of the member states, “Bauld told CNBC.

AstraZeneca weft suspension

This was highlighted recently when 13 EU countries decided to stop using the Oxford AstraZeneca shot while investigating possible side effects.

At the time, the European Medicines Agency – the medicines agency for the entire 27-member region – was recommending countries to continue using the vaccine, despite reviewing data on blood clots in some vaccinated people. However, some member states preferred to be cautious and used their sovereign power to stop the use of this vaccine as the EMA completed its review. The Safety Committee of the Medicines Agency concluded in a preliminary review that the benefits of the vaccine continue to outweigh the risk of side effects.

It has also been the case that heads of state have used the institutions in Brussels to complain about the hiccups in the process. At the beginning of March, the Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz said the decision to distribute the vaccines in the Commission’s steering committee was “secret”.

The group, chaired by the Commission, has representatives from all Member States, including Austria.

“Why do you get this idea when you know that Austria, like the 26 other member states, is a member of the steering committee and how the others have been informed about the previous allocations?” An EU official from another Member State who did not want to be named due to the sensitivity of the issue asked during a CNBC interview in March.

The vaccines are distributed proportionally depending on the population of the countries. However, some EU states were particularly interested in getting more of the AstraZeneca shot, as it’s cheaper and easier to store than the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine.

“If a Member State decides not to start its pro-rata allocation, the doses will be shared among the other interested Member States,” the Commission said in a statement in March.

We also know that AstraZeneca has unfortunately produced too little and delivered too little. And this, of course, painfully reduced the speed of the vaccination campaign.

Ursula von der Leyen

President of the European Commission

Vaccine distribution has become an issue due to AstraZeneca’s repeated cuts in supplies.

While the EU was expecting 90 million doses of the shot by the end of the first quarter, the pharmaceutical company said it could only deliver 40 million doses during that period. This was later reduced to 30 million cans.

AstraZeneca has blamed low yields at European plants for lower shipments. In addition, the drug maker has said it can only administer 70 million doses between April and June when the EU was expecting 180 million over the same period.

“We also know that AstraZeneca has unfortunately produced too little and delivered too little. And of course this has painfully reduced the speed of the vaccination campaign,” said von der Leyen at a press conference in March.

Stricter export rules

To address this problem, the Commission proposed stricter rules for the export of ingot-made shots.

Since the end of January, the 27 countries have been able to stop delivering Covid vaccines if a company does not meet delivery targets with the EU. This is how the Italian government stopped a delivery of AstraZeneca shots to Australia in March. Between the end of January and the end of March, the Commission received 315 applications for vaccine exports, but only this one was rejected.

However, as EU officials are concerned about further delivery delays, the Commission decided to tighten export regulations from the end of March.

I think the EU definitely prioritizes its population first, but it is no different from other high-income countries or regions.

Dimitri Eynikel

Coordinator at Medecins sans Frontieres

The Commission will not only check whether the pharmaceutical companies deliver on time, but also whether the recipient country has bans or restrictions on Covid vaccines produced there and whether this country also has a better epidemiological situation than the EU.

“At the political level, the entire discussion about export restrictions, controls or even bans is rather worrying,” Dimitri Eynikel, coordinator at Medecins sans Frontieres, told CNBC. He added that doing so could create further barriers, divisions and delays in vaccine distribution.

Ultimately, the supply chain is international and if a nation stopped sending raw materials to the EU, for example, it could undermine the production of the shots within the bloc.

The EU’s attempt to have tighter control over where vaccines go has sparked criticism of vaccine nationalism.

“I think the EU definitely prioritizes its people first, but it is no different from any other high-income country or region. The US is doing the same thing, the UK is doing the same thing, in that sense (the EU) is no different.” Said Eynicle.

International Monetary Fund data has shown that China, India and the EU are among the largest exporters of Covid shots, while the US and UK have not exported any to date.

Hopes for the second quarter

Despite several problems, the EU is confident that the next three months will prove to be a turning point in the vaccination program.

