#rob carson

Eric Hananoki at MMFA:

Right-wing media outlets have been helping former President Donald Trump’s campaign push the bogus attack that Vice President Kamala Harris and Gov. Tim Walz have never had a “real job” in their lives. The claims have gone unchallenged in right-wing media, including the statement from Trump National Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt that “neither of them, by the way, have had a real job in the outside world, outside of politics in their entire careers.” In reality, Harris has served as the district attorney of San Francisco, attorney general of California, a U.S. senator, and vice president. She also worked in the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office and at McDonald’s. Walz has served as a U.S congressman and Minnesota governor. He also worked in the Army National Guard, as a public school teacher and football coach, and on a farm. Despite that background, right-wing media outlets have been helping the Trump campaign push the bogus attack that the two haven’t worked any “real” jobs.

Right-wing media and Trump campaign surrogates push bogus insinuation that neither Kamala Harris nor Tim Walz worked a “real job” in their lives.

Aaron Rupar at Vox: 

Former President Donald Trump gave a speech over the weekend, but you might not have known it even if you are a regular Fox News viewer. Instead, you would’ve had to turn to Newsmax, the right-wing cable news channel that’s sticking to its old-school strategy of being the Trumpiest channel on TV.

But with Trump now more than seven months removed from the White House, out-Trumping the competition isn’t proving to be the ratings hit these days that it was in December and January.

The wall-to-wall coverage of Trump’s speech on Saturday at a Turning Point event in Phoenix was a snapshot of how Newsmax is trying to stay relevant. While Fox News continued with its regularly scheduled programming, Newsmax carried all of Trump’s nearly two-hour speech live. Not only that, but Newsmax led into the speech with a segment that pushed the former president’s big lies about the 2020 election.

“We’re beyond the ‘conspiracy theory’ nonsense. We all know, we’re not stupid, we know something happened,” said host Rob Carson, who went on to cite long-debunked claims of election fraud in Arizona to make a case that Trump was somehow cheated out of the presidency.

This approach was a hit for Newsmax in December and January, when Trump supporters felt burned by Fox News in the wake of its early (but ultimately accurate) call of Arizona for Joe Biden. Those anti-Fox grievances were promoted by Trump, who helped Newsmax by live-tweeting the channel instead of Fox News (before his Twitter banishment, of course), and even helping Newsmax best Fox News in the ratings in the key demographic.

But Newsmax’s effort to out-Trump the competition has been less successful since Trump left the White House for Mar-a-Lago. Newsmax’s viewership is down more than 50 percent from January (from an average of about 300,000 viewers then to about 114,000 on July 18), and following a significant slump in December and January, Fox News has reestablished itself as not just the most-watched right-wing cable news network but the most-watched cable news network, period.

With Trump once again holding political rallies ahead of a likely 2024 presidential run, I thought it was timely to talk to Media Matters for America’s resident Newsmax expert, Jason Campbell, about Newsmax’s place in the broader right-wing media ecosystem. Suffice it to say he’s bearish on Newsmax’s prospects of ever filling CEO Chris Ruddy’s vow to “overtake” Fox News.

“The issue that I always come back to ... is that Newsmax is just not good,” Campbell told me. “It’s very dull, it’s very repetitive of conservative talking points I see everywhere else.”

So while Newsmax may be relevant enough to warrant occasional call-ins from Trump for extreme softball interviews, Campbell, whose areas of expertise also include Steven Crowder and Ben Shapiro, doesn’t foresee it becoming a major player heading into next year’s midterms — especially after it burned viewers with election fraud conspiracy theories that ended up not returning Trump to the White House for a second term after all.

Mount St. Helens: The Eruption and Recovery of a Volcano

Mount St. Helens: The Eruption and Recovery of a Volcano by Rob Carson

Synopsis: The eruption of Mount St. Helens on May 18, 1980, was the most catastrophic and deadly volcanic event ever experienced in the United States. That event had the force of thousands of atom bombs and destroyed 234 square miles of forestland. This highly visual book tells the scientific and human story of that cataclysm…