In total, the commission expects 360 million doses of Covid shots between April and June, meaning it is well positioned to meet its goal of vaccinating 70% of the adult population before the end of summer.

“Despite the fact that things could have gone faster, we had great success. The alternative of not having vaccines sourced together would be that we would compete between European member states and possibly some of us did not.” Vaccine at this point too, “Malta’s Minister of Health Chris Fearne told CNBC’s Squawk Box Europe on Tuesday.

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Business

The Week in Enterprise: Fb Filters Politics

The Week in Business: Facebook Filters Politics

Happy Valentines Day. Here’s your quick rundown of the top business and tech stories you should know for the week ahead, so you can spend the rest of your day eating (sorry, reading) the candies that you want for loved ones (or for yourself) bought. – Charlotte Cowles

The Biden government’s $ 1.9 trillion stimulus proposal winds its way through Congress. However, many leading economists have argued that the sweeping bailout plan is excessive and could lead to out-of-control inflation. In a speech on Wednesday, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome H. Powell disagreed, urging policymakers to reduce inflation fears and focus on restoring full employment. He also pointed out that the latest unemployment figures do not tell the full story of the volatile labor market. Employment for workers with higher wages is down 4 percent (still strong), but the lower quartile of the workforce has seen a devastating 17 percent decline.

The online chat platform Reddit has completed its lead role in buying GameStop stock and raising $ 250 million in new funds. The company is valued at $ 6 billion and plans to double its workforce and expand its user base. Reddit’s message boards are not just a popular forum for stock market tips these days. They have also become an important information and community resource for unemployed Americans trying to navigate the complex system of unemployment benefits during the pandemic.

The 131-year-old pancake and syrup brand officially has a new name: Pearl Milling Company. Quaker Oats pledged to revamp the line, which has long been criticized for its history of racist imagery, following widespread protests against racial injustice last June. The redesigned packaging will hit the shelves this summer. Some other food brands that use racist imagery in their marketing, including Ben’s Original Rice Products (formerly Uncle Ben’s), Wheat Cream Muesli, and Mrs. Butterworth’s Syrup, are currently undergoing a similar makeover.

If you are tired of your crazy uncle’s political abuse on Facebook, welcome this development: the social media platform is changing its algorithm to reduce the political content in people’s newsfeeds. The new algorithm, which makes political content less prominent but does not remove it, is being tested in several countries and will be rolled out to the US in the coming weeks. The change comes in response to popular requests: “One of the most important feedback we are currently hearing from our community is that people don’t want politics and struggles to take over their experience of our services,” said Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive of Facebook. However, not all political offices are affected. Content from official government agencies is excluded from the change.

Facebook may tone down political content, but Twitter is struggling to keep it up – at least in India. The clash began when Indian farmers took to Twitter to protest new farming laws. The country’s government ordered Twitter to delete or mute more than 1,100 accounts alleged to have promoted violence or spread misinformation. Twitter complied with some of these requests, but refused to remove reports from journalists, activists, and others who are exercising their right to criticize the government and not violate company policies. Now the Indian government has accused Twitter of breaking its laws.

Regulators and policymakers are still trying to figure out how to react to the recent GameStop stock trading frenzy that hijacked the market in January and harmed investors large and small. Congress will hold a hearing on the matter this week, and key players – including Reddit executives, hedge fund Citadel and stock trading platform Robinhood – have been asked to testify.

A new analysis found that women’s participation in the US labor market fell to a 33-year low in January. Almost 80 percent of workers over the age of 19 who left the labor force in the past month were women. Bumble, a company that runs a dating app for women, went public on Thursday, making its 31-year-old founder Whitney Wolfe Herd, a billionaire and the youngest woman to go public. The sale of Chinese social media app TikTok to Oracle and Walmart, forced by the Trump administration, has been suspended indefinitely by the Biden administration while national security concerns are investigated